Perception and analogy: Poetry, science, and religion in the eighteenth century 9781526157058

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Perception and analogy

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Perception and analogy Poetry, science, and religion in the eighteenth century Rosalind Powell

manchester university press

Copyright © Rosalind Powell 2021

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The right of Rosalind Powell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 5704 1 hardback First published 2021 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover credit: ‘Des moments de plaisir, et de jours de torurmens de notre etre imparfait voila des elemens’ by Francus Pedro aft er F. Magg iotto, n.d. Engraving 18th century. Wellcome Library, London. CC BY 4.0 Cover design: Abbey Akanbi, Manchester University Press

Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

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Contents

List of figures page vi Acknowledgementsvii List of abbreviations viii Introduction1 1 Celestial speculations 25 2 Light, perception, and revelation 77 3 Seeing in colour 119 4 Understanding the eye 163 5 Perception and the body 209 Bibliography256 Index282

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Figures

1 Frontispiece to Benjamin Martin, The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Philosophy, vol. I (London: Owen, 1759). Wellcome Collection. page 33 2 Model planetarium. Benjamin Martin, The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Philosophy, 2 vols (London: Owen, 1759–63), vol. I, plate VIII. Wellcome Collection. 46 3 Model planetarium. Benjamin Martin, The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Philosophy, 2 vols (London: Owen, 1759–63), vol. I, appendage to plate VIII. Wellcome Collection. 47 4 Title page of Isaac Newton, Opticks (London: Smith and Walford, 1704). Wellcome Collection. 79 5 Observing a rainbow. Isaac Newton, Opticks (London: Smith and Walford, 1704), Book I, Part II, plate IV, figure 15. Wellcome Collection. 130 6 Full-page plate of Spring, designed by William Kent, engraved by N. Tardieu, in James Thomson, The Seasons (London: Millar, 1730). © The Trustees of the British Museum. 133 7 The eyes, the sensorium commune, and binocular vision. William Porterfield, A Treatise on the Eye, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Miller, Hamilton and Balfour, 1759), vol. II, plate II, figure 12. Image courtesy of University of Bristol Library, Special Collections. 179 8 Aeolian harp. Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia universalis (Rome: Corbelletti, 1650), II, 352. Copyright of the University of Manchester. 234

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Acknowledgements

My thanks are manifold and too great to outline here. I would like to recognise in particular the support of the following people and institutions. Colleagues and students at the University of Bristol, especially the students whom I have taught on the unit ‘Literature and Science: Newton to Darwin’; my colleagues at Liverpool Hope University, where work on this book began; and staff at the many libraries where I have carried out research. For funding periods of research: the Faculty of Arts, University of Bristol, Chawton House Library, and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA. The anonymous readers for Manchester University Press; everyone at the Press, especially Matthew Frost, who has helped me through the publication process; and Fiona Little for her excellent copyediting (remaining errors mine). Colleagues and friends who have listened to me talk through my ideas or, very generously, read drafts: Andrew Bennett, Ian Calvert, Sarah Daw, Lesel Dawson, Alice Jenkins, Tom Jones, Greg Lynall, Ralph Pite, and Sebastiaan Verweij, and the BSLS regulars. My dearest friends: Tristan Franklinos, Chera Cole, Charly Stapley, Cat Wilson, and Helen Longfils. My family: (Doc Senior) Nigel and Ceri Stringer, Heidi Honert (much missed), Wolfgang Honert, my parents Sue and David Powell (for everything), and, more than anything, Dan Honert.

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Abbreviations

ELH English Literary History Phil. Trans. Philosohical Transactions of the Royal Society PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association of America RES Review of English Studies Note: All biblical quotations are taken from the 1611 King James Version.

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Introduction

Seeing scientifically involves the perception of order in a bewilderingly large universal landscape. It demands the ability to interpret the material nature of things and to recognise the laws and forces that govern them. In James Thomson’s 1727 celebration of Isaac Newton’s life, the natural philosopher’s discoveries and methods are framed in terms of eyesight: All-piercing sage! who sat not down and dream’d Romantic schemes, defended by the din Of specious words, and tyranny of names; But, bidding his amazing mind attend, And with heroic patience years on years Deep searching, saw at last the System dawn, And shine, of all his race, on him alone.1

Newton’s recognition of universal laws governing physical phenomena is set out here as a Lockean process in which evidence is gradually acquired through observation and inductive law-making. Although Thomson emphasises that success is the result of ‘heroic patience’ rather than sudden inspiration, he does not outline the experimental methods employed but relies instead upon the trope of Newton’s superior ‘all-piercing’ vision which enables him to ‘see’ the ‘System dawn’. The ‘penetrative eye’ (line 73) becomes an analogy for a particular kind of scientific understanding:2 All intellectual eye, our solar Round First gazing thro’, he by the blended power Of Gravitation and Projection saw The whole in silent harmony revolve.

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From unassisted vision hid, the Moons To chear remoter planets numerous pour’d, By him in all their mingled tracts were seen. (lines 39–45)

Thomson’s references to eyesight in this passage function metonymically for the kind of knowledgeable perception that permitted Newton to establish laws of optics and motion and to communicate those laws to others. Thomson is not alone in making an association between Newton’s knowledge and his privileged sight: Richard Glover’s ‘A Poem on Sir Isaac Newton’ (1728) celebrates how his ‘quick sight pursu’d [light’s] darting rays’, in order to see accurately ‘How in the texture of each body lay / The power that separates the diff’rent beams’;3 in a patriotic poem of 1735, Jane Brereton compares Merlin’s erroneous astronomy to Newton’s correct laws of attraction, according the new discoveries to the latter’s ‘faculties enlarg’d’;4 and the anonymous 1750 poem A Philosophic Ode on the Sun and the Universe describes Newton’s genius with reference to his ‘piercing eyes’.5 Newton’s own works display a preoccupation with visual perception. In Opticks (1704), he demonstrates awareness of the need to shape readers’ visual and mental engagements with new scientific ideas through definition, explanation, demonstration, and prompts for replication. Both Laura Miller and Charles Bazerman have drawn attention to Newton’s exploitation of the monograph form – in preference to articles in Philosophical Transactions that provide an interactive arena for scientific debate and critique – as a space where he could establish his authority to propose new laws of natural philosophy. Bazerman argues that Newton creates in Opticks a ‘controlled experience’ that takes readers ‘from first principles to a fully articulated and fully imagined system’.6 We can see how this controlled experience is established through the opening ‘Definitions’, which equip readers with an apparatus of key terms such rays, refrangibility, and reflexibility. In the main body of Opticks, Newton encourages readers to adopt an empiricist approach to observing light and its properties. He notes that his accounts of experiments are designed to facilitate replication and not only to report evidence: ‘in the Description of these Experiments, I have set down such Circumstances by which either

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Introduction 3

the Phaenomenon might be rendred more conspicuous, or a Novice might more easily try them’.7 Newton trains the would-be experimenter to arrange and observe these processes correctly, advising them to make the site of experimentation dark enough for light rays to be viewed, to use ‘good’ optical lenses, and to employ a ‘well wrought’ glass prism that is ‘free from Bubbles and Veins’ (Book I, p. 53). Each of these devices shows that Opticks cannot be read passively: axioms and diagrams need to be scrutinised, and experiments should be repeated. The outcome is that the reader will be able to observe light’s properties in a newly accurate and systematic way. Perception and Analogy is about ways of seeing scientifically and how these ways are presented, explained, manipulated, and applied in eighteenth-century literature and science. Newton is a frequent touchstone throughout this study, both by virtue of his scientific publications and because his name becomes a shorthand for empiricist enquiry in this period under the banner of Newtonianism. Whilst a few of the instances of observation that I examine in this book do involve the replication of experiments in acts of direct witnessing of the kind invoked by Newton, the majority of my examples – from topographical poems, scientific reports, didactic textbooks and lectures, dialogues, and descriptions of models and instruments – employ what Steven Shapin has identified as ‘the literary technology of virtual witnessing’, that is, ‘the production in a reader’s mind of such an image of an experimental scene as obviates the necessity for either its direct witness or its replication’.8 I extend Shapin’s usage to encompass a whole range of literary and imaginative empirical sites where scientific perception needs to be employed, such as conceptions of outer space, the description of colour in a landscape, and explorations of the relationship between the senses and the body. I show how writers employ analogy within the virtual environment of the text to permit readers’ cognitive experiences of scientific perception without the need for direct observation.9 Reading, the witnessing of experiments and demonstrations, and empirical observations of celestial and terrestrial sites all demonstrate how seeing – and the cognitive experience of perception – is central to the new science and its communication in creative and didactic texts.

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As a founding text for the empirical method, John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) prompts natural philosophers to consider processes of knowledge acquisition. With its new emphasis on sensation and reflection, science becomes literally a way of seeing things differently. Philosophical approaches to phenomenal reality and knowledge construction, such as discussion of Molyneux’s Question and Berkeley’s idealism, also raise questions about the relationship between the different senses and how sensation functions as the basis of knowledge. Finally, the lived experience of perception – from individual acts of seeing or feeling to medical intervention – raises further questions about the relationship between sensation, reflection, and knowledge. I show how these different accounts rub up against habitual analogies between light and knowledge and divine design, producing new analogical models for perception and its processes. Studies on the role of the senses in the eighteenth century have proliferated in the past decade, and many critics have rightly looked beyond the ocularcentric discourse of the period to investigate touch, smell, and hearing.10 Perception and Analogy begins with vision as the key sense that governs empiricist encounters with the phenomenal world. However, the informative or knowledgeable encounter – mediated through popular accounts of science, descriptive poems, or even representative objects – is also shown to involve the other senses. Outlining eighteenth-century educational theory and practices, I show how touch and the tactile manipulation of objects are important for understanding the causal relationships between phenomena such as light and refracting prisms, for making planetary features and motions comprehensible through models of the universe, and for conceptualising infinite astronomical systems in outer space and hidden systems within the body. I explore, therefore, both the practical use of the senses in scientific and natural encounters and the treatment of these sensory encounters and processes in optical, medical, and literary texts. In the chapters that follow, I uncover the tension between detached and objective models of eyes and sight, as found in the optical diagrams and experiments of Newton and William Chesselden and the poems of Henry Brooke, Richard Blackmore, and James Thomson, and the subjective experience of individual

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Introduction 5

perception in cases of imperfect sight, impairment, and blindness as explored by George Berkeley or David Hartley, and presented in poems by Richard Jago, Edward Young, and Thomas Blacklock. Although I discuss the ways in which some ideas are revised in this period – new theories of colour production and perception, the shift from understanding the connection between the body and the senses in terms of animal spirits towards Hartley’s nervous fibres, the increasingly medicalised account of vision – I do not aim at a neat chronological exploration of the senses, science, knowledge, and belief in the period. As some models for perception and experience (such as the camera obscura or the idea of readable signs and tokens in the natural world) are replaced, others (such as the connection between light and knowledge or the limitation of human understanding) prove enduring even as the analogies that are used to express them change. Four key subjects, together with perception, shape my approach to the period’s literature and science: poetry as a site for the interpretation, display, or acquisition of knowledge; the role of the imagination in scientific discovery, description, and learning; the method and effects of analogy; and, finally, the co-presence of science and religion in the period’s habitual physico-theological outlook. I outline these here.

Poetry Topographical poetry, as a genre that seeks to represent the landscape and the experience of looking at it, can be read as an indicator of the developing figuration of sensory experience in this period. In the poems that I take as exempla, eyes scan skies and landscapes and focus on particular details, vision is facilitated by lenses and, occasionally, surgical intervention, or inhibited by impairment or natural light and meteorological conditions, and the processes of colour perception, binocular vision, and sensory communication are interrogated. By paying attention to the readers, writers, and viewers in topographical poetry, it is possible to interpret these texts as engagements with optics and the science of vision as applied to

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subjective experience. This affects how the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘you’, indicating viewers, are to be approached: not as an ideal point of static or roving spectatorship, but as an imagined counterpart to the real viewer theorised in, for example, Locke’s Essay and addressed through the educational dialogues on astronomy. John Barrell’s account of formal prospect viewing in art and its relation to Thomson’s Seasons shows how a knowledgeable observer might render a landscape picturesque through an active process ‘of jockeying for position, of screwing up the eyes, of moving back and forth, [and] of rearranging objects in the imagination’.11 Alternatives to this neat account of prospect viewing as political power move have been supplied in more recent criticism: Margaret Koehler has documented a shift in the course of the century from Locke’s passively receptive mind to models of alert, skilful associationism, and, more recently, Ingrid Horrocks has described the transition from the privileging of detached observers in Thomson to the recognition of the wanderer as the key observer in the topographical poetry of a ‘post-patronage poet’ such as Oliver Goldsmith.12 Both of these approaches are comparable with my own identification of how objective models of vision and spectatorship become destabilised in the period. In its framing of poetry as a route to knowledge acquisition, Perception and Analogy considers descriptions of observers within the texts and the ways in which topographical poetry facilitates perceptual experience for readers. Thomson’s frequent invocations of eyes (explored in Chapter 5) have attracted a great deal of critical attention, and they offer one way in to thinking about this topic. Whilst the poet certainly invokes specific individuals in some descriptions of observation, such as the appearance of Lord Lyttleton’s estate in Spring and Arthur Onslow’s appearance in Autumn, many of the eyes in Thomson’s poem are what Heather Keenleyside has described as ‘oddly detached body parts that could  belong to any creature’.13 There is potential for the reader to adopt these eyes through imaginative perception. Kevis Goodman’s  study of the affective techniques through which The Seasons and other descriptive poems of the period are able to bring historical landscapes to life provides a helpful account of how the somatic experience of observation can be transmitted to readers

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Introduction 7

through the conflict between focused microscopic observation and its disturbance by external factors.14 Goodman’s interest is the transmission of historical detail, but her focus on sensation points towards the kinds of readerly involvement that my own study addresses. Further ammunition for the interpretation of topographical poetry in this mode is supplied by its actual use in the eighteenth century. John Sitter’s explanation of how the ‘miniature dramas’ of the period’s poetry ‘are waiting to be produced by active readers’ who ‘see as well as hear’, corroborated more recently by Abigail Williams’s ground-breaking account of communal reading practices in the period, helps to show how the poems I address in this book are not to be viewed as static representations of spectatorship but as interactive texts that facilitate knowledgeable encounters with the more particular phenomena that make up a landscape, an astronomical vista, or a description of bodily processes.15 The poems frequently employ imperatives and deictic indicators (‘See!’, ‘Lo!’) that invite active participation from the reader. The quotation of verse examples in popular science texts gives some indication of what this participation might look like. For example, in Benjamin Martin’s The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Philosophy (1759–63), lines from Creation are integrated into the dialogue as a call to active viewing – ‘In the course of these Meditations, we shall (in the words of Sir R. Blackmore) See through this vast extended Theatre, / Of skill divine, what shining Marks appear!’ – and Henry Baker’s invitation in The Universe to observe the night sky are activated as part of a dialogue about the fixed stars: ‘The Evening seems to invite us abroad’, exclaims the young tutor to his sister, ‘in the Language of Mr. Baker, Come forth, O Man! yon azure Round survey, / And view those Lamps which yield eternal Day, / Bring forth thy Glasses, clear thy wond’ring Eyes’.16 Whilst these examples demonstrate the kind of quotation and repurposing practices visible in miscellanies, printed commonplaces and personal compilations, they also demonstrate a precise didactic function through a fluidity of pronominal reference (most commonly seen in hymns and religious lyrics) where the ‘you’ or ‘I’ becomes associated with the subjective sensory e­ xperience of the individual observing reader.

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Imagination The inclusion of the reader’s own perceptive capacities in poetic encounters is connected to the interpretative role of the imagination in producing new knowledge. Locke’s reconfiguration of the imagination as the internal processing of received sensations and reflections is one of the key ideas that writers take from the new empiricism, as exemplified by Addison’s explanations in his Spectator series ‘On the Pleasures of the Imagination’ (1712) and Akenside’s extensive verse rendering, The Pleasures of Imagination (1744). As Tita Chico explores in her important study of the imagination and literary epistemology, ‘experimental observation uses imaginative speculation, and imaginative fancy enables new forms of understanding’.17 The didactic texts I explore use analogy to prompt this kind of speculation as they require readers to imaginatively perceive distant or unseen phenomena and to picture themselves in various positions on globes or orreries; topographical poems also encourage imaginative perception when they depict their narrator taking prospect views, inspecting natural processes, or even taking imaginative flights through space. A description of ‘ideal presence’ in Elements of Criticism by Henry Home, Lord Kames (1762), helps to demonstrate how experience brings together imagination and analogy. Kames ­ accounts for ­experience through sensation as ‘a continued train of objects passing in [the] mind’, and he explains how understanding involves making connections between these perceptual snapshots.18 His concept of ‘ideal presence’ involves recalling or imagining and piecing together objects when they are not in view – a version of virtual witnessing – through the memory or as prompted by a written account: An important event, by a lively and accurate description, rouses my attention and insensibly transforms me into a spectator: I perceive ideally every incident as passing in my presence. On the other hand, a slight or superficial narrative produceth only a faint and incomplete idea, precisely similar to a reflective recollection of memory. (I, 110)

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Introduction 9

Kames’s account permits a circumvention of empirical experience because ideal presence can facilitate new knowledge without the need for direct encounter. As it is understood in this book, analogy exploits the possibilities of imaginative perception in the same way by constructing moments of ideal presence that allow the reader to perceive and understand new concepts. Chapters 4 and 5 show how developments in medicine and physiology and the emergence of neurology in the course of the eighteenth century determine a reassessment of the relationships between the mind and the body and between sensory perception and the imagination.19 The analogical models of embodied perception that emerge at mid-century show how ideal presence and scientific perception are subjective and productive modes of seeing that collapse the hierarchical distinction between observer and object. Beginning with analogies that manipulate the observer’s perspective on outer space and imaginative cosmic travel and ending by turning inwards to the very workings of the perceiving body that relies on ideal and real presence for knowledge, this book shows how perception and analogy are central to practices of scientific observation in the eighteenth century.

Analogy Both a method of explanation and a way of reading, analogy is used in the eighteenth century to demonstrate new scientific ideas, to facilitate their conceptualisation, and to explore their implications in different contexts and for different audiences. Analogy is, therefore, the key literary technology under examination in this book. Perhaps the most familiar application of analogy as an ordering and explanatory device in the eighteenth century is its use in the botany of Carl Linnaeus. Linnaeus’s novel method of plant classification through sexual analogies that categorise the plant kingdom according to human hierarchies and relationships (based upon the counting of stamens and pistils, which he describes as ‘husbands’ and ‘wives’) has already been explored in depth, particularly in relation to Erasmus Darwin’s didactic poem The Loves of the Plants and in discussions of how the analogy affects women’s botanical writing

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in the second half of the long eighteenth century.20 Linnaeus’s usage reflects the ways in which analogy can help to establish or clarify general laws, systematise and explain phenomena, facilitate communication by providing a common lingua franca, and teach new concepts to amateurs through vivid comparisons. This book looks at different areas of natural philosophy that appear in poetry and popular science from the period, including optics, astronomy, and the science of the senses. The analogies that I investigate include simple domestic and familiar comparisons, staged dialogues, more elaborate philosophical debates about the analogous relationships between different concepts, analogies that draw attention to divine design, and physical models (such as orreries and Aeolian harps) that offer simplified and/or scaled-down approximations of phenomena. Put simply, analogy is the practical or literary exploitation of likeness, and analogising is a process of making creative comparisons with known phenomena to formulate and explain new concepts. It is a productive tool for modelling new ideas about phenomena to which we have no first-hand sensory access and which can be experienced only cognitively (such as Newton’s analogy between observable laws of motion on earth and those seen in planetary motions, or Molyneux’s Question, which considers the implications of sensory analogies by asking about the relationship between touch and sight). As Mary Fairclough notes, this kind of thinking through analogy is connected in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with Baconian induction as a process of law-making and structuring, which enables empiricists to make creative connections as a ‘last resort’ after the possibilities of direct observation have been exhausted.21 Analogy also opens up a field of figurative language that facilitates the explanation of new knowledge by drawing comparisons with known phenomena (as in the description of the eye’s function as akin to a camera obscura) or by aligning new knowledge with accepted beliefs (as in the presentation of gravity as God’s attractive love). Analogy’s capacity to generate new connections, and therefore new knowledge, is reflected in its critical treatment outside of literary contexts. In Creating Scientific Concepts, for example, Nancy J. Nersessian explores ‘analogical modelling, visual modelling, and thought-experimenting’ as ‘especially productive means’ of

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Introduction 11

­conceptual innovation.22 Keith J. Holyoak and Paul Thagard demonstrate in Mental Leaps how analogy constitutes an essential tool for negotiating new experiences and predicting events. This can involve constructing formal analogies based on known r­ elationships – through the standard formulation ‘A is to B as C is to D’ – which is a skill developed in childhood, or it can involve more complex modes of recognising likenesses. Holyoak and Thagard offer the following instances: When strange and surprising things happen, people naturally search for explanations. Why do sounds echo? Why did the dinosaurs become extinct? Why is Daddy grumpy today? One powerful way of producing explanations is to use analogy, making a leap from one’s understanding of one familiar happening to understanding of a surprising occurrence.23

As I show in this book, the same process of explaining by analogy can be found in the laws of Newtonian celestial mechanics and the domestic analogies that are used to teach them to lay audiences (explored in Chapter 1), the extrapolation from Newton’s prism experiments to the explanation of colour’s appearance in physical objects (explored in Chapter 3), or Hartley’s use of vibrating strings to describe communication between different parts of the body in acts of perception (explored in Chapter 5). Holyoak and Thagard also note the capacity of analogy ‘to give rise to ideas that take us beyond sensory experience while still maintaining conceptual links to it.’24 Employing the example of the Lord’s Prayer, in which God is addressed familiarly as ‘Our Father’ and conceptually located in a place called heaven, they show how analogy can facilitate a cognitive experience of things that are completely or partially unknown. For eighteenth-century users of analogy, this application can be related not only to considerations of God – significant as part of a habitual narrative of design, most commonly found in physicotheological discourse that applies new scientific concepts to formulate new accounts of the divine – but also to the understanding of the nerves, light, and outer space, all of which are only partially experienced. The treatment of analogy in literary criticism has been most visible in approaches to nineteenth-century texts such as Charles

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Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). Although Darwin developed his evolutionary theory through an ambitious, non-empirical kind of extrapolation that demanded conceptual leaps from the observed artificial selection of crops and pigeons to a governing principle of natural selection, the established critical approach to nineteenth-century developments in biology as examples of analogy offers a foundation for scholars of the eighteenth century. In The Age of Analogy (2016) Devin Griffiths employs a similar definition to my own when he claims that ‘analogies give voice to patterns that have no name’.25 Bookended by considerations of the treatment of evolutionary thought in Erasmus Darwin’s 1794 Zoonomia (read as  a static account) and his grandson’s more famous Origin of Species (read as a broadly comparative one), Griffiths’s study foregrounds how in the nineteenth century historical scholarship, and therefore ideas of large-scale biological history, begins to involve synthetic pattern-making rather than a whiggish narrative of progress. He explains how analogy is used ‘as a tool that brings the relation between previous ages and the present into focus, seeking the origin of contemporary social and natural order within the patterns of past events’.26 This is, he explains, a fundamentally novel application of analogy that is facilitated by the rise of historical fiction in the nineteenth century and which displaces virtual witnessing in favour of narrative incidents that enable the writer or the scientist to envision ‘other worlds’.27 Whilst he foregrounds a different kind of reading experience from the encounters with didactic texts and poems that dominate the current study, Griffiths reveals here a helpful account of how analogy can aid both the development of new ideas and their communication. Both Gillian Beer and Alice Jenkins have also looked to Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory to remind us of analogy’s plasticity as a mode of encounter and a process through which connections can be tested. Beer’s description of discovery as ‘redescribing what is known and taken for granted’ helps to demonstrate how analogies, as especially concise forms of description, are part of scientific concept-building that bring new and old ideas into contact.28 Beer’s field-defining establishment of a two-way exchange between literature and science in terms of the ‘metaphors and thought-sets’ that they employ has long been central to literature and science studies, and it informs my own



Introduction 13

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approach to thinking about seeing scientifically in the eighteenth century.29 Finally, Alice Jenkins’s assertion that ‘analogy is perhaps the central gesture of literature and science studies’ in terms of ‘our methodological proceeding’ and ‘our form of argument’ helps to explain the reading practice I employ in Perception and Analogy, where poetry, scientific accounts, and theological publications are brought into dialogue.30

Physico-theology Religion is a ubiquitous element of the analogical approaches to perception and knowledge explored in this study, and it appears most frequently in the form of physico-theological writing that couples empiricism with evidence of design in the natural world. Whilst Rob Iliffe and others have established Newton in particular as a natural philosopher embedded in the religious and theological cultures of his day, and narratives of the Enlightenment as the ­harbinger of disenchantment have long been laid to rest, recent scholars of literature and science have remained unduly cautious about emphasising on the role of Christianity in the wider communication and cultural reception of natural philosophy in the period.31 One study that does bring together faith and figurative language is Courtney Weiss Smith’s account of ‘meditative e­ mpiricism’ in Empiricist Devotions.32 Taking Robert Boyle’s Occasional Reflections (1665) and Some Considerations Touching the Usefulness of Experimental and Natural Philosophy (1663) as a starting point, Smith’s monograph shows how close observation of minute particulars leads to the establishment of correspondences or patterns – expressed as tropes, analogies, or personifications – as provisional ways of explaining an ordered natural world. The main subject of enquiry in Empiricist Devotions is not scientific practices and ideas themselves, but the application of empiricist techniques to produce an ‘other empiricism’ that allows for these tropes to thrive in a range of non-scientific and non-devotional texts such as georgic poems, legal texts, and itnarratives.33 Smith’s account of tropes that enable ‘writers to slip easily between the literal and the spiritual’ is similar to my own

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account of s­ cientific seeing through analogy, though in the current study I argue for a re-centring of scientifically knowledgeable perception for all kinds of observers.34 Boyle’s position as both natural philosopher and lay theologian has led a number of critics – including Tita Chico, Clare Preston, and Robert Markley – to explore his scientific language, employment of tropes, and emphasis on reading between the Book of God and the Book of Nature.35 As my own focus is the later relationship between empiricist models of seeing, the rise of the scientific topographical poem, and the development of what might be called Newtonian popular science, the starting point for physico-­theological writing in this book is the lectures endowed by Boyle in 1691 for the promotion of Christian ideas.36 Margaret Jacob ascribes the p ­ opularisation and acceptance of Newton’s ideas to these sermons, suggesting that the ‘first Newtonians’ – Richard Bentley, John Harris (later author of Astronomical Dialogues), Samuel Clarke, William Whiston, and William Derham (who published his lectures of 1711 and 1712 as Physico-Theology) – were able to make religious principles attractive to the commercial classes: In the most universal and widely read lectures ever delivered during the eighteenth century, the Newtonians soothed and assured their congregations, yet simultaneously exhorted them. … Social harmony and political stability complement an ordered universe explicated by Newton where matter is dead or lifeless, its motion controlled by the will of God.37

In Jacobs’s account, physico-theology has a political role in presenting the Newtonian universe – ordered but not independent – as a defence against anti-materialist and anti-rationalist freethinkers and atheists. Newtonianism’s religio-political contexts have been explored most recently by Philip Connell, who argues for Anglican physico-theology as a promotion of the Protestant succession.38 My purpose in addressing physico-theology, explored through the works of Boyle lecturers such as Whiston’s rewriting of the creation narrative according to Newtonian principles and William Derham’s exploration of design in natural and astronomical landscapes, is to understand how they bring together (scientific) perception and belief.

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Introduction 15

Physico-theological writing has a greater function beyond popularising the new empiricism: the tradition established by the Boyle lectures is visible in a range of literary, educational, and theological texts. Knit through the scientific analogies that dominate this book are figures that demonstrate a productive dialogue between natural philosophy and theology. Explanatory analogies that figure gravity as God’s attractive love or the spectrum as evidence of divine artistry enable writers to explain concepts in familiar ways, to maintain a sense of scale, to incorporate unseen or obscure phenomena into the new scientific schema, and to provide an acceptable theological framework for advancing new scientific theories. I show how some of these references are part of a discourse of limitation, exemplified in Pope’s famous statement that ‘the proper study of Mankind is Man’, which questions the extent to which humans can look into the mysteries of the universe.39 This concept of limitation is also demonstrated in empiricist accounts that acknowledge the limitations of sensory perception and which often advertise a theological context for these restrictions. For example, in the ‘General Scholium’ to the Principia (1727, trans. 1729) Newton states that we can know only the external properties of things, illustrating his claim with an analogy between the blind man’s idea of colours and human ideas of God’s perception. In Chapter 1 of the current study, this restriction is figured through the contrast between an infinite universe and the limits of the senses and the imagination; by Chapter 5, this restriction is newly addressed through the variability of individuals’ sensory and somatic experience. Finally, I show how some natural philosophical developments prompt writers to produce new accounts of revealed knowledge. More extensive examples of these are presented in the genre of biblical interpretation, which reads through analogy to produce quasi-empirical accounts of creation narratives in both prose and verse.

Overview In order to interrogate how analogy and perception function in eighteenth-century literature and science, I begin with the elementary creative comparisons that facilitate familiarity and

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Perception and analogy

­conceptualisation of unknown phenomena. Chapter 1 demonstrates how analogies and models are used in literature about Newtonian astronomy to communicate a cognitive experience of outer space to a range of public readers. I show how eighteenth-century literature about astronomy is distinct from earlier treatments of the Copernican system as a result of developments in celestial mechanics, which accord planetary motions to forces, and the new concept of an infinite and various universe. The key texts addressed in this chapter are educational dialogues on astronomy which build on the example set by Fontenelle in his Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686, trans. 1688) – chiefly, John Harris’s Astronomical Dialogues (1719), James Ferguson’s The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Astronomy (1768), and Benjamin Martin’s The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Philosophy (1759–63) – and astronomical poems by John Hughes, David Mallet, Elizabeth Carter, and Mark Akenside. I assess a range of analogical techniques for transmitting knowledge about space: familiar conversation, the use of models as physical analogies that permit a range of cognitive and somatic experiences, domestic analogies that make the vast scales and unseen forces of space comprehensible, the Newtonian concept of an infinite universe and how to envision it, and the possibilities and restrictions of imaginative journeys into space. Whereas the first chapter concentrates on pragmatic uses of analogy for knowledge construction, the second establishes the significance of religious discourse to scientific perception in the period. Chapter 2 homes in on one part of the solar system, the sun, to explore the endurance of analogical associations between light and the divine, and the way this analogy is used to explain both sensory and extra-sensory knowledge in the context of empiricist approaches to light in the early eighteenth century. Focusing on responses to Newton’s Opticks, this chapter explores writers’ diverse attempts to re-establish older correspondences between light and the divine according to new empiricist, rational, or anti-empiricist modes. The first section considers the relationship between light and ­perception in Newtonian poetry and physico-theology by looking at the Neoplatonic concept of signs and tokens in the natural world. The second section investigates the ways in which light’s properties are incorporated into novel accounts of the creation of the world in

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Introduction 17

rewritings of Genesis by William Whiston, John Hutchinson, and Thomas Hobson. The final section explores how light analogies are employed by Thomson, Mallet, and others to negotiate a tension between empiricist perception and divine revelation. The third chapter explores the presentation of colour  in Thomson’s Seasons, Blackmore’s Creation, Akenside’s The Pleasures of Imagination, and several other topographical poems to demonstrate how the enumeration and naming of colours, and explanatory descriptions of their occurrence and perception in the natural environment, become for scientific poets a way to stimulate individual perception and knowledge in the reader. It reveals how there is a connection between categorisation as an essential mode of eighteenth-century philosophical practice – and, indeed, topographical poetry – and the blurring and transgression of categorical boundaries that analogy permits. The rainbow, seized on by Newtonians as the symbol of the new theory of colour, is presented as a key example of divergent modes of colour perception that show the challenges and possibilities of a biblical worldview. Three alternatives to Newton’s account of colour production and perception are also explored: Louis-Bertrand Castel’s materialist theory, George Berkeley’s rationalist equation of both colours and physical phenomena as non-material in Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713), and Christopher Smart’s religious poetry, which presents an anti-Newtonian spectrum. The chapter closes by presenting common analogical tropes that poets use to describe the effect and experience of colour in the natural world: colour as painting or dye, colour as tapestry or weaving, and colour as clothing or covering. These terms are shown to function analogically, in that they train readers’ perceptions according to the newly established empirical account of the production of colour and its phenomenal existence. The final two chapters turn to discussions of perception as the source of knowledge acquisition to establish how subjective, individual perception comes under interrogation in the eighteenth century. Drawing on anatomical treatments of the eye and vision by William Chesselden and William Porterfield, Chapter 4 investigates the connections between optical anatomy and individual visual experience in popular science and poetry. The main focus of the chapter is

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Perception and analogy

eighteenth-century engagements with Molyneux’s Question, which probes the relationship between knowledge gained through touch (often understood in this period as an extension of the sight) and through eyesight, in terms of the hypothetical example of a blind person who gains the power of sight. Preceding the investigation of this phenomenon is an exploration of eye anatomy and perception theory in the period’s optics and poetry which establishes the use of divine analogies for the eye. I then demonstrate the significance of the analogy set out in Molyneux’s Question and its implications for thinking about individualised sensory experience as the source of knowledge, the relationships between the different senses, and competing philosophical accounts of interactions between the perceiving individual and the lived environment. The analogies between the senses encouraged by Molyneux’s Question and the analogies for the eye and its functions are then put to the test through an investigation of scientific and literary reports of surgically restored sight from Chesselden, William Oldys, and Richard Jago. The final chapter explores how models of subjective perception begin to displace philosophical models and creative analogies that frame the eye as a divinely designed instrument. I show how new analogies for perception reflect a revaluation of individually variable somatic experience at mid-century. The first half of this chapter establishes the implications of the restrictive body in mid-century topographical poems that depict impaired sight and blindness and in models of somatic spiritual perception aired by Richard Jago, Edward Young, and William Blake that demand a breaking out of the physical body to gain true vision. The second half of the chapter introduces the impact of Hartleian associationism and looks at how neural networks and exchanges between senses become popular tools for expressing creatively the relationships between different kinds of subjective sensory experience. I explore how musical instruments are looked upon with new interest as models for the sensitive, reactive body and for perceptual experience. Readings of poetic descriptions by Thomson, Akenside, Coleridge, and others present the genesis of the Aeolian harp from its associations with imaginative creation in the middle of the century to its use at its end as a model for the relationship between the mind and the body. By addressing poetry from both the middle of the century and

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Introduction 19

the 1790s, this chapter facilitates a consideration of the afterlife of analogy as a mode for exploring scientific perception. Perception and Analogy shows how seeing scientifically requires observers to make active comparisons between the known and the unknown in order to conceptualise new ideas. By drawing attention to the literary modelling of sensory perception as well as philos­ ophers’ and theologians’ interrogations of its function as the basis of knowledge – all of which rely in this period on fundamental cooperation between mind and body and between perception and imagination – I show how analogy brings the reader into active engagement with the matter of science.

Notes  1 James Thomson, ‘A Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton’, in Liberty, The Castle of Indolence and Other Poems, ed. James Sambrook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 1–14, lines 23–9.   2 Whilst ‘natural philosophy’ – not ‘science’ – is the proper historical term for the kinds of approaches to and processes of knowledge acquisition that I explore in this book, I employ ‘science’ and its cognates in their modern sense.   3 Richard Glover, ‘A Poem on Sir Isaac Newton’ in Henry Pemberton, A View of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy (London: Palmer, 1728), lines 184–8, no page number.   4 [Jane Brereton], Merlin: A Poem Humbly Inscribed to Her Majesty (London: Cave, 1735), p. 8.   5 A Philosophic Ode on the Sun and the Universe (London: Payne and Bouquet, 1750), line 141.   6 Charles Bazerman, Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), p. 124. See also Laura Miller, Reading Popular Newtonianism: Print, the Principia, and the Dissemination of Newtonian Science (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018), pp. 1–9.   7 Isaac Newton, Opticks: or a Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light (London: Smith and Walford: 1704), Book I, p. 17. All references to Opticks are to this edition unless otherwise indicated.

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Perception and analogy

  8 Steven Shapin, ‘Pump and circumstance: Robert Boyle’s literary technology’, Social Studies of Science 14:4 (1984), 481–520 (pp. 490–1). Tita Chico has recently explored how Shapin’s ‘modest witness’ is set up as an ideal of natural philosophical ideal and promoted through the satirical stage treatments of immodest virtuosos in drama of the period; see The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018). For an account of how witnessing influences the narrative forms of s­ eventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural-philosophical articles (such as those published in Philosophical Transactions), see also Alan G. Gross, Joseph E. Harman, and Michael Reidy, Communicating Science: The Scientific Article from the 17th Century to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).   9 Jonathan Kramnick’s account of paper minds – where literary technologies are employed to enact ‘the formal construal of a world as it shows up for an agent engaged or coping with built or natural environments; the setting down or eliciting of perceptual or emotional or cognitive experience on the page’ – offers an alternative perspective on how literary (non-scientific) virtual witnessing can be achieved. Jonathan Kramnick, Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), p. 2. 10 On touch, see Kristen M. Girten, ‘Mingling with matter: tactile ­microscopy and the philosophic mind in Brobdingnag and beyond’, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 54:4 (2013), ­497–520; and Mark Paterson, Seeing with the Hands: Blindness, Vision and Touch after Descartes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). The most recent publications on smell include Emily Friedman, Reading Smell in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2016) and William Tullett, Smell in EighteenthCentury England: A Social Sense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). On hearing, see, for example, Penelope Gouk and Ingrid Sykes, ‘Hearing science in mid-eighteenth-century Britain and France’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 66:4 (2011), 507–43; and Isabelle Bour’s special issue of Études épistémè: revue de littérature et de civilisation 29, ‘Noise and Sound in EighteenthCentury Britain’ (2016). On the more general shift to sensory studies, see Manushag N. Powell and Rivka Swenson’s special issue of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 54:2, ‘Sensational Subjects’ (2013); and Jonathan Reinarz and Leonard Schwarz’s special issue of the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 35:4, ‘The Senses’ (2012).

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Introduction 21

11 John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730–1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 5 and 37. Barrell’s version of prospect viewing can be compared to Peter De Bolla’s account of a ‘knowing eye that teases out allusions’ when viewing the semiotic system of a cultivated landscape garden in ‘The Charm’d Eye’, in Veronica Kelly and Dorothea von Mücke (eds), Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 89–111 (p. 94). 12 Margaret Koehler, Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Ingrid Horrocks, ‘“Circling eye” and “houseless dtranger”: the new eighteenth-century wanderer (Thomson to Goldsmith)’, ELH 77:3 (2010), 665–87 (p. 667). 13 Heather Keenleyside, ‘Personification for the people: on James Thomson’s The Seasons’, ELH 76:2 (2009), 447–72 (p. 455). 14 Kevis Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 15 John Sitter, ‘Introduction: The Future of Eighteenth-Century Poetry’, in John Sitter (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 1–10 (p. 8); Abigail Williams, The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). 16 Benjamin Martin, The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Philosophy, in a Continued Survey of the Works of Nature and Art; by Way of Dialogue, 2 vols (London: Printed and Sold by Owen and by the Author, 1759–63), I, 6 and I, 131–2. 17 Chico, The Experimental Imagination, p. 2. 18 Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, 3 vols (Edinburgh and London: Kincaid and Millar, 1762), I, 21. 19 In taking this approach, I draw on earlier studies of perception and culture, such as Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imagining the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). 20 See, for example, Devin S. Griffiths, ‘The intuitions of analogy in Erasmus Darwin’s Poetics’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 51:3 (2011), 645–65; Catherine Porter, ‘The science and poetry of

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Perception and analogy

a­nimation: personification, analogy, and Erasmus Darwin’s Loves of the Plants’, Romanticism 10:2 (2004), 191–208; Dahlia Porter, ‘Scientific analogy and literary taxonomy in Darwin’s Loves of the Plants’, European Romantic Review 18:2 (2007), 213–27; and Rosalind Powell, ‘Linnaeus, analogy, and taxonomy: botanical naming and categorization in Erasmus Darwin and Charlotte Smith’, Philological Quarterly 95:1 (2016), 101–24. 21 Mary Fairclough, Literature, Electricity and Politics 1740–1840: ‘Electric Communication Every Where’ (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), p. 22. In her investigation of induction in Romantic literature, Dahlia Porter distinguishes between observations made in the world and induction made in print as elements of both literary composition and scientific enquiry. She reads this process as a technique for dealing with ‘information overload’, where the compilation of experimental results and composite texts can be read as analogous. Dahlia Porter, Science, Form and the Problem of Induction in British Romanticism, Cambridge Studies in Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 5. 22 Nancy J. Nersessian, Creating Scientific Concepts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), p. 13. 23 Keith J. Holyoak and Paul Thagard, Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), p. 167. 24 Holyoak and Thagard, Mental Leaps, p. 11. 25 Devin Griffiths, The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature between the Darwins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), p. 11. 26 Griffiths, Age of Analogy, pp. 2–3. 27 Griffiths, Age of Analogy, p. 28. 28 Gillian Beer, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 149. 29 Beer, Open Fields, p. 8. 30 Alice Jenkins, ‘Beyond Two Cultures: Science, Literature, and Disciplinary Boundaries’, in Juliet John (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 401–15 (p. 411). 31 There is a considerable body of scholarship on Newton’s theology which is not examined in the current study. See, for example, Rob Iliffe, ‘The Religion of Isaac Newton’, in Rob Iliffe and George E. Smith (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Newton, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 485–523; and Iliffe’s recent biography, which highlights Newton’s private theological writings and convictions: Priest of Nature: The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton

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Introduction 23

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); see also Scott Mandelbrote, ‘“A duty of the greatest moment”: Isaac Newton and the Writing of biblical criticism’, British Journal for the History of Science 26:3 (1993), 281–302; and Stephen D. Snobelen’s presentation of the ‘distinctly biblical character of Newton’s presentation of God’ (p. 170) in the ‘General Scholium’ in his essay that explores unitarian thought in the scientist’s publications and private papers: ‘“God of Gods, and Lord of Lords”: the theology of Isaac Newton’s General Scholium to the Principia’, Osiris 16, special issue: ‘Science in Theistic Cognitive Dimensions’ (2001), 169–208. 32 Courtney Weiss Smith, Empiricist Devotions: Science, Religion, and Poetry in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016), p. 6. 33 Smith, Empiricist Devotions, p. 36. 34 Smith, Empiricist Devotions, p. 45. 35 Robert Markley, Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660–1740 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 34–62; Claire Preston, The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 68–89; Chico, The Experimental Imagination. The term ‘lay theologian’ is borrowed from Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific imagination: From the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century, 2nd edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). 36 On the connection between the Boyle lectures and Newtonianism, and Newton’s influence upon the first Boyle lecturer Richard Bentley, see M.C. Jacob and Henry Guerlac, ‘Bentley, Newton and providence (the Boyle Lectures once more)’, Journal of the History of Ideas 30:3 (1969), 307–18. 37 Margaret C. Jacob, ‘Newtonianism and the origins of the Enlightenment: a reassessment’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 11:1 (1977), 1–25 (p. 10). 38 Philip Connell, Secular Chains: Poetry and the Politics of Religion from Milton to Pope (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 177–209. 39 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, vol. III.i of The Twickenham Edition of the Works of Alexander Pope, ed. Maynard Mack (London: Methuen, 1950), Epistle II, line 2.

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Of all the sciences cultivated by mankind, Astronomy is acknowledged to be, and undoubtedly is, the most sublime, the most interesting, and the most useful. For, by knowledge derived from this science, not only the bulk of the Earth is discovered, the situation and extent of the countries and kingdoms upon it ascertained, trade and commerce carried on to the remotest parts of the world, and the various products of several countries distributed for the health, comfort, and conveniency of its inhabitants; but our very faculties are enlarged with the grandeur of the ideas it conveys, our minds exalted above the low contracted prejudices of the vulgar, and our understandings clearly convinced, and affected with the conviction, of the existence, wisdom, power, goodness, and superintendency of the SUPREME BEING! James Ferguson, Astronomy Explained upon Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles (1757), p. 1.

1

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Celestial speculations

Lady Mary Chudleigh’s 1710 essay ‘Of Knowledge’ persuasively recommends natural philosophy to a polite audience. Employing astronomical imagery of spheres and stars to represent a select few women who already ‘shine bright in the Firmament of Knowledge’, Chudleigh advises her readers to seek ‘the Knowledge of God, and [of] our Selves’ with a programme that advances from geometry to physics, metaphysics, geography, moral philosophy, and, finally, history.1 The results, Chudleigh notes, will be a new ‘brightness of Thought’ and ‘distinctness of Conception’, as well as enhanced social conversation (p. 259). Learning is expected to reshape the viewer’s perceptions, and outer space emerges as a distinctive subject for contemplation: When you are alone, how transportingly pleasant will it be to take a view of the Universe … To contemplate the Superiour Regions, and their blest Inhabitants, those bright Intelligences who make the nearest approach to absolute Perfection, and are at once the most exalted, and the happiest Parts of the Creation; to survey all those solid Globes which swim in the fluid Æther, see vast Masses of fiery Matter whirl’d round their Axis with an amazing, an inconceivable Rapidity, and at the same time moving with them their respective Vortices, and attending Planets, to consider their Distances, and the several Circles they describe; and when dazl’d with an almost infinity of glorious Objects, to turn your Thoughts to Prospects no less wonderful, but nearer to you, and more adequate to your Capacities. (pp. 259–60)

This description combines technical language of orbits and axes with a reaction of dazzled wonder. Chudleigh’s essay represents some of the ways in which astronomy is marketed as a polite

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a­ ctivity through public science, literature, and objects in the eighteenth century. In this chapter, I address how public scientists, popular writers, and poets employ analogy and creative comparisons to present novel ideas about outer space – planets and stars, vast scales, unseen forces, unimaginable speeds, and a whole plurality of worlds circling the fixed stars – so that these concepts can enter into the cognitive experience of amateur learners, reinforcing social, religious and national values and sometimes even prompting imaginative transports. Lady Chudleigh’s description of the vortices determining planetary orbits refers, of course, to Cartesian doctrine, which by 1710 had already been displaced by Newtonian theories in British natural philosophy.2 The astronomical ideas in ‘Of Knowledge’ were probably the result of encounters with texts such as Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle’s phenomenally successful Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686), which saw numerous editions and translations throughout the eighteenth century (with seven different versions in English by 1803) and which set the standard for later accounts of astronomy aimed at British amateur readers.3 Fontenelle employs a conversational format for his text: a tutor instructs a wealthy Marquise in Copernican-Cartesian astronomy through a series of dialogues complete with garden walks, gallantry, and charming ‘Philosophical Entertainment’.4 A succession of imitative versions produced by public lecturers, astronomers, and instrument-makers recast Fontenelle’s conversations in the Newtonian mould: John Harris’s Astronomical Dialogues between a Gentleman and a Lady (1719), Francesco Algarotti’s Il newtonianismo per le dame (1737; translated by Elizabeth Carter as Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explain’d for the Use of the Ladies in 1739), Benjamin Martin’s The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Philosophy (1759–63), and James Ferguson’s The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Astronomy (1768). Two further dialogues explicitly marketed for children cashed in on the astronomy boom: Andrew Baxter’s Matho: or the Cosmotheoria Puerilis (published in Latin in 1738 with an expanded English edition in 1740) and John Newbery’s The Newtonian System of Philosophy, which was published under the name of its juvenile protagonist Tom Telescope in 1761. These later dialogues describe the orbits of planetary phenomena as ­determined

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Celestial speculations 27

by the Copernican system and subsequent observations of Galileo, Kepler, and others; in addition, they explain the motions, distances, and velocities of planets, moons, and comets according to the Newtonian physics of forces. Whereas Fontenelle’s dialogue and other seventeenth-century astronomical texts speculate about lunar travel and the inhabitants to be found on the moon, later texts depict broader hypotheses about planetary life and make very little reference to flight as the speakers are themselves confined to polite domestic spaces. Finally, these texts advertise the ways in which the ‘Newtonian’ label is applied to a range of ideas not necessarily taken from the physicist’s own work, the most significant of which is the concept of an infinite cosmos peopled by intelligent inhabitants. The first half of the eighteenth century saw an explosion of astronomical verse documenting the physics of space – gravitation, the orbital periods of each planet and the methods for their calculation, and the elliptical orbits of comets – and the experience of celestial observation. In his 1734 poem The Universe, the microscopist Henry Baker refers to the plurality of microcosmic and celestial systems to correct readers’ common-sense perceptions of the phenomenal world and their place within it. Stargazing is framed as an educational event: Come forth, O Man, yon azure Round survey, And view those Lamps which yield eternal Day. Bring forth thy Glasses: clear thy wond’ring Eyes: Millions beyond the former Millions rise: Look farther – Millions more blaze from remoter Skies: And canst thou think, poor Worm! these Orbs of Light, In Size, immense, in Number, infinite, Were made for Thee alone to twinkle to thy Sight?5

Gazing through a telescope, the viewer is stunned by the sight of stars not usually visible to the naked eye. Baker invokes the concept of utility to hint at the existence of a plurality of worlds: the stars cannot simply be decorative amusements for human eyes and must serve some greater purpose akin to earth’s own sun. This sidereal knowledge diminishes the observer’s authority rather than enhancing it, and Baker manipulates the perceptions of a

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Perception and analogy

reader accustomed in this period to surveying a landscape from an elevated prospect view. This example shows how adjustments of perspective permit a cognitive experience of astronomy and outer space whilst maintaining a position that is, as Chudleigh says above, ‘adequate to your Capacities’. A second perspective in didactic astronomy is facilitated through the trope of the imaginative journey through space. A famous example is Thomson’s prediction of Newton’s posthumous celestial journey ‘to mingle with his stars’ in ‘A Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton’.6 In Thomson’s poem, Newton’s already superior knowledge of physical laws is confirmed and extended by travel, but other poets such as John Hughes, David Mallet, and Elizabeth Carter also explore the possibilities of imaginative space flight to communicate to amateur readers the technical details of Newtonian celestial mechanics and the limits of astronomical knowledge. These mental conceptualisations of the sublime universe carry with them an extended narrative that will be repeated throughout the different didactic texts addressed in this chapter: astronomical reading permits one to travel into the vast reaches of outer space and to return not only with an extended understanding, but also with a sense of the limitedness of human grandeur and one’s own polite social role within the cosmic scale. The texts explored in this chapter adopt a range of perspectives that transmit possible experiences of outer space: the stargazing act of looking up (often with the aid of a telescope); the diminishing of planets and stars into the domestic context of familiar conversation and tactile engagement with models such as globes and orreries; and journeys into space that bring the spectator into imaginative contact with the planets. As sight and scale are manipulated in these diverse ways, readers and learners are frequently reminded of human littleness in the face of divine design. Anne Janowitz notes the obstacles that hamper the study and contemplation of astronomy: ‘Witnessing the celestial sublime, the alert eighteenthcentury mind had to process the alien immensity of the universe in accordance with the difficulty of the concepts entailed by the new astronomy. … For the poet of the night sky … who looks up, not out, the task is to totalize something that cannot be encompassed: the infinitude of the universe itself.’7 The writer, too, must process

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Celestial speculations 29

this alien immensity as they communicate the details of a whole planetary system that is visible only as indistinct lights mediated through a telescope: they must conceptualise planetary orbits that seem contrary to the experience of an earth-dwelling viewer, and transmit the idea of an infinite universe when the concept itself is a negative one.8 Mary Baine Campbell and Frédérique Aït-Touati have addressed the use of analogy and imagination to conceptualise Copernican and Cartesian astronomy in seventeenth-century narrative treatises and prose works that describe fictional journeys and direct encounters with outer space to teach and test astronomical hypotheses.9 By later in the century, the lunar travels of William Godwin and Cyrano de Bergerac had been displaced in favour of a range of new analogies and models that make astronomical concepts familiar. From Fontenelle’s famous (and much repeated) physico-theological image of nature as an opera stage, where the backstage machinery that is employed to adjust the scenery is hidden from the audience’s sight,10 to more familiar comparisons with domestic objects and the construction of instruments and living models that replicate planetary systems, eighteenth-century public and poetic astronomy is displayed and communicated through new forms of analogy that display a Lockean theory of knowledge acquisition and use visual and tactile familiarity as the starting point for imaginative mental leaps into space. I begin with an examination of these analogies as they appear in educational dialogues of the period.

Conversation and polite astronomy John Harris’s Astronomical Dialogues is framed as a sequel of sorts to Fontenelle’s Entretiens and its conversations between Lady M. and her tutor take place some seven years after she has read the Cartesian bestseller. Harris’s preface advertises how the ‘Fair Astronomer’ will now be instructed about the ‘true System of the World’ without any references to ‘Chrystalline Heavens’, ‘clumsy Epicycles’, or ‘impossible Vortices’.11 In addition to highlighting the Newtonian context of his work, Harris explains his employment of the dialogue form:

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I wrote it in this diverting Way, in pursuit of a Design … [of] engaging Persons of Birth and Fortune in a warm Application to useful and real Learning: To induce them to detach some of their happy Leisure from being lost by Sports, Play, or worse Avocations, and to dedicate it to the Improvement of their Minds. (pp. iii–iv)

Harris’s description illustrates what Abigail Williams has called ‘the increasing socialization of knowledge’ in the eighteenth century, a process through which natural philosophical ideas were packaged and received as material for polite conversation.12 Harris recognises that, in order to achieve this status, the asocial language of specialised astronomical knowledge – regularly associated with pedantry and solitude – needs to be smoothed out and rendered a ‘diverting’ entertainment.13 The utility of learning itself is not a sufficient selling point because the whole business of public science is bound up with concerns about politeness and propriety. Harris’s preface posits astronomy as the subject of a pleasing and devoted addiction that is socially improving: ‘what glorious Improvements might one expect from Persons of Fortune and Leisure, if they would addict themselves to these Things? Who can bear the expence of Good Instruments for Coelestial Observations’ (p. iv). Stephen Pumfrey’s important article on the status of professional experimenters and science lecturers in the early eighteenth century has highlighted the distinction between leisured gentlemen of independent means who pursued natural philosophy and those of lower status who were paid to use their hands to conduct the necessary labour.14 The popularisation of instruments as toys to be manipulated by the wealthy is one facet of the transformation of natural philosophy for public consumption. Harris’s reference to the purchase of instruments therefore signals his commercial awareness. Before writing the Astronomical Dialogues, he gave lectures in mathematics and natural philosophy at the Marine Coffee House in London, publishing his material as Lexicon Technicum in 1704 and 1710. As Larry Stewart and others have noted, public lecturing on natural philosophy was on the rise, and the sociable spaces of coffee houses were ideal sites.15 Several other authors of popular texts also sold astronomy as a sociable science. Benjamin Martin, who serialised his Young Gentleman and Lady’s

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Celestial speculations 31

Philosophy in his s­cientific periodical The General Magazine of Arts and Sciences between 1759 and 1763, ran a boarding school in the mid-1730s, published a number of textbooks, and worked as an itinerant science ­lecturer on natural philosophical subjects (using portable apparatus) throughout England before setting up as an instrument-maker from the mid-1750s.16 James Ferguson also lectured widely, though as a Fellow of the Royal Society he could ask his pupils to come to him at his own lodgings in London, providing the opportunity for astronomical observations and the demonstration of orreries and globes; he also lectured with his orrery in London coffee houses, gave public lectures in Bristol and Bath in the late 1740s and early 1750s, and journeyed further afield in the 1760s.17 The conversational set-up of each dialogue shows how these commercial spaces of public science are transformed into polite domesticity. Fontenelle, Algarotti, and Harris all employ the same mode of a wealthy lady taught by a tutor; in the dialogues by Benjamin Martin and James Ferguson, a girl is taught by her older university-attending brother;18 Andrew Baxter replicates his own experience as a tutor by presenting a dialogue between eleven-yearold Matho and his tutor Philon; and Newbery presents a group of children with attendant adults taught by the young Tom Telescope. Anticipating later domestic educational books featuring mothers and children by Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Smith, and others, these astronomical dialogues advertise the importance of conversation for learning.19 In the light of Abigail Williams’s work on reading and conversation, the dialogues can be seen to take on the properties of both domestic oratory and sociable reading outside the home in coffee houses, libraries, and gardens.20 It has been suggested, for example, that The Newtonian System of Philosophy was written to be read aloud to children rather than for private study.21 Whilst the other dialogues use conversation as a modernised peripatetic method – often demanding active engagement with the ideas they relate – it is unlikely that they would have been designed for dramatic drawing-room readings. Instead, we can look for cues within the dialogues themselves for the kinds of polite learning spaces and materials that the reader is being encouraged to seek out in their leisure hours. Alice Walter’s comment that ‘the pursuit of polite science was … presented as complementary to the

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Perception and analogy

pursuit of politeness itself’ applies both to the learner within each dialogue and to its readers.22 The astronomical dialogues exploit a wide range of domestic situations for which the reader might find an active counterpart: Harris’s lessons employ a range of globes, telescopes, and other instruments, and night-time observations take place at ‘a Summer-House, placed on a Mount in the Garden, where the Lady had order’d the Celestial Globe to be set out, [and] several Poetical Descriptions of such a Night occurred to our Thoughts, and were recited’.23 The dialogues in Ferguson’s Young Gentleman and Lady’s Astronomy take place indoors with the use of local objects, such as candles and mops, to facilitate demonstration. The young Eudosia and the projected female readers of quality are encouraged in their astronomical studies as ‘a rational way of spending their time at home’ in preference to ‘going abroad to card-tables, balls, and plays’.24 Benjamin Martin’s dialogue exploits the polite setting to full effect: the frontispiece to The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Philosophy depicts a lady and her tutor in a library complete with globe and telescope (see figure 1). Within the text, Euphrosyne and Cleonicus converse as they ‘walk round the Park, or over the Fields and Meadows’;25 a hill affords a prospect view for telescope observations; and the reader is frequently presented with the conspicuous consumption of scientific instruments and literature (Baker’s Universe, Blackmore’s Creation, and Moses Browne’s Essay on the Universe are all quoted at length). The same level of aspirational consumption is also apparent in Newbery’s The Newtonian System of Philosophy, where the ‘Marquis of Setstar’ supplies the children with bountiful entertainment, including a supper of ‘tarts, sweetmeats, syllabubs, and such other dainties’, and grants them access to a fully equipped observatory.26 Authors frequently point learners towards other books that will enable them to expand their astronomical knowledge further. Fontenelle crops up regularly, and Huygens’s Cosmotheoros is mentioned by both Harris and Martin in the context of the plurality of worlds. Whiston’s popular Astronomical Principles of Religion, David Gregory’s Elements of Astronomy, and Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth all appear as further reading in the Astronomical Dialogues. Such references sometimes take the form of self-promotion. For example, in The Young Gentleman and

Celestial speculations 33

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Figure 1  Frontispiece to Benjamin Martin, The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Philosophy, vol. I (London: Owen, 1759).

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Perception and analogy

Lady’s Astronomy, James Ferguson advertises his own Astronomy Explained (first edition 1756): Neander presents his sister Eudosia with a copy (‘I sent for it to Mr. Cadell’s shop, in the Strand, opposite Catharine street, on purpose to make you a present of it.’ (p. 183)), and she uses the book’s apparatus and tables to complete her calculations of lunar cycles, modelling the intended usage by a reader. The tutor in Astronomical Dialogues also advises Lady M. to consult ‘Dr Harris’s Little Book of the Globes’ (p. 40).27 Domestic objects and luxury instruments, rich surroundings, and books are therefore all employed as part of the learning arsenal in these polite promotions of astronomy. At the end of the second dialogue in The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Astronomy, Neander proclaims his plan to document the lessons: ‘I believe I shall publish these our conversations, for the sake of other young ladies; many of whom are, no doubt, willing to learn Astronomy, but have no body to teach them’ (p.  56). Recalling the common practice of recording conversations in personal diaries, Ferguson’s embedded device reveals how politeness fuels a vital relationship between commercial science or print culture and the domestic environment.28 This communication goes both ways, and reading astronomy can also be a way of becoming polite by emulating elite characters, particularly those portrayed by Fontenelle, Algarotti, and Harris.29 Certainly, as the domestic analogies and models employed in the later dialogues by Martin  and Ferguson show, the middling sort is increasingly the target audience. It may also be noted that the implied reader is not necessarily reflected in practice. For example, Paula Findlen has suggested that the dialogues are not for the education of women at all and that ‘the fictional women whose questions initiated and guided these dialogues provided a reason to assume ignorance without impugning the ability of the reader to comprehend new forms of knowledge’.30 Both Newbery’s dialogue and Matho appear to be aimed at children of the same age as their central characters. Adults are, however, present in both dialogues, and, as J.H. Plumb notes, ‘the new children’s literature was designed to attract adults, to project an image of those virtues which parents wished to inculcate in their offspring, as well as to beguile the child’.31 By investigating how analogies demand of their readers active ­ participation and ­ comparisons



Celestial speculations 35

between real life, models, and scientific concepts, we can understand better the significance of polite spaces in a­ stronomical dialogues and the broader possibilities of scientific participation that they offer.

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Making astronomy familiar Many of the dialogues offer advice about how to succeed in one’s astronomical studies. In Harris’s dialogue, teacher and pupil pause for tea and Lady M. states that she will ‘con [her] Lesson in the Book’ before the evening’s activity of stargazing (p. 55). Ferguson’s Eudosia studies between conversations, initially documenting all that she can remember in order to ‘make the most and best of it’, and she is compared to ‘a young lady of quality; who, last year, attended a course of lectures on experimental philosophy at Tunbridge Wells; and always, when she went home, wrote down what she had heard and seen’ (pp. 31–3). By the final dialogues Eudosia not only remembers what she has learned, but also carries out her own calculations. The processes described here show how private study transforms passive knowledge into active application, reflecting Locke’s theory of learning in which repetition facilitates memory.32 Practice becomes increasingly necessary because, as Meyer has noted, the technical detail and level of mathematical skill required increase exponentially in the later dialogues.33 The reader must also learn how to think and perceive like a Newtonian. In a discussion of gravity, Neander corrects Eudosia’s method of questioning: E. I should be glad to know the reason why the sun’s attraction decreases in proportion to the squares of the distances from him. Why do you shake your head? N. Because you ask me a question which Sir Isaac Newton himself could not solve, although he was the prince of philosophers. …  [W]hen I henceforth speak of gravity, I would have you always understand, that I do not thereby mean a Cause, but the effect of a cause, which we do not comprehend. (pp. 61 and 64)

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Neander’s responses demonstrate a Newtonian antipathy to hypothesis-­forming, and the reader is reminded that, where forces are concerned, ‘why’ is not a suitable question. Neander evades his sister’s query by explaining how Newtonian physics explains the effects of forces, not mechanical causes, and that attraction is determined by a body’s mass rather than its surface properties.34 As Newton notes in the ‘General Scholium’ to the Principia, the reasons for such effects can only be assigned to a higher cause. A similar correction of perspective appears in Algarotti’s Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explain’d for the Use of the Ladies, where the Marchioness’s analogy for the Copernican system is criticised: I regard the Sun as Monarch of the immense planetary Realm, in which the primary Planets are the Grandees and Nobles; some of these possess certain Districts where they exercise the same Jurisdiction in little which their Sovereign does in great, but all shew their Dependence by revolving round him alone.35

The Marchioness’s model of planetary ‘Districts’ is deemed too similar to the ‘imaginary Systems’ of Cartesian vortices. The imaginative connections to be made by a learner must, therefore, follow a correct form. Whilst the Copernican system had displaced Ptolemaic notions of the earth’s position at the centre of the solar system some centuries earlier, these texts demonstrate the continued necessity of tempering common-sense perceptions. The Astronomical Dialogues, Matho, and The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Astronomy all adjust the observer’s orientation to facilitate the comprehension of planetary and lunar orbits. As Ferguson notes, ‘Up and down are only relative terms’ (p. 9). In Matho, Baxter paints a deliberately absurd picture to illustrate the same rule: M. [T]ell me, are there any Inhabitants in the Part of the Earth just opposite to us? P.  There either are, or at least may be, Men directly opposite to us. M. They walk then with their Heads hanging downward; in which case what can hinder them from falling down altogether? P.  How would you, Matho, answer that Question, if those Men argued thus concerning you? For they have the very same Reason to be afraid lest you should fall off from the Earth.



Celestial speculations 37

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M. It cannot be that any one should fall upward, or towards Heaven; that would be to be raised on high, not to fall downward.36

Matho is led towards an understanding of orientation and the effects of gravity by considering the positions of those on the other side of the world as analogous to his own experience. A related analogy is the much-used example (derived from Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632)) of a ship in motion – which appears static in comparison to passing landmarks – to demonstrate how the diurnal motion of the earth is imperceptible, causing a viewer to erroneously suspect the stars to be circling overhead.37 Didactic texts routinely set out the duration, distance, and velocity of each planet’s orbit, its size and distance from the sun (calculated to an approximate degree by observing their parallax according to Cassini’s 1672 method),38 and the duration of its diurnal revolution (observed through a telescope by tracking the reappearance of specific spots on the planet). The distances and velocities involved are quite beyond the comprehension of ordinary individuals: Harris notes that Mercury is ‘about 32 Millions of miles’ from the sun with an orbit of eighty-eight days at around 100,000 miles an hour, and Saturn is about 777 million miles from the sun with an orbit of ‘about 30 Years’ at a rate of 18,000 miles per hour.39 Analogies can help readers to gain cognitive experience of this scale. Whilst Anne Janowitz has focused on the effect of the imagination and ‘feeling the meaning of the new astronomy through sublime metaphors’, I pay attention to the opposite scale with analogies that make outer space familiar.40 By far the most common analogies for velocities and distances involve bullets or cannonballs. For example, responding to Eudosia’s claim that she ‘can form no ideas’ of cosmic distances (p. 47), Neander explains them in terms of a cannonball’s motion: Suppose a body, projected from the sun, should continue to fly at the rate of 480 miles every hour (which is much about the swiftness of a cannon-ball) it would reach the orbit of Mercury in 8 years, 276 days; of Venus in 16 years, 136 days; of the earth in 22 years, 226 days; of Mars in 34 years, 165 days; of Jupiter in 117 years, 237 days; and of Saturn in 215 years, 287 days. (p. 48)

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Perception and analogy

Thomas Wright notes that a cannonball’s velocity can be understood as ‘a Rate of 100 Fathom in a Moment, i.e. the Pulse of an Artery’ before introducing his own analogy for planetary scale with a celestial map that uses the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral as the sun and places the planets at proportionally distant landmarks.41 Other familiar analogies describe astronomical phenomena in domestic terms. In The Newtonian System of Philosophy, the ­juvenile tutor responds to Lady Setstar’s request for an explanation of the earth’s diurnal motion as follows: I see the Duke of Galaxy is coming to make your Ladyship a visit. His coach is just entering the iron gates, and will presently wheel round the circle, or rather oval, before the portico. Pray, Madam, fix your eye on one of the wheels, which you may do as it is moon-light, and you will perceive it turn round upon its own axis, at the same time that it runs round the circle before the house. This double motion of the wheel very fitly represents the two motions of the earth. (p. 29)

With this explanatory model in mind readers can conceptualise the motions for themselves by observing the next carriage that appears. A carriage’s reliance on a coachman adds a physico-theological resonance to the description. Both Harris and Ferguson introduce the mundane analogy of a mop to explain the earth’s diurnal motion and its attendant forces. The tutor in the Astronomical Dialogues establishes, by use of the ship analogy, that this diurnal motion can occur at a great velocity without our awareness of it and that this motion applies to earth’s atmosphere as well as its matter. However, he notes, ‘the greatest Wonder in this Case is, that we are not all whirl’d off into the Air, like Dirt from a Wheel, or Drops of Water from a twirling Mop, or Stones parting from a Sling’ (p. 90). A comical poem is supplied to illustrate the effects of the rotating earth’s centripetal force (towards the axis) and centrifugal force (away from the axis): See how Culina with hard adverse Wrists, The dreary Radii of her Mop untwists; Swift twirling round, the oblong Planet rolls, With Axe produc’d thro’ the Meridian Poles, The Stiff’ning Threads their rigid Form preserve, While dirty Drops fly off in Tangents to the Curve. (p. 91)42

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Celestial speculations 39

The use of a common domestic object and familiar verse form enables Harris to present the difficult subject of forces with humour. The mop is described as a planet complete with an axis and a radius. In this example, the centripetal force (holding the ‘dirty Drops’ to the mop head) is weaker than the centrifugal force caused by the twisting action of Culina’s wrists, and this results in the expulsion of water. However, as Harris qualifies, the centrifugal force of earth’s diurnal motion does not cause people (or the sea) to fly off its surface, thanks to a perfect equilibrium of forces: ‘the Centripetal Force, by which Bodies tend thither [i.e. to Earth], is almost 300 times greater, that that by which they are forced off by the Earth’s Motion round its Axis, or the Centrifugal Force’ (p. 92). The use of a familiar, manoeuvrable object is successful: ‘a new World of Knowledge opens and dawns upon me!’ Lady M. exclaims, ‘I begin to see a thousand Things, of which I had no Notion before’ (pp. 92–3). By implying the ease and simplicity of comprehension, Harris encourages his readers to adopt a mode of careful observation when encountering everyday phenomena and to align these empirical observations with newly acquired knowledge about outer space. This active engagement is replicated in Ferguson’s later dialogue, where it is the pupil Eudosia who produces the analogy of the mop to describe the earth’s swollen middle and the flattened sea at its poles due to its diurnal motion around its axis which decreases gravity.43 The mop analogy shows that comparisons need not refer to aspirational objects to be successful.44 The kitchen is a common site for these familiar presentations of astronomical education, as shown by Joseph Addison’s much-quoted sketch of a young lady reading Fontenelle’s dialogue aloud to her working sisters: I was mightily pleased, the other Day to find them all busie in preserving several Fruits of the Season, with the Sparkler in the midst of them, reading over the Plurality of Worlds. It was very entertaining to me to see them dividing their Speculations between Jellies and Stars, and making a sudden Transition from the Sun to an Apricot, or from the Copernican system to the figure of a Cheese-cake.45

This is, of course, a bad case of dismissing women’s learning as spectacle, as Addison predictably descends into a discussion of how

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Perception and analogy

such reading practices will replace time spent gossiping.46 Meyer suggests, however, that it can also be read as ‘an account, figuratively true, of what was happening in many an English home’.47 Given the dialogues’ encouragement of active analogising, this seems a reasonable conjecture. However, the analogies encountered are generally more purposeful than Addison’s spoofing references to sudden transitions between cheesecakes and jellies (neither of which works in practice). Even simple objects must be suited to demonstration, as when candles and oranges are employed to show lunar phases or diurnal motions.48 A final productive analogy, then, is Harris’s use of a roasting spit to represent diurnal rotation and the Copernican system as the product of frugal design: [Y]ou will never believe that the Sun and fixed Stars turn all around us in 24 Hours; when you reflect, that the bare Motion of the Earth round its Axis will answer all your Ends that are to be served by the other. That would be just as absurd, as for a great Architect to contrive, with vast Expence and Machinery, a Kitchen-Grate, that should revolve round a Spit, in order to roast a Wheatear or a Wren; but never so much dream of a Way to turn the Spit round. (p. 96)

This analogy, or rather disanalogy, provides a considerably more successful explanation of the Copernican system than Addison’s facetious reference to puddings. It works on two levels: first by enabling the learner to envision what the diurnal motion of a planet might look like, and then by showing the absurdity and unbalanced geocentricism of the Ptolemaic account. The reference to the ‘great Architect’ ensures that the reader maintains a sense of scale and recognises the limited explanation of effects rather than causes.

Instruments and models As well as drawing analogies with familiar objects, the dialogues encourage participants, and sometimes even readers, to manipulate instruments and models of scaled-down astronomical systems. The use of such objects involves several analogical processes: interpreting them as representations of planets and planetary systems; viewing models such as globes and orreries and connecting them

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Celestial speculations 41

with actual phenomena; and linking with subjective experience by using, constructing, or customising instruments and taking part in living models. As Alice Walters notes, ‘for the polite customer, any scientific instrument was unquestionably a luxury item, and so a mark of politeness. This was true even if that same instrument might, in another’s possession, serve as a professional tool.’49 As instrument sellers, Ferguson and Martin were well positioned to manipulate these associations in a trio of commercial products: demonstration in public lectures, the publication of science books such as dialogues where polite characters employ the instruments, and the sale of instruments with handbooks for trying things out at home. The most obvious astronomical instrument is the telescope, which assists the spectator in perceiving otherwise undetectable planets, comets, and stars. However, the most common apparatus in the dialogues are practical models such as globes and orreries. As we shall see, these models can be understood as analogical learning tools. Harris, Ferguson, Martin, and Baxter all employ celestial and terrestrial globes in their dialogues. Globes are used to demonstrate earth’s diurnal motion and the obliquity of its axis and to calculate latitude, degrees, and scale. They can also be rectified to accurately represent the seasonal and light conditions at a specific latitude.50 By applying a pin or patch to mark one’s location and turning the rectified globe on its axis in candlelight, it is possible to represent the hours of light and darkness in that location. The two globes can also be used together to show the positions of constellations at different times of year. Globes are both practical models and objects of conspicuous consumption: whilst the smallest of the ‘New Globes’ in George Adams’s 1766 catalogue is a twelve-inch-diameter model at £5 5s., an eighteen-inch-diameter globe is listed at £9 9s. and a brass-mounted mahogany version is £26.51 The orrery is employed several times in Martin’s dialogues, and Harris appends a ‘Description’ of the instrument at the end of his volume. The first orrery, featuring only the earth and the moon, was made by John Rowley in or by 1713; a second model produced in 1715 incorporated Mercury and Venus. This was a luxury item, and the 1715 Rowley model that the tutor presents to Lady M. in Astronomical Dialogues appears at first glance to be more a piece

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of decorative furniture, designed to occupy polite space, than an informative device:52

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The Frame is of fine Ebony richly adorned with twelve silver Pilasters, in the form of Cariatides; and with all the Signs of the Zodiack, cast of the same Metal, and placed between them; the Handles were also of Silver finely wrought, with the Joints as nice as ever were seen in the Hinges of any Snuff-Box. (pp. 159–60)

This frame supports a model of the solar system: at the centre is a ‘large gilded Ball’, set at an angle of ‘about 82 Degrees’, representing the sun (p. 161); earth appears in a metal ring describing the zodiac, with a smaller sphere showing the moon’s orbit; and two more rotating balls represent Mercury and Venus. The elaborateness of this scheme, the bathetic comparison to a snuff box, and the fact that the model neither measures phenomena nor produces new knowledge validate Davis Baird’s modern description of orreries as toys to catch the eye rather than serious philosophical instruments.53 However, the orrery is not merely ornamental, for it demands both mental and tactile engagement. Harris describes how it can be set to a particular date and the orbits of the planets can be watched in agonisingly slow real time as ‘a true Celestial or Astronomical Clock, which would shew the Aspects, Eclipses, and other Phaenomena of the Sun and Planets, for ever’ (p. 167); facilitated by a hand-winch, planetary orbits, and revolutions can also be repeated or accelerated. Orreries’ and globes’ promotion of tactility highlights the importance in Locke’s educational theory of connecting mental operations with material objects. This relationship has been the subject of studies on children’s books of the period (including Newbery’s dialogue) by Gillian Brown, Melanie Keene, and others.54 In his recommendation of tactile, playful learning, which begins with dice embossed with letters for reading and ascends to globes for introducing astronomy, Locke promotes curiosity and inquisitiveness whilst underlining the necessity of sensory experience in encountering new ideas.55 Besides engaging the hands, models of earth and the solar system also provide new cognitive experiences by shifting the viewer’s perspective. To view a terrestrial globe properly, for example, you have to picture yourself standing upon one part of it



Celestial speculations 43

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(Adams suggests that the reader should imagine a sun painted upon the ceiling directly overhead).56 Even when rectified, an armillary sphere or celestial globe cannot merely be considered objectively, and viewers must imaginatively transport themselves to its centre: [Y]ou must now imagine your Eye placed within at the Center of the Globe, or on the little Ball there in the Figure which represents the Earth; and that the Spherical Surface of it, on which you see the Stars there painted and gilded were transparent like Glass; so that you could actually see thro’ it, not only all the Circles drawn upon it, but also all the Stars above in the Heavens, as they really appear there in a bright Night.57

Like the framing of concepts of ‘up’ and ‘down’ addressed earlier, the reorientation that is required here demonstrates how the full understanding of the globe as a model involves somatic engagement. When, in the 29 October 1713 issue of The Englishman, Richard Steele describes his own encounter with an orrery as akin to the acquisition of ‘a new Sense’, he recognises a model that can facilitate the imaginative conceptualisation of planetary phenomena.58 This use is reflected in the didactic texts. In Astronomical Dialogues, Lady M. observes the motions of the planets around the orrery as her tutor turns the handle. From her point of elevated spectatorship over the model she is able to connect imaginative with actual experience: ‘I fancy myself travelling along with that little Earth in its course round the gilded Sun’, she exclaims, ‘as I know I am in reality that on which I stand, round the real one’ (p. 170). In order to achieve this full cognitive experience, the viewer needs to know what to look at: both scale and machinery need to be interpreted correctly, and the analogy with physical phenomena needs to be clear. In the case of the former, the proportional distances of Jupiter and Saturn need to be reduced significantly, and the earth and moon are often magnified. A lot of mechanical noise must also be ignored to focus on the orbiting planets, rather than the gears that drive them. As Baird notes, this kind of viewing shows how Newton’s laws of celestial mechanics and the overarching physico-theological explanation of a prime mover became current: These models were ‘read’ metaphorically. No one expected to find brass gears in the heavens. But the idea that the motions of the

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heavenly bodies were brought about by some kind of mechanical actions, as were the motions in orreries, became current. People did not expect to find cosmic brass gears, but they did expect there to be a mechanical explanation for the motions of the heavenly bodies.59

In order to conceptualise the earth’s journey around the sun, Lady M. must focus on the motions of that sphere, even as the gears and arms of the mechanism are visible as a non-literal reminder of constant forces and laws of motion. Harris’s dialogue continues with a tactile example to show the sun’s diurnal motion: You see, Madam, said I, that one entire turn of the Handle is, as I said before, a Natural Day: Now, if you please to take off one of the broadest of your Patches, and make it a Spot upon the Golden Sun there, you shall see that your Patch will move quite round in 25 Days, or 25 turns of this Handle; and that will shew you how by the Motion of the Spots in the real Sun the Astronomers discover’d he had such a Motion round his Axis, as you shall see Mr. Rowley hath given here to his Representative. Well, said she, since even my Patches must become Astronomical, I will stick one upon this Fictitious Sun; but I must own I don’t love those Spots upon the Natural one; nor to have any of his Face hid, or his Heat impaired: But shew me to what part of the Sun this Patch is to be preferred. (p. 170).

This form of tactile engagement is not completely unique: Ferguson’s 1746 guide to his ‘New Orrery’ describes how the earth sphere on his model is equipped with ‘four Pin-holes, one in the Equator, one in each Tropic, and one in the Parallel of London’, into which can be placed pins ‘to represent so many Inhabitants, each standing with his feet toward the Center of the Earth’. When the sun sphere is removed from the model and replaced with a wax candle, the pins’ shadows represent shadows cast by people on earth at different times of day.60 In his 1738 guide to his ‘Grand Orrery’, William Deane also suggests affixing ‘a little black Patch’ on every planet to observe the comparative speeds of their diurnal rotations.61 The significance of Harris’s version in Astronomical Dialogues is that the personal and the polite are combined in the cosmetic image: in later examples the patch becomes part of the objective system,

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Celestial speculations 45

but Harris’s maintenance of the possessive pronoun (‘your Patch’) allows for subjectively personal conceptualisation. In his Englishman essay, Richard Steele recommends the orrery as a tool for ‘all Persons’ to ‘come into the Interests of Knowledge’, and he suggests that this ‘should incite any numerous Family of Distinction to have an Orrery as necessarily as they would have a Clock’.62 However, a reader’s closest encounter with an orrery could well have been through the demonstrations of a public lecturer such as Martin or Ferguson. Consciousness of the remarkable expense of some of these instruments is reflected in the dialogues, where diagrams play twin roles of illustrating the planetary motions geometrically and of supplementing the imaginations of those whose drawing rooms are less well equipped. Martin in The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Philosophy supplies a diagram of the orrery ‘to assist the Understanding and Memory’, noting that ‘such a Print may supply the Want of an Orrery, or other Instrument for this Purpose’ (I, 244n).63 He also provides a tactile opportunity for his readers with a cut-out-and-build ‘Geocentric Planetarium’ (see figures 2 and 3). Included to facilitate ‘practical Astronomy’, this model replicates the one that Cleonicus introduces to his sister: ‘You may in a Minute or two, represent to your Self the true Appearance of the planetary System, just as it really is, in the Heavens for any Day you please; by assigning to every Planet its proper Place in its Orbit’ (I, 88–9). The eighth plate of the book supplies the following elements: first, a multi-circle dial akin to a clock face describing the orbits of Mercury, Venus, earth, and Mars, which are to be cut out and affixed to paste-board; second, a set of labelled hands with a circle (half black and half white) for each planet, which are to be cut out and attached with string to the centre of the dial so that each planet moves along its circle of orbit; third, a second dial with measurements for earth’s elliptic to be affixed by another thread through the centre of the circle representing earth. Further arrangements must be made to include the other planets: To fit this Instrument for Jupiter and Saturn, it must be stuck on to the Side of a Room, or on a large round Table; you must then lay a Thread over the Center of the Sun, and Jupiter’s Place in the Elliptic about the Sun, and at 12½ Inches from the Center, stick a Patch, and

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Figure 2  Model planetarium. Benjamin Martin, The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Philosophy, 2 vols (London: Owen, 1759–63), vol. I, plate VIII. it will be the true Place of Jupiter. For Saturn you do the same, but for him you must place the Patch at the Distance of 23¼ Inches. (I, 90n)

The process of assembly enables the reader to extend their passive reception of knowledge about planetary orbits and distances into an active and tactile experience.64

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Figure 3  Model planetarium. Benjamin Martin, The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Philosophy, 2 vols (London: Owen, 1759–63), vol. I, appendage to plate VIII.

Although Martin frames this activity in Lockean terms of the ‘Pleasure’ and ‘Delight’ of learning (I, 85), he also demands of his reader concentration, accuracy in measurement, and manual dexterity. The constructed model can be used to view the ‘True or Heliocentric’ positions of the planets, as well as their geocentric

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positions as viewed from the earth (I, 89). The paper planetarium can also be rectified to show planetary positions at a specified date by adjusting the hands to the relevant degrees with the aid of a heliocentric table; threads can be suspended between each planet and earth in order to show how each one ‘appears to us at any Time’ (I, 90). This displays another form of reading through making analogies between abstract numbers and a concrete model. The overall effect, we are told, is entertainment: ‘It is much easier than I thought it was’, Euphrosyne exclaims, ‘and will often be the subject of my leisure Hours Amusement’ (I, 92).65 A second example of embodied learning occurs in Ferguson’s Young Gentleman and Lady’s Astronomy. Ferguson employs several practical demonstrations, but the most productive one is his  construction of a living planetarium. The room is set up by closing the shutters and lighting a candle at the far end, and Eudosia is positioned some distance away. The process is described so that the reader can replicate it: N. Here is a small ivory globe, with a wire through it, by way of an axis. I will now move that globe round your head: and as I carry it about, do you turn yourself round, and keep looking at it. Let the candle represent the Sun, your head the Earth, and the globe the  Moon. As the candle can enlighten only that half of the globe which is turned toward it, so the Sun can only enlighten that half of the Moon which is at any time turned toward him. The other half is in the dark, and the Moon goes round the Earth in her orbit once a month. As I carry the globe round your head, the dark side of it is toward you when it is between your head and the candle; the light side when it is carried half round, or opposite to the candle with respect to your head, and in the middle between these two positions you have half the light and half the dark side toward you. (pp. 145–6)

As she turns around, Eudosia performs several practical and observatory functions: first, she replicates the diurnal motion of the earth; second, her head casts a shadow on the moon-globe at different points in the latter’s orbit to demonstrate how the different lunar phases are caused by reflection of the sun’s light variously modified; third, she observes and narrates the lunar cycle from firsthand experience. By bringing together motion, embodied learning,



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and narration, Ferguson demonstrates a replicable living model that is analogous to the solar system. This model, which Neander concedes is ‘more like the works of nature than any figures we can draw on paper’ (p. 150), is followed by a diagram and more detailed examples of the timing of the lunar cycle.

An infinite cosmos The cognitive experiences afforded by instruments and models, both in these dialogues and transposed into drawing rooms and sociable spaces, are only approximate. Neander concedes that the living planetarium is imperfect because the moon is rarely fully eclipsed by the earth as their orbits are not parallel; Martin’s geometric planetarium depicts circular, not elliptical, orbits; and even interpretations of the globe and orrery demand significant mental leaps  to read the systems according to Newtonian forces. More generally, the transposition of celestial knowledge into the home diminishes the immensity of the system. Whilst this last adjustment might be appropriate for understanding individual orbits, forces, or principles, extrapolation out from model and laws to the entire universe requires a different approach.66 The rest of this chapter therefore examines how the analogical techniques of imaginative and speculative astronomy can widen readers’ cognitive access to space. The concept of a plurality of worlds was not new to Newtonian astronomy – Fontenelle’s Entretiens were of course based on the Cartesian concept of plural, identical worlds – but, as Stephen J. Dick has noted, the concept of infinite variety was a novel one.67 Whereas understanding Cartesian plurality necessitates imaginative replication within a universe that is filled with matter, Newton’s New System demands a different kind of experiential engagement with space and forces.68 In his first letter to Richard Bentley (1692), Newton confirms that an ordered, finite universe would not obey the orbital patterns of the Copernican system: It seems to me that if the Matter of our Sun and Planets, and all the Matter of the Universe, were evenly scattered throughout all  the Heavens, and every Particle had an innate Gravity towards all

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the  rest, and the whole Space, throughout which this Matter was scattered, was but finite, the Matter on the outside of this Space would by its Gravity tend towards all the Matter on the inside, and by consequence fall down into the middle of the whole Space, and there compose one great spherical Mass. But if the Matter was evenly disposed throughout an infinite Space, it could never convene into one Mass, but some of it would convene into one Mass and some into another, so as to make an infinite Number of great Masses, scattered at great Distances from one to another throughout all that infinite Space. And thus might the Sun and fixt Stars be formed, supposing the Matter were of an infinite Nature.69

Newton’s concept of an infinite universe transposes demonstrable experimental philosophy to celestial sites: he describes mutual gravitation on earth, where (as his editor Roger Cotes explains in his preface to the Principia) ‘just as all bodies universally gravitate toward the earth, so the earth in turn gravitates equally toward the bodies’,70 to gravitation in the heavens, where curvilinear orbits are maintained by mutual attraction between each planet and the sun. The idea of a potentially collapsing world that can be kept in balance only by the proportional masses and distances between stars and planets suggests for Newton a divinely organised equilibrium: ‘so that the systems of the fixed stars will not fall upon one another as a result of their gravity, he has placed them at immense distances from one another’.71 Patricia Fara has noted, however, that Newton’s references to an infinite universe in the Opticks and the ‘General Scholium’ are proposed in conditional terms rather than explicit endorsements.72 The version of cosmic pluralism that is incorporated into Newtonian astronomy by William Derham and James Ferguson, and philosophical poets such as David Mallet and John Hughes, is more concrete. This received version of infinite worlds also involves new attention to extra-solar systems and, by 1728, David Mallet’s description of stars as suns is typical: ‘each the Central Fire / Of his surrounding Worlds, whose whirling Speed, / Solemn and silent, thro’ pathless Void; / Nor Change, nor Error knows.’73 This description demonstrates the shift from inductive reasoning between model and system to a new kind of speculative astronomy based on analogy.



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This newly infinite, various, and plural universe is conceptualised and communicated through analogies that express common philosophical and theological values. The governing scientific principle of such descriptions is equilibrium, and neither the earth nor the sun is privileged as the centre of the system. The following description from Astronomy Explained is representative of this perspective: As we have incomparably more light from the Moon than from all the Stars together, it is the greatest absurdity to imagine that the Stars were made for no other purpose than to cast a faint light upon the Earth: especially since many more require the assistance of a good telescope to find them out, than are visible without that instrument. Our Sun is surrounded by a system of Planets and Comets; all which would be invisible from the nearest fixed Star. And from what we already know of the immense distance of the Stars, the nearest may be computed at 32,000,000,000,000 of miles from us, which is further than a cannon-bullet would fly in 7,000,000 of years. Hence ’tis easy to prove, that the Sun seen from such a distance, would appear no bigger than a Star of the first magnitude. For all this it is highly probable that each Star is a Sun to a system of worlds moving round it, though unseen by us; especially, as the doctrine of the plurality of worlds is rational, and greatly manifests the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of the Great Creator.74

Ferguson presents a radical view of space: the observation of our solar system from ‘the nearest fixed Star’ would show the sun to be one of many seemingly identical lights with no planets discernible from such a great distance. Given that God makes nothing in excess, Ferguson reasons, other stars may have their own planetary systems. The unorthodox astronomer Thomas Wright also employs the mode of sidereal perspective with a thought experiment: he imagines ‘a new-created Mind, or thinking Being, in a profound State of Ignorance, with regard to the Nature of all external Objects’ and places him ‘exactly in the midway, betwixt Syrius and the Sun’:75 Now should such a Being, determined either by Accident or Choice, arrive at this our System of the Sun, and seeing all the planetary Bodies moving round him, I would ask you what you think he would imagine to be round Syrius? Your Answer, I think I may venture to say, would not be nothing; and methinks I already hear you say, Why Planets such as ours. (p. 34)

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The theory of a plurality of worlds is therefore shown to be a common-sense deduction based on the visible features of the system and analogies between them. A question of purpose lingers in the background of both Ferguson’s and Wright’s explanations of infinite space: if the sun is so important to earth, then why would other suns be merely decorative? This rhetorical question appears frequently in astronomical poetry. The Beauties of the Universe (1732), attributed to Richard Gambol, is a typical example: Can we believe the Moon was made so bright, The Stars to twinkle with that brilliant Light, Only to gratify our wanton Sight? Are they not rather Worlds, well stor’d as this, In which too many vainly place their Bliss? The fixt Stars Suns, on which their Planets wait, And wheel in order, as they gravitate, While their Satellites in attendance dance, Moving to them, as they to those advance?76

Gambol combines the depiction of ordered gravitational orbits with the claim that all productions of ‘unerring Wisdom’s Hand’ (p. 5) must have a purpose. The deflating correctives to wantonness and vanity highlight further the ways in which purpose and plurality can have theological heft: God’s creations are to the glory of God, not of humans. Baker’s Universe (subtitled A Poem Intended to Restrain the Pride of Man) similarly harnesses the image of ‘Worlds, to Thee unknown’ (p. 11) to present plurality as a reasonable and necessary explanation of each star’s purpose. The theological principle of plenitude that underpins much seventeenth-century astronomy becomes important for these later explorations of cosmic pluralism because it allows for a celebration of the infinite variety of God’s universe in spite of the apparent diminution of earth’s significance.77 For example, in Astro-Theology (1715) Derham argues for an analogical connection between astronomical knowledge and knowledge of God based on the principle of design: When we see such prodigious Numbers of those Heavenly Bodies, which no art of man can number; and when we farther consider,



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that in all probability, we do not see the half, nay perchance not the thousandth Part of what the Heavens do contain; as we cannot but be struck with Amazement at such a multitude of GOD’s glorious Works, so we cannot, we are worse than Men if we do not, own the great CREATOR, and give him his due praises.78

Stargazing, for Derham, elevates the system and puts the human observer in their place. Writing some three decades later in An Essay on Man, Alexander Pope acknowledges man’s position at the middle of the chain of being – ‘His knowledge measur’d to his state and place, / His time a moment, and a point his space’79 – in a c­hiasmic description that both diminishes the individual’s significance and celebrates the cosmic space apportioned to him.80 Pope’s astronomical knowledge, gained through study with William Whiston, leads him to mock the person who sees themself within a closed system ruled by a short-sighted God:81 Ask for what end the heav’nly bodies shine, Earth for whose use? Pride answers, ‘’Tis for mine: … ‘Seas roll to waft me, suns to light me rise; ‘My foot-stool earth, my canopy the skies.’ (Epistle I, lines 131–2 and 139–40)

Rather than diminishing God’s significance, Pope’s presentation of hubris in the face of a purposefully plural universe provides a corrective reminder of the limits to the individual’s view of divine plenitude. The plenitude argument goes only some way towards aligning the plural system with Christian orthodoxy, and, as Fara notes, ‘it was hard to reconcile the existence of multiple inhabited worlds within the Christian belief that God had singled out the human race for special attention’.82 In Astro-Theology, Derham makes a case for the privileging of earth’s position – if not its status – by ­addressing its ideal conditions of light, heat, and atmosphere as a divine indulgence: Our World is well fitted for habitation, well provided with every thing that may minister to the support, the comfort and pleasure of its Inhabitants. By those indulgent Rays all things are enlightened, and we and all the rest of the Animal Kingdom are enabled to ­dispatch

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our business, to seek and provide our Food, and to pass from place to place, as our occasions or pleasure lead us. By its cherishing Beams all things are warmed and comforted, Vapours in some measure made to rise for the forming of Clouds and Rain; Trees and Plants are enabled thereby to put on their verdure and gaiety, and to yield us the benefit and pleasure of their Grain and Fruit. (pp. 158–9)

Derham is describing what is now recognised as earth’s location in the temperate ‘Goldilocks zone’. This ideal location permits plant and animal life and therefore enables theologians to maintain a narrative of divine providence even as they posit the possibility of other analogous worlds. Richard Blackmore anticipates Derham’s description by some two years in an anti-Epicurean argument positing earth’s location as the product of design rather than ­ chance:83 See, how th’ Indulgent Father of the Day At such due Distance does his Beams display, That he his Heat may give to Sea and Land, In just degrees, as all their Wants demand. But had he in th’ unmeasurable Space Of Aether, chosen a remoter Place; For Instance, pleas’d with that Superior Seat Where Saturn, or where Jove their Course repeat: Or had he happen’d farther yet to lye, In the more distant Quarters of the Sky, How sad, how wild, how exquisite a Scene Of Desolation, had his Planet been?84

Blackmore displays the variety of the ordered system as an argument for the chosen status of earth, which a Cartesian universe of identical planets would not permit. Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742–46) uncovers a final tension in theological conceptions of the plurality of worlds. Throughout the ninth Night, the narrator vacillates between celebrating the immensity of the universe – ‘Speaks He the Word? a Thousand Worlds are born!’85 – and a desire to maintain humans’ privileged status at the centre of the system. Young is careful to show the necessity of tempering the overly active perception (which ‘dwarfs the Whole, / And makes an Universe an Orrery’ (Night IX,



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lines 788–9)), favouring instead a passive reception of astronomical revelation:

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All Things speak a GOD; but, in the Small, Men trace out Him; in Great, He seizes Man; Seizes, and elevates, and raps, and fills With new Inquiries, ’mid Associates new. (Night IX, lines 774–7)

In this immense scale of a plural world, humans are ‘seized’ or chosen by the divine even as they learn of their own insignificance. This contradictory stance shows a kind of elastic perception that is typical of many attempts to grapple with a system that can only be known through conjecture and analogy.

Flights of imagination The sixth dialogue of Algarotti’s Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explain’d for the Use of the Ladies marks a shift from the fully observable phenomena of optics to astronomy. The dialogue opens with a reference to an imaginative journey: The next Morning the Marchioness no less impatient for Attraction than she had been for all the rest, after a few short Compliments, began, It is now Time to mount our Hippogryph, and give him the Reins. He will not grow weary, answered I, for a little Journey, if I can remember certain horrible Numbers. (II, 148)

This passage employs the familiar tropes of gallantry – punning on the double meaning of ‘Attraction’ – and politeness, where details about the distance of each planet from the sun are excused as ‘horrible Numbers’. The reference to a journey promises to bring the immense scales and distances within the scope of the mind’s eye. The examples that I explore in this final section use the possibilities of imaginative journeying to communicate a more immediate ­cognitive experience of outer space. It is significant that the Marchioness proposes a mythical beast for her imaginary voyage. The hippogriff, the offspring of a griffin and a mare, originates in Virgil’s Eclogues as an image for something ludicrously unimaginable.86 Indeed, whilst

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s­eventeenth-century accounts of outer space are often concerned with how to get there – Gonsales’s wild swans in The Man in the Moone or Cyrano de Bergerac’s bottles of dew – serious considerations of the technology of flight had waned by our period.87 Lunar voyages are generally employed only for satirical purposes, and flight is the subject of mockery in texts such as Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), in which a hubristic artist constructs wings and makes a disastrous attempt to fly.88 David Russen’s Iter Lunare: or, a Voyage to the Moon (1703) seems to evaluate seriously the earlier possibilities for space travel in the context of Newtonian attraction. The author dismisses the possibility of using mechanical wings because, unlike birds’ wings, they cannot be ‘knit, in with [the] very Bones, Nerves, and other Organs of Motion’.89 He suggests that any kind of flying ‘Chariot’ will be made out of heavy material and therefore likely to fail because of the imbalance of forces without some new source of perpetual motion (pp. 42–4). Finally, Russen suggests the implementation of a giant spring whose force can counteract gravity: Could a Spring of well-tempered Steel be framed, whose Basis being fastned to the Earth, and on the other end placed a Frame or Seat, wherein a Man, with other necessaries, could abide with safety, this Spring being with Cords, Pullies, or other Engins [sic] bent, and then let loose by degrees by those who manage the Pullies, the other end would reach the Moon, where the Person who ascended landing, might continue there, and according to a time appointed, might again enter into his Seat, and with Pullies the Engine may again be bent, till the end touching the Earth, should discharge the Passenger again in safety. (pp. 44–5)

Paul K. Alkon is certainly right to identify Russen’s spring hypothesis as a joke rather than a serious suggestion, but this example also shows how Newtonian physics makes space flight less imaginable than before.90 Poetic descriptions of imaginary cosmic journeys bypass these problems whilst also capitalising on the Lockean promotion of the imagination as a tool for amusement and knowledge consolidation.91 As Akenside celebrates it in The Pleasures of Imagination, imagination permits man to have ‘thoughts beyond the limit of his frame’

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and a view of the ‘boundless theatre’ of creation.92 Imaginative space travel appears in several poems of the period that fuse natural philosophy with physico-theological ­instruction.93 David Mallet’s The Excursion (1728) and John Hughes’s The Ecstasy (1720) both begin with an enhanced prospect view facilitated by terrestrial flight before their narrators ascend further into space. As its advertisement indicates, Hughes’s poem is partly an imitation of Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski’s neo-Latin ode E rebus humanis excessus, in which the original references to classical mythology are replaced with contemporary astronomical detail.94 The terrestrial flight in The Ecstasy affords views of terrestrial discord and imperfection before the order of the heavens is revealed. The opening to Mallet’s Excursion demonstrates more clearly how these differing aerial perspectives are possible: Fancy, with me range Earth’s extended Space, Surveying Nature’s Works: and thence aloft, Spread to superior Worlds thy bolder Wing, Unweary’d in thy Flight. (p. 10)

One of the key shifts in perspective facilitated by Mallet’s celestial journey is earth’s decentring. Each planet is considered in order from ‘Mercury the first, / Near-bordering on the Day, with speedy Wheel’ (pp. 54–5) to Saturn: This chill Globe forlorn: An endless Desart; where Extreme of Cold Eternal sits, as in his native Seat, Shivering on Hills of never-thawing Ice! (p. 58)

The journey motif, outlining the sequence of planets and their velocities as well as the active ‘shivering’ of Saturn, helps Mallet to evoke a sense of physical presence. The reader is encouraged to connect their cognitive knowledge of Copernican astronomy to a somatic experience mediated through the imagination. As we know, analogy-making can communicate phenomena that are cognitively known but not experienced. The most common feature of analogising in eighteenth-century texts that imagine other planets is conjecture about their likely inhabitants. As Stephen J. Dick has noted, ‘the assertion of extraterrestrial intelligent life involved a

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more specific determination of the nature of the planets than the gross similarity implied by the Copernican theory’.95 Christiaan Huygens’s use in Cosmotheoros (1698) of a chain of reasoning or analogies to establish an essentially anthropocentric version of ‘planetarians’ – who need eyes to observe the stars, who would therefore study astronomy (especially on Jupiter and Saturn, given the number of moons and celestial phenomena to be observed) and develop instruments to that purpose, for which activity they would require hands – has been studied in depth.96 Later texts develop a more measured version of this approach by considering adaptation as the basis for different kinds of extraterrestrial life. Descriptions of extraterrestrial life are routinely geocentric. They are formulated according to how humans and other earth-dwelling creatures would need to adapt to the temperature and light conditions of other planets. A memorable example occurs in Ferguson’s detailed consideration of eyesight: Now, supposing all the other planets to be inhabited by such beings as we are (though, for reasons I shall mention afterwards, we cannot believe they are), if the pupils of their eyes who live on the planet Mercury are seven times as small as ours are, the light will appear no stronger to them than it doth to us here. And if the pupils of their eyes who live on Saturn are ninety times as large as ours (which they will be, if they are nine times and a half as large in diameter as ours; and which will appear to be no deformity where all are alike, and other sorts have never been seen) the light there will be of the same strength as it is to our eyes here.97

The concession that the analogy model may be imperfect does not halt the suggestion of variously adapted eyes. Though cartoonish, the description is not fantastic: it is based on the calculation of the light levels on different planets according to their distance from the sun and, secondarily, on an awareness of the ocular aperture necessary to allow light to reflect on the retina producing seen images. Lest this sound improbable, Ferguson reminds his reader that the idea of ‘deformity’ is only relative to a perceived norm. In The Universe, Baker describes conditions on each planet. He suggests that Mercury and its inhabitants must be ‘refin’d and pure’ because ‘Bodies like ours such Ardour can’t endure’ and earth’s



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rocks would ‘melt away’ at such proximity to the sun (p. 16). Considering Saturn, with its thirty-year orbit at a distance of 777 million miles from the sun, Baker notes how time and temperature will cause everything to run slowly: Who, there, inhabit, must have other Pow’rs, Juices, and Veins, and Sense, and Life than Ours. One Moment’s Cold, like their’s would pierce the Bone, Freeze the Heart-Blood, and turn Us all to Stone. (p. 18)

Baker assumes that each planet is inhabited by those ‘with Constitutions fitted for that Spot’ (p. 19), and this results in frequent comparisons to readers’ somatic experience on earth. Martin’s dialogue, which quotes the lines above to illustrate the fact that Saturn is ‘9½ times farther than the Earth; and therefore the Light and Heat will be 90 times less than it is with us’, similarly considers the physical properties of its inhabitants (p. 79).98 This functions as a mnemonic device: Jovians, Euphrosia earlier supposes, are ‘doomed to a very cold and gloomy State’ (p. 72), and the humorous horror of this depiction might well help the student to remember Jupiter’s distance of 424 million miles from the sun. First published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in June 1738 under the pseudonym ‘Eliza’, Elizabeth Carter’s untitled poem ‘While clear the night, and ev’ry thought serene’ is a third example of this genre; it uses evening contemplation as the starting point for an imaginative ascent into space.99 As a former pupil of the astronomer Thomas Wright and the translator of Algarotti’s Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy, Carter was well equipped to describe ‘the radiant Wonders of the Skies’ (line 4). The quotation from Virgil’s  Georgics, ‘Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas’,100 that serves as the epigraph to the 1738 version helps to authorise Carter’s attempt by signalling her classical knowledge (her later works demonstrate a remarkable ability in Greek and Latin translation), condoning exploration of causes, and suggesting a politely literary approach. This poem provides a strong corrective to the materialist argument of ‘atheists [who] boast th’ atomic dance / And call yon beauteous worlds the work of chance’ (lines 27–8) in favour of a physico-theological presentation of the ‘central and projectile force[s]’ which prevent planetary confusion.101

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The imaginative journey of a mind ‘wing’d by active contemplation’ (line 3) enables Carter to depict planetary life. In a passage removed from the 1762 version that bears a full indication of authorship, Carter imagines a Saturnian’s perspective:102 And yet, perhaps, while we our station prize Blest with the warmth of mere indulgent skies, Some cold Saturnian, when the lifted tube Shows to his wond’ring eyes our pensile globe, Pities our thirsty soil and sultry air, And thanks the friendly pow’r that fix’d him there. (lines 21–6)

This affective depiction of the ‘cold’ and ‘wond’ring’ Saturnian evokes pity as quickly as it corrects it. This has the effect both of decentring the terrestrial perspective and guarding against hubristic superiority, and of bringing to life the physical environment of the distant planet, which is understood in contrast to earth’s ‘sultry’ extremes. Harris’s Astronomical Dialogues addresses a different form of adaptation through a familiar domestic analogy. The tutor describes the sun’s heat on Mercury as approximately seven times greater than on earth (‘enough to make Water to boil’). This observation leads to the following exchange: You will easily see therefore that his Inhabitants cannot be such as we are; for our Bodies could by no means bear such a Degree of Heat. Our Ancestors Bodies, said she, I believe could not: but by our drinking so much scalding Tea and Coffee as we now do, I should think we are preparing ourselves to go and live there: And I suppose our famous Fire-Eater came from thence. (p. 112)

Whilst the reference to fashionable hot drinks is memorable, it does not help the learner to conceive of Mercury as anything other than a trifling amusement for human observers, and the decentred perspective that analogy can afford is not achieved. Instead, Lady M. falls into the dangerous mistake (identified in Baxter’s Matho) of ‘measuring Conveniencies according to our own Constitution on this Globe’.103 Harris’s pointed reference to products of imperial consumption also bears comment. Lady M.’s confident assumption about tea- and coffee- drinking Britons exemplifies how the

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Mercurians become subject to her colonial gaze. As Aileen Douglas says of the speakers in such dialogues: ‘They may express sympathy for the plight of the non-European Other, but they cannot conceive of their respective relationships in terms other than those of center and margin, source and dependent, colonizer and colonized.’104 The slippage in Harris’s text between proximity to the sun and skin colour also facilitates this othering. These issues point to the ways in which the inward-looking analogies of astronomical knowledge can be easily transferred from knowledge to domination by extending the links between astronomy, practical navigation, and trade.105 The imaginary traveller can offer a more modest perspective. In The Excursion, Mallet’s narrator glances back to see the earth taking on lunar properties: ‘Gleaming a borrow’d Light, from hence how small / The Speck of Earth!’ (p. 51). The most significant point of this celestial voyage is the moment when earth disappears from sight altogether. Whilst it is frequently acknowledged that earth will not be visible from Saturn or Jupiter, this commentary chiefly appears at the point at which the celestial traveller quits the solar system completely. ‘Where is now / The Seat of Mankind, Earth!’, the narrator exclaims (p. 63) before declaring the whole solar system ‘almost lost to Thought’: The Sun himself, Ocean of Flame, but twinkles from afar, A glimmering Star amid the Train of Night! While in these deep Abysses of the Sky, Spaces incomprehensible, new Suns, Crown’d with unborrow’d Beams, illustrious shine. (pp. 63–4)

This passage demonstrates the imagination’s limited capacity to frame an experience of extra-solar space. The landscape is typified by negatives – a kind of inverse analogy – and Mallet describes a boundless prospect of infinite stars. In contrast, Hughes’s poem takes imagines space beyond the Milky Way as a starless workshop, where the ‘Almighty Builder … /Laid up his Stores for many a Sphere / In destin’d Worlds, as yet unknown.’106 This image recalls, of course, Milton’s characterisation of Chaos as filled with ‘[A]ll the unaccomplished works of nature’s hand’ in Paradise Lost, and it exemplifies a common trend in post-Newtonian astronomical

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verse.107 In 1744 Akenside imagines the site of ‘empyreal waste’ beyond the Milky Way, ‘where happy spirits hold, / Beyond this concave heav’n their calm abode’, drawing on the concept of light’s speed (and perhaps a decentred earth) to emphasise the distance divine ‘radiance’ that, though it has ‘travell’d the profound six thousand years’, has yet to reach the ‘sight of mortal things’.108 In ‘A Summer Evening’s Meditation’ (1773), which takes an approach similar to Carter’s, Anna Laetitia Barbauld also imagines ‘the desarts of creation, wide and wild’ populated with an infinite supply of sleeping ‘embryo systems and unkindled suns’.109 These astronomically informed revisions of spiritual flight depict the impossibility of analogising beyond the boundaries of empirical perception: if it is not empty, infinite space must contain only replication after replication or works in embryo. This helps to explain why descriptions are somewhat vague and repetitive and imaginative journeys are often curtailed: Akenside’s travelling soul ‘plunges’ down, ‘o’erwhelm’d and swallow’d up’ by eternity (I, 210), and for Mallet, full celestial knowledge cannot be achieved by the mortal imagination. The latter’s description of a dying sun and the mystery of comets’ ‘eccentric Ways’ as they orbit in and out of the system leads to a description of superior immortal travellers, and the final limitless conception of God: ‘where no Land-Marks are, / No Paths to guide Imagination’s Flight’ (p. 74). Even Newton’s astronomical knowledge is curtailed until after death, as demonstrated by his posthumous celestial journey in Thomson’s memorial poem and Mallet’s description of how ‘He wings his Way, / Thro’ wondrous Scenes, new open’d in the World / Invisible’ (p. 61). Journeys in the imagination can bring outer space closer to the reader, but they cannot facilitate new astronomical knowledge. Analogy transforms astronomy from an abstract and solitary philosophy into a polite activity. From domestic familiarity to imaginative journey amongst the stars and from observation to the construction of models, the analogies surveyed in this chapter adjust the reader’s perspective and enable connections to be made between the known and the unknown. In ‘The History of Astronomy’ (1795), Adam Smith describes ‘wonder’ as the natural response to a sequence of unknown or unexpected events; he suggests that this response vanishes when the imagination discerns

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‘a connecting chain of intermediate events’ that explains such phenomena. ‘Who wonders at the machinery of the opera-house who has once been admitted behind the scenes?’ he asks in an echo of Fontenelle’s earlier analogy.110 As a result of astronomical knowledge, then, planetary motions, eclipses and comets no longer evoke wonder or terror. However, as this chapter has shown, the anthropocentricism of astronomy can both improve and distort the reader’s perspective. The tools of celestial speculation employed in popular astronomy therefore supply explanation within limits to deflate hubris and to facilitate the scientific perception of planetary phenomena.

Notes 1 Mary Chudleigh, ‘Of Knowledge’, in The Poems and Prose of Mary, Lady Chudleigh, ed. Margaret J.M. Ezell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 251–61 (pp. 251 and 256). 2 On Chudleigh’s Cartesianism, see Eileen O’Neill, ‘Woman Cartesians, “Feminine Philosophy”, and Historical Exclusion’, in Susan Bordo (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of René Descartes (University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 1999), pp. 232–57. 3 Bronwyn Price notes an additional connection with the references to Descartes’s mechanical philosophy in Henry More’s The Immortality of the Soul (1659). Bronwen Price, ‘“In one harmonious song combine”: inclusiveness, toleration, and liberty in Lady Mary Chudleigh’s The Song of the Three Children Paraphras’d’, English 62:237 (2013), 193–213 (p. 201). 4 [Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle], A Discovery of New Worlds. From the French, trans. A. Behn (London: Canning, 1688), p. 71. 5 [Henry] Baker, The Universe: A Poem Intended to Restrain the Pride of Man (London: Worrall, 1734), p. 6. 6 Thomson, ‘A Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton’, line 2. 7 Anne Janowitz, ‘“What a rich fund of Images is treasured up here”: poetic commonplaces of the sublime universe’, Studies in Romanticism 44:4 (2005), 469–92 (p. 471). 8 On the concept of infinity in this period, see Kathleen Lundeen, ‘A wrinkle in space: the Romantic disruption of the English cosmos’, Pacific Coast Philology 43 (2008), 1–19.

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9 Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder & Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Frédérique Aït-Touati, Fictions of the Cosmos: Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century, trans. Susan Emmanuel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 10 ‘[T]he Ropes, Pullies, Wheels, and Weights, which give motion to the different Scenes represented to us by Nature, are so well hid both from our sight and understanding, that it was a long time before mankind could so much as guess at the Causes that moved the vast Frame of the Universe.’ A Discovery of New Worlds, p. 10. 11 J.H. [John Harris], Astronomical Dialogues between a Gentleman and a Lady (London: Cowse, 1719), p. v. 12 Williams, The Social Life of Books, p. 251. 13 See Alice N. Walters, ‘Conversation pieces: science and politeness in eighteenth-century England’, History of Science 35 (1997), 121–54 (pp. 122 and 126). 14 Stephen Pumfrey, ‘Who did the work? Experimental philosophers and public demonstrators in Augustan England’, British Journal for the History of Science 28:2 (1995), 131–56. 15 On public lectures, see Laurence Brockliss, ‘Science, the Universities, and Other Public Spaces in Europe and the Americas’, in Roy Porter (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Science, vol. IV of The Cambridge History of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 44–86; Simon Schaffer, ‘Natural philosophy and public spectacle in the eighteenth century’, History of Science 21:1 (1983), 1–43; Larry Stewart, ‘Public lectures and private patronage in Newtonian England’, Isis 77 (1986), 47–58; and Larry Stewart, ‘The selling of Newton: science and technology in early eighteenth-century England’, Journal of British Studies 25:2 (1986), 178–92. 16 See John R. Millburn, Benjamin Martin: Author, Instrument Maker, and ‘Country Showman’ (Leiden: Noordhoff, 1976). For an account of Martin’s lectures and writings on electrical science, see Fairclough, Literature, Electricity and Politics 1740–1840, pp. 8–17. 17 See John R. Millburn and Henry C. King, Wheelwright of the Heavens: The Life and Work of James Ferguson, FRS (London: Vade-Mecum Press, 1988), pp. 58–81. 18 Walters notes that Ferguson’s astronomical dialogue was inspired by his own experience as a private tutor to the teenaged Anna Emblin. Walters, ‘Conversation pieces’, pp. 132–3. 19 On the relationship between textbook conversations and their replication as learning method in early nineteenth-century works, see

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Melanie Keene, ‘Familiar science in nineteenth-century Britain’, History of Science 52:1 (2014), 53–71. 20 See Williams, The Social Life of Books, pp. 37–63. 21 James Secord, ‘Newton in the nursery: Tom Telescope and the philosophy of tops and balls, 1761–1838’, History of Science 23:2 (1985), 127–51 (p. 134). 22 Walters, ‘Conversation pieces’, p. 123. 23 Harris, Astronomical Dialogues, p. 55. On the seductive implications of this kind of setting, see Lisa Anscomb, ‘“As far as a woman’s reasoning can go”: scientific dialogue and sexploitation’, History of European Ideas 31:2 (2005), 193–208. 24 James Ferguson, The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Astronomy, Familiarly Explained in Ten Dialogues between Neander and Eudosia (London: Millar and Cadell, 1768), pp. 75–6. 25 Martin, The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Philosophy, I, 4. 26 Tom Telescope, The Newtonian System of Philosophy: Adapted to the Capacities of Young Gentlemen and Ladies, and Familiarized and Made Entertaining by Objects with which they are Intimately Acquainted: Being the Substance of Six Lectures Read to the Lilliputian Society … (London: Newbery, 1761), p. 17. 27 The reference is to Harris’s own 1702 publication The Description and Uses of the Celestial and Terrestrial Globes. 28 Michèle Cohen, ‘Familiar Conversation: The Role of the “Familiar Format” in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England’, in Mary Hilton and Jill Shefrin (eds), Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Culture, Practices (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 99–116. 29 On the circulation of astronomical ideas, see: Mary Fissell and Roger Cooter, ‘Exploring Natural Knowledge: Science and the Popular’, in Roy Porter (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Science, vol. IV of The Cambridge History of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 129–58; Roger Cooter and Stephen Pumfrey, ‘Separate spheres and public places: reflections on the history of science popularization and science in popular culture’, History of Science 32:3 (1994), 237–67 (pp. 249ff.); and James Secord, ‘Knowledge in transit’, Isis 95:4 (2004), 654–72. See also Matthew Grenby’s chapter on the use of children’s book in this period, which looks at signs of use – dog-earing, tears, annotations and marginalia – in addition to personal diaries and journals: M.O. Grenby, ‘Delightful Instruction? Assessing Children’s Use of Educational Books in the Long Eighteenth Century’, in Mary Hilton and Jill Shefrin (eds), Educating the Child in

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Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Culture, Practices (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 181–98. 30 Paula Findlen, ‘Translating the new science: women and the circulation of knowledge in Enlightenment Italy’, Configurations 3:2 (1995), 167–205 (p. 170). 31 J.H. Plumb, ‘The new world of children in eighteenth-century England’, Past and Present 67 (1975), 64–95 (p. 81). 32 See, for example, §180 of Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), where Locke advises practice of arithmetic, ‘do[ing] something in it every Day’, before advancing to astronomy. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed. John W. Yolton and Jean S. Yolton, The Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 235. 33 Gerald Dennis Meyer, The Scientific Lady in England 1650–1760: An Account of her Rise, with Emphasis on the Major Roles of the Telescope and Microscope (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1955), p. 27. Meyer draws attention to a review of Ferguson’s Young Gentleman and Lady’s Astronomy, which comments on the necessity of geometrical knowledge for following this work: ‘The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Astronomy …’, Monthly Review (October 1768), 291–5 (p. 294). There is a non-fictional counterpart to this model of women’s able interaction with complex mathematics and figures in the case of The Ladies Diary, or Woman’s Almanack, published between 1704 and 1840, which developed what Shelley Costa describes as ‘a reader-based mathematical discourse’ by soliciting advanced mathematical puzzles and their responses drawing on Newtonian mathematics from both men and women. See Shelley Costa, ‘The Ladies’ Diary: gender, mathematics, and civil society in early-eighteenth-century England’, Osiris, 2nd series, 17 (2002), 49–73 (p. 56). 34 Newton explains attraction mathematically in his comparison of the weights, quantities of matter, and densities (the latter increases according to a planet’s smallness and proximity to the sun) of different planetary bodies and their distances from the sun in Book III, Proposition 8, Corollaries 1–4. Isaac Newton, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 811–15. 35 [Francesco] Algarotti, Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explain’d for the Use of the Ladies: In Six Dialogues on Light and Colours [trans. Elizabeth Carter], 2 vols (London: Cave, 1739), II, 153.

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36 Andrew Baxter, Matho: or the Cosmotheoria Puerilis, a Dialogue, translated by the author, 2 vols (London: Millar, 1740), pp. 13–14. 37 Ferguson, The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Astronomy, pp. 7–8; Fontenelle, A Discovery of New Worlds, pp. 31–2. 38 Newton explains this with reference to the moon’s apparent diameter, distance from the earth and orbit in The Principia, Book III, Propositions 27–8, pp. 843–6. 39 Harris, Astronomical Dialogues, pp. 111 and 131. Writing five decades later, Ferguson acknowledges that precise distances are difficult to determine, although the 1761 Transit of Venus had solidified some hypotheses. He opts instead for the analogical method of proportional distances so that if earth is 100,000 equal units from the sun, then Mercury is at a distance of 37,710 units and Saturn is at 954,006 units (The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Astronomy, p. 46). 40 Janowitz, ‘Poetic commonplaces of the sublime universe’, p. 487. 41 Thomas Wright, An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe, Founded upon the Laws of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 69. 42 Italic in original. 43 Ferguson, The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Astronomy, p. 22. This reflects Newton’s claim in the third edition of Principia (1726) that gravitational force would cause the earth to take the shape of an oblate spheroid (Book III, Proposition 19). See John L. Greenberg, ‘Isaac Newton and the problem of the earth’s shape’, Archive for the History of Exact Sciences 49:4 (1996), 371–91. 44 Walter’s ‘Conversation pieces’ identifies domesticity and familiarity, though chiefly in terms of aspirational motifs. 45 Joseph Addison, Guardian 155 (8 September 1713), in Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Guardian, 2 vols (London: Tonson, 1714), II, 265–8 (p. 265). 46 On the problems of spectacle and gallantry, see Aileen Douglas, ‘Popular science and the representation of women: Fontenelle and after’, Eighteenth-Century Life 18:2 (1994), 1–14 (p. 11). 47 Meyer, The Scientific Lady in England, 1650–1760, p. 24. 48 For example, Harris employs an orange to demonstrate earth and its shadow (Astronomical Dialogues, p. 15); Tom Telescope describes a lunar eclipse with the help of an orange, a cricket ball and a spinning top (The Newtonian System of Philosophy, pp. 26–7). 49 Walters, ‘Conversation pieces’, p. 137. 50 ‘Rectifying the Globes, Madam, said I, is reducing them to such a Position, as that they shall truly represent the Situation of the Circles

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of the Sphere of the fixed Stars and Planets; and of the Position of the Earth itself at any Time assigned.’ Harris, Astronomical Dialogues, p. 47. 51 George Adams, ‘A Catalogue of Mathematical, Philosophical, and Optical Instruments’, in A Treatise Describing and Explaining the Construction and Use of New Celestial and Terrestrial Globes (London: Printed for and Sold by the Author, 1766), pp. 1–8 (p. 5). 52 The price of an orrery varied a great deal according to the elaborateness of design and decreased substantially through the century. Adams’s catalogue (1766) lists orreries ranging from £25 to £150. In the catalogue of The Description and Use of Both the Globes, the Armillary Sphere, and Orrery (London: for the Author, [1762]), Martin prices his orreries from £40 to £150. In his 1771 Description and Use of an Orrery Martin advertised a new enterprise, with orreries in ‘a great Variety of Parts’ that could be bought in various combinations according to one’s budget; six different options are listed, ranging from the rather sparse ‘Planetarium’ at £12 12s. through to ‘The Orrery compleat, with all the Six Parts’ at £105 or an elaborate contraption with ‘additional Machinery’ such as ‘Brachia and Balls’ to portray accurate proportions of planets and their distances and vectors plotting the transits of Venus and Mercury at £157. Benjamin Martin, The Description and Use of an Orrery of a New Construction, Representing in the Various Parts of its Machinery All the Motions and Phoenomena of the Planetary System (London: Printed for and Sold by the Author, 1771), pp. 28 and 10. 53 Davis Baird, Thing Knowledge: A Philosophy of Scientific Instruments (Berkeley: California University Press, 2004), p. 21. Looking to Joseph Wright of Derby’s famous painting of the orrery (1766), Baird notes how only the women and children are transfixed by the orrery, whereas the men watch the man who is writing [that is, the knowledge production taking place] in the top left corner of the image. 54 Gillian Brown, ‘The metamorphic book: children’s print culture in the eighteenth century’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 39:3, special issue: ‘New Feminist Work in Epistemology’ (2006), 351–62; and Melanie Keene, ‘Playing among the stars: Science in Sport, or the Pleasures of Astronomy (1804)’, History of Education 40:4 (2011), 521–42. 55 Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, especially §148 (pp. 208–9) and §180 (pp. 235–7). 56 Adams, A Treatise Describing the Construction and Use of New Celestial and Terrestrial Globes, p. 76. 57 Harris, Astronomical Dialogues, p. 16.

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58 Richard Steele, The Englishman 11 (29 October 1713), 70–6 (p. 72). 59 Baird, Thing Knowledge, pp. 28–9. 60 James Ferguson, The Use of a New Orrery, Made and Described by James Ferguson (London: Printed for the Author, 1746), p. 24. 61 William Deane, The Description of the Copernican System, with the Theory of the Planets … Being an Introduction to the Description and Use of the Grand Orrery, Lately Made by Mr. William Deane (London: Printed for the Author, 1738), p. 104. 62 Steele, The Englishman 11, p. 72. 63 The interpretation of this kind of diagram may in fact require a different form of cognitive engagement. Kathleen Crowther and Peter Barker’s work on early modern astronomy diagrams suggest ways in which readers were trained to put abstract diagrams into motion. Kathleen M. Crowther and Peter Barker, ‘Training the intelligent eye: understanding illustrations in early modern astronomy texts’, Isis 104:3 (2013), 429–70 (p. 443). 64 For a later example of tactile construction as a route to learning, see Katie Taylor’s description of a three-dimensional model to be constructed at home: ‘Mogg’s celestial sphere (1813): the construction of polite astronomy’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 40:4, special issue: ‘On Scientific Instruments’ (2009), 360–71. This approach is also comparable to the object-centred learning in Newbery’s The Newtonian System of Philosophy, which uses balls and spinning-tops already found in the home or perhaps acquired by purchasing Newbery’s other children’s books, which were supplied with objects such as pincushions to facilitate experiential reading. See Heather Klemann, ‘The matter of moral education: Locke, Newbery and the didactic book-toy hybrid’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 44:2 (2011), 223–44. 65 Substantial work has been done on later applications of models and games in didactic texts. See, in particular, Jill Shefrin, ‘“Make it a pleasure and not a task”: educational games for children in Georgian England’, Princeton University Library Chronicle 60:2 (1999), 251–75; and Patricia Fara, ‘“A treasure of hidden vertues”: the attraction of magnetic marketing’, British Journal for the History of Science, 28:1, special issue: ‘Science Lecturing in the Eighteenth Century’ (1995), 5–35. 66 Laura Miller’s recent work on how Newton’s Principia demands extrapolation from small observable theories to planetary dimensions also informs my approach in turning from domestic to cosmic analogy. As Miller notes, ‘The fact that the same word “space” is

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used today to refer to both celestial and terrestrial space shows how much the type of extrapolation Newton used has become normalized.’ Miller, Reading Popular Newtonianism, pp. 39–41 (p. 41). 67 Stephen J. Dick, Plurality of Worlds: The Origins of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 146. 68 On Fontenelle’s treatment of the plurality of worlds see Ladina Bezzola Lambert, Imagining the Unimaginable: The Poetics of Early Modern Astronomy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), chapter 5, and Dick, Plurality of Worlds, chapter 5. One of the clearest explanations of Newton’s theory of plural variety is found in Query 31 at the end of the 1730 edition of Opticks, which addresses the attractive properties of different substances and bodies (from the very small up to planetary scale). Newton describes how homogeneal hard bodies are attracted to one another whereas compound bodies require less force to be separated, leading to his tentative suggestion that ‘since Space is divisible in inifinitum, and Matter is not necessarily in all places, it may be also allow’d that God is able to create Particles of Matter of several Sizes and Figures, and in several Proportions to Space, and perhaps of different Densities and Forces, and thereby to vary the Laws of Nature, and make Worlds of several sorts in several Parts of the Universe’. Isaac Newton, Opticks: or, a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light, 4th edn (London: Innys, 1730), pp. 379–80. 69 Isaac Newton, Four Letters from Isaac Newton to Doctor Bentley, Containing Some Arguments in Proof of a Deity (London: Dodsley, 1756), Letter I, pp. 2–3. 70 Roger Cotes, ‘Preface to the Second Edition’, in Isaac Newton, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. I.  Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 385–99 (p. 386). This idea of mutual gravitation is set out in the Book III of the Principia: ‘The forces by which the primary planets are continually drawn away from rectilinear motions and are maintained in their respective orbits are directed to the sun and are inversely as the squares of their distances from its center’ (Proposition 2, p. 802); ‘there is gravity towards all planets universally. For no one doubts that Venus, Mercury, and the rest [of the planets, primary and secondary,] are bodies of the same kind as Jupiter and Saturn. And since, by the third law of motion, every attraction is mutual, Jupiter will gravitate toward all its satellites, Saturn toward its satellites, and the earth will gravitate toward the moon, and the

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sun toward all primary planets’ (Proposition 5, Corollary 1, p. 806); and ‘Gravity exists in all bodies universally and is proportional to the quantity of matter in each (Proposition 7, p. 810). 71 Isaac Newton, ‘General Scholium’ [from 3rd edn of Principia], in The Principia, trans. Cohen and Whitman, pp. 939–44 (p. 940). 72 Patricia Fara, ‘Heavenly bodies: Newtonianism, natural theology and the plurality of worlds debate in the eighteenth century’, Journal of the History of Astronomy 35:2 (2004), 143–60 (p. 146). 73 [David Mallet], The Excursion: A Poem in Two Books (London: Walthoe, 1728), p. 62. 74 James Ferguson, Astronomy Explained upon Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles, and Made Easy to Those Who Have Not Studied Mathematics, 2nd edn (London: Printed for the author, 1757), pp. 335–6. 75 Thomas Wright, Original Theory, p. 34. See Michael Hoskin, ‘The cosmology of Thomas Wright of Durham’, Journal for the History of Astronomy 1:1 (1970), 44–52. 76 [Richard Gambol], The Beauties of the Universe: A Poem (London: Roberts, 1732), pp. 4–5. 77 On the principle of plenitude, see Lambert, Imagining the Unimaginable, p. 125; and Andreas Losch, ‘Astrotheology: on exoplanets, Christian concerns, and human hopes’, Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 51:2 (2016), 405–13 (pp. 405–6). 78 William Derham, Astro-Theology: or a Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, from a Survey of the Heavens (London: Innys, 1715), p. 32. 79 Pope, An Essay on Man, Epistle I, lines 71–2. 80 For an ecotheological reading of Pope’s decentred man, see John Sitter, ‘Eighteenth-century ecological poetry and ecotheology’, Religion & Literature 40:1 (2008), 11–37. 81 Marjorie Nicolson and George Rousseau’s study of Pope’s attendance at Whiston’s lectures and his subsequence interest in astronomical topics remains the definitive account: Marjorie Nicolson and George Rousseau, ‘This Long Disease My Life’: Alexander Pope and the Sciences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968). 82 Fara, ‘Heavenly bodies’, p. 144. Quoting J. Illive’s 1733 oration, Fara provides a telling example of biblical analogy: ‘Texts such as “In my Father’s House, are many Mansions, I go to prepare a Place for you” lent themselves to the interpretation that “there are Worlds besides this whereon we inhabit; and it may justly be concluded, that they are inhabited by Beings who are far superior to us in Goodness”.’ Fara, ‘Heavenly bodies’, p. 147.

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83 Adam Roberts, in The History of Science Fiction, 2nd edn (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 89, identifies Blackmore as the first author to address this topic. Blackmore’s description of the universe and creation attacks Lucretius’s epicurean account of atomism and the plurality of worlds, which had gained increased attention after Thomas Creech’s translation of De rerum natura in 1682. On Lucretian cosmology and its eighteenth-century reception, see MaryJane Rubenstein, Worlds without End: The Many Lives of Multiverse (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), pp. 40–52; Jonathan Kramnick, ‘Living with Lucretius’, in Helen Deutsch and Mary Terrall (eds), Vital Matters: Eighteenth-Century Views of Conception, Life, and Death (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), pp. 13–38; and David Hopkins, ‘The English Voices of Lucretius from Lucy Hutchinson to John Mason Good’, in Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 254–73. 84 Richard Blackmore, Creation: A Philosophical Poem Demonstrating the Existence and Providence of a God. In Seven Books, 2nd edn (London: Buckley and Tonson, 1712), p. 58. In Book V Blackmore posits planetary orbit, dependent as Newton affirms on forces, as another example showing the necessity of a creator (pp. 228–9). 85 Edward Young, Night Thoughts, ed. Stephen Cornford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), Night IX, line 1562. 86 ‘Now Nysa marries Mopsus? lovers, what to think! / We’ll soon see griffins mate with mares’ (Virgil, Eclogue VIII, in Virgil’s Eclogues, trans. Len Krisak (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), pp. 58–65 (p. 61)). There is a precedent for the association with travel in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, where a hippogryph does enable Astolfo to journey to the moon, but this had lost credibility by even Milton’s time insofar as to be included as an example of Satan’s failed temptation of Christ in Paradise Regained, Book IV, line 452. On the appearance of the hippogriff up to Milton’s Paradise Regained, see Karen Edwards, ‘Milton’s reformed animals: an early modern bestiary H–K’, Milton Quarterly 41:2 (2007), 79–129 (pp. 94–6). 87 Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s monograph Voyages to the Moon uncovers a rich ‘literature of wings’, from Satan’s supernatural flight in Paradise Lost, Book III, to the ‘little cosmic voyages’ in Thomson and Akenside. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Voyages to the Moon (New York: Macmillan, 1960), pp. 132 and 206. 88 On satirical usage see also Paul Baines, ‘“Able Mechanick”: The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins and the Eighteenth-Century

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Fantastic Voyage’, in David Seed (ed.), Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and its Precursors (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995), pp. 1–25. On Johnson’s critique of flying in Rasselas and explorations of terrestrial flight with wings in Robert Paltock’s The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1751), see Robert Crossley, ‘Ethereal ascents: eighteenth-century fantasies of human flight’, Eighteenth-Century Life 7:2 (1982), 55–64. 89 David Russen, Iter Lunare: or, a Voyage to the Moon (London: Nutt, 1703), p. 39. 90 Paul K. Alkon, Origins of Futuristic Fiction (Athens: Georgia University Press, 1987), p. 51. 91 See G.S. Rousseau, ‘Science and the discovery of the imagination in Enlightened England’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 3:1, special issue: ‘The Eighteenth-Century Imagination’ (1969), 108–35 (p. 112). 92 Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination: A Poem in Three Books, in The Poetical Works of Mark Akenside, ed. Robin Dix (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), pp. 83–174, Book I, lines 154 and 157. 93 Examples of imaginative flight not explored in this chapter include the anonymous Solitude: An Irregular Ode (1738); Isaac Watts’s ‘The Adventurous Muse’ (1706), and Barbauld’s ‘A Summer Evening’s Meditation’ (1773). Night Thoughts also features elements of imaginative flight. The examples by Watts and Young also highlight the religious origin of this trope in visionary flight poems, which in earlier periods was associated with seeking heavenly grace (recalling the hypothetical flight in Psalm 139:9). 94 John Hughes, The Ecstasy: An Ode (London: Roberts, 1720). 95 Stephen J. Dick, ‘The origins of the extraterrestrial life debate and its relation to the Scientific Revolution’, Journal of the History of Ideas 41:1 (1980), 3–27 (p. 8). 96 Christianus Huygens, Cosmotheoros: or, Conjectures Concerning the Planetary Worlds, and their Inhabitants, new edn (Glasgow: Rob. and Foulis, 1757). On Huygens’s use of analogy, see Aït-Touati, Fictions of the Cosmos, chapter 4. 97 Ferguson, Young Gentleman and Lady’s Astronomy, pp. 71–2. 98 Cleonicus reports his own experiments that aim to replicate in miniature the planetary conditions on Saturn, by placing ‘very small Animals’ that habitually live in very cold water in Winter in a ‘Mixture made of Nitre and Snow’ (p. 79) and then freezing them in ice to show that the creatures can survive such extreme temperatures.

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99 Gentleman’s Magazine 8 (June 1738), 315–16. A slightly different version, headed by a quotation from Ovid’s Fasti, appears in Carter’s Poems on Several Occasions (London: Rivington, 1762), pp. 5–7. 100 Virgil, Georgics, ed. R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), Book II, line 290. 101 Carter describes how God has ‘Imprest the central and projectile force; / Lest in one mass their orbs confus’d should run, / Drawn by th’ attractive virtue of the sun’ (lines 42–4). 102 This is not the only excision: references to the ‘boundless freedom’ of the mind and the possibility of knowing first causes – certainly neither Newtonian or Christian orthodoxy – are no longer visible in the later version. 103 Baxter, Matho, II, 211. 104 Douglas, ‘Popular science and the representation of women’, p. 11. 105 On the economic and trade impetus behind astronomical developments and popularity, see: Stewart, ‘The selling of Newton’; and G.L’E. Turner, ‘Eighteenth-Century Scientific Instruments and their Makers’, in Roy Porter (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Science, vol. IV of The Cambridge History of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 511–35. 106 Hughes, The Ecstasy, p. 7. 107 John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2013), Book III, line 455. 108 Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination, Book I, lines 202–3 and 205–6. 109 Anna Laetitia Barbauld, ‘A Summer Evening’s Meditation’, in David Fairer and Christine Gerrard (eds), Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, 3rd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2014), pp. 595–6, lines 96–8. 110 Adam Smith, ‘A History of Astronomy’, in Essays on Philosophical Subjects with Dugald Stewart’s Account of Adam Smith, ed. W.P.D. Wightman, J. Bryce, and I. Ross, vol. III of The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 33–105 (p. 42).

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For man loves knowledge, and the beams of truth More welcome touch his understanding’s eye, Than all the blandishments of sound his ear. Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination (1744), Book II, lines 100–2.

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Light, perception, and revelation

In Scripture, and in Christian discourse more widely, light has special properties. It hails the beginning of God’s creative fiat – ‘Let there be light’ – in Genesis 1:3, and it reappears in the New Testament proclamation of Christ as the ‘light of the world’ in John 8:12 and the promise of ‘a light to lighten the Gentiles’ in the Song of Simeon (Luke 2:32). In the Old Testament, light is the visible sign of divine presence (the burning bush in Exodus 3, the ‘pillar of fire by night’ that gives the Israelites light in Exodus 13:21), and the sun and the stars are read as signs of God’s creative presence as ‘the heavens declare the glory of God’ (Psalm 19:1).1 The New Testament trope of light as knowledge – ‘God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’ (2 Corinthians 4:6) – was manipulated by eighteenthcentury theologians to signify knowledge as it is revealed in both the Bible and the natural world. This is exemplified by Joseph Butler’s claim that ‘Life and Immortality are eminently brought to Light by the Gospel’ and his statement of analogy that ‘there is a great Resemblance between the Light of Nature and that of Revelation’.2 Thanks to its status in this period as a ubiquitous yet incompletely explored phenomenon, the topic of light is central to empiricist epistemology that reassesses the sources and boundaries of k ­ nowledge according to what can be gained from sensation and reflection.3 In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), John Locke even uses light as an example of a simple idea  that cannot be reduced to a more specific or informative property:

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Those who tell us, that Light is a great number of little Globules, striking briskly on the bottom of the Eye, speak more intelligibly than the Schools: but yet these Words never so well understood, would make the Idea, the Word Light stands for, no more known to a Man that understands it not before, than if one should tell him, that Light was nothing but a Company of little Tennis-balls, which Fairies all day long struck with rackets against some Men’s Fore-heads, whilst they passed by others.4

By emphasising that to comprehend the simple idea of light by sensation is not the same as to understand the causal process of its production, Locke excludes any kind of speculative metaphysics. As a simple idea, light can be recognised and categorised, but any effort to define it will be tautological.5 For the empiricist philosopher, then, light is connected with origins and first principles. Light’s analogical associations are also challenged by Newtonian physics, which considers the physical properties and laws of light as well as laws governing the arrangement of stars and motion of the planets. Whilst Newton was certainly not the first experimenter to take light as his subject, his enormously popular Opticks brought the empiricist investigation of light to a wide audience and provided a set of conceptual tools for the scientific perception of its properties. Newton deals with light as a physical property to be measured. The title page of his treatise lists the processes of reflection, refraction, and inflection (see figure 4); definitions are provided of measurable rays of light and their properties; and axioms preceding the main text divide light into a series of measurements. The sun becomes a key part of the experimental apparatus, often reduced to a small circle in diagrams illustrating experiments with prisms and lenses. In the preface to his work, Newton promotes empirical demonstration over hypotheses when he claims that his purpose is ‘to propose and prove [the ‘Properties of Light’] by Reason and Experiments’ (Book I, p. 1).6 His famous refraction experiment involving ‘the Sun shining into a dark Chamber through a little round Hole in the Window shut, and his Light being there refracted by a Prism to cast his coloured Image … upon the opposite Wall’ is notoriously difficult to replicate, demanding absolute precision (Book I, p. 98).7 Earlier in the treatise, Newton emphasises the importance of prism placement (calculated according to the prism’s refracting angle

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Figure 4  Title page of Isaac Newton, Opticks (London: Smith and Walford, 1704).

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and the breadth of the hole in the window shutter) and notes that, ‘because it is easie to commit a mistake in placing the Prism in its due posture, I repeated the Experiment four or five times, and always found the length of the Image that which is set down above’ (Book I, p. 20).8 As well as demonstrating an approach of careful measurement, manipulation, and repetition, the account of the experiment reveals the natural philosopher’s perspective as he perceives the process of refraction. The record is framed in personified terms (‘being refracted … cast his coloured Image’) to suggest an equivalence between process and effect. Personal witness, in the manipulation of objects within the private space of a chamber, and objective vision, in the final published report, which diminishes the challenges of prism placement, are conflated to suggest a newly neat empirical approach to light. Newton’s account of his refraction experiment therefore demonstrates how Lockean and Newtonian empiricism is the watershed after which a figurative understanding of light could be less persuasive. However, as even minor instances of the sun’s personification might suggest, analogical language conflating physics and popular or religious discourse could still be used. The scientific explanation is, furthermore, incomplete because Newton’s optics can describe only processes rather than fundamental causes. These elements suggest that references to light could retain spiritual import after Newton and his followers had dismantled its workings. This chapter considers the endurance of analogical associations with light and the treatment of both perceptive and extra-sensory knowledge alongside the new empiricist approach in the early eighteenth century. Such analogies use ‘light’ and its cognates in a variety of ways that draw on ideas of reason, imagination, and faith in order to challenge and question the possibilities of scientific perception and knowledge. As Geoffrey Cantor has noted, this period’s optical discourse retains some of its ‘theological underpinnings’: ‘Since “light” inhabits not only natural philosophy but also other forms of eighteenth-century discourse, we can expect light metaphors to carry resonances from outside science.’9 By considering in particular the physico-theological context of natural religion in which natural and moral laws are made analogous, we can see a spectrum of attempts to re-establish older correspondences ­according to new empiricist and rationalist modes.

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The term ‘physico-theology’ predates both Locke’s Essay and Newton’s Opticks, appearing in Walter Charleton’s The Darkness of Atheism Dispelled by the Light of Nature: A Physico-Theological Treatise in 1652 and popularised by William Derham’s publication of his 1711–12 Boyle lectures as Physico-Theology in 1713. Derham’s monograph repeatedly teaches its readers how the close study of nature will show it ‘to be a Matter of Design, and the infinitely wise Creator’s Work’.10 Physico-theological texts regularly focus on light’s significance as a meeting point between the physical and the moral world. Poetry, too, facilitates this kind of figurative thought. In her still-influential 1946 study of Opticks in eighteenthcentury poetry, Marjorie Hope Nicolson notes the endurance of physico-theology after Newton: Thomson, Savage, [and] Mallet, did not forget Milton but they also remembered Newton. They reminded their readers that the ultimate source of light is God, but they were even more aware that the immediate source of light is the sun, a physical body which, in spite of its pre-eminence in the solar system, is nevertheless responsive to laws of nature which man had come to comprehend.11

Taking this observation as a starting point, I explore in this chapter how Thomson, Mallet and other more strongly theological poets use light analogies to demonstrate the limitations of human perception, as well as the interplay between the revealed knowledge afforded by God and the active searching after truths that is the aim of the empiricist scientist. According to Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, ‘to enlighten’ can mean both ‘to supply with light’ and ‘to furnish with the encrease of knowledge’.12 Many physico-theological tropes refer to the connections between light and clarity, darkness and obscurity, or vision and knowledge. For example, Derham celebrates light as ‘this first made, because most necessary, Creature of God’, by which earth’s inhabitants ‘can with Admiration and Pleasure, behold the glorious Works of God’.13 These connections are shown in Johnson’s own definition of ‘analogy’, which he furnishes with the following example: ‘learning is said to enlighten the mind; that is, it is to the mind what light is to the eye, by enabling it to discover that which was hidden before’. Johnson’s analogy gets

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to the nub of the issue, as he hints at the revealing of certain pieces of undiscovered or hidden knowledge rather than something completely novel. These analogical links point towards the construction of knowledge in scientific and physico-theological texts where various uses of ‘light’ and its cognates unveil a dichotomy between reasoned perception or the articulation of laws in the natural world and limited revelation. Light analogies are employed in works of empiricist natural philosophy and physico-theology to represent, amend, or challenge received knowledge about light’s origins, influence, and physical processes. One question raised by these texts is whether the empirical approach to light and its attendant analogies can produce new knowledge or whether it merely reveals, or shines light, on what is already present. This question is connected to contemporaneous models of restricted knowledge which are governed first by empiricists’ hesitance to address causation and second by theological ­concerns about the nature of divine revelation. In the next section, I consider the central role of analogy and perception to the discussion of light and knowledge. The subsequent section looks to physicotheological texts which re-interpret the description of the creative fiat in Genesis to refine or to critique Newtonian physics, resulting in new presentations of the first light and its significance. The final section turns to figurative applications of light in poetry of the period. By drawing on light analogies in Lady Mary Chudleigh’s The Song of the Three Children Paraphras’d (1703), Richard Blackmore’s Creation (1712), David Mallet’s The Excursion (1728), Henry Baker’s The Universe (1734), Thomas Hobson’s Christianity the Light of the Moral World (1745), and James Thomson’s Seasons (1746), I will show how light analogies in these works refer to its physical properties, as well as its analogical associations with both the acquisition of knowledge and the divine.

Revelation and explanation The idea of analogical resemblances is rooted in the Platonic concept of readable correspondences between the material, ­phenomenal world ruled by fixed Aristotelian laws and hidden

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Light, perception, and revelation 83

or occult laws determining the workings of the natural world. In Losing Touch with Nature (2014) Mary Thomas Crane explores the prevalence of Platonism in the natural philosophy and theology of the mid-sixteenth century. Crane notes the importance in this tradition of reading precise ‘signs and tokens’ revealed in the natural world which point towards its own workings and origins. A key biblical instance of this figuration is the stars’ creation as ‘lights in the firmament of the heaven’ and their placing ‘for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years’ in Genesis 1:14.14 Crane’s examples from Robert Recorde’s The Castle of Knowledge (1556), which reads connections between the observed astronomical events of planets’ orbits and astrological divination ‘to understand a universe in flux’,15 point towards the reading of natural laws that are unexplained by the Aristotelian model, but which are nevertheless revealed in the occult patterns of the phenomenal world. ‘Signs’, Crane notes, ‘are manifest and perceptible in the course of daily experience yet require some kind of training in order to be properly interpreted.’16 Training enables  the viewer to read in the signs and tokens of the natural world the correspondences between the word  of God (the Bible) and his creation. Augustine’s guide to exegesis On Christian Doctrine is an important indicator of this approach in terms of reading the correspondences that signify revealed truth: ‘An ignorance of things makes figurative expressions obscure when we are ignorant of the natures of animals, or stones, or plants, or other things which are often used in the Scriptures for purposes of constructing similitudes.’17 Augustine therefore directs his readers back to the study of Scripture as the source of revelation. The analogical worldview of similitudes is exemplified in the ­seventeenth century in the poetry of George Herbert. In his 1633 poem ‘The Windows’, Herbert addresses the possibility of preaching the word of God from a position of obscured human knowledge.18 He describes the human minister as ‘brittle crazie glass’ (line 2) through which the light of God can shine when that glass is strengthened into ‘a window’ (line 5). An elaborate conceit is drawn up that combines the biblical stories that are annealed or fixed in stained glass and the function of a preacher as a window through which God’s glory can shine to teach his congregation:

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But when thou dost anneal in glass thy storie, Making thy life to shine within The holy Preachers, then the light and glorie More rev’rend grows, & more doth win: Which else shows watrish, bleak, & thin. (lines 6–10)

This image of the ‘glorie’ of the coloured light creates a synaesthetic effect that is dependent upon analogical associations between light and truth: ‘Doctrine and life, colours and light, in one / When they combine and mingle, bring / A strong regard and aw’ (lines 11–13). Light is therefore associated with God’s grace and creative power. The comparison between the ‘bleak, & thin’ light that reaches people without interpretation and the colourful splendour of true preaching that opens up knowledge of God has a further biblical resonance in terms of humans’ obscured vision (‘for now we see through a glass darkly’ (1 Corinthians 13:12)) and the light of inspiration and grace. The poetic form of Herbert’s conceit, the enjambed lines coinciding with the mingling of senses, heightens the sense of a mysterious kind of communication afforded by the light of God and points towards methods of reading and interpreting his word. Earl R. Wasserman argued some decades ago that the mode of ‘organized perception’ exemplified by writing such as Herbert’s became less vital as philosophers and poets alike rushed to categorise and explain the plenitude of the natural world.19 Amos Funkenstein’s Theology and the Scientific Imagination offers a corrective to this view by tracing the shift in the seventeenth century to an emphasis on the absolute rationality of a world created by an omnipotent God – revealed through physical laws rather than contingent or arbitrary signs – that permits a marriage of theology and physics in Newtonian physics.20 We can see, therefore, that the analogical focus is retained, albeit to a lesser degree, in eighteenthcentury thought through tropes such as the Great Chain of Being and the reading of correspondences between the Book of God and the Book of Nature. The ‘great chain, that draws all to agree’ is familiar from canonical works such as Pope’s Essay on Man.21 John Newton gives an informative account of God’s books in his ‘Plan of a Compendious Christian Library’ (1773), where he advocates a



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model of four books – the Bible, the Book of Nature, the Book of Providence, and the Book of Human Nature – as material for study superior to human writings. Newton’s description of the Book of Nature promotes an alternative route to knowledge of the world: The lines of this book, though very beautiful and expressive in themselves, are not immediately legible by fallen man. The works of creation may be compared to a fair character in cypher, of which the Bible is the key; and without this key they cannot be understood.22

Like Augustine, John Newton refers to the special perception afforded by scriptural knowledge, where the Bible can be used as a ‘key’ to the natural world. This idea of correspondences is also promoted in Richard Barton’s Analogy of Divine Wisdom (1750), where ‘the whole creation’ is described as ‘one volume, in which every line expresses the divine Attributes’.23 We can see, therefore, how elements of analogical thinking continue to be applied cautiously in physico-theological writing. Modifications to this rule of resemblances are also visible after Locke’s Essay and the rise of empiricism, when, as Don Cupitt notes, ‘the question of our analogical knowledge of God became urgent’.24 In the earliest popularisation of the Principia, A New Theory of the Earth (1696, rev. 1725), a work dedicated to Newton, William Whiston produces an account of divine design that acknowledges the fitness of planetary orbits and describes gravity, ‘the most mechanical Affection of Bodies’, as dependent on ‘the supernatural and miraculous influence of Almighty God’.25 Whiston describes the earth’s creation as by God’s ‘fore-adaptation’ of the natural world, referring to visible signs and tokens of moral order: He so order’d and appointed the whole System, with every individual Branch of it, as to Time, Place, Proportion, and all other Circumstances, that nothing should happen unseasonably, unfitly, disproportionately, or otherwise than the Junctures of Affairs, the demerits of his reasonable Creatures, and the wise Intentions of his Providence did require. In fine, he so previously adjusted and contemper’d the Moral and Natural World to one another, that the Marks and Tokens of his Providence should be in all Ages legible and conspicuous, whatsoever the visible secondary Causes or Occasions might be. (p. 294)

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This description extends the presentation of astronomical phenomena in Genesis 1:14 by applying the popular physico-theological motif of a world set in perfect order according to readable general laws that are visible to all. Joseph Butler, the author of The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed (1736), follows the same pattern. Butler’s Lockean preface to his treatise shows him to be hypothesis-shy, in the empiricist tradition of deriving knowledge only from observed facts, as he articulates his intention to ‘compare the known Constitution and Course of Things, with what is said to be the moral System of Nature’.26 He argues from this standpoint that ‘God governs the World by general fixt Laws … [which] plainly implies some sort of Moral Government’ (p. 49). As Wasserman shows, this later version of rational analogy demonstrates that ‘natural and revealed religion do not contradict each other … only that the natural evidence suggests the probability of the revealed truth and shows it to be credible’.27 Keen to reconcile orthodoxy with empiricism and to recall deists to the fold, Butler excludes any hint of the old occult signs that could damage his case. He is careful to note that whilst no hidden truths can be found through sensation, a model of working senses and knowledge can be achieved: It is not intended, by any thing said, to affirm, that the whole Apparatus of Vision, or of Perception by any other of our Senses, can be traced, through all its Steps, quite up to the living Power of feeling or perceiving: But that so far as it can be traced by experimental Observations so far it appears, that our Organs of Sense prepare and convey on Objects, in order to their being perceived n like manner as foreign Matter does, without affording any Shadow of Appearance, that they themselves perceive. (pp. 20–1)

Vestiges of the old analogical correspondences do remain, therefore, but the analogies are transformed by the Lockean development of knowledge as acquired through sensation and reflection and an empirical philosophy in which the behaviour of physical phenomena is determined by cause and effect. Light analogies, therefore, no longer prompt automatic readings of revealed connections. Instead, they are wielded to critique the source and acquisition of knowledge in a new culture of empirical thought.

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Light, perception, and revelation 87

Looking to popular works on Newtonian optics, we can see how analogy enables the presentation of new scientific ideas about light to a lay audience. This form of analogical explanation is frequently employed to demonstrate that light and colour are not mysterious productions but are governed by physical laws. Algarotti’s Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explain’d for the Use of the Ladies exemplifies the use of analogies to train women and children in scientific perception and the recognition of optical laws. The dialogues are consciously addressed to a genteel female audience ‘which had rather perceive than understand’.28 Within the polite space of a well-stocked villa, the chevalier delivers his lessons about light and colours with reference to subjects of taste, such as painting and poetry. To render Newton’s optical laws perceptible and familiar, Algarotti outlines the refraction experiments with prisms by referring to well-known poetic works (‘Imagine yourself to be in a Place of Milton’s visible Darkness, or rather still darker a Place, if you will be absolutely deprived of all Light; and this shall be our Theatre of Reasoning and Observations’ (II, 26)); discusses the nature of colours and white light with reference to familiar domestic occurrences (‘Water thickened with Soap, and agitated so as to raise a Froth, is more proper to demonstrate that a Composition of Colours produces White’ (II, 98));29 and compares the eye and its functions to a camera obscura (I, 136–40).30 These examples reflect the ideal that familiar correspondences need only be observed to enable full understanding. As Massimo Mazzotti has noted, this is also a matter of scientific authority: ‘Algarotti represented experiments concretely, thus engendering in the reader the impression that, like the marchioness, they needed no further information in order to give their assent to Newton’s final victory.’31 Within the text the analogies also have an entertaining and educative effect, as the Marchioness notes in the fifth dialogue: ‘My interrupted Dreams have transported me into the Region of Optics, where I saw nothing but Prisms, Lenses, Rays differently refracted, [and] coloured Images’ (II, 83). The polite and familiar analogies used in the Newtonian explanations solidify transient phenomena and result in an empirical approach to perceiving and understanding light and colour. They also enable the pupil to articulate and communicate these new ideas as they relate to lived experience.32

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In works of public science such as Algarotti’s, light is represented as a material substance like any other. It can be manipulated by opaque bodies, mirrors, burning glasses, and prisms. This profusion of experiments, instruments, and demonstrations leave less room for the analogical associations made between light and divine power (as an inexplicable, eternal force opposing darkness with heavenly light) and may even suggest that knowledge through revelation is no longer sufficient because active experimental engagement is needed to interpret the phenomenal world. There is, therefore, a tension between two kinds of analogical description in Newtonian writing on light: simple explanatory analogies in didactic natural philosophy and loaded moral analogies in physico-theological poetry and prose that relates to non-empiricist searching for first causes. As popular forms of public expression in this period, philosophical and physico-theological poems demonstrate these changing approaches to analogy and also draw attention to the relationship between perception and revelation in the formation of knowledge. Physico-theological writers grasp the order of empiricism and Newtonian laws to effect a moral analogy where Newton happily fits into the system, lending a new religious rhetoric to science.33 This physico-theological recourse to revealed laws is visible in the poetry of James Thomson, whose connections with the forwardlooking Watts Academy and connections to other scientific circles has been well documented.34 Thomson’s natural descriptions are thoroughly Newtonian. This influence is clearly seen in the treatment of light and perception in The Seasons, which exemplifies Laura Miller’s observation that ‘to write popular Newtonian poetry is to stake a claim to authorised as well as aesthetic territory’.35 In Summer, Thomson addresses light directly as a physical phenomenon that demonstrates both natural laws and divine origins:         Prime Chearer Light! Of all material Beings first, and best! Efflux divine! Nature’s resplendent Robe! Without whose vesting Beauty all were wrapt In unessential Gloom! and thou, O Sun! Soul of surrounding Worlds! in whom best seen Shines out thy Maker! may I sing of thee?



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  ’Tis by thy secret, strong, attractive Force, As with a Chain indissoluble bound, Thy System rolls entire: from the far Bourne Of utmost Saturn, wheeling wide his Round Of thirty Years, to Mercury, whose Disk Can scarce be caught by Philosophic Eye, Lost in the near Effulgence of thy Blaze.36

Thomson signals an analogy between the sun and the ‘divine Maker’ through the perceptive focus of a ‘Philosophic Eye’. There is a balance between the ordered ‘Systems’ of planets’ motions caused by the ‘strong attractive force’ of gravity and the divine, beauty-revealing light of the sun, which is described empirically only through its effects. Thomson’s descriptions of light in Summer bear a striking resemblance to the explanations of Newtonian optics in George Cheyne’s Philosophical Principles of Natural Religion (1705). Written one year after the publication of Opticks, Cheyne’s work conflates an empiricist account of optical laws with a Platonic theory of spiritual attraction as analogous to Newton’s account of attractive forces in both the Principia and Opticks.37 Cheyne brings together light’s physical properties and with its divine origin: ‘What a noble representation of the Divine Wisdom does our Fluid of Light afford us! how wonderfully are its parts fram’d and with what a prodigious velocity are they sent from the Body of the Sun.’38 Evidence of God’s design is thus supported by Newtonian laws, and Cheyne further notes the utility of solar properties: ‘How beautiful and glorious a Body is the Sun, and of what absolute Necessity to the Being of all Animals and Vegetables’ (p. 138). In Summer, Thomson similarly describes processes that are governed by light: the growth of ‘the vegetable World’ (line 112), the changing seasons; and even the production of diamonds in rock impregnated by light to become ‘Collected Light, compact’ (line 143). For Thomson, then, an understanding of light and its attendant analogies can be achieved through an empirical examination of physical phenomena. As James Sambrook notes, however, Thomson ‘is concerned less with natural objects “themselves” than with the emotional, intellectual and devotional experience of a consciousness responding to these objects’.39 This view is corroborated

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by W.B. Hutchings’s more recent account of the poet’s method: ‘Thomson’s descriptions assert the capacity of the natural world to create vital sensations in the observer; and their language is designed to provoke like sensation in the reader, not by a vain attempt at exact representation, but by an evocation of a parallel process of imaginative sensation.’40 This highlights a similarity between Thomson’s writing and the Lockean approach of learning adopted in the didactic texts explored in Chapter 1 above. The experience of light through sensation and the understanding of Newtonian laws therefore take on a philosophical colour in  Summer, whilst Thomson also maintains analogical connections, in which God is described as ‘Light Himself … awfully retir’d / From mortal Eye’ (lines 176–8). However, it is ‘Philosophy’ with which Thomson chooses to ‘crown [his] song’ (Summer, lines 1730–1). Philosophy – the ‘[e]ffusive Source of Evidence, and Truth!’ (line 1732) – is a source of ‘luster’ [sic] (lines 1733) and an aid to clear-eyed perception: She springs aloft, with elevated Pride, Above the tangling Mass of low Desires, That bind the fluttering Croud; and, Angel-wing’d The Heights of Science and of Virtue gains, Where All is calm and clear; with Nature round, Or in the starry Regions, or th’ Abyss, To Reason’s and to Fancy’s Eye display’d: The First up-tracing, from the dreary Void, The Chain of Causes and Effects to Him, The World-producing Essence, who alone Possesses Being; (lines 1738–48)

For Thomson the vision afforded by light and then informed by fancy and reason results in the production of knowledge both about the natural world and about God. Thomson’s description here draws together ‘Science’ and ‘Virtue’, as well as the eye of ‘Reason’ and that of ‘Fancy’ through syntactic parallelism, demonstrating an idealised empirical reading of the world. Thomson’s blank-verse statement of reasonable, immovable fact shows how the empirical approach of ordering and categorising according to the evidence of natural laws governed by cause and effect can be read along an

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a­ nalogical ‘Chain’ leading to knowledge of the divine. The poet’s interest in ‘Reason’s and … Fancy’s Eye’ can also be linked to poems celebrating Newton’s discovery of general laws as a product of his own piercing sight. This version of light as analogous to knowledge and insight suggests limitless possibilities for the codification of the world. More conservative physico-theological accounts of the natural world maintain the importance of perception for knowledge, but they focus instead on learning through reading the revealed analogical connections between natural and moral laws. Keith J. Holyoak and Paul Thagard identify the ‘mental leap’ that is needed to analogise between the known and the unknown in order to generate new ideas.41 A similar approach is visible in The Analogy of Divine Wisdom, where Richard Barton explains the light-as-­knowledge trope through an analogy that preserves earlier ­meanings: ‘as the first material light was created by the Deity, so was the first knowledge of religion revealed’ (p. 56). As this statement shows, Barton interprets knowledge as a product of revelation, an explanation that reflects divine rather than human agency: ‘The Analogy between the light of revelation, and that of the heavens, is in many respects worth notice’, he claims, ‘and the similitude is such, that the language belonging to one, may, with great propriety, be transferred to the other’ (p. 56). This suggestion of an innate analogical link preserves a degree of understanding between the physical properties of light, as ‘the means of knowledge’, and God’s teaching, because light ‘not only renders the world visible, but also enlivens it’ (p. 57). Barton also considers the less positive properties of light, when it is reflected, manipulated, or blocked by clouds, as ­analogous to the limited revelation afforded by God.

‘Let there be light’: creation and origins 1750 saw the publication of an anonymous pamphlet poem, A Philosophic Ode on the Sun and the Universe. In the introduction to this work, the author notes natural philosophy’s amplifying properties that enable the unacquainted observer of the world to ‘stretch his imagination’ and perceive ‘the amazingly-wise and

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apposite disposition’ of the whole system: ‘I should think it impossible for Men, accustomed to such meditations, to open their eyes to let in the light, without letting in, at the same time, an awful idea of the majesty, goodness and omnipresence of the great Creator.’42 The poem itself explores the sun’s situation and effects, the planets’ orbits according to the Copernican account, and the New System that recognises suns as stars with their own corresponding planets and moons. Rather than falling into confusion at the prospect of a limitless creation, as we saw with the poems of imaginative flight discussed in Chapter 1, this narrator settles on the ordering vision of Newton’s account of gravitational orbit. Tellingly, the light-asknowledge trope sees this framed as a re-staging of the Genesis ­creation narrative with Newton taking on a quasi-divine role: Newton, immortal Newton, rose; This mighty frame, its order, laws, His piercing eye beheld: That Sun of Science pour’d his streams, All Darkness fled before his beams, And Nature stood reveal’d. (lines 139–44)

Instead of beginning the cosmogony with chaos and the void as depicted in Genesis, this text presents the earth as already being in existence. The key creation event is one of perceived revelation. The light employed by the deified Newton enables the dispelling of dark ignorance and the recognition of an ordered creation. In a Lockean process of learning and a rewriting of the Genesis refrain, the observer sees and reflects on the goodness of the system. As the days of creation in Genesis bring a refinement of the earth’s form, flora, and fauna, successive ages in the world of reason enable the improvement of humans’ perceptions: ‘So that his mind each day improve, / Each day inspire coelestial love, / And sublimate his soul’ (lines 148–50). Given that physico-theology is founded upon the recognition of analogies between the biblical word and the created work, it is not surprising that writers aiming to create more thorough narratives of the world as created according to modern scientific or ­ philosophical  principles routinely turn to a reassessment of Genesis. Some, such as William Derham, content themselves with

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a ­revaluation of the ‘lights in the firmament of heaven’ as ‘signs’ of divine order (Genesis 1:14). As Derham notes of celestial phenomena, ‘there are two things that are manifest Demonstrations of the presence and management of GOD, namely, that such Bodies should move at all: and that their Motion is so regular’.43 Others, such as William Whiston, take a more extensive approach, as shown by the full title to his first work: A New Theory of the Earth from its Original, to the Consummation of All Things, Wherein the Creation of the World in Six Days, the Universal Deluge, and the General Conflagration, as Laid Down in the Heavenly Scriptures, are Shewn to be Perfectly Agreeable to Reason and Philosophy. The argument in the New Theory and its prefatory essay on ‘the Mosaick History of the Creation’ work by aligning the account in Genesis with modern science and common-sense observations.44 Educated in Cartesian philosophy at Cambridge, Whiston had first met Newton in 1694 and shortly afterwards made a study of his Principia; he succeeded Newton as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in 1702.45 First published in 1697 and reaching its sixth edition by 1755, Whiston’s New Theory of the Earth played an important role in displacing Cartesian thought from theological discourse (the latter exemplified by Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth, which Whiston had studied at Cambridge in 1690).46 Newton himself read the work in draft and had a great influence on its contents.47 Whiston’s description of the process of creation in Genesis involves a novel reframing of light’s role. The biblical verses upon which he draws bear repetition: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. (Genesis 1:1–4)

After noting that the days in Genesis are not strictly related to a period of twenty-four hours – explaining that ‘a Divine Power immediately interpos’d, and either form’d every Thing in its grown and mature State; or at least accelerated and hasten’d the course

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of Nature, so as to enable her to perfect each Creature in so short a Space’48 – Whiston argues that the appearance of light is only important as ‘[t]he visible Part of the first Day’s Work’ (p. 226). Much more significant, he suggests, is the first verse, where the act of creation actually occurs: ‘as soon as the Holy Writer descends to the Description of the Chaos [in verse 2], and the commencing of the Six Days Creation, he mentions not a word of any Production out of Nothing’ (p. 5). The effect of this framework is that the philosophically provable process of making the earth from chaotic matter (a process that Whiston explains as the ordering of chaos – from the atmosphere of a comet – in response to gravitational attraction) can be explained with reference to scriptural details, but the divine mystery of creation ex nihilo remains an unknown and inexplicable process.49 The statement ‘God created the heaven and the earth’ is, like light itself, a simple idea that cannot be reduced or explained further. Whiston’s interpretation of the earth’s formation out of the chaos of unassembled matter also enables him to incorporate the whole planetary system into the Genesis account. Basing his deductions on recent astronomy establishing the infinity of the cosmos and the position of the stars, he acknowledges that the sun and stars exist outside the firmament (or ‘farthest Boundaries and Limits’ (p. 13)) of heaven; Whiston suggests that ‘the Creation of Light on the first Day, is not at all asserted in the History; but only that then it first appear’d in the World’ (p. 14). This qualification allows Whiston to suggest that the sun and the other planets were already in place before the formation of the earth  out of chaos and that this is a concept that can be understood now only through the advances of modern science and Newtonian celestial mechanics, which reveals ordered orbits and stars in an infinite cosmos: ’Twas entirely with regard to our Light and Darkness, our Day and Night, that all was done, as far as can be collected from the words of Moses. Thus, as soon as the Heavenly Bodies are made, tho’ they be universally useful, and belong to the entire Solar System, yet are they here plac’d in the Firmament of our Heaven (a Phrase us’d in this History for our Air only) to divide our Day from Night, to be to us for signs and seasons, for days and years; to be lights in the firmament



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of heaven to give light upon the earth; to rule over our day and night, to divide our light from darkness. (p. 19)

Light’s appearance in Genesis 1 is therefore interpreted as a process by which the rays reach the earth before the physical formation of the planet. Book III of Whiston’s New Theory of the Earth describes particular phenomena connected with this early light according to new scientific principles, and the heat of the sun is taken as a catalyst for the separation of the waters, the creation of the firmament of heaven, and the appearance of dry land. Whiston reformulates this succession as the natural result of the increasing penetration of the sun’s light into the atmosphere, heating vapours and purifying the air. In this context, divinely bestowed light sets off a chain of events: The Expansion or Firmament which was this Day spread out above the Earth, was plainly the Air, now truly so called, as being freed from most of its Earthly Mixtures. The Superior-Waters, all those fresh ones, which in the Form of Vapour, a nine or ten Months Heat of the Sun, with the continual Assistance of the Central Heat, could elevate, and the Air sustain, besides those vast Quantities of Salt ones, which had never yet left those Regions. The Inferior Waters were those which were no elevated, but remain’d below, all that fell down with, were enclos’d in, sunk into, or lay upon the Orb of Earth beneath. (p. 318)

Reading this account alongside Genesis 1, it is possible to see how the timeline of extended days (permissible because without diurnal motion a day on earth is not restricted) and an attention to matterof-fact physical properties enable Whiston to produce a scientifically informed account of origins.50 Thomas Hobson’s Christianity the Light of the Moral World, published in 1745 but written eight years before, considers earth’s origins in a more biblically conservative and didactic manner.51 His aim is ‘to represent this great difference between the discoveries of reason, and those that are made by revelation’.52 Light is predictably central to his account of creation:              Power divine Spoke the creative word, ‘Let there be Light, And there was Light – An instantaneous dawn

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Of floating rays, at first diffuse and wide, Shed round the rising world a languid gleam, To colour o’er the dark unfinish’d mass, And form the outlines of a brighter scene. (pp. 19–20)

This description returns to the traditional interpretation of the creative fiat. The focus here, however, is on the physical conception of gradually focusing rays of light ‘at first diffuse’ that lend colour to the scene of the partially created world. The specific focus on rays as they travel to illuminate the world allows for a deeper understanding of the process of creation. This idea of the mysterious, ‘instantaneous’ propagation of light – ‘as quick as thought’ (p. 20n) – which then gradually illuminates and colours the world is also Newtonian: it observes the laws of gravity and travelling light, and it presents  colour as a property of light, not the unfinished objects of creation. It allows for an insight into creation that is both scientifically specific and which displays Hobson’s analogy of truth-giving light. Hobson’s light is responsible for the completed creation of the world: At thy approach, if philosophic minds Conjecture truth, the vegetable race Spontaneous kindled into fragrant life: … And crawling reptiles tumbled into day, By stated laws mechanically form’d. (pp. 22–3)

Hobson suggests that God creates a static earth, bound by ‘stated laws’, and that his subsequent creation of the light causes everything to play by those rules – the orbit of planets, the birth of plants and reptiles, even morality itself. The laws of light, ‘Fair effluence of Him, who lives in Light / Yet unconceiv’d by man’ (p. 21), and its effect on the earth, are therefore part of his theology. The key analogy of the poem shows that the light-ordered world displays a moral order. Newton’s description of his particle theory of light in the ‘Definitions’ of Opticks demonstrates the interplay of cause and effect in the production and transmission of rays of light. His definition of light rays is instructive for understanding Hobson’s account of light’s activating role as a phenomenon of motion:

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Light, perception, and revelation 97 By the Rays of Light I understand its least Parts, and those as well Successive in the same Lines as Contemporary in several Lines. For it is manifest that Light consists of parts both Successive and Contemporary; because in the same place you may stop that which comes one moment, and let pass that which comes presently after; and in the same time you may stop it at any one place, and let it pass in any other. For that part of Light which is stopt cannot be the same with that which is let pass. The least Light or part of Light, which may be stopt alone without the rest of the Light, or  propagated alone, or do or suffer any thing alone, which the rest of Light doth not or suffers not, I call a Ray of Light. (Book I, pp. 1–2)

Newton’s light is divisible into parts or rays which are manipulated and manoeuvred by other bodies. As applied to Hobson’s account, the focusing and productive rays of the first light are connected to divine motion. Hobson’s movement from ‘diffuse’ to focused rays – instantly produced because divinely created – incorporates Newtonian optics: the world is coloured only gradually by the travelling rays of light. The instantaneous propagation of light is a theme that Christopher Smart touches upon in his fragmentary, resolutely anti-Newtonian poem Jubilate Agno (1758–63). Smart’s light is not just a physical property, and it is always instantaneous. A correct understanding of light’s properties points towards a ­comprehension of the nature of creation and the divine: For LIGHT is propagated at all distances in an instant because it is actuated by the divine conception. For the satellites of the planet prove nothing in this matter but the glory of Almighty God.53

For Smart, unlike Hobson, ‘the divine conception’ is not the source of a single moment of creation that is subsequently kept in motion by the laws of physics. Ever-renewed divine laws, rather than a universal law of gravity, keep the moons and planets in motion. In his focus upon instantaneous light, Smart furthermore dismisses Newton’s calculations of the velocity of light in favour of a theology of everpresent divinity that propagates light ‘at all distances in an instant’. In fact, Smart seems at pains to use the analogy of light theologically: he drops the physical aspect altogether when he proclaims that ‘in perfect light there is no shadow’ (Fragment B, line 309).

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Another group of theologians who reassessed the significance of light in Genesis were the Hutchinsonians. Initiated by the self-taught natural philosopher John Hutchinson in important texts such as the two volumes entitled Moses’s Principia (1724 and 1727), and popularised towards the middle of the century by Duncan Forbes, Julius Bate, Robert Spearman, and others, this school of thought started as a refutation of empiricist physics through a novel approach to biblical revelation. Hutchinson’s aim was to ‘liberate religion from extra-biblical influences’ such as scientific reasoning and church teachings.54 As Spearman and Bate claim in the preface to their 1748 edition of Hutchinson’s Works, ‘Reason is but the Capacity of the Soul to know; no more in the Soul, than the Eye in the Body, hath no Light in itself; but the Light of Revelation we look on as sufficient to guide us into all Truth.’55 Moses’s Principia is based on the premise that knowledge acquired through ­experience – r­evelation through nature – is limited and knowledge of the phenomenal world can be gained through the reconstruction of imagery from the Hebrew Bible as analogical explanation of creation. The argument for acquiring knowledge through biblical revelation is founded upon a modified version of Lockean sensationalism. As Duncan Forbes argues in A Letter to a Bishop (1732), ‘[there] is no Proof that there may not be Millions of different Beings and Substances round us, besides those that affects our Senses, of which, and, of their Powers or Actions, we  can know nothing’, let alone how matter ‘is acted upon, or how it is supported’.56 However, whereas Locke limits the knowledge that can be acquired by the senses to the outward properties of things, Hutchinsonianism seeks eternal truths and claims, as Derya Gurses Tarbuck notes, that ‘a transcendent God could not be approached, nor the truth about the universe reached, through the ordinary material world, except with the assistance of scriptural knowledge and analogy from scripture’.57 As the title of Moses’s Principia suggests, the doctrine of revelation is also based upon a refutation of Newtonian science in favour of biblical revelation. Hutchinson’s reaction against empiricist natural philosophy is most evident in An Essay toward a Natural History of the Bible (1725), where he states that ‘Ever since the Creation of Man, it has been [t]he constant Employment of the Devil, to set up the Works of God in Opposition to God, and to ­persuade Man that

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there were Properties in them independent of God, or incommunic­ able, or that they were for other Ends than he created and appointed them.’58 Gravity and the vacuum are for Hutchinson particular examples of these mistaken ‘Properties’: general laws of attraction and orbits permit a self-governing physical universe, and, as John C. English notes, ‘[t]o attribute agency to matter was to ascribe divine attributes to it’.59 To avoid these dangers, Hutchinson posits that the universe is filled with a ‘subtile Fluid’ or aether through which the triune God governs the universe. In order to explain how the concept of aether (another imponderable fluid) is connected to a reassessment of light, we need to turn to Hutchinson’s model of analogical exegesis.60 Hutchinsonianism is grounded in the concept that Hebrew is the original language created by God, which ‘conveyed perfect Ideas of the Things by the Words’.61 This perfect language allows for an insight into divine truths: Every Idea we have of God, and every Name or word we use for one of those Ideas, are taken comparatively, either positively or negatively from the Things or Actions of the Things he has created; and they cannot otherwise be express’d or comprehended by us. This is not a Diminution of God, but the Measure of our Capacity; the Word for the material Heaven is us’d for the immaterial Heaven; the  Word for the corruptible Spirit is us’d for the incorruptible Spirit; the Word for the material Light is us’d for the ineffable Light.62

Hutchinson thus sees direct signification between words and things and between material and spiritual concepts. Contrary to the analogy of religion pioneered by Butler and Barton explored above, Hutchinson suggests that biblical revelation in the original language allows direct, immediate knowledge of spiritual realities rather than ideas mediated through the senses.63 This philosophy of lost analogies between Scripture and nature – lost in the exile and captivity of the Jews in Babylon and subsequently mistranslated and ­misunderstood – leads to a novel method of reading the Old Testament to uncover its true meaning. By removing the points (vowel markings) from biblical Hebrew, Hutchinson argues, it is possible to find these old relations that are revealed in the shared consonantal roots of different words. An example of this ­analogising

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between root forms is found in Hutchinson’s treatment of ‫( אל‬el), one of the words for God in the Old Testament. Hutchinson associates this word not with the more common ‫( אלהים‬elohim), but with the verb ‫( הל‬hel or hal), ‘to irradiate, send out Light’, on the basis that the aleph and the he are frequently exchanged in the Chaldeean dialect of Isaiah.64 Duncan Forbes glosses this further in A Letter to a Bishop, noting that el can be read as ‘the Irradiator’: ‘An Idea borrowed from that Irradiation or Emission of Light and Influence from the Sun to move, support, and preserve, in Being and Action, every thing in this material System.’65 This focus on light and irradiation as an analogy for divine presence is consonant with Hutchinson’s exegesis of Genesis 1. Like Whiston, Hutchinson locates the key moment of creation in the first verse, in which God creates the matter of ‘heaven and earth’. The key difference here, as Forbes notes in A Letter to a Bishop, is in the central role that he gives to the ‘subtile’ fluid (p. 16) of aether. The heavens (‫ שמ׳ם‬shemim) therefore signify God’s creation of a medium to facilitate direct intervention: [B]esides the differently formed Particles, of which this Earth, and the several Metals, Minerals, and other solid Substances in it, and in the other solid Orbs are composed, God at first created all the subtile Fluid which now is, and from the Creation has been, in the condition of Fire, Light, or Air, and goes under the name of the Heavens. (p. 14)

Hutchinson’s aethereal fluid is made up of particles, or atoms that, according to Forbes, ‘pervade the Pores of all Substances whatever’, and it has three forms (pp. 14–15). When the atoms move or are reflected or refracted in straight lines, they produce light. Another kind of vigorous motion, collision, produces heat and fire; the sun is ‘a vast Collection of this subtile Matter in the Action of Fire, which continually melts down all the Air that is brought into it by the powerful Action of the Firmament or Expansion’ (p. 15). In stasis, the atoms group into ‘masses’ to produce air or spirit. After creation, this triune subtile fluid is the mechanical source of action and motion through which God maintains the universe.66 This process therefore allows for a separation of matter and spirit in physical explanations of natural origins. Genesis 1:2, ‘the Spirit

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of God moved upon the face of the waters’, is interpreted as the ‘Airs in Motion’.67 Reading Genesis 1.3 in Moses Principia: Part II, Hutchinson focuses on the Hebrew word ‫( אור‬or), which he defines as ‘Light, Splendor, Illumination, Morning Light, the Morning, [or] Day-break’ (p. 177). He describes its beginning as moment of illumination and form-making as already created atoms collide with one another. This alters the purpose of light itself because it does not merely show things – ‘the first and chiefest Uses of Light was not for the Effect it has upon the Eyes for seeing’ (pp. 209–10) – but actually sets them up and running: [L]et there be Light included that Motion, and implied some Action like Fire, and produced that Motion of Light, which issued against a Side of the Sphere, directed the Force of the Spirit, and so determined the Rotation of the Sphere, and formed Night and Day; the Spirit was in Motion, and the Light was put into Motion; there was no other Agent, nor no Sphere or Orb. (pp. 197–8)

It is, therefore, only later (in Genesis 14) with the creation of ‘lights in the firmament of the heaven’ that the conventional understanding of light becomes relevant. The Hebrew ‫( שמש‬shemosh) is usually translated as ‘sun’; its other meaning ‘to stand fix’d’ conveniently aligns with the Copernican system, and the later Hutchinsonian Samuel Pike is careful to note that the noun properly means the light that flows from the sun (thereby eliminating any problems with the notion of a rising and setting sun).68 These examples of physico-theological interpretations of the creation narrative show how the physical property of light, understood in a range of Newtonian and non-Newtonian ways, acts as an analogical bridge between physics and mystery. The focus on biblical revelation enables these writers to circumscribe the limits of knowledge according to what is biblically available.

Imagination and revelation The remainder of this chapter looks to more conventional uses of light analogies, examining the relationship between perception and revelation in analogical references to light in verse written between

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1712 and 1745. Central to these poems is the empiricist concept of knowledge as accessed through the senses and its consolidation and reformulation in the imagination. An early example that establishes the Lockean foundations of the light-as-knowledge trope, published the year before Opticks, is Lady Mary Chudleigh’s extensive Pindaric ode The Song of the Three Children Paraphras’d (1703). Bronwen Price correctly identifies the apocryphal Song of the Three Children as the poem’s ‘premise’ rather than its source text. This is a popular text for imitation and most familiar now because the canticle ‘Benedicite, omnia opera’ in the Book of Common Prayer is drawn from the song of praise that makes up its final two-thirds.69 Chudleigh’s expansions of the original are lengthy and frequently scientific, and she prefaces her work with an essay pointing out references to seventeenth-century thinkers such as Descartes and Burnet. Her elaboration of verse 18 (‘O let the earth bless the Lord: yea, let it praise him, and magnify him for ever’) rewrites the Genesis narrative of creation according to a materialist theory of ‘motive Energies’ and ‘active Warmth’ bestowed by God to produce the planets and stars.70 However, the poem’s seventysecond verse shows a clear debt to empiricism in its description of reason and imagination. In a departure from the address to the ‘souls of the righteous’ articulated in the original, Chudleigh recommends a somewhat Epicurean model of self-restraint that connects ‘Abstinence’ with clear-sightedness:71 They only taste those Pleasures which from Abstinence arise; Those pure Delights, those Banquets of the Mind, Which from enlighten’d Reason spring: Reason, when from the Dregs of Sense refin’d, From all those Steams, those darkning [sic] Vapors freed, Which from excess proceed; When no thick Damps of Earth retard its Flight, Or make it flag the Wing, Will boldly soar on high, Above the Atmosphere, Where all is calm, and all is clear, And there, at Pleasure fly. (lines 1649–60)

The product of the newly freed ‘enlightened Reason’ is a wider imagination. Here, the model of imaginative flight, familiar from



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Chapter 1 above, is explored through a description of Lockean learning as a delightful activity to be enjoyed by the ‘sprightly’ senses: Bless’d with a free, distinct, unclouded Sight Of all those Glories which adorn the happy Realms of Light, Our Faculties will all awake, And each will sprightly grow, Exert its Pow’r, and its whole Force will show: Th’ Imagination quick and active prove, Thro’ the whole Compass of created Nature rove: Collect bright Images, from them Ideas make, From ev’ry Object some new Hint will take, And with them entertain the Mind, And Bus’ness for the Understanding find: The Understanding more sublime will grow, We shall more accurately think, and much more fully know. (lines 1661–73)

This model of ‘sublime’ understanding matches Margaret Ezell’s account of Chudleigh’s interest in rational theology.72 The process described – roving nature, collecting ideas from ‘bright Images’, and making connections to ‘entertain the Mind’ – is clearly drawn from Locke’s model of sensation and reflection. Chudleigh’s imagery creates a persuasive narrative for moral living: external brightness in the world can be conveyed to the mind or understanding through the clear perception enabled by bodily control. The shifting understanding of imagination in this period, from a process of mimesis and repetition to one of creative thought, is foundational to David Mallet’s The Excursion, a poem which draws upon the analogous properties of sunlight as the imagination or fancy and the divine product of God.73 As explored in Chapter 1, The Excursion begins with the narrator calling upon the ‘creative Power’ of fancy to aid him in his physico-theological flight over the earth and through space.74 The poem constantly draws upon the faculty of sight as the narrator roams in his imagination throughout ‘Nature’s Works’ to see ‘Nature’s God’ (p. 14). Fancy allows the narrator to travel from polar regions to deserts, and Mallet draws an instructive analogy between the knowledge afforded by ­imagination and the light of the sun:

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’Tis Morning; and the Sun, his welcome Light, Swift, from beyond dark Ocean’s orient Stream, Casts thro’ the Air, enlightning Nature’s Face With new-born Beauty. O’er her ample Breast, O’er Sea and Shore, light Fancy speeds along, Quick as the darted Beam, from Pole to Pole, Excursive Traveller. (p. 27)

This description generates a range of light analogies: the sun brings light and beauty to the earth and a parallel is drawn to ‘Fancy’ or the imagination which, quick as the speed of light’s ‘Beam’, makes sense of received ideas through visual description. The Excursion is full of the dramatic, sublime, and often comically extreme images afforded by the imagination. However, as these images suggest, the imagination does not involve any real increase in new knowledge. Light enlightens – ‘Aided by Thee, with Transport I survey / This Firmament, and these her rowling Worlds’ (p. 54) – but it allows for only superficial knowledge by shining light on what is already present. This fits with Locke’s account of sensation and reflection and helps to show how human creativity is only a weak analogy for divine creation. Even in describing the sun itself as ‘the Source / Where Morning Springs’ (p. 51), Mallet is often too caught up in the expressive possibilities of verse rather than the task of explaining the original phenomena he describes. He does, however, draw a key analogy between planetary and moral laws as he surveys the ‘Simplicity divine’ that governs the planets and points back to the first cause: ‘World attracting World / With mutual Love, and to their Central Sun / All gravitating’ (p. 60). In this creator-oriented account, fancy allows for reflection on the combination of old ideas but not for the production of new ones. Mallet therefore runs through the familiar analogies, but shows that imaginative learning cannot uncover new insights. Hobson’s poetic discussion of the difference between perceptive reason and revealed natural laws in Christianity the Light of the Moral World is underpinned by the analogical associations of light. The poem supplies all the usual allusions: darkness and chaos of the world before creation is categorised as ‘a significant emblem of the deplorable ignorance of the heathen world’ and the ordered c­ reation is read as ‘the universe arising from the light of



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the sun, as an expressive and lively picture of the clear knowledge of the  Christian’ (p. 13). Descriptions of human thought in the poem are divided between pre- and post-lapsarian stages. Newly created, the ‘flame’ of the human mind is ordered, regulated, and perfect: The Mind, an ever-active unmix’d form, A pure immortal flame, by heaven infus’d Through all this wond’rous complicated frame, Unrival’d gives the little system laws, And, self-dependent, regulates the whole. As Newton’s sun the erring planets guides. (pp. 27–8)

Hobson’s note to these lines draws an easy analogy between physical and moral laws: ‘it is not improbable that there was something analogous to the attractive Force of the Sun originally inherent in human Reason, whereby it preserved a beautiful Regularity and Harmony among the Passions’ (p. 28n). The ‘flame’ of the mind can thus be seen as a solar image linked to the first light of creation. Hobson describes the first man reading ‘the World’s all-perfect volume’ (p. 29) where connections are automatic and no reasoning is required for comprehension. As the poem progresses, Hobson paraphrases 1 Corinthians 13:12 to explain the post-lapsarian limits of knowledge, in which the rays from heaven are weakened before they can be perceived by ordinary sight: Even God’s imperial care, the chosen Jew, Saw but a typic-light; a ray that shone, As through a glass obscure, in dubious gleams Oft unperceiv’d, too languid to display, Celestial Canaan, thy immortal realms, Where streams of pleasure unpolluted flow! (p. 40)

Key here is that this limited revelation is promoted as the only route to knowledge. Hobson notes that this obscurity can only be cleared by divine revelation, which provides ‘[a] clearer Light than besttaught reason lends’ (p. 45). A similar approach is found in John Ellis’s The Knowledge of Divine Things from Revelation Not from Reason or Nature, published only two years before Hobson’s poem. Ellis’s work conflates Lockean empiricism, where knowledge of the

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phenomenal world is gained through perception, with God’s revelation of ‘Divine Things’ enabled according to how they are ‘sufficient for our present State’: So that being never manifested to our Sense or Apprehension, but in part, as in a Glass darkly, the loftiest Conception we can form of them, fall infinitely short of their real Natures; nor can we raise them beyond those Metaphors and Similitudes by which they have been pictured out and resembled to us.75

Again, complete knowledge of God cannot be obtained through human perception, and Ellis adds that this partial ‘Apprehension’ itself can be supplied only through the contemplation of analogous physical phenomena. The possibility of divine knowledge is also promoted as Hobson’s conception of light and knowledge is connected to a ‘future State’ (p. 45n), and the key analogy of the poem states that the lightordered world displays a moral order which will be understood through future revelation. The conclusion of the poem alludes to the end of Pope’s first epistle of An Essay on Man, which predates Hobson’s work by a handful of years, as Hobson points to a new focus in the form of inner light:76       [L]earn Thy Self to know; To glow with pure devotion; to adore With humble, grateful homage; well-secur’d Of this great truth, ‘whatever is, is best.[’] (p. 59)

This conclusive statement suggests that Hobson’s light of knowledge is not concerned with reasoning but with the correct perception of revealed truth. The poem’s ending moves towards the ‘light of the moral world’ of the poem’s title, putting reason in its place beneath the promised revelation: Let reason soar, when mounted on the wings Of meek-ey’d Faith; and, unpresuming, wait Till heaven evolves the mazy-winding folds Of God’s eternal will. … When, full-reveal’d the filial Light Himself Shall pour upon thee one immortal day! (p. 59)

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We can see how Hobson uses the fervour for light and its physical properties to convey a series of analogies explaining humans’ place in the world, their future state, and their ability to gain knowledge and insight into these properties. Henry Baker’s The Universe provides an interesting parallel to Hobson’s treatment of the light-as-knowledge trope. In his prefatory address to the reader, Baker explains his aim to reform overreaching man who is deluded enough ‘to fancy the Whole was design’d for him alone’.77 Baker’s solar descriptions invoke a series of analogies that demonstrate the littleness of humans. Rather than focusing on the obscurity of the light that reaches earth, he describes the sun’s power: Does he not make thy very Marrow fry? Canst Thou behold him with a stedfast Eye? Why dost thou turn and hide Thee from his Sight? Is he, indeed, insufferably bright? Think then, how glorious must that Pow’r be Whose Hand has form’d ten thousand such as he! (p. 3)

The ‘insufferable’ brightness of the sun is presented as analogous to God’s own power and incomprehensibility, and Baker’s insistent rhyming couplets lend a didactic tone as he instructs his reader in the interpretation of correspondences that demonstrate both access to knowledge and its limitations. The personification of the sun has a diminishing effect when set alongside the ‘Pow’r’ of the creator. The tone here recalls Derham’s Astro-Theology, which describes the sun’s astounding heat: ‘what Power is there that the most extravagant Phancy can imagine to it self, that could ever be able to make so prodigious a mass of the Fire as the Sun is, but only the power of God’s Almighty Hand!’78 Taking up ‘Glasses’ to perceive the millions of stars (‘And canst thou think, poor Worm! these Orbs of Light, / In Size, immense, in Number, infinite, / Were made for Thee alone to twinkle to thy Sight?), Baker draws analogies between different worlds and theorises through the Great Chain of Being that each star is also another sun (p. 6). Indeed, in the note to this passage, Baker conceives of the stars as analogous to earth and its sun: ‘May we not more justly suppose these glorious Orbs, inhabited by those numberless Orders of more glorious Beings which are

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betwixt Us and our Creator?’ (p. 8n). The inaccessibility of this knowledge to sensory perception thus functions as an analogy for both humans’ limited understanding and their inferior place within the Great Chain of Being. Finally, Richard Blackmore sets himself high rational and ­physico-theological standards in his poem Creation (1712), subtitled A Philosophical Poem Demonstrating the Existence and Providence of a God. Long requested by rationalists such as William Molyneux and John Locke, the poem demonstrates how light analogies can be employed to explore the limitations to both reasoned perception and revelation.79 Megan Kitching notes the explicitly anti-Epicurean, anti-materialist focus of Blackmore’s argument, drawing links with the poet’s later Essay upon the Laws of Nature (1716), in which he claims that ‘laws imposed upon us by divine authority need not be solely physical’.80 The seventh book of Creation puts this argument into the context of Lockean ideas about knowledge and vision: When Man with Reason dignify’d is born, No Images his naked Mind adorn: No Sciences or Arts enrich his Brain, Nor Fancy yet displays her pictur’d Train. He no Innate Ideas can discern, Of Knowledge destitute, tho’ apt to learn. Our Intellectual, like the Body’s Eye, Whilst in the Womb, no Object can descry; Yet is dispos’d to entertain the Light, And judge of Things when offer’d to the Sight. (pp. 324–5)

Blackmore explains the gradual acquisition of knowledge through the comparison of ideas and objects as alike or differing from those already encountered, and he supplements this description with the suggestion that humans are ‘dispos’d to entertain the Light’. This reference suggests that the human mind is designed to receive revelation. In fact, perception is introduced much earlier in this poem and Blackmore, is keen to emphasise that sight, aided by the light which reveals its object, is a tool of God’s limited revelation. This subject is introduced in Book II through the characterisation of the sun as both ‘familiar’ and ‘unknown’:



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Behold the Light emitted from the Sun, What more familiar, and what more unknown? While by its spreading Radiance it reveals All Nature’s Face, it still it self conceals. (p. 75)

This characterisation of the sun as enlightening, because it reveals ‘all Nature’s Face’, and yet also baffling in its unapproachability is central to the divine analogy that Blackmore draws here. This leads the poet back to a consideration of the creator: With Thought from Prepossession free, reflect On solar Rays, as they the Sight respect. The Beams of Light had been in vain display’d, Had not the Eye been fit for Vision made: In vain the Author had the Eye prepar’d With so much Skill, had not the Light appear’d. (pp. 76–7)

Without light there is no vision. Without light, there is no reason for the rest of creation. Without light there is no world to be known. These realisations, and the recognition that human thought is merely ‘dark’, ‘vain’, and ‘feeble’ (p. 19), are a precondition for Blackmore’s version of creation. These analogies, expressed in the optical language of ‘solar Rays’ and framed in the empiricist mode of cause and effect, do not so much add to human knowledge as reveal its inferiority and dependence upon revelation. Blackmore’s version of the natural world therefore prompts a different kind of enlightenment in its readers to ensure that they recognise the limits of revelation and perception. These physico-theological descriptions of light demonstrate how signs and tokens are transformed by the influence of Lockean empiricism and Newton’s Opticks. Light’s creation, production, and speed are newly understood as physical phenomena, but they continue to carry with them analogical associations that permit writers to exploit the relationships between the function and laws of light and the limits and possibilities of knowledge. The light-asknowledge trope inevitably leads to connections between vision and the clarity of the light that reaches the earth. The impossibility of fully comprehending the sun and stars through the senses, however much these objects might bring up associations with creation and the Great Chain of Being, is central to the preservation of

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mystery and awe that these conservative physico-theological poets seek to achieve. Returning once more to the account of the stars’ creation as ‘signs’ in Genesis 1:14 in the context of Newton’s own reference to stars in his theory of light can help to clarify how light analogies are transformed by empiricist physics. Newton’s notes on the improvement of telescopes in the fourth edition of Opticks provide  an explanation of the twinkling of stars which encapsulates the tension between physical readability and mystery. His explanation of the phenomenon is purely physical: [T]hese stars do not twinkle when viewed through Telescopes which have large apertures. For the Rays of Light which pass through diverse parts of the aperture, tremble each of them apart, and by means of their various and sometimes contrary Tremors, fall at one and the same time upon different points in the bottom of the Eye.81

By attributing the twinkling of stars to the atmosphere’s refraction of the light that they emit (in the same manner as light is refracted when it passes through a prism), Newton is able to produce an explanation for the phenomenon as well as to suggest an improvement in the function of instruments used to view the stars. We might compare this inductive process with James Thomson’s view of the ‘starry Regions’ as they are displayed to the eye of ‘Reason’ (Summer, lines 1743–4) and restored through empirical explanation. The other poets and physico-theologians considered in this chapter preserve the mystery of light and the unknown methods of divine creation before its appearance, and its obscurity or twinkling remains indicative of limited knowledge and the glory of God. This is fully exemplified by Hobson’s characterisation of the Star of Bethlehem, which will remain ‘unknown’ until a future date: The leading Star, to optic tube unknown, Glad harbinger of Light, whose powerful beams O’er earth shall shine effulgent, to dethrone The Prince of darkness, and diffuse around The blissful dawn of Evangelic Day. (pp. 46–7)

These analogies, and those already considered, show how the endurance of a modified trope of light as knowledge enables



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­ hysico-theologians to critique and revise physical explanations. p They therefore situate light in an argument of divine design, figuring the viewer’s place within the structure and giving meaning to the idea of limited knowledge and future revelation.

Notes  1 One example of an eighteenth-century sermon that exploits these biblical connections is George Watson’s Christ the Light of the World: A Sermon Preached before the University of Oxford, at St. Peters, on Saturday, October 28, 1749 (Oxford: Parker, 1750).  2 Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature (London: John and Knapton, 1736), pp. 146 and 179.  3 On the treatment of light, heat, electricity, gravity, and magnetism as ‘imponderable fluids’, see Fairclough, Literature, Electricity and Politics 1740–1840, pp. 22–3.  4 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), III.iv.10. All quotations are taken from this edition; references indicate book, chapter, and section.   5 See Paul de Man, ‘The epistemology of metaphor’, Critical Inquiry 5:1, special issue: ‘Metaphor’ (1978), 13–30 (p. 18).  6 Newton, Opticks, Book I, p. 1.  7 Earlier in the treatise, Newton emphasises the importance of accurate prism placement, which must be calculated according to the prism’s refracting angle and the breadth of the hole in the window shutter: ‘because it is easie to commit a mistake in placing the Prism in its due posture, I repeated the Experiment four or five times, and always found the length of the Image that which is set down above’ (p. 20). Patricia Fara’s comment on the 1672 account of his refraction experiments applies here, too: ‘Achieving his results demanded a sophisticated grasp of glass technology as well as a delicate and patient experimental hand. In the interests of rhetorical persuasiveness, Newton did not describe the same sequence of processes that he used to reach his conclusions; omitting any mention of dead-ends, he left some trials ­ unrecorded even in manuscript.’ Patricia Fara, ‘Newton shows the light: a commentary on Newton (1672) “A letter … containing his new theory about light and colours”’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal

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Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 373:2039 (2015), no page number.  8 Charles Bazerman explains how responses from Francis Line and others to Newton’s early publications on the prism experiments in Philosophical Transactions might have led towards this additional note on precision. Bazerman, Shaping Written Knowledge, pp. 82–127.  9 Geoffrey N. Cantor, ‘Weighing Light: The Role of Metaphor in Eighteenth-Century Optical Discourse’, in Andrew E. Benjamin, Geoffrey N. Cantor, and John R.R. Christie (eds), The Figural and the Literal: Problems of Language in the History of Science and Philosophy, 1630–1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 124–46 (p. 128). See also Julia L. Epstein and Mark L. Greenberg, ‘Decomposing Newton’s rainbow’, Journal of the History of Ideas 45:1 (1984), 115–40. 10 William Derham, Physico-Theology: or a Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God from the Works of Creation, Being the Substance of XVI Sermons Preached in St. Mary le Bow Church, London, at the Honble Mr. Boyle’s Lectures in the Years 1711 and 1712, 2nd edn (London: Innys, 1714), p. 4. 11 Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse: Newton’s Opticks and the Eighteenth-Century Poets (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), p. 21. 12 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols (London: Strahan, 1755). 13 Derham, Physico-Theology, p. 27. 14 Mary Thomas Crane, Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), p. 57. 15 Crane, Losing Touch with Nature, p. 65. 16 Crane, Losing Touch with Nature, p. 57. 17 Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D.W. Robertson (New York: Macmillan, 1958), 2.16.24, p. 50. 18 George Herbert, ‘The Windows’, in The Works of George Herbert, ed. F.E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), pp. 67–8. 19 Earl R. Wasserman, The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neoclassical and Romantic Poems (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959), pp. 173 and 179–80. See also Earl R. Wasserman, ‘Nature moralized: the divine analogy in the eighteenth century’, ELH 20:1 (1953), 39–76. 20 Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, especially chapter 2.

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21 Pope, An Essay on Man, Epistle I, line 33. 22 John Newton, ‘A Plan of a Compendious Christian Library’, in Twenty Six Letters on Religious Subjects (London: Printed by J. and W. Oliver, 1774), pp. 113–22 (p. 118). 23 Richard Barton, The Analogy of Divine Wisdom in the Natural, Moral, and Spiritual System of Things. In Eight Parts (Dublin: Ewing, 1750), p. 36. 24 Don Cupitt, ‘The doctrine of analogy in the age of Locke’, Journal of Theological Studies 19:1 (1968), 186–202 (p. 186). 25 William Whiston, A New Theory of the Earth from its Original, to the Consummation of All Things, 4th edn (London: Tooke and Motte, 1725), p. 293. 26 Butler, The Analogy of Religion, p. viii. 27 Wasserman, ‘Nature moralized’, p. 58. 28 Algarotti, Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explain’d for the Use of the Ladies, I, v. 29 This example is taken from Opticks: ‘Hitherto, I have produced whiteness by mixing the Colours of Prisms. If now the Colours of natural Bodies are to be mingled, let Water a little thickened with Soap be agitated to raise a froth, and after that froth has stood a little, there will appear to one that shall view it intently various Colours every where in the surface of the several Bubbles, but to one that shall go so far off that he cannot distinguish the Colours from one another, the whole froth will grow white with a perfect whiteness.’ Opticks, Book I, p. 110. On the significance of soap bubbles as an object of scientific demonstration combining transience and commodity throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Simon Schaffer, ‘A Science whose Business is Bursting: Soap Bubbles as Commodities in Classical Physics’, in Lorraine Daston (ed.), Things that Talk: Objects Lessons from Art and Science (New York: Zone Books, 2008), pp. 147–92. 30 See Chapter 4, pp. 173–7, for a fuller discussion of the camera obscura. 31 Massimo Mazzotti, ‘Newton for ladies: gentility, gender and radical culture’, British Journal for the History of Science 37:2 (2004), 119–46 (p. 122). 32 Algarotti continues Newton’s practice of using domestic objects – mirrors, bubbles, combs, knives – as experimental apparatus. 33 William Powell Jones makes this point emphatically in The Rhetoric of Science: A Study of Scientific Ideas and Imagery in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966). 34 On Thomson’s background, see James Sambrook, ‘Introduction’, in

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James Thomson, The Seasons, ed. James Sambrook (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. xx–xxiv, and Connell, Secular Chains, pp. 187–8. 35 Miller, Reading Popular Newtonianism, p. 74. 36 James Thomson, Summer, in The Seasons, ed. James Sambrook (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 58–143, lines 90–103. Sambrook’s edition is based upon the 1746 version of The Seasons, which contains the last revisions attributable to Thomson and is my source for all quotations unless indicated otherwise. 37 See G. Bowles, ‘Physical, human, and divine attraction in the life and thought of George Cheyne’, Annals of Science 31:6 (1974), 473–88 (p. 481). 38 George Cheyne, Philosophical Principles of Natural Religion: Containing the Elements of Natural Philosophy, and the Proofs for Natural Religion, Arising from Them (London: Strahan, 1705), pp. 191–2. 39 Sambrook, ‘Introduction’, Thomson, The Seasons, p. xxxii. 40 W.B. Hutchings, ‘“Can Pure Description Hold the Place of Sense?”: Thomson’s Landscape Poetry’, in Richard Terry (ed.), James Thomson: Essays for the Tercentenary, Liverpool English Texts and Studies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), pp. 35–66 (p. 51). 41 Holyoak and Thagard, Mental Leaps, p. 9. 42 ‘Introduction’, in A Philosophic Ode on the Sun and the Universe, no page number. 43 Derham, Astro-Theology, p. 63. 44 For an account of Whiston’s and Newton’s critique of biblical accommodation in the context of miracles and seventeenth-century science see Peter Harrison, ‘Newtonian science, miracles, and the laws of nature’, Journal of the History of Ideas 56:4 (1995), 531–53. Courtney Weiss Smith provides an analysis of Whiston’s physico-theology in terms of a clockwork universe kept in motion by an interventionism God. Smith, Empiricist Devotions, pp. 93–8. 45 Maureen Farrell, William Whiston (New York: Arno Press, 1981). Farrell’s opening chapter provides a detailed biography of Whiston. 46 Farrell, William Whiston, p. 92. 47 See Stephen David Snobelen, ‘William Whiston, Isaac Newton and the crisis of publicity’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 35:3 (2004), 573–603. 48 Whiston, ‘A Discourse Concerning the Nature, Stile, and Extent of the Mosaick History of Creation’, in New Theory of the Earth, pp. 1–94 (p. 52). 49 Whiston hypothesises that ‘a Planet is a Comet form’d into a regular and lasting Constitution, and plac’d at a proper Distance from the Sun

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in a Circular Orbit, or one very Eccentrical; and a Comet is a Chaos, i.e. a Planet unform’d, or in its primaeval State, plac’d in a very Eccentrical One.’ New Theory of the Earth, p. 80. 50 Compare Whiston’s account of the antediluvian atmosphere as pure and free from rainfall – ‘The descending Vapours compos’d only a gentle Mist, not sensible round Drops of Rain, as we have before seen’ (New Theory of the Earth, p. 371) – and his subsequent argument that the first rainbow could take place only in the case of the flood in Genesis 6–9, where raindrops were available to refract the sun’s rays. 51 See Powell Jones, The Rhetoric of Science, p. 147. and Hoxie Neale Fairchild’s brief note in Religious Trends in English Poetry, vol. I: ­1700–1740 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), pp. 310–12. 52 Thomas Hobson, Christianity the Light of the Moral World: A Poem (London: Lewis, 1745), p. 13. 53 Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno, ed. Karina Williamson, vol. I of The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), Fragment B, ‘For’ lines 284–5. 54 Derya Gurses Tarbuck, Enlightenment Reformation: Hutchinsonianism and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Routledge, 2017), p. 33. 55 Robert Spearman and Julius Bate, ‘Preface’, in The Philosophical and Theological Works of John Hutchinson, esq, 12 vols, 3rd edn (London: Hodges, 1748–49), I, iii–l (p. xvi). 56 [Duncan Forbes], A Letter to a Bishop, Concerning Some Important Discoveries in Philosophy and Theology (London: Dodd, 1732), pp. 11 and 12. 57 Tarbuck, Enlightenment Reformation, p. 52. 58 John Hutchinson, An Essay toward a Natural History of the Bible, Especially of Some Parts which Relate to the Occasion of Revealing  Moses’s Principia, in The Philosophical and Theological Works, I, 23. 59 John C. English, ‘John Hutchinson’s critique of Newtonian heterodoxy’, Church History 68:3 (1999), 581–97 (p. 585). See also David S. Katz, ‘“Moses’s Principia”: Hutchinsonianism and Newton’s Critics’, in James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin (eds), The Books of Nature and Scripture: Recent Essays on Natural Philosophy, Theology, and Biblical Creation in the Netherlands of Spinoza’s Time and the British Isles of Newton’s Time, International Archives of the History of Ideas, 139 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), pp. 201–11, and C.B. Wilde, ‘Matter and spirit as natural symbols in eighteenth-century Britain’, British Journal for the History of Science 15:2 (1989), 99–131.

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60 Fairclough surveys a range of natural philosophical discussions from the period about aether as a material form, from Benjamin Martin’s strong advocation of the experimental method to Berkeley’s anima mundi as an alternative figuration of electricity, to Benjamin Franklin’s recognition of ‘electrical fire’. See Fairclough, Literature, Electricity and Politics 1740–1840, pp. 31–75. 61 Hutchinson, ‘Introduction’, in Moses’s Principia: Part II: Of the Circulation of the Heavens; Of the Cause of the Motion and Course of the Earth, Moon, &c; Of the Religion, Philosophy, and Emblems of the Heathens before Moses Writ, and of the Jews after, in Confirmation of the Natural History of the Bible, in The Philosophical and Theological Works, II, i–xlviii (p. xxix). 62 Hutchinson, ‘Introduction’, in Moses’s Principia: Part II, p. xxvii. 63 On Hutchinson’s approach to revelation, see C.D.A. Leighton, ‘“Knowledge of divine things”: a study of Hutchinsonianism’, History of European Ideas 26:3–4 (2000), 159–75 (pp. 162–3), and Albert J. Kuhn, ‘Glory or gravity; Hutchinson vs. Newton’, Journal of the History of Ideas 22:3 (1961), 303–22 (p. 305). 64 Hutchinson, Moses’s Sine Principio: Represented by Names, by Types, by Words, by Emblems, in The Philosophical and Theological Works, III, 50–1. 65 Forbes, Letter to a Bishop, p. 47. Forbes notes further that hallelujah (‫‘ )הללויה‬transcribed, without translating … signifies properly and undoubtedly Irradiation to Jah, or ascribe ye Irradiation to the Essence’ (p. 48). The implications of the light/God analogy in Hebrew is adopted by Smart in Jubilate Agno: ‘For L is love. God in every language. … For L is light, and ‫ ל‬is the line of beauty.’ Jubilate Agno, Fragment B, lines 523 and 548. For discussions of Smart’s connection to Hutchinsonian thought, see Karina Williamson, ‘Smart’s Principia: science and antiscience in Jubilate Agno’, RES 30:120 (1979), 409–22 (pp. 416–17), and Marcus Walsh, ‘Smart’s pillars and the Hutchinsonians’, Notes and Queries 33 (1986), 67–70. 66 ‘[T]here is a created fluid Substance in, and by which the Orbs move, which the first Heathens knew to be a Machine composed of three Parts, yet took it for their God; and to which the later Heathens, from whom we have our Language, gave the Attributes of Eternal, Infinite, all Eye, all Hand, &c.’ (Hutchinson, Moses’s Principia: Part II, p. 25). See G.N. Cantor, ‘Revelation and the Cyclical Cosmos of John Hutchinson’, in L.J. Jordanova and Roy S. Porter (eds), Images of the Earth: Essays in the History of the Environmental Sciences (Chalfont St Giles: British Society for the History of Science, 1979), pp. 3–22 (pp. 8–9).

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67 John Hutchinson, Moses’s Principia: Part I: Containing an Account of the Dissolution and Reformation of the World, in The Philosophical and Theological Works, I, 15. 68 Hutchinson, Moses’s Principia: Part II, p. 191; Samuel Pike, Philosophia Sacra: or, the Principles of Natural Philosophy Extracted from Divine Revelation (London: Printed for the Author, 1753), p. 46. 69 Price, ‘“In one harmonious song combine”’, p. 198. On paraphrases of this text, see also William Powell Jones, ‘Science in biblical paraphrases in eighteenth-century England’, PMLA 74:1 (1959), 41–51 (p. 44). 70 Mary Chudleigh, The Song of the Three Children Paraphrased, in The Poems and Prose of Mary, Lady Chudleigh, pp. 167–241, lines 473 and 474. 71 The original verse reads: ‘O ye spirits and souls of the righteous, bless ye the Lord: praise and exalt him above all for ever.’ The focus on temperance fits well with the Lucretian nuances of Chudleigh’s ­materialism. 72 Margaret Ezell, ‘Introduction’, in The Poems and Prose of Mary, Lady Chudleigh, pp. xvii–xxxv (pp. xxvi–xxvii). 73 Rousseau, ‘Science and the discovery of the imagination’, p. 115. See also Margaret Koehler’s revision of this shift in terms of active attention in Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century. 74 Mallet, The Excursion, p. 9. 75 [John Ellis], The Knowledge of Divine Things from Revelation Not from Reason or Nature (London: Watts and others, 1743), p. 96. 76 ‘Know thine own point … / Whatever is, is right.’ Pope, An Essay on Man, Epistle I, lines 283 and 294. 77 Hobson’s focus is more securely focused on the possibilities of revelation, rather than the limitations on human knowledge. 78 Derham, Astro-Theology, p. 162. 79 Megan Kitching, ‘“When Universal Nature I Survey”: Philosophical Poetry before 1750’, in Joanna Fowler and Allan Ingram (eds), Voice and Context in Eighteenth-Century Verse: Order in Variety (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 83–100 (pp. 86–7). 80 Kitching, ‘“When Universal Nature I Survey”’, p. 91. 81 Newton, Opticks (1730), p. 98.

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But for the magic Organ’s powerful charm, Earth were a rude, uncolour’d Chaos still. Objects are but the occasion; Ours th’ Exploit; Ours is the Cloth, the Pencil, and the Paint, Which Nature’s admirable Picture draws; And beautifies Creation’s ample Dome. Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742–46), Night VI, lines 429–34.

3

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Seeing in colour

Eighteenth-century topographical poems frequently present an enlightened viewer surveying the landscape from a point of elevation. In Book I of Creation, Richard Blackmore encourages his reader to view the well-ordered ‘Theater’ of the world: Now view the Earth in finish’d Beauty drest: The various Scenes, which various Charms display, Thro’ all th’ extended Theater survey.1

The image of the natural world as a performance space to be viewed, perhaps recalling Fontenelle’s physico-theological machinery, is underscored by the repeated language of vision (‘see’, ‘observe’, ‘take the Prospect’) which suggests a surface landscape that can be read and verbally recreated. A later example of this perspective is found in John Scott’s 1776 poem Amwell, which uses evocative sensory imagery to convey the experience of the landscape to the reader. Scott invokes the ‘Descriptive Muse’:2     Vouchsafe thine aid: From all our rich varieties of view, What best may please, assist me to select, With art dispose, with energy describe, And its full image on the mind express. (lines 19–23)

This description of an image being ‘expressed’ on the mind, a modification of the process of impression described in Locke’s Essay, promotes a sense of physical, material engagement. The narrator’s stated aim is to replicate the ‘full image’ of the landscape in the minds of his readers through a communicative technique

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that requires accurate selection of material and energetic description. Notably, the activities of selection and disposition resonate with accounts of Scott’s own enthusiastic landscaping of the gardens around Amwell House.3 Margaret Koehler identifies poetic engagements of this kind as ‘experimental’, and the philosophical approach taken here certainly meets with her description of this genre as ‘attending as comprehensively as possible to all the stimuli that make up a landscape’.4 I argue in this chapter that poets’ employment of detailed descriptions and their appeals to perception can be read as a process of training readers to view the world philosophically. In this scheme, the prospect poet who surveys the world from a point of elevation  and separation represents the observing and categorising philosophical mind. Colour emerges as a key category in  the empirical  analysis and description of the landscape. See,  for  instance, this description of the sunrise in Thomson’s Summer: But yonder comes the powerful King of Day Rejoicing in the East. The lessening Cloud, The kindling Azure, and the Mountain’s Brow Illum’d with fluid Gold, his near Approach Betoken glad. Lo! now apparent all, Aslant the dew-bright Earth, and colour’d Air, He looks in boundless Majesty abroad.5

The evocation of presence and the direct address demand the perceptive engagement of the reader. Observation of the landscape also fulfils a didactic function, as Thomson combines allegorical references to the ‘King of Day’ and his majestic light with a description of the causal relationship between illumination and ‘colour’d Air’. Thomson also trains his readers in the perception and identification of specific colours, as exemplified in the following description of the changing shades of autumnal woods: But see the fading many-colour’d Woods, Shade deepening over Shade, the Country round Imbrown; a crowded Umbrage, dusk, and dun, Of every Hue, from wan declining Green To sooty Dark.6

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The reader is encouraged to recognise specific colours as well as light’s function in their appearance and the role of ‘umbrage’ or shade in their diminution. Thomson’s vivid description of colour production as a process – drawing on the active colouring of the environment as ‘imbrowning’, the autumnal ‘declining green’, and the tautologically intensified ‘sooty dark’ – prompts the reader to perceive colour scientifically. Topographical poems of this period highlight the interplay between the presentation and reception of colour as a bedrock of human empirical experience and the challenge that Newton’s Opticks presented to a common-sense documentation of colour and colour vision. As Marjorie Hope Nicolson noted in Newton Demands the Muse, ‘[t]o the descriptive poets of the Age of Newton, light was the source of beauty because it was the source of color’.7 However, I go beyond this early description of the aesthetic utility of Newtonian optics for poets by considering perception, the role of the individual viewer, and analogical references. I focus in particular on the processes by which writers manipulate and train readers’ perception of colour through technical explanations of colour processes and creative analogies that establish the nature of colour’s production in relation to phenomena and individual perception. The next section of this chapter argues that Newton’s explanations of colour production and perception produce a unique challenge to natural description in this period by emphasising the centrality of subjective experience. The third section ­ considers challenges to the analogical significance of colour categories by looking at representations of the rainbow and individual colours and how they are  observed in religious, natural-philosophical, and literary texts. In the fourth section, I introduce the alternatives to Newton’s account of colour presented by Louis-Bertrand Castel and George Berkeley to explain further the challenges of representing colour perception. The final section of the chapter examines the techniques used by a range of natural philosophical and physico-theological poets to present colour and its experience accurately through analogy. By exploring the valuation, representation, and replication of colours in natural descriptions, I therefore consider the influence of optical science on a property that is usually associated with creativity by showing how

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writers use analogies for colour and its experience to train readers to perceive the p ­ henomenal world in new ways.

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Locating and perceiving colour In his 1756 Seatonian Prize poem ‘On the Goodness of the Supreme Being’, Christopher Smart presents the numerous colours of the natural world as indicative of its plenitude: Without the aid of yonder golden globe Lost were the garnet’s lustre, lost the lilly [sic], The tulip and auricula’s spotted pride; Lost were the peacock’s plumage, to the sight So pleasing in its pomp and glossy glow. O thrice-illustrious! were it not for thee Those pansies, that reclining from the bank, View thro’ th’ immaculate, pellucid stream Their portraiture in the inverted heaven, Might as well change their triple boast, the white, The purple, and the gold, that far outvie The Eastern monarch’s garb, ev’n with the dock, Ev’n with the baneful hemlock’s irksome green.8

Without the sun, Smart explains, the vast array of colours in this natural environment would be eliminated. References to ‘yonder golden globe’ and the pansies’ reflection in the ‘inverted  heaven’  of  the stream acknowledge sunlight’s and sight’s  function in constructing colour. Even from a poet with a  famously ambivalent relationship to empirical science, this natural description displays an awareness of modern optics and an engagement with colours’ properties beyond their aesthetic appeal.9 In the decades succeeding the dissemination of Newton’s optical discoveries, colour began to be understood more widely as an optical phenomenon determined by physical properties and perceptual processes. Newton’s initial theories about colour were published some thirty years before Opticks in a letter addressed to the Royal Society and printed in the Philosophical Transactions in February 1672. The much-quoted opening of the letter describing



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his prism experiments establishes Newton’s experimental approach, apparatus, and purpose: [I]n the beginning of the Year 1666 (at which time I applyed my self to the grinding of Optick glasses of other figures than Spherical,) I procured me a Triangular glass-Prisme, to try therewith the celebrated Phænomena of Colours. And in order thereto having darkened my chamber, and made a small hole in my window-shuts, to let in a convenient quantity of the Suns light, I placed my Prisme at his entrance, that it might be thereby refracted to the opposite wall. It was at first a very pleasing divertisement, to view the vivid and intense colours produced thereby; but after a while [I applied] my self to consider them more circumspectly.10

As Charles Bazerman notes, this account drew immediate critical responses from Hooke, Huygens, Ignace-Gaston Pardies, and other natural philosophers, which resulted in a series of published exchanges in Philosophical Transactions through which Newton refined and clarified his approach.11 Although Newton’s prism experiments had been preceded by similar demonstrations by Robert Boyle and others, they garnered wider recognition and poetic engagement than earlier examples thanks to the publication of Opticks in English, public lectures in experimental philosophy replicating the optical demonstrations, and didactic dialogues such as Francesco Algarotti’s popularisation of Newton ‘for the Use of the Ladies’, Martin’s Young Gentleman and Lady’s Philosophy, and Newbery’s Newtonian System of Philosophy.12 Newton’s description of his first refraction experiment also offers a seemingly simple approach to observing colour production. The casual first-person presentation suggests a repeatable process of observation that can be carried out at home should the necessary prism be ‘procured’ (in fact, this is precisely what Martin’s characters do in their lesson on colour).13 Despite this suggestion of simplicity, Newton’s ideas about the composite nature of light  and  the production and perception of colour run counter to traditional common-sense assumptions.14 The 1672 letter challenges earlier accounts that are based on colour as it is experienced in the phenomenal world, connecting it instead to light’s refrangibility:

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As the Rays of light differ in degrees of Refrangibility, so they also differ in their disposition to exhibit this or that particular colour. Colours are not Qualifications of Light, derived from Refractions, or Reflections of natural Bodies (as ’tis generally believed,) but Original and connate properties, which in divers Rays are divers. Some Rays are disposed to exhibit a red colour and no other; some a yellow and no other, some a green and no other, and so of the rest. Nor are there only Rays proper and particular to the more eminent colours, but even to all their intermediate gradations. (p. 3081)

Newton shows that colours are not effects that are ‘derived from’ the manipulation of light by the prism, but that the prism causes each ray of light to display its own refractive property. This idea is applied to specific colours in the second proposition, where Newton describes a direct ‘Analogy ’twixt colours, and refrangibility’: The least Refrangible Rays are all disposed to exhibit a Red colour, and contrarily those Rays, which are disposed to exhibit a Red colour, are all the least refrangible: So the most refrangible Rays are all disposed to exhibit a deep Violet Colour, and contrarily those which are apt to exhibit such a violet colour, are all the most Refrangible. And so to all the intermediate colours in a continued series belong intermediate degrees of refrangibility. (p. 3081)

Colour is therefore explained by the property of refrangibility (a term coined by Newton) within each ray of light. As Dennis Sepper notes, Newton shows that ‘color, or more precisely the quality of producing color, is inherent not in physical bodies or in the eye but in rays’.15 The thirteenth proposition in the letter relates the refrangible rays to the colours of phenomenal objects to show how colour is a property of light rather than objects: ‘the Colours of all natural Bodies have no other origin than this, that they are variously qualified to reflect one sort of light in greater plenty then [sic] another’ (p. 3084). The language of this early letter is deceptively simple. Good empiricist that he is, Newton avoids discussing causes that he cannot determine through experimental demonstrations, and he does not explain what these reflecting qualities might be.16 Newton’s statements about light’s refrangibility feed into a longstanding debate about the location of colour which informs the language that writers use to talk about its nature and the challenges



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of understanding it as a physical phenomenon. Earlier accounts of colour distinguished between the ‘apparent’ or ‘emphatic’ colours produced by prisms or seen in rainbows and ‘real’ colours in objects. In chapter 4 of Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664), Boyle notes that colours are not inherent in objects, and he uses the evidence of sensory experience to argue that all colours, emphatic or not, are real and affective rather than imaginary: Now since we are wont to esteem the Echoes and other Sounds of Bodies, to be True Sounds, all their Odours to be True Odours, and (to be short) since we judge other Sensible Qualities to be True ones, because they are the proper Objects of some or other of our Senses, I see not why Emphatical Colours, being the proper and peculiar Objects of the Organ of Sight, and capable to Affect it as Truly and as Powerfully as other Colours, should be reputed but Imaginary ones.17

In the 1704 Opticks, Newton takes this idea further to suggest that colours are purely optical phenomena. He argues that they are internal sensations created in the eye by the light reflected from luminous or illuminated bodies and that they have no extra-mental existence in physical objects: ‘Every Body reflects the rays of its own Colour more copiously than the rest, and from their excess and predominance in the reflected Light has its Colour’.18 By aligning colour’s production with the refraction and reflection of light, Newton shows that objects are not themselves coloured even as we see them as such.19 In the Queries to the 1704 Opticks, Newton explores the perception of light and colour, which he links to the operation of the eye itself. Query 12 describes the entry of light into the eye and its reception by the retina and optic nerves: Do not the rays of Light in falling upon the bottom of the Eye excite vibrations in the Tunica retina? Which vibrations, being propagated along the solid fibres of the optick Nerves into the Brain, cause the sense of seeing. For because dense Bodies conserve their heat a long time, and the densest Bodies conserve their heat the longest, the vibrations of their parts are of a lasting nature, and therefore may be propagated along solid fibres of uniform dense matter to a great distance, for conveying into the Brain the impressions made upon all

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the Organs of sense. For that motion which can continue long in one and the same part of a Body, can be propagated a long way from one part to another, supposing the Body homogeneal, so that the motion may not be reflected, refracted, interrupted or disordered by any ­unevenness of the Body. (Book II, p. 135)

In the subsequent query, Newton connects the vibrations in the retina to the refrangibility of different rays, with the most refrangible rays with the shortest vibrations causing the sensation of violet and the least refrangible rays having the longest vibrations causing the sensation of red. Colour, by Newton’s account, is a sensory effect of the vibrations caused by rays reflected and refracted by objects touching the eye and exciting various levels of vibrations which are carried from the retina to the brain along optic nerves. Crucially, it is only in this transmission that the rays of light become colour as it is perceived.20 Newton’s account of colour as a property of light affected by the internal processes of the eye poses a challenge for colour description. For example, the third of Addison’s essays ‘On the Pleasures of the Imagination’ grapples with the concept of a colourless world. ‘Things would make but a poor Appearance to the Eye, if we saw them only in their proper Figures and Motions’, Addison claims, as he seeks analogies for the mental experience of colour:21 [W]hat a rough unsightly Sketch of Nature should we be entertained with, did all her Colouring disappear, and the several Distinctions of Light and Shade vanish? In short, our Souls are at present delightfully lost and bewildered in a pleasing Delusion and we walk about like the Enchanted Hero of a Romance who sees beautiful Castles, Woods, and Meadows; and at the same time hears the warbling of Birds and the purling of Streams; but upon the finishing of some secret Spell the fantastick Scene breaks up, and the disconsolate Knight finds himself on a barren Heath, or in a solitary Desart. It is not improbable that something like this may be the State of the Soul after its first Separation, in respect of the Images it will receive from Matter; tho’ indeed the Ideas of Colours are so pleasing and beautiful in the Imagination, that it is possible the Soul will not be deprived of them, but perhaps find them excited by some other occasional Cause, as they are at present by the different Impressions of the subtle Matter on the Organ of Sight. (pp. 546–7)

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Addison conducts an imaginative exercise of reconstructing a world that is colourless without the presence of either viewer or light. This idea of a colourless world is transmitted through enargeia in a fictitious analogy of a knight whose delightful landscape of castles and streams disappears at a moment.22 Richard Cronin identifies the concept of a colourless world as both unconvincing and recognisably neoclassical.23 Katherine Myers, however, notes that it shows a crucial engagement with theories of vision proposed by Locke and Berkeley.24 Addison’s fantastic description brings to life earlier anxieties that colour is only a ‘pleasing’ and misleading illusion, whilst also suggesting a new awareness of the function of the eye’s perceptions: the soul will not be able to see colour without material eyes to receive the rays that are reflected by objects.25 His struggle to conceptualise colour as it is divorced from objects demonstrates a general problem that was encountered by eighteenth-century writers who chose to engage with the new optical science: colour experience is not communal.

Counting colours Depictions of colour in eighteenth-century landscape poetry frequently bring together analysis and appreciative observation: in Edge-Hill (1767) Richard Jago describes how a prospect view attracts both ‘Fancy’s Eye’ and ‘th’ enlightened Sense’,26 and Henry Brooke’s Universal Beauty (1735) boldly claims that ‘Reason’s task is, only to Adore’.27 Colour and colours carry aesthetic and spiritual associations, and these analogical lenses were frequently applied in new ways after Newton’s publications on colour. The preconceptions that needed to be revised when observing colour after Newton are nowhere more visible than in descriptions of rainbows, which, as a more immediately comprehensible indicator of the relationship between light and colour than other natural phenomena, become a helpful focal point for thinking about the subjectivity of colour experience and colour interpretation. Whilst the technical explanation of the rainbow predates Opticks quite significantly, and the only major new observation was the identification of seven precise colours, the knowledgeable perception of refraction

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is closely ­associated with Newton’s work in its popular and literary reception. The physico-theology legacy of the rainbow as a token of divine mercy is also relevant, and the effort to categorise colours is seen, alternately, as a stranglehold upon religious and creative expression or as a facilitator of descriptive possibilities. Beginning with the rainbow, this section explores the scientific and literary representation of colour perception through reference to individual and general colours in Newton’s spectrum. In his account of scientific stock diction, John Arthos suggests that the terminology used to describe the natural world shifts when new theories are introduced: Terms of a scientific sort of are … meaningful in reference to a system of concepts which have been formed to explain the nature of the universe. And since changes of meaning come with changes of systems and philosophies, the ideal scientific term would supply an  exact reference to the particular scheme of thought and ultimately  the philosophy which authorized its use in a particular context.28

In line with this observation, Newton’s description of the spectrum and the production and experience of colour as a perceptual phenomenon caused by the refraction and reflection of varied rays offers new possibilities for precision in colour naming and presentation that are particularly vital for natural description and didactic writing. Julia L. Epstein and Mark L. Greenberg’s description of the natural philosophical aim to produce ‘an appropriate language not just to describe nature, but to indicate the thing described’ can also be applied to prospect poets who cherished the visual sense and aimed to replicate the experience of vision in their work.29 As we investigate colour references, we should therefore pay attention not only to the colour terms applied, but also to descriptions of the situation and experience of colour vision. For many writers, colour holds biblical significance, both in the symbolism of individual colours, with bright shades such as red traditionally carrying negative associations and blue connoting purity, and in terms of the analogical heft borne by the symbol of the rainbow in the Old Testament.30 The rainbow appears in Genesis as a sign of God’s covenant with Noah after the Flood:

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Seeing in colour 129 And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth. And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth. (Genesis 9:12–16)

This reading of the rainbow as the spiritual sign of a covenant between God and humans recurs in the Book of Revelation and is familiar throughout medieval and early modern ­literature.31 Its association with spiritual mystery endured long after Newtonianism: Thomas Campbell greets the ‘triumphal arch’ as a ‘sacred sign’ of ‘Heaven’s covenant’, and Wordsworth’s ‘heart leaps up’ when, seeing ‘a rainbow in the sky’, he recognises a covenant ‘of natural piety’.32 This symbolic correspondence, and the status of the rainbow as a sign from God revealed in the natural world, help to explain a tendency amongst some writers to resist its categorisation into composite parts produced by analysable and manipulable phenomena. In his 1672 letter, Newton enumerates seven ‘Original or primary colours’: ‘Red, Yellow, Green, Blew, and a Violet-purple, together with Orange, [and] Indico’ (p. 3082). That he identifies these colours in the context of ‘an indefinite variety of Intermediate gradations’ (p. 3082) shows how colour recognition is itself a process of categorisation. Newton looks to the analogy with the heptatonic musical scale to select seven primary colours whose rays combine to provide an infinite number of compound colours.33 The musical analogy plays into both cultural assumptions about harmony and empiricist views about different kinds of sensory experience. The seven ‘Original or primary colours’ are also employed in Newton’s description of the rainbow in Opticks (an event which forms the basis of colour description for poets such as Thomson and Akenside):

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This Bow never appears but where it rains in the Sun-shine, and may be made artificially by spouting up Water which may break aloft, and scatter into Drops, and fall down like Rain. For the Sun shining upon these Drops certainly causes the Bow to appear to a Spectator standing in a due position to the Rain and Sun. And hence it is now agreed upon, that this Bow is made by refraction of the Sun’s Light in Drops of falling Rain. This was understood by some of the Ancients, and of late more fully discovered and explained by the Famous Antonius de Dominis Archbishop of Spilato … The same Explication Des-Cartes hath pursued in his Meteors, and mended that of the exterior Bow. (Book I, pp. 126–7)

The rainbow is described here as a physical phenomenon produced in certain natural conditions by the refraction and internal reflection of light in raindrops (see figure 5) which can be replicated artificially with a prism. The activities of colour identification and ordering align with James Elkins’s definition of analogy as a form of organising perception, where ‘analogies allow us to see bodies where we might see meaningless aggregates, formless matter or “substrate”’, and where ‘the need for analogies is deep-rooted in our habits of seeing’.34 Elkins’s description could be taken as a motto for the whole project

Figure 5  Observing a rainbow. Isaac Newton, Opticks (London: Smith and Walford, 1704), Book I, Part II, plate IV, figure 15.

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of empirical science, but it is particularly useful as we consider the appetite to categorise, define, and replicate colour in eighteenthcentury poetry.35 In discussions of landscape poetry of this period, the specificity and scientific accuracy of Thomson’s writing is frequently singled out for celebration. As Robert Shiells notes in his Lives of the Poets (1753), ‘[Thomson’s] manner of writing is entirely his own: He has … created a kind of new language for himself’ to produce a specificity of description, which each ‘object he paints stands full before the eye’: [W]e admire it in all its lustre, and who would not rather enjoy a perfect inspection into a natural curiosity through a microscope capable of discovering all the minute beauties, though its exterior form should not be comely, than perceive an object but faintly, through a microscope ill adapted for the purpose, however its outside may be decorated.36

For Shiells, the ‘perfect inspection’ of Thomson’s descriptive writing is valuable for its accurate representation of natural beauty rather than the aesthetic qualities of his expression. The comparison to a microscope is consonant with Thomson’s own optical awareness, shown through his references to the ‘straining Eye’ (Summer, line 1689) and the ‘sage-instructed Eye’ (Spring, line 210) of the observer.37 In Spring, two adjacent perspectives on the rainbow demonstrate some of the analogical approaches already outlined: Meantime refracted from yon eastern Cloud, Bestriding Earth, the grand ethereal Bow Shoots up immense; and every Hue unfolds, In fair Proportion, running from the Red, To where the Violet fades into the Sky. Here, awful Newton, the dissolving Clouds Form, fronting on the Sun, thy showery Prism; And to the sage-instructed Eye unfold The various Twine of Light, by thee disclos’d From the white-mingling Maze. Not so the Swain, He wondering views the bright Enchantment bend, Delightful, o’er the radiant Fields, and runs To catch the falling Glory; but amaz’d Beholds th’ amusive Arch before him fly, Then vanish quite away. (lines 203–17)

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Thomson presents two ways of looking at a rainbow. The first ten lines describe a Newtonian version of colour, in which the rainbow is viewed in a ‘fair Proportion’ of shades running in refrangibility from red to violet, where each ray can be individually identified. Refraction is represented, with the raindrops acting as ‘showery Prism[s]’ of rays which are then received by the eye. William Kent’s illustration for Spring in the 1730 edition of The Seasons, with its  neat seven-band rainbow which is reflected in water, corroborates the empirical account (see figure 6).38 The alternative experience of the swain exemplifies a pre-Newtonian idea of enchantment and mystery: the rainbow is transitory, uncategorisable, and without physical cause or end. No individual colours are identified in the swain’s view, which focuses instead on the ‘amusive’ and mysterious nature of the ‘vanishing’ colours. In an oft-quoted passage in The Pleasures of Imagination, Akenside provides a thoroughly Newtonian account of the spectrum, calling on ‘the hand of science’ to explain the rainbow’s production through the refraction of raindrops. This passage demonstrates scientific perception in action as the ‘understanding’s eye’ appraises the rainbow as part of a celebration of empirical ­knowledge and its relationship with aesthetic beauty: For man loves knowledge, and the beams of truth More welcome touch his understanding’s eye, Than all the blandishments of sound his ear, Than all of taste his tongue. Nor ever yet The melting rainbow’s vernal-tinctur’d hues To me have shone so pleasing, as when first The hand of science pointed out the path In which the sun-beams gleaming from the west Fall on the watry cloud, whose darksome veil Involves the orient; and that trickling show’r Piercing through ev’ry crystalline convex Of clustering dew-drops to their flight oppos’d Recoil at length where concave all behind Th’ internal surface of each glassy orb Repells their forward passage into air; That thence direct they seek the radiant goal From which their course began; and, as they strike

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Figure 6  Full-page plate of Spring, designed by William Kent, engraved by N. Tardieu, in James Thomson, The Seasons (London: Millar, 1730). In diff’rent lines the gazer’s obvious eye, Assume a different lustre, through the brede Of colours changing from the splendid rose To the pale violet’s dejected hue.39

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The appearance of the ‘splendid rose’ and the ‘pale violet’ is seen differently (given ‘a different lustre’) by the clearing away of mystery and the newly precise language that is permitted by Newton’s ‘proof by experiments’. The individual experience of colour therefore becomes a paradigm for empirical perception. Importantly, Akenside emphasises not just a single abstract viewer but the subjective perception of the narrator, whose knowledge affects their sensory experiences. As Nicolson notes, Akenside is always concerned with the clarity of sight achieved by reason against the confusion of the imagination.40 This description outlines a complete process: the sun-beams pierce the rounded ‘convex’ of the raindrops; they are reflected in different lines of refrangibility, and are perceived by the viewer as different ‘lustres’ or colours. The result is one of aesthetic judgement. The colours are imbued with their own ‘splendid’ or ‘dejected’ properties, but it is the viewer’s knowledge of this process that makes it a ‘pleasing’ experience. There is also a possible physico-theological reading here that reformulates the older model of the rainbow as a token in favour of correct perception. Akenside’s analogical reference to ‘the beams of truth’ implies both the physical ‘sun-beams’ that are refracted to produce the rainbow and the experience of enlightening knowledge. Akenside’s description was followed just one year later by Thomas Hobson’s physico-theological celebration of ‘seven-fold Light’ in Christianity the Light of the Moral World (1745):   We own Thy strong attractive force, thy bounteous stream Of seven-fold Light; whose variegated ray, Reflected various, calls forth every charm Where beauty blushes, or where colours glow, In the bright ruby or the tulip gay. But vital influence from Him descends, Whose all-commanding fiat first brought forth, And into full perfection spoke, the whole.41

The description of the sun as the product of God’s creative fiat is enlivened further by its characterisation as the source of colour from ‘variegated ray[s]’. Hobson’s description of light-produced and reflected colour is distinctly Newtonian.

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Of course, colour perception involves all daily experiences, not just gazing at rainbows, and descriptions incorporating Newtonian optics must recognise that the production of all colour in all physical phenomena occurs through a process of refraction and reflection that is experienced through perception. In Opticks, Newton makes frequent reference to how colour ‘appears’ in objects and how compound colours (‘a sensation of a mean Colour between [rays’] proper Colours’) are produced in the ‘Sensorium’ of the viewer as a product of perception rather than of the modification of light rays (Book I, p. 118).42 The sensation of new, mixed colours in the mind, in which the ‘colorifick qualities’ (Book I, p. 118) of rays are not changed, weakened, or compromised, is analogous to the literary-philosophical theory of ideal presence, where the c­ ompleting features of a sketched-out landscape are supplied by the mind. Epstein and Greenberg explore this connection and its relationship to ‘deliberately unfinished or unelaborated verse, painting, and music [that] depended for their completion upon the reader’s, spectator’s, or listener’s imaginative engagement and active artistic complicity’.43 As we shall see here, the numbering  and naming of colours, the specificity or openness of such images, and  explanatory descriptions of their occurrence and perception in the natural environment became for natural-­ philosophical poets ways to access and stimulate individual perception and experience in the reader. Newton’s severance of colours from the physical phenomena that display them produces further challenges for poetic description because writers must engage the perceptive faculties of the reader to evoke colour vision. Richard Waller’s 1687 ‘Catalogue of Simple and Mixt Colours’ provides one solution with its charts of pigments ranging from ceruse or white lead to ‘lamp-black’. This is presented as an unambiguous ‘Standard of Colours’, which its author claims to be ‘yet a thing wanting in Philosophy’:44 Not that I pretend to give the Shades of all the mixt Colours, which were indeed infinite as the Compositions and Proportions of them may be unlimited; but I have mixt each of the Simple Yellows and Reds and each of the simple Blews, and these Mixtures give most of the mean colours, viz, Greens, Purples, &c. (p. 24)

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Though it provides Latin, Greek, English, and French colour terms, this table bypasses the need for translation, and Waller envisions its use for identifying and communicating the colours of a plant through a systematic reading. Waller’s solution to the problem of communicating colour is an objective record that does not require engaging with the individual’s experience of colour perception. There is, of course, no literary equivalent to this catalogue: poets cannot colour their words. W.B. Hutchings notes this challenge in his critique of Thomson’s description of ‘the yellow Wall-Flower, stain’d with iron Brown’ in Spring (line 533): What the description cannot do … is to simulate us to the illusion that we are actually looking at the object: it cannot form a total representation. We hear the poet rather than see the object, for we judge the appropriateness of the selection of words according to our consensual system of signs; and we might also notice, in this example, how the hand of the writer betrays its awareness of human processes in the use of the artistic, not natural, metaphor of staining.45

Colour experience is therefore something that cannot be wholly transmitted through a verbal shorthand of colour naming. Even Thomson struggles to replicate the abundant plenitude of the natural world and to transmit it to his readers: ‘who can paint / Like Nature?’ he asks, ‘Can Imagination boast, / Amid its gay Creation, Hues like hers?’ (Spring, lines 468–70). Later in Spring, Thomson describes an intricate garden that is dizzying in its variety of flowers. Each shade is enumerated, from the ‘Violet darkly blue’ (line 531) and ‘Renunculas, of glowing Red’ (line 538) to the ‘varied Colours’ of the tulips (line 542) and ‘Hyacinths, of purest virgin White’ (line 547).46 The colours produce a sensory assault of ‘Infinite Numbers, Delicacies, Smells, / With Hues on Hues Expression cannot paint’, showing ‘The Breath of Nature, and her endless Bloom’ (lines 553–5). Whilst the florist shows pride in ‘the Wonders of His Hand’ (line 544), the source of this visual variety is clearly divine (not least because, as Patricia Meyer Spacks has noted, this ‘endless Bloom’ miraculously combines plants that flower at different times).47 The resulting show of overwhelming plenitude builds towards a celebration of the ‘Source of Beings’ (line 556) whose ‘Master-hand’ has ‘the great Whole into Perfection touch’d’ (lines 559–50).

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Akenside’s The Pleasures of Imagination is similarly inflected with Newtonian and Lockean empirical detail. At the beginning of Book I, Akenside presents himself as a ‘youthful bard’ (Book I, line 26) whose senses will be instructed by ‘finer sounds’ and ‘the bloom of nature’ (lines 28–9). From his opening invocations to ‘Genii’ (line 25) – including ‘Musical delight’ (line 7), ‘Fancy’ (line 10), ‘Truth’ (line 23) and ‘Fiction’ – Akenside aligns colour with plenitude, creativity, and learning: Let Fiction come, upon her fragrant wings Wafting ten thousand colours thro’ the air, Which, by the glances of her magic eye, She blends and shifts at will thro’ countless forms, Her wild creation. (Book I, lines 14–18)

By personifying Fiction, the poet both suggests a creative avenue for colours’ uncategorisable shades and highlights the role of perception and the imagination in constructing colour.

Alternative accounts Newton’s account of colour is by no means the final word on the matter, and there is considerable debate throughout the period about colour and colouring as well as the site – material, optical, or spiritual – of its production.48 Some of these alternative theories became important for philosophical and physico-theological descriptions of light in the natural world that explore the relationship between divine and human agency and perception. George Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713, rev. 1734) collapses altogether the distinction between colour as a property of light and the material nature of phenomenal objects in favour of an idealist conception of the natural world where nothing has material substance.49 Colour is central to Berkeley’s argument in the first dialogue. He draws together prism experiments, which cause ‘the whitest [light] to appear of a deep blue or red to the naked eye’, and microscope images which show no colour at all – even though (he argues) ‘they should be ‘more genuine and real than those perceived otherwise’ – to suggest that colour lacks real existence.50

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This concept forms the foundation for the philosopher’s central argument that ‘no idea can exist without the mind’, which is based on the following questions: ‘Can a real thing in itself invisible be like a colour, or a real thing which is not audible be like a sound? In a word, can anything be like a sensation or idea, but another sensation or idea?’ (p. 189). Berkeley’s idealist argument therefore uses the experience of colour to destabilise any sense of phenomenal existence beyond mental experiences. At the other extreme, Thomas Reid’s An Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764) presents the ‘visual language’ of the natural world as distinct from its reality, whilst also maintaining a materialist argument of the ‘real’ colours of objects, whether they are unmediated or seen through colour-changing media (such as jaundiced eyes or coloured glass): ‘The common language of mankind shows evidently, that we ought to distinguish the colour of a body, which is conceived to be a fixed and permanent quality of it, from the appearance of that colour to the eye, which may be varied a thousand ways depending on the light, the medium, or the eye itself.’51 By using colour perception to distinguish between phenomenal reality and appearance, Reid is able to call on readers’ own visual and mental experiences. The topic of colour therefore allows both Berkeley and Reid to posit alternative ideas about both perception and reality, showing the centrality of colour as an analogy for the relationship between perception and knowledge. A striking experimental alternative to Newton’s colour theory is presented in Louis-Bertrand Castel’s Optique des couleurs, which was published in Paris in 1740.52 A French Jesuit, Castel had been admitted to the Royal Society in 1730. Castel’s anti-Newtonianism is rooted in his religious rejection of mathematical abstraction in favour of a tangible and observable account of creation.53 He therefore rejected Newton’s mathematical account of light, taking instead a mechanistic approach to colour which he developed through experiments in the 1730s with mixing paints and manipulating materials such as paper and dyed cloths. Castel argues in his Optique that black is the origin of colour, demonstrating this through the heating of a piece of iron: ‘D’une espece de noir dont il y paroît d’abord, il devient bleu, violet, rouge, jaune, & enfin blanc, ce qui est son dernier dégré, après lequel il n’y a plus de nouvelles couleurs’ (‘Appearing black to begin with, it will become blue, then violet,

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then red, then yellow, and finally white, which is the last stage, after which there are no new colours’; pp. 46–7, my translation). From this experiment, Castel surmises that the primary colours of blue, red, and yellow exist as the principal colours between black and white and that all other colours are nuances of these three shades. Castel’s observed spectrum consists of twelve colours in a continuous circle: blue, celadon (a light green), green, olive, yellow, fallow (pale brown), nacarat (orange), red, carmine (a deep purplish red), violet, agate, and violaceous (pp. 283 and ­299–300).54 He also posits that each of the twelve colours can be divided further to produce a colour circle of 144 distinct shades (p. 480). Castel’s propositions about the individual experience of colour are comparable with Christopher Smart’s non-experimental colour sequence of twelve blended shades. Smart’s colour spectrum in Fragment B of Jubilate Agno is one of the most sustained and vivid analogies for an alternative, non-Newtonian physico-theology in his oeuvre.55 Smart draws on the perceived universality of colour as an expression of divine order. His use of the Greek expression αλογος (literally ‘without the word’) signals that his stance is quite the opposite of natural philosophy, as he claims that anything that originates from human conjecture alone is faulty, unless it is from innate knowledge given by God: For Newton’s notion of colours is αλογος unphilosophical. For the colours are spiritual. For WHITE is the first and the best. For there are many intermediate colours, before you come to SILVER. For the next colour is a lively GREY. For the next colour is BLUE. For the next is GREEN of which there are ten thousand distinct sorts. For the next is YELLOW which is more excellent than red, tho Newton makes red the prime. God be gracious to John Delap. For RED is the next working round the Orange. For Red is of sundry sorts till it deepens to BLACK. For black blooms and it is PURPLE. For purple works off to BROWN which is of ten thousand acceptable shades. For the next is PALE. God be gracious to William Whitehead. For pale works back to White again.56

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The inclusion of black and white in the list suggests two things. First, the implied progression from light to dark colours suggests the Aristotelian idea of colour as different quantities of white and black mixed together. Second, the poet is concerned with a theory of colour formation (or colouring) that is based upon artists’ theories of pigment mixing rather than the Newtonian explanation of refracted light.57 It is clear from Smart’s description of colours that he views a continuum of shades blending, ‘blooming’, ‘working round’, and ‘deepening’ into one another in a circle. Of course, there are significant differences between the ancient philosopher’s idea of a three-tiered rainbow and Smart’s many-coloured vision, but there is a clear signal here that Smart is more interested in traditional interpretations than in new developments. There are similarities between Smart’s approach and Castel’s material colour theory. A preference for aesthetic pleasure over analysis can also be seen from the appreciative language – ‘best’, ‘excellent’, ‘acceptable’ – that the poet employs to introduce colours. Smart creates a spectrum out of colours that he perceives and feels subjectively. The colours include hues that are rarely identified in colour theory: brown (although Aristotle mentions brown as a species of black), grey (usually acknowledged in artists’ theories, yet not in Newtonian theory), silver (often, like gold, dismissed as an effect of reflected light), and, most interestingly, ‘pale’. The use of the adjective ‘pale’ to signify a colour existing between brown and white demonstrates the poet’s non-scientific method. Smart’s suggestion that colours are ‘spiritual’ also invites the compelling parallels that D.J. Greene has noted with Berkeley’s treatment of colour. Greene argues that ‘Berkeley, in his phil­ osophic notebooks … insists a good deal on the fact that there are many various shades of the same color.’58 This is a convincing argument: as we have seen, Berkeley’s Three Dialogues rejects the idea of materially existent phenomena (or their colours) to argue that everything is an operation of divine, and therefore human, perception. Berkeley’s main complaint against Newtonian optics is therefore founded upon the sense that Newton’s white light is a material substance. For Smart, though he recognises colours to be ‘spiritual’, he is not quite looking upon them as abstract concepts but as sensory experiences informed by God. It is clear that Smart would

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agree with the suggestion that colours, in that they are s­ piritual – of the spirit, as well as mysterious – are immeasurable and only felt. Both Smart and Berkeley depart from Newtonian assumptions, each taking the opposing direction towards materialism and idealism because he considers that God is the source of all principles and can change the principles by which he acts at will. Smart therefore resists writing down a specific number of colours. What Greene says of Berkeley’s attitude can also be said of Smart: ‘it is not that Newton is materialistic, but rather that he is, in a sense, not materialistic enough: the concrete objects of the world vanish into mathematical abstractions; the universe becomes a universe, not of intimate and pleasing sensation, but of cold “printer-readings”.’59 Thus, for Smart, colours are inextricably linked with objects (such as the binary form of ‘pale’ and the blush of human flesh) rather than the refraction and reflection of light. Between them, the materialist and rationalist arguments presented by Berkeley, Reid, Smart, and Castel point out the challenges posed by the experience of colour in the active temporal and spiritual worlds rather than in the artificially darkened room of Newton’s theoretical abstractions.

How to see in colour Training somebody to see colour scientifically – in the real world and not just in the artificially darkened setting of Newton’s prism ­experiments or even the ideal circumstances that produce natural rainbows – demands creative approaches. In Benjamin Martin’s Young Gentleman and Lady’s Philosophy, having repeated Newton’s first experiment, Euphrosyne demands to see real examples of colour ‘while the Thing is fresh in my Mind’, and this leads to the observation of a light-refracting water fountain and then a consideration of clothing as an example of colour in experience: ‘I not only put on a red, a yellow, or blue Ribbon’, she notes, ‘but they give me Occasion, at the same Time, to reflect on the Reason why they are such, and thereby double my Pleasure in the Use of them.’60 John Newbery’s juvenile lecturer Tom Telescope also uses clothing as an example when he explains that ‘blackness … is only a disposition to absorb or stifle, without reflection, most of the rays of every sort that

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fall on those bodies; and it is for that reason, we may suppose that black cloaths are warmer than those of any other colour; and are therefore rejected by the inhabitants of hot countries, who choose such colours for their raiment as will reflect the Sun’s rays, and not absorb them’.61 In Algarotti’s popular account for more mature readers, the ‘sevenfold Light’ is described enticingly as ‘the inexhaustible Treasury of those innumerable Colours, which form the gay Picture of the Universe’, an image which recalls ideas of painting and artistry to emphasise the shift in perceptive knowledge that a Newtonian encounter with colour should involve.62 Descriptions of colour’s location in relation to perceived objects are troubled by the common mixing of imagery in Newton’s own optical writing. As Alan E. Shapiro and others have noted, Newton’s account of colour coincided with new artists’ theories of colour, the publication of accounts on the chemistry of dyeing colours in the Philosophical Transactions, and the rise of ‘Colourmen’ who prepared pigments to supply to artists.63 These tangible versions of colour and colour production carry with them more comprehensible imagery that is connected with experience of the phenomenal world. In fact, a conflation of prismatic and pigmentary colour is visible in the Opticks, where the language of art permeates Newton’s descriptions of the perception of colour.64 In Newton’s description of vision the ‘Picture of the Object’ is said to be ‘painted’ on the retina when the rays converge ‘in the bottom of the Eye’ (Book I, p. 10), and in the prism experiments the refracted rays are said to ‘paint’ colours on the ‘Wall’ of the chamber (Book I, p. 26). Problems arise in the mixing of terms that suggest different analogical explanations. Newton begins his account of Experiment XV, proving the nature of white light, by referring, confusingly, to ‘the coloured Powders which Painters use’, and he demonstrates the mixing of these powders to ‘compound a white’ (Book I, p. 110). He describes how the powders ‘reflect the light of their own Colours more sparingly’ than other bodies: [B]y mixing such Powders we are not to expect a strong and full white, such as is that of Paper, but some dusky obscure one, such as might arise from a mixture of light and darkness, or from white and black, that is, a grey, or dun, or russet brown, such as are the Colours



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of a Man’s Nail, of a Mouse, of Ashes, of ordinary Stones, of Mortar, of Dust and Dirt in Highways, and the like. And such a dark white I have often produced by mixing coloured Powders. (Book I, p. 111)

Newton seems to suggest here that the colours of these paints operate in the same manner as those of other physical bodies. However, the mixing of terminology results in a confusing explanation. To the modern eye, none of the comparisons that Newton makes – to a mouse, or ashes, or stones – really qualify as white, and he appears to be stretching the point a little here with his reference to ‘dark white’. The reference to the pigment theory of ‘a mixture of light and darkness’ seems initially more related to ancient colour theory than to modern optics.65 The explanation that follows, however, refers to the reflection of light: I took a third of the above-mentioned grey mixtures (that which was compounded of Orpiment, Purple, and Viride Æris) and rubbed it thickly upon the floor of my Chamber, where the Sun shone upon it through the open Casement; and by it, in the shadow, I laid a piece of white Paper of the same bigness. Then going from them to the distance of 12 or 18 Feet, so that I could not discern the unevenness of the surface of the Powder, nor the little shadows let fall from the gritty particles thereof; the Powder appeared intensely white, so as to transcend even the Paper itself in whiteness, especially if the Paper were a little shaded from the Light of the Clouds, and then the Paper compared with the Power appeared of such a grey Colour as the Powder had done before. (Book I, pp. 112–13)

With this comparison between the even surface of the paper and the ‘gritty particles’ of the mixed powders, Newton demonstrates how the reflection of light producing colour saturation and pigment’s properties both produce colour in the same manner. This enables him to use artists’ materials to displace artists’ theories of colour. Newton’s conflation of colour theories demonstrates how artistic analogies can be used to transmit a new, but still experientially comprehensible, account of colour. This potential was seized upon by creative and didactic writers to facilitate knowledgeable encounters with colour in their works. Three images are recurrent in natural description: colour as painting or dye, as tapestry or weaving, or as clothing or covering. These tropes function analogically, as they

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carry with them the implications of Newtonian colour theory and ideas about the production of colour and its phenomenal existence. In Tatler 218 (1710), Addison presents the experience of visiting a garden containing ‘such a Blow of Tulips as was not to be matched in the whole Country’.66 Addison’s description of visual engagement suggests a self-conscious oscillation between empirical and aesthetic approaches: Sometimes I considered them with the Eye of an ordinary Spectator as so many beautiful Objects, varnished over with a natural Gloss, and stained with such a Variety of Colours, as are not to be equalled in any artificial Dies or Tinctures. (p. 142)

Addison employs diction connected with artistic production and aesthetic enjoyment to describe the reaction of an ‘ordinary Spectator’ – a polite precursor to Thomson’s swain – who surveys the tulips with awe. As the description continues, however, he outlines more philosophical analogies beyond artistry. He considers the fabric of the leaves and their production of colour as they reflect the sunlight: Sometimes I considered every Leaf as an elaborate Piece of Tissue, in which the Threads and Fibres were woven together into different Configurations, which gave a different Colouring to the Light as it glanced on the several Parts of the Surface. (p. 142)

Finally elevated to the position of a natural philosopher, he draws an analogy between the tulips’ reflection of a whole spectrum of beautiful shades and the function of optical instruments: Sometimes I considered the whole Bed of Tulips, according to the Notion of the greatest Mathematician and Philosopher that ever lived, as a Multitude of Optick Instruments, designed for the separating Light into all those various Colours of which it is composed. (p. 142)

The effect of these analogies is a gradual process of education and  philosophical engagement as Addison leads his readers to connect an aesthetic enjoyment of artistry with the natural and artificial production of colour through the refraction and reflection of light. In his Panegyrick on the Newtonian Philosophy (1749), Benjamin Martin states that an artist must perceive and imitate



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the ­phenomenal world according to ‘the most refined Principles’ of modern optics: Painting, as it consist in an exact Imitation of Nature, by a judicious Mixture of Colours, and a proper Disposition of various Tints, Lights, Shades, &c. must be pronounced a philosophic Art, whose Theory depends on the most refined Principles of this Science. A Person, by a thorough Skill in the Doctrine of Light and Colours, might almost make a Picture a Priori: How natural, genuine, and excellent must that Portrait be, which is executed by a Hand whose every Motion is directed by the Dictates of Presiding Science?67

The synecdoche of the artist’s hand elevates ‘the Dictates of Presiding Science’ as a philosophy that is not simply a ‘meer mechanic Practice’. The hint of an analogy between a divine and a human artist is confirmed later in the text, where Martin draws a direct correlation between scientific understanding and ‘the ultimate Perfection and Essence of human Nature’ (p. 49) describing natural philosophy as ‘a Mystery that had been hid from Ages, and from Generations; but is now made manifest, and according to the Commandment of the everlasting God, is made known to all Nations, by the divine Writings of the immortal Sir Isaac Newton’ (p. 56). For Martin, the artist’s hand is governed by God’s own colouring of the natural world so that humans can communicate and celebrate phenomena according to optical laws. In both physico-theological and natural poetic descriptions, the imagery of painting is regularly employed to refer both to an argument for the creator and to a particular view of colour as a material phenomenon. The theme of God’s unique creativity is apparent in Smart’s description of divine pigmentation his Seatonian Prize  poems. ‘On the Eternity of the Supreme Being’ (1750), with its ‘painted chambers of the heav’ns’, shows a minor example of this, but Smart’s most interesting exploration of divine artistry in creation combines the pigment theory with an account of refraction:68 Illustrious name, irrefragable proof Of man’s vast genius, and the soaring soul! Yet what wert thou to him, who knew his works, Before creation form’d them, long before

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He measur’d in the hollow of his hand Th’ exulting ocean, and the highest Heav’ns He comprehended with a span, and weigh’d The mighty mountains in his golden Scales: Who shone supreme, who was himself the light, Ere yet Refraction learn’d her skill to paint, And bend athwart the clouds her beauteous bow.69

Smart represents God’s omniscience here by describing his knowledge and comprehension of matter before its creation. In the final three lines of the excerpt, the poet employs the familiar analogy of the divine artist. Interestingly, Smart does not dispense with the optical account of colour altogether. Instead, refraction is described as a late manipulation of God’s light that produces colour in the world and its already created phenomena. For the omniscient and all-perceiving God, colour is always already present: it is brought to the created world, and to limited human perception, through the refraction of light, which is a law of optics that is created, perceived, and taught by God. James Thomson’s Newtonian physico-theology leads him to draw more extended comparisons with God as divine artist for whom colour is an essential version of a painter’s pigments. This analogy is drawn out further in ‘A Hymn on the Seasons’, where a list of properties reveals the divine origin of light, colour, and sensory experience: A secret World of Wonders in thyself, Sound His stupendous praise; whose greater Voice Or bids you roar, or bids your Roarings fall. Soft-roll your Incense, Herbs, and Fruits, and Flowers, In mingled Clouds to Him; whose Sun exalts, Whose Breath perfumes you, and whose Pencil paints.70

The repeated possessive pronouns create a sense of distance from the divine origin at the same time as the artistic verbs suggest the sensory experience of material phenomena. In Creation, too, Blackmore makes the artistic comparison explicit through the figure of ‘the Painter, who with Nature vies’ as ‘He views her various Scenes, intent to trace / The Master Lines, that form her finished Face’ (p. 145). In this version, the ‘Master Lines’ that form and



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shape the whole of the natural world can also be read as outlines to be coloured in by human perception.71 Finally, Akenside’s The Pleasures of Imagination uses the image of painted colour to represent the experience of individual perception. Akenside uses colour as an analogy for the correct functioning of the imagination as it reflects and replicates ‘the images of things’:   For since the course Of things external acts in different ways On human apprehensions, as the hand Of nature temper’d to a different frame Peculiar minds; so haply where the pow’rs Of fancy neither lessen nor enlarge The images of things, but paint in all Their genuine hues, the features which they wore In nature; there opinion will be true, And action right. (Book III, lines 14–23)

The analogy of colour ‘in nature’ as a form of painting enables the poet to explore imaginative processes which, as Locke explains, enable humans to piece together sensory experiences in new and different ways. Akenside’s description of mental recreation as the correct painting of objects seems to be modelled on the contemporaneous version of visual perception where refracted light reflecting onto the retina produces colour vision. The second common trope for colour is weaving or tapestry, which carry artistic connotations similar to the references to paint and pigment. Arguments of God’s design are, therefore, still visible in Jago’s descriptions of the ‘Earth’s huge Fabric!’ that is ‘beauteous to the Sight / And, to the searching Mind, with Wonders stor’d.’72 Embroidery is a typical image representing the complexity, beauty, and intricacy of colours in the natural world. Reaching the summit of Edge Hill, Jago’s narrator looks south-west at the prospect: Such is the Scene! that, from the terrac’d Hill, Whose Sides the Dryads and the Wood Nymphs dress With rich Embroidery, salutes the Eye, Ample, and Various; Intermixture sweet Of Lawns and Groves, of open and retir’d. (Book I, lines 50–4)

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Drawing on a fanciful view of a designed landscape, rather than introducing the imagery of divine creation, the embroidery image here is both decorative and transient in its effect. Thomson’s description of how ‘Valleys shift / Their green embroider’d Robe to fiery brown’ in the rapidly scorched plains of the Torrid Zone has a similar effect (Summer, lines 697–8). In A View of Death (1725), John Reynolds combines imagery to demonstrate the perception of colour: Obliging pow’r! thus daily to renew Thy largess to these thy clients bound; Thus solemnly to turn thy self around, And take them all within thy friendly view! Rich painter! that can thus caress the eye, Bestow on ev’ry face its diff’rent dye, And hang the globe in all its gaudy tapestry!73

This is an active depiction: the sun – not God – is personified as  the enlivening ‘pow’r’ that sheds light, and therefore colour, on the world. The painting of the natural world is produced with the viewer in mind. The final three lines of this description, with the focus on the visual ‘caress’ that sunlight affords, bring with them the suggestion that sunlight and vision must act together to produce the experience of each ‘diff’rent dye’. The ‘gaudy tapestry’ that is  the final product of this interaction diminishes the usual effect of care and artistic precision, but the image of a decoration hung around the globe still transmits the concept of colour as divorced from the surface of each object. In Book I of Creation, Blackmore provides a compelling image of the air as a loom through which colour is produced. The tone is didactic as Blackmore calls on his reader to perceive the ordered artistry at work: Remark the Air’s transparent Element, Its curious Structure, and its vast Extent: Its wondrous Web proclaims the Loom Divine, Its Threads, the Hand that drew them out so fine This thin Contexture makes its Bosom fit, Celestial Heat and Lustre to transmit; By which of Foreign Orbs the Riches flow On this dependent, needy Ball below. (p. 90)

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Again, we see the accommodation of divine hands weaving the ‘Threads’ of light, and this produces a clear sense of the artistry behind the refractive properties of the transparent ‘thin Contexture’ of the air. The ‘Lustre’ of sun and stars is transmitted and refracted through the atmosphere to the earth below. The image of a loom enables Blackmore to supply a visible and tang­ ible model for the movement of heat and light; at the same time, the ‘vast’ scale of the ‘Celestial’ site demonstrates that the analogy is only approximate. Many poems concerned with natural history invoke the passing of the seasons, and in such instances colour is necessarily represented as a transitory effect. This is frequently communicated through the image of colour as a robe or dress. As Herman Pleij notes, the imagery of clothing, shrouding, or material covering has a long history: ‘In many languages, the words “color” and “paint” stem from the words for “cover” and “skin”. In Latin, for example “color” is derived from “celare” or “occulare”, to cover up.’74 Whilst this imagery has historically been viewed negatively, as a sign of the worldliness of colour against the spiritual ideal of religious observance (an approach still reflected in Thomson’s rewriting of Georgics, Book II, on the simplicity of rural life, where ‘the glittering Robe / Of every Hue reflected Light can give’ stands  as a metonym for the richness that rejected in favour of ‘plain innocence’, ‘unambitious Toil’, and ‘Unsully’d Beauty’),75 by the eighteenth century the analogy of clothing or covering was regularly applied more neutrally by philosophical writers who aimed to transmit an accurate account of colour together with a sense of the onlooker’s experience of colour perception. Akenside’s description of nature’s ‘robes of light / Which thus invest her with more lovely pomp’ (Book III, lines 485–6) manipulates the image to aesthetic effect; and John Dyer’s description of Nature, who ‘dresses green and gay, / To disperse our cares away’, is typical of a prospect poem that frequently refers to the cladding of colour on the environment.76 This can be compared with Mallet’s description in The Excursion of the sunrise, which causes ‘The Plains below’ to ‘put on a sudden Robe, / Rich Purple wrought on high of temper’d Light’, combining the imagery of colour as covering with its origin from light.77

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The Seasons offers numerous examples of colour as clothing. For example, the coming of spring is presented as a change of costume prompted by the heat of the sun: Nor only thro’ the lenient Air this Change, Delicious, breathes; the penetrative Sun, His Force deep-darting to the dark Retreat Of Vegetation, sets the steaming Power At large, to wander o’er the vernant Earth, In various Hues; but chiefly thee, gay Green! Thou smiling Nature’s universal Robe! United Light and Shade! where the Sight dwells With growing Strength, and ever-new Delight. (Spring, lines 78–86)

Green functions here both as a sign of Britain’s rich agriculture and vegetation and as ‘a right Mixture of Light and Shade, that it comforts and strengthens the Eye’.78 Thomson provides a description of the rising temperature (‘steaming Power’) that results in the appearance of greenery to dress the landscape.79 The involvement of the observer in Thomson’s version (‘where the Sight dwells’) completes the perceptual link between the growth of foliage and its greenness  in the ‘united light and shade’. Thomson’s frequent present participles help to display the experience of colour in the moment as a property of light and changing seasons. These analogical representations engage with colour as it is experienced. However, whilst the analogies between colour and pigment, tapestry, or clothing train a perception of colour as transitory or physically disconnected from objects, it is only in the representation of colour as an interaction between light, object, and eye that writers can train readers fully in the correct comprehension of the landscapes that they perceive in the natural world. Cases that depict the absence of colour from natural scenes provide instructive examples. Mallet’s description of dusk in The Excursion shows the interplay between light and natural phenomena and the changing colours that accompany the declining sun: [A]nd now the Sun, Declin’d, hangs verging on the western Main, Whose fluctuating Bosom, blushing red The Space of many Seas beneath his Force,



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Heaves in soft Swellings murmuring to the Shore, A circling Glory glows around his Disk Of milder Beams: part, streaming o’er the Sky, Inflame the distant Azure: part below Shoot thro’ the waving Wood in level Lines, Tinging the Green with Gold. (p. 20)

In this active environment, the process of colour production is inhibited, and the ‘fluctuating’ prospect view is subject to a lessening reflection of light as its colours gradually diminish. ­ Thomson’s description of nightfall similarly explains the experience of a gradually darkening natural scene:    Evening yields The World to Night; not in her Winter-Robe Of massy Stygian Woof, but loose array’d In Mantle dun. A faint erroneous Ray, Glanc’d from th’ imperfect Surfaces of Things, Flings half an Image on the straining Eye; While wavering Woods, and Villages, and Streams, And Rocks, and Mountain-tops, that long retain’d Th’ascending Gleam, are all one swimming Scene, Uncertain if beheld. (Summer, lines 1684–93)

The familiar image of colour as covering is employed here to evoke the image of twilight, where the whole environment is cloaked in nondescript colour which finally becomes black. The viewer’s experience of imprecise vision at the mid-point between light and darkness is evoked through a precise description of straining vision. The ‘imperfect Surfaces of Things’ reflect the fading light, casting shadows as the sun is at an oblique and the retina receives a halfimage in which colours are no longer fully present. This is, then, a thoroughly Newtonian representation: as in Opticks, the ‘faint erroneous Ray’ is not itself coloured, but it is reflected in a particular way by objects to produce the sensation of motion that becomes colour in the eye. Richard Cronin describes colours and the words used to describe them as existing ‘at the frontier between the private world of impressions that take place sealed in the brain, and the public world of language’.80 This is a fitting image for the treatment of colour in

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the changing landscape of analogy and light theory after Opticks. Colour perception is reassessed as an individual, somatic experience where the private world meets the public. The reader of optical texts and the ideal poetic observer undergo a process of education in which the perceptive categories and analogies that engage with optics and colour are reframed and reinterpreted. In The Pleasures of Imagination, Akenside calls for the twinning of philosophy and art: ‘Arm’d with the lyre, already have we dar’d / To pierce divine philosophy’s retreats, / And teach the Muse her lore’ (Book  II, lines 62–4). We have seen that the exploding of the rainbow’s mystery and the description of colour as an ephemeral phenomenon prompt a range of aesthetic and philosophical responses, both enthusiastic and hostile. As Newton’s own mixing of analogies shows, however, the aesthetic appeal of the spectrum opens up to all readers the possibility of seeing scientifically.

Notes  1 Blackmore, Creation, p. 28.   2 John Scott, Amwell: A Descriptive Poem (Dublin: Price et al., 1776), line 11.  3 Note, for example, the horticultural detail in ‘Eclogue I: Rural Scenery, or The Describers’, where exhaustive description of a well-laid-out environment demonstrates ‘What varied scenes this pleasant country yields,  / Form’d by the arrangement fair of woods and fields!’ (The Poetical Works of John Scott (London: Buckland, 1782), pp. 93–105 (p. 99)). See also Scott’s Horatian ‘Epistle I: The Garden’ (The Poetical Works, pp. 259–65), in which he describes his landscaping of Amwell as amateurish: ‘“No scene like this,” I say, “did Nature raise,” / “Brown’s fancy form,” or Walpole’s judgement praise’ (p. 262).  4 Koehler, Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century, p. 129.  5 Thomson, Summer, in The Seasons, pp. 58–143, lines 81–7.  6 Thomson, Autumn, in The Seasons, pp. 144–201, lines 950–4.  7 Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse, p. 23.  8 Christopher Smart, ‘On the Goodness of the Supreme Being’, in Miscellaneous Poems in English and Latin, ed. Karina Williamson, vol. IV of The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 305–8, lines 32–44.

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 9 On Smart’s reactions to science see D.J. Greene, ‘Smart, Berkeley, the scientists and the poets’, Journal of the History of Ideas 14 (1953), 327–52; Williamson, ‘Smart’s Principia’; and Rosalind Powell, ‘Christopher Smart’s systema naturae: anti-Newtonianism and the categorical impulse in Jubilate Agno’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 37:3 (2014), 361–76. 10 Isaac Newton, ‘A Letter of Mr. Isaac Newton … Containing his New Theory about Light and Colors’, Phil. Trans. 6:80 (1672), 3075–87 (pp. 3075–6). 11 See Bazerman, Shaping Written Knowledge, pp. 82–127. 12 See, for example, Robert Boyle’s experiments with refraction using ‘The Triangular Prismatical Glass’ and ‘a large (double Convex) Burning glass’ in Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (London: Herringman, 1664), pp. 191–3. See also Stephen Prickett on Newton’s role as ‘a profoundly ambiguous symbol of the whole scientific revolution’ (p. 7) in Coleridge and Wordsworth: The Poetry of Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). 13 Martin, The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Philosophy, II, 198–9. 14 Quoting Newton’s letter in Phil. Trans. 7:88 (1672), which responds to early criticisms of his colour theory, Finlay notes this acknowledgement in the physicist’s own work: ‘Newton recognized that his findings about the composite nature of light ran counter to age-old, common-sense assumptions: “I perswade my selfe that this assertion above the rest appears Paradoxicall, & it is with most difficulty ­admitted.”’ Robert Finlay, ‘Weaving the rainbow: visions of color in world history’, Journal of World History 18:4 (2007), 383–431 (p. 384). 15 Dennis L. Sepper, Goethe contra Newton: Polemics and the Project for a New Science of Color (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 10. 16 ‘But, to determine more absolutely, what Light is, after what manner refracted, and by what modes or actions it produceth in our minds the Phantasms of Colours, is not so easie. And I shall not mingle conjectures with certainties.’ Newton, ‘Letter’, p. 3085. The flipside of this reticence, Bazerman claims, is that Newton did not expect the level of critique that his letter received, resulting in a lengthy delay before the publication of his Opticks monograph in 1704. 17 Boyle, Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours, p. 76. On Boyle’s colour theory see Tarwin Baker, ‘Color and Contingency in Robert Boyle’s Works’, in Tarwin Baker et al. (eds), Early Modern Color Worlds, ed. Baker et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 248–73.

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18 Newton, Opticks, Book, I, p. 135. 19 See Henry Guerlac, ‘Can there be colours in the dark? Physical colour before Newton’, Journal for the History of Ideas 47:1 (1986), 3–20 (pp. 3–4). 20 Newton’s fourteenth query connects this mechanical hypothesis with a note on the experience of colour which aligns it with a theory of sonic vibrations: ‘May not the harmony and discord of Colours arise from the proportions of the vibrations propagated through the fibres of the optick Nerves into the Brain, as the harmony and discord of sounds arises from the proportions of the vibrations of the Air? For some Colours are agreeable, as those of Gold and Indico, and others disagree.’ Opticks, Book II, p. 136. 21 Joseph Addison, Spectator 413 (24 June 1712), in The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), III, 544–7 (p. 546). 22 A comparison can be drawn here with Nick Grindle’s analysis of enargeia in Addison’s Essay on Virgil’s Georgics (1697). Grindle argues that ‘Addison champions poetry as pleasing, but what underpins this judgement is his view that there is an intimate connection between the reader’s imagination and the exterior world of real objects and things.  … Put simply, the faculty of imagination is the end of physical sensation and the experience by which we acquire knowledge.’ Grindle’s suggestion that the ‘imagination is itself an organ of perception’ for Addison overstates the case, as the celebration of vision as the foundation of knowledge in the Spectator essays shows. Nick Grindle, ‘Virgil’s prospects: the gentry and the representation of landscape in Addison’s theory of the imagination’, Oxford Art Journal 29:2 (2006), 185–95 (pp. 188 and 191). 23 Richard Cronin, Colour and Experience in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), p. 22. 24 Katherine Myers, ‘Ways of seeing: Joseph Addison, enchantment and the early landscape garden’, Garden History 41 (2013), 3–20 (p. 8). Myers also notes here Addison’s long-standing engagement with optics, including his meeting with Malebranche in 1699/1700. 25 On the moral implications of colour as an illusion, see Michel Pastoureau’s account of Protestant chronoclasm in Red: The History of a Color, trans. Jody Gladding (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). 26 Richard Jago, Edge-Hill, or, the Rural Prospect Delineated and Moralized. A Poem in Four Books (London: Dodsley, 1767), Book I, line 187.

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27 Henry Brooke, Universal Beauty: A Philosophical Poem in Six Books, in Poetical Works, rev. and corrected by Miss Brooke, 3rd edn (Dublin: Printed for the Editor, 1792), II, 1–132, Book V, line 165. 28 John Arthos, The Language of Natural Description in Eighteenth-Century Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1949), pp. 50–1. 29 Epstein and Greenberg, ‘Decomposing Newton’s rainbow’, p. 119. Epstein and Greenberg trace poetic images of the rainbow after Opticks to explore ‘how the demystifying power of poetic versions of Newtonianism worked, and how it in turn generated new myths’ (p. 122). 30 See Pastoureau, Red: The History of a Color. Robert Finlay’s ‘Weaving the rainbow’ provides an account of the negative classical and early Christian associations with colour. 31 The description of a divine vision in the first chapter of Ezekiel, which describes the appearance of cherubim and God’s appearance in ‘the likeness of a man’ upon a throne (1:27), also involves a rainbow. The apparition is described analogically, recalling Genesis: ‘As the ­appearance of the bow that is in the cloud in the day of rain, so was the appearance of the brightness round about. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. And when I saw it, I fell upon my face, and I heard a voice of one that spake’ (1:28). The throne of God is similarly described as surrounded by a rainbow in Revelation 4:3. 32 Thomas Campbell, ‘To the Rainbow’, New Monthly Magazine 1:1 (January 1821), 16–17, lines 21–4; William Wordsworth, ‘My heart leaps up when I behold’, in The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 246, lines 1–2 and 9. Examples of Romantic poets’ engagements with the rainbow as a sign of divine mystery, as signifier of the imagination, or in celebrations of the natural world are too numerous to list here; see Cronin, Colour and Experience in Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Prickett, Coleridge and Wordsworth, pp. 1–21. 33 Newton, Opticks, Book II, pp. 17–18. See also Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse, pp. 85–6. 34 James Elkins, ‘On visual desperation and the bodies of protozoa’, Representations 40 (1992), 33–56 (pp. 33–4). Elkins describes ‘visual desperation’ as ‘a peculiarly strained and anxious seeing that casts about, trying to construct analogies and retrieve an unknown form into the fold of vision. When it succeeds, we complacently classify the bodies as humans, other animals, plants, and fabulous beasts of various sorts. When it fails, we become blind; we see only chaos or trackless monstrosity’ (p. 35).

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35 On the figurative implications of chromatism, see Richard Terry, ‘Transitions and digressions in the eighteenth-century long poem’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 32:3 (1992), 495–510 (p. 506). As John Gage notes, Newton vacillated between a range of colours, from five to eleven, before settling on seven. John Gage, Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999), p. 132. 36 Robert Shiells, The Lives of the Poets of Great-Britain and Ireland, to the Time of Dean Swift, 5 vols (London: Griffiths, 1753), V, 202–3. John Aikin’s similar focus on the vitality and variety of the poem’s ‘striking scenes’ leads to an identification of the poem as ‘the first capital work in which natural description was professedly the principal object’. John Aikin, ‘An Essay on the Plan and Character of Thomson’s Seasons’, in James Thomson, The Seasons. A New Edition … to which is Prefixed an Essay on the Plan and Character of the Poem, by J. Aikin (London: Murray, 1778), pp. iii–xlv (p. viii). Modern critics pay frequent reference to this feature. Whilst for Koehler, ‘[t]he poem’s devotion of extravagant attention’ is a case of ‘overstimulation’ (Poetry of Attention, p. 147), W.B. Hutchings has noted historical recognition of ‘[t]he quality of Thomson’s descriptions as forming an authentic version of experience, their capacity to create a plausible and hence effective version of visual perception’. Hutchings, ‘“Can Pure Description Hold the Place of Sense?”’, p. 49. 37 Thomson, Spring, in The Seasons, pp. 2–57. See Chapter 5, pp. 212–13, for a discussion of Thomson’s descriptions of subjective, variable perception in The Seasons. 38 A number of critics have dealt with the accuracy of Kent’s illustration: Michèle Plaisant notes that, with the influence of Newton apparent throughout The Seasons, Kent’s choice of the rainbow for the engraving is no coincidence. Michèle Plaisant, ‘“Ut pictura poesis”: lumière et ombres dans les Saisons de Thomson’, Revue de la Société d’Études Anglo-Américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (1999), 159–71, p. 160 (this special issue, ‘Hommage Paul Denizot’, is not numbered). See also Sandro Jung’s recent work on Thomson’s Seasons and visual culture for an in-depth account of the genesis of engraving, from Kent’s ‘mythopoetic tableaux offer[ing] a high-culture interpretation of the seasons’ to a ‘representational mode’ in the 1770s, and engravings after William Hamilton that present realistic human and domestic scenes in the 1790s. Sandro Jung, ‘Visual interpretations, print, and illustrations of Thomson’s The Seasons, 1730–1797’, Eighteenth-Century Life 34:2 (2010), 23–64 (pp. 26 and 41); and Sandro Jung, ‘Print culture,

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high cultural consumption, and Thomson’s The Seasons, 1780–1797’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 44:4 (2010), 495–514. 39 Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination, Book II, lines 100–20. 40 Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse, p. 98. 41 Hobson, Christianity the Light of the Moral World, p. 23. The footnote to these lines describes Newton’s theory of refrangibility, and the author directs the reader to the fourth dialogue of Algarotti’s popular account. 42 For a full exploration of Newton’s theories of colour mixing and its relationship to theories of painters’ primaries in the mixing of pigments see Alan E. Shapiro, ‘Artists’ colors and Newton’s colors’, Isis 85:4 (1994), 600–30. 43 Epstein and Greenberg, ‘Decomposing Newton’s rainbow’, p. 117. 44 Richard Waller, ‘A Catalogue of Simple and Mixt Colours, with a Specimen of Each Colour Prefixt to its Proper Name’, Phil. Trans. 16:179 (1687), 24–32 (p. 25). Sachiko Kusukawa summarises the contents of Waller’s colour table as follows: ‘It listed 7 simple “blue” colours across the top, and 14 simple colours down the first left columns from ceruse (white lead), though five “yellows” and eight “reds” ending with the dark, “lamp-black”.’ Sachiko Kusukawa, ‘Picturing knowledge in the early Royal Society: the examples of Richard Waller and Henry Hunt’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 65 (2011), 273–94 (p. 283). Sarah Lowengard provides examples and assessments of other colour charts (including Jacob Christian Schäffer’s from the 1760s and Abram Gottlob Werner’s of 1775) in The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York: Columbus University Press, 2006), [no page numbers] (chapter entitled ‘Number, Order, Form: Color Systems and Systemization’). 45 Hutchings, ‘“Can Pure Description Hold the Place of Sense?”’, p. 38. 46 Ralph Cohen’s reading of this passage describes the immediacy and detail achieved through its placement directly after a broadly expansive view. Ralph Cohen, ‘Thomson’s Poetry of Space and Time’, in Howard Anderson and John S. Shea (eds), Studies in Criticism and Aesthetics, 1660–1800: Essays in Honor of Samuel Holt Monk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1967), pp. 176–92 (pp. 180–1). 47 Spacks links this ‘imagined panorama’ with Thomson’s letter to George Dodington of 24 October 1730, in which Thomson describes ‘the storing one’s Imagination with Ideas of all-beautiful, all-great, all-perfect Nature’. See Patricia Meyer Spacks, ‘Vision and meaning in James Thomson’, Studies in Romanticism 4:4 (1965), 206–19 (p. 208).

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48 Perhaps the most famous anti-Newtonian colour theory is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre, which, published in 1810 and translated into English in 1840, is outside the range of this study. Helpful accounts of Goethe’s intervention and its relationship to the treatment of colour in literature can be found in Cronin’s Colour and Experience in Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Sepper’s Goethe contra Newton. 49 See also P.M. Heimann and J.E. McGuire, ‘Newtonian forces and Lockean powers: concepts of matter in eighteenth-century thought’, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 3 (1971), 233–306. 50 George Berkeley, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, in Philosophical Writings, ed. Desmond M. Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). pp. 151–242 (pp. 169 and 168). 51 Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense, ed. Derek R. Brookes, The Edinburgh Edition of Thomas Reid (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 182 and 188. 52 [Louis-Bertrand] Castel, Optique des couleurs: fondée sur les simples observations, & tournée sur-tout à la pratique de la teinture & des autres arts coloristes (Paris: Briasson, 1740). For a comprehensive treatment of Castel’s natural philosophy, see Jean-Oliver Richard, ‘The Art of Making Rain and Fair Weather: The Life and World System of Louis-Bertrand Castel, SJ (1688–1757)’ (PhD dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 2015). 53 J.B. Shank, The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 196. 54 Maarten Franssen, ‘The ocular harpsichord of Louis-Bertrand Castel: the science and aesthetics of an eighteenth-century cause célèbre’, Tractrix 3 (1991), 15–77 (pp. 24–5). 55 For an account of Smart’s later expressions of anti-Newtonianism in comparison to the unremarkable treatment of natural philosophy in the Seatonian poems, see Powell, ‘Christopher Smart’s systema naturae’, pp. 362–5. 56 Smart, Jubilate Agno, Fragment B, lines 650–61. 57 On the relationship between pigment theory and refraction theory, see John Gage, Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), p. 110. 58 Greene, ‘Smart, Berkeley, the scientists and the poets’, p. 340. 59 Greene, ‘Smart, Berkeley, the scientists and the poets’, p. 340. 60 Martin, The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Philosophy, II, 204 and 205. 61 Tom Telescope, The Newtonian System of Philosophy, p. 108.

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62 Algarotti, Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explain’d For the Use of the Ladies, II, 23. 63 Shapiro, ‘Artists’ colors and Newton’s colors’, pp. 615ff. See also Finlay, ‘Weaving the rainbow’, p. 426. 64 Paul D. Schweizer, ‘John Constable, rainbow science, and English color theory’, The Art Bulletin 64:3 (1982), 424–45 (p. 433). Schweizer briefly explores the mixing of pigment and light in Newton’s work. 65 Aristotle’s account of colour as varying mixtures of light and dark appears in De coloribus, where he discusses the production of compound colours: ‘So when what is black and shady is mixed with light the result is red. For we see that, when what is black is mixed with the light of the sun and fire, the result is always red, and black things when burned always change to the colour red; for smoky flame and coal, when it is burned through, are seen to have a red colour. Purple is gay and bright whenever the rays of the sun are a weak mixture of white and shady. Consequently at the hours of sunrise and sunset the air seems to have a purple tint, the sun being at its rising or setting.’ Aristotle, ‘On Colours (De coloribus)’, in Minor Works, ed. T.E. Page et al., trans. W.S. Hett (London: Heinemann, 1936), pp. 1–45 (p. 9). This account is corrected in Newton’s 1704 Opticks, Book II, pp. 81–2. On the development of colour theory between Aristotle and Newton, particularly in the seventeenth century, see Shapiro, ‘Artists’ colors and Newton’s colors’. 66 Joseph Addison, Tatler. 218 (31 August 1710), in The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), III, 140–3 (p. 142). 67 B[enjamin] Martin, A Panegyrick on the Newtonian Philosophy (London: Owen, 1749), p. 41. 68 Smart, ‘On the Eternity of the Supreme Being’, in Poetical Works, IV, 148–52, line 28. 69 Smart, ‘On the Omniscience of the Supreme Being’, in Poetical Works, IV, 205–10, lines 92–102. 70 Thomson, ‘A Hymn on the Seasons’, in The Seasons, pp. 254–9, lines 53–8. 71 Compare the paradox of unreflective sight in Creation, Book VII: ‘The Soul, as mention’d, can her self inspect, / By Acts reflex can view her Acts direct; / A Task too hard for Sense, for tho’ the Eye / Its own reflected Image can descry, / Yet it ne’er saw the Sight, by which it sees, / Vision can shew no colour’d Images’ (p. 328). 72 Jago, Edge-Hill, Book I, lines 170–1.

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73 J[ohn] Reynolds, A View of Death: or, the Soul’s Departure from the World (London: Clark and Hett, 1725), pp. 39–40. 74 Herman Pleij, Colors Demonic and Divine: Shades of Meaning in the Middle Ages and After, trans. Diane Webb (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 11. 75 Thomson, Autumn, lines 1242–3 and 1273–6. Thomson rewrites Georgics, Book II, lines 448–542. 76 John Dyer, ‘Grongar Hill’, in Poems (London: Dodsley, 1761), pp. 9–16 (p. 14). 77 Mallet, The Excursion, p. 12. 78 Addison, Spectator 387 (24 May 1712), in The Spectator, III, 451–4 (p. 452). 79 Sambrook notes the connections to Spectator 387 and to Stephen Hales’s Vegetable Staticks (1727), which explains plants’ absorption of water according to temperature (Summer, lines 79–89n). 80 Cronin, Colour and Experience in Nineteenth-Century Poetry, p. 13.

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      Quit we rather than These Metaphysical Subtleties, and mark The curious Structure of these visual Orbs, The Windows of the Mind, Substance how clear, Aqueous, or chrystalline! through which the Soul, As thro’ a Glass, all outward Things surveys. Richard Jago, Edge-Hill (1767), Book III, lines 27–32.

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Understanding the eye

What is the relationship between the body and sensory experience? How is perceptual experience in the mind related to visual experience of the phenomenal world, and how can material things give rise to mental states? These questions make necessary a somatic framing of the Lockean model of sensory perception and knowledge acquisition which had come to be accepted in the eighteenth century. The sixth and seventh books of Richard Blackmore’s physico-theological poem Creation move from external landscapes to explore ‘the living Fabrick’ of the body from the heart and the digestive system to the nerves and the brain.1 This gives rise to a didactic exploration – framed as an attack on Epicureanism – of the relationship between the physical body, images perceived in the mind, and the external world: How is the Image to the Sense convey’d? On the tun’d Organ how the Impulse made? How, and by which more noble Part the Brain Perceives th’Idea, can their Schools explain? ’Tis clear, in the Superior Seat alone The Judge of Objects has her secret Throne. Since, a Limb sever’d by the wounding Steel, We still may Pain, as in that Member, feel. (p. 316)

Blackmore identifies the ‘secret Throne’ of the brain as the centre of experience, explaining that feelings are perceived in the brain rather than in an eye or a limb, and he questions how somatic and sensory impulses are relayed there from different parts of the body. His account of this process distinguishes between sensation – material,

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tangible encounters between the body and the external world – and the individual’s mental experience of perception. Following his admission to the Royal College of Physicians in April 1687, Blackmore gained increasing prominence, and a combination  of his medical prowess and patriotic poetry, including the publication of Prince Arthur in 1695, saw his appointment as one of King William’s Physicians in Ordinary within little more  than a decade.2 Blackmore followed Thomas Sydenham’s revolutionary method of medical diagnosis, which involved the physical observation of a patient’s respiration, pulse, and temperature, and the patient’s self-report of discomfort. It is understandable, therefore, that Creation represents a somatic approach to considering the relationship between sensation and perception. The poem promoted  Locke’s theory of empirical perception, but preceded  the  ophthalmic developments that were at the centre of a revaluation of the relationship between touch, sight, and knowledge later in the century. The senses became increasingly relevant and individualised in the course of the century with a movement away from  a  theorised account of the body and a geometrical understanding of vision towards a focus on flesh, nerves, and sensory subjectivity. In Chapter 5, I will explore developments in neurology that led to a complete refiguration of the relationship betweem mind and body. Here, however, I focus on the relationship between sight, touch, and knowledge in empiricist treatments of the senses. In Open Fields, Gillian Beer addresses the ways in which practices of both writing and medicine engage the body’s faculties, and particularly how they demand the engagement of both the hands and the eyes. Poets, physicians (including Locke himself), and the recipients of popular explanations of optics all engaged with the embodied experience of sight; increasingly, empiricist and rationalist philosophers of vision began to do the same. This chapter considers the textual productions from all four groups. Blackmore’s Creation, Brooke’s Universal Beauty, and Jago’s Edge-Hill, long poems that range between landscape description and the consideration of other natural systems, all explore the experience of being an observer. The physico-theological colouring of each of these poems also helps to demonstrate the ways in which philosophical and

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medical t­ reatments of sensory experience put traditional analogical figurations of the eye and sight under strain. The purpose of this chapter is to investigate how the eye and its processes were understood medically, philosophically, and analogically in the first half of the eighteenth century. I outline how figures of sight, blindness, and recovery of sight were employed both before and after significant ophthalmological developments in the middle of the period. I will explore how these descriptions, models, and processes are largely distanced from the individual’s experience of sight as well as the implications this has for the valuation of sighted and non-sighted experience. Through these readings, I want to provide an alternative to what Kevis Goodman identifies in Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism as the ‘over-sighted man’, that is, ‘the new type of professional observer in the early eighteenth century, whose trade it was to “observe everything”’.3 The over-sightedness of observers in The Seasons, The Pleasures of Imagination, and other prospect poems that pay specific, sometimes microscopic, attention to features such as colours and colour production has already been demonstrated in the previous chapter. This chapter complicates that account by exploring how writers treat the operations of the eye itself. The ways in which the mechanisms of sense experience are mediated and communicated throughout the body take centre stage here, as philosophers and poets grapple theoretically, practically, and creatively with the mind–body problem.

The eye: anatomy and analogy In Book IV of Universal Beauty (1735) Henry Brooke turns to the animal system, and he explores perception as the distinguishing feature of animal life. He describes how nerves and organs work together in the ‘nice machine’ of the body to receive sensory impressions.4 The faculty of perception is important to Brooke because it separates animals from vegetables and minerals: in his summary of this book, he explains that ‘perception and consciousness’ constitute the ‘personal identity’ of an ‘organized being’, and that this itself is evidence of God’s design (p. 65). This description reflects Locke’s account – which Brooke is apparently referencing in his paratextual

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note on the work of ‘an eminent author’ – of how experience determines the constant identity of a person over time even as an organism changes (p. 67n). According to Brooke, sensory engagement is a natural process through which the body informs the conscious soul about the external world. He describes the processes of vision and hearing as follows: With conscious act the vivid semblance vies, And subtile now the sprightly nerve supplies; Unconscious lifts the lucid ball to light, And glares around with unperceiving sight; Or studious seems to muse with thought profound, Or lifts as ’waked to catch the flying sound— So temper’d wondrous by mechanic scheme, The Sovereign Geometrician5 knits the frame; In mode of organizing texture wrought, And quick with spirited quintessence fraught: When objects on the exterior membrane press, The alarm runs inmost thro’ each dark recess, Impulsive strikes the corresponding springs, And moves the accord of sympathetic strings. (Book IV, 31–44)

The processes described here are not governed by decision-making on the part of an observer but by the ‘unconscious’ working of physical machinery that is geometrically designed by God. There is an uneasy use of personification to depict independent sensory operations; the verb ‘glares’ is distracting because Brooke is describing the mechanical process of the ‘lucid Ball’ stretching to catch the light. Hearing and sight are depicted as physical processes caused by objects striking the ‘exterior membrane’ of the retina or eardrum and transmitted from sense to perception through a material process of communications through the body.6 Brooke is careful to note that there is no way of describing or explaining the mind’s operations, claiming that ‘No plexured mode, no aptitude refined, / Can yield one glimpse of all-informing mind’ (lines 55–6). Instead, he deliberately focuses on the body as ‘matter’ (line 23n) that is supported by divine design without requiring the intervention of the mind to function. In this way, Brooke’s account demonstrates an important distinction between mechanical sight and an individual’s perception whilst also circumventing the challenging

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topic of how the sensory impressions are conveyed to the mind by privileging this information as a divine mystery. Before turning to Brooke’s treatment of the technical process of vision, we must examine its natural philosophical grounding in eighteenth-century optics. The basic geometrical mechanism of vision – the transmission and refraction of light rays through the cornea, the aqueous humour, the lens (or crystalline humour), and the vitreous humours to produce an inverted image on the retina at the back of the eye – had been established by Johannes Kepler in his Ad Vitellionem paralipomena, quibus astronomiae pars optica traditur (1604).7 James Ferguson addresses the implication of this mechanical process in his 1760 lecture on optics (as part of a sequence of lectures that introduce accepted scientific topics to a lay audience) by comparing the different parts of the eye with the operations of lenses that cause rays of light to converge: Having described how the rays of light, flowing from objects and passing through convex glasses, are collected into points, and form the images of the objects; it will be easy to understand how the rays are effected [sic] by passing through the humours of the eye, and are thereby collected into innumerable points on the bottom of the eye, and thereon form the images of the objects which they flow from. For the different humours of the eye, and particularly the chrystalline humour, are to be considered as a convex glass; and the rays in passing through them to be effected in the same manner as in passing through a convex glass.8

These processes of refraction are displayed in a diagram demonstrating the focusing of light rays as they pass through different media. Ferguson subsequently notes that the aqueous humour ‘has the same limpidity, specific gravity, and refractive power, as water’ (p. 221); the lens, surrounded by fibres (the ligentem cillare) that adjust its shape, position, and convexity, is ‘shaped like a double convex glass’, is ‘of the consistence of hard jelly’, and ‘converges the rays … to its focus at the bottom of the eye’ (p. 222); behind the lens is the transparent vitreous humour, which is ‘much of a consistence with the white of an egg’ (p. 222). According to Ferguson’s descriptions, the different parts of the eye can be understood, and their functions perhaps even replicated in an experimental arrangement, with reference to familiar objects.

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A standard optical text for the period, following Kepler’s model, is William Porterfield’s A Treatise on the Eye (1759).9 Porterfield had published his research on eye motion some two decades earlier, but in this lengthy textbook he combines physiology, physics, and philosophy to explain how the shape and make-up of the eye determines vision. His approach is exemplified by his explanation that eye is spherical, with ‘all the Parts of the Retina … at due focal Distance behind the Chrystalline’ (I, 68), to enable rays from several points of an object to be refracted into a distinct point on the retina. He explains the geometrical facility of this design: ‘was the Eye a Cube, or of any multangular Form, some Parts of the Retina would be too far off, and some too nigh, these refracting Humours, and so could not but receive the several Pencils of Rays, some before they meet in the Focus, and others after they meet, which would render the Images of Objects, and consequently Vision, very confused and indistinct’ (I, 67). Porterfield’s account of how the eye’s perfect internal structure facilitates sight presents the organ as having a representative, rather than active, function. He draws a connection between the opacity and refractive powers of the different humours and the clarity of vision: The Humours of the Eye … are three in number, the Aqueous, the Crystalline, and the Vitreous. All of them are transparent, that none of the Light may be intercepted, but that all of it may be transmitted for painting the Images of Objects upon the Retina with sufficient Strength and Brightness. They are also all clear like Water, that the Images of Objects may be seen in their own proper Colours; for, were they tinged with any Colour, the Objects would also appear tinged with that Colour; For tho’ Objects are seen very distinctly when this Tincture does not render the Humours opaque, yet they must appear in the same Manner as to an Eye that is perfectly sound, when it looks at them thro’ a Glass tinged with the like Colour. Thus in Jaundices the Eye is frequently so much tinged with the yellow Colour of the obstructed Bile, that all Objects appear tinged with the same yellow Colour. (I, 125–6)

The consistency and transparency of the eyes’ humours cause the rays reflected by the observed object to converge on the retina.10 Porterfield’s reference to Kepler’s example of ‘Pictures … formed by a Glass-globe full of Water’ (I, 360) provides an empirical

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demonstration of the refractive effects of different media. In fact, Ferguson’s more invasive exploration of this phenomenon in his Lectures instructs his readers to test the process for themselves through home dissection: ‘Take a bullock’s eye whilst it is fresh, and having cut off the three coats from the back part, quite to the vitreous humour, put a piece of white paper over that part, and hold the eye towards any bright object, and you will see an inverted picture of it upon the paper’ (p. 223). Each of these material models emphasises the nativist perspective, where the eye is understood as a material instrument that operates according to geometrical laws and can be manipulated, replicated, and demonstrated apart from an experienced perceiving mind.11 A final text important for understanding the early eighteenthcentury concept of vision is Matthew Beare’s 1710 work The Sensorium, which describes sensation as a tactile process in which ‘Objects, when they strike on our Organs, communicate a Motion to the Nerves; either of simple Pressure, Divulsion, Dilation, or Vellication; by which, the Spirits shut up in the Nerves are sent back to the Brain’.12 Beare identifies three pairs of nerves (like Brooke’s ‘sympathetic strings’) that control the eyes’ functions. First are the Par Opticum, or optic nerves, ‘whose Fibres are expanded all along the Retina, ready to receive the Impressions of the Rays of Light, and convey them by the Undulations of the Spirits to the Brain’ (p. 25). The second and third pairs of nerves are the Par Oculorum Motorium and the Par Patheticum, which are connected to the muscles and determine eye motion. In addition, Beare identifies the retina as a fourth nerve: ‘so call’d because it resembles a Net; it is formed out of the thin Filaments of the Optick Nerve, and thought the principal Organ of Vision’ (p. 27). The eye and its neural mechanisms are accordingly presented as a sophisticated and sensitively adjustable kind of technology. Brooke’s account of the senses in terms of a ‘mechanic scheme’ that receives impressions of external objects is consistent with these natural-philosophical texts, in which the structure of the eye and the nerves that transmit sensory impulses around the body are described in a material, mechanical fashion. Brooke’s description of the eye in Universal Beauty demonstrates how creative and didactic accounts frequently read the anatomical

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functions of the eye analogically. The eye’s structure and ­mechanical perfection are shown to be evidence of God’s design, and its function also carries moral weight because it permits visual experience of the external world and that world’s divine origins: So awful did the Almighty’s forming will, Amazing texture, and stupendous skill, The visionary net and tunics weave, And the bright gem with lucid humours lave; So gave the ball’s collected ray to glow, And round the pupil arched his radiant bow; Full in a point unmeasured spaces lie, And worlds inclusive dwell within our eye. Yet useless was this textured wonder made, Were Nature, beauteous object! undisplay’d. (Book IV, lines 313–22)

The language of skilled craftmanship, describing God’s weaving of the ‘visionary net’ of the retina and the tunics (the sclera and cornea at the front of the eye), and the architectural image of design, with the ‘radiant bow’ of the iris around the pupil both aesthetic and functional, elevate both the subject and the scale. However, we are also reminded that design without purpose is ‘useless’: the eye is constructed to enable the observer to perceive the beauty of creation. Brooke’s preceding description of retinal images combines an account of reflection with physico-theological celebration: [O]n the beam the painted image rides; Those images that still continuous glow, Effluviated around, above, below, True to the colour, distance, shape, and size, That from essential things perpetual rise, And obvious gratulate our wondering eyes; Convey the bloom of nature’s smiling scene, The vernal landskip, and the watery main; The flocks that nibble on the flowery lawn, The frisking lambkin, and the wanton fawn; The sight how grateful to the social soul, That thus imbibes the blessings of the whole, Joys in their joy, while each inspires his breast With blessing multiplied from all that’s blest! Nor less yon heights the unfolding heaven display,



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Its nightly twinkle, and its streaming day; The page impress’d conspicuous on the skies, A preface to the Book of Glory lies; We mount the steep, high born upon delight, While hope aspires beyond – and distances the sight. Thus heaven and earth, whom varying graces deck, In full proportions paint the visual speck. (Book IV, lines 291–312)

Brooke describes the process of vision as beams of light carry the ‘painted images’ of the ‘essential’ exterior world to the interior eye. He stresses the immediacy of sight: the images conveyed, from the skipping lamb to constellations of stars, are representations of the ‘colour, distance, shape, and size’ of the originals. He is careful to note that these images are not objects situated within the eye, but that they appear ‘in full proportions’ minimised on the retina. The language of painting and impression that describes the imagemaking process helps to emphasise active perception and aesthetic appreciation in addition to mere vision. Notably, too, the physicotheological framing necessitates a recognition of the ‘social soul’ and the perceiving mind that learns from visual experience. This is not simply an operation of detached geometry – the optical processes enable the observer to read ‘the Book of Glory’ in the delights of the natural world – but the accuracy of the proportional retinal images also displays and proves divine design. Given that, before Book IV’s exploration of animal life and perception, the poem’s opening three books survey the beauty and plenitude of the natural world in exhaustive detail from stars to plants, the celebration of God’s ‘largess [sic] of perceptive sense, / … to perceive, to feel, to find to know’ (Book IV, lines 90–1) forms a coherent part of the physico-theological whole. ‘The Province of celebrating [sight’s] Charms, I leave to the Poets’, proclaimed the surgeon Claude-Nicolas Le Cat, ‘Its surprising Properties alone belong to me as a Naturalist; and, indeed, what Naturalist could avoid being inchanted by them?’13 Le Cat’s determination to address physical properties does not mean, however, that he and other naturalists shun figurative language or the physico-­ theological celebration of design. In his descriptions of the anatomical structure of the eye, Porterfield also comments upon its beauty and ‘prodigious Workmanship’ (I, 251). Without the pupil to allow

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rays into the eye, he notes, ‘the whole Structure of this most curious and beautiful little Organ would have been in vain, and to no Purpose (II, 84). In addition, he explains how the pupil is the ideal size to admit sufficient light for distinct pictures to be displayed on the retina (II, 85–6). Matthew Beare takes a similar approach: So Admirable is the Fabrick of our Senses, so Wonderful the Ways by which we perceive Things by ’em, that it alone might suffice to recal [sic] the Atheist, the most Inveterate (if any such there be) from his Madness; and convince him, that no jarring fortuitous Concourse of Atoms could form a Thing, so exquisitely compleat in all its Faculties, as an Animal, without the All ruling Guide of an Omnipotent Hand: For which Organ soever of Animal Sensation we consider, we find all its Structure so congruously disposed, so compleatly furnished, as it must be the Power of God alone, the Work of an Infinite Wisdom. (pp. 1–2)

Beare’s enthusiastic physico-theology is based upon the fitness of physiology, and he also celebrates the eyes’ position in the head as ‘the Light-House of our Body, to direct and guide us in our Way’ (p. 2). The privileging of the eye as a model of divine design is also visible in texts which are not singularly concerned with eyes and vision. There is a precedent here in biblical treatments of sight such as Jesus’ healing of the blind (John 9), Saul’s temporary blindness (Acts 9:1–9), and common analogies between light and knowledge which implicitly endorse the faculty of sight. More technical celebrations of the eye appeared in physico-theological texts throughout the eighteenth century and well before Paley’s famous treatment in Natural Theology (1802). Jessica Riskin notes how ‘the physiology of the eye and the argument from design developed in tandem during the latter seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’.14 Early examples of this include Henry More’s detailed description of ‘the number, the situation, [and] the fabrick’ of the eyes as an ‘Unavoidable Argument for divine Providence’ in An Antidote against Atheism (1655).15 In his extremely popular didactic work The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691), the parson-naturalist John Ray (who himself quotes More) provides a textbook example:



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[T]he Eye [is] a part so artificially composed, and commodiously situate, as nothing can be contrived better for Use, Ornament or Security; nothing to advantage added thereto or altered therein. Of the beauty of the Eye I shall say little, leaving that to Poets and Orators; that it is a very pleasant and lovely Object to behold, if we consider the Figure, Colors and Splendor of it, is the least that I can say.16

Again, the eye is presented as something that must have been ‘composed’ and ‘situate[d]’ through an artistic and creative process. This is further reinforced by Ray’s exposition of the eye’s structure, materials, and functions. One of the key features that he  draws upon is the location of the retinal blind spot. In 1660 Edme Mariotte had identified the location where optic nerve meets the eye as being to the side of the retina and as causing a blind spot at that point.17 Ray celebrates the design of this scheme by proclaiming that ‘we see the admirable Wisdom of Nature in thus placing the Optick Nerve in respect of the Eye, which he that did not consider or understand would be apt to think more inconveniently situate for Vision, that if it had been right behind [the eye]’ (p. 262). Finally, in Physico-Theology (1713), William Derham produces a similar account of how well ‘adapted’ and ‘suited’ the eye is to all of its activities, singling out in particular the crystalline humour or lens for the ‘Prodigious Art and Finery of its constituent Parts’.18 He describes Antoni van Leeuwenhoek’s microscopical observations of the lens in the 1670s, which revealed it to be ‘composed of divers thin Scales  and these made up of one single minutest Thread, or Fibre, woven round and round, so as not to cross one another in any one Place, and yet to meet, some in two, and some in more different Centers. A Web not to be woven, an Optick-Lens not to be wrought, by Art less than infinite Wisdom’ (p. 106). This description demonstrates two distinctive kinds of analogising: the weaving of the lens is so precise that the ordered structure requires divine artistry, and the eye is a more perfect kind of instrument than any arrangement of artificial lenses can achieve. Derham’s treatment of the lens helps to explain the motivation behind a second explanatory analogy: the camera obscura, which is frequently drawn upon as a model of the eye to facilitate comprehension of vision as a passive, mechanical process. The camera

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obscura was not a new instrument in this period: the basic principle of producing an inverted image on the wall of a darkened room by passing light through a small hole had been known for centuries, and the pin-hole camera was used in astronomy in the early modern period.19 In the eighteenth century, small portable models were made popular by Robert Hooke and sold by John Cuff, Benjamin Martin, George Adams, and others.20 They were employed as optical drawing aids for capturing perspective (by practitioners including Joshua Reynolds, who had a folding version that could be collapsed into a book format,21 and William Chesselden for his anatomical diagrams), in astronomical observations (often in combination with a telescope), and for popular entertainment.22 The mainstream appeal of the camera obscura in the mid-eighteenth century is demonstrated by a short pamphlet poem, Verses Occasion’d by the Sight of a Chamera Obscura, printed in 1747 as promotional material for the instrument-maker John Cuff. The pamphlet’s final page bears a lengthy advertisement for Cuff’s optical wares ‘All at Reasonable Prices, either Wholesale or Retale’. Microscopes, micrometres, magic lanterns, opera glasses, and spectacles are all listed, together, of course, with ‘The Chamera Obscura, for exhibiting Prospects in their natural Proportions and Colours, together with the Motions of living Objects’. The verses themselves use apostrophe to provide a helpful description of what a camera obscura does: How little is thy Cell? How dark the Room? Disclose thine Eye-lid, and dispel this Gloom! That radiant Orb reveal’d, smooth, pure, polite; In darts a sudden Blaze of beaming Light, And stains the clear white Sheet, with Colours strong and bright; Exterior Objects painting on the Scroll, True as the Eye presents ’em to the Soul.23

The poem lists with dramatic flair all the things that can be displayed in the camera, including gardens, mountains, a hunt, the British navy, and a great storm that renders ‘The Room obscur’d the Picture quite eras’d’ (p. 13). The inversion of the images (which are flipped upside down and crosswise) is described with fervour as the product of an ‘Instructive Glass’ in which ‘human Pride may trace, / Diminish’d Grandeur and inverted Place’ (p. 5).

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The poet also makes an explicit analogy between the camera obscura and the eye to show how the latter processes images in the same fashion. This is coached in polite apostrophe: ‘Say, rare Machine, who taught thee to design / And mimick Nature with such Skill divine?’ (p. 3). This common analogy is also used as an explanation in Ephraim Chambers’s popular Cyclopaedia (1728), where the instrument is described as ‘representing an Artificial Eye’.24 Given the popularity and familiarity of the camera obscura and the attendant analogy with the eye, it is no surprise that Porterfield incorporates it into his physiological explanation of geometrical sight. He adopts polite diction to explain how the eyelashes protect the eyes as a kind of ‘Palisado’, which ‘render[s] the inward Eye more dark; whence the Picture on the Retina becomes more clear and distinct’ (I, 9). He notes further that, ‘Just as in a Camera Obscura, the Picture is always the most distinct and lively, when no Rays are allowed to enter it but those that come from the Object forming the Picture’ (I, 10). Later in the Treatise, he uses the model of the camera obscura to describe the process of vision: Now this Representation of Objects upon a Sheet of white Paper, by means of a Lens placed at a Hole in the Window-shut of a dark Room, is perfectly similar to what happens in our Eyes when we view Objects; for Vision, in so far as our Eyes are concerned, consists in nothing but such a Refraction of the Rays of Light by the transparent Skins and Humours of the Eye, as is necessary to unite and bring together the Rays which come from the several Points of the Object in so many corresponding Points in the Bottom of the Eye, and there to paint the Picture of the Object upon the Tunica Retina, with which the Bottom of the Eye is covered; which Picture being propagated by Motion along the Fibres of the optic Nerve into the Brain, is the Cause of Vision. (I, 353–4)

According to this account of vision, the eye works perfectly when detached from the body, and a model can be constructed to reproduce its functions. Similar comparisons are made by Beare in his Sensorium and Le Cat in his Philosophical Essay on the Senses, showing that this was a commonly held analogy that displayed and influenced conceptions of the eye and sight.25 One of the objections raised by both Riskin and Turbayne is that the analogies between the eye and the camera obscura tend to avoid

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any suggestion of the imperfection of sight, or even the subjective, embodied experience of perception. Riskin sees ‘a segregation of conversations about the eye from conversations about seeing’.26 Turbayne, likewise, notes that ‘vision enters into this science [of optics] only in that, first, the image can be either projected on a screen or seen through an optical system; secondly, the eye is an example of an optical system; and thirdly, the eye is the beneficiary of the ultimate design’.27 The camera obscura analogy describes a detached, monocular process of vision from which the perceiving mind is absent. The seen image can be displayed clearly on a sheet of paper, and no transition from the retina to the perceiving mind is required. Even in discussions of the imperfections of sight, such as where Porterfield ascribes long-sightedness and short-sightedness to the imperfect convergence of rays upon the retina (caused by the eye’s plumpness or flatness) which can be corrected by convex and concave lenses, the process is mechanical and disconnected from individual perception (I, 353–5). What this model of the detached ideal eye excludes is an account of how the individual’s perception actually occurs: how the retinal image reaches or is read by the mind, how the two-eyed observer sees a single image, how that single image is inverted (what we call the movement from the retinal image to the real image), how the observer judges distances, and how all of these mechanisms translate into an individual’s experience and knowledge. It is, therefore, quite a leap from Brooke’s descriptions of eye anatomy to the long passages of individually observed natural description that dominate the rest of Universal Beauty. Jonathan Crary suggests that the dominance of the camera obscura analogy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a consequence of the empiricist philosophy which assumed a dichotomy between the interior vision of a disembodied subject and the external physical world.28 He provides examples of Locke’s empty cabinet of the mind and even Newton’s darkened chamber as two examples of the detachment that is necessary for philosophical exploration as a ‘disembodied witness’.29 The understanding of the eye that has been outlined so far, therefore, is fundamentally an exploration of objective sight and not one of subjective perception. This interpretation is corroborated in A Treatise on the Eye, where Porterfield issues a caution:



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Properly speaking, there is no Picture in the Retina, and the Pictures which are seen painted there … are Sensations in the Mind of him who perceives them, and do not belong to the Retina on which they appear to be painted. These Pictures, considered as belonging to the Retina, consist in nothing but the Union or Coalescence of the Rays that come from the several Points of the Object. (I, 362)

Individual perception and the acquisition of knowledge through vision, and how it relates to the mechanics that bring the reflected and refracted light to the retina, are the subject of the remainder of this chapter. I begin with philosophical considerations of the mind– body problem.

Molyneux’s Question The hypothetical blind man who regains his sight appears in public for the first time in Book II of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding in a reference to private correspondence between the author and the Irish natural philosopher William Molyneux in 1688. Molyneux asked whether a blind person who could distinguish between objects – say a sphere and a cube – by touch would (supposing his sight was restored to him) be able to make the distinction by sight. Locke responded in the negative. Locke’s formulation of Molyneux’s Question in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding signals some implications for thinking about the relationships between sight and knowledge, between the external world and internal experience, and between each of the senses. Locke describes how the learned perception of convex figures transforms an image seen flat – ‘the Idea thereby imprinted in our Mind is of a flat Circle variously shadow’d, with several degrees of Light and Brightness coming to our Eyes’ (II  ix.8)  – into the three-dimensional figure of a sphere. He outlines a process of recognition, through which ‘the Judgement presently, by an habitual custom, alters the Appearances into their Causes’. This is how, he says, we learn to distinguish one shape from another or a flat painting of a globe from the original three-dimensional object. Having established the necessity of experience and judgement for translating decontextualised visual data

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into a ­comprehensible understanding of the world, Locke argues, quoting from Molyneux’s letter, that a newly sighted person would be unable to recognise or distinguish a cube or globe by sight alone: [T]hough he has obtain’d the experience of, how a Globe, how a Cube affects his touch; yet he has not yet attained the Experience, that what affects his touch so or so, must affect his sight so or so; Or that a protuberant angle in the Cube, that pressed his hand unequally, shall appear to his eye, as it does in the Cube. I agree with this thinking Gent. whom I am proud to call my Friend, in his answer to this his Problem; and am of opinion, that the Blind Man, at first sight, would not be able with certainty to say, which was the Globe, which the Cube, whilst he only saw them: though he could unerringly name them by his touch, and certainly distinguish them by the difference of their Figures felt. This I have set down, and leave with my Reader, as an occasion for him to consider, how much he may be beholding to experience, improvement, and acquired notions, where he thinks, he has not the least use of, or help from them. (II.ix.8)

Molyneux’s Question and Locke’s response prompted new discussion of a range of topics associated with subjective perception: the impossibility of innate knowledge, sensory substitution and the nature of tactile literacy, and the development of spatial judgements over time. As Mark Paterson notes, it also calls into question for us ‘what “seeing” actually is’; this is a central question that applies also to representations of seeing in landscape poetry.30 In carrying out this thought experiment about restored sight, Molyneux, Locke, and the numerous philosophers who wrote their own responses to it in the eighteenth century based their deductions upon two foundational concepts which have implications for the figuring of sight and perception in this period. The first concept is the mind or ‘sensorium commune’ as the location where different sensory impressions are brought together, often with the aid of the animal spirits, to become perceptions, and the second is the interpretation of the different senses as closely related to touch. In the second edition of Opticks, Newton describes the ‘Sensory’ or sensorium as ‘that place to which the sensitive Substance is present, and into which the sensible Species of Things are carried through the Nerves and Brain, that there they may be perceived by their immediate presence to that Substance’.31 The discussion of bodily location

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is somewhat misleading; Karl M. Figlio notes that the concept of the immaterial sensorium inhabits a slippery landscape between the tangible and the intangible, where ‘presence’ suggests ‘the location and the manner of interaction of the incommensurable substances which could neither be located in the same terms, nor affect each other’.32 We should further note that the sensorium, nerves, and spinal cord are frequently grouped together to express a material continuum of sensory experience connecting body and mind. Typical of this is Beare’s identification of the ‘Genus Nervosum, and fluidum Spirituosum’ as the seat of the mind: ‘for the Nerves extended to all the parts of our Body, and taking their Rise from the Brain, and Medulla Spinalis, make up one part of this visible Substance our Soul is contain’d in’.33 There is, therefore, a sense that touch and sight result in common impressions within the sensorium itself. This concept raises the possibility of interchangeable senses as regards Molyneux’s Question. Porterfield’s treatise also considers the relationship between the eyes and the nervous system. He notes that the eyes are located in the head because they ‘may, with greater facility, convey the Images of external Objects to the common Sensorium’ (I, 53). He suggests that this accounts for the comparative vividness of visual perception (unlike touch, which is spread out to nerves all over the body) because the optic nerves deliver sensory impressions almost directly, and the agitation conveyed to the brain is stronger and undiminished by travel through the body (see figure 7). A Treatise on the

Figure 7  The eyes, the sensorium commune, and binocular vision. William Porterfield, A Treatise on the Eye, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Miller, Hamilton and Balfour, 1759), vol. II, plate II, figure 12.

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Eye was published some years after Porterfield had had a leg amputated. His own account of phantom limb experiences, the first selfreport by a physician,34 demonstrates an interest in the relationship between the body and sense experience. Just as Blackmore’s earlier Creation draws on phantom limb experiences to describe the brain as the source of feelings – ‘Since, a Limb sever’d by the wounding Steel, / We still may Pain, as in that Member, feel’ (p. 316) – Porterfield uses his own experience to make a connection between his mechanical understanding of vision and mental p ­ erception. He explains that, though sensations are produced by the Mind, ‘the Mind never considers them as such … [and] it is always made to refer them to something external (I, 364). This provides some firsthand evidence for a perceived interchangeability of the senses and explains how the mind can be seen to conflate external and internal experiences: It is therefore evident, that, did the Mind perceive Pictures in the Retina, it behoved to be there present: And for the same Reason, did it perceive in the other Organs of Sense, it behoved also to be present to all the Parts of the Body; because the Sense of Feeling is diffused thro’ all the Body: Nay, in some Cases it behoved to be extended beyond the Body itself, as in the Case of Amputations … Having had this Misfortune myself, I can the better vouch the Truth of this Fact from my own Experience; for I sometimes still feel Pains and Itchings, as if in my Toes, Heel or Ancle, &c. tho’ it be several Years since my Leg was taken off. (I, 363–4)

This account of sensory awareness throughout the body has implications for the concept of vision. Porterfield’s descriptions of the eye and vision establish that perception is not a directly haptic experience: he explains that the retina receives images that are ‘propagate[d] … thro’ the small Fibres of the optic Nerve into the common Sensory, or that Part of the Brain in which all the Fibres of our Nerves terminate, and which in our Mind resides’ (II, 214). Whilst he does not come to any conclusive theory about the relationship between these physical processes and the experience of sight, Porterfield notes that ‘the Union of the Body and Mind is so strict, that some Motions in the Body do, as it were, cohere with certain Ideas in the Mind, so as they cannot be separated from each other’ (II, 214). The principle of sensory immediacy suggests how

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the ­representative mode promoted by Porterfield could encourage a positive response to Molyneux’s Question. Furthermore, the concept of sensory exchanges between body and mind – without a manipulable test case – helps to blur the distinction between the products of each sense. Brooke’s Universal Beauty presents the relationship between the sensory organs and the mind through a mock-heroic description of personified ‘envoys’ (Book IV, line 277) who transmit sensory impressions from the ‘frontier senses’ (Book IV, line 278), through the nerves, to the queenly soul that governs the body from her ‘intellectual throne’ (Book IV, line 264). References to animal spirits are common in descriptions of the relationship between sensory impressions and perceptive experience. The entry for ‘Sensation’ in Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (1728) gives an account of sensory organs and nerves: [A]ll the Organs consist of little Threads, or Nerves; which have their Origine [sic] in the Middle of the Brain, are diffused thence throughout all the Members which have any Sense, and terminate in the exterior Parts of the Body: That when we are in Health, and awake, one End of these Nerves cannot be agitated, or shaken, without shaking the other; by reason they are always a little stretch’d, as is the Case of a stretch’d Cord, one Part of which cannot be stirr’d without a like Motion of all the rest. Observe, again, That these Nerves may be agitated two ways; either by the End out of the Brain, or that in the Brain. (II, 53)

Chambers ascribes the processes of internal and external sensation to ‘the Course of the Animal Spirits’ (though he posits that there may be ‘any other Cause’) (II, 54) as they travel along the nerves directed towards the brain, where the nerves terminate. Blackmore’s account of nervous activity in Creation is similarly reliant upon the model of the animal spirits, and it provides a useful summary of contemporaneous accounts that connect the senses with the sensorium. His description in Book VI of the developing nervous system of an embryo anticipates Chambers’s model of the relationship between the senses and the mind. The passage begins with a description of nerves’ initial compression in the embryo’s brain before they expand throughout the body:

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Th’Elastic Spirits which remain at rest In the straight Lodgings of the Brain comprest, While by the ambient Womb’s enliv’ning Heat Cheer’d and awaken’d, first themselves dilate; Then quicken’d and expanded ev’ry way The Genial Lab’rers all their Force display. They now begin to work the wondrous Frame, To shape the Parts, and raise the vital Flame. (pp. 282–3)

The personification of the ‘Elastic Spirits’, which are activated by the organic heat of the womb rather than their own consciousness, helps to overcome the question of vital origins, and there is a hint at sensory responsiveness in this depiction. The nerves are described as ‘th’extended Fibres of the Brain’ which, filled with animal spirits, spring in various directions and forge neural pathways from the brain to the body and the senses that lie at its openings (p. 283): Thus with a steady and alternate Toil They issue from, and to the head recoil: By which their plastic Function they discharge, Extend their Channels, and their Tracks enlarge. For by the swift Excursions which they make, Still sallying from the Brain, and leaping back, They pierce the Nervous Fibre, bore the Vein, And stretch th’Arterial Channels, which contain The various Streams of Life, that to and fro Thro’ dark Meanders undirected flow. (p. 284)

Blackmore envisions a network of hollow nerves that connect the sensorium or brain with the nervous system and, therefore, the tactile body and sensory organs, forming a web of communication throughout the body.35 Porterfield, too, makes infrequent references to the animal spirits in his Treatise on the Eye. He is careful, however, to emphasise that the spirits have no role in the mechanics of vision, but only in communication between the retina and the sensorium. An example of this is double vision, which Porterfield attributes to ‘the languid irregular Motion of the animal Spirits’, which causes the eyes to look in different directions (I, 112). In addition to these ideas about the sensorium commune and the animal spirits, a second concept shared by philosophers who

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tackle Molyneux’s Question is the close alignment of touch and sight.36 Ann Jessie van Sant notes that these two senses are frequently singled out as the ‘philosophical senses’ that work together to open up knowledge of the material world.37 For example, Beare suggests that, in the broadest terms, ‘all the Senses may be reduc’d to the Touch alone; since ’tis by this, that all the others receive the Impression of Objects, striking on the external Organs’ (pp. 10–11). This statement demonstrates an intromissionist account of the senses, which defines vision, touch, hearing, taste, and smell as products of external stimuli touching the receptive senses.38 In the Essay, Locke’s language of sensory impressions and ‘impulses’ from perceptible and imperceptible bodies similarly frames sight as a kind of touch. For example, he argues that external bodies produce sensations ‘by impulse’: If then external Objects be not united to our minds, when they produce Ideas in it; and yet we perceive these original Qualities in such of them as singly fall under our Senses, ’tis evident, that some motion must be thence continued by our Nerves or animal Spirits, by some parts of our Bodies, to the Brains, or the seat of Sensation, there to produce in our minds the particular Ideas we have of them. And since the Extension, Figure, Number and Motion of Bodies, of an observable bigness, may be perceived at a distance by the sight, ’tis evident some singly imperceptible Bodies must come from them to the Eyes, and thereby convey to the Brain some Motion, which produces these Ideas, which we have of them in us. (II.viii.12)

Van Sant rightly reads Lockean impression as ‘a fusion of traditional metaphor with the natural scientist’s and the physiologist’s understanding of sensation’.39 What is clear, though, is that Locke is also using the language of touch to describe the experience of other kinds of sensation. This idea finds its way into Addison’s Spectator essays on ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’, in which he describes sight as ‘a more delicate and diffusive kind of Touch, that spreads itself over an infinite Multitude of Bodies, comprehends the  largest Figures, and brings into our reach some of the most remote Parts of the Universe’.40 Whilst he does employ the tactile language of ‘gross’ and delicate senses, Addison does not directly refer to the operations of the body. His popular version of sight,

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however, shows the emergence of Lockean ideas about the senses into the public realm. In Edge-Hill, Richard Jago pauses his survey of Warwickshire landscapes to provide an extensive philosophical explanation of how the ‘Organs’ of all five senses receive similar impressions from ‘external Things’: [S]age Philosophy explores the Cause Of each Phænomenon of Sight, or Sound, Taste, Touch, or Smell; each Organ’s inmost Frame, And Correspondence with external Things. Explains how diff’rent Texture of their Parts Excites Sensations diff’rent, rough, or smooth, Bitter, or sweet, Fragrance, or noisome Scent. How various Streams of undulating Air, Thro’ the Ear’s winding Labyrinth convey’d, Cause all the vast Variety of Sounds. Hence too the subtle Properties of Light, And sev’n-fold Colour are distinctly view’d In the Prismatic Glass, and outward Forms Shewn fairly drawn, in Miniature Divine, On the transparent Eye’s membraneous Cell.41

The ‘Correspondence’ between the external world and the sensory organs is described as one of physical impressions. Jago’s descriptions of the material labyrinths and membranes of ear and retina emphasise the materiality of the senses, whilst the references to artistic representation allow for a transition between sensory engagement and perception. The universality of tactility to all senses in these diverse experiences suggests a possible interchangeability between different modalities as well as some evidence for why a positive response to Molyneux’s Question could be assumed according to common-sense principles. George Berkeley offers an alternative approach to Molyneux’s Question and the division of the senses in An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (rev. 1732), in which he addresses the acquisition of knowledge about the phenomenal world. Berkeley omits his immaterialist theory from this essay – his first major p ­ ublication – and focuses on the relationship between the different senses. As A.A. Luce notes, this omission was perhaps a tactic to garner

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support for his ideas about sensory experience.42 Berkeley’s negative response to Molyneux’s Question is therefore based upon his discussion of the separation of the senses, using the perception of secondary qualities such as distance, magnitude, and situation as a starting point, rather than any discussion of innate knowledge. Like Locke, Berkeley argues that distance cannot be perceived through a simple mechanism of sight within the eye, but he takes a different approach to the discussion of perceptual experience. Although he acknowledges that the appearance of distances in the eye is connected with the lines and angles that cause the image’s rays to converge on the retina, Berkeley states that judgement is also needed to render distance perceptible to the mind. He suggests that distance perception is connected with clarity of vision, as ‘a man may make use of the divergency of the rays in computing the apparent distance, though not for its own sake, yet on account of the confusion with which it is connected’.43 He argues from this point that the inferential perception of clarity and closeness would not be possible in a blind man’s first experience of vision: [A] man born blind, being made to see, would at first have no idea of distance by sight. The sun and stars, the remotest objects as well as the nearer, would all seem to be in his eye, or rather in his mind. The objects intromitted by sight would seem to him (as in truth they are) no other than a new set of thoughts or sensations, each whereof is as near to him as the perceptions of pain or pleasure, or the most inward passions of his soul. (p. 20 (§41))

Berkeley’s version of visual perception is therefore, as Kramnick notes, ‘indirect and inferential, a product of internal calculations’ that relies on judgement and immediacy.44 Rather than referring to the more commonly combined senses of touch and sight, Berkeley illustrates his claims for the separation of the senses by considering the relationship between hearing and sight. He provides a practical example: Sitting in my study I hear a coach drive along the street; I look through the casement and see it; I walk out and enter into it. Thus common speech would incline to think I heard, saw, and touched the same thing, to wit, the coach. It is nevertheless certain, the ideas intromitted by each sense are widely different and distinct from each

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other; but have been observed constantly to go together, they are spoken of as one and the same thing. By the variation of the noise I perceive the different distances of the coach, and know that it approaches before I look out. Thus by the ear I perceive distance, just after the same manner as I do by the eye. (p. 23 (§46))

In this refutation of inter-sensory communication, Berkeley distinguishes between the perception of the coach’s distance (which conflates hearing and sight) and the distinct impressions provided by the two senses to contribute to this perception.45 As Michael J. Morgan notes, ‘[h]is powerful motive for denying the existence of inter-sensory ideas was that such ideas would be general ideas: and these general ideas were anathema to the empiricists because they smelled of nativism’.46 Berkeley runs through examples of size and situation to demonstrate that there is no essential connection between the knowledge acquired by sight and that acquired by the other senses. He explains that this conclusion would be evident to the hypothetical blind man, who ‘would not consider the ideas of sight with reference to, or as having any connexion with, the ideas of touch. His view of them being entirely terminated within themselves, he can no otherwise judge them great or small than as they contain a greater or lesser number of visible points’ (p. 37 (§79)). According to this idea of singular senses, then, Molyneux’s Question receives a negative response.47 Philosophical texts routinely include real-life examples of sensory substitution demonstrated by blind people who appear to display quasi-visual abilities. In his Essay on the Senses Le Cat explains that ‘[t]he Sense of Feeling is absolutely so compleat, and of such universal Benefit, that it has sometimes performed, if I may so express myself, the Function of the Eyes, and recompensed in some measure, the Blind for the Loss of their Sight’ (p. 8). He evidences this claim with an account of a Dutch organist who could ‘play perfectly well’ although he was blind, and could also distinguish ‘different kinds of Money, and even Colours [and playing] Cards’ by touch (p. 8).48 Beare, too, comments that blind people have the most accurate sense of touch and ‘can sometimes distinguish ev’n Colours by it’ (p. 172). Similarly, we must not forget Locke’s example in the Essay of a blind man, who describes the colour scarlet as akin to the sound of a trumpet (II.iv.5). These are, however, examples of



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adaptation rather than interchangeability, and it is quite a step to suggest that either the Dutch organist or Locke’s blind man would know how to interpret visual images. Only in 1728 would a practical test case for the latter be supplied.

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Cataract surgery and the recovery of sight In these thought experiments, there is scant interest in the blind person as an individual, and therefore very little appears in the way of direct literary responses. The analogical associations with sight and blindness – drawing on the model of the camera obscura that functions geometrically and precisely, and on the concept of the eye’s divine design – are also undisturbed by these  queries. Molyneux himself was married to a blind woman but she makes no appearance in his speculations.49 Molyneux’s Question is instead the starting point for theoretical explorations of the relationships between the senses and the limits of sense experience. Unsurprisingly, this thought experiment has been met with substantial contemporary criticism owing to its ethical failings. Georgina Kleege notes that ‘the blind man’s primary function is to highlight the importance of sight and to elicit a frisson of awe and pity which promotes gratitude among the sighted theorists for the vision that they possess’.50 Mark M. Smith also urges caution about the hierarchies of sense experience implied by this kind of enterprise: ‘Frequently, the descriptions we have of the use of the senses were established by – and left by – elites, which likely reflect their preferred understanding of reality, but not reality in its full, multivalent, contingent texture.’51 Most problematically, the hypothetical blind man is not really a man at all: he is a test case whose experience shifts suddenly from complete darkness to a fully realised visual world, he speaks in the strict language of optics, he is necessarily distanced from any contact with society, he is ‘made to see’ painlessly without any reference to the surgical process, and whereas his blindness constituted lack his new sight is a fully positive development.52 Chris Mounsey’s ground-breaking work on the lived experiences of blind people in the eighteenth century also urges us to question this

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overly simplistic approach.53 A possible solution can be found in the surgical treatment of eye conditions in the first half of the century: reports address a number of treatable conditions causing partial or complete obstructions in one or both eyes, including cataracts, glaucoma, ulcers, and diastasis of the iris (a condition where the iris swells to close the pupil).54 For the greater part, the patients appear to have had some visual ability before procedures were carried out. As Mounsey notes, the language in which these cases are described can be misleading, and ‘[i]t is impossible to give a brief definition of blindness as it might have been understood in the eighteenth century, except that it appears it was not a simple binary of “sight and no sight”’.55 However, two cataract removal operations, the first by William Chesselden in 1728 and the second by John Taylor of Hatton Garden in 1751, engaged with newly acquired sight as a testable phenomenon. In 1728 the celebrated surgeon William Chesselden published an account of cataract surgery in the Philosophical Transactions. This operation was widely read, and its results became an important reference point for thinking about the practical implications of Molyneux’s Question. An earlier case of sight recovery through surgery was reported by Steele and others in 1709, but its veracity is greatly contested.56 Chesselden’s subject was ‘between 13 and 14 years of age’ and, because of cataracts in both eyes, had been ‘born blind, or lost his sight so early, that he had no remembrance of ever having seen’.57 He could distinguish between black, white, and red, but could not perceive distinct shapes. The surgical procedure that Chesselden employed was a modified version of the ancient method of couching, an imprecise technique involving inserting needles into the eye to detach the clouded lens, moving it down away from the pupil and leaving the patient reliant upon artificial lenses.58 The  account in Philosophical Transactions provides brief details of the surgery, but the author’s chief focus is the patient’s reactions to encountering the world through sight for the first time. The boy’s initial assumptions corroborate Berkeley’s claims about an inability to recognise or articulate vision as a new, separate sense: ‘When he first saw, he was so far from making any Judgement about Distances, that he thought all Objects whatever touch’d his Eyes (as he express’d it) as what he felt, did his Skin’

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(p. 448).59 Further to this initial claim, a definitive refutation of Molyneux’s Question is provided that accords with Locke’s model of experience: ‘He knew not the Shape of any Thing, nor any one Thing from another, however different in Shape, or Magnitude; but upon being told what Things were, whose Form he before knew from feeling, he would carefully observe, that he might know them again’ (p. 448). Sight, and the interpretation of the visual world as connected to tangible reality, are therefore shown to be dependent upon repeated experience and judgement. Whilst it should be remembered that cataract surgery was carried out for medical, not merely philosophical, purposes, Chesselden relates an incident connected to Molyneux’s query about distinguishing between objects: Having often forgot which was the Cat, and which the Dog, he was asham’d to ask; but catching the Cat (which he knew by feeling) he was observ’d to look at her stedfastly, and then setting her down, said, So Puss! I shall know you another Time. (p. 448)

Though as Chesselden says this incident ‘may appear trifling’ (p. 448), it can be read as evidence that common sense about knowledge through sight is, in fact, merely sighted common sense. The newly sighted boy does not recognise pictures as representations of things and cannot distinguish between painted perspective and the dimensions of real objects. The boy’s repeated query, ‘which was the lying Sense, Feeling, or Seeing?’ (p. 449), therefore indicates that he experiences no habitual connection between the senses. As Morgan, Riskin, and others have shown, Chesselden’s operation received wide attention in both Britain and France.60 For example, the Cambridge mathematician and natural philosopher Robert Smith devotes a chapter of his Compleat System of Opticks (1738) to an exposition of ideas acquired through sight. After quoting Chesselden’s report in full, he suggests a programme of activities through which a newly sighted person might learn to recognise and compare tactile and visual sensations. In an activity designed to develop visual spatial awareness and distance judgement, which would be familiar to the touch but unfamiliar in sight, Smith advises the reader to observe his hand’s movements when touching an object and to note the alterations in

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visual a­ ppearance, so that ‘By the like observations made with his hand and frequently repeated, he may learn to know the motion of a body by sight; and the direction of its motion, with respect to his own body; and consequently to know extension and the situation of extension.’61 The newly sighted person will also need to learn how ‘to direct his eye to any desired object’ in order to see it distinctly (p. 45). Smith describes all these exercises as the development of ‘habitual  connection[s]’ between light, colours, and objects, and he shows successful sight to be the product of ‘constant experience’ (p. 46). A second example of reception can be found in Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s Histoire naturelle de l’âme (1747), where  Chesselden’s patient appears in the third of six stories that prove that all ideas have their origins in sensation. La Mettrie notes that the boy’s recovered sight initially constitutes ‘coloured light’ (‘ne … qu’une lumière colorée’) without any sense of extension, distance, or figure.62 He posits a compensatory ­sensitivity of nerves in the fingers of blind people that he suggests is akin to the well-practised touch of skilled surgeons, and he also refers to Locke’s Essay to show how perspective and judgement are not automatic. Notwithstanding the authority accorded to Chesselden by his professional status and the wide reception of his Philosophical Transactions report, there are some doubts about the degree to which his account can be accepted at face value.63 Mounsey’s considerable archival scholarship has uncovered the successful of itinerant and professional oculists such as John ‘Chevalier’ Taylor and his son John Taylor of Hatton Garden to show how these practitioners, who have been routinely dismissed as quack doctors in both contemporaneous and modern accounts, by far surpassed crown-approved general anatomists such as Chesselden who possessed surgical dexterity – most skilfully deployed in his pioneering operations on bladder stones – but lacked the specialist know-how to operate on eyes with success.64 Mounsey suggests that Chesselden’s 1728 report describes a sole successful couching operation, whereas the procedure – ordinarily treating patients with impaired vision in one or both eyes, rather than the more unusual case of somebody ‘made to see’ for the first time – was fairly routine for specialist eye doctors.65

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Concern about the sub-par skills of generalists such as Chesselden is reflected in the preface to Benedict Duddell’s 1729 account of cataract treatments, where he attacks ‘conceited’ generalist anatomists whose pride and limited knowledge leads them to do damage,66 and in Peter Kennedy’s 1739 ‘supplement’ to his earlier work Ophthalmographia, where he accuses Chesselden of plagiarism and incompetence (by suggesting that he had had the temerity to amend images he had taken from Ophthalmographia and to introduce errors in the process).67 Repeating Duddell’s attack on generalist medical knowledge, Kennedy muses that ‘the best Hands will commit infinite Blunders daily’ without a ‘good Head’ of knowledge (p. 98). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kennedy criticises Chesselden’s 1728 cataract operation, and his report of a visit to see the patient suggests a poor long-term outcome: Now, as to this Gentleman’s seeing, I am sorry to say for his sake, that it is still but very imperfect, and far from being able to read or write therewith; which, says our Author, he thought only worth the undergoing an Operation for: It seems even to be with considerable difficulty he can guide himself along without some Assistance. (p. 95)

It is with some relish that Kennedy refers to the original Philosophical Transaction report on the boy’s animal interactions: he acknowledges that the young gentlemen ‘still knows Puss (whom our Author mentions) much better by his feeling than he does by his seeing’ (p.  95). Importantly, however, the oculist also suggests that the poor recovery of sight may have been owing to a separate ‘Abscess, or a total Suppuration, or purulence of the Crystalline Humour’ (p. 96) some six months after the operation, rather than a failure of the original couching. If Kennedy’s documentation of the young gentleman’s poor vision, as a result of either a botched operation or the subsequent ailment, can be taken as the explanation for the failure to recognise objects by sight, then a second test case is required. In October 1751 John Taylor of Hatton Garden performed a double couching on the eyes of the eight-year-old William Taylor, ‘the Blind Boy of Ightham’, who was reported to have been born with cataracts in both eyes. An account written by William Oldys, antiquary and friend of the surgeon, describes John Taylor’s education and

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t­ raining in ophthalmology together with an account of how the boy was ‘brought to Sight’.68 The authorising strategies are quite different from Chesselden’s confident report to the Royal Society: Taylor does not report his own work, and Oldys’s account is endorsed by prefatory letters with another acquaintance, Dr M.  Monsey. As Mounsey’s research has shown, the account is further corroborated through newspaper advertisements including the following announcement in the London Daily Advertiser and Literary Gazette for 9 November 1751: I hereby certify, that my Son, a Boy of eight Years old, was born blind; but by the Help of God, and the Assistance of Mr. John Taylor, Oculist, in Hatton-Garden, London, was restored to Sight. William Taylor. The Operation was performed in Presence of us, George Taylor, Clement Taylor, James Hackett, Thomas Knell, Alexander Berry, William Coachman, jun. Clerk of the Parish. The abovementioned Lad is now at Mr. Taylor’s House in Hatton-Garden, where any Gentleman of the Faculty, or other, may satisfy their Curiosity by seeing him whenever they think proper to call. As the Lad never saw before, the Curious cannot fail of being agreeably amused with his Notions of Objects.69

The patient’s ‘Notions of Objects’ are explored at greater length in William Oldys’s account. Oldys notes that prior to the couching operations the young William Taylor ‘had some faint Discernment, or glimmering Sensation of luminous Bodies’ as the cataracts did not cover his lenses completely.70 The first significant statement regarding visual recognition after couching – ‘That he saw the Pewter on the Shelf, with the Clock, and its Case; that all these Things the Boy knew before by Feeling’ (p. 12) – is quoted as the boy’s own testament confirmed by his father. However, Oldys suggests with heavy scepticism that suggestibility may have played a part: ‘the Boy might answer yes, name those several Things, as he heard them named, and saw them; and also point out the Places where they stood, as he had been led the Way’ (p. 17). Oldys does, however, provide two further examples of William Taylor’s responses to visual data which are more helpful for thinking about Molyneux’s Question. Like Chesselden’s patient, the boy is clearly short-sighted and in need of sight correction. But his encounters with the environment around him also indicate an

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inability to interpret distances or to conceive of objects as anything but immediately present. Accustomed to encountering the world through the immediacy of touch, the boy shows no awareness of distance and is unable to interpret objects around him. He requires aid in navigating the physical world: ‘when he saw any large Utensil, Piece of Furniture, or Apparel, that stood, or lay near him, he discover’d himself so perplex’d to go forward, that he would not stir, till he was told what it was, how far off, and how to avoid, or pass by it’ (p. 20). In an example that confirms Berkeley’s suspicions about distance judgement and shows the newly sighted boy’s assumption that vision operates identically to touch, Oldys reports that the boy was found one night climbing upon the roof of the house, ‘without any Apprehension of Danger’, in an attempt ‘to catch the Moon’ (p. 20). Finally, Oldys explains the boy’s navigational difficulties further by describing his ‘Ignorance of Situations, as to higher and lower, or right and left’ – demonstrated in an experiment where the boy constantly points at the wrong end of ‘a Pin held up before him’ – showing that this needs practice in order to be resolved (p. 22). Whilst Oldys does not explain this point in terms of the learned inversion of retinal images, it is a helpful indication of the multiple ways in which Molyneux’s Question can be answered with a resounding negative. In both surgical cases, successful vision is shown to be contingent upon experience and the correct functioning of sensory organs. However, the analogical associations between sight and knowledge are inescapable. At one extreme, La Mettrie frames Chesselden’s patient’s inability to judge visual sensations instinctively as a feature of divine design because, he says, ‘God, who does nothing without use, does not give us any original ideas’ (‘Dieu, qui ne fait rien d’inutile, ne nous a donné aucune idée primitive’, p. 305). More generally, Chesselden’s and Oldys’s reports both treat their patients as surgical objects first and foremost, with very limited quotation of first-person experience.71 One challenge to this perspective is provided by Voltaire’s summary of the 1729 case, which highlights the older patient’s scepticism about the procedure: He could not very well conceive, that the Sense of Sight could contribute much to his Happiness. Without inculcating to him the

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its [sic] use for learning to read and write, he had never desired to see. His Indifference in this Point proves, that It is impossible to be unhappy by the Privation of the Good of which we have no Idea.72

This reflects some of the ethical reminders provided in modern disability studies that caution against framing blindness in terms of lack or absence or attempting any totalising account of blind people’s experience. The problem with an analogical idealisation of sight is addressed directly in the report from Philosophical Transactions. Chesselden writes that the boy ‘was very much surpriz’d, that those Things which he had lik’d best, did not appear most agreeable to his Eyes, expecting those Persons would appear most beautiful that he lov’d most, and such Things to be most agreeable to his Sight that were so to his Taste’ (pp. 448–9). The report of this event suggests that both patient and (sighted) ophthalmologist assume that the recovery of sight will be a fully positive phenomenon.73 This tension recalls the strong physico-theological analogical a­ ssociations – both in terms of the modelling of the eye as divinely created instrument and in terms of biblical precedent – through which sight is habitually posited as the fullest sense through which the world is encountered.74 In Chesselden’s account, we see a recognition of the imperfection of visual experience: good things are not always beautiful, and blindness must be reassessed as a diagnosable medical, not moral, condition.

Correcting sight, correcting over-sightedness Philosophical ideas about the immediacy of visual experience, the analogical valuation of models of sight and blindness, and the recognition of sight’s recovery as subjective phenomena are explored in detail in Jago’s Edge-Hill. The epigraph to the work, echoing traditional analogical associations, is taken from Addison’s Spectator essay no. 411: ‘Our sight is the most perfect, and most delightful of all our Senses. It fills the Mind with the largest Variety of Ideas, converses with its Objects at the greatest Distance, and continues the longest in Action without being tired, or satiated with its proper Enjoyment.’ However, the poem itself critiques this ocularcentric

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stance. The first two books of the poem are chiefly concerned with the excursive views over the Warwickshire landscape and, especially, the historically significant estates in the area. In the first book, the reader is taught not only how to view and interpret the landscape ‘to know / The various Characters of Time and Place’ (Book I, lines 414–15), but also how to landscape one’s own ‘rural Seat’ to allow the ‘unimprison’d Eye’ to roam freely (Book I, lines 423, 455). The second book guides the reader through an ‘accurate Survey’ (Book II, line 73) of different castles in the West Midlands, from Ratley Hill to Kenilworth. Contrary to the promises of the epigraph, however, the attainment of the prospect view is embodied and imperfect: First view, but cautious, the vast Precipice; Lest, startled at the giddy Height, thy Sense Swimming forsake thee, and thy trembling Limbs, Unnerv’d, and fault’ring, threaten dang’rous Lapse. …      Below, the Lawns, With spacious Sweep, and wild Declivity, To yellow Plains their sloping Verdure join. (Book II, lines 83–6 and 91–3)

Jago acknowledges that the prospect view can be affected by the mental and physical stability of the observer and that dizzy heights can produce a hazy image. The eyes do not function here as perfect instruments, but as subjective and responsive body parts. Although the poem’s combination of didacticism and natural catalogue suggests a typical emphasis on the over-sighted man, Book III, summarised as ‘Metaphysical Subtleties exploded’, avoids this association by looking at the philosophical and physical problems connected with viewing a landscape. The introduction addresses scepticism, and Jago suggests that all the views seen so far may be only products of ‘Ideal Vision’ (Book III, line 4): Do all our Senses make the same Report? Or mock we each with Semblances of Sense? Are we, or are we not what thus we seem? Or is this World, which we material call, A visionary Scene, like midnight Dreams, Without Existence, save what Fancy gives? (Book III, lines 11–16)

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Jago acknowledges then dismisses the philosophical puzzle of ‘how Matter acts on incorporeal Mind’ (Book III, line 18) and introduces the mechanism of vision as the key distinction between reality and fancy. The ‘transparent Eye’s membraneous Cell’ is compared first to a prism and then to both telescope and microscope (Book III, line 69) before the poet celebrates the unacknowledged wonders of subjective sight. Jago presents the reader with three images of Kenilworth Castle as it is viewed in bright sunshine, in obscuring clouds, and, by analogy, through impaired eyes: See, while the Sun gilds, with his golden Beam, Yon’ distant Pile, which Hyde, with Care refin’d, From tastless [sic] Plunder guards, how beautiful Its venerable Form! Anon some Cloud Opake the streaming Lustre intercepts, And all the glitter’ing Object fades away. Or, if some Incrustation o’er the Sight Its baleful Texture spread, like a clear Lens, With Filth obscur’d! no more the Sensory, Thro’ the thick Film, imbibes the cheerful Day, ‘But Cloud instead, and ever-during Night Surround it.’ (Book III, lines 33–44)

The first two descriptions ascribe clarity of vision to the external conditions. However, the third view emphasises the opacity of the eyes’ humours which prevent the observer from seeing the castle clearly as analogous to the external effects of a cloudy day on a fully sighted viewer. Although he quotes here lines 45–6 of Milton’s exploration of his own blindness in ‘On Light’, a poem that calls optimistically for celestial light and insight, Jago instead considers how the imperfect refraction of light through the eyes can result in the ‘mishapen [sic] Forms’ (Book III, line 50) of ignorance and superstition in the mind. There is no possibility of analogical sensory substitution in this account: physiology determines knowledge. The fact that the acquisition of knowledge through vision is a learned process is demonstrated through a narrative of recovered sight later in Book III. Although this is not drawn directly from the surgical cases outlined in the previous section, bearing instead resemblances to Steele’s 1709 account, some familiar characteristics

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can be identified.75 Jago describes ‘a Youth of lib’ral Mind’ who is blind from infancy because of ‘Suffusion’ or cataracts (Book III, lines 91–3). He undergoes surgery ‘[t]o draw side the Veil, which, like a Cloud, / With grossest Vapours charg’d, hung o’er his Sight, / And ope a lucid Passage to the Sun’ (Book III, lines 103–5). The situation of this narrative in a physico-theological prospect poem highlights a familiar tension as we see the language of artful surgery and miraculous recovery conveyed through analogical light imagery. The surgery is completed with miraculous swiftness: The friendly Wound was giv’n; th’ obstructing Film Drawn artfully aside; and, on his Sight Burst the full Tide of Day. Surpriz’d he stood, Not knowing where he was, nor what he saw. (Book III, lines 122–5)

The effect, heightened by the sudden caesura separating the surgical procedure and its outcome, is of course bathetic. However artful the surgery, the promised miracle of sight is not immediate: the eyes are not automatic instruments divorced from the judging mind. The narrative of the boy’s gradual engagement with the visual world – framed in the language of a previous ‘darksome World’ and new ‘bright Realms’ (Book III, lines 248–9) – provides a dramatisation of Molyneux’s Question: The skilful Artist first, as first in Place He view’d, then view’d himself, then sudden seiz’d His Benefactor’s Hand, then felt his own; Now mark’d their near Resemblance, much perplex’d And still the more perplex’d, the more he saw. (Book III, lines 126–30)

The youth only gradually recognises the relationship between the hands he touches and those he sees. He must interpret visual shapes in the context of physical objects, and he must be instructed in the connection between known voices and the visible appearances of his family. This perplexing experience is intimate and shocking – ‘I feel a Death-like Damp / Chill all my Frame’, he says (Book III, lines 141–2) – and not at all like the sanitised thought experiments of philosophical literature. Echoing the Lockean emphasis on

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e­xperience, Jago describes the newly acquired sight as an ‘infant Sense’ (Book III, line 158). The ‘dang’rous Joy’ of meeting his ‘gentle Friend’ Lydia is cut short (Book III, lines 159, 143). A second sentimentalised visual encounter is prompted by another unbandaging, and the boy orders Lydia to ‘loose these envious Folds, and be thyself / The first, best Object of my longing Eyes’ (Book III, lines 180–1). There is some concern on Lydia’s part that she will not live up to her dear friend’s visual hopes (he confirms that she is beautiful to all his other senses). Fortunately, the boy does not revise his views upon seeing her, and he gains a ‘gentle Partner’ to lead him through the heavenly new visual world he has entered (Book III, line 291). Jago does not hesitate to provide an analogical reading between the boy’s future lessons of fixing his gaze and distinguishing between ‘painted, unsubstantial Forms’ (Book III, line 286) and real people, and Lydia acts as a guide to distinguishing between truth and artifice. There is an uneasy relationship in Jago’s poem between the privileging of the unbounded sight of an unnamed or hypothetical viewer, the analogical framing of sight and blindness, and the transition of the unsighted and newly sighted from hypothetical figure to medical subject and to stock character that can be embedded into an easy narrative of moral guidance. However, whilst this episode is introduced as an example of the usually unacknowledged wonders of sight, Jago does not permit himself an unabashed celebration, and it is clear throughout the poem that embodied vision cannot appeal to a standard of mechanical or analogical perfection. As the surgical case and this creative exploration of Molyneux’s Question at mid-century suggests, when applied to lived experience and human narratives, the models and assumptions that govern the understanding of sight are insufficient for a full account of an individual’s perceptive faculties.

Notes  1 Blackmore, Creation, p. 281.  2 See Harry M. Solomon, Sir Richard Blackmore (Boston: Twayne, 1980), pp. 24–5.

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 3 Goodman, Georgic Modernity, p. 40.  4 Brooke, Universal Beauty, Book IV, line 24.  5 Brooke’s note to ‘Sovereign Geometrician’ emphasises the non-­ volitional nature of sensation: ‘Omnipotence to support the Scheme, who actuating and informing all Nature by his wisdom, as he created it by his will, the Creature so subjected can’t possibly withstand the creating Power, and nothing to him is impossible’ (line 38n).  6 The analogy between the nervous system and the ‘sympathetic strings’ of the harp produces an image of correspondence that is akin to the Hartleian associationism. See Chapter 5, pp. 233–42.  7 See Olivier Darrigol, A History of Optics from Greek Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 26–31.  8 James Ferguson, ‘Lecture VII. Of Optics’, in Lectures on Select Subjects in Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Hydraulics, Pneumatics and Optics. With the Use of Globes, the Art of Dialing, and the Calculation of the Mean Times of New and Full Moons and Eclipses (London: Millar, 1760), pp. 209–59 (pp. 220–1).  9 William Porterfield, A Treatise on the Eye: The Manner and Phaenomena of Vision, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Miller, Hamilton and Balfour, 1759). 10 The connection between the transparency of the humours and the clarity of perceived objects is also identified in John Dalton’s diagnosis (the first of its kind) of his own colour blindness in 1798. Dalton could only distinguish two or three distinct colours, yellow and blue/ purple. Dalton notes his inability to distinguish substantially between pink and blue or green and red and suggests that the medium of his eye must be tinged ‘some modification of blue’: ‘Now the effect of a transparent coloured medium, as Mr. Delaval has proved, is to transmit more, and consequently imbibe fewer of the rays of its own colour, than those of other colours. Reflecting upon these facts, I was led to conjecture that one of the humours of my eye must be a transparent, but coloured medium, so constituted as to absorb red and green rays principally, because I obtain no proper ideas of these in the solar spectrum; and to transmit blue and other colours more perfectly.’ John Dalton, ‘Extraordinary Facts Relating to the Vision of Colours: With Observations’, Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester 5:1 (1798), 28–45 (pp. 43, 42). 11 See Colin Murray Turbayne, The Myth of Metaphor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), pp. 166–7. 12 Mat[thew] Beare, The Sensorium: A Philosophical Discourse of the Senses (Exon: Bishop, 1710), p. 7.

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13 [Claude-Nicolas] Le Cat, A Physical Essay on the Senses, trans. from the French (London: Griffiths, 1750), p. 72. 14 Jessica Riskin, ‘The Divine Optician’, The American Historical Review 116:2 (2011), 352–70 (p. 354). 15 Henry More, An Antidote against Atheism: or, an Appeal to the Naturall Faculties of the Minde of Man, Where There Be or Not a God, 2nd edn (London: Flesher, 1655), pp. 142–3. 16 John Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation, 3rd edn (London: Smith and Walford, 1701), pp. 255–6. This influential work reached four editions during Ray’s lifetime and its twelfth edition in 1759, and new editions were produced as late as 1846. 17 Reported from a series of letters between the Abbé Edme Marriote and Monsieur Jean Pacquet published as ‘A New Discovery Touching Vision’ in Phil. Trans., 3:35 (1668), 668–71. 18 Derham, Physico-Theology, pp. 97 and 105–6. Derham’s full description of the eye repeats earlier anatomical examples with added physicotheological colouring: ‘To pass by its Arteries and Veins, and such other Parts common to the rest of the Body, let us cast our Eye on its Muscles. These we shall find exactly and neatly placed for every Motion of the Eye. Let us view its Tunicks; and these we shall find admir­ ably seated, so well adapted, and of so firm a Texture, as to fit every place, to answer every occasion, and to be proof against all common Inconveniences, and Annoyances. Let us examine its three Humours; and these we shall find all of exquisite Clearness and Transparency, for  an easy Admission of the Rays; well placed for the refracting of them, and formed (particularly the Crystalline Humour) by the nicest Laws of Opticks, to collect the wandering Rays into a point. And to name no more, let us look into its darkned [sic] Cell, where those curious Humours lie, and into which the Glories of the Heavens and Earth are brought, and exquisitely Pictured; and this Cell we shall find, without, well prepared by means of its Texture, Aperture, and Colour, to fence off all the useless, or noxious rays; and within, as well coated with a dark Tegument, that it may not reflect, dissipate, or any way confuse or disturb the beneficial Rays’ (p. 97). 19 Philip Steadman tracks the camera obscura’s development from eighthcentury China to seventeenth-century Europe in Vermeer’s Camera: Uncovering the Truth behind the Masterpieces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 4–23. For the history of the camera as a ‘constructed artifact’, especially its use in art, see Crary, Techniques of the Observer, pp. 26–66.

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20 In 1766 Adams listed a pocket-sized version for £10 6s.; in around 1770 Martin advertised a model with a detachable solar microscope for £2 12s. 6d. in The Description and Use of a Proportional Camera Obscura, with a Solar Microscope Attached. Invented and Sold by B. Martin Fleet-Street (London: s.n., ?1770). 21 This model is currently held by the Science Museum, London (object identifier: 1875–28). 22 By 1768 the instrument was so popular that it appeared in the title of a satirical pamphlet issued by one ‘Mr. Smirk’ as An Original Camera Obscura; or, the Court, City, and Country Magic-Lanthorn (London: Wilkie, 1768). Soame Jenyns’s poem ‘A Translation of Some Latin Verses on the Camera Obscura’ is also worth noting as it provides a popularised description of the instrument and its kinship to sight: ‘Dark be the room; nor let a straggling ray / Intrude, to chase the shadowy forms away, / Except one bright refulgent blaze convey’d / Thro’ a strait passage, in the shutter made, / In which th’ ingenious artist first must place / A little, convex, round, transparent glass, / And just behind th’ extended paper lay, / On which his art shall all its pow’r display; / There rays reflected from all parts shall meet, / And paint their objects on the silver sheet; / A thousand forms shall in a moment rise, / And magic landskips charm our wand’ring eyes; / ’Tis thus from ev’ry object that we view, / If Epicurus’ doctrine teaches true, / The subtile parts upon our organs play, / And to our minds th’ external forms convey.’ [Soame Jenyns], Poems by ***** (London: Dodsley, 1752), pp. 176–80, lines 19–34. This poem was reprinted in Jenyns’s 1761 Miscellaneous Poems. 23 Verses Occasion’d by the Sight of a Chamera Obscura (London: Printed for John Cuff, 1747), p. 4. 24 E[phraim] Chambers, Cyclopaedia: or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, 2 vols (London: Knapton et al., 1728), I, 143. 25 Beare, The Sensorium, pp. 54–5; Le Cat, A Physical Essay on the Senses, pp. 138–9. 26 Riskin, ‘The Divine Optician’, p. 354. 27 Turbayne, The Myth of Metaphor, p. 142. 28 Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 39. For Locke’s empty cabinet analogy see Essay, II.ii.15 (p. 55). 29 Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 41. 30 Paterson, Seeing with the Hands, pp. 2–3. 31 Isaac Newton, Opticks: or, a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colours of Light, 2nd edn (London: Innys, 1718), pp. 344–5.

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32 Karl M. Figlio, ‘Theories of perception and the physiology of mind in the late eighteenth century’, History of Science 13:3 (1975), 177–212 (p. 182). 33 Beare, The Sensorium, pp. 157–8. 34 Nicholas J. Wade, ‘The Vision of William Porterfield’, in Harry Whitaker, C.U.M. Smith, and Stanley Finger (eds), Brain, Mind and Medicine: Essays in Eighteenth-Century Neuroscience (New York, Springer, 2007), pp. 163–76 (p. 174). 35 For a detailed exploration of Blackmore’s use of animal spirits to explore the hard problem of consciousness see Jess Keiser, ‘Nervous figures: Enlightenment neurology and the personified mind’, ELH 82:4 (2015), 1073–1108. 36 Kristin M. Girten’s scholarship on ‘tactile microscopy’ provides an important re-centring of touch in eighteenth-century philosophy and literature. Her focus on the haptic is an important corrective to ocularcentric assumptions about empiricist vision and intermodal perception. See Girten, ‘Mingling with matter’. 37 Ann Jessie van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 84. 38 Friedman, Reading Smell in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, p. 11. 39 Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility, p. 90. See also Figlio, ‘Theories of perception’, pp. 194ff. 40 Joseph Addison, Spectator 411 (21 June 1712), in The Spectator, III, 535–9 (p. 536). 41 Jago, Edge-Hill, Book III, lines 55–69. 42 George Berkeley, The Works of George Berkeley Bishop of Cloyne, vol. I: Philosophical Commentaries, Essay towards A New Theory of Vision and Theory of Vision Vindicated, ed. A.A. Luce (London: Nelson, 1948), p. 152. 43 George Berkeley, An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, in Philosophical Writings, ed. Desmond M. Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 1–66 (p. 18) (§38). 44 Jonathan Kramnick, ‘Presence of Mind: An Ecology of Perception in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Mary Helen McMurran and Alison Conway (eds), Mind, Body, Motion, Matter: Eighteenth-Century British and French Literary Perspectives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), pp. 47–71 (pp. 51–2). 45 Berkeley employs a linguistic analogy to explain the mistaken conflation of the senses and their essential differences: ‘No sooner do we hear the words of a familiar language pronounced in our ears, but the ideas

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corresponding thereto present themselves to our minds. In the very same instant the sound and the meaning enter the understanding; so closely are they united that it is not in our power to keep out the one, except we exclude the other also. We even act in all respects as if we heard the very thoughts themselves. So likewise the secondary objects, or those which are only suggested by sight, do often more strongly affect us, and are more regarded than the proper objects of that sense; along with which they enter into the mind and with which they have a far more strict connexion, than ideas have with words. Hence it is we find it so difficult to discriminate between the intermediate and mediate objects of sight, and are so prone to attribute to the former what belongs only to the latter.’ Berkeley, An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, p. 24 (§51). 46 Michael J. Morgan, Molyneux’s Question: Vision, Touch and the Philosophy of Perception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 59. 47 Berkeley’s claims about an essential disconnect between the senses are visible in the response of the twentieth-century philosopher Colin Murray Turbayne, who claims that ‘a foreigner to visual language cannot understand it’ because ‘he would get no meaning from the spinning mass of colors before his eyes. That is, he would not be able to see.’ Turbayne, The Myth of Metaphor, p. 109. 48 Le Cat provides further cases of extraordinary sensory acuity, including ‘a Man, who was not a Jot behind the Owl, being able to read in the Dark’ and ‘a young Woman at Parma, who could see as clearly at Midnight when all the Windows were shut, as if it had been Noonday’, and he repeats Robert Boyle’s account of ‘a Gentleman confined in a Dungeon absolutely dark, who, having been there some Weeks without seeing any thing, imagined at last that he discerned a little Glimmering; which Glimmering increased daily, so that he could now see his Bed, and Objects of the like Bulk. At length he could see even the Rats that came for his Crums [sic], and mark their Motions very distinctly’ (pp. 81–2). 49 Georgina Kleege, ‘Blindness and visual culture: an eyewitness account’, Journal of Visual Culture 4:2 (2005), 179–90 (p. 181). Kleege notes, shrewdly, that the exclusion of Molyneux’s wife from reports may have been because ‘others would object that marriage to a philosopher might contaminate the experimental data’. 50 Kleege, ‘Blindness and visual culture’, p. 180. 51 Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), p. 15.

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52 On the unexplored aspect of pain in cataract surgery in this period, see Kate E. Tunstall, Blindness and Enlightenment: An Essay. With a New Translation of Diderot’s ‘Letter on the Blind’ and La Mothe Le Vayer’s ‘Of a Man Born Blind’ (London: Continuum, 2011), p. 119. 53 Chris Mounsey, Sight Correction: Vision and Blindness in EighteenthCentury Britain (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019), pp. 47–8. 54 See, for example, Benedict Duddell, A Treatise of the Diseases of the Horny-Coat of the Eye, and the Various Kinds of Cataracts (London: Clark, 1729), pp. 104–6. 55 Mounsey, Sight Correction, p. 39. 56 Richard Steele provides an account of a very hasty operation carried out upon a twenty-year-old man by Roger Grant in 1709 (Joseph Addison, Tatler 55 (16 August 1709), in The Tatler, I, 384–8). A 1709 pamphlet, A Full and True Account of a Miraculous Cure of a Young Man in Newington, that was Born Blind and was in Five Minutes Brought to Perfect Sight. By Mr. Roger Grant, Oculist (London: Childe, 1709), reports that the patient, William Jones, and his mother swore affidavits attesting to this recovery of sight, suggesting nefarious aims. Grant was a known fraud, and the speed of recovery is not supported by other cases. 57 Will. Chesselden, ‘An Account of Some Observations Made by a Young Gentleman, who was Born Blind, or Lost his Sight So Early, that he Had No Remembrance of Ever Having Seen, and was Couch’d between 13 and 14 Years of Age’, Phil. Trans., 35:402 (1728), 447–50 (p. 447). The surgeon compares his patient’s clouded lenses with the perceptions of ‘a sound Eye … thro’ a Glass of broken Jelly, where a great Variety of Surfaces so differently refract the Light, that the several distinct Pencils of Rays cannot be collected by the Eye into their proper Foci’ (p. 447). 58 For more details about the technique of couching, see Paterson, Seeing with the Hands, p. 68. 59 Compare Berkeley’s note in the appendix to the 1709 edition of A New Theory of Vision, which shows interest in just this kind of practical application: ‘I am informed that, soon after the First Edition of this Treatise, a Man somewhere near London was made to see, who had been Born Blind, and continued so for about Twenty Years. Such a one may be supposed a proper Judge to decide how far some tenents [sic] laid down in several Places of the foregoing Essay are agreeable to Truth, and if any Curious Person hath the Opportunity of making proper Interrogatories to him thereon, I should gladly see my

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Notions either amended or confirmed by Experience.’ George Berkeley, An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (Dublin: Pepyat, 1709), pp. 197–8. A.A. Luce suggested in his 1948 Works that this may refer to the 1709 Tatler case (see n. 56 above). 60 Voltaire’s comment on this experiment is the source of its reception in France. See Voltaire, The Elements of Isaac Newton’s Philosophy, rev. and trans. John Hanna (London: Austen, 1738), pp. 63–5. Jessica Riskin’s work shows how the French reception of both Molyneux’s Question and the Chesselden case was dominated by debate about sensibility and solipsism: ‘To philosophers and experimenters in the Molyneux-Cheselden tradition, sensibility meant something that was at once specific and twofold: a physical, sensory receptiveness to the world outside oneself, whose consequence was emotional and moral openness. Its opposite was a physical insensitivity that brought solipsism.’ Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 21. 61 Robert Smith, A Compleat System of Opticks in Four Books, 2 vols (Cambridge: Printed for the Author, 1738), I, 45. 62 Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Histoire naturelle de l’âme (Paris: aux dépends de l’Auteur, 1747), p. 302. 63 Chesselden was appointed as Queen Caroline’s surgeon in 1727; he also had literary connections as Alexander Pope’s chief surgeon, celebrated in the Imitations of Horace: ‘Weak tho’ I am of limb, and short of sight, / Far from a Lynx, and not a Giant quite, / I’ll do what Mead and Cheselden advise, / To keep these limbs, and to preserve these eyes.’ Alexander Pope, ‘The First Epistle of the First Book of Horace Imitated’, in Imitations of Horace, vol. IV of The Twickenham Edition of the Works of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt, 2nd edn (London: Methuen, 1953), pp. 275–93, lines 49–52. See also Nicolson and Rousseau, ‘This Long Disease My Life’, part I. 64 Mounsey, Sight Correction, pp. 42–7 (see chapters 6 and 7 for detailed accounts of John ‘Chevalier’ Taylor and his son John Taylor). 65 Cases of ‘making someone see’ became a little more common in the second half of the century; Mounsey provides a list of seventeen children born blind who were treated by John Taylor of Hatton Garden in the 1750s and 1760s. 66 Duddell, A Treatise of the Diseases of the Horny-Coat of the Eye, p. vii. 67 Peter Kennedy, A Supplement to Kennedy’s Ophthalmographia; or, Treatise of the Eye (London: Cooper, 1739), pp. 70–7.

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68 [William Oldys], Observations on the Cure of William Taylor, the Blind Boy of Ightham in Kent; Who Being born with Cataracts in Both Eyes, was at Eight Years of Age, Brought to Sight, on the 8th of October, 1751, by Mr. John Taylor, junr. Oculist, in Hatton Garden (London: Printed by E. Owen, 1753). This account was published after William Chesselden’s death in April 1752. Mounsey notes that this text should be interpreted as both ‘a philosophical discussion of the importance of sight to human understanding and an argument for setting up a teaching hospital for training specialist eye surgeons to be run by John Taylor, oculist of Hatton Garden.’ Mounsey, Sight Correction, p. 182. 69 London Daily Advertiser and Literary Gazette 216 (9 November 1751). 70 Oldys, Observations, p. 12. 71 There is certainly a social dimension to the later account, designed as it is to raise support for a teaching hospital; Oldys notes that the eight-year-old boy can only be persuaded to receive eye treatment upon threats that he will otherwise experience a life of poverty. 72 Voltaire, The Elements of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy, p. 64. 73 Paterson, Seeing with the Hands, p. 3. 74 See also Moshe Barasch, Blindness: The History of a Mental Image in Western Thought (London: Routledge, 2001). Barasch’s reading of regained sight in the Book of Tobit – where ‘the miraculous healing is achieved by seemingly “natural” means, by sprinkling a medication made of the gall and the liver of a fish on Tobit’s eyes’ (p. 48) provides a helpful interpretation of biblical medicine. 75 Both Steele and Jago describe the comparison of hands and the exchange between mother and newly sighted son. Lidia, a ‘gentlewomen who loved him, and whom he loved’, is a rather livelier character in Steele’s account (she ‘shrieked in the loudest manner’ when the patient fainted). Tatler 55 (16 August 1709), in The Tatler, I, p. 386. The prose account documents lengthy complaints from the patient when he is rebandaged, but the reunion of the two lovers follows much the same scheme in both cases. This is clearly a narrative device for Jago, and given that surgical procedures had been successful by the time Edge-Hill was composed in 1767, the falsity of this account of Grant’s success does not affect the poetic application.

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A few things could now be added concerning a certain very subtle spirit pervading gross bodies and lying hidden in them; … all sensation is excited, and the limbs of animals move at the command of the will, namely, by the vibrations of this spirit being propagated through the solid fibers of the nerves, from the external organs of the senses to the brain, and from the brain into the muscles. But these things cannot be explained in a few words, furthermore, there is not a sufficient number of experiments to determine and demonstrate accurately the laws governing the actions of this spirit. Isaac Newton, ‘General Scholium’ to the Principia (1713, trans. 1999), pp. 943–4.

5

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Perception and the body

James Beresford’s The Miseries of Human Life (1806) is a satirical dialogue addressed ‘To the Miserable’ in which two speakers, Samuel Sensitive and Timothy Testy, imagine scenarios that will cause pain to those of heightened sensibilities.1 The reader is invited to shudder through an array of hypothetical situations ‘so as to make you long for a trap-door to open under your feet’ (p. 54). These range from the day-to-day struggle of existence alongside ‘one, whose feelings widely differ from your own with regard to the admission of fresh air’ (p. 144), to mildly embarrassing wardrobe malfunctions (‘Mis-buttoning your waistcoat (undiscovered till you have gone into company)’ (p. 234)) and clumsy accidents (such as nonchalantly springing over a gate to impress a ‘party of ladies’ and hitting one’s nose (p. 32)), to the irritating failure of one’s polite accoutrements, such as ‘Your opera-glass … becoming obstinately dim at the moment when you have it pointed towards an enchanting creature who has just entered’ (p. 87). These events deplore the inconveniences of an embodied existence and the ways in which an individual’s sensory judgements and requirements can result in physical and social discomfort. This account of sensibility, and the huge popularity of Beresford’s humorous publication, signals a shift in ideas about perception in the second half of the eighteenth century.2 This change is demonstrated in the first dialogue, which demarcates the two principal actors through a literal separation of the nervous system and the body. Timothy Testy signifies a version of ‘the phenomenon of an human body, in which the nerves have been omitted’, whilst Samuel Sensitive is made up of ‘little else’ but nerves; the former is angered by ‘tangible ­tribulations’ and the

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latter plagued by nervous upsets (pp. 2–3). Samuel Sensitive paints a picture of the defenceless, always-feeling everyman: ‘What, my poor Sir, are the senses, but five yawning inlets to hourly and momentary molestations? – What is your House, while you are in it, but a prison filled with nests of little reptiles – of insect-annoyances – which torment you the more, because they cannot kill you?’ (p. 13). The idea of a body that is dangerously permeable to physical and mental torments can be connected to the more general framing of the body in this period as receptive and reactive to outside stimuli. This chapter explores how new analogies for the subjectivity of perception reflect a revaluation of individual sensory experience in the half-century leading up to Beresford’s satire. In the textual examples that I explore, the senses are presented, both positively and negatively, as ‘inlets’ or windows from the interior body to the outside world; this model later gives way to a representation of the whole body as perforated by sensory receptors or subject to nervous impulses. The permeability of the human body is interpreted in some texts as a sign of its mortality and vulnerability and, later in the period, as an indication of extraordinary sensibility. This chapter explores this change by considering representations of embodied perception and their analogical trappings: disturbed or inhibited sight, compensatory sensibility (the heightening of one sense in response to the lack of another), and the interplay between the nerves and the senses in the construction of knowledge and experience. The first section of the chapter considers alternatives to the instrument analogies explored in Chapter 4 and outlines the role of the restrictive body in determining the individual sensibility of the observer. I explore this through a brief survey of mid-century topographical poetry from Gray, Akenside, and Thomson before introducing the increasing attention to the lived experiences of blind people including the poet Thomas Blacklock. I then outline new models of spiritual perception in the work of Edward Young and William Blake that combine analogies of somatic perception with concepts of mortal restriction. The second half of the chapter introduces the impact of Hartleian associationism and looks at how both the nerves and analogous stringed instruments become popular creative tropes for expressing different kinds of individual experience. Showing how musical instruments were looked upon

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with new interest as models for the nature of perceptual experience and for the sensitive, even reactive, body, I will explore a range of poetic examples to demonstrate the emergence of the Aeolian harp as an analogy that shifts from associations with imaginative ­creation in the middle of the century to its use at its end as a model for the relationship between the mind and the body. By interrogating the analogies that writers use to represent the processes of sensory perception, imagination, and creativity, I demonstrate how the essential reception and conceptualisation of new ideas also applies to the human body as a site of natural philosophical and theological concern. The models of embodied perception offered here correspond with a preoccupation with the limits of knowledge and these models offer a new perspective on the contingency of empirical explanations and the subjectivity of scientific sight.

The diversity of perception As explored in the early chapters of this book, the typical early prospect poem presents the observer as detached from the physical environment and equipped with idealised, ever extendable senses. Blackmore leads the reader of Creation to ‘See, thro’ this vast extended Theater / Of Skill Divine’, ranging from land and sea to subterranean zones, and from the planets, meteors and stars, to the details of the human body itself.3 Mallet, too, allows his narrator to fly from zone to zone with no element of perception compromised in an imagined excursion that precludes the need for telescopes to view the planets. In The Universe, Henry Baker concedes the necessity of optical instruments (unsurprisingly, given his own professional use of such devices): Come forth, O Man, yon azure Round survey, And view those Lamps which yield eternal Day. Bring forth thy Glasses: clear thy wond’ring Eyes: Millions beyond the former Millions rise.4

Even this command is presented with an aim not of enhancing the sight but of neutralising any mental disruption to the viewed image. The focusing, magnifying ‘Glasses’ force the observer out

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of his reverie to focus analytically upon the ‘Millions’ of stars. Furthermore, Baker’s poem draws upon biblical modes of spiritual insight and blindness – ‘God’s amazing Works unheeded pass, / Like Images that fleet before a Glass’ (p. 15) – rather than a somatic, individual experience of perception. These descriptions of the observer’s visual ease reflect the earlier analogies of the eye and sight as summarised in Brooke’s Universal Beauty: ‘Sense to perceive, to feel, to find, to know, / That we enjoy, and You Alone bestow’.5 Even as these writers recognise the relationship between sensory organs and experience, and call upon readers to do the same, being an observer in a topographical poem seldom involves the entire body. We know, however, from the previous chapter’s treatment of Molyneux’s Question and recovered sight that the idea of direct, uninhibited, easily replicable perception was not sustainable. Alongside the objective examples from Baker, Brooke, and Blackmore, there was growing interest in subjective or individual experiences of perceiving the landscape which can be partially accounted for by a gradual shift in the idea of what perception actually is. Margaret Koehler’s important identification of changing approaches to perception after Locke – ‘from automatic function to voluntary command, from a passive recipient of ideas to an active and selective participant, and from an undifferentiated capacity to a flexible set of attentive resources’ – can be aligned with the increasing attention to embodied perception in the period’s poetry.6 James Thomson has long been understood as a poet who was invested in detailed accounts of vision, and his descriptions of perception in The Seasons demonstrate the beginnings of a movement towards active, individual perception. Thomson’s active eyes – some identified, some general – perceive in a great variety of ways: they are ‘philosophic’ (Summer, line 102), ‘sage-instructed’ (Spring, line 210), ‘roving’ (Spring, line 507), ‘hurried’ (Spring, line 518), ‘serious’ and ‘raptur’d’ (Summer, line 17), ‘curious’ or ‘pious’ (Spring, line 925), and ‘ravish’d’ by beautiful sights (Autumn, line 661); prospects ‘Swell on the Sight’ (Summer, line 55), and, upon entering a shaded spot, the eye is ‘fresh-expanded’ (Summer, line 477); vision is sometimes technologically assisted to enable a ‘microscopic Eye’ (Summer, line 288).7 Whilst some of these do suggest the kind of

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‘over-sightedness’ Kevis Goodman identifies in Thomson’s writing, they also suggest a personal, embodied, and transformative model of vision.8 Tess Somervell’s study of The Seasons and Wordsworth’s Prelude highlights how, for both writers, eyes are instruments of perceptive mediation rather than direct vision.9 Somervell locates Thomson’s accuracy not just in his descriptive detail, but also in ‘the precision with which he describes the eye’s perception of nature, with all the distortion that is involved in that act of perception’.10 She draws on the description of altered perception at nightfall in the 1727 version of Summer as representative of Thomson’s approach to the limit­ations of vision: A few erroneous rays Glanc’d from th’ imperfect Surfaces of Things, Fling half an image on the straining Eye. While wavering Woods, and Villages, and Streams, And Rocks, and Mountain-Tops, that long retain’d Th’ascending Gleam, are all one swimming Scene, Doubtful if seen.11

Here, the world outside is imperfectly transmitted to the mind in half-images. Thomson’s explanation combines external events – the fading light and reflected images – with the visual phenomenon of the ‘straining Eye’ that perceives a confused image.12 Thomson presents another nightfall scene in Spring, where ‘[a]ll Nature fades extinct’ and failed bodily perception is replaced by the imagination which ‘[f]ills every Sense, and pants in every Vein’ (lines 1013 and 1015). Visual confusion also occurs in the scorching heat of Summer, when the bright light creates a ‘too resplendent Scene [that] / Already darkens on the dizzy Eye’, making ‘double Objects dance’ (1727 edn, p. 33). These examples of the eye as altering mediator, rather than transparent receptive medium, show an awareness of the subjectivity and contingency of visual experience as dependent upon the time and place of perception. From the middle of the century, increasingly varied representations of perception demonstrate Stuart Clark’s point that ‘sight is a constructed medium and the eye not the innocent, objective reporter of the world but its creator and interpreter’.13 It is not unusual, therefore, to see poetic accounts of observers’ visual c­onfusion,

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myopia, visual impairment, or blindness. One example is Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard’ (1751), where the speaker’s isolation in ‘darkness’ and ‘solemn stillness’ is a precondition for the imaginatively reconstructed narrative of unsung poets that follows.14 The watershed moment occurs at nightfall when ‘the glimmering landscape [fades] on the sight’ (line 5) and the poem departs from standard topographical description. Koehler’s account of attention, where ‘[p]oems capture [observers] poised in moments of vigilance, concentration and wonder … [and] explore how alert receptivity can reveal a world that is fresher, stranger, and more vivid’15 demonstrates how the narrator’s isolation and visual effort are vital to poetic production. In The Pleasures of Imagination, Akenside also reflects upon the variability of sense experience as he claims that ‘not alike to every mortal eye / Is this great scene unveil’d’.16 Of course, this description is not solely concerned with physical perception but also – in true Lockean fashion – with understanding, imagination, and the mind. The eye stands in here as a synecdoche for taste and refinement as ‘the hand of nature on peculiar minds / Imprints a diff’rent byass’ (Book I, lines 83–4). However, Akenside also employs the references to sight to describe those of ‘purer’ perceptions (Book I, lines 98), who are able to ‘read / The transcript’ of God in the Book of Nature (Book I, lines  100–1) and who, observing phenomenal objects such as meadows, the shining moon, or a beautiful girl, can ‘see portray’d / That uncreated beauty, which delights / The mind supreme’ (Book I, lines 105–7). This description appears to be a reworking of Thomson’s claim that ‘to every purer Eye / Th’ informing Author in his Works appears’ (Spring, lines 859–60), and it suggests an active, embodied process of vision that is itself informed by the individual’s mental processes. With the increasing awareness in this period of eyes as mediating instruments for individual perception, not just convenient outlets on the world, these references become relevant as analogical models of subjective vision. This emphasis on individuality and subjectivity is vital. In the past decade, Chris Mounsey, David Turner, and other scholars of disability have applied the concept of ‘variability’ – the e­ xpectation that ‘disabled people are defined by their disability, not their relationship to the able-bodied’17 – as a way of understanding

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­ ifferent experiences of embodiment in the period. Whilst this term d is common to both contemporary and historical disability studies, Turner shows how it directs readers towards understanding an approach already implicit in eighteenth-century thought about the state of the body, where (as Mounsey paraphrases) impairment is framed as ‘as a badge of frail humanity to which all would eventually succumb’.18 In his work on the cultural fashioning of physical disability in the period, Turner cautions against assuming a radical shift in approach from religion (disability as ‘portent’ caused by supernatural agency) to medicine (disability as ‘pathology’ requiring treatment).19 Whilst I do not offer here a radical contribution to the field of disability studies, this chapter engages with the representation of diverse sensory experience and bodily capacity. I consider how these representations affect the tropes and analogies that are used to conceptualise and interpret somatic experience in terms of religious belief and in terms of wider philosophical questions about the relationship both between the senses and knowledge and between the individual’s body and the phenomenal world. Treatments of relative sight and physiological impairment frequently join traditional moral and analogical readings with a new recognition of the diversity of sensory experience. This is, in part, a response to the proliferation of writing at the middle of the century about the experiences of the visually impaired. The most famous example of this is Denis Diderot’s Lettre sur les aveugles (1749, trans. 1770), which is recognised as part of an intellectual ­revolution in attitudes towards blind people.20 Rather than documenting the kinds of miraculous or surgical recovery of sight outlined in Chapter 4 above, Diderot’s Lettre focuses on encounters with men born blind who remain blind. Kate E. Tunstall emphasises the fictional nature of the Lettre, drawing on the distinction between the anonymous correspondent and Diderot himself and the ambiguity of the accounts provided to establish that, although some subjects may be real, it is ‘a fictional text in the epistolary genre’.21 Its conversational tone, its focus on the experience of blind people from different walks of life, and its tacit suggestion that ocularcentric assumptions about blindness underestimate the varieties of sensory experience beyond sight explain how this letter became so important to later writers and thinkers considering the variability of

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sensory experience. Diderot’s correspondent blends fact and fiction to document conversations with a blind man of Puiseaux who leads a largely nocturnal life – because ‘At midnight, there is nothing to disturb him and he disturbs no one’22 – and whose view of the world is accessed through an acute sensitivity of touch: The man-born-blind of Puiseaux works out how close he is to the fire by how hot it is, how full a receptacle is by the sound liquid makes as he decants it, and how near he is to other bodies by the way the air feels on his face. He is so sensitive to minor changes in the atmosphere that he can tell a street from a cul-de-sac. He can guess with astonishing accuracy how much something weighs and how much a bottle can hold, and his arms make such precise scales and his fingers such experienced compasses that, in matters of statics, I would always back our blind man against twenty sighted people. (p. 177)

This description establishes a narrative of sensory compensation to suggest that the man experiences no deprivation from his blindness and, in fact, carries out amazing feats to achieve practical ends. Diderot provides further examples of this compensation with reference to Nicholas Saunderson’s ability to teach optics and his use of tactile calculation machines. The Lettre’s approach to the lived experience of blind people shows an interest in subjective experience; as Moshe Barasch recognises, ‘Diderot attempts to explore the inner world of the blind, and obviously the assumption underlying his treatise is that there is such a world.’23 The interviews reveal a new phenomenal world as understood through the testimony of those with diverse sensory experiences.24 This non-interventionist documentation of individuals’ experiences certainly suggests a conceptual shift away from Chesselden’s 1728 report of the outcomes of cataract surgery. Following the publication of Diderot’s essay, other philosophers begin to engage with the subjectivity of sense experience and with the personal accounts of blind people, and there is an emerging awareness of how diverse sensory abilities can give access to knowledge. For example, in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful (1759) Edmund Burke introduces the blind poet Thomas Blacklock to support his argument that ‘[people’s] passions are affected by words from whence

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they have no ideas’.25 He then comments on a topic that struck many of Blacklock’s first readers: ‘Few men blessed with the most perfect sight can describe visual objects with more spirit and justness than this blind man’ (p. 133). Blacklock, whose first volume of poetry was published in 1746 following his studies of divinity at Edinburgh, enjoyed a spell of popularity in the mid-eighteenth century. The poet’s 1756 editor Joseph Spence, who was the Oxford Professor of Poetry, celebrated in his prefatory essay ‘Of the Describing Visible Objects’ the ‘novelty’ of a poet who had been blind from birth or early infancy.26 Blacklock’s poems were published fairly widely during the second half of the century, in volumes including an expanded edition of his works promoted by David Hume, and he attracted patrons and subscribers such as James Beattie, Robert Lowth, and Thomas Herring, Archbishop of Canterbury.27 As the 1793 editor notes, interest in Blacklock’s work seems to have been awakened by accounts of his blindness, which was caused by a bout of smallpox in his infancy: ‘He who reads these poems with that interest which their intrinsic merit deserves, will feel that interest very much increased when he shall be told the various difficulties which their author overcame in their production.’28 Catherine Packham emphasises the role of ‘sympathetic sociability’ and ‘sentimental ideals’ in Blacklock’s admission into Edinburgh polite society, a set of values that cemented his role as subject of intrigue even as his literary output garnered respect.29 Blacklock’s output is a conventional mixture of pastorals, odes, hymns, elegies, and occasional addresses and epistles. Many of the poems employ detailed natural descriptions. For example, Blacklock describes with precision the ‘insect crouds that ’scape the nicest eye’;30 he evokes nightfall, when ‘Clouds press on clouds, and as they rise, / Condense to solid gloom the skies’;31 and in ‘Happiness: An Ode’, daylight reveals the natural world as ‘the darling of my sight’.32 Spence identifies Blacklock’s striking visual descriptions as the product of the compensatory gift of insight, but this was an account that Blacklock himself strongly resisted.33 In his own testimony, ‘The Author’s Picture’, the poet suggests instead a clear connection between somatic experience and creative production.34 Blacklock adopts a self-deprecating tone as he describes himself, ‘touch[ing] each feature with a trembling hand’ (line 2) to

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ascertain his features. The result of this inventory is a description of a poet who ‘scribble[s] – not for pudding, but for praise’ (line 56):

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Straight is my person, but of little size; Lean are my cheeks, and hollow are my eyes: My youthful down is, like my talents, rare; Politely distant stands each single hair. (lines 13–16)

The poem’s most striking passage describes Blacklock’s distinctive bodily motions which enable him to navigate his environment by touch: ‘as some vessel, toss’d by wind and tide, / Bounds o’er the waves, and rocks from side to side; / In just vibration thus I always move’ (lines 31–3). The 1793 editor notes that this description of physical motion is corroborated by Blacklock’s amanuenses: ‘He never could dictate till he stood up; and as his blindness made walking about without assistance inconvenient or dangerous to him, he fell insensibly into a vibratory sort of motion of his body, which increased as he warmed with his subject.’35 The poet’s composition process is therefore bound up with somatic experience, partly because Blacklock interprets his environment through touch, and we are left in no doubt as to the presence of the poet’s own perceptual experiences in his work. A final example, ‘A Soliloquy’, was written in response to an episode in which Blacklock narrowly escaped falling into a well (he was, fortunately, warned of the impending danger by ‘a favourite lap-dog’).36 It begins with an account of the poet’s incomplete sense of his surroundings: ‘What shall I do, or whither shall I turn? (line 5). He describes his engagement with the strange environment with reference to the tactile horror that ‘Relaxes ev’ry nerve, untunes my frame’ (line 22) and by using typical images of darkness and shade. It is striking, therefore, that the explanation of Blacklock’s predicament is delivered in the context of visible natural imagery: For oh! – while others gaze on nature’s face, The verdant vale, the mountains, woods, and streams; Or, with delight ineffable, survey The sun, bright image of his parent God; The seasons, in majestic order, round This vary’d globe revolving …

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Perception and the body 219 Whilst others view heav’n’s all-involving arch, Bright with unnumber’d worlds; and, lost in joy, Fair order and utility behold: Or, unfatigu’d, th’ amazing chain pursue, Which, in one vast all-comprehending whole, Unites th’ immense stupendous works of God, Conjoining part with part, and, thro’ the frame, Diffusing sacred harmony and joy: To me those fair vicissitudes are lost, And grace and beauty blotted from my view. (lines 40–5 and 51–60)

The aesthetic losses of blindness, it seems, are greater than its attendant physical dangers. As Catherine Packham notes, ‘Like its Miltonic models, the “Soliloquy” laments the unavailability, to the blind poet, of nature, which is presented as a denied object of potential aesthetic appreciation, and religious contemplation.’37 The delayed description of loss in line 68 has the effect of negating the vivid ‘delight’ of the previous lines. Blacklock therefore provides a forceful rejection of suggestions of compensatory insight as poet’s visual imagery are the result not of experience but of education.38 All of these examples of subjective and somatic perception, from the perspectives of sighted and blind poets and subjects, demonstrate how the individuality of sensory experience and an observer’s somatic status, position, or engagement can affect visual descriptions. The body itself is therefore implicated in analogies for visual experience and its limitations. I continue in the next section by outlining the ways in which the pure instruments of optical science are replaced with other analogies that posit malleable examples of sensory experience which – whether bounded by bodily or mental restriction – can result in more direct communion with the natural world.

The material body and spiritual perception The destabilisation of the objective model of vision affects the treatment of the senses in the context of spiritual aspirations and the limits of knowledge. Paul the Apostle’s reference to ‘see[ing]

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through a glass, darkly’ (1 Corinthians 12:13) is often revised so that the ‘glass’ is understood as bodily restriction that will be overcome in death. This duality between material and spiritual bodies is explored in Jago’s ‘An Elegy on Man’ (1752). The poem’s initial view of ‘imperial Man’ presents a positive account of his strength and ‘active mind’:39 Behold him range with curious eye, O’er Earth from pole to pole, And thro’ th’ illimitable sky Explore with daring soul. (lines 13–16)

In this positive description not only the sky but also the ‘curious eye’ of the observing man seem to have limitless range. This is an elegy, of course, so the optimism is short lived. After ‘some twenty fleeting years’ a steady decline occurs: ‘His languid eye is bath’d in tears, / He sickens, groans, and dies’ (lines 19–20). In this imagined depiction of the failing physical body life seems a futile exercise. Furthermore, the eyes and other sensory organs are shown to be imperfect and fallible because ‘blows may maim, or time impair / These instruments of clay’ (lines 73–4). On the one hand, then, Jago presents the body as liable to decay and failure – a gesture that aligns him with typical ideas about impairment. However, drawing on Butler’s 1736 Analogy of Religion, a text to which he refers explicitly in a note, the poet also builds a sequence of analogies to suggest that the corporeal sensory organs are only precursors to future spiritual glory and insight.40 In the first analogy, the ‘silken tomb’ (line 38) that imprisons a caterpillar during its metamorphosis is a model for the human body and the setting for a resurrection analogy of renewed and transformed life: ‘Anon you see him rise / No more a crawling worm to view, / But tenant of the skies’ (lines 42–4). Secondly, Jago describes the embryonic growth of the human body ‘when life first warm’d / Our flesh’ (lines 49–50): There was a time, when ev’ry sense In straiter limits dwelt, Yet each its task cou’d then dispense, We saw, we heard, we felt. (lines 53–6)

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The gradual development of the sensory organs is presented as a miraculous formation of the embryo as it enters into a physical form of continuous perceptive engagement; each sense has its proper place, and direct subjective experience develops. However, this genesis is limited by the ‘imperfect substance’ (line 51) of the completely developed body, and Jago employs material analogies – the eye as a ‘glass to read’, the ear as ‘a trump to hear’ (line 71) – to emphasise its physical and temporal limits. Jago also reads spiritual significance and potential in the physical senses. The final analogy in this section of the poem looks forward to an extension of these sensory organs and the possibility for (sensory) resurrection after death: But are these then that living Pow’r That thinks, compares and rules? Then say a scaffold is a tow’r, A workman is his tools. (lines 77–80)

This rhetorical question and its answer point towards a potentially perfect sensory condition that will break out from the physical confines of the body, just as the caterpillar emerges from the tomb-like cocoon a butterfly, to reach a new level of perfect and unhindered perception that does not require individual sense organs. Jago therefore rejects the material analogies of tools and masonry to suggest that perfect sensory experience requires unmediated perception. Spanning the period from the 1740s to the beginning of the nineteenth century, Edward Young and William Blake experiment in their poetry with the new analogical framing of the human body in terms of limited perception. Wayne Ripley’s suggestion that, like Blake, Young can be seen as ‘an early Counter-Enlightenment figure’ points towards the importance of individual experience in the work of both writers, who ‘made the Enlightenment worldview the basis of spiritual subjectivity’ yet also criticised the empirical limitation to five senses.41 Young’s Night Thoughts (1742–46) was popular throughout the eighteenth century, and it continued to enjoy a wide readership during Blake’s own time of writing. In this work, Young’s narrator takes a succession of nine increasingly lengthy ‘Nights’ to generate a defence of Christianity against deism through a narrative of revelation following the contemplation of

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death. Young’s representation of the human body is founded in a typological narrative that is bound up with the correct manner of perception where ‘Nature is the Glass reflecting GOD’.42 Throughout Night Thoughts, Young demonstrates an ambivalent attitude towards the corporeal senses. He frequently privileges mental experiences over sensual ones, manipulating an aesthetic argument to demonstrate the inferiority of the latter on the basis that ‘Joys of Sense can’t rise to Reason’s Taste’ (Night V, line 26). In Night II, he depicts the mortal body’s failure:     Years to Moments shrink, Ages to Years. The Telescope is turn’d: To Man’s false opticks (from his Folly false) Time, in advance, behind him hides his Wings, And seems to creep, decrepit with his Age. (II, lines 136–40)

Young’s comparison of the eye to the telescope signals the collapse of the older analogies with lenses and instruments whilst also heightening the impression that the human perception of time and extension is imperfect and restricted by the body and the mind. A similar scepticism about ‘Man’s false Optics’ can be found in Night VI, where Young somewhat uncharitably describes humans as ‘Little worldlings’ or ‘Monkies at a mirror’ who are misled by the promise of riches into perceiving happiness where there is ‘Disease’ (Night VI, lines 520, 523, 507). Even though they use their sensory resources to ‘gaze, and touch, and peep, and peep again’, the Worldlings cannot see beyond illusory value (Night VI, line 527). Young’s employment of ocular imagery to establish this failure of both sense and judgement is telling, and his fusion of moral and physical vision allows him to destabilise an empirical account of the senses. Reading the moral world incorrectly is therefore framed as a failure that can be improved only by breaking out from the material body to achieve fuller vision. A clear sense of somatic restriction is generated in Young’s narrative of redemption in Night III, where the narrator mourns the death of the young girl Narcissa. Narcissa’s early death is described later in the poem in a manner that suggests physical fleetingness: ‘Early, Bright, Transient, Chast [sic], as Morning Dew / She sparkled, was exhal’d, and went to Heav’n’ (Night V, lines 600–1).



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More positively, though, this event also signifies redemptive freeing from corporeal restriction: Life makes the Soul Dependent on the Dust; Death gives her wings to mount above the Spheres. Thro’ Chinks, styl’d Organs, dim Life peeps at Light; Death bursts th’ Involving Cloud, and all is Day; All Eye, all Ear, the disembod’d Power. … Death but entombs the Body; Life the Soul. (Night III, lines 448–52, 458)

The image of the body as a temporary vessel is not unusual.43 Interesting here, however, is the image of ‘dim Life’ that peeps out through narrow ‘chinks’ in restrictive body. The sensory organs are framed as small inlets through which the soul can access the world. Young expands upon this imagery in Night VI with his description of the material world that is ‘seen in Shades, / And in those Shades, by Fragments only seen, / And seen those Fragments by the labouring Eye’ (Night VI, lines 167–9). Visual effort and the restricted senses are for Young a condition of material life, in contrast with the revelatory freedom of heaven. It is only after death that the body’s shell is broken and the spirit unconfined is ‘all eye, all ear’. Unrestricted perception after death is still, therefore, understood by analogy through the sensory organs: ‘[Heaven] In full Dimensions, swells to the Survey; / And enters, at one Glance, the ravisht Sight’ (Night VI, lines 172–3). In all these cases, Young takes the idea of humans created in God’s image to its logical conclusion by exploring the perfection of the senses as unrestricted and infinite.44 Between 1795 and 1797 William Blake worked on a sequence of interpretative illustrations of Young’s poem to a total of 537 watercolour images; Richard Edwards’s 1797 edition of parts I to IV of Night Thoughts contains forty-three engravings from these drawings. The illustrations, composed during a period of eighteen months from which we have no poetry from Blake, have been acknowledged as ‘a valuable pictorial expression of Blake’s own mind’.45 As H.M. Margoliouth has noted, there are certainly comparisons to be made between the approaches of both poets: ‘The otherworldliness of Young’s poem, its insistence on immortality

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and the values which a firm belief in immortality compels, must have appealed to [Blake] strongly.’46 A number of critics have also documented the somatic restriction of the senses in Blake’s original work, where characters regularly announce states of sensory deprivation caused by their limited senses and ‘vegetable eyes’.47 For example, Rowan Rose Boyson notes a similarity with Young’s model of restriction in Oothoon’s lamentation in Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793): ‘They told me that the night and day were all that I could see; / They told me that I had five senses to enclose me up, / And they enclos’d my infinite brain into a narrow circle.’48 The First Book of Urizen (1794) similarly describes Urizen’s immortal ‘allflexible senses’ that were enclosed and restricted by his mortal body as ‘bones of solidness froze / Over all his nerves of joy.’49 Blake’s habitual references to the restrictive nature of the five senses can be compared with Young’s presentation of small ‘inlets’ that inhibit full sensory experience. For Blake, sensory organs are openings (‘Five windows light the caverned Man’)50 or, alternately, organs of restriction, an echo perhaps of Young’s championing of reason over sense.51 This suggests a similar ambivalence about both the senses and the human capacity for knowledge. However, the images of somatic restriction explored so far provide an incomplete account of both poets’ attitudes towards perception and the body; Barbara F. Lefcowitz’s warning that ‘[a]lthough that which is corporeal may indeed be delusory or fallen [for Blake], it is not always so’52 applies to both poets. George Eliot’s negative description of Young’s conception of religion as ‘egoism turned heavenward’ hints at the perceptive potential that the older poet accords to humans as he manages a balance between a passive response to revelation and active reasoning.53 The centrality of witness to material and spiritual understanding can also be found in the work of both writers, and this goes some way towards explaining why Young and Blake also present a more positive model of sensory potential, one that is, unlike the images of restriction we have already seen, based upon a typological reading of the body and the senses.54 For example, in Night VI Young produces a narrative of humans as a ‘Sky-born, sky-guided, sky-returning Race’ (Night VI, line 418), and he makes an imploring command to avoid material ambition and to seek ‘true Treasure’ in the ‘naked



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Self’ (Night VI, lines 413 and 416). According to this model, the senses can be explained as miraculous organs that half-create the world they receive: In Senses, which inherit Earth, and Heavens; Enjoy the various riches Nature yields; Far nobler! give the riches they enjoy; Give tast [sic] to Fruits; and harmony to Groves; Their radiant beams to Gold, and Gold’s bright Sire; Take in, at once, the Landscape of the world, At a small Inlet, which a Grain might close, And half create the wonderous World, they see. Our Senses, as our Reason, are Divine. But for the magic Organ’s powerful charm, Earth were a rude, uncolour’d Chaos still. Objects are but the Occasion; Ours th’ Exploit; Ours is the Cloth, the Pencil, and the Paint, Which Nature’s admirable Picture draws; And beautifies Creation’s ample Dome. (Night VI, 420–34)

Whilst the image of ‘a small Inlet’ is again employed to describe the physical eye, the emphasis here is on the miraculous process through which sight ‘beautifies’ the phenomenal world. Young’s description of the ‘magic Organ’ develops a physico-theological application of Newtonian colour theory which re-imagines human sight as a kind of divinely bestowed artistry that colours and orders the ‘Chaos’.55 Young’s reference to inheritance echoes the Psalms’ celebration of how the obedient and meek will ‘inherit the earth’ and emphasises the Neoplatonic connection between divine creation and human perception.56 In a new extension of the concept of stewardship, humans – the final creation – are also responsible for earth’s completion. Night IV, ‘The Christian Triumph’, extends the Trinitarian analogy by framing the resurrection of Christ as enacting and enabling another kind of breaking out of the body. Rather than focusing on sight, however, Young meditates on the nature of touch in a passage that recalls the Neoplatonism of Herbert or Donne: Touch’d by the Cross, we live; or, more than die; That Touch which touch’d not Angels; more divine Than that, which touch’d Confusion into Form, And Darkness into Glory; Partial Touch!

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Ineffably pre-eminent Regard! Sacred to Man, and Sovereign thro’ the whole Long golden Chain of Miracles, which hangs From Heaven thro’ all Duration, and supports In one illustrious, and amazing Plan, Thy Welfare, Nature! and thy God’s Renown; That Touch, with charm celestial, heals the Soul. Diseas’d, drives Pain from Guilt, Lights Life in Death, Turns Earth to Heav’n, to heavenly Thrones transforms The ghastly Ruins of the mould’ring Tomb. (Night IV, lines 677–90)

Here, touch transcends mere sensory or somatic engagement as Young envisions a range of encounters between the human and the divine. Creation, which is carried out by touching ‘Confusion into Form’, is placed alongside the typological Light of the World in Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. Each miraculous event is arranged in a hierarchy of haptic healing events as the incarnate God cures the diseased and ‘Lights Life in Death’. The focus on the presence of touch, rather than a more mystical exploration of origins and miracles, helps to cement the connections Young makes elsewhere in the poem between divine and human senses: touch is both performed and felt. Blake, too, expands the senses to develop models of limitless perception.57 The vision of an idealised past in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793) illustrates the privileging of imaginative over sensory perception: The ancient poets animated all sensible objects with gods or geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties, of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged and numerous senses could perceive. And particularly they studied the genius of each city and country, placing it under its mental deity.58

The poets’ senses that are expanded and ‘numerous’, and seamlessly connected to names and categories, are placed in an unreachable ancient past. As Robert F. Gleckner notes, ‘For Blake, imaginative or total perception is not simply a matter of “sight” as opposed to “vision”; it is a fourfold integration of the whole man … and

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this involves all the senses.’59 In this vision of the past, sight and knowledge are brought together through a pre-lapsarian version of sensory experience which is now closed off.60 This idea of enlarged  senses that can perceive, create, and animate phenomena describes something akin to an Adamic process of naming by ‘placing [each genius] under its mental deity’.61 The ideal of poetic perception is recalled at the beginning of Milton, where the poet’s invocation to the muses involves direct communion: ‘Come into my hand / By your mild power descending down the nerves of my right arm / From out the portals of my brain.’62 Blake’s model of imaginative perception involves the free mixing of multiple senses and a two-way exchange between the body and the outside world. To permit this kind of knowledgeable perception the senses must be expanded beyond their usual confines. Donald Ault points towards verses in a letter written to Thomas Butts on 2 October 1800 to demonstrate Blake’s model of perception as one which conflates Newtonian physics with an alternative visual process of the eye expanding to receive ‘glorious beams of light’.63 Blake’s couplets describe a luminous vision: To my friend Butts I write My first vision of light: On the yellow sands sitting, The sun was emitting His glorious beams From heaven’s high streams. Over sea, over land, My eyes did expand Into regions of air, Away from all care; Into regions of fire, Remote from desire; The light of the morning Heaven’s mountains adorning: In particles bright, The jewels of light Distinct shone and clear.64

Blake presents a model of creative perception that binds the material body to external phenomena. Whereas in the usual process of

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vision pupils reactively expand in dark conditions to allow light into the eye, here the unrestricted eyes expand outwards in response to the bright light. In this spiritual experience, the eyes do not function as receptive inlets; instead this model involves a fusion as the eyes are enlarged ‘[i]nto regions of fire’. Ault interprets this description as a somatic encounter between the narrator and eternity.65 We might also note that this visionary perception functions as a kind of creative touch, akin to the poets’ naming in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, as the light is transformed into tangible ‘jewels’. For the unrestricted eye, perception is a combination of mind and matter  – the physical bounds of the body dissolve, and the light is solidified through perception into jewels in a reaction that Lefcowitz describes as ‘the transmutation of nature into art’ – and a process of incorporation and creativity.66

Vibrating bodies For both Blake and Young, a full understanding of divine and material phenomena can be achieved only by breaking out of the imperfect body – in the ideal past or at death, through a process of imaginative perception, or through the miracle of resurrection – to achieve an unlimited and unbounded sensory state. For other physico-theological writers such as Henry Brooke, cross-sensory or synaesthetic perception is only possible for immaterial beings, such as angels, who are ‘Of bright, the brightest; pure, the most refined; / All intellect, quintessence of the mind’.67 These representations of the body and the senses work analogically as explanations for mortal restriction. Given that the eyes were no longer recognised as perfectly designed instruments, and that perception was beginning to be revised in this period as demanding the cooperation of the whole body, many writers looked to emergent neurological models to explore the processes through which humans access knowledge about the phenomenal world. George Rousseau finds the roots of the Romantic turn away from empirical science in natural philosophers’ inability to explain fully the relationship between the insubstantial mind and the material body: ‘With the promise of an organic marriage of the spiritual (imagination) and the material

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(animal spirits, fibres, nerves) thwarted, it remained the task of non-scientists to formulate a mythical set of laws uniting them.’68 The rest of this chapter, which frames that revolt as beginning some decades earlier than Rousseau’s Romantic period, explores this establishment of a ‘mythical set of laws’ as a new model of perception that involves a re-imagining of the body as a responsive, not merely materially receptive, instrument. I will explore, therefore, the ways in which the analogy of the eye as perfect model is reformulated through the figuration of the perceiving, responsive, creative mind in inter-sensory analogies that demonstrate and produce unity between the poetic observer and the material world. The versions of perception, knowledge acquisition, and imaginative thought addressed in the greater part of this book have been framed in terms of the sensory organs. These have resulted either in a geometric version of sense perception that is hindered by examples of sensory privation and by an incomplete solution to the mind–body problem of how sensory information becomes cognition, or in an over-concretised version of the restrictive material body that works theologically but does not fully reflect lived experience. The medicalisation of the mind in the second half of the century offered new ways of conceptualising these problems as not only perception, but also thought and imagination begin to be considered physiologically.69 Late seventeenth-century philosophy and physiology had already established ‘man’s essentially nervous nature’.70 Thomas Willis’s brain dissections in the 1660s had shown the cerebrum and the cerebellum to be the location of the soul (or consciousness) and, together with Locke’s account of perception some decades later in the Essay, pointed towards a physiological theory of perception.71 However, it was not until the eighteenth century that the implications of this model were used to address somatic experience in full. This physiological theory is grounded in the operation of the nervous system and its relation to the brain. In the ‘General Scholium’ to the Principia, Newton briefly outlines the doctrine of vibrations to explain the function of sensation as the combined operation of a ‘certain very subtle spirit’ throughout the body and the action of nerves as vibrating strings carrying impulses to the brain:72 ‘All sensation is excited, and the limbs of animals

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move at the command of the will, namely, by the vibrations of this spirit propagated through the solid fibers of the nerves from the external organs of the senses to the brain, and from the brain into the muscles.’73 This model of embodied perception led to David Hartley’s formulation of association in Observations on Man (1749), where he explains the sensitive operation of the nerves and advances a mechanist account of vibrations connecting mind and body.74 This doctrine promoted a movement away from the accepted model of hollow nerves channelling animal spirits, as explored in Chapter 4 above, to a view of nerves as solid, vibrating fibres that receive sensory impressions and carry their impulses through the body. The doctrine of vibrations was seized upon in the second half of the century as a new way of conceptualising sensory connections between the subjective observer and external reality.75 The auditory metaphors and analogies between sensory and musical instruments that Hartley generates in his account of association help to show how this imagery is related to a theory of subjective and interrelated perception. For example, he describes habit formation as a process of repeated impressions: ‘the several Regions of the Brain have such a Texture as disposes them to those specific Vibrations, which are to be impressed by the proper Objects in the Events of life’.76 This process is demonstrated through a musical analogy that compares a plucked string’s sounding vibrations to the body’s nervous vibrations when it responds to external impressions: [M]usical Strings always accommodate themselves to, and lean towards, the State into which they were last put. Thus the Tone of a musical String either rises or falls upon altering its Tension, according as the preceding Tension was greater or less than its present Tension. Now the small component Parts of a musical String must recede from, and approach to each other, i.e. must oscillate lengthways, during every transverse Oscillation of the String. And this must arise from the mutual Influences of the component Particles tending to their last superinduced State. Let us suppose something analogous to this to take place in the component Molecules of the Brain, the Molecules of the Molecules, &c. (I, 62)

According to Hartley’s explanation, the body operates both receptively and responsively as an instrument consisting of many strings or nerves that receive vibrations from outside stimuli and convey

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them to the brain, ‘the Seat of the sensitive Soul’ (I, 31). This analogy can be stretched further to account for the individual’s sensibility, sensitivity, and imaginative responsiveness to the phenomenal world. Hartley’s account of association also introduces the possibility that the correspondence of nervous vibrations within the body permits internal communication between different senses. He makes frequent connections between the operations of the senses and the stimuli that they receive. See, for example, Hartley’s description of the ear: The immediate Organ of Hearing appears to be the soft Portion of the Seventh Pair of Nerves distributed in the Cochlea, and semicircular Canals. What the particular Uses of these Cavities are, is not known. They bear some obscure Likeness to the Instruments commonly made use of for increasing either the Loudness of Sounds, or the Effects them upon the Ear; just as the Coats and Humours of the Eye resemble Lenses. The auditory Nerve is also like the Optic in detaching no Branches off to the neighbouring Parts; and there are many other Instances of Resemblance between these two most refined and spiritual, if one may so say, of our Senses; some of which I shall mention in the Course of this Section. (I, 223)

Hartley’s analogy between the ear and the eye is primarily founded in anatomical description.77 Both organs are understood as instruments that focus the impulses of external stimuli upon the sensory receptors of retina and cochlea before the impressions are transmitted directly to the brain along the nerves. However, Hartley also makes a less tangible connection between sight and hearing in his description of them as the ‘two most refined and spiritual’ senses. Later in the treatise, he compares the associations of ‘Discords’ (dissonant chords) with ‘the Limits of Pleasure’ and the colour associations between brightness, ‘happiness and light’ and ‘darkness for misery’ (I, 321). The vividness of seen and heard impressions leads Hartley to claim that ‘Trains of audible Ideas force themselves upon the Fancy, in nearly the same manner, as Trains of visible Ideas do in like Cases’ (I, 234).78 Hartley’s analogies between the different senses and sensory organs are underpinned by a long history of comparisons between sounds, colours, and their effects dating back to Pythagoras.

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Observations on Man also references Newton’s explorations of the relationship between the senses in his optical writings.79 As noted in Chapter 3, Newton’s interest in the correlating ratios that indicate a physical connection between colour and sound is a defining feature of his optics, particularly as it was this element that prompted him to settle on the seven-colour spectrum.80 In the Optical Lectures that preceded the publication of Opticks, Newton compares colours in the spectrum as ‘proportional to a string divided so it would cause the individual degrees of the octave to sound’.81 A few years later, in ‘An Hypothesis Explaining the Properties of Light’ (1675), Newton described the analogy between the musical scale and the spectrum in full, and he drew further connections between the ‘harmony and discord of Sounds’ and colours as aligned with ‘the proportion of the aereal vibrations’.82 In The Elements of Isaac Newton’s Philosophy of 1738, Voltaire suggests that Newton’s analogy between light and sound was developed from Athanasius Kircher. He explains the refrangibility of different colours in terms  of proportion, concluding that Newton’s system is founded on an ‘Agreement, no less exact than singular, between Colours and Musick’; this is illustrated by a diagram that aligns the refractive range of each colour in sequence with the heptatonic scale so that ‘the greatest Refrangibility of the Red’ answers to C, that of orange to D, and so on.83 Niccolò Guicciardini has recently argued that, rather than drawing connections between light and sound per se, Newton’s argument is rooted in an analogy between auditory and visual perception that is based on a corpuscular theory of vibrations in ether.84 To this interpretation of perceptual experience should be added the fact that Newton’s analogy between the musical scale and the colour spectrum is imperfect: not only is the analogy limited to the Dorian mode, but the frequency ratio of red to violet works out as rather less than an octave. Similarly, Hartley’s argument for the relationship between the senses is dependent upon a metaphorical framing of vibration which he later dropped from his associationist theory. These Hartleian and Newtonian concepts of vibration and sensation led to the conceptualisation of the body as sensitive to the impulses of the material world. The frequency of references to the brain and spinal cord as an ‘instrument of sensation’, then, was no

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mere coincidence, and it opened the possibility of analogical references to other stringed instruments as models of somatic perception and mental production. Carmel Raz explains, in a fascinating article on the harmonium (or ‘sensitive organ’), the Aeolian harp, and the tuning fork, how ‘[t]he concept of sympathetic vibrations as embodied by musical instruments … provided a readily accessible model for the ethereally mediated interaction between the mind and various physical and spiritual forces’.85 This seeking for analogies with material instruments can also be understood as a form of Neoplatonism.86 As Gretchen L. Finney explains, the analogy between the body and a stringed instrument is a modification of the early modern theology of divine harmony in which ‘everything was a vehicle for [God’s] harmoniousness’:87 The Elizabethan inherited these musical ideas from the past, but he supported them with the evidence of his own observation. In as much as man breathes or is filled with the breath of God he was likened to wind instrument; in as much as he was bound by cords and tendons, fibres and nerves, that give life and motion and that respond to stimulus, to stress and feeling, he or the parts of his body were likened to lute or viol.88

By the mid-eighteenth century these analogies had been developed further as writers began to consider the relationship between the mind and the material body through new models – particularly the Aeolian harp – that respond to outside stimuli by receiving and ­reformulating them into creative productions.

The Aeolian harp The Aeolian harp emerged in the middle of the century as a model for understanding the engagement between the senses, the body, and the phenomenal world. In its poetic manifestations, it is frequently presented as a model or analogy for the receptive and productive mind. The harp is constructed from a long narrow wooden box, equipped with a bridge at either end over which eight or ten catgut strings are stretched and tuned in unison (see figure  8). Placed at an open window, the instrument produces h ­ armonic

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Figure 8  Aeolian harp. Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia universalis (Rome: Corbelletti, 1650), II, 352.

notes when the wind passes over its strings: ‘[T]he unison is plainly heard as the lowest note, and the combination of concords, though consisting chiefly of the harmonic notes, are by no means confined to them, but change, as the wind is more or less intense, with a variety and sweetness which is past description.’89 The theory of vibrations both within and beyond the body is easily aligned with this stringed instrument that plays in sympathy with the breeze and produces an apparently unexplained array of notes. In ‘A Defence of Poetry’ (1821), Percy Bysshe Shelley’s image of the human as ‘an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven’ draws a direct analogy with ‘the alterations of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre; which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody’.90 It is easy to see how the Aeolian harp, as an instrument that requires no player, only external stimuli, to produce its music, became a figure for the mind as acted on by external phenomena producing imaginative p ­ erception and production.91 By ending this book with literary treatments of an analogy that is also a physical model, I return to the questions addressed in Chapter  1, where diagrams, globes, and orreries were shown to enable a cognitive experience of outer space. In the case of the Aeolian harp, the model that is used is not just a scaled-down approximation of an unseen physical phenomenon – in this case, the

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nerves and the body – because the music of the harp is aligned with the imagination, with divine and human creative production, and with the relationship between the human body and the phenomenal world. This model-as-analogy also raises the question of familiarity: like the astronomical instruments, the Aeolian harp was a popular parlour toy that blended science and polite culture and evoked wonder. Unlike the manipulable globe or orrery, however, the harp works without physical interaction and requires only correct placement to fulfil its musical function. It is this apparent autonomy that makes the harp suitable as an analogy for perceptual experience, displacing the eye analogies explored in Chapter 4 and providing a positive alternative to the narratives of restriction offered by Blake and Young. In later usages of the harp in Romantic poetry, which collapse the distinction between observer and observed and signify a complete embeddedness of the observer in their environment, we can see how the use of this model-as-analogy escapes the dominant ocularcentric discourse around perception and offers an alternative to the static prospect view. A product of Kircher’s Musurgia universalis (1650), the Aeolian harp was popularised by Thomson’s friend and fellow Scot James Oswald, who made and sold instruments from his London shop around a century later. Its widespread popularity is demonstrated by Henry Thorowgood’s pamphlet A Description of the Aeolian Harp (c.1754), which brings together technical details, a description of the harp’s origins, and topical poems by Thomson and anonymous submissions (one of which is Christopher Smart’s ‘Inscription on an Aeolian Harp’) culled from the Gentleman’s Magazine.92 The instrument can also be understood as the product of polite consumption. Besides Oswald, other instrument-makers aimed to attract potential customers, and Thorowgood’s Description was most likely a puff-piece for his own products.93 Newspaper advertisements also suggest a popular market.94 The harp began its poetic career in the 1740s when both Thomson and Akenside employed it as a figure for the creative imagination; towards the nineteenth century, it gained a new status as an image of the ‘sympathetic strings’ of a subjective and reacting body. Thomson’s ‘Ode on Æolus’s Harp’ (1748) describes

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the mechanics of the instrument – in fact he credits Oswald as its ­inventor in a note to the poem’s title – but its main focus is upon how the ‘Æthereal race’ of winds play upon the harp to ‘raise majestick strains, or melt in love’.95 This description reflects how the harp’s mystery is founded in its passive production of intangible music. Thomson also seems to anticipate uses of the harp for thinking about the relationship between the mind and body as they react to external phenomena: the references to personified winds sound strikingly similar to the animal spirits discussed in the previous chapter: they are led by ‘wild Fancy’ to ‘touch the string’ (line 22) to produce sounds both ‘tender’ (line 5) and ‘solemn’ (line 15). This ­explanation for the instrument’s music is also effective because the harmony produced by the vibration of identical strings is harmonically rich – ‘Methinks I hear the full celestial choir, / Thro’ heav’n’s high dome their awful anthem raise’ (lines 17–18) – and Thomson describes the harp’s production as a miraculous process of music-making.96 Writing some thirty years later in Physiological Disquisitions (1781), William Jones of Nayland is drawn to similar analogies with divine music as he compares the new instrument and its effect upon the human mind to the Old Testament harp of David.97 Jones also concentrates on a more technical discussion of how the Aeolian harp produces its harmonic tones. His explanation draws upon the synaesthetic analogy of an ‘air-prism, for the physical sensation of musical sounds’: The principles I shall offer for solving this wonderful effect are founded on the analogy between light and air. 1. At first I lay it down, that music is in air as colours are in the light. When any body inflects the rays of light or refracts them, it does not give the colours that are seen, but it makes the light give them: so a sonorous body does not give music sounds, but makes the air give them. 2. That as colours are produced by inflections and refractions of the rays of light, so musical sounds are produced by similar refractions of the air. There is no reason to suppose that air is homogenous in its parts, any more than light: … The parts of air most refrangible will excite the most acute sounds; and the smallest parts will be most refrangible.98

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Jones does not suggest that the harp’s music is produced out of nothing. Instead, like refrangible rays of light, the tonal properties are latent within the air, which can be refracted through a prismlike harp to produce different harmonic tones. We see here an extension of Newton’s analogy between music and colour. Hankins and Silverman note the non-empirical basis of Jones’s analogy, his  interest in the language of revelation, and the roots of these ideas in his commitment to Hutchinsonianism.99 Hutchinson’s own exploration of the significance of ‘Airs’ before creation in Genesis 1:1–2 signals how Jones might consider the existence of latent properties: ‘The first Act of God which this History treats of was, that he produc’d from nothing the Corpuscles or Matter contained in the Airs, and in the Earth.’100 Furthermore, Hutchinson sees not emptiness, but divine presence in the ‘Airs’. His reading of Genesis 1:2 – ‘And the Spirit of God moved upon the Face of the Waters’ – locates God as the source of motion (which finds its full expression in the creative fiat): The Spirit of God, in speaking of material Things, is the Name used for Airs in Motion, and, ’tis like, was then for Airs, in a State between Darkness and that of Light; and was that Air upon, or above the Surfaces of the Waters, or in the then Atmosphere moved, or put into Motion. As there is no prior Motion revealed, there can be no second or intermediate Cause assign’d: This first Motion is justly attributed to the Power of God.101

We see here the confluence of ‘spirit’ as corpuscular breath and immaterial divine presence, both of which can be understood as the source of life and the Aeolian harp’s music. For Hutchinson, God – and the matter of creation – is always already present before the first motion.102 For Jones, colours and music are always already in the air. There are possibilities here for understanding the harp as analogy for divine and human creative production. The mysterious productions of the Aeolian harp therefore prompt three different analogies: for the creative productions achieved in the combination of ephemerality and physical matter; for the relationship between mind and body; and for the effects of divine or natural inspiration. These analogies are all concerned with perceptive connections with the phenomenal world and the

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acquisition of knowledge. As Emily I. Dolan notes, ‘Not only did the instrument suggest that music was an organic part of nature, it also resonated with contemporaneous notions of how humans interacted and were acted upon by the outside world.’103 The similarity of the harp’s timbre to that of the human voice may be one factor that led writers to draw analogies with imaginative, poetic creativity. Mark Akenside’s description of his own imaginative production, as he aims ‘[t]o paint the finest features of the mind’ at the beginning of The Pleasures of Imagination (Book I, line 46), draws on some familiar elements:   Nature’s kindling breath Must fire the chosen genius; nature’s hand Must string his nerves, and imp his eagle-wings Impatient of the painful steep, to soar High as the summit, there to breathe at large Ætherial air; with bards and sages old, Immortal sons of praise. (Book I, lines 37–43)

The exchange between the internal and external world that is necessary for the imaginative process is described here as an interaction between nature’s breath and the nervous system. The analogy of the nerves as strings that vibrate through the body is modified as the body itself is figured as a musical instrument that is breathed into – inspired – and tuned by Nature. In the trope of the ‘Æthereal air’ of imaginative altitude we can recognise earlier physico-theological images of creativity. The result is a synaesthetic account of the ‘subtile and mysterious’ (Book I, line 47) imagination that is both materially comprehensible and intangible. Akenside returns to the image of miraculously produced music in a passage on the statue of Memnon, one of two ancient colossi at the Theban Necropolis. A note records the history of the colossus: ‘It was of a very hard, iron-like stone, and, according to Juvenal, held in its hand a lyre; which being touch’d by the sun-beams, emitted a distinct and agreeable sound’.104 This is recognisable as a version of the Aeolian harp, a connection that Akenside exploits in his poem:   As Memnon’s marble harp, renown’d of old By fabling Nilus, to the quivering touch

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Perception and the body 239 Of Titan’s ray, with each repulsive string Consenting, sounded thro’ the warbling air Unbidden strains; ev’n so did nature’s hand To certain species of external things, Attune the finer organs of the mind: So the glad impulse of congenial pow’rs, Or of sweet sound, or fair proportion’d form, The grace of motion, or the bloom of light, Thrills thro’ imagination’s tender frame, From nerve to nerve: all naked and alive They catch the spreading rays: till now the soul At length discloses every tuneful spring, To that harmonious movement from without, Responsive.105

Akenside describes the mystery of the statue’s musical p ­ roductions as the vibratory effect of sunlight striking the harp.106 This allows for a fruitful analogy between ‘external things’ and ‘the finer organs  of the mind’, where the nerves are not just accessible through inlets, but are nakedly exposed to outside impulses. In the harmonious movements, the musical vibrations, and the idea of tuning and adjustment, we can see an extended analogy of the mind as an instrument that processes (‘harmonious’) external impulses creatively so that ‘the inexpressive strain / Diffuses its inchantment (Book I, lines 124–5). The imagination’s productions are explained as a musical melody that is analogous to the ‘unbidden strains’ of the harp. The poet asks his reader to ‘listen to my song’ (Book I, line 135) that is so produced. The musical analogies allow for a material explanation of mental processes and their relationship with the external world. In the preface to The Power of Harmony (1745), a response to Akenside’s Pleasures, John Gilbert Cooper makes a physico-­ theological argument for the analogy between natural and moral beauty. Crucially, Cooper aligns this analogy with the senses, claiming that ‘the great Creator of all things, infinitely wise and good, ordain’d a perpetual agreement between the Faculties of Moral Perception, the Powers of Fancy, and the Organs of bodily Sensation, when they are free and undistemper’d’.107 In the poem itself, Cooper describes the external effect of music’s ‘subtle pow’r’:

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   When th’ harmonious plan Of inward Beauty ceases, oft the Lute, By soft vibrations on repulsive nerves, Has reconcil’d, by medicinal sounds, Corporeal Chaos to it’s [sic] pristine form. Such is the fabled charm Italians boast To cure that Insect’s venom, which benumbs By fatal touch the frozen veins, and lulls The senses in oblivion: when the Harp, Sonorous, thro’ the patient’s bosom pours It’s [sic] antidotal notes, the flood of life, Loos’d at its source by tepefying [sic] strains, Flows like collected snows of wintry storms At a warm Zephyr of the genial Spring. (Book I, lines 144–57)

This description of the stringed lute’s healing harmony is crucially aligned with its ‘soft vibrations’ that can reconcile ‘repulsive nerves’ to order and beauty. The nervous system, the receptor of musical sensation, is healed through the encounter with music. This idea of harmonious, sympathetic vibrations between the strings of lute and the body is used as a sign of a healthy existence. An Aeolian connection can also be found here: the harp exists without a player and is compared to the vernal wind. Hartley’s theory of vibrations and associationism can be seen in both poems, and the analogy with a stringed instrument helps to unpack the mind–body problem in new ways. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous treatment of the Aeolian harp has received copious critical attention, but it is worth revisiting at the end of this chapter as an instance of the afterlife of associationism, mind/body analogies, and somatic perception.108 ‘The Eolian Harp’ (1795, rev. 1817) draws on the precedent set by Akenside’s imagination and Hartley’s associationism to suggest a sequence of analogies connected with ‘that simplest lute, / Placed length-ways in the clasping casement’ as it responds to the caresses of the ‘desultory breeze’ (lines 12–14).109 The first of Coleridge’s panentheistic analogies (added to the 1817 Satyrane Letters version of the poem), which suggest a divine immanence throughout the natural world, brings together some of the inter-sensory connections identified by Jones in his trope of the ‘air-prism’.110 The poet describes



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light / sound analogies as a feature of a unifying ‘one Life’ that connects the mind with the phenomenal world:

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O the one Life within us and abroad, Which meets all motion and becomes its soul, A light in sound, a sound-like power in light Rhythm in all thought, and joyance every where— (lines 26–9)

The transformative creative process that is outlined here is akin to Akenside’s description of the imagination. This model of expressive potential allows for the existence of creativity within the air itself.111 The automatic porosity and confluence between mental and external worlds create a universal subjectivity of perception. The most promising of Coleridge’s analogies for subjective experience is the framing of the poet as a harp (an image which seems to be the next logical step following Akenside’s description of attuning the mind in Pleasures): [A]s on the midway slope Of yonder hill I stretch my limbs at noon, Whilst through my half-closed eye-lids I behold The sunbeams dance, like diamonds on the main, And tranquil muse upon tranquillity; Full many a thought uncalled and undetained, And many idle flitting phantasies, Traverse my indolent and passive brain, As wild and various as the random gales That swell and flutter on this subject lute! (lines 34–43)

Contrary to the modes of active observation prized by earlier writers, this image is strangely passive. Instead of interacting with the impressions of the external world, the poet is prone and idle as thoughts enter his mind ‘uncalled and undetained’. This is ­oppositional to the active and reactive modes of perception that the harp has so far displayed, and it demonstrates the materialist shortcomings of a physical model as analogy for a living and thinking organism (Coleridge had, of course, rejected Hartleian thought by the time he revised the poem in 1817). Shelley Trower’s reading of this image as an analogy for the solid human nerve that ‘translat[es] sensory vibrations into consciousness’ is important in terms of this question of agency.112 It shows how communication between

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e­ xternal and internal impulses is based not on a theory of animal spirits within the human nervous system, but on constant association throughout the phenomenal world.113 The apotheosis of Coleridge’s poem is his suggestion that ‘all animated nature’ might be ‘organic Harps diversely framed’ (lines 44–5). Again, we see the fruitful image of air as a creative, divine force in the ‘intellectual breeze’ (line 47) that is common to all, and the instrument allows for a materialised exploration of mind and body ‘trembling into thought’ (line 46).This totalising analogy is rejected at the end of the poem as ‘vain Philosophy’ (line 57) in favour of a more orthodox account of God’s animating power, suggesting an enduring anxiety about ascribing the soul to material causes and of giving up individual agency in moments of subjective perception. Coleridge’s use of the harp analogy does offer an ideal for unified and continuous perception and creativity that recalls the unrestricted senses of Young and Blake, even if in all cases the ideal of unlimited perception is postponed. The Aeolian harp analogy collapses the traditional topographical mode of elevation by embedding the human observer in a process of continuous subjective interaction with the natural world. This analogy bypasses the mind–body problem and promotes instead of new models of sensory engagement where the inlets of the sensory organs are opened out into a new model of naked sensibility. A final comparison demonstrates the effect of this shift. For Young, writing in the 1740s, the opening up of the senses is bound up with a narrative of redemption where the ‘present God’ who ‘tunes / My Voice (if tun’d); [and] the Nerve, that writes, sustains’ (Night IV, lines 399–402). This allows him to move away from analogies that align perception with the precision of scientific instruments (‘Oh for a Telescope his throne to reach!’ (Night IX, line 1834)) towards an interactive, responsive ideal. In Night VIII, Young describes a model of ideal perception in ‘A Man on Earth devoted to the Skies’ who views the world ‘[w]ith Aspect mild and elevated Eye’ (Night VIII, lines 1081 and 1083). As he is uplifted physically and morally elevated, the man’s perceptions appear to transcend the usual restrictions, as ‘He sees with other Eyes than Theirs: Where They / Behold a Sun, He spies a Deity’ (Night VIII, lines 1107–8). In ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’ (1798), Wordsworth



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draws directly upon Young’s version of idealised perception to produce a different model of sensory interaction: Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye and ear, both what they half-create, And what perceive; well pleased to recognize In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts.114

Wordsworth’s version of embodied perception, like Coleridge’s, encapsulates the wonder and curiosity of the earlier prospect poets but suggests a new way of seeing or witnessing. This model of witnessing situates the creative observer within the natural landscape but avoids the materialist implications of a model as analogy.115 Neither authoritatively detached nor elevated, the embodied poetic viewer is not simply the possessor of perfect perceptions. Instead, the idealised embodied viewer is sensitively receptive and ­reactive. This ideal is akin to the openness to sensory engagement that Thomas Blacklock depicts in his self-portraits and to the universal model of embedded perception offered by the Aeolian harp. According to this new subjective model, perception breaks out of the singularly readable ‘signs and tokens’ of traditional analogical interpretation to a more active completion of the viewed image. Direct sensory experience is still relevant for the acquisition of knowledge about the phenomenal world, but the Lockean mode of sensation and reflection is transformed into a much less hierarchical process of scientific perception. Perceptual experience becomes in these new analogies something that is transformative – recalling Kames’s concept of ‘ideal presence’116 – as the acquisition of new scientific knowledge enables the individual observer to complete (or ‘half-create’) the image from a simple description, to marshal their own sensory capabilities and awareness of the subjectivity of sense experience in order to perceive and identify colours, effects of light, and astronomical phenomena and, finally, to communicate the experience of natural philosophy to others. This technique is itself part of the didactic arsenal employed by natural philosophers and

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the poets who incorporate new concepts into their writing: a good description will enable the reader to become an active observer and to see phenomena in a new way. The question of restricted perception and the limits of natural philosophy have not quite gone away, but this model of engagement has become individualised and embodied. In its ideal form, the integration of the individual, non-abstract observer into topographical writing can help to combine the communication of new knowledge with models for the ­processes of observation and sensory engagement.

Notes 1 [James Beresford], The Miseries of Human Life: or the Groans of Samuel Sensitive and Timothy Testy, 4th edn (London: Miller, 1806), p. v. 2 Beresford’s work reached eleven editions within two decades, was translated into French and English, and prompted responses including Harriet Corp’s An Antidote to the Miseries of Human Life (1807) and additional illustrative caricatures by John Atkinson (1807) and Thomas Rowlandson (1807). 3 Blackmore, Creation, p. 5. 4 Baker, The Universe, p. 6. 5 Brooke, Universal Beauty, Book IV, lines 91–2. 6 Koehler, Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century, p. 17. 7 Thomson, Spring and Summer in The Seasons, pp. 2–57 and 58–143. Ralph Cohen identifies ninety-nine instances of ‘Eye’ and ‘Eyes’ to show that ‘Thomson is not writing descriptive verse but dealing with the meaning of experience’, with the result that ‘the incorporation of personal detail, of fragments of from his life, can become absorbed into what appears, but only appears, to be “objective” description’. Ralph Cohen, The Unfolding of the Seasons (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 102–3. 8 Goodman, Georgic Modernity, p. 40. 9 Tess Somervell, ‘Mediating vision: Wordsworth’s allusions to Thomson’s Seasons in The Prelude’, Romanticism 22:1 (2016), 48–60. Somervell documents the relationship between external mediation through fog and mist and the distortion caused by the eyes themselves. See in particular her reading of the ‘stalking shepherd’ in Book VIII of The Prelude (lines 264–70) and its roots in a description of the

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‘indistinct’ vision of the Shepherd in the ‘formless grey Confusion’ of fog in Autumn (lines 724–31) as well as Wordsworth’s suspicion of the bodily eyes as deceptive in The Prelude (Book XII, lines 128–9) on p. 52 of this article. 10 Somervell, ‘Mediating vision’, p. 49. See also Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s examination of this topic in Newton Demands the Muse, pp. 94–9. 11 James Thomson, Summer: A Poem (London: Millan, 1727), p. 80. 12 A technical account of the eye’s straining to see over distances and in difficulties can be found in Porterfield’s 1738 account of how ‘our Eyes change their Conformation to accommodate themselves to the various Distances of Objects’ in ‘An Essay Concerning the Motions of our Eyes: Part 2 Of Their Internal Motions’, in Medical Essays and Observations, Published by a Society in Edinburgh, 5 vols, 3rd edn (Edinburgh: Hamilton and Balfour, 1767), pp. 103–236 (p. 104). 13 Clark, Vanities of the Eye, p. 39. 14 Thomas Gray, ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard’, in The Complete Poems of Thomas Gray: English, Latin and Greek, ed. Herbert W. Starr and J.R. Hendrickson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 37–43, lines 4 and 6. 15 Koehler, Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century, p. 1. 16 Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination, Book I, lines 79–80. 17 Chris Mounsey, ‘Introduction: Variability: Beyond Sameness and Difference’, in Chris Mounsey (ed.), The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth-Century (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2014), pp. 1–27 (p. 6). See also the introductory chapter of Mounsey’s Sight Correction. 18 Mounsey, ‘Introduction’, p. 3. 19 David Turner, Disability in Eighteenth-Century England: Imagining Physical Impairment (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 5 and 35. 20 See, for example, Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility, pp. 19–68, and Lissa Roberts, ‘The Senses in Philosophy and Science: Blindness and Insight’, in Anne C. Vila (ed.), A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Enlightenment (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 109–31. 21 Tunstall, Blindness and Enlightenment, p. 17. 22 Denis Diderot, Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who Can See, trans. in Kate E. Tunstall, Blindness and Enlightenment: An Essay. With a New Translation of Diderot’s ‘Letter on the Blind’ and La Mothe Le Vayer’s ‘Of a Man Born Blind’ (London: Continuum, 2011), pp. 171–219 (p. 172). 23 Barasch, Blindness, p. 148.

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24 As Mark Paterson remarks, ‘[t]he interview with the blind man from Puiseaux is unlikely to be symptomatic of an absolute shift from the blind person as “object” of philosophical inquiry to their becoming a “subject” of equal stature … but certainly there was some measure of demystification of blindness and blind experience through his testimony’. Paterson, Seeing with the Hands, p. 122. 25 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Paul Guyer, new edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 133. 26 [Joseph] Spence, ‘Of the Describing Visible Objects’, in Thomas Blacklock, Poems by Mr. Thomas Blacklock. To which is Prefix’d an Account of the Life, Character, and Writings of the Author, by the Reverend Mr. Spence, Late Professor of Poetry at Oxford, 2nd edn (London: Printed for the Author and J. Dodsley, 1756), pp. xxxiii–liv (p. xxxiii). Spence distinguishes Blacklock’s blindness from that of Milton, who lost his sight in middle age. 27 For an account of Blacklock’s receipt of patronage and his engagement in Scottish literary culture as a promoter of both Robert Burns and Walter Scott see David E. Shuttleton, ‘“Nae Hottentots”: Thomas Blacklock, Robert Burns, and the Scottish vernacular revival’, Eighteenth-Century Life 37:1 (2013), 21–50. 28 ‘Some Account of the Life and Writings of Dr. Blacklock’, in Thomas Blacklock, Poems by the Late Reverend Dr. Thomas Blacklock … to which is Prefixed A New Account of the Life and Writings of the Author (Edinburgh: Printed by Chapman and Company, 1793), pp. i–xxx (p. iii). By this point in the century, Blacklock’s popularity can also be aligned with an interest in natural genius. The editor appears to echo Young’s claims about originality in his comment that ‘Poetry, however, though it attains its highest perfection in a cultivated soil, grows perhaps as luxuriantly in a wild one’ (p. v). 29 Catherine Packham, ‘Disability and sympathetic sociability in Enlightenment Scotland: the case of Thomas Blacklock’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 30:3 (2007), 423–38 (p. 427). Packham notes that: ‘In the context of Scottish Enlightenment ­morality … disability or other physical defect, rather than opening up questions about liminal or aberrant humanity, in fact offers the disabled subject as a socially valuable object of abjection, a useful occasion for a morally invigorating performance of sympathy’ (p. 426). 30 Blacklock, ‘An Hymn to Divine Love’, in Poems (1756), pp. 23–5, line 18.

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31 Blacklock, ‘An Hymn to Fortitude’, in Poems (1756), pp. 28–38, lines 3–4. 32 Blacklock, ‘To Happiness: An Ode’, in Poems (1756), pp. 43–7, line 9. 33 David E. Shuttleton, Smallpox and the Literary Imagination: 1 ­ 660–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 150–1. Edward Larissey also explores the prominence of theories of auditory compensation, especially blind people’s compensatory sensitivity to sounds and music, throughout the eighteenth century. Edward Larissey, The Blind and Blindness in Literature of the Romantic Period (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 14–20. 34 Thomas Blacklock, ‘The Author’s Picture’, in Poems (1756), pp.  191–4. Shuttleton reads this poem convincingly as ‘a painfully defensive response to the curiosity over the poet’s physical “otherness”’. Smallpox and the Literary Imagination, p. 153. 35 ‘Some Account of the Life and Writings of Dr. Blacklock’, p. ix. 36 Blacklock, ‘A Soliloquy’, in Poems (1756), pp. 153–67 (p. 153). 37 Packham, ‘Disability and sympathetic sociability’, p. 435. 38 Blacklock was not the only blind poet to garner attention in this period. Another significant example was the Lichfield poet Priscilla Pointon, whose Poems on Several Occasions were published by subscription in 1770. Several of the poems address the author’s own sensory experience; for example, ‘The following Lines made extempore, on Leaving Biana in Staffordshire’ describes the birdsong she hears whilst walking around the estate’s gardens as a kind of sensory substitution: ‘The feather’d train wou’d join in tuneful sound, / As if they knew I nothing cou’d see there’ (pp. 56–7, lines 10–11). Other poems, such as one addressed ‘to a blind young Gentleman’ (pp.  84–5) and another that explores ‘Consolatory Reflections that have Occasionally occurred as that most lamentable incident, my loss of sight’ (pp. 99–105), recommend fellow feeling and internal sight in favour of the operations of the corporeal senses. The latter poem describes Pointon’s initial despair at her loss of sight at the age of twelve before introducing consolation in the form of sensory dangers avoided and the prospect of acquiring immutable senses after death and experiencing ‘perfect permanent delight’ when encountering God in heaven (line 94). Priscilla Pointon, Poems on Several Occasions by Miss Priscilla Pointon of Lichfield (Birmingham: Printed for the Author, 1770). Chris Mounsey has explored the negating effect of blindness on Pointon’s sense of the endurance and portability of the written word and her ‘self-presence’ in her poems, which leads to surprisingly vindictive attacks in her verses (Mounsey., Sight Correction,

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pp. 254–6). See also Chris Mounsey, ‘Blind Woman on the Rampage: Priscilla Pointon’s Grand Tour of the Midlands and the Question of the Legitimacy of Sources for Biography’, in Joanna Fowler and Allan Ingram (eds), Voice and Context in Eighteenth-Century Verse: Order in Variety (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 230–47; and Jess Domanico, ‘Reading “The Blind Poetess of Lichfield”: The Consolatory Odes of Priscilla Poynton’, in Chris Mounsey (ed.), The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2014), pp. 203–21. 39 Richard Jago, ‘An Elegy on Man’, in Poems Moral and Descriptive by the Late Richard Jago, Prepared for the Press, and Improved by the Author (London: Dodsley, 1784), pp. 189–93, lines 1 and 9. 40 Jago, ‘An Elegy on Man’, p. 193n. 41 Wayne C. Ripley, ‘“An age more curious, than devout”: the counter-Enlightenment Edward Young’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 49:4 (2016), 507–29 (p. 508). 42 Young, Night Thoughts, Night IX, line 1007. 43 Cf. 2 Corinthians 4:7: ‘But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us’; 1 Thessalonians 4:4: ‘every one of you should know how to possess his vessel in sanctification and honour’; and Psalm 31:12: ‘I am like a broken vessel.’ 44 An alternative perspective might consider Young’s model of perfect perception as a rejection or surpassing of any kind of sense experience. This interpretation can be connected to John Sitter’s identification of Night Thoughts as a non-empiricist poem that promotes darkness over light. John E. Sitter, ‘Theodicy at midcentury: Young, Akenside, and Hume’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 12:1 (1978), 90–106 (pp. 93–4). 45 Thomas H. Helmstadter, ‘Blake’s Night Thoughts: interpretations of Edward Young’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 12:1 (1970), 27–54 (p. 28). 46 H.M. Margoliouth, ‘Blake’s drawings for Young’s Night Thoughts’, RES 5:17 (1954), 47–54 (p. 50). Margoliouth’s article provides a detailed description of these illustrations and the processes behind their production. 47 William Blake, Milton, in The Complete Poems, ed. W.H. Stevenson, 3rd edn (Harlow: Longman, 2007), pp. 503–602, Book I, plate 26, lines 10–12 (p. 561): ‘these the Visions of Eternity. / But we see only as it were the hem of their garments / When with our vegetable eyes we view those wondrous visions.’

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48 Rowan Rose Boyson, ‘The Senses in Literature: Pleasures of Imagining in Poetry and Prose’, in Anne C. Vila (ed.), A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Enlightenment (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 155–78 (p. 172); Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, in The Complete Poems, pp. 179–93, Book I, plate 2, lines 53–5 (pp. 184–5). In Milton, the Daughters of Albion sing of humans’ mortal restriction through the senses: ‘Ah! shut in a narrow doleful form! / Creeping in reptile flesh upon the bosom of the ground! / The eye of man, a little narrow orb closed up & dark, / Scarcely beholding the great light conversing with the void. / The ear, a little shell in small volitions shutting out / All melodies, & comprehending only discord and harmony: / The tongue, a little moisture fills, a little food it cloys, / A little sound it utters & its cries are faintly heard.’ Plate 5, lines 19–26 (p. 513). 49 Blake, The First Book of Urizen, in The Complete Poems, pp. 252–74, lines 38 and 205–6 (pp. 256 and 262). 50 Blake, Europe, in The Complete Poems, pp. 229–46, line 1 (p. 231). 51 For a positive reading of this ‘voluntary self confinement’, see S.H. Clark, ‘“The whole internal world his own”: Locke and metaphor reconsidered’, Journal of the History of Ideas 59:2 (1998), 241–65 (p. 249). 52 Barbara F. Lefcowitz, ‘Blake and the natural world’, PMLA, 89:1 (1974), 121–31 (p. 121). 53 George Eliot, ‘Worldliness and Other-Worldliness: The Poet Young’, Westminster Review 67:131 (January 1857), 1–42 (p. 36). 54 W.D. Odell draws attention to Young’s manipulation of a Platonic theory of perception, which takes as its starting point the Trinitarian connection between divine presence incarnate in Jesus (extended through the resurrection) and genius and originality in humans. See D.W. Odell, ‘Genius and analogy in Young’s Conjectures and the theology of Night Thoughts’, Renascence 64:2 (2012), 143–60 (p. 146). Compare Ripley’s comment in response to Odell that ‘Perception organizes the chaos of sensory data like the divine creation itself, making the intellect analogous to the creator, a key aspect of Young’s Christian subjectivity.’ Ripley, ‘“An age more curious, than devout”’, p. 515. 55 Ripley notes that ‘As a friend of Joseph Addison, James Thomson, Aaron Hill, and David Mallet, Young had several sources for appreciating the aesthetic implications of Newtonian physico-theology. He also subscribed to Henry Pemberton’s Newtonian handbook, A View of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy (1728).’ Ripley, ‘“An age more curious, than devout”’, p. 517.

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56 This phrase appears in Psalm 37:11 and Matthew 5:5. 57 For accounts of Blake’s evasion of the material body as a negative response to Locke and Newton, see Erin M. Goss, ‘What is called corporeal: William Blake and the question of the body’, The Eighteenth Century 51:4 (2010), 413–30, and Lefcowitz, ‘Blake and the natural world’. 58 Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in The Complete Poems, pp. 106–29, plate 11, lines 1–7 (pp. 116–17). 59 Robert F. Gleckner, ‘Blake and the senses’, Studies in Romanticism 5:1 (1965), 1–15 (p. 2). 60 Martin Priestman’s reading of these ‘mental deities’ as a psychologically-constructed religion, or ‘primitive animism’, offers a very different outlook on Blake’s visionary writing which has its own implications for the mind–body problem. Martin Priestman, Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 92. 61 Compare Adam’s naming of creation in Genesis 2:19: ‘And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.’ 62 Blake, Milton, Book I, plate 2, lines 6–7 (p. 507). 63 Donald D. Ault, Visionary Physics: Blake’s Response to Newton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 142–7. 64 Blake, [untitled], in The Complete Poems, pp. 485–7, lines 1–17. 65 Ault, Visionary Physics, p. 144. 66 Lefcowitz, ‘Blake and the natural world’, p. 129. 67 Brooke, Universal Beauty, Book I, lines 191–2. 68 Rousseau, ‘Science and the discovery of the imagination’, p. 129. 69 Noel Jackson sees this shift to physiology as central to the Romantic understanding of cognition. See Noel Jackson, Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 1–20. 70 George Rousseau, ‘Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origins of Sensibility’, in Nervous Acts: Essays on Literature, Culture and Sensibility (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 157–84 (p. 169). Rousseau notes the customary time-lag of several decades before these ideas were adopted in broader literary and philosophical discourse. 71 On brain dissection, see Keiser, ‘Nervous figures’, p. 1073. Keiser also links the rise of physiological approaches to the mind to the linguistic

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‘figuring of the brain’ (p. 1074), and he surveys the language of active and personified animal spirits in Willis and Blackmore and mechanical and material analogies for the brain by Locke, Leibniz, Collins and others as efforts to circumvent the mind–body problem. 72 Newton, ‘General Scholium’, in Principia, trans. Cohen and Whitman, p. 943. 73 Newton, ‘General Scholium’, p. 944. 74 Mounsey suggests that Hartley may have derived his ideas about the importance of tactility and the physical senses from observing his mathematics teacher Nicholas Saunderson. Mounsey, Sight Correction, p. 53. 75 For an exploration of this development, see Shelley Trower, Senses of Vibration: A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound (New York: Continuum, 2012). 76 David Hartley, Observations on Man: His Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), I, 61. 77 See my discussion of Henry Brooke’s earlier poetic description of tactile senses that receive vibrations in Chapter 4, pp. 166–7. 78 At times, Hartley’s connections between sensory organs and the material body involve grosser phenomena than vibrating molecules. The comparison between the eye and the stomach is an instance of this: ‘The Imagery of the Eye sympathizes also remarkably with the Affections of the Stomach. Thus the grateful Impressions of Opium upon the Stomach raise up the Ideas of gay Colours, and transporting Scenes, in the Eye; and Spasms, and Indigestions, have often a contrary Effect. The ghastly Faces which sometimes appear in Idea, particularly after drinking Tea, seem to be an Effect of this Kind, or perhaps of the last-mentioned one; for they are common to Persons of irritable nervous Systems’ (I, 212–13). 79 ‘Sensations may be said to be associated together, when their Impressions are either made precisely at the same Instant or Time, or in the contiguous successive Instants.’ Hartley, Observations, I, 65. 80 See Chapter 3, p. 129. 81 Isaac Newton, The Optical Papers of Isaac Newton, vol. I: The Optical Lectures, 1670–1672, ed. and trans. Alan E. Shapiro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 543. 82 Isaac Newton, ‘An Hypothesis Explaining the Properties of Light, Discoursed of in my Several Papers’, in A History of the Royal Society of London, ed. Thomas Birch, 4 vols (London: Millar, 1756–57), III, 248–305 (p. 262). A detailed account of Newton’s analogies is

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­ rovided in Olivier Darrigol, ‘The analogy between light and sound in p the history of optics from the Ancient Greeks to Isaac Newton: part 2’, Centaurus 52:3 (2010), 206–57 (pp. 230ff.). See also David Topper, ‘Newton on the number of colours in the spectrum’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 21:2 (1990), 269–79; and Penelope Gouk, ‘Newton and music: from the microcosm to the macrocosm’, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 1:1 (1986), 36–59. 83 Voltaire, The Elements of Isaac Newton’s Philosophy, pp. 152–3. 84 Niccolò Guicciardini, ‘The role of musical analogies in Newton’s optical and cosmological work’, Journal of the History of Ideas 74:1 (2013), 45–67 (pp. 52–3). 85 Carmel Raz, ‘“The expressive organ within us”: ether, ethereality, and early Romantic ideas about music and the nerves’, 19th-Century Music 38:2 (2014), 115–44 (p. 125). 86 See Chapter 2, pp. 82–6, for a fuller discussion of Platonism and Neoplatonism. 87 Gretchen L. Finney, ‘A world of instruments’, ELH 20:2 (1953), 87–120 (p. 88). Penelope Gouk explores Robert Fludd’s Neoplatonic image of ‘man the microcosm’ in his Microcosm historia (Frankfurt, 1619–21), in which the harmony of the heavens, ‘maintained by tonos or tension’, is represented as ‘a musical string that stretches upwards from the earthbound body of man and connects it sympathetically to the empyrean or heavenly realms’. Penelope Gouk, ‘Clockwork or Musical Instrument? Some English Theories of M ­ ind– Body Interaction Before and After Descartes’, in Susan McClary (ed.), Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Cultural Expression (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), pp. 35–59 (p. 39). 88 Finney, ‘A world of instruments’, p. 99. 89 William Jones, ‘On the Aeolian Harp’, in Physiological Disquisitions; or, Discourses on the Natural Philosophy of the Elements (London: Rivington et al., 1781), pp. 338–45 (p. 340). 90 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, in The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 674–701 (p. 675). 91 An important account of the Aeolian harp and its genesis is found in chapter 5 of Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 86–112. 92 Henry Thorowgood, A Description of the Aeolian Harp, or Harp of Aeolus from the Earliest Account to the Present Time (London: Printed for the Author, ?1754).

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93 See David Lasocki, ‘New light on eighteenth-century English woodwind makers from newspaper advertisements’, The Galpin Society Journal 63 (2010), 73–142 (pp. 100–1). Lasocki cites Thorowgood’s advertisements in the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser on 29 October 1764 and 23 May 1765. The latter lists the price of such an instrument at one guinea. 94 In 1782 Longman and Broderip advertised an improved model, which would ‘produce the effect of sounds either in house or garden, admitting there is any wind blowing’ (Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser 538 (20 July 1782, 3 August 1782, 14 August 1782)). A 1788 advertisement for the auction of the ‘Elegant Household Goods and Furniture’ of ‘a Lady who left Bath’ lists an Aeolian harp amongst items such as ‘fashionable mahogany chairs’, ‘dressing-glasses’, and card tables, suggesting that the instrument had entered into fashionable domestic spaces (Bath Chronicle 1456 (23 October 1788)). 95 James Thomson, ‘Ode on Æolus’s Harp’, in Liberty, The Castle of Indolence and Other Poems, pp. 314–15, lines 1 and 4. 96 Thomson employs the Aeolian harp again in his fantastical romance The Castle of Indolence (1748), where it produces dangerously ­seductive music. The effect of the ‘Aerial Music’ (Canto I, line 345) in this later poem is soporific and enchanting – ‘breath[ing], in tender Musings through the Heart’ (Canto I, line 366) suggesting again an imaginative confluence of musical and bodily vibrations. James Thomson, The Castle of Indolence, in Liberty, The Castle of Indolence and Other Poems, pp. 161–223, Canto I, lines 345–70. 97 Jones, Physiological Disquisitions, p. 328. Cf. the Rabbinic account of David hanging a harp in his chamber: ‘There was a harp hanging above David’s bed, and when the time of midnight arrived a north wind came and blew upon it, so that it produced melody.’ The Babylonian Talmūd: Tractate Berākōt, trans. A. Cohen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921), chapter 1, p. 11. 98 Jones, Physiological Disquisitions, p. 341. 99 Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination, pp. 99–100. 100 Hutchinson, Moses’s Principia, Part I, pp. 2–3. 101 Hutchinson, Moses’s Principia: Part I, p. 15. 102 See my reading of Hutchinson’s interpretation of Genesis in Chapter 2, pp. 91–101. 103 Emily I. Dolan, ‘E. T. A. Hoffmann and the ethereal technologies of “nature music”’, Eighteenth-Century Music 5:1 (2008), 7–26 (p. 13). 104 Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination, note to Book I, line 109. This note appears in the first and second editions of the poem in 1744.

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105 The version quoted here is from the first edition of the poem: [Mark Akenside], The Pleasures of Imagination: A Poem in Three Books (London: Dodsley, 1744), Book I, lines 109–24. However, subsequent reading of Richard Pococke’s A Description of the East, and Some Other Countries (1743) – which established any reference to the harp as a product of faulty translation – prompted Akenside to remove the reference to the harp from the fifth edition in 1754. Akenside’s image of the harp, although excluded from modern editions, was widely circulated and therefore exerted a significant influence over later writers. 106 Robin C. Dix notes that ‘It was the French translator of Juvenal, Jean Joseph Dusaulx, who first suggested [in 1770] that when the colossus was damaged fissures may have been created in the stone and that any air trapped in them would be set in motion by a sudden temperature change. He went on to surmise that as the trapped air escaped, a noise would be produced.’ Robin C. Dix, ‘The harps of Memnon and Aeolus: a study in the propagation of an error’, Modern Philology 65:3 (1988), 288–93 (p. 289). 107 John Gilbert Cooper, The Power of Harmony: A Poem in Two Books (London: Dodsley, 1745), p. 5. 108 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Eolian Harp’, in The Major Works, ed. H.J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 27–9, line 26. 109 For an examination of Coleridge’s reading of Hartley and associationism, see Ian Wylie, Young Coleridge and the Philosophers of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 74–7. 110 On Coleridge’s panentheism, see C.U.M. Smith, ‘Coleridge’s “Theory of Life”’, Journal of the History of Biology 32:1 (1999), 31–50. 111 Thomas H. Ford generates an interpretation of late treatments of the Aeolian harp, including Coleridge’s, in terms of the harp’s reconceptualisation as ‘an instrument of atmospheric reception’ that represents audience response rather than poetic experience. Thomas H. Ford, Wordsworth and the Poetics of Air: Atmospheric Romanticism in a Time of Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 29–34 (p. 32). 112 Shelley Trower, ‘Nerves, vibration and the Aeolian harp’, Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 54 (2009), no page number. 113 For more detailed examinations of the unity with nature imagined by Coleridge, see Raimonda Modiano, Coleridge and the Concept of Nature (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1985), pp.  57ff. See also Anya Taylor, ‘Coleridge and “essential oneness”’, The Wordsworth Circle 6 (1985), 29–32.

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114 William Wordsworth, ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’, in The Major Works, pp. 131–5, lines 103–10. The poet’s note to line 107 acknowledges the debt to Young. 115 Reading Wordsworth’s paraphrase of Young’s verse, Noel Jackson suggests that ‘“Tintern Abbey” might itself be read as an exposition of the half-perceiving, half-creating character of consciousness that Wordsworth identifies.’ Science and Sensation, p. 33. 116 Kames, Elements of Criticism, I, 108.

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Bibliography

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Index

Primary works can be found under authors’ names. An ‘n’ after a page number indicates the note number. Adams, George 41, 43, 68n52, 174 Addison, Joseph 8, 39–40, 126–7, 144, 183–4, 194, 249n55 Aeolian harp 232, 233–42 aether 99–100, 111n3 air 148–9, 236–7 Akenside, Mark: The Pleasures of Imagination 8, 56–7, 62, 76, 132–4, 137, 147, 149, 152, 214, 235, 238–9 Algarotti, Francesco: Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explain’d for the Use of the Ladies 26, 31, 34, 36, 55–6, 87, 123, 142, 157n41 animal spirits 178–82, 183, 230, 236 anthropocentricism 52–3, 58–61, 106–8, 163 see also geocentricism; knowledge, limits of anti-Newtonianism 97, 139–41, 158n48 Aristotle 140, 159n65 associationism 230–2, 240–2 attraction see gravity

Augustine 83 authority, scientific 2, 30–1, 87, 190–2 see also witnessing Baker, Henry: The Universe 7, 27–8, 32, 52, 58–9, 107–8, 211–12 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia 62 Barton, Richard 85, 91 Baxter, Andrew 26, 31, 34, 36–7, 60 Beare, Matthew 169, 172, 175, 179, 183, 186 Beresford, James 209–10 Berkeley, George 127 Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, An 184–6 Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous 137–8, 140–1, 188–9, 193 Bible 72, 73, 77, 84, 102–3, 105, 129, 155n31, 172, 219–20, 225, 248n43 on blindness 172, 206n74, 219–20 on colour 128–9

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Index 283

Genesis, Book of 77, 83, 86, 91–101, 128–9, 237 see also cosmogony; Hutchinsonianism on light 77 scientific interpretation 92–7 on sight 194 biblical Hebrew 99–101 biblical paraphrase 92, 102–3, 105 Blacklock, Thomas 216–19, 243 Blackmore, Richard 164 Creation 7, 54, 108–9, 119, 146–7, 148–9, 159n71, 163–4, 181–2, 211 Blake, William 223–4, 226–8 blind(ness) 187–8, 212, 215–19 hypothetical 177–87 see also Blacklock, Thomas; cataract surgery; Diderot, Denis; Molyneux’s Question; ocularcentricism; Pointon, Priscilla; Saunderson, Nicholas; substitution, sensory Book of Nature 84–5, 230 see also correspondences; physico-theology Boyle Lectures 14–15, 81 Boyle, Robert 13–14, 123, 125, 153n12 Brereton, Jane 2 Brooke, Henry: Universal Beauty 127, 164, 165–7, 169–71, 176, 181, 212, 228 Burke, Edmund 216–17 Burnet, Thomas 32, 93, 102 Butler, Joseph 77, 86, 220 camera obscura 173–7 Carter, Elizabeth 26, 28, 59–60 Cartesianism 25–6, 29, 36, 49, 93, 102

see also Chudleigh, Mary, Lady Chudleigh; Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de Castel, Louis Bertrand 138–41 Cat, Claude-Nicolas Le 171, 175, 186, 203n48, cataract surgery 188–94, 196–8 categorisation 17, 120–1, 128–31, 135–6 Chesselden, William 174, 188–91 Cheyne, George 89 children’s literature 26–7, 31, 32, 34, 42, 69n65 Chudleigh, Mary, Lady Chudleigh 25–6, 102–3 coffee houses 30–1 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 240–2 colour analogies for perception 126–7, 144, 147 as completion 135, 126–7, 146–7, 225 pigment theory 142–4, 145–7 process of vision 125–7, 134, 135, 141–51 see also eyesight; perception; rainbow; spectrum comets 27, 51, 62, 63, 94 commerce 30–1, 41 see also Aeolian harp; globes; orreries; polite science common sense 35–7 conversation 25, 28, 30, 31–5 see also dialogues, scientific; domestic natural philosophy; polite science Cooper, John Gilbert 239–40 correspondences 13, 80, 82–6, 107 cosmogony 91–101, 226, 236–7 creation narrative see Bible; cosmogony; light Cuff, John 184, 188

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Darwin, Charles 11–12 Darwin, Erasmus 9 death 1–2, 62, 219–23 Derham, William 14, 50, 52–4, 81, 92–3, 107, 173 design see physico-theology diagrams 3, 45–8, 78, 174 dialogues, scientific 26–7, 29–40, 41, 43–9, 55, 58, 59, 60–1, 87, 141–2 see also Algarotti, Francesco; Baxter, Andrew; Ferguson, James; Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de; Harris, John; Martin, Benjamin; Telescope, Tom; women and science Diderot, Denis: Letter on the Blind 215–16 digestion 163, 251n78 disabled body 217–18 disability and medical model 193–4, 198, 215–16 theory of variability 214–15 see also blind(ness) disciplinarity 9–14 domestic natural philosophy experiments in 3, 73n98, 78–80, 87–8, 123–4, 167–9 object comparisons 29, 35–40, 60–1, 87, 141–2, 167 see also models; polite science; replication of experiments Dyer, John 149 electricity 111n3, 116n60 Ellis, John 105–6 embryo 181–2, 220–1 empiricism 1–4, 15, 77–80, 82, 85–7, 102–4, 108–9, 119–21, 122–4, 175–7, 211

see also induction; Locke, John; Molyneux’s Question; Newton, Isaac; Newtonianism epicureanism 72n83, 102–3, 163 experiments see domestic natural philosophy; empiricism; replication of experiments extra-solar space 61–2 see also infinity; stars extraterrestrials 27, 57–60, 71n82 eye 58, 165–77, 212–13 see also nerve, optic eyesight 5–6, 189–90, 212–13 blind spot 173 blurred vision 168, 196 colour blindness 199n10 double vision 182 eyestrain 155n34, 213 as metonym for knowledge 1–2, 138, 172–3, 211–16 short-sightedness 176, 196 three-dimensional objects ­ 177–94 passim see also blind(ness); eye; Molyneux’s Question; perception; vision Ferguson, James 31, 41, 44 Astronomy Explained upon Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles 24, 34, 51–2 Lectures on Select Subjects 167 Young Gentleman and Lady’s Astronomy 26, 32–9 passim, 48–9, 58, 64n18 flight 27, 29, 55–6 see also space travel, imaginary Flood, the 115n50, 128–9 fluids, imponderable 99, 111n3 see also aether; electricity; light



Index 285

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Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de 16, 26, 29, 31, 32, 34 Forbes, Duncan 98, 100–1 Gambol, Richard 52 gardening, landscape 119–20 gardens 21n11, 26, 32, 136, 144 genius 2, 10, 249n54 Gentleman’s Magazine, The 59–60, 235 geocentricism 36–7, 51–3, 58–61 see also infinity globes 32, 41, 42–3, 49 gravity 1–2, 35–6, 38–9, 49–50, 55–6, 70n70, 72n84, 85, 88–9, 94–5, 96, 97, 99, 104 see also cosmogony; infinity; planets Gray, Thomas 214 Great Chain of Being 84, 107–8, 109–10 habit 130–1, 177–8, 230–1 Harris, John 14, 30 Astronomical Dialogues between a Gentleman and a Lady 6, 29–45 passim, 60–1 Hartley, David see associationism hearing 4, 166–7, 183, 185–6, 231 Herbert, George 83–4 Hobson, Thomas: Christianity the Light of the Moral World 95–7, 104–7, 110, 134–5 Home, Henry, Lord Kames see ideal presence Hooke, Robert 123, 174 Hughes, John 28, 50, 57, 61–2 Hume, David 217 Hutchinsonianism 98–101, 237 Hutchinson, John 98–101, 237 Huygens, Christiaan 32, 58, 123 hypotheses 35–6, 78, 86 see also empiricism; induction

identity, theories of 165–6 imagination 8–9, 29, 37, 55–62, 101–4, 126–7, 136–7, 147, 155n32, 195–6, 228–9, 233–42 passim induction 1, 10, 49–50 infinity 27, 28–9, 49–55, 61–2, 94–5, 107–8 instruments, musical 186, 210–11, 230–1, 233, 233–42 Jago, Richard Edge-Hill 127, 147–8, 162, 184, 194–8 ‘Elegy on Man, An’ 220–1 Jenyns, Soame 201n22 judgement 177–8, 184–6, 188–90, 192–3 see also eyesight; knowledge; vision Kepler, Johannes 27, 167, 168–9 knowledge adamic 105, 226–7 limits of 5, 27–9, 61–2, 82, 84–5, 105–8, 220–3 of self 106–8 see also death; empiricism; eyesight; judgement; light; perception; revelation; vision learning Lockean 92, 104, 119–20 play 42, 67n48, 69n64, 69n65 revision 35 tactile 4, 42–9 passim, 69n64 see also dialogues, scientific; models; spectacle; witnessing lectures, public 3, 30–1, 35, 41, 45, 123

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light as analogy for divine mystery 97, 99–100, 108–9 as analogy for knowledge 4, 77, 81–2, 91, 102–10, 132–4 in creation narrative 95–7 speed of 89, 95–7 see also colour; cosmogony; physico-theology; stars limb, phantom 163–4, 179–81 Linnaeus, Carl 9–10 Locke, John 164 analogies for the mind 176 educational theory 35, 42–9 passim, 90, 91 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, An 4, 8, 77–8, 177–8, 183, 186–7, 190 Lucretius 72n83 Mallet, David 28, 81 Excursion, The 50, 57, 61, 62, 103–4, 149–51 passim, 211 Martin, Benjamin 30–1, 41, 68n52, 174 Panegyrick on the Newtonian Philosophy, A 144–5 Young Gentleman and Lady’s Astronomy, The 7, 26, 31, 32, 33, 45–8, 49, 59, 123, 141 mathematics 35, 55 Memnon, statue of 238–9 microscope 6–7, 137, 174, 196, 212 Milton, John 61, 72n86, 87, 196 models 40–2, 49, 234–5 see also Aeolian harp; globes; orreries models, living 45–9 Molyneux’s Question 177–87, 188–9, 193–4 More, Henry 172

Neoplatonism see signs and tokens nerve, optic 125–6, 166, 169, 173 nerves 163–4, 165, 169, 178–82, 183, 194–5, 209–10, 224–33 passim see also eye; sensorium commune Newbery, John see Telescope, Tom Newton, Isaac Four Letters from Isaac Newton to Doctor Bentley 49–50 ‘Letter … Containing his New Theory about Light and Colours, A’ 122–5, 129 Opticks 2–3, 50, 78–80, 96–7, 109–10, 129–30, 142–3, 178 poetic representations 1–2, 92 Principia, The 49–50, 208, 229–30 Newtonianism 3, 14, 50 ocularcentrism 193–6 occulists 190–1 order 49–50, 51–4, 139 orreries 41–8, 49 Oswald, James 235–6 painting 87, 142–7, 168, 171, 189 Paley, William 172 perception adamic 225–7 elevated 5–7, 119–20, 127–8, 147–8, 150–1, 195–6 embodied 195–6, 217–19, 235, 237–43 as learned 184–6, 189–90 see also Molyneux’s Question scientific 1–3, 9, 19, 78, 87, 91–2, 132–3, 244 see also death; embryo; eye; eyesight; judgement; Molyneux’s Question; reading, active; subjectivity; vision

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Index 287

physicians 164 physico-theology 13–15, 84–6, 88–101, 104–7, 119–20, 144–9, 164–7 passim, 169–73, 193–4, 197, 224–5, 239–40 see also Bible; cosmogony; order; plenitude; signs and tokens planets orbit 36, 37–9, 40–9 passim, 50, 52 size of 28–9, 37–8, 49, 51, 58–9 temperature 57, 58–9, 60, 73 see also extraterrestrials; gravity; orreries plenitude 52–5, 84, 122, 137 poetry, topographical see colour; gardens; perception; reading, active Pointon, Priscilla 247n38 polite science 25–35, 41, 87, 141–2, 144–5, 235 Pope, Alexander 205n63 Essay on Man, An 15, 53, 84, 106 Porterfield, William: A Treatise on the Eye 168–9, 171–2, 175–7, 179–82 presence, ideal 8–9, 135, 243 see also imagination; witnessing presumption see knowledge, limits of pudding 32, 39, 218 quotation 7, 32 rainbow 128–34 Ray, John 172–3 reading, active 2–3, 7, 19, 25, 27–9, 34–5, 56–9, 119–22 see also learning; perception, scientific

reading, communal 7, 31, 39–40 Reid, Thomas 138 replication of experiments 2–3, 78–80, 87, 141 resurrection 220–1, 225–6, 228 revelation, biblical 93–101 revelation, natural 81–91 see also signs and tokens Reynolds, John 148 Royal Society 31, 122, 138 Saunderson, Nicholas 216 Scott, John, of Amwell 119–20 senses, hierarchy of see ocularcentricism senses, relationship between 178–82, 184–6, 189, 194–8, 220–1 see also eyesight; hearing; Molyneux’s Question; taste; touch senses, tactility of 166, 169, 183, 231–2 sensibility 194–5, 205n60, 209–10, 230–1, 240–4 sensorium commune 178–82 sermons 83–4, 111n1 see also Boyle Lectures Shelley, Percy Bysshe 234 signs and tokens 82–4, 109–10, 224–7 Smart, Christopher 97, 116n65, 122, 139–41, 145–6 smell 4, 20n11, 183, 184 Smith, Adam 62–3 space travel, imaginary 28–9, 51–2, 55–62, 102–3 see also flight spectrum compared to musical scale 129, 154n20, 231–2 Newtonian 127–37 non-Newtonian 137–41

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288

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stars 25, 27–8, 51–2, 77, 83, 107–8, 109–10, 185 see also infinity Steele, Richard 43, 45, 188, 196–7, 206n75 subjectivity 5–7, 9, 40–1, 44–9, 121, 132–4, 151–2, 175–6, 194–8, 203n48, 209–19 substitution, sensory 184–7, 196, 247n33, 247n38 see also blind(ness); disability; hearing surgeons 190–1, 193 surgery, cataract 187–94, 196–8 surgery, skill in 190–1 Sydenham, Thomas 164 sympathy 230–40 passim taste 102, 183, 184, 194 Taylor, John, of Hatton Garden 188, 190, 191–3 tea 60, 251n78 telescope 27–8, 32, 41, 110, 211–12, 222 Telescope, Tom: The Newtonian System of Philosophy 26, 31, 32, 38, 69n64, 141–2 Thomson, James 88, 131, 156n36 Castle of Indolence, The 253n96 ‘Hymn on the Seasons, A’ 146–7 ‘Ode on Aeolus’s Harp’ 235–6 ‘Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton, A’ 1–2, 28, 62 Seasons, The 6, 88–91, 110, 120–1, 131–2, 149, 150, 151, 212–13 touch 20n10, 177–81, 216, 218, 225–6 as analogous to sight 183–4, 227–8

view, prospect 5–6, 21n11, 27–8, 57, 120, 127–8, 147–8, 150–1, 235 see also eyesight; perception; vision Virgil 55–6, 59, 149, 152n3 vision distance judgement 185–6, 189–90, 193 fallibility of 194–6 intromissive theory of 227–8 restoration see surgery, cataract see also eye; eyesight Voltaire 193–4, 232 voyages, lunar see flight Waller, Richard 135–6, 157n44 Whiston, William 14, 32, 53 New Theory of the Earth, A 85–6, 93–5 witnessing 3, 78–80 virtual 3, 7, 8–9, 90, 119–21, 148–9, 196, 211–12 see also dialogues, scientific; space travel, imaginary; perception; replication of experiments; view, prospect women and science 31–2, 34, 39–40, 55, 87 wonder 25, 62–3 Wordsworth, William 129, 242–3, 244n9 Wright, Thomas 38, 51–2, 59 Young, Edward 246n28 Night Thoughts 54–5, 118, 221–3, 224–6, 228, 242