qui - maria vita romeo

70 Alessandro Chiessi
es. 58 is mechanism, however, could lead to determinism. ere is the
possibility that once described the ways of action and the paths of “animal
spirits,” one can foresee the results of the abstract action of thinking. Mandeville
tries to solve the problem saying that we know too little about matter.
Beyond that, he believes that “animal spirits” are “Instruments” of
“Motion” and “Feeling” but, at the same time, he cannot—or wants—establish
the causes of their actions, motions or effects. 59 e impossibility of
totally observing the human body and, in particular, brain and “animal
spirits” does not allow a complete mechanical description of their operations
and, from that, a deterministic explication (although it remains eventually
possible). Corporeity, matter and thus nature exceed human cognitive
capabilities. 60 It is important to stress that, in the flattening of “res cogitans”
onto “res extensa,” mechanism is no longer an ontological characteristic
of the latter, but becomes an interpretative paradigm of a knowable
object, in other words, of matter and, generally, of nature. Misomedon,
talking about the soul-body relation, says: “When we have confess’d what
every body must be conscious of, that we are far from knowing all the
Properties that may belong to Matter, is it, I beg of you, more easy to conceive
that what is incorporeal should act upon the Body, & vice versa, that
it is that Omnipotence should be able in such a manner to modify and dis-
58 Again Hobbes: “By this it appears that reason is not, as sense and memory, born with us;
nor gotten by experience only, as prudence is; but attained by industry; first in apt imposing of
names; and secondly by getting a good and orderly method in proceeding from the elements, which
are names, to assertions made by connexion of one of them to another; and so to syllogisms, which
are the connexions of one assertion to another, till we come to a knowledge of all the consequences
of names appertaining to the subject in hand.” T. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 35, in op. cit. e sensation,
for Hobbes, involves conceptualization and reason can be developed on that; so: “Originally
all conceptions proceed from the action of the thing itself, whereof it is the conception: now when
the action is present, the conception it produceth is also called sense; and the thing by whose action
the same is produced, is called the object of the sense.” T. Hobbes, Human Nature, vol. IV, p. 3, in
op cit. (emphasis in the text). Mandeville does not (explicitly) talk about a “present” action of the
object that creates the sensation, but about “Images received,” which, however, need it.
59 Cf. Treatise 1730, p. 163.
60 “It is impossible to enter into the Mechanism of them [the animal spirits], at least so far as
to determine their Motions to an Angle of Incidence; more especially, when we know them to be so
minute and volatile, that to some of them our very Bones are pervious.” Treatise 1711, p. 140; Treatise
1730, p. 171 (emphasis in the text).