ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Francis Bacon's ideas concerning the prolongation of life and demonstrates how it was that in his treatment of the subject the emphasis shifted from moisture and heat to spirits and natural appetites, from animate to inanimate bodies, from the art of ageing well to the technique of artificially restoring and preserving bodies. It presents a synthetic account of the classical views on natural heat and primigenial moisture that were still current among seventeenth-century practitioners in order to set a conceptual counterpart to Bacon's alternative. The chapter also discusses Bacon's idea of the preservation of life and its relationship to his notion of matter as a vital substratum driven by inexorable appetitive forces. It will become apparent that Bacon shifted his focus from the fleeting quality of animal life to the active continuance of matter, from the ephemerality of individual lives to the durability of the primal appetites of nature.
