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In the scale of beings in the Fluddian scheme, angels occupy a relatively high place; souls come below angels; and other creatures below souls; but all creatures are made of varying degrees of that primitive matter, light. Angels are made of subtle matter. We have seen Milton concurring in this. One more precise point is in the lines where the angel says:

whence the soul

Reason receives; and reason is her being,
Discursive or intuitive; discourse

Is oftest yours, the latter most is ours;
Diff'ring but in degree, of kind the same.14

Fludd has the same idea and the passage is close enough to Milton's:

Quia diversus est modus intelligendi; major in angelis, minor in animalibus . . . Quia anima aliquando est discursiva, quatenus scilicet est in corpore humano, angelus vero semper est intuitivus et sine discursu.1

Let us hear what angels are made of:

essentia simplicissima, et quasi immaterialis, lucida, pura, distincta. . . eorum denique operatio, per quam exercentur, voluntaria est, subita, utilis et honesta, operantur enim sine retardatione aut impedimento.16

So Milton's angel:

And obstacle find none

Of membrane, joint, or limb, exclusive bars;
Easier than air with air; if spirits embrace
Total they mix. . .17

And in Book VI they are described as

14 P. L., V, 486-90.

15 Tome I, I, IV, 11, p. 123.
16 Tome I, I, IV, 2, p. 110.

17 P. L., VIII, 624-27.

spirits that live throughout

Vital in every part, not as frail man
In entrails, heart or head, liver or reins

All heart they live, all head, all eye, all ear,
All intellect, all sense, and as they please,
They limb themselves, and colour, shape or size
Assume, as likes them best, condense or rare.18

With this compare Fludd:

Dæmones ex subtilissimorum cœli spiritualis elementorum materia componi . . . quorum compositio, si cum creaturis cœlorum inferiorum comparetur incorporea dicitur, sed respectu simplicitatis substantiæ lucidæ cœli Empyrei in quo, um quo et ex cujus elementis primo die creati sunt, non aliter equam plantæ, herbæ, carumque semina die tertio cum terra facta fuerunt.19

On the subject of men, however, Fludd and Milton do not agree quite so well; for Fludd, men have souls, material souls, it is true, yet souls, immortal and with all the ordinary qualities of souls except immateriality.20 It is true that he makes up for what Milton must have considered a lapse from the only doctrine by allowing animals souls also, which considerably reduces the value of that given to men." Even plants and minerals are not without souls for Fludd. And as all these souls are material, the question is largely one of vocabulary. However, to get a precise relationship with Milton's theory of the soul, we shall have to go a step further down the evolution of the doctrine, to the Mortalists.

18 Ibid., VI, 344-53.

19 Tome I, I, IV, 1, 2, pp. 108-09.

20 Vol. III, Tome II, tract. II, sec. I, pars. II, chap. 3, p. 161. References to Fludd are not always easy, as he occasionally starts a new numbering of his pages, and he subdivides his sub-divisions of parts in a most complicated manner.

21 Tome I, I, VI, 6, p. 177, and IV, 9, p. 119.

What are we to conclude from these general resemblances joined to the few precise points brought forward? Hardly, after all, a direct and precise influence from Fludd on Milton, except, perhaps, in one or two passages more important from the literary than from the philosophical point of view. But Fludd remains as a witness to a movement towards pantheistic materialism in the early 7 seventeenth century. Milton is entirely different from Fludd in his general preoccupations: he cares essentially for a vindication of God's justice and man's liberty; he is turned more towards the political world. But he uses some of the same theories as Fludd, and Fludd's success proves that Milton was no solitary thinker in his own time and country. Besides, we shall see that the Mortalists, who stand quite close to Milton, probably derive their general idea from Fludd.

Many of the ideas in common between the two can be referred to the background of the Kabbalah and Renaissance Neo-Platonism generally; but in their cosmological conceptions the two men come closer together. The idea that matter is the sufficient cause "of all subsequent good" (as Milton puts it) and that everything that exists is only a modification of one universal substance, was gaining ground in European thought. Fludd and Milton are two closely connected links of the chain that was to bring that conception from the reveries of the Renaissance to an age of precise investigation of natural phenomena.

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CHAPTER III

THE MORTALISTS, 1643-1655

E come closest of all to Milton's most personal ideas in a group of his immediate contemporaries, the Mortalists.

This group is known to us chiefly by a little pamphlet, Man's Mortality, published in 1643 (Amsterdam, printed by John Canne), and republished, with changes, in 1644 (same place and printer) and in 1655 (London, no publisher). The author is generally considered to have been Richard Overton, a London printer and bookseller, and a friend of John Lilburne, the head of the Levellers.2 Owing to the success of their revolutionary propaganda in the army, Overton and Lilburne frequently got into trouble with the Commonwealth government. Milton could hardly help knowing them, since in March, 1649, it was his task as Secretary to report on their arrest, and he was probably present at a violent scene that took place in Council between them and Cromwell. But if Overton was the principal author, it is likely that he had collaborators. Thomas Edwards, in the first part of his Gangræna (1645),* says that a certain Clement Wrighter is thought either to be the author or at least to have had a large part

1 This last edition was reissued in 1675. The British Museum possesses copies of all four printings. The edition of 1643 is described by Masson, III, 156.

2 The title pages of all the editions read "By R. O." Several of the copies in the British Museum bear the pencilled addition, in an old handwriting, "Richard Overton." On Overton, see the article by C. H. Firth in the Dictionary of National Biography.

3 See Masson, IV, 87.

4 Pp. 81-82.

in the book on the mortality of the soul. And in the second part of the same book (1646) Edwards describes a meeting of Anabaptists" at the Spitle," where the question of the immortality of the soul was discussed. A man called Battie upheld the thesis that the soul was mortal. Richard Overton seconded, and declared that God had made man, and the whole of man, from the dust, and that consequently the whole of man would return to dust. A good part of the audience approved. There would thus seem to have been a fairly well organized group, that could command a certain amount of popular support, back of the writing of Man's Mortality."

Milton, who was

of discontent" in

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among the sectaries and in a world 1643-1644, must have known the Mortalists then. At any rate, they would seem to have known him and his pamphlet on divorce. In Chapter VI of Man's Mortality, we find an allusion to "the tyrant Mezentius, that bound living men to dead bodyes.' Shortly before the tract came out, Milton had written, in the first edition of his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (August, 1643): " or as it may happen, a living soul bound to a dead corpse; a punishment too like that inflicted by the tyrant Mezentius."" It is only too likely that Milton was considered as potentially among the sectaries. But at this date, and for a good while still, there is no reason to think that he shared the ideas of the

5 P. 17.

6 That the pamphlet sold is evident from the fact that the edition of 1644 replaced in their proper context passages omitted by accident in 1643 and printed in that edition in fine, which proves that the usual trick of printing a new title page and sticking it on the unsold copies was not practised in this case. In other words, the edition of 1643 was sold out.

7 Cf. Masson, III, 156, 188, 262-63.

8 Ed. 1643, P. 44.

→ Prose Works, III, 249.

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