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

The dynamic force of the “one first matter all” and the materiality of spirit are
explicated with an almost uncanny precision. Pagel catches the essence of this tract with
his summary thus:
It is his endeavour to demonstrate the identity of all functions in
principle which separates Glisson by a wide gulf from Descartes… To
Glisson, ‘soul’ is but one aspect, one grade of the living, i.e. of the
‘energetic substance’. There is no difference in kind between these
aspects and grades, from the lowest stage of matter endowed with the
most ‘dim perceptions’ to the higher forms of consciousness in the
living animal. In Glisson’s philosophy, matter appears as much
‘spiritualised’ as soul is ‘materialised’, so that the contrast between
them is only artificial. 97
Cudworth’s response to this heretical philosophy is almost identical to the objection we
saw earlier to the notion of a material soul. Defending the dualist thesis, Cudworth
declares that the notion of active, animate substance assumes a world where:
By reason of which life (not animal, but only plastical), all parts of
matter being supposed to form themselves artificially and
methodically... and therefore also sometimes by organisation to
improve themselves further into sense and self-enjoyment in all
animals, as also to universal reason and reflexive knowledge in men; it
is plain that there is no Necessity at all left either of any Incorporeal
Soul in Men to make them Rational, or any Deity in the Universe to
solve the Regularity thereof. 98
The notion that matter has the power to bring forth living forms is treated as a denial of
divine agency. To this anxious religious philosophy is added a political dimension when
Cudworth attacks the notion that living matter can organise itself into ever more
complex forms and organisms. Cudworth asserts the impossibility that “greater
perfections and higher degrees of being should rise and ascend out of lesser and lower”
without the total “overthrow of the natural order”. 99
This accusation is not without some
sort of basis, certainly in the work of Milton and even in that of Glisson.
97 Walter Pagel, ‘The Reaction to Aristotle in Seventeenth-Century Biological Thought: Campanella, Van
Helmont, Glanvill, Charleton, Harvey, Glisson, Descartes’, in Science, Medicine and History. Essays on
the Evolution of Scientific Thought and Medical Practice Written in Honour of Charles Singer, 2 vols. ed.
E. A. Underwood (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 1: 489-509, 507.
98 Cudworth, The true intellectual system, 233-4. Cudworth’s notion of ‘plastic nature’ gives God instead
a delegated spiritual force in the world to perform these tasks.
99 Cudworth quoted in Giglioni, ‘Anatomist Atheist’, 127.
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