The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  6. Martin Luther, “Appeal to the German Nobility,” in Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (New York: Doubleday, 1961), 471.

  7. Ibid., 470, 471.

  8. Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (New York: Penguin, 2004).

  9. George Sarton, Appreciation of Ancient and Modern Science During the Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1955); Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 51–52.

  10. François Rabelais, Pantagruel, ed. Jean Plattard (Paris: Société des Belles-Lettres, 1959), VII, 42.

  11. Eisenstein, Printing Revolution, 43.

  12. Ibid., 44.

  13. Johan Huizinga, Erasmus of Rotterdam (London: Phaidon Press, 1952), 3, 7.

  14. Desiderius Erasmus, The Epistles of Erasmus, trans. F. M. Nichols, 3 vols. (London: Longmans, 1901–18).

  15. Paul Kristeller, ed., Eight Philosophers of the Renaissance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1964), 51; editor’s introduction, Desiderius Erasmus, In Praise of Folly, ed. A.H.T. Levi (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 23.

  16. Huizinga, Erasmus, 62.

  17. Ibid., 64.

  18. Ibid. Erasmus had published an earlier version of the Adagia, using only Latin authors, in 1500. However, with Greek now under his belt, he could comb through the offerings of various Venetian scholars from authors like Plato, Plutarch, and Pindar.

  19. Erasmus, letter to Martin Dorp, 1515, in In Praise of Folly, 230.

  20. Hastings Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958); Walter Ong, Ramus: Method and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 133–35.

  21. Ong, Ramus, 143.

  22. François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), 70.

  23. Huizinga, Erasmus, 107.

  24. As implied in Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986); and Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

  25. David McNeil, Guillaume Budé and Humanism in the Reign of Francis I (Geneva: Droz, 1975).

  26. Quoted in Huizinga, Erasmus, 103.

  27. Boehmer, Road to Reformation, 370.

  28. Albrecht Dürer, Dürer’s Record of Journeys to Venice and the Low Countries, ed. Roger Fry (1913; repr., New York: Dover Books, 1995).

  29. Heiko Oberman, The Harvest of Late Medieval Theology (1963; repr., Durham, N.C.: Labyrinth, 1983); and Roland Bainton, The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century (1952; repr., Boston: Beacon Press, 1980).

  30. John Bossy, Christianity in the West 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

  31. Martin Luther, “Bondage of the Will,” in Dillenberger, Martin Luther, 203.

  32. Martin Luther, “Preface to Romans,” ibid., 20.

  33. Martin Luther, “Pagan Servitude of the Church,” ibid., 268.

  34. Martin Luther, “Bondage of the Will,” ibid., 171.

  35. Martin Luther, “Pagan Servitude,” ibid., 343.

  36. Martin Luther, “Institutes,” ibid., 361.

  37. Martin Luther, “Freedom of the Christian Man,” ibid., 73.

  38. Martin Luther, “On Corruption and Grace,” quoted in Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture (1940; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), 504.

  Chapter 19: Secrets of the Heavens: Plato, Galileo, and the New Science

  1. “The Publisher to the Reader,” in Galileo Galilei, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, trans. Henry Crew (1914; repr., New York: Dover, 1954), xx.

  2. Alexander Kohanski, The Greek Mode of Thought in Western Philosophy (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984), 42.

  3. Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), (510d–511b).

  4. Ibid., (511c–d).

  5. Jacopo Zabarella, De Natura Logicae, quoted in John Herman Randall, “The Development of Scientific Method in the School of Padua,” in Paul Kristeller and Philip Wiener, eds., Renaissance Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 240.

  6. As in John Herman Randall, The Making of the Modern Mind (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1940). But see Stillman Drake, Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 47–48, who points out that Zabarella steadfastly opposed the use of mathematics in science, and that his successors fought Galileo every step of the way.

  7. Randall, “School of Padua,” 224.

  8. What chiefly kept him there for more than a decade was a salary three times what he could get at any other university. Stillman Drake, Galileo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 27.

  9. Vincenzo Galilei, “Dialogo della musica antica et della moderna” of Vincenzo Galilei: Translation and Commentary, ed. R. H. Herman, PhD thesis, North Texas State University, 1973.

  10. Robert Lawlor, Sacred Geometry: Philosophy and Practice (London: Thames & Hudson, 1982), 13.

  11. John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy (1892; repr., New York: Meridian, 1958), 284.

  12. R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, Symbol and the Symbolic (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Tradition, 1981).

  13. Drake, Galileo at Work, 2–3.

  14. Mario Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 7.

  15. Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957).

  16. Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier, 105–6.

  17. Quoted in Drake, Galileo.

  18. For example, Aristotle, Physics, VII:3.

  19. Galileo mentioned De Revolutionibus in his 1591–92 treatise on motion, De Motu, but only regarding its mathematical calculations, never its heliocentric theory. Drake, Galileo at Work, 27.

  20. Galileo to Kepler, August 4, 1597, in Johannes Kepler: Life and Letters, ed. Carola Baumgardt (London: V. Gollancz, 1952), 38.

  21. Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two World Systems, quoted in Drake, Galileo, 46.

  22. V. Galilei, “Dialogo della musica antica.”

  23. The full account is in Galileo’s The Assayer (1623), quoted in Stillman Drake, Galileo: Pioneer Scientist (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 132.

  24. Galileo to Kepler, August 19, 1610, in Baumgardt, Kepler, 86.

  25. Drake, Galileo, 44–45.

  26. Galileo-Kepler correspondence, quoted in Mario Livio, The Golden Ratio (London: Review, 2003), 148.

  27. Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), 214–19.

  28. Benoît Mandelbrot, Les objets fractals: Forme, hasard et dimension (1975; repr., Paris: Flammarion, 1989).

  29. Quoted in Lawlor, Sacred Geometry, 10.

  30. Livio, Golden Ratio, 136. See also Fritjof Capra, The Science of Leonardo: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance (New York: Anchor, 2007), 148–49.

  31. Charles Carman, Images of Humanist Ideals in Italian Renaissance Art (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000), 74–76, 81.

  32. Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 272–73.

  33. Ibid., 24.

  34. Drake, Galileo, 29; Galileo did add, “No one doubts that the Supreme Pontiff has always an absolute power to approve or condemn” on matters of faith, “but it is not in the power of any created being to make things true or false.”

  35. Kuhn, Copernican Revolution; Livio, Golden Ratio, 147–48.

  36. Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632), quoted in Drake, Galileo, 91.

  37. Galileo Galilei, The Assayer (1623), quoted in Stillman Drake, ed., Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo
(New York: Anchor Books, 1957), 237–38.

  38. With apologies to Thomas Kuhn’s masterpiece, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

  39. Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, trans. Stillman Drake (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 110.

  40. Giorgio de Santillana, The Crime of Galileo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955), 187.

  41. Dated February 25, 1616, reprinted in Maurice E. Finocchiaro, ed., The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 147.

  42. Quoted in ibid., 213.

  43. Deposition of April 12, 1633, ibid., 259.

  44. Ibid.

  45. By their own rules of evidence, as Stillman Drake points out. Drake, Galileo, 78.

  46. Santillana, Crime of Galileo.

  47. Ibid., 310–11.

  48. According to a 1639 letter, quoted in Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers (New York: Macmillan, 1968).

  49. See R. Hooykaas, Religion and the Rise of Modern Science (London: Regent College Publishing, 2000).

  50. John Milton, Paradise Lost, in Complete Poetry and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Hughes (New York: Odyssey, 1957), 1:287–290.

  51. John Milton, Areopagitica, ibid., 1:738.

  Chapter 20: God, Kings, and Philosophers in the Age of Genius

  1. Richard Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 15.

  2. Bacon’s quotation is that Greek philosophy “abounds in words but is barren of works.” Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica Press, 1952), 1:81.

  3. Bacon quoted in Ernst Cassirer, The Platonic Renaissance in England (New York: Gordian, 1970), 48.

  4. Theo Verbeek, Descartes and the Dutch: Early Reactions to the Cartesian Philosophy, 1637–1650 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992).

  5. Henry More, letter to Samuel Hartlib, in Henry More, Letters on Several Subjects (London: 1694).

  6. René Descartes, Philosophical Works, trans. E. S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross (1911; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), vol. 1.

  7. Westfall, Never at Rest, 102–3.

  8. It was Gottfried Leibnitz’s unveiling of his own discovery of the principles of calculus that finally compelled Newton to come clean. Characteristically, Newton assumed the German philosopher had somehow stolen the secret from him. See Westfall, Never at Rest.

  9. Isaac Newton, “On the Gravity and Equilibrium of Fluids” and “Optics,” quoted in Westfall, Never at Rest, 302, 395–96.

  10. Ibid., 303.

  11. Isaac Newton, Principia Mathematica, in Isaac Newton, Newton’s Philosophy of Nature: Selections from His Writings, ed. H. S. Thayer (1953; repr. New York: Macmillan, 1974), 45; Isaac Newton, letter to Dr. Bentley, February 1692–93, ibid., 54.

  12. Newton, Principia Mathematica, 42–43.

  13. Ibid., 44.

  14. Duke de la Force, Louis XIV et sa cour, in John B. Wolf, ed., Louis XIV (New York: Norton, 1974), 74.

  15. Ibid., 75; Saint-Simon, Memoirs (New York: Brentano, 1915–18).

  16. La Force, Louis XIV et sa cour, 79.

  17. Quoted in Wolf, Louis XIV, 373.

  18. La Force, Louis XIV et sa cour, 81.

  19. Bishop Bossuet, Politique tirée de l’écriture sainte, quoted in Wolf, Louis XIV, 373.

  20. Pierre Goubert, Louis XIV et quarante million français (1966; repr., Paris: Fayard, 1977).

  21. Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (1957; repr., London: Longmans, 1959), 229–30.

  22. Westfall, Never at Rest, 489.

  23. Cranston, John Locke, 210.

  24. John Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature, quoted in Francis Oakley, Natural Law, Laws of Nature, Natural Rights (New York: Continuum, 2005), 83–84.

  25. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J.A.K. Thomson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), V, vii (1134b8–24), 189.

  26. Ernest Barker, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Otto Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society, 1500 to 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934), xxxviii. Aquinas actually had a fourth category, lex aeterna, which was the law inherent in God’s purposes for all His creation. However, most commentators incorporated this teleological aspect of creation under lex divina.

  27. Gierke, Natural Law.

  28. Suárez quoted in Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 156.

  29. See Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

  30. Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought.

  31. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. MacPherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 257 (II:20).

  32. For Hobbes on Aristotle, see ibid., 267 (II:22), 369 (II:29). The quotation is at 264 (II:22).

  33. John Locke, Second Treatise, in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), I:6.

  34. Ibid., IV:27–28. See James Tully, A Discourse of Property: John Locke and His Adversaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

  35. Westfall, Never at Rest, 491.

  36. Locke, Second Treatise, in Two Treatises of Government, III:21.

  37. Ibid., III:17.

  38. Ibid., XIX:220.

  39. See Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government (1698; repr., Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1996); and Zera Silver Fink, The Classical Republicans (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1962).

  40. See Martyn Thompson, Ideas of Contract in English Political Thought in the Age of John Locke (New York: Garland, 1987).

  41. John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, ed. I. T. Ramsey (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1958), 61.

  Chapter 21: Aristotle in a Periwig: The Culture of the Enlightenment

  1. J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

  2. See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689; repr., London: G. Bell, 1903), on substance and essence. But, Locke uses these words in a sense very different from the way Aristotle had coined them in his Metaphysics.

  3. Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (1957; repr., London: Longmans, 1959), 245, 428.

  4. John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, July 16, 1814, quoted in Jeffrey Morison, John Witherspoon and the Founding of the American Republic (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 116.

  5. Jefferson to Adams, July 5, 1814, quoted in ibid., 2:252–53. Voltaire’s article on the Chain of Being in Dictionnaire philosophique is quoted in A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (1936; repr., New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 253.

  6. Voltaire, “Letter on Pascal,” in Voltaire. Candide and Philosophical Letters (New York: Modern Library, 1992).

  7. Adams to Jefferson, July 16, 1814, quoted in Morison, John Witherspoon.

  8. Quoted in ibid., 117. Witherspoon was a founding member of the American Philosophical Society, along with another confirmed neo-Aristotelian, Benjamin Franklin.

  9. See René Descartes, Meditation III, in Descartes, Philosophical Works, trans. E. S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross (1911; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

  10. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, quoted in Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (1945; repr., New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 610.

  11. It was one that many philosophers who accepted Locke’s assertion that all knowledge comes from observation, including Thomas Reid, were unwilling to take. See Thomas Reid’s critique on Locke in Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969).

  12. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV:15.

  13. Quoted in Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 609.

  14. See Ke
ith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Lovejoy, Great Chain of Being, esp. chapter 9.

  15. Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, in Alexander Pope: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Robin Sowerby (London: Routledge, 1988), 157 (IV:29–34).

  16. Thomas Hankins, Science and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

  17. Locke quoted in Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 613.

  18. See Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and Liberty; and Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), passim.

  19. For example, Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman (1726; repr., Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1987), chapters 4, 5.

  20. Nathan Rosenberg and L. E. Birdzell, How the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 18–19.

  21. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 1:90, 2:413.

  22. Shaftesbury, “Freedom of Wit and Humor,” in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), 46.

  23. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J.A.K. Thomson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 154–55.

  24. “The necessity of believing without knowledge, nay often upon very slight grounds … should make us more busy and careful to inform ourselves than constrain others.” Locke adds, “For where is the man that has incontestable evidence of the truth of all he holds, or the falsehood of all he condemns?” John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV:16.

  25. Voltaire, Letters on England, trans. Leonard Tancock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 51.

  26. Ibid.

  27. Ibid., 62, 57.

  28. Ibid., 112.

  29. Ibid., 52.

  30. See Richard Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

  31. The parallels with Newton are made plain in Duncan Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

  32. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Historical Law Tracts (1761), quoted in Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World (New York: Crown, 2001), 98.