Copernicus to Boyle
Alvin Snider
In the second half of the twentieth century, the study of the scientific revolution itself underwent a revolution. As early as the eighteenth century, European thinkers decided that something crucial emerged in the period stretching between Copernicus and Newton, but had trouble describing exactly what. Few now share the Enlightenment’s confidence in “an unambiguous triumph of rationality over obfuscation,” or regard our own scientific knowledge as “a neutral and inevitable product of progress” (Dear 2001: 2). We can still find a hardy perennial version of the tradition in a body of contemporary fiction that narrates stories about the triumphant defeat of medieval superstition and scholastic inertia. Nicolaus Copernicus remains a canonical figure in this saga, and does duty as the hero of John Banville’s prize-winning Doctor Copernicus, published in 1976, the first in a trilogy of novels, with additional volumes on Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton. Banville draws on conventional historiography when he invokes two well-worn metaphors (fortifications and tides) to describe the young Copernicus’s first glimpse of the Cracow Academy at the end of the fifteenth century: the college “had reminded him of nothing so much as a fortress, for it was, despite its pretentions, the main link in the defences thrown up by scholasticism against the tide of new ideas sweeping in from Italy, from England, and from Rotterdam” (Banville 2000: 35).
Copernicus not only sets his face against the medieval past, but must also stave off the grubby reality of the present, which threatens to contaminate the purity of his vision and disembodied fixation on the heavens. Specialists tell us that the Copernican system, when it did not meet with condemnation on religious grounds, became subject to various attempts to reconcile it with Aristotelian physical theories and reintegrate it into a Christianized natural philosophy (Gaukroger 2006: 125–26). Followers of Copernicus had little trouble blunting the edge of his theories, accommodating heliocentrism and descriptions of planetary motion with religious belief, because his ideas emerged from the matrix of late scholasticism and spoke its language. Banville nevertheless prefers to give us a quasi-mythic portrait of an aloof, transcendent genius instead of the versatile public figure recorded in the historical archive, diligently engaged in economic, legal, medical, and ecclesiastical pursuits.
With Quicksilver (2003), the first volume of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, another novel trilogy, a writer best known for cyberpunk shoulders the burden of fictionalizing the scientific revolution. Quicksilver includes among its sprawling cast of characters notables such as Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Christiaan Huygens, and Newton. When one character advises another to “consider the future of the revolution,” by which he means an epistemological insurrection or uprising (“You speak and think in a language that did not exist when you and Sir Isaac entered Trinity”), he pronounces as a traditional historian of science avant la lettre (Stephenson 2003: 46). Stephenson’s protagonists float above their societies, behaving as our postmodern contemporaries do and participating in a celebrity culture that reduces the novel of ideas to chat-show banter. The revolution he invokes admittedly entails no “single dramatic moment of apocalypse,” since one cannot point to “the Moment It All Happened” (864). Yet this historical novel very much depends on the narrative constructed by two of the distinguished historians Stephenson acknowledges as his sources, A. Rupert Hall and Richard S. Westfall, who published scholarship after World War II that sealed the significance and singular identity of the scientific revolution for decades.
In a bibliographical essay annexed to his revisionist The Scientific Revolution, Steven Shapin describes the “Great Tradition” in historiography, exemplified by Hall and Westfall, as marked by
robust confidence that there was a coherent and specifiable body of early modern culture rightly called revolutionary … that it had an ‘essence,’ and that this essence could be captured through accounts of the rise of mechanism and materialism, the mathematization of natural philosophy, the emergence of full-blooded experimentalism, and for many, though not all, traditional writers, the identification of an effective ‘method’ for producing authentic science.
(Shapin 1996: 168)
Historians of science now generally doubt the existence of a revolutionary moment of origin in the seventeenth century, of a fixed method for the production of new knowledge, of a cultural totality captured by the anachronistic word “science.” At the same time, they have not discarded the use of the problematic term altogether, and few would doubt its utility in designating a significant historical transformation in thought and practice. If literary scholars continue to use the phrase for want of a better, in the recent historical studies surveyed below the concept barely registers.
We would expect any alteration in the Western understanding of nature, not to say a tectonic realignment in the forces of disciplinary knowledge, to encroach well beyond fields such as celestial dynamics, and certainly as far as the elite literary culture of the period. To sound the depths of this rethinking of nature and language, readers can turn to writers of poetry and other literary genres who tuned in to these developments. In them we find more subtle and searching critiques than in fictionalized accounts of the scientific revolution produced in our own day. Without attempting to distill any “scientific” essence from literary works, the following pages sample texts that explicitly draw on controversies involving astronomy, and also discuss how literature could serve an agenda linked to the theory and practice of natural philosophy. Neither literature nor science functions as an autonomous domain in this period, and sometimes one can work to catalyze the other.
In standard accounts of the “construction of modern science,” mathematics, astronomy, physics, and chemistry tend to win pride of place, while anatomy, physiology, and other fields get relegated to secondary status or snipped to a mechanistic pattern (Westfall 1971). What made the Copernican revolution especially significant for Thomas Kuhn involved not only its eventual culmination in Newtonian dynamics and classical mechanics but also its consequences in disciplines external to astronomy and physics. According to Kuhn, a wider crisis of modernity prepared the way for innovation in astronomy because decisive change in one field typically has a domino effect on other modes of inquiry (Kuhn 1957: 124). The general upheaval of the age – and Kuhn takes into account European exploration, the expansion of the Ottoman empire, the revival of classical learning, the Reformation, and many other factors, large and small – provides the backdrop to his study of astronomy.
Kuhn’s study brings to center stage an exposition of the shift from two-sphere cosmology to a new understanding of planetary motion, which abolished concepts such as epicycles and eccentrics and promoted an entirely new view of the universe. Nevertheless, in Copernicus’s major work, De revolutionibus orbium Coelestium of 1543, Kuhn discovers a text closer in spirit to ancient and medieval cosmology than to the science that later became synonymous with the author’s name (Kuhn 1957: 135). Copernican astronomy, which relocated the earth from the center and assigned it to a place among the planets, retained many of the features of an orderly, hierarchical, and finite system. Trained as a physicist, Kuhn treats the science of motion as integral to a wider intellectual history, breaking down artificial boundaries and reading planetary astronomy back into the culture from which it emerged. His methodology allows him to unravel the tangled skein of high culture and canonical texts, from which he extricates scientific theories that warrant much closer attention than (say) the poetic passages from Dante, Du Bartas, and John Donne he sometimes quotes.
One can compare Kuhn’s strategy of disentangling various cultural strands – even while he eventually and famously disallowed any distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification – to a more recent study, Harold J. Cook’s Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age. Cook brings into close conjunction the rise of early modern natural history and medicine, the expansion of Dutch commerce, developments in epistemology, the circulation of trade and information, studying the interplay between the emergence of global trade and the concerns of the new science. He embeds the production of knowledge in systems of accumulation and networks of exchange (Cook 2007: 411), taking the Dutch case to exemplify developments elsewhere in Europe. In this book the commanding figure of Copernicus gives way to scientists and physicians of decidedly smaller reputations (the botanist Georg Eberhard Rumphius, the physician Herman Boerhaave, the anatomist Nicolaes Tulp, among many others); today only the names of the philosophers whom Cook treats at length (René Descartes and Benedict Spinoza) have wide currency outside of the Netherlands. Cook’s analysis of the scientific revolution at once keeps close to the ground in its focus on medicine, natural history, and technology, even while it emphasizes how the enterprise of collecting and exchanging information involved people from all over the world, of varying social and educational backgrounds (414). The book’s global scope and inter-disciplinary method counterbalance its materialist and microanalytical approach to the scientific revolution, making the study at once compendious and highly specialized in ways altogether typical of the best current work.
Despite its broad outlook on early modern culture, Cook’s substantial volume has nothing to say about literature as a form of knowledge, apart from some stray comments about Dutch writers and Tulp’sefforts to ban Joost van Vondel’s play Lucifer (“a model for John Milton’s Paradise Lost”) (159). Post-war writers on the history of science, such as Kuhn or Alexandre Koyré, enjoyed quoting lines from Lucretius, Donne, and Milton, but did so in an off-hand way. More recent studies, such as Cook’s, routinely take note of the participation of humanists in social networks built by scientists, and relations between the scientific community and traditional centers of authority and expertise, religion in particular. But they have relatively little to say about literature. Literary scholars, too, have not always exercised whatever disciplinary prerogatives remain to them. In the 1980s, structuralism and semiotics, mythology and “poetics” (understood as the analysis of tropes, submerged metaphors, analogy, and commonplaces) provided impetus for work on cosmology by scholars such as Fernand Hallyn (1993). Yet all the texts Hallyn subjected to analysis have either a philosophical or an astronomical orientation; his poetics proceeds without reference to poetry or poets.
Closer in methodology to what we now might think of as a characteristically “literary” (or book-centered) project on early modern science is Adrian Johns’s The Nature of the Book (1998). Johns includes a chapter on what he calls “Literatory Life,” drawing simultaneously on the title of Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar’s classic study, Laboratory Life, which turns to literary criticism and anthropology for its analysis of the social construction of scientific knowledge, and on a neologism applied disparagingly to the bookseller Edmund Curll’s workshop for textual production. Johns’s contribution lies within the parameters of science studies, but also the history of the book, since the processes that produced early modern print culture also produced the cultural construction that goes by the name of “science.” The chapter on literatory life looks to various overlapping “domains” in early modern London to consider how “the ‘social geography’ of the printing house and bookshop meshed with that of the wider urban environment, and how together they conditioned the knowledge that could be produced and encountered in early modern London” (Johns 1998: 62). Johns writes a version of cultural history that integrates scientific research into a very specific framework: the networks of trust and authority that produced and disseminated knowledge about nature. Grand narratives about the emergence of scientific method or biographies of great scientists play no part in his project.
In tying the success of experimental philosophy to the processes of textual production and distribution, Johns relies on anecdote and récit, or narrative reconstruction, somewhat in the manner of new historicism or of cultural anthropology. Milton figures for Johns (if only tangentially) much in the same way he figures in book studies, as a writer enmeshed in an interlocking network of stationers, licensers, censors, authors, printers, and readers. In other words, the interdisciplinary method of Johns’s book draws literary authorship and literary property into the orbit of the history of science, all under the auspices of print culture and questions of “credit” or intellectual authority. Such an approach has little in common with the “rhetoric of science,” a field that parses particular styles of persuasive argumentation in order to determine how they induce agreement by mobilizing distinctive modes of reasoning, but rather, shares powerful affinities with literary criticism that takes a sociohistorical bent.
We can say, then, that the varied enterprises bundled under the heading of “science”–according to a later convention where the term marks the site of a universal and timeless rationality – had no revolutionary significance for those who undertook them before 1700. The general absence of clear lines of demarcation between scientific and non-scientific knowledge had another effect. Just as humanist textualism suffuses the discourses of medicine and astronomy, natural philosophy seeped into the sanctum of high literary culture. Intellectual traffic flowed in both directions. Christiaan Huygens, son of a poet and composer, wrote a treatise (posthumously published) on the plurality of worlds, which included fictional elements. Huygens notes the blurring of the boundaries when he points to modern experts, the great astronomer Kepler among them, who “have coined some pretty Fairy Stories of the Men in the Moon, just as probable as Lucian’s true History” (Huygens 1698: 3).
A much more famous astronomical text, Galileo’s 1632 Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican, takes the form of a colloquy that embraces both performative and dialectical precedents. (Philip Glass’s 2002 opera, Galileo Galilei, restores the physicist to the theater, treating the contribution to early opera of Galileo’s father, Vincenzio, as key to unlocking the physicist’s later career.) Part humanist symposium and part theatrical entertainment, Galileo’s Dialogue conjures the presence of Giovanfrancesco Sagredo and Filippo Salviati, together with the sharply satirized Aristotelian philosopher Simplicio, and rescues his friends from oblivion “by reviving them in these pages of mine and using them as interlocutors in the present controversy” (Galilei 1997: 82). Thus, the Venetian diplomat Sagredo and the Florentine virtuoso Salviati emerge as characters in search of an author, and Copernican theories find expression in persons whose standpoints are grounded in their historical moments. Galileo had employed dialogue form in his earliest publication in 1605, and returned to it towards the end of his career with renewed assurance about its persuasive power. The literary, theological, and philosophical sophistication on display in the Dialogue, not to mention the skillful use of vernacular Italian, obviously failed to impress the authorities, and Galileo’s attempt to make Copernican theories accessible to a lay audience attracted the unwelcome attention of the Inquisition in 1633 and the book’s prohibition.
Unique among Milton’s contemporaries, Galileo makes an appearance by name in Paradise Lost, in a passage that describes the angel Raphael’s first glimpse of earth: “As when by night the Glass / Of Galileo, less assur’d, observes / Imagin’d Lands and Regions in the Moon” (5.261–63). Despite the note of skepticism sounded with the phrases “less assur’d” and “imagin’d,” the simile records an extraordinary moment of recognition. Milton’s selection of Galileo owes to several factors: in 1638 he had met, still under house arrest, “the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisner to the Inquisition, for thinking in Astronomy otherwise then the Franciscan and Dominican licencers thought” (cited in Campbell and Corns 2008: 112; in fact, Galileo had obtained a license to print the Dialogue); the astronomer’s persecution served zealous Protestants such as Milton as shorthand for the repressive forces of Catholicism and censorship; and Galileo’s observations of the lunar surface, reported in Sidereus Nuncius of 1610, challenged the dominant lunar theory derived from Aristotle in ways that served Milton’s larger purpose in the epic. This last discovery belongs together with two other iconic moments in empirical research: Galileo’s experiment with falling objects and the experiment with rolling balls down inclined planes.
Gazing through a telescope –“an apparatus that signifies the ‘New Science’ of the seventeenth century, and a technology that makes ‘new worlds’ available for inspection” (Albanese 1996: 122) – Galileo observed changing dark and light patches on the moon’s surface. Where Aristotle considered the moon perfectly spherical and smooth, Galileo observed that the moon’s surface, like that of the Earth, has an irregular topography, with mountains and valleys visible in shadows that swell and shrink relative to the position of the sun. Milton, however, deprives the reader of certainty, or even any sense of human agency, since, in the passage quoted above, the “Glass” carries out the observation, not the star gazer. The syntax of the simile refuses to attach the point of view to the blind Galileo, the blind poet, or the disoriented reader. On some level, the perception of a world in the moon could appear the product of analogy itself, of an assumption, by no means self-evident, that a single principle obtains in all bodies of a similar type.
With this loaded simile, Milton opens to further investigation questions about knowledge, certainty, and intellectual authority. Galileo and Milton lived in a period when Aristotelian and scholastic explanations had stopped making sense for many of those acquainted with them, but the intelligibility of Copernican theories (and the mechanistic worldview in general) remained subject to fierce debate. An older generation of Miltonists, who pondered the question of whose astronomical theory Milton adopts in Paradise Lost (Ptolemy’s? Copernicus’s? Tycho Brahe’s?), of whether he posits a closed or infinite universe, labeled Milton’s astronomical views as basically Ptolemaic. Yet Milton would hardly endorse the outcome of Galileo’s trial for heresy, and well understood that the new cosmological models faced much less resistance in Protestant England (and Lutheran Germany) than in Catholic countries.
Convinced that Galileo’s Dialogue can function as “a shadowy intertext for Milton’s universalizing epic” (Albanese 1996: 149), and treating the telescope as a token of epistemological innovation, literary scholars have sought out additional points of convergence between Milton and science. Recently some have directed attention to environmental issues, giving new attention to herbals, bestiaries, manuals of animal husbandry, and so forth, and launching an early modern ecocriticism in which Milton occupies a central role (e.g. Hiltner 2008). Such an approach may in the long run prove more fruitful than looking for extensive evidence of Milton’s direct engagement with the new science (Poole 2004). Scholars nevertheless have recognized that from his youth Milton traveled in circles that included contemporaries we might describe as polymathic humanists with strong scientific interests (Joseph Mede, Carlo Dati), and that he corresponded with two notable figures closely associated with the Royal Society of London, Samuel Hartlib and Henry Oldenburg (Campbell and Corns 2008: 28, 113–14, 180, 267; Duran 2007). Within the last two decades, Miltonists have begun seriously to investigate the significance of such cross-currents. John Rogers’s work on convergences among science, poetry, and politics in the period focuses on theories of animist materialism, and casts Milton and Margaret Cavendish as “notable participants in the seventeenth-century literary practice of scientific speculation,” who both struggled in their writings “to accommodate divergent and contradictory forms of sanctioned truth” (Rogers 1996: 180–81).
The traditional view of Milton’s cosmology, that he reverts to a Ptolemaic model of the universe and a “medieval” idea of Nature, often serves a program of reclaiming the poet for Christian humanism and literary value. More recently, Stephen M. Fallon (1991) has put Milton in dialog with his contemporaries, sharply distinguishing his animist materialism from the mechanical philosophy of Descartes and Thomas Hobbes, finding an analog to Milton’s monistic ontology in the monism of Anne Conway, a neo-Platonist metaphysician. Fallon contends that, despite resemblances between Miltonic and Hobbesian views, the poet sees all matter as basically alive, while the philosopher sees only particles in motion. Mechanists considered it an Aristotelian error to talk about the natural world as something imbued with life or goal directed, while Milton has Raphael speak of “one first matter all, / Indu’d with various forms, various degrees / Of substance, and in things that live, of life” (5.472–74).
Karen Edwards (1999) points out that when the old science resurfaces in Paradise Lost, Milton’s tone tends to grow satirical and dismissive, whereas the poem “consistently makes available new representational possibilities suggested by the experimental philosophy, and it does so with excitement, wit, and creative relish” (Edwards 1999: 10). Milton swam in the same current that set in motion the processes and discoveries that gave seventeenth-century English science a central place in European intellectual life, and in the writings of Hooke and Boyle we can find many of the ideas and concerns that animate Milton’s attitudes towards experience, the human body, and the phenomenal world. Milton’s representation of the natural world in Paradise Lost grows out of the same doubts and possibilities that provided the impulse for the founding of the Royal Society in 1661. We can also detect the influence of Francis Bacon and the legacy of Baconianism in his thought. Catherine Gimelli Martin (2007), for example, detects the presence of Bacon shining through Milton’s work, linking the poet to the Royal Society virtuosi whose politics and religion he held in anathema. We find such inconsistencies and apparent contradictions everywhere in the intellectual life of the age. For example, Kepler and Bacon hoped to reform astrology, not to drive it underground, and John Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal whose residence at the Royal Greenwich Observatory remains a popular site of science tourism, both dabbled in and disputed astrology.
Before the seventeenth century, a “revolution” signified something cyclical, not a violent upheaval that produces an irreversible new social, political, or intellectual order. Many writers associated with the coming of modernity “saw themselves not as bringing about totally new states of affairs but as restoring or purifying old ones” (Shapin 1996: 3). Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, shared few political or religious opinions with her compatriot John Milton, yet, like him, she took an active interest in the intellectual currents of the day, especially natural philosophy. Driven by the civil wars to join the court of Queen Henrietta Maria in France, in 1645 Cavendish married William Cavendish, a dilettantish nobleman friendly with some of the leading lights of the age, including John Dryden, Hobbes, Anthony van Dyck, and Descartes. In 1660 Margaret returned to England and published, among many works in different forms, her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy in 1666. To this text, contemporaneous with the first edition of Paradise Lost, she appended The Blazing World, a prose narrative sometimes regarded as an early work of science fiction. Cavendish was not alone in thinking that natural philosophy might don the guise of fable (see, e.g., Huygens 1698: 1–11), but few launched themselves into philosophical debates with such daring and originality.
The antithesis of a radical in any political sense, Cavendish outlined a critique of the new science in the Observations and The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing World that has only recently received the careful attention it deserves. The story of The Blazing World involves the making and dissolving of mental worlds, the creation of an infinitely recursive set of imaginative constructs. It tells the story of a lady abducted and taken aboard a ship driven northward by a storm toward the Pole and into the Blazing World, located beyond “another Pole of another world, which joined close to it” (Cavendish 2003: 8). Once married to the Emperor of that world, as an Empress she assembles an academy of savants to instruct her and whom she engages in a free-wheeling seminar on scientific, religious, and political subjects. Cavendish adopted a philosophy of vitalist materialism, which subordinates empiricism to “Rational Contemplation” and valorizes observation by the naked eye. She lays out a critique of telescopes for their distortion of the visible world and for only representing surfaces of things, for causing differences among astronomers rather than producing consensus.
Impatient with the results of a series of unsuccessful experiments using telescopes, the Empress labels the instruments “false informers” and denounces them for deluding the sight (Cavendish 2003: 27). Glasses, she argues, cannot compete with “sense and reason,” and a proper empirical method must not depend on artifice for assistance, or escape the limitations of ordinary perception. Some liberal feminist critics (e.g., John Rogers) conclude that Cavendish’s treatment of nature as autonomous, self-knowing, and self-moving strikes a telling blow against mechanism and patriarchalist logic. Other readers of Cavendish have situated the text between the emergent discourses of British colonialism and the new science. Mary Baine Campbell finds multiple connections among early modern utopianism, scientific experiment, exploration, and colonialism, joining Hooke’s Micrographia with The Blazing World to show how both works encourage Europeans to define themselves through the exclusion or domination of others (Campbell 1999: 204–5). Whether or not Cavendish succeeded in devising a feminist epistemology, her skeptical assessments of Cartesian dualism, Royal Society experimentalism, and mechanist notions of matter (as inert, lifeless particles moved by external forces) offered a radical critique of the new science. In The Blazing World she installs herself at the helm of an institution that captures the Royal Society in a mirror image, faithful to the original but simultaneously inverted, and a challenge to many of its basic assumptions, not least of all the exclusion of women from its ranks.
The Royal Society found its exemplar, the highest expression of the Baconian principles it espoused, in another aristocrat, Robert Boyle, who combined the skills of a chemist, theologian, and accomplished writer of English prose. A seminal study of debates between Boyle and Hobbes, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, identifies “the technical, literary, and social practices” deployed in the creation and validation of “experimental matters of fact” (Shapin and Schaffer 1985: 18). Shapin and Schaffer argue, if you will, the importance of language and representation in the production of knowledge. They devote considerable energy to studying Boyle’s technique of “virtual witnessing,” by which they mean the creation of an aura of reliability through the use of pictorial representations of the air pump in pneumatic experiments, and a particular discourse of scientific discovery, heavy on circumstantial detail and dedicated to rendering the scene of experiment in vivid colors. Boyle wields a highly wrought yet unbuttoned English prose, carefully designed to present the author as disinterested, innocent of theory, and modest (Shapin and Schaffer 1985: 60–69). At times he adopts a convoluted periodic style, characterized by intricate clausal structures and other formal devices intended to simulate an effect of the mind in motion. More often he lays aside any hint of rhetoricity or learned citation in order to achieve an effect of selfless dedication to matters of fact (67). Such techniques strive to preserve the experimental community from splintering into factions and offer a simulacrum of eye-witnessing for second-hand observers, for consumers of the printed text.
The scare quotes encasing the word “revolution” in the title of this chapter could expand to engulf the entire phrase and every other keyword we have discussed. The idea behind the term, however, retains its hold on the cultural imagination of the West because it encapsulates notions about modernity and the autonomy of science that we surrender with reluctance. A radical disjunction of science from other realms of knowledge underwrites many of the tales we tell about the origin of the modern world. If we cannot shake off the term altogether, the study of early modern literature and science provides one approach for breaking through the wall that separates laboratory and literary life.
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