A Brill Calendar: December 30

Van Helmont: Pater et Fils

Few sons live lives downright independent of their father’s profession; Homo sapiens qualifies also as Homo imitans.

As far as history can look back in time, parental occupations proved themselves to be highly contagious. A vast range of human activity ‘runs in the family’. And often for generations; in farming and fishing, as well as in music and mathematics. When achievements of a progenitor have become worthy of the attention of notable historians, continuities may appear, intimations of a ‘dynasty’ occur; as in the case of generations Luchtmans preceding Messrs Brill Senior and Junior. It provides a peculiar mass and momentum to cultural processes.

It is seldom in the history of the humanities and life-sciences that a long-drawn-out metamorphosis from medieval alchemy to intellectual inquiry presently called ‘rational’ is encompassed by attainments of one father and his son: Johannes Baptista and Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont. Senior, a physician and chemist, was born in Brussels in 1579 and died December 30, 1644; Junior, a physician and philosopher, died in Berlin in 1699. Father van Helmont initially embraced, then refuted teachings of the great Paracelsus (1493 – 1541), but never abjured magic and alchemy (like Isaac Newton later), although his chemical work on hydrogen and carbon-dioxide heralded a new era in chemistry. Just like ‘landscape’, ‘drugs’, ‘apartheid’ and ‘rollator’, the word ‘gas’ hails from the Low Countries. Van Helmont Père coined the neologism.

Fils, born in 1614, became ‘auctor intellectualis’ of the ‘monad’ theory: a ‘monad’ was deemed an infinitesimal psychophysical entity, comprising ultimate reality. It grew into a system of thought brought to fashionable fruition by Gottfriend Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 – 1716) during the spring of the European Enlightenment; only to be slowly abandoned and largely forgotten later.