Butterfield's Origins and the Scientific Revolution

14 Historically Speaking September/October 2006 Butterfield's Origins and the Scientific Revolution Charles C. Gillispie For those of us attempting to inaugurate teaching of the history of science after the war, Herbert Butterfield's Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800 was literally a godsend. He began the cultivation of a largely untilled field like a deus ex machina bestriding, albeit unpretentiously, the discipline of history proper. Not only did he set the example of how to write a narrative history of technical material, he also wrote a book we could give undergraduates to read. And this may have been even more valuable. The current generation can scarcely imagine the conceptual and stylistic poverty of what passed for the literature half a century ago. Apart from Arthur O. Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being (1936), E. A. Burtt's MetaphysicalFoundations of Modern Science (rev. ed. 1932), the chapters on English, French, and German scientific styles in J. T. Merz's A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century (1896-1914), and James B. Conant's On Understanding Science, an Historical Approach (1947), none of which was properly historical, the pickings were thin and thorny. That said, it is ironic that Butterfield is best known to historians at large for his devastating and perhaps overdone critique, The Whiginterpretation of History (1931), for there is no more classic an example of whiggishness in the historiography of science than his Origins. The notion of a delayed scientific revolution in chemistry is instance enough. It is no reflection on Butterfield to say that he popularized, or better publicized, an analysis developed by Burtt and more deeply by Alexandre Koyré in Etudesgaliléennes (1939) and From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (1957). Thanks to them— though not new with them—the very concept of a scientific revolution was of crucial importance to our thinking. It gave us a framework with which to contrast our accounts of ancient and medieval science —the word may be thought anachronistic, but scientia does mean knowledge—and within which to develop the story line leading to modernity. To rehearse only the highest lights: Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1 543) gives Kepler the basis for mathematically formulating and observationally confirming the laws of planetary motion {Astronomia nova [1609], De harmonica mundi [1619]). Experimentation as discovery, full fledged in William Gilbert (De magnete, [1600]), is joined to experimentation as confirmation of mathematical formulation by Galileo in founding classical kinematics if not quite dynamics (Discorsi . . . à due Nuove Science [1638]); Galileo's trial and conviction for the DialEngraved illustration from the alchemical text, Theatrum chemicum Britannicum . . ., 1652. Beinecke Rare Elook and Manuscript Library, Yale University. ogo dei Massimi Systemi del mondo (1632) is science as theater; what with the Royal Society, the Académie Royale des Sciences, Stevin, Beekman, Huygens, Paracelsus, Hooke, Mariotte, Boyle, et al. the stage soon grows crowded; Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica (1 543) appears coincidentally widi Copernicus 's De revolutionibus. The background of Renaissance artistic realism thus naturalized sciences of Ufe, wherein developments parallel those in the physical sciences. Dissection and experiment at the hands of Girolamo Fabrici, Realdo Colombo, and others culminates in Harvey's experimental discovery of the circulation of the blood (De motu cordis [1628]), confirmed by quantitative reasoning. Except for an increasingly rigorous botany, the life sciences waited until the early 19th century for biology to emerge, on the one hand, from medical concerns, mainly physiology and anatomy, and, on the other hand, from natural history, mainly classification of the animal kingdom. Throughout the 17th century protagonists insist on the novelty of their work. The adjective new appears in many tides. Moderns rebel against ancients in the Battle of the Books. It is always the business of philosophers, not so much to innovate themselves, as to see deeply into what is happening to knowledge. Bacon does so for the relation of experiment to the new knowledge of nature, Descartes for the relation of mathematics to the new knowledge of nature, and Spinoza for the relation of the new knowledge of nature to theology and religion. Finally, in Principia mathematica naturalisphilosophiae (1787) Newton unites laws of celestial motion with...