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on their chemical heritage when they found it useful.”
3
In addition to tracing the
influences of vitalistic corpuscularianism on the shift to a mechanistic atomistic
ontology,
s
operational and analytical definition of chemical element, in the work of Sennert
and Boyle. As Rocke has pointed out, “the operational criterion of elementarity
gradually insinuated itself into the consciousness of chemists, so that by the time
Lavoisier first clearly and unambiguously stated it in his classic
Traite´´l ´mentaire
de chimie
, it could provoke but little controversy.”
4
this paper will also establish historical antecedents for Lavoisier
'
10.2 The Vitalistic Corpuscularianism
of Van Helmont and Sennert
Vitalism has been generally regarded as the view that
vital forces
or
vital spirits
'
are causally operative in nature. Vitalistic descriptions of natural phenomena tend
to be qualitative, and vitalistic processes tend to be viewed as holistic and teleo-
logical. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, it was not unusual to find
alchemists and chymists embracing both a vitalistic conception of nature and a
corpuscularian conception of matter. In fact, not only is corpuscularianism perfectly
compatible with a vitalistic conceptions of nature, but one finds that corpuscularian
matter theory actually predates the advent of the mechanistic philosophy and of
modern Epicurean atomism. There was, thus, no tension between endorsing a
particulate theory of matter along with a belief in the
tria prima
, substantial form,
seminal reasons, and vital spirits. In fact, one of the central issues for fifteenth and
sixteenth century alchemists and chymists was precisely how to interpret
'
'
'
'
vital
spirits
. By the end of the sixteenth century, the interpretation of vital spirits
becomes unambiguously chemical, while still retaining the strong Neoplatonic
tone that it had acquired in the work of Paracelsus, Girolamo Fracastoro, Isaac
Beeckman, and Sebastien Basso. Although Joseph Duschene and Oswald Croll
reinforce this interpretation when they state that “the only active remedies [are]
those prepared by using spirits extracted by distillation”,
5
such an unambiguously
chemical interpretation of vital spirits is even more evident in the chemical philos-
ophy of Jan Baptista van Helmont (1579-1644). As we shall see presently, there
is a strong relationship between van Helmont
'
s theory of vital spirits and his
corpuscularian theory of matter. For van Helmont, vital spirit (
Archeus
) is con-
ceived as an alkaline volatile salt that moves through the body and that is “gener-
ated from the volatile salt contained in
cruor
[blood without spirit] and by means of
a local ferment.”
6
The notion of ferment links van Helmont
'
s theory of vital spirit to
'
3
Ibid
.
4
Rocke (
1984
), pp. 4-5.
5
Clericuzio (
1994
), p. 53.
6
Ibid
.
