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John Henry: Nature, the Church and the State
Nature, the Church and the State
[National Styles in Science: Experimental Philosophy in Seventeenth-Century France
and England]
by John Henry
(Copyright © John Henry, 1998)
Previously published in French as: "La Nature, l'Église et l'État", Les
Cahiers de Science et Vie, No. 45 (June, 1998) [special issue on "Science
anglaise, science franÿaise"], pp. 80-86.
It would be wrong, as well as politically
incorrect, to assert that there are natural differences between peoples
of different nationalities. Certainly there are no significant biological
differences between the English and the French. Nevertheless, just as
each of us are shaped by our own individual life histories, so the people
of a nation are shaped by the history of their country. There can be
no doubt that the vicissitudes of historical contingency over the centuries
have ensured that the collective experience of the English has been very
different from that of the French, with the result that, generally speaking,
the English and the French are very different from one another.
Such national differences can even be
seen in styles of scientific thinking. This is particularly evident
in the seventeenth century, the period when a new way of doing science
was being developed in Western Europe. As the traditional Scholastic
Aristotelianism of the pre-modern period was being rejected and replaced
by a "new philosophy", the different national styles of thinking gave
rise to markedly different conceptions of the correct way to approach
an understanding of the natural world. To a large extent, these differences
can be seen to have had their origins in the very different religious
and political histories of France and England.
Arguably
the most distinctive feature of the new approach to natural philosophy
in the seventeenth century was the rejection of Ancient authority,
and a new emphasis upon the importance of observation and other means
of determining natural phenomena for one's self. Experimentalism has
long been recognised, therefore, as a hallmark of the new science of
the seventeenth century. The experimental philosophy in England, however,
was markedly different from that professed in the rest of Europe. Before
we look at the peculiar way in which the English developed their experimental
philosophy, and the reasons for it, let us consider the development
of experimentalism in France.
From about the 1620s the experimental
approach to understanding nature began to take off. To begin with,
however, it emerged in the universities among professors who were still
committed to the fundamentals of Aristotelianism. The Scholastic Aristotelianism
of the universities as it had been developed since the thirteenth century
had recently suffered numerous blows. A number of recent physical discoveries
ran counter to Aristotle's teachings, while the Renaissance recovery
of the writings of other Ancient philosophers suggesting numerous alternative
accounts of natural phenomena. The dominance of Aristotle seemed to
be over. Nevertheless, the tendency in the universities, particularly
in a Roman Catholic country like France where Aristotelianism was bound
up with religious and political orthodoxy, was to make adjustments
and refinements to Aristotelian theory to accommodate the new changes.
Since Aristotle himself always emphasised the importance of the senses
for establishing the truth, it was easy for university professors of
natural philosophy to lay claim to being experimentalists and Aristotelians,
and the theory was always flexible enough to accommodate the new discoveries.
Adherence to Aristotle was almost certainly
connected to religious concerns. Anti-Aristotelianism, particularly
in the early part of the century, was associated with Protestantism.
After the assassination of Henry IV in 1610 there was a noticeable
increase in opposition to non-Aristotelian positions. Although the
situation eased after 1630 when the Crown and its ministers insisted
upon the relative independence of the state from the Church, it was
still not easy for French intellectuals to embrace unorthodox positions.
The leading proponents of new systems of philosophy which were capable
of replacing Aristotelianism tout court, Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655)
and René Descartes (1596-1650), both encountered severe opposition.
For all Gassendi's attempts to rehabilitate the Ancient atomist and
reputed atheist, Epicurus (c. 341-270 BC), his atomistic system
was denounced by the religious authorities as atheistic. Similarly,
Descartes's corpuscular philosophy presented problems for the doctrine
of substantiation. Consequently, his writings were condemned at Rome
in 1663 and banned from teaching in France in 1671.
Perhaps the most important aspect of
the continuing predominance of Aristotelianism in France was the undiminished
emphasis on causal explanations in natural philosophy. Virtually all
intellectuals agreed with the Aristotelian principle that a confident
knowledge of something is only possible when we know the cause on which
that thing depends. Demonstrative knowledge of a fact could only be
established by showing how the fact followed from the operation of
a specific cause, and how, as a result of the operation of that cause,
the fact could not be other than it is. With the exception of sceptical
philosophers like Marin Mersenne (1588-1648), all exponents of the
new experimentalism in France, be they Jesuits, Cartesians, autodidacts
like Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), or whoever, subscribed to this principal
of epistemology. In the case of Descartes and his followers this was
seen as an important aspect of their attempt to create a complete alternative
to the Aristotelian system: if Cartesianism provided no demonstrable
knowledge, it could hardly hope to win the support of the Roman Catholic
Church which was always concerned with certainties.
The result of this attitude in practice
was that experiments were always presented in the writings of French
natural philosophers as demonstrations of law-like behaviour. The experimental
set-up was not regarded as a unique individual trial which took place
at a certain time and place, but as a representation of general principles,
or a universal claim about how things happen. French experiments, therefore,
always went hand in hand with rational arguments that both dictated
the set-up of the experiment and, if successful, explained the outcome
of the experiment. As the leading English scientist Robert Boyle (1627-1691)
complained about Pascal, he might not have actually tried his experiments,
but merely "set them down as things which must happen, upon
a just confidence that he was not mistaken in his Ratiocinations".
For the Englishman Boyle, however, it was not possible to be justly
confident that one was not mistaken.
The general adherence to Aristotelianism
in France, even though it was greatly altered and refined to adapt
to new empirical discoveries, ensured that the burgeoning "new philosophy" was
never regarded as a potentially uncontrollable threat to church and
state. The establishment of the Académie royale des sciences
in 1666 shows that, on the contrary, natural philosophers could be
regarded as a real asset to the nation.
In England things were very different.
In the disruption of the Civil War period and the subsequent Interregnum
the new natural philosophies came to be seen either as atheistic, or
associated with radical sectarianism, both of which were generally
regarded as highly subversive to sound religion and the state. The
radical sects often embraced the anti-establishment philosophical and
religious theories of the Swiss alchemist and reformer Paracelsus (1493-1541).
This was bad enough, but orthodox thinkers were even more worried by
the fear that legions of atheists were promoting the new mechanical
philosophies being developed on the Continent by thinkers like Gassendi
and Descartes. Indeed, many English thinkers at this time believed
that the new materialist French philosophies were deliberately being
promoted in England by Roman Catholics to divert the best minds to
natural philosophy, making it easier for Jesuits to secretly enter
the country and re-convert the people to Catholicism! As Thomas Barlow,
Bishop of Lincoln (1607-1691), wrote: "It is certain this New Philosophy
(as they call it) was set on foot and has been carried on by the Arts
of Rome". Shortly after the Royal Society was founded in 1660 one of
its fellows reported that it was widely regarded as "a Company of Atheists,
Papists, Dunces, and utter enemies to all learning". Clearly, English
natural philosophers, after the Restoration of the monarchy and a return
to comparative stability, had to replace this negative image of science
with one that linked their new philosophy to the best interests of
church and state.
One of the ways they did this was by
developing their unique kind of experimentalism. The perfect English
experiment was simply a detailed historical account of exactly what
happened on the particular occasion or occasions which were being
described by the experimenter. The alleged concern was not with any
particular theory or hypothesis about how the world worked, but merely
with the so-called "matters of fact". The experiment was intended
only to establish what could clearly and undeniably be seen, not
to confirm a particular interpretation of what must "therefore" be
the underlying reality. Now, in practice this notion of what an experiment
should be is hardly tenable. More often than not, English experimenters
smuggled theoretical interpretations into their accounts of the "matters
of fact", or their insistence that they eschewed theoretical presuppositions
was based entirely upon rhetoric. Nevertheless, the way the English
presented their experiments and the way they professed to conceive
of them, and in many cases the way they did actually practise them,
conformed to this "theory-free" method of establishing matters of
natural fact.
So, how did this help to promote the
new science among English contemporaries? In order to understand this
we need to consider England's history as a Protestant country. England
was unique in being the only Protestant country whose religious Reformation
was not based upon doctrinal grounds. When Henry VIII declared himself
head of the Church of England in 1534, to legitimate his divorce from
Catherine of Aragon and marriage to Anne Boleyn, he severed the English
Church from Rome while still upholding the fundamental doctrines of
Catholicism. Subsequent tensions between Calvinist would-be Reformers
and Church leaders who continued to favour Romanism resulted in the
famous compromise position, initiated in Edward VI's reign and finally
worked out in Elizabeth I's reign. From then on the Anglican Church
continually tried to present itself as the true via media between
two extreme and mistaken positions: Roman Catholicism on the one hand
and Calvinism on the other. Accordingly, the rhetorical defence of
the English Church and its "middle way" became highly important in
efforts to maintain the peace, particularly in the troubled times of
the seventeenth century, before the Civil War and after the Restoration
of the monarchy.
Two important aspects of that rhetoric
were to influence the English way of doing science. Firstly, the founders
of the Anglican compromise developed a notion of doctrinal minimalism.
Dispute over theological niceties was never-ending and seemingly irresolvable.
The compromise solution was simply to declare that only a few basic
beliefs are essential for salvation and must, therefore be accepted
by all believers. All other doctrines, including all those which led
to dissension, were declared to be adiaphora, things indifferent
to salvation. Efforts to determine the few "common notions" to which
all English believers could subscribe were not themselves without contention,
of course, but English theologians endlessly repeated that such fundamental
beliefs were obvious and undeniable to everyone.
A second feature of the rhetoric of
theological compromise was the insistence on the belief that some things
are immediately obvious to "common sense" and do not need to be established
by elaborate rational arguments. The important thing to bear in mind
when trying to understand this attitude is that both the Catholics
and the Calvinists claimed that their theological principles were securely
founded upon "reason". English theologians were deeply suspicious of
elaborate arguments based upon long series of ratiocinations. The suspicion
was that such arguments could always be made to support any case, and,
more importantly, never succeeded in resolving dispute, but merely
served to heighten it. Subtlety of reasoning was regarded as beguiling
and treacherous. Significantly, the prime example of such arguments
was the scholastic "disputation", that is to say, the kind of arguments
used in the universities to defend Aristotelian principles. The result
was a no-doubt naive insistence that all important truths can be, indeed
should be, immediately obvious to "common sense".
The group of English natural philosophers
who became the founding fellows of the Royal Society of London in 1660,
sought to improve the image of English science by adapting the Anglican
Church's method of resolving religious dispute and thereby establishing
truth. By no means all English philosophers carried out their work
in accordance with the experimental method as it was expounded by the
leading public spokesmen of the Society, but if they joined the Society
they were effectively assenting to its professed methodology. Thus,
as Thomas Sprat (1635-1713) wrote in his History of the Royal Society (1667),
the Society was so "backward from settling of Principles, or fixing
upon Doctrines" that it could even be said, "they have wholly omitted
Doctrines". The Society, therefore, embraced the Anglican stratagem
of doctrinal minimalism. Sprat went on to say that the experiments
performed at the Society were concerned only to establish the "matters
of fact". The assembled witnesses of the experiment do not get involved
in tendentious "rational" interpretations, but restrict themselves
to "the plain objects of their eyes". Elsewhere, we can see other leading
fellows of the Society distancing themselves from the use of rational
argumentation. One of the greatest of the Society's experimenters,
Robert Hooke (1635-1703) wrote that "Arguing, concluding, defining,
judging and all other degrees of Reason are liable to the same imperfection,
being, at best, either vain or uncertain". Robert Boyle dismissed French
disputes between Cartesians and Gassendists as to whether atoms were
indivisible as irresolvable by experiment and only likely to perpetuate
dispute. He even refused to be drawn into arguments as to whether there
really was a vacuum inside the air-pump which he and Hooke used to
such advantage in their experiments. Similarly, his experiments with
the air-pump established "that the air hath a spring", but he refused
to commit himself to an explanation of what caused the spring. All
such explanations, such as the claim that the particles of air were
shaped like coiled springs, or that the particles were continually
vibrating back and forth, were merely hypothetical interpretations
and, as he kept insisting, Boyle was concerned only with matters of
fact. In their efforts to establish the intellectual authority of their
new philosophy, then, the spokesmen for the Royal Society drew upon
the earlier efforts of their Church to end theological dispute and
establish what they thought was the true religion. It was the pursuit
of this enterprise which made experimentalism in England so different
from that in France. If English experimentalists had presented their
experiments as confirmations of rational demonstrations in the French
manner, their fellow countrymen, used to the Anglican way of establishing
truth, would have been suspicious that they were being led astray by
beguiling ratiocinations, supported by elaborately conceived experimental
trickery. By insisting that their experiments simply revealed obvious
matters of fact, with no tendentious theoretical presuppositions, orthodox
English suspicions were allayed and the experimental philosophy came
to be accepted as an unbiased, "objective" way of establishing truth.
The fact that this nationally idiosyncratic
version of the experimental method was self-consciously modelled on
the efforts of English theologians to establish the authority of the
national church over all believers is perfectly evident from Thomas
Sprat's History of the Royal Society, where he wrote that the
Society and the Church of England "arose on the same Method", and that
the one had achieved a Reformation in religion and the other in philosophy.
The seeds of the Royal Society, Sprat claimed, were sown in Edward
VI's and Elizabeth I's reigns and "The Church of England therefore
may justly be styled the Mother of this sort of Knowledge."
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