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Focusing less on the wider debates over the rise of capitalism based on humans’ ‘animal nature’ than on Mandeville’s concept of virtue, John Callanan has recently drawn attention to the use, function and description of animals and the debates over their ‘nature’ in Mandeville’s work.41 _{The question of the relationship between man}

and animals was clearly central, not only to the Fable, but to Mandeville’s wider oeuvre; the poem thus needs to be read – and this will be another central theme of this dissertation – against the background of the heated debates on the nature, and possible soul, of animals. Leonora Cohen Rosenfield in particular has shown that while the question of the animal soul was not an invention of the seventeenth century, this period saw particularly vigorous debates on the matter. The key episode in its history revolves, of course, around Descartes’ theory of the beast-machine.42 _{Rejecting the}

Scholastic notion of the tripartite soul, divided into vegetative, sensitive and rational (with only the latter being a human prerogative), Descartes declared that all bodies were purely machines. Humans, he argued, were the only beings capable of thought and its visible manifestation, language. This was so because they had been given a soul, which the philosopher reduced to and equated with the rational faculties (discursive reasoning and free will).43 _{Conscious passions and sensations thus became}

operations of the soul.44 _{Although, Descartes argued, animals sensed, they did so}

41 _{Callanan, ‘Pride’.}

42 _{The best discussion of the fate of the beast-machine theory in the eighteenth century remains}

Rosenfield. On the fact that Descartes did, indeed, grant sensation to animals, see Cohen Rosenfield,

Beast-Machine, pp. 17-18.

43 _{Cohen Rosenfeld, Beast-Machine, pp. xxiv-xxv. The mind-body relationship in Descartes is complex}

and has been a matter of much scholarly discussion; a good account of the problem is Gary Hatfield, ‘Descartes’ Physiology and Its Relation to His Psychology’, in The Cambridge Companion to Descartes, ed. by John Cottingham, Cambridge Companions to Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 335–70.

44 _{In his treatise on the passions (first edition 1650), Descartes argued that animals could not feel the}

effects of the passions, because these depended on the soul and its interaction with the body: ‘car encore qu’elles [les bestes] n’ayent point de raison, ny peut-estre aussi aucune pensée, tous les mouvemens des

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without being aware of it. Unlike humans, they did not have the will to resist the pull of their appetites and sensations; they were purely matter in motion.45

Mandeville was clearly aware with all these debates. During his medical studies at the University of Leiden, he had written a dissertation on the nature of animals (Disputatio Philosophica de Brutorum Operationibus, 1689), in which he defended the orthodox Cartesian position of an absolute distinction between thought and feeling of humans and the machine-like nature of all other animals.46 _{In his thesis,}

Mandeville argued against the idea of thought in animals, though he did admit that that they might sense. The satirist would later reverse his position, instead admitting that animals were capable of thought and that all living beings were governed by the principle of ‘life’ which distinguished the from inert matter.47 _{His Disputatio shows,}

in any case, that he had grappled with the question of the animal from early on in his career.

Leiden was, at the time of his studies, one of the most important centres in Europe for natural philosophy and medicine. It attracted Cartesian scholars as well as their detractors, and was thus rightly considered a hotbed for debates about the nature of living bodies, both animal and human.48 _{Descartes himself had spent some of his}

exile in the Dutch city, where he also published his Discours de la méthode (1638) and the city remained famous for Cartesian philosophy and physics long after his death.49 _{To name one illustrious example of a Leiden Cartesian, Florentius Schuyl}

(1619-1669), professor of medicine at Leiden from 1664 onwards, published a Latin translation in 1662 of Descartes’ De l’homme, which set out to develop an entirely

esprits & de la glande, qui excitent en nous les passions, ne laissant pas d’estre en elles, & d’y servir à entretenir & fortifier, non pas comme en nous les passions, mais les mouvemens des nerfs & des muscles, qui ont coustume de les accompagner.’ René Descartes, Les passions de l’âme (Paris: M. Bobin, & N. le Gras, 1664), p. 75. See also Cohen Rosenfield, Beast-Machine, p. 17.

45 _{As Gary Hatfiel explains, Descartes took earlier physiological theories and provided a ‘translation’}

into a purely mechanical account; see Hatfield, ‘Descartes’ Physiology,’ p. 353.

46 _{Bernard Mandeville, Disputatio philosophica de brutorum operationibus (Leiden: Apud Abrahamum}

Elzevier, 1689). For more on Mandeville’s engagement with ‘the animal question’, see Callanan.

47 _{Mandeville, Fable II, p. 166.}

48 _{For natural philosophy in general, see Ann M. Blair, ‘Natural Philosophy’, in The Cambridge History} of Science Volume 3: Early Modern Science, ed. by Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 363–406. On Leiden and natural philosophy, see G.A. Lindeboom, ‘Dog and Frog - Physiological Experiments’, in Leiden University in the Seventeenth Century: An Exchange of Learning, ed. by Theodoor Herman Lunsingh Scheurleer and G.H.M. Posthumus Meyjes (Leiden: Universitaire Pers Leiden; Brill, 1975), pp. 279–93.

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mechanistic physiology of the human body.50 _{Schuyl’s ‘Ad Lectorem’ focused almost}

entirely on the Cartesian doctrine of the beast-machine, despite the fact that this was only a minor aspect of Descartes’ original.51 _{At the hands of some of his followers,}

Descartes’ theory provided a particularly stark way of distinguishing (exclusively human) reason from the purely mechanical body, whether in humans or in animals. The problem of the animal soul was thus linked to questions about the interaction between soul (or mind) and body, the nature of the ‘oeconomy’ of the living body and ̶ by implicit or explicit analogy ̶ the ‘oeconomy’ of human individual and collective bodies. The concept of the animal oeconomy, broadly defined as the ensemble of anatomical structures, organs and fluids necessary for the upkeep of the living body, spanned all living beings from insect to man and made the study of one kind of body relevant to that of another.52 _{Central to the study of all bodies was the relationship}

between the rational faculties (reason and will) and the passions. As historians of medicine have outlined, the most influential theory of the animal oeconomy in the early eighteenth century was the iatromechanism of the Leiden physician Herman Boerhaave.53 _{For iatromechanists, organic bodies should be conceived of as hydraulic}

machines, composed of solid and fluid parts representing, respectively, the pulleys, levers, vessels and the liquids (most importantly, the blood) circulating through them. For Boerhaave and his followers, the machine of the body was set in motion and governed by the sensorium commune. While Aristotle had located the sensorium commune in the heart, Boerhaave argued that it was to be found in the brain, that it gathered all bodily sensations and that it produced all ideas, emotions and voluntary movements.54 _{For iatromechanists, the mechanical laws of the physical interaction of}

bodies were sufficient to explain the body, while the ‘soul’ and its ‘functions’ (such

50 _{Lindeboom, ‘Dog and Frog,’ pp. 283-284; Cohen Rosenfield, Beast-Machine, pp. 31-32; Cohen}

Rosenfield classifies Schuyl as one of several ‘physiologists’ who, in the decades after Descartes’ death, defended the beast-machine theory; see pp. 28-37.

51 _{Rosenfield, Beast-Machine, pp. 245-249.}

52 _{Harro Maas analyses the thought of Thomas Reid to show how his understanding of physiology}

affects his political economic thought: Harro Maas, ‘Where Mechanism Ends: Thomas Reid on the Moral and the Animal Oeconomy’, History of Political Economy, 35.Suppl 1 (2003), 338–60. Catherine Packham has analysed the influence of vitalist physiology on the work of Adam Smith: Packham.

53 _{On Boerhaave, see especially Rina Knoeff, Herman Boerhaave (1668-1738): Calvinist Chemist and} Physician (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 2002).

54 _{Knoeff, pp. 193–94; John P. Wright, ‘Boerhaave on Minds, Human Beings, and Mental Diseases’,} Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 20.1 (2010), 289–302. The physiologist Albrecht von Haller adopted the notion of the sensorium commune as the ‘corporeal antechamber to the non-corporeal

soul’, while Charles Bonnet went further, seeking to link all sensations, thoughts and language to sensible fibres in the body coordinated by the sensorium commune: see Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology, pp. 28–37.

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as consciousness) had to be bracketed out by the physician. According to the Boerhaavian model, then, there was a clear distinction between the ‘soul’ and the rest of the body that it set in motion. While the body was to be considered like a machine, the immortal soul was beyond the purview of the physician or anatomist.

The mechanical model of the human-animal difference was contested not only by Scholastic thinkers, but also by thinkers in the sceptical tradition. Particularly influential for post-Cartesian sceptics was, of course, Michel de Montaigne (1533- 1592), quoted by Mandeville as a model for his own Fable; Du Châtelet, in her effort to make Mandeville palatable to her French audience, described him as ‘the English Montaigne’.55 _{Montaigne, in his ‘Apologie de Raymond Sebond’, had argued that}

animals seemed to possess both reason and morality, and possibly even more so than humans: ‘Il se trouve plus de difference de tel homme à tel homme que de tel animal à tel homme.’56 _{Montaigne’s goal, not dissimilar to Mandeville’s, was less to provide}

an account of animals than to undermine man’s confidence, or, more accurately, man’s pride, in his own rational faculties: ‘Le moyen que je prens pour rabatre cette frenaisie et qui me semble le plus propre, c’est de froisser et fouler aux pieds l’orgueil et humaine fierté.’ By linking his poem to Montaigne’s work, Mandeville suggested to his readers (at least those who were well read in natural philosophy) that he, too, was engaged in removing rational man from the throne on which Descartes – Mandeville’s erstwhile source on the question of animal nature – had placed him.57

By contrast, with his claim about the particularity of the living body, be it the individual body Mandeville was treating in his medical practice or the body politic, the satirist was echoing the theories of the German physician Georg Ernst Stahl (1660– 1734), even though I have been unable to find explicit references. Stahl, one of the

55 _{‘It was said of Montaigne, that he was pretty well versed in the defects of mankind, but unacquainted}

with the excellencies of human nature: if I fare no worse, I shall think myself well used.’ Mandeville, ‘Preface,’ Fable, p. 20. Montaigne, in his ‘Apologie de Raymond Sebond’, argued that ‘Il se trouve

plus de difference de tel homme à tel homme que de tel animal à tel homme.’ On Montaigne and the animal question, see Hassan Melehy, ‘Montaigne and Ethics: The Case of Animals’, L’Esprit Créateur, 46.1 (2006), 96–107. On how his position got taken up in the seventeenth century, see Peter Harrison, ‘The Virtues of Animals in Seventeenth-Century Thought’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 59.3 (1998), 463–84.

56 _{’Apologie de Raymon Sebond’, Michel de Montaigne, Essais de Michel de Montaigne (1580), ed. by}

André Tournon (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale Éditions, 2003) Livre II, 12.

57 _{Descartes tends to omit the names of his sources, he cites Montaigne once, precisely to refute the}

latter’s claims about the intelligence of beasts; see Michael Moriarty, ‘Montaigne and Descartes’, in

The Oxford Handbook of Montaigne, ed. by Philippe Desan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 347–63; Martine Pécharman, ‘Contre le “pensement” et le “parler” des bêtes ou Descartes devenu juge de Montaigne’, Montaigne Studies, 25 (2013), 105–17.

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most famous and influential critics of Boerhaaavian theories, proposed instead an animist conception of the living body as governed in every movement by a soul.58 _He

asserted that although the body functioned mechanically, life itself could not be explained entirely by mechanical forces. Instead, living bodies – radically different from inanimate or mechanical objects – were moved by a soul, or anima, which was located in the body and directed its motions through mechanical means. Stahl did not completely reject the mechanistic study of the body but argued that there were two fundamental principles, matter (material) and motion (immaterial). Because the soul too was immaterial, it could cause motion, which in turn affected matter.59 _Living

bodies, for Stahl, were composed of mixed matter; the harmony between these different compounds, as well as the coordination of parts, was guaranteed by the soul. In the second volume Fable, written as a dialogue between two interlocutors called Cleomenes (a man with medical training who shared the Fable’s suspicion of ‘fashionable men’ and their supposed virtues) and Horatio (‘one of the modish People’), Mandeville makes the connection between his medical thought and the political ideas of the Fable more explicit.60 _{Mandeville echoes Stahl, for example, in}

his claim that the usefulness of anatomy, or at least dissection, to medical practice is limited because it can only reveal the structure but not the function of body parts:

The Structure and Motions of the Body, may, perhaps, be mechanically accounted for, and all Fluids are under the Laws of Hydrostaticks: But we can have no Help from any Part of the Mechanicks, in the Discovery of things, infinitely remote from Sight, and entirely unknown as to their Shapes and Bulks.61

58 _{Lester S. King, ‘Stahl and Hoffmann: A Study in Eighteenth Century Animism’, Journal of the} History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, XIX.2 (1964), 118–30; On the place of Stahl in the European Enlightenment, and especially as a source for mid-century vitalists, see Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology, pp. 43–44; Elizabeth A. Williams, The Physical and the Moral: Anthropology, Physiology, and Philosophical Medicine in France, 1750-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 30–31; Johanna Geyer-Kordesch, ‘Georg Ernst Stahl’s Radical Pietist Medicine and Its Influence on the German Enlightenment’, in The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century, ed. by Andrew Cunningham and Roger French (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 67–87.

59 _{King, ‘Stahl,’ p. 123.}

60 _{For descriptions of the interlocutors, see Mandeville, Fable II, pp. 15-19.} 61 _{Mandeville, Fable II, p. 161.}

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Though Mandeville admitted that anatomy and mathematics were useful for reaching limited knowledge of some body parts, it ultimately could not account for the living body as a whole.62 _{The reason for this was that for Mandeville both animal and human}

bodies are governed by a vital force that radically distinguishes them from inert objects.

Hor. The main Spring in us is the Soul, which is immaterial and immortal: But what is that to other Creatures that have a Brain like ours, and no such immortal Substance distinct from Body? Don’t you believe that Dogs and Horses think? Cleo. I believe they do, though in a Degree of Perfection far inferior to us. Hor. What is it, that superintends Thought in them? where must we look for it? which is the main Spring?

Cleo. I can answer you no otherwise, than Life. Hor. What is Life?

Cleo. Every body understands the Meaning of the Word, though, perhaps, no body knows the Principle of Life, that Part which gives Motion to all the rest.63

For Cleomenes, both animals and human bodies are driven by an immaterial and unknowable ‘principle of life’. Even if an anatomist had complete knowledge of each of the body’s parts, that is, he would still be unable to understand the living body as a whole. The same is true, of course, of Mandeville’s bee swarm: even if citizens, when looked at individually, seem vicious and depraved, the well-governed body politic as a whole is still harmonious.

Mandeville’s most important medical work was his Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions (1711), a dialogue between a physician called Philopiro, who like Mandeville studied in Leiden and his sick patient. Mandeville’s medical dissertation (written two years after his general dissertation on animals), like Philopiro’s, had been on the role of chyle in digestion; as De Marchi notes, his treatise on hypochondria continued his interest in the stomach and emphasised the importance of good digestion in the treatment of melancholic

62 _{On Mandeville’s sceptical attitude towards mathematics, see Charles T. Wolfe, ‘Vital Anti-}

Mathematicism and the Ontology of the Emerging Life Sciences: From Mandeville to Diderot’,

Synthèse, (2017), 1–22 (online first).

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‘diseases’.64 _{Philopiro insisted that ‘whilst the strict union that is between the Body}

and the Soul lasts, they continue to be, as it were, a mixture, the latter cannot act without the assistance of the first’.65 _{Every man’s or woman’s body, Mandeville}

claimed, was a unique mixture of parts. When, in the Fable, Mandeville made the individual as endowed with his or her own passions the basis of society, he was thus also echoing his own medical theory and practice. Because of the uniqueness of each of his patients, Philopiro/Mandeville insisted that doctors become well acquainted with the manner of living of […] Patients’ so as to ‘better to consult the Circumstances as well as Idiosyncrasy of every particular Person: Some have strange Aversions as to Diet; others peculiar Antipathies against some excellent Remedies; and every wholesome Exercise suits not with all People.’66 _{While this was a fairly conventional}

view of health and disease, Mandeville put it to novel use in his Fable. In the poem, the insistence on the ‘idiosyncrasy’ of each man or woman manifests itself in the various paragraphs on members of the different trades, who each have their own dominant passions. For society to become a harmonious whole, lawgivers should not ignore the unique passions or attempt to constrain them through a rigid moral code. Society, in short, was a body of mixed composites animated with its own life force.

Mandeville’s anti-Boerhaavian view of the body and his questioning of Descartes’ assumption about man as rational in opposition to animals were central to Mandeville’s claims about the body politic in more important ways. In the first line of the preface to the 1728 edition, Mandeville relates his understanding of the body politic to the study of animal bodies: ‘Laws and government are to the political bodies of civil societies what the vital spirits and life itself are to the natural bodies of animated creatures’.67 _{With the very first sentence of his preface, Mandeville thus}

suggested that the bodies of communities, like the bodies of (human) animals, did not function mechanically but were instead ‘animated’ by ‘vital spirits’.68 _{Rejecting the}

Cartesian mechanism he had himself endorsed in his first publication, Mandeville goes on to mock those who pretended that ‘the anatomy of dead carcasses’ will yield

64 _{De Marchi, ‘Mandeville’, pp. 69-70.} 65 _{Mandeville, Treatise, p. 128.}