(electronic music)
- Good afternoon.
My name is Andrew Szeri, I'm
dean of the Graduate Division.
And we are pleased, along with
the Hitchcock Professorship Committee
and the Graduate Council to
present Professor John Heilbron,
this year's speaker in the
Charles and Martha
Hitchcock Lecture Series.
As a condition of this bequest,
it's my pleasure to tell you
how the endowment came to UC Berkeley.
It's a story that
exemplifies the many ways
this campus is linked to the history
of California and the Bay Area.
Dr. Charles Hitchcock, a
physician for the Army,
came to San Francisco during the Gold Rush
where he opened a
thriving private practice.
In 1885, Charles
established a professorship
here at Berkeley as an expression
of his long-held interest in education.
His daughter, Lillie Hitchcock Coit,
still treasured in San Francisco
for her colorful personality
as well as her generosity,
greatly expanded her
father's original gift
to establish a professorship at Berkeley,
making it possible for us to
present a series of lectures.
The Hitchcock Fund has become one
of the most cherished endowments
of the University of California,
recognizing the highest distinction
of scholarly thought and achievement.
And for this, we are
grateful to the Hitchcocks.
I now invite William Lester,
Professor of Chemistry
and Chair of the Hitchcock Committee,
to the podium to say a few words
about Professor John Heilbron.
Thank you.
(audience claps)
- Thank you, Andrew.
John Heilbron has made
fundamental contributions
as an historian of science.
His work sets the history
of the physical sciences
within its wider cultural context.
Heilbron is best known for his writings
on the history of physics and astronomy,
but the full breadth of his expertise
ranges from early
experiments in electricity
and European solar observatories,
to the work of Ernest O.
Lawrence and Max Planck.
His works are highly regarded
for illuminating the technical
complexities of science,
as well as the social
and political contexts
in which it has been advanced.
His current research interests include
relations between science and religion
in the 17th and 18th centuries,
physics and its institutions
in the 20th century,
and the use of history of science
in the teaching of science.
After graduating from San
Francisco's Lowell High School,
Heilbron obtained all of
his degrees at UC Berkeley,
earning his BA and MA in
Physics and his PhD in History.
Heilbron taught at the
University of Pennsylvania
for three years and returned
to UC Berkeley's History
Department in 1967.
As a professor at UC
Berkeley, Heilbron created
the Office for the History
of Science and Technology,
which he directed from 1973
until his retirement in 1994.
He was named Class of
1936 Professor of History
and History of Science in 1985.
And also served as the Vice Chancellor
under Chancellor Chang-Lin
Tien, this was 1990 to 1994,
and chair of the Berkeley
division of the Academic Senate
from 1988 to 1990.
Since retiring in 1994,
Heilbron has served
as a visiting professor
at the California Institute of Technology,
Yale University, and UC Berkeley.
In 2002, the Bancroft Library awarded him
the Hubert Howe Bancroft
Award to honor his quote,
"Significant achievements in the support
"of historical research and
scholarship," close quote.
He has also received the Sarton Medal
from the History of Science Society,
the Abraham Pais Prize
for History of Physics,
awarded jointly by the
American Physical Society
and the American Institute of Physics,
and the Premio Internazionale
Galileo Galilei.
Heilbron is a foreign member
of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences,
and an honorary fellow at
Wooster College, Oxford, England
where he now resides.
Please join me in welcoming
Dr. Professor John Heilbron.
(audience claps)
- Good afternoon.
I was overwhelmed to be invited
to give the Hitchcock Lectures,
and humbled by the list
of previous lecturers.
It includes many great physicists
like Niles Bohr, Enrico
Fermi, and Steve Chu,
and two historians, one
of whom was a saint.
Or any way, the patron saint
of my discipline, George Sarton.
He gave eight lectures,
perhaps more than the audience required,
on medieval science and culture.
His ectatic report of his visit
opens with the memorable phrase,
"No university, certainly
no American university,
"has done so much to promote
the history of science
"as the University of California."
That was in 1933.
The university has continued
to support the subject generously,
for which I was and am immensely grateful.
However, I fear that Sarton could not
give priority to Berkeley today.
Not only because he's
dead, but more importantly,
because Harvard, with
which he was associated,
and a few other places,
now devote substantially greater resources
to the subject than we do.
I'm sure that the powerful
administrators present
here today can right this historic wrong.
(audience laughs)
The high medieval culture
extensively described by Sarton
was made of a surprisingly durable alloy
of pagan and Christian elements.
Tough though it was, however,
the alloy deformed
irreversibly under the weight
of such events as the European
discovery of the New World,
the Protestant Reformation,
the rise of belligerent nation states,
and the recovery and printing
of ancient authorities
in conflict with the Aristotelian basis
of scholastic learning.
At the high culture end, these events
prompted the creation of
a newly vigorous physics
and a newly corrosive history.
The rise and early development
of these twin destroyers of
the medieval world picture
are the subject of my lectures.
Now, it's not news that the
medieval world picture is dead
or that it faded during the 16th
and died during the 17th century.
Where I think that I may have
added something to the story
is an argument that in the transformation
from the medieval to the
early modern world picture,
the historical sciences
worked in tandem with,
and sometimes more strongly
than, the physical sciences.
My lectures turn on a set of parallels
intended to show that
both sets of sciences
obtain their modern impulses
from the same sources
and grew strong by appeal
to similar arguments.
So here is the course of today's lecture.
Throughout, I shall
have to stomp roughshod
over pastures long cultivated by scholars
with tweezers and nail scissors.
I beg their forgiveness and yours, too,
for any damage I might
do to academic hedges
and flower beds by omitting many useful
and perhaps some necessary qualifications.
One hedge I must make at the outset,
in today's lecture I use physics,
as my early modern actors did,
to refer to the study of
the entire natural world
from astrology to zoology.
So to the situation around 1550.
I begin my story around
1550 when Copernicus,
Vesalius, Paracelsus, and
the recovered Archimedes
quickened criticism of
the medieval universe.
And when the political histories
of Machiavelli and Guicciardini,
the recovery of Tacitus and Polybius,
and the discovery of the
value of medieval documents
in religious and legal disputes
began to transform the writing of history.
Which proves that I'm not
a Christian chronicler
of the type still current around 1550,
for if I were, I would've
begun at the beginning:
with creation, some 4,000
years before Augustus Caesar
and continued year after
year down to my own time
with one damn thing after another.
If I were more concerned with national
than with universal history,
I probably would've begun
with the descendants
of the sons of Noah, or better,
with the diaspora
following the fall of Troy,
which had the advantages of
moving the action forward
and boasting a classic
of Latin literature,
Virgil's Aeneid, as a pattern.
Many members of the present European Union
once traced their founding
to fertile Trojans,
like Hector's son Francio,
and Aeneis' grandson, Brutus,
whom the Brits call Brute.
Medieval writers often use this device
to launch their histories
and to give their kings
a pedigree as old as Romulus.
The practice was still
alive in the 16th century,
when Jean Bodin allowed a
Trojan origin to the Galls
and the odd abbot Johannes Trithemius
invented an eponymous King
Frank of Trojan descent
to replace fanciful Francio.
And if I wrote in the
humanist tradition in 1550,
I would not write history as my colleagues
at Dwinelle Hall do today.
Humanist history belong
to the art of rhetoric,
learned along with the ancient languages
and applied as a source of
uplifting or instructive examples.
The Stoicism of Cato, the
prudence of Fabius Maximus,
the misbehavior of almost everyone,
and more recently the battles
and intrigues of Italian Princelings,
illustrated the rewards of
virtue, and the wages of sin.
There was no point trying
to check the truth of these stories,
for who could know
better than the ancients
what the ancients did?
Or, more about recent happenings
than the eyewitnesses
who wrote about them.
And, in any case, there
was no market for nuances
that would blur the stories, the lessons,
and the rationale of history.
In short; enter rough first approximation.
Around 1550 secular history
was a part of rhetoric,
in search of exemplars and origins.
Ecclesiastical history
was a true chronicle,
anchored in scripture, and the
annals of medieval clerics,
and national history
was a mixture of myth,
wars, dynasties, disaster
and self-promotion.
What's changed, I suppose you'll ask.
(audience laughs)
To be sure, there was indication of change
in the writings of
Machiavelli, Guicciardini,
and other disingenuous
commentators on the then,
recent past, and in the
philological criticism
developed by Lorenzo Valla and
other Italian rhetoricians.
Come now to the cosmos,
as it was seen roughly around 1550,
by literate people who
were not mathematicians.
It was then still much as Dante saw it
on his journey to Paradise,
250 years earlier.
So, here he is, with Beatrice,
visiting the 3rd heaven,
inhabited by formerly lusty Venusians.
Astrologers will notice that
Venus appears on the left,
the far left, in both her zodiacal houses,
the bull and the balance.
The travelers then gradually ascended,
to the Sphere of the Stars.
This picture was Greek,
in what may be called its spatial aspect.
Symmetrical, unchanging,
with no beginning,
and not anticipated end.
Its marriage to Christian
theology in the 13th century
provided it with a temporal dimension.
The standard illustrations
of the late medieval universe
have a Greek part, consisting
of a celestial region,
composed of ether or quintessence,
in which the planets and the
stars, the sun and the moon,
circulate eternally
around a stationary Earth,
and a sublinary sphere composed of
the Earth at the center
with its surrounding layers
of water, air, and
fire, eternally in flux.
The Christian part is linear,
stretching from the damned
at the pit of the universe,
to the saved beyond the stars.
Here is a prelapsarian version,
showing god resting on the 7th day
before the invention of
sin, and so there is no pit.
Humans came into existence with the Earth,
or maybe a day or two
later, and would continue,
despite the fall, to
lord it over all other
terrestrial creatures, until the end,
some 6,000 years after the beginning.
Meanwhile, humankind would continue
to suffer in the flesh for Adam's sin,
which, as interpreted by
Greek physiology meant
to experience imbalances
in their black bile
and other humors, provoked by bad habits
and astral influences.
This cocoon-like world
picture was not very helpful
to mathematicians,
physicians, and theologians,
of the later 16th century,
when they went about their
professional business.
Mathematical astronomers could not
predict the places of the planets
from the geocentric universe
of concentric spheres
turning eternally at constant velocity.
The ancient authority
on the humoral system,
Galen, had made gross
errors in human anatomy,
which he had inferred
from cutting up animals.
And, there was much more to eschatology
than Dante's vision included.
Anyone wanting exact knowledge
needed more refined tools.
Astronomers turned to mathematics,
which, however, made use of models
in conflict with the cosmos
of concentric spheres.
Anatomists turned to
systematic human dissection,
and found the circulation of the blood,
the lymphatic system, and other structures
in conflict with the teachings
of the medical schools.
They did not hide their novelties.
Theologians tried to formulate
exegetical principals
that would accommodate information
like the existence of Americans,
about which the scriptures
and the fathers were silent.
Experts lived, as they often
do, in discordant worlds.
I turn now to the logic of practice,
which is supposed to change the situation
I've just described.
The applications of mathematics
and natural philosophy
was driven largely by practical interests.
Navigation for exploration,
commerce and conquest.
Calendrics for the liturgy, chronology,
and the conversion of the Chinese.
That's a Belgian Jesuit
you see before you.
Astrology for improving life,
ballistics for ending it,
and architecture, surveying, hydraulics,
and after the invention of the telescope,
optical instruments.
These items were bundled
together with astronomy,
mechanics, optics, and
pneumatics, into what the later,
17th century called physico mathematics.
Here is an indication of the apparatus
required by the up-to-date,
early modern physico mathematician.
History, too, owed its
break from rhetoric,
exemplary tales, and
ecclesiastical chronicles
to practical concerns.
During the second half
of the 16th century,
the great scholars on either side
of the Protestant Reformation
invoked history to
authenticate their communions,
and a generation or two of
French lawyers rewrote history
and law in order to free
the France of their day
from previous and current
entanglements with Rome.
In both cases, the application required
extensive engagement with the Middle Ages,
a subject despised, or
ignored, by Italian humanists,
and books and research
groups equal to the task.
I begin with the mathematicians
and the philosophers.
The problem of forging a reliable union
of physics and astronomy, or
philosophy and mathematics
goes back to antiquity.
A solution satisfactory
to the philosophers
was reached on the principle that,
and I hope I do not offend anyone,
the principle that there
is no truth in mathematics.
Mathematicians can
describe phenomena exactly,
using whatever contrivances
they think most convenient,
but to accept points without dimension,
cords without weight,
planes without frictions,
epicycles, eccentrics,
equents, wave functions,
as existing objectively, is,
according to 16th century ideas,
to misunderstand both nature and science.
An important and perhaps
the most important
achievement of the Scientific Revolution
was to overcome the ancient dichotomy
between mathematics and physics.
Quantitative arguments could
then be brought to bear
effectively against
qualitative generalizations.
Let me give you an early example,
the attempt to measure the
universe by Stellar Parallax.
You all know what that is.
By putting the Earth in motion,
Copernicus made possible the detection
of a Stellar Parallax 25,000 times smaller
than the minimum detectable
from a stationary Earth.
This was by making the stations,
from which you can measure a parallax,
the diameter of the Earth's orbit apart
rather than the diameter
of the Earth apart.
Since astronomers still could not discern
any displacement of the stars,
they had to conclude that
the universe was at least
25,000 times larger than
the Greeks had left it.
That was not the least of
what the Holy Inquisition
later called the philosophical
absurdities of Heliocentrism.
Where was the perpetual wind arising from
the supposed turning of the Earth?
In order to have the
quantitative advantages
of the Copernican hypothesis,
like an unambiguous
calculation of planetary distances,
without the attendant absurdities,
most of the few people who
knew about it before 1600
withdrew to the default position;
mathematics is useful but not truthful.
In so doing, they could claim
the authority of Copernicus himself,
who had appeared to warn his readers
not to take as fact hypotheses
he intended as fictions,
lest and I quote his words directly,
"Lest you hadst leave
the study of astronomy
"a greater fool than when you entered it."
In fact, his warning did
not come from Copernicus,
but from his editor, a theologian,
who thought that the
traditional understanding
of mathematical constructs as fictions
might protect the book
from other theologians.
Another mathematical
challenge to the cocoon model
in the later 16th century
was the determination by
parallactic measurements
that comets and super novi
such as the nova that lighted
up Cassiopeia's chair in 1572,
ran their courses where theory
forbade their appearance.
The heavens, apparently,
were not eternally the same.
They too must have a history.
The main author of these
discoveries and conclusions,
Tycho Brahe, could work his
prodigies of measurement
because the King of Denmark,
eager for glory and sound astrology,
and perhaps also for better navigation,
gave him an island on which
to build an observatory
and perfect naked eye astronomy.
Copernicus also was asked to
make his knowledge useful,
but he rejected a call to Rome
to advise on the reform of the calendar.
The effect of mathematics
of altering physics
may be followed on the Earth
as well as in the heavens.
Archimedes approach to mechanical
and hydrostatic problems,
his method of abstraction
that paradoxically,
yielded concrete results,
and his legendary
military accomplishments,
such as incinerating the Roman fleet,
made him a heroic figure
to applied mathematicians
after the publication of
the Greek and Latin edition
of his work in 1544.
Galileo became a master at
using Archimedes' methods
to destroy physical
propositions that Aristotle
had intended merely as qualitative.
He, that is, Galileo,
met a lot of resistance
from people in positions of power
who refused to allow mathematical
hypotheses to puncture
a physical system in such perfect
harmony with common sense,
and scripture as the old cocoon universe.
I come now to the practical
applications of history
in the hands of theologians and lawyers.
During the same half century that physics
first wrestled with
Copernicus and Archimedes,
that's the second half
of the 16th century,
practice was enlarging and
redefining the domain of history.
Theologians strove to make the case for
their confession on
historical grounds with as
Berkeley's historiographer
James Westfall Thompson put it,
"Incalculable significance
for the development
"of historical scholarship."
To show that the bishops of Rome
had distorted the teachings
of the early church,
and usurped its authority,
Protestants used
technical, historical arguments
against Catholic claims
much as up to date
astronomers used mathematics
against the Christianized
Aristotelean cosmos.
The most productive of
these reverend spin doctors
was Matthias Flacius Illyricus,
a leading Lutheran theologian,
and a very hot controversialist.
He set up shop in Magdeburg
with four colleagues,
seven studiosi, or graduate students,
an payment from Protestant princes
to trace the rivulet of true Christianity
and the flood of Papal
pretension from Christ to Luther.
This precocious research group,
historians preceded
physicists, incidentally,
in working in groups, this
precocious research group
printed 13 stout volumes
between 1559 and 1574
and reached the 14th century before
the death of Flacius ended their work.
The group arranged their
materials in blocks of 100 years,
which earned their books
the informal title of
Magdeburg Centuries and them
the novel name of Centuriators.
Over half of the work is given to dogma,
liturgy and theology,
and much of the balance
to the progress of anti-Christ,
that is, the Papacy,
which in the judgment of the Centuriators,
was as dangerous to the true faith
as the institution of Islam.
Here is one version of their attitudes.
If you are Protestant, read the left,
if you are Catholic, don't read the right.
(audience laughs)
There you find Flacius' idea
of the worship of idols,
the worship of money, and so on,
depicted under the sermon of a fat monk,
whereas on the left side, you
have only reasonable people
attending to the words of a scholar
as they take communion in two kinds.
In pursuing these themes, that is,
the history of the Church
from Christ to Luther,
with the help of manuscripts
that Flacius and his post docs
turned up in libraries
from Hungary to Scotland,
the Magdeburg group assembled
many facts not easily answered
and pointed their argument
by reference to forgeries,
such as the well-known
Donation of Constantine
on which the Holy See rested some of its
spiritual and temporal claims.
The fight against the blind
fanatics inspired by the devil,
as the Centuriators described the forgers,
had its excitement.
One Centuriator died suddenly,
poisoned, it was said,
by counter reformers, unhappy
at his supplying documents
from Catholic libraries
for Protestant causes.
Catholics found their
champion in Cesare Baronio,
an oratorian priest who
very nearly became Pope,
and may be on his way to Canonization.
Although he had not wanted the assignment,
his boss, St. Philip
Neri, judged him the equal
of a dozen Centuriators, and
so, informed him by telepathy.
(audience laughs)
For 28 years the venerable
Baronio did nothing
but take notes and copy
extracts from the material
put at his disposal in
the Vatican Library.
Then came the folios, 12 of them,
at the rate of one every 18 months.
The series began with the
action packed title page
you see on your right, in
which Saints Peter and Paul
stand on their pedestals
and a female figure
representing the Catholic
Church holds a cross
to which are chained an old
hag, representing heresy,
and a man representing
other uncooperative people.
Baronio's Annals were a great
success among Catholics,
although to say the truth,
they are unreadable.
Like the Magdeburg centuries,
they devote one volume
to every hundred years
since the birth of Christ,
listing year by year the Popes,
Emperors, Saints, and so on,
all to show, as Baronio put it,
"That the visible monarchy
of the Catholic Church,
"instituted by Christ, and
founded on the rock of Peter,
"has been conserved inviolate,
through his legitimate
"and true successors.", that
is to say, the Roman Popes.
At first it appeared that Baronio's folios
had crushed the Centuriators.
Then the technicians went to work.
James I of England hired a
great scholar, Isaac Casaubon,
to look for mistakes in Baronio's work.
It was a slam dunk.
Casaubon found enough errors
in Baronio's first volume
to inspire 800 pages of criticism.
(audience laughs)
Another energetic expert
found 8,000 in the whole work.
And, even the Catholics had to admit
that their gladiator had
little judgment and less Greek.
We need not follow further
the low and learned
appropriation of historical documents for
the high purpose of confirming faith.
It is enough to say that
each round brought to light
cornucopias of information
and buckets of spin,
fuel at once historians,
controversialists, and cynics.
Lawyers writing in France during
the civil and religious wars
of the later 16th century
gave as strong a shove to
historical studies as the
theologians who tracked the
pure streams of Christianity.
Here, the Gallican cause,
which asserted independence
of France and the French Church from Rome,
played the part of confessional conflict,
which peaked in 1572 in
the massacre of Protestants
buy Catholics in commemoration
of the flaying of St. Bartholomew.
The lawyers, the best known
of whom now is Jean Bodin,
relied on the philological tools developed
by Italian humanists to
subvert the common belief that
French civil law derived
directly from Roman precedence.
Similarly, they show that
the famous Code of Justinian
taught as a model of rational
design in European law schools
hardly had the coherence it claimed.
Like technical astronomy,
it had been knocked together
from bits and pieces from
different times and places.
With this insight, François Hotman,
a choleric controversialist,
long time civil lawyer,
one time Royal Historiographer,
and part time secretary to Calvin himself,
sweated over medieval
manuscripts to discover
the true customary law of France.
Hotman and his colleagues wanted to ground
French law and institutions
on the supposedly free
oligarchies of the German tribes.
He derived France not from Francio,
whom he relegated to poetry,
but from Frank, free,
like the Protestant theologians,
he sought to recover
the true, pure fountain, in this case,
of laws, custom, and government,
not primarily to enrich
historical studies,
but to tip the balance
in contemporary political
and religious battles.
But again, like the theologians,
he and his colleagues
dug up all sorts of original information
about the Middle Ages
in trying to demonstrate
their preferred form of
Gallicanism and the roots
of French feudal law and institutions.
Étienne Pasquier, perhaps
the best historian
among the 16th century lawyers,
might qualify as the Copernicus
of French Historiography,
for putting France, rather than Rome,
at the center of historical interest.
No medieval records, however
repellent, repelled him.
Acts of Parliament, Papal
Bulls, coins, travel reports,
chronicles, trial
records, he was the first,
incidentally, to look at the
trial records of Joan of Arc.
With copious documents and
exact philology, he said,
the rise and fall of
states could be explained
and even predicted by methods
as quote "easily grasped"
as mathematical demonstrations.
That was to invoke a dubious ally.
Contemporaries who knew there
is not truth in mathematics
suspected there was little in history
written as a legal brief, or
in ecclesiastical history,
compiled by controversialists.
Even people with the best credentials
turned out to be liars.
For example, Annius of Viterbo,
a Dominican theologian,
and professor of theology,
who made up most of the matter
he claimed to derive from the lost books
of Barosus the Babylonian,
and, Abbot Trithemius,
the good Benedictine, though a magician,
who invented the 18 ancient
books from which he wrote
the History of the Franks,
from Troy to Clovis.
How was one to know what to believe?
(audience laughs)
I come to Skepticism and its defeat.
An easy solution was to accept
the religious confession
as the leap of faith and
deny that anything else
could be known with certainty.
This feckless policy was recommended,
not only by the confusion of the times,
but also by the writings of the
grandfather of all skeptics,
Sextus Impericus, who was
awakened from his slumbers
in the later 16th century to
supply Montagne's generation
with many finely crafted arguments,
subversive of all dogmatisms.
Sextus observed that a
criterion was necessary
to resolve disputes and that
to establish the criterion,
another would be needed,
and so ad infinitum.
The bottom line of this
Pyranism, is that we cannot know
whether any knowledge claim is true.
How comforting.
If no world picture could
truly be said to be true,
why fight over any?
Only a madman would allow
himself to suffer punishment
for insisting on the truth
of a history or cosmology
offensive to his
community, which of course,
would be equally crazy if
it acted from conviction
that it knew the truth,
rather than from concern
to maintain public order.
However useful in undercutting dogmatism
Pyranism is not a satisfactory
long term strategy.
It allows only a temporary withdrawal
from the struggle to
understand the universe,
and the place of human beings in it.
John Locke's Pyranist
King of Siam may have been
an impeccable epistemologist,
when he refused to believe
the Dutch Ambassador's
tale about water so hard
an elephant could walk upon it,
but in rejecting this true report,
he deprived himself a chance
of winning the Nobel Prize
for the physics of freezing.
Perhaps a greater danger
is run by people like
Sir Kenelm Digby, an ancient
ornament of my Oxford College,
who credited the so-called
salve of sympathy
on the say so of a gentleman and a monk.
This salve healed a wound when applied
to the weapon that had caused it,
and although the ointment
no doubt was more helpful
to the victim when smeared on
the weapon than on the wound,
in neither place did it
advance medical science.
In abandoning the relative
safety of Pyranism,
the enquiring mind needed prophylactics
against the gullibility of a Digby
and the incredulity of the King of Siam.
The criterion in physics.
The two most influential
solutions to the problem
of this criterion during
the Scientific Revolution
originated among people who,
because of their line of work,
implicitly rejected Pyranism.
These were lawyers and Jesuits.
The lawyer-like solution
came from Francis Bacon,
who rose to the pinnacle of
the English Bar under James I.
The Jesuit-like solution
came from that preternatural
product of their pedagogy, René Descartes.
Curiously, Bacon much
admired Jesuit teaching,
and Descartes studied to be a lawyer.
They began by unraveling what
remained of the cocoon universe.
Bacon did so by identifying
certain idols or prejudices
in thought patterns,
which blocked access to
truth about the natural
world and perverted attempts
to transmit the little secure information
that had been discovered.
Decartes jettisoned even more, indeed,
everything but his own mind,
by doubting the existence
of the external world and everything
that any philosopher
had ever said about it.
To rebuild, Bacon
proposed the collection of
all available information
about the external world,
from every likely source,
and its assortment into
natural histories of related phenomena.
Careful analysis would then
produce trial hypotheses
about their relationships,
systematic experiment
would eliminate most of the hypotheses,
and eventually a series
of crucial experiments
would determine the correct world picture.
To achieve this goal,
Bacon designed a costly
research establishment,
which he called Solomon's House.
As you see, I hope, it
boasted an observatory,
botanical and zoological gardens,
instruments for what he called
"twisting the lion's tail",
that is for experimenting under conditions
not found in nature,
a mine, orchard, farm,
hospital, workshops of all
kinds, in which experiments
could be conducted and
their fruit supplied.
And, an extensive system of
espionage in case foreigners
had discovered something
the Solomons had overlooked.
The design was premature
when proposed in the 1620s,
Bacon couldn't get James to fund it.
It was revived rhetorically
some 40 years later
in the Royal Society of
London, which unabashedly,
without Pyranist reservations,
claimed to seek natural knowledge.
It is still doing so.
Descartes' analysis left him with a weapon
more powerful even than Bacon's, that is,
the criterion of his own conviction.
Any proposition that struck
him as clearly and distinctly
as the great truth, "I doubt,
therefore, my mind exists",
now best known in the sound bite,
"Cogito Ergo Sum", must be true.
Incidentally, the ultimate
ground of the validity
of this test, was the
inference from God's goodness
that he would not deceive
Descartes about any matter
that Descartes grasped
clearly and distinctly,
a proposition that Einstein
later rendered in the terms
"God is clever but not malicious."
(audience laughs)
The first and fundamental
truth about nature,
that Descartes tests secured,
was that the material world
consists of a very few primary qualities,
qualities easily quantified,
like extension and mobility.
From which, it followed, forgive
me for not explaining how,
that the universe "...is full of suns,
"placed at the centers of vortices,
"in which the planets swim."
Those things that look like chili peppers
over on the left are comets.
That demoted almost all of the
myriad substantial qualities
of the Aristotelian world view
like hotness, and moistness,
and magnetism, and bogginess,
to secondary effects
created in the perceiving mind.
Despite the arrogance of the argument,
Descartes' universe of
pushes and whirlpools,
of animal machines and disembodied minds
very quickly gained
adherents, particularly among
young doctors, dissatisfied
with the teachings of Galen
and the rigidity of the
medical establishment.
Although many of the special
arguments and mechanisms
did not survive long, his
insistence that a true physics,
that is a mathematical
and mechanical philosophy,
which would've been considered
an oxymoron 100 years
earlier, could be found.
That inspired many deep minds
of the later 17th century,
including Leibniz' and Newton's.
The strength of mechanism
as a weapon against Pyranism
lies in its appeal to the intuition.
As the Victorian physicist
who came as close
as may be possible to reducing
all physical phenomena
to strictly mechanical
principles liked to say,
"Thinking about a mechanical
universe is as easy
"as imagining yourself
inside a steam engine."
Perhaps the strongest criticism
that Bacon and Descartes
leveled at a received
learning was uselessness,
and each promised that his
method would, in Bacon's phrase,
"Improve man's estate."
Given sufficient resources,
they would reveal
the operations of the body,
build a rational medicine,
and lengthen human life.
In fact, neither of them had sense enough
to come in out of the cold.
Bacon is said to have caught his death
while stuffing a chicken with ice,
although it is more likely that he died
from swallowing his own medicines
before Solomon's House had approved them.
Descartes caught his
death while instructing
Christina, the philosophical
Queen of Sweden,
in the principles of his
system at two in the morning
in her frozen palace in Stockholm.
(audience laughs)
These stories, which tell
us that the true savant
is heedless of health
in the pursuit of truth,
are example of history
as a branch of rhetoric.
That brings me to the
criterion in history.
Historians obtain their
criterion by privileging material
survivals of the past over the
writings of their colleagues.
The up-to-date historian
must have inscriptions,
statues, candelabra, sarcophagi,
coins, seals, and gems,
which did not lie.
In this way, the
distinction between primary
and secondary qualities
introduced against the
Aristotelian world view
had an exact parallel in
the essential distinction
between primary and secondary sources
in historical research.
Furthermore, the privileging
of physical artifacts
among primary historical
sources had much the same
psychological appeal as the preference
for mechanical concepts
among primary qualities,
for just as a supposition
of a mechanical universe
stimulated the imaginations
of natural philosophers,
so handling ancient coins or
puzzling out old inscriptions
gave susceptible souls the
feeling of the presence of Rome.
A single artifact might be
difficult to date and interpret,
but with enough items, with
large enough collections,
carful comparison would
elicit the historical truth
as faithfully and in much the same manner
as Bacon's philosophers
winnowed out physical truth.
The business of the antiquary,
the collection and comparison of relics,
amounted to a Baconian
natural history of history.
Bird and bugs, gems and coins,
rarities of nature and art,
sat side by side in the cabinets
of philosophers and gentlemen.
Here is a small portion
of a cabineto in Bologna
with a living rarity, a
dwarf, as chicharonne,
and here is the rest of the clutter.
The philosophical narrative
that would incorporate
antiquarian findings in the
manner that physical theory
would rise from the
siftings of Solomon's House,
was the work of the 18th century,
and a subject I'll deal with tomorrow.
Several auxiliary sciences,
and a brisk trade in artifacts,
grew up during the 17th century,
around the comparative
study of ancient monuments.
The great antiquarian Nicolas de Peiresc,
who was also a good astronomer
and natural philosopher,
remarked that "Coins and
metals ancient and modern,
"real and fake", were
available in such profusion
in the markets in Rome
that sellers offered them
"strung together as if necklaces."
That gave buyers an additional spur
to develop critical antiquarian expertise.
Among the disciplines
at their disposal in the
mid 17th century, at the time
that Descartes was writing,
were epigraphy, the
science of inscriptions,
sfragistics, the science of seals,
and numismatics, the
study of coins and metals.
Here are some numismatical connoisseurs,
exercising discernment
in a market in Rome.
(audience laughs)
The first major application
of ancient coins
to historical writing was
to history as rhetoric,
that is, it made available
depictions of emperors
to go with the usual ancient accounts
of their deeds and misdeeds.
The first application to unscrambling
geography and chronology by Ania Vico,
who is not the Great Vico,
came at the middle of the 16th century,
but had very little influence
for a hundred years,
much as the major innovations
in natural science
of Vico's time associated with Copernicus,
Thessalius, and Romus,
did not have a wide impact
before Galileo, Harvey, and Descartes.
But, from the middle of the 17th century,
most knowledgeable people
accepted Vico's dictum
that no sound ancient
history could be written
without reference to coins and metals.
Numismatics was but child's play
in comparison with diplomatics,
a subject at first approached
as "cold, dry, and repulsive",
according to a Dictionnaire
de la Diplomatie,
of the 18th century, "as
cold, dry, and repulsive
"as calculation with
trigonometric functions."
(audience laughs)
In both cases, however,
perseverance would be
rewarded a thousand fold.
Master trigonometry and you can ascend
to the height of the
Newtonian world system.
Master diplomatics, and you
have internalized the, quote,
"judicious criticism that is the very key
"to nearly all the sciences."
The parallel can be drawn out further.
By coincidence, or divine plan,
the mathematical world system
and the critical evaluation of documents,
fixed their foundations in
the same decade, the 1680s.
The first, in Newton's
Mathematical Principles
of Natural Philosophy,
the second in Jean
Mabillon's De re diplomatica.
As everyone knew, Newton
assembled empirical laws
found by Kepler and
Galileo, critically compared
measurements reported by astronomers,
transcended the blueprint for a
mechanical natural philosophy
laid down by Descartes,
and with one encompassing
law, not only showed
that phenomena previously held distinct,
like the motions of the
planets of the luminaries,
the rotations of Jupiter's satellites,
the elliptical shape of the Earth,
the ocean tides and the
precession of the equinoxes,
were all consequences of
the same simple principle.
He also accounted for them
in quantitative detail.
As not so many know, Mabillon
assembled and compared
information about the physical makeup
of medieval documents collected
by himself and other members
of the Benedictine convent
at Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
His research group worked
out the styles, inks,
parchment, paper, seals and calendars
employed by the various
chancelleries, monastery,
cathedrals, cities, regions,
nations, and empires
at different times, and
found enough correspondences
to be able to judge decisively
whether a test document
came from the time and place it claimed.
Trithemius could've got
nowhere with Mabillon.
The answer to Pyranism in
history turned out to be
the close and critical
comparison of original sources
for which medieval documents provided
the chief material and test bed.
It may not be too fanciful
to think that the Middle Ages
played the same part
in historical thinking
as the vacuum did in physics.
Both were unknown territory in 1550.
In the second half of the 17th century,
they were the sites of
the some of the most
progressive research in
their respective areas.
To pick but one example from history,
the half century after
1660 saw the invention,
almost from whole cloth,
of Anglo Saxon studies
with their attendant
dictionaries, grammars,
catalogs, additions, and translations.
These instruments had
their parallel in physics
in the air pump, invented just before 1660
and its paraphernalia, which
revolutionized understanding
of the nature of matter
during the same half century.
The parallels between modern history and
experimental science that I
hope to have made plausible are,
if you will believe only half
of them, I will be content.
(audience laughs)
A further parallel deserves mention.
Distinctions and collections,
applications and analogies,
do not automatically generate,
what from time to time
is accepted as truth.
To produce even transient
truth, according to
Mabillon's Italian disciple, Muratori,
"requires good taste as well."
Muratori, the man of good taste,
wrote several volumes on on bon gusto
in all the arts and sciences
for those who lacked it.
This was the early 18th century.
His long lesson came down to this:
The three fundamental
ingredients of good taste are,
and I think you can remember this,
humility, humility, humility.
(audience laughs)
In this spirit, I quit for the day,
humbly confident that you will tell me
where I have gone astray,
and hopeful that I will
see you here tomorrow for
a surprising conclusion.
Thank you.
(audience claps)
(electronic music)
