| Summary: | This essay is devoted to El examen de ingenios para las ciencias de Juan Huarte de San Juan (1575), an encyclopedic text which intends to classify the human spirits and to determine the kinds of activities each one may accomplish. His thought is inspired by Aristotelian philosophy and galenic medicine, reconsidered in a tripartite system of temperaments. Among the imaginative spirits, the melancholical ones are recognized by the Spanish philosopher as particularly able to create, to govern and to cure. Predication is also promoted by imagination and melancholy : Huarte de San Juan takes the example of saint Paul, and shows that his eloquence is due to his melancholy, as well as the violence he expresses towards Christians before his conversion. In this conception of sacred eloquence, divine inspiration is interpreted as a physiological ability, a fruit of nature. This materialist vision has been considered as transgressive by the Catholic Church, which censured and prohibited the book, and approved of by a French libertine such as Sorel, who quotes it in his Science universelle.
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