Sir Charles Bell and the Bridgewater Treatises / by Benjamin Spector.

  • Spector, Benjamin, 1893-1976
Date:
1942
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sir Charles Bell and the Bridgewater Treatises / by Benjamin Spector. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    2, 1810,*? in a letter he wrote to his future wife, Marion Shaw: “T see a God in everything, it is the habit of my mind. Do you think I could have been employed as I have been without con- templating the architect?” Again, he writes to his brother on December 5, 1818: “‘I love Nature and Nature’s God with a sense of devotion—and I have never for a day let myself be lost in mere worldliness.” ** This reverential attitude is seen in many of his writings. There was as yet nothing in the latter part of the Eighteenth century to replace the prevailing Mechanical view of the Universe similar for example to the protest which the Baconian and Cartesian physics made against scholastic Aristoteli- anism. The advent of the theory of Evolution by Darwin was yet to come to the front. A brief backward glance of the history of Natural Theology, to which Bell made his contribution in the book on ‘“ The Hand”’ will set the stage for our interpretation of that book. Natural Theology, ~ in the time of Bell, was a conception which emphasized evidences of contrivances and design in nature ordered by an Intelligent Being for a Purpose. Our first effort, then, must be to remove ourselves from this conception of Natural Theology made so familiar to us by William Paley and the Bridgewater Treatises. We recall, for example, that Aristotle ** in his De Caelo writes that God and Nature create nothing that has not its use and further that in his De Anima * declares that Nature does nothing in vain and omits nothing that is indispensable. The teleology of Galen’s De Usu Partium has its roots in the books of Aristotle, just quoted. We also remember that Cicero in the De Natura Deorum’*® remarks “that man has been cared for by divine providence will be more readily understood if we survey the whole structure of man and all the conformation and per- fection of human nature.” Maimonides,*’ whose medical practice is based upon Galenic philosophy uses the same evidence. Francis 12 Letters of Sir Charles Bell, Selected from His Correspondence with his Brother, George Joseph Bell, 1870, p. 180. 18 Tbid., p. 264. 14 The Works of Aristotlh—W. D. Ross, 1936, Vol. II. De Caelo, I, 4, 271a, 34-35. 15 Aristotle, De Anima, R. D. Hicks, III, 9, 432b, 21. 1907. 16 Cicero De Natura Deorum Academica, II, 54, sect. 133, Tr. H. Rackham, 1933. 17 Sarton, G. Introduction to the History of Science, Vol. II, Part I, p. 74, 1931.
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