The pursuit of glory, p.61
The Pursuit of Glory, page 61
This ‘mathematization’ of the natural sciences was given magisterial expression by Newton in Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), first published in 1687. Among many other things, it demonstrated that the same force that caused an apple to fall to the ground also kept the planets orbiting the sun in a regular fashion. By finally destroying the Greek assumption that the celestial and terrestrial worlds are fundamentally different and by demonstrating that both operate according to the same regular, immutable laws of motion, he opened the way for the mechanization of heaven and earth. God might still have a place in a post-Newtonian universe but only as the original creator of a mechanism that then ran according to its own laws. There was certainly no place in it for demons or witches. Most historians of science are anxious to distance themselves from a ‘Whig’ account of the scientific revolution which sees it as a progression from error to truth. Indeed, many deny that there was anything revolutionary about it at all, preferring an evolutionary process beginning in the Middle Ages. Others like to stress the contributions made by other scientific traditions, notably the organic and the magical. It has been pointed out how much mathematics owed to Neoplatonism, for example. Yet when every qualification has been given due weight, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that mechanistic science did triumph in the course of the seventeenth century and that Newton’s Principia sealed its victory. It was not just a hugely influential scientific treatise, although it certainly was that too–‘No other work known to the history of science has simultaneously permitted so large an increase in both the scope and precision of research’ (Thomas Kuhn). It also marked a seismic cultural shift. Moreover, it was a shift that could be perceived by contemporaries. The very heavy demands that the Principia made on its readers’ intellects ensured that its impact could not be immediate. The panegyric composed after Newton’s death by Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757), the secretary of the French Academy of Sciences, put it well:
at last, when the Book came to be sufficiently known, the approbation, which had been so slowly gain’d, became so universal, that nothing was to be heard from all quarters but one general cry of Admiration. Mankind were amaz’d at the masterly Strokes, which shone throughout the Work, and stood astonish’d at the vast Genius for Invention discover’d in it, which in all the Countries of the learned World hardly ever shews itself in above three or four Persons during the whole extent of a most fruitful Age.
Better known is Alexander Pope’s epitaph intended for Newton’s tombstone in Westminster Abbey:
Nature and Nature’s laws
lay hid in night;
God said, Let Newton be!
and all was light
Assessing the impact of the mechanistic view of the universe on the ‘disenchantment of the world’ (Max Weber) in general and belief in witchcraft in particular is difficult, not to say impossible. If John Wesley, educated at Charterhouse and Christ Church, Oxford, could still believe in witches half a century after Newton’s death, it could not be expected that the illiterate majority would abandon traditional beliefs. Of course a distinction must be drawn between the end of belief in witchcraft and the end of the prosecution of witches, the latter preceding the former by a century or more. What was needed to bring the trials to a halt was scepticism on the part of those who could stop them or refuse even to start them–magistrates, judges and legislators. If the evidence is patchy, most of it does point towards just this happening during the second half of the seventeenth century. For example, in 1668 Joseph Glanvill (1636–80), very much a believer in demons and witches, admitted ruefully that ‘most of the looser gentry and the small pretenders to philosophy and wit are generally deriders of the belief in witchcraft’. Among his opponents was John Webster (1611–82), whose The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (1677) was dedicated to the Justices of the Peace of the West Riding of Yorkshire. Significantly, the ecclesiastical authorities had tried to prevent its appearance, but it was published with an endorsement from the Vice-President of the Royal Society, Sir Jonas Moore. At the core of Webster’s refutation of witchcraft was his argument that the confessions so often paraded by its supporters were inadmissible in principle because ‘it is…simply impossible for either the Devil or witches to change or alter the course that God hath set in nature’. By 1681 another polemicist, Henry Hallywell, could write that believers in the reality of witches and demons met with derision and contempt. The last witch to be executed in England went to the gallows in 1684. The last known successful indictment occurred in 1712 when a jury found a woman guilty of witchcraft, but the verdict was against the advice of the judge, who then secured a royal pardon for the victim.
The pattern on the continent appears to have been similar: judicial authorities losing confidence in the reliability of witnesses and finally abandoning belief in the crime itself. In Geneva, where surgeons were increasingly reluctant to identify ‘the Devil’s mark’ on the accused, the last witch-burning took place in 1652 and the last trial ten years later. In France, it was the magistrates of the Parlement of Paris who intervened in the 1660s to put a stop to prosecutions in the north of France, and it was the royal government, directed by Colbert, which reclassified witchcraft as fraud in 1682. East of the Rhine, it all took a great deal longer, although treatises casting doubt on witchcraft had been published since the second quarter of the seventeenth century. Here too it was the judicial authorities who eventually took action from above to put a stop to prosecutions initiated by popular action from below.
Fortunately, the evidence needed to sustain a historical hypothesis is less rigorous than the proofs demanded by mathematicians or physicists. If the link between the growth of mechanistic science and the decline in the belief in magic or witchcraft cannot be reduced to a formula or repeated in the laboratory, it can at least be established as a probability. It can be enhanced by two further considerations. First, it should be remembered that science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had not been elevated to realms so abstruse as to be accessible only to professional practitioners. Indeed, the word ‘science’ did not acquire its modern meaning as being synonymous with the natural sciences until deep into the nineteenth century. Earlier it had meant simply ‘knowledge’. Significantly, in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, those who today would be regarded as ‘scientists’ thought of themselves as exponents of ‘natural philosophy’ and moved easily between various forms of knowledge that have since become compartmentalized. Virtually all the great scientists of the seventeenth century were philosophers as well as mathematicians, theologians as well as physicists.
Secondly, it was not necessary to understand everything to get the gist of what was being argued. Taking Descartes’ advice that ‘if you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things’ was not conditional on a close reading of his Discourse on Method. Neither did the concept of immutable natural laws depend on mastering the mathematics of Newton’s Principia. Moreover, there were plenty of popularizers available to make the great discoveries comprehensible to lesser mortals and to point out the implications. James Ferguson’s Astronomy Explained upon Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles, and Made Easy to Those who have not studied Mathematics (1756) went through seven editions. In New Dialogues of the Dead (1683–4), Conversations with a Lady, on the Plurality of Worlds (1686) or Of the Usefulness of Mathematical Learning (1699) Fontenelle provided Descartes-without-tears. As we shall see later in this chapter, both encouraging–and encouraged by–this popularization of science was a rapid expansion of the public sphere.
Before that important dimension can be examined however, one important historiographical issue needs to be addressed. There was a time when both the radicalism and the speed of the changes discussed so far in this chapter were emphasized. The most memorable formulation was that of the Flemish historian Paul Hazard, who in a book first published in Paris in 1935 with the title The Crisis of the European Consciousness asserted: ‘One day, the French people, almost to a man, were thinking like Bossuet. The day after, they were thinking like Voltaire. No ordinary swing of the pendulum, that. It was a revolution.’ This kind of broad-brush generalization (not to mention sentences without verbs) later fell out of fashion. Continuity became the order of the day, as Hazard’s free-thinking heroes were shown to be much more conservative than he had supposed, while Bossuet’s theocentric world-view turned out to have a long future. Very recently, however, Jonathan Israel has presented a similar scenario to that of Hazard in his massive study The Radical Enlightenment (2001). It places the same emphasis on the revolutionary nature of the change: ‘a vast turbulence in every sphere of knowledge and belief which shook European civilisation to its foundations’. It identifies the same modernizing forces at work: ‘no other period of European history displays such a profound and decisive shift towards rationalisation and secularisation at every level’. It shares Hazard’s assumption that there was a single ‘European mind’: ‘there was just one highly integrated European Enlightenment’. It too is very much a history of ideas, presenting an ‘intellectual revolution’, ‘battle of ideas’, ‘intellectual upheaval’. Where it differs is, first, in the timing: Hazard’s dating of the transformation of the European mind was 1680–1715; Israel pushes it back to 1650–80. What is usually thought of as the ‘High Englightenment’, he states, was in reality just a process of ‘consolidating, popularising and annotating revolutionary concepts introduced earlier’, indeed it amounted to ‘often little more than footnotes to the earlier shift’. Secondly, he reorientates the focus away from England and France to the Dutch Republic and, in particular, to Baruch Spinoza (1632–77). Thirdly, as a result of this privileging of Spinoza, he makes much more of the atheism, materialism, egalitarianism and republicanism of the early Enlightenment.
To do justice to a book containing more than eight hundred pages of small print would require a substantial volume itself. Here it can only be recorded that, thanks to his phenomenal erudition, Israel has certainly rescued Spinoza from obscurity, both in his own right and through the Europe-wide network of those he influenced. He has also brought the Dutch Republic to centre-stage, both in its own right and as the great clearing-house of radical ideas in Europe. As with many great revisions, however, the case is overstated. The members of the ‘radical intellectual underground’ were few in number and with limited influence–gadflies on the margin. They invite the comment made by Edmund Burke on the British radicals who welcomed the French Revolution: ‘half-a-dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath shadows of the Great British oak, chew the cud and are silent’. Also open to question is the depth penetrated by the radical ideas. Israel seeks to head off such an objection by remarking that ‘while it is true that the intellectual revolution of the late seventeenth century was primarily a crisis of elites…it was precisely these elites which moulded, supervised, and fixed the contours of popular culture. Consequently, an intellectual crisis of elites quickly made an impact on ordinary men’s attitudes too and by no means only the minority of literate artisans and small bourgeoisie.’ Even if one could accept such an elitist view of popular culture, there remains the problem of just what sort of a proportion of those elites embraced the particular ‘intellectual revolution’ offered by the radical Enlightenment. Although over a long period of time enough adopted a mechanistic view of the universe to put a stop to the persecution of witches, the overwhelming majority continued to be devout Christians. As we have seen in an earlier chapter, the eighteenth century has as good a claim to be dubbed ‘the age of religion’ as ‘the age of reason’. Not only were the churches flourishing, but both public and private discourse were dominated by religion. Moreover, most of the debates and controversies that raged did not align believer against non-believer but one kind of believer against another kind of believer.
THE PUBLIC SPHERE
The dissemination of a view of the natural world without the supernatural went hand-in-hand with the expansion of a new kind of cultural space: the public sphere. Although neither the word nor the concept ‘public’ was new, hitherto it had been applied either very generally, to denote the whole community–‘pro bono publico’ for example–or specifically, to a particular group of people engaged in the same pursuit–‘the theatre-going public’, for example. It was only during the period covered by this volume that ‘the public’, as in ‘public opinion’, came to acquire its modern meaning as the prime source of cultural and political legitimation. One of the first uses in the English language was by the great scientist Robert Boyle, who in his Occasional Reflections of 1665 referred to ‘the favourable Reception that the public has hitherto vouchsafed to what has been presented it’. Significantly, Boyle did not go to university and had no academic appointment, but was a younger son of the Earl of Cork and a gentleman-scholar of independent means, Most important, he chose to write in the vernacular, not in Latin. The language of academic discourse was still very much undecided. If Galileo, Boyle and Descartes used their respective vernaculars, Harvey, Huygens and Newton used Latin. Leibniz corresponded with his aristocratic friends in French, his relations in German and his scholarly colleagues in Latin. But the tide was turning fast. In France, even pornography was being published in Latin in 1650, but more than 90 per cent of all titles were in French in 1700, by which time Latin had ceased to be a living language. In the German-speaking world, the percentage of Latin titles fell from 67 per cent in 1650 to 38 per cent in 1700 to 28 per cent by 1740 and to 4 per cent in 1800.
Part and parcel of this rapid and irreversible move to the vernacular was the trickle down of literacy from the academically trained elites to an ever-widening public. Although the evidence is fragmentary, what there is points in the direction of a steady expansion. During the century between the 1680s and the 1780s, literacy rates in France increased from 29 per cent to 47 per cent for men and from 14 per cent to 27 per cent for women. Daniel Roche has concluded that if it is assumed that all those who could sign their names could also read, there were perhaps 10,000,000 potential readers in France. Much higher rates could be found in the north-east, especially in Paris, where something approaching mass literacy had been achieved by 1789. Simon Schama has even written: ‘literacy rates in late eighteenth century France were much higher than in the late twentieth century United States’. Better figures still have been established for England, Scotland, the Low Countries and Sweden. By the late eighteenth century, 87 per cent of Protestant men and 69 per cent of women in Amsterdam could sign the marriage register. The figures for Catholics were 79 and 53 per cent respectively. The overall figures for German-speaking Europe must be very approximate guesses, but–for what they are worth–they reveal a rising curve from 10 per cent of the adult population in 1700, to 15 percent in 1770 and 25 per cent in 1800. Everywhere, men were much more likely to be literate than women, for the good reason that they were much more likely to go to school.
As it was improvements in education that brought the rise in literacy, it can be said to have been at the root of the expansion of the public sphere. The initiative came first and foremost not from the secular authorities but from the churches. In the Protestant world, the emphasis on the need for all the faithful to have direct access to Scripture made popular education a priority. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this was given renewed impetus by the various reform movements–nonconformity, Pietism and Methodism, for example. Even within the established Anglican Church, it was through private initiatives in founding charity schools at a parish level that literacy was spread. In London alone there were 132 such schools in 1734, educating more than 3,000 boys and nearly 2,000 girls. Although often short-lived, more than 1,700 were established. If such schools were intended to be ‘little garrisons against Popery’, as Bishop Kennett put it, they were reinforced by more material considerations. As literacy and numeracy were becoming essentials in an increasingly commercialized economy, the market responded with its customary speed to the opportunity. A German visitor recorded in 1782: ‘It is here not uncommon to see on doors in one continued succession “Children educated here”, “Shoes mended here”, “Foreign spirituous liquors sold here”, “Funerals furnished here” ’.
In continental Europe there was the familiar gradient from north-west to east. Although pockets of literacy could be found in Poland, in Russia mass literacy was a twentieth-century phenomenon. As the figures for France, the Rhineland, Belgium and parts of northern Italy show, this was not a Protestant/Catholic divide. Rather it was the need to compete which prompted all confessions to promote education. In Catholic Europe it was most often missionary orders which took the initiative to improve–or even initiate–popular education. In France, the Sisters of the Holy Infant Jesus and the Christian Brothers, both founded at Reims, could claim much of the credit for making north-eastern France one of the most literate parts of Europe. Only later did the state get involved. It was the founder of the Christian Brothers, Jean-Baptiste de La Salle, aided and abetted by the royal mistress (and later morganatic wife) Madame de Maintenon, who persuaded Louis XIV to issue a decree ordering all children between the ages of seven and fourteen to attend a Catholic school.
