Daniel Sennert on the Concept of the Soul: Formal Causation and Efficient Causation in Early Modern Europe

I: Introduction

During the medieval period, the Scholastic philosophers tackled the account of generation and that of substantial change, advancing various interpretations drawn from the texts of Aristotle. I will briefly mention the accounts offered by Aquinas and Suarez to better understand the philosophical background against which Sennert was competing. Second, I will analyze how formal causality and efficient causality are conceptually equated in Sennert, making a radical break from the traditional view of the external origin of human soul. I will then conclude with the status of the soul post-Sennert as a result of this conceptual change.

Aristotle argued that there are three ways in which one can speak of generation of substances: generation can be natural, artificial or spontaneous. In all three cases, he maintains, the producer and the product must be the same in form. In the case of the generation of a human being, the producer (the male) have the same form as the product (the offspring), but the latter shares the same form in a different piece of matter that is provided by the female. The medieval philosophers focused on the role the form plays on the matter. They appealed to the pre-existence of the form in the producer to explain why the generated product shares the characteristics the producer has. In a way, generation is seen as a process consisting in the transmission of a form from the producer to the product. Simply put, the coming into being of composite substances is nothing but the acquisition of a form of a certain kind, i.e. substantial form. This form is equated with the role of forming the internal structure and organization of sensible objects.

II: Scholastic Notion of the Soul

Aquinas (1225-1274) argued that unless forms come to matter externally rather than emerging from within the matter, there would not be a true and a substantial generation, but only an accidental change in the predicate of the matter as the subject. For Aquinas, the matter or the embryo comes to be such a state that it can acquire a fit form through changes in the matter. The formative power in the semen needs to modify the matter so it forms organs suitable for living beings. The matter then appropriately so organized, i.e. equipped with organs, can receive a form by triggering the actualization of the potency of the matter. This formative power is not to be confused with the soul itself, for Aquinas does not want to associate the formative power of the semen with the functionality of the souls. What the formative power does is simply organize the matter in such a way that once the soul is received, the soul can perform its functions using those organs. The formative power is a vital operation at the moment of conception, and it is a corporeal power passed on to by the agent, which forms the matter into an organically structured stuff so it can begin to digest food if there were a soul in it. Once this digestive organ has been formed, the vegetative soul comes to be, doing its own functions of digesting. The formative power, however, does not cease to be, but still keeps forming the organs to make the matter like itself. This formative power is what Amerini calls, “a program” for material development that “expressly tasked to structure the matter of a given body.” Once the organs appropriate for sensation have been formed, the sensitive soul takes place of the vegetative soul, subsuming the powers of vegetative soul under itself. It is probably more proper to conceive of this process as a transformation of an inferior soul into a superior one. When the organs can afford to perform more tasks, the soul too develops into a more adequate form fit for that specific matter. In this way, Aquinas manages to explain the various stages of biological development. Aquinas admits a substantial generation only once at the moment of ensoulment, i.e. the union between the vegetative soul and the matter properly organized. After the vegetative soul takes its root in the matter, the soul develops into the higher soul, and throughout this entire generative process, the formative power keeps forming the organs until it finishes its task of structuring the body.

Francisco Suarez (1548-1617), on the other hand, equates rational soul with the substantial form. Aquinas avoided conflating the two (soul and substantial form) precisely because he did not want to imply that the soul, which is the efficient cause and functions with the organs, is the same as the formative power, which is merely a forming principle. It is here in Suarez that we see the Aristotle’s analogy in explaining substantial generation of artificial things and natural things starts to break apart completely. For the formative principle in statue-making does not involve functionality of the organs, and just as Aquinas outlines, the formative principle must be distinct from the efficient cause, which would be the sculptor in the example of the statue-making. Suarez argues, on the contrary, this cannot be the case when one is dealing with the natural generation. For in natural generation, as soon as the organs are formed, they function. In fact, even as they are being formed, they show signs of activity. It appears as though this forming principle in natural generation is equipped with the active principle that is doing the forming! This point is significant, for it is true that the artist as the efficacious cause is necessary for the form in his mind to be expressed in the matter so as to produce an informed matter. Without the efficacious agent being present, the production halts and no further information on the matter is possible. However, with natural generation, once the efficacious, external agent passes on to the matter a seed or semen, the efficacious agent who produced such seed is no longer necessary for the rest of the formation to take place. The seed takes on the task of the efficacious agent at the moment of conception and it itself performs all the functions attributed to the efficacious agent. It is easy to see why Suarez identified the form with the rational soul. For if the forming power that also functions with the organs so formed is not the soul, what really is a soul? Plants are said to nurture when they are equipped with the vegetative soul. Similarly, animals sense and move about only in virtue of them having the sensitive soul. It follows that soul is that which performs all these functions attributed to the forming principle. Since the forming principle is efficacious, this principle is not really the formal cause but an efficient cause of natural generation. For Suarez, the composite being is generated out of the matter by the efficient cause. As a result of the matter being so organized, the new form of the composite as the substantial form of that specific composite appears. In this way, as Helen Hattab argued, the explanatory burden of accounting for natural generation and substantial change shifted onto the efficient and material causes from the formal cause. The substantial form is now posterior to the generation of the form-matter composite, and the formal causality is reduced to a mode of the union of the substantial form to matter. Since the formal causality is just a mode of union “between an already existing substantial form and an already existing matter,” it is neither the formal causality nor the material causality that performs the organic functions, but rather, it is the emergent substantial form that is the source of the efficacious causation.

Suarez argues further that the human substantial form as the rational soul is essentially different from the other types of substantial forms, i.e., material substantial forms. These material substantial forms are educed out of the matter, rather than created out of nothing by God, and hence they cannot survive the material death. These material substantial forms too are still united by the formal causality, but because they are educed from and attached to matter, they do not properly come to be out of nothing, and what was considered as a substantial generation for Aristotle and Aquinas was reduced to the status of accidental change happening within the same subject, just like the example of Aristotle on the generation of health in a body. For Suarez, whereas the human substantial form is created by God ex nihilo, the material substantial forms emerge out of the prime matter, and hence they do not count as a substantial generation, but only as an accidental generation.

Helen Hattab has convincingly shown that Suarez’s redefinition of the substantial form paved the way for a new corpuscular mechanistic worldview to take roots. These redefinitions include 1) the substantial form as an incomplete substance, which together with the matter makes one per se composite substance, 2) the attribution of the efficient causality to the seed separate from the generator, and 3) the reduction of formal causality to a mode of the union between the substantial form and matter. In what follows, I will show how Sennert played a pivotal role in the devaluation of formal causality and the conflation of it with the efficient causality, paving the way for finally getting rid of the formal causality altogether.

III: Philosophy of Daniel Sennert

We have seen that Suarez conflated the soul with the substantial form, departing Aquinas’ distinction between efficient causality and formal causality. Further, Suarez made both the form and the matter incomplete substances, with which together forms a complete substance and a per se unity. But the form and the matter are able to exist on their own, what part of them is it that is incomplete? After all, such notion as an ‘incomplete substance’ is only a relative term to a natural being that is a composite of form and matter. It does not hinder God from separating them to subsist on its own. It then seems clear that there is no need to qualify such a substance as ‘incomplete,’ since it is not incomplete strictly speaking. Sennert indeed takes this path, arguing that substantial form is naturally before all the accidents or adjuncts, for “if the Forms were an Accident, there would be no Generation of anything, but only an alteration.” Although form is a substance of itself, it is imperfect in the sense that it is not found in nature by itself, just as matter by itself is imperfect. It is only the composite of form and matter that constitutes the natural things. Sennert thus argues that the form and the matter need each other and mutually assist one another in order to come to form a composite. This is because the forming of a composite requires both matter and form, as matter is said to be the principium subjectivum formae, or that which provides a subject for the form, and the form as the formal principle of the matter. In other words, the form gives the matter an actual being proper to itself. Indeed, Sennert contends that this is what generation essentially is – the form is a substantial act, perfecting the matter in the form of a compound. Since the form is an act, it is at the same time an efficient cause. In fact, we are told that “the three causes [efficient, formal and final] are in natural things many times united together, and grow into one cause: so that the form and end, though they differ in definition, yet in number and subject, they are one Cause.” Further, he conceives the form as the formal cause with respect to the thing generated, “inasmuch as it is an act perfecting the matter, and therewith making up the compound,” and an end with respect to generation, but “the same form is also the efficient, inasmuch as the thing generated, is of the same species or sort with the generator.” Here, clearly Sennert takes the form as an act of generation; not only sharing with that which is a terminus ad quem (the generated) but also a terminus a quo (the generator). However, if the same form is shared in both the generated and the generator, but is numerically different from the efficient cause, the form must be capable of being divided in some way, so as to communicate the form onto the matter to be generated as a compound. This seemingly quantified notion of form is explained in terms of its co-extension with its body. Notice that by soul, Sennert only means the substantial act or that which performs the office of the soul, i.e. power to perform and function. It then makes sense for him to say that soul is not just in one part of the body, but in the whole of the body. This way of conceiving the soul as performative power is similar to Suarez. It is clear from the following that Sennert takes such a position after the manner of the traditional Scholastic philosophy. Sennert explains that although the soul has no quantity, “it fills and penetrates the whole Body, it is indivisible of itself, yet is co-extended with the whole Body without quantity,” but for something to be in a place, it has to be either definitively, or repletively, or circumscriptively in a place. According to Aquinas, a corporeal substance is said to be locally and circumscriptively in a place, since it is measured by the place, whereas an incorporeal substance is neither locally nor circumscriptively but definitively in place, that is to say when a body and the place occupied by the body are commensurate with its quantity or power, e.g. angels are said to be definitively in a place, for the power of an angel is only operative at that specific place. Things are repletively in a place when they fill a place by virtue of the commensuration of their own quantitative dimensions with the dimension of the place, e.g. God is repletively in space. Sennert reasons that since there is more than one way in which a thing is said to be, “substances free from quantity can be either divers of them together, or with other bodies in some place,” and hence conjectures that the soul must be either definitively or repletively in space. Although he acknowledges that only God is properly said to be repletively in place, Sennert entertains the idea, along with other ‘learned men’ that the soul can also be said to be repletively in place. In fact, Sennert wants to argue that the soul is everywhere present, with Aristotle, and whatever is present everywhere is necessarily present repletively. Sennert goes further and argues that if “all Dimensions being taken away, the form of any of us may be in the same ubiwith that of another,” as is observed with many lights scattered through the air, converging into the same place. In such case, “although there are many [lights] in the same place, yet they are not mingled, which the shadows declare.” Clearly, Sennert makes this case not only to account for the alleged expansion of the soul as things grow larger, but also in order to account for the spontaneous generation of animals and plants, for if the soul is present everywhere, as we will see later on, there does not appear to be a contradiction for a life emerging out of anywhere.

Although the manner in which the soul is co-extended with the body has been explained, how can the form be said to be divided along with the body? For division necessarily implies the notion of more or less, i.e. when a thing is divided, each of the divided parts is less than the undivided whole. To overcome this conceptual problem, Sennert directs us to think of the soul not as divisible but as multipliable. The soul is multiplied rather than divided, Sennert argues, “[f]or since nothing is divided but what hath Quantity, and one part without another, but the Soul hath no quantity,” which explains although the part of the soul is separated from the generator into the generated, and “although it be in a small body, yet is it as totally and entirely there, as the soul of the Generator is in this Body.” As we know, Descartes would later have it that the essence of extension is in its divisibility, but Sennert makes a distinction between formal and material extensions. A soul is formally extended with the body if it can exercise the power throughout the body that is corporeally extended. This makes sense, since for Sennert, a soul is nothing but an ability to function using the organs of the body. Insofar as one can exercise his organs throughout his body, the same soul is said to be present. Sennert follows Fortunius Licetus, an Italian philosopher and a scientist, whom Sennert cites frequently, in that the material extension belongs to corporeal bodies and thus is subject to division and quantity, whereas the formal extension belongs to incorporeal bodies that it “makes not the thing to which it belongs to be subject to quantity, nor necessarily divisible, either of itself or by accident.” Hence, a soul is present repletively with qualification, i.e. it is bound by the boundaries of the material extension, for only God is properly said to be repletively present. Since a soul does not pertain to quantity, it is not divided but rather multiplied, and the multiplied souls are neither more nor less than the original soul from which they multiplied. Thus, Sennert likens the propagation of the soul in the imagery of a candle fire. Souls are propagated, he explains by a simile, as one candle is lit by another, “and wherever they meet with a fit matter wherein they may subsist by themselves, they can transfuse themselves thereinto and cloath themselves therewith, to that that [sic.] part (if I may so call it, for it is not properly a part) of the form [that] hath the same Essence with the whole form” and begins to perform the same operations as it did from whence it was separated. Further, although the candle fire is corporeal and thus unlike souls, the way in which the souls are conceived of as multiplying without admitting quantitative parts is like sensible species such as a bright light is said to have its representation multiplied without having quantitative parts. For if a bright shining light is in a place, and there is only one man or one looking glass to receive that representation of the light, the whole image of that light is said to be in this one man or in the looking glass, but “if an hundred, or a thousand, or more men come, or a thousand Glasses be set, the same image which was before received by one Man and by one Glass does now appear in a thousand Men and a thousand Looking glasses; nor yet is the Species or Representation of that of that Visible Object divided into Quantitative parts.” In this way, souls are rightly conceived of as multiplying themselves upon finding a proper matter.

Now, we need to know what soul is not for Sennert. For we have said that a soul is nothing but the substantial act, the power to function according to the delegated offices, i.e. vegetative, sensitive, or rational, but we still do not know wherein does that power to perform and produce each sensible species, such as taste, smell and colour resides. For these are not the functionality of the soul, strictly speaking, as they involve no perceivable performance on the part of the soul. Here, Sennert shows his empirical side in doing his philosophy as a scientist. In explaining unfolding qualities in living things, he adapted the Augustinian tradition of seminal principles, i.e. semina, conceived as immaterial principle in matter that God placed in the form of seeds. Hence, Augustine says, “[t]here are of course the seeds plants and animals produce which we can see with our eyes; but of these seeds there are other hidden seeds from which, at the creator’s bidding, water produced the first fishes and birds, and earth the first plants and animals of their kind.” The concept of semina, by the sixteenth century, came to be interpreted as an immaterial informing principle that guides the formation of matter into specific beings, and Ficino interpreted semina as that which are “hidden in the prime matter, from which they draw the forms of the four elements,” occupying an intermediate place between matter and form. However, the Aristotelian elements were not entirely rejected, but accepted as remote causes, from which the three chymical principles are derived.

He was at the same time much influenced by the Paracelsian doctrine of tria prima and his cosmic system where the Aristotelian four elements are the universal world and the three chymical principles of salt, sulphur and mercury constitute everything that is generated out of the mixture of the four elements. So when Paracelsus argued that “[t]he first man was made from the mass, extracted from the machinery of the whole universe,” and when he called this mass in nature semen, Sennert reasoned that this matter invisibly contains something in itself. And this something is a soul or a form, guided by the seminal principle. Such is the principle given to things as forms when God first created the world, “by which the Order of Generation is continued and perfected,” and these forms “have a power to multiply themselves,” as the Scripture also attests in Genesis where God commands all the beings on the Earth to ‘increase and multiply.’ Indeed, all the generation of natural things depends upon the multiplication and propagation of these forms, or souls. However, for Sennert as well as for his contemporaries, there is something else that plays a central role in the generation of animals, which the form or soul uses as a principal instrument to act by, viz., the natural heat or the spirit. This spirit, Sennert argues, has the powers that the four elements from which a composite substance comes to be do not have. Here, Sennert argues with Scaliger that every form of a perfect mixture has a fifth essence distinct from the four elements, namely, the powers to move forward or backward, and many others that cannot be explained simply by appealing to the four elements. He argues that this innate heat or the spirit is “more divine than an elementary heat,” citing Aristotle as the very proponent of this view, as Aristotle says in Generation of Animals that “it is true that the faculty of all kinds of souls seems to have a connection with a matter different from and more divine than the so-called elements.” This inbred heat or the spirit, he argues, “is the cause of all attraction, excretion, increase, generation and life” but these powers are not in the elementary heat. Indeed, Aristotle himself affirms that there is a natural principle in semen that causes it to be productive, calling this principle a vital heat, which is “not fire nor any such force, but it is… the natural principle in the breath, being analogous to the elements of the stars.” This element of the stars, Sennert argues, is the spirit that has powers to produce scents, flavors and colours. Such a spirit, Scaliger calls a form of a fifth nature. This peculiar form is made out of the mixture of the four elements and attained the seminal and essential reasons to keep the propagation of the species going. Thus organized, the form of a fifth nature is further distinguished into three kinds, all of which arise from the true mixture of the four elements, but due to their own peculiar forms, they differ from the elements and acquire powers that were not in the four elements. They are the principles of salt, sulphur and mercury, which are made of the elements, yet their forms come from the first creation and were given to by God. These three principles are responsible for qualities of savory, scent and colours that are more material in that they can be distinguished from the primary qualities of hot, cold, wet and dry. In this way, Sennert explains the hierarchy of principles and the order of things in nature, arguing that just as the inferior things should serve the superior, so it is in talking of bodies, the four elements are placed at the top of the hierarchy, from which are made the principles of salt, sulphur and mercury, i.e. tria prima. Then, these tria prima are mixed diversely by concurrence of the elements, and they produce minerals, metals, stones, gems, plants and animals. We can see this from the fact that however diverse these forms of different species seem, we can always extract their ingredient, e.g. salt, from the earth, plants and various creatures. Sennert directs us to observe the empirical fact that “[n]atural bodies are made of such things as they are resolved into, [and since] they are resolved into those three principles, therefore they are made of them.” It is important to note here that these principles are now somewhat empirical, rather than pure principles, and they are hence observable. Even though the chymical principles are inferior to the principles of the four elements, they still assert themselves through powers that are peculiar to them, i.e. sourness, saltiness and combustibility, and so on. When a mixed body is corrupted, some parts turn to the four elements while other parts turn into salt or sulphur, according to their respective forms. The principle of tria prima is indispensable in addition to the four elements because of its explanatory value. Those who hold that all mixed bodies are resolved into the primary elements cannot properly explain why some vapors make us sleepy and not others, or why the fume of lead and quicksilver corrodes gold but not the fume of vitriol and other things, and so on. These questions are answerable only by referring to the chymical principles. By introducing these chymical principles, Sennert departed from the scholastic notion of the inbred heat, i.e. the element of the stars, that Aristotle speaks of, and turns it into something phenomenal. For instance, Sennert argues that salt is manifest in all things that grow, and sulphur is needed as the principle that produces scented things due to its flammability. The elements themselves are not inflamed, so to account for why things burn, sulphurous vapors are necessary. In short, Sennert argues against the Aristotelians that the four elements alone cannot bring scent or colours, and something else must be responsible for these qualities. Mercury is explained as spiritual liquor devoid of impurities and as the principle that is subtle, quickening and the primary instrument, i.e. the inbred heat, which the form uses for vitalizing the organisms. Mercury is the spirit and the element of the stars mentioned above, but for Sennert, it is so united with the salt and sulphur, each of which has its own qualities, that all three are needed in the generation of natural things. These three principles are the first mixture of the elements and the form of a fifth nature, from which composite substances will derive. This form of a fifth nature is nothing but the semina, the seed of things.

The nature of semina is such that it retains the forms of the elements in them, for if the elementary forms are gone or replaced by a new specific form, it would not be called a mixture of the four elements. Indeed, Sennert goes on to say that the opinion of Aristotle that the simple elements do not retain their forms and natures in the mixed bodies is wrong, and all things become plain and easy once it is discarded. He defends this view by saying that as a matter of fact Aristotle himself came to this opinion against his will! Even though Aristotle argued that the small particles in the mixture would not retain their nature, for that would be a composition and not a true mixture, Sennert responds by citing where Aristotle implies the contrary that the forms of the elements do remain in the mixed bodies, for example, “Elements are that of which existing things consist; it must need be that these Elements must abide and exist in the mixt Body,” (Metaphysics Bk V.5, 3), “a mixt Body is moved according to the sway of the prevailing Element,” (De Caelo, Bk I), and “the things mixable may be separated again from the mixt Body,” (Generation and Corruption, Bk I), which suggests that the resolution of mixt bodies into the elements is possible. Therefore, Sennert concludes that “[a]lthough of many things one be made: yet neither is it necessary that those simples should perish, nor is it a meer [sic.] aggregation or blending, but the simples by a superior form are reduced into one body.” So the new specific form made out of the mixture retains all the previous forms, since it is necessary that all mixed bodies can be turned back into the primary elements. Had there been a corruption of the previous forms, mixed bodies could not be resolved into the four elements. So it follows that the specific form made out of all the previous forms is necessarily “abide under the Dominion of one superior form, from which it is a species.” Although Sennert argues that experience attests mixed bodies are changed into that which it was first made, otherwise in resolution or putrefaction there would be a generation of new elements, from the mixture there must arise a new form of the vital principles, i.e. chymical principles. For he remains adamant that the four elements still lack in active principles, i.e. motion as well as some sensible qualities, and that in addition there needs vital principles “by which from invisible things they become visible, and produce all the ornaments of all bodies; and by this renovation of individuals, they preserve the perpetuity of all species or kinds.” So once the four elements are genuinely mixed, there manifest vital, active principles of tria prima. These vital principles afford the sensible qualities to the otherwise passive mixture of elements, operating without purpose and act mechanically. But once properly mixed and made into a union, this union then assumes a specific form. And it is this form that is equipped with knowledge of a particular thing, and this is what directs the generation and formation of that particular thing to be generated and formed. For Sennert, every form participates the power and wisdom of the creator, “every Being or thing, by its form, hath a desire to be, a Knowledge how to be, and a Power to be,” and from this form proceeds the qualities and all the furniture of the body. This knowledge, or the active power of the form, is what Sennert calls the mover of mixture. So the manner in which generation occurs is through the mixture of principles and not only its proper form but also a proper matter is required to have a specific form responsible for the propagation of the species. This specific form of being cannot be made by the mere concourse of the elements, nor through the rash mixture of them. The chymical spirits are at the basis of generation and the specific form and soul are the architect, thereby “in generation, all things are directed by the form”, that is to say, the forms are the first mover of everything in mixture. Further, since there does not appear to be hardness or firmness in a grain of seed, it is difficult to explain why a certain seed grows to be firm or hard, green or brown. Sennert is thus led to conclude that the seed is “a most simple substance, or a certain spirit in which the Soul and Formative Faculty is immediately seated,” and it contains in itself “the idea or model of that Organical Body from which it is taken, and therefore having the Power to Form a Body like to that from whence it was taken, and to perfect itself into an Individual of the same sort with the Generator.”

In all cases of generation, although it is a mutation of the whole, and no sensible subject remains as the same subject, it is not as if all the parts of a natural body were corrupted or bred anew. The matter still remains the same in all generation and corruption, but the specific form of a natural body being abolished, the whole compound is changed, and thus said to be corrupted, and a new dominant form takes the matter, so that there remains not the same sensible subject for the new form, but a new compound is said to come to be. This new compound necessarily differs specifically from the one whose form has perished. Generation for Sennert is nothing but the continuous process of shedding of the forms. The form which uses the spirit and the vital principles is the primary cause of generation. This move that the form is the agent may offend and violate the Scholastic philosophy still prevalent in the early seventeenth century. In fact, Sennert himself is aware of such a possibility, but continues to argue that although some people “suppose that this the distinction is taken away betwixt the internal and external Causes… and they aver that no Efficient Cause does ever go into the Essence of the Effect… this Doctrine of the propagation of Souls does no waies take away the distinction of Causes,” it is known to be the case that “the same Essence may be both the Form and the Efficient Cause, the Form as it informs the Matter, the Efficient as it is the cause of all Operations performed in the compound.” Here, Sennert clearly departs from the traditional conception of the formal and efficient causation in generation of animals, but he is also mindful of the fact that the error of the scholastics arises due to the conflation of the generation of living organisms with the generation of artificial things. Even though Aristotle often used the analogy of the sculptor making a statue in the explanation of four causes in generation of natural things, there is a great difference between the artificial things and natural organisms in that although every artificer communicates nothing of his own to the things produced, “living things which begets their like cannot do the same unless they communicate their own essence.” Again, this is best illustrated with the already mentioned example of the ways in which the candle fire or the light propagates itself. Since for artificial things, the visual image is multiplied in the perceiver analogously, but for living things, like the fire of the candle, they can only multiply when their own innate heat is communicated to the generated. Sennert thus argued that the formal cause and the efficient cause in natural living things are one and the same. Further, the form itself possesses the knowledge of what it will become and hence can direct as well as perform the organic functions, for a thing is rightly said to be an animal or another living body only when the soul is in its subject rightly disposed, and performs the operations belonging to its own kind.

IV: Conclusion

Whereas up to Suarez, the form still remained as an inactive principle and the formal causation came to play no constructive role, but with Sennert, the form became active and efficacious, and conducive to the empirical observation. It seems it was during the early 1630’s when the formal causation was officially discarded, not as unnecessary, but as already implied in the efficient causation when talking about generation of living things. For as was mentioned earlier, although Licetus gave a definition of formal extension of the soul in 1628 and in 1630 in his works on spontaneous generation of things, he did not go so far as to equate the formal causation as the efficient causation. In looking at the treatment of formal causation in Sennert’s works, it appears that Sennert had both the motivation as well as the ability to articulate the formal causation in terms of efficient causation. As a result, the concept of the soul became obsolete in explaining natural generation as souls came to be regarded as purely metaphysical. The medieval conception of the soul used to have an influence on the phenomenal world, but Sennert pushed it into the background in favour of the chymico-physical explanation that was more useful in conducting natural science.

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Hirai, Hiro. “Human & Animal Generation in Renaissance Medical Debates” in Human & Animal Cognition in Early Modern Philosophy & Medicine. Edited by Stephanie Buchenau & Robert Lo Presti. USA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017.

Newman, William R. Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry & the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Hirai, Hiro. “Human & Animal Generation in Renaissance Medical Debate” in Human and Animal Cognition in Early Modern Philosophy & Medicine. For the purpose of this paper, I focus on the concept of the soul itself.

Gabriele Galluzzo, The Medieval Reception of Book Zeta of Aristototle’s Metaphysics: Aristotle’s Ontology, 182.

Fabrizio Amerini, Aquinas on the Beginning and End of Human Life, 16.

Helen Hattab, “Suarez’s Last Stand for the Substantial Form” in The Philosophy of Francisco Suarez, 101-118.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Daniel Sennert, Thirteen Books of Natural Philosophy, 16.

Ibid., 17.

Ibid.

Ibid., 23. Italics mine. He continues, “but the formal and the efficient cannot be one in number, yet one in kind. For the same form of an animal is at the same time both the form and end.” What he means by this is that the form of an animal is the same as the end in kind in the sense that it imparts the same form onto the matter to be generated, while the generator and the generated remain distinctly separate.

Ibid., italic mine.

Ibid., 456, for instance.

See Aquinas, “Summa Theologica Pars Prima Q52, Art. 2, 3” in Basic Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas: Volume I, edited by Pegis, 500. See also Marilyn McCord Adams, Some Later Medieval Theories of the Eucharist, 94-95. Further, Charles Hodge, a 19^th century theologian, in his Systematic Theology summarizes them as follows: “Bodies are in space circumscriptively. Spirits are in space definitively. They have an ubi. They are not everywhere, but only somewhere. God is in space repletively. He fills all space. In other words, the limitations of space have no reference to Him. He is not absent from any portion of space, nor more present in one portion than in another.”

Sennert, Thirteen Books of Philosophy, 487.

Ubi means where/whereabouts in Latin.

Sennert, Thirteen Books, 487.

Sennert, 488.

Ibid. Licetus also wrote on spontaneous generation in the works entitled as “De spontaneo viventium ortu libri quatuor” (1628) and “De anima subiecto corpori nihil tribuente, deque seminis vita et efficentia primaria in constitutione foetus” (1630).

Ibid., 489-490.

Ibid., 488.

Newman, William R. “The Interplay of Structure and Essence in Sennert’s Corpuscular Theory,” in Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry & the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution, pp.138-139. Newman details the conflict Sennert tried to resolve between the conceptual problem of qualities flowing from the substantial form and the empirical observation of how the substantial form remains completely insensible yet perceptible qualities can emerge from it.

Augustine quoted in Antonio Clericuzio, Elements, Principles and Corpuscles: A Study of Atomism and Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century (USA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), 15, footnote 27.

Clericuzio, Elements, Principles and Corpuscles, 17.

Ibid., 20.

Paracelsus, “The End of the Birth, and the Consideration of the Stars” and “Concerning the Three Prime Essences” in The Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Paracelsus, vol. 2, 299-314, 317-322.

Paracelsus, “The End of the Birth”; Sennert, Chymistry Made Easie and Useful. Or, the Agreement and Disagreement of the Chymists and Galenists, 29-30.

Sennert, Thirteen Books of Natural Philosophy, 421.

Sennert, Chymistry Made Easie and Useful. Or the Agreement and Disagreement of the Chymists and Galenics, 44-45.

Ibid., 45.

Aristotle, GA Bk. II 3, 736b29-30.

Ibid., 736b32-37.

Sennert, Chymistry Made Easie, 52.

Ibid., 53.

Ibid., 53.

Ibid., 54.

Ibid.

Ibid., 57.

Ibid., 62-63.

Ibid., 63-64.

Sennert, Thirteen Books, 457.

See Aristotle, Metaphysics Bk V iii (1014a31-32), “those who speak of the elements of bodies mean the things into which bodies are ultimately divided… (because each of them being one and simple is present in a plurality of things, either in all or in as many as possible).”

See Aristotle, De Caelo Bk I ii (269a28-29), “For the movement of composite bodies is, as we said, determined by that simple body which prevails in the composition.”

Ibid. See Aristotle, GC Bk I x (327b23-327b31), “some things are potentially while others are actually, the constituents can be in a sense and yet not-be. The compound may be actually other than the constituents from which it has resulted; nevertheless each of them may still be potentially what it was before they were combined, and both of them may survive undestroyed. (… it is evident that the combining constituents not only coalesce, having formerly existed in separation, but also can again be separated out from the compound.) The constituents, therefore, neither persist actually, as body and while persist nor are they destroyed (either of them or both), for their potentiality is preserved.”

Ibid.

Sennert, Chymistry Made Easie, 73.

Ibid. Italics mine.

Ibid., 64.

Sennert, Thirteen Books of Natural Philosophy, ch.3, 423.

Sennert, Chymistry Made Easie., 67. “…the mover of mixture is a vital principle, adorned with knowledge by which the power of which, the Divine offices of mixture are performed.”

Ibid., 71.

Ibid. “Therefore the form and soul is the architect, and the first mover of every thing in mixture is that soul and form.”

Sennert, Thirteen Books, 477.

Ibid., 94.

Ibid., 493.

Ibid.

Ibid.

See Newman, in particular where likens Sennert’s view of form as “religion of form.” P.148, p.152.

See also Newman, p.153. “Substantial forms acquired a new emphasis as efficient causes of corpuscular local motion in his system… He had provided the very means of making forms unnecessary.”