INTRODUCTION
1. See Michał Hanov, Geologia, biologia, phytologia generalis et dendrologia, in vol. 3 of Gesammelte Werke (Halle, 1766).
2. Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 185.
3. See, in particular, Pierre Duhem, La théorie physique: Son objet, sa structure (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1914).
4. See Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007).
5. G VI, 618.
6. G II, 270.
7. Daniel Garber, “Leibniz and the Foundations of Physics: The Middle Years,” in The Natural Philosophy of Leibniz, ed. K. Okruhlik and J. R. Brown (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985), 27–130.
8. André Robinet, Architectonique disjonctive, automates systémiques et idéalité transcendentale dans l’oeuvre de G. W. Leibniz (Paris: G. Vrin, 1986).
9. Catherine Wilson, “Leibniz and the Animalcula,” in Studies in Seventeenth-Century European Philosophy, ed. M. A. Steward (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 153–76, at 174.
10. See Glenn A. Hartz, Leibniz’s Final System: Monads, Matter, and Animals (London: Routledge, 2007). See also the very plausible argument of Glenn A. Hartz and Catherine Wilson, “Ideas and Animals: The Hard Problem of Leibniz’s Metaphysics,” Studia Leibnitiana 37 (2005): 1–19.
11. Michel Fichant, “Les machines de la nature,” Studia Leibnitiana 35, no. 1 (2003): 1–28.
12. Pauline Phemister, Leibniz and the Natural World: Activity, Passivity, and Corporeal Substances in Leibniz’s Philosophy (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005). For a thorough discussion of this work, see Justin E. H. Smith, “Review of Phemister, Leibniz and the Natural World,” Leibniz Review 16 (2006): 73–84. Peter Loptson has recently offered what he calls an “epiphenomenalist” account of the Leibnizian world of bodies according to which bodies are real and causally separate from monads, while also being perfectly coordinated with them. This is a variety of compatibilism but rather far in spirit from the one outlined by Phemister, to the extent that Phemister wants to bring the different ontological levels in Leibniz’s thought together rather than characterizing them as autonomous. See Peter Loptson, “Was Leibniz an Idealist?” Philosophy 74 (1999): 361–85. See also Peter Loptson and Richard T. W. Arthur, “Leibniz’s Body Realism: Two Interpretations,” Leibniz Review 16 (2006): 1–42.
13. G IV, 390.
14. Of course, there is also a crucially important Platonic component in Leibniz’s philosophy. This component has been thoroughly studied by other scholars, including, recently, Christia Mercer, Leibniz’s Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
15. Montgomery Furth, “Aristotle’s Biological Universe: An Overview,” in Philosophical Issues in Aristotle’s Biology ed. Allan Gotthelf and James G. Lennox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 21–52, at 24.
16. James G. Lennox, “Putting Philosophy of Science to the Test: The Case of Aristotle’s Biology,” in Aristotle’s Philosophy of Biology: Studies in the Origins of Life Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 98–109.
17. James G. Lennox, “Nature Does Nothing in Vain,” in ibid., 205–24, at 222f.
18. G VI 543f.
19. On this, see particularly Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes’ System of Natural Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
20. It is this feature of the Leibnizian model of the animal body that has, of course, inspired the title of this book. A similarly titled book, on living bodies and automata in Descartes, Leibniz, La Mettrie, and Kant, was published some years ago in German. See Alex Sutter, Göttliche Maschinen: Die Automaten für Lebendiges bei Descartes, Leibniz, La Mettrie und Kant (Bodenheim: Athenaeum Verlag, 1989).
21. AT V, 278–79.
22. Dennis Des Chene, Spirits and Clocks: Machine and Organism in Descartes (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 121. The question of vestigial or latent teleology in mechanism has generated a good deal of secondary literature. Some interesting recent contributions to this include Alison Simmons, “Sensible Ends: Latent Teleology in Descartes’ Account of Sensation,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 39 (2001): 49–75; Lisa Shapiro, “The Health of the Body-Machine? or, Seventeenth-Century Mechanism and the Concept of Health,” Perspectives on Science 11, no. 4 (2003): 421–42.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 45.
25. As an anonymous referee reminds, however, Descartes’ letters concerning the Utrecht quarrel to Henrius Regius and Gisbertus Voetius, beginning in 1641, do bring out Descartes’ more developed views on species and on the reproduction of kinds much more than any of his other work, published or not. See for example AT III, 371–74; AT III, 460–62.
26. AT XI 254f.
27. Descartes, Primae cogitationes circa generationem animalium, in AT XI 516–28. Certain radical schools of ancient materialism aside, it is a novel claim of mechanism that vitality is a corporeal phenomenon like any other. But Descartes is by no means the first to identify vitality with the beating of the heart, and so to see it as the primordial organ. Indeed, he shares this assessment of its importance with many whose other physiological precepts he would abhor. For example, in the thirteenth century Giles of Rome sees the heart as analogous in the individual to the role of the “first mover” in the cosmos: “Just as in the whole visible universe there has to be something that does not cease from motion, and which is the source of the motion of other things, so in animals the heart is always moving secundum dyastolen et systolen, i.e., according to dilation and constriction, by impelling and drawing. From this motion arises motion in all the other members. So the heart is formed first in the embryo, is the first to live and the last to die” (cited in M. A. Hewson, Giles of Rome and the Medieval Theory of Conception: A Study of the De formatione corporis humani in utero [London: Athlone Press, 1975], 157f.).
28. AT XI, 516–28.
29. De corpore 15.2. George MacDonald Ross’s article, “Leibniz’s Debt to Hobbes” (in Leibniz and the English-Speaking World, ed. Pauline Phemister and Stuart Brown [Dordrecht: Springer, 2004], 19–34), has been very helpful for illuminating the full extent of the similarity between Hobbes’s theory of animal motion and Leibniz’s early model of animal economy. See also Catherine Wilson, “Motion, Sensation, and the Infinite: The Lasting Impression of Hobbes on Leibniz,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 5, no. 2 (1997): 339–51; Howard Bernstein, “Conatus, Hobbes, and the Young Leibniz,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 11 (1980): 25–37; Ursula Goldenbaum, “Hobbes and Spinoza as the Heroes of the Young Leibniz; Leibniz as Belonging to the Modern,” paper delivered at the conference The Young Leibniz (Rice University, Houston, Texas, 2003).
30. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Parts I and II, ed. A. P. Martinich (London: Blackwell, 2005), 40.
31. G VII, 273.
32. See, for example, James G. Lennox, “Putting Philosophy of Science to the Test: The Case of Aristotle’s Biology,” in Philosophy of Science Association, ed. Micky Forbes, David Hull, and R. M. Burian, vol. 2, 1994 (East Lansing, MI: Philosophy of Science Association, 1996).
CHAPTER 1
“QUE LES PHILOSOPHES MEDICINASSENT”
1. Some literature has appeared in the last several years on Leibniz’s contribution to medicine, but little of it has been concerned to place Leibniz’s interest within the context of his interest in, broadly speaking, the natural-philosophical study of the structure, motion, and generation of living things and the metaphysical study of substance and individual. See, for example, F. Hartmann and M. Kruger, “Methoden ärztlicher Wissenschaft bei Leibniz,” in Akten des II. Internationalen Leibniz-Kongresses, Hannover, 17.–22. Juli 1972, 4 vols. (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1973–), 235–47; Marion Mahrenholtz, “Leibniz’ Literaturquellen zu einigen frühen Texten medizinischen Inhalts,” Studia Leibnitiana Supplementa, vol. 27, Leibniz’ Auseinandersetzung mit Vorgängern und Zeitgenossen, ed. Ingrid Marchlewitz and Albert Heinekamp (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1990), 350–57; Achim Trunk, “An Early Concept of G. W. Leibniz Regarding Medicine,” in The Global and the Local: The History of Science and the Cultural Integration of Europe, ed. M. Kokowski. Proceedings of the Second ICESHS (Krakow, September 6–9, 2006), 373–78.
2. AT VI 62, 15–20. For an excellent treatment of Descartes’ views on, and contribution to, medicine, see Vincent Aucante, La philosophie médicale chez Descartes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004). An interesting, if less comprehensive, earlier work on this topic is Richard Burnett Carter’s Descartes’ Medical Philosophy: The Organic Solution to the Mind-Body Problem (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). Many recent authors have also treated Descartes’ notion of health, but only in the narrow context of the question of whether his philosophy involves a continued commitment to teleology, and not out of any direct interest, such as Aucante’s, for Descartes’ philosophy of medicine.
3. G IV 275. See also Marie-Noëlle Dumas, La pensée de la vie chez Leibniz (Paris: Vrin, 1976), 2–3; Ferdinand Alquié, La découverte métaphysique de l’homme chez Descartes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950).
4. G IV 316.
5. See, in particular, Aucante, La philosophie médicale de Descartes, chap. 1.
6. LH III 1, 1.
7. OH 115.
8. See, for example, Leibniz’s undated letter to Peter the Great, in Ger’e, No. 244, § 15.
9. FdC VII, 243.
10. A VI iii 87.
11. Gaspare Aselli (1581–1626), a Paduan anatomist, and discoverer of the “lacteal vessels.”
12. Olaus Rudbeck (1630–1702), a Swedish anatomist and one of the first to describe the lymphatic system.
13. Leibniz most likely has in mind Benjamin ben Immanuel Mustaphia, alias Dionysius, a Spanish Jewish physician based for a time in Amsterdam and the author of the Sacro-Medicae Sententiae ex Bibliis of 1640.
14. Caspar (1560–1624) and Jean (1541–1613) Bauhin were both influential Swiss botanists. Caspar in particular played an important role in developing a binomial taxonomic system for classifying plants. As we will see in chapter 7, plant taxonomy would remain a focus of interest for Leibniz at least into the first decade of the eighteenth century. Evidently, in this text of 1671, Leibniz is comfortable including these Swiss brothers among the great “German” contributors to medicine and related fields.
15. A IV i 543–52, 546.
16. Journal des Sçavans, August 1677, 190–91. For a thorough account of Leibniz’s relations with Krafft, see H. Peters, Leibniz als Chemiker, in Archiv für die Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften und Technik, VII (1916), which includes an edition of their correspondence.
17. See MK 68; GM IV 497–98.
18. Journal des Sçavans, February 1681, 46. Leibniz had written on the same subject in a letter to Schelhammer of May 23, 1680. See also Ravier 48.
19. On which, see, in particular, Vera Keller, “Drebbel’s Living Instruments, Harmann’s Microcosm, and Libavius’s Thelesmos: Epistemic Machines before Descartes,” History of Science 48 (2010): 39–74.
20. Dutens II 2, 108–10.
21. Nearly a decade later, Leibniz publishes anonymously the review of Johann Bernoulli’s “Dissertatio Chymico-Physica de Effervescentia et Fermentatione nova Hypothesi fundata, cum descriptione alicujus perpetui mobilis pure artificialis,” in the Acta Eruditorum of February 1691. This review reveals, if little else, a continued interest in these questions into the 1690s. Beyond this, it is noteworthy that Leibniz pays particular attention in this review to what he identifies as animal economy. He writes that the author “observes, following Bartholin’s Act. Med., p. 2, obs. 70, that the predominance of antimony with sublimate of mercury, mixed well and narrowly compressed, heats up and emits a vapor, and he is familiar with this one example of a solid effervescing with a solid. He disputes Borelli, who maintained in his De Mot. Anim., p. 2, pr. 29, that dilated parts contained in what is being distilled will in turn soon vanish; as is confirmed by experiments however, the air emitted from ferments does not vanish, but instead can be collected” (65). Although this is just a review and does not contain any evident statement of Leibniz’s own ideas, it is of note for the continuity, with respect to the authors cited and questions addressed, with the texts of a decade earlier.
22. G VII, 504.
23. Pertz I, 4, 266f.
24. See George MacDonald Ross, “Leibniz and Alchemy,” Studia Leibnitiana Sonderheft 7 (1978): 166–77, repr. R. S. Woolhouse, ed., Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Critical Assessments, IV (New York: Routledge, 1994), 502–14; George MacDonald Ross, “Okkulte Strömungen im 17. Jahrhundert,” translated into German by Andreas Beriger, in J.-P. Schobinger, ed., Friedrich Ueberwegs Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, Reihe 5, 17 (Basel: Schwabe, 1998), 196–224.
25. Cited in MacDonald Ross, “Leibniz and Alchemy,” 508.
26. OH 417.
27. MK 85.
28. MK 86.
29. A VI i 279.
30. See, for example, Lawrence M. Principe and William R. Newman, “Some Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy,” in Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, ed. William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 385–431. On Boyle’s debt to alchemy, see Principe, The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); on Sennert’s, see William R. Newman, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). To designate the broad swath of shared techniques, presumptions, and aims of these two subsequently separated endeavors, Principe and Newman have taken to using “chymistry” as a neologistic umbrella term for either alchemy or chemistry.
31. On the influence of Sennert, see, in particular, Richard T. W. Arthur, “The Enigma of Leibniz’s Atomism,” Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy 1 (2003): 183–227, at 203; Andreas Blank, “Sennert and Leibniz on Animate Atoms,” in Machines of Nature and Corporeal Substances in Leibniz, ed. Justin E. H. Smith and Ohad Nachtomy (Springer, 2011).
32. Arthur, “The Enigma of Leibniz’s Atomism,” 203.
33. Daniel Sennert, Thirteen Books of Natural Philosophy (London: P. Cole, 1659), 458. See also Julius Caesar Scaliger, Exotericarum exercitationum liber XV. De subtilitate, ad Hieronymum Cardanum (Paris: Vascovani, 1557).
34. Blank, “Sennert and Leibniz on Animate Atoms.”
35. See Appendix 1 for a complete translation of this text.
36. In personal correspondence.
37. LH III 1, 3; Appendix 1, 66.
38. LH III 1, 3; Appendix 1, 67.
39. LH III 1, 3; Appendix 1, 28.
40. LH III 1, 3; Appendix 1, 13.
41. Ibid.
42. LH III 1, 3; Appendix 1, 8.
43. Walter Charleton, Natural History of Nutrition, Life, and Voluntary Motion (London: Printed for Henry Herringman, 1659), 2–3.
44. LH III 1, 3; Appendix 1, 33.
45. LH III 1, 3; Appendix 1, 22.
46. This point has been made in rather greater detail by other authors. See, in particular, Keith Hutchison, “What Happened to Occult Qualities in the Scientific Revolution?” Isis 73 (1982): 233–53.
47. LH III 1, 3; Appendix 1, 37.
48. See Descartes’ Primae cogitationes circa generationem animalium (Amsterdam, 1701), 11.
49. LH III 1, 3; Appendix 1, 37.
50. LH III 1, 3; Appendix 1, 50. “Denn ordens personen sind dis-interessirt.”
51. LH III 1, 3; Appendix 1, 53.
52. LH III 1, 3; Appendix 1, 54. Here it is interesting to note the choice Leibniz makes as to which words should be capitalized, and which not, in a German language that as yet had no explicit rules.
53. LH III 1, 3; Appendix 1, 54.
54. LH III 1, 1.
55. Klopp VIII, letter cxxxv, to Thomas Burnet, 85; G III 220.
56. See LH III 4, 3a Bl. 1.
57. See Justin E. H. Smith, “The Body-Machine in Leibniz’s Early Medical and Physiological Writings: A Selection of Texts with Commentary,” Leibniz Review 17 (2007): 141–79.
58. An alembic is the upper part of a sort of still, used in alchemy, consisting in two “retorts” or spherical vessels connected by a narrow passage.
59. Smith, “The Body-Machine in Leibniz’s Early Physiological and Medical Writings,” 170.
60. Ibid.
61. Misc. Acad. Nat. Cur., 1695–96, decuria 3, iii (app.) pp. 1–22; republished in Dutens II 2, 110–19.
62. Leibniz writes of Helvétius in a letter to Schelhammer of 1715: “Helvétius brought out a little book in which he purports to promise more noble and more exquisite remedies for the majority of illnesses. He is thus an Empiric, though at present the greater part of medicine is still not empirical. And few are those matters for which certain reasons, in a domain that is so hidden, have been sufficiently established.” He adds some of his own views on the medical application of purgatives, a topic evidently still of great interest to him twenty years after the treatise on ipecacuanha: “I consider that purgations are often useful, not in the way that many believe, whereby the corrupt elements are ejected, but rather in quickening the lethargic nature by its own instruments, and in such a way almost that vomiting is useful in apoplexy. I submit these, my very audacious conjectures, to your judgment” (Dutens II 2, 73).
63. MK 132; Pertz I 4, 177. “Nachmittag gegen 3 Uhr war bey der Hitze in den intestinis tenuibus, wie einstmalen, ein Kleines Grimmen, gleich wie nach einer eingenommenen Purgation. Vielleicht weil ich Mittag Garley getruncken.”
64. MK 132.
65. Ibid.
66. In a letter to Louis Bourguet of 1714, Leibniz famously writes: “I despise almost nothing—except judiciary astrology” (G III 562). Some authors (e.g., Elster, Leibniz et la formation de l’esprit capitaliste [Paris: Auber Montaigne, 1975]) have taken this statement to represent a firm opposition to astrology throughout Leibniz’s career. It would be more correct to characterize it as Leibniz’s late-life estrangement from a practice that earlier he had approached, not with enthusiasm, but as one possible source among many of scientific knowledge.
67. Dan Garber first suggested this parallel to me.
68. Dutens II 2, 111.
69. Ibid.
70. In English in the original. Leibniz is evidently referring to the work of the English economist and epidemiologist William Petty, who had conducted a quantitative study of the impact of the 1665 London plague. See The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty, Together with the Observations upon Bills of Mortality, More Probably by Captain John Graunt, ed. Charles Henry Hull, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1899). For an interesting study of Leibniz’s interest in demographics and epidemiology, see Jean-Marc Rohrbasser and Jacques Veron, “Leibniz et les raisonnements sur la vie humaine,” in Etudes et enquêtes historiques (Paris: Institut National d’Études Démographiques, 2001).
71. “Extrait d’une lettre sur la maniére de perfectionner la Médecine,” Dutens II 2, 162.
72. Guhrauer B II, 458. “[Er] sagt, er wolle dergestalt Medicinische Calender machen, aber nicht, wie die Astrologen, vorher, sondern wenn das Jahr umb.”
73. Ramazzini’s most noted work was his De morbis artificium diatriba (Diatribe concerning the Illnesses of Workers) of 1700, which is widely recognized as the first treatise ever on occupational medicine. This field is inherently concerned with the approach to the study of health that considers data from large population samples.
74. Müller and Krönert report that in July 26, 1691 “Leibniz brings Bernardo Ramazzini to the attention of the president of the Academia naturae curiosorum Leopoldina, the Nuremberg physician Johann Georg Volckamer (d. 1693), and succeeds in making the compendium of statistics on illness, ‘De constitutione anni 1690 ac de rurali epidemia’ an annex to the Ephemeridae of the Academy for 1691” (MK 112; Ravier 263).
75. MK 40; Cat. Crit. 3 N. 1179, 2.
76. Klopp 10, 346–50; MK 176.
77. Klopp 10, 350–53; MK 176.
78. Bernoulli’s medical works, and Leibniz’s reaction to them, will be treated briefly in the next chapter.
79. A III vi, 570.
80. A III vi, 124–32,124f.
81. A III vi, 762–63.
82. In a letter of Leibniz to Denis Papin of December 2, 1697 (A III vii, 418), for example, Leibniz describes the usefulness of sulfur and vitriol for combating scurvy, and also in passing reveals an enduring interest in international affairs as well as an interest, first evidenced in 1671 (see his Modus instituendi novam militiam invictam, A IV i, 408–10, discussed briefly in chapter 7 below), in the problem seafarers have in obtaining fresh water. He writes: “I would think that the effect of the acidic liquors of sulfur and of vitriol hardly differ the one from the other. And although ordinarily the mechanical usages are of more benefit than those in medicine, nonetheless the latter deserve to be more highly regarded. I even believe that they would be of considerable profit here, if the spirit of sulfur, employed to correct and conserve the water on ships, were also resistant to the illness of scurvy. In this case, if the English had had some [spirit of sulfur] recently, when the Spanish refused to give them fresh water in Havana, not as many of them would have died.”
83. A III vi, 302.
84. Ibid. “Voila ce que J’ay vuë et que Je puis affirmer ayant moy mesme aydé l’inciseur anathomique à la dissection de ces deux corps, c’est peut estre Trop abuser de votre pattience monsieur.”
85. A III vi 395.
86. See Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998).
87. For a comprehensive treatment of this topic, see W. F. Bynum and Vivian Nutton, eds., Theories of Fever from Antiquity to the Enlightenment (London: The Wellcome Institute, 1981).
88. See Hermann Boerhaave, Institutiones medicae (Leiden, 1708).
89. Thomas Willis, De Febribus in Opera Omnia (Lyon, 1676), 65.
90. LH III 5, 111–12.
91. Ekkehard Görlich, Leibniz als Mensch und Kranker (Hanover, 1987), 128.
92. Dutens II, 2, 72.
93. A comprehensive analysis of the Leibniz-Stahl controversy is offered by L. H. Rather and J. B. Frerichs in “The Leibniz-Stahl Controversy—I. Leibniz’s Opening Objections to the Theoria medica vera,” Clio Medica 3 (1968): 21–40; “The Leibniz-Stahl Controversy—II. Stahl’s Survey of the Principal Points of Doubt,” Clio Medica 5 (1970): 53–67. See also Paul Hoffman’s very helpful “La controverse entre Leibniz et Stahl sur la nature de l’âme,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 199 (1981): 237–49; Jean-Pierre Coutard, Le vivant chez Leibniz (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007), particularly 304–33.
94. The full text will be published in a critical edition in Reihe VIII of the Akademie Edition, as well, separately, as in a bilingual scholarly edition prepared by François Duchesneau and the present author. Sarah Carvallo has done a bilingual (French-Latin) edition of a part of the controversy. See Carvallo, Stahl-Leibniz: Controverse sur la vie, l’organisme et le mixte (Paris: Vrin, 2004). Unfortunately, however, Carvallo’s edition leaves out Stahl’s own “Observations,” offering us only Leibniz’s first round of thirty-one animadversions, or “doubts,” and then his thirty-one replies to Stahl’s observations.
95. NO Ad XI, 3, 158.
96. NO Ad XXIV, 216.
97. Dutens II 2, 111.
98. Görlich, Leibniz als Mensch und Kranker, 126–28.
99. Kant, Vorlesungen über Ethik 27:459, cited from Kant, Lectures on Ethics, trans. Louis Infield (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 239; see also Kritik der praktischen Vernunft 5:160. The legend may have some shred of truth to it, however. We know that Leibniz was intensely interested in the art of silk production. According to Nicholas Rescher, Leibniz raised his own silkworms from the beginning of his period in Hanover (Nicholas Rescher, On Leibniz [Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003], 187), and as late as 1716 Leibniz would write to Bourguet urgently asking him to send him silkworm eggs from Italy (G III 590). As Maria Rosa Antognazza notes, Leibniz hoped to use silkworms to generate revenue for the Berlin Academy of Sciences, and in 1707 he obtained a monopoly for the production of silk in Prussia. It is not unlikely that he was very solicitous of the well-being of the creatures on which this industry depended. See Maria Rosa Antognazza, Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 463; see also MK 180.
100. LH III 1, 3; Appendix 1, 28.
101. Anita Guerrini, Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Galen to Animal Rights (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 37.
102. For a more lengthy account of these and similar experiments, see Anita Guerrini, “The Ethics of Animal Experimentation in Seventeenth-Century England,” Journal of the History of Ideas 50 (1989): 391–407.
103. LH III 1, 3; Appendix 1, 42. “Man mus nicht aufhohren Proben, mit transfusione sanguinis zu thuen, zum wenigsten in thieren, wie denn in England ein mattes pferd durch frisches Hamels-blut wieder kräftig worden.”
104. Richard Lower, Tractatus de corde. Item de motu & colore sanguinis et chyli in eum transitu (Amsterdam: Daniel Elzevirius, 1669), 182.
105. Ibid., 200.
106. Ibid., 203.
107. He may well be referring to the work of Carlo Ruini, Anatomia del cauallo, infermità, et suoi rimedii: Opera nuoua, degna di qualsivoglia prencipe, & caualiere, & molto necessaria aà filosofi, medici, cauallerizzi, & marescalchi (Venice: F. Prati, 1618), or to one of the numerous editions of Laurentius Rusius’s Hippiatria sive marescalia (Paris: C. Wechel, 1532).
108. Notes on Henry More’s The Immortality of the Soul, 1677–78(?), A VI iv 1679.
109. A VI iv 1369.
110. John Cottingham has argued against the caricatured view of Descartes as completely indifferent to the suffering of animals. See his “A Brute to the Brutes? Descartes’ Treatment of Animals,” Philosophy 53 (1978): 551–61.
111. A VI iv 1488–89.
112. LH III 1, 1.
113. A II i 860–61.
114. GM 641. For an interesting account of Huygens’s own views on animals and their moral status, see Nathaniel Wolloch, “Christiaan Huygens’s Attitude toward Animals,” Journal of the History of Ideas 61, no. 3 (2000): 415–32.
115. NO Animadversio XXII(b), 16–17.
116. NO Ad IX, 152–53.
117. NO Ad X, 155. “Itaque reipublicae interest nihil omitti, quod ad spem futuri progressus facere possit.”
118. G III 507–8.
119. Cited in Charles E. Raven, John Ray, Naturalist: His Life and Works (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950), 375.
120. A IV i, 408–10.
CHAPTER 2
THE “HYDRAULICO-PNEUMATICO-PYROTECHNICAL MACHINE OF QUASI-PERPETUAL MOTION”
1. Obtaining great effects from slight motions, without violating mechanical laws, will be an important component of Leibniz’s physiological account of the origins of animal motion, as we will see in our treatment of the Machina animalis of 1677 and of the Corpus hominis of 1682–83, both examined below.
2. A IV i, 562–68. In an interesting article, Horst Bredekamp argues for the importance of the ideas about shadow theater and projection developed in this text for Leibniz’s later perspectivalist theory of monads. See Bredekamp, “Kunstkammer, Play-Palace, Shadow Theatre: Three Thought Loci by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz,” in Collection, Laboratory, Theater: Scenes of Knowledge in the 17th Century, ed. Helmar Schramm, Ludger Schwarte, and Jan Lazardig (Berlin; New York: De Gruyter, 2005), 266–82.
3. Jon Elster, Leibniz et la formation de l’esprit capitaliste (Paris: Aubier, 1975), 80.
4. Leibniz comments on this text in a note dated by the Academy editors to between summer 1678, and the end of 1682 (A VI iv, 1783–84). The spate of occurrences of this term in other texts of the same period corroborates their dating.
5. Walter Charleton, Oeconomia animalis novis in medicina hypothesibus superstructa et mechanice explicata (London: R. Danielis, 1659).
6. Cornelis van Hogelande, Cogitationes sive de Dei existentia (Amsterdam: Ludovicus Elzevirius, 1646).
7. This is a term Leibniz uses in an undated letter to Peter the Great on the division of the sciences, in which he defines “pneumatics” as the investigation of pure spirits. See Ger’e, No. 244, § XV.
8. For a fine overview of Leibniz’s natural-scientific writings of the Paris period, which includes the Drôle de pensée and which immediately precedes the appearance of the notion of animal economy in Leibniz’s work, see Hans-Jürgen Hess, “Die unveröffentlichten naturwissenschaftlichen und technischen Arbeiten von G. W. Leibniz aus der Zeit seines Parisaufenthaltes. Eine Kurzcharacteristik,” in Leibniz à Paris, 1672–1676, ed. G.-W.-Leibniz Gesellschaft and Centre national de recherche scientifique (Wiesbaden: Steiner), vol. I, 183–217.
9. LH III 1, 1.
10. As François Duchesneau explains, to describe the animal body as a hydraulico-pneumatico-pyriac machine (the variant we find in the polemic with Stahl), is to hold that “the organism appears as a combination of dynamic microprocesses for which agents of impetus should be identified: this might be done by means of the chemical reactions that correspond to their specific functional properties.” See his “Leibniz vs. Stahl on the Operation of Machines of Nature,” in Machines of Nature and Corporeal Substances in Leibniz, ed. Justin E. H. Smith and Ohad Nachtomy (Springer, 2011).
11. See, in particular, Antonio Clericuzio, Elements, Principles, and Corpus-cles: A Study of Atomism and Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2000).
12. Please see Appendix 2 for a complete translation of this text.
13. LH III 5, 12.
14. Ibid.
15. G VI 609.
16. These are in fact a special kind of lymph vessel known as “lacteals.” They are not veins. They were discovered by the Paduan anatomist Gaspare Aselli, who was mentioned in the Bedenken, a 1671 text discussed briefly in the previous chapter.
17. Enrico Pasini, Corpo e funzioni cognitive in Leibniz (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1996), 110–11. Pasini also notes, “The comparison with the fermentation of wine, which belongs to the Galenic tradition (De usu partium, I 4, iii) is taken up by Descartes in L’homme in connection with the transformation of the chyle into blood, . . . and in the Discours de la méthode in connection with the heat of the heart. . . . Another contribution of Descartes’ is the attribution of the movement of the heart to the fermentation due to the mixture in the heart of the blood that has just arrived there with the blood remaining from the prior diastoles. Nonetheless, Descartes attributes greater importance to the effect of dilatation that is produced by the heat of the fermentation than to the agitation caused by the fermentation itself” (Corpo e funzioni cognitive in Leibniz, 110–11). See also Jan van Gijn, “Franciscus Sylvius (1614–1672),” Journal of Neurology 248, no. 10 (2001): 915–16.
18. Please see Appendix 3 for a complete translation of this text.
19. Boyle, Works 10, 540. On the influence of the English chemist on Leibniz, see Leroy Loemker, “Boyle and Leibniz,” Journal of the History of Ideas 16 (1955): 22–43.
20. Pasini writes on the roots of Leibniz’s three-part neologism: “Hydraulico-pneumatic machines are those such that, to the techniques for constructing hydraulic machines, such as fountains, are added the use of air pressure, as in vacuum pumps; pyrotechnical or pyrobolic machines are those in which fire is involved in varying degrees, and thus are connected to metallurgy, as in the Pirotechnia of Biringuccio (1540), to bombs and to explosives in general, to the production of heat, though substantially the field of application of pyrotechnics ends up corresponding . . . to chemical reactions. Leibniz, with his neologism, wishes to emphasize the dynamic character which imbues the animal machine with its active principle, whether this is a matter of effervescence, which, as was said, was capable of producing heat and ebullition, or of a fire without light as Descartes had already maintained, or, finally, of little explosions similar to those of gunpowder” (Corpo e funzioni cognitive in Leibniz, 119).
21. Kaspar Schott, Mechanica Hydraulico-pneumatica, Qua Praeterquam quod Aquei Elementi natura, proprietas, vis matrix, atque occultus cum aere conflictus, a primis fundamentis demonstratur; omnis quoque generis Experimenta Hydraulico-pneumatica recluduntur; & absoluta Machinarum aqua & aere animandarum ratio ac methodus praescribitur (Würzburg, 1657), preface, no page numbers.
22. Ibid., italics added.
23. See Marie Boas, “Hero’s Pneumatica: A Study of Its Transmission and Influence,” Isis 40, no. 1 (1949).
24. For a comprehensive account of this distinction, see Dennis Des Chene, Spirits and Clocks: Machine and Organism in Descartes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).
25. LH III 1, 2, § 1.
26. LH III, 1, 2, § 2. Pasini (in personal conversation) recommends the alternative translation of “saltatrices” as “jumping” rather than “dancing.”
27. Leibniz’s most famous conflict with a contemporary concerning this issue was with Joachim Becher, who was so infuriated by Leibniz’s dismissal of his purported invention that he is inspired in his Närrische Weisheit und weise Narrheit (Ignorant Wisdom and Wise Ignorance) of 1680 to ridicule Leibniz’s inventions at great length, including Leibniz’s supposed plan to invent a carriage that could travel from Amsterdam to Hanover in six hours. See A I iii, 278; Gerland 119; MK 69. In March 1683, Leibniz gives his own account to the Landgraf Ernst concerning the value of Becher’s supposed invention: “This man is well enough known through his exaggerations, which are mixed with black malice. One need only read his books in order to be convinced of this. . . . He set upon me because I stood in the way of a certain alchemical swindle he had planned. . . . What he says about the six-hour journey of the wagon from Hanover to Amsterdam belongs to his invention. . . . For one would have to lose one’s reason in order to have ever thought of such a thing” (A I iii, 278).
28. A I 2, 90.
29. See, for example, Vera Keller, “Drebbel’s Living Instruments, Harmann’s Microcosm, and Libavius’s Thelesmos: Epistemic Machines before Descartes,” History of Science 48 (2010): 39–74.
30. In the Essais de dynamique of 1695 (FdC I, 653), Leibniz strongly denies the possibility of a perpetual-motion machine in the usual sense by the following reasoning: “If the substitution of one force for another gives rise to perpetual mechanical motion, or an effect which is greater than its cause, then the two forces are clearly unequal; and the one that was substituted for the other must be the more powerful, since it produced something greater. I take it to be certain that nature never substitutes unequal forces for each other, and that the complete effect is always equal in power to the total cause.”
31. Antonio Nunziante has also pinpointed these two properties as constituting Leibniz’s notion of life throughout, at least, the 1680s. See his “‘Corpus vivens est automaton sui perpetuativum ex naturae instituto.’ Some Remarks on Leibniz’s Distinction between ‘Machina naturalis’ and ‘Organica artificialia,’” in Individuals, Minds, and Bodies: Themes from Leibniz, ed. M. Carrara, A. M. Nunziante, and G. Tomasi (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2004), 203–16.
32. LH III 1, 2, § 3.
33. LH III 1, 2, § 7.
34. In the Corpus hominis Leibniz also suggests that the source of the heat may be “pyropus,” a sort of “artificial fire,” which he describes at greater length in the course of contrasting it with aqua fumans in a 1680 letter to Schelhammer as follows: “Aqua fumans (insofar as I see it), whose first invention is wrongly attributed to Kunckel, has nothing in common with light or durable artificial fire. For to those who had aqua fumans the composition of this pyropus was unknown. What the Jesuit communicated to you, I do not know: [but] this is certain, this artificial and, so to speak, cold fire is drawn from urine. This fire, which I described in a poem, is not something else, if you consider the origin and perfection of the thing. . . . By strong friction and much motion it is possible to produce the fire only if it is mixed in with gunpowder. But the light is communicated to bodies by the lightest rubbing. I am in the habit of calling this pyropus. It is namely a fiery gem, which, if I may say, you should fear to handle in the darkness, [and] which shines like amber” (September 14, 1680; Kortholt 173f.; Dutens II 2, 165).
35. LH III 1, 2, § 4.
36. Jean Fernel, Physiologia, ed. John M. Forrester and John Henry (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2003). Book IV (“De spiritibus et in-nato caldo”), chap. 1 (“Calorem quendam in nobis cunctisque viventibus inesse, eumque divinium”), 256–58.
37. See AT VI 46, 7–8.
38. Leibniz uses the term “nescio quid” here, as frequently elsewhere, not to express irony, but rather generality. He wishes to say that there is something analogous to the stars, without having to go into the details of this analogy.
39. This last sentence is one of the hardest in the manuscript to decipher, and likely for that reason Mahrenholtz misreads it as asserting that an animal is a hydraulico-pneumatic machine (Marion Mahrenholtz, “Leibniz’ Literaturquellen zu einigen frühen Texten medizinischen Inhalts,” 353). The Latin reads: “Plerique enim Calidum in corpore animalis statuunt, quod humido alatur; nonnulli flam-mulam cordis adhibent; alii ignem lucentem, <quidam nescio quid analogum elementi stellarum, quale quod revera omnis est flamma,> quidam fermentationem, nonnulli displosiunculas innumerabiles ad pulveris pyrii instar: nos quod in his omnibus reperitur ebullitionem moderatam et durabilem, quae <a> materia circulata magisque ac magis rarefacta, et paulatim etiam instaurata, alatur. . . . Animal ergo esse machinam non tantum Hydraulico-Pneumaticam, sed et quodammodo Pyrotechnicam merito dicemus.”
40. See, in particular, Ernst Wilhelm Kämmerer, Das Leib-Seele-Geist Problem bei Paracelsus und einigen Autoren des 17. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1971).
41. NO 9. The passage reads in full: “So that therefore the Archaeus should not be sought after except in the soul and in the corporeal spirits that are in agreement with it, nor do we need some plastic or hylarchic principle, nor various princes or little kinglets in the bodily parts like the cardianax, gastrianax, and other such ones.”
42. See, in particular, Agostino Nifo, Expositiones in omnes libros De historia animalium, De partibus animalium et earum causis ac De generatione animalium (Venice, 1546). For a thorough study of Nifo’s thought, see Edward P. Mahoney, Two Aristotelians of the Italian Renaissance: Nicoletto Vernia and Agostino Nifo (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000).
43. Pierre Gassendi, Syntagma, 2, 345a; cited in Antonia LoLordo, Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 205–6.
44. The most important direct influence on Leibniz’s theory appears to come from Sylvius’s Praxeos medicae idea nova of 1671. Sylvius is sometimes credited as the founder of the theory of fermentation as the basic chemical process in living bodies.
45. Walter Charleton, Natural History of Nutrition, Life, and Voluntary Motion (London: Printed for Henry Herringman, 1659), preface.
46. Ibid., 2–3.
47. Charleton, Natural History of Nutrition, Life, and Voluntary Motion, 17.
48. Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes’s System of Natural Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 194.
49. Rudolphus Goclenius, Lexicon Philosophicum (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1980), 783. “Nutriri proprie dicitur id, quod in se ipso aliquid recipit ad suam ipsius conservationem corporalem.”
50. LH III 1, 1.
51. On this, see in particular Vincent Aucante, La philosophie médicale de Descartes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004).
52. For a comprehensive survey of this history, see Antonio Clericuzio, “Chemistry of Life: Ferments and Fermentation in 17th-Century Iatrochemistry,” Med. Secoli 15, no. 2 (2003): 227–45. See also Clericuzio, Elements, Principles, and Corpuscles.
53. Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, The Janus Face of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 49.
54. Ibid., 48.
55. Willis, De Fermentatione, chap. 1, 1, in Opera Omnia (Lyon, 1676).
56. Ibid.
58. Ibid., 12–13.
59. NO Animadversio XIII, 13.
60. Thomas Willis, De anima brutorum, quae hominis vitalis ac sensitiva est, in Opera Omnia, chap. 2, 7.
61. Willis, De anima brutorum, chap. 1, 3–4.
62. See Appendix 4 for a complete translation.
63. As Pasini notes, in the De scribendis “the rhythm of the deduction is more certain and more accelerated than in the Corpus hominis of the same era—perhaps as a result of the nature of the program of elaborating the theoretical elements of medicine announced in the beginning of the text—which gives to the text a more abstract and schematic tone, but also, at least at the beginning, a more compact structure” (Corpo e funzioni cognitive in Leibniz, 117).
64. It is possible that in the Corpus hominis manuscript as well, “pyrotechnic” should be read as “pyrobolic.”
65. LH III 1, 1.
66. Ibid.
67. Psychopyrism, though, did have its defenders. See Richard Baxter, Of the Nature of Spirits: Especially Mans Soul. In a placid Collation with the Learned Dr. Henry More (London, 1682).
68. Pasini, Corpo e funzioni cognitive in Leibniz, 116–17.
69. This succinct account of Bernoulli’s theory owes much to Raphaële Andrault, “Mathématiser la médecine,” presented at the conference, “Leibniz and the Empirical Sciences,” Orotava, Spain, February, 2009.
70. In personal conversation and correspondence.
71. See, for example, GM III/2, 884.
72. Dutens II 2, 91.
73. Bernoulli writes to Leibniz on April 8, 1711, making explicit his disagreement with Steno: “Steno thought that it is not certain nerves, but rather the muscles themselves that are contracted by means of crispation [crispationem], and this without access to new material: I preferred rather to say, with Borelli, Willis, Majorvius, and others, that the contraction of the muscles proceeds through a certain inflation, resulting from effervescence or ebullition, of the spirituous juice together with the blood that is coming in, just as I explained this at length in my own Dissertation on the Motion of the Muscles” (GM III/2, 872–73).
74. Leibniz to Bernoulli, February 10, 1711, GM III/2, 864. “I will readily agree with Steno that the nerves act by a certain contraction [crispationem]. Yet this very contraction, if I am not mistaken, cannot be explained unless by appeal to a fluid that passes through the nerves.”
75. GM III/2 884f. “Many things in organic bodies appear to consist in perpetual, imperceptible vibrations, which mutually restrain each other when we appear to be at rest. Thus in truth the matter leads back to the elastic force. I suspect that memory itself consists in the perdurance of vibrations. . . . Thus we have no need of the fluid that is called ‘animal spirits’, unless we trace it back to this elastic force itself.”
76. See Robert Boyle, New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall, Touching the Spring of the Air, and Its Effects (London, 1660), I, Experiment 1. On Boyle’s influence, See Pasini, Corpo e funzioni cognitive in Leibniz, 123.
77. LH III 1, 2, § 5.
78. See Johann Bernoulli, On the Mechanics of the Movement of the Muscles (1694), ed. and trans. Paul Maquet (Philadelphia: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 1997), § 20.
79. See, in particular, François Duchesneau, La physiologie des Lumières. Empirisme, modèles et théories (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1982), 32–64.
80. Leibniz writes to Bernoulli in December, 1710: “Baglivi, the Italian physician, denies . . . that the animal spirits contribute to the motion of the muscles, which he supposes to be contracted by a certain crispation; Steno held a similar opinion.”
81. See Giorgio Baglivi’s Specimen quatuor librorum de fibra motrice et morbosa, in Opera omnia medico-practica et anatomica, 7th ed. (Leiden: Sumptibus Anisson and Joannis Posuel, 1710), 237–394. Duchesneau sees Baglivi’s work as an important anticipation of that of Albrecht von Haller. See also N. Zurak, “Nervous System in the Fibrillar Theory of Giorgio Baglivi,” Med Secoli 12, no. 1 (2000): 147–58; N. G. Mihali, “Re-Evaluation of the Epistemic Foundation of Baglivi’s Medical Doctrine and His Anatomic-Physiological Theory,” Lijec Vjen 131, nos. 1–2 (2009): 40–41.
82. NO Animadversio XIII, 13.
83. NO Animadversio XVIII, 15.
84. 84. . NO Animadversio XIII, 13. “Et dici potest corpus nostrum non tantum machinam hydraulico-pneumaticam, sed et pyriam esse.”
85. NO Ad XII (2), 161.
86. NO Ad XIII, 162.
87. NO Ad XV (1), 163.
88. NO 2.
89. NO Ad I, 135–36.
90. NO Animadversio IX, 11.
91. This is a view attributed by Cicero to Chrysippus in his De natura deorum: “It would take too long to praise the qualities with which the mule and the ass are endowed—for mankind, of course. And the pig? What else is it but food? It has a soul, Chrysippus says, in order to keep it from rotting; the soul takes the place of salt, for it is destined to serve as nourishment for man” (De natura deorum II, 64).
92. NO Animadversio VIII, 11.
93. NO Animadversio IX, 11.
94. NO Animadversio XV, 14.
95. NO Ad IX, 152.
96. NO Ad XVI (2), 165. “Corpus non posse sic actuari ab anima, ut leges mechanicae corporum vel minimum violentur.”
97. François Duchesneau, Les modèles du vivant de Descartes à Leibniz (Paris: Vrin, 1998), 336.
98. NO Animadversio XXVI, 18.
99. NO Ad XXIX (1), 221.
100. NO, 3.
101. NO Ad XXI, 175–76.
102. Ibid.
103. NO Ad XXIX, 221.
104. NO Animadversio XXX, 19.
105. NO Ad XXI (1), 176.
106. NO 6–7.
CHAPTER 3
ORGANIC BODIES, PART I: NATURE AND STRUCTURE
1. NO, Preamble, no page numbers given. “Omnis organismus revera sit mechanismus, sed exquisitior.”
2. Montgomery Furth, “Aristotle’s Biological Universe: An Overview,” in Philosophical Issues in Aristotle’s Biology ed. Allan Gotthelf and James G. Lennox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 24.
3. See Catherine Wilson, The Invisible World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 181–83.
4. De generatione animalium I, 715.
5. François Duchesneau, Les modèles du vivant de Descartes à Leibniz (Paris: Vrin, 1998), 199.
6. Ibid., 199–200.
7. Cited in Duchesneau, Les modèles du vivant, 202; Marcello Malpighi, Opere scelte di Marcello Malpighi, ed. Luigi Belloni (Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1968), 512–13.
8. Wilson, Invisible World, 13.
9. Garber, “Leibniz and the Foundations of Physics: The Middle Years,” in The Natural Philosophy of Leibniz, ed. K. Okruhlik and J. R. Brown (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985), 89.
10. For an exhaustive account of the role of derivative force in Leibniz’s dynamics, Pauline Phemister, Leibniz and the Natural World: Activity, Passivity, and Corporeal Substances in Leibniz’s Philosophy (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005).
11. LH III 1, 2 § 9.
12. See, for example, Dutens II 1, 260.
13. An earlier version of this section of the present chapter appeared as Justin E. H. Smith, “‘A Mere Organical Body Like a Clock?’ Organic Body and the Problem of Idealism in the Late Leibniz,” Eighteenth-Century Thought 4 (2009).
14. We will intentionally be eliding “idealism” and “phenomenalism,” two positions some commentators have sought to distinguish in their interpretations of Leibniz. For our purposes, phenomenalism, whether Leibniz held it or not, may be seen as a variety of idealism.
15. One notable exception to this is Rutherford’s recent article, “Leibniz as Idealist,” to be discussed shortly.
16. Marie-Noëlle Dumas, La pensée de la vie chez Leibniz (Paris: Vrin, 1976), 121.
17. Leroy Loemker, ed., Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Philosophical Papers and Letters (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1969 [1976]), 528.
18. Donald Rutherford, “Metaphysics: The Late Period,” in The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz, ed. Nicholas Jolley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 124–75, at 154.
19. Letter to Damaris Masham, May 1704. G II 253.
20. Robert Merrihew Adams, Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 306.
21. Glenn Hartz, “Why Corporeal Substances Keep Popping Up in Leibniz’s Later Philosophy,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 32, no. 6 (1998): 193–207, at 201. In fact, as we’ll see shortly, Hartz does understand the distinction between organic body and corporeal substance, and the list he gives here should not be taken as a list of synonyms.
22. This is a point that has already been made by Michel Fichant, most notably in his influential 2003 article “Les machines de la nature.” At the same time, however, Fichant believes that the corporeal-substance metaphysics of the late period remains fundamentally at odds with the alternative idealistic metaphysics that Leibniz sought to develop simultaneously.
23. Donald Rutherford, “Leibniz as Idealist,” in Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, vol. 4, ed. Daniel Garber and Steven Nadler (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 141–90, esp. 141.
24. Ibid., 142.
25. Ibid., 143.
26. See Anne-Lise Rey, “Action, Perception, Organisation,” in Machines of Nature and Corporeal Substances in Leibniz, ed. Justin E. H. Smith and Ohad Nachtomy (Springer, 2011).
27. G II 253.
28. See Daniel Garber, Leibniz: Body, Substance, Monad (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
29. This singular occurrence reads: “Je definis l’Organisme, ou la Machine naturelle, que c’est une machine dont chaque partie est machine, et par consequent que la subtilité va à l’infini” (G III 356). This again seems to be a one-off occurrence of the term in a sense compatible with its general understanding today. See also Leibniz’s letters of June 30, 1704 (G III 356), and September 1704 (G III 362). Masham uses the term “organism” in her letter of June 1704 (G III 350) and it appears again in her letter to Leibniz of August 8, 1704 (G III 358). For an extensive analysis of the concept of organism from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries that takes its shift from an abstract noun to a count noun into account, see Tobias Cheung, “From the Organism of a Body to the Body of an Organism: Occurrence and Meaning of the Word ‘Organism’ from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century,” British Journal for the History of Science 39 (2006): 319–39.
30. G III 340. “Organisme c’est à dire l’ordre et l’artifice, est quelque chose d’essentiel à la matière produite et arrangée par la sagesse souveraine.”
31. A VI iv1615. As Duchesneau rightly notes, it is impossible that this passage dates from the period in which the Academy editors have placed it, for precisely the reason that Leibniz did not yet have the concept of organism employed in it (Les modèles du vivant de Descartes à Leibniz, 341). The academy editors rightly note that the reference to “organism” might point to a later date, but also mistakenly understand the phrase “pleine d’organisme” as referring to organisms in the plural: “Die These, in jedem Teil der Materie seien Organismen enthalten, könnte aber auch auf eine spätere Entstehungszeit verweisen” (A VI iv 1614).
32. Nehemiah Grew, Cosmologia Sacra: Or a Discourse of the Universe as It Is the Creature and Kingdom of God (London: W. Rogers, S. Smith, and B. Walford, 1701), 20; see also Tobias Cheung, Res vivens. Agentenmodelle organischer Ordnung 1600–1800 (Freiburg: Rombach Verlag, 2008), chap. 2, § 5.
33. G VII 344; AG 319.
34. G VII 415–18.
35. Anne Conway, Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, ed. Alison P. Coudert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 64.
36. Johannes Micraelius, Lexicon Philosophicum terminorum philosophis usitatorum (1662; repr. Düsseldorf: Stern-Verlag Janssen, 1966).
37. G VI 599.
38. Physics II i 193a.
39. L. A. Kosman, “Animals and Other Beings in Aristotle,” in Philosophical Issues in Aristotle’s Biology, ed. Allan Gotthelf and James G. Lennox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 360–91, at 379.
40. Ibid., 377. Kosman bases this distinction on Parts of Animals, II i 646b.
41. De anima 412b 10–24.
42. Brandon Look has compellingly argued that Leibniz is unable to give an adequate account of monadic domination without making essential reference to the relation between the dominant monad and its body. At the same time, Look maintains that these bodies are in the end intentional objects. See Look, “On Monadic Domination in Leibniz’s Metaphysics,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 10, no. 3 (2002): 379–99.
43. G IV 395–96.
44. Italics added. Cited in Sarah Carvallo, Stahl-Leibniz: Controverse sur la vie, l’organisme et le mixte (Paris: Vrin, 2004), 82. This sentence is suppressed in the 1720 and 1768 editions, but is included parenthetically in the original manuscript.
45. G V 297.
46. Letter to Sophie, November 4, 1696; G VII 542.
47. G III 260. See also GM III 536–37.
48. G III 260.
49. G VI 598.
50. G II 296.
51. Donald Baxter, “Corporeal Substances and True Unities,” Studia Leibnitiana 27, no. 2 (1995): 64.
52. G II 96f. “Ce qui fait l’essence d’une armée n’est qu’une maniere d’estre des hommes qui la composent.”
53. Grua 323, “nullum enim reale in ipso est, quod non resultet ex partium unde aggregatur realitate.”
54. G II 100.
55. R. C. Sleigh, Leibniz and Arnauld: A Commentary on Their Correspondence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 126.
56. Steven Nadler, Introduction, Causation in Early Modern Philosophy: Cartesianism, Occasionalism, and Preestablished Harmony, ed. Steven Nadler (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 5.
57. G III 262.
58. G III 657.
59. G IV 572.
60. G III 457.
61. Michel Fichant, “Les machines de la nature,” Studia Leibnitiana 35, no. 1 (2003): 19.
62. Sleigh, Leibniz and Arnauld, 126.
63. G IV 482.
64. For a rich account of the context of Leibniz’s reintroduction of a form-matter philosophy, see Michel Fichant, “Mécanisme et métaphysique: Le rétablissement des formes substantielles,” in Science et métaphysique dans Descartes et Leibniz (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), 163–204.
65. G II 270.
66. Adams, Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist, 306.
67. Garber, “Leibniz and the Foundations of Physics,” 63.
68. Nicholas Rescher, Leibniz’s Metaphysics of Nature (Dordrecht; Boston: Reidel, 1981), 46.
69. Donald Rutherford, Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 154f.
70. See Etienne Gilson, Index Scholastico-Cartésien (Paris, 1979), 126; cited in Garber, “Leibniz and the Foundations of Physics: The Middle Years,” 29.
71. Garber, “Leibniz and the Foundations of Physics,” 39.
72. Ibid.
73. G VI 618.
74. Ibid., 607.
75. More recently Garber has offered a highly plausible account of the difference between the middle and late periods, according to which Leibniz remains committed to corporeal substance throughout his life, while what changes from the middle to the late periods is that, in the late period, corporeal substance is underlain by rock-bottom entities, the monads, whereas in the middle period corporeal substances really are just “bugs-within-bugs” ad infinitum. See Garber, Leibniz: Body, Substance, Monad.
76. Michel Fichant, “La constitution du concept de monade,” in La mona-dologie de Leibniz: Genèse et contexte, ed. Enrico Pasini (Paris: Mimesis, 2005), 31–54, esp. 33.
77. G VI 599.
78. Ibid.
79. Ibid., 617–18.
80. G II 171.
81. See William R. Newman, Atoms and Alchemy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), chap. 1.
82. Paul of Taranto, Theorica et practica; cited in Newman, Atoms and Alchemy, 41. “Quoniam autem redeunt haec eadem sicut prius, manifestum est ea ad quedam sua componentia tantum resoluta fuisse et non ad elementa vel ad primam materiam ut mentuntur prefati.”
83. Newman, Atoms and Alchemy, 42.
84. The latest extant work on a subject relating to the nature of “inorganic” mixtures and compositions, prior to the development of the organic model of bodies, is “Meditatio de Separatione Salis et aquae dulcis, novoque Separationum Chymicarum genere,” published in the Acta Eruditorum in December 1682 (386–88; Dutens II 2 108–10).
85. In order to drive home the distinction between animals and organic bodies, it is interesting to consider the early text, Principium mechanicae universae novum of 1680–86, in which Leibniz says that the world is a single and unique machine. This machine is assuredly natural, but we should certainly not infer from this that Leibniz believed that the world is a single and unique animal. Such a view—requiring as it does that the world itself have a soul—was widely deemed heretical, and was avoided even by the Cambridge Platonists, notwithstanding their admiration for Plato’s Timaeus.
86. This term was coined by Donald Rutherford in his Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature. See especially chapter 8.
87. Fichant, “Les machines de la nature,” 19.
88. G II 268.
89. Martial Guéroult, Dynamique et métaphysique leibniziennes (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1934), 187.
90. Michel Fichant makes a similar point when he notes of Leibniz’s ontology: “Ce n’est pas . . . un idéalisme quasi-berkeleyen, qui réduirait la réalité des corps au seul contenu objectif des représentations perceptives. Ce qu’il y a toujours eu en Leibniz de fidélité aristotélicienne le préservait de la Scwhärmerei où Kant verra la marque de cette sorte là d’idéalisme” (Fichant, “Les machines de la nature,” 28).
91. G VI 545.
92. As Rutherford writes: “For every monad representing itself as an embodied creature . . . there is a ground in reality for that appearance: monads whose perceptions represent them as the organic components of those bodies. In this account, there is clearly no inconsistency between Leibniz’s monadic and panorganic models. They represent complementary ways of understanding the universe: one from the point of view of reality as it is in itself, a system of harmoniously related monads; the other from the point of view of the order determined by those monads’ expression of themselves as embodied creatures naturally subordinated to one another. There is thus no problem with Leibniz’s asserting . . . that reality consists solely of monads and their harmonious perceptions” (Rutherford, Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature, 230).
93. See De principiis 2.8.3, in Origen, An Exhortation to Martyrdom, Prayer, and Selected Works, trans. and ed. Rowan A. Greer (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1979).
94. Ibid., 2.2.2.
95. Henry More, Democritus Platonissans, or, An Essay upon the Infinity of Worlds (Cambridge: Roger Daniel, 1646), stanza 12.
96. Conway, Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 30–32.
97. G VI 507.
98. G VI 548.
99. Origen, An Exhortation to Martyrdom, Prayer, and Selected Works, 214.
100. Ibid.
101. Brandon Look pointed this problem out (in personal correspondence).
102. In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger makes a similar point about the different ways in which the label “idealist” has been applied to figures in the history of philosophy: “If what the term ‘idealism’ says, amounts to the understanding that Being can never be explained by entities but is already that which is ‘transcendental’ for every entity, then idealism affords the only correct possibility for a philosophical problematic. If so, Aristotle was no less an idealist than Kant. But if ‘idealism’ signifies tracing back every entity to a subject or consciousness whose sole distinguishing features are that it remains indefinite in its Being and is best characterized negatively as ‘un-Thing-like,’ then this idealism is no less naive in its method than the most grossly militant realism” (Being and Time, ed. and trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson [Oxford: Blackwell, 2000], 251–52).
103. As discussed in chapter 2, this notion is Paracelsian in origin, and initially served primarily as an explanation of the alchemical force that guides digestion, conceived as the transformation of food into a new bodily substance.
104. Dutens II 2, 225.
105. Cudworth, True Intellectual System, I.3.37, art. 5, 150.
106. Ibid., I.3.37, art. 3, 148.
107. Ibid., I.3.37, art. 4, 150. On the connection of Cudworth’s pananimism to Plotinus, see Alain Petit, “Ralph Cudworth: Un platonisme paradoxal. La nature dans la Digression concerning the Plastick Life of Nature,” in The Cambridge Platonists in Philosophical Context, ed. G.A.J. Rogers, J. M. Vienne, and Y.-C. Zarka (Dordrecht; Boston: Kluwer, 1997), 101–10.
108. Cudworth, True Intellectual System, I.3.37, art. 21, 165.
109. Duchesneau, Les modèles du vivant de Descartes à Leibniz, 181.
110. Cudworth, True Intellectual System, 1.3.37, art. 15, 158–59.
111. For a detailed account of Cudworth’s theory of natural growth and change, see François Jacob, La logique du vivant (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 110–14.
112. Philo of Alexandria, The Contemplative Life, The Giants, and Selections, trans. and ed. David Winston (Garden City: Doubleday, 1997), 97.
113. Ibid., 114.
114. Cudworth, True Intellectual System, I.2.10, 72.
115. Interestingly, in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, Kant refers to hylozoism as “the death of all natural philosophy” (AA 4:544). According to Brandon Look (in personal correspondence), it is Leibniz that Kant has in mind here.
116. Cudworth, True Intellectual System, I.3, note 37, 178.
117. Cited in Petit, “Ralph Cudworth: Un platonisme paradoxal. La nature dans la Digression concerning the Plastick Life of Nature,” 103.
118. NO 177.
119. GM 241.
120. G IV 391.
121. G V 126.
122. G III 368.
123. G VI 544.
124. G III 371.
125. G III 371.
126. G III 374.
127. G IV 391.
128. On the connection between material plastic natures and derivative force, see Pauline Phemister and Justin E. H. Smith, “Leibniz and the Cambridge Platonists and the Debate over Plastic Natures,” in Leibniz and the English-Speaking World, ed. Pauline Phemister and Stuart Brown (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007).
129. G VII 417–18.
CHAPTER 4
ORGANIC BODIES, PART II: CONTEXT AND LEGACY
1. This term first occurs in Ohad Nachtomy, Ayelet Shavit, and Justin Smith, “Leibnizian Organisms, Nested Individuals, and Units of Selection,” Theory in Biosciences 12, no. 2 (2002): 205–30. The notion of nested individuality is extensively developed in Ohad Nachtomy, Possibility, Agency, and Individuality in Leibniz’s Metaphysics (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007). It is above all Nachtomy’s work that has brought to our attention the importance of the notion of nestedness for understanding Leibniz’s notions of individuality and substance. Parts of this section overlap with the coauthored article.
2. G II 250.
3. Leibniz writes that “no entelechy ever lacks an organic body” (G II 251).
4. G II 251.
5. “A substance—that which is called a substance most strictly, primarily, and most of all—is that which is neither said of a subject nor in a subject, e.g., the individual man or the individual horse” (Categories 5 2a 11–13).
6. As much work in the contemporary philosophy of biology shows, moreover, biological organisms (or organism colonies) that do not easily fit with the commonsense view of individuality—that is, the view passed down from Aristotle—continue to pose conceptual difficulties. Philosophers admit that asexual protozoan or siphonophore colonies can be comprehended only with difficulty in terms of our commonsense intuitions about what a biological individual is, and the fact that these cases continue to be written about as threatening to our ordinary views about the biological world so long after phenomena such as parthenogenesis were first noticed by science shows just how entrenched the commonsense view of the biological world really is. See, in this connection, Jack Wilson, Biological Individuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); John Dupré, The Disorder of Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Michael T. Ghiselin, “Natural Kinds and Supraorganismal Individuals,” in Folkbiology, ed. Douglas L. Medin and Scott Atran (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 447–60.
7. Ludwig Feuerbach, Darstellung, Entwicklung und Kritik der Leibnitz’schen Philosophie (Ansbach: C. Brügel, 1837), 86.
8. David L. Hull, “Individuality and Selection,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 11 (1980): 314.
9. Peter van Inwagen, Material Beings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 89.
10. Hull recognizes the ultimately arbitrary nature of our effort to get at the “true” individuals in nature. He writes: “Individuals are spatiotemporally localized entities that have reasonably sharp beginnings and endings in time . . . [i]t is only an accident of our relative size, longevity and perceptual acuity that we can see the distances between the organisms that comprise a species but not the even greater relative distances that separate the atoms that make up an organic body” (Hull, “Individuality and Selection,” 313).
11. Eva Jablonka, “Inheritance Systems and the Evolution of New Levels of Individuality,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 170 (1994): 301–9, at 301.
12. See Richard C. Lewontin, “The Units of Selection,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 1 (1970): 1–18; Robert N. Brandon, “The Units of Selection Revisited: The Modules of Selection,” Biology and Philosophy 14, no. 2 (1999): 167–80.
14. Robert Merrihew Adams, Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 228.
15. Catherine Wilson, “Leibniz and the Animalcula,” in Studies in Seventeenth-Century European Philosophy, ed. M. A. Stewart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 174.
16. Jacques Roger, “Leibniz et les sciences de la vie,” Studia Leibnitiana Supplementa 2, no. 2 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1969): 209.
17. It is radically new, at least, as a theoretical model of body. It is likely, however, that for a full account of the background to Leibniz’s model of nested individuals, one would have to delve into the literary sources that constituted part of the broader cultural background of Leibniz’s work. Worlds within worlds appear to be an important theme of baroque literature, but one that lies well beyond the scope of the present investigation. For an interesting account of the possible influence on Leibniz of one expression of this theme in seventeenth-century fiction, namely, Cyrano de Bergerac’s Les empires de la lune, see Antonio Nunziante, “Continuity or Discontinuity? Some Remarks on Leibniz’s Concepts of ‘substantia vivens’ and ‘Organism,’” in Machines of Nature and Corporeal Substances in Leibniz, ed. Justin E. H. Smith and Ohad Nachtomy (Springer, 2011).
18. Historia animalium 611b.
19. Historia animalium 602b.
20. Historia animalium 548b.
21. See Alexander von Tralles: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Medicin, vol. 2, ed. Theodor Puschmann (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1878), 586–99.
22. Jack Wilson, Biological Individuality, chap. 1.
23. AG 105; see S 322–25; FdeC 317–23.
24. Couturat 522. “Nullum est corpus tam exiguum, quin sit actu subdivisum.”
25. For a thorough and revealing treatment of Leibniz’s complicated relationship to atomism, see Richard T. W. Arthur, “The Enigma of Leibniz’s Atomism,” Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy 1 (2003): 183–227.
26. A VI ii, 280.
27. G II 111–29.
28. G II 118.
29. G II 184.
30. GM III/2 565.
31. G II 475.
32. G II 451.
33. GM III 565.
34. Catherine Wilson, The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 160.
35. Hartsoeker to Andry, February 26, 1699; in Nicolas Andry, De la génération des vers dans le corps de l’homme (Amsterdam, 1700), 232f.
36. Friedrich Christian Lesser, Théologie des insectes, ou demonstration des perfections de Dieu, 212–13. Originally published in German (Frankfurt, Leipzig: Blochberger, 1738; French edition, La Haye, 1742).
37. Ibid., 232–33.
38. Charles Bonnet, Considérations sur les corps organisés (Amsterdam, 1762), vol. 1, 131.
39. Balthasar de Monconys, Journal des voyages de Monsieur de Monconys (Lyons: Boissat and Remeus, 1665–66), vol. 1, 177; cited in Wilson, The Invisible World, 173.
40. G VI 586.
41. Wilson, The Invisible World, 76.
42. Christia Mercer, Leibniz’s Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 69.
43. G IV 64.
44. Robert Hooke, Micrographia; or, Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon (London: Jo. Martyn and J. A. Allestry, 1665), preface, unpaginated.
45. Wilson, The Invisible World, 88–119.
46. G I 19.
47. WBG V/2, 302.
48. LH III 5, 111–12.
49. G VI 327.
50. A VI iv 953.
51. GM 641.
52. Hans Poser, “Leibniz’ Parisaufenthalt in seiner Bedeutung für die Monadenlehre,” Studia Leibnitiana, Supplement 18 (Wiesbaden: Steiner 1978): 131–44, at 141.
53. Ibid., 142.
54. Monconys, Journal des voyages, vol. 1, 177; cited in Wilson, The Invisible World, 173.
55. That is, the infection of the eyelids with pubic lice.
56. LH XXXVII, 2, 123v.
57. G II 92. As we will see in chapter 6, it is from the observation of grafting in plants that Leibniz and fellow Lutheran defenders of the doctrine of traducianism derive their account of the “splitting” of souls and the consequent transmission of original sin.
58. G V 296.
59. Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, Alle de brieven van Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, vol. 14 (Amsterdam: Swets and Zeitlinger B.V., 1996), 169. Interestingly, the eighteenth-century Danish naturalist Otto Friedrich Müller traces the history of experiments in parthenogenesis back to Aristotle and Augustine, though this may be more a convention characteristic of the prefaces to eighteenth-century scientific treatises than the expression of a genuine belief that premodern philosophy contributed anything of significance to the field of inquiry. Müller writes that “Aristotle, great in many ways, had already made remarks concerning the continuation of life in the divided insect, even concerning the centipedes.” As for Augustine’s contribution, Müller claims to know even the precise species of creature on which he experimented: “The Church Father Augustine had made similar experiments in Liguria with a long, many-footed earthworm, whereupon his students put him in something of a predicament. It is clear that Augustine’s worm was a spiny worm, and quite likely even the same as ours; his description is much too clear for us to require any proof: it was no Polyp” (see Otto Friedrich Müller, Vermium terrestrium et fluviatilium, seu animalium infusoriorum, helminthicorum et testaceorum, non marinorum, succincta historia [Copenhagen and Leipzig: Heineck and Faber, 1773], 137 n. 9).
60. This argument may be traced in particular to Aram Vartanian, “Trembley’s Polyp, La Mettrie, and Eighteenth-Century French Materialism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 11 (1950): 159–86.
61. It is perhaps worth noting that Trembley began his career as a mathematician, obtaining his Promotion with a thesis on the infinitesimal calculus. See his Theses mathematici de infinito et calculo infinitesimali (Geneva: Marci-Michaelis Bousquet, 1730).
62. For an exhaustive account of Trembley’s experiments and their scientific context, see Virginia P. Dawson, Nature’s Enigma: The Problem of the Polyp in the Letters of Bonnet, Trembley and Réaumur (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1987).
63. Charles Bonnet, Considérations sur les corps organisés (Amsterdam: Marc-Michel Rey, 1762), vol. 1, 218. Bonnet himself offers this very interesting response to the metaphysical anxiety parthenogenesis had induced in his contemporaries: “I consider the existence of the souls of beasts as only probable, since it is only based on analogy: people who are led by sentiment go further; they decide upon the reality of its existence, and even the philosopher has trouble not following them. But in according a soul to the polyp, my reader apparently fears that I am preparing tortures for myself. Almost all men have in their mind certain metaphysical ideas on the basis of which they reason: almost all of them know, more or less, that the soul is a simple being, from which they easily conclude that it cannot be divided. How, then, can one bring about, with a single cut of the scalpel, many animals from a single worm or polyp? What surprises me the most is that the philosophers, like the common men, have to a certain extent limited themselves to sensing the difficulty, without making a proper effort to resolve it. It seems to me that they have in general regarded it as irresolvable. . . . They have contented themselves with admiring, and with declaiming upon the uncertainty of our knowledge in metaphysics. They would have done better to use their time thinking, rather than wasting it on discourses” (Considérations sur les corps organisés, vol. 1, 76–77).
64. Bonnet, Considérations sur les corps organisés, vol. 2, 71. Italics added.
65. Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, Système de la Nature, in Oeuvres (Lyon, 1756; repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1965–74), 137–84.
66. Müller, Vermium terrestrium et fluviatilium, 1–22.
67. C. G. Ehrenberg, Die Infusionsthierchen als vollkommende Organismen. Ein Blick in das tiefere organische Leben der Natur (Leipzig, 1838).
68. Ibid.
69. Müller, Vermium terrestrium et fluviatilium, “Genus Infusoria,” no page numbers.
70. Roger, “Leibniz et les sciences de la vie,” 218.
71. Julien Offray de La Mettrie, L’homme machine, in Oeuvres philosophiques (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1970), 286.
72. Denis Diderot, Eléments de physiologie, ed. Jean Mayer (Paris: Société des textes français modernes, 1964), 56.
73. Ibid., 56.
74. Ibid., 192.
75. Ibid., 189–91.
76. Wilson, “Leibniz and the Animalcula,” 153.
77. Wilson attributes this view to Daniel Garber, “Leibniz and the Foundations of Physics: The Middle Years,” in The Natural Philosophy of Leibniz, ed. K. Okruhlik and J. R. Brown (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985), 29ff.; and to C. D. Broad, Leibniz: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 83.
78. Wilson, “Leibniz and the Animalcula,” 174.
79. Ibid., 175.
80. In the Micrographia of 1665, Robert Hooke describes the “cells” of cork, by which he means, as the term suggests, only small, roomlike cavities within it. In the eighteenth century, a number of authors (e.g., Haller, Lecat) described globules or bubbles in muscle tissue. As Ernst Mayr notes, though, “it took a century and a half after Hooke’s first description before any real progress was made in the study of cells” (Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982], 653).
81. Georges Canguilhem, “Note sur les rapports de la théorie cellulaire et de la philosophie de Leibniz,” in La connaissance de la vie (Paris: Vrin, 1998), 187.
82. Wilson, “Leibniz and the Animalcula,” 153.
83. A II i 719.
CHAPTER 5
THE DIVINE PREFORMATION OF ORGANIC BODIES
1. G VI 544.
2. Letter to Schelhammer, December 6, 1680; Dutens II 2, 166.
3. Dutens II 2, 165.
4. See G VI 601.
5. Many of the significant points of this chapter were already developed in Justin E. H. Smith, “Leibniz on Spermatozoa and Immortality,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 89, no. 3 (2007): 264–82.
6. For a late example of such popular work, see the treatise attributed to Albertus Magnus, Die Heimligkeit des Weiblichen geschlechts (Frankfurt: Sigmund Feyrabendt, 1581).
7. François Mauriceau, Des maladies des femmes grosses et accouchées (Paris, 1668), 69.
8. William Harvey, Exercitationes de generatione animalium. Quibus accedunt quaedam de partu; de membranis ac humoribus uteri; & de conceptione (London: Typis Du-Gardianis; Impensis O. Pulleyn, 1651).
9. For a thorough treatment of this aspect of Harvey’s generation theory, see Guido Giglioni, “‘Conceptus uteri/conceptus cerebri’: Note sull’analogia del concepimento nella teoria della generazione di William Harvey,” Rivista di storia della filosofia 48 (1993). See also James G. Lennox, “The Comparative Study of Animal Development: William Harvey’s Aristotelianism,” in The Problem of Animal Generation in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Justin E. H. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 21–46.
10. G VI 544. Leibniz writes similarly to Arnauld in a letter of April 30, 1687: “We can probably say of [animals] . . . that they were already alive from the creation of the world, and that they will live to its end, and that since generation is apparently only a change consisting in growth, so death will only be a change consisting in diminution, which causes this animal to reenter the recesses of a world of minute creatures where perceptions are more limited.”
11. G VI 543f.
12. G VI 543.
13. G VI 544.
14. See Jacques Roger, Les sciences de la vie dans la pensée française du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1963); Peter Bowler, “Preformation and Preexistence in the Seventeenth Century: A Brief Analysis,” Journal of the History of Biology 4 (1971): 221–22.
15. See Andrew Pyle, “Animal Generation and the Mechanical Philosophy: Some Light on the Role of Biology in the Scientific Revolution,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 9 (1987): 225–54.
16. For a good account of the eighteenth-century developments in the pre-formation-epigenesis debate, see Walter Bernardi, Le metafisiche dell’embrione: Scienze della vita e filosofia da Malpighi a Spallanzani (1672–1793) (Florence: Olschki, 1985); see also Shirley Roe, Matter, Life, and Generation: Eighteenth-Century Embryology and the Haller-Wolff Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
17. AT VI, 45; cited in Dennis Des Chene, Spirits and Clocks: Machine and Organism in Descartes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 32.
18. John Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of His Creation (London, 1691), 67f.
19. Georges Canguilhem perceptively notes that “historians of biology have very often connected the epigenetic conception of development to mechanistic biology, forgetting the close and almost necessary relationship that connects the theory of preformation to that same biology. Since a machine does not build itself, since there are no machines, in an absolute sense, to build machines, it was necessary that the living machine should have a connection to some machinist. . . . Insofar as [this machinist] was not perceivable in the present, he was presumed to have been there at the beginning and through the theory of the emboîtement of germs was able to meet the exigencies of intelligibility that sustained the theory of preformation” (Canguilhem, Etudes d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences [Paris: J. Vrin, 1983], 325f.). On Canguilhem’s account, for second-wave mechanists such as Leibniz, preformation was the only way out of the evident failure of the Cartesian embryological program to account for conception and fetal development. Other scholars have argued that this account, on which preformationism or preexistence theory presented itself as an escape route from the dead-end into which mechanism had led embryology, is rather too simplistic. See in particular Karen Detlefsen’s careful and helpful article, “Supernaturalism, Occasionalism, and Preformation in Malebranche,” Perspectives on Science 11, no. 4 (2003): 443–83. While in general we agree with the account presented here, in the particular case of Leibniz, as we will see shortly, there can be no question but that for Leibniz one of preformation’s strongest attractions is its ability to circumvent the evident inability of mechanism to account for generation.
20. J. F. Bertram, Eine bescheidene Prüfung der Meinung von der Præexistentz oder dem Vorherseyn menschlicher Seelen in organischen Leibern (Bremen: Saurmann, 1741), preface, no page numbers given. Bertram was an ardent anti-Wolffian (and, by extension, anti-Leibnizian) polemicist. In 1739, he published another work denouncing the theory of preestablished harmony, Beleuchtung der Neu-getünchten Meynung von der Harmonia Praestabilita durch Veranlassung der jüngst-edirten Reinbeckischen Erörterung (Illumination of the Newfangled Opinion of the Preestablished Harmony in View of Reinbeck’s Recently Published Discussion). Johann Gustav Reinbeck was a defender of physical influx theory who had been appointed by Friedrich the Great to lead a commission inquiring into the merits, or lack thereof, of the Wolffian philosophy. See Eric Watkins, “From Pre-Established Harmony to Physical Influx: Leibniz’s Reception in Eighteenth Century Germany,” Perspectives on Science 6, nos. 1 and 2 (1998): 136–203. Although Bertram had been opposed to both theories, it is interesting to note that he appears to understand the connection between preestablished harmony and preformation: in order for all substances to have always existed in a harmonious order of individually causally self-sufficient substances, these substances must have always preexisted in an organically embodied form.
21. Bertram, Bescheidene Prüfung, preface, no page numbers given.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., chaps. 10, 32.
25. Garden, “A Discourse concerning the Modern Theory of Generation,” Philosophial Transactions (January 1691): 474.
26. G II 251.
27. G VI 620.
28. OH 179.
29. De Trinitate, Book III, chap. 9; in St. Augustine, The Trinity, trans. Stephen McKenna (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1963), 112.
30. G VI 534.
31. A VI iv 427.
32. G VII 539.
33. See Jan Swammerdam, Ephemeri vita, of, Afbeeldingh van ‘s menschen leven (Amsterdam: Abraham Wolfgang, 1675).
34. Interestingly, the very term “spermatozoon” reveals an important conceptual confusion at the root of animalcular preformationism. In fact, spermatozoa are cells of the male body, just like any other, with the one difference that they are equipped with flagella that make self-motion possible. They are not, however, spermatic “animals,” as their name suggests, no matter how strong the temptation to associate the capacity for self-motion with substantial individuality.
35. Ian Hacking, “Do We See through a Microscope?” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 62 (1981): 305–22; repr. P. M. Churchland and C. A. Hooker, eds., Images of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 132–52.
36. See Elizabeth Gasking, Investigations into Generation, 1651–1828 (London: Hutchinson, 1967), chap. 3.
37. K. E. von Baer, De ovi mammalium et hominis genesi (Leipzig, 1827). Translated by C. D. O’Malley in Isis 48, no. 148 (1956).
38. See Appendix 5.
39. In this connection, Leibniz’s preformation theory has at least one feature in common with earlier, nonempirical theories of generation, such as that of Aristotle, that take the father to be the source of the future individual. As Françoise Heritier has argued from an anthropological point of view, the attribution of primary, active responsibility for generation to the father is a widely recurring view in folk cultures, and indeed has had such a strong hold on the Western imagination as to find itself smuggled into recent scientific accounts of generation with alarming explicitness. She cites, for example, the article on “Fécondation” from the Encyclopaedia universalis of 1984: “The distinctive feature of female gametes is a particular metabolic regime. Once they are differentiated, these cells display an extraordinary inability to develop on their own. They enter into a state of physiological inertia, so that they are bound to die unless they are activated. It is in this way that the necessity of fecundation arises: the male gamete fulfills the natural activating function” (Heritier, Masculin/Féminin I: La pensée de la différence [Paris: Odile Jacob, 1996], 204).
40. Catherine Wilson, “Leibniz and the Animalcula,” in Studies in Seventeenth-Century European Philosophy, ed. M. A. Stewart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 158.
41. Catherine Wilson also notes a number of other important influences on Leibniz’s thought about microscopy from around this period. Among these are the following: In 1676 Leibniz mentions Borel’s experiments on cherry seeds in his discussion of Boyle’s ideas about resurrection in De sede animae (A VI iii 478).
42. Alle de brieven van Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, vol. II, 335.
43. Philosophical Transactions 22, no. 268 (1700): 739–46, at 741. The letter he refers to is in Philosophical Transactions 12, no. 142 (1677): 1040–46.
44. This discovery certainly did not settle the matter. In a 1669 report to Oldenburg from Leiden, Samuel Colepresse worries that “it may be Hollanders have other Testicles than English men.” In any case, Colepresse will not be the one to settle the matter. Commenting on De Graaf’s search for an answer to this question through the collection of samples of human semen, he declares in evident exasperation: “Truelie should De Graaf desire ye experiment on me I should looke but soure on’t” (The Correspondence of Henry OIdenburg, ed. and trans. A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965–86], vol. 6, 193).
45. Alle de brieven van Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, vol. III, 19–21.
46. Ibid., vol. VII, 35.
47. Ibid., vol. XII, 317.
48. Ibid., vol. XXI, 270.
49. Ibid., vol. VII. 380f.
50. Ibid., vol. V, 209. Leeuwenhoek himself attributes this view to the physician Cornelis Bontekoe, a Cartesian iatrochemist.
51. Ibid, vol. V, 209.
52. Nicolas Andry de Bois-Regard, De la génération des vers dans le corps de l’homme (Amsterdam, 1700), 203.
53. François Duchesneau, Les modèles du vivant de Descartes à Leibniz (Paris: Vrin, 1998), 319.
54. G II 122.
55. G IV 478f.
56. G VI 601.
57. Duchesneau, Les modèles du vivant de Descartes à Leibniz, 251.
58. G III 564.
59. Ibid., 564f.
60. For example, G VI 601; G VI 619f.
61. Klopp 159.
62. G V 295.
63. Contrary to Bowler, who identifies metamorphosis as the spontaneous production of all parts after conception (Bowler, “Preformation and Preexistence in the Seventeenth Century: A Brief Analysis,” 222), this term is used here to refer specifically to the development of new organs out of a preexisting organism, either at conception or at another significantly transformative moment, such as the emergence of an insect from a cocoon or, for Leibniz, death.
64. G VI 621.
65. Cotgrave’s 1611 Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues translates “revestement” as “a reinuesting, reattiring, new clothing.”
66. G VI 601.
67. G V 215–16. Italics added. Heliogabalus was a third-century Roman emperor, notorious for his gluttony and decadent behavior.
68. For example, Difficultates circa naturam et originem animarum (A VI iv 1494f., Summer 1683–Winter 1684/85); De animarum creatione atque mentium origine (A VI iv 1496f., Summer 1683–Winter 1684/85).
69. G IV 480.
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid., 481.
72. G VI 601.
73. Ibid.
74. See Daniel C. Fouke, “Spontaneity and the Generation of Rational Beings in Leibniz’s Theory of Biological Reproduction,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 29, no. 1 (1991): 33–45.
75. G VI 601.
76. A VI iv 1491.
77. Ibid.
78. I 136. “μετενσωματοσις id est, transcorporatio, qua est anima de corpore humano in corpus felinum migratio.”
79. G II 99.
80. G VI 533.
81. Ibid.
82. Klopp-SC, 184f.
83. WBG 4, 17.
84. G III 349.
85. OCM I, chap. XI, 13.
86. Following Robert Sleigh, “mind-body concomitance” may be seen as a subdoctrine of the doctrine of preestablished harmony. The latter holds that the perceptions of all minds or mindlike monads are coordinated from the beginning to express the same order of coexistence without any real interaction between them. Since, however, this perception is always a perception of the world qua totality of bodies—created monads never perceive other monads directly—pre-established harmony is always also an agreement between minds or mindlike substance and the world of bodies from which the minds are causally cut off.
87. For the most complete account of the similarities and differences between the philosophies of Malebranche and Leibniz, see André Robinet, Malebranche et Leibniz: Relations personelles (Paris: Vrin, 1955).
88. Alle de brieven van Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, vol. XXI, 270f.
89. G VI 541.
90. G IV 498.
91. Alle de brieven van Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, vol. V, 151.
92. Alle de brieven van Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, vol. VII, 35.
93. Alle de brieven van Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, vol. VII, 35.
94. Alle de brieven van Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, vol. VII, 35.
CHAPTER 6
GAMES OF NATURE, THE EMERGENCE OF ORGANIC FORM, AND THE PROBLEM OF SPONTANEITY
1. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (London: Penguin Books, 1994), 106–7.
2. Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life, ed. and trans. Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1989), 323–25. For a thorough treatment of Ficino on imagination and embryo-genesis and his relation to other thinkers on this topic, see Concetta Pennuto, Simpatia, fantasia e contagio: Il pensiero medico e il pensiero filosofico di Girolamo Fracastoro (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2008).
3. Antoine Goudin, Philosophie suivant les principes de Saint Thomas, trans. T. Bourard (Paris, 1864 [original ed. Paris, 1668]), 301: Des corps mixtes inanimés, dit fossiles. Thanks to Roger Ariew for bringing this work to my attention.
4. For a subtle discussion of the metaphysical grounds of Leibniz’s theory of spontaneity, see Donald Rutherford, “Leibniz on Spontaneity,” in Donald Rutherford and J. A. Cover, Leibniz: Nature and Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2005), 156-180.
5. Directiones 37.
6. G V 295.
7. See, for example, Andrew Pyle, who asks of Malebranche’s acceptance of the theory: “Why does Malebranche endorse the old wives’ tale? The empirical evidence in its favour is only anecdotal (of a kind that in other contexts he would dismiss with scorn); there is no remotely plausible mechanism to convey the supposed influence; the theory of pre-existence seems to render such an influence redundant. Everything, it seems, should militate against endorsing the old wives’ tale” (Pyle, Malebranche [London: Routledge, 2003], 180).
8. See, e.g., Georges Canguilhem, Le normal et le pathologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003).
9. Pietro Pomponazzi, Les causes des merveilles de la nature ou les enchantements, ed. and trans. Henri Busson (Paris, 1930).
10. Lynn Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science, vol. 7 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947–64), 449.
11. Paracelsus, De natura rerum (1537), book 9, Sämtliche Werke, 4 vols. (Leipzig: Zentralantiquariat der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 1975).
12. Directiones 22.
13. See Aristotle, Metaphysics, book VI, chap. 2. Here Aristotle defines the “accidental” as that which fails to happen “always or for the most part.”
14. Coimbricenses, In phys. Cited in Dennis Des Chene, Physiologia: Natural Philosophy in Late Aristotelian and Cartesian Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 206f.
15. AT VI, 45.
16. AT II 254. Des Chene describes this entire process in wonderful detail in Spirits and Clocks. I am only interested in communicating a basic sketch of Descartes’ concerns and limitations in his account of fetal development before moving on to what interests us here: the imagination theory and its use in mechanist embryology.
17. There were a number of two-seed theorists among the late Aristotelians for whom sexual reproduction would involve both a material and formal contribution from each of the two parents. Yet one may certainly ask how much these thinkers remain, at least in this regard, Aristotelians.
18. AT II, 525–26.
19. This distinction between the legitimacy of some aspects of physiognomy on the one hand and the fraudulence of chiromancy, astrology, and other such disciplines on the other seems widespread throughout the seventeenth century. Thorndike mentions a 1683 miscellaneous volume by Wilhelm ten Ryne that “upheld physiognomy but decried astrology and chiromancy and their association with physiognomy” (Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science, vol. 7, 472). He also mentions François Bayle’s Dissertationes physicae, in which the author “approaches the subject of physiognomy through the foetus. . . . By certain reactions certain parts of the body are nourished and strengthened more than others. The foetus is easily affected by the nervous juice. Other juices, too, excite reactions in the foetus, to which the mores and mode of life of the mother greatly contribute” (471). On this understanding, the mother is capable of transmitting moral as well as physiological traits to the fetus, and even this capacity is distinguished by its defenders from occult connections, such as that between the lines of the hand and a person’s future.
20. AT III, 21.
21. Ibid., 49.
22. AT VI, 129.
23. AT XI, 177.
24. OCM I 243.
25. Ibid., 241f.
26. Ibid., 234.
27. Ibid., 242.
28. Pyle, Malebranche, 181.
29. OCM I, 243.
31. G IV, 433.
32. OCM I, 247.
33. Ibid., 246.
34. For a thorough account of Leibniz’s engagement with this doctrine, see Richard T. W. Arthur, “Animal Generation and Substance in Sennert and Leibniz,” in The Problem of Animal Generation in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Justin E. H. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 304–59.
35. A II i 97–98.
36. Daniel Sennert, Hypomnemata physica (Venice, 1651), 54.
37. As an example of this way of thinking, in a letter to Mersenne of February 14, 1631, Jean-Baptiste van Helmont claims that sin leaves its mark on the bodies of sinners and their offspring, and that this marking is the foundation of physiognomy. For van Helmont, these marks might also come from the inclination of the stars, or directly from God. François Bayle, to cite a contemporary of Malebranche and Leibniz who has similar ideas about the acquisition of moral and physical traits, describes physiognomy effectively as a branch of embryology in his Dissertationes physicae of 1677. For him, the study of physical and moral traits is one that reads back from the adult to events in utero. In his view, as Thorndyke explains, “the foetus is easily affected by the nervous juice. Other juices, too, excite reactions in the foetus, to which the mores and mode of life of the mother greatly contribute” (see Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science, vol. 7, 471). Later in the seventeenth century, there were, not surprisingly, many efforts to render the art of correlating physical traits with moral ones comprehensible in mechanistic terms. For example, in a remarkable article in the Philosophical Transactions of 1694 Owen Gwither acknowledges of this art that “most Men reject it as a Folly. . . . But upon strict Enquiry,” he goes on, “I find reason to conclude that a sober Naturalist may find much truth in that Art, which may be useful, and well solve all its Phaenomena intelligibly, which has not been done by any one that I know. . . . But, lest it be mere folly, it needs to be accounted for in terms of the motion of animal spirits in the body: “The manner I conceive to be thus, the Animal Spirits moved in the Sensory by an Object, continue their motion to the Brain, whence the motion is propagated to this or that particular part of the Body as is most suitable to the design of its Creation, having first made an alteration in the Face by its Nerves, especially the Pathetick, and Oculorum motorii, actuating its many Muscles, as the Dial-plate to that stupendious piece of Clock-work, which shews what is to be expected next from the striking part” (Philosophical Transactions 18, no. 210 [1694]: 119).
38. Stuart Brown, “Malebranche’s Occasionalism and Leibniz’s Preestablished Harmony: An ‘Essay Crossing’ or an Unbridgeable Gap?” in Nicholas Male-branche: His Philosophical Critics and Successors, ed. Stuart Brown (Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1991), 116.
39. Catherine Wilson, “Leibniz and the Animalcula,” in Studies in Seventeenth-Century European Philosophy, ed. M. A. Stewart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 169.
40. NO 8.
41. As in, e.g., Discourse on Metaphysics§ 16 (G IV, 441–42).
42. Henry More, The Immortality of the Soul, ed. A. Jacob (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1987), 70.
43. Ibid., 257.
44. Giuliano Gliozzi, Adamo e il Nuovo Mundo: La nascità dell’antropologia come ideologia coloniale; dale genealogie bibliche alle teorie raziale (1500–1700) (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1977), 427.
45. Ibid., 432.
46. Plato espouses his myth of the earthborn men in the Statesman: “At the beginning of the cycle before our own . . . there was no such thing as the procreation of animals from one another, but they were born of the earth, and of this our ancestors, who came into being immediately after the end of the last cycle and at the beginning of this, have preserved the recollection” (Statesman 279d–271b). If the mythical character of this report makes it difficult to attribute a belief in the spontaneous generation of human beings to Plato, at least it serves as confirmation of La Mothe Le Vayer’s claim that in antiquity such a view was widespread.
47. Gliozzi, Adamo e il Nuovo Mundo, 432.
48. Ibid.
49. GA II 3 736b29.
50. See C.S.F. Burnett, “The Planets and the Development of the Embryo,” in The Human Embryo: Aristotle and the Arabic and European Traditions, ed. G. R. Dunstan (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1990), 113–22.
51. See Bruno Nardi, “La teoria dell’anima e la generazione delle forme secondo Pietro d’Abano,” in Saggi sull’Aristotelismo Padovano dal secolo xiv al xvi (Florence: Sansoni, 1958), 1–17.
52. Of course, in the end Leibniz will also deny that corruption happens just as surely as he denies generation. Generation and corruption both will thus amount to varieties of alteration.
53. For another very interesting account of heterogenesis as an origin of plague, and indeed one that takes this topic as directly relevant to the metaphysical problem of the inherence of subordinate forms in bodies, see Daniel Sennert, Quaestionum medicarum controversarum liber, cui accessit tractatus de pestilentia (Wittenberg, 1609).
54. Athanasius Kircher, Scrutinium physico-medicum (Leipzig: Schüreri and Götzii, 1659), sec. I, chap. 7; cited in Harry Beal Torrey, “Athanasius Kircher and the Progress of Medicine,” Osiris 4 (1938): 246–75, at 258.
55. Athanasius Kircher, Scrutinium medico-physicum; cited in Charles Singer, “Notes on the Early History of Microscopy,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 7 (1914): 247–79, at 278.
56. Nathaniel Highmore writes in his History of Generation of 1651: “From our own flesh, from other Animals, from Wood, nay, from every thing putrified, these imprisoned, seminal principles are muster’d forth, and oftentimes having obtained their freedom, by a kinde of revenge feed on their prison; and devour that which preserv’d them from being scatter’d” (Highmore, The History of Generation [London: John Martin, 1651], 27). Margaret Cavendish, in her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, of 1666, would similarly explain that the “generation” of certain organisms may be accounted for entirely as an alteration in their source material: “I have mentioned in my Philosophical Letters that no animal creature can be produced by the way of metamorphosing, which is a change of motions in the same parts of matter; but (as I do also express in the same place) I mean such animals which are produced one from another, and where the production of one is not caused by the destruction of the other; such creatures, I say, it is impossible should be produced by a bare metamorphosis, without transmigration or translation of parts from the generator: but such insects, as maggots, and several other sorts of worms and flies, and the like, which have no generator of their own kind, but are bred out of cheese, earth and dung, etc. their production is only by the way of metamorphosing, and not translation of parts” (Cavendish, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy [London: A. Maxwell, 1666], 37–38.).
57. Michel Fichant, “Mécanisme et métaphysique: Le rétablissement des formes substantielles (1679),” in Science et métaphysique dans Descartes et Leibniz (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), 163–204, at 171.
58. G I, 19.
59. A VI ii, 241.
60. See G VI, 601.
61. G I, 20.
62. William R. Newman, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 49.
63. Ibid.
64. G. W. Leibniz, “Protogaea G.G.L.,” Acta eruditorum Lips. (January 1693): 40–42; repr. Barrande 198–201.
65. Bodemann, 231.
66. One of Conring’s greatest preoccupations in this work is with the giants supposed to have previously occupied the region of Germany he is describing. Conring adduces paleontological evidence of their presence there, which, we may presume, in fact consisted in nothing other than dinosaur fossils. Leibniz as well is interested in the hominoid giants that once ruled the earth, and he treats them as a subject for paleontology, as in the Protogaea, and also as part of his project of what might be called “ethnohistory,” tracing the origins of the current inhabitants of Europe. On the latter, see his Epistola ad amicum, de titanis et gigantibus ex Scythia oriundis (Letter to a Friend, on the Titans and Giants Originating from Scythia) (Dutens IV, 2, 209–10). One interesting question, far beyond our present scope, concerns the extent to which the widespread legends of giants, which would subsequently be incorporated into the historiography of Leibniz, Conring, Vico, and others, were themselves initially inspired by the observation of fossil remains.
67. See, in particular, his De solido intra solidum naturaliter contento dissertationis prodromus (Sketch of a Dissertation on the Solid That Is Naturally Contained within a Solid) (Florence, 1669). The “solid within a solid” to which Steno refers is the fossil embedded in rock. In December 1677, Leibniz meets Steno and is disappointed that as a result of his conversion to Catholicism and his new-found devoutness the Danish physician and geologist has abandoned his natural-scientific inquiries entirely. Leibniz writes to Conring on January 13, 1677: “He is a modest and, I believe, good man, very well-versed in anatomy and in natural philosophy in general, as you know. But now unfortunately he has abandoned this sort of studies” (II 1, 385; MK 50).
68. Protogaea V; Barrande 23.
69. See Leibniz’s letter to Jean Gallois of October 1682; A II i, 834–35.
70. A I iii, 149–66. Certainly the most extensive account of the practical, technological, and economical aspect of Leibniz’s mining endeavor is Jon Elster’s Leibniz et la formation de l’esprit capitaliste, chapter 3, “Les mines de Harz.” See also Jürgen Gottschalk, “Technische Verbesserungsvorschläge im Oberharzer Bergbau,” in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Das Wirken des großen Universalgelehrten als Philosoph, Mathematiker, Physiker, Techniker, ed. K. Popp and E. Stein (Hanover, 2000), 109–32.
71. According to Elster, Leibniz’s work on the Harz project was an expression of his rationalism, in view of its “constant concern for planning and implementation, so very different from the tentative empiricism of the epoch.” Yet Elster maintains that Leibniz’s work was nonetheless “condemned to failure by its very negligence of this empiricism, its disregard for detail, its tendency to confuse intention and realization” (Elster, Leibniz et la formation de l’esprit capitaliste, 78). Elster’s historiographical orientation (Marxist) is one that rates ideas in history in view of their realizability at the practical level. Here, in contrast, we are mostly interested in the speculative aspect of Leibniz’s engagement with geology, which could not in any case have been “tested” in real-world applications.
72. For a sustained treatment of the emergence of the science of geology out of natural-philosophical speculation about the distant origins of the earth and the cosmos, see Rhoda Rappaport, When Geologists Were Historians (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).
73. Protogaea VI; Barrande 26.
74. §§ 2–3, Dutens II ii 201–2.
75. George MacDonald Ross, “Leibniz and the Origin of Things,” in Leibniz and Adam, ed. Marcelo Dascal and Elhanan Yakira (Tel Aviv: University Publishing Projects, 1993), 241–57.
76. LH XXXVII, 4, 16r; cited in Claudine Cohen and Andre Wakefield, eds., Protogaea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), xxvi–xxvii. For a thorough study of this important manuscript, see Claudine Cohen, “An Unpublished Manuscript by Leibniz (1646–1716) on the Nature of ‘Fossil Objects,’” Bulletin de la Société Géologique de France 169, no. 1 (1998): 137–42.
77. G VI, 263.
78. Protogaea XXIX; Barrande 96. Leibniz is most likely referring here to Joachim Becher’s Physica subterranea of 1669.
79. Couturat, Op. 445.
80. Protogaea XVIII; Barrande 69.
81. Protogaea XXIX.
82. Protogaea XXX.
83. Protogaea XVIII; Barrande 97. In their new English edition of the Protogaea, Cohen and Wakefield misleadingly translate the phrase “seminales, nescio quas ideas” as “some ideas about generation.” But it is not a matter of what ob-servers might have thought about the generation of fossils; rather, it is a matter of the formative principles in nature that were supposed by Leibniz’s opponents to produce zoomorphic forms in what we would call “inorganic” matter.
84. Presumably, given Leibniz’s commitment to postformation, he would be compelled to believe that wherever a fossilized fish is found, there must remain somewhere in the vicinity some microscopic living body of a fish or former fish. The organic body, of which the fossil is a vestige, was never, strictly speaking, created, and can never be destroyed.
85. Protogaea XVIII; Barrande 95–97. The Latin reads: “Et sane plerumque video, quantoquisque in observando diligentior, et cum natura familiarior fuit, eo proniorem in nostram sententium visum, ut peritissimi viri merito animalium exuvias, aut aliarum rerum reliquias putent obrutas, nec facile persuaderi sibi patiantur, organica corpora sine exemplo, sine usu, sine seminiis praeter, naturae consuetudinem in limo saxove, ineptis matricibus, nescio qua plastica facultate natas.”
86. Protogaea XVIII; Barrande 95–97.
87. Protogaea IX; Barrande 45.
88. Protogaea X.
89. In fact, both senses attached to the Greek term automatos as well, though the sense of “acting of one’s own will” was far more common.
90. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters, ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 11.
CHAPTER 7
THE NATURE AND BOUNDARIES OF BIOLOGICAL SPECIES
1. The classic and most forceful case for Leibniz’s nominalism is Benson Mates’s The Philosophy of Leibniz: Metaphysics and Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Here, Mates is principally concerned with the nonexistence for Leibniz of abstract entities such as numbers, geometrical figures, and other mathematical objects, and in this connection it is not surprising that Mates does not dwell on the fact that different considerations come into play for Leibniz when it is a question of the existence of biological kinds.
2. John Ray, Historia plantarum, vol. 2 (London, 1688); cited in John C. Green, The Death of Adam: Evolution and Its Impact on Western Thought (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1959), 129. Leibniz frequently praises the work of Ray, writing, for example, in the Protogaea of the “diligent English investigator of the works of nature, John Ray [diligens naturae operum investigator Joh. Raius Anglus]” (Protogaea XXVI; Barrande 90).
3. For an account of the emergence of species fixism in the early modern period, along with an extensive bibliography for further reading, see Justin E. H. Smith, “‘The Unity of the Generative Power’: Modern Taxonomy and the Problem of Generation,” Perspectives on Science 17, no. 1 (2008): 78–104.
4. For more thorough treatment of the Adamic language in the seventeenth century, see David S. Katz, “The Language of Adam in Seventeenth-Century England,” in History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H. R. Trevor-Roper, ed. Hugh-Lloyd Jones, Valerie Pearl, and Blair Worden (London, 1981), 132–45; Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).
5. Hieronymus Bock, Neu Kreutterbuch (Strasburg, 1577), preface, no page numbers.
6. John Ray, Synopsis methodica stirpium Brittanicarum (London: Smith and Walford, 1696), 30f.
7. John Ray, De variis plantarum methodus dissertatio brevis (London: Smith and Walford, 1696), chap. 6; cited in Scott Atran, Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Anthropology of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 164.
8. While here we are distinguishing between Leibniz’s “classificatory realism” on the one hand and Locke’s thoroughgoing nominalism on the other, the contrast may not be so great. Peter Anstey and Stephen Harris have argued that Locke as well has “realist” concerns in his very sophisticated interest in botanical systematics. See Anstey and Harris, “Locke and Botany,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 37 (2006): 151–71.
9. See John Dupré, The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
10. See, for example, Robert A. Wilson, “Realism, Essence, and Kind: Resuscitating Species Essentialism?”; Richard Boyd, “Homeostasis, Species, and Higher Taxa,” both in Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Robert A. Wilson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). Both authors argue, in different ways, that some kind of modified realism can be made to fit with an evolutionary account of species. For a classical statement of the view that evolutionary theory renders essentialism about species untenable, see David Hull, “The Effect of Essentialism on Taxonomy—2000 Years of Stasis (I & II),” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 15, no. 69; 16, no. 60 (1965): 314–26; 1–18.
11. It is remarkable that from Locke through Kripke and beyond biological species are regularly adduced as examples in the discussion of the problem of natural kinds, alongside naturally occurring elements, as though these two different examples presented all and only the same problems. (See, for example, S. A. Kripke, “Identity and Necessity,” in Identity and Individuation, ed. M. K. Munitz [New York: New York University Press, 1971], 135–64.) Of course, as Elliott Sober points out, atom smashers can now transform one element into another, but this is not in itself proof that elements are not, after all, natural kinds. Arguably, the immense difference between the relative ephemerality of, say, a species of finch on the one hand, and the relative fixity of, say, gold on the other, does at least problematize their interchangeability as stock examples for the discussion of natural kinds (see Elliott Sober, Philosophy of Biology [Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000], chap. 6).
12. Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 451–52.
13. OCM I, 243.
14. Nathaniel Highmore, The History of Generation (London: R. N., 1651), 15.
15. Ibid., 22.
16. Michael Ayers, Locke, Volume II: Ontology (London: Routledge, 1991). See Part I, chap. 6, “Species and Their Names in the Corpuscularian World.”
17. G V, 284.
18. Anne Conway, Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, trans. and ed. Taylor Corse and Alison P. Coudert (1692; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 28.
19. Dutens VI 1, 213.
20. Conway, Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 34.
21. The classic study of this idea and its long history is Arthur O. Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936).
22. Dutens II 2, 169.
23. G V, 271.
24. Dutens II 2, 171.
25. Ibid.
26. OH 414.
27. G V, 289–90.
28. Immanuel Kant, Von den verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen, in Werke. Band 9. (1775 [Darmstadt, 1964]); cited in Ernst Cassirer, Die Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. Band II: Das mythische Denken (Berlin, 1925), 180.
29. Ibid., 294.
30. Ibid., 281.
31. Ibid., 287.
32. Ibid., 288.
33. Ibid.
34. Dutens II 2, 171.
35. Ibid.
36. A VI iv, 1625.
37. Dutens II 2, 171.
38. G IV, 445.
39. LH III 1, 2, § 3.
40. NO 4.
41. NO Ad I, 135–36.
42. On Leibniz’s take on the question of unicorns, see Roger Ariew, “Leibniz on the Unicorn and Various Other Curiosities,” Early Science and Medicine 3, no. 4 (1998): 267–88.
43. “Extrait d’une lettre de Mr. de Leibniz, A l’Auteur, du Journal des Savans, écrite d’Hanovre le 18. Juin 1677. Contenant la Rélation, et la figure d’un Chevreuil coëffé d’une manière fort extraordinaire,” Journal des Sçavans, July 5, 1677, 166–68; repr. Dutens II 2, 175–76.
44. E.g., G V, 290–91.
45. See, in particular, Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998).
46. G V, 295.
47. Ibid., 289–99.
48. Ibid., 299.
49. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, in Darwin: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Philip Appleman (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 202f.
50. Letter to Burnett de Kemney, 1696, in Barrande, 201. Leibniz was evidently very impressed by the mammoth bones uncovered in 1696. There are at least two other letters from the same year in which he brings them up quite independently. In a letter to Grimaldi he writes: “Recently in Gotha, in Thuringia, the bones of a very large animal from the elephant genus were dug up. Curious men marvel that they are found in these parts. But indeed similar ones have been found by ploughing in Braunschweig, Brabant, and elsewhere. I likewise do not doubt that things are sometimes dug up in China that nowadays in those parts are not seen [walking] the earth, notice of which would be advantageous to Europeans in setting up comparisons” (OH 24). And in a letter to Bussingius of December 24, 1696: “I do not know whether you have seen what Tenzelius wrote about the skeleton of the elephantiform animal dug up in Thuringia. I agree entirely that it is from the animal, not the mineral, kingdom, but I do not know whether it is credibly said to be an animal transported here from distant lands by the waters of Noah’s flood. . . . And it is plausible that some were formerly marine or amphibious animals that today are at home on land” (OH 31).
51. August 22, 1696. C. L. Grotefend, Leibniz-Album aus den Handschriften der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Hannover (Hanover, 1846).
52. See Horst Bredekamp, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’ Theater der Natur und Kunst (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2004), 125.
53. The so-called A version was the basis of Wolf von Engelhardt’s 1949 German translation of the Protogaea, as well as of the excellent new bilingual Latin-English 2008 edition by Claudine Cohen and Andre Wakefield. The B version, in turn, has been the basis of at least three editions (Scheidt 1749; Bertrand de Saint-Germain 1859; Barrande 1993). Cohen and Wakefield note that much of the B version shows signs of substantial editorial interpolation on the part of Eck-hart (Leibniz’s executor) and Scheidt. In the case of the citation under discussion, however, it is unlikely that it comes from anyone but Leibniz himself. Bredekamp here cites the 1949 German edition, which reads as follows: “Einstmals, als der Ozean alles bedeckte, die Tiere, die heute das Land bewohnen, Wassertiere gewesen [seien], dann seien sie mit dem Fortgang dieses Elementes allmählich Amphibien geworden und haetten sich schliesslich in ihrer Nachkommenschaft ihrer urspruenglichen Heimat entwoehnt. . . . Doch solches widersprucht den heiligen Schriftstellern, von denen abzuweichen sündhaft ist” (Protogaea, ed. and trans. W. von Engelhardt [Stuttgart, 1949], 25).
54. Protogaea VI; Barrande 26.
55. Protogaea XXXIV; Barrande 126.
56. The American paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson wrote in 1951: “Discontinuities are more frequent and of more varied sorts in paleontology than in neontology. This has certain disadvantages for paleontological theory and interpretation, but it also has some practical advantages. Discontinuities of observation, only, due to inadequate sampling of local populations or inadequate distribution of sampling stations, occur in both fields but are generally harder to fill in when paleontological. Discontinuities of record, that is, in the organisms actually present and available for sampling in the field, are a particular paleontological problem and may concern both time and space. When samples have been obtained from different localities or horizons, rocks and fossils intermediate between them may not exist. Such discontinuities are, as of now, facts in nature. Their use to delimit taxonomic groups is non-arbitrary, by definition. Yet they do not necessarily coincide with any particular sort of discontinuity that existed when the organisms were alive. Hence their relationship to the sorts of units defined in neontology may be and remain ambiguous.” George Gaylord Simpson, “The Species Concept,” Evolution 4 (1951): 285–98, at 291.
57. G V, 296.
58. Ibid., 305.
59. Marin Cureau de la Chambre, A Discourse of the Knowledge of Beasts, Wherein All That Hath Been Said for, and against Their Ratiocination Is Examined (London: Thomas Newcomb, 1657), 3.
60. Ibid., preface, no page numbers given.
61. John Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis: A vievv of the people of the vvhole vvorld (London: Thomas Gibbs, 1658), 445. Remarkably little has been written about Bulwer’s anthropology. He is widely and rightly cited as a significant contributor to the development of the field of sociolinguistics and to the study of gesture, having published five books on the semiotics of the human body. On this aspect of his work, see Jeffrey Wollock, “John Bulwer (1606–1656) and the Significance of Gesture in 17th-Century Theories of Language and Cognition,” Gesture 2, no. 2 (2002): 227–58.
62. Thomas Willis, De anima brutorum (1672) in Opera omnia, 76. For Willis’s most extended treatment of the brain and its functions, see his Cerebri anatome (London, 1664). For a general overview of Willis’s work, see T. J. Hughes, Thomas Willis: His Life and Work (London: Royal Society of Medicine Services, 1991). For an interesting discussion of Willis’s easy passage between anatomy and psychology, see William F. Bynum, “The Anatomical Method, Natural Theology, and the Functions of the Brain,” Isis 64, no. 4 (December, 1973): 444–68. For a fairly extensive treatment of Willis’s place in the history of neurology, see William Feindel, “The Beginnings of Neurology: Thomas Willis and His Circle of Friends,” in The History of Neurology: The British Contribution, 1660–1910, ed. F. C. Rose (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1999), 1–18.
63. “Exposé d’une lettre de M. Leibnitz à l’abbé de Saint-Pierre sur un chien qui parle,” Histoire de l’académie des sciences 1706; Dutens II 2, 180.
64. Richard Serjeantson, “The Passions and Animal Language,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62, no. 3 (2001): 425–44, at 428.
65. AT V, 344–45.
66. A VI iv 1474.
67. Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding, 450–51.
68. The City of God against the Pagans, ed. R. W. Dyson. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Book XVI, chap. 8.
69. G V, 217.
70. Edward Tyson, Orang-Outang, sive, Homo sylvestris, Or, the Anatomy of a Pygmie, compared with that of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man (London, 1699), 28.
71. Ibid., Epistle Dedicatory, no page numbers.
72. For a thorough account of Tyson’s study of the porpoise, see L. Kruger, “Edward Tyson’s 1680 Account of the ‘Porpess’ Brain and Its Place in the History of Comparative Neurology,” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 12, no. 4 (2003): 339–49.
73. Edward Tyson, Phocaena; or, The Anatomy of a Porpess, dissected at Greshame Colledge; with a Praeliminary Discourse concerning Anatomy, and a Natural History of Animals (London: Benjamin Tooke, 1680), 16–17.
74. Tyson, Orang-Outang, 7.
75. Ibid., 55.
76. Ibid., preface, no page numbers.
77. Ibid., 51f.
78. Ibid., 52.
79. Ibid., 54–55.
80. Ibid., 14.
81. G V 254.
82. James Burnet, Lord Monboddo, Of the Origin and Progress of Language (Edinburgh, 1773), vol. 1, book 2, chap. 4, 347.
83. G V, 293.
84. Tyson, Orang-Outang, preface, no page numbers.
85. A IV i, 208.
86. “Definitiones notionum ex Wilkinsio” (1677–86[?]), A VI iv 30–34. “Catena est series rerum talis, ut initium posterioris sit ante finem prioris. Race, genus, Geschlecht. Series generationum. Genealogia seriei hujus Explicatio,” 34.
87. Peter Fenves, “Imagining an Inundation of Australians; or, Leibniz on the Principles of Grace and Race,” in Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy, ed. Andrew Valls (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 73–89, at 73f.
88. OH, 36–38.
89. OH, 158. The paraphrase reads, in part: “Nova terrae divisio per diversas hominum species vel generationes, quas magnus peregrinator misit Domino Abbati della Chambre, Parisino, extat in Diario Eruditorum Parisino A. 1684. d. 24. April. Res huc redit. Geographi terram per regiones (gubernationes potius) dividunt. Ego quinque species vel generationes observo. Prima continet homines Europae, parte Moscoviae excepta; His addo littus Africae a Nilo ad columnas Herculis, Imperium Turcicum, Persicum, Mogolis, Golcondam, Visapur, Maldivas, partem regionum Arakan, Pegu, Siam, Sumatrae, Bantam, Borneo. Equidem non parum differre Indos a nostris negari non potest, non satis tamen ut speciem faciat differentem. Secunda species est Africanorum: Grandia labra, naso scaffo o simo, paucissimis labia mediocria, nasusque aquilinus. Nigredo non a Sole, sed natura, nam & transplantati retinent nisi coniugia misceantur. Cutis levis, polita, mollis & velut oleosa, exceptis locis ubi Sole velut torrentur. Barbae vix tres quatuorve pili, capilli lanae similes, ut canum, quos barbettos dicimus. Dentes ebore candidiores, lingua corallii rubedine. Tertia species implet partem regnorum Arakam, Siam, Sumatrae, Borneo, tum Philippinas vel Manillas, Japoniam, Pegu, Tunkinum, Cocincinam, Chinam, Tulariam intra Chinam, Gangem, Moscovi sitam, Usbek, Turkestan, Zagetai partem Moscici Imperii; Tartaros Europaeos & Turcomannos versus Euphratem & Aleppum habitants. His omnibus color albus, sed humeri largi, facies plana (viso piatto,) nasus exiguus (picciolo & schiacciato) oculi exigui & porcini, (lungi & incavati) & pauci in barba pili.”
90. For an impressively detailed account of this voyage, see André Robinet, G. W. Leibniz: Iter italicum (mars 1689–mars 1690). La dynamique de la république des lettres (Florence: Olschki, 1988).
91. Ibid.
92. Richard H. Popkin, “Leibniz and Vico on the Pre-Adamite Theory,” in Leibniz and Adam, ed. Marcelo Dascal and Elhanan Yakira (Tel Aviv: University Publishing Projects, 1993), 377–86, at 381.
93. Cited in Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 138.
APPENDIX 1
DIRECTIONS PERTAINING TO THE INSTITUTION OF MEDICINE (1671)
1. Jan Marek Marci (1595–1677), a Bohemian physician and astronomer, and the author of De proportione motus seu regula sphygmica (1637).
2. Santorio Santorio (1561–1636), a Paduan physician and author of De statica medicina (Venice, 1614). The concept described in the title would best be translated as “medical measurement.”
3. Francesco Eschinardi (1623–1700[?]), an Italian Jesuit mathematician and astronomer. Leibniz is referring here to his “Difetti di termometri,” in Giornale de Letterati (February 22, 1670), 22f.
4. Lodewijk De Bils (Ludovicus Bilsius) (1624–1671) was a self-taught Dutch anatomist, widely known for his proposals for the preservation of corpses.
5. This is a reference to Philipp von May, Chiromantia medica: Mitt einem anhang von den zeichen auff den Näglen der Finger. Nebens einem Tractätlein Von der Physiognomia Medica (Den Haag, 1667).
6. Moyse Charas was a Parisian pharmacist and the author of the Pharmacopée royale galénique et chimique of 1676.
7. This is evidently a play on words alluding to the tarantella, an Italian folk dance that, like the spider, derives its name from the southern Italian town of Taranto. The dance itself may have originated in ritualized contortions intended to alleviate the effects of spider bites. These would not in fact be the bites of tarantulas, however, since in that region tarantulas are not venomous. In any case, to be “bitten by the tarantula,” in Leibniz’s usage here, is to be overtaken by an urge to dance upon hearing a seductive melody.
8. See Republic IV 424c.
9. This is a reference to the tropical hardwood Pterocarpus indicus, a naturally fluorescent substance whose properties had been studied by, among others, Kircher and Boyle.
10. “Antimonium crudum” is an addition in the manuscript. Leibniz probably intended to write “Antimoniale” instead of “Antimonachale.” Either way, what he has in mind is sulfide of antimony.
11. Laurenz Scholz, a German physician and author of, among other works, the Consiliarum medicinalium (Frankfurt, 1598).
12. Marcus Meibom (ca. 1630–1710), a Danish scholar. Leibniz is here referring to Meibom’s Epistolae de longaevis ad serenissimum celsissimumque principem ac dominum Dn. Augustum ducem Brunsvicensem ac Lunaeburgensem octogesimum sextum annum agentem (Helmstedt, 1664).
13. Daniel Ludwig (1625–1680), a German pharmacist and the author of the Pharmacopoeia ludoviciana, which went through a number of editions. The earliest edition we have succeeded in locating is the Pharmacopoeia ludoviciana, seu medicamentorum sylloge quae in prompta asservanda velit Clariss. D. Ludovicus (London: G. Sawbridge, 1712).
14. That is, Francis Bacon. See his Historia vitae & mortis. Sive, Titulus secundus in historia naturali & experimentali ad condendam philosophiam: quae est instaurationis magnae pars tertia (London: Haviland, 1623).
15. That is, raw.
16. This is a reference to the Venetian traveler Lazaro Soranzo’s L’Ottomanno (Ferrara, 1599).
17. See note 7.
APPENDIX 3
THE HUMAN BODY, LIKE THAT OF ANY ANIMAL, IS A SORT OF MACHINE (1680–83)
1. In the Specimen Inventorum of 1688(?) Leibniz describes the Elastrum as “causam impulsus corporis a corpore esse ipsum corporis Elastrum, quo ab alio resilit” (VI iv, 1620). The Greek terms 
λατ
ρ and λαστιχóς, for which no equivalent had existed in Latin, were introduced by Jean Pecquet in 1654 in connection with his research on the atmosphere. They were then taken up by Boyle who in 1660 writes of the “λατρ, or elastical power of the air” (Boyle, New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall, Touching the Spring of the Air, and Its Effects (London, 1660), I, Exp. 1. See Pasini, Corpo e funzioni cognitive in Leibniz, 1996, 123.
2. See “Extrait d’une lettre de M. Leibniz à l’auteur du Journal touchant le principe de justesse des horloges portatives de son invention,” Journal des Sça-vans (1675); repr. Dutens III 135–37.
3. It is a well-known theme from Aristotle’s biology that sexual reproduction amounts to a sort of approximation of eternity in kind, if not in number. See Aristotle, De Generatione animalium, II 1 731b 33–36.
4. See Girolamo Cardano, De subtilitate, in Opera omnia (Lyon, 1663), III, 359–60.
5. The registers of furnaces are holes or notches in the wall of the furnace that enable one to place whatever is to be heated at various distances from the fire.
6. In June 1682, Leibniz composes a short work on the “Compositio des Feuers oder pyropi” for Tschirnhaus (GM IV, 497–98).
7. In animals, the parenchyma (pl.: parenchymata) is the tissue characteristic of a functioning organ, as contrasted with any connective or supporting tissue; that is, parenchymata are any elements of an organ essential to its functioning, in contrast with the stroma or framework of supporting tissue.
8. Bartholin in contrast cites Galen’s authority to affirm that the heart is not a muscle: “Galenus recte negavit cor esse musculum, 1. Quia omnis generis fibras habet. 2. Quia musculus est motus voluntarii instrumentum” (Anatomia Reformata, II vi, 238–39).
9. See Descartes, AT VI 46, 7–8.
10. With Pasini, Corpo e funzioni cognitive in Leibniz, 1996, we note that in the Hypothesis physica nova of 1671 (A VI ii 240–41), Leibniz makes no mention of the ebullition of nonhomogeneous fluids. This topic is first treated in the Propositiones quaedam physicae of 1672 (A VI iii 48–49).
11. This last sentence is one of the hardest in the manuscript to decipher, and likely for that reason Mahrenholtz, “Leibniz’ Literaturquellen zu einigen frühen Texten medizinischen Inhalts,” 1990, misreads it as claiming that for Leibniz an animal is a hydraulico-pneumatic machine (353).
12. That is, if it does not find a ready food source, it will at least know how to prepare its food.
13. Reference is to the third edition of the Anatomia reformata of the Danish anatomist Thomas Bartholin (1616–1680), published in several editions beginning in 1651. See Anatome, ex Caspari Bartolini parentis Institutionibus . . . quartum renovata (Louvain, 1673).
14. Here Bartholin devotes a section of the chapter, “De corde in genere,” to the question, “an facultas pulsifica admittenda?” In his lengthy answer, he notes that “facultas pulsifica cordi insita ad motum ejusdem cum sanguine necessario est conjugenda, sive ut sanguinis in fluxum & exitum juvet dirigatque, inordinate alioquin procedentem, sicut ego explico: sive ut per se producat motum, ex sententia antiquoru, qui conservari non potest, si sanguinis perpetuus fluxus inhibeatur” (Anatomia Reformata, II vi, 255). Leibniz disagrees with Bartholin to the extent that he seems to see the pulse as explicable entirely in the same terms as other instances of elasticity.