Exploring our archives

I’ve just been referred to this searchable collection of document descriptions and images online, the Waller Collection from Uppsala University. It includes a letter from Hooke to his friend the MP, natural philosopher and antiquary James Long dated 1688 in which he discusses the auctioning of books, sends a new history of China along with some ‘very considerable relations’ of earthquakes in Peru, China, Spain, and India. Hooke puts forward a theory that ‘the Poysenous Exhalations that Issue from such Eruptions may have caused those Distempers in the seasons and constitutions of the air and euen of the helth of People, though in Countrys very Remote, which haue accompanyd them or been always contemporary’. He goes on to speculate that such noxious fumes might have contributed to the ‘Aguish distemper’ then affecting people in England and France, as well as to the plague spreading in Germany. Hooke was of course correct to assume that the effects of earthquakes could have long-term effects on public health through environmental contamination, although inaccurate in linking them to the plague.

Various references to earthquakes also appear in the Hooke folio. At a meeting of 20 June 1677, Hooke outlined his theory that hills and mountains had been originally thrown up by earthquakes. He illustrated this idea by referring to a cliff in his childhood home of the Isle of Wight ‘whose bottom is washt by the sea wherein at a pretty depth below the top and at many fathoms aboue the surface of the sea he found shells of seuerall sorts which he thinks may possibly haue been placed there by earthquakes remouing the superficiall parts of the earth Rasing the bottom of the sea and sinking the surface of the Land.’ He then supported his theory by reading from Varsenius’ account of a huge lake in China that was created after an earthquake. On 12 December the following year, Hooke returned to the subject of earthquakes, this time linking them to volcanoes in explain how metals like gold, which he reasoned were heavy and therefore ought to lie closer to the centre of earth, were occasionally brought closer to the surface. Christopher Wren also came up with various , rather less accurate, theories about what earthquakes could reveal about the earth, reasoning at a meeting of 12 January 1680 that earthquakes might occur when parts of the earth fell down into great subterranean caverns, this fall being the cause of the noise and shaking of the surface of the earth.

The collection also includes manuscripts from several other of the Society’s prominent members, including Joseph Banks, Isaac Newton, Joseph Dalton Hooker, and George Biddel Aidy.

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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

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