The Story of Civilization: Volume VII: The Age of Reason Begins

by Will Durant

  This fascinating lead was followed by William Gilbert, physician to Elizabeth. After seventeen years of research and experiment—financed by his inherited fortune, and sometimes watched by the Queen—he set forth his results in the first great book of English science, De magnete … et de magno magnete tellure (1600)—On the Magnet … and the Great Magnet the Earth. He laid a pivoted compass needle successively at different points upon a globular lodestone, he marked with lines on the globe the directions in which the needle successively set, he prolonged each line to form a great circle around the stone, and he found that all these circles crossed at two diametrically opposite points on the globe; these were the magnetic poles, which, in the case of the earth, Gilbert mistakenly identified with the geographical poles. He described the earth as an enormous magnet, explained thereby the behavior of the magnetic needle, and showed that any iron bar left for a long time in a north-and-south position would become magnetized. A magnet placed at either pole of the globular lodestone took a position vertical to the globe; placed at any point midway between the poles (such points constituting the magnetic equator), the magnet lay horizontal. Gilbert concluded that the dip of the needle would be greater the nearer it was placed to the geographical poles of the earth; and though this was not quite correct, it was approximately confirmed by Henry Hudson in his exploration of the Arctic in 1608. From his own observations Gilbert drew up directions for calculating latitude from the degree of the magnetic dip. He suggested that “from about a magnetic body the virtue magnetical is poured out on every side”; he ascribed the rotation of the earth to the influence of this magnetic field. Passing on to the study of electricity—wherein little had been done since antiquity—he proved that many other substances besides amber could, when rubbed, generate frictional electricity; and from the Greek for amber he formed the word electric to denote a power to deflect a magnetic needle. He believed that all heavenly bodies are endowed with magnetism; Kepler was to use this idea to explain the motion of the planets. Most of Gilbert’s work was an admirable example of experimental procedure, and its effects on science and industry were immeasurable.

  The advance of science appeared more dramatically in the efforts of adventurous or acquisitive spirits to explore the “great magnet” for geographical or commercial purposes. In 1576 Sir Humphrey Gilbert (no kin to William) published a suggestive Discourse … for a New Passage to Catata—i.e., “Cathay,” or China—proposing a northwest sailing through or around Canada. Sir Martin Frobisher, in that year, set out with three small vessels to find such a route. One of his ships foundered, another deserted; he went ahead in the tiny twenty-five-ton Gabriel; he reached Baffin Land, but the Eskimos fought him, and he returned to England for more men and supplies. His later voyages were diverted from geography by a vain hunt for gold. Gilbert took up the quest for a northwest passage, but was drowned in the attempt (1583). Four years later John Davys pushed through the strait now named for him; then he fought the Armada, went off to the South Seas with Thomas Cavendish, discovered the Falkland Islands, and was killed by Japanese pirates near Singapore (1605). Cavendish explored southern South America, accomplished the third circumnavigation of the globe, and died at sea (1592). Henry Hudson navigated the Hudson River (1609), and, in another voyage, reached Hudson Bay; but his crew, maddened with hardships and longing for home, mutinied and set him adrift, with eight others, in a small open boat (1611); they were never heard of again. William Baffin explored the bay and the island that bear his name, ventured as far north as 77° 45’—a latitude not reached again for 236 years—and had the further distinction of first finding longitude by observation of the moon. Richard Hakluyt saw in such ships and hearts of oak an epic of courage and terror surpassing any Iliad, and he gathered their narratives into successive volumes, the best-known of which are those published as The Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589, 1598–1600); Samuel Purchas expanded the record in Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625). So, by the greed for gold or trade, and the zest for far-off peril and scenes, geography unwittingly grew.

  The best work of this age in physics, chemistry, and biology was done on the Continent; in England, however, Sir Kenelm Digby discovered the necessity of oxygen to plant life, and Robert Fludd, mystic and medico, advocated vaccination 150 years before Jenner. Medical prescriptions continued to rely on their repulsiveness for their effect; the official London pharmacopoeia of 1618 recommended bile, blood, claws, cockscomb, fur, sweat, saliva, scorpions, snakeskin, wood lice, and spider web as medicaments; and bloodletting was a first resort.14 Nevertheless this period boasts of Thomas Parr (“old Parr”), who was presented to Charles I in 1635 as still in good health at the alleged age of 152. Parr did not profess to know his exact age, but his parish authorities dated his birth in 1483; he claimed to have joined the army in 1500, and he recalled in detail the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII (1536). “You have lived longer than other men,” said Charles I. “What have you done more than they?” Parr replied that he had fertilized a wench when he was over a hundred years old and had done public penance for it. He had subsisted almost entirely on potatoes, greens, coarse bread, and buttermilk, with rarely a taste of meat. For a while he became a lion in London parlors and pubs, and he was so handsomely feasted that he died within a year of meeting the King. Sir William Harvey performed a post-mortem on him, found him free of arteriosclerosis, and diagnosed his death as due to change of air and food.15

  It was Harvey who provided the scientific climax of the age by explaining the circulation of the blood—”the most momentous event in medical history since Galen’s time.”16 Born at Folkstone in 1578, he studied at Cambridge, then at Padua under Fabrizio d’Acquapendente. Returning, he settled down to medical practice in London, and became personal physician to James I and Charles I. Through patient years he carried on experiments and dissections on animals and cadavers, and particularly studied the flow and the course of blood in wounds. He came to his main theory in 1615,17 but belatedly published it at Frankfurt in 1628 as a modest Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus—the first and greatest classic in English medicine.

  The steps to his discovery illustrate the internationalism of science. For over a thousand years the functions of heart and blood had been interpreted as by Galen in the second century A.D. Galen had supposed that blood flowed to the tissues from the liver as well as the heart; that air passed from the lungs to the heart; that the arteries and veins carried twin streams of blood, which were propelled and received by the heart in tides of ebb and flow; and that blood passed from the right to the left side of the heart through pores in the septum between the ventricles. Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1506) questioned the view that air passed from lungs to heart; Vesalius (1543) denied the existence of pores in the septum, and his masterly sketches of arteries and veins revealed their terminals as so minute and neighborly as almost to suggest passage and circulation; Fabrizio showed that valves in the veins made it impossible for venous blood to flow from the heart. The Galenic theory faded away. In 1553 Michael Servetus, and in 1558 Realdo Colombo, discovered the pulmonary circulation of the blood—its passage from the right chamber of the heart through the pulmonary artery to and through the lungs, its purification there by aeration, and its return via the pulmonary vein to the left chamber of the heart. Andrea Cesalpino (c. 1571) tentatively—as we shall see—anticipated the full theory of circulation. Harvey’s work turned the theory into a demonstrated fact.

  While Francis Bacon, his patient, was extolling induction, Harvey proceeded to his illuminating conclusion by a striking combination of deduction and induction. Estimating the amount of blood pressed out of the heart by each systole, or contraction, to be one half a fluid ounce, he calculated that in half an hour the heart would pour into the arteries over 500 fluid ounces—a larger quantity than the entire body contained. Where did all this blood come from? It seemed impossible that so great a quantity should be pr
oduced, hour after hour, from the digestion of food. Harvey concluded that the blood pumped out of the heart was returned to it, and that there was no other apparent avenue for this but the veins. By simple experiments and observations—as by pressing a finger upon some superficial vein—it was readily shown that venous blood flowed away from the tissues and toward the heart.

  When I surveyed my mass of evidence, whether derived from vivisections and my previous reflections on them, or from the ventricles of the heart and the vessels that enter into and issue from them … and frequently and seriously bethought me … what might be the quantity of blood which was transmitted … and not finding it possible that this could be supplied by the juices of the ingested aliment without the veins on the one hand becoming drained, and the arteries on the other getting ruptured through the excessive charge of blood, unless the blood should somehow find its way from the arteries into the veins, and so return to the right side of the heart; when, I say, I surveyed all this evidence, I began to think whether there might not be a motion as it were in a circle… And now I may be allowed to give my view of the circulation of the blood.18

  He had long hesitated to publish his conclusions, knowing the conservatism of the medical profession of his time. He predicted that no one over forty years of age would accept his theory.19 “I have heard him say,” reported Aubrey, “that after his book of the Circulation of the Blood came out, he fell mightily in his practice, and ‘twas believed by the vulgar that he was crack-brained.”20 Not until Malpighi in 1660 demonstrated the existence of capillaries conveying blood from the arteries to the veins did the learned world concede the circulation to be a fact. The new view illuminated almost every field of physiology, and affected the old problem of the interrelation between body and mind. Said Harvey:

  Every affection of the mind that is attended with either pain or pleasure, hope or fear, is the cause of an agitation whose influence extends to the heart … In almost every affection [emotion] … the countenance changes, and the blood appears to course hither and thither. In anger the eyes are fiery and the pupils contracted; in modesty the cheeks are suffused with blushes … in lust how quickly is the member distended with blood!21

  Harvey continued to serve Charles I almost to the latter’s bitter end. He accompanied Charles when revolution drove the King from London, was with him at the battle of Edgehill, and narrowly escaped death.22 Meanwhile the rebels sacked his London house and destroyed his manuscripts and anatomical collections. Perhaps he had made a variety of enemies by his sharp temper and views. He rated man as “but a great mischievous baboon,” says Aubrey, and thought that “we Europeans knew not how to order or govern our Woemen,” and that “the Turks were the only people who used them wisely.”23 Still vigorous at seventy-three, he published a treatise on embryology, Exercitationes de generatione animalium (1651). Rejecting the prevalent belief in the spontaneous generation of minute organisms out of decaying flesh, Harvey held that “all animals, even those that produce their young alive, including man himself, are evolved out of an egg”; and he coined the phrase Omne animal ex ovo—”Every animal comes from an agg.” He died six years later of paralysis, bequeathing most of his fortune of twenty thousand pounds to the Royal College of Physicians, and ten pounds to Thomas Hobbes “as a token of his love.”

  III. THE RISE AND FALL OF FRANCIS BACON: 1561–1621

  We come now to the greatest and proudest intellect of the age. We have already noted his birth and lineage, his education in letters, diplomacy, and law, his unexpected poverty, his unheard pleas for office, his futile cautioning and reluctant prosecution of his beneficent, guilty friend. Learning and ambition so consumed him that he had no lust left for women; he had, however, a liking for young men.24 Finally, at forty-five (1606), he married Alice Barnham, who brought him £220 a year. But he gave no “hostages to fortune”—he had no children.

  On the accession of James I, Bacon, in a letter of adulation profuse in the manner of the time, suggested himself to the King as fit and due for a governmental post. Son of a Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, nephew or cousin to the Cecils, he felt that his long wait for office reflected some hostility on the part of the commanding ministers; and perhaps his impatient opportunism was an effect as well as a cause of his tardy admission to place. He had already served in Parliament for nineteen years, usually defending the government, and winning repute for wide learning, constructive thought, and clear and striking speech. Periodically he sent to the King “memories” eloquent with prudent advice: how to improve mutual understanding and co-operation between Commons and Lords, to unite the parliaments of England and Scotland, to end persecution for religious diversity, to pacify Ireland by conciliating its Catholics, to give greater freedom to Catholics in England without opening the door to papal claims, and to find a compromise between Anglicans and Puritans. “To carry out this program,” in the judgment of the historian who has most thoroughly studied the politics of this period, “would have been to avert the evils of the next half-century.”25 James put the proposals aside as impracticable in the current state of opinion, and contented himself with including Bacon in the three hundred knighthoods that he distributed in 1603. Sir Francis still cooled his heels.

  Nevertheless his skill as a lawyer slowly raised him to affluence. By 1607 he estimated his wealth at £24,155.26 On his luxurious estate at Gorhambury, manned with select and expensive servants and alert secretaries like Thomas Hobbes, he could enjoy the beauty and comfort that he loved wisely but too well. He nursed his health by gardening, and built amid his gardens a costly retreat for his scholastic privacy. He wrote like a philosopher and lived like a prince. He saw no reason why reason should be penniless, or why Solomon should not be king.

  He did not fall far short. In 1607 James, valuing him at last, made him solicitor general; in 1613, attorney general; in 1616, a member of the Privy Council; in 1617, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal; in 1618, Chancellor. New dignities were added to grace his powers: in 1618 he was created first Baron Verulam; in January 1621, Viscount St. Albans. When James went to Scotland he left his Chancellor to rule England. Bacon “gave audience in great state to ambassadors,” and lived in such splendor at Gorhambury that it “seemed as if the court was there, and not in Whitehall or St. James.”27

  All was won save honor. In the pursuit of place Bacon had repeatedly sacrificed principle. As attorney general he used his influence to secure judicial verdicts desired by the King.28 As Keeper of the Seal he defended and protected the most oppressive monopolies, apparently to keep the good will of Buckingham. As judge he accepted substantial presents from persons suing in his court. All this was in the loose custom of the age: public officials were poorly paid, and they recompensed themselves with “gifts” from those whom they aided; James confessed, “If I were … to punish those who take bribes, I should soon not have a single subject left”; and James himself took bribes.29

  The Parliament that assembled in January 1621 was in angry revolt against the King. It hated Bacon as James’s best advocate, who had ruled that monopolies were legal. If it could not yet depose the King it could impeach his minister. In February it named a committee to inquire into the courts of justice. In March the committee reported that it had found many irregularities, especially in the conduct of the Lord Chancellor. Twenty-three specific cases of corruption were charged against him. He appealed to the King to save him, predicting that “those who now strike at the Chancellor will soon strike at the Crown.”30 James advised him to acknowledge the charge and so set an example deterrent to further venality in office. On April 22 Bacon sent in his confession to the House of Lords. He admitted taking gifts from litigants, as other judges did; he denied that his decisions had been thereby influenced—in several cases he had ruled against the giver. The Lords condemned him “to pay a fine of £40,000; to be imprisoned in the Tower during the King’s pleasure; to be forever incapable to holding any public office … in the Commonwealth; never to sit in Parliament nor come within
the verge of the Court.” He was taken to the Tower on May 31, but was released within four days by order of the King, who also remitted the ruinous fine. The chastened Chancellor retired to Gorhambury and tried to live more simply. In cipher, on a paper left by Bacon at his death, his first biographer, Rawley, found the famous statement, “I was the justest judge that was in England these fifty years. But it was the justest censure in Parliament that was these 200 years.”31

  The effects of the impeachment were good. It lessened corruption in office, especially in the courts; and it set a precedent for the responsibility of the King’s ministers to Parliament. It turned Francis Bacon back from politics, where he had been a liberal in views and a reactionary in practice, to his alternative pursuit of science and philosophy, where he would “ring the bell that called the wits together,” and would proclaim, in majestic prose, the revolt and program of reason.

  IV. THE GREAT RENEWAL

  Philosophy had long been his refuge from affairs, if not his secret love and happiest aptitude. He had already, in 1603–5, published a noble work, The Proficience and Advancement of Learning, but that seemed to him rather a prospectus than a performance. In 1609 he had written to the Bishop of Ely, “If God give me leave to write a just and perfect volume of philosophy …”;32 and in 1610 to Casaubon, “To bring about the better ordering of man’s life … by the help of sound and true contemplations—this is the thing I aim at.”33

  During those harassed years of office he had conceived—with a rash assumption of abundant days—a magisterial plan for the renovation of science and philosophy. Seven months before his fall he announced the plan in a Latin work addressed to all Europe, boldly entitled lnstauratio Magna (The Great Renewal). The title page itself was a challenge: it showed a vessel passing full sail through the Pillars of Hercules into the Atlantic; and where a medieval motto had set between those pillars the warning “Ne plus ultra” ([Go] no farther beyond), Bacon wrote, “Multi pertransibunt, et augebitur scientia” (Many will pass through, and knowledge will be increased). The proud proemium added, “Francis of Verulam reasoned thus with himself, and judged it to be for the interest of the present and future generations that they should be made acquainted with his thoughts.”34