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Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science
By Richard Yeo THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-10656-4
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Is it not evident, in these last hundred years (when the study of philosophy has been the business of all the Virtuosi in Christendom), that almost a new Nature has been revealed to us? John Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy (1668)
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The most famous diarist of the seventeenth century, Samuel Pepys, gave a vivid eyewitness account of the Great Fire of London, which began about midnight on Sunday, September 2, 1666. We have his description of its "most horrid malicious bloody flame, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire." Some days later Pepys felt compelled to record that at last he was able to return to "my Journall-book to enter for five days past." This entry displays the devotion to a daily task, interrupted only by catastrophe and now made good, relying on memory. Thanks to similar punctilious note-taking, we have another, less direct, notice of the fire from John Locke, about fifty miles away in Oxford.
Locke's record is interesting because he did not know what he was seeing. On the morning of Tuesday, September 4, he made his daily weather observations from his rooms in Christ Church. He had started to keep a "Register" of the weather on June 24 of that year and continued to do so—with various interruptions—until June 30, 1683. At 9 a.m. on that day in September 1666, he entered his usual set of figures about temperature, air pressure, humidity, and the strength and direction of the wind. At 1 p.m. he made another series of entries, adding "dim redish sun shine" in the column marked "Weather." At 8 p.m. he made a third set. Either at that time or later, he inserted a note in the far right of the page reserved for comments: "This day the sun beams were dim'd & of an unusuall colour heare at Oxford which I observed at 12 a clock & all that afternoon & others in the morning, which was occasiond by the smoak of London burning." Locke now realized the significance of his earlier observational report (see fig. 1.1).
Here we have two notebooks kept by English virtuosi. Both evince the methodical note-keeping habits urged by Renaissance pedagogues and Puritan moralists. Yet examination of Locke's notebook also highlights an instructive complication. Locke entered his daily weather observations in the carefully ruled pages he prepared for this purpose. This "Register" occupies the final pages of one of his large folio-sized commonplace books, arranged by subject, not by chronology as in the case of all diaries. This placement may seem to indicate a distinction in kind, separating the weather diary from the topical arrangement of the copious notes from his reading of scientific, especially medical, books. However, by making the weather observations under the heading of "Aer 66" (top center of the first page) he signaled the use of the method of commonplacing. The "Head" (heading) indicated that this information belonged to a topic—namely, the nature and phenomena of the "air," one that occurs elsewhere in this and other notebooks (see fig. 1.2). Locke regarded his observations and measurements as a contribution to a long-term collaborative project on the natural history of the air that had implications for the genesis and transmission of diseases. The "Register" was later published in Robert Boyle's The General History of the Air (1692), a book prepared for the press by Locke in his role as one of Boyle's literary executors. This work collated information collected by various observers in response to Boyle's queries, probably first issued in the 1660s. The challenge was to coordinate notes made by individuals, often under different principles—such as topical or chronological—so that they might be of collective and public value.
Scholarship over the last few decades has contended that the rise of early modern science was deeply enmeshed within a range of humanist, legal, and social ways of inquiring. As an intellectual pursuit cultivated in new institutions, empirical scientific inquiry drew to some extent upon the methods of older disciplines, such as medicine and law, and the ethos of gentlemanly codes of civil conduct. I think note-taking needs to be added to this set of preoccupations and techniques. In Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science I consider this practice as a way of exploring attitudes toward both memory and information in the early modern period (say, 1550 to 1700), focusing mainly on the second half of the seventeenth century. In particular, the case of scientific knowledge (especially Baconian natural history) is revealing because the virtuosi who sought new empirical information used notebooks in both traditional and novel ways, as aids to memory and as records of information that might potentially have value for those who did not collect the original material. These English figures were aware of the note-taking techniques promoted by Renaissance humanists and inculcated in grammar schools and universities throughout Europe. They were not the first to extend this practice from the selection of textual passages to the recording of observations of the social and natural worlds. However, they may be distinctive in their reflections on note-taking and its relationship with the demands of empirical inquiry. As members of the early Royal Society of London, these virtuosi had to confront the personal problem of dealing with empirical information that exceeded the capacity of memory, and the institutional one of collecting private notes in a scientific archive. I aim to bring these people together, comparing their assumptions and methods, and considering them in the context of European concerns about the management of information and knowledge from Francis Bacon and René Descartes to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
Any discussion of "science" in the seventeenth century requires a discussion of terminology. It is now well recognized that this word did not exclusively denote the study of the natural world, as it came to do (especially in English) by the mid-nineteenth century. In the early modern period, the term "science" referred to bodies of systematic knowledge, including grammar, geometry, and theology. When it was applied to knowledge of nature it was usually limited to those disciplines that claimed, or sought, certain or axiomatic knowledge. In her study of Elizabethan inventors, surgeons, apothecaries, and mathematicians, Deborah Harkness has suggested that they began to use the word "science" in ways that anticipate the later, more restricted, "modern" usage.
But even if this is so, the older concept of "science" was still alive among some of Bacon's ardent followers who cultivated natural knowledge. Thus in 1648, Samuel Hartlib, a mentor to several members of the Royal Society, entertained at least quasi-demonstrative aspirations: "By Science wee conceive a Certain Body of Notions set in order to inable the Mind of Man to discerne the Principles of all Thinges; whereof there are certain and constant causes existent in nature; and to Demonstrat the production of the Effects which naturally follow thereupon." With this criterion as a benchmark, most of the new experimental inquiries fell short, although natural philosophy and mixed mathematics, understood as the study of causes anchored in principles, came closer than natural history, if regarded solely as an exercise in description and classification. As late as 1690, Locke suspected "that natural Philosophy is not capable of being made a Science." He certainly did not mean that this subject was unworthy of study, but that its achievements were likely to be less stable than the demonstrative knowledge expected of disciplines, such as mathematics and ethics, which he called "sciences." Similar caution must be taken with words we use in speaking about the people who sought knowledge of nature. The word "scientist" was coined by William Whewell in 1833 and not widely used until after 1900. In writing about the seventeenth century, I therefore use the actors' terms: natural historians, natural philosophers, physicians, experimental chemists, and virtuosi.
In addition, some of the people I discuss referred to themselves as "moderns." Thus Boyle frequently spoke of the learned or ingenious "moderns," usually in contrast with those adhering to older views on medicine, chemistry, and natural philosophy deriving from Hippocrates, Aristotle, or Galen. In an early reflection (c. 1650), Boyle wrote that once he had become "inclin'd to the Study of Naturall Philosophy" he set out "to instruct my selfe in the Aristotelian Doctrine," but soon became disenchanted by it, in part because "I observ'd many things in my Travells which were wholly unintelligible from Aristotles Theory." Later, in his Memoirs (1684) about the study of human blood, he judged that "the curiosity of the Moderns" had delivered far more than "the Ancients." In tune with this attitude, the poet John Dryden declared in 1668 that in his time "more errors of the school have been detected, more useful experiments in philosophy have been made, more noble secrets in optics, medicine, anatomy, astronomy, discovered, than in all those credulous and doting ages from Aristotle to us ... [and] that nothing spreads more fast than science, when rightly and generally cultivated." Here we do see an attempt to make the "new philosophy" synonymous with "science."
Virtuosi
The first two terms of my title—"notebooks" and "English virtuosi"—also need explanation. I shall start with the people themselves. The first reputed use of the word virtuoso in English occurs in Henry Peacham's The Compleat Gentleman (1634), in his chapter "Of Antiquities." Referring to collectors of "Statues, Inscriptions, and Coynes," Peacham added that "such as are skilled in them, are by the Italians called Virtuosi." It soon became common in English, used either with or without observance of its Italian plural form, and often without italics or other indication of it being a foreign word. In his Glossographia (1656), Thomas Blount defined a "virtuoso" simply as "a learned or ingenious person, one that is well qualified." In 1673 the naturalist John Ray continued this usage but allowed it to extend to connoisseurship as well as skilled performance. Speaking of the Italians encountered on his travels, he remarked: "Though all of them cannot paint or play on the music, yet do they all affect skill and judgement in both: And this knowledge is enough to denominate a man a virtuoso."
By the 1660s the leading members of the newly established Royal Society applied the label "virtuosi" to themselves. When Pepys was offered an introduction to this group in early 1662, he referred to it as "the college of Virtuosoes." In his unpublished biographical sketches (later called Brief Lives), John Aubrey used this term to identify some of the leading physicians, mathematicians, and natural philosophers of his day. Nominating Oxford as the home of some "ingeniose scholars" such as Ralph Bathurst, John Wilkins, Seth Ward, and Thomas Willis, he reported that "experimentall philosophy first budded here and was first cultivated by these vertuosi in that darke time." Samuel Hartlib, seeking to associate his own earlier hopes for a Baconian academy with the new society in London (soon to be called "Royal"), remarked in December 1660 that "there is a meeting every week of the prime virtuosi," and that "His Maj[esty]. is sayd to profess himself one of those virtuosi." A month later he wrote of "Mr. Boyle" being "one of the virtuosi." Boyle himself used the word regularly when referring to those interested in experimental philosophy, and awarded it as a badge of honor to Locke after the latter's less-than-successful attempt to take barometric measurements in a mine in the Mendip Hills in Somerset in 1666. He occasionally spoke of a "Virtuosa" when describing a learned woman. When John Evelyn listed the range of visitors keen to meet Boyle, he mentioned "Princes, Ambassadors, Forrainers, Scholars, Travellers & Virtuosi," thereby giving the last category a separate recognition.
During the seventeenth century, one could admire virtuosi for their skill in a particular subject, or for the breadth of their curiosity. In English Scientific Virtuosi (1979), Barbara Shapiro and Robert Frank stressed the overlap of interests between antiquarians and physicians in the early Royal Society, and the operation of an intellectual framework that did not demarcate historical and natural observations. Abraham Hill, one of the first secretaries of the Society, acknowledged such a range of interests when describing the lawyer Sir John Hoskyns as one who "understands painting and sculpture exceedingly well, and is a virtuoso in most other branches, particularly gardening." Aubrey's examples also show that the virtuosi were involved in a broad range of inquiries that included medicine, botany, horticulture, physiology, chemistry, experimental philosophy, and archaeological research on historical monuments. In 1668 the Italian visitor Lorenzo Magalotti noticed the diverse interests of the members of the Royal Society, and Evelyn, as the very model of an English virtuoso, embraced this wider suite of subjects.
It was possible, however, to put a negative slant on this broad range of interests, regarding it as indicative of a promiscuous approach. To some extent, the historian Walter Houghton did this in his pioneering study that identified virtuosi as not only those collecting coins, medals, and paintings, but also those boasting various scientific interests. However, he viewed these multiple pursuits as responsible for the "dilution and distortion of the scientific mind ... to the spirit of virtuosity." In a sense, this echoed some of the contemporary attacks from those whom Thomas Sprat, in The History of the Royal Society (1667), called "these terrible men." Almost a decade later, in his comedy The Virtuoso (1676), Thomas Shadwell had his lead character, Sir Nicholas Gimcrack, pursuing projects close to those of the Society. These are satirized as abstract speculation marked by nonutility: "We virtuosos never find out anything of use." In fact, Gimcrack is refused entry by "the College" (a reference to Gresham College, London, the first location of the Society's meetings), but such a twist only heightened the satirical effect. Robert Hooke, the curator of the Society, returned from the play and vented his anger in his diary: "Damned Doggs, Vindica me Deus. People almost pointed." Similarly, the physician and political statistician William Petty expressed private dismay at the manner in which worthy and difficult inquiries were portrayed. We can detect the impact of Shadwell's work in William Wotton's Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694). He commented that "nothing wounds so much as Jest," and so ridicule of the Royal Society might discourage participation in scientific studies, especially if it got about that "every Man whom they call a Virtuoso, must needs be a Sir Nicolas Gimcrack."
Continuing aftershocks of this caricature are discernible in Ephraim Chambers' Cyclopaedia (1728), which carried this entry:
Virtuoso, an Italian term, lately introduced into English; signifying a Man of Curiosity and Learning; or one who loves and promotes the Arts and Sciences. In Italy, Virtuosi are properly such as apply themselves to the polite Arts of Painting, Sculpture, Turning, Mathematicks, &c.... Among us, the Term seems affected to those who apply themselves to some curious and quaint, rather than immediately useful Art or Study: As Antiquaries, Collectors of Rarities of any kind, Microscopical Observers, &c.
Chambers knew that these last three activities were pursuits of the Society, to which he was elected in 1729 by virtue of this Cyclopaedia, and its support of Newtonianism. His definition appropriately includes the sciences, but with a negative connotation—"curious and quaint, rather than immediately useful"—that applied to the interests of some members. A more severe insinuation was already present in Isaac Newton's caustic mention of "some great virtuosos": these people, he said, did not "take my meaning, when I spake of the nature of light and colours abstractedly." This remark attests to an incipient tension between mathematical and natural history interests within the Society. Nevertheless, in the late seventeenth century the term "virtuoso" in association with science carried a generally positive connotation. It did not at that time resemble the negative "macaroni" tag circulating during Sir Joseph Banks' presidency from 1778. Boyle, Locke, and Hooke were not butterfly collectors. In about 1704, Leibniz used this term in connection with a call for more interaction between "practice and theory" which, he said, could already be seen "among painters, sculptors and musicians, and among certain other kinds of virtuosi."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science by Richard Yeo. Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS.
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