Conclusion: The Spirits of the Soul

Abstract

This study’s aim has been to explain the importance of motion in the soul, including the movement of animal spirits; examine late seventeenth-century views of the soul in an Epicurean context; and consider the rise of nervous “disorders”, which gained gendered associations in literature and culture during the Restoration, My purpose has been to start a critical discussion by offering a range of medical and philosophical perspectives and gendered theories on the soul that survey the complex and diverse understandings of its substance in several lesser known but no less important works that advanced Lucretius’s Epicurean ideas.