The Classical Sceptical Origins of John Milton's Logic Terms

IN 1672 when John Milton’s Artis Logicae Plenior Instituto ad Petri Rami Methodo Concinnata was published, he used a very unusual logical term to designate an external cause, ‘procatarctica’. Here I trace the origins of this term in early modern logic texts beyond an English context to suggest that Milton’s usage has its lexical and potentially its intellectual roots in Pyrrhonian scepticism and to argue for the benefits of further exploration of those connections.1 In choosing the word ‘procatarctica’, Milton is one branch of a small but distinguished family tree of logicians and their texts in the 1600s: to date, my archival work indicates that Bartholomew Keckermann was the first to introduce this term to early modern logic manuals in his Systema Logicae (1600).2 In a second edition from 1602 a printing error led to the following misleading definition: ‘procatarctica est, quae intrinsecus impellit ad agendum’, ‘procatarctica is a cause which impels something to action intrinsically’. An anonymous annotator in the copy held at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois struck through the erring ‘intrinsecus’, replacing this with ‘causa προκαταρχωσα’, frustrated by his poor edition (there are numerous similar errors), leaving us to supplement it with an imagined ‘extrinsecus’, ‘extrinsically’.3 In print, Keckermann elaborates with some Latin counterparts including ‘causa irritatrix’ ‘the cause which incites’, and ‘causa provocans primitiva’ ‘the most fundamental provoking cause’, suggesting the importance of this logical function.4 He is followed by Christopher Scheibler, head of the Dortmund Gymnasium (1624–55), who uses ‘procatarctica’ in his Opus Logicum, the compilation of four tracts on logic written c.1613–19 during his tenure as professor at the University of Giessen.5 In England, R. W. Serjeantson and Howard Hotson have noted that one of Milton’s contemporaries and a fellow-Republican Zachary Coke based the framework for his Art of Logick (1654) on Keckermann’s text. Here I wish to intensify this observation by noting that this included Coke’s use of Keckermann’s term to describe a ‘Procatarktick’ cause, that ‘which outwardly moveth to do’, as previously noted the first of its kind in a vernacular logic.6 In addition to his Latin definitions of ‘procatarctica’, Keckermann furnished a brief German gloss, ‘ein anlaß zum Ding’, and it may be his gesture to a vernacular context for his textbook which inspired Coke’s usage of the Systema Logicae, and perhaps this particular term.7 One of the last seventeenth-century usages of this logical term was by Gerard De Vries of Utrecht University in his Logica Compendiosa (1684) written for law students, in which he ponders with a certain relish that ‘procatarctica … qui suadet aut mandat Homicidium’ ‘the procatarctic cause … is that which persuades or orders a Homicide’.8

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