Erasmus Darwin, philosopher, poet, and physician : a lecture to the Literary and Philosophical Society of Whitby / by John Dowson.

  • Dowson, John, 1820-1881.
Date:
1861
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Erasmus Darwin, philosopher, poet, and physician : a lecture to the Literary and Philosophical Society of Whitby / by John Dowson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    Darwin then was avowedly a theorist, and he was really such, not merely because he was a thinker, for theory does not include all thought, but because he was a diligent framer of theories, commonly so called, or rather of hypotheses, and most of them resting on a basis of hypothetical materialism. He tells us, indeed, at the beginning of “ Zoonomia,” that “the whole of nature may be supposed to consist of two essences or substances ; one of which may be termed spirit and the other matter ; the former possessing the power to commence or produce motion, and the latter to receive or communicate it; ” but he subsequently classes “ the spirit of animation,” by which he means animal and even vegetable life, with heat, electricity, and magnetism, and says in other parts of the work that “ the sensorial power or spirit of animation is perpetually renewed by the secretion or produc- tion of it in the brain and spinal marrow ; ” (I, 75,) that “ the spirit of animation at the time it communicates or receives motion from solid bodies must itself possess some property of solidity,” (I, 115,) and that “ the oxygen of the atmosphere supplies the material from which it is extracted or fabricated.” (II, 185, 706.) And further, that “ the word idea, which has various meanings in the writers of metaphysic,” is used by him “ simply for those notions of external things, which our organs of sense bring us acquainted with originally, and is defined a contrac- tion, or motion, or configuration of the fibres, which consti- tute the immediate organ of sense.” (I, 11, 2nd edition.) “ The spirit of animation ha3 four different inodes of action, or in other words, the animal sensorium possesses four different faculties, which are occasionally exerted, and cause all the contractions of the