The modern view of nature owes something both to Greek and to Renaissance cosmology, but it differs from each in fundamental ways. To describe the differences with precision is not easy, because the movement is still young and has not yet had the time to ripen its ideas for systematic statement. We are confronted not so much with a new cosmology as with a large number of new cosmological experiments, all very disconcerting if looked at from the Renaissance point of view, and all to some extent animated by what we can recognize as a single spirit; but to define this spirit is very difficult. We can, however, describe the kind of experience in which it is based, and so indicate that starting-point of this movement.
Modern cosmology, like its predecessors, is based on an analogy. What is new about it is that the analogy is a new one. As Greek natural science was based on the analogy between the macrocosm nature and the microcosm man, as man is revealed to himself in his own self-consciousness; as Renaissance natural science was based on the analogy between nature as God’s handiwork and the machines that are the handiwork of man (the same Analogy which in the eighteenth century was to become the presupposition of Joseph Butler’s masterpiece); so the modern view of nature, which first begins to find expression towards the end of the eighteenth century and ever since then has been gathering weight and establishing itself more securely down to the present day, is based on the analogy between the processes of the natural world as studied by natural scientists and the vicissitudes of human affairs as studied by historians.
Like the Renaissance analogy, this could only begin to operate when certain conditions were fulfilled. Renaissance cosmology, as I have pointed out, arose from a widespread familiarity with the making and handling of machines. The sixteenth century was the time when this familiarity had been achieved. Modern cosmology could only have arisen from a widespread familiarity with historical studies, and in particular with historical studies of the kind which placed the conception of process, change, development in the centre of their picture and recognized it as the fundamental category of historical thought. This kind of history appeared for the first time about the middle of the eighteenth century. Bury finds it first in Turgot (Discours sur l’histoire universelle, 1750) and Voltaire (Le Siècle de Louis XIV, 1751). It was developed in the Encyclopèdie (1751-65), and thereafter became a commonplace. Transposed during the next half-century into terms of natural science, the idea of ‘progress’ became (as in Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia, 1794-8, and Lamarck, Philosophie zoologique, 1809) the idea which in another half-century was to become famous as that of ‘evolution’.
In its narrowest sense, evolution means the doctrine especially associated with the name of Charles Darwin, though not first expounded by him, that the species of living organisms are not a fixed repertory of permanent types, but begin to exist and cease to exist in time. But this doctrine is only one expression of a tendency which may work, and has in fact worked, in a much wider field: the tendency to resolve the very ancient dualism between changing and unchanging elements in the world of nature by maintaining that what had hitherto been regarded as unchanging was itself in reality subject to change. When this tendency works unchecked, and the conception of unchanging elements in nature is completely eradicated, the result may be called ‘radical evolutionism’: a doctrine which hardly arrived at maturity until the twentieth century, and was first systematically expounded by Bergson.
The origin of this tendency, which can be traced at work in various fields of natural science for more than a hundred years before Bergson, must be sought in the historical movement of the late eighteenth century, and its further development in the growth of the same movement in the nineteenth.
The concept of evolution, as those who witnessed its detailed application by Darwin to the field of biology knew, marked a crisis of the first importance in the history of human thought. But the earliest attempts at a philosophical exposition of the concept, notably Herbert Spencer’s, were amateurish and inconclusive; and the criticism which they justly provoked led not so much to a closer inquiry into the concept itself as to a belief that no such inquiry was worth making.
The question at issue was a very far-reaching one: under what conditions is knowledge possible? For the Greeks it had been an axiom that nothing is knowable unless it is unchanging. The world of nature, again according to the Greeks, is a world of continual and all-pervading change. It might seem to follow that a science of nature is impossible. But Renaissance cosmology had avoided this conclusion by a distinguo. The world of nature as it appears to our senses was admitted to be unknowable; but it was argued that behind this world of so-called ‘secondary qualities’ there lay other things, the true objects of natural science, knowable because unchanging. First, there was the ‘substance’ or ‘matter’, itself not subject to change, whose unchanging arrangements and dispositions were the realities whose appearances to our sensibility took the shape of secondary qualities. Secondly, there were the ‘laws’ according to which these arrangements and dispositions changed. These two things, matter and natural law, were the unchanging objects of natural science.
What is the relation between the ‘matter’ which was regarded as the substance of the change in the perceptible natural world and the ‘laws’ according to which those changes took place? Without all the fully discussing this question, I will venture to suggest that they represent the same thing said twice over. The motive for asserting either of them arises from the supposed need for an unchanging and therefore, according to the time-honoured axiom, knowable something behind the changing and therefore unknowable show of nature as we perceive it through our senses.
This changeless something was sought in two directions at once, or (if you will) described in two vocabularies at once. First it was sought by stripping away from nature-as-we-perceive-it whatever is obviously changeable, so as to leave a residue in the shape of a natural world now at last knowable because exempt from change; secondly, it was sought by looking for unchanging relations between the changeables. Alternatively, you may say that the unchangeable something was described first in the vocabulary of ‘materialism’, as by the early Ionians and secondly in the vocabulary of ‘idealism’, as by the Pythagoreans; where ‘materialism’ means the attempt to understand things by asking what they are made of, and ‘idealism’ the attempt to understand things by asking what ‘A is made of B’ means: that is, what ‘form’ has been imposed on it to differentiate it from that out of which it is made.
If the required ‘changeless something’ can be found in one of these quests, or described in one of these vocabularies, the other become unnecessary. Hence ‘materialism’ and ‘idealism’, which in the seventeenth century existed peacefully side by side, revealed themselves gradually in the eighteenth century as rivals. To Spinoza it seemed clear that nature revealed itself to the human intellect in two ‘attributes’, ‘extension’ and ‘thought’: where ‘extension’ means not the visible extension of, for example, visible patches of colour in sky, trees, grass, and so on, but the intelligible ‘extension’ of geometry, which Descartes had identified with ‘matter’; and where ‘thought’ means not the mental activity of thinking but the ‘laws of nature’ which are the objects of the natural scientist’s thinking. The reality of nature, Spinoza maintains, is alternatively ‘expressed’ in these two ‘attributes’; in other words, Spinoza is ‘materialist’ and ‘idealist’ at once. But when Locke maintained that there is ‘no science of Substance’, he was abandoning the ‘materialist’ answer to the question and proclaiming the sufficiency of the ‘idealist’ answer. The question was: How are we to find a changeless and therefore knowable something in, or behind, or somehow belonging to, the flux of nature-as-we-perceive-it? In modern or evolutionary natural science, this question does not arise, and the controversy between ‘materialism’ and ‘idealism’, as two answers to it, no longer has any meaning.
This controversy became meaningless because its presupposition had undergone a revolutionary change by the beginning of the nineteenth century. By then historians had trained themselves to think, and had found themselves able to think scientifically, about a world of constantly changing human affairs in which there was no unchanging substrate behind the changes, and no unchanging laws according to which the changes took place. History had by now established itself as a science, that is, a progressive inquiry in which conclusions are solidly and demonstratively established. It had thus been proved by experiment that scientific knowledge was possible concerning objects that were constantly changing. Once more, the self-consciousness of man, in this case the corporate self-consciousness of man, his historical consciousness of his own corporate doings, provided a clue to his thoughts about nature. The historical conception of scientifically knowable change or process was applied, under the name of evolution, to the natural world.
| Last Updated: 10/19/22 |