The two revolutions contaminated each other in both directions. Thirty years after the publication of Copernicus’ work, the revolution on earth spread to the heavens, and strange beasts and birds were discovered in the sky – the mysterious nova stella, the ‘new star’ first recorded by Tycho Brahe; the comet, or ‘Long-haired Star’ of Halley, long known, but now by Kepler shown to be beyond the sphere of the moon; the spots on the sun – the spot of Jupiter – the moons of Jupiter – the rings of Saturn. By 1647 there was a competent atlas of the moon in circulation, marred only by the fact that it did not mark capital cities or national highways. Save for the lack of life and its luxuriance, the heavens were as full of prodigies as the earth.
More important is the fact that the revolution in the heavens climbed down Jacob’s ladder and threatened to swallow the revolution on earth. It landed first on the young man Galileo, who applied the kind of mathematical laws that govern the swinging circuits of stars to the swinging circuits of pendulums. And though he, too, was an explorer – chiefly an explorer of the skies – he was first and foremost a physicist describing motion on earth. In doing so he added a new limb to modern science. When faced with a dodo, a scientist’s best resort is to describe its strange qualities and compare it with its closer avian cousins. There is no rhyme or reason to the productions of nature; they are always functional, and they are always ingenious, but they are always unpredictable. But Galileo discovered that if you drop the dodo, it will behave very predictably. It will in fact behave with a mathematical regularity astonishing for a bird of the dodo’s intelligence. It will not diverge in the slightest from the strict formula described by the mysterious symbols in ‘s = ½at²’. With complete disregard for the complexity of the dodo, these scientists discovered the simplicity of all things. They were empiricists and observationalists, in that they insisted on checking all their data with their own eyes; but they produced an account of the world readily accessible even by the blind, and by the anti-empiricists. While one party of scientists were exploring the visible dimension of nature, the other were exploring the invisible dimension of nature. The first group is represented by L’Encyclopédie, a systematic and philosophical collection of curiosities compiled by Diderot and D’Alembert, and the first modern encyclopaedia. The second is represented by a particular geometrical textbook that makes frequent reference to entities bearing remarkable parallels in name and nature to entities observed in the real world, written by a man named Newton, and called, significantly, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. The scientific revolution was animated not by one, but by two spirits.
To our minds, the revolution of discovery may seem, on the whole, somewhat less scientific than the Copernican revolution, when we consider that Copernicus made his discovery by laying aside old theories and examining evidence, while Columbus made his discoveries by sailing a little further than most, and the humanists invented scholarship from the happenstance that gave them more manuscripts than they had possessed before. Now, we must realise how much of our modern science was obtained in this way. The art of going to look, the art of reporting and the art of organising, between them built up the bulk of our knowledge. It is true that the basics of our worldview were not discovered in that way. If there were three continents, and not seven, our worldview would be substantially the same. If we did not know about the dinosaurs, we would probably not have different opinions in religion or philosophy. The spirit of Solomon did not make us modern. That is why typical histories of the scientific revolution scarcely mention these great progresses. You will not find in them the biography of Magellan, or the history of Padua’s gardens. You will rarely find the bare names of Gesner and Fuchs, though the one was the father of zoology and the other of botany. Tycho Brahe will be praised, but not for his catalogue of stars. Viète and Napier will be ignored as irrelevant, for they only contributed to the paltry art of abstract mathematics. Valla and Erasmus will be neglected, because they only contributed to the negligible science of scholarship. But Copernicus will be there. Galileo will be there. Kepler will make his appearance. And Newton will be accorded his crown. What is the standard of distinction? Why are the astronomers in favour, and the biologists out of favour? It is not a matter of relative importance. It is not a matter of originality, for just as the botanists and zoologists and explorers continued old traditions and fulfilled what were, in the end, medieval dreams, so also the astronomers merely made new discoveries using medieval methods. The great difference is that the astronomers were theoretical in their approach to nature. They sought out, not the facts of nature, but the logic of nature. The anatomists and zoologists took a new census of the world, and revised the old accounts of its population and particulars. The astronomers revised the law code. They are responsible for the fact that scientific revolution changed not only the world viewed but also the worldview in the West.
When that is understood it is possible to account for the general feeling that Browne is less than scientific, though he is in fact thoroughly scientific, and the fact that he appears more medieval than his contemporaries, though in fact it is not so. If by ‘scientific’ we mean ‘like our own scientists,’ he is not very scientific. If we use the present as the standard by which we judge the past, he will fall far short of his age – his operations resemble those of a twenty-first century scientist very little. It is in the mathematical revolution that the modern spirit is most apparent, though it accounts for only a small part of the modern mind. All of us carry around in our heads an enormous amount of general knowledge, and most of us carry around in our heads very few scientific formulae; but when we imagine a scientist, we expect them to be full of formulae. The kind of expertise we expect of Browne is not the kind of expertise Browne has.
Now, it should be enough to prove that the kind of expertise Browne had was vital in his own age. But I will not limit myself to that. It is a fact that the kind of expertise Browne had was, in spite of us, vital to the creation of our age. I do not say we each know more today than our ancestors of six hundred years ago; but we certainly know a greater variety, since our world stretches to seven continents, ten planets, and six thousand global years of human history. These things were not discovered by calculation: they were discovered by observation. It was not Newtonian calculations that derived Sargon from Akkad, but a spade and linguistics. Nor was it the subtle process of addition that increased the continents from three to seven: it was sails and sailors. In spite of this, Galileo seems more modern than Browne. If it comes to it, Newton seems more modern than Diderot. The reason is not that Galileo is more modern than Browne, or Newton more modern than Diderot. One might with equal justice deduce the explanation that Browne and Diderot are more modern than Galileo and Newton. At any rate, more modern people are like Browne than are like Galileo. That is to say, more of us are concerned with processing and comprehending the vast amounts of information that are fed to us, than with investigating in detail the formulae they follow.
Most of us, that is, are broader than we are deep. The science we are fed today is dogmatic. Most of us do not discover things for ourselves, but sift through the things we are told in the hopes of finding the probable truth. Often we do not even sift; we simply take for truth what we cannot believe would be fabricated. The practice we follow is that of the researchers and investigators, not of the mathematical analysts. But then, those of us who do not consider ourselves scientists expect our scientists to be clear and dogmatic; we expect science to be assertive and lucid; if fascinating, still factual, if intriguing, yet indubitable. We are mere researchers ourselves, but expect our experts to talk like the mathematicians. That is why, when we read Browne with his scientific rumours, tracing through ancient tomes reports of the phoenix, to conclude that the evidence for it is insufficient, we feel a little superior: he ought to simply assert what to us seems evident: he is not omniscient and therefore seems unscientific. It does not matter that we ourselves know that the phoenix does not exist purely from books, and not because we have searched the whole world for one. But when we read the dry calculations of the Principia Mathematica, we happily forget that the author dabbled in alchemy and allegorised prophecies: he speaks like a scientist, so he seems modern.
That should not cast suspicion on Newton; it should rather cast suspicion on us. We are the ones who find Newton so scientific and Browne so unscientific. Newton speaks in the spirit of Pythagoras, who said that all is number; and Browne speaks in the spirit of Solomon, who said that the wise man stores up knowledge. And today, the streets are not filled with minor Newtons. They are filled with minor Solomons. Perhaps the spirit of Solomon did not make us modern, but it is one of the basic traits of the modern mind. Newton may have done a great deal to make us what we are, but few of us think like Newton. It is our broad knowledge, not deep knowledge, that makes our identity. It is not the precision but the preponderance of our knowledge that underlies our philosophies. To people such as us the nature of Newton is alien and the nature of Browne is familiar. We do not desire to be more abstract in our view of the world, and to see in all movements the operation of inertia, in all elements the immigrations and emigrations of electrons, and in the tides the geometry of gravity. Sooner we would be more concrete in our view of the world. This is the basis of most of our leisure employment; it explains, for instance, why we prefer to read real stories with characters rather than bare and undeveloped plot structures. It is the reason for the existence of tourism. The arch-heresy in tourism is Newtonianism: the idea that a tide is a tide wherever it is on earth, and a mountain is a mountain whether it be in England or in India. The sacred creed of the tourist is that a mountain is not a mountain: that the Himalayas are not the same as the Andes, as a kiwi is not the same as emu. The only thing keeping tourism afloat is that we are not all scientists of the Newtonian kind. If a man turned that science into a philosophy, it would strip all things of their individuality, and all the infinite variations of the world of their freshness. Read as philosophy, there is a deep and destructive disillusionment in the Principia Mathematica. ‘Of natural effects of the same kind the causes are the same: as of respiration in man and beast, the fall of a stone in Europe and America, light in a kitchen fire and in the sun, light reflected from the earth and from the planets.’ The principle, of course, any scientist would agree with: the spirit, taken to its extreme, not even Newton could bear. But that is the extreme Newton verges on. Browne verges on the other.
For though Browne would agree with the principle, and can speak of the ‘mystical mathematics of the city of Heaven’, he is not a stranger to the strangeness of nature, its complexity, its variety, and the individuality of all things. He chooses to know many things rather than the ‘one thing necessary’. He knows almost the limits of nature though he has only a mediocre knowledge of its laws. That, for him, as for Vesalius, and for Magellan, is what it means to be scientific. And they are not wrong. Did Newton know more of the world than the explorers? They certainly had a richer relationship with it.
theparsnipoftime 