The Reinvention of the World: English Writing 1650–1770 by Douglas Chambers (review)

HUMANITIES 209 ' at the forefront of the scientific revolution, reshaping both physics and mathematics in ways undreamt of by Locke. The range of agreement and disagreement, which bears scant similarity to the party lines, also gives the lie to the old dichotomy. The New Essays presupposes much of Leibniz's philosophy and cannot serve as an introduction, but it adds much to our appreciation of that philosophy and reveals how Leibniz could apply it to questions from another's philosophical agenda. It is also delightful to see the scope and freedom of Leibniz's thought. He even gives us hints of our world; of the health sciences he says: 'this aspect of public policy will become almost the chiefconcern of those who govern.' Buthis vision is perhaps inaccurate, for he goes on to qualify that the concern for health will be 'second only to the concern for virtue'! Finally, I raise a small question about Leibniz. Though he was always interested in the emergingmathematical theories of probability andindeed contributed to them, did he ever tmderstand probability? In the New Essays he manages to state correctly the odds fC?r rolling a seven versus rolling a nine, but he is merely lucky. Leibniz is counting I arrangements' of the dice and not their permutations, as revealed by a later remark (in a letter) that one is equally likely to roll a twelve as an eleven. Itis astonishing to me that Leibniz apparently lived out his life in ignorance of absolutely basic features of probability that were well known before his time. Or is there some other explanation? (WILLIAM SEAGER) Douglas Chambers. The Reinvention oj the World: English Writing 16SCf-17S0 Writing in History. Arnold. x, 212. $35.50 The argumentative plan for this garden of intellectual delights is announced early on: 'My argwnent ... is that the rationalist consolidation taking place during this period - whether ideological or material- was not accomplished without considerable resistance to its exclusion by ... Nrival knowledge.II , In separate chapters, several disciplines are, presumably, to be discussed in terms of 'resistance' to ratiocinative methodization of knowledge, 1650-1750. These include geography and cartography, travel and diversification of knowledge, domestic husbandry and pastoral, restrictions on land use, and the education and shaping of the child. Alas and however, whereas the variety of species, colour, height, texture, and shape of an English garden border is often given coherence just by the solid backgrotmd of a stone wall, here an immense variety of learned aperc;us make a brilliant show - but lack a wall. The English mixed border comes to mind not just because Chambers is the creator of one of the finest private gardens in Canada, but because the book reminds me of one in the ways the garden metaphor suggests: bril- 210 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 liant bloom, natural vigour, variety, and lack of apparent artifice. A joy, in short, to wander through and experience. An individual bit - a sentence, paragraph, or two-page account of a particular work - can display an ephemeral and engaging notion, colourfullyexpressed, as when Chambers suggests that the London of Ogilvy's exacting ichnography of 1676 is imaginatively reconstituted in Moll Flanders, which, Chambers reminds us, was fictively written in 1683, or when he redefines Milton's Satan as a Swiftian projector, reinventing the universe on a mechanical model, employing the advances of science to speculative and lucrative ends, envisioning an Earth 'worthier of Gods, as built / With second thoughts, reforming what was old!', and bragging, 'For what God after better worse would build?' That Satan was meant to be resisted is clear, but Chambers too frequently fails to clarify exactly what was to be resisted or why or how in the 'rationalist consolidation' he sees taking place in the period. Furthermore, the chapteron travel and diversification ofknowledge - albeit a descriptive catalogue that is a deep repository of information - has no thesis, and its scattered generalizations aren't new (travelling served imperial interests, for example); that on geography and cartography is largely a history thereof rather than a development of the book's alU10unced argument; that on land use and enclosurehas no apparentrelation to 'rationalistconsolidation ' except by semantic serendipity, etc. Infact, the whole is...