The Reenchantment of the World (6 page)

the
Newtonian century was the solution to the
problem of planetary motion, a problem that, it was commonly believed,
not even the Greeks had been able to solve (the Greeks, it should be
noted, took a more positive view of their own achievement). Bacon had
derided the ancient learning, but he did not speak for the majority of
Europeans. The strong revival of classical learning in the sixteenth
century, for example, reflected the belief that despite the enormous
problems with the Greek cosmologicaI model, their epoch was and would
remain the true Golden Age of mankind. Newton's precise mathematical
description of a heliocentric solar system changed all that; he not only
summed up the universe in four simple algebraic formulas, but he also
accounted for hitherto unexplained phenomena, made accurate predictions,
clarified the relation between theory and experiment, and even sorted
out the role of God in the whole system. Above all, Newton's system
was atomistic: the earth and sun, being composed of atoms themselves,
behaved in the same way that any two atoms did, and vice versa. Thus both
the smallest and the largest objects in the universe were seen to obey
identical laws. The moon's relationship to the earth was the same as
that of a falling apple. The mystery of nearly two millennia was over:
one could be reassured that the heavens that confront us on a starry
night held no more secrets than a few grains of sand running through
our fingers.

 

 

Newton deliberately titled his major work, popularly called the
"Principia," the "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy"
(1686),19 the two adjectives serving to emphasize his rejection of
Descartes, whose "Principles of Philosophy" he regarded as a collection
of unproven hypotheses. Step by step he analyzed Descartes' propostitions
about the natural world and demonstrated their falsity. For example,
Descartes envisaged the matter of the universe circulating in whirlpools,
or vortices. Newton was able to show that this theory contradicted the
work of Kepler, which seemed quite reliable; and that if one experimented
with models of vortices by spinning buckets of fluid (water, oil, pitch),
the contents would eventually slow down and stop, indicating that on
Descartes' hypothesis the universe would have come to a standstill long
ago. Despite his attacks on Descartes' views, it is clear from recent
research that Newton was a Cartesian right up to the publication of the
"Principia"; and when one reads the work, one is struck by an awesome
fact: Newton made the Cartesian world view tenable by falsifying all of
its details. In other words, although Descartes' facts were wrong and his
theories insupportable, the central Cartesian outlook -- that the world
is a vast machine of matter and motion obeying mathematical laws -- was
thoroughly validated by Newton's work. For all of Newton's brilliance,
the real hero (some would say ghost) of the Scientific Revolution was
René Descartes.

 

 

But Newton did not have his triumph so easily. His entire view of the
cosmos hinged on the law of universal gravitation, or gravity, and even
after it had been given an exact mathematical formulation, no one knew
just what this attraction was. Cartesian thinkers pointed out that their
own mentor had wisely restricted himself to motion by direct impact, and
ruled out what scientists would later call action-at-a-distance. Newton,
they argued, has not
explained
gravity, but merely stated its effects,
and thus it really is, in his system, an occult property. Where is this
"gravity" that he makes so much of? It can be neither seen, nor heard,
nor felt, nor smelled. It is, in short, as much a fiction as the vortices
of Descartes.

 

 

Privately, Newton agonized over this judgment. He felt that his critics
were correct. Early in 1692 or 1693 he wrote his friend the Reverend
Richard Bentley the following admission:

 

 

That gravity should be innate, inherent and essential to matter, so
that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum,
without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their
action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so
great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical
matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it. Gravity
must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain
laws, but whether this agent be material or immaterial I have left
to the consideration of my readers.20

 

 

Publicly, however, Newton adopted a stance that established, once and
for all, the philosophical relationship between appearance and reality,
hypothesis and experiment. In a section of the Principia entitled "God
and Natural Philosophy," he wrote:

 

 

Hitherto we have explained the phenomena of the heavens and of our
sea by the power of gravity, but have not yet assigned the cause of
this power. This is certain, that it must proceed from a cause that
penetrates to the very centers of the sun and planets. . . . But
hitherto I have not been able to discover the cause of those
properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses;
for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called a
hypothesis, and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether
of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental
philosophy.21

 

 

Newton was echoing the major theme of the scientific Revolution: our
goal is how, not why. That I cannot explain gravity is irrelevant. I
can measure it, observe it, make predictions based on it, and this is
all the scientist has to do. If a phenomenon is not measurable, it can
"have no place in experimental philosophy." This philosophical position,
in its various forms called "positivism," has been the public face of
modern science down to the present day.22

 

 

 

 

 

The second major aspect of Newton's work was best delineated in the
"Opticks" (1704), in which he was able to wed philosophical atomism
to the definition of experiment which had been crystallizing in the
minds of scientists throughout the previous century. As a result,
Newton's researches on light and color became the model for the correct
analysis of natural phenomena. The question was, is white light simple
or complex? Descartes, for one, had regarded it as simple, and saw colors
as the result of some sort of modification of the light. Newton believed
white light was in fact composed of colors that somehow cancelled each
other out in combination to produce the effect of white. How to decide
between these two claims?

 

 

In the experiment illustrated in Figure 6, Newton took white light,
broke it into parts with a prism, selected one of the parts, and showed
that it could not be further broken down. He did this with each color,
demonstrating that monochromatic light could not be subdivided. Next,
Newton ran the experiment in the opposite direction: he broke the ray
of white light into its parts, and then recombined them by passing them
through a convex lens (see Figure 7). The result was white light. This
atomistic approach, which follows Descartes' four-step method exactly,
establishes the thesis beyond doubt. But as in the case of gravity, the
Cartesians took issue with Newton. Where, they asked, is your
theory
of light and color, where is your explanation of this behavior? And
as in the previous case, Newton retreated behind the smokescreen of
positivism. I am looking for laws, or optical facts, he replied, not
hypotheses. If you ask me what "red" is, I can only tell you that it is
a number, a certain degree of refrangibility, and the same is true for
each of the other colors. I have measured it: that is enough.

 

 

 

 

 

In this case too, of course, Newton struggled with possible explanations
for the behavior of light, but the combination of (philosophical) atomism,
positivism, and experimental method -- in short, the definition of reality
-- is still very much with us today. To know something is to subdivide it,
quantify it, and recombine it; is to ask "how," and never get entangled
in the complicated underbrush of "why." It is, above all, to distance
yourself from it, as Galileo pointed out; to make it an abstraction. The
poet may get uncritically effusive about a red streak across the sky
as the sun is going down, but the scientist is not so easily deluded:
he knows that his emotions can teach him nothing substantial. The red
streak is a number, and that is the essence of the matter.

 

 

To summarize our discussion of the Scientific Revolution, it is necessary
to note that in the course of the seventeenth century, Western Europe
hammered out a new way of perceiving reality. The most important
change was the shift from quality to quantity, from "why" to how." The
universe, once seen as alive, possessing its own goals and purposes,
is now a collection of inert matter, hurrying around endlessly and
meaninglessly, as Alfred North, Whitehead put it.23 What constitutes an
acceptable explanation has thus been radically altered. The acid test of
existence is quantifiability, and there are no more basic realities in
any object than the parts into which it can be broken down. Finally,
atomism, quantifiability, and the deliberate act of viewing nature
as an abstraction from which one can distance oneself -- all open
the possibility that Bacon proclaimed as the true goal of science:
control. The Cartesian or technological paradigm is, as stated above,
the equation of truth with utility, with the purposive manipulation
of the environment. The holistic view of man as a part of nature, as
being at home in the cosmos, is so much romantic claptrap. Not holism,
but domination of nature; not the ageless rhythm of ecology, but the
conscious management of the world; not (to take the process to its
logical end point) "the magic of personality, [but] the fetishism of
commodities."24 In the mind of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
medieval man (or woman) had been a passive spectator of the physical
world. The new mental tools of the seventeenth century made it possible
to change all that. It was now within our power to have heaven on earth;
and the fact that it was a material heaven hardly made it less valuable.

 

 

Nevertheless, it was the Industrial Revolution that put the Scientific
Revolution on the map. Bacon's dream of a technological society was not
realized in the seventeenth century or even in the eighteenth, although
things were beginning to change by 1760. Ideas, as we have said, do not
exist in a vacuum. People could regard the mechanical world view as the
true philosophy without feeling compelled to transform the world according
to its dictates. The relationship between science and technology is
very complicated, and it is in fact in the twentieth century that the
full impact of the Cartesian paradigm has been most keenly felt. To
grasp the meaning of the scientific Revolution in Western history we
must consider the social and economic milieu that served to sustain
this new way of thinking. The sociologist Peter Berger was correct when
he said that ideas "do not succeed in history by virtue of their truth
but by virtue of their relationships to specific social processes."25
Scientific ideas are no exception.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2
Consciousness and Society
in Early Modern Europe

 

 

From whence there may arise many admirable advantages, towards the
increase of the
Operative
, and the
Mechanick
Knowledge, to which
this Age seems so much inclined, because we may perhaps be inabled to
discern all the secret workings of Nature, almost in the same manner
as we do those that are the productions of Art, and are manag'd by
Wheels, and Engines, and Springs, that were devised by humane Wit.