The Project of Enlightenment (Master Systems)

What’s at stake in tracking system can perhaps best be captured by the image in figure 3.1. It scales up that genre’s history by adding new temporal and spatial dimensions to its trajectory. As I was writing about it, this image has become one of the first human artifacts to leave the solar system. To put this more succinctly, the system of the world is about to leave our system. In 1977, NASA chose pages from Newton’s A Treatise of the System of the World to represent humanity to whomever or whatever else is out there, encoding this image of those pages onto a twelve-inch gold phonograph record packed into the Voyager 1 spacecraft. But there’s a twist to this apparently simple act of homage to the Principia and its author. These are not pages from the System of the World famously published as Book 3 of the Principia. It is a very, very different version—one that Newton rejected; it was, in fact, not even published until 1728, the year after Newton died.

And there’s another twist to that twist. Newton came very close—repeatedly—to sending his treatise into the world without any “System” at all. Why was system such a vexed issue in the late seventeenth century? And why, once it did make it onto the printed page, did system become so successful that it was launched into space as one of humanity’s calling cards three centuries later? How did that particular form of knowledge come to represent our species’ ability to, as Francis Bacon put it, “advance knowledge”?

Even editors who do not experience their work as a religious vocation may find themselves occasionally haunted by this last sentence—“May God never allow us to publish a dream of our imagination as a model of the world”—just as the first sentence, with its imperative to see “things as they are” has haunted historians of science, eliciting tales of empiricism and induction.

To test those tales, let’s try an experiment. Here are some “things” to look at. Figure 3.2 is a recent photograph of what Galileo saw through his new spyglass—the things that conveyed his message. But as with the image on Voyager, there’s a twist to this image as well: the message from the stars was that these things were not stars at all—they were moons revolving around Jupiter. This next image, figure 3.3,¹ is what we would call stars—Galileo would have called them “fixed stars.”

“Such Fictions or Hypotheses,” Chambers concluded, “are much less current now than formerly,” for philosophers had become “divided” as to their use. He then clarified his own position by asserting that “the latest and best Writers are for excluding Hypothesis, and standing wholly on Observation and Experiment.”

Not surprisingly, given the frequency we have already noted of the “Sir” Isaac” “Newton” wordplates on title pages at that time, Chambers then invokes the author of the Principia:

This statement is from the penultimate paragraph of the “General Scholium” added to the end of 1713 second edition of the Principia. It was thus an echo of how Newton had chosen to open the Opticks nine years earlier (1704): “My design in this Book is not to explain the Properties of Light by Hypotheses, but to propose and prove them by Reason and Experiments” (Newton 1952, 1). Hypothesis was in such ill repute by that second decade of the eighteenth century that Roger Cotes opened his editor’s Preface to the Principia’s second edition with a full-scale attack on those who “take the liberty of imagining … whatever they please”:

If system had been functionally synonymous with hypothesis, then it too would have been banished into romance and from a central role in Enlightenment. But the consistent and telling qualifications in Chambers’s entries presage a different tale. Read together, they describe how a conceptual and functional wedge formed between the two genres that angled system into its linear rise.

In his entry for system, Chambers inserts the wedge by adding a second thought to the initial claim of hypothesis having the “same Signification.” The turn is tentative—“unless, perhaps”—but it does pry the terms apart with the suggestion that they operate on different levels of particularity. That gap widens in the hypothesis entry with the assertion of an essential difference in their similarity; system here is hierarchically dominant with hypothesis but one of its “kind.” The cyclopedic turn back to “system” then drives the wedge even deeper—deep enough to open a historical split between them:

The furnishing of this “distinction” proved to be a crucial adjustment to the historical trajectory of system, functioning like the controlled burns that change the attitude of a spacecraft, redirecting and prolonging its flight.

Systems appeared in the skies and on the page at the start of the seventeenth century as part of the collective cutting of scholasticism’s ties to authority. As a form for positing how different parts might combine into different wholes, system joined other genres in facilitating the necessary task of guesswork. I emphasize “necessary” to acknowledge Deutsch’s correction to the standard histories of science as empiricism’s enabling of induction (Deutsch 2011, 1–10). The path from empirical “things” to explanations—from seeing dots to knowing about furnaces—required guesswork, and that is precisely why Newton, Cotes, and Chambers all worried about how that guesswork should be performed. And we can read that worry in the historical use of—and comments on—the genres that performed that work. That’s why system can tell us a great deal about the shape of knowledge from the Enlightenment.

One message that system conveys over and over again is that knowledge during the Enlightenment became a matter of doing things over and over again. Guesswork needed “things as they are” not because things like dots somehow suggest nuclear furnaces, but because things can help us to choose between guesses. After choosing, we can then guess and choose again, and then again, with the expectation that every iteration mediates the previous ones to produce a tighter fit between things and explanations. For Deutsch (2011), this process of error correction informed the “tradition of criticism” that distinguished Enlightenment, enabling its “sustained, rapid growth of knowledge” (13).

Here, then, are two important reasons why system played a central role in that tradition. Not only did its parts and wholes lend themselves to guesswork—to choosing what parts fit together into what wholes; their scalability, as we saw in chapter 1, proved to be scaffolding for error correction, as explanations were made to fit through adjustments to scale. Thanks to these specific features with these specific functions, the genre of system was increasingly experienced during the eighteenth century as sharing guesswork with other genres but potentially doing that work better. In Chambers’s terms, knowledge shaped by system could be “built” and “raised” on the “firmest ground.” The conditional is crucial here. Many systems could just as easily—to use a favorite word for failed systems we encountered earlier—“explode.” There was no set way to build them and no guarantee of the results, but what mattered was not their fallibility but that they remained on the strong side of Chambers’s “fresher distinction.”

Ruminating in his commonplace book seventy years after the Cyclopaedia, Francis Jeffrey, one of the founders of the Edinburgh Review, still echoed Chambers’s twists and turns at the very end of the century. “I really cannot help suspecting,” Jeffrey begins, that “theory,” “system,” and “hypothesis” all share a “real meaning,” but he then shifts immediately to delineating differences in how we use those words. While with theory we “attend” to “general views or principles,” and with hypothesis we attend to “assumption[s],” with system we “consider more particularly the collection of facts that are presented to us.” Here, again, is Chambers’s “firmest ground” in contrast to the ungrounded guessing of system’s partners. Confirming the familiarity of system by 1800,but also its plasticity, Jeffrey concludes with the casually phrased observation that “there is little difficulty about systems, tho’ it is a pity the word should not have some more determinate signification” (Pitre 1980, 86–87).

If system was solely an idea—and thus identified and valued by what it meant—then the lack of a “determinate signification” might be a basis for regret—or for me, attempting to offer a more determinate definition in this book. But as a genre, system’s flexibility of features and functions was a reason that systems had become so familiar and could be deployed with “little difficulty.” It is what allowed Adam Smith, for example, to complain about systems while writing more of them. People wrote systems to avoid the very problems for which system was often blamed. And that meant more and more systems.

To sight those systems within the history of mediation is to see that they proliferated in part because that genre’s flexibility and scalability allowed it to mediate itself—and thus efficiently enact the iterations of guesswork. In the history of ideas, however, the hegemony of agency figures that twist in a very different way—as a love/hate relationship among personifications. In Ernst Cassirer’s romantic version, desire for freedom redeems system from blame:

Whatever designs “Enlightenment” may have had on “philosophy,” what those who wrote and used systems needed was clear and concrete: the proper genres for their undertaking. In system, they found and made a firmer form for the guesswork that could distance them from the determinacies of scholasticism.

The Newtonian Difference—System and the Real

In his plan to jump-start that effort, Bacon feared that forms like system might easily be deployed using scholastic methods, with rhetoric ³—rather than “things”—filling out the initially “empty” spaces. His solution was generic: claiming to follow the “earliest and most ancient investigators of truth,” he wrote aphorisms. These “short, unconnected sentences, not methodically arranged,” conveyed in their very form, he argued, the sense of knowledge in growth (Bacon [1620] 2000, 71). Another formal solution was the “essay” understood as an attempt or a fragment—what Samuel Johnson called a “loose sally.” The plan was to start with these short forms and then proceed into the long list of histories addressed in the previous chapter.

On these choices of genre, insisted Bacon, hung no less than the fate of mankind. This may sound hyperbolic, but keep Voyager in mind as you listen to his prophecy. A process would begin, claimed Bacon, with

such an end perhaps as in the present condition of things and the present state of thought men cannot easily grasp or guess. It is not merely success in speculation which is in question, but the human situation, human fortune and the whole potential of works. (Bacon [1620] 2000, 24)

For system to play a role in this new, high-stakes world of knowledge—not only to contribute to success in speculation but to become a track on Voyager’s phonograph record—it had to overcome Bacon’s skepticism to gain Chambers’s “firmest ground.” This entailed new connections, not only the iterative ones to “things,” but also social links to new configurations of knowledge. Guesswork had to work with another kind of work: the political and institutional work of renegotiating forms of authority and access to knowledge.

With its feature of parts and wholes, for example, system could be cast as a democratizing vehicle: by explaining many things according to a single principle, it could be presented as a tool for reducing complexity to simplicity. Even typographical conventions played a role. Innovations in the printing of the early Ramist systems, as David Simpson has argued, helped to open writing and knowledge to the “common people” by dispersing the univocal authority of earlier texts: commas and italics set off illustrative materials as coming from a variety of sources, and tables of contents framed the entire text as something not given but made (Simpson 1993, 24–25).

Systems could also, of course, be written and printed to dampen this leveling effect. When skills (and not just ideas) became systemic principles—as in the turn to observation and experiment—older hierarchies of authority were transformed into new hierarchies of expertise: not who has access to knowledge but who knows best how to access it. System making and system reading thus took on increasing social consequence. John Locke, for example, devoted roughly four sections of his Thoughts on Education (1692) to the pedagogical role of systems, recurring again and again to the same two-part formulation. On the one hand, the attempt to know “the principles, properties, and operations of things, as they are in themselves” through system was unlikely to succeed:

though the world be full of systems of it [natural philosophy], yet I cannot say, I know any one which can be taught a young man as a science, wherein he may be sure to find truth and certainty, which is what all sciences give an expectation of. (Locke 1693, 229–230)

On the other hand, systems were not to be dismissed: “I do not hence conclude, that none of them are to be read.” For Locke, even flawed systems carried social value: “It is necessary for a gentleman in this learned age to look into some of them, to fit himself for conversation.”

Locke’s “look,” as with Bacon’s, engaged system as a genre interrelated with other genres. In his case, however, those others were not forms for making knowledge but pedagogical alternatives. To teach about “spirit,” for example, Locke suggested writing a “history” of the Bible complemented by what was then a sister genre of system, the “epitome,” “containing the chief and most material heads” (1693, 227). Locke thus relegated system to the status of a schoolboy’s shortcut or a minor form of what we now call cultural capital for young gentlemen—with one exception. It was an exception, however, that proved to be exceptional, for it was so widely shared—and shared with such enthusiasm—that it altered the fate of system. That exception was Newton.

Although the Principia had been published just six years earlier (1687) than his Thoughts, Locke was already writing to the converted when he singled out that book as having changed mankind’s understanding of what could be understood. Only when he turned to Newton did Locke even entertain the possibility that knowledge could assume and maintain the form of a system:

Though the systems of Physick, that I have met with, afford little encouragement to look for certainty or science in any treatise … yet the incomparable Mr. Newton, has shewn how far mathematicks, applied to some parts of nature, may, upon principles that matter of fact justifie, carry us in the knowledge of some, as I may so call them, particular provinces of the incomprehensible Universe. (232)

Here was the conviction that became so central to Enlightenment—the conviction that the world could be known. What made it comprehensible were new forms of mediation in new combinations. Mathematics made new by Newton’s invention of the calculus⁴ brought to system a new way of generating “principles” more firmly grounded in “fact”—a regrounding that opened the gap Chambers detected between system and its competitors.

Newton’s accomplishment elicited not just admiration but astonishment. The sense that he had changed all of the rules by framing a system of the whole “world” out of a few simple ones was immediate and persistent. But testimonials throughout the eighteenth century were still tinged with surprise that such a thing could be—a “system,” as Adam Smith put it at midcentury, “whose parts are all more strictly connected together, than those of any other philosophical hypothesis.” Having acquired “the most universal empire that was ever established in philosophy,” Newton’s principles, asserted Smith, “have a degree of firmness and solidity that we should in vain look for in any other system” (Smith [1795] 1980, 104–105).

But when it came down to specifying what they were actually looking at, admirers and system makers like Smith ran into a really difficult question: how real could a system be? “Even we,” wrote Smith, astonished by his own reaction to Newton’s system,

while we have been endeavouring to represent all philosophical systems as mere inventions of the imagination, to connect together the otherwise disjointed and discordant phaenomena of nature, have insensibly been drawn in, to make use of language expressing the connecting principles of this one, as if they were the real chains which Nature makes use of to bind together her several operations. (105)

That “as if” drove the proliferation of system in the eighteenth century, haunting everyone with the possibility that a system could be adequate to the real thing. By portraying that adequacy as a matter of connection, Smith’s “as if” echoes the logic of the calculus—of using parts to approximate wholes—as it enacts the scalability of system—of connecting more and more parts into wholes comprehensive enough to “be” real.

This interaction was the engine of Newtonian Enlightenment: the calculus divided wholes into an infinite number of parts, and system connected parts into wholes.⁵ The Principia was the embodiment of that interaction; it literally took shape as a pairing of these tools.

When Newton first took up the project at the urging of Edmond Halley in 1684, he planned a two-book treatise on the “motion of bodies” (De Motu Corporum). Liber primus, after preliminary matter consisting of “Definitions,” a “Scholium,” and “Axioms,” begins with the principle that undergirds the calculus. “The method of first and ultimate ratios”—of parts approximating the whole—is “for use in demonstrating what follows”:

Quantities, and also ratios of quantities, which in any finite time constantly tend to equality, and which before the end of that time approach so close to one another that their difference is less than any given quantity, become ultimately equal. (Newton 1999 [1687], 433)

Liber secundus then became Newton’s first attempt to pair the calculus with the form that makes a whole of parts: with the “motion of bodies” calculated, he proclaimed, the “true constitution of the system would thus be fully and accurately be perceived.”⁶

The wider implications for knowledge of pairing of these forms of mediation—calculating the world and systematizing it—emerged as the project took its final form. By summer 1685, Newton had scaled up his plans. He extended the first book into a new second book on the same topic—the motion of bodies; the old second book was rewritten to become a new third book, now explicitly titled The System of the World; and this more comprehensive whole now carried the much more ambitious title of Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica.⁷ “Ambition,” however, does not really capture what was at stake in this marrying of natural philosophy and mathematics. Newton’s new title was, in Edward Grant’s (2007) terms, “a virtual contradiction in terms.”

The roots of that contradiction lie in Aristotle’s classifying natural philosophy, metaphysics, and mathematics as three different kinds of knowledge. The first two were “speculative” rather than “practical” sciences; their purpose was to contemplate truth in regard to changeable bodies—that is, Newton’s “bodies in motion.” During the fourteenth century, scholastic natural philosophers did begin to apply mathematics to problems of motion, as Grant has shown, but those applications were not understood to be illustrations of “mathematical principles of natural philosophy.”

The difference, argues Grant, was that “Newton regarded his treatise as if it were revealing the mathematical structure of physical nature, rather than as the mere application of mathematics to nature, as virtually all previous natural philosophers would have perceived it” (2007, 313). The interplay of the calculus and system, by mixing the mathematically practical and the philosophically speculative, gave shape to a new kind of knowledge. Its unprecedented purchase on the real was signaled by Smith’s “as if” and his assertion that Newton’s system had “gained the general and complete approbation of mankind” because it was considered

not as an attempt to connect in the imagination the phaenomena of the Heavens, but as the greatest discovery that ever was made by man, the discovery of an immense chain of the most important and sublime truths, all closely connected together, by one capital fact, of the reality of which we have daily experience. (Smith [1795] 1980, 105)

The calculus had provided the mathematical “fact”—the law of gravity—that confirmed the philosophical truth of system: that “all” truths were “closely connected together.”

Newton acknowledged in a letter to Halley in 1686 that his claim to doing natural philosophy depended on this mix with system. “The first two books without the third,” he wrote, “will not so well bear the title of Philosophiae naturalis Principia Mathematica.” But then the letter zigs and zags in a way that has puzzled many Newton scholars. Having just confirmed that he had been hard at work on the three-book version, he informed Halley of two rapid-fire changes of plan:

The third I now design to suppress … & therefore I had altered it to this De motu corporum libri duo: but upon second thoughts I retain the former title. Twill help the sale of the book which I ought not to diminish now tis yours. (Newton [1686] 1960, 2:437)

A reply from Halley a few days later apparently convinced Newton to return to the three-book plan, thus avoiding a telling discrepancy between the title of the book and its content.

But why did he need convincing? Newton does complain in his letter that

philosophy is such an impertinently litigious Lady that a man had as good be engaged in Law suits as have to do with her. I found it so formerly & now I no sooner come near to her again but she gives me warning.

Most critics have taken this as a surly reaction to Robert Hooke’s demand that he be given credit for the inverse-square law for gravity (Newton 1999, 48). Though that may have been an immediate trigger, “suppression of Book III,” as A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall point out, “could hardly have quietened Hooke, though Newton might have believed that it would do so” (Newton 1978, 234–235).

Whether he did or not, what we do know from this letter is that Newton worried that natural philosophy exposed him and his enterprise to certain risks. The very popularity that promised sales also invited disagreement and controversy—controversy with which we are now so familiar in our age of litigious copyright that we too easily misjudge the scope of Newton’s worry. Quarreling over who discovered what and when was certainly a cause for concern for Newton, but what we forget is how new a concern it would have been for everyone then. For there even to be squabbles over who made discoveries, knowledge itself had to be understood as something to be discovered rather than reaffirmed. Part of what the Royal Society was acknowledging when it honored Bacon as its father figure was that producing knowledge now meant “advancing” knowledge—and that invited arguments over claiming new ground. It’s hard for us to grasp today that the society’s motto—Nullius in verba, “on the word of no one”—was, back then, the condition of possibility for arguing over who said what first.

Newton may in fact have been hotheaded and disputatious, but focusing on his individual behavior risks our missing how strange—and strained—this newly competitive world of new knowledge must have been for him and for all of his contemporaries. Read with that strangeness in mind, Newton’s twists and turns regarding philosophy do not themselves seem so strange. Philosophy had become doubly dangerous for him: at the very moment the tensions of competition heightened, the scholastic version of natural philosophy, as Bacon so vehemently complained, had reached its shelf life. Its toolbox of commentaries and summas could not accommodate mathematical principles as Newton wanted to use them.

Newton thus had to make a choice—suppress philosophy or change it—that was much tougher and, of course, much more important in the long run than handling Hooke. As the letter makes clear, suppressing was a no-win option. On the one hand, to avoid Hooke and litigation by removing philosophy from the project and reverting to the original title would be to surrender sales and thus the public recognition that was at stake in these rivalries. On the other, the compromise of keeping philosophy in the title while suppressing the book that actually contained it would not—to use Newton’s word—“bear” even his own scrutiny.

That left changing philosophy, and that is where system came in. Newton would have been familiar with system as a vehicle for the scholastic version, a role in which it performed the rhetorical guesswork that Adam Smith derided. That was a cardinal sin for Newton as well; in fact, his problem with Hooke was less about timing and much more about method—about the role of guesswork in producing knowledge. Just like Johannes Kepler, Newton argued, who “knew” orbits were “not circular but oval,” but only “guessed it to be elliptical,” so Mr. Hooke

[knew] that the proportion was duplicate quam proximè at great distances from the centre & only guessed it to be so accurately, & guessed amiss in extending that proportion down to the very centre.⁸

Time was clearly not the only variable in these disputes; for Newton, you knew something first only if you knew it in the proper way. Guessing was necessary but not enough. In making that distinction, Newton was as tough on himself as he was on others. “I hope I shall not be urged to declare in print,” he wrote of his earlier work on the inverse square law, “that I understood not the obvious mathematical conditions of my own hypothesis” (Newton [1686] 1960, 436).

The primary waypoints on Newton’s path to understanding—a path trod over and over again in his letters—were “hypothesis,” “demonstration,” and “philosophy.” “Without my Demonstrations,” Newton argued, the inverse square hypothesis “cannot be believed by a judicious Philosopher to be any where accurate” (Newton [1686] 1960, 437). Demonstrating the mathematical conditions of earlier guesswork—his own and Hooke’s—was the first step to being believed. The next step—from demonstration to philosophy—posed a question that was difficult because it was still new: how do you put a hypothesis cast in the language of mathematics into philosophy?

Galileo had most famously put this issue on the table only sixty years earlier with his admonition in The Assayer (1623):

Philosophy is written in this all-encompassing book that is constantly open before our eyes, that is the universe; but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to understand the language and knows the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures; without these it is humanly impossible to understand a word of it, and one wanders around pointlessly in a dark labyrinth. (Galileo [1623] 2008, 183)

Because mathematics did become the language of modern science, celebrations of Galileo’s foresight rarely attend to who and what he was admonishing. The who was Orazio Grassi, who published The Astronomical and Philosophical Balance in 1619 under the pseudonym of Lothario Sarsi. But as with Newton and Hooke, it was the what that raised Galileo’s ire—and that what was philosophy itself:

I seem to detect in Sarsi the firm belief that in philosophizing one must rely upon the opinions of some famous author, so that if our mind does not marry the thinking of someone else, it remains altogether sterile and fruitless. (183)

What Galileo detected was the persistence of a mode of knowing into the very medium that would eventually silence it. That mode was the aural one that Ong has eulogized as the sociable discourse of persons, of knowledge arising out of dialogue. To Galileo, this was nostalgic and a mistake. He mocks Sarsi for holding to the notion “that philosophy is the creation of a man, a book like the Iliad or Orlando Furioso, in which the least important thing is whether what is written in them is true.”

“Mr. Sarsi,” pronounced Galileo, with a finality intended to cut any further dialogue short, “that is not the way it is” (183). The time had come for books of another kind, books that could, to use Ong’s word for knowledge-in-print, “contain” truth because they would be translations of the book that is the universe. Galileo’s insistence on the language of mathematics as the medium for translation was thus an argument for changing philosophy itself. Philosophy was thus in play in a special way during the seventeenth century: the question of doing it was a matter of debates over the very nature of that enterprise and not just its content. Or, wary of the animosity and pitfalls of those debates, one could decide not to do philosophy at all. As strange as that sounds, that is precisely the choice that ignited the animosity between Hooke and Newton.

Seven years before Newton’s letter to Halley, Hooke had written to Newton (November 24, 1679) requesting that he continue his “former favours to the Society by communicating what shall occur to you that is philosophical” (Newton [1679] 1960, 297). This pairing of “philosophy” and “communication” is what connects Galileo’s concern about Sarsi’s “marrying” of minds (philosophy as communication rather than truth) and Newton’s decisions about what became the Principia (should he communicate truth through philosophy?). For Newton, this was a very pressing issue. Moving from demonstrated hypotheses to philosophy meant engaging in acts of communication: how do you put what you want to be believed in writing? If mathematics was the language of demonstration, then must it also be, per Galileo, the language of philosophy, and, if so, then what form should philosophy on mathematical principles take?

In the exchange that followed Hooke’s request, this pairing of philosophy with communication surfaces with astonishing regularity. In fact, Newton rarely separates the two, either turning philosophy into an adjective paired with a form of communication or presenting himself as communicating (or not) with philosophy personified. He is “tempted,” he writes Hooke, to engage in “Philosophical correspondence,” but has “had no time to entertein Philosophical meditations.” In that same paragraph, he also describes himself as “endeavouring to bend myself from Philosophy” and then as “having thus shook hands with Philosophy.” The letter ends with him “declin[ing] Philosophical commerce,” a retreat from communication that provokes a rebuke from Hooke: “Your deserting Philosophy … Seems a little Unkind” (Newton [1679] 1960, 300–304).

Newton and philosophy, in other words, had a history well before their dust-up in the writing of the Principia. And his threat of desertion in the letter to Halley is less surprising once we recognize that, by his own admission, he had done so before. It’s easy, of course, to psychologize that tale, but I have recovered it not to establish a pattern of personal behavior but to document the fate of philosophy in the late seventeenth century.⁹ In the history of mediation, this sequence is not about Newton changing his mind but about changes in philosophy. Deserting philosophy as it had been practiced was the easy part—so easy that Newton repeated the gesture. But to change it into something that he could practice required a retooling—changes that would make it adequate to Galileo’s admonition.

From that perspective, the calculus was a new dialect of the language of mathematics, developed to demonstrate hypotheses. For philosophy to communicate what could now be “believed,” it too needed a new tool—a tool capable of translating that dialect. This was more reinvention than invention, since Newton chose the same tool—system—that Galileo had helped bring to prominence because it was so helpful to him: system did double duty, both naming what was seen in the physical world and turning it into a message. That was precisely the purpose of Book 3 described in Newton’s Preface to the first edition. It would, he promised, link philosophy and communication: “Our explanation of the system of the world illustrates these propositions” (Newton [1687] 1999, 382, emphasis mine). Suppressing or including that book (the Preface was written in May, a month before the Halley letter) was thus a debate about genre—about whether system could emerge from scholastic inquiry and from the “mere romance” of hypothesis to perform a different kind of work.

This was the intellectual drama behind the often-told melodrama of Newton’s spats and also the historical prelude to the pairing I highlighted earlier: the calculus translated wholes into parts, and system translated parts into wholes. Calibrating their interaction, however, was no easy task. Newton did, in fact, suppress his first attempt to “exhibit the system of the world from these [mathematical] principles,” revealing in the opening paragraph of the published version¹⁰ that he had

composed an earlier version of book 3 in popular form, so that it might be more widely read. But those who have not sufficiently grasped the principles set down here will certainly not perceive the force of the conclusions, nor will they lay aside the preconceptions to which they have become accustomed over many years; and therefore, to avoid lengthy disputations, I have translated the substance of the earlier version into propositions in a mathematical style, so that they may be read only by those who have first mastered the principles.

This recalibration put system on what we saw Chambers call “firmer ground.” Perhaps appropriately, then, NASA chose the “popular” version Newton rejected to be launched into space. For Newton’s immediate purposes, however, mixing in more of the mathematical distanced system from hypothesis, turning it into a different kind of guesswork—a genre more finely tuned to the communicative function of philosophy.

For Newton that function was not simply a matter of clarity and popularity. Part of making his newly demonstrated knowledge believable was to insulate it from knowledge that would erode that belief through “lengthy disputations.” That meant stopping the older kinds of knowledge that were generated from such disputation. Newton’s strange publication record sets his turn from those kinds and his formal drive to a firmer system in dramatic relief. Newton first published on optics in a 1672 article in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, an effort that elicited a wide range of criticisms requiring detailed rebuttal. For Newton, that kind of debate was not healthy, for it left the knowledge he produced looking like Sarsi’s old knowledge—the unconvincing result of deductive hypothesizing and scholastic debate. His reaction was absolute. “Newton was never again,” as Charles Bazerman (1988) points out,

to publish optical results in a journal, nor was he to publish anything else in the Transactions or any other journal, except for a minor piece in 1701 on a scale of temperatures. He was to present his major physical findings only within the complete and com-prehensive argumentative systems of the Opticks and the Principia. (119)

“I thought that publication should be put off,” wrote Newton in the Preface to the latter, in order to “publish all my results together” (Newton [1687] 1999, 383). The authority of his two inclusive books lay in their communicating through systems that, in Bazerman’s words, “reduced opposing arguments” from debatable differences “to error” (83).

Error correction—once displaced from the public and personal into content and truth—emerged within the books themselves as the process of positing better explanations described by Deutsch. Editions then index progress. Newton justifies the Principia’s third edition, for example, by emphasizing that “some things … are explained a little more fully than previously, and new experiments are added,” and another “argument … is presented a little more fully, and new observations” also “added” (Newton [1725/1726] 1999, 400). More things and better guesses alternate, in the manner described earlier, to produce tighter-fitting explanations.

System assumed a central role in this reshaping of knowledge thanks in part to what Newton did to it. Not only did he put it onto firmer ground by altering its “style,” but by choosing it as the form for consolidating and conveying what his new principles could demonstrate, he provided the “as if” exception to system’s reputation for falling short. Its growing stature was indexed by how people referred to the Principia. The dedication calls it a “treatise most humbly” presented to James II—a genre, as we have seen, commonly employed for knowledge work during the previous century and often a home for systems. But Book 3’s “System of the World,” through the pars pro toto (part for whole) of synecdoche—system’s sister among figures of speech—came to stand for the entire work. The Principia became known as the “Newtonian System.”

Monsters of Mediation—The Sublimity of Simplicity

In its extensive use of maths, the Principia was highly complex—its details decipherable only by a very few. But experienced synecdochically as a system, it conveyed an unprecedented sense of simplicity. What Locke admired as exceptional about Newton’s system was not only its “as if” quality but its clarity—and what that promised for similar endeavors:

And if others could give us so good and clear an account of other parts of Nature, as he has of this our planetary world, and the most considerable Phoenomena observable in it, in his admirable book, Philosophiae naturalis principia Mathematica, we might in time hope to be furnished with more true and certain knowledge in several parts of this stupendious machin, than hitherto we could have expected. (1693, 232)

Once Newton had demonstrated that system could be made “good and clear,” it became a primary genre for negotiating the relationship between complexity and simplicity in other parts of the machine of Nature.

That negotiation became a crucial form of Enlightenment mediation. Its project of “more true and certain knowledge” of more and more “parts” took the inverse square law as its model. The promise of the Principia was that everything could be known because it could be known through such laws. And the premise behind the “could” was that both Nature and its laws shared one fundamental characteristic: simplicity. Since laws reduce the apparently complex to the simple, then the things they claim to describe must themselves be simple.¹¹ Simplicity is thus Newton’s starting point for the “System of the World.” The first of the “Rules for the Study of Natural Philosophy” establishes it as the condition of possibility for the entire enterprise:

Rule 1 No more causes of natural things should be admitted than are both true and sufficient to explain their phenomena.

As the philosophers say: Nature does nothing in vain, and more causes are in vain when fewer suffice. For nature is simple and does not indulge in the luxury of superfluous causes. (Newton [1687] 1999, 794)

This Ockhamite proclamation, in its insistence on sticking to the sufficient, cuts off from consideration anything that is more than enough. Knowledge was thus reclassified as well as produced. Metaphysics, for example, once contiguous with natural philosophy as a speculative science, was now ruled out of the system. Like the supernatural, the metaphysical was an example of “more,” and thus placed beyond the bounds of the causal.

Boundaries, like parts and wholes, have been, as noted earlier, a persistent feature of the genre of system, playing a more or less prominent role in different deployments of the genre. It became particularly prominent in specific fields of knowledge making, such as thermodynamics, where a system is explicitly understood as the part of an environment under consideration. The effect of any “working substance,” such as steam, can then be consistently measured within the set confines of the system. In the twentieth century, this constituting of systems through boundary setting became a basic experimental protocol of the modern practices of system modeling and systems theory.

By starting his System with “Rules,” Newton helped to establish that protocol for knowledge making. Rule 1 defined Nature as a simple system, and rule 2, as we saw in chapter 1, insisted on that system’s internal scalability. If apples behaved like moons for the same simple reason, then gravity could be expressed as a “law” governing both. That law, in turn, materialized the notion of a “solar system” as a physical entity: all things that are under the influence of the gravitational pull of the sun. Composed and used in this manner, system thus embodied Bacon’s handshake of the intellectual and visible worlds: system became a thing in the world and a way of constituting that world as a thing.

The “Newtonian Moment,” to use Mordechai Feingold’s (2004) phrase for the immediate and astonishing impact of Newton and his work in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was thus a major event in the history of mediation. A new process of knowledge making was encoded within a specific genre: the Newtonian system demonstrated what could be gained by setting boundaries and exploring the relationship between parts and whole within those boundaries. Although systems did continue to be blamed for failing to explain and for producing “imaginary” philosophers, the Principia was a watershed in the attitudes toward and the use of system. Newton was widely understood to have provided an example of what system could do when, in Chambers’s words, it was not only “built on the firmest Ground” but also “raised by the severest Rules.”

As Newton’s system convinced others, in Britain and across Europe, that the entire world really was a system, the genre’s logic of scale and simplicity fueled its proliferation. Almost a century after the Principia was published, the abbé de Condillac still celebrated Newton’s achievement as a matter of system and its consequences:

Since the universe can be simplified as a system, each part of it having the least complexity is a system: man himself is a system. If, then, we renounce systems, how can we explore anything deeply? I agree that in general philosophers are wrong. They invent systems, but systems should not be in-vented. We should discover those which the author of nature has made. (Condillac [1749] 1947, 3.511–3.512)¹²

Writers of systems, that is, needed to be good readers—of both the divine author and the deductive “errors that the craze for systems led to” (Condillac [1749] 1982, 10). The former told of man’s place in nature as part of things as they are, while the latter detailed his departures from it when pressed to explain those things.

In pairing the divine and system, Condillac had the precedent of Newton’s turn to God in the “General Scholium.” Added to the end of the Principia’s second edition (1713) as a comment on the main books, it begins by contrasting the “hypothesis of vortices” with the explanation of bodies in motion that Newton had just demonstrated. By tagging Descartes’ effort as a “hypothesis” at the start of the “Scholium,” Newton set the stage for ending it with the catchphrase that became the motto of Newtonian science: “Hypothesis non fingo” (“I do not feign hypotheses”). In the paragraphs between, Newton gave his alternative form of guesswork—guesswork modified (in the mathematical “style”) to make it demonstrable—a divine seal of approval:

This most elegant system of the sun, planets, and comets could not have arisen without the design and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being. (Newton [1713] 1999, 940, emphasis mine)

With that system as the template, the rest of the universe falls simply into place:

And if the fixed stars are the centers of similar systems, they will all be constructed according to a similar design and subject to the dominion of One, especially since the light of the fixed stars is of the same nature as the light of the sun, and all the systems send light into all the others.

All of the other systems will be just like the one system Newton described in Book 3—the oneness of all systems evidence of the dominion of the One God.

We need that evidence, Newton insisted, because “without dominion,” God “is not the Lord God.” We can thus “know him” only through our knowledge of his dominion: “only by his properties and attributes and by the wisest and best construction of things and their final causes.” After the hesitation and revision I have documented, Newton chose system as the tool that could best construct things with the wisdom to demonstrate

that gravity really exists and acts according to the laws that we have set forth and is sufficient to explain all the motions of the heavenly bodies and of our sea.

That effort at causation—per rule 1, stop when you have a true and sufficient one—was the closest we could get, claimed Newton, to final causes, “for all discourse about God is derived through a certain similitude from things human, which while not perfect is nevertheless, a similitude of some kind.” “To treat of God from phenomena,” he concluded, “is certainly a part of ‘natural’ philosophy” (941–943).

Instead of excluding God from or installing Him into this newly capacious version of natural philosophy, Newton made “godhood”¹³ an optional topic—a part that could be included (as in the Principia’s second and third editions), or not (as in its first), by those who did or did not share his belief. Either way, the exact same phenomena remained the actual objects of study. As the tool of choice for constructing this newly popular kind of knowledge, system’s popularity rose—and, in treating phenomena in a simple way—system then repaid the favor, enhancing natural philosophy’s broad appeal. “A system is nothing other,” argued Condillac,

than the arrangement of different parts of an art or science in an order in which they all lend each other support and in which the last ones are explained by the first ones. Parts that explain other parts are called principles, and the fewer principles a system has the more perfect it is. It is even desirable to reduce all principles to a single one. (Condillac [1749] 1982, 1)

What systems want, in other words, is simplicity—in this case, the highest ratio of parts to principles. The most desirable and most common method through most of the eighteenth century, as recommended here, had been an emphasis on fewer and more comprehensive principles—for example, one law to explain motions of all kinds. Toward the end of the century, however, with more—and more specialized—systems, ratios were raised by increasing the diversity and thus number of parts.

Such simplicity could, of course, be seen as reductive rather than productive, and accusations of that kind constituted another chapter in system’s history of blame. In 1759, for example, Oliver Goldsmith wielded that complaint as a weapon in the increasingly heated rivalry between Britain and France. His chapter on the French in The Present State of Polite Learning in Europe begins by complimenting them on a “growth of genius … more vigorous than ours.” He credits that in part to “the fair sex in France” having “not a little contributed to prevent the decline of taste and literature, by expecting such qualifications in their admirers.”

Unlike the “damsels” in Holland who can be “caught”

by dumb shew, by a squeeze of the hand, or the ogling of a broad eye, [French women] must be pursued at once through all the labyrinths of the Newtonian System. (Goldsmith 1759, 100, 102–103)

Navigating those labyrinths was, I have described, a matter of negotiating the relationship between complexity and simplicity. Goldsmith was not critical of the former—handling complexity kept genius on its toes—but the latter, in his analysis, had become a stumbling block for the French:

The writers of this country have of late also fallen into a method of considering every part of art and science, as arising from simple principles. … To this end they turn to our view that side of the subject which contributes to support their hypothesis, while the objections are generally passed over in silence. Thus an universal system rises from a partial representation of the question, an Whole is concluded from a Part. (112–113)

Bearing witness to system’s pervasive presence by midcentury, Goldsmith claims to find those risings and conclusion in “almost every subject,” even those “naturally proceeding on many principles” are “all taught to proceed along the line of systematic simplicity” (112–113).

Goldsmith’s critique is particularly valuable for our understanding of system’s proliferation because he recognized that this line did not dead-end in simplicity. Thanks to system’s scalability, a simple whole could become a part of a more complex one. Just as the labyrinthine had been reduced to the simple, so the simple could scale up to its apparent opposite. In Goldsmith’s rendering, the line of simplicity scaled in both directions: either “contracting a single science into system” or “drawing up a system of all the sciences united.”

Goldsmith’s description of the latter evokes for us now Mary Shelley’s bad dream of a half-century later. “Such undertakings as these,” Goldsmith warned,

are carried on by different writers cemented into one body, and concurring in the same design, by the mediation of a bookseller. From these auspicious combinations, proceed those monsters of learning, the Trevoux,¹⁴ Encyclopedie’s, and Bibliotheques of the age. (114)

These monsters of mediation were large scale in every way. Most obviously, they dwarfed in physical size the pioneering encyclopedic efforts from the previous century, such as Alsted’s—leaving readers “daunted at the immense distance between one great pasteboard and the other” (115). But they were also immense undertakings in human terms. Thanks to Newton’s example and popularity, these systems were not single-authored efforts aimed at a small circle of scholars, but “in making these, men of every rank in literature are employed, wits and dunces contribute their share” to the “enormous mass” that “makes its way among the public” (114).

At this scale of pages, writers, and readers, system evoked the sublimity of simplicity. He who enters the “wide extended desart” of these volumes, warned Goldsmith, discovers that “what is past only encreases his terror of what is to come” (115–116). In criticizing the French, he does highlight the negative effects of simplicity and scaling—its “terror” and the “perplexity” it produces—but the admirable and powerful facets of sublime aspirations surface in the use of words like “great” and “genius.”

Mixed Messages—“Towards” System

This mixed message of affirmation and critique—Newtonian optimism regarding what could be known and the record of ambition gone awry—is a characteristic feature of mid- and late eighteenth-century attitudes toward system and of the systems themselves.¹⁵ A letter to the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1777, for example, began with an obligatory bow to Bacon and then proceeded to turn a discussion about inoculating the poor into a debate over system: when men’s

opinions are warped in favour of a System, all future experiments must be made to fit it. Thus from some successful experience of the benefit of tar-water, Bp. Berkeley erected a fanciful and elaborate theory, which attributed to it the essence of all medical virtues. (“Letter,” 1777, 105)

A writer in the Monthly Review, however, had earlier cited precisely the same figure not to attack but to extol the “spirit of system”:

To the discerning enquirer after philosophy and science, the speculations of a Berkeley or a Hume, notwithstanding the absurdities with which they may be chargeable, are infinitely more valuable than the collective mass of the dissertations and essays that have been written against them. (“Review of Essays Moral, Philosophical, and Political,” 1772, 382–382)

Notice how a disagreement that appears to be about the work of an individual turns out to be about the form of that work: the systematic speculations of Berkeley versus the essays of his critics.

David Hume’s career famously enacted that debate. When his systematic Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740) “fell dead-born from the press,” he switched genres, fragmenting it into separate inquiries into “understanding” (1748), “morals” (1751) “passions” (1757), and “religion” (1755), and then arranged to have them published together posthumously as Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1777). The status of “system” played a crucial role in the content as well as the form of those efforts. He used system both to explain how skepticism works—focusing on the conditions under which we should “embrace a new system with regard to the evidence of our senses”—and to clarify its purpose. Skepticism, he argued, is not a turn from the production of knowledge but a “necessary preparative” to do it well: “though by these means we shall make both a slow and a short progress in our systems; [they] are the only methods, by which we can ever hope to reach truth” (Hume [1758/1777] 1902/1975, sec. 12, 150–152).

Thomas Pownall’s A Treatise on the Study of Antiquities (1782) is one of the most telling examples of this debate over system, for rather than indulging in abstract praise or satire of others, Pownall posed to himself the practical problem of finding the best genre for a particular kind of work. For studying antiquities, he argued, the choice comes down to making systems or collections:

Did we follow the seductions of fancy, and quitting the sober steps of experience, hastily adopt system; and then form a dotage on our own phantoms, dress such system out in the rags and remnants of antiquity, we should only make work to mock ourselves: or were we on the other hand to persevere in making unmeaning endless collections without scope or view, we should be the dupes of our futility, and become in either case ridiculous. (Pownall 1782, 3)

The risks of both genres are cast as risks to the health of those who use them: “The upstart fungus of system is poison to the mind; and an unintrusive mass of learning may create and indulge a false appetite, but never can feed the mind … [for] all the learning in the world, if it stops short and rests on particulars, never will become knowledge.” Pownall believed that his colleagues—tempted by “extreams of self-delusion on one hand, or of the false conceptions of barren folly on the other”—could choose the right genre only by keeping their “minds constantly fixed on the PRINCIPLE and END of our institution” (4).

That institution was the Society of Antiquaries, and what Pownall termed its “branch of learning” did require, despite the risks, a system—but a system of a particular kind and constructed in a particular way. As antiquaries, Pownall argues, their study must be the study of “the system of the human being; and of the state of nature, of which that being is a part.” Since that state changes over time, the antiquary must trace the “great machine” of that system “in all its parts” through “every period of its progressive existence, and compare all with the present state of it” (4). Pownall’s strategy for antiquarianism thus turns out to be the “gratifying” relationship between system and history that I described using the tectonic maps of chapter 2. As a product of the last two decades of the century, it corresponds chronologically to the third of those maps in which system and history came to share a tectonic edge. To produce a historical system, Pownall advises, the analysis “must” avoid the “theoretic abstract view of things in general” that leads to “self-delusion” and follow instead “the path in which nature acting leads; and by a strict induction of her laws as found in her actions” (5).

Pownall understood that path to nature’s laws through system to be Newton’s path. System under the rule of simplicity is not a fungus, nor can it be extreme. In one of the most clear-cut examples of the shape knowledge takes from the Enlightenment, Pownall pairs that Newtonian “line” with the “concurrent” one of Bacon and his tools: “what the lord Verulam calls “Inventarium opum humanarum”—the “inventory of human resources” (5–6). That line of mediation should be “traced,” argued Pownall, using Bacon’s strategy of multiple histories, headed by the “experimental history” that Bacon posited as a primary vehicle for “Reinstauration.” As Bacon’s line joins Newton’s, the renewal of knowledge takes, for Pownall, the form of a system. It does so because the Newtonian exception—the “as if” of his particular system—convinced him, like so many others, that “there is in nature a system” (emphasis mine). Using Bacon’s historical tools, Pownall aspired to translate the system of nature into a knowledge system of linked “causes and effects” that “investigation may retrace back” to the “principles on which the whole depends” (6–7).

In Pownall’s case, then, the mixed message of critique and affirmation of system set the stage for treating system not just as a better genre, but as the genre that nature’s own system calls on us to reproduce. Whatever the failings of individual systems—in fact, because they could and did have failings—system became a primary form of the Enlightenment. In addition to its empowerment by history, we can gauge that ascension through system’s relations with other forms, such as essay, and with particular types of organization, such as alphabetization.

The competition between system and essay throughout the eighteenth century—documented, as we have seen, by Johnson in his Dictionary and by my title page counts in figure 1.5—emerges as well in the titles themselves and in comments that invoke both genres. One phrase in particular was repeatedly used to suggest the direction knowledge was now supposed to take in response to nature’s call to reproduce its own system on the page. Right at midcentury, for example, John Burton sought to recover his reputation as a physician after his arrest for treason for Jacobite leanings after the rebellion of1745. His primary tactic was to publish a work on obstetrics to compete with William Smellie’s Theory and Practice of Midwifery. The strategy was twofold: include engravings (the first illustrations published by George Stubbs, who later gained fame for his paintings of horses) and set the generic bar as high as possible. His title turned Smellie’s nouns into adjectives modifying his own project’s lofty ambition: An Essay Toward a Complete New System of Midwifry, Theoretical and Practical (Burton and Stubbs 1751).¹⁶

“Essay towards system” conveyed the Newtonian aspiration of Enlightenment—the sense of being generically adequate to the real. System became the preferred form of attention to nature. By 1771 Horace Walpole could put this generic preference to what we would now call aesthetic ends with this assessment of the landscape architect William Kent in “The Modern Taste of Gardening”:

When nature was taken into the plan, under improvements, every step that was made, pointed out new beauties and inspired new ideas. At that moment appeared Kent, painter enough to taste the charms of landscape, bold and opinionative enough to dare and to dictate, and born with a genius to strike out a great system from the twilight of imperfect essays.¹⁷

Other techniques for striking out systems from essays were not quite as daring. Perhaps the most mundane was alphabetization. Adding more was one way to improve on the imperfect, and the alphabet facilitated that process by providing a template for organizing more parts into a limitless whole without requiring new categories.

The alphabet thus occupied the borderland between collection and system that so concerned Pownall. In fact, Johnson’s definition of the genre that was most closely identified with the alphabetical—the dictionary—cited Isaac Watt’s description of that genre as “a collection of words.” But such collections also became literary Petri dishes for growing new generic strains by modifying the alphabetical code. Diderot and d’Alembert, for example, as Richard Yeo has shown, praised Chambers “for his attempt to impart system to an alphabetical dictionary” by adding cross-references to his Cyclopaedia (or Universal Dictionary)—such as those we followed earlier between “system” and “hypothesis” (Yeo 2001, 26).

The French efforts “toward” system in the Encyclopédie, however, were not enough to prevent William Smellie (another Smellie, not Burton’s rival) from turning them into a selling point for the 1771 first edition of his Encyclopaedia Britannica:

Whoever has had occasion to consult Chambers, Owen, etc. or even the voluminous French Encyclopédie, will have discovered the folly of attempting to communicate science under the various technical terms arranged in alphabetical order. Such an attempt is repugnant to the very idea of science, which is a connected series of conclusions deduced from self-evident or previously discovered principles.

For Smellie, knowledge is shaped by the relationship between “parts” and wholes—a relationship governed by Newtonian “principles” and thus incompatible with the alphabetical. “But where is the man,” asks Smellie, “who can learn the principles of any science from a Dictionary compiled upon the plan hitherto adopted” (Britannica 1771, Preface 1).

Smellie announced his “NEW PLAN”—one that would allow “any man of ordinary parts” to learn principles—on the title page of the first edition and then dwelled on the intention of the “compilers” in the Preface:

Instead of dismembering the Sciences, by attempting to treat them intelligibly under a multitude of technical terms, they have digested the principles of every science in the form of systems or distinct treatises, and explained the terms as they occur in the order of the alphabet, with references to the sciences to which they belong.

The editors of Britannica’s third edition celebrated their predecessors’ initial modification of the alphabetical as a necessary switch of genre. They understood Smellie to have turned to “system” as the generic alternative to “collection”—the competition’s “vast collection of particular truths” that was of “little advantage to the arts of life.” To turn to system was, per Newton, to turn to nature itself: “Much cautious attention is requisite to class objects in human systems as they are in fact classed in the system of nature” (Britannica 1797, Preface, 1–2, emphasis mine).

By that third edition, in the kind of change we now call “emergence” (Siskin 2005, 819), more and more classification, in Britannica and in many other venues, yielded difference—a difference in the organization of knowledge itself that I explore in the next chapter. Smellie’s Encyclopaedia was not even the only “Britannica” to feature this turn toward system. Compare the two title pages from 1747 and 1769 in figure 3.4.

Figure 3.4 Title pages from 1747 and 1769.

Volume 1 of William Oldys’s Biographica Britannica announced itself in 1747 as “collected” and then “digested in the Manner of” Bayle’s Dictionary. Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire Historique et Critique was first published at the end of the previous century (1695–1697) and translated into English in 1709. Its lives were collected into a strictly alphabetical format, but Bayle, like Chambers, sought to surpass his predecessors within the entries themselves; his technique was not cross-referencing but a focus on compilation, comparison, and skeptical critique.

Richard Popkin argues that Bayle’s influence on Enlightenment figures such as Oldys—figures ranging from Voltaire to Hume—entailed a misunderstanding. “Bayle’s message,” Popkin asserts, “was that of the inadequacy and incoherence of man’s intellectual endeavors, of the need for a different guide—faith and revelation.” But that stance was “transformed,” Popkin argues, “by the Age of Reason into a positive affirmative of other views, into a new theology—scientism” (Popkin 2003, 300). The notion of “thinkers” misunderstanding each other fits well with the “Ages” and “-isms” of the history of ideas, but does not help us explain what happened and why. Within a history of mediation, however, we can engage Bayle’s effort as participating in the remediation of scholastic forms, including scholastic systems. Like Newton, his contemporary, but in a different way, Bayle’s skeptical dismantling of established kinds of knowledge cleared the way for the reshaping I am describing; his work, that is, was not mysteriously misunderstood but enabling.

James Granger launched his challenge to Bayle’s and Oldys’s “manner” of proceeding within one year of Smellie’s new plan for encyclopedias. The 1769 title page highlights the primary strategy common to both endeavors: these were turns to system. Granger actually used the standard phrasing, describing his project as an “ESSAY towards … SYSTEM.” And since he called the volume a Biographical History, it is yet another example of system and history sharing the same late eighteenth-century title page. Their interrelations shaped Granger’s effort to—as Smellie’s successors put it—“class objects.”

In a lengthy appraisal, the Monthly Review focused on that effort, providing an extended extract of “The Author’s plan.” This sample highlighted the interaction of historical classification—

All portraits of such persons as flourished before the end of the reign of Henry the Seventy, are thrown into one article

—with other kinds:

In the succeeding reigns, they are ranged in the following order:

Class I. Kings, queens, princes, princesses, &c. of the royal family.

Class II. Great officers of state, and of the household. (“Review of Granger’s Biographical History of England,” 1769, 209)

Many more classes follow, illustrating once again system’s role in negotiating the relationship between the simple and the complex. Although Granger described the move toward system as an act of “reducing,” the reduction took the form of dividing and including; the drive to simplify by grouping things into different classes, that is, heightened attention to difference—thus inviting more classes.

That invitation was a major reason that Granger, as Felicity Nussbaum notes, was “among the innovative few that reflect on the method for representing female character in biography” (2005, 308). In addition to the initial chronological grouping, Granger topped out at twelve different classes, including not just “Ladies, and others, of the female sex” but also others

of both sexes, chiefly of the lowest order of the people, remarkable from only one circumstance in their lives; namely, such as lived to a great age, deformed persons, convicts, &c. (Granger 1769, 2–3)

The move toward system thus changed what was being systematized, transforming the project of national biography from Oldys’s collection of the “Most eminent PERSONS” into an attempt at (“essay”) a new whole consisting “of CHARACTERS disposed in different Classes.”

This apotheosis of system in the ambitions of Smellie, Granger, and many others was furthered by system’s interrelations with other forms. History, as I am documenting, played an important role here, but system’s new claims and status were most clearly and grandly enacted through a form of self-improvement: the embedding of systems within Systems. For a brief period of time in the mid-and late eighteenth century, the decades we most commonly brand Enlightenment in the West—the genre that was used to trump system was system. Here, for example, is Benjamin Martin in 1747:

Having read and consider’d the Design of the several Books hitherto published for the Explanation of the NEWTONIAN PHILOSOPHY, under the titles of Commentaries, Courses, Essays, Elements, Systems, &c. I observed not one of them all could be justly esteemed a TRUE SYSTEM, or COMPLEAT BODY of this science. (1)

“SYSTEM” rises from this long list of genres to be singled out as the “TRUE” form of “science” here in Martin’s preface and in his title: Philosophia Britannica or A New and Comprehensive SYSTEM of the Newtonian PHILOSOPHY, ASTRONOMY and GEOGRAPHY. The solution to failed, partial, or old systems and other forms of generic inadequacy was system itself—a Master System ambitious enough to comprehend the embedded remains of its predecessors.

Notes

9. The emotive language of letters (deserting, unkind) plus the era’s proclivity for personification do invite a personal and personality-driven interpretation of that sequence. The history of ideas, with the emphasis I have described on human agency, often yields interpretations that pursue that invitation. I turn to the history of mediation to focus instead on issues of genre and knowledge. These passages also lend themselves to a focus on gender, as well as on genre. Particularly useful in that regard are the efforts of scholars such as Sandra Harding and Evelyn Fox Keller to highlight the social values that permeate the language, concepts, and history of science. See, for example, Harding 1991 and Keller 1985. I see my exploration of the Fair Intellectual-Club in this book as complementing their attention to gender.

10. For a best estimate of the sequence of composition of these versions, see Newton 1978, 236:

Calmed by Halley’s letter of 29 June 1686, and seeking “how best to compose the present dispute” with Hooke, Newton may have started pretty rapidly thereafter on the recomposition of the astronomical book “in the mathematical way” and accomplished this, as well as the completion of Book II, in the autumn and winter following. It seems more natural to believe that matters happened thus, than that Newton first wrote De Systemate Mundi, then abandoned its more popular approach and rewrote it, then decided to suppress Book III altogether, and finally changed his mind once more to include it. Indeed, his expressed intention of preventing those incapable of mastering Book I from following Book III may well have been specially aimed at Hooke, of whose mathematical attainments Newton had a low opinion.

This first version was published after Newton’s death in Latin and in English in 1728. See Newton 2004, xii.

11. There is a history of simplicity of which Newton’s effort can be considered a part. Aristotle, for example, begins the Physica with a paragraph invoking and centered on στοιχείων, meaning element but often understood and translated as “simplest elements” as in the following:

When the objects of an inquiry, in any department, have principles, conditions, or elements, it is through acquaintance with these that knowledge, that is to say scientific knowledge, is attained. For we do not think that we know a thing until we are acquainted with its primary conditions or first principles, and have carried our analysis as far as its simplest elements. Plainly therefore in the science of Nature, as in other branches of study, our first task will be to try to determine what relates to its principles. (Aristotle 1930, 1, emphasis mine)

In his chapter of this history, Newton is setting up “simplicity” as a “rule” that addresses the particular issues of demonstrating hypotheses, doing so in the language of mathematics, and claiming a law applicable to the system of the world.

20. In Sloane’s will, the word is used in its early modern sense, synonymous with “collection of objects,” and refers to the things rather than the building that holds them. Older “museums” are particular collections, the work of a particular collector (Myrone and Pelz 1999, 193). In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, an emerging meaning of the word privileged the housing—the space—the place of the collection. Paula Findlen observes that by the end of the seventeenth century, “the language of collecting had evolved to such an extent that it designated the projects of collectors … as the ‘museums’ that gave meaning to the rooms in which scholars hoarded and displayed knowledge” (Findlen 1994, 49). Here, still, the word museum is significantly the collection, even as the meaning begins to leak from “projects” to the galleries. With the British Museum, the word came to signify to the public, national space in which objects were held and encountered. And the collection became something housed in a museum rather than the museum itself. The British Museum thus established a meaning of “museum” separate from a single collector and even, potentially, from a specific group of objects.