Exquisite Mixture: the Virtues of Impurity in Early Modern England by Wolfram Schmidgen (review)

Wolfram Schmidgen’s Exquisite Mixture shows how revolutionary scientific notions of mixture, impurity, and deformity that emerged during the early seventeenth century shaped English political and philosophical thought during the mid- and late-seventeenth century. As Schmidgen shows, from the time of Plato and Aristotle, notions of mixture and impurity were almost uniformly seen in negative terms. Within traditional Enlightenment thought, the purpose of human endeavor was order and the disciplining of heterogeneity, classification and differentiation of natural phenomena, and organization and modernization of chaotic traditional societies. In contrast to this typical narrative of emerging Enlightenment thought, Schmidgen notes that a number of prominent seventeenth century thinkers, representatives of a wide array of religious faiths, political loyalties, and social conditions, including Catholic, Arminian, royalist, and republican, came to similar conclusions about the importance of mixture within the natural world and the world of human affairs. Their inspiration consisted of early seventeenth-century clergymen such as George Hakewell and natural philosophers such as Nathaniel Carpenter and Kenelm Digby. According to Schmidgen, such writers were largely successful in liberating concepts of mixture from the strictures of the dominant scholastic and Calvinist traditions, which had followed Aristotle in associating mixture with imperfection and impurity. For Aristotle, mixture was only ever an interim or temporary stage of development, from which emerged either an altogether different body or a return to a prior and more pure state. Accordingly, for early seventeenth-century adherents to Aristotelian purity such as Godfrey Goodman, mixture was the source of the “progressive decay of nature after the fall” and a source of corruption and disease in the contemporary world (29). The broader context in which the virtue of purity was upheld as an ideal might initially seem a little reductive: for the author, the adherents to purity and the detractors of mixture were narrow-minded Calvinists, who associated mixture with corruption and the fall of mankind, Aristotelian traditionalists who associated it with imperfection and deformity, and absolutists who associated it with republicanism and egalitarianism (19). At the same time, Schmidgen’s argument about those writers who valued mixture is compelling. He shows that natural philosophers such as Carpenter, Digby, and Robert Boyle were able to redefine mixture as “a generative cause,” which had the capacity to embody “cohesive and durable unions, superior and new qualities, and even new bodies” (57).

As result, certain traditional religious, political, and social hierarchies, according to which “form” structured and shaped undifferentiated “matter” and the one enlightened ruler governed the unruly multitudes, began to falter. And it is here within political and religious contexts that Schmidgen focuses most of his energies. In the religious context, a mediated relationship between God and the world replaced an “orthodox Calvinist” conception of God as unmediated cause of all earthly events (63). But it is in the world of political philosophy, in particular the Catholic and Arminian thinkers such as Digby, his friend and associate Thomas White, Thomas Jackson, and John Bramhall, that Schmidgen makes his most interesting and impactful contribution to the field. All of these writers stress the importance of a mediated relationship between first and second causes in a world in which contingency and human liberty were important forces. Against religious mystics such as Thomas Browne and absolutists such as Thomas Hobbes, such thinkers argued, ironically from a traditional Catholic or conformist perspective, that hierarchy is not natural or predetermined by God and that the logic of mediated secondary causes meant that “liberty, equality, and collaboration are inscribed into nature from the start” (75). In the final chapter, Schmidgen shows that John Locke’s defense of mixed government, his philosophical account of epistemology, morality, and politics, and his account of biological reproduction can similarly be explained by his adoption of Digby, White, and Boyle’s theories on mixture. Unlike most commentators on Locke who tend to ignore his more problematic views on interspecies mixing, Schmidgen shows convincingly that Locke’s bizarre accounts...