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The Early Modern conception of Body

Summary

Part of the early Modern conception of the human being was that s/he had a body. This was thought of in a way that represented the rejection of Scholastic hylomorphism. It was considered by most thinkers to be a congeries of corpuscles, each with a finite set of properties, subject to a finite number of forces. And the properties of the body as a whole flowed from the properties of the corpuscles (of which there were fewer).

Introduction

To appreciate the Early Modern conception of the body you really need to have some appreciation of the Scholastic framework of thought about the human being, which I have tried to outline on another page. (The key ideas were prima materia and form.)

The question I begin to address below is What replaced that pre-Modern framework?

On this page I try to explain the situation regarding a new notion of matter. (And on another, the Early Modern take on mind.)

The Early Modern conception of matter

The idea of matter as sort of mass of 'undifferentiated stuff' out of which everything was made was not sponsored by mainstream medieval thought - by Aquinas, for example - but it wasn't new with the Modern period either. It is there in Ancient thought, in Aristotle in particular, and the Aristotelian position is debated within the medieval period (see E. Grant's exquisitely titled book Much Ado About Nothing). But it was an idea that received fresh articulation by Descartes as an aspect of the birth of Modern science.

The 'plenum'

Descartes speaks of the whole universe as being one single extended thing:

"Let us conceive of matter," he says, "as a real, perfectly solid body which uniformly fills the entire length, breadth and depth of ... space" (Descartes; Cottingham, Descartes, p.87).

This is the theory of the plenum. If we tried to think along plenum lines, tried out the idea of there being just one huge thing filling the whole of space, how then would we have to think of the ordinary-loooking apparently individual things which appear before us as we look about us?

Descartes' plenum theory proposes that the individual physical 'objects' of ordinary experience - boulders, trees, the bodies of horses and of human beings - are simply 'local disturbances' in the plenum. We are to think of the plenum on the model of a river in which there occur eddies and whirpools. Individual objects are like the eddies and whirpools - or groups of eddies or whirlpools - as they form here and there within the river.

'From what has already been said, we have established that all the bodies in the universe are composed of one and the same matter, which is divisible into indefinitely many parts, and is in fact divided into a large number of parts which move in different directions and have a sort of circular motion.' (Descartes, Principles II 46 Cottingham, Descartes, p.92.)

This 'plenum' conception of Descartes' did not gain general acceptance, but it's detail does articulate for the Modern period the notion of 'matter' as the basic stuff of which everything else is constituted. What we call 'physical things' are according to this theory local movements of the plenum - and since the plenum is otherwise undifferentiated everything 'material' is being thought of by Descartes as being made out of 'the same kind of undifferentiated stuff'.

Corpuscularianism

One point being made by the plenum theory was that physical stuff was continuous - ie that physical things could in principle be divided indefinitely - keep on splitting a physical thing into two and you would never reach a situation where what you had was 'in principle' indivisible.

But not all the revolutionary thinkers agreed on this point.

Those who defended corpuscularianism maintained that there were basic units of matter which were in principle indivisible.

This is a peculiar thought because it runs counter to how we think of space. Ordinarily (today) we think of space as 'infinitely divisible', don't we, or in other words of space as somehow 'continuous'. So if you took what the corpuscularians regarded as a single corpuscle and thought of the space it occupied you would be thinking of the space as 'in principle' divisible but the corpuscle itself as not. So you could have the thought: 'the left hand half of this corpuscle occupies a different bit of space from the right hand half'. But what is this thought but the thought that the corpuscle as in principle divisible?

So while the plenum theory held that the 'ordinary physical bodies' that we appear to see about us were local disturbances in a single plenum, others thought that instead of one body, the plenum, at bottom there there were in fact lots of very small in-principle-indivisible-bodies, corpuscles, out of which bigger ones - ordinary objects - were formed through agglomeration.

But then it is clear that Descartes himself thought it was useful to think of everything being made of such small bodies or "particles" - so long as you thought of those particles as themselves consisting of vortices in the plenum.

Robert Boyle, actually the person most identified with 'corpuscularianism', maintains exactly the same position:

"I agree with the generality of philosophers, so far as to allow that there is one catholic or universal matter common to all bodies, by which I mean a substance extended, divisible, and impenetrable." - Selected Philosophical Papers of Robert Boyle, p18.

So neither Boyle nor Descartes were philosophically strict corpuscularians.

For one of those - that is, for a defender of the idea that everything material was made up of an agglomeration of in-principle-indivible-particles - we turn to Galileo.

Galileo, with precise geometrical argument (which it needed, you may think), maintained that a material thing consisted of an infinite number of 'indivisible, and infinitely small components'. I'll just link to this - it's quite a long passage:

Galileo, Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences, 1638; English Translation by Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio, Macmillan, 1914; on-line presentation of this edition thanks to Michael Fowler, p.41. (Galileo's defence starts at page 21)

It was around the 'corpuscularianism' of Boyle (and, as we have seen, actually, Descartes) that the consensus settled at the end of the 17th Century. The universe is then conceived of as consisting of as in effect an enormous (or infinite) number of solid discrete particles, each of them a definite size and shape.

There are, according to the corpuscularian, a limited variety of types of corpuscle. All they have in common are the properties essential to material objects, their 'materiality'. Descartes thought there was only one such property - 'extension'. Anything extended for Descartes was a material object, and if a thing had extension, that was enough to make it a material object. Boyle thought Descartes might be right about that, but there was also a possibility he thought that to be material a thing had to be impenetrable as well:

"...since the true notion of body consists either alone in its extension, or in that and impenetrability together, it will follow that the differences which make the varieties of bodies we see must not proceed from the nature of matter - of which, as such, we have but one uniform conception - but from certain attributes, such as motion, size, position, &c. ..." (Boyle, Selected Philosophical Papers pp. 203-4.)

Corpuscles were thought also to have properties in addition to those which were essential to their materiality: shape, for example, whether they were moving or not, and at what speed. Theorists drew up different lists of these properties, and Locke for example, drew up different lists in different chapters of his exposition.

Corpuscles were thought of as subject to 'forces' of various kinds (the number and kinds varying from one theorist to another), and as a result they sometimes combined, it was thought, to form complexes. The things of everyday experience - a table, a fence - were thought of as composed of the elementary particles, either as individuals or clustered into sub-complexes.

A material thing made up of corpuscles also had properties. These included the properties essential to materiality - of course - and they included all the other properties which the corpuscles were considered to have. But the big things of ordinary experience were thought to have still more properties. For example a lump of sugar had the property of tasting sweet. Part of the goal of science was thought to be to show how the properties exhibited by ordinary-sized things were a consequence of the more limited number of properties possessed by their constituent corpuscles.

Basic properties explain others

Here for example is Galileo explaining the basis of a thing's taste:

"Perhaps the origin of two other senses lies in the fact that there are bodies which constantly dissolve into minute particles, some of which are heavier than air and descend, while others are lighter and rise up. The former may strike upon a certain part of our bodies that is much more sensitive than the skin, which does not feel the invasion of such subtle matter. This is the upper surface of the tongue; here tiny particles are received, and mixing with and penetrating its moisture, they give rise to tastes which are sweet or unsavory according to the various shapes, numbers and speeds of the particles. And those minute particles that rise up may enter by our nostrils and strike upon some small protuberances which are the instrument of smelling; here likewise their touch and passage is received to our like or dislike according as they have this or that shape, are fast or slow, and are numerous or few. ...

"To excite in us tastes, odors, and sounds I believe that nothing is required in external bodies except shapes, numbers, and slow or rapid movements. I think that if ears, tongues, and noses were removed, shapes and numbers and motions would remain, but not odors or tastes or sounds. The latter I believe are nothing more than names when separated from living beings, just as tickling and titillation are nothing but names in the absence of such things as noses and armpits. "

Galileo, The Assayer, 1623, translation by Stillman Drake, in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, 1957, New York, Doubleday; p.274-7.

I have now tried to explain what the dominant corpuscularian framework meant by a 'body' - including a 'human' body - in the early Modern period. It was considered by most thinkers to be a congeries of corpuscles, each with a finite set of properties, subject to a finite number of forces. And the properties of the body as a whole flowed from the properties of the corpuscles (of which there were fewer).

How then was the mind conceived of?

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