The second of the three cosmological movements mentioned at the beginning of this chapter took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I propose to designate its view of nature by the name of ‘Renaissance’ cosmology. The name is not a good one, because the word ‘Renaissance’ is applied to an earlier phase in the history of thought, beginning in Italy with the humanism of the fourteenth century and continuing, in the same country, with the Platonic and Aristotelian cosmologies of that century and the fifteenth. The cosmology I have now to describe was in principle a reaction against these and might, perhaps, be more accurately called ‘post-Renaissance’; but this is a clumsy term.
Historians of art have lately been using, for some part of the period with which I am concerned, the adjective ‘baroque’; but this is a word borrowed from the technicalities of formal logic as a term of contempt for a certain kind of bad taste prevalent in the seventeenth century, and its adoption as a descriptive epithet for the natural science of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton would be ‘bien baroque’. The word ‘gothic’, as applied to medieval architecture, succeeded in divesting itself of its original significance and becoming a term merely descriptive of a certain style; but no one, I think, ever proposed to call the work of Aquinas or Scotus ‘gothic philosophy’’ and even as applied to architecture the term is now disappearing. So I shall use the term ‘Renaissance’, with this definition of my meaning and this apology for departing from established usage.
The Renaissance view of nature began to take shape as antithetical to the Greek view in the work of Copernicus (1473-1543), Telesio (1508-88), and Bruno (1548-1600). The central point of this antithesis was the denial that the world of nature, the world studied by physical science, is an organism, and the assertion that it is devoid both of intelligence and of life. It is therefore incapable of ordering its own movements in a rational manner, and indeed incapable of moving itself at all. The movements which it exhibits, and which the physicist investigates, are imposed upon it from without, and their regularity is due to ‘laws of nature’ likewise imposed from without. Instead of being an organism, the natural world is a machine: a machine in the literal designed and put together and set going for a definite purpose by an intelligent mind outside itself. The Renaissance thinkers, like the Greeks, saw in the orderliness of the natural world an expression of intelligence: but for the Greeks this intelligence was nature’s own intelligence, for the Renaissance thinkers it was the intelligence of something other than nature: the diving creator and ruler of nature. This distinction is the key to all the main differences between Greek and Renaissance natural science.
Each of these cosmological movements was followed by a movement in which the focus of interest shifted from nature to mind. In the history of Greek thought this shift took place with Socrates. Whereas previous thinkers had not neglected ethics, politics, or even logic and the theory of knowledge, they had concentrated their main effort of thought upon the theory of nature. Socrates reversed this emphasis and concentrated his thought on ethics and logic; and from his time onwards, although the theory of nature was by no means forgotten even by Plato, who did far more work on that subject than is generally realized, the theory of mind predominated, and the theory of nature took the second place.
This Greek theory of mind in Socrates and his successors was intimately connected with and conditioned by the results already obtained in the theory of nature. The mind that was studied by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle was always first and foremost mind in nature, the mind in the body and of the body, manifesting itself by its control of the body; and when these philosophers found themselves obliged to recognize mind as transcending body, they stated this discovery in a way that shows unmistakably how paradoxical it seemed to them and how remote from their habitual or (as we sometimes say) ‘instinctive’ ways of thinking. Socrates in Plato’s dialogues over and over again expects to be met with incredulity and misunderstanding when he sets out to assert that rational soul or mind operates independently of the body: either when he is discussing the theory of knowledge and contrasts the bodily mind of appetite and sense with the pure intellectual apprehension of the forms which is effected by the rational soul’s wholly independent and self-contained activity without any help from the body, or when he is expounding the doctrine of immortality and asserting that the rational soul enjoys an eternal life unaffected by the birth or death of the body belonging to it.
The same tone is found in Aristotle, who treats it as a matter of course that the ‘soul’ should be defined as the entelechy of an organic body – that is, the self-maintaining activity of an organism – but speaks as one expounding mysterious and difficult doctrine when he says that the intellect or reason, although in some sense it is a part of the ‘soul’, possesses no bodily organ and is not acted upon, as sense is, by its proper objects so that it is nothing apart from its activity of thinking and is ‘separable’ from the body. All this shows that what from a general knowledge of pre-Socratic physics we should expect: that Greek thinkers in general take it for granted that mind belongs essentially to body and lives with it in the closest union, and that when they are confronted with reasons for thinking this union partial, occasional, or precarious, they are puzzled to know how this can be.
In Renaissance thought this state of things is precisely reversed. For Descartes body is one substance and mind is another. Each works independently of the other according to its own laws. Just as the fundamental axiom of Greek thought about mind is its immanence in body, so the fundamental axiom of Descartes is its transcendence. Descartes knows very well that transcendence must not be pushed to the point of dualism; the two things must be connected somehow; but cosmologically he can find no connexion short of God, and in the individual human being he is driven to the desperate expedient, justly ridiculed by Spinoza, of finding it in the pineal gland, which he thinks must be the organ of union between body and soul because, as an anatomist, he can find no other function for it.
Even Spinoza, with his insistence on the unity of substance, is in no better case; for thought and extension are in his philosophy two utterly distinct attributes of this one substance, and each, as an attribute, completely transcends the other. Hence when in the eighteenth century the centre of gravity in philosophical thought swung over from the theory of nature to the theory of mind, Berkeley being the critical point here as Socrates was for the Greeks, the problem of nature inevitably stated itself in this form: how can mind have any connexion with something utterly alien to itself, something essentially mechanical and non-mental, namely nature? This was the question, at bottom the only question, concerning nature which exercised the great philosophers of mind, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel. In every case their answer was at bottom the same: namely, that mind makes nature; nature is, so to speak, a byproduct of the autonomous and self-existing activity of mind.
I shall discuss this idealistic view of nature more fully hereafter; all I wish to make clear at this point is that there are two things which it never meant. It never meant that nature is in itself mental, made of the stuff of mind; on the contrary, it set out from the assumption that nature is radically non-mental or mechanical, and never went back on that assumption, but always maintained that nature is essentially alien to mind, mind’s other or opposite. Secondly it never meant that nature is an illusion or dream of mind, something non-existent: on the contrary, it always maintained that nature really is what it seems to be: it is the work of mind and not existing in its own right, but a work really produced and, because really produced, really existing.
A warning against these two errors is needed because they have been over and over again taught in modern books whose authors are so much obsessed by the ideas of the twentieth century that they simply cannot understand those of the eighteenth. They are, in a way, none the worse for this; it is progress, of a sort, that people should have got right away from the thoughts of their great-grandfathers; but that is not a kind of progress which qualifies people for making historical statements about the ideas which they have ceased to understand; and when they venture to make such statements, and to say that to Hegel ‘material characteristics are delusive appearances of certain mental characteristics’ (C. D. Broad, The Mind and its Place in Nature, 1928, p.624) or that according to Berkeley ‘experience of green is entirely indistinguishable from green’ (G. E. Moore, Philosophical Studies, 1922, p. 14, where Berkeley is not named, but seems to be meant) respect for their personal attainments and their academic positions must not blind a reader to the fact that they are publishing untrue statements about something they have not understood.
The Greek view of nature as an intelligent organism was based on an analogy: an analogy between the world of nature and the individual human being, who begins by finding certain characteristics in himself as an individual, and goes on to think of nature as possessed of similar characteristics. By the work of his own self-consciousness he comes to think of himself as a body whose parts are in constant rhythmic motion, these motions being delicately adjusted to each other so as to preserve the vitality of the whole: and at the same time he finds himself to be a mind directing the activity of this body in accordance with its own desires. The world of nature as a whole is then explained as a macrocosm analogous to this microcosm.
The Renaissance view of nature as a machine is equally analogical in its origin, but it presupposes a quite different order of ideas. First, it is based on the Christian idea of a creative and omnipotent God. Secondly, it is based on the human experience of designing and constructing machines. The Greeks and Romans were not machine-users, except to a very small extent: their catapults and water-clocks were not a prominent enough feature of their life to affect the way in which they conceived the relation between themselves and the world. But by the sixteenth century the Industrial Revolution was well on the way. The printing-press and the windmill, the lever, the pump, and the pulley, the clock and the wheel-barrow, and a host of machines in use among miners and engineers were established features of daily life. Everyone understood the nature of a machine, and the experience of making and using such things had become part of the general consciousness of European man. It was an easy step to the proposition: as a clockmaker or millwright is to a clock or mill, so is God to Nature.
| Last Updated: 10/19/22 |