Conclusion

I do not expect that by this way the Assent should in every one be proportion’d to the Grounds and Clearness wherewith every Truth is capable to be made out, or that Men should be perfectly kept from Error: That is more than humane Nature can by any means be advanc’d to; I aim at no such unattainable Privilege; I am only speaking of what they should do who would deal fairly with their own Minds, and make a right use of their Faculties in the pursuit of Truth; we fail them a great deal more than they fail us. JOHN LOCKE , OF THE CONDUCT OF THE UNDERSTANDING

The central point I have defended in this book is that Robert Boyle’s and John Locke’s epistemological and methodological views were nourished by an early modern tradition of thought about the conduct of inquiry that is rooted in a regimen approach to the human mind. That approach involves an anatomy of capacities, limits, and distempers, as well as a view about the possibility and need of a cure and cultivation that may shape a virtuous inquirer. The regulation in question involves an education of the whole set of the mind’s powers; it is at the same time a molding of character and is thus bound up with a way of life. In their writings, Boyle and Locke fashioned an exemplary figure that stood not so much for an image of perfection of that life as for the very paideic (perfecting) process leading to it. Both called it the Lover of Truth, and Boyle gave it the resonant name of the Christian Virtuoso.¹ It was indeed, I want to stress again, the process—the pursuit, the search, the “pilgrimage”—that this figure represented for the two philosophers. In the hands of the apologists of the Royal Society, the Christian Virtuoso and Boyle as his incarnation could be turned into an iconic image of perfection, one whose capacity to guide historical understanding has rightly been challenged by Michael Hunter.² Hunter’s alternative to that image is a historically rich private Boyle, a “great but complicated man,” whose “scrupulosity” fed both his profound philosophy and his tortured conscience.³ I have suggested here that we do not need to delve into Boyle’s conscience in order to find a historically meaningful alternative: his own Christian Virtuoso figure, if rightly understood, is challenge enough to the frozen iconic image. That figure, just like Locke’s Lover of Truth, was primarily the figure of a seeker and a learner, one confronted at every step with the frailties and limits of his own mind, but one who strove to recognize them and submit himself to a lifelong discipline. To what extent Boyle and Locke themselves impersonated this figure in their own lives is a biographical question that has not been the prime concern of this study. I have rather addressed the intellectual historical question about the relation of this figure to the two philosophers’ views on mind, reason, and knowledge pursuit, and about the intellectual and cultural resources that informed those views.

The Christian Virtuoso and the Lover of Truth were model figures of the human being engaged on a path leading to truth (or the truths of God knowable by man in this life) and to a rectified mind as aspects of the same process. The recent persona approach to the identity of early modern cultural actors suggests that we look at such figures as representatives of specialized offices—in this case the philosopher’s or the natural philosopher’s.⁴ This is a valuable suggestion, which makes us see how such offices were distributed across the early modern intellectual space, and surely there is such an “official” side to these two figures. It is also the case, though, that for Boyle and Locke, they were equally meant as exemplary postures of the rational creature. The Christian philosopher was not just a philosopher but also a model of humanity within a theistic worldview, carrying duties and responsibilities insofar as he was a human being. The comprehensiveness of this figure, I have suggested, echoes the transdisciplinary and, we might say, transofficial domain of the early modern physicians of the soul—one that also served the human being as primarily a human being, whether in its capacity as philosopher, Christian, or gentleman. This goes to argue in favor of the foundational role ascribed to the education of the mind in the line of thought investigated in this book, one that spelled out a life program for the human being aware of its relation to creation and to the Creator, and that, as such, was taken to precede, as well as ground, the various disciplines and offices. The study of the interplay between the dimensions of the public offices and those of this foundational office (whether theistically grounded or not) may be apt to enrich the persona approach to the early modern and the Enlightenment cultures.

The figure of the Christian philosopher expressed Boyle’s and Locke’s conception of the moral-religious value of the pursuit of knowledge. I have argued that there are two early modern interlacing contexts relevant to this conception: the experimental philosophical programs developed by Bacon and the Royal Society virtuosi, and the early modern cultura animi tradition. These contexts testify to the fluidity of the disciplinary boundaries in early modern thought and to the usefulness that an investigation of the intellectual landscape of the time in its own terms has for historical understanding. The regimen approach to the problem of knowledge, which I argued shaped early modern English experimental thought, was also developed in a body of what is generally known as moralist, pastoral, or psychological literature. The historical point of this study has been that this literature carves a rich early modern intellectual domain in which English experimental thought can be meaningfully placed. Bacon’s and the virtuosi’s philosophical programs can thus be illuminated from a new perspective and their regimen component better grasped. In turn, the much discussed Baconian legacy of the Royal Society is apt to be enriched with a hitherto little appreciated aspect. The references to Bacon’s idols in the virtuosi’s texts, as in Boyle’s or Locke’s, have not escaped critical attention, but they have been subsumed in to discussions of natural philosophical methodology in its own right. It can now be appreciated, I hope, that the later seventeenth-century English philosophers’ interest in the Baconian idols points to the therapeutic value they attached to the experimental way of inquiry, and testifies to the combined Baconian and cultura animi legacy that substantiated this notion.

The approach to knowledge surveyed here takes the form of anthropological questions. I concur thus with Peter Harrison’s thesis about the role of notions of human nature in the early modern views of knowledge and its foundations.⁵ However, I disagree with his conclusions relative to the emergence of an English procedural, person-effacing view of method, premised on a Protestant Augustinian anthropology that denied individuals the capacity for virtuous self-transformation. The anthropology at work in the English experimentalists’ approach to knowledge, I have argued instead, was an integral part of a therapeutic conception. That conception was in fact a common feature of the cultura animi literature, across its various degrees of Augustinianism. True, partisans of one form of therapy could deny the validity or efficacy of the others, but one common ground was represented by the conceptualization of the therapy in terms of an inner transformation. Both “Socratic medicine” and “spiritual physick” gave the inner man another “tincture” by reorienting the habits of the mind or of the heart, and thus proved their “usefulness” as life regimens. The English experimental philosophers, I have argued, worked with a view of human nature that was moderately Augustinian, and they allowed the exercise of reason a crucial role in man’s reformation and “perfection.” They shared this view with the similarly moderate philosophical and religious physicians of the soul in seventeenth-century England. They also emphasized the “usefulness” of the experimental pursuit of knowledge in similar terms, as a constant counterpart of the new emphasis on the production of useful works for the public.

The regimen approach is also apt to modify our picture of Boyle’s and Locke’s notion of the limits of reason and of their views about the relation between reason and revelation. Both held the anti-Deist position that there are revealed truths that natural reason alone cannot discover, either in principle or in actual fact. Both also assigned reason the anti-enthusiastic task of authenticating revelation before the mind could receive it with assurance. But, in their view, reason was also a learning capacity. From this perspective, there was no sharp distinction between truths of reason and truths of revelation: both were taken to be able to inform reason and to lead to a growth in understanding as well as in epistemic and moral virtues. The work of reason—a work of discovery, examination, and understanding, coupled with one of reorienting the mind’s emotions—was conceived as a dynamic paideia. Complete knowledge, infallible certainty, and security from error in the study of both natural and supernatural things, they agreed, are beyond human capacity. There are indeed limits to human reason, and recognizing them aright is part of man’s duty of fair self-assessment. But the limits-of-reason theme (well emphasized in Boyle’s case by Jan Wojcik)⁶ goes together in their thought with the less appreciated theme of the “perfecting” of the mind, within the territory of those limits.

The latter theme also permeates the well-known skepticism and probabilism of early modern English experimental philosophy. I have argued that the drawing of epistemic charts of degrees of the certain and the probable is only one part of the story here. This epistemic territory not only traced boundaries for the human capacities but also indicated the task of a work on the mind—a work of self-assessment invested with a therapeutic capacity, as well as a work of mind-ordering regulation of assent. The virtuosi reinvested these epistemological categories with anthropological-therapeutic roles. Thus, for instance, to hold findings or propositions as probable was a requirement that pointed to the need to recognize, on the one hand, that such findings and propositions could not capture the “richness” of the world, and, on the other, that they needed to be acknowledged as “temporary” or “probationary” and the (distempered) impulse to see them as definitive resisted. The virtuosi’s mitigated skepticism acquired thus a therapeutic value, and their epistemic modesty was conceived as a virtue in the strong sense of the term. We can appreciate this aspect of early modern experimental skepticism and probabilism, I have suggested, once we try to make sense of the analysis of mind distempers and regimens to which it was moored.

It is against the same background, of an anthropological-therapeutic account of the human mind, that one central line of the defense of experimental investigation was constructed in England, in ways that may differ in their details from Bacon to Boyle and Locke, but that also preserve a core common element. That common element involves a revaluation of the very notion of experience, now highlighted as a source of knowledge in a new way, set in opposition with the Aristotelian notion of experience as bound to a theoretical system that it serves only to illustrate. Experience (including both observation and experimentation) acquires indeed a new authority, often legitimated by reference to the limits-of-reason theme: natural (as well as theological) truths are simply not imprinted on human minds and therefore cannot be learned by the self-involved exercise of the intellect alone. But these themes, I have shown, are integrated within the analyses of the distempers of the mind, in such a way that the speculative and the experimental ways of inquiry are evaluated in terms of their potential for aggravating or alleviating the corrupt tendencies of the mind. At stake, then, is not only a conception of the legitimate sources of knowledge (itself rooted in anthropological considerations) but also a firmly articulated view about the quality of the mental activity geared by the two types of inquiry. This is already a Baconian tenet, which Boyle, Locke, and the virtuosi also share: speculation springs from and in turn fosters distempers, while the experimental “reading” of the books of nature and Scripture starts with and in turn cultivates a set of moral and intellectual virtues.

The topic of the typology of readers of the “two books,” which I have emphasized in this context, is also apt to throw light on the demands the experimental askesis placed on those called to engage in it. Glanvill captured the gist of the idea when he wrote that experimental philosophy was “not the only Catholick way of cure” but “’tis a remedy for those that are strong enough to take it.”⁷ The severity of the demands of the work on the self involved in this program of inquiry dissolves facile dichotomies between “optimistic” and “pessimistic” views of human capacities, or between the “democracy” and the “elitism” of the new philosophy. I have commented on the inaccuracy of reading Locke, for instance, as a promoter of Enlightenment optimism about human reason who was nevertheless disappointed in his expectations and fell into an uneasy pessimism. For Locke, as for Boyle, Bacon, and the cultura animi tradition, reason and the human mental capacities in general were inscribed in a multilayered picture: the distempers, the cure and cultivation, and the healthy or virtuous condition were all aspects of the mind, and all could be seen as “natural” to a human being at the various stages of its progress. It was this progress that could make a “rational creature,” but it was a demanding and selective endeavor. The way was open to all, yet few proved up to the task.

If the English experimentalists’ epistemology and methodology had such an indelible ascetic component, so did their natural theology. It, too, was conceived as a practice for the mind’s powers, informed by a specific anthropological conception. This reading differs from current interpretations. According to Peter Harrison, the late seventeenth-century physico-theological project, aimed at providing “evidence of divine providence and design” in nature, worked with the assumption that divine design could be fully discerned. Consequently, the state of the human capacities in relation to the prospects of knowledge no longer constituted a problem.⁸ Steven Shapin describes the project of the early modern English “culture of natural theology” in a similar way: natural philosophers were “engaged in matching their knowledge to that of the Creator.”⁹ With the vocabulary I explored in chapter 6, this would be to say that natural theology rested on the assumption of an unproblematic proportionate match between mind and world. I have shown that in Boyle’s and Locke’s case this is not so. They rather worked with a nuanced understanding of the disproportion between mind and world, and their natural theology, like their experimental methodology, rested on a subtle conception of the interplay between proportion and disproportion. The result of this interplay was the core requirement of a continuous search, whose value lay not so much in the logical demonstrations of the existence of God as in the cognitive-cum-affective transformations wrought in the minds of the students of God’s works. It was indeed the quality of the search that differentiated the “diligent” from the “vulgar” inquirers.

I have thus defended the claim that for the philosophers analyzed in this book, the problem of knowledge was construed as a problem of the ordering of minds. The key consequence of this perspective is a conception of method that invests it with the role of an internal regimen for irregular or weak minds. Boyle’s and Locke’s rules for conducting inquiry, regulating assent, or reading Scripture came in the shape of general, nonformalized guidelines, as had Bacon’s aphoristic directions for inquiry. In all these cases, we are not yet at the stage of what Steven Shapin has described as the modern cult of Method, invariant, apersonal, and objective. But even the early modern methods, Shapin writes, already rested on the principle that the rules could be “formalized, written down, transmitted with ease from one person to another, and implemented by each person so as to yield reliable knowledge,” although it is true that in that period “none of these formal prescriptions of Method was securely institutionalized.”¹⁰ But apart from the lack of firm institutionalization, my investigation has challenged the very notion of a formalized, written-down method, whose only relation to the person was that it helped keep idiosyncrasies at bay. Shapin also acknowledges the existence of a “providentialist conception of the knower” as an exception to the formalized method idea.¹¹ I have here emphasized not the exceptionalist idea of the researcher divinely inspired (which Boyle did hold at times), but the ordinary-conditions notion that rules are not to be formalized and learned but incorporated and, as it were, lived. The experimentalists’ talk of “dispositions” and “tempers” of the mind that both precede and issue from the following of rules of inquiry makes sense only if we appreciate the extent to which their methods were not formalized and written down for the use of effaced inquirers.

Besides the notions of the incorporation of rules and of the consequent development of stable mental habits, another characteristic of this line of thought that argues against the impersonal method idea is a view of the work of reason that did not separate it from the emotional and volitional aspects of the life of the mind. The early modern relation between reason and the emotions is still in need of exploration, and I hope I have added to this line of research. In the texts I have analyzed, the interplay of cognition, emotion, and volition was crucial both in the diagnosis of the distempered mind and in the formulation of its regimen. The counterpart of the integrated accounts of the passions and errors of the mind was the framing of the regimen as a course for the regulation of all of the mind’s movements: a governing of assent, a strengthening of the will, and a reorientation of love and desire.

The context of the cultura animi literature serves to point out the pervasiveness of this conception in early modern culture, as well as the complexity of the generic and disciplinary approaches that nourished it. Further exploration of this literature in tandem with the more familiar developments in the philosophical and scientific literature of the time, both in England and on the Continent, may throw light on the early modern legacy in the eighteenth-century reconfigurations of the disciplines concerned with the natural history of the human kind. Often explicitly indebted to the Baconian and Lockean projects, the Enlightenment saw a proliferation of such histories of the human faculties across the domains of medicine, theology, moral philosophy, logic, and metaphysics (the latter two often understood as analyses of the understanding with a view to its conduct), with an increasingly explicit “psychological” and “anthropological” dimension and with a pedagogical or even therapeutic concern.¹² A vigorous tendency of the eighteenth-century logics, in particular, as well as of the books of advice on studying and thinking well in several quarters of the European Republic of Letters, was to ground a practical program for the education of the faculties in a natural history of the understanding.¹³ As such, they promoted an approach to the human mind that was jointly experimental and practical, in contrast to the theoretical and formalized style of both the scholastic logics and the scholastic science of the soul, from which they still felt the need to distance themselves. If their explicit debt was to Locke or Bacon, we can now begin to see that the impetus for this movement grew within a wider early modern culture of regimens.

I have proposed that the experimentalists worked with a notion of method-as-internal-regimen rather than with a notion of method-as-formalized-procedure. A related conclusion is that their view of what was later to be called objectivity was also rooted in a conception of the regimen and the virtues of the mind. Modern objectivity is usually associated with values that obtain at the communal level and thus rest on the erasure of the personal. There is no place for the virtues in this picture. However, an alternative proposal, offered by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison in their recent study on the history of scientific objectivity, is that the willing erasure of the defining feature of a person (her will-centered subjectivity), which characterizes modern objectivity, should itself be seen as an epistemic virtue, since it is acquired through techniques of the self.¹⁴ While this is a stimulating suggestion, it remains an odd notion to think of the epistemic virtues in terms of a removal of the personal. The training of the modern “scientific self” into apersonal objectivity is indeed governed by a code of values and can surely be seen in terms of a pedagogical process, but we may wonder to what extent it can be said to cultivate a set of virtues in any recognizable sense of the term. It seems to me that the virtues do need to be seen as features of a person, and the recent trends in virtue epistemology to which I alluded in chapter 5 still work with a robust “person” notion. Perhaps recognition of the person requires a “self” notion that is indeed richer than the “will-centered self,” which Daston and Galison have identified as the relevant self of post-Kantian modernity. I have argued that the early modern perspective investigated in this book construes the features of objectivity, such as impartiality or honesty, as personal virtues that cross the moral-intellectual divide. In terms of the “self” notion implicit in these accounts, it may be said that the English experimental philosophers work with a self that is not reducible to the (subjective) will but is one in which assent, desire, love, passions, and will interact in multifarious ways. In turn, what they cultivate in their educational programs is not a “will to willessness” but an ordering and rightful reorientation of the whole array of such mental activities. The outcome of the regimen thus framed is indeed a “cure” of the mind’s “partial” notions and loves, yet the cure does not entail an erasure of the person itself. It is rather geared toward the cultivation of a “universal” temper of the mind, one in which rightly ordered ways of judging, feeling, and willing become stable habits of the person. Objectivity-as-universality thus understood is possibly more of a virtue than the modern notion. In any event, Daston and Galison have suggested links between the history of objectivity and the history of the self that invite further explorations. I hope this study can offer insights to that end, as well as new ground on which these histories can interact with today’s virtue (or regulative) epistemologies.

The social dimensions of the early modern approach to the problem of knowledge, which have been emphasized by social history, can also be reevaluated from a regimen perspective. Objectivity and other features of the modern ethos may indeed be fruitfully approached as values that come into play at a social, communal level. To what extent they can be seen as epistemic virtues of individual inquirers is a question, we have seen, that is beginning to be asked. I have proposed that, in the early modern context, the social dimensions of the question of knowledge may be seen not only in terms of strategies for the validation and recognition of knowers in the social space but also as intimately involved with the question of the education of knowers. Self-mastery, for instance, was valuable to Boyle not simply because it could be made visible as a social instrument that ensured credibility¹⁵ but also, and primarily, because it served the ordering of the mind that went into the making of a rational creature. It was on such well-ordered minds, indeed, that social order was felt to rest. Moreover, for the virtuosi, the community was not simply a tool for the validation of identities or scientific results but also a site for mutual assistance, issuing, among other things, in the government of individual selves.

The key notion I have emphasized throughout this work is that of an education of the mind. This notion was at the core of what I have described as an early modern culture of regimens, and its impact on English experimental philosophy resulted in a reorganization of the conception of the pursuit of knowledge around the figure of the learner. It was a Socratic and a Christian figure at the same time, and Boyle and Locke contributed the most in the early modern English space to its establishment as an emblematic cultural figure. That figure is still with us, whether we allow it its Christian dimensions or not, and we are apt to see the attitude it represents not only as a value but also as a virtue. I end with the description of this attitude in Roberts and Wood’s contemporary account of an (early-modern-inspired) regulative epistemology:

It is the attitude of the perpetual student, and this attitude is a self-understanding: I do not have the final word on things; though I know a few things, my understanding is far less than it might be, and I have much to learn.¹⁶