Seventeenth Century
Thinkers
The European
background
Desiderius
Erasmus (1466 - 1536) was
intensely aware of a need for change and renewal in Church and University,
religion and thought. His demand for a "return to the sources" was an expression
of dissatisfaction with what he saw around him. In particular, he had inherited
from the Italian Humanists an impatience with what was perceived as the closed
dogmatism of medieval Scholasticism. His satire of Folly suggested the need for
change, stimulating the thinkers of his time to explore new
directions.
When
Christopher Columbus (1451 - 1506) sailed westwards in 1492, it was at
least partly because he refused to accept the conventional reasons given for
not doing so. He had no idea of the presence of a vast double continent between
Europe and Asia, but he saw no reason for not trying to make a journey of
exploration in a new direction. His exploit was preceded by Vasco da
Gama's journey round the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean and it was
followed by the better publicized journeys of Amerigo Vespucci westward.
Soon Magellan would set out on a journey to circum-navigate the world; he
died in the Philippines in 1521 but his ship reached home.
The complex
events known as the Reformation (and the Counter-Reformation),
provoked mainly by Martin Luther followed by Jean Calvin, brought
about huge changes in European attitudes. The new stress laid on the Bible, and
the rejection of Tradition as a basis for believing the Church's teachings, left
each individual more or less free to search for new formulations of their
faith.
A cultural
revolution of radical proportions took place during the 16th and 17th centuries,
when old ideas and ways of thought were challenged and replaced at many levels.
In philosophy, it evolved mainly out of renaissance humanism, with its
rediscovery of Socrates in Plato's works for ever disputing static and
unsatisfactory dogmas as to what was true or real. The Greek word for "doubt" or
"inquire" is skepsis. After Plato, the Academy continued to be known for
its "scepticism" while a more extreme form of the same attitude, called
Pyrronism after its founder Pyrrho, was formulated by Sextus Empiricus in about
200 A.D. in works widely read in the renaissance in Latin translations.
Pyrrhonism does not so much assert the impossibility of knowing anything
("academic scepticism") as refuse to take sides in any argument involving
questions of knowledge, always suspending judgement in
uncertainty.
The
fundamental attitude of academic scepticism denies the possibility of knowing
anything for sure. What we perceive with our senses appears to be something, but
we may be perceiving it wrongly. Doubt was thought by the sceptics to bring
tranquility, because the sceptic knows that he cannot know anything, and does
not have to try hard to distinguish illusion and reality. In response, Stoics
and Epicureans tried to establish in various ways a "criterion of truth" or of
certainty but their solutions failed to satisfy the
renaissance.
Scepticism is in some ways a very passive and conservative attitude; as
such, it was adopted by Erasmus in his refusal to follow Luther. He said that it
was better to follow existing practices in the Church since we cannot know for
sure that any other way is better. There can never be a reply to systematic
scepticism because it simply repeats itself, challenging the bases of language
as well as of knowledge.
At the centre
of the philosophical debate, then, is the question of knowing, known as
epistemology. The basis for knowledge, according to Aristotle, was
thought to be "experience", the information derived by our five senses. This was
normally accepted in the middle ages. The teaching of the Christian Church about
the invisible realities of God and Heaven was not considered to be "knowledge"
but faith in propositions made known by divine revelation.
The
scepticism of Sextus Empiricus appealed to Michel de Montaigne (1533 -
1592). The division between Catholic and Protestant was by now established and
irreconcilable; he himself was Catholic but others in his family were
Protestant. His early Essays (Books 1 and 2, published 1580) were in a
Senecan Stoic vein, designed to produce philosophical fortitude in a vain world,
in preparation for the painful death from kidney stones he was doomed to by
heredity. But a few years after his "retirement from the world" in 1570, after
reading the newly made (1562 and 1569) Latin translations of Empiricus, he had a
medal made with the Pyrrhonian motto "Que sçay-je?" (What do I know?) and
composed his longest essay, Apologie de Raimond Sebond which formed part
of the Third Book of essays, first published in 1588.
Sebond
was a 15th century
theologian whose Theologia naturalis followed the non-Scholastic
tradition of Anselm and Lull, offering rational proofs of God's existence and
giving Man a very high position in the created order, quite unlike the
Protestants who considered humanity to be totally depraved and corrupt. In the
Apologie, Montaigne deals less with Sebond than with all forms of
dogmatism and intellectual pretension. He is an unsystematic pyrrhonist, but his
essay demonstrates how like a animal Man is, weak in reason, his senses
unreliable, his morality irrational. The world is full of diversity and
difference, the whole universe is characterized by flux and change.
Taken as it
stands, the Apologie leads to despair. In the essays that followed, for
the rest of his life, Montaigne tried to lay the bases for a new understanding
of what it was to be human. Old philosophies had failed to find general
solutions, a new search was in order, starting with the individual's self-study.
Montaigne was convinced that every person is equally and fully human, a mixture
of virtue and vice. Since there can be no one perfect system of anything,
diversity and tolerance are essential. His later essays dwell carefully on the
minute details of his own body and
daily life, something that no one before him had done in such "scientific"
detail.
John
Florio (1553 - 1625) was born
in London of an Italian Protestant father; he translated Montaigne's essays into
English in a creative way, publishing them first in 1603. Shakespeare read them
closely, and was surely influenced by them in many ways. In King Lear
there are many echoes of Florio's vocabulary, while The Tempest is in
part inspired by Montaigne.
Another of
the modern world's pioneer thinkers was born, like Shakespeare, in 1564, but
lived far longer. Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642) was born in Pisa (Italy)
and it is mainly thanks to him that the Copernican vision of the universe was
finally accepted despite fierce opposition from the scholastics who dominated
the Catholic Church. The famous "recantation" in 1633, where he is said to have
declared that the earth was the centre of the universe and did not move, only to
murmur "eppur si muove" (yet it does move), was prompted by his Dialogue
Concerning the Two World Systems of 1632 where he affirms the truth of
Copernicanism. In 1994, the Catholic Church rather belatedly lifted its
condemnation of Galileo's ideas.
At the heart
of the dispute, that marks the end of the ancient world and the start of the
modern, is a confrontation between two different understandings of "truth" and
the ways in which humanity can know it. Aquinas, like Aristotle, was an intense
idealist, not interested in pragmatic verification. For the ancient Greeks,
irregular motion was always seen as a sign of the imperfection of matter. Under
the teaching of the old system, the Moon and all the "bodies" above it (planets
and stars) were considered perfect in matter, spherical in shape and gliding in
perfectly circular orbits, moving not in search of a greater perfection but
guided by an Intelligence (angel or Mover) in order to accomplish some end by
influencing events in the imperfect world below.
Galileo was
not the first to notice that there was something wrong in the sky, that the
planets did not in fact move as they were supposed to. His response was stronger
because he looked through his telescope and saw comets coming and going,
declared that there was change in the heavens, and rejected the old idea that
heavenly bodies and the earth were essentially different. The earth, he said,
belonged among the heavenly bodies because there was change there as here. What
Aristotle said was simply not
true.
Another point
where Galileo differed from Aristotle lay in his atomist theories, according to
which all matter is composed of the same basic particles (atoms) arranged in
different ways. For the Catholic Church this was a threatening idea because
Aristotle had assumed (following Plato's theory of forms) that each kind of body
had its own essential "substance" (the "breadness" that distinguishes bread from
cake) distinct from the "accidents" of colour, appearance, taste. The
Scholastics had used this to "explain" the meaning of Jesus's words "This is my
Body, this is my Blood" repeated during the Mass to consecrate the bread and
wine. The Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation depended entirely on the idea
that there was a "substance" in bread, distinct from its appearance, that could
be changed into the Body of Christ by a priest repeating Christ's
words.
Galileo stood
for empirical observation of things, he practiced measuring the motion of slowly
falling bodies (metal balls rolling in grooves down a sloping surface), he
established mathematical formulae to represent the laws he found them following.
He was the first to state that once a body is moving, the law of inertia
means that it will continue to move until some new force either stops it or
changes its motion. There was no need to imagine Intelligences pushing the stars
to keep them moving.
Galileo has
become the symbol of the modern spirit of free enquiry. His was a mind full of
mechanical curiosity, always wanting to understand the mechanics of things.
Until his age, "explanations" of things seen in the universe were given in terms
of God's will and providence. Galileo's question was not Why? but How? How does
it work? It was a revolutionary question but contained the dangerous assumption
that things and phenomena are ends in themselves. The "scientific" question
never enquires about the ultimate meaning of a phenomenon; to "explain" becomes
merely giving a mathematical account of the way things happen. God has no place
in the methods underlying this enquiry.
In France,
the response to Montaigne's challenge to intellectual certainty came a
generation later. René Descartes (or Des Cartes, whence the adjective
"Cartesian") (1596 - 1650) devoted his first published work to the role of
scepticism in the search for truth. His Discours de la Méthode
("Discourse on the method of rightly conducting reason and reaching the truth in
the sciences") was published in 1637. It is cast partly in a personal,
autobiographical style. Descartes tells how he realized after a scholastic
education at school that truth could not be found in the books he had read, or
in the old Aristotelian categories; people had to think anew for themselves. He
decides to try to assume nothing, to establish by systematic doubt what things
are completely self-evident and to build on them by reasoning.
If all
knowledge depends on sense-data and reasoning, the integrity of the individual
subject is central. Descartes reached a point where he found himself convinced
of his own existence as a reliable subject: "Je pense, donc je suis" (in Latin,
cogito, ergo sum). The subject's consciousness of being engaged in
rational thought is Descartes's touchstone of reality and truth. This thought,
he believed he could prove, is a non-physical activity, the work in the body of
the mind or soul, the immaterial "thinking substance" that exists in union with
the body yet is totally independent of it and can exist without it. The
Cartesian "dualism" of body and mind has been much
debated.
Then follows
his most controversial point: since the mind can conceive of a perfect being,
although the human subject cannot claim to be perfect, there must be a perfect
being, God. Like every thinker in the seventeenth century, Descartes found
himself unable and unwilling to deny the existence of God. Only now God has
become the image of our human idea of the Perfect, and serves to guarantee the
validity of sense experience. Because God exists, truth exists and can be
reached by the use of our God-given reason. Out of this comes the essence of
Descartes's "Method": experiment and deduction.
In 1644
Descartes published his great Principles of Philosophy in which his main
system was developed to the full. The main importance of Descartes does not lie
in his epistemological ideas; the cogito, the argument for God, the
dualism of non-dimensional mind and physical body, have all been more or less
rejected. But Descartes was the first person to assume that matter is the same
and always obeys the same laws everywhere in the universe. The physical laws
governing the universe can be stated in mathematical-style formulae that owe
nothing at all to human sense-data, and will be equally valid everywhere. By
matter, he means anything that has "extension" (length, breadth, height)
although the particles composing it may be of differing kinds in different
states. Descartes saw too that motion was a fundamental property of matter that might be
varied but never lost.
In the
history of European thought, Descartes occupies a central place. He laid the
foundations of the entire "scientific" process that is still fundamental to
today's world. The cosmic vision the scholastics inherited from Aristotle and
the Bible was an ancient one, never subject to verification by experimentation.
Descartes's "natural philosophy" was essentially a mechanical view of nature, in
which every aspect could be "explained" by mathematical
laws.
Francis
Bacon
In England,
Descartes was preceded by an almost equally impressive and important writer,
Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626). For England, Bacon was the great herald of
the scientific revolution. This was in great part because he was a wonderful
writer, a master of prose style. His parents were in the court, and he himself
was very ambitious. His mother's sister was the wife of Lord Burghley, the most
powerful man in Elizabeth's administration, but he did not help Bacon much.
Instead, he was encouraged by the Earl of Essex during the 1590s. He turned
against Essex after the rebellion. Under King James he rose rapidly in the legal
administration until in 1618 he became lord chancellor. Yet in 1621 he was
forced to admit that he had taken bribes as a judge and had to retire from
public life in disgrace. His public career tells nothing about his enduring
significance.
Bacon was
schooled in the old rhetorical tradition, memorizing many quotations from the
classics, learning how to use them in disputations, developing a style marked
by many aphorisms (short sayings). His legal training only encouraged him to
develop the art of using rhetoric to persuade others to think in a particular
way, while concealing the opinions of the lawyer as an individual person. Bacon
was a master of words, but was not interested in expressing personal opinions or
experience in the way that Montaigne was. Montaigne invented the word "essay"
for this kind of writing, suggesting as it does words like "experiment, trial,
test". Erasmus's Latin Adagia were a major
influence.
Bacon's
Essays are his most widely-read work yet they are often disconcerting. He
first published a collection of ten essays in 1597, under the title (in
the original spelling) Essayes. Religious Meditations. Places of perswasion
and disswasion. He continued to write and to revise his earlier work, as
Montaigne did. In 1612 a second edition appeared, with the simpler title The
Essaies, containing thirty-eight essays, including nine from the first
edition. The final edition, published in 1625 with the title The Essayes or
Counsels, Civil and Morall, contained fifty-eight essays, twenty of them new
and most of the essays from the 1612 edition much revised.
Bacon, like
Erasmus, liked to define himself by opposition to the old Scholasticism, which
for him represented error, confused thinking, and superstition. Yet in the
Essays he is following the scholastic method of debate, which consisted
basically in presenting aphorisms from various authorities (classical, biblical,
or patristic) to support or attack a given topic. Bacon's elaborate Elizabethan
style lends great elegance and complexity to what are in fact a series of
mutually contradictory aphorisms buried in his text; the contradictions are not
given any direct resolution, the reader must think and judge the
issues.
The most
well-known quotation from the Essays, and a key to reading them, is the
opening of the first essay, Of Truth:
The reference
is to St John's Gospel where Pontius Pilate is judging Jesus who has just said,
"I came into the world to bear witness to the truth". Pilate's question is
doubly ironic, suggesting that there is no ultimate truth at the very moment
when he is in the presence of Jesus who is believed by Christian's to be God's
own Truth. No one is going to find anything in Bacon's essays if they cannot
echo the words spoken by Pilate without the irony. In the face of so many
contradictory opinions, what is the truth about Death, or Religion, or Love, or
any of the other topics covered by Bacon? The danger is that, like Pilate, we
rush to the wrong opinion and stick there, not "staying" (taking the time) to
see the whole picture.
Bacon
summarizes the heart of the problem:
But it is not only the difficulty and labour which men take in finding out of truth, nor again that when it is found it imposeth upon men's thoughts, that doth bring lies in favour, but a natural though corrupt love of the
lie itself. One of the later school of the Greecians examineth the matter and is at a stand to think what should be in it, that men should love lies where neither they make for pleasure,as with poets, not for advantage, as with the merchant, but for the lie's sake. But I cannot tell. This same truth is a naked and open daylight that doth not show the masques and mummeries and triumphs of the world half so stately and daintily as candlelights. Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that showeth best by day; but it will not rise to the price of a diamond or carbuncle, that showeth best in varied lights.
This mixture
of hard-to-find truth and attractive lies is the challenge of life. The essay
Of Truth ends with another Gospel question, only Bacon changes Christ's
words from Luke into a certain prophecy that "He shall not find faith upon the
earth". Bacon makes Christ foresee that people will prefer lies to truth, and in
his own life Bacon certainly seems to have been more untruthful than many. The
main appeal of his essays is the delight of many striking
expressions:
The joys of
parents are secret, and so are their griefs and fears: they cannot utter the
one, nor they will not utter the other. Children sweeten labours, but they make
misfortunes more bitter: they increase the cares of life, but they mitigate the
remembrance of death. (Of Parents and Children)
He that hath
wife and children hath given hostages to Fortune, for they are impediments to
great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works, and
of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless
men, which both in affection and means have married and endowed the public.
(Of Marriage and Single Life)
The stage is
more beholding to love than the life of man. For as to the stage, love is ever
matter of comedies and now and then of tragedies; but in life it doth much
mischief, sometimes like a siren, sometimes like a fury. (Of
Love)
The
Essays fall under the kind of writings considered today as "literature"
but they are not Bacon's main work. His The Advancement of Learning
(1605) and the Novum Organum (1620) are the two works by which he
influenced his age and became known as one of the fathers of modern scientific
method. He consciously and conspicuously turned his back on the past and looked
towards the future. The Advancement was first published in English, but
Bacon later revised it and translated it into Latin to give it a European
readership as De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientarum (1623) which was in
turn re-translated into English and published in Oxford in 1640. In it Bacon
attacks the ignorance and superstition of the astrologer-magicians, of the
scholastics, and even of the humanists, because they remain content with flawed
and imperfect knowledge, instead of striving to gain a better understanding of
God's works. His basic argument is that before the Fall, Adam in Paradise
possessed "pure and immaculate Natural Knowledge" by God-given intuition. That
instinctive knowledge had given him the mastery over the Creation he had needed
when he gave names to everything but which was lost with Adam's original
perfection at the Fall.
Bacon insists
that knowledge of the universe was not the cause of Adam's Fall, and that "the
Divine nature took delight to hide his works, to the end that they might be
found out. Therefore it is God's will that humanity should strive to come to an
ever more nearly perfect, unified understanding of every aspect of the natural
world. Bacon's fundamental programme of study he termed "The Great
Instauration". It was to be based on experimentation and step-by-step induction
as a scientific method allowing an ever more perfect form of learning to come
into being and be transmitted.
Until now,
the "authorities", the received writers of past ages, had been seen as the
giants on whose shoulders the modern dwarfs stood. It was Bacon who overturned
the giants and said that everything remained to be discovered. This was an
intellectual revolution and recent studies have stressed Bacon's importance in
the whole social revolution of his time. His rejection of the past and his
proclamation of a New Age of science leads directly to the belief in Progress
that has so marked the scientific age.
Yet Bacon
built on Aristotle. The Organon (instrument) was the name given to
Aristotle's six treatises on formal and scientific logic based on the syllogism.
Bacon denounces the syllogistic method of speculative deduction and advocates in
its place a new methodology, a "new instrument" based on scientific deduction,
itself based on direct observation of phenomena.
Bacon
distrusted words and he distrusted the mind; he was in many ways a sceptic. He
demanded that people's minds should be purified (like the pagan temples at the
coming of Christianity) by removing the various idols
that stood for false notions of the truth. This is the most famous part of the
Novum Organum:
(51) The human understanding is of its own nature
prone to abstractions and gives a substance and reality to things which are
fleeting. But to resolve nature into abstractions is less to our purpose than to
dissect her into parts.... Matter rather than forms should be the object of our
attention, its configurations and changes of configuration, and simple action,
and law of action or motion; for forms are figments of the human mind, unless
you will call those laws of action forms.
(52) Such then
are the idols which I call Idols of the Tribe...
Bacon's
Idols of the Tribe represent the general tendency of people to mistake
words for reality and to think that an abstraction is a reality; he is recalling
the medieval conflict between nominalists and realists, and his position has
some parallels with the English nominalist William Ockham (1285 -
1347).
Bacon's
second set of idols are the Idols of the Cave, by which he means the
wrong conclusions reached by individuals on account of their personal prejudices
and limited experience. He reveals in his writings that he was by no means free
of these himself. His distrust of words underlies the third
class:
(59) But the
Idols of the Marketplace are the most troublesome of all: idols which
have crept into the understanding through the alliances of words and names. For
men believe that their reason governs words; but it is also true that words
react on the understanding; and this it is that has rendered philosophy and the
sciences sophistical and inactive....
(60) The idols
imposed by words on the understanding are of two kinds. They are either names of
things which do not exist (...), or they are names of things which exist, but
yet confused and ill-defined, and hastily and irregularly derived from
realities. Of the former kind are Fortune, the Prime Mover, Planetary Orbits,
Element of Fire, and like fictions which owe their origin to false and idle
theories....
Bacon
reserves his fiercest attack for the Idols of the Theatre, false ideas
which result from speculative thought unchecked by reference to any kind of
empirical evidence or experimentation:
(61) But the
Idols of the Theatre are not innate, nor do they steal into the
understanding secretly, but are plainly impressed and received into the mind
from the play-books of philosophical systems and the perverted rules of
demonstration.
Bacon was
firmly rooted in the Scholastic tradition that he denounced so strongly. One of
his main achievements was to propose a clear distinction between Nature and the
"supernatural" realm perceived only by Faith. Here he follows Aristotle and
Aquinas but the result of his distinction was to deny that faith had anything to
say about the physical universe. Knowledge of God comes from the Bible: "Sacred
theology must be drawn from the word and oracles of God, not from the light of
Nature or the dictates of Reason".
The world of
Nature which is accessible to observation, measurement, and mechanical
description becomes a quite separate thing. Bacon describes Nature as "God's
second book" as Christian thinkers have often done since Augustine. Galileo also
used the idea that to study and seek to understand Nature is a duty we owe to
God. The "laws" governing nature are felt to resemble those given by God in the
Bible. This suggests that God's laws are reasonable and consistent, the source
of harmony and order. Bacon insisted that by making this division between nature
and faith he was preserving the particular claims of each one. In his time, no
one thought of doubting the existence of God.
Yet by
putting the observable universe at the centre of his attention and isolating the
things of faith from the claims of reason, Bacon was preparing the way for the
secularization of learning. Very soon, the regularity of the laws of nature was
felt to be so absolute a law that even God was bound by them to such and extent
that even miracles were impossible.
In 1623
George Herbert's elder brother Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, finished
writing his De Veritate (On Truth). After the Royalist defeat in the
Civil War he also published De Causis Errorum (On the cause of errors)
and De Religione Laici (On the faith of a layman). Herbert's view of
reasonable religion was to become very general in the eighteenth century: God
exists, and should be worshipped; worship means living a virtuous life and
repenting of sin, living in piety, because after we die there are rewards and
punishments. The usual name for such a minimal system is
Deism.
Sir Thomas
Browne
Born in the
year that Bacon published his Advancement of Learning, Sir Thomas
Browne (1605 - 1682) lived a very simple kind of life. After the traditional
classical education at Winchester College and Oxford he travelled in Ireland,
then studied medicine in France, Italy, and the Netherlands at a time when the
old book-learning was being slowly challenged by the new experimental
approaches.
He realized
that tensions had arisen between science (or natural philosophy, as it was
known) and religious faith. After returning to England in 1633 he began to
compose (in English) a book discussing and trying to help solve those tensions.
He settled in Norwich to practice medicine in about 1637 and Religio
Medici was first published without his name or permission in 1642. It was
very popular and in 1643 an official edition appeared. It was translated into
several European languages and was widely read, not always with approval among
dogmatic churchmen. Browne explores religious divisions and hostilities; then he
goes on to expound a universal love for humanity in all its diversities.
Biblical ideas are supported by many classical references and a great display of
wit.
Browne had
read widely in many areas, he was a true "Metaphysical" in being able to draw
metaphors from many sources, classical, biblical, scientific, and he wrote in as
complex a style as Bacon. He was fascinated by the search for greater truth and
during the years of the Civil War he composed Pseudodoxia Epidemica: or
Enquiries into Very many received Tenents and commonly presumed Truths often
known as Vulgar Errors published in 1646 but several times revised and
augmented later. Here he is directly following in the footsteps of Bacon, who
was always critical of the way
wrong ideas were taken for truth. He starts by analyzing the various reasons for
error in ways similar to Bacon's idols: sin, gullibility, fallacy, credulity,
authority, Satan. Then follow six books in which he examines over a hundred
familiar errors in various scientific and historical
disciplines.
The
Pseudodoxia established Browne's reputation as a very learned man,
capable of informed debate in almost every aspect of learning. During the 1650s,
he wrote Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial (published 1658) which is now his
most widely admired work. Starting with the discovery of some prehistoric urns
containing human ashes, he meditates on the ways different cultures have treated
their dead. This leads to a meditation on the fragility of monuments, the power
of time, and culminates in a realization that only the Christian hope of
Resurrection offers a solution to the threat of oblivion. The high style of
Hydriotaphia makes it one of the finest pieces of English prose ever
written. Browne published Hydriotaphia accompanied by The Garden of
Cyrus, a kind of witty showpiece about the use of certain numerical motifs
employing the number five in classical buildings and gardens. He also wrote a
number of tracts and his private letters are also popular
reading.
Browne's
voice is one of those raised to resist the excessive materialism of Bacon's
views, and to insist that faith remains central to a right understanding of
nature since to measure and observe is not the same as to understand truly. One
of the most famous passages of Religio Medici (Part I section 9) stresses
the need for a sense of religious wonder:
As for those
wingy mysteries in divinity and airy subtleties in religion which have unhinged
the brains of better heads, they never stretched the pia mater (skin
around the brain) of mine; methinks there be not impossibilities enough in
religion for an active faith; the deepest mysteries ours contains have not only
been illustrated, but maintained by syllogism and the rule of reason: I love to
lose myself in a mystery, to pursue my reason to an o altitudo ("O the
depths..." Romans 11:33). 'Tis my solitary recreation to pose my apprehension
with those involved enigmas and riffles of the Trinity, with incarnation and
resurrection. I can answer all the objections of Satan, and my rebellious
reason, with that odd resolution I learned of Tertullian, Certum est quia
impossibile est (It is certain because it is impossible). I desire to
exercise my faith in the difficultest points, for to credit ordinary and visible
objects is not faith, but persuasion.
It was the
continuing human need for the dimension of wonder expressed in Browne's o
altitudo that led thinkers later in the seventeenth and in the eighteenth
centuries to stress the experience of the sublime.
The style
that Browne employed for Religio Medici reaches its finest heights in the
fifth chapter of Urn Burial. This starts with a meditation on the way the
carefully buried bones of the famous are lost while the unknown ashes in the
urns survived:
Now since
these dead bones have already outlasted the living ones of Methuselah, and in a
yard underground and thin walls of clay outworn all the strong and specious
buildings above it, and quietly rested under the drums and tramplings of three
conquests, what prince can promise such diuturnity unto his relics... Time which
antiquates antiquities and hath an art to make dust of all things hath yet
spared these minor monuments. In vain we hope to be known by open and visible
conservatories, when to be unknown was the means of their continuation and
obscurity their protection.
It ends in a
great showpiece of style:
Pyramids,
arches, obelisks were but the irregularities of vainglory and wild enormities of
ancient magnanimity. But the most magnanimous resolution rests in the Christian
religion, which trampleth upon pride and sits on the neck of ambition, humbly
pursuing that infallible perpetuity unto which all others must diminish their
diameters, and be poorly seen in angles of contingency.
Pious spirits
who passed their days in raptures of futurity made little more of this world
than the world that was before it, while they lay obscure in the chaos of
preordination and night of their fore beings....
To subsist in
lasting monuments, to live in their productions, to exist in their names and
predicament of chimeras was large satisfaction unto old expectations, and made
one part of their Elysiums. But all this is nothing in the metaphysics of true
belief. To live indeed is to be again ourselves, which being not only an hope
but an evidence in noble believers, 'tis all one to lie in St Innocent's
churchyard as in the sands of Egypt, ready to be anything, in the ecstasy of
being over, and as content with six feet as the moles of
Adrianus.
It should not
be thought that Sir Thomas Browne (he was knighted by Charles II in 1671) was
merely a playful stylist. He created the language that expressed what he wanted
to say. Among the words that he was the first to use in English are 'medical',
'literary', 'electricity', 'precarious', 'hallucination'. He
followed Bacon in his enthusiasm for the new age of experiment and discovery. It
is the personal authenticity and breadth of vision that speak through Browne
that have endeared him to generations of readers. Not surprisingly, he was a
friend of many of the leading researchers of his time.
Among
Browne's acquaintances was William Harvey (1578 - 1657) who studied at
Padua and became the physician (doctor) of kings James I and Charles I. In 1628
Harvey published De motu cordis (only translated from Latin into English
in 1653) which for the first time in human history offered an accurate account
of the mechanical function of the heart and the circulation of the blood. He
also produced radically new work on the growth of the human embryo. Harvey
rejected the extremely mechanical approach to physical reality and employed a
symbolism which brought him close to such arcane poets as
Vaughan.
Other figures
related to Browne include Sir Kenelm Digby (1603 - 1665) who first
established that plants need oxygen to live, wrote an early criticism of
Religio Medici, and was one of the first members of the Royal Society.
Another of the 17th century's great antiquaries who was fascinated by relics of
the past was Sir Robert Cotton (1571 - 1631) whose great library of
medieval manuscripts saved from monasteries survived a fire in 1731 to become
part of the British Library's collection. It includes the manuscripts of
Beowulf, and Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight.
Another
writer contemporary with Browne is Robert Burton (1577 - 1640). Burton is
famous for his only work, the difficult and remarkable Anatomy of
Melancholy. First published in 1621, this complex study of human psychology
was enlarged with each new edition until the final version appeared in 1651.
Burton suffered from melancholy, a form of psychological distress, and was a
very learned man. His work is personal, and at the same time full of references
to classical and modern writings. Burton insists that everyone is slightly
tinged by melancholy and that the only solution is to avoid solitude and
idleness. He writes in an amused satirical tone about the failures of human
learning and action. After discussing the causes and possible cures of
melancholy he studies love-melancholy and religious melancholy in
detail.
While Browne
was pursuing his quiet life in Norwich, in France another great man lived and
died. Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662) was equally a polymath,
interested by many topics including mathematics, physics and mechanics, morality
and religion. The difference between Browne and Pascal reflects the differences
between the intellectual and religious worlds of England and France. Pascal did
major work in mathematics and physics, he even invented a calculating machine
that anticipated the modern computer. Yet his fame rests on two religious works,
Les Provinciales (1656-7, translated into English in 1657) against the
Jesuits, and Les Pensées, incomplete thoughts on how best to defend
Christianity published in 1670 after his death. Pascal was deeply influenced in
his last years by the spiritual movement in the French Catholic church known as
Jansenism.
Thomas
Hobbes
The main
concern of all the thinkers of this age was truth. The quest for truth went in
two main directions. The truth about the external world was now seen to be a
matter of measurement, while faith and ethics were inward truths discovered by
some kind of inner light and supported by Reason. Descartes divided reality into
Extension (the material world with its dimensions in space) and Thought (mind or
soul). What could be described and defined mathematically was considered real in
the truest sense. Reality was material, extended in space and moving in various
ways. At the same time, Galileo's atomic theories and Copernicus's heliocentric
model suggested strongly that the impressions received by the senses
(sense-data) might be quite misleading.
The result of
this in Descartes was a division between body and mind (spirit or soul) that
could never be bridged. The two essential certainties that Descartes reached by
intuition, that I and God truly exist, have nothing in common with the
mechanical laws governing the objects that the mind perceives outside of itself.
Since the senses are deceitful, they should not be given room to interfere with
the operations of the thinking mind, of Reason. Descartes's approach is not
poetic or symbolic.
This, pushed
to its ultimate extremes, leads to the position stated by Hobbes in Chapter 46
of his Leviathan:
The universe, that is, the whole mass of all things that are, is corporeal, that is to say, body, and hath the dimensions of magnitude, namely length, breadth, and depth; also, every part of body is likewise body, and hath the like dimensions, and consequently every part of the universe is body, and that which is not body is no part of the universe; and because the universe is all, that which is no part of it is nothing, and consequently nowhere.
In these
words, using concepts such as "corporeal" or "body" which he never really
queries or defines, Hobbes is rejecting every kind of speculative approach and
every suggestion that there is more to existence than matter and motion.
Although he was in name a Christian, his arguments lead straight to atheism.
Hobbes had little in common with the concerns and sympathies of Sir Thomas
Browne.
After an
education at Oxford, in the 1620s Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679) was close
to Sir Francis Bacon and even worked as a kind of secretary for him. He knew Ben
Jonson and, later, Abraham Cowley; during travels in Europe he met Galileo and
Descartes. In 1647 he was appointed mathematical tutor to the future king
Charles II in exile in France but in 1652 he returned to England and submitted
to the Commonwealth Council of State. This did not prevent him receiving a
pension at the Restoration.
Hobbes's
philosophical writings have generally provoked intense hostility, both on
account of their contents and also because of the emotions of hatred or fear
inspiring much of them. Hobbes's tone is mostly very gruff, with none of the
charm of Sir Thomas Browne's. He really hates the scholastics and churchmen with
their abstract speculations, while he fears the chaos that selfish human
passions bring to society. Therefore his philosophy is mostly expressed in
political terms, pleading for strong government and absolute rule in a society
devoid of any transcendent Being or metaphysical system, that might challenge
the rule of law.
From 1650
onwards, he published a variety of works devoted to matter, human nature, and
society, in both English and Latin. By far the most significant is The
Leviathan, or the Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and
Civil (1651). Hobbes's power lies in his willingness to take his arguments
to their logical conclusion with intense single-mindedness, irrespective of what
this does to generally received opinions or systems. He demands answers as
firmly based in
He takes the
Cartesian idea that the material universe is composed of extended matter in
motion and insists that there is no need to postulate a separate realm of
"thought" or "spirit" as Descartes did. All our perceptions, thoughts, and
feelings he considers to be the result of matter in movement in our bodies and
brains. In particular, Hobbes denied that there was a distinct "soul", a
non-corporeal "I" that could exist without a physical body. Like Milton, he
professed "mortalism".
Hobbes
suggests that all human actions begin as endeavour, a tension of the
will, either an appetite straining towards something that is expected to
cause pleasure or an aversion straining away from what may cause pain. In
his introduction to the Leviathan Hobbes claims that introspection shows
this to be true. The desire for pleasure, or to keep the pleasure we have, and
the dislike of pain and death, direct every activity of all except those rare
people who by very special education have learned to be altruistic and
self-sacrificing.
All human
actions, he claims in the most famous portion of Leviathan, are prompted
by self-interest or by fear (self-preservation). Having established selfishness
as an almost universal fact, he deduces that social peace and order are
constantly threatened by "quarrel" or strife. He suggests three reasons for
strife between people: "competition", "diffidence" (distrust), and "glory"
(reputation or pride):
Hereby it is
manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all
in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of
every man against every man. For war consisteth not in battle only, or in the
act of fighting, but in a tract of time wherein the will to contend by battle is
sufficiently known; and therefore the notion of time is to be considered in the
nature of war, as it was in the nature of weather. For as the nature of foul
weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of
many days together; so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but
in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to
the contrary. All other time is peace.
Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same is consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that ma be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and, which is worst of all. continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
That last
epigrammatic phrase has provoked immense debate and helped many thinkers clarify
their fundamental opinion about the meaning and value of human
existence.
Hobbes offers
a very simple solution. All people need do to avoid strife is to submit to a
single absolute ruler whose laws are decisive in every matter. For Hobbes, even
religious truth is true only because the sovereign's law declares it to be so.
The "social contract" is the name of this topic, and it developed in 17th
century Europe in part as a result of protestant attempts to apply the biblical
idea of "Covenant" to human society in general. Because Hobbes has such a
negative view of human life (he always insisted that he was born early because
his mother was terrified by news of the Spanish Armada in 1588!) he proposes a
form of contract that sounds like a prison sentence.
Yet the main
historical interest of Hobbes's work is not his concept of absolute
dictatorship, which only found its unfortunate fruition in the 20th century, but
the expression he gives to extreme materialist explanations of sensation and
thought. In the epistemological debate about knowledge and perception, Hobbes's
denial of any non-material essential "I" led him to look for entirely mechanical
explanations of the way we see and respond to the outside world. All perception
is the echo inside of our bodies of motions and vibrations outside of them.
Hobbes did not explain "consciousness" at all but felt no need to postulate an
immaterial soul as an explanation of anything. For Hobbes, the soul belonged to
the same category as ghosts, and he hated ghost stories, considering them to be
utter "nonsense".
In the
history of thought, the great battles are often fought in teams, not always by
extraordinary individuals. A response to Hobbes's materialism was formulated in
the various writings of a group of men associated with Cambridge University
during the Commonwealth and Restoration: Benjamin Whichcote, John Smith, Henry
More, and Ralph Cudworth whose The True Intellectual System of the
Universe was the most important expression of the group's
ideas.
While they
were opposed to Hobbes, they were also distressed by the irrational fanaticism
and extremist controversy that was tearing the Church apart. While they
reasserted Plato's notion of Forms printed in the soul enabling us to interpret
reliably the appearances perceived outside ourselves, they believed that human
Reason, the Order of the Universe, and Divine Revelation were in harmony;
therefore to seek for Truth with our reason is to seek for God and to understand
the Order of the universe is to know the mind of God its Author.
Like Milton,
they did not accept the pessimistic Calvinistic doctrine of "total depravity" by
which no one could know anything about God without special saving Grace.
Instead, they optimistically believed that human beings could advance to
perfection by using their Reason, which at the same time would show them how to
live virtuously in society. Truth and Goodness were both natural possibilities
for ordinary people in general. Their calm, reasonable attitude with its appeal
to Plato and cool reason helped prepare the way for the Deism of the 18th
century's religious thinkers.
The Royal
Society
An
independent college had been founded near London in the 1580s by a London
merchant, Sir Thomas Gresham. It had developed a practical curriculum that
included Astronomy, mathematics, anatomy, physics for adult citizens who wanted
to learn more in areas that could help them in their work. When Oxford came
under Puritan control in the later 1640s, teachers formed at Gresham were
brought in to develop the study of the "natural sciences"
there.
Bacon had
justified his programme of The Great Instauration by reference to a restoration
of the perfection Adam had enjoyed in the Earthly Paradise. This theological
vision coincided exactly with the optimistic millenarianism that was being
promoted in the early 1640s by Samuel Hartlib, Gabriel Plattes (in the Utopian
work Macaria of 1641), John Dury, and Jan Amos Comenius. Comenius called
his vision "Pansophia", it was to be the dawn of a new enlightenment spread
across Protestant Europe by which material benefits would accrue from increased
knowledge about the universe. Like Milton and many others, they were convinced
that if England led the way, this new perfection of learning in society would
encourage God to bring in the Reign of Christ and vanquish the old ignorance.
Throughout
the Commonwealth, the Baconian vision and the millenarian optimism of many
Puritans worked together to promote the growth of experimental sciences. Even
when the Commonwealth failed, the sense of being promised an ever brighter
future continued, and the very word "Restoration" spoke of much more than the
return of a king. It was felt to allude to the Restoration of Paradise, the
Golden Age often related to the time of Augustus, a time of peace, progress, and
reason.
Finally the
Royal Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge was given its
charter in 1662. Not all its members were scientists, they included Dryden,
Cowley, Waller, as well as Sir Christopher Wren (architect of St Paul's
Cathedral after the great fire of 1666). The Royal Society is generally credited
with having encouraged its members to employ a simple plain style of writing. In
this it helped the English language pass from the elegance of Sir Thomas Browne
to a more modern austerity. It also reflects the way in which poetry, marked by
metaphor and wit, was being marginalized and rejected in favour of a lucid,
"prosaic" means of expression.
John
Locke
Although
Locke's work and influence really belong to the period beyond the scope of this
book, it would be foolish to omit one of the most influential thinkers England
ever produced. John Locke (1632 - 1704) was educated in the traditional way at
Westminster School and at Christ Church, Oxford. He was given positions in the
university and in public service, he was also interested in medicine and was
physician to the earl of Shaftesbury but much of his time was spent in study and
writing.
In 1690 he
published his greatest work, the Essay concerning Human Understanding
that remains one of the fundamental texts in the philosophical analysis of
"mind". In the same year, he published two Treatises of Government in
which he insists that there is no divine or absolute right of kings.
Contradicting Hobbes, he insists that the king in a state is bound by the social
contract, that the people's consent to his rule may be withdrawn and a new ruler
chosen if the king fails to serve the best interests of the nation.
He was
writing at the time before 1685 when people were trying to prevent the Catholic
prince James Stuart from succeeding his brother Charles II. After this failed,
the events of 1688 forced James into exile but he did not surrender the crown.
Locke was closely associated with William of Orange and published the
Treatises in support of the argument that the title of king was given by
popular consent and could be taken back by regular process. Many in England had
been troubled by the idea of recognizing Parliament's right to make and unmake
kings; Locke writes to justify this course of action.
In 1695,
Locke published another major text, The Reasonableness of Christianity,
expressing a form of natural religion without fixed creeds or traditions. He was
opposed to Catholicism but wished for a very tolerant attitude towards the
various forms of Protestantism. Locke was a leader in the development of
rational Deism. His Thoughts concerning Education (1693) were immensely
popular in the following century and influenced Rousseau's ideas on the subject
expressed in Emile.
Locke's
fundamental assertion is that we are born with our minds a blank, like an empty
sheet of paper, tabula rasa; we receive impressions from outside which
our reason then transforms into knowledge. There is no in-born knowledge. Locke
is an empiricist and a rationalist: "Reason must be our last judge and guide in
everything." In many matters Locke is prepared to say that we cannot know or
cannot be sure of knowing rightly about the outside world. One important word
for Locke is idea which he does not use in the Platonic sense but in
Descartes's manner, to signify "the object of the understanding when a man
thinks", mind-dependant.
It was Locke
who, after Descartes, decided the direction and concerns of modern European
philosophy. For the writers and thinkers of the 18th century, Locke was
fundamental reading, though perhaps more for his political views on society than
for his difficult theories of knowledge. If the 18th century is known commonly
as the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason, it is very largely thanks to
John Locke. The work of Lessing and Kant, of Voltaire and Diderot, and many
others, derives from ideas first developed in England. The successors to Locke
in England are George Berkeley (1685 - 1753), David Hartley (1705 - 1757) and
David Hume (1711 - 1776)
Sir Isaac
Newton
The 18th
century looked back with gratitude to the century that produced Milton, Locke,
and Newton. Paradise Lost was the only European epic that stood
comparison with Homer or Virgil. Locke had established Reason as the basis for
all knowledge. Newton was the third great founder of the Age of Reason. Newton
(1642 - 1727) was born into a humble family, but
was able to study at Cambridge and stayed there from 1661 until 1696, when he
was given the post of master of the Royal Mint and president of the Royal
Society. He never married.
Newton was
one of the greatest geniuses that Europe ever produced. His pioneering work in
mathematics, dynamics, astro-physics, astronomy, optics, cosmology is still a
fundamental reference today. Only in the matter of relativism (Einstein) has he
been shown to have been lacking. Yet he wrote major studies in areas such as
prophecy and alchemy, as well as theology and biblical chronology, where today
these subjects are not part of a scientist's normal
concerns.
Newton's
cosmic view ("Newtonianism") is expressed in three major works: Philosophiae
naturalis principia mathematica (1687), the Optiks (1704) on the
nature of light, and Arithmetica universalis (1707). He established
firmly that the cosmos was governed by perfectly rational laws "of nature" that
kept it in a marvelous pattern under God its Maker whose glory was manifest in
its great universal harmonies. This became the leading ideology of the
Enlightenment. Contemporary with Newton, and in conflict with him in some areas,
was the great German Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646 -
1716).