The Anatomy of Melancholy: Philosophy Classic. Robert Burton

pleasure and pain. His organ is the same with the common sense, and is divided into two powers, or inclinations, concupiscible or irascible: or (as one [991] translates it) coveting, anger invading, or impugning. Concupiscible covets always pleasant and delightsome things, and abhors that which is distasteful, harsh, and unpleasant. Irascible, quasi [992] aversans per iram et odium, as avoiding it with anger and indignation. All affections and perturbations arise out of these two fountains, which, although the stoics make light of, we hold natural, and not to be resisted. The good affections are caused by some object of the same nature; and if present, they procure joy, which dilates the heart, and preserves the body: if absent, they cause hope, love, desire, and concupiscence. The bad are simple or mixed: simple for some bad object present, as sorrow, which contracts the heart, macerates the soul, subverts the good estate of the body, hindering all the operations of it, causing melancholy, and many times death itself; or future, as fear. Out of these two arise those mixed affections and passions of anger, which is a desire of revenge; hatred, which is inveterate anger; zeal, which is offended with him who hurts that he loves; and [Greek: epikairekakia], a compound affection of joy and hate, when we rejoice at other men's mischief, and are grieved at their prosperity; pride, self-love, emulation, envy, shame, &c., of which elsewhere.

      Moving from place to place, is a faculty necessarily following the other. For in vain were it otherwise to desire and to abhor, if we had not likewise power to prosecute or eschew, by moving the body from place to place: by this faculty therefore we locally move the body, or any part of it, and go from one place to another. To the better performance of which, three things are requisite: that which moves; by what it moves; that which is moved. That which moves, is either the efficient cause, or end. The end is the object, which is desired or eschewed; as in a dog to catch a hare, &c. The efficient cause in man is reason, or his subordinate phantasy, which apprehends good or bad objects: in brutes imagination alone, which moves the appetite, the appetite this faculty, which by an admirable league of nature, and by meditation of the spirit, commands the organ by which it moves: and that consists of nerves, muscles, cords, dispersed through the whole body, contracted and relaxed as the spirits will, which move the muscles, or [993]nerves in the midst of them, and draw the cord, and so per consequens the joint, to the place intended. That which is moved, is the body or some member apt to move. The motion of the body is divers, as going, running, leaping, dancing, sitting, and such like, referred to the predicament of situs. Worms creep, birds fly, fishes swim; and so of parts, the chief of which is respiration or breathing, and is thus performed. The outward air is drawn in by the vocal artery, and sent by mediation of the midriff to the lungs, which, dilating themselves as a pair of bellows, reciprocally fetch it in, and send it out to the heart to cool it; and from thence now being hot, convey it again, still taking in fresh. Such a like motion is that of the pulse, of which, because many have written whole books, I will say nothing.

      SUBSECT. IX.—Of the Rational Soul.

      In the precedent subsections I have anatomised those inferior faculties of the soul; the rational remaineth, "a pleasant, but a doubtful subject" (as [994]one terms it), and with the like brevity to be discussed. Many erroneous opinions are about the essence and original of it; whether it be fire, as Zeno held; harmony, as Aristoxenus; number, as Xenocrates; whether it be organical, or inorganical; seated in the brain, heart or blood; mortal or immortal; how it comes into the body. Some hold that it is ex traduce, as Phil. 1. de Anima, Tertullian, Lactantius de opific. Dei, cap. 19. Hugo, lib. de Spiritu et Anima, Vincentius Bellavic. spec. natural. lib. 23. cap. 2. et 11. Hippocrates, Avicenna, and many [995] late writers; that one man begets another, body and soul; or as a candle from a candle, to be produced from the seed: otherwise, say they, a man begets but half a man, and is worse than a beast that begets both matter and form; and, besides, the three faculties of the soul must be together infused, which is most absurd as they hold, because in beasts they are begot, the two inferior I mean, and may not be well separated in men. [996] Galen supposeth the soul crasin esse, to be the temperature itself; Trismegistus, Musaeus, Orpheus, Homer, Pindarus, Phaerecides Syrus, Epictetus, with the Chaldees and Egyptians, affirmed the soul to be immortal, as did those British [997]Druids of old. The [998]Pythagoreans defend Metempsychosis; and Palingenesia, that souls go from one body to another, epota prius Lethes unda, as men into wolves, bears, dogs, hogs, as they were inclined in their lives, or participated in conditions:

      [999]———"inque ferinas Possumus ire domus, pecudumque in corpora condi."

      [1000]Lucian's cock was first Euphorbus, a captain:

      "Ille ego (nam memini) Trojani tempore belli,

       Panthoides Euphorbus eram,"

      a horse, a man, a sponge. [1001]Julian the Apostate thought Alexander's soul was descended into his body: Plato in Timaeo, and in his Phaedon, (for aught I can perceive,) differs not much from this opinion, that it was from God at first, and knew all, but being enclosed in the body, it forgets, and learns anew, which he calls reminiscentia, or recalling, and that it was put into the body for a punishment; and thence it goes into a beast's, or man's, as appears by his pleasant fiction de sortitione animarum, lib. 10. de rep. and after [1002]ten thousand years is to return into the former body again,

      [1003]———"post varios annos, per mille figuras,

       Rursus ad humanae fertur primordia vitae."

      Others deny the immortality of it, which Pomponatus of Padua decided out of

       Aristotle not long since, Plinias Avunculus, cap. 1. lib. 2, et lib. 7. cap. 55; Seneca, lib. 7. epist. ad Lucilium, epist. 55; Dicearchus in Tull. Tusc. Epicurus, Aratus, Hippocrates, Galen, Lucretius, lib. 1.

      (Praeterea gigni pariter cum corpore, et una

       Cresere sentimus, pariterque senescere mentem.)[1004]

      Averroes, and I know not how many Neoterics. [1005]"This question of the immortality of the soul, is diversely and wonderfully impugned and disputed, especially among the Italians of late," saith Jab. Colerus, lib. de immort. animae, cap. 1. The popes themselves have doubted of it: Leo Decimus, that Epicurean pope, as [1006]some record of him, caused this question to be discussed pro and con before him, and concluded at last, as a profane and atheistical moderator, with that verse of Cornelius Gallus, Et redit in nihilum, quod fuit ante nihil. It began of nothing, and in nothing it ends. Zeno and his Stoics, as [1007]Austin quotes him, supposed the soul so long to continue, till the body was fully putrified, and resolved into materia prima: but after that, in fumos evanescere, to be extinguished and vanished; and in the meantime, whilst the body was consuming, it wandered all abroad, et e longinquo multa annunciare, and (as that Clazomenian Hermotimus averred) saw pretty visions, and suffered I know not what. [1008]Errant exangues sine corpore et ossibus umbrae. Others grant the immortality thereof, but they make many fabulous fictions in the meantime of it, after the departure from the body: like Plato's Elysian fields, and that Turkey paradise. The souls of good men they deified; the bad (saith [1009]Austin) became devils, as they supposed; with many such absurd tenets, which he hath confuted. Hierome, Austin, and other Fathers of the church, hold that the soul is immortal, created of nothing, and so infused into the child or embryo in his mother's womb, six months after the [1010]conception; not as those of brutes, which are ex traduce, and dying with them vanish into nothing. To whose divine treatises, and to the Scriptures themselves, I rejourn all such atheistical spirits, as Tully did Atticus, doubting of this point, to Plato's Phaedon. Or if they desire philosophical proofs and demonstrations, I refer them to Niphus, Nic. Faventinus' tracts of this subject. To Fran. and John Picus in digress: sup. 3. de Anima, Tholosanus, Eugubinus, To. Soto, Canas, Thomas, Peresius, Dandinus, Colerus, to that elaborate tract in Zanchius, to Tolet's Sixty Reasons, and Lessius' Twenty-two Arguments, to prove the immortality of the soul. Campanella, lib. de sensu rerum, is large in the same discourse, Albertinus the Schoolman, Jacob. Nactantus, tom. 2. op. handleth it in four questions, Antony Brunus, Aonius Palearius, Marinus Marcennus, with many others. This reasonable soul, which Austin calls a spiritual substance moving itself, is defined by philosophers to be "the first substantial act of a natural, humane, organical body, by which a man lives, perceives, and understands, freely doing all things, and with election." Out of which definition