Ministrations

Abstract

Hooke’s project to reform natural knowledge aimed at the restoration of the original human condition lost in the Fall. Since then, humans have no more direct access to the hidden nature of things through their bare natural faculties. The only way to recover human “command over things” and “some degrees of those former perfections” consists in “rectifying the operations of the sense, the memory and reason.” As noted earlier, these are the “three faculties of the soul,” which are “to be examined how far their ability and power, when in the greatest perfection extends, and wherein each of them are deficient, and by what means they may be assisted and perfected.” Like Bacon, Hooke thought of the means for reforming natural philosophy as a set of artificial ministrationes directed to the three human faculties. Devoid of any assistance, these faculties have produced a “knowledge very confus’d and imperfect, and very insignificant as to the enabling a man to practise or operate by it.”