Descartes' Bones Read Online Free Page A

the procedure would have a religious cast. Illness and health were almost universally related to being in or out of God’s sight, and the language of healing was shot through with theology. It was commonly held that medicine would work only if a prayer was offered to unlock its powers. Relying on physical remedies alone was often seen as downright ungodly: in England, Puritan minister John Sym advised “caution” that people
“dote not
upon, nor
trust,
or
ascribe too much
to physical means; but that we carefully look and pray to God for a blessing by the warrantable
use
of them.” To do otherwise—to rely on a physic or powder alone—would be to put the material above the spiritual. That was why a strictly mechanical approach to medicine was considered dangerously atheistic.
    Now, it must be said that millions if not billions of people around the world today subscribe to beliefs similar to those of Sym: that the physical and the spiritual—pills and prayers, as it were—are both necessary components to health. They visit specialists and get diagnostic screenings, and at the same time they meditate and pray and ask God for a miracle cure. And these people don’t exactly inhabit the inner recesses of the rain forest; they live modern lives. They are us. What’s more, in the seventeenth century it wasn’t only the premodern Aristotelians who held such views; so, for the most part, did the first generation of modern philosopher-scientists who reacted against them. So, too, did Descartes, who seems to have been as devout a Catholic as anyone of his time and whose whole mechanical account of the universe depended on God to hold it in place. The main challenge in following the story of Descartes’ bones would seem to be understanding exactly what “modern” is. If it means a hard divide between the material and the spiritual, how do we account for the fact that both people of the seventeenth century who brought the modern sensibility into being and people today have managed to bridge this divide? We associate modern with a nonreligious, nonspiritual, purely rational and scientific outlook. Are we wrong to think that? If so, if it’s a false divide, how did it come into being?
    A partial answer is that when, in the early seventeenth century, the premodern worldview built around the received wisdom of the Bible and selected ancient writers began to come apart, and as dissatisfaction with it led to a conviction that the mind’s latent strength could be brought to bear in radically new ways on the body’s weakness, an inevitable result of the new approach was to give greater importance to the physical world and thus, however unintentionally, to devalue theological interpretations. Experimentation was not actually discovered by Francis Bacon in the early seventeenth century, but what Bacon promoted in his
No-vum Organum,
which was published in 1620, was a commitment to reasoning based on observation of the natural world.
    The most far-reaching application of this approach came with William Harvey’s study of the human heart. Following Galen, the accepted thinking prior to Harvey was that the lungs pumped blood; that there were two kinds of blood, one that was made by the heart and another by the liver; and that both were continually used up by the body. Harvey’s dissections and calculations convinced him that the vast quantity of blood that was pumped out of the heart every minute couldn’t possibly be consumed by the body. The bold theory he published in 1628—that the blood circulated continually throughout the body, that the heart was the central pump, and that the liver did not make blood—was not instantly adopted by one and all. Harvey anticipated hostility—“I tremble lest I have mankind at large for my enemies. . . . Doctrine once sown strikes deep its root, and respect for antiquity influences all men”—and indeed some