Ideas

by Peter Watson

  Descartes was no less a child of his time than Bacon, though in many ways he was very different from the Englishman. He was, for a start, a considerable mathematician. He received a thorough Jesuit education, spent some time in the military, and wrote La géométrie, which introduced analytical geometry to his contemporaries.81 This was not published separately, however, but as one of three appendices to the Discours de la méthode, which explained Descartes’ general philosophical approach. The other two appendices were La dioptrique, which included the first publication of the law of refraction (actually discovered by Willebrord Snell), and Les météores, which contained among other things the first generally satisfactory quantitative explanation of the rainbow.82 It was by no means clear why Descartes had included these appendices in the book, except that they showed the high place he accorded science in philosophy.83

  His philosophy was in fact much influenced by the then-current vogue for scepticism. This had been partly stimulated by the rediscovery of Sextus Empiricus’ classical defence, which had been seized upon by Montaigne, who argued that all doctrine is ‘humanly invented’, that nothing was certain because belief was determined by tradition or custom, because the senses could deceive, and because there was no way of knowing if nature matched the processes of the human mind. Descartes brought his own brand of scepticism to bear on this. Geometry and arithmetic offered certainty, he said, observation of nature was free of contradiction and, in practical terms, life went on, with certain events at least being predictable. This was common sense. And when he looked about him, he realised that one thing was clear. The one thing that could not be doubted–because he was certain of it–was his own doubt. (This ‘Pentecost of reason’, Daniel Boorstin says, took place on the night of 10 November 1619.84) It was doubt that gave rise to Descartes’ famous saying ‘Cogito, ergo sum’–I am thinking, therefore I am. But Descartes also believed that, since God was perfect, he would not deceive man, and therefore what could be worked out by reason ‘was in fact so’. This led Descartes to his famous distinction between res cogitans–subjective experience, consciousness, the interior life, which is certain–and res extensa–matter, physical things, the exterior objective world, the universe ‘out there’. Thus was conceived Descartes’ famous dualism, in which soul is understood as mind. It was a bigger change than we might imagine today for, at a stroke, Descartes denied that objects in the world–stones and streams, which at one stage had been worshipped, machines and mountains, everything physical–had any human qualities, or any form of consciousness. God, he said, had created the universe but, after that, it moved on its own, composed of non-vital, atomistic matter. ‘The laws of mechanics,’ he said, ‘are identical with those of nature,’ and so the basic understanding of the universe would be discovered via mathematics, which was available to human reason. This was a major transformation, for underneath it all (but not buried in any way) Descartes was saying that God had been established by human reason, rather than the other way round. Revelation, which had once been a form of knowledge with equal authority to science, now began to slip: from here on, the truths of revelation needed to be reaffirmed by reason.

  And so finally, after a long night of two thousand years, since classical Greece, the twin forces of empiricism and rationalism were back at the forefront of human activity. ‘After Newton, science reigned as the authoritative definer of the universe, and philosophy defined itself in relation to science.’ The universe ‘out there’ was devoid of human or spiritual properties, nor was it especially Christian.85 After Bacon and Descartes (sitting on the shoulders of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and Leibniz), the world was set for a new view of humanity: that fulfilment would come, not from the revelations of a religious nature, but from an increasingly fruitful engagement with the natural world.

  While all these events were taking place, England was going through a civil war which resulted in the king losing his head. In the run-up to that event, the war produced some bizarre side-effects. At one point, for example, King Charles was forced to make his headquarters in Oxford. The professors and Fellows of the Oxford colleges proved very loyal to his majesty, but that backfired when he was driven out and they were all condemned by the rebels as ‘security risks’. Removed from their positions, they were replaced by more republican-minded men from Cambridge and London. Several of these were scientists and, as a result and for a while, science at Oxford blossomed. As part of this, a number of distinguished scientists began to meet in each other’s rooms to discuss their problems. This was a new practice that was occurring all over Europe. In Italy, for instance, in the early years of the seventeenth century, the Accademia dei Lincei (the Academy of the Lynx-Eyed) was formed, with Galileo as its sixth member. There was a similar group in Florence, and in Paris the Académie Royale des Sciences was founded formally in 1666, though men such as Descartes, Pascal and Pierre de Fermat had been meeting informally since about 1630.86

  In Britain there were two groups. One set formed around John Wallis, a mathematician, and met weekly at Gresham College in London from about 1645. (Wallis was a particular favourite of Oliver Cromwell because he had used his mathematical gift to break enemy ciphers.) The second group included the republican-minded men that centred in Oxford around the Hon. Robert Boyle, son of the Earl of Cork, who had spent some years in Puritan Geneva. He was a physicist interested in the vacuum and in gases. A rich aristocrat, Boyle was helped by his assistant Robert Hooke, who made the instruments and actually did the experiments. (Boyle called his group the Invisible College.) It may well have been Hooke who first had the idea of the inverse-square law and gravity.87 Wallis and his group were among those who were put in place at Oxford by Cromwell, where they met up with Boyle and his Invisible College. This enlarged group turned into the Royal Society, which was formally founded in 1662, though for some time the Fellows of the new society were still known as Gresham Philosophers. Charles II, who was persuaded to start the society by John Evelyn, the diarist, must have thought the whole process somewhat odd because, as recent scholarship has shown, out of sixty-eight early Fellows, no fewer than forty-two were Puritans.88 On the other hand, this make-up gave the society its complexion–such men showed an indifference to the authority of the past.

  Among the other early Fellows of the Royal Society were Christopher Wren, better known as the architect of St Paul’s and many London churches. There was also Thomas Sprat, later bishop of Rochester, who wrote what he called a ‘history’ of the Royal Society in 1667, only seven years after it had been founded, though it was more a defence of the so-called ‘new experimental philosophy’ and skipped over the awkward political colour of some of its members. (The frontispiece, besides showing the royal patron, also shows Francis Bacon.) After denouncing a number of dogmatic (speculative/metaphysical) philosophers, Sprat went on: ‘The Third sort of new Philosophers, have been those, who have not onely disagreed from the Antients, but have also propos’d to themselves the right course of slow, and sure Experimenting…For now the Genius of Experimenting is so much dispers’d…All places and corners are now busie…’ And he described some of the members. ‘The principal and most constant of them were Seth Ward, the present Lord Bishop of Exeter, Mr Boyle, Dr Wilkins, Sir William Petty, Mr Mathew Wren, Dr Wallis [a mathematician], Dr Goddard, Dr Willis [another mathematician], Dr Theodore Haak, Dr Christopher Wren and Mr Hooke.’89

  Sir William Petty was a pioneer of statistical methods (though he was also a professor of anatomy at Oxford, where he carried out many dissections, and at one stage was credited with inventing the water closet, now thought to have been introduced in Elizabethan times). Once described as ‘being bored with three quarters of what he knows’, in 1662 Petty published a Treatise on Taxes and Contributions which was one of the first works to show an awareness that value in an economy derives not from its store of treasure but from its capacity for production.90 In the same year, with Petty’s help, John Graunt, another early FRS, published Observations on the Bills of Mort
ality of the City of London, which became the basis for life-insurance tables. These illustrate the very practical bent of the early Royal Society Fellows and their many-sided nature. None more so than Robert Hooke, the society’s curator of experiments, whom history has treated unkindly. Hooke invented the balance spring of the modern watch, produced one of the first books to publish drawings of microscopic animals, Micrographia (a ‘jolting revelation’), laid out the meridian at Greenwich, and had the idea, along with others, that gravitation extended throughout the solar system and held it together. As we have seen, it was discussions between Hooke, Wren and Halley that induced the latter to approach Newton, which resulted in the Principia. Hooke has been relatively forgotten because he quarrelled with Newton over his interpretation of the results of his optics experiments. Lately, however, Hooke has been rehabilitated.91

  It was the Fellows of the Royal Society who developed the familiar form of scientific publication. One of Hooke’s jobs, as an employee of the Society, was to help earn its keep by publishing Philosophical Transactions and selling them. Fellows, and other scientists, had begun writing in to the Society with their discoveries and in this way the Society became a clearing house and then publisher of the Transactions, which formed a model for subsequent scientific communication. In their hard-headed, practical way, the Fellows demanded good English in these papers, even going so far as to appoint the poet John Dryden to a committee to oversee the writing style of scientists.

  It has often been claimed that the early universities played little role in the development of modern science–that most of the academies and societies were private or ‘royal’ affairs. Mordechai Feingold has recently cast doubt on this. He shows that there was a big increase in the university population between 1550 and 1650 (at least in England), that the Lucasian chair in mathematics was founded at Cambridge in 1663 and the Savilean chairs in mathematics and astronomy were also founded in Oxford at much the same time.92 John Bainbridge, an early Savilean professor of astronomy, undertook expeditions to see eclipses and other phenomena, and when Henry Briggs, the logarithm expert (see above, page 481), died in 1630, his funeral was attended by all the heads of Oxford colleges. Feingold identified the correspondence of several individuals–Henry Savile himself, William Camden, Patric Young, Thomas Crane, Richard Madox–who each formed part of a Europe-wide network of scientists, linked to such figures as Brahe, Kepler, Scaliger and Gassendi. He shows that students were exposed to scientific results and that textbooks were modified in the light of those results.93 Overall, the picture he paints is of the universities as part of the scientific revolution but without producing any great names of their own or major innovations. This is not perhaps a very dramatic or striking contribution, but Feingold insists it wasn’t negligible either. Nor should we forget that Newton was a Cambridge man, Galileo a professor at Pisa, and Harvey and Vesalius both developed their ideas in a university context.

  These few details about the early days of the Royal Society and the universities bring us back to the beginning of this chapter and the question as to whether or not we may speak of a scientific revolution. It is certainly true that 144 years elapsed between publication of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus and Newton’s Principia Mathematica, and that no less a figure than Newton himself was interested in alchemy and numerology, subjects or practices that were dying out. But, as Thomas Sprat’s book shows, the men of the time did feel that they were taking part in something new, in a venture that needed defending from its critics, and that they took as their guiding spirit Francis Bacon, rather than some figure from antiquity. Experimentation, he said, was proliferating.

  There is little doubt too that knowledge was being reorganised in new and more modern ways. Peter Burke, for example, has described this reorganisation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The word ‘research’ was first used in Étienne Pasquier’s Recherches de la France in 1560.94 Libraries were revamped in the seventeenth century, with a more secular layout, with subjects like mathematics, geography and dictionaries being promoted at the expense of theology.95 The Catholic Index was alphabetised, an essentially artificial and non-theological arrangement, and Graunt and Petty’s work on early statistics was augmented by the plague episodes of 1575 and 1630, which stimulated yet more counting of people. And by a royal census of trees in France.96

  Richard Westfall has outlined what are perhaps the more important ways in which ideas changed during the scientific revolution. Beforehand, he says, theology was queen of all the sciences–now, it is ‘not allowed on the premises any more’.97 ‘A once Christian culture has become a scientific one…Scientists of today can read and recognise works done after 1687. It takes a historian to comprehend those written before 1543.’98 ‘…in its most general terms, the Scientific Revolution was the replacement of Aristotelian natural philosophy, which aside from its earlier career had completely dominated thought about nature in western Europe during the previous four centuries.’99 ‘We have to look carefully…to find experiments before the seventeenth century. Experiment had not yet been considered the distinctive procedure of natural philosophy; by the end of the century it was so recognised…The elaboration and expansion of the set of available instruments was closely allied to experimentation. I have been collecting information on the scientists from this period that appear in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 631 in all. One hundred fifty-six of them, only a small decimal short of one-quarter, either made instruments or developed new ones. They are spread over every field of investigation.’100

  In the end, Westfall thought it all came down to the relationship between Christianity and science. He quotes the episode, early in the seventeenth century, when the Catholic church, in particular Cardinal Bellarmino, condemned Copernican astronomy because it conflicted with certain overt passages in the scriptures. Sixty-five years later Newton engaged in a correspondence with a certain Thomas Burnet, who claimed that the scriptural account of the Creation was a fiction, composed by Moses for political purposes. Newton defended Genesis, arguing that it stated what science–chemistry–would lead us to expect. ‘Where Bellarmino had employed Scripture to judge a scientific opinion, both Burnet and Newton used science to judge the validity of Scripture.’ This was a huge transformation. Theology had become subordinate to science, the very opposite of the earlier position and, as Westfall concluded, that hierarchy has never been reversed.101

  In historical terms, sixty-five years is a very brief time-span. Without question, the changes wrought by science in the seventeenth century were ‘sudden, radical, and complete’. In short, they were a revolution.

  24

  Liberty, Property and Community: the Origins of Conservatism and Liberalism

  To Chapter 24 Notes and References

  Louis XIV, the Sun King of France, born in 1638, became king in 1643 and achieved his age of majority in 1661. Until his reign, the last sentence on laws in France usually read: ‘In the presence and with the consent of the prelates and barons.’ Later that changed to: ‘Le roi a ordonné et établi par délibération de son conseil ’, ‘The king has resolved by deliberation in his council’.1 This nicely illustrates the dominant political fact of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which was the rise of the nation-state and absolute monarchy, emerging out of feudal dynasties and the ‘city-states’ that had characterised the Middle Ages and Renaissance.2 These states gradually took on a form, and size, not seen since Roman times. Their emergence went hand-in-hand with a fresh round of political theorising, more impressive than at any other time, and the consequences of which are still with us.

  These states emerged when they did thanks to a whole series of disasters and catastrophes, which left Europe little more than a wreck. In 1309 the popes began their exile at Avignon. In 1339 the Hundred Years War was begun between England and France. Increasing famines and plague culminated in the Black Death of 1348–1349. The Jacquerie, the French peasant insurrection, took place in 1358 and the Great Ecclesiastical Sc
hism lasted from 1378 to 1417. There were risings in England and France in 1381–1382 and the Habsburgs were defeated by the Swiss Confederation four years later. In 1395 the Turks destroyed the Hungarian army at Nikopolis, the beginning of a campaign that culminated in 1453 with the fall of Constantinople. No area of Europe was immune, and Christendom itself was devastated. The Black Death reduced the population of the continent by a third but even so there was not enough food to go round and this widespread destitution and distress resulted in the most drastic upheaval in society that Europe had ever known.3 At the same time that ideas about the universe (and therefore about God) were beginning to change, so law and order here on earth were disintegrating.