Vital motion as a mode of physical motion / by Charles Bland Radcliffe.

  • Radcliffe, Charles Bland, 1822-1889.
Date:
1876
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vital motion as a mode of physical motion / by Charles Bland Radcliffe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    regard it as natural. The power of motion, indeed, was one of the faculties with which the principle of nature was endowed. . Plato says little to the point. With him all philo- sophy merged in theology: to him vital motion, and motion generally, when traced to its source, resolved itself into a display of divine power. Aristotle, the great contemporary of Plato, recog- nized, not a Divine Being as Plato did, but a First Movmg Cause, a priinum mobile, one in essence, eternal, immaterial, at once immoveable, and the spring of all movement. According to him, this First Moving Cause worked in the living body (fwov) through the instrumen- tality of a principle which was distinctive of this body, and to which he gave the name of soul {^uxv)—3- prin- ciple possessing various energies or faculties of its own, distinct from the organs in which it was manifested, and yet requiring these organs for its manifestations. To this soul, when most developed, belonged several faculties (hwd^iei^)—the faculty of receiving nourishment (Bvvafitg OpeiTTiKT]), the faculty of sensation (8. alaOr^TiKri), the faculty of motion in place (8. KivrjTLicrj), the faculty of impulse or desire (S. opert/ti;), the faculty of intelligence (S. hiavovTiKr]). Vegetables even, by having the lowest of these faculties, the threptic, were supposed to have souls. Moreover, it is hinted that the seat of this kinetic faculty in animals is in the muscles, and that—a con- jecture for which Praxagoras, who lived two hundred years previously, ought to have credit—there were nerves, some of which had to do with movement and others with sensation. Nay, it is scarcely just to speak of the localization of the kinetic faculty in the muscles as being only hinted at, for this was the definite conclusion at which Aristotle arrived after witnessing the working