Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  In all respects, Newton chimed with the approved public image of the Royal Society, and with other leading lights of Restoration natural philosophy, in particular the Hon. Robert Boyle. Conspicuous for his philosophical modesty while well-born to boot, that pioneer chemist also pursued his researches from the stance of altruistic piety, insistent that investigation of Nature was the road to God.33

  It was providential that Newton's Principia was published in 1687, on the eve of the Glorious Revolution. Himself the MP for his university and a staunch Whig, Newton, like Locke, was soon rewarded under William and Mary with high office, and his science was enlisted to back the new moral and political order, chiefly via the Boyle Lectures, a sermon series endowed by Boyle's will to be read annually from London pulpits ‘for proving the Christian Religion against notorious infidels’. Delivering the first series in 1692 (published as the Confutation of Atheism), Newton's protégé Richard Bentley used the Principia to demonstrate God's providential design for the universe. Samuel Clarke, in 1704–5, and other early lecturers also drew on Newton to bolster Latitudinarian Anglicanism, and to hammer home the value of empirical inquiry, intellectual freedom and rational religion. These lectures not only boosted the Christian faith, however; they helped reinforce the position of the new political regime.34

  The affinities between the Newtonian cosmos and the post-1688 polity were played up. In the year after the master's death, his disciple J. T. Desaguliers produced an explicit application of physics to politics in The Newtonian System of the World: The Best Model of Government, an Allegorical Poem (1728), where the British monarchy was celebrated as the guarantor of liberty and rights: ‘attraction is now as universal in the political, as the philosophical world’.

  What made the Planets in such Order move,

  He said, was Harmony and mutual Love.35

  God himself was commended as a kind of constitutional monarch:

  His Pow'r, coerc'd by Laws, still leaves them free,

  Directs but not Destroys their Liberty.36

  The Principia thus provided an atomic explanatory model not just for Nature but for society too (freely moving individuals governed by law). For Desaguliers, no praise was sufficient for the genius who had finally revealed the ways of God to man:

  Newton the unparallel'd, whose Name

  No Time will wear out of the Book of Fame,

  Coelestiall Science has promoted more,

  Than all the Sages that have shone before.37

  It was particularly fortunate that Newton had apostles assiduous in guarding his image. For, as is now known from scrutiny of his private papers, he was in reality far from the flawless figure cosmeticized for public consumption. He had plunged deeply into esoterica, his idiosyncratic Arianism was profoundly heretical and he was jealous and browbeating to boot. Public exposure of such traits would have blown his cover as an enlightened idol. Newton himself, however, kept his speculations private, and he left it to loyal juniors like Whiston to try out in public his more chancy speculations, such as anti-Trinitarianism – sometimes to their cost (Whiston was dismissed from his Cambridge chair).38

  After his death, Newton's findings – indeed the new science in general – were occasionally deployed to dispute or erode Christian teachings, as by the Deist geologist James Hutton, or the unabashed pantheist who touted the eternity of the Earth, George Hoggart Toulmin.39 In Britain, however, thanks to the Newtonian synthesis, natural philosophy remained remarkably in tune with the rational Christianity of the moderate Enlightenment – a holy alliance embodied in a lively tradition of natural theology, culminating in William Paley's influential Natural Theology (1802). A strategic example opened that work: from a watch we infer a watchmaker;40 from natural contrivances, such as the human body, we could, by the same logic, infer a Divine Clockmaker, reasoning ‘thro’ Nature up to Nature's God’:

  The pivot upon which the head turns, the ligament within the socket of the hip joint, the pulley or trochlear muscles of the eye; the epiglottis, the bandages which tie down the tendons of the wrist and instep, the slit or perforated muscles at the hands and feet, the knitting of the intestines to the mesentery.41

  Could all this be the work of blind chance?42

  The Enlightenment secured the triumph of a radical new rendering of the very constitution of Nature.43 After 1660, the Aristotelian metaphysics of elements, humours, substances, qualities and final causes, so long dominant in the universities, as well as rival Renaissance neo-Platonic and hermetic visions of a spiritual universe, were finally superseded by models of Nature viewed as matter in motion, governed by laws capable of mathematical expression. This enthronement of the mechanical philosophy, the key paradigm switch of the ‘scientific revolution’, in turn sanctioned the new assertions of man's rights over Nature so salient to enlightened thought.44

  Pioneered in France by Pierre Gassendi, Marin Mersenne and especially by Descartes, and in England by Hobbes, the mechanical philosophy's key feature lay in its ontology of microscopic corpuscles interacting by contact. These possessed only the ‘primary qualities’ of size, shape and motion: all other (‘secondary’) properties – like smell, colour or taste – were deemed the subjective products of interaction with human sense organs. For Cartesianism, the universe was a plenum, matter was inert and passive and motion depended on billiard-ball contact – all other supposed modes of action were ridiculed as vulgar or mystical, relics of discredited magic. Challenging Descartes in his revised version of the mechanical philosophy, Newton affirmed action at a distance in a matter theory in which force assumed a central role, being associated with gravity and applicable to many other phenomena.

  In its diverse and contested forms, the mechanical philosophy achieved towering prestige in the early Enlightenment, and not just in the physical sciences. ‘Clockwork’ thinking, for example, invaded physiology and medicine; ‘iatromechanism’, advanced among others by the Scottish physicians Archibald Pitcairne and George Cheyne, cast the human body as a system of pulleys, springs and levers, pipes and vessels, its fluids being governed by the laws of hydraulics. Life itself was potentially explicable within the new mechanical paradigm.

  By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, strict mechanism was being judged incapable of accounting for the full complexities of living phenomena, especially properties like growth and reproduction. The Scottish surgeon John Hunter, the ‘father’ of British physiology, substituted a vitalism, which held that organized matter had an inherent vital force which distinguished it from the inorganic. Seemingly paradoxically, vitalism was thereby recruited to bolster materialism: having banished belief in the natural qualities and manifestations of the soul and other spiritual powers (‘anima’), enlightened thinkers such as Erasmus Darwin then found the mechanical philosophy inadequate to explain those special features of living matter (such as generation) which the ‘animists’ had highlighted; hence they extended the power of self-organization to all matter, by analogy with such phenomena as crystal growth.45

  In Britain, enlightened theorizings of matter and inquiries into chemistry and branches of experimental physics like the study of heat were dominated by Newtonianism. It diverged sharply from the Cartesian brand of mechanism, for not only did Newtonianism embrace the vacuum – as proved by airpump experiments – but it held that the quantity of matter (strictly defined) in the universe was tiny; in Joseph Priestley's graphic image, ‘all the solid matter in the solar system might be contained within a nut-shell’.46 ‘Solid’ bodies, in other words, were largely void space, which resisted disintegration or penetration thanks to the intensity of the forces acting between their component particles. The prime example of these inter-particular forces was gravitation, but in the speculative ‘Queries’ to the Opticks, Newton also floated the idea of analogous microscopic forces, introducing, as we have seen, the ‘aether’ to explain electrical phenomena and even gravity itself.

  The Newtonian matter model underwent challenge and change. In the 1720s and 1
730s, Robert Greene and John Rowning held that attractive and repulsive forces acted antagonistically so as to sustain activity in Nature.47 This assertion marks an important juncture in enlightened matter theory: while for Newton force had been an expression of divine intervention, later theorists increasingly assumed that matter was inherently active and that Nature was sustained independently of God's immediate will.

  This move was made possible by the uptake and modification of aether theories. From the 1740s, they were popularized by works such as Bryan Robinson's Dissertation on the Aether of Sir Isaac Newton (1743), and similar sorts of ‘subtle fluids’ were proposed in domains such as electricity, magnetism and physiology. The Scot James Hutton applied them to heat, and then to geology in his Theory of the Earth (1795). A friend of David Hume and Adam Smith, Hutton ventured a true secularization of Nature: light, heat and electricity were modifications of a single aetherial substance, which acted as a principle of repulsion to counter attraction; interacting with gravitational matter, the circulation of aetherial (repulsive) matter through the universe maintained movement independently of what the Deist Hutton scorned as the vulgar notion of divine supervention.48 Partly on these grounds, he could present the Earth as indefinitely old – it showed ‘no vestige of a beginning – no prospect of an end’.49 ‘Nature's God’ was thus in retreat.

  This secularization of matter theory is also visible in thinking about force, as Newtonian ‘forces’ were assimilated into the ‘powers’ which Locke had ascribed to matter, notably the power to affect the senses. In his Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (1777), Joseph Priestley boldly proposed that matter was, in reality, reducible to such Lockean ‘powers’: ‘particles’ were actually nothing more than spheres of attractive and repulsive forces circling a nucleus. Since these forces comprised the Lockean powers making us aware of matter's existence, the core of each particle was quite unknowable. Thus, concluded Priestley, we had no grounds for concluding that there was really anything there at all: the existence of a material substrate independent of its powers was one of those redundant hypotheses a true Newtonian would not wish to ‘feign’; Newton's ‘solid’, inert matter was thus an illusion.

  The beauty of this argument for Priestley, qua enlightened materialist, was that it collapsed the problematic Cartesian distinction between matter and spirit. All matter became in effect spiritualized, or vice versa, and the mysteries of mind/body dualism dissolved.50 His adversaries, however, condemned such views as smacking of that strand of French materialism which held that matter was alive, thus raising the bogey of Locke's ‘thinking matter’. The development of matter theory thus brought together a clutch of concerns – epistemology, mind–body relations and God's government of the physical world – which made it central to enlightened attempts to formulate a science of natural order.

  It was not only, of course, the physical sciences which developed, even if, thanks to Newton, they seemed the most spectacular. By the middle of the eighteenth century, knowledge of all aspects of Nature was advancing on a broad front. Carolus Linnaeus arrived at a system for classifying the kingdoms which natural historians studied, while works like Oliver Goldsmith's 8-volume History of the Earth and Animated Nature (1774) popularized the living world for the new reading public, and opened up new aesthetic prospects, as will be shown in chapter 13.51

  Newton's principate proved momentous for enlightened thinking. It bolstered confidence that Nature had finally been fathomed, and created a model of a material reality, amenable to observation and experiment, which squared perfectly with Locke's empiricism. No longer alive or occult but rather composed of largely inert matter, Nature could be weighed, measured – and mastered. The mechanical philosophy fostered belief that man was permitted, indeed dutybound, to apply himself to Nature for (in Bacon's words) the ‘glory of God and the relief of man's estate’. Since Nature was not, after all, sacred or ‘ensouled’, there could be nothing impious about utilizing and dominating it. The progressiveness of science thus became pivotal to enlightened propaganda. The way was now well-lit, as bright as light itself.52

  Science was energetically promoted amongst the public. Initially in London's coffee houses, lecturers began to offer demonstrations with globes, orreries and other instruments displaying the marvels of the clockwork universe, while performing chemical, magnetic, electrical and airpump experiments besides.53 In the spring of 1713, for instance, Newton's protégé William Whiston was holding forth on mathematics and science at both Douglas's coffee house in St Martin's Lane and at the Marine coffee house near the Royal Exchange – typical Whig haunts. The most illustrious popularizer, however, was the Royal Society's official experimenter, Desaguliers. In that same year he offered a course on Newtonian science in twenty-one lectures, providing to ‘such as are altogether unskilled in Mathematics’ experimental proof of the reality of the vacuum, while also catering for interest in ‘mechanical engines in general’. Mechanical principles would be applied to the operations of levers, weights and pulleys, and to ballistics – warfare offered major opportunities for applied science.54

  Such lecturing might also launch a fashionable career, as demonstrated by that of Adam Walker. Befriended by Priestley, the inventor and astronomy lecturer performed at the Haymarket Theatre in 1778, while in glamorous George Street, off Hanover Square, he put on a lecture series each winter, which brought him to the notice of London's intelligentsia – even if Fanny Burney found him ‘vulgar in conversation’. About 1781 Walker built a magnificent 20-foot orrery consisting of luminous globes of various sizes to represent the planets and displaying the workings of the solar system in a darkened auditorium, which he named the Eidouranion. He also doubled as a visiting science lecturer at Westminster, Winchester and other public schools. At Eton, one member of his audience, Percy Bysshe Shelley, was ‘completely captivated’ by his discourses on astronomy, electricity, chemistry, magnetism and hydrostatics – as is plain to see from Shelley's philosophical poetry.55 Medicine too had its popularizers – the Scot James Graham, for instance, gave demonstrations of medical electricity and sexual rejuvenation in his Temple of Health off the Strand in London, where he displayed his ‘Celestial Bed’.56

  Science popularization spread to the provinces, Desaguliers himself lecturing to the very first provincial scientific and literary society, the Spalding Gentlemen's Society in Lincolnshire. As early as 1712, the Newcastle Courant publicized the proposals of Dr James Jurin, physician and master of the Royal Free Grammar School, ‘for carrying on by subscription a compleat Course of Mechanicks, by which Gentlemen unacquainted with any part of the Mathematicks in the Space of 12 or 18 Months by meeting 3 Times a Week for an Hour at a Time may be enabled to compute the Effect of any Machine whatsoever’. Jurin was yet another Newtonian, who, under a different enlightenment hat, was also a pioneer of smallpox inoculation.57

  Whiston lectured in Bristol in 1724; James Ferguson – one of a host of Scots who took the high road south – performed in Bath and Bristol in the 1760s and 1770s; James Arden, Henry Moyes, John Warltire, Benjamin Martin and others brought science to the West Country. Early in his career Martin lectured in Gloucester, Salisbury, Newbury, Oxford, Chichester, Bath, Reading, York, Scarborough and Ipswich, and in 1747 he set up his pitch in Birmingham for the first time.58 By the end of the century few towns of any significance had not been milked by itinerant lecturers offering courses of a dozen or twenty lectures over a few weeks, supplementing their income meanwhile by selling their books, apparatus and medical nostrums, by performing land surveys or by giving private tuition. In short, ‘knowledge’, as Benjamin Martin reflected, ‘is now become a fashionable thing, and philosophy is the science à la mode; hence, to cultivate this study is only to be in taste, and politeness is the inseparable consequence’.59

  Science entered and shaped the world of the educated in many ways. An instrument trade flourished – an erudite gentleman or lady of means might be expected to own a microscope or a telescope, alongside a c
abinet of beetles or stuffed birds.60 Popular science books appeared, some for children, and encyclopaedias played a major role in its dissemination.61 But while science thus staked its place in polite culture, it was also promoted as utilitarian, an engine of national progress. ‘None has more improved the Mechanic Arts,’ noted the Frenchman Guy Miège, enthusing over the English alliance of science, technology and industry. ‘Here are made the best Clocks, Watches, Barometers, Thermometers, Air Pumps, and all Sorts of Mathematical Instruments… For Merchandize and Navigation, except the Hollanders, none come near them.’62The Collection for Improvement of Husbandry and Trade (1692), put out by apothecary, entrepreneur and fellow of the Royal Society John Houghton, was one of scores of works which proclaimed the economic benefits expected from the link-up of science and know-how.63 Such claims grew louder. ‘The study of the useful arts and sciences and of modern languages,’ declared the New and Old Principles of Trade Compared (1788), ‘are [sic] superior to the study of the languages and the works of taste of decayed nations.’64 ‘Read the history of mankind,’ barked another booster;

  consider the gradual steps of civilization from barbarism to refinement, and you will not fail to discover that the progress of society from its lowest and worst to its highest and most perfect state has been uniformly accompanied and chiefly promoted by the happy exertions of man in the character of a mechanic or engineer. Let all machines be destroyed, and we are reduced in a moment to the condition of savages.65

  It was just such thinking which underlay the aims of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Commerce and Manufactures (1754), located just off the Strand, which offered premiums to reward innovators in various aspects of the practical and decorative arts. Bandying around buzz words like ‘experiments’, its founder, William Shipley, floated projects designed to turn technical expertise to economic advantage, including, rather enterprisingly, shoes waterproofed with tin foil (cost: id. a pair), while others dreamed – ominously! – of making ‘coffee of English materials’.66 In the 1770s James Barry produced a suite of paintings to decorate the Society's great hall. The train of philosophers, scientists and others painted by the artist began with the Ancients and culminated with contemporary British adepts, like Newton, portrayed as the new Olympians.67