Excerpts from Landmarks in Western Science (1999)



Excerpts from Landmarks in Western Science (1999)

by Peter Whitfield

By the time of Newton’s death in 1727, science had become a major force in western intellectual life, exerting a powerful influence on philosophy and theology. The education of a gentleman still centred on the classics and mathematics, but no cultivated man could remain ignorant, in general terms, of Copernican astronomy, the theory of gravity, or of concepts such as vacuum, chemical reactions, magnetic force, and so on. Science was in fashion, with lectures and experiments providing a form of entertainment for the salons. This is the familiar image of eighteenth-century science: elegant figures in silk and lace gazing impassively at air-pumps, electrical machines, and dissected animals.

Yet in terms of intellectual innovation, the eighteenth century unfolded as a prolonged anti-climax after the scientific revolution. There was no second Newton in physics, no second Galileo in astronomy . . . The eighteenth century was an age of science in the sense that an awareness of science spread widely among educated people, but not in the sense of major discoveries or innovations. This was the age of the botanical garden, the scientific discovery, and the ‘cabinet’ of natural curiosities . . . There was indeed a technological revolution in the making in England, in steam power and in iron and textiles, but it had a craft basis . . . The new machines were built in mining regions, hidden from polite society, and as yet had little impact on people’s lives . . . There were no great reforms in education to reflect the scientific revolution, for the universities remained wedded to a virtually medieval syllabus of classical literature and mathematics, while scientific men met in their private academies. Science in this period was characterized by advances in three areas: there were far-reaching developments in mathematics, many of which served to vindicate Newtonian physics; there was a rapid accumulation of data, notably in zoology and botany, together with a universal desire to measure and classify natural phenomena; and there was a philosophical enquiry into Nature and its laws, and the role of God and man in the new science, an enquiry which came to very different conclusions in England from those in France. Only towards the end of the century did the stirrings of a second scientific revolution begin to appear, with the new sciences of electricity, of empirical chemistry, and with the revolution in industrial machines.

Many European philosophers found Newton’s celestial physics difficult to accept, and Descartes’s mechanistic science remained for them a more attractive model than action at a distance. Newton’s dispute with Leibniz over the priority in discovering calculus tended to reinforce tension between English and continental scientists . . . [160-162]

The great representative biologist of the period was Georges Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788), an enlightened aristocrat who employed his wealth and his country estate in the pursuit of natural history, and whose vast forty-four volume Histoire naturelle, 1749-1804, became a repository of eighteenth-century knowledge and speculation. Its outstanding feature was its conscious abandonment of the doctrine of fixity of species, and its affirmation that nature was in a state of change. Only thus could Buffon explain the existence of groups of animals which were obviously related to each other—man and ape, horse and ass for example. He went so far as to suggest that these species might share a common ancestor, but rather than progressive evolution, Buffon conceived that degeneration was at work: thus an ape was a degenerate man, the ass a degenerate horse, and so on. A similar process of change was to be seen in the history of the earth, which he suggested had arisen from the collision of a comet with the Sun. Whether as a result of such a collision, or arising from the nebular hypothesis, the cooling of the earth over thousands of years became an accepted principle of geological thought. The cooling of the earth, the formation of rocks and minerals, ocean and atmosphere, and the emergence of life are all described by Buffon as natural processes, quite distinct from any biblical frame of reference, and they occurred, Buffon estimated, over some 100,000 years. Buffon was also a strong supporter of epigenesis, as against the still widespread belief in preformation. Thus Buffon produced a rational, non-Biblical map of nature suited to the age of enlightenment . . .

The most radical denial of the fixity of species came in the work of Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (1744-1829), who extended the time-scale of the earth far beyond that of his tutor, Buffon. 'Time is insignificant', he wrote, 'and is never a difficulty for nature. It is always at her disposal and represents an unlimited power with which she accomplishes her greatest and smallest tasks.' Lamarck had no doubt that species had evolved and become differentiated over time, and the mechanism which he proposed to explain this was the inheritance of acquired characteristics: for example the long legs of a wading bird or the long neck of a giraffe arose from constant stretching as these animals sought for food in their different environments . . . Darwin too accepted that variations occurred in nature, and it was essential to his theory that these differentiated traits were inherited, otherwise new species would never become established . . . [166-167]

In 1714 William Derham wrote of Newtonian astronomy: ‘This system is the most rational and probable because it is far the most magnificent of any, and worthy of an infinite Creator.’ Derham (1657-1735) was an Anglican clergyman, socially well-connected, a competent amateur scientist and a fellow of the Royal Society. His two original works, Physico-Theology (1713) and Astro-Theology (1714) took as their theme the magnificence of God as shown in the glories of the natural world and the cosmic structure. The possibility that the universe was infinite . . . is eagerly embraced by Derham because it would the more magnificently display God’s creative power. He accepts that every fixed star is a sun, probably with attendant planets, which in turn probably support lives ours does. The novelty of this belief is worth dwelling on . . . The idea of the ‘plurality of worlds’, as it was called in Derham’s

day . . . [undercut] the unique personal relationship between God and world of man that always been at the heart of religious faith. Yet Derham had no uneasiness about the implications of his ideas, for the new vistas opened by science were smoothly transformed into a supremely rational religion: beneath all the diversity of nature lay laws so powerful that any new demonstration of their complexity could be welcomed as further proof of God’s omnipotence. This synthesis of religion and science was to prevail in English thought throughout the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth. The design that was everywhere apparent in the universe was seen as proof not merely of God’s existence, but of his wisdom and goodness.

Thirty years after Derham’s death, Baron d’Holbach wrote, in a France where social and intellectual tensions were becoming intolerable, ‘Theology is but the ignorance of natural causes reduced to a system’ and again ‘When man ascribes to ‘the gods’ the production of some phenomenon . . . does he in fact do anything more than substitute for the darkness of his own mind, a sound to which he had been accustomed to listen with reverential awe?’. Among the group centred around Diderot and the Encyclopédie, d’Holbach (1723-1789) was perhaps the most strident atheist. To him, nature was a self-sustaining mechanism which needed no controlling intelligence, and science as the study of nature was a purely secular pursuit. God was merely a label for man’s ignorance of nature’s secrets . . .

[During the eighteenth century science] acquired an intellectual authority in its own right, an authority that was secular, radical and exclusive of other approaches to truth. This model arose first amid the social and political tensions of eighteenth-century France; it found little favor in England or Germany, but despite the efforts of deists and rational theologians, it was the model of science that would ultimately prevail . . .

The limitations of eighteenth-century science, and striking differences between the national schools of scientific philosophy, remind us that science is not pure knowledge but is a provisional report, a system of beliefs which are historically conditioned. . . [180-181]

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