Abstract
In 1647 the much maligned English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), had a protracted illness, which he afterwards described briefly in a letter and from which description we may identify four stages. First, there was a painful and continuing fever, during which period Hobbes was delirious. This lasted six weeks. Next, as the fever waned, abscesses (’apostemata’) broke out, so that he was confined to bed for four more weeks. Then, after the abscesses healed, he suffered excruciating pain, which he attributed to sciatica (’ischidiaca’). Indeed, the attending physician recorded that the pain was such that Hobbes wished to kill himself. And finally, there was apparent recovery, for as the pain became milder, the will to live reasserted itself.1
... it is not when parts are more relaxed than usual that spasms and tetanus supervene, but when they are more on the stretch.
Hippocratic writings ‘On Fractures’
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Notes
For the letter, written in Latin to Samuel Sorbière and dated 27 November 1647, see G. Croom Robertson, ‘Some newly discovered letters of Hobbes’, Mind 15 (1890) 446–7.
See also G. Patin, Lettres..., ed. J.H. Reveillé-Perise (new edn., 2 vols., Paris, 1846) vol.2, pp. 593–4. Apparently, Patin treated Hobbes for several illnesses, according to F.R. Packard, Guy Patin and the Medical Profession in Paris in the XVIIth Century (New York, 1970) p. 89.
J. Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. O.L. Dick (Harmondsworth, 1978) p. 315.
(Letter to) R. Boyle, The Works, ed. T. Birch (6 vols., London, 1965–66), vol. 6, p. 486. For this letter and evidence of Hooke’s friendship with Hobbes, see J.C. Kassler, Inner Music: Hobbes, Hooke and North on Internal Character (London, 1995), p. 128.
Aubrey, Brief Lives, p. 316.
J. Parkinson, An Essay on the Shaking Palsy (London, 1817) pp. 3–9, who did not mention such symptoms as immobile facial expression, eye movement abnormalities and loss of strength in the modulation of the voice. But he did attempt to distinguish between the tremor of Parkinsonism and other kinds of tremor. For modern attempts,
see L.J. Findley and R. Capildeo (eds.), Movement Disorders: Tremor (London, 1984), who identify three cardinal features of Parkinsonism: tremor, rigidity and bradykinesia.
According to S. Mintz, ‘Thomas Hobbes’, in C.C. Gillispie (ed.), Dictionary of Scientific Biography (16 vols., New York, 1970–80) vol.6, pp. 444–51.
T. Hobbes, ‘De corpore’, in W. Molesworth (ed.), Thomae Hobbes Malmesburiensis Opera philosophica quœ Latine scripsit (5 vols., London, 1839–45) vol.1;
T. Hobbes, ‘Concerning Body’, in W. Molesworth (ed.), The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmsbury (11 vols., Scientia Aalen, 1962) vol.1. Hobbes did not prepare the English version; nevertheless, I rely on it here for quotations.
For details, see Kassler, Inner Music.
E.T. Bell, Men of Mathematics (New York, 1961) p. 13, points out that: All the points on a segment of a straight line... have no... clear-cut individualities as have the numbers of the sequence 1, 2, 3,..., where the step from one member of the sequence to the next is the same (namely 1:1 + 2 = 3, 1 + 3 = 4, and so on); for between any two points on the line segment, no matter how close together the points may be, we can always find, or at least imagine, another point: there is no ‘shortest’ step from one point to the ‘next’: in fact there is no next point at all. See also E.T. Bell, Mathematics: Queen and Servant of Science (New York, 1951) pp. 297–8, 301–2.
D.E. Hahm, The Origins of Stoic Cosmology (Ohio State University Press, 1977) pp. 3–10.
See Kassler, Inner Music, Chapter 2.
M. Mersenne, Harmonie universelle... (Paris, 1636/37), whose experiments are described by
F.V. Hunt, Origins in Acoustics: The Science of Sound from Antiquity to the Age of Newton (New Haven, 1978) pp. 89–94.
See also S. Dostrovsky, ‘Early vibration theory: Physics and music in the seventeenth century’, Archive for the History of Exact Sciences 14 (1974–75) 169–218.
M. Mersenne, ‘Ballistica’ and ‘Hydraulica’, Cogitata physico mathematica... (Paris, 1644), contains expositions of Hobbes’ ideas as follows: ‘Ballistica, Praefatio...ad Lectorem’ (unpaginated on faculties of the soul); ‘Ballistica, Corollarium post Prop. XI’ (p. 29–30 on dynamics and ‘reditus arcus’); ‘Ballistica, Proposition XXIV et Monita I et II’ (pp. 74–82 on theory of light and planetary motion); ‘Hydraulica, Corollarium II post Propos. XXV (pp. 129–31 on ‘De parabola helici Archimedeae aequali’). The first treatise was described by J. Wilkins, ‘Mathematical magic (1648)’, The Works... (2 vols., London 1802) vol.2, p. 162, who wrote: He that would be informed in the nature of bows, let him consult Mersennus de Ballistica et Acontismologia, where there are diverse subtile enquiries and demonstrations, concerning the strength required to the bending of them to any distance, the force they have in the discharge, according to several hints, the strength required to be in the string of them, the several proportions of swiftness and distance in an arrow shot vertically, or horizontally, or transversally. For Hobbes’ own contribution to Mersenne’s tracts, see below (Note 21).
Hobbes, ‘Concerning Body’, p. 73.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. ix.
According to R. Colie, Paradoxia epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton, 1966) p. 431, the subject of Vesalius’ book provided a metaphor for all sorts of ‘uncoverings’, in which the investigators sought to articulate, as anatomy does, the disparate parts of a system or systems into a fitting whole. For examples of such ‘uncoverings’ in Vesalius’ book, see the muscle illustrations in the frontispiece to this volume, and fig. 8 in Martin Kemp’s paper (also this volume).
See Mintz, ‘Thomas Hobbes’; but from the musical inventory, he also seems to have played the lute. See L. Hulse, ‘Hardwick MS 29: A new source for Jacobean lutenists’, The Lute 26 (1986) 63–72.
Aubrey, Brief Lives, p. 399: At Paris he [Petty] studyed Anatomie, and read Vesalius with Mr. Thomas Hobbes, who loved his company. Mr. H then wrote his Optiques [see below Note 21]; Sir W.P. then had a fine hand in drawing and limning, and drew Mr Hobbes Opticall schemes for him, which he was pleased to like’.
T. Hobbes, Critique de ‘De mundo’ de Thomas White, ed. by J. Jacquot and H.W. Jones (Paris, 1973), which includes, besides the edition of Hobbes’ manuscript, his Latin poem on the motion of the earth and his English notes on an early draft of some chapter of De corpore; see also
T. Hobes, Thomas White De mundo examined..., trans. H.W. Jones (London, 1976).
T. Hobbes, ‘Opticorum libri septem Praefatio ad Lectorem IV, M. Mersenne, Universœ geometriœ, mixtaque, synopsis et bini refractionum demonstratum tractatus (Paris, 1644), pp. 472–5. For a detailed treatment of Hobbes’ treatise and its reception, see A.E. Shapiro, ‘Kinematic optics: A study of the wave theory of light in the seventeenth’, Archive for History of Exact Sciences 11 (1973) 143–72, who is the first to point out that Hobbes began the kinematic tradition in continuum theories of light.
Aubrey, Brief Lives, pp. 292, 318.
G. Keynes, The Life of William Harvey (Oxford, 1966). For Harvey’s treatise, see below (Note 51).
Kassier, Inner Music, and ‘The paradox of power: Hobbes and Stoic naturalism’, in S. Gaukroger (ed.), The Uses of Antiquity: The Scientific Revolution and the Classical Tradition (Dordrecht, 1991) pp. 53–78.
R.G. Frank, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists: Scientific Ideas and Social Interaction (Berkeley, 1980) pp 38–42.
Quoted in Keynes, The Life, p. 388n. Today, peristalsis is understood as a progressive wave of contraction seen in tubes provided with longitudinal and transverse muscular fibres (e.g. the gastrointestinal tract). It consists in a narrowing and shortening of a portion of the tube, which then relaxes, while a distal portion becomes shortened and narrowed. By means of this motion the contents of the tube are forced toward the opening.
E.g., R. Tuck, Hobbes (Oxford 1989) pp 49–50, who repeats, uncritically, the interpretation of S. Shapin and S. Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, 1985). The latter authors focus on Hobbes’ criticisms of Boyle’s vacuum experiments, so as to depict Hobbes as an anti-experimentalist. But see Kassler, Inner Music, Chapter 2.
I.e., works written after c.1636.
T. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C.B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth, 1986). The terms, physiology and pathology, were coined in the sixteenth century by the French physician, Jean Fernel.
For the nomenclature, see Hahm, The Origins of Stoic Cosmology, pp. 154–5, 168, 170–2, 179 n.45, and E. Bastholm, The History of Muscle Physiology... (Copenhagen, 1950) p. 21 et passim.
G.E.R. Lloyd (ed.), ‘The heart’, trans. by I.M. Lonie, Hippocratic Writings (Harmondsworth, 1986) 347–51, p. 348.
In Aristotle’s technical vocabulary, neura denotes sinews, ligaments and muscles but not nerves. See F. Solmsen, ‘Greek philosophy and the discovery of the nerves’, Museum Helveticum 18 (1961) 150–67, 169–97 and ‘Tissues and the soul: Philosophical contributions to physiology’, Philosophical Review 59 (1950) 435–68.
Aristotle, De motu animalium, trans. by M.C. Nussbaum (Princeton, 1978). See also Bastholm, The History of Muscle Physiology, pp. 41–52.
For the importance of the lever principle in Aristotle’s philosophy, see T.J. Tracy, Physiological Theory and the Doctrine of the Mean in Plato and Aristotle (Chicago, 1969).
Aristotle, De motu animalium, seems to introduce connate pneuma as a development of his earlier doctrine of innate heat. See E. Mendelsohn, Heat and Life: The Development of the Theory of Animal Heat (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1964) pp. 11–4, who remarks that vital heat, as defined by Aristotle, was utilised in explanations by the foremost physicians and physiologists well into the seventeenth century.
See B. Inwood, Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism (Oxford, 1985).
For illustrations relating to bow and lyre strings, see Hahm, The Origin of Stoic Cosmology, pp. 153–4; for illustrations using the taut threads of a spider’s web, see S. Sambursky, Physics of the Stoics (London, 1987) pp. 24–5, 123–4. The pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus, used all three analogues to illustrate ‘back-stretched connection’ (i.e., tension).
J. Rist, ‘On Greek biology, Greek cosmology and some sources of theological pneuma’, Prudentia supplementary number (1985) 27–47, p. 45. Chrysippus did not give up the imagery of a lyre, as Hahm, The Origin of Stoic Cosmology, p. 169, claims; rather, he changed the emphasis of the lyre imagery from that of a plucked lyre string (Cleanthes) to that of the whole lyre bound together by tonoi (Chrysippus).
See Hahm, The Origin of Stoic Cosmology, pp. 169, 171; J.B. Gould, The Philosophy of Chrysippus (Leiden, 1970) p. 195.
For the Stoic definition of ‘primary impulse’ as the power—tonike dunamis—to set oneself in motion in pursuit of goals, see Inwood, Ethics and Action, pp. 27–8. Hence, the precondition for primary impulse is tautness—syntonia.
See Hahm, The Origin of Stoic Cosmology, pp. 167, 182–3, n.77.
Bastholme, The History of Muscle Physiology, pp. 74–96; Sambursky, Physics of the Stoics, pp. 32–4.
C. Sherrington, A note on the history of the word “tonus” as a physiological term’, in C.L. Dana (ed.), Contributions to Medical and Biological Research dedicated to Sir William Osler... (2 vols., New York, 1919) vol.1, pp. 261–8;
F. Fearing, ‘The reflex maintenance of posture’, Reflex Action: A Study in the History of Physiological Psychology (New York, 1964) pp. 218–31.
O. Temkin, ‘Vesalius on an immanent biological motor force’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 39 (1965) 277–80.
In 1664 Niels Stensen argued that muscles do not consist of parenchyma and fibres; rather, they are collections of motor fibres which may be divided into minor fibrils bounded together by continuous transverse fibres of the membrane of the muscle. See E. Bastholm, ‘Niels Stensen’s myology’, in Gustav Scherz (ed.), Steno and Brain Research in the 17th Century (Oxford, 1968) pp. 147–53. Long after the seventeenth century nerves continued to be conceived not as bundles of fibres but as tubular prolongations of the substance of the central nervous system, although there were some early sceptics, including Vesalius and his pupil,
Gabrielo Falloppio. See, e.g., E. Clarke, The doctrine of the hollow nerve in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, in L.G. Stevenson and R.P. Multhauf (eds.), Medicine, Science and Culture: Historical Essays in Honor of Owsei Temkin (Baltimore, 1968) 123–41.
Inwood, Ethics and Human Action, p. 176. According to Aristotle, De motu animalium, p. 42, ‘sense-perceptions are at once a kind of alteration[,] and phantasiai and thinking have the power of the actual things. For it turns out that the form conceived of the... pleasant or fearful is like the actual thing itself. That is why we shudder and are frightened just thinking of something’.
L. da Vinci, The Notebooks, trans. E. MacCurdy (2 vols., London, 1956) vol.1, p. 107.
Bastholm, The History of Muscle Physiology, p. 117.
See R. Descartes, Treatise on Man, trans. T.S. Hall (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1972), which was written in 1632 but not published until 1662;
and T. Willis, Cerebri anatome: Cui accessit nervorum descriptio et usus (London, 1664).
See P. Ariotti, ‘Aspects of the conception and development of the pendulum in the 17th century’, Archives for the History of Exact Sciences 8 (1971–72) 329–410.
W. Harvey, De motu locali animalium 1627, trans. G. Whitteridge (Cambridge, 1959). The draft is more like a common place book than a treatise, as is clear from the way Harvey recorded the etymology of neura and tenon, ibid., pp. 68 n.1, 69 and n.4, 71 and n.7, 83, 97, 115, 117; repeated Aristotle’s conception of fear (see above Note 46), ibid., pp. 37, 99; reviewed ideas about tremor, ibid., pp. 57, 83, 97, 99, 103, 121, 125, 141, 149; etc.
W. Harvey, De motu locali animalium 1627, trans. G. Whitteridge (Cambridge, 1959), pp. 5, 89 and 117, in contradistinction to his anatomy teacher in Padua, Girolamo Fabrici (Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente), who retained the tendon theory.
W. Harvey, De motu locali animalium 1627, trans. G. Whitteridge (Cambridge, 1959), pp. 111, 150.
W. Harvey, De motu locali animalium 1627, trans. G. Whitteridge (Cambridge, 1959), p. 122 (quod scalpere).
W. Harvey, De motu locali animalium 1627, trans. G. Whitteridge (Cambridge, 1959), pp. 45, 103.
W. Harvey, De motu locali animalium 1627, trans. G. Whitteridge (Cambridge, 1959), p. 111.
W. Harvey, De motu locali animalium 1627, trans. G. Whitteridge (Cambridge, 1959), pp. 67, 111, 143, 145, 147, 149, 153.
W. Harvey, De motu locali animalium 1627, trans. G. Whitteridge (Cambridge, 1959), pp. 27, 29, 61, 65, 83, 119, 121, which includes an instance of tonic motion ‘in the French execution horse’. The translator glosses this as ‘the instrument of torture known as a chevalet’. But the context suggests one of the ‘standing’ positions taken by a horse in dressage. The terms for these positions were explained by Hobbes’ friend, W. Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, La méthode et invention nouvelle de dresser les chevaux (Antwerp, 1658), for whom Hobbes wrote a paper entitled ‘Considerations touching the Facility or Difficulty of the Motions of a Horse on straight lines and circular’. See C.H. Firth (ed.), The Life of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle...by Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle (2d edn., London, n.d.) pp. xiv–xvi, xx–xxii, 62–3 nn.1–2, 106 and n.l, 206.
Harvey, De motu locali animalium, p. 57.
Ibid., p. 57; see also pp. 83, 121.
Ibid., p. 119.
Ibid.
Ibid., pp. 121, 141, 153.
Perhaps from W. Gilbert, De magnete trans. P. F. Mottelay (New York, 1958) pp. 192, 353. For Harvey’s ideas about action at a distance, see Kassler, Inner Music, and The paradox of power’.
For an extensive treatment of Parkinsonism from the physician’s, as well as from the patient’s point of view, see O. Sacks, Awakenings (London, 1982).
Ibid., pp. 10, 38; cf. W. James, Textbook of Psychology (London, 1892) p. 454. The distress that results may call forth a variety of other symptoms, so there is need to alleviate distress by helping to make movement easy. One of the most effective ways of doing this, according to Sacks, ibid., pp. 56, 99, 115, 148, 283, 317, is through the power of music. Since the disorders of movement and force result in a loss of naturalness in posture and action, music supplies externally what the Parkinsonian patient lacks internally, for it functions as an artificial pacemaker, thus restoring, temporarily, each patient’s natural ‘harmony and rhythm’.
Sacks, ibid., p. 11, asserts that Parkinsonism ‘exhibits a formal analogy of conative structure’.
Hobbes, ‘Concerning Body’, pp. 347–8. For details, see Kassler, Inner Music.
Ibid., p. 344.
Ibid., pp. 324–5 et passim, for Hobbes’ kinetic theory of heat.
Tensio (from tendo): to stretch, strain; to aim, shoot (an arrow); to bend (a bow); to tune (an instrument); to endeavour, exert onself. Hooke related stress and strain to a stretched elastic spring, but his constitutive relation applies also to stretched strings and other linear systems. Although Hooke was aware of this relation as early as 1658, he announced it in an anagram in 1676 and provided details in 1678. In contemporary bio-mechanics Hooke’s Law appears in models of postural mechanisms and, especially, that mechanism which determines the tone of a muscle—the stretch reflex.
For some historical background, see J.L. Russell, ‘Action and reaction before Newton’, The British Journal for the History of Science 9 (1976) 25–38, who states that Newton ‘did not create a law of action and reaction out of nothing. It was there already, although associated to a large extent with an obsolete Aristotelian theory of motion’. But see Kassler, Inner Music, for Hobbes’ rejection of the Aristotelian theory of motion.
For the perfectly inverse process called ‘analysis and synthesis’, see W. Sacksteder, ‘Hobbes’ Logística: Definition and commentary’, Philosophy Research Archives 8 (1982) 55–94.
The Stoics identified three states in the cognitive process—presentation, assent and apprehension, the first of which is like an open hand with the fingers outstretched, the second, like the fingers contracted a little, and the third, like the hand closed entirely. In Hobbes’ version, ‘Concerning Body’, p. 392, the incoming sensory impulses reach ‘the last yielding part [the brain]; which by reaction [i.e., resistance], in the same instant, if the reaction be strong enough, makes a phantasm; and a phantasm being made, perception is made together with it’. For Hobbes, therefore, the stages are sense, phantasm and impulse, the last of which involves a contraction of the pia mater as the end link in a chain of events between the incoming stimulus and the outgoing final reaction (e.g., to act or not to act).
The old term for muscle sense, kinaesthesis, was coined in the nineteenth century by H. Charlton Bastian; the new term, proprioception, was coined early in this century by Charles Sherrington.
Hobbes, ‘Concerning Body’, pp. 349–50.
Ibid., pp. 527–8; see also pp. 499–500 on the causes of the ‘concent of sounds’. Today, we would say that the magnetic field vibrates transversely about the direction of propagation, just like a stretched string, with the magnetic field corresponding to the displacement.
If a musician sounds a pitch on a musical string, which is a linear system, the result is a superposition of overtones on the fundamental tone. For Hobbes’ treatment of superposition, see Kassler, Inner Music.
I.e., interference will take place, and this can be heard as beats, which are periodic fluctuations of loudness produced by the superposition of tones of close, but not identical, frequencies. In some cases, however, sound will be interdicted altogether. Although beats have always been known to practical musicians, Mersenne seems to have been the first theorist to describe this phenomenon. See H.F. Cohen, Quantifying Music: The Science of Music at the First Stage of the Scientific Revolution, 1580–1650 (Dordrecht, 1984).
For Hobbes, as for the Stoics, coherence is the criterion. In the case of bundles of vibrating strings, the initial conditions are each string’s modulus of elasticity and density.
E.g., atonic, atonic bladder, atonic ulcer, catatonic, cerebrotonic, dystonic, epitonic, hypertonic, hypotonic, hypotonic diplegia, isotonic, myotonic, myotonic acquisita, myotonic congenita, myotonic paradoxica, myotonic dystrophy, somatotonic, sympathicotonic, syntonic, tonic-clonic, tonic postural epilepsy, tonic seizure, tonic spasm, viscerotonic.
For Hobbes, as for the Stoics, activity and existence are one, so that tonus is the condition for life, and death is a slackening of tension, where living death would be a profound state of stupor, unconsciousness or arrested activity, as in a deep narcosis.
Hobbes, ‘Concerning Body’, p. 78; see also pp. 392, 393, 397, 400.
Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 139.
Ibid, p. 135.
Ibid, p. 142.
Ibid, p. 140.
As a viol and, possibly, a lute player, Hobbes would have had direct experience of false strings, although he also could have learned about them from two other sources: music treatises, including Mersenne, Harmonie universelle; and musicians employed by his patrons—the Cavendish family, their relations and neighbours. For some of the musicians, see, e.g., Hulse, ‘Hardwick MS 29’; D.C. Price, Patrons and Musicians of the English Renaissance (Cambridge, 1981);
and G.A. Philipps, ‘John Wilbye’s other patrons: The Cavendishes and their place in English musical life during the Renaissance’, Music Review 38 (1977) 81–93.
Hobbes, ‘Concerning Body’, pp. 475–6, where rupture means loss of continuity. This may happen in one of two ways, for either the separation may begin in the outermost superficies and proceed successively to the innermost parts thereof; or it may proceed in the convex superficies of the bowed part of a body and proceed to the concave superficies. Both types of rupture may be demonstrated by a lute or viol string which is excessively stretched beyond its tuned tension or excessively pulled or pushed from its equilibrium position.
Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 134; see also pp. 91, 95, where Hobbes attributed night and day dreams to the ‘distemper’—lack of attunement—’of some of the inward parts of the Body’. For attunement in the poetry of Hobbes’ contemporaries, see J. Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry 1500–1700 (New York, 1970).
Ibid., pp. 129–30; see also, p. 430, where Hobbes asserted: ‘the nature of God is incomprehensible; that is to say, we understand nothing of what he is, but only that he is; and therefore the Attributes we give him, are... our desire to honor him with such names as we conceive most honorable amongst our selves’.
See Kassler, Inner Music. The same biblical text supplies Hobbes with the title for his book on the Civil War, Behemoth.
K. Hutchison, ‘Supernaturalism and the mechanical philosophy’, History of Science 21 (1983) 297–333.
M. Hesse, Forces and Fields: The Concept of Action at a Distance in the History of Physics (New York, 1962).
According to W.L. Scott, The Conflict between Atomism and Conservation Theory 1644–1860 (London, 1970), Descartes assumed that hard bodies rebound; but the criticism of his laws of impact led to a different conclusion, and this was maintained by most of the supernaturalists up to and including Newton. Hobbes, ‘Concerning Body’, pp. 334–5 et passim, rejected the metaphysic of impenetrability.
Cicero, De natura deorum (2: 27–30). Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 473, 414, 471–8, defined miracle as ‘a work of God, (besides his operation by the way of Nature, ordained in the Creation,) done for the making manifest to his elect, the mission of an extraordinary Minister for their salvation’; but since ‘Miracles now cease’, he cautioned against the ‘Imposture of Miracles’ by false prophets.
E.g., E.J. Dijksterhuis, The Mechanisation of the World Picture, trans. C. Dikshoorn (London, 1961).
Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Note 27 above).
According to Colie, Paradoxia epidemica, p. 223, nihil paradoxes ‘were engaged in an operation at once imitative and blasphemous, at once sacred and profane, since the formal paradox, conventionally regarded as low, parodied at the same time as it imitated the divine act of Creation’.
Boyle, The Works, vol.1, p. 187; see also p. 194, where Boyle again expressed his dissatisfaction with ‘that principle of Mr. Hobbes, though it be the fundamental one of his philosophy’. According to the classification offered by J.R. Jacob, ‘Boyle’s atomism and the Restoration assault on pagan naturalism’, Social Studies of Science 8 (1978) 211–33, Hobbes would belong to the second group of naturalists attacked by Boyle. The first group, consisting of Roman Catholic scholastic philosophers, adumbrated what Jacob calls an ‘heretical naturalism’ that ‘may be and often is materialistic, but it is never mechanistic. It is animistic and asserts that the world is governed by non-mechanical vital forces or spiritual agencies of divinity’. The second group, believed in God and a divine order; but ‘their God does not exist outside of and above nature, and this divine order is immanent in nature’. Nevertheless, they were regarded as atheists ‘not because they deny God’s existence but simply because they are not theists, though because they worship a God immanent in nature they might also be called deists of sorts’.
C. Webster, ‘The discovery of Boyle’s Law, and the concept of the elasticity of the air in the seventeenth century’, Archives for the History of Exact Sciences 2 (1962–66) 441–502.
G. Galilei, Dialogues concerning Two New Sciences, trans. by H. Crew and A. de Salvio (New York, 1954), pp. 115–6. According to the translators: ‘The one fundamental error which is implicitly introduced into this proposition [Proposition I] and which is carried through the entire discussion of the Second Day consists in a failure to see that, in such a beam, there must be equilibrium between the forces of tension and compression over any cross-section’.
Hobbes, ‘Concerning Body’, p. 343, did not repeat Galileo’s mistake of supposing that in a stressed structure fibres are inextensible.
Boyle, The Works, vol.1, pp. 223–4.
See, e.g., J. Glanvil, Scepsis scientifica: Or, Confest Ignorance, the Way to Science; in an Essay of the Vanity of Dogmatizing, and Confident Opinion, ed. J. Owen (London, 1885), and
H. More, ‘An antidote against atheism’, Philosophical Writings, ed. F.I. Mackinnon (New York, 1969), both of which contain an attack on Hobbes. Although Glanvil and More may be described as emanation theorists and Boyle as an emission theorist, the two types of theorists shared a common approach, as is pointed out by E. A. Burtt, The Metaphycial Foundations of Modern Physical Science (Garden City, 1954) p. 193.
Sambursky, Physics of the Stoics, p. 114.
Quoted in K. Dewhurst, John Locke (1632–1704) Physician and Philosopher: A Medical Biography (London, 1963) p. 285.
E.g., H. von Foerster, M. Mead, H.L. Teuber (eds.), Cybernetics: Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems: Transactions of the Ninth Conference, March 20–21, 1952 (New York, 1953) pp. 6–47 and pp. xvi, 3, 51–2, 68, 70, 131, where the participants fail to recognise that bio-medical and social sciences track scientific conceptual changes and technological concepts. Hence, tension, when applied figuratively (say, to physiological psychology), may derive either from physical tension, as defined in this paper, or from electrical tension, defined before c. 1882 as potential, electromotive or mechanical force exerted by electricity and after c.1882 as the stress along lines of a force in a dialectric.
W. Petty, A Discourse made before the Royal Society... Concerning... Duplicate Proportion (London, 1674).
Quoted in Q. Skinner, ‘Thomas Hobbes and his disciples in France and England’, Comparative Studies in History and Society 8 (1966), p. 165. For Nicholas Mercator’s undated explication of Petty’s duplicate proportion, see J. Aubrey, On Education, ed. J.E. Stephens (London, 1972) pp. 106–8. Mercator also wrote treatises on other aspects of applied mathematics, including one on music, about which
see R. Hooke, The Diary, ed. H.W. Robinson and W. Adams (London, 1935) pp. 242, 254,
and W. Holder, Treatise of the Natural Grounds and Principles of Harmony (New York, 1967) pp. 104–6 (whose ‘Friend’ is Hooke).
For Hooke’s ‘General Rule of Mechanics’, see R.T. Gunther, Early Science in Oxford (15 vols., Oxford, 1923–67) vol.8, pp. 186–7. For an earlier statement (1669) resulting from Hooke’s efforts to demonstrate elastic rebound, see Gunther, ibid., vol.6, pp. 346–8.
For Hooke’s Law, see Gunther, ibid., vol.8, pp. 331–56. M. Hesse, ‘Hooke’s vibration theory and the isochrony of springs’, Isis 57 (1966) 433–41 outlines the development of Hooke’s theory without spotting the influence of Hobbes, although she states clearly what other historians tend to gloss over, namely, that Boyle appeared ‘to feel little obligation to ascribe his assistant’s ideas to their true author until forced to do so’. For the influence of Hobbes, see Kassler, Inner Music, Chapters 3 and 4.
In a series of lectures delivered between 1828 and 1830, Michael Faraday reported that Hooke, in his Micrographia (1665), made the ‘first correct observations’ about the transmission of sound through solid bodies (i.e., that sound was propagated swifter through wire than air) and that his results were confirmed in Berlin in 1788. Faraday’s source for this statement is C. Wheatstone, ‘On the transmission of musical sounds through solid linear conductors, and on their subsequent reciprocation’ (1830), The Scientific Papers... (London, 1879) 47–63. See also J.C. Kassler, The Science of Music in Britain, 1714–1830: A Catalogue of Writings, Lectures and Inventions (2 vols., New York, 1979).
R. Hooke, The Posthumous Works (New York, 1969) p. 364.
Ibid., pp. 183–5.
For Hooke’s musical analogues, see Kassler, Inner Music, pp. 124–59.
L. Brodsley, C. Frank and J.W. Steeds, ‘Prince Rupert’s drops’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society 41 (1986) 10–26, point out that Hooke also was the first to understand the origin of thermal stress.
Kassler, Inner Music, details the experiments with bells, as well as the development of Hooke’s thought concerning body as a resonating system (i.e., a combination of acoustic vibrators and resonators). Perhaps following Hooke, Leonard Euler conceived the sun as an incessantly ringing bell. See A.J.L. James, Thermodynamics and sources of solar heat, 1846–1862’, The British Journal for the History of Science 15 (1982) 155–81, p. 156, who claims, p. 158, that J.R. Mayer rejected the bell analogy. But see J.R. Mayer, ‘Celestial dynamics’, in R.B. Lindsay (ed.), Applications of Energy: Nineteenth Century (Stroudsburg, 1976) 151–286, who, after comparing sound and light, observes, p. 152, that the ‘sun has often and appropriately been compared to an incessantly sounding bell’. The analogy explained the radiation of heat but not its source, as Hooke grasped before Mayer when studying the source of earth tremors from volcanic eruptions. The former, but not the latter, can be explained by the bell analogy, just as, today, we describe the earth, during tremors, as ‘ringing’ like a bell.
For Hooke’s answer to More, see Gunther, Early Science in Oxford, vol.8, p. 188.
The case was similar with Hooke’s combustion theory, for which, see D. McKie, ‘Fire and the flamma vitalis: Boyle, Hooke and Mayow’, in E.A. Underwood (ed.), Science, Medicine and History... (2 vols., London, 1953), voll, pp. 469–88.
Boyle, The Works, vol.5, pp. 1–37.
Ibid., p. 22.
Boyle, ibid., p. 4, mentions Hooke only once, when reporting the theory of an ‘ingenious person’ on the cause of a flint’s sparking (a marginal note identifies the person as Hooke).
E.g., in describing Hooke’s experiments with glass bells, Boyle, ibid., pp. 30–1, ignored the patterns of vibration of the contained substance, reporting only that the substance is agitated. By contrast Hooke’s glass bell experiments provided a visible demonstration of patterns of vibration, a type of experiment Hooke devised as early as 1665 with sand on a stretched drum membrane. See Kassler, Inner Music, pp. 157–58.
See, e.g. R. Westfall, Force in Newton’s Physics: The Science of Dynamics in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1971) pp. 211–12, 260–61.
Objections to the resonance theory of sympathy seem to have been made on the grounds that the motion of the untouched string had been caused not by the ‘impulse’ of the air but by the propagated motion of the instrument itself to which the touched string was also fastened. Boyle focused on this very problem, which I hope to treat in detail elsewhere.
A periodic vibration is heard as a tone; for beats, see above (Note 79).
Aubrey, Brief Lives, p. 315; for historical background concerning singing for health, see G. Finney, ‘Medical theories of vocal exercise and health’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 40 (1968) 422–49.
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Kassler, J.C. (2000). On the Stretch: Hobbes, Mechanics and the Shaking Palsy. In: Freeland, G., Corones, A. (eds) 1543 and All That. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 13. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9478-3_5
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