Abstract
In the foregoing part I presented Newton’s texts as they relate to the human, as well as the divine sensorium. The purpose of this and the next section is to discover what can be learned from those about the human sensorium. Although this usage of the term ‘sensorium’ is found most frequently in the texts concerning the visual sensory system, yet I shall begin with Text III, in which there is no mention of a human sensorium. Nevertheless, an analysis of that text, as well as evidence and inferences drawn from it, will help to identify problems that require solution during the course of this inquiry.
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Notes
- 1.
Newton, Opticks (1), Axiom VII, pp. 9–11, p. 9.
- 2.
Ibid., p. 10.
- 3.
Newton, Opticks (1), p. 10. For other references to a ‘dark Chamber’ or ‘dark Room’, see ibid., Bk. I, Pt.I, pp. 9, 15, 18, 28, 30, 34, 36, 39, 41, 47, 50, 55; Pt.II, pp. 81, 83–4, 98, 105, 121; Bk. II, Pt. I, p. 15, Pt.III, pp. 52, 66, Pt. IV, pp. 87–8; Bk. III, pp. 113, ‘112’ [=120], 124, 129. For earlier references, see Cohen and Schofield (eds.) Isaac Newton’s Papers & Letters, pp. 48, 56–7, 59, 91, 136–8, 145, 156, 160, 170, 172, 192–3, 195–8, 207, 234, et passim. It is not clear from these references whether Newton was using a room converted into a dark chamber or whether he was using a portable box-shaped structure of room size.
- 4.
Crombie, Science, Optics and Music, p. 170. The second major modern physiological discovery was made by William Harvey concerning the circulation of the blood; for details of publication, see the ‘Editor’s Postscript’ at the conclusion of Harvey, The Anatomical Exercises.
- 5.
See Koelbing, ‘Ocular Physiology’, pp. 219–24.
- 6.
See ibid., p. 226.
- 7.
For a detailed treatment of the problem of optical imagery from Kepler to the early part of the eighteenth century, see Shapiro, ‘The Optical Lectures’.
- 8.
See Crombie, Science, Optics and Music, p. 232 and fig. 36, p. 233.
- 9.
Ibid., pp. 232–6, et passim. For Descartes’s indebtedness to Kepler, see Riba, ‘Cartesian Optics’, pp. 45, 52.
- 10.
For a brief description of the astronomical content of the two books, see Gingerich, ‘Johannes Kepler’, pp. 298–9. Note that in the latter book, Kepler included a description of the optics of spherical lenses, which Riba, ‘Cartesian Optics’, p. 58, described as a direct descendant of the modern theory of lenses.
- 11.
See Feingold, ‘Isaac Barrow’s Library’, (Nos. 559 and 560), p. 336. According to Shapiro, ‘The Spectre of Newton’s “Spectrum”’, p. 186, Newton did not read the first book before 1672.
- 12.
See Harrison, The Library of Isaac Newton, (No. 651), p. 147.
- 13.
Crombie, Science, Optics and Music, pp. 297–8. In the last part of this long sentence, Kepler alludes to Plato’s synaugeia theory of sensory perception, according to which sensation is not a one-directional process; see p. 51 and n.101 below.
- 14.
Ibid., pp. 238–9. Note that Crombie, pp. 284–322, provided what is probably the first English translation of the whole of Chapter V, Section 2 of Ad Vitellionem paralipomena, together with the introduction to this chapter, the introductions to Sections 1 and 3, and the Propositions in Section 3 demonstrating the main conclusions about the formation of the retinal image described in Section 2.
- 15.
The notion of a sensus communis is traceable to Aristotle, who distinguished between special objects, each of which are definitive of one of the five external senses, and ‘common-sense objects’, which are available only to a common sense; see Hett (tr.), Aristotle On the Soul, III.i, pp. 143–5, Lawson-Tancred (tr.), Aristotle De Anima, III.i, pp. 189–91. See infra Pt. III.3.3, p. 89.
- 16.
See OED I.3., obs. (1588–1690).
- 17.
See OED I. Metaphysics: 5.a and b, obs. (1614–1707 and 1621–1726).
- 18.
See supra Pt. I.1.2, Text II and comment to Text VIII.
- 19.
See supra Pt. I.1.2, Texts VIII and XI.
- 20.
See supra Pt. I.1.2, Texts II and X.
- 21.
See Edwin Clarke, ‘The Doctrine of the Hollow Nerve’, p. 124; see further pp. 37–8 below.
- 22.
See Shapiro, Fits, Passions, and Paroxysms, pp. 86–8, et passim, for what he called Newton’s ‘compositional theory of matter’ and I have called a ‘porosity theory’. Although Shapiro gives credit for this theory to Robert Boyle, a similar theory underpins Willis’s treatment of structural composites, especially in his tract on fermentation included in Diatribæ medico-philosophicæ [1659].
- 23.
Willis, The Anatomy of the Brain [1664 tr. 1681], p. 125.
- 24.
Galen’s term ‘thalamus’, which occurs in only one passage of the Greek corpus of his writings, denoted the recess (now the inferior cornu) in the lateral ventricles of the brain which, in his anatomy, was the source of the optic nerves; see Smith, ‘Galen’s Account of the Cranial Nerves’, pp. 85–6 and 96 n.34. Note, therefore, that his anatomy of the thalamus differs from that of the two seventeenth-century physicians treated infra Pt.III.3.1 and III.3.2.
- 25.
Ibid., pp. 86–7 (additions in square brackets mine). According to Koelbing, ‘Ocular Physiology’, pp. 219–20, Galen’s knowledge of the anatomy of the eye, including what now is called the optic tract, was ‘very accurate’; and this judgment was reaffirmed by Spiegel, Galen on Sense Perception. For some continental writers (but not English ones) who noticed or described the X-shaped structure after Galen, see Crombie, Science, Optics, and Music. But the term ‘chiasma’ (or its English equivalent, ‘chiasm’) did not become a term of art in English anatomy until the nineteenth century (see OED).
- 26.
See Smith, ‘Galen’s Account of the Cranial Nerves’, pp. 85–7, p. 86.
- 27.
According to Galen, Herophilus of Alexandria had referred to the optic nerves as channels’ (poroi); see May (tr.), Galen on the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, Bk. X, Ch. 12, p. 491.
- 28.
Ibid. (italics mine).
- 29.
See Crombie, Science, Optics and Music, pp. 298–9.
- 30.
See, e.g., Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology, pp. 75, 675, and Boring, Sensation and Perception, pp. 227 and 257. Note that this author assumed that Galen, as well as Kepler explained singleness of binocular vision in terms of the ‘semi-decussation’ of the fibers at the junction (‘chiasma’) of the optic nerves.
- 31.
See Clarke, ‘The Doctrine of the Hollow Nerve’, pp. 124, 137–9. It is possible that this was the result of the naked-eye observations of Andreas Vesalius, who is said to have identified macroscopically the existence of peripheral nerve fibre; see Clarke and Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts, p. 388 n.10.
- 32.
See Willis, Two Discourses, p. 61. See further, also for the source of fibre irritation, infra Pt.III.3.2, p. 79 and n.25.
- 33.
See infra Pt.III.3.1, pp. 64–5.
- 34.
According to Boring, Sensation and Perception, pp. 226, 257, this hypothesis was first mooted in 1613.
- 35.
See Crombie, Science, Optics and Music, p. 235 n.108.
- 36.
See Whewell, Novumn Organon Renovatum, p. 17.
- 37.
See Wheatstone, ‘Contributions to the Physiology of Vision’, p. 389. Note that Wheatstone’s experiments with the Stereoscope also drew attention to a new phenomenon now called ‘steropsis’, in which there is a separation between objects as seen by the left and by the right eye (retinal disparity). Investigations into this phenomenon gradually led to the understanding that these differences between the left and the right eye provide information that the brain can use to calculate depth in a visual scene. Note also that Wheatstone’s Stereoscope was the outcome of his exploration of the analogy between sound and light, which led him to a study of vision and an understanding of the principles of binocular vision; see Bowers, Sir Charles Wheatstone, p. 3, et passim. For a brief historical discussion of stereoscopy, see Boring, Sensation and Perception, pp. 282–88.
- 38.
See Newton, ‘Of Colours’, p. 485.
- 39.
See Willis, The Anatomy of the Brain [1664 tr. 1681], p. 103. Newton would have had access to Barrow’s copy of the first edition of this book; see Feingold, ‘Isaac Barrow’s Library’, (No. 1048), p. 369. For evidence that he read it, see infra Pt.III.3.2, p. 80 and n.106.
- 40.
Ibid., p. 139.
- 41.
For some of the anatomists involved in the debate prior to Descartes, see Hall in Descartes, Treatise on Man, p. 40 n.72. As pointed out supra Introduction, pp. xvii, xix, he did not use the term sensorium commune in this work or in his Discours de la méthod.
- 42.
For details, see infra Pt.III.3.2.
- 43.
Briggs, ‘A New Theory’, p. 170. For what he said ‘formerly’ concerning the formation of the eye in different animals (in which there is no mention of the X-shaped structure), see Briggs, Opththalmo-graphia [1676], Ch. VII, pp. 66–72. Concerning the ‘union’ of the optic nerves in fish, see also Willis, The Anatomy of the Brain [tr. 1681], p. 77. According to Mendelsohn, Heat and Life, p. 40, not until the seventeenth century did comparative anatomical studies between humans and other animals become essential.
- 44.
See infra Pt.III.3.1.
- 45.
For the premiss of that physiology, see infra Pt.III.3.2, p. 81.
- 46.
Newton, ‘De gravitatione’, p. 141.
- 47.
See also infra Pt.IV.4.2, pp. 107–8.
- 48.
For the omitted text that contains the three suppositions, see Cohen and Schofield (eds.), Newton’s Papers, pp. 182–3; see also supra Pt.I.1.2, Text II, p. 6 n.18.
- 49.
For Galen’s theory, see Bastholm, The History of Muscle Physiology, pp. 74–96.
- 50.
See Woollam, ‘Concepts of the Brain and its Function in Classical Antiquity’, pp. 17–9.
- 51.
For some seventeenth-century variants of the theory, see ibid. Bastholm (n.49 above); see also Needham, Machina Carnis and Fulton, The History of the Physiology of Muscle. Although important contributions to muscle physiology were made in the seventeenth century, yet physiological thought was dominated by the belief in animal spirits until the nineteenth century.
- 52.
For an account of Boyle’s experiments on the compression and dilation of air, see Webster, ‘The Discovery of Boyle’s Law’, pp. 484–90.
- 53.
Note that Willis devoted two chapters (IX and X) to solvents in his tract on fermentation included in Diatribæ duæ medico-philosophicæ [1659]; see also supra Pt.I.1.2, Text II, p. 7 n.24.
- 54.
See Descartes, Discourse on Method, pp. 37–48, for the heart, the blood and the production of animal spirits, which, ‘like a very subtle wind, or rather like a very pure and lively flame’, arise ‘continuously and in great abundance from the heart to the brain’ and go from there ‘through the nerves into the muscles’ to impart ‘movement to all the members’. For details of Descartes’s physiology, see, e.g., Davis, Circulation Physiology and Medical Chemistry, pp. 40–6, 101–108, 112, et passim.
- 55.
For this term, see also supra Pt.I.1.2, Text X and comment.
- 56.
See Willis, Cerebri anatome [1664], Ch. XIX (on the nervous system in general), p. 246. In English the term appears as ‘capillament’, see Willis, The Anatomy of the Brain [1664 tr. 1681], p. 128. See also OED obs. (1681–1751), where the first citation is to the ‘Table of all the hard words derived from the Greek and Latin’, appended by the translator, Pordage, to a collection of some of Willis’s writings published in 1681. See also Briggs, Ophthalamo-graphia [1676], in which the description of one of his figures (Fig. 5) refers to ‘Nervi Optici capillamenta’.
- 57.
Willis, The Anatomy of the Brain [tr. 1681], p. 89.
- 58.
See Willis, Cerebri anatome [1664], pp. 246–8, and Willis, The Anatomy of the Brain [1664 tr. 1681], pp. 128–9.
- 59.
Willis, The Anatomy of the Brain [1664 tr. 1681], pp. 129; see also Ch. XX (‘Of the Nervous Liquor, and whether that or the bloody Humor be Nutritious’), pp. 131–6. Note that the two ‘juices’ represent Willis’s version of the two-semen theory of Hippocratic tradition.
- 60.
For Aristotle’s treatment of the heart in ‘Parva naturalia’, see Hett (tr.) Aristotle on the Soul, xx–xxi, pp. 475–81, especially p. 479, where he compared the shape of the heart to ‘both the bellows in a forge’.
- 61.
For ‘inkindling’ (‘infiring’, ‘accension’), see Willis, The Anatomy of the Brain [1664 tr. 1681], pp. 95, 126, 129, 131, 136, 152, 154, 162.
- 62.
For ‘boiling up’ (‘ebullition’, ‘deflagration’), see ibid., pp. 84, 90, 96, 104, 124, 131, 155.
- 63.
Ibid., p. 135.
- 64.
For the brain as an alembic, see ibid., pp. 87–8, et passim.
- 65.
Ibid., p. 88.
- 66.
Ibid., p. 77.
- 67.
Cf. Willis, Two Discourses [1672 tr. 1683], pp. 23–4: ‘The comparing of these [animal spirits], with the Spirits of Wine ... and such like, does not quadrate or agree [with their essence]. For besides, that ... Chymical Liquors, neither represent the Images of their Objects, nor are indued with any Elastic Virtue as the Animal Spirits; those also are less Subtle than these’. For the motive power called ‘Elastic Virtue’, see further below.
- 68.
Ibid., p. 135.
- 69.
See the first tract in Harvey, The Anatomical Exercises, pp. 46, 69–70, in which he clearly recognised that contractility is a relation between stretch (‘constriction being oblong’) and tension. Note that Frank, Jr., Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists, did not grasp that the Oxonians’ interest in muscle action began with concepts from Galenic tradition, for this tradition better suited their proto-chemical interests.
- 70.
See Willis, The Anatomy of the Brain [1664 tr. 1681], pp. 129, 135, 152–3. In an early tract, he devoted a chapter on nature’s solvents (fire and water) that included a description of gunpowder and its effects; see Willis, A Medical-Philosophical Discourse of Fermentation [1659 tr. 1681], pp. 41–2.
- 71.
I.e., Willis, Pathologiæ cerebri, et nervosi generis specimen.
- 72.
Willis, An Essay of the Pathology of the Brain [1667 tr. 1684], p. 2.
- 73.
See supra Pt.I.1.2, comment to Text II.
- 74.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1667), 2 (No. 31), pp. 600–2.
- 75.
Ibid., p. 601.
- 76.
See supra Pt.I.1.2, Text II, p. 6 n.18.
- 77.
See OED vbl. sb., rare: The action of stretching.
- 78.
I.e., the fibrous membrane forming the outermost covering of the brain.
- 79.
See Cohen and Schofield (eds.), Isaac Newton’s Papers, p. 183.
- 80.
Briggs, Ophthalamo-graphia [1676], p. 48.
- 81.
Ibid., pp. 46–8. Note that Briggs’s mechanical analogue is a balance, which is analogous to a lever, the analogue Willis used in his 1670 tract, ‘De motu musculari’, which, with two other tracts, was included in Willis, Affectionum que dicuntur ... pathologia spasmodica vindicata, in which the myology of Nicolaus Steno is mentioned with respect, even though it contained criticisms of some of Willis’s ideas.
- 82.
In 1669 Lower concluded from experiments that the motive power is due not to an explosion but to an orderly inflow of spirits into the muscles through the nerves; for full details, see Lower, Tractatus de Corde, pp. 62–86, et passim. For a review of his tract, see Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1669), 4: 909–12. According to Bastholm, The History of Muscle Physiology, p. 148 n.2, Lower made use of Steno’s illustrations of the heart as a muscle.
- 83.
OED obs. or arch.: The action of kindling or the state of being kindled; ignition; inflamation; heat. For his tract on the accension of the blood, see Willis, Affectionum que dicuntur ... pathologia spasmodica vindicata,
- 84.
By c.1687, however, he was aware of it. See supra Pt.I.1.2, comment to Text X, p. 24, where he writes that ‘the inrush of animal spirits’ does not swell the muscles, since they were ‘already full before’; rather, contraction is due to the micro-mechanical interchange of particles (i.e., the motion of fermentation that generates heat), and ‘when this ceases’, the muscles ‘grow flaccid’.
- 85.
E.g., Willis’s succus nervosi and succus nitritis mentioned earlier in this section; for their equivalent, see Briggs, Ophthalamo-graphia [1676], pp. 39 and 43.
- 86.
- 87.
The same is true of the soul of Text IX; see supra Pt.I.1.2, comment to Text IX.
- 88.
See supra Pt.I.1.2, where according to Texts II light rays enter the eye and strike the coat of the retina and according to Text VI ‘the several sorts of rays ... by mixing their actions in the Sensorium beget a sensation’ of colour.
- 89.
See Newton, Opticks (C-R), Query 31, p. 399.
- 90.
See supra Pt.I.1.2, Text II and comment, and Text X and comment.
- 91.
See, e.g., supra Pt.I.1.2, Text IV and comment.
- 92.
See Newton, Principia mathematica (C-M), Bk.III, General Scholium, p. 547, and Newton The Principia, Bk.III, General Scholium, pp. 589–90. For his reliance on the last medium to elucidate sensory-motor function, see Newton, ‘De motu et sensatione Animalium” and its companion text, ‘De vita & morte vegetabili’, which pre-date by two or three years the composition of the General Scholium that concludes the second 1713 edition of Principia mathematica. Note that at the end of the comment on this manuscript, the transcribers add a quote from f. 241 of a manuscript that is not part of the texts transcribed. The quote is as follows: ‘This [electrical] spirit therefore may be the medium of sense & animal motion & by consequence of uniting the thinking soul & unthinking body’.
- 93.
See all of Part I in Shapiro, Fits, Passions, and Paroxysms; see also Shapiro, ‘Newton’s Optical Theories and Vibrating Media’.
- 94.
OED has no entry for the special use in anatomy of the term ‘seat’; but see various related Latin terms: sedes = seat (dwelling place), situs = site; and locus = place in which something is situated.
- 95.
See p. 33 above.
- 96.
See the supplement to OED 3b, Biology. The term was introduced as a term of art in neurology following its coinage in 1906 by Charles Sherrington.
- 97.
The main, as well as supplementary volumes of OED do not include this term; but see Blakiston’s Pocket Medical Dictionary (4th edn., New York, 1979).
- 98.
See supra Pt.I.1.2, Text II (regarding the heart), Text X (regarding palsy) and Texts IX, XI, XII (regarding the ‘instinct’ of animals’). Note that in the manuscripts, ‘De motu et sensatione Animalium’ and ‘De vita & morte vegetabili’, Newton retains the paradigm of voluntary action.
- 99.
Crombie, Science, Optics and Music, pp. 170–1.
- 100.
See Hett (tr.), Aristotle On the Soul, pp. 140–63, and Lawson-Tancred (tr.), Aristotle De Anima, pp. 189–201.
- 101.
Koelbing, ‘Ocular Physiology’, p. 219; who also pointed out, pp. 219–20, that the notion of vision as a one-directional process (action of an object, movement of a medium, alteration in the eye) was not generally accepted either by philosophers such as Plato or by the Greek naturalists, including Galen, whose physiological theory, which was similar to Plato’s ‘synaugeia’, became known as the emission-intromission theory.
- 102.
See Hett (tr.), Aristotle on the Soul, ‘Parva naturalia’, pp. 418–21, p. 421.
- 103.
Ibid., pp. 326–9, p. 329. On the common sense faculty, see also Tracy, Physiological Theory ad the Doctrine of the Mean, pp. 212–20, as well as p. 34 above. On Aristotle’s use of the term ‘faculty’ (dunamis), see Lawson-Tancred in Aristotle De anima, p. 118; and Aristotle’s conception of the brain as a refrigerating agent, see Woollam, ‘Concepts of the Brain and its Function in Classical Antiquity’, p. 11.
- 104.
For example, Harvey, in a number of his writings, critically reviewed the classical sources on various topics (e.g., generation, movement), as well as attempted to harmonise the radical contradictions between his own opinions and those of Aristotle, as well as the Galenic physicians; for two instances of this, see Kassler, Music, Science, Philosophy, pp. 61–82, 98–100.
- 105.
Hall, ‘On Biological Analogs’, p. 10, who also indicated, p. 11 that, after Galen, dispositional thinking was furthered by the Scholastics, who re-emphasised a distinction, traceable to Greek Stoicism, between ‘proegumenal’ (or dispositive) and procatarctic’ (or incitative) causes. In Newton’s day, the latter cause was understood medically as an external and occasional cause such as the previous disposition of a patient; see supra Pt.I.1.2, comment to Text IV.
- 106.
The first edition appeared in 1542, ‘within about a year of the publication of the great works of Copernicus and Vesalius’; see Hall, ‘On Biological Analogs’, p. 10. According to Brazier, ‘The Historical Development of Neurophysiology’, p. 2, this was the first textbook on physiology.
- 107.
Quoted in Hall, ‘On Biological Analogs’, p. 10 (italics mine).
- 108.
See ibid., pp. 12–4, who did not mention Robert Whytt, one of the pioneers in the study of reflex action, who adopted physiological procedures in the Newtonian style at the same time retaining the Galenic tradition of treating unknown causes, which in his case include a disposing ‘sentient’ principle co-extensive with ‘mind’; see Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology, p. 35; see also Clarke and Jaycna, Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts, pp. 113, 402 n.83.
- 109.
As is well known, Newton sought, but failed to discover the unknown causes of gravity, cohesion and fermentation, so that these physical phenomena are instances of disposing ‘powers’.
- 110.
For an instance of his agnosticism about causes in relation to a disposing ‘property’, see supra Pt.I.1.2, comment to Text IV.
- 111.
See Wightman, The Emergence of Scientific Medicine, pp. 44, 91. For the medical background to, and details of Aristotle’s physiological concepts, see Tracy, Physiological Theory and the Doctrine of the Mean, pp. 197–222.
- 112.
For the brain system, see Spiegel, Galen on Psychology; see also Woollam, ‘Concepts of the Brain and its Functions in Classical Antiquity’, pp. 17–9.
- 113.
See Brock (tr.), Galen on the Natural Faculties’, pp. xxxiv–xxxv, who, p. xxv, described Galen’s book as providing instances within ‘its comparatively short compass’ that illustrate ‘perhaps most of the sides of this many sided writer’. For a succinct but useful summary of Galen’s physiology, see also Crombie, Medieval and Early Modern Science, vol. 1, pp. 162–8.
- 114.
For Harvey, see infra Pt.III.3.2, p. 82; for Descartes, see p. 42 above.
- 115.
See supra Introduction, p. viii and n.14
- 116.
Quoted in Gabbey, ‘Henry More and the Limits of Mechanism’, pp. 27–8. See Kassler, Seeking Truth, pp. 96–7 and n.182; see also Jacob, ‘The Neoplatonic Conception of Nature’, pp. 105–10.
- 117.
See Hall in Descartes, Treatise of Man, p. xxviii.
- 118.
See pp. 42–3 above.
- 119.
Hall, ‘On Biological Analogs’, p. 13.
- 120.
For an instance of his eclecticism, see Galen, On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato, which includes vigorous criticisms of the Aristotelian Stoics and more tempered criticisms of the Platonic Stoic, Posidonius (see, e.g., pp. 329, 331). Perhaps, therefore, the latter was the source for Stoic influences noted by Brock, ‘Introduction’, Galen on the Natural Faculties, p. xxv.
- 121.
See, e.g., Galen, On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato, pp. 157, 211, et passim. See also Woollam, ‘Concepts of the Brain and its Functions in Classical Antiquity’, pp. 13–8.
- 122.
See p. 51 above.
- 123.
For the medical background to, and details of Plato’s Timaeus, see Tracy, Physiological Theory and the Doctrine of the Mean, pp. 77–156.
- 124.
See supra Pt.I.1.2, Text I.
- 125.
See More, Philosophical Writings, pp. 129–49; see also the useful notes by the editor, pp. 321–4.
- 126.
See Harrison, The Library of Isaac Newton, (No. 1113), p. 196.
- 127.
See McGuire and Tamny (eds.), Certain Philosophical Questions, p. 183; see also Feingold, ‘Isaac Barrow’s Library’, (No. 663), p. 358.
- 128.
For details, see MacKinnon in More, Philosophical Writings, ‘Notes’, pp. 321–9.
- 129.
According to MacKinnon in ibid., p. 323, Galen is the probable source for More’s own opinion. Note, therefore, that it was Herophilus, who gave the first clear description of the ventricles; see Woollam, ‘Concepts of the Brain and its Functions in Classical Antiquity’, p. 12. Note also that after him, thought about the brain concentrated on the ventricles for nearly two thousand years; indeed, according to Clarke, ‘Brain Anatomy before Steno’, p. 30, in ‘all descriptions of the brain’ after Herophilus, the anatomist ‘paid more attention to the ventricular system than to any other part because of its functional significance’.
- 130.
More, here and elsewhere, followed the traditional distinction between God as masculine and the human soul as feminine; but as will later become apparent, some of those who adumbrated a dual soul concept, described the inferior soul alone in feminine terms.
- 131.
More, Philosophical Writings, p. 143.
- 132.
See OED, where the first citation in English of the term, sensorium, is to a 1647 poem by More. See also MacKinnon in More, Philosophical Writings, p. 291–2.
- 133.
More, Philosophical Writings, pp. 144–5.
- 134.
See Kassler, Inner Music, pp. 115–7.
- 135.
See Woollam, ‘Concepts of the Brain and its Function in Classical Antiquity’, and Pagel, ‘Medieval and Renaissance Contributions to Knowledge of the Brain and its Functions’. In his book, Gargantua et Pantagruel, the sixteenth-century physician, François Rabelais, using the body as an extended metaphor, foreshadowed the demise of the ventricular theory by giving a satirical account of it, whereas after the anatomical work of Vesalius, the theory was no longer tenable.
- 136.
See Harvey, Lectures on the Whole of Anatomy, p. 222, which forms part of his notes on the brain and nerves, pp. 215–227. These notes, which were not published during Harvey’s lifetime, survey anatomical opinions then in process of re-assessment and criticism. For his mature 1651 opinion concerning brain function, in which he compared conception in the brain with conception in the womb, see Kassler, Music, Science, Philosophy, pp. 61–82.
- 137.
More, Philosophical Writings, p. 141.
- 138.
Ibid., p. 145.
- 139.
See Hall in Descartes, Treatise of Man, pp. xxxi–xxxiii, who pointed out first, that although Descartes’s physiology was derivative of traditional ideas, yet he discarded certain of them in order to build a new mechanistic physiology of reflex; and second, that of his predecessors ‘it will be Galen whose name and whose ideas will appear most frequently in our notes’.
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Kassler, J.C. (2018). II The Human Sensorium in Context. In: Newton’s Sensorium: Anatomy of a Concept. Archimedes, vol 53. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72053-1_2
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