THE BLOOD THE INNATE HEAT
The latter part of Harvey's treatise On Generation is devoted to
that of the mammal; but the treatise does not end with the end of
this subject, for from his account of generation the author turns
abruptly to append two Exercises on other topics. The first of these
two is entitled "On the Innate Heat," and the second, which is very
brief, is entitled "On the Primitive Moisture."
The Exercise On the Innate Heat is Harvey's express and polemical
contribution to this subject, which had been much discussed both
during and before his time;[310] a subject with which the famous
discoverer deals roundly by maintaining that the innate heat is
neither more nor less than the circulating blood. So the last words
as to the significance of the circulating blood which he wrote for
publication are contained in this Exercise. It begins as follows:--
"Since mention is often made of the innate heat, I propose now,
by way of dessert, briefly to discuss the same and the primitive
moisture also; and this the more willingly that I see there are
many who take the greatest delight in those names and yet, in
my judgment, comprehend but little of the things themselves.
Truly, there is no need to seek for any spirits distinct from
the blood, or to bring in heat from elsewhere, or call gods
upon the stage and load philosophy with fanciful opinions;
for what we so commonly would fetch from the stars is born at
home. In truth, the blood alone is the innate warmth, or the
first-born psychical heat;[311] as is proved excellently well
by our observations of the generation of animals, especially of
the chick in the egg; so that it were superfluous to multiply
entities. Indeed, there is nothing to be met with in the animal
body prior to the blood, or more excellent; nor are the spirits
which they distinguish from the blood to be found anywhere
separate from it; for the very blood itself, if without spirits
or heat, does not deserve the name of blood, but of cruor....
"Scaliger, Fernelius, and others lay less weight on the
extraordinary endowments of the blood and imagine other
spirits to exist, aërial or ethereal or composed of substance
both ethereal and elemental, constituting an innate heat more
excellent and more divine, as it were; and these spirits
they believe to be the soul's most immediate instrument, the
fittest for every use. They rely especially upon this argument,
viz.: that the blood, being composed of elements, can exert
no activity beyond the powers of the elements or of bodies
consisting of a mixture thereof. Therefore, they imagine a
spirit, another innate heat, of celestial origin and nature,
to wit: a body most simple, most subtile, most fine, most
mobile, most swift, most clear, ethereal, and sharing in the
quintessence. Nowhere, however, has any such gift of spirit been
demonstrated by them, nor that the same acts beyond the powers
of the elements, or accomplishes greater works than could the
blood alone. As for us who use our senses to guide us in the
scrutiny of things, nowhere have we been able to find anything
of the kind. Furthermore, there exist no cavities destined
for the generation or preservation of these spirits, or even
assigned thereto by the persons aforesaid."[312]
A little farther on we read:--
"I deem it, however, most wonderful that spirits which draw
their origin from heaven and are adorned with such surpassing
endowments should be nourished by our common and elemental air;
especially seeing that their advocates hold that none of the
elements can act beyond its own powers....[313] What need then
is there, say I, of that foreign guest, ethereal heat, since
all can be accomplished by the blood, even as by it; while
from the blood the spirits cannot withdraw a hair's breadth
without perishing? Most assuredly nowhere do they wander or
penetrate as separate bodies without the blood. For whether it
be said that they are generated, nourished, and increased from
the thinner part of the blood, as some believe, or from the
primitive moisture, as others hold; yet it is confessed that
they are never found outside the blood but forever cleave to
the same as to their sustenance, as flame does to oil or to
a wick. Wherefore their tenuity, subtility, mobility, and so
forth, confer no greater advantage than does the blood which
they continually accompany. It follows that the blood suffices
and is fit to be the immediate instrument of the soul, since the
blood is present everywhere and most swiftly permeates hither
and thither."[314]
The two opponents named by Harvey were not his contemporaries, but
worthies of the Renaissance who had written about one hundred years
before the publication of his treatise On Generation and had died
before he was born. The Italian physician Julius Cæsar Scaliger
had written learned commentaries on Aristotle, as well as other
works; and the Frenchman Jean Fernel, physician to King Henri II of
France, had taught anatomy at Paris and had been a medical writer
of importance. Each of these two authors was nearly sixty years
of age in 1543, in which memorable year were first published the
revolutionary writings of the aged astronomer Copernicus and of
the young anatomist Vesalius, in the second year after the death
of the hardy innovator Paracelsus. Such were the men against whose
doctrines Harvey was impelled in his old age to launch his vigorous
criticism, in order to clear the way for his own doctrine of the
preëminence of the blood. What can we workers of to-day make of
their opinions, which were living for Harvey but now are so deeply
buried? Test-tube and balance, telescope, spectroscope, microscope,
manometer, and the rest, have served their purpose so well since
Harvey's time that even he, one of the foremost worthies of science,
must seem merely to beat the air with words in his last message to
us, unless we can recover his standpoint. Happily he himself shall
attempt to clarify the meaning of his polemic by setting before us
certain words of Aristotle, embodying far-reaching speculations as
to body and soul in relation to the universe. Yet we shall find
these not easy to understand.
Let Harvey continue his criticism of his predecessors. He says:--
"But while they believe that there are found in animals spirits
and ultimate or primitive nourishment, or something else, which
acts beyond the powers of the elements more than does the blood,
they do not seem to have a sufficient grasp of what it may be to
'act beyond the powers of the elements'; nor have they rightly
interpreted the words of Aristotle where he says:[315] 'The
virtue or potency of every soul[316] seems to be associated with
a body[317] other than the so-called elements and more divine.'"
And a little farther on:[318]--
"'For there exists in the semen of all [animals] that which
makes their semen generative, the so-called heat. Yet this is
not fire, nor any such power, but the spirits[319] included
in the semen and in foaminess, and in the spirits the nature
which is analogous to the element of the stars.[320] Wherefore
fire generates no animal, nor does anything [animal] appear in
process of formation in that, whether moist or dry, which is
undergoing the action of fire;[321] whereas the heat of the sun
and that of animals--not only that [which acts] through the
semen,[322] but also, should there occur some excretion of a
different nature[323]--even this, too, possesses a life-giving
principle. It is patent, then, from such [facts] as these that
the heat in animals is not fire and does not take its origin
from fire.'[324]
"I, too, would say the same, for my part, of the innate heat
and the blood, to wit: that it is not fire and does not take
its origin from fire, but is associated with another body and
that more divine, and, therefore, does not act by reason of
any elemental faculty; but, just as there exists in the semen
something which makes it generative and exceeds the powers of
the elements in building an animal--to wit, spirits, and in the
spirits a nature analogous[325] to the element of the stars--so
likewise in the blood there exist spirits or some power which
acts beyond the powers of the elements, a power very conspicuous
in the nourishing and preserving of the several parts of an
animal; and in the spirits and blood exist a nature, yea, a
soul, analogous to the element of the stars. It is manifest,
therefore, that the heat in the blood of animals during life is
not fire and does not take its origin from fire; and this is
taught excellently well by our own observations....[326]
"Therefore, those who assert that nothing composed of the
elements can work beyond the powers of these, unless it be
associated at the same time with another body and that more
divine, and maintain, therefore, that the spirits aforesaid
consist in part of the elements, in part of some ethereal and
celestial substance--truly, such persons seem to me to have
drawn their conclusions ill. For you shall find scarcely any
elemental body which, when in action, will not exceed its own
proper powers."[327]
On reaching the end of the last quoted words of Harvey's polemic,
a physician or biologist of to-day may easily be conscious of
disappointment, even of a mild despair; for the once celebrated
passage from Aristotle, about the interpretation of which Harvey
gives battle, seems at first the source of all the obscurities of
the controversy, rather than of the promised light which shall clear
them away. Yet that light must come by way of that rugged passage.
The gist of the first part of the Aristotelian passage may be set
forth as follows: In the semen soul is potential, being associated
therein with a "body" or "nature" which possesses a "life-giving
principle" and is in the spirits, _i.e._, in the hot vapor, within
the foam-bubbles of the semen. This body or nature is called heat,
yet it is not that one of the four elemental bodies which is known
as fire, nor yet a derivative of this, but is "a body other than
the so-called elements and more divine," a "nature analogous to
the element of the stars." What is this "element of the stars"?
It is clear that only from the answer to this question can the
light which we are seeking begin to shine. To find this celestial
element we must immediately take a rapid glance at the Aristotelian
universe--that grand conception which the master mainly accepted
from his predecessors and contemporaries, but owed, in part, to
the work of his own mind. Let us swiftly scan what he styled the
"Cosmos."
At the center thereof is the earth, spherical and motionless. The
core of the universe consists not only of this central globe with
everything in or upon it, but also of the atmosphere or, more
correctly, of all which extends between the surface of the globe
and the nearest of the distant revolving hollow spheres of heaven,
in some of which spheres are set the heavenly bodies. Below the
heavenly spheres this core of the universe is made up of the four
elements, earth, water, air, and fire; and all things composed of
these are subject to opposed and limited and compounded motions, to
generation, alteration, and corruption. The inclosing heaven, on the
other hand, is unchangeable and eternal, has never been created,
and will never be destroyed. Its many component hollow spheres are
contiguous and concentric, and concentric also with our globe.
In a single sphere, the outermost, called the "first heaven,"
all the fixed stars are set. In separate spheres, nearer to the
earth, are set the seven bodies which the astronomy of Aristotle's
day styled "planets." To these (here designated by their present
names) that ancient astronomy assigned the following order from the
earth outward toward the fixed stars: the moon, the sun, Venus,
Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Each of the celestial spheres
revolves with simple circular motion in one direction forever. The
"first heaven," the sphere of the fixed stars, needs but the one
simple motion which is its own, and it carries with it in its daily
revolution all the inner spheres. These are more numerous than the
seven planets; for though each planet is set in but a single sphere,
each planet's complex course results from the combined simple
motions of more spheres than one. In spite of these more or less
intimate relations, the spheres of heaven are separate existences,
self-moved, like animals; and, like animals, possess activity, life,
and soul. But the motion and life of the heavenly existences are
continuous and eternal, and hence these existences--the spheres,
and the planets and fixed stars set therein--are all divine; much
more divine than man, though man possesses a far larger share of the
divine than other animals.[328]
Just as the troubled regions which lie below the sphere of the moon
are contrasted with the serene heaven which incloses and limits
them, so the changing forms of matter which compose our globe and
its nearer surroundings are contrasted with the simple unalterable
substance of the heavenly spheres. "Of necessity," says Aristotle,
"there exists a simple body whose very nature it is to be borne
on in circular motion."[329] Elsewhere he says that the men of old
"would seem to have assumed that the body which moves forever is
likewise divine by nature."[330] This is "an embodied substance
different from the compounds here, more divine and prior to them
all";[331] a body "of a nature the more precious the farther it is
withdrawn from what is here."[332] After reasoning about this body
Aristotle says:--
"If what has been laid down be accepted, it is plain from the
foregoing why the first of bodies is eternal, and shows neither
growth nor decay nor old age nor alteration, and is affected by
nothing. The conception seems to testify to the phenomena and
the phenomena to the conception.... Therefore, as the first body
is something different from earth and fire and air and water,
[the ancients] gave the name of ether to the region most on
high, naming it from its moving always during all eternity."[333]
The place in nature of "the first element," so grandly conceived,
is fixed more definitely by Aristotle when he says "that the whole
universe in the region of the courses on high is filled with that
body."[334]
Now, therefore, we have attained the object of our rapid quest;
at last we have reached "the element of the stars"; for Aristotle
tells us that not only heaven, but all the heavenly bodies as well,
consist of the ether, saying:--
"It is most reasonable and consequent, in view of things already
said, for us to make each of the stars out of that body in which
it has its course, since we have declared the existence of
something of which the nature is to be borne in a circle."[335]
At a later day the ethereal element of the stars was distinguished
from the four inferior elements not by its Aristotelian name of
first element but by that of fifth element, or fifth existence, or
fifth "essence." Hence arose and was applied to the fifth element
the name "quintessence"; a word which in its turn acquired various
meanings.
Ten years after Harvey's death Milton published his description of
the creation of heaven; a description couched, however, in terms of
the uncreated heaven of Aristotle. Milton wrote:--
"And this ethereal quintessence of heaven
Flew upward, spirited with various forms,
That roll'd orbicular, and turned to stars
Numberless, as thou seest, and how they move;
Each had his place appointed, each his course;
The rest in circuit walls this universe."[336]
We may now return from this excursion through the "Cosmos," to bring
its light to bear upon those high-sounding words of Aristotle which,
according to Harvey, formed the basis of speculations about the
innate heat, the spirits, and the blood, which were handed down by
"Scaliger, Fernelius, and others," and affected the views of Harvey
himself. Aristotle had written:--
"The virtue or potency of every soul[316] seems to be associated
with a body[317] other than the so-called elements, and more
divine."
And a little farther on:--
"For there exists in the semen of all [animals] that which makes
their semen generative, the so-called heat. Yet this is not
fire, nor any such power, but the spirits[319] included in the
semen and in foaminess, and in the spirits the nature which is
analogous to the element of the stars."[337]
That generative heat which is not elemental fire, but a "body" or
"nature" diviner than the lower elements, can be the analogue of
nothing else than the celestial ether.
What led Aristotle to so lofty a flight of speculation? He does not
tell. One may guess, however, that it may well have been this: that
he had found himself obliged not only to deny the identity of the
generative heat of the semen with elemental fire, but also to deny
the identity with elemental fire even of the glowing sun, as well
as of the other planets and the fixed stars; and to maintain that
all the heavenly bodies consist of ether. These denials we have
read already; they shall presently be commented on. Taking them for
granted: now, since the life-giving sun is not elemental fire but
ether, would not the life-giving seminal heat, which also is not
elemental fire, naturally be the analogue of the ether? "Man and
the sun generate man," said Aristotle, in a famous passage.[338]
He needed no knowledge of chlorophyll to teach him this. The ether
is the element of the sun, moon, stars, and spheres; of it consist
the bodies associated with the souls of the living, unalterable,
immortal, divine existences of the eternal heaven. To associate
a body analogous to this ether with the dormant soul of a living
existence--a living existence alterable and mortal as an individual,
but one of an immortal race--in the medium which shall maintain
that racial immortality by begetting a new individual out of the
lower elements--this is a stroke characteristic of the man who
declared that "the race of men, and of animals, and of plants,
exists forever";[339] the man who assigned to every bloodless animal
an analogue of the blood and an analogue of the heart,[340] to the
octopus, an analogue of the brain;[341] the man in whose eyes
the heavenly bodies were divine living existences running eternal
courses and so, we may presume, were analogous in some degree to the
living existences of the earth.[342]
Harvey in one of the earlier Exercises of his treatise On Generation
had already followed the ancient master's footsteps in this matter.
Discoursing of the endless succession of generations the pupil says
that this
"makes the race of fowls eternal; since now the chick and now
the egg, in an ever-continued series, produce an immortal
species out of individuals which fail and perish. We discern,
too, that in similar fashion many lower things rival the
perpetuity of higher things. And whether or no we say that
there is a soul in the egg, it clearly appears from the cycle
aforesaid that there underlies this revolution from hen to egg
and from egg again to hen, a principle which bestows eternity
upon them. That same, according to Aristotle,[343] is analogous
to the element of the stars; and it makes parents generate,
makes their semen or eggs prolific, and, like Proteus, is ever
present."[344]
Let us return now to Harvey's polemic. In it he does not give
chapter and verse by which we can properly verify more than a few of
his statements of the views of "Scaliger, Fernelius, and others";
but the words of Aristotle which Harvey quotes go far to justify
his intimation that the views which he states and combats, as the
champion of the circulating blood, are largely derived from those
Aristotelian words--whether by misinterpretation, as he roundly but
indefinitely declares, or with deliberate modification of doctrine,
need not now concern us.
At the very outset of Harvey's discourse about the innate heat, the
first doctrine that he reprobates is a striking one, viz.: that the
innate heat is one and the same thing with spirits distinguishable
from the blood, though not separable from it. Of these spirits he
stoutly denies the existence, on the true scientific ground of
lack of all evidence from observation in their favor. Our earlier
studies of ancient doctrines of respiration have brought before
us, as supposed to exist in the blood, spirits variously styled
"elemental," "aërial," "nourished by our common and elemental air,"
"nourished and increased from the thinner part of the blood." We
have even read Galen's words of spirits which are "the soul's most
immediate instrument," viz.: the "animal spirits" in the brain and
nerves. Indeed, during the eighteen centuries between the death
of Aristotle and the boyhood of Fernelius and Scaliger, the word
"_pneuma_"--"spirits" or "spirit"--did most varied duties in the
service of physicians, philosophers, alchemists, and theologians;
and this same word is of great importance in the scriptures.[345] It
is noticeable that, although Harvey rejects the doctrine of spirits
in the blood, even he himself talks of the blood being itself
spirits.[346] This fact, however, should not militate against him
or lead to confusion. The word "spirits" being a very comprehensive
technical term of his day, he does not refuse to employ it as a
label for qualities of the blood after he has denied the very
existence of what is properly denoted by the word "spirits." He
simply behaves as we behave when we talk of the "sympathetic"
nerves, though the theory is exploded which the adjective expresses;
or when we speak of "animal cell," well knowing that no proper wall
necessarily surrounds the living substance.
Despite the protean forms of the spirits it is not till we have
reached Harvey's Exercise On the Innate Heat that we have fallen
in with spirits in the blood which, for some of his predecessors,
"constitute an innate heat more excellent and more divine, as it
were"; nor with "a spirit, another innate heat, of celestial origin
and nature." For this treatment of spirits within the blood and
of innate heat, as convertible terms, the way may well have been
paved by the words in which Aristotle intimates that the generative
heat of the semen resides in the spirits therein, _i.e._, in hot
vapor produced within the body of the male and included within the
films of foam-bubbles in the semen. Referring to "the so-called
heat" the words of Aristotle are: "Yet this is not fire nor any
such power, but the spirits included in the semen and in foaminess,
and in the spirits the nature which is analogous to the element of
the stars."[347] The transition can hardly have been too difficult
from the view of Aristotle that in the spirits of the semen is heat
which is not elemental fire, to the view combated by Harvey that the
spirits of the blood are heat which is not elemental fire.
Aristotle's striking biological doctrine that the generative seminal
heat is a "nature which is analogous to the element of the stars"
appears to be an obvious source of those seeming fantasies, written
down eighteen centuries later, at which Harvey girds when he says:
"For what we so commonly would fetch from the stars is born at
home." If we use our judgment simply, upon Harvey's statement of
their opinions, the men whom he castigates, having strayed from the
ancient master's footsteps by making the spirits one and the same
with the innate heat instead of the vehicle thereof, next stray
still more blindly by identifying this heat, _alias_ these spirits,
not with an analogue of the ether, but with a portion of the ether
itself. Therefore is it that we read in the words of Harvey's
polemic, of "that foreign guest, ethereal heat"; of those spirits
"aërial or ethereal, or composed of substance both ethereal and
elemental"; of spirits "which draw their origin from heaven" and
elicit Harvey's ironical wonder that they "should be nourished by
our common and elemental air." Therefore, too, is he able to tell us
of that amazing spirit, _alias_ innate heat, which is "a body" and
qualified by many imposing adjectives and finally styled "ethereal
and sharing in the quintessence." The doctrine of Aristotle that
in the semen there are spirits which are the vehicle of generative
heat which is analogous to the element of the stars, is a baseless
doctrine, but it is a subtle and far-reaching speculation. The
doctrine stated and attacked by Harvey that in the blood there are
spirits which are the innate heat, which consists as a whole or in
part of the element of the stars, is not only a baseless doctrine,
as Harvey vigorously shows, but certainly is lame as speculation
despite its glittering appeal to the imagination. To make spirits
and innate heat convertible terms may pass as but one among many
phases of speculation. But to bring down actual ether from heaven to
earth, although attempted by eminent thinkers[348] centuries before
Scaliger and Fernelius, is to bring chaos into that conception
of the universe which requires the "first element" to revolve
forever on high, above that lower world which lies beneath the
sphere of the moon. To Aristotle such chaos surely would have been
abhorrent; indeed, it runs counter to his expressed description
of the ether.[349] Moreover, Aristotle's application of the term
"analogue" to the generative heat is equivalent to a denial that the
generative heat is actually ether; for analogues do frequent service
in his doctrines and he explicitly states the analogue of a thing
to be something different from the thing itself.[350] What that
mysterious analogue of the ether may be with which the generative
heat is identified we are not explicitly told, as we are not told
what the analogue of the heat may be in bloodless animals. We are
left to judge for ourselves after deeper investigation of nature or
deeper study of the Aristotelian writings. Had Aristotle been ready
to define and describe the body which is more divine than the four
lower elements, but is not the first element on high, he probably
would not have chosen an analogue as the fittest vehicle for his
thought.
According to Harvey the horse of battle of his criticized
predecessors was the argument stated by him as follows: "That
nothing composed of the elements can work beyond the powers of
these, unless it be associated at the same time with another body
and that more divine; and ... therefore, that the spirits aforesaid
consist in part of the elements, in part of some ethereal and
celestial substance."[351] The "spirits aforesaid" are held to be
one and the same with the innate heat and reside in the blood.
Aristotle had written, we remember: "The virtue or potency of every
soul seems to be associated with a body other than the so-called
elements and more divine,"[352] viz.: the generative seminal heat,
which is not fire but an analogue of the ether. It would seem fairly
probable that largely from this doctrine of Aristotle was developed
the doctrine about the "powers of the elements" which Harvey
sets forth in his polemic. Nothing can be more emphatic than his
disagreement with the advocates of this doctrine. "Such persons,"
he says, "seem to me to have drawn their conclusions ill. For you
shall find scarcely any elemental body which, when in action, will
not exceed its own proper powers."[353] On the same page with this
sweeping statement we find it supported by the following very simple
line of thought:--
"All natural bodies present themselves in a double relation, to
wit: according as they are reckoned with apart and comprehended
within the circuit of their own proper nature, or according as
they are the instruments of some nobler and superior authority.
For, as to their own proper powers, there is no doubt that all
things which are subject to generation and corruption derive
their origin from the elements, and work according to the
standard thereof. In so far, however, as all things so subject
are instruments of a more excellent agent and are regulated
thereby, their works do not proceed from their own proper nature
but from the rule of that other; and, consequently, they seem to
be associated with another and more divine body and to exceed
the powers of the elements."[354]
In the very next Exercise, however, that On the Primitive Moisture,
the last Exercise of Harvey's treatise On Generation, we come
suddenly upon a reason why "the powers of the elements" must have
seemed to him something to be treated rather as a convenient
form of words than as a serious doctrine, despite his respectful
argument just quoted. Speaking of the "primitive moisture," the
great observer says that he sees in the hen's egg that out of
that "crystalline colliquament," that "simplest body" alone,
all the parts of the embryo are made and increased;[355] and
proceeds bluntly to question the reality of the elements, "namely,
the fire, air, water, and earth of Empedocles and Aristotle; or
the salt, sulphur, and mercury of the chemists; or the atoms of
Democritus."[356] Harvey says:--
"Therefore, the so-called elements do not exist prior to
whatever is generated or arises; but rather are subsequent
thereto, being remains rather than origins. Not even Aristotle
himself, nor any one else, has ever demonstrated that elements
exist separately in nature, or give rise to bodies which consist
of parts similar one to another."[357]
Almost immediately after this tug at the foundations of the
Aristotelian universe, Harvey brings his treatise On Generation to
an end.
The admirable feature of Harvey's brief last-published discussion
of the circulating blood is this, that the aged veteran ever
strikes vigorous blows for observation, for the use of the senses,
in the search for truth. But we have seen already that by his arm,
as by another's, the blows are delivered both for better and for
worse. Rightly does he drive out of court the spirits "ethereal
and elemental" which no man can demonstrate. Wrongly does he
discredit the real complexity of that humor, to the eye so simple
and crystal-clear, out of which he believes all the diverse parts of
the living bird to be developed. In Harvey's present polemic we find
no new appeal to nature; he vindicates the justice of his former
appeals and maintains with vigor the doctrines already familiar to
us, that the blood is the principal part of the body, is itself the
innate heat, and is the seat of the soul. This relation of blood
and soul he reaffirms very impressively in this, his final public
utterance; a most important passage of which, about the presence
of the soul in the blood, has been embodied in the chapter on that
subject of the present paper.[358]
But evidently the main purpose of his polemical Exercise on the
Innate Heat is to cast out of the blood the futile spirits which
obscure the real relation of that heat to the circulating blood; and
so to defend the thesis best set forth in the following words of his
own:--
"In truth, the blood alone is the innate warmth, or the first
born psychical heat; as is proved excellently well by our
observations of the generation of animals, especially of the
chick in the egg; so that it were superfluous to multiply
entities....[359] What need, then, is there, say I, of that
foreign guest, ethereal heat, since all can be accomplished by
the blood, even as by it?"[360]
Harvey has expelled from the blood the mythical spirits which had
stood in the way of the direct identification of the blood with
the innate heat. But how does he interpret the famous words of
Aristotle which he quotes, and declares not to have been "rightly
interpreted" by the champions of ethereal spirits? When we seek an
answer to this question, we do not find the veteran discoverer at
his best. The ancient philosopher surely would have been as much
surprised at Harvey's interpretation of his words as at any use of
them made by Scaliger or Fernelius. We have seen that Harvey follows
up his quotation from Aristotle by promptly applying its language,
literally or by paraphrase, to the innate heat and the blood.[361]
Emphatic are the words which immediately follow the words of
Aristotle. Harvey says:--
"I, too, would say the same, for my part, of the innate heat and
the blood, to wit: that it is not fire and does not take its
origin from fire, but is associated with another body and that
more divine."
This denial he soon repeats, adding the words: "and this is taught
excellently well by our observations."
According to Aristotle the soul in the semen is associated with a
body diviner than the four lower elements, viz.: the generative
heat, an analogue of the element of the stars, which analogue
resides in spirits, _i.e._, in hot vapor within bubbles of seminal
foam. In the case of the blood, according to Harvey, it is the heat
itself, the innate heat _alias_ the blood, which is associated with
"another body and that more divine," and Harvey, having denied the
reality of the spirits, uses the word "spirits" as equivalent to
"some power" in the blood, which power is "very conspicuous in the
nourishing and preserving of the several parts of an animal." In
the spirits, so understood, and the blood, dwells the soul; and it
is the soul itself which Harvey states to be "a nature analogous
[_respondens_ not _proportione respondens_] to the element of the
stars." Even as the word "spirits" has become, in effect, a label
for powers of the blood, so the analogue of the ether becomes, in
effect, a pious epithet applied to the soul; and only to the soul
itself can Harvey have referred as "another body and that more
divine." In the next page to the passage now under discussion he
says:--
"The blood, therefore, is spirits, because of its extraordinary
virtues and powers. It is also celestial, inasmuch as in the
spirits aforesaid is lodged a nature, the soul, to wit, which
is analogous to the element of the stars; something, that is,
analogous to heaven, the instrument of heaven, vicarious of
heaven....[362] The heat of the blood is psychical, inasmuch as
it is governed in its operations by the soul;[363] it is also
celestial, because subservient to heaven; and divine, because
the instrument of God, the best and greatest....[364] The lower
world, according to Aristotle, is so connected with the courses
on high that all its motives and changes seem to take thence
their origin and to be governed thence.[365] Truly, in that
world which the Greeks called the 'Cosmos' from the beauty of
its order,[366] lower and corruptible things are subject to
other higher and incorruptible things; but all are beneath the
highest, the omnipotent and eternal Creator, and obey Him."[367]
It is obvious that, although Harvey in dealing with the blood
does not forego the use of the phrases used by the ancient master
in dealing with the semen, nevertheless, the entities recognized
by Harvey are not only fewer than those of Aristotle, but are
differently disposed within the draperies of Aristotelian language.
Harvey's entities are simply the innate heat _alias_ the blood, and
the soul which dwells therein; but he sincerely takes himself to
be an interpreter of Aristotle's words, as appears a second time
from an echo of those words which we meet in an earlier Exercise of
Harvey's treatise On Generation. Here, pleading that it is true that
the soul is in the blood, Harvey refers to Aristotle by name and
immediately says:--
"Indeed, if he is constrained by the truth to acknowledge that
there is a soul in an egg, even in a wind-egg;[368] and that
in the semen and the blood also there is found something which
is divine and analogous to the element of the stars and is
vicarious of the omnipotent Creator; and if certain of the
modems truly say," etc., etc.[369]
These zealous words show Harvey drawn into statements by no
means warranted by the text of Aristotle. We have seen that the
Aristotelian heaven was uncreated;[370] and, whatever Harvey in his
day may have thought, no "omnipotent Creator" is revealed by more
modern study of the Aristotelian philosophy. Whatever inferences
Harvey may have drawn from Aristotle's words, Aristotle does not
"acknowledge"[371] that the analogue of the ether exists in the
blood. Moreover, when in Harvey's Exercise On the Innate Heat that
analogue of the element of the stars which Aristotle associated with
the soul is identified by Harvey with the soul itself, the change is
almost as great as if one should declare that protoplasm is life,
instead of styling it with Huxley "the physical basis of life." In
a third Exercise of the treatise On Generation, the earliest of the
three, Harvey had dealt in a better and more characteristic way with
the analogue of the ether; though here, too, his exposition gives
no accurate idea of Aristotle's doctrine. In discussing Aristotle's
opinion as to how the semen of the cock causes the formation of the
embryo Harvey says of Aristotle:--
"Indeed, where he appears to settle and determine with certainty
what that may be in whatsoever seed, whether of plants or of
animals, which renders the same fruitful, he rejects heat and
fire as unfit for the work, but does not give recognition to any
similar faculty, nor yet discover in the seed aught suitable
for that duty; but is forced to admit something incorporeal,
and coming from without, which shall act with understanding and
foresight (like art or mind) to form the fœtus, and therein
shall establish and order all things to a purpose and for the
better. He betakes himself, I say, to something obscure and to
us unknown, 'spirits included in the semen and in foaminess, and
in the spirits the nature which is analogous to the element of
the stars.' But what that may be he has nowhere taught us."[372]
We have found that Aristotle describes "the element of the stars"
as a "body,"[373] and that in the passage about the semen which
Harvey quotes Aristotle expressly applies the same term, "body," to
the analogue of the element of the stars.[374] Yet to this analogue
Harvey seems to refer as "something incorporeal" in his last-quoted
words, which tend to confound it with soul. Harvey agrees with
Aristotle, however, in calling fire a "body";[375] and where in his
Exercise On the Innate Heat he extols at some length[376] fire, air
and water in motion as flame, wind and flood, he also sets forth how
they each claim the title of spirits "by virtue of their movement
and perpetual flux,"[377] and says:--
"These three, therefore, in so far as they acquire a certain
life, appear to act beyond the powers of the elements and to
have a share[378] of another and diviner body; wherefore they
were reckoned among the deities by the heathen. For that of
which the outcome is some extraordinary work, exceeding the bare
faculties of the elements, that same they held to proceed from
some diviner agent; as though it were one and the same to act
beyond the powers of the elements and to have a share of another
and diviner body--diviner, because it does not derive its origin
from the elements."[379]
Nowhere but in the third chapter of the second book of Aristotle's
treatise On Generation does he refer to the analogue of the ether;
and the complete text of this chapter--rugged, here and there,
especially in Gaza's Latin translation--may help us perhaps to
account for some of Harvey's efforts at exposition.[380] But when
these and his reports of his predecessor's doctrines are compared
with the words of Aristotle, Harvey and those other biologists of
the Renaissance seem like sturdy children reaching forward in the
dust, each still clasping a finger of the strong old father who
strides among them.