THREE

Virtuoso Discipline

The cure of the mind and Solomon’s House

In 1657 Walter Charleton wrote a dialogue called The Immortality of the Human Soul, which was meant to complement his previous apology for Epicurean atomism in Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charletoniana (1654). Charleton had been refused a fellowship in the College of Physicians in 1655, but he remained hopeful and painted the college in gratulatory colors in his Immortality as a Solomon’s House that made real Bacon’s utopia and as the “Great Luminary of the World,” by the side of the equally promising Oxonian community that was to form the basis of the early Royal Society of London.¹ The Immortality is framed as an exchange among three characters, Athanasius (Charleton), Lucretius (John Evelyn), and Isodicastes (Henry Pierrepont, the dedicatee of the work). Before the actual conversation on the question of the immortality of the soul begins, the first dialogue represents a sort of double identity card, which sketches not only the pattern of the new natural philosophical institution but also the portrait of the new natural philosopher, couched in recognizable medicina-cultura animi terms and introduced via a consolation dialogue. Athanasius recounts his misfortunes and “disquiet” and asks for advice on how to come to “deport” himself “as becomes a Philosopher, with Constancy and tranquillity of mind.” Lucretius responds by confessing that he is familiar with Athanasius’s “Melancholy disposition” and proneness to “dejection,” but also that his own ability as a “Physician for the Mind” extends no further than reminding Athanasius of what he already knows, which comprises two main things: the “Morall Precepts, which you have been long collecting” and the curative effects of “gentle and Philosophicall Divertisements.”²

The reference to the moral precepts that Athanasius has been collecting is a transparent reference to Charleton’s work that introduced Epicurean ethics to the English world, Epicurus’s Morals (1656), in emulation of Pierre Gassendi.³ Charleton’s moral Epicurus is actually a blend of Epicurus, Seneca, Cicero, and Plutarch, in conformity with the ancient Hellenistic schools’ common program of offering the cure of reason to disturbed minds toward the achievement of philosophical tranquility, through self-knowledge and mind-ordering regimens.⁴ Comparable syncretism is also present in Gassendi’s general program for his work, where philosophy is defined as the love, study, and exercise of wisdom, and wisdom as the disposition of the mind whereby it embraces truth in all things and follows honesty in all actions. This understanding of the aim and scope of philosophy, we are told, is in tune with a tradition that includes ancient philosophers (Pythagoras, Plato, Seneca, Cicero, Epicurus, Lucretius) and early Fathers of the Church (Justin, Clement, Lactantius). All agree that philosophy as the search for wisdom is a true medicine for the soul.⁵

Epicurean echoes in this general moral sense can also be detected in Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667), which includes a section on the way experimenting itself is “usefull for the cure of mens minds.”⁶ It can be that, Sprat argues, owing to its active nature. The passions of men’s minds (the “violent desires, malicious envies, intemperate joyes, and irregular griefs, by which the lives of most men become miserable, or guilty”) are mainly due to idleness, so that the “medicine” lies in “earnest employments” coupled with “innocent, various, lasting, and even sensible delights.” Experimenting not only is supremely industrious in this earnest way but can also afford the innocent delights that can counter man’s “vanity and intemperance,” in a way that “the greatest Epicure has no reason to reject.”⁷ This is manifestly not a full-fledged endorsement of Epicurean wisdom; but Sprat does marshal Epicurean arguments about the therapeutic effect of the pleasures of the mind (as opposed to those of the body) in support of the idea that the study of nature can function as a medicine for the soul. A similar strategy features in Boyle’s defense of the moral benefits of experimental natural philosophy. Boyle distances himself from “Epicureanism” in general, yet he can only agree with Epicurus’s notion that the study of the natural world cures the soul’s fears, a notion of which we learn, Boyle says, from Diogenes Laertius and Lucretius, as well as his “best Interpreter, Gassendus.”⁸

The second head of Lucretius’s advice for Athanasius in Charleton’s Immortality referred to the “medicine” provided by “free and unbiased Philosophicall Conferences” in the company of friends.⁹ The theme of this second advice is that of an art of inquiry informed by the discipline of judgment and the rightful conduct of the intellect, which played a crucial role in the virtuosi’s apologies for experimental philosophy and formed the crux of their critique of dogmatism. Athanasius complains that he has little hope for such conversations among the “hot and testy” French (the encounter takes place in Paris), and that he is, on the contrary, of a “Genius, which is so averse to all contests and passionate Altercations, and which alwaies brings me to Philosophicall Discourses only as to Enquiries, not final Determinations.”¹⁰ Prudent inquiry in contrast to “passionate Altercations” and “final Determinations,” or else to disputation and dogmatism, was indeed the mot d’ordre of the early Royal Society as put forward by its apologists. Joseph Glanvill, for instance, identifies both scholastic Aristotelianism and the religious “enthusiasts” as promoters of vain “notions” dogmatically affirmed in disrupting and sterile “disputes”; they are thus enemies of the “liberty of enquiry.”¹¹ Thomas Sprat extends his quarrel with the Schools to include a critique of the “modern dogmatists,” or builders of metaphysical systems: their well-rounded theories terminate the search into nature’s secrets and can serve only vanity and contradiction.¹² Lucretius promises he will introduce Athanasius to a compatriot, Isodicastes, who should be the best companion and thus a provider of the “Physick” of wise conversation. Isodicastes’ portrait as drawn by Lucretius is the portrait of the “perfect Virtuoso”: he is a noble person both by birth and owing to his virtues, and a pursuer of knowledge for its proper “use,” which includes both self-government and provision for life. He is also a master of the art of judgment: “a prudent Estimator of mens actions and opinions, but no rigid Censor of either. A valiant Assertor of truth, yet far from Tyranny.” Moreover, he understands well the causes of error: “human frailty, and the obscurity of things in themselves.”¹³

Charleton’s sketch of the portrait of the new philosopher brings together the themes of an art of inquiry and of judgment, of useful knowledge, and of an awareness of human frailty, included in the general province of the “physician for the mind.” The same cluster of themes features in Glanvill’s continuation of Bacon’s New Atlantis, an essay entitled “Anti-fanatical Religion and Free Philosophy” (1676). We are again in the vicinity of Solomon’s House, and the Governor of Bensalem expounds the island’s religion to his visitors. Glanvill’s story is a quite straightforward text compared with Bacon’s mysteries: it is a transparent rendition of the post-Restoration Anglican project of a rational religion that could supersede Interregnum “enthusiasm.”¹⁴ Among the chief concerns of Bensalem’s divines, we are told, was the exercise of the liberty of inquiry and the search after truth. This exercise can be pursued, they thought, only by being wary in inquiry and remaining modest in opinions, avoiding both peremptory dogmatism and an “unwarrantable Scepticism.”¹⁵ Such epistemic modesty was praiseworthy both as a guarantee of charity and peace in the community, and as the “likelyest way of Cure” for the mind’s weaknesses, which were taken to be responsible for the social unrest in the first place. These divines devoted much of their study to the understanding of human nature and of men’s inclinations and passions, and they were fully aware, just as Isodicastes was, of the fact that human error and vice are rooted in human frailty: “They consider’d, that our Understandings, at best, are weak; and that the search of Truth is difficult; that we are very liable to be imposed on by our Complexions, Imaginations, Interests, and Affections.”¹⁶

Glanvill’s Bensalemite divines belong to the family of physicians of the soul reviewed in the previous chapter: both their religion and their philosophical studies are mainly construed as practical regimens for the mind. In describing their religion, Glanvill defends the “Latitudinarian” tenets of the minimal creed (there are only a few principles necessary to salvation), the role of reason in religion, the collaboration of grace and human endeavor, and the importance of the moral virtues (or of inward righteousness, in contrast with Calvinist imputed righteousness) for justification. Christianity is indeed the “highest improvement” of the moral virtues, and “the power of it consists in subduing self-will, and ruling our passions, and moderating our appetites, and doing the works of real Righteousness towards God, and our Neighbour.”¹⁷ If their religion is thus to a great extent a cure of souls, their “way of study” is equally framed to the same purpose. Glanvill describes a philosophical curriculum whose purpose is not knowledge per se (and thus potentially dogmatism and dispute), but the kind of knowledge pursuit that favors self-knowledge and the cure and cultivation of the powers of the mind. Their moral philosophy is founded on “the excellent knowledge of Humane Nature and Passions” rather than on ethical systems, and is pursued, in Ciceronian fashion, as a lex vitae rather than for ostentatio scientiae.¹⁸ Mathematics is praised mainly for its capacity to accustom the mind “to a close way of reasoning” and thus as a “good Antidote against the confus’d, and wandring humour of Disputers.”¹⁹ Their logic is opposed to the formal syllogistic logic of the Schools and can be called the “Logick of Plato” or the “modest, Socratical way of Question,” which avoids passionate and sterile disputes.²⁰ Their “physiology” or natural philosophy is grounded in natural histories, which is a way of “assisting” reason by observations; inquiry into nature is pursued modestly, and “no infallible Theory” is asserted.²¹ They examine various doctrines—the Cartesian and the Gassendist, the mechanical and the pneumatic philosophies—without “adhering” to any as the final account of nature. They keep inquiry open and seek “to make Philosophy operative, and useful,” that is, a philosophy that teaches the mind to govern its tendency of forming “vain Ideas of fancy” and is at the same time productive of “profitable works.”²²

The theme of the utility of philosophy in this double sense is a transparent Baconian echo, and so is the framing of the branches of knowledge as arts of assisting and cultivating the intellect. At the same time, as we have seen, these are topics that were developed in the cultura animi literature of the seventeenth century, which is variously echoed in the virtuosi’s texts. Charleton’s “Physician for the Mind” and Glanvill’s Ben-salemite divines bring the culture of the regimens of the mind into the precincts of Solomon’s House and claim for the new natural philosophy the status of a medicine for the soul. Glanvill’s Bensalemite curriculum indicates that this move is legitimated by the inclusion of a reformed natural philosophy within a circle of disciplines that are themselves reoriented toward an ethos-building type of knowledge pursuit. It is true that Sprat tells us that moral philosophy, by the side of politics and oratory, is an art on which the Royal Society virtuosi “have no mind to intrench.”²³ Indeed, they do not write moral treatises, but they do include in their natural philosophical tracts accounts of the distempers of the mind in a manner echoing the integrated anatomies of the passions and errors of the soul that formed the common ground of Bacon’s new logic and practical moral philosophy, and that also featured in the English treatises of the passions we have looked at. Equally, they do not write logic tracts, but their accounts of the natural philosophical way of inquiry do take the form of methods for directing and cultivating the intellect, which was the newly assumed purpose of a number of early modern logics, as it was of Bacon’s art of direction and of the discipline of the mental powers in the cultura animi genres.

An investigation of the significance of such conceptions for the experimental natural philosophy in later seventeenth-century England will be the concern of this and the following chapters. I would like to claim that several major features of this philosophy were shaped by a cultura animi project. Thus, the epistemic modesty that is characteristic of English experimentalism in this period is, I argue, a direct consequence of the anthropological-therapeutic assumptions about the human mind. Accordingly, the mitigated skepticism and probabilism advocated by the virtuosi are motivated by a curative concern, and therefore these categories, which did feature elsewhere (in the late scholastic logics, Descartes, or Gassendi) in more straightforwardly epistemological contexts, are reinterpreted by the virtuosi in cultura animi terms. Equally, it is the notions elaborated in their charts of distempers and virtues of the mind that underlie their defense of experimental versus speculative or dogmatic philosophy, and thus one of the strong lines of legitimation for experimentalism is founded on a regimen approach to the human mind. Finally, such a reshaping of natural philosophy along the lines of a cultivation project is apt to throw new light on two issues that are also associated with the virtuosi’s philosophy: On the one hand, the collective nature of the experimental activity is valued in their case not only as guaranteeing epistemic and social stability but also as creating a forum where minds are more easily purged with the help of “wise friends.” On the other, the impersonal objectivity associated with modern scientific methods, results, and practitioners will be seen to be a distant (much more recent) relative of an early modern type of “objectivity” that in fact names a personal virtuous disposition.

Passions, errors, and method

Before looking at the virtuosi’s approach to the reformation of the mind, I would like to briefly consider several developments in the genres of the treatise of the passions and of the logic tract as they were informed by the new Continental philosophies, which also included an integrated approach to the passions and errors of the mind, and which point to the role of a method of inquiry seen as a cultivating regimen. While these are indeed comparable developments, which the virtuosi do draw upon, it will be seen that these influences are grafted in their case on the Baconian and cultura animi tradition.

Walter Charleton’s Natural History of the Passions (1674) is a treatise of the passions informed no longer by a scholastic-Galenic but rather by a Gassendist-Epicurean theory of the soul. Its purpose is nevertheless in tune with the cultura animi treatises: it is aimed at “the divine art of acquiring constant Tranquillity of Mind, by Wisedom or the right use of Reason.”²⁴ For the concluding section on the “General Remedies” for the passions, Charleton’s main source is Descartes, but a Descartes who is a synthesis of the Méditations métaphysiques (Latin ed. 1641, French ed. 1647) and of the Passions de l’âme (1649), two works that were also known early on to Boyle and Locke.²⁵ The interest of Charleton’s text lies in its collation of Descartes’s accounts of error in the Fourth Meditation and of the passions in the Passions; it thus brings to the fore the elements that make these accounts branches of the same endeavor, in a manner that remained only latent in Descartes’s own writings. In his Fourth Meditation, Descartes explained the mechanism of error by positing a disparity between the scope of the intellect and the scope of the will, or between a limited faculty or power of understanding (which can perceive only a limited number of ideas in a clear and distinct way) and an infinite faculty or power of choosing. Thus, “the scope of the will is wider than that of the intellect,” and error arises when “instead of restricting it [the operation of the will] within the same limits, I extend its use to matters which I do not understand. Since the will is indifferent in such cases, it easily turns aside from what is true and good, and this is the source of my error and sin.”²⁶ The double reference to the true and the good, and to error and sin, in Descartes’s account of error indicates not only the Augustinian framework of his discussion²⁷ but also the relevance of his analysis in the Fourth Meditation to the account of the moral life in the Passions. According to Descartes, the passions are phenomena of the union of soul and body; they are “obscure and confused” perceptions of the soul that are caused, maintained, and fortified by the motions of the corporeal spirits, and they are joined to representations that lead to judgments about the good or evil of things to which the perceiver relates.²⁸ Descartes does not detail the faculty mechanism of error in the Passions, but Charleton includes it explicitly in his Natural History: he distinguishes between a “faculty of Discerning” (the intellect) and a “faculty of Assenting” (the will),²⁹ observes that while the former is “not omniscious,” the latter is “unlimited,”³⁰ and explains that error in both science and the moral life “ariseth from our assent to things whose truth or falsity, good or evil, we have not clearly and distinctly discerned.”³¹ Charleton uses thus the accommodating genre of the treatise of the passions to perform the same unification we have seen in the other treatises, less tributary to the new philosophy, of the moral and epistemological realms insofar as they serve a common cultura animi program.

Charleton also rehearses with fidelity the Cartesian account of the remedies for the excessive passions in his Natural History, while also suggesting its congruence with Descartes’s account for the remedy of error in the Fourth Meditation.³² Both remedies amount to a proper use of one’s free will, Descartes thought. We have a “freedom of indifference,” whereby the will is not determined to choose when the perception is obscure and confused. This is to some extent a defect, to be contrasted with the true freedom of choosing the true and the good “spontaneously,” i.e., without deliberation.³³ Such imperfection, he argues, is attributable not to God but only to me, who misuse the freedom I have to assent or not to assent, and judge in a precipitate manner (je donne témérairement mon jugement) of matters that I perceive only in an obscure and confused manner.³⁴ But it is also a useful capacity, since it makes it possible for me to withhold my assent when my perception is not clear and distinct. The proper use of this freedom lies in resolving to hold off judgment when perceptions lack clarity and distinctness, and in becoming habituated to doing so on a regular basis. For Descartes, this amounts to a discipline of judgment and self-mastery that represents “man’s greatest and most important perfection.”³⁵ In the Passions, he similarly speaks of “the exercise of our free will and the control we have over our volitions” (l’usage de notre libre arbitre, et l’empire que nous avons sur nos volontés), a capacity that “renders us in a certain way like God by making us masters of ourselves.” This is the only thing in us that can rightly cause us to esteem ourselves, and the “firm and constant resolution” to dispose of one’s volitions constitutes the key remedial disposition, générosité.³⁶ The proper use of our freedom with respect to the remedy of the excessive passions also involves a discipline of judgment: it lies in the “firm and determinate judgements bearing upon the knowledge of good and evil,” which the soul resolves to let govern her conduct.³⁷ Such a discipline, Descartes argues, should be capable of separating the corporeal motions (of the blood and animal spirits) from the thought to which they are usually joined when the passion is formed.³⁸ Constantly and resolutely pursued, the discipline will form virtuous habits in the soul, which “dispose it to have certain thoughts”; these thoughts will be fortified by the motions of the corporeal spirits. Virtue consists thus in a rehabituation of the whole man, the union of mind and body.³⁹

To some extent, the Charletonian-Cartesian synthesis of the doctrines of the passions and errors of the mind and their remedy is in tune with the general approach of the cultura animi literature, but there are also differences. One major difference concerns the notion of “assent.” Descartes makes a radical move in attributing assent to the will versus the intellect and in explaining the mechanism of error by positing a radical disproportion between the two “faculties.” A much more common view makes assent an operation of the understanding itself, which is voluntary (“in our power”) without thereby being the unique prerogative of a separately functioning will.⁴⁰ In the line of thought I am investigating, assent is in fact framed as a complex cognitive-conative-emotional mechanism with moral value, and is thus distinct from the Cartesian will-assent. On the other hand, the will-resolution understood as a general disposition and orientation toward the goal of self-reformation is characteristic of both Descartes and the cultura animi literature, as is the notion that the program of training results in reformed habits of thought and feeling. Another major difference has to do with the absence in the Cartesian account of an emphasis on the corruption and infirmity of human nature of the sort the other texts articulated by means of the double Augustinian-Socratic reference.⁴¹ As a consequence, Descartes finds no place for self-love or pride in his account, and the counterpart of the variegated charts of errors and distempers is in his case a sparse explication of a core mechanism. Assent or judgment, we have seen, was central to the treatises of the passions, too, as well as to the Baconian doctrine of the idols, yet in their case it was included in a much more complex (and colorful) picture.

But a comparably complex picture of error can be found in a work that is both Cartesian and Augustinian, and that is not a treatise of the passions but a logic tract: the Logique ou l’Art de penser (1662), written by Port Royal members Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole. The third part of this work (on reasoning) ends with a discussion of sophisms. The very last chapter of this part swerves from a formal discussion and looks into the “false Judgments which are made of all sorts of things” in everyday life, and which are explained by a combination of Cartesian and Augustinian terms. The most conspicuous cause of such false judgments is the “irregularity of our will.”⁴² The claim that it is the will that precipitates the understanding to judge in a hasty manner and thus fall into error is a reference to Descartes’s account of error in the Fourth Meditation. But the authors have much more to say about the irregularity of the will: they develop the question under the head “Of the Sophisms, of Self-Love, Interest and Passion.” The “sophisms” they talk about here are reducible neither to breaches of formal validity nor to the Cartesian “infinite will.” They are rather “Delusions of the heart”⁴³ that betray a mind ill regulated in its inclinations and affections and above all a bad positioning of the self with respect to truth: “we judg of things not as they are in themselves, but as they are in respect of us: and Truth and Profit are to us the same thing.”⁴⁴ Augustinian self-love, together with the action of inordinate passions, is responsible for people’s forming judgments in conformity with their likes and dislikes, their loves and jealousies, with their misplaced high opinion of themselves, or with their previous, scarcely examined, and self-sufficiently embraced opinions. Passions and self-love are the harbingers of credulity, obstinacy, the spirit of contradiction and disputation, or complaisance. Further, the mind lacks patience to inquire beyond the surface of things or the first results of investigation, or else is too easily seduced by either authority or eloquence, and thus hastens to superficial conclusions.⁴⁵ The Logique develops a long and variegated picture of errors, unlike anything in Descartes, but rather close to the non-Cartesian treatises of the passions, or else to Malebranche’s extensive account of error in De la recherche de la vérité (1674–75), attributed in Augustinian fashion to the “misery” of sinning and criminal man.⁴⁶ The picture is also much more complex than the references to errors in Gassendi’s Institutio Logica (1658), which may have served as a model for the Logique.⁴⁷ Gassendi only cursorily mentions the senses, temperament, custom, prejudices, authority, and ambiguity as possible causes of errors.⁴⁸

The general purpose of the Logique is the shaping of sound judgment. The description of the aim of logic is part of a general critique of the uselessness of the “speculative sciences” if pursued for their own sake—a critique that we have seen was also important to the cultura animi literature. To pursue knowledge without thereby seeking to “perfect Reason” is “sottish Vanity” and results in “Fruitless and Barren Sciences.”⁴⁹ The utility of logic lies in its capacity to remedy the “Irregularities of the Understanding” (les déréglements d’esprit), which are responsible for errors both in the sciences and in civil life.⁵⁰ This statement of purpose is in tune with the late scholastic and early modern shifts in the conception of logic, toward a novel concentration on the operations of the cognitive faculties apart from the issue of formal validity, coupled with the re­­­­­definition of logic as a method for conducting the intellect’s reasoning. While the late scholastic logics preserve the traditional format—one that typically deals with terms, propositions, and reasoning or argument, often with the addition of a fourth part, on method—they also assume the role of practical guides for correct reasoning. They take a normative approach to cognition, and their purpose is sometimes described as therapeutic insofar as they are supposed to remedy the epistemic infirmities of the intellect.⁵¹ These logics gesture toward an account of mind that looks at the workings of the cognitive faculties and raise the question of the mending of the weaknesses of the mind. Yet this development was secondary within the economy of these texts, which remained generally scholastic. In contrast, logic understood as a method for educating and improving the natural powers of the intellect becomes a fully articulated idea in Descartes’s philosophy.

In the second part of his Discours de la méthode (1637), the critique of formal syllogistic logic, which, Descartes says, teaches only ways of presenting already acquired knowledge, is accompanied by the proposal of four rules that he promises himself to abide by with “strong and unswerving resolution”: never to accept anything as true that is not clearly and distinctly known, which is a way of avoiding precipitation (précipitation) and preconceptions (prévention); to divide the difficult questions into manageable parts; to follow order in his thinking, passing gradually from the simple to the complex; and to review the chains of reasoning as comprehensively as possible.⁵² Descartes’s new logic is a method for guiding the intellect’s operations with a view to discovery. As Daniel Garber explains, method here is understood as “a kind of mental exercise for training the intellect.”⁵³ This logic comes in the form of guidelines or “precepts” that need to be held constantly present to mind in the actual process of thought and that result in an “accustoming” of the mind to conducting itself in the right way.⁵⁴ The process is thus one of self-training, accompanied by an engagement of the will-resolution kind, which Descartes also proposed for the remedy of the errors (and the passions) of the mind, and which was similarly expected to result in reformed habits. The first rule of Descartes’s logic is actually an early formulation of the general principle for the remedy of error that Descartes develops in the Fourth Meditation. The conception of logic as an art of thinking or a method for guiding, purging, or cultivating the intellect is widespread among the new philosophers, whether they preserved the traditional format (e.g., Gassendi or the Logique) or not (e.g., Descartes or Spinoza).⁵⁵

The early modern logics and the treatises of the passions share a common ground. This common ground includes accounts of error explained in terms of the irregularities of the human faculties, be it sparsely as in the Cartesian picture of the will-assent extending beyond the reach of the intellect, or in more complex colors as in the Logique’s list of the “Delusions of the heart” or else in Wright’s or Reynolds’s charts of the “defects and weaknesses” of the human mind. The common ground also includes the prescription of a discipline for training the judgment, which the new logics construe as the “method” of conducting the mind in discovery. The discipline is understood to work on the datum of the human propensity for error and thus to be the instrument for assisting the mind in a process with a double function: purging the mind of its irregular tendencies (and cultivating its strengths) and guiding it toward truth. It is precisely such an endeavor of exploring the irregularities of the mind and ways of curing and cultivating it that can be traced not only in the seventeenth-century literature of the physicians of the soul, but also in Bacon’s and the virtuosi’s natural philosophical programs.

Idols and diseases of the mind

Joseph Glanvill’s Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661) is one conspicuous example of a tract dedicated to the defense of experimental natural philosophy that not only takes a cultura animi approach to the mind and its regimens but also incorporates the format of the charts of errors and passions characteristic of the types of treatises of the passions I have investigated.⁵⁶ In discussing the dangers of “dogmatism,” Glanvill places the issue within the larger question of the “disease of our Intellectuals” (i.e., of our minds). The current situation of the human faculties, Glanvill explains, is primarily due to the Fall of the first man; yet he believes that a “more particular account” is in order. The justification of such a detailed investigation points to a double topos in the literature on the cure of the mind: on the one hand, any attempt at living a good life must start with self-examination (“it is a good degree of Knowledge to be acquainted with the causes of our Ignorance”); on the other, the task is difficult and not everyone is capable of such preparative lucidity (“it is acknowledged by all, while everyone denies it”).⁵⁷

Glanvill discusses in turn the weaknesses of the mind due to the inordinate operations of the senses, the imagination, the understanding, and the affections. The senses, Glanvill explains, do not mislead us by themselves; rather, error arises owing to our “precipitate judgements” or to the “unwary rashness of our Understanding.”⁵⁸ The deceptions occasioned by the senses are mostly the fruit of our young years, when the understanding is still crude, “being almost meerly Passive to sensible Impressions, receiving all things in an uncontroverted and promiscuous admission.”⁵⁹ The imagination is responsible, in conformity with a mixed cognitive-medicalized account, for the visions of the enthusiast, and it also has a more general role in the development of the vices of credulity and obstinacy, “impressing a strong perswasion of the Truth of an Opinion, where there is no evidence to support it.”⁶⁰ But ungrounded “persuasions” are mostly the fruit of a precipitate assent. “Praecipitancy” is indeed the malady proper to the intellect: Glanvill insists on “the forwardness of our Understandings assent, to slightly examin’d conclusions, contracting many times a firm and obstinate belief from weak inducements; and that not only in such things, as immediately concern the sense, but in almost every thing that falls within the scope of our enquiry.”⁶¹

Glanvill identifies the maladies of assent as the core of the “disease” of the mind, in the same manner as Bacon, Descartes, and the treatises of the passions indebted to the Stoic account of assent. Unlike Descartes, but like all the others, Glanvill counts assent not as an operation of the will but as a voluntary operation of the understanding. The crucial malfunction of assent, which all these authors recognize, is precipitation, a violation of the firm movement of a constant mind, and the fruit of intemperance.⁶² Glanvill inscribes this core malfunction in a larger picture of the distempered mind, informed by a mitigated Augustinian anthropology, again like Bacon and the English treatises of the passions, but unlike Descartes. One element of this larger picture is the explanation of “precipitation” (alternately called “forwardness,” “haste,” or “rashness”) in terms of a pre-/postlapsarian scenario (that is actually a blend of Aristotelian, Platonic, and Christian notions). The mind’s “forwardness” is, Glanvill explains, a malfunction of an originally healthy condition of the human mind. Everything aspires to its own perfection; the perfection of a faculty lies in its union with its object; the perfecting object of the understanding is truth; thus, the understanding “with all the impatience, which accompanies strong desire, breaths after its enjoyment.”⁶³ But ours is a fallen mind, which can no longer discern truth. We still possess the propensity to truth but are no longer capable of seeing immediately where it lies. Thus, the human mind, “naturally amorous of, and impatient for Truth, and yet averse to, and almost incapacitated for, that diligent and painful search, which is necessary to its discovery,” is prone to give assent to any false notion without taking the time to question it: “Thus we see the inconsiderate vulgar, prostrating their assent to every shallow appearance.”⁶⁴

These are exactly the terms Walter Charleton used in his Physiologia to describe what he, too, considered to be the main cause of erroneous judgment, “the Impatience, Praecipitancy, or Inconsiderateness of the Mind” giving hasty approbation to unexamined notions. Faced with a merely plausible explanation, we “greedily embrace it, and without further prepension [trial] of its solidity and verity, immediately judge it to be true, and thus set up our rest therein.” This condition of the mind, Charleton proposes, is due to the “insatiable Appetence of Knowledge,” which is a consequence of Adam’s Fall.⁶⁵ Let us recall that an explanation of hasty assent in terms of “greed” or pursuit of “self-satisfaction” in a mind desirous of rest was involved not only in Bacon’s examination of the idols of the mind but also in Galen’s analysis of error, although neither of them traced it to the Fall (for obvious reasons in Galen’s case). Apart from the biblical story, therefore, the critical element in these accounts is the construal of assent as a hybrid cognitive-desirative operation of the mind (in contrast with both Descartes’s will-assent and the early Stoic entirely cognitive assent).

The other element in Glanvill’s larger picture enriches the notion of assent with its passionate and moral dimensions. The reason why the affections have such a powerful hold on our understandings is that we are caught in a circle of reflected self-love: since love unites the object of interest to the soul, we become amorously attached to our ideas and they become “but our selves in another Name”: “For every man is naturally a Narcissus, and each passion in us, no other but self-love sweetened by milder Epithets. We can love nothing, but what is agreeable to us; and our desire of what is so, hath its first inducement from within us.”⁶⁶ This is perhaps the most serious failing: what at one level is simply an error of judgment is at bottom the grievous moral failure of remaining a prisoner to the perspective of one’s private self, and being unable to embrace the perspective of the whole. Glanvill says as much later on, rehearsing the Baconian conjunction of pride and partiality: “Our demonstrations are levyed upon Principles of our own, not universal Nature: And, as my Lord Bacon notes, we judge from the Analogy of our selves, not the Universe.”⁶⁷

The association of precipitation (as the core malady of assent) and self-love or vanity features in other places as well. In the Port Royal Logique the authors explain that fallacious judgment is mostly due to precipitation described in Cartesian terms: men “judge rashly of what they only know obscurely and confusedly.” This “miscarriage,” the authors add, this time not in Cartesian but in Augustinian terms, is largely due to men’s “Vanity and Presumption.”⁶⁸ A similar picture is offered by Thomas Sprat in the manner of a graphic sketch of the gradual activation of the intemperance of judgment fueled by vanity to which a philosopher can fall prey. The character is in principle a “sincere and invincible Observer,” who is nevertheless incapable of maintaining a steady course of inquiry. He is seduced by his own preliminary judgment upon the matter under investigation (equivalent to what Bacon called the anticipations of the intellect), finds “more and more proofs to confirm his judgment,” becomes “warmer in his imaginations,” and with “presumption” rushes into self-gratifying conclusions. The purpose of the little sketch is to show “by how many plausible degrees, the wisest men are apt to deceive themselves, into a sudden confidence of the certainty of their knowledge.” This sudden confidence has all the characteristics of a passion, and a violent one at that. It is the outgrowth of a mind that has fallen into a state jointly characterized by intemperate judgment, warm passion, and presumption.⁶⁹

For Glanvill, the emblematic phrase that captures this miscarriage of the mind is one that Reynolds also quoted: facile credimus quod volumus. Beliefs are at the same time wishes and loves of a mind enamored with itself: our “beloved Opinion being thus wedded to the Intellect, the case of our espoused self becomes our own,” to the ruin of (moral and intellectual) justice.⁷⁰ Glanvill enlarges upon the effect of love on the understanding in a list that rehearses some of Bacon’s sources of idols: opinions grounded in our natural constitutions, owing to custom and education, to interest, and to our affection for our own inventions (“we love the issues of our Brains”)⁷¹ are all presented as forms of self-love. Our reverence for antiquity and worship of authority (a “pedantick Adoration”)⁷² are the main forms taken by our love for others.

The Baconian idols also play a foundational role in Robert Hooke’s posthumously published General Scheme or Idea of the Present State of Natural Philosophy (1705), where his stated aim is to give “the true method of building a solid philosophy” or a “Philosophical Algebra.” To that end, he first describes “the manner of preparing the Mind, and Furnishing it with Materials to work on,” which he takes as the necessary preparative groundwork for the second part, the “algebra” itself (which he actually never wrote).⁷³ As a first step in the preparation of the mind, Hooke engages in a discussion of the “Constitution and Powers of the soul,” of which a significant part is taken up with presenting the imperfections of the soul. His list is composed (in a transparently Baconian fashion) of imperfections due to human nature (especially the defective senses), imperfections arising “from every man’s own peculiar Structure” (some are inclined to speculation, others to experimentation, some “fancy novelty,” others are addicted to “chymical or mechanical operations,” and each philosopher has his own preferred subject by affinity to his peculiar constitution), and imperfections due to education and custom, which are so many forms of “prejudices,” either already acquired or lying in store for us in the future.

“Prejudices,” “prepossessions,” “preoccupations” are equivalent terms that in these texts stand for results of a flawed conduct of the understanding. Coupled with “credulity” and “obstinacy,” they are the main ingredients of the archenemy of the new philosophy, dogmatism. Once placed in the context of the analysis of the mind’s distempers, dogmatism is interpreted as itself a “disease” or a vice of the mind. For Glanvill, it is a product of “shallow unimprov’d intellects.”⁷⁴ The mechanism responsible for it is the same conjoined action of precipitation and self-love that breeds the majority of errors: “’Tis Pride, and Presumption of ones self that causeth such forwardness and assurance.” Above all, dogmatism rests in a failure of self-government: “For one of the first Rules in the Art of Self-Government is, to be modest in Opinions: And this Wisdom makes Men considerate and wary, distrustful of their own Powers, and jealous of their Thoughts.”⁷⁵

Let us note that the critique of credulity and dogmatism is often one member of a double attack that also includes a critique of radical skepticism. Thus, for instance, in the Logique, precipitation and presumption account for the vice of those “who decide and determine all things.” But there is also a contrary vice, of those who maintain that nothing is certain. The former are the dogmatists, the latter the “Pyrronists.”⁷⁶ Pyrrhonian skepticism is also presented as a malady of assent joined by irregular desire: its supporters “place their whole delight in doubting all things . . . by which means they fall into a voluntary suspence and wavering.” Both are called “Irregularities of the Understanding,” and in both cases the “Remedy” lies in “rectifying our Judgments and our Thoughts, with mature and studious Deliberation.”⁷⁷

Similarly, Sprat elaborates on the dangers that can sway the inquirer to the opposite poles of dogmatism and skepticism by the ill management of the operation of judgment. The “first Danger” lies in “an over-hasty, and precipitant concluding upon the Causes, before the Effects have been enough search’d into: a finishing the roof, before the foundation has been well laid.”⁷⁸ The “second Mischief” comes with the other extreme: “an eternal instability, and aversion from assigning of any [cause]. This arises from a violent, and imprudent hast to avoid the first.”⁷⁹ Sprat concludes on the delicate business of steering a middle course between the Scylla and Charybdis of dogmatism and skepticism: “So easie is the passage from one extreme to another; and so hard it is, to stop in that little point, wherein the right does consist.”⁸⁰ For Sprat, dogmatism and skepticism are types of epistemic behavior due to an ill-regulated rhythm of the mind’s assent: in different ways, they are both the result of a certain “haste” or “precipitancy” in forming judgments.

The idols and diseases of the mind in the English virtuosi’s texts are therefore treated as mental phenomena that do not permit a dichotomization of the cognitive and the affective or of the epistemological and the moral. They are, moreover, the background against which accounts of the experimental method of inquiry are formulated. As a consequence, inquiry is itself understood as a method with a similarly complex cognitive, affective, and moral outcome. As a preliminary to the discussion of the method of inquiry as rooted in a regimen perspective, I want to look at one of its defining features: epistemic modesty.

Epistemic modesty

The developments in early modern English philosophical thought toward a legitimation of a modest epistemological position that gave up the quest for infallibly certain knowledge (or for an Aristotelian scientia) have been documented in a number of important studies.⁸¹ If, for these authors, a high level of certainty was still preserved for mathematics and sometimes metaphysics (while absolutely infallible certainty was increasingly reserved for God alone), everything else fell into various levels of certainty and of probability, arranged in new cartographies of kinds and degrees of knowledge, and associated with new standards of well-founded belief.

One influential explanation of this development is Richard Popkin’s account of the early modern “skeptical crisis,” a European intellectual crisis fueled by the Reformation and the revival of Greek skepticism in the sixteenth century. Common to both, Popkin explains, was a basic epistemological problem: the criterion of truth or the problem of justifying a standard of true knowledge. The various philosophical solutions to this problem included the Cartesian type of “quest for certainty,” but also, in other quarters, the “quest for faith” (the fideist position) and the “quest for reasonableness” (the “mitigated skeptical” position).⁸² The latter was represented by a theory that “could accept the full force of the sceptical attack on the possibility of human knowledge, in the sense of necessary truths about the nature of reality, and yet allow for the possibility of knowledge in a lesser sense, as convincing or probable truths about appearances.”⁸³ This was, Popkin argues, the position embraced and developed by the advocates of the new experimental philosophy: Gassendi and Mersenne in France; Wilkins, Glanvill, Boyle, and Locke in England.

In the case of the English virtuosi, a number of scholars have argued that the major source for their epistemological position was the theological epistemology and methodology developed by the Anglican Reformers: the latter’s doctrinal minimalism, irenicism, and epistemological prudence (epitomized in their category of “moral certainty”), embraced as the safest way to salvation amid theological controversies, spelled out a platform of mitigated skepticism, probabilism, and fallibilism, which the virtuosi took over for their own purposes in devising the epistemology and methodology of their “new philosophy.” Barbara Shapiro calls the result of this development, nourished by the revivals of skepticism and of Augustinianism, a new English cultural “style” that permeated not only natural philosophy and theology but also history, law, and literary thought. She takes this style as the bedrock of several important emphases of the early Royal Society: cooperative work, tentativeness and modesty in evaluating scientific findings, a nondogmatic style of discussion and presentation.⁸⁴

An alternative account of cultural influences has been suggested by Steven Shapin, who sees English epistemic modesty as a cultural repertoire that was transferred into the scientific milieu of the Royal Society from the larger gentlemanly culture of the time, and that represented a response to problems that should be analyzed simultaneously as epistemic and social. The gentlemanly truth-telling practices, Shapin argues, were construed as a guarantee of both credibility and social order, since they involved such order-preserving features as trust, decorum, prudence, and tolerance, as well as a “judicious skepticism about the quality of knowledge and a temperate probabilism about its certainty.”⁸⁵ Such discursive and social features were relocated to the scientific culture of the early Royal Society and shaped the virtuosi’s procedures for assessing testimony and for managing assent.

While recognizing the pervasiveness of the themes of skepticism, probabilism, and collective endeavor in the English experimental philosophy, Peter Harrison has offered yet another angle on the early modern problem of knowledge: at bottom, he argues, this problem needs to be seen as rooted in a theological anthropology. In particular, Harrison argues for the centrality of the story of the biblical Fall and of the epistemic and moral consequences of the original sin in all early modern theories of knowledge, be they “experimental,” “speculative,” or “illuminative.”⁸⁶ An assessment of the postlapsarian state of the human faculties was the cornerstone of statements about the possibility and extent of human knowledge. In the case of English experimentalism, the powerful influence of a Protestant Augustinian anthropology resulted in pessimistic assessments of the capacities of the human faculties, which in turn led to an idea of the modest prospects of epistemic achievements and to a construal of scientific method as a set of procedures that could secure dependable probable knowledge at a social, cooperative level. Scientific method actually belonged to a series of coercive external regimens that could placate individual corruption, a series that also included methods of education or the social-ordering activities of the state.⁸⁷

In summary, these approaches in the history of epistemology construct the English theme of epistemic modesty in the seventeenth century as (a) a response to a uniquely epistemological problem, in fact, to what has been taken as the epistemological problem of modern philosophy, the justification of knowledge (Popkin); (b) a chapter in the cultural history of knowledge, which still construes the problem as fundamentally epistemological, but analyzes the transfer of approaches from theology (or law, or history) into natural philosophical discourse (Shapiro); (c) a chapter in the social history of knowledge, for which the epistemological problem is at the same time a problem of social order, informed by social discourses or repertoires (Shapin); (d) an outgrowth of an underlying problematic, the assessment of the capacities of human nature and the human faculties from the perspective of a theological anthropology (Harrison).

The suggestion of my investigation so far has been that English experimental natural philosophy absorbs the cultura animi conception of the diagnosis and cure of the mind. I have argued that this is a valid perspective on Bacon’s philosophical program, and that the general frame of this conception is present in some of the Royal Society virtuosi’s writings. I am going to show in more detail below how this conception is worked out in the latter’s case. It is therefore clear that I want to argue for the central role of the assessment of the human faculties in the English experimental natural philosophers’ approach to knowledge. I therefore concur with Harrison’s position on the role of anthropology in the problem of knowledge: the question of the limits of reason and knowledge was indeed frequently couched at the time in terms of an evaluation of the human faculties. As such, it exceeds the epistemological framework proposed by Popkin and enriched by the analyses of cultural transfer. Where I depart from Harrison’s reconstruction, though, is in my understanding of the consequences of the anthropological perspective. In the texts I analyze here, the anthropological evaluation is of what I called the mitigated Augustinian sort, which, although harsh in diagnosing the failings of the mind, is nevertheless associated with a program of cure and cultivation. Against this background, the experimental inquiry into nature appears not as a coercive external method but rather as a cultivating regimen assisting the mind in its search for truth. The fallibilist, probabilist epistemology of the English experimentalists is an expression of such a stance, which is indeed governed by an awareness of human frailty but also sanctions a dynamic view of the progress of the mind in knowledge pursuits—a view that is not recognized by the epistemological approaches and is denied by the strict Augustinian-anthropological perspective. To recall the example of the Bensalemite divines in Glanvill’s sequel to the New Atlantis, their epistemic modesty is not simply a consequence of, but actually an active response to, human frailty. It is not a picture of what man can reasonably expect from his epistemic endeavors given his limits, but rather an exercise of sifting truth from error by renewed interrogation that is expected to cure the mind’s frailties as much as is humanly possible. Wary inquiry is granted here, as in Athanasius’s case in Charleton’s consolation dialogue, the role of a “physic” capable of removing prejudices and preoccupations, of calming the passions and composing the agitation of the mind.

The social dimensions of epistemic modesty may also fruitfully be seen as expressions of a culture of regimens. That social dissension was a problem to which the Royal Society virtuosi responded in their philosophical (and religious) thought is undeniable. “Dogmatism” was a term that for them designated unwarranted claims to infallibility in both philosophy and religion (as typified by speculative philosophy and enthusiastic religion) and that they took as the prime cause of social unrest.⁸⁸ Thus, for instance, Glanvill in his Vanity of Dogmatizing holds dogmatism responsible for “ill manners, and immodesty” in civil life and calls it a “great disturber both of ourselves and of the world without us.” Similarly, the Bensalemite divines’ epistemic modesty was a response to the problems of the wars of enthusiasm. But it is important to see that this evaluation of dogmatism is part of a larger account that argues that dogmatism is actually a “disease of the mind,” one of the species of distempers that Glanvill charts throughout one third of his book. Dogmatism is the fruit of ignorance (in the sense of a misevaluation of ourselves, resulting in presumption about our capacities); such ignorance belongs to “shallow passive intellects, that were never ingag’d in a through search of verity” and do not realize that their notions (spun out of their own heads) do not discover the truth of things. Dogmatism is also the fruit of a mind devastated by passions and other distempers: it “dwells with untamed passions, and is maintain’d upon the depraved obstinacy of an ungovern’d spirit”; it makes one a prisoner of his own “chains of errors,” incapable of escaping his own private perspective; and it betrays “a poverty and narrowness of spirit” that is the direct opposite of the liberty of judgment of a “generous soul.”⁸⁹ Thus understood, the problem of social order is to a large extent seen as an outcrop of the problem of the order of the mind. Dogmatism appears here as a moral and intellectual failure of a mind incapable of a just estimation of itself and of its relation to the truth of things, as well as of a mind fallen prey to disturbing passions and to a private, narrow perspective. This dimension of the early modern English discussion of dogmatism can be acknowledged, I propose, if we shift the historiographic perspective from isolated epistemology or from cultural styles and social codes onto questions about doctrines of mind and its regimens. From this angle, the critique of dogmatism is primarily the castigation of what is conceived as a bad use of one’s capacities, and features as a preliminary to pointing the right way toward the cultivation and improvement of one’s mind. Epistemic modesty is indeed an attitude of opting for prudent inquiry rather than positive assertion, for the probable rather than for the infallibly certain: but the option is validated by its being, on this account, the best way to “teach Men the right use of their Faculties.”⁹⁰

The Royal Society virtuosi describe natural philosophical inquiry as governed by the double purpose of the search for truth about the natural world and of the training of ordered and improved minds. They work with the conceptual patterns of what I described generally as the art of the physician of the soul and argue for the special benefits of natural inquiry as contributing to that art. Their epistemic modesty, I propose, is not reducible to the concern with an epistemically acceptable science of appearances, or with the observance of codes of socially acceptable intellectual behavior. It is rather rooted in an anthropological conception of human frailties and capacities, and is also the form that, in their view, the labor of the mind should take if distempers are to be cured.

The way of inquiry

The regulation of assent and probable truth

In the essay “Of Scepticism and Certainty,” Glanvill explains that the aim of philosophy is the government and cultivation of the human faculties: “’Tis the office and business of Philosophy to teach Men the right use of their Faculties, in order to the extending and inlarging of their Reasons.” The main rule to that end is described in terms of a regulation of assent: it is “to be wary and diffident, not to be hasty in our Conclusions, or over-confident of Opinions; but to be sparing of our assent, and not to afford it but to things clearly and distinctly perceiv’d.”⁹¹ The format of this rule is obviously Cartesian, and Glanvill refers in several places approvingly to Descartes’s “method” for the remedy of error. Nevertheless, for Glanvill this Cartesian rule is of the same substance with the teachings of both Bacon and Gassendi on the question of the best way of natural inquiry. He names the three philosophers as the worthy predecessors of the method of the Royal Society, who understood that the search for truth in nature should proceed with “wariness and circumspection” and that opinions should be proposed “as Hypotheses, that may probably be the true accounts, without peremptorily affirming that they are.”⁹² Now, this picture does suit Gassendi’s views about conjectural reasoning and probable results in inquiry,⁹³ but it seems to misrepresent Bacon’s and Descartes’s. There is nevertheless something to be said in favor of Glanvill’s syncretism. For Bacon, the end result of the experimental investigation should be certainty, yet he warns that the path leading to it is longer than anyone could tread in a lifetime. He speaks of the lower degrees of certainty of the intermediary results and warns that embracing these as final and terminating inquiry is a fatal mistake (and the sign of distemper). Descartes also finds a place for the less than absolutely certain in his epistemic scheme relative to natural philosophical inquiry. While metaphysical principles are such as to meet the criterion of the clear and distinct, those physical principles that cannot be directly derived from them are hypothetical and “morally” rather than “mathematically” certain.⁹⁴ The category of “moral certainty” actually became prominent in the work of the empiricist Cartesians who, Roger Ariew explains, eroded the distinction between absolute and moral certainty mainly owing to their discarding of Descartes’s method of hyperbolic doubt.⁹⁵

We should note here that Descartes’s rule for regulating assent is explicitly formulated only within the context of his method of hyperbolic doubt: nothing will be assented to, Descartes resolves, but what is clear and distinct and thus can acquire the status of absolute certainty. In Glanvill’s hands, however, the “clear and distinct” seems to fuse the Cartesian and the Gassendist vocabulary, and to point to a method of wariness and circumspection rather than one of hyperbolic doubt. Moreover, Glanvill reinterprets the Cartesian regulation of assent in terms of those developments in the cultura animi literature which inscribed Stoic assent into an Academic skeptical framing of the discipline of judgment. With this move, the regulation of assent is relocated in the domain of the less than absolutely certain, and is interpreted as a prudent, long-term fight with the whole array of distempers analyzed in the Augustinian-Socratic anatomies of the mind (in contrast with Descartes’s once-in-a-lifetime course of hyperbolic doubt).⁹⁶ In a similar way, John Wilkins takes care to say that “moral certainty” will win the “consent” of “every man whose judgment is free from prejudice” (emphasis mine),⁹⁷ and emphasizes the “labor” that the understanding is required to perform in assenting to nonevident things, a work liable to moral evaluation: “Things that are not manifested to the senses, are not assented unto without some labour of the minde, some travaile and discourse of the understanding; and many lazie soules had rather quietly repose themselves in an easie errour, than take paines to search out the truth.”⁹⁸

The search for truth is indeed the orienting task of the virtuosi’s endeavor, but, in keeping with epistemic modesty, they will say that discovered truths should be held as only “probable,” or as “hypotheses” that might well be revised with further inquiry. A probable truth nevertheless is not a mere “probability,” Glanvill warns. He wants to maintain a distinction between a probable truth plausibly confirmed and capable of revision, and a category of epistemic products labeled “probabilities,” “opinions,” or “verisimilitudes.” The distinction is made in conformity with the requirement of a wary regulation of assent that is at the same time seen as a method of purging and fortifying the mind. In our post-lapsarian state, Glanvill says, we are surrounded by “such a multitude, such an Infinite of uncertain opinions, bare probabilities, specious falshoods, spreading themselves before us, and soliciting our belief.” We are, moreover, both “greedy of Truth” and “unable to discern it,” so that “it cannot be, that we should reach it any otherwise, then by the most close meditation and engagement of our minds; by which we must endeavour to estrange our assent from every thing, which is not clearly, and distinctly evidenc’d to our faculties.”⁹⁹ Echoing the Baconian “subtlety” of the labyrinth of nature, Glanvill says that truth lies deep, is mixed with falsity, and is “relative” (i.e., truths are linked in a chain and thus dependent on one another, so that to know one means to be able to know all).¹⁰⁰ Consequently truth can be sought after only with a labor of the mind that must remain, on the one hand, tentative in its conclusions and, on the other, constantly aware of the disruptive inclinations of the mind. Without labor, the mind acquires “opinions” and “verisimilitudes”: “Verisimilitude and Opinion are an easie purchase; and these counterfeits are all the Vulgars treasure: But true Knowledge is as dear in acquisition, as rare in possession.”¹⁰¹

“Opinion” here bears a strong echo of the shapes of the same term in the cultura animi texts. It is not simply an epistemic category but also the mark of a specific state of the mind.¹⁰² For Glanvill, truth (even if in the guise of what is probable) can be attained only by an attentive, discriminating mind, while opinion is the harvest of the superficial, irregular mind. The positing of a degree of certainty (the highest) that may well remain forever outside human reach seems to reinforce, rather than weaken, the moral and intellectual task of clearing and improving the mind. This task, moreover, is explicitly formulated in terms not of remaining content in computing probabilities but of pursuing the search for truth, even if in the guise of the less than infallibly certain: “Truth is not to be attained, without much close and severe Inquiry. . . . It requires much Care, and nice Observation to extract and separate the precious Oar from so much vile Mixture; so that the Understanding must be patient, and wary, and thoughtful in seeking Truth.”¹⁰³

Therapeutic skepticism and constancy

The virtuosi’s perspective on human nature and the search for truth performs a reinterpretation of the epistemic categories of the certain and the probable in cultura animi terms. Once the inquiry into nature is placed in the context of the anatomy and cure of the mind, epistemic modesty acquires the double status of an expectation proportionate to the acknowledgment of the limits of human nature (the proper self-knowledge in view of an anthropology of human frailty) and of an active task of regulating the mind’s operations. Engaging in the labor of patient search and wary discrimination between truths and falsehoods requires the self-denying recognition that the truth of nature cannot be definitively captured in a theoretical system—a notion sanctioned by the related views that human capacities are limited and that nature’s complexity far exceeds those capacities (truth “lies deep,” and nature is a labyrinth or a divine fabric of concatenated elements whose totality escapes the human grasp).¹⁰⁴ Consequently, the results of inquiry should be held as only “probable” (provisional) and the search continuously resumed. For the virtuosi, this antisystemic epistemological position is explained by reference to the distempered inclinations that they analyze in their anatomies of the idols and diseases of the mind. System construction is the fruit of a “dogmatic” or “speculative” tendency that is actually geared by an ungoverned, impatient mind. An experimental inquiry, they argue, has the benefit of tempering such a tendency, and as a consequence, the skepticism that they warn should accompany natural inquiry is presented as having therapeutic effects. This is to say that the virtuosi explore within the context of natural philosophical research the same association of the virtues of (skeptical) inquiry, (Stoic) constancy, and (Christian) humility that was developed in some of the cultura animi texts. I propose therefore that mitigated skepticism is valorized in their case as an operator of a discipline of judgment, and thus as a practical instrument of the regimen of the mind.

Thus, for instance, in the essay “Of Scepticism and Certainty,” Glanvill defends experimental philosophy against the accusation of “skepticism.” He turns the presumed vice into a virtue by explaining that, rightly understood, skepticism is the attitude of honest search par excellence. In contrast with the “pretended Philosophy” of the Pyrrhonian skeptics, such modern skeptics as the Royal Society fellows, as well as their forefathers Cicero and the Middle Academy, are truly called “seekers,” and not “assertors.”¹⁰⁵ Such skepticism is the right way of inquiry and the best course of fortifying the mind against its distempers. The (skeptical) regulation of assent that it warrants has the power to breed a set of (Stoic) virtues of the mind (firmness, constancy, freedom from fancy and humor):

[I]f a Man proportion the degree of his Assent to the degree of Evidence, being more sparing and reserv’d to the more difficult and not throughly examin’d Theories, and confident only of those that are distinctly and clearly apprehended; he stands upon a firm bottom, and is not mov’d by the winds of Fancy and Humour, which blow up and down the conceited Dogmatists: For the Assent that is difficultly obtain’d, and sparingly bestow’d, is better establish’d and fixt than that which hath been easie and precipitant.¹⁰⁶

Such a discipline of assent is for Glanvill a true art of self-government (an “Art of Autocrasy”), whose main instrument is right judgment (governed by the “hegemonical power”): note that Glanvill employs the Hellenistic notions with their echoes of a therapeutic philosophy. In describing the “generous soul” or the “nobler spirit” as the one who manages to rise above the Narcissus point of view and embrace the perspective of the universe, Glanvill also invokes the Stoic ideal of stability and constancy.¹⁰⁷

Sprat’s portrait of the experimental philosopher in his History is drawn in a similar manner. The experimental way keeps a middle course between “dogmatism” and “speculative skepticism,” which we have seen are described by Sprat in terms of disturbed assent. That middle course is represented by a skepticism that allows “the advantage of probability to one Opinion, or Cause, above another,” but in such a way that further explorations may follow and “speculation” may be deferred “till the matters be ripe for it; and not by madly rushing upon it in the very beginning.”¹⁰⁸ The collections of natural experimental histories enriched by directions and questions for further inquiry are the proper method of providing enough material for such a later theorizing moment, in contrast with the dogmatic (scholastic) way of “striving to reduce the Sciences, in their beginnings, into Method, and Shape, and Beauty.”¹⁰⁹ The Baconian substance of these statements is clear. Sprat takes over from Bacon both the promise of a future science that lies at the far end of the road and the insistence on the tentativeness of inquiry and the need to avoid search-arresting “speculation” while along the road. Again like Bacon, Sprat suggests that speculative theories thrive on distempers. They rest on “two very dangerous Mischiefs,” which are presented as inclinations of the mind. The first is the inclination to stop inquiry and become satisfied with preliminary results, an error “which is very natural to mens minds”: the mind longs to rest and finds it difficult “to be long in suspence.” These are exactly the terms in which Bacon interpreted syllogistic reasoning (and Reynolds, the need of the mind to have “something to rest it selfe upon”). The second is the propensity toward obstinacy, imperiousness in opinions, and contradiction, which constitute “a Temper of the mind, of all others the most pernicious,” in opposition with the “calmness, and unpassionate evenness of the true Philosophical Spirit.”¹¹⁰

The opposition between “experimental” and “speculative” philosophy in the second half of the seventeenth century was indeed, as Peter Anstey has argued, the most prominent methodological opposition, often put forward by the English virtuosi for polemical purposes.¹¹¹ But in view of the framing of this opposition in terms of the “temper of the mind” associated with each of these alternatives, it is apparent that it also included a cultura animi perspective. For Sprat, the experimental way of inquiry can cure the mind of “romantic swelling” and the “perversity” of peremptory conclusions, while also resulting in observations that have the benefit of “supply[ing] for the wants of human life,” in conformity with the double understanding of the “usefulness” of experimental natural philosophy.¹¹²

The conception of a therapeutic use of skepticism is also present in Hooke’s General Scheme. The way in which Hooke conceived of the compilation of natural histories as both the groundwork of philosophy and the best remedy for the faculty of memory has been expounded in a couple of important articles by Lotte Mulligan.¹¹³ Less attention has been paid, however, to the way in which Hooke’s transparently Baconian chart of the “imperfections of the soul” includes references to a discipline of judgment with remedial capacities. Countering those imperfections are a series of prescriptions for the good conduct of the mind in inquiry. Thus, for instance, Hooke recommends an exercise in flexibility meant to shed obstinacy (“to accustom oneself to a contrary supposal or practice”), as well as an exercise in regulating judgment by trial of arguments and circumspection as to one’s preferences, which should lead to acquiring a habit “not to receive any Notion for certain till thoroughly confirm’d by very Cogent Arguments and Ratiocinations, and always to suspect that which seems most consonant and pleasing to our Inclination.”¹¹⁴ Most important, he advocates a general regulation of assent that he calls “an Hypothetical Scepticism, whereby to impose upon our selves a Disbelief of every thing whatsoever, that we have already imbraced or taken in as a Truth.”¹¹⁵ For Hooke, this is a description of an “Art for Inquiry” that does not nevertheless sanction skepticism about its final results, since “my Design . . . supposes all things as possible to be known.”¹¹⁶ Hooke’s prescriptions for the conduct of the intellect in inquiry are echoed in his exemplary portrait of the “natural historian,” an inquirer capable of “the greatest Degree of Candor and Freedom from Prejudice”¹¹⁷ and devoted to the cause of truth rather than to that of his own self. Prejudice can be countered owing to the fact that “by discovering experimentally the Errors in this or that Hypothesis, [the mind] will be much easier taken off from adhering to any, and so enjoy a greater Freedom of perceiving and imbracing Truth from what occasion soever it be offered.”¹¹⁸

That the “freedom” of the mind acquired by the skeptical discipline of judgment is a virtuous disposition is also signaled by a specific use of the term “indifference” in the virtuosi’s texts. The meaning of the term in the discussions of the freedom of choice (cf. Descartes’s “freedom of indifference”) was that of lack of determination. But in our texts “indifference” translates as lack of enslavement to passions, vanities, and other distempered inclinations of the mind and is held as the required attitude of the seeker after truth, whose sole aim and desire is the finding of truth rather than any other corrupt end of knowledge. Charleton uses the term in this sense when he has Athanasius describe his own distaste for “passionate Altercations” and love for honest inquiry, which he pursued “with perfect Indifferency to either side,” that is, not caring whether it is himself or his opponent that is proved right.¹¹⁹ Wilkins emphasizes the difficulty of the indifferent attitude thus understood: “’Tis very difficult for any one, in the search of Truth, to find in himselfe such an indifferencie, as that his judgement is not all swayd by an overweening affection unto that which is proper unto himselfe.”¹²⁰

The virtuosi’s refashioning of natural philosophical inquiry in cultura animi terms translates epistemological moderate skepticism into a therapeutic instrument that directs the mind in rightful inquiry. This Socratic type of skepticism (Glanvill calls it Socratic modesty)¹²¹ asks for a constant revision of judgment accompanied by the effort of self-knowledge, and is taken to build such virtuous dispositions of the mind as constancy and freedom from enslaving distempers, while at the same time allowing for a growth of true (if only probably true) knowledge about the natural world.

A “union of eyes and hands”:

The community and objectivity revisited

The value of the assembly

English experimental natural philosophy valued the gathering of “particulars,” often described as “facts.” The significance of “facts” or “matters of fact” as conceptual constituents of English natural philosophy in the seventeenth century has been illuminated in important scholarly studies.¹²² According to Shapin and Schaffer’s social historical line of investigation into this topic, the discourse of facts was not only a solution to questions about legitimate knowledge and scientific method but also a response to questions about the legitimate philosophical “form of life,” with consequences for the conception of the appropriate manner of life in the polity. Central to this form of life was the collective nature of the experimental practice, which presupposed a number of rules of discourse and of assessment of knowledge claims that could guarantee the consensus and produce the trustworthiness required for the establishment of matters of fact as the foundation of legitimate knowledge. The cognitive gains were thus premised on a moral integrity of the experimental form of life, which played a crucial role in its validation in face of other, competing models of natural philosophical pursuits.¹²³

I would like to suggest that the value of the community in the early modern experimental philosophical perspective is richer than what can be said about it on the social-historical approach. While the significance of this feature as the mold of a new form of life characteristic of the modern scientific ethos is undeniable, the cultura animi framework in which I argue it was developed makes it also, and more fundamentally, a way of life, with the set of connotations derived from the tradition of philosophy as a cure and cultivation of the mind. The defense of the value of the community, or the “assembly,” as Sprat calls it, of the natural philosophers looks not only at the way it establishes trustworthiness and reaches consensus, but also at the role it has in the discipline of judgment and thus in helping the individual’s progress against the idols of his mind. In this respect, the assembly takes on the monitoring role of the “wise and discreet friends” in the cultura animi texts, and its moral integrity rests not only on collective values but also on individual virtues which are, indeed, acquired with the help of the community and recognized as valuable at the communal level.

Thus, when Hooke deals with the imperfections of the soul arising from every man’s peculiar constitution (an equivalent of Bacon’s idols of the cave), he accompanies his recommendations for a discipline of self-examination and of wary trial of the notions one forms with the observation that individual effort has greater chances of success if assisted by the monitoring of those around: “So though the reason should be satisfied, and the Phant’sy full of the Truth of this or that Opinion, another Mind otherwise qualified, may find many Flaws and Errors in it, and perceive many things to have proceeded from Prejudice.”¹²⁴ The wiser “minds,” Hooke believes, can help the individual look at himself from outside the cave, as it were, and thus guard him against the self-loving tendency to remain satisfied with partially examined opinions. The freedom from prejudice that Hooke called “candor” is not only a feature of the philosophical style involved in the establishment of experimental results that everyone can accept at the level of the community, but also a feature of individual minds extracted from their private cells (Bacon’s “measure of the individual” or Glanvill’s Narcissus perspective) with the help of the community.

The same view is elaborated at length in Sprat’s History. The Baconian “union of eyes and hands” provided by the assembly of natural philosophers is “an excellent cure,” Sprat says, for the weariness and negligence that unavoidably threaten any researcher who undertakes a work of inquiry alone. The “mingling of Tempers” in a community has the effect of balancing individual humors.¹²⁵ True inquiry, i.e., the inquiry that recognizes the necessary tentativeness of results and the need for renewed effort, is best served by collaborative rather than individual work precisely because it makes possible the government and regulation of the mind’s tendencies that this type of inquiry depends on. This is one reason, for instance, why Descartes’s “philosophical method” cannot really be successful. Unlike Granvill, Sprat refers here not to Descartes’s regulation of assent as a remedy for error (which he, too, could only approve given his considerations on the matter a few pages on), but to his contemplative, speculative method whereby he “wholly gave himself over to a reflexion on the naked Ideas of his own mind.” When it comes to natural inquiry (as opposed to metaphysical contemplation), such a course can generate only “narrow and obscure” apprehensions that remain “peculiar” to the individual mind. It is wiser therefore to “measure or strengthen [one’s thoughts] by the assistance of others.”¹²⁶ The philosopher gradually falling into a “sudden confidence” about his theory in Sprat’s sketch I presented above was actually a philosopher choosing to retreat alone to his study, and the sketch was part of Sprat’s defense of the value of the assembly against the dangers of dogmatism.

Being exposed to a multitude of opinions, Sprat thinks, does not by itself breed prejudices, but on the contrary invites you not to become obstinately attached to any. Similarly, for Hooke, the natural historian needs to be not only a skilled discriminator of sense information and opinions but also versed in theories and systems of philosophy, to be able to “understand their several Hypotheses, Suppositions, Collections, Observations, &c. their various ways of Ratiocinations and Proceedings.” This practice should not breed credulity and prepossessions if it is used in order to formulate “queries,” or lines of investigation, and to propose provisional “conjectures.”¹²⁷ For Sprat, as for Hooke, prejudice arises only when you become “addicted” to this or that opinion.¹²⁸ One role of the community is to keep you safe from such addiction. But more than that, Sprat resorts to a rather strange Baconian explanation of the power of the assembly. In Sylva Sylvarum, Century X, Bacon noted that the passions of men are more intense in companies than they would be in solitude. It is as if, Sprat comments, the mind of one man would be “posess’d with the Souls of the whole multitude, before whom they stand.” The same phenomenon, he proposes, may also occur as far as the other operations of the mind are concerned, including those of the understanding: “In Assemblies, the Wits of most men are sharper, their Apprehensions readier, their Thoughts fuller, than in their Closets.”¹²⁹ The Baconian conjecture about the strengthening of the powers of the mind in communities, possibly by some sort of communication of spirits, becomes in Sprat a version of the idea of the assistance provided by the scrutiny of many minds to the individual’s self-government.

It is also as a remedy for the mismanagement of the mind that “conjecturing and debating on the consequences of the experiments” need to be done by the assembly, and not by one or two persons. Sprat explains: “there can never be found, in the breast of any particular Philosopher, as much wariness, and coldness of thinking, and rigorous examination; as is needfull, to a solid assent, and to a lasting conclusion, on the whole frame of Nature.” If one man were singlehandedly to undertake this work, he would have to possess special intellectual and moral qualities: “vastness of soul,” “impartiality of judgment,” “straightness,” and a capacity of “holding the scale even.” But, Sprat says, “that has never been seen in one man yet,”¹³⁰ although, by implication, it is precisely such qualities that may be cultivated by the assembly.

The “union of eyes and hands” of the early Royal Society of London was devised as a Baconian Solomon’s House made real. It is true that, as Daniel Garber has argued, the idea of a collective establishment of results of inquiry (or of experimental facts) was a new development that went together with the creation of a new social structure. The collaborative nature of the Royal Society’s experimental program is distinct from the concatenation of individual results of inquiry that was characteristic of Bacon’s Solomon’s House in The New Atlantis.¹³¹ On the other hand, though, the discipline of judgment and of self that formed part of the Baconian conception of inquiry is fully taken over by the virtuosi and, I would say, turned into one powerful legitimation of the value of the community of natural philosophers. It thus accompanies the equally Ba-conian conception of the collective gathering of experimental and natural histories as groundwork for a philosophy of nature.¹³² If the virtuosi develop a new awareness of the importance of the communal establishment of facts, they also exploit the role of the community in the process of self-knowledge as involved in self-reformation. They take self-knowledge, understood as a diagnosis that is critical to a cure, to be essential to the pursuit of natural knowledge itself. The idea was indeed present in Bacon as well, even if it was not explicitly linked with the experimental activity of Solomon’s House in his fable. I have suggested that one resource for the valuation of the role of the community in self-knowledge was the figure of the “wise and discreet” friends, which was shaped by the ancient ideal of philosophy as a way of life and which was promoted in the early modern age by the cultura animi literature (Bacon included).

Objectivity, universality, and the temper of the mind

The regulative role of the community in the development of modern experimental science is also one feature of our understanding of the notion of “objectivity.” That this notion has a history, as does the conception of the social dimension of scientific inquiry, has been the suggestion of illuminating recent scholarship on the history of objectivity, most notably in the work of Lorraine Daston and her collaborators.¹³³ The early modern period is an especially interesting moment in this history, since it was then, scholars agree, that something like the modern notion starts being shaped. The modern notion can be analyzed as a cluster of concepts that describe features of exemplary inquirers and of the methodological procedures they follow, such as impartiality, disinterestedness, detachment—in short, impersonality and thus absence of “subjectivity”—which are taken to ensure the security and dependability of scientific results. These features are primarily construed as forms of absence as far as the individual is concerned: they rest on the absence of personal idiosyncrasies, subjective bias, or partisanship in individual observation or judgment. They are instead seen as positive values of the scientific community, which builds knowledge on the impersonal pillars of routinized procedures and universal standards: it is indeed the value of the communicability of knowledge that requires the activation of the apparatus of objectivity. It is worth noting, though, as Daston has argued, that this notion of objectivity is itself permeated by a discourse of values, which argues for an inextricable moral dimension, indeed a “moral economy,” of modern objectivity.¹³⁴ On the other hand, studies in the sociology of knowledge have shown that modern scientific communities cannot really do without the valorization of trust, personal expertise, and skills, and thus of the reliability of individuals. Steven Shapin has recently called the double value attached to the personal and the impersonal the “essential tension” of the discourse of modern science.¹³⁵

As far as the early modern period is concerned, it looks as if the scholarly assessments of the development of values such as impartiality, disinterestedness, or intellectual honesty testify precisely to this essential tension. In the various historical reconstructions, the early moderns are credited both with a defense of the personal and with a promotion of the impersonal character of natural philosophical knowledge: they appear to hold on to the trust in the personal skills and integrity of the individual inquirer, but also to forge a conception of the impersonal impartiality of inquiry.¹³⁶ “Impartiality” itself appears to be an ambivalent notion: it seems to have been developed within the fields of history and law as a norm of impersonality,¹³⁷ but it has also been argued that judicial impartiality was construed at the time as an “ethical capacity,” the fruit of an “exercise of spirit.”¹³⁸ Such wavering about early modern conceptions of “objectivity” is probably due to the weight of the classical sociological perspective, which attaches the features of objectivity to the structural level of the community.¹³⁹ In exchange, we might consider putting the individual person back into the picture. In doing so, we will still recognize intellectual honesty, lack of bias, and impartiality as the constitutive components of objectivity. But we will also see that, as far as the early moderns are concerned, these features are not reducible to impersonal values that have been codified as norms of intellectual conduct in a community and that depend on routinized procedures performed by faceless inquirers. Social value may be acknowledged while at the same time understanding these components of objectivity as personal virtues. Such an understanding becomes possible once we recognize that they are integral parts of the virtuosi’s accounts of the human mind and of regimens for its cure and cultivation.

In the previous chapter I noted the association performed in several cultura animi texts between the virtues of a constant mind and the quality of “universality.” Bacon also thought that his natural philosophical regimen would be able to perform a crucial shift of perspective whereby the individual mind would be extricated from the hold of “pride” and “partiality” and reoriented toward the “measure of the universe.” In themselves, these claims could very well be subsumed in the modern notion of objectivity, but only if the extrication in question amounted to an erasure of personal features. In their recent study on the history of scientific objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have made the stimulating suggestion that modern objectivity itself is to be understood as an epistemic virtue, since it relies on “techniques of the self,” whereby a “will-centered self” wills itself into “willessness” and thus into an erasure of subjectivity.¹⁴⁰ Nevertheless, what distinguishes the early modern perspective I am investigating here from modern objectivity, even when construed as an epistemic virtue, is precisely the absence of the notion of the erasure of the person (which will only later be defined as a will-centered self or as “subjectivity,” as Daston and Galison very well note).¹⁴¹ The key process geared toward “universality” is not erasure but reorientation and transformation. The datum on which the education works is one of irregular motions of the mind that combine cognitive, emotional, and volitional aspects, which are responsible for a “narrow,” “partial,” “private,” or “peculiar” disposition of the mind, but which cannot be reduced to a (viciously subjective) will. The education is expected to perform a transformation of this disposition, the outcome of which is an ordering and a strengthening of the mind’s powers, which preserves the emotional and the volitional components by the side of the cognitive, now reoriented in a good way. The transformation is understood, moreover, in terms of a rehabituation that stands for an incorporation of the new ways of reasoning, feeling, and willing—and is thus close to the cultura animi notion of a habituation into permanent traits of character. The components of “universality”—the “impartiality,” the “indifference” (understood as freedom from inner enslavement), the “generosity,” “largeness,” “candor” or “nobility” of mind—include references to the good emotions and volitions, as well as to a rehabituation of the “temper” of the mind, which make them unambiguously personal virtues.

Thus, in Glanvill, the remedy that experimental inquiry is expected to provide is consistent with the analysis of the mind’s operations as a complex cognitive-emotional hybrid. Glanvill believes therefore that “that Remedy is the best and most effectual that alters the crasis [temper] and disposition of the mind”¹⁴² and explains:

There are few that hold their Opinions by Arguments and dry Reasonings, but by congruity to the Understanding and consequently by relish in the Affections: So that seldom any thing cures our intellectual Diseases throughly but what changes these. This dare affirm, that the Free, experimental Philosophy will do to purpose by giving the Mind another Tincture, and introducing a sounder Habit, which by degrees will at last absolutely repel all the little Malignities, and settle it in a strong and manly Temperament, that will master and cast out idle Dotages and effeminate Fears.¹⁴³

“Congruity to the Understanding” is by the same token a “relish in the Affections.” If a distempered mind is one whose operation of assent is at the same time a cognitive operation and a movement of desire and love, the healthy “temperament” of the mind will similarly reunite cognition and affection, now rightly managed and oriented. That the talk of the temperament thus fashioned involves the idea of a transformation in the whole disposition of the mind is signaled by Glanvill’s use of the eloquent metaphor of the “tincture”: experimental philosophy is thus seen as a practice capable of instilling a virtuous, ethos-transforming habit in the mind. The habit is virtuous because it can, on this account, govern and order the operations of the mind in a stable way and because it can perform the work of extracting the inquirers from their private perspectives, which is the moral purpose of the discipline of assent.

Glanvill addresses these issues in his Philosophia Pia (1671), a work that argues not only for the compatibility of philosophy and religion but also for the special usefulness of experimental philosophy as a service to religion. Experimental philosophy, Glanvill argues, is apt to “enlarge” men’s minds by taking them off “from all fond adherences to their private Sentiments.” It can do that precisely because of its conception of inquiry as a self-denying discipline (i.e., as a discipline denying self-love and “private” distempers, although not the capacities of the person) that cures “narrow minds” and builds a “free, manly and generous spirit.” Such a spirit is precisely the type that true religion, Glanvill says, also cultivates. In this sense, experimental philosophy (a “Philosophy of God’s Works”) is a practice of the soul in tune with the “operative Principles of the Gospel.”¹⁴⁴ Working against “private Sentiments,” experimental study is held capable of reorienting the mind’s love toward truth and toward God as expressed in nature. It cultivates the wonder and thankfulness that come with a deep, habitual understanding of the divine power and wisdom stamped on creation and can thus constitute a rightful “sacrifice of praise” to its author.¹⁴⁵ The framing of the experimental inquiry into nature as a natural religious exercise, which will be seen to play an important role in Boyle’s and Locke’s thought as well, is an integral element of the embedding of natural philosophy within a culture of regimens.

The features of early modern objectivity are placed by the English virtuosi in the context of the work of inquiry understood as a practice of the transformation of the “temper” of the mind. The history of objectivity, I suggest, includes a chapter about the components of “universality,” construed in the early modern period as virtues of the mind that are also socially valuable, both at the level of the philosophical community and at that of the larger polity. This type of objectivity, and the epistemic modesty, the experimentalism, and the collective nature of this philosophical practice, I have argued, are features of the virtuosi’s conception of natural philosophical inquiry that are variously indebted to the context of the analysis of the human mind in terms of distempers, therapeutic methods, and cultivating regimens. It is this context, as developed by the Baconian and virtuoso discipline, as well as by the early modern physicians of the soul, that informed the views on the rightful conduct of the mind held by Robert Boyle and John Locke. It is to them that I now turn.