dormitive virtue

A calque translation of Latin, virtus dormitiva, coined by Molière in The Imaginary Invalid. In the play, he lampoons a group of physicians providing an explanation in macaronic Latin of the sleep-inducing properties of opium as stemming from its "virtus dormitiva".

• "The inevitable next suggestion -— that aesthetic experience is distinguished not by pleasure at all but by a special aesthetic emotion can be dropped on the waste-pile of "dormitive virtue” explanations"
• "Solidity now has all the defects of a dormitive virtue, obscurity, unobservability, something-we-know-notwhattery — and none of the advantages of a dormitive virtue"
• "Because (1) is postulated and at the same time used as a covering law, the putative explanations are vacuous in the sense in which explanatory appeals to dormitive virtue are."
• "Now admittedly, this has the look of a dormitive virtue argument: the reason the intellect can recollect its own activity is that it possesses just such a recollective capacity."
• "But if talk of such facts just arises via hypostatizations out of the relevant truths, then the facts posited can't explain the truths except via a blatant dormitive virtue explanation."
• "Fitness is not the empty idea of a dormitive virtue. The point is that although fitness is explanatory, it seems to be a placeholder for a deeper account that dispenses with the concept of fitness [again the propensity concept]."

• dormitive principle

• aureation
• jargon