Species in perception · Lexicon

From the book

The Anatomy of Melancholy

Robert Burton · Diotimos Editions · 2026

Orientation

At a Glance

The wordSpecies can mean a form, appearance, impression or representation through which something is apprehended.
In the Anatomy of MelancholyThe account of the sensitive soul supplies a compact model.
In this editionThe checked equivalents vary by construction: “multiply species” becomes “amplified impressions”; “Species of sensible things” becomes “sensory forms of things”; “intelligible Species” becomes “intelligible forms”; “species of objects” becomes “mental images of objects”; and “species of love” becomes “images of love.”
A place to readMultiplying sensory impressions in an imagined comprehensive survey

Meaning

Species can mean a form, appearance, impression or representation through which something is apprehended. Burton uses the Latin word within English prose as well as in Latin quotations. The family includes “speciem,” an accusative singular form, and “specierum,” a genitive plural. In perceptual contexts, species are what the senses convey, imagination retains or changes, memory stores, and understanding abstracts. The word also means a kind or class elsewhere, and medicinal ingredients in one pharmaceutical passage. Those senses require separate identification rather than one automatic definition.

Latin “specie” can also mean outward appearance or looks, including a deceptive guise; “species animorum” denotes changing mental dispositions in a weather passage. These uses extend beyond the anatomy’s account of perceptual representations.

Use in the book

Forms received and retained

The account of the sensitive soul supplies a compact model. Through its apprehensive power, we perceive the species of things present or absent and retain them as wax retains a seal’s print. The wax is not the external object; it receives and holds its impression. The comparison explains how a thing can continue to be represented when it is no longer before the senses. It describes a necessary capacity of perception and retention, rather than making every species a delusion.

Burton’s inward senses give the forms differentiated destinations. Common sense assesses the sensory information that the separate organs bring. Imagination examines it more fully, keeps it longer, recalls it and constructs further forms by comparing what it receives. Memory stores the forms for later use by imagination and reason. The object perceived, the organ conveying information and the form retained are therefore distinct. The wax analogy illustrates representation; Burton does not specify a single uniform mechanism for every subsequent use.

The inward senses’ objects include things future, past and absent, but Burton qualifies them as forms that were previously in sense. The future is represented through available material, not claimed here as an immediately visible event. When the active understanding abstracts “intelligible Species” from imagination and transfers them to passive understanding, the adjective marks their role in intellectual apprehension. The next passage gives the active understanding judgment over truth and falsehood, while the passive preserves and further judges what is entrusted to it. Sensory reception and rational assessment are connected stages, not interchangeable operations.

Optical questions and an imaginary instrument

The vision discussion asks whether seeing occurs “intra mittendo, vel extra mittendo”: through receiving visible forms or sending them out. Burton presents this as a question debated by philosophers, followed by a reading list on optics. The alternatives should remain alternatives. The passage cannot be cited as his unqualified endorsement of emission or reception, and its sequence of marginal references is not consistently attached to the neighbouring names.

In the address to the reader, an imagined optical glass or listening instrument would “multiply species” so that its user could see and hear everything at once. The fantasy belongs to a survey of hidden motives and concealed folly: windows into breasts, opened bedroom doors and supernatural means of observation surround it. Multiplication here amplifies perceptual access; it does not multiply kinds of organism. The impossibly comprehensive instrument is part of the satirical supposition, not a report of an achieved invention. Later the aerial digression asks whether Bacon and Dee philosophize correctly about “multiplicatione specierum,” the propagation of forms. Again, Burton raises a question rather than supplying a settled account.

Retention, amplification and attributed agency

In the force-of-imagination digression, the species of objects remain in melancholy imagination and are misunderstood or magnified through continual meditation. Eventually, Burton says, real effects arise in some people. The important difference is between what the representation depicts and what its sustained presence may cause. The proposed bodily effect does not establish the represented object’s truth; conversely, an imagined object’s falsity does not make the sufferer’s distress unreal. Burton preserves a qualification of persons and outcome rather than saying that every retained image causes illness.

The later symptom catalogue describes “vanæ finguntur species,” unreal forms are fashioned like a sick person’s dreams. It proceeds from persistent thoughts about an insult or disappointment to grotesque inventions and, in some cases, the belief that feared phantoms stand before the eyes. This is a movement from brooding to apparent presence in Burton’s description; it is not evidence that the goblin has actually arrived.

The symptoms of melancholy from the whole body include a marginal adaptation of Apuleius’s curse, “species mortuorum,” forms of the dead. Burton applies the imprecation to people whose illness is far advanced; fumes from corrupt blood disturb their minds. In the adapted Latin, they heap ghostly forms before their own eyes and imagine terrifying encounters. Its agency and quotation frame matter: the sufferer’s represented terrors are being described, not authenticated as visits by dead people. The English body adds bones and fairy-babes not printed in that Latin quotation.

Other uses give representation a supernatural or extraordinary causal setting. In the account attributed to Cardan, “species sine visu” are images without sight, paired with words without a voice and said to be suggested by the devil in accordance with a person’s inclinations. The next paragraph explains demonic action on imagination through humours while reporting a different opinion that allows direct action. The phrase therefore concerns an alleged agent supplying appearances; it should not be absorbed into the purely humoral explanation of a nightmare elsewhere.

In the maternal-impression argument, the Latin “speciem” names the form imagined by a pregnant woman and supposedly impressed upon the foetus. Burton’s English gloss calls it a stamp. The imaged form is the proposed content transmitted; the mother’s imagination is the claimed operative power. This is a historical theory, presented with anecdotes and named authorities. Its presence does not establish that thoughts or cravings cause birthmarks or malformations, nor assign maternal responsibility for them.

Beauty conveyed by words

The love discussion uses species for forms of beauty received through eyes or ears or conceived inwardly. Music, pictures, gardens and other pleasing objects provide a deliberately varied field; the term is not limited to the visual outline of a person. Burton loosely attributes a positive account of beauty to Plato and then invokes Valesius. The supplied note cautions that this synthesis is not the actual conclusion of the unresolved discussion in Hippias Major. The lexical occurrence can be explained without endorsing the historical attribution.

More concretely, “species of love” enter imagination through description alone. Burton first offers people who fall in love through reputation or reading: praise of an unseen person, the literary account of Panthea, and letters. He then says that the mind sees where bodily eyes have not. The following paragraph nonetheless calls direct sight the most familiar and usual cause of love. This preserves a ranking, not a contradiction: sight is frequent, but language can convey material for an erotic representation without a prior sight of that particular beloved.

The return to the beloved’s sight can also revive a passion that has subsided. In the marginal Petrarch quotation, “auri species” is the appearance of gold, which renews greed, just as magnificent display renews ambition and bodily beauty kindles lust. Burton’s English body says “the sight of gold.” This is a locally concrete appearance presented as a stimulus to desire; the passage does not specify the anatomy’s sequence of inner faculties afresh.

Boundaries with other senses

Ordinary appearance and moral semblance supply further senses. In the attack on false friends, specie names the appearance of virtue by which hypocrites deceive and win favour, even while Burton denies that they possess the worth they display. The same printed form in the beauty discussion means looks: those who cannot be conquered in battle, he says, can be conquered by beauty. These passages concern a persuasive exterior or visible attractiveness; neither repeats the technical chain through common sense, imagination and memory. The guise of virtue recurs in the religious polemic.

In the weather discussion, the Latin phrase species animorum means the forms or states of minds, rendered here as their dispositions. Burton quotes an adapted passage of Virgil in which changing weather accompanies changed dispositions and fresh impulses, then restates it in English verse. The phrase refers to moods or mental states, rather than pictures of external things stored within a faculty. It remains part of the historical argument about air and temperament.

“Species” at the end of the reproduction account is the kind preserved when one creature produces another like itself. The “fourteen species of the understanding” are kinds of intellectual activity or disposition, not fourteen sensory pictures. The many medical species discussed under melancholy are classifications whose boundaries Burton repeatedly finds mixed in actual patients. These belong primarily under Genus and species. The pharmaceutical occurrence “the said species” instead refers to ingredients used with oils and wax in ointments. Its material recipe context distinguishes it both from classification and from representation.

Related entries

Imagination; Common sense; Memory and recollection; Intellect; Form; Sensible; Simulacra; Genus and species; Maternal impressions; Demonic apparitions. Future entries: Catoptrics and perspectives; Medicinal ingredients

Places to read

The satirical viewing and listening instrumentFocus on paragraph 16. Multiplying sensory impressions in an imagined comprehensive survey
Preserving the kindGeneration preserves the species; this classificatory use is distinct from a sensory representation
Retaining a formSeal and wax, disputed theories of vision, and the work of common sense, imagination and memory
Forms for understandingAbstraction of intelligible forms, subsequent judgment and the contrasting classificatory sense in “fourteen species”
Kinds and mixed clinical casesSpecies as classifications and symptoms, with distinctions complicated by mixed disease and physicians’ disagreement
Images attributed to a supernatural agentImages without sight, with direct and humour-mediated accounts distinguished
Changing dispositions with weatherFocus on paragraph 09. Species animorum in an adapted Virgil quotation and Burton’s separate English restatement
Persistent and supposedly transmitted formsRetention and amplification; the separate maternal-impression claim
Unreal forms and apparent presenceDream comparison, brooding and believed encounters with phantoms
An adapted curse in the symptom accountForms of the dead imagined by severely affected sufferers
Propagation as a questionBacon and Dee’s propagation of forms in the aerial digression
The pharmaceutical senseIngredients in preparations for external use
Beauty and its mediaForms perceived through eyes and ears or conceived inwardly
Deceptive appearanceFocus on paragraph 22. Specie as the outward semblance of virtue used to gain affection and favour
Beauty conveyed by reportReputation, reading and the qualified primacy of direct sight
Looks as a conquering powerFocus on paragraph 35. Specie as beauty or looks in a comparison with military force
Appearance renewing desireThe appearance of gold and the revival of greed
Virtue’s guise in religious polemicFocus on paragraph 02. The recurrent phrase is applied to ascetic practices in Burton’s hostile argument

In this edition

The checked equivalents vary by construction: “multiply species” becomes “amplified impressions”; “Species of sensible things” becomes “sensory forms of things”; “intelligible Species” becomes “intelligible forms”; “species of objects” becomes “mental images of objects”; and “species of love” becomes “images of love.” “Mental” makes the context explicit; it is not a separately printed adjective there. The different equivalents retain the representational sense without insisting that all passages use one model.

The marginal “species mortuorum” and “auri species” are rendered “Forms of the dead” and “the appearance of gold” in the editorial translations of the accompanying note and the accompanying note. Burton’s body paraphrases, including added bones and “the sight of gold,” remain separate textual operations.

“Speciem” is rendered “form” in the maternal-impression quotation; Burton’s following “stamp” and the modern gloss’s “image” remain a separate restatement. “Multiplicatione specierum” becomes “propagation of forms,” while pharmaceutical “species” becomes “ingredients.” Original quotation, authorial restatement and modern explanation thus remain distinguishable layers.

The boundary uses have their own equivalents: species animorum becomes “dispositions of minds”; specie in the false-friend passage contributes “appearance” to “with the appearance and shadow of virtue,” while specie in the battle comparison becomes “by looks.” The ablative ending supplies the instrumental relation in the latter; virtue and shadow belong to separate words in the former.

auri species

Printed “auri species” (Latin).

Citation key, Printed form, Original wording: auri species

Visible appearance of gold, represented as reviving avarice.

Context: Marginal Petrarch quotation, condensed by Burton; parallel to revived ambition and lust; not a fresh technical account of the inner senses.

Source: Burton original marginal quotation

Source wording, Original construction: ut pompa visa renovat ambitionem, auri species avaritiam

Modern rendering, Modern wording: the appearance of gold

At a Glance

Meaning

Use in the book

Places to read

In this edition

auri species

intelligible species

intra mittendo, vel extra mittendo

multiplicatio specierum

multiply species

species · Species · local use 1

species · local use 1

species · specierum

species · speciem

species · Species · local use 2

species · local use 2

species · local use 3

species · local use 4

species · local use 5

species · specie · local use 1

species · specie · local use 2

species animorum (phrase)

species mortuorum

species of beauty

species of love

species of objects

species of sensible things

species sine visu

vanæ species