111418

THE ORIGINS OF MODERN SCIENCE

1300-1800

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The
Historical

Novel

The Peace-Tactics of Napoleon, 1806-1808 The Whig Interpretation of History Editor Select Documents ofEurqpean History, Vol. 17 15-1920
Napoleon (Great Lives
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Ill,

The Statecraft of Machiavelli The Englishman and his History George III, Lord North and the People, 1779-80
Christianity and History History and Human Relations
Christianity in European History
Christianity,

Diplomacy and Man on his Past

War

THE ORIGINS
OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

1300-1800

BY
H.

BUTTERFIELD, M.A.
Master ofPeterhouse and
Professor of Modern History in the

University of Cambridge

The Macmillan Company / New York / 1959

G. Bell

&

Sons Ltd. 1957

1949

New

First published

Edition 1957

Third Printing 1959

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number:

5714603

CONTENTS
Page
Introduction
I

vii

The

Historical Importance

of a Theory of Impetus

II

The Conservatism of Copernicus

17

ffl

The Study of the Heart down

to William

Harvey

37
'

IV The Downfall of Aristotle and Ptolemy

55

The Experimental Method

Descartes

in the Seventeenth

Century

77
9<>

VI Bacon and

VII The Effect of the Scientific Revolution on the

Non1 17

Mechanical Sciences

VDI The History of the Modern Theory of Gravitation

139

IX The

Transition to the Philosophe Reign of Louis XIV

Movement

in the

*59

The

Place of the Scientific Revolution in the History of Western Civilisation

Scientific

175
191

XI The Postponed

Revolution in Chemistry

XII Ideas of Progress and Ideas of Evolution

Suggestions for Further Reading

210
23 5

Index

239

INTRODUCTION
CONSIDERING the part played by the
sciences in the story

of our

Western

hardly possible to doubt the importance which the history of science will sooner or later acquire both in its own right and as the bridge which has been so long
civilisation, it is

needed between the Arts and the Sciences.

which were delivered for the History of Science Committee in Cambridge in 1948, were produced in the hope that they would stimulate in the historian a little interest in science, and in the scientist a litde interest in history. In this revised edition they appear now with some of their original errors removed, some judgments altered, and some changes which reflect the advance of knowledge in the
lectures,

The following

intervening years.

Nobody, of

course, will imagine that the

mere "general

historian" can pretend to broach the question of the more recent developments in any of the natural sciences; but it is

fortunate that in respect of students in both the Arts and the Sciences the supremely important field for the ordinary pur-

poses of education is one more manageable in itselfand, indeed, perhaps more in need of the intervention of the historian as
such. It
is

the so-called "scientific revolution", popularly

associated with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but a reaching back in an unmistakably continuous line to period

much earlier stilL

Since that revolution overturned the author-

not only ity in science

of the middle ages but of the ancient world since* it ended not only in the eclipse of scholastic it philosophy but in the destruction of Aristotelian physics outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and. reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements, within the system of medieval Christendom. Since it changed the character of men's habitual mental operations even in the conduct of the non-material
vii

viii

INTRODUCTION

sciences, while transforming the whole diagram of the physical universe and the very texture of human life itself, it looms so of the modern world and of the large as the real origin both

modern mentality that our customary periodisation of European history has become an anachronism and an encumbrance. There can hardly be a field in which it is of greater moment to us to see at somewhat closer range the precise operations that
underlay a particular historical transition, a particular chapter

of intellectual development. It is this phase of European history which the following course oflectures is chiefly intended to survey There will be no pretence of laying out four centuries of the history of science
.

long piece of wall-paper, however, and dividing it into so many units of superficial area so much acreage of historical narrative to be covered in each lecture after the manner of the
like a

encyclopaedist

and the abridger.

It will

be necessary rather to

look for the lines of strategic change, and to put the microscope
that seem pivotal trying, for example, to discover the particular intellectual knots that had to be untied at a given conjuncture. It will concern us particularly to take note of those cases in which men not only solved a prob-

upon those moments

lem but had to alter their mentality in the process, or at least discovered afterwards that the solution involved a change in
their

mental approach.

Two further points of method ought perhaps to be noted in

all,

order to avoid misunderstanding and cross-purposes. First of the subject has not been turned into genuine history it is
at

still

an

inferior degree

of organisation,

like the

work of the

annalist and the chronicler

ifwe remain content with a

biographical
struct

mode of treatment, and

particularly if

we

merely con-

our story of science by drawing lines straight from one great figure to another. Some of the surprises, some of the remarkable reversals ofjudgment, that have taken in the
place
last

have been the result of a much more detailed of a host of intervening scientific workers whose names study had been comparatively unknown. Secondly, the whole fabric of our history of science is lifeless and its whole is disfifty years

shape

IN1-RODUCTION
totted if we seize

ix

now upon this particular man in the fifteenth had who an idea that strikes us as modern, now upon century another man of the sixteenth century who had a hunch or an
of some later theory all as if one were making of inventions or of maritime discoveries. It has almost more useful to learn something of the misfires proved and the mistaken hypotheses of early scientists, to examine the particular intellectual hurdles that seemed insurmountable at given periods, and even to pursue courses of scientific development which ran into a blind alley, but which still had their effect on the progress of science in general. Similarly in these lectures we may try to examine various facets or aspects of
anticipation a catalogue
called the scientific revolution; we shall not be able to measure the achievement at any given moment, however, if we merely pay attention to the new doctrines and take note of the emergence of the views that we now regard as right. It is

what is

necessary

on each occasion to have a picture of the older the systems type of science that was to be overthrown. it is relevant to note that, in a still Finally, larger sense, we must proceed in the history of science from the earlier to the
from the sixteenth-century ideas of mechanics to the of Galileo so that we can know exactly how a great
development

later

ideas

thinker operated on the margin of contemporary thought, or created a new synthesis, or completed a line of

already taking place. It is not sufficient to read Galileo with the eyes of the twentieth century or to interpret him in modern

we can only understand his work if we know someof the system which he was attacking, and we must thing know something of that system apart from the things which were said about it by its enemies. In any case, it is necessary not merely to describe and expound discoveries, but to probe
terms

more deeply into historical processes and to learn something of

the interconnectedness

of events,

as

well as to exert

all

our en-

deavours for the understanding of

men who were

not like-

minded with ourselves. Little progress can be made ifwe thinlc of the older studies as merely a case of bad science or if we imagine that only the achievements of the scientist in very

INTRODUCTION
subject itself is at

of serious attention at the present day. a stage which should offer interest and opportunity to the student of history who is concerned with precisely the mental operations most necessary to carry it a
recent times are worthy

The

stage farther,

and who,

if he

is

a general student

of the history

of civilisation, can never afford to ignore so important a factor in that story. As reflections on some reading of secondary

works and some examination of classical treatises, the following

lectures

may

if not

by any

merit, at least
(as

by

their defects
scientist's)

illustrate

the need for the historian's

well as the

point of view*

PETERHOUSE, CAMBRIDGE

H. BUTTERHELD

CHAPTER ONE

THE HISTORICAL IMPORTANCE OF A THEORY OF IMPETUS

one of the paradoxes of the whole story with which we have to deal that the most sensational step leading to the
IT
is

scientific

revolution in astronomy was taken long before the discovery of the telescope even long before the Danish

astronomer,

Tycho Brahe,

in the latter part

of the sixteenth
that it

century, had shown the great improvement

was

still

possible to achieve in observations made with the naked eye. When William Harvey in England opened up new paths for

physiology by his study of the action of the heart, he alluded once or twice to his use of a magnifying glass, but he carried out his revolutionary work before any serviceable kind of

microscope had become available. With regard to the transformation of the science of mechanics, it is remarkable to what

an extent even Galileo

life,

phenomena of what if would conjectures happen a stone were everyday thrown from the mast of a moving ship, or plays with pellets on inclined planes in a manner that had long been customary.
discusses the ordinary

In fact,

we shall find that in both celestial and terrestrial physics

strategic place in the

which hold the

whole movement

change is brought about, not by new observations or additional evidence in the first instance, but by transpositions that were
taking pkce inside the minds of the scientists themselves. In this connection it is not irrelevant to note that, of all forms of

mental

activity, the

most

difficult

to induce even in the minds

be presumed not to have lost their as is the art of handling the same bundle of data flexibility, before, but placing them in a new system of relations with one

of the young,

who may

them a different framework, all of which kind of thinking-cap for virtually means putting on a different
another

by

giving

the

moment

It is easy

to teach anybody a

new

feet

about

2
Richelieu, but

ORIGINS OF
it

MODERN

SCIENCE

needs light from heaven to enable a teacher to

the

break the old framework in which the student has been accus-

tomed

to seeing his Richelieu

framework which

is

built

up sometimes far too rigidly by the Higher and into which he will fit whatever new information he ever
Certificate student,

afterwards acquires on this subject. But tie supreme paradox of the scientific revolution is the fact that things which we find
that they easy to instil into boys at school, because we see us as the strike would start off on the right foot things which ordinary natural way of looking at the universe, the obvious
it

way of regarding the behaviour of felling bodies,

for

example

defeated the greatest intellects for centuries, defeated Leonardo da Vinci and at the marginal point even Galileo, when

minds were wrestling on the very frontiers of human thought with these very problems. Even the great geniuses who broke through the ancient views in some special field of study Gilbert, Bacon and Harvey, for example would remain stranded in a species of medievalism when they went outside that chosen field. It required their combined efforts to dear up certain simple things which we should now regard as obvious to any unprejudiced mind, and even easy for a child. A particular development of ideas which was already taking
their

place in the later middle ages has come to stand as the first chapter in the history of the transition to what we call the
scientific revolution. It is

field

of thought upon which an

expositor can embark only with the greatest trepidation, in view of the vicissitudes of lecturers at the very beginning of

modern

times. Students

of history will remember

how

the

humanists of the Renaissance, Erasmus included, were accustomed to complaining of the boredom deriding the sophistries

and

subtleties

of the

scholastic lectures

which they had

to endure at the university. Occasionally they specified the

forms of teaching and lecturing to which they most objected, and as they particularly mentioned those discussions of
mechanics with which
will

we

have

now
is

to concern ourselves,

it

no doubt be prudent to make the examination of such

curious that these despised

teaching as brief as possible. It

HISTORICAL IMPORTANCE OF A THEORY OF IMPETUS

scholastic disquisitions should

now have come to hold a remarkable key-position in the story of the evolution of the modern mind. Perhaps the lack of mathematics, or the failure
of mathematical ways of formulating things, was for what appeared to be verbal subtleties and partly responsible an excessive straining of language in these men who were almost yearning to find the way to the modern science of
to think

mechanics.

Of all the intellectual hurdles

which the human mind has

confronted and has overcome in the last fifteen hundred years, the one which seems to me to have been the most amazing in

and the most stupendous in the scope of its consequences is the one relating to the problem of motion the one which perhaps was hardly disposed of by Galileo, though it received a definitive form of settlement shortly after his time in the full revised statement of what every schoolboy learns to call the law of inertia. On this question of motion the Aristotelian teaching, precisely because it carried such an intricate dovetailing of observations and explanations that is to say, precisely because it was part of a system which was such a colossal intellectual feat in itself was hard for the human mind to escape from, and gained a strong hold on medieval
character
scholastic thought. Furthermore, it remains as the essential

background of the story it continues to present the presiding issue until the time of Galileo himself; inotherwords, until the first half of the seventeenth century. On the Aristotelian theory all heavy terrestrial bodies had a natural motion towards the centre of the universe, which for medieval thinkers was at or near the centre of (lie earth; but motion in any other direction

was

it contradicted die ordinary tento what was regarded as its natural move a to dency of body of a mover, place. Such motion depended on the operation

violent motion, because

it

and the Aristotelian doctrine of inertia was a doctrine of rest was motion, not rest, that always required to be explained Wherever this motion existed, and however long it existed,
something had to be brought in to account for
it.

The

essential feature

of this view was the

assertion or the

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

assumption that a body would keep in movement only so long as a mover was actually in contact with it, imparting

motion to
the

it all

the time.

Once
the

the

mover
fell

movement stopped

body

ceased to operate, straight to earth or

dropped suddenly to rest. Further

heretical to the present day it resistance of the medium through

a point that will seem very was argued that, provided the

which the body passed remained a constant, the speed of the body would be proportionate to

what we should

being exerted upon it by by the mover over a given length of time produced not any acceleration at all, but a uniform motion for the whole period.

describe as the force consistently the mover. constant force exerted

On the other hand, if there was any variation in the resistance

the difference between

of the medium

moving

in air

and

in water, for example the speed would vary in inverse proportion to this, provided the other factors remained

moving

constant

And

if the resistance
infinite; that
is

were reduced to nought, the

speed would be

place in a vacuum, bodies

another instantaneously. reasons why the Aristotelians regarded a complete void as impossible, and said that God Himself could not make one.
It is

to say, if the movement took would move from one pkce to The absurdity of this was one of the

rivals

astonishing to what a degree not only this theory but its even the ones which superseded it in the course of the

scientific

revolution

of the data

available to

were based on the ordinary observation common sense. And, as writers have
is

clearly pointed out, it Aristotelians had

not relevant for us to argue that if the merely watched the more carefully they

their theory of inertia for the modern over to the view that bodies tend to continue changed either at rest or in motion along a straight line until something

would have changed

one

intervenes to stop
difficult

them or deflect their course. It was supremely from the Aristotelian doctrine by merely more observing things dosdy, especially if you had already started off on the wrong foot and were hampered beforehand with die whole system of interlocking Aristotelian ideas. In fact, the modern kw of inertia is not the thing you would
to escape

HISTORICAL IMPORTANCE OF
discover

A THEORY OF IMPETUS

by mere photographic methods of observation it a required different kind of diinking-cap, a transposition in the mind of the scientist himself; for we do not actually sec ordinary objects continuing their rectilinear motion in that kind of empty space which Aristotle said could not occur, and sailing
to that infinity which also he said could not possibly we do not in real life have perfectly spherical balls and exist; on moving perfectly smooth horizontal planes the trick lay

away

in the fact that it occurred to Galileo to imagine these. Furthermore, even when men were coming extraordinarily near to

what we should call the

clinch the matter
until they

truth about local motion, they did not

the thing did not

realised

come out dear and dean

had

to themselves the feet

and had made completely conscious that they were in reality transposing the

question into a different realm. They were discussing not real bodies as we actually observe them in the real world, but geometrical bodies moving in a world without resistance and with-

out gravity

moving in that boundless emptiness of Euclidean

space which Aristotle had regarded as unthinkable. In the long

run, therefore,

we have to recognise that here was a problem of a fundamental nature, and it could not be solved by close observation within the framework of the older system of ideas
required a transposition in the mini As often happened with such theories in those days, if not now, the Aristotelian doctrine of motion might seem to
it

correspond in a self-evident manner with most of the data available to common sense, but there were small pockets of
fact

which did not square with the theory at the first stage of the argument; they were unamenable to the Aristotelian kws at what we should call the ordinary common-sense level There were one or two anomalies which required a further degree of analysis before they could be satisfactorily adjusted to the system; and perhaps, as some writers have said, the Aristotelian theory came to a brilliant peak in the manner by which it hauled these exceptional cases into the synthesis and established (at a second remove) their conformity with the stated rules. On the argument so far as we have taken it, an

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE
it

arrow ought to have

fallen to the

ground the moment

lost

contact with the bow-string; for neither the bow-string nor anything else could impart a motion which would continue
after the direct contact

with the original mover had been

broken.

The

Aristotelians explained the continued

movement

of projectiles by the commotion which the initial movement had produced in the air especially as the air which was being
pushed and compressed in front had to rush round behind to prevent that vacuum which must never be allowed to take
place. At this point in the argument there even occurred a serious fault in observation which harassed the writers on

physical science for

after it

many

centuries. It
initial

was thought

that the

arrow had left the bow-string, and it is curious to note that Leonardo da Vinci and kter writers shared this mistake the artillerymen of the Renaissance were victims of the same
acceleration in the

rush of air produced an actual

who had
in the

though there had been people in the kter middle ages taken care not to commit themselves on this point. The motion of a projectile, since it was caused by a disturbance
error

medium itself, was

a thing which

it

was not

possible to

imagine taking pkce in a vacuum. Furthermore, since the Aristotelian commentators held
something corresponding to the view that a constant uniform
force only produced uniform motion, there was a second serious anomaly to be explained it was necessary to produce special reasons to account for the fact that falling bodies were

observed to

move

at

an accelerating speed. Once again the

supporters of the older teaching used the argument from the rush of air, or they thought that, as the body approached the earth, the greater height of the atmosphere above meant an
increase in the

downward

of

air

below would

pressure, offer a

while the shorter column

descent. Alternatively they used Aristotle's

filling
it

diminishing resistance to the argument that the

body moved more

jubilantly every

moment

because

found itself nearer home.

From

Aristotelian doctrine

the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, then, this of motion persisted in the face of re-

HISTORICAL IMPORTANCE OF A THEORY OF IMPETUS

current controversy, and it was only in the kter stages of that period that the satisfactory alternative emerged, somewhat on

up the opposite end of the stick. Once this question was solved in the modern manner, it altered much of one's ordinary thinking about the world and opened the way for a flood of further discoveries and reinterpretations, even in the realm of common sense, before any very elaborate experiments had been embarked upon. It was as though science or human thought had been held up by a barrier until this momentthe waters dammed because of an initial defect in one's attitude to everything in tie universe that had any sort of motion and now the floods were released. Change and discovery were bound to come in cascades even if there were no
the policy of picking

other factors working for a scientific revolution. Indeed, we might say that a change in one's attitude to the movement of things that move was bound to result in so many new analyses of various kinds of motion that it constituted a scientific
revolution in
itself.

was one special problem which made the issue momentous.

all this

of the We have not to the ourselves home peculiar character of always brought that Aristotelian universe in which the things that were in motion had to be accompanied by a mover all the time. A universe constructed on die mechanics of Aristode had the
Apart from
there
feature

door half-way open for spirits already; it was a universe in which unseen hands had to be in constant operation, and sublime Intelligences had to roll the planetary spheres around. Alternatively, bodies had to be endowed with souls and a "disposition" to certain kinds of motion, so aspirations, with
that matter itself

seemed to
the

possess mystical qualities.

The
die

modern

kw of inertia,

modern theory of motion,

is

great factor

which in die seventeenth century helped to drive the spirits out of the world and opened die way to a universe that ran like a piece of clockwork. Not only so but die very first men who in the middle ages launched the great attack on the Aristotelian dieory were conscious of die fact that this colossal issue was involved in the question. One of the early

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

important figures, Jean Buridan in the middle of the fourteenth century, pointed out that his alternative interpretation
eliminate the need for the Intelligences that turned the celestial spheres. He even noted that the Bible provided no

would

authority for these spiritual agencies they were demanded by the teaching of the ancient Greeks, not by the Christian religion as such. Not much kter than this, Nicholas of Oresme went further still, and said that, on the new alternative theory,

God might have started off the universe as a kind of dock and
to run of itself Eva: since the earlier years of the twentieth century at latest, therefore, a great and growing interest has been taken in that school of thinkers who so far back as the fourteenth century were challenging the Aristotelian explanations of motion, and who put forward an alternative doctrine of "impetus" which though imperfect in itself must represent the first stage in the history of the scientific revolution. And if it is imagined that this kind of argument falls into one of the traps which it is
left it

always necessary to guard against picking out from the middle ages mere anticipations and casual analogies to modern ideas the answer to that objection will be clear to us if we
bear in

mind

the kind of rules that ought to govern historians

Here we have a case of a consistent body of in Oxford, is developed as a tradition by which rises teaching a school of thinkers in Paris, and is still being taught in Paris at the beginning of the sixteenth century. It has a continuous
in such matters.

history

we know how this teaching passed into Italy, how it

was promulgated

how

in the universities of the Renaissance, and Leonardo da Vinci picked it up, so that some of what were once considered to be remarkable strokes of modernity,

of genius, in his notebooks, were in reality from transcriptions fourteenth-century Parisian scholastic writers. We know how the teaching was developed in Italy later in the sixteenth century, how it was misunderstood on occasion sometimes only partially appropriated and how some of Galileo's early writings on motion are reminiscent of tins school, being associated with that doctrine ofthe "impetus"
remarkable
flashes

HISTORICAL IMPORTANCE OF
which
it is

A THEORY OF IMPETUS
It is

our purpose to examine.

even

known

fairly

certainly in what edition Galileo read the works of certain writers belonging to this fourteenth-century Parisian school. Indeed, Galileo could have produced much, though not quite
all,

works on this particular subject had lived in the fourteenth century; and in this field one might very well ask what the world with its Renaissance and so forth had been doing in the meantime. It has been suggested that if printing had been invented two centuries earlier the doctrine of "impetus" would have produced a more rapid general development in the history of science, and would not have needed so long to pass from the stage ofJean Buridan to the stage of Galileo. If the orthodox doctrine of the middle ages had been based on Aristotle, however, it has to be noted that, both then and
if he

that we find in his juvenile

during the Renaissance (as well as later still), the attacks on Aristode the theory of impetus included would themselves be based on some ancient thinker. Here we touch on one of the
generative factors, not only in the formation of the modern world, but also in the development of the scientific revolution

namely, the discovery of the

feet that

even Aristotle had not

reigned unchallenged in the ancient days. All this produced a healthy friction, resulting in the emergence of important

problems which the middle ages had to make up their own minds about, so that men were driven to some kind of examination of the workings of nature themselves, even if only
because they

had

to decide between Aristotle

and some

rival

teacher. It also appears that a religious factor affected the rise of that movement which produced the theory of impetus, and,

in a curious

analyse away, a for once in favour of freedom for religious taboo operated scientific hypothesis. In the year 1277 a council in. Paris con-

manner which one tries in vain to

demned a large number of Aristotelian theses, such as

that even

the

view

God could not create a void, or an infinite universe,

one in which certain

or a plurality ofworlds ; and that decision

forms ofpartisanship were involved

by

was apparently extended the Archbishop of Canterbury to this country. The regions

io

ORIGINS OF

MODERN
of these

SCIENCE
must have been

that

came within the

orbit

decisions

the seat of a certain anti-Aristotelian bias already; and certainly from this time both Oxford and Paris showed the effects of
this bias in the field

of what we should call physical science. From this time also the discussion of the possibility of the existence of empty space, or of an infinite universe, or of a

of worlds takes a remarkable step forward in Paris. the names concerned in this development are which some figure in the rise of the doctrine of impetus. It has been pointed out furthermore that in the same Parisian tradition there was a tendency towards something in the
plurality

And amongst

nature

of mathematical

physics,

though the mathematics of

the time were not sufficiently advanced to allow of this being carried very far or to produce anything like the achievement

of Galileo in the way of a mathematical approach to scientific problems. We must avoid the temptation, however, to stress unduly the apparent analogies with modern times and the "anticipations'* which are so easy to discover in the past things which often owe a little, no doubt, to the trick-mirrors of the historian. And though it may be useful sometimes, in order to illustrate a point, we must beware of submitting to the fascination of "what might have been".
chiefly concern us, then, are certain fourteenth-century writers, first of all a group at Merton College, and Oxford, and, after these, Jean Buridan, Albert of

The people who

Saxony

Nicholas of Oresme.
besides their teaching

subject of impetus. The contemof Erasmus poraries laughed at the scholastic lecturers for not "uniform motion" and "difibrm motion", discussing only but also "uniform difform motion" all carried to a great degree of subtlety but it transpired in the sixteenth century, when the world was looking for a formula to represent the uniform acceleration of falling bodies, that the solution of the problem had been at their disposal for a long time in the

They on the

are important for other things

medieval formula for the case of uniformly difform motion.

Hie whole development which we are studying took place amongst people who, in fact, were working upon questions

HISTORICAL IMPORTANCE OF A THEORY OF IMPETUS

and answers which had been suggested by Aristotle. These people came up against the Aristotelian theory of motion at the very points where we should expect the attack to take place, namely, in connection with the two particularly doubtful questions of the movement of projectiles and the acceleration of falling bodies. If we take a glance at the kind of arguments they used, we can observe the type of critical procedure which would take pkce even in the middle ages, producing changes on the margin of the current Aristotelian teaching. We are observing also the early stages of the great debate on certain issues that lay at the heart of the scientific revolution itself. Indeed, the arguments which were employed at this early period often reappeared with reference to precisely the same instances even in the major works of Galileo, for they passed into general currency in die course of time. And if they seem
simple arguments based
to

common

sense,

we

on the ordinary phenomena available ought to remember that many of the

newer arguments brought forward by Galileo himself at a kter stage of the story were really of the same type. According to the view developed by these thinkers, the an actual impetus which projectile was carried forward by it had acquired and which bodies were capable of acquiring, from the mere feet of being in motion. And this impetus was supposed to be a thing inside the body itselfoccasionally it was described as an impetuosity that had been imparted to it; occasionally one sees it discussed as though it were itself movement which the body acquired as tie result of being in motion. In any case this view made it possible for men to contemplate the continued motion of a body after the contact with the original mover had been lost It was explained that the in a impetus lay in the body and continued there, as heat stays red-hot poker after it has been taken, from the fire; while in the case of felling bodies the effect was described as accidental the body acquired as a regravity, an additional gravity which sult of being in motion, so that the acceleration of felling bodies was due to the effects of impetus being continually added to the
constant
fell

due to ordinary weight.

A constant force exerted

12

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

on a body, therefore, produced here not uniform motion but a uniform rate of acceleration. It is to be noted, however, that Leonardo da Vinci, like a number of others who accepted the failed to follow the Parisian school general theory of impetus,
ia the application of their teaching to the acceleration of felling bodies. Whereas the Aristotelians thought that felling bodies

rushed more quickly as they got nearer home, the new teaching

was rather the distance from the bodies fell to earth along starting-point that mattered. If two the same line BC, the one which had started higher up at A would move more quickly from B to C than the one that started at B, though in this particular part of their course they were both equally distant from the centre of the earth. It followed from the new doctrine that if a cylindrical hole were
inverted
this,

and

said that it

cut through the earth, passing through the centre, a body, when it reached the centre, would be carried forward on its

own* impetus for some

distance,

and indeed would

oscillate

about the centre for some time

a thing impossible to conceive

under the terms of the ancient theory. There was a further unconpoint in regard to which the Aristotelians had been
vincing; for if the continued flight of a projectile were really due not to the thrower but to the rush of air, it was difficult to
see

why the air should carry a stone so much farther than a ball of feathers why one should be able to throw the stone the
greater distance.

The newer

school

showed

that, starting at

given pace, a greater impetus would be communicated to the stone by reason of the density of its material than to a feather;

though, of course, a larger body of the same material would not travel farther * large stone would not be more easy to throw
than a small one. Mass was used as the measure of the impetus which corresponded with a given speed.
Since Aristotle found
air as
it necessary on occasion to regard the a resisting factor, he was open to the charge that one could

not then^-in the next breath, so to speak

said that die air

start using the

argu-

ment that the air was also the actual propellant. The new school
could not be the propellant except in the case
that if

of a high wind; and they brought the further objection

HISTORICAL IMPORTANCE OF

A THEORY OF IMPETUS

13

the original perturbation of the air the rush which occurred when die bow-string started the arrow had the capacity to repeat itself, pushing the arrow on and on, there could be no reason why it should ever stop ; it ought to go on for ever re-

peating

itself, communicating further perturbations to every next region of the atmosphere. Furthermore, a thread tied to a to be blown ahead of it, instead of trailing projectile ought

behind. In any case, on the Aristotelian view of the matter it ought to be impossible for an arrow to fly against the wind.

new theory of impetus, however, a as projectile moving in a straight line until the regarded exhausted had itself, and then quickly curving round impetus
Even
the apostles of the
to

They looked upon this impetus as a thing which gradually weakened and wore itself out, just as a poker grows cold when taken from the fire. Or, said Galileo, it was like the reverberations which go on in
earth.

make a direct vertical drop to

a bell long after it has been struck, but which gradually fade away. Only, in the case of the celestial bodies and the orbs

which

carried the planets round the sky, the impulse never exhausted itselfthe pace of these bodies never slackened

since there
fore, it

was no

air-resistance to

slow them down. Theregiven these things

as

could be argued,

God might have

their

their initial impetus, continuing for ever.

and

motion could be imagined

ever,

The theory of the impetus did not solve all problems, howand proved to be only the half-way house to the modern

view, which is fairly explicit in Galileo though it received its in Descartes the view that a body perfect formulation only
continues
its

motion in a

venes to halt or
tioned, this

straight line until something interslacken or deflect it As I have already men-

modern law of inertia is calculated to present itself more easily to the mind when a transposition has taken place

when we see, not real bodies, moving under the restrictions of

die real world and clogged by the atmosphere, but geometrical bodies sailing away in empty Euclidean space. Archimedes,

whose works were more completely discovered at the Renaissance and became very influential especially after the

14

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

have done something and encourage this habit of mind; and nothing could have been more important than the growing tendency to
translation published in 1543, appears to
assist

to

geometrise or mathematise a problem. Nothing

tive, after

is

more

effec-

people have long been debating and wrangling and the air, than the appearance of a person who draws a churning line on the blackboard, which with the help of a little geometry

whole problem in an instant. In any case, it is possible who taught people to think of the weight of a thing in water and then its weight in air and finally, therefore, its weight when unencumbered by either, helped to induce some men to pick up the problem of motion from the opposite end to the usual one, and to think of the simplest form of motion as occurring when there was no resisting medium to complicate it. So you assumed the tendency in bodies to continue their existing morion along a straight line, and you set about afterwards to examine the things which might clog or
solves the

that Archimedes,

hamper or
return to

qualify that motion; whereas Aristotle, assuming that the state of rest was natural and that bodies tended to
it

when

left to

themselves, had the difficult task of

providing an active mover that should operate as long as the body continued to have any movement at all

On the other hand, it may be true to say that Aristotle, when he thought of motion, had in mind a horse drawing a cart, so that his whole feeling for the problem was spoiled by his preteaching

occupation with a misleading example. The very fact that his on the subject ofprojectiles was so
unsatisfactory

may

have helped to produce the phenomenon of a later age which, when it thought of motion, had rather the motion of projectiles in mind, and so acquired a different feeling in regard to the

whole matter.
It is natural that the transition to modern science should often appear to us as a reaction against the doctrines of Aristotib. Because there was a conservative resistance to be com-

bated, the supporters

to produce

of the new ideas would fed compelled what was sometimes a bitterly anti-Aristotelian

polemical literature. Appearances are deceptive, however, and

HISTORICAL IMPORTANCE OF
often

A THEORY OF IMPETUS

15

it is fairer to regard the new ideas as the developing achievement of the successive commentators on Aristotle.

These

men

realised their indebtedness to the ancient master;

and they would hold to a great part of his system even if, at one place and another, they were pressing against the frontiers of that system. In answer to the conservatives of their time, the innovators would sometimes argue that Aristotle himself would have been on their side if he had been living in the modern world. The conflicts of the kter medieval and early modern centuries ought not to be allowed to diminish our impression of the greatness of this ancient teacher, who provoked so much thought and controversy, and who kept the
presiding position for so long. Nor ought we to imagine that Aristotle shared the faults of those people who, in the sixteenth

and seventeenth
totelian" party

centuries,

would be held

to be

of the "Aris-

The work
on the

merely because they were conservatives. of Pierre Duhem, who, over fifty years ago,

brought out the importance ofthe fourteenth-century teaching subject of the "impetus", has not remained free from criticism in the period that has since elapsed. On the one hand
the story has been carried behind Jean Buridan and the Parisian school carried further back to Merton College, Oxford.

On

the other hand

it

has been rightly pointed out that the

transition

from the doctrine of the "impetus" to the modern doctrine of inertia required from Galileo, for example greater originality than some writers seem to allow. It is also
true that the originality in the fourteenth-century writers

extended beyond the problem of motion which we have been considering; and by this time, as we shall see, advance was already taking place in the theoretical discussion of
scientific

possible to exaggerate the role of these medieval precursors, and so to under-estimate the magnitude of the seventeenth-century revolution. But the work of Duhem in

method.

It is

the field that

we have been considering has been an important

factor in the great change which has taken place in the attitude of historians of science to the middle ages. One of the strands

of the

historical narrative

with which

we

are concerned

is

16

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

occasion through the development of scholastic thinking itself. In other words, the modern world is in a certain sense a continuation of the medieval one
the progress
is

which

made on

it is

not to be regarded as merely a reaction against it As a result of this some historians of science have been disposed and to

of the "Renaiseleventh or from the twelfth sance'*, see, century at least, a continuous development of western thought.
seriously to qualify the traditional concept

CHAPTER

TWO

THE CONSERVATISM OF COPERNICUS

AN
must be
introductory sketch of the medieval view of the cosmos that in this qualified first of all with the reservation

particular ties, controversies

realm of .thought there were variations, uncertain-

and developments which it would obviously

be impossible to describe in detail. On the whole, therefore, it would be well, perhaps, if we were to take Dante's view of the universe as a pattern, because it will be easy to note in parenthesis some of the important variations that occurred, and at the same time this policy will enable us to see in a single survey the
range of the multiple objections which it took the Copernican to surmount. theory something like a hundred and fifty years According to Dante, what one must have in mind is a series

of spheres, one
system
call
lies

inside another,

and

at the heart

of the whole

the motionless earth.

is

The realm of what we should

its neighbourand this matter, the stuff hoodthe region below the moon; that we can hold between our fingers and which our modern
is humble and unstable, being physical sciences set out to study, which we shall examine for reasons and decay subject to change

ordinary matter

confined to the earth and

later.

and the heavenly bodies the rotating spheres and the stars and planets that are attached to them are made of a very tangible kind of matter too, though it is more subtle and it is not subject to change and corruption. It is in
skies

The

quality

not subject to the physical kws that govern the more earthy kind of material which we have below the moon. From the of what we should call purely physical science, point of view
the earth and the skies therefore were cut off from one another

and, for a medieval student, were separate organisations, dovetailed together though in a wider system of thought they
to

form one coherent cosmos. As to the ordinary matter of which the earth
17

is

composed,

it

i8
is

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

formed of four elements, and these are graded according to There is earth, which is the meanest stuff of all, then water, then air and, finally, fire, and this last comes highest in the hierarchy .We do not see these elements in the earthy stuff that their pure and undiluted form, however we handle when we pick up a little soil is a base compound and the fire that we actually see is mixed with earthiness. Of the four elements, earth and water possess gravity; they have a tendency to fall; they can only be at rest at the centre of the universe. Fire and air do not have gravity, but possess the very reverse; they are characterised by levity, an actual tendency to
their virtue, their nobility.
rise,
it is

though the atmosphere clings a little to the earth because loaded with base mundane impurities. For all the elements

have their spheres, and aspire to reach their proper sphere,

where they find stability and rest; and when flame, for example, has soared to its own upper region it will be happy and contented, for here it can be still and can most endure. If the elements did not mix if they were all at home in their proper spheres we should have a solid sphere of earth at the heart of everything and every particle of it would be still. We should then have an ocean covering that whole globe, like a cap that fitted all round, then a sphere ofair., which far above mountaintops was supposed to swirl round from east to west in sympathy with the movement of the skies. Finally, there would come the region of enduring fire, fitting like a sphere over all
the
rest.

would be a dead universe. In fact, it was a of this whole view of the world that ordinary motion corollary
That, however,

up or down or in a straight line could only take place if there was something wrong something displaced from its proper
sphere. It mattered very much, therefore, that the various elements were not all in order but were mixed and out of pkce

for instance,

some of the land had been drawn out above the

waters, raised out of its proper sphere at the bottom, to provide habitable ground. this land natural objects existed and, since

On

they were mixtures, they might, for example, contain water, which as soon as it was released would tend to seek its way

THE CONSERVATISM OF COPERNICUS

19

down

to the sea. On the other hand, they might contain the element of fire, which would come out of them when they

burned and would

and push its way upwards, aspiring to reach its true home. But the elements are not always able to
flutter

follow their nature in

strike

this

pure fashion

occasionally the fire

downwards, as in lightning, or the water may rise may in the form of vapour to prepare a store of rain. On one point, however, the law was fixed : while the elements are out of their
proper spheres they are bound to be unstable there cannot possibly be restfulness and peace. Woven, as we find them, on
the surface of the globe, they make a mixed and chancy world, a world that is subject to constant mutation, liable to dissolution

and decay. It is only in the northern hemisphere that land emerges, protruding above the waters that cover the rest of the globe. This
land has been pulled up, out of its proper sphere, says Dante drawn not by the moon or the planets or the ninth sky, but by

an influence from the fixed stars, in his opinion. The land stretches from the Pillars of Hercules in the west to the Ganges
in the east,

from the Equator

in the south to the Arctic Circle

in the north.

And in the centre of this whole habitable world is

Jerusalem, the

who had

Holy City. Dante had heard stories of travellers found a great deal more of the continent of Africa, found actual land much farther south than he had been taught to consider possible. As a true rationalist he seems to have of his rejected "fables" that contradicted the natural science
remembering that travellers were apt to be liars. The disthe unproportionate amount of water in the world and of the to discussion led some of the land balanced distribution whereabouts of the earth's real centre. The great discoveries, however, culminating in the unmistakable discovery of
time,

America, provoked certain changes in ideas,

as

well as a debate

counconcerning the possibility of the existence of inhabited tries at the antipodes. There was a growing view that earth and
water, instead

of coming in two

the other, really

sphere.

one above dovetailed into one another to form a single

separate circles, the

20

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

All this concerns the sublunary region; but there is another realm of matter to be considered, and this, as we have already seen, comes under a different polity. The skies are not liable to
stars and the an incorruptible kind of matter, which is subject to a different set of what we should call physical kws. If earth tends to fall to the centre of the universe, and fire tends to rise to its proper sphere above the air itself,

change and decay, for they

planets

with the sun, the

are formed of a fifth element,

the incorruptible stuff that forms the heavens has no reason for discontent it is fixed in its congenial place already. Only one

motion

is

possible for

it

namely, circular motion

it

must

turn while remaining in the same place. According to Dante there are ten skies, only the last of them, the Empyrean Heaven,
the abode

of God, being

at rest.

Each of the

skies

is

a sphere

that surrounds the globe of the earth, and though all these spheres are transparent they are sufficiently tangible and real to
as

carry one or more of the heavenly bodies round on their backs they rotate about the earth the whole system forming a

set

of transparent spheres, one around the other, with the hard earth at the centre of all. The sphere nearest to the earth has the moon attached to it, the others carry the planets or the sun,
until

we

reach the eighth, to which

all

the fixed stars are fasstar attached to

it
it,

tened.

A ninth sphere has

is

no

planet or
it

nothing to give visible signs of its existence; but

there, for it

must be
all

the JMWWW mobile

turns not only itself but

from east to west, so that once in twenty-four hours the whole celestial system wheels round the motionless earth. This ninth sphere moves more quickly than any of the others, for the spirits which move it have
the other spheres or skies as well,

every reason to be ardent Heaven.

They

are next to the

Empyrean

In the system of Aristotle the spheres were supposed to be formed of a very subtle ethereal substance, moving more softly than liquids and without any friction; but with the passage of time the idea seems to have become coarsened and vulgarised.

The successive heavens turned into glassy or crystalline

solid

globes,

bra

still

transparent, so that

it

became harder

for

men to

THE CONSERVATISM OF COPERNICUS

21

keep in mind the fact that they were frictionless and free from weight, though the Aristotelian theory in regard to these
points

was

still

formally held.

The original beauty of this essentially Aristotelian system had been gravely compromised, however, by the improvements which had been made in astronomical observation since the time when it had been given its original shape; for even in the ancient world astronomy afforded a remarkable example of the progress which could be achieved in science by the sheer passage of time the accumulating store of observations and
the increasing precision in the recordings. Early in the Christian era, in the age of Ptolemy, the complications had become

and in the middle ages both the Arabs and the Christians produced additions to the intricacies of the system. The whole of the celestial machinery needed further elaboration to account for planets which, as viewed by the observer, now stopped in the sky, now turned back on their courses, now changed their distance from the earth, now altered their speed. However irregular the motion of the planets might seem to be,
serious,

however curious the path that they traced, their behaviour must somehow or other be reduced to circular, even uniform circular motion if necessary to a complicated series of circular motions each corrective of the other. Dante explains how Venus goes round with the sphere which forms the third of the
skies, but as this does not quite correspond to the phenomena, another sphere which revolves independently is fixed to the

sphere of the third sky, and the planet rides on the back of the smaller sphere (sitting like a jewel there, says Dante) , reflecting
the light of the sun. But writers varied on this point, and we meet the view that the planet was rather like a knot in a piece

of wood, or represented a mere thickening of the material that formed the whole celestial sphere a sort of swelling that caught the sunlight and shone with special brilliance as a
result.

the

Writers differed also on the question whether the whole of more elaborate machinery the eccentrics or epicycles as

devised

by Ptolemy and

his successors, really existed in the

22

ORIGINS OF
of the

MODERN
skies,

SCIENCE

actual architecture

though the theory of the

until the seventeenth century. crystalline spheres persisted

whole complicated system demanded eighty spheres, some of which must apparently intersect one another as they turned round, some writers regarded the circles and epicycles as mere geometrical devices that formed a basis for calculation and prediction. And some men who believed that the nine skies were genuine crystalline spheres might regard the rest of the machinery as a mathematical way of representing those irregularities and anomalies which they knew they were unable realised long before the properly to explain. In any case, it was time of Copernicus that the Ptolemaic system, in spite of all
Since the
its

the phenomena as complications, did not exactly cover observed. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we shall
still
is

who will admit that the Ptolemaic system and will say that a new one must be disinadequate, for understandable reasons they reject the covered, though offered solution by Copernicus. Copernicus himself, when he
find people

a possible new celestial the divergent views system, mentioned amongst otter things that he had found already in existence. The Ptolemaic system

explained

why his mind had turned to

would be referred to as the Ptolemaic hypothesis, and we even

find the Copernican theory described by one of its supporters as "the revision of the hypotheses". Many of us have gone too
far perhaps in

imagining a cast-iron Ptolemaic system, to the

whole of which the predecessors of Copernicus were supposed to be blindly attached.

are Finally, according to Dante, all the various spheres their various have or which moved by Intelligences Spirits, of nobility that exist in to the

degrees grades corresponding die physical world. Of these, the lowliest are the angels who move the sphere of the moon; for the moon is in the humblest

of the heavens; she has dark spots that show her imperfections she is associated with the servile and poor. (It is not the moon but the sun which affords the material for romantic poetry under this older system of ideas.) Through the various Intelligences operating by means of the celestial bodies, God has
;

THE CONSERVATISM OF COPERNICUS

shaped the material world, only touching
it,

23

so to speak,

through intermediaries.
matter, and this
influences.

What He
however,

created
into

was

later

moulded

was only inchoate a world by celestial

Human

souls,

God creates with His own

hands; and these, again, are of a special substance they are incorruptible. Even now, long after the creation, the heavens
still

continue to influence the earth, however, says

Dante-

Venus affecting lovers, for example, by a power that comes not from the sphere but from the planet itself, a power that is actually transmitted by its rays. The Church had struggled long against the deterministic implications of astrology, and was to continue the conflict after the time of Dante, though means were already being adopted to reconcile astrology with the Christian teaching concerning free wilL Dante said that the stars influence the lower dispositions of a man, but God has given all men a soul by which they can rise above such conditioning circumstances. Occasionally one meets even with the opposite view that the stars can influence only for good, and that it is man's own evil disposition that is responsible if he turns to sin. Those who attacked astrology often took the line that the observation of the paths of the heavenly bodies was not sufficiently accurate as yet to allow of detailed predictions. Astrologers themselves, when their prophecies were found to be inaccurate, would blame the faultiness of astronomical observation rather than the defects of their own supposed science. The controversy between the supporters and the opponents of astrology could be turned into a channel, therefore, in which it became an argument in a circle. It would appear to be the case that astrology, like witch-burning, was considerably on the increase in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in spite of what we say about the beginning of

modern

times.

In this whole picture of the universe there is more of Aristode than of Christianity. It was the authority of Aristode and his successors which was responsible even for those features of
this

teaching

which might seem

ecclesiastical flavour

to us to carry somediing of an the hierarchy of heavens, the revolving

24
spheres,

ORIGINS OF

MODERN SCIENCE

the Intelligences which moved the planets, the grading of the elements in the order of their nobility and the view that the celestial bodies were composed of an incorruptible fifth

was Aristotle rather than Ptolemy who had to be overthrown in the sixteenth century. It was necessary to make a great advance on the general scientific teaching of Aristotle before the world could be in a position to do justice to the Copernican hypothesis. Once again, this ancient teacher, perhaps by reason of the merit and the very power of his intellectual system, comes to appear as an obstruction to the progress of science. The great work of Copernicus, De Revolutionibus Orbium, was published in 1543, though its author would appear to
essence. Indeed,

we may

say

it

have been working upon it and elaborating his system since the early years of the century. It has often been pointed out
that he himselfwas not a great observer, and his system was not the result of any passion for new observations. This passion

came

into astronomy later in the century, particularly with Tycho Brahe, who himselfalways refused to become a follower

of Copernicus, and who amongst other things introduced the practice of observing planets throughout the whole of their courses, instead of just trying to pick them out when they happened to be at special points in their orbits. It was even true
that Copernicus trusted too

much to the observations

that

had

himself from the days of In of his one he criticises a antiquity. writings contemporary for being too sceptical concerning the accuracy of Ptolemy's observations. The later astronomer, Kepler, said that Copernicus filled to see the riches that were within his grasp, and was
content to interpret Ptolemy rather than nature. It seems to have been one of his objects to find a new system which would
reconcile
all

been handed

down by Ptolemy

recorded observations, and a disciple of his has

as in a series
fell

described how he would have all these before hi

of

into the mistake of accepting the bad observations and the good without discrimination. One modern writer has pointed out that
since

catalogues. It is

admitted, however, that

he

he was putting forward a system which claimed to

THE CONSERVATISM OP COPERNICUS

25

account for the same phenomena as were covered by the Ptolemaic theory, he may have been wise in not laying himself

open to the charge that he was doctoring Ptolemy's observations in order to fit

them

to his hypothesis.

Through

his trust

in the ancient observations,

troubled

by

irregularities

however, he allowed himself to be in the sky which did not really exist;

and in one or two ways he produced needless elaborations which were calculated to hinder the acceptance of his system. If we ask, then, why he was moved to attempt a new interpretation of the skies, he tells us that he was disturbed by the differences of opinion that had already existed amongst mathematicians. There is evidence that one matter of actual observation gave him some bewilderment he was puzzled by the variations he had observed in the brightness of the planet Mars. This was the planet which during the next century caused great to most remarkable developdifficulty to astronomers and led
ments in astronomy. Copemicus's
answering to the in his main work

own system was so far from

of Mars that Galileo phenomena him for dinging to his on this subject praises
in the case
it

new

theory though

contradicted observation

contradicted

in particular what could be observed in the behaviour of Mars. It would appear that Copernicus found a still stronger stimulus to his great

work in the fact that he had an

obsession

and was

ridden by a grievance. He was dissatisfied with the Ptolemaic system for a reason which we must regard as a remarkably
conservative one

he held thatin a curious wayitcaused offence call a species of cheating. almost can what one Ptolemy had by of Aristotle the to follow by reducing the principles pretended course of the planets to combinations of uniform circular motion but in reality it was not always uniform motion about a centre, it was sometimes only uniform if regarded as angular motion about a point that was not the centre. Ptolemy, in feet, had introduced die policy ofwhat was called the equant, which allowed of uniform angular motion around a point which was not the centre, and a certain resentment against this type of
;

sleight-of-hand seems to have given Copernicus a special urge to change the system. That he was in earnest in his criticism of

26

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

Ptolemy's device is shown both in the system he himself produced, and in the character of certain associated ideas that gave a strong bias to his mind.
further point has been noted sometimes. It can best be explained, perhaps, if we imagine a competent pkyer who

the draught-board until a whole chain of his rival's draughts seem to stand out in his mind, plainly asking to be removed by a grand comprehensive stroke of policy. An obstares at

server

of the game can often be

sensible

of the way in which

the particular pieces glare out at one so many blade draughts which are waiting to be taken as soon as the white opponent

can secure a king.

It

would seem

to have been the case that a

mind

so geometrical as that of Copernicus could look at the complicated diagram of the Ptolemaic skies and see a number

a king to take

of the circles which cried out to be removed provided you had them with all of them would caned out as soon as it occurred to you to think of the earth as being in
motion. For, if the ancients ignored the feet that they
spectators

the

of the skies

were moving,

it

was inevitable that to

each of the heavenly bodies they should have imputed an addi-

complicating motion sun, planets and had to have a tiresome extra circle in the diagram and this in every case would be referable to the same formula, since it corresponded to what ought to have been each time the motion of the earth. As a geometer and a mathematician Copernicus seems to have been struck by the redundancy of so many of the wheels.
tional, unnecessary,
stars

Finally in this connection it is necessary to remember the way in which Copernicus rises to lyricism and almost to worship when he writes about the regal nature and the central

position of the sun. He would not stand alone if he proved to have been stimulated to genuine scientific enquiry by something like mysticism or neo-platonic sentiment. He held a view

which has been

associated

speculations to the effect

with Platonic and Pythagorean that immobility was a nobler thing

both the sun
factors, therefore,

than movement, and

this affected his attitude to

and the fixed

stars.

Many

combined to

THE CONSERVATISM OF COPERNICUS

stimulate his

27

mind and provoke him

to a questioning of the

ancient system of astronomy.

He had passed a number of years in Italy at one of the most

brilliant periods

of the Renaissance; and here he had learned

something of those Platonic-Pythagorean speculations which had become fashionable, while acquiring, no doubt, some of the improved mathematics which had resulted from the
further acquaintance with the achievements of antiquity. His reverence for the ancient world is illustrated in the way he

always spoke of Ptolemy; and, having seen reason to be dissatisfied with the prevailing condition of things in astronomy,
tells us that he went back to study what previous writers had had to say on the whole question. Once again, as in the case of the theory of impetus, the new development in science was assisted by hints from ancient writers, and was stimulated by the differences of opinion that had already existed in Nicholas of Cusa antiquity. Some kter medieval writers like had encountered the suggestion that the earth might be in

he

motion, and had been willing to entertain the idea; but nobody had troubled to work out the details of such a scheme, and up

of Copernicus the heliocentric theory had never been elaborated mathematically in order to see whether it would cover and explain the observed phenomena in the comhad proved able to petent way in which the Ptolemaic system
to the time

Only the Ptolemaic theory had hitherto possessed the advantage which the modern world would prize the merit of having been established in a concrete way, with the demondo.
stration that it fitted the facts (on the

phenomena in somewhat by a view transmitted to the middle ages by Martianus Capella, which regarded just the two planets, Mercury and Venus, as going round the sun. These two the earth and the sun and always obplanets, lying between served in close proximity to the latter, had long presented to those people who tried to regard them as special problems
the
detail.

whole) when applied to Copernicus may have been assisted

going round the earth. Wherever he found the hint, Copernicus made

it

his real

28

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

new

uncover the detailed, workings of the skies under the hypothesis and to elaborate the mathematics of the scheme. His own theory was only a modified form of the
task to

Ptolemaic system assuming the same celestial machinery, but with one or two of the wheels interchanged through the transposition of the r6les of the earth and the sun. He made it a little harder for himself by trying to work all the observed move-

ments of the planets into a more genuine system of uniform circular motion uniform in respect of the centre of the circle, without any conjuring-tricks with equants. He had to use the old complicated system of spheres and epicycles, however,

though he could claim that

his hypothesis

reduced the

total

number of wheels from eighty

to thirty-four. Although some doubt has been expressed (and he himself declared the matter to be outside his concern) he appears to have believed in the

heavens

of the rotating orbs the successive crystalline and at any rate the astronomer Kepler considered this to have been the case. It was a disadvantage of his system that it was not quite heliocentric after all the earth did not describe an exact circle with the sun as its centre, and, in fact, all the movements of the skies were reckoned not from the sun itself, but from the centre of the Earth's orbit, which came somewhat to the side. This was significant, as it infringed the old doctrine that there must be a core of hard matter somewhere on which the other things actually hinged and turned
actual existence

something more than a mere mathematical point to serve

the

as

hub of the

universe.

Since the older Ptolemaic theory had approximately accounted for the phenomena, while the Copernican system itself only accounted for them approximately, much of the

argument in favour of the new hypothesis was to turn on the fact of its greater economy, its cleaner mathematics and its more symmetrical arrangement. Those who were unable to believe in the motion of the earth had to admit that for calculation and prediction the Copernican theory provided a ampler and shorter method. Whereas on the older view the fixed stars moved round in one direction at a speed which seemed in-

THE CONSERVATISM OF COPERNICUS

credible,

29

while the planets largely turned in the opposite

way

and often seemed to be at sixes and sevens with the sun, it now the all in the same direction appeared that the motion was earth and the planets, duly spaced and all in order, swung in the same sweeping way around the sun, the time of their orbits
latter. Only being related to their respective distances from the of instead needed or circles were eighty, as thirty-four spheres

we have seen. And by a simple daily rotation of the earth upon

its

axis

you were saved from

the necessity of making

all

the

skies

undertake a complete revolution every twenty-four

the other hand,

hours.

some of what we might regard as the of the beautiful economy Copernican system only came later of Copernicus's own complications some when for example, taken away. And if from a purely had been and encumbrances or from the geometer's point of view the optical standpoint new hypothesis was more economical, there was another sense in which it was more prodigal; because in respect of the physics of the sixteenth century it left a greater number of separate

On

In any case, at least things that required separate explanation. some of the economy of the Copernican system is rather an
illusion of more recent centuries. nowadays may optical smaller effort to move the earth round upon say that it requires its axis than to swing the whole universe in a twenty-four hour

We

revolution about the earth; but in the Aristotelian physics it colossal to shift the heavy and sluggish required something that earth, while all the skies were made of a subtle substance

was supposed to have no weight, and they were comparatively was concordant with their nature. easy to turn, since turning

Above

all,

if

you grant Copernicus a

certain advantage in

the sacrifice that had to be respect of geometrical simplicity, was of this made for the sake nothing less than tremendous. You lost the whole cosmology associated with AristoteHanism the whole intricately dovetailed system in which the nobility of the various elements and the hierarchical arrangement of these had been so beautifully interlocked. In fact, you had to framework of existing science, and throw overboard the

very

30
it

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

was here

factory alternative.

that Copernicus clearly failed to discover a satisHe provided a neater geometry of the
it

was one which made nonsense of the reasons and explanations that had previously been given to account for the movements in the sky. Here, as in the case of the doctrine of impetus, it was necessary to go farther still and complete the scientific revolution before one could squarely meet the criticisms to which the new hypothesis was liable. Kepler was right, therefore, when he said that Copernicus failed to see how rich he was, and erred by remaining too close to the older system of Ptolemy. This point becomes clear when Copernicus tries to meet the objections to his hypothesis, and particularly when he has to show how the celestial machinery could possibly work, supheavens, but

posing his geometrical design to be correct.

that,
it is

We are all aware

when two

trains are alongside, it is difficult to tell whether

ours or the other one that is moving ; and this purely optical
it

relativity

wise

of motion must have long been realised, for othercould never have occurred to either the ancient world

or the middle ages that it was possible to discuss whether it was the earth or the sun which moved. Anybody may grant the
point concerning the relativity of motion for the sake of argument, but still this does not decide for us the crucial question
it

does not

tell

us which of the trains

it is

that

is

actually

mov-

all ing. In order to discuss this question at

Copernicus had to go of the and nature cause of movement problem had to move from geometry and from the problem of the mere pattern of the skies to issues which belonged rather to
into the further

one asked Copernicus why the earth and the heavenly bodies moved, he would answer: Because they were spherical or because they were attached to spherical orbs. Put a sphere anywhere in space and it would naturally revolve it would turn without needing anybody to turn it because it was the very nature of the sphere to rotate in this way. Whereas Aristotle had made movement depend on the total nature of the celestial bodies as such, it has been pointed out that Copernicus observed with something of the geometer's
physics. If

THE CONSERVATISM OF COPERNICUS

31

his argument the nature of the body was decided eye; for in the geometrical shape, and the movement merely purely by depended upon sphericity. All bodies, furthermore, aspired to

become

spheres like water forming drops for the simple reason that the sphere represented the perfect shape. Gravity itself could belong to the sun and moon as well as to the earth

could belong to anything spherical since it represented the tendency of all parts of a body to come together and consolidate themselves in the

form of a

sphere.

In

fact,

the earth

from a certain point of view the actual movement of falls into place as almost an incidental matter in the

as I have system of Copernicus, which, viewed geometrically, with of the skies Ptolemaic is the old pattern already said, just

one or two of tie wheels interchanged and one or two of them taken out. If one stares long at the new system, it seems to be a
set

of other

characteristics that

begin to

come out

into relief,

and these have the effect of putting Copernicus into remarkable contrast with both the older world and modern times. Not
Copernicus prodded and pressed into overturning .the old system by a veritable obsession for uniform circular motion (the point on which he thought that Ptolemy had
only
is

shuffled

his system, the

and faked), but in facing the two biggest problems of dynamics of it and the question of gravitation, an he gives unexpected turn to the discussion by a very similar
obsession in regard to the sphere as the perfect shape. It is colossal amaging that at this early date he had even faced these

matters concerning which his successors went on But fumbling down to the time of Galileo and even Newton.
is sues

on

the

first

system?

What were the dynamics of the new By what physical kw did bodies move in the
big question:

the doctrine of Copernican way? his answer was neither kw of inertia, but the view impetus as such, nor the modern
that spherical bodies
this principle

must turn die earth itself according to could not help turning. If you take the other the earth is no longer the centre of great problem: Now that the universe, what about the whole Aristotelian theory of
gravity?

Copemicus jumps

to

what

in one aspect

is

the

32

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

modem view: that not only the earth but other bodies like the sun and the moon have gravity. But he ties the whole notion
same fundamental principle the tendency of all things to form and consolidate themselves into spheres, because the spherical shape is the perfect one. That is why his synthesis is so he not only replaces Ptolemy's astronomy but he colossal attacks Aristotle's physics on matters of the profoundest principle. And the passion which is the motor behind everything is connected with what might seem to us almost an obsession for circularity and sphericity one which puts the
to the

ancient

Ptolemy into die shade.

When you go down,

so to

you have forgotten everystill float before your eyes that hazy vision, that fantasia of circles and spheres, which is the trade-mark of Copernicus, the very essence of undiluted Copernican thought. And, though it had influence in the sixspeak, for the third time, long after thing else in this lecture, there will

teenth century
significant

we must

note that

it

never came in that

way

into the ideas

of the seventeenth century or

fact that the

into the science

In general,

it is

of the modern world. important not to overlook the

teaching of Copernicus is entangled (in a way that was customary with the older type of science) with concepts of value,
ideological explanations and forms of animism. He doses an old epoch much

what we should call more clearly than he

opens any new one. He is himself one of those individual makers of world-systems, like Aristotle and Ptolemy, who
astonish us

by

the

power which they showed

synthesis so mythical

in producing a and soirrdevantto thepresentday ttat

we

should regard their

alone.

judgment of Copernican thinking,

fact that the

work almost as a matter for aesthetic Once we have discovered the real character

we

can hardly

hdp recognising

the

was still to come. genuine Within die framework of the older system of ideas, Copernicus was unable to clinch his argument. To the old objection that if the earth rotated its parts would fly away and it would
scientific

revolution

said that since rotation

whirl itsdf into pieces, he gave an unsatisfactory answer he was for the earth a natural movement,

THE CONSERVATISM OF COPERNICUS

the evil effects could not follow, for the natural
effect

33

movement of a of destroying the nature of that body. It was the argument of a man who still had one foot caught up in Aristotelianism himself, though perhaps precisely because it seems to be archaic to us it was
body could never be one that had the

more

appropriate to those conservative people

whose

objec-

tions required to be met in the sixteenth century. it was said that if the world was rushing from west to east (in the way that Copernicus suggested) the air would be left behind and

When

there would be a continual wind from east to west, he still answered somewhat in the terms of the ancient physics, and said the air must go round with the globe because of the
earthiness

rotated in

which the atmosphere itself contained and which sympathy with everything else that was earthy. He

was not much more successful when he tried to take the argument about the earth whirling itself to pieces, and turn it
against the possible critics

of his theory, saying that the

rotate so quickly as

skies

was assumed, into broken the would be fragments by operation of the very same laws. The skies and the heavenly bodies, as we have seen, were supposed to have no weight on the Aristotelian theory they were not regarded as being subject to the operation ofwhat
themselves, if they

were to

we now call centrifugal force. Galileo himself apparently made

mistakes

when

trying to meet the argument that the world

would fly to pieces if it were turning on its own axis. That whole question of centrifugal force proved to be a serious
sixteenth century,

obstruction to the acceptance of the Copernican system in the and was only made manageable by the

work of men

like

Huygens, whose writings appeared more

than a hundred years after

De Revolutionists Orbium. The truth

was that Ptolemy in ancient times had rejected the hypothesis ofthe movement of the earth, not because he had failed to consider it, but because it was impossible to make such an hypothesis square with Aristotelian physics. It was not until Aristotelian physics had been overthrown in other regions
headaltogether that the hypothesis could make any serious times. modern even in therefore, way,

34

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

If Copernicus is so far from being a representative of the modern outlook, his case may serve to remind us how often in the mentality of the Renaissance we meet with features which we today would have to regard as archaic. It has been pointed

lost in the supernatural,

who did not mean to be mystics, were perhaps rather what we might call surrealists, projecting the fabulous animals of antiquity and the products of their own imagination on to what they thought was the concrete world. Now, therefore, more than in the middle ages, "the basilisk, the Egyptian phoenix, the gryphon, the salamander, again came in to their own". There was some imposing philosophical thought in this period, and if much of this was concentrated on the problem of the soul or the question of the dignity of man, much of it represented also an attempt to see the whole of nature as a single selfexplanatory system. The object was to eliminate transcendental influences the activity of spirits and demons working on the world from outside, or the capricious intervention of God Himself and to seek the explanations ofall phenomena within the actual system of nature, this system being regarded as selfsufficient and as working under the government of law. There was even a growing insistence that the phenomena of nature should be more carefully observed and that data should not simply be accepted on the authority of ancient writers. This whole movement has its place in the history of science, therefore, and made its contribution to the story that we have to examine, though later it was to become an obstruction and in some respects it now seems less rational to us than the scholasticism of the middle ages. Under the cover of the revival of antiquity, ancient forms of occultism, Jewish cabalistic speculation, Arabian magical arts, and alchemical mystification came to be mixed with the ingredients of philosophy. These influences helped to bring back views of the universe that were older than Aristotle forms of what might be called pan-psychism and astro-biology and animism. If die belief in astrology and witchcraft and alchemical speculation went on increasing from this time, they
out that

men

in those days

THE CONSERVATISM OF COPERNICUS

35

were encouraged by a fashionable philosophy and a prevailing inteEectual tendency so that what we should call magic belonged not merely to popular superstition but to the highbrowism of the age. The attempt to achieve a unified idea of the cosmos was in fact perhaps bound to result in something fanciful, in view of die imperfection of the data then available.

The Renaissance naturalists might be anxious to reject miracles, but like Pomponazzi they would still believe that certain
plants or stones might bring rain, that animals could prophesy, or that a statue might perspire to announce a grand event.

These things could be accepted because they were regarded as amongst the verified data in the universe, and it could even be held that prayers might conjure away a storm not by any intervention of God but by the displacements they produced
in the atmosphere. It was possible, therefore, to apply one's mind solely to what one regarded as nature, but to see nature
itself as

magical.
set

And some who were

determined to apply

criticism

were unable to
it

reject the evidence for astrology

it from superstition, without was itself in any way a fraud. On this system, it was important to attach phenomena to their causes, and a real chain of cause and effect was taken for granted, though there might be no rigorous distinction between material and mental phenomena, between mechanical and occult activity. To a certain degree, causes were sought by hunting out analogies and mystical correspondences between

some even

out to purify

conceiving that

things

imagining the stars as male or female, or as hot or and cold, giving them special affinities with minerals or with of the human body, so that the whole universe seemed parts sometimes to be a universe of symbols. The action of the magnet seems to have influenced these thinkers very much. It appears even to have been taken as a typical example of
the

way things work in nature,

so that there

was a

search for

magical sympathies between objects. The feet that plants had sex, and the manner in which light was diffused throughout the world of nature, had a typical or symbolical significance in somewhat the same way. At the same time,
secret

36

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

the thinkers took into their survey various phenomena connected with telepathy, hypnotism, etc., which have become
interesting to us again in the twentieth century.

They would

show, for example, how, by bringing methods of suggestion into play, one might discover that a man was a thief.
All such kinds

Bruno, who, a system of the universe that seems to us reminiscent rather

at the

of thinking culminated, perhaps, in Giordano end of the sixteenth century, brings out

of the poet than of the scientist. One of the processes of the scientific revolution was the conflict against this whole oudook, and it is this which gives an added historical significance to
the whole inquiry into the physical universe. It seemed as though, having succumbed to the initial aberration, the world

could only reach sanity again by first allowing the to swing to the opposite extreme.

pendulum

CHAPTER THREE

THE STUDY OF THE HEART DOWN TO WILLIAM HARVEY

THE
Renaissance in one of its important aspects sees the culmination of the long medieval process of first recovering, then

and finally assimilating, the scholarly and scientific of writings antiquity. This in itself may have added no new ingredients to a civilisation that was Graeco-Roman in character; but the exhilaration which it produced was very great, and, together with the blossoming of urban life in city-states, it seemed to bring liveliness to the intellect The world now became aware, moreover, that Aristotle had not been without his rivals in the ancient world; and the confrontation of rival
translating

explanations, rival systems, provided significant issues that men were compelled to decide for themselves. The discovery

of the new world, and the beginning of a dose acquaintance with tropical countries, released a flood ofnew data and a mass of descriptive literature which itself was to have stimulating effects. The essential structure of the sciences was not changed the scientific revolution was still far off but the Renaissance
has perhaps a greater significance in the biological field than it appears to have had in the case of physics. Devices that were
associated with printing
plate engravings scientific teacher.

such things as woodcuts and copperat the disposal of the sure that drawings and

put new instruments

At last one could be

diagrams would be copied and multiplied with accuracy; and

this,

together with printing itself

scientific
is

made

accurate recording

and

who

intercommunication more practicable. Vesalius, of some importance in our story, is particularly

with this development-Hsignificant in his use of illustrations and in the naturalistic character that he gave
associated

them, so different from the conventionality of the medieval

drawings.
37

38

ORIGINS OF
There
is

MODERN
art

SCIENCE
Italy

a sense in which the

science.

of fifteenth-century

may
rise

claim perhaps to stand as a chapter in the history of the

of modern

insisted that painting

merely bidding for

The practitioners and theorists who was a branch of knowledge were not a higher status in the world; and from
on the

Alberti to Leonardo da Vinci they insisted, for example,

importance of mathematics, or even claimed it as the primary the study of optics and qualification of the artist. Apart from and of geometry proportion, great significance perspective, was attached to anatomy; and here the artist could observe for observation's sake observe without all the preoccupations of the medical student, anxious to appropriate die whole Galenic theory of the human body. It has been considered the virtue of Masaccio, after the end of the first quarter of the century, that he had painted his figures in the round, and not merely as flat things on the canvas, and for this reason it was said of him that he was the first man to reproduce things as they really are. From this time, the Florentine school of painters distinguished itself by the intentness with which it concentrated on the purpose of naturalistic representation especially where
the

human

figure

was concerned

* purpose which, from a

of view, might be regarded as quasi-scientific. The goldsmith's workshop and the artist's studio would seem to have been forerunners of the modern laboratory; the very materials of the painter were the subject of research and experiment; in other ways there must have been dose relations with the artisan all very different from the natural philosopher
certain point

producing
artisan

scientific theories at his desk.

Indeed, the

artist,

the

and the natural philosopher seem to be compounded together in the evolution of that modern figure, the natural scientist. In the fifteenth century the artist was often a technician often the inventor of gadgets an expert in machines, hydraulics and fortifications. Both before Leonardo da Vinci and after him, one painter after another is commissioned as a military engineer. Amongst the Florentine painters, and
particularly the

more mediocre

ones,

it

would appear
itself

that at

times the science prevailed over the art

die pictures

STUDY OF THE HEART

DOWN TO

WILLIAM HARVEY

39

showed offa knowledge of muscles or virtuosity in the handof perspective. It has been pointed out that ling of problems drawn to the artist's studio in the fifteenth were who men the
were to be
century are just those who through the same temperament attracted to the workshop of Galileo in the seven-

Above all, the art of empirical observation must have been greatly developed. And the artists, much as they owed to the ancient world, were the first to cry out against mere subservience to authority the first to say that one must observe nature for oneself. Concerning some of the writers of the sixteenth century, it has been discovered that, though they talked of the importance of seeing things with one's own eyes, they still could not
teenth century.

observe a tree or a scene in nature without noticing just those things which the classical writers had taught them to look for.

When

Machiavelli pretended to be drawing his conclusions

from contemporary political events, he would still produce maxims drawn from one ancient thinker or another he may have thought that he was making inferences from the data in front of him, but in reality he was selecting the data which illustrated the maxims previously existing in his mind. Simiconfronted with a mass of docularly, the historical student, a of magnet in his mind which has kind mentary material, unless he is very careful will draw out of that material just the things which confirm the shape of the story as he assumed
it

men

to be before his researches began. In the later middle ages realised that in the last resort everything depended on

observation and experience, on dissection and experiment so much so that in the fifteenth century we can find a man who

be communicating the result of his own experience and experiments, when in reality we now know that he was writer. But transcribing passages from the work of another an to dissection was increasing degree being practised though men only observed the things which it produced little result
claims to

the ancient writer Galen had taught them to look for. that when Apart from all this, it seems to be true even today
conclusions have been readied in science or in history,
it is

40

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

normal to incorporate these into a realm of "established facts"; which they come to be transcribed from one book to another, as though now you had reached the end of the matter and on these topics the mind could rest. Students of history do not themselves authenticate every square inch of the history that they handle, and an outsider may wonder whether even
after

by independent experiment every particle of that science which they have built up in their minds. Now, much of the dissection that was
being done at the opening of modern times was not a form of what we should call research at all, but was rather a demon-

scientific students authentically re-discover

not a process of discovery, but away of and teaching illustrating established facts. Its very purpose was to communicate to students the truths that were in Galen, and a mere assistant would apparently conduct the actual work of dissection while the lecturer read the appropriate passage from the book. These poor creatures knew tiat Galen was a much greater artist in the work of dissection than they would ever be, and they took no end of pride in themselves if the result came out as Galen said it ought to do a matter not at all easy, especially as Galen used apes, for example, instead of human bodies when he conducted his dissections. When in the field of anatomy an original mind emerged in the second quarter
stration before a class

sixteenth century in the person of Vesalius, even he, finding that he differed from Galen, said (like others) that at

of the

first

he could not believe his

own eyes.
of the
trans-

The
lations

scientific

Renaissance, then, brought more translations work of the Greeks in botany, for example
It

brought conflicts concerning the authorities of the ancient world disputes in the universities between Aristotle and Galen, for example, some of them on the of the and the activity of the function turning problem heart There was also conflict between the so-called Arabians

even of Galen himsel

and die

the former taking their Galen through Arabian transmission while the latter went direct to the original Greek but it would appear that this controversy did not turn on the question of the heart. Finally, the Renais-

so-called Greeks

STUDY OF THE HEART

DOWN TO

WILLIAM HARVEY

41

sance brought a greater insistence on observation and a refinement of observational skill. It is perhaps not an accident that the first branch of science transformed by improved observation was that of anatomy, the science of the painter, the one restored by Vesalius, in whom the mind of the artist and the mind of the scientist seem almost to have been fused into
one.

Even in regard to the question of the heart, the influence of antiquity was not without its place in the story of the scientific revolution. William Harvey, whose demonstration of the ckculation of the blood is the crowning-point of this episode, was Aristotelian in many respects, and was associated with the
Aristotelian university of Padua. Like Aristode he regarded the heart as the central organ of the body the principal feature-

so that on the subject of the heart he waxes so lyrical sometimes

that he hal*eminds us

of Copernicus on the subject of the sun. Galen rather emphasised the importance of the liver and regarded the veins
as centring in the liver.

The Aristotelian view

fell

and said that even the from the heart, which had a special importance as being the seat of the emotions. The ancients had practised dissection, and Galen, besides and made dissecting animals, had studied human skeletons, experiments on living creatures. In feet, it was from Galen that the medical students in a university like that of Padua, for example had learned to be in advance of the other scientists in their general attitude to experiment. There had always been two pitfalls in the practice of ordinary dissection, however. First of all, many conclusions had been reached, not from human but from animal dissection, and even Vesalius in the work which inaugurated modern anatomy had to resort to animals instead of human beings for certain parts of the body. out Secondly and this was a fault that still had to be pointed made seventeenth in the century people by William Harvey wrong inferences when they examined animals which had been bled to death, so that the arteries and the left ventricle of the heart were seen only after the blood had been drained out
into a corresponding extravagance

nerves ran

42

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

of them. Galen, however, had exposed the error of the ancient view that thearteries and theleftside ofthe heart contained only air. At the same time he regarded arterial blood as being mixed with a sort of spirituous substance called pneuma, a lifeprinciple analogous in some ways to air and in other ways to
fire.

Galen, however, was responsible for an important heresy which flourished in the sixteenth century and which it was the particular virtue of William Harvey to dispose of in a final manner. He held that one kind of blood ran from the liver
all parts ofthe body to perform an ordinwhile a different kind of blood, mixed function, ary nutrifying with vital spirits in the way that I have ahready mentioned,

through the veins to

flowed out through the arteries to perform a more vivifying kind of work. There were a great many hurdles to leap over
before the seventeenth century came to the modern view that the blopd goes out in the arteries and then comes back to the
heart through the veins, Galen himself having had no conception of anything more than a sort of ebb and flow that occurred in the veins and the arteries independently. In order to understand the difficulties it is necessary for us to distinguish between

involved

the various processes which the ancient teaching on this subject the key-points in the system which had to be over-

thrown. Implied in the Galenical view,

first

passage of air from the lungs to the heart, posed to prevent any excess of that heat which
tion

of all, was a direct where it was sup-

it was the funcof the heart to supply. Secondly, on the same view the chief action ofthe heart took place on the diastole, the dilatation the main process was the drawing ofthe blood into the heart, and not its expulsion. Finally, on the same view the venous blood was drawn initially into the right side of the heart, but some of it seeped through a duck dividing-wall called the septum into the left ventricle ofthe heart, and here it was purified and mixed with vital spirits, the new mixture passing finally into the arteries on its own motion. The pivot of the whole system the mechanically essential part of the scheme was the passage ofthe blood across the dividing-wall,

STUDY OF THE HEART

the septum, into the
arteries.

DOWN TO

WILLIAM HAJRVEY
it

43

left ventricle,

whence

moved

into the

Here we have a complex system of errors concerning which

it has to be noted that the doctrine was not only wrong in itself, but, until it was put right, it stood as a permanent barrier

against physiological advance for, indeed, nothing else could be right. It is another of those cases in which we can say that

once this matter was rectified the way lay open to a tremendous

of further change elsewhere. Now an Arabian physician of the thirteenth century denied that there were either visible passages or invisible pores in the of the heart to admit of the transit of blood from one septum
flood
side to the other.

He maintained that

only via the lungs could

make its way from the right ventricle of the heart to the left. A Latin translation ofhis work was printed in 1547 but
the blood
it

did not contain his teaching on this subject, so that the developments which took place in Italy after this date must be

regarded as part of an independent movement. In the later middle ages there had been a dissecting student in western

Europe who had said that the passages across the septum were very hard to find. Even Leonardo da Vinci fell into the error of thinking that the blood passed through the septum, though

he had some doubt about it in later life. is one writer Vesalius himself who says that it shows the mighty power of God that He should be able to make blood pass through the apparent solidity of the septum. In fact, it is this man Vesalius who first casts doubt on the whole Galenical teaching in regard to the septum, though it must be noted that, while correcting Galen, after much hesitation, on this particular point, he still does not see the necessity of a totally new conception of the movement of
it
is

possible that

After him, there

at least

the blood.

The year 1543, which saw the publication of Copernicus's great work and of the important translation of Archimedes, is
because

of considerable significance in the scientific revolution, it saw also the publication of the magnum opus of Vesalius, namely the De Fabrica, the work which stands as the
a date

44

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

foundation of modern anatomy. Vesalius had started as a fervent follower of Galen, but it appears that from 1538 he had

begun to have more and more doubts; for he was the genuine kind of pioneer, who carried out his dissections himself, invented new instruments for the purpose or borrowed them from workers in other fields, and established new forms of
technique
tons.

for example, in regard to the mounting of skelemust not imagine, however, that because he had doubts about the passage of the blood across the septum of the heart this heresy disappeared from the world of scholar-

We

ship; especially as he expressed his doubts very cautiously and was particularly diffident in his first edition of 1543, where, as

he later confessed, he deliberately accommodated his results to conform to the teaching ofGalen. His achievement, his methods and (as we have seen) his illustrations, make him an important turning-point in our story, in spite of what he retained of the old mentality; and it was unfortunate that he quitted the life of research while still in his thirties and became physician first in the army and then at the court of the Emperor Charles V. In spite of his acknowledged greatness, he did not realise that a new account of the movements of the heart and blood was now necessary in general, he retained the Galenical teaching

on these points. That was the first step towards the work of William Harvey, and at the next stage of the argument a different issue was in
question, namely, the problem of the part played by the lungs in the system and the movement of the blood. Leonardo da

Vinci had attacked the old view that

into the heart- in fact,

air

passed

from the lungs

with a

he said

that

he had

tried

pump

and that

was impossible to force air into the heart by that route. It was the successor of Vesalius in Padua, a man called Colombo, who, in a publication of 1559, correctly described what is called the smaller circulation, the passage of the blood from the right side of the heart into the lungs and thence into the left ventricle of the heart. Apart from this single point Colombo remained true to the older Galenic doctrine on this subject namely, that die blood flowed to the outer parts of
it

STUDY OF THE HEART

the
veins

DOWN TO

WILLIAM HARVEY

45

body not only through the arteries but also through the in other words, Colombo had no idea of the larger, general circulation of die blood. Earlier than this, the famous
Miguel Serveto, had published his Christianismi Restitutio in 1553, a work which was almost totally destroyed, since it was equally offensive to Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist; and here he had inserted an account of the passage of the blood from the heart to the lungs and then back again to the left ventricle of the heart. As doctrines were sometimes communicated and treatises written some years before their actual appearance in print, scholars have not quite agreed on the question whether Serveto's discovery really precedes the achievement in Padua. Nor is it known whether tie one party

heretic,

owed any
Another
circulation
established

debt to the other.

Italian writer, Cesalpino, is

of interest and

is

some-

times claimed

by the Italians as the real discoverer of the general

of the blood, and if the claim had been genuinely he would have stood well in advance of William
it is

Harvey, for

argued that he established

his conclusions

by

1593 and that these were disclosed in a work posthumously published in 1606. He was a great disciple of Aristode, and

put forward many stimulating things in his defence of the Aristotelian system as against the system of Galen. But though he talked of something like a general circulation and even saw some passage of blood from the arteries into the veins at the extremities of each, it is not dear that He realised the normal flow of all the blood from the one to the other; and though he
not

saw that the blood in the veins moved towards the heart, he did seize upon the importance of the discovery. Certainly he did not demonstrate tie circulation as Harvey was to do, or grasp the whole in a mighty synthesis. It is unfortunate that Cesalpino's name has been discussed so largely in reference to
controversy only; for the concentration upon of his work has prevented people from recog-

this particular this single side

nising

many other things of interest in his writings.

another great step towards the discovery of the circulation of the blood had been made by Fabricius, who in

By

this time,

46

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

1574 published a

work

describing certain valves in the veins.

Though he may not have been the first to make the discovery, the identification of these was most significant because it was perceived that the valves operated to check only the outward passage of blood from the heart and through the veins the passage to the hands and feet by that route* for example. Such being the case, one might have expected that Fabricius would have realised that the normal passage was in the opposite direction inwards, towards the heart and that the blood in the veins was to be regarded therefore as being on its return journey. The mind of Fabricius was so shaped to the teaching of Galen, however, that he missed the whole point of his own discovery, and produced an explanation which left the large question exactly where it had stood before. He said that the valves merely served the purpose of checking and delaying the flow of blood, lest it should run too copiously to the hands and feet and collect there to excess, carried down, so to speak, by its own weight. Fabricius, in fact, was conservative in regard to many things and was still convinced that air passed directly
from the lungs
strated that

into the heart.

When

it

was

really

demon-

blood was carried into the lungs by that very same

passage-way from the heart, along which

air

men

believed that

moved

heart, it

in the opposite direction from the lungs into the was still necessary for William Harvey to point out
in opposite directions could hardly

that

two such movements

be taking place along one and the same passage at the same time. Until the seventeenth century, therefore, a curious mental rigidity prevented even the leading students of science from realising essential truths concerning the circulation of the blood, though we might say with considerable justice that they already held some of tie most significant evidence in
their hands.
It is

only

existed in the sixteenth century,

stages

by glancing at the obstructions and hurdles which and by watching these earlier

of fumbling piecemeal progress, that we can gain some impression of the greatness of William Harvey, who early in the seventeenth century transformed the whole state of the

STUDY OF THE HEART

DOWN TO

WILLIAM HARVEY

4?

ever by a few masterly strategic strokes. Francis question for Bacon noted that some scientific discoveries appear deceptively
easy after they have been made. He called to mind certain in Euclid which appeared incredible when you propositions

heard them propounded, yet seemed so simple after they had been proved that you felt they were something that you who look at the story from had really known all the time. of the transition with the history inside the wrong great we the answer beforehand are tempted know verted because to see Harvey's predecessors as foolish and ipso facto to miss the own achievement. Yet once again we greatness of Harvey's must wonder both in the past and in the present that the
first

We

human mind, which

its

goes on collecting facts, is so inelastic, so of reference. The predecessors of framework slow to change Harvey had observed by cuts and ligatures the flow of the

blood in the veins towards the heart

not towards the outer

as their theory always took for granted. But parts of the body so dominated were by Galen that they said the blood they behaved irregularly when it was tortured by such experiments

rushing off in the wrong direction like a fluttering frightened hen.

Before dealing with the actual achievement of Harvey we may note that for some years he was at the university of Padua,

where the chief of his predecessors, Vesalius, Colombo and Fabricius, had worked. It is not possible to dose one's eyes to the fact that this whole chapter in the history of the study of the heart is primarily the glory of that university. The credit which this is greater than any which her is due to Italy in respect of
patriotic

historians could

good the claims

win for her, supposing they made they have made on behalf of Cesalpino. From

die beginning to die end our story is connected with die unithe attention of die historian should be versity of Padua, and
directed diere. Furthermore, both Copernicus anid Galileo were at the same university at important periods of dieir lives;

and apart from die splendour of these great names diere were the view developments in diat university which would justify that in so far as any single place could claim die honour of

48

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

the distinction must being the seat of the scientific revolution, had taken its current which The Padua. to great belong
the scholasticism of fourteenth-century Paris passed to the universities of north Italy, and in the sixparticularly
rise in

teenth century

it is

there that the doctrine

of the impetus

is

developed, at a
itself

time

when

the tradition and interests of Paris

were moving away from that branch of study. To the humanists of the Renaissance, Padua was an object of particular derision because it was the hotbed of Aristotelianism; and it is one of the paradoxes of the scientific revolution that so imin it by a university in which Arisportant a part was played totle was so much the tradition and for centuries had been so Padua had certain advantages, however it greatly adored. was a university in which Aristotle was studied largely as a for here medicine was the preliminary to a course in medicine rather than theology, as was the case in of the sciences, queen Paris. As I have already mentioned, Galen had handed down
;

to the medical students a regard, not merely for observation, but for actual experiment; and, further than this, his own

conscious diswritings had given an impulse in Padua to the cussion of the experimental method. In any case, the Italian
cities at this

date had

become highly

secularised,

and in Padua

a long time^ noticethis particularly noticeable for as is evidenced able even in political thought, by the work of

had been

Marsiglio.

The interpretation of Aristotle in

the university was

on the physical universe, largely concerned with his writings and the study had long been carried out in collaboration with
the medical faculty itself. Whereas the scholastic philosophers of the middle ages had assimilated Aristotle into their Christian
synthesis, the

Paduans made him, a much more secular study

looking rather to the original Aristotle, naked that is to say, without his Christian dress. Or, rather, perhaps one ought to remember that the Paduans were inclined to adopt this attitude
because they were an Averroist university seeing Aristotle in die light of the Arabian commentator, Averroes. Padua fell

under die rule of Venice from 1404, and Venice was die most and successfully anti-clerical state in Europe both at this time

STUDY OF THE HEART

Padua

DOWN TO

WILLIAM HARVEY

49

for long afterwards. The freedom of thought enjoyed by attracted the ablest men, not only from the whole of

the Italian peninsula, but also

from the

rest

of Europe-

William Harvey himself being a conspicuous example of this. In the first volume of the Journal ofthe History ofIdeas an article
points out that we have exaggerated the imthe of new thought of the Renaissance particularly portance the cult of Pktonic-Pythagorean ideas in the scientific revolution. There is a deeper continuity of history between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries in the conscious dis-

by J. H. Randall

method in the university of Padua; and have to note the way in which Aristotle was overthrown by the mere continuance and development of the process of commentating on Aristotle. It has been pointed out that fifteenth-century discussions of scientific method in Padua attacked the question of the purely quantitative (as of treatment; that in the against the older qualitative) mode sixteenth century the Paduans were doubting the old view that natural motion, in the case of falling bodies, for example, was the result of a tendency inherent in those bodies they were asking whether it was not perhaps the effect of the exertion of a force. Towards the end of the sixteenth century they were questioning whether final causes ought to have any place in natural philosophy. They had extraordinarily dear views concerning scientific method, and Galileo, who arrived in that university just after some of die greatest controversies had taken place on that subject, inherited some of these points of method and used the same terminology when he discussed
cussion of the scientific

here again

we

their character. It was in their

most signal results of considerable importance that William Harvey was initiated into that tradition; for one of the remarkable features of his work was not merely dissection and observation, but actual experiment As late as 1670 we find an English work which describes Padua as "the Imperial University for Physic of all
others in the world."

anatomy, however, that they achieved as a school and as a tradition; and it is

William Harvey continued and developed, not merely the

50

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

and observations, but also the kind of experiments which are to be seen in sixteenth-century Padua. He declared that he both learned and taught anatomy, "not from books but from dissection", and he combined the results of this with clinical observation and ingenious experiment. What is very remarkable in him is the comprehensive and systematic character of his investigation as a whole not merely in ranging over so many of the operations and so much of the topography of the blood-circuit, but also in extending the comparative method so systematically over so large a range of creatures. After we have heard so much about the mistakes that had been made through dissecting apes and other animals instead of
dissections

human beings, human body

attaches to his

it is

curious to find

Harvey making

it

a matter

of complaint that

dissection was

now too often confined to the

comparative method.

that insufficient attention was being given to the extraordinarily modern flavour

An

work as a result of the clearly mechanical nature

of much of his enquiry and his argument; the importance that he gave to purely quantitative considerations; and the final cogency that he attributed to a piece of arithmetic. It is interesting to see him talking about the heart as "a piece of machinery in which though one wheel gives motion to another, yet all the wheels seem to move simultaneously". When he examined any anatomical feature he did not pretend immediately to deduce its function from an impression of its form and structure, but, once a hypothesis suggested itself, sought for the experiment which would mechanically confirm the idea he had conceived. Finally, though his book itself seems to lack order, it gives a clear account of the methods employed at the various points of the argument, and is remarkable as a comprehensive record of experiments made. It seems to have been the valves which set Harvey thinking, possibly the valves at the entries or outlets of the heart itself, though very soon he was concerned with those valves in the veins which his teacher Fabricius had described and which he himself appears to have regarded as the stimulus to his enquiry. His book,

De

motu

cordis,

was published in

1628,^

but

STUDY OF THE HEART

DOWN TO

WILLIAM HARVEY

51

he himself wrote that "for more than nine years" he had been confirming his views "by multiple demonstrations". He still had to fight the old heresies, and we should make a mistake if we imagined that the discoveries made by those Paduan precursors of his who have been mentioned had as yet become common property. He attacks the view that the arteries take
it necessary to point out that Galen himself had to contain shown them nothing but blood. He notes that when they are cut or wounded they neither take in air nor expel it

in air, arid finds

in die

way that the windpipe does when it has been severed. He still sets out to undermine the idea that the blood crosses the

septum of the heart that septum, he says, is "of denser and more compact structure than any part of the body itself". If blood seeped through it, why did die septum need to have its own private supply through the coronary veins and arteries like the rest of die fabric of the heart? In any case, how could the left ventricle draw blood from die right when bodi contracted and dilated simultaneously ? Similarly, he attacked the vexed question of the lungs asked why something that had all the structure of a major blood-vessel should be supposed to have the function of carrying air from die lungs to the heart, while blood, on die other hand, was alleged to strain itself so laboriously through die solid septum of die heart. He made inferences from the structure of die vessels, made experiments to test the direction of the blood in diem, and argued from their size that they must not merely carry blood necessary for die private nourishment of die lungs, but transmit all die blood through die lungs for the purpose of refreshing it, diough he was unaware of the process of oxygenation which actually takes place. In addition, he used die comparative mediod, showing diat creatures without lungs had no right ventricle of
the heart

which confirmed

was connected widi

diat the right ventricle die transit to die lungs. He was able to
his

view

show diat in the embryo

die blood took a shorter route from a route which ceased

the right to die left ventricle of the heart

to be operative when die lungs came into action. Then he examined the fibrous structure of die heart, and showed that

52

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE
its

contrary to the hitherto accepted view

sisted in its contraction
systole,

real activity

con-

when

it

and constriction that is to say, in its pumped out blood, and not in its diastole,

whenit had been alleged to suck it in. His actual description of the structure and the action of the heart may be said to rank as an admirable piece of artistry.

were neither plausible nor self-consistent; but though he was remarkable in his use of the comparative method he was not at his most original in the experimental field, where there appear even to have been devices, already put to use, which he did not employ. The revolution that he brought about was like the one which we have seen in the realm of mechanics, or the one that Lavoisier was to achieve in chemistry it was due to the power of seeing the whole subject in a new framework and a the problem managere-stating the issue in way which made a kind of strategic sense which able. It was due in feet to enabled his mind to seize on the point of crucial significance. Harvey's crowning argument is a simple piece of arithmetic, based on his estimate a rough and inaccurate estimate of the amount of blood which the heart sends through the body. It did not matter that his measurement was only a rough one he knew that his conclusion must be right, even granting the largest margin of error that anybody might impute to him. The answer was dear to any mechanically-minded person who could really bring his attention to the point; and it rendered the rest of Harvey's evidence and argument merely
that existing opinions
these subjects
subsidiary.

He showed

on

In regard to the capacity of the heart, he presents us with a sentence that can be left to speak for itself:

What remains to be said upon the quantity and source of the blood which thus passes is of a character so novel and unheard of that I not only fear injury to myself from the envy of a few but I tremble lest I have mankind at
large for

my

enemies, so

much doth wont and custom

become a second nature.

STUDY OF THE HEART

DOWN TO

WILLIAM HARVEY

53

He found that in the space of an hour the heart would throw

out more blood titan the weight of a roan, far more blood than could be created in that time out of any nourishment received.
It

was impossible to say where all that blood came from and where it could possibly go, unless one adopted the hypothesis that it went streaming through the whole body time after
time in a continual circulation. Harvey followed that circula-

of the heart and around the body, showing how it explained the position of the valves of the heart, and accounted for the harder structure of the arteries, near the heart, where they had to bear die shock of especially each propulsion. He was now able to demonstrate why so often in bodies the blood had drained away from the arteries but not the veins, and he could give a more satisfactory reason for those valves in the veins which left the way to the heart open the return of the blood to the outer branches of but
tion

from the

left ventricle

prevented

the veins.
tion,

The one link in the chain, the one part of the circula-

which he failed to trace was the passage of the blood from

the outermost ramifications of the arteries to the outlying branches of the veins. The connection here could only be dis-

covered with a microscope, and was made good in 1661

his identification

when

Malpighi announced in the almost transparent lungs of a frog. capillaries It seems to have taken between thirty and fifty years for
Harvey's

of what are called the

to secure acceptance, though his arguments more cogent to us today than those of any seem would perhaps other treatise that had been written up to this period; since, views though he held some of the unsatisfactory speculative

work

which were current at that time

his

such as a belief in vital

thesis

spirits

was so in itself that it helped to render them mechanically satisfying and unnecessary in future. Descartes welcomed the

on these, and his arguments never depended

meaningless of the ckculation of the blood, but it appears that his on a partial misunderstanding, and acceptance of it was based he differed from Harvey on the question of the action or function of the heart itself. Most important of all, however, is the feet that the establishment of the circulation of the blood
idea

54

ORIGINS OF

MODERN SCIENCE
new
start in

released physiology for a

creatures.

the study of living

Only now could one begin to understand respiration

or even the digestive and other functions. Given

itself properly,

of the blood running through the arteries and then back by the veins, one could begin to ask "what it carries, and why, how and where it takes up its loads, and how, where and why it parts with them". Both in regard to methods and
the circulation
results, therefore,

we seem to have touched something like the

revolution at
last.

genuine

scientific

CHAPTER FOUR

THE DOWNFALL OF ARISTOTLE AND PTOLEMY

As the crucial stage in the grand controversy concerning the Ptolemaic system does not seem to have been treated organicis seldom or never ally, and envisaged in its entirety, it is necessary that we should put together a fairly continuous account of it, so that we may survey the transition as a whole. bird's-eye view of the field should be of some significance for the student

of the

scientific

revolution in general, especially as the battles

come

in crescendo and rise to their greatest intensity in this of the campaign. part It would be wrong to imagine that the publication of

Copernicus's great

work in

1543 either shook the foundations

of European thought

or sufficed to accomplish anything like a scientific revolution. Almost a hundred and a fifty years were needed before there was achieved satisfactory
straight

away

combination of ideas

a satisfactory system of the universe an which permitted explanation of the movement of the earth and the other planets, and provided a framework for further scientific development. Short of this, it was only a generation after the death of Copernicus only towards the close of the
sixteenth century
that the period

of crucial
intense.

transition really

opened and the

conflict

even became

And when

the

of very great perturbations occurred they were the result would which of events different considerations the result
have shaken the older cosmos almost
as

much

if

Copernicus

had never even written his revolutionary work. Indeed, though the influence of Copernicus was as important as people generresulted not so much ally imagine it to have been, this influence from the success of his actual system of the skies, but rather from the stimulus which he gave to men who in reality were
producing something very
different.
first

When

Copernicus's

work

appeared

it

provoked ret-

5<5

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

gious objections, especially on Biblical grounds, and since the Protestants were the party particularly inclined to what was
called Bibliolatry, some scathing condemnations very soon from their side for example, from Luther and

appeared

Melanchthon personally. One may suspect that unconscious prejudice had some part in this, and that the Aristotelian view of the universe had become entangled with Christianity more closely than necessity dictated; for if the Old Testament talked of God establishing the earth fast, the words were capable of elastic interpretation, and Biblical exegesis in previous centuries had managed to get round worse corners than this. In any case, if the Old Testament was not Copernican, it was very far from being Ptolemaic either. And it gives something of a blow to Aristotle and his immaculate fifth essence, surely,

when it says that the heavens shall grow old as a garment, and,
tflllring

of God,

tells

us that the stars

and the very heavens

themselves are not pure in His sight. The prejudice long remained with the Protestants, and when a few years ago the Cambridge History of Science Committee celebrated in the

House the tercentenary of the visit to England of the great Czech educator Comenius or Komensky, the numerous orations overlooked the fact that he was anti-Copernican and
Senate
that his text-books, reprinted in successive editions throughout the seventeenth century, were a powerful influence in the Protestant world on the wrong side of the question. the

On

other hand, Copernicus

was a canon in the Roman Catholic Church and high dignitaries of that Church were associated with

the publication of his book. The comparatively mild reception which the new view received on this side led only recently to the enunciation of the view that the Roman Catholics,

being slow in the uptake, took nearly

ever, that the question

years to see that Copernicus was bound to lead to Voltaire. The truth was, howfifty

of the movement of the earth reached

the stage of genuine conflict only towards the end of die sixteenth century, as I have said. By that time^-and for difiercit

reasons altogether

the religious difficulties themselves

were beginning to appear more serious than before.

DOWNFALL OF ARISTOTLE AND PTOLEMY

infinite

57

Although Copernicus had not stated that the universe was and had declared this issue to belong rather to the province of the philosopher he had been compelled, for a reason which we shall have to consider later, to place the fixed stars at what he called an immeasurable distance away. He was
as

quickly interpreted particularly by some English followers having put the case in favour of an infinite universe; and

had some non-religious objections Christians could hardly complain of this, or declare it to be impossible, without detracting from the power and glory of God. Unfortunately,
unless they

however, that enfant terrible amongst sixteenth-century Italian speculators, Giordano Bruno, went further and talked of the
actual existence

of a

plurality

of worlds. There arose more

seriously than ever before the question: Did the human beings in other worlds need redemption* Were there to be so many

appearances of Christ, so many incarnations and so many atonements throughout the length and breadth of this infinite

That question was much more embarrassing than the purely Biblical issue which was mentioned earlier; and the unbridled speculations of Bruno, who was burned by the Inquisition for a number of heresies in 1600, were a further, factor in the intensification of religious fear on the subject of the
universe 2

Copernican system.

Apart from all this, it is remarkable from how many sides and in how many forms one meets the thesis that is familiar
also in the writings

of Galileo himself namely, the assertion absurd to suppose that the whole of this new colossal universe was created by God purely for the sake of men,
that it
is

purely to serve the purposes of the earth. The whole outlay seemed to be too extravagant now that things were seen in their true proportions and the object had come to appear so
insignificant.

At this later stage the resistance to tie Copernican

hypothesis was common to both Roman Catholics and Protestants, though in England itself it appears to have been less strong than in most other places. The Protestant astronomer,

by the Protestant Faculty at Tubingen, took actually refuge with the Jesuits in 1596. Both the ProtesKepler, persecuted

58
tant, Kepler,

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

and the Roman Catholic, Galileo, ventured into of theology by addressing their co-religionists and attempting to show them that the Copernican system was consistent with a fair interpretation of the words of Scripture. Galileo made excellent use of St. Augustine, and for a time he
the realms

received
circles in

more encouragement in the higher ecclesiastical Rome than from his Aristotelian colleagues in the

university of Padua. In the long run it was Protestantism which for semi-technical reasons had an elasticity that enabled it to

make

alliance

with the

scientific

and the

rationalist

move-

ments, however. That process in its turn greatly altered the character of Protestantism from the closing years of the seventeenth century, and changed it into the more liberalising move-

ment of modern

times.

The religious obstruction could hardly have mattered, however, if it had not been supported partly by scientific reasons
and partly by the conservatism of the scientists themselves. has been pointed out by one student that to a certain degree was the astrologers who were the more ready to be
It
it

open-

minded on
thesis

this subject in the sixteenth century. Apart from the difficulties that might be involved in the whole new syn-

which Copernicus had provided (and which,

as

we have

seen, included a quasi-superstitious reliance upon the virtues of circles and the behaviour of spheres as such), there were

particular physical objections to the attribution

of movement

to the earth, whether on the plan put forward by Copernicus or in any other conceivable system. Copernicus, as we have seen, had tried to meet the particular objections in detail, but
it

will easily be understood that his answers, which we have already noted, were not likely to put the matter beyond

controversy.

Copernicus himself had been aware that his hypothesis was open to objection in a way that has not hitherto been mentioned. If the earth

moved

in a colossal orbit

then the fixed

when
is

ought to show a slight observed from opposite sides of die orbit. In feet, there a change but it is so slight that for three centuries after
stars

around the sun, change of position

DOWNFALL OF ARISTOTLE AND PTOLEMY

59

Copernicus it was not detected, and Copernicus had to explain what then appeared to be a discrepancy by pkcing the fixed stars so far away that the width of the earth's orbit was only a
strained credulity
at so great a

point in comparison with this distance. If the Ptolemaic theory somewhat by making the fixed stars move

pace in their diurnal rotation, Copernicus strained

credulity in those days by what seemed a corresponding extravagance he put the fixed stars at what men thought to be a

He even robbed his system of some of and its economy symmetry; for after all the beautiful spacand the successive planets he found himthe sun between ing self obliged to put a prodigal wilderness of empty space between the outermost planet, Saturn, and the fixed stars. The situation was even more paradoxical than this. When Galileo first used a telescope, one of his initial surprises was to learn that the fixed stars now appeared to be smaller than they had seemed to the naked eye; they showed themselves, he said, as mere pin-points of light. Owing to a kind of blur the fixed stars appear to be bigger than they really ought to appear to the naked eye, and Copernicus, living before that optical illusion had been clarified, was bound to be under certain misapprehensions on this subject. Even before his time some of the fixed stars had seemed unbelievably large when the attempt had been made to calculate their size on the basis of their apparent magnitude. His removal of them to a distance almost imfabulous distance away.
its

measurably farther away (while their apparent magnitude remained the same, of course, to the terrestrial observer) made it necessary to regard them as immensely bigger still, and
strained

credulity

which had been

stretched over-far

already.

Beyond this there was the famous objection that if the world were rushing from west to east a stone dropped from the top of a tower ought to be left behind, falling therefore well to the west of the tower. The famous Danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe, took this argument seriously, however absurd it might that a appear to us, and he introduced the new argument cannon-tall ought to carry much farther one way than tie

60

ORIGINS OF

MODERN
it

SCIENCE
argument had

other, supposing the earth to be in motion. This

a novel flavour that

made

particularly fashionable in the

succeeding period. In the meantime, however, certain other important things had been happening, and as a result of these it gradually became
clear that great changes
that, indeed, the older theories

would have to take place in astronomy were unworkable, whether

the Copernican hypothesis should happen to be true or not. One of these occurrences was the appearance of a new star in

1572 an event which one historian of science appears to me to be correct in describing as a greater shock to European thought than the publication of the Copernican hypothesis itself. This star is said to have been brighter in the sky than anything except
the sun, the

moon and Venus

it

visible

even in daylight some-

times

and

shone throughout the whole of the year 1573,

only disappearing early in 1574. If it was a new star it contradicted the old view that the sublime heavens knew neither

change nor generation nor corruption, and people even reminded themselves that God had ceased the work of creation on the seventh day. Attempts were made to show that the star
existed only in the sublunary region, and even Galileo later thought it necessary to expose the inaccurate observations

which were selected from the mass of available data to support this view. After all, Copernicus had only put forward an alternative theory ofthe skies which he claimed to be superior to the ancient one. Now, however, men were meeting inconvenient facts which sooner or kter they would have to stop denying. In 1577 a new comet appeared, and even some people who disbelieved the Copernican theory had to admit that it belonged to the upper
skies,

not to the sublunary regions

the

more accurate

observations

which were

now

being made had

altered the situation in regard to the observation

abouts of comets. As

this

of the whereone cut a path straight through what

were supposed to be the impenetrable crystal spheres that formed the skies, it encouraged the view that the spheres did not actually exist as part ofthemachinery oftheheavens Tycho Brake, conservative though he was in other respects, hence;

DOWNFALL OF ARISTOTLE AND PTOLEMY

last

61

forward declared his disbelief in the reality of these orbs. In the the sixteenth century Giordano Bruno, whom I quarter of

have already mentioned, pictured the planets and

in

stars floating

empty space, though it now became more difficult than ever to say why they moved and how they were kept in their regular Also the Aristotelian theory that comets were formed paths. of mere exhalations from the earth, which ignited in the out
sphere

of fire

all

tenable.

And
one

those

within the sublunary realm was no longer who did not wish to fly in the fere of

actual evidence
detail

man would

began to modify the Aristotelian theory in say that the upper heavens were not

unchangeable and uncorruptible; another would say that the very atmosphere extended throughout the upper skies,enabling
the exhalations

from the earth to rise and ignite even in the moon. Quite apart from any attack which regions made had upon the system, the foundations of the Copernicus Ptolemaic universe were beginning to shake. towards the end of the sixteenth century It is particularly
far above the

that

which

we can recognise the extraordinary intermediate situation existed we can see the people themselves already be-

coming conscious of the transitional stage which astronomical science had reached. In 1589 one writer, Magini, said that there was a great demand for a new hypothesis which would supersede the Ptolemaic one and yet not be so absurd as the Copernican. Another writer, Maesdin, said that better observations were needed than either those of Ptolemy or those of Copernicus, and that the time had come for "tie radical renovation of astronomy". People even put forward the view that one
should drop
collection
all hypotheses and set out simply to assemble a of more accurate observations. Tycho Brahe replied to this that it was impossible to sit down just to observe without the guidance of any hypothesis at all Yet that radical renovation of astronomy which Maesdin

required was being carried out precisely of the sixteendi century; and Tycho Brahe

in the closing years

was its

first leader,

becoming important not for his hypotheses but precisely because of what has been called the "chaos" of observations

62
that

ORIGINS OF
he
left

MODERN

SCIENCE

last

his successors. We have seen that in the of sixteenth the century he achieved practically all quarter that in fact was achieved, if not all that was possible, in the way of pre-tdescopic observation. He greatly improved the instruments and the accuracy of observation. He followed the planets throughout the whole of their courses, instead of

behind for

merely trying to pick them out at special points in their orbits. have noticed also his anti-Copernican fervour, and in one

We

respect his actual systematizing was important, though his theories were not justified by events; and when he had made
his observations

ment of them

since

he did not follow them up with any develophe was not a remarkable mathematician.

attempted, however, to establish a compromise between the Ptolemaic and the Copernican systems some of the planets moving around the sun, but then the sun and its planetary system
earth. This

He

moving
is

in a great

sweep around the motionless

period,

a further illustration of the intermediate and

transitional character

of

this

for his compromise

gained a certain following ; he complained later that other men pretended to be the inventors of it; and after a certain period in
the seventeenth century this system secured the adhesion of those who still refused to believe in the actual movement of
the earth.

He was not quite so original as he imagined, and his

history

compromise system has a

earlier times.
Still

which goes back

to

much

collected

significant was the fact that the chaos of data and recorded by Tycho Brahe came into the hands of a man who had been his assistant for a time, Johann Kepler, the pupil of the very person, Maesdin, who had demanded a renovation of astronomy. Kepler, therefore, emerges not merely as an isolated genius, but as a product of that whole movement of renovation which was taking place at the end of the sixteenth century. He had the advantage over Tycho Brahe in that he was a great mathematician, and he could profit from considerable advances that had taken place in mathematics during the sixteenth century. There was one further factor which curiously assisted that renovation of astronomy which

more

DOWNFALL OF ABISTOTLB AND PTOLEMY

63

we arc examining at the moment, and it was a factor of special

importance if the world was to get rid of the crystal spheres and see the planets merely floating in empty space. An Englishin 1600

man, William Gilbert, published a famous book on the magnet and laid himself open to the gibes of Sir Francis Bacon for being one of those people so taken up with their pet subject of research that they could only see the whole universe transposed into the terms of it. Having made a spherical magnet called a terrella, and having found that it revolved when placed in a magnetic field, he decided that the whole earth was a magnet, that gravity was a form of magnetic attraction, and that the principles of the magnet accounted for the workings of the Copernican system as a whole. Kepler and Galileo were both influenced by this view, and with Kepler it became an integral part of his system, a basis for a doctrine of almost universal gravitation. William Gilbert provided intermediate assistance therefore brought a gleam of light when the Aristotelian cosmos was breaking down and the heavenly bodies would otherwise have been left drifting blindly in

empty space.
"With all these developments behind him, therefore, the famous Kepler in the first thirty years of the seventeenth century "reduced to order the chaos of data" left by Tycho Brahe, and added to them just the thing that was needed mathematical genius. Like Copernicus he created another worldsystem which, since it did not ultimately prevail, merely remains as a strange monument of colossal intellectual power working on insufficient materials; and even more than

Copernicus lie was driven by a mystical semi-religious fervour a passion to uncover the magic of mete numbers and to
demonstrate the music of the spheres. In his attempt to disclose

mathematical sympathies in the machinery of the skies he tried

one moment to relate the planetary orbits to geometrical to make them correspond to figures, and at another moment musical notes. He was like the child who having picked a mass of wild flowers tries to arrange diem into a posy this way, and
at

tben

tries

another way, exploring the possible combinations

64.

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

and harmonies.

He has

and conclusions

to his credit a collection of discoveries some of them more ingenious than useful

from which we today can pick out three that have a permanent importance in the history of astronomy. Having discovered
in the
first pkce that the planets did not move at a uniform speed, he set out to find order somewhere, and came upon the law that if a line were drawn from a given planet to the sun

that line

would

describe equal areas in equal times.

At two

different points in his calculations it would appear that he made

mistakes, but the conclusion was happy, for the two errors had the effect of cancelling one another out. Kepler realised that the

pace of the planet was affected

by its nearness to the sun a him which in his view that the planets were point encouraged moved by a power actually emitted by the sun. His achievements would have been impossible without that tremendous improvement in observation which had taken pkce since the time of Copernicus. He left behind him great masses of papers which help the historian of science to realise better than in the case of his predecessors his actual manner of work and the stages by which he made his discoveries. It was when working on the data left by Tycho Brahe on the subject of the movements of Mars that he found himself faced with the problem of accounting for the extraordinary anomalies in the apparent orbit of this planet. We know how with colossal expenditure of energy he tried one hypothesis after another, and threw them away, until he reached a point where he had a vague knowledge of the shape required, decided that for purposes of calcuktion an ellipse might give him at any rate
approximate results, and then found that an ellipse was right a conclusion which he assumed then to be true also for the
other planets.

Some people have

said that

Kepler emancipated the world

from the myth of circular motion, but this is hardly true, for from the time of the ancient Ptolemy men had realised that
the planets themselves did not

move in regular circles. Copernicus had been aware that certain combinations of circular
motion would provide an
elliptical course,

and even

after

DOWNFALL OF ARISTOTLE AND PTOLEMY

Kepler

<5 5

we

find people accounting for the

new

elliptical

path

of die planets by reference to a mixture of circular movements. The obsession on the subject of circular motion was disappearing at this time, however, for other reasons, and chiefly because the existence of the hard crystal spheres was ceasing to be credible. It had been the spheres, the various inner wheels of the vast celestial machine, that had enjoyed the happiness of
circular
effect

motion, while the planet, recording the resultant

realised all

of various compound movements, had been

the time to be pursuing a more irregular course. It was the circular motion of the spheres themselves that symbolised the
perfection

of the skies, while the planet was like the rear lamp of

a bicycle

it might be the only thing that could actually be from the seen earth, and it dodged about in an irregular manner; but just as we know that it is really the man on the

bicycle who matters, though we see nothing save the red light, so the celestial orbs had formed the essential machinery of the skies, though only the planet that rode on their shoulder was
actually visible. Once the crystal spheres were eliminated, the circular motion ceased to be the thing that really mattered henceforward it was the actual path of the planet itself that

fixed one's attention. It was as though the man on the bicycle had been proved not to exist, and the rear lamp, the red light, was discovered to be sailing on its own account in empty space. The world might be rid of the myth of circular motion, but it was faced with more difficult problems than ever with these lamps let loose and no bicycle to attach them to. If the skies were like this, Tngt> had to discover why they remained in any order at all why the universe was not shattered by the senseless onrush and die uncontrollable collidings of countless
billiard-balls.

and

Kepler believed in order and in die harmony of numbers, it was in his attempt to fasten upon the music of the

spheres that he discovered, amongst many other things, that third of his series of planetary kws which was to prove both
useful

and permanent

die period

namely, the law that the squares of of the orbit were proportional to the cubes of their

66

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

in a sense

mean distances from the sun. By this time Kepler was mystical somewhat different from before he was no longer

looking for an actual music of the spheres which could be heard by God or man, or which should be loaded with mystical
content.
less

The music of the spheres was now nothing more or him than mathematics as such the purely mathematical sympathies that the universe exhibited so that what concerned hi-m was merely to drive ahead, for ever eliciting
to

mathematical proportions in the heavens. In fact, we may say that this worship of numerical patterns, of mathematical rela-

took the place of the older attempt, that was still terms of circles and a of the foundation kind of astronand became new spheres, that most properly can It is in this sense Kepler omy. particular be described as having provided an improvement upon the
tions as such,
visible in Galileo, to transpose the skies into

old superstition which had hankered only after circular motion. Furthermore, by the same route, Kepler became the aposde of a mechanistic system the first one of the seventeenth-century kind -realising that he was aspiring to turn the universe into pure clockwork, and believing that this was
the highest thing he could do to glorify God. It will be necessary to glance at the Keplerian system as a whole when we come
to the

problem of gravitation at a later stage of the story. We must note that, of course, Kepler believed in the motion of the earth, and showed that if this supposition were accepted the movement conformed to the kws which he had discovered
for the planets in general Besides Kepler's three planetary kws,

one final addition was

being made
spelt die

in this period to the collection of material that

doom of Ptolemy and Aristotle. In 1609 Galileo, of the discovery of the telescope in Holland, heard having created a telescope for Kinwlf^ though not before an actual
sample of the Dutch instrument had appeared in Venice. Instandy the sky was filled with new things and the conservative

view of die heavenly bodies became more completely untenable than ever. Two items were of particular importance, first, the discovery ofdie satellites ofJupiter provided a picture

DOWNFALL OF AMSTOTLE AND PTOLEMY

of what might be described
in
itself.

67

as a sort of miniature solar system Those who had argued that the moon obviously goes

round the earth, ergo in a regular heaven the celestial bodies must move about the same centre, were now confronted with the feet that Jupiter had its own moons, which revolved around both Jupiter and its attendants certainly moved it, while either around the sun as the Copernicans said, or together
around the earth according to the system of Ptolemy. Someas thing besides the earth could be shown to operate therefore

of motions taking place in the sky. Secondly, the visible and if Galileo's observations of sunspots them were correct they destroyed the basis for the view that the heavens were immaculate and unchanging. Galileo set out to demonstrate that the spots were, so to speak, part of the sun,
the centre

now became

actually revolving argue that they were

it, though the Aristotelians tried to an intervening cloud, and that some of Galileo's discoveries were really the result of flaws in the lenses

with

of

provoked by these taunts and at this point of the story the whole controversy with the Aristotelians flared up to an unprecedented degree of because the situation was ripe for it, but intensity, not only because Galileo, goaded to scorn by university colleagues and
his telescope.

Galileo

was

seriously

monks, turned his attention from questions ofmechanics to the of tie Aristotelian issue in general. He ranged larger problem over the whole field ofthat controversy, bringing to it an amazthe enemy in turn. ing polemical imagination, which goaded His intervention was particularly important because the at which there was bound to be a point had been reached die new astronomy could be married complete impasse unless somehow to the new science of dynamics. The Aristotelian and indeed was doomed to be cosmos

might

jeopardised,

the recent astronomical disclosures; yet these facts did not in die least help the enquirers over the original hurdledid not show diem how to square the movement of
destruction

by

the earth itself with die principles of Aristotelian mechanics or

how

to account for die motions in die sky. Copernicus had taken one course in treating die earth as virtually a celestial

68

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

body
the

* perfect sphere governed by the in higher reaches of the skies. operated Galileo complemented this by taking now the opposite course
in the Aristotelian sense

kws which

rather treating the heavenly bodies as terrestrial ones, regarding the planets as subject to the very kws which applied to balls sliding down inclined planes. There was something in
all this

which tended to the reduction of the whole universe to

uniform physical kws, and it is dear that the world was coming to be more ready to admit such a view. After his construction of a telescope in 1609 and the disit quickly revealed in the skies, rektions with the Peripatetics the worshippers of Aristotle at the university of Padua became intensely

turbing

phenomena which

Galileo's

bitter.

Though for a time he met with support and encouragein

ment in high pkces and even

Rome

itself,

the intensified

controversy led to the condemnation of the Copernican in 1616. This hypothesis by the Congregation of the Index

did not prevent Galileo from producing in the years 1625-29 the series of Dialogues on The Two Principal World-Systems which he designed to stand as his magnum opus and which

were to lead to his condemnation. This book traversed the whole range of anti-Aristotelian argument, not merely in the realm of astronomy, but in the field of mechanics, as
though seeking to codify the entire case against the adherents of the ancient system. It stands as a testimony to the fact that it was vain to attack the Aristotelian teaching merely at a single point vain to attempt in one corner of the field to reinterpret motion by the theory of impetus as the Parisian scholastics had done which was only like filling the gap in one jigsaw puzzle
with a piece out of a different jigsaw puzzle altogether. What was needed was a large-scale changeof design the substitution of one highly dovetailed system for another and in a sense it appeared to be the case that the whole Aristotelian synthesis had to be overturned at once. And that is why Galileo is so important; for, at the strategic moment, he took the lead in a policy of simultaneous attack on the whole front. The work in question was written in Italian and addressed

DOWNFALL OF ARISTOTLE AND PTOLEMY

69

to a public somewhat wider than the realm oflearning wider than that university world which Galileo had set out to attack.
Its

argument was conducted much more in the language of ordinary conversation, much more in terms of general disthan the

present-day reader would expect the themselves are remarkable for their literary skill and Diabgues
course,

polemical scorn. Galileo paid little attention to Kepler's astronomical discoveries remaining more Copernican in his
general views, more content to discuss purely circqlar motion in the skies, than the modern reader would expect to be the
case.

He has been regarded as unfair because he talked only of

principal world-systems, those

of Ptolemy and Coperniof systems Tycho Brahe and Johann Kepler entirely out of account. In his mechanics he was a litde less original than most people imagine, since, apart from the older teachers of the impetus-theory, he had had more immediate precursors, who had begun to develop the more modern views concerning the flight of projectiles, the law of inertia and the behaviour of falling bodies. He was not original when he showed that clouds and air and everything on the earth including falling bodies naturally moved round with the rotating earth, as part of the same mechanical system, and in their relations with one another were unaffected by the movement, so that like the objects in the cabin of a moving ship, they might appear motionless to anybody moving with them. His system of mechanics did not quite come out dear and dean, did not even quite explicitly reach the modern law of inertia, since here again he had not quite disentangled himself from obsessions concerning circular motion. It was chiefly in
cus, leaving the

two

new

his mechanics,

however, that Galileo made

his contributions

to the solution

of the problem of the

skies;

and here he came

had only to continue were able to in fact read back into his writings views which were only put forward later. Galileo's kind of mechanics had a strategic place in the story, for they had to be married to the astronomy of Kepler before die new scientific order was established. And the
so near to the
their

mark

that his successors

work on

the same lines

future students

70

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

new dynamics

themselves could not be developed merely out of a study of terrestrial motion. Galileo is important because he began to develop than with reference to the behaviour of the

heavenly bodies too.

At the end of everything Galileo failed to clinch his argument he did not exactly prove the rotation of the earth and
in the resulting situation a reader could either adopt his

whole

way of looking at things or could reject it in toto it was a question of taking over that whole realm of thought into which he had transposed the question. It was true that the
genuinely scientific mind could hardly resist the case as a whole, or refuse to enter into the new way of envisaging the
matter; but

when Galileo's mouthpiece was charged in the with having failed to prove his case having done Dialogues nothing more than explain away die ideas that made the movement of the earth seem impossible he seemed prepared to admit that he had not demonstrated the actual movement, and at the end of Book IH he brought out his secret weapon he declared that he had an argument which would really clinch
the matter.

We know that Galileo attached a crucial imporof

it.

tance to this argument, which appears in the fourth book, and, in fact, he thought of taking the tide of die whole work from
this particular part

His argument was that die tides demonstrated die movement of die earth. He made a long examination of them and said that they were caused, so to
speak,

by die shaking of die vessel which contained diem. This seemed to contradict his former argument that everything on die earth moved with die earth, and was as unaffected by the movement as die candle in the cabin of a moving ship. It was the combination of motions, however die daily rotation together with the annual movement, and the accompanying strains and changes of pace which produced the jerks, he and therefore set the tides in motion. Nothing can better said, show the transitional stage of the question even now than the fact that Galileo's capital proof of die motion of the earth was a great mistake and did nothing to bring the solution of the
question nearer.

DOWNFALL OF ARISTOTLE AND PTOLEMY

71

Aristotelian physics were clearly breaking down, and the Ptolemaic system was split from top to bottom. But not till the time of Newton did the satisfactory alternative system

appear; and though the more modern of the scientists tended to believe in the movement of the earth from this time, the
genera] tendency from about 1630 seems to have been to adopt the compromise system of Tycho Brahe. In 1672 a

writer could say that the student of the heavens had four different world-systems from which to choose, and there were

even talked of seven. Even at this kter date an could still come forward as Galileo had done and enquirer claim that at last he had discovered the capital argument. The long existence of this dubious, intermediate situation brings
the importance of Sir Isaac

men who

Newton
also, if

into

still

We

stronger

relief.

can better understand

we

cannot condone, the

treatment which Galileo had to suffer from the Church for

a presumption one.

which in his dialogues on The Two Principal had certainly displayed in more ways than he World-Systems
Although
Galileo's

most famous writings appeared in the of work which had been done at an earlier date. The second quarter of the seventeenth century a new represents really generation that of the disciples of Galileo, and particularly of those who followed him in his capacity as the founder of modern mechanics. La the 1630*8 and 1640*5 his arguments are carried to a further stage, and the essential theme of the story assembles itself around a group of interrelated workers whose centre seems to be Paris, though there are connections also with Holland and Italy.
1630*5 they were the fruits

The group in
in Holland, a

question includes Isaac

initiated a

Beeckman

(1588-1637)
to

man who stimulated others to take an interest in

number of ideas. Next

important problems and

him comes Marin Mersenne

(1588-1648), not himself a great a but central discoverer, depot of information and a general channel of communication a man who provoked enquiries, collected results, set one scientist against another, and incited
his colleagues to controversy.

Next again in point of age comes

72

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

and writer of an encyclopaedic knowpossessed him comes Ren6 the And after of time. of sciences the ledge in Descartes (1596-1650), though many respects he stands out as a lonely worker, mathematician, physicist and philosopher all in one. Gilles de Roberval (1602-75) comes next, and he is
Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), a philosopher
scientific biographies,

who

an original figure,

essentially

a mathematician; while Galileo's

also comes into the pupil, Evangelista Torricelli (1608-47), the famous Pascal, and also Christian picture on occasion. Even

Huygens, were brought into contact with the circle as young men in the latter part of the period, and helped to form the bridge to alater generation, their fathers having been connected
with the group. The Englishman, Thomas Hobbes, first began to develop his views on die physical universe after he had made
contact with Mersenne and his friends.

These are the people who carry the argument a stage further. Though they are disciples of Galileo in the field of mechanics
they are at

of

inclined to adopt a cautious attitude in respect his cosmology. Some of them fed that Galileo has not
first

established the case for Copernicus,

though they

may like the

Copernican system because it aesthetic than the ancient one.

over
is

is

more economical and more

What they have chiefly taken of way mathematising a problem, and what of all affects them most perhaps is the establishment of the modern principle of inertia the thesis that things will conGalileo's

tinue their movement ina straight line until something actually intervenes to check or to alter their motion. This principle is

important because
science

it

provides the starting-point for a

new

of dynamics.

continued on the problem of felling bodies and of hydrostatics; and the atmosphere itself was questions now being examined on mechanical principles. Round about

Work was

on

1630, in various regions independently, work was conducted on the assumption that the air has weight; die problem of the possible existence of a vacuum became alive again; and there occurred those developments which carry us from Galileo to
Torrkelli's

famous experiment

to the barometer and the

DOWNFALL OF ARISTOTLE AND PTOLEMY

air-pump. The old

73

way of

explaining things through the

assumed existence of

secret sympathies in various

forms of

matter, or through nature's "abhorrence" of a vacuum, was derided only mechanical explanations would serve. The

magnet was still a serious problem, because it seemed to confirm theideaofsympatheticattraction; butthere was now a tendency to believe that it would some day be explicable on mechanical One was now less inclined to believe in the ability principles. of the magnet to recognise an adulterous woman or to bring about peace between man and wife. The war on Aristotle still continued; and this meant also war against medieval scholasticism and against the modern conservative followers of Aristotle, the Peripatetics, who
retained their place in the universities even after this period was over. But the warfare was equally against the so-called

naturalism of the Renaissance

the belief in pan-psychism

and

animism, which gave everything a soul and saw miracles everywhere in nature. It was partly in the name of religion itself that Renaissance naturalism was attacked, and the Christians rationalism by their jealous deterhelped the cause of modern mination to sweep out of the world all miracles and magic
except their own.

Some of this new

generation of scientists

could not be vinargued that Christian miracles themselves normal workings that the assumed be dicated unless it could

of the universe were regular and subject to law. In the circle around Mersenne in the 1630*5 the idea of a complete mechanistic interpretation of the universe came out into the open, and its chief exponents were the most religious men in the to prove the group that we are discussing. They were anxious to vindicate adequacy and the perfection of Creation anxious
God's
rationality.

The advent of tie printed book on the one hand, and of the woodcut and the engraving on the other, had greatly of scientific communication from transformed the
the time

problem of the Renaissance, though even

in the sixteenth

century

work

local the effect of original surprising to see how the corremight be. Before the close of the century
it is

74

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

spondence between

scientific

workers became significant

particularly perhaps that between the astronomers, who found it valuable to compare the observations that were made in one

place and another. From the time of Galileo the development of modern science appears much more as a general movement; it is much less capable of reconstruction as a case of isolated endeavour. The experimental method became quite the fashion amongst groups of people both inside the universities and outside them; and men who had previously cultivated antiquity or collected coins began to regard it as a mark of culture to patronise science and experiments too, and to collect

Amongst the clergy and the university teachers, the doctors and the gentry, there would emerge enthusiastic amateurs, some of them attracted by the love of marvels, by mechanical tricks and toys, or by
rare plants or curiosities in nature.

the fantastic side of nature. Indeed, a good number of the famous names of the seventeenth century would seem to have

belonged to this class. To a certain degree the

that period;

scientist

made

use of the forms of

communication which already existed for other purposes in and the antecedents of the scientific societies are the literary dubs of the sixteenth century and the groups of people who assembled to discuss philosophy at the time of the Renaissance. It was customary for people to meet in informal societies and read news-letters which had been written from correspondents abroad letters which would describe not only political events but recent publications and movements ofideas. Scientific works and even experiments would come to be included in the readings and discussions. In some cases, those who were interested in science would feel that the news was too political, and would try to make the proceedings more scientific or would be inclined to break away and form a scientific cirde of their own. One purely group at the house of the French historian De Thou had been composed of sdiolars, men of letters and members of the professions, and later, for a number of decades, it sat under the brothers Dupuy, serving as a bureau for the exchange of foreign news and being at

DOWNFALL OF ARISTOTLE AND PTOLEMY

times largely political in
tific
its interest. It

75

did not always

move on

the same course, however, and

we find members of the scien-

Mersenne and Gassendi, for example amongst those who attended its gatherings. Henry Oldenburg, later Secretary of the Royal Society, went to the meetings in 1659-60. Between 1633 and 1642 weekly conferences were held at the house of Th^ophraste Renaudot in Paris, and here
a weekly pamphlet was published. They were called Conferences de Bureau d'Adresse, and the discussions dealt with

movement

air,

concepts such as those of First Matter and Cause, subjects like water, atoms, dew and fire, mythical creatures like the unicorn and the phoenix, but also novels, dancing, the educa-

tion

of women and the

serious

status

of trade. These conferences had

late 1640*5.

an influence in England in the

groups or societies or academies existed actual scientific workers from the very beginning of amongst the seventeenth century, however; and here the priority seems
to belong to a circle in

More

Rome called the Accademie dei Lincei,

when

which ran from 1600 to 1657$ with an interval before 1609 they were broken up because they were suspected of poisonings and incantations. They met at the house of their
patron, a

Duke, but hoped to

establish their

own museum,

and printing office, as library, laboratory, botanical garden well as to organise subordinate branches in various parts of
the world.
earliest

From 1609 their written proceedings form the recorded publication of a scientific society, Galileo

himself was an active member, and he made a microscope for the society, which published one or two of his important

works.
Similar historical significance attaches to the conferences

founded by Mersenne in 1635 and kept up by him until his death in 1648, conferences which brought together with more or less regularity the mathematicians and physicists, Gassendi, elder and the younger Desargues, Roberval, Descartes, the
Pascal,

and many others. Mersenne, we are told, is responsible more than any other single person for the establishment of the intellectual centre of Europe in Paris during the middle

76

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE
himself conducted a

third

of the seventeenth century.

He

universal correspondence, passed problems from one scientist to another, submitted the suggestions of one worker to the

of a rival, established relations abroad and created the most important system of scientific communication then in existence. Much of the essential history of science in the seventeenth century has to be worked out from the massive corcriticism

respondence of
scientific

men

like Mersenne. In the

more

definitely

gatherings the

work of individual

scientists

would be

checked, their experiments

to criticism, and their conclusions

would be repeated and subjected would become the subject

of debate.

CHAPTER

FIVE

THE EXPERIMENTAL METHOD IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

IT

not always realised to what a degree the sciences in the middle ages were a matter for what we today would describe
is

as literary transmission,

and came into European history as a from ancient and imperial Rome. Nobody can Greece heritage the actual state of scientific examine knowledge in, say, the
tenth century A.0. without realising what had been lost both in scholarship and in technique indeed, in civilisation as a

whole

since the days of ancient Athens and ancient Alexandria, or even since the time when St. Augustine flourished.

Nobody who

has any picture of Europe as it emerged from the dark ages, or any impression of our Anglo-Saxon forefathers one or two centuries before the Norman Conquest, will

imagine that the world was then in a condition to discover by its own enquiries and experiments the scientific knowledge which Athens and Alexandria had attained at a time when
their civilisation

was at its peak. Actual contact with the science

of the ancient world had to be re-established by the unearthing of texts and manuscripts, or by the acquisition of translations

and commentaries from peoples like the Arabs or the subjects of the Byzantine Empire, who already possessed, or had never lost, the contact. That process of recovery reached its climax

and came to full consciousness in the period ofwhat we call the Renaissance. It would have taken many hundreds of years more
if the

middle ages had had, so to speak, to find the same things

out for themselves

to re-create so much of the development of science by independent enquiry and unaided research. All this helps to explain why so much of the history of

medieval thought rests on a framework of dates which are in the literary transmission of ancient science and really dates
scholarship. Historians find it

of primary importance to
77

dis-

78

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

cover at what date such and such a

suscitated in western
treatise

Europe; or

work of Aristotle was rewhen this or that scientific

an Arabian
translation,

became

available through

and

better still when western Europe was able to acquire the authentic text in the original Greek. The process was not stopped by any reluctance on the part of Catholic Europe to

learn

even the pagan Greeks.

from the infidel Arabians or the Byzantine schismatics or Nor is it known that there was any middle which the ages missed any great store opportunity of science that they turned their backs upon because it was
with paganism or
infidelity.

tainted

Because tke4ntdKgentsia

in thejniddle^es
ship

was a^lerical one_and theJnteUectu^leader-

was

religious in character, such natural science as existed

was the more likely to keep the subordinate pkce it had always had in a larger philosophical system what we call "natural
scientists'*

could hardly be said to have existed then, in any

significant sense of the term. Because the purely literary transmission was so important, that thing which we call science, and

which might rather be called natural philosophy, was first and foremost a series of ancient texts upon which one commentary after another would be compiled, often by people writing, so to speak, at a desk. If even at die Renaissance philology was considered the queen of the sciences, this was because the man who was master of the classical languages did in feet hold the key position. We can still read the letters of humanists who cursed their fete because they had to ruin their style by translating works of physics from the Greek. So in the middle ages men found themselves endowed with an explanation of the physical universe and the workings of nature which had fallen upon them out of the blue, and which they had taken over full-grown and ready-made. And they were infinitely more the slaves of that intellectual system than if they had actually invented it themselves, developing it out of their own original researches and their own wrestlings with truth. There even seems to have been a perceptible hurdle here and there where there was a gap in the transmission where patches of ancient scholarship had still remained undiscovered.

EXPERIMENTAL METHOD IN SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

79

Wehavealready noticed, for example, certain tendencies in fourteenth-century Paris which are considered to have been nipped in the bud because of a deficiency in mathematics a deficiency

somewhat

rectified

by a

further recovery

of ancient

texts in

the period of the Renaissance. Under such conditions the chief openings for independent thought the chief controversies in the sixteenth century even occurred at those places where the ancient writers were found to have differed from one another.

And though in the kter middle ages there were men who were
doing experiments and pushing back the frontiers of thought, they were, for the most part, like the theorists of the impetus,
only playing on the margin of that Aristotelian system which
in the year 1500 must have appeared at least as valid to a rational thinker as it could have done fifteen hundred years
before.

were

in the kter middle ages who and nature, carefully observing improving greatly in the of their these tended to compile encyobservations, accuracy

Though

there

were men

descriptive matter. "When there was anyttese men would not elicit thing Aat.^eededL to be their theories from the observations themselves they would
clopaedias

of purely

^^l^ed

still

draw on that whole system of explanation which had been provided for them by the ancient philosophy. Sir Francis
Bacon, early in the seventeenth century, complained of this divorce between observation and explanation, and it was part

of his purpose to show how the latter ought to arise out of the
former.

"So far as one can

acquired at the

see,

the mathematics of ancient Alexandria,

time of the Renaissance, and the works of

generally avaikble in transktion in 1543, represent the last pocket of the science of antiquity which was recovered in time to be an ingredient or a factor in the forma-

Archimedes,

made

of our modern science. As we have already seen, this was body of knowledge which, so far as one can judge, it was necessary to recover before all the components of the scientific movement could be assembled together and the autonomous of a new crowd of pioneers in efforts of scientific enquirers
tion

research

could properly be put into gear.

And

it is

remark-

80

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

began to move, once all the ingredihad at last been collected together. Early in to so ents, speak, the seventeenth century, as we have already seen, the ancient
able

how quickly things

explanation of the universe

the

framework of existing science

was^palpably teaaking^down. There^ivas^eginning to emerge what contemporaries dearly recognised as a scientific

revolution,

and what to us

is

the

dawn of modern science.

by

Now,
science

if

we are

we must

seeking to understand this birth of modern not imagine that everything is explained

the resort to an experimental

mode of procedure,

or even that

experiments were any great novelty. It was commonly argued, even by the enemies of the Aristotelian system, that that

system

could never have been founded except on the of observations and experiments a reminder necesfooting sary perhaps in the case of those university teachers of the sixitself

teenth

and seventeenth
call

centuries

who

still

clung to the old

routine and

might

writers.

may be surprised to note, however, that in one of the dialogues of Galileo, it is Simplicius, the spokesman of the the butt of the whole piece who defends the Aristotelians
experimental method of Aristotle against what is described as the mathematical method of Galileo. And elsewhere it is the

We

went on commentating too much (in what we a "literary" manner) upon the works of the ancient

man
that

speaking as the mouthpiece of Galileo himself who says though Aristotle only gives reasoning to prove that such and such a thing must be the case, still this is only Aristotle's of demonstrating the thesis the actual discovery of it

way

must haye been the result ofexperiment. We have already seen how the medical students and the medical university of Padua were ahead of most other people in their regard for experiment, and the most remarkable result of the experimental method that we have met with so far in these lectures is William Harvey's treatise on the circuktion of the blood. Yet it was not in the biological sciences that the Aristotelian way of attacking the problem was to receive its spectacular overthrow. It was not there that the scientific revolution found its centre or its pivot on the contrary, we shall have to study

EXPERIMENTAL METHOD IN SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

later the effects

81

of the

scientific

revolution as they

come by

reflection, so to

which experiment reigned supreme which was centred in laboratories even before the beginning of modern times was remarkably slow, if not the slowest of all, in reaching its modern form. It was long before alchemy became chemistry, and chemistry itself became in the full sense of the word quantitative in its method, instead of being qualitative, after die manner of ancient science. It may be interesting in this connection to glance at what is the most famous of the scientific revoluperhaps experiment tion what an historian of science declared in 1923 to be "one of the outstanding achievements of scientific history". It comes from the vague story of a disciple and a somewhat romantic biographer of Galileo, who said that his teacher had dropped two bodies of different weights from the tower of Pisa to prove that Aristotle was wrong in his view that they would
the science
at paces proportional to their weights. Later historians of science filled in die details, so that in a work published in 1918
fall

logical and fact that the science in

speak (and at a second remove), upon the bioother sciences. What is more remarkable still is the

was attained, and we learn how this martyr of science climbed the leaning tower of Pisa with a one-hundred-pound cannon ball under one arm and a one^pound ball under the other. Even Dr. Singer repeated the story in 1941 in his history of science, where he calls it "the most famous of experiments" and attributes it to the year 1591. None of the
the final precision

crowd who are supposed to have observed the experiment gave any evidence on its behalf though, as we shall see, there was a particular reason why they should have done so if they had actually been witnesses and the writings of Galileo give no confirmation of the story. On the contrary, the writings of Galileo showed that he had tried the experiment several
vast
his juvenile

times in his youth with the opposite result he said in one of works that he had tested the matter on many
occasions

from a high tower and that in his experience a lump of lead would very soon leave a lump of wood behind. The supposed experiment had actually been tried by another

82
scientist,

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

Simon Stevin of Bruges, and was recorded in a book

from a height of thirty

published in 1605. Stevin, however, dropped balls of lead only feet, and, considering how little was
in those days about the effects of such things as airresistance, the Aristotelians were perhaps not unreasonable in

known

saying that the result was not conclusive experiment from a great height.
Galileo,

you needed to try the

in his youth indulged in curious speculations of falling bodies, ought to have been the behaviour concerning in a position to appreciate that argument; for, again in one of

who

works, he had even insisted that it was useless to drop from the top of a tower the height would need to be doubled before it was possible to form a proper judgment, he said. To crown the comedy, it was an Aristotelian, Coresio, who in 1612 claimed that previous experiments had been carried out from too low an altitude. In a work published in that year he described how he had improved on all previous attempts he had not merely dropped bodies from a high window, he had gone to the very top of the tower of Pisa. The larger body had fallen more quickly than the smaller one on this occasion, and the experiment, he claimed, had proved Aristotle to have been right all the time. Coresio's work was
his early

bodies

published inFlorence, and it does not appear that either Galileo or anybody else challenged the truth of the assertion, though
the date
Galileo.
is

long

after that

of the

alleged incident in the

life

of

In reality, the predecessors of Galileo had for some time been gradually approaching the settlement of the problem on differ-

they had moved timidly and had argued that different weights of the same substance would fall simultaneously; though there might be a difference in pace,
ent lines altogether.

At

first

they

said, if the

comparison were between different substances

altogether. Galileo, in feet, uses the argument employed by his predecessors they had reasoned that two tiles each weighing

a pound and dropped

ground

at precisely the
still

end, ttey would

same moment would fall to the same time. Fastened together, end to descend at the pace at which they had
at the

EXPERIMENTAL METHOD IN SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

fallen

83

when dropped merely

on the top of the

side

by

side.

And

if

one were

fastened

would not press down other, more heavily than before, and therefore it would do nothing to press its lower partner to fall any more quickly either. In
still it

other words, the predecessors of Galileo had reasoned their way

Galileo
to the answer to this particular problem, and neither they nor showed any willingness to alter the conclusion merely

because the experimental method had failed to confirm their judgment. In his youth Galileo had held the view for a time
that falling bodies did not accelerate accelerated at the beginning of their fall,

he

at least, they only said, until they got

into proper going form. Even on this point he was not to be put off by mere observation. It was in this connection that he

refused to be deterred

by the results of an experiment made from a tower, and said that it would be necessary to drop things from twice that height before the experiment could be regarded as decisive. As an appendix to the whole story I may note the existence of a controversy on the question whether Aristotle himself held the views for which this crucial experiment was supposed to have brought him into discredit. The matter is irrelevant, however, as at any rate the Aristotelians of the seventeenth century held these views and accepted the issue
as

fair

one.

In connection with this and many similar problems, it would

be somewhere near the truth if one were to say that for about has been considerable comment on what are fifty years there
called the "thought-experiments" of Galileo. In some of his works one can hardly fail to notice the way in which he would
assert:

do this thing, then this other particular thing would happen"; and on some occasions it would appear to be the case that he was wrong in his inference on some occasions nobody stops to worry if one of the parties in the dialogues even makes the point that the experiment has never been tried. It is curious also how often Galileo makes use of these "thought-experiments** in regard to those points of
"If you were to

mechanics that affect the question of the rotation of the earth

how

often he resorts to

them when he

is

meeting the argu-

84

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

ments that were the chief stock-in-trade of the Aristotelians. He discusses what would happen if you were to drop a stone

from the top of the mast of a ship (a) when the vessel was moving and (b) when the vessel was at rest. Much kter, in 1641, a considerable sensation was caused by Gassendi, who and published the result, which actually tried the experiment on this occasion confirmed the thesis of Galileo. There was in France a younger contemporary and admirer of Galileo, called Mersenne, who, though a disciple of the great Italian in mechanics, was unable to feel convinced by the arguments which had been put forward in favour of the rotation of the earth. He came across Galileo's "thought-experiments'* in this field and

on one occasion after another we find him making the significant comment: "Yes, only the experiment has never been tried." As, kter, he began to show himself more sympathetic
to the

now it was

Copernican point of view, Mersenne revealed that even a different form of reasoning that appealed to him

a type of argument belonging to a period long before the time of Galileo. He said: "If I could be convinced that God

and always did things in the shortest

easiest way, then I should fact that the world does the to have recognise certainly move." The scientific revolution is most significant, and its achievements are the most remarkable, in the fields of astronomy and

mechanics. In the former realm the use of experiment in any to have had ordinary sense of the word can hardly be expected relevance. In regard to the ktter we may recall what we

any

observed when we were dealing with the problem of motion

how it seemed reasonable to say that the great achievement was

due to a transposition taking pkce in the mind of the enquirer himself. Here was a problem which only became manageable when in a certain sense it had been "geometrised ", so that

motion had come to be envisaged as occurring in the emptiness of Archimedean space. Indeed, the modern kw of inertia the modern picture of bodies continuing their motion in a straight line and away to infinity was hardly a thing which the human mind would ever reach by an experiment, or by any attempt

EXPERIMENTAL METHOD IN SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

to

85

in any case. It of seeing a purely geometrical body sailing off into a kind of space which was empty and neutral utterly indifferent to what was happening like a blank sheet of paper, equally passive whether we draw on it a vertical or a

make

observation

more photographic,

depended on the

trick

horizontal line.

In the case of the Aristotelian system the situation had been

had always been impossible to forget that certain had a special "pull ". There were certain parts of the universe directions which it was fundamental to regard as privileged directions. All lines tended to be attracted to the centre of the earth. Under this system it was not possible to make the a simple required abstraction, and, for example, to draw
different
it

body flying off at a tangent flying and rectitude into infinite space. It was of the necessary that the line should curl round to the bottom it down, was universe the for dragging the pulling very paper, of the earth. At this point body all tie time towards the centre
off with determination

a straight line to represent

even Galileo was imperfect. He did not attain the full conception of utterly empty, utterly directionless, Euclidean space. That is why he failed to achieve the perfect formulation of the modern law of inertia, for he believed that the kw of inertia was wrong what applied to motion in a circle; and here he we call "inertial motion" must be movement along a straight
line.

When he talked of a perfectly spherical ball riding off to

on a perfectly smooth horizontal plane, he showed his limitations; for he regarded the horizontal plane as being centre of the earth, and pictured it as a equidistant from the so that he could seize plane that actually went round the earth; this as a form of circular motion. And, though he even upon was not finally unaware of the fact that a body might fly off from the circular course at a tangent, in general he was perhaps
infinity

too "Copernican" even in his mechanics a litde too * kind ofmotion, ready to regard circular motion as the 'natural** the thing which did not require to be explained. In reality, under the terms of the new physics, it was precisely this cir-

little

cular

motion which became "violent" motion in the Aris-

86

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE
that
is

totelian sense

of the word. The stone

swung round

in

a sling requires a constant force to draw it to the centre, and needs the exertion of violence to keep it in a circular path and
it from flying off at a tangent. The men who succeeded Galileo made a cleaner affair of this business of geometrising a problem, and drew their diagrams in a space more free, more completely empty, and more

prevent

can see at times how the new science thoroughly neutral. of had to dispose mental obstructions in the achievement of
this task, as

We

when

assumed to be

must meet

at

two vertical sides of a balance were and the objection was raised that they parallel die centre of the earth. It was easy to reply:
the

"Very

well, let us leave the centre

of the earth out of the

picture, let us suspend the balance up in the sky, far above the sun itself. Let us take it even an infinite distance away if

necessary.

Then we can be

satisfied that

the lines are really

parallel/* If there was a threat that the diagram should be spoiled by the operation of gravity they would say: "Away with gravity ! Let us imagine the body placed in heaven, where

there is neither

as indifferent as right

up nor down where up and down, in fact, are and left." It was possible to argue:

"Surely God can put a body in totally empty space, and we can watch it moving where there is nothing in the universe to
attract

The
policy,

or repel or in any way interfere with it." Aristotelian system had never been conducive to such a

which was necessary for the "geometrising" of problems, and which rendered science itself more amenable to a
mathematical

mode of treatment.

It

had not even been con-

ducive to such a simple thing as "the parallelogram offerees", though Simon Stevin may not have been absolutely original

when he produced this device while man. The Aristotelian system had
die composition

Galileo

was

still

a young

discouraged the idea of

of motions, and was uncongenial to any mathematical treatment of the path which a body would
follow

when one motion happened

another.

We

Peripatetics

to be complicated by have seen how, in die case of projectiles, the had been unwilling to consider a mixture of

EXPERIMENTAL METHOD IN SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

motions, and had preferred to regard the

87

body as driving forspent,

It

wards

in a straight line until that

motion was

quickly turning to drop vertically to the ground. the new school which had begun to curve the

and then had been path of the

moving body and produced the view that in the mathematical world (which for a time they confused with the real world) the
projectile described a parabola. And they worked out by mathematics the angle at which a must stand in order to fire the

gun

farthest; leaving their conclusion to

be tested afterwards by

actual experiment. All this helps to explain why Galileo could be in the position of defending what he called the mathematical

method even

against the experimental system

of the

better

Aristotelians. It helps to explain also Sir Francis Bacon, for all his love of experiments, was in a certain sense inadequate

why

for the age, and proved to be open to criticism in the seventeenth century because of his deficiency in mathematics. In a
certain sense

he saw the importance of mathematics the of necessity making calculations on the results of experiments in physics, for example and on one occasion he even made an emphatic statement in regard to this matter. What he lacked was the geometer's eye, the power to single out those things which could be measured, and to turn a given scientific problem into a question of mathematics. It was the extension of the new method that was to prove exceptionally important, however. Having conceived of motion in its simplest form motion as taking place in this empty directionless space where nothing whatever could interfere with it and no resisting medium could put a check on it the modern school could then reverse the process and collect back the things they had thrown away. Or, rather, we must into their say, they could draw more and more of these things to the same and them amenable world make geometrised kind of mathematical treatment. Things like air-resistance, which had been read out of the diagram at the first stage of the argument, could now be brought back into the picture, but brought back in a different way no longer as despots but as subjugated servants. These things themselves were now caught

88

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

method and turned into problems of and the same mode .of treatment could be applied geometry; to the problem of gravity itself. The very method which the new science had adopted was one that directed the mind to more fields of enquiry and suggested new lines of experiment attracting the student to things that would never have caught the attention of the Aristotelian enquirer. And the new avenues which were opened up in this way, even for experiment, were to carry the natural sciences away from that world of common-sense phenomena and ordinary appearances in which not only the Aristotelians but also the theorists of the impetus had done so much of their thinking. In particular, the mind was to be constantly directed in future to those things and was to apply itself to those problems which were amenable to measurement and calculation. very much to the point when he said that shape, size,jjuantity and motion jRrere jihe primarynqualities whicBTthe scientist should seek to examine when he was enquiring jbtojpven bodies. Tastes, colours, sounds and smells were a matter x>fcomparative indifference to him they would not exist, he asserted, if human beings had not possessed noses and ears, tongues and eyes. In other words, science was to confine its attention to those things which were capable of measurement and calculation. Other objects which might be unamenable to such
into the mathematical

mathematical treatment in the

first

instance

might

still

in the

course of time be resolved into the same fundamentals.

They
so,

might be
at

translated or transposed into

something

else,

and

of the argument, might become capable of measured and being weighed in turn. In any case, it is essential that our interest in the experimental method as such should not cause us to overlook a matter of which the seventeenth century itself was clearly conscious namely, the importance of mathematics in the developments that were taking place. When the interpretation of the whole scientific revolution is in question, certain facts which seem to have a bearing upon this issue strike the outsider as peculiarly significant. We have already met with a
a
later stage

EXPERIMENTAL METHOD IN SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

89

number ofimportant aspirations and developments that belong to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries hints of a more modern kind of mechanics for example, foreshadowing* of
analytical

what we

call

geometry, discussions which seem to point towards mathematical physics, and even intuitions con-

natural sciences.

cerning the value of the purely quantitative method in the are told, however, that these interesting

We

developments were brought to a

halt,

apparently because the

middle ages lacked the necessary mathematics the world had to wait until more of the mathematics of the ancient world had been recovered at the Renaissance* It would appear that there can exist a case of what might be called stunted development in the history of science. A movement may be checked, almost before it has cut any ice, if one of the requisite conditions haplearn that Kepler's discovery

pens to be lacking for the time being. In a similar way, we of the laws of planetary motion

was made possible only by the fact that he inherited and developed further for himself the study of conic sections, a study in which he was famous in his day. And certainly Tycho Brake's astronomical observations became a revolutionary factor in history only when the mathematical mind of aKepler had set to work upon that collection of materials. At a later date the same phenomenon recurs and we leajrn that the problem of gravitation would never have been solved the whole Newtonian synthesis would never have been achieved without, first, the analytical geometry of Ren Descartes and, secondly, the infinitesimal calculus of Newton and Leibnitz. Not only, then, did the science of mathematics make a remarkable development in the seventeenth century, but in dynamics and in physics die sciences give the impression that they were pressing upon the frontiers of the mathematics all the time. Without the achievements of the mathematicians the
It

scientific revolution, as

we

know it, would have been impossible.

was true in general that where geometrical and mathematical methods could be easily and direcdy appliedr-as possibly in optics there was very considerable development
in the seventeenth century, In the period we have now readied

po

ORIGINS OP

MODERN

SCIENCE
had
attained

in the age of Galileo arithmetic and algebra something like their modern external appearance

the French-

man, Francois

Vifcte, for

example, had established the use of

letters to represent numbers; the Fleming, Simon Stevin, was introducing the decimal system for representing fractions; various symbols, now familiar to students, were coming into

use between the fifteenth century and the time of Descartes. At the same time aids to mathematical calculation a matter of

importance to students of the heavenly bodies were being created, such as John Napier's logarithms, developed between

and

1595 and 1614, and other devices for simplifying multiplication division the "bones", for example, which in the seven-

teenth century would appear to have had greater renown even than his logarithms. It has been pointed out that as algebra and

geometry had developed separately the former amongst the Hindus and the latter amongst the Greeks the marriage of the
two, "the application of algebraic methods to the geometric field", was "die greatest single step ever made in the progress
its

of the exact sciences". The crucial development here came to climax in the time of Descartes. Descartes put forward the
sciences involving order

view that

and measure

whether the

measure affected numbers, forms, shapes, sounds or other objects are related to mathematics. "There ought therefore to be a general science namely, mathematics," lie said, "which should explain all that can be known about order and measure,
considered independently of any application to a particular subject." Such a science, he asserted, would surpass in utility

and importance all the other sciences, which in reality depended upon it. Kepler said that just as the ears are made for sound and the eyes for colour, the mind of man is meant to consider quantity and it wanders in darkness when it leaves the realm of quantitative thought. Galileo said that the book of the universe was written in mathematical language, and its alphabet consisted of triangles, circles and geometrical figures. There is no doubt that, in both Kepler and Galileo, Platonic and Pythagorean influences played an important part in the
story.

EXPERIMENTAL METHOD IN SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

91

If all these things are kept in mind we can see why the resort to experiment in the natural sciences now came to have direction, came at last to be organised to some purpose. For centuries it

had been an

affair

of wild and almost pointless

flutter-

ing

a thing in

many respects irrelevant to the true progress of

understanding sometimes the most capricious and fantastic part of the scientific programme. There had been men in the

who had said that experiment was the thing that or had realised that behind the natural philosophy of mattered, the Greeks there had been experiment and observation in the
middle ages
first place.

But

that

was not enough, and even

in the seven-

teenth century a man like Sir Francis Bacon, who harped on the need for experiments but failed to hitch this policy on to that general mathematising mode ofprocedure which I have

was early recognised to have missed the point In the thirteenth century, a writer called Peregrine produced a work on the magnet, and many of his experiments prepared
described,

the

way for the remarkable book on the magnet produced by

Gilbert's

William Gilbert in 1600. The chief influence that came from book, however, emerged from his cosmic specula-

tions based on the thesis that the earth was itself a great magnet, and Sir Francis Bacon was ready to seize upon the fact that this was not a hypothesis demonstrated by experiment, the thesis did not arise in the appointed way out of the experiments themselves. Even Leonardo da Vinci had tended to cast around here and there, like a schoolboy interested in everything, and when he drew up a plan of experiments in advance as in die case of his projected scheme of study on the subject of flying

we can hardly fail to realise that here are experiments, but not
the

modern experimental method. Neither the medieval period nor the Renaissance was lacking in the ingenuity or the mechftniral slcill for nrKvWn technical achievement, as can be seen from the yntawng contrivances they produced even where no urgent utilitarian purpose provided the incentive. Yet it is not
until the seventeenth century that the resort to experiments

comes to be tamed and harnessed so to speak, and is brought under direction, like a great machine getting into gear.

92

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

Even when one

primarily as

is

interested in the scientific revolution

a transformation in thought, one cannot ignore

those wider changes in the world which affect man's thinking or alter the conditions under which this thinking takes place. It

coming to be realised that the history of technology plays a larger part in the development of the scientific movement than it was once understood to do; and in feet the history of
is

science
as

bound to be imperfect if it is regarded too exclusively the history of scientific books. Some of the influence of
is

industry and engineering

locate, as yet,

upon scientific thought is difficult to and might well be difficult to prove. But apart from the transference of ideas and techniques, there must have been an appreciable effect of a subtle kind upon the way in which problems were tackled and upon man's feeling for things, his feeling perhaps even for matter itself. A series of famous sixteenth-century books has put on record the technical progress which had then been achieved in various fields in mining and metallurgy, for example; and some of this work must be regarded as preparing the way for modern chemistry, which it would be wrong to imagine as springing out of alchemy alone. On this technical side, and especially in the field of mechanics and hydrostatics, there is no doubt that Archimedes had a further influence on the course of the scientific revolution we may almost regard him as the patron saint of the mechanically-minded and of the modern experimenters in physics. At first there was a considerable gulf between the practical man, and the theorisers. The navigators would be too ignorant of mathematics, while the mathematicians lacked any experience of the sea. Those who worked out the trajectory of projectiles, or the appropriate angle of fire, might be far removed from the men who actually fired the guns in time of war. The map-makers, the surveyors, the engineers had long

some mathematics, however; the Portuguese dishad needed science to help them when they sailed south of the equator; William Gilbert had associated with navigators; and Galileo speaks of the kind of problems which
required coverers
arose in the sHp-building yards at Venice, or in connection

EXPERIMENTAL METHOD IN SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

mines. Indeed,

93

with the handling of artillery, and the pumping of water in

it is proper to picture Galileo as passing his time in a sort of workshop with trained mechanics as his even making things for assistants, for ever making things

and carrying out experiments, so that in him the mechcombined with the philosopher to produce a modern type of scientist. It has been argued that the growing number of mechanical at large had induced also a sort of specialobjects in the world ised interest or a modern attitude of mind an interest in the sheer question of the way in which things worked, and a disthe same preoccupation. position to look upon nature with cases in which a strategic experiment famous the from Apart might bring the solution of a particular problem, Galileo of having experimented so constantly as gives the impression to gain an intimacy with movement and structures he has watched the ways of projectiles, the operation of levers and
sale

anic or artisan

of balls on inclined planes, until he seems to know them, so to speak, from the inside in the way that some men know their dogs. And clocks worked by wheels were still a surprisingly new thing in the world when there appeared in
the behaviour
the fourteenth century the suggestion that the heavenly bodies

might be like a piece of clockwork. The early propaganda on behalf of the scientific movement laid remarkable stress on the utilitarian results that were expected from it; and this was one of the grounds on which the scientists or the scientific societies called for the patronage of kings. Sometimes there seems to be a curious correspondence between the technical needs of the
even, when the age and the preoccupations ofscientific enquirers, as in the case to locate us or is hard precise connection escapes

sixteenth century and hydraulic problems, Much ofthe attention ofthe Royal seventeenth. in the perhaps, of was its in actually directed to problems early years Society

of ballistics in die

practical utility.

And for a remarkably long

period one of the

to the technicians and scientists topics constantly presented was a matter of urgent necessity the question of the finding of measuring longitude. It is not surof a
satisfactory

way

94
prising that

ORIGINS OF

MODERN SCIENCE

much of the work of students in our time has been

turned to the history of technology. One thing becomes significant in the seventeenth century and that is the creation of scientific instruments, especially
difficult

measuring instruments; and it is hard for us to realise how things must have been in earlier centuries without

telescope and the microscope appear at the very of the century and may have been devised a little beginning and it is difficult not to regard them as a by-product earlier of the glass- and metal-polishing industries in Holland. The microscope proved to be inadequate, however, for a long time, owing apparently to a defect, not in industrial technique as such, but in the actual science of optics. A more powerful single lens was produced, however, in the middle of the century, and much of the important work in the later period was really done with that. Galileo represents an important stage in the development of the thermometer and the pendulum-clock; and the barometer appears in the middle of the century; but for a long

them.

The

time it was possible to detect just the fact that the temperature was changing without having a reliable scale for the actual measurement of temperature. really accurate thermometer

did not exist until the eighteenth century. In the middle of the seventeenth century, again we meet with the momentous
discovery of the air-pump, and only after this time do we see the use of the blow-pipe in chemical analysis. Van Helmont
in the earlier half of the century studied gases, invented the word gas, and found that different kinds of gases existed not

simply

air but he was greatly handicapped, as he had no means of collecting and isolating a particular gas that he might want to examine, nor did he achieve our modern conception of what is a "gas**. "When one considers the richness and the fantastic nature of the objects that littered the laboratory of the alchemist even in the sixteenth century, one may feel that it can hardly have been the lack of industrial technique which delayed die appearance of some of the modern scientific instruments; though it appears that where purity or accuracy was highly necessary, either in the glass or in the metal-work,

EXPERIMENTAL METHOD IN SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

the technical progress achieved is a factor that affects the case.

95

by

the seventeenth century

We may gather from repeated

statements in books and correspondence that the experimental method in the first half of the seventeenth century involved a
serious financial burden on its practitioners. Later in the century,

when the

scientific societies

informal gatherings of scientific workers turned into the Royal Society in England, the Academie
still

des Sciences in France (and similar bodies earlier

in Italy),

these societies helped to bear the expense of experiments. Their publications, and the establishment of a periodical
literature,

speeded up

still

more

collation
until the

of

scientific results. It

the communication and would seem not to have been

middle of the century that scientific publications really

took the form of the communication of actual experiments. Sometimes, as in the works of Galileo, a point would be
demonstrated by reasoning, though possibly it had been discovered in the course of experiment first of alL

CHAPTER

SIX

BACON AND DESCARTES

IT
is

their

comparatively easy for people today to accommodate minds to changes that may take place in upper regions of

changes which from year to year may add further weight to the curriculum of the undergraduate student of the subject. It is not clear what the patriarchs of our
the different sciences

generation

would

do, however, if we

tearing-up of the roots of science antiquated and useless the primary things said about the universe at the elementary school if we had even to invert our atti-

were faced with such a that we had to wipe out as

with the whole question of local motion by picking up the opposite end of the stick. The early seventeenth century was more conscious than we ourselves (in
tudes,

and

deal, for example,

our capacity as

historians)

of the revolutionary character of the

moment that had now been reached. While everything was in the melting-pot the older order undermined but the new
scientific

system unachieved
_

ated.

|Men

the conflict was bitterly exasperwere^actudly^ tajfag. forj^revolution not merely

of existing anomaliesTnit for aTnew science and a new methodJProgrammes ofthe revolutionary movement
for an explanation

were put forward, and it is dear that some men were highly conscious of the predicament in which the world now found itself. They seemed to be curiously lacking in discernment in one way, however, for they tended to believe that the scientific revolution could be carried out entirely in a single lifetime. It was a case of changing one lantern-slide of the universe for
another, in their opinion establishing a new system to take die place of Aristotle's. Gradually they found that it would

need not merely one generation but perhaps two to complete the task. By the dose of the seventeenth century they had come
to see that they had opened the way to an indefinitely expanding future, and that the sciences were only in their cradle stilL
96

BACON AND DESCARTES

97

Before the seventeenth century had opened, the general state of knowledge in regard to the physical universe had been conducive to the production of a number of speculative systems these not founded upon scientific enquiry as a rule, but generally compounded out of ingredients taken from classical antithe sixteenth century, also, attention had quity. Already in been directed to the question of a general scientific method,

and in the seventeeatLcentury this problem of method came to be one of the grand preoccupations, not merely of the practising scientist, but, at a higher level, amongst the general thinkers and philosophers. The principal leaders in this seventeenth-century movement were Francis Bacon in the first quarter of the century, who glorified the inductive method and sought to reduce it to a set of regulations; and Descartes, whose work belongs chiefly to the second quarter of die century and who differed from Bacon not only in his jglbrification of mathematics as the queen of the sciences, but in the emphasis which^Jbe -placed., on a deductive and philosophical mode ofIfSsoning, which he claimed to have screwed up to such a degree of tightness that it possessed all the discipline and
certainty

oTSradie^ticafre^^

and well into the eighteenth centiu:y;~there was a grand controversy between an English school, which was popularly identified with the empirical method, and a Jrrach_sdiool, which glorified Descartes and came to be associated rather with the deductive meod, In the middle of the eighteenth century, however, the French, with a charm that we must

view of the matter, but

describe as Mediterranean, not only submitted to the English in their famous Encyclopedic made

even too ample a return, placing Bacon on a pedestal higher It would perhaps than any that had been given him before. or of excess that their, charity brought gratiousness appear

some confusion
story.

into historical science at a later stage in the

increasingly common and sometimes exceedingly bitter in the sixteenth century. In which we have already seen to be so important 1543 a

Attacks

on

Aristotle

had been

year

98

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

with Copernicus and Vesalius as well as the Pierre Ramus produced his famous Animadversions on Aristotle. This work, which was known to Francis Bacon, and which attacked Aristotle without ever
in connection

revival

of Archimedes

really understanding

which was
Lettres

rather that

him, proposed an alternative method of a humanist and professor of Belles

namely, studying nature through the best writers, and then applying deductive and syllogistic procedures to the result. In 1581 another writer, Francois Sanchez, produced a
further attack on Aristotle, and more particularly on the modern

followers of Aristotle
anticipation
I

work which
said:

provides a remarkable

of Descartes. He

questioned the learned

I consulted those

men of bygone centuries; then but who were my contemporaries

.

none of their

replies

was

satisfactory

... So

turned in

upon myself & put everything to doubt, as though I had never been told anything by anybody. I began to
examine things myself in order to discover the true way of gaining knowledge Hence the thesis which, is the
starting-point of I doubt

my reflections

the more I think, the more

He

telian school, because it

reality

attacked the syllogistic reasoning of the prevalent Aristoturned men away from the study of

and encouraged them to play a

sophistical

game of ver-

promised to expound the true method of but in the fifty years of life that were left to him he science,
bal subtlety.

He

never
sies

fulfilled

the promise.

One participant in. the

controver-

over scientific method, Everard Digby, was teaching Logic

in the University of Cambridge when Francis Bacon was there in his youth; and a German scholar has shown that at certain

points

Bacon appears to have followed the ideas of this man. Bacon held that if Adam, owing to j^FaU^adjostfor the
CTWtteJ worid^wBi^r
it

human ise t&BTd^^

had

originally been designed to possess, stiirtESrF^ir a subordinate command over nature, available if men ^worked

BACON AND DESCARTES

99

sufficiently hard to ssecurcdt^thpu^i this had beea thrown away by human follyJThereiad been only, three short periods of

genuine

scientific

human history, he said

progress throughout the whole course of one in Greek times, one in the Roman

period, and the third which was being enjoyed in the seventeenth century. In each of the two ancient periods the era of

had been confined to two hundred years. The earlier Greek philosophers had set the course of enquiry on the right lines, but Pkto and Aristotle had supervened, and they had come to prevail precisely because, being of lighter weight, they had managed to ride much farther down upon the stream of time. They had survived the storms of the Barscientific progress

barian Invasions precisely because they had been shallow and buoyant, and Aristotle, in particular, had owed his remarkable

sway in the world to the fact that, like the Ottoman sultans, he had pursued the policy of destroying all rivals. As for the scholastics of the middle ages, they had had "subtle and strong of leisure, and but small variety of capacities, abundance minds their being shut up in a few authors"; and reading, therefore they had "with infinite agitation of wit, spun out of a small quantity of matter those laborious webs of learning which are extant in their books". Bacon was impressed by the fact that scientific knowledge had made such extraordinarily little progress since the days of antiquity. He begins by saying that men ought to "throw aside all thought of philosophy, or at least to expect but little and poor fruit from it, until an approved and careful natural and Experimental History be prepared and constructed".
For to what purpose are these brain-creations and idle display of power. ... All these invented systems of the
universe, each according to his
.

own

fancy

[are]

like so

every one philosophises out many arguments of plays of the cells of his own imagination, as out of Plato's cave.
.

He uses the term "history" in the sense that we have in mind when we speak of natural history, and he regards it as comprising a collection

of data, the fruits of enquiry.

ioo

ORIGINS OF

MODERN SCIENCE
search for find

He believed that many men had been led away by allowing

their scientific

work

to

become entangled in a

causes, really belonged rather to philosophy, and which he said corrupted the sciences, except those relating to the

which

intercourse

of man with man. In education he thought

that

scholars were introduced too early to logic and rhetoric, which were the cream of the sciences since they jmanged _and

methodised jhe. subject-matter of all the others. To apply the it had been confronted with the juvenile mind to these before
subject-matter of the otter sciences was like painting and measuring the wind, he said on the one hand it degraded
logic into childish sophistry,
effect

on the other hand it had the of making the more concrete sciences superficial. In his reaction against the older ways of discussing science, Bacon
carried the attack

beyond the bounds of prudence on occasion

denying the value of syllogistic modes of reasoning in a way that the modern philosopher would disapprove of; though
the general line of attack was understandable, and very useful in view of the situation of things at that time. Bacon wanted

men

dose in on nature and get to grips with her, bringing minds to mix in its actual operations. "The secrets of nature**, he said, "betray themselves more readily when tormented by art than when left to their own course." "It is best to consider matter, its conformation, and the changes of that conformation, its own action, and the law of this action in motion.** He did not support a dead kind of empiricism; the empirics, he said, were like ants merely heaping up a collection of data. The natural philosophers still generally current in the
to
their

world, however, were rather like spiders spinning their webs out of their own interior. He thought that the scientists ought

up an intermediate position, like that of the bees, which from the flowers and then refashioned it by their own efforts. Existing interpretations of nature, he said, were generally "founded on too narrow a basis of experiment**. "In any case**, he insisted, "the present method of
to take
extracted matter

experiment

is blind and men did it as though they stupid** were schoolboys engaged "as it were in sport**. He talked of

BACON AND DESCARTES

101

"desultory, ill-combined experiment". The alchemists, he said, had theoretical preconceptions which hindered them

from either carrying out their experiments along useful lines or extracting anything important from their results. Men in too hastily at the result of an experiment, and general glanced
then imagined that the rest could be done by sheer contemplation; or they would fly off into the skies with a hasty first
impression and attempt to make this square with the vulgar notions already existing in their minds. Even Gilbert working

on

the

magnet had no unity or order

in his experiments

the

only unity in his treatise lay in the feet that he had been ready to try out anything that there was to try out with a

iNow

it

was Bacon's firm

principle that

men. wanted .Jo

achieve anything new injhejgcadd, it was of no use. attempting to reach it onliy ancient method they^aust_rea1jsethat new

pracH^anJpbHcies would be necessary. He stressc^bpv^all mere

teliee3nfor^
haphazard experimenting

and hejnsisjsdL that.^sgmefiEg^r

It is

more subde"MdTffiHr5icEInj^odd.be adiieved byjhe proper

organisation ofeqTenments.
quite dear that

he reaEsed

how science could be brought to a higher power altogether by

being transported away from that ordinary world of commonsense

phenomena

in

which

so

much of

the discussion had

hitherto been carried on.

He insisted on the importance of the actual recording of experiments, a point which, as we have be of some significance. He already seen, was now coming to
urged that experimenters in
different
fields

should

get

knock sparks off one another; together, because they would and things done in one field would give hints to people working in another
Professor
field.

In

this sense

he anticipated tie point of

Whitehead who shows how, precisely in this period, the knowledge of several different branches of science at once which might have an enriching effect on each. Also, suggestions have to seem work Bacon's of are scattered in various parts served as an inspiration to some of the men who founded the
Royal Society.

102

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

It often happens that when the philosopher comes to deal with the position of a man like Bacon in the history of thought,

he

internal inconsistencies that lays great stress either upon the may exist in the intellectual system in question, or on the
actual correctness

from a modern point of view of the man's conclusions, which in the present case would mean the correctness of Bacon's predictions concerning the character

and the method which modern science was going to take upon itself. A modern critic may lay about him right and left on the subject of the philosophy of the nineteenth-century Utilitarians, if that teaching merits the name of philosophy; but the
historian

who remembers

all

the inhibitions that restricted

parliamentary action at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and who has in mind the vast flood of legislation that

began to appear in the second quarter of that century, can hardly help realising that on a lower level altogether in a
sub-philosophical field it required a first-class campaign to get rid of the inhibitions and to persuade people of die com-

monplace feet that laws could be regarded as mere ministers to ordinary utility, that anachronistic legislation was not a thing to be preserved for semi-mystical reasons. It is at this lower level of analysis in this sub-philosophical realm that Bacon
is

so interesting ask ourselves:

and so important in history, and

we must not

How

many

system literally and in toto ? in the seventeenth century

We must not be surprised that even

people adopted the Baconian

same

it was precisely the people in the Bacon the logicians who were the least influenced by his teaching. We must not be disconcerted if even at the very heart of his teaching, where he purported to show exactly how the results of experiments could be turned into generalisations, he was on occasion less original than he intended to be, and on occasion actually mistaken. In the days when the grand campaign against Aristotle was coming to its height he produced a programme and manifesto, and some of the most important things that he said are dead to us but were

line

of thought

as

quivering with

life

were right and so happen to have become commonplaces

in the seventeenth century, because they to-

BACON AND DESCARTES

day.

103

did not produce Baconians taking over his whole rather stimulated people in a piecemeal way but system, who apparently did not always even read his works in people
since authors who merely write about their entirety. men method are liable to mistakes which are avoided

He

And

by

who

engaged in research (for the simple reason that the latter can often hardly help following their noses halfthe time) ,
are actually
it is

not surprising if some people thought they were

disciples

of

method when in reality they were doing something different, something which in many cases would be better still. In his own words, "he rang the bell which called the wits together", and many of his aphorisms especially where he is diagnosing the causes of common errors in thought would give both profit and stimulus to students of history today. Paradoxically enough, there is possibly some truth in the view that the Baconian influence has been most direct in some of what might be called the literary sciences.
his

He has been attacked because there is so much in his writing

that savours
his

of the old

Aristotle; but that

was necessary

since

system ranged over all the realms of thought and philosophy. He has been mocked because so many of his beliefs

about nature were still medieval but that was also true of the various scientists of the time. If he believed in the existence of
vital spirits in the

blood, so did William Harvey himself, as we have seen. If he described inanimate things as having aspirations

and dispositions, or as being drawn by affection to one another, Robert Boyle, much later in the century, explicitly defended this mode of expression. He has been criticised because when he collected data he included fables and old wives*
along with established scientific facts. He instructed workers to examine the fables, however, and remade the point that he expected to find his data he peatedly
tales

scientific

corrected

place in the future. a When he set out to provide starting-point for scientific of known facts, enquiry* and to assemble his catalogues

by

enquiries that

would take

achieved experiments and suggested hypotheses, he made terrible mistakes, for he was writing before modern physics or

104

ORIGINS OP

MODERN

SCIENCE

established.

chemistry or astronomy or physiology had really begun to be The mistaken science of the past always appears as

blind superstition to the future, and Bacon at one point and another would fail to free himself from existing prejudices or,
his mind from running to fantastic alternatively, to prevent the possibility of error in advance, realised But he conjecture.
it mattered little if his experiments were wrong, must needs happen in beginnings". He claimed that at any rate his compendiums were more useful than the scientific knowledge that had hitherto been available. He constantly reiterated, furthermore, that he intended only to offer hypotheses for people to examine; even if they were wrong they would be useful, he said. On one occasion he noted that it was too early to put forward an opinion on a given issue, but he would offer his own for the time being because it might seem like cowardice if he did not. On another occasion

and

said that
it

"since

he

said:

do not pronounce upon anything,

I

I set

down and

prescribe but only provisionally ...

sometimes make

attempts at interpretation * . . [but] what need have I of pride or imposture seeing that I so often declare that we
are not furnished with so

much history or

experiments

as

we want and

that without these the interpretation

of

nature cannot be accomplished; and that therefore enough for me if I set the thing on foot.
If we look for the root of the error that

it is

was in him

the

beHfld the other causes-it

assumption tbaLjdiejgmber ofjAenomena, the nu

ky

inhis

of possiblegq3erimente _was limited^^q^hat

t

__

tEe^cientific

revolutioncould be expected to take place in a decade or two.

**The particular phenomena of die arts and sciences are in of all reality but as a handful**, he once said; "the invention
causes

and

sciences

would be

the labour

of but a few

years."

He thought that he could make catalogues of facts, of required

experiments and of suggested hypotheses; and while on the

BACON AND DESCARTES

sciences

105

one hand he imagined that the whole renovation of the would be held up unless he provided this guide-book,
he spoke

compendium had been compiled, the work of science would proceed almost by rule of thumb. Even here he was not so inelastic as some people have made out, however, and not so blind to the importance of
at times as

though, once

his

hypotheses. If he thought

it his

special function to

provide the

hypotheses, he would add the remark that further ones would suggest themselves to the enquirer as he went along. He believed that out of onejroflld drawjpneral-

jsaons 3Q. tat^ie'gcnfiuMtMs Jtxeotfv^ wo

the

'

exj>raments

point

way to further casperiments. In a curious but significant way he seems to have foreseen the structure that science was to
take in the future

a point which may best be illustrated peran adapting example suggested in a lecture by Prohaps by fessor Broad. Bacon thought that at the first immediate level

which might be drawn out of too were low-grade, too near to concrete facts to experiments be of any great utility. Knowledge is limited if we only know that heat can be produced by mixing sulphuric acid and water; and the knowledge is of little value unless these two substances happen to be at hand. The very highest generalisations of all, however, are out of reach, too near to God and to final causes; they must be left to the philosopher. The intermediate axioms are the ones that are "true, solid and full of life", says Bacon the rather higher generalisations which can be reached by the method of climbing up to them from below. If one knows that violent molecular motion is the factor that produces heat, one is in possession of a wider form -of generalisation and this
the generalisations or axioms
will greatly increase one's power over nature. Incidentally, Bacon makes the remark that there are some things which have become so familiar or which are accepted so automatically that people take them as self-evident, though they are just the In this conthings which are most in need of re-examination. nection he specifies the causes of gravity, the rotation of the heavenly bodies, heat, light, density and organic formation. He shows some insight in recognising that the progress of

io6

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE
of enquiries upon
lines

science

would

consist in the pursuit

such as these.
It

was on the mathematical

the geometrical side

side

and

particularly, so to

Bacon missed the point speak, on of that kind of science which was to spring from Galileo. His error ought not to be exaggerated. He says in one place: "The
that
investigation of nature is best conducted when mathematics are applied to physics/' He says in another pkce: "If physics be daily improving, and drawing out new axioms, it will con-

be wanting fresh assistance from mathematics." On the other hand, he regarded mathematics merely as the handmaid to physics, and actually complained of the dominion
tinually

which

very well to

was beginning to exercise in that science. It was all do sums on the results of one's experiments, but Bacon specifically disliked Galileo's method of turning the problem of motion, in the way we have seen, into the problem of geometrical bodies moving in geometrical space. Far from
it

wanting to read away the air-resistance, in the way the new school of scientists were doing, he wanted to add other things
to the picture for example, the tensions that were bound to take place within the moving body itself. Far from wanting to
abstract and to isolate any aspect

of a scientific problem, so that motion could be considered as a line drawn in geometrical space, he longed rather to load all the concreteness back into the problem, to see a picture which included air-resistance and gravity and the internal texture of the body itself. Even in the case of the celestial bodies he deprecated the purely geometrical study of motion and said that the enquirer ought not to overlook die question of the kind of material out of which die planets were manufactured. On the subject of projectiles he declined to accept either Aristode's theory that the motion was caused by the rush of air, or the impetus-theory which had hitherto been its principal rival. He put forward the hypothesis diat if motion continued after an impact this was the result of die pky of the internal forces and stresses which had been put into operation by the shock of the original percussion. Indeed, it is important in the study of Bacon not merely to

BACON AND DESCARTES

know the skeleton of his

107

system, but to observe how he treats the problems in any of the branches of science. And it is not sufficient to note whether he was right or wrong
to the views

of the present day. We must know where each particular science stood at jhe time when he was writing, and exactly how he would play upon the margin of it. There is one
field in

according

which this matter may perhaps be usefully discussed at the present moment, since it is connected with problems which we have already traversed in a general way; and that is, the field that rektes to the problem of the skies. It is the more
interesting

from the

fact that

Bacon

is

so often summarily

dismissed for his anti-Copernican prejudices.

On this subject Bacon begins by saying:

I

will

myself therefore construct a Theory of the Uni-

verse according to the measure of the history, [the established facts,] as yet known to us; keeping judgment however in all points free, for the time whenhistory,

my

and by means of history, my inductive philosophy have been further advanced.

Later he says:

shall

repeat once more that I do not mean to bind myself to these; for in them as in other things I am

Nevertheless

certain

of my
is

way

but not certain of my position.

have

introduced
that it

diem by way of interlude lest it be thought from vacillation of judgment or inability to

affirm that I prefer negative questions.

He

which

says that many astronomical systems can be put forward will cover the phenomena. The Ptolemaic is one, the

Copernican is another. Either will account for the observed movements, but Bacon prefers the system of Tycho Brahe, the intermediate system by which some of the planets go round the
sun and these
regrets,
all together go round the motionless earth. He however, that Tychp Brahe had not worked out the

io8

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE
detail.

mathematics of such a system and shown its operation in

"Now it is easy to see", he says, "that both they who think the
earth revolves and they who hold the primum mobile and the old construction are about equally and indifferently supported

by the phenomena/' He
earth
is

prefers,

however, the view that the

think the truer opinion", as one for the reader to

stationary

"for that I

now

he

says. Still,

he puts the question

is a system of the universe with a or the whether centre, particular globes of earth and stars are

answer: Whether there

just scattered

or each as "so
earth revolves

and dispersed, each, as he says, "on its own roots", many islands in an immense sea"1|JEven if the

it does not necessarily follow that there is no he of the universe, says; for there are planets that do system revolve round the sun. But though the rotation of the earth is an ancient idea, the Copernican view that tb e sun stands im-

movable

at the centre

of the universe

is

one which Bacon

considers to be unprecedented. He is prepared to ask whether there may not be many different centres of the universe, the

heavenly bodies being congregated in bundles or groups, so that he can picture them as separate parties of people each doing
a separate dance. He addresses himself to the problem we discussed in connection with the modern doctrine of inertia when

he says: "Let no one hope to determine the question whether the earth or heaven revolve in the diurnal motion unless he

have

first

comprehended the nature of spontaneous

rotation."

In one place he makes it clear that he dislikes the movement of the earth because it would leave nature without any quiet, any

immobility. Repeatedly he tells us that so far as the mathematical aspect is concerned the Copernican system is satisfactory, but he stumbles at the obstacle which we have seen to

be the general difficulty even in the days of Galileo : the Copernican hypothesis has not yet been made to square with what is

known of physical

science in general Bacon repeats that the mathematicianrastxonomers can never solve the problem by

themselves. Let the observation of the heavenly bodies proceed we are all the better if we can get the geometry of the skies
correct

and the mathematical side of the work must certainly

BACON AND DESCARTES

109

be dovetailed into the discoveries of physical science. On the mathematical side things are going well at the moment, with the new optical instruments; but there must be especially

of observation, greater severity ofjudgment, greater constancy more witnesses to confirm observations, and each particular
fact
lies

must be

tested in different ways.

The

real

weakness

still

in the physics, however. The enquirer ought to have regard to the actual material the stars are made of, learn

about the appetites and behaviour of the stuff itself, which must be fundamentally the same in all regions of the heavens.

Bacon declines to accept the view that the heavenly bodies are formed of an immaculate substance free from change and exempt from the ordinary forces of nature. It was heathen arrogance, not the Holy Scripture, he says, which endowed the skies with the prerogative of being incorruptible. Also he tells us: "I shall not stand upon that piece of mathematical of motions to perfect circles." Diselegance, the reduction
persed through his

work

are

many

references to Galileo's

He accepts all the empirical data that* these observations provide; but he does not accept Galileo's theories, though he does quote Galileo with approval for the
telescopic discoveries.

view that the effect of gravity diminishes as one goes farther away from the earth. When he discusses the question of the tides, he says that on the supposition that the movement of ths earth causes the tides, certain things will follow not that he His own personally holds with Galileo's theory on this subject. view is that the farthest skies and stars move rapidly in a perfect
circle,

but that as

we come down nearer to earth the heavenly

become more earthy and they move in a more resistant medium. Things becoming more heavy and their motion slows gross as we approach the mundane region,
bodies themselves

down

in proportion as they are nearer to earth

and hold a

lower place in the skies. What appears to be the motion of the illusion produced planets in one direction is merely the optical by the fact that they are so much behind the highest skies and the farthest stars; it merely represents a lag in that single
circular

movement which they

are

all

supposed to share.

Not

no

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

only is the pace reduced, but the circular motion is departed from, as one comes lower down in the sky and nearer to the
gross and material earth. The total result is to produce in the sky the effect of spirals, and Bacon affects to wonder why the
spiral has

never been thought of before, since

it

represents an

motion constantly going off the circle as it descends to more turgid realms. In his view the tides are the last weak effects of the total revolution of the skies around the
initial circular

motionless earth.

That was Bacon's system of the universe, though as we have already seen, it was a mere tentative hypothesis and he did not consider that the time had yet come for the production of a
general synthesis. It is clear, however, that from the point of view of that time his work was essentially stimulating,
especially in the signs it

gave of an extraordinary elasticity of and that mind; many people were influenced by it, though their work might not itself have a Baconian look at the finish

tended to make men better than himself, make them something better than mere Baconians. The numerous translations of his works into French in the first half of the seventeenth century show that he aroused great interest across
his influence

the Channel.

With Ren6
meet J:
trated,
this

Descartes,

who

lived

from 1596

to 1650,

we

s^toajcoug
and

mumor<yntgmvej^
intricately interlocked.

concen-

muAjnore

We sEaBTfind

man,

like Galileo, reappearing in various aspects in the

story of the scientific revolution, sprawling over the whole area that is left of the seventeenth century. What requires notice at the moment is merely the short treatise a thing
isjjne

almost of pamphlet size entitled Discourse onMethoct, which of the really important bookHn our ixitdDbcfiaalhBitory.

To jJeTysi^^

not in

its

one or

two philosophical passages orTin the disquisition on "matheIn matics, but in its aspect as jusj a piece of autobiognyjby.
this aspect it influen<x3,

not merely those who were to become

Cartesian in philosophy, but the world in general. It was written in the vernacular, and Descartes

meant to

BACON AND DESCARTES

address himself to the natural reason

rn

of men whose minds had

not been perverted by the traditions of the schools. Those who read the Discourse on Method, not profoundly as philosophers

but superficially in the

will understand, better

which people do read books, than the philosophers ever do, the im-

way

in

the influence of Descartes in general history. portance and More important perhaps than anything the author intended is

the

manner in which the book was misunderstood; and Des-

cartes

himself complains not only in his letters but in this very book of the way in which he was being misunderstood alDiscourse that when he hears his own ready. Kfejays in^the

views repeated he finds them so changedTEatThe cannot

recognisenor'a^ go VtfaigE^to^ the heart

of every author. He cries out against that they can master in a day the think those people had taken twelve years to think out.JHe things which he

who

Discourse explains in the

how he had come

15s

to feel that

all

the

sci5c^wEIch^gj.ad been/taugEt in

Him nntfvmg

how

youtETiacL really told the ^anSS^^pimons to winch men in

is

diffefeofpaSs of tEFworld were attached were so often merely

th^r^T^^^tomTanJItraditi^. The book

vivid as a

after much chapter of autobiography, writtenT>y a~man~who travail decided ikat h& must sweep away all ancient opinions

and

start all his thitvlcing

over again.

Bacon had tale<Tof the need of "minds washed clean of went further in his determination to opinions", but Descartes
unload himself ofaETthe teaching which EacT Seen transmitted fromlEeliii^^

andrslafTnaked^onoE^^
save the
the doubting must existcoraaousn^jhat f even though I may doubt whether I am doubting. Those who and who never tmderstood tke^bafive^chingi(^

w^3o

could never have risen to his philosophy, appreciated this dramatic rejection of inherited systems and ideas. And though
said thatlthe^attempt to overthrow all tradition alEng to be carried

oiifbjTm^ji^eyay

he Cautioned against any imitation of the

H2
sceptics

ORIGINS OF
for, in fact,

MODERN

SCIENCE

he was only doubting in order .tojind a

firmer basis for belief or certainty still the influence of the was in the long run to be most policy of methodical doubt the destructive side and in the realm ofgeneral significant on ideas. The misunderstanding of Descartes was made more
easy, because, in fact,

he did not intend

his Discourse on

Method

to be anything more than a mere preface to his real study and survey of the problem of method. The essay was an introduction to three treatises
metry,

the Diojrtric, the Meteors

and the Geoit

andit was thejmte&tion of Desci^To^welopTihe idea

illustrating it in action,

of Ks method by

showing Ibow

operated in concrete cases

to say, in different branches of science. It proved to be these three treatises that provided the greater sensation and drew the chief attention at theTtime;
that
is

but the world soon gets tired of reading out-of-date science, so that these parts of the work gradually lost their initial Imwhich is stimulating to read portance. The Discourse on Method,
at
it

any time, gradually detached itself from the essays to which was a mere preface, and came to stand on its own feet.
Descartes believed that the essential capacity to see reason

without any however clouded it nugK beTry prejudice or-by'dl^ fflusiohs of "the imagination. He established wha'f became the great principle of common senseJnlnod^rn times, for if he insisted on one point more than any other it was in his thesJSL."All things which we^ clearly .an<T distinctly conceive are true." If I say "I think, therefore I am", Tarn not am announcing^ a land of intuitive really deducing anything I a of myself, perception which jgothnig can get perception

was '"TfistofotecFtE^
difference~6f degree,

Behind."

Beyond that, if I say "I have a body'*, I ^nj^ble to be by picture Sid fogs the visual imagination imprecisely the thing that is unreliable. The people who say "1 believe in my body because I can see it clearly, but I cannot j?ee God"
misled
:

the reverse of
Desotrtes

what

Descartes to the purposejcxacdy had been intended. In the system of

Go3 was another of those dear ideas that are dearer

the

mind than anything seent>y tE? actual

BACON AND DESCARTES

eye. Furtiicrmore^jgverything
fect

113

hung on this existence of a perand righteous^ GoSTWitKout H5h a man could not trust in anything, could not believe in a geometrical proposition, for He was the guarantee that everything was not an illusion, the senses not a complete hoax, and life not a mere nightmare.
Starting

from this point, Descartes was prepared to deduce whole universe from God, with each step of the argument as ~clear ancl certain as a demonstration in geometry. He was
the

determined to have^ a science as closely knit, as regularly ordered, as any piece of mathematics one which, so far as the
material universe
spiritual

side

of

concerned Jand excluding the soul and the things), would lay out a perfect piece of
is

mechanism. His vision of a single universal science so unified, so ordered, so interlocked, was perhaps one of his most recarried the unification so far that

markable contributions to thejdentific revolution. Indeed, he he said that one single mind

ought to work out the whole system he indulged at one time in the hope that he might carry out the whole scientific revolution himself. When others offered to help him with
experiments he was tempted to reply that
better if they
it

would be much

to carry out his own. give The physics of Descartes, therefore, depends in a particular way upon his metaphysics; it provides merely the lower stages in

would

him money

an hierarchical system that

is

definitely reaches

back to God.

Descartes

verse, starting

prepared to work out a whole system of the uniwith matter (or with what the philosophers call

on the one hand, and movement, purely local the other. Everything was to be accounted for on motion, mathematically, either by configuration or by number. His universe, granting extension and movement in the first place, was so based on kw that no matter how many different universes God had created no matter how different from one
extension)

another these might be at the start <hey were bound, he said, to become like the universe we live in, through the sheer

upon the primary material. Even if God had operation of created a different universe at the beginning, it would have worked itself round to the system that now exists. Even if He

kw

ii 4

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

had made the earth a cube, it would have rolled itself into a law in the physical system sphere. Perhaps the most essential of Descartes was the law concerning the invariability in the

amount of motion in the universe. Motion depended ultimately on God, and the kw concerning the invariability in the amount of motion was a kw which followed from the immutability of God. It might be thought that Descartes could have arrived at some such kw by observation and experiment,

or at
that

least
it

would

a possible hypothesis and discovering actually succeeded, actually worked in practice. That never have been sufficient for him, for it could never

by taking

it as

have provided that clinching demonstration, that exclusion of alternative possibilities, which it was the purpose of his system to achieve. What he wanted was the certainty of a deductive and quasi-geometrical proof, and he had to carry the question
his physics had to depend on his metathe matter with the eye of the geometer, physics. Envisaging and however, conceiving motion therefore so largely in its

back to God, so that

kinematic aspect, he laid himself open to the criticism that his system suffered from anaemia in respect of questions rekting to

dynamics. His

kw on the subject of the conservation of moto be repkced

mentum proved unsatisfactory and had

by the

kw of the conservation of energy.

He
his
tells

us in the Discourse on Method that

primary truths that he had established

from one or two he was able to reason

of the

way by

the deductive

method

to the existence

heavens, the stars and the earth, as well as water, air, fire, minerals, etc. "When it came farther than that to the more
detailed operations

of nature he needed experiment to show him in which of the alternative ways that were possible under
his

system

God

actually did
effects

discover

which of the

produce certain effects; or to amongst a host of possible

alternatives that his philosophy

would have allowed or ex-

actually chosen to produce. plained Experiment, therefore, only had a subordinate place in the

God had

system of Descartes, and in die ktter part of the seventeenth

century the famous
scientist

Huygens,

who

criticised

Bacon

BACON AND DESCARTES

for his lack

115

of mathematics, complained that the theories of were not sufficiently confirmed by experiment. The beauty and the unity of the system of Descartes lay in the fact that on the one hand it started from God and worked downwards by a system of reasoning that was claimed to be waterat the same time it worked tight; while upwards from below, or axioms from the experiments. drawing generalisations are that There Descartes would use an experisigns, however, ment to confirm a hunch or an hypothesis, but would close
Descartes

down

observations even

the enquiry very soon refusing to pursue further when these might have affected the case in a
less indirect

more or

manner.
its

He

worried

much

less

about

establishing a fact than about

show

that,

supposing

this thing

explanation his point was to was a fact, his system would

this

provide the explanation; and, indeed,

system would have

explained the case supposing God at one point or another had taken an alternative course that might have been open to Him.

which was one of the works attached to his Discourse on Method, he was prepared to explain how the clouds could rain blood, as was sometimes alleged, and how lightning could be turned into a stone. In fact, he confessed that he preferred to apply his method to the explanation of what were the ordinarily accepted phenomena, rather than
So in his
treatise

on

Meteors,

to use experiment in order to find new phenomena or out-ofthe-way occurrences. Many of his accepted "facts," like the

ones I have just mentioned, were in reality taken over without examination from scholastic writers. He accepted the idea of
the circulation of the blood, but quarrelled with Harvey concerning its cause and concerning the action of the heart He
said that

when

the blood
it

was drawn into

the heart

it

became

so heated that

leaped of its

own

effervesced, caused the heart to expand, and motion into the arteries. In this case the truth

was

that he accepted unconsciously and without real examination the scholastic assumption that the heart functioned as the

centre

of heat.
influenced

The men who were

affected

by Bacon were

chiefly

by

the thesis that experiment was the thing that

ii6

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE
Boyle,

mattered in the natural sciences.

And Robert
criticised

who

shows

clear

marks of that influence, was

by Huygens

and others for having built so little on the great number of experiments that he recorded. The founders of the Royal

were under that general influence, and in the early proceedings of the Royal Society there is a rage for experiments, not only of what we should call the scientific kind, but in regard to curiosities and prodigies in nature, or in respect of invention and technological devices sometimes experiments just to test old wives' tales. In the synthesis of Descartes, however, as we shall see later, there is the economy and austerity of
Society

a highly concentrated deductive system. By its mechanisation it anticipated the structure that physical science was to assume

But the combination of the mathematical and the experimental method in England was destined to put the natural science of Descartes into the shade before the sevenin the future.

teenth century had expired.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE EFFECT OF THE SCIENTIFIC DEVOLUTION ON THE NON-MECHANICAL SCIENCES

IT has already been noted that the central studies in the scientific revolution were those of astronomy and mechanics.

They represent the fields in which the most drastic changes and
most remarkable progress occurred in the seventeenth of the stick, we may consider the century. Picking up one end that astronomy might well have been ripe for such suggestion development because in so ancient a science observations had been accumulating for thousands of years and the process of
the

was bound sooner or later to demand a new effort of fed at the same time that the science of synthesis. We may mechanics had an advantage in that it was a branch of study in which there was much to be achieved by simple devices, such
revision

watching balls rolling down inclined planes. Picking up the other end of the stick, however, we may say that these sciences were spurred forward because in both cases there was an at the point which unusually bad hurdle to get over precisely
as

the story had then reached. In the one case there

was the diffi-

of simple motion. In culty of arriving at a proper conception the other case there was the particular difficulty of conceiving
sciences

or explaining the motion of the earth itself. With both the it was to transpire that, once the hurdle had been

surmounted, the

open to an astonishing flood of further change. Perhaps the mere development of mathematics and of the mathematising habit had much to do not only with

way was

left

the scientific revolution in general, but

more

especially

with

the surmounting of the significant hurdles that are here in have been true in any case that the question. It would seem to

whole history ofthought was to be affected by the new study of motion whether on the earth or in the sky which was the science. That century high-water mark of seventeenth-century
117

n8
was to
see

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

one attempt after another to explain many things motion, and, indeed, to interpret all the changes of the of a purely mechanistic system. The physical universe, in terms ideal of a clockwork universe was the great contribution of
besides

seventeenth-century science to the eighteenth-century age of

reason.

never easy if it is possible at all to feel that one has reached the bottom of a matter, or touched the last limit of explanation, when dealing with an historical transition. It
It is

would appear that the most fundamental changes in outlook, the most remarkable turns in the current of intellectual fashion,

may

be referable in the

last resort

to an alteration in men's

and so generally to any particular writers pervasive that it cannot be attributed or any influence of academic thought as such. When at the
feeling for things, an alteration at once so subtle

beginning of the sixteenth century an Englishman could write

concerning the clergy that
king's subjects evading escaping die law of the land
their
it

was scandalous

to see half the

proper allegiance to the

crown

we know that he was registering

a change in the feding men had for the territorial state, a change more significant in that people were unconscious of the fact
that anything novel
this

had been taking place. Subtle changes like the result not of any book but of the new texture of human experience in a new age are apparent behind the
story of the scientific revolution, a revolution which some have tried to explain by a change in men's feeling for matter
itself.

It is fairly clear in the sixteenth century, and it is certain in the seventeenth, that through changes in the habitual use of words, certain things in the natural philosophy of Aristotle

had

now acquired a coarsened meaning or were actually misunderstood. It may not be easy to say why such a thing should
men
unconsciously betray the fact that a

have happened, but

certain Aristotelian thesis simply has

thinlc

no meaning for them any

of the stars and heavenly bodies longer they just cannot as things without weight even when the book tells them to do so. Francis Bacon seems unable to say anything except that it is

THE NON-MECHANICAL SCIENCES

119

obvious that these heavenly bodies have weight, like any other kind of matter which we meet in our experience. Bacon says,
furthermore, that he

unable to imagine the planets as nailed to crystalline spheres; and the whole idea only seems more absurd to him if the spheres in question are supposed to be
is

made of that liquid, ethereal kind of substance which Aristotle had had in mind. Between the idea of a stone aspiring to reach and rushing more its natural pkce at the centre of the universe fervently as it came nearer home and the idea of a stone accelerating its descent under the constant force of gravity, there is an intellectual transition which involves somewhere or other a change in men's feeling for matter. As we have already seen, there was a change also in the feeling that men had for motion, if only because Aristotle, thinking of simple motion, naturally had in his mind the picture of a horse drawing a cart, while the new age had good reason for focusing its primary attention on die projectile, which meant a difference in the apprehension of the whole affair. In a similar way, a subtle intellectual change was giving people an interest in the operation of pure mechanism; and
some have even said that this came from the growing familiarity with clocks and machines, though it would be impossible to put one's finger on any authentic proof of this. The great
importance of astronomy and mechanics can certainly not be attributed to this alone, though such a factor may have helped

of scientific enquiry with the there of mechanism. One thing is dear: not only was question in some of the intellectual leaders a great aspiration to demonstrate that the universe ran like a piece of clockwork, but this was itself initially a religious aspiration. It was felt that there would be something defective in Creation itself something not quite worthy of God unless the whole system of the unito intensify the preoccupation
verse could be

shown

to be interlocking, so that

it

carried the

pattern of reasonableness and orderliness. Kepler, inaugurating the scientist's quest for a mechanistic universe in the sevenhis music of is teenth significant here his mysticism,

century, the spheres, his rational deity,

demand a system which has

the

120

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

men had
and the

had been a time when beauty of a piece of mathematics. There God to demonstrate by means of miracles, sought
intellect

yearned rather to discover the evidence of divine caprice in the world. At the moment which

of

man had

we have now
formation in

human

reached, a difference of feeling marked a transexperience; for it is clear that it was now

rather the aspiration

of the mind to demonstrate divine order and self-consistency. Without regularity in the ordinaryworkings of the universe the Christian miracles themselves could have no meaning. And, as we have seen, the aspiration to turn the created world into mechanism was part of the
reaction against pan-psychic superstition, against the belief that nature itself was magical. It was clear that God could
create

something out of nothing, but it was obvious to Francis Bacon that nature would do nothing of the kind the amount have alof matter in the universe must remain constant.

We

ready seen

how

Descartes deduced the conservation of

mo-

mentum from his idea of the immutability of God. It is perhaps not too much to say, therefore, that something
in the whole intellectual climate of the age helps to explain the to revive those attempts which were made in this period

nature of matter itself on purely systems which interpreted the this which led to the prevalence It was mechanistic principles.
in the seventeenth century of various forms

of what came to be called the corpuscular philosophy. The view became current that all the operations of nature, all the fabric of the created universe, could be reduced to the behaviour of minute particles
of matter, and
the variety that presented itself to human of the size, the experience could be resolved into the question configuration, the motion, the position and the juxtaposition
all

of these particles. The ancient atomic theories associated with Democritus and the Epicureans were brought to life again in a new context; but one broad difference existed whereas the
ancient theory had tended to attribute everything to the fortuitous combinations of atoms, so that the universe had

been left, so to speak, at the mercy of chance, now there was assumed to be rationality in the mechanism itself indeed, the

THE NON-MECHANICAL SCIENCES

corpuscular theories were the result of the search for rationaland even part of the urge to justify GocL ity,

he protested against philosophical systems, took great pains to call attention to the importance of these atomic explanations of the universe. He has some interesting remarks upon this subject in a series of essays enFrancis Bacon,
as

much

tided Thoughts on the Nature of Things. He pictured the original atoms "throwing themselves into certain groups and knots"

combinations being sufficient explanation of the of substance which axe presented to the five senses of man. He saw the importance of the motion of the panicles and suggested how many things heat, for example were to be explained by the mere fact of this motion, which took place on a minute scale inside the very fabric of solid substances. In this connection he pointed out that the great defect of the ancient thinkers was their failure to study and understand motion a matter that was essential to the comprehension of the processes of nature. Some people believed that the minute I have mentioned were the very last thing that particles which could be reached in the analysis and subdivision of matter. They were hard and impenetrable and final utterly incapable of further reduction. These people were prepared to desert a principle which had been accepted on the authority of Aristotle prepared to admit the existence of a vacuum between the ultimate particles and inside the fabric of matter itsd They tended to follow Gassendi, who in 1626 announced his intention ofrestoring the philosophy ofEpicurus, and produced
their different
varieties

a system specifically atomic in character. Others, who regarded a vacuum as impossible in any sense and believed therefore
in the

unbroken continuity of matter throughout the universe,

On their view, matter the could be broken up and, particles infinitely divisible, atom which represented in feet, there was no really ultimate the hard basis of all forms of substance. If all the air could
tended rather to follow Descartes.

was

be drawn out ofa tube, that tubewould still be as

full as before,

and

tiie

substance

which

it

now

contained

tinuous,

however much more

ethereal.

would be conThere were men

122

ORIGINS OF

MODERN SCIENCE

like

these

Robert Boyle who were unwilling to decide between two views, but still confessed their hankering after some

form of what they

nature

called the corpuscular philosophy. In the seventeenth century the revelation of the intricate structure of

the magnifying especially with the increasing use of the and then the microscope made people telescope glass, subdivision of matter. Bacon in the minute interested greatly

himself

is an illustration of the way in which men became aware of the extraordinary intricacy in the structure of things and the complexity of even the minute aspects of nature. The

new philosophy enabled men to reduce the whole universe to matter and motion. It made possible the explanation of the
whole of nature in mechanistic terms.
often explicitly formulated in the seventeenth century of attempting to explain everything in the physical universe by mechanical processes had important
intention
effects

The

upon the
its

imprint

own

biological sciences, upon which it tended to peculiar character. Such sciences would
this

appear to have been stimulated by

at the first stage

new mode of treatment

of the

story

stimulated to exceptional de-

velopment on certain sides perhaps. It appears, however, that the time was to come when the mechanistic point of view became an embarrassment in this field, so that it ultimately
operated rather as a check upon the progress of knowledge and
understanding.

We have already seen the mechanical character of William

Harvey's enquiries into the circulation of the blood; but at Harvey's university of Padua there is more remarkable direct evidence of the fact that the work and the of Galileo
principles

the medical faculty. Sanctus Sanetorius (1561-1636) set out to adapt the thermometer for
their effect
clinical purposes, and used an instrument invented by Galileo for measuring the beat of the puke. He studied temperature, the of the respiration, circulation, and in particular physics made experiments in weighing he had a balance in which he

were having

on

could both eat and sleep and so could test his

various conditions; and he

own weight under

made

discoveries concerning in-

THE NON-MECHANICAL SCIENCES

sensible perspiration.

123

Then

there

was a younger person, Gio-

vanni Alfonso Borelli (1608-79), who was a mathematician and a friend of Galileo. His book On the Motion of Animals,
published in 1680-81, just after his death, represented a supreme example of the application of the science of mechanics
to the study of the living organism. He was most successful in the treatment of muscular movements, using mathematics and

diagrams, so that his treatise looks like a text-book in mechanics. One of his chapters deals with the "Mechanical propositions useful for the more exact determination of the motive

power of muscles". He examined the act ofwalking as nobody had ever done before, and then turned to the flight of birds and
the

swimming of fish
is

bird

where

its

entitled:

"The

almost the first thing he asks about a centre of gravity lies. One of his sections is quantity of air acted upon by the wing of a
in shape a solid sector swept out

Bird in flight

is

by a

radius

equal to the span of the wing". He calculates that "the power of those muscles that beat the wings is greater by ten-thousand
times than the weight of the bird'*, and he points out that, if anything analogous applies in the case of human, beings, the

motive power of our pectoral muscles could never be sufficient for such a task, so that the old story of Icarus could not work of William possibly have been true. Starting from die
Harvey, he examined the action of the
fibres

of the

heart,

and calculated that, to maintain the circulation, the heart at each beat must exert a force equivalent to not less than 135,000 Ib. We find him comparing the heart to a piston or a winehe worked out that if the blood flows evenly from press. Also,
the arteries, through the minute capillaries, into the veins (for its return journey to the heart), this steady flow is due to the elastic reactions of the arterial walls. The arteries after expansion contract

and force the blood forward as though a rope had been twisted round themr-so that a certain regularity in the flow is not directly, but indirectly, attributable to the beats of the heart itself. A contemporary of BoreIFs,the Dane, Niels Stensen, who worked chiefly in France and Italy, was also a mechanist, seeking to apply mathematical and
essentially

124

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

geometrical principles to the muscles. In proportion as the

in proporpeculiarly mechanical approach was inadequate, tion as chemical operations were involved as in the case of the digestion this whole method of dealing with the living body was bound to prove a hindrance to biological studies sooner or
later.

The result of this tendency to glorify mere mechanisation was the spread of the view that the animal body was nothing more than a piece of dockwork. Descartes, completing the continuous interlocking machinery of his physical universe, seems to have made himself the most remarkable exponent of this view. Adherence to his principle of strict animal automatism became, so to speak, a marginal point of dogma and was regarded as a test case amongst the followers of his system; it decided whether you could claim to have in you the pure milk of Cartesian orthodoxy. The whole issue was one which aroused great controversy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The philosophy of Descartes made so strict a separation between thought and matter, soul and body, that it was hardly possible to bridge the gulf between them with anything short of a miracle that defeated imagination. Under this animals were system, regarded as being devoid of either
thought or genuine consciousness, whereas to possess precisely these two things was the very essence of the human souL It was even held, therefore, that animals could not authentically
see anything or

fed the bitterness the genuine pangs -of Their bodily pain. eyes would hold the kind of picture which we have when we are not oursdvcs when we gaze on things with a glassy stare and a vacant look but do not really appre-

hend. Similarly, in the theory of Descartes, animals had a purdy corporeal, unconscious kind of sensation, but no
consciousness,

no mental agony, no

real ability to feel pain.

God, the human soul and the whole realm of spiritual things, however, escaped imprisonment in the process of mechanisation, and were superadded presences, flitting vaporously
relentless

amongst the cog-wheds, the pulleys, the sted castings of a world-machine. It was very difficult to show how

THE NON-MECHANICAL SCIENCES

these
sect,

125

two

planes of existence could ever have come to

inter-

representing in the Cartesian system could hardly be regarded as having a location in space at all. There was another sense in which it was possible to say that it was no more
chiefly

or at what point mind or soul could ever join up with matter. There was a sense in which the soul

Thought

having imagined found the strategic place where soul and body joined, acquired
a certain virtue

with one part of the human body than, with another. Descartes particularly attached it, however, to the pineal gland, partly because it was thought that the mere animals did not possess this feature at all. In the next generation, however, Niels Stensen spoiled the argument by discovering this gland in other animals. Descartes, that he had
associated

upon the

by concentrating attention at the next remove action of the nerves. He believed, however, that an actual transmission of matter took place from the nerves to
the muscles. In general, he arrived at too direct a process of mechanisation.
Leibnitz said that everything which took place in the body of man or animal was as mechanical as the things that happen

inside a watch.

Some Englishmen

later in the seventeenth

century Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist, for example thought that Descartes had gone too far in his idea of man as an organised statue, an automatic machine. Newton felt that, though the system of Descartes necessitated a Creator who had set the clockwork into motion in the first place, it was in danger of making God superfluous once the universe had been

given a
century

start.

And it is curious to note that, religious men had hankered after a

if earlier in the

mathematically

interlocking universe to justify the rationality and self-consistency of God, before the end of the century their successors were

beginning to be nervous because they saw the mechanism becoming possibly too self-complete. Boyle differed from
Descartes in thinking that God was necessary, not merely to set things in motion and to establish the kws of motion, but
also to

combine the atoms or corpuscles into those remarkable architectural systems that enabled them to organise themselves

126

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

into a living world. Newton was even prepared to believe that gravity, which was otherwise so apparently unaccount-

of a living being that was ready to think also that pervaded the whole of space. He on occasion in the sky special combinations which took pkce unusual conjunctures, for example, or the passage of comets along a path when another heavenly body happened to be near
able, represented the constant activity

produced small mechanical derangements and casual

crepancies

dis-

which

necessitated the occasional intervention

of a

watchful Deity.

The

effects

of the

scientific

revolution in general, and of the

new

mechanistic outlook in particular, are vividly illustrated in the works of the Hon. Robert Boyle, who lived from 1627

and who at the same time helps to demonstrate the importance of some of the ideas of Francis Bacon. From the age of twenty he came under the influence of the members of a group who from 1645 were meeting in London to study the
to 1691,

Philosophy, specifically described by them as the Experimental Philosophy. At the age of twenty, writing to another member of this group, he confessed that he had once

New

been very much inclined to Copernicus, but he now wrote of the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems, as well as the system of Tycho Brahe, as though they were rival theories in a controversy which at the

moment

it

was impossible

to settle. Five

or six years after

this

that is to say, in 1652-53

he appears to

have been converted to the doctrine of the circulation of the blood, and he made the acquaintance of William Harvey at the end of Harvey's life. In 1654 he went to live in Oxford at the
invitation ofDr. John Wilkins, the recently appointed Warden of there were grouped a College, around

Wadham

whom

number of chemists, physicians, etc., who were passionate believers in Bacon and the Experimental Philosophy. Although
he
of having discovered "the usefulness of speculative geometry for natural philosophy", Boyle regrets his lack of mathematics and his work wears a more Baconian appearance because he does not give that mathematical turn to his researches. In parts of his works he sets out explicitly to justify
talks

THE NON-MECHANICAL SCIENCES

127

the non-mathematical approach to the problems of science. in the first to be an historian in Bacon's Boyle sought place

of the word the sense that is implied in the term "natural history" namely, to assemble the results of particular enquiries and to accumulate a great collection of data which would be of use in the future to any person wishing to reconsense
struct natural philosophy. In this sense he set out to such collections as a natural of the air, a

history

history

produce of

fluidity

cold, just as

us

firmness, an experimental history of colour or of Bacon had done with winds or with heat He tells that one of his collections was designed as a continuation of
that
is

and

Sylva Sylvarum

to say, of Francis Bacon's natural

history. He was so Baconian, he confesses, that for a long time he declined to read Gassendi or Descartes or even Bacon's own

Novum Organum,
;

lest

he should be seduced too

early

by

lofty

hypotheses thoughhe agrees that there is aplace for hypotheses behind experiments, and only insists that these should be of a subordinate kind, and thatthesdentistshallnotding to them too long or build too great superstructures upon them. Occasionally

he says he will communicate the

results

of experiments
is

without any theories concerning

concrete data established

their causes, because it

the

or permanent use, no t. He created a certain public interest in his experiments as he employed a host of "assistants, experimenters, secretaries and
collectors".
It

whether

by his enquiries which will be his theories prove to be acceptable

of

was noted by the contemporary

scientist,

Huygens, and

has been repeated with some justice by historians of science since, that in relation to the vast amount of experimental work
that

he put on record, Boyle made very few important

dis-

coveries or strategic changes in science. He wrote like Bacon: "It has long seemed to to be none of the least impediments

me

of the real advancement of true natural philosophy that men have been so forward to write systems of it." He complained

new science, the mechanical philosophy, still had too narrow an experimental basis, and that people despised die limited generalisations of the Baconian experimentaJist the
that even the

128

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

world wanted everything to be explained from first principles manner of Descartes, and thought it nothing if you merely proved that a certain phenomenon was the result of the application of heat. He valued Bacon even where Bacon has
after the

most been despised by modern writers namely, in his natural history. And though Boyle had severe things to say about Bacon's contemporary the famous chemist, Van Hdmont as well as about many other people, he found it hard to believe that the great Francis Bacon could have been foolish. In one or two cases where people jeered at Bacon for reporting experiments that had proved fallacious, he set out to enquire how Bacon could have been wrong, and discovered that, for example, Bacon was correct if you assume that he used a purer sort of spirits of wine than was usually employed a generation later. Even apart from this, he was interested in those anomalies or impurities which often existed in the materials employed by chemists, and which explain why so many of their experiments were vitiated. He wrote about the whole range of accidents which in given cases prevented experiments from producing
the correct result or even a uniform result.

He

kept careful

registers of observations himself and insisted on the importance of recording experiments, of confirming them by unwearied repetition, and of distrusting a great amount of what purported to be the published record of experiments. He was Baconian in that he repeatedly thanked God that he had been
initiated into

chemical operations
his

not capable of infiisitig into

philosophising of the alchemists, a class of people who had been blinded by die jargon of their trade. Perhaps he was Baconian

by illiterate artisans mind the notions and

men

even in

his interest in

what

is

more popularly known

as

water into earth, his idea alchemy, that he had transmuted gold into a lower metal, and the degree of secrecy and mystification which he manifested in regard to some of his work. It was because of his confidence in
his work

his belief that he could turn

secured

Ac repeal of a kw of Henry IV*s reign against people

to multiply gold and silver.

on that side that he petitioned parliament in 1 689 and

who set out

THE NON-MECHANICAL SCIENCES

129

It is difficult for us to imagine the state of chemical enquiry before the days of Boyle, or to comprehend on the one hand the mystifications and the mysticisms, on the other hand the anarchical condition of the alchemists in things,

amongst

general. Van Helmont, who stands roughly Francis Bacon, made one or two
coveries,

twenty years

after

significant chemical dis-

but these are buried in so

all

much fandfulness

includ-

ing the view that

bodies can ultimately be resolved into

water

that even

Helmont
things in
state

twentieth-century commentators on Van are fabulous creatures themselves, and the strangest
rationalistic
it is

Bacon seem

Concerning alchemy of things, in that the historians

and modern in comparison. more difficult to discover the actual

who specialise in this field

seem sometimes to be underthe wrath of God themselves; for, like those who write on the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy or on Spanish politics, they seem to become tinctured with the kind of lunacy they set out to describe. Two things, however, are clear in the time ofBoyle, because the conscious campaign against them was one of the explicit objects of much of his writing. On the one hand he quarrelled with the scholastic interpretation of the properties and qualities greenness, fluidity, coldness, etc. which bodies possess; that is to say, he quarrelled with a traditional doctrine of what were called "substantial forms", a doctrine which he claimed had become hardened and perverted since its exposition by Aristotle. In this connection he showed that the doctrine of "substantial forms" had explained nothing and had only added a species of mystification, while it was dear that, without die embarrassment of that doctrine, important problems had been
solved in recent times in
statics, hydrostatics, etc.

On the other

hand, in regard to the constitution of matter, the followers of Aristotle believed that substances could be resolved into the
four dements
earth, water, air

and

fire.

The

alchemists,

Boyle was in the habit of calling Spagyrists, believed that matter could be resolved into three hypostatical principles
sulphur, salt and mercury. In his attack

whom

upon these views or

upon any combination of them, Boyle came near to laying

130

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

contributions to science
ture

the foundations of modern chemistry and made his significant contributions relating to the struc-

of matter. Here

his

work

torical explanation has to

so stimulating that some hisbe provided for the fact that it took
is

another century to place the science of chemistry really on

feet.

its

At a point where

his

work was

to be

of such

interest

and

importance in the history of science, it is curious to note that Robert Boyle, in spite of all his preaching against that kind of

of the way in which he apparently tried to was spurred and stimulated by a species of doctrine, an afl-embracing philosophy which had become current amongst the more advanced thinkers of the time. In a sense he was Baconian even in this for it was the corpuscular view of the universe which had attracted him, and Bacon in one of his most fascinating essays, as we have seen, had called
thing,
spite

and in

fight against himsel

remark that

purposes demonstration, since hardly any other hypothesis enabled one either to comprehend or to portray the extraordinary subtlety

attention to the corpuscular theory, making the significant it was either true or useful for the of

of nature. Ear from regarding it as a purely speculative theory of the kind that ought to be avoided, Bacon had told the
scientists that this

was

precisely the direction in

which they

they wished to "cut nature to the quick". tells us that for a long time he avoided reading about the Boyle

ought to

move

if

corpuscularian hypothesis lest his

deflected

work and his mind should be

his writings that

by

it,

but

it is

dear from

he could

notreallyresistit. He continually discusseditwhetherinthefbrm

of an atomic theory in Gassendi, or in the system of Descartes, which regarded matter as infinitely divisible, and he bracketed the two as forms of the corpuscularian theory, setting them
against both the Aristotelian and the alchemical theories of matter. He said on one occasion that he was prepared to be

corrected in his particular generalisations about the formations of mixtures and compounds in chemistry, but that as a natural philosopher he did not expect to "see any principles proposed

more comprehensive and intelligible than the

corpuscularian^,

THE NON-MECHANICAL SCIENCES

131

which he often also called the "mechanical** philosopy, since it purported to give a mechanical explanation of the physical universe. Here, then, is another way in which Boyle is a product of the scientific revolution on its essentially mechanical
side.

Boyle
little

said that the Peripatetics, the Aristotelians,

made too

use of experiment they brought in experiment merely to illustrate the principles they had arrived at in their general system of philosophy. That was a criticism very Baconian in

and perhaps not quite just, and the same was true of upon the syllogistic method. Boyle was Baconian again when he pointed out that the mechanical philosophers themselves "have brought few experiments to
character,

the continued attacks

verify their assertions". He consciously set out to do that particular service to the mechanical philosophers to supply the experimental background for their theory of matter; and

of the multitude of his protestations, he was laying himself open to the charge of doing the very thing he had reproached the Aristotelians for doing namely, using experiments to demonstrate and fortify a philosophy already existing in his mind. Above all, Boyle tells us that he set out to "beget a good understanding between the chymists and the mechanical philosophers who have hitherto been too little acquainted with one another** learning". He stressed the necessity for an alliance between chemistry and mechanical science in the study of the body stressed the importance of having men actually skilled in both sciences at once and showed that chemistry had its part to pky, for example in research on the subject of the digestion. He regarded the whole corpuscular philosophy as being confirmed by chemical science, in the operations of which, he said, it often happened
in that sense, in spite
sensible**.

that "matter [was] divided into parts too small to be.singly the one hand, therefore, the principles of mechanics are often brought by Boyle into connection with

On

chemical and medical questions

ie has a work,

for example,

entidedMo&ma
Medico.

On

Hydrostatica or Hydrostatics applied to Materia the other hand, he constantly hauls these sciences

I 32

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

into

connection with the fashionable seventeenth-century

hypotheses concerning the structure of matter.

writings
to
is

One of

his

entitled

Of

the Recondleableness

of Specific Medicines

Corpuscular Philosophy. He repeatedly expressed his anxiety to show that chemical experiments had relevance and in its higher reaches. In all applicability to natural philosophy
the
this it is

abundantly clear that he thought he was doing the greatest possible service to Christianity, for the interests of which he was very jealous and for the furtherance of which he

wrote

many treatises.
on
Aristotle

In his attacks both

and on the alchemists, he

gives a close picture of the structure of matter as conceived in the new mechanical philosophy, and we can follow the way in

which he was led to his new doctrine concerning the chemical elements. On his view, the universe could be explained from three original principles matter, motion and rest matter itself being capable of reduction to minute particles which on one occasion and for purposes of illustration he was prepared to assume to be a billionth of an inch in length. Hrsdy, he said:
stores of particles of matter, too small to be, whilst single, sensible; and being intire or undivided must needs have both its determinate shape and be very solid. Insomuch that

there are in the

world great

each of which

is

might be mentally and by divine omnipotence yet by reason of its smallness and solidity nature doth scarce ever actually divide it; and these may in a sense be called minima or prima naturalia.
though
it

divisible,

At the next

stage,

he

said:

there are also multitudes of corpuscles which are of the coalition of several of the former

made up

[particles or]

and whose bulk is so small and their adhesion so dose and strict that each of these little primitive concretions or dusters of particles is singly below the discernment of seme; and though not absolutely innataratia;

minima

THE NON-MECHANICAL SCIENCES

divisible

133

by

nature into

[the original particles or] prima

naturalia that

they very rarely happen to be actually dissolved or broken but remain intire in a

composed

it

great variety

of sensible

bodies.

Granted the original particles and their clustering together in knots or concretions, says Boyle, the purely mechanical

movements and arrangements of these minute

explain
all

corpuscles will the different characteristics and tendencies of

physical bodies, so that there is no need to resort to Aristotelian notions of forms or to any mystification about the quality of

greenness in bodies that happen to look green. The differences between one substance and another are merely differences in the schematic systems into which the particles of common matter are ranged, the motions that take place amongst them, and the difference of texture or structure which the various possible combinations produce. The configuration of the corpuscles, the size of the clusters, the position or posture of the particles
these are sufficient to explain all the variety that exists in nature. One of Boyle's works is entitled Experiments about the

Mechanical Origin or Production of Particular Qualities, and it includes a discourse on the mechanical origin of heat and of

magnetism. Boyle showed elsewhere that bodies are fluid when die minute corpuscles lie over one another, touching at
only some parts of their surfaces, so that they easily glide along each other until they meet some resisting body "to whose
internal surface they exquisitely accommodate themselves". "Bodies exhibit colours not upon the account ofthe predomin-

ancy of this or that principle in them but upon that of their texture and especially the disposition of their superficial parts;

whereby the
Whiteness
surface
is

light

rebounding thence to the eye

is

modified.**

the result of reflection from a

body whose

is

asperated

by almost innumerable

small surfaces; which

convex being of an almost specular nature [like tiny this way and mirrors] are also so placed that some looking

134

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

some that, they yet reflect the rays of light that fall on them not towards one another but outwards towards the
spectator's eye.

And just as the colours of plush or velvet will vary as you stroke one part of the fabric one way and another part another way just as the wind creates waves of colour and
shadow in a field of corn as It falls
of it
so the posture and
differently in different parts inclination of the particles in a given

body will govern the way the light is modified before it is returned to the eye. Something similar to this is true with
various processes in nature or in chemistry in the case of putrefaction, for example, air or some other fluid fetches out

the looser particles, and the substance is dislocated, producing perhaps even a change in the composition of the separate corpuscles.

The

taste

of things

is

accounted for in a parallel way:

If bodies be reduced into a multitude of parts minute and sharp enough, it is very possible that some of these, either in part or in coqunction with others, may acquire a size and shape that fits them sensibly to affect the organ of taste.

He

of their sharp edges pricking. His total view is dear the qualities and properties of the bodies that we know may be accounted for by motion, size, configuration and combinations of particles. The behaviour of the particles and the resulting manifestations in the various kinds of body that exist are attributed by hitn to what he calls "the mechanical affections of matter", because,
speaks sometimes as though
it

were a

case

he

says, they are analogous to "the various operations of mechanical engines*'. He often talk* of the human body as a

"matchless engine" and of the universe as "an automaton or

self-moving engine". He was greatly concerned over what he was for ever calling die texture or the structure of matter, the result of the numberless

combinations that were possible with particles and cor-

puscles.

Many of his

greatest

works are

illustrations

of

his

THE NON-MECHANICAL SCIENCES

tremendous
that his
interest in this question;

135

and

it is

not surprising

most important contribution to chemistry lay in this field namely, in his discussion of what constituted a chemical element. His most famous work, The Sceptical Chymist,
addresses itself to this particular question. It does not give his positive system at its ripest we must rather regard it as his
greatest piece of destructive work. He attacked what his predecessors had hitherto regarded as the virtually irreducible things in chemistry on the one hand, Aristotle's doctrine of

the four elements;

alchemist

on the other hand, the teaching of the on the subject of the three hypostatical principles. He showed that the alchemists were wrong in assuming that by the use of fire all mixed bodies could be analysed into their
elementary ingredients.

He

demonstrated

that, indeed, differ-

ent things happened if a sample of some mixed body were burned in an open fire and another sample in a closed retort.

produced on a substance by a moderate degree of heat, he said, would not always be compatible with the effects produced by a very great heat. He showed that sometimes fire

The

results

actually united bodies

substance

of different natures or produced out of a that had not existed previously. heated the two combined ingredients to form soap, he Having substances it two of out and closed retort produced soap in a

new compounds

different

that fire

from the ones he had used originally. He maintained divides mixed bodies because some parts are more

fixed and others

more

volatile,
is

but that

it

does not matter

fire

whether

either

of these

of an elementary nature or not

does not necessarily reduce a substance into its primary elements. At the same time he pointed out that nobody had ever divided gold into any four component parts, while blood was a substance capable of being reduced to more than four
ingredients.

He drew attention to

the difference between chemical

com-

how the two were differpounds and mere mixtures, showed

and indicated ently related to the elements composing them, the tests that would facilitate the identification of individual substances. In a full-dress attack on the prevailing belief in the

I36

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

three Paracelsan "principles" sulphur, salt and mercuryhe clarified the description of the irreducible nature of a chemical
this,

element, though

Van Helmont had foreshadowed him

in

and indeed it which he apprehended confusion which nullified the benefit he had bestowed. He showed that fire was unable to reduce glass to its elements, though everybody was aware that there were elements to which it could be reduced, since it was composed of sand and alkali. He regarded a piece of gold as being built up from very fine corpuscles and he was prepared to believe that these metalto sub-division than lic corpuscles were even more resistant as composed of ultimate parthem itself. He glass regarded ticles, each corpuscle being what he called a "concretion" extremely stable, extremely difficult to reduce, and clearly recoverable even after gold had been compounded with something else and had apparently disappeared. But he was not convinced that they could never be resolved into something more genuinely elementary; and he does not seem to have been consistently prepared to be pragmatic, as Lavoisier was ready to be at a later date, and to accept a substance as "elementary" merely because it had proved chemically irreducible up to this time. On occasion he even expressed doubts about the existence of "chemical elements" or the need for postulating such things, since the differences between one substance and another might be explained as the effect of size, shape, structure, texture, and motion produced by the mere accretion and architectural arrangement of the ultimate particles of primary matter. Chemistry itself could be reduced to what has been called "micro-mechanics", therefore; and Boyle himself showed a tendency to rush direct to this ultimate explanation of the qualities that he found in any kind of matter. In this, if to some degree he foreshadowed a distant future, he may still have done harm, because it meant by-passing the whole idea of a chemical dement. His mechanistic philosophy may have helped him in some ways, but it hindered

can be argued that, through the way in the matter, Boyle introduced a new

him

in other ways, therefore.

And,

at this point in the argu-

THE NON-MECHANICAL SCIENCES

ment his work,

137

in proportion as it influenced the world, may well have served rather to check the progress of chemistry.

The

Paracelsan division of matter into three hypostatical "principles" may have gone somewhat out of fashion in the

subsequent period; but the parallel system of Aristotle the doctrine of the four "elements'* was to recover favour, as

was noted

in the eighteenth century. Boyle's study of the atmosphere, which inaugurated his career as a chemist and his quarrel with Aristotelianism, has an

important pkce in a longer narrative of seventeenth-century discovery. "When Galileo was faced with two smooth slabs of

marble or metal so clinging together that the one could lift the other, he interpreted the phenomenon in accordance with the
Aristotelian thesis

that nature abhors

a vacuum, and he

slurred over the objection that the resistance

of these bodies to

any attempt to separate them could hardly be due to something which did not yet exist namely, the vacuum that
would be produced by their separation. When a pump refused to raise water above thirty-two feet Galileo did not ask why
nature's abhorrence

of a vacuum should come to its limit at column of water broke by its own said as one he might hang up a column of iron so weight, just it would break by its own weight. Galileo that and heavy long both regarded the atmosphere as having weight and conjectured that a column of mercury, because it was so much heavier than water, would break if it reached only onefourteenth of the height that a pump could carry water. But
that point

he

said that the

it

was

his disciple, Torricelli,

who

took a tube three

feet

long

filled it with mercury, and immersed it in a (sealed at the top), bowl of mercury, so that the column of liquid fell to two feet six inches thereby showing that the pressure of the atmosphere a kept up the column of mercury and that something like vacuum existed at the top of the tube. This led to the discovery of the barometer and then to further experiments concerning
;

atmospheric pressure its variation at different altitudes, example while in Germany the observation of die pumping

for

of water led to the important discovery of the air-pump.

138

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

Robert Boyle greatly improved the German air-pump which, he tells us, required the hard labour of two men for many hours before the vessel could be emptied. He demonstrated that the air could

force

which

resisted pressure

was kept up solely moment he made the

as so

that it had an expansive and that the barometric column by the weight of the outside air. At one

be weighed

interesting conjecture that the

its

behaviour
particles

of the air might be explained by regarding

minute

he and combustion and came near to the discovery of oxygen when he said: "There is in the air a little vital quintessence (if I may call it so) which serves to the reand freshment restoration of our vital spirits, for which uses the grosser and incomparably greater part of the air un[is]

many

tiny coiled-up springs. In addition to

all this,

studied both respiration

serviceable."

He

realised that in the

atmosphere there

is

"a

confused aggregate of effluviums. . . . There is scarce a more heterogeneous body in the world." But it seems to have been

view that the air itself was homogeneous, the variations being due to the presence of steams and effluvia which in reality were foreign to it. In this single field his experiments
his

did

much

to justify the Baconian influence under

which they

were undertaken

the principle that the scientist should use the experimental method in order to collect concrete data, without attempts at too hurried synthesis. And ifhis concentration

on

fortunate effects

the mechanical activity of the air may have on the chemical study of the

had un-

atmosphere in

the following period, as we shall see, Boyle in general marks so great a difference from the older chemistry that historians

have had to wonder

why greater progress that science in the next century.

was not made

in

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE HISTORY OF THE MODERN THEORY OP GRAVITATION

IT

became

clear to us

when we were

studying the

work of

Copernicus that the hypothesis of the daily and annual rotation of the earth presented two enormous difficulties at the start.

The
earth

first

What power was

(as

was the question: to keep this heavy and sluggish well as the rest of the heavenly bodies) in motion ?
in dynamics. It at

was a problem

work

The second was more complicated and requires some explanacosmos

On the older theory of the bodies tended to fall to the centre of the heavy earth, because this was the centre of the universe. It did not
tion;
it

was the problem of gravity.

all

matter if such earthy and heavy material were located for a moment on the immaculate surface of a distant star it would
still

be drawn, or rather would aspire to rush, to the same universal centre, the very middle of this earth. Indeed, supposing

God had
still

piece of earthy material found

created other universes besides ours and a genuine itself in one of these, it would
fall
it

tend to

to the centre
it

of our

urge within

would make
earth

seek to

universe, because every come back to its true

home. Granted an

which described a spacious orbit

case,

around the sun, however, such a globe could no longer be

regarded as the centre of the universe. In that
the existence

how could

of gravity be explained ? For it was still true that heavy objects seemed to aspire to reach the centre of the earth. The two problems in question became more acute when,

men began to see the were that the of view the kept in motion planets untenability and held in their proper courses by their attachment to the great crystalline orbs that formed the series of rotating skies. It became necessary to find another reason why these heavenly bodies should keep in movement yet not drift at the mercy of
towards the aid of the sixteenth century,
139

140

ORIGINS OF

MODERN SCIENCE

chance in the ocean of boundless space. These two problems were the most critical issues of the seventeenth century, and

were only solved in the grand

synthesis

produced by

Sir Isaac

Newton in his Prindpia in 1687

basis

a synthesis which represented the culmination of the scientific revolution and established the

of modern

science.

Though it entails a certain amount of

recapitulation, we shall be drawing the threads of our whole story together if we try to mark out the chief stages in the de-

velopment of this new system of the universe. It has been suggested that Copernicus owes to Nicholas of Cusa his view that a sphere set in empty space would begin to
that before the problem

turn without needing anything to move it. Francis Bacon said of the heavens could be solved it would

be necessary to study the question of what he

taneous rotation". Galileo,

called

"spon-

who seems at
as a

times almost to have

imagined gravity

as

an absolute

kind of "pull" which

particular object in

existed in the universe irrespective

of any

space drew a fancy-picture of God dropping the planets vertically until they had accelerated themselves to the required speed, and then stopping the fell, turning it into circular motion at the achieved velocity a motion which on his principle of
inertia

could then be presumed to continue indefinitely. In-

volved in the whole discussion concerning the form of the universe was the special problem of circular motion.
Copernicus was responsible for raising these great issues and,
as

we have already seen, he did not fail to realise the magnitude

set. It

of the problems he had

besides the earth

was

his

view that other bodies

the sun and the

moon,

for example

possessed the virtue of gravity; but he did not mean that the earth, the sun and the moon were united in a universal gravitational system or balanced against one another in a mutual meant that harmony. any mundane object would aspire to regain contact with the earth, even if it had been carried to

He

the surface of the

feet,

moon. The

sun, the

moon and

the earth, in

had

their private systems, their exclusive brands, their

appropriate types
gravity
still

of gravity. For Copernicus, furthermore, remained a tendency or an aspiration in the alien-

HISTORY OF THE

MODERN THEORY OF GRAVITATION

141

ated body, which rushed, so to speak, to join its mother it was not a case of the earth exercising an actual "pull" on the

And, as we have already seen, Copernicus regarded gravity as an example of the disposition of matter to collect itself into a sphere. The Aristotelian theory had implied the converse of this the earth became spherical because of the tendency of matter to congregate as near as possible around its
estranged body.
centre.

In view of the principles which were emphasised in this way in the system of Copernicus, a special significance attaches to the famous book which William Gilbert published in 1600 on
the subject of the magnet. This work marks, in fact, a new and important stage in the history of the whole problem which we
are discussing. I have already mentioned how, according to Aristotle, four elements underlay all the forms of sublunary

matter, and one of these was called "earth"

not the soil which

we can take into our hands, but a more refined and sublimated
substance free from the mixtures and impurities that characterise the common earth. William Gilbert, starting from this

view, held that the matter on or near the surface of the globe was waste and sediment a purely external wrapping like the
skin and hair of an animal
especially as

by exposure

to the

atmosphere and to the influence of the heavenly bodies it was peculiarly subject to debasement and to the operation of chance and change. The authentic "earth" Aristotle's element in its pure state was to be found below this superficial level, and formed, in fact, the bulk of the interior of this globe. Indeed, it was neither more nor less than lodestone. This world of ours

was for the most part simply a colossal magnet. The force of the magnetic attraction was the real cause of various parts of gravity, said Gilbert, and it explained why the tie earth could be held together. The force of the attraction exerted was always proportional to the quantity or mass of the body exerting it die greater the mass of the lodestone, the on the related object. At greater the "pull" which it exercises die same time, this attraction was not regarded as representing a force which could operate at a distance or across a vacuum

142
it

ORIGINS OF

MODERN SCIENCE

was produced by a

subtle exhalation or effluvium, said Gil-

bert.

And the action was a reciprocal one; the earth and the moon both attracted and repelled one another, the earth having
the greater effect because it was so greatly superior in mass. If a magnet were cut in two, the surfaces where the break had been

and had a hankering to join represented opposite poles to represent another one with again. Magnetism seemed up a in to whole, therefore the tendency of parts keep together

made

of material units, to maintain their of gravity carried with it an attack on integrity. Gilbert's view the idea that any mere geometrical point the actual centre of
the tendency

of

bodies,

the universe, for example could operate as the real attraction or could stand as the goal towards which an object moved. Aristotle had said that heavy bodies were attracted to the

of the universe. The later scholastics who adopted the for example had de^ impetus-theory Albert of Saxony, this view and had brought out the point that in reality veloped it was the centre of gravity of a body which aspired to reach
centre

the centre of the universe. Gilbert,

that gravity

on the other hand,

insisted

action taking place between mere mathematical points, but was a characteristic of the stuff itself, a feature of the actual particles which were affected by the

was not an

relationship.

"What was important was the tendency on the

of matter to join matter. It was the real material of the magnet that was engaged in the process, as it exercised its influence on a kindred object. Francis Bacon was attracted by this view of gravity, and it occurred to him that, if it was true, then a body taken down a well or a mine into the bowels of the earth would perhaps weigh less than at the surface of the earth, since some of the attraction exerted from below would possibly be cancelled by magnetic counter-attraction from that part of the earth which was now above. And though there were fallacies in this hypothesis, die experiment was apparently attempted more than once in the latter half of the seventeenth century; Robert Hooke, for example, stating that he tried it on Bacon's suggestion, though he failed to reach a satisfactory result.
part

HISTORY OF THE
Gilbert's

MODERN THEORY OF GRAVITATION

143

views on the subject of gravity took their place

amongst the prevailing ideas of the seventeenth century, though they did not remain unchallenged, and it was long confessed that the question presented a mystery. Robert Boyle wrote of gravity as being possibly due to what he called "magnetical steams" of the earth. He was prepared, however, to consider an alternative hypothesis namely, that it was due to the pressure of matter the air itself and the ethereal substances above the air upon any body that happened to be underneath.

William Gilbert constructed a spherical magnet called a terrella, and its behaviour strengthened his belief that the magnet possesses the very properties of the globe on which we
live

namely, attraction, polarity, the tendency to revolve,

and the habit of "taking positions in the universe according to the law of the whole" automatically finding its proper pkce in relation to the rest of the cosmos. "Whatever moves naturally in nature, he said, is impelled by its own force and "by a consentient

compact of other bodies"; there was a correspondence between the movement of one body and another so that they formed a kind of choir; he described the planets as each obin with one serving the career of the rest and all chiming another's movements. That gravitational pull towards the centre affected not merely bodies on the earth, he said, but and these also operated similarly with the sun, the moon, etc.,

moved

in circles for magnetic reasons. Magnetism, furthermore, was responsible for the rotation of the earth and the

other heavenly bodies

on their axes. And it was not difficult to

achieve rotation even in the case of the earth, he said, because as the earth has a natural axis it is balanced in equilibrium its
earth itself has no weight it "is set parts have weight but the in motion easily by the slightest cause". He held that the moon

the earth because it was bound always turned the same face to to the earth magnetically. But, like Copernicus, he regarded

the sun as the most powerful of all the heavenly bodies. sun, he said, was the chief inciter of action in nature.
In a curious

The

manner the wider theories of Gilbert had found

144

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

way prepared for them and had had their prospects somewhat facilitated. Since the fourteenth century there had existed a theory that some magnetic attraction exerted by the moon was responsible for the tides. Such an idea came to be unthe

popular amongst the followers of Copernicus, but it appealed to astrologers because it supported the view that the heavenly
bodies could exercise an influence

upon the earth. In the very of Copernicus's great treatise that is to a work was produced which attributed the say, in 1544 tides to the movement of the earth, and Galileo, as we have
year after the publication
already seen,

was to make this point one of his capital arguments in favour of the Copernican revolution. It was in reply to Galileo that the astrologer Morin put forward a view which

had already appeared

only the
theories

moon

earlier in the century namely, that not but also the sun contributed to afiect the tides.

one time was prepared to adopt the more general of Gilbert in a vague kind of way, though he did not pretend that he had understood magnetism or the mode of its operation in the universe. He regretted that Gilbert had been so much a mere experimenter and had failed to mathematise magnetic phenomena in what we have seen to be the Galileian
Galileo at

manner.
earlier than Galileo, however, the great astronomer had been influenced by Gilbert's book, and it appears Kepler that he had been interested somewhat in magnetism before the work of Gilbert had been published. Kepler must have an

Even

important place in the story because, under the influence of the magnetic theory, he turned the whole problem of gravity

problem of what we call attraction. It was no longer a case of a body aspiring to reach the earth, but, rather, it was the earth which was to be regarded as drawing the body into its bosom. Put a earth near to this one, said Kepler, and bigger this earth of ours would in relation to the bigger acquire weight one and tend to fell into it, as a stone falls on to the ground.
into a

was not now a mathematical point, not the centre of the earth, that exercised the attraction, but matter itself and every particle of matter. If die earth were a
And,
as in Gilbert's case, it

HISTORY OF THE

MODERN THEORY OF GRAVITATION

145

sphere, the stone would tend to move towards its centre for that reason, but if the earth were differently shaped if one of its surfaces were an irregular quadrilateral, for example the

stone

would move towards

different points according as it

approached the earth from one side or another. Kepler further showed that the attraction between bodies was mutual the

and if there were nothing to interfere with the direct operation of gravity, then the earth and the moon would approach one another and meet at an intermediate point the earth covering one-fiftyfourth of the distance (assuming it to be of the same density as the moon) because it was fifty-four times as big as the moon. It was their motion in their orbits which prevented the earth and its satellite from coming into collision with one another in
stone attracts the earth as well as the earth a stone
this

way.

we see that curious rapprochement between and magnetism which was already visible in Gilbert, gravity whom he admired so greatly, and which is explicit in later seventeenth-century writers, As in the example of the broken magnet this gravity could be described as a tendency in cognate bodies to unite. Kepler belongs also to the line of
In Kepler
writers who believed that the tides were caused by the magnetic

action of the

moon; and he has been criticised on the ground

of magnetic attraction, which he pictured as it streaming out of the earth, were so strong as to have made
that his chains

did not quite impossible to hurl a projectile across them. He reach the idea of universal gravitation, however for example, he did not regard the fixed stars as being terrestrial bodies by
nature and as having gravity, though he

knew

that Jupiter

threw shadows and Venus had no light on away from the sun. Like Bacon, he seems to have regarded the skies as
the side

becoming more aethereal more unlike the eartk as they receded from our globe and as one approached the region of the fixed stars. Also, he regarded the sun as a special case, with, so to speak, a gravity of its own. as the Having noted that the speed of planets decreased the sun, he regarded this as planet became more distant from

146

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

a confirmation of the view to which he was mystically attached in any case namely, that die sun was responsible for

motion in the heavens, though it acted by a kind of power which diminished as it operated at a farther range. He held that the planets were moved on their course by a sort of virtue which streamed out of the sun a force which moved round as the sun itself rotated and which operated, so to speak, tangentially on the planet. He once called this force an effluvium mqgneticum and seemed to regard it as something which was transmitted along with the rays of light. If the sun did not rotate, he said, the earth could not revolve around it, and if the earth did not rotate on its axis, the moon in turn would not revolve around our globe. The rotation of the earth on its axis was largely caused by a force inherent in the earth, said
all

the

Kepler, but the sun did something also to assist this movement. Granting that the earth rotates 365 times in the course of the year, he thought that the sun was responsible for five of
these.

Kepler knew nothing of the modern doctrine of inertia which assumes that bodies will keep in motion until something intervenes to stop them or to deflect their course. In his theory the planets required a positive force to push them around
the sky and to keep

them

in motion.

He had

to explain
this

why
pur-

the motion

was

pose he
tion,

made

elliptical instead of circular further use of magnetism

and for

the axis of the

planets, like that

of the

earth, always

remained in one direc-

now the sun drew these pushed them away, producing therefore an elliptical orbit. The force with which the planets were propelled, however, did not radiate in all directions and distribute
and
at a given angle, so that

bodies

in,

now

it

itself

indiscriminately throughout the universe like light, but

moved from the sun only along the plane of the planet's orbit. The force had to know, so to speak, where to find its object,
therefore
shafts

not ranging over the whole void but aiming its within die limits of a given field. In a similar way, the

idea that die attracting body must be sensible of its objectdie earth must know where die moon was located in order to

HISTORY OF THE
direct

MODERN THEORY OF GRAVITATION

147

its "pull" to that region was one of the obstacles to the theory of an attraction exerted by bodies on one another across empty space.

then, seemed to be making a remarkable the to modern view of gravitation in the days of approach and and many of the ingredients of the modern Galileo, Kepler

The world,

doctrine were already there.

At this point in the story, however, an important diversion occurs, and it was to have an extremely distracting effect even long after the time of Sir Isaac Newton himself. Ren Descartes who, as we have seen, had
undertaken, so to speak, to reconstruct the universe, starting

with only matter and motion, and working deductively produced a world-system which it is easy for us to underestimate today, unless

we remember

the influence that

it

had

even on great scientists for the rest of the century and still later. It is only in retrospect and perhaps through optical illusions that as in the case of more ancient attempts to create worldsystems

be tempted to feel at this point that the human mind, seeking too wide a synthesis and grasping it too

we may

may work to brilliant effect, yet only in order to obstructions for itself. future produce have already seen that, in spite of all his attempts to throw overboard the prejudices of the past, Descartes was
quickly,

We

liable to

be misled by too easy an acceptance of data that had been handed down by scholastic writers. It is curious to note

similarly that

two grand

Aristotelian principles helped to

condition the
first,

form of the universe as he reconstructed itthe view that a vacuum is impossible, and secondly, the
that objects could only influence

view

one another if they

there could be no such thing as attraction, actually touched no such thing as action at a distance. As a result of this, Descartes insisted that every fraction

by was regarded as infinitely divisible. The particles were supone of them could not move posed to be packed so tightly that without communicating the commotion to the rest. Itis matter formed whirlpools in the skies, and it was because the
occupied
all

the time

of space should be fully continuous matter matter which

14.8

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

were caught each in its own whirlpool that they were round like pieces of straw driven hy the matter with which they were in actual contact and at the same time were kept in their proper places in the sky. It was because they were all similarly caught in a larger whirlpool, which had the sun as its centre, that they (and their particular whirlpools) were
planets carried carried along, across die sky, so that they described their krge orbits around the sun. Gravity itselfwas the result of these whirl-

pools of invisible matter which had the effect of sucking things

down

towards their

own

centre.

The mathematical

principles

governing the whirlpool were too difficult to allow any great precision at this time in such a picture of the machinery of the
followers of Descartes laid themselves open to the charge that they reconstructed the system of things too
universe.

The

on phenomena which they for which they could bring but regarded no actual evidence. In the time of Newton the system of
largely

by deduction and

insisted

as logically necessary

Descartes and the theory of vortices or whirlpools proved to be vulnerable to both mathematical and experimental attack.

At die same time

certain believers in the

plenum

in the

Cartesian idea of a space entirely filled with matter contributed further ingredients to what was to become the Newtonian synthesis. Descartes himself achieved the modern formulation of the law of inertia the view that motion continues in a
straight line until interrupted by something working it out by a natural deduction from his theory of die conservation of

momentum, his theory that the amount of motion

verse always remains the same. It

in the uni-

was he rather than Galileo who fully grasped this principle of inertia and formulated it in all its clarity. A contemporary of his, Roberval, first enunciated the theory of universal gravitation applying it to matter everywhere though he did not discover any law regarding the variation in the strength of this gravitational force as it operated at various distances. He saw a tendency throughout die whole of matter to cohere and come together; and on his view the moon would have fallen into the earth if it had not been for the thickness of the ether within the intervening space

HISTORY OF THE

MODERN THEORY OF GRAVITATION

149

moon

the fact that the matter existing between the earth and the put up a resistance which counterbalanced the effect of

gravity.

This was in 1643.

It

was in 1665

that the next important step

was

taken,

when Alphonse Borelli, though he followed Kepler

that
it

in the

view

needed a force emanating from the sun to

push the planets around in their orbits, said that the planets would fall into the sun by a "natural instinct" to approach the
central

body if the

effect

of gravity were not counterbalanced

by a centrifugal tendency the tendency of the planets to leave the curve of their orbits, like a stone seeking to leave
the sling. So, though he
the planets

came

short in that he failed to see

moving by

their

own inertial motion and failed to

understand the nature of that gravity which drew the planets towards the sun, Borelli did present the picture of the planets
balanced between

two opposing forces one which tended to make them fall into the sun, and another which tended to make them fly off at a tangent. In the ancient world in a work of Plutarch's which was familiar to Kepler, for example
sense that

been compared to a stone in a sling, in the motion overcame the effect of gravity. Borelli was unable to carry his whole hypothesis beyond the failed to understage of vague conjecture, however, because he
the
its

moon had

circular

stand the mathematics of centrifugal force. By this date (1665), most of the ingredients of Newton's
scattered in the gravitational theory were in existence, though scientists in such a way that no man held of different writings

them in combination. The modern doctrine of inertia had been put forward by Descartes and was quickly gaining acceptance,
though people like Borelli, who has just been mentioned, still seemed to diinlc that they had to provide a force actually that gravity pushing the planets along their orbit. The view was universal, operating between all bodies, had also been put
forward, and on this view it became comprehensible that the sun should have a pull on the planets, and the earth should keep
the

moon from flying off into

space.

Now,

in 1665, there

was

the suggestion that this gravitational

movement was

counter-

150

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

balanced

by

a centrifugal force

a tendency of the planets to

go off at a tangent and slip out of the sling that held them. All these ideas inertia, gravitation and centrifugal force are
matters of terrestrial mechanics; they represented precisely those points of dynamics which had to be grappled with and understood before the movements of the planets and the whole

problem of the skies were settled. But if you had these on the one hand, there were the findings of astronomers on the other hand, which had to be incorporated in the final synthesis and these included Kepler's three kws of planetary motion; the one which described the orbits as elliptical; the one which said that a line between the sun and any planet covered equal areas in equal times; and the one which said that the square of the time of the orbit was proportional to the cube of the mean distance from the sun. It had to be shown mathematically that the planets would behave in the way Kepler said they behaved, supposing their motions were governed by the mechanical kws which I have mentioned. Huygens worked out the necessary mathematics of centrifugal action, especially the calcuktion of the force that was required to hold the stone in the sling and prevent it rushing off at a tangent. He seems to have arrived at this formula in 1659, but he only published his results in this field in 1673, as an appendix to his work on the pendulum dock. It seems,
however, that it never occurred to Huygens to apply his views of circular motion and centrifugal force to the planets themselvesthat is to say, to the problem of the skies; and he seems

hampered at this point of the argument by the of the ideas of Descartes on the subject of the heavenly bodies. In 1669 he tried to explain gravity as the sucking effect of those whirlpools of matter with which Descartes had filled the whole of space, and he illustrated this by a bowl of water and rotating showing how heavy particles in
influence

to have been

the water

moved towards

the centre as the rotation slowed

down. He also believed at this time that circular motion was natural and fundamental not a thing requiring to be specially and that rectilinear motion in the case of felling explained

HISTORY OF THE

MODERN THEORY OF GRAVITATION

151

bodies, as with the particles in the rotating bowl so to speak, a by-product of circular motion.

of water, was,

A writer on Keats has attempted to show how in the period

before the production of the sonnet "On Reading Chapman's Homer" the poet had been setting his mind at play and gradually

making himself at home

in terms

in

what might be described

as

the field of its effective imagery.

Now there had been an experi-

of astronomical discovery, now an attempt to the experience of the explorer; squeeze a poetical phrase from but one after another had misfired. The mind of the poet, however, had traversed and re-traversed the field, and in the had been generated, long run apparently a certain high pressure is to that came moment exalted so that when the say, when

ment

the happy Chapman's Homer had provided the stimulus themimages from those identical fields rapidly precipitated selves in the mind of the poet. The sonnet came from the pen

without

without any apparent preparation, but, in fact, a subterranean labour had long been taking place. of men So, as the seventeenth century proceeded, the minds
effort,

had

which we have been this way and that, but never studying, putting things together a certain high pressure was clearly though
traversed

and re-traversed the

fields

quite succeeding,

being generated.

One man might

have grasped a

strategic

in a realm piece in the puzzle and,

seemed

relevant, another scientist

which at the time hardly would have seized upon

another piece, but neither had quite realised that if the two were put together they would be complementary. Already the scattered parts of the problem were beginning to converge,

one youth however, and the situation had become so ripe that and field the of possessed who made a comprehensive survey
of mind, great elasticity the with help of a pattern
indeed,

could shake the pieces into die proper few intuitions. These intuitions,

were to be so simple in character that, once they had been achieved, any man might well ask himself why such matters had ever given any difficulty to the world. The rdle of Newton in the story has been the subject of his recent controversy, and doubt has even been thrown upon

I 52

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE
still

claim to have

made

the effective synthesis while

a very-

young man. It has been shown that, up to a period little short of this, his notes give no evidence of any exceptional ability; but by 1665-66 he was making important discoveries both in optics and in mathematics, while in respect of the gravitational theory his own retrospective account of his discoveries is not to be lightly dismissed. It would seem then that, acting independently, he had found the required formulae relating to centrifugal force in 1665-66, before the work of Huygens on this subject had been published. He had also discovered that the planets would move in something like conformity with Kepler's laws ifthey were drawn towards the sun by a force which varied in inverse proportion to the square of their distance from the sun in other words, he had succeeded in giving mathematical expression to the operation of the force of gravity. On the basis of these results he compared the force required to keep a stone in a sling or the moon in its orbit with the effect of gravity (that is to say, with the behaviour of falling bodies at the earth's surface). He found that the two corresponded if one

made allowance for the fact that gravity varied inversely as the
square of the distance.
into a curve

He treated the moon as though it had been a projectile tending to rush offin a straight line but pulled

by the effect of the earth's gravity; and he found the that hypotheses fitted in with the theory that the force of universal gravitation varied inversely as the square of the
distance.

The fall which the moon had to make

(as

a result of

the earth's drag) every second, if it was to keep its circular path, bore the requisite proportion to the descent of the body
falling

The story of Newton and the apple is historical and was bound to have at least a sort of typical validity for if it was not an apple it had to be some
here at the surface of the earth.
other terrestrial falling body that served as the basis for comparison. And the essential feat was the demonstration that

of terrestrial mechanics was applied to the heavenly bodies the mathematics came out correctly. Newton would seem, therefore, to have achieved his essential synthesis in 1665-66, though IK was dissatisfied with certain
the
science

when

new

HISTORY OF THE

MODERN THEORY OF GRAVITATION

work away

153

points in the demonstrations and put the

for

many

years.

In the middle of the i66os, Borelli, Newton, Huygens and Hooke were wrestling with various parts of the same planetary

problem, some of them also treading on one another's heels in the study of the nature of light. Huygens had visited London,

produced experiments for the Royal Society, corresponded with members of that Society, and tried out in England his pendulum clocks, which date back to 1657. But in England, experiments with the pendulum had started independently, and Christopher Wren, William Croone, William Balle and Laurence Rooke appear to have inaugurated the enquiry into laws of motion, Robert Hooke performing most of the experiments.
It is

hardly possible to discover the influence that

Huygens and the English scientists must have had on one another in the development of this work. The 16705 must represent one ofthe greatest decades in the scientific revolution, ifnot the climax of the whole movement; and in both London and Paris there were circles of scientific workers whose achievements at this time were of a remarkable nature. So
far as the gravitational
resist

theory is concerned, it is difficult to that in this period our attention ought to be directed not merely to Newton as an individual but to the
the

view

combined operations ofthe English group. The Royal Society,

we

from

are told, following Baconian principles, sought to collect all the world the data necessary for the establishment of

the Copernican hypothesis; and, perhaps ideally at least, its members were assisting one another, "freely communicating their methods and pooling their gains". Here the names that
are in the forefront are those

Edmond

of Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, and Halley Christopher Wren. Hooke is amaTmg in the number, the variety and the ingenuity ofhis experiments
as well as for his extraordinary fertility in hypotheses. He followed Bacon in his attempts to demonstrate that the effects

of gravity on a body must dimmish as the body was sunk into the bowels of the earth. He sought to discover how far the effects were altered at great heights or in the region of the

154

ORIGINS OF

MODERN SCIENCE

equator; and he threw light on the problem by observations and experiments on the pendulum. From the globular shapes

of the heavenly bodies and the stable conformation of the ridges on the moon he deduced that the moon and the planets had gravity; and by 1666 he saw the motion of a comet (for example) as incurvated by the pull of the sun upon it, and suggested that the motion of the planets might be explicable on the kind of principles that account for die motion of a pendulum. In 1674 he was suggesting that by this route one could arrive at a mechanical system ofthe planets which would be "the true perfection of astronomy". He pointed out that, apart from the influence which the sun exerted on the planets, account had to be taken of the force which all the heavenly bodies must be presumed to be exerting on one another. By 1678 he had formulated the idea of gravitation as a universal principle; and by 1679 he, too, had discovered that the diminution of the force of gravity is proportional to the square of the distance. In this period it would appear that Newton put on to paper some remarks which might suggest that he was unsure about his own earlier theory; for the moment he seemed to be less firm in his apprehension than Hooke. At the same time he was called upon for mathematical help on various occasions. Some doubt seems to have been entertained (especially amongst Englishmen) on the subject of Kepler's law relating to the elliptical orbit of the planets. Newton provided a demonstration of the feet that the attraction exerted on the planets made it necessary to adopt the elliptical rather
than the circular hypothesis. Hooke was to claim the priority in respect of the whole gravitational theory, and because

Newton had been secretive about his work in

1665-66, because

many of Hooke's own papers disappeared, and because Newton's memory was defective sometimes or his accounts
unreliable the controversy on this subject has been renewed in recent years. But, apart from the evidence of Newton's earlier interest at least in the problem, Hooke did not produce

the mathematical demonstration

be said on his behalfthat in the crucial

of his system. It can simply period he was developing

HISTORY OF THE
his

MODERN THEORY OF GRAVITATION

155

mathematical powers more than was once imagined to be

the case. His reputation has risen, with the development of historical research, therefore; though the glory of Newton

has not been eclipsed.

It

should be noted that, whereas Kepler had seen the planets

as subject to forces

which emanated from the sun, the view which Hooke had expounded and which Newton was to develop presented a much more complicated sky a harmonious system in which the heavenly bodies all contributed to govern one another in a greater or lesser degree. The satellites ofJupiter leaned or reacted on one another as well as influencing the planet itself, while Jupiter in turn had a still more powerful hold upon them. The planet, however, together with its collection of satellites, was in the grip of the sun (upon which it exerted its own small degree of attraction), and was also within range of the influence of neighbouring planets. As Newton remarked later, the sun was so preponderant amongst these bodies that the influence of the smaller ones mattered little and, similarly, one might make small account of the influence of the moon upon the earth. At the same time it had been noticed, especially in England, that when Jupiter and Saturn came into closest proximity with one another their movements showed an irregularity which was never observed at any other point in the course of their travels.
Also the

moon

caused a slight alteration in the earth's orbit.

of similar perturbations in the planet Uranus in 1846 By astronomers were able to deduce the existence of still another planet Neptune before the planet had actually been obvirtue
served.

The whole system was

therefore

much more com-

die early part plicated in the 16705 than had been envisaged in of the century the whole sky presented a more intricate set of mathematical harmonies. It was to be the virtue of die new theory of die skies that it explained some of the minor anomalies, and embraced a world of interactions much more comprehensive than anything which Kepler had envisaged. It was in die middle of the i<58os that Isaac Newton returned to the problem. His greatest difficulty had apparently been due

156

ORIGINS OF

MODERN SCIENCE
we
have
seen,

to the fact that though gravity operates, as

between all particles of matter, he had to make his calculations from one mathematical point to another from the centre of the moon to the centre of the earth, for example. In 1685 he was able to prove, however, that it was mathematically correct to act upon this assumption as though the whole mass of the moon were concentrated at its centre, so that the whole of its
gravity could be regarded as operating from that point. It happened furthermore that though in the middle '6os the data
still

upon which he worked may not have been radically wrong, in 1684 he was able to make use of more accurate observa-

and calculations; for in 1672 a French expedition under had enabled simultaneous measurements of the Picard Jean of Mars to be taken in Cayenne and in Paris, and the altitude
tions

of the expedition made it possible to secure a more accurate estimate of the sun's mean distance from the earth
results

which was worked out

the

at 87 million miles, coming nearer to modern calculation of 92 million as well as revealing still more vividly the magnitude of the solar system. It was even possible now to have more accurate measurements of the dimensions of the earth itself. The achievements of this ex-

pedition, although they

earlier date,

had found their way into print at an became only widely known after a publication of and these materials were die ones employed by Newton 1684, when he made his final calcuktions and produced his system. In the middle *8os, therefore, there were converging reasons for his return to the problem he had been dealing with twenty years before; and this time he was satisfied with his results and demonstrations, which were completed in 1686 and communicated to the world in the Principia in 1687. One of Newton's objects when he promulgated his system was to show the impossibility of that theory of vortices or whirlpools which Descartes had formulated. He showed that mathematically a whirlpool would not behave in the way that Descartes had assumed a planet caught in a whirlpool would not act in conformity with Kepler's observations on the subject of planetary motion. Furthermore, it would not be possible

HISTORY OF THE MODERN THEORY OF GRAVITATION

for a

157

comet to cut a straight path across the whole system, from one whirlpool to another, in the way that the theory required. In any case, if the whole of space were full of matter dense enough to carry round the planets in its whirlings, the strength of so strong a resisting-medium would have the effect of slowing down all the movements in the universe. On the other hand, it appears that even mathematicians did not immediately grasp the meaning and the importance of the Prindpia, and

many

people

especially those

who were

under the influence

regarded Newton as unscientific in that he back on to the stage two things which had been driven brought out as superstitious namely, the idea ofa vacuum and the idea

of Descartes

of an influence which could operate across space between bodies that did not touch one another. His "attraction" was sometimes regarded as a kpse into the old heresies which had
attributed something like occult properties to matter. Actually he denied that he had committed himself to any explanation

of gravity, or to anything more than a mathematical description of the relations which had been found to exist between bodies of matter. At one moment, however, he seemed privately to favour the view that the cause of gravity was in the ether (which became less dense at or near the earth, and least dense of all at or near the sun), gravity representing the tendency of all bodies to move to the place where the ether was rarer. At another time he seemed to think that this gravitation of his represented an effect that had to be produced by God throughout the whole of space something that made the existence of God logically necessary and rescued the universe from the over-mechanisation that Descartes had achieved. And, as we have seen, Newton believed also that certain and conirregular phenomena in the skies rare combinations a were liable to cause a comet of or the junctures, passage
derangement in the clockwork, calling for die continued intervention of God. The great contemporaries, Huygens and Leibnitz, severely criticised the Newtonian system, and their work helped to in strengthen the position of the philosophy of Descartes
slight

I58

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

Europe for many years. They attempted mechanical explanations of gravity either imputing it to the action and pressure of subtle matter pervading the universe, or looking back to the
idea of magnetism. The English in general supported Newton, while the French tended to cling to Descartes, and the result

was a controversy which continued well into the eighteenth century. Both Descartes and Newton were in the first rank of geometers; but the ultimate victory of Newton has a particular significance for us in that it vindicated the alliance of geometry
with the experimental method against the elaborate deductive system of Descartes. The clean and comparatively empty

Newtonian

day against a Cartesian universe packed with matter and agitated with whirlpools, for the existence of which scientific observation provided no
skies ultimately carried the

evidence.

CHAPTER NINE

THE TRANSITION TO THE PHILOSOPHE MOVEMENT IN THE REIGN OF LOUIS XIV

be the strategic lines of the in the story seventeenth-century scientific revolution, and we have seen how that revolution was particularly connected with the study of motion both on the earth and in the its culmination in that synthesis of sky, the story reaching

WE have now glanced at what seem to

astronomy and mechanics which was achieved in the system of Sir Isaac Newton. The point at which we have now arrived must stand as one of the great moments in tie history ofhuman experience, because though problems were not completely solved and even Newton could not say what were the causes

of gravitation, still it emerges from the whole narrative that here was one of those occasions when, by solving this problem and that, men acquired new habits of mind, new methods
ofen^uiry
almost incidentally, so to speak, they founded

mo3OTfscience. Furthermore, they discovered in the system of Newton that earth and sky could be comprised in a single
and survey and reduced to one fundamental system of law, this tended to alter their attitude to the whole universe. seen that conscious attempts were made to extend have

We

already the mechanistic systepi

itself,

as well as the scientific

methods

which had given such great results in physics, to cover also the case of chemical phenomena and to embrace even the field of in conscious correspondence biology. We have seen also that with this mechanistic system ancient atomic philosophies had been resurrected or were being moulded into new forms. It is not often that the historian can sweep into a single cluster such
a wide range of intellectual changes, forming altogether such a general transformation of man's outlook. All this, however, represents only a small corner in that vast range of significance which the
scientific

revolution possesses;

159

i(5o

ORIGINS OF

MODERN SCIENCE

and

we should be wrong if now we did not turn aside for a moment to study the repercussions of the new thought upon the life and society of the seventeenth century. The history of
science

ought not merely to exist by itself in a separate pocket, and if we have isolated certain aspects of it and put the microthat at this point scope on these, we have done so on the view in the narrative the intellectual changes had significance for

would be useful now, therefore, if we were to go back to the number we first thought of and see where the scientific movement of the seventeenth In this century finds its pkce in the total story of civilisation. connection we can hardly do better than take up the story we have actually reached in our precisely at the point which account of the scientific revolution the time when the movement may be said really to have come into its own. The galgeneral history in
its

broadest sense.

It

vanic period even for our present purposes seems to lie in that decade of the i68os when, as we have already seen, a handful

of scientists in both London and Paris were crowning the story with remarkable achievements; in fact, the years which came to their peak in 1687 with the publication of Newton's
Prindpia.

In order to understand the developments that took place we cannot begin better than by putting our fingers on the principal

agent in the transmission of the results of the scientific movement to the outside world in this period namely, the French
writer Fontenelle.

He is the most important single link between

the scientific revolution and the pkilosophe movement. He has a special interest for us because he lived from 1657 to 1757 and

spanned the great transition with which we are now concerned. And he is instructive because on die one hand he is in a sense
the
first

of the French philosopher, while on the other hand he

invented and exploited a whole technique of popularisation. He was secretary of the Academic ties Sciences from 1699 to
1741, and
it

may be

useful first
his

of all to take some evidence

loge$

which he supplies in

famous

the funeral orations

on a

of this period, which he great as in his of the capacity gave secretary Academy After examinscientists
.

number of the

TRANSITION TO THE PHILOSOPHE MOVEMENT

ing

161

what is a critical point in

the intellectual transition

we shall

later try to find the place

of the whole story in a wider survey

of the history of civilisation, so as to bring out some further to what we usually call the age of reason. aspects of the passage If we were grading forms of historical evidence, most of us would be inclined to put funeral orations into the lowest and
least
class of all. But it often happens in the case that a witness is most important in of document of any the things that he was not intending to give away, and the

trustworthy
class

historian

in the

is in the position of a detective there is not anything world which may not provide him with a due. Fontenelle, in fact, was an extremely subtle and diplomatic narrator, and even in what was supposed to be eulogy he could manage without offence to draw attention to the weaknesses of this scientist or that as in the case of one man who was the unduly jealous both of his colleagues and of inferiors. At

same time he seems to have used the orations in order to conduct a kind of propaganda on behalf of the scientific movement, and interesting things emerge from the character of that propaganda for example, where he tilts against prevailing
educational methods or against religious prejudice there is a considerable amount of information concerning the controversies
It is,

of the time.

however, by collating a great number of his short biothe narratives that we discover some graphies and comparing of the most interesting of the sidelights which Fontenelle was well situated to provide. There is always a stage in
particularly

the historiography of a movement, or a revolution, or a war, which might be described as the "heroic age" die primitive of the story, when people make period in the writing-up and exult in the overthrow of the myths, count their trophies of the the in or, Orangemen, hold commemoraspirit

enemy,

tive dinners.

kges of Fontenelle our to picture became may be said to contribute something this saga of the scientific revolution. they provide us with just If we examine some illustrations, it is not the names of particu-

There is a sense in which the

lar scientists that

matter or the specific things said about them.

162

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

concerns us, rather, is the pattern adopted in these biographies and the cumuktive effect of the series as a whole.

What

from the character of this collection of lives that we are now dealing not with lonely pioneers like Galileo, but with a movement that is on the way to becoming generalised. It would appear from Fontenelle's biographies that those who joined the movement often sprang from bourgeois families, and remarkably often they are the sons ofavocats, as he himself happened to be. Repeatedly it appears that they had originally been intended for the Church and that their fathers had insisted on giving them an education in theology. But over and over again the same pattern occurs in these biographies the youth finds the prevailing educational methods irksome, finds that he is being given an education in mere words and not in real identical fairythings. And then, on repeated occasions, the
It is clear

story seems to take place.

Of one person, Bernoulli, we are told that he saw some geometrical figures by chance and immediately responded to their charms proceeding later to a study of the philosophy of
Amontons, found himself deaf after an and had to cut short his formal education so now he could turn his mind to whatever he pleased, and he began to study machines and dedicated himself to a design for the production of perpetual motion. R6gis was intended for the Church, and, while he was getting tired of the length of time which he had to spend on an unimportant line of work, he chanced upon the Cartesian philosophy and immediately was struck by it Tournefort discovered the philosophy of Descartes in his father's library and recognised straight away that this was the thing his mind had been looking for. Louis Carr was die same he was to have been a priest, but the prospect was disgusting to him; then he discovered the philosophy of Descartes which opened up a new universe for him. Malebranche
Descartes. Another,
illness

so transported on reading Descartes, that he gave up everything else for the sake of the study of his philosophy.

was

Varignon picked up a volume of Euclid by chance, and, charmed to see the contrast between this and the sophistries

TRANSITION TO THE PHZLOSOPHE

and
obscurities that

MOVEMENT

163

he had been taught in the schools, he

to

allowed himself to be led by geometry to the reading of

Descartes

who came

him

as a

new

light.

The Dutchman,

Boerhaave, was training for theology, but having tumbled upon geometry he could not resist it because of its invincible

charm.

It is all like

the Christians recounting conversions in

the early stages of a religious movement, when one man after another sees the light and changes the course of his whole
life.

And

the

movement

generalises

itself in

those people

who

represent a
is

new

from the burden or routine or

Everything
still

generation, glad to be emancipated prejudice of the old one.

in the heroic period

the scientific

view

comes

as

conquests.

new revelation and its apostles are counting their And a particular agent in die transition is geometry,

especially at this time.

the influence of Descartes, which was very powerful

Fontenelle's biographical sketches, furthermore, give evithe curious social success of the sciences in dence

concerning

the reign of Louis XTV. As we survey them we find that the i68os comes out with peculiar vividness, especiperiod of the
this point ally as at

gives us

what

was probably some of the leading members of the new movement, and by definite contact 1683 or 1684 he had established himself in with it. This means that he came into direct touch with the
scientists at

he speaks very often as an eyewitness, and are really glimpses into his autobiography. It from about 1680 that he himself was meeting

an exhilarating moment at one of the peak points in the story and it is remarkable that though at this time he was only in the middle twenties, and had over seventy years did his most vivid impressions belong to live, not
longer

only

to this period, but much of his permanent outlook was establearn that Paris was full of foreigners lished by this date. who came to attend the conferences or observe the demonstra-

We

tions

of various

scientists

in

one year there were

as

many

as

Scotland alone who came to hear the forty people from famous chemist L6tnery. Crowds of women attended Lemery's courses

carried

away by

the prevailing fashion,

we arc

164

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

and as a result of his popularity his medicinal preparabecame the vogue. Rgis, the philosopher, had provided a stimulus in Toulouse, where he had awakened in both the clergy and the magistrates an interest in Cartesianism; and in 1680 he had come to Paris, where "the concourse of people was great so great that a private house couldnot conveniently hold them; people came to make sure of seats long before the rime to begin". The most pleasant of the actors at the Italian theatre came to learn the philosophy of Descartes; but the impression produced by Rgis was so sensational that the Archbishop of Paris put an end to the sessions. Another man,
told
tions

Du Verney

the anatomist, attracted

young

ladies to the study

of his subject "Anatomy, hitherto confined to the schools of

medicine,*' writes Fontenelle,

"now

dared to

come out

into

the beau

monde" He adds: "I remember having seen people of the beau monde carrying away the dried specimens which he had prepared in order to show them in their own circles/' Later, when he was Professor at the Jardin Royal, this man Du Verney had great crowds of students, 140 foreigners
attending his courses in a single year.

We learn more about a

an
interesting

group of

men from Normandy who formed

circle in Paris, including Fontenelle himself,

Varignon the famous geometer, the well-known Abb de Saint Pierre, and Vertot an historian. We learn of aristocratic patronage how L&nery the chemist came to be admitted to the salons of the Prince de Cond6, where many learned men assembled; while Du Verney was asked to assist in the education of the Dauphin, and then had a more distinguished audience than ever at his conferences. Fontenelle makes the interesting note that
mathematics made a good profit in the i68os, though he adds the significant remark that the outbreak of the great war in 1688 the war between Louis XTV and William IE had a

bad

effect

on this.

Then
entitled

famous dialogue The Plurality of WorMs--the first work in France which

in i<586 Fontenelle produced his

made the discoveries of science dear, intelligible and atrmsing to the general reading-public. In many respects this book

TRANSITION TO THE PHLLOSOPHE MOVEMENT

would stand

165

as a model for works of scientific popularisation that have appeared down to the present day. Fontenelle consciously set out to make science amusing to fashionable ladies

the latest novel, and in this connection it is important to note that he had begun life as a writer before he ever turned to science he was a literary man, manqut having
as easy as

and

written undistinguished verse and having failed as a dramatist. In one sense he was typical of the whole French philosophe

movement of the eighteenth century which he helped augurate. The results of the scientific revolution were
pitately

to inpreci-

and

hastily translated into a

work was
letters.

carried out not so

new world-view, and this much by scientists as by men of

Fontenelle wrote some mathematical works, but he was not himself important as a scientist he is not remembered by any actual scientific discovery of his own. He was the proper person to write the funeral orations because he was somewhat versatile and familiarised himself with many sciences, so that

he could appraise the discoveries of specialists in widely different fields. As a man of the world he saw what was fashionable and produced just what was wanted bringing out his work on The Plurality of Worlds in the year before the publication of the Principia, and giving the general picture of the heavens as this had been achieved in the pre-Newtonian period. He invented, and carried to extremes, a playful style, based on a conversational manner, full of what was called esprit, with devices of exposition that are so ingenious and witty that they end by becoming tedious at times. "A mixture of the pedant and the prtdeux calculated to go down well with the bourgeoisie

and the

provinces'*,

somebody has

said.

did not merely popularise die scientific achievement of the seventeenth century. It is important to note that the literary man intervenes at this crucial stage of the story and performs a

He

second function
into a
tists

die translation of the scientific achievement

new view of life and of the universe. Many of the scienof the seventeenth century had been pious Protestants and Catholics, and in this very period both Robert Boyk and Isaac
considerable

Newton showed

fervour

concerning

their

i6<5

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

Christianity even Descartes had thought that his work would serve the cause of religion. It had almost been a mystical urge

and a religious preoccupation which had impelled a man like Kepler to reduce the universe to mechanical law in order to

show that God was consistent and reasonable

left

that

He had not
charming,

things at the

mercy even of His

little

own

caprice. Fontenelle,

as I have

suggested, was something of a Talleyrand

of both the pessimist and the cynic in his attitude to human nature. He had held his sceptical views before coming into touch with the scientific movement at all had learned them from Lucretius and from more modern writers like Machiavelli and Montaigne. A scepticism which really had a literary genealogy combined to give to the results of tie seventeenth-century scientific movement a bias which was rarely to be seen in the scientists themselves and which Descartes would have repudiated. And this was encouraged by the obstructive attitude of the Roman Catholic clergy in France, who helped to strengthen the impression that the Church was the enemy of scientific discovery and, indeed, of anything new. In this connection it is important to note that the great movement of the eighteenth century was a literary one it was not the new discoveries of science in that
sceptical

and evasive, with a

epoch but,

rather, the

French philosophe

movement

that de-

cided the next turn in the story and determined the course Western civilisation was to take. The discoveries ofseventeenth-

century science were translated into a new outlook and a new world-view, not by scientists themselves, but by the heirs and
successors

of Fontenelle.

So, in the great transition from the seventeenth century to the eighteenth century, there is not just a straight organic development of human thought at a number of points there is, so to speak, a hiatus in the transmission, and these curious
faults in the connection, these discontinuities, throw light on the whole structure and fabric of our general history. There is a break in the generations- the young reacting against the ideas

whkt

and the educational system of dhtir fathers. There is that appeal Galileo was already making and which came to its

TRANSITION TO THE PHILOSOPHE

MOVEMENT

167

climax in Fontenelle and his successors the appeal against the learned world of the time, against both Church and universities, to a new arbiter of human thought: a wider general readThere is a further discontinuity when we find that ing-public.
it is

the literary

men who,
task

form the momentous

sometimes in a rapid manner, perof translating the results of scientific

work into
is

a new general outlook, a new world-view. Finally, to imthe there greatest discontinuity of all the emergence portance of a new class.
as

After a long straggle the French kings had achieved, as fully ever they were to achieve, that work which it was the func-

of monarchy to carry out in European to weld provincial units into national ones, history namely, to reduce the power of local tyrants, and to impose upon the
tion

of the

institution

the larger idea of the parochialism of half-developed peoples State. In the i68os Louis XIV was at the height of his power in France; the disastrous consequences of his policy had not yet unxlermined his work, and, since the Fronde, the might of a
rebellious nobility

had been broken

since 1660 there

had

been a remarkable return to stability in France after which had often put the entire period of distress and anarchy It has been noted that this return to into peril monarchy have been itself sufficient to produce a remarkstability would able revival of economic activity, even if there had never been
a Colbert to organise it, so that too much has perhaps been attributed to the work of this statesman and to the directing

a long

hand of government, And it is possible that students of history do not sufficiently stress the primary importance of a mere return to stability amongst the factors which help civilisation to make important steps forward and which were operative in this particular period. Anglo-French jealousy in the economic noticeable in the latter part of the seventeenth field is
very
the scene at this point in the story century, and if one surveys revolution was going to industrial the that one has the feeling

take place in France rather than in England. France at this time was the most thickly populated country in Europe ; the West had made a great development; and India trade, in
particular,

i68
it

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

that by the close of the seventeenth were drawing their livelihood, directly century 400,000 people or indirectly, from colonial commerce. Literary references at this time show that a wave of speculation swept over the country long before the famous upheaval associated with the name of John Law early in the eighteenth century; just as in William Hi's reign there already existed in England some of that speculative fever which Holland had witnessed at an earlier period still. Not only had the sting been taken out of the old nobility, but new classes were gaining the influential posi-

has been

computed

tion, the intellectual leadership.

Saint-Simon, the famous memoir-writer of this period, belonged to the old noblesse and wrote with all the prejudices

He calls our attention to a side of the reign of Louis XIV that we too often overlook when he denojinces it as
of that
class.

vile bourgeoisie". During the sixteenth was the century nobility who headed the Huguenot cause in the civil wars and in that period the bourgeoisie had had little part in literature. During much of the seventeenth century ecclesiastical leadership was so strong in both politics and init

"a long reign of the

tellectual life

so

many Cardinals in high office in the state, for

example that historians speak of the Catholic Renaissance in the France of this period. Now, however, the very texture of
society
is

draper. In the reign

palpably changing. Colbert himself was the son of a of Louis XIV, Corneille, Racine, Moli&re,
a whole host of distinguished

Boileau, La Bruy&re, Pascal, etc.

We have seen further signs personages of its growing influence and intellectual leadership in the case of the scientists themselves. All these modern developments in the reign of Louis XIV would have been more remarkable if the latter half of the reign had not been disastrous for the kind of state which Colbert had been promoting; and if there had
came from
this class.

not been an

aristocratic reaction after that.

Even so, the period

1660 to 1760 has been called "the golden age of the bourgeoisie** in France.

When men like Galileo and Descartes had decided to write

their

works in the vernacular

rather than in Latin,

avowedly

TRANSITION TO THE PHZLOSOPHE

for the purpose

MOVEMENT

i<$9

against the learned world to an that stroke of policy had itself been intelligent reading-public,

of appealing

of some significance, and something like it had occurred in Reformation Germany. There is involved in it one of those
discontinuities in the history

of

civilisation

which we have

noticed in other aspects of the subject for in the transfer of the intellectual leadership, in the reference to a new arbiter in
the realm
things in the intellectual heritage of a civilisation are liable to be lost, as we can see in the parallel

of thought, some

case

of the Marxist appeal to

still

another arbiter

the prole-

tariat

with

at the present day. In the case of Prance in the period are dealing, there are particular reasons why the which

we

middle

classes

were able to make

their intellectual leadership

effective.

With a curious humility,

life,

or a rare sense of the true values in

the French bourgeoisie halashamed of their class, and spurning the usual bourgeois idealsr showed an anxiety to

leave the bustle

and conflict of economic life at the first oppora safe but modest income, to build tunity, to be satisfied with a fine hStel and to ape the nobility. Instead of reinvesting their money in industry and commerce and training up their
children to carry on their work in the parental firm, they would buy lands or rentes or one of the safe little official posts,

of which a village of two thousand inhabitants could supply a remarkable number. Alternatively, they would move into tie law and medicine escaping from the business professions of
world, which they despised in their hearts, as soon as they achieved a modest competence. Colbert himself complained of the loss which was caused to the economic development of
this pattern of the bourgeois conduct of life in that would compare Prance unfavourably with Travellers country. the children tended naturally to be brought where Holland,

Prance

by

up to carry on and enlarge

the business

of their fathers. As one

French historian has said: a 'Tisemorrhage of capital removed it from business as soon as it had been created**.

So there were forces at work making the bourgeoisie a numerous body, but often preventing single members of the

I 7o

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

extraordinarily rich or economically the one hand, the French commercial horizon powerful. was the narrower for all this the spirit of enterprise was
class

from becoming

On

limited and the safe "fixed

income" became the homely ideal had the psychology of a nation of you for the extraordinary economic rentiers. And the reason perhaps success of the Huguenots was due in part to the fact that they had less chance of becoming functionaries in the state or ornaof the middle
classes

ments in society, so that they tended to stay in business. On the other hand, you can say that the French middle classes had a

of true values making enterprise subordinate to the purpose of "the good life" and that, if every nation had done the same, a fortunate brake would have checked a disproportionate and onesided progress in life and society. At any rate, it is important for the general history of culture that there was in France a bourgeoisie which knew leisure and looked for the delights of social life and desired to patronise art and learning. That class was one which was little impressed by either authority or tradition, and Fontenelle, as well as later writers of the philosophe movement, adopted the policy of making the intellectual work palatable and easy unlike the older forms of academic or scholastic controversy. Whereas "reason" had once been a thing that required to be disciplined by a long and intensive training, the very meaning of the word began to change now any man could say that he had it, especially if his mind was unspoiled by education and tradition. "Reason", in fact, came to signify much more what we today should call
sense

common sense.
modern outlook and the birth of the philosophe movement do not proceed from the scientific revolution by what you might call normal ascent by a direct logical development of ideas pure and simple. A number of
transition to the

The

things in our intellectual tradition were undoubtedly lost for the time being one could write a whole history even of those

things which have been recaptured into our tradition since that time, or those cases in which we have had to rediscover

the

meaning of ideas

that during a considerable period

had

TRANSITION TO THE PHILOSOPHE

been dismissed
achieved
as useless. In addition, the

MOVEMENT

171

whole transition was which involved passions, by and misunderstanding cross-purposes and those who were fighting the obscurantism of universities, priests and provindaUy-minded aristocrats were tempted to be cavalier on occasion they had no time to worry if there were a few unnecessary casualties in the course of the struggle. It is a curious
intellectual conflict

furthermore, that France gained the intellectual leadership in Europe through the prestige of an imposing collection of
fact,

classical writers
sailles.

whom we

associate

with the court of Vertakes

The movement which we have been studying

place behind that imposing fa$ade almost in the shadows and one historian of literature gathers it up under the tide

"The Decline of the Age of Louis XIV", though from the point of view which we are taking at the moment it was this movement which was the really germinal one. What is interesting here is another curious cultural discontinuity the intellectual leadership which France had acquired as a result

of her

brilliance in

eighteenth century to disseminate a different type tion altogether.

one kind of literature she used in the of civilisa-

There is one further field in which the intellectual changes of Louis XIV's reign touch the history of science especially as they represent the extension of the scientific method into other

and

realms of thought. In this case the field is that of politics, all historians note its importance as the beginning of a development that led to the French Revolution. If on the one

hand die French monarchy achieved its function in Louis XTV's reign, as completely as ever it was to do so, on the other hand we meet the beginnings of the criticism of the French monarchy not the mere carping and obstructionism of the those sections privileged classes now, but acute criticism from of the French intelligentsia who could rlaim to understand the idea of die state better than die king himself. After reaching its diat peak in die i68os, die reign of Louis XIV entered on diis in sinister decline by which it is principally remembdred criticisms of country; and from 1695 to 1707 a whole series of

172

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

levelled against the monarchy. The of Fontenelle call attention to an aspect of this movement which is often overlooked that is to say, the initial effect of the new scientific movement on political

modern kind were

funeral orations

thought.

The

political

logues of later times

ofthephilosophes.

reformers in question were not yet the ideanot doctrinaire writers after the manner

They wrote out of their genuine

experience,

and Fontenelle,

had to deal with various people of this either members or honorary members were type (since they of the Acad&mie des Sciences in one capacity or another), called attention to the effect of the scientific movement upon them. The first result the natural result of the transfer of scientific methods to

who

was the insistpolitics, as Fontenelle makes dear, ence that politics requires the inductive method, the collection of information, the accumuktion of concrete data and statistics. Fontenelle points out, for example, that it is necessary
for the master

of a

state to

study his country as a geographer

or a scientist would.

He describes with approval how Vauban,

of Louis XIV,

the great military engineer and one of the critics

travelled over France, accumulating data, seeing the condition

of things for himself, studying commerce and the possibilities of commerce, and gaining a knowledge of the variety of local conditions. Vauban, says Fontenelle, did more than anybody else to call mathematics out of the skies and attach it to various kinds of mundane utility. Elsewhere Fontenelle says with

some exaggeration that it is practically to Vauban alone that modern statistics are due Vauban, indeed, put statistics to the service of modern political economy and first applied the rational and experimental method in matters of finance.
Similarly Fontenelle tells us that in England Sir William Petty, the author of Political Arithmetic, showed how much of the

government reduces itself to matheEven where the movement was veering very much over to doctrinairism in the case of Fontendle's friend, the Abb6 de Saint-Pierre, we find an interesting pro-

knowledge

requisite for

matical calculation.

posal being put forward. Saint-Pierre desired to establish a

TRANSITION TO THE PHILOSOPHE MOVEMENT

173

for the

body of scientific politicians to examine all kinds of projects improvement of the methods of government or the better conduct of economic affairs. Bureaux of experts would either conduct the various branches of government or would
be attached to the various ministries in order to give inspiration

and advice. Saint-Pierre appears to have been ready to encourage any member of the public to submit ameliorative for the consideration of the government. When the projects
intellectual leadership passed in the eighteenth

century to

in classics and rhetoric, attention was literary men, educated turned away from this form of scientific politics, and political can hardly avoid writing took a course to which in general we
"doctrinaire". giving the description In an essay on "The Utility of Mathematics** Fontenefle stated a general doctrine which was coming to be widely held :

that it geometrical spirit is not so tied to geometry other to and it from cannot be detached transported

The

branches of knowledge.
criticism,

A work of morals or politics or

(other

perhaps even of eloquence, would be better done in the style of a things being equal) if it were

geometer.

The

which have
.

order, clarity, precision and exactitude been apparent in good books for some
this

time might well have their source in

.

Sometimes one great

man gives the

geometric spirit. tone to a whole

be century; [Descartes], to whom might legitimately accorded the glory of having established a new art of
reasoning,

was an

excellent geometer.

If Descartes was the great fashion in the age of Louis XIV, Bacon was chosen as the patron saint, so to speak, of the French encyclopaedists, and both of these authorities, as we

have seen, encouraged the disposition to overhaul every kind of traditional teaching, and question the whole intellectual an example of the transfer of the heritage. Fontenelle provides and the application of methodical doubt, in sdentific
spirit,

another

work of his, on

the History ofOracks. In a sense he

is

174

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

one of the precursors of the comparative method in the history of religion the collection of myths of all lands to throw light on the development of human reason. In order to learn

more about the primitive stages of our own history he recommends the study of primitive tribes as they exist in our own

Red Indians or the Lapps. He treats myths as, so to a natural speak, product, subject to scientific analysis not the fruits of conscious imposture but the characteristic of a certain
day
the
stage in

human development. The human mind he

all

essentially the same in

influences

affected

by

regards as times and ages, but subject to local the stage of social development so far

achieved, the character of the country itself and the climate under which the human being happened to be living. He uses

or the stories of sailors and travellers in the of or Rouen, port Jesuit missionary narrations, as materials for a comparative study of myths. Here is a self-conscious attempt to show how the scientific method could receive extended application and could be transferred from the examination of purely material phenomena even into the field of what we should call human studies. And it was important that the methodical doubt, upon which Descartes had insisted at a very high level and with peculiar implications as well as under a
classical history

particularly strict discipline, as

we

have seen
its

easily vulgarised, a thing already changing

was a thing character in the

age of Fontenelle, so that

had come to mean simply an ordinary unbelieving attitude, the very kind of scepticism which he had tried to guard against.
it

CHAPTER TEN

THE PLACE OF THE SCIENTMC REVOLUTION IN THE HISTORY OF WESTERN CIVILISATION

IT

was the passion of Ranke, whatever period or episode in to seek to put it in its place in history he might be studying, what he called "Universal History", which was the home you reached the ocean you finally gazed upon if you went far a enough in your reflection upon a piece of narrative. To such he set his mind on this object that he could describe did degree
the quest for "the ocean of universal history" as the great of his life, the ultimate goal of all his studies. It is

purpose

strange that this

one of the most insistent parts of his message the one we have allowed to drop most been have should usual studies of history, so that completely out of sight in our we tend to overlook it even when we are making an estimate
of Ranke himself. Having examined many aspects of the

howseventeenth-century intellectual movement internally, our we us if perspective, ever, it may be useful for enlarge
standing

some distance away from the story that we have been find the bearings of these events on the studying, and try to
whole history of Western
civilisation.

Until a comparatively recent date that is to say, until the sixteenth or dbte seventeenth century such civilisation as of the globe had been centred for existed in our whole

portion thousands of years in the Mediterranean, and during the Christian era had been composed largely out of Graeco-Rioman

and ancient Hebrew ingredients. Even at the Renaissance, Italy still held the intellectual leadership in Europe, and, even after
this,
still to come to its climax, Spanish Spanish culture had of history, and Spain kings ruled over one of the great empires had the ascendancy in the Counter-Reformation. Until a period before the Renaissance, the intellectual leadership of not

long such civilisation as existed in this quarter of the globe had re175

176

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

mained with the lands in the

Middle
East.

eastern half of the Mediterranean

or in empires that stretched farther

still into what we call the While our Anglo-Saxon forefathers were semibarbarian, Constantinople and Baghdad were fabulously wealthy cities, contemptuous of the backwardness of the

Christian West.

In these circumstances

West should have come

it requires to be explained why the to hold the leadership in this part of

the world; and, considering the Graeco-Roman character of European culture in general, it is necessary to account for the division of the continent and to show why there should ever

have arisen anything which we could call the civilisation of the West. Explanations are not difficult to find. Even when
the

Roman Empire

surrounded the whole of the Mediter* tension

ranean, there had been tension betweenEast and West

greatly increased when a second capital of theEmpire had been founded and the oriental influences were able to gather them-

and focus their influence on the city of Conthe age of the Barbarian stantinople. In the subsequent period Invasions the differences were increased when Constantinople
selves together

held out against attacks and preserved the continuity of classical culture, while, as we have seen, the West was so

reduced that
appropriating

it

had to spend centuries recapturing and

re>-

gathering the fragments together again and them into its own peculiar view of life. The incorporating between Rome and Byzantium in the middle religious deavage
it

of religion seemed to penetrate into of every department thought) accentuated the discrepancies between Latin and Greek and led to divergent lines of development in the West, for example, the friction between Church and State gave a tremendous stimulus to the progress of society and the rise of political thought. The West developed independently, then, but, though it may have been more dynamic, it was still for a long time backward. Even in the fifteenth eentary in die period of the high Renaissance the Italians were ready to sit at the feet of exiled teachers from Constantinople and to welcome diem as men like Einstein were
ages

(when

differences

PLACE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION IN HISTORY

177

welcomed not very long ago in England or America. By this time, however, visitors from the Byzantine Empire were exat the technological advances in the West. pressing their wonder

An important factor in the decline of the East and the rise of Western leadership, however, was one which has been unduly overlooked in our historical teaching, tor it has played a decisive part in the shaping of the map of Europe, as well as in
the story of European civilisation itself. From the fourth to the twentieth century one of the most remarkable aspects of the
story
years

the
is

most impressive conflict that spans fifteen hundred the conflict between Europe and Asia, a conflict in

which down to the time of Newton's Prindpia it was the Asiatics who were on the aggressive. From the fourth to the
seventeenth century when they still expected to reach the Rhine the greatest menace to any culture at all in Europe

were the hordes of successive invaders from the heart of Asia, coming generally by a route to the north of the Black Sea (a region which remained therefore a sort of no-man Viand almost down to the time of the French Revolution), but coming later south of the Caspian Sea and into Asia Minor and the Mediterranean region. Beginning with the Huns, and conthe Pettinuing with the Avars, the Bulgars, the Magyars, these hordes the Cumans, etc., generally Turkish chenegs, one another so succeeded or Mongol in character sometimes

forward into Europe by the quickly that one group was thrust in the rear, or a chain of them would be others of pressure
jostling

one another in a westerly direction all of which culminated in the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century, and the conquests of the Ottoman Turks after that. These Asiatic invaders had something to do with the downr fall of Rome and the western empire over fifteen hundred
the second Rome, years ago; they overthrew Constantinople, in 1453; and for centuries they virtually enslaved Russia and

dominated Moscow, which later came to stand in the position of a third Rome. It was they who hung as a constant shadow over the East and eventually turned the eastern Mediterranean lands into desert ; and they put an end to the glory of Baghdad.

i 78

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

Because of their activity over so many centuries it was the western half of Europe that emerged into modern history as
the effective heir and legatee of the Graeco-Roman civilisation. From the tenth century A.D. these Asiatics though for centuries

as far as the Atlantic coast

they had tormented us and carried their depredations were never able to break into the
to

West again or

do more than

century represents something therefore the time from which Western civilisation makes

like

besiege Vienna. The tenth a restoration of stability,

its

remarkable advance.

One aspect of the period that comes to its

is

culmination in the Renaissance

the emergence of western

Europe to a position 'of independence and, indeed, of conscious cultural leadership.

A primary aspect of the Renaissance, however, as we have

and brings to its climax the which the thought of antiquity was being long process by recovered and assimilated in the middle ages. It even carries to what at times is a ludicrous extreme the spirit of an exaggerated
seen, is the fact that it completes

subservience to antiquity, the spirit that helped to- turn Latin into a dead language. Ideas may have appeared in new combinations,

but

we

cannot say that essentially

new

ingredients

were introduced into our civilisation at the Renaissance. We cannot say that here were intellectual changes calculated to transform the character and structure of our society or civilisation. Even the secularisation of thought which was locally achieved in certain circles at this time was not unprecedented and was a hot-house growth, soon to be overwhelmed by the fanaticism of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. During much of the seventeenth century itself we can hardly fail to be struck, for example, by the power of religion both in and in thought politics. People have talked sometimes as though nothing very new
happened in the seventeenth century either, since natural science itself came to the modern world as a legacy from ancient Greece. More than once in the course of our survey we ourselves have even been left with the impression that the scientific revolution could not take place-Hiat significant

PLACE OF SCIENTIHC REVOLUTION IN HISTORY

developments were held up for considerable periods further draft had been made upon the thought of

179

until a

antiquity

and a certain

minimum of Greek

science

had been recovered.

Against all this, however, it might be said that the course of the seventeenth century, as we have studied it, represents one of the great episodes in human experience, which to be

ought

along with the exile of the ancient Jews or lie buildthe universal empires of Alexander the Great and of ing-up of ancient Rome amongst the epic adventures that have helped to make the human race what it is. It represents one of

pkced

those periods when new things are brought into the world and into history out of men's own creative and their
activity,

own wrestlings with truth. There does not seem to be any sign
its heritage had been dispersed, was moving towards anything like the scientific revolution, or that the Byzantine Empire, in spite of the continuity of its classical tradition, would ever have taken hold of ancient thought and so remoulded it by a great transforming power.

that the ancient world, before

we must regard, therefore, as a of the West depending on a complicated set of conditions which existed only in western Europe, dealso a certain dynamic quality in on pending partly perhaps the life and the history of this half of the continent. And not only was a new factor introduced into history at this time amongst other factors, but it proved to be so capable of growth, and so many-sided in its operations, that it consciously assumed a directing r6le from the very first, and, so to speak, began to take control of the other factors just as
The
scientific

revolution

creative product

Christianity in the middle ages had come to preside over everything else, percolating into every corner of life and thought.

And when we

speak of Western

civilisation

being carried to

an oriental country like Japan in recent generations, we do not mean Graeco-Roman philosophy and humanist ideals, we do not mean the Christianising of Japan, we mean the science, the modes of thought and all that apparatus of civilisation which

were beginning to change the face of the West in the

half of the seventeenth century*

latter

i8o

ORIGINS OF
it

MODERN

SCIENCE
historian,

Now I think

as distinct perhaps

would be true to say that, for the from the student of pre-history,

there are

not in any absolute sense civilisations that rise and fall there is just the unbroken web of history, the unceasing march of

which themselves overkp with one another and interpenetrate, so thatfeven the history of science is part of a continuous story of mankind going back to peoples far behind the ancient Greeks themselves. But we cannot hold our history in our minds without any landmarks, or as an ocean without fixed points, and we may talk about this civilisation and that as though they were ultimate units, provided we are not superstitious in our use of the word and we take care not to become the slaves of our terminology. Similarly, though everything comes by antecedents and mediations and these may always be traced farther and farther back without the mind ever coming to rest still, we can speak of certain epochs of crucial transition, when the subterranean movements come above ground, and new things are palpably born, and the very face of the earth can be seen to be changinguQn this view we may say that in regard not merely to the history of science but to civilisation and society as a whole the transformation becomes obvious, and the changes become congested, in tKe latter part of the seventeenth century. We may
generations
civilisation is

take the line that here, for practical purposes, our modern corning out in a perceptible manner into the
daylight.

In this period the changes were not by any means confined to France, though what we have hitherto studied has drawn

our attention to certain aspects of the transition in the case of that country in particular. The movement was localised, however, and it is connected with the humming activity which was taking pkce, say from 1660, not only in England, Holland and Prance, but also actually between these countries the
shuttle

different

running to and fro and weaving what was to become a kind of Western culture. At this moment the leader-

ship

of civilisation may be said to have moved in a definitive manner from the Mediterranean, which had held it for thou-

PLACE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION IN HISTORY

181

sands of years, to the regions farther north. There had been a this direction on the part of the university of Paris in pull in the later middle ages, and a still stronger pull after the Renaissance, when Germany had revolted against Rome and the

north had taken

its

the Mediterranean

had become

own path at the Reformation. In any case at times almost a Mohamme-

dan lake, and the geographical discoveries had been transferring the economic predominance to the Atlantic seaboard for a number of generations. For a moment, then, the history of civilisation was focused on the English Channel, where things were weaving themselves into new patterns, and henceforward the Mediterranean was to appear to the moderns as a backward
region.

promoting

did England and Holland hold a leading but that part of France which was most active in position, the new order was the Huguenot or ex-Huguenot

Not only

section, especially the

Huguenots in

exile, the

nomads,

who

that pkyed an important part in the intellectual exchange of the Revocation was taking place. After 1685 after the Edict of Nantes the alliance between the French and the

more close. Huguenots fled to English Protestants became the intermediaries for the publication in or became England
Holland of journals written in French and communicating
the English ideas. As the eighteenth century proceeded, with balance in Europe shifted more definitely to the north,

the rise of the non-Catholic powers of Russia and Prussia. Even in the new world it was the northern half of the continent
that

came to the

forefront,

and

it

was soon decided

that this

northern part should be British not French, Protestant not therefore, of the new form of Roman Oatholic-^an
ally,

civilisation.

The centre of gravity of tie globe itself seemed

to

have changed and

This

new

areas

of its

surface

found for a time

their "place in the sun".

new chapter in the history of civilisation really opened

when in 1660, after a long period of internal upheaval and civil

about not war, a comparative political stability was brought the continent, merely in France but in general throughout been gravdy had of institution the where on aH sides monarchy

i82

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

challenged but had managed to reassert itself and to reestablish a public order. In fact, what we have already noticed
in the case of France was
still

more true in England and Holland

in the seventeenth century we see the power in intellectual matters of what, in spite of the objections to the term, we must call the middle class. And just as the Renaissance was
particularly associated

with

city-states (or virtual city-states)

in Italy, South

Germany and the Netherlands, where the commerce and economic development had produced an exhilarating civic life, so in the last quarter of the seventeenth
century the intellectual changes were centred on the English Channel, where commerce had been making so remarkable a
rise

and so much prosperity seemed to have been achieved. The city-state disappeared from history in the first half of the sixteenth century; but on the wider platform of the nationstate the future still belonged to what we call the middle
classes.

we have in mind merely the intellectual changes of the period we are considering, they have been described by one
If
historian under the tide,

title

which

itself gives

the transition that

La arise de la conscience europ&enne some indication of the importance of was taking place. What was in question

was a colossal secularisation of thought in every possible realm of ideas at the same time, after the extraordinarily strong religious character of much of the thinking of the seventeenth century. John Locke produces a transposition into secular terms of what had been a presbyterian tradition in political thought, and in doing so he is not a freak or a lonely prophethe stands at the pivotal point in what is now a general transition. This secularisation came at the appropriate moment for combination with the work of the scientific revolution at the dose of the seventeenth century; yet it would appear that it was not itselfentirely the result of the scientific achievements a certain decline of Christianity appears to have been taking place for independent reasons. One is tempted to say on quite separate grounds that this period emerges as one of die lowest points in the history of Western Christianity between the

PLACE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION IN HISTORY

183

eleventh century and the twentieth. If we look at the general moral tone of Charles iTs reign after the period of the Puritan

ascendancy and compare it with the extraordinarily parallel case of the Regency in France after the religiosity of the closing
years of Louis XTV's reign, it is difficult to resist the feeling that in both cases a general relaxation in religion and morals followed periods of too great tension these things were not

the straight results of the scientific revolution taken in isolation. In any case it lay perhaps in the dialectic of history itself that in the long conflicts betweenProtestantand Catholic thesecular
state
rise to independence and should secure an arbitral what now seemed to be mere religious parties over position within it. The whole story of the Renaissance shows within

should

the limits of the city-state how the exhilarating rise of an urban

civilisation is liable to issue in a process

of secularisation

the

priest as

the noble loses tie power that he was able to a conservative agrarian world. Something in more possess has happened over and over again in the case of parallel

well

as

nation-states

in character

only have towns become really urban which is kte in the case of England, for example but when a sort of leadership in society has passed to the towns, and literature itself comes to have a different character. There is another reason why it would be wrong to impute all the changes in thought at this time to the effect of the
scientific

when not

discoveries

alone.

It

happened that just at

this

moment books of travel were beginning to have a remarkable effect on the general outlook of men a postponed result of
die geographical discoveries and of the growing acquaintance was now coming to be with distant lands. Western
familiar

Europe with the widespread existence of peoples who had never heard of ancient Greece or of Christianity. When these were taken into one's larger survey, the European outlook came to be envisaged not as universal, not necessarily even as central, but somewhat as a regional affair. It became possible to look upon it as only the local tradition of a comparatively

own cokore, even <H*e*s own religion, with

small section of the globe. So one could begin to regard one's of a. great degree

184
relativity. It

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE
local creed as

was

possible to look

on each

emits

bodying one

essential truth,

but covering that truth with

own local myths, perversions and accretions. What was common to all was the universal irreducible truth the and in French books of travel, principles of natural religion the essential find therefore, you ingredients of Deism before
John Locke had shown the way. Furthermore, you could feel that in western Europe Christianity had its basis in the same universal truth, but the principles had been covered (in

Roman Catholicism,
tions

for example)

by

local accretions, revela-

miracles, from which it now required to be extricated. The results of all this harmonised with the operations of the new science, and strengthened the case for die kind of Deism which Newton's system seemed to encourage a Deism which required a God only at the beginning of time to

and

set

the universe in motion.

this

period also there developed in a remarkable way and with extraordinary speed the tendency to a new type of
Protestantism
in

From

the

more

liberal

type which most of us have

are in controversy on this subject. It was a Protestantism married to the rationalising movement, and so
different

mind when we

from the

original Protestantism that it

now

requires

an effort of historical imagination to discover what Martin Luther had in mind. Some remarkable developments in this
rationalising tendency were only checked in England by the rise

and the pervasive influence ofjohn Wesley, who, however, also carries so many of the features of the Age of Reason in himself. On the other hand we have to note that if books oftravel affected the attitude of western Europeans to their own traditions, the very attitude these people adopted (the kind of relativity
they achieved)

owed something to
clearly

a certain scientific

oudook

which was

now

becoming a more general habit of

mind. Similarly, when in the i66os a writer like Joseph Glanvffl could produce a book on The Vanity of Dogmatising, insistscepticism in science and on the of methodical doubt, it is impossible to deny that this system critical oudook is an effect of the scientific movement. In

ing

on the importance of

PLACE OP SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION IN HISTORY

general,

185

to dose our eyes to the extremely disof that general overthrow of the authority of both the middle ages and antiquity which again had been
locating effects

we ought not

produced by the
therefore, that a

scientific revolution.

Either
factors

we may

say,

number of converging

the Western world in one prevailing was one wind so overpowering that say that there
carry along with
that
it it

were moving direction, or we must

it

could

happened anything other movement into its sweep, every gathered mighty to strengthen the current in favour of secularisation at this
time.

else that

a wind so

The changes which took pkce in the history of thought in this period, however, are not more remarkable tihan the changes
in life

and

the origins of the eighteenth century, and though, as I agrarian revolution have said , we can trace back the origin of anything as fax as we
like, it is

our tendency to push back society. It has long been of both the industrial revolution and the so-called

changes
scientific

towards the end of the seventeenth century that the are becoming palpable. The passion to extend the

method to every branch of thought was at least to make science serve the cause of equalled by the passion and it was accompanied by a sort of and agriculture, industry Francis Bacon had always laid stress on fervour. technological
the

immense

utilitarian possibilities

of science, the advantages

the control ofnature; beyond all dreams that would come from and it is difficult, even in the early history of the Royal Society, to separate the interest shown in the cause of pure scientific truth from the curiosity in respect of useful inventions on the or the inclination to dabble in fables and freakisbness one

on the

part, other. It has

become

a debatable question

how far the

by
tnrhnical

direction

of scientific

interest

was

itself afiected

needs or preoccupations in regard to shipbuilding and other Galileo in concernindustries; but the Royal Society followed the mode die with for important question of example, ing itself, trace the to wish who Those sea. at of discovering longitude a story is it that find will development of the steam-engine

which really begins to be vivid and lively in this period. Apart

186

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

from such developments, the possibilities of scientific experiment were likely themselves to be limited until certain forms
of production and technique had been elaborated in society the industrial and the agrarian generally. Indeed, the scientific,
revolutions

form such

a system

of complex and

interrelated

examination we have a changes, that in the lack of microscopic to heap them all together as aspects of a general movement,

which by the

seventeenth century was palquarter of the The hazard consists not in pably altering the face of the earth. all these things together and rolling them into one putting but in thinking that we know great bundle of complex change, how to disentangle them what we see is the total intricate network of changes, and it is difficult to say that any one of these was the simple result of the scientific revolution
last
itself.

Embraced
France

in the

overseas trade

same general movement is that growth of which we have already noticed in the case of

and once again we find a remarkable postponed result of the geographical discoveries of a much earlier period, reminding us that the New World represents one of the permanent changes in the conditioning circumstances of the modern age, one of the great standing differences between medieval and modern times, its results coming in relays and
reproducing themselves at postponed periods. In the England

of Charles n's reign we begin to see that we are an empire; the Board of Trade and Plantations comes to occupy a central
position in the government;
its

it is

after

1660 that the East India

less

Company reaps in the way of complaint about

the

colossal harvests.

We begin to hear much

the excessive

numbers of

begin to hear are comof customs officials, number about the plaints growing all of them subcontractors colonial officers, Treasury men, is die to This the epoch in corruption by government ject

dergy

henceforward what

we

which, as historians have long pointed out, wars of trade especially amongst the Dutch, tie French and die English succeeded the long series of wars of religion. Inasimilarway

we must

take note of the foundation of such things as the

PLACE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION IN HISTORY

Bank of England and
the national debt

187

new world of

finance that alters not merely the government but the very have seen how in France fabric of the body politic.

We

and England there already existed signs of that speculative fever which culminated in the scheme of John Law on the one hand and the South Sea Bubble on the other; while in Holland
there

had been a parallel financial sensation earlier still. For two thousand years the general appearance of the world and the activities of men had varied astonishingly little the so much so that men were not sky-line for ever the same conscious of either progress or process in history, save as one
city or state
fell.

might rise by effort or good fortune while another

essentially static because
life in

Their view of history had been

the world had been

static so far as they could see

successive generations played out by that remained essentially the same.

human beings on a stage Now, however, change

became so quick as to be perceptible with the naked eye, and the face of the earth and the activities of men were to alter more in a century than they had previously done in a thousand in connection with the idea of proyears. We shall see later, for effective purposes^-it was in and in how general gress, this period that men's whole notion of the process of things
in time

was thrown into the melting-pot. And the publication of a host ofjournals in France, England and Holland speeded

up the pace of intellectual change

itself.

of seventeentk-century English life illustrates the growing modernity of the world, and throws light not only on social change but on a certain different flavour that is becoming apparent in the prevailing mentality. There is a foretaste of it in the debates of James fs reign when we find
that certain people called Projectors are being attacked in we might call companydie sort of people

A curious feature

parliament

whom

promoters, and

who

devised schemes for

making money.

They developed very considerable phenomenon

a greatly after the Restoration, becoming inWilliam Hi's reign, and they cul-

minated in die period of the South Sea Bubble, when comexecute all kinds of fantastic schemes, panies were founded to

188

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

including a method of procuring perpetual motion. Just before the end of the seventeenth century Daniel Defoe who

emerges
Projects

remarkably modern mind produced an Essay on in which he commented on the whole phenomenon,
as a

satirised the Projectors,

but then produced

is

many

schemes of

his

own

to swell the flood. It

curious to note that these

Projectors provided another of what we should call the "mediations" which assisted the passage to thephilosophe move-

ment; for though some of them had schemes for getting rich quickly Defoe had a scheme for improving trade by settling the problem of the Barbary pirates, for example some others

had wider views: schemes of general amelioration, schemes for tackling the problem of the poor, plans for female education, devices for getting rid of the national debt. The famous socialistic system of Robert Owen was taken, as Owen himself explains, from John Bellairs, who produced the design of it in 1696 under the tide of "a scheme by which the rich were to remain rich and the poor were to become independent, and children were to be educated". Bellairs had other proposals
for example in connection with Such prisoDHrefonn. things easily passed into projects for new forms of government, and curious mechanical schemes were put forward the prelude to modern constitution-making and blue-prints for Utopia. They make it dear that the historical
for general amelioration

process

is

very complex; that while the

scientific

movement

was taking
call

place, otter changes wore occurring in society other factors were ready to combine with it to create what we

the

modern world.
later generation to thitilc that its
it

It is

always easy for a

pre-

decessor

was

foolish,

and

may seem

even after the first World War

shocking to state that historians could write the good

history of the nineteenth century with hardly a hint of the importance of Socialism, hardly a mention of Karl Marx a

which we should misinterpret unless we took it as a reminder of the kind of faults to which all of us are prone. Because we have a fuller knowledge of after-events, we today can see die nineteenth century differently; and it is not we who
fact

PLACE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION IN HISTORY

are under

189

an optical

illusion

reading the twentieth century

back unfairly into the nineteenth when we say that the student of the last hundred years is missing a decisive factor if he overlooks the rise of Socialism. A man of insight could have
recognised the importance of the phenomenon long before the end of the nineteenth century. But we, who have seen the
implications worked out in the events of our time, need no insight to recognise the importance of this whole aspect of the
story.

Something similar to this is true when we of the year 1957 take our perspective of the scientific revolution we are in a its implications at the present day much more position to see the men who flourished fifty or even twenty than clearly
us. years before

And, once again, it is not we who are under an

optical

reading the present back into the past for the things that have been revealed in the 19505 merely bring out more vividly the vast importance of the turn which the
illusion

world took three hundred years ago, in the days of the scientific revolution. We can see why our predecessors were less conscious of the significance of the seventeenth century why they talked so much more of the Renaissance or the eighteenthcentury Enlightenment, for example because in this as in so many other cases we can now discern those surprising overlaps

and time-lags which so often disguise the direction things are taking. Our Graeco-Roman roots and our Christian heriso central to all our thinking that it tage were so profound has required centuries of pulls and pressures, and almost a conflict of civilisations in our very midst, to make it dear that the centre had long ago shifted. At one time the effects of the scientific revolution, and the changes contemporary with it,

would be masked by the persistence of our classical traditions and education, which still decided so much of the character of
the eighteenth century in England and in France, for example. At another time these effects would be concealed through that which so helped to form the attachment to

popular

religion

character of even the nineteenth century in this country. The that ours was a Gracostrength of our conviction

very

190

ORIGINS OF
civilisation

MODERN SCIENCE
way
in

Roman

the very

which we allowed the

art-historians

and the

philologists to

make

us think that this

the product of thing which we call "die modern world" was the Renaissance the inelasticity of our historical concepts, in fact helped to conceal the radical nature of the changes that

had taken place and the

seeds

colossal possibilities that lay in the

the seventeenth century. The seventeenth did not merely bring anewfactorinto history, indeed, century, in the way we often assume one that must just be added, so

sown by

to speak, to the other permanent factors. The new factor immediately began to elbow the other ones away, pushing them

began immediately to of the new movement had declared their intention of doing from the very start. The result was the emergence of a kind of Western civilisation
their central position. Indeed, it
rest, as the apostles

from

seek control of the

which when transmitted to Japan operates on tradition there as it operates on tradition here dissolving it and having eyes for nothing save a future of brave new worlds. It was a civilisation that could cut itselfaway from the Graeco-Roman heritage in general, away from Christianity itself only too confident in its power to exist independent of anything of the kind. We know now that what was emerging towards the end of the seventeenth century was a civilisation exhilaratingly new perhaps, but strange as Nineveh and Babylon. That is why, since the rise of Christianity, there is no landmark in history
that
is

worthy to be compared with

this.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE POSTPONED
IT has often

SCffiNTIHC

REVOLUTION

IN CHEMISTRY
been a matter of surprise that the emergence of at so kte a stage in the story

modern chemistry should come

of scientific progress; and there has been considerable controversy amongst historians concerning the reasons for this. Laboratories and distilleries, the dissolution or the combination of substances and the study of the action of acid and
fire

these things had been familiar in the world for a long time. By the sixteenth century there had been remarkable advances

on anything
the field of

that had been achieved in the ancient world in what might be called chemical technology the smelting and refining of metals, the production and the treatment of glass-ware, pottery and dyes, the development of such

things as explosives, artists' materials and medicinal substances. It would appear that experimentation and even technological

progress are insufficient by themselves to provide the basis for the establishment of what we should call a "modern science**.

Their results need to be related to an adequate intellectual framework which on the one hand embraces tie observed data and on the other hand helps to decide at any moment the direction of the next enquiry. Alchemy had certainly failed to produce the required structure of scientific thought, and perhaps even in the experimental field it was a borrower ratter

than a contributor, playing a

in the evolution

less

important part, therefore,

the early the "ktro-chemists",

of chemistry than was once imagined. From sixteenth century, the more genuine precursors were

who

followed Paracelsus in their

insist-

ence on the importance ofchemical remedies for the physician. And, until kte in the eighteenth century, chemistry caine to

be particularly associated with the practke and the teadbiag of

medicine.
191

192

ORIGINS OF

MODERN SCIENCE

Robert Boyle had set out to bring about a marriage between the chemical practitioner and the natural philosopher; and from this time the story does at least become more comprethere are recognisable aspirations in the directions of science, with less of what to us seems mere capriciousness or Boyle's feme was great; the Latin editions
hensible to us
mystification.

of his works were numerous; some aspects of his researches Continent. Englishmen in his certainly had influence upon the time were beginning to be particularly drawn to the type of problem that was to be important throughout the following
have already seen, however, that Boyle's fervour century. for the "mechanical philosophy" may have had an unfortunate
effect

We

upon his work at what he regarded as the crucial point. At the same time his Baconian method his love of describing or synthesis may experiments independent of explanation
have worked, though in a contrary direction, to put a limit upon his influence. Joseph Freind, Professor of Chemistry in
the University of Oxford, wrote in 1712:

also

progress in Exthat litde Adperiments; but we may justly complain, vances have been made towards the explication of *em

(Chemistry has

made a very kudable

No body has brought more Light into this Art than Mr.
Boyle . . . who nevertheless has not so much laid a new Foundation of Chemistry as he has thrown down the old.

When we study the history of science,

our attention to the

it is

useful to direct

intellectual obstruction

which, at a given
the hurdle

moment, which it was then

is

checking the progress

of thought

particularly necessary for the

mind

to sur-

mount. In mechanics, at the crucial moment, as we have seen, it had been the very concept of motion; in astronomy, the rotation of the earth; and in physiology, the movement of the blood and the corresponding action of the heart. In chemistry, once again, it would seem that the difficulty in this period lay in certain primary things which are homely and fermli^r
things

which would not trouble a schoolboy

in the twentieth

POSTPONED SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION IN CHEMISTRY

193

century, so that it is not easy for us to see why our predecessors should seem to have been so obtuse. It was necessary in the first place that they should be able to identify the chemical

most of all. For thousands of years, air, water and fire had been wrapped up in a myth somewhat similar to the myth of the special ethereal substance out of which the heavenly bodies and celestial spheres were thought to have been made. Of all the things in the world, air and water seemed most certain to be irreducible elements, if indeed as Van Hehnont suggested everything in the world could not be resolved into water. Even fire seemed to be another element hidden in many substances, but released during combustion, and visibly making its escape in the form of flame. Bacon and some ofhis successors in the seventeenth century had conjectured that heat might be a form of motion in microscopic particles of matter. Mixed up with such conjectures, however, we find the view that it was itself a material substance; and this latter view was to prevail in the eighteenth century. Men who had made great advances in metallurgy and had accumulated much knowledge of elaborate and complicated chemical interactions, were as yet unable to straighten out their ideas on these apparently simple
difficult

elements, but the simplest examples were perhaps the

to us today that chemistry could not be topics. It would appear established on a proper footing until a satisfactory starting-

of air and point could be discovered for the understanding to have been seem it would to be achieved for this and water; the existabout idea both a to more have adequate necessary lite combustion, of the about and ence of "gases" process the and on the recognition whole

development depended cenweighing of gases; but at the opening of the eighteenth distinctions between gases, die of realisation there was no tury no instrument for collecting a gas, and no sufficient consciousness of the feet that measurements of weight might pky the
decisive part

amongst the data of chemistry.

From the time of Boyle and Hooke a great deal of activity

was being concentrated on the crudal and interrelated processes of combustion, calcination and respiration. A considerable

194

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

amount of study had been devoted also to the air; and these two branches of enquiry had obvious relations with one another. Earlier in the century, Van Helmont had examined what
in those days were regarded as "fumes", but though he discovered and described certain things which we should call
"gases", he had regarded these as impurities and exhalations as earthy matter carried by the air and for him there was

one "gas", which itself was only a form assumed by water, water being the basis of all material things. The contemporaries of Boyle had come near to discovering various gases, and were able to detect something which clearly suggests oxygen, while they talked of nitro-aerial particles
really only

with which they associated not only gunpowder but earthquakes and lightning, and even freezing, so that here was something which appeared to have almost a cosmic significance. They did not realise the existence of different gases, however, or understand that the air might comprise different gases; and it would be anachronistic to see them as the discoverers of

oxygen and nitrogen. The problem of the air was to be elucidated only by a more methodical handling and a more acute examination of the processes of combustion. In this connection the emergence of the phlogiston theory provides a significant moment in the history of chemistry. This theory, which was to become so fashionable for a time in the eighteenth century, embodied the essential feature of a tradition that went back to the ancient world namely, the assumption that, when anything burns, something of its substance streams out of it, straggling to escape in the flutter of a flame, and producing a decomposition the original body being reduced to more elementary ingredients. The entire view was based upon one of those fundamental conclusions of commonsense observation which (like Aristotle's view of motion) may set the whole of men's thinking on the wrong track and block scientific progress for thousands of years.

The theoiy might have representedan advance at the time when it was first put forward; but in future ages no rectification
seems to have been possible save by the process of going back

POSTPONED SCIENTIHC REVOLUTION IN CHEMISTRY

to the beginning again.

195

Under the system of the Aristotelians fire which had been of "element" the was it supposed to be a the combustion of released during body. During most of the seventeenth century it was thought to be a sulphurous"element"
not exactly sulphur as

we know

it,

but an idealised or a

it materially a different kind of sulphur in mystical form of bodies in which it might appear. A different the of case the German chemist, J. J. Becher, who was contemporary with of it was terra pinguis an oily kind Boyle, said in 1669, that earth; and at the opening of the eighteenth century another

German chemist, G.
it

E. Stahl,

took over
terra

this

view, elaborating

down to

1731, renaming the

as

regarding phlogiston

an actual physical substance

and pinguis "phlogiston", solid and

It

fatty , though apparently impossible

to secure in isolation.

was

in the process

or by metals given off by bodies in die process of combustion, of calcination, and it went out in flame to combine with
air,

or perhaps deposited at least a part of itself in an

the calx the residue unusually pure form as soot. Ifyou heated of a calcinated metal along with charcoal, the substance would recover its lost phlogiston and would be restored to its form as a metal. Charcoal was therefore regarded as
original

a substance like copper was containing much phlogiston, while contain very little. This phlogiston theory was not to supposed

aman like the famous Boereverywhere immediately accepted: haave seemed able to ignore it; and some people who worked
within theframeworkofitmayhavebeen^ French were apparently going over to it in a general

way from

about 1730; but the rapid spread and development would seem to have occurred onlyin the 1740$ and 1750* itwouldappearto

have been in about the middle of the century that the doctrine established itself as the orthodox one amongst chemists. Tl*e
case has been

made out that only some two decades later did it

in the chemical literature; and begin to occupy much place in the world at the time when it stir most the that it caused

was being seriously challenged. It had been realised all the time, and

it

was known to

Stahl,

who

the phlogiston doctrine, that realty developed

when

196

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

burning had taken place or metals had been calcined an actual increase in weight had been discovered in the residue. The
fact may have been known to the Arabs ; it was realised by some

people in the sixteenth century;

it

was brought to the attention

of the Royal Society in London after 1660. In the seventeenth century the view had even been put forward more than once that, in the act of burning, a substance took something out of

and that this process of combination accounted for the increase which was observed in the weight. The phlogiston theory the theory that something was lost to a body in the process of burning is a remarkable evidence of the fact that at this time the results of weighing and measuring were not the decisive factors in the formation of chemical doctrine. Like Aristotle's view of motion, therefore, the phlogiston theory answered to certain prima facie appearances, but stood almost as an inversion of the real truth a case of picking up the wrong end of the stick. It is remarkable how far people may be carried in the study of a science, even when an hypothesis turns everything upside-down, but there comes a point when Aristotle reaches the problem of pro(as on the occasion where one cannot escape an anomaly, and the theory jectiles) has to be tucked and folded, pushed and pinched, in order to make it conform with the observed facts. This happened in the case of the phlogiston theory when the scientist found it impossible to evade the feet of the augmented weight of bodies after combustion or calcination. Somebody suggested that the phlogiston might have negative weight, a positive virtue of "levity", so that a body actually became heavier after losing it. Such an hypothesis, however, made a serious inroad on the whole doctrine of a solid phlogiston; and we can see that this ancient idea of "levity" had ceased to be capable of carrying much conviction by the
the
air,

eighteenth century. One German chemist, Pott, suggested that the departure of the phlogiston increased the density of the substance which had held it, and J. Ellicott in 1780 put

forward the view that its presence in a body "weakened the repulaon between die particles and ether", thereby "diminish-

POSTPONED SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION IN CHEMISTRY

197

The more popular view seems ing their mutual gravitation". to have been that while the burning produced a loss of
phlogiston

of weight, a secondary and somewhat incidental operation occurred, which more than cancelled the loss of weight. It is curious to find that Boyle had considerable influence at any rate in one of his errors, because he had noted the increase of weight when substances were burned and he had explained it by the suggestion of fire-particles which insinuated themselves into the minute pores of the burned matter, and which he regarded as having weight but as being able to pass through the glass walls of a closed container. Not in the eighteenth only was this view held by some people it was possible to hold die phlogiston theory and but century,
and a
loss
still

was gained in combustion as a result of something which was taken incidentally from the air this on a sufficient scale to override any reduction that had been For a considerable produced by the loss of the phlogiston. in phlogiston anomalies the the of eighteenth century part insufficient die of illustration an as chemistry may be taken
believe that weight
attention given to the question of weight in die formation of hypodieses. Widiout the device of a secondary increase in weight, however, die phlogiston theory could not have it did in die closing decades of the put up the fight which

century.

had a further disadvantage in that it phlogiston dieory carried die implication that nothing which could be burned or

The

calcined could possibly

decomposition.

Only after the removal

its

be an dement. Combustion implied of die phlogiston could

elementary forms. If in calcombining with a metal, the

you expect
cination

to find matter in

today see oxygen saw die compound body die metal century eighteenth of its phlogiston. If in the being decomposed and deprived from a lead reverse process we see die oxygen being removed
oxide to recover the original element, diey imagined diat diey

we

were adding somediing-Hrestoring the phlogiston so that the lead which emerged was a chemical compound, a product of synthesis. For men who worked on a system of ideas like

198
this, it

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE
problem of the

was not going

to be easy to solve the

nature of chemical elements.

Modern

historical writers

have tended to try to be kind to

the phlogiston theory, apparently on the view that it is the historian's function to be charitable, and that the sympathy

due to human beings can properly be extended to inanimate things. It has been noted that the men who established the theory made a mistake that was common in ancient times they realised the existence ofcertain properties and turned these into an actual substance. One writer has said that the phlogiston theory "was the first important generalisation in chemistry correlating in a simple and comprehensive manner a great number ofchemical actions and certain relations existing between a great variety of substances". As the unifying factor and the ground of the relations was the fictitious phlogiston, however, it is difficult to see how anything was facilitated. It is claimed that not only was there a phlogiston theory, but this theory of combustion gradually extended itself into a system of chemistry what you have now is a period of phlogistic chemistry. And it is true that from 1750 we possess something more like a history of chemistry, whereas before we seem to have rather a history of chemists too many of them standing on an independent footing with their separate theories so that the general acceptance of phlogiston seemed to bring them all into one intellectual system. Some writers have pointed out that within the framework of phlogistic chemistry many experiments were carried out, and it would hardly have occurred to the enquirer to make some of these if a different framework had been currently accepted. Many important experiments had been carried out under preceding intellectual systems, however ; and it might be held (though such speculations certainly have their dangers) that the emergence of chemistry as a science is remarkably late, that the chemistry of Boyle and Hooke may not have taken the shortest possible route to arrive at Lavoisier, and that the interposition of the phlogistic theory made the
transition

more

difficult rather

than more easy. This theory

was

in a significant sense a conservative one,

though

it

may

POSTPONED SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

have had the
effect

IN

CHEMISTRY

199

of making the conservative view more

manageable for a certain period. It was made to serve comprehensive

purposes. Because bodies changed colour at different degrees of heating it could be extended into an explanation of colour. But that in

spite

of

created difficulties during the generation of its unquestioned predominance is shown by Lavoisier's taunts
this
it

in the lySos,
free fire

when he said that phlogiston now had to be and now had to be fire combined with an earthy element; sometimes passed through the pores of vessels and sometimes was unable to do so; and was used to explain at the same time causticity and non-causticity, transparency and opacity, colour and the absence of colour. Furthermore, the last two decades of the eighteenth century give one of the most spectacular proofs inhistory of the fact that able men who had the truth under their very noses, and possessed all the ingredients for the solution of the problem the very men who had actually made the strategic discoveries were incapacitated by the phlogiston theory from realising the implications of their own work. Although it is true in the history of thought
that false ideas or half-truths sometimes act as a convoying agency leading the enquirer to a sounder form of generalisation,

and then dropping out of the story when they have ftiit still is not dear which of the famous filled their purpose discoveries of Bkck, Cavendish, Priestley and Lavoisier would
have proved more
difficult

to achieve if the phlogiston theory

had not existed. Perhaps it is possible to say that the perpetual removal of phlogiston from one body to another or from a body into the air itself, and then the return of the phlogiston to the original body, accustomed the mind of the chemist to the practice of moving and reshuffling the discs so that he be-

came more agile more ready to see elements ejected or transferred in the course of chemical reactions* But if chemistry made great advances from 1750 it is much more dear that die and the demondevelopment of methods of collecting gases,
stration

use by Joseph Black of what could be achieved by the

of the

balance, together with the general

improvement in die

200

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

manufacture of apparatus (which was a serious and often an expensive matter at this rime), are much more tangible and
concrete causes of progress. Although there appears to have been continued interest in

chemistry and chemical experiments during the first half of the eighteenth century, it is perhaps true to say that no remarkable genius emerged to develop what had been achieved

by Boyle, Hooke and Mayou. In Germany and Holland, where there was considerable interest in the application of science to the industrial arts, there was an awakening in the second quarter of the century, and the pupils
in the previous decades

of Boerhaave at Leyden carried his influence to the universities of many countries, one of them William Cullen, being the teacher of Joseph Black. In Britain around the middle of the century chemists were engaged very much with pharmacology
with physics.
or technology, or in pursuits that we should associate rather It has been pointed out that the Industrial Revo-

lution in England depended "as much upon chemical discovery as upon mechanical, discovery", with sulphuric acid playing a
peculiarly important part in the story. Scotland appears to

have been the

seat

of important developments on

this side,

Bkck performing

in Edinburgh something like the r6le

of

Boerhaave in Leyden. When die Swedish chemist, Scheele, embarked upon the problem of combustion he found that it would be impossible
to arrive at satisfactory answers to his questions until he had dealt with the problem of the air, to which he devoted his

were

attention in the years 1768-73. The fact that the two problems related and that combustion had even a curious corre-

spondence with respiration had long been realised, and there are hints of it in the ancient world. Certain chemists certain
F.nglishmen, for example have already been mentioned, who in the seventeenth century had put forward suggestions on this

question which werein advance of the views of the phlogistonists. In the seventeenth century, however, the problem had

been made more

difficult by ideas concerning the purely mechanical operation of the air, or concerning the action of the

POSTPONED

SCIENTIFIC

REVOLUTION IN CHEMISTRY

201

atmosphere as the mere receptacle for the fumes that were given out on combustion. It was held that if a lighted candle soon went out when enclosed under a container, the increasing
pressure

of the
it.

air

extinguishing

And

loaded with fumes was responsible for even after the air-pump had been in-

it could be shown that the candle would not burn vacuum, a purely mechanistic theory was still possible you could argue that the pressure of the air was necessary to force out the fire and flame from the burning substance, so that any ratifying of the atmosphere would rob the flame of its vital impulse. At the time of the phlogiston theory mechanistic ideas still prevailed, for it was eminently the function of the air to absorb the escaping phlogiston, and in time the air became saturated, which accounted for the extinguishing of the candle under a closed container. Though the waters are muddy, and things apparently inconsistent with one another could co-exist, it would seem

vented and

in a

to be true that in the period before 1750 chemists did not think of the actual air as being a mixture, though they were well

aware that the atmosphere might be loaded more in some in others with more or less obnoxious alien places than effluvia. Up to this date also they had no dear idea even of the of perfectly distinct kinds of gases. The possible existence which differences they observed on occasion they were liable
to ascribe to a modification of

same substance. In any case and subtle that they found it difficult to imagine that air (or called it)--*rapped any part of it) might be "fixed" (as they a stable comform to a solid substance with into combining more been to have prepared to believe pound. They appear

what was fundamentally the the atmosphere was so intangible

of air might lurk as foreign bodies in the minute and that this might account for any pores of solid substances, increase in weight taking place after combustion. in 1727 that gases could be "fixed", Stephen Hales showed and vegetable life this process was animal in that however, and
that particles

constantly taking place.

gases over water

He

discovered a

way of collecting

and would examine the quantity produced

202

ORIGINS OF

MODERN SCIENCE

by chemical action from a given weight of materials. He even showed that the gases, or "airs" as he called them, which he collected from various substances, differed in regard to colour, smell, solubility in water, inflammability, etc., though no great importance was attached to these differences at the time. Hales, like his readers, still thought that what was in question was one single air under different conditions "infected" or "tainted", as he said, with extraneous fumes or vapours. It was
an important moment,
air",

therefore, when Joseph Black, in 1754, demonstrated the existence ofan "air" which, unlike "common

was attracted to quicklime, and which he studied in vari-

ous combinations, though he did not isolate and collect it or provide a full account of its characteristics. He called it "fixed

and he showed that not could be captured into solid bodies; indeed, it could combine with one substance and then be transferred into combination with another. He noted soon afterwards that it differed from the "air" produced by the solution of metals in acids, and resembled common air that had been tainted by breathing or combustion. The method by which Black made this examination of what we should call carbon dioxide was as important as the discovery itself. His work stood as a model for the thorough and intensive study of a chemical reaction, and revealed the decisive results that could be achieved by the use of the balance. He showed that common air can be an actual participant in chemical processes and that an air could exist which was different from ordinary air. At the same time it does not appear that even he was fully conscious ofthe independent existence of separate gases. He seems to have been prepared to regard his "fixed air" as a modification of
air"

the term which Hales had used

it

only could

exist in a free state

but

it

produced by the operation of the inflammable principle namely, phlogiston. In 1766 Henry Cavendish carried the story further in some studies of what he described in the words of Boyle as "factiair

common

tious airs", which,

he

said,

contained in other bodies in an inelastic sense and

from thence by

art".

meant "any kind of air which is is produced other he dissolved Amongst things

POSTPONED SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION IN CHEMISTRY

203

marble in hydrochloric acid, producing Black's "fixed air"; dried the gas and used the device of storing it over mercury,
since
it,

soluble in water; and expanded the description of calculating its specific gravity, its solubility in water, etc.
it

was

He

also

produced hydrogen by dissolving

either zinc or iron

or tin in sulphuric or hydrochloric acid, and found that there was no difference in the gas if he used different acids on the

and again he calculated its specific gravity. It was clear, therefore, that these two gases had a stable existence, and could be produced with permanent properties they were not the
metals;
capricious result

of some more inconstant impurities in the air. these gases had actually been discovered both And though much earlier, they had not been separated in die mind from other things of a kindred nature hydrogen had not been
distinguished from other inflammable Even now, however, there was a feeling
gases,

for example.

that in the last resort

only one kind of air really existed

varieties

common air and that the

were due to the presence or absence of phlogiston. Cavendish was inclined to identify his "inflammable air" with phlogiston, though there were objections to this, since
assumed to be not the burning body itself phlogiston had been the burning body and if the hydrogen left that but a substance

was phlogiston

how

could phlogiston leave

itself?

the apparatus for collectJoseph Priestley further improved as an amateur without ing gases, and it is possible that, coming

the means for any great outlay, he was driven to greater inthe requisite instruments. He had genuity in the devising of
it by 1771* a^d produced oxygen without realising a specially pure of had been ideas long before his time there a specially pure constituent, of the air, which had portion, or for breathing and combustion* as been

actually

important recognised In August 1774 Priesdey isolated oxygen, but at first thought nitrous it to be what he called "modified" or "phlogisticated a for moment, and what we call nitrous oxide. Later,
air",

after further tests,

he decided that it must be common air, but realised that it was five or six by die middle of March 1775 he times more effective than die ordinary atmosphere, and he

204

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

named it "dephlogisticated air". The discovery had been made

a

few years

earlier

by

the Swedish chemist, Scheele,

who

published his results later,

but

who showed more

insight

by the way in which he recognised the existence of two separate gases in the air. Whoever may deserve the
than Priesdey
credit, the discovery

and

isolation

of oxygen marks an im-

portant date in the history of chemistry. By this time die position was coming to be complicated and chaotic. You have to remember that a deep prejudice regarded
still

the air as a simple primordial substance, and a deeper prejudice regarded water as an irreducible element. The balance of

as

opinion, on the other hand, was in favour ofregarding the metals compounds, and if one of these, under the action of an acid,

produced hydrogen, it was natural to thinlc that the hydrogen had simply been released from the metal itself. When it was found later that an exploded mixture of hydrogen and oxygen
it was simplest to argue that water was one of the constituents of oxygen, or of both the gases, and had been precipitated in the course of the experiment. When a gas was

formed water,

produced after the combustion of a solid body they gradually sorted out the fact that sometimes it was "fixed air" and sometimes the very different "dephlogisticated air"; but they did not know that the former carbon dioxide was a compound, or that the latter oxygen was an element. Priesdey long

thought that "fixed air" was elementary and existed in both

common air and in his oxygen his "dephlogisticated air". Many acids were known, but dieir components were not
recognised and they were often regarded as modifications of one fundamental acid. For the chemist of this time there were
capable of being shifted and shuffled and together, nobody knew how to play with them. So many confusions existed that chemistry was building up "strange
all

these counters,

mythical constitutions for

its

various substances. It

is

possible

any purely doctrinal statement of what a chemical element ought to be (such as that put forward by Boyle) was bound to be ineffective and beside the
point

that so long as this anarchy existed

POSTPONED SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION IN CHEMISTRY

At
this

205

moment

there emerged one of those

men who

can

stand above the whole scene, look at the confused pieces of the jig-saw puzzle and see a. way of turning them into a pattern.

He was
giants

Lavoisier,
all

and

it is difficult

not to believe that he

towers above

who

the rest and belongs to the small group of have the highest place in the story of the scientific

revolution. In 1772,

when he was twenty-eight, he surveyed of the modern study of gases and said that whole the history what had hitherto been done was like the separate pieces of a which required a monumental body of directed great chain experiments to bring them into unity. He set out to make a complete study of the air that is liberated from substances and that combines with them; and he declared in advance that this work seemed to him to be "destined to bring about a revolution in physics and in chemistry". Two years later he made a more detailed historical survey of what had been done, and added experiments and arguments of his own to show that when metals are calcined they take an "elastic fluid" out of the
though he was still confused concerning the question whether the gas which was produced on any given occasion was "fixed air" (carbon dioxide) or oxygen. He came to feel that it was not the whole of the air, but a particular gas in the and calair, which entered into the processes of combustion a air" had "fixed called what that was complicination; and cated origin when you heated red lead and charcoal together, he said, the gas did not arise from either of the substances alone, but took something from both, and therefore had the character On the other hand, he soon came to of a chemical
air,

compound.

when heated in isolation prowith common air. connected duced a gas which was closely When he heard that Priestley had isolated a gas in which a
the conclusion that the red lead

candle

would burn

better than in

common

air, his

mind

of a grand synthesis. Quite quickly jumped to the possibility steal the credit for the discovery for himto tried he unjustly,
self,

he was the person who recognised the of the achievement and brought out its astonishing significance he produced a famous paper On implications. In April 1775
but
it is

true that

206
the Nature

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

and that
earlier

increases their Weight, in

of the Principle that combines with Metals in Calcination which he threw overboard his

view that the principle might be "fixed air" carbon dioxide and came to the conclusion that it was the purest part of the air we breathe. The idea now came to him that "fixed air" was a compound a combination of common air with charcoal and he soon arrived at the thesis that it was charcoal plus the "eminently respirable part of the air". Next, he decided that common air consisted of two "elastic fluids", one of which was this eminently respirable part. Further than this, he decided that all acids were formed by the combination of
non-metallic substances with "eminently respirable air", so he
described this latter as the acidifying principle, or the principe oxygine. As a result of this theory oxygen acquired the name

which it now possesses, and in the mind of Lavoisier it ranked an irreducible element, save that it contained "caloric", which was the principle of heat. Lavoisier was not one of those men who are ingenious in experimental devices, but he seized upon the work of his contemporaries and the hints that were scattered over a century of chemical history, and used them to some purpose. Occasionally his experimental results were not as accurate as he pretended, or he put out hunches before he had clinched the proof of them, or he relied on points that had really been established by others. If he used the word "phlogiston", he soon did his structural thinking as though no such thing existed, and he disliked the doctrine before he knew enough to overthrow it. In 1783 he came out with his formal attack on the phlogiston theory in general. When a calx was reduced with charcoal he demonstrated that the tranpositions of the various ingredients could be accounted for without leaving room for any passage of phlogiston out of the charcoal into the recovered metal. The French chemist Macquer had suggested in the meantime in 1778 that phlogiston was the pure matter of light andheat, but Lavoisier ridiculed this and showed that it had nothing save the
as

name in common with the phlogiston theory, which had reference to a solid substance possessing weight.

He

demonstrated

POSTPONED SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION IN CHEMISTRY

that in

207

any case the ideas of Macquer led to inconsistencies. The quarrel over the phlogiston theory seems to have aroused, as Priestley said, more "zeal and emulation" than anything else "in all the history of philosophy". At first the physicians and
mathematicians in France inclined to Lavoisier, while the chemists retained their professional prejudices, and it seems to have been very much a new generation of chemists in that

country who carried the victory for the new theory. In England the resistance was stronger and Cavendish refused to surrender,

though he withdrew from the controversy later; Joseph Black went over to Lavoisier very late in the day; while Priesdey held
out, publishing in 1800 his Doctrine ofPhlogiston Established and the Composition of Water Refuted. Like the controversy between

Newton and Descartes, the new scientific issue produced someliveliness

thing like a national division. Priesdey showed an amazing and ingenuity, possessing the kind of mind which

quickly seized on the importance of "fixed air" for the commercial production of mineral waters, and of oxygen for

medical purposes, but could not clear the board and redistribute all the pieces on it so as to clarify the situation. At the

same time

his resistance to Lavoisier seems to

have compelled

the latter to reconsider questions and to develop his views in a more impressive way. It is curious to note that even Lavoisier

shadow of the old views of combustion. Men had been long puzzled by the departure of heat and the radiation oflight, and to explain these he introduced the idea of a weightretained a

which was involved in the process of combustion. proved to be easily detachable from his system later. In 1776 Volta was firing gases with electric sparks, and he to regard even passed die discovery on to Priesdey, who came was In as 1781 exploding Priesdey electricity phlogiston. called a "random he what this in and way oxygen hydrogen
less caloric

But

this

experiment" and noticed that the inside of die glass vessels "became dewy". Scientists had been so accustomed to deposits of moisture from the atmosphere or to collecting gases over water, diat this kind of thing had often been observed but had

a friend of Priesdey's called passed without notice, and

208

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

what was
been a

Waltire repeated the experiment, but was more interested in him think that there had really a slip which made
loss

of ponderable heat. Cavendish confirmed the production of dew, and showed that it was plain water, that the to produce nothing but gases combined in certain proportions water, and that no weight had been lost in the course of the
to believe at this time proceedings. It was difficult for people or diffusion of weight transmission could not be there that any

during such an experiment, but Cavendish denied that any such loss took place. It was still more difficult for anybody to
believe that water

was not an

irreducible element. Cavendish

came

hydrogen must be water deprived of its phlogiston and oxygen must be phlogisticated water. Once again Lavoisier was the first to understand the situation, after learning of Cavendish's experiment, and once again he
to the conclusion that

pretended to have made the actual discovery. In November 1783 he showed that water was not, properly speaking, an element, but could be decomposed and recombined, and this

gave him new weapons against the phlogiston theory. He himself might have discovered the composition of water earlier than the others, but he had been unable in these years
to escape from the tyranny of a preconception of his own the view that oxygen was the great acidifying principle which led him to look for an acid product while burning hydro-

gen

at a jet.

He was

remarkable in other ways. Finding that organic

substances gave mainly fixed air and water when they burned, and knowing that fixed air was a compound of carbon and

oxygen, he decided that organic substances must be largely composed of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, and he did much

towards their analysis so far as these ingredients were concerned. Already another Frenchman, de Morveau, had been
striving for a revision

1782 Lavoisier

of chemical nomenclature, and from worked in co-operation with him, producing a

is still

new

language of chemistry which

the basis of the lan-

guage used today. The chemical revolution which he had set out to achieve was incorporated in the new terminology, as

POSTPONED SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION IN CHEMISTRY

well as in a
the

209
at

new

treatise

on chemistry which he wrote; and

same time he was able to establish at last the ideas which Boyle had foreshadowed on the subject of a chemical element.

He was willing in practice to

so long as
therefore,

accept a substance as elementary

it resisted chemical analysis. Over a broad field, he made good his victory, so that he stands as the founder of the modern science.

CHAPTER TWELVE

IDEAS OF PROGRESS AND IDEAS OF EVOLUTION

IT
possible that the men of the Renaissance were less capable of seeing history as the ascent of the human race, or
is

envisaging the successive centuries as an advancing series, than even their medieval predecessors had been. The men of the Renaissance

were in a peculiar

situation for

human

history

their outlook highly conditioned

commenting on the course of by the

unusual platform from which they turned to take their retrospect. What they saw behind them in the far distance were the

peaks of classical antiquity, representing the summit of human reason, the heights which had been reached by the Greeks and

of which they themselves were engaging their finest endeavours. Between classical antiquity and their own time was the darkness of that medieval age which had lost contact with the legacy of the ancient world
since lost, the ideal for the return

and had come to represent in their minds only a fall into error and superstition. Even if their own situation had not been so
vivid, the classical

thought which had such great authority for them provided a picture of the process of things in time a
far

way in which things happened in hisremoved from tory anything like tie modern idea of progress. When they cast their minds over the whole course of centuries they were governed by the terms of this ancient oudook which at one level represented a static view of the
theory concerning the
course of things in general, and at another level (and as it regarded the internal processes within particular states or
civilisations)

involved a theory of decadence

the

whole

combining to produce in one sense change, and in another sense changelessness, under a system that might be described
as cyclic.

This antique-modern view which became current at the

210

IDEAS OF PROGRESS

AND

IDEAS OF

EVOLUTION

211

Renaissance found explicit statement, in one of its extreme forms, in the writings of Machiavelli. Human beings, on this

view, are acting throughout the centuries on the unchanging stage of the earth the whole of nature providing a permanent
scene

upon which

human

the human drama is superimposed. The themselves are always alike, always made out beings

of the same lump of dough; or, rather, we might say, they are varying mixtures of the constant ingredients of passion, affection and desire. The texture of historical narrative, therefore, would be fundamentally the same whatever the period under consideration, and to any person taking a bird's-eye view, the total appearance of the world would be very similar in all ages. One city or state might be found to be flourishing in one cenbut the world in tury and different ones at other periods,
general

would present the same picture indeed, Machiavelli, for his part, explicitly tells us that he inclines to the view that the total amount of virtue in the world is always the same. At
might be heaped together in the Roman more thinly Empire. At another time it might be scattered over the whole surface of the globe. In a fundamental sense, however, the world was forever the same. Within any city or state or civilisation, on the other hand,
one time
this virtue

the natural operation of time was to produce internal corrupof tion; the ordinary expected routine thing was a process a manner in observed decadence. This could even be parallel
in the physical world, where bodies tended to decompose and the finest fabrics in nature would suffer putrefaction. la feet,

the current science

for in both these realms

chimed in with the current view of nature, it was held that compound bodies had

a natural tendency to disintegrate. This did not mean that all unbroken process of decline, however; it history was a long, an extraordinary thing, somewhat merely meant that a rise was a even and stability for any great periodr-even against nature, a considerwas of the to resistance corruptionrprocesses long able feat.ITwas plain to everybody, and it was easily con^oeor if hensible, tEat if a people made a superlative endeavour, for assisted by fortune if, example, they were bountifully

212

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

they were endowed with a leader of special genius they might be brought to the top of the world by a wonderfully rapid to be so extravagantly process. Only, when fortune ceased kind, or the genius died, or the unusual effort and straining

were relaxed

in other words,

when life returned

to

its

hum-

the ordinary tendencies of nature would begin their operation again and the normal processes of decline

drum

level

would

set in

once more.

Of course,

if they

had been

pressed,

the people who held these views concerning the course of things would have admitted something like general the in early stages of human history since the days progress before the discovery of fire, for example. But it does not seem

many of

that their broader views concerning the succession

of ages were

governed by

facts like

theseTj.

On this view of the universe, time and the course of history were not considered to be actually generative of anything. On
this

one had no conception of a world opening out to ever grander things, to an expanding future there was not even an idea of a civilisation that was supposed to develop rather the existence of a closed indefinitely. Men assumed culture, assumed that there were limits to human achievement, the horizon reaching only to the design of recapturing the wisdom of antiquity, as though one could do no more than hope to be as wise as the Greeks or as politic as the Romans. On the same view the notion of something like a "Renaissance" was a comprehensible thing, associated in a way with ideas arising out of the fable of the phoenix; and some signs of such a notion are visible in the later middle ages, when the humanist movement was associated for a time with the dream of rescuing the papacy from Avignon. and the empire from Germany, the wheel coming into full cycle as men looked forward to the renewed supremacy of Rome. The reassertion of these ancient ideas on the subject of the

view

also,

historical process helps to explain

why

at the Renaissance it

was almost less possible to believe in what we call progress than it had been in the middle ages. If anything it was more easy to believe in something of this sort in the realm of spiritual

IDEAS OF PROGRESS

AND

IDEAS OF EVOLUTION

213

matters than in any other sphere to believe in stages of time succeeding one another in an ascending series (though possibly still by sudden jumps) and so to find meaning and purpose in
the passage of time itself. The transition from the Old Testament to die New, and the notion of a Kingdom of the Father,

succeeded

by

Kingdom of the

Son, widi a

Kingdom of the

were examples of this. It has been suggested Spirit to follow, that the modern idea of progress owes something to the fact
had provided a meaning for history and a to which the whole of creation moved. In grand purpose other words, the idea of progress represented the secularisation
that Christianity

of an

attitude, initially religious,

ment

in

some future,

far-off event,

which looked to a fine fulfiland saw history, therefore,

as definitely leading to

something.

are

view of history of the latter part of the seventeenth century; but the famous quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns the controversy in the course of which a more modern view of progress was hammered out In this earlier is already visible at the time of the Renaissance. in which everybody was period, however, there was a sense on the side of the Ancients and possibly rightly so, since

Most of the
still

basic ideas in the Renaissance

clearly present in the controversies

to teach to western Europe antiquity had still many things to which the was the issue so that the real question of the degree said that the Machiavelli to be carried.
discipleship

ought

to be imitated in every detail, t and he was rethe Romans had proached for disparaging gunpowder because not used it. Guicciardini, however, insisted that a more fluid

Romans ought

and

elastic

tions

had changed.

because condipolicy of imitation was necessary, when He that, taking one's bear-

thought

of a military science, one ought to ings for the development have all the resources of modern invention before one's mind. have already seen that one school of Renaissance students the medical teaching of the ancient world as it went on

We

taking

had been transmitted by the Arabs; another school would be content with nothing short of the ancient Greek text itself, and a purer knowledge of antiquity.

214

ORIGINS OF

MODERN SCIENCE
however,

Even

in the sixteenth century,

we meet more

than once a fact which has particular significance in connection

with that development in ideas which

are considering. Some people realise that the mariner's compass, the printing of books and the use of artillery represent achievements as

we

anything produced in the world of antiquity. even people bring out this argument without any hint of the influence which the Far East may have had on these de-

momentous

as

Some

velopmentsthey simply use

these tilings as demonstrations

of the prowess of the West, the accomplishments of the Moderns. The new worlds opened up by geographical discovery and the multitude of published books are calculated to become a heavy counter-weight to the much-vaunted superiority of the Ancients. It could not be very long before it was realised that certain
scientific knowledge gained something by the very of time, whether by the accumulation of data the sheer kpse or by the continual increasing aggregation of observed facts

forms of

revision

of the results and the improvements in actual method.

This had been particularly noticeable hitherto in the case of astronomy. Before the end of the sixteenth century Giordano

Bruno was pointing out that even in the ancient world Ptolemy had built on the observations of his predecessors; these in turn had had the advantage of starting from the achievements of others earlier still; while Copernicus, collecting all that his predecessors had done, was in a better position than any of them to know the situation of things in the sky. In fact, said Bruno, it is we who are the Ancients, and who enjoy the benefits of the accumulated experience of mankind; and the age of classical Greece belongs rather to the childhood of the world. The argument that we are the more ancient appears on a number of occasions in die seventeenth century; but the comparison of the whole of history with the life of a man was capable of being used to the opposite purpose, and it is possible that Francis Bacon gave a wrong impression when he showed that the Moderns were really the seniors; for it became necessary before the end of the seventeenth

IDEAS OF PROGRESS

AND

IDEAS OF EVOLUTION

215

century to deal with an extremer version of the doctrine of decadence the view that this was the old age of the world

and that nature was unable to put out the same powers as before a notion which involved, not a static view of the total process of things in time, but a feeling that nature herself was suffering from a long process of exhaustion. It was Fontenelle who set out to answer this argument at the end of the century, and replied that if the human race was to be likened to a man, it was to a man who acquired experience without ever growing old.

Though on its mechanical side the scientific revolution

of atomic thought of
science

glorified Archimedes, while the revived forms philosophy called attention to another aspect of die

the ancient world, the conscious

demand

for a

new

and a new outlook, the

of Aristotle and the insistence by Descartes on the importance of unloading the mind of all its traditions all those things dealt a great blow at the authority of antiquity. It was the glamour of Versailles and the literary glory of Louis XTV's reign, however, which led to the new and more fundamental form of the controversy between the Ancients and the Moderns in the latter part of the seventeenth century an important stage in the development of the idea of progress. One aspect of the self-glorification in which the age indulged was the spread of the idea that the glories of ancient Greece had been revived by the literary giants of le grand sihle. The
discrediting

who in 1687 controversy was precipitated by Charles Perrault, Louis the Great and The on work a Age of rhymed published
between 1688 and 1697 produced his Parallel between the Ancients and the Moderns. But he had been preceded earlier in the who had carried cm the century by another writer, Desmarets, and had claimed, for the Ancients, controversy against
literary

better themes for example, that Christian subjects provided he had ilfaswhich thesis a the poet than ancient mythology

trated in epics of his own, though it was better illustrated by Milton in England. He had likened antiquity to spring, and and, as it wtre, die modern times to the mature old

age

autumn of the world; the

faults

of earlier centuries were now

216

ORIGINS OF

MODERN SCIENCE

he said, and those who come latest must excel in and happiness knowledge. It is interesting to note that this man, Desmarets, had definitely bequeathed his mantle and entrusted the continuation of the controversy to Charles Perrault, and it was Perrault who, in fact, created a much greater sensation and was responsible for the crucial controversy. He claimed that Pkto had been tedious on occasion, and, like others, he was prepared to maintain that even Homer had nodded at times. In his view the age of Louis XIV had excelled the literary prowess of the ancient world; for, just as the Ancients only knew the seven planets and the most remarkable stars, while we had discovered the satellites of the planets and numberless tiny stars, so the Ancients had known the passions of the soul only engro$9 while we knew an infinity of subtle distinctions and accompanying circumstances. It is interesting to note that, though the controversy which ensued was so essentially a literary one, the decisive fact that emerged and the argument which proved effective on the side of the Moderns was connected with the achievements in natural science, and in the related aspects of life and society. And by this time it is dear that what we should call a more historical attitude had made itself apparent in the discussion of the position of science in the panorama of the centuries. Previously, as we have seen, there had been an idea that a scientific revolution was necessary, but it had been thought that it would occur and complete itself as a great historical episode, putting a new view of the universe in pkce of the Aristotelian one; and Bacon had imagined that the work ofexperimentand discovery could be achieved in a limited period, while Descartes had
corrected,

thought it important that the revolution should be carried out by a single mind. cataclysmic view of such forms of achieve-

ment was

still

prevalent and

it

was consonant with

this

whole

outlook that the age believed in the formation of states by a social contract, rather than as a growth taking place, so to
speak, in nature. In the latter part of the seventeenth century, however, it becomes dear that men have a vision of science
as a

young

affair

with

all its

future before

it

an ever-expand-

IDEAS OF PROGRESS
ing future

AND

IDEAS OF EVOLUTION

217

in their cradle. In the

and Fontenelle points out that the sciences are still new stage of the controversy between the Ancients and the Moderns it is difficult for the former to

deny the progress

there
art
is

and
it

that has taken place on this side, and though a tendency to make discriminations and to say that the literature of the ancient Greeks are still unexcelled, the

modern world may come

that
case, the

so near, even in the field of poetry, seems to have the advantage on the whole count. In any

science, industry, improvements in society and the development of communications forms an argument in favour of the Moderns, and a popular debating-point was used to give the Moderns the palm on the ground ofthe general opulence which had come to prevail. The general impression of abundance, the feeling of comparative security of insurance or disease-^the progress of luxury and the against mischance wonderful machines were described in a manner which reminds us of Macaulay in the nineteenth century; and it was noted that theTatizen of Paris walked the streets in greater

sum of

splendour than used to belong to a Roman triumphal mar3ju There began to be even a certain intolerance of the barbarity

of the preceding centuries we gain an impression of modernism when we see men indignant that the streets of Paris had had to wait so long before being paved. People dreamed of the time when what they called "this mechanic civilisation" would be transported to countries hitherto uncivilised The whole of tendency of the new philosophies was to shelve die idea Providence, which seemed a capricious interference with the kws of nature; and, indeed, the new power which was coming to be acquired over material things encouraged thejdea that

man new

could, so to speak, play Providence over himself. "Hie historical work Fontenelle's study of myths, for ex-

of Vico, the examination of ample, and then the writings and the discussion of die development of primitive societies human reason encouraged the idea diat men possessed natural
reason,

and this only required to be disengaged from traditions, institutions and mal-education. A general improvement was in individuals diemsdves, then, and was already obpossible

2i8

ORIGINS OF

MODERN SCIENCE

servable at that very time. The way was open for the doctrine of the perfectibility of man, a perfectibility that was to be

achieved by remedying institutions. The transition to the idea of progress was not one that could
close

be completed in a single simple stage, however, and at the of the seventeenth century we can neither say that the

idea

had been fully developed nor feel that its implications had become generalised. Even the advocates of the Moderns against the Ancients could hardly be described as the apostles of what we mean by progress. Even Perrault, though he thought that civilisation had come to a new peak in the France of Louis XIV, did not consider that the ascent would be prolonged indefinitely, but held that when the present epoch had had its run the world would return to normal, so that the process of decline would soon start over again. Perrault, in fact, was of the opinion that there would not be many things for which the France of Louis XIV would need to envy posterity. And Fontenelle, though he was conscious of the widening vistas which the future promised to the natural sciences, was too well aware of the limitations of human nature to share the illusions of many of the philosophes concerning the general improvement of the world. What is asserted in the controversies at the close of the seventeenth century is the fact that nature is the same in all ages she can still put forth men of genius who are capable of holding their own with the giants of ancient times.
Fontenelle sets out to

show that nature in the seventeenth cen-

tury has lost none of her prolific power the modern oaktrees are as big as those of ancient Greece. At the same time

perhaps almost incidentally

the idea

is

asserting itself that a

general improvement is taking place in conditions, and particularly in die things that concern the welfare of ordinary human beings. can even discern that these are the things

We

which are coming to bulk most largely in the public mind, the sheer weight of them serving to turn the scale in favour of the Moderns. Writers were able to address themselves to this idea of a general progress in human conditions as though it were a
matter generally understood.

IDEAS OF PROGRESS

AND

IDEAS OF

EVOLUTION

219

Even

ideas or prejudices are

in the eighteenth century certain of the prevailing awkward to reconcile with any scheme

of history on the basis of the idea of progress. The regard for native reason, and the view that this was liable to be perverted by institutions, led to a certain amount of day-dreaming about the "noble savage" and the evils of civilisation itself, as is illustrated in the writings of Rousseau. John Wesley, when he went to America in his youth, not only had the idea of carrywould be ing out a missionary task, but thought that light

thrown on the Bible itself if native minds, uncorrupted by centuries of commentating, could suddenly be confronted with the scriptural revelation. The political ideas of eighteenthto a scheme century England are formulated with reference which still assumed the golden age of the constituof

history tion to have existed

ture

somewhere in the distant past. The literaof parliamentary reform in the 17705 and of the Yorkshire Association of 1780 stresses the fact that annual parliaments and

universal
land,

manhood

though subsequent dence for die existence of our ancient

suffrage prevailed in Anglo-Saxon Engthe evityrants had tried to destroy

liberties.

Embedded

in

the whiggism of the eighteenth century are maxims and theses taken straight from Machiavelli concerning the tendency of to decline if men do not strain their ingenuity in every
liberty

it At the most primitive stage in our generation to preserve the best of constitutions; but in the reign history we had had

of George HI the corruption of this was regarded by some men

as

having become almost complete. In fact, the attempt to embrace the whole course of things in time and to relate the successive epochs to one anotherdie sometransition to the view that time is actually aiming at succession has meaning and that die thing, that temporal was gready influenced by the passage of ages is generative than that of human history, wider fact that the survey became came to see prehistory and

and the mind gradually geology, to one another. The new science and succession due in history a new power the new history joined hands and each acquired of progress idea The reinforcement. mutual as a result of their

220
itself

ORIGINS OF

MODERN

SCIENCE

gained additional implications

a

when

there

gradually

emerged wider idea of evolution.1lt may be useful to compile though necessarily at second-hand, and though the time has perhaps not yet come for any profound understanding of the matter a sketch of the developments which took place in
this field in
is connected with the of in the realm of plants of classification systems development and animals. A rapid survey of this story might start with the work of John Ray in the closing years of the seventeenth century; for Ray seems to have discussed the notion of "species" more than any of his predecessors, and some of his remarks support the traditional view which regarded the

The

the course of our period. history of the idea of evolution

various species as having been absolutely fixed since the day when God rested from the work of Creation. This latter view

was adopted by die Swede, Linnaeus, whose work as a classifier in the 1730$ gave him a remarkable reputation that lasted down to the time of Darwin. He assumed that all individuals in a
given species could be traced back to an original pair produced at the Creation, and it was to be significant that he gave the weight of his great authority to the idea of the immutability of

happens at times that it is not the best of a man's which are remembered and which gain currency by thoughts his name. Linnaeus, towards the end of his life, with association became more careful in his discussion of the borderlines between the species pardy because he had discovered much overlapping, and pardy because he had done much in the way of hybridising in his own garden. It does not appear to have been this side of his work which influenced the world, however. It transpires, in fact, that his successors were more rigid in their ideas on diis subject than he himself bad been in his better moments. Before his time the famous German philosopher, Leibnitz, had adopted a more flexible attitude. At the beginning of die eighteenth century he had emphasised the continuity of creation and the unbroken gradation of organisms in nature. He had called attention to fishes which had wings and could live
species. It

IDEAS OF PROGRESS

AND

IDEAS OF EVOLUTION

221

out of water, as well as to birds which inhabited the water and had cold blood like fish; and, similarly, he had noted the case of animals that came near to being birds. His view of nature
appears to have been influenced by the achievements effected with the microscope in the latter part of the seventeenth
century,

when even a drop of water had been shown to be life. Instead of with reducing the universe to atoms teeming which were rigid and lifeless, he regarded it as composed of small particles of matter which were living monads or life^ and which served as the basis of living organisms principles,
a

made

view which influenced a number of biologists, especially as it it more easy to explain the variety of combinations that existed in nature and to account for the origins of various forms of life without a special act of creation. The assumption that
these

minute living particles ultimately accounted for the various forms of life that existed in the world helped to prolong the idea of spontaneous generation into a period which would otherwise have hardly found it plausible. John Locke had

were the boundaries between the pointed out how vague all descending "by easy steps and a continued series of species, remove differ very little from one another things that in each down to the lowest and most unorganical parts of matter".

He

held that the various species had

no

reality

they were

created, in fact,

by

the

in separate existence mind of man, re-

were not the work of nature herducing nature to order, and to have been self. Altogether, in the days of Locke, it seems than of the immutability to species rather more
easy
question

The influence of Linduring most of the eighteenth century. for a certain have been to seem naeus would partly responsible
in the latter period. hardening of ideas that took place The eighteenth century indeed brings to a climax in scientific and in literature, the notion of "the thought, in philosophy series Great Chain of Being*' the idea of an infinitely graded

of creatures

down to inanimate nature and up to God Himself, with man standing somewhere near the middle,
stretching
as necessarily

ifas high as that.

The entire range ofthe series was not regarded our particular planet; but as many existing on

222
varieties, as

ORIGINS OF

MODERN SCIENCE
exist as

many individuals, were presumed to

and
even
if at the cost

could

consistently co-exist, so that all the potentialities of Being should

be
all

actualised

of accompanying

evil

the possibilities of good should be brought to realisation. Each individual in the series existed for its own sake, and not merely as a link in the chain certainly not for the mere purpose of serving man as the chief end of creation. But any known gradation might be imagined as capable of further sub-division, and interest particularly concentrated itself on the missing links, especially at the transitions between plants and animals and between animals and man. Hence the excitement when in

1739 Trembley rediscovered the fresh-water polyp Hydra, which seemed to provide the missing 1ir>1c between vegetable and animal life ; also the interest in the Hottentots who from the late seventeenth century seemed almost to represent an intermediate stage between the ape and homo sapiens. The whole notion of 55 this "chain of being could be combined, however, with the idea of the immutability of nature; for all the potentialities of being might be regarded as always existing at the same time in order that the fullness of the universe should be complete. It was even inconvenient to learn that from fossils one might infer the existence in the distant past of species now extinct. And though early in the eighteenth century one meets the suggestion that the earliest animal forms were those that lived in the sea, one finds also the theory that all future generations
existed inside the first
ed, in the first individual

the original Eve

generations existed, pre-form200,000 million miniature men in so that time had nothing to do with the
in the course

all future

shaping of them.

The remarkable development

of the eighteenth century was the transformation of the "Chain of Being" into historical terms, into a ladder by means of which the living world had come to its present state. Even in a wider sense than this, the universe was coming to be seen not merely as existing spatially but also as possessing a history. Although fossils had long been associated with die sea and the Hood, more fantastic conjectures were common, and there was a view that they had grown from seeds carried by

IDEAS OF PROGRESS

AND

IDEAS OF

EVOLUTION

223

underground passages to the tops of mountains and that these had been fertilised by the snow. Alternatively it was suggested that before earth and water had been separated at the Creation, they had existed in the primeval mud, and when this had been
pressed like a sponge the birds and fishes had run out with the water, while plants and animals had been drawn on to the land,

some creatures, however, missing their emancipation owing to accident. There was even an idea that the fossils on Mont Cenis had been dropped from the food of pilgrims passing that for that had become fish, way example, petrified in the course of time. As the eighteenth century proceeded, however, it came to be accepted that fossils were formed by deposits which had been made by the ocean in prehistoric times. In the days before modern specialisation, the collectors of fossils seem
to have often been

men who had also

scientific

been caught up by the

antiquarian movement. The

revolution combined of parallel development history, and one now tended to envisage the world as existing and developing through the succession of ages. Already the minds of certain people had ranged more widely over the spectacle of the earth in time, and behind the historical realm, behind the story of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, had gained an impression of a drama more truly primeval, realising that there was another tale to be told in terms of geo-

with the

logical epochs. Interest in all kinds

of speculation concerning the history of fossils and rocks was becoming particularly lively again in the latter part of the seventeenth century.

had the idea that this globe had once been a sun, and a gives picture of the mother earth solidifying so that its enLeibnitz
crusted surface crinkled into mountain-ranges. The materials were being assembled for a larger apprehension of Ac whole

on to the canvas of all process of things in time transposing the ages that width of survey, that comprehensive vision, which

had already done so much to reveal the earth's position in there had existed vague ideas space. In the most ancient days the world from a concerning the evolution of all the things in sort of primeval slime, or the emergence of gods from the

224

ORIGINS OF

MODERN SCIENCE

hatching of primordial eggs.- The introduction in modern times of a view which envisaged the whole universe in terms

of historical process was a new thing, however, and represents an important stage in the development of the modern mind. The transition which took place in the eighteenth century would have implied a radical change in the human outlook even if it had not brought the scientists into conflict with the Biblical story of creation. And though we must regard the idea of evolution like the idea of progress as only imperfectly achieved at the end of that century, it would seem to be true that almost all the essential ingredients of Charles Darwin's system had made their appearance by that date. Science and history had come together to present the idea of the whole of nature advancing slowly but relentlessly to some high
goal-

Georges Louis Leclerc de Buffbn produced in the

fifty years

from 1749 an

Histoire Naturelle

the signal products

was great, but his and he was over-hasty in generalisation, fulfilling in part the role of a populariser, and labouring greatly over his style (though the style was too pompous and turgid) while apparently desirous that his contribution to science should serve also the sentimental education of men. He attempted to see nature

as one of of eighteenth-century science. His industry researches were not original or profound,

which was to stand

produced a vast synthesis and sought to give a picof the history of the earth, regarded as a habitation for living creatures. Indeed, if Newton had appeared to reduce the inanimate world to a system of law, Bufibn would seem to have set his mind on a parallel achievement, and even a wider one comprising in his synthesis biological phenomena and expanding into the realm of history. His views were not always the same and he has been accused of hovering between Biblical Creation and the ideas of Evolution, or of an unwillingness to challenge too seriously the teaching of the Church. Along with Leibnitz he believed that the earth had once been in an incandescent state; and it was his view that, like the other planets, it had actually been part of the sun, but had broken
as a whole,

ture

IDEAS OF PROGRESS

AND

IDEAS OF EVOLUTION

225

away

after a collision

with a comet.

He

rejected the tradition

that this globe was only six thousand years old and made an attempt to set out the periods or stages of its history; a time

when

the mountain-ranges were formed; another time

when

the waters entirely covered the face of the globe; a period when the volcanoes began to be active; a time when tropical

animals inhabited the northern hemisphere; and a time when the continents came to be separated from one another. He held
that changes took pkce in the vegetable and animal kingdoms as the earth passed from one of these epochs to another. In connection with this problem he made it part of his task to
in die stone that was study the fossils which were abundant the for in then being used building city of Paris.

We find him making surmises concerning the origins of the

various forms of life and the place of their appearance, as well as the subsequent influence of physical conditions in general
is not always conupon them; though here, as elsewhere, he of creation act a to that think sistent. He was prepared special was not necessary to account for the emergence of living creatures on this planet, regarding life as, so to speak, a quality or potentiality of matter itself. He held something like Leib-

nitz's idea that

of a mass every plant and animal was composed the whole of a was which of minute particles, each of pattern of the living origin individual; and this enabled him to explain
creatures without reference to an act

of creation.

He

tried to

show that no absolutely definite boundary existed between the

animal and the vegetable kingdoms. Nature always proceeds to descend by almost inby nuances, he said. "It is possible creature to the most from the most sensible
degrees formless matter.'* There are
perfect

many

"intermediate species",

and half in another". many things that are "half in one class orthoreaction a he against the For these reasons represented of those the and rigidity ofthe Lirnuean tradition, against

doxy
itsel

writers

eternally

who tended to regard mere classification as an end in He could deny the view that the species were immutable from one another. He had misgivings separate
considered the
infertility

when he

of hybrids, however, for

226
this

ORIGINS OF

MODERN SCIENCE
entities,

suggested that the species were real against the rest.

each insulated

respects his ideas would be strange to modern believers in evolution; for he seems to have believed that

In

some

had once been

various living species were degenerate forms of types which perfect. He put forward the view, however,
that the environment directly modified the structure of animals and plants, and he implied that the acquired characteristics

were

transmissible.

He

declared that

many of

the

species

"being perfected or degenerated by great changes in land and sea, by the favours or disfavours of Nature, by food, by the

prolonged influences of climate, contrary or favourable, are

no longer what they were." He hinted at the possibility of a common ancestor of the horse and the ass, and even said that he would have extended this supposition to the case of man himself if the Bible had not taught the contrary. Of the orangoutang he declared: "If we do not take the soul into account he lacks nothing that we possess/ He wrote: "The pig does
5

not appear to have been formed upon an original special and perfect plan, since it is a compound of other animals: it has
evidently useless parts, or rather parts of which it cannot make any use, toes all die bones of which' are perfectly formed and

which nevertheless are of no service to it." He argued that since some organs in living creatures no longer seemed to have any utility, times must have very radically changed. He had some conception of a struggle for existence which eliminated the unfit and preserved the balance of nature.
It is

dear that

world. Bufibn's

are already in a transformed intellectual work envisages the universe throughout the

we

ages and shows a remarkable sense for the continuous flow of things in time. It involves a new conception of the relations

between man and nature, revealing a willingness to study man in his aspect as part ofnature. Henceforward die idea was spread that many features in the anatomy of man pointed to his having
fully adapted to

descended from quadrupeds, and, indeed, to his not being an erect position even now. to the same

period La Mettric, in a series of bold speculations, based on the

IDEAS OF PROGRESS

AND IDEAS OF EVOLUTION

227

idea of living particles which were supposed to come together to form live individuals, had discussed the emergence of
living

creatures

the surface of the earth, and had found a natural for the origin of man. explanation
It would seem, however, that apart from great syntheses and famous names apart from men like Bufion the accumulated work of a multitude of famous enquirers contributed to

on

the developments which were taking place. In the latter half of the eighteenth century researches in varied fields were preparing the way for a more solid advance towards the modern
idea of evolution. Caspar Friedrich

Wolff in Germany would

seem

have played his part when he made a comparative of plant and animal development and pointed out the study cell-tissue which was common to both. In 1759 and 1768 he
to

attacked the popular pre-formation theory which regarded the female -as containing the germs of all the generations to
follow, one incapsulated within another, and each comprising the pre-formed individual, already supposed to exist in miniathat limbs and organs in the embryo passed successive various shapes, and this process seemed to through him to exhibit the operation of a kind of life-force which
ture.

He showed

worked upon simple homogeneous organic matter, building it up into structures. Koekeuter studied pollen and pointed out the importance, on the one hand of insects, on the other hand of the wind, in the fertilisation of flowers. Conducting
he showed, for example, experiments in hybrid formations, that when hybrids were mated with their parent-species a
reversion

would

would

return.

take place the characteristics of the patent Christian Conrad Sprengel showed how

certain flowers required certain forms

fertilisation,

of

insect for their

while others might be fertilised by insects of of the nectaries in each flower varying sorts; and the position would be adapted to tie insects which were accustomed to servicing that flower. Petrus Camper in Holland studied faces and stressed the differences between those of human

which might be regarded as most beings and those of the apes man himself a topic which provoked a good
resembling

228

ORIGINS OF

MODERN SCIENCE

It

deal of controversy in the latter half of the eighteenth century. would appear that the old views concerning the immut-

ability

of species were
themselves

liable to

be modified by
or,

men who had

like

interested

in

hybridisation,

Erasmus

Darwin, in the breeding of horses, dogs and sheep.

The transition to evolutionary thinking was assisted not only by the spread ofthe historical outlook and the idea of progress,
but also by philosophical tendencies, such as the inclination to see the whole world as a living thing, to believe in an

and to postulate some spiritual formative principle, operating throughout nature and gradually realising itself. Jean Baptists Robinet (1735-1820) shows the effect of these ideas in his treatise on Nature which appeared between 1761 and 1768. He sees all organic creatures in a linear scale, but to him all the lower forms of life are an adumbration of the future figure of man, and even in the early stages of the world's development he looks for the suggestion of the human form. In his view, the lower creations were a necessary intermediate stage before man himself could be produced as the crown of creation* All the parts of the human form had to be tried out in every conceivable combination before the shape of a man could really be discovered. The history of the earth itself was "the apprenticeship of Nature in learning to make a man". Robinet illustrates another view which was current in this period, and which assisted evolutionary speculation the idea that the atoms out of which everything was composed were not merely dead matter but were individually possessed of both life and soul. Inorganic matter could build itself up into combinations that formed living creatures there was no real gulf between the animate and inanimate. There were infinitely small gradations between all the things in nature, and the chain of being was a continuous one a single pattern at the basis of everything, a single prototype, was discoverable behind all the variations and provided the continuity. And this idea, which is found in Robinet, was to receive further development in the work of Herder and Goethe in Germany. Furthermore, an age that had long been femiW with discusflan vital

IDEAS OF PROGRESS
sion about the influence

AND

IDEAS OF EVOLUTION

229

of climate and environment on the race, was ready to reflect as the in did which the external world Robinet upon way might condition the development of plants and animals. Also geological ideas and hypotheses, which had been appearing for a long time, were beginning to shape themselves into a science, and from about the year 1775 acquired more importance than ever before. By the end of the eighteenth century a handful of sciences on which geology itself depends had at last been brought to a state of ripeness. The view that all rocks had been precipitated in a primordial ocean or from the fluid that formed the original chaos is one that goes back to antiquity. It was challenged in the 17405 by a theory which volcanic origin of all rocks; and from the postulated the 17605 the Neptunists were in conflict with what were called the Vulcanists or Plutonists. In 1775 Werner in Germany discussed the earth's surface in a more systematic manner than and he maintained die aqueous origin of his
various sections of the

human

rock

predecessors, the view that was then the more popular. JamesHutton,

who

wrote in 1788 and 1795, asserted the igneous origin of rocks and rejected the idea that the earth had acquired its formation through a series of great catastrophes. He preferred the past in the light ofthe known present and sought to
interpret to account for the earth's present condition

by

reference to

processes

still

observable, forces

still

in operation and principles

already familiar.

was met by a doctrine of Uniformitarianism, and Button, though he had for the little influence in his own day, marked out the path future development of geology.

The

Catastrophic theory

to Charles Bonnet (1720-93) brought his religious bdief of the in the had he that faith progress support the prophetic world and the advancement of nature. He too hdd the vkw
that the final units out

of which everything

in the world

is

built are living, indestructible things, as old as the universe, a "soul". He saw the whole of and each of them

nature in a linear

to the comrunning from the ample its each member differing only mfbntesiinaHy from plex, but
series,

primarily

230

ORIGINS OF

MODERN SCIENCE

neighbours, so that continuity was unbroken from the mineral to the vegetable world, and then till the animal kingdom was
reached,

was

finally until the emergence of man. Bonnet particularly interested in the transitional forms such as
fish,

and

the bat, the polypus and the sensitive plant interested in the orang-outang, which he said was particularly into a polite and creditable of educated susceptible being

the flying

valet de chambre.

He was prepared to

believe that evolution

had
the

been carried further on some planets than on the earth

stones having sensations, the dogs being capable of intellectual exchange, the men achieving the virtue of angels. But he held

the pre-formation theory

inside her the

held that the

first

female holds

germ of

merely the germ

viduals.

succeeding generations and not but the miniature form of the adult indiall

According to Bonnet the world was periodically enin gulfed great catastrophes of which the last was the great Flood that we associate with Noah. In such catastrophes the

bodies of all living creatures were destroyed but the germs the future generations lived on, and after the catastrophe
led to creatures that

of

they

were higher in the scale of being. The eighteenth-century part of the story really came to its climax in two men whose important writings appear at the opening of the nineteenth century, at a time when Paris had become the chief centre of biological study Jean Baptiste de Monet (who is known as Lamarck) and Georges Leopold Cuvier. It was fortunate that they lived "in the Paris basin, a vast cemetery of corals, shells and mammals; and not far from extensive deposits of cretaceous rocks packed with fossil invertebrates". They became respectively important as the virtual founders of invertebrate and vertebrate palaeontology. Lamarck was a man of brilliant intuitions, but his specuktions sometimes ran too far ahead of his scientific achievements, and perhaps it was partly for this reason that he secured hardly

any following in his own day. He began by thinking that the species were fixed, but he came over to the view that "in
nature". He began by arranging reality only the zoological groups in a vertical scale, but as time went on he
individuals exist in

IDEAS OF PROGRESS

AND

IDEAS OF EVOLUTION

231

allowed the rungs of the ladder to spread wider horizontally, till the became more like a system genealogical tree. He did not believe in the continuous Chain of Being, but thought that there were leaps in nature a for gap example between the mineral and the vegetable realms. He held, however, that life

was generated spontaneously from gelatinous or mucilaginous matter, the process being assisted by heat and electricity. He rejected the view that the history of the animal world could
be explained only by a series of colossal universal catastrophes which changed the whole distribution of land and sea. He believed that the earth had had a slower and more continuous history and that only in a much more gradual way had the
extinct species revealed in fossils been turned into the ones which inhabit the world today. He had an impressive sense of the colossal length of geological time, and saw animal life as

continuous

without

total extinctions

and

total renewals in

the times of cataclysm though more gradual changes in the world altered the environment of living creatures. Changes in

environment did not operate

directly to alter the species in the

course of time; they acted through the nervous system on the whole structure of creatures, and an urge inside the creature
itself had its

part to play in the evolutionary process. Altered

wants led to altered habits; and the organs of animals were enlarged or diminished according to the degree to which they were put to use. Lamarck held that it was not the form or
character

of the living body itself which decided the habits of

the creature in question. It was rather the habits and manner of life which decided the fashioning of the organs moles and blind mice having lost their sight because they had lived under-

ground for many

acquired webbed

generations, while

swimming

birds

had

feet because they stretched

out tbeir toes in

the water. If new characteristics were acquired

by both sexes Lamarck assumed that they were transmissible; and he thought that if a number of children were deprived of their left eye at birth, only a few generations would be necessary to produce a race of one-eyed human beings. He was unfairly charged -with
the theory that animals could create new organs for themselves

232

ORIGINS OF

MODERN SCIENCE

by merely wanting them. Although he spoke as though everyand bething were the product of blind mechanical forces, such of the lieved that even the soul was only forces, product
his

the individual theory ascribed a role to a certain urge within an urge which converted itself into an active fluid, case of the giraffe flowing into the channels required, as in the
creature,

which

neck to reach the high branches of trees. Because he believed in this urge, and in a kind of aspiration of
strained
its

as well as thinking living things to attain greater complexity, that, up to a certain limit, life itself tends to increase the

volume of any body

a body) possessing it, some (or part of to argue that he shared some of the able been have people "vitalistic" notions of his time.

His contemporary, Cuvier, made a greater impression upon the world at the time, and has been described as "the first man to enjoy the full luxury of a bird's-eye view of the whole of
life

He

as well as around in space'*. spread out backwards in time had affected the nature which held that great catastrophes

of the earth's surface had altered the character of the animal world at different periods. The view seemed to him to explain those cases where stratifications now discovered at great shown by fossils to heights and in an inverted position were have taken place in the sea. It has been suggested that he was
the fact that French geological research had been so largely concerned with the Alps, where subverted formations of this kind had aroused considerable interest. over-influenced

by

Cuvier's evolutionary theory did not require the long periods of time which Lamarck had had to postulate for the mainten-

ance of continuity in a protracted course of gradual development. Also, he did not agree that the species underwent

changes as a normal

effect

of habitat and environment

to

him

the changes which occurred in the animal kingdom had a catastrophic character. At any particular date the existing
species

were immutable in his opinion, and change was brought about when some upheaval resulted in their destruction. At each catastrophe,however, some isolated region would be spared, so making it possible that the human race itself,

IDEAS OF PROGRESS

AND IDEAS OF EVOLUTION

its

233

for example, should maintain

continuity.

He made a more methodical study than Buffon of the fossils which were so plentiful in the region of Paris. He was not
content to study the separate parts of the body in isolation, but examined the way in which they would be adjusted to one
another,

showing how the carnivorous animal would have the

right kind of teeth, jaws, ckws, digestive canal, good visual organs and the power of rapid motion. This attention to the
correlating

reconstructions

show, for

make more successful from fossils and fragments; and he was able to example, how an extinct mammoth was more
parts enabled

of the

him

to

closely related to the Indian elephant than the Indian and

African elephants are to one another. He went further than Lamarck in his refusal to arrange all living creatures in a single ascending or descending series, and
in his insistence that the animal world should be divided into
separate groups, each

important idea, Charles Bonnet, implied that there was not a single evolutionary progression, but parallel lines of development in the various
groups.
straight
It

with a ground-plan of its own. This of which there had been a hint in the work of

stood as a warning against any attempt to draw

of direct comparison between highly developed and highly specialised creatures which might have run far away from one another as a result of separate developments
lines

within separate groups. The new system also enabled Cuvier to make greatimprovements in classification. It was anecessary step

towards the establishment of a practicable theory of descent. It has been noted that by this date all the ingredients of
Charles Darwin's theory had already been discovered save Ac idea of the struggle for existence. The work of Malthus and
the economic writings of the industrial revolution were soon to supply what was needed here, and the development of

of Lyell, for example geological study the work die minds of men for the Origin of Species in 1859.

prepared

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Alton, E.
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Andrade, E. N. de C. Sir Isaac Newton (London, 1954). Armitage, A. Copernicus the founder of modern astronomy (London,
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critiques

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sur fhistoire de la littfrature jranfaise,

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Koyr,
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C.The

science metaphysical foundations of modem physical

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(London, 1920). Carre, J. R. La philosophie de
Clark, G.

inquiry

into its origin

outgrowth

Fontenelle (Paris, 1932).

N.

Science and social welfare in the age

of Newton (Oxford,

1937)-

The

and the tower of Pisa (Ithaca, New Cooper, I,. Aristotle* Galileo York, 1935)A History ofScience (3rd ed., Cambridge, Dampier, Sir William C.
1942).

seventeenth century (Oxford, 1947)-

Davis, T. L.

of Elements compared with that "Boyle's conception of Lavoisier," Isis, Vol. XVI (1931)"Copernicus'*

Dingle, H.

Work,"
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J.

MODERN

SCIENCE
Thales
to

Dreyer,

L. E.

History of the planetary systems from

Kepler (Cambridge, 1906).

Duhcm, P.
fitudes sur

Le mouvement absolu et le mouvement relatif (Paris, Uonard it Vinci (Paris, 1906-13).

1905).

Le systeme du monde (Paris, 1954). The Aim and Structure ofPhysical Theory (Eng. transl., Princeton,
N.J., 1954)Foster, Sir

Michael

Lectures on the history of physiology during the

centuries (Cambridge, 1901). and times of Tycho Brahe (Princeton, 194?)le role

i6th, i^th

and i8th

Gade, J, A.
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The

life

Etudes sur

de la pensle tntdievale dans la formation

du systbne carttsienne (Paris, 1930). Goldbeck, E.Keplers Lehre von der Gravitation (Halle a.S., 1896), Ballistics in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1952). Hall, A. R.

The

Scientific Revolution,

Hazard, P.

La

crise

1500-1800 (London, 1954). de la conscience europtenne (1690-1715) (3 vols.,

Paris, 1935). The growth ofphysical science (Cambridge, 1947). Jeans, Sir James F. R. Astronomical Johnson, thought in Renaissance England (Balti-

more, 1937)-

"The

Thomas Digges on the Progress of Modern in Sixteenth Astronomy Century England," Osiris, Vol. I and Sanford V., "Thomas Digges, the Coperni(1936), Larkey,
Influence of

can System and the Idea of the Infinity of the Universe in

1576," Huntington Library Bulletin,

No.

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"Robert Recorders Mathematical Teaching and the Anti-Aristotelian Movement,*' ibid., No. 7 (April 1935). Koyri, A. Etudes galiUennes (3 fascicules, Paris, 1939-40).

Kuhn, T.

S.

"Robert Boyle and Structural Chemistry in the

Seventeenth Century," Isis, VoL XLffl (1952). Lenoble, ILMersenne ou la naissance du micanisme (Paris, 1943). The Great Chain ofBeing (Cambridge, Mass., 1950). Lovejoy, A. O.

+Uactivitt intellectuelle de fAngtetens dans fancien Lovering, "Mercure de France" (Paris, 1930). McColley, G. "The seventeenth century Doctrine of a Plurality

of Worlds," Annals of Science, Vol. I (1936). McKie, D. Antoine Lavoisier, the father ofmodern chemistry (London,
1935)-

Meyerson, E.La deduction relativists, especially Ch. IV (Paris, 1925). Identity and reality, especially Ch. ffl (London, 1930).

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Mieli,

237

A.

La

science arabe et son role dans revolution scientifique

mondiale (Leiden, 1939). The history of biology (Eng. Nordenskiold, N. E.

1929).

transl.,

London,

Ornstein [Bronfenbrenner],
Packard, A. S.
Pagel,

M.

The

role

of scientific

societies in the

seventeenth century (Chicago, 1938).

Lamarck (London,

1901).

"William Harvey and the Purpose of Circulation," Isis, Vol. XLII (1951). "Hooke's Gravitation Theory and its Influence on Patterson, L. D.

W.

Newton,"
Pledge, H. T.
Randall, Jr., J.

Isis,

XL-XLI (1949-50). Science since 1500 (Science Museum Publication,

Vok

London, 1939). H. "The Development of the Scientific Method in the School of Padua," Journal of die History of Ideas, Vol. I
(1940).
d'histoire des sciences,

Revue

on

"

Rosen, E.

m (1937).

l/Encylopdie' "The Commentariolus of Copernicus,"

treatises

juillet-decembre 1951. Special issue et le proges des sciences."

Osiris,

Vol.

Three Copernican
Sarton, G.

(New York,

1939)-

The

history

ofscience

and the new humanism (Cambridge,

Mass., 1937). Schneer, C. "The Rise of Historical Biology in the Seventeenth (1954). Century", Isis, Vol.

XLV

Singer, C. J.

The evolution of anatomy (London,

Matter and gravity
in

1925).

A short history of medicine (Oxford, 1928).

J.

Snow, A.

Newton s

physical philosophy

(London, 1926).
Stoner, G. B.

"The atomistic view of matter in

centuries," bis, Vol.

the

XVth, XVIth,

and
Syfret,

XVHth

(1928).

R. H.

"The Origins of

the

Royal Society," Nbto anJ

Records of the Royal Society, Vol. V, No. 2. short history of science (London, 1939)Sherwood Taylor, and experimental science, Vok t-VI L. Ttorndike, History of magic

Science

(London, 1925)and thought in

Whitehead, A. N.

thejtfteenth century (New York, 1929). Science and the modern world (Cambridge, 1927).

Wightman,
1950).

W.

P.

D.The Growth of Scientific Ideas (Edinburgh,

INDEX
Acadfmie des Sciences 95, 160, 172 Albert of Saxony, 10, 142
Alberti, L. B., 38

Bonnet, Charles, 229-30, 233

Borelli, Alfonso, 123, 149, 153

Boyle, Robert, 103, 116, 122, 125-

Alchemy,
America,

34, 81, 92, 94* 101,

12837,

38, 143, 165, 192-95, 197-98, 200,

29, 132, 135* I9i

202, 204, 209

Discovery

19,

183-84, 186 Ancients versus Moderns, 213-18

Brahe, Tycho, i, 24, 59-64, 69, 71, 89, 107, 126

Anglo-French Controversies, 97, 158, 167, 206-07 Arabs, The, 21, 34, 4O, 43, 48, 7778, 176-77, 181, 196, 213 Archimedes, 13-14, 43, 79, 84, 92,

Bruno, Giordano, 36, 57, 61, 214 Buffon, G. L. L. de, 224-27, 233
Buridan, Jean, 8-10, 15

Cavendish,

Henry,

199,

202-03,

207-08
Cesalpino, 45, 47

98, 215
Aristotle, 5-7, 9,

"-I5, 23-25,
5<$,

30,

Church, The,

9, 23, 45, 56-58, 162,

34, 37, 40-41, 48-49,

66, 73

165-68, 224

78, 80-83, 97-99,

102-03, 106,
*9<5*

Colombo, 44-45, 47
Comenius, 56
Copernican Theory,
126, 141, 153
17, 24, 28-33,

119-21, 132, 135* 194, Aristotelianism, vii, 3-9.

215
13-14,

n,

20-21, 29, 31-33, 40-4i> 45, 48, 56, 61, 63, 66-68, 71, 79-80, 8587, 96, 102, 118, 130, 133, 137,

56-63, 67-69, 72, 84-85, 107-08,

141, 147, 195, 216

Aristotelians, 4, 6, 12, 15, 67-68, 73,

Copernicus, 22, 24-34, 43, 47, 55-6i, 63-64* 67, 69, 72, 98, 139-41*

129-31 Astrology, 23, 35, 58, 144 Atmosphere, The, 18, 72, 137-38,

80, 82-84, 86-88, 98,

143-44, 214 Coresio, 82

Corpuscular Philosophy, 120-22, 125, 130-36, 147^48, 159

Cuvier, G. L., 230, 232-33

194,200-07
Augustine, St., 58, 77 Averroes, 48

Dante, 17^-23

Bacon,

Sir Francis, 2, 47, 63, 79, 87,

Darwin, Charles, 220, 224, 233

Defoe, Daniel, 188

91, 97-111, 115, 118-22, 126-31,

138, 140, 142, 145, 153* 173, 185,

Democritus, 120
Descartes, Rene\ 13, 53, 7*, 75,
90, 97-98* 110-16, 120-21,

192-93, 214, 216 BecherJ.J., 195

89124-

Bccckman,

71 Bellairs, John, 188 Bible, The, 8, 56-58, 109, 213, 219,

Isaac,

25, 127-28, 130, 147-5Q>

I5<H8,

162-04, 166, 168-69, 173-74, 207,

224,226
Black, Joseph, 199-200, 202-03, 207

215-16 Digby, Everard, g&

Dissection, 39-41,

43^4* 50

Boerhaave, H., 163, 195, 200

Duhem,
239

Piene, 15

240
Elements, Chemical, 18-20, 129,

INDEX
208Impetus, Theory of the, 8-13, 15, 27, 30-31, 48, 68-69, 79, 88, 106,

135-37, 193, 195, 198, 204,

09
120-21 Epicurus and Epicureans, Erasmus, Desiderius, 2, 10 Evolution, 220, 226, 228, 230-32 Experiments and the Experimental

142
Industrial Revolution,

167,

1853 if

86,200
Inertia, Principle of, 3-7,

*3~I4,

72, 84-85, 108, 146, 148

Method, 39-41, 47-51,

74,

7<5,

Instruments, Scientific, 94
Jupiter, 66-67, 145, 155

80-84, 87-88, 91-95, 99-105, 11416, 126-27, 131-32, 138, 153, 158,

186, 191-92, 198

Kepler, J., 24, 28-30, 57-58, 62-66, 69, 89-90, 119, 144-47, 149-50,
Fabricius, 45-47, 5

152, i55-5<5, 166

Fontenelle, B. le B. de, 160-66,

170, 172-^74, 215,
Fossils,

217-18

Lamarck,

(J.

B. de Monet), 230-33

222-23, 230-31, 233

Lavoisier, A., 52, 136, 198-99,

205223-

Freind, Joseph, 192

09
Leibnitz, 89, 125, 157, 220-21,

Galen, 38-42, 44-46*, 48, 51

Galileo, ix, 1-3, 5,

25

8-u,

13, 15,25,

Leonardo da Vinci,
43-44, 91
Lincei,

2, 6, 8, 12, 38,

31, 33, 39, 47, 49, 57~<5o, 63,

66-

72, 74-75, 8o-95, 106, 108-10, 122

Accademie

dei, 75

-23, 137, 140, 144, 147-48, 162, 166, 168-69, 185 Gas or Gases, 94, 193-94, *97, 200-

Linnseus, 220-21, 225

Locke, John, 182, 184, 221

Logarithms, 90 Louis XIV, 16364, 167-68, 17173, 183, 215-16, 218
Machiavelli, N., 39, 166, 211, 213,

09
Gassendi, 72, 75, 84, 121, 127, 130

Geology, 219, 229, 232-33

Gilbert, William, 2, 63, 91-92, 101,

141-45
Glanvill, Joseph,

184

Gravity and the Theory of Gravitation, u, 18, 31-32, 86, 88-89, 105-06, 109, 118-19, 123, 126,
139-59, 197

219 Maesdin, M., 61-62 Magini, G. A., 61 Makbranche, N., 162

Malpighi, M., 53 Mars, 25, 64, 156
Marsiglio of Padua, 48

Hales, Stephen,

201-02

Halley,

Edmond, 153

Martianus Capella, 27 Masaccio, 38 Mathematics and the Scientific Revolution, 3, 10, 62, 66, 79, 87-90,
106, 108-09, 116-17, 173

Harvey,WilIiam, 1-2, 41-42, 44-47, 49-54, 80, 103, 115, 122-23, 126 Hobbes, Thomas, 72 Hooke, Robert, 142, 153~55, *93,
198,

Mercury, 27 Mersenne, M.,

Microscope,

71-^73, 75-76",

84

200

I, 53,

94
182

Hulton, James, 229 Huygens, Christian, 33, 72, 114-16, 127, 150, 152-53, 157

Middle

Classes, 167-71,

More, Henry, 125 Morin, 144

INDEX
Motion, 3-18, 30-33, 49,
64-6*5,

241

Ptolemy, 21, 24-27, 31, 33, 61, 64,

69-70, 81-87, 96, 105-06, 109, 113-14, 117, 119, 121, 125, 139142-46, 40, 148-50, 152-57
159,

66,214
Pythagoreanism, 26-27, 49, 90
Pierre, 98 Ranke, L. Von, 175 Ray, John, 220

Ramus,

Napier, John, 90
Neptunists, 229

Renaissance, The, vii, 2, 6, 8-9, 13,

16, 27, 34-35, 37-41, 48-49, 73, 77-79, 89, 91, 175-76, 178, 182-

Newton, Sk

Isaac, 31, 71, 89, 97,

125-26, 140, 147-49, 151-60, 165

177, 184, 207, 224

Nicholas of Cusa, 27, 140 Nicholas of Oresme, 8, 10

83, 189-90, 210-13 Roberval, G. Personne de, 72, 75, 148

Oxford,

8, 10, 15,

126, 192

Robinet, Jean Baptiste, 228-29 Royal Society, The, 75, 93, 95, 101, 116, 153, 185, 196
St. Pierre,

Bemadin du,

164, 172-

Padua, 41, 44-45, 47~5i, 58, 68, 80, 122

Paris, 9, 71, 75, 153, 156, 160,

73

Saint-Simon,

Due de,

168

163-

64, 217, 225, 230, 233 Scholasticism in, 8-12, 15, 48,

Sanchez, Francois, 98 Sanctus Sanctorius, 122

Saturn, 59, 155
Scheele, Carl
Scientific Revolution,

68, 79, 181

Pascal, B., 72, 75

Wilhelm, 200, 204 The, vii,

ix,

Peregrine, on die Magnet, 91 Perrault, Charles, 215-16, 218

Petty,

1-2, 4, 7^9, ii, 15, 30, 32, 36-37,

48, 54, 80-81, 84, 88-89, 92-93,
96, 104, 117-18, 126, 131, 153,

Sk William,

172

Philosophes, 160, 165-66, 170, 172,

188, 218

159-60, 165, 170, 178-79, 182, 185, 189, 216, 223

Serveto, Miguel, 45
Societies, Scientific, (see also

Phlogiston Theory, The, 195-209 Picard,Jean, 156 Pisa, Tower of, 81

Royal

Society) 74-76,
Spagyrists, 129
Stafl,

95

Pkto and Platonism, 26-27,

99,216
Plutonists,

49, 90,

G. E, 195
Simon,
82, 86,

229
P.,

Stensen, Niels, 123, 125

Pomponazzi,

35

Stevin,

90

Priesdey, Joseph, 199, 203-207 Progress, Idea o 187, 212-14,

217-20
Projectiles, 6, 11-14, 69, 86-87,

92-

Technology, 92-94* 185, 191, 200 Telescope, I, 59, 66-68, 94, 109 Torricefli, Evangelista, 137

93, 106, 145, 152, 196

Projectors, 188 Protestants, and Protestantism, 45,

Vacuum,

4, 6,

9-10, 73, 121, 137,

136,

141, 147, 157, 201

56-58, 165, 170, 181, 183-84 Ptolemaic System, Chap. H passim, 55-56, 59, 61-62, 67, 69, 71, 107,

Van Helmont, J. B., 94, 12^-29,

193-94 Vauban, 172
Venice, 48, 66, 92

126

242
Venus, 21, 23, 27, 60, 145 Vesalius, A., 37, 40-41* 43~44 47,
Vico, G. B., 217
Viete, Francois, Volta, A., 207 Voltaire, 56
Vulcanists,

INDEX
Waltire, 208
$

Werner, A. G., 229

Wesley, John, 184, 219 Wilkins, John, 126 Wren, Christopher, 153

90

229