In the history of the West, the quest to understand the universe around us has been pursued under the influence of either of two major alternative convictions concerning the relationship between knowledge and life. In one—that coming from the Platonic tradition—philosophic understanding is coextensive with the whole of human life and experience and is the proper end, the supreme accomplishment of life. In this tradition, as Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living. The other conviction or philosophic tradition supposes that life essentially transcends knowledge and that while philosophic understandings are very valuable, they are subordinate to the greater end of that practical knowledge which will either improve human life or, at least, make its hardships more bearable. These two convictions, which for simplicity might be termed ‘humans are for philosophy’ and ‘philosophy is for humans’, have continued on down through the ages, albeit in somewhat different garb.
The two views are not mutually exclusive and it is, rather, often a matter of emphasis. We too readily assume that the empiricist-scientific model has now rendered all other contenders as obsolete, but it, too, has its limitations. We have no warrant to assume that our modern version of things represents some end-point of knowledge or, indeed, that it provides the only conditions capable of sustaining a sophisticated and cultured society. It is salutary to recall that, in the civilization of ancient Greece which produced such prodigies of art, literature, and learning, important decisions were made by consulting the Oracle at Delphi, or by divination. In the Roman Empire too, Pliny tells us of the importance of the birds used for divination:
These are the birds that give the Most-Favourable Omens; these birds daily control our officers of state, and shut or open to them their own homes; these send forward or hold back the Roman rods of office and order or forbid battle formation, being the auspices of all our victories won all over the world; these hold supreme empire over the empire of the world, being as acceptable to the gods with even their inward parts and vitals as are the costliest victims.[1]
Out of the ruins of the Greek and Roman Empire there gradually emerged the civilisation of Christian Europe with its particular understanding of the universe around it. This system of understanding underwent many modifications, particularly in the 13th century when many of the works of Plato and Aristotle were finally recovered via the Arab world. The medieval system of understanding reached its climax in the works of St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 who, in a brilliant synthesis, managed to combine many of the elements of Greek philosophy with the Biblical understanding and the corpus of Christian works handed down from the early Church Fathers. This system, usually referred to as the scholastic philosophy, endured until the Reformation. Indeed, a significant part of the medieval understanding of the universe persisted until much later. By the end 17th Century, however, a huge change had taken place and there emerged what we now call ‘the age of science’. It is of course, something of a misnomer because ‘science’ is a Greek word and had been in play for two millennia or more. The critical difference is in content. For the ancients, as for the medieval scholars, the supreme science was metaphysics – the science of the Real. For us, science is concerned chiefly with progress in the material universe. For them, it was predominantly a non-experimental and intellectual enterprise and, to use that lovely phrase attributed to Plotinus, it was ‘no journey for the feet’.
This is not to suggest that the science of material things was entirely neglected during these earlier periods. Indeed, during the scholastic period and the rise of the universities there was an array of factors which combined to provide an amenable seed-bed for the new science which was to follow. The belief in a divinely created world order which was accessible to human reason legitimised scientific and scholarly research. Moreover, the ancient understanding of humans as imperfect beings and the Christian notion of the Fall introduced the idea of limitation of the human intellect and thus opened the way for intellectual criticism. It also provided justification for the scholarly values of modesty, reverence, and self-criticism. [2] For all that, though, scientific enquiry (as we know it) was not a major feature of the period. It would be truer to say that it laid the intellectual groundwork but not the clear motivation needed for such a major change. The pearl of great price was not some better understanding of this world, but of the conditions necessary to achieve life in the next.
Of course, great changes in our system of understanding are seldom abrupt and clear cut. There is usually what Sidney Webb once called ‘the inevitability of gradualness’. The standard explanation from today’s science popularisers is that the scientific age is somehow or other a product of the gradual secularisation of society such that real scientific progress advanced in proportion to the general retreat of religion. Only when men and women were ‘liberated’ from the shackles of imposed religious doctrines and ideas, so the story goes, could they freely examine the world round them in what Hume was to call, much later, ‘the calm sunshine of the mind’. But the change in outlook in the seventeenth century was rapid and nowhere more so than in England. What brought about this huge and relatively sudden change? The claim of increasing secularisation will simply not do as an explanatory principle since all the evidence suggests that the early promoters of the new science were, for the most part, pious believers.
During the 1930s, a young Harvard sociologist, Robert Merton, decided to investigate this matter in some detail and it became the substance of his PhD dissertation. He was prompted to do so by after reading Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In this work, Weber had made passing reference to the possibility that the sorts of arguments he had advanced in respect of capitalism might also apply to the rise of modern science. Merton took up this idea and published his findings in 1938 under the title Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England.[3] It was immediately controversial and caused a great deal of angst amongst his fellow sociologists—for reasons which I will discuss later.
As the title of Merton’s work suggests, his scope went well beyond religion and the new science, and he was quick to point out that a whole range of influences, not just religion, was in play during this crucial period. Nonetheless, it was clear to Merton that many of the values held by the Puritans—an intramundane asceticism, faith in progress, and an empiricist outlook were the very qualities that allowed the new science to flourish and he proposed that Puritanism was a major factor in its rise to prominence. To back up his thesis Merton trawled through a huge amount of written material from 17th century England and also consulted other scholars of his own time who were also interested in a possible connection. One of these, Dorothy Stimson, had carefully studied the composition of the newly formed Royal Society (1645). She found that, of 68 members for whom religious outlook was known, 42 were clearly Puritan.[4] Given that the Puritans comprised a relatively small minority in the general population, this finding is quite significant.
When Merton looks at the writings of prominent Puritans of this era, he finds a ‘consistent scheme of orientation’ which:
… embraced an undisguised emphasis upon utility as well as control of self and the external world, which in turn involved a preference for the visual, manual and concretely manageable rather than the purely logical and verbal.[5]
This lines up precisely with the requirements of the new science, first outlined by Francis Bacon in his Novum Organum (1620). Bacon was heavily influenced by the Puritans as a young man and, although his allegiances shifted backwards and forwards over time (pro and anti-Puritanism), his writings stress Puritan values such as utility and practicality. His posthumous influence on the fledgling Royal Society is everywhere evident. Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society is full of praise for Bacon.[6] No-one has better summarised Bacon’s general outlook and the profound changes that they involved than Lord Macaulay in his famous essay on Bacon:
In the fifth century Christianity had conquered Paganism, and Paganism had infected Christianity. The Church was now corrupt. The rites of the Pantheon had passed into her worship, and the subtilties of the Academy into her creed … The great work of improving the condition of the human race was still considered as unworthy of a man of learning … At length the time arrived when the barren philosophy …. was destined to fall. Driven from its ancient haunts, it had taken sanctuary in that Church which it had persecuted …. Antiquity, prescription, the sound of great names, have ceased to awe mankind. The dynasty which had reigned for ages was at an end; and the vacant throne was left … At this time Bacon appeared … To make men perfect was no part of Bacon’s plan. His humble aim was to make imperfect men comfortable … The aim of the Platonic philosophy was to raise us far above vulgar wants. The aim of the Baconian philosophy was to supply our vulgar wants.[7]
One factor not discussed by Merton was the influence of magic and ‘wise’ men and women. In an age of frequent disease outbreaks, disastrous fires, and other factors contributing to human suffering, astrologers, soothsayers, alchemists and the like provided an alternative source of comfort and hope to the Puritan clergy. The latter, perceiving these practitioners of magic as a threat to their authority, saw the new science as a means to discredit them.[8] Moreover, the Puritans had a keen dislike of ‘easy solutions’, supposing that all benefits and comforts to mankind must be won by honest, hard work and not by magic and cunning. One suspects too, that such magic may well have been attributed to diabolic influences. One Puritan divine of the period argued that it was ‘better to lose clothes or coin, than recover either by Satan’. [9]
But the most extraordinary aspect of the rise of the new science in the 17th century, at least to my way of thinking, was the huge change in the way in which the natural world was regarded. If you go back to the beginning of our history in the West, to archaic Greece as depicted by Homer, you are introduced to a world where every part of nature exhibited a sort of spiritual aura. We have a nature shimmering with inhering divinity. With the coming of Plato this view was modified but certainly not entirely lost. Matter, by its very nature, was limited but the perfect intelligible universe, which was its template, was not. There was still beauty in the world and still perfection, but it was a necessarily limited perfection, to be thought of as a reflected beauty emanating from the eternal Forms. In early Christianity, this view was further modified. Nature was created ex nihilo, by God. The early Church Fathers, mindful of the dangers of pantheism, needed to assert that the world was not God and the entirety of the cosmos did not exhaust the Being of God. Nonetheless, they were ever mindful of those repeated phrases in Genesis – ‘and God saw that it was good’. Nothing created by God could be dismissed as mere substrate or as some inert stage prop against which the drama of individual salvation was to be played out.
Moreover, through the entire history of Christendom, there existed the powerful idea of The Great Chain of Being. Drawing upon Platonic ideas(especially from the Timeaus) and the philosophy of Being, the scholars conceived of a great descending and unbroken chain of being, with God at the summit and then, at an infinite distance below, gradations of being reaching down to through the animal and vegetable world to non-living matter and the least of all existing things. The importance of this notion has been well documented in a well- known study by Professor Arthur Lovejoy.[10] In Christianity, this was not an emanationist idea but it did imply that even the very simplest inert materials, merely by the fact of their existence, somehow or other participated in that which was the author of all existence – all being.
Two other important ideas connected with the medieval concept of nature also need to be mentioned. The first of these, having its genesis in Platonic philosophy, was the notion of microcosm-macrocosm. In the Timaeus, Plato had suggested that the human frame mimics or mirrors the shape of the universe. Many of the early Church Fathers took up this notion in biblical exegesis.[11] It also found expression in the idea of correspondence – that the stars, for instance, exerted influence over plants and animals. The second important idea was that of animals as representing certain moral characters in humans (or lack thereof). This found expression in the enormously popular bestiaries and aviaries, where a range of domesticated and wild animals was described and the habits of each related to human morality or other Christian themes. The common ancestor of these medieval bestiaries is thought to be the Physiologus – a text which may date back as early as the 2nd century AD and whose author is unknown.[12] Here, physical and behavioural characteristics (real and imagined) of each animal were presented and moralized for a Christian audience. The later bestiaries of the medieval period follow this model, often drawing from a wide range of sources including the Bible itself, Aristotle, Pliny and other Greek and Roman authors of antiquity. Even today, one can find, in some Catholic churches at any rate, the image of the pelican-in-her-piety as a symbol of Christ (the pelican was thought to feed her young with blood from her own breast).
All of these various ways of understanding the natural world had the effect of giving intrinsic value to the material universe. Plants and animals and even non-living entities were not just a sort of substrate or inert medium. A good, late example of just how nature was viewed can be found in the poetry of Henry Vaughan (1621 -1695). Unlike the Puritans of his day (he was a Cavalier), Vaughan gained his ideas on nature largely from medieval and more ancient sources.
However, during the course of the 17th century, the attitude towards the natural world took a radical turn, and nowhere was this more evident than in Bacon’s works. The new science advanced apace not because of the secularisation of society, but because of the secularisation of nature. Dame Nature (which, in an earlier time, Chaucer had described as vicaire of the Almighty Lorde[13]) now became an enemy to be overcome or, more precisely, a subject to be interrogated so as to yield up valuable information. Indeed, the tone of Bacon’s writings has prompted feminist writers like Sandra Harding, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Carolyn Merchant to suggest that Bacon was a misogynist and nature-hater. It is rather difficult to disagree with them when, for instance, you look at the title Temporis Partus Masculus (The Masculine Birth of Time) for one of his unpublished works. [14]
Bacon saw himself as the buccinator novi temporis and, in The Advancement of Learning, says this:
Nor is mine a trumpet which summons and excites men to cut each other to pieces … but rather to make peace between themselves, and turning with united forces against the Nature of Things, to storm and occupy her castles and strongholds, and extend the bounds of human empire, as far as God Almighty in his goodness may permit.
This interrogation of nature, Bacon believed, would yield up a sort of hidden code whereby God’s intentions and plans would be made clear. As Jorge Louis Borges has observed:
Francis Bacon declared in his Advancement of Learning that God offered us two books so that we would not fall into error: the first, the volume of the Scriptures, reveals His will; the second, the volume of the creatures, reveals His power and is the key to the former. Bacon intended much more than the making of a metaphor; he believed that the world was reducible to essential forms (temperatures, densities, weights, colors), which formed, in a limited number, an abecedarium naturae or series of letters with which the universal text is written.[15]
This view of nature was taken up by many of the early members of the Royal Society, including its first historian, Thomas Sprat.
One remarkable thing about Sprat’s history is the amount of space devoted to a justification of ‘the Real Philosophy’ (i.e. the new science). The work is divided into three parts. The first, of some fifty pages, discusses ‘the state of the Ancient Philosophy’, the second part comprises of the history proper of the Royal Society in about 100 pages and ‘examples’ of the new science in a further 160 pages. The third and final part, of about 130 pages is devoted to a defense/justification of the new approach. Given that the first part of the work is used largely to point out the deficiencies in the work of ancient authors it is really little more than a justification for the new approach to science. Thus, in a work of some 440 pages, well over one-third is devoted to defending the new experimental method. A very large part of this defense is devoted to the question of the impact of the new science on religious belief and religious morality.
Why does Sprat find it so important to defend Baconian science in this way? And why does he, and Bacon before him, need to pour scorn on the beliefs of the ancients? All the available evidence suggests that many of the Anglican Divines and other important public figures of the time were very apprehensive of this new emphasis on experimentation and the probing of nature. Richard Corbet’s (1582-1633) Farewell Rewards and Fairies provides a good example. One can see why Bacon and Sprat wrote as they did . Only when nature is purged of all spiritual content and intrinsic value can it be probed and dissected with a complete indifference. Experimentation is to become a completely amoral enterprise because ‘getting to the bottom of things’ is the great and noble task. Here, for instance, is Sprat’s account of some experiments by Sir Christopher Wren:
He was the first Author of the Noble Anatomical Experiment of Injecting Liquors into the Veins of Animals. An Experiment now vulgarly known; but long since exhibited to the Meetings at Oxford. … By this operation divers Creatures were immediately purg’d, vomited, intoxicated, kill’d, or reviv’d according to the quality of the Liquor injected. [16]
One might be tempted to attribute the change to the appearance of Cartesian philosophy, but Bacon (1561-1626), who held exactly the same attitude towards nature, wrote his works well before Descartes’ philosophy had become well known (the Discourse on Method was published in 1637). Moreover, their methods of enquiry were entirely different. Descartes began with principles that were intuitively derived and these were taken as the premises in the standard deductive method of reasoning. Bacon and his later followers, on the other hand, began with empirical observations and used these used inductively to arrive at higher axioms.
In all of this, there is a certain irony. Today, the science popularisers and debunkers of religion like to push the view that the scientific mode of understanding has wholly supplanted the religious mode and represents some sort of advance in real knowledge about our world. They further suppose that science has been able to advance only by sweeping away these earlier and erroneous views. To suggest, then, that the rise of the new science was very much a religious development, is very nasty medicine indeed. And it is especially nasty because of the popular image of Puritanism. H.L. Mencken once defined Puritanism (rather unfairly) as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy”.
This irony has played itself out in a most unexpected way. When Merton first advanced his theory linking the new science with Puritanism, many of his fellow American sociologists were appalled. As Wegter McNelly points out, many of the early American sociologists were themselves a strange mixture of Puritanism and Comtean positivism.[17] By Merton’s time, they had associated themselves with logical positivism and had wholly ditched all religious appurtenances. The great gospel of that time was A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic. The thesis here was that scientific knowledge constituted the only genuine form of knowledge. At the same time, there was a concerted push by the sociologists to be accepted into the scientific stable. As Wegter-McNelly points out, they did not wish to be reminded of their origins:
Why did the portion of Merton’s original dissertation dealing with Puritanism and science attract the most attention? Because a version of his thesis was at that moment being played out in his very own discipline. Like the Puritans before them, sociologists of the generation that trained Merton found in science a partner that advanced their own cause and mirrored their own interests. … Because empirical science and its positivist epistemology devalued theological knowledge, they could no longer ask questions that sounded overtly ‘theological’. With so much at stake in their perception of themselves as building a new secular, scientific discipline, their hesitation to accept Merton’s challenge to this self-perception is understandable.[18]
Without realising it, Merton had uncovered a nasty skeleton from the cupboard of the 17th century which served to highlight discrepancies within his own discipline – a discipline anxious to distance itself from its own heritage and to strut its scientific credentials.
There is a further irony in all of this. The secularisation of nature, which was a necessary precursor to the scientific revolution, also removed any trace of intrinsic value in nature. With all links to any higher realm removed, nature was to be valued simply for what it might yield up to human enquiry and human work. That is one of the reasons why, today, we have many serious problems of environmental misuse. The pleas from the scientists and environmentalists for us to respect nature fall on deaf ears, because we have been deprived of the very means of that appreciation.
[1] Pliny, Natural History. Transl. H. Rackham. 1938-63. Loeb Classical Library (Harvard Univ. Press). Book X. xxiv. p. 49.
[2] This brief summary of the intellectual climate of the medieval universities comes from the massive History of the University in Europe. Vol 1. Universities in the Middle Ages. Ed. Hilde de Ridder-Symoens. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992
[3] Merton, R.K. Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England. In this essay, I use the 1970 edition published by Humanities Press New Jersey. This later edition contains a useful preface where Merton answers some of his critics and provides a summary of important ideas.
[4] Quoted by Merton, op.cit. pg 114
[5] Merton, pg 115
[6] I have used the facsimile edition of Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society. Kessinger Publishing, 2003
[7] http://www.scribd.com/doc/49640596/Francis-Bacon-Selections-With-Essays-by-Macaulay-and-S-A-Gardiner
[8] Wegter-McNelly, K. 2001. The Merton Thesis: The Influence of Puritanism on the Development of Science. Centre for Theology and the Natural Sciences. Bulletin 21.4. Berkeley, USA.
[9] Wegter-McNelly. Op. cit. pg 25
[10] Lovejoy. A. 1936. The Great Chain of Being Harvard Univ. Press.
[11] Harrison, op.cit. pp. 47-51
[12] Clark, W.B. (Ed. & Transl.) 1992. The Medieval Book of Birds. Hugh of Fouilloy’s Aviarium. Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, Binghampton, New York. p. 4.
[13] Parlement of Foulys (line 379)
[14] Bacon’s treatment of nature has been examined in some detail by the British Philosopher, Mary Midgley. See her Science as Salvation, 1992. Routledge. London. pp.75-83
[15] Borges, J.L. 1999. “On the Cult of Books” In The Total Library – Non-Fiction 1922-1986. Edited E. Weinberger. Penguin Books, London . Pg 360.
[16] Sprat, T. History of the Royal Society. Op. Cit. Pg 317
[17] Wegter-McNelly, op.cit. pg 26.
[18] Ibid. pg 27
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