Exploring our archives

Mechanics and the soul may seem like rather distant concepts these days, but the two concepts collided in the early debates of natural philosophy. Descartes, followed by mechanist philosophers like Gassendi (translated by Walter Charleton, FRS) had challenged atomist ideas with their conceptions of the universe as governed by mechanical laws, a mechanical concept of the workings of the human being was perhaps a natural progression.

At a meeting of June. 28. 1682 Hooke finished reading a discourse, which he had begun at the previous meeting.

Those present objected that ‘this Discourse had tended to proue the soule mechanicall’. In response:
M[r]. Hooke answered that there was noe such thing hinted
or in the Least Intended It being only intended to shew
that the soule did forme for its own vse certaine corpore
all Ideas which It stored vp in the Repository or organ of
memory, and that by its power of being Immediately sensible
of those Ideas wheneuer it exerted its power for that end
It thereby became sensible of those Ideas formerly made
as if they were made at that present but w[th] this Differ
rence that the further they were remoued from the cen
ter or seat of its more Immediat momentary Resi=
dence the more faint were the Reflections or Reactions
from them, and that occasioned the notion of the Distance
of time.

It is not explicit from the minutes which discourse Hooke was reading here, although Birch concludes that this discourse represented three of the Cutlerian lectures, later published in his ‘Posthumous Works’, edited by Waller. Waller dates the ‘lectures of light’ to ‘April 1681 and thereafter’, and a passage of this tract in which he describes the memory as the ‘Repository of Ideas’. While noting that the sense play a part in interpreting the impressions delivered to this repository, Hooke notes that the most important part is the soul, which directs and guides these impressions: ‘for I conceive no idea can be really formed or stored up in this Repository without the Directive and Architectonical Powers of the Soul’ (PW, p. 140).

Hooke had also referred to the soul in his ‘General Scheme or Idea of the PRESENT STATE of Natural Philosophy. . .’ begun in the early 1660’s as part of his unfinished ‘Philosophical Algebra’, and which mixes a Baconian approach to experimental knowledge with mechanist ideas. Here, the concern of the usually practically-orientated Hooke with the soul becomes a little clearer: following Bacon, he notes that the senses on their own are insufficient to produce a true understanding of the workings of nature. Man must therefore assist his sense, beginning with a thorough interrogation of his own soul to find the prejudices to which he is subject and the conscious correction of them:
The best remedy against this inconvenience, is the finding out what Constitution ones self is, and to what either naturally or accidentally most inclin’d to believe, and accordingly by reasoning and comparing things together to consider what the things themselves hint, and what Intimation proceeds from ones own consciousness’.

Hooke’s idea of the soul could be compared to his conception of machines, therefore, but not in the sense of either as unchanging and operating like clockwork, rather both can be regarded as aids to understanding, to be examined and improved, and compared with the impressions given by other instruments.
Johannes Amos Comenius. Orbis sensualium picus. Nuremburg, c. 1658. Wellcome Trust image L0007596

Comments :