Bacon devised the method by which scientists turn observations into general laws: induction, by which a general inference is made from a series of uniform observations, then tested. The result, if it works, is a scientific law, which can be used to make predictions.
For over three hundred years after Bacon’s time, scientists claimed, on the whole, to work inductively. ‘The great tragedy of science’, as Darwin’s henchman, Thomas Huxley, later put it, ‘is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.’26 The reality is very different from the claim: no one ever really begins to make observations without already having a hypothesis to test. The best criterion for whether a proposition is scientific was identified by Karl Popper, who argued that scientists start with a theory, then try to prove it false. The theory is scientific if a test exists capable of proving it false; it becomes a scientific law if the test fails.27
Experience, to Bacon, was a better guide than reason. With the Dutch scientist J. B. van Helmont, he shared the trenchant motto ‘Logic is useless for making scientific discoveries.’28 This was consistent with the growing tension between reason and science we observed in late-medieval thought. But a final strand in the thinking of the time helped to reconcile them. René Descartes made doubt the key to the only possible certainty. Striving to escape from the suspicion that all appearances are delusive, he reasoned that the reality of his mind was proved by its own self-doubts.29 In some ways, Descartes was an even more improbable hero than Bacon. Laziness kept him abed until noon. He claimed (falsely) to avoid reading in order not to alloy his brilliance or clutter his mind with the inferior thoughts of other authors. Scholars point to suspicious resemblances between his supposedly most original thinking and texts St Anselm wrote half a millennium earlier. The starting point, for Descartes, was the age-old problem of epistemology: how do we know that we know? How do we distinguish truth from falsehood? Suppose, he said, ‘some evil genius has deployed all his energies in deceiving me.’ It might then be that ‘there is nothing in the world that is certain.’ But, he noted, ‘without doubt I exist also if he deceives me, and let him deceive me as much as he will, he will never cause me to be nothing so long as I think that I am something.’ Descartes’s doctrine is usually apostrophized as, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ It would be more helpful to reformulate it as, ‘I doubt, therefore I am.’ By doubting one’s own existence, one proves that one exists. This left a further problem: ‘What then am I? A thing which thinks. What is a thing which thinks? It is a thing which doubts, understands, conceives, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, which also imagines and feels.’30
Thought proceeding from such a conviction was bound to be subjective. When, for instance, Descartes inferred the existence of the soul and of God, he did so on the grounds, for the former, that he could doubt the reality of his body but not that of his thoughts, and for the latter that his knowledge of perfection must have been implanted ‘by a Being truly more perfect than I’. Political and social prescriptions developed from Descartes therefore tended to be individualistic. While organic notions of society and the state never disappeared from Europe, Western civilization, by comparison with other cultures, has been the home of individualism. Descartes deserves much of the praise or blame. Determinism remained attractive to constructors of cosmic systems: in the generations after Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, the Jewish materialist and intellectual provocateur who achieved the distinction of censure by Catholic and Jewish authorities alike, implicitly denied free will. Even Leibniz, who devoted much effort to refuting Spinoza, eliminated free will from his secret thoughts, and suspected that God, in his goodness, allowed us only the illusion that we have it. But in the following century, determinism became a marginalized heresy in an age that made freedom its highest value among a strictly limited range of ‘self-evident truths’. Descartes, moreover, contributed something even more sacred to our modernity: by rehabilitating reason alongside science, his era left us an apparently complete toolkit for thinking – science and reason realigned.
Beyond or beneath this mental apparatus, much of the new science that explorers triggered was to do with the Earth. Locating the Earth in the cosmos was a task inextricably entwined with the rapidly unfolding technology of maps. When texts by Ptolemy, the great second-century bce Alexandrian geographer, began to circulate in the West in the fifteenth century, they came to dominate the way the learned pictured the world. Even before Latin translations began to circulate, Western mapmakers imbibed one of Ptolemy’s big ideas: constructing maps on the basis of co-ordinates of longitude and latitude. Latitude turned cartographers’ eyes toward the heavens, because a relatively easy way to fix it was by observation of the sun and the Pole Star. Longitude did so, too, because it demanded minute and complicated celestial observations. Meanwhile, astronomical data remained of major importance in two traditional fields: astrology and meteorology. In partial consequence, the technology of astronomy improved; from the early seventeenth century, the telescope made visible previously unglimpsed parts of the heavens. Increasingly accurate clockwork helped record celestial motion. Hence, in part, the advantage Jesuit astronomers established over local practitioners when they got to China. The Chinese knew about glassware, but, preferring porcelain, had not bothered to develop it. They knew about clockwork, but had no use for timing mechanisms that were independent of the sun and stars. Westerners, by contrast, needed the technologies China neglected for devotional reasons: glass, to rim churches with light-transmuting, image-bearing windows; clocks to regularize the hours of monastic prayer.31
The era’s biggest new idea in cosmology, however, owed nothing to technical innovations and everything to rethinking traditional data with an open mind. It arose in 1543, when the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus proposed reclassifying the Earth as one of several planets revolving around the sun. Until then, the prevailing mental picture of the cosmos was unresolved. On the one hand, the vastness of God dwarfed the material universe, as eternity dwarfed time. On the other, our planet and therefore our species was at the heart of observable space, and the other planets, sun, and stars seemed to surround it as courtiers surround a sovereign or shelters a hearth. Ancient Greeks had debated the geocentric model, but most upheld it. In the most influential synthesis of ancient astronomy, Ptolemy ensured that geocentrism would be the orthodoxy of the next thousand years. Toward the end of the tenth century, Al-Biruni, the great Persian geographer, questioned it, as did subsequent theorists writing in Arabic (some of whose work Copernicus almost certainly knew).32 In the fourteenth century, in Paris, Nicolas of Oresme thought the arguments finely balanced. By the sixteenth century, so many contrary observations had accumulated that a new theory seemed essential.
Copernicus’s suggestion was formulated tentatively, propagated discreetly, and spread slowly. He received the first printing of his great book on the heavens when he lay on his deathbed, half paralysed, his mind and memory wrecked. It took nearly a hundred years to recast people’s vision of the universe in a Copernican mould. In combination with Johannes Kepler’s early-seventeenth-century work on the mapping of orbits around the sun, the Copernican revolution expanded the limits of the observable heavens, substituted a dynamic for a static system, and wrenched the perceived universe into a new shape around the elliptical paths of the planets.33
This shift of focus from the Earth to the sun was a strain on eyes adjusted to a geocentric galactic outlook. It would be mistaken, however, to suppose that the ‘medieval mind’ was focused on humans. The centre of the total composition was God. The world was tiny compared to heaven. The part of creation inhabited by man was a tiny blob in a corner of an image of God at work on creation: Earth and firmament together were a small disc trapped between God’s dividers, like a bit of fluff trapped in a pair of tweezers. Yet humans were at least as puny in a heliocentric universe as they had seemed formerly in the hands of God: perhaps more so, because Copernicus displaced the planet we live on from its central position. Every subsequent revela
tion of astronomy has reduced the relative dimensions of our dwelling place and ground its apparent significance into tinier fragments.
God is easy to fit around the cosmos. The problem for religion is where to fit man inside it. Like every new scientific paradigm, heliocentrism challenged the Church to adjust. Religion often seems to go with the notion that everything was made for us and that human beings have a privileged rank in divine order. Science has made such a cosmos incredible. Therefore – it is tempting to conclude – religion is now purposeless and incapable of surviving the findings of science. So how did the Christian understanding of human beings’ value survive heliocentrism?
Religion, I suspect, is not necessarily an inference from the order of the universe: it can be a reaction against chaos, an act of defiance of muddle. So the challenge of Copernicanism, which made better sense of the order of the cosmos, was not hard to accommodate. The illusion that it conflicts with Christianity arose from the peculiar circumstances of a much-misunderstood case. Galileo Galilei, the first effective wielder of the telescope for astronomical observation, was an eloquent teacher of the heliocentric theory. He exposed himself to inquisitorial persecution in the course of what was really an academic demarcation dispute. Galileo presumed to take part in the textual criticism of Scripture, deploying Copernican theory to elucidate a text from Exodus, in which Joshua’s prayers make the sun halt in its heavenly course. He was forbidden to return to the subject; but there was, as Galileo himself maintained, nothing unorthodox in Copernicanism, and other scholars, including clerics and even some inquisitors, continued to teach it. In the 1620s, Pope Urban VIII, who did not hesitate to acknowledge that Copernicus was right about the solar system, encouraged Galileo to break his silence and publish a work reconciling the heliocentric and geocentric pictures with recourse to the old paradigm of two kinds of truth – scientific and religious. The treatise the scientist produced, however, made no such concessions to geocentrism. Meanwhile, papal court politics alerted rival factions, especially within the Jesuit order, to the potential for exploiting astronomical debate, as Copernicans were heavily overrepresented in one faction. Galileo was caught in the crossfire, condemned in 1633, and confined to his home, while suspicion of heresy tainted heliocentrism. Everyone who thought seriously about it, however, realized that the Copernican synthesis was the best available description of the observed universe.34 The pop version of the episode – benighted religion tormenting bright science – is drivel.
After the work of Galileo and Kepler, the cosmos seemed more complicated than before, but no less divine and no more disorderly. Gravity, which Isaac Newton discovered in a bout of furious thinking and experimenting, beginning in the 1660s, reinforced the appearance of order. It seemed to confirm the idea of an engineered universe that reflected the creator’s mind. It was, to those who perceived it, the underlying, permeating secret, which had eluded the Renaissance magi. Newton imagined the cosmos as a mechanical contrivance – like the wind-up orreries, in brass and gleaming wood, that became popular toys for gentlemen’s libraries. A celestial engineer tuned it. A ubiquitous force turned and stabilized it. You could see God at work in the swing of a pendulum or the fall of an apple, as well as in the motions of moons and planets.
Newton was a traditional figure: an old-fashioned humanist and an encyclopaedist, a biblical scholar obsessed by sacred chronology – even, in his wilder fantasies, a magus hunting down the secret of a systematic universe, or an alchemist seeking the Philosopher’s Stone. He was also a representative figure of a trend in the thought of his time: empiricism, the doctrine beloved in England and Scotland in his day, that reality is observable and verifiable by sense perception. The universe, as empiricists saw it, consisted of events ‘cemented’ by causation, of which Newton found a scientific description and exposed the laws. ‘Nature’s Laws’, according to the epitaph Alexander Pope wrote, ‘lay hid in Night’ until ‘God said, “Let Newton be!” and there was Light.’ It turned out to be an act of divine self-effacement. Newton thought gravity was God’s way of holding the universe together. Many of his followers did not agree on that point. Deism throve in the eighteenth century in Europe, partly because the mechanical universe could dispense with the divine Watchmaker after he had given it its initial winding. By the end of the eighteenth century, Pierre-Simon Laplace, who interpreted almost every known physical phenomenon in terms of the attraction and repulsion of particles, could boast that he had reduced God to ‘an unnecessary hypothesis’. According to Newton’s description of himself, ‘I seem only to have been like a boy playing on the sea-shore … while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.’ As we shall see in future chapters, the navigators who followed him onto it were not bound to steer by his course.35
Political Thought
New political thinking in the age of the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution followed a similar trajectory to that of science, beginning with reverence for antiquity, adjusting to the impact of new discoveries, and ending in revolution.
People started by looking back to the Greeks and Romans but invented new ideas in response to new problems: the rise of sovereign states and of unprecedented new empires forced thinking into new patterns. The new worlds that exploration revealed stimulated political as well as scientific imaginations. Ideal lands, imagined in order to make implicit criticisms of real countries, had always figured in political thoughts. In Plato’s imaginary ideal society, arts were outlawed and infants exposed. The Liezi, a work complete by about 200 bce, featured a perfumed land discovered by a legendary emperor, who was also a great explorer, where ‘people were gentle, following Nature without strife’,36 practising free love, and devoted to music. Zhou Kangyuan in the thirteenth century told a tale of travellers returning, satiated from paradise, to find the real world empty and desolate. Most peoples have golden age myths of harmony, amity, and plenty. Some humanists responded to Columbus’s accounts of his discoveries by supposing that he had stumbled on a golden age, such as classical poets sang of, that survived, uncorrupted from a remote past in fortunate isles. The people Columbus reported seemed almost prelapsarian. They were naked, as if in evocation of Eden and of utter dependence on God. They exchanged gold for worthless trinkets. They were ‘docile’ – Columbus’s code for easily enslaved – and naturally reverent.
The model work that gave the utopia genre its name was Thomas More’s Utopia of 1529. ‘There is hardly a scheme of political or social reform’, according to Sidney Lee, a critic who spoke for most of More’s interpreters, ‘of which there is no definite adumbration in More’s pages.’37 But Utopia was a strangely cheerless place, where there were gold chamber pots and no pubs, and the classless, communistic regime delivered education without emotion, religion without love, and contentment without happiness. A string of other wonderlands followed, inspired by the real-life El Dorados explorers were disclosing at the time. They seemed to get ever less appealing. In Tommaso Campanella’s La città del sole of 1580, sexual couplings had to be licensed by astrologers. Milton’s Paradise would have bored any lively denizen to death. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville thought he had found a real-life sexual utopia in eighteenth-century Tahiti and found on departure that his ships’ crews were raddled with venereal disease. In the following century, in Charles Fourier’s projected settlement, which he called Harmony, orgies were to be organized with a degree of bureaucratic particularity such as seems certain to kill passion. In America, as John Adolphus Etzler proposed to remodel it in 1833, mountains are flattened and forests ‘ground to dust’ to make cement for building: something like this has actually happened in parts of modern America. In Icaria, the utopia Étienne Cabet launched in Texas in 1849, clothes had to be made of elastic to make the principle of equality ‘suit people of different sizes’. In Elizabeth Corbett’s feminist utopia, the empowered women get terribly pleased with cures for wrinkles.38
In individual Western imaginations, in short, most utopias have turned out to be dysto
pias in disguise: deeply repellent, albeit advocated with impressive sincerity. All utopianists evince misplaced faith in the power of society to improve citizens. They all want us to defer to fantasy father-figures who would surely make life wretched: guardians, proletarian dictators, intrusive computers, know-all theocrats, or paternalistic sages who do your thinking for you, overregulate your life, and crush or stretch you into comfortless conformity. Every utopia is an empire of Procrustes. The nearest approximations to lasting realizations of utopian visions in the real world were built in the twentieth century by Bolsheviks and Nazis. The search for an ideal society is like the pursuit of happiness: it is better to travel hopefully, because arrival breeds disillusionment.
Niccolò Machiavelli’s realism is usually seen as a perfect contrast with More’s fantasy. But Machiavelli’s was the more inventive imagination. He traduced all previous Western thinking about government. The purpose of the state – ancient moralists decreed – is to make its citizens good. Political theorists of antiquity and the Middle Ages recommended various kinds of state, but they all agreed that the state must have a moral purpose: to increase virtue or happiness or both. Even the legalist school in ancient China advocated oppression in the wider interest of the oppressed. When Machiavelli wrote The Prince, his rules for rulers, in 1513, the book seemed shocking to readers not just because the author recommended lying, cheating, ruthlessness, and injustice, but because he did so with no apparent concession to morality. Machiavelli cut all references to God out of his descriptions of politics and made only mocking references to religion. Politics was a savage, lawless wilderness, where ‘a ruler … must be a fox to recognize traps and a lion to frighten off wolves’.39 The only basis of decision making was the ruler’s own interest, and his only responsibility was to keep hold of his power. He should keep faith – only when it suits him. He should feign virtue. He should affect to be religious. Later thinking borrowed two influences from this: first, the doctrine of realpolitik: the state is not subject to moral laws and serves only itself; second, the claim that the end justifies the means and that any excesses are permissible for the survival of the state, or public safety, as some later formulations put it. Meanwhile, ‘Machiavel’ became a term of abuse in English and the Devil was apostrophized as ‘Old Nic’.
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