III The Human Sensorium in Wider Context

Kassler, Jamie C.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-72053-1_3

Jamie C. Kassler³

Part of the book series: Archimedes ((ARIM,volume 53))

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Abstract

In 1663, two years after Newton was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, Briggs was admitted to Corpus Christi, graduating B.A. (1667) and M.A. (1670, incorporated at Oxford). In 1668 he became a fellow of his college, the same year that Newton became a major fellow at Trinity. The patronage of Ralph Montagu, who on 1 January 1669 was appointed ambassador-extraordinary to France, enabled Briggs to travel there for further study, which included attending, in Montpellier, the anatomical lectures of Raymond Vieussens. According to Briggs, these lectures extended his learning beyond ‘the elegant structure of the parts of the eye and its labyrinthine convolutions’ to the whole of the ‘animal economy’, including ‘the overall threads [i.e., fibres] of the human body’.

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Notes

1.
His tutor was Thomas Tenison, later Archbishop of Canterbury, who was one of the patrons of Samuel Clarke, the translator of Newton’s Optice; see Kassler, Seeking Truth, p. 116 passim.
2.
See Briggs, Opththalamo-graphia [1990], ‘Epistola Dedicatoria’ to Ralph Montagu.
3.
Ibid., ‘Præfatio’, which contains the only mention of Vieussens in Briggs’s writings, which suggests that his conception of the human body’s thin films, i.e., fibres or filaments, was afterwards superseded by his exposure to Willis’s anatomy.
4.
Barrow owned a copy of this edition; see Feingold, ‘Isaac Barrow’s Library’, (No. 191), p. 346.
5.
Briggs, ‘A New Theory of Vision’, and ‘A Continuation’.
6.
Newton owned a copy of this edition; see Harrison, The Library of Isaac Newton, (No. 297) p. 111.
7.
The ‘Editio altera’ of 1685 was reissued at Leyden in 1686. A facsimile of the 1685 edition was published in 1990 with an English translation of all three publications; see Briggs, Opthalamo-graphia [1685/1990, part 1]. Unfortunately, there are a number of problems with the translation, including the literal rendering of some seventeenth-century technical terms that can be misleading (for some other problems, see n.8 and p. 67 n.39 below). In addition, the editor seems to have substituted modern terms that are inappropriate for a seventeenth-century text (e.g., ‘chiasma’ for ‘unionem’, ‘ciliary body’ for ‘processus ciliare’ and, in one place ‘oxygen’ for ‘spirituum’). Consequently, when quoting from the English translation of the republished 1676 treatise, I have checked the translation against the original version. As for Briggs’s two tracts, I rely solely on the original English texts of 1682 and 1683.
8.
In the ‘Editio altera’ of 1685, the letter is dated ‘Cantabrigiæ 7 Kal. Maii, 1685’; but in the English translation of this letter in Briggs, Opthalamo-graphia [1990], the letter is dated 25 April 1685; and this same discrepancy also appears in Newton, The Correspondence, vol. 2, Letter 280, pp. 417–8 (Latin version), 418–9 (English translation).
9.
Briggs, Opthalamo-graphia [1990], p. v [italics mine].
10.
See Briggs, Ophthalamo-graphia [1676], pp. 17, 21.
11.
Ibid., pp. 17–22, who also claimed that the texture of the filaments of the iris was evident by analogy with the phenomena of other natural bodies, including feathers of birds, silk and flowers.
12.
Ibid., p. 21. Of the three works by Descartes (La Dioptrique, L’Homme, Les Météors) cited by Briggs, it is probable that his reference above is to the corpuscular explanation of the colours of the rainbow and clouds in the last work and which concluded Descartes, Discourse on Method, pp. 332 seq.
13.
But he did mention the colours of thin films such as ‘the fine Hairs, or Capillamenta’ of bird feathers, silk, cloths and flowers; see Newton, Opticks (1), Bk. II, Pt.II, Props. V–X, pp. 55–6. He also mentioned ‘the Webs of some Spiders’, which, in terms of thin films, implies webs called ‘gossamers’ that are spun by small spiders.
14.
Cohen and Schofield (eds.), Isaac Newton’s Papers, pp. 226–38, in which, pp. 229–30, mention is made of silk, cloths and flowers.
15.
The concept in question is Newton’s ‘fits’ of easy reflection and easy transmission; see supra Pt.I.1.2, Text IV. But in ‘An Hypothesis’, his explanation is in terms of mechanical æther vibrations and not, as in Opticks (1), in terms of attractive powers.
16.
See Shapiro, Fits, Passions and Paroxysms, pp. 77–9, where, on p. 79, he mentions the assumption Newton had to make when applying his hypothesis of aetherial vibrations to the periodic colours of thin films, namely, that the æther vibrations stirred up by the incident light rays move faster than the rays themselves; see also supra Pt.I.1.2, comment to Text IV. Compare this assumption with Briggs, Ophthalamo-graphia [1676], pp. 54–5, who mentions a ‘materia ætheria’ when indicating that under certain circumstances, the vibrations of the light rays exceed the motion of the animal spirits.
17.
See Newton’s commendatory letter in Briggs, Ophthalamo-graphia [1990 part 2].
18.
I.e., the peripheral end-organ of vision; see Briggs, Ophthalamo-graphia [1676], p. 17.
19.
Ibid., p. 25. This modification may have been due to Scheiner, whose work is cited, p. 36, but not in connection with humours as refracting lenses.
20.
Briggs, Ophthalamo-graphia [1990], pp. 17–8, 35.
21.
Ibid., p. 17.
22.
I.e. the brain’s membranous coverings called the dura and pia mater.
23.
I.e., center (of the nerves).
24.
I.e., (from the exterior of the eye inward) the region of the vitreous humour in front of the retina; see Briggs, Ophthalamo-graphia [1990], pp. 24–5.
25.
I.e., (from the exterior of the eye inward) the outermost coat of the eye, of which the cornea is the part in front of the aqueous humour that precedes the crystalline humour.
26.
I.e., marrowy or medullary, not membranous.
27.
Briggs, Opththalamo-graphia [1676], pp. 42–2; [1990], p. 28.
28.
See ibid. pp. 2–4, in which Briggs seems to assume that visual spatial localisation is the result of some kind of position sense of the two eyes from the tensions in muscles extrinsic to the eyeball. For the basis of this assumption, see supra Pt.II.2.1, pp. 38–9.
29.
Ibid., p. 3.
30.
Briggs, ‘A New Theory’, p. 170.
31.
See the translators’ ‘Introduction’ in Harvey, Lectures on the Whole of Anatomy, p. 10.
32.
See Harvey, Lectures on the Whole of Anatomy, p. 225.
33.
See supra Pt.II.2.1, p. 38.
34.
The term ‘thalami’ had been coined by Galen; for its place in his anatomy, see supra Pt.II.2.1, p. 36 n.24.
35.
This illustration faces the title page of No. 6 of The Philosophical Collections, whereas the explanatory table (Tab. I.) is found at the conclusion of Briggs, ‘A New Theory’, p. 178.
36.
Briggs, ‘A New Theory’, p. 169.
37.
Ibid.
38.
See ibid., pp. 170–1, where Briggs claimed that this muscle keeps the eye even and ‘in sight, so that it cannot incline too much either to the internal or external Canthus’. An errata list at the end of Briggs’s tract corrects ‘in sight’ to ‘in situ’. Unfortunately, in presenting the English version of the tract in Opthalamo-graphia [1985/1990, part 2], p. 5, the editor failed either to compare it with the translator’s Latin version (which has ‘in æquilibrio’) or to consult the original 1682 errata.
39.
Newton, The Correspondence, vol. 2, Letter 261 (20 June 1682), pp. 377–8, with the address: ‘For his honoured friend Dr. William Briggs at his house in Suffolk Street in London’.
40.
See ibid., vol. 2, Letter 264, pp. 381–5; for the criticisms, see pp. 381–3, 385.
41.
See ibid., p. 382, where he compares the bent optic nerves to branches of ‘Codlings’ (trees with apples called codlings) twisted to form hedges or branches of fruit trees espaliered (‘nailed up) to a wall’
42.
Ibid., p. 384.
43.
Newton, The Correspondence, vol. 2, Letter 261, pp. 383–4.
44.
See Newton, ‘Of Colours’, pp. 485–7.
45.
For the letter in which this consideration appears, see Kassler, The Beginnings of the Modern Philosophy of Music, pp. 175–8.
46.
Ibid., p. 178; for a comment on this part of Newton’s letter, see pp. 98–100, 121, and for one response to his letter, see pp. 102–3.
47.
Newton, The Correspondence, vol. 2, Letter 261, p. 383.
48.
For the hypothesis, see supra Pt.II.2.1, p. 39.
49.
See supra Pt.I.12, Text VII (Qu. 15).
50.
See supra Pt.I.12, Text II, and supra Pt.II.2.1, p. 43. Note that after 1664 this hypothesis was widely adopted and sometimes modified.
51.
The source of this italicised phrase may have been an ancient anatomical maxim; see supra Pr.I.1.2, Texts VIII, p. 20 n.103 and XI, p. 25 n.133. Note that Newton provides an important gloss on this phrase in the sentence italicised at the conclusion of the quotation.
52.
Newton, The Correspondence, vol. 2, Letter 261, p. 384 (italics mine).
53.
See supra Pt.I.1.2, Text VII (Qu. 40); see also supra Pt.II.2.1, p. 40 and n.43.
54.
Briggs, ‘Continuation’, p. 175.
55.
Ibid., p. 177.
56.
Note that this would imply a continuum, not an emission hypothesis; see Shapiro, ‘Kinematic Optics’, p. 136 n.5.
57.
Briggs, ‘Continuation’, p. 181.
58.
Ibid., pp. 175–6.
59.
The objector seems to have been Edme Mariotte, who in 1668 described the blind spot and localised it at the point of emergence of the optic nerve from the retina; see Boring, Sensation and Perception, pp. 100 and 121. It is puzzling, therefore, that he also argued against the retina and for the choroid (‘chorœides’) as the peripheral end-organ of vision; see ‘The Answer of Monsieur Mariotte to Monsieur Pecquet’. Today, the choroid, with the iris and ciliary body, is considered as part of the uvea, the pigmented, vascular layer of the eye. In addition to the iris, Briggs, Ophthalamo-graphia [1676], described the other two bodies, the first of which, p. 17, is referred to by its Greek name, the last of which, p. 18, is referred to as ‘processus ciliares’. The ‘processes’ of the latter, the ligamentum ciliare, are given a short, separate description, pp. 22–3, in which Briggs stated that they are arranged like the teeth of a comb. It is possible, therefore, that this description could have influenced Newton’s choice of a comb to make the experiments described supra Pt.I.1.2, Text V.
60.
OED obs.: The center of anything; here, part of the brain (encephalon) called ‘the cerebrum’.
61.
Briggs, ‘Continuation’, p. 175.
62.
I.e., the off-shoots or subdivisions of nerve fibres.
63.
Briggs, ‘Continuation’, pp. 181–2.
64.
Briggs, Opththalamo-graphia [1990], p. 34.
65.
Ibid., p. 45
66.
Ibid., p. 34.
67.
See ibid., pp. 6, 28–30, 41 (citations to Willis, Cerebri anatome [1664], Ch. 21 and 22, on the cranial nerves); and Briggs, ‘A New Theory’, p. 176 (citation to Willis, De anima brutorum [1670], Ch. 15, on vision). See also supra Pt.II.2.1, p. 46.
68.
See Briggs, ‘A Continuation’, p. 174.
69.
See Willis, The Anatomy of the Brain [1664 tr. 1681], pp. 137–41, pp. 141–48, pp. 157–73, and pp. 173–6. See Briggs, Opththalamo-graphia [1990], first pair, p. 30; second pair, passim; third pair, pp. 2–4, 7, 10, 26–30, 52; fourth pair, pp. 6–7, 26, 32, 51, 52; fifth pair, pp. 33–4 (implied), 40–1, 52; sixth pair, pp. 7, 52; spinal nerves (Willis identified 31 pairs), p. 33; and intercostal nerves, p. 41.
70.
Ibid., p. 139 (italics mine). The word ‘shanks’ here refers to Willis’s ‘medullar trunk’, which includes both the oblong and spinal marrow; see pp. 82–3 below.
71.
Ibid., p. 105 (explanatory table to Fig. 8); see also pp. 61–2, where is indicated that the same method of dissection may be used for the human brain. But Willis, Two Discourses [1672 tr. 1683], Fig. 8 facing the explanatory table, p. 44, used a different method to expose some of the same parts in his ‘new Anatomy of the Human Brain’.
72.
See supra Pt.II.2.1, p. 47.
73.
See pp. 84–6 below.
74.
This section is partly based on Kassler, Music, Science, Philosophy, pp. 124–65, and sources cited there.
75.
See supra Pt.I.1.2, comment to Text II, comment to Text IV and comment to Text X; see also supra Pt.II.2.1, p. 45.
76.
See supra Introduction p. viii. For extensive evidence of Newton’s plan, see Guicciardini, Isaac Newton; for a near contemporary who grasped the nature of that plan, see Kassler, Seeking Truth, p. 54, et passim; and for some of Newton’s difficulties in accomplishing it, see infra Conclusion, pp. 134–5.
77.
Although Willis developed the dual-soul concept for his own purposes, yet his older contemporary, Pierre Gassendi, also had recourse to a similar concept to serve his own purposes. For since the latter aimed to reconstruct the materialist teaching of the Epicurean atomists, as a divine he had to avoid reducing the principle of animus to material soul atoms. And it was this requirement that led him to propound a double composition of the soul. See Jones, The Epicurean Tradition, pp. 55–61; see also Osler, ‘Baptizing Epicurean Atomism’. For some ancient antecedents for the dual-soul concept, see Kassler, Music, Science, Philosophy, pp. 64 n.10, 65–6. 147–8; see also Lee (tr.), Plato Republic, Pt. V, Bk. IV, pp. 206–22, and Lawson-Tancred (tr.), Aristotle De anima, II.ii–iii, pp. 158–64.
78.
Willis, Two Discourses [1672 tr. 1683], p. 42. Of the two discourses, (i.e., medical exercises or practices), one is physiological, intended to show the nature, disposing powers, affections and parts, vital and sensitive, of the corporeal soul, whereas the other is pathological, intended to unfold the diseases which affect the ‘primary seat’ in the brain of the sensitive part of this soul. Despite his focus on anima, there are scattered references throughout the book to animus.
79.
For examples, see Willis, An Essay of the Pathology of the Brain [1667 tr. 1683], pp. 11 (the ‘holy’ disease, epilepsy), 43–4 (the ‘universal convulsions from witchcraft’). See also Kassler, Music, Science, Philosophy, pp. 127, 137–8, 151 and n.73, 152–3, 158–60.
80.
See ibid., pp. 127, 147–8, 151 and n.73, 152–3. For the pre-Galenic medico-biological context of the Hippocratic corpus and for Plato’s theory in the Timaeus and Aristotle’s development of that theory, see Tracy, Physiological Theory and the Doctrine of the Mean.
81.
Like the Platonists at Cambridge, Willis embraced some form of atomism, probably having learned about it from Gassendi, whom he cites in De anima brutorum [1672], and perhaps also from one of Willis’s patients, Anne Conway, a pupil of the Cambridge Platonist, Henry More; see Dewhurst, ‘Some Letters’, pp. 74–5.
82.
Willis’s speculations were based not only on anatomical dissections but also on ‘farmyard empiricism’, chemical studies, experiments and clinical experience, for details of which, see Dewhurst, Willis’s Oxford Casebook. Unfortunately, there is a tendency among some commentators to criticise Willis for his speculations; but they do so without taking into account not only the problem of a developing field that requires new terms, but also the nature of anatomical reasoning. For the latter, see Stevenson, ‘Anatomical Reasoning in Physiological Thought’.
83.
Consequently, Willis cannot be classed with either the iatromechanists or the iatrochemists.
84.
Willis used various terms for the containers, including chambers, cisterns, cloisters, pipes, repositories, reservoirs, sinks, storehouses, tubules.
85.
This division modifies the three-element theory of Paracelsus, in which mercury is renamed as spirit; see Bastholm, The History of Muscle Physiology, p. 203. For his description of the five principles, see Ch. 2 in Willis, Diatribæ duæ medico-philosophicæ [1659]. For his belief that they are directly implicated in disease; see Davis, Circulation Physiology and Medical Chemistry, p. 154 passim.
86.
According to Willis, The Anatomy of the Brain [1664 tr. 1681], p. 98, ‘all the Pores and passages in all the parts of a living Creature are dilated by spirit and heat’, i.e., the motion of fermentation Cf. Newton supra Pt.II.2.2, pp. 47–8 and Briggs p. 62 above.
87.
According to Wilkie, ‘Body and Soul in Aristotelian Tradition’, p. 20, for Aristotle and his successors, the problem of the relation between soul and body was ‘never felt to be particularly troublesome’, whereas the ‘really difficult problem for them was the relation between the imagination and the intellect.’
88.
Note that this part of Willis’s dual soul concept also has ancient antecedents that include the tradition of interpreting allegorically the biblical ‘Fall’ of man in Genesis. For example, the Greek-speaking Jewish-Platonist philosopher, Philo of Alexandria, repeatedly suggested that the first man, Adam, symbolises intellect (nous) and the first woman, Eve, sensitivity (aisthēsis); see Stead, Doctrine and Philosophy in Early Christianity, IX, p. 230. According to Lawson-Tancred (tr.), Aristotle De Anima, p. 118, the Greek word, aisthēsis, is a term of wide meaning, encompassing the sense of three modern terms: sensation, perception and consciousness.
89.
Willis, Two Discourses [1672 tr. 1683], p. 41. The doctrine that incorporeal substance is indivisible has a long history, starting with the Parmenides of Plato, taken up, e.g., by Philo of Alexandria and ‘vividly characterised’ by Origen; see Stead Doctrine and Philosophy in Early Christianity, V, p. 44.
90.
A doctrine of the identity of intellect and rational will was commonly held by seventeenth-century Platonists in opposition to the received Thomistic doctrine of the real distinction of these powers. For example, in discoursing on the mind as the ‘seat or subject of faith’, the Rev. John Tillotson claimed to make no ‘real distinction of Faculties’. But if some person would distinguish them, ‘the proper seat of this persuasion [i.e., faith] is the Understanding [i.e., intellect]; the immediate effect of it is upon the Will; by which it works upon the affections and the life’; see Dockrill, ‘Enthusiasm in Seventeenth Century England’, p. 151.
91.
Willis Two Discourses [1672 tr. 1683], pp. 41–2.
92.
This complexity has not been grasped by Wallace, ‘The Vibrating Nerve Impulse’, who therefore has missed the multiple nature of Willis’s dualism, as well as its ramifications for his anatomy and physiology.
93.
See ibid., Ch. XV (‘Of the Sight’), pp. 75–86. All quotations concerning Willis’s ocular anatomy are taken from this chapter.
94.
These are the sclerotic or outermost coat, the albuginia and the choroid, the last of which is rendered by Willis’s English translator, Samuel Pordage, as ‘chorocœides’ or ‘crocoideos’.
95.
According to Willis, these ciliary fibres, which stick to the cornea, are contiguous not only to the crystalline humour and its little membrane called ‘the Cobweb’, but also to the retina; and they have two uses: (1) to expand and contract the pupil, and (2) to ‘thrust forward, or draw backward the Chrystalline humour, and bend it hither and thither into the view of the [external] Objects’. In his description of the second use, Willis was on the right tract, for his ciliary processes are now called ‘ciliary muscles’, and their function is to adjust the power of the crystalline lens.
96.
This is Willis’s requirement for all sensory modalities; but he also required that the chemical properties of the atomic bodies be different for each sensory modality, which, of course, have different functions.
97.
Willis, Two Discourses [1672 tr. 1683], Ch. X (Of the Sense in General), p. 57. Unlike Newton, Willis distinguished between the terms ‘sensory’ as a peripheral end-organ and ‘common sensory’ as a central end-organ.
98.
I.e., a convex lens; see Newton, Opticks (1), p. 6.
99.
Willis, Two Discourses [1672 tr. 1683], pp. 77–8 et passim. In 1658 the Norfolk physician, Thomas Browne, modelled the functional anatomy of the eye on a camera obscura; and in 1659 Willis first mentioned the camera obscura in connection with sight; see Willis, A Medical Philosophical Discourse of Fermentation [1659 tr. 1681], p. 39 (‘close chamber’).
100.
Scheiner may have been Willis’s source for a ‘fused’ lens; see Crombie, Science, Optics and Music, p. 232 n.100 and p. 233 (Fig. 36).
101.
For Willis, the two main parts of the brain (encephalon) are the cerebrum and cerebellum; see further pp. 81–2 below.
102.
See supra Pt.II.2.2, p. 56.
103.
See Descartes, Treatise on Man, p. 86, who, earlier in La Dioptrique, had identified ‘the seat of common sense’ as ‘a certain small gland which is found about the center of these concavities [the ventricles]’; see Descartes, Discourse on Method, p. 100. The modern term is ‘pineal body’, which is attached to the roof of the third ventricle.
104.
Willis, The Anatomy of the Brain [1664 tr. 1681], p. 97.
105.
Ibid., pp. 96–100, 104, 123, et passim.
106.
I.e., precious; see Newton, ‘Of Colours’, p. 487, whose description (above) suggests that he actually read the first edition of Willis’s Cerebri anatome [1664], a copy of which was in Barrow’s library; see supra Pt.II.2.1, p. 39 n.39.
107.
For a full treatment of Willis’s model, see Kassler, Music, Science, Philosophy, pp. 125–64.
108.
See Kassler, ‘Man—A Musical Instrument’, pp. 62–6; Kassler, Inner Music, pp. 43–8; and Kassler, The Beginnings of the Modern Philosophy, pp. 9–10. Descartes and, before him, Fernel were forerunners of the concept of reflex action, but Willis’s contribution was more significant; see Brazier, ‘The Historical Development of Neurophysiology, p. 31.
109.
Harvey, The Anatomical Exercises, p. 157, had condemned spirits as a deus ex machina and the recourse to them as an asylum of the ignorant. Perhaps in answer to Harvey’s ghost, Willis, Two Discourses [1672 tr. 1683], p. 23, wrote: ‘I shall say nothing to those, who wholly deny these Spirits, for ... the exi[s]tences of which, is almost palpable, and may be proved demonstratively by the effects.’ Note his indebtedness to the method of physiological explanation of Galenic tradition described supra Pt.II.2.2, p. 52.
110.
For details of the operating system, see Kassler, Music, Science, Philosophy, pp. 129–40.
111.
This feature is also unique to the musical instrument that is the probable source of Willis’s model; see ibid., pp. 160–4.
112.
In the medical tradition that Willis inherited, a distinction was made between three classes of motor function: voluntary (‘animal’), involuntary (‘vital’) and movements partly under our control and partly not (‘natural’). In Willis’s system, the last class would have been controlled by both cerebrum and cerebellum.
113.
For the cerebellum, see Kassler, Music, Science, Philosophy, pp. 1437.
114.
See Clarke and Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts, p. 287.
115.
Since Fig. III.4 represents a side view of the pathway of the medullar trunk, anatomical substrates that are composed of two or more bodies show only half the number of which they are composed.
116.
Anatomists referred to these protuberances (now called ‘corpora quadrigemina’) as ‘nates’ and ‘testes’, terms that Willis disliked, although he continued to use them; see The Anatomy of the Brain [1664 tr. 1681], pp. 106–10. Unlike Descartes, he located the pineal gland (vulgarly, penis) between these protuberances; and he concluded that the use of this gland, like other ‘Kernels’, is to receive and retain within it ‘the serous humors deposited from the arterious blood, till the Veins being emptied, may sup them back’.
117.
For background on the corpus of knowledge about the brain between 1600 and 1665, see the brief but useful survey by Clarke, ‘Brain Anatomy before Steno’, pp. 27–32, who, pp. 32–3, mentions the names of those who made new advances between 1655 and 1665.
118.
Willis’s term ‘corpora striata’, like that of Briggs, clearly indicates more than one body. Indeed, when he first introduced this mechanism in The Anatomy of the Brain [1664 tr. 1681], p. 59, he used the term ‘lentiform prominences’, which not only suggests two bodies but also, significantly for what is to follow, bodies having the shape of a convex lens.
119.
See Willis, The Anatomy of the Brain [1664 tr. 1681], pp. 122, 124, 126, 127, 130.
120.
See ibid., p. 127: ‘The nerves themselves (as may be discovered by the help of a Microcosm or Perspective-glass) are furnished throughout with pores and passages, as it were so many little holes in a Honey-comb, thickly set, made hollow, and contiguous one by another; so the Tube-like substance of them, like an Indian Cane, is everywhere porous and pervious’. For a useful survey of early-modern nerve theories, see Clarke, ‘The Doctrine of the Hollow Nerve’, who, classed porosity theories as a variant of the hollow-nerve theory, included Willis’s theory in this class and stated that Willis was probably the first to examine the nerve with a microscope. Newton is not mentioned in his survey, but I have already pointed out in Part II that his theory of compound matter, which includes the nerves, is a porosity theory and, hence, a variant of the hollow-nerve theory.
121.
See Willis, The Anatomy of the Brain [1664 tr. 1681], p. 132; see also Willis, Two Discourses [1672 tr. 1683], p. 24.
122.
It is possible that Willis retained the scholastic doctrine of species, according to which movements like eddies represent the action of the transmuted ‘power’ of percussion, such action, though conceived as incorporeal, invisible and spiritual, by moving corporeal ‘instruments’ at any time becomes ‘material’. For this doctrine, see Kassler, The Beginnings of the Modern Philosophy of Music, pp. 7–8, 10; for Thomas Hobbes’s criticism of it, see Kassler, Inner Music, p. 50.
123.
Some commentators have substituted the term ‘corpus striatum’, or simply ‘striatum’ for Willis’s term ‘corpora striata’; see, e.g., Meyer and Hierons, ‘A Note on Thomas Willis’ Views on the Corpus Striatum’. Unfortunately, Connolly, ‘Newton and God’s Sensorium’, p. 187, adopted their usage. For the meaning of this substituted term, see infra Conclusion, pp. 137–8, where it will be clear that the modern concept is not the same as Willis’s concept, and, therefore, it is historically misleading to substitute the former for the latter.
124.
I.e., mirrors.
125.
I.e., object glass. See OED: The lens or combination of lenses in a telescope, microscope, or other optical instrument, which is situated nearest to the object, and thus receives the rays of light directly from it (1665–1839).
126.
Willis, Two Discourses [1672 tr. 1683], p. 25, see also pp. 33, 59, et passim.
127.
But Willis, Two Discourses [1672 tr. 1683], p. 59, seems to have been uncertain whether images^b transmitted ‘into the streaked Bodies’ are ‘there represented as upon a white wall; ... or perhaps carried forward beyond into the Callous Body’.
128.
Willis, The Anatomy of the Brain [1664 tr. 1681], p. 77.
129.
Willis, Two Discourses [1672 tr. 1683], p. 34.
130.
Willis, The Anatomy of the Brain [1664 tr. 1681], p. 102.
131.
Ibid., p. 162. See also Willis, Two Discourses [1672 tr. 1683], p. 27, which is part of an ‘accurate’ description and use of the corpora striata with reference to the explanatory Table 8 and the accompanying figure of the human brain, pp. 26–9, 44.
132.
OED sb. 1 obs.: prompting, impulse = Instigation OED b: an incentive, stimulus, spur (1526–1869).
133.
Willis, The Anatomy of the Brain [1664 tr. 1681], p. 102.
134.
Willis, Two Discourses [1672 tr. 1683], pp. 46–8.
135.
Willis, Two Discourses [1672 tr. 1683], pp. 42–3.
136.
Ibid., p. 48. For the preternatural passions that perturb the nervous system, see especially Willis, An Essay of the Pathology of the Brain, [1667 tr. 1684].
137.
I.e., in the allegorical interpretation of the ‘Fall’ of man, phantasie represents Eve, whose property is sensitivity (aisthēsis); see p. 77 n.88 above. Note that as late as 1909, Upton, Women in Music, pp. 30–1, used the distinction between intellect and phantasie in order to distinguish the attributes of male and (detrimentally) female biological ‘organisation’ that, according to him, determine their respective roles in music.
138.
Willis, Two Discourses [1672 tr. 1683], p. 39. Cf. Briggs pp. 71–2 above.
139.
Ibid. For ‘the sense’, read here and also below ‘the sensitive part of the corporeal soul’.
140.
I.e., in logic that which is predicated or said of the subject of a proposition; the second term of a proposition, which is affirmed or denied of the first term by means of a copula.
141.
OED b: Immediate apprehension by the intellect alone (1659–1877).
142.
Willis, Two Discourses [1672 tr. 1683], p. 39. In the passage quoted he reveals his indebtedness to the conception of intelligence (i.e., knowledge) of Platonic tradition. In Willis’s version, the incorporeal soul (animus) exercises its power of intellect in the acquisition of intelligible truths. Accordingly, knowing is an intuitive grasp of such truths and thinking is a logical progression towards them. Cf. the version of the Renaissance philosopher, Ficino, ‘Five Questions concerning Mind’, pp. 197–207.
143.
Ibid., referring to divine truths, which during the Middle Ages were conceived as exemplar ideas illuminated not by the human intellect but by God; see Robinson, The Shape of Things Known, p. 34.
144.
Willis, The Anatomy of the Brain [1664 tr. 1681], ‘Preface to the Reader’. This conception may imply that the Musician (see p. 86 above), seated in its organ room (the corpus callosum), actually represents that part of the human hydraulis on which it plays, i.e., the part concerned with voluntary function. For a later, fully developed representative theory based on a musical-instrument model, see Kassler, Music, Science, Philosophy, pp. 286–90.
145.
I.e., mirror.
146.
See Willis, The Anatomy of the Brain [1664 tr. 1681], p. 32 (italics mine).
147.
Ibid., p. 39 (italics mine).
148.
Willis, Two Discourses [1672 tr. 1683], p. 179 (italics mine); see also pp. 188, 209–10, for distorted images^b due to brains ‘evilly affected’ or malformed.
149.
Willis, Two Discourses [1672 tr. 1683], p. 75 (italics mine); see also p. 82: the eye, being round, imitates ‘the System of the World’.
150.
See Frangenberg, ‘Auditus visu prestantior’, p. 73 and n.8.
151.
Plato, Timaeus, 47. Like sight, the gift of hearing was given to us ‘for the sake of harmony, which has motions akin to the orbits in our own soul’. But the lesser position of hearing is accounted for by Plato’s warning against using ‘audible musical sound’ to give ‘irrational pleasure’ rather than to reduce ‘to order and harmony any disharmony in the revolutions within us’.
152.
Hett (tr.), Aristotle On the Soul, ‘Parva naturalia’, pp. 218–9, where Aristotle added that ‘for the mind and indirectly[,] hearing is the more important’, indirectly because ‘hearing makes the largest contribution to wisdom’.
153.
See Aristotle, De Anima, III.iii. in Lawson-Tancred (tr.), Aristotle De Anima, p. 200. Cf. Hett (tr.), Aristotle On the Soul, pp. 162–3 (‘sight is the chief sense’). See also Crowther and Barker, ‘Training the Intelligent Eye’, p. 436, for the privileging of sight in Aristotle’s Metaphysics.
154.
See p. 61 above. As indicated there, Briggs first came into contact with Newton in the 1660s, when the two men were at Cambridge University. As for Willis, whose influence on Briggs was there evidenced, his professional life began in Oxford and ended in London, so that it is unlikely that the two men were directly acquainted, because Briggs was in France from c.1669 and returned to Cambridge in 1672; and three years later Willis died in London at his house in St. Martin’s Lane.
155.
Briggs, Opthalamo-graphia [1675], Ch. 1, sect. 1, pp. 1–3; cf. Briggs, Opthalamo-graphia [1685 tr. 1990], Ch. 1, sect 1, pp. 1–2 (italics mine).
156.
According to Westfall, Never at Rest, pp. 288–9, Newton and Boyle first met in 1675. For Boyle’s publications owned by Newton, or accessible to him through Barrow, see Harrison, The Library of Isaac Newton, (Nos. 254–81), pp. 107–9, and Feingold, ‘Isaac Barrow’s Library’, (Nos. 172–83), pp. 345–6.
157.
See Dewhurst, Willis’s Oxford Lectures, p. 8 and Plate 8. Note that Cross was also a friend of the Oxonian, John Fell, a college contemporary of Willis, who later married Fell’s sister.
158.
See ibid., pp. 1–36. The Club, which met between c.1648 and 1667, used the laboratory facilities at Wadham College until 1659; but after Boyle set up his first laboratory in Deep Hall, the Club’s meetings were held there. According to Frank, Jr., Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists, pp. 183 and nn.160–2, two divines on the periphery of the Club followed the anatomical discussions closely, namely, Samuel Parker and Robert Sharrock. In their publications the former, relying on Willis’s anatomy, presented two arguments, one from design, the other for the pre-existence of souls, whereas the latter included a digression on Willis’s conception of the use of the corpora striata and corpus callosum.
159.
According to Bennett, ‘A Note’, pp. 63–4 and n.30, one of the members of the Club, Christopher Wren, in an address to the Royal Society read about 1662, pointed out that a mechanical account of the muscles must be complemented by a chemical explanation; and in March 1665, Wren himself made an experiment to explain muscle action by ‘explosion’. It should be noted, therefore, that Willis, The Anatomy of the Brain [1664 tr. 1681], ‘Preface to the Reader’, acknowledged Wren not only for delineating ‘many Figures of the Brain and Skull’ reproduced in his book, but also, with Thomas Millington (another member of the Club), for being ‘frequently’ present ‘at our Dissections, and to confer and reason about the uses of the Parts’.
160.
See Boyle, The Works, vol. 6, pp. 462–81; for Willis, see also Boyle, The Correspondence, vols. 1–4.
161.
See Dewhurst, Willis’s Oxford Lectures, pp. 37–49. In 1667 Willis and in 1668 Boyle left Oxford for London.
162.
See Boyle, The Works, vol. 4, p. 503, where, in a convoluted sentence, he indicated that he used the term ‘chymical principles’ in Willis’s ‘enlarged’ sense, i.e., to mean five, not three principles, as noted p. 76 and n.85 above.
163.
See ibid., vol. 6, for the invaluable analytical index (not paginated).
164.
I.e., the intellect, ibid., vol. 5, p. 242.
165.
Ibid., vol. 4, p. 461.
166.
Ibid., vol. 2, p. 6.
167.
Ibid., vol. 4, p. 442; vol. 5, p. 232.
168.
Ibid., vol. 6, p. 740.
169.
Ibid., vol. 4, p. 442; vol. 5, p. 232. The observable fluids include the blood and ‘liquors’, the latter of which are so disposed ‘by things analogous to local ferments’ as to be put into ‘a fermentation or commotion’. For there are ‘chymical uses’ of ‘some parts, that serve for the chemical elaboration of spirits and other fluids’.
170.
See supra Pt.II.2.2, pp. 52–3.
171.
Boyle, The Works, vol. 2, p. 731.
172.
Ibid., vol. 4, pp. 19–20.
173.
Ibid., vol. 4, p. 419 (italics mine).
174.
See OED: Species, sb. I. 3c, obs.: The image of something as cast upon, or reflected from, a surface; a reflection (1638–1737).
175.
Boyle, The Works, vol. 4, pp.460–1.
176.
Ibid., vol. 6, p. 740. For this disposing principle as the whole of a distributed body of animal spirits in the brain and nervous system, see ibid., vol. 4, pp. 442, 457; vol. 5, p. 10; vol. 6, pp. 739–40.
177.
Ibid., vol. 6, p. 741.
178.
Ibid., vol. 4, p. 415.
179.
Ibid.
180.
Ibid., vol. 6, p. 743 (italics mine).
181.
See supra Pt.II.2.1, pp. 43–5.
182.
According to Westfall, Never at Rest, pp. 289, 488, contact between Locke and Newton began in the late 1680s, probably 1689.
183.
Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, p. 146; see also, p. 43.
184.
This assumption has its roots in Aristotle’s theory that the soul perceives an image ‘in its own right’ and a copy of the image as a reminder; see Sorabji (tr.), Aristotle on Memory, pp. 47–50, especially pp. 48–9, 51–2.
185.
See Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, p. 363.
186.
See ibid., pp. 52, 127, 131, 136, 144, 149–50, 209, 226, et passim.
187.
For a brief but useful history of visual epistemology from Parmenides to Pomponazzi, see Robinson, The Shape of Things Known, pp. 11–59, according to whom, pp. 36–7, the two main traditions of it derive from Plato and Aristotle until these traditions were fused by Boethius, after which his fusion was to become the norm in medieval philosophy.
188.
See Niditch in Locke An Essay concerning Human Understanding, p. xix.
189.
Ibid., p. xxii.
190.
See Hamlyn, Sensation and Perception, pp. 96–7.
191.
Buchdahl, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science, p. 596. For a brief critique Buchdahl’s claim, see infra Conclusion pp. 127–8. For critical assessment of Locke’s theory of perception, see Hamlyn, Sensation and Perception, pp. 94–104.
192.
See Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, p. 117. Note that Newton owned the first (1690) edition of this book, as well as a Latin translation of the fourth (1701) edition; see Harrison, The Library of Isaac Newton, (Nos. 967, 698), p. 181.
193.
See Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, p. 136.
194.
Ibid., pp. 121.
195.
Ibid., pp. 162–3.
196.
See Dewhurst, John Locke, pp. 11–2. Like Boyle, Locke utilised Willis’s concepts for his own purposes; see, e.g., Locke An Essay concerning Human Understanding, pp. 484–5, where the ‘liquor’ in question is Willis’s succus nervosus.
197.
At the termination of the lectures in 1667, both Willis and Locke left Oxford for London; see Dewhurst, Willis’s Oxford Lectures, pp. 37–49.
198.
See ibid., p. viii, whose edition of the lectures is a collation of Locke’s notes with those of Richard Lower. Note that the substance of some of the lectures afterwards appeared in expanded form in Willis, Pathologiæ cerebri, et nervosi [1667] and De anima brutorum [1672].
199.
See Dewhurst, Willis’s Oxford Lectures, pp. 138–43 and n.1.
200.
I.e., upper part of Willis’s medullar trunk (or wind chest); see Fig.III.4 above.
201.
OED Sensory sb. 2 = Sensorium, obs. as common or first sensory (1653–1829).
202.
Dewhurst, Willis’s Oxford Lectures, p. 141 (bold face mine).
203.
I.e., Species; see OED sb. 6, obs. in Platonic philosophy = Idea sb. 1, obs. (1678–1792).
204.
Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, p. 143.
205.
Ibid., pp. 117–8.
206.
Ibid., p. 226. The various meanings of Willis’s term ‘behold’ are now obsolete, and Locke did not employ the term. Instead, he used the term ‘contemplate’ and its synonyms; see OED 1. trans.: To look at with continued attention; gaze upon, view, observe.
207.
Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, pp. 236–7.
208.
Ibid., p. 152: In contemplating or searching for some idea ‘lodg’d in the Memory’, ‘The Mind ... turns, as it were, the Eye of the Soul upon it’.
209.
Like Willis p. 87 n.142 above. Locke retained the Platonic tradition of knowledge as information (intelligence). For the former’s statement that the cerebrum at birth is a ‘tabula rasa’, see Dewhurst, Willis’s Oxford Lectures, p. 66; and for the latter’s statement that the ‘yet empty Cabinet’, like ‘white Paper void of all Characters’, needs to be furnished with ‘Ideas’ from both sensation and reflection, see Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, pp. 55, 81, 104.
210.
See supra Pt.I.1.2, Texts III, V, VI, VII (Ques. 12, 13), VIII, XI and XII.
211.
Locke is the main representative of this variety of empiricism; see Kassler, Music, Science, Philosophy, pp. 279–92.

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Kassler, J.C. (2018). III The Human Sensorium in Wider Context. In: Newton’s Sensorium: Anatomy of a Concept. Archimedes, vol 53. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72053-1_3

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