The Revolution in Science 1500 - 1750

A.Rupert Hall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317872115
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

The 'revolution in science' of this book concerns the natural sciences, that is, knowledge of the external world which we now presume to exist independently of man.

CHAPTER ONE

The problem of cause

Neither mutation nor fixity is inevitable in human affairs, including philosophy and science. Ideas, like societies, have sometimes changed rapidly, sometimes remained as it seems in the same state for many successive centuries. It is therefore a paradox of historiography that either mutation or fixity may equally seem to demand explanation, as though the other – which may be either – did not. Thus we might seek to explain why English political institutions, though plainly imperfect in many respects, remained unchanged from 1689 to 1832, while conversely seeking to explain the occurrence of a great political convulsion in France in 1789. This is partly because the historian may ask of any event: ‘Why now, rather than earlier or later?’ or ‘Why here, rather than there?’ so that the problem of the occurrence of one event may be simply the inverse of the problem of the non-occurrence of that event.

Unless the inevitability of historical events be accepted¹ – and if it is, no need of explanation remains – the scientific revolution of early modern times need not have occurred. Verbose and general as it was, the system of philosophy, science and medicine which had been formed by selection (sometimes capricious) from the intellectual life of the ancient world and which had satisfied the successor societies both Islamic and Christian for so long might have endured longer still. Perhaps subtly modified, as it had been in previous centuries, yet still preserving its essential homogeneity and sources of deep (if erroneous) appeals to the human consciousness it might have endured for millennia. That system still attracts the deep interest of specialist scholars, even though its validity be denied; no sensitive mind would dismiss it as so much outdated rubbish, while portions of it are still entertained as valid by the less sophisticated members of Western societies. Though we now know the pre-modern scientific world-view to be false, it was not and is not intellectually contemptible, and indeed can be seen as satisfying and adequate for many purposes. One cannot say that it was ‘bound’ to be exploded.

Therefore there must be special reasons for its breakdown, which indeed was powerfully resisted for reasons not wholly absurd or conventional. In political revolutions one sometimes feels that the coup succeeds because the forces of conservatism have lost conviction and so have lost courage: the defenders of established science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries lacked neither, nor were they stupid, and of course they possessed the power of the establishment. We ought therefore to ask not one question, but two: why did new scientific ideas and methods come to be introduced, and why did they prevail (or more exactly, why did some prevail, at least for a time)? And always we have to remember that the scientific revolution was an episodic process – we have no reason to believe that Copernicus’ views on medicine were other than conventional. Philosophers like Bacon and Descartes levelled very broad methodological attacks on the past, but actual investigators of phenomena tended to be piecemeal in their approach (this is true for insistance of Descartes’s own study of light).

The causes of the scientific revolution offered by historians fall into two well-defined classes: some relate to the degree of mismatch between established learning and the society of the Renaissance, and accordingly make a change in society precede a change in science. Other causes relate to the intellectual consistency of science either within itself, or with other intellectual activities such as religion and philosophy: we are here speaking very generally of a ‘world-view’ which contains many elements besides the scientific; if these alter, the scientific parts of the picture must shift also. Obviously these two classes of cause are, irrespective of the plausibility of particular discussions of them, complementary rather than antagonistic: we might, if we wished, seek the origin of new scientific ideas in shifts of intellectual perspective, while looking to changes in society for their acceptability. Equally obviously intellectual change relates to individuals – some one, or a small group, must propose a new idea or method in the first place – while discussions of social shifts relate in principle to large groups of people, such as most English Puritans, or speculators in foreign exploration, or practising physicians. One writes in principle because, in intellectual history, where ‘society’ is invoked there is in ordinary practice no employment of statistically significant samples, except where the techniques of prosopology are employed; argument usually turns on the discussion of a few supposedly typical individuals. A third obvious point is that the intellectual analysis is vulnerable on grounds of particularity (if we study as closely as possible the workings of the mind of a single individual, be it Galileo or Newton, this cannot tell us anything of the thoughts in other minds), while the social analysis is vulnerable not only technically (because of paucity of evidence) but because of the logical impossibility of making, say the perception of a problem the same thing as its acceptable solution. For of course the tackling of new problems is only one aspect of the evolution of ideas; the provision of new solutions to old problems is at least as important, perhaps more so, and few problems have unique solutions.

To begin with social analysis, which at least promises generality and not merely a host of individual case-histories, it is clear that historians have long discussed a multitude of changes denoting the transition from the ‘medieval’ to the ‘modern’ world, changes which may be symbolized geographically by the discovery of America in 1492, politically by the French descent into Italy of 1494, and in religion by the posting of Luther’s theses in 1517. If there was indeed a turning-point in the character of Western civilization – never marked by long-term stability – then it is not unreasonable to suppose a connection between more flexible ways of thought and more flexible forms of society. Historians have written of the stimulus provided by world-wide exploration and the discovery of the strange fauna and flora inhabiting new continents: the one, through the dependence of navigation upon cartography and astronomy, ensured the importance of applied mathematical skills which were cultivated by a host of ‘mathematical practitioners’ in seaports and other large centres, from whom again grew some of the first professional schools training naval officers²; the other, through curiosity, through the prestige attaching to collections of exotic animals, and through the medicinal importance universally assigned to herbs, re-invigorated natural history and initiated anthropological interests.³ In both instances what was chiefly involved was a broadening and reification of interests: a concern developing almost of necessity in real things like the times of rising of the stars or unfamiliar animals, yet without there being any tension between this new concern with a new reality and the old structure of astronomy and philosophy. If a wider experience of nature and sharper mathematical necessities aroused any scepticism with respect to the old categories of thought it was at most indirectly, through the conversion of academic professionalism into practical professionalism.

Rather the same conclusion seems to apply to another much-canvassed agent of intellectual ferment, technology. The purely indirect role of the printing press (1454), for example, is surely beyond dispute: the press did not incite people to write new books or put new ideas into them any more than the organized scriptoria which had existed for centuries. What the press did was to enlarge readership vastly: it was the multitude of copies of books, not their mode of production per se, which slowly led to an enlargement of the nature of the book, as by the writing of manuals for the autodidact, and of specialist books for people who previously, if literate at all, certainly had not bought books. Interlocking with that is the rise of practical mathematical professionalism, on land as well as at sea (surveyors, drainage engineers, architects, shipbuilders, gunners) thriving in an economically adventurous and bellicose Europe. The mathematization, rudimentary as it was, of these old arts (changing, in the Renaissance, in form rather than in essence) was itself expressive of a new attitude creating a positive feedback effect between the idea of what such a practitioner ought to be, and the manner in which he actually did his work, where the printed book plays a seminal reinforcing role. Again the main interest here for the historian of the scientific revolution is in the creation of a new population that was both learned’ and practical, though not formally academic, a population capable of channelling knowledge of natural phenomena to effective intellectual levels, for example. Among the letters of Torricelli one finds a complaint that the ballistic tables he had published were not confirmed by practical trials (to which the mathematician replied that he wrote for philosophers, not gunners)⁴ and a more celebrated instance is Galileo’s learning that suction-pumps could not raise water more than some 9 m (30 ft). In the general field of engineering one observes mathematicians from Simon Stevin in the sixteenth century to Leonhard Euler two centuries later making a wide range of practical suggestions, to which this world of literate practitioners was able to respond by adopting some and rejecting others: up to a point, at least, the introduction of a workable steam-engine may be regarded as an example of this process, which was both commercially and philosophically lucrative.

No historian would wish to overlook the significance of numbers: no intellectual activity can thrive if those who pursue it are extremely few, isolated, and without support from others. Certainly the political, social and economic changes of the Renaissance provided a bigger literate (and to a much less extent, numerate) population than had ever existed before, whose concerns drew it towards an investigation of natural phenomena. One might also expect that this interest would tend to be more ‘real’ and less schematic or discursive than during the high Middle Ages. When one makes this point, however, it is again necessary to emphasize that novelty or originality was not at a premium: the most successful printed books in the fifteenth century (leaving aside almanacs, health tracts and other medical books) were medieval encyclopaedias like De Proprietatibus Rerum, c. 1230 (On the Properties of Things) by Bartholomew the Englishman, or Caxton’s Myrrour of the World (1481), or the largely imaginary travels of John of Mandeville’. In astronomy easily the best seller of all time (relatively speaking) was Sacrobosco’s Sphere (c. 1230). The historian can hardly overemphasize the conservatism of the substratum of culture, especially in the north (which accounts for Shakespeare’s world-view).

In a weak sense, then, a Marxist proposition that the development of commerce and industry in the Renaissance, and perhaps particularly its global extent, stimulated a certain kind of intellectual activity in Europe may be taken as valid, though hardly adequate to account for any specific events (such as the Copernican revolution in astronomy) that one might care to name, whereas the strong form of the same proposition, that commerce and industry dictated problems for natural philosophers to solve seems (to me, at any rate) palpably false, for the most interesting scientific problems of the time tended to be still traditional ones – human anatomy, planetary motion, the fall of heavy bodies and so forth. One need not be long misled by the vulgar sophism that would see Leonardo da Vinci’s studies of artillery or Galileo’s lessons in fortification as evidence that ‘science’ had been overtaken by novel military necessities.

Science was linked with technology and religion by Robert K. Merton almost half a century ago in his classic case-history of the sociology of science⁵: the idea that the reformed religion (its Calvinist sects especially) favoured the cultivation of natural science in a way that the Roman Catholic Church did not, and indeed any church with bishops did not, is of course much older than half a century, and still attracts able exponents such as Christopher Hill, Reijer Hooykaas and Charles Webster.⁶ Historians from Catholic, Mediterranean Europe seem not to have espoused it. At a first inspection the correlation asserted has much to commend it: the northern, Protestant half of Europe seems to have been rendered more fortunate in eminent scientific discovery than the south, and in countries like Italy and Spain scientific achievement seems to have followed, rather than preceded, the relaxation of the clerical ascendancy in educational and intellectual matters. No one could deny the distinction of research in Catholic France, but it is notorious that in that country intellectuals, especially the lumières of the eighteenth century, were for the most part anticlerical. Moreover, the case argued by Merton and others did not merely depend on accumulating instances (where weighting becomes alike important and impossible) but also on a detailed argument turning on the value of the work-ethic in the Protestant outlook, the belief in salvation by works, and the necessity to praise God understandingly: thus a coherent explanation was offered of why the Calvinist or Puritan in particular should be more likely to study nature than his more light-hearted or obscurantist Catholic contemporary. Thus Merton wrote⁷:

Puritanism transfused ascetic vigour into activities which, in their own right, could not as yet achieve self-sufficiency. It so redefined the relations between the divine and the mundane as to move science to the front rank of social values. As it happened, this was at the immediate expense of literary, and ultimately, of religious pursuits … Puritanism differed from Catholicism, which had gradually come to tolerate science, in demanding, not merely condoning, its pursuit.

However surprising these strong expressions (to which I have added emphasis) may seem to those with other views of the principal teachings of John Calvin and John Knox, they have not (to my knowledge) been repudiated by the recent upholders of the ‘Protestant ethic’ in relation to science, who indeed cite mainly seventeenth-century authors and sometimes, even, men who actually became bishops. But in any case, extrapolation backwards of the ‘Protestant ethic’ thesis to the fifteenth century is impossible, nor has anyone supported it by reference to Luther’s celebrated Wittenberg theses of 1517. Calvin’s dominance of Geneva began in 1541 but his Institutes were completed only in 1559. By this time, in the eyes of most intellectual historians, the history of thought in Europe had long been set on a new course. The great works of Copernicus and Vesalius had been printed (1543) and the former was dead. Tartaglia, Paracelsus, Fernel and many other pioneers of the new scientific movement were dead also by 1559. It would be strange indeed to claim that the reawakening of the European spirit had been effected by Calvin, who ordered the burning at the stake of Servetus in Geneva (1544). Moreover, it was to Italy and nowhere else that sixteenth-century intellectuals – even, much later, the arch-Puritan Milton – wished to travel. Italy formed Copernicus, and enabled Vesalius (another notherner) to do his work. The new botany, the new algebra, the new anatomy, came from Italy, whose universities attracted the most distinguished students from all countries irrespective of sect. The telescope and microscope were Italian, as eyeglasses had been before; pneumatics was Italian; the most highly paid engineers were Italian.

Protestantism is totally irrelevant to the initiation of the scientific revolution. The influence it had on the character of seventeenth-century science is another matter. But no historian (I believe) has failed to see an essential continuity from Vesalius to Harvey, from Copernicus to Kepler, from Galileo to Newton, bridging firmly over any stretch of time in which the new Protestant spirit might be supposed to infiltrate. Those historians who wish to write any kind of genetic account of the scientific revolution, or to trace its evolution from small beginnings through successive accretions and modifications, are surely right in looking back to the universally Catholic fifteenth century, in the youth of Leonardo and Copernicus, for the first portents of what was to come.

To say this is not to deny that other historical issues remain. As soon as we ask why the Mediterranean failed to retain, after the sixteenth century, the ascendancy in science and technology so marked during the Renaissance, why the names of northerners like Descartes, Huygens and Newton dominate the scene, clerical reaction against the new philosophy suggests itself as the obvious explanation. The tradition of Galileo, condemned by his Church, died in Florence⁸; those of the next generation like Borelli and Malpighi who continued to bring intellectual distinction to Italy were by no means universally praised there, or free from obstructions. Sectarian distinctions may well therefore have much to do with the continuation of the scientific revolution – though even the Protestant north had its reactionaries, like Sir William Temple and Dr Jonathan Swift, and its clerical criticism of the materialism of the new science – even though a simple association between Protestantism and science, Catholicism and non-science, is clearly untenable.

Investigations of the affiliations of those energetic either on behalf of intellectual innovation or in opposition to it have proved difficult and inconclusive, and there has hardly been agreement on how to conduct them in an illuminating manner. Almost every kind of person down to the level of clerks, tradesmen and apothecaries might be found upon the fringes of the scientific movement. The main centres of activity were, naturally, the universities and the great cities (some of which, like London, Venice and Lyons were not graced by universities), but there was a scattering of the curious or the virtuosi (as they were usually called in the seventeenth century) in provincial towns and even in the depths of the countryside. In some towns like Caen in Normandy or Spalding in Lincolnshire local societies flourished. Such groups and isolated individuals (old John Beale in Somerset, Martin Lister in York) who could rarely attend the meetings of national academies l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Bibliographical note
• Introduction
• 1. The problem of cause
• 2. The scientific revival of the sixteenth century
• 3. A century of confusion
• 4. The new science of motion
• 5. The revolution in astronomy
• 6. Innovation in biology
• 7. New systems of scientific thought in the seventeenth century
• 8. The organization and purpose of science
• 9. Some technical influences
• 10. The progress of experimentation
• 11. Nature and number
• 12. Newton
• 13. The range of life
• 14. The legacy of Newton
• Index