The Gentleman, the Virtuoso, the Inquirer - Cambridge Scholars ...

10
Chapter One
Catholic Padua to study, where the best medical investigations of his
generation were going on, sometimes in an explicitly materialist context.
When Harvey was awarded his doctorate in philosophy and medicine in
April 1602 by count palatine, he swore and signed the required oath to the
Pope’s supremacy and all the articles of the council of Trent--although at
his request this was left off the copy of the certificate with which he
returned. 18 It is worth nothing here, too, that Harvey’s main patron was
Thomas Howard, 2nd Earl of Arundel, a scion of one of the greatest
English Catholic families of the era, although Arundel remained nominally
a Protestant after 1615. Maybe, then, a whiff of Rome hung about Harvey,
which might even account for why Harvey was not appointed a royal
physician-in-ordinary until December 1639, by which time the religious
policies of Charles I and Archibishop Laud seemed to many to be bent on
the restoration of the old religion. Harvey was also associated with the
philosopher Robert Fludd--who was the first person to support Harvey’s
discovery of the circulation of the blood in print. Fludd also placed the
heart at the center of all animal motion, including the passions. The place
of the heart at the center of human experience was then preoccupying
many religious thinkers, and would lead, in the middle of the century, to
Catholic worship of the Sacred Heart. But Fludd was also a pantheistic
materialist, and Harvey shows many of the same philosophical attributes,
although they have usually been attributed to his sympathy for Aristotle.
Another of Harvey’s friends was the most famous materialist of the day,
Thomas Hobbes, of whom Sir Geoffrey Keynes notes that his early treatise
De corpore shares a theory of the senses with Harvey’s notes to his work
De motu locali animalium. 19 On his deathbed, Harvey left a ring to
Hobbes in order to be remembered by him. Harvey’s own philosophical
attack on the idea of faculties and spiritus was one of the things that most
bothered his opponents. 20 And finally we have the several reports that
Harvey was a free-thinker who believed that suicide was a proper way out
of personal suffering, perhaps even attempting suicide with laudanum first
in 1652 and doing it successfully after a debilitating stroke in 1657. All in
all, the more one probes, the more one can only agree with those
biographers who have found Harvey’s personal views to be a very elusive.
But they certainly point to the power of philosophical materialism in his
day.
In the work of Harvey, the anatomical work of Descartes, 21 and
elsewhere, one also finds growing doubts about the connections between
natural and moral philosophy. In the classical and Augustinian view, both
are connected in the logos, the meaningful world created by God, where
the knowledge of nature leads one to the understanding of the laws of