Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England. A Study of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law and Literature (review)

416 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ~4:3 JULY 1986 Finally, one must ask whether Condorcet's arguments for principles that are now part of modern democracy are the ones by which individual rights and social equality are justified today. In a short contribution on the relationship between Condorcet's scientific approach to social issues and his faith in individual rights, Keith Baker notes that Condorcet was convinced that natural rights could be derived by a logical analysis of human nature--they were, so to speak, based on science. In our postAuschwitz , post-Hiroshima world, it is hard to share this confidence; modern defenses of human rights have often sought a transcendental ground, in a manner that Condorcet would have rejected. One hopes that future studies of Condorcet will explore further how the underpinnings of democratic political theory have evolved since his day. JZREMV POPKIN University of Kentucky Barbara J. Shapiro. Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-CenturyEngland. A Study of the Relationships betweenNatural Science,Religion, Histo~, Law and Literature. Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1983. pp. X + 347. $35.o0. In this large and ambitious volume, Professor Shapiro tries to show that the conception of truth or knowledge in England changed between the time of Bacon and that of the leaders of the Royal Society, shifting to a less insistent demand for evidence and absolute guarantees that greatly affected not only the natural sciences, religion, and theology, but also legal theory, the study of history, and the literature that was being written at the end of this period. She offers the sweeping thesis that the lowering of demands for infallible knowledge and absolute truth, and the acceptance of probabilities and degrees of certainty, affected most areas of the humanities and affected them for the better. From Francis Bacon's rejection of scholasticism to the development of a probabilistic experimental science by the Royal Society, progress was made that revolutionized the scientific enterprise and its relation to human affairs. From Chillingworth's rejection of the demand for absolute certainty in religion to the Latitudinarian theology of Wilkins, Stillingfleet, Tillotson, and Glanvill, progress was made in eliminating the bases for religious strife and intolerance. Similarly , English law became the common-sense search for certainty beyond all reasonable doubt, but not for absolute certainty. And history became an empirical nonpolemical account, our best estimate of the past. With much erudition, Professor Shapiro discusses the development in England of the theory of limited certainty and its wide range of effects. She puts a lot of flesh on the theory oudined by Henry Van Leeuwen in his Problem of Certainty in English Thought, ,63o-z69o (The Hague, 1963), by myself, and others, about the development of a constructive or mitigated scepticism, and she attributes most of the "good" developments in English intellectual history to this form of scepticism. Working out the details of how this theory of limited certainty was adopted and applied is all to the good, and brings together many elements that previously seemed unrelated. BOOK REVIEWS 417 I think that this work makes the whole picture too clear, however, and in so doing loses much of the historical reality. The forces leading to the development of experimental science include Bacon's writings, of course, and also the work of the Invisible College. The Invisible College was strongiy influenced by Mfllenarian mystics like Jan Amos Comenius, Samuel Harflib, and John Duty, who saw the development of science as a prelude to the Millenium. Up until 166o, the Millenarians dominated the English scientific and religious scene. In Shapiro's study, .however, they appear in only one sentence, on page 169 (where Dury is spelled "Drury"). Charles Webster's work on them is not mentioned. Further, it is not clear that the Millenarians vanished with the Restoration. Boyle was Duty's nephew and Henry Oldenburg his son-in-law; they kept in close contact with Dury's Millenarian associates in Holland. And, of course, the greatest English empirical scientist, the glory of the Royal Society, Sir Isaac Newton, was a Millenarian through and through. He, his teacher Henry More (the basic theoretician of the notion of limited certainty), and Newton's disciples, Whiston and Fatio...