to matter. The explanation of the world, the explanation of life, were reduced to the play of physical or mechanical forces. Epicurus, a little later, maintained that the knowledge of matter and its different forms accounts for all phenomena, and therefore for those of life.
Descartes, sharply separating the metaphysical world—that is to say, the soul defined by its attribute, thought—from the physical or material world characterized by extension, practically came to the same conclusions as the materialists of antiquity. To him, as to them, the living body was a mere machine.
Iatro-mechanism. Descartes. Borelli.—This, then, is the theory of the iatro-mechanicians, of which we may consider Descartes the founder, instead of the Greek philosophers. These ideas held their own for two centuries, and were productive of such fruitful results in the hands of Borelli, Pitcairn, Hales, Bernoulli, and Boerhaave, as to justify the jest of Bacon that "the philosophy of Epicurus had done less harm to science than that of Plato." The iatro-mechanic school tenaciously held its own until Bichat came upon the scene.
Iatro-chemistry. Sylvius le Boë.—It was from a reaction against their exaggerations that Stahl created animism, and the Montpellier school created vitalism. We gather some idea of the extravagant character of their explanations by reading Boerhaave. To this celebrated doctor the muscles were springs, the heart was a pump, the kidneys a sieve, and the secretions of the glandular juices were produced by pressure; the heat of the body was the result of the friction of the globules of blood against the walls of the blood-vessels; it was greater in the lungs because the vessels of the lungs were supposed to be narrower
