Hermeticism and the Scientific Revolution (review)

392 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY fact constructed entirely by their Catholic adversaries" (2:3 ~l). Thus, both the concept of the State as an impersonal power to which citizens owed their allegiance and a populist theory of revolutionary action designed to reconstruct or capture this power formed part of the legacy bequeathed by sixteenth-century political theorists to their seventeenth-century progeny. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought represents a remarkable advancement in the genre of histories of political theory. Some critics (and reviewers) have complained that Skinner's approach does not adequately explain or take into account the "originality" of thinkers such as Machiavelli, Bodin, or Luther. When this objection is taken to mean more than the tautological affirmation of originality by definitiorv-which characterizes the traditional approach--it can only refer to the interpreter's placing of emphasis upon some ideas rather than upon others drawn from the total corpus of the theorist's writings. This problem, as Skinner maintains throughout Founda//om, can only be "solved"--there are always several plausible "solutions"--by establishing the context in which such choices have a meaning (for the theorist, for his audience, and for us). Skinner's work, in short, makes it possible not only for arguments about the interpretation of previous political theory to claim "historical" evidence on their behalf, but the engagement in such arguments may prove to be enlightening in a self-critical way in bringing to consciousness our intentions as contemporary political theorists writing for an audience which is as much shaped by the constraints of particular intellectual traditions and the contours of specific political conflicts as any discussed in The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. RICHARD ASHCRAFT University of California, Los Angeles Robert S. Westman and J. E. McGuire. Hermeticisraand the Scientific Revolution. Los Angeles: University of California, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1977. Pp. iv + 15o. "Hermes Trismegistus names him the visible God.... So the Sun sits as upon a royal throne ruling his children, the planets who circle round him." Thus Copernicus in De revolutionibus (1543). His citation from the Corpus Hermeticus is an indication of the importance Renaissance Platonists had given those writings. In 1614 Isaac Casaubon proved them to be late-antique forgeries. But late in that century, the "Lament of Asclepius," copied in Newton's neat handwriting, together with a number of copies of the Smaragdine Tablet of Hermes, is to be found among Newton's manuscript remains. What was the significance of the Hermetic revival for the revolution in scientific ideas? In the first of two Clark Library Seminar papers printed in this volume, Robert S. Westman painstakingly establishes that there was no necessary link between Hermetic sun-worship and acceptance of the heliostatic cosmology. It required a central orbit for the Sun among the planets but did not demand that it be placed at the geometric center of the universe. Nor did the Hermetic assumption of universal animation lead BOOK REVIEWS 393 inevitably to the idea of a moving earth. Such alleged Hermeticists as Dee, Patrizzi, Foix de Candale, and Fludd did not accept the Copernican system. Hermeticist interpretations of the Copernican innovation followed the conventional line. At first they took him to have suggested a convenient calculating device. Only later did they recognize him as having put forward an alternative cosmology. Giordano Bruno added to it an insistence that a Copernican universe must be an infinite one. But his infinitist ideas could not have been directly influenced by the Asclepius text since (as Edward Grant showed some years ago) that text had already served to inspire latemedieval speculations in which a finite and unique cosmos was surrounded by an infinite spiritual receptacle. In the other paper J. E. McGuire restates the thesis, already well known from the works of E. A. Burtt and Alexandre Koyr~, that Isaac Newton's philosophy of nature bears the deep impress of the Cambridge Piatonist thinkers. That is particularly evident in Newton's views of space and time, of nature as an active and passive agent, and of God as substantially omnipresent in the world. Whatever the significance of Newton's alchemical studies, it would therefore be misleading to ascribe primary importance to...