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The Seventeenth Century Doctrine of Plastic Nature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 August 2011

William B. Hunter Jr.
William B. Hunter Jr.
Affiliation:
Wofford College
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Extract

Few eras are more interesting and profitable to study than those in which the basic ideas of mankind change under the impact of new discoveries and ideas. Our own appears to be such a period; of previous ages perhaps only the ebullient Renaissance can equal it. At its English beginnings in the sixteenth century men reached avidly for new experiences; in the course of time they tried to codify them into theories which would do justice to the observed facts and at the same time harmonize as far as possible with the dicta transmitted from the past. These early efforts resulted in the foundation of the modern methods of science, not to mention permanent and still unchallenged achievements like Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood or Boyle's theory of gases. Such is the seventeenth century: the first great age of scientific generalization in English history.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 43 , Issue 3 , July 1950 , pp. 197 - 213
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1950

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References

1 As he wrote, “It is true that the earth produced the first living creatures of all sorts but man…. So that it is evident that God gave unto the earth that virtue. Which virtue must needs consist in motion, because all generation is motion,” Decameron Physiologicum, in The English Works of Hobbes, Thomas, ed. SirMolesworth, Wm., London (1839), VII, 176Google Scholar. Boyle, Robert disagrees in his Sceptical Chymist, Oxford (1680), p. 380Google Scholar: “I confess I cannot well Conceive, how from matter, Barely put into Motion, and then left to it self, there could emerge such Curious Fabricks as the Bodies of men and perfect Animals, and … the seeds of living Creatures.” In his Two Choice and Useful Treatises, London (1682), p. 16Google Scholar, Joseph Glanvill disclaims Hobbes' view.

2 The Primitive Origination of Mankind, London (1677), p. 10.Google Scholar

3 It is not my present intention to trace the history of the term before its entrance into English letters. But it is a very old idea, certainly dating at least to the Orphic Hymns. Thus in Hymn X, “To Nature” (The Mystical Hymns of Orpheus, trans. Taylor, Thomas, London, 1896, p. 32Google Scholar), nature is called

Father of all, great nurse, and mother kind,

Abundant, blessed, All-spermatic mind:

Nature, impetuous, from whose fertile seeds

And plastic [plasteira] hand this changing scene proceeds.

The concept also appears in Galen. See, for instance, the diaplastic activity in his On the Natural Faculties, I, v–vi.

Sennert, Daniel in his Physica Hypomnemata, Lugduni (1637), pp. 158f.Google Scholar, asserts that the idea was furthered by Albertus Magnus. But the later Renaissance probably drew it from Schegkii, J., De Plastica seminis facultate libri tres, Argentorati (1580)Google Scholar. I have not found a copy in this country; some of its ideas, however, are available in summary in Sennert, loc. cit., and, more briefly, in Bayle, Pierre, Dictionary Historical and Critical, London (1737)Google Scholar, s.v. Sennertus. I should add that none of the English thinkers who support the concept pleads any source as authority for it. Thus they probably felt little or no limitation as to what attributes it might possess.

4 I, 15, in Philosophical Poems of Henry More, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, Manchester (1931). Aether the poet identified with “a subtill fiery liquor or liquid fire,” ibid., p. 178.

5 In The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Wilkin, Simon, London (1900), ii, 517Google Scholar.

6 Ibid.

7 A number of studies bear upon this question. See particularly Nicolson, Marjorie, “The Early Stage of Cartesianism in England,” SP, XXVI (1929), 356–74Google Scholar, and Lamprecht, Sterling P., “The Role of Descartes in Seventeenth-Century England,” Studies in the History of Ideas, New York (1935), 179–240Google Scholar.

8 In Stanford Studies in Language and Literature (1941), pp. 188ff.

9 The True Intellectual System of the Universe, London (1845), I, 251Google Scholar. Only Henry More seems to have let his enthusiasm for the new term run away to the extent of applying it to the sensitive as well as the vegetative soul. In his Enchiridion Ethicum (available in reprint in Facsimile Text Society, New York, 1930 pp. 35, 37–8), he urges that the “Plastic Part of the Soul … does also in some degree submit to Reason.” Thus he comes to associate the plastic part with the passions in his ethical system, in opposition to the intellectual powers. As he continues, “the Intellectual Part of the Soul strives with the Plastic; which, tho fiercely abetted and incited by the Spirit of Nature in some certain Desires and Appetites; yet on the other side, a Divine Power is at hand, urging resistance against all such incantations.”

10 The Origin of Forms and Qualities, in The Works of Boyle, Robert, London (1772), III, 116–17Google Scholar.

11 Op. cit., p. 252.

12 From his notes in Glanvill, op. cit., p. 129.

13 Letter of Resolution Concerning Origen (1661), reprinted by Facsimile Text Society, New York (1933), p. 84.

14 Op. cit., pp. 218–19.

15 Ibid., p. 260. Cf. More, Henry, Immortality of the Soul, in A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings, London (1662), p. 193Google Scholar: “The Spirit of Nature therefore, according to that notion I have of it, is, A substance incorporeal, but without Sense and Animadversion, pervading the whole Matter of the Universe, and exercising a Plastical power therein according to the sundry predispositions and occasions in the parts it works upon, raising such Phaenomena in the World, by directing the parts of the Matter and their Motion, as cannot be resolved into mere Mechanical powers.”

16 Immortality of the Soul, in A Collection, pp. 120–21.

17 Op. cit., p. 234.

18 Ibid., p. 254.

19 Op. cit., p. 293. Robinson, Thomas, in New Observations on the Natural History of This World of Matter and This World of Life, London (1696), p. 20Google Scholar, holds that “By Light is to be understood the vast Aetherial flame, which whilst it was in Mass diffus'd its bright shining Rays, not only through the Material Regions, but the Planetary and Coelestial Spheres: This Aetherial flame was the Anima Mundi, the Vehicle of Life, wherein was contained the Seminal and Specific Forms of all sublunary Creatures (Man only excepted) and then danc'd about the Passive Matter like Atoms in the Morning Sun Beams; until its Prolifick Slime, by vertue of its Plastick Power was modifi'd and prepar'd for receiving of Life.” Robinson deserves to be known as the last of the Cambridge Platonists of the seventeenth century. He entered Christ's College in 1664 and graduated in 1668; thus his writing undoubtedly reflects the teachings of Cudworth or More. He became Vicar of Ousby, Cumberland, where he died in 1719.

20 Op. cit., p. 306. I have traced the theory at greater length in “Milton's Materialistic Life Principle,” JEGP, XLV (1946), 68–76Google Scholar. I should now modify my terminology there from “spiritual materialism” to the proper seventeenth century words, “incorporeal substance.”

21 Robinson, op. cit., p. 21.

22 Works, V, 640. Note also his Sceptical Chymist, pp. 163–64: “it will be alledged, that [my] Examples [of formations] are all taken from Plants, and Animals, in whom the Matter is Fashioned by the Plastick power of the seed, or something analogous thereunto. Whereas the Fire do's not act like any of the Seminal Principles, but destroys them all when they come within its Reach. But to this I … Answer, That whether it be a Seminal Principle, or any other which fashions that Matter after those various manners I have mentioned to You, yet , tis Evident, that either by the Plastick principle Alone, or that and Heat Together, or by some Other cause capable to contex the matter, it is yet possible that the matter may be Anew contriv'd into such Bodies.”

23 Works, V, 641.

24 Works, III, 48.

25 Op. dt, p. 300.

26 Quoted from Defensio Tractatus de origine formarum pro Daniele Sennerto (1638) in Bayle, loc. cit.

27 Op. cit., pp. 192–3. In The Usefulness of Natural Philosophy in Works, II, 44, Boyle supports the same notion, suggesting that earth which has once produced diamonds will do so again if put aside for a long enough time.

28 Op. cit., pp. 105–06.

29 Works, I, 434.

30 London (1672), pp. 55, 71.

31 Translated by Willis, Robert in The Works of William Harvey, London (1847), pp. 229, 235, 335Google Scholar.

32 Ibid., p. 368.

33 Op. cit., p. 119. More, Immortality of the Soul, in A Collection, p. 102, and Cudworth, op. cit., p. 223, echo the same idea.

34 The Vanity of Dogmatizing, Facsimile Text Society, New York (1931), pp. 43–44Google Scholar.

35 Two Treatises, London (1669), p. 289. In his Discourse Concerning the Vegetation of Plants, written in 1660 and published in ibid., p. 220, new pagination, he criticizes those who have “recourse to a vis formatrix, and other insignificant terms …; , tis want of consideration and judgment, which makes men fly to occult and imaginary qualities; to shroud their ignorance under inconceivable terms.”

36 Second Reply to the Bishop of Worcester, in The Works of Locke, John, London (1794), III, 364Google Scholar.

37 Essay of Human Understanding, in ibid., I, 450–51.

38 See his Dialogues on Metaphysics and on Religion, trans. Ginsberg, Morris, London (1923), especially pp. 193, 254, 270, and 287Google Scholar.

39 Opticks, reprinted from ed. of 1730, New York (1931), p. 401.

40 An outline of the controversy is given in Thomas Birch's “Account of the Life and Writings of Ralph Cudworth” prefixed to Cudworth, op. cit., pp. xix ff.

41 Opera Omnia, Geneva (1718), V, 359.

42 Creation: A Philosophical Poem, London (1712), pp. 282–84Google Scholar.

43 Poems on Several Occasions, ed. Waller, A. R., Cambridge (1905), p. 233Google Scholar. See Spears, Monroe K., “The Meaning of Matthew Prior's ‘Alma’,” ELH, XIII (1946), 266–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 Warburton, William, in The Divine Legation of Moses, London (1738), I, 9Google Scholar, erroneously refers the idea to Bacon.