“By Gradual Scale Sublimed”

This essay addresses an aporia in the current critical account of the fruit of the tree of knowledge in Milton’s Paradise Lost in which the fruit is either given an orthodox reading as an empty sign, or is imagined as part of a monist materialist universe. The author demonstrates that contemporary chymical medicine structures the monist human physiology of Paradise Lost and accounts for a material source of the rational soul, concluding that the fruit is most accurately read as the cause of a febrile fermentation with sources and analogues in the work of experimental physicians Thomas Willis and Francis Glisson.