Given that classical thought tended to view evil in terms of negation (as finitude, limitation and lack), the general notion of illness was caught in a double temptation: to be considered simply as negation (this was the tendency to suppress notions like the idea of 'morbiffick matter'), but also to detach itself from a metaphysics of disease, which became quite sterile if what was desired was an understanding of the real, positive and full nature of illness (the tendency to exclude from medical thought notions of illness due to an absence or to a lack).