Isaac Beeckman on Matter and Motion: Mechanical Philosophy in the Making

7. Beeckman and the Scientific Revolution

Is the Ramist inspiration for Beeckman’s mechanical philosophy important? SuchanassessmentultimatelydependsonBeeckman’splaceinwhathistorians still refer to as the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Was his an isolated case with minimal historical impact, or did his ideas play an important role in early modern natural philosophy? For a long time, historians minimized Beeckman’s influence on the development of modern science. They regarded him as a minor philosopher without real influence, despite Beeckman’s joint derivation of the law of falling bodies with Descartes. Beeckman did not do enough to promote his ideas, according to E. J. Dijksterhuis, who was otherwise sympathetic to the idea of publishing the Journal in its entirety. In his classic account of the rise of mechanism, The Mechanization of the World Picture, DijksterhuisdeploresBeeckman ’slackoftenacityofpurposeandpowersofconcentration required to systematize, finish, record, and publish his inquiries. As a result, he “did not advance science at all, or at least to a much smaller extent than[he]mighthavedone.”1 EveninthecaseofBeeckmanandDescartes’s1618 collaboration, Dijksterhuis claimed that Beeckman’s ideas did not really form a link in the chain of development of seventeenth-century science. Beeckman’s notebooks were valuable only “because they give the reader some notion of the scientific thought of a gifted man of the early seventeenth century.”2 For Dijksterhuis, the history of science primarily was a chain of theories, of which the science of mechanics was the most important. In this history of mechanics , Beeckman’s influence was limited by his failure to publish his derivation of the law of falling bodies. Yet this assessment does not do justice to Beeckman and the Scientific Revolution chapter seven beeckman and the scientific revolution 165 Beeckman’s contribution to the development of natural philosophy. Our conception of science has broadened considerably over the past half century. Mechanics no longer takes center stage and “science” in general is now viewed as a set of practices that are only partially articulated, and not simply as a set of theories. This broader concept of early modern science has consequences for a definitive assessment of Beeckman’s legacy. Firstofall,oneshoulddeemphasize,asBeeckmandid,hisworkonthelawof falling bodies. He focused on many other disciplines, including music, chemistry , optics, and meteorology. Second, disseminating his views on these topics took different forms. Dijksterhuis presumes that knowledge is transmitted only through books and underestimates the role of oral conversation and writtencorrespondence .Somescholarshaddifficultyacquiringbooks,andattimes the scholarly community took years to integrate new ideas they encountered in books. Exchanging letters was often a faster and more direct way of informing others of one’s work than publishing a book. One should therefore not underestimate the extent to which Beeckman influenced the course of seventeenthcentury natural philosophy through his correspondence and personal contacts with Descartes, Gassendi, and Mersenne—in fact, writing a letter to Mersenne was the early modern equivalent of publishing an article in a scientific journal. Finally, analyzing Beeckman’s Journal also directly and indirectly demonstrates the importance of artisanal knowledge in the rise of modern science. Beeckman repeatedly used his workshop experience to make sense of natural phenomena in the Journal, while Ramism—rooted in the world of practical knowledge—gave him confidence that this was a sensible thing to do. These ideas coalesce in the notion of picturability introduced above to capture the essence of Beeckman’s approach. This notion places Beeckman at the heart of the scientific revolution, while establishing how Beeckman’s work fits in the general culture of the Dutch Republic in the early seventeenth century. beeckman, gassendi, and mersenne Other scholars have challenged Dijksterhuis’s assessment that Beeckman had limited influence on his contemporaries. In his Mersenne biography, Robert Lenoble wrote, “It seems that the first initiator of a great number of the ideas of the seventeenth century was the modest and taciturn Beeckman.”3 Many wellknown discoveries of seventeenth-century science were, indeed, first expressed in Beeckman’s notebooks: for example, Beeckman noted the correlation between the height of a column of water and the flow velocity of water 166 isa ac beeckman on matter and motion pouring through an opening at the bottom of the column thirty years before Torricelli published on the subject.4 Of course, Beeckman did not publish his discovery, and so Torricelli had to “discover” it on his own. Beeckman, though, was not a recluse: he shared his speculations with others and was...