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    Plan détaillé Texte intégral Introduction Fernel on Seeds Harvey on Seeds Conclusion Bibliographie Notes de bas de page Auteur

    Analogies végétales dans la connaissance de la vie de l’Antiquité à l’Âge classique

    Ce livre est recensé par

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    Table des matières

    Jean Fernel and William Harvey on Seeds

    Benjamin Goldberg

    p. 197-225

    Résumés

    Abstract. The analogy of the seed is an ancient and omnipresent feature of theories of generation in the history of philosophy. The basic idea is that animals emit seeds that are like those of plants, these seeds containing some power or force for development. In this essay, I compare and contrast the use of this analogy in two influential philosopher physicians: Jean Fernel (1497-1558) and William Harvey (1578-1657). I characterize Fernel’s account as compositional, focusing on the nature of seeds and what they contain, namely, the innate heat (calor innatus) and spirit (spiritus). While Harvey’s theory is similar in that he, too, thinks that this heat is key to understanding the process of generation, his use of the seed analogy is functional--he focuses less on what seeds contain and more on the fact that the ‘seed’ is a stage in the teleological process of reproduction. That is, while Fernel focuses on seeds as a vehicle for spiritus, Harvey concentrates on the fact that seeds are always paired with fruits, setting up a system of hypothetical necessities within a teleological system of directed development toward the creation of the living offspring. The two thinkers also differ on the nature of the power of the heat, Fernel evincing a Platonic position that requires the heat in the seed partake of a superior, Divine body (spiritus), while Harvey maintaining an Aristotelian position that locates the direct instrument of soul directly to the heat of the blood. While these differences are important, I also argue that there is a fundamental congruence between their theories of the seed insofar as both emphasize the need for seeds to act beyond their elemental natures. Both philosophers thus elevate the status of the vegetative soul, articulating how it is superior to the rational soul insofar as it can create the structure and function of a living being.

    Résumé. Le recours analogique à la graine est une caractéristique ancienne et omniprésente des théories de la génération dans l'histoire de la philosophie. L’idée fondamentale consiste à poser que les animaux émettent des graines pareilles à celles des plantes, ces graines contenant un certain pouvoir ou force de développement. Dans cet essai, j’analyse les points communs et différences de l’usage de cette analogie chez deux médecins philosophes influents : Jean Fernel (1497-1558) et William Harvey (1578-1657). Je caractérise le récit de Fernel comme compositionnel, en ce qu’il traite de la nature des graines et de leur contenu, à savoir la chaleur innée (calor innatus) et l'esprit (spiritus). Bien que Harvey conçoive également cette chaleur comme essentielle pour comprendre le processus de génération, son utilisation de l'analogie des graines est d’abord fonctionnelle - il s’intéresse moins à ce que contiennent les graines et plus au fait que « la graine » détermine une étape du processus téléologique de reproduction. Autrement dit, alors que Fernel se concentre sur les graines en tant que véhicule pour le spiritus, Harvey se concentre sur le fait que les graines s’accompagnent toujours de fruits, et met en place un système de nécessités hypothétiques dans le cadre d’un système téléologique de développement orienté vers la création de la progéniture vivante. Les deux penseurs diffèrent également sur la nature de la puissance de la chaleur : Fernel assume une position platonicienne qui situe la chaleur dans la semence d'un corps divin supérieur (spiritus), tandis que Harvey maintient une position aristotélicienne qui localise l'instrument direct de l’âme dans la chaleur du sang. Bien que ces différences soient importantes, je soutiens également qu'il existe une congruence fondamentale entre leurs théories de la graine, dans la mesure où toutes deux soulignent la nécessité pour les graines d'agir au-delà de leur nature élémentaire. Les deux philosophes accordent ainsi à l'âme végétative un statut hiérarchique supérieur à celui de l’âme rationnelle, dans la mesure où l’âme végétative crée la structure et les fonctions de l’être vivant.

    Texte intégral Bibliographie Notes de bas de page Auteur

    Texte intégral

    Introduction

    1It remains common to talk about reproduction in terms of an analogy: the male emits a “seed” that is “implanted” in the body of the female, and thus we find the following correspondences:

    • Animal seed ~ vegetable seed;
    • uterus/menstrual blood ~ soil;
    • animal development ~ plant growth;
    • animal heat ~ Sun’s heat.

    2This was first articulated, perhaps, by Anaxagoras, but it was quickly adopted throughout antiquity, invoked by Aristotle and Galen, Porphyry and Plotinus1. Importantly, after Aristotle, we see the invocation of the Sun’s heat as an analogue to what would become known as the animal or vital or innate heat (calor animalis, calor vitalis, calor innatus)—a special heat that corresponds to the element of the stars2. In the Medieval period, Augustine and Albertus Magnus developed the analogy into a model for natural causation: “seminal reasons (logoi spermatikoi)”, used even in non-organic contexts like mineralogy3. The Renaissance witnessed a flowering of new ideas about seeds, especially among an eclectic group inspired by Marsilio Ficino4. These followers attempted to unite theology and natural philosophy in a profound way, linking soul to seeds, seeds to natural causes, and natural causes to God. They had a profound effect on medicine: Girolamo Fracastoro constructed a theory of contagion based on the idea of seeds of disease, wherein tiny particles could cause sickness in whosoever’s body now served as fertile soil5.

    3Here I concentrate on this analogy in the generation theories of Jean Fernel (1497-1558) and William Harvey (1578-1657). A century separates their respective works: Fernel’s De abditis rerum causa of 1551 and Harvey’s Exercitationes de generatione animalium of 1651. Their works reflect different times and places, differing ideas of anatomy, medicine, and philosophy, as well as different traditions—Harvey a product of Paduan Aristotelianism, Fernel the apotheosis of Renaissance Platonism’s influence in medicine. Harvey was deeply familiar with Fernel’s works, which formed the assumptions within and against which he worked. He mentions Fernel directly many times: 11 times in the Prelectiones6, 3 times in De circulatione sanguinis7, and 5 times in De generatione animalium8. In this last, we find Harvey critiquing Fernel, emphasizing disagreements not just in doctrine, but also in method9. Fernel, unlike Harvey, wanted to show the fundamental coherence of the Ancients’ explanations and their agreement with Christian theology (Prisca theologia)10. Harvey, unlike Fernel, wanted to observationally and experimentally describe the phenomena of generation (historia anatomica)11. Indeed, it was one of his observations—that there was no sign of the seed in the womb immediately after coitus—that prompted Harvey to reject much that had been central to Renaissance explanations, in particular, many doctrines concerning seed, explicitly arguing against Fernel12.

    4While there have been a number of scholarly works discussing Fernel and Harvey, there has been no direct examination of the way in which they use the seed analogy13. I will focus on two aspects: the first connects vegetable and animal kinds: animals emit seeds like the seeds of plants. These seeds serve as the means of delivering a power to generate, creating not just structure, but function, form, and vital activity. Both thinkers deny that seeds are equal to this task by their motion or matter alone. We thus encounter the second aspect: the process of embryogenesis requires a force that works like a craftsman, operating as if by foresight14. This occurs not due to actual reasoning, but because of the nature of the substance involved, in particular, its innate heat. The connection with craft is important, emphasizing a teleological structure assumed in both intentional actions and natural processes. While Fernel explains the craft-like nature of the seed through the addition of a Divine spiritus that guides this heat, Harvey refers his explanations to the heat itself directly, which, across the stages of generation, acts as the direct instrument of the vegetative soul. We might call Fernel’s position a compositional account of seeds (focusing on seeds as containers), and Harvey’s a functional one (focusing on the role of seeds as a stage during development).

    5Across the Renaissance, the analogy of the seed was elaborated, debated, and hybridized in the eclectic style of Humanist medicine. For our purposes, what is important is that discussions of seeds blossomed into a fully-fledged system of natural philosophy. Much of the discussion was instigated by the work of Marsilio Ficino, who deployed them to explain nature and especially God’s relation to nature, using a variety of kinds of semina, e.g., seeds of things (semina rerum) or seminal reasons (rationes seminales). Hiro Hirai has analyzed this explosion of seed-talk, describing chains of influence that link Renaissance Platonism to seventeenth-century Epicureanism15, including the numerous ways in which Jean Fernel was influenced by Ficino16.

    Fernel on Seeds17

    6Hirai has established that Fernel was the first academic physician to introduce Ficino’s ideas of seeds into learned medicine18. Our main source is his De abditis rerum causa—an attempt to understand occult causes. A theme throughout this work is that the seed is Divine, and it must be so, because it operates beyond the bounds of elemental nature. Indeed, despite his disagreements with Fernel, Harvey largely agrees with the need for supra-elemental causation to explain generation19.

    7In the background is a primary concern of Fernel’s, namely, finding what is divine (to theion) in nature, something celestial in origin20. Relevant here is Fernel’s rejection of Niccolò Leoniceno’s (1428-1524) naturalistic interpretation of Galen’s formative force, which argues that the innate heat is not Divine21. In the first book of De abditis, Fernel establishes the celestial origin of form and soul, moving on to address a belief about the nature of its three parts (vegetative, sensitive, and rational): only the supreme (rational) is Divine and immortal, the others perishable22. Contrary to this view, Fernel argues that the vegetative and sensitive aspects of soul—thought inferior—are also celestial in their origin. Important here is the Galenic doctrine of the formative force, as it is this force in the seed that causes generation23.

    8The first book of De abditis argues for a distinction between the seed as the origin of the fetus, and the origin of the seed’s power, and thus the origin of the forms of living things. The second then book argues that, given this, we must assume that,

    […] everything in us comes from God and through God; this Creator of all things maintains the beginning, the end and the middle of all things; everything is full of gods, and the divine virtue and potency, by which everything exists and persists, makes its way through everything; filling up this universe and initiating the perpetual generation of things, God was divided up through all natures by their particular seeds according to kinds and species […]24.

    9God’s Divine power is distributed throughout the natures of things; thus God is the primary cause, the operations of nature happening via secondary causation, acting as His instruments25. This is accomplished by seeds, through which He bestows the breath of life. Following a long tradition identifying breath and spirit with heat and growth26, Fernel talks of “the divine spirit and heat in the seed” which is capable of preparing “[…] the substrate matter of the seed in such a way as to induce a mingling and tempering appropriate to the individual parts27” Fernel thus uses seed in two senses: one refers to the material vehicle of the divine spirit and heat, the other to that heat and spirit directly, the vegetative soul and its attendant power of generation. We shall see a similar double conception in Harvey.

    10Using these assumptions, Fernel argues for the necessity of the Divine, affirming that the cause of generation, that which molds, feeds, preserves and governs the body until death, is a single substance, variously called soul, nature, or native heat (calor nativus). Fernel then deploys the craft aspect of the seed analogy:

    On the view and judgment of others, [Galen] says that the substance of the soul and the nature is incorporeal, and is contained in the seed. As a rule, indeed, he calls the seed the “nature simpliciter” and at times “the other origin of our coming into being”, and sometimes “the very strong craftsman”; whenever he enters upon a more precise style of speech, he states that it is not in fact a craftsman, but has a craftsman in it […] Therefore the incorporeal nature confined in the seed receives its powers from there just as a craftsman receives his from his instrument […]28.

    11Note two things here: first, Fernel characterizes this faculty or nature as incorporeal. Second, Fernel separates the material body of the seed from the power contained within it, characterizing the latter as a kind of craftsman, an Artifex, that gives the seed the power to construct and shapes the fetus after the likeness of the parents. Fernel’s aim here is to reject Leoniceno’s materialistic interpretation of soul as destructible, arguing that Aristotle and Galen placed the architect of the fetus far beyond this elemental realm29.

    12The craft analogy is indispensable, as it is the teleological structure of craft that allows for explanation. The seed, insofar as it acts towards a goal in a series of ordered steps, constructs the embryo according to that plan, the goals setting up a system of hypothetical necessities30. Fernel, unlike Harvey, does not dwell much on craft, though, in a passage similar to Harvey, he does argue that the process of generation is similar to the process of creation in art: “Cannot a sculptor mould a statue in his mind, without the aid of any outside instrument, by using simply his skill (which is his power)31?” It is the nature of craft not just to have goals, but also tools—instruments—that help accomplish those goals. The relevant similarity here is that both craft and generation depend on an immaterial form (an idea in the mind of the artist, the form contained in the seed) to guide the action of an instrument (the sculptor’s chisel, the material body of the seed and the prepared matter of the womb) in the creation of a new object after that form (the artwork, the offspring)32.

    13So, what is the relation of the body of the seed to the power it holds? And what is the relation of the conception to the body of the seed? Here we turn to instrumentality. The basic idea is that the soul literally organizes the body according to its powers, setting up that system of hypothetical necessities: for each end (i.e., nutrition, growth, movement), a system of parts and processes are required, just as with the sculptor, where the goal of creating a statue necessitates various tools like hammers and chisels. This forms a complex set of nested instrumental relations, in which the body of the seed is instrumental to the power of the seed, forming its first foundation, the seminal parts upon which it (and the embryo upon it) is built33. The matter of the seed and the menstrual blood are prepared especially for the reception of form, acting as instruments to the Divine formative force. The power in the seed does not work directly through its material body, but, instead, through the spirits found inside34. The material aspect of seed is used by the power of the seed as a tool, just as the sculptor uses a chisel to make their task easier. The nature of this Divine power in the seed corresponds to an enigmatic passage from Aristotle’s Generatione Animalium II.3, where the formative power of the vital heat is said to correspond to the element of the stars. This heat causes growth, unlike the heat of fire, and Fernel identifies it with the nature contained within the seed. Finally, Fernel argues that this power—the “craftsman (artifex)” or “workman (opifex)”—is ontologically separate from the material body of the seed, its origin both external to the seed and celestial in nature35.

    14Complications set in with the fact that, while seeds are the vehicle of soul in generation, and heat the nature of Divinity, there is, in addition, an intermediate entity or attendant vehicle active in generation: spiritus36. Fernel, in grand Renaissance-Platonic fashion, qualifies spiritus in two ways: superior and inferior. There is the superior spirit of nature, the cosmic mind or God or World-Soul (animus mundi), which is, “Dispersed far and wide, it embraces everything, it cheers everything, carrying along with it the vital soul of the world, and nature itself; it renders vital everything into which it has extended37.” The inferior spiritus is that of individual, mortal objects: thus, as seed is the vehicle for spiritus, so too spiritus is the vehicle for the innate heat, which, in turn, is the vehicle (or better, instrument) of the soul and its faculties, or, as he says, the body of soul38. This individual spiritus partakes of the superior, allowing the forms of mortal things to act in accordance with (and with the seeming rationality of) the superior spirit, uniting both in an account of teleological structure of nature, evincing a Platonized, multi-level system of hierarchically organized, hypothetically necessary, instrumental relations39. Hirai summarizes:

    This cosmic mind, identified as the World Soul by all the ancients for Fernel, is now seen as the source of a certain divine “force” (vis) which embraces all the parts of living Beings. For Fernel whatever label is used, be it “nature,” “soul,” or “force,” what governs the functions of body parts must be divine if the formative agent of these parts is divine. Even if there is any other inferior force that molds these parts, it prepares them for its superior agent. Since this force is regarded as divine, the superior agent is more deserving of the title of “divine”40.

    15As we shall see, there is convergence here between Fernel and Harvey, not in the precise relation between God and Nature, but rather in the way that both authors invoke the Divine in the operations of the most basic processes of the living world41.

    16Here Fernel appeals to the aforementioned passage from Aristotle’s Generatione Animalium, invoking celestial heat42. This heat effects the functions of the body (the faculties of the soul), and when this ‘flame’ is no longer kindled, death follows (Harvey making a similar point43). Fernel argues that Leoniceno misunderstands Aristotle: this heat must be external and Divine. Here we learn what divine means: it refers just to that which Aristotle said “corresponds to the element of the stars”, the aether44. Fernel maintains that this heat is beyond the elements45, and it is this supra-elemental nature which affords it the marvelous ability to construct the embryo: “[…] you will understand that the nature, spirit, and heat that the seed holds within its grasp […] are beyond the powers and rank of the elements, and their pre-eminence belong neither to these perishable and base elements, nor to the special character of the temperament46.” The supra-elemental nature of this heat found in the seed is thus the core of Fernel’s account of seed’s ability to generate form and life.

    17We now return to plant analogies, for, following Aristotle and the Platonic tradition, the Sun forms a key example of celestial heat. In fact, beyond the power of solar heat to cause growth, Fernel notes the relationship between spring and plant growth, winter and plant death, the connection between generation and the coming and going of the seasons47. Indeed, meteorology is quite important, for the sun is essential to the causality of reproduction: as Fernel says quoting Aristotle, “A human being and the sun beget a human being48.” In particular, it is the continuous and eternal rotation of the celestial sphere that not just sets these things into motion, but also controls the timing of generation: “And the endless ages of the world demonstrate that the Sun, performing its annual changes with regular rotation, both brings on the births of things, and brings about their declines and deaths by its approach to us or withdrawal from us49.” As he says, beyond the principles of matter and form, there must be an efficient cause of coming into being, the Sun and heavens.

    18Ideas of primary and secondary causation are endemic to discussions of generation, due to the difficulty of explaining it50. Secondary causes—sperm and blood—are not the sort of things that can be said to be causally responsible for their effect: a fully functioning, ensouled living being. As such, a superior primary cause must be added, and both Fernel and Harvey link this to Divine, celestial causes: Sun and God. But Fernel, unlike Harvey, uses a Platonic idea to explain this sort of causality, the light metaphysics of Neo-Platonism. This tradition stems from Plotinus, who, “[…] developed a metaphysical system based on the principle of emanation or radiation. The source of all being […] is the transcendent, self-sufficient One, from whom proceeds all lesser being by an overflowing or emanation of its essence, just as rays of light emanate from the sun51.” Fernel thus connects the emanation or flowing of forms to the relation between form to matter, soul to body, and between Sun and generation52. Souls, then, are not directly transmitted from the Divine, but, following the dictates of emanationist metaphysics, from the Sun flows, “[…] a power capable of producing a soul within suitably prepared matter53.” Thus, for Fernel, no living thing can be understood without due consideration of the Sun and heavens54.

    Harvey on Seeds

    19Harvey’s 1651 Exercitationes De generatione animalium was an influential work, not least because of his introduction of the term “epigenesis” to characterize the process of fetal development part-by-part, over time. While his characterization was remarkably influential, his theoretical explanations did not fare as well, due to his allegiance to what, by the mid-seventeenth century, was an old-fashioned, Aristotelian philosophy55.

    20Harvey, while willing to invoke forms of natural theology, was not concerned with finding the Divine in nature; his work is rather a careful piece of Aristotelian science56. Following Aristotelian strictures, Harvey’s method used collected and organized facts—called historia—to discover causal knowledge57. The former provide the inductive basis for the latter, and are meant to establish what is the case so that why it is the case can be discovered (empirical description to theoretical explanation via causes)58. The transition from what to why is found in Exercise 26 of De generatione, “Quid sit ovum.” On the basis of his broad comparative work, Harvey theorized that all animals come from eggs. Though he did not use the phrase, Harvey became associated with the dictum ex ovo omnia, displayed prominently on the frontispiece to De generatione. This dictum became important in embryology, as in Regnier de Graaf’s argument that humans have ovaries (ovaria) and not female testicles (testes muliebres)59. Harvey’s idea does not refer to the actual mammalian egg (which cannot be observed sans microscope), but rather something abstract: a new concept of the egg such that, in reproduction across all animal kinds, there exist bodies that play the same causal role in analogous material structures, an essential stage in development. The analogy of the seed is important, for the egg is the seed, and thus the bearer of Fernel’s Divine power, which Harvey variously terms the procreative or moulding power (vis procreativa, sive plastica), the vegetative faculty (facultas vegetativa), the efficient cause and craftsman of the future procreation (futurae procreationis efficiens & opifex), or the vegetative soul (anima vegetative)60.

    21Harvey knew the male provided geniture, but he never saw anything in the womb after sex61. He concluded that the substance emitted by the male never reached the womb, and thus its action must affect the female herself, rendering her uterus fertile:

    From the male proceeds only the procreative or molding power which renders the egg fertile but constitutes no part of that egg. For the geniture62 which is emitted by the male […] in no way enters the womb (in which the egg is perfected), nor indeed […] can it by any means penetrate into such places, much less reach the ovary near the middle of the body […]63.

    22Note the language: he uses the Fernelian formulation of procreative power, but so too does he use Jacob Schegk’s vis plastica64. For Harvey, this lack of a material carrier of the male’s power created a problem, since all theories of seed and blood—even Fernel’s, which embraced ethereal spirits and admitted incorporeality—as well as all theories that define the seed as part of the body of the fetus, had to be rejected. Harvey writes that the male grants to the female and to the egg nothing material, but rather a precept that grants, “[…] the definition [rationem], the form and laws of the future fetus […]65.” The male’s geniture must pass on a power without its material ever getting to where that power is expressed, the womb. Instead, it must move through a series of intermediaries, passed along the female’s reproductive tract.

    23Harvey’ term—ratio66—comes from Latin translations of Aristotle’s De anima, denoting an account of the essence of a something, a statement of its form. Harvey, like Fernel, thinks that the male’s contribution is formal, but goes further in arguing that he contributes nothing material, but rather only (some part) of the form of the future offspring in potentia. In fact, the male’s contribution is even more ethereal than in Fernel’s account, because the container (the body of the seed) forms no part of the fetus, and thus cannot be an instrument used by the power of seed. Thus, while Harvey seems to locate vital powers in material things like the blood, he is in actuality committed to a strong mode of formal causation67. Indeed, on account of this material lack, much of Harvey’s work differs from Aristotle’s, which constantly uses mechanical examples (automata) in Book II of the Generatione Animalium68, Aristotle explains how the male’s seed passes its power to the female blood via regular causal processes like mechanical puppets and toys, wanting, “[…] to convey the idea that causation is transitive: A moves B, B moves C69.” This could not be the case for Harvey because there is no material to start this process, nor one to receive it70. Harvey seems to embrace an idea of a power that can be transmitted sans matter.71 Harvey argues that the female’s contribution is also formal: “[…] the form, the definition, and the resemblance of the fetus is no less […] in the female than in the male […]72.” Note that for Harvey the true egg is the product of both male and female, both contributing active potentialities for soul (as A. Code phrases it), whose combination contains the future form of the offspring73.

    24As Harvey’s work undermined existing theories, he turns to speculation. Here, then, we find reference to an idea from the Fincian seed tradition, Fracastoro’s idea of contagion:

    […] all animals whatsoever which arise from male and female are generated by the coition of both sexes, and so are created just as if by some contagion. Just as the Physicians observe that contagious diseases […] slowly reap a massacre of mortal beings and breed affections similar to themselves in the bodies of others only by external contact, nay more, sometimes only by a breath, or through a miasma, and that from a distance and through an inanimate medium, which is not altered in any perceptible way […] It is not, I affirm, the intromitted seed of males which supplies to each egg the office of the craftsman, or constructs its body or introduces its soul, but rather eggs are made fertile by some sort of contact alone74.

    25The male’s geniture acts by the merest touch which imparts a power to the uterus and from there to the egg, without passing this virtue to any intermediary. The male’s emission cannot be true seed, since it does not have the office of craftsman (opificis munus75) so central to Fernel, and to Harvey also:

    …if what I have called by the common name contagion, as having sprung from spermatic contact in coitus, and remaining in the female (the geniture not present here), is the efficient cause and craftsman of the future procreation, if, I say, this contagion (or atoms or odor or ferment or any other thing that it might be), is unrelated to the nature of a body, then it must be something incorporeal76.

    26Note that Harvey characterizes the power involved in fetal development in the same way that Fernel had, invoking the analogy of the craftsman.

    27Harvey’s conception of contagion is distinct from his characterization of this crafting power: the former concerns the mystery of fertilization, the latter what both Fernel and Harvey call a formative or moulding power. Contagion is meant to characterize how this power is transmitted, not how it operates. The former depends upon the idea of fomites, which we find in an annotation of Harvey’s in his copy of De generatione:

    Indeed, morbific contagion [contagium morbificum] is an influx [influxus est] for it can act both at a distance and through some foreign fomitem, or again through the same fomitem, Δ the pox77. It infects those who copulate with a woman in whose womb the poison has not, or not as yet, manifested itself in action but lying hidden as in some harboring-place. Again, rabies in dogs can lie hidden for many months, or WH smallpox for days. And so in the same way the genital seed coming from the male lies hidden in the female as in some fomes78.

    28Fomes means kindling or firewood. As mentioned, Fracastoro uses fomes to indicate the way in which the seeds of contagion are transmitted. Thus, he could explain how, say, the blanket of a plague victim might harm other people: the contagion in the body of the victim produces seeds of disease, which can be expelled and come to rest on a blanket. This blanket, meanwhile, can now infect other persons who imbibe those seeds, which are then implanted in the fertile soil of this new victim. Harvey’s thought is that, just as fomes of contagion can be passed through various intermediaries (person to blanket to person) without the intermediary gaining the power of the contagion, so too can the formative virtue of the male’s geniture be passed along the reproductive tract of the female: the blanket in no way gets sick, in the same way the vagina does not become fertile. But at this point the analogy breaks down, for in Harvey’s case, this power is entirely incorporeal: there can be no material seeds passed to the uterus. So, Harvey uses contagion as an analogy not for generation tout court, but only fertilization79. Here we begin to put some light between Harvey and Fernel, since for the former, a true seed takes its origin from both parents, such as in the seeds of plants, following Aristotle80. Harvey’s conception of the seed and its powers is less materialistic than Fernel’s, insofar as there is no material vehicle by which the innate heat and Divine power can be transmitted.

    29It is well known that Harvey is an important origin for ideas about the mammalian egg, his work is the common origin of both ovist preformationism and epigenesis81. Harvey, recall, argues that there exist bodies playing the same causal role in similar material structures across animals, an essential stage in development. Seeds are the origin of a process involving the transmission of formative powers, and seeds as origins are always matched to fruits as ends. In other words, the transition from seed to fruit sets up that system of teleological relations and hypothetical necessities noted above. This first conception of the fetus is the true seed, and Harvey calls it the egg. This conception is a natural body, endowed with the principle of motion and rest, change and conservation82. It is,

    […] some kind of medium, not only insofar as it is the origin and the end, but as it is the common work of both sexes, and it is composed from both of them. Because it contains in itself the matter and the constructive faculty of both of them, it has the power of both, by which it produces a fetus similar to them both. It is also the medium between animate and something inanimate, for it is neither absolutely bestowed with life nor absolutely deprived of it83.

    30This is a deeply teleological picture of generation. From the male and female contributions an egg is formed84, an intermediate entity: the end of the interaction between male and female, but also the beginning of the embryo, whose end is the completed organism. This true egg cannot have the complete soul of the offspring, since, following Aristotle, the soul is the form of a living thing with all its parts. The egg is intermediate between animate and inanimate: not entirely alive, but certainly not dead. The egg is at a higher level of actuality than the male’s geniture, but lower than that of the completed offspring.

    31Harvey here offers a functional analysis of the seed, his views echoing Aristotle’s. The seed is a role played by the vegetative soul during various stages of embryological development (the last stage of conception, the first stage of fetal growth). It is during the first stage that the formal power, transmitted immaterially from the male, begins its craftsman’s work:

    The egg moreover… corresponds by analogy to the seeds of plants and maintains all the same qualifications that they have, so that it may not undeservingly be judged the seed or sperm of hens (just as the seeds of plants can well be called eggs), as being not only that out of which, as out of matter, but also that by which, as by an efficient cause, the chick arises. In it however, there is no part of the future offspring actually in being, but all parts are indeed present in it potentially85.

    32A seed is not, truly, a material vehicle, but is one of a set of paired opposites that define the teleological system that undergirds Harvey’s explanations. Given the end goal of the actualized, living creature, the process of generation must proceed from the potentiality of the seed/egg to the actuality of the offspring:

    Nor is it [the egg] only the beginning but the fruit and the end; that is to say it is the beginning of the offspring that is to be generated but it is the fruit of both parents, for example the work of the cock and of the hen, or the end which they proposed to themselves in generation, and it is the origin of the future fetus. According to Aristotle, “the seed and the fruit are distinguished from one another by reason that one is prior the other posterior; for the fruit is that which is made of something else, the seed that out of which something is made. For otherwise they are both the same86.”

    33Harvey has made the idea of seed closer to the case of plants, uniting the orders of animal and plant life in a single scheme of reproduction. While both Fernel and Harvey amalgamate generation and the spread of occult diseases via seeds (a Ficinian origin in common), they do so in quite different ways. Harvey does so because contagion seems the only parallel example of a natural phenomenon where transmitting a formal power occurs without touch. Meanwhile, for Fernel, the most salient similarity between occult diseases and generation is that both involve processes wherein the components act beyond their elemental natures and powers.

    34Harvey understands generation as self-maintenance, broadly understood as the care of both the body-soul union and the species, allowing the forms of animal kinds, though not individuals, to achieve immortality87. Harvey argues that it is one principle that animates all the processes that maintain living things, called various things at various times in the life stages of living creatures, but which is a single, Divine power. We shall see that, for broadly Ockhamist reasons, Harvey rejects Fernel’s Platonic picture of a hierarchy of nested powers and divine spirits, in favor of an Aristotelian theory which combines all the various necessities needed to create and perpetuate living things to a single power, differentiated not ontologically as a panoply of different powers, but functionally as different stages of development. We thus come to the innate heat.

    35Harvey, like Fernel, identifies the innate heat as the direct instrument of the soul, responsible for the powers of growth and nutrition88. But here Harvey argues that Aristotle was mistaken, putting Aristotle’s position on the power of the seed close to Fernel’s, both emphasizing the need for something external. We have to be careful here, since we are not talking about primary causation, but secondary—both Harvey and Fernel admit of God and Sun as primary causes89. But here Harvey and Fernel part ways, for Harvey thinks that secondary causes need not have anything added to them. Remember that for Fernel, the craft-like ability of the formative virtue to create the fetus could only be explained by reference to a more Divine body (spiritus) which needs must be added to the seed from outside. Fernel invokes a variety of instrumental efficient causes to explain generation, and Harvey sees something similar in Aristotle. Harvey writes that Aristotle invokes,

    […] so many different efficient causes for the generation of animals, and sometimes had to resort to examples of automata, of coagulation, of art, of instruments and of motion, other times turning aside to the soul in the egg and in the seed of the male […] Moreover, where he seems to establish certainty and determine what it is90 in any kind of seed, whether of plants or of animals, which makes it fertile, he rejects heat and fire as unsuitable craftsman and does not acknowledge any similar faculty; he can find nothing in the seed which is appropriate for that office, and is compelled to admit of some extrinsic, incorporeal thing, which, like art or mind, should form the fetus with wisdom and foresight, and build and ordain all its parts therein in accordance with a goal and for the good of their being. He takes refuge, I repeat, in so me obscure thing unknown to us, in “a spirit contained in the seed and its frothy substance and a nature in that spirit corresponding by analogy to the clement of the stars91.”

    36The language of craft is present here, just as in Fernel. Without this idea, which we can interpret in terms of the coordination between formal, final, and efficient causes, nothing about generation could be explained. Harvey’s larger critique of Aristotle laid out over this and the following exercises is, in part, a rejection of not just the need for some super-added spirit, but also a rejection of material causation in the context of generation, given Harvey’s purported discoveries92.

    37Instead of requiring a superior, Divine body, Harvey says that it is the blood itself, the geniture itself, which are, truly, Divine bodies: there is no need for anything added. Blood is the direct instrument of the soul, and, as such, the efficient cause of the construction of the fetus. This power is effected by means of the heat of the blood, which is now the bearer of that which is “akin to the elements of the stars93.” He argues that Fernel has not carefully thought about the issue94, accusing him of violating Ockham’s Razor:

    Because there has been recent mention of innate heat, I intend to say something about it here by way of dessert […] Surely there is no need to search for any spirit distinct from blood, or to introduce heat from another source, or invoke the gods to appear upon the scene, or burden philosophy with false beliefs: as we know, that which we commonly seek from the stars is born at home. For, truly, the blood alone is the innate heat, or first-born animal heat, as is clearly established from my observations95 concerning the generation of animals (especially of the chick in the egg): as to multiply entities is unnecessary. For indeed there is nothing more prestigious or prior in the body of an animal than its blood; nor are the spirits that some men distinguish from blood anywhere to be found apart from it: blood itself without spirit or heat is no longer to be called blood but gore96.

    38Harvey believes he has solved the riddle of the location of the soul’s instrument on empirical grounds. Because he observed the blood to be the first living, moving particle of the body in generation (the punctum saliens), he argues that we must identify it as the instrument of soul, bearer of life-giving heat, the source of motion in the body. This living blood is by its very nature defined as having this heat, granting it generative and nutritive capacities97. Harvey reduces a multiplicity of explanatory entities to a unity: the nature of the blood is all that is needed to understand physiological processes like generation. And though this heat is “bred and born at home,” it is celestial because it operates like the heat of the Sun, causing growth98.

    39Harvey’s view is based upon his blood experiments, in vivisected animals and removed from the body99. Harvey notices that once removed, it cools, changes color, separating into different parts100. From this he reasons that its essence consists in a heat that, once lost, renders the blood into its parts, mere gore. Heat turns blood into a unified object, giving blood a double aspect:

    Blood, therefore, as it is a living part of the body, is of an ambiguous nature and comes under consideration in two ways. Materially and through itself, it is called nutriment; formally and in so far as it provided with heat and spirits (the immediate instruments of soul), and with the soul itself, it is to be judged the tutelary deity [of the body], its preserver, its principal, primigenial and genital part101.

    40Or as Harvey puts it elsewhere, the blood is “[…] compounded out of soul and body102.” This dual nature—soul and body—is more or less the same as Fernel’s dual-natured seed—spiritus and body103. This nature is also found in the contribution of the male, that which grants what Harvey calls the virtus plastica or facultatem opificem. Both concern the relations between material and formal essence. The latter is heat, and it is this that is responsible for the powers of nutrition and growth.

    41The power of the blood operates according to form and logos, according to the final cause inherent within it, as if it had true foresight:

    Blood also in this way acts beyond the powers of the elements, for while it is now the first-born particle and innate heat of the body (as it is in the seed and in the spirit), it fashions the remaining parts of the entire body in due order; and that with the greatest foresight and understanding, acting towards a certain end, as if made use of some power of reason104.

    42Thus Harvey, in line with Fernel, argues that it is characteristic of generative processes, in fact, all processes involving this vivifying heat, to act beyond their elements. But for Harvey, this process is not caused by God’s distribution of Divine seeds containing spiritus but is rather an effect of God’s Design of the natures of blood and sperm. These objects, being the direct instruments of God and soul, were created with an essence, a ratio or logos, that grants them powers that cannot be reduced to their elemental nature. Despite this similarity, positing supra-elemental powers as a means of explaining generation, there are important differences here. These are not just differences of terminology, nor of ontology, but are rather a reflection of opposing tendencies concerning final causality105. Fernel, following in the Platonic tradition, locates the source of teleology—the relationship between form and matter, soul, and body—in an external cause, spirits added to seed receive form via Divine emanation. Harvey, following Aristotle, locates the source of teleology internal to the natures of animals, what he calls an idea or ratio, a definition of its essence, to ti ên einai. These definitions are, unlike Fernel’s forms, knowable through empirical means.

    43Importantly, the blood’s purpose beyond vivifying heat becomes a pressing question for Harvey after his 1628 De motu, and shapes his investigations into generation—for him it is not seed but blood that is the object of interest106. Indeed, later in the seventeenth century it became a fundamental issue for a Harvey-inspired group, which included Robert Boyle and others founders of the Royal Society, that Robert Frank has termed the Oxford Physiologists107. This problem of the blood, if we understand it from Harvey’s perspective, demonstrates a deep kinship between his two published treatises. In De motu, Harvey is only willing to speculate about the blood’s purpose, whereas in De generatione there is a thoroughgoing, if incomplete, theory of the role of blood in the body. By investigating blood in the context of generation, Harvey had another angle, so to speak, on its nature. He concludes that blood is the prime instrument of the soul, responsible for both nutrition and generation. Of course, central issues are not addressed: why must the blood pass through the lungs? Why in adult animals but not in the embryo? Indeed, the full purpose of the circulation beyond the need for the blood to be distributed around the body for heating and vivification, as well as feeding the parts, remain mysterious. But that he did not solve every problem does not mean that he contributed nothing to the search for the final cause of the circulation. It is clear that in De motu Harvey was already thinking along much the same lines as he would in De generatione108.

    44By arguing that the blood by its very nature was granted supra-elemental powers, Harvey might reasonably conclude that some light has been shed upon the circulation, upon generation, and, indeed, upon all the operations of living things. The blood, as the direct instrument of the vegetative soul, must be present in all parts of the body in order for the body to work. Harvey elevates the divinity of the blood to the status that Fernel gave to spiritus—as the most direct representative of God on earth109. He writes that the vegetative soul,

    […] is by far more excellent and more divine and more nearly resembles God than the rational part of the soul, whose excellence nevertheless we extol with wondrous praises above all the faculties of all animals, as though it held law and authority over the others, and as though all created things were subservient to it. Or then we must confess that, in the works of Nature, there is neither foresight, nor skill, nor understanding, but they seem such only to our concepts, which judge the divine productions of Nature by our own arts and faculties […]110.

    45Notice the prestige given to the vegetative soul—it operates far beyond the capabilities of the rational soul, for no mind could control the incredibly complex construction of the fetus. It is here that Harvey comes closest to mortalism111, but not as, Bono argued, through adding a power to blood and thereby giving a power directly to a material entity—this, I think, is a post Mechanical Philosophy idea about bodies. Instead, Harvey understood the blood’s essence to be expanded to carry the instrument of soul, thereby granting to the lower orders of soul the very characteristics that traditionally distinguished them from the higher, rational soul.

    Conclusion

    46We have seen here that the ideas of seed held by our two authors are quite far apart: Fernel thinks of seed as the material vehicle and container for spiritus and innate heat which are the efficient causes of generation, Harvey understanding the seed as a stage of development, one characterized in a new way through his concept of the egg. Related is another difference: since Harvey does not think a material seed exists until the egg (as the union of male and female) comes into being, he does not think that the seed or geniture of the male becomes any part of the fetus, rejecting Fernel’s ideas that the body of the seed acts as an instrument of generation. Further, Fernel thinks that there is this Divine body, spiritus, superadded through Divine emanation to seed (and blood) which acts as if by reason, whereas Harvey thinks that the blood and geniture bear this force. Though they both elevate the prestige of the vegetative soul, they do so in metaphysically different ways, cleaving to their identities as Platonist or Aristotelian.

    47Despite these important differences, there is sometimes very little light between Harvey and Fernel. Beyond the fact that both rely on the basic vegetative analogy between the seeds of plants and animals, both relate the power of this seed to the innate heat. Further, this innate heat is analogous the element of the stars, and it is this analogy that allows for the seed to act beyond its material components. Both authors depend, crucially, on an underlying model of craft to articulate how generation can happen—it is accomplished analogously to how a building is constructed. A basic idea animating their underlying assumptions is to see the transmission of form in generation as part of the larger transmission of forms in nature, and, in particular, with the spread of infectious diseases. Though they obviously do not rely on exactly the same explanations, evincing different conceptions on teleology, they do both see seeds, heat, and form as the most important secondary causes of a number of related processes in nature.

    48Indeed, both propose something that could be seen as religiously problematic by arguing for the fundamental Divinity of certain processes in nature, and, in so doing, they both elevate what was considered (from both Greek and Christian point of view) the lowest order of soul: the humble anima vegetativa. Their connection of the Divine to the operations of nature has yet a further benefit, allowing both philosophers to unify their cosmologies: both synchronize the operations of nature with a system of coordinated primary and secondary causation, endorsing the ancient adage that Sun and man together make a man. Generation is thus caught up in the cycles of the seasons and of the heavens, offering explanation not just of these causal processes, but also of their systematicity and regularity, making sense of their temporal aspects. Embedding this regularity into a larger cosmological framework is as close as either Harvey or Fernel come to offering a complete explanation112, a style of explanation omnipresent in embryological studies from the seventeenth century through the end of the eighteenth, especially in the context of preformationism113.

    49The explanations of Harvey and Fernel, different though they are, are among the last examples of traditional natural philosophy, soon replaced by the mechanizing tendencies of the neoterics. They both represent the waning of qualitative, classical conceptions of causality, wrapped up in ideas of nature and essence that become increasingly irrelevant across the seventeenth century. But here, in the ways that Fernelian and Harveian style philosophies were rejected, we see a final—and important—difference between our authors. Though both Fernel and Harvey’s theoretical explanations of generation were abandoned, the latter’s empirical and experimental work was esteemed for decades114. Harvey’s authority established two important facts: first, that the egg begins as homogenous ball of undifferentiated matter that develops, part by part, over time: epigenesis. Second, through his idea of the egg, Harvey demonstrated that vivipara and ovipara were analogous, the same sets of causes and processes generating both, and thus also cementing the connection between animal and plant generation. Essential here, it turns out, was an anecdote related by Harvey, who notes in De generatione his visit with Aromatari in Venice, having been shown a tiny leaf of the future plant found inside its bean-pod115.

    50Harvey’s idea of the egg became one of the most important concepts shaping the next century of European philosophizing on generation—though it was often misunderstood, many mistaking Harvey’s functional account for a compositional one. Many began to study and articulate the idea of the viviparous egg, most importantly Nicholas Steno, Johann van Horne, and Regnier de Graaf. In 1667, Steno affirmed an analogy between what were, at the time, called the female testicles of vivipara with the ovaries of egg laying creatures, on the basis of his dissection of a female dogfish shark116. Van Horne in 1668 and De Graaf in 1672 published works on female anatomy that confirmed Steno’s ideas, and, with the egg in place, a theory of ovism would soon supplant both Aristotle and Galen’s theory of seeds, testes muliebres now seen as ovaria117. This example would soon inspire what would become preformationism, and the analogy at issue in this essay, between the seeds of animals and those of plants, proved an important source of inspiration for partisans of preformation118. Harvey was thus a foundational figure in early modern generation theory, his work having formed the basis for both epigenesis and preformation, as well as ovism.

    Bibliographie

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    Notes de bas de page

    1 The literature here is voluminous, but some citations consulted for this essay include: Vlastos 1950; Colish 1985; Boylan 1986; Wilberding 2008 and 2016; and Lo Presti 2014.

    2 Aristotle, Generatione animalium ii.4: 736b29-737a6.

    3 For some orienting discussions, see: Boyer 1931; Brady 1964; Jacquart and Thomasset, 1981; and Takahashi 2008. For Augustine, see, e.g., De Genesi ad litteram, ii, 15, 30; iii, 12, 19-20; iv, 33, 51; for Albert the Great see, e.g., De mineralibus, I, i.8. While earlier neo-Platonics and Stoics had put forward a similar account of causation, these works were not known to medieval thinkers.

    4 Please forgive this entirely avoidable pun. To date, the best work of intellectual history on this subject is Hirai 2005, as well as his numerous other publications on these topics. For a work on a related idea, also employing the analogy of the seed, see: Horowitz 1998.

    5 This idea has roots in the ancient world, though the exact pedigree of Fracastoro’s ideas is complex. For an overview from the Greeks, see Nutton 1983; on Fracastoro see Nutton 1990. See also: Grissom, 2004; and, as always, Hirai 2005.

    6 Harvey 1616 [1964]). For the manuscript see: The British Library, Sloane MS230a.

    7 Harvey 1649.

    8 Harvey 1651. Note that in the first edition of this work, Ex.4 was used twice; in what follows, I shall cite the page number of this edition, but correct the exercise number.

    9 This is related to the differences between physicians and philosophers; for a thorough analysis of the differences between Medici et Philosophi, focusing on generation theory, see: Richardson 2018.

    10 Hirai 2005. See also: Hirai 2011, Ch. 2.

    11 See Lennox 2006 and Goldberg 2013.

    12 Harvey could not see the seed because he worked without a microscope, and thus could not detect sperm. It would wait until the work of Leeuwenhoek and others to change this situation. See: Roger 1993; Richardson 2018; Goldberg 2020.

    13 See especially: Bono 1990.

    14 For discussion: Goldberg 2013, 423-24 and passim.

    15 See also: Hirai 2007.

    16 See: Hirai 2005; Hirai 2006; and Hirai 2016. I borrow the phrase chains of influence from C. Martin’s review of Hirai’s book: Martin 2006.

    17 This section is heavily indebted to the wide-ranging work of Hirai on Fernel.

    18 Hirai 2015, 1004.

    19 This was noted quite some time ago in Walker 1958, 125, in the case of Fernel, for whom “[…] the supposition of astrological spirits extends the area of possible rational explanation to such things as procreation, embryology, infectious diseases, psychological disorders, which cannot be adequately explained by elemental causes, and would therefore, if no celestial causes were assumed, have to be incomprehensibly divine.” The same is true for Harvey, though his conception of astrological bodies is much less indebted to Neoplatonic metaphysics (though these are not entirely absent, at least in Harvey’s use of some terminology, such as World-Soul [Anima Mundi]).

    20 Hirai 2016, 50.

    21 Hirai 2005, 25-26; 32-33; Hirai 2007 392-393. Leoniceno 1532, De virtute formative, ff. 83v-93r. In a very interesting recent paper, X. Wang compares the ideas of Harvey and Fernel on the nature of this divinity, arguing that Harvey thought God was the direct cause of generation. While I disagree with this account, there is not space to take issue with this paper. See: Wang 2019; for differing accounts of these same issues, cf. Goldberg 2013 and Bates 2000.

    22 Important here is the effect of fifth Lateran Council of 1513, and the Apostolici Regiminis, on the teaching and development of naturalistic ideas of soul (and, indeed, debates about the proper modality for studying soul). See: Kessler 1990; Monfasani 1993; and Constant 2002.

    23 Hirai 2016, 51-53.

    24 Fernel 1551 [2005], Bk.2, Ch. 2, 416, trans. Forrester.

    25 For Fernel’s idea of primary causation, see, e.g.: Fernel 1551, Bk I, Ch. 10.

    26 There is a large literature here but see: Solmsen 1957; Walker 1958; Mendelsohn 1964; Bianchi 1982; Freudenthal 1995; and Debru 1996.

    27 Fernel 1551, Bk.I, Ch. 8, 319, trans. Forrester.

    28 Fernel 1551, Bk.II, Ch. 6, 475-477, trans. slightly modified from Forrester (after Hirai 2016, 54).

    29 These ideas, and this same passage, are discussed in detail in Hirai 2016, 52-54.

    30 For hypothetical necessity in Aristotle, see: Bradie and Miller 1984; Cooper 1985 and 1987; and Stein 2016. For similar ideas in Galen, see: Hankinson 1989. And for this idea in Harvey, see: Goldberg 2012 and 2016.

    31 Fernel 1551, Bk.II, Ch. 1, 413, trans. Forrester. Compare to Harvey 1651, Praefatio, B3, and for which see: Goldberg 2013. While he does not dwell so much on craft, the Divine Craftsman is present throughout his work, something inherited from Ficino. For which see Ficino Platonic Theology 4.1 (Allen-Hankins, i: 250 = Marcel, I: 145); and Hirai 2011, 138-139.

    32 This analogy is explored in depth in the context of Harvey’s De conceptione in Goldberg 2013.

    33 See, for instance, Fernel 1557 [2003], Bk.I., Ch. 8, 86. This is one area of disagreement between Fernel and Harvey.

    34 Fernel 1551, Bk.II, Ch. 1, 411-413.

    35 Fernel 1551, Bk.II, Ch. 6, 477. Hirai 2011, 65-67.

    36 Hirai 2007, 392, describes Fernel’s ideas here as a fully Platonized interpretation of Galen and Aristotle, for which, see also Hirai 2005, 24-28.

    37 Fernel 1551, Bk.II, Ch. 7, 481, trans. Forrester. See: Hirai 2011, 68.

    38 Fernel 1551, Bk.II, Ch. 7, 481.

    39 It is important to note that the teleology of Fernel is different from that of Harvey: as S. Carvallo has helpfully pointed out, we might characterize the former’s position as invoking a transcendent causal force, and the latter an immanent one.

    40 Hirai 2011, 65-66. See also Hirai 2005, 86-88.

    41 Though for a differing account, see Bono 1990, 374-375 and passim. Bono argues that Harvey restricts the Divine orchestration of teleological relations in nature to biological matter.

    42 Fernel 1551, Bk.ii, Ch. 7, 481-485; see: Hirai 2011, 69-71.

    43 Fernel 1551, Bk.ii, Ch. 7, 489; cf. Harvey 1651, Ex.52, and especially Ex.71. Harvey often talks about the soul in this flame-based manner.

    44 Fernel 1551, Bk.ii, Ch. 7, 495, trans. Forrester.

    45 Fernel, and most during the Renaissance, do not take the aether to be an element, at least in the same sense as the early elements.

    46 Fernel 1551, Bk.II, Ch. 7, 495, my translation (after Hirai 2011, 72).

    47 See: Aristotle, Physics, II 194b13; Meteorologica, II.2 339a22ff.

    48 Fernel 1551, Bk.I, Ch. 7, 297, trans. Forrester.

    49 Fernel 1551, Bk.I, Ch. 8, 307, my translation.

    50 This assessment echoes Walker’s conclusions from 1958.

    51 Lindberg 1986, 9; and Walker 1958. For some background concerning ideas about light in the mediaeval period, see: McEvoy 1978.

    52 Fernel 1551, Bk.I, Ch. 8, 321.

    53 Henry 2005, 32.

    54 Fernel 1551, Bk.I, Ch. 10, 355, trans. Forrester.

    55 See: Goldberg 2020 for an overview of Harvey’s influence on generation theory. The literature on Harvey is enormous, but the best accounts remain: Pagel’s classic works from 1967 and 1976; and French 2006.

    56 His Aristotelianism is of the eclectic, Paduan variety, for which see: Schmitt 1989; Lennox 2006; and Goldberg 2012 and 2016. For the Paduan background, see: Bylebyl 1979; Schmitt 1985; Cunningham 1985; and Klestinec 2011. For two differing accounts of Harvey on divinity, cf. Goldberg 2013 and Wang 2019.

    57 Pomata 2005. See also: Lennox 2006 and Goldberg 2016.

    58 This is the method of the Aristotle’s Analytica Posteriora and Historia Animalium; see, e.g. , A.Po I.10, 76b21–22, and compare to: HA I.6, 490b7-491a6 , II.15 , 505b26-506a10, and IV.8 , 534b12-15.

    59 De Graaf 1672. Harvey’s idea that all generation proceeds from an egg was quite influential, if also quite misunderstood. See Goldberg 2020.

    60 Harvey was nothing if not both erudite and profligate in his of terminology, as we shall see when it comes to divinity. While Harvey objected to the proliferation of spirits initiated by Fernel, he certainly helped himself to their many names, without not committing himself to any precise ontology.

    61 As noted above, Harvey was wrong about this due to his lack of microscopy.

    62 Harvey uses the term geniture since, strictly speaking, the male’s semen is not a true seed.

    63 Harvey 1651, Ex. 26, 80.

    64 Schegk 1580.

    65 Harvey 1651, Ex.29, 89. “[…] ex praecepto maris; quasi ab hujus coitu, foemina artem, rationem, formam, ac legem futuri foetus acciperet.” Cf. Goldberg 2013.

    66 This is (one) translation of Aristotle’s logos; for discussion of this term in Harvey and his source (the 1552 Giunta Aristotle-Averroes), see Goldberg 2013, 423.

    67 Pagel 1967, 332 argued Harvey was more ‘Aristotelian than Aristotle’ because he eschewed the Philosopher’s ‘dualistic’ tendencies, something argued at length by Bono 1990. The basic idea, that Harvey identifies ‘biological matter’ (namely the blood) and activity (that is, the functions carried out by the vegetative soul) is, I think, an incorrect and anachronistic reading. I think that both Pagel and Bono mistake both Aristotle and Harvey on the topic of causation, mistaking explanation for ontology. Though I do not have space here to argue, I want to suggest that the debate ‘dualism’ and ‘monism’ here is ahistorical and lacking motivation in the texts: Harvey’s ideas of formal and efficient causation, about actuality and potentiality, are extremely close to Aristotle’s, critiquing the Master’s inaccuracies with respect to empirical phenomena, but leaving the system as a whole relatively intact. See: Goldberg 2017; and Lennox 2006.

    68 Aristotle, De generatione animalium II.1: 734b 1; II.5: 741b8. Cf. Matthen, 1989.

    69 Berryman 2003, 359. See also: Lennox, 1982; and Matthen 1989.

    70 It’s important to remember that, for Aristotle and Harvey, there is no sense in which organisms really work like mechanical devices—the analogy is really an analogy, in contradistinction with the dictates of the post-Cartesian world, where the various forms of the mechanical philosophy look at the world as literally a machine.

    71 This seems to me to greatly undermine Bono’s 1990 account of Harvey’s ‘monism.’ Harvey does locate the power in the blood, but its activity is separable from its matter in a way that Aristotle might very well deny (given his claim that form and matter are but two sides of the same coin, which can only be separated in one’s mind but not in fact).

    72 Harvey 1651, Ex.29, 89.

    73 Code, 1987, 51-59.

    74 Harvey 1651, Ex.49, 138.

    75 Officio and munus are part of a constellation of technical terms in Renaissance anatomy (actio, utilitas, usus), which serve to undergird the teleological hierarchy of functions in living organisms. Office refers to a kind of functional role—very often an instrumental role—which can be played by different parts in different kinds of organisms. For discussion of this terminology, see: Goldberg 2012 and 2016; and Distelzweig 2014.

    76 Harvey 1651, De conceptione, 297.

    77 The delta is Harvey’s way of signifying a comment of his own in his notes.

    78 Harvey 1651, in his copy of De generatione animalium, in the Pybus Collection in the library of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne; quoted in Whitteridge’s 1981 translation of De generatione, 463.

    79 Besides contagion, Harvey turned to a variety of similar phenomena in order to describe the mode by which the male transmits his power to the female (which, again, is not the same as how he characterizes embryogenesis). These include analogies with magnetic phenomena, sympathetic medicine, and so on, all of which seem to have occult or rather unknown cause [occulta vel ignota] and do this without contact.

    80 Harvey 1651, Ex.26, 76. In Whitebridge’s edition, she does not extend the quotation from Aristotle far enough, as nearly the whole passage is a very close paraphrase of Generatione Animalium I.18: 724b 12-17.

    81 Goldberg 2020; aspects of this story can be found in the classic history of generation theory: Roger 1993.

    82 Harvey 1651, Ex.26, 77.

    83 Harvey 1651, Ex.26, 76. Note that the grammar here is a bit unclear, but Harvey does not maintain that both male and female contribute matter; the ‘of both of them’ refers only to the constructive faculty.

    84 This is also discussed in Goldberg 2013.

    85 Harvey 1651, Ex.26, 76.

    86 Harvey 1651, Ex.26, 76. C.f. Aristotle, Generatione animalium I.20, 728b 33-35.

    87 See especially Harvey 1651, Ex.28, 86.

    88 It’s important to emphasize that this idea is not, in any way, unique or special to Fernel or Harvey: it is a commonplace of early modern medicine, found, in differing ways, in many authors. To take just one example of this oft repeated idea, see Sennert 1694, 77.

    89 Cf.: Fernel 1551, Bk I, Ch. 10, 355 and 357 and Harvey 1651, Ex.50, 144.

    90 That is, what the soul in the seed is.

    91 Harvey 1651, Ex.47, 132-133.

    92 For a larger discussion of material causation and materialism in Harvey, see Goldberg 2017.

    93 See Richardson 2018 for a discussion of the role of the innate heat among Renaissance physicians and philosophers.

    94 Harvey 1651, Ex.71, 245. Harvey also includes Scaliger, but I must leave him aside for the present paper.

    95 Harvey uses this word in two ways: sometimes to refer to empirical experiences done in the course of, say, anatomy; and sometimes to refer to the conclusions of all those observations, which often includes things we wouldn’t count as observations, for instance, the circulation. This is an ambiguity seen in a number of early modern medical contexts (it is very common, for instance, in collections of medical recipes).

    96 Harvey 1651, Ex.71, 244.

    97 Note a disagreement with Wang 2019, who argues that God is directly involved through intervention, whereas here and in Goldberg 2013 it is maintained that God’s involvement comes from Design, not direct intervention a la occasionalism. I do not, unfortunately, have space here to respond to Wang’s argument, but please do note that this issue is by no means settled one.

    98 This connotation between blood, heat, and soul is ancient: for instance, in Homer’s Odyssey, a dead person’s soul can be brought back to a kind of life by drinking blood. Indeed, these sorts of connections resound throughout Ancient Greek thought, from Hippocrates to Aristotle, Galen and beyond. See: Gundert 2002.

    99 These experiments are discussed in detail in Goldberg 2012.

    100 See: Harvey 1651 Ex.52.

    101 Harvey 1651, Ex.52, 160.

    102 Harvey 1651, Ex.52, 159.

    103 Fernel links this to Aristotle, who taught us of the world of body and the ‘loftier’ world of soul: Fernel 1551, Bk.I, Ch. 6, Ch. 9.

    104 Harvey 1651, Ex.71, 247-248.

    105 Lennox has termed this as a difference between natural and unnatural teleology: Lennox, 1985.

    106 For which, see: Goldberg 2012.

    107 Frank 1980.

    108 Cf. Ex.71 of De generatione animalium with Cap.VIII of De motu cordis.

    109 Harvey 1651, Ex.50, 146-147.

    110 Harvey 1651, Ex.50, 145-146.

    111 Hill 1964.

    112 See also: Goldberg 2013, 2017, though cf. Wang 2019.

    113 This is an old argument, for which see Roger 1993. See also Needham 1959, 94 ;236; and Pinto-Correia1998, 20ff; 149; 265.

    114 Pomata 2005. See, for example, Schrader 1674.

    115 Harvey 1651, Ex.11. See also: Goldberg 2020.

    116 Steno 1667.

    117 Van Horne 1668 and De Graaf 1672.

    118 Roger 1993, 103-104.

    Auteur

    • Benjamin Goldberg

      University of South Florida

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    1 The literature here is voluminous, but some citations consulted for this essay include: Vlastos 1950; Colish 1985; Boylan 1986; Wilberding 2008 and 2016; and Lo Presti 2014.

    2 Aristotle, Generatione animalium ii.4: 736b29-737a6.

    3 For some orienting discussions, see: Boyer 1931; Brady 1964; Jacquart and Thomasset, 1981; and Takahashi 2008. For Augustine, see, e.g., De Genesi ad litteram, ii, 15, 30; iii, 12, 19-20; iv, 33, 51; for Albert the Great see, e.g., De mineralibus, I, i.8. While earlier neo-Platonics and Stoics had put forward a similar account of causation, these works were not known to medieval thinkers.

    4 Please forgive this entirely avoidable pun. To date, the best work of intellectual history on this subject is Hirai 2005, as well as his numerous other publications on these topics. For a work on a related idea, also employing the analogy of the seed, see: Horowitz 1998.

    5 This idea has roots in the ancient world, though the exact pedigree of Fracastoro’s ideas is complex. For an overview from the Greeks, see Nutton 1983; on Fracastoro see Nutton 1990. See also: Grissom, 2004; and, as always, Hirai 2005.

    6 Harvey 1616 [1964]). For the manuscript see: The British Library, Sloane MS230a.

    7 Harvey 1649.

    8 Harvey 1651. Note that in the first edition of this work, Ex.4 was used twice; in what follows, I shall cite the page number of this edition, but correct the exercise number.

    9 This is related to the differences between physicians and philosophers; for a thorough analysis of the differences between Medici et Philosophi, focusing on generation theory, see: Richardson 2018.

    10 Hirai 2005. See also: Hirai 2011, Ch. 2.

    11 See Lennox 2006 and Goldberg 2013.

    12 Harvey could not see the seed because he worked without a microscope, and thus could not detect sperm. It would wait until the work of Leeuwenhoek and others to change this situation. See: Roger 1993; Richardson 2018; Goldberg 2020.

    13 See especially: Bono 1990.

    14 For discussion: Goldberg 2013, 423-24 and passim.

    15 See also: Hirai 2007.

    16 See: Hirai 2005; Hirai 2006; and Hirai 2016. I borrow the phrase chains of influence from C. Martin’s review of Hirai’s book: Martin 2006.

    17 This section is heavily indebted to the wide-ranging work of Hirai on Fernel.

    18 Hirai 2015, 1004.

    19 This was noted quite some time ago in Walker 1958, 125, in the case of Fernel, for whom “[…] the supposition of astrological spirits extends the area of possible rational explanation to such things as procreation, embryology, infectious diseases, psychological disorders, which cannot be adequately explained by elemental causes, and would therefore, if no celestial causes were assumed, have to be incomprehensibly divine.” The same is true for Harvey, though his conception of astrological bodies is much less indebted to Neoplatonic metaphysics (though these are not entirely absent, at least in Harvey’s use of some terminology, such as World-Soul [Anima Mundi]).

    20 Hirai 2016, 50.

    21 Hirai 2005, 25-26; 32-33; Hirai 2007 392-393. Leoniceno 1532, De virtute formative, ff. 83v-93r. In a very interesting recent paper, X. Wang compares the ideas of Harvey and Fernel on the nature of this divinity, arguing that Harvey thought God was the direct cause of generation. While I disagree with this account, there is not space to take issue with this paper. See: Wang 2019; for differing accounts of these same issues, cf. Goldberg 2013 and Bates 2000.

    22 Important here is the effect of fifth Lateran Council of 1513, and the Apostolici Regiminis, on the teaching and development of naturalistic ideas of soul (and, indeed, debates about the proper modality for studying soul). See: Kessler 1990; Monfasani 1993; and Constant 2002.

    23 Hirai 2016, 51-53.

    24 Fernel 1551 [2005], Bk.2, Ch. 2, 416, trans. Forrester.

    25 For Fernel’s idea of primary causation, see, e.g.: Fernel 1551, Bk I, Ch. 10.

    26 There is a large literature here but see: Solmsen 1957; Walker 1958; Mendelsohn 1964; Bianchi 1982; Freudenthal 1995; and Debru 1996.

    27 Fernel 1551, Bk.I, Ch. 8, 319, trans. Forrester.

    28 Fernel 1551, Bk.II, Ch. 6, 475-477, trans. slightly modified from Forrester (after Hirai 2016, 54).

    29 These ideas, and this same passage, are discussed in detail in Hirai 2016, 52-54.

    30 For hypothetical necessity in Aristotle, see: Bradie and Miller 1984; Cooper 1985 and 1987; and Stein 2016. For similar ideas in Galen, see: Hankinson 1989. And for this idea in Harvey, see: Goldberg 2012 and 2016.

    31 Fernel 1551, Bk.II, Ch. 1, 413, trans. Forrester. Compare to Harvey 1651, Praefatio, B3, and for which see: Goldberg 2013. While he does not dwell so much on craft, the Divine Craftsman is present throughout his work, something inherited from Ficino. For which see Ficino Platonic Theology 4.1 (Allen-Hankins, i: 250 = Marcel, I: 145); and Hirai 2011, 138-139.

    32 This analogy is explored in depth in the context of Harvey’s De conceptione in Goldberg 2013.

    33 See, for instance, Fernel 1557 [2003], Bk.I., Ch. 8, 86. This is one area of disagreement between Fernel and Harvey.

    34 Fernel 1551, Bk.II, Ch. 1, 411-413.

    35 Fernel 1551, Bk.II, Ch. 6, 477. Hirai 2011, 65-67.

    36 Hirai 2007, 392, describes Fernel’s ideas here as a fully Platonized interpretation of Galen and Aristotle, for which, see also Hirai 2005, 24-28.

    37 Fernel 1551, Bk.II, Ch. 7, 481, trans. Forrester. See: Hirai 2011, 68.

    38 Fernel 1551, Bk.II, Ch. 7, 481.

    39 It is important to note that the teleology of Fernel is different from that of Harvey: as S. Carvallo has helpfully pointed out, we might characterize the former’s position as invoking a transcendent causal force, and the latter an immanent one.

    40 Hirai 2011, 65-66. See also Hirai 2005, 86-88.

    41 Though for a differing account, see Bono 1990, 374-375 and passim. Bono argues that Harvey restricts the Divine orchestration of teleological relations in nature to biological matter.

    42 Fernel 1551, Bk.ii, Ch. 7, 481-485; see: Hirai 2011, 69-71.

    43 Fernel 1551, Bk.ii, Ch. 7, 489; cf. Harvey 1651, Ex.52, and especially Ex.71. Harvey often talks about the soul in this flame-based manner.

    44 Fernel 1551, Bk.ii, Ch. 7, 495, trans. Forrester.

    45 Fernel, and most during the Renaissance, do not take the aether to be an element, at least in the same sense as the early elements.

    46 Fernel 1551, Bk.II, Ch. 7, 495, my translation (after Hirai 2011, 72).

    47 See: Aristotle, Physics, II 194b13; Meteorologica, II.2 339a22ff.

    48 Fernel 1551, Bk.I, Ch. 7, 297, trans. Forrester.

    49 Fernel 1551, Bk.I, Ch. 8, 307, my translation.

    50 This assessment echoes Walker’s conclusions from 1958.

    51 Lindberg 1986, 9; and Walker 1958. For some background concerning ideas about light in the mediaeval period, see: McEvoy 1978.

    52 Fernel 1551, Bk.I, Ch. 8, 321.

    53 Henry 2005, 32.

    54 Fernel 1551, Bk.I, Ch. 10, 355, trans. Forrester.

    55 See: Goldberg 2020 for an overview of Harvey’s influence on generation theory. The literature on Harvey is enormous, but the best accounts remain: Pagel’s classic works from 1967 and 1976; and French 2006.

    56 His Aristotelianism is of the eclectic, Paduan variety, for which see: Schmitt 1989; Lennox 2006; and Goldberg 2012 and 2016. For the Paduan background, see: Bylebyl 1979; Schmitt 1985; Cunningham 1985; and Klestinec 2011. For two differing accounts of Harvey on divinity, cf. Goldberg 2013 and Wang 2019.

    57 Pomata 2005. See also: Lennox 2006 and Goldberg 2016.

    58 This is the method of the Aristotle’s Analytica Posteriora and Historia Animalium; see, e.g. , A.Po I.10, 76b21–22, and compare to: HA I.6, 490b7-491a6 , II.15 , 505b26-506a10, and IV.8 , 534b12-15.

    59 De Graaf 1672. Harvey’s idea that all generation proceeds from an egg was quite influential, if also quite misunderstood. See Goldberg 2020.

    60 Harvey was nothing if not both erudite and profligate in his of terminology, as we shall see when it comes to divinity. While Harvey objected to the proliferation of spirits initiated by Fernel, he certainly helped himself to their many names, without not committing himself to any precise ontology.

    61 As noted above, Harvey was wrong about this due to his lack of microscopy.

    62 Harvey uses the term geniture since, strictly speaking, the male’s semen is not a true seed.

    63 Harvey 1651, Ex. 26, 80.

    64 Schegk 1580.

    65 Harvey 1651, Ex.29, 89. “[…] ex praecepto maris; quasi ab hujus coitu, foemina artem, rationem, formam, ac legem futuri foetus acciperet.” Cf. Goldberg 2013.

    66 This is (one) translation of Aristotle’s logos; for discussion of this term in Harvey and his source (the 1552 Giunta Aristotle-Averroes), see Goldberg 2013, 423.

    67 Pagel 1967, 332 argued Harvey was more ‘Aristotelian than Aristotle’ because he eschewed the Philosopher’s ‘dualistic’ tendencies, something argued at length by Bono 1990. The basic idea, that Harvey identifies ‘biological matter’ (namely the blood) and activity (that is, the functions carried out by the vegetative soul) is, I think, an incorrect and anachronistic reading. I think that both Pagel and Bono mistake both Aristotle and Harvey on the topic of causation, mistaking explanation for ontology. Though I do not have space here to argue, I want to suggest that the debate ‘dualism’ and ‘monism’ here is ahistorical and lacking motivation in the texts: Harvey’s ideas of formal and efficient causation, about actuality and potentiality, are extremely close to Aristotle’s, critiquing the Master’s inaccuracies with respect to empirical phenomena, but leaving the system as a whole relatively intact. See: Goldberg 2017; and Lennox 2006.

    68 Aristotle, De generatione animalium II.1: 734b 1; II.5: 741b8. Cf. Matthen, 1989.

    69 Berryman 2003, 359. See also: Lennox, 1982; and Matthen 1989.

    70 It’s important to remember that, for Aristotle and Harvey, there is no sense in which organisms really work like mechanical devices—the analogy is really an analogy, in contradistinction with the dictates of the post-Cartesian world, where the various forms of the mechanical philosophy look at the world as literally a machine.

    71 This seems to me to greatly undermine Bono’s 1990 account of Harvey’s ‘monism.’ Harvey does locate the power in the blood, but its activity is separable from its matter in a way that Aristotle might very well deny (given his claim that form and matter are but two sides of the same coin, which can only be separated in one’s mind but not in fact).

    72 Harvey 1651, Ex.29, 89.

    73 Code, 1987, 51-59.

    74 Harvey 1651, Ex.49, 138.

    75 Officio and munus are part of a constellation of technical terms in Renaissance anatomy (actio, utilitas, usus), which serve to undergird the teleological hierarchy of functions in living organisms. Office refers to a kind of functional role—very often an instrumental role—which can be played by different parts in different kinds of organisms. For discussion of this terminology, see: Goldberg 2012 and 2016; and Distelzweig 2014.

    76 Harvey 1651, De conceptione, 297.

    77 The delta is Harvey’s way of signifying a comment of his own in his notes.

    78 Harvey 1651, in his copy of De generatione animalium, in the Pybus Collection in the library of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne; quoted in Whitteridge’s 1981 translation of De generatione, 463.

    79 Besides contagion, Harvey turned to a variety of similar phenomena in order to describe the mode by which the male transmits his power to the female (which, again, is not the same as how he characterizes embryogenesis). These include analogies with magnetic phenomena, sympathetic medicine, and so on, all of which seem to have occult or rather unknown cause [occulta vel ignota] and do this without contact.

    80 Harvey 1651, Ex.26, 76. In Whitebridge’s edition, she does not extend the quotation from Aristotle far enough, as nearly the whole passage is a very close paraphrase of Generatione Animalium I.18: 724b 12-17.

    81 Goldberg 2020; aspects of this story can be found in the classic history of generation theory: Roger 1993.

    82 Harvey 1651, Ex.26, 77.

    83 Harvey 1651, Ex.26, 76. Note that the grammar here is a bit unclear, but Harvey does not maintain that both male and female contribute matter; the ‘of both of them’ refers only to the constructive faculty.

    84 This is also discussed in Goldberg 2013.

    85 Harvey 1651, Ex.26, 76.

    86 Harvey 1651, Ex.26, 76. C.f. Aristotle, Generatione animalium I.20, 728b 33-35.

    87 See especially Harvey 1651, Ex.28, 86.

    88 It’s important to emphasize that this idea is not, in any way, unique or special to Fernel or Harvey: it is a commonplace of early modern medicine, found, in differing ways, in many authors. To take just one example of this oft repeated idea, see Sennert 1694, 77.

    89 Cf.: Fernel 1551, Bk I, Ch. 10, 355 and 357 and Harvey 1651, Ex.50, 144.

    90 That is, what the soul in the seed is.

    91 Harvey 1651, Ex.47, 132-133.

    92 For a larger discussion of material causation and materialism in Harvey, see Goldberg 2017.

    93 See Richardson 2018 for a discussion of the role of the innate heat among Renaissance physicians and philosophers.

    94 Harvey 1651, Ex.71, 245. Harvey also includes Scaliger, but I must leave him aside for the present paper.

    95 Harvey uses this word in two ways: sometimes to refer to empirical experiences done in the course of, say, anatomy; and sometimes to refer to the conclusions of all those observations, which often includes things we wouldn’t count as observations, for instance, the circulation. This is an ambiguity seen in a number of early modern medical contexts (it is very common, for instance, in collections of medical recipes).

    96 Harvey 1651, Ex.71, 244.

    97 Note a disagreement with Wang 2019, who argues that God is directly involved through intervention, whereas here and in Goldberg 2013 it is maintained that God’s involvement comes from Design, not direct intervention a la occasionalism. I do not, unfortunately, have space here to respond to Wang’s argument, but please do note that this issue is by no means settled one.

    98 This connotation between blood, heat, and soul is ancient: for instance, in Homer’s Odyssey, a dead person’s soul can be brought back to a kind of life by drinking blood. Indeed, these sorts of connections resound throughout Ancient Greek thought, from Hippocrates to Aristotle, Galen and beyond. See: Gundert 2002.

    99 These experiments are discussed in detail in Goldberg 2012.

    100 See: Harvey 1651 Ex.52.

    101 Harvey 1651, Ex.52, 160.

    102 Harvey 1651, Ex.52, 159.

    103 Fernel links this to Aristotle, who taught us of the world of body and the ‘loftier’ world of soul: Fernel 1551, Bk.I, Ch. 6, Ch. 9.

    104 Harvey 1651, Ex.71, 247-248.

    105 Lennox has termed this as a difference between natural and unnatural teleology: Lennox, 1985.

    106 For which, see: Goldberg 2012.

    107 Frank 1980.

    108 Cf. Ex.71 of De generatione animalium with Cap.VIII of De motu cordis.

    109 Harvey 1651, Ex.50, 146-147.

    110 Harvey 1651, Ex.50, 145-146.

    111 Hill 1964.

    112 See also: Goldberg 2013, 2017, though cf. Wang 2019.

    113 This is an old argument, for which see Roger 1993. See also Needham 1959, 94 ;236; and Pinto-Correia1998, 20ff; 149; 265.

    114 Pomata 2005. See, for example, Schrader 1674.

    115 Harvey 1651, Ex.11. See also: Goldberg 2020.

    116 Steno 1667.

    117 Van Horne 1668 and De Graaf 1672.

    118 Roger 1993, 103-104.

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    Analogies végétales dans la connaissance de la vie de l’Antiquité à l’Âge classique

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    Référence numérique du chapitre

    Format

    Goldberg, B. (2023). Jean Fernel and William Harvey on Seeds. In Analogies végétales dans la connaissance de la vie de l’Antiquité à l’Âge classique. Besançon: Presses universitaires de Franche-Comté. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pufc.51671
    Goldberg, Benjamin. « Jean Fernel and William Harvey on Seeds ». In Analogies végétales Dans La Connaissance De La Vie De l’Antiquité à l’Âge Classique. Besançon: Presses universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2023. doi:10.4000/books.pufc.51671.
    Goldberg, Benjamin. « Jean Fernel and William Harvey on Seeds ». Analogies végétales Dans La Connaissance De La Vie De l’Antiquité à l’Âge Classique, Presses universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2023, https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pufc.51671.

    Référence numérique du livre

    Format

    Carvallo, S., & Macé, A. (2023). Analogies végétales dans la connaissance de la vie de l’Antiquité à l’Âge classique. Besançon: Presses universitaires de Franche-Comté. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pufc.51621
    Carvallo, Sarah, et Arnaud Macé. Analogies végétales dans la connaissance de la vie de l’Antiquité à l’Âge classique. Besançon: Presses universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2023. doi:10.4000/books.pufc.51621.
    Carvallo, Sarah, et Arnaud Macé. Analogies végétales dans la connaissance de la vie de l’Antiquité à l’Âge classique. Presses universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2023, https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pufc.51621.
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