Harvey's Views on the Use of the Circulation of the BloodCurtis, John Green
History
Harvey's Views on the Use of the Circulation of the Blood
Curtis, John Green
Blood -- Circulation; Harvey, William, 1578-1657
"It assuredly contains the soul first and foremost, not only
the nutritive, but the sensory soul as well, and the motor. The
blood penetrates in all directions and is present everywhere;
if it be taken away, the soul itself is made away with
also and at once; so that the blood would seem to be wholly
indistinguishable from the soul or, at least, should be reckoned
the substance of which the soul is the activity. The soul I aver
to be such that neither is it body at all, nor yet entirely
without body, but comes in part from without, in part is born
on the premises,[281] and in a manner is part of the body;
in a manner, however, is the origin and cause of everything
within the body of an animal, certainly of nutrition, sense,
and motion, and hence, in like manner, of life and death; for
whatsoever is nourished, that same is living, and _vice versa_.
So, likewise, whatsoever is nourished abundantly, increases; but
whatsoever too sparingly, dwindles; and whatsoever is nourished
perfectly, keeps its health; whatsoever otherwise, lapses into
disease. Therefore, as is the soul, so also is the blood to be
reckoned the cause and author of youth and old age, of sleep
and of waking, and even of respiration also--especially in view
of this, that in the things of nature the first instrument
contains within itself an internal moving cause. Therefore, it
comes to the same whether one say that the soul and the blood,
or the blood together with the soul, or, if preferred, the soul
together with the blood, bring everything within an animal to
pass."[282]
Only two years before these words were published the aged Harvey had
said the following:--
"Nor does the blood possess vigor, faculty, reason, motion, or
heat, as the gift of the heart."[283]
A comparison of the foregoing passages from Harvey with the
preceding passages from Aristotle makes it clear that, for Harvey,
although the soul dwells no longer in its Aristotelian seat, it is
no other than the Aristotelian soul which pervades the "principal
part" of the body, the living blood of the Harveian circulation.
What proofs does Harvey offer that the soul is in the blood? He has
offered already one weighty piece of evidence noted by many from
of old in the chase, in butchery, in sacrifice, in battle--the
evidence from fatal hæmorrhage. This had been set forth nineteen
centuries before him by one of his Hippocratic predecessors, who had
referred to the reasoning
"used by those who say that the blood is the man; for, seeing
men slaughtered and the blood running out of the body, they
conclude that the blood is the soul of man."[284]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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