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CHAPTER 6 Mechanically Minded The central decades of the seventeenth century were tumultuous ones for England. Rebellions in Scotland, Ireland, and England fused into a civil war that did not so much end with the execution of Charles I in January 1649 as transform into an unsuccessful eleven-year experiment in republican government.These same decades witnessed an unprecedented intellectual upheaval as the Reformation splintered into innumerable warring factions , and new mechanical and mathematical worldviews were proposed as foundations for a restored epistemological order (even though their particular goals and methods were often in “con›ict with each other”).1 The “Mechanical” (or “Corpuscular”) hypothesis saw the universe as made of matter in motion. As Robert Boyle explained it: I agree with the generalty of philosophers, so far as to allow that there is one catholic or universal matter common to all bodies, by which I mean a substance extended, divisible, and impenetrable. . . . it will follow that, to discriminate the catholic matter into a variety of natural bodies, it must have motion. . . . matter [in motion] must be actually divided into parts . . . [and] each of the primitive fragments . . . must have two attributes —its own magnitude, or rather size, and its own ‹gure or shape. And since experience shows us (especially that which is afforded us by chemical operations, in many of which matter is divided into parts too small to be singly sensible) that this division of matter is frequently made into insensible corpuscles or particles, we may conclude that the minutest fragments, as well as the biggest masses, of the universal matter are likewise endowed each with its peculiar bulk and shape.2 The eventual spread of the term corpuscle from physics to physiology in the eighteenth century3 is an indicator of the extent to which this macrocosmic hypothesis also mechanized the microcosm. Since the human body also functioned as the seventeenth century’s basic sociological model, the mechanico-mathematical worldview developed in the middle decades of the seventeenth century would reconstruct society as well. Three of our economic writers came to maturity in this period: Sir William Petty, Sir Josiah Child, and John Locke. Petty and Locke were 101 trained as physicians; Child was a merchant. The century’s most original contribution to economic theory belongs to the physician Petty. This was no coincidence; Petty applied his new understanding of the human body to his analysis of the body politic. Locke’s strictly economic work was both less original and less radically rearranging of the body politic than Petty’s, but it was still built on the new model of the human body. And, merchant or no, Child could not help but be in›uenced by it as well. We begin then with William Harvey (1578–1657), the Italian-trained English physician whose 1628 treatise Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (The Movement of the Heart and Blood in Animals) put forth the case for the circulative movement of the blood through the body via a single system composed of the heart, lungs, arteries , and veins. According to established Galenic medical thought, the veins and arteries belonged to different systems: the veins were the vessels through which “hungry” organs drew nutrient-rich blood created by the liver from ingested food, while the arteries carried the pneuma-rich blood created by the heart’s heat to breathe life into those same organs. Harvey used observations and experiments in human and comparative anatomy to prove the direction of the ›ow, and a quantitative analysis of arterial blood ›ow to show the necessity of a recirculation rather than a continual manufacture of the blood.4 The operation of this system was mechanical, but Harvey’s worldview was not. His dedication of De Motu Cordis to Charles I reads: The animal’s heart is the basis of its life, its chief member, the sun of its microcosm; on its heart all its activity depends, from the heart all its liveliness and strength arise. Equally is the King the basis of his kingdoms, the sun of his microcosm, the heart of the state, from him all power arises and all grace stems.5 In the main text, he referred to the heart as “the titular deity of the body, the basis of life, the source of all things.”6 This may have been a Copernican rather than a Ptolemaic cosmos, but it was still fundamentally an Aristotelian (or qualitative) rather than a mechanical (or quantitative) universe .7 Harvey’s work was...

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