From the book
Sal Lumen and Spiritus Mundi Philosophici
Clovis Hesteau de Nuysement · Diotimos Editions · 2026
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At a Glance
- The wordBlood and humours provide the bodily vocabulary through which the author explains differing dispositions to corruption.
- In Sal LumenII.3.9 locates differing degrees of malignity in blood and humours within a discussion of parental contamination and excessive use of corruptible things.
- In this edition“Offending humour” in the new English preserves the causal sense of peccante without assigning moral intention to a bodily fluid.
- A place to readBlood and humours are discussed through degrees of inherited and acquired corruption.
Meaning
Blood and humours provide the bodily vocabulary through which the author explains differing dispositions to corruption. Humeur peccante is an offending or morbid humour, not a humour guilty of a conscious sin. The moral colouring of peccant does not remove its local physiological role. The claims belong to the book’s period medicine, not a modern diagnostic system.
Use in the book
II.3.9 locates differing degrees of malignity in blood and humours within a discussion of parental contamination and excessive use of corruptible things. Its comparison with a purer celestial life is conditional: if earth were as pure as heaven, the bodily situation would differ. The argument therefore cannot be made to assert that ordinary blood is already free of the conditions it condemns.
II.3.12 offers two alternative explanations for a cure attributed to ordinary remedies. Nature may be strong enough to overcome the impure bulk and benefit from the small useful substance; or the poison expelled by vigorous Nature may attract and carry away some resembling offending humour. In the second account, attraction and sympathy explain the alleged association of like harmful matter. The “or else” matters: these are not one and the same mechanism, nor proof that every poisonous remedy operates beneficially.
The author’s preference is for what suits Nature rather than afflicts it, and he closes the digression by saying that practising medicine is not his profession. Elsewhere the bright red of blood is used as a sign of vitality, with scorched blackness and false colours marking disturbance. That chromatic analogy should remain distinct from a verified test of disease or a recommendation to purify bodily humours by the described substances.
Places to read
- Book Two · Chapter 3 · Unit 9Blood and humours are discussed through degrees of inherited and acquired corruption.
- Book Two · Chapter 3 · Unit 12Two alternative cure accounts assign different roles to Nature and the offending humour.
- Book Two · Chapter 4 · Unit 18Vital red and false colours extend the physiological argument through tincture.
Translation
“Offending humour” in the new English preserves the causal sense of peccante without assigning moral intention to a bodily fluid. The translation also retains the alternatives in the cure explanation and the author’s disclaimer of medical profession. That statement qualifies the authority of the polemic, but does not make its extensive physiological claims disappear.
Attested forms
sang; malignité des humeurs; humeur peccante; humeurs