[To appear in Peter Anstey (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century]
Introduction
The problem of generation, at its broadest, concerns the way in which entities that at one time do not exist, later do. The generation of animals is just one instance of this problem, as are the coming-into-being of minerals, plants, mountains and other features of the natural environment; planets, stars, and the cosmos itself. In any given domain, there are, to put it succinctly, three possible solutions to the problem: (i) to hold that nothing ever really comes into being, but only emerges out of a new arrangement of preexisting material parts; (ii) to hold that nothing ever really comes into being, but is always itself pre-contained in the world in a hidden form; (iii) to hold that new creatures come into being as a result of the imposition of some new form on matter, either as a result of God’s direct intervention (as in the traditional Christian account of human embryogenesis) or of the transition of a previously merely potential form to actuality. One might adopt one of these solutions for a given domain, and another for another: for example, one might hold that the generation of humans involves the supernatural creation of a soul by God in, say, the fourth month of gestation, while in contrast the ‘generation’ of a mountain is really just the rearrangement of already existing dirt. But in general for those entities to which natural philosophers have traditionally wanted to ascribe some substantial reality, or reality over and above the parts that compose them, only the second or third solution would do.
Thus, we may see the problem of generation as consisting in the set of fundamental questions: What things are such that their being cannot be accounted for in terms of the mere rearrangement of things in the world? If their being is not due to such rearrangement, then how can we account for the fact that they do not appear to have always existed? Have they in fact always existed, but in a manner unknown to us? And how could the other option --that they are supernaturally created at a given moment-- be tenable if one is committed to the view, as so many 17th-century British philosophers were, that everything in the world unfolds according to rigid mechanical laws? In this chapter, we will follow what appears to have been the convention in most natural-philosophical writing of the early modern period, in treating questions of 'biological' generation interchangeably with those coming from chemistry, mineralogy, meteorology, etc. How do actually existing things come into being? That is the question, whether it concerns humans, frogs, chemical compounds, or comets.
Often indeed, biological generation is taken as the model of generation in general. This is a commonplace that does not begin with British philosophy. Thus Albertus Magnus writes in his Book of Minerals:
The mineralizing power is a certain power, common to the production of both stones and metals, and of things intermediate between them... And because we have no special name for this power, we are obliged to explain by analogies what it is. Let us say, then, that just as in an animal’s seed, which is a residue from its food, there comes from the seminal vessels a force capable of forming an animal, which actually forms and produces an animal, and is in the seed in the same way as an artisan is in the artifact that he makes by his art; so in material suitable for stones there is a power that forms and produces stones, and develops the form of this stone or that (Albertus Magnus 1967, 22; cited in Clericuzio 2000, 16).
Now, one might interpret this parallel that Albert is drawing between mineralogenesis and embryogenesis as an analogy, as one might call God the ‘architect’ of the world. But one might by contrast understand it as a hypothesis about how minerals come into being. That is, Albert had empirical evidence for the existence of seeds that stood at the beginning of the process of generation of animals, and supposed that minerals might be generated in the same way, even though we have never seen their seed. There is no prima facie reason why they should not be generated in this way. It may however be a consequence of our contemporary conception of seed that we should suppose it is the sort of thing whose existence might be empirically established. Indeed, in Aristotle, the animal semen is only the material vehicle of an immaterial form, and as such simply dissipates once the form is transmitted to the female’s uterus. Such a conception of seed might be deemed necessary for anyone who wants to steer clear of a materialist conception of generation, or a conception that veers to close to a reduction of generation to mere alteration.
There are in fact two broad traditions of thinking about seeds, and so inevitably about generation, that will play a role in the early modern period. The one begins in the Epicurean tradition, passes through Lucretius, and enters the modern world through Pierre Gassendi, Walter Charleton, and others, positing invisible clusters of atoms that develop into the familiar kinds of qualitatively diverse natural things in the world. The other is rooted in the Stoic tradition, and enters the modern world through Paracelsus, Jean-Baptiste van Helmont, and others, conceiving of seeds in the vitalistic and abstract sense of logoi spermatikoi, immaterial principles embedded in nature that are triggered at different moments to develop. The various seed theories of the 17th century followed in either of these two traditions, or mixed elements of both of them. Indeed, with many thinkers it is difficult to determine in which sense they themselves understand the notion of seed, and this is particularly true of the generally very eclectic natural philosophers in 17th-century England.
Let us now seek to chart the most prominent theories of generation in English philosophy of the 17th century, as well as some of their immediate continental antecedents, paying particular attention to the way in which they are positioned relative to the three possibilities outlined above.
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