Quelle révolution scientifique? Les sciences de la vie dans la querelle des anciens et des modernes (XVIe et XVIIIe siècles) par Pascal Duris (review)

The late-seventeenth-century quarrel between the ancients and the moderns was as much about the relative virtues of the old and new science as about classical and seventeenth-century literature. Moreover, as Pascal Duris sets out to show, the quarrel, where it touched the life sciences in particular, was part of a much longer argument and one in which the ancients had the best lines. The author identifies two distinct periods to the debate. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, philosophers were very conscious of their debt to the ancients. A few, like Bacon and Harvey, believed it would be possible to go further than the ancients because they were standing on the shoulders of giants; others, feeling the world was ageing fast and the ancients were bigger in every way including size, suspected there was little the moderns could add; while sceptics, such as Agrippa or Montaigne, felt the ancients were an anchor in a world where nothing could be known for certain. From the mid-seventeenth century, in contrast, a small but growing number of natural philosophers, led in France by Descartes, Malebranche, and Fontenelle, affected contempt for the ancients and maintained that new discoveries, like the circulation of the blood, meant that the science of nature had to be remade. The supporters of the ancients, however, fought back—and more than held their own. They did not reject the discoveries of their contemporaries out of hand, but embraced them, insisting that they had either been anticipated by the ancients or would have been, had the ancients had access to the telescope and the microscope. The quarrel between the ancients and moderns in the sciences therefore became a quarrel between the Baconians and the Cartesians. In the life sciences, where there were many ways of interpreting similar experiences—as was shown by Redi and his opponents over the reality of spontaneous generation —, the Cartesians would always be objects of suspicion. If the eighteenth century was the age of Linnaeus, it was also the age of Buffon, who had no time for the former's attempt to establish a completely new form of classification and who opened his Histoire naturelle in 1749 by honouring the ancients. This is a very readable book which offers an interesting approach to the history of seventeenth-century science. Many of the texts discussed are little known, and even the more familiar are discussed in a novel way. The only caveat that might be raised is with the conclusion the author draws from the study. In his view, it was the work of the life scientists, not the physical scientists, that captivated the seventeenth-century imagination. Given the dominance of the Baconians in this field, it is thus no longer useful to speak of a Scientific Revolution, for the concept would have meant nothing to contemporaries. This seems a huge leap, and in the case of England ignores the broad and deep literary interest in astronomy and the physical sciences, charted over fifty years ago by Marjorie Hope Nicolson in Newton Demands the Muse: Newton's 'Opticks' and the 18th Century Poets (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946).