Authors: Bill Bryson
We are today understandably prepared to believe that the only reasons anyone might have had to cling to the old crumbling teleological cathedral, in light of the superior science battering it, were speciously theological; and, in fact, such reasons probably did motivate most of those who clung to the old system. Still, there was nothing a priori fallacious about the old system’s assumptions about reality, just as there was nothing a priori true about the assumptions that would replace them.
The grand old system was crumbling, and it made for a capacious space into which genius could expand. When foundations fall, everything can and must be rethought. The exhilaration on display in the writings of the new scientists bears witness to how bracingly liberating such possibilities can be, at least for those with the intellectual imagination and bravado to
take advantage of them. ‘You cannot help it, Signor Sarsi,’ Galileo exults in
The Assayer,
written in the form of a letter to a friend, ‘that it was granted to me alone to discover all the new phenomena in the sky and nothing to anybody else.’
And what question is more foundational than the question of what counts as a good explanation? All the great men whom we now associate with the formation of modern science – Copernicus (1473–1543), William Gilbert (1544–1603), Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), William Harvey (1578–1657), René Descartes (1596–1650), Robert Boyle (1627–1691), John Locke (1632–1704) and Isaac Newton (1643–1727) – were intensely involved with the question of what form explanation ought to take, if teleology was truly to be abandoned, and there was by no means a consensus among them. Two different orientations emerged: one rationalist, stressing abstract reason, the other empiricist, stressing experience.
In some sense, this cognitive split was nothing new. It had made itself felt in the ancient world, in the distinction between the Platonists and the Aristotelians. It is probably as old as thought itself, shadowing two distinct intellectual temperaments. But the new rationalist and empiricist orientations were not like the old. The rationalist orientation looked to mathematics to provide the new mode of explanation. The empiricists saw the new scientific method as emerging out of experimentation. In responding to the need for a new mode of explanation to take the place of teleology, they became epistemological rivals, offering competing models to take the place of the old system’s final causes.
The men who met in Gresham College, London,
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had given notice, in their self-baptism, that the mathematical and experimental approaches were not only compatible but collaborative; even, as it were,
one.
There is an important epistemological claim implicit in their stated intention to promote ‘physico-mathematicall experimentall learning’, and the claim was by no means demonstrable in 1660. The thinkers whose work inspired them could be divided into those whose stance was slanted toward the new rationalist understanding of physical explanation – Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes – and those who espoused the experimental understanding of physical explanation – Francis Bacon, William Gilbert and William Harvey. This list suggests a geographical divide, with the rationalists on the Continent, the empiricists in England, which makes the ecumenicalism of the sources of inspiration all the more noteworthy.
The temperamental distinction between the mathematical rationalists and experimental empiricists could be, in fact, so marked that we can well wonder how these scientific founders made common cause with one another against the old system. How can such different scientific temperaments, proffering such different answers as to what a scientific explanation ought to look like, have conspired to hammer out the new methodology?
William Gilbert, for example, a luminary of the experimental approach, is acknowledged as the founder of the science of magnetism, and his experiments had been ingenious. He had carved out of a lodestone – a piece of naturally magnetic mineral – a scale model of the Earth he called his terrella, or little Earth, and with it he had been able to explain a phenomenon that had been known for centuries. A freely suspended compass needle pointed North, but later observations had revealed that the direction deviated somewhat from true North, and Robert Norman had published his finding in 1581 that the force on a magnetic needle was not horizontal but slanted into the Earth. Passing a small compass over his terrella, Gilbert demonstrated that a horizontal compass would point toward the magnetic pole, while a dip needle, balanced on a horizontal axis perpendicular to the magnetic one, indicated the proper ‘magnetic inclination’ between the magnetic force and the horizontal direction. The experiments convinced him that the Earth itself was a giant magnet. Galileo, his contemporary,
commends his work, but criticises him for not being well-grounded in mathematics, especially geometry.
Galileo, for his part, could be high-handed in regard to experimentation, writing, for example, that it was only the need to convince his ignorant opponents that made him resort to ‘a variety of experiments, though to satisfy his own mind alone he had never felt it necessary to make any’.
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As one historian of science has written, ‘If this was seriously meant, it was extremely important for the advance of science that Galileo had strong opponents, and in fact there are other passages in his works which show that his confident belief in the mathematical structure of the world emancipated him from the necessity of close dependence on experiment.’
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The two orientations, rationalist and empiricist, were partly defining themselves in opposition to one another, becoming far more adversarial now that the old system was crumbling. That system had blended together both a priori reason and empirical observation, conceiving both as co-dependently involved in scientific explanation. Aristotle had been a biologist, much given to observing the natural world, and the system that had grown up on Aristotelian foundations had always striven to take account of observable facts. So, for example, as more precise observations of the ‘wandering’ planets were made, a vast complexity of interacting celestial gears, the ever more torturous epicycles and eccentrics, was sketched to accommodate them into the geocentric picture which was an essential part of the old system’s teleology. In
Paradise Lost,
John Milton speaks of ‘Sphere/With Centric and Eccentric scribbled o’er,/Cycle and Epicycle,
Orb in Orb’. Such complexity was demanded because of ongoing observation. Aristotelians were not given to ignoring the observable facts. Quite the contrary: they observed processes so as to be able to read out of them the narratives of potentiality actualised.
Then again, Aristotle was also a logician, who had laid down the laws of the syllogism. According to Aristotle, logical demonstration, by way of the syllogism, was a necessary component
of epistêmê,
or scientific knowledge. In his
Posterior Analytics,
he says that scientific knowledge requires that we know the cause ‘of why the thing is’, and also know that it could not have been otherwise. In other words, scientific knowledge not only must discover causes but demonstrate that they are necessarily the causes, and it is the abstract science of the syllogism that is assigned the latter demonstrative role.
However, both rationalism and empiricism, as they emerged in the seventeenth century, were of an entirely different kind from their counterparts in the old system. The scientific rationalism of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Descartes had little use for the Aristotelian syllogism, which, so they argued, cannot expand our knowledge but merely rearrange it to set off implicit logical relations. Logic may be perfect, but it is also perfectly inert, incapable of moving substantive discovery forward. For the new scientific rationalists, it is not syllogistic logic but rather mathematics that holds an incomparable active power, capable of generating new knowledge. ‘We do not learn to demonstrate from the manuals of logic,’ Galileo wrote, ‘but from the books which are full of demonstrations, which are mathematical, not logical.’ A priori reason in the form of mathematics provides a methodology for discovery. As Galileo was to put it ringingly in
The Assayer:
Philosophy is written in this vast book, which continuously lies upon before our eyes (I mean the universe). But it cannot be understood unless you have first learned to understand the language and recognise the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and the characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures. Without such means, it is impossible for us humans to understand a word of it, and to be without them is to wander around in vain through a dark labyrinth.
It was, more than anything else, the new mathematical conception of the physical universe that had hastened the crumbling of the old explanatory system. Copernicus had urged his heliocentric model of the solar system not on the basis of its empirical superiority – both the geocentric and the heliocentric pictures could accommodate the data – but on the basis of its mathematical superiority:
Nor do I doubt that skilled and scholarly mathematicians will agree with me if, what philosophy requires from the beginning, they will examine and judge, not casually but deeply, what I have gathered together in this book to prove these things … Mathematics is written for mathematicians, to whom these my labours, if I am not mistaken, will appear to contribute something.
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Under Galileo, the mathematical conceptualising of nature was radically advanced. He took the concept of motion, agreeing with Aristotle that it is the object of scientific explanation, and he reconfigured it into terms that can be expressed precisely in numbers. Distance travelled is quantifiable, as is time elapsed; and, from Galileo onward, motion is conceived of as a comparison between these two factors, the change of distance and the passing of time. Once motion itself had been reconfigured as a mathematical concept, other concepts, which are functions of motion, can be mathematically defined, so that, by developing the equations between the various functions of mathematical motions, new properties can be uncovered. The mathematical expression of the physical allows for what logic could never accomplish: the generation of new descriptions, going beyond the observable. It is the relations between these mathematical properties which, expressed as equations, remain constant between instances, yielding universal laws of nature. And it is these laws that supplant teleology in the new conception of explanation.
A priori mathematics, according to Galileo, does not entirely obviate the need for observation (only the most extreme of rationalists, Spinoza and Leibniz, were to argue the expendability, at least in principle, of all empirical knowledge, claiming that all could be a priori deduced from first principles
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); but mathematics
does
allow us to deduce unobservable properties and thus to penetrate into the structure of nature.
Of course, this meant that not all of the processes conceived of as motions by Aristotle were Galilean motions. Only motions susceptible to mathematical translation came under the purview of science; the rest were expelled from the possibility of physical explanation. Even more than this, Galileo, and those who followed him, defined physical nature itself in terms of mathematics. It was Galileo who first drew the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. If all aspects of physical reality are mathematically expressible, and if not all aspects of our experience are susceptible to mathematical treatment, the implication is that
not all aspects of our experience are physically real. Our minds contribute to what we seem to see out there in the world. Our experience is not transparent; there is a gauzy veil of subjectivity hung between us and the objective physical world of mathematical bodies, compounded out of mathematically arranged mathematical constituents, mathematically moving through mathematical space over the course of mathematical time. All those aspects of our experience that can be rendered in mathematical language are ‘primary’ and correlated with what is out there; the rest are ‘secondary’ qualities, features of our subjective experience, caused by the interaction between the primary qualities out there and our own sensory organs. This distinction was widely accepted, not only by rationalists like Galileo and Descartes, but empiricists like John Locke. The portions of
res cogitans
lurking in our cerebral hemispheres provide a sanctuary for the otherwise inexplicable flotsam and jetsam of perception.
Scientific rationalism, then, as it emerged to challenge the old system, placed its hopes not in logic but in mathematics. Whereas the old system’s working hypothesis had been that all physical processes are striving toward an end they seek to accomplish, the working hypothesis of the new rationalists was that all physical processes have a quantitative structure, and it is this abstract structure that distils the laws of nature that provide their explanation. As the über-rationalist Spinoza was to express it:
Thus the prejudice developed into superstitions, and took deep root in the human mind; and for this reason everyone strove most zealously to understand and explain the final causes of things; but in their endeavour to show that nature does nothing in vain, i.e. nothing which is useless to man, they only seem to have demonstrated that nature, the gods, and men are all mad together … Such a doctrine might well have sufficed to conceal the truth from the human race for all eternity if mathematics had not furnished another
standard of verity in considering solely the essence and properties of figures without regard to their final causes.
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But what of the new empiricism? How was it in opposition to the old system? Aristotle may not himself have thought much of mathematics, but he was himself an empiricist, who took observation, most especially of biological organisms, very seriously; it was his mathematical-maniacal teacher, Plato, who dismissed sense-data (and many of those in the Copernicus–Kepler–Galileo camp were neo-Platonists). But Aristotle and the grand cathedral of thought that was erected around him advocated a passive form of observation. Nature, working always with its own ends in view, the very ends which provide the explanation in terms of final causes, was not to be interfered with. Teleology trumped technology. The very windingness of the roads of Europe’s medieval cities testifies to the old system’s hands-off approach toward nature. These roads were laid out on paths the rain took as it rolled down inclines. To transpose our own pathways over nature’s choices was a violation of the fundamental assumption of the old system. One must respectfully observe the motions of nature, since their course had been plotted by their implicit end states, and it is in the hands-off observation that the explanation emerges.