From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine: Animal Soul in French Letters from Descartes to La Mettrie (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 95 have a major role in Bacon's thinking. The discussion of Bacon's defense of JUtiLlS Caesar (p. 61) obviously betrays a misunderstanding both of Bncon's monarchism and of complex renaissance attitudes toward Caesar. To speak of "the passions, or as Bacon preferred to call them, the 'affections' " (p. 23) is to ignore a vital distinction between terms for pathological emotional states and for the normal emotional drives necessary to man's functioning, or to overlook that a proper subordination of the affections to reason is for the renaissance thinker one of the conditions of virtuous conduct (p. 24). Bacon's distinction between a real and an apparent good as the mother respectively of virtue and passion (p. 224) may be a "foreshadowing of Hobbes," but it had been standard Christian psychology for centuries. Professor White recognizes that "More does not expect his own Christian world to advance to Utopia" (p. I00) but is setting up an ideal non-Christian state by contrast with which the imperfections of Christian England and Europe stand revealed. The aim is social criticism, not a political blueprint. Plato's Republic arises from an attempt to define justice. Why need one assume, as White does, that the New Atlantis is serious political theory rather than an attempt to arouse men by an ideal vision to the possibilities of the new science? White's stated reasons leave one reader, at least, unconvinced . His statement that the New Atlantis is an analogy, "and if Bacon poured any new light, that is where we should look for it" (p. 109) will make any student of Shakespeare nervous as he recalls the assumptions of the "Baconians", so will some of the interpretations based upon this premise. Finally, it seems likely that Bacon would have regarded a science of political action as growing out of the data provided by political history, much as the operative levels of natural philosophy grow ultimately out of natural history. One misses in Peace Among the Willows an attempt to extrapolate from the considerable evidence available a Baconian scheme of political philosophy as distinguished from political ideas. Various attempts have been made to do so, but what is apparently the most perceptive is safely hidden in a Latin dissertation by Augustus Dorner published in Berlin in 1867. White deafly has the necessary knowledge and ingenuity, and, if Dorner was on the right track, the results might provide a useful commentary on the methodological assumptions of the contemporary social sciences. VIRGIL K. WHITAKER Stanford University From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine: Animal Soul in French Letters from Descartes to La Mettrie. New and enlarged edition. By Leonora Cohen Rosenfield. (New York: Octagon Books, Inc., 1968. Pp. xxviii+385. $i0.00) I hear your skeptic questioning the good of all this patience applied so long and so diligently. What, he asks, is the use of all this trouble and toil? What profit in the days and weeks and months and years which the author has devoted to her task? The drift of such questioning is perfectly clear. Once upon a time, no man would have dared to raise the issue; to-day we hear all too much of it. Accordingly our reply will be prompt. To know a past which alone can explain our present, is a necessity for any thinking creatures. To search for the truth is a noble moral discipline, useful to those persons whom 96 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY it protects against the powers of laziness and illusion, and useful to those nations which it defends against abandonment and accommodations. Paul Hazard's words from the Preface of Profesosr Rosenfield's book are as trenchant today as they were for the original published in the dark days of 1940. It is not enough to say perfunctorily as one does, that, nearly thirty years later, it is a joy to see this long-out-of-print volume re-issued with the addition of Professor Rosenfield's pioneering study, "Peripatetic Adversaries of Cartesianism in 17th Century France." One must go further to give thanks that this is possible in the new Age of Relevance, and even while adhering to the ideal .of disinterested...