AUSTRALASIAN STUDIES TN HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE THE USES OF ANTTIQIJITY The Scientific Revolution and the Classical Tradition Ediled by STEPHEN GAUKROGER Department of Traditional and Modern Philosophy, University of SydneY, Australia VOLUME IO General Editor: R. W. HOME, UniversitY of Melbourne Editorial Advisory Board: W. R. ALBURY, [Jniversity of New SouthWales D. W. CHAMBERS, Dea&in Universiry R. JOHNSTON, University of Wollongong H. E. LE GRAND, IJniversiry of Melbourne A. MUSGRAVE, UniversitY of Otago G. C. NERLICH, tJniversity of Adelaide D. R. OLDROYD, University of New SouthWales E. RICHARDS, University of Wollongong J. J. C. SMART, Australian National University R. YEO, GrffithUniversiry \a BY KLUWER ACADEMIC DORDRECHT / BOSTON PUBLISHERS / LONDON 'l'lrc ritlcs ltttltlislutl in //ri,r,rrrir'.r u'a li,ttul ut tlte crul oJ this volunte' Routledge Studies in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy 1 The Soft Underbelly of Reason Edited by Stephen Gaukroger The Soft Underbelly of Reason The Passions in the Seventeenth Century Edited by Stephen Gaukroger sl HS L,ondon and New York Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Uses of antjqurty , the screntifjc nevolutjon and the classical tnadrtjon / edited b!'Stephen Gaukncger. p. cm. -- (Austnalasian studies jn history and philosophy cf science ; v. 'l 0) Includes index. ISBN 0-7923-1130-2 (HB : acid-fnee papen) 1. Scrence, Ancient. 2. Scrence--Philosophy--History--17th centuny. i, Gaukroger, Stephen. II. Sen i es. o124.95. U83 1391 509-d c20 rstsN 0-7923-1 1 30-2 Publishcd by D. Reidel Publishing Company, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, Holland. Sold and distributed in the U.S.A. and Canada by Kh"rwer Academic Publishers, 101 Philip Drive, Norwcll, MA 02061, U.S.A. In all other countries. sold and distributed by Kluwer Academic Publishers Group, P.O. Box 322. 3300 AH Dordrecht, Holland Printed on acid-free paper All Rights Rcserved O 1991 Kluwer Academic Publishers No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be rcproduced or utilizcd in any form or by any mezrns, clectronic or mechanical, including photocopying, rccorcling or by any information storage and rctricval systcm. without writtcn pe rmission from thc copyright owner. FOREWORD 'l'he institutionalization of History and Philosophy of Science as a tlistinct field of scholarly endeavour began comparatively early though not always under that name in the Australasian region. An initial lecturing appointment was made at the University of Melbourne irrrmediately after the Second World War, in 1946, and other appointnlcnts followed as the subject underwent an expansion during the I 9-50s and 1960s similar to that which took place in other parts of the world. Today there are major Departments at the University of Mclbourne, the University of New South Wales and the University of Wollongong, and smaller groups active in many other parts of Australia irncl in New Zealand. 'Australasian Studies in History and Philosophy of Science' aims to 1rr'<rvide a distinctive publication outlet for Australian and New Zealand scholars working in the general area of history, philosophy and social stuclies of science. Each volume comprises a group of essays on a connccted theme, edited by an Australian or a New Zealander with spccial expertise in that particular area. Papers address general issues, Irowcver, rather than local ones; parochial topics are avoided. Furtherrrrorc, though in each volume a majority of the contributors is from Australia or New Zealand, contributions from elsewhere are by no nlcans ruled out. Quite the reverse, in fact they are actively cncouraged wherever appropriate to the balance of the volume in (lucstion. R. W. Home General Editor Australasian Studies in History and Philosophy of Science s0-268'19 l'rintctl in'l lrc Ncthcrlanrls TABLE OF CONTENTS STEPHEN GAUKRoGER / Introduction: The Idea of Antiquity ix KE,ITH HUTCHISON / Copernicus, Apollo, and Herakles L .toHN SUTTONzReligionandtheFailuresofDeterminism 25 .IAMIE C. KASSLER / The Paradox of Power: Hobbes and Stoic Naturalism uDo THIEL / Cudworth and Seventeenth-Century Theories of Consciousness ALEXANDER JACOB / The Neoplatonic Conception of Nature in More, Cudworth, and Berkeley 101 .IAMES FRANKLIN / The Ancient Legal Sources of Seventeenth-Century Probability 123 KIRSTEN BIRKETT and OEVTO OLDROYD / Robert HooKe, Physico-Mythology, Knowledge of the World of the Ancients and Knowledge of the Ancient World 53 79 JoHN GASCOIGNE /'The Wisdom of the Egyptians'and the Secularisation of History in the Age of Newton GARRY w. TROMPF / On Newtonian History NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS INDEX OF MYTHICAL AND HISTORICAL FIGURES 145 't71 z',J.3 251 253 vll .IOHN SUTTON* RELIGION AND THE FAILURES OF DETERMINISM Fate's a spaniel, We cannot beat it from us. John Webster, The White Devill INTRODUCTION 'Io trace a path from Pico della Mirandola's Renaissance man to the Jacobean malcontents of Marston or Webster is to document not an inflation of hopes for dominion over the natural world, but rather a loss of confidence in the possibility of control over even human affairs. 'For I am going into a wilderness, /Where I shall find nor path, nor friendly clew/To be my guide'.2 The bleak consequences of this lack of direction, leaving traces through into the Restoration period in England, are particularly evident in the free will debate: of Milton's angels, Others apart sat on a hill retired, In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and FateFixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absoluteAnd found no end, in wandering mazes lost.3 For Pico, man is of intermediary status, unique among earthly creatures in being linked to the divine mind. This is the source of his glory, an optimistic encouragement to try to ascend the chain of being. But, a generation after Pico's Oration on the Dignity of Man, the same reflection is for Pomponazz\ a source of confusion as much as of confidence: man is of a nature 'not simple but multiple, not certain but ambiguous, in between mortal and immortal things'.4 Pomponazzian 'ambiguity' is realized in the moral and spiritual complexity and confusion of Jacobean drama in England, for it is both symptom and source of a disenchantment, mirrored in pessimistic theories of the incompatibility of free will and determinism, which continued through the sixteenth century and helped to set the agenda for the seventeenth. It has recently become clear that sophisticated treatments of the 25 ,ltepltcrt Ouukrogcr (el.),'fhe Use,s o.f Anriquity, 25-51. (A lr)()l Klrtu't'r Autlctrtir I'ttltli.tltcr:;. I'rittted itt tlte Nctherlunds. 26 JOHN SUTTON problems of determinism, freedom and responsibility cannot overlook it-r" tglZ years of debate between the death of Aristotle and the publication of Leviathan Sorabji and white in particular have demonitrated the subtlety and relevance of Hellenistic theories.s Meanwhile Dihle has investigated the clash between Greek conceptions of the universe as rationally ordered and Judaeo-Christian voluntarism as leading to Augustineis 'invention' of the modern notion of the will-6 Stoic determinism, with its eternal causal chain available for man's rational examination, can be seen as the philosophical systematization of the Greek intuition noted by Dihle. It was the root of two of the three sixteenthand seventeenth-century general classes of determinism at which I shall look in this paper; the explicitly neo-Stoic determinism of Justus Lipsius and the naturalistic determinisms of Pomponazzi and of Hobbes. These views, in contrast to the radical providentialist determinism of Luther and Calvin, failed to gain widespread acceptance. But, despite obvious major differences between them, the three determinisms were not entirely distinct, particularly in the eyes of their critics. All three were accused, as determinisms have always been, of leading to moral decay, political and religious subversion, and the erosion of human dignity. Whether denying free will like Luther, finding room for human freedom within a deterministic world of causes like Lipsius, or arguing for revised conceptions of freedom and responsiUiiity tite Pomponazzi and Hobbes, these views were attacked for not attributing a sufficient degree of flexibility to human decision and action. Determinism is never popular' I will not always distinguish between the theological problem of freedom versus predestination and the philosophical problem of freedom versus determinism. The latter grew out of the former only gradually, and the possibility of their separation was itself a contentious issue. In addition, I do not of course intend to identify Luther's views with Calvin's, Lipsius' with the English neo-Stoics', or in particular Pomponazzi's with Hobbes'. The failures of these systems had at least as much to do with their manifest cultural image, and thus with their reception by generally hostile writers, as with what their proponents actually thought. Modern work on free will often seems to assume that any determinism must be that of Laplace, tied to classical mechanics. But the intuition that the universe is one connected causal whole does not depend on any particular physical theory. Pomponazzi was not less of a RELIGION AND THE FAILURES OF DETERMINISM 27 determinist for believing in occult powers and systematic astrological causation: he was just working within an erroneous physical system.T Determinism is a blanket description used to cover many particular views. I shall mean little more by it in general than the thesis that every cvent has a cause and that the same cause is always followed by the same effect. A note on some other terms: compatibilism (also known as soft determinism) is the view that the truth of determinism does not rule out human freedom. Incompatibilists think that it does. Of these, hard determinists claim that determinism is in fact true, and thus that we are not free; whereas the libertarian position is that determinism is in fact false, and that we are free. This latter view was that of the most vehement philosophical opponents of sixteenthand seventeenth-century determinism; so the paper concludes with a sketch of two libertarian attempts at positive accounts of freedom, those of Mersenne and Cudworth. I. NEO-STOICISM AND RE,LIGIOUS DESPAIR A powerful early statement of determinism is that of the Stoic Chrysippus. Fate is 'the natural order of all things established from cternity, mutually following each other in an immutable and imperishable connection'.8 Towards the end of the sixteenth century Stoicism was reinvigorated as it became clear that eclectic use of its ethics could cnhance Christianity. The oracular Justus Lipsius tried, most systematically in his Pftyslologia Stoicorum of 1604, to reconcile Stoic determinism with human freedom:e and an ethical neo-Stoicism became as lashionable as its ancestor had been in first century A.D. Rome. Lipsius' God is Providence, Fate, Necessity and the Greek Logos. He notes Augustine's approval of the Stoic attribution of 'the so-called order and connection of the causes to the Will and Power of God most high'.lO But God is no slave to Necessity; the decrees he obeys are his own.ll With respect to human freedom, Lipsius expounds an ultrarational compatibilism. He sees that the attempts to divorce necessitation from causation ascribed to Chrysippusr2 do not allow sufficient flexibility to human action. Chrysippus has failed in his attack on 'men who, when they have been convicted of crime and in an evil deed, flee l'or refuge to the necessity of Fate, as if to some kind of asylum'.r3 But, against this, Lipsius'compatibilism is barely more than asserted. 28 JOHN SUTTON Although God/Fate creates our character, these inbred causes can somehow be moderated or even turned aside easily ('leviter') by the Will, which is a proximate and auxiliary cause.la Unlike later attempts to save freedom and moralityrs Lipsius does not go so far as entirely to remove human will from the chain of universal causation: but he gives inadequate reason to assume that fully determined choice is 'free' in a sense strong enough to ground Christian ethical practice. Lipsius' neo-Stoicism, as an attempt fully to rationalise Christian theology, was bound to conflict with the voluntarism inherent in Christianity since its inception.r6 But the ethical aspect of neo-Stoicism, in its popular form an unmetaphysical philosophy of life, found a continued popularity, among a multiplicity of unreconciled philosophical dogmas, for intellectuals who desired a Christian morality independent both of discredited Catholic authority and the faith of fanatical reformers. But almost all its adherents were Christians before they were Stoics, for as an all-embracing philosophical system its reconciliatory tactics failed to hide the inconsistencies between the two world-views. This is apparent in the problems its adherents faced in England. Stoicism's remarkable vogue in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean era has been well documented, particularly with regard to its literary influence.17 Thomas James, prefacing his 1598 translation of du Yair's Ls Philosophie morale des Stoiques (1594), remarked that 'Christians may profit by the Stoicks'because 'no kind of philosophie is more profitable and neerer approaching Christianitie'.l8 Fulke Greville was one who tried to carry out this project of incorporation.re But his explorations of such a fusion could not but induce public criticism from those unwilling to be bound by the Stoic causal chain. One of the cynical choruses in the 1609 Quarto of Greville's play Mustapha, the Chorus Tartarorum, attacks 'Religion, thou vain and glorious style of weakness'. But a copy of the 1633 Folio edition in the Bibliothbque Nationale has a manuscript annotation in the hand of Sir Kenelm Digby, who would later become the first to introduce the Cartesian philosophy into England.20 The line now reads 'Vast superstition! Glorious style of weakness', because the original 'seemed too atheistical to be licensed at the press'.2r Internal as well as external problems beset neo-Stoic Christianity.22 In the world of the Jacobean malcontent, where man is 'confounded in a maze of mischief, /Staggered, stark fell'd with bruising stroke of chance',23 the idea of rational harmony with a divine and beneficently ordered scheme becomes a mirage: RELIGION AND THE FAILURES OF DETERMINISM 29 Philosophy maintains that nature's wise And forms no useless and unperfect thing . . . . Go to, go to, thou liest, Philosophy! Nature forms things unperfect, useless, vain.2a Yet more widely criticised than Stoicism's determinist metaphysic is its ethic of patience in adversity. Even 'our English Seneca', the Anglican Bishop Joseph Hall, rejected Stoic emotionlessness: 'I would not be a Stoic, to have no passions; for that were to overthrow this inward government God hath erected in me; but a Christian, to order those I have'.2s Webster's Antonio, in the manner of the best Stoics of llooks 15 and 16 of Tacitus' Annals, finding easy ways to die, begs the I)uchess O be of comfort, Make patience a noble fortitude: And think not how unkindly we are us'd. Wc are not surprised to see him found unconvincing: Must I like to a slave-born Russian Account it praise to suffer tyranny?26 II. DIVINE FATALISM ARBITRARY Sloic resignation was similarly rejected by the Reformation theologians. ('irlvin's first published work, in 1532, was a commentary on Seneca's l)a Clementia, but his praise in the preface of Seneca's 'perfect grasp of thc mysteries of natural philosophy' and supremacy in ethics2T was later tlisplaced by an impatience with Stoic detachment.'Ye see that patiently lo bcar the Cross is not be utterly stupefied and to be deprived of all lccling of pain. It is not as the Stoics of old foolishly described the "grcat-souled man": one who, having cast off all human qualities, was ;rllccted equally by adversity and prosperity'.2s In particular, he was clrcl'ul to distinguish his own theory of predestination from the 'lirtalism' of the Stoics.2e If God is direct cause even of every drop of rrin,3(r and there is no 'wandryng power' independently inherent in any t'r'caturc,3r thcn both Catholic free will and rational Greek determinism lrril l<l clo justicc to thc phenomena. As John Knox put it, 'Fortune and rrtlvcnturc are thc words of Paynims . . . That which ye scoffingly call 30 JOHN SUTTON Destiny and Stoical necessity . . . we call God's eternal election and purpose immutable'.32 Besides Augustine's voluntaristic conception of God, the intellectual ancestor of Luther's denial of free will was the De Libero Arbitrio of Lorenzo Valla (1439), which had also asserted the requisite dependence on faith ('no-one who likes philosophy so much can be pleasing to God').33 The Reformation assertion that the fall was ordained and that some men are made necessarily damnable seems to imply God's ultimate responsibility for the existence of evil. So unless faith is exercised, and the apparatus of praise and blame, salvation and damnation in a universe in which man is caused to sin by a wholly external force is simply accepted, the doctrine will lead to despair, doubt and atheism. At the end of the seventeenth century, Pierre Bayle explained the existence of so many bungling theological attempts to save free will: 'It is the wish to exculpate God; for it has been clearly understood that all religion is here at stake, and that, as soon as one dared to teach that God is the author of sin, one would necessarily lead men to atheism'.34 Luther's initial attack on the Church's doctrine of free will was answered by Erasmus in 1524, and a bitter controversy ensued, in which Melanchthon was won over by Erasmus. But Luther repeatedly pointed out Erasmus' (typically compatibilist) inconsistency in claiming that on the one hand man can do nothing without grace, but on the other the human will has enough power to fulfil its own commands and even to earn eternal life.3s In this as elsewhere Erasmus, 'the fountainhead of the systematic deliberate vagueness of liberal Protestant theology',36 sets the agenda for future attempts to defuse real theological controversy. Like Cudworth3T he blames injustice and moral failings on those who teach that men are not causally responsible for their own actions. 'While we are fully occupied singing the praises of faith, we must be careful not to destroy freedom, because if we do, I cannot see how we could resolve the problems of justice and divine mercy . . . who will be able to bring himself to love God with all his heart when He created hell seething with torments in order to punish His own misdeeds in His victims as though He took delight in human torments?'38 III. NATURALISTIC DETERMINISM: POMPONAZZI, CHRISTIANITY AND FREE WILL Hard determinism was the rarest view in antiquity on freedom and RELIGION AND THE FAILURES OF DETERMINISM 31 tlcterminism,3e and, apart from hints in Valla, it did not gain much ground in the early Renaisisance. But in the early sixteenth century two vcry different new systematic philosophies denied that we have as much lrce will as traditional philosophy and theology had assumed. The flat nlcssage of Luther's De Servo Arbitrio had been that 'there can be no lrce will in man, in the angels or in any other creature'.ao Because this r adical determinism was tied to a strict providentialism, looking only to ( iod as first cause, its problematizing of moral responsibility could at lcast be referred back to God's incomprehensible will. But in its lcrnoval of the initiative from the human will to maintain God's ornniscience and omnipotence, it shared a common determinism with tlrc system of Pietro Pomponazzi.ot He, however, advocated no such c:ontinual meditation on God alone as first cause,a2 had, unlike the Stoics, no popular ethical system readily assimilable to Christianity, and was thus more vulnerable to violent criticism from those fearing the collapse of traditional moralities. This kind of common ground between rirclical determinist providentialism and radical determinist naturalism is parallel to the similar alliance noted by Keith Hutchisona3 on the issue ol supernatural and natural causation. It is just as striking in the case of rlctcrminism, free will and responsibility, for the contemporaneous systcms of Luther and Pomponazzi both threatened, from different rlircctions, traditional Catholic moralities based on free will, as adopted by the Council of Trent, and as would survive into the mechanical philosophy of the seventeenth century.aa The similarity of the two new rlctcrminist systems of the 1520s has been briefly noted by Poppi: 'In llro Reformation debate, therefore, Pomponazzi's philosophical fatalism rvls infiltrated by a fideistic fatalism of the opposite kind'.4s Pomponazzi's De Fato, De Libero Arbitrio et De Praedestinatione, t'ompleted in 1520, is a sustained and sophisticated attack on traditional Aristotelian vagueness about the relations between causation and rrcccssitation, or between free will and responsibility.a6 Using the De l;uto <>f Alexander of Aphrodisias, an attack on Stoic fatal necessity, as lris primary target, he criticises the Aristotelian exemption of chance t.vcnts and coincidences from the realm of necessity.aT Fortuitousness is conrpatible with necessity, as when a stone falls and happens to hit the hcacl of an unwitting bystander.as This is exactly the kind of example Ar.istotle had used to avoid necessity.ae But Pomponazzi points out that lhis contingency is not the real ontological indifference of the explicitly libcrtarian vicw, the actual physical possibility of an event happening or rrot happcning; it is simply a notion we apply to things which sometimes 32 JOHN SUTTON happen and sometimes do not. (If it does rain tomorrow, it rains necessarily; if it doesn't rain, the lack of rain is necessary). 'And that is the true meaning of contingency.'s0 He neatly demonstrates the contradiction, implicit in Aristotle's works on ethics and explicit in Alexander, between the assumed libertarian possibility of self-change, which Alexander takes to be self-determination as between two incompatible choices, and the Aristotelian denial of self-change in sublunary creatures.sr For Pomponazzi, as for Aquinas before and for Hobbes after, the will is not an independent psychological faculty. And as it cannot change itself, it must be changed by some higher, external source. Of decision, he writes 'It is held without qualification to be within the power of the will, which it in no way is'.s2 Surprisingly, the De Fato was not banned by the Inquisition on its publication in the mid-sixteenth century: neither, until a century after its original composition, was Pomponazzi's De Incantationibus, which cast doubt on the existence of angels and demons and gave a naturalistic account of the rise and fall of religions, including Christianity.s3 But his views on moral matters arising out of fate and free will were subject to religious criticism throughout the sixteenth century.sa His former student Paolo Giovio claimed in 1557 that Pomponazzl's doctrines led 'to the corruption of young men and the destruction of Christian discipline'.ss But, just as in De Immortalitate Animae Pomponazzi had argued that the unqualified ('simpliciter') mortality of the soul does not destroy human goals and ideals,s6 so in De Fato he makes a case for a moral responsibility which could be compatible with universal necessitation. We are Fate's children, and ordinary praise and blame are out of place.sT But a revised conception of morality can see good and evil both as parts of the natural order. Indeed, as for the Gnostics, good requires evil: 'It is necessary that there should be sin: providence intends there to be sin and is itself author of sins'.s8 He avoids the ensuing temptation to blame God for evil by claiming that God's behaviour towards man is as free and blameless as is man's towards cattle and chickens.5e Given the natural existence of evil, Pomponazzi suggests that judgements about good and evil can function as do judgements on good wine or noxious insects.6o Book Three of the De Fato begins a different and incompatible account of freedom which is firmly Christian, taking free will as a premise.6l As Copenhaver notes, however, 'in the larger context of his work these attempts to repair the damage done to free will ring REI-IGION AND THE FAILURES OF DETERMINISM 33 hollow'.62 Pomponazzi has already counterattacked against Christian doctrines of free will in Book Two by praising Stoic determinism for refusing to deny any powers to God. The Stoics 'preferred to be servants and followers than to be impious and blasphemers; they believed that everything was fated and arranged by providence and that there is nothing in us which is not done by providence'.63 So Pomponazzi too professes docility, using the same phrase.6a This attribution of all causes directly to God is not quite an accurate description either of Stoic determinism or of Pomponazzi's version of it.6s But he had to tread carefully. Less than a hundred years later, in February 1619, Vanini was burnt in Toulouse for expounding Pomponazzian naturalism. Poppi's remark that the Christian account of free will in Book Three of the De Fato was a 'dialectical line of defence'66 is confirmed by a close reading of the wonderfully ironic epilogue to the whole work.67 It ends with Pomponazzi's acknowledgement that because the Church has condemned Stoic fatalism, he too must deny it, 'and the Church is firmly to be believed'.68 Against anticipated attacks on his work, Pomponazzi happily issues a disclaimer of its doctrines; 'Moreover, of the opinions I have put forward, I adhere only to as many as the Roman Church, to which both in this and in other matters I wholly submit, will have approved'.6e But a few paragraphs earlier, at the beginning of the epilogue, Pomponazzihad concluded that, although no account of fate and free will is wholly satisfactory, that of the Stoics, in nature alone and by reason, is 'furthest removed from contradiction'.i0 Here he says that the best argument against it is that it makes God the cause of sin. Pomponazzi remarks that this consequence 'seems I'videtur'l absurd and erroneous',7l before referring back to his own arguments in Book Two which remove its sting. He provides just sufficient disclaimers throughout to escape more than unofficial censure. A clever man. IV. NATURALISTIC DETERMINISM: HOBBES, MATERIALISM AND MORALITY Naturalism, materialism and determinism are thought to be entirely compatible by many modern philosophers, aspects of the same broadly 'naturalistic' perspective. Cudworth, unlike Bramhall, saw the crucial link betwecn determinism and materialism in Hobbes' thought' In the 34 JOHN SUTTON now fragmentary Discourse of Liberty qnd Necessity Cudworth claims that Hobbes denied free will because he 'denied all spirituality and immateriality and made all cogitation, intellection and volition be nothing but mechanical motion and passion from objects without . . . wherefore it is a sufficient confutation of (Hobbes) to show that there is another substance in the world besides body',72 which Cudworth, of course, thinks he has done in The True Intellectural System of the Universe.T3 Hobbes' deterministic psychology has been the focus of much work generically classifiable as 'Hobbism'74 both in the seventeenth century and again recently, as materialist theories of mind have gained widespread acceptance. Cognition is reduced, via sensation, to motion. Deliberation is a vector of mechanical motions, of which the will is the resultant vector. Mental processes are 'nothing really, but motion in some internal substance of the head',7s and psychology is reducible to the mechanics of appetite and aversion.i6 This Hobbes is at least a revisionary if not an eliminative materialist.TT Psychological Hobbism has certainly over-emphasised the external determination of mental events: Jamie Kassler in this volume demonstrates the importance of the movement outward in Hobbes' physiology, and thus of the internal determinism of action and character. It would indeed be a crude materialist determinism which ignored (deterministic) inner processes' But what is at issue here is whether the naturalism in Hobbes brought out by Kassler is at odds with the materialism of contemporary and modern Hobbist interpretations of Hobbes. I tend to think not;78 but the following treatment of Hobbes'determinism holds for both readings. Hobbes knew PomponazzT's thought: his friend Mersenne had devoted the first section of his Quaestiones Celeberrimae in Genesim to an attack on Pomponazzi's and Vanini's naturalistic denial of the immortality of the soul and the existence of angels and miracles.ie There are interesting similarities between the two determinisms. Hobbes' account of the will as merely the last desire or appetite in deliberation is in accord with Pomponazzi's unification of intellectual and sensitive soul. Both men offer an argument against free will from human ignorance of causes: in our epistemically deprived state we do not know the true causes of things, and we pass easily from such ignorance to the illusory belief that there are no such causes in nature. This account, which may go back to the ancient atomists,8O is intended to explain away orn intuitions of free will. Pomponazzi's account of soul and mind is very complex, trying to RELIGION AND THE FAILURES OF DETERMINISM 35 ward off the crudest varieties of materialism; but at the very least he too claimed that the human soul was by nature absolutely ('simpliciter') 'materiale' and only relatively ('secundum quid') 'immateriale'.81 Of course not all causes are easily explicable in physical terms; Pomponazzi accepted astrological causation, and explained alleged pheno-"nu in terms of occult or hidden powers and qualities. This could be seen as an area in which Hobbes is typical of a general advance on Pomponazzi and other Renaissance naturalists and magicians. But Pomponazzi's acceptance of occult qualities is not naturalism in an antimaterialist sense.82 The shortcomings of Aristotelian physics and theories of matter make such an inability to tolerate temporary ignorance unremarkable in the Aristotelian philosopher desiring to know the causes of things. Hobbes, in contrast, shares with many philosophers of the scientific revolution an acceptance that all explanation is incomplete. Keith Thomas pinpoints this as an important intellectual and cultural innovation in the seventeenth century.s3 But despite this change, it is unnecessary to see belief in occult qualities as marking an 'irreconcilable difference' between Renaissance naturalism and seventeenth century philosophy, as Keith Hutchison has shown.8a Seventeenth century science did not so much reject occult qualities as break down the distinction between occult and manifest, by showing occult qualities to be no more and no less intelligible than any other causes, irnd subsuming those which gained scientific respectability into the new science. Hutchison's remark on natural magic and the new science in general could be applied to Pomponazzi and Hobbes in particular: '" ' ihe t*o systems have in common a willingness to deal with occult clualities and a refusal to accept that insensibility implies spirituality: it ii within natural magic that we can find precedents for the confidence with which seventeenth century philosophy insisted that the insensible rcalms of nature could be profitably entered by human thought.'85 I noted earlier Poppi's drawing of the parallel between the two new dcterminisms, Pomponazzian and Lutheran, of the 1520's. He follows this with the comment that both are 'equally destructive of man's rcality; in the first case because he is the victim of material cosmic lirrces, and in the second because he is the victim of a predestined will' Man's highest faculties are systematically demoted and denied; his works are entirely disregarded, and his moral commitments discarded ls illusory'.8" Similar remarks are easy to find in both seventeenth and twcr-rtieth century treatments of Hobbes' determinism.8T But few if any u .l(r .r ()ilN stj.r,l.()N clctcrminists, lcast of all Hobbcs, havc cver bccl.l amorally Il'bbist i' the sensc thcir opponents assume they must bc. Altcrnativc detcrmi'ist conceptions of self-creation, and revisecl frcedoms and moralities, aro consistently ignored. we need historical and curtural explanations or the intuitions behind the reception in England of Hobbcs' .blasphemous, desperatc, and destructive opinion of tatal necessity'.ss One of the ironies of Hobbes studies is that Hobbes 'arguecl in support of a social and political order the conceptual .erou..ei to justify which he had removcd'.Ee But free will, uniike some of the othei concepts mentioned by Shapin and Schaffer in this context, was not so much a legacy of an existing sociar and political order which was about to disappear, as an important factor in the construction of an emergent new order which required the creation of an idealized autont_rmous individual subject.e. on Hobbes in particurar, Mintz has describecl Bramhall's and others' criticisms of the ,ethical inconveniences, of determinism.er Benjamin Laney complained in 1677 that it .must needs shake noJ only the Foundation of all Religion, but evcn of humane Society'.e2 The prevalence of these assumptions about the consequences of determinism needs to be related to in English fear of social and religious corruption among intellectuals which was not confined to political reactionaries: rhe p'rared rirmament,, Iiii::l?l;, And earth's base built on stubble.e3 Determinism and naturalism are a short step from atheism. As Sir william Alexander wrote in 1630, 'young Naturalists oft old Atheists doe prove'.ea Bramhall's epistle to the reader, in his vindication of rrue Liberty front Antecedent Extrinsicar Necessi4r, gives us furthêugg"rtions on the social implications of determinism:"Hobbes' ,principles are pernicious both to piety and policy, and destructive to all relations of mankind, between prince and subject, father and child, master and servant, husband and wife; ancl they who maintain them obstinately, are fitter to live in hollow trees among wild beasts, than in any christian or political society. So God bless me'.es Hobbes' particular defences of moral practices in a deterministic world are generally consequentialist.e6 Theie are extrinsic justifications for praise and blame. Even 'retributive' punishment does not require full moral responsibility, for it works 'to the end that the will of men l{l Ll(;l()N n Nl) llll l n ll.(lltlrs ()lrl)lr'l l:l{MINISM 3l rrrtry lhcrcby lrc thc bcttcr clisposccl to obedience'.')7 Rejection of Stoic rirtional dcsigrt nrrrl Rclormation providentialism had always been lccognisccl as lcading to ethical relativism: Most things that morally adhere to souls Wholly exist in drunk opinion, Whose reeling censure, if I value not, It values nought.es Ifubbes acccpts this, but claims that things can nevertheless be necessary and yct praiseworthy, just as they can be necessary and yet dispraiscd.ee Consequentialism in some form is surely the best ethical lramework for a sincere determinist, and if there is a way out of the rlcterminist maze described in this paper this is it. But it makes moral tlrcorizing desperatcly difficult (rightly so?), and no libertarian has ever been convinced that it could be a genuine substitute for moral realism. One reason for this is that it fails to save, to any significant degree, what thc libertarian considers to be the moral phenomena. Given this, it is slightly odd that Hobbes is supposed to be a compatibilist.r00 He acknowledges that dispute over qucstions of free will and determinism among 'the greatest part of mankind. not as they should be, but as they are . . . will rather hurt than help their piety', that he would not be putting forward his argument if Bramhall had not provoked him, and that he hopes 'your Lordship and his will keep it private'.lol Free will should still be def'ended in public. Bacon had written to some judges in 1617 that 'there will be a continual defection, except you keep men in by preaching, as well as the law doth by punishing'.r02 Dcspite regular protestations of innocence, Hobbes knew the revisionary consequences of his determinism for morality as wcll as did his critics: but, unlike them, he was willing to embrace what they saw as ethical inconveniences. V. JOHN WEBSTER AND THE FAILURE,S OF DETERMINISM Hobbes' account of contingency as ignorance of causes is justifiably lamous: A wooden top that is lashed by the bovs, and runs about sometimes to one wall, sometimes to another, sometimes spinning, sometimes hitting men on thc shins, if it were sensible of its own motion, would think it proceeded from its own will, unless it folt what lashed it. And is a man any wiser, whcn he runs to one place for a bcnefice, to 38 JOHN SUTI.ON another for a bargain, and troubles the world with writing crrors ancl requiring answers, because he thinks he doth it without any cause other than his own will, and seeth not what are the lashings that cause hc will?rr)r The image, as used in this context, is not his own. we have already seen how the Duchess' rejcction of Antonio's advice to 'make patience a noble fortitude' is symptomatic of embarrassmcnt over Stoic determinism and impatience with Stoic resignation. She continues with an appeal to a radical providentialism, to God as guidc of a// human af'fairs: And yet, O Heaven, thy heavy hand is in it' I have oft scen my little boy scourge his top, And comparecl myself to't: nought made me e'er go right, But Heaven's scourgc-stick' I oa This is one of Wcbstcr's rare borrowings from Sidney's verse works. Refercnce to this source for the image makcs its providentialist inclination clearcr: Gricfe onely makes his wretched state to see (Even like a toppe which nought but whipping moves) This man, this talking beast, this walking tree ' ' ' But still our dazeled eyes their way do missc, While that we do at his swecte scourge repinc, The kindly way to beat us to our blisse.r0s Bramhall too, in perhaps his most famous rhetorical flourish against Hobbes' determinism, asserting that man must be more than talking beast or walking tree, echoes a webster borrowing lrom sidney. Bosola notoriously complains, after the unintended death of Antonio, that 'We are merely the stars' tennis balls, struck and banded/Which way please them,.r06 Simitarly Hobbes' doctrine 'destroys liberty, and dishonours the nature of man. It makes the second causes and outward objects to be the rackets, and men to be but the tennis-balls of destiny'.r0i A whole conflation of traditions is at work here. Thc idea itself is an old conceit, going back at least to Plautus.r08 It reaches Webster through a use by Sicfney which mingles the medicval morality traclition with a Calvinist belitlling of man's powers: 'in such a shaclowe, or rathcr pit of darkness. the wormish mankinilc lives, that ncithcr thcy know htlw to foresec, nor what to leare: and arc but likc tcnisllalls, tossccl lly thc rackct of hycr pt)wcrs'.10') J'hc .lacobcan nlltlctltrlcn{ is lhc brttisccl REI-IGION AND'I'TIE FAIT,URES OfT DE,TERMINISM 39 inheritorofwhatlJurtoncalleclthis.horribleconsiderationofthe diversity of religions which are and have been in thc world'.rr0 Inthesetextsareinscribedthefailuresofthethreemajordeterminist ,y*., of the early modern age' The Duchess rejects Antonio's s'tolcir-; her own frail providentialist faith in G'd's scourge-stick ;r;;"t unfbuncled; Hobbes' use of the image of the top to explain away our intuitions of free will is rejected because it gives man no more than brute or object status'rrrWhat accounts of human freedom could be offerecl in their place? In England the Restoration government banned put-,fi. prcaching ancl cliscussi"on on the topic of free will' among other'J;;";"" issuls,'r2 as the Royal Society took stepstowards the corrccting of cxcesses in naturai philosophy' without. Hobbes'rr3 But besides clnsorship, the scventcenth century saw two criticisms of determinism from mijor new philosophical clirections' the mechanical fnitoropny and Cambriage etatonis-: Y" will take Mersenne's criti- .ir_ of pomponazzian naturalism ancl cudworth's deft but desperate bolstering of irec will against thc evils of Hobbist atheism as represcntative. VILIBER'I.ARIANS ON I-REE WILL: MERSIINNE The religious dangers of overzealous application of the mechanical fnliornpty were oLvious even bcfore Hobbes' perniciou'sly .materialist vcrsion. So sometimes, .to preserve religion, morality and science"lla it lvas 'more pruclent to adopi thc mechanical philosophy.in an attenuated form even at the cost of philosophical unticliness or inconsistency''r1s Mersenne died beforc the publicition of the Hobbes-Bramhall debate' But his attacks \n Qtnestiones Celeberrimae in Genesim and L,Irnpi6t6 tles Dtistesu 6 on the naturalisms of Pomponazzi' Cardano and Vanini show that, like Bramhall, he was willing to exclude the human mind and in purti.uiu, the will from the mechanical universe of secondary causes. .t.rreoirricuttyofMersenne,slimiteddefenceofsupernaturalismagainst Ncoplatonicmagicandastrologyonthconehandandthenaturalists' .t*iatnrangelsandmiraclesnntt'"otherhasbeendemonstratedby llinc: 'with naturalism, Mersenne's task was to explain the limitations of naturc. With magic, ire had to emphasise the limits of supernatural cvcnts ancl angelic powers'.il? A similar balancing act is apparent in his irttituclcs to clctcrminism and frce will. He criticizes Pico and Ficino for ilflr.iltuting too muchtO human freedom.lls But the threat of naturalism, 40 JOHN SUTT.ON in contrast, is the erosion of human dignity by cosmic destiny' Mersenne's typically libertarian assumption is that the determinists' denial of absolute self-determination automatically removes all justification for any moral striving whatsoever. A naturalistic Averroist view of religions as natural phenomena like any other, as taken up by Pomjiiarti,t"'ensures tirat 'whether one preserves the name of "free will" tr not, man cloes not escape his destiny''r20 There is little logical ipace for Mersenne's position. He attacks thc Cabala and astrology because they fail to do thc explanatory and predictive work they profess to,r2r and because they derive from iisreputable Eastern ,our."r. But his alternative, 'Greck' conception of the c^osmos as rationally ordered, and the importance for mechanism in general of the iclea of a nature subject to intelligible laws, seem prima facie to suggest a naturalistic determinism which denies the belief in miracles and the efficacy of prayer to which the good catholic priest is committed. When thesl opposing influences, religious morality and mechanistic science, come -into conflict, the outcome is decided in a familiar manner, by the necessity of making man rathcr than God responsible for sin. Despite, or perhaps because of, mcchanism's boast to Le the true science to deliver politic society from the variety of false sciences. Mersenne must in the end profess the traditional catholic liberty of indifference: 'So the will, then, is in my opinion ablc to pursue eithei one of two objects equally set before it, even if no greater reason should be apparent to it why it should pursue one. rather than the other,.t22 He ^supported free will against the Jansenists in the early 1640s.r23 Even Lenoble confesses Mersenne's difficulties in attempting ath" impossible synthesis . . . of two violently opposed traditions; the ancienttraditionwhichidentifiesGodanddestiny,andwhich'with regard to man, must thus suborclinate freedom to nature; the Christian tra'dition for which God gives benevolently and freely, and creates as his masterpiece souls which are truly free'.l2a These are exactly the two incompatible tendencies identified by Dihle as contributing to the origins of the modern problems of the will'12s This is another angle on the problems created by the mechanists' tendency to remove the mind from the realm of physical causality. If ,voluntaiy'human action is not to be explained within the same causal nexus as the behaviour of physical bodies, how does the libertarian freedom of indifference possesied by a separate faculty of the will itself help in giving an account of the springs of action which preserves a RIlt-l(ilON AND 'l'llti IrAlLUllLrS OI" I)11'I BnMINISM 4l space for rational deliberation? The arbjtrariness which dogs any account of action, tt.;;;;;;;us to J' R'. Lucas' which does not refer to previous deterministic causal factors' infects Mersenne as well' In modern terms, 'it no amo"nt or kind of cognitive and volitional capacity and complexity that ;;;ki-;;i"t, in a de"terminisric world will suffice for free agency, then adding a requirement of indeterminism won't help'.126 VII. LIBE,RTARIANS ON FREE WILL: ANGLICANISM AND CUDWORTH The elements of Reformation determinism which were fully absorbed into the Anglican t";;i;;"were nevertheless somewhat less menacing than the varieties-JLu"fop"O in Geneva' Scotland or New England: hell was sanitized, ""t1, "t"ipitg the bruising stroke of chance" the English found God's'tJit-t"g"-itit:rt rhe kindty way to beat them l: il,"l: bliss. Webster has e"ioniJ aftempt to bolster the Duchess' quavenng faith in Providence' Do not weeP: Heaven fashioned us of nothing; and we strive To bring ourselves to nothing'r27 'Ihe tag derives from Donne's First Anniversarie Wee seeme ambitious' God's whole worke t'undoe; Of nothing hee made us' and we strive too' To bring Jurselves to nothing backe'r28 Sclf-denigrationwastheclarkersideofAnslicanism'explicitatleast 'efore Laud made L"fi"t in free will an obTigatory article .of, faith' It rnixed with a .or" Ji,i*iriirit ress honest Eiglish,compatibilism and complacency Th" ;;;;i attituae is apparentln Hooker's complaint: 'A number there are, who think they cannot admire as they ought the 'ower and authoritf;; ;; *oro ot-i;od' if in things divine they should irttribute any force io-"u'ott' For which cause they never use reason so t"ifflngfy as io discredit reason''r2e The first y"u,' oiln" seventeenth century say 1 c]ima1 of religious pcssimism, apparent in the raw nerves iouched by the 'Iacobean rrramatists. In Holland, the controversy over Arminian attacks on ('alvinist pr"a"rtinuiion'*a' brougnt to a temporary halt by the death I j I I 42 jolrN sut'.r.oN of Arminius himself in 1609 and by the victory in 160g-9 in front ol the Dutch States-General of the followers of Gomarus (who had studied at oxford and cambridge). These 'supralapsarians' ieiterated the calvinist claim that God wills the fate of each man before creafi6tr.130 This was the dominant view in England too, indeed almost universal before the accession of Charles I.131 But alongside predestinationism in England were prevalent optimistic views of causation and free will. peter Baro, profeisor of Divinity at cambridge from r574 to 1596, believed that'God willed that there should be divers and sundry causes, namely some necessary and othersome also free and contingent: which according to their several natures might work freely and contingently, or not work. Whereupon we conclude that secondary causes are not enforced by God,s purpose and decree, but carried willingly and after their own nature'.r32 The tendency towards a libertarian view of the autonomy of the human will among other secondary causes evident in this passage coexisted happily with a genuinely prescientific devaluation of secondary natural causes, 'thus must we in all things that be done, whether they be good or evil (except sin, which God hates and causes not), not only look at the second causes, which be but God's means and instruments whereby he works, but have a further eye and look up to God'.r33 For the Elizabethan preacher, distanced from theological ancl scientific controversy on the continent, second causes were of little interest anyway. But this latter view does show the influence of calvinist determinism: calvin too could allow talk of secondary causes, but affirmed that 'whatsoever instruments God uses, his original workyng is nothing hindered thereby', for 'we set no power in creatures. onely this we say, that God useth mcanes and instruments whiche he hymselfe seeth to be expedient'.13a In England, religious despair arising from radical providentialism and from the failure of Stoicism was often an impetus to construct a less threatening metaphysic. Some, like Donne and his oxford nearcontemporary Marston, found solace in a retreat to the Anglican altar. Ignoring or suppressing the problem, like the Restoration censors, was one way out (webster's Duchess, in our text, knows the perils of thinking: 'All our wit/And reading brings us to a truer sense,/Of sorrow'135). But not the only way. One of the most resolute supralapsarian opponents of free will in the late sixteenth century was the cambridge preacher william Perkins. His chosen successor as vicar of St. Andrews' I{l'.Ll(il()N n Nl) llll: lrAIl.LJltl:S ()lr l)lr't t: II.MINISM 43 ('lrrrlch in Carnbridgc was his collaborator in divinity, one Rafe ('rrtlworth. Wc know that his son Ralph's first reading of the ancients irritiatccl crisis and revolt against the strict Calvinism of his upbringing.rr(' If men acccpt that they have no free will and that God is cause of ;rll, clcbauchcry, scepticism and infidelity, thinks the natural libertarian, t'irrr be the only results: Nashe in 1592 had his character Ver in ,\'rttrrnrcr's Last Will and Testament complain, after surveying the rvorlcl's evils, 'If then the best husband be so liberal of his best handirvrlrk, to what end should we make much of a glittering excrement, or tkrubt to spend at a banquet as many pounds as He spends men at a birttle?'r37 Ralph Cudworth includes the Reformation'Theologick Fate' irnd the ideas of that 'atheistic politician' whom he never mentions by rramc, Hobbes, among his four atheistical doctrines of the Fatal Ncccssity of all Actions and Events.r3s Just as the Calvinist Divine Iratalism Arbitrary makes God 'meer arbitrary will omnipotent',r3e so a tlcnial of free will on the basis of an overenthusiastic mechanism, kroking only to second causes, fails to explain the alleged (moral) phcnomena, and leaves us with no 'measure or norma in nature'.140 So instead Cudworth, with a phrase reminiscent of the chameleon-like I{cnaissance man of Pico della Mirandola, upholds man's 'potential omniformity'.111 But Cudworth, unusually, is not content with the taking of free will irs a given, and just asserting that it is. Mintz has unravelled the tortuous positive account of what it is in the manuscripts of Cudworth's Discourse of Liberty and Necessity.ta2 Agreeing with Hobbes against Ilramhall that the will is not a separate faculty, he sees the free will as tlre soul redoubled on itself, as giving the soul sui potestas over itself and the ability to 'command it Selfe or turne it Selfe this way and yt way'.r'l3 But although he professes not to be avowing an arbitrary l'reedom of indifference,la4 he found no easy road between that and cleterminism. The perennial objection to compatibilism that choice must be either determined by external and internal causes beyond the individual's control, or be arbitrary, forced him finally into incompatibilism, accepting'indifferent Voluntaneity' almost despite himself as the root of sin.la5 Because he will accept only an 'eternal and immutable' morality,la6 he must finally retreat to an incoherent libertarianism. lf determinism is true, the reasons why particular determinisms have failed might be exactly those intuitions about freedom which have to be changed if they cannot be satisfied. But, as the case of Cudworth shows, I ,I,I JOHN SUTTON jl:iillli,lil;.'ffir::-,ly revised ethics has any prospect of survival in N ().1'l r S ;.lfTtJlTnto Jamic Kasslcr antl stcphcn Gaukr.gc. trr c'nrnrcnrs .n an earrierI Webster. J.. The Whirc Dcuit (1612). V.vi. 177_.g.. Rel.erences to Webster are to the i"i;ii :^:;' ^!);:i ffi : #, i,il":;i' ; ;;; "' ; "- *' u " D;, ;il; i'ffi ) and r h e ' Webster, The Duchess of Uottr glt+1,I.i.359_61.3 Mitton, J., paradise Lo.rr,London Oe6il,il-.isl at.a pomponazzi,p., oe rmmii;tt;";;r';;;,;;:;Jr;, (ls3a), p. s.) Sorabji. R.. Necessr.ry, Corv ona' gio;;,;;;Irtregratity,Dora...r,iiilss;. on (1980); white, M., Agency antt irfltij: A" The Thiorv of witt in Ctassi.at Antiquity, Los Angeres and London 7 Similarry, if a deterministic theory should be found to underlie quantum theory at a ilff"Tli1tr:11,ffiJifliJ'i.ur'."uri,v,-,rii, nl""o.,.." wourd not enta' a return to.:,:i!i:n:iit,;:';:..,::,xy[:,,#:3,,,ift;,I1? SHl". by Lipsius, I, physiotogia eop. cit. (note B;. s." suuna.r,. .l., );;;;'il;jii,,,?T;" phit^.^^I.. ^r nstoicism. N!* v.i ii rssr o; ,*ffi;' ,; ;;i:ffi ,!", ,(!,!X,1,!,!r^:{"f."Ji,::":#Schmirr. C.. and Skinner. g., 1e<is.y. ri, V"^titii, 1,:,o, "f Rrr;;;;r;;;:;-iiitoropny.Camhridge ( 1988), especiatty kraye. I . laO_irn,"""d poppi. A.. pp. 64 I _650."' Augusrine. Cin of Gott. u. t. qro,.a Jy if pi"r. itp. cit. 1note8). IV. 862.Ir Much or lipiiui' effort is ip"nr in'*uiii"f "ir ,rr" probrem of evir. He arrackschrysippus for failins to absorve c"a rr"r'.iir"1op. rii..nore g rV. soii.-l-ip.rur.solurion is ro add ti ni. -sroi.i.r;.';;";:riueopraronic accounr of marter asintrinsically evil (lV. 862_7 3). '' Cicero. De Fato 39.41:se..e Sorabji. op. cit. (note5). chapters 3 antl 4.rr Chrysippus at Autus Geuius. Nir,r{ iiiiriii;)s;,tv. soo. lvuctes tllttcae vu'2' quoted by Lipsius, op. cit. (note 1a Ibid.:and see Saunders-,s See berow, secrions ;r;X?ii;.(note e), pp. 143, r47-sl. 16 This point is well mad-eby Long, A., .Hellenistic philosophy and the classical ffSffi !3!']H* to H,ti,,t,ti,''pithiin:i"iondon (1e74), pp. 232-48; on r7 Monsarrat. G., Light fro.m tlte porch: stoicism and Engrish Renaissance Literature,Paris (1984;' and. on Liosius r,ir ."ppi"g.,yt.1.'*'utu,nron , G.. The senecan Ambte,London (195 I). pp. l2r-49.. Salmon. 1..'iai.i.,n'io Rorun Exampre: Seneca andTacitus in Jacobean Ensland. Journat "f ,i;';;;;;; of rdeas so.lr,s:#. (l9se)makes an imporranr "ur]. fo,. tr," r.ai,iJu.'p",t,t.li'tro,,*rions of a rasre for Stoicliterary and historical themes, particularly amo.ng'it itr."" .i."f". I{lrl.l(;lON n Nl)'l'lllr l'n ll.tJI{l:S OIr I)fi'l'trRMINISM 45 l" l)rr Vair', ().,'l'\rc Morul l)hiktsoplie of the Stoicks, trans. T. James, edited by R. l(ir k, Ncw IJrunswick ( 1951), p. 45. r'' I{clrholz, R.,'l'he LiJb of Fulke Greville, Oxford (1971), especially pp.24*6,82-5, ).19. '" [)igby, K' Tvvo Treatises, London (1644), repr. New York (1978). rr (ircville, F., Mustapha, in Selected Writings, edited by J. Rees, London (1973); llilton Kelliher, W., 'The Warwick Manuscripts of Fulke Greville', British Museum ()trurterly 34, 107-21 (1970); Dollimore, J., Radical Tragedy, Brighton (1984), pp. t28,28t-2. rr On Greville's own concern with the problem of evil, see Rebholz, op. cit. (note l9), pp.25,308-9. r1 Marston, J., Antonio's Revenge (1600), ed. G. Hunter, London (1966), IV.i.56-7. rr Marston, 1., Antonio and Mellida (1599), ed. G. Hunter, London (1965), n.i.27-8, .14-5. At Antonio's Revenge ll.li.47tf. Antonio actually reads from Seneca's De I'rovidentia, only to reject it as'naught/But foamy bubbling of a fleamy brain'; cf. The Nlulcontent (1603), ed. G. Hunter, London (1975), UI.i.20-8. Aggeler, G., in'Stoicism irrrd Revenge in Marston', English Studies 51,50-l-17, (1970) argues that The Mulcontent is consistently and successfully both Christian and neo-Stoic, the tragicomic mode reflecting Marston's belief that this new fusion could not accommodate blood vcngeance. This seems to me to ignore the terrible ambiguities in Marston's treatment of the views put forward by the protagonist Malevole/Altofront. It is far from clear that thc play upholds belief in a rationally and beneficently ordered nature. r5 Hall, J., Works, 10 Vols, ed. P. Wynter, Oxford (1863),V11.457. Sams, H., in'AntiStoicism in Seventeenthand Early Eighteenth-century England', Studies in Philology 41, 65-78 (1944) saw the Stoics' suppression of passion, their paganism, and their over-reliance on reason as the three main elements of the popular received perceptions of neo-Stoic views. His opinion (77-8) that the first of the three was the most prevalent and specific source of criticism in England is supported by literary sources as well as the philosophical and theological writers he cites. (I owe this reference to Jamie Kassler). This received view of Stoicism was a far remove from Lipsius' systematic philosophy let alone from actual ancient Stoic tenets. One reason for this may be that, as Salmon, op. cit. (noIe 17), 224, notes, the rational blending of metaphysics and ethics with politics which was possible, at least in theory, for Lipsius, was never a practical option for'those English malcontents who devised their own blend of Senecan and Tacitean influence under the pressure of plots, rivalries and disappointments in the first decade of the seventeenth century'. 26 Webster, J., The Duchess of Malfi,Ill.v.72-4,76-7. 27 Battles, F. L., and Hugo, A., Calvin's Commentary on Seneca's De Clementia, Leiden (1969). 28 Calvin, J., Institutes,trans. Beveridge, H., 2 Vols, London (1949), III.viii.9. 2e Ibid.,l.xvi.8. 30 lbid.,IV.xiv.17. 3t lbid.,l.xvi.7. 32 The Works of John Knox, ed. D. Laing, Edinburgh (1846-6 4),V. 32, 119. 33 Valla, L' De Libero Arbitio, ed. M. Anfossi, Florence (1.93\; quoted by Poppi, op. cit. (note 9), p. 650. 46 JOHN SUTTON 3a Bayle, P., Dictionnaire historique et critique, paris (1697), art. pauliciens, rem. (I), p. 632. rs Poppi. op. cit.(note9).p.664. ro Walker, D.,The Declineof Hetl,ChicagoandLondon (L964),p. 193.3i See below, Section VII. 38 Erasmus, D., De Libero Arbitrio Diatribe sive Collatio in opera omnia, r0 vols., ed. J. Leclerc, Leiden (1703-6), repr. Hildesheim, (196l-2). 3e Sorabji, op. cit.(note 5), p. 87. a0 Luther, M., De Servo Arbitrio,in Werke,Weimar (1gg3), XWII, p. 7g6.al Pomponazzi,P., De Fato, De Libert Arbitio et'De praedestinitione, ed. R. Lemay, Lugano (1957). a2 At least, not in the same part of his work. See below. a3 Hutchison, K., 'supernaturalism and the Mechanical philosophy', History of science 21,297-333, e.g. 311, (1983). aa See below on Mersenne, Section VI. as Poppi, op. cit.(note9),666. I f9-!o1y1i, op. cit. (note 41). See Huby, p.,.The Firsr Discovery of the Freewill P_roblem', Philosophy 42,353-62, (1967) on Aristotle's failure to address the issues.a7 Alexander of Aphrodisias on Fate, ed. R. Sharples, London ( I 9g3).a8 Pomponazzi, op. cit. (note 4), I.6. ae Aristotle, Physicsil.5, Metaphysics VI.3. See Sorabji, op. cit.(note5), chapter 1. lf' Pomponazzi. op. cit. (note 4l ), t.7.2.23 p. a0). '1 lbid..II.5.59 1p. 183).52 1bid.,I.9.3.3. (p. 160). s3. De Naturalium Effectuum Causis sive de Incantationibus, Basel (1567), especially chapter 73: De Immortalitate Animae, op. cit. (note \,p. lZ3. Det iio, fvt., O*quisi_ tionum Magicarum Libri Sex,Mainz (1624),p. L0. 5a Poppi, op. cit. (note 9), p. 660. 15 Giovio, P., Elogia Doctorum Virorum,Antwerp (1557), p. 15a.s6 Op. cit. (note 4), chapters 13 and 14. s-7 Op. cit. (note 41), I.11.3. 35-46 (pp.78-S1). s8 lbid., tr.i.t.34 (p. 203). 5' .Ibi!.' 11.7.1.42 1p. 205); cf. il.7.1.39 (p. 204). This comparison functions as a reductio ad absurdum of determinism for the libertarian defender of free will and divine and human dignity: see Bramhall's remarks on brutish liberty in The English works of rhomas Hobbes of Malmsbury, ed. w. Molesworth, London (rg39-45i, v. 40; and below, section IV. 6tt op. cil. (note 41), I.1 1-15. compare a modern aesthetic justification of ,moral' judgements in a world of hard determinism: 'I could regret being selfish or dishonest in the _way I regret having no talent for music or for sport. I could judge my actions aesthetically as admirable or appalling; and these thoughts could be charged with feelings'. Glover, J., 'Self-creation', proceedings of the Britkh Academy 69,745-71 (1983); cf. I: The Philosophy and psychology of personal ldentity, London (198g), chapter 1 8. 61 At III.6.8 (p.252), Pomponazzi even sees the will as a prime mover. 62 Copenhaver, B., in Schmitt, C. and Skinner, e., eds., op. cit.(note9),p.273. I{lil.l(;lON n NI)'l'llli lrn ILLJllliS OIr l)ti'l'IIItMINISM 47 " I l\rnrlronazzi, op. <'it.(notc 4l), ll.l.76-7 (p. 15a). "t tltid., il.3. t 9 (p. l rr3). '"' 'l'hc attcnrpt to claim for naturalistic Stoic determinism the prime doctrinal advantirgc ol'raclical providentialism is a sleight-of-hand in that the Stoic God is identical with (cvcn if not bound by) at least a logical Necessity which the Reformation theologians suw as itself subject to God's Will. However, Pomponazzi's fundamental point, that the grcatcr the power and control attributed to the human will, the more God's omnilx)tcnce is eroded, was shared by Luther and Calvin. ''" Poppi, op. cit. (note 9), p. 659. "7 Pomponazzi, op. cit. (note 41), Epilogus sive Peroratio, (pp. a51-a). 68 lbid.,p.453. "') Ibid.,p.454. '11' Ibid.,p.45l.'tt lbid.,p.45l. 7r British Museum Additional Manuscripts 4979,fol.61: see Mintz, 5., The Hunting of Leviathan, Cambridge (19 62), pp. 127 -8.i3 Cudworth, R, The True Intellectual System of the Universe, 2 Vols, London (1678), repr. New York (1978). 7a A good account of what constitutes 'Hobbism' (although his emphasis is on politics) is Lamprecht, S.,'Hobbes and Hobbism', American Political Science Review 34,31s3, (1e40). 7s Human Nature,in English Works, op. cit. (note 59), IV. 31. 76 Spragens, T., The Politics of Motion, London (1973), pp.68-73; Lott, T.,'Hobbes' Mechanistic Psychology', in J. G. van der Bend, (ed.), Thomas Hobbes: His View of Man, Amslerdam (1982), pp.63*75. The mechanistic materialist reading of Hobbes in the twentieth century derives from Brandt., F., Thomas Hobbes' Mechanical Conception of Nature, Copenhagen and London (1928). i7 For the terms, see Churchland, P. S., 'Replies to Comments'. Inquiry 29,247-8, (1986). For the modern theory, see for example, Churchland, P. M., Matter and Consciousness,2nd edition, Cambridge, Mass. (1988), p.43-9. The conceptual affinity between eliminative materialism and hard determinism is noted by Armstrong, D., 'Recent Work on the Relation of Mind and Brain', in G. Floistad, (ed.), Contemporary Philosophy, VoL 4,The Hague (1983), pp. 53-4. 78 The important passages in the later work of Hobbes are Body chapter XXV, in English Works, op. cit. (note 59), I.287-410; Human Nature chapters II and VII, in English Works,IY.3-9, pp. 31-4; Leviathan chapters I,2, 3 and 6, ed. C. Macpherson, Harmondsworth (1968), pp.83-99, 118-30. Nothing in these passages seems to me incompatible with a sophisticated materialism: for instance, in Leviathan chapter 3, an initially crude associationism about 'mental discourse' is supplemented by an account of the influence of'desire and design' on the consequence or train of thoughts. Of course any materialist will avoid fatalism by allowing that processes inside us, which form a part of a chain of physical causes, are among those which determine future actions and events. To what extent they are 'in our power', and how the self acts through a rational will when neither self nor will has any separate existence apart from the same physical causal nexus, are further questions. In psychology at least, perhaps, there is no Hobbist smoke without Hobbes'own fire. 48 JOHN SUTTON 7e Mersenne, M ., Quaestiones Celeberrimae in Genesim, Paris (1623)' 80 Aristotle, Physics 196 al-3,b6-7 on the atomists'views on chance' 8r Pomponazzi, De Immortalitate Animae, op. cit. (nole 4),pp'15-6' 82 It is perhaps, rather, comparable to the views of those physicists of strong determinist inclination (including Einstein, Schrcidinger and Planck) who have believed that indeterministic q.,untu* theory is incomplete, or that thele may be hidden variables yet to be discover"d in uppurerrtly indeterministic systems' See Bohm' D'' Causality and Chance in Modern fiystcs, ind edition, London (1984)' and Wholeness and the Implicate order,London (1980). occult qualities, like hidden variables, were postulated to explain phenomena which contemporaly natural philosophy could not, while avoiding recourse to supernaturalism or non-material entities' s3 Thcrmas, K., Retigion and the Decline of Magic, Harmondsworth (1973), pp. 78594. He quoies Sir Robert Filmer: 'There be daily many things found out and daily more may be *hi"h oul. forefathers never knew to be possible" An Advertisement to the Juryui" "r Englantl, London (1653), g. Similar considerations are used as arguments for niaden variabtes by Hondeiicn,i.,,q. Theory of Determinism, Oxford (1988)'pp.3225. sa Hutchison, K., 'What Happened to occult Qualities in the Scientific Revolution?" lsn 73, 233-53, especially 249-50 (1982)' 8s lbid., 250. one genuine difference between Pomponazzi and Hobbes is_ in their respective concepts of God. A crucial question here is the extent to which Hobbes' God wai involved in the natural world. For an important argument that the God of Hobbes' writings on determinism is not the accepted Hobbist deus absconditus, see Pacchi, A, .Hobb-es and the Problem of God', in G. Rogers and A. Ryan, (eds'), Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes, Oxford (1988), pp. 171-87' s6 Poppi, op. cit. (note9), P' 666' 8? Fo; e*a_ple,'sramtatt on the .horrid consequences' of determinism., which ,dishonours the nature of man" in Hobbes, Engtish works, op. cir. (note 59), V.[I; cf. More, H., The Immortality of the Soal (1659), ed' A' Jacob, The Hague (1987)' I'ix'1; Eliot,T.,'JohnBramhalllinSelectedEssaygLondon(1951),e'g'p'358;Peters'R'' Hobbes,London (1956), PP. 184-5. 8E Bramhall, op. cit. (nole 59),V .21' se Shapin, S. ana Sitratter,'5., Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Lfe, Princeton (1985), p. 104, note 64. Those who consider Shapin and Schaffer's Hobbist Hobbes to traue iittl" to do with the real Hobbes can treat the present remarks purely as part of a historY of recePtion' in S". for.*u-pl" Dollimore, J., op. cii. (note 21), chapters 1, 10' 16; Barker' F'' The Tremulous privite Body: Essays on subiectlor?, London (1984); Belsey, c., The Subiect ofTragedy,Londonltlas;,'ctrapter4.ThereiSimportantmaterjalforapolitical f,'irto./of"in" free wili debate in Tyacke, N., 'Puritanism, Arminianism, and CounterRevolution', in C. Russell, (ed.), The Origins of the English Civil War' London (1973)' pp. I 19-43. st Op. cit. (note 72), chapters, pp. 110-33' ,, Laney, b.,,our"ruations" appen<ted to Hobbes, T., A Letter About Liberty and Necessity,London (167 7)' pp. 1 03-4' e3 Milton, J., Comus,ed. W. Bell, London (1899), pp' 597-9' llI:Ll(;I()N n NI)'l lII; lrAIl.LJI{l'lS OIf Dtll'EITMINISM 49 "r ()tro{crl by Iluntcr, M., "fhc Problem of Atheism in Early Modern England', Irrttr:;ttt tiott.s ol thc lloyuI IIistorical Society 35, I55 (1985). ''" llranrhall, op. cit. (note 59),V. 25. "" Iirr cxamplc, English Works, op. clr. (note 59), IV.252-8. ''t Iltid.,lll.297 . '''r Marston, 1., Antonio's Revenge, op. cit. (note 23), IVJ.31-4; see Dollimore, J., op. r lr. (rrr>tc 2l),pp.36-40. '''' Iitrglish Works, op. cit. (note 59), IV.255-6. r"" {lompare the optimistic claim of a modern determinist, who thinks he is also a comp;rtibilist, that we will keep all our social and moral practices in place even 'now that we scc thc social utility of the myth of free will'. Dennett, D., Elbow Room, Cambridge, Muss., and London (1984), chapter 7 and p. 166. Good modern accounts of the intuitiorrs behind compatibilism and incompatibilism are Strawson, G., Freedom and Belief, { )xlbrd (1986), pp. 105-20, and Honderich,T., op. cit. (note 83), pp. 382*400. t"l linglish Works, op. cil. (note 59),1V.256-7. l"i l3acon, F., Works 14 vols, (eds.) J. Spedding, R. Ellis, D. Heath, (1857-61), repr. Sluttgart (1 96 I -3), XIII.2 1 3.t"' Iinglish Works, op. clr. (note 59), V.55. l"r Webster, The Duchess of Malfi,III.v.78-81. lrri SiCney, P., Arcadiall,in Works (ed.) A. Feuillerat, Cambridge (1922),1.227. tt\tt 'l'he Duchess o.f Malfi, V.iv.54-5. t"t English Works, op. cit. (note 59), V.111. l"r Plautus, Captivi,Prol.22. Fortune's Tennis was the title of a play by Dekker, now k rst. t"') Arcadia Y , op. cit. (note i 05), II.l77. rr" Burton, R., The Anatomy of Melancholy, quoted by Trevor-Roper, H., Renaissance /:.s,rays, London (198 5), p. 27 0. rrr Traditional Webster criticism, either attacking his perverted and macabre sensationalism or somehow finding a deeply religious Christian humanism lurking beneath thc plays' apparent anarchy, has oniy recently been challenged by readings which mark lhc sustained antihumanism of his thought. Particularly relevant here is Kroll, N., 'The l)cmocritean Universe in Webster's The White Devil', Comparative Drama 7,3-21 ( 1973). She notes, among other things, the play's systematic materialism, which extends to the human mind, its emphasis on contact action between bodies, and its insistence that the universe, and life itself, is nothing but continual motion. Forker, C., 'The Tragic Indcterminacy of The Duchess of Malfi', chapter 7 in Skull Beneath The Skin: The Athievement of John Webster, Southern Illinois (1986), refers (pp. 367-8) to Pomponazzi's double truth, in which reason and faith are incompatible but complementary. Ilut Forker's notion of a dual causality which preserves freedom, derived from the work of R. Grudin, on Paracelsus' influence, in Mighry Opposites: Shakespeare and Renais- :;unce Contrariety, Los Angeles and London (1979), chapter 2, is an over-optimistic reading of Webster, even if it is applicable to Shakespeare. Pomponazzi's attitude to this 'double truth', too, is somewhat less than straightforward (section III above). rr2 Shapin and Schaffer, op. cit. (note 93), pp. 284-98. On censorship see Hill, C., 'Censorship and English Literature', in The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill, Vo lume O ne : Writing a nd Revo lut io n, Brighton ( 1 985), pp. 32*7 l. 50 JOHN SUTTON RELIGION AND THE Irn Il't'Jl{l1S OIr DE'I'F-RMINISM 51 r13 See now Malcolm, N.,'Hobbes and the Royal Society', in G. Rogers and A. Ryan (eds.), op. cir. (note 85), pp. 43-66. ita Lenoble, R., Mersenne, ou la naissance du m'1canisme, Paris (1943), p' 133. t15 Webster, C' From Paracelsus to Newton, Cambridge (1982), p. 89. 1r6 Mersenne, op. cit.(note79); L'ImpiLtd des Diistes, Paris (1624). 1r7 Hine, W., 'Mersenne, Naturalism and Magic', in B' Vickers, (ed-), Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Rencissance, Cambridge (1984), pp. 165*16. t18 Op. cir. (note 79), section 3. rre See note 53. r20 Lenoble, op. cit. (nole 114), p. 1 I 1. t21 Op. cir. (note 79), col. 386. t22 lbid.,col. 1298; Lenoble, op. cit.(note 114),pp. 108-9,300-2:' cf.Hutchison, op' cil. (note 43), on other proponents of mechanism who thought that the very barrenness of matter on which their natural philosophy of contact action was based actually guaranteed the existence of a separate realm of the supernatural, including God, the mind, angels and demons, which intervenes in the otherwise passive material world. If there is no real distinction between natural and supernatural, it matters little, from Mersenne's point-of-view, whether God is immanent, as for Stoics and naturalists, or transcendent, as for radical supernaturalists. Mersenne nrusl make a clean distinction between the mechanistic physical universe and the transcendent supernatural. Liberty of indifference was a technical term of the Molinist Jesuits. It seems a'lso to have been accepted by Descartes: see Principles of Philosophy, trans. v. Miller and R. Miller, Reidel (1983), I.x1, x1i. r23 Lenoble, op. cit. (note 1 l4), pp. 57 l-2. r2s Dihle, op. cit. (note 6). 126 Watson, G.,'Free Action and Free Will', Mind 96, I12 (1987). 127 Webster, The Duchess of Malfi,Ill.v.8l-3. 12s Donne, J., 'An Anatomy of the World', pp. 155-7, in The Complete English Poems,(ed.) A. Smith, Harmondsworth (1971). 12e Hooier, R., Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, with an introduction by C. Morris, 2 Vols., London (1969) III.viii.4. rr0 cf.Calvin, Institutes,op.cit.(note28), II.931: 'byHisjustandirreprehensiblebut incomprehensible judgement He has barred the door of life to those who He has given over to damnation'. See also Baker-Smith, D., 'Religion and John Webster', in (ed.) B. Morris, J o hn Web ster, London ( 1 970), pp. 207 -28. 13r On this and other issues relevant to the flee will debate in England see Tyacke, N., op. cit. (nore 90); and colie, R., Light and Enlightenment: A study of the Cambridge Platonists and the Dutch Armireians, Cambridge (1957). r32 Quoted by Porter, H., Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge, Cambridge (1958), p. 377. See Gunby, D., The Duchess of Malfi: A Theological Approach', in (ed') B. Morris, op. cit. (note 130), pp. 179-204. 1 33 Pilkington, 1., Works, (ed.) J. Scholefield, Cambridge (1853), p. 227 . r3a Calvin, Institutes, op. cit. (note 28), l.xiv.20, 21. 13s The Duchess of Malfi,III.v.69-71. r36 Cudworth, R., Letter to Limborch, (1668), quoted by Cassirer, E., The Platonic Renaissance in Eng,land,London (1953), pp. 122-3. r37 Nashe, T., The lh{ortunare Travcllar ant! Otltcr Works' (ed') J' Steane' HarmondsH'.,}l::lil.t;,I:t;", have been rightry rinkcir in the minds or their critics. Damrosch, L., 'Hobbes as Reformation" il;;;;;;"' Implications of the Free-Will Controversy" Journal of History of ldeas 4O' iflg:sz'(1979)' argues that Anglican think-ersrvere so antagonistic towards ffoU*s' punfy t'"tuu'" 'he was systematically reasserting the calvinist determinism "" *ti.tti"-pr"-Luu,liu.r Reforrned Anglicanchurctr.had been based. This may not b" th;^;;;i"irirth lsee note 85 above)' but might well have been accepted by cudworth' ble Morality,London (1731), repr' '' iu6*6t11r, R., A Treatise of Eternal and Immutal New York (1978)' vii. 't,i guot"d' by Niintt, op. clr. (note 7 Z)' p' 129'. 1at Op.ci. (note 139): see Baker-Smiitr, op cit' (note 130)'p'212' rr: p4'1n,r, op. clt. (note 72)'pp'129-33' '., s.itlrtr Museum Additionil Manuscripts' 49'7 9' fol' 5' t14 lbid..4982, fol. 15. r'rs Mintz, op. cit' (note72)'pp'132-3' 116 Cudworth, oP.cit (note139)' 146 103 John Sutton Quoted by B. R. Singer, 'Robert Hooke on Memory, Association, and Time Peroeption', Nolc,t' und Record,s of the Royul Society of London 3l (t976),126. 104 Michael Hunteq Science und Socicty in Restorutiort Englund (Cambridge, 1981), 13, 37,136; Hunter, The Roy,al Society and it,s Fellot,s 1660 1700 (Oxlbrd, 1994),35 54. 105 Henry More, An Antidote Aguinst Atlteisttt, itt A Collection of Sarcral Pltilosoplirnl Writings, vol. I (1662, reprinted London, 1978), Book l, clrapter 1 l, paragraph 2, p. 33; Glanvill, Vanity of Dogmatizing,35,38. 106 More, The Intntortulity of the Soll, in A Collection, vol.2,2.2.7,68; Glanvill, Wmity, 39, 35 6. 107 Glanvill, Vanity, 36, 39. 108 More, Intntortulity,2.l0.9, 105; 2.5.7, 83. 109 Digby, Ttyo Trcati:;es,284 5. 110 Hooke, Lccturcs d Liglrt,142. (This was a 1682 lecture on mernory to the Royal Society.) 11 1 This theoletical imposition of order went togetl.rer, for Hooke, with practical but cxtcrnal schemes lor the organization of ilrfom-ration about the past in diaries, lists and other memory aids: see Lotte Mulligan, 'Robert Hooke's "Memoranda": memory and natural history', Armul:; of scient:c 49 (1992),41 61. 112 Jamie Kassler', htner Musit;: Hobbcs, Hooke, und North on internul cluu.actcr (London, 1995), ch. 3. 113 Hooke, Lecturc,s of Light,l44. This is a strict analogy between'the Soul in the Center of the Repository' and the sun irr-adiating or resonating thloughout the spl.rere of the bodies which it regulates and governs by an attractivc power'. Compare More, Antitlote, l.l 1.1 1, 36. 114 John P. Wlight, Tlrc Sceptical Rcali:;nt o.f Duvitl li.are (Manchester., 1983), 5 9, 704, 2t2,ts, 224-6. I I 5 Locke, E,tsu1',11.33.6,7 . I l6 Wright, Association, Madness, and the Measures of probability', I l6-20. lll Letter Cont:erning Entlusiusnt (1708), quotcd by DePor.te, Nightntures und Hobblhot'ses,434. The Mechunicul Operution o/ the Spirit (1104), quoted by Hillel Schwartz, Knuyes, Fool.s, Mudmen, und the Sttbtle Eflluyir;rl (Gainesville, 1978), 53. Rogel Smith. Inhihition: listory untl meuning in the ,sciences of' rnintl antl bruin (Berkeley, 1992); Georges Canguilhern, Lu Fbrmution tlu Cont,ept de Rt/lexe uux XVI( et XVII( Sl2cy'c.r (Palis, 1955); Michel Foucault, Matlncs.s und Civiliztttior, tl'ans. R. Howald (New York, 1965), 124 46; G. S. Rousseau, 'Towards a Social Anthropology ol the Imagination' (1969), in his Enliglttemncnt Crossings (Mar.rchester, l99l), I 25; W. F. Bynum, 'The Anatornical Method, Natural Theology, and the Functions ol tlrc Brain', Lsis 64 (1973),445 68. 6 Restraining the passions Hydropneumatics and hierarchy in the philosophy of Thomas Willis Jantie C. Kassler So long as the brain is still, a man is in his right mind. (Hippocrates, The Sot:red Diseu.set) INTRODUCTION From the time of the ancient Greeks, there has been a recurring theme in which the passions are conceived as storms at sea or tempests in the air. This theme occurs in two diflerent versions. One version, deriving from the Stoics, regards passions as fatal to a tranquil mind, so that Francis Bacon. for example, wrote: 'as the sea would of itself be calm and quiet, if the winds did not move and trouble it; so . . . the mind . . . would be temperate and stayed, if the affections, as winds, did not put it into tumult and perturbation'.2 The other version, deriving from Aristotle, regards the passions as spurs to action, so that Henry More, for example, maintained that the brisk winds ol passion serve as active forces guarding man's vessel from inertia.3 To extend the metaphor of the passions as winds, one might conceive of the body as a ship, either moved by healthy gales or tossed hither and thither by every wind, and the mind as a pilot or steersman, since reason is supposed to rule the passions. But John Bramhall lamented, for example, that reason is too seldom the guide at the helm, because passion, 'like an unruly passenger . . . thrusts reason away from the rudder'.4 Although the ship model has been used by many writers from antiquity right up to the present day.s this chapter presents an analysis of a different model constructed by Thomas Willis (1621-75), perhaps the most prominent English physician after William Harvey (1578-1657).6 From the single contemporary sorlrce that describes Willis's medical practice, we learn that he was a caring physician;7 and lrom his writings, we discover an astute anatomical and clinical observer.s But his philosophy is Janus-faced, and, hence, presents difficulties for the I l8