Peter Dear

Totius in Verba: Rhetoric and Authority in the Early Royal Society

T HE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION reached a stage of consolidation in the second half of the seventeenth century. The ferment of new ideas, and the conscious rejection of old, had resulted in the formation of an identifiable community of practitioners with a shared ideal of natural inquiry. The clearest indicators of this consolidation are the scientific societies that arose in the 1650s and 1660s, foremost among them the Academie Royale des Sciences in Paris and the Royal Society of London. These groups stand as testimony to a new attitude toward knowledge of nature.1 This article, concentrating on the Royal Society, examines how the cooperative investigation of nature both shaped and was made possible by the new forms of natural knowledge generally associated with the Scientific Revolution. The present study, however, does not mean to suggest that these new conceptions emerged suddenly with the formation of the Royal Society, nor that they were especially English. (Some recent literature on the connections between experimental philosophy and ideological currents in Restoration England is curiously Anglocentric.)2 Instead, the Society is treated here as a convenient focus at the end of a process of change.

What Is the History of Science the History Of

The mismatch between common representations of “science” and the miscellany of materials typically studied by the historian of science is traced to a systematic ambiguity that may itself be traced to early modern Europe. In that cultural setting, natural philosophy came to be rearticulated (most famously by Francis Bacon) as involving both contemplative and practical knowledge. The resulting tension and ambiguity are illustrated by the eighteenth‐century views of Buffon. In the nineteenth century, a new enterprise called “science” represents the establishment of an unstable ideology of natural knowledge that was heavily indebted to those early modern developments. The two complementary and competing elements of the ideology of modern science are accordingly described as “natural philosophy” (a discourse of contemplative knowledge) and “instrumentality” (a discourse of practical or useful knowledge; know‐how). The history of science in large part concerns the story of their shifting, often mutually denying, interrelations.

The Meanings of Experience

The categories of “experience” and “experiment” lay at the heart of the conceptions of natural knowledge that dominated European learning at both the beginning and the end of the Scientific Revolution. The Latin words generally used to denote “experience” in both the medieval and early modern periods, experientia and experimentum , were generally interchangeable, with no systematic distinction between them except in particular contexts to be discussed; both are related to the word peritus , meaning skilled or experienced. Besides these terms and their vernacular cognates, another related Latin term, periculum (“trial” or “test”), began to be used in the late sixteenth century to designate the deliberate carrying out of an experiment ( periculum facere ), initially in the mathematical sciences. By the end of the seventeenth century, the construal of experience as “experiment” in this sense had acquired a wide and influential currency. At the start of the sixteenth century, scholastic versions of Aristotelian natural philosophy dominated the approach to knowledge of nature that informed the official curricula of the universities (see the following chapters in this volume: Blair, Chapter 17; Garber, Chapter 2); Aristotle’s writings stress repeatedly the importance of sense experience in the creation of reliable knowledge of the world. Nonetheless, during the seventeenth century, many of the proponents of what came to be called by some (rather obscurely) “the new science” criticized the earlier orthodoxy of what Aristotelian natural philosophy (or “physics”) had become on the grounds that it paid insufficient attention to the lessons of experience. For example, Francis Bacon (1561–1626) wrote in his New Organon of 1620 that Aristotle “did not properly consult experience… after making his decisions arbitrarily, he parades experience around, distorted to suit his opinions, a captive.”

Dismantling boundaries in science and technology studies.

The boundaries between the history of science and science and technology studies (STS) can be misleadingly drawn, to the detriment of both fields. This essay stresses their commonalities and potential for valuable synergy. The evolution of the two fields has been characterized by lively interchange and boundary crossing, with leading scholars functioning easily on both sides of the past/present divide. Disciplines, it is argued, are best regarded as training grounds for asking particular kinds of questions, using particular clusters of methods. Viewed in this way, history of science and STS are notable for their shared approaches to disciplining. The essay concludes with a concrete example—regulatory science—showing how a topic such as this can be productively studied with methods that contradict any alleged disciplinary divide between historical and contemporary studies of science.

The History of Science and the History of the Sciences: George Sarton, Isis, and the Two Cultures

The intent and content of Isis since its inauguration in 1913 have in some ways tracked changes in both a professionalizing history of science and in the cultures of scientific disciplines. George Sarton saw history as part of an overall metascientific project in which the sciences themselves participated, and his perspective was often duplicated by the constructive appropriation of history by scientists: a century ago, scientific culture often incorporated a sense of itself as an ongoing historical enterprise. After one hundred volumes, however, Isis caters above all to a professionalized historical discipline, while the identity of the scientist has typically ceased to rely on a sense of historical embeddedness.

Darwin and Deep Time: Temporal Scales and the Naturalist’s Imagination

Charles Darwin built a world around an implied metaphysics of time that treated deep time as something qualitatively different from ordinary, experienced time. He did not simply require a vast amount of time within which his primary evolutionary mechanism of natural selection could operate; in practice, he required a deep time that functioned according to different rules from those of ordinary, “shallow” time. The experience of the naturalist occupied shallow time, but it was from that experience that Darwin necessarily had to build his arguments concerning a transformism that took place on an entirely different temporal scale. Much of his reconstruction of what took place in deep time relied on inferences drawn from taxonomic classification, and those inferences in turn depended to a large degree on conclusions reached through the already-established practices of his fellow non-transformist naturalists. By bootstrapping his transformist arguments, focused on both natural and sexual selection, with non-transformist classificatory judgments, Darwin attempted to convince his fellow naturalists of the truth of evolution in deep time. In other words, while Darwin argued for the existence of selectionist processes themselves in contemporary shallow time, their transformist consequences could only be traced out in deep time, being evidenced by both contemporary and paleontological slices, or laminae, of shallow time. This served to protect transformism from the dangers of unorthodoxy by preserving uniformity within shallow time.

Romanticism and Victorian Scientific Naturalism

Examples from Charles Darwin, especially his tacking between different forms of temporality that enabled an integration of human experience and geological immensity, and John Tyndall, with his all-encompassing vision of a mechanical and energetic universe, show the sense in which Victorian scientific naturalism replicated in important respects the Romantic sensibilities of a Humboldt or a Goethe, for whom the natural world represented a self-sufficient unity. There was no ontological gap between Mind and Nature for scientific naturalism any more than there had been for Romantic sensibilities. Reason was what resulted from human nature, and human nature was reason. Nature red in tooth and claw, the terrible sublimity of scientific naturalism, was Romanticisms legitimate offspring.

Philosophy of Science and Its Historical Reconstructions

The title of this chapter alludes, of course, to a famous article by Imre Lakatos, “History of Science and Its Rational Reconstructions.” It is also meant to invoke the title of another celebrated article, itself teasingly resonating with Lakatos’s, by Steven Shapin, “History of Science and Its Sociological Reconstructions” (Shapin 1982). Both Lakatos and Shapin wanted to talk about how best to do the history of science, but my own intention is not to tell people how to do the philosophy of science. However, I do value the disciplinary intersection of “history and philosophy of science” (HPS); consequently, my subject is what I think HPS used to be about, and what it could still offer us.

Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution. By Bruce T. Moran. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2005. Pp. 210.

Bruce Morans new book forms part of Harvard University Presss series “New Histories of Science, Technology, and Medicine.” The series is aimed at a general readership rather than a specialized academic market, although its volumes can also serve as basic introductions to scholars in other specialties who need a quick entree into their fields. In the present instance, however, the location of the precise problematic that the book addresses is historiographically rather complex for such a task.

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