Medical Science and the Anatomia Animata in Milton's Paradise Lost

of ‘spirit’ and ‘faculty’ were designed to suture) was that of causality. Motive force and
the origin of motion were loci about which questions of ancient philosophy and the new
mechanical philosophy circled continually: the branch of study which included
medicine was no exception.
Milton’s definition of the word spirit, which identifies the traditionally
immaterial abstract capacity of the mind with the functions of the body, also demands a
closer examination of its various contemporary meanings. In contemporary thought
medical spirit is conceived of as a substance of sorts, but it is volatile, rarefied and
active: it occupies the border between the potential motive force and actual impact and
motion. The classical body of medical knowledge inherited by the seventeenth century
was made up of a tripartite system of interlocking orders of animation where faculties
were motivated by different sorts of spirit. Walker gives a fairly concise definition of
medical spirits as
very fine, hot vapour, deriving from the blood and breathed air... They
are usually divided into three kinds: natural, vital and animal… the
vital spirits are manufactured in the heart and conveyed by the
arteries; their main function is to distribute innate or vital heat to all
parts of the body. Animal spirits are elaborated from these and are
contained in the ventricles of the brain, whence through the nervous
system they are transmitted to the sense-organs and muscles; their
functions are motor-activity sense-perception and, usually, such lower
psychological activities of appetite, sensus communis and imagination.
They are the first, direct, instrument of the soul. 83
We must add some detail to the ‘lowest’ order of spirit, the natural spirits. In the
original Galenic schema they are produced in the liver; they emanate through the veins
with the venous blood and function in the order of nutritional and reproductive faculties.
These faculties we share not only with animals but also with plant life, thus the
designation of this ‘lowest’ order of animation as the ‘vegetative soul’. 84
The vegetative
faculty deals entirely with involuntary functions, primarily those of the lower abdomen,
and often does not gain the critical attention demanded by the more dramatic faculties of
voluntary motion, sense perception and imagination. Nevertheless we can see the basic
83
D. P. Walker, ‘The Astral Body in Renaissance Medicine’ in Music, Spirit and Language in the
Renaissance, ed. Penelope Gouk (London: Varorium Reprints, 1985), 119-133, 121.
84
For a wider exploration of the orders of spirit and faculty which preceded Harvey’s discovery of the
circulation of the blood see Paster, ‘Nervous Tension’, 107-125; John Henry, ‘The Matter of Souls:
Medical Theory and Theology in Seventeenth-Century England’, in The Medical Revolution of the
Seventeenth Century, ed. French and Wear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 87-113.
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