Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660–1740 9781501744624

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FALLEN LANGUAGE S

ALSO BY ROBERT MARKLEY

Two-Edg'd Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve From Renaissance to Restoration: Metamorphoses of the Drama (co-editor) Kierkegaard and Literature: Irony, Repetition, and Criticism (co-editor)

FALLEN LANGUAGES Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660-1740 t ROBERT MARKLEY

Cornell University Press ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright© 1993 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 199 3 by Cornell University Press International Standard Book Number o-8014-2588-3 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 93-17884

Librarians: Library of Congress cataloging information appears on the last page of the book.

@> The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39·48-1984.

FoRM.

H.

MARKLEY (188o- 1982) AND

MARY LEVIN MARKLEY (1926- 1990)

Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction. Physico-Theology: Dialogics, History, ~Th~

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"A Close (though Mystick) Connection": Boyle's Defense of the Bible

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"Babel revers'd": Real Characters, Philosophical Languages, and Idealizations of Order

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3 "Those Fabulous Chaldeans,: Boyle and the Crisis of Baconianism

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4 "Ye true & real temple of God": Mathematics, History, and the Narrative Structures of Newton's Natural Philosophy

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5 "The interposition of Omniscience": History, Method, and Aesthetics in Early Eighteenth-Century Newtonianism

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6 Boyle "Epitomiz' d": The Reinscription of Science in Early Eighteenth-Century England

Contents

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Epilogue

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Index

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57

Acknowledgments

This book took shape over several years, and during that time I was fortunate to have the opportunity to discuss its contents with a number of people who have contributed, in a variety of ways, to its present form. Laurie Finke has read innumerable versions of the manuscript since it began slouching its way toward publication, in between her own teaching, writing, and parenting our children. My collaborators on other projects, Kenneth Knoespel and Molly Rothenberg, have read large chunks of this manuscript and have offered trenchant criticisms as well as opportunities to rethink what I thought I already knew. I am particularly grateful to Ken for sharing with me his research and thinking on Newton's manuscripts and to Molly for always challenging me to go beyond what I had thought was a finished product. Ronald Schleifer has been steadfast in his friendship and encouragement. To these four I owe much more than I can begin to articulate. Over the years, I have discussed parts of the project with Sally Shuttleworth, Eric White, Samuel Delany, G. S. Rousseau, Jonathan Culler, Mary Jacobus, Paul Privateer, N. Katherine Hayles, Valerie Greenberg, Joel Weinsheimer, Desiree Hellegers, Helen Burke, Margaret C. Jacob, Mordechai Feingold, Mark Greenberg, Richard Grusin, James Bono, Lance Schachterle, David Gross, and Thomas

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Acknowledgments

Lockwood. At a relatively late stage in my revisions, Rebecca Merrens and Michelle Kendrick provided invaluable help as readers and as researchers. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Bernhard Kendler, my editor at Cornell University Press, and to the readers of the manuscript, particularly Anita Guerrini. Grants from the College of Arts and Sciences at Texas Tech University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at the University of California at Los Angeles, and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University allowed me to devote a number of months to the research for this project, and I am sincerely grateful for their support. As I indicate in the notes, parts of the manuscript originally appeared in various publications, and I acknowledge, with thanks, the editors of Genre, the University of Chicago Press, the University of Wisconsin Press, and Associated University Presses for their permission to include revised versions of articles I had previously published. I also wish to thank the History of Science Collection at the Olin Library, Cornell University, for permission to reprint the plates from Boyle's works. Finally, I want to thank my children, Stephen and Hannah, who have put up with an often absent and distracted father with unfailing love and humor. They have made a tough road much easier to follow. R.M.

Introduction Physico-Theology: Dialogics, History, and Theory

This book began to take shape as far back as the late 1970s, while I was doing research for my dissertation on the dramatic language of three Restoration playwrights: George Etherege, William Wycherley, and William Congreve. Intending to supplement my knowledge of late seventeenth-century literature and drama, I found myself reading a good deal more about universal language schemes and prose style reform in the late seventeenth century than I had anticipated-and the more I read of critics such as R. F. Jones, Morris Croll, and Robert Adolph, the more troubled I became. The Jones-Croll debate, which shaped discussions of seventeenth-century prose style from the 1930s to the 198os (despite a series of correctives that began to appear in the late 196os), took place on what I quickly could see were dubious historical and literary grounds. 1 Jones's thesis-that the "rise" of r. See Morris W. Croll, Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm: Essays by Morris W. Croll, ed. J. Max Patrick et a!. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966); R. F. Jones et a!., The Seventeenth Century: Studies in the History of English Thought and Literature from Bacon to Pope (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1951); Robert Adolph, The Rise of Modern Prose Style (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968). For more recent work, see Margreta de Grazia, "The Secularization of Language in the Seventeenth Century," Journal of the History of Ideas 41 (1980), 319-29; John Steadman, The Hill and the Labyrinth: Discourse and

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"modern" prose style was determined by the rise of modern science-depended on flimsy evidence handled in a slipshod manner. In 1979, Paul Arakelian demonstrated that Jones misrepresented and even fabricated "evidence" for his dubious conclusions, ignored the political and ideological agendas of members of the Royal Society, such as Thomas Sprat and Joseph Glanvill, who made sweeping claims for their efforts to enforce an "objective" (read coercive) language as a standard of discourse, and naively reproduced a Whiggish view of the rise of modern science that has since been attacked by a host of historians of science. 2 However, I found, despite its ahistorical tenor, factual errors, and general implausibility, that Jones's thesis still retained a surprising currency among literary critics and historians because it reinforced the notion that language change passively reflected the rise of modern science and because it preserved a mechanism to describe this epistemic change in linear and progressivist terms: the binarism of a dialectical progress from old and occult to new and improved. 3 Even such critics of Jones as Brian Vickers and

Certitude in Milton and His Near-Contemporaries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); and Brian Vickers, "Introduction," in Occult and Scientific Mentalities in theRenaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 3-44. 2. Paul Arakelian, "The Myth of a Restoration Style Shift," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 20 (1979), 227-45. See, for example, the articles by Michael Fores, "Constructed Science and the Seventeenth-Century 'Revolution,'" History of Science 22 (1984), 217-44; and "Newton on a Horse: A Critique of the Historiographies of 'Technology' and 'Modernity,"' History of Science 23 (1985), 351-78. 3· Jones and his followers (and often his critics) repress or ignore the political or more broadly ideological explanations offered by seventeenth-century writers to account for stylistic change. Thomas Sprat, for example, attributes changes in the English language to "our late Civil Wars . .. a time, wherein all Languages use, if ever, to increase by extraordinary degrees" and then invokes class-specific standards of linguistic propriety to decry the "many fantastical terms ... introduc'd by our Religious Sects" (Sprat, History of the Royal Society, ed. Jackson I. Cope and Harold W. Jones [St. Louis: Washington University Press, 19 58], 42). Samuel Parker maintains that in the I 64os "the Nation had shattered into infinite factions with senseless and phantastick phrases" and advocates an act of Parliament "to abridge Preachers of the use of fulsome and luscious Metaphors" as an "effectual cure for all our present [political and religious] distempers" (Parker, Ecclesiastical Politie [London, r67o], 75-6). The linguistic and ideological conflicts among the "infinite factions" in seventeenth-century England resist the tropes of progressivist history that Jones and his followers employ; the dialogical welter of "Languages" that Sprat describes as "increas[ing] by extraordinary degrees" complicates any effort to narrate a coherent history of language change during the era. See Robert Markley, Two-Edg'd Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 36-47; Brian Vickers, "Restoration Prose Style: A Reassessment," in Nancy Struever and Brian Vickers, Rhetoric and the Pursuit of Truth (Los Angeles: Clark Library, 198 5), 3-76; and

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Hans Aarsleff began by positing or accepting the idea that a revolutionary change in linguistic, stylistic, and representational practices took place during the second half of the seventeenth century and then offered analyses to describe why this change occurred. 4 "Style," it turned out, seemed an excuse to confirm a priori assumptions about the rise of modernity that construct narratives of linguistic and scientific progress as seemingly necessary effects of a Hegelian idea of history. I soon realized that the problem of a history of style was tied to the problem of definition, or, more broadly, that of describing a theory of stylistic analysis. I had begun my research with the notion that a thumbnail description of style would suffice for my literary analysis of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve, and that I did not need a theory of style-or of anything else, for that matter. I had taken no courses in literary theory as a graduate student and had only a passing acquaintance with Michel Foucault's work. But, once again, the more reading I did, the more troubled I became. Literary critics such as Leo Spitzer and Jonas Barish employed what they admitted were circular methodologies to justify their formalist interpretations of style; linguistically oriented critics were just as circular, although less reflexive, about the assumptions they made that allowed them to "prove" what they had begun by assuming. 5 The "science" of stylistics, I found, depended on critics' adopting and acknowledging various "intuitive" or "subjective" judgments about what constituted "meaningful" stylistic markers, then trying to generalize their biases by invoking some variant of the "scientific method" to legitimate what were often conventional readings of individual works, authors, or periods that, in turn, confirmed the accuracy of their "aesthetic" judgments. Disenchanted, I began to read writers-Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Foucault-who, in 1977-78, still lay beyond most English departments' notions of the Pillars of Hercules.

Roger Pooley, "Language and Loyalty: Plain Style at the Restoration," Literature and History 6 (1980), 2-18. 4· Vickers, Occult and Scientific Mentalities, 3-44; and Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). 5. Leo Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948); Jonas Barish, Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960). For my critique of stylistics, see Two-Edg'd Weapons, 9-14.

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In short, by the time I finished my dissertation, what I had originally envisioned as a few pages on the history and theory of dramatic language had become two chapters, and then-radically revised after my reading of Mikhail Bakhtin-two chapters in my book TwoEdg'd Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve. In this study, I offered revisionist accounts of both the history of seventeenth-century language theory and debates about representation and the theory of whatever it is we mean by "style." Long before the book was published, though, my interests had shifted from interpreting the works of three playwrights to examining the cultural complexities that I felt were obscured by progressivist accounts-both Whiggish and Marxist-that linked the rises of modern conceptions of language, science, and culture. 6 By offering strategies to explain the complexities and contradictions of representation in the early modern period, I found that I was writing (in a series of articles published between 1983 and 1992, some of which appear in revised and expanded versions below) a historicotheoretical account of the dialogic relationships among representation, history, ideology, and theory between 166o and 1740.? 6. My use of the term "progressivist" is not intended to denote a monolithic ideology at work in contemporary literary or cultural history. As ]. C. D. Clark notes, competing versions of progressivism underlie different political constructions of historiography, from liberal to Marxist (Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986]). The divisiveness of progress as a concept is, I believe, crucial to its ideological appeal: it allows for a variety of political differences within reconstructions of the past while still permitting writers to posit (implicitly or explicitly) a "logic" to history-at once aesthetic and political-that locates "meaning" both in a transhistorical dialectic (for example, Hegel's idea of history) and in the agency of a coherent subject. The implications of this progressivist logic cannot be easily generalized, although, given the limitations of time and space, I have to do so, to some extent, in this Introduction. On the notion of progress in Judea-Christian history from the ancients through the Renaissance, see Theodore Olson, Millennia/ism, Utopianism, and Progress (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982). Significantly, however, Olsen admits his inability to explain the theoretical rationale underlying progressivist conceptions of history: "The doctrine that there is a blind force, uncontaminated by historical contingency, dedicated to the continued improvement of man is the central affirmation of the notion of progress. I have no explanation for the persistence of this doctrine except the fact of its manifest convenience" (265-66). As I argue in Chapters 5 and 6, the abstraction of a notion of particularly scientific progress is a crucial political activity in Newtonian England. 7· These essays include "Objectivity as Ideology: Boyle, Newton, and the Languages of Science," Genre 16 (1983), 355-72; "Robert Boyle on Language: Some Considerations Touching the Style of the Holy Scriptures," in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture,

Physico-Theology

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This study, then, continues the work I began in Two-Edg'd Weapons to describe the history of representation as a complex and internally divided process rather than as a linear sequence of progressive development. The texts I examine, from Robert Boyle's Some Considerations Touching the Style of the Holy Scriptures to Colin Maclaurin's version of the history of science in the opening chapters of his Account of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy, are typical of a good deal of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century physico-theological writing that does not make it into standard intellectual histories or even into many self-consciously revisionist accounts. The term itself, "physicotheology," which I have taken from Walter Charleton's The Darknes of Atheism Dispelled by the Light of Nature, has antiquarian, even unsettling, connotations, taking us back to a time when our seemingly commonsense distinctions between Church and scientific State were vehemently denied by most natural philosophers. 8 These physicotheological texts are concerned, in a variety of ways, with the crises of representation that inhere in the Christian dilemma, voiced by Augustine, of having to praise a perfect God in an imperfect language: Have we spoken or announced anything worthy of God? Rather I feel that I have done nothing but wish to speak: if I have spoken, I have not said what I wished to say. Whence do I know this, except because God is ineffable? ... For God, although nothing worthy

vol. 14, ed. 0. M. Brack, Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, r985), 159-71; "The Rise of Nothing: Revisionist Historiography and the Narrative Structures of Eighteenth-Century Studies," Genre 23 (1990), 77-ror; "Representing Order: Natural Philosophy, Mathematics, and Theology in the Newtonian Revolution," in Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science, ed. N. Katherine Hayles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 125-48; and "Robert Boyle, Peter Shaw, and the Reinscription of Technology: Inventing and Reinventing the Air Pump," in Literature and Technology, ed. Mark Greenberg and Lance Schachterle (Bethlehem, Pa: Lehigh University Press, 1992), I25-53· 8. See Walter Charleton, The Darknes of Atheism Dispelled by the Light of Nature: A Physico-theological Treatise (London, r652). On Charleton, see Richard W. F. Kroll, The Material Word: Literate Culture in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 71-72, 75-77. On theology and natural philosophy, see particularly Simon Schaffer, "Godly Men and Mechanical Philosophers: Souls and Spirits in Restoration Natural Philosophy," Science in Context I (r987), 5 s-Ss; and Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).

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Fallen Languages may be spoken of Him, has accepted the tribute of the human voice and wished us to take joy in praising Him with our words. 9

This rupture between God's "ineffable" word and the fallen languages of humankind is exacerbated in the seventeenth century when natural philosophers, such as Boyle, confront the problem of describing-and of theorizing-the radical separation between theological absolutes and a material world that bears the imprints of God's power and yet that is figured, in and by Protestant theology, as irrevocably corrupt. In a crucial passage in The Excellency of Theology, as Compar'd with Natural Philosophy (a work that has generated little comment from historians of science), Boyle privileges theology-specifically, revelation-over nature and the means he uses to study it: Theology teaches us expressly from Divine Revelation, that the present course of Nature shall not last always, but that one Day this World (or at least this Vortex of ours) shall either be Abolished by Annihilation, or (which seems far more probable) be Innovated, and, as it were, Transfigur'd, and that by the Intervention of that Fire, which shall dissolve and destroy the present frame of Nature: So that either way, the present state of things (as well as Natural as Political) shall have an end. 10 For Boyle, the physical realm is subject to the voluntaristic power of God to intervene in it as He sees fit. "The present course of Nature," in fact, requires what Boyle terms innovation to transmute it from a postlapsarian realm of corruption to a paradise transformed. Constrained by the semiotics of Protestant theology, his scientific project is confined to "the present state of things," always heuristic and always subject to the authoritative formulation, "Theology teaches us." The study of nature for Boyle and his contemporaries is contingent and consensual, as Richard Kroll argues, but its very contingency is both framed and interpenetrated by the absolutist discourse of theological instruction. 11 Theology, in this respect, is not simply a matter 9· On Christian Doctrine, ed. D. W. Robertson, Jr. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958),

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ro. Robert Boyle, The Excellency of Theology, as Compar'd with Natural Philosophy (London, 1674), 22. II. Kroll, Materia/Word, r-27, 49-79.

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of faith, a self-contained system of beliefs that can be isolated from the practice of experimental natural philosophy, but an open-ended system that celebrates the "ineffable" or "revelation" -that is, whatever lies beyond representation. Theology, as I shall argue below, marks the contested territory of what literary and cultural critics and some historians call theory-"a [literary and conceptual] practice," as Terry Eagleton describes it, "forced into a new form of selfreflectiveness by the questioning of traditional rationales." 12 If we see the theology which Boyle describes, then, not as a set of coherent, identifiable beliefs but as a complex means to mediate between the word of God and the languages of man, then we can begin to recognize it as the site of ongoing efforts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to negotiate between principles of order and the historically contingent realm of experience. Theology, in this respect, has a complex double function: it provides an absolute pattern that allows natural philosophers to view their always fragmentary discoveries as parts of a coherent and purposeful design, and it serves to remind them that, without revelation, their efforts can never transcend a postlapsarian realm of chaos, sin, and corruption. As my emphasis on the compound form "physico-theology" may suggest, the complex relationships between the realms of metaphysics and physics, as they are represented between 166o and 1740, cannot be treated reductively as the evolution of ideas about matter, mathematics, and theology, nor can debates during the period about biblical style, universal language schemes, the systematizing of experimental results, and the literary forms of scientific writing be characterized as conflicts between an emergent science and residual forms of nonscientific belief. In effect, physico-theology becomes the quest for a single system of representation that articulates its equally strong commitments to experimental philosophy and to theology. It is marked by an impatience with conventional forms of discourse and by often polemical attempts to perfect representational schemes capable of describing the phenomena of nature with new precision and of demonstrating the physical and metaphysical order of a divinely authored universe. In an important sense, then, the problems of defining an authoritative language ultimately take the form of questions of reli12. Terry Eagleton, The Significance of Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 26.

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gious celebration: in what language should one worship? what language demonstrates most adequately a sincere devotion to God? Although Boyle and Newton recognize that to legitimate itself as a form of piety natural philosophy must create a language worthy of the task, they are also acutely aware that these questions can be answered only by appeals to faith. The crises in and of representation that texts such as Boyle's Excellency of Theology discuss, attempt to resolve, and reinscribe are also crises within history, ideology, and the discourses of theory. Because these crises are cast within the oppositional modes of Protestant theology-soul versus body, form versus substance, spirit versus matter-they can be mediated rather than "solved" only by appropriating notions of objectivity, teleology, and progress from theology. This process is acknowledged, even celebrated, by Boyle and Newton, but it is downplayed by many of their followers, such as Peter Shaw, so that science begins to emerge in the early eighteenth century as a seemingly autonomous set of discourses and practices. The "rise" of science, in this sense, can be seen as the erasure of these traces of appropriation. Our own temptations to read back into the history of natural philosophy a progressivist agenda, however, should not be allowed to obscure what Boyle, Newton, William Whiston, and numerous others see at stake in the work of physico-theology: the redemption of a fallen world, the fulfillment of prophetic history, and the stability of a sociopolitical order which they perceive as both divinely sanctioned and beset by a variety of internal and external threats. In one sense, the discourses of natural philosophy begin and end, I suggest, in the narrative forms of teleological history-of what Boyle calls the "endless progress" of natural philosophy toward revelation.13 And yet it is through the discourses of voluntaristic theology that Boyle and Newton arrive at their powerful critiques of scientific determinism and their championing of accounts that insist on the irreducible complexity of the universe. For seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury physico-theologians, complexity becomes a means to theorize the indeterminacy of scientific inquiry: what cannot be known or represented becomes the ineffable-and absent-sign of God's wisdom and power. 14 13. Boyle, Excellency of Theology, 63. Bacon uses the phrase repeatedly in The Advancement of Learning (London, 1605) and elsewhere. 14. My use of "complexity" in this study has both technical and more figurative con-

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The six chapters in this book deal with the problematics of order-itself a jerry-rigged and elusive concept-from different, though interrelated perspectives. Chapter r examines Boyle's treatise Some Considerations Touching the Style of the Holy Scriptures (r66r), a defense of the Bible's stylistic as well as moral authority, which attempts to stabilize the metaphor of the two books-nature and Scripture-in order both to legitimate the study of the natural world and to subordinate it to theology. I argue that the discourses of theology, style, gentlemanly privilege, and experimental natural philosophy interpenetrate, that Boyle's attempts to defend biblical style engage him in complex arguments that seek to locate a ground for an absolute faith in a host of contingent, sociocultural beliefs. This problem-of finding a warrant for his epistemological investigations and an unimpeachable, if mysterious, ontological order in a divinely authored creation-ultimately calls attention to the force of rhetoric as constitutive of physical and metaphysical "reality." Chapter 2 deals with the universal language schemes of the midseventeenth century, particularly John Wilkins's Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (r668), as failed efforts to idealize a material order of "things," a semiotics of the "real," that could serve as the basis of an authoritative rendering of the natural and political world. Although in his early writings Wilkins promotes the study of natural knowledge and challenges the metaphysical truths of theology, he is concerned with what I argue are at once ideological and theoretical questions about maintaining social and intellectual order in a time of political upheaval. Questioning recent readings of Wilkins as the proponent of a discernibly modern science or as a champion of a theory of atomistic contingency, I suggest that notations: it is intended to imply a specific group of concepts within nonlinear dynamics, chaos theory, and hadron bootstrap theory and, more generally, to refer to dynamic fields of energy that resist systematizing and deterministic impulses. On complexity in contemporary scientific thought, see James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Viking, 1987); Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. and trans. Josue V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.); N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); the essays in Hayles, ed., Chaos and Order; and William Paulson, The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). On bootstrapping, see Geoffrey Chew, "Hadron Bootstrap: Triumph or Frustration?" Physics Today 2.3 (October 1970), 2.3-2.8; and David B. Morris, "Bootstrap Theory: Pope, Physics, and Interpretation," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 2.9 (1988), 101-2.1.

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his Essay is marked by the anxieties of Restoration political culture, by its failure to theorize an order of the natural world. Wilkins ends up presenting a purportedly realist ontology that is everywhere marked by traces of the very mystical associationism that he decries. His efforts to create a real character that escapes ideology reinscribes the ideological values and presuppositions that privilege an ideal of taxonomic regularity over the things it seeks to organize. The interlocking discourses of theology, semiotics, and natural philosophy are the subject of Chapter 3, which discusses what I call the crisis of Baconianism in the late seventeenth century: the problems of practicing and defending natural philosophy without a theory, a metalanguage, to negotiate between a fallen nature and its divine Creator. For Boyle, John Ray, and their contemporaries, theological and political discourses remain essential, epistemologically and teleologically, to their efforts to bring order to their study of nature. In this regard, their emphases on inductive methodologies and their attacks on totalizing conceptions of theory reveal their commitment to a theological voluntarism. Their voluntarism, though, creates a fundamental paradox in their physico-theology: if the world is completely ordered, if its order can be represented without supplement or remainder, then God's presence is superfluous; if the natural world is perceived as imperfect, God's continuing intervention in it becomes crucial to any project for its description and redemption. Chapter 4 explores the interpenetrating semiotic systems of Newton's work in mathematics, history, and theology, and locates his mathematics-traditionally privileged by historians and philosophers of science-in the context of his efforts to negotiate the space of theory, the gap between the material and ideal realms. Although the Principia conventionally has been celebrated as a foundational text for a modern scientific method, Newton conceived of mathematics as only one approach among many to understanding, as far as humanly possible, the workings of a theocentric creation. By destabilizing the Bible as an accurate representation of the word of God, Newton suggests that mathematics provides a means to theorize the order of creation, yet he describes that order as irreducibly complex, beyond the explanatory power of the various semiotic systems-including mathematics-that he uses to analyze it. If his work gestures toward an ideal of unity, the metaphors which characterize his history are co-

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ercive and fragmented, particularly in his antttnmtarian polemic, "Paradoxical Questions concerning ye morals & actions of Athanasius and his followers." Chapter 5 examines the popularizations of Newton's work that proliferate in the eighteenth century; it studies, in particular, the efforts of natural philosophers such as William Whiston, Colin Maclaurin, Benjamin Martin, and John Keill, among others, both to preserve the theocentric, voluntaristic complexity of Newton's "system" and to systematize mathematics as a reflection of a universal order. But this process, often cast in the languages of aesthetics, exacerbates tensions within his work: science is presented as economically profitable, politically useful, and socially fashionable and, in a different register, as an unquestioned repository of theological truth. The reinscribing of Newton's work is instrumental in constructing a narrative history of science that radically differentiates between right and wrong answers, truth and error, relevant factors and irrelevant distractions that both extend and appropriate Christian-that is, teleological-patterns of reading and writing history. The logic of explanation that develops in Newtonian science thus invokes explicitly and causally the metanarrative of Christian historiography to make science meaningful; yet Newton's followers construct a narrative of linear progress-with the author of the Principia as both a unique genius and a prophetic fulfillment of the promise of historical causality-that paradoxically makes science self-explanatory. Chapter 6 explores the effects of Newtonianism as a set of ideological as well as scientific discourses. Concentrating on Peter Shaw's I725 "abridgement" of Boyle's Works, I argue that Shaw's recasting of Boyle reflects changing practical and theoretical conceptions of natural philosophy. By reinscribing Boyle within the context of Newtonianism, Shaw demonstrates the ways in which changing epistemological conceptions of natural philosophy affect the practice of experimental science. His redaction also invests Boyle's experimental program with a self-sufficiency and authority that Boyle explicitly rejects. The consequences of this rejection are the subject of my Epilogue, in which I suggest that the consequences of Newtonianism-figured as competing discourses rather than as a straightforward triumph of scientific method-still inform the philosophy and social studies of

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science. For cultural criticism, in particular, the interlocking histories of materiality and modernity need to examine far more closely than they have in the past the discourses of natural philosophy. As my overview may suggest, I draw on the works of a variety of critics, theorists, and historians to offer a dialogical rethinking of both seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural philosophy and the critical values and assumptions that consign the works of Boyle, Newton, and their contemporaries to the carefully demarcated territory of the "history of science" rather than "intellectual history," "literary studies," or "theory." My quotation marks are meant to suggest the constructed, institutional nature of the divisions among disciplines-and to indicate that, in one sense, this study participates in a revisionist project that, in Dominick LaCapra's words, tries "to make the trope linking history and criticism an acceptable oxymoron." 15 As I have argued in Two-Edg'd Weapons, history and theory cannot be separated as distinct domains, or even as distinct rhetorics with clear and identifiable disciplinary boundaries. The rhetorics neither of history nor of theory can escape the conditions under which they are produced, and this recognition of their contingency has important consequences both for any attempt to construct a narrative history, however discontinuous (to borrow Foucault's term), of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural philosophy and for the self-critical process that is, as LaCapra maintains, "intimately bound up both with the understanding of the past and with the sociocultural and political critique bearing on the present and future." 16 In turn, however, any sociopolitical critique remains situated in the contending rhetorics of history, theory, and ideology which structure its analytic. In this regard, the most significant consequence of the theory wars of the I 970s and 198os may have been the recognition that the discourses of theory can foster an understanding of the uncertainties that, as Timothy Reiss argues, inhere in any form of analysis. 17 In the wake of theory, however, uncertainty and self-reflection are marks not of ambivalence 15. Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 10.

16. Dominick La Capra, Soundings in Critical Theory {Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 8. 17. Timothy J. Reiss, The Uncertainty of Analysis: Problems in Truth, Meaning, and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).

Physico-Theology

but of a rethinking from within of the values and assumptions of historical, theoretical, and critical analysis. On a metacriticallevel, then, this study continues my efforts (begun in Two-Edg'd Weapons) to explore the implications of a dialogic account of language for the ways in which we employ the terms "history," "ideology," and "theory" in our efforts to understand-or, more radically, to re-present-the past. Each of these terms has been defined and redefined within different disciplinary domains over the last two decades, and each remains subject to often radically different interpretations: Terry Eagleton, a Marxist literary and cultural theorist, and Margaret C. Jacob, a social historian of science, may share a number of views about early eighteenth-century culture, yet they mean very different things when they speak of "ideology," and it is precisely that difference-that contention within "keywords" (to borrow Raymond Williams's term)-which I think it is important to preserve rather than to struggle to eradicate in the quest for an interpretation of eighteenth-century culture which must always remain partial. 18 My purpose, then, in offering brief accounts of language, history, ideology, and theory is not to compel assent for hard-and-fast definitions but to make the conflicts among competing understandings of these terms a heuristic means to rethink our understanding of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural philosophy and our own roles as its interpreters. LANGUAGE AND REPRESENTATION

Because I am concerned with the ways in which these keywordsrepresentation, history, theory, and ideology-preserve within them the traces of their histories as bitterly contested terms, I find it useful to begin with Mikhail Bakhtin. Though I have discussed previously Bakhtin's dialogics as a means to reread the history of seventeenthcentury accounts of language and style, some of his key points are worth emphasizing because it is precisely the notion of language as 18. Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991); Margaret C. Jacob, The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988); Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

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always contested which calls forth the most resistance from those who try to exempt their own rhetorics of theoretical and historical analysis from critical and self-critical scrutiny. 19 Bakhtin rejects the notion of a "unitary" or authoritative language as an abstraction that attempts-and always fails-to generalize out of existence, "the uninterrupted process of historical becoming that is a characteristic of all living language": Actual social life and historical becoming create within an abstractly unitary ... language a multitude of concrete worlds, a multitude of bounded verbal-ideological and social belief systems .... Thus at any given moment of its historical existence, language is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socioideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles, and so forth, all given a bodily form. 20 For Bakhtin, each utterance is historically and socioculturally specific; it penetrates and is penetrated by other utterances, "entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgments and accents." Marked by internally contested relations to other utterances, each utterance competes agonistically in "a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents." 21 Language, then, does not passively represent a preexistent reality but is itself a material intervention in a reality that is always in process and that is always contested. It is not the property of any individual or group, nor does it express essential identities or truths; language describes the agonistic realm in which psychology, 19. See Two-Edg'd Weapons, 18-27, on Bakhtin and his commentators. Bakhtin, in my mind, offers a useful supplement to recent discussions of language in the philosophy of science by providing a way beyond the impasse that has tended to pit a rather naive realism against a fascination with Ludwig Wittgenstein's notion of language games. For the realist argument, see Paisley Livingston, Literary Knowledge: Humanistic Inquiry and the Philosophy of Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); for a valuable discussion of the relationship between Wittgenstein and Bakhtin, see Terry Eagleton, Against the Grain: Essays, I975-r985 (London: Verso, 1986), 99-130. 20. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogical Imagination, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 198r), 288-89. 2r. Bakhtin, Dialogical Imagination, 276.

Physico- Theology truth, and value constantly are in the process of being formed, challenged, and reconstituted. As even this thumbnail sketch should suggest, Bakhtin's account of language rejects not only the binary models of Saussurean linguistics but also the binary structures of what we might term an Enlightenment analytic-self/other, subject/object, form/content, fact/opinion, science/ideology, and truth/falsehood-that underwrites the knowledge claims of scientific, social-scientific, and much humanist thought. Although Bakhtin is not above using conventional notions of a "monologic" scientific language as a whipping boy to celebrate the "dialogic" nature of "living" or literary language, his reproduction of this dualistic account should not obscure his fundamental point: no utterance-including the analytical languages of history, theory, and criticism-can escape or transcend its dialogically agitated environment. Therefore, not only the objects of inquiry but the languages of analysis we bring to bear on them are constantly agitated, always unstable, and always open-ended. In short, because all understanding, as Bakhtin suggests, is dialogic, there can be no transhistorical description of "reality," no noncontingent truth, and no global system of signification. The value of Bakhtin's work is not that he provides a general theory of representation but that his dialogic account of language offers a means to begin to understand why contentious debates about "history," "ideology," and "theory" cannot be resolved by invoking standards of truth, reality, or objectivity. As N. Katherine Hayles argues, "to posit a model for scientific inquiry is to presuppose or evoke a correlative view of language," or, alternately, a theory of language (even an unacknowledged theory) produces specific views of both historical and material reality and of the reliability of the means we use to represent that reality. 22 This recognition of what Steve Woolgar calls "the ideology of representation" underlies the recent emphasis within the history and philosophy of science on the ways in which 22. N. Katherine Hayles, "Constrained Constructivism: Locating Scientific Inquiry in the Theater of Representation," New Orleans Review r8 (r99r), 83; see also Jan Golinski, "Language, Discourse, and Science," in Companion to the History of Modern Science, ed. R. C. Olby, G. N. Cantor, J. R. R. Christie, and M. J. S. Hodge (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), rro-23; and Steven Shapin, "Robert Boyle and Mathematics: Reality, Representation, and Experimental Practice," Science in Context 2 ( r 988), 2 3-5 8.

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language and science are mutually constructive: "the organization of discourse," Woolgar points out, "is the object" of scientific inquiryY This process of organization, of constituting objects of inquiry in and through discourses, has, as Peter Dear notes in his analysis of seventeenth-century experimental practice, significant consequences for discussions of method and epistemology: "there cannot be an account of an experimental event without reference to the spatiotemporally defined region, while the spatiotemporally defined region cannot be an experimental event without its constitution in such an account. Looking at the account, the presentation of the formal establishment of knowledge-claims is therefore inseparable from, and in fact crucial to, an understanding of what is happening epistemologically."24 This literary process of "constitution" defines epistemological parameters in which "science" becomes what we know and how we know it; as Joseph Rouse suggests, "there is no occupation of a meta-standpoint from which to interpret science that is not a move within the contested terrain within which scientists themselves operate, a terrain in which 'science' names both the outcome and the shape of the contested terrain." 25 For Rouse and Dear, then, "science" becomes, in part, a set of rhetorical strategies that different communities-experimentalists and philosophers-develop to contain the contentious, dialogic nature of its discourses. If, as Dear claims, the "style of science espoused by the Fellows of the Royal Society was more important than the substance of that science," then the language of science has a complex and (at least) double function. 26 On the one 23. Steve Woolgar, Science: The Very Idea (London: Tavistock, 1988), 81. Woolgar offers a valuable summary of recent work in the sociology of science; see particularly Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (1979; rpt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); and Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, r987). For the seventeenth century, see, Timothy J. Reiss, The Discourse of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982). Reiss argues that, "It is a constant principle of Bacon's discussion that such a birth [of new modes of thought and experience] depends on new discoveries, that such discoveries depend on experience ordered according to some methodical rule, and that such a method depends on writing: what Bacon calls experientia literata or "literate experience" (201). 24. Peter Dear, "Narratives, Anecdotes, and Experiments: Turning Experience into Science in the Seventeenth Century," in The Literary Structure of Scientific Argument: Historical Studies, ed. Peter Dear (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 137. 25. Joseph Rouse, "Philosophy of Science and the Persistent Narratives of Modernity," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 22 (1991), 162. 26. Peter Dear, "Totius in Verba: Rhetoric and Authority in the Early Royal Society," Isis 76 (r985), 159.

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17

hand, it becomes a means to unify diverse individuals and accounts, to constitute discursive forms of authority that legitimate particular views of the natural world and thereby that establish, verify, and institutionalize the validity of its knowledge claims. Yet, on the other, in this very process, the language of science must deploy a host of strategies to naturalize its efforts to construct accounts of "reality"; even as individuals take pains to organize languages to reflect what they claim, after the fact, is a preexistent, mind-independent reality, they must strive to deny or to repress the contested processes of that construction and the constitutive nature of their rhetoricsY The constructivist accounts that Woolgar, Dear, and Rouse offer of the reflexive relationship between representation and reality depend implicitly on a dialogic conception of language. If language generates the epistemological "grounds" for knowledge claims, these claims cannot be made in a "pure" language that escapes its sociohistorical embeddedness. Representation is always constrained, and it is the nature and extent of those constraints that become the focus of revisionist accounts of science. In this context, Bakhtin's dialogics sanction neither the absurdist view that no meaning is possible nor the pluralistic view that all interpretations can stake equal claims to epistemological plausibility; it implies instead that meanings are always contested and always in the process of renegotiation and redefinition. In this regard, what Hayles terms "constrained constructivism" -the study of the ways in which scientific reliability is established, defended, and modified-is also a dialogical constructivism: it does not simply invert the priority of "context" over "text," implying that we can understand scientific discourse by reducing it to the social conditions of its productions, but replaces the dialectic of text and context with a heuristic model of dialogical interplay and contention. 28 My assumption, then, is that the physico-theological texts I study construct the "facts" of theology, science, and history rather than unproblematically reflect "evidence," "facts," or "ideas"; they are not "documents" that present self-evident positions and ideas but texts 27. See Latour, Science in Action; Nancy Leys Stepan, "Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science," Isis 77 (1986), 261-77; and James Bono, "Science, Discourse, and Literature: The Role/Rule of Metaphor in Science," in Literature and Science: Theory and Practice, ed. Stuart Peterfreund (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), 59-90. 28. Hayles, "Constrained Constructivism," 77-85; see also Bruce Clarke, "Resistance in Theory and the Physics of the Text," New Orleans Review 18 (1991), 86-93.

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Fallen Languages

which have "complex, internally divided relations to their contexts of creation and use." 29 More radically, a dialogic constructivism that challenges the oppositions of scientific text and cultural context calls into question the status of science itself as a transhistorical enterprise and as a readily identifiable set of practices, rhetorics, and institutional structures. It suggests that the "contested terrain" of science does not exist independently of the economic, institutional, social, and discursive constraints that shape and act on it. If, as Woolgar, Rouse, Latour, and others argue, science cannot by itself solve the crises of legitimation that beset it, it is, in part, because its modes of (contested) representation are interpenetrated by the very semiotic systems-those of politics, economics, and theology, for examplethat they appropriate and seek to delegitimize. In effect, the study of science by anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, and historians often becomes a study of its liminal regions, the contested areas where science seeks to write out of existence the knowledge claims of competing accounts of representation and reality. HISTORY AND NARRATIVE

Because, as Rouse contends, "a coherent internal history of science" ultimately depends on "a general theory of language," a dialogics of representation-the contextualizing or demystifying of any notion of a fully adequate, analytic language-leads to a redefinition of the history of science, or history more generally, as a site of competing claims to represent the past. 30 In brief, dialogics recasts the writing of history as a heuristic rather than a teleological narrative. A dialogical critique of the language of history suggests that the historian, like the scientist, is always in the process of constructing the (imperfect) means to legitimate her own enterprise as well as to provide a convincing narrative of past events. These historical narratives, 29. LaCapra, Soundings, 5· 30. Rouse, "Philosophy of Science and the Persistent Narratives of Modernity," 157.

See John Toews, "Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience," American Historical Review 92 (1987), 879-907; David Harlan, "Intellectual History and the Return of Literature," American Historical Review 94 (1989), 581-609; and David A. Hollinger, "The Return of the Prodigal: The Persistence of Historical Knowing," American Historical Review 94 (1989), 61o-2r.

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19

as Paolo Rossi implies, depend implicitly on their confidence in a transhistorical language of analysis that is capable of distinguishing true science from other forms of belief. Traditional historians of science, he maintains, "flatter themselves that the discipline they study has always existed. They draw their subject matter from a variety of texts belonging to different epochs and to heterogeneous fields, and they plot the development of an imaginary object." 31 These narratives of "an imaginary object" must suppress the contested and constructed nature of their analytic languages in order to preserve the "fundamental" distinctions between truth and error, observer and phenomena, and fact and opinion that allow them to stand as alternatives to other discursive formations, other systems of belief-typically, but as I shall argue, inaccurately, coded as "metaphysics," "theology," "superstition," "ideology," and so on. This process of isolating science, as Rossi suggests, also has crucial consequences for the narratives that one can tell about it: if science has always existed, if it is always discernible, the only way to account for its development is to locate it within a narrative of maturation or progress. In this respect, the "imaginary object" of science is emplotted within a narrative framework in which progress "is not an agent-specific notion" but a kind of by-product of methodological imperatives to observe objectively and reason inductively. 32 The notion of a decontextualized progress that exists independently of human intention informs what Rouse calls "the persistent narratives of modernity" in the history and philosophy of science. If we agree with Hayden White that "narrativity in the representation of real events arises out of a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can be only imaginary," then the distance between "real events" and an imaginary unity can be figured by what LaCapra calls a "transferential" relationship to the past: the projecting of contemporary anxieties and desires onto the past and the paradoxical recreation of the past as a grounding authority for the epistemological coherence of histo3 r. Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), vii. 32. Larry Laudan, "Progress of Rationality? The Prospects for Normative Naturalism," American Philosophical Quarterly 24 (1987), 28.

Fallen Languages

20

riography. 33 In the writing of history, La Capra maintains, transference "highlight[s] the issue of the historian's voice in narration and analysis-an issue prematurely foreclosed when one assumes full unity not only of narrative but of narrative and authorial voice." 34 The integrity of the historian, in this regard, is predicated on her making order out of chaos, thereby stabilizing her own subject position and intellectual commitments by locating truth in a "definitive" or "authoritative" account of the past. In the history of science, this transferential relation is particularly deep-seated-and efforts to challenge its premises are often strongly resisted-because the narratives of scientific progress and the development of scientific objectivity legitimate the historian's objectivity in rendering a truthful account of the past. Nowhere is this reflexive logic clearer than in progressivist accounts of language change in the seventeenth century. Even for those critics-including Arakelian and Vickers-who attack Jones's assumptions, methods, and conclusions, progress becomes both an assumption and a value that links the narratives of linguistic and scientific development. Having argued against the "myth" of a Restoration style shift from "baroque" to "modern" syntactical structures, Arakelian celebrates Newton's prose style in the Opticks as exemplifying those qualities of precision, rationality, and dispassionate observation that Jones attributes to Glanvill and Sprat, leading advocates for the Royal Society's efforts to legislate standards of stylistic decorum. 35 The method which Arakelian employs reproduces transferentially the "objective" language of scientific description which he attributes to Newton, reifying some aspects of Newton's prose as exemplary and ignoring others. In Query 3 r of the Opticks, for example, after raising a series of questions on the attractive force operating at a microcosmic level, Newton asks: And when Aqua fortis, or Spirit Iron dissolves the Filings with a this Heat and Ebullition effected and does not that Motion argue

of Vitriol poured upon Filings of great Heat and Ebullition, is not by a violent Motion of the Parts, that the acid Parts of the Liquor

33· Hayden White, "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Real Events," in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 23. 34· LaCapra, Soundings, 39· 35· Arakelian, "The Myth of a Restoration Style Shift," esp. 237-45.

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21

rush towards the Parts of the Metal with violence, and run forcibly into its Pores till they get between its outmost Particles, and the main Mass of Metal, and surrounding those Particles loosen them from the main Mass, and set them at liberty to float off into the Water? 36 This description of a chemical process draws on various metaphors, including those of "violence" and "liberty," almost as though the acid and filings were enacting a microdrama of Newton's Whiggish political convictions. The political and the chemical are not irrevocably distinct linguistic registers but two elements of a synthetic explanatory rhetoric. Newton's language, in this regard, becomes "objective" and "dispassionate" only if the reader accepts as natural the aesthetic and ideological presuppositions which anthropomorphize the realm of chemical processes. By emphasizing the syntactical clarity of Newton's prose and its affinities with post-Enlightenment notions of scientific objectivity, Arakelian downplays its historical contingency, its implication in a late seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century cosmology of active forces and repressed or displaced political contention. For his part, Vickers, having argued convincingly against the influence of the new science on Restoration prose style, recuperates the opposition between what he terms "scientific" and "occult" mentalities in the Restoration, paradoxically reinscribing essentialist notions about the differences between science and nonscience, an argument that his own politico-historical analyses at least implicitly undermine, as I discuss in Chapter 2Y In short, what we see in the otherwise valuable works of Arakelian, Vickers, Aarsleff, Murray Cohen, Barbara Shapiro, and others is the persistence of a narrative model of "revolutionary" progress that is imposed on the fragmentary and often conflicting evidence about language use that these critics and historians present. They assume a stylistic and conceptual shift that enacts what they analyze-an ideology of modernity-a break with the past that is both evolutionary and revolutionary. 38 The narrative of 36. Isaac Newton, Opticks (rpt. New York: Dover, 1952), 377· 37· Vickers, Occult and Scientific Mentalities, 3-44. 38. Murray Cohen, Sensible Words: Linguistic Practice in England, r64o-r785 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); Barbara Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships between Science, Religion, History, Law, and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, r983).

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enlightenment-or of its Foucaultian "other," the growth of an "analytico-referential discourse" that serves the hegemonic interests of a disseminated but omnipresent power-recasts the notion of a revolutionary stylistic and conceptual shift in the seventeenth century precisely because the concept of modernity itself overdetermines our valuing (to borrow J. C. D. Clark's terms) of revolution over rebellionY The idea of a transformation in seventeenth-century prose style or, more broadly, in language and representation persists, then, because it is crucial to any account that postulates that fundamental conceptual changes divide the premodern from the modern period.

IDEOLOGY

If dialogic accounts of language disrupt internalist conceptions of science and of the history of science, they also dismantle models of ideology that identify it merely with repression or bad faith. Traditional distinctions between science and ideology depend on the assumption that we have inherited or can craft an analytical language capable of distinguishing between them with scalpel-like precision. But as numerous recent studies in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury natural philosophy have demonstrated, what looks like God's truth or scientific fact to one individual, faction, professional organization, or generation can be the devil's work or crass political repression to others. 40 Ideology, in this respect, resists simple definitions, as 39· Clark, Revolution and Rebellion. 40. See the following works of J. R. Jacob: Robert Boyle and the English Revolution (New York: Burt Franklin, 1977); "Restoration Ideologies and the Royal Society," History of Science 17 (1980), 25-38; Henry Stubbe: Radical Protestantism and the Early Enlightenment in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); "'By an Orphean

Charm': Science and the Two Cultures in Seventeenth-Century England," in Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Phyllis Mack and Margaret C. Jacob (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 231-49; and, with Margaret C. Jacob, "The Anglican Origins of Modern Science: The Metaphysical Foundations of the Whig Constitution," Isis 71 (1980), 251-67. See also Margaret C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, r689-1720 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976); G. S. Rousseau, "Mysticism and Millenarianism: 'Immortal Dr. Cheyne,'" in Millenarianism and Messianism in English Literature and Thought r6so- r8oo, ed. Richard H. Popkin (Leiden: Brill, 1988), 8r- 126; Wilda C. Anderson, Between the Library and Laboratory: The Language of Chemistry in Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984); Brian Easlea, Witch-hunting, Magic, and the New Philosophy: An Introduction to Debates of the

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23

Eagleton observes, precisely because it describes the processes by which individuals seek to invest their utterances, their narratives, with the ability to transcend the circumstances of their production, to make their languages of critical analysis and self-definition accurate measures of truth, reality, and nature. 41 Ideology, no less than history, is marked by the "internally divided relations" of competing constructions of "reality." It cannot be identified solely with a set of cogent beliefs, logical ideas, or a coherent political program because the differences it excites are perceived not as legitimate social or political disputes but as incommensurate views of nature or reality. Yet because ideology takes the form of "second nature" or "common sense" -values and assumptions which its proponents assume do not need to be interrogated-its constitutive metaphors, for many contemporary theorists, are those of multiplicity and dissemination rather than outright repression. What Foucault calls the "positive unconscious of knowledge" operates in ways that remain at least partially mysterious or inaccessible to those concerned with the conscious forms of thought, language, and behavior.42 In this respect, Foucault's propositions about power reflect the complex relations that describe ideology: "Power," he asserts, "is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away; power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations." These relations "are the immediate effects of the divisions, inequalities, and disequilibriums which occur in [economic, social, and sexual processes], and conversely they are the internal conditions of these differentiations." Consequently, according to Foucault, "there is no binary and allencompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations"; instead, "the manifold relationships of force that Scientific Revolution (Brighton: Harvester, 198o); Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); James Force, William Whiston: Honest Newtonian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Stuart Peterfreund, "The Re-Emergence of Energy in the Discourse of Literature and Science," Annals of Scholarship 4 (1986), 22-53; and Kenneth ]. Knoespel, "Newton in the School of Time: The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended and the Crisis of Seventeenth-Century Historiography," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 30 (1989), 19-41. . 41. Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction, I - I I . 42. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1971), xi.

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take shape and come into play in the machinery of production, in families, limited groups, and institutions, are the basis of wideranging effects of cleavage that run through the social body as a whole." Because "hegemonic effects" are produced and "sustained by all these confrontations," relations of power are "both intentional and nonsubjective," or what I have termed dialogic. If the "logic" of power "is perfectly clear" and its "aims decipherable," nonetheless "it is often the case that no one is there to have invented them, and few who can be said to have formulated them." "Where there is power," then, "there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power." Although Foucault admits the possibility of "radical ruptures, massive binary divisions," a position that I accept guardedly, power relations, and hence ideology, are characterized by "points of resistance, producing cleavages in society that shift about, fracturing unities and effecting regroupings, furrowing across individuals themselves, cutting them up and remolding them, marking off irreducible regions in them, in their bodies and minds." 43 For Foucault, then, ideology is predicated on what I argue is a more-or-less dialogic view of language which calls into question both linear narratives of cause and effect and the self-privileging of any analytic language which presumes it can escape or transcend the processes that fracture individuals, groups, and the rhetorics they use to define themselves. In this respect, we might contrast Foucault's view of ideology to those within the history of science, which identify "ideology" with, say, the development of the Royal Society or of eighteenth-century Newtonianism-that is, with narrative structures that take as their object the rise of science or of a progressively oriented middle class. Such structures presume that ideological views are reasonably consistent, if not coherent, and that they are produced by agents cognizant of the implications of their actions, beliefs, and strategies. 44 What is at stake in these differing views of ideology, there43· Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), 92-93. 44· See particularly Jacob, Cultural Meaning; Michael Hunter, Establishing the New Science: The Experience of the Early Royal Society (Woodbridge, Eng.: Boydell, r989); Anita Guerrini, "The Tory Newtonians: Gregory, Pitcairne, and Their Circle," journal of British Studies 25 (1986), 288-311; and Guerrini, rev. of Jacob's Cultural Meaning, in Eighteenth-Century Studies 23 (1989), rrr-q.

Physico-Theology fore, are fundamental differences about how individuals perceive the practices of history and criticism. My account of ideology should suggest the differences between this project and those of Shapiro, Vickers, Kroll, and Margaret Jacob. Given my emphasis on the dialogics of representation, history, and ideology, I argue that the discourses of natural philosophy reinscribe as well as challenge the "hegemonic effects" of competing strategies of representation. On the one hand, seventeenth-century religious and political controversies and the development of experimental science led to breakdowns of traditional systems of representation, specifically the Bible and the taxonomies of Aristotelian science; this insistent questioning of the semiotics of power also challenged the ecclesiastical and political authority of the Church and State, institutions which depended, in part, on their ability to monopolize and to disseminate their versions of an authoritative language. On the other hand, these challenges led to a variety of efforts to discover or invent new systems of representation that promised either to transcend contested and politicized languages or to subsume them within an authoritative semiotics, thereby reasserting the validity of the political, socioeconomic, and theological order. For Boyle, Newton, and other seventeenth-century voluntarists, God provides men (and more problematically women) with the freedom to interpret the books of nature and Scripture for themselves; but it is precisely this interpretive freedom which must be policed externally and internally to ensure that Protestant liberty does not become subversive license. As Foucault argues, ideologies survive by exciting dissent, by exploiting fractures within and among groups and individuals, to justify their continuing efforts to maintain order. In contrast, to depict seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural philosophy as a conflict between residual and emergent ideologies-what Vickers labels occult and scientific mentalities-is, in some measure, to reproduce the views of representation, narrative, and ideology that members of the Royal Society, for example, were eager to promote. This division-the opposition of science and ideology-is among the "hegemonic effects" of the very strategies, assumptions, and values that I analyze in the chapters which follow. The implications of a dialogic view of ideology may become apparent if we consider the homology between style and ideology evident

Fallen Languages

in Boyle's use of "gentleman," a key term, as Shapin and Golinski note, in defining the credibility of those who witness and verify his experiments. 45 Boyle's use of "gentleman" implies more than a precise description of men distinguished by economic stature, political loyalties, or genealogy; it is also the marker for an ideal community of individuals whose assumed wealth, symbolic capital, political advantages, and social and moral values can become the means to forge strategies to define the acceptable limits of social, political, and religious difference. 46 In this sense, "gentleman" refers not only to specific individuals or well-defined social classes but to a conceptual terrain that is marked by the internally divided relations-political, social, economic, and religious-of Restoration England; therefore, the uses of "gentleman" must be policed, and, if possible, the tensions and contradictions within the term must be subsumed within an ideological framework which can contain them. Where these policing efforts become most noticed are at the margins of language, behavior, and economic qualifications. At the end of Some Considerations Touching the Style of the Holy Scriptures, Boyle indulges in some nervous, second-rate satire aimed at "wits" who abuse the Bible (as I argue in Chapter I); more prominently, the often vicious satire directed against impertinence, social climbing, and the folly of various pretenders to wit are stocks-in-trade of much Restoration comedy. Precisely because "gentleman" is a contingent rather than absolute term, it can be deployed in a variety of contexts for a variety of purposes: Boyle uses it to exclude Thomas Hobbes from the community of Christian virtuosi (as I suggest in Chapter 6); to define his intended audiences (Chapter I); and, as Shapin and Schaffer demonstrate, to 4 5. Steven Shapin, "Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle's Literary Technology," Social Studies of Science I4 (r984), 481-520; Shapin, "'A Scholar and a Gentleman': The Problematic Identity of the Scientific Practitioners in Early Modern England," History of Science 29 (I99r), 279-327; Jan V. Golinski, "Robert Boyle: Scepticism and Authority in Seventeenth-Century Chemical Discourse," in The Figural and the Literal: Problems of Language in the History of Science and Philosophy, r6Jo-r8oo, ed. Andrew W. Benjamin, Geoffrey N. Cantor, and John R. R. Christie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, r987), 5 s-s2.

46. On class structure in the eighteenth century, see Shapin, "'Scholar and Gentleman,"' 279-327; Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society, and Family Life in London, r66o-r730 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 3- r 6; and Penelope J. Corfield, "Class by Name and Number in Eighteenth-Century Britain," in Language, History, and Class, ed. Penelope J. Corfield (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), IOI-30.

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27

establish the credibility of those who witness and can verify his experiments. In this respect, a "gentleman" is not simply a social given but also an unstable entity that must be continually redefined and reinscribed to present the complexities, uncertainties, and ambiguities of social relations as a convenient-and simplified-opposition between "us" and "them"; in turn, the privileged term of this binary construction, the gentleman, contains unending social and economic negotiations to determine (always contingent) hierarchical positions of rank, stature, and power. "Gentleman," in this sense, is a shorthand term to negotiate the trade-offs necessary to maintain moral, political, social, and economic order in a class-stratified society. For some, efforts to deconstruct the opposition between science and ideology-to argue that none of us can escape the complex processes of acculturation and resistance that Foucault and Eagleton identify with ideology-raise the specter of relativism, the fear that reinscribing truth as contingent will lead to an intellectual Hobbesian war of all against all, without any means to evaluate competing knowledge claims. 47 But as Donna Haraway argues, relativism and monolithic or totalizing ideologies are, in effect, two sides of the same coin; they are opposed to each other only insofar as they differ about the location of authority, of the power to see without being seen, to represent without becoming an object of representation: "both [selfprivileging views]," she maintains, "deny the stakes in location, embodiment, and partial perspective." "The alternative to relativism," she suggests, "is partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology." 48 But these "shared conversations," too, are dialogic; they cannot escape the constraints of narra47· See, for example, Livingston, Literary Knowledge; and Darrel Mansell, "The Difference between a Lump and a Text," Poetics Today 9 (r988), 791 -8o6. For critiques of the realist philosophy of science, see Stanley Aronowitz, Science as Power: Discourse and Ideology in Modern Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); Kurt Hubner, Critique of Scientific Reason, trans. Paul R. Dixon, Jr., and Hollis M. Dixon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 198 3); Nancy Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983); Paul Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (London: New Left Books, 197 5); and Joseph Rouse, Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987).

48. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), r9r. Haraway responds to and extends the arguments of Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).

Fallen Languages tive, of ideology, that both shape and are shaped by these conversations. Haraway's argument suggests that local knowledges are not an antidote to ideology but a means of negotiating our way among the always coercive and always partial power relations that act upon us.

THEORY AS INTERPOSITION

The dialogics of culture-of representation, history, and ideologythat I have been discussing have important implications for understanding theory as a heuristic rather than as the timeless, invariant, and general explanation that it is often alleged to be. The secondary literature on theory in philosophy, science, history, and criticism is so diffuse and the arguments so vexed (and the rewards often so limited) that I want to use my previous discussion to reconfigure what it is we are arguing about. In general, there are two views of theory: one identifies it as a kind of creed, the other as a policy. The default option for a good many historians, critics, and philosophers is to assume that theory is an informing base that allows interpretation to take place. In his preface to Jacob's Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution, Raymond Grew argues that the "larger significance [of social history] requires that the disparate facts about daily life, local behavior, or the activities of unorganized groups be related to some general view of social relations and patterns of change. Theory is essential to analysis." 49 As a "general view," theory becomes a means to generate narrative coherence. If social historians, presumably like Jacob, reject "sweeping narratives that gave to chronological sequence the aura of cause and effect," the "coherence" of their efforts then depends on "a consistent interpretive argument." 50 "Theory is essential," for Grew, because it redefines causal logic as a function of analysis. What is left unclear, though, in his remarks is the extent to which theory itself is perceived as a dialogical construct, to what extent "consistency" depends on repressing the internally divided relations of writing about history and culture. A good many accounts of theory, like Grew's, 49· Raymond Grew, Preface, The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution, by Maragert C. Jacob (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), vi. 50. Grew, Preface, vi.

Physico-Theology remain trapped between views that are, at best, difficult to reconcile: theory as absolute pattern and theory as heuristic practice. If theory, like analysis, is uncertain, then we might say that it represents the desire for the "imaginary" unity and closure to which White calls attention: it marks the gaps between an ideal narrative form of transcendent meaning, purposeful intent, and logical and aesthetic closure and the "disparate facts" on which that form must be imposed. If we view the discourses of theory as dialogical, fractured, and incomplete, then we can begin to redefine theory itself as a dynamic that mediates between idealist conceptions of order and the constructed and contested "facts" of experience. For Jean-Joseph Goux and for Michel Serres, theory and history tend to collapse into each other because they reproduce an oppositional logic that marks history as both an abstract idea of progress and the content on which this narrative must be imposed. History, like theory, is divided against itself because it encodes both a metaphysics of form-White's "desire" for closure-and the raw material which must be sifted, probed, and reshaped to conform to a coercive or, to use Serres's term, "thanatocratic" order. 51 Drawing on the language of thermodynamics, Serres argues that all physical systems and the means we use to represent them are imperfect: "we know of no system that functions perfectly, that is to say, without losses, flights, wear and tear, errors, accidents, opacity-a system whose return is one for one, where the yield is maximal. ... The distance from equality, from perfect agreement, is history." 52 This distance is also theory, the narratives that seek to account for "losses, flights, wear and tear," that mediate between ideal schematics of systems and those systems in operation. Goux sees this gap as crucial to the dynamics of value that reproduce, in Western culture, divisions between metaphysics and physics, or what would conventionally be called theory and practice. He argues that the sexualized oppositions of Western culture-male/female, humankind/nature, idea/substance, soul/body, and form/matterdepend on the privileging of "general equivalents," which, following Marx, he defines as standard measures of value that underwrite par5 r. Serres, Hermes, 100; Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies after Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, r 990). 52. Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 12- I 3·

30

Fallen Languages

ticular economies of exchange as "principle[s] of order." These general equivalents are idealized as absolute, transcendent determinants of value, but they remain distinct from the logic of displacement and substitution that Marx identifies with monetary value. 53 Between the idealizations of general equivalents and the realm of exchange-value lies what Goux calls the dynamic of "interposition," a term, as we shall see in Chapter 5, that is employed in an analogous manner by Maclaurin. "The dialectic of history," Goux argues, "is embedded within the production and reproduction of interposition-which automatically poses two terms, separated by the 'inter' of a third." 54 Interposition might be defined as a process of always imperfectly theorizing an ideal realm of forms-of uncorruptible standards of value, of unmoved movers-that would separate them from the wear and tear of material existence. Or, as Goux puts it: The life of ideality seeks eternity without matter because it discovers the essence of life in the infinite conservation of the true form. This is the eternal life of the absolute pattern-the very utopia of the living, but a utopia wrested from mutable matter, contradictory, ceaselessly reorganizing, losing and recovering its balance, by producing constantly renewed forms, reproducing them, maintaining them for a time identical to themselves through the endless play of metabolisms. 5 5 Interposition is precisely the seeking of absolutes, of principles of order, that transcend yet legitimate the structures of knowledge by which humankind tries to make sense of experience. Like Serres, then, Goux provides a means to rethink theory not as a set of absolute principles but as the means by which humankind constantly tries to reconcile "ought" and "is." Theory-as-interposi53· Moving beyond Marx, Goux argues that the "social monopoly" of gold as a general equivalent, a means to fix the price on, and the value of, each commodity in a monetary economy of exchange, describes a logic reproduced in the privileging as general equivalents of the phallus in the symbolic economy of desire, the father in that of selfhood, and language in that of representation. Although there may be a certain rigidity in the schemes he outlines, this manner of thinking about the ways in which values are created provides a powerful heuristic to deal with the crises of legitimation and representation that occupy historians and philosophers of science. 54· Goux, Symbolic Economies. 239. 55· Goux, 236.

Physico-Theology tion, in effect, names the contradictions between absolute value and exchange value, between ideal narrative forms-coherent, parsimonious, and general explanations that transcend the conditions of their production-and the desire for those forms, the struggle toward those ideals, that always ends by collapsing back into the experiential conditions which produced them. As a heuristic, theory becomes the means by which we recognize the inconsistencies and gaps within any totalizing logic or language of analysis; it is a self-reflective process that seeks "shared conversations" with, rather than authority over, the dialogical welter of competing languages that may seem partial, imperfect, or, by the standards of the communities that judge them, simply wrong. To conceive of theory as "the 'inter' of a third" term allows us to comprehend the dialogics of power and resistance which operate within and among competing knowledge claims, particularly those efforts by Serres, Hayles, and Paulson to redescribe conventional distinctions between order and chaos, meaning and noise. In drawing on contemporary developments in chaos theory, Hayles argues that noise produces as well as disrupts information: "the more chaotic a system is, the more information it produces .... Chaos [can] be conceived as an inexhaustible ocean of information rather than as a void signifying absence." 16 Similarly, Paulson maintains that "literary language, by its very failure as a system of communication of preexistent information, becomes a vehicle for the creation of new information. For this to be the case, literature must be, to a degree, both obscure and repetitive."57 In a different context, Shapin makes a similar point about Boyle's "technology of virtual witnessing": Boyle's diffuse and often repetitious style-which, as we shall see in Chapter 6, was considered inelegant enough to lead Richard Boulton and Peter Shaw to rewrite his works to conform to their standards of stylistic decorumattempts to capture the circumstantial complexity of the experience of the laboratory. 58 Noise, then, is precisely that obscurity and repe56. Hayles, Chaos Bound, 8. 57· Paulson, Noise of Culture, IOI. Noise and chaos, as Hayles argues, can be interpreted in a variety of ways to reveal a variety of forms of order-the recursive symmetries among scale levels in chaos theory, for example-but these symmetries, the strange auraetors that produce identifiable order out of chaos, are themselves products of strategies of recognition, that is, of representation, which are never distinct from the noise they generate. 58. Shapin, "Pump and Circumstance," 481-520.

Fallen Languages titian which resists being coded as pure meaning; it is not the opposite of information but a mark of the dialogical complexity which inhabits all forms of communication. In this respect, Bakhtin's dialogics, Serres's noise, and Hayles's interpretation of chaos theory can be read as different strategies to describe the processes of interposition: Goux's "third term," then, reproduces both reified binaries-the "sexualized oppositions" of Western culture-and the means to critique or to deconstruct them. These interlocking processes of reinscribing and resisting the dialectics of form and substance, of idea and matter, of theological principles and experimental practice are crucial to seventeenth-century natural philosophy because its basic projectarticulated by Boyle, Newton, Ray, and the Newtonians-is to explore how God imprints his power and wisdom onto a physical universe so that a metaphysics of order can be imperfectly glimpsed by humankind. The 'inter' of the "third term" -the space of theory-is insistently figured and refigured through the discourses of theology.

CODA

The dialogics of representation, the narrative structures of history and theory, and complex tensions within ideology lead us to reconsider what is at stake in the efforts of Boyle, Newton, and their contemporaries to bridge the gap between their theological beliefs and their study of the natural world. If theology is the metalanguage that allows the interpretation of nature, textual as well as experimental, to take place, it also serves the interpretive function of a third term; it occupies the space of interposition between religious faith-the belief in noise-free channels of communication-and the noise of culture. Similarly, the efforts of Boyle, Newton, Wilkins, and others to produce authoritative systems of meaning and value must contend with the binary structures of the discourses of theology, history, and mathematics that are at once totalizing and unstable. Each effort to reassert the logic of general equivalents runs into Augustine's dilemma: attempts to justify the ways of God to man reproduce the very gaps, the divisions, they are supposed to explain. But these attempts are themselves extraordinarily productive; they generate new information, new and more complex modes of representation that displace older

Physico-Theology

33

forms of explanation. Consequently, the strategies of interposition that characterize the work of Boyle, Newton, and their contemporaries are often hegemonic in their intentions and, at the same time, productively destabilizing in their effects. The processes of reinscribing and deconstructing the binary structures of thought and representation of their culture are precisely what generate the complex forms of new information that have been labeled the scientific revolution. In brief, the ongoing crises within the symbolic economies of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England testify, as Boyle and Newton recognized, to increasingly complex forms of semiotic mediation. The reading that I offer of crises of representation in Newtonian England, then, is intended to allow us to rethink the simplified models of physics and metaphysics that inhabit even sophisticated theoretical accounts. To a greater extent than most of us recognize, we are the heirs of those voluntarists, notably Boyle and Newton, for whom theology was a reservoir for noise, complexity, and chaos as well as a guarantee of the epistemological and ontological coherence of their efforts. As a culture, we have barely begun to come to terms with the implications of rehistoricizing science, of demonstrating its embeddedness in its local topographies, of seeing science as a way of producing socially sanctioned and contested meanings rather than as an infallible guide to truth. One could argue, in fact, that the convergence of the social study of science and literary theory in the postdisciplinary field of Literature and Science is of more potential significance than, say, what we now know as literary postmodernism. 59 In this respect, my purpose is not so much to bring theory to contemporary historiography-the project, in different ways, of LaCapra, Bono, and others-but to bring issues raised within the history and sociology of science to the often insular realm of theory. 59· For challenges to traditional assumptions about disciplinary divisions, particularly as they affect literature and science, see G. S. Rousseau, '"Till we have built Jerusalem': The Berkeley Symposium and the Future of Literature and Science," Annals of Scholarship 4 (1986), 1-21; George Levine, "One Culture: Science and Literature," in One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature, ed. George Levine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 3-32; J. R. R. Christie, "Introduction: Rhetoric and Writing in Early Modern Philosophy and Science," in Figural and the Literal, r -9; Stuart Peterfreund, "Introduction," in Literature and Science, 3-13; and N. Katherine Hayles, "Introduction: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science," in Chaos and Order, 1-33. All the essays in these collections are valuable in challenging traditional assumptions about disciplinary divisions between the humanities and the sciences.

CHAPTER I

"A Close (though Mystick) Connection": Boyle's Defense of the Bible

Throughout the seventeenth century, debates about the status and meaning of the Bible were among the dominant forms of intellectual discourse. Particularly during the Civil War and Interregnum, interpretations of the Bible-including outright dismissals of its claim to be the revealed word of God-generated intense political as well as theological controversies. After the Restoration in r66o, defenses of the Bible's moral and intellectual authority and related attacks on atheism, Catholicism, and dissenting forms of Protestantism were equated in often brutally straightforward ways with the canons of philosophical reason, demonstrations of political allegiance to Church and State, and support for a hierarchical social system, which, from the point of view of the restored monarchy and its allies, had been seriously threatened by the Civil War, regicide, and Commonwealth. Treatises such as Edward Stillingfleet's Origines Sacrae (London, r662), Sir Charles Wolseley's The Unreasonableness of Atheism (London, r669) and The Reasonableness of Scripture (London, 1672), Henry More's An Antidote against Atheism (London, r665), Richard Baxter's The Reasons of the Christian Religion (London, r667), and Richard Bentley's A Confutation of Atheism (1697) (to name only a few of the hundreds of such works published between r66o and

"A Close (though Mystick) Connection,

35

I7oo) all premise their arguments for moral and political order on the historical accuracy and theological infallibility of the Bible. In one sense, the defenses of Scripture that proliferate during the late I 6 5os and after can be read as responses to attacks on the Bible's historical accuracy and spiritual authority by radicals and sectaries during the Interregnum and, later in the century, to the challenge posed by Richard Simon, a French Jesuit, who argued in four tracts translated into English in the I68os and I69os that the textually corrupt state of the Bible compelled all true Christians to accept the interpretive authority of the Catholic Church. 1 But, in another sense, the vehement denunciations of atheism and equally spirited defenses of the Bible often seem like overkill, far in excess of the published or otherwise documented attacks on biblical authority. As G. E. Aylmer notes, it is difficult to pin down exactly who these "atheists" were who figure so prominently in seventeenth-century theological discourse, even if atheism is loosely defined to include Hobbes and his followers. 2 The radicals and sectaries of the Interregnum, like Samuel Fisher and Gerard Winstanley, are seldom, if ever, mentioned directly in defenses of the Bible published after I 66o. Instead, the brunt of the counteroffensive against the individuals Boyle labels "Anti-Scripturists" is borne by "gentlemen," who, in works such as Boyle's Some Considerations Touching the Style of the Holy Scriptures (I66I) and Stillingfleet's Origines Sacrae, are also specifically designated as the intended audience for these treatises. The overall effect created by the hundreds of defenses of the Anglican religion and the Bible's authority written after the Restoration, therefore, seems less a timely response to an imminent crisis of faith than a massive polemical effort to defend the interlocking semiotic systems of established religion, royalist politics, and hierarchical socioeconomic organization against enemies who paradoxically seem to be everywhere and nowhere. The crisis that does exist lies within the realm of interposition; it is characterized by r. On challenges to the Bible during the Interregnum, see Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (1972; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 259-68; on Simon, see Gerard Reedy, S.]., The Bible and Reason: Anglicans and Scripture in Late Seventeenth-Century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, r 98 5), 104. 2. G. E. Aylmer, "Unbelief in Seventeenth-Century England," in Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays Presented to Christopher Hill, ed. Donald Pennington and Keith Thomas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 22-42.

Fallen Languages attempts to impose ideal concepts of order, ostensibly derived from the Bible, on a politicized and argumentative nation. Implicitly and explicitly, a number of seventeenth-century defenses of the Bible respond to what they see as threats to its symbolic order by insisting on its stylistic as well as moral authority. In addition to Boyle's Style of the Scriptures-in my opinion, the most far-reaching, sophisticated, and historically significant of these works-defenses of the Bible's style and structure were written by John Prideaux, Sacred Eloquence: Or the Art of Rhetorick, as It is Layd Down in Scripture (London, r659); Nathaniel Ingelo, The Perfection, Authority, and Credibility of the Holy Scriptures (London, r659); Henry Lukin, An Introduction to the Holy Scriptures, Containing the Several Tropes, Figures, Properties of Speech Used Therein (London, r669); Robert Ferguson, The Interest of Reason in Religion, with the Import & Use of Scripture-Metaphors (London, r 67 5); Charles Marie de Veil, A Letter to the Honourable Robert Boyle . . . Defending the Divine Authority of the Holy Scriptures ... in Answer to Father Simon's Critical History of the Old Testament (London, r683); Offspring Blackall, Bishop of Exeter, The Sufficiency of the Scripture-Revelation as to the Proof of It (London, r678; four editions by r688); William Lowth, A Vindication of Divine Authority and Inspiration (London, r692); and Walter Cross, The Taghmical Art: Or the Art of Expounding Scripture ... a Grammatical, Logical, and Rhetorical Instrument of Interpretation (London, r698). Numerous other works, such as Stillingfleet's Origines Sacrae, devote scattered but significant numbers of pages to defending scriptural style. Few of these defenses are written in response to specific attacks, although de Veil's rejoinder to Simon's questioning of the textual authority of the Old Testament is an important exception. Instead, they are directed against what their authors perceive as a crisis of authority, what Stillingfleet terms "the disesteem of the Scriptures" that presages "the decay of Religion"; 3 they are, as I shall argue in the case of Boyle's Style of the Scriptures, responses not primarily to the threat posed by actual atheists but to the semiotic destabilization, the crises of representation, that Samuel Parker and Thomas Sprat, among oth3· Edward Stillingfleet, Origines Sacrae, or a Rational Account of the Grounds of Christian Faith, as to the Truth and Divine Authority of the Scriptures, and the Matters Therein Contained (London, r662), aJV. All quotations are from this edition.

"A Close (though Mystick) Connection"

37

ers, identified with the chaos of the Civil War and its aftermath. Parker, for example, claimed that "the different Subdivisions among the [dissenting] Sects themselves are not so much distinguish'd by any real diversity of Opinions, as by variety of Phrases and Forms of Speech, that are the peculiar Shibboleths of each Tribe"; Sprat blamed religious and political radicals for the "many fantastical terms" that contributed to the corruption of the English language in the 164os. 4 Responses of this nature suggest that if the Bible serves as the ultimate justification for the "restored" political and theological culture of the 166os, it is also the site of intense political struggles over what the structure of that society will be, what principles and values it will embody. Not surprisingly, then, treatises about the nature and extent of scriptural authority (as Boyle, Stillingfleet, and other writers acknowledge) frequently become efforts to define rhetorically and epistemologically methods for persuading or compelling one's adversaries to accept one's politically and theologically "correct" interpretation of the Bible. Restoration defenses of the Scriptures not only assert general propositions about the Bible's infallibility but also develop strategies to represent-in the senses of both appropriating and reflecting unproblematically-its logocentric authority. In this respect, debates about the status of the Bible demonstrate that, as the keystone for conceptions of natural and political order, the Scriptures function both as a means to hold together the Restoration settlement by uniting members of various factions in a vision of Protestant-specifically, Anglican-prosperity and as a site of dialogical contestation, of thinly veiled theological and political conflict. Christopher Hill notes perceptively that the "essence of protestantism-the priesthood of all believers-was logically a doctrine of individualist anarchy." 5 This principle extends to biblical interpretation: seemingly similar invocations of faith, grace, and providence by seventeenth-century writers mask a variety of theological and political 4· Samuel Parker, A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (London, 16yo), 75; Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society, ed. Jackson I. Cope and Harold W. Jones (St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1958), 42. All quotations are from this edition. I deal more generally with the destabilization of language in seventeenth-century England in Two-Edg'd Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 30-55. 5. Collected Essays of Christopher Hill, 3 vols. (Amherst: Universiry of Massachusetts Press, r 986), 2: 3 8.

Fallen Languages

differences. Like political controversies of the era, theological debates are struggles to control the meaning of a common vocabulary. Although defenses of the Bible's authority cut across party and theological lines, writers of differing political views perceive themselves as defending different conceptions of biblical hermeneutics and different versions of Protestant authority. Defenders of the Restoration settlement, such as Parker, could and did insist on the authority of the Anglican Church to police interpretations of the Bible; radicals, Puritans, and dissenters, including Milton, could argue that "every believer is entitled to interpret the Scriptures ... for himself." 6 Others, among them the nonconformist Thomas Delaune in his Tropologia: A Key to Open Scripture Metaphors (London, 1682), could appropriate the language of biblical hermeneutics to argue unorthodox theological positions, at least during temporary breakdowns in censorship such as the one triggered by the Exclusion Crisis in the late 167os and early I68os. The "individualist anarchy" of Protestant belief made the need to control and disseminate authoritative interpretations of the Bible all the more important for those in positions of authority. After the Civil War, conservative political and religious principles could no longer be assumed; they had to be articulated and copiously defended.? The politicizing of theological discourse noted by Sprat, Parker, and others reflects a general concern in the seventeenth century with mastering the heteroglot languages of controversy and, more specifically after I66o, with enforcing standards of stylistic decorum as a means to promote social stability. For writers of different political stripes and religious convictions, the Bible had to be defended against those who would attack it or interpret it differently precisely because it served as an authorizing Logos for all possible organizations of society. In practice, to take the high moral ground against one's enemies, one had to assume that the Bible's "message" was accessible to all 6. Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols., ed. D. M. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953-82.), 6:583. 7· On the need for new ideological justifications for conservative politics in the seventeenth century, see Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 2.4-2.6. For the connections between politics and religion during the period, see Michael G. Finlayson, Historians, Puritanism, and the English Revolution: The Religious Factor in F.nglish Politics before and after the Interregnum (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, r 983).

"A Close (though Mystick) ConnectionH

39

men (and women) of good faith and right reason and that the Bible provided its readers-regardless of their social classes or political convictions-with a rhetorical means to apprehend what it was saying. In this respect, substance and style were reflexive vindications of Scripture's claims to truth and to rhetorical persuasiveness. For defenders of the Restoration settlement, to deny the authority of the Bible was to challenge fundamentally the moral and political foundations of government; to denigrate its style, for Boyle and Parker, among others, was to undermine the socioeconomic foundations of gentlemanly discourse and, at least implicitly, of upper-class privilege. In this regard, the debates that surround the Bible-and the nearapocalyptic rhetoric in which they are often cast-cannot be typed simply as instances of "belief" and "unbelief," Anglicanism and atheism; they should be seen instead as competing attempts to impose order on a dialogically agitated set of discourses, to legislate an authoritative interpretation of Scripture for political and theological ends. Although a number of moderate latitudinarians promote what Kroll argues are contingent epistemologies, the fact that they had to deal with probabilistic modes of knowledge in a symbolic economy of exchange and displacement compels them to elevate their versions of biblical authority to the status of a general equivalent. 8 For the controversialists of the late seventeenth century, then, the Bible serves as a transhistorical model of moral and stylistic authority that both underwrites investigations in theology and natural philosophy and acts-ideally-as an infallible means to transcend the fallen, dialogical languages of a postlapsarian world. For Boyle, the defense of the Bible is crucial to his efforts-and, more generally, after r66o, to those of the Royal Society-to promote an ideology of national greatness, scientific and technological achievement, economic prosperity, religious tranquility, and material and cultural progress. Both his religious faith and his experimental practice are underwritten by the metaphor of the two books-the reflexive identification popular since the fourteenth century of the book of 8. See Martin Elsky, Authorizing Words: Speech, Writing, and Print in the English Renaissance {Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1 989); for a cogent discussion of the various intellectual programs of the mid-seventeenth century, see Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform, r626- r66o (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1976).

Fallen Languages

Scriptures and the book of Nature. As Shapin notes, the metaphor of the two books has crucial consequences for early modern science because it constructs the world as a text, thereby defining the central problem of scientific investigation as that of finding a proper language in which to describe nature; the two books, then, function as what Nancy Leys Stepan calls a "constitutive metaphor": they do not merely represent a prior reality or activity-say, the practice of natural philosophy-but constitute the natural world as an object worthy of study. 9 Boyle's use of this traditional metaphor informs and legitimates his version of the argument from design, the idea that the orderly structure of the universe could be the result only of a divine intelligence. Although writers since Roger Bacon had employed the metaphor of the two books to justify their investigations of the natural world, the increasing sophistication and specificity of experimental philosophy in the mid-seventeenth century lead Boyle and his contemporaries to seek increasingly detailed correspondences between experimental knowledge and the structure and meaning of the Bible. To maintain the equivalence of the two books, Boyle develops an account of biblical style to underscore the correspondence between Scripture and the increasingly complex world described by contemporary science. In Style of the Scriptures, therefore, the Bible emerges as both rhetorically accessible and irreducibly complex-Boyle's version of the latitudinarian paradox that a few basic religious principles require copious theological justification. His fascination with the Bible as the mystical embodiment of a transcendent order, in this respect, suggests something of the ways in which the texts of the two books-the discourses of theology and experimental philosophyinterpenetrate, inform, and elucidate each other. The isomorphism of nature and Scripture, I would suggest, takes the place of a selfconscious epistemology; it refers questions of how we know what we think we know to a reflexive logic that structures both experimental practice and metacritical justifications for natural philosophy. In 9· Steven Shapin, "Robert Boyle and Mathematics: Reality, Representation, and Experimental Practice," Science in Context 2 (1988), 23-24; Nancy Leys Stepan, "Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science," Isis 77 (1986), 261-77. Stepan provides a useful summary and critique of previous criticism on the role of metaphor in scientific writing. See also James J. Bono, "Science, Discourse, and Literature: The Role/Rule of Metaphor in Science," in Literature and Science: Theory and Practice, ed. Stuart Peterfreund (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), 59-89.

"A Close (though Mystick) Connection" short, Style of the Scriptures is not an adjunct to Boyle's experimental work but a crucial text in his efforts to negotiate the conceptual space between the word of God and the imperfect narratives of humankind. Like many of his contemporaries, Boyle argues that the texts of the Bible and nature are to be read, studied, and interpreted to reveal God's design of, and man's role in, a benevolent, if ultimately mysterious, universe. He uses the image of the two books repeatedly in his works to describe the isomorphic relationships between spiritual and scientific knowledge; the metaphor structures both the method and the ends of scientific investigation: the Book of Grace ... doth resemble the Book of Nature; wherein the Stars ... are not more Nicely nor Methodically plac'd than the Passages of Scripture. 10 ... a man need not be acquainted with, or unfit to relish, the Lessons taught us in the Book of the Creatures, to think them less Excellent than those, that may be learned in the Book of the Scriptures ... the Preference of this last Book is very consistent with an high Esteem and an Assiduous study of the first. 11 The two books, in Boyle's mind, are complementary. "Theology and Philosophy," he states, "seem to be but members of the Universal Hypothesis, whose Objects, I conceive, to be the Nature, Counsels, and Works of God, as far as they are discoverable by us (for I say not to us) in this Life" (Excellency of Theology, 52). Boyle's "Universal Hypothesis" structures his understanding of the universe and the methodologies he employs to comprehend, as far as is humanly possible, the workings of God's creation. Ideally, for Boyle, scientific experimentation is to nature what exegesis is to the Bible. Both methods may be misused or misunderstood by "Atheists," "Anti-Scripturists," and "Libertines," but the proper devotion to the study of both books will result in an "Endlesse Progress" in natural and scriptural knowledge: "that Inquisitiveness and Sagacity that has made in our Age such a happy Progress in Philosophical [studies] will make Explicaro. Robert Boyle, Some Considerations Touching the Style of the Holy Scriptures (London, r66r), 53· All quotations are from this edition. r I. Robert Boyle, The Excellency of Theology, as Compar' d with Natural Philosophy (London, r674), sig. arr. All quotations are from this edition.

Fallen Languages tions and Discoveries [in] the study of Religion and the Divine Books" (Excellency of Theology, 63, 47). By equating the epistemological practices of experimental science with what he considers the authoritative word of the Bible, Boyle, like Bacon and other seventeenthcentury philosophers, turns the natural world into a vast text that can be studied and deciphered to reveal its divinely ordained coherence. The metaphor of the two books, in this regard, lends credibility to experimental philosophy, minimizing the epistemological problems of scientific investigation by justifying natural philosophy as a means to a theological end. The "Endlesse Progress" of science offers its practitioners inexhaustible opportunities to celebrate divine wisdom and, as Sprat, Boyle, John Wilkins, John Ray, and Joseph Glanvill assert, to legitimate the authoritarian, patrilineal ideology of Restoration England. 12 Yet although his defense of natural philosophy depends on the assumptions that the books of nature and Scripture are epistemologically as well as teleologically compatible, Boyle consistently privileges the Bible as a true reflection of God's wisdom, as the title of his treatise, The Excellency ofTheology, as Compar'd with Natural Philosophy (written in I 66 5 but not published until I 67 4), indicates. The Bible, as Logos, underwrites the study of nature because it is ontologically prior to physical reality; it alone describes the path to salvation. As Stillingfleet puts it, "the large volume of the Creation, wherein God hath described so much of his wisdom and power, is yet too dark and obscure, too short and imperfect to set forth to us the way which leads to eternal happinesse" (Origines, 602). Boyle similarly calls attention to the limitations of philosophical inquiry in 12. The ideology of privilege is a recurring theme in late seventeenth-century natural philosophy; it is an important part of the foundational arguments for the institutionalization of science. See J. R. Jacob, "Restoration, Reformation, and the Origins of the Royal Society," History of Science 13 (1975), 155-76; and Jacob, "Restoration Ideologies and the Royal Society," History of Science 17 (1980), 25-38; Michael Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Hunter, Establishing the New Science: The Experience of the Early Royal Society (Woodbridge, Eng.: Boydell, 1989), 245-78; and Liah Greenfeld, "Science and National Greatness in Seventeenth-Century England," Minerva 25 (1987), 107-22. On the ideology of Restoration, particularly as it relates to the literature of the period, see Michael McKeon, Politics and Poetry in Restoration England: The Case of Dryden's "Annus Mirabilis" (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975); and Nicholas Jose, Ideas of the Restoration in English Literature, I66o-7I (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).

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A Discourse ofThings above Reason (r68r) when he has Sophronius, one of the speakers in his dialogue, admit "that there are some things relating to that infinite and most Monadical Being (if I may so speak) that we call God, which will still remain incomprehensible even to Philosophical [that is, scientific] understandings." 13 This subordination of the book of nature to the authorizing Logos assumes different, and revealing, forms elsewhere in his work. In The Excellency of Theology, Boyle suggests that what nature lacks is a plot: in the Book of Nature, as in a well contriv'd Romance, the parts have such a connection and relation to one another, and the things we would discover are so darkly or incompleatly knowable by those that precede them, that the mind is never satisfied till it comes to the end of the Book; till [t]hen all that is discover'd in the progress, is unable to keep the mind from being molested with Impatience to find that yet conceal'd, which will not be known till one does at least make a further progress. And yet the full discovery of Natures Mysteries, is so unlikely to fall to any mans share in this Life, that the case of the Pursuers of them is at best like theirs, that light upon some excellent Romance, of which they shall never see the latter parts. (rr8-r9) Boyle's image of experimental philosophy as a "Romance" brings to mind Northrop Frye's definition of the romance as "an endless form" that relies on a "major adventure, ... the quest" to give it "literary form." 14 This is a particularly suggestive figure for Boyle to use because in his unpublished and posthumously published papers he discusses his attraction to-and the dangers of-reading romances. During an adolescent illness, he "read the ... adventures of Amadis de Gaule, and other fabulous and wandring stories, which much more prejudiced him, by unsettling his thoughts, than they could have advantaged him, had they affected his recovery ... they accustomed his thoughts to such a habitude of roving, that he has scarce ever been their quiet master since, but they would take all occasions to steal 13. Robert Boyle, A Discourse of Things above Reason (London, r681), 2.8. 14. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 186-87.

44

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away, and go a-gadding to objects then unseasonable and impertinent." 15 For Boyle, romance is identified with a lack of mental discipline, with images of "roving" and wandering, with the absence of an authoritative discourse or knowledge that the Bible, symbolically and psychologically, provides. By comparing the study of nature to a "Romance," Boyle brings natural philosophy down to the level of fictional discourse, a series of paratactic adventures that lacks an internal mechanism to ensure its progress. Some thirty-five or forty years after he composed his autobiography, in A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Receiv' d Notion of Nature (r686), Boyle attacks Aristotle's definition of nature and all attempts to separate the physical world from its Creator; he asks: "Whether Nature be a Thing, or a Name? I mean, whether a real Existent Being or a notional Entity, somewhat of kin to those fictious Terms, that Men have devis'd, that might compendiously express several things together, by one Name?" 16 Nature is "notional" in the sense that it is not an independent text but a palimpsest that must be decoded to reveal what man can know of God's intentions. In contrast to the fiction of a self-sustaining nature akin to the narratives of "Romance," Boyle defines nature as the product of God's will: "Nature is the Aggregate of the Bodies, that make up the World, framed as it is, considered as a Principle, by virtue whereof, they Act and Suffer according to the Laws of Motion, prescribed by the Author of Things" (Free Enquiry, 71). For Boyle, the Protestant conceptions of narrative and historical progress exemplified by the Bible serve as a metanarrative not simply to authorize scientific inquiry but to constitute the natural world as an object worthy of study, a coherent, if mysterious, text that can be studied to reveal the hand of "the Author of Things." 17 Boyle's handling of the metaphor of the two books, then, displays 15. "An Account of PHILARETUS [i.e. Mr. R. BOYLE] during his Minority," in The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle in Five Volumes, ed. Thomas Birch (London, 1744), I: 9· Boyle's autobiographical sketch is written in the third person. All quotations are from this edition. 16. Robert Boyle, A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Receiv'd Notion of Nature (London, 1686), 6o. All quotations are from this edition. 17. On Protestant notions of narrative and history in the seventeenth century, see Marshall Grossman, Authors to Themselves: Milton and the Revelation of History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 14-21.

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a complex double movement: on the one hand, he celebrates the immaculate text of the Bible, divorcing it from a corrupt natural world; on the other, he conflates the two texts-conceptually as well as rhetorically-to justify the study of nature. This is, in effect, the operation of interposition that divides and conjoins ideal and corrupt texts, that attempts endlessly to distinguish between an originary materiality-the Bible's production, within history, of pure meaningand the fallen materiality of a feminized nature. Boyle's superimposing of the texts of nature and Scripture may be, in part, a response to the objections voiced by a number of clergymen in the seventeenth century, those "over-zealous Divines," as Sprat called them, who "reprobate Natural Philosophy, as a carnal knowledge, and a too much minding worldly things" (27). 18 To answer them, Boyle conflares the metaphor of the two books, projecting a theologically purifying textuality-the infallibility and order of the Bible-onto an otherwise corrupt physical world. But this strategy leads to a fundamental paradox: although Boyle maintains a "notional" distinction by describing nature and the Bible as two separate books, he can justify the study of the former only by subverting the differences between them. Repeatedly, he lumps physical and spiritual manifestations of divinity under the all-embracing term "works," and, tellingly, characterizes God as the "Author" of nature, a metaphor which seems a projection of his idealized self-image as an objective interpreter of divine "works." 19 It is precisely because Boyle projects the image of a coherent text onto the natural world that he is able to idealize his role as a reader and interpreter of the two books. His explorations of both texts become forms of mediation between Scripture and nature. For Boyle, then, the act of writing is a form of devotion, closer to prayer than logical argument. r8. On Calvinist constructions of the world as irrevocably corrupt, see Norman 0. Brown, Life against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), 202-34; Brian Easlea, Witch-hunting, Magic, and the New Philosophy: An Introduction to the Debates of the Scientific Revolution, I 4 so- 175o (Brighton: Harvester, r98o); Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 198o); and Hill, Essays, 2: II7-40. 19. For two of the many examples, see Free Enquiry, 245; and The Christian Virtuoso (London, r69o), 14.

Fallen Languages

Boyle's most ambitious attempt to stabilize the Bible as an authoritative and authorizing discourse is Some Considerations Touching the Style of the Holy Scriptures, written during the r 6 sos but not published until r66r. 20 In this important but little-known work, Boyle undertakes what he sees as a set of integrally related tasks: defending the style and the moral authority of the Bible, justifying his classbased views of style as a measure of social and moral worth, and accounting for the paradoxical nature of language as both a temporal instrument, a form of interposition, and an atemporal ideal, a general equivalent. In this respect, Style of the Scriptures is an ambitious work: part theological defense of latitudinarian theology, part stylistic manifesto, and part testament to the author's passionate quest for spiritual salvation. It is also an attempt to depoliticize the controversies surrounding the Bible, to persuade his readers-cast as "gentlemen" -that acceding to the authority of the Scriptures can serve as a defense against the evils of radical sectarianism and Hobbesian disbelief. Boyle's rhetorical strategies in this treatise reveal the ways in which his theological, stylistic, and social concerns reinforce one another. By arguing that the Bible embodies upper-class standards of stylistic decorum, Boyle seeks to transcend divisions among Protestants by appealing to shared conceptions of what constitutes polite discourse and, by implication, of a social order founded on the rule of likeminded, gentlemanly Christians. The outlines of his argument demonstrate, however, that, far from being an unassailable means to justify a broad-based ideological unity, the Bible has become the focus of seemingly endless debates, the occasion for competing polemical 20. The dating of Boyle's manuscripts and treatises is often approximate, although occasional prefaces and drafts are dated. I differ from previous scholars in emphasizing the continuities rather than the differences between his early "theological" and later "scientific" works. On Boyle's moral writings of the r64os and r6sos, see the valuable Introduction in The Early Essays and Ethics of Robert Boyle, ed. John T. Harwood (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), xv-lxvii. Harwood offers a useful chronology and emphasizes Boyle's debts to Christian humanism and such predecessors as Alsted and Calvin. Although I agree that Boyle uses a traditional rhetoric of piety to discuss the morality of the Bible, he is also concerned in ways that previous commentators were not in negotiating his way through the vexed theological and political debates of his time. Boyle's papers are now available on microfilm; see Michael Hunter's Introduction to Letters and Papers of Robert Boyle: A Guide to the Manuscripts and Microfilm in the series entitled Collections from The Royal Society (Bethesda, Md.: University Publications of America, 1992), v-xlvii.

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interpretations that underscore the politicized nature of theological discourse. 21 Style of the Scriptures is, in some respects, the result of a rhetorical and conceptual practice that Boyle developed during the I64os and I65os in response to what he characterizes as "sin ... the chief incendiary of the war [that works] to multiply and heighten those sins, to which it owes its being" (Birch, I: I8). As this remark suggests, Boyle characteristically converts political questions into narrowly moral ones which can then be resolved by invoking the Bible and Protestant common sense to distinguish good from evil. His latitudinarianism, in this light, may be seen as an attempt to find the broadest common ground among his readers by suppressing, "in a Discourse Written Chiefly for Gentlemen" (A7r), theological and political differences within invocations of Christian and class unity. But Style of the Scriptures also becomes a means for Boyle "to curb" what he calls in his autobiographical sketch "the roving wildness of his wandring thoughts" (Birch, I: 9). It is an attempt to wed his quest for personal salvation to a vision of a restored, civilized, and Christian nation embarked on the "Endlesse Progress" of scientific investigation and the gradual, cumulative revelation of biblical mysteries. 22 The means to accomplish this end is to promote a unity of faith and fashion, to disseminate the values of Christian gentility that bring together rather than divide well-meaning men. This project-to counteract "sin" as "the chief incendiary of war" and political unrest-is crucial to Boyle's thinking both before and after the Restoration. Even as he acknowledges political differences and the contingent structures of knowledge, he seeks to bring them within the confines of a broad socioideological consensus. In fact, we can read his pre- I 66o writings as a series of attempts to outline what we can identify, after I 66o, as 2 r. This is not to suggest that prior to the English Revolution a consensus existed about the status and authority of the Bible. The idealized invocations of a pre-Civil War past were used, as Jose argues in Ideas of the Restoration, to legitimate efforts after r 66o to discredit dissenters and former supporters of the Commonwealth. On the violence and repression associated with dissenting readings of the Bible in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, see Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); and Hill, World Turned Upside Down,

259-68.

22. In addition to Harwood, Early Essays and Ethics, xv-lxvii, see J. R. Jacob, Robert Boyle and the English Revolution (New York: Burt Franklin, 1977), esp. 40-41; and Michael Hunter, "Alchemy, Magic, and Moralism in the Thought of Robert Boyle," British Journal of the History of Science 23 (1990), 387-410.

Fallen Languages a latitudinarian ideology that celebrates piety, political stability, and religious tolerance. In his early Occasional Reflections, a seminal work in his development as a writer, Boyle adapts the tradition of the moral essay to construct a portrait of the natural philosopher as devout, meditative, and apolitical-an idealized self-projection of his social position which he exploits effectively in his later theological and scientific works, including Style of the Scriptures. 23 Written during the r64os, Occasional Reflections becomes the author's testing ground for the incipient ideological as well as personal formation of a theologically based rhetoric of dispassionate contemplation as a way to check not only his own "roving" thoughts but the sectarian disputes in which England was embroiled. It serves also as a paradigmatic attempt to import into his early thinking on experimental philosophy the certainty-the objectivity-guaranteed by religious faith. Boyle justifies at length in his opening chapters his practice of "occasional meditations" as a method to free his imagination to contemplate the operations of divine Grace. By carefully observing and meditating on the significance of even the most mundane objects and actions, the "Ingenious Man" is able "to pry into the innermost Recesses of mysterious Nature, and discover there so much of the Wisdom, Power, and Goodness, of the Author, as are most fit to give the Discoverer a high and devout Veneration for those Excellencies" (35). Reflection, for Boyle, becomes a way of transcending the world by the act of studying it: "the restless mind having div'd to the lower most parts of the Earth, can thence in a trice take such a Flight, that having travers'd all the corporeal Heavens, and scorn'd to suffer her self to be confin'd with the very Limits of the World, she roves about in the ultramundane spaces, and considers how farr they reach" (3 5). This process of metaphysical contemplation, as J. R. Jacob argues, is crucial to Boyle's scientific and religious thought. 24 His "occasional reflections" allow him to perceive the discrete phenomena of nature as evi2.3. Boyle, Occasional Reflections upon Several Subjects (London, r665). All quotations are from this edition. On Boyle's adaptation of the moral essay, see James Paradis, "Montaigne, Boyle, and the Essay of Experience," in One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature, ed. George Levine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 59-91; on the influence of Occasional Reflections, see ]. Paul Hunter, "Robert Boyle and the Epistemology of the Novel," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2. (1990), 2.75-91. 2.4. Jacob, Boyle and the English Revolution, 2.9, 98-99.

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dence of God's "Excellencies" and his ordering of the universe. These short essays both promote and are promoted by Boyle's identification of natural philosophy with a firm belief in a divine and mysterious "Author." Yet if Boyle's meditations are, as he claims, the results of "meer chance," the uses to which he puts them are not. However "occasional" his reflections may be, his putting them into writing is a selfconsciously literary process; they are rhetorical pieces designed to "cherish piety ... and help make the man good, whether or not they make his style be thought so" (26-27). They are meditations constructed in the language of moral contemplation and, in an important sense, meditations on the power of language to communicate the mystical experience of reflection: "rov[ing] about the ultra-mundane spaces" and "pry[ing] into the innermost Recesses of mysterious Nature." The language of his reflections, then, is "like Jacob's Ladder, whereof though the foot lean'd on the Earth, the top reach'd up to Heaven" (So). For Boyle, language and the processes of thought that it encodes are forms of interposition; like Jacob's ladder, they mediate between the actual and the ideal, the individual's experience of a fallen, historical reality and his faith in a universal order. In this respect, the language of contemplation figures his ascension from a postlapsarian earth to a pristine realm of "thought." Boyle's occasional reflections are, in this sense, historical narratives written to transcend history. What the individual experiences as a series of discrete, even arbitrary observations is transformed by reflection into traces of a coherent narrative, structured and authorized by the divine Logos. The purpose of occasional reflections, then, is to erase the difference-quite literally, for Boyle, the difference engendered by sin-between the individual's roving thoughts, his or her subjective experience, and the objective contemplation of a divinely authored umverse. Style of the Scriptures represents an attempt by Boyle to work his way through the ideological implications of what he leaves implicit in Occasional Reflections. In theory, Boyle resolves the paradoxes of postlapsarian representation-Augustine's dilemma of having to praise a perfect God in an imperfect language-by taking a dialectical view of discourse: the language of man is, at best, a necessary evil; the word of God, as manifest in the Bible, is perfect, if mysterious. In

so

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practice, however, this opposition breaks down because the relationships between fallen and ideal languages become endlessly complicated by his efforts to use contemporary standards of gentlemanly speech-the self-representation of the ideology of privilege-to legitimate scriptural style as a transcendent measure of value. Boyle has no means to demonstrate that the Bible sets uncorruptible standards of speech without resorting to reflexive assertions; he can argue only that it embodies the moral and aesthetic ideals of upper-class discourse, articulating a view shared by Dryden, Sprat, Glanvill, Congreve, and a host of other writers after I66o that in the "conversation of gentlemen" the English language had reached a state of "perfection."25 Boyle's argument, then, employs reflexive standards of legitimation: the "perfection" of gentlemanly conversation reflects the natural, hierarchical order of the universe, but this order, embodied in the style and structure of the Bible, can be justified only by recourse to the ideologically sanctioned standards of fashionable speech. Boyle, therefore, finds himself struggling throughout Style of the Scriptures with the implications of his argument that the language he employs is both morally corrupt and socially perfect, both a departure from the divine Logos and the only means available to defend its authority. Boyle's definition of style in the opening pages of his treatise is based on what he calls the "Complication ... of Rhetorick and Mystery" (5 I) that he finds operating throughout the Bible. This "Complication" both subsumes and transcends conventional notions of style as an expression of "self"; like the literary technology of "virtual 25. See John Dryden, Works, ed. H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., eta!., 19 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956- ), 8: 89; 9: I 17, 205- r6; and II: 218, 221, for a few of his many references to the "perfection" of gentlemanly conversation; Sprat, History, rro-r3; Joseph Glanvill, Plus Ultra (London, r668), 84-88; and Congreve, The Complete Plays of William Congreve, ed. Herbert Davis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 391. I have discussed seventeenth-century notions of gentlemanly style in TwoEdg'd Weapons, 30-99. Ideals of upper-class style do not take the form of specific rhetorical or linguistic features, although Boyle's circumlocutions and penchant for series of weak negatives (note, for example, the passage from the preface to Style of the Scriptures [A7r] quoted in the text below) are suggestive of some habits of gentlemanly address common in the late seventeenth century. The idea that Restoration prose style is somehow less syntactically complex than its Renaissance counterparts has finally been put to rest by Paul Arakelian, 'The Myth of a Restoration Style Shift," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 20 (1979), 227-45.

"A Close (though Mystick) Connection" witnessing" that Boyle develops in his experimental writings, it depends on shared conceptual models of noise-free communication. 26 In examining the Old and New Testaments, Boyle states that he will not "consider the style ... in the stricter acception, wherein an Authors style is wont to signify the choice and disposition of his words, but in that larger sense, wherein the word Style comprehends not only the Phraseology, the Tropes and Figures made use of by a Writer, but his Method, his lofty or humbler Character (as Orators speak) his Pathetical or languid, his close or incoherent way of writing ... almost the whole manner of an Author expressing himself" (2). By defining style as broadly as possible, he avoids confining himself to arguments based solely on contemporary notions of linguistic propriety and counters the claims of the Bible's detractors who find its style unfashionable: "some . . . say that Book is too obscure, others, that 'tis immethodical, others that it is contradictory to it self, others, that the neighbouring parts of it are incoherent, others, that 'tis unadorned, others, that it is flat and unaffecting, others, that it abounds with things that are either trivial or impertinent, and also with useless Repetitions" (4). Boyle's response to these objections is to challenge the stylistic assumptions on which they are based. His argument depends on his expanding the notion of decorum to accommodate a variety of rhetorical strategies. In the course of his treatise, Boyle deplores poor translations of the Bible; emphasizes the differences between the rhetorical practices and standards of the ancient East and modern West; attacks the rigidity of Ciceronian rhetoric and its elevation of manner over matter; parodies the style of "Wits" and other "AntiScripturists"; and offers frequent observations on morality, ancient history, Christian humility, natural philosophy, and the arts (and snares) of rhetorical persuasion. The copiousness of his argument precludes a narrow, formalist defense; style is so crucial to Boyle because it verges on becoming an epistemology of faith. For Boyle, the ideal of biblical language informs and is distinguished from human discourse; as a general equivalent, then, it is the standard against which all individual styles must be judged and, in 26. On the "literary technology" of "virtual witnessing," see Steven Shapin, "Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle's Literary Technology," Social Studies of Science 14 (1984), 481-520.

Fallen Languages varying degrees, found wanting. His concept of style, in this regard, measures the distance between the individual's postlapsarian "manner" and the scriptural Logos. Yet Boyle remains committed to his belief that the timeless, monological truths of the Bible must be legitimated not only by the individual's faith but by their inscription in the fashionable language of gentlemanly authors and readers. Like Stillingfleet in Origines Sacrae, Boyle sees himself, in part, as a polemicist out to reclaim those, in Stillingfleet's words, "whose birth and education hath raised them above the Common people of the World" and "who account it a matter of judgement to disbelieve the Scriptures, and a piece of wit to dispute themselves out of the possibility of being happy in another world" (a3r, a3v). In his preface, written, as he tells us, after he had completed the text of Style of the Scriptures, Boyle takes note of his dilemma in arguing for the complicity of truth and "fashionable Style": Orators may not unjustly bear with some Rudenesses in the Style of a Person that Professes not Rhetorick, and Writes of a Subject that Needs Few of her Ornaments, and Rejects Many, as Indecencies misbecoming its Majesty: and that Severer Divines may safely Pardon some Smoothnesse in a Discourse Written Chiefly for Gentlemen, who would scarce be fond of Truth in every Dresse, by a Gentleman who fear'd it might misbecome a Person of his Youth and Quality Studiously to Decline a fashionable Style. (A7r) For all his disclaimers about "Rhetorick," Boyle recognizes that the success of his treatise depends on his adhering to fashionable standards of decorum that dress timeless truths in timely fashion. The "Complication ... of Rhetorick and Mystery" that Boyle idealizes as a stylistic and moral grounding for the Bible thus involves a mutual interpenetration: if rhetoric is authorized by the mystery of faith, then faith is inscribed within-and, more dangerously, contaminated by-discourse. In this respect, the principle of fashionable style that Boyle apologetically introduces in his preface is not merely a matter of "Ornaments" and "Dresse" but is itself constitutive of his ideal of the Bible's moral and stylistic authority. Because Boyle's and Stillingfleet's arguments depend on the mutual validation of faith and upper-class ideology, they suggest that the

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faultlines between the virtuous and the fallen should (in theory) follow divisions between social classes. Style of the Scriptures, like Boyle's other works, presupposes and enacts its exclusionary values. By taking as his antagonists fashionable scoffers and wits, Boyle consigns to the margins of his argument radicals, such as Winstanley and Fisher, who claimed that the Bible conveyed not the word of God but the corrupt intentions of men intent on protecting their power and mystifying socioeconomic inequality. There is no conclusive evidence in his treatise that Boyle had read any of the radical critics of the Bible; yet given his associations with the Hartlib circle in the I 6 sos and with the radical Henry Stubbe in the I66os, it is difficult to believe that Boyle was ignorant of the sectaries' attacks when he composed Style of the Scriptures sometime in the late I64os or early I65osY Other members of the Royal Society, such as Parker, were aware of the radicals' arguments. It seems, then, that by concentrating on nameless wits and "Anti-Scripturists" as his intellectual foes Boyle is displacing an incipient critique of political and religious radicalism that might legitimate sectarianism simply by acknowledging its existence and projecting it onto antagonists who question the authority of the Scriptures only from within the ideological parameters of upper-class style. Radicals function as what Michel Serres terms "third men," or parasites, who must be excluded for communication to take place but who mediate the exchange of information among gentlemen of differing theological views. By writing the radicals out of his treatise, Boyle seeks to negate the threat that they pose to the sociopolitical order: he transforms dissenting attacks on biblical authority into arguments about the aesthetics of style rather than the politics of interpretation. His method of argumentation, in this respect, is to acknowledge the historical circumstances of attacks on the Bible but to transcend them by framing his exclusionary ideology of style in the rhetoric of an inclusive decorum: the Bible appeals to all men throughout history. Stylistically, Boyle maintains that the Bible is a polyglot, "a Collection of composures of very differing sorts, and written at different times" (I7). Its authority derives not from its stylistic or rhetorical 27. On Stubbe's and Boyle's relations, see]. R. Jacob, Henry Stubbe: Radical Protestantism and the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 43, 50-60. See also Jacob, Boyle and the Revolution, chap. 3·

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prescriptions-its adherence to what Boyle slightingly calls the "Utopian Laws of Oratory" (r68)-but from its appeal to individuals of different times, countries, and races. To achieve His ends, according to Boyle, God "varied the heavenly Doctrine into Ratiocinations, Mysteries, Promises, Threats, and Examples" to suit "the several abilities and dispositions of men" (22). These varied strategies result in a conception of unity that cannot be encompassed by the formal rules of rhetoric, the standards of decorum held by its detractors, or the historical understandings of its readers. The Bible succeeds by embodying the mysteries of revelation rather than by appealing to reason. Each of the Bible's parts, Boyle argues, contributes to the design of the whole, "the least Text in it being as contributory to the Compleating of the Bible, as Every Loop or Pin was to the Perfection of the Tabernacle" (79). The reflexive nature of this simile is revealing: the "Perfection" that Boyle finds in the Scriptures is an article of faith rather than a formal quality of the text. "Where there's nothing but Choice Flowers," he claims, "in what Order soever you find them, they will make a good Poesie" (53). Biblical style functions as both a means of rhetorical persuasion and an aesthetic ideal of copiousness. Its complex interweavings defy temporal conceptions of order. The stylistic structure of the Bible, then, transcends the particular logics of historical arguments and of theological disputes. In effect, Boyle's response to the Protestant theology of "individualist anarchy" is to emphasize the partial nature of all interpretations that must be cast in imperfect languages. Significantly, Boyle sets his treatise apart from the hermeneutical tradition-the unfolding of biblical prophecy that fascinated seventeenth-century thinkers from Joseph Mede to Isaac Newton. His concern is not to offer definitive interpretations of the Bible but to establish the ideological grounds for interpretation; he promotes a conception of style that frustrates attempts to turn the Bible to sectarian, as opposed to latitudinarian, purposes. Interpretive differences can be subsumed within an ideology that equates the aesthetics of style-the language of gentlemen-and the immutable truths of revealed religion. His defense of scriptural style, in this regard, attempts to escape the historical conditions of its composition, even as Boyle recognizes and represses the complicity of the biblical ideal in the fallen, historical realm of dialogical discourse. In a passage which his eighteenth-century editor Thomas Birch "extracted from

"A Close (though Mystick) Connection"

55

some loose sheets, intended as a part of his Essay on Scripture," Boyle reveals his contempt for the study of human languages as an end in itself. "My propensity and value for real learning [natural philosophy]," he says, "gave me so much aversion and contempt for the empty study of words, that not only have I visited divers countries, whose languages I could never vouchsafe to study, but I could never yet be induced to learn the native tongue of the kingdome [Ireland] I was born and for some years bred in" (Birch, I: 29-30). Boyle's distinction between "real learning" and "the empty study of words" suggests the extent to which he attempts to divorce the semiotics of God's creation from the languages of a fallen and imperfect world. But, he continues, "in spite of the greatness of these indispositions to the study of tongues, my veneration for the scripture made one of the great despisers of verbal learning leave Aristotle and Paracelsus to turn grammarian ... to learn as much Greek and Hebrew, as suffered to read the old and new testament ... and thereby free himself from the necessity of relying on a translation" (I: 30). For Boyle, the study of language can be justified only as a means to a religious end. Turning "grammarian," in this respect, is another form of his "aversion" for "the empty study of words," an effort to escape the constraints of postlapsarian language and to recover, as best he can, a pristine form of communication. Studying Greek and Hebrew offers Boyle a way to reject the literary processes of translation and to return to the relatively uncorrupted languages in which the Bible was written. But Boyle's desire to return to what Sprat calls the "primitive purity" of speech is blocked by his almost Calvinist distrust of postlapsarian language. Precisely because Boyle finds "the Apothegms of the Sages, the Placits of Philosophers, the Examples of Eminent Persons, the Pretty Similes, quaint Allegories, and quick Sentences of Fine wits ... such two-edg'd Weapons, that they are as well applicable to the service of Falshood, as of Truth" (126), he places his trust in an ideal of biblical style that both invites and frustrates interpretation: But when I remember how many things I once thought Incoherent [in the Bible], in which I now think I discern a Close (though Mystick) Connection; when I reflect on the Author and. the Ends of Scripture, and when I allow my self to Imagine how exquisite a Symmetry (though as yet undiscern'd by me) Omniscience Doth,

Fallen Languages and after-Ages (probably) Will discover in the Scripture's Method, in spite of those seeming Discomposures that now puzzle me: when I think upon all this, I say, I think it just to check my toward Thoughts, that would either presume to know all the Recluse Ends of Omniscience, or premptorily judge of the Fitnesse of Means to Ends unknown; and am reduc'd to think that Oeconomy the Wisest, that is chosen by a Wisdom so Boundlesse, that it can at once Survay all Expedients, and so Unbyass'd, that it hath no interest to choose any, but for it's being the Fittest. (73-74) As this passage reveals, Boyle's conceptions of order and objectivityof "a Wisdom ... Boundlesse" and "Unbyass'd"-are grounded only in his recognition that "it [becomes] not the Majesty of God to suffer himself to be fetter'd to Humane Laws of Method" (53), only in his sense of humankind's inability to interpret "all the Recluse Ends of Omniscience." God's "Wisdom" is revealed by His choosing the "Fittest" means to order creation-Boyle's version of the argument from design-yet the fitness of that design can be demonstrated only by invoking each of the two books, nature and Scripture, to confirm the authority of the other. Significantly, given the circularity of this theocentric logic, the "Close (though Mystick) Connection" that underlies "those seeming Discomposures" of the Bible remains untheorized and untheorizable by Boyle. There is no method, in other words, that can unlock biblical mysteries. Instead, Boyle places his faith in a progressive revelation of the Bible's meaning to those interpreters in "after-Ages" who will add to the unfolding narrative of Christian teleology. Boyle's reliance on revelation rather than method is ultimately what allows him to finesse the implications of comparing the perfection of God's word as revealed in the Bible to a postlapsarian physical reality. The metaphor of the two books is never stable in Style of the Scriptures because Boyle's privileging of the Bible as Logos undermines the logical force of the argument from design. If the physical world is desacralized, it cannot provide a basis for religious faith. Stillingfleet makes precisely this argument in Origines Sacrae: "What St. Austin said of Tullies works, is true of the whole Volume of the Creation, There are admirable things to be found in them; but the name of Christ is not legible there. The work of Redemption is not engraven

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on the works of providence; if it had, a particular divine revelation had been unnecessary" (607-8). In one sense, Boyle's notion of a progressive revelation is an attempt to counter the kind of objection that Stillingfleet makes to the study of nature; in another, however, Boyle shares his contemporary's notion that "the works of providence" are inadequate to lead one to salvation. This dilemma (as I argue in Chapter 3) leads Boyle to incorporate the theological absolute of revelation into his conceptions of scientific theory and practice as a means to curb the temptation to indulge in dangerous reflections on the conceptual autonomy of experimental philosophy. 28 The" Volume of the Creation" is ultimately as inadequate for Boyle's purposes as it is for Stillingfleet's. It cannot provide a basis for either faith or a faithful representation of its own order. And it is precisely his reluctance to use the book of nature as an authoritative text that brings Boyle to his copious defense of the Bible. The significance of Style of the Scriptures-what sets it apart from treatises like Prideaux's Sacred Eloquence and Stillingfleet's Origines Sacrae-is the recognition by Boyle that he is dealing with problems of theory rather than simply of interpretation. The more complex nature is discovered to be, the more he must strive to demonstrate that the Bible is equally complex. Other commentators, with less at stake in the success of experimental philosophy, use the metaphor of the two books, for example, without calling attention to the ways in which it functions as a theoretical model of and for interpretation. Stillingfleet draws on natural philosophy for figurative descriptions of the perfection of the Bible's language: The word [of God as revealed in the Bible] is a Telescope to discover the great Luminaries of the world, the truths of highest concernment to the souls of men, and it is such a Microscope as discovers to us the smallest Atome of our thoughts, and discerns the most secret intent of the heart. And as far as this Light reacheth, it comes with power and authority, as it comes armed with the Majesty of God who reveals it[.] ... 28. See particularly the preface to Excellency of Theology. On the notion of an autonomous science in the seventeenth century, see B. C. Southgate, "'Forgotten and Lost': Some Reactions to Autonomous Science in the Seventeenth Century," journal of the History of Ideas 50 (1989), 249-68.

ss

Fallen Languages In a pure and unmixed manner; in all other writings how good soever we have a great mixture of dross and gold together; here is nothing but pure gold, Diamonds without flaws, Suns without spots. The most current coynes of the world have their alloyes of baser mettals, there is no such mixture in divine Truths; as they all come from the same Author, so they all have the same purity. There is ... light and perfection in every part of it. (613)

Stillingfleet's metaphors are drawn from the material world of technology and alchemy; he can explain the "perswasive and convincing manner" of the Bible only by seeking to reproduce its method of "Bringing divine truths down to our capacity, cloathing spiritual matter in familiar expressions and similitudes" (6 I 5). His figurative language is instrumental rather than epistemological. For Stillingfleet, divine truths remain dependent on a rhetoric that claims simultaneously to be both perfect and "familiar," the "pure gold" of the Logos, that nevertheless must employ postlapsarian conventions of speech to ensure the "discovery of Gods mind to the world" (6 I 6). Stillingfleet leaves this paradox largely unexplored, described only by metaphors from the "Volume of the Creation" which purport to reflect unproblematically the authority of the Bible, which, in turn, purports to reveal nothing but "divine Truths." In contrast, Boyle's method is to elaborate on the paradox that Style of the Scriptures embodies: his treatise is a supplement to, and a commentary on, a work that-by definition-needs no supplement, that is complete and perfectly ordered in itself. It becomes what Stanley Fish calls a "self-consuming artifact." 29 Boyle's project, in brief, is to reconcile his vision of theological and material complexity-the "Close (though Mystick) Connection[s]" of creation-to the demands of upper-class ideology and its idealized views of gentlemanly existence. Like Stillingfleet, Boyle finds himself in the position of arguing that the fundamental truths of the Christian faith (as opposed to painstaking interpretations of obscure passages) are readily apparent and then expounding at length on the reasons why religious disputes, atheism, and skepticism persist. Precisely because Boyle and Stillingfleet must assert the infallibility of the Bible, they must explain con29. Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972).

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troversies about its style and meaning by falling back on arguments about the perversity of human nature, as Stillingfleet's metaphor of the microscope suggests, and on analyses of the divisiveness within the upper classes. Boyle's task, in effect, becomes to reinscribe what his rhetoric deconstructs: logocentric authority. He therefore develops at length his notion that sociopolitical solidarity can serve as a means to counterbalance sin, the rubric, as I noted earlier, under which he subsumes political conflict and transforms it into questions of individual morality, particularly for the upper classes. All gentlemen, he maintains, have a vested political as well as theological interest in promoting biblical authority to reinforce social and linguistic stability. To press home his argument that defending the Bible is a means to support the hierarchical order of his society, Boyle adapts the rhetorical strategies of upper-class wit to counter fashionable skepticism. Toward the close of Style of the Scriptures, he attacks those detractors of the Bible (characteristically conflated with followers of Hobbes) who undervalue it "out of a Criminal fondnesse [for] the overambition'd Title of a wit, which they hope to acquire by Unherding and Keeping out of the Road, and Owing [to] their being able to Slight and Disgrace that, which so many others Reverence and Venerate" (175). The form that this attack takes, in part, is parody; he appropriates the rhetorical form of wit to chastise those who "Abuse the Words of [the Bible], to Irreligious Senses, and perhaps passing to the Impudence of Perverting Inspir'd Expressions, to deliver Obscene Thoughts" (r78). Boyle's cumbersome parodies are unlikely to be confused with the wit of the Earl of Rochester or George Etherege, but they seem intended less to demonstrate the author's verbal skill than to insist on connections among blasphemy, sexual desire, and social impudence: almost any Man may have the Wit to Talk at that Prophane Rate, that will but allow himself the Sawcinesse to do so. ( r 79) Considering Persons will scarce think it a Demonstration of a Mans being a Wit, that he will Venture to be Damn'd to be Thought one. (179)

For Persons Really Knowing, can easily Distinguish betwixt that which Exacts the Title of Wit from our Judgements, and that which but Appears such to our Corruptions. (r8r)

6o

Fallen Languages [The] Rare Composures [of] these Transcendant Wits, (as they are pleas'd to think themselves,) ... [are] Commonly no other than some Drunken Song or Paltry Epigram, some Fawning Love-letter, or some such other flashy Trifle, that doth much more argue a Depress'd Soul, than an Elevated Fansy. (r82) [He] Prostitutes his Wit to Evince and Celebrate the Defeat of his Reason ... and takes it for as high a Proof as Desirable a Fruit of Eloquence, to Perswade a Vain Mistresse that She is Handsome and Ador' d, to whom 'twere Eloquence indeed to be able to perswade the contrary. (182-83)

The connections between wit and sex in these passages imply a perversion of the holy to the erotic, of man's understanding corrupted by and to physical desire. In effect, Boyle attempts to use verbal wit to check the destabilizing properties of wit. His parodies are a form of monological assertion, underwritten by the same theological and political assumptions that give rise to his energetic defense of biblical style. Implicitly, he defends his parodic strategy by arguing that the ends justify his means: "Rhetorick," he maintains, is "an Organical or Instrumental Art, in order Chiefly to Perswasion, or Delight, its Rules ought to be estimated by their Tendency, and Commensurateness to its End" ( r 6 5). Boyle's purpose, then, is to reappropriate the verbal patterns of wit for latitudinarian theology and, by implication, to offer a means for wits to reconcile themselves to an inclusive ideology based on defending property rights, upper-class power, and the fundamental principles of the established Church. Boyle's argument-his appeal to and against the wits-anticipates numerous calls after the Restoration for ideological solidarity based on the dual supports of religion and experimental philosophy. In his History of the Royal Society, Sprat explicitly defends the Bible as a basis for a Christian wit that "may be us'd and allow'd without any danger of prophaness" (414); he then goes on to "hope what I have here said [in the History] will prevail something with the Wits and Railleurs of this Age, to reconcile their Opinions and their Discourses to these Studies" (417) of a natural philosophy that contributes vitally to the theological and political order of the Restoration. Like Sprat, Boyle attempts in Style of the Scriptures to define a common ground for civilized debate-the moral and stylistic authority of the

"A Close (though Mystick) Connection"

6r

Bible-that will succeed where the discourses of politics in the r 64os and r6sos have failed. In this respect, Boyle's characterizations of his gentlemanly adversaries are intended, as his preface implies, to draw them into an arena of polite discourse where debates about the Bible can be sealed off from the sociopolitical challenges to privilege and property that the sectaries' attacks on scriptural authority make explicit. In attacking and appealing to the wits, then, Style of the Scriptures becomes a preemptive strike against those who knowingly and unknowingly undermine the bases of gentlemanly authority by refusing to accept the Bible as a transhistorical guarantee of the politicized rhetorics that Boyle both decries and exploits. Although Boyle's defense of biblical authority paradoxically calls attention to its own inadequacies as an imperfect supplement to a supposedly perfect text, it would be a mistake to underestimate the complexity and sophistication of its argument. Style of the Scriptures is a copious setting-forth of the grounding principles of the related studies of theology and experimental philosophy. It represents a significant departure from previous versions of the argument from design because Boyle uses the Bible to redefine aesthetic conceptions of order and of the methods that are employed to study them. By focusing on style rather than on exegesis, he directs his readers' attention to metaphors of complexity and mystery rather than to "keys" to interpreting the prophetic books of the Bible or specific doctrinal interpretations. By redefining the concept of order in the Bible, Boyle also reinscribes the relationships of the two books and reconceives the theoretical foundations of experimental natural philosophy. In contrast to traditional Aristotelian taxonomies prevalent in mid-seventeenth-century natural philosophy, Boyle offers the possibility of an ordered universe that nonetheless escapes any and all attempts to specify that order, that can be studied only by striving to ascertain the "Close (though Mystick) Connection[s]" of God's creation. In this respect, his essays-both theological and experimental-provide a significant contrast to the project of the seventeenth-century encyclopedists and taxonomers, such as Wilkins, who attempt to articulate with great precision an "empirical" basis for studying an ordered world. Yet, paradoxically, it is Boyle's theocentric paradigm of a mysterious order which transcends human attempts to understand it that becomes the basis for the "rise" of modern science associated with the Royal So-

Fallen Languages ciety. In the next two chapters, then, I explore some of the implications of these differing conceptions of order for attempts to theorize a basis for experimental philosophy and for semiotic systems intended to represent authoritatively the natural world. My subject in both chapters is what I shall call the crisis of Baconianism in late seventeenth-century England.

CHAPTER II

"Babel revers' d": Real Characters, Philosophical Languages, and Idealizations of Order

The decentering of the Bible as a logocentric guarantee of interpretive and ideological authority had profound consequences in seventeenthcentury England beyond debates about hermeneutics and style. Politically, as Boyle's and Stillingfleet's treatises demonstrate, controversies about the status of the Scriptures exacerbated religious and ideological conflicts; in the theater of representation the politicizing of the Logos led directly and indirectly to a number of attempts to supplement the authority of the Bible by constructing synthetic systems of representation that would reveal the harmonious structure of a divinely ordered creation. The real characters and universal language schemes that proliferate in England between 1640 and 168o attempt to accomplish what the Bible could no longer offer: a semiotic encoding of the order of the material and political worlds, an ideal of noisefree communication that, in theory, would transcend political and theological controversy, what John Wilkins called "that Humour of Scepticism and Infidelity which hath late so much abounded in the world." 1 Although seventeenth-century language reformers and proI.

John Wilkins, Of the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion (London, 1691),

I.

Fallen Languages ponents of universal language schemes almost invariably appeal to the notions of disinterested progress and the "true" state of the universe, their arguments, as Brian Vickers and I have suggested, are always politically interested. 2 In this respect, the rhetoric used to promote, defend, and apologize for universal language schemes and real characters in seventeenth-century England offers a good short course in the complex, ideologically divisive forms of discourse that characterize the Commonwealth and Restoration eras. The comparatively widespread attempts to develop and promote a "Real Character" -an ideographic system of representation that defines unproblematically what it names-are themselves evidence of the anxieties fed by the belief that the world had grown too complex to describe in conventional speech or, alternately, that everyday discourse had been corrupted by war, sectarianism, and political instability past the point where it could adequately describe the physical or metaphysical umverse. These fears are articulated-and combated-in a variety of ways by writers of virtually all political persuasions, from Winstanley and Fisher, to Boyle and Glanvill, to Locke and Shaftesbury, although the sources of their apprehensions and uncertainties differ. Proponents of real characters and universal language schemes, among them Wilkins, Cave Beck, George Dalgarno, and Francis Lodowick, envision an ideal semiotics that will establish a basis for the kind of certain knowledge that Boyle attributes only to God. Paradoxically, these efforts to construct an objectivist means of representation-suggested by the "real" in their real characters-are undone not simply by their commitment to a realist epistemology but also by their methodological reliance on a mystical associationism that constructs rather than unproblematically embodies a supposedly "essential" order of things. 2. Brian Vickers, "Restoration Prose Style: A Reassessment," in Nancy Struever and Brian Vickers, Rhetoric and the Pursuit of Truth (Los Angeles: Clark Library, 1985 ), 3 -76; Robert Markley, Two-Edg'd Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 30-55. In this chapter I concentrate on universal language schemes in England. To deal exhaustively with Continental projects would carry me beyond the bounds of this chapter as well as raise issues about the relationship between voluntaristic and deterministic views of natural philosophy that make me hesitant to generalize about the Continental tradition. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1970); and Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), esp. So-roo.

''Babel revers'd" In this respect, these schemes, particularly Wilkins's, reveal the difficulties late seventeenth-century writers have in trying to theorize a basis for scientific investigation that locates the authority for "real knowledge" in the works of nature rather than solely in the scriptural Logos: the trappings of an empiricist taxonomy, of probabilistic models of knowledge and representation, cannot conceal the workings of a coercive political idealism. 3 Scholarly accounts of universal language schemes and the related issues of stylistic reform and linguistic change in the seventeenth century frequently reproduce the polemics that they seek to describe. Since the 193os, many critics have followed the lead of R. F. Jones, who argues that prose style reform was influenced by the advent of modern scientific practice by members of the Royal Society; he and his followers recast seventeenth-century debates about language into the form of evolutionary narratives that trace the unproblematic "rise" of modern prose style and modern linguistic thought. 4 Although Jones's thesis has now been discredited, its progressivist assumptions have lingered in the dialectically related views that Wilkins and other proponents of real characters were either hopeless cranks or serious scholars whose work evinces the deeply embedded values of a 3· My argument in this chapter differs from that advanced by Richard W. F. Kroll in The Material Word: Literate Culture in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 187-91, 205-r 1, who maintains that Wilkins, like many of his contemporaries, views knowledge as contingent and relational. Kroll's point, it seems to me, is valid to the extent that we are willing to accept Wilkins's Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language as a demonstration, within the history of ideas, of a probabilistic philosophy. However, Wilkins, like Boyle, can acknowledge contingent or relational models and still be constrained by the binary structures of thought that Goux, Serres, Haraway, and others find endemic in Western philosophy, science, and language study. In this chapter, then, I address questions of how "contingent" values and structures of knowledge are constituted, defended, and culturally embedded. 4· See R. F. Jones et al., The Seventeenth Century: Studies in the History of English Thought and Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1951). This collection includes Jones's essays from the 1930s and 1940s. See also Robert Adolph, The Rise of Modern Prose Style (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968); Margreta de Grazia, 'The Secularization of Language in the Seventeenth Century," journal of the History of Ideas 41 (198o), 319-29; and John Steadman, The Hill and the Labyrinth: Discourse and Certitude in Milton and His Near-Contemporaries (Berkeley: University of California Press, r 984). For an important corrective to Jones, see Paul Arakelian, "The Myth of a Restoration Style Shift," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 20 (1979), 227-45. Vickers, "Restoration Prose Style," 3-76, and Kroll, Material Word, 1-7, also attack Jones's ahistorical assumptions and inconsistent methodology.

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seventeenth-century episteme. 5 In one sense, to rewrite the history of schemes for idealized semiotics in late Commonwealth and Restoration England is to challenge the evolutionary assumptions that have characterized previous discussions of the rise of modern linguistic and scientific thought. Real characters and universal language schemes, I shall argue, have no independent epistemological status as representations of the "real world"; they are instead politicized semiotics that paradoxically call attention to disruptions and inconsistencies within their own systems as well as within the historical discourses that they are intended to correct. What drives language projectors-from Comenius to Wilkins-is the energy generated by a crisis of linguistic faith, by the desire to create an authoritative semiotics that will suppress dialogical contention and promote sociopolitical stability. Their objective is to remove representation from history by enforcing a transhistorical yoking of physical and metaphysical order. Their language of progress, in this regard, cannot be described in terms of the rise of modern concepts of science and epistemology, as Jones and Robert Adolph would have it; it needs to be examined within Commonwealth and Restoration assumptions about social and political order. On March r9, r646/7, Boyle wrote to Samuel Hartlib: "If the design of the Real Character [then being promoted by Hartlib and members of his circle] take effect, it will in good part make amends to mankind for what their pride lost them at the Tower of Babel. And truly, since our arithmetical Characters are understood by all Nations of Europe the same ... I conceive no impossibility, that opposes the doing in words, that we see already done in numbers." 6 Boyle's com5. On universal language schemes in the seventeenth century, see particularly Murray Cohen, Sensible Words: Linguistic Practice in England, I640-1785 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); Sidonie Clauss, "John Wilkins' Essay Towards a Real Character: Its Place in the Seventeenth-Century Episteme," journal of the History of Ideas 43 (1982), 531-54; M. M. Slaughter, Universal Language Schemes and Scientific Taxonomy Theory in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Fredric C. Dolezal, "John Wilkins and the Development of a Structural Semantics," in Papers in the History of Linguistics, ed. Hans Aarsleff, Louis F. Kelly, and Hans Josef Niederehe (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1987), 271-81; and Theodore C. Singer, "Hieroglyphs, Real Characters, and the Idea of a Natural Language in English SeventeenthCentury Thought," journal of the History of Ideas 50 (1989), 49-70. 6. The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle in Five Volumes, ed. Thomas Birch (London, 1744), r: 22.

"Babel revers'd" parison of a real character to mathematical symbols is a crucial one for proponents of universal language schemes because it draws on the notion that mathematics is not a constructed system of representation but a "natural" reflection of the structure of the universe: the ideal of a perfect semiotics, in this regard, inheres in nature. Earlier in the seventeenth century, Galileo, echoing a tradition that goes back to ancient Greece, had claimed: "Philosophy is written in that vast book which stands forever open before our eyes, I mean the universe; but it cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it was written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word." 7 For Galileo, mathematics opens the universe to human understanding; for Boyle, mathematical characters are capable of repairing the damage done by human presumption at Babel. Both men, in effect, privilege mathematics (to use Galileo's metaphor) as a form of originary writing, an inscription of the natural order that antedates history and historical-that is, postlapsarian-communication. Similarly, in r666, Robert Hooke presents as an ideal form of representation "geometrical Algebra, the expressing of many and very perplex Quantities by a few obvious and plain Symbols: And therefore," he continues, "'twere to be wisht, that we could express the whole [natural] History in a few Letters or Characters." 8 Like Galileo and Boyle, Hooke grants mathematics-as a form of writing-priority over human speech, over historical utterances. His view, that the semiotics of mathematics is natural and transhistorical, is widespread, as we have seen, in the seventeenth century. In contrast, speech is typed as corrupt; its dialogical nature is rendered typologically, as it is in Boyle's letter to Hartlib, as the cacophony of languages heard at the Tower of Babel. The fall into historical language is the fall into sin and political instability. What is repressed in Galileo's, Boyle's, and Hooke's remarks is any sense that mathematics is a constructed system of communication. Serres argues that "mathematics presents itself as a successful dia7· Quoted in I. Bernard Cohen, The Newtonian Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 19. 8. Robert Hooke, "General Scheme or Idea of the Present State of Natural Philosophy," 64; cited in Slaughter, Universal Language Schemes, r 59·

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Iogue or a communication which rigorously dominates its repertoire and is maximally purged of noise." 9 The ideal of mathematics as communication can be represented by this diagram: Noise

Code or Repertoire

Even as the line between the speakers presupposes a perfect exchange of information-without remainder, without confusion, and without redundancy-the code by which information is transmitted is dialectically linked to and defined by its opposition to noise; noise is anything that is not integral to the message, that disrupts the transmission of information. The ideal communication of mathematics, then, depends on the inclusion of a third term, the code, to carry the information and the rigorous exclusion of a fourth term, noise, defined as anything that interferes with the linear process of exchange. However, Serres continues, the communication situation of mathematics "is not that simple. The irrational and the unspeakable lie in the details; listening always requires collating; there is always a leftover or residue, indefinitely. But then, the schema remains open and history possible." 10 The code, in other words, is implicated in the existence of noise; mathematics, as an ideal form of communication-maximum information, minimal noise-can define itself for Galileo, Boyle, and Hooke only in opposition to a perceived disorder that, paradoxically, is encoded, or anticoded, within its efforts to represent order unproblematically. As Kenneth J. Knoespel has demonstrated, mathematics is itself a rhetoric and is always described contextually; its forms of representation are never pure, never unmediated, and, as Jacques Derrida argues, never free from the assump9· Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. Josue V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 1 2.6. 10. Serres, Hermes, 126. Sec William Paulson, The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, r988), 30-52, for a useful discussion of Serres's work.

"Babel revers'd" tions of logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence. 11 Boyle's identification of universal comprehension with what is "already done in numbers" suggests that mathematics, for seventeenth-century thinkers, is identified with a divinely authored Logos; but, as Serres suggests, despite efforts to reify mathematics during the neoclassical age as a general equivalent to legitimate the semiotic exchange of information, it exists as a form of mediation between the real and the ideal, the physical world and an imagined realm of pure representation. As Foucault maintains, mathematics can be seen as a set of specific strategies within a symbolic economy of "mathesis," "the science of calculable order"; as both a metaphor for and an instantiation of order, it offers a "philosophy of representation" and an unmediated "knowledge of nature itself." 12 Mathematics presupposes rather than enacts a logocentric vision of communication as communion. Therefore, as a model for real characters and universal language schemes, seventeenth-century mathematics encourages views of systemic order as general and invariant and yet always in need of additional legitimation. The ideal of "arithmetical Characters" underwrites a kind of semiotic absolutism that represses dialogical communication. As Boyle, Wilkins, and their contemporaries recognize, the threat to mathematics and to mathematically based semiotics always lies "in the details," in the historical disruptions of the ideal of noise-free communication. For seventeenth-century linguistic reformers, the antithesis of what Sprat calls "mathematicall plainess" 13 is the confusion and noise symbolized by the Tower of Babel. For Boyle, Newton, and their contemporaries, Babel is a historical fact, not a parable or myth. The biblical account describes, in their minds, an actual state of affairs-linguistic and moral-that had existed before the construction of a tower symbolizing both the sin of human pride and the corruption of language that was a consequence of that sin. Seventeenth-century writers comr r. Kenneth J. Knoespel, "The Narrative Matter of Mathematics: John Dee's Preface to the Elements of Euclid of Megara (1570)," Philological Quarterly 66 (1987), 35-54. See also Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husser/'s "Origin of Geometry": An Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey (Stony Brook, N.Y.: Nicolas Hayes, 1978), 62-107. 12. Foucault, Order of Things, 73, 74· 13. Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society, ed. Jackson I. Cope and Harold W. Jones (St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1958), rr3. All quotations are from this edition.

Fallen Languages mitted to some version of millenarian reform see the restoration of Babel often as a prerequisite to, or occasionally as a consequence of, socioeconomic and political progress, however differently that progress may be defined. 14 Therefore, most proponents of real characters and universal languages invoke the theological argument that postlapsarian language conceals or corrupts the underlying order of nature to justify their appeal to the Adamic and utopian vision of a lost origin-the dream of a common language-rediscovered. Newton begins his r66r manuscript fragment "Of an Universall Language" by proclaiming that because the "Dialects of each Language [are] soe divers & arbitrary A generall Language cannot bee so fitly deduced from them as from ye natures of things themselves wch is ye same in all Nations & by which all language was at yc first composed." 15 This vision of a language restored to its isomorphic relationship with the "natures of things themselves" depends on the exclusion of noise, of the "divers & arbitrary" dialects that signify humankind's fall into dialogical utterances. The millenarian fervor that accompanies universal language schemes thus promotes them as a means to inscribe an authoritative system of writing that will reform and legitimate all forms of human intercourse by returning them to the "mathematical! plainess" they exhibited before Babel. In this regard, the real character is not, as Newton suggests, "deduced" from the "natures of things" but constructed to signify the privileging of its authoritative inscription over what otherwise appears an unruly and undisciplined nature. 16 14. On the significance of millenarianism in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought, and on the different ways in which it could be construed politically, see Michael McKeon, Politics and Poetry in Restoration England: The Case of Dryden's "Annus Mirahi/is" (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975); J. R. Jacob, Robert Boyle and the English Revolution (New York: Burt Franklin, 1977), esp. 42-44; James Holstun, A Rational Millennium: Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth-Century England and America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); and the essays collected in Millenarianism and Messianism in English Literature and Thought, I6so-I8oo, ed. Richard Popkin (Leiden: Brill, 1988). 1 5. Rpt. in Ralph W. V. Elliott, "Isaac Newton's 'Of an Universall Language,'" Modern Language Review 52 (1957), 13· 16. Tony Davies, "The Ark in Flames: Science, Language, and Education in Seventeenth-Century England," in The Figural and the Literal: Problems of Language in the History of Science and Philosophy I630-I8oo, ed. Andrew W. Benjamin, Geoffrey N. Cantor, and John R. R. Christie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 83102, argues persuasively that Wilkins's project is an exercise in grammatology, an effort to

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In his verses prefacing Cave Beck's The Universal Character (16 57), Joseph Waite maintains that Beck's system of numerical and alphabetical notation will prove "Th' Index of Speech, the dumb Interpreter; I . .. The travellers Relief; I Ferry of Nations Commerce" and will make possible "The Iliads in a Nut-shell; Tongues in Brief; I Babel revers' d." 17 For Waite and Beck, the universal character is not a representation of speech but a grounding for it; a real character eliminates noise, and-at least in theory-assumes the role that Boyle had envisioned a decade earlier of a semiotic system which parallels and complements mathematics, what Foucault calls "taxonomia," the science of tabular classification as an expression of a static and universal order. 18 Waite's millenarian rhetoric, like Newton's preface to his abortive universal language scheme, describes a self-contained and internally consistent semiotics that will repair a rent in the fabric of postlapsarian nature, returning human discourse to what Sprat called a pristine and ahistorical "primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver'd so many things, almost in an equal number of words" (r 13). For Waite and Beck, as for Wilkins, the universal character is thematized, agentless. The real character is granted an ontological priority over the "things" it describes; epistemological problems-how can one know the natures of things when they cannot be adequately represented?-are suppressed by the collusion of millennia! and utilitarian rhetoric. In short, "Babel revers'd." The typical modern reaction to the projects of Beck, Dalgarno, Wilkins, and others is voiced by M. M. Slaughter: "As linguistic enterprises we know the schemes to be nonsense." 19 But this seemingly obvious judgment imposes twentieth-century, or at least postEnlightenment, conceptions of sense, rationality, and post-Saussurean linguistics on projects that seek not to describe language or simply to classify natural phenomena but to construct a semiotics capable of privilege the written character over the nature that it is supposed to represent. This observation can be extended to include all semiotic systems in the seventeenth century that purport to order the natural world by inscribing it taxonomically. For Serres's revaluation of the image of Babel, see Maria Assad, "Michel Serres: In Search of a Topography," in Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science, ed. N. Katherine Hayles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 286-87. 17. Cave Beck, The Universal Character (London, r657), A6r. 18. Foucault, Ordero(Things, 73-74. 19. Slaughter, Universal Language Schemes, 3·

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enacting a political vision of order. The language schemes published in the decades after the Civil War testify to the ideological urgency motivating their authors-and, in Wilkins's case, members of the Royal Society and the Court-to control the dialogical and subversive tendencies of language by offering an authoritative ground for judging the theological and political efficacy of utterances, for establishing a monological means of signification. The image of restoring Babel in Commonwealth and Restoration England has explicit political connotations. After a divisive civil war characterized by a breakdown of censorship and a cacophony of voices struggling to articulate the rights of various factions, the ideological appeal of universal language schemes lies in the images of unity and structure they deploy; these images, like that of "Babel revers'd," function as a kind of secondorder typology to buttress (after r66o) the ideology of restoration, the metaphysics of a providential order. In this respect, Beck's The Universal Character, Dalgarno's Ars Signorum (166r), Lodowick's The Groundwork of a New and Perfect Language (1652) and "An Essay Towards an Universal Alphabet and Universal Primer" (published in the Transactions of the Royal Society in 1686), and Wilkins's Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668) strive to eliminate noise, to make all differences meaningful relationally, to describe these differences spatially rather than temporally, and to order dynamic modes of interaction by hierarchical schemes of classification. The totalizing rhetoric of language reformers and projectors in seventeenth-century England betrays the nervousness of an intellectual elite committed to achieving political, theological, and socioeconomic ends by stabilizing and regularizing forms of communication. As Serres argues in his discussions of information theory, all communication depends paradoxically both on the existence of noise, against which, and only against which, a meaningful message can define itself, and on the exclusion of that noise. Noise, interference, and disruption take the form of what Serres terms the "third man." "To hold a dialogue," he maintains, "is to suppose a third man and to seek to exclude him; a successful communication is the exclusion of the third man." Therefore, according to Serres, the "most profound dialectical problem [in the communication situation] is not the problem of the Other, who is only a variety-or a variation-of the Same,

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it is the problem of the third man." 20 The third man becomes the personification of noise who, by continually disrupting exchanges of information, midwifes ongoing reformulations of more complex forms of orderY For Dalgarno, Wilkins, Boyle, Sprat, Glanvill, Newton, and others involved in language reform and universal language schemes in seventeenth-century England, the third man assumes a number of specific names: Levelers, sectaries, Hobbists, atheists, Quakers, Ranters, Fifth Monarchists, materialists, dissenters, and other commonly invoked bogeymen who appear in the demonology of Restoration literary, historical, and political writing. 22 More generally, the third man who must be excluded is the specter of disorder itself, of political upheaval, of threats to property rights, of the chaos of civil war. Sprat, for example, explicitly links the turbulence of the Civil War and Commonwealth to the proliferation of dialogically agitated dialects and the "many fantastical terms ... introduc'd by our Religious Sects" (42). Wilkins states that one of the advantages of his universal language is that it will distinguish true religion from false: this designe will ... contribute much to the clearing of some of our Modern differences in Religion, by unmasking many wild errors, that shelter themselves under the disguise of affected phrases; which being Philosophically unfolded, and rendered according to the genuine and natural importance of Words, will appear to be inconsistencies and contradictions. And several of those pretended, mysterious, profound notions, expressed in great swelling words, whereby some men set up for reputation, being this way examined, will appear to be, either nonsence, or very flat and jejeune. 23 Serres, Hermes, 67. Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 14· 22. On reactions to the specter of radicalism and enthusiasm after the Restoration, see McKeon, Politics and Poetry, esp. 65-69; Nicholas Jose, Ideas of the Restoration in English Literature, r66o-7r (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 79-98; Steven Zwicker, Politics and Language in Dryden's Poetry: The Arts of Disguise (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 8-12; Richard L. Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil: The Radical Underground in Britain, r66o-r663 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and Greaves, Enemies under His Feet: Radicals and Nonconformists in Britain, r664r677 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). 23. John Wilkins, Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (London, r668), brr. All quotations are from this edition. 20.

21.

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As Wilkins's claims for his philosophical language suggest, one of the idealized aims of seventeenth-century language schemes is to banish the third man and the noise he symbolizes by creating clear divisions between what is communicable-and therefore "good" -within the system and what must be excluded on theological and ideological grounds. The radicals and sectaries-those who would disrupt the order represented by the ideological collusion of "mathematicall plainess" and political loyalty-are literally rendered unrepresentable and denied access, symbolically and politically, to the only means of semiotic authority by which they could seek to legitimate their theological and political views. 24 According to John Collins, Wilkins's scheme "so well pleased the King that his Majestie ... resolved to make him a Bishop upon the next opportunity," a promise Charles II subsequently kept. 25 In Bakhtinian terms, the universal characters promoted by Wilkins, Dalgarno, and others try to suppress the historicity of discourse into an atemporal and monological semiotic. Yet as Serres suggests, the very suppression of noise is crucial to the ongoing reconstitution of more complex forms of order-that is, more complex disseminations of ideology. In this respect, the rhetoric of contingency in Wilkins's work, to which Kroll calls attention, both acknowledges the disruptive power of noise and attempts to appropriate the languages of dissent and corruption as the means to produce more and more sophisticated visions of a hierarchically structured universe. Although Wilkins's Essay offers very different views of nature and representation from those found in Boyle's Style of the Scriptures, it, too, seeks to recuperate the complex structures of the physical world for a theocentric conception of order. The problem with ideal language schemes, in this regard, has less to do with their internal incoherence, as critics from Ralph Elliott to Slaughter have supposed, than with their investing authority in systems that are taken to correspond to the "natures of things themselves." Wilkins, after having acknowledged his "slender expecta24. On the political implications of stylistic and linguistic views after 166o, see Roger Pooley, "Language and Loyalty: Plain Style at the Restoration," Literature and History 6 (1980), 2-!8. 25. Quoted in Barbara Shapiro, john Wilkins: An Intellectual Biography, r6r4-r672 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 220. Shapiro's study remains the standard

biography.

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tions" that his scheme will ever be put into practice, "assert[s] with greater confidence, That the reducing of all things and notions to such kind of Tables, as are here proposed (were it as compleatly done as it might be) would prove the shortest and plainest way for the attainment of real Knowledge, that hath been yet offered to the World" (brv). He is, in effect, seeking to contain through his written taxonomy the uncertainty that Boyle registers in The Origines of Formes and Qualities when he discusses the chaotic state of contemporary systems of classifying matter. According to Boyle, 'twas very much by a kind of tacit agreement, that Men had distinguish'd the Species of Bodies, and that those Distinctions were more Arbitrary than we are wont to be aware of.... I have not found, that any Naturalist has laid down a determinate Number and sort of Qualities, or other Attributes, which is sufficient and necessary to constitute all portions of Matter.... [M]ost commonly Men look upon these as Distinct Species of Bodies, that have had the luck to have Distinct Names found out for them. 26 By seeking to reduce the mysterious order of the natural world to "Tables" of "real Knowledge," Wilkins privileges an "Arbitrary" system of signs over experimental knowledge; he shapes nature, in other words, to conform to a political vision of order. In this respect, he renders communication as an idealized fiction of inscripted taxonomy and hierarchical ordering, what Serres calls a "thanatocratic" science in which nature and the semiotics of representation are reduced to an isomorphic equation. Noise and complexity are repressed by a code that is (to borrow Serres's description of deterministic science) "stable, unchanging, redundant." 27 The idealized vision of "Babel revers' d" thus implies an effort to subsume history and individual or cultural agency within metanarratives of an essential order. The violence implicit in the hierarchical taxonomies of universal language schemes not only seeks to exclude the third man but presupposes the suppression of contingent differences between the self and other. As a basis for universal language 26. Robert Boyle, The Origines of Formes and Qualities (Oxford, r666), 199-200. All quotations are from this edition. 27. Serres, Hermes, roo.

Fallen Languages schemes, the "natures of things themselves," as Slaughter argues, recuperates essentialist, Aristotelian notions of the physical world. 28 For the proponents of a universal or real character, nature must be idealized to conform to conceptions of hierarchical order. Dalgarno, for example, asserts that "one who would impose the names of things rationally must first introduce into that chaos the form, beauty, and order of an ideal world existing in the mind, by a sort of logical creation." 29 This "ideal world" of perfect forms animates the language projects of the seventeenth century. Throughout his works, Wilkins emphasizes that natural philosophy and its systems of representation reveal "the Nature and Essence of the things themselves." 30 "If there be nothing in the naked essence of things that make them to differ," he maintains, "but what doth merely arise from Custom and positive Laws; why then Custom and Law would be able to render it a very virtuous and commendable thing for a man to be ingrateful, a breaker of compacts, a false witness, a perjured person." 31 As his examples indicate, Wilkins sees the denial of essential differences as a reckless invitation to social and legal disorder. His insistence that order inheres in the "naked essence of things" allows him to presuppose an objective view of the world and thereby to deny the constructed nature of his own principles. As Peter Dear observes, "an Aristotelian science does not involve formal procedures for demonstrating its own principles: the logic of the deductive structure requires that they simply be accepted at the outset." 32 In this regard, the essentialism of Wilkins and Dalgarno suggests that the real character requires no hermeneutic to produce its unmediated meaning, to reproduce "an ideal world existing in the mind." Hermeneutics itself is identified with the social disruptions that Wilkins fears, the Hobbesian rule of law and custom, as well as with scholastic accretions of competing meanings that need to be stripped away from the "naked essence" of truth. Because contingency is reduced to the status of accident, Wilkins is 28. Slaughter, Universal Language Schemes, esp. 3-5, 35. 29. George Dalgarno, Ars Signorum (London, 1661), 37; Slaughter's translation, Universal Language Schemes, 143. 30. John Wilkins, A Discourse Concerning a New Planet (London, 1684), 2.

3 I. Wilkins, Principles and Duties of Natural Religion, I s8. 32. Peter Dear, "Narratives, Anecdotes, and Experiments: Turning Experience into Science in the Seventeenth Century," in The Literary Structure of Scientific Argument: Historical Studies, ed. Peter Dear (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 139.

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able to free himself to concentrate on essentials-and to justify his political maneuverings in the turbulent era of the Commonwealth and Restoration. The schemes of Dalgarno and Wilkins, in this respect, presuppose that the "ideal world" of essence and truth is a shared realm of belief, beyond dialogical contention and questioning. Their systems require a subordination of agency to a generalized, essentialist concept of the self that suppresses both contingent circumstances and any sense of social or psychological agency capable of producing noise, destabilizing hierarchical schemes of representation, or promoting iteration, in Derrida's sense, rather than mere redundancy. 33 In this regard, Dalgarno's "logical creation" becomes the tyranny of an aesthetic ideology that subordinates the natural and political world to idealized and static visions of order. Wilkins's obsession with order permeates his description of his real character and philosophical language. It is, he states on the first page of his text, "the proper end and design of the several branches of Philosophy to reduce all things and notions unto such a frame, as may express their natural order, dependence, and relations" (r). As the verb "reduce" suggests, Wilkins's conception of "natural order" is hierarchical and static rather than complex and dynamic. Like Comenius, Wilkins seeks to reduce language to its "radicals"-"things and notions" -and then adds to these substantives indications of their grammatical and syntactical relationships. Encoded in this process of representational reduction is a view of language that presupposes that "every [linguistic] change is a gradual corruption" (8). For Wilkins, as for Sprat, Parker, and Boyle, the politicizing of language, particularly during the Civil War, is represented as a series of deviations from a standard of pristine, Adamic simplicity. In Wilkins's mind, "'tis evident enough that the first Language was con-created with our first Parents, they immediately understanding the voice of God speaking to them in the Garden. And how Languages came to be 33· On the concept of iteration, see Jacques Derrida, "Limited, Inc. abc ... ," trans. Samuel Weber, Glyph 2 (1977), 162-254: "lterability supposes a minimal remainder (as well as a minimum of idealization) in order that the identity of the self-same be repeatable and identifiable in, through, and even in view of its alteration. For the structure of iteration ... implies both identity and difference. Iteration in its 'purest' form-and it is always impure-contains in itself the discrepancy of a difference that constitutes it as iteration" (190).

Fallen Languages multiplyed, is likewise manifested in the Story of the Confusion of Babel" (2). Throughout the introduction to his Essay, "the Curse of Babel" functions as an image of linguistic corruption, moral decay, and political confusion. The real character and philosophical language, Wilkins states, are attempts to lift the "Curse of the Confusion" that attends the "multitude and variety of Languages" (13). He takes aim at two primary targets: the "variety" of languages, which must be replaced by his unambiguous semiotics, and the semantic instability of language itself, that can be corrected only by a real character which defines what it designates and which therefore cannot be corrupted to ambiguous or multiple meanings. The susceptibility of all existing languages to misinterpretation is, for Wilkins, a consequence of man's fall from grace, his fall into history. The urgency of his project-and the insistence of his rhetoric-derives from what he envisions as the redemptive function of his philosophical language. In this regard, the Essay is part of the mythology of restoration prevalent in England after r66o; it is a bizarre, semiological equivalent of, say, Dryden's heroic plays, an attempt to reify as the order of an "ideal world" the class- and gender-based prerogatives of Restoration England. As Slaughter demonstrates, Wilkins's Essay evidences a conception of "natural order, dependence, and relations" taken over uncritically from Aristotelian taxonomies that represent the natural world as hierarchically structured. 34 It creates a conceptual framework that describes the "perfection" and "simplicity" of these relations in transhistorical and therefore static terms. The basis of Wilkins's "establishing a Philosophical Character or Language, is a just Enumeration of all such things and notions to which names are to be assigned" (r9); this "Enumeration" takes the form of page after page of tables designed to set forth unambiguously "such things or notions as are to have Marks or Names assigned to them" (20). The "Chief Difficulty and Labour" in this undertaking, he admits, "will be so to contrive the Enumeration of things and notions, as that they may be full and 34· See Slaughter, Universal Language Schemes, 3-ro, 63-65, 145-52. John Ray, the naturalist, helped Wilkins compile his tables to represent the order of the natural world. On debates in the seventeenth century about classification, see Philip R. Sloan, "John Locke, John Ray, and the Problem of the Natural System," Journal of the History of Biology 5 (1972), I-53·

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adequate, without any Redundancy or Deficiency as to the Number of them, and regular as to their Place and Order" (20). Even as his "Tables" present elaborate systems of classification that create a spatialized system of representation, however, they depend on a prior and absolute knowledge of the order in which all "things and notions" have their unambiguous and unassailable places. Therefore, Wilkins studiously avoids the epistemological problems of induction that preoccupy Boyle; his method of "Enumeration" reduces substantives into "Classes, according to their several kinds, with such an order of precedence and subsequence as their natures will bear; this being the proper end and design of that which we call Method, to separate the Heterogeneous, and put the Homogeneous together" (14). This "method" of classification that isomorphically yokes real characters to what they "naturally" represent requires making explicit the kind of knowledge that Boyle, for example, finds humanly unattainable; it presupposes that the real character can decipher and encode those "Close (though Mystick) Connection[s]" among the elements of creation that, for Boyle, can be apprehended only through revelation. For Wilkins, however, this kind of authoritative knowledge is both a prerequisite for a philosophical method and the goal toward which his character strives. Paradoxically, the universal order that Wilkins claims can be made manifest only by adopting his semiotic scheme must first be inscribed in his tables in order to serve as a basis from which a philosophical language can be brought into being. Wilkins's recognition of his dilemma-of the inaccessibility of an absolute order which he must describe before he can represent itplagues the author throughout his Essay and necessitates, as he acknowledges, various efforts to fudge what he does not know. "These Affinities [in his tables]," he admits, "are sometimes less proper and more remote [than they should be], there being several things shifted into these places, because I knew not how to provide for them better" (22). Because Wilkins makes the explicit claim that his taxonomies reflect the order of the universe, any lapses within his scheme threaten the theocentric principle that underlies his methods of division, classification, and hierarchical arrangement. Therefore, he must assert general principles of organization that transcend local difficulties or render them, within his system, meaningless. Wilkins relies on two basic relations as principles of order: binary opposition and hierar-

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chical structuring. These relations, at times, may become complicated, but-and this is a crucial point-they are never represented as complex or indeterminate. Instead, to demonstrate the "Affinities" that exist among "substantives," Wilkins combines oppositional and hierarchical methods of organization to produce an idealized vision of the political and natural world. In explicating the characters to represent "Relations of EQUALITY or Fellowship," Wilkins demonstrates the antithetical structure of his method. These relations, he asserts, are founded on either" Mutual Love: or Hatred, which should be chiefly upon the account of Vertue: or Vice" (251). These oppositions-their antithetical nature emphasized by the colons that separate the elements-structure subsequent algorithmic relations. "FRIEND" and "ENEMY'' (and their various synonyms) are opposed, their antithetical relationship described by "Conversation with others, chiefly upon the account of Pleasure; or Segregation from others." This opposition, in turn, structures that obtaining between "COMPANION" and "SOLITARY," which is elaborated by "Near: or remote Habitation" and the subheadings of" NEIGHBOUR" and "FOREIGNER" and their respective synonyms (251). As the colons, the italics, and the structuring of these headings and subheadings on the page suggest, Wilkins employs a variety of graphic and typesetting conventions to reinforce the oppositional and hierarchical ordering of the categories he defines and arranges. But his principles make sense as the bases for the graphic inscription of a real character only if they are not complicated by dynamic interactions among categories, say, a witty enemy or a closemouthed friend. He also must assume a basis for his scheme" Conversation with others" -which both encodes gentlemanly values (talk as opposed to labor) and co-opts the historical, dialogical nature of speech into his idealized vision of sociopolitical order. Political disagreements between friends of the same social class, for example, seem unrepresentable. His antitheses try to deny the middle ground of ambiguity, the interposition of noise. They encode Wilkins's view of the world that seeks to exclude the third man who mediates between social self and a- or antisocial other-even as his philosophical language stands as a testament to the parasite's power to disrupt and to enable communication. For cultural historians, Wilkins's Essay is less significant for its ec-

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centricities than for its encyclopedic registering of a seventeenthcentury gentleman's social, economic, and political values. We must be careful, in this context, to distinguish between Wilkins's shifting political allegiances (he was Cromwell's brother-in-law and a supporter of the Commonwealth before the Restoration and a friend of the Court several years later) and the inclusive ideology that he promotes. Like Boyle, Wilkins attempts to subsume political differences within principles of Protestant and upper-class solidarity. The basis for sociopolitical order in his Essay becomes relationships of ownership and property. When Wilkins seeks to clarify his conception of "natural order," we can witness a fascinating game of ideological free association taking place. Under the heading "oECONOMICAL POSSESSIONS," for example, he seeks to represent not simply material goods but their socioeconomic "Place and Order": By ... Estate, Goods, Substance, Stock, Ability, Chattels, hold, injoy, seized of, occupy, indow, in hand, enter upon, are intended such kinds of things as are necessary upon several accounts for the use, preservation, and well-being of a Family. And although divers of these things, as Land, Buildings, &c. be common as well to Political and Ecclesiastical Bodies, yet do they (as was said before) originally belong to Families, to which all other Associations were subsequent, and in which they were founded. To this may be adjoyned that other Notion signifying the benefit accruing to us by our Possessions, styled REVENUE, Income, Intrado, Patrimony, Rent, Profit, Endowment, Steward, Fee, Vails, Perequisites, the proceed. (254) Wilkins seeks to encode in his real character a "natural order" of "OECONOMICAL POSSESSIONS" that privileges the patrilineal family as a literate, landholding, and legally constituted entity with the ability to collect rent, seize goods, foreclose mortgages, employ stewards, exact fees, and generally exercise its legal as well as economic authority to preserve its estate, goods, stock, chattels, and so on. As Wilkins says in his Principles and Duties of Natural Religion, "every relation of superiority and dominion [is] a distinct engagement to subjection" (228). In an economy of superiority and subjection, the real character is designed not simply to represent the family but to constitute it in

Fallen Languages

such a way that economic possessions and the patrilineal descent of property are united, implicitly banishing those who are without income, profits, and endowments to the margins of a suspect historical and local representation. Women, for example, exist outside the "us" who profit by "our Possessions," although their bodies are literally the means by which property descends from one generation of men to the next. Because "all other Associations [are] subsequent" to the patrilineal family, the principles that underlie Wilkins' representation of "oECONOMICAL POSSESSIONs" structure his models of all social relations. His conception of "Civil Relations" reproduces an idealized and static social hierarchy, founded on the opposition of the notions of "DEGREES, [including] Place, Quality, Rank, Order, Scutcheon, Coat of Arms, [and] Herald" to "the word PARI1Y, Levelling" (264). Political order embodies a hierarchical set of values; leveling is associated with a lack of order, with the kind of "variety" that Wilkins anathematizes, as we have seen, under the phrase "the Curse of Babel." Arranged as a ladder on the page, the "natural order" of "Civil Relations" reproduces a rigid division of social ranks, from "KING" and "PRINCE"; to "Orders of Subjects," divided into general headings ("LORD," "GENTLEMAN") and "more special with regard to the Degrees in Liberal Professions" ("GRADUATE," "cANDIDATE"); to "PEOPLE," subdivided into "ciTIZEN" and "YEOMAN"; and last and least to the "Lower sort," "Aggregately Rabble, Segregately VILLAIN, BEGGAR[,] according to their want of Dignity: or wealth" (264). As in his ordering of the family, women are excluded not so much from the domain of representation but from the systematizing logic that conceives of society as a vertical arrangement of power relations. Given the political bias informing this "natural order," it is no surprise that the Essay was welcomed by the King as a defense of the politics of privilege. For all his rhetoric, then, Wilkins cannot articulate a coherent theory underlying the real character. In place of a metalanguage to describe how his semiotics can "naturally" reflect the sociopolitical order, he reproduces upper-class assumptions that naturalize "Civil Relations" as the material basis of representation. In effect, his notion of political order reinscribes both the patrilineal ideology of his era and the transhistorical models of idealized systems which he adopts from mathematics and Aristotelian taxonomy. Given the reflexive

"Babel revers'd" logic of his hierarchical representations of social relations, Wilkins has no means to question or generate pressure against the politicized model that he creates. He cannot describe dynamic interactions, only repetitive elaborations of what he has already ideologically constructed as "real." The political values that underlie Wilkins's taxonomies are encoded also within his conception of the real character itself. The logic of hierarchy is thus reflected in the logic of representation. "Every Radical word in the Tables," Wilkins explains, "is supposed to be a Substantive; though they could not all of them be so expressed, because of the defect of proper words for them in the present Languages; upon which account there is a necessity of expressing some of them by Adjectives, and some by an Aggregate of words: but they are all of them to be understood as being simple Substantives" (299). Whatever concessions Wilkins makes to the imperfections of existing languages, he refuses to acknowledge any complexities within the relations he describes, any instability within or among "simple Substantives." Substantives cannot be accidental or historically contingent; they cannot change or evolve. In this respect, his characterizing of the "relations" among these substantives is spatial rather than temporal; action in Wilkins's philosophical language is defined solely in terms of the acting and suffering of simple radicals: Though every Noun Substantive have not an Active or Passive belonging to it either in the Greek, Latin, English, &c., yet according to the Nature and Philosophy of things, whatsoever hath an Essence, must likewise have an Act; either of Being or becoming: or of Doing or being done: or of making or being made: to be, or do. And consequently every Radical Substantive which is capable of Action, should have an Active or Passive formed from it, which is commonly called a Verb. (3oo) In Wilkins's philosophical language, substantives may be "real" but the actions they perform or suffer can be represented only as the accidental relationships between or among objects and ideas. Because the real character is privileged as real and essential-because it is designed to resist what Wilkins sees as the fate of all other languages, corruption-action is restricted to reproducing the oppositional and

Fallen Languages

hierarchical relationships that are encoded in his tables. Syntax, as a modern linguist would define it, seems almost an afterthought, relegated largely to expressing the functions and hierarchies of "things" and "notions." Syntactical structures are either "Customary and figurative" or "Natural and regular"; the former are constrained by the denotative precision of the real character (even irony is to be signaled by "some mark for direction, when things are to be so pronounced" [3 56]), the latter are characterized by determinate word order: subject-verb-object, substantive-adjective, and so on. What Murray Cohen calls the "bewildering complex minimum" of Wilkins's tabular semiotics might be more accurately described as a series of rule-bound complications that resist complexity, dialogical instability, and historical transformation. 35 In this regard, the Essay represents a Christianized Aristotelianism, an effort to construct a graphic scheme of semiotic order that reproduces the oppositional and hierarchical structure of its sociopolitical world. The relatively little space that Wilkins devotes to syntax suggests that ultimately the Essay is more concerned with the ends it envisions than with the means it develops. For the author and, one supposes, for his readers, the adoption of the real character is secondary to promoting the metaphysics of order on which any universal semiotics must, by definition, be based. In this respect, it is important to distinguish between the failure of the Essay to transform writing and the comparative success of the ideology that underwrites it. Those writers who praise the work, for example, rely on the aesthetic vocabulary of gentlemanly compliment: "The Character," says an anonymous author in the early eighteenth century, "is Natural, Graceful, and Easie, containing a lively Picture, Description, or indeed Definition of the thing it represents; the Language [is] numerous, Copious and Noble, ... and more full and expressive than any extant." 36 For this writer, the Essay does not transform ideals of communication but accommodates itself to them. As radical, as bizarre, as Wilkins's semiotics may seem, it is ultimately the product of a conservative impulse to disseminate values that its potential consumers already hold. Neither Wilkins nor his contemporaries, however, were deceived 35· Cohen, Sensible Words, 32.. 36. The Athenian Oracle, a Collection of Mercuries (London, 1704), in Slaughter, Universal Language Schemes, 176.

I;

33 s- 36. Cited

"Babel revers'd,

Bs

about the practicality of instituting a real character or a universal language. Even the most dedicated advocates of these semiotic schemes recognize that what they are producing are elaborate justifications for the status quo, imperfect taxonomies of an idealized structure presumed to exist in the natural world. Wilkins, in particular, seems to regard his Essay as a manifesto, a call to action that is ideologically useful precisely because it preserves what is valuable in his civilization. In his eyes, its failure lies not in its idealizations but almost quixotically in the inability of the material-and political-world to achieve the degree of stability required by his semiotics. In their efforts to return language to the "natures of things themselves," Wilkins and his fellow proponents of real characters are forced to admit that these natures are imperfectly understood and that consequently both words and things are subject to contested interpretations. In his Dedicatory Epistle, Wilkins acknowledges, even as he asserts the value of his labors, that he has "but very slender expectations" of bringing a real character "into Common use" (brv). A decade later, John Wallis, Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford and a prominent member of the Royal Society, offers this account of Wilkins's view of his project: Not that [Wilkins] did expect, this Real Character of his, and his Philosophical Language, should universally obtain; and all Books be translated into it: But, to shew the thing to be fesible; and divers Advantages which might arise thence, if it could so obtain. And to demonstrate the thing it self to be Practicable; He was pleased (when his Book was newly made publick) to write a Letter to me, in his Real Character; to which I return'd an Answer in his Philosophical Language: And we did perfectly understand one another, as if written in our own Language. 37 Wallis's sympathetic yet skeptical account reduces his friend's work to a diversion or, at best, a theoretical exercise in grammatology. If the real character is "Practicable" -that is, internally consistent enough to provide a grammar for writing as intelligibly as one could in English-it is also, according to Wallis, based on idealized assump37· John Wallis, Defence of the Royal Society (London, r678), 17. All quotations are from this edition.

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tions about the correspondence between words and things, between constructed semiotics and the "natures of things themselves." In r66r, Wallis tells his reader, he told Dalgarno that the latter's plan for a real character in Ars Signorum was not "likely to obtain in Practice": For all Persons, to learn his Character, and to have all Books, Written in it; is the same thing as to Translate all Books into One Language, and to have this Language learned by All. Which if it cannot be hoped, of any of the Languages now in being (which have the advantage of being already understood, by more than ever are like to learn that other:) much less is it to be hoped for, of a NewLanguage, now to be contrived. And, in case men should be willing, to change the Way of Writing, from Vocal to Real Characters: there would soon arise a like Variety of Real Characters, (each fansying his own way the best,) as now there is of Vocal Languages. (r6) As in his comments on Wilkins's Essay, Wallis conceives of the real character as a form of synthetic inscription that holds together only so long as it is confined to the printed page. Once Dalgarno's real character comes into competition with "Vocal Languages" (or alternative characters), it is exposed as an arbitrary system that will prove susceptible to a variety of reinscriptions. Although without apparently intending his comments to be an attack on the idea of universal languages and real characters, Wallis effectively demolishes the foundational assumptions for Dalgarno's and Wilkins's schemes by demystifying the claims of these systems to embody the natures of things in a transparent semiotics. In this respect, Wallis's comments call attention to the dialogical and political nature of representation that underlies-and undermines-the claims made in the seventeenth century for schemes to undo the curse of Babel. Ultimately, as Wallis intimates, the very idealism of Wilkins's and Dalgarno's works dictates that they remain incomplete and imperfect. As Wilkins admits when he nearly begs the Royal Society to follow up on his work, his is an essay toward a real character, an imperfect realization of a goal not yet in sight, a work that depends ultimately on the success of natural philosophy in delivering a complete and un-

''Babel revers'd, ambiguous taxonomy of the material world and on an orderly maintenance of familial and political relations. Having promised to deliver a work "sufficient for the business to which it pretends, namely the direct expression of all things and notions that fall under discourse" (arv), Wilkins must later in his work include a long list of those "things" which cannot be signified by his character: "all such as are appropriated to particular Places or Times," including "Titles of Honour," "Titles of Office and Place, "Degrees in Professions," "Law Terms," and "several terms of Heraldry"; things that "are continually altering, according to several ages and times," including "Vest and Garments," "Kinds of Stuff [cloth]," "Games and Plays," "Drinks," "Meats," and "Tunes for Musick, or Dauncing"; "the names of several Tools belonging to Trades"; and "the names of divers sects, whether Philosophical, Political, or Religious" (29 5 -96). Significantly, what Wilkins cannot fit into his semiotic scheme are elements of exchange-symbolic, material, and political-that resist the essentializing tendencies of hierarchical valuation based on an absent but legitimating general equivalent. As Wallis suggests and as Dalgarno comes to recognize in the r68os, the real character is undone by the very act of its creation, its attempts to eliminate the differences which writing preserves. It posits ideographic representation as a material rather than a symbolic construct, yet once its ideal symbols become "things"-a system of discourse-they acquire a conventional, historical, and, as Wallis recognizes, therefore corruptible nature. When it is put into practice, the real character becomes open to the dialogical processes of interpretation that disrupt the isomorphic relationship between sign and signified which it presumes to embody. Once described, the real character is no longer a unitary ideal but an arbitrary and synthetic representation to impose order on things "which are continually altering." Wilkins's real character, then, might stand as a cultural icon for the unfinished, lost, abandoned, and provisional schemes which make up the seventeenth-century history of attempts to restore Babel. These relics-from Newton's unfinished manuscript to the lost "discourse" delivered by John Keogh to the Dublin Philosophical Society in r68 s-testify to the inability of real characters to represent completely what their proponents invariably saw or came to realize was

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an "incomplete" and incompletely understood nature. 38 By the time the Essay was published in 1668, taxonomy was in the process of becoming a minor and marginal science; it represents precisely the foregrounding of writing that Boyle's experimental philosophy, at least on one level, was designed to counter. When they seek to embody their visions of ideal order in their real characters, Dalgarno and Wilkins are forced to describe relationally differences that are constantly being redescribed as nature itself is perceived to change. The more information universal language schemes must process, in other words, the greater the risks of noise, of disruptions in transmission, of inadequacies revealed in the code. When confronted by discrepancies and anomalies within the "natures of things themselves," proponents of universal languages either give up, as Newton does, or leave gaping holes in their schemes, as Wilkins admits that he is forced to do. Significantly, it is at precisely these moments-when the elaborate fiction of objective and universal encoding breaks down-that we can glimpse underlying Wilkins's and his contemporaries' theorizing an associative logic that has less to do with a "scientific" impulse than with the "traces," in Derrida's sense, of occult presuppositions that haunt their construction of the "real." Wilkins understandably makes a great show of the objective and scientific aspects of his enterprise: to ensure the accuracy of his tables of trees, minerals, plants, and so on, he enlisted the help of John Ray, perhaps the most noteworthy naturalist of the time. Yet the intricacy of Wilkins's system operates less scientifically than as an imperfect means of mediation between what Vickers calls the occult and scientific mentalities of the seventeenth century. Vickers defines the occult as a kind of monological reasoning based on analogy; logical connections are subordinated to the manipulation of symbols-numerical, astrological, and alchemical-as an end in itself. 39 A sympathetic relationship exists between natural objects and their occult manifesta38. See K. Theodore Hoppen, The Common Scientist in the Seventeenth Century: A Study of the Dublin Philosophical Society, I 683- no8 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, r 970 ), r 55. 39· Brian Vickers, "On the Function of Analogy in the Occult," in Hermeticism and the Renaissance: Intellectual History and the Occult in Early Modern Europe, ed. Ingrid Merkel and Allen G. Debus (Washington: Folger Library, 1988), 265-92. See also Michael Heyd, "The New Experimental Philosophy: A Manifestation of 'Enthusiasm' or an Antidote to It?" Minerva 25 (1987), 423-40.

''Babel revers,d, tions in various, and often interlocking, symbolic systems. As Vickers notes, this sympathetic relationship between the natural world and the means used to represent it is characteristically anthropomorphic and animist; the physical world is not the Cartesian realm of mechanistic forces but one of souls and spirits operating in unseen ways. Yet where Vickers discerns a firm division between the occult mind and the scientific imagination developing during the seventeenth century, Wilkins's project undoes this distinction by positing an identity between his real character and what it describes: the arbitrary is invested by Wilkins and by other language schemers, such as Dalgarno, with qualities of the inevitable, natural, and ideal. 40 The "logical creation" that Dalgarno envisions cannot free itself of the "traces" of sympathetic manipulation that underwrite the absolute knowledge required to transform ideographs from representations to manifestations of essence. And, as Wilkins's visionary hopes for his philosophical language suggest, the real character has material consequences that as easily could be demonstrations of the power of the magus as reflections of the "natures of things themselves." The essentialist conceptions of mind and nature on which the real character is based function as a kind of displaced mysticism, an idealism that both enables and resists Wilkins's deployment of his method. The art of combining real characters into "complex Propositions and Discourses" is called, by Wilkins, "Grammar," which he divides into" Natural Grammar, (which may ... be stiled Philosophical, Rational, and Universal) [and] should contain all such Grounds and Rules, as do naturally and necessarily belong to the Philosophy of letters and speech in the General," and "Instituted and Particular Grammar, [which] doth deliver the rules which are proper and peculiar to any one Language in Particular" (297). This distinction presup40. See Brian Vickers, "Introduction," Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 3-44, for his view that fundamental differences exist between occult and scientific epistemologies and world-views in the seventeenth century. For opposing views, see Simon Schaffer, "Godly Men and Mechanical Philosophers: Souls and Spirits in Restoration Natural Philosophy," Science in Context r (1987), 55-88; and Karin Johannisson, "Magic, Science, and Institutionalization in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," in Hermeticism and the Renaissance, ed. Merkel and Debus, 251-61. My emphasis is close to Schaffer's: the oppositions that Vickers and others seek to impose on seventeenth-century thinking are the product of post-Enlightenment disciplinary distinctions.

Fallen Languages

poses an unchanging nature and an authoritative means to describe it-"Philosophical, Rational, and Universal"-that has escaped his predecessors, such as Duns Scotus and Tommaso Campanella, who "were so far prejudiced by the common Theory of the languages they were acquainted with, that they did not sufficiently abstract their rules according to Nature" (297-98). Wilkins's conception of nature, as I have suggested, is idealized and hierarchical; it must be assumed before it can be inscribed in the real character. His attempt, then, to inscribe nature in his semiotic, to privilege a logocentric ideology of the real, depends on his manipulating characters and grammars to produce the harmonious nature he already assumes. In this regard, his ordering of nature represents the end of an occult process which reduces, as far as it is able, history into taxonomy, time into space. "The word SPACE," Wilkins tells his readers, is a name importing the more general notion of that wherein any thing is contained or done; { Time. Comprehending both

Place. Situation. (r86)

The spatial arrangement of these terms on the page-a practice Wilkins employs and varies throughout his treatise-suggests that the constitutive metaphor of the Essay is the grid, the stacking and shelving of "things" in a manner that owes as much to the sympathetic manipulation of John Dee as it does to the geometry of Descartes. Space subsumes time and historical contingencies, the specifics of class, gender, and theology that exist as unrepresentable traces within "Situation." The spatial geometry of hierarchical ordering in the Essay denies the role of inference in favor of what we might call a taxonomy of immanence. 41 The universalist tendency evident in Wilkins, as George Steiner notes, depends ultimately on the mystical belief in "a lost primal or paradigmatic speech," and it is precisely this strain that presupposes the power of occult manipulation called forth to fill 4I. On the role of inference in Restoration biblical criticism, see Kroll, Material Word, 239-74·

"Babel revers' d" in or paper over the gaps when a complex nature resists the violence of an idealized grammatological order. 42 Space becomes the order of an idealized "logical creation," of a semiotic that mystifies and mystically encodes the ideology of Restoration, of" Babel revers'd." In an important sense, then, the real characters and universal language schemes of the seventeenth century superimpose occult and experimental paradigms. Their quixotic attempts to fix nature, to determine relationships among substantives, testify to the efforts of natural philosophers and their intellectual allies to deal with an explosion of knowledge, the development of new technologies-from the air pump to the microscope-that redefine what "nature" and the "natures of things themselves" are or might be. In this respect, the fascination of universal language projectors with taxonomy can be seen as an attempt to finesse-or repress-the epistemological problems that seventeenth-century natural philosophy poses. Wilkins's method, however, might be described as rational imposition through mystical analogy, a hierarchical structuring which presupposes the "order of an ideal world" that remains beyond the capacity of rational observation to describe. The universal language schemes of the 165os and 166os, despite their authors' disclaimers, operate on a principle analogous to the "Close (though Mystick) Connection" that Boyle finds everywhere at work in the Bible. In this regard, what we might call the impure method of Wilkins, Dalgarno, and even Newton represses the historical agency of the self because it ultimately depends on mystical or occult conceptions of the soul as part of the "order of an ideal world" that exists both in the mind and in creation. The underlying assumption of the semiotic taxonomers is that the mind is capable of reflecting unproblematically-without remainder, without noise or interference-the perfection of a divinely authored creation. The image of "Babel revers'd" associates the ideal of a philosophical, Adamic language with visions of a prelapsarian unity of creation, with aspects of hermetic wisdom, with millenarian expectations of man and nature redeemed. The language schemes, then, represent one of the many dis42. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 73·

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placements-or transformations-of the occult into utopian schemes for reform, for a kind of cultural alchemy that will cut rather than untie the Gordian knot of postlapsarian history as it is represented by the confusion of Babel. 43 In a related sense, Wilkins's obsession with the spatial arrangement of his tables links his Essay to the universal histories that proliferated in the first half of the seventeenth century and to Newton's euhemeristic manuscripts which date from the I68os and after. Works such as John More's A Table from the Beginning of the World (London, I593), Anthony Munday's A Brief Chronicle of the Successe of Times from Creation (London, I 6 I I), and Henry Isaacson's Saturni Ephemerides: Tabula Historico-chronologica (London, I633) arrange events from biblical and pagan accounts chronologically to provide, in Knoespel's words, "both a visual scheme of metaphysical order and an incentive to conduct further research." 44 The blank spaces in these folios can be read, as Kroll argues in a somewhat different context, as the sites of Lockean inference or, as Knoespel suggests, as gaps that invite the creation of narratives to connect fragmentary texts, to provide a master narrative capable of demonstrating the providential ordering of history. 45 In this context, Wilkins's elaborate structuring of the elements of natural and political relations can be seen as an attempt to make explicit the connections within inferential logic, to scientize the imagination, to offer what amounts to a synchronic chronology. Because Wilkins describes the history of linguistic change as a process of corruption, his tabular presentation of metaphysical order can offer only a steady-state version of the efforts of More, Munday, Isaacson, and later Newton to make sense of history. History-the contingent fashions and politics that Wilkins cannot work 4 3. On seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century utopias and utopian schemes, see Frank Manuel and Fritzie Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 205-410; and Holstun, Rational Millennium. 44· Kenneth J. Knoespel, "Milton and the Hermeneutics of Time: Seventeenth-Century Chronologies and the Science of History," Studies in the Literary Imagination 22 (1989), 20. For a thorough discussion of Renaissance chronologies, see Donald J. Wilcox, The Measure of Times Past: Pre-Newtonian Chronologies and the Rhetoric of Relative Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 45· See Kroll, Material Word, 270-74; Kenneth J. Knoespel, "Newton in the School of Time: The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended and the Crisis of SeventeenthCentury Historiography," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 30 (1989), 19-41.

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into his Essay-is, in one respect, what his real character strives to conquer. The past is reinscribed as the universal history of man and nature on the verge of a millennia! redemption to be midwifed by his idealized semiotic. Wilkins shares with Boyle, then, the vision of an endless progress in knowledge capable of transcending the languages of Babel. Wilkins's real character is paradigmatic of efforts, particularly after the Restoration, to develop a natural philosophy that defines itself in opposition to and yet paradoxically preserves "traces" of mystical explanations of the workings of the natural world. Although Boyle and Wallis voice reservations about the practicality of adopting real characters and philosophical languages, they are sympathetic to the impulse behind Wilkins's Essay to establish a theoretical basis for experimental science, to describe reflexively the isomorphism between a coherent semiotic and an ordered universe. Like Bacon and Boyle, Wilkins perceives his project as a masculinist imposition of order on a feminized nature. 46 His massive, convoluted Essay, his repression of action into an idealized nominalist order, can be seen, then, as a failed attempt to theorize a basis for the collection of data, for Baconian science-an attempt to draw a close though mystical connection between human knowledge and the "natures of things themselves." Lacking a complete taxonomy of nature to legitimate the relational complexity of his semiotics, Wilkins can reproduce, as Slaughter notes, only the hierarchical conceptions of order that inform his project from the start. He can only recast, not undo, the "curse of Babel." As Andrew Marvell demonstrates in his "Instructions to a Painter" poems, the use of biblical typology in the 166os can be turned against the mythos of the Restoration and used to expose the political shortcomings of the Restoration settlement and the Second Dutch War. In this regard, the image of Babel in the late seventeenth century has subversive as well as Adamic connotations: it is a symbol of human pride and power as well as cooperation, an archetypal topos of man's overreaching his natural-and subservient-role in the universe. In contrast to Boyle's humility and Newton's reticence to publish, Wilkins exhibits more of the hubris of the magus who seeks to manipu46. For an important revisionist account of Bacon as an ideological marker in the Restoration, see Alvin Snider, "Bacon, Legitimation, and the 'Origin' of Restoration Science," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 32 (1991), 119-38.

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late the physical world by the force of his intellect. His mystical associationism, the traces of the occult that inhabit the Essay, identify his project with literary celebrations of the Restoration settlement, particularly the providentialist propaganda that elevates political crises to typological demonstrations of God's intentionsY The real and the ideal, the physical and the spiritual, are conflated to produce an apology for the order that Wilkins envisions to redeem a fallen world. "Babel revers'd," then, implies a double, ironic perspective on ideal language schemes: the phrase, and the complex of ideas underlying it, suggests both the heroic act of restoration, of constructing a universal order, and the failure of the heroic ethos in the 166os. The image of Babel, in this regard, embodies heroic presumptions as well as gimcrack projects doomed from the start; it recalls the literary yo kings of heroic self-praise and ironic self-mockery that figure prominently in poetry and the drama between 166o and 1688. Because of its ideological and typological instability, however, Babel resists simple reconstructions of its significance. Like the Bible, it becomes the site and the occasion for struggles over who defines and who interprets representations of political, social, and religious order. It testifies as well to the ambiguous position of experimental philosophers, particularly in the Royal Society, who sought both to uphold the Bible and received religion and to supplement them by their investigations. In this respect, the image of Babel extends emblematically beyond the province of universal language projectors to cast its shadow over seventeenth-century natural philosophy. 4 7. On the heroic pretensions and antiheroic failures of the Restoration, see Michael Neill, "Heroic Heads and Humble Tails: Sex, Politics, and the Restoration Comic Rake," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 24 (1983), 115- 39; and Susan Staves, Players' Sceptres: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979).

CHAPTER III

"Those Fabulous Chaldeans": Boyle and the Crisis of Baconianism

I

At its inception in r 662, the Royal Society tried to keep the peace at its meetings by forbidding overt theological discussions of the implications of its experiments in natural philosophy. Though dominated by such socially prominent Anglicans as Boyle and Wilkins, the Society largely succeeded in remaining free from internal theological disputes, although it was attacked by adversaries, notably Thomas Hobbes and Henry Stubbe, who sought to disrupt the homology of royalist politics, experimental philosophy, and Anglicanism that characterized its ideological program. 1 As Thomas Sprat claimed in his History of the Royal Society, philosophical endeavors asserted their "Advantage and Innocence ... in respect of all Professions, and es1. On Hobbes's disputes with the Royal Society and with Boyle about the experiments conducted with the air pump, see Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), esp. 80-154, 185-207. See also Steven Shapin, "The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England," Isis 79 (1988), 373-404. On Stubbe, see J. R. Jacob, Henry Stubbe: Radical Protestantism and the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 77-107.

Fallen Languages pecially of Religion." 2 For Sprat, conducting experiments, presenting scientific papers, demonstrating new technological marvels such as Boyle's air pump, and promoting "the Advancement of Real Knowledge" were the disinterested efforts of "Excellent Men" to better humankind through "purposeful tryals" (2) such as dissecting "monsters" (usually deformed fetuses), transfusing the blood of dogs to humans, and attempting to measure the velocity of bullets. Natural philosophy as practiced by members of the Royal Society, in short, offered the vision of a near utopia of "Advancement," objective knowledge, and material progress, what Sprat called "the Improvement of the Arts" and the championing of England's political "Honour" (3). For Sprat and his colleagues, the separation of natural philosophy and religious disputation had the welcome effect of promoting an ideological inclusiveness, sanctioned by the Restoration settlement and devoted to what Dryden called in Astraea Redux "the joint growth of Armes and Arts," the linking of Britain's political power with its cultural authority and technological and scientific prowess. 3 In one sense, however, the Royal Society's attempts to limit its discussions to experimental philosophy testify to its members' recognition of the complex interconnections among the discourses of science, politics, and religion. If the Society's heuristic separation of these discourses can be seen as a "revolutionary" act that fosters an ideological myth of the "Innocence" of "Real Knowledge," it also underscores the influence of religious assumptions on what we might call the deep structure of knowledge and on its modes of knowledge2. Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society, ed. Jackson I. Cope and Harold Jones (St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1958), 4· All quotations are from this edition. 3· John Dryden, Astraea Redux, line 322, in The Works of john Dryden, ed. H. T. Sweden berg, Jr., et al., r 9 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, I 9 56-), I: 3 I. On the political significance of the Royal Society and its programs in natural philosophy, see Michael Hunter, Establishing the New Science: The Experience of the Early Royal Society (Woodbridge, Eng.: Boydell, I989); J. R. Jacob, "Restoration, Reformation, and the Origins of the Royal Society," History of Science I 3 (I975), I5 s-76; Jacob, "Restoration Ideologies and the Royal Society," History of Science I7 (I98o), 25-38; and Paul Wood, "Methodology and Apologetics: Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society," British Journal of the History of Science I3 (r98o), 1-26. On Dryden and the new science, see Helen Burke, "Annus Mirabilis and the Ideology of the New Science," ELH 57 (1990), 307-34; and Richard Kroll, The Material Word: Literate Culture in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 33-37.

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production: the Royal Society could afford to ban theological debates only because its members collectively assumed that their assertions of God's authority ultimately justified their endeavors. Although the Society bracketed experimental philosophy rhetorically, heuristically insulating its discourses from theological disputes, its members did not claim that their investigations were conceptually independent. If the dynamics of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century science is evident in its devotion to what Paul Feyerabend calls "classical empiricism" -the "fascinating, tortuous, schizophrenic combination of a conservative ideology and a progressive practice" -then the hallmark of this combination is its commitment to defending both its experimental "Innocence" and, in Newton's words, "the wisdom and dominion of ... the Lord of the Universe." 4 The dialectical project of late seventeenth-century natural philosophy, then, can be described as the discovery and enumeration of an "objective" body of knowledge about the natural world and the presentation of that knowledge as incontrovertible evidence of the divinely created and maintained order of the universe. In this chapter, I examine the ways in which very real differences among members of the Royal Society are negotiated and subsumed within a contested rhetoric of experimentalism, a discourse which recognizes, even celebrates, intellectual disagreements but attempts to use these debates to jerry-rig a broad ideological consensus of the kind Dryden envisions. The passionate intensity characteristic of seventeenth-century theological debates finds its way into the languages of natural philosophy, in part, through the metaphor of the two books; this metaphor, as I argued in Chapter r, is a template for grappling with complex theoretical issues raised by the increasing sophistication of experimental knowledge. In this regard, the ideological and theological projects of the Royal Society complement and interpenetrate each other: this interpenetration-the relationship between the Society's scientific practice and its members' teleological insistence 4· Paul Feyerabend, "Classical Empiricism," in The Methodological Heritage of Newton, ed. Robert E. Butts and John W. Davis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970), 1 sr; Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton, ed. and trans. A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 352. For a different view of the science of the period, see B. C. Southgate, "'Forgotten and Lost': Some Reactions to Autonomous Science in the Seventeenth Century," journal of the History of Ideas 50 (1989), 249-68.

Fallen Languages on the order of the universe-can be described as the problem of theory: the dependence of experimental knowledge on theological narratives of progress, coherence, and order. This metaphysics of order-the reflexive identification of theology, beauty, and perfection with scientific knowledge-serves, for Boyle, Newton, and their contemporaries, as the ultimate warrant for their investigations. In a variety of ways, the semiotics they employ invoke the metadiscourse of theology to gesture toward a unity that their scientific endeavors can only imperfectly suggest. Significantly, their privileging of theology relieves them from the burden of having to articulate a theory from within the languages of natural philosophy to justify their epistemological procedures and teleological imperatives. In this regard, the insistent emphases on objectivity in Restoration science paradoxically call our attention to the fact that experimental "Innocence" is a concept imported from theology and that theocentric justifications of experimental philosophy take the place of theory: they presuppose the ontological coherence of nature and the epistemological coherence of the means they use to probe its secrets. Yet the metaphor of the two books implies that the ideal for scientific knowledge is to (re)produce in its study of nature the comprehensiveness accorded by faith to the Bible. While insisting that the Bible underwrites the study of nature, natural philosophers, claiming their "Innocence" and disinterest, attempt to develop an objective methodinternally consistent and epistemologically self-sufficient-that mirrors and supplements biblical exegesis without disturbing the theacentric universe. Boyle and Ray develop different strategies to repress their anxieties about studying a fallen nature and to demonstrate that it reveals a divinely created order. Paradoxically, however, that proof must fall short of the perfect knowledge which Boyle and Stillingfleet identify with revelation. The discourses of objective knowledge, in this regard, are displaced accounts of partial or inadequate efforts to negotiate the complex relations between experimental results and theological absolutes. The fiction of objectivity becomes significant in late seventeenth-century natural philosophy not only because it is yet another manifestation of the dream of an apolitical and transhistorical grounding for authoritative systems of representation but because it threatens to destabilize the very arguments-the ultimate recourse to God's power and knowledge-that call it into being. Consequently, in the works of Boyle, Ray, and Newton, the quest for theory-for

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adequate description and prediction-must be deferred to an idealized future. If the ideology of objectivity, like Wilkins's real character, attempts to legitimate new forms of representing nature, to rebuild Babel, it also reinscribes the dependence of natural philosophy on theology. For all their rhetoric about the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, members of the Royal Society in the I 66os and I 67os insist on grounding science theologically and ideologically. For Boyle, Ray, Newton, Wilkins, and others, scientific objectivity guarantees the disinterested pursuit of truth only because the study of nature is a form of worship, a response to a divine injunction to read the Book of Nature with the same care that Christians read the Scriptures: according to Boyle, "so farre is God from being unwilling, that we should Prye into his Works, that by divers Dispensations he imposes on us little Jesse then a necessity of studying them." 5 Boyle's emphasis on this "necessity" reveals both the assurance and the anxiety of those committed to the project of experimental natural philosophy. Unlike the idealized semiotics of a philosophical language, scientific objectivity largely succeeds in inscribing its ideological presuppositions into the investigation of the natural world. It provides a useful defense against the perceived enemies of experimental science, notably Hobbes and Stubbe, by allowing defenders of the Royal Society to portray themselves as having transcended political controversies and sectarian squabbling. It becomes a valuable conceptual weapon, in this regard, because it subsumes disagreements within the experimental community by furnishing a means to ground scientific fact in shared religious and sociopolitical beliefs. As Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer have demonstrated, objectivity is linked to the production of informed assent, what Shapin terms the "literary technology of virtual witnessing," which crafts rhetorical strategies designed to promote science as a means of producing knowledge and to develop criteria by which this knowledge can be profitably employed. 6 As both product and process, the objectivity of Restoration science 5· Robert Boyle, Of the Usefulnesse of Experimental Natural Philosophy (Oxford, 1663), 30. All quotations are from this edition.

6. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump, 22-79; see also Steven Shapin, "Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle's Literary Technology," Social Studies of Science 14 (1984), 48 r- 5 20; and Peter Dear, "Totius in verba: Rhetoric and Authority in the Early Royal Society," Isis 76 (1985), 145-61.

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might be described as the reflection-or the irruption-of faith in the practices of experimental philosophy. It functions as both a methodological imperative and a metaphysical ideal. As Sprat's defense of experimental "Innocence" suggests, it is an assumption, a value, and a method, innately present in scientific investigation and yet meticulously constructed by a variety of practices and safeguards designed to minimize error, validate experimental knowledge, and disseminate that knowledge for the good of society.? The commitment to objectivity, in this respect, implies a network of interlocking commitments to the Royal Society's ideological program-its valorizing of social privilege and Anglican theology-and its model for producing scientific knowledge: generally closed houses of experimentation that legislate what counts as knowledge and determine who will be able to exploit it. 8 Yet as the vast literature, polemical as well as philosophical, devoted to defending the Royal Society demonstrates, Boyle, Newton, Sprat, Wilkins, and their contemporaries were aware of the coerciveness and tenuousness of an ideologically constructed notion of objectivity designed to mediate between faith and experience. The reifying of objectivity as theory suggests something of the conflicted ideology of Restoration natural philosophy, what Laura Brown calls in the case of Dryden a cultural "anxiety" that the chaos of civil war and social disorder lurk somewhere in the near future. 9 As I have argued in previous chapters, Boyle's and Wilkins's quests for an idealized semiotics to supplement the Bible's authority are marked by a nervous glorification of the politics and aesthetics of order; the discourses of natural philosophy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries are similarly characterized by efforts to promote new forms of cultural and semiotic authority-a new aesthetics of order7. See Shapin, "House of Experiment," 37 3-404. 8. This is, in effect, Shapin and Schaffer's argument in Leviathan and the Air Pump; I return to the problem of constructing objective, scientific knowledge in Chapter 6 by examining Peter Shaw's rewriting of Boyle's works to make them conform to early eighteenthcentury notions of stylistic decorum and scientific methodology. 9· Laura Brown, "The Ideology of Restoration Poetic Form: John Dryden," PMLA 97 (r982), 395-407. On the tenuousness of the Restoration settlement and some of its implications for the literary and intellectual life of England, see J. R. Jones, Country and Court: England, r6s8-r714 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978); and Ronald Hutton, The Restoration: A Political and Religious History of England and Wales, r658-r667 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, r 9 8 5).

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which destabilize the theology they are ostensibly intended to buttress. This cultural anxiety also manifests itself in the forms of unstable self-characterizations on the part of natural philosophers themselves: their insistence on the fact that they are doing God's work discloses paradoxically their own sense of inadequacy, of their implication in a corrupt and corrupting material world, and leads to fervent denials that their work will displace theology and, as their critics charged, promote atheism. What we have traditionally considered the "rise" of modern science is, in an important sense, a set of conflicted efforts to deal with the interpenetrating crises of theology, theory, and representation. In this respect, my subject in this chapter is the crisis of late seventeenth-century Baconianism, the half-acknowledged, half-repressed effort to justify the scientific enterprise as a coequal complement to theology. This search, however, as I have argued in the preceding two chapters, provokes and is provoked by crises of representation-a recognition of the gap between the languages of man and the word of God which leads to the theorizing of new semiotic forms, from real characters to the calculus. But precisely because they are representations, these efforts can only reinscribe the conditions of their failure to represent-without noise, without remainder, without supplement-the perfection of a theocentric order. The incommensurability of theocentric idealizations of a coherent universal order and (re)creations of the material world defines the problematic of theory-the necessarily incomplete and contested efforts to develop a metalanguage to talk about the failure of discourse.

2

Before the publication of Boyle's New Experiments PhysicoMechanical Touching the Spring of the Air in r 66o, natural philosophy in England generally followed the conceptual and literary models of Aristotelian science, even as it invoked the methodology of Baconian empiricism. Through much of the seventeenth century, scientific publications in Great Britain, as on the Continent, take the form of natural histories that purport to offer encyclopedic treatments of the natural world. Although these treatises usually assume rather than

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articulate theoretical schemes, the lines between taxonomy and universalist theory are frequently blurred. Characteristically, these works elaborate taxonomies, describe universal "laws," or (often following Descartes) develop abstract systems that offer holistic visions of the universe. The universalizing claims of these projects, however, are betrayed by their inability to reconcile the complexity of the material world to the principles of order they implicitly assume or explicitly invoke. The subtitle of Robert Lovell's Panzooryktologia (Oxford, 1661) reads: Or a Compleat History of Animals and Minerals, Containing the Summe of all Authors, both Ancient and Modern, GALENICALL and CHYMICALL, touching Animals, viz. Beasts, Birds, Fishes, Serpents, Insects, and Man, as to their Place, Meat, Name, Temperature, Vertues, Uses in Meat and Medicine, Description, Kinds, Generation, Sympathie, Antipathie, Diseases, Cures, Hurts, and Remedies &c. with the Anatomy of MAN, his Diseases, with their Definitions, Causes, Signes, Cures, Remedies: and use of the London Dispensatory, with the Doses and Formes of all Kinds of Remedies: As also a History of MINERALLS, viz. Earths, Mettals, Semi-mettals, their Naturall and Artificiall excrements, Salts, Sulphurs, and Stones, with their Place, Matter, Names, Kinds, Temperature, Vertues, Use, Choice, Dose, Danger, and Antidotes. Also

an Introduction to ZOOGRAPHY and MINERALOGY. Index of Latine Names, with their English Names. UniversalliNDEX of the Use and Vertues. 10

Lovell quite literally runs out of space on the title page before he exhausts the possibilities generated by his model of universal comprehensiveness. Like Wilkins's Essay, his treatise (and similar attempts to produce a "Universal/INDEX") depend on the ideal of a "just enumeration" of everything in God's creation. But as his paratactic subro. I have transliterated the title from the Greek. See also, for example, Henry Power, Experimental Philosophy (London, r664). A member of the Royal Society, Power offers a compendium of experimental results which preserves, particularly in its preface, the universalizing rhetoric of seventeenth-century encyclopedic treatises. On the relationship of natural history and natural philosophy, see Anita Guerrini, Natural History and the New World, r524-I770: An Annotated Bibliography of Printed Materials in the Library of the American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Library, r 986), I - 2..

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title suggests, the universality Lovell seeks lacks a means to organize the phenomena of the natural world in a manner that would transcend the random cataloging of the properties of minerals, men, and animals. His "Compleat History" has, in effect, no narrative structure: it does not order its information so much as it rearranges various indices that reproduce the randomness of his observations and reading. What distinguishes Boyle as a scientific writer from Lovell, Wilkins, Henry Power, and, at least through the mid-I66os, from most of his contemporaries is not simply his intellectual and financial commitment to laboratory research but his recognition of the primacy of writing in the construction of scientific knowledge. As Style of the Scriptures suggests, Boyle sees writing as a means of intervention; in this respect, his distrust of the systematizing tendencies that had defined philosophical discourse since Aristotle takes the form of a critique of efforts to develop authoritative and comprehensive means to describe nature. As Jan Golinski has demonstrated, Boyle, in The Sceptical Chymist (I 66 I), challenges the systematizing rhetoric of seventeenth-century chemical textbooks, which, like Lovell's text, advertise their efforts to produce a "Compleat History." He offers in place of this rhetoric "a new literary form for chemical discourse""narrative accounts of laboratory experiments" which reject the totalizing claims for their authoritative methods advanced by Aristotelian taxonomers. 11 Boyle's experimental essays, however, are themselves literary re-creations of an idealized laboratory experience which, like his arguments in Style of the Scriptures, are constructed within the ideological assumptions and values of gentlemanly discourse.12 In this respect, Boyle's discussions of scientific writing are grounded in his theocentric conception of language; scientific discourse must remain heuristic and incomplete because the only systematic language, the only coherent (though necessarily mysterious) discourse, is the word of God. Throughout his work Boyle contrasts "the r I. Jan V. Golinski, "Robert Boyle: Scepticism and Authority in Seventeenth-Century Chemical Discourse," in The Figural and the Literal: Problems of Language in the History of Science and Philosophy, 1630- r 8oo, ed. Andrew W. Benjamin, Geoffrey N. Cantor, and John R. R. Christie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 62-63. 12. See James Paradis, "Montaigne, Boyle, and the Essay of Experience," in One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature, ed George Levine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 59-91.

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doubtfulness and incompleatness of Natural Philosophy" to the certain truths that are contained in the Bible's "Complication . . . of Rhetorick and Mystery." 13 The systematic writing of natural philosophy remains an ideal accessible only through revelation, and consequently the search for an authoritative semiotics becomes a continuing process of displacing order to a hypothesized future state of perfect-that is, revealed-knowledge. Because Boyle identifies the coherence of nature and the absolute power of God he is able to critique those natural philosophers who, in his mind, usurp divine authority by trying to develop universal accounts of nature as a self-sufficient system. In his Certain Physiological Essays (r66r), Boyle argues that it has long seem'd to me none of the least impediments of the real advancement of true Natural Philosophy, that men have been so forward to write Systems of it, and have thought themselves oblig'd either to be altogether silent, or not to write !esse than an entire body of Physiology.... [W]hen men by having diligently study'd either Chymistry, Anatomy, Botanicks, or some other particular part of Physiology, or perhaps by having only read Authors on those Subjects, have thought themselves thereby qualify'd to publish compleat Systems of Natural Philosophy, they have found themselves by nature of their undertaking, and the Laws of Method, engag'd to write of several other things than those wherein they had made themselves Proficients, and thereby have been reduc'd, either idly to repeat what has been already, though perhaps but impertinently enough, written by others on the same Subject, or else to say any thing rather than nothing. 14 Boyle's attack on systematizers is based on their substitution of generic "Laws of Method" -the rhetorical, inscripted form of universalizing theories-for hands-on experience. His critique is based on his recognition that these languages create the systematic order they purport to describe. Those writers who privilege "what has been 13. Robert Boyle, The Excellency of Theology, as Compar'd with Natural Philosophy (London, 1674), 143. All quotations are from this edition. Boyle, Some Considerations Touching the Style of the Holy Scriptures (London, 1661), 51. 14· Robert Boyle, Certain Physiological Essays (London, 1661), 3-4. All quotations are from this edition.

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already ... written" reduce "true" philosophical knowledge to the limitations of human understanding. Their "compleat Systems" are only reductive metaphors which presume rather than demonstrate the mystical unity of God's creation. In this regard, Boyle attacks Aristotelian science for what he perceives as the threat it poses to his theological and political values. In his Free Enquiry, Boyle says that he "take[s] divers of Aristotle's Opinions relating to Religion, to be more unfriendly, not to say pernicious, to It, than those of several other Heathen Philosophers." 15 He is particularly severe on Aristotle's theory of the eternity of the earth because it contradicts the account in Genesis: very many of the Philosophers that succeeded Aristotle, suppose the World to have been JEternal; and those that believ'd it to have been produc'd, had not the confidence to pretend the knowing how old it was; unless it were some extravagant ambitious People, such as those fabulous Chaldeans, whose fond account reach'd up to 40000 or 50000 years: Theology teaches us, that the World is very far from being so old by 30 or 40 thousand years as they, and by very many Ages, as divers others have presum'd; and does, from the Scripture, give us such an account of the age of the World, that it has set us certain Limits, within which so long a Duration may be bounded, without mistaking in our Reckoning. Whereas Philosophy leaves us to the vastness of Indeterminate Duration, without any certain Limits at all. (Excellency of Theology, 20-21) As it will in the 169os for Thomas Burnet and William Whiston, the biblical account of creation sets limits on what would otherwise be indeterminate-the age of the earth. Natural philosophy, left to its own devices, offers no guarantees because its methods offer no conceptual certainty, no "certain Limits": what it threatens, in effect, is the discovery of "deep time," of a geological past that is "indeterminate." 16 Boyle's rhetorical formulation, "Theology teaches us," repro15. Robert Boyle, A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Receiv'd Notion of Nature (London, 1686), 9· All quotations are from this edition. r6. See Thomas Burnet, The Sacred Theory of the Earth (London, r686) and William Whiston, A New Theory of the Earth (London, 1696). See also Stephen J. Gould, Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Cam-

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duces the Logos within the domain of geological debate. It defines parameters, offers a means to set "Limits," conceptualizes historical time as a grid that becomes a bulwark against the "vastness of Indeterminate Duration." Theology, in this respect, is assumed to be a form of timeless inscription that structures the logic of discovery and limits whatever discoveries man might make, any theories he might advance-whether by seventeenth-century scientists or by "those fabulous Chaldeans" whose wild theorizing was unassisted by revelation. In this regard, the interlocking discourses of theology, science, politics, and social privilege demonstrate the critical function served by the excluded third men of seventeenth-century natural philosophy-Aristotelians, "those fabulous Chaldeans," and (as we shall see in Chapter 6) Hobbes-who must be attacked in order to promote the discursive order of the political and natural world. The move to exclude the third man, as Serres suggests, is always a move to invoke an idealized absolute, the fiction of noise-free transmission; yet paradoxically, the celebration of noise, of indeterminacy, is crucial to Boyle's voluntaristic theology: noise becomes the mark of an imperfect universe into which God must continually intervene. Theology revalues the limitations of an imperfect scientific knowledge to signify the existence of an order that transcends humankind's ability to describe it. If theories and taxonomies, for Boyle, are heuristic rather than systematic, his contemporaries, including Robert Hooke and John Ray, are prone to a nostalgia for an Aristotelian certainty that natural philosophy by the r66os can no longer provide. Without a theory, a narrative structure, to provide a framework for its experimental results, the natural philosophy practiced by Boyle and Ray threatens to become a gimcrack collection of miscellaneous data that have no observable order independent of theological justifications propped up by the metaphor of the two books and its corollary, the argument from design. By undermining Aristotelian notions of taxonomy-of the idea of "system" itself-Boyle's experimental science had effectively

bridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 1-19; and Roy Porter, "Creation and Credence: The Career of Theories of the Earth in Britain, 166o- 1 820," in Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientific Culture, ed. Barry Barnes and Steven Shapin (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1979), 97-123.

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destroyed the internal theoretical mechanisms, however static, derivative, or arbitrary they may have been, by which Aristotelians in the Renaissance had ordered their research programs,'? As the "systems" of the natural world are redefined as heuristic and contingent, significant tensions emerge within the constructions of nature offered by experimental philosophy: to the virtuosi in the Royal Society, nature must appear disordered to justify their efforts to probe its secrets, but it must also be orderable to demonstrate, in Ray's phrase, "the wisdom of God manifested in the works of creation." 18 This tension is evident, as Hunter and Wood have argued, in conflicts within the Royal Society about the purpose and limits of experimental research. In contrast to those members interested primarily in collecting oddities and stockpiling information, Hooke and William Neile, among others, advocated a coherent experimental program that emphasized probing the causal connections among phenomena. 19 In a manuscript headed "Proposalls humbly offered to better consideration," Neile argues that it seems a little belowe the name and dignity of Philosophers to sitt still with the bare registring of effects without an inquiry into their causes. Which if it be referred till they have more experiments to enlighten them in the discovery of truth. First they know not till they try whether they have not already enough to afford them a competent light towards the discovery of knowledge at least in some reasonable instances. 20 Neile's impatience with "the bare registring of effects" marks what we might call the ongoing collapse of experimental knowledge into theoretical assertions, into a chain of causal reasoning that, as I argue in Chapters 5 and 6, becomes characteristic of the efforts of such Newr 7. The attack by Henry Stubbe on the Royal Society for its irreligion, in this sense, is not merely an opportunistic means to discredit the conservative ideology of the Restoration intellectual establishment but a telling response to what natural philosophy by I 670 had accomplished. See Jacob, Stubbe, 78-102. r8. John Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation (London: Wernerian Club, I 844-46). 19. Michael Hunter and Paul Wood, "Towards Solomon's House: Rival Strategies for Reforming the Early Royal Society," rpt. in Hunter, Establishing the New Science, 185-244· 20. Cited in Hunter, Establishing the New Science, 224.

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tonians as Desaguliers and Shaw to demonstrate the self-sufficiency of scientific theorizing. In the 166os and 167os, however, theoretically ambitious texts like Hooke's "History of the Weather" defer theorizing to a future when natural philosophers will have accumulated "more experiments to enlighten them in the discovery of truth." In arguing for an epistemologically coherent approach to meteorology, for example, Hooke must fall back on a taxonomy of observations: "The Strength and Quarter of the Winds," "The Degrees of Heat and Cold in the Air," "The Degrees of Dryness and Moisture in the Air," "The degrees of Pressure in the Air," "The constitution and face of the Sky or Heavens," "What Effects are produc'd upon other bodies," "What Thunders and Lightnings happen," and "Any thing extraordinary in the Tides." 21 What he describes is not a "history" -a coherent narrative of the weather-but a catalog of accurate observations that presuppose the natural philosopher's objectivity and competence. This collection of data, organized into tabular form, becomes the basis from which, he hopes, a narrative can emerge: "As for the Method of using, and digesting those so collected Observations; That will be more advantageously considered when the Supellex is provided; A Workman being then best able to fit and prepare his Tools, for his work, when he sees what materials he has to work upon" (178). Hooke's "History" remains no more than "the bare registring of effects" it is intended to structure and to transcend. Although local instances of a universal order can be intuited, demonstrated, and described, the emphasis, for voluntarists such as Boyle and Newton, and even for Hooke, falls on what Dryden, in a different context, calls "Nature in disorder" to justify both God's and their own intervention in the material world. 22 The paradoxical state of nature-as both chaotic and mysteriously unified-cannot be rendered as a neat dialectic; the discourses of order and disorder dialogically interpenetrate, (re)producing the crisis in theory to which Boyle, Neile, and Hooke, in different ways, respond. In this sense, natural 21. Robert Hooke, "Method for Making a History of the Weather," in Sprat, History, 173-75. All quotations are from this edition. 22. Dryden, Works, r: 54· The phrase occurs in Dryden's characterization of Ovid's style, "with which the study and choice of words is inconsistent." On Dryden's eclecticism, see Kevin L. Cope, Criteria of Certainty: Truth and judgment in the English Enlightenment (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1990), 66-89.

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philosophy in the 167os might be described as an epistemology in search of a theoretical structure that does not depend solely on either overtly metaphysical or narrowly utilitarian justifications. This crisis in theory, as I have suggested, lies behind the efforts of proponents of universal language schemes to impose on a chaotic nature an idealized order that would fix hierarchical principles as metaphysical absolutes. For natural philosophers such as Boyle and Newton, this crisis prompts efforts to describe the conditions of narrativity that exist in the unstable realm of interposition, to discover ways to negotiate the chasm between the semiotics of the material world and theocentric ideals of order. 3

Boyle's complaints about the intellectual tyranny of what has already been written, about the primacy of writing in natural philosophy, is paradoxically informed by his awareness that the antidote to this state of affairs is not an unmediated truth but new forms of writing.23 Boyle declares that he intends The Origines and Formes of Qualities (I 666) to be a demystification of the "obscure," "perplex' d," "unsatisfactory," and "contradictory" descriptions by "Scholastical Philosophers" of the forms and qualities of material substances; his purpose is both "in some sort, [to] exhibit a Scheme of, or ... Introduction into the Elements of the Corpuscularian Philosophy" and to "remove in some measure the obstacle, that [the] Dark and Narrow Theories of the Peripateticks [Aristotelians] and Chymists may prove to the Advancement of solid and usefull Philosophy." 24 Yet as Boyle's subsequent discussion of the nature of qualities makes clear, his "solid and usefull" knowledge depends on socially constructed "tacite agreement[s]" that underlie the ways in which matter is defined and theorized.25 Boyle offers, in effect, a constructivist account of the role that 23. See Shapin, "Pump and Circumstance," 48r-520; and Golinski, "Scepticism and Authority," 58-82. I treat Boyle's experimental writings and their rewriting in Chapter 6. 24. Robert Boyle, The Origines and Formes of Qualities (Oxford, r666), a8v-brr, B6r. All quotations are from this edition. 25. See Peter Alexander, Ideas, Qualities, and Corpuscles: Locke and Boyle on the External World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), for a different view of Boyle's project and its influence in the late seventeenth century.

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language plays in theorizing the nature of forms and qualities; rather than providing a nominalist certainty, however, he emphasizes the heuristic and productive role of new definitional forms: For if in a parcel of Matter there happen to be produc'd ... a Concurrence of all those Accidents, (whether those onely, or more) that Men by tacite agreement have thought necessary and sufficient to constitute any one Determinate Species of things corporeal, then we say, That a Body belonging to that Species, as suppose a Stone, or a Mettal, is Generated, or produc'd de novo. Not that there is really any thing ... Substantial produc'd, but that those parts of Matter, that did indeed before praeexist, but were either scatter'd and shar'd among other Bodies, or at least otherwise dispos'd of, are now brought together, and dispos'd of after the manner requisite, to entitle the Body that results from them to a new Denomination. (8o-81) Because Boyle believes in "one Catholick or Universal Matter common to all Bodies" (3) the only way to differentiate one "Determinate Species" from another is to "entitle" bodies with new names, to seek a "tacite agreement" so that "then we [can] say" (my emphasis) which substances belong to which species. In a theocentric universe, the role of the natural philosopher, as Wilkins recognizes in his Essay, coexists with that of the lexicographer and taxonomer. Boyle, however, does not share Wilkins's essentialist faith in "radicals" and "substantives" as the foundations of a hierarchical ordering of nature and of society. In a manner reminiscent of his mode of argumentation in Style of the Scriptures, Boyle uses metaphors of writing, speech, and inscription in Origines of Formes and Qualities to construct, rather than to represent passively, the complexity of matter:

If, I say, we consider ... that (to use Lucretius his Comparison) all that innumerable multitude of Words, that are contain'd in all the Languages of the World, are made of the various Combinations of some of the 24 Letters of the Alphabet; 'twill not be hard to conceive, that there may be an incomprehensible variety of Associations and Textures of the Minute particles of Matter endow'd with store enough of differing Qualities to deserve distinct Appellations;

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though for want of heedfulnesse and fit Words, Men have not yet taken so much notice of their lesse obvious Varieties, as to sort them as they deserve, and give them distinct and proper Names. (94-95) Boyle's borrowing of Lucretius's metaphor invites a deconstruction of the opposition between tenor and vehicle. "The innumerable multitude of Words" and letters becomes a constitutive metaphor (set in implicit opposition to the metaphors of "compleat Systems" he attacks in Certain Physiological Essays) that allows Boyle to theorize the possibility of "distinct and proper Names," to suggest what a universal taxonomy might be at the same time that he emphasizes the contingent, relational structure of the material world and of the imperfect semiotics that humankind uses to describe it. 26 This possibility, though, remains grounded in a theocentric conception of the universe: "since Bodies, having but one common Matter, can be differenc'd but by Accidents, which seem all of them to be the Effects and Consequences of Local Motion" (9 5) and because "the Origine of Motion in Matter is from God" (5 ), Boyle locates the authority of naming-of taxonomic differentiation-in the divine intelligence that can comprehend the "incomprehensible variety" of forms and qualities. In this regard, his metaphors of writing exploit and reinforce the conceptual guarantees of theology as an overarching metalanguage; they work continually to collapse distinctions between the books of nature and Scripture; in turn, this reflexive identification foregrounds metaphors of inscription. For Boyle, then, both Christianity and corpuscularianism-the study of texts and of nature-are (as I noted in Chapter r) "members of the Universal Hypothesis, whose Objects, I conceive, to be the Nature, Counsels, and Works of God, as far as they are discoverable by us (for I say not to us) in this Life" (Excellency of Theology, 52). In his privileging of theology over natural philosophy and his attack on systematizing, then, Boyle defers the authoritative theorizing promised by "compleat Systems" and redefines theory as a narrative, 26. See Nancy Leys Stepan, "Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science," Isis 77 (1986), 261-77; and James Bono, "Science, Discourse, and Literature: The Role/Rule of Metaphor in Science," in Literature and Science: Theory and Practice, ed. Stuart Peterfreund (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), 59-89. On the metaphor of atoms and letters, see Kroll, Material Word, r r- 2 7.

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a "romance," which is always in the process of being elaborated. In The Origines of Formes and Qualities (considered one of his more "systematic" works by modern scholars), Boyle describes his purpose as encouraging others "to Enquire after more Intelligible and Satisfactory wayes of explicating Qualities ... by Beginning such a Collection of Materials towards the History of those Qualities"; this heuristic collection can then be used to "lay a foundation, whereon ... perhaps I may superstruct a more Distinct and Explicite Theory of Qualities, then I shall at present adventure at" (B7r). In contrast to Neile, Boyle maintains that theory, in the sense of a master narrative, cannot legitimately be developed from "a Collection of Materials" that is always incomplete; as his metaphor of building suggests, Boyle's project, by definition, is only "Beginning" and, significantly, can only begin. A comprehensive account, an authoritative "History" of forms and qualities, can come about only through the kind of progressive revelation that Boyle envisions in scriptural studies. Precisely because a "Distinct and Explicite Theory" must be deferred to an unrealized-and unrealizable-future, Boyle countenances heuristic narratives "publish'd by their Authors [not] as compleat Bodies or Systems of Physiology, but rather as general Principles (almost like the Hypotheses of Astronomers) to assist men to explicate the alreadyknown Phaenomena of Nature" (Certain Physiological Essays, 6). These "general Principles" can never transcend the limitations of experimental knowledge. In contrast to Neile and Hooke, Boyle argues that experimentalists should forbear to establish any Theory, till they have consulted with (though not a fully competent Number of Experiments, such as may afford them all the Phaenomena to be explicated by that Theory, yet) a considerable number of Experiments in proportion to the comprehensiveness of the Theory to be erected on them. And ... I would have such kind of superstructures look'd upon only as temporary ones, which though they may be preferr'd before any others, as being the least imperfect, or ... the best in their kind that we yet have, yet are they not entirely to be acquiesced in as absolutely perfect, or uncapable of improving Alterations. (9) The logic of this passage dictates that a provable theory, one that no longer needs "improving Alterations, must await a perfect experimen-

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tal knowledge, "a fully competent Number of Experiments." But, as Boyle suggests in The Excellency of Theology, "the full discovery of Natures Mysteries"-and the experiments necessary to that discovery-constitute an "excellent Romance" whose ending is unknowable. 27 Precisely because he disdains the false systematizing that he condemns in others, he finds that "by the way of Writing to which [he has] condemn'd [him] self, [he] can hope for little better than to passe for a Drudge of much greater Industry than Reason, and fit only to collect Experiments for more rational and Philosophical heads to explicate and make use of" (Certain Physiological Essays, 16). As a narrative construct, theory may be made "more Distinct and Explicite" but never complete; the experimental style which Boyle advocates and the theological presuppositions which, he argues, are essential to natural philosophy preclude the "endlesse Progress" of experimental inquiry from ever reaching the perfect knowledge offered by theology: "bare Reason," he asserts, "well improv'd will suffice to make a man behold many glorious Attributes in the Deity; yet the same Reason, when assisted by Revelation, may enable a man to discover far more Excellencies in God, and perceive them, [than] he contemplated before, far greater and more distinctly" (Excellency of Theology, 5). "Revelation" functions as the metaphysical guarantee for scientific theorizing, but this theorizing-tied to a limited number of experiments and to the limitations of a postlapsarian languagecan never attain the narrative coherence of the theology on which it is imperfectly modeled. Not surprisingly, then, Boyle's metacritical descriptions of his scientific writing seek ways to go beyond the constraints of a literal, denotative language in order to emulate the "Complication ... of Rhetorick and Mystery" that he identifies with biblical style. The same assumptions about style and decorum that govern his analysis of biblical rhetoric in Style of the Scriptures inform his defense of figurative language in scientific writing. In contrast to those in the Royal Society who denounce figurative language (among them Parker, Sprat, and Glanvill), Boyle defends his use of similes as a means to make accessible that which would otherwise "lye conceal'd from ... men's Sight 27. See Chapter 1 above and, for a different view, James Lennox, "Robert Boyle's Defense of Teleological Influence in Experimental Science," Isis 74 (1983), 38-52.

Fallen Languages and Reach." 28 In his preface to The Christian Virtuoso (r69o), he claims that proper Comparisons do the Imagination almost as much Service, as Microscopes do the Eye; for, as this Instrument gives us a distinct view of divers minute Things, which our naked Eye cannot well discern; because these Glasses represent them far more large, than by the bare Eye we judge them; so a skilfully chosen, and wellapplied, Comparison much helps the Imagination, by illustrating Things scarce discernible, so as to represent them by Things much more familiar and easy to be apprehended. (Asv-A6r) Boyle's simile glosses over the fact that the microscope led to a radical reconstitution of scientific reality earlier in the seventeenth century. The microscope does not merely allow observers to see "divers minute Things, which our naked Eye cannot well discern," but brings into the discursive realm of knowledge things that previously had not been thought to exist. Even as Boyle seeks in his simile to restrict "Comparisons" to a narrow instrumentalism, his comparison of one set of represented "Things" to another set of "Things much more familiar and easy to be apprehended" becomes part of a metaphoric displacement that locates the discursive authority of the experimental text within the context of his theological beliefs. Although he constantly emphasizes in his work the need to make experience useful, his descriptions transcend straightforward notions of utility. His heavily figurative and syntactically convoluted prose style is indebted to Renaissance writers such as Montaigne, for whom language is moral, experiential, complex rather than linearly rationalistic, and, in Stanley Fish's sense, "self-consuming." 29 Unlike his contemporaries, Dalgarno, Wilkins, Sprat, and Glanvill, Boyle can place his faith neither in a real character nor in a reformed language because he perceives representation-the metaphoricity of language-as ultimately mysterious. As this passage on comparisons demonstrates, his character28. Robert Boyle, The Christian Virtuoso (London, r69o), 6. All quotations are from this edition. 29. See Paradis, "Montaigne, Boyle, and the Essay of Experience," 59-91; and Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972).

"Those Fabulous Chaldeans" istic form of discourse becomes argument by metaphoric overkill, an idiosyncratic mode to which he seems attracted because it approximates, within the imperfect bonds of human speech, the biblical ideal of rhetoric and mystery. In this regard, the nature that Boyle (re)presents is not a mind-independent reality but the realm of his own consciousness-itself dialogically interpenetrated by the discourses of social privilege and near-Calvinist self-denigration. The language of comparisons, for Boyle, leads from the systematicity of the external world, the concerns of Hooke and Ray, to the reproduction of conditions that make faith essential to the scientific enterprise. Boyle's figurative language can be understood, in one sense, as an attempt to produce as well as to explicate new information relevant to the study of nature. His metacritical comments in Certain Physiological Essays and Origines of Formes and Qualities are provoked, in large measure, by the abundance of information that his experiments, observations, and reading generate. His figurative language is a consequence of humankind's inability to explain logically-that is, without remainder or noise-the operations of the physical universe. In an important sense, what Boyle reacts against in his attack on systematizers is their obsession with making all information meaningful, with refusing to understand the productive function of noiseinformation that cannot be accommodated to received systems of classification or knowledge. In Boyle's mind (and, as I argue in the next chapter, in Newton's as well), noise is essential to a voluntaristic theology: it is paradoxically the sign of God's necessary intervention in his creation; noise confirms humankind's need for revelation. Boyle's emphasis on the complexity of the natural world-its resistance to taxonomy-suggests, then, an implicit recognition on his part of "a discontinuity in [scientific] knowledge between the parts and the whole," the inability of any signifying system to eliminate noise. 30 His formula of biblical style as "a Complication ... of Rhetorick and Mystery" underscores the contingent and implicative relationship between meaning and noise, reason and revelation, that is apparent throughout his work. William Paulson argues "that literary language, by its very failure for the communication of preexistent in30. William Paulson, The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), ro8, defining complex systems.

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formation, becomes a vehicle for the creation of new information. For this to be the case, literature must be, to a degree, both obscure and repetitive." 31 The "literary" qualities of Boyle's writing, his fascination with metaphor, style, and the "technology of virtual witnessing," emphasize the extent to which the "discontinuity ... between parts and the whole" -the space of theory-produces what is figured from the point of view of human understanding as an excess of information and from the hypothesized vantage point of God's perfect knowledge as an always incomplete catalog of His works. Boyle's scientific language must' always "fail" to represent the natural world precisely so that it can reproduce the disorder necessary to generate new efforts to derive meaning from (excessive) information. The attempts to impose order on the noise of creation-the texts that have "already been written" -in turn produce more efforts to reinterpret "preexistent information," thereby generating "new information" and new narratives. In this respect, Boyle's description of Origines of Formes and Qualities as an attempt "to lay a foundation, whereon ... perhaps [he] may superstruct a more Distinct and Explicite Theory of Qualities" reveals the dialectical movement in his work toward both order and disorder-his desire to theorize his observations and his fascination with generating new information which will endlessly defer this project.

4 As Boyle's work suggests, the experimental and technological production of new information in the late seventeenth century leads to anxieties about the order of the natural and political world and efforts to stabilize dialogically agitated discourses by identifying and then seeking to exclude those "third men" who disrupt the transmission of information. The crisis of late seventeenth-century Baconianism can be defined, in one sense, as its inability to integrate the data it collects into existing systems of classification. If the breakdown of hierarchical, Aristotelian structures into incomplete or contingent systems functions as both the cause and effect of a renarrativizing of experi3 r. Paulson, Noise of Culture, I or.

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mental knowledge, it also produces defenses of theological and ideological doctrines-God's "dominion" and scientific "Innocence"that, in turn, reassert hierarchical principles of organization. These principles structure rather than emerge unproblematically from experimental knowledge and objective observation. The works of John Ray provide an excellent example of the ways in which anxieties about the order of the natural (and political) world lead to the reinscription of scientific knowledge within a theocentric metanarrative. Although his ideological project is similar to Boyle's, Ray is less voluntaristic in his theological assumptions and more nearly Aristotelian in his methods of classification, more concerned with identifying the organizing principles of the natural world. The constitutive metaphors he uses are those of observation rather than of writing; instead of emphasizing the limitations of scientific knowledge, he seeks to reproduce as the source of objective knowledge the omniscient perspective of God's observation of His creation. In r692 Ray published his Miscellaneous Discourses Concerning the Dissolution and Changes of the World, an ad hoc collection of his opinions on geology, biblical prophecy, and the origins of such "freaks" of nature as fossils and geysers. The following year he produced a revised, "Corrected, very much Enlarged, and Illustrated" second edition, retitled Three Physico-Theological Discourses, Concerning I. The Primitive CHAOS, and Creation of the World. II. The General DELUGE, its Causes and Effects. III. The Dissolution of the WORLD, and Future Conflagration.Jl In his preface to the revised version, Ray justifies his "[h]aving altered the Method of this Treatise" (A4r) and provides a rationale for its restructuring. In Miscellaneous Discourses, he tells us, he had treated The primitive Chaos and Creation, and the General Deluge, occasionally and by way of digression, at the request of some Friends. But now this Treatise coming to a second Impression, I thought it more convenient to make these several Discourses upon these Particulars, substantial Parts of my Work, and to dispose them according to the priority and posteriority of their Subjects, in order of time, beginning with the Primitive Chaos. (A4v) 32. John Ray, Three Physico-Theological Discourses ... (London, 1693), title page. All quotations are from this edition.

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As this explanation of his "Method" suggests, Ray does not present new material or new findings in the "second Impression" so much as he restructures his original essays, examples, and digressions to provide an explicitly theological framework for his natural history. The authoritative account of Genesis becomes the means for him to reorganize his previously miscellaneous observations and speculations to create, "in order of time," a sequential series of events that reveal a causal (and "convenient") logic as well as a divine intention operating within geological history. The I692 version begins with four short chapters (I- 3 8) on the dissolution of the world, followed by a long fifth chapter (39-I70) that includes four subsections on the possibility of the world's ending by flood, by the sun's being extinguished, by fire, and by volcanoes. Interspersed in this chapter are digressions on "the Original of fountains," on fossils, on the Flood in the Old Testament, and on chaos and the creation of the world. In Three PhysicoTheological Discourses, Ray reorders his material to provide three separate discourses: the first treats creation, with separate chapters on the creation theories of the ancients, on Genesis, on contemporary theories of geology (including Burnet's), and on the creation of animals; a second discourse on the Flood that incorporates and reorders the digressions from chapter 5 of his I 69 2 work; and a third discourse on Dissolution which presents edited versions of chapters I through 4 and 6 through I 2 of his earlier book. The purpose of Ray's renarrativizing is not to define a scientific method of analysis, to present new results, or to reconsider the principles of geological history; it is rather to suggest the inability of miscellaneous observations and speculations to provide a history-an objective and ordered account-of natural phenomena. As the title of his revised treatise suggests, Ray uses the biblical accounts of the Flood and Creation to provide a narrative framework that redefines the role of the scientific observer: the natural philosopher, no longer a miscellanist, becomes an avatar of divine authority. In describing the primitive chaos, he locates order, as Boyle does, not in the physical structure of matter but in God's intention: "these [particles were] variously and confusedly commixed, as though they had been carelessly shaken and shuffled together; yet not so, but that there was order observed by the most Wise Creator in the disposition of them" (Three Discourses, 6). The phrase "yet not so" signals a radical

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shift from a contingent to an objective view of primordial matter; in effect, we see the primitive chaos through the eyes of God. In this respect, order is created by the narrative displacement of theological authority-troped as omniscient observation-from "the most Wise Creator" to the natural philosopher. Precisely because theology stands in for theory, Ray is able to mystify his role in producing an "objective" viewpoint by casting his account of the history of the earth in the rhetoric of religious belief. Ray's Three Physico-Theological Discourses is no less miscellaneous than the Miscellaneous Discourses it is intended to supplant; his method-to offer compilations of various opinions and then choose from among them those that seem to him most reasonable (or that conform most readily to his theocentric view of creation)-is unchanged from the first edition to the second. It is not that Ray "gets religion" between 1692 and r693 (his earlier works, as I suggest below, rely on versions of the argument from design), but that his privileging of objectivity-making coherence a property of the hypothesized viewpoint of God rather than of humanly discernible or discoverable phenomena-reinscribes in his scientific writing theological, aesthetic, and ideological imperatives. The contingent methodologies that Kroll argues play a vital role in late seventeenth-century culture are underwritten precisely by the kinds of assumptions that operate in Ray's works: the displacing of objectivity onto a divine authority which is then used to legitimate the (re)importation of objectivity as the method and metaphysical guarantee of natural philosophy.JJ Ray's revision of Miscellaneous Discourses provides a dramatic example of the ways in which the renarrativizing of scientific speculation both discloses and mystifies tensions between the practice of natural philosophy and its tendencies to theorize, by means of theology, a metaphysics of order. As the leading botanist and scientific taxonomer of his era, Ray seems particularly sensitive during the course of his career to the redefinition of systematizing that takes place as the open-ended "romance" (to borrow Boyle's image) of cataloging species and recording observations is (re)narrativized. Early in his career, as his work in setting up "Tables" for Wilkins's Essay suggests, Ray generates catalogs-that is, systems-which are static or which, lack33· Kroll, Material Word, 49-79.

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ing a theological metanarrative, remain a haphazard collection of miscellaneous data, such as his Observations Topographical, Moral, and Physiological (1673). This work has two parts: a catalog, in Latin, of various plants which grow in Continental Europe but are not native to the British Isles and an account of Ray's trip to the Continent in 1663. The purpose of this work is modest: "If either Catalogue or Observations prove any ways useful to the Public, by affording matter of Information, or if nothing else innocent Diversion to those that abound with leisure, and might perhaps bestow their time worse, I have what I desire, and as much as I can reasonably expect." 34 Ray's readership-"those that abound with leisure" -is upper-class, and his work, therefore, catalogs those sights that the author imagines would prove entertaining to these readers. Its narrative structure is that of the Grand Tour, and his observations are cast in the form of a diary. Ray comments on strange sights and customs, enumerates the contents of various museums and libraries; indulges in social stereotyping, particularly at the expense of the Dutch ("The Common People of Holland, especially Innkeepers, Wagoners[,] ... Boatmen [and] Porters are surly and uncivil" [so]); and catalogs the sorts of oddities that Thomas Shadwell satirizes in The Virtuoso: "A Nobleman of this City [Venice] shewed us a Boy, who had a faculty of charging his belly with wind, and discharging it again backward at pleasure; which we saw him perform. When he charged himself he lay upon his hands and knees, and put his head on the ground almost between his legs" (202). Without a commitment to the narrative order of theocentric history evident in Three Physico-Theological Discourses, Ray presents natural philosophy as travelogue and sideshow. He develops no criteria to distinguish the odd from the useful (farting boys from evidence of the hand of God in creation), no metalanguage to organize miscellaneous data, no method to move from observation to theory or from parataxis to order. The natural philosopher is not Boyle's questing knight of romance but a picaresque figure who inhabits the generic universe of farce. 35 In contrast, in The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of 34· John Ray, Observations Topographical, Moral, and Physiological (London, r673), A3v-A4r. All quotations are from this edition. 3 5. On the generic troping of scientific narratives, see Eric White, "Contemporary Cosmology and Narrative Theory," in Literature and Science, ed. Peterfreund, 91-r r2.

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Creation (r691), Ray uses a theological metanarrative to theorize a basis for the complexity of material creation. This immensely popular work went into four editions in his lifetime and then was reprinted fourteen times before the end of the eighteenth century, translated into French and German, and reissued as late as 1844-46, in an expensive, leather-bound edition produced for the Wernerian Club of London. 36 Ray's argument is unambiguous: natural philosophy is valuable precisely because it provides a more efficient means than mere theological speculation "to trace the Footsteps of [God's] Wisdom in the Composition, Order, [and] Harmony" of the world (xxii). Belief in God must be demonstrated by Arguments drawn from the Light of Nature, and Works of the Creation; For as all other Sciences, so Divinity, proves not, but supposes its Subjects, taking it for granted, that by Natural Light, Men are sufficiently convinced of the Being of a Deity. There are, indeed, supernatural Demonstrations of this fundamental Truth, but not common to all Persons, or Times, and so liable to Cavil and Exception by Atheistical Persons, as inward illuminations of Mind, a Spirit of Prophecy and fore-telling future Contingents, illustrious Miracles, and the like. But these Proofs, taken from Effects and Operations, exposed to every Man's View, not to be denied or questioned by any, are most effectual to convince all that deny, or doubt of it. Neither are they only convictions of the greatest and subtlest Adversaries, but intelligible also to the meanest Capacities. For you may hear illiterate Persons of the lowest Rank of the Commonalty, affirming, That they need no Proof of the Being of a God, for that every Pile of Grass, or Ear of Corn, 36. The first edition was published in London in 1691. The second edition, "very much enlarged," appeared in 1692, a third in 1701, and a fourth in 1704. The latter was reproduced in 1709, 1714, 1717, 1722, 1727, 1735, 1743, 1750, 1759, 1762, 1768 (Glasgow), 1777 (one in London and one in Edinburgh), and 1798 (Glasgow). All quotations are from the Wernerian Club edition of 1844-46. Although the body of Ray's treatise has been edited for anachronisms, the preface is reproduced (except for accidentals) as it appears in the early editions. The popularity of this work demonstrates how crucial Ray's argument from design remained for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientists determined to preserve a theological basis for experimentation. For contemporary arguments related to Ray's, see Richard Bentley, A Confutation of Atheism from the Origin and Frame of the World (London, 1692), and A Confutation of Atheisme from the Structure and Origin of Humane Bodies (London, 1692).

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sufficiently proves that: For, they say, all the Men of the World cannot make such a Thing as one of these; and if they cannot do it, who can, or did make it but God? To tell them, that it made itself, or sprung up by Chance, would be as ridiculous as to tell the Greatest Philosophers so. (xxii-xxiii) To demonstrate the "fundamental Truth" of God's existence and to counter the skepticism of "Atheistical Persons," Ray establishes the order of the natural world as a grounding principle for religious belief. He maintains that the argument from design is self-evident, even to "illiterate Persons of the lowest Rank of the Commonalty." It is self-evident, however, only because its logic of explanation is cast in terms-those of making, of agency-that, within the semiotics of seventeenth-century Christianity, presuppose its response: "who can, or did make it but God?" By posing questions about the complexity of the physical universe in terms of agency, Ray is able to argue for a higher threshold of explanation than his "Atheistical" adversaries and to render meaningful any information-any counterargument, any noise-that they might produce. Creation is not, as it is for Boyle and Newton, a voluntaristic, interventionist process but a holistic product; the observation of specific forms of biological organizationblades of grass and ears of corn-become demonstrations of the intelligence which has foreordained a universal order. In this respect, the order of the natural world, the aesthetic principles of beauty and coherence, is defined by and in terms of theology. Perception itself encodes theological values that, Ray claims, transcend social and political differences, that make order manifest even to "the lowest Rank of the Commonalty." 37 However, Ray's appeal to observation, a common tactic among seventeenth-century natural philosophers, creates as many problems as it solves. Even as his version of the argument from design identifies the objectivity of science with the observational authority of an un37· See James R. Jacob, "'By an Orphean charm': Science and the Two Cultures," in Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Phyllis Mack and Margaret C. Jacob (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 231-49, for a discussion of the coercive ideological arguments made by members of the Royal Society to contain the lower classes: "The natural philosopher joins the priest, minister and magistrate in the business of curbing potentially unruly popular passions" (235).

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moved mover, it implicates the natural philosopher in a postlapsarian material, social, and political world. Like Boyle, then, Ray reproduces incommensurate views of nature: the physical universe is both unproblematic evidence of God's wisdom and an irrevocably fallen realm of sin and delusion. In one respect, efforts to use theology as theory in seventeenth-century natural philosophy reinscribe the sexualized oppositions-male and female, idea and substance, form and matter, soul and body, idealism and materialism-that have structured Western thought since Plato. But, in another, these attempts point to the dialogical interpenetration of these oppositions, to what Goux calls "the production and reproduction of interposition," the "third term" that deconstructs and reinforces these binary structures, that mediates between absolute values and economies of exchange. 18 As I have suggested, the "third term" in seventeenth-century natural philosophy assumes different forms, or, perhaps more accurately, different scientists develop different strategies to negotiate this space of theory, the gap between idealist theology and the material universe. What is common, though, to Boyle and Ray is the appeal to technologies of observation as well as inscription-to what the former characterizes as "experience"-to address the problem of theory. Experience, often generalized as a form of interposition between theological metanarratives and experimental practice, is crucial to the "endlesse Progress" of seventeenth-century natural philosophy and yet invariably implicates the experimentalist in the demonized material realm of Protestant theology. In this regard, the crucial problem that Boyle and Newton confront is how to salvage experience for theocentric sctence. According to Boyle, the Christian virtuosi in the Royal Society "consult Experience both frequently and heedfully ... they enlarge their Experience by Tryals purposely devis'd" (Christian Virtuoso, 6). These men "may be compar' d to a skilful Diver, that cannot only fetch those things that lye upon the Surface of the Sea, but make his way to the very Bottom of it; and thence fetch up Pearls, Corals, and other precious things, that in those Depths lye conceal'd from other men's Sight and Reach" (6). Boyle's image of the scientist as a "skilful 38. Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies after Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 236.

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Diver" is characteristic of how he turns the metalanguage of experimental justification into an experiential rendering of the reality it describes. But as the comments of Ray and Wilkins as well as Boyle demonstrate, experience can never function as an unproblematic base; it is self-evident only within the context of self-legitimating ideologies, as Hobbes and Stubbe maintain in their attacks on the experimental practices of the Royal Society. The material world of experience-the site of politicized discourses, the corrupt and feminized realm of Baconian science-must be controlled as well as studied. The scientist's objectivity, in this regard, is frequently cast in terms of piety and asceticism, of isolating himself from the world he studies.

5 Neither Boyle nor Newton ever married. Once past adolescence, neither seems to have had much to do with women beyond their immediate families. "Boyle's piety," J. R. Jacob argues, "drove him to make his life a model of Christian virtue"; Frank Manuel notes of Newton that the "scrupulosity, punitiveness, austerity, discipline, industriousness, and fear associated with a repressive morality were early stamped upon his character"; and Richard S. Westfall describes him during his university years as the "solitary and dejected scholar of Cambridge." 39 In brief, both Boyle and Newton led existences that verged on compulsive asceticism, sealing themselves off from many of the experiences of the world they studied. Their asceticism is at once psychological and cultural, rooted in their personal crises of faith and their nearly Calvinist fear and distrust of the physical world. Their asexuality, in this regard, is not mere prudery but symptomatic of their deep-seated ambivalence toward "Experience." On the one hand, the physical reality they investigate is the work of a divine intelligence, benevolent if mysterious, and therefore good; but on the other hand, their Protestant, post-Reformation world is fallen and irrevocably corrupt-the province of the Devil. "Protestantism," for 39· ]. R. Jacob, Robert Boyle and the English Revolution (New York: Burt Franklin, 1977), 5 r; Frank Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 54; RichardS. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 75·

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Norman 0. Brown, "as a new relation to God is a response to a new experience of evil," more immediate and threatening than the medieval, Catholic construction. 40 This experience, as Brown argues, is · intensely, even overwhelmingly, physical; the evil traditionally associated with the body is both repressed as internalized "sin" and projected onto a world that becomes filthy, corrupt, and frankly excremental. Martin Luther makes the relationship between evil and physicality brutally clear: "The world is the Devil and the Devil is the world." 41 During the Protestant Reformation and its aftermath, then, "the whole domain of traditional virtue, pejoratively re-evaluated as mere 'works,' is handed over to the Devil." 42 This perception of the world as irrevocably corrupt and corrupting underlies the "repressive morality" that leads Boyle and Newton to devalue the physical realm, to subjugate its study to overriding theological imperatives. Asceticism and extreme piety become their defenses against contamination by the diabolical-and feminizedrealm of experience. Both, in this respect, are preconditions for scientific study. Boyle's and Newton's repression of the body, then, becomes a form of penance for their engagement with the defiling world of the senses, with the kind of temporal "works" that Luther rejects. The argument from design is inhabited by the traces of materiality, of the anxiety of history and contingency; the world, figured as the Devil, becomes the other-the specter of unbelief-that must exist in order to justify belief. What Boyle terms "that infinite Distance" between God and humankind places the natural philosopher in close proximity to the devils he seeks to overcome (Free Enquiry, 3 56): though the Devils be Spirits, not onely extreamly knowing in the Properties of Things (by their hidden skill in Physiology, by which they teach Magicians, and their other Clients, to do divers of the strange things for which they are admired) But also unmeasureably proud, and willing to pervert their knowledge to the cherishing of Atheisms; yet St. James informs us, That they themselves believe there is a God, and tremble at him; which argues, either that skill 40. Norman 0. Brown, Life against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), 2.1 1. 41. Quoted in Brown, Life, 2.12.. 42.. Brown, Life, 212.

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in Natural Philosophy does not necessarily lead to Atheism, or that there are other Arguments, besides those drawn from Science, sufficient to convince the most refractory of the existence of a Deity. (Usefulness, 106) Boyle describes his devils in terms reminiscent of the criticisms-and indeed of the self-characterizations-of members of the Royal Society; as he says in his preface to The Excellency of Theology, the purpose of his work is, in part, "to justifie to [him] self ... the Preference [he] give[s] Divine Truths (before Physiological ones) and to confirm ... the Esteem [he has] for them" (A3V-A4r). In this respect, his treatise functions as a mortification of scientific pride. The natural philosopher's implication in a corrupt world leads to his constant vigilance, to his efforts to redefine his role in terms that both efface and dramatize the workings of scientific pride and ingenuity, precisely those attributes Boyle associates with the "skill" of devils. In his meditative work Occasional Reflections upon Several Subjects (I66s), Boyle juxtaposes two striking images that might serve as emblems for his efforts to mediate between physical corruption and metaphysical perfection: And as Chymists boast of their Elixir, that 'twill turn the ignoblest Metals into Gold; so Wisdome makes all Objects, on which it operates, inrich the Possessor with useful and Precious Thoughts: And since, ev'n the illiterate Husbandman can, with the most abject Dung it self, give a flourishing growth to the most useful Grains, to Medicinable herbs, and ev'n to fragrant Flowers, why may not a wise Man, by the meanest Creatures, and slightd'st Object, give a considerable Improvement to the noblest Faculties of the Soul, and the most lovely Qualities of the Mind. 43 The alchemist transmuting the "ignoblest Metals into Gold" and the "illiterate Husbandman" growing "useful" and "Medicinable" plants from "the most abject Dung" become metaphors for both the natural philosopher's reclaiming the physical world from the Devil and the upper classes' appropriation of the labor of others as a means to their 43· Robert Boyle, Occasional Reflections upon Several Sub;ects (London, I665), 47-48.

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own "considerable Improvement." These images idealize nature and the virtuoso who investigates its mysteries by suppressing the actual processes of transforming the diabolical realm of earth and excrement into an object worthy of spiritual and aesthetic contemplation. 44 The two main verbs-"turn" and "give" -are weak, inadequate to the task of describing the labor of the alchemist and farmer. The "wise Man," too, is passive, only "giv[ing] a considerable Improvement" to soul and mind. These processes remain unexplained, indeed inexplicable, because Boyle has no real way of describing historical change, of bridging the gulf these images create between the physical and spiritual realms, between labor and the idealization of values-ideological ("noblest Faculties"), aesthetic ("most lovely Qualities"), and economic ("inrich the Possessor"). Paradoxically, this gulf between nature and theology allows him to describe scientific investigation as a means to transcend the contingencies of temporal existence. To describe change would be to give the Devil his due. But, for Boyle, temporal processes exist only as instances of an abstract "Wisdome"; they are less a method to achieve knowledge than examples of the state of grace that the natural philosopher ideally attains and that enables him to reinforce fundamental distinctions between "noble Faculties" and the "meanest Creatures, and slightd'st Object" on which they operate. Boyle's "Wisdome," then, is a linguistic marker, an attempt to signify the spiritual state that protects its possessors from the corruption of the natural world. Knowledge becomes a kind of spiritual capital that distances the immediacy of evil by denying its own historical-and material-origins: transmutation as transcendence, narrative displaced by revelation. As the language of the Bible, in Boyle's mind, frees itself from the politicized imperfections of everyday discourse, so the symbolic representation of experience as science, as an "endlesse Progress" both rational and mysterious, idealizes the material world as a sign of God's wisdom and power, disembodying it and thereby rendering it-provisionally, heuristically-worthy of study by the virtuosi. For Boyle, as well as for Ray and Newton, the processes by which the material world is transformed into a site of rep44· On the significance of Boyle's Occasional Reflections for novelistic discourse, see Paul Hunter, "Robert Boyle and the Epistemology of the Novel," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2 (1990), 275-91.

J.

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resentation do not exist as processes, as self-conscious narratives; they are displaced by, and rendered as, axioms of faith. In this regard, the repression of the body, of a disordered and feminized nature, becomes a repression into language, into symbolic forms-the two books for Boyle, taxonomy for Ray, and mathematics for Newtonthat idealize what they describe. The space of theory, constructed by and collapsed into the fiction of objectivity, functions also as a psychological as well as ideological and theological form of mediation for Boyle and (as I argue in the next chapter) Newton. Experimental natural philosophy, for Boyle, is a way of transcending his doubts; it enacts the means by which the laboratory-seemingly modeled on the enclosed, private space in which the meticulous study of the Bible takes place-becomes the site of forms of devotion, of prayer, that vindicate his faith in the possibility of redemption through scientific and technological progress. 45 For Newton, as Manuel suggests, science becomes, in part, a lifelong attempt to please an absent, mysterious, and unforgiving Father, to demonstrate compulsively his worthiness. 46 For both men, and for many of their contemporaries, the corruption of the material world is necessary to their self-perception as pious men overcoming their crises of faith in order to overcome the Devil. The endless progress of Restoration natural philosophy-heroically, presumptuously-brings the world closer and closer to Revelation, to a millennia! escape from history. In this regard, science explains, anticipates, and verges on the Resurrection-as Boyle argues in Some Physico-Theological Considerations about the Possibility of the Resurrection (r 67 5)-that is, the transformation of material corruption into spiritual perfection, of "abject Dung" into "useful Grains" and "fragrant Flowers." By studying nature, Boyle and Newton seek to redeem it. They are not only its students but its saviors, translating a fallen nature into an ongoing demonstration of God's power and benevolence. This redemption of nature involves a heroicizing of the natural philosopher and the mystification of what Jacob terms the "aggressive, acquisitive, materialistic, imperialistic ideology" of the Restoration as the betterment of humankind and the advancement of knowledgeY 45· See Shapin, "House of Experiment"; and, on Boyle's crises of faith, Jacob, Boyle, 38-42. 46. Manuel, Portrait, esp. 64-66. 47· Jacob, Boyle, 159.

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In this sense, the "romance" of natural philosophy verges on claiming for itself the status of an epic. Boyle's writings, in particular, may be seen as a more ambitious-and successful-version of the Restoration's literary panegyrics to order and stability. Implicit in his and his contemporaries' emphasis on the usefulness of experimental natural philosophy is the idea of restoration itself, of order restored (or reimposed) by the redemptive act of the virtuoso's study. Boyle's defenses of his theocentric practice are characterized by the same sort of selfconscious mythologizing of the "Restoration" that one finds in poem after poem and tragedy after tragedy during the 166os: the imposition of order and the temporal salvation of the historical world. 48 Like Newton's Principia, Boyle's works- The Christian Virtuoso, The Excellency of Theology, A Free Inquiry, and The Usefulnesse of Experimental Natural Philosophy, among others-are the epics of the new scientific ideology that yokes material progress and spiritual redemption, and that justifies its existence by emphasizing the complexity of the material world that it alone can explicate in such a way as to demonstrate its contribution to Boyle's "Universal Hypothesis." The discourses of natural philosophy, for Boyle, Ray, and Newton, like that of theology, are thus marked by the deployment of politicized languages to combat the evils and divisiveness of politics. If knowledge during the late seventeenth century, as Kroll suggests, is troped as contingent, it is precisely its contingency-its mediated naturethat necessitates the search for authoritative languages that mimic or seek to garner for themselves those forms of authority underwritten by the metaphor of the two books. The interlocking discourses of politics, natural philosophy, and theology do not simply explain but constitute a metanarrative, however dialogically contested, of order. In this regard, the emphasis in the works of Boyle, Newton, and their contemporaries on "Nature in disorder" suggests something of the ongoing state of crisis that is apparent everywhere in Restoration intellectual discourse. It is a crisis that requires the importation of ideals of objectivity and coherence into the investigation of nature to allow contingent and incomplete demonstrations to confirm a universal hypothesis-a metaphysics of order-whose temporal manifestation is precisely a sociopolitical order that is at once divinely ordained and 48. See Nicholas Jose, Ideas of the Restoration in English Literature, r66o-7 r (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), for the self-dramatizing nature of panegyrics of the 166os.

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already fallen. In the work of Newton, the "Complication ... of Rhetorick and Mystery" -of message and noise-becomes more complicated. For its contemporaries, the Principia offers a means to retheorize the dialectic of a corrupt world and a theologically ideal realm. Mathematics becomes the means of interposition, a semiotics that allows Newton to jettison the metaphor of the two books by offering the possibility of noise-free information: the world of mathematics, to many of Newton's followers, appears systematically cohesive and meaningful. But Newton's metacritical comments suggest that he was well aware that the mathematicization of the physical universe exacerbates the tensions between nature and theology, matter and ideal, that seventeenth-century efforts to define and to defer theory mediate. In Newton's works and those of his followers, the crisis of Baconianism is displaced into a series of discourses that try to sort out what mathematics does and does not signify.

CHAPTER IV

"Ye true & real temple of God": Mathematics, History, and the Narrative Structures of Newton's Natural Philosophy

I

A basic problem for scholars who study the published and unpublished works of Isaac Newton is that none of us, in one lifetime, can hope to reproduce the research that Newton assimilated, synthesized, and critiqued in his inquiries into alchemy, biblical prophecy, theology, pagan and Christian history, optics, and mathematics. Even scholars such as Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, who have devoted careers to exploring one aspect of Newton's thought, in her case alchemy, must, of necessity, limit themselves in other areas, say, his work on fourthcentury theological controversies. No one chapter-no one studycan offer a "complete" account of Newton's thought because its synthesizing tendencies resist efforts to impose on it a post-Kantian notion of "organic" unity. The various discourses that Newton draws on and transforms in his works may be described dialogically rather than hierarchically; they challenge the concept of what we mean by "unity" in the thought of an individual or even by epistemic "totality" in the thought of a particular age. Frequently, such scholars of Newton's works as Frank Manuel have called attention to his compulsion to establish order in his undertakings, but they usually make

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this assertion to demonstrate that the "same" principles are operative in both his "scientific" and "nonscientific" work, or, as James Force argues, that a single principle, God's dominion, unifies his various research projects. 1 Recently, Dobbs has offered the most comprehensive effort to date to explore the ways in which alchemy informs the relationships among Newton's matter theory, his search for a causal explanation of gravity, his Arian theology, and his writings on vegetative forces, electricity, comets, and what became (over the course of five decades) an increasingly subtle aether. 2 Ultimately, she offers what she styles a "religious interpretation" (25 1) of Newton's alchemy, arguing for the "ultimate unity of Newton's thought" (253), grounded in a "doctrine of the unity of Truth" (25 5) that is "guaranteed by the unity of God" and the supplementary operations of "reason and revelation" (6). Building on the work of Richard Westfall, among others, Dobbs perhaps puts the final nail in the coffin of positivist readings of Newton by offering a synthesis of various strains of his thought that demonstrate convincingly that Newton's theocentric interpretation of nature was profoundly antimechanistic. In reconstructing a Newton who antedates and resists our familiar disciplinary structures of knowledge, Dobbs marks the limits of what we now recognize as the history of science: if the book looks backward to a careful, even painstaking historical reconstruction of Newton's thought, it also looks forward to a postdisciplinary study of science. In this chapter, I argue that Newton's work reveals an interpenetrating, variety of semiotic endeavors, none of which in and of itself is adequate to explain a physical and metaphysical "order" that he describes-in The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, in Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. john, and in the Opticks-as irreducibly complex. Like Dobbs, I challenge previous interpretations of Newton that privilege mathematics and method as the governing structures of his work; unlike Dobbs, however, I question the ways in which metaphors of unity 1. See Frank Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 103; and James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin, Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton's Theology (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990),

?8-89. 2. Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton's Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Page numbers of quotations are given in the text.

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have been used to argue for homologies among his various courses of study. In some respects, Newton shares Boyle's project of searching for a basis to theorize the relationship between God's dominion and His physical creation; but he differs crucially in his commitment to rewriting the interanimating narratives of history and natural philosophy. As Dobbs suggests, Newton often transposes alchemical narratives of regeneration-of creating order out of chaos, of manufacturing redemption from corruption-into the discourses of human, if not providential, history. 3 His redefining of order takes a variety of forms: attacks on systematizers, from Leibniz to Athanasius; an obsession with origins, which he equates with a notion of pristine, uncorrupted meaning; and efforts to defer the kind of authoritative claims for his work that were often made for him by his eighteenthcentury followers. Newton is the most important writer of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries precisely, and paradoxically, because he leaves his works unfinished, disorganized, as though he were semiconsciously staging the very conflicts between ideals of knowledge-of comprehensive accounts of the mysteries of creation and the workings of prophetic history-and the fallen languages of analysis that so concerned him and his contemporaries. To a greater extent than even Boyle's works, Newton's writings are marked by the anxieties of describing and transgressing the space between the word of God and the semiotics of man. In mathematics and in history, the processes of interposition, for Newton, are figured as corruption. In this chapter, then, I examine the ways in which Newton's mathematics and his comments on methodology are implicated in an economy of corruption, a cyclical process within postlapsarian history that reenacts a fall from a pristine knowledge to a dialogically agitated realm of contested and politicized discourses. I want to read Newton's natural philosophy within the context of his fragmentary and deeply divided histories to suggest that his efforts are directed, in part, to resolve the crises within theory that troubled Boyle, Wilkins, and numerous others. To define this context, I concentrate on some of his unpublished texts, specifically sections of Theologiae Gentilis Origines Philoso3· On the interanimating narratives of alchemy and history, see Dobbs, Janus Faces of Genius, 150-68.

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phicae [The Philosophical (Scientific) Origins of Gentile Theology] and the Clark Library manuscript of "Paradoxical Questions concerning ye morals & actions of Athanasius & his followers," the latter of which has not been studied previously in any detail. 4 These manuscripts reveal an anxiety-laden process of bootstrapping that oscillates between developing their own systems of explanation and deferring all efforts at comprehensive accounts of science and history to a millennia! future. In some unexpected ways, they offer a means to chart heuristically the interconnections among Newton's mathematical and historical works. In trying to clear the channels of transmission within science and history, Newton faces the crises of representation that confronted his predecessors and contemporaries: the more information he accumulates, the more noise his semiotic endeavors generate, and the more suspicious he becomes of the tyranny of totalizing methodologies. Yet the greater the noise, the greater his need is to devise a theoretical framework to contain and shape the results of his investigations. As he attempts to demonstrate the order of the universe in various semiotic systems-history, theology, mathematics, alchemy, and opticshe becomes increasingly aware of the limitations of each system to represent what is ultimately an unrepresentable order. Because order, for Newton, always recedes beyond the scope of human investigation, it cannot be expressed semiotically but only imperfectly glimpsed in the promise of a future revelation. Paradoxically, precisely because order is a fundamentally religious and mystical concept, it authorizes the logocentric assumptions that underlie his various projects and allows him to develop epistemological strategies to celebrate the workings of an "absent" guarantee of transcendental perfection. The logic that informs Newton's mathematics and history is one of exchange and displacement predicated on God's existence as an embodiment (to use Goux's phrase) of "the paternal metaphor ... the central and centralizing metaphor that anchors all other metaphors." 5 As the foun4· Frank Manuel, Isaac Newton, Historian (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), 156-6r; RichardS. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 344-46; and Richard H. Popkin, "Newton's

Biblical Theology and His Theological Physics," in Newton's Scientific and Philosophical Legacy, ed. P. B. Scheurer and G. Debrock (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press, 1988), 81-97, provide brief comments on this manuscript. 5· Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies after Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 21.

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dation of the logic of general equivalents, God demands the praise and deference of his creatures, but He also banishes Newton, as both sinner and prophet, to the space of interposition between the ideal and the material, a banishment that fosters an always incomplete rebellion against what Goux calls the tyranny of the symbolic. 6 Newton's efforts to validate the existence of a divinely created order by mathematicizing the universe thus reinscribes the binary structure of Western metaphysics, reproducing an oppositional logic that operates in both his "scientific" and "nonscientific" work. The quest to describe an order that forever recedes into greater and greater complexities discloses the profound anxiety of the natural philosopher dedicated to bringing the discourses of experimental science within received theological and ideological structures of expectation and knowledge. In this regard, the space of theory, for Newton, is, as it is for Boyle, that of failure and sin on the one hand and self-justification and the "Complication[s]" of rhetoric, mystery, and natural philosophy on the other.

2

In an important sense, what Boyle's experimental natural philosophy lacked, the Continental mathematical tradition-represented most frequently in seventeenth-century English scientific writing by Galileo and Descartes-seemingly offered: a means to theorize rigorously the governing principles of an ordered universe. For many seventeenth-century readers, Cartesian mathematics functions as an ideal semiotics, a self-sufficient system that at once demonstrates and reflects the order of the physical universe/ Descartes displaces the authority of the ancients and, claimed his English detractors after 1687, the authority of experimental observation onto the proofs offered by geometry. As Otto Mayr notes, Cartesian descriptions of the mathematicized universe are based on mechanistic metaphors; their methodologies are founded on the assumption that the "vast book" of nature can be read as though it were a series of mutually reinforcing 6. Goux, Symbolic Economies, 163. 7· See Morris Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty (New York: Oxford University Press, 198o), 42-45.

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blueprints rather than an infinitely mysterious text. 8 As I argue in the next chapter, Descartes becomes the villain for such later eighteenthcentury writers as John Keill and Benjamin Martin precisely because his materialism and rigorously mathematical descriptions of nature seem to exclude both the kind of experimentation fostered by the Royal Society and the theological appeals made by Boyle, Newton, and others to the active role of God in maintaining his creation. 9 In one respect, the challenge facing Newton is to reconcile the epistemological tradition of experimental science with the rigor and predictive capabilities of mathematics, as he implies in his preface to the first edition of the Principia and as Roger Cotes argues in his preface to the second. 10 In seeking to reconcile these traditions, Newton and his followers test and redefine the limits of mathematics' ability to represent increasingly complex conceptions of the order of creation. In the process, however, Newton repeatedly emphasizes the instrumental significance of mathematics as a means to investigate the complexities of history and theology. In one sense, it is precisely his awareness of the usefulness of mathematics as part of a larger analytic that leads to his confrontation with the Cartesian and Leibnizian constructions of mathematics as a self-sufficient system. 11 Newton's mathematics has been taken by many historians as an attempt (often considered successful) to move the basis of religious belief from faith or revelation-the inward light of the Protestant tradition-to the legibility of an external, objective, self-consistent, and authoritative system of representation. According to John Roche, "Newton did not simply construct a theory [in the Principia]: he created a method and a language, applied them superbly, and inspired 8. Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 62-70. 9· See Michael J. Buckley, S.J., At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 77-97. On the differences between experimental and mathematical traditions in the seventeenth century, see Thomas Kuhn, The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 3 r-6s.

ro. Isaac Newton, Principia, ed. Florian Cajori (1934; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), xvii-xviii, xx-xxi, xxvi-xxvii. All quotations are from this edition. r r. See A. Rupert Hall, Philosophers at War: The Quarrel between Newton and Leibniz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); and Steven Shapin, "Of Gods and Kings: Natural Philosophy and Politics in the Leibniz-Clarke Disputes," Isis 72 (r98r), 187-215.

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others to follow his example. . In the world of scientific literature, . . . [the] Principia is the jewel in the crown. It may even be compared to a great cathedral soaring above the transitory and occasionally ramshackle constructions surrounding it." 12 Roche's rhetorical move-to displace theological authority onto Newton-dates from the late seventeenth century. Since the publication of the Principia, Newton has served as both a locus and the symbolic origin of the advent of scientific methodology and, as Roche suggests, of an objective language of dispassionate inquiry. What I. B. Cohen has celebrated as the "Newtonian style" of the Principia-"the elaboration of an incredibly successful method of dealing mathematically with the realities of the external world as revealed by experiment and observation and codified by reason" -depends on Newton's developing "purely mathematical counterparts of simplified and idealized physical situations that could later be brought into relation with the conditions of reality as revealed by experiment and observation." 13 But this process of mathematical idealization, in turn, depends on what we might call a logic of erasure: in his scientific and alchemical manuscripts, Newton habitually suppresses the processes, the historical contingencies, of his thought "to freeze time," to borrow Serres's phrase, "in order to conceive of geometry." 14 In developing the principle of inertia, for example, Newton initially drew on the notion of an inherent force, leading him to conceive of uniform motion in a straight line and uniform rotation as one and the same. In the course of his work on the Principia, however, he recognized that he needed to jettison the notion of inherent force and to alter the definitions and the first Law he had developed in De motu corporum in gyrum (On the Motion of Bodies in an Orbit [1684)) to arrive at the concept of 12. John Roche, "Newton's Principia," in Let Newton Be! A New Perspective on His Life and Works, ed. John Fauvel, Raymond Flood, Michael Shortland, and Robin Wilson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 43· For an overview of Newton's mathematical work, see D. T. Whiteside, "Newton the Mathematician," in Contemporary Newtonian Research, ed. Zev Bechler (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1982), 109-2.7. For a critique of "positivist" approaches to Newton (including Westfall's biography), see Arthur Quinn, "On Reading Newton Apocalyptically," in Millenarianism and Messianism in English Literature and Thought, r6so-r8oo, ed. Richard H. Popkin (Leiden: Brill, 1988), 176-92. 13. I. B. Cohen, The Newtonian Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 51, 37· 14. Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. Josue V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hokins University Press, 1982.), 87.

Fallen Languages inertia. As Westfall notes, "in the Principia itself, he ... eliminated the reference to inherent force from the statement of the first law, thus obliterating the principal record of the path by which he arrived at it." 15 The "Newtonian style," in this regard, is predicated on the repression of experimental experience into what Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar call the "literary inscription" of the constructive process of scientific facts. 16 The scientific ideology that Newton is taken to represent devalues the historical processes of discovery in favor of reifying as a "style," a method, the finished artifact-what Cohen identifies, and privileges, as the idealization of mathematics. This idealization can then be used as a "fact" within the history of science to demonstrate reflexively the coherence of a narrative of scientific progress that proceeds asymptotically toward a hypothesized and overdetermined truth. At the beginning of Book Three of the Principia, Newton calls attention to the fundamental distinction in his work between philosophical and mathematical principles: "In the preceding books I have laid down the principles of philosophy; principles not philosophical but mathematical: such, namely, as we may build our reasonings upon in philosophical inquiries" (3 97). This separation of mathematics from the physical world reflects, if problematically, the theocentric division of an ideal realm from a corrupt material world. As Cohen argues, the ability Newton has to bracket questions about the ontological status of gravity allows him to derive a mathematical description of gravitational force without having to grapple with the troubling philosophical and theological questions that prevented Christian Huygens, for example, from accepting the reality-and hence mathematical validity-of force operating at a distanceY But this separation between mathematics and the physical reality it describes problematizes 15. Westfall, Never at Rest, 417. 16. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (1979; rpt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), esp. 45-90. 17. See Cohen, Newtonian Revolution, 52- 54; I. B. Cohen, "The Principia, Universal Gravitation, and the 'Newtonian Style,' in Relation to the Newtonian Revolution in Science: Notes on the Occasion of the 25oth Anniversary of Newton's Death,'' in Contemporary Newtonian Research, ed. Bechler, 21-108; and Cohen, "Newton's Method and Newton's Style,'' in Some Truer Method: Reflections on the Heritage of Newton, ed. Frank Durham and Robert D. Purrington (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 15-57. For a critique of Cohen, see C. Hakfoort, "Newton's Opticks and the Incomplete Revolution,'' in Newton's Scientific and Philosophical Legacy, ed. Scheurer and Debrock, 113-31·

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their relationship. Even as mathematics claims to be a self-consistent, even "universal" system to explain natural phenomena, it reinscribes the oppositions of form and substance, idea and matter, privileging its ordering of an unruly and feminized nature and paradoxically revealing its dependence on the material conditions it seeks to generalize and to transcend. In an early, "popular" version of Book Three (translated and published separately in 1728 as Newton's System of the World), Newton states that his "purpose is only to trace out the quantity and properties of this [gravitational] force from the phenomena, and to apply what we discover in some simple cases as principles, by which, in a mathematical way, we may estimate the effects thereof in more involved cases." Mathematics is essential, he continues, because "it would be endless and impossible to bring every particular to direct and immediate observation" (5 so). This recognition that "scientific" or mathematical systems of representation do not reflect unproblematically an ordered universe is, as Boyle's writings suggest, not a question of Newton's individual "style" of scientific research (as Cohen implies) but a cultural and theological problem that lies at the heart of seventeenth-century attempts to construe the universe as ordered and legible, as "proof" of God's infinite wisdom and boundless authority. In the General Scholium at the conclusion of the Principia, Newton indicates that the purpose of his treatise, in effect, is to offer a more precise version of the argument from design: it is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions [of celestial bodies], since the comets range over all parts of the heavens in very eccentric orbits; for by that kind of motion they pass easily through the orbs of the planets, and with great rapidity; and in their aphelions, where they move the slowest, and are detained the longest, they recede to the greatest distances from each other, and hence suffer the least disturbance from their mutual attractions. This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being. And if the fixed stars are the centres of other like systems, these being formed by the like wise counsel, must be all subject to the dominion of One. (544) Newton's emphasis on the "beautiful system" of celestial objects locates mathematical description within a master discourse of aesthetic

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and theological order. This order proceeds not from "mere mechanical causes," from a Cartesian or Leibnizian determinism, but from the voluntaristic "counsel and dominion" of God. As a form of mediation, mathematics remains part of the logic of exchange rather than a transcendent ideal. In his Letter to Richard Bentley, Newton says of the Principia, "When I wrote my Treatise about our System, I had an Eye upon such Principles as might work with considering Men, for the Belief of a Deity." 18 The implicitly selective nature of Newton's "Principles" suggests that mathematics is not an end in itself but an improved epistemological strategy to pursue the goals of natural philosophy. In effect, Newton's purpose-in the Principia as well as in the Chronology-is to make signifying systems explanatory, to discover one-to-one correspondences between mathematical and prophetic signs and thereby to derive as authoritative a semiotic as humanly possible to provide a method for calculation or interpretation. Because mathematics, for Newton, is ultimately a means to a theological end, it is grounded in what Knoespel argues persuasively is "a logocentric view of the world." Although mathematics may maintain an "independent logical status" as "an internally consistent system," it cannot be applied to descriptions of the physical universe except through discursive elaborations, through the imperfect medium of language.J9 Put simply, the internal operations of mathematics do not and cannot describe an epistemology; whatever authority, whatever special status mathematics may claim is derived from the philosophical, theological, technological, and scientific discourses in which it is embedded and which it helps to constitute. 20 In this respect, Newton's 18. The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, ed. H. W. Turn ball ct al. 7 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959-77), 3:233. All quotations are from this edition. 19. Kenneth J. Knoespel, "The Narrative Matter of Mathematics: John Dee's Preface to the Elements of Euclid of Megara (I 570)," Philological Quarterly 66 (I987), 3 5. 20. The literature on the philosophy of mathematics is too vast to treat intelligently in a note. In addition to the historians cited above, see Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty; Morris Kline, Mathematics and the Search for Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, I 9 85); Gabriel Stolzenberg, "Can an Inquiry into the Foundations of Mathematics Tell Us Anything Interesting about Mind?" in Psychology and Biology of Language and Thought, ed. George Miller and Elizabeth Lennenberg (New York: Academic Press, I978), 221 -69; 0. B. Hardison, Jr., "A Tree, a Streamlined Fish, and a SelfSquared Dragon: Science as a Form of Culture," Georgia Review 40 (1986), 369-4I5; Kuhn, The Essential Tension, 31-65; and Brian Rotman, "Toward a Semiotics of Mathematics," Semiotica 1-2 (1988), 1-35.

"Y• true & real temple of God" comments in the General Scholium represent not a theological "extension" of his mathematical practice but an elaboration of the contexts in which his mathematical demonstrations in the Principia take place. In the Scholium, following a series of propositions and theorems on the operation of his "attractive force," Newton observes that he has now explained the two principal cases of attractions; to wit, when the centripetal forces decrease as the square of the ratio of the distances, or increase in a simple ratio of the distances, causing the bodies in both cases to revolve in conic sections, and composing spherical bodies whose centripetal forces observe the same law of increase or decrease in the recess from the centre as the forces of the particles themselves do; which is very remarkable. It would be tedious to run over the other cases, whose conclusions are less elegant and important, so particularly as I have done these. (202- 3) Newton then adds that he will "comprehend and determine them all by one general method" and offers Lemma XXIX (203). Elegance and mathematical significance are effectively joined. The "attractive force" exists not simply in self-evident calculations but in the discursive formations-those of elegance and teleological significancethat dispose mathematical proofs and theorems in a particular order. In this respect, aspects of a universal order are reproduced metonymically within the Principia on the level of mathematical demonstration. Ernan McMullin suggests that "meaning" in the Principia depends on the overall system rather than on the individual rule or demonstration, or, to extend his valuable insight, on the complex network of relations that exist among different semiotic systemsY The order that the Principia creates-the illusion of a "pure" system of describing the natural world-exists, then, only to the extent that Newton suppresses the semiotic context in which and by which his demonstrations acquire their ideational significance. In this sense, Newton's mathematics, as part of a larger relational network defined by his theological and historical concerns, is not the closed system envi21. Ernan McMullin, "The Significance of Newton's Principia for Empiricism," in Religion, Science, and Worldview: Essays Presented to RichardS. Westfall, ed. Margaret Osler and Paul Farber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 39-45·

Fallen Languages sioned by Cohen, Roche, and most traditional mathematicians and philosophers but a provisional inquiry that, by its very nature, can never be finalized. Because Newton's mathematics functions within the space of interposition, the method it describes is inductive and contingent rather than deterministic. At the end of the Opticks, Newton offers a concise account of what he considers proper scientific method: As in Mathematicks, so in Natural Philosophy, the Investigation of difficult Things by the Method of Analysis, ought ever to precede the Method of Composition. This Analysis consists in making Experiments and Observations, and in drawing general Conclusions from them by Induction, and admitting of no Objections against the Conclusions, but such as are taken from Experiments, or other certain Truths. For Hypotheses are not to be regarded in experimental Philosophy. And although the arguing from Experiments and Observations by Induction be no Demonstration of general Conclusions; yet it is the best way of arguing which the Nature of Things admits of, and may be looked upon as so much the stronger, by how much the Induction is more general. And if no Exception occur from Phaenomena, the Conclusion may be pronounced generally. But if at any time afterwards any Exception shall occur from Experiments, it may then begin to be pronounced with such Exceptions as occur. By this way of Analysis we may proceed from Compounds to Ingredients, and from Motions to the Forces producing them; and in general, from Effects to their Causes, and from particular Causes to more general ones, till the Argument end in the most general. 22 Although the end of natural philosophy is the "most general" of "Causes"(presumably God's will), induction resists the abstract theorizing that would systematize a methodology. Epistemologically, induction complements a voluntaristic theology: it does not demonstrate "general Conclusions" but produces "Argument[s]"narratives-which can be supplemented or countered only by other narratives derived from "Experiments and Observations." The nar22. Isaac Newton, Opticks (New York: Dover, r 9 52), 404. All quotations are from this edition.

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rative of induction, Newton's updating of Boyle's "romance," creates a voluntaristic frame of reference that allows natural philosophers to distinguish heuristic knowledge from the false certainty of hypotheses. In this respect, Newton's description of his method delegitimates competing-specifically, Cartesian and Leibnizian-methodologies by arguing against a philosophical tradition that rejects or modifies Baconian empiricism. The stakes in differentiating between empirical induction and hypothetico-deduction are theological as well as methodological: induction, for Newton, is the necessary complement of theological voluntarism precisely because it discloses the discontinuity between the parts and the whole, between experimental observation and first causes. Induction, in this regard, is not an absolute principle but the thumbnail description of a narrative procedure of the kind that Charles Bazerman discusses: an after-the-fact restructuring of discrete experiments and observations into a meaningful, linear sequence of causes and effects. 23 The belatedness of this method, then, is the guarantee of its authenticity, a mark of its resistance to the systematizing of absolute principles, to the imposition of a deterministic order on the physical universe and on God's power to intervene in his creation. As a heuristic counterpart of experimental induction, then, mathematics serves as a means to allow Newton to plot a narrative order that emphasizes both local stabilities and what Boyle calls the "recluse ends of Omniscience." Mathematics is a sign of God's absent dominion, a "trace" of an ordering principle that stands metonymically for humankind's questions about origins and order. In this regard, mathematics becomes a means to hypothesize a narrative principle, a sequential logic, for history-whether the history of an experiment (say, the causal construction that Newton imposes on his optical research in his "Light and Colors")-or the metanarrative of prophetic history, the cyclical accounts of corruption that he develops in his theological manuscripts. Mathematics, precisely because it is implicated in a postlapsarian, historical nature, becomes both a mode of redemption and an always incomplete and inadequate means to represent the perfection of God's universe, to bridge or eliminate the gap between 23. Charles Bazerman, Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), So- 127.

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sign and signified. To some extent, Newton shares the idealizing vision of Restoration language projectors such as Wilkins, but he remains acutely aware of the ways in which the oppositions of meaning and noise, idea and matter, authority and corruption are always in the process of being destabilized by the dialogical contention of history.

3 Newton's insistence on induction and voluntarism produces and is produced by a crucial displacement of the vehicle and tenor of the metaphor of the two books, a displacement which distinguishes his work from that of his predecessors. Boyle's argument from design is ultimately based, as I have argued, on his conception of the Bible's "Complication ... of Rhetorick and Mystery" as a reflection of God's inscrutable purposes; even if many of its intricacies lie beyond human understanding, the Bible is perfectly ordered and consequently so is the natural world. But, for Newton, the bulk of the Bible-all of the Old and New Testaments except the prophetic books and Revelation-is a flawed, imperfect text that had been corrupted by poor translations and the willful deceit of trinitarians such as Jerome and Athanasius. Because his quest for a pristine scientific and theological knowledge takes place without the reinforcing epistemological grid of the Bible's textual authority, Newton seeks to create in its place a network of mutually supporting epistemologies-scientific and historical-to justify the ways of God to man. The inadequacy of the Bible as an ontological guarantee points, for Newton, to the profound uncertainty of any form of analysis, to his emphasis on induction, and to his suspicion of systematizers from Athanasius to Leibniz. In this regard, Newton's habits of composition, the obsessive rewriting we find in his mathematical and theological manuscripts, suggests that the interconnections among mathematics, theology, and sociopolitical concerns are themselves potentially destabilizing: any time his calculations do not "work out," do not yield results that can be readily integrated into an overarching explanatory system or that correspond to observable data, the theological order itself, as distinct from the Bible as ontological model, is at least implicitly threatened.

"¥• true & real temple of God,

His investigations, in this respect, provoke crises that repeatedly lead Newton to try to justify in new and ever more complex ways the workings of the universe as evidence of God's omnipotence. Newton's obsession with accuracy, with precise measurement, with reading all available historical and theological sources, stems, in part, from his awareness of what is at stake in his various semiotic explorations. 24 His reluctance to publish his work (noted by many of his contemporaries) may result from his frustration in never being able to make the necessary discoveries that would stabilize the relations among the semiotic systems he studies. In this sense, there is a unified "purpose" to Newton's inquiries, but it is not the sort of mystical order that David Castilleja envisions. 25 In the absence of the Bible as a guarantee of religious belief, Newton becomes obsessed with the cycles of corruption that recur throughout history. The space of theory, of interposition, for Newton, is characterized by the processes of dissemination and corruption that obscure the origins of pristine knowledge and faith: the narrative of corruption is postlapsarian history. Repeatedly in his unpublished writings, Newton describes the processes of the Bible's "corruption" by trinitarian polemicists. In a continuation of "Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture," a completed manuscript that he sent to John Locke and then frantically withdrew from publication in r692, Newton argues that the text of r John 5.20 mistakenly (and maliciously) transfers the epithet "true" from the Father to the Son. He concludes that it's manifest that ye scriptures have been very much corrupted in ye first ages & chiefly in the fourth Century in the times of the Arian Controversy. And to ye shame of Christians be it spoken ye Catholicks are here found much more guilty of these corruptions then the hereticks .... The Catholicks ever made ye corruptions (so far as I can yet find) & then to justify & propagate them exclaimed against the Hereticks & old Interpreters, as if the ancient genuine readings & translations had been corrupted. Whoever was the au24. Newton's concern with precise measurements of lunar motion led to his long correspondence and ultimate falling out with john Flamsteed, the Royal Astronomer. See particularly the letters that passed among Newton, Flamsteed, and john Wallis in the early 169os in volumes 3 and 4 of the Correspondence. 25. David Castillejo, The Expanding Force in Newton's Cosmos (Madrid: Ediciones de Arte y Bibliofilia, 1981).

Fallen Languages thor of the Latin Version [of the Bible] wch did insert ye testimony of the three in heaven, he charges the Authors of ye ancient Latin versions with infidelity for leaving it out.... And if [the Catholics] have taken this liberty with ye scriptures, its to be feared they have not spared other authors: So Ruffin (if we may believe Jerome) corrupted Origen's works & pretended that he only purged them from ye corruptions of ye Arians. And such was the liberty of that age that learned men blushed not in translating Authors to correct them at their pleasure & confess openly yt ... they did so as if it were a crime to translate them faithfully. All wch I mention out of the great hatred I have to pious frauds, & to shame Christians out of these practices. (Correspondence, 3 : r 3 8-3 9) Newton claims disingenuously that his subject in passages such as this one is "no article of faith, no point of discipline, nothing but a criticism concerning a text of scripture," and couches his antitrinitarianism in the guise of indicting "the pious frauds of ye Roman Church" and of meticulous biblical scholarship designed to prove "that ye scriptures have been very much corrupted in ye first ages" to promote trinitarian doctrine (3: 83, 3: 138). But his arguments imply that the authority of the Bible is dissipated in errors of transmission and translation, in the textual corruption that is emblematic of spiritual corruption, the politicizing of religion, and the semiotic-and theological-incoherence which results from allowing the fallen languages of man to usurp the authority of the word of God. Newton's implicit rejection of the constitutive metaphor of the two books necessitates a far-ranging theoretical quest to find, derive, or demonstrate a new grounding for his investigations, a new authorizing language to legitimate his faith in the revealed order of the universe. By rejecting the idea of the Bible as Logos, Newton implicitly subverts logocentric justifications for scientific research that depend on the belief that the order of the natural world reflects the mystical order of the Bible. In stark contrast to Boyle, who seeks to cordon off the Bible from the corruptions of history and language, Newton reinserts its trinitarian texts into a politicized realm of dissemination and corruption. He develops, in effect, two strategies to counter what he sees as the corruption of history: he makes the study of nature the basis for religious faith and he attempts to recover a "true" history

"¥• true & real temple of God" that the Bible renders only in a corrupt form. 26 In practice, Newton devotes much of his time to salvaging the authority of Daniel and Revelation and to rewriting ancient history to privilege a voluntaristic conception of theocentric science, to create the very giants on whose shoulders he would stand. His history-writing, then, is predicated on a reflexive logic: it assumes that a logocentric mathematics can be used to demonstrate the order of nature, then uses this idealized knowledge as a basis to argue for the narrative coherence of history. By locating the origins of religious faith in scientific knowledge, Newton is free to challenge Christian accounts of the Word incarnate as a basis for belief. Michel de Certeau suggests that the narrative constructs of history provide "the empty frame of a linear succession which formally answers to questions on beginnings and to the need for order," that history itself "becomes the myth of language[,] ... creating the absent, in making the signs scattered over the surface of current times become the traces of 'historical' realities, missing indeed because they are other." 27 In de Certeau's sense, Newton rereads the "traces" of his postlapsarian present to offer an alternative to trinitarian theology-a "succession" of "beginnings" and "order" grounded in the study of nature. However, the complexity of the natural order that Newton describes endlessly complicates the search for an "absent" origin. As Boyle's works suggest, a voluntaristic theology requires a construction of nature that offers no readily apparent-or inherent-narrative or causal structure: the endless progress of natural philosophy, Boyle argues, is emplotted as a romance, displacing teleology into parataxis. A fallen nature, however complex, cannot serve as the origin of faith because it is subject to transmutation, to the "recluse ends" of God's will. The origin for faith and science that Newton locates in a pristine Noachian religion, then, is based not on an idealized vision of an uncorrupted nature but on an idealization of an uncorrupted knowledge of nature. This crucial-and problem26. See Kenneth J. Knoespel, "Milton and the Hermeneutics of Time: SeventeenthCentury Chronologies and the Science of History," Studies in the Literary Imagination 22 (1989), 17-35; and Richard S. Westfall, "Isaac Newton's Theologiae Gentilis Origines Philosopicae," in The Secular Mind: Transformations of Faith in Modern Europe, ed. W. Warren Wagar (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982), 15-34; and Westfall, "Newton's Theological Manuscripts," in Contemporary Newtonian Research, ed. Bechler, 129-43. 2 7. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 12, 46.

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atic-separation of scientific knowledge from the object of its study allows Newton to privilege (as I argue below) an idealized notion of the masculinist transmission of symbolic capital and to use what he perceives as the "traces" of the religion of Noah to legitimate his scientific and historical research. In the Origines and related manuscripts, Newton sets himself up as being among "a remnant, a few scattered persons which God hath chosen, such as without being led by interest, education, or humane authorities, can set themselves sincerely & earnestly to search after truth." 28 He argues that the ancient Noachian religion is based on two principles: love God and love your neighbor. It has been corrupted throughout history, although God periodically has sent messengers, notably Moses and Jesus, to recall humankind to this true form of worship. Newton's view of history, therefore, is cyclical, an ongoing repetition of periods of true faith followed by the corruptions of idolatry and priestcraft, variously represented by Egyptian priests, pagans, and, from the fourth century on, trinitarians. The Origines, in this regard, is Newton's attempt to restore his readers to the "true religion" of monotheism, which has its origins in an understanding of the physical universe: "there is no way," he says in the Origines, "(w'hout revelation) to come to ye knowledge of a Deity but by the frame of nature." 29 Although monotheistic, the Noachian religion, as Newton reconstructs it, accords Vesta-identified with "the frame of nature"complementary if not equal status with manifestations of the male divinity: Jupiter, the "world soul," or the Sun. According to Newton, the ancient Latins sacrificed not according to the religion of Troy (supposedly imported to Rome by Aeneas) but to the deities of Janus (a corruption of the Greek form of Noah) and Vesta (Yahuda ms. 41, fu). 30 The dialectical nature of these ancient divinities-the yoking of nature and soul-symbolizes, for Newton, a preexistent natural order that resists, on one level, the sexualized dichotomies that he sees 28. Yahuda ms. I. I, f. 1; cited in Westfall, Never at Rest, '\25. 29. Yahuda ms. 41, f. 7; cited in Westfall, "Newton's Th~ol~giae," 25; Westfall notes

that Newton "inserted the parenthetical phrase, 'w•hout revelation' above the line as an afterthought." 30. Quotations are from "The Original of Religions" (Yahuda ms. 41), an English precis of some of the key arguments found in the Origines. I am grateful to Kenneth Knoespel for calling this manuscript to my attention.

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as symptomatic of the corruption of idolatry. The originary structures of divinity, Janus and Vesta, he implies, embody rather than represent the order of the physical universe; they symbolize a hypothesized unity of soul and matter. But the logic of Newton's assumptions about the relationship of physical nature to the divine will is never completely articulated in the Origines or "The Original of Religions." This relationship is irrevocably conflicted (as it is for Boyle) because nature is the mark of both God's omnipotence and man's fall into corruption. This conflict works itself out in the Origines as an intermittent and imperfect reversal of the binary structures of Western thought that elevate spirit over matter. If nature is the way back to the knowledge of God, it can be recast so that it becomes the idealized object of a pristine knowledge, at once both emblem and fetish. Although Newton accepts, particularly in his published works, traditional constructions of a feminized and devalued nature, he also strains against them by positing an uncorrupted knowledge of nature as the basis of religious faith and as a standard against which the corruptions of history and theology may be measured. In this respect, his efforts to recover a "true religion" lead him to question as well as to reinscribe the binary structures of thought that distinguish metaphysics from physics. The proof that Newton offers to support his view of the Noachian religion takes the form of an extended discussion of heliocentric models of the solar system, represented, he contends, by temples constructed around central flames that were tended by vestal virgins. 31 The pristine, originary example is the Temple of Solomon, whose dimensions, he calculates, reveal the structure and dynamics of the solar system as they were known in the seventeenth century. The Temple, with its sacred fire at the center, embodies rather than represents the order of the physical and moral universe. According to Newton, "as the Tabernacle was contrived by Moses to be a symbol of ye Heavens (as St. Paul & Josephus teach), so were ye Prytanea amongst ye 31. On Newton's views of ancient wisdom, see Westfall, "Newton's Theologiae," 17-23; Dobbs, Janus Faces, 27-32, 152- 54;]. E. McGuire and P.M. Rattansi, "Newton and the 'Pipes of Pan,'" Notes and Records of the Royal Society 21 (1966), roS-43; J. E. McGuire, "Force, Active Principles, and Newton's Invisible Realm," Ambix r 5 (r968), 154-208; and, for a more skeptical approach, Paolo Casini, "Newton: The Classical Scholia," trans. A. Rupert Hall, History of Science 22 (1984), r-58.

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nations .... The whole heavens they reconed to be ye true & real temple of God & therefore that a Prytanaeum might deserve ye name of his Temple they framed it so in the fullest manner to represent the whole systeme of the heavens. A point of religion then weh nothing can be more rational" (Yahuda ms. 41, 6r). "The fullest manner" of pristine representation bridges the postlapsarian gap between sign and signified, communicating-without noise, without misinterpretation-a rational "point of religion." Because Newton sees the Noachian religion as having been universal, he finds this model of the heliocentric system, to varying degrees corrupted from the Solomonic ideal by idolatry and priestcraft, in a number of ancient religions: Egyptian, Italian, Phoenician, and so on. All these cultures offer redactions of a true, scientifically based faith. In this regard, the knowledge that Newton claims to retrieve in the Principia is the mathematical demonstration of the "true & real temple of God," a system of signification that locates in the ancient structures of worship a warrant, an origin, that does not depend on the suspect texts of the trinitarians or, more generally, on a logic of exchange and displacement. The knowledge symbolized by Solomon's Temple, however, is always in danger of being fragmented into competing forms of idolatry. Janus and Vesta are severed into antithetical representations of masculine spirit or idea and feminine body or matter. Vesta is then split into contradictory images of a feminized nature-both the nurturing mother and the object of desire, of exploitation. She marks the gap between a chaotic physical world and its idealized forms as the ordered manifestations of God's power; she figures the means-a postlapsarian history-by which an ideal knowledge is gradually but irrevocably corrupted. The fall of nature, then, inheres in the act of anthropomorphizing or, more accurately, feminizing it as a material representation rather than as an ineffable sign of God's power. Implicitly, a feminized nature, for Newton, thus becomes both an object to be feared and exploited and the sign of an absent ideal. The painstaking study of nature's mysteries can be justified, as it is in the Origines, as a mode of redemption because nature's restoration would mark the completion of prophetic history, the return to an originary faith. Yet even as it represents, for Newton, the possibility of a pristine scientific knowledge, nature remains a postlapsarian realm that must be transcended to allow "men" unmediated access to theological truths.

"Ye true & real temple of God" Newton remains caught within a logic that problematizes boundaries between signified and sign, immanence and representation, force and matter, idea and materiality-a logic that plays itself out in his fascination with processes of corruption. However, Newton does try to transcend the corruption of nature by positing pristine forms of symbolization that remain unmarked by their materiality-specifically, the semiotic of Solomon's Temple. Because the Temple embodies and reveals a true, mathematical knowledge of the physical universe, Newton invests it with the burden of representing what is unrepresentable-namely God. In his discussion of Moses, Freud, and iconoclastic prescription, Goux argues that the "necessary invisibility of God" in the Judea-Christian tradition "points to a place beyond matter" and representation: "The Father is Eternal," he asserts, "only if he is beyond any compromise with perishable, corruptible matter, in a position of radical alterity.... The empty temple, the imageless sanctuary, is also the bodiless tomb of the dead Father, or rather the memorial, free of phantasy, which makes him the Eternal." 32 For Newton, then, the Temple symbolizes both the origin of faith in its heliocentrism and-because it is a physical structure that can be reconstructed only through its traces in the Bible-the infiltration by "perishable, corruptible matter" of the "empty" space of God. The Temple paradoxically testifies to the symbolic death-the absence-of a God who cannot be named, who can be known only through his works. Any attempt, then, to locate God within the empty space of the Temple is to implicate him in economies of representation and to encourage those forms of displacement that lead to idolatry and metastasizing corruption. The corruption of the "true," scientifically based religion, Newton argues, is a process of displacement, the worshiping of symbols or "sensible objects" instead of the "philosophical truths" that they represent. The search for origins leads all but the "remnant" to shortcuts, to theoretical leaps, to systematizing, and to forms of dissemination that inevitably introduce noise and corruption into the messages they transmit. "Idolatry," Newton asserts, "began in ye worship of ye heavenly bodies & elements" (Yahuda ms. 41, 8r). The true religion was then further corrupted to include the worship of deified ancestors; this 32. Goux, Symbolic Economies, 146.

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displacement of religious devotion from God to man is the origin of paganism. "The worshipping ... of these false gods & goddesses in ye Prytanea," says Newton, "was ye first & most general corruption of ye primitive religion: but ye grossest corruption was by introducing ye worship of dead men & statues" (9r). The danger of idolatry is that it conflates artifacts and those truths they originally were supposed to represent. Significantly, this process is defined by Newton as a confusion between representation and idea, between material forms and spiritual truths. Idolatry marks the liminal space where "ye true & real Temple of God" slips from noise-free communication to the endless exchanges of representation. For Newton, then, the idea of corruption inheres in the problematic of representation, of the alienation of general equivalents from the economies of exchange and displacement that they authorize. Newton can never locate a precise source for this corruption-or a moment when true faith becomes idolatry-because "the frame of nature" that he identifies as the basis of his faith is itself figured as the originary alienation of sin, of history, of humankind's exile from a pristine knowledge of the universe and its Creator. The putative sources of corruption, therefore, proliferate in Newton's work in seemingly endless cycles of displacement, of the falling away from faith and of God's intervention by sending his messengers-Noah, Moses, and Jesus-to recall humankind from the corruption they bring on themselves. At the end of Query 3 I of the Opticks, Newton asserts, "no doubt, if the Worship of false Gods had not blinded the Heathen, their moral Philosophy would have gone farther than to the four Cardinal Virtues; and instead of teaching the Transmigration of Souls, and to worship the Sun and Moon, and dead Heroes, they would have taught us to worship our true Author and Benefactor, as their Ancestors did under the Government of Noah and his Sons before they corrupted themselves" (405-6). Apparently, the source of the heathens' "originary" corruption lies in "themselves," in human nature; the Protestant theology of original sin inhabits this passage as the "trace" of a religious conviction which Newton neither fully expounds nor fully eradicates.33 Sin is within us, and yet it is also that which Newton seeks to 3 3. See Norman 0. Brown, Life against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), 202-33.

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explain by locating its "source" in the idolatry that transformed heliocentrism into heathenism or, in the Christian era, in the figure of Athanasius.

4 In a projected chapter heading for the Origines, Newton reveals his views of the continuity between pagan idolatry and Christianity: "What the true religion of the Children of Noah was before it began to be corrupted by the worship of false Gods. And that the Christian religion was not more true and did not become less corrupted." 34 As Westfall has demonstrated, Newton's theological manuscripts testify to his belief that the coming of Christ was not a "climactic event of human history [but] one repetition of a cyclical pattern" of the corruption, restoration, and renewed corruptions of a primitive, Noachian religion.JS For Newton, Christianity reproduces the logic of idolatry-the false worshiping of a "dead Hero" as a divinity. The trinitarian conception of God as man inverts the material and the ideal: God becomes a projection of a theological anthropomorphism and a corrupt human nature. Precisely because trinitarianism confuses the boundaries between God and man, between transcendent power and material existence, it distorts the truth that can be derived from "the frame of nature" by privileging corrupt texts over scientifically based knowledge. Because Christianity is yet another epicycle in the history of corruption, it lacks the means to generate a narrative structure that will lead the "remnant" toward the mysterious ends of prophetic history. In Newton's mind, the narrative of history must be rescued from Christianity and from the historiography that it engenders. To this end, in his rewriting of Church history in the fourth century, Newton seeks to short-circuit both the corrupt theology of trinitarianism and the narrative forms which that theology takes. The Clark Library manuscript of "Paradoxical Questions" is a later, or at least a more fully developed, version of Keynes ms. 10, 34· Yahuda ms. I6.2, f. 4sv; cited in Westfall, "Newton's Theologiae," 30. 35· Westfall, "Newton's Theologiae," 29.

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published by Herbert McLachlan in 1950. 36 In this manuscript, Newton challenges implicitly and explicitly the tenets of both the providentialist tradition of Christian historiography (that dates from Eusebius's fourth-century Church History) and the nonteleological narratives of political history which, as Arnaldo Momigliano notes, derive from classical, pagan historiansY In one respect, Newton explains the workings of iniquity in starkly oppositional terms reminiscent· of the political crises of late seventeenth-century England: malevolent trinitarians, led by Athanasius, and law-abiding Arians, who reject the mystifications of the Church. But this opposition between a corrupt theological sect and a faithful "remnant" also discloses Newton's subjective imposition on history of a rigid, totalizing order; he projects into the narrative structures of history what Goux terms (in discussing the repressive mechanisms of nascent capitalism) "the necessary substitution of a private ideology (neurosis) for the dominant social ideology." 38 This ordering principle or "private ideology" -which Newton both "finds" in his sources and imposes on them-is the structure of paranoia. Paranoia, from the Greek para, outside of or beyond, and nous, mind, is usually defined as a pathological condition of seeing everything and everyone as alien, hostile. Freud describes paranoia in terms of fears of persecution focusing on the object of repressed homosexual desire, but he also states that "the delusions of paranoiacs have an unpalatable external similarity and internal kinship to the systems of our philosophers." 39 As Naomi Schor notes, Freud minimizes "the differences between socially acceptable and deviant forms of system36. Herbert McLachlan, ed., Newton's Theological Manuscripts (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1950), 61-II8. Westfall, Never at Rest, notes that the Clark manuscript contains questions not found in the Keynes manuscript (344 n. 35). Other relevant manuscripts include Babson ms. 436, a Latin text on Athanasius's theology, and notes on Athanasius, Yahuda ms. 5·3· See the checklist of Newton's theological writings in Westfall, "Newton's Theological Manuscripts," 141-43· I have not examined the Bodmer Library Manuscript in Geneva of Newton's Church History, which remains inaccessible to scholars, including Westfall. 37· Arnalda Momigliano, "Pagan and Christian Historiography in the Fourth Century A.D," in Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1977), II5. 38. Goux, Symbolic Economies, 85. 39· Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey and trans. James Strachey, et al., 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74), 17:261.

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building." 40 If paranoia and systematizing in philosophy, history, and science are closely related, as Goux also argues, 41 that relationship can be seen as both mutually sustaining and antagonistic. Paranoia is at once the discovery of an objective order, of a completely meaningful narrative in which everything signifies, and the imposition of subjective neuroses-inflexible, reductive, and solipsistic-on experience. In recent years, however, radical critics of psychoanalysis have suggested ways to reinterpret paranoia as a form of resistance to dominant ideologies, "appropriate," says Mary Daly, to choose only one example, "to describe movement beyond, outside of, the patriarchal mind-set." 42 In this regard, the paranoid structure of "Paradoxical Questions" both employs and challenges a host of oppositions that structure seventeenth-century historiography-Christian orthodoxy versus heresy, occasional conformity versus open defiance of orthodox dictates, true or reliable accounts versus self-interested fabrications, history as the working out of teleological patterns versus history as a series of random occurrences, and the hope of returning to a pristine origin versus the fear of entrapment in a corrupt and politicized world-precisely to move beyond the "mind-set" they represent. Paranoia, then, is not simply or solely a neurotic condition of Newton's mind but an organizing trope for his history, a means to make sense of the triumph of iniquity and to resist providentialist interpretations of the dissemination and institutionalization of trinitarian orthodoxy. It is an extension of the belief Newton holds that he is among "a remnant" dedicated "sincerely & earnestly to search after truth." The paranoid structure of history-the totalizing order which counters the totalizing explanations of others-offers Newton a means to make conflicting accounts and self-interested vindications conform to an idealized, authoritative narrative, to suppress dialogical contention in favor of a monological truth. But Newton's narrative also threatens constantly to reproduce an inverted image of the totalizing ideology-the bad-faith mystifications-that he sees at work in trini40. Naomi Schor, "Female Paranoia: The Case for Psychoanalytic Feminist Criticism," Yale French Studies (1979), 209. 41. Goux, Symbolic Economies, 81-86. 42. Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 316.

Fallen Languages tarianism. His rhetoric of legal indictment reveals a repetitive, even obsessive argument that transgresses the boundaries between external fact and subjective interpretation, that constructs history as both the source and effect of the corruption which Newton seeks to transcend but in which, as he recognizes, he is irrevocably mired. In its unfinished form, "Paradoxical Questions" is an incomplete, unabashedly heretical history of the machinations of Athanasius and his followers that, in Newton's mind, led to the triumph of trinitarian doctrine in the fourth century. 43 Newton exposes what he perceives as the lies, forgeries, scare tactics, and pagan superstitions that Athanasius and his collaborators used to promote their selfish interests under the pretext of defending the Church. Chronologically, "Paradoxical Questions" begins by challenging orthodox-that is, trinitarianaccounts of the Council of Nicaea (325), at which the Emperor Constantine brokered the formulation of the Nicene Creed, codifying the belief that the Father and the Son were of one substance (homoousios). Newton then seeks to establish the legitimacy of the subsequent councils at Tyre (335), Antioch (341), Arles (353), Sirmium (357 and 359), and Nice (358), which temporarily overturned the doctrine of consubstantiality and offered a series of hotly debated and increasingly byzantine explanations to spell out the precise relationship between the Father and the Son. Throughout "Paradoxical Questions," Newton marshals evidence to support the charges of sedition, murder, blasphemy, and corruption leveled by the Arians at these councils against Athanasius, which resulted in his being banished five times between 336 and 365. 43· The problem of defining heresy in the late seventeenth century is complicated; James E. Force uses the dismissal of William Whiston, Newton's antitrinitarian successor to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge, in I?IO as a point of comparison. Whiston, Force argues plausibly, wrote publicly what Newton. as indicated by his unpublished manuscripts and correspondence, believed privately (see Force and Popkin, Newton's Theology, 120-35). See also R. C. Iliffe, "The Idols of the Temple: Isaac Newton and the Private Life of Anti-idolatry" (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge, 1989). Unlike the radically selfcensored versions of his chronological and prophetic writings published posthumously in the Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended and Daniel, Newton's antitrinitarian rewriting of Church history contains little that could have been safely published, although textual arguments similar to those found in "Paradoxical Questions" are reworked in "Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture." Yet even this relatively mild version struck Newton as too dangerous to publish. In one respect, his reluctance to commit his views to print testifies to his fears of possible persecution, to his internalization of a paranoid view of the politics of his time. The persecution that dogged Whiston after he made his antitrinitarian views public suggests the practical wisdom of Newton's occasional conformity.

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The historiographic problem we face in trying to assess the plausibility of Newton's revisionist account is that the only source for much of what happened to Athanasius comes from his own apologies, defenses, and after-the-fact denunciations of the councils which banished him. Newton challenges these efforts at autohagiography by exposing the inconsistencies and special pleading in Athanasius's accounts of the deposition and death of Arius, of the Nicene, Ariminum, and Seleucian Councils, and of his own actions. In the course of refuting Athanasius, Newton reopens thirteen-hundred-year-old investigations of Arian charges that Athanasius staged a riot and occupied the Church in Alexandria to have himself declared Bishop and that he later had an honest priest murdered to cover up his political and financial misdeeds. Newton also inquires minutely into the motivations of all the historians and apologists he studies, both Arian and trinitarian, and accuses Athanasius of promoting monasticism to delude the masses and to consolidate his power. Newton's mode of attack in "Paradoxical Questions" is to fire off a series of legal indictments aimed at Athanasius and his apologists. Along with reinterpreting the events between the Council of Nicaea in 325 and the Council of Constantinople in 381 (which reestablished trinitarian orthodoxy), Newton devotes chapters to seemingly trivial disputes. Question 10, for example, rehashes mutual accusations by Eusebius-Bishop of Caesarea, historian, and semi-Arian-and Athanasius that the other was responsible for impregnating a woman who, when called before the Council of Tyre, refused "to accuse such men [as the Bishops] of base lust." Newton concludes that because the story is not mentioned by Athanasius in his version of what happened at Tyre, it must be the invention of later commentators to discredit the Arians by accusing them of underhanded tactics. The relative insignificance of this question, sandwiched between revisionist readings of major fourth-century councils, is characteristic of what many Newton scholars find problematic about his historical workits digressive, repetitive arguments and its apparent lack of a coherent narrative pattern. Westfall suggests that "no one ... would call Newton a great historian . . . . He approached history with an a priori pattern of interpretation, and he produced indigestible catenae of quotations instead of readable narratives." 44 Yet this lack of "read44· Westfall, Never at Rest, 3 29.

Fallen Languages able narratives" in Newton's theological manuscripts reveals his rejection of the progressivist and teleological assumptions that inform Christian historiography. His obsessive piling on of quotation after quotation, example after example, is a version of his inductive methodology-the tracing out of an order to history that can only reiterate the cyclical tale of corruption and God's intervention that will continue to the end of what humankind understands as time. Newton's challenge to trinitarianism in "Paradoxical Questions," then, is also a challenge to Christian conceptions of history and to the narrative forms that privilege its "linear succession" of teleological values. In discussing the development of a distinctly Christian historiography in the fourth century, Momigliano argues that "Christian chronology was also a philosophy of history." Unlike their pagan counterparts, Christian historians, like Eusebius, were "concern[ed] with the pattern of history rather than with detail"; they viewed history as linear and teleological, and used their euhemeristic projects of comparative chronologies to establish the primacy of the JudeaChristian religion. 45 In challenging the claims of trinitarians to reveal an unquestioned truth about history, Newton therefore undermines the generic pattern of Christian historical narrative. As he makes clear in his writings on biblical prophecy, he believes that prophecies can be deciphered only after the fact; they offer no reliable guide to the future (as many millennialists in the seventeenth century believed) because they remain subject to, as well as indices of, God's voluntaristic power. In Daniel, Newton argues: The folly of Interpreters has been, to forte! times and things by this Prophecy [of Revelation], as if God designed to make them Prophets. By this rashness they have not only exposed themselves, but brought the Prophecy also into contempt. The design of God was much otherwise. He gave this and the Prophecies of the Old Testament, not to justify men's curiosities by ennabling them to foreknow things, but that after they were fulfilled they might be interpreted by the event, and his own Providence, not the Interpreters['], be then manifested thereby to the world. 46 45· Momigliano, "Pagan and Christian Historiography," IIO, II5.

46. Isaac Newton, Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. john (London, 1733), 25 I. All quotations are from this edition.

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Precisely because "the time is not yet come for understanding [these prophecies] perfectly," the study of history becomes crucial to the remnant because it offers them a means to decipher the workings of God's power. "We must content ourselves," says Newton, "with interpreting what hath been already fulfilled" (Daniel, 2 52, 2 53). History, then, is to prophetic time what inductive reasoning is to the "frame of nature": a heuristic narrative that allows the remnant to resist the false knowledge of systematizers and idolaters. Determined to reinterpret the controversies of the fourth century as a means to counter trinitarian hegemony, Newton must redefine the narrative structure of history to reveal Christianity as the corruption of an idealized but "absent" Noachian religion; he must redefine, in other words, his own faith in opposition to the future-oriented interpretations of false prophets. In this regard, the paranoid economy of "Paradoxical Questions" is his response to the threat that there is no discernible structure or meaning in history. Newton must guarantee the "truth" of history, and therefore of his faith, by insisting on his ability-divinely inspired and subjectively generated-to distinguish his "true" version of trinitarian evils from the "false" apologetics that he attacks. Given his politicized reading of history, however, Newton's quest for order always ends in describing the recurrence of corruption rather than in uncovering its origins. To attempt to locate and thereby to eradicate the origin of iniquity is to promote dialectically the imposition of order, the systematizing principle of paranoia. But the "traces" of corruption Newton discovers in trinitarian texts point not simply to an alien "other"-Athanasius-who must be overcome but to a disseminated evil, cyclically recurring in idolatrous cultures across the ancient world, that can never be pinpointed. In his efforts to suppress the noise of history, to render every text, every fragment, meaningful, Newton paradoxically makes Athanasius the archcorruptor of a world already corrupt, both the source and the effect of corruption. Athanasius is at once a historical agent and a kind of metaphysical shorthand to describe the alienation of humankind from truth and knowledge. The corruption which he embodies, in one respect, inheres in the cyclical nature of history itself, in the ongoing and repetitive fall from the "true religion" of Noah. History becomes a paranoid repetition, a reliving that effaces the differences between

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"past" and "present" and that marks humankind's alienation from the ideal narrative of progress toward revelation. What Newton must struggle constantly to repress, then, is his recognition that the twoedged sword of paranoia threatens to displace or to supplement God with a vision of the originary corruption of history. Athanasius, in this regard, becomes a mechanism to (re)articulate and to historicize the processes by which iniquity flourishes. It would be a mistake, however, to underestimate "Paradoxical Questions" by characterizing it as a single-minded working out of Newton's antipathy for trinitarianism. The problems that Newton faced in mastering a host of primary and secondary works, crosschecking sources, and attempting to verify dates and to reconstruct sequences of events were enormous. He came to know the primary material on fourth-century ecclesiastical history-the writings of Eusebius, Socrates, Sozomen, Basil, Hilary, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Athanasius himself-as well as, if not better than, any nineteenth- or twentieth-century historian of the Church. Not surprisingly, most of the modern historians of the Arian Controversy are, in a word, Christians who see their analyses as part of the unfolding history of Christian doctrine that they studyY What these scholars frequently take on faith-or what they study within the narrative and conceptual frameworks of doctrinal progress and understanding-Newton submits to a withering prosecutorial glare, anticipating recent views that the conventional account of the Arian controversy is "a complete travesty." 48 Although the language in which he couches his attacks on Athanasius and his followers is that of the search for an objective and rigorous truth-"that discredits all ye lies & fictions" of the trinitariansNewton's history is interventionist. The models he has before him4 7· For representative works, see J. W. C. Wand, A History of the Early Church to A.D. soo (1937; rpt. London: Methuen, 1974); B. J. Kidd, A History of the Church to A.D. 46r. Volume z: A.D. 3 q-408 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922); Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christianity, Volume r: To A.D. rsoo (1953; rpt. New York: Harper & Row, 1 97 5); and Glenn F. Chestnut, The First Christian Historians: Eusebius, Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret, Evagrius, 2d ed. (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1986). See also Ramsay MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire (A.D. roo-400) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); and, for events surrounding the Nicene Council, Hermann Dorries, Constantine the Great, trans. Richard H. Bainton (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 130-76. 48. Richard P. C. Hanson, Studies in Christian Antiquity (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1985), 234.

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notably Eusebius's Church History and the pro-Athanasian histories of Gregory of Nazianzus and Basil, among others-are themselves polemical and contestatory; the differing accounts of theological controversies in the fourth century play into Newton's fascination with locating origins and with filling in lacunae that is evident throughout his writings on chronology and theology. As a narrative principle, paranoia allows him to make sense out of a number of texts whose political and theological underpinnings, and arguments, are often confused or obscure. 49 Newton tries to work his way back through thirteen hundred years of textual corruption, prejudice, and superstition to a primitive Christianity that represents a monotheistic continuation of and development from the "true religion" of Noah. Yet in contrast to the Origines, "Paradoxical Questions" has little to say about this uncorrupted belief; the Christian theology and historiography whose semiotics he employs but whose values he explicitly and implicitly subverts remain alien to his vision of an uncorrupted past.

5 Newton justifies his attack on the trinitarians by claiming that he is simply undoing what they have already done, exposing-and therefore presumably rectifying-the corruption of the historical record. He asserts that it "has been ye constant practice of the Moncks to misrepresent & corrupt all things by pretending (without proof) that hereticks had corrupted them before." Newton's narrative, however, ironically is ordered by and predicated on the "originary" corruption of Athanasius and his followers; it tries to counter the paranoia of "the Moncks" who base their false accounts on the premise of a prior, but groundless, corruption. For example, Newton believes that the pro-Athanasian accounts of the Nicene Council distort what actually happened. His argument hinges on the trinitarians' corruption of the 49· See Hanson, Studies in Christian Antiquity, 234-35; Henry Chadwick, "Faith and Order at the Council of Nicaea," Harvard Theological Review 53 (1960), 181-95; and A. H. M. Jones, Constantine and the Conversion of Europe (rpt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978). Jones notes that the "three accounts of the debate [at the Council of Nicaea] which we possess are very different, and it is difficult to see whether they represent successive stages in it, or are variant versions, distorted by the authors' prejudices, of the same events" (133).

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term homoousios, which, he maintains, never signified "one undivided substance totally common to the ffather and Son . . . till ye Sabellians [a trinitarian sect] made it so." He maintains that the bishops subscribed at Nicaea to a semi-Arian position-that the Son is of a like substance with the Father-and opposed the new definition of homoousios ("one undivided substance") that the trinitarians sought to impose: "For when the Emperor Constantine the great sitting in the middle of the Bishops of the Council of Nice prest the word homoousios upon ye Council: they for a time stiffly opposed [it] untill the corrupt [trinitarian] significations of the word were rejected & such a signification as they could allow, proposed & agreed upon." Newton then argues that the inconsistencies described by Eusebius and other historians-a basically Arian Council assenting to a creed that it secretly found contemptible-result from the deliberate efforts of Athanasius and his followers to conceal the truth. If you can believe ... that one part of ye [Nicene] Council (& if we may judge by all the following Councils of ye east, the much greater part,) were such knaves as to do this [subscribe to a trinitarian position they disbelieved and had argued against] fraudulently & Constantine ye great w'h ye rest of ye Council such fools as to look on & let them do it fraudulently, you'! make a fine Council on't. But it has been ye constant practice of ye Catholicks to cry out fraud at every thing wch makes against 'em before they know whether it be so or not & thereby they have corrupted all history.

Newton makes the same charge against the Catholics that he accuses them of leveling against heretics and schismatics. These mutual accusations, however, share the presupposition that history-as a narrative reconstruction of "what happened" -is irrevocably corrupt. Consequently, the distinctions that Newton insists on between true and false accounts, between his views and the mystifications of trinitarians, are always in the process of collapsing, even as he asserts them. "All history," in other words, is both Newton's foundation and his target, the court to which he appeals and the criminal he must prosecute. Precisely because order and corruption are implicated in each other, to write history, for Newton, is to implicate oneself in its corruption. The obsessive quality that marks Newton's his-

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torical manuscripts, in this regard, reflects his recognition-and his struggle against that recognition-that the historian is part of what he condemns. For Newton, the corruption of history is also significantly the corruption of language, and his attacks on corrupters of ancient texts are a crucial part of his argument. Throughout "Paradoxical Questions," linguistic and textual corruption serves synecdochically for the political, theological, and sexual evils that have metastasized throughout history. His critique extends from analyzing specific corruptions of Scripture (1 John 5.20, he argues, transfers the epithet "true" from the Father to the Son) to discrediting the "Ecclesiastical Romances" and "Fabulous Legends" Athanasius and his followers used to promote their interests. The rigid standards of historical and linguistic propriety that Newton sees his work as upholding-and the standards of legal proof that he repeatedly invokes to convict his enemies-are defined in opposition to the pervasive corruption of the historical record. As we have seen in "Two Notable Corruptions," Newton harangues the tradition of textual corruption that extends back to the fourth century; in his mind, the only antidote to this corruption is to recognize its pervasiveness and counter it by invoking a pristine-and inaccessible-truth. The writing of history, for Newton, becomes the attempt to unmask "pious frauds" and to reassert the authority of uncorrupted texts and an uncorrupted analytical language. Ironically, however, the historical language he would restore is constantly in the process of fragmenting into dialogic, contested discourses and competing interpretations that he then demonizes as corrupt. Trying "to shame Christians" out of corrupting texts that are already corrupt becomes the logical, and yet impossible, end of Newton's efforts. Because language is always in the process of being corrupted, verbal attempts to coerce people into belief, like the Nicene Creed, can never be the representation of truth, only a sign of political conformity or of complicity in and with corruption. True belief, Newton argues in "Paradoxical Questions," cannot be circumscribed by a corrupt language. Paradoxically, then, the only faithful attitude for the remnant is to take oaths as signs of outward political conformity and inward theological dissent. The danger of the Nicene Creed is that it mystifies rhetorical posturing as an indication of faith and provides an excuse for political persecution. "Had Athanasius & his

Fallen Languages Moncks the gift of searching & knowing men's h[earts]?" Newton asks rhetorically. He answers his own question: "We have no other means of knowing men's faith but by profession & outward communion & way of worship." "Outward communion" is, for Newton, necessary temporizing with an iniquitous Church; it implies a recognition of the compromises that a corrupt world forces on all true believers and justifies his own occasional conformity. Newton's views on language and corruption also have precise theological implications. Richard Hanson, for example, notes that the early Fathers of the Church found it impossible to reconcile the eschatological language of Old Testament hermeneutics and "interpretation[s] of Christianity in terms of Greek philosophy"; the Arians in the fourth century offered a literal interpretation of biblical passages relating to the Messiah, while the trinitarians argued that the Son was the incarnation of the Word. 5° The fourth-century controversies about the nature of Christ center on the interpretation of "Logos" as well as on questions of his substance. Athanasius's first major contribution to the Arian controversy was a tract entitled, significantly, On the Incarnation of the Word. The Word and the Son, in Athanasius's mind, are one: For the Word, perceiving that no otherwise could the corruption of men be undone save by death as a necessary condition, while it was impossible for the Word to suffer death, being immortal, and Son of the Father; to this end He takes to Himself a body capable of death, that it, by partaking of the Word Who is above all, might be worthy to die in the stead of all, and might, because of the Word which was to come to dwell in it, remain incorruptible, and that henceforth corruption might be stayed from all by the Grace of Resurrection. 51 For Athanasius, the Word is the bulwark against corruption, literally an authorizing Logos that is mystically one "part" of the Trinity. As 50. Richard P. C. Hanson, "Biblical Exegesis in the Early Church," in The Cambridge History of the English Bible, Volume I: From the Beginnings to jerome, ed. P. R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 433-48. 5 r. Archibald Robertson, ed. and trans., Select Writings and Letters of Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, vol. 4 of A Select Library of Nicene and Post·Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 2d series (New York: Christian Literature Company, r892), 40.

"Ye true & real temple of God" Anthony Kemp argues, this emphasis on the word attempts to guarantee that the past remains "present," that the truth the Church seeks to preserve remains constant throughout time. 5 2 Newton's rejection of the Incarnation, in contrast, depends on distinguishing between a corrupt language and the divine semiotics to be read in the physical universe. For Newton, the confusion of the Word-of Jesus as an active agent in history, as an instrument of the divine will-with God is idolatry. His argument against the immanence of the Incarnation consigns language to the devalued half of a dialectic operating within history: it is dialogical and transgressive, a measure of the corruption which it disseminates. Newton's fascination with the corruption of biblical language, in this respect, suggests what is at stake on a theoretical or metacritical level in his antitrinitarianism. In discussing the gendering of the oppositional structures of Western metaphysics, Goux argues that social or "ideological reproduction" takes the "imaginary" form of a masculine ideal of a "perfect" and "supernatural transmission of image and likeness" that violently represses the role of women in conception and generationY This "paterialist ideology of conception," he argues, achieves its apotheosis in the notion of the immaculate conception, "the myth [that] signifies that procreation is spiritual" and that both derives from and reinforces a masculinist ideology which insists "reproduction is essentially idealist reproduction, the transmission of symbolic capital, and that the father is the agent and guarantor of this process, while secondary, material generation is the woman's function." 54 In this context, Newton's antitrinitarianism provides a theological-and theoretical-basis for a view of God's dominion that constantly reinforces the voluntaristic separation of masculine idea from a disordered and feminized matter. In one respect, Newton must deny the Son's consubstantiality because his humanitythe Word made flesh-marks His implication in a corrupt material world; trinitarianism subverts the opposition of spirit and body, of masculine, paternal authority and feminine nature. The ideal of a pure, masculine conception-of the noise-free "transmission of sym52. Anthony Kemp, The Estrangement of the Past: A Study in the Origins of Modern Historical Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, r 99 r ), esp. 3- 34· 53· Goux, Symbolic Economies, 224. 54· Goux, 225.

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bolic capital," of a knowledge distinct from and superior to "perishable matter" -is held hostage by Athanasius and his inheritors to the corruption of materiality. Trinitarianism, in this sense, threatens the semiotics of knowledge-scientific and prophetic-that Newton so painstakingly decodes. Newton's efforts to recover an uncorrupted language of truth and simplicity, an authoritative and legible semiotics within history, are thus always in the process of being overwhelmed by the breakdown of binary structures of meaning: in one sense, corruption, for Newton, is precisely the deconstruction of these oppositions. Because God functions as a general equivalent who must be excluded from history in order to guarantee its meaningfulness, the historian must immerse himself in an omnipresent corruption. Newton's attacks on the evils of Athanasius and his followers, in this regard, are also efforts to eradicate within himself the marks of his nearly Calvinist sense of his own unworthiness. 55 "Paradoxical Questions" abounds with images of idolatry, pollution, corruption, and violation that describe the means-the agents, strategies, institutions, and discourses-by which evil is disseminated. Chief among them is the institution of "monckery." Newton's attack on monasticism capitalizes on the anti-Catholic prejudices of his time and reveals as well his psychological investment in identifying and attempting to eradicate the sins of the trinitarians. In a more vivid version of a passage in Yahuda ms. r8.r (a fragment on ecclesiastical history), Newton makes explicit connections among the monks' sexual corruption, the mortification of the flesh, false theology, and moral evil. 56 His attack on the depravity of the Egyptian monks, followers of Athanasius, registers the horror he experiences at the corruption of spiritual authority to sensuality and superstition: Some are of the opinion that these Monks of this age were most holy men: but this is a great prejudice & such a prejudice as judicious men who have read & considered their lives can scarce fall into. ffor they seeme to me to have been ye most unchast & superstitious part of mankind as well in this first age as in all following 55. On Newton's senses of guilt and inadequacy, see Westfall, Never at Rest, 77-79. Manuel's psychoanalytic reading of Newton's career in Portrait emphasizes this point at length. 56. Manuel reprints part of this passage in Religion of Newton, r 3·

"Ye true & real temple of God" ages. For it was a general notion amongst them ... that after any man became a Monk he found himself more tempted by the Devil to lust then before & those who went furthest into yc wilderness & profest Monkery most stricktly were most tempted, the Devil (as they imagined) tempting them most when it was to divert them from the best purpo[se.] So that to turn a Monk was to run into such temptation as Christ has taught us to pray that God would not lead us into. For lust by being forcibly restrained & by struggling w•h it is always inflamed. The way to be chast is not to contend & struggle with unchast thoughts but to decline them [and] to keep the mind imployed about other things: for he that's always thinking of chastity will be always thinking of weomen & every contest w•h unchast thoughts will leave such impressions upon the mind as shall make those thoughts apt to return more frequently. £fasting duly is one of ye moral vertues & has its vitious extremes like all the rest. If duly exercised 'tis temperance & its extremes are intemperances. To pamper yc body enflames lust & makes it !esse active & fit for use. And on the other hand to macerate it by fasting and watching beyond measure does ye same thing. It does not only render ye body feeble & unfit for use, but also enflames it & invigorates lustful thoughts. The want of sleep & due refreshment disturbs the imagination and brings at length distraction & madnesse so as to make them have visions of weomen conversing with 'em [and sitting upon their knees] & think they really see & touch them & heare them talk .... These are the extremes of intemperance & between these such a moderate fasting as best suits with ever mans body so as w•hout unfitting it for use to keep down lust, is the due means of temperance. ffor my part I have not met with more uncleannesse & greater arguments of unchast minds in any sort of people then in the lives of the first Monks: what else means their doctrine that its better to contend with & vanquish unchast thoughts than not to have them, their frequent visions of naked weomen, their digging up of bodies of dead weomen with [which?] they burned in lust, their lusting even after passive Sodomy, & their relating these & other such histories w•hout blush. The deleted clause "and [women] stttmg upon their knees" seems a crucial point in this passage, existing, as does the last sentence on lust, necrophilia, and sodomy, in a liminal space between "un-

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chast thoughts" and their relation as "histories." The slippage from thought to history, from internal to external corruption-cast in the form of writing-suggests that the mind itself becomes politicized, and therefore corrupt, in a corrupt world. Newton's scholarly style becomes pointedly interventionist as he criticizes the monks for courting temptation and offers prescriptions for avoiding the moral evils symbolized by and displaced onto women. Lust is a significant trope for Newton because it represents the horrors of pollution, defilement, violation-"their lusting even after passive Sodomy" -acted on the body by the evil that results from courting "unchast thoughts." This passage erases traditional Christian distinctions between the corrupt body and the pristine soul; writing, which functions as the permeable border between the mind and the body, becomes the means by which corruption is spread by Athanasius and the monks. It is metonymic of the moral corruption that leads to lust and madness. In its denunciations of illusory virtues, this passage describes, decries, and recuperates an ideology of paranoia that finds temptation and evil everywhere. Binary oppositions-the soul and body, for example-are displaced onto a continuum between "£fasting duly" and "its vitious extremes" of self-deprivation: "If duly exercised 'tis temperance & its extremes are intemperances." The ethic that underlies this supposition is that the individual needs to maintain a constant vigilance, to develop strategies to displace "unchast thoughts [onto] other things." But this process of displacement itself needs to be vigorously monitored, its written expressions (as in the case of the more decorous version of this passage Manuel reprints) self-censored. The paranoia of the monks who "run into ... temptation[s]" can be guarded against only by a more rigorous version of their conviction that evil is omnipresent. To protect himself against the temptations that the monks court, Newton must acknowledge that he is part of the same corrupt moral universe, that his body is as susceptible to lust and self-deprivation as theirs. The violation of the body's physical integrity is linked to the violation of monotheistic order; desire functions as the agent of a corruption which can never be eradicated, only displaced into an ethics of moderation and work, or repressed into silence, propriety, and the blushes which the monks fail to exhibit. This passage, then, reveals the processes by which Newton seeks to guard himself against a corruption that already contaminates him, to cast himself in the role of God's prophet in an effort to preserve him-

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self from the violation to which he, like the monks, is subject. 57 Sexual, spiritual, and linguistic corruption mark, for Newton, crises within the symbolic economies of desire, selfhood, and representation; they are symptomatic of the breakdowns in the hegemonic logic of theocentrism that he sees as his duty to shore up wherever he can.

6

Despite Newton's implicit self-characterization as a prophet in the wilderness, his antitrinitarian history, even in its unpublished form, requires at least hypothetical readers to validate its claims to historical and theological truth. Perhaps more than any of his other historical or theological manuscripts, "Paradoxical Questions" addresses its reader(s) as "you." In a frankly heretical manuscript, this mode of address raises the significant question of who Newton envisions as his audience, or, in Serres's sense, who is being included in and who is being excluded from this revisionist history. This question, in turn, raises others about the genre of Newton's iconoclastic history and about the significance of paranoia as a cultural rather than simply psychological response to the problematics of history. "Paradoxical Questions" might be described, in part, as a late seventeenth-century counterhistory, a genre which, by definition, had to remain unpublished. It may prove useful, then, to compare Newton's treatise to another significant, and unpublished, heretical history of the late seventeenth century, Henry Stubbe's An Account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometanism. 58 Although both Newton and Stubbe reject orthodox accounts of Christian theology and history, the differences in their approaches may illuminate the problematic position of Newton's historiography in resisting the implications of its demystifying analyses. J. R. Jacob has argued persuasively for the significance of Stubbe as "a 'Hobbesian' secular historicist" who challenges the "clerical, prov57. On Newton's casting himself in the role of prophet, see Stuart Peterfreund, "Saving the Phenomenon or Saving the Hexameron? Mosaic Self-Presentation in Newtonian Optics," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 32 (1991), 139-65. 58. Henry Stubbe, The Rise and Progress of Mahometanism with the Life of Mahomet and a Vindication of him and his Religion from the Calumnies of the Christians, ed. Hafiz Mahmud Khan Shairani (19II; rpt. Lahore: Orientalia, 1975). All quotations are from this edition.

Fallen Languages identialist [terms] of conventional historiography." 59 Although this description (Hobbesianism aside) is tempting to apply to Newton's "Paradoxical Questions," the differences between the two manuscripts suggest different political approaches to revisionist history. Stubbe demystifies early Christianity in ways reminiscent of the radicals of the r 64os, and, by attacking the factionalism of early Christianity-Arian as well as trinitarian-he undermines providentialist accounts of its "triumph" in the ancient world: "the only thing that contributed to the prejudice of Christianity [in the fourth century]," he writes, "was their divisions among themselves, in which, by mutually exposing each other's Lives and Doctrines, all the parties became equally contemptible and ridiculous" (38). In part because he finds all the parties in the Arian controversy "equally contemptible," Stubbe admits he is at a loss to explain why trinitarianism ultimately prevailed: Whether the power of [the Arians'] Chieftains, the riches of their Churches, the Magnificence of their Worship ... or the fame of their Learning and pretentions to reason, which is alwaies an invidious Plea, and more especially to the reigning Ignorance of those times, or what else it was that raised jealousy in the Emperors, and hatred in the People against them, and most contributed to their depression and Persecution, I know not, but the other party again got the upper hand of them, and persecuted them again in their turn, altho' to persecute for Religion were by Hilary, Athanasius, and other Trinitarians then accounted an Arrian and Unchristian Tenet [emphasis added]. (43) The possible causes that Stubbe lists provide no mechanism to describe what Newton seizes on as a crucial turning point in ecclesiastical and political history. For Stubbe's secularist history, Christianity is not the site of a life-and-death struggle between true believers and apostates but a polyglot entity that seems less than the sum of its parts: "that [religion] which we seem descended from is no other than a mixture of the Religion of the Jewish Heretical Sect of the Essenes, and of the Egyptian Therapeutae, who were also Jews, but not Essenes, together with the superadded Tenet of Jesus being the Messiah, 59· J. R. Jacob, Henry Stubbe: Radical Protestantism and the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, r983), 66.

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and other Doctrines derived from the Gentile Philosophy, and certain Paganical Rites and Ceremonies" (53). Stubbe's depiction of fourthcentury Christianity draws on Hobbesian explanations of political struggle and, more generally, on the cultural mythology of the English Civil War as a period of factionalism and chaos to discredit the ideological as well as theological claims of Christianity to moral truth. In this regard, his championing of Mahometanism as the true form of primitive Christianity is an attempt to forge a rational religion by appealing to readers fed up with the sectarian squabbling of seventeenth-century England. Mahometanism, for Stubbe, becomes a vehicle for social progress rather than an exclusionary doctrine; it rejects the logic of persecution and paranoia in favor of an appeal to political stability. In contrast to Stubbe's Account, "Paradoxical Questions" denies some of the implications of its political analysis. Unlike Stubbe, who explains fourth-century factionalism as part of a Hobbesian war of all against all, Newton subordinates a secular or materialist reading of Church politics to the dualistic logic of paranoia to account for what is otherwise unaccountable: the presence and triumph of evil. Stubbe seems comfortable with incomplete, partial, or dialogic explanations of historical occurrences because they can be accommodated to his project of ideological demystification; Newton, in contrast, offers totalizing explanations for the corruption of Christianity from an offshoot of Judaism to a variant of paganism: And whilst Theodoret endeavours by the affinity between [Christianity] & heathenism to perswade the heathens to come over to it: this opens the meaning of that crafty politician Athanasius in setting it up. For when he found himself by the means of ye Sirmium[,] Ariminum & Seleucia [Councils (all of which took place in 359)] baffled & deserted by all but the Monks: he contrived his religion for y' easy conversion of y' heathens by bringing into it as much of ye heathen superstitions as the name of Christianity would then bear. ffor when ye heathens saw two sorts of Christianity, the one unlike[,] the other like their own religion; it must needs be that they would more readily embrace ye latter. And this I take to be y' true original of heathen ceremonies & superstitions web continue to this day in the Greek & Latine Churches. ffor who sees not that those superstitions came into Christianity while heathenism was yet in being? And who besides Athanasius had either opportunity or

Fallen Languages authority enough to bring them in[?] ... Twas this authority & none but this wch could bring into ye religion of his party monstrous Legends, fals miracles, veneration of reliques, charms, y' doctrine of Ghosts or Daemons, & their intercession[,] invocation & worship & such other heathen superstitions as were then brought in. Newton collapses the variety of evils that Stubbe identifies with political strife into the binary structure of paranoia. Christianity is conflated with "heathenism," replete with "saint worship" and "superstitions," so that it becomes another example of a false religion, an epicycle in Newton's vision of corruption and redemption. The fall into trinitarianism repeats the fall from a pristine Noachian faith to paganism. As a force within history, evil is displaced onto Athanasius and then disseminated from its "true original" through the corrupt languages and practices that Newton anatomizes throughout his treatise. Paranoia thus becomes Newton's mode of resistance to orthodox histories of the rise of trinitarianism: the structure of his narrativeus versus them-becomes a form of authoritative explanation that takes the place of hermeneutic inquiry. In this regard, the rhetoric of indictment characteristic of "Paradoxical Questions" is self-confirming: paranoia displaces epistemology because Newton's history can locate no warrant beyond the unmasking of corruption to justify its claims to truth. Paranoia, for Newton, implies constant vigilance, an acute sensitivity to the workings of history, because there is no point at which the past can safely be relegated to the status of an unproblematic guarantee of truth and sanctity. Corruption is always and already upon us. The tensions within "Paradoxical Questions," then, suggest that the question of who is being addressed-who the text's "you" iscan never be answered simply. Stubbe seems to envision his ideal readers as Hobbesians and skeptics; the readers of Newton's manuscript are more difficult to pin down because they assume a variety of roles. Newton's readers and the individuals being excluded are as fragmentary as the manuscript that constructs them: his readers and parasites are overlays or composites, and the ambiguities they embody reveal the problematic rewriting of Christianity within a cyclical history of renovation and corruption. In one sense, Athanasius is the "third man" who must be rigorously excluded from a privileged communication between an authoritative speaker-Newton as prophetand a reader, "you," who is both part of the corruption of history

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and capable of being converted by and to the truth. Newton's vision of a "true religion," unmediated even by Christ, suggests that trinitarianism itself is what must be excluded, that the communication takes place between Newton and a reader who is already converted to his beliefs. The "other," in this regard, becomes a reflection of the "same," who can be figured as other true believers, other exemplars of the prophetic tradition. "You," then, can become a metonymic stand-in for God, the omnipotent but remote father Newton cannot directly address and who remains radically other, "beyond any compromise," as Goux phrases it, "with perishable, corrupt matter." 60 But "you," as the reader of and participant in Newton's postlapsarian history, must also be figured simultaneously as metonymic of the corruption of that history-and therefore as incapable of being redeemed. In this version of the model, the excluded "third man" might become an idealized embodiment of prophetic truth who exists outside the corruption of history; therefore, "you" would be a demonic figure, a stand-in for Athanasius himself, who reflects back to Newton his own corruption and mortality. None of these explanations is "correct'' in and of itself or sufficient to describe the complexity of Newton's relationship to trinitarianism and its historiography. The various "yous" are superimposed on and compete dialogically with one another. The instability of "you," in this sense, mirrors an implicit conception of identity that Newton defines (as he does in the case of the Egyptian monks' succumbing to temptation) in terms of sin, corruption, and fragmentation. "You," in short, figures the ambiguous, inexplicable nature of corruption within history, the persecution which Newton experiences as one of God's remnant. It testifies to the effect on the author of the paranoid structures he discovers in and imposes on history. In Newton's theology, the stabilizing of identity awaits the "completion" of prophetic history, the transcendence of an economy of exchange that raises the sinful individual into an impossible union with what must be figured as the empty space of the Temple. In this respect, "you" marks the irrevocable sin, the originary alienation, of material existence. Newton's conception of an authorizing origin, then, necessarily re6o. Goux, Symbolic Economies, 146. Newton's anagrammatic doodlings are particularly interesting in this regard: for example, "ISAACUS NEUTONUS-JEOVA SANCTUS ET UNUS." See Manuel, Portrait, 112.

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mains an article of faith, an image of a pristine, Noachian religion that exists only after the earth has been cleansed of a prior state of corruption by the Flood. This idea of cleansing, of God's covenant to eradicate corruption at some indefinite point in the future, pervades Newton's works; think, for example, of his fascination with the rainbow, optics, and light, which, as Peterfreund argues, are fraught with theological significance. 61 Newton's scientific understanding of the rainbow marks his prophetic identification as a participant in God's covenant with Noah. Yet given Newton's view of the corruption which Athanasius enacts, the process of theological cleansing, of redemption through religion, is well-nigh impossible. In the Origines, Newton suggests that all true religions are derived from a knowledge of the workings of God in nature, and yet nature in the Protestant tradition is constructed as feminine and corrupt, in need of "man's" control, a site for "man" to demonstrate his power. Again, Newton finds himself trapped within cultural paradoxes that resist straightforward solutions or even straightforward articulations of faith. Many commentators on Newton have noted that his religious writings seem devoid of any expressions of heartfelt faith. The polarized argument of "Paradoxical Questions" suggests that, for Newton, belief lies outside history, beyond the corrupted and corrupting languages of doctrinal disputes. Faith is the realm of prophetic interpretation, the displacement of pristine order to a distant and unknowable future. His history is at odds with prophetic tradition and at the same time a necessary complement to it. To remove faith from history is ultimately to render it, in an almost Kierkegaardian sense, absurd. For Newton, faith is that which cannot be articulated, which remains a silent supplement to the corruption of language, politics, and history. The incompleteness, the failure, of his paranoid history to make everything meaningful, then, marks Newton's implication in the politicotheological history of his times, in precisely the kind of temporizing he condemns in his adversaries. In this regard, Newton's challenge to Christian theology in "Paradoxical Questions" must be read in the context of the turbulent history of the seventeenth century, particularly in the polarization of English political life during the Exclusion Crisis of the early 168os. The conflicts between Whigs and Tories, Protestants and Catholics, 61. Peterfreund, "Saving the Phenomenon," 139-65.

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parliamentarians and royalists that raged during the early 168os provide one impetus for Newton to read back into the fourth century the crises of his era, then to use this displacement of contemporary politics into the past as a means to locate an origin, in the figure of Athanasius, for the threat posed by Catholicism from the fourth century on. Polemically, Newton participates in and seeks to identify his work with Protestant apologetics for a primitive Christianity which existed before the corruption of Catholicism prevailed. Yet the polemical tradition which he exploits-the anti-Catholic literature of the late seventeenth century-insists on the absolute distinction between Catholicism and Protestantism. 62 The oppositions that were called into play by both sides during the early 168os-Protestantism versus Catholicism, liberty versus the Crown's authority, the "ancient constitution" versus arbitrary rule-break down in Newton's historical narrative into a sliding scale that measures not moral absolutes but different degrees of treachery, deceit, and corruption. What distinguishes "Paradoxical Questions" from the anti-Catholic propaganda of the period is that the latter constructs its bids for power within political and ideational structures already in place: it exploits a fear of the other to validate an idealized vision of sociopolitical stability. But, for Newton, the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism is one of degree rather than kind; Anglicanism becomes an offshoot of trinitarian corruption. In the context of the 168os, "Paradoxical Questions" can be read as a form of defiant accommodation to the corruption of history, an accommodation both problematized and mediated by the treatise's paranoid logic. The Exclusion Crisis, in brief, allows Newton to identify his attack on trinitarianism with a larger political cause-the defeat of Catholicism-and to subsume his own heresy within a show of political solidarity with the Whigs. He assumes the role of prophet, speaking out against the corruption of history, to avoid jeopardizing himself by castigating the evils of his time. 62. Newton's antitrinitarianism dates from at least the early I 67os; the Exclusion Crisis and the subsequent ascension and deposition of James II brought intellectual as well as political matters to a head. See ]. R. Jones, Country and Court: England, 1 658- I 7 I 4 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 197-216. Among Newton's books were such anti-Catholic works as Edward Stillingfleet's Origines Sacrae (1662; 7th ed., Cambridge, 1702) and A Discourse Concerning the Idolatry Practised in the Church of Rome (London, 1671). See John Harrison, The Library of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).

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Newton's privileging of temporal over ecclesiastical authority is crucial in "Paradoxical Questions" to his self-presentation as an advocate of political stability. At several points, as I have noted, Newton argues that outward, legal authority is what legitimates ecclesiastical bodies, not the purity of their religious beliefs. If belief is privatized as a matter of individual conscience, then religious disputes among different parties can be analyzed as political conflicts, and Newton can maintain a radical disjunction between political and psychic order, external authority and individual belief, to safeguard his problematic position as a heretical supporter of the status quo. 63 Because trinitarian theology makes individual belief subject to doctrinal authority, its institutionalization in the Catholic (and Anglican) Church threatens to become a cover for political tyranny. Repeatedly in "Paradoxical Questions," Newton attacks the political ambitions of the trinitarians, indicting them for "sedition" against the Emperors Constantius and Valens and disputing Basil's account of the persecution of Christians under the latter's rule: "So then what Valens did whether in punishing seditious persons by temporal Judges or deposing Clergy men by spiritual ones, was not looked upon by the people during his reign as a persecution, but those that suffered were thought to suffer justly. [Which satisfies me that torturing{,} killing & burning for mere religion was not then in fashion.]" 64 By depicting the trinitarians as political rebels, Newton undercuts their claims to be acting on behalf of the "true faith" and justifies the actions of the Emperors in treating their defiance of temporal authority as sedition rather than martyrdom. Precisely because he sees trinitarian theology as irrevocably politicized, Newton supports the authority of State over Church to contain its tyrannical tendencies. He then suggests that his radical antitrinitarianism serves the interests of a Whiggish, class-based socioeconomic order which favors limited toleration and the ideology of individual merit. Newton's heresy, in this regard, paradoxically encourages his defense of the political status quo-in the fourth-century Roman Empire and in late seventeenth-century England. His Whig63. Newton played a prominent role in the late r68os in seeking to block the conferring of a Master of Arts degree on a Benedictine monk, Alban Francis. As Westfall puts it, Newton, "the arch-heretic, decided to throw his support to the Anglican university" to challenge the King's attempt to promote Catholicism in Cambridge (Never at Rest, 475). 64. The bracketed sentence is deleted, but legible, in the manuscript.

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gish convictions thus become the means by which paranoia is contained and deployed within the ideological structures of his time. 65 Newton's effort to render history politically meaningful, to work his way through the incomplete, biased, and often contradictory histories of his predecessors in order to recover the "truth," is one of many attempts in the late seventeenth century to suppress the noise of history, to make the word of God as accessible as possible. His commitment to a voluntaristic conception of God's dominion, however, is also a commitment to viewing the physical and spiritual universe as irreducibly complex. The universe, in other words, is noisy: the noise of history, like the complexity of the physical universe, is paradoxically a sign of God's dominion, of his continuing intervention in his creation. Newton's paradox, then, is that although the "remnant" may be called to seek for "truth," its duty is not to systematize the universe, as Leibniz tries to do, nor to systematize history, as the trinitarians do, but to preserve as well as to interpret the ways in which noise and meaning are dialectically interrelated. Every suppression of noise is, in effect, a suppression of God's manifestation in creation, an effort to displace or to usurp his authority by attempting to disclose what only he can reveal. The noise of history, in this respect, necessitates the self-legitimating role of the Mosaic prophet. Newton's history moves simultaneously, dialectically, toward, on one hand, the ideality of a totalizing order and, on the other, the chaos, corruption, and noise that makes history impenetrable but that also legitimates the remnant's efforts to understand it. History thus enacts a kind of dialectical schizophrenia that leads the remnant to reproduce the signs of God's absence as well as his presence. The invocation of God-in history as in physics-is always, in part, a sign of, as well as a symbolic effort to ward off, the recognition of the true believers that the space of the Temple remains empty. 66 65. See James E. Force, William Whiston: Honest Newtonian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 91-103; and Larry Stewart, "Samuel Clarke, Newtonianism, and the Factions of Post-Revolutionary England," Journal of the History of Ideas 42 (r981), 43-7266. This problem in Christian theology is discussed by Jacques Derrida, "How to Avoid

Speaking: Denials," trans. Ken Frieden, in Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Jser (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 3-66.

CHAPTER

v

"The interposition of Omniscience": History, Method, and Aesthetics in Early Eighteenth-Century Newtonianism

I

In recent years, Newtonianism has been defined and redefined by historians of eighteenth-century science and culture: I. B. Cohen, among others, has discussed Newton's work in terms of a "Newtonian revolution" in mathematics and methodology; Ruth Salvaggio has called attention to the repressive, masculinist view of nature encoded in and promoted by eighteenth-century science; Margaret C. Jacob has argued for the significance of Newtonianism in institutionalizing a Whiggish theological and political order; Anita Guerrini has challenged Jacob's thesis by calling attention to the work of such Tory Newtonians as Archibald Pitcairne and David Gregory; Jacob, Larry Stewart, and G. S. Rousseau have studied the dissemination of Newtonian science by lectures, demonstrations, subscription courses, and book-length popularizations; and James Force and Richard Popkin have examined the influence of Newton's antitrinitarian theology on his contemporaries and successors, notably William Whiston. 1 In an 1.

I. B. Cohen, The Newtonian Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

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important sense, Newtonianism can be described by all these reinterpretations and by none of them exclusively. As a set of cultural phenomena, Newtonianism resists any hard-and-fast definition or even a convenient narrative troping; it cannot be identified simply with a specific political program or a handpicked group of Newton's disciples. In this chapter I offer a heuristic rather than an authoritative definition of Newtonianism (in the roughly sixty years after the publication of the Principia) as the site of a complex series of cultural, scientific, philosophical, and theological negotiations. These dialogical processes include the systematizing of Newton's thought, a process which abstracts his work into a set of transhistorical "laws" and verges on deifying Newton as an avatar of divine authority; the reifying of science-particularly geometry-and method as conceptually independent and (at least in their pretensions) authoritative semiotics; the concomitant (though always partial) displacing of the metanarrative warrant for natural philosophy from theology to geometry; and the related bracketing of speculation about final causes in favor of detailing intermediate causes and their effects. Although the Newtonians characteristically invoke holistic metaphors-aesthetic and theological-to justify their appropriations of Newton's work, their descriptions of the natural world and of the means they use to study it could be cast, more profitably, in the epistemological terms of Geoffrey Chew's bootstrap theory: a seemingly foundational model that is 1980); Ruth Salvaggio, Enlightened Absence: Neoclassical Configurations of the Feminine (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988); Margaret C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, r689-1720 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, r 976); Anita Guerrini, "The Tory Newtonians: Gregory, Pitcairne, and Their Circle," Journal of British Studies 25 (1986), 288-3rr; Larry Stewart, "The Selling of Newton: Science and Technology in Early Eighteenth-Century England," journal of British Studies 25 (1986), 178-92; Margaret C. Jacob, "Scientific Culture in the Early English Enlightenment: Mechanism, Industry, and Gentlemanly Facts," in Anticipations of the Enlightenment in England, France, and Germany, ed. Alan Charles Kors and Paul J. Korshin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 134-64; G. S. Rousseau, "Science Books and Their Readers in the Eighteenth Century," in Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Isabel Rivers (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982), 197-25 5; James E. force and Richard H. Popkin, Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton's Theology (Dordrecht: Kluwcr Academic Publishers, 1990). Larry Stewart's The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, r66o-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) was published while this study was in press.

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"supplemented by an unending series of additional models, each with its special capabilities and limitations." 2 This process of supplementing Newton's "authoritative" texts in the forms of lectures, demonstrations, coffee-table folios, synthesized textbooks, and commentaries typically preserves his insistence on the connections between inductive reasoning and theological voluntarism but, in the process of interpreting and institutionalizing his mathematical, experimental, and, to a lesser extent, theological works, also radically recontextualizes them: they become less heuristic investigations than reifications of a Newtonian system that some, among them William Whiston and John Theophilus Desaguliers, extend beyond the natural to the political realm. To get some sense of the complexity of Newtonianism, we might set Jacob's thesis against Guerrini's: the former argues that Newtonianism is at once liberal in its Whiggish political doctrine and conservative in its support of property rights and a socioeconomic hierarchy; the latter maintains that the dissemination of Newton's work, particularly in Scotland, follows the faultlines of intellectual allegiances and kinship relations rather than those of party politics. One way of acknowledging the explanatory power of both views is to describe Newtonianism as a series of often contentious discourses that pledge their fidelity to Newton as the exemplar, if not the originator, of "true" science-and then proceed to generate competing narratives of scientific progress and self-sufficiency to suit a variety of ends. 3 As a dialogically contested site of debates about knowledge, authority, and faith, then, Newtonianism records the struggles of its self-styled adherents to control the languages of legitimation that they associate with their progenitor's name. The men who seek to preserve, interpret, and appropriate Newton's works, particularly the Principia, in the first half of the eighteenth century set themselves into a self-consciously patrilineal intellectual economy: they see themselves (to borrow Harold Bloom's vocabulary) as sons conscious of their own belatedness, trying to contribute to the progress and dissemination of science, yet recognizing that they 2. Geoffrey Chew, "Hadron Bootstrap: Triumph or Frustration?" Physics Today 23 (October 1970), 27. 3· In addition to the articles by Jacob and Guerrini cited above, see James E. Force, William Whiston: Honest Newtonian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 92-ro6, on the Whiggish implications of Newtonian biblical interpretation.

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are engaged in the process of reconfirming, or minutely reconfiguring, what already-and authoritatively-has been written. 4 They invest the text-Newton's "system"-with an authority they can only imperfectly reproduce. Such Newtonians as Desaguliers, Henry Pemberton, and Benjamin Martin preserve Newton's analytical vocabulary, ideas, and theories but treat them as "true," as unassailable facts, rather than as heuristic constructs-even as they promote, on a metacritical level, inductive reasoning and a voluntarist theology against Cartesianism, Leibnizian determinism, and deism. Newtonianism thus seeks to legitimate both a hierarchical, theocentric economy of absolute value and an exchange economy that fetishizes mathematical and scientific knowledge as commodities. The development of Newtonianism, then, can be described not as a simple "rise" of modern science but as the contested and internally divisive processes of reinscribing a metaphysics of order into the economies of nature and culture, processes that both exacerbate and repress the contradictions and tensions within Newton's work. Newton's aloofness from scientific debates in the early eighteenth century encouraged both the dissemination and the distortion of his works, their cultural and institutional recontextualizing. In this regard, Newtonianism is less a radical departure from Newton's work than a productive misreading of some of its aspects. It is characterized dialectically by its tendencies both toward the championing of mathematics as the most accurate means available to represent physical creation and toward a fascination with other schemes of interpretation that offer a theological frame of reference in which to interpret the universe and, significantly, to harness its powers for practical ends. Some Newtonians-notably, as Force and Rousseau respectively have shown, Whiston and George Cheyne-follow Newton into the realms of chronology and the interpretation of biblical prophecies in attempts to locate natural philosophy in relation to other, complementary epistemological and teleological inquiries. 5 Others, including Desaguliers and Martin, while praising the religious implications of Newton's 4· See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). 5· Force, Whiston; G. S. Rousseau, "Mysticism and Millenarianism: 'Immortal Dr. Cheyne,"' in Millenarianism and Messianism in English Literature and Thought, I6JoI Boo, ed. Richard H. Popkin (Lei den: Brill, 1988), 81-126.

Fallen Languages work, emphasize its practical applications for medicine, chemistry, and optics. By the 1720s Newtonianism had become identified with specific technological programs, with "pure" scientific research, with the institutionalization of scientific inquiry under the auspices of Newton's presidency of the Royal Society, and with the broader sociopolitical implications of Britain's efforts to apply its scientific and technological expertise to problems in navigation, manufacturing, mining, ballistics, and medicine. As a complex of ideological practices and discourses, Newtonianism operates in heterogeneous ways to sanction a variety of cultural values and assumptions. Newtonianism could be-and was-used to promote and defend the hierarchical structure of society, the "secularization" of values, and the emergence of a bourgeois aesthetics which has profound implications for notions of subjectivity and power in the first half of the eighteenth century. In brief, it coopts internal challenges and disputes into a hegemonic construction of humankind's relationship to nature; it preserves notions of liberty and complexity and contains them within the binary structures of scientific thought. In examining the work of some prominent Newtonians in this chapter and the next, I want to concentrate on the prefaces, introductory chapters, historical surveys, and even footnotes to explore the theoretical assumptions and values that underlie their works. Traditionally, these "marginal" statements have been ignored by historians and philosophers of science intent on tracking the progress of scientific ideas from Newton's works in and through those of his successors; in contrast, I argue that reading the margins of eighteenth-century scientific discourse is crucial to understanding its complex cultural, political, and intellectual functions. The Newtonians' metacritical comments reveal the ideological underpinnings of their arguments for a conceptually independent science. Collectively and individually, such Newtonians as Desaguliers, John Rowning, Martin, Ditton, Whiston, Colin Maclaurin, Pemberton, John Keill, Peter Shaw, and many others foster what they see as emerging disciplinary divisions between nonscience and science, between the external social contexts that nurture industry, technology, and the advancement of useful knowledge and the internal, self-sufficient workings of nature's "laws." These oppositions implicitly and explicitly revalue the discourses of seventeenth-century natural philosophy, marginalizing or

"The interposition of Omniscience" repressing the theological assumptions crucial to Newton's work, and privilege science over rhetoric, knowledge over belief, text over context. In trying to create a past from which they would like to be descended, the Newtonians describe retroactively a progressive history of science that, in its linear development, mimics the narrative construction of method that they celebrate in the Principia. This process of rewriting the history of science privileges mathematics as a model of and for epistemological self-sufficiency and redefines the aesthetics of science by promoting a fundamental homology between the narratives of method and history. Seventeenthcentury voluntarism, with its insistence on revelation and God's omnipotence, is recast by Pemberton, Maclaurin, and others as a dialectic of the beauty of nature and the sublimity of man's imagination. Even as they invoke God's authority as a be-ali and end-all, many Newtonians promote a view of an autonomous science based on the constitutive metaphors of linearity (including patrilineal descent), progress, the beauty that mathematics reflexively constructs and represents, the symmetry of cause and effect, and the harmony of the physical universe. Whatever cannot be explained by the mutually reinforcing filiations of these metaphors is troped as sublime, a category that becomes a reservoir for noise, chaos, and complexity. This aestheticizing of both the physical universe and the semiotics of knowledge allows Newton's followers to celebrate a holistic ideology that, in one sense, attempts to make good on the promises of the 166os: Newtonianism promotes the union of scientific method, a theocentric aesthetics, a hierarchical socioeconomic system, and the exploitation of both labor and natural resources. However, the Newtonians' views differ significantly from Boyle's and Newton's construction of the physical and moral universe, even as they are predicated on it. Rather than the site of moral corruption and the individual's struggle for salvation, the physical world is recast as a reflection of an idealized and mathematically demonstrated harmony. For the Newtonians, as for Newton, the more remote God becomes, the greater the mediation of the semiotic traces of his presence; but because these traces have been mathematicized and systematized, the greater the temptation becomes to read them as evidence of a benevolent and harmonious nature. This mathematical and aesthetic process, though, does not suggest that eighteenth-century science simply comes to be more secular; theology is

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not exorcised from the corpus of Newtonianism but repressed within it, deferred to the "end" of Boyle's endless progress.

2

The intellectual prominence of Newton's work in the late seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries would be difficult to overestimate. Deification might be as accurate a term as any to describe the canonizing of Newton and the Principia in the years following its publication. As early as r 70 5, Ditton describes the Principia as "the Divine Book" and beseeches his reader "to return his Thanks to the great Genius [Newton] to whom all this [the "profound and pleasing Speculations of Nature"] is owing." 6 In effect, Newton and his work are conflated with God and the Bible; Whiston similarly yokes scientific means and religious ends by praising Newton's "Divine Philosophy."7 This process of displacing God's authority onto Newton makes him the agent for bringing true knowledge to an unenlightened mankind, as Pope's couplet suggests: "Nature and Nature's Laws lay hid in Night; I God said, Let Newton be! and All was Light." 8 As a mediator between God and humankind, Newton is figured as both prophet and epic hero. His beatification, at least rhetorically, collapses distinctions between the epistemology of scientific investigation and the ends to which science, according to devout Newtonians, should be put: justifying the mathematical ways of God to man. Richard Glover's "A Poem on Sir Isaac Newton," which prefaces Pemberton's A View of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy (1728), locates Newton within a Christianized tradition of epic heroism: NEWTON, who first th'almighty works display'd, And smooth'd that mirror, in whose polish'd face The great creator now conspicuous shines;

6. Humphry Ditton, The General Laws of Nature and Motion; with Their Application to Mechanicals (London, 1705), sigs. Sigs. Brr, B4r. All quotations are from this edition. 7· William Whiston, Sir Isaac Newton's Mathematical Philosophy More Easily Demonstrated (London, 1716), r. 8. The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. Norman Ault and John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 6: 317·

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r8s

Who open' d nature's adamantine gates, And to our minds her secret powers expos'd; Newton demands the muse; his sacred hand Shall guide her infant steps; his sacred hand Shall raise her to the Heliconian height, Where, on its lofty top inthron' d, her head Shall mingle with the Stars. 9 The image of the mirror suggests a reciprocity, if not equality, between Creator and his avatar. Newton is given priority over the muse who celebrates him; his hand is "sacred," his task verges on revealing God's authorship of the universe. Throughout the poem, he is insistently masculinized as nature's master and symbolic violator, exposing her "secret powers" and opening her "adamantine gates" to subject her to the human authority he embodies and the divine power he represents. The sixteen-year-old Glover offers little precise scientific information of the kind that Pemberton's text provides, but he suggests to his contemporaries what is at stake in the heroicizing of Newton: forms of mastery that reinforce the binary structures-man/nature, male/female-of a culture intent on glorifying science as the quest for transhistorical knowledge and on exploiting its discoveries for material ends. Although the Newtonians frequently invoke notions of probable knowledge, their rhetoric insistently idealizes Newton's scientific achievement to such an extent that the certainties of mathematics become almost indistinguishable from the certainties of revealed religion. What are often taken by recent scholars to be basic distinctions between probable and certain knowledge are asserted by Newton's followers but then at least partially erased; Newton becomes a catalyst who allows humankind to poach, in Michel de Certeau's sense, on divine authority and knowledge. 10 Pemberton, for example, de9· Henry Pemberton, A View of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy (London, 1728), au. All quotations are from this edition. On Glover's poem in the context of eighteenth-century efforts to describe scientific discovery, see Mark Greenberg, "Eighteenth-Century Poetry Represents Moments of Scientific Discovery: Appropriation and Generic Transformation," in Literature and Science: Theory and Practice, ed. Stuart Peterfreund (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), 127-29. 10. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). See Barbara Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century

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scribes Newton as a "great man ... who not only must raise the glory of the country, which gave him birth; but ... has done honour to human nature, by having extended the greatest and most noble of our faculties, reason, to subjects, which, till he attempted them, appeared to be wholly beyond the reach of our limited capacities" (A2v). Pemberton yokes patriotism, individual genius, and reason to confer on Newton a symbolic-and politicized-status; "reason" is "extended" but also, it seems, qualitatively enhanced so that humankind's "limited capacities" can approach the kind of "perfection" that the Newtonians characteristically equate with mathematics. In a similar vein, John Rowning declares that to Newton "it is principally owing, that we have now a rational System of Natural Philosophy; 'tis He, who, by pursuing the sure and unerring Method of reasoning from Experiment and Observation, joined with the most profound Skill in Geometry, has carried his Enquiries to the most minute and invisible Parts of Matter, as well as to the largest and most remote Bodies in the Universe, and has established a System not subject to the Uncertainty of a mere Hypothesis, but which stands upon the secure Basis of Geometry itself." 11 This "secure Basis of Geometry" functions reflexively as an absolute standard of scientific verification; mathematics is constructed or "discovered" by Newton and, at the same time, transhistorically legitimated. According to the author of An Essay on the Usefulness of Mathematical Learning, Newton has achieved "[a] perfection in Philosophy, that the boldest Thinker durst hardly have hoped for; unless Mankind turn barbarous, will continue the Reputation of this Nation, as long as the Fabrick of Nature shall endure." 12 Although the "Fabrick of Nature" may change-and Boyle, Newton, England: A Study of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law, and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, I 98 3), for a different view; see also Force, Whiston, 42-44. I r. John Rowning, A Compendious System of Natural Philosophy, second ed. (London, I758), s-6. All quotations are from this edition. I2. An Essay on the Usefulness of Mathematical Learning, 2d ed. (Oxford, I72I), 3· All quotations are from this edition. The first edition was published in 170r. This essay traditionally has been attributed to Martin Strong, but Margaret Jacob notes that it is attributed to John Arbuthnot in the British Library copy in a contemporary hand ("Scientific Culture," I 57 n.). Robert C. Steensma discusses the work, but not the problem of authorship, in Dr. john Arbuthnot (New York: Twayne, I979), I09- Io. Arbuthnot was a prominent physician, satirist, and Tory. His essay suggests that the appeal of Newtonian mathematics cut across and helped to subsume the rage of party.

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and Whiston, among others, all believed that it would-Newton becomes the demiurge of the here-and-now, the politicized realm of eighteenth-century England. At times, he comes close to filling the symbolic function of prime mediator between God and the material universe which antitrinitarians during the period-including, of course, Newton himself-attribute to Christ. Newton's "perfection" is thus cast in terms at once universal and nationalistic: his work can be appropriated to testify both to humankind's progress and, more specifically, to England's moral and scientific superiority to Catholic Europe. For John Arbuthnot, mathematics, exemplified by Newton, becomes a counter to the superstitions of "those Countries, where Romish Priests exercise their barbarous Tyranny over the Minds of Men" (5). Desaguliers, the son of a Huguenot who emigrated to England, similarly celebrates Newton's mathematical achievement as a liberation from false knowledge: It is to Sir Isaac Newton's Application of Geometry to Philosophy,

that we owe the routing of this Army of Goths and Vandals [that is, Cartesians] in the philosophical World; which he has enrich'd with more and greater Discoveries, than all the Philosophers that went before him: And has laid such Foundations for future Acquisitions; that even after his death his Works still promote Natural Knowledge. Before Sir Isaac, we had but wild Guesses at the Cause of the Motion of Comets and Planets round the Sun; but now he has clearly deduc'd them from the universal Laws of Attraction (the Existence of which he has prov'd beyond Contradiction). 13 Desaguliers establishes as absolutes Newton's findings in the Principia and in the Opticks; the latter contains a "vast Fund of Philosophy" which "(tho' he has modestly delivered [it] under the name of Queries, as if they were only Conjectures) daily Experiments and Observations confirm" (a4r). Desaguliers' images turn knowledge into a form of symbolic capital; his metaphoric rendering naturalizes both the progressive accumulation of scientific knowledge and the material benefits that accrue from "Natural Knowledge": Newton's heuristic "Queries" and "Conjectures" become a "Fund" for enrichment, for 13. John Theophilus Desaguliers, A Course of Experimental Philosophy (London, 1734), a3V. All quotations are from this edition.

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"future Acquisitions" of knowledge. Desaguliers' Newton, like Glover's, transcends the very limitations, such as those of inductive reasoning, on which he insists; he mediates between human knowledge and transhistorical truth. In his eagerness to praise Newton, Desaguliers' grammar begins to fail him, and the slippage is fascinating: because "them" in the final sentence lacks a plural antecedent, the sentence can be read to mean that Newton "clearly deduc'd" the "Motion[s] of Comets and Planets" or that Newton "clearly deduc'd" the "Cause[s]" of this motion. The latter reading presumes on the voluntaristic conception of God's power, recasting Newton's reticence to move beyond inductive reasoning as a bold revelation that is (later) experimentally confirmed. If articulated unambiguously, this reading would probably be denied or suppressed, but its spectral existence within the text suggests the ambiguous status of an idealized Newton within a nominally voluntaristic universe. For Desaguliers, Glover, Pemberton, Rowning, and others, Newton mediates between the idealizations of general equivalents-God, the "perfection" of geometry in a symbolic economy of measurement, and reason-and the exchanges that take place within the world of applied mathematics and technology. He becomes a kind of metaphoric shorthand for the problematic of interposition; he occupies the space of theory, assuming-precisely as an idealization-the functions of an authoritative metalanguage to legitimate the languages of eighteenth-century science and mathematics. In this regard, the various functions of the Newton who emerges in the popularizations of his work-national and epic hero, lawgiver, demiurge, avatar of divine authority-testify to his status as a symbolic mediator who is, more often than not, conflated with mathematics itself. This conflation of Newton and the certain knowledge that is at once derived from and projected onto the Principia suggests the extent to which eighteenth-century Newtonians see themselves facing a different set of conceptual problems from those confronting Boyle and his contemporaries immediately after the Restoration. Rather than concocting taxonomies to impose order on nature or invoking the mysteries of revelation to distinguish their recognition of the limits of human knowledge from the foolhardy claims of Cartesians and "fabulous Chaldeans," the Newtonians devote much of their time and energy to describing the relationship between experimental knowl-

"The interposition of Omniscience" edge and the "perfection" of mathematics. For many Newtonians, mathematics addresses the problems that surfaced in Hobbes's and Stubbe's critique of the experimental natural philosophy of the 166os: how to guarantee the objectivity of scientific knowledge without resorting to sociopolitical criteria, such as the credibility of witnesses, to ensure that this knowledge can be disseminated to the middle classes and made technologically and economically useful. Rather than constructing class-specific notions of objective knowledge or importing a concept of objectivity from theology, mathematicians such as Pemberton and Maclaurin argue that mathematics itself is inherently objective and transhistorically true; it can function, then, as an absolute standard to adjudicate scientific disputes, to discriminate between true and false knowledge, and to describe without noise or remainder the order of the natural world. Like the idealized figure of the heroicized Newton, mathematics becomes a means of interposition, identified with the processes by which metaphysics and methodology impinge on and reinforce each other's domains. 14 In A View of Newton's Philosophy, Pemberton (the editor of the third edition of the Principia and, according to Newton, "a man of the greatest skill in these [editorial and mathematical] matters" 15 contrasts the differences between natural philosophy and mathematics in order to provide an epistemological basis for the progress of scientific knowledge: The proofs in natural philosophy cannot be so absolutely conclusive, as in mathematics. For the subjects of that science are purely the ideas of our own minds. They may be represented to our senses by material objects, but they are themselves the arbitrary productions of our own thoughts; so that as the mind can have a full and adequate knowledge of its own ideas, the reasoning in geometry can be rendered perfect. But in natural knowledge the subject of our contemplation is without us, not so compleatly to be known: therefore our method of arguing must fall a little short of absolute per14· For a more traditional view of the relationship between methodology and metaphysics, see Patrick Grant, Literature and the Discovery of Method in the English Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1985), 1-18. 15. Isaac Newton, Principia, ed. Florian Cajori (1934; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), xxxv.

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fection. It is only here required to steer a just course between the conjectural method of proceeding, ... and demanding so rigorous a proof, as will reduce all philosophy to mere scepticism, and exclude all prospect of making any progress in the knowledge of nature. (23) In celebrating the "absolute perfection" of mathematical reasoning, Pemberton effectively cuts off "the arbitrary productions of our own thoughts" from the natural world. If mathematics has a theory and a method that natural philosophy lacks, it achieves its "perfection" by presupposing a Cartesian, or Platonist, separation of world and intellect, in which the question of what mathematics represents is answered tautologically. 16 Mathematics, for Pemberton, represents an ideal order because it presupposes an ordered "mind" which, at least in theory, "can have a full and adequate knowledge of its own ideas." This view, however, is self-confirming; it depends on a closed belief system that equates internally defined logical consistencies with (to use Pemberton's words) "perfection" and "truth." As Gabriel Stolzenberg argues, "although [pure mathematics] is supposed to be and appears to be a scientific activity, that is, a discipline in which research is conducted and knowledge is acquired, it is committed to a position for which there is no intelligible account of what, if anything, the statements of pure mathematics are about (and hence of what, if anything, one is acquiring knowledge about when one conducts pure mathematical research)." 17 Newton's reluctance to see mathematics 16. On Platonist assumptions in mathematics, see Brian Rotman, "Toward a Semiotics of Mathematics," Semiotica 1-2 (1988), 1-35. Distinguishing Platonism from formalism and intuitionism, Rotman argues that, for Platonists (who constitute the vast majority of practicing mathematicians), "mathematics is neither a formal and meaningless game [formalism] nor some kind of languageless mental construction [intuitionism], but a science, a public discipline concerned to discover and validate objective or logical truths. According to this conception mathematical assertions are true or false propositions, statements of facts about some definite state of affairs, some objective reality, which exists independently of and prior to the mathematical act of investigating it" (5). Pemberton, at times, seems to verge on articulating a kind of intuitionism, but he always recalls himself to the problem of steering a "just course" between mathematical certainty and the probable knowledge of the natural world. 17. Gabriel Stolzenberg, "Can an Inquiry into the Foundations of Mathematics Tell Us Anything Interesting about Mind?" Psychology and Biology of Language and Thought, ed.

'The interposition of Omniscience" as an independent belief system leads to his answering the questions of what he has demonstrated by his invocations of God's omnipotence, by describing mathematics as a heuristic. In contrast, Pemberton maintains that mathematics constitutes its own "intelligible account" of its significance. He is not exactly denying the inductive and voluntaristic bases of Newton's natural philosophy, but he has let his theoretical vocabulary slip into a nether region where heuristics shade into deterministic assertions. His "just course" can be seen, then, as a Platonist effort to apply mathematics to the physical world while still asserting its "perfection," its conceptual independence from the semiotics that constitute it as a means of interposition between ideal and material realms. Like other Newtonians, Pemberton describes the "full and adequate knowledge" of mathematical reasoning in aesthetic and religious terms, as a means to escape the vicissitudes of historical existence. In mathematics, Arbuthnot maintains, "the Object and Faculty are more Spiritual, the delight is the more pure, free from the regret, turpitude, lassitude, and intemperance, that commonly attend sensual pleasures" (3). Mathematics becomes a means to transcend the frustrations he identifies with "sensual pleasures"; it assumes or usurps the authority traditionally reserved for theological contemplation or Boyle's occasional reflections. Pemberton justifies Newtonian philosophy by reworking Boyle's argument from design in post-Lockean terms. Mathematics mediates between the inner world of the mind and external reality, between ideal forms and the physical universe: our desire after knowledge is an effect of that taste for the sublime and the beautiful in things, which chiefly constitutes the difference between the human life, and the life of brutes .... [From reason] arises that pursuit of grace and elegance in our thoughts and actions, in all things belonging to us, which principally creates imployment for the active mind of man. The thoughts of the human mind are too extensive to be confined only to the providing and George Miller and Elizabeth Lennenberg (New York: Academic Press, 1978), 258. The entire article (221 -69) counters realist assumptions about the supposedly foundational status of mathematics. See also Rotman, "Semiotics of Mathematics," r-35.

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enjoying of what is necessary for the support of our being. It is this taste, which has given rise to poetry, oratory, and every branch of literature and science .... Perspicuous reasoning appears not only beautiful; but, when set forth in its full strength and dignity, it partakes of the sublime, and not only pleases, but warms and elevates the soul. This is the source of our strong desire of knowledge; and the same taste for the sublime and beautiful directs us to chuse particularly the productions of nature for the subject of our contemplation: our creator having so adapted our minds to the condition, wherein he has placed us, that all his visible works, before we inquire into their make, strike us with the most lively ideas of beauty and magnificence. (3-4) The mind, for Pemberton, is thus "naturally" predisposed to perceiving "beauty and magnificence" in the "visible works" of creation: order, in this respect, is inherent in the act of perception, in the existence of "the human life." It does not have to be discovered but merely apprehended by the observer alert to what is already present in God's creation. More than a century after Galileo, Pemberton has translated the argument from design into the vocabulary of near-Shaftesburian effusion. His rhetoric effects a kind of phenomenalistic conflation of the natural world and "the most lively ideas of beauty and magnificence"; his "just course" of Platonist duality seems in danger of collapsing into a reflexive vindication of the "desire after knowledge" whose temporal origin lies in the sentimental beneficence of the human mind. Aesthetics, as Terry Eagleton suggests, can be defined in the eighteenth century as the process of mediation between absolute, or absolutist, forms and human bodies; the aestheticizing of nature by the Newtonians, in this regard, reinscribes the dualistic assumptions of a platonizing mathematics and underscores the need both to suppress and to employ the strategies of mediation that go by the names of beauty and sublimity. 18 What can be understood-what is amenable to reason, method, and mathematical representation-is typed as beauty and pleasure, the "grace and elegance" of a metaphysical order; at the liminal space where reason begins to fail, Pemberton locates the "sublime," which, precisely because it cannot be r8. See Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (London: Basil Blackwell, 1990), esp. 2-9, F-37·

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comprehended rationally, "warms and elevates the soul." In contrast to Boyle's insistence on the metaphor of the two books as a means to order a chaotic and feminized nature, to cast it both as "other" and as evidence of God's wisdom and power, Pemberton offers a view of the sublime that domesticates the posdapsarian nature of seventeenthcentury natural philosophy. Indeterminacy-Newton's very resistance to systematizing-paradoxically confirms, for Pemberton, a dialectic and aestheticized view of universal order and the semiotics he uses to represent it. Even as Pemberton's View calls attention to the problematic relationship between the natural world and Newtonian mechanics, however, it theorizes this gap, the inability of mathematics to describe nature with perfect accuracy, as natural and inevitable. Maintaining the gap-the space of theory, the space between the word of God and the fallen languages of man-is necessary to any voluntarist theology, even one that makes Newton and "his" mathematics intermediaries between the two. But the aestheticizing of the natural world as both beautiful and sublime allows Pemberton to use mathematics as a stand-in for theory in order to downplay the threat posed by a nature that is still described in quasi-Calvinist terms as feminized, imperfect, and corrupt. The mind of man, for many Newtonians, becomes a mirror of a universal harmony (mathematically described) rather than the site of moral struggles between good and evil, between pristine knowledge and a corrupt material world. In the formation of the bourgeois ideology described by Eagleton, mathematics privileges an aesthetic sensibility but also encourages an idealist depreciation of the body in favor of the mind. Mathematics, as Pemberton and others describe it, is simply the beauty of a perfect order impressed on the mind. 19 For the Newtonians, however, aesthetics remains conceptually dependent on theology. Descriptions of the beautiful and sublime are cast ultimately in terms of God's agency. The "perfection" of geometry allows Pemberton and others to redefine what counts as beauty, as order, by invoking theocentric standards of truth to legitimate reflexively a voluntaristic aesthetics and theology. Maclaurin, in his influential An Account of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophical Discoveries r9. Contrast this view to Eagleton's, in Ideology of the Aesthetic, esp. 36-37.

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(1748), remarks that "to all such as have just notions of the great author of the universe and his admirable workmanship, Sir Isaac Newton's caution and modesty will recommend his philosophy; and even the avowed imperfection of some parts of it will, to them, rather appear a consequence of its conformity with nature." 2° For Maclaurin, Newton's "imperfect" philosophy is preferable to "all complete and finished systems" (r r ), like those of Descartes and Leibniz, all "systems founded on abstract speculations" (24) that, in effect, make God "the object of sense" rather than the unmoved mover by refusing to recognize that "his nature and essence are unfathomable" (22). In this regard, Newton's natural philosophy mediates between ideal forms and "avowed imperfections"; it is the instrument and the process of interposition between a knowable physical world and the "unfathomable" existence of God. Like Pemberton, then, Maclaurin seeks to harmonize voluntaristic philosophy and aesthetic absolutes by maintaining that Newtonian philosophy accurately reflects an aesthetically and theologically constructed nature: "it is a consequence of [nature's] beauty, that the least part of true [that is, Newtonian] philosophy is incomparably more beautiful than the most complete systems which have been the product of invention" (12). In short, Newton's philosophy is as "true" as it can be because it does not distort nature into invented systems but "excite[s] and animate[s]" the natural philosopher "to correspond with the general harmony of nature" (4). The study of nature, for Maclaurin as for John Ray, enables a self-confirming perception of the wisdom of God manifested in blades of grass and the elliptical orbit of the planets. Order, in this regard, becomes identified with a "truth ... that ... will be always found consistent with itself" (5 ), that is both defined by and transcends the operations of mathematics. The connections both Pemberton and Maclaurin make among truth, geometry, the harmony of nature, and the natural predisposition of the human mind to order, therefore, lead them away from the kind of extrinsic imposition of semiotic and ideological authority promoted by, say, Wilkins. They describe a metaphysic and a methodology "consistent with itself," an order that can be grasped by reifying mathematical perfection as an end and mathematical utility as a means to that end. 20. Colin Maclaurin, An Account of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophical Discoveries (London, 1748), II. All quotations are from this edition.

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Pemberton's and Maclaurin's renarrativizing of Newton's natural philosophy, then, elevates method, as exemplified by geometry, to the status of a self-evident truth. Epistemology gives way to ontology: mathematical "truth," says Arbuthnot, "is the same thing to the understanding, as Musick to the ear, and Beauty to the eye" (3).lt serves as a model for what he calls "the methodical Systems of truths" for "other Sciences" (5 ). "In the search for truth," he claims, "an imitation of the method of the Geometers will carry a Man further than all the Dialectical rules" (4)-further, that is, toward an aestheticized conception of the truth that is "consistent with itself." This method, however, is always described by the Newtonians metonymically; it involves (to borrow Cohen's description of the Principia) elaborating "purely mathematical counterparts of simplified and idealized physical situations that could later be brought into relation with the conditions of reality as revealed by experiment and observation." 21 This bringing "into relation," however, is precisely the problem with which philosophers and sociologists of science must wrestle constantly: experiment, observation, mathematics, and theory are not conceptually independent of the semiotics which construct them. Consequently, modern attempts to locate an origin for scientific methodology in Newton's works end up reproducing the reflexive logic of his early eighteenth-century followers. For Patrick Grant, Newton's method becomes "a certain efficient organisation of knowledge, based on the assumption of responsibility for a mathematico-empirical investigation of nature, espousing a corpuscular theory of matter and, for practical purposes, depicting the universe in terms of geometrical configurations of mass in space." 22 Newton's function as an "originary" source of knowledge, of "responsibility" for a conceptually independent description of the universe, mystifies the literary nature of this "method," which Charles Bazerman discusses in his study of Newton's optical papers. 23 In this regard, "the method of the Geometers" becomes a means to recast experimental procedures as a sequence of determinate causes and effects. The "mathematico-empirical investiCohen, Newtonian Revolution, 37· Grant, Literature and the Discovery of Method, I I. See also Frank Durham and Robert D. Purrington, "Newton's Legacy," in Some Truer Method: Reflections on the Heritage of Newton, ed. Frank Durham and Robert D. Purrington (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 1-1423. Charles Bazerman, Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). 21.

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gation of nature" necessarily presupposes and then suppresses a prior experience that allows mathematicians and experimentalists to avoid having to reinvent the wheel every time they begin work on a new problem. Method functions metonymically as a displacement of experimental history, as a linear narrative that reduces the messiness and uncertainty of trial-and-error jerry-rigging to a sequence of "selfevident" steps along a clearly determined path. Although the "method of the Geometers" ostensibly leads by pure deduction inexorably to the knowledge of God, it is, as Pemberton's and Maclaurin's comments demonstrate, a product of, as well as a means to verify, theocentric assumptions of the ontological order of the universe and the epistemological coherence of their efforts to confirm what they already believe. As Richard H. Popkin argues, Newton and such followers as David Hartley and Joseph Priestley "held a view about divine causality that overshadowed their views about natural causality and made their scientific achievement subordinate to their millenarian religious views. Natural history for these thinkers was going on within divine history and would last only as long as necessary to fulfill God's prophetic history." 24 Mathematics, in this regard, mediates between natural and prophetic history and enforces its authority as a means of interposition. It idealizes, as a surefire method, its mediating function in the form of hypothetico-deductive reasoning-the "just course" that Pemberton advocates, the "mathematicoexperimental investigation of nature" that modern science has canonized. The dependence of natural causality on theology suggests, then, that method itself is a narrative structure. Its claims to universality, to epistemological coherence, and to truth are therefore premised upon and, in effect, coextensive with the development of an authoritative semiotics. In his Course of Experimental Philosophy, for example, Desaguliers makes explicit the homology that exists in his mind among mathematical reasoning, scientific method, and precise definition. Attacking the "spirit of Disputing" that arises "when different Persons annex different Ideas to the same Words," he claims: 24. Richard H. Popkin, "Divine Causality: Newton, the Newtonians, and Hume," in Greene Centennial Studies, ed. Paul J. Korshin and Robert R. Allen (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, I984), 41. For the seventeenth century, see Barbara Donagan, "Providence, Chance, and Explanation: Some Paradoxical Aspects of Puritan Views of Causation," Journal of Religious History II (I980-8I), 385-403.

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No Disputes arise in pure Mathematics, because the Definitions of the Terms are premis'd; and every Body that reads a Proposition has the same Idea of every Part of it: So that when any Man is so weak as to think to bring one Demonstration in opposition to another, he is to be disregarded by every one that wou'd reason like a Philosopher: For we may immediately put an End to all Mathematical Controversies, by shewing, either that our Adversary has not stuck to his Definitions, or has not laid down true Premises, or else that he has drawn false Conclusions from the Principles he has laid down. (r) Newton's cautions about the heuristic nature of induction give way to Desaguliers' coercive "Method of Analysis." For Desaguliers, method becomes the code to distinguish those "to be disregarded" -those given to "wrangling"-from true philosophers. He insists that causation is based on a denotative semiotics; in this respect, mathematical reasoning premised on and derived from true definitions reinforces the reflexive logic of "pure mathematics" to which Stolzenberg calls attention. Desaguliers' rhetoric allows him to suppress the dependence of his descriptions of method on constitutive metaphors of narrative progress, of linearity, but his attempt to banish disputes from mathematics discloses the dialogic nature of his own rhetoric: it must define itself against the specter of "Mathematical Controversies," the parasite which infects the language of reason. Method, causation, and reason, in this regard, do not exist prior to their articulation, their generic encoding in the linear narratives which Desaguliers champions. What he resists is the recognition that surfaces repeatedly in the works of Boyle and Newton-the contentious and politicized nature of all languages that interpose themselves between God's perfect wisdom and an imperfect world. Other Newtonians use different metaphors to emphasize the uncertainty of induction, to locate method in the space of interposition and to domesticate it so that it can provide a means to steer a "just course" between local knowledge and global assertions. 25 In the preface to the third edition of his Mathematical Elements of Natural Philosophy (which, interestingly enough, Desaguliers translated), W. 25. On the uncertainty of method in modern culture, see Timothy J. Reiss, The Uncertainty of Analysis: Problems in Truth, Meaning, and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), esp. I-55·

Fallen Languages James 'sGravesande maintains that "the Strength of [Newton's] Genius chiefly appears in that Art, by which he open'd himself the way, which he constantly follow'd, as if he had been led by Ariadne's Clue of Thread, until he put in execution what he had propos'd." 26 Method, for 'sGravesande, is an "Art." When he describes Newton's experimental program, he uses approximate rather than absolute terms: "His Experiments have a kind of Connexion one with another; and from one Experiment he has often, with great Subtilty, deduc'd what was to be try'd next, so as to enable him to come nearer to the Mark" (xv). The slippage from Newton's defense of induction in the Principia and the Opticks to 'sGravesande's emphasis on his predecessor's "great Subtilty" of deduction reveals the extent to which method is structured by assumptions of causality-of "a kind of Connexion" -that are, in turn, informed by the constitutive metaphor of Ariadne's thread. 27 What 'sGravesande describes as a form of deduction is the literary reconstruction of a "method" that, as Bazerman, Latour, and Woolgar have shown, always occurs after the fact. 28 In this regard, induction and deduction are not transhistorical descriptions of distinct forms of reasoning but generic (re)creations of different forms of intervention in the natural world. The image of Newton's finding his way out of the labyrinth of ignorance implicitly locates the "Clue of Thread" -the promise of narrative and historical intelligibility-not in the ingenuity of Newtonffheseus but in the figure of Ariadne, who represents both a mysterious but always beckoning nature and the repressed "Art" that cannot be codified by method. Because methodological statements always disclose, even in the act of suppression, that they are narratives, method is historically and culturally constructed, not, as Pemberton and others claimed, transhistorically determined. As a dialogically contested language, the rhet26. W. James 'sGravesande, Mathematical Elements of Natural Philosophy, Confirm'd by Experiments: or, an Introduction to Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy, trans. John Theophilus Desaguliers, 6th ed., 2 vols. (London, 1747), xv. All quotations are from this edition. 27. See L. L. Laudan, "Thomas Reid and the Newtonian Turn of British Methodological Thought," in The Methodological Heritage of Newton, ed. Robert E. Butts and John W. Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1970), 103-3 r; see also William A. Wallace, Causality and Scientific Explanation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, r 973 ), 44-5 r. 28. See Bazerman, Shaping Written Knowledge, 82-99; and Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (1979; rpt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), esp. 45-91.

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99

oric of causality is always unstable, always open to differing interpretations, as the debates later in the eighteenth century between Thomas Reid and David Hartley, both self-described Newtonians, suggest. 29 Reid goes so far as to argue that method is quantitatively rather than qualitatively different from other epistemological structures: "Omens, portents, good and bad luck, palmistry, astrology, all the numerous arts of divination and interpreting dreams, false hypotheses and systems, and true principles in the philosophy of nature are all built upon the same foundation in the human constitution, and are distinguished only according as we conclude rashly from too few instances, or cautiously from a sufficient induction." 30 Reid's description is based on implicit metaphors of economic accumulation. Inductive reasoning is a process of generating and gathering "facts" that serve as a kind of symbolic capital, a knowledge base which can, and must, be added to endlessly. Reid emphasizes that induction is an intuitive, naturalized response to the external world rather than a mode of rational analysis, an argument he developed in response to Hume's critique of Newton's second and third rules of philosophizing. Reid's redefinition of induction, in this respect, reflects what we might see as the return of the repressed in eighteenth-century natural philosophy: the reemergence of the narrative structure of Boyle's "romance" within the totalizing rhetoric of efforts to promote "the Method of the Geometers" to the status of certain truth. For Reid, as for Boyle, method becomes an after-the-fact narrative encoding of trial-and-error experimentation. Scientific method is thus the selective process of connecting the "traces" of a past history to disclose the "same" narrative structure and values that operate within theocentric history: the careful study of the texts of nature or the Bible, heuristic attempts to deduce general laws from this study, and efforts to derive further explanations-that is, metanarratives-from these laws. What Newton, Whiston, and Reid describe as method is what we might call, in the language of chaos theory, self-similarity across different scales: the atomic scale of Newton's alchemy and optics, the experiential scale of observable phenomena, the mathematical scale of the "System" of the universe, and ultimately the grand scale of 29.

Laudan, "Reid and the Newtonian Turn,"

124-25.

30. Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind (Edinburgh, 1765), u3; cited in

Laudan, "Reid and the Newtonian Turn,"

121.

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prophetic history. 31 All these registers are prone to human limitations, to the necessary failure of method within a voluntaristic account of creation. Therefore, in their efforts to describe a method and to celebrate Newton as the source and exemplar of scientific knowledge, his followers characteristically define his achievement in opposition to the false knowledge of his intellectual forerunners and adversaries. Writing the history of science as the progress of natural knowledge becomes a means to exclude a variety of "third men," and thereby to inscribe within human history the "same" values and assumptions that operate within the atemporal present of the laboratory, within the timeless realm of mathematics, and within prophetic history. In distinguishing Newton's achievements from those of his predecessors and his intellectual adversaries, notably Descartes and Leibniz, his followers narrate a past which reflexively legitimates their constructions of scientific method. In his lectures read at Oxford in 1700 (translated and frequently republished during the eighteenth century), Keill attacks the Cartesians' disdain of geometry in favor of speculation: All [their] Errors seem to spring from hence, that Men ignorant of Geometry presume to philosophic, and to give Causes of natural Things. For what can we expect but Mistakes, from such, as having neglected Geometry, the Foundation of all Philosophy, and being unacquainted with the Forces of Nature, which can only be estimated by the means of Geometry, do yet attempt to explain its operations, by a Method not at all agreeing with the Rule of Mechanicks? 32 The "Rule" -the absolute correctness of geometry-becomes the basis for a selective history of science. Keill creates a textbook tradition extending from "the divine Archimedes," to Galileo, to Toricelli and Pascal, and ultimately to Newton: "what all our Predecessors from Time immemorial have handed down to us concerning the Mechanical Philosophy, does not amount to the tenth part of those Things, 31. See James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Viking, 1987), esp. II5-I7•

3 2. John Keill, Introduction to Natural Philosophy, trans. ]. T. Desaguliers, 5th ed. (London, 1758), vii. All quotations are from this edition.

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20I

which Sir Isaac Newton alone, through his vast skill in Geometry, has found out by his own Sagacity" (ix, x). The development of geometry reflexively promotes a view of history as progressive and teleological, celebrating those figures who contribute to the advancement of science and disparaging those, such as the Cartesians, who hinder it. Keill's narrative reproduces-and yet offers itself as conceptually distinct from-the narrative structure of Christian history that Newton both poaches on and rejects in "Paradoxical Questions." The idea of progress emerges as a narrative trope that is no longer "endlesse," no longer committed to and constituted by Christian eschatology. The reinforcing narratives of scientific progress and scientific method are crucial to the historical accounts of other Newtonians as well. In his Course of Chemistry, a posthumously published version of the lectures that he had given a half-century earlier, Pemberton begins with a history of chemistry that includes a sustained attack on Paracelsus and other alchemists. Although Paracelsus "declared open war upon the schools, disavowing, in the most opprobrious terms, the whole ancient doctrine, and philosophical systems, by which [the] ostentatious superfluities [of the Aristotelians] were supported," he was not a protoscientist but a charlatan of "the most absurd [character] that ever imposed on mankind": "From the age of five and twenty, his life was spent in drunken debaucheries with the most illiterate people; his whole pretensions in physic supported by a daring and inconsiderate use, after the manner of more modern empirics, of some powerful medicines ... in which it must be supposed he was sometimes successful; but probably much oftner unsuccessful." 33 Pemberton draws what seem to be causal connections between Paracelsus's social and moral depravity and his violating standards of scientific propriety. His medical practice is hit-or-miss, his dismissal of the ancients the result of "absurd" license rather than intellectual liberty. Paracelsus transgresses class boundaries, mocks standards of piety and decorum, and threatens those values of sociopolitical stability that the Newtonians promote. He becomes a scapegoat for the evils and uncertainties of experimental practice before the establishment of a mature science, the parasite who must be excluded for modern 33· Henry Pemberton, A Course of Chemistry, Divided into Twenty-four Lectures (London, 1771), 8-9. All quotations are from this edition.

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chemistry to develop. By casting out this representative of superstition and chaos, Pemberton seeks to naturalize a discursive construction of science that represses into a linear narrative, and into a related oppositional structure of "good" and "bad" scientists, a conflicted, even chaotic, history. Paracelsus symbolizes the would-be scientist who surrenders to the chaos of a feminized nature, who lacks the intellectual and moral fortitude to devote himself to the demands of a transcendent and harmonious reason. Maclaurin's Account incorporates the most sustained effort in the early eighteenth century to narrate a progressive history of science. 34 In this work, Newton serves as a guarantee for the authority-epistemological and teleological-of method and history. Newton has, the author assures his readers, "secured his philosophy against any hazard of being disproved or weakned by future discoveries" (9). Unlike some of his contemporaries, however, Maclaurin seeks to preserve the voluntaristic overtones of "true philosophy [which] is incomparably more beautiful than the most complete systems which have been the product of invention" (12). These "product[s] of invention" range from "that monstrous system" of Lucretius, which "derived the ineffable beauty of things, even life and thought itself, from a lucky hit in a blind uproar" (4); to the "very imperfect" (33) notions of "the Platonists [who] became unintelligible mystics, and the Peripatetics [who became] unwearied disputants" (38); to the "Gothic barbarity" (40) of the Catholic Middle Ages; to the "extravagant undertaking" (67) of the system-building Descartes and his followers; to the "absurd doctrine" (78) of Spinoza; and finally to the "excessive fondness for necessity and mechanism" of Leibniz (85). In contrast to this history of error and abstract speculation, Maclaurin provides a genealogy of piety and progress. In praising Socrates and Pythagoras, he offers a redaction of the seventeenth-century version of a lost ancient wisdom: "it seems reasonable to suppose that [the ancient Greeks] had some hints of [scientific knowledge] from some more knowing nations who had made greater advances in philosophy; and that they were able to describe them perhaps not much better than we may imagine an ingenious Indian, after passing some 34· Something of the significance of Maclaurin's work may be indicated by the list of more than eleven hundred subscribers for the volume. On the notion of progress in the eighteenth century, see David Spadaforda, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

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years in Europe, and having had some access to learned men, would represent our systems to his countrymen after his return" (33). This true knowledge has been rediscovered, in bits and pieces, by Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, and Boyle. They each contribute to the evolutionary nature of knowledge, of which Newton represents the apotheosis. Maclaurin's history, then, like Pemberton's, defines by exclusion what is essential to scientific knowledge: We have seen, in the foregoing account of the state of philosophy in different periods, that they who have indulged themselves in inventing systems and compleating them, tho' they have sometimes set out in a manner that has appeared plausible, yet, in pursuing those schemes, such consequences have arisen as could not fail to disgust all but such as were intoxicated with the deceit. Some, from their fondness to explain all things by mechanism, have been led to exclude every thing but matter and motion out of the universe: others, from a contrary disposition, admit nothing but perceptions, and things which perceive; and some have pursued this way of reasoning, till they have admitted nothing but their own perceptions. Others, while they overlook the intermediate links in the chain of causes, and hastily resolve every principle into the immediate influence of the first cause, impair the beauty of nature, put an end to our enquiries into the most sublime part of philosophy, and hurt those very interests which they would promote. In framing those systems, he who has prosecuted each of them farthest has done this valuable service, that, while he vainly imagined he improved or compleated it, he really opened up the fallacy, and reduced it to an absurdity. (9 5) Maclaurin's narrative allows him to imply a formal congruence between the method of "true philosophy" -Newtonian mathematics-and the development of history, its evolution toward the kind of progressive revelation evident in Boyle's notion of an endless progress. In this regard, metaphors of linearity constitute scientific method and the history of science, confirming and displacing the metaphor of the two books. The reflexive confirmation of method and history as two aspects of the same code by which truth is distinguished from error thus necessitates, even in such an intentionally religious work as Maclaurin's Account, a deemphasis on the significance of the Bible. His

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description of the heroes and villains of the history of science promotes a linear, systematic account of the fortunes of voluntarism that makes the homology of history, method, and beauty the organizing principle of a master narrative of knowledge. The interlocking vocabularies of method and history, however, precisely because they define themselves against the alien languages of parasites and systematizers, always reveal their politicized, dialogic natures. Because the semiotics of Newtonianism are unstable, conflicts arise within the "same" schemes of representation: old paradigms and new interpenetrate and contradict each other, disputes arise over scientific terms and biblical passages, the contradictions within systems are exposed and debunked, and the contradictions within voluntaristic critiques of these efforts are themselves attacked. In the geological controversies at the end of the seventeenth century, sacred history-the metanarrative of Creation and the Flood-becomes a contested site of scientific and scriptural interpretation by "honest Newtonians," notably Keill and Whiston, who were ostensibly on the same side in promoting Newtonian principles and in deferring to Newton himself as a figure of unquestioned authority. Their exchange, initiated by Whiston's A New Theory of the Earth (I696), itself a reply to Burnet's Sacred Theory, on the Mosaic account of creation demonstrates concisely how similar, or even the "same," scientific vocabularies within Newtonianism can mask crucial theological and political differences. These differences, however, also suggest the ideological value of a Newtonian vocabulary which could both countenance global assertions of order and provide a venue to adjudicate local disputes. By trying to outflank each other as the authentic representative of Newtonian natural philosophy, Keill and Whiston reinforce the identification of mathematics with larger, explicitly theological truths. As Foucault suggests, one of the crucial functions of ideology is precisely to incite transgressions so that it can justify the continuing exercise of its power. 35 This process implicates Keill, the High Church Tory, and Whiston, the Whig apologist, in an ongoing process of explaining, redefining, and recontextualizing Newton's achievement that is crucial to its intellectual dissemination. 3 5. See Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978).

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In A New Theory, Whiston rejects the Cartesianism of Burnet and offers natural explanations of the Creation and the Flood. He justifies the biblical accounts by invoking intermediate causes to explain seemingly miraculous occurrences. According to Whiston, a passing comet knocked the earth out of what had been a perfectly circular orbit and brought about the Flood. Whiston's method, as he describes it in his r698 rejoinder to Keill's criticism of A New Theory, is to proceed from a hypothesis, to mathematical demonstrations, to confirmation from the Mosaic account, to a positive review of his theory by Newton: the ancient Solar Year [360 days], if the Earth's Orbit was Circular [before the hypothesized encounter with the comet], exactly corresponded with the present and ancient Lunar, by reason of the accurate Equality and Agreement of the Eccentricity of the Earth with the Lunar Epact. Which Coincidence I must own did in the highest degree please and satisfy my Thoughts; and gave me some assurance of the truth, as well as probability of my main Hypothesis. Soon after this I discern'd another most remarkable way of trying the Reality of the Passing by of the Comet; namely, to see whether the Place of the Perihelion, at which I perceiv' d the Deluge must, on my Hypothesis, begin, would accord with the Time of the Year deliver'd by Moses. [When it did] I went on with my work with considerable application, and no small degree of pleasure and satisfaction; till I brought it to an intire Systeme, and sent it to Cambridge for Mr. Newton's final Review and Correction. Which being over, and communicated to me, I soon brought it into the present form. 36 Whiston offers a historical narrative that reproduces his methodological procedure; historical veracity confirms the truth of his "intire Sys36. William Whiston, A Vindication of the New Theory of the Earth (London, 1698), A4r-[aiV]. On Whiston's controversy with Keill, see Force, Whiston, 6o-62. See also Roy Porter, "Creation and Credence: The Career of Theories of the Earth in Britain," 166o-182o," in Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientific Culture, ed. Barry Barnes and Steven Shapin (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1979), 97-123. On the political implications of the Latin and English versions of Burnet's Sacred Theory, see M. C. Jacob and W. A. Lockwood, "Political Millenarianism and Burnet's Sacred Theory," Science Studies 2 (1972), 265-79.

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teme." Although he argues against Burnet's Cartesianism, Whiston reveals, in his account of "secondary causes," of the action of God in the material world, the hypothetico-deductive assumptions that underlie his efforts to construct an "intire Systeme." As the title of his work suggests, his "Systeme" and "Theory" are generic as well as ideational constructs; the coherence which he attributes to his discoveries cannot be distinguished from the aesthetic values in which they are cast. For his part, Keill rejects both Burnet's and Whiston's emphases on supplementing or supplanting the biblical accounts with narratives of their own devising. His version of Newtonianism subordinates scientific explanation to a literal interpretation of Genesis. He accuses Burnet, and to a lesser extent Whiston, of denying the priority of the Bible's explanation. While acknowledging that Whiston, unlike Burnet, knows his mathematics, Keill insists on subordinating questions of method, or really any account of secondary causes, to the miraculous workings of divine omnipotence. "Miracles" such as the Flood, he contends, "are the great and wonderful works of God, by which he sheweth his Dominion and Power, and that his Kingdom reacheth over all, even Nature her self, and that he does not confine himself to the ordinary methods of acting, but can alter them according to his pleasure." 37 Keill argues from Whiston's own mathematics "that a Comet could never have produced those various effects that Mr. Whiston has attributed to it; and ... that the Deluge was the immediate work of the Divine Power, and that no secondary causes without the interposition of Omnipotence, could have brought such an effect to pass" (141). In effect, Keill relegates Whiston's "intire Systeme" to the category of "Ingenious Romance" (139) to which he consigns Burnet's Cartesian account. "Interposition," for Keill, is the space not of a conceptually independent theory but of God's direct action. In contrast, Whiston's invoking of Newton's authority (challenged by Keill, who "venture[s] to say Mr. Newton wont engage for the truth of all [Whiston's] Theorems" [312]) becomes an attempt to interpose 37· John Keill, An Examination of Dr. Burnet's Theory of the Earth: With Some Remarks on Mr. Whiston's New Theory of the Earth, 2d ed. (London, 1734), 27-28. All quotations are from this edition. On the Whiston-Keill controversy, see David Kubrin, "Providence and the Mechanical Philosophy: The Creation and Dissolution of the World in Newtonian Thought" (Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell, 1968).

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mathematics between God's power and the physical universe. Whiston and Keill do have substantive disagreements, but they are also disputing about terms-precisely what Desaguliers wants to banish from scientific discourse. Both writers struggle to describe the nature of God's "interposition," the operations of an ordering principle in the material world. In this respect, their lack of data, the insufficiency of experimental knowledge ever to move beyond induction, discloses the fragmentary, dialogical nature of scientific discourse within the hegemony of eighteenth-century Newtonianism. Whiston and Keill can never settle their differences because they hold very different views of the relationship between the books of nature and Scripture; they can only reenact the differing values and assumptions that they read into and abstract from Newton's work. Both men, in short, appropriate Newton's authority to legitimate their social and theological positions. Whiston and Keill, though, were among the very few in the I 69os and after who could read the Principia with a fair degree of understanding. Precisely because Newton's scientific works were beyond the comprehension of most readers, there was a great deal at stake in those popularizations which-without exception-stressed the practical applications of the new science and maintained that Newtonian mathematics confirmed both the theological order of the universe and the sociopolitical order of eighteenth-century England. Martin prefaces his Philosophia Britannica with a list of more than fifty previous works that sought to explain Newton's work to the public; he himself had written several earlier books on various aspects of Newtonian science. Lectures, demonstrations, and courses reinforced the sociopolitical lessons that the redactions of Newton preached. The "consumers of the new science," Jacob notes, "who might pay anything from one to three guineas for a six-week course that met two or three times a week, were repeatedly told that what they were learning sanctioned the existing social and constitutional order"; further, she argues, "the practical interests and mathematical limitations of the audience for science profoundly shaped its articulation." 38 Although audiences at these lectures may not have been hectored into supporting a Whiggish political program, they do seem to have been part of 38. Jacob, "Scientific Culture," 137; see also Stewart, "Selling of Newton," 178-92..

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a broad-based ideological effort to identify the utility of science with economic self-advancement and national prosperity. The audience for Newtonian science, as both the subscriber lists for such works as Maclaurin's and the fees for lectures and courses suggest, was predominantly middle and upper-middle class. By "middle class" I mean those who could afford the course fees and book prices (a concern, as we shall see in the next chapter, that Richard Boulton addresses in his prefaces to his redactions of Boyle's works) and those who had capital to invest both in the material benefits they could expect to acquire from the new technology and in scientific knowledge itself as a commodity invested with both practical and symbolic value. 39 In addition to his compendious Philosophia Britannica, intended for a mathematically sophisticated audience, Martin wrote such works as A Plain and Familiar Introduction to the Newtonian Philosophy ... Designed for the Use of such Gentlemen and Ladies as would acquire a Competent Knowledge of this Science, without Mathematical Learning; and more Especially those who have, or may attend the Author's Course of Six Lectures and Experiments on these Subjects (London, 1754). The purpose of his course, he tells his readers in the first two pages, "is to exhibit, in a very natural and easy Manner, the principal and most Phenomena or Appearances of natural Bodies; to account for their Causes and Effects on plain and evident Principles; and to prove and illustrate the same by a great Variety of curious and newcontrived Instruments and Experiments; so as to render the whole not only the most rational and instructive, but also the most pleasant and satisfactory Entertainment." Scientific knowledge becomes both a commodity and a form of recreation; its use-value is tied to the aesthetic pleasure it gives. As Martin's description suggests, Newtonianism implies the creation of a subject who is empowered by the possession of scientific knowledge and who is both the recipient of and a conduit for the practical aspects of this knowledge. 40 If mathematics registers the dy39· On the nature of the middle class, defined in terms of its ability to invest capital in labor and commodities, see Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 3-10. 40. On the problems of empowerment, see Joseph Rouse, Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of Science (Ithaca: Ccrnell University Press, 1987); and Stanley Aronowitz, Science as Power: Discourse and Ideology in Modern Society (Minneapolis:

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namics by which absolute values are interposed into the material realm, then, in Eagleton's terms, this process of interposition takes the form of the individual's internalizing of mathematical law-of the metaphysics of order-to become the kind of subject who can exist in a harmonious relationship to a revalued nature, who exhibits a "mind [that] can have a full and adequate knowledge of its own ideas." This subject naturalizes the disciplinary technologies of selfpolicing: the new knowledge both empowers the individual who attends courses such as Martin's by bringing him (and occasionally her) into a community defined by its possession of scientific and technological knowledge and makes that individual subject to the forms of power that this knowledge promotes. At times, the Newtonian commentators sound like precursors of Thomas Gradgrind. For Arbuthnot, "Arithmetick is not only the great Instrument of private Commerce, but by it are (or ought to be) kept the publick Accounts of a Nation: ... the number, fructification of its people, increase of Stock, improvement of Lands and Manufactures, Ballance of Trade, Publick Revenues, Coynage, Military power by Sea and Land, &c . ... what is it, the Government could not perform in this way, who have the command of all publick Records" (r8-r9). Mathematics becomes, for Arbuthnot, an expression of what John Brewer identifies as the emerging "fiscal military state," a set of technologies of calculation that make the individual subservient to the "command" of specialized forms of knowledge.4' But the individual who is subject to the ordering principles of mathematics, to the effects of political power, is also cast, within a few pages, in the position of a detached observer who can appreciate the beauty of geometry and distinguish it neatly in its "pure" form from its mundane applications. Arbuthnot celebrates the recent improvement in "the doctrine of Projectiles; whereon the Art of Gunnery is founded. Here the Geometers have invented a beautiful

University of Minnesota Press, 1988). In contrast to Aronowitz, I argue that scientific knowledge offers the promise of empowerment even to those who see themselves excluded from current socioeconomic and political configurations of power. By desiring what others already have, individuals who see themselves as marginalized nevertheless frequently buy into existing constructions of scientific knowledge and technological expertise as a means to improve their socioeconomic situation. 4r. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, r688-r783 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).

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Theory and Rules and Instruments which have reduced the casting of Bombs to great exactness" (26). The instrumental nature of mathematics allows it to be seen as a resource, as a commodity, and as an aesthetic object. The individual is encouraged to see the "beautiful Theory" of "the doctrine of Projectiles" as an extension of the sociopolitical order that considers geometry a means to military ends and an independent confirmation of the aesthetic and ideological values that underlie and inform that order. In discussing the development of the aesthetic ideology in the eighteenth century, Eagleton argues that the "aesthetic is ... no more than a name for the political unconscious .... The beautiful is just political order lived out on the body." 42 Although mathematics and aesthetics cannot be conflated, they are both strategies of interposition that operate analogously within what may be different, yet overlapping, symbolic economies; alternately, they may be seen as different forms of mediation within an economy of belief that privileges God, ideality, and originary forms over the chaos of material reality. But the very acts of applying mathematics to the physical world break down this opposition and, at the same time, foster efforts to reproduce or to reinscribe it. Mathematics, in this sense, is the political unconscious of Newtonian efforts to promote reason without jettisoning the guarantee of a benevolent, if mysterious, deity. The Newtonian laws invoked by Whiston, Maclaurin, and their contemporaries are both idealized and anchored in a material reality. The intuitionist tendencies of, say, Pemberton's mathematics-its reflexive isolation in a state of self-conscious "perfection" within the mind-are marked irrevocably by its implication in the lived experience-social, political, and economic-of the mathematician. 43 But this implication of mathematics in the world, as Rotman suggests, is precisely what the practitioners of mathematics must deny: 42. Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 37· Eagleton follows Antonio Gramsci in his use of hegemony. On hegemony, see David Gross, '"Mind-Forg'd Manacles': Hegemony and Counter-Hegemony in Blake," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 27 (I986}, 3-25.

43· Rotman, "Semiotics of Mathematics," II-I?, distinguishes among the roles of the mathematician, the agent, and the "person" in mathematics: the first is an idealized convention who performs specific operations (find the square root of I, for example); the second is the practicing professional who argues, calculates, and generally lives a professional existence within the instirutions of mathematics; and the third is the individual who exists within a complex sociopolitical, economic, and biological environment.

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Capitalism and mathematics are intimately related: mathematics functions as the grammar of techno-scientific discourse which every form of capitalism has relied upon and initiated. So it would be feasible to read the widespread acceptance of mathematical platonism in terms of the effects of this intimacy, to relate the exchange of meaning within mathematical languages to the exchange of commodities, to see in the notion of a 'timeless, eternal, unchangeable' object the presence of a pure fetishized meaning. 44 Rotman calls attention to the paradoxical double function of mathematics as both an ideal standard and a fetishized object of exchange. The ideality of mathematics, in other words, rests on the privileging of "pure" mathematics as a general equivalent and on its status as a commodity: mathematical knowledge becomes part of an exchange economy, but this knowledge must present itself as emptied of any inherent value, that is, as a fetish which can be consumed, traded, sold, and commodified in what Goux calls the "play of substitutions [that] defines qualitative values." 45 In the works of the Newtonians, we can witness the birth pangs of the "intimate relationship" between mathematics and capitalism; this relationship is predicated on the construction of value in and through a mathematical knowledge that is both instrumental and transhistorical, that functions as a "true" and self-evident representation of theological values that are displaced into the operations of "the market" itself. Capitalism, in other words, fetishizes mathematics as the means to project theological assumptions (invisible hands, for example) into a "practical" realm of exchange. I would, caution, however, against a simplistic reading of this "intimate relationship." Because mathematics operates as both halves of a binary structure-as "pure" form and as a material semiotics-its complex series of symbolic and material exchanges involves both the practical acquisition of power and the continual fetishizing of that power as objective knowledge, as a privileged access to "reality." In this regard, the fetishizing of mathematics produces a dialectical essentialism: mathematics becomes an idealized location of truth and a reflexive demonstration of the reality of the world it represents and 44· Rotman, 30. 45· Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies after Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 3·

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constructs. According to Rotman, "whether one sees realism as a mathematical adjunct of capitalism or as a theistic wish for eternity, the semiotic point is the same: what present-day mathematicians think they are doing-using mathematical language as a transparent medium for describing a world of pre-semiotic reality-is semiotically alienated from what they are ... doing-namely, creating that reality through the very language which claims to describe it." 46 This "alienation" is crucial to eighteenth-century Newtonians who must maintain mathematics as both the basis for economic and symbolic exchanges of "pure" value-money, knowledge, and power-and as unimpeachable evidence for their "theistic wish for eternity," for a coherent and timeless order to the universe. But this dialectical model of mathematics as mediation is itself a simplified representation: in practice, the Platonic divisions between intrinsic worth and exchange value break down because the languages in which they are cast interpenetrate dialogically to naturalize the process of commodification. For example, Newtonian commentators, almost as a matter of course, conflate images of property or ownership and those of "perfection" to describe Newton's achievement. In his General Laws, Ditton claims that Newton's "Divine" and "incomparable Book ... is compos'd of [materials] ... so absolutely Mr. Newton's Property, that I dare hardly pretend to call any thing mine. The Principles most certainly are all his own" (Bu-B1v). Benjamin Worster declares that "The Business of Natural Philosophy is to deduce from Experiments such Laws as the ordinary and stated Cause of Nature is govern'd by, and to refer the natural Phaenomena to those Laws." 47 These metaphors of "Property," "Business," and government reinforce the sociopolitical order by defining a subject position predicated on idealized and material forms of ownership. The possession of knowledge is a two-edged sword: it frees bourgeois identity from questions of intrinsic worth-a freedom premised on the existence of an exchange economy of differential value-and reimposes on the subject the marks of an external, idealized authority as a "natural" consequence of the existence of all bodies, human and heavenly. In this respect, the dissemination of scientific and mathematical 46. Rotman, "Semiotics of Mathematics," 30. 47· Benjamin Worster, A Compendious and Methodical Account of the Principles of Natural Philosophy, seconded. (London, 1730), 2. All quotations are from this edition.

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knowledge in the early eighteenth century may be seen-like aesthetics, like sexuality-as part of a complex process of fetishizing individuality: it allows for both the totalizing claims that buttress Arbuthnot's vision of social management and the means for the individual, as the possessor as well as the object of scientific knowledge, to resist those claims by accumulating his or her own stock of symbolic capital.48 As we shall see in the next chapter in Richard Boulton's redactions of Boyle's scientific and theological works, the dissemination of scientific knowledge always has the potential to create a means for the individual to resist being completely objectified. The knowledgeable subject functions as a parasite who multiplies channels of communication, disseminates information, and, by increasing both meaning and noise, potentially destabilizes class hierarchies. He (re)constructs forms of knowledge that can be commodified and turned to his monetary or symbolic profit. In a related sense, Newtonianism marks the continuation and the containment of the anarchistic tendencies of a Protestant theology that emphasizes the freedom of the individual to interpret the Bible and, by implication, to use his or her interpretations to question the sociopolitical and economic order. 49 Ditton, for example, justifies his writing The General Laws of Nature and Motion in English rather than Latin by arguing against the notion that "these sublime Pieces of [Newton's] Philosophy" should be kept from "the Vulgar." He then draws an explicit parallel between the Catholic Church's resistance to vernacular translations of the Bible and the restriction of Newton's philosophy to a small circle of specialists qualified to read Latin treatises on abstruse mathematics: "some People argue for keeping the Sacred Books in an unknown Tongue: But we pretend to a Protestant Liberty, at least with respect to our Philosophy" (B3r). The rendering of scientific knowledge as coextensive with "Protestant Liberty" allows Ditton to place the reader in a position at once humbled and empowered: "when [the reader] comes to perceive the Use and Ad48. In addition to Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, see Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), for a discussion of how the discourses of gender and sexuality help to construct emerging notions of individuality in the eighteenth century. 49· See Desiree E. Hellegers, "The Politics of Redemption: Science, Conscience, and the Crisis of Authority in John Donne's 'Anniversaries,'" New Orleans Review r8 (1991), 9-18.

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vantage of these Things, and how they tend to lead him into the most profound and pleasing Speculations of Nature; let him return his Thanks to the great Genius [Newton] to whom all this is owing" (B4r). The displacing of God by Newton suggests the extent to which the acquisition of scientific knowledge is modeled on Protestant conceptions of humility and interpretive "Liberty." The bourgeois subject and the Protestant true believer become mirror images of each other. 50 This construction of subjectivity sheds light, I believe, on the Newtonians' fascination with constructing "intire Systeme[s]" in their scientific works. Their insistence reflects the claims of a scientific ideology that constructs and is constructed by the hegemony of knowledgethe latticework of assumptions and values that turn various heuristic endeavors into authoritative systems of knowledge. The transition from, say, Boyle's theocentrism to Shaw's utilitarianism (as we shall see in the final chapter) follows the same trajectory as the movement from the Christian virtuoso of the seventeenth century, whose knowledge is modeled and conceptually dependent on the authority of revelation, to the bourgeois subject whose "natural and easy" acquisition of knowledge allows him to possess it, to internalize it as his own, and to exploit it. Almost all the treatises written by self-styled Newtonians in the first half of the eighteenth century make totalizing claims, from Martin's Philosophia Britannica, which shows evidence that the author, as he maintains, did look at fifty or so previous digests of Newton's discoveries, to Worster's A Compendious and Methodical Account of the Principles of Natural Philosophy. Worster's claim for the "compendious" nature of his work is a misleading form of self-promotion. The subtitle indicates that the principles of natural philosophy are presented As Explained and Illustrated in the Course of Experiments, performed at the ACADEMY in Little-Tower Street. Like many of the works of other Newtonians, Worster's treatise is, in 50. Because the "Use and Advantage" of scientific knowledge is temporal rather than spiritual, the Newtonian system-encompassing both notions of Protestant liberty and the mathematical representation of an ordered universe-can become a template for the redefinition of political as well as individual value, as works such as Desaguliers' The Newtonian System of the World, the Best Model of Government (London, 1728) and Whiston's

Scripture Politicks: Or an Impartial Account of the Origin and Measures of Government Ecclesiastical and Civil, Taken out of the Old and New Testament (London, 1717) suggest. On Whiston's use of biblical interpretation to support his Whiggish political views, see Force, Whiston, 92-ro5.

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part, a shill for his course; his treatise is a mere 257 pages, contains no plates, and is given to telegraphic descriptions of complex phenomena: "The Rays of Light are Streams of Aethereal Effluvia, all of which are exceeding small, though not all precisely of the same Bigness" (239). The method and "compendious" nature of his version of natural philosophy depend on the mode of demonstration; what Worster offers his readers and the consumers who attend his lectures is the implicit promise that the knowledge they acquire can be used for both personal and national advancement. In this sense, his title plays on its potential buyers' fear of being excluded from new symbolic and technological economies whose (re)definitions of value contest the traditional aristocratic homology of birth, intrinsic moral worth, and the hereditary transfer of property. As a complex set of discursive efforts to disseminate scientific knowledge, Newtonianism acts, as I have suggested, within different symbolic economies, linking them as though they were series of intersecting axes. It involves a host of necessary simplifications to solve the problem of theory, to reinscribe the dualistic constructions of the natural world and the structures of thought that they engendered. Yet it also preserves in radically altered form the complexity of a voluntaristic theology that finds its most concise articulation in the paradoxical elevating of induction to a methodological absolute. In practice, the consequences of Newtonianism are evident, as I suggest in the final chapter, in Boulton's and Shaw's redactions of Boyle. In their efforts to make Boyle conform to the generic and aesthetic constructions of Newtonian science, Boulton and Shaw rewrite the past to constitute a scientific present very different from the one which their predecessor contemplated.

CHAPTER VI

Boyle "Epitomiz' d": The Reinscription of Science in Early Eighteenth-Century England

I

The rewriting of Robert Boyle's scientific prose became something of a cottage industry in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. In r699-1700 Richard Boulton produced his Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, Esq. Epitomiz'd, which abridged his predecessor's scientific writings, and then, to demonstrate "that Philosophy and Divinity were not inconsistent with one another, and that being a Philosopher, would not be prejudicial to, but rather promote, Religion and Christianity," brought forth The Theological Works ... Epitomiz'd in 1715. 1 In 1725 Peter Shaw, later a prominent physician, published his more comprehensive redaction, The Philosophical Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, Esq; Abridged, Methodized, and Disposed under the General Heads of Physics, Statics, Pneumatics, Natural History, and Medicine . ... Shaw's work, as F. W. Gibbs has noted, was influential as a reference work well into the nineteenth r. Richard Boulton, The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, Esq. Epitomiz'd, 4 vols. (London, r699-I7oo); and Boulton, The Theological Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, Esq.; Epitomized, 3 vols. (London, 1715), r :iv. All quotations are from these editions.

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century. 2 But, in addition to making Boyle more accessible to eighteenth-century readers, Shaw's radical, line-by-line rewriting of his predecessor's work also transmits an ideologically complex example of what scientific writing "should" be. The fact that Shaw and Boulton thought it necessary to recast the prose of one of the great scientists of the seventeenth century suggests something of the complexity of the problems of literary transmission and epistemological continuity in Newtonian science. Their reinscription of Boyle's works within the context of eighteenth-century natural philosophy challenges a number of assumptions about the "rise" of science and experimental technology: rather than a straightforward "triumph" of Newtonianism, their redactions disclose the ideological tensions that characterize the rewriting of science and its history during the period. The "epitomies" of what Boulton and Shaw consider essential to Boyle's thought suggest how conceptions of science changed in England between the 166os and the early I?OOS. In rewriting his works, both men implicitly call into question the theocentric basis of Boyle's experimental program. Boulton effectively separates scientific and theological modes of discourse, then belatedly backtracks: the preface to his second volume reads like an apology for having allowed himself-and Boyle-to be misconstrued as champions of a secular science divorced from "the necessity of acknowledging a Deity" (I: xv). Shaw meticulously rewrites Boyle's experimental essays but shows little interest in revising his predecessor's theological writings; he either eliminates completely or reprints without substantive changes most overtly religious passages. Apparently, Shaw cannot be bothered to subject metaphysical speculation and affirmations of faith to the same scrutiny, the same processes of recontextualization, that he reserves for Boyle's scientific prose. To a greater extent than many other Newtonians, Shaw displaces the warrant for scientific inquiry from theology onto the experimental tradition itself. His recasting of Boyle's prose, in this regard, represents a radical revision of what had been, for Boyle and Newton, the interlocking semiotics of science and theology. The rewriting of Boyle, then, offers a means to investigate how science is recontextualized and redefined in the early eighteenth century 2. All quotations are from Shaw's edition. See F. W. Gibbs, "Peter Shaw and the Revival of Chemistry," Annals of Science 7 (195I), 214; see also Jan V. Golinski, "Peter Shaw: Chemistry and Communication in Augustan England," Ambix 30 (1983), 19-28.

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as an autonomous, self-consciously disciplinary discourse. Shaw and, to a lesser extent, Boulton participate in disseminating a broadly Newtonian science which feeds parasitically on the totalizing discourses of theocentric explanation and yet denies or mystifies its origins-and its implication-in theological values and assumptions. Significantly, both writers describe their task of revising Boyle's works in terms that anticipate those of Steven Shapin and Peter Dear when they discuss his literary technologies. Boulton and Shaw are concerned with the rhetorical effect of Boyle's experimental style on readers, and they promote their redactions as necessary strategies to advance scientific knowledge and experimental technology. Although both men claim to revere Boyle, they seek to appropriate his sociocultural authority to serve their ideas of intellectual and financial profit. In the process, their revisions marginalize epistemological and ontological questions; Boulton and Shaw redefine what counts as science, as useful knowledge, in socioeconomic and ideological terms that suit their own ends. Although the kind of neutral, seemingly subject-less prose that Shaw produces in revising Boyle's writing may seem less eccentric, more "modern" than his predecessor's, it represents a construction of science that is neither more nor less objective than seventeenthcentury natural philosophy. What we find in moving from Boyle's works to Shaw's is a transition from one construction of objectivity to another, from a theocentric description of the physical universe to a systematized account of Boyle's experimental method and results that renders them semiotically and theoretically coherent. Shaw's recasting of his predecessor's works demonstrates that the "rise" of science depends, to a great extent, on the repression of historical experience into generic conventions of a scientific discourse that enacts and promotes a host of ideological, socioeconomic, and political values. The issue in Shaw's revision is not the ethics of scientific writing-of being "true" to a "real" experience-but the politics of science, the uses to which a methodized version of Boyle's works may be put. Shaw's restructuring of Boyle's texts, in this respect, cannot be read simply as an indication of the linear progress of scientific practice or theory; to move from Boyle to Shaw is to encounter a discontinuous narrative that marks shifting currents within the cultural and ideological justifications for natural philosophy. However, two crucial points need to be stressed: first, Shaw's version of science is not the

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only such description available during the early eighteenth century, and its downplaying of the theological underpinnings of scientific inquiry should not be taken as representative of an emerging, monolithic rationalism; second, despite the radical reconstruction of science in Shaw's revision of Boyle, the ideological implications of experimental philosophy do not radically alter. If references to the deity are pushed to the margins in Shaw's abridgment, those to the benefits of science (particularly to an aspiring middle class) are foregrounded, heroicizing Boyle as one of the founders of an objective method, a theoretical discourse which must be recovered-and generalizedfrom the historical conditions of its production in the Restoration. 3 In editing, annotating, footnoting, and grammatically regularizing Boyle's writing, Shaw pieces together a theoretical framework for his predecessor's essays. He attempts to resolve the problem of interposition, of theory, by investing science with self-regulating standards of authority that Boyle deferred to the metaphysical guarantees of theology. In Shaw's abridgment, Boyle's ideological apparatus-his concern with promoting stability and maintaining a hierarchical social order-has been internalized within the discourse of a conceptually independent natural philosophy. The battles that Boyle, Sprat, and Ray fought in the seventeenth century, in this sense, make possible Shaw's suppression of explicit sociopolitical comment into the "natural'' and seemingly unproblematic discourse of a "methodized," Newtonian science. In this chapter I examine four stages in the writing and rewriting of Boyle's science: his early work on the air pump in New Experiments Physico-Mechanical/ Touching the Spring of the Air (r66o); his Continuation of New Experiments (r669), done with a second version of the air-pump; Boulton's epitome of Boyle; and Shaw's revision of the air pump experiments and of Boyle's metacritical comments on natural philosophy. The changing modes of scientific description reflect significant changes in the ways in which sociopolitical 3· On Shaw's social climbing and his championing of Baconian induction, see Golinski, "Peter Shaw," 19-28. Golinski makes the valuable point that in his later chemical writing, particularly on Herman Boerhaave, Shaw dissents from a dominant Newtonian paradigm. In his revision of Boyle, Shaw's basic strategy, as I argue below, is to accommodate his work to a mainstream science that uses Newton as much as an advertising logo as an intellectual anchor.

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and theological discourses were used to resolve the problem of theory, of a language to talk about scientific language. However, as I have argued throughout this study, scientific discourse between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries does not resolve itself simply into the metaphors of progress, refinement, or revolution which characterize traditional histories of prose style during the period. 4 Rather, it redefines the constitutive metaphors of science in efforts to defuse the crisis mentality evident in metacritical commentary on the languages of science and theology between 1640 and 1700. The myth of a prose style shift initiated and encouraged by the Royal Society is bound up with the myth-actively promoted by the Society-that a "natural" way of writing reflected a commitment to objective observation, that it constituted science as a distinct discipline defined by its emerging stylistic technologies. In this regard, Boulton's and Shaw's revisions of Boyle's works demonstrate that scientific writing is historically specific, that "virtual witnessing" in one generation looks like class snobbery or excess verbiage in another. As conceptions of scientific "reality" change, so do the stylistic strategies for describing them. Late seventeenth-century technologies of "virtual witnessing" are embedded in a network of other discourses-political, religious, and socioeconomic-that conditioned the form of scientific prose and the nature it sought to describe. Boyle's rhetorical practice in his experimental essays is not, and is not intended to be, conceptually selfsufficient; it is part of an undifferentiated discourse that conflates the languages of Baconian experimentation, of Renaissance moral reflection, of upper-class apologetics, of latitudinarian theology, of Calvinistic distrust of the physical world, of masculinist constructions of nature, and of ideological moderation in the decades following the Civil War and Commonwealth. Writing to Joseph Glanvill in I 677, Boyle invokes the same kinds of assumptions and values that Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer identify with his scientific writing to credit the "virtual witnessing" of reports of witchcraft and alchemical transmutation: "I hope ... that your intended narration will resume the 4· In addition to the critics cited in the Introduction, see Geoffrey Cantor, "The Rhetoric of Experiment," in The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences, ed. David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, and Simon Schaffer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 159-80.

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credit of [witchcraft] stories in the opinions of unbiased men, by having its circumstances warranted with testimonies, and authorities, which, the nature of the thing considered, may suffice to satisfy those, that are diffident, out of cautiousness, not prejudice.... [A]ny one relation of a supernatural phenomenon being fully proved, and duly verified, suffices to evince the thing contended for." To demonstrate his point, he invokes the "witnessing" (his word) of "the illustrious count of Wallestein," who has seen "the famous frier Wencel ... several times actually [make] transmutations of baser metals into gold, in the presence of the emperor, and divers noblemen, and good chemists." 5 The criteria Boyle relies on in this letter are indistinguishable from those he applies to his scientific practice: reliable eyewitnesses, the repetition of experiments, the warrant of prior "authorities," and the overarching invocations of piety and nobility. At witchcraft trials as at demonstrations of his air pump, Boyle's witnesses are defined as credible by their social, political, and ecclesiastical standing. In this respect, the authority of virtual witnessing depends on ideological conceptions of authority extrinsic to the experience of observing experimental phenomena, on Boyle's invoking shared sociopolitical values and deference to the supreme authority of a mysterious and omnipotent deity. Reflexively, this authority depends on the kinds of class-specific assumptions that Boyle voices in his preface to Style of the Scriptures and reiterates in The Sceptical Chymist (r66r). In the preface to the latter, he announces that he has "written these Dialogues in a stile more Fashionable then That of meer scholars is wont to be" in order to maintain "a due decorum" in "a book written by a Gentleman, and wherein only Gentlemen are introduc'd as speakers." His rhetorical purpose, he claims, is to demonstrate "that a man may be a Champion for Truth, without being an Enemy to Civility." 6 The implication of Boyle's comments on style in a book that attacks not the basic tenets of alchemy but the obscurity of the languages in which its "mysteries" are couched brings scientific discourse-" Truth"within the realm of socially defined concepts of aesthetic fashion and political authority. "Virtual witnessing" is a social act, and though it 5. Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle in Five Volumes, ed. Thomas Birch (London, 1744), 5: 244· 6. Robert Boyle, The Sceptical Chymist (London, 1661}, A6r.

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seeks to compel assent, it evokes not simply what one "sees" or has seen but the complex of cultural relations that allows one gentleman to see-and to verify-what another gentleman has done in the laboratory. To make this assertion is not to "attack" Boyle by arguing that he was not a disinterested or "pure" scientist but to call attention to the "impurity" of all modes of scientific description and to emphasize the ultimate dependence, in Boyle's mind, of experimentation on theological and sociopolitical justifications. In this regard, instead of developing a single, monological scientific style, Boyle deploys a number of rhetorical strategies that work polemically to explain, defend, and institutionalize his experiments with the air pump. His experimental essays should be read not as narrowly technical descriptions but as texts self-consciously participating and embedded in the discourses of Restoration theology and the ideological values and assumptions that inform it.?

2

Boyle's New Experiments begins with an elaborate description (accompanied by an "exploded" diagram) of the air pump that Robert Hooke had constructed for Boyle in r658-59 (see Figurer). Faced with the prospect of describing perhaps the most sophisticated piece of equipment ever built solely for the purposes of scientific inquiry, Boyle seeks to familiarize this new technology through a variety of descriptive strategies. His descriptions are copious, conversational, and seemingly unencumbered by either overt theologizing or outright disclaimers about the limitations of experimental philosophy. The treatise takes the form of a letter to his nephew, Lord Dungarvan: At the very top of the Vessel, (A) you may observe a round hole, whose Diameter (BC) is of about four inches, and whereof, the Ori7. For a helpful critique of internalist accounts of Boyle's role in the development of modern chemistry, see Jan V. Golinski, "Robert Boyle: Scepticism and Authority in Seventeenth-Century Chemical Discourse," in The Figural and the Literal: Problems of Language in the History of Science and Philosophy, r6Jo-r8oo, ed. Andrew W. Benjamin, Geoffrey N. Cantor, and John R. R. Christie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 58-82.

Figure I. Robert Boyle, New JC,xperiments Physico-Mechanical! Touching the Spring of the Air. r66o. Courtesy of Olin Library, History of Science Collection, Cornell University.

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fice is incircled with a lip of Glass, almost an inch high: For the making of which lip, it was requisite (to mention that upon the by, in case your Lordship should have such another Engine made for you) to have a hollow and tapering Pipe of Glass drawn out, whereof the Orifice above mentioned was the Basis, and then to have the cone cut off with an hot Iron, within about an Inch of the Points (BC). The use of the lip, is to sustain the cover delineated in the second Figure; where (DE) points out a brass Ring, so cast, as that it doth cover the lip (BC) of the first Figure, and is cemented on it with a strong and close Cement. To the inward tapering Orifice of the Ring (which is about three Inches over) are exquisitely ground the sides of the Brass stopple (FG;) so that the concave superficies of the one, and the convex of the other, may touch one another in so many places, as may leave as little access, as possible, to the external Air: And in the midst of this cover is left a hole (HI) of about half an inch over, invironed also with a ring or socket of the same mettal, and fitted likewise with a brass stopple (K) made in the form of the Key of a stop-cock, and exactly ground into the hole (HI) it is to fill; so as that though it be turn'd round in the cavity it possesses, it will not let in the Air, and yet may be put in or taken out at pleasure, for uses to be hereafter mentioned. In order to some of which, it is perforated with a little hole, (8) traversing the whole thickness of it at the lower end; through which, and a little brass Ring (L) fastned to one side, (no matter which) of the bottom of the stopple (FG) a string (8, 9, w) might pass, to be imploy'd to move some things in the capacity of the empty'd Vessel; without any where unstopping it. 8 Shapin and Schaffer are surely correct in arguing that passages such as this one are designed to mimic the immediacy of pictorial representation, that Boyle's scientific prose, in other words, seeks to recreate the experience of laboratory experimentation. Yet the experience it describes is historically specific. The air pump is the product of gentlemanly leisure as well as philosophical interest for those, like Boyle's nephew, who have the money to "have such another Engine made 8. Robert Boyle, New Experiments Physico-Mechanica/1 Touching the Spring of the Air (Oxford, 166o), 9-11. All quotations are from this edition.

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for" them. The role that Boyle creates for himself in this passage is less that of an active participant than that of an observer and manager orchestrating the assembly of this engine; the verbal constructions-"you may observe," "have such another Engine made for you," "have the cone cut off," and so on-describe not Boyle's handson experience in building the air pump but his directing someone else (presumably Robert Hooke, his jack-of-all-trades in the late r6sos) to assemble its parts. 9 In this respect, Boyle's description of his "Engine" is grounded in the class-specific assumptions and class-specific forms of gentlemanly address of a member of the upper classes who is accustomed to, and can afford, having his menial labor done for him. Precisely because the air pump is a revolutionary intervention in nature, Boyle tries to naturalize it by setting it within a familiar socioeconomic context: the circumstantial, experiential style of the essay form. 10 The class-specific nature of Boyle's description of the air pump both shapes and is repressed within his prose. If his prose advertises itself as the product of upper-class sociopolitical values, as it does in Style of the Scriptures, it also strives to universalize the discourses of gentlemanly prerogative as disinterested attempts to reveal nature's secrets. Boyle's writing, as this passage demonstrates, is synthetic. If, as Shapin suggests, the author is creating a new literary technology, he is also defining the experimentalist as a manager capable of bringing together what previously had been discrete technologies: glassblowing, metal-working, carpentry, and so on. In The Excellency of Theology, Boyle characterizes "the study of ... Experimental Philosophy" as "a very troublesome and laborious Employment" because it "will put [the scientist] upon needing, and consequently applying himself to such a Variety of Mechanick People, (as Distillers, Drugsters, Smiths, Turners, &c.) that a great part of his time, and perhaps all his Patience, shall be spent in waiting upon Trades-men, and repairing the losses he sustains by Their disappointments." 11 Boyle's 9· On Hooke, see Steven Shapin, "The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England," Isis 79 (1988), 382. ro. See James Paradis, "Montaigne, Boyle, and the Essay of Experience," in One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature, ed. George Levine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 59-91. r r. Robert Boyle, The Excellency of Theology, as Compar' d with Natural Philosophy (London, 1674), II7.

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ability to transcend the "disappointments" of having to deal with "Mechanick People" depends on his having the economic means to purchase and to coordinate their services. Yet in his New Experiments, there is little to suggest his "troublesome and laborious Employment," only scattered references to what must have been the painstaking trials necessary to produce (even by others' hands) a vacuum pump. The rhetoric of Boyle's description subsumes the history of constructing the air pump under the studied ease of a gentlemanly prose that issues decorous and implicit commands to unnamed subordinates who, if we are to judge from the facility with which Boyle moves from describing one part to the next, just as easily comply with his commands. In short, the form of Boyle's description-its copiousness, its disinterestedness-is an outgrowth of his class-based assumptions about the role of the gentleman-philosopher. The experience that is rendered by Boyle in New Experiments, then, might mimic pictorial representation but only because it is an idealized narrative which suppresses his "disappointments" and which emphasizes the product rather than the processes of intellectual and physical labor. Its "scientific" detachment, in this regard, is intended not as an accurate portrayal of historical experience-the trials of ordering about "Mechanick People" -but as a polemical rendering of an experimental ideal that is designed, as Boyle repeatedly tells his readers, to promote natural philosophy. In his efforts to familiarize his "Engine," Boyle offers an anthropomorphized description of the air pump that casts its "otherness," its unfamiliar workings, within the rhetorical traditions of seventeenthcentury physiology. The air pump, in this respect, represents a crucial overlay of the emerging discourses of gender, science, and technology precisely because it is interposed between a feminized nature and a theologically based and masculinist inquiry into her "secrets." Described anthropomorphically, Boyle's apparatus mediates between the external world of nature and the experience ofthe experimental philosopher who studies natural phenomena to reclaim the fallen world of Calvinist theology by demonstrating the "hidden properties" and mystical regularities that order the physical universe. The anthropomorphized terms of description that Boyle employs in describing the air pump are frequently (if seemingly subliminally) sexualized. The

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vessel has an "Orifice ... incircled with a lip of Glass"; the lip is made by having "a hollow and tapering Pipe of Glass drawn out [of the orifice] ... and then ... cut off with an hot Iron"; the orifice is filled by a "Brass stopple ... so that the concave superficies of the one, and the convex of the other, ... touch one another in so many places, as may leave [no] access"; this stopple, in turn, has a small hole fitted with its own stopple in the shape of a "stop-cock" that may be "turn' d round in the cavity it possesses, ... yet may be put in or taken out at pleasure." Vulgar Freudians interpreting Boyle's descriptive strategies might have all sorts of fun with repressed images of castration and intercourse. What is more significant, though, are the ways in which these images supplement Boyle's theocentric view of the physical world as both corrupt and corrupting; they are, in this respect, ideologically as well as psychologically revealing. Boyle's implicit gendering of the air pump reveals, in a fragmentary manner, the complexities of gender ideology in the seventeenth century. What we find in this description is not only a conscious suppression of the feminine but also a figurative recoding of a feminized nature and the machine designed to probe its secrets. To be sure, Boyle frequently employs what by the 166os is a standard Baconian rhetoric of masculinist intervention in nature; in the Origines of Formes and Qualities, he proposes "to set down some Observations of what Nature does, without being overul'd by the Power and Skill of Man, as well as some Experiments wherein Nature is guided, and as it were Master'd by Art, that so she may be made to attest to the Truth of our Doctrine, as well, when she discloses her Self freely, and if I may so speak, of her Own accord, as when she is as it were Cited to make her Depositions by the Industry of Man." 12 Boyle's metaphors of sexual power are also legalistic; nature is deposed to speak "freely" even as "she" is "Master'd by Art." In one respect, the gendering of the natural world becomes a means to mystify the class-based, hierarchical values that legitimate the upper classes' exploitation of nature and labor; in another, Boyle and his culture insist on these sexualized oppositions-such as man versus nature-precisely to guard against their (ongoing) breakdown: the semiotic confusion constantly repro12.

Robert Boyle, The Origines and Formes of Qualities (Oxford, r666), ro8.

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duced by godly men involved in the mastering of a corrupt and feminized nature. 13 Although Boyle draws on this sexualized imagery, these images have been both internalized as the "natural" means to describe his apparatus and simultaneously defamiliarized by the very act of his making them concrete rather than figurative so that they refer directly to a machine constructed to produce scientific "facts." His technical description depends, in this respect, on what we might call the defiguration of figurative language: the gendering of nature and technology becomes a utilitarian, "objective" strategy to promote experimental philosophy and the values it represents. Yet his anthropomorphized description embodies also the tensions between different strategies of representing and intervening in the natural world: like his contemporaries, Boyle claims that nature must be mastered by upper-class, masculine "Art," but he also asserts that nature "discloses her Self freely ... of her Own accord." These images of rape and seduction suggest that, in one sense, the air pump is a concrete representation of interposition, man's attempt to force a feminized nature to conform to an idealized state of what she might be-or, in the case of the vacuum, be forced to become-to sanction his efforts to understand her essence. Nature, however, remains devalued in this model because it is a means to an end: the theological principles, the "laws" that Boyle and later Newton describe, are signs of man's access to masculinized, idealized conceptions of the truth. The experimental results produced by the air pump are a kind of symbolic currency that allow godly men to plot the ways in which "ye true & real Temple of God" may be reconstructed. But this reconstruction, as I have argued, precisely because it is both idealized and material, because it takes place within the space of interposition, can never escape the sexualized oppositions of a patrilineal culture. The air pump thus figures the reinscription and deconstruction of what Serres calls thanatocratic science. 13. On the complexity of sexualized constructions of man's intervention in nature and their implication in class-specific discourses of power and property, see Robert Markley and Molly Rothenberg, "The Contestations of Nature: Aphra Behn's 'The Golden Age' and the Sexualizing of Politics," in Rereading Aphra Behn: History, Theory, and Criticism, ed. Heidi Hutner (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 301-2 r. On the destabilizing aspects of femininity, see Desiree E. Hellegers, "The Politics of Redemption: Science, Conscience, and the Crisis of Authority in John Donne's 'Anniversaries,'" New Orleans Review I 8 (I 99 r ), 9-18.

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Having described the individual parts of the air pump in copious detail, Boyle proceeds to give an account of how the apparatus works. All things being thus fitted, and the lower shank (o) of the stopcock being put into the upper Orifice of the Cylinder (&), into which it was exactly ground; the Experimenter is first, by turning the handle, to force the Sucker to the top of the Cylinder, that there may be no Air left in the upper part of it: Then shutting the Valve with the Plug, and turning the other way, he is to draw down the Sucker to the bottom of the Cylinder; by which motion of the Sucker, the Air that was formerly in the Cylinder being thrust out, and none being permitted to succeed in its room, 'tis manifest that the cavity of the Cylinder must be empty, in reference to the Air. So that if thereupon the Key of the Stop-cock be so turn'd, as that through the perforation of it, a free passage be opened betwixt the Cylinder and the Receiver, part of the Air formerly contain'd in the Receiver, will nimbly descend into the Cylinder. And this Air, being by the turning back of the Key hinder' d from the returning into the Receiver, may, by the opening of the Valve, and forcing up of the Sucker to the top of the Cylinder again, be driven out into the open Air. And thus by the repetition of the motion of the Sucker upward and downward, and by opportunely turning the Key, and stopping the Valve, as occasion requires, more or less Air may be suck'd out of the Receiver, according to the exigency of the Experiment, and the intention of him that makes it. (17-18) Boyle describes the operation of the air pump by employing strategies similar to those he uses to anatomize its parts. Metaphorically, the air pump is feminized, subject to the dominion of man, and, as a means to "force" nature into "unnatural" forms, an extension of man's prerogative to make her yield her secrets. Once again, however, the images of fetishization-stopcocks, orifices, and suckers-cannot be read simply as Freudian projections of psychological neuroses onto the physical world. Instead, they suggest the ambivalent relationship of the experimenter to the natural world, the paradoxes that describe Boyle's theological investment in his experimental program and his awareness (as Hobbes charges) that it threatens to transgress the boundaries between the profane and the sacred, the physical and the

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spiritual. 14 Because the air pump is figured as a form of mediation-as a means to make nature conform to the ideal semiotics of theocentric knowledge-Boyle's imagery is conflicted, even contradictory; it does not display consistently worked out patterns that can be read to reveal specific intentions. Instead, as in the air being thrust out, his language implicitly as well as explicitly encodes the sociopolitical ideals of r66o-of succession and restoration-as part of the "natural" order. Although Boyle resists making grand theoretical claims for his experimental practice, his language validates his ideological and theacentric conceptions of what nature is and how it is to be examined. In an important sense, Boyle's experimentally created vacuum represents the intrusion of the experimenter into nature-the disruption, the gap-caused by his inquiry into the works of God. It is, in effect, the space of representation, of theory, of human attempts to gain a supernatural knowledge of the "mysteries" of the physical universe. In this regard, the air pump becomes an extension of human experience, and metaphorically of the human body, that both reveals and constitutes the order of nature. As Boyle makes clear in his next paragraph, however, the operation of the air pump that he has described is an idealized version of how it should-in theory-work. The actual experience of getting his "Engine" to function adequately is far more problematic than his description initially makes it seem: Your Lordship [Boyle's nephew] will, perhaps, think that I have been unnecessarily prolix in this first part of my Discourse: But if you had seen how many unexpected difficulties we found to keep out the externall Air, even for a little while, when some considerable part of the internal had been suckt out; You would peradventure allow, that I might have set down more circumstances than I have, without setting down any, whose knowledge, he that shall try the Experiment may not have need of.... [U]pon tryal, we found it so exceeding (and scarce imaginable) difficult a matter, to keep the Air from getting at all in at any imperceptible hole or flaw whatsoever, in a Vessel immediately surrounded with the compressed 14. On Hobbes, see Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), esp. chaps. 3 and 4·

Boyle "Epitomiz'd, Atmosphere, that in spight of all our care and diligence, we never were able totally to exhaust the Receiver, or keep it when it was almost empty, any considerable time, from leaking more or less: although (as we have lately intimated) by unwearyed quickness in plying the Pump, the internal! Air can be much faster drawn out then the external can get in, till the Receiver come to be almost quite empty. And that's enough to enable men to discover hitherto unobserved Phaenomena of Nature. (17, 18-19) Boyle's term for the experiments which follow his description of the air pump is, significantly, "Narratives." The experiments he reports are not conscious fictions-they are not simply fabricated-but they constitute a selective and idealized rather than a historically accurate representation of experience. These "Narratives" bracket the problem of maintaining the vacuum by creating a set of generic parameters and discursive conventions that idealize the processes of experimentation in a manner analogous to Boyle's idealized description of how the air pump should work. In simple terms, the air pump exists discursively in a realm of "as if"; the experiments report on "hitherto unobserved Phaenomena" "as if" a perfect vacuum-or a perfect "enough" vacuum-had been achieved. Boyle does not, as Shapin and Schaffer note, make any theoretical claims for his course of experimentation; but having indicated that difficulties exist in constructing and operating the air pump, he develops an internal logic within the experimental essays that is designed to forestall questions about the actual conditions of experimentation. After Boyle acknowledges the difference between what "really" happened and the idealized discourse of experimental reporting (which takes as its warrant the fact that the receiver's being "almost quite empty" is "enough" to gather data on the spring and weight of the air), he allows himself to enter the generic territory of "as if." Once it is experimentally legitimated, the space of the imperfect vacuum-of man's intervening in the natural world-can be displaced by the fiction of a perfect vacuum. The vacuum, idealized as though it were absolute, represents metaphorically the triumph of technological intervention, the ideal for which experimental philosophy is to strive. Boyle's acknowledging his problems with the air pump in a preface to his "Narratives" is thus a double rhetorical gesture: it convinces

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his readers of the reliability of his account by frankly noting the difficulties of experimentation and, by relegating these difficulties to a preface that is generically distinct from his experimental essays, brackets them so that his readers can credit his "Narratives" "as if" they represent unproblematically what happened in the laboratory. No descriptions of Hooke or other technicians madly "plying the Pump" to maintain the semblance of a vacuum are included in Boyle's essays; having admitted the vagaries of experimental experience in his preface, Boyle asks us to participate in the fictional or narrative representation of laboratory experience in which previously "unobserved Phaenomena of Nature" are revealed. Paradoxically, however, Boyle can make this demand on his readers precisely because he offers not an account of universal truths but discrete observations which are intended to be taken heuristically rather than as incontrovertible evidence for the sort of systematizing that characterizes Aristotelian natural philosophy. Boyle's idealizing of experimental experience, then, is intended to emphasize that his "Narratives" constitute notes toward a theocentric account of knowledge rather than a conceptually independent theory of scientific truth. Their reliability derives ultimately not from their comprehensiveness but from their carefully limited claims to offer modest insights into "hitherto unobserved Phaenomena."

3 Boyle's Continuation of New Experiments, published nine years after his first book of experimental essays, was written within different discursive and political contexts from its predecessor. Soon after the publication of New Experiments, Boyle found himself involved in both scientific and political controversies with critics of what was soon to be chartered as the Royal Society-most notably, Hobbes. In r662 Boyle responded to Hobbes's disparaging of experimental philosophy by launching a brilliantly crafted counterattack, An Examen of Mr. T. Hobbes his Dialogus Physicus de Natura Aeris. 15 The opening 1 5.

An Examen of Mr. T. Hobbes his Dialogus Physicus de Natura Aeris (London,

1662). All quotations are from this edition. Hobbes's treatise Dialogus Physicus (1661) is

translated by Schaffer as an appendix to Leviathan and the Air Pump, 345-391.

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chapter (not dealt with in depth by Shapin and Schaffer) is a small masterpiece of detraction. Boyle narrates a tale of his own marginalization, as an experimentalist and as a younger son, to isolate Hobbes as an outsider-at once powerful, ruthless, and intemperate-who represents a threat to the tenuous order of the Restoration settlement. Boyle's strategy in this treatise is five-pronged: he attacks Hobbes "for want of having sufficiently considered the Experiments he would be thought to despise" (a2v); for using this attack on experimental science as a pretext to promote his "dangerous Opinions about some important, if not fundamental Articles of Religion, [of the sort Boyle] had met with in his Leviathan, and some other of his Writings" (a2v); for engaging in an unprovoked personal attack on Boyle; for showing ingratitude to his patron; and for showing disrespect to his social superiors by "causelessly and needlessly ... fall[ing] upon a Society, whereof, besides many other Persons of Quality and men of Parts, his own great Patron, and my highly Honour'd and Learned Friend, The Earl of Devonshire himself, is an Illustrious Member" (2). Boyle's rhetoric invokes the aristocratic languages of honor and dueling ("Illustrious Enemies") to set his scientific debate with Hobbes within the social semiotics of gentlemanly discourse. In terms of "Honour" and "Civility," as well as in "Matters philosophical," Hobbes is characterized as existing beyond the pale of those values-idealized in this passage in terms of politics and patronage-that Boyle identifies with the Restoration settlement. 16 The effectiveness of Boyle's rhetorical strategy, in this regard, lies in his identifying experimental science with gentlemanly "Civility," national prosperity, a stable sociopolitical order, established religion, and the kind of exemplary disinterestedness that Hobbes, as a "Writer of Politicks," compromises (2). In brief, by subtle insinuation and strategically deployed buzz words, Boyle describes Hobbes's attack in terms reminiscent of the radical challenges to ecclesiastical and civil authority that occurred during the 164os and 165os. In contrast, he defends experimental philosophy in terms that anticipate Sprat's ideological defense of natural philosophy in his History of the Royal Society: stability, reverence for political and ecclesiastical authority, na16. On patronage in the seventeenth century, see Deborah C. Payne, "Patronage and the Dramatic Marketplace under Charles I and II," The Yearbook of English Studies 21 (1991), 137-52.

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tiona! prosperity, and scientific progress. What we see at work, then, are strategies of exclusion that, as Hobbes recognized, are crucial to the development of scientific communication: Hobbes becomes the third man, the parasite, whose banishment from the discourses of the virtuosi allows Boyle to define what counts as the free exchange of information-predicated on sociocultural standards of credibilityand to oppose them to the discourses of civil and political as well as philosophical discord. As Boyle's counterattack on the "atheistical" implications of Leviathan demonstrates, his adversary's political and social incivilities, along with his attack on the air pump and on experimentalism, place Hobbes outside the theocentric rationale for natural philosophy. Boyle portrays himself as a put-upon gentleman who, having "a natural lndispos'dness to Contention," must struggle to maintain a proper "Civility" in his reply, although he has "but little hope that [he] can oppose [Hobbes] without angering him" (2-3). In this respect, Boyle's self-characterization as a novice in "Matters philosophical" calls attention, if only implicitly, to his early published (and popular) works on theology. Hobbes's attack on Boyle and the experimental science of the Royal Society, in this regard, becomes evidence of his rejection of the theology underlying natural philosophy. Yet, at the same time, Boyle presents himself as the underdog in his intellectual confrontation with Hobbes, as a seemingly isolated defender of the scientific and religious faith. The paradox of his selfpresentation both as a marginalized younger brother and as a representative of the Royal Society and its commitment to natural philosophy depends on Boyle's distancing himself from "Politicks," figured as a realm of contention, which Hobbes advocates and embodies. This strategy allows Boyle to promote the fiction of his and the Royal Society's disinterest, to contrast Hobbesian self-aggrandizement to the disinterested pursuit of truth, to use the politicized language of the Restoration establishment to decry the politicizing of intellectual discourse. The significance of Boyle's response to Hobbes lies, in part, in his recognition (idealistic disclaimers notwithstanding) that scientific controversies cannot be separated from "personal and extrinsic Matters" (3), from the political and cultural contexts in which they take place. Boyle is not arguing in bad faith; he believes passionately in the concepts of scientific disinterest and utilitarian progress that his

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works promote. Yet his yoking of experimental science and ideology in the Examen of Hobbes leads him to redirect his subsequent experimental essays toward offering a more sociopolitically engaged account of scientific research. In one sense, the Continuation of New Experiments is less a radical break with his first volume of experimental essays than a more explicit articulation of the ways in which natural philosophy in the r66os is a means to consolidate rather than redistribute sociopolitical and economic power. Nevertheless, the rhetorical strategies Boyle employs in his Continuation differ markedly from those of his earlier "Narratives"; they redefine his view of the relationship between technology and experimental investigation, his conception of his audience, and his description of experience itself. Boyle begins his preface to Continuation with a brief account of how he was prevailed on to redesign his original air pump (which he had donated to the Royal Society) in order to continue his experiments. With "the help of Other work-men then Those [he] had unsuccessfully imploy'd" before, he "procured a new Engine lesse [expensive] than [the earlier model] and differing in some Circumstances. from it"; the new version "work[s] as well as the Other, and, as to some purposes, better" ([a3r]). These technological improvements, however, are not described in the detail that Boyle had lavished on his first air pump. The physical design of the new model is relegated to a relatively brief (for Boyle) five-page section, entitled "Some Advertisements touching the Engine it self" (b4r), which prefaces the reports of his experiments. He begins this description by carefully defining the audience for whom it is intended: As for the Construction of the second Engine it self, since tis presumed, that the Readers of this Book have already perused That of which this is a Continuation, and understood the contrivance of the Instrument that belongs to it, it was presumed sufficient to exhibit in the first Plate the delineation of the entire Engine ready to be set at work; and in the second, the figures of the several Metalline parts that compose it, before they are set together. For though these have not verbal and Alphabetical explications annexed to them, yet the sight of them may suffice to make those that have an imagination fitted to conceive Mechanical contrivances, [and] are acquainted with the former Engine, comprehend the structure of this;

Fallen Languages which, Alphabetical explications would scarce make such Readers do, as are not so qualified. (b4r) A sea-change has occurred in Boyle's rhetorical strategies. In place of the explicit, piece-by-piece description of the original air pump, Boyle offers in this passage simple allusions to a knowledge that he presumes already exists. His audience no longer includes interested amateurs, such as his nephew; it is restricted to those with "imagination[s] fitted to conceive Mechanical contrivances," that is, to other experimentalists and members of the Royal Society. Boyle divides his potential readers into those who can understand the operation and significance of the improved air pump and those who cannot; he then dismisses the latter as an unfit audience. In Serres's terms, the uninitiated (rather than Hobbes, the political and social outcast) become the parasites who must be excluded for the exchange of information to take place. The code that allows Boyle to define his audience has also changed: a scientific, technological, and semiotic knowledge of the air pump-and perhaps the actual experience of having seen it operate-determines who is included and who is excluded from the privileged circle of cognoscenti. By limiting his readers to a select group of virtuosi, Boyle can dispense with many of the laborious, overexplicit semiotic strategies-"verbal and Alphabetical explications" -that he had previously employed. In this sense, his "advertisements" for his "Engine" both reflect and participate in the institutionalization of a scientific discourse that, by r 669, is more or less accessible to readers familiar with the rhetoric of the essays published in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions, the "unadorned" styles of experimentalists such as Hooke and Henry Power, and the ideological arguments for experimental philosophy advanced by Sprat, Wilkins, Boyle, and othersY In one sense, Boyle's Continuation depends on an exclusionary strategy to distinguish, or to construct, an audience sophisticated enough to comprehend the workings of his new air pump without the kind of meticulous description that he had employed in r66o. The air pump has become not simply a means to 17. On the institutionalization of scientific discourse during the I66os, see Charles Bazerman, Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 59-79.

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investigate nature but an object that creates a conceptual, rather than purely physical, space to which access can and should be controlled. 18 This shift in rhetorical strategies signals an important change in Boyle's conception and depiction of experimental experience. His difficulties in constructing the original air pump and in getting it to function properly, described in the preface to New Experiments, are downplayed, tucked into a parenthetical admission that "we did (though not without trouble enough) bring [the new pump] to work as well ... [or] better" than its predecessor (a3r). The first plate of the redesigned air pump (Figure 2) is not, as in the original, an "exploded" diagram but an artistic rendering of the finished product, complete with a dead cat in the receiver; the technological improvements are reserved for the second plate (Figure 3) and are decorously laid out on the page with (for Boyle) a minimum of accompanying explanation. If the first plate is reasonably accurate in its depiction of detail, the new workmen Boyle employed took some pains to make this "Engine" look more like a piece of well-wrought furniture than a utilitarian apparatus; note, for example, the beveled edge at the bottom of the water tank, the curve and beveling of the supporting arm of the higher platform, and the pear shape of the vacuum chamber. The conceptual space of experimental knowledge, in this regard, is defined by an aesthetic style which serves as a marker of social status: technological expertise becomes coextensive with the semiotics of taste. In short, the two plates in Continuation offer less technical information than the single plate in New Experiments. They work, like Boyle's brief description, to deemphasize the historical circumstances of the air pump's construction and operation in favor of visual appeals to a technical knowledge and an ability to read the semiotics of socioaesthetic exclusiveness that are presumed already to exist. In this respect, the purpose of Boyle's description and the accompanying plates of the new air pump is not so much to educate readers or convince them of the value of experimental science but to create in them the desire for a kind of knowledge that only this technologically advanced apparatus can satisfy. Boyle's "Engine," in other words, becomes less of a heuristic device for probing the kinds of secrets that 18. On the problem of access to experimental sites in the seventeenth century, see Shapin, "House of Experiment," 383-90; on the second version of the air pump, see Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump, 260-63.

Plate

Figure 2. Robert Boyle, Continuation of New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall. r669. Courtesy of Olin Library, History of Science Collection, Cornell University.

E

_f)

Figure 3· Robert Boyle, Continuation of New Experiments Physico-Mechanica/1. r669. Courtesy of Olin Library, History of Science Collection, Cornell University.

Fallen Languages lead to a heightened religious devotion and more of a fetish, an object that has begun to displace the desire for knowledge by becoming that which is in itself desirable. The air pump symbolizes the subject's desire for an unlimited knowledge and power that are projected as the idealized control of nature; at the same time, it makes the practitioner (and consumer) of experimental technology both the source and effect of this knowledge. 4 The changes in Boyle's rhetorical strategies between New Experiments and its Continuation reveal some of the ways in which the discourses of natural philosophy develop in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. On the one hand, the ideological and theological bases of experimental science are presented in relatively consistent terms between 166o and 1750. In 1748, for example, Maclaurin describes scientific investigation in language reminiscent of Boyle's and Newton's theologizing: "natural philosophy is subservient to purposes of a higher kind, and is chiefly to be valued as it lays a sure foundation for natural religion and moral philosophy; by leading us, in a satisfactory manner, to the knowledge of the Author and Governor of the universe." 19 Yet, on the other hand, as I suggested in the previous chapter, eighteenth-century natural philosophers, intent on anatomizing the structures and "laws" of the physical world, often give short shrift to theology as a means of explaining physical phenomena, relegating it to the status of a transcendent guarantee of the value of their efforts. The systematizing of the universe-the displacement of teleology by an emphasis on the harmony of the natural world and the smooth functioning of its "laws" -marks a fetishizing of the technologies that are employed to discover and to exploit the workings of nature. In short, the processes that we can begin to see operating in Boyle's description of his redesigned air pump become, by the early eighteenth century, dominant modes of scientific discourse, of figuring the relationships among technology, humankind, and nature. 19. Colin Maclaurin, An Account of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophical Discoveries (London, 1748), 3·

Boyle "Epitomiz'd" Boulton's epitomies of Boyle's works, particularly the four-volume abridgment of the scientific writings published in 1699-1700, seek to make his predecessor's works accessible to readers outside the polite circles of gentlemanly society. Boulton, educated at Brasenose College, Oxford, wrote numerous volumes on medicine and witchcraft but never found the preferment he sought. His sense of being an outsider (evident in his letters to Hans Sloane, Secretary of the Royal Society in the early eighteenth century) contributes, logically enough, to his concern with disseminating to a readership of enterprising tradesmen the technical knowledge he finds half-buried within Boyle's digressive and class-conscious prose: 20 Although it is the General Consent of all Learned Men, that the Author's Works deserve the highest Esteem amongst all Cultivators of Natural Knowledge; yet, it is as common a Complaint that long Apologies and too frequent Excursions interspers'd through his Writings make 'em less serviceable to Vulgar Readers, who are unable to carry his Sense along with them, when interrupted too often with Digressions, which have little or no Relation to the Subject under Consideration. And as his Prolix and Complaisant Way of Writing is some disadvantage to Vulgar Readers; so there are some, who, tho' they have Abilities sufficient to extract the Instructive Part, and to pass over his Prolixities, without losing the Advantage of his Improvements; yet they are not backwards to say, that the Reading of Compliments takes up too much time, and they had rather have the Instructive Part, without his long digressive Excuses. (Works, Bu) Boulton seeks to enforce distinctions between "the Instructive Part"scientific information-and Boyle's "Prolixities," "Compliments," and "long digressive Excuses," precisely those aspects of experimental discourse on which his predecessor insisted. The "Vulgar Readers" targeted by Boulton have "Abilities sufficient" to understand scientific information; what they lack is the familiarity with modes of gentlemanly address that Boyle's style demands. Accordingly, Boulton cuts what he considers Boyle's digressions "to gratifie the Reader [and] 20. On Boulton, see the entry in the DNB; his letters to Sloane are in the British Museum (Sloane MS 4038).

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become serviceable to the Author": "tho [the digressions] may seem Gentleman-like Embellishments, [they] are not so entertaining to Philosophers, who consider things just as they are without Additions of Art or Rhetorick" (B2r-B2v). Boyle's painstaking descriptions are transformed into a self-conscious utilitarianism that yokes stylistic form to authoritative "instruction." Scientific style is still instructive, but Boulton's lessons are different from Boyle's: his text is less marked by the prerogatives of class, more prone to reconstructing technical information as a form of leveling, a (modest) form of empowerment that attempts to separate knowledge from privileged sociocultural institutions, including gentlemanly speech and writing. Although Boulton claims to cut nothing "except Digressions and Apologies," he maintains that "the Reader will have [in] about 30 sheets ... as much Matter as in the Original takes up near 200 sheets ... what before would have taken up near two Months time in reading, may be read in a Week ... he will likewise purchase Philosophy at so cheap a Rate, that upon that Account it will undoubtedly be more acceptable, the Price of this Volume coming far short of Forty Shillings, which the Books Epitomiz'd in this Volume almost amount to" (B3r-B3V). In effect, Boulton sees eighty-five percent of Boyle's works as extraneous information, noise. He redefines the internal operations of scientific experimentation and methodology to privilege what he considers relevant information and to exclude "Gentleman-like Embellishments." Time and money-elements which, as we have seen, are largely suppressed in Boyle's accounts of his experiments with the air pumpbecome the means for Boulton to justify his epitome by expanding the audience for whom natural philosophy is fit reading. By eliminating "Digressions and Apologies," he also is able to synthesize from Boyle's works an inductive experimental method: the epistemological movement from experimental knowledge, to particulars, to general principles. In redefining the notion of scientific methodology, Boulton radically alters the nature of the experience which Boyle describes in New Experiments. As he recasts his predecessor's description of the air pump, for example, Boulton retains references to the original plates but largely eliminates the anthropomorphic images which structure the earlier account:

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[The air pump] consists then of two Principal Parts; a Glass Vessel, and a Pump to suck out the Air contain'd in it. The first of which is a Glass, furnish'd with a Hole at the Top, to which a Cover is adapted, and also a Stop-Cock, fitted to the Extremity of it's Neck below; the Cavity of it being large enough to contain about 6o lib. of Water, allowing 3 xvi. to each Pound. The Diameter (BC) of the Top of the Vessel (A) is about four Inches, which is encompassed with a Lip, almost an Inch in Height; the Use of which is for the Cover to rest on; which is describ'd in the second Figure, where (DE) denotes a brazen Ring, which is to cover and to be closely cemented on the Lip (BC) of the first Figure. To the Internal Orifice of this Ring is adapted a Glass Stopple, so exactly, as to prevent any considerable Access of external Air: In the midst of this Cover there is a Hole (HI) about half an Inch Diameter incircl'd with a Ring or Socket, to which is adapted a brazen Stopple (K) so exquisitely, that it may be turn'd round without admitting in the least Air. Through the lower end of it there is a little Hole (8) made for the Passage of a String (8, 9, 10) which is likewise to pass through a small brazen Ring (L) fix'd to the bottom of the Stopple (FG) the use of which String is to move about what is contain'd in the exhausted Vessel, when stop' d. (1: 307) Boulton's redaction of Boyle's prose is accretive rather than digressive, a linear sequence of clauses that depend on the reader's constantly referring to illustrations to understand how the air pump fits together. In one sense, Boulton's version downplays the significance of copious description in favor of the semiotics of pictorial representation. Although Boulton at times ventriloquizes Boyle's epistolary voice-even addressing Lord Dungarvan as "Dear Lord" -he eliminates the circumstantial aspects of the original description, including Boyle's cautionary remarks about the difficulty of creating a vacuum. In this respect, his text seeks to supplant Boyle's even as it mimics, abridges, and recontextualizes it. The immediacy of virtual witnessing-including the conflicted gendering of the air pump-gives way to a shorthand redaction of a knowledge that already exists and must now be disseminated to "Vulgar Readers" who can afford neither the time nor the money to read Boyle's originals. What Boulton produces, in this regard, is not value-free information-"the Instructive Part"-

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but a revaluing of mechanical utility that seeks to decouple scientific knowledge from upper-class values. His abridgment of Boyle's theological works in I7I 5 seems a belated attempt to resuture what Boulton has already severed: experimental science and theocentric constructions of natural philosophy. In his preface, Boulton again justifies his project by invoking utilitarian and class-based standards of accessibility: "the Copiousness of [Boyle's] Style, making it both chargeable to the Bookseller, and dear to the Buyer, to have his Works Printed at the first Extent, ... we thought it might not be unserviceable to the Publick to preserve both the Memory and the Usefulness of the Authors Writings, in as small a Compass as the Subjects would admit, without Contracting them so much as to leave out any thing that might be useful and instructive" (I :ii-iii). Instruction, for Boulton, again means paring down Boyle's "multitude of Words" to a "useful" knowledge; what he preserves in his redaction of the theological works is largely a series of extracts about God's wisdom that demonstrate the ease with which they can be abstracted from their original contexts. Boulton stitches together arguments without reproducing those passages-from The Excellency of Theology, for example-that would challenge the ideational separation his two epitomies enact. As in his earlier redaction, he produces a version of the Newtonian assumption that the coherence of the physical world allows him to distinguish the "useful and instructive" from what is merely accidental or socially contingent. Peter Shaw's three-volume revision of The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle is a more ambitious effort than Boulton's to reinscribe Boyle's works within what Shaw perceives as the Newtonian orthodoxy of the I72os. His purpose is not primarily to disseminate information to "Vulgar Readers" but to redefine the canons of scientific authority, to create a Boyle from whom Newtonian science dearly-lineally-can be seen to develop. 21 Shaw, in fact, begins by attacking Boulton: "For, notwithstanding the Epitome of Mr. Boulton, a well digested, and compendious collection of all Mr. Boyle's philosophical writings, has been generally wish'd for, and declared, by inexceptionable judges, to be greatly wanting" (I : ii). Shaw's "in21. Shaw also abridged Bacon's works. See Gibbs, "Shaw and the Revival of Chemistry," 211-37, and Golinski, "Peter Shaw," 19-28, for Shaw's other publications, his work in chemistry, and his rise to prominence.

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exceptionable judges" are a version of Boyle's credible witnesses, the virtuosi who act as the interpreters and legislators of scientific knowledge. For Shaw, these "judges" provide the impetus and the authority to reinscribe Boyle's works within the sociopolitical and symbolic economies of early eighteenth-century science. In rewriting Boyle's works, often line by line, Shaw effects radical stylistic and conceptual changes in his efforts to make his predecessor's essays conform to what he considers the bedrock tenets of scientific discourse: objectivity, concision, and clarity. As "the introducer, or, at least, the great restorer of mechanical philosophy among us," Boyle was concerned, according to Shaw, "to deliver himself in the most full and circumstantial manner," even to the point of "immoderate length." Given the "miscellaneous manner" in which they were written, Boyle's works create "a matter of some difficulty to reduce them to an order fit for a ready and commodious perusal" (I : i). Therefore, to render Boyle accessible to an eighteenth-century audience, Shaw sets himself the task of regularizing Boyle's corpus-cutting, rearranging, rephrasing, and paraphrasing his originals-so that they "should together tend to compose one regular whole" (I: ii). To improve Boyle's "copious, diffusive, and circumstantial style," Shaw announces that he will "leave out in the abridgment whatever was merely personal, or had no relation to the argument; and to contract [Boyle's] words into as small a compass as appear'd consistent with the perspicuity requisite in philosophical writings" (I: ii). "Perspicuity" becomes a constitutive metaphor, the impetus for a narrative that describes the progress of natural knowledge from diffuse, personal, and fragmentary essays to a conceptually independent science. Boyle is recast as the noble predecessor of a Newtonian science whose works need merely to be refined to contribute to the advancement of knowledge.H Shaw, however, finds himself, as he recognizes, in the awkward position of systematizing a writer who disparaged all forms of systematizing. Boyle, he notes, "never design'd to write a body of philosophy, only to bestow occasional essays on those subjects whereto his genius or inclination led him; 'tis not to be expected, that even the most exquisite arrangement, should ever reduce them to a methodical and 22. On refinement as a cultural value in the early eighteenth century, see Susan Staves, "Pope and Refinement," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 29 (1989), 145-63.

Fallen Languages uniform system, tho' they afford abundant material for one" (I: ii). Boyle, then, is to be admired for the breadth and "perspicuity" of his inquiries into the natural world but regarded as a noble forefather, who "laid the foundations of almost all the improvements which have been made since his time, in natural philosophy," rather than as a systematic natural philosopher. Such effusive praise puts Shaw in the paradoxical position of commending his predecessor for not having "work' d up a glorious system, and erected a more pompous, ostentatious, and, perhaps, a more durable structure of natural or chymical philosophy" (I :xv)-in other words, for not having done what Shaw in I725 must do to his work to get people to read it. What Shaw asks his readers to see as an act of homage, of rewriting Boyle in order to restore him to his rightful place as the progenitor of experimental philosophy, may also be read as an act of epistemological violence, of recontextualizing Boyle in a way that dehistoricizes his laboratory experience and subsumes his explicit theocentric rhetoric within the increasingly institutionalized and commodified world of early eighteenth-century science. In this respect, the purpose of Shaw's methodizing and abridging of Boyle's writings is to refashion them into a commercially profitable form-a three-volume, meticulously printed "system" -that naturalizes both the science and the sociocultural values that Shaw seeks to promote. Natural philosophy has become both a rhetoric-a way of explicating universal "laws" -and a product to be displayed in the most intellectually and financially advantageous way possible. Shaw's recontextualizing of Boyle's work within the parameters of Newtonian stylistic and scientific practices is particularly evident in his copious footnotes. In general, they indicate ways in which Boyle's work has been supplemented or superseded in the years since it was originally published. Shaw's notes provide a commentary on and a context for Boyle's work and supply whatever "theory" cannot be abstracted from or teased out of his revised essays. In volume I, Newton appears twenty-one times in the notes, and his work is discussed extensively; Willem Homberg is cited six times; John Freind and William Whiston, four times; and no other scientist more than three. Taken together, the notes mark the Newtonian displacement of authority from theology to a self-sufficient and self-correcting scientific tradition. In a note to the separate preface to the first volume, Shaw claims:

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'Tis unphilosophical to resolve effects into the original cause of all things, the supreme Being, without an absolute necessity. Indeed, by discovering more intermediate causes, we only lengthen the chain, and must end in the author of nature at last; but it is the business of philosophy, to discover all these links, and to shew, if possible, how the last is connected with the rest. Many philosophers tell us, that gravity is, doubtless, immechanical, and must be immediately resolved into the will of God; yet Sir Isaac Newton, with great sagacity, has nobly attempted to give a mechanical account of it. The practice, therefore, of this illustrious author, as well as of Mr. Boyle, shews, that philosophers shou'd not be too hasty in solving phenomena from the will of the Creator; because it tends to stop the progress and advancement of natural knowledge. (xxi n) Shaw's reconstruction of Newton's and Boyle's voluntarism isolates one of the tendencies of seventeenth-century natural philosophy-its concern with increasing the store of experimental knowledge-and marginalizes the constitutive role of theology. Thus Newton's account of gravity becomes "mechanical" -either a misreading on the author's part or, more productively, a redefinition of "mechanical" philosophy to subsume, and to distance itself from, theology. Shaw's metaphors in this passage ("chain," "links," "progress and advancement") suggest a linear, causal account of "natural knowledge" that, distinguished as much as possible from the "will of God," becomes self-confirming, self-generating. In a series of lectures in the early 1730s (published in 1734), Shaw defines chemistry as "a rational Art of dividing or resolving all the Bodies within our Power by means of all the Instruments we can procure ... [to] find out the physical Causes of physical Effects; and hence improve the State of natural Knowledge and the Arts thereon depending." 23 Shaw's project, however, depends on his assuming an epistemological coherence to experimental science, to the inductive method, that Boyle and Newton accept only heuristically. According to Shaw, the argument from design "has been so very fully and satisfactorily done of late, particularly by means of that noble lecture, founded by Mr. Boyle himself, to defend the Christian religion; that the sect of atheists, if there ever 23. Quoted in Graham Oldham, "Peter Shaw," Journal of Chemical Education 37 (1960), 418.

Fallen Languages

was a real one, is entirely vanquish'd and put to silence" (I: I7 n). Like those of other Newtonians, Shaw's argument for the conceptual independence of scientific knowledge is underwritten by theocentric notions of order that have been internalized and naturalized within science. In this respect, his rewriting of Boyle is less a secularization than a further development of the strategies by which Boyle and his colleagues in the I66os and I67os derived notions of scientific progress and objectivity: appropriating theological concepts and then repressing their constitutive force within natural philosophy. Shaw's revisions of Boyle suggest a lack of interest in theology. Shaw either cQts theological passages entirely-the whole of Excellency of Theology is missing from his version-or reprints them almost verbatim, restricting his changes to modernizing punctuation and spelling, rewording some of Boyle's longer circumlocutions, and regularizing personal pronouns (substituting "who" for "that," for example). In his version of A Free Enquiry, for instance, Shaw reproduces crucial passages on the argument from design with only minor rev1s10ns: the most general and effectual argument which has persuaded men that there is a God and a providence, is afforded by the consideration of the visible world, wherein so many operations and other things are observ'd to be managed with such conduct and benignity, as cannot justly be ascribed but to the wisdom and goodness of a deity; they who ascribe these things to mere nature, much weaken the force of that argument, if they do not quite take away the necessity of acknowledging a deity; by shewing, that, without having recourse to him, an account may be given of the administration of the world, and of what is perform'd among things corporeal. (2 : I I

8- 9) 24

Shaw passes over in silence the implicit contradictions between this passage and his note on the "unphilosophical" nature of attempts to resolve scientific problems, such as the nature of gravity, by recourse to the "will of God." This passage can be left largely intact, it seems, because it is up24. Boyle's original passage is found in A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Receiv'd Notion of Nature (London, 1686), 134-35. All quotations are from this edition.

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rooted from its original context. Boyle's Free Enquiry runs to approximately 78,ooo words; Shaw's version is approximately 24,000. Shaw cuts completely and silently Boyle's preface, which deals with the problems of defining nature, apologizes for the haphazard and asystematic nature of his treatise, responds to "zealous Assertors of the Vulgar Notion of Nature" -atheists, theists, and of course Hobbesians-and makes his program explicit: "my Intentions," Boyle declares, "were to keep the Glory of the Divine Author of Things from being usurp'd or intrench'd upon by His Creatures, and to make His Works more thor[o]ughly and solidly understood, by the Philosophical Studies of Them" (a2r-a2v). Eliminating the preface allows Shaw to suppress the scientific, theological, and political controversies that provoked and inform Boyle's work. He also cuts those sections in which Boyle marshals biblical citations to offer a theocentric description of nature (47-56, for example) and rearranges into three main sections and twenty subsections a treatise that his predecessor frankly acknowledges is a mess: "considering in how preposterous an Order the Papers, I have here tack'd together, came to Hand; and how many Things are upon that score unduly plac'd, I ... must desire, to have this Rhapsody, of my own loose Papers, look'd upon but as an Apparatus, or Collection of Materials, in order to (what I well know this maim'd and confus'd Essay is not,) a compleat and regular Discourse" (a4r-a4v). Shaw's transformation of Boyle's "Rhapsody" into "a compleat and regular Discourse" makes his redaction of Free Enquiry an authoritative text that stabilizes the concept of nature by removing Boyle's heuristic descriptions from the context of seventeenth-century religious and scientific debates. Nature, for Shaw, is less a contested site of Calvinist self-questioning than a base which exists independently of the symbolic economies-biblical, theological, social, and political-Boyle draws on in his efforts to describe it. By cutting Boyle's metacritical comments, Shaw reinforces the notion that his predecessor's experimental essays are self-contained, transhistorical documents. Unlike Boulton, who frequently ventriloquizes Boyle's voice, though with a kind of telegraphic brevity, Shaw takes an active part in redefining the form of scientific writing: his abridged and methodized volumes are indebted to the popularizations of Newton's works (those of Ditton, Rowning, Keill, and others) and to the scientific papers published in the Philosophical Transactions of

Fallen Languages the Royal Society. 25 For Shaw, the process of methodizing Boyle-of demonstrating an internal order among his predecessor's "Collection of Materials" -occupies the problematic space of theory, the metanarrative which authorizes both the process of revision and the "progress and advancement of natural knowledge." In rewriting A Discourse of Things above Reason, for example, Shaw eliminates the dialogue that Boyle constructs among four speakers (Sophronius, Eugenius, Pyrocles, and Timotheus) and presents this treatise as a straightforward exposition of his predecessor's views rather than as a debate or, as Boyle calls it, a "Conference." 26 Boyle's essays often take the form of direct or indirect dialogues, a genre which allows the author to ventriloquize and to respond to the objections of his opponents, as he does with those of alchemists in The Sceptical Chymist and those of "Anti-Scripturists" in Style of the Scriptures. Typically, Boyle reproduces the form of dialogical communication but represses any sense of social, cultural, or political difference-what Bakhtin calls heteroglossia-by ensuring that his speakers and readers are constructed as gentlemen who speak a common and authoritative language. In this regard, the dialogue form is related to his literary technology of virtual witnessing; it dramatizes what Boyle means, for example, by "toleration," the limited inclusiveness of the Restoration settlement that tries to appropriate and to control the subversive potential of "alien" discourses by subsuming them within the language of gentlemen. By doing away with the dialogue form in his rewriting of Things above Reason, Shaw also eliminates Boyle's demonstrations of how to adjudicate disputes among virtuosi; he redefines scientific authority in more absolute and transhistorical terms that emphasize "facts" rather than the sociopolitical and theological means by which they are constructed and reified. Shaw's specific revisions turn Boyle's heuristic comments into assertions of fact. By suppressing the narrative contexts of his predecessor's dialogue, Shaw drastically shortens and seeks to stabilize, to institutionalize, the genre of scientific writing. At the beginning of Boyle's 2 5. On the development of the scientific article in the Philosophical Transactions, see Bazerman, Shaping Written Knowledge, 121-50. 26. Robert Boyle, A Discourse of Things above Reason (London, I68I), 15. All quotations are from this edition.

Boyle "Epitomiz' d" treatise, Sophronius describes "the three sorts of things that seem to [him] above Reason" in four and a half explicit pages; Shaw's version occupies half a page. In revising the first category of "things above reason," Shaw works by allusion rather than demonstration as these passages (the first by Boyle, the second by Shaw) illustrate: The first consists of those whose Nature is not distinctly and adequately comprehensible by us: To which sort perhaps we may refer all those Intellectual Beings (if it be granted that there are such) as we are by nature of a higher order than humane Souls. To which sort some of the Angels (at least of the good ones[)] may probably belong; but more than probably we may refer to this Head, the Divine Author of Nature, and of our Souls, Almighty God, whose perfections are so boundless, and his Nature so very singular, that 'tis no less weakness than presumption to imagine, that such finite Beings as our Souls, can frame full and adequate Idea's of them: We may indeed know by the consideration of his works, and particularly those parts of them that we our selves are, both That he is, and in great measure What he is not; but to understand th[o]roughly What he is, is a task too great for any but his own infinite Intellect: And therefore I think we may truly call this immense Object, in the newly declared sence, supra-Intellectual. (Boyle, Things above Reason, 8-9) The first consists of those things, whose nature is not distinctly, and adequately, comprehensible by us; to which, perhaps, we may refer all such intellectual Beings, if any be granted, as are, by nature, of an higher order than human souls; at least, we may refer to this head the great author of nature. (Shaw, 2: 1 97) By cutting the second half of this paragraph, Shaw does away with the basis of Boyle's argument. In one sense, Boyle's description of God as "supra-Intellectual" is not relevant to the category of "things above reason" which he is describing; in another, however, to make this judgment-to accede to Shaw's sense of what is germane to a discourse about the limitations of reason-is implicitly to assent to a host of theoretical assumptions about the epistemologies of "natural knowledge," the nature of "nature," the place of God in the discourses of natural philosophy, and the (ir)relevance of Protestant

Fallen Languages doctrine to defining nature and "supra-Intellectual" agency. Shaw's version reifies Boyle's heuristic categories to suppress the narrative structure of his mode of inquiry and to make reason, rather than the "things" which transcend it, the focus of his abridgment. For Boyle, reason itself is a dialogically contested term. In a section which Shaw cuts completely, Pyrocles and Sophronius voice conflicting views of the nature of reason: Pyrocles. I have long thought that the wit of man, was able to lay a fine varnish upon any thing that it would recommend; but I have not till now found Reason set a work to degrade it self, as if it were a noble exercise of its power to establish its own impotency: And indeed 'tis strange to me, how you would have our Reason comprehend and reach things, that you your self confess to be above Reason ... [.] Sophronius. I do not think, that 'tis to degrade the understanding, to refuse to idolize it, and 'tis not an injury to Re~son, to think it a limited faculty, but an injury to the Author of it, to think man's understanding infinite, like his. (22-23)

In this encounter, and others like it, Boyle stages debates about the relationship of reason to revelation that are crucial to the discourses of natural philosophy in the 166os and 167os. By eliminating Boyle's construction of reason, Shaw seeks to eliminate noise, to make "things above reason" contribute to his progressivist and utilitarian view of natural philosophy. The limitations of reason are marginalized; Boyle's heuristic categories are reified-science progresses. The complex strategies that his predecessor develops to generate assent, to promote natural philosophy, are both naturalized and repressed. They exist only as the traces of an older method of experimentation, an older form of discourse, which provides the framework for the kind of "distinct superstructure"-for theory-that Boyle himself distrusted. As a lecturer and experimental chemist, Shaw pays particular attention to revising meticulously Boyle's experimental essays. With an implicit theoretical framework in place-a science grounded in, but seemingly independent of, theistic truisms-he rewrites Boyle's account of the operation of his first air pump (quoted above) to canonize the experimenter, his apparatus, and the scientific methodology which they both, in his mind, embody:

Boyle