The revolution in scientific theory was deep, though perhaps narrow as a result. It begins with Copernicus, and ends, if it has ended, with Newton. In a broad sense, it did not discover new entities, but rather rediscovered old entities. It began with the theory that the earth orbits the sun and is in sympathy with the theory that matter is empty space and irrational energies. Neither earth nor the sun nor matter are new discoveries. In fact, they are some of the most basic realities – we learn to call them familiar almost before we are out of the womb, long before it is revealed to us that they are not so familiar after all. The method of this science is mathematical, and it measures more than it explains. It is an art for specialists; it is the art of empirical calculation.
The revolution in research, as I am compelled to call it, was broad, though it might be seen as shallow. It is impossible to say precisely where it began, but we will not be far off if we nominate Columbus, and say that it begins with him and ends, if it has ended, with Diderot. It is this revolution, something quite distinct from the work of Newton, that accounts for the great difference in scale between the medieval mind and our own minds. The medieval thinker is not less intelligent, nor less diligent, but he has less information to deal with. He may even be a better thinker as a result; but at the expense of having less to think about. All the greatest thoughts and truths are there for him, but far fewer of the insignificant truths. He has less information to sort through. The revolution lies in the fact that, between the invention of the printing press and the printing of the first encyclopaedia, such a vast amount of knowledge and information was introduced into the Western World. If all scientists worked like Galileo and Kepler and Newton, the stock of knowledge would have increased only very slightly; the truths uncovered would be vitally important, but they would be very few. And yet the stock of knowledge was vastly increased, and much of the new information was of what we would call a scientific nature. If we had to point to scientists associated with this, they would not be lacking: all those of the type of Vesalius and Boyle and Hooke.
Both revolutions, the revolution in theories and the revolution in research, were scientific, in that both were empirical, and contributed incalculably to the modern mind. But they are opposite in that one said, look, and you shall see; and the other said, think, and you shall realise that you do not see. To discover America, you merely pull back the curtain of the Atlantic, and believe what you see. To discover gravity, you must pull back that curtain of the senses, and see with your intellect what with your senses and your commonsense you cannot see. Commonsense, aided by the senses, tells you that things fall because they are heavy, or through some kind of magnetism. Commonsense says that a heavier object falls faster. The scientist first dispels commonsense, by dropping cannonballs from the leaning tower of Pisa, and then sidelines the senses, by describing mathematically the precise rate of the fall. You will not find a single person on earth who can testify that, with their unaided senses, they saw the inverse square law in operation. At best they saw something that tallied with it. In the end, modern scientific theories are a scourge to the senses: the experts can tell us whatever they like – it might even contradict the witness of the senses – and we will have to believe them, for the very good reason that they are generally right and our senses are almost systematically wrong. If we can believe in quantum mechanics, what can we not believe in? The earth does not seem to move, and, as the court of clergymen pointed out, the wisest ancients all speak as though it does not. ‘And yet,’ as Galileo might have said, though he did not – ‘and yet it moves’.
This side of science comes from what historians and scientists call, with a rare flash of humour, the Copernican revolution. To understand the reason for this, one must understand the state of astronomy in the time of Copernicus. At the time, astronomy was, in practice, applied geometry. It was recognised that the stars and planets were regular and repetitive in their motions, but there were varying degrees of complexity. The stars were simple: they went around the earth every day, and had a yearly cycle as well. The sun, likewise, rose and set each day, and moved from North to South and North again by a fixed amount every year. The other planets – of which there were six, including the moon – were more complex, so more complex formulae were found to account for their seemingly erratic regularities. They moved now fast, now slow, now forward, now backward. Every time the astronomical tables recording the paths of the planets were improved, the accounts became more complicated or more flawed. For they rested on several assumptions which were, in fact, false, though they were, equally, quite reasonable. One assumption was that the planets orbited the earth, as, from our perspective, they do. Another assumption was that the planets moved in circles. As they did not seem to be moving around the earth in simple circles, it was inferred from the start that they must move in circles grafted onto the circles that orbited the earth – on epicycles. These assumptions were in their way reasonable. So was the assumption that nothing changed beyond the moon: four thousand years of astronomical observation had not uncovered anything directly suggesting the contrary.
So geometrical difficulties existed, and no new information to shed light on the stars was forthcoming. Hence the revolution in astronomy was not the result of a new discovery, nor even of a new method. On earth, explorers were uncovering continents in the oceans and manuscripts in the monasteries. But there would be no New World in the sky, unless some start should shoot down from the astral sphere to fight the sun for the dominion of the day. There would be no new scholarship of the sky, for there were no new manuscripts of Mars. Nor would there be a new botany of the moon, or an anatomy of Saturn. Hence the revolution in astronomy would not rest on the discovery of new marvels, but on shuffling the numbers and rearranging the old elements. It would be abstract, not concrete. It would be a revolution of logistics.
Here then is the familiar story: Copernicus published a book retaining the old system of cycles and epicycles, but grafting all the planetary epicycles onto the circle of the sun. Which, in the end, is as good as to say, everything revolves around the sun, and the earth might as well. Copernicus thought it did; his successor Tycho Brahe, though agreeing that the planets circle the sun, thought that the sun still circled the earth. On either system, the calculations became simpler, though there were still discrepancies in the figures: and having broken one of the indubitable laws of commonsense (that the great light that moves across the sky each day does, indeed, move across the sky) it became necessary to break another. Hence the bold vandal Kepler, who had a much greater desire for accuracy, not only agreed with Copernicus, but concluded that the planets do not orbit in orbits or cycle in circles, but rather orbit and cycle in ellipses: and the sun not quite at their centre.
These discoveries in astronomy are responsible for the mathematical side of the scientific revolution. We may almost say the mathematical revolution, for, as I have insisted, it is quite distinct in manner and style from the other side of the revolution, the revolution in research. The first revolution justifies one old term for what we call science, the term ‘natural philosophy’. The other revolution, which I shall shortly discuss, justifies the other old term, ‘natural history’. The one changed our understanding of the known universe, the other increased the scope of the information to be understood. The one analysed, the other annaled the world. The one comprehended the facts, the other collected the facts. No one now would doubt that Copernicus and Kepler were scientists, and enlightened men. As for the Copernican revolution, no one doubts it was a scientific revolution. As for the revolution in research, it strikes us as less scientific, and in some respects almost as accidental. But it is problematic to credit the one and criticise the other. By itself, the Copernican revolution would have improved our worldview little. The revolution in research was every bit as essential to the development of what we call science, and should call modernity. But let us trace its development.
Where it began is hard to say, for the medievals had always been obsessed with information. It was medieval man who first thought up systematic theology, and they majored on the bestiary. One of the most typically medieval faults in poetry is the habit of cataloguing: giving too much information. But to like to know is not the same as knowing; and one may like to know without putting in the required effort to find things out. If you trust the experts, you need not turn to your own experiments. Medieval scholars had an enormous faith in the theories of their experts; nearly as much faith as we have in the theories of our experts. Would it not be naïve to say that we are never misled by the bias or inexperience of our experts? In any case, it is certain that they frequently were.
In the time leading up to Copernicus, it suddenly became clear on all fronts how much further good thinkers could go than the experts, if they set their mind to it. At the same time, a wealth of information that the experts knew nothing about flooded in, through the early inter-continental ships, through the tubes of telescopes, and through the introduction of Greek into the educational curriculum. In the same century the printing press was invented, and the book trade blew up at an unbelievable rate. Where there had been a habit of laboriously ransacking a few dozens of books for quotes and curiosities, there was now the habit of swimming in hundreds of voluminous volumes. Where there had been the pastime of experimenting with optics, there was now a fully-fledged, ground-up rewriting of the old account of the material world. Where there had been luxuries brought in from the East second hand by mediterranean ships, there was now plentiful supply brought direct round the coasts of whole continents and from worlds hitherto unknown.
As a result of exploration, which took Europeans into every nook and cranny of the world, geography was the first science to be revolutionised. It is not typical to think of this as science, perhaps because exploration paid, and some think science should not. The same people think that technology is the natural result of science, and on both counts they are confused. The labour of exploration, though its motive was mercantile, was a work of investigation, of accurate observation and recording, and therefore it was scientific. Not the least significant distinction of modern life and thought is that it incorporates seven continents and global communication; not the least significant distinction of modern maps is that they do not trail off into vague unknowns ‘where be dragons’. There is no mystery of the East now; and there is no Hy Brasil or isle of paradise in the West. But if science can be motivated by mercantilism, the marvel is not that it was, in the matter of exploration, but rather that it was not, in the matter of invention. The myth that technology and science are inextricable is not new; it was current during the scientific revolution itself, for it was Francis Bacon who said that knowledge is power. He might have realised that knowledge is not power: knowledge is knowledge. Telescopes and microscopes came out the scientific revolution: the scientists helped themselves. But the first stirrings of practical technology for the improvement of life had to wait another century and more; and when they came, they came from tradesmen, not scientists. Those tradesmen and their Industrial Revolution are a whole different story.
After geography, the next science to be revolutionised was anatomy. Modern anatomy has learnt to proclaim that humans are essentially apes. It began with a furious insistence that humans are not essentially apes. This original insistence tells us something more profound about its nature: it tells us that it is a science of discovery and of details. There are indeed certain broad resemblances between humans and apes – a family resemblance, if you will, or a hint of parody, as I suspect; but the details are different. The ancient expert whose textbooks lasted the length of the middle ages, Galen, had treated the difference as negligible, and had explained the human body by experimenting on apes. For this, and other reasons, his textbooks were rather imperfect, and it fell to a young professor named Vesalius to correct him. Correct him he did; but the spirit of correction quickly spilled over into a spirit of vindictive opposition. Galen the teacher became Galen the rival. He had to be surpassed and outdone in every way possible. There was an indignant independence – the old authority had deceived them. There were a boost in confidence – careful re-examination of the human body revealed a great deal of new information. It was as though a new science had been invented, though that was not the case. Only, a new life and spirit had been breathed into anatomy by these felt slights and felt successes.
Meanwhile, a dozen other sciences were flourishing on a diet of discovery; it filled the universities and drove a wedge through the church. The great influx of information was not a coordinated effort. The experimentalists were for abolishing the authorities, so that among them Galen and Aristotle fell into disrepute. The men of letters were still discovering new authorities, so that in the universities Galen and Aristotle – besides Homer and Plutarch and Sophocles and Thucydides – were fêted like kings. The explorers were not necessarily interested in either the science or the scholarship – and, since they were gambling on big money, they might have been inclined to sneer at both. Whatever the disunion in their ranks, though, their accomplishments were in the end the same: to increase the stock of raw information by deliberate and concentrated exploration. If we think that the increase of knowledge and the spirit of accuracy that brought it about are scientific, we cannot deny even the humanists of the universities their part in science. It was not white coats in laboratories that made the modern scientific mind.
While de Gama and Magellan were mapping the coastlines in boats, Eustachi and Fallopio were dissecting cadavers in small theatres. Mathematicians felt the winds of revitalisation too, in yet another environment – their ships being chairs and their cadavers quadratics. The scholars of plants prospered, the investigation of animals progressed. Observational astronomers discovered new stars, mapped out moons and scrutinised the faces of the planets. Metallurgy became systematic under the hands of Agricola. On all sides knowledge was increased. The microscope and the telescope, the barometer and the scientific clock revealed secrets beyond the reach of the hand and mind of man. After his long, forced medieval reverie on the vanity of all earthly things, Solomon had returned to his house of wisdom.
This is the context in which we find Browne. Like Vesalius, he is an investigator of details. He is not a whit less keen, devoted, or perceptive than the rest of them. If they were scientists, he too is a thoroughgoing scientist. It is, however, necessary to say a word or two about why he made so few and little discoveries himself. We must not let this detain us long: for in a large part, perhaps, it is owing to time and chance, which happen to all. For the rest, we must remember that a scientist and an innovator are two different things. A scientist is someone who pursues knowledge, not someone who finds the unknown. One of the more unique traits in Browne is that he has an interest in the details of all things: he is at least an historian, a botanist, an anatomist, a linguist, a theologian, and a philosopher: and before me I have an essay that lists no less than 27 distinct disciplines in which he was learned. He was as deep in book-learning as in empirical observation; and as he read omnivorously, he observed omnivorously. For this very reason his discoveries are small and disconnected; but it would be a mistake to think he is superficial. He is, perhaps, not as intense in any one field as most of the names that go down in scientific history, but he is thoroughly competent in all that he does. The small discoveries prove that. It was not by being superficial that he discovered grave-wax or called into doubt the origin of the word ‘dread’. It was by being a scientist.
In this regard, he was almost more of a scientist than his peers, even though that made him a less indispensable scientist. If science is driven by curiosity, his curiosity is second to none. If science is about exploring the knowledge available to human beings, his explorations took him much further than most. Vesalius made great discoveries in the human body, but scarce left the human body. Browne was accomplished in every field.
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