The popularity of literary anatomies during the late sixteenth as well as the seventeenth century is well attested by existing titles. And the habit of anatomizing all things was very evidently applied to the soul and particularly to the passions of the soul. Since it is to the philosophy of the passions that tragedy is related, I propose briefly to sketch the background of moral philosophy in which these anatomies of the passions rested. And in spite of the conflicts of thought concerning the nature and the substance of the soul, concerning the immortality of the soul, and concerning other questions which involved defending or attacking certain theological premises, it is quite possible to find much fundamental agreement in regard to the anatomy of the soul, between Stoics and Peripatetics, Platonists and Aristotelians, followers respectively of St Thomas Aquinas and of St Augustine, Catholics and Protestants. For there was a common agreement among all these authorities in regard to much that we should to-day class as psychology.

The De Proprietatibus Rerum of Bartholomew said:

In this work too is given the old doctrine current in Elizabethan England that the vegetable soul is like a triangle with its three virtues of engendering, nourishing, and waxing and growing.