Natural Law and Laws of Nature in Early Modern Europe

Jurisprudence, Theology, Moral and Natural Philosophy

Michael Stolleis, Lorraine Daston, Lorraine Daston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317089766
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This impressive volume is the first attempt to look at the intertwined histories of natural law and the laws of nature in early modern Europe. These notions became central to jurisprudence and natural philosophy in the seventeenth century; the debates that informed developments in those fields drew heavily on theology and moral philosophy, and vice versa. Historians of science, law, philosophy, and theology from Europe and North America here come together to address these central themes and to consider the question; was the emergence of natural law both in European jurisprudence and natural philosophy merely a coincidence, or did these disciplinary traditions develop within a common conceptual matrix, in which theological, philosophical, and political arguments converged to make the analogy between legal and natural orders compelling. This book will stimulate new debate in the areas of intellectual history and the history of philosophy, as well as the natural and human sciences in general.

Chapter 1
From Limits to Laws: The Construction of the Nomological Image of Nature in Early Modern Philosophy

Catherine Wilson

Introduction

By the mid-eighteenth century, it was common to represent Nature, considered as an object of theoretical inquiry, as a collection of laws and law-governed entities. According to the Comte de Buffon: ‘La Nature est le système des lois éternels etablies par le créateur, pour l’existence des choses et pour la succession des êtres.’¹ The identification of knowledge of nature with knowledge of nature’s laws prompted inquiry into dependencies of the most qualitative and speculative forms: laws of the union of soul and body, laws of compensation spanning the physical and moral realms, and laws of historical evolution.[LARRÈRE]. The subsequent entrenchment of the law concept in the philosophy of science over the next two centuries was profound, even with the loosening of its deterministic connotations with the introduction of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics.² The view that scientific explanation – including explanation in the social sciences and even in history – implied deduction from general laws gave support to a picture of scientific inquiry as specially dedicated to the discovery of previously unknown laws of the natural and social world,³ and the historiography of science reflected this understanding.

The representation of nature as a domain ruled by or constituted by its laws is undoubtedly related to seventeenth-century discoveries in what Thomas Kuhn has designated as the classical or mathematical sciences – astronomy, optics, statics and hydrostatics, and music, to which mechanics and dynamics were later added.⁴ Within a hundred years, Kepler’s three rules of planetary motion, Galileo’s law of falling bodies, Descartes’ laws of motion and his rules of collision, emended by Huygens and Wallis, Snell’s law of the refraction of the light ray, Boyle’s law of gases, and Newton’s inverse-square law make their debuts. They are held to confirm, in the first instance, the wisdom and power of the Creator; later, the genius of their discoverers.

The concept of a law of nature has several paradoxical features that belie its seeming robustness. Contemporary philosophers of science regard the laws of nature as well-confirmed general statements about the behaviour or properties of some type of entity, or as well-confirmed general statements relating two or more variables or constants. Unlike a mere accidental generalization, a law of nature is thought to have counterfactual implications, and to presuppose certain idealized conditions free of interference. But why call such logically, semantically, and pragmatically unusual statements ‘laws’ when the laws of the land – the original laws of human experience – do not possess these characteristics? And how were our early modern predecessors, who had no explicit understanding of these logico-linguistic niceties, able to characterize some statements correctly as stating laws of nature?

Another difficulty is this: On the one hand, we are inclined to believe that it was not always known that there were laws of nature and that scientific inquiry is a search for fundamental laws. Historically, there have existed a number of conceptions of systematic inquiry into nature, for example, Aristotelian or Paracelsian, or Baconian, that were formulated without reference to the discovery of laws of nature, but instead by reference to discovery of logical relations, or essences, correspondences, or ‘Forms’. The existence of laws and their importance in scientific discourse was a fact that, like other facts, had, it seems, to be discovered by experimentation with the possible forms of science, by a process of trial and error with respect to the aims and methods of inquiry. On the other hand, the nomological conception of nature seems to be an invention and not a discovery at all. Inanimate objects, as was first pointed out by Lactantius in the fourth century, cannot enter into civil relations. The notion of a universal physical law of nature must be a metaphor, not to be taken literally. But how can the lawfulness of physical nature be both the outcome of a lengthy historical experiment with different styles of inquiry and the imposition of the imagination?

This essay will try to shed light on these questions by offering a historical account of the introduction of the law of nature concept in the seventeenth century, showing how its separate and independent strands came together in certain texts to fashion the nomological image of Nature expressed in the definitions above. These separate strands consisted of the appreciation of natural regularities, the posit of a providential supervisor, the hypothesis of qualitatively undifferentiated basic units of matter (atoms, corpuscles), the rejection of chance or hazard, and – critically – the discovery that not just the actions of light, but also those of its supposed antithesis, matter, could be described by quantitative and relational ‘rules’. In view of its tangled origins, it is not surprising that the very idea of a law of nature has never managed to extricate itself from the charge that it is philosophically incoherent.

Order without Laws in Ancient Natural Philosophy

The notion of a law of nature appears only rarely and not programmatically in ancient writings.⁵ There are several likely explanations – terminological and conceptual – why ‘nature’ and ‘law’ do not take up nearby places in ancient texts, despite the interest of philosophers in natural necessity and in observed regularities.

First, it is often pointed out that the ancients were impressed by the distinction between physis and nomos: the realm of the natural and the realm of the normative, and a salient feature of laws for the ancients (with the exception of Stoic natural law, mentioned below) was that they were not universal, but local and conventional.⁶ But the physis-nomos distinction explains at best a terminological gap. The absence of a law-concept, called by whatever name, needs a different sort of explanation. Might not the recognition of the fact that fire tends to move upwards and a stone downwards be considered as an acknowledgment of lawlike behaviour, even if formulated in the language of physis or potentials? Aristotle after all observed that, while some occurrences are ‘spontaneous’ or ‘due to chance’, others ‘always come to pass in the same way, and others for the most part’.⁷

Another contributing reason for the absence of a law-concept in ancient natural philosophy is that for Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics, the distinction between ideal order and rough actuality is conceived as a distinction between celestial and the terrestrial realms, not between observations made within controlled experiments and passive observation, nor between mathematical models and data-sets. Orderliness descends from higher to lower and is lost as one moves from higher causes to lower effects. The regular motion of the heavenly bodies causes the regular (but still slightly unpredictable) succession of the seasons; the seasons bring about the (still more unpredictable) weather; and the weather influences the (very unpredictable) growth of crops and increase of flocks.

Epicureanism, the original ‘mechanical philosophy,’ rejected top-down accounts of order, but it did not furnish an exception to the generalization that ancient natural philosophy does not mediate order through laws. As A.A. Long points out, later Epicureanism is deterministic and form-preserving in its overall intention. Lucretius frequently refers to nature under the description ‘certa’, best interpreted as ‘definite’, for example, certa ratio, certa semina, certa genetrix, certum tempus and so on.⁸ At the same time, the atomists were motivated to downplay the theme of natural order to strengthen their theological scepticism.

The atoms, according to Epicurus, move with equal speed regardless of size provided they meet with no obstruction or resistance. Their actual motions are a (seemingly unpredictable) function of upward and lateral motions on account of collisions and a downward motion due to weight. Collision between the atoms does not affect their speed. However, ‘weight’ and ‘obstruction’ do.⁹ As might be expected, Epicurus’ astronomy was less impressive than his terrestrial meteorology. He insisted in his Epistle on Physics that ‘in the sky revolutions, solstices, eclipses, risings and settings and the like, take place without the ministration or command, either now or in the future, of any being who at the same time enjoys perfect bliss along with immortality’.¹⁰ He conjured up mechanisms, processes of friction, pressure, tearing, compression, collision, and congelation – useful for explaining thunder, lightening, rain, hail and snow, but useless in accounting for the pathways of celestial objects in the night sky. Nor did Epicurus insist on the uniformity of nature. Other worlds may be dissimilar to ours, he thought, with different plants and animals.¹¹

The system of Titus Lucretius Carus developed in his Latin poem of c. 55 BCE, De rerum natura and presumed to follow a lost treatise of Epicurus’, employed the order concepts noted by Long, but defended mechanism and materialism without any substantial help from the concept of a law of nature. In this treatise known to and cited by every early modern philosopher of note, Lucretius provided a comprehensive account of physical, psychological, and even historical phenomena, encompassing colour vision, the weather, epidemics, the formation of government and the social contract, dreams, love, and death, as well as describing the origins of our world and all the other worlds in the cosmos. All phenomena supervene on the motions of atoms, and the philosophical fundamentals of matter and motion are discussed at some length. Lucretius followed his predecessor in maintaining that ‘[The atoms] must be carried with equal speed, although not of equal weight, through the unresisting void.’¹² (He remarked, displaying a more quantitative perspective than his master, that ‘all weights naturally thrust downward; but when a blow is added, the velocity is doubled, and that first impulse grows heavier…’¹³) At the same time, Lucretius was an indeterminist or at least vague about the motion of individual atoms: ‘Motions have some cause other than blows and weights.’¹⁴ Both he and Epicurus ascribed to them a swerve, not only to preserve the mind’s freedom, but lest their overall tendency to move downwards eventually bring the universe to a condition of stasis.¹⁵ Though the manifest order supervenes on the motions of the atoms, there is no latent order, only ‘secret and unseen motions.’¹⁶ ‘[T]his world was made by nature, and the seeds of things themselves of their own accord, knocking together by chance, clashed in all sorts of ways, heedless, without aim, until at length those combined which, suddenly thrown together, could become in each case the beginnings of mighty things …’¹⁷

How is it possible that such motions can produce a visible, stable order? Why isn’t the universe simply a confused, structureless chaos, as is suggested by the im...