Empiricist Devotions: Science, Religion, and Poetry in Early Eighteenth-Century England by Courtney Weiss Smith (review)

We often think of the Restoration as Britain’s portal into modernity. In histories of science and literature alike, this four-decade period has often been imagined as a point of origin for secular habits of observation that shaped the scientific revolution, the emergence of the human subject, and the rise of the prose novel. In turn, empiricist attitudes toward nature are understood to have cooperated with contractarian political ideals, financial revolutions, and increasing literacy to make British readers rational agents of their own technological progress and savvy interpreters of their own destiny. But was British empiricism really so godless, so prosaic, or so confident of its capacity to dominate nature? Courtney Weiss Smith’s deftly conceived Empiricist Devotions: Science, Religion, and Poetry in Early Eighteenth-Century England challenges us to question this received wisdom. Smith contends that, far from banishing religiosity from natural philosophical investigation, writers from Robert Boyle to Alexander Pope relished the prospect of finding in nature a divine order and intention. She shows that, in keeping with Protestant expectations for humility in the face of the Book of Nature, these writers embraced analogy and figuration—not just plain, denotative prose—as tools for accessing a supra-human order.

The central descriptive project of Empiricist Devotions is an epistemic portrait of what Smith calls “the meditative empiricism,” a pious, scientific way of looking at nature that has been unduly occluded by modern accounts of the popularization of Royal Society experimentalism, with its perceived preference for assertive, secular, materialist methods of observation. The book begins with an analysis of Boyle’s Occasional Reflections (1665) which Smith explicates as a “how-to guide” and a popularizing vehicle for practicing occasional meditation in an empiricist mode (31). Empiricism, as Boyle practices it here, is not attention to minute particulars for their own sake; rather, particulars become the starting point for a reverential, open-eyed meditation on the natural systems in which they are involved, so that multiple natural meanings may present themselves to the meditator, whether through the material presence of the observed object or through analogic representation of some other aspect of God’s will for humanity. Subsequent chapters follow this attitude toward nature from the well-established genre of the occasional meditation through several prominent literary-historical episodes and genres. Chapter 2 demonstrates the centrality of clock metaphors to debates about and popularizations of Newtonian theories of gravity—an understanding traceable to Newton himself, who made room for the possibility of God as an interventionist clockmaker, setting the weights and regularly winding it. Chapter 3 documents meditative-empiricist deference to nature’s lessons on both sides of the 1690s coinage controversy and then follows this observational mode into “it-narratives” about talking coins by Charles Gildon and Joseph Addison, which Smith reads as a playful extension of a meditative-empiricist confidence that “the natural world is full of hints and prompts” (128). Chapter 4 reads social contract theories as extensions of meditative-empiricists’ habit of “subordinat[ing] themselves to a supra-human order encoded, but only ever glimpsed, in nature” (141), from prose essays by John Locke and Lord Bolingbroke to Daniel Defoe’s natural argument against passive obedience in Jure Divino to Alexander Pope’s “voice of Nature” in the Essay on Man. Chapter 5 then explores the georgic as “the mode, par excellence, for empiricist devotions,” with its peculiar “straddling” of “metaphor and materiality” (174–5), its attention to non-human agents in nature, and its penchant for periphrastic description. Even (or especially) in these figurative profusions, the georgic is, for Smith, a “realist” form, comparable in its empiricist engagements to the early prose novel.

This is a fitting endpoint, for the project as a whole is explicitly framed as a corrective to R. F. Jones’s still-influential account of the centrality of the “plain style” in Restoration science and religion, whose grounding assumptions are reiterated in histories of the...