Natural Philosophy in Harrington's Political Thought

Natural Philosophy in Harrington's Political Thought Wm. CRAIG DIAMOND I. IN THE LATERYEARSOF HIS LIFE, James Harrington (1611-77) was probably "much decay'd in his understanding, by reason of his great and long weakness." But, continued Harrington's biographer, John Toland (1670-1722), "I shall never be convinced that he was delirious in that only instance which they allege," for he was "allowed to discourse of most other things as rationally as any man, except his own distemper, fancying strange things in the operation of his animal spirits, which he thought to transpire from him in the shape of birds, of flys, of bees, or the like.'" Harrington had never recovered from the poor medical care he received while imprisoned after the Restoration in 1660. But Toland wanted to refute those who saw in that fanciful rhetoric an appropriately "mad" conclu'sion to Harrington's republican political philosophy, for his writings remained in high regard with those known as Commonwealthmen, among whom Toland counted himself. 2 Toland argued that Harrington had been discussing his illness in legitimate scientific terminology with only slight poetic exaggeration. To support this argument Toland had included in his edition of Harrington's works a fragmentary treatise dating from the early 1660s entitled The Mechanics of Nature. A reading of this document suggests that Harrington was outlining here ideas that in a less explicit fashion had contributed to the political philosophy he had developed earlier during the Commonwealth. For the concept of spirits expressed in this treatise can be shown to have played a major role in the construction of Harrington's political philosophy. An analysis of that role, with particular emphasis on the political implications of spirit for Harrington's contemporaries, expands our understanding of how politics and science shaped each other in seventeenth-century England. The Mechanics of Nature reported Harrington's own peculiar understanding of Nature as anima mundi. Nature was "the very word of God . . . that same spirit ' "The Lifeof Harrington," in The Works of James Harrington: The Oceana and Other Works, ed. John Toland (London, 1771), pp. xxii-xxxiv (hereafter cited as Works). John Aubrey also reported Harrington's interest in spirits. From Aubrey's description it is possible to infer that Harrington was carryingon experimentsconcerningthe questionof spontaneousgeneration. For the Restorationinterest in this problem, see Elizabeth Gasking,Investigation into Generation, 1651-1828(Baltimore:The Johns Hopkins Press, 1967). 2 On this group, see Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 1959). For the larger context of British civic humanism in which Harrington's political thought must be located, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1975). [3871 388 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY of God which in the beginning mov'd upon the waters . . . his plastic virtue. ''3 Harrington proceeded to quote the classic celebration of the Platonic soul of the world--that passage from the Aeneid containing the phrase "mens agitat molem.'" He then described how "ministerial spirits" did the bidding of the anima mundi. It is striking that the workings of these spirits are mechanical; the title of the treatise is not misleading. Yet Boyle's image of Nature as the Strasbourg clock--which can be understood as the epitome of the "new mechanical philosophy"-is very different from this natural philosophy. 5 As we shall see, it is the assumption that nature operates through spirits that distinguished Harrington's thought from the "new mechanical philosophy." His natural philosophy might be called one of a "spiritual mechanics. ' ' We first need to understand what spirit meant for Harrington in The Mechanics of Nature and the philosophical context in which he arrived at that usage. Harrington declared that "Nature is not only a spirit, but is furnished or rather furnishes herself with innumerable ministerial spirits. ''6 These spirits are composed of "aethereal particles invisibly mixed with elementary." They should be understood as spiritus, that ambivalent substance that comprehended both spirit and matter and so provided the intermediary element in the Neoplatonic picture of the cosmos. 7 In Harrington 's lifetime the newer meanings of spiritus ranged from the animal spirits in English corpuscularian thought, which were little more than chemical particles, 8 to the...