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The Collapse of
Mechanism and the
Rise of Sensibility
Science and the Shaping of
Modernity, 1680–1760
STEPHEN GAUKROGER
CLARENDON PRESS
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP
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South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam
Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press
in the UK and in certain other countries
Published in the United States
by Oxford University Press Inc., New York
# Stephen Gaukroger 2010
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Database right Oxford University Press (maker)
First published 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,
or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate
reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction
outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover
and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Data available
Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India
Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire
ISBN 978–0–19–959493–1
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Preface
Nec miremur tam tarde erui quae tam alte iacent (‘no wonder that it has taken
me so long to uncover something that lies so deep’).
Seneca, Quaestiones Naturales
This book is the sequel to The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the
Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685. Although it follows on naturally from the
story told in the earlier volume, it can nevertheless be read in its own right as an
account of the development of a scientific culture in early Enlightenment
Europe. I take such a development to be a distinctive and unique feature of
Western culture. In many respects it is the characteristic that marks the West out
decisively from other cultures, and it is in the period between 1680 and 1760 that
the distinctive credentials of this new development began to be established.
I have set out to build a detailed historical picture of how the modern image of
science emerged, my aim being to provide us with a lever by which to prise open
questions which would otherwise remain hidden and unexplored. Some might
wonder why I have gone to such trouble, for surely—it might be thought—the
question of why a scientific culture emerged in the West has a simple answer:
namely, it emerged because, in the aftermath of the Scientific Revolution, science
itself was so successful that it carried all in its wake, providing a model to which
all other cognitive disciplines could aspire. Here we would do well to heed the
advice of H. L. Mencken, who pointed out that for every complex problem there
is always a simple solution, and it is always wrong. I have not confused clarity
with simplicity, and in aiming at the former, I have tried to see complex
questions for what they are, and for what in many cases they will remain.
This book is the second in a planned series of six volumes. It is now fifteen
years since I began the project in earnest, and something on this scale incurs
many intellectual debts. In working on the present volume, I would particularly
like to thank: Frédérique Aı̈t-Touati, Peter Anstey, Guido Bacciagaluppi, Mark
Colyvan, Conal Condren, Lisa Downing, Larrie Ferreiro, Ofer Gal, Dan Garber,
Cressida Gaukroger, Peter Harrison, John Henry, Rod Home, Ian Hunter,
Helen Irving, Dana Jalobeanu, Mogens Laerke, Alex Marr, Julia Mihai, Paul
Redding, Dean Rickles, Jessica Riskin, John Rogers, Eric Schliesser, John Schus-
ter, Jeffrey Schwegman, J. B. Shank, Bill Shea, Julián Simón Calero, Sandy
Stewart, Aidan Sudbury, Theo Verbeek, Anik Waldow, Catherine Wilson,
Charles Wolfe, and Richard Yeo. Work on the book has been pursued at the
University of Sydney—where, from the mid-1990s, I have received very gener-
ous support from the Australian Research Council—and more recently also at
the University of Aberdeen. Recent research has been supported by two
vi Preface
Introduction 1
PART I
1. The Construction of a New World Picture 11
The Completeness of Natural Philosophy 13
A New Metaphysics 17
Physico-Theology 30
The Rationalization of Religion 40
PART II
3. The Metaphysical Unity of Natural Philosophy 97
Leibniz and the Unity of Knowledge 98
The Role of Metaphysics 104
Leibnizian Dynamics 115
Demonstration: Geometry versus Analysis 125
Phenomenalism and the Rise of Rational Mechanics 145
PART III
6. Natural Philosophy and the Republic of Letters 229
The Académie des Sciences and the Republic of Letters 232
Vortices, Attraction, and the Shape of the Earth 247
PART IV
8. The Fortunes of a Mechanical Model for
Natural Philosophy 293
Explanatory Models and the Unity of Natural Philosophy 294
Mechanics as an A Priori Discipline 304
The Limits of Mechanics 317
PART V
11. The Realm of Sensibility 387
From Sensibility to Sensibilism 389
Physiological Sensitivity 394
Moral Sensibility 402
The Unity of Sensibility 409
Contents ix
Conclusion 453
In what follows, I have set out to trace, in the period between the 1680s and the
middle of the eighteenth century, the emergence of scientific values, considered
both as a cognitive norm—a model for all cognitive claims—and as a develop-
ment that explicitly goes beyond technical expertise and articulates a world-view
that was designed to displace others, whether humanist or Christian. The
significance of the emergence of such scientific values lies above all in their ability
to provide the criteria by which we come to appraise cognitive enquiry, and
which shape our understanding of what it can achieve. This concern with
scientific values is not an essentially new one. In his Essai sur l’Étude de la
Literature (1761), Gibbon writes:
In every country in every age, we witness some discipline being given preference which is
too often unmerited, while other studies suffer from an equally unmerited contempt.
Metaphysics and dialectic in the successors of Alexander, politics and eloquence in the
Roman Republic, history and poetry in the Augustan age, grammar and jurisprudence in
the later Empire, scholastic philosophy in the thirteenth century, humane letters up to the
age of our fathers: each of these has enjoyed by turn the admiration and scorn of men.
Physics and mathematics presently occupy the throne. We witness their sisters prostrate
before them, chained to their chariot wheels, or otherwise devoted to the adornment of
their triumph. Perhaps their fall is not far off. The time of a skilful writer would be well
spent dealing with this revolution in religion, government, and manners, whose successive
phases have misled, devastated, and corrupted humanity.1
Between 1680 and 1760, Western culture underwent a profound transforma-
tion, one in which natural philosophy—particularly the physics and mathematics
of which Gibbon speaks—played a leading part, and from which it emerged with
a new standing. The questions that Gibbon raises have become progressively
more profound and central since he wrote. Understanding the emergence of a
scientific culture—one in which cognitive values generally are modelled on, or
subordinated to, scientific ones—is, I believe, one of the foremost historical and
philosophical problems with which we are now confronted in understanding our
own culture.
1
Edward Gibbon, Essai sur l’Étude de la Literature (Dublin, 1777), 2–4.
2 Introduction
turned out to be a problematic move on the theological side. The problem was
not, as one might initially expect, that the move was unprecedented or imposed
from outside. A new understanding of ‘religion’ arose in the seventeenth century
whereby—contrary to earlier notions that effectively identified Christianity and
religion so that Judaism and Islam, for example, were simply forms of heresy—
there were now different religions: Christianity was now a religion, a new
meaning for the term ‘religion’. The importance of the idea of different religions,
from the point of view of our present concerns, was that they were distinguished
by their cognitive contents, by contrast with different traditions, forms of
worship, etc. In other words, thinking of Christianity in terms of its cognitive
content was in many respects internally generated. The problem was not so much
that Christianity had come to be characterized in terms of its cognitive content
but that, considered purely in terms of cognitive content, natural philosophy was
far more secure in its cognitive values than was Christianity, and these values
leant themselves easily to generalization, so that it was consequently these that
came to predominate. In this way, the project of combining the resources of
natural philosophy with Christian natural theology and revelation pushed the
cognitive standards of natural philosophy to the fore of any form of intellectual
enquiry. Even more significantly, however, what resulted was an incorporation of
natural philosophy into a world-view as part of the core of a Christian under-
standing of the world and our place in it, thereby endowing it with a greatly
enhanced significance, a significance which, once locked into place, it would
continue to have independently of—and, from the mid-nineteenth century, at
the expense of—the fortunes of Christianity.
The third development was completely different from these and was confined
to the Francophone world. On the face of it, its upshot was the idea, associated
with Voltaire and the philosophes, that natural philosophy embodied ultimate
cognitive standards, but what occurred took place in a peculiar and overdeter-
mined fashion, and closer scrutiny of the history of what happened indicates that
the outcome was not the triumph of ‘reason’, as has commonly been supposed,
but rather a simultaneous elevation of the standing of natural philosophy and the
beginnings of a serious questioning of the connection between natural philoso-
phy and reason. Three developments in this connection will concern us: the
attempt by the French Crown to act as absolute arbiter and guardian of standards
by means of the institution of various Académies; the gradual appearance of a
Republic of Letters in which any claim to a monopoly of judgements of cognitive
worth was quickly undermined; and finally the way in which the rise of New-
tonianism in the 1730s threatened the prevalent understanding of natural
philosophy and opened up the question of its standing. The combination of
these circumstances provided the context in which natural philosophy emerged
as the paradigm bearer of, and the standard for, cognitive values. It was Fonte-
nelle who, from the 1680s onwards, had positioned natural philosophy within
the Republic of Letters, in a successful attempt to generate public support for the
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