qui - maria vita romeo

e other Mandeville: the origins of a scandalous thought. Mechanism, ecc. 73
is not for nature tout court: it can be only presumed. If there is a post-
Adamic corruption for human nature, is there for nature tout court? Or,
being subjected to becoming, is nature corrupt? ese are open questions
to which Mandeville does not clearly answer. In addition, one should
analyse the role of “Providence” and
the relation it entertains not only
with nature, but also with mankind,
other living beings and events that,
from our point of view, are calamitous.
70
Why is physiological naturalism
not accepted? Why are the substantiality
of soul and the substantiality
of body equal? How does mankind
distinguish itself from brutes? To
these questions, Misomedon answers
rather caustically.
e Body of Man is thought to be of
mean Descent; the animal Functions
of it have a near Resemblance to the
same Functions in Brutes: It is generated and born like theirs; and the difference
between the Bodies of Men and those of Beasts is still less in their Decay […].
erefore the greatest Philosophers, before Christianity as well as since, have taken
up strong Resolutions to believe the Soul to be immortal; tho’ some of them
have own’d, at the same time, that they had no other Reason for such a Belief,
than what was suggested to them by Self-love […]. Oh, the unfathomable depth
of human Pride! 71
omas Hobbes.
Physiological naturalism puts the soul in a religious perspective; moreover,
it provides a mechanical description for abstractive functions of
thinking and for other physiological activities; it states that life is the cause
of motion and, at the end, it provides an empirical explanation for and into
nature; so, according to Mandeville, physiological naturalism is not ac-
70 Cf. especially Fable II, pp. 243-246.
71 Treatise 1730, pp. 52-53.