Abstract
Thomas Willis has been criticized for sowing the first seeds of what would become the contemporary reductive turn in psychiatric medicine. Yet an examination of his theory of animal spirits, the keystone of his neurology, reveals that an ineradicable phenomenology remains at the core of his conception of mental illness. While many of Willis’s explanations for psychopathological processes are couched in iatrochemical terms, the felt experience of mental illness maintains a place in his explanations as well as in his descriptions. In the case of many neurological disorders – especially those that are not caused by gross brain trauma – Willis attributes causal power to the disposition of the animal spirits, which themselves display the familiar symptoms of madness. Set against contemporary psychiatric nosology, wherein scientific and phenomenological accounts are only uneasily incorporated, Willis offers a different perspective: the body and its parts constitute but do not render epiphenomenal the phenomenology of mental suffering that was – and remains – the crucial diagnostic measure of psychopathology. In this regard Willis stands in important contrast to his contemporary René Descartes, whose dualism has dominated explorations of the problem of embodiment in the early modern period.
Wherefore to explicate the uses of the Brain, seems as difficult a task as to paint the Soul, of which it is commonly said, That it understands all things but itself (Preface to “The Anatomy of the Brain” (Willis 1681a)).
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Notes
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My project of untangling vitalization from anthropomorphization in Willis’s account of the animal spirits is made more delicate by the shifting significance of the components of the term: today our contrast class for “animal” is “human” or “inorganic,” rather than “vital” or “natural.” Recalling that the root of the word is from “soul” (anima) is helpful here. Similarly, Rousseau (2004, p. 20) claims of the medieval concepts of animal and Holy spirit that “each was embodied in the other, if not an extension of itself then a mirror reflection.” While this description may also aptly apply to the contemporary reader’s associations with the term “spirit,” it should be recalled that Willis was deeply saturated in the iatrochemical tradition in which fermentation and distillation were fundamental forces. “Spirit” was a technical term of art.
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In his discussion of the Epicurean inheritance of Locke and Willis, Wright (1991) notes how Willis’s location of Descartes in this tradition alongside Gassendi and Digby, while seeming bizarre at first to the contemporary reader, demonstrates that in Willis’s milieu “soul” signified precisely those life functions that Descartes banished to the body. Wright emphasizes, however, that Willis’s corporeal soul was ultimately far more expansive, bestowing on animals a “‘sensitive’ use of reason” – a sort of ratiocination (1991, p. 249). Indeed, he goes so far as to suggest that, “For Willis, the higher soul perceives the images of the lower soul and so operates on and reacts to an entity which is already thinking (in Descartes’s sense)” (Wright 1991, p. 253).
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Otherwise known as the corpus callosum.
- 7.
Willis distinguishes between the sensitive soul, constituted by the spirits in the nerves and brain, and the vital soul, which plays little role in sensation or perception but is responsible for activities of bodily maintenance like breathing, digestion, and the flow of blood. Nonetheless he refers to man as a two-souled creature, conflating the vital and sensitive functions into one corporeal soul.
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See also Chap. 1 of this volume.
- 9.
Nonetheless I would tend to agree with Sutton (1998, p. 45) that their ontology was of less general interest than their ability to be controlled, both by the rational soul and by the physician.
- 10.
The broader role of animal spirits in neurology was also challenged as well as championed during the seventeenth century. Harvey was explicitly contemptuous of spirit talk, and Descartes’s theory of muscular contraction was subject to particularly incisive attacks by Jan Swammerdam, who demonstrated that a muscle could shorten without the volume of its paired muscle increasing (as it would following an influx of animal spirits). In the following century Robert Whytt argued strenuously against the anthropomorphic nature of animal spirits, arguing that the movement of nervous fluid should be explained by the natural and law-like telos of the soul rather than by discrete quasi-mechanistic atoms. See Rocca (2007).
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See Conry (1978) for a discussion of Hooke’s influence on Willis’s metaphorical armament.
- 13.
On “sension:” this favorite word of Willis’s refers to the “Symbol,” impression or effect caused by a sensed external object, which, passed along by animal spirits through the nerves, is finally projected onto the inner recesses of the brain as if from a camera obscura. The Century Dictionary (1889) defines “sension” as “The becoming aware of being affected from without within sensation.”
- 14.
For more on the role of animal spirits in the relationship between sensation and motion see Canguilhem (1977), especially the third chapter, which treats Willis.
- 15.
Or Aqua fortis, known today as nitric acid.
- 16.
Today’s hydrochloric acid and sulfuric acid, respectively.
- 17.
For a discussion of the use of “as it were” and other indicators of simile in Willis and other early modern natural philosophers, see Harris (1917). Harris makes the compelling but potentially Whiggish argument that during this period analogy was used as a placeholder for a more technical explanation than contemporary knowledge could support. From this perspective, Willis’s constant use of metaphor in the discussion of neuropathology would suggest that he did not find iatrochemistry sufficient to explain every aspect of the soul. For more on Willis and metaphor see Rousseau (2004, p. 4).
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Tabb, K. (2014). ‘Struck, As It Were, with Madness’: Phenomenology and Animal Spirits in the Neuropathology of Thomas Willis. In: Smith, C., Whitaker, H. (eds) Brain, Mind and Consciousness in the History of Neuroscience. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8774-1_3
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