by Bill Mesler
During his early days in Paris, d’Holbach had been a deist with a worldview similar to Voltaire’s. But by the 1760s, d’Holbach had become an ardent atheist, one who preached his disbelief with the fervor of the newly converted. Some said it was his close friend and collaborator Diderot who had influenced him, but there were plenty in his circle who shared this worldview. What set d’Holbach apart from these fellow travelers were the risks he was willing to take. In 1761, he published a book called Christianity Unveiled, an unapologetic assault on the idea of the existence of God. On the title page, he identified the author as the skeptic Nicolas Boulanger, his old friend, who had died before the book was penned. Using Boulanger’s name was also an homage to the notorious house where d’Holbach’s ideas had been spawned.
It was an ugly book. D’Holbach’s writing style was plain, stilted, and hard to read. Diderot told him it lacked all art. But the book’s sheer audacity gave it a certain power, and its lack of rhetorical flourish gave it a kind of widespread appeal, ironic since d’Holbach was an elitist snob, scornful of democracy and given to sneering at what he called the “imbecilic populace.” The book found an audience, even though those merely caught with it in their possession were whipped, branded, and imprisoned by the French police. All too aware of the potential repercussions, D’Holbach took exhaustive precautions to keep his own involvement a secret, including making clandestine trips to London to meet with Marc-Michel Rey, a publisher in Amsterdam who had earned a reputation for orchestrating publication of the most dangerous books, including some by Voltaire.
More books on the theme of atheism were to follow, culminating in 1770 with the publication of d’Holbach’s most influential work, The System of Nature: or, the Laws of the Moral and Physical World. It was an attempt to provide a clear-cut framework for the world, to answer existential questions without turning to a supernatural explanation. Like Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, it was the kind of book that summed itself up in its first few lines: “Men will always deceive themselves by abandoning experience to follow imaginary systems. Man is the work of Nature: he exists in Nature: he is submitted to her laws.” The soul does not exist, d’Holbach insisted. God was simply an anthropomorphization of things people did not understand.
In the second chapter, d’Holbach turned to the question of the origin of life. He touted Needham’s experiments as proof that life could organize itself merely by physical processes, that nonliving matter could naturally become living. In a footnote, he invited readers to “see the observations microscopiques of M. Needham” and asked, “would the production of a man independently from the ordinary means be more marvelous than that of an insect from flour and water?”
The book was a scandal. Voltaire called it “a great moral sickness, a work of darkness.” For Voltaire, at the root of that whole moral sickness was a singular idea, the idea that life could come from nonlife. To a friend he wrote that d’Holbach had “founded an entire system on a false experiment made by an Irish Jesuit who has been mistaken for a philosopher.” Voltaire began referring to Needham’s account of his experiments as “the story of the eels.” It had become a creation myth for atheism. Adding to the list of his insults against Needham, Voltaire began accusing the latter of pretending to be Jesus Christ.
The System of Nature was perhaps even more distressing to Needham. “The world recoils in horror at the blasphemies hurled there against its Creator,” he wrote. The use of his name was a personal insult. Yet even as he denounced the book, he was careful not to disavow or even waver in his own scientific observations and conclusions. They had, he said, simply been misinterpreted. His championship of spontaneous generation had made him famous. It had earned him recognition in the Royal Society and other pillars of natural philosophy. He could not let it go, even as it became clear that Voltaire had been prescient in his warning that Needham’s microscope was “the laboratory of the atheists.”
SOON, VOLTAIRE RECEIVED more ammunition for his feud with Needham, in the form of experimental evidence provided by an Italian university professor named Lazzaro Spallanzani. Spallanzani actually had much in common with Needham. Both were lay priests who had chosen a life in science and won fame as experimentalists. Spallanzani went on to become the first person to perform in vitro fertilization, which he accomplished using frog eggs. He also inseminated a poodle with semen he had taken from another dog, which was for a time thought to be the first example of artificial insemination, although Arab natural philosophers had, in fact, accomplished this with horses in the Middle Ages.
In 1776, Spallanzani went to work disproving Needham’s conclusions on spontaneous generation. He repeated Needham’s experiments, but more carefully, always searching for flaws in Needham’s execution. Suspecting that air had leaked through Needham’s corks, Spallanzani sealed his test tubes over a flame, fusing the melted glass until their contents were completely enclosed. He used all manner of substances: white beans, barley, maize, white beets, and egg yolk. Spallanzani’s experiments were exhaustive, superior to Needham’s in almost every way—a rare example of careful application of the scientific method for the time. By heating his flasks to different temperatures, Spallanzani showed that some animalcules could be destroyed only at extreme temperatures beyond what Needham had subjected them to. The two men then began their own public debate, which played out in their books and within the highest circles of natural philosophy.
Voltaire was quick to join Spallanzani’s arguments to his own. Voltaire wrote Spallanzani almost sycophantic letters in the fawning tone usually reserved for his personal communications with royalty. In his published writings, he referred to Spallanzani as “the Italian savant,” even as he continued to deride Needham as “the Irish Jesuit.” Spallanzani was, in fact, more of a priest than Needham, having actually officiated at mass. The Italian had also been trained by Jesuits. None of that really mattered to Voltaire, though. Nor, really, did the experimental evidence. The crux of Voltaire’s argument always remained the same: that positing a naturalistic explanation for how life came to be poses a challenge to the notion of a creator. The question of the origin of life, Voltaire understood, was important at a metaphysical level in a way that no other scientific question could ever be. Those were the stakes he was fighting for.
VOLTAIRE CONTINUED his relentless attacks on Needham, even into his last few years. They could still be found in his final book, Dialogues d’Évhémère, published in 1777. The following year, Voltaire died in Paris, where he had traveled to see the play Irene by the Englishman Samuel Johnson. It was his first trip to Paris since the de la Barre affair. The last words he wrote were, “I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.” Church authorities in Paris denied Voltaire a Christian burial, but before their decision was issued, his admirers stealthily slipped his body back to Champagne to be buried in an abbey not far from Cirey, where he and Émilie du Châtelet had lived.
By the time of Voltaire’s death, Needham had become head of the Imperial Academy of the Austrian Netherlands, as the territories of modern Belgium were then known. He received his appointment from the last Hapsburg ruler of the once-great Holy Roman Empire, Empress Maria Theresa, who had also appointed Spallanzani to head a university in Italy. Needham could never quite shake Voltaire’s criticisms. He spent much of his public life refuting Voltaire’s charges, sometimes also feebly reminding people that he was neither Irish nor a Jesuit. He even tried to fight back by trying his hand at a work of literature in the form of satire. He wrote a parody of a thinly disguised Voltaire who, Needham wrote, “misled our minds by the dictates of his heart.” It fell far short in the art so carefully shaped by Voltaire. It was eventually published in the appendix of a book that Needham edited.
Needham’s last attempt at experiment returned to the subject of miracles. An old Catholic folk belief held that the ringing of church bells could protect against lightning. French philosophers had taken to pointing out that, on the contrary,
the lists of people killed by lightning annually always seemed to include an inordinate number who were ringing those same bells. Needham argued that church bells did, in fact, provide some form of miraculous protection. The work was mostly ignored. Where it was not, it was simply shrugged aside as an oddity.
In 1781, two years before Needham died, he penned a letter to a sympathetic French philosopher. As he explained the motivations that lay behind his experiments on spontaneous generation, he came very close to what might be characterized as regret. Preformation and the existence of germs, he believed, had never rested on firm scientific ground. These ideas simply weren’t supported by the available evidence. Inevitably, natural philosophy would lead to new solutions to the problem of the origin of life. Needham’s experiments were an attempt to provide a theory that could fill the void after preformation was proved wrong. He felt he had reconciled the mechanistic Newtonian world in a way that preserved a role for a creator God.
In fact, Needham had done the opposite. And in the coming century, the argument over the spontaneous generation of microscopic life would be at the center of an increasingly contentious debate that broke out of the insular realm of those devoted to natural philosophy and into society at large.
* Malebranche’s concept anticipated, in ways he could not have understood, the idea of genetic inheritance. In a sense, the information for making potentially infinite generations of apple trees is contained in a single apple seed.
† As humankind’s understanding of living things increased exponentially during the eighteenth century, a Cartesian perspective of living organisms became harder to deny—even to some preformationists. The Genevan naturalist Charles Bonnet would echo Descartes when he wrote that “even the tiniest fibril can be imagined as infinitely minute Machines with functions of their own. The whole Machine, the great Machine, therefore is the result of grouping a prodigious number of ‘machinules’ whose actions are concurrent or converge.” Bonnet’s understanding of the organizational nature of life—machines composed of ever-smaller machines—wouldn’t be out of place in the twenty-first century. Yet Bonnet was also a staunch advocate of preformation.
‡ In 1998, biologist Daniel Martinez discovered another amazing fact about Trembley’s polyp: it does not age, because its stem cells have the capacity to regenerate, forever. Unlike most animals, the hydra is, in theory at least, immortal.
§ Thomas Jefferson was one of many influenced by Natural History. The future president of the United States was bothered, though, by Buffon’s characterization of the wildlife of the Americas—in Buffon’s imagining, a land of swamps and bogs—as “inferior.” Jefferson devoted the longest chapter of his only book, Notes on the State of Virginia, to rebutting Buffon’s claim. In 1785, when Jefferson visited Paris, he took time to dine with Buffon at his home. He managed to sway the French naturalist, who removed any references to the inferiority of the American animals from subsequent printings of Natural History.
¶ While in Berlin, Voltaire also found time to write a short story centered on a 120,000-foot-tall alien named Micromegas. The alien was a little like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver, except he traveled from planet to planet by “acquaintance with the laws of gravitation.” He finds the Earth filled with “fools, knaves and miserable wretches.” A philosopher tells him of “100,000 madmen of our species wearing hats, killing 100,000 other animals wearing turbans.” Eponymously titled “Micromegas,” it is considered by many to be the first work of science fiction ever written.
# As a teenager, Frederick tried unsuccessfully to flee the Prussian court with a man presumed to be his lover, Hans Hermann von Katte. His brutish father made Frederick watch von Katte’s beheading. Frederick was then married off, though he and his wife saw each other only officially, and only once a year.
A VITAL FORCE
Oh! But it is all proved . . . read the book. It is impossible to contradict anything in it. You understand, it is all science; it is not like those books in which one says one thing and another the contrary, and both may be wrong. Everything is proved.
—BENJAMIN DISRAELI, Tancred, 1847
THE MANSION OF FYNE COURT was set deep in the sparsely populated Quantock Hills of county Somerset, in southwest England. From high points nearby, a person could take in a fine view of the surrounding countryside. On a clear day, one could even see Glastonbury Tor, the cone-shaped green hill that the ancient Britons once called Ynys yr Afalon, likely the fabled “Isle of Avalon” of Arthurian legend. Yet the mansion itself was set on oddly low ground, covered on three sides by dense forests in a valley that was no more than a gash between the hills. No right-minded architect would have chosen such a spot, a visitor once remarked, for it was as if “the soil on which it had been built suddenly sunk one fine morning.”
To the north of Somerset County, coal mining was uprooting the forests, fueling the steam engines of the first great industrial revolution. But the Quantocks were largely spared. The woodlands were still filled with unusually tall oaks and firs, the ground covered by wildflowers and ferns. The poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge had spent summers nearby. It was where Coleridge composed two of the most famous poems in the English language: Kubla Khan and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
But in the unusually brutal winter of 1836, Fyne Court looked less like a preserve of England’s rural past and more like a vision of an extraordinary future. At the top of each tree nearest the house, a long metal pole had been placed. From each of these, a third of a mile of copper wires were strung like Christmas lights. They crept from the bases of the trees toward the house, all converging on a single open window on the first floor, in the organ room. There, the wires made their way haphazardly past shelves stocked with vials of mysterious, multicolored liquids, until they reached a giant electric battery through which passed enough current to kill twenty men. The device bore a warning, written large and in Latin: Noli Me Tangere. Do not touch me.
The owner of the house, Andrew Crosse, didn’t use the organ room much for entertaining. Crosse was a bit of a recluse, in his fifties and living the quiet life of a country aristocrat. His days were spent leisurely managing his lands and the tenant farmers who paid him rents, leaving him plenty of time to pursue his real interests. Crosse was known as a “scientist,” a word that was only just replacing “natural philosopher” in the English vernacular. Electricity was his first passion, and he had by then earned a strong reputation for his work in the field. Interest in his work had even drawn a visit to Fyne Court from the president of the Royal Society.
Crosse’s other interest was something that had intrigued him since he was a teenager: the natural formation of crystals. He thought the two subjects connected, that electricity might offer a clue to the question of how crystals were formed in nature. He began trying to form crystals by running electric currents through various pieces of stone, sometimes for weeks at a time. He thought that one day it would be possible to use electricity to create any kind of mineral, even gold or diamonds. The theory had gained him a measure of notoriety.
Crosse’s latest experiment involved running an electric current into an airtight glass jar that contained a stone from Mount Vesuvius, the volcano that had destroyed the Roman cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii, and a solution of finely powdered flint and potassium carbonate. Every morning for the previous two weeks, he had donned the velvet smoking jacket he always wore in his lab and headed downstairs to check for results.
One morning, Crosse finally saw something that intrigued him. Perched atop his rock were tiny white specks. Over the next four days, he dutifully returned each morning to find the specks growing ever larger. On the fourth day, he was stunned to see in place of one of the specks a tiny white insect situated just above the liquid. As the days passed, more appeared. They were, he scribbled excitedly in his journal, the “perfect insect.” In the years to follow, Crosse’s experiment would be cited as proof of spontaneous generation, as well as invoking comparisons to strange experimen
ts conducted by the Italian Luigi Galvani, who had seemingly proved the existence of some kind of electrical life force. The experiment would also make Crosse, for a brief period of time, one of the more famous men in the British Empire, as well as one of the most vilified.
ONE MIGHT DESCRIBE the history of science as being shaped like an hourglass. Before the nineteenth century, science had always been largely a pastime practiced only by wealthy intellectuals, or those maintained by wealthy patrons. Its inaccessibility was not unlike that of the modern age, in which science is largely the exclusive purview of an educated elite we call scientists. But for a remarkable period during the nineteenth century, it became a pastime for nearly all walks of society. Particularly in the country at the center of the industrial revolution, Great Britain, science was discussed and debated in newspapers, at the dinner table, and even in working-class pubs and radical journals. A century earlier, few people would have had the opportunity to hear of experiments like Andrew Crosse’s. Even fewer would have cared. By the middle of the nineteenth century, virtually everybody knew about the latest scientific trends, and no one seemed to be without an opinion.
This democratization of science was due largely to the advent of the steam-powered printing press. The business of printing was exploding. Paper prices tumbled to historic lows, and publishers saw mass publication as the wave of the future. Newspapers and periodicals popped up everywhere. Literacy, in turn, began reaching levels that had been unimaginable for most of human history.