Abstract
Almost at the end of The Two Treatises, Kenelm Digby had to conclude that his treatment of body and soul had not brought a contact between the two any nearer. This conclusion did not come as a surprise. From the start it was Digby’s intention to prove the spirituality and immortality of the soul by showing that the principles that govern the world of material bodies cannot explain the workings of the soul. In spite of such an unbridgeable gap between the two domains, however, Digby must of course admit that the soul acquires knowledge of the world of bodies (as well as of its own operations). This raises the question: Does Digby have the conceptual resources to bridge a seemingly unbridgeable gap after all? What makes this traditional question about the relationship between body and soul even more interesting in the case of Digby is his self-professed allegiance to the philosophy of Aristotle in spite of a dualism that comes close to that of Descartes. This article will analyze several tensions that arise from Digby’s attempt to synthesize several different elements developed in dialogue with contemporaries such as Thomas Hobbes, Descartes, his close friend Thomas White, and the Aristotelian traditions still very much alive in Digby’s time. Starting with Digby’s account of common notions, the article will study Digby’s account of the soul’s knowledge, locating it in the wider philosophical controversies of the time.
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Notes
- 1.
The part on body is usually thought to have been written while Digby was in prison between November 1642 and July 1643; the part on soul was probably begun c. 1640; see Levitin 2015, 248 n. 94.
- 2.
On Digby’s atomism see Adriaenssen and de Boer 2019, 63: ‘An atom, in Digby’s vocabulary, is a minute portion of one of the elements that, though not indivisible in principle, does resist further division in practice. It is the mingling of elementary minima of this kind, he claims, that yields the mixed materials we find around us’. Yet, as Laura Georgescu has suggested to me, Digby articulated many anti-atomist arguments, e.g. against indivisibles; he might have been quite dissatisfied with atomism. This is however not the place to enter into this difficult issue.
- 3.
For Digby the senses are non-conceptual; they work purely by the principles of the body; by ‘information’ I therefore mean simply the data that the senses offer. As Digby writes: ‘Experience must be our informer in generall: after which our discourse shall anatomise what that presents us in bulke’ (TT 387).
- 4.
Garber and Wilson 1998, 839, with reference to TT 412 and 441–42. In the same History, Garber briefly discusses Digby’s position (Garber 1998, 769–71). In addition, we may note that Digby does not seem to make a distinction between the human body and other bodies: ‘the living creature being composed of the same principles as the world round about him’ (TT 294).
- 5.
It is clear that for Digby there is no place for form in natural philosophy; see e.g. TT 344: ‘And where it our turn to declare and teach Logike and Metaphysikes, we should be forced to go the way of matter and of formes and of privations . . . But this is not our taske for the present’. However, form remains indispensable in metaphysics to account for bodily identity over time, particular in view of the resurrection. See Adriaenssen and de Boer 2019.
- 6.
For these claims see TT 1–6. More specific references will be given below.
- 7.
On quality see TT 8–15; on place, TT 6.
- 8.
Blank 2007, 16: ‘Common concepts belong to the natural impressions the thing makes on us, and for this reason are as close to the nature of the thing as we can get’.
- 9.
Krook 1993, 40, thinks that ‘Digby’s common people are evidently no more common than Johnson’s Common Reader was to be; if they were, it would be difficult to conceive how their notion of ‘quantity’ could be of any use to the physicist’. Digby must have in mind the cultured, well-educated layman of his time, with an interest in science and scholarship. This might be true of his readership but Digby’s point here is precisely that these notions are truly universal and natural, imprinted by nature in everybody’s mind and hence shared among ‘all kindes of people’ (or ‘every man living’).
- 10.
Blank 2007, 15; they are explications of our everyday concept (cf. on quantity, TT 17). Blank suggests that Digby might be influenced by Gassendi, who employed the Stoic-Epicurean epistemology of common notions, though the texts cited were published after Digby’s TT. Another text, not quoted by Blank, is Gassendi’s Syntagma Philosophiae Epicuri, also published much later than TT where Gassendi writes that the method of doctrine or teaching ‘begins with Resolution, and proceeds by composition’, mentioning also clearness of language, clearness of division, avoidance of useless digressions, and the necessity of proceeding from the most common and essential elements to the more obscure; Syntagma Philosophiae Epicuri (Amsterdam, 1684, 22) But we know that Digby discussed an atomist argument of Gassendi’s before it was published; see Henry 1982, 215 n. 22.
- 11.
See e.g. Gassendi’s appeal to ‘the common and accepted manner of speaking (communis et protritus loquendi usus)’, in his Exercitationes Paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos from 1624, in Gassendi 1658, vol. 3, 151B. Humanists such as Lorenzo Valla and Juan Luis Vives frequently appealed to similar notions in their attacks on the language of the scholastics, also quoting the same line from Horace; see Nauta 2016.
- 12.
In the introduction to his edition of TT MacDonald notes: ‘The New OED provides more than 600 quotations from his works. . .Many of these quotes are the earliest recorded instances of the word’s usage, and some of them are the only examples’, and Roland Hall ‘discovered twenty words in the Two Treatises which antedate the earliest dated entry in the OED’ (MacDonald 2013, 10). For a discussion of such borrowings in seventeenth-century English, with special attention to Robert Boyle, see Gotti 1996, 15–23.
- 13.
Mercer 1993, 33–67, 41 on the distinction between Aristotle and later Aristotelians, often made by early-modern thinkers; many were in search of the ‘real Aristotle’ (Mercer 1993, 61). See Mercer 1993, 53 on the revival of Aristotelianism in Oxford in the 1630s; see also in the same volume Southgate 1993, 110.
- 14.
Six Lessons to the Savilian Professors of the Mathematics II, in Hobbes 1839a, vol. 7, 226.
- 15.
Examinatio et Emendatio Mathematicae Hodiernae I, in Hobbes 1839b, vol. 4, 26.
- 16.
On this debate see Leijenhorst 2002b, 337–68.
- 17.
- 18.
Holden 2004, 96; cf. 53, 118–20, 125–26 and 141–42.
- 19.
As already remarked, we may doubt whether the cases are entirely similar, even though Digby often mentions qualities in one breath with parts like hands and eyes: Parceling a body into (conventional) parts seems not quite the same as perceiving qualities like colors or smells; while the words like ‘red’ and ‘round’ are of course conventional, the perception of these qualities is not, or at least not in the same manner as dividing a body into parts.
- 20.
MacDonald 2013, 27 summarizes the proofs in the introduction to his edition of the Two Treatises very briefly.
- 21.
On these concepts in early modern philosophy, see the work by Nuchelmans 1998, vol. 1, 118–31.
- 22.
See e.g. TT 430 where he says that ‘our looking upon the phantasmes in our braine, is not our soules action upon them, but it is our letting them beate at our common sense; that is, letting them worke upon our soule’. Cf. also TT 401: ‘We may conclude out of this evident signe, that the impression is in the understanding not in its owne likenesse, but in an other shape, which we do not discover; and which is excitated as well by the name, as by the impression in a man that is used to the names’.
- 23.
TT 344. See also TT 143; see note 5 above.
- 24.
When discussing the soul’s knowledge in its disembodied state, Digby writes that knowledge in general (also in this life) is ‘nothing else but a Being of the obiect in the knower; from thence it followeth, that to know all thinges [in the disembodied state, LN] is naught else then to be all thinges’ (TT 430; italics in the original). But again this seems tautological: the being of a knife is in me when I know/apprehend the knife. Being is what a thing is; but if the being of a thing is what I think or have come to learn what it is (its parts, qualities, properties, effects, function, etc.), then we seem to end up saying that my apprehension of a knife is the apprehension of a knife in me.
- 25.
See also TT 353–54 where Digby says that everything people do is built on the same foundation, viz. ‘a long chaine of discourses, whereof every little part or linke is that which schollers do call a Syllogisme; and Syllogismes we know are framed of enuntiations; and they of single or uncomposed apprehensions. All which actions are wrought by the understanding of a man’. According to Krook, this passage states that all knowledge is ‘a function of discourse or language’, a position she identifies as ‘Aristotle’s terminist logic or ‘logical nominalism’, with a ‘distinctly nominalist colouring, with interesting variations of hue’ (Krook 1993, 33). But ‘discourse’ in Digby often means thought/thinking, and while thought is expressed in language, they are not the same for Digby. Further, the division into terms, propositions, and syllogisms is quite traditional and does not say anything about a nominalist position.
- 26.
TT 359. Descartes counts being (être) as one of the primitive notions, e.g. in a letter to Elisabeth of Bohemia from 1643, in AT III 665.
- 27.
TT 367. For Hobbes such a difference between languages shows that the copula does not have a meaning in itself, and that words such as ‘entity, essence, essential, essentiality’ that have arisen out of the copula mean nothing. People speaking a language without a copula ‘would be not a jot the less capable of inferring, concluding, and all kind of reasoning than were the Greeks and Latins’ (Leviathan 46, in Hobbes 1839, vol. 3, 674, Hobbes 2012, vol. 3, 1078–80).
- 28.
See Adriaenssen 2017, 198–220.
- 29.
The soul’s knowing an object may be something outside time but the soul itself in its embodied state seem to be in time, since Digby argues that ‘time is then required betwixt her knowledge of one thing and her knowledge of an other thing’ (TT 430), which Digby contrasts to its knowledge of all things in its disembodied state.
- 30.
Digby compiled a MS with scholastic texts, as reported by Joe Moshenska at a workshop on Digby in Groningen, January 2018. And in the late 1630s he was reading late scholastic authors as appears from a letter referred to by Levitin 2015, 247 n. 92. See Adriaenssen and de Boer 2019 for other examples of Digby’s debt to late-scholastic distinctions and discussions.
- 31.
TT 428–29. Another source of mortalism and materialism that might have triggered Digby’s defense of the soul’s immateriality and immortality is Thomas Hobbes’s Elements of Law from 1640. This text, however, enjoyed a limited circulation, and if Digby started working on the second treatise in about 1640, Hobbes’s work was probably too late for him.
- 32.
TT 431. See TT 443 for another example of a very general Aristotelian ‘axiom’ used by Digby to press home his point.
- 33.
TT 431. Levitin 2015, 249 n. 102 points out that Digby read this statement probably in Aquinas or a later scholastic source; in this wording it cannot be found in Aristotle.
- 34.
TT 429. John Mair refers to the non-successive illumination of the horizon by the sun in his In Primum Sent. (1530), d. 1, q. 6, fol. 14ra-b, referred to by Kitanov 2015, 172.
- 35.
I am grateful to the editors for having invited me to participate in their workshop on Digby in Jan. 2018, and in particular to Laura Georgescu for her suggestions and comments on an earlier draft of this article.
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Nauta, L. (2022). Two Treatises in One Volume: Kenelm Digby Between Body and Soul. In: Georgescu, L., Adriaenssen, H.T. (eds) The Philosophy of Kenelm Digby (1603–1665). International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 239. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99822-6_2
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