Science and the Human Comedy. Natural Philosophy in French Literature from Rabelais to Maupertuis by Harcourt Brown (review)

HUMANITIES 443 extreme resorbe tout Ie processus en reengendrant 1a matrice premiere,' p 155); de Jacques Seebacher, deployant sous nos yeux Ie chiffon de papier 'jaune, sordide et rompu ases plis: dans lequel il voit Ie texte generateur du Dernier jour d'un condamne et de I'ensemble des romans hugoliens (pp 166-7). Mais ce qui frappe Ie plus Ie lecteur, me semble-tii , c'est encore dans l'ensemble de ce Colloque consacre ala 'socialite' la place immense prise par les analyses d'ceuvres du XIXe siec1e. L'avenement de la revolution industrielle et de la production de masse, joint ala generalisation de la valeur d'echange, de plus en pl",s prise seule en consideration au detriment des autres valeurs, aurait-il done intensifiepour ne pas dire irremediablement aggrave - Ie vieux conflit bipolaire entre la Machine Sociale et nous-memes? (ALBERT CHESNEAU) Harcourt Brown, Science and the HIlman Comedy. Natural Philosophy in French Literaturefrom Rabelais to Maupertuis. University ofToronto Press. xx, 221. $ 15.00 This study in intellectual history looks at leading writers during the scientific revolution. Brown sees this revolution as contributing to an increasing emphasis on detachment, producing attitudes of mind rather than a coherent culture, and thus, in a continuous process, permeating and gradually transforming 'the mind of the west by the acceptance of the organizing principles of the exact sciences' (p xix). He distinguishes firmly between the activities of the humanist and the scientist, the former being strikingly an individual, the latter participating in a more corporate enterprise that sometimes is portrayed as disconcertingly positivistic. Yet Brown stresses the need for a humanistic component in the history of science, and the reciprocal benefits of such an interfusion. One such benefit that he derives is the recognition that the new scientists had a major literary task in framing and communicating their enterprise. These are large themes, discursively handled in the introduction and first chapter. As generalities they are tempting and familiar. Brown goes on to give them novel illustration rather than demonstration, thus informing and unifying his themes. He does this by considering individuals , convincingly and with insight. His views of history and of literature stress the individual, taking societies and movements almost for granted. The first individual to be considered, Rabelais, is presented as his contemporaries saw him - a phYSician and a skilled anatomist who was associated with the invention of the Glossocomion, a device for setting fractured thighs. Rabelais's medical experience took him from confidence in the virtues of undisturbed nature, to the recognition that cooperation with nature sometimes meant coercing her. Nature and theory were in conflict. Brown adduces parallels from Rabelais's fiction, and 444 LEITERS IN CANADA 1976 shows how this fiction follows his medicine in displaying the unity of man's spirit and body. The tension between the worlds of nature and of spirit was fundamental for Pascal, who recognized different kinds of authority. Brown shows how he finally minimized this tension by limiting and subordinating science. Science was meanwhile increasingly a part of the republic of letters. Mezeray's proposed journal was to record scientific achievement as well as literary and political events, and the Journal des sfavans had similar aims. Science and literature came together again in Moliere'S Le Malade imaginaire, where the conflict between nature and theory and between the new knowledge and the old are constant themes. Brown moves from Moliere to a sympathetic and wholly original account of the growth of experimental medicine in France, giving a fine summary of early work on the transfusion of blood and its relations to a modified theory of temperaments. The increasing national importance of science was marked by Voltaire 's treatment of it. Brown presents him as one imbued by 'the chief legacy of seventeenth-century science' beyond its immediate sphere the discovery that liberty lay in the mind, not in the laws of the natural or social order. Yet Voltaire emerges in this balanced view as a philosophe, not a philosopher, as his hostility to Maupertuis showed. Brown gives a fascinating account of Maupertuis's theoretical and observational study of the shape of the earth, which vindicated Newton's theory of attraction. Voltaire...