Crombie ScienceArtNatureMedieval PDF

SCIENCE,
ART AND NATURE

l
IN MEDIEVAL AND MODERN THOUGHT
SID-EREVS
N V N C I VS
MAGNA, L O N G E Q V E ADM1RAB1LIA
Spectacula pandens, fufpiciendaquc proponens
vnicuique, prfertim ver
F H I L O S O P H I S , atg, ASTRONOM1S, g u a
GALILEO GALILEO
P A T R I T I O FLORENTINO
Patauini Gymnafij Publico Mathematico
PERSPICILLI
Nuper fe reperti bencficiofunt obferuata in LVN FACIE, FIXIS IN-.

NVMERIS, LACTEO CIRCVLO, STELL1S NEBVLOSIS,
Apprime ver in
Circa IO VI S Stellam difparibus interuallis, atque periodis, celeri.

tate mirabili circumuolutis; guos , neminiin hanc vfque
diem cognitos, nouiAim Author deprhendit primus; atque
MEDICEA S I D E R A
NVNCVPANDOS DECREVIT.
V E N E T I I S , Apud Thomam Baglionum. M DC X.

Superiorum Permiffu, & Privilegio.
Galileo Galilei, Sidereus mincius (1610): title page. This little book marks a
turning-point in Galileo's life. Here he published his first telescopic discoveries,
notably of the mountainous surface of the Moon and the satellites of Jupiter,
which he named the Medicean stars after the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Here
also he showed a serious commitment to the Gopernican system.
SCIENCE, ART AND

NATURE IN MEDIEVAL
AND MODERN THOUGHT
A.C. CROMBIE
THE HAMBLEDON PRESS

LONDON
AND
RIO GRANDE
Published by Hambledon Press 1996

102 Gloucester Avenue, London NW1 8HX (UK)
PO Box 102, Rio Grande, Ohio 45674 (USA)
ISBN 1 85285 067 1
Alistair Cameron Crombie 1996
A description of this book is available from the British Library and from the
Library of Congress
Printed on acid-free paper and bound in Great Britain

by Cambridge University Press
Contents
Acknowledgements
Illustrations
Preface
Further Bibliography of A.C. Crombie
1 Designed in the Mind: Western visions of Science, Nature and
Humankind
2 The Western Experience of Scientific Objectivity
3 Historical Perceptions of Medieval Science
4 Robert Grosseteste (c. 1168-1253)
5 Roger Bacon (c. 1219-1292) [with J.D. North]
6 Infinite Power and the Laws of Nature: A Medieval Speculation
7 Experimental Science and the Rational Artist in Early Modern
Europe
8 Mathematics and Platonism in the Sixteenth-Century Italian
Universities and in Jesuit Educational Policy
9 Sources of Galileo Galilei's Early Natural Philosophy
10 The Jesuits and Galileo's Ideas of Science and of Nature
[with A. Carugo]
11 Galileo and the Art of Rhetoric [with A. Carugo]
12 Galileo Galilei: A Philosophical Symbol
13 Alexandre Koyr and Great Britain: Galileo and Mersenne
14 Marin Mersenne and the Origins of Language
15 Le Corps la Renaissance: Theories of Perceiver and Perceived
in Hearing
16 Expectation, Modelling and Assent in the History of Optics: i,
Alhazen and the Medieval Tradition; ii, Kepler and Descartes
17 Contingent Expectation and Uncertain Choice: Historical Contexts
of Arguments from Probabilities
18 P.-L. Moreau de Maupertuis, F.R.S. (1698-1759): Prcurseur du
Transformisme
19 The Public and Private Faces of Charles Darwin
20 The Language of Science
vii
ix
xi
xiii
1
13
31
39
51
67
89
115
149
165
231
257
263
275
291
301
357
407
429
439
vi
Science, Art and Nature in Medieval and Modern Thought
21 Some Historical Questions about Disease

22 Historians and the Scientific Revolution
23 The Origins of Western Science
443
451
465
Appendix to Chapter 10:

479
(a) Sources and Dates of Galileos Writings [with A. Carugo]
(b) Pietro Redondi, Galileo eretico (Torino, 1983) [with A. Carugo]
(c) Mario Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier (Chicago, 1993)
Corrections to Science, Optics and Music in Medieval and Early
Modern Thought (1990)
495
Index
497
Acknowledgements
The articles reprinted here first appeared in the following places and are
reprinted by kind permission of the original publishers.
1
History of Science, xxvi (1988), pp. 1-12.
Proceedings of the 3rd International Humanistic Symposium 1975: The

Case of Objectivity (Athenai: Hellenistic Society for Humanistic Studies,
1977), pp. 428-55.
In Italian in Federico II e le Scienze: Proceedings of the International

Seminar on Frederick II and the Mediterranean World (1990), a cura di A.
Paravicini Bagliani (Palermo: Sellerio, 1995).
Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. C.C. Gillispie, v (New York:

Charles Scriber's Sons, 1972), pp. 548-54.
Ibid., i (1970), pp. 377-85.
L'infinito nella scienza, a cura di G. Toraldo di Francia (Roma:

Enciclopedia Italiana, 1987), pp. 223-43.
Daedalus, cxv (1986), pp. 49-74.
Prismata: Naturwissenschaftsgeschichtliche Studien: Festchrift fur Willy

Hartner, hrsg. Y. Maeyama aund W.G. Salzer (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner
Verlag GmbH, 1977), pp. 63-94.
Reason, Experiment and Mysticism in the Scientific Revolution, ed. M.L.

Righini Bonelli and W.R. Shea (New York: Science History Publications,
1975), pp. 157-75.
10 Annali dell' Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze, viii.2 (1983),
pp. 1-68.
11 Nouvelles de la rpublique des lettres (1988) ii, pp. 7-31.
12 Actes du VIIle Congrs International d'Histoire des Sciences (Florence,
1956), pp. 1089-95.
viii
13 The Renaissance of a History: Proceedings of the International Conference

Alexandre Koyr, Paris, 1986, ed. P Redondi: History and Technology, iv
(London, 1987), pp. 81-92.
14 In French in Nature, histoire, socit: Essais en hommage Jacques Roger,
d. C. Blanckaert, J.-L. Fischer, R. Rey (Paris: Editions Klincksieck,
1995); Appendix: The Times Literary Supplement, 2 October 1992, p. 23.
15 Le Corps la Renaissance: Actes du XXXe Colloque de Tours 1987, sous
la direction de J. Card, M.M. Fontaine, J.-C. Margolin (Paris: Aux
Amateurs de Livres, 1990), pp. 379-87.
16 Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, xxi (1990), pp. 605-32, xxii
(1991), pp. 89-115.
17 The Rational Arts of Living, ed. A.C. Crombie and N.G. Siraisi, Smith
College Studies in History, vol. 50 (Northampton, Mass., 1987), pp. 53101; first version published in French in Mdecine et Probabilits: Actes de
la Journe d'Etudes du 15 December 1979, d. A. Fagot (Paris: I'Universit Paris-Val de Marne, 1982).
18 Revue de synthse, lxxviii (1957), pp. 35-56.
19 First published as 'Darwin's Scientific Method' in Actes du IXe Congrs
International d'Histoire des Sciences, Barcelona-Madrid 1959 (Barcelona/
Paris, 1960), pp. 354-62; reprinted in The Listener (London: B.B.C.,
November 1959).
20 Presented at the Forum de la communication scientifique et technique:
Quelles langues pour la science?, organise a l'initiative du Ministre de la
Francophonie; published in French in Alliage: Culture - Science Technique, no. 4 (Et, 1990), pp. 39-42.
21 Sida: Epidmies et socits, 20 et 21 juin 1987, d. C. Mrieux (Lyon,
1987), pp. 115-21.
22 Physis, xi (1969), pp. 167-80.
23 Metascience, n.s.ii (1993), pp. 1-16.
Illustrations
Galileo Galilei, Sidereus nuncius (1610): title page
ii
Figure illustrating Roger Bacon's fifth rule
56
Galileo Galilei, from // Saggiatore (1623) : frontispiece
88
The beginning of Galileo's autograph Disputationes
152
Autograph page of Galileo's Tractatio de Caelo
154
Watermark showing a backward-looking lamb
157
Diagram of the Copernican system, with the Sun in the centre,

from Galileo's Dialogo (1632)
164
Pope Urban VIII facing Galileo
165
Galileo Galilei by Mario Leoni (1624)
230
Galileo Galilei, Dialogo (1632): title page
256
Vincenzo Galilei, Dialogo della musica antica (1581): title page
274
Rene Descartes, by an unknown artist
300
Euclid: the geometry of vision
302
Euclidian vision: from Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi. . . historia:

Microcosmus (Oppenheim, 1618)
303
The anatomy of the eye (1572)
306
Diagram of the eye, from Roger Bacon, Opus Majus
307
Light rays and the eye, from Roger Bacon, Opus Majus
312
Alberti's grid (1435)
318
A painting of a cross-section of the visual pyramid: from Fludd (1618)
318
Leonardo da Vinci, Codex Atlanticus, f. 337, illustrating his

comparison of the eye with a camera obscura
321
Leonardo da Vinci, Codex D, f. 3v
322
Observing a solar eclipse in a camera obscura (1545)
323
Kepler, Ad Vitellionem paralipomena (Frankfurt, 1604), after

Plater, De corporis humani structura et usu (Basel, 1583)
333
Descartes, La dioptrique (Leiden, 1637), illustrating Kepler's

ocular dioptrics
337
Kepler, Ad Vitellionem paralipomena (Frankfurt, 1604),

vol. 3, prop, xxiii
340
Scheiner, Rosa ursina (Bracciani, 1630), comparing the eye and

a camera obscura with a lens system, and the effects on each of
using further lenses
346
Descartes, La dioptrique (Leiden, 1637), illustrating the transmission

of light
351
Scheiner, Oculus (Oeniponti, 1619), showing the structure of the eye
353
Preface
This second volume of essays forms a coherent set of studies like the first
volume Science, Optics and Music in Medieval and Early Modern Thought
published in 1990. Both volumes complement my books Augustine to Galileo:
Medieval and Early Modern Science and Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of
Experimental Science 1100-1700 and lead into my Styles of Scientific Thinking
in the European Tradition: The History of Argument and Explanation
Especially in the Mathematical and Biomedical Sciences and Arts (3 volumes,
published by Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd, London, 1994), and forthcoming
Galileo's Arguments and Disputes in Natural Philosophy (with the collaboration of Adriano Carugo), and Marin Mersenne: Science, Music and Language.
The history of Western science is the history of a vision and an argument,
initiated by the ancient Greeks in their search for principles at once of nature
and of argument itself. This scientific vision, explored and controlled by
argument, and the diversification of both vision and argument by scientific
experience and by interaction with the wider contexts of intellectual culture,
constitute the long history of European scientific thought. Underlying that
development have been specific commitments to conceptions of nature and of
science with its intellectual and moral assumptions, accompanied by a
recurrent critique. Their diversification has generated a series of different
styles of scientific thinking and of making theoretical and practical decisions.
These styles are described and analysed in the opening chapter and
exemplified in more detail in those that follow. These deal with scientific
objectivity, the historiography of medieval science, Robert Grosseteste and
Roger Bacon (Chapter 5 in collaboration with John North), the medieval
conception of laws of nature, and the historical relation between rational
design in scientific experimentation and in the arts exemplified especially by
perspective painting. After a chapter on the place of mathematics in sixteenthcentury Italian universities and in Jesuit educational policy, there are five
substantial studies of Galileo and his ideals of scientific demonstration and
experimentation, of his use of rhetoric, and of his reputation. Two of them,
Chapters 10 and 11, were written in collaboration with my colleague Adriano
Carugo. Central to them are our discoveries of the use by Galileo of works by
Jesuit philosophers at the Collegio Romano or associated therewith, which
xii
have thrown an entirely new and very influential light on Galileo's intellectual
biography. These chapters contain the original and authentic account of these
discoveries. Next come studies of Mersenne and the origins of language, and of
the role of hypothetical modelling in the investigation of hearing and more
particularly of vision, with a detailed analysis of the theories and researches of
Alhazen, Kepler and Descartes. These complement and bring up to date my
long monograph on the subject (1967) republished in Science, Optics and
Music. There is a further substantial analysis of historical contexts of
arguments from probabilities, from the qualitative treatment found in ancient
medicine, ethics and law, through the quantification of probabilities initiated
with insurance and commerce in fifteenth-century Italy, given mathematical
elegance especially by Pascal, Huygens and Leibniz, developed further in the
fields of demography and economics, and applied to a form of evolution by
natural selection in the eighteenth century by Maupertuis and finally in crucial
detail by Darwin. Concluding chapters deal with scientific language, conceptions of disease, and the historiography of science.
Some of the papers included in this volume (chs. 3,10 appendix (a), 14, 20)
have not been published in English before. The others have been left as they
were first printed except for minor corrections. Thus they record stages in the
process of discovery and interpretation, as in the chapters on Galileo,
especially when dealing with problems of dating, many of them still unsolved.
They have been reprinted with continuous pagination, with footnotes at the
bottom of the page, and with appropriate revision of internal references.
Immediately relevant further bibliography has been added as required at the
ends of chapters. An extensive bibliography for the whole subject is included
in my Styles of Scientific Thinking. Additions to my own publications, beyond
those included in the bibliography of my writings in Science, Optics and Music,
are listed below. Finally, once again it is a pleasure to thank all those who
provided the occasions for these papers, in Belagio, Athens, Erice, Rome,
Cambridge, Mass., Capri, Florence, Paris, Tours, Smith College, Barcelona
and Annecy.
A.C. Crombie
30 November 1994
Trinity College, Oxford
Further Bibliography of A.C. Crombie
Acknowledgements should have been made in Science, Optics and Music to

the bibliography published in The Light of Nature: Essays in the History and
Philosophy of Science Presented to A.C. Crombie, ed. J.D. North and J.J.
Roche. Dordrecht, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1985.
(a) Books on the History of Science
1992
Stili di pensiero scientifico agli inizi dell' Europa moderna.

Napoli, Bibliopolis. Spanish translation by J.L. Barona, Valencia,
1994.
1994
Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition: The History of

Argument and Explanation Especially in the Mathematical and
Biomedical Sciences and Arts, 3 vols. London, Gerald Duckworth &
Co. Ltd., 1994.
(b) Papers on the History of Science
1990
'Le corps a la Renaissance: Theories of Perceiver and Perceived in

Hearing' in Le Corps a la Renaissance: Actes du xxxe Colloque de
Tours 1987, sous la direction de J. Card, M.M. Fontaine, J.-C.
Margolin. Paris, Aux Amateurs de Livres, pp. 379-87.
'Expectation and Assent in Seventeenth-Century Scientific Argument: Galileo and Others' (Banfi Lecture, 1989), Istituto Antonio
Banfi Annali, iii (1989-90), pp. 11-54
'La Langue maternelle de la science', Alliage: Culture - Science Technique, no. 4 (Et, 1990), pp. 39-42.
Review of E. Grant and J.E. Murdoch (ed.), Mathematics and its
Applications to Science and Natural Philosophy in the Middle Ages
(Cambridge, 1987) in English Historical Review, cv (1990), pp.
1007-8.
1990/91 'Expectation, Modelling and Assent in the History of Optics, i:

Alhazen and the Medieval Tradition; ii: Kepler and Descartes',
xiv

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, xxi (1990), pp. 605-32,
xxii (1991), pp. 89-115
1992
Review of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, Lettres Claude Saumaise

et son entourage (1620-1637), d. Agnes Bresson. Firenze, Leo S.
Olschki, 1992, Times Literary Supplement, 2 October 1992, p. 23.
1993
The Origins of Western Science', Metascience, n.s. ii, pp. 1-16.

Presentation of Lessico filosofico dei secoli xvii e xviii, Sezione latina,
a cura di Marta Fattori con la collaborazione di M.L. Bianchi, fasc.i
(Roma, 1992) at the Warburg Institute, London, 3 May 1993, in
Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres, (1993)-ii, 102-4.
1994
Reviews of Elspeth Whitney, Paradise Restored: The Mechanical Arts

from Antiquity through the Thirteenth Century (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, Transactions lxxx.1, 1990) and Georges
Minois, L'Eglise et la Science: Histoire d'un malentendu. De Saint
Augustine a Galilee (Paris, 1990) in English Historical Review, cix
(1994), pp. 136-8; and of Guiseppe Olmi, L'inventario del mondo:
Catalogazione della natura a luoghi delsapere nella prima et moderna
(Bologna, 1992) in Journal of the History of Collections, forthcoming.
'The Greek Origins of European Scientific Styles', Ad familiares: The
journal of the Friends of Classics, vii (1994), pp. xii-xiv.
'The History of European Science', New European: European
Business Review, xciv (1994), pp. ii-v.
'Historical Perceptions of Medieval Science' in Federico II e le
Scienze: Proceedings of the International Seminar on Frederick II and
the Mediterranean World, a cura di A. Paravicini Bagliani. Palermo,
Sellerio, pp. 15-24.
'Marin Mersenne et les origines du langage' in Nature, histoire,
socit: Essais en hommage a Jacques Roger, prs. par C. Blanckaert,
J.-L. Fischer, J. Rey. Paris, Editions Klincksieck, pp. 35-46.
1995
'Boundaries of normality' in Malatia i cultura: Seminari d'Estudis

sobre la Cincia, ed. J.L. Barona (Valencia, 1995), pp. 11-17.
'Per una antropologia histrica del saber cientfic', interview by Marc
Borrs in Mtode: Revista de difusi de la investigaci de la Universitat
de Valncia, ix (1995), pp. 14-17.
'Commitments and Styles of European Scientific Thinking' in History
of Science, xxiii (1995), pp. 225-38.
'Univers' (with J.D. North) in Les caractres originaux de I'Occident

medieval, d. J. Le Goff, J.-C. Schmitt. Paris, Librairie Arthme
Fayard, forthcoming.
Bibliography
xv
"Philosophical Commitments and Scientific Progress" in The Idea of

Progress (Academia Europea conference 1994), forthcoming.
(c) Editorships
Editor, 1949-54 of The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. Joint
founder and editor of History of Science: A Review of Literature, Research and
Teaching, Cambridge, W. Heffer and Sons, 1962-72; Science History Publications 1973- .
(d) Scientific Papers
Papers on (i) interspecific competition (an experimental and mathematical
analysis on some aspects of ecology and natural selection) and (ii) the
physiology of the chemical sense-organs in insects.
1941
On Oviposition, Olfactory Conditioning and Host Selection in

Rhizopertha dominica Fab. (Insecta, coleoptera)', Journal of Experimental Biology, 18, pp. 62-79.
1942
'The Effect of Crowding upon the Oviposition of Grain-Infesting

Insects',/. Exp. Biol., 19, pp. 311-40.
1943
'The Effect of Crowding upon the Natality of Grain-Infesting Insects',

Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, A, 113, pp. 77-98.
1944
'On Intraspecific and Interspecific Competition in Larvae of Graminivorous Insects', 7. Exp. BioL, 20, pp. 135-51.
'On the Measurement and Modification of the Olfactory Responses
of Blow-Flies', /. Exp. BioL, 20, pp. 159-66.
'Sensillae of the Adults and larvae of the Beetle Rhizopertha
dominica Fab. (Bostrichidae)', Proceedings of the Royal Entomological Society of London A, 19, pp. 131-2.
1945
'On Competition between Different Species of Graminivorous

Insects', Proceedings of the Royal Society, B, 132, pp. 362-95.
1946
'Further Experiments on Insect Competition', Proc. Roy. Soc., B,

133, pp. 76-109.
1947
'The Behaviour of Wireworms in Response to Chemical Stimulation'

[with W.H. Thorpe, R. Hill and J.H. Darrah], /. Exp. BioL, 23, pp.
234-66.
'The Chemoreceptors of the Wire worm (Agriotes spp.) and the
Relation of Activity to Chemical Composition' [with J.H. Darrah], J.
Exp. Biol. 24, pp. 95-109.
'Interspecific Competition', Journal of Animal Ecology, 16, pp.
44-73.
In nature's infinite book of secrecy

A little I can read.
(Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra i.l 1)
1
Designed in the Mind: Western Visions of
Science, Nature and Humankind
When we speak today of natural science we mean a specific vision created
within Western culture, at once of knowledge and of the object of that
knowledge, a vision at once of natural science and of nature.1 We may trace
the characteristically Western tradition of rational science and philosophy to
the commitment of the ancient Greeks, for whatever reason, to the decision of
questions by argument and evidence, as distinct from custom, edict, authority,
revelation, rule-of-thumb, on some other principle or practice. They developed
thereby the notion of a problem as distinct from a doctrine, and the
consequent habit of envisaging thought and action in all situations as the
perception and solving of problems. By deciding at the same time that among
many possible worlds as envisaged in other cultures, the one world that existed
was a world of exclusively self-consistent and discoverable rational causality,
the Greek philosophers, mathematicians and medical men committed their
scientific successors exclusively to this effective direction of thinking. They
closed for Western scientific vision the elsewhere open questions of what kind
of world people found themselves inhabiting and so of what methods they
should use to explore and explain and control it. They introduced in this way
the conception of a rational scientific system, a system in which formal
reasoning matched natural causation, so that natural events must follow
exactly from scientific principles, just as logical and mathematical conclusions
must follow from their premises. Thus they introduced, in parallel with their
conception of causal demonstration, the equally fundamental conception of
formal proof. From these two conceptions all the essential character and style
of Western philosophy, mathematics and natural science have followed. The
exclusive rationality so defined supplied the presuppositions and came to
supply the methods of reasoning alike in purely formal discourse and in the
experiential exploration of nature. Hence it offered rational control of subjectmatters of all kinds, from mathematical to material, from ideas to things. A
similar characteristic style is evident over the whole range of Western
intellectual and practical enterprise. We have then in Western scientific
culture, as an object of study to which we its students at the same time
inextricably belong, a highly intellectualized and integrated whole, designed in
the mind like a work of art, not all at once but over many generations of
interaction between creative thinking and testing, between programmes and
their realization or modification or rejection.
But if we insist upon the cultural specificity of the Western scientific
tradition in its origins and initial development, and upon its enduring identity
in diffusion to other cultures, we do not have to look far below the surface of
scientific inquiry and its immediate results to see that the whole historical
process has gone on in a context of intellectual and moral commitments,
expectations, dispositions and memories that have varied greatly with different periods, societies and also individuals. These have affected both the
problems perceived and the solutions found acceptable, and also the evaluations of desirable or undesirable ends and their motivations. The whole
historical experience of scientific thinking is an invitation to treat the history of
science, both in its development in the West and in its complex diffusion
through other cultures, as a kind of comparative historical anthropology of
thought. An historical anthropology of science must be concerned before all
with people and their vision. The scientific movement offers an invitation to
examine the,identity of natural science within an intellectual culture, to
distinguishrihat from the identities of other intellectual and practical activities
in the arts, scholarship, philosophy, law, government, commerce and so on,
and to relate them all in a taxonomy of styles. It is an invitation to analyse the
various elements that make up an intellectual style in the study and treatment
of nature: conceptions of nature and of science, methods of scientific inquiry
and demonstration diversified according to the subject-matter, evaluations of
scientific goals with consequent motivations, and intellectual and moral
commitments and expectations generating attitudes to innovation and change.
The scientific thinking found in a particular period or society or individual
gets its vision and style from different but closely related intellectual or moral
commitments or dispositions. We may distinguish three.
(1) First there have been conceptions of nature within the general scheme of
existence and of its knowability to man. These in turn have been conditioned
by language. The original Greek commitment entailed the replacement of
conceptions of nature as an arbitrary sociological order maintained by
personified agents, found in all ancient cosmologies and cosmogonies, with the
conception of an inevitable order established by an exclusive natural causality.
In the succession competing for dominance in subsequent Western thought,
nature has been conceived as a product of divine economy or art with
appropriate characteristics of simplicity and harmony, as a consequence of
atomic chance, as a causal continuum, as a workshop of active substantial
powers, as a passive system of mechanisms, as an evolutionary generation of
novelty, as a manifestation of probabilities.
Western Visions of Science, Nature and Humankind
Any language itself embodies a theory of meaning, a logic, a classification of

experience in names, a conception of both perceiver and perceived and their
relation, and of relations in space and time. Philology can be an indispensable
guide to theoretical ideas and real actions. The expression of a system of
science in a language may not entail an immediate critique of the fundamental
structure of that language, yet its vocabulary and syntax may have to be
modified to provide for the conceptual and technical precision required by the
science developing within it. Thus a new terminology had to be devised in
medieval and early modern Latin to accommodate the new kinematic and
dynamic conceptions, especially of functions, of instantaneous change and of
rates of change, which could scarcely be expressed in the classical logic and
syntax of subject and predicate. Terminology may have had to be revised to
detach its specific scientific meaning from its source in common but inadequate
or misleading analogies. "The word current", wrote Michael Faraday,2 "is so
expressive in common language that when applied in the consideration of
electrical phenomena, we can hardly divest it sufficiently of its meaning, or
prevent our minds from being prejudiced by it". For the same reason he
replaced "pole", inconveniently suggesting attraction, with the neutral "electrode", in a new terminology devised with the aid of William Whewell to fit the
precise context of electro-chemistry. John Tyndall3 in his attractive account of
Faraday as a discoverer exemplified a familiar historical process when he
described how, in this new science, "prompted by certain analogies we ascribe
electrical phenomena to the action of a peculiar fluid, sometimes flowing,
sometimes at rest. Such conceptions have their advantages and their disadvantages; they afford peaceful lodging to the intellect for a time, but they also
circumscribe it, and by-and-by, when the mind has grown too large for its
lodging, it often finds difficulty in breaking down the walls of what has become
its prison instead of its home." Thus a radically new technical language may be
made up, precisely symbolized as first for mathematics and music and later for
many other sciences and arts. The result may be a special language fundamentally different in intention from that implicit in the common language of the
society from which it originated, but still a language that may be learned and
understood in any society and may convey to it objectively communicable
knowledge.
Must science in different linguistic cultures always acquire differences of
logical form, and must the grammatical structure of a language always impose
its ontological presuppositions on the science developing within it? While the
technical language of science has often been developed partly to escape from
just such impositions, philology can be an accurate guide to implicit or explicit
intellectual commitments of this kind and to their changes.
The West learnt from the Greeks to look for causal continuity in events both
physical and moral, and this has structured its natural and moral philosophy
alike and its whole tradition of dramatic literature and music since Antiquity.
Japanese thinking, now in exemplary possession of Western science and music,
seems traditionally by contrast to have accepted events in their individual
existential discontinuity, impressionistically unrelated to before and after, with
no general abstract term for nature, but each thing the subject of personal
knowledge and companionship, not of mastery either by thought or action.
The whole question might throw an interesting light in our philosophical
anthropology upon a question central to the whole Western debate: that of
distinguishing the argument giving rational control of subject-matter from an
implication of the existence of entities appearing in the language used, or,
more generally, that of distinguishing a rational structure of nature from that
of the organizing human mind.
(2) A second kind of intellectual commitment affecting scientific style has
been to a conception of science and of the organization of scientific inquiry.
Two different traditions of scientific organization and method began in
Antiquity. The dominant Greek mathematicians saw as their goal the reduction of every scientific field to the axiomatic model of their most powerful
intellectual invention, geometry. At once alternative and complementary to
this was the much older medical and technological practice of exploring and
recording by piecemeal observation, measurement and trial. The medieval and
early modern experimental natural philosophers combined both traditions, to
transform the geometrical pattern by an increasing preoccupation with
quantitative experimental analysis of causal connections and functional relations. Yet a different pattern came from intellectual satisfaction in mathematical harmonies rather than causal processes. Other modes of intellectual
organization assimilated analysis for scientific investigation to that for artistic
construction, or looked for probabilities or for genetic origins and derivations.
All generated scientific systems made up of theories and laws and statements
of observations, providing particular explanations and solutions of problems
within the framework of a general conception of nature and science, along
with scientific methods diversified by the diversity both of general commitments and of particular subject-matters of varying complexity.
The commitments of a period or group or individual to general beliefs about
nature and about science, combined with the technical possibilities available,
have regulated the problems seen, the questions put to nature, and the
acceptability of both questions and answers. Such commitments have directed
research towards certain types of problem and towards certain types of
discovery and explanation, but away from others. They have both guided
inquiry and supplied its ultimate irreducible explanatory principles. By taking
us beneath the surface of immediate scientific results, they help us to identify
the conceptual and technical conditions, frontiers and horizons making certain
discoveries possible and explanations acceptable to a generation or group, but
others not, and the same not to others. More specifically a discovery or a
theory or even a presentation of research may open fresh horizons but at the
same time close others hitherto held possible. Dominant intellectual commitments have made certain kinds of question appear cogent and given certain
kinds of explanation their power to convince, and excluded others. They
established, in anticipation of any particular research, the kind of world that
was supposed to exist and the appropriate methods of inquiry. Such beliefs,
taken from the more general intellectual context of natural science, have
regulated the expectations both of questions and of answers, the form of
theories and the kinds of explanatory entities taken into them, and the
acceptability of the explanations they offered. They established in advance the
kind of explanation that would give satisfaction when the supposedly discoverable
had been discovered. They have been challenged not usually by observation,
but by re-examining the metaphysics or theology or other general beliefs
assumed. In this process the cogency of such worlds might change from
generation to generation as each nevertheless added to enduringly valid
scientific knowledge.
(3) A third kind of intellectual and moral commitment has concerned what
could and should be done. This in its diverse modes has followed from diverse
evaluations of the nature and purpose of existence and hence of right human
action. It has been linked with dispositions generating an habitual response to
events, both internally within scientific thinking itself, and externally in the
responses of society: dispositions to expect to master or to be mastered by or
simply to contemplate events, to change or to resist change, to anticipate
innovation or conservation, to be ready or not to reject theories and to rethink
accepted beliefs and to alter habits. Such dispositions have been both
psychological and social. They may be specified by habitual styles and
methods both of opposition and of acceptance. They may characterize a
society over the whole range of its intellectual and moral behaviour, of which
its natural science is simply a part.
The primary focus, for example, of medieval and early modern Christian as
of Islamic culture and society on the teaching and preservation of theological
truth could scarcely fail to condition all human inquiries. Sensitive implications of natural philosophical and metaphysical questions and doctrines
placed the whole of intellectual life within the political framework and control
of a moral cosmology.The medieval Christian theological hierarchy of dignity
within that cosmology, as also Islamic attitudes to the visual representation of
natural objects, took that control as far as aesthetic style. Given the dual
source of human knowledge in the divine gifts of true reason and of
undeniable revelation, the whole enterprise made an urgent issue then of error,
of the possibility of error in good faith, of the attitude to be taken to
unpersuadable infidels and irredeemable heretics, of the commitments and

expectations of disagreement as well as agreement.
In all this, and in the whole scientific movement considered in the context of
society and of communication, persuasion has been as important as proof. The
use of persuasive arguments to reinforce or to create the power of ideas to
convince, especially when the ideas were new and the audience uncertain or
unsympathetic, has been well understood by some of the greatest scientific
innovators. Galileo and Descartes were both masters of the current rhetorical
techniques of persuasion. Galileo devoted at least as much energy to trying to
establish the identity of natural science within contemporary intellectual
culture as to solving particular physical problems. He conducted all his
controversies at two levels: one was concerned with the particular physical
problem in question; the other was concerned with an eloquent advocacy of
his conception of natural science as an enterprise in solving problems and
finding scientific explanations distinct from the philosophical or theological
exegesis of authorities and texts, from a literary exercise, from a commercial or
legal negotiation, from magic, and so on. His test of a general explanation was
its ability to incorporate the solution of particular problems. Descartes argued
likewise at two levels, and this indeed was a general necessity in a period when
the intellectual identity of the contemporary scientific movement was still open
to misunderstanding by the learned world at large and when its methods and
accepted styles of reasoning were still to some extent being established. Again,
Charles Lyell, himself a lawyer, set out like a skilful lawyer to present his
uniformitarian conception of geology as the only acceptable one and to
discredit its hitherto accepted catastrophic rival. Charles Darwin similarly set
out his argument in the Origin of species for evolution by natural selection like
a legal brief: marshalling the evidence, demolishing rival explanations, proposing his own solution, raising difficulties against it, meeting them one by one,
and finally concluding that his was the only plausible and acceptable explanation that could account for all the various categories of fact that had to be
considered. By presenting his arguments in the wake of the statistical analysis
of human economics which provided the persuasive analogy, Darwin was able
to establish at one and the same time his scientific explanation by natural
selection and a statistical conception of the economy of nature which belief in
providential design had hitherto made widely unacceptable in biology. Persuasion has obviously been aimed at the diffusion of scientific ideas, both at the
sophisticated level of the scientific community and also among the general
public.
Change in ideas has come about more easily in some scientific situations,
periods and societies than in others. It has been easier to reject particular
theories within an accepted system of general doctrine than to take the drastic
step of rejecting the whole doctrine. The disposition to change, which has been
so marked a characteristic of the whole modern history of the West, became

within the same culture an essential part of the scientific movement over a
period when innovation and improvement were also becoming the intellectual
habit in art, theology, philosophy, law, government, commerce and many
other activities. It was a matter of individual as well as collective behaviour:
Kepler, for example, contrasts notably with some of his contemporaries and
opponents in controversy by his readiness to sacrifice a favourite theory to
contrary evidence. The conscious cultivation and reward of a disposition
towards innovation began in Western society perhaps first in the technical arts
and philosophy, but it has been transmitted elsewhere mainly with Western
commerce and science.
A comprehensive historical inquiry into the sciences and arts mediating
man's experience of nature as perceiver and knower and agent would include
questions at different levels, in part given by nature, in part made by man.
These correspond to the three kinds of commitment. Thus at the level of
nature there is historical ecology: the reconstruction of the physical and
biomedical environment and of what people made of it. The sources and
problems of historical ecology, both human and physical, range from those of
archaeology and palaeopathology to those of the history of climate, technology, medicine, agriculture, travel and art. Historical problems at all levels
require scientific and linguistic knowledge to control the view of any present
recorded through the eyes and language of those who saw it. They may require
also historical knowledge of religion and of artistic style, economic theory, and
other analytical disciplines. At all levels comparative historical studies of the
intellectual and social commitments, dispositions and habits, and of the
material conditions, that might make scientific activity and its practical
applications intellectually or socially or materially easy for one society, but
difficult or impossible for another, have an immediate relevance for the diverse
cultures brought into contact with the science, medicine, technology and
commerce of our contemporary world.
It is only comparatively recently, and only in highly industrialized societies,
that science and technology have risen to a dominant position among the
vastly various concerns and interests that throughout history have moved men
to thought and action. What have been the numbers, social position, education, occupations, institutions, private and public habits, motives, opportunities, persuasions and means of communication of the individuals taking part
in scientific activities in different periods and societies? What critical audience
has there been to be convinced by, use, transmit, develop, revise or reject their
arguments? Where scientific and analogous inquiries have interested only a
scattered minority, what opportunities have existed for establishing agreement
on principles and methods, or even continuity between generations? How, for
example, were these maintained in the ancient Mediterranean, or in China or
India? In comparison, what intellectual or moral or practical commitments

motivated the teaching and learned institutions of medieval Islam and of
medieval and early modern Christendom, and came in the last to establish
effective conditions of education and research for an explicit scientific community? How have the conditions for science and for technology differed?
What intellectual needs or habits or intentions or social pressures have there
been within different philosophical or scientific or technical groups to bring
about a consensus of opinion in favour of innovation or of conservation?
How have scientific ideas and activities been located within the values of
society at large? What has been the intellectual or moral or practical value
given to science in different societies, within a range of interests so divergent as
those indicated, for example, by a predominant concern with a theological
scheme of human responsibility and destiny, by the cultivation of the arts or of
literary learning or of logic and philosophy, by the pressures and expediencies
of politics, by the needs of war, trade, industry, transport or medicine? What
has been the appeal of pure intellectual curiosity and philosophical satisfaction, of a religious search for God in nature, of a desire for intellectual or
moral or social or political reform, of utility in the senses either of the material
improvement of the human condition or of industrial or commercial or
political or military power or gain? What social or commercial or political
interests have promoted or resisted scientific research and technical innovation, and the diffusion and application of ideas, discoveries and inventions?
To what extent does innovation breed innovation? What was the costeffectiveness of the inventions described in histories of technology, who used
them, and with what consequences? It would be relevant to compare the
criteria of evidence and decision used in science or in medical diagnosis and
prognosis with those used in commerce and industry, in law courts, and in
choice of policies by governments. Relevant also are mentalities indicated by
philosophical and social programmes and responses in relation to their social,
economic and sometimes military context. So too are the intellectual and
social responses of society at large to making man an object of scientific
inquiry and treatment.
Likewise what external pressures and internal dispositions have operated in
the intellectual and practical responses of one culture to another, of Islam to
Greek thought, of medieval Western Christendom to Islam and to farther
Asia, of early modern Europe to China and Japan and India and the New
World, of Japan in its early history to China and in the sixteenth and
nineteenth centuries to the West, of China throughout its history to any other
culture, of the so-called developing countries now to the industrially
developed?
The essence of effective scientific thinking has been the advancement of
knowledge through the identification of soluble problems. What have been the
sources of new intellectual perceptions? How have the intellectual commitments or dispositions or habits or the technical potentialities of an individual
or a group or period either promoted or discouraged creative discovery and
technical invention? How have these interacted with the conditions for
intellectual change or conservation in the philosophical, technical, social and
materal ambience of science? To what extent has the internal logic of science
taken over from features of this ambience, accidental analogies, or suggestions
for new hypotheses or styles of thinking? What has been the part played in the
initiation of progress by breaches of conceptual frontiers leading to asking new
questions, seeing new problems, accepting new criteria of valid demonstration
and cogent, satisfactory explanation? Scientific thinking has commonly progressed through periods of critical analysis bringing novel forms of speculation
about the discoverable in nature in anticipation of technical inquiry. Obvious
examples are the critique of the Aristotelian doctrine of qualities and causation preceding the new science of motion established from Galileo to Newton,
the atomic speculations preceding the quantitative atomic theory promoted by
John Dalton, and the evolutionary speculations preceding the scientific
organization of the evidence and theory finally achieved by Charles Darwin.
The older conceptions were discarded and the new first entertained by
rethinking; but the new ideas became established as scientific knowledge only
by technical scientific research. Only after that were their speculative precursors given a retrospective scientific significance.
Of the essence of the Western scientific tradition, and of the evidence for its
history, have been the self-conscious assessments of its presuppositions,
performance and prospects that have continued through many changes of
context from Archytas and Aristotle down to the latest disputes among
scientists, philosophers and historians. The critical historiography of science
has been an integral part of the scientific movement itself. Such assessments
both of current science and of the history of science have had various
purposes. Those made in medieval and early modern Europe aimed usually to
monitor the identity and intellectual orientation of the contemporary scientific
movement and to define its methods and criteria of acceptability of questions
and answers. They were made during a long period when increasing scientific
experience, historical scholarship, and awareness of other contemporary
cultures enabled Europeans to measure their own scientific orientations and
potentialities against those of diverse earlier and contemporary societies.
The range of modern assessments points to the range of sources for an
interpretation. The radical variations in contemporary assessments and their
changes with time and context and individual disposition provide unique and
indispensable primary evidence in historically taking the measure of the
intellectual and technical and moral equipment available in any scientific
situation. An habitual search during this period at once for the best form of
10
science, and for its best ancient model, projected the earlier into the contemporary tradition but with extended power. Through the variations of the
scientific movement there has run a consistency of development in conceptions
of explanation and method. The growth of particular scientific knowledge has
carried in its wake a growth of general understanding of scientific thinking and
its varieties. This consistency clarifies the historical variety of accepted
explanations and methods diversified by intellectual commitments and
subject-matters.
Both in the perception and solution of problems within the theoretical and
technical possibilities available, and in the justification of the enterprise
whether intellectual or practical or moral, the history of science has been the
history of argument. Scientific argument forms the substance of the scientific
movement, a discourse using experiment and observation, instruments and
apparatus, mathematical reasoning and calculation, but with significance
always in relation to the argument. The scientific movement brought together
in its common restriction to answerable questions a variety of scientific
methods, or styles of scientific inquiry and demonstration, diversified by their
subject-matters, by general conceptions of nature, by presuppositions about
scientific validity, and by scientific experience of the interaction of programmes with realizations. Throughout, methods of yielding accurately
reproducible results were required equally by the practical commitment of
technology and the arts to the control of materials, and by the theoretical
commitment of science to establishing regularities or causal connections
within a common form of demonstration. An historian needs to ask both what
theories of scientific method contributed to science, and what methods were
used by scientists. We may distinguish in the classical scientific movement six
styles of scientific thinking, or methods of scientific inquiry and demonstration. Three styles or methods were developed in the investigation of
individual regularities, and three in the investigation of the regularities of
populations ordered in space and in time. Each arose in a context in which an
assembly of cognate subject-matters was united under a common form of
argument.
Thus (i) the simple method of postulation exemplified by the Greek
mathematical sciences originated within the common Greek search for the
rational principles alike of the perceptible world and of human reasoning. This
was the primary ancient model, uniting all the mathematical sciences and
dependent arts, from optics and music to mechanics, astronomy and cartography, (ii) The deployment of experiment, both to control postulation and to
explore by observation and measurement, was required by the scientific search
for principles in the observable relations of more complex subject-matters.
Starting with the Greeks, the strategy of experimental argument was elaborated in medieval and early modern Europe as a form of reasoning by analysis
11
and synthesis in which the point at which experiment was brought into the
argument, either for control or for exploration, was precisely defined. Moves
towards quantification in all sciences may be traced to the general European
growth both of mathematics and of the habits of measurement and recording
and calculation arising from need in some special sciences, as in astronomy,
and in the practical and commercial arts, where new systems of weights and
measures and of arithmetical calculation were first developed. The scientific
experimental method derived from the union of these practical habits with the
logic of controls, with further quantification through new techniques of
instrumentation and mathematical calculation. The rational experimenter was
the rational artist of scientific) inquiry, (iii) Hypothetical modelling was
developed in a sophisticated form first in application to early modern
perspective painting and to engineering, and was then transposed from art into
science as likewise a method of analysis and synthesis by the construction of
analogies. The recognition that/in the constructive arts theoretical design must
precede material realization anticipated the scientific hypothetical model.
Each proceeding to a different end, artist and scientist shared a common style.
The imitation of nature by art then became an art of inquisition; rational
design for construction became rational modelling for inquisitorial trial, (iv)
Taxonomy emerged first in Greek thought as a logical method of ordering
variety in any subject-matter by comparison and difference. The elaboration of
taxonomic methods and of their theoretical foundations may be attributed to
the need to accommodate the vast expansion of known varieties of plants and
animals and diseases following European exploration overseas, with attempts
to relate diagnostic signs and symptoms to their causes and to discover the
natural system that would express real affinities, (v) The statistical and
probabilistic analysis of expectation and choice developed in early modern
Europe again took the same forms whether in estimating the outcome of a
disease, of a legal process, of a commercial enterprise, or natural selection, or
the reasonableness of assent to a scientific theory. The subject-matter of
probability and statistics came to be recognized through attempts to accommodate within the context of ancient and medieval logic situations of
contingent expectation and uncertain choice, followed by the early modern
discovery of the phenomenon of statistical regularities in adequately numerous
populations of economic and medical and other events. Thus uncertainty was
mastered by reason and stabilized in a calculus of probability, (vi) The method
of historical derivation, or the analysis and synthesis of genetic development,
was developed originally by the Greeks and then in early modern Europe first
in application to languages and more generally to human cultures, and
afterwards to geological history and to the evolution of living organisms. The
subject-matter of historical derivation was defined by the diagnosis, from the
12
Science, Art and Nature in Medieval and Modem Thought
common characteristics of diverse existing things, of a common source earlier

in time, followed by the postulation of causes to account for the diversification
from that source.
Clearly all this scientific diversity can be understood only within the
diversity and the changes of thought in the whole historical context. The
history of science is the history of argument: an argument initiated in the West
by ancient Greek philosophers, mathematicians and physicians in their search
for principles at once of nature and of argument itself. Of its essence have been
its genuine continuity, even after long breaks, based on the study by any
generation of texts written by its predecessors, its progress equally in scientific
knowledge and in the analysis of scientific argument, and its recurrent critique
of its moral justification. A subtle question is what continued and what
changed through different historical contexts, in the scientific argument and in
the cultural vision through which experience is mediated, when education and
experience itself could furnish options for a different future. Styles of thinking
and making decisions, established with the commitments with which they
began, habitually endure as long as these remain. Hence the structural
differences between different civilizations and societies and the persistence in
each despite change of a specific identity. Hence the need for historical analysis
in the scientific movement of both continuity and change. These like most
human behaviour begin in the mind, and we its historians who belong at the
same time to its history must look in a true intellectual anthropology at once
with and into the eye of its beholder.
REFERENCES
1. This paper is based on the historiographical introduction to my book, Styles of scientific
thinking in the European tradition (Gerald Duckworth, London, 1994), which contains
full documentation and bibliography; cf. also A. C. Crombie, "Science and the arts in the
Renaissance: The search for truth and certainty, old and new", History of science, xviii
(1980), 233-46; idem, "Historical commitments of European science", Annali del' Istituto
e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze, vii, part 2 (1982), 29-51; idem, "What is the
history of science?", History of European ideas, vii (1986), 21-31; idem, "Experimental
science and the rational artist in early modern Europe", Daedalus, cxv (1986), 49-74;
idem, "Contingent expectation and uncertain choice: Historical contexts of arguments
from probabilities" in The rational arts of living, ed. by A. C. Crombie and N. G. Siraisi
(Northampton, Mass.: Smith College studies in history, 1987): the first three of these
papers are included in A. C. Crombie, Science, optics and music in medieval and early
modern thought (Hambledon Press, London, 1990).
2. Michael Faraday, Experimental researches in electricity, i (London, 1839), 515; cf. pp. 195 ff.
3. John Tyndall, Faraday as a discoverer (London, 1868), 53-55.
The Western Experience of Scientific Objectivity *

At a depressing period of the Pelopennesian War, Thucydides
included in his famous account of the moral disintegration of society
in revolution two points of immediate relevance to a discussion of the
European experience of scientific objectivity. Revolution had brought
many and terrible sufferings upon the Greek cities. Unscrupulous mendacity and opportunist treachery masqueraded as superior cleverness,
the sweeter if a rival trusting a pledge of reconciliation were taken off
his guard. Anyone who excelled in evil and anyone who prompted to
evil someone who had never thought of it were alike commended*.
Conspirators used fair words for guilty ends with cynical confidence
that others would hypocritically welcome them as cover for their own
moral cowardice or indifference. United only through complicity in
crime, greed and envy against the moderate and the honest, neither
had any regard for true piety, yet those who could carry through an
odious deed under the cloak of a specious phrase received the higher
praise. 1 Among all this violence against both truth and person he
noted interestingly : Words had to change their ordinary meaning in
relation to things and to take that which men thought fit*. And, he
argued, these calamities of behaviour have occurred and always will
occur as long as the nature of mankind remains the same. For human
nature, always rebelling against the law and now its master, gladly
showed itself ungoverned in passion, setting gain above justice and
revenge above religion : For surely no man would put revenge above
religion, and gain before innocence of wrong, had not envy swayed him
with her blighting power 2 . It was the same in the plague of Athens.
Strong and weak were swept indifferently away, victims with unquench* 'H (ivaxotvoxjis aveYV<J>a6y) UTT& TOU xaOvj^ToO ERWIN SCUEUCU, 8i6n 6
et<rifjY)T7)<; x<oXu6(jievo^ 8&v ^8uv/)0yj vA TrapaaTfj. 'Q? x Toii-rou, dTcdvTO? TOO elcnqyi')TOU, 8&V iTttfJXOXoiiGlJCS au)f)TY)(ItS.
1. Peloponnesian War, iii.82.

2. Ibid, iii.84.
14
able thirst drank much or little with common failure of relief, physicians
could find no remedy and perished themselves, prayers and other measures all proved equally futile and were given up, and men thus bereft
of fear of any law divine or human now coolly ventured on what they
had formerly done in a corner*1. Yet from those who had suffered and
recovered from the plague, the sick and dying received help and compassion. Influenced by medical thought, Thucydides looked for the causes
of social as of individual disorders in a theory of human nature, expressing in stable language the dependability of natural law. He offered a
commitment to reasoned beliefs and actions against which to measure
the motivation of behaviour. This may suitably introduce the subject
of my brief contribution to this discussion of objectivity and culture,
which is the interaction of reason, belief and motive in the history of
science, medicine and technology.
I shall argue that in order to understand our culture, we are not
only advised but obliged to study the intellecutal attitudes and achievements of societies that have formed its history remote in time and seemingly remote in character from the immediate present. Yesterday's
events can be the least relevant to educated understanding. In the spirit
of a symposium evidently based on the belief that one main reason for
studying history is to throw light upon ourselves, a belief which I fully
share, there are various ways of doing this in the history of science,
medicine and technology. It hardly now needs saying that in this field,
as mutatis mutandis in all intellectual and social history whether of
philosophy, law, theology or whatever, the particular thinking found
in any period can be properly understood by us only by relating it to
the categories in which nature, and man as a participant in and student
of nature, were understood in the societies and by the individuals with
which we are concerned. We can study the history of science as a kind
of intellectual anthropology. We can make a natural history of intellectual and moral behaviour in situations presenting questions for decision.
The enlightenment that we may derive from this kind of historical
experience is like that we get from foreign travel, especially outside the
areas of Western culture. We expose ourselves to the surprise of discovering that thinkers so effective in solving problems which we seem to
be able to recognize should be able to do so within the context of such
a variety of aims, categories and presuppositions, mostly very different
from our own. We encounter also societies and individuals who find
1. Ibid, ii.54.
The Western Experience of Scientific Objectivity 15
15
intellectual satisfaction in categories of thought and explanation not

aimed at solving scientific or technical problems at all but expressing
some quite different purpose. Yet in looking for a comparative history
or anthropology of approaches to nature, putting ourselves into the
minds of those we are studying and trying to understand their questions,
we need to control relativity by the contrasting light of the objective
continuity of cultural tradition.
Science has developed in the characteristically rational Western
tradition as an approach to nature effectively competent to solve problems. Before the general direction towards scientific knowledge had
been decided, either in antiquity or in early modern times, two essential
general questions remained open. It was an open question what kind of
world men found themselves inhabiting, and so it was also an open
question what methods they should use to explore, explain and control
it. The characteristically Western tradition of rational science and
philosophy can be dated from the ancient Greek commitment to the
decision of questions by argument and evidence, as distinct from custom,
edict, authority, revelation, or some other source. The Greek philosophers
and mathematicians at the same time committed the Western tradition
to the belief that among many possible worlds, the world that exists
is a world of exclusively self-consistent and discoverable rationality.
In this way they introduced the fundamental conception of a scientific
system, separately for each category of nature and collectively for every
category. Pride in self-reliant intelligence, in skill of mind and hand
which gave man mastery of earth and sea, of other living creatures,
and of such difficult arts and sciences as writing, mathematics, astronomy and medicine, appears with the first Greek achievements in these
fields in the fifth century B.C., notably in the Prometheus of Aeschylus.
In the grasp and technical development of the logic of proof and decision
by the ancient Greek philosophers, mathematicians and medics we
may see the origins of our scientific tradition. They introduced decision
into speculations about nature. The one world that actually exists did
so in one discoverable way, which excluded others. Scientific thinking
has proceeded and scientific knowledge has progressed ever since by
such a logic of either or, by decisions both about the general nature of
the world and about particular questions each of which has committed
the future towards one line of theory and away from others. Science has
been recognized since Aristotle and Archimedes as a cumulative progress of knowledge, even through periods of the darkest gloom about the
16
moral regress of mankind. 1 These rational commitments applied moreover as much to decisions about moral values and principles showing
what ought or ought not to be done, as to the decisions of science about
what was or was not the case. Aristotle meant his ethics to be derived
as systematically from a theory of human nature as his physics was
from a theory of matter and causation.
To understand any historical culture we must then study its intellectual orientation and re-orientations through long tradition. The
recovery of our own scientific culture after periods of external disaster
or internal confusion has been the recovery of rational decision. In
such a process we may see the origins of modern science in the rediscovery, exegesis and elaboration of the Greek model by medieval and early
modern Europe. The rediscovery was made by a new society, with a
different view of man and his place in nature and his destiny, a different theology and a different economy, but it was seen first, in the
twelfth century, as a continuation of the ancient scientific movement.
Nothing is difficult unless you despair..., wrote the Englishman
ADELARD OF BATH, translator into Latin of Euclid's Elements of Geometry and author of two works presenting his vision of natural philosophy early in that century; Therefore hope and you will find the
capability. For I shall be the more able to shed light on the matter,
from the assumption of the constancy and certainty of principle*.2
Looking forward from the shoulders of giant predecessors,3 ADELARD
and his contemporaries saw unlimited potentialities for the elaboration
of scientific knowledge long before these were actually discovered in
application to any of the numerous and diverse new problems and subject
matters which we can now look back on. ADELARD'S countryman ROGER
1. Cf. E. R. DODDS, The Ancient Concept of Progress (Oxford, 1973) 1 sqq.;
A. G. GROMBIE, Some attitudes to scientific progress : ancient, medieval and early
modern, History of Science, xiii (1975) 213 sqq., and also for the argument above
Scientific Change, Introduction (London, 1963) 1 sqq., Historical commitments
of biology, The Britsh Journal for the History of Science, iii (1966) 97 sqq.
2. ADELARDUS VON BATH Quaestiones naturales, ed. M. MULLER (Beitrage
zur Geschichte der Philosophic des Mittelalters, xxxi.2; Minister, 1934) 58; cf.
T. STIEFEL, The heresy of science : a twelfth-century conceptual revolution*,
Isis , ixviii (1977) 347 sqq.
3. Cf. CROMBIE, Some attitudes... (1975) 220, Historians and the scientific
revolution*, Physis, xi (1969), and also The relevance of the middle ages to the
scientific movement)) in Perspectives in Medieval History, ed. K.F. DREW and F.
S. LEAR (Chicago, 1963) 35 sqq.; citing myself here and elsewhere for ease of reference and further bibliography.
The Western Experience of Scientific Objectivity
17
BACON in the next century likewise looked to the recovery of a greater

past as the first step towards a happier future, and this remained the
common outlook of Christendom until some four hundred years later
when modern scientific discovery had got confidently under way.
Programmes for intellectual reform such as those of ROGER BACON
and FRANCIS BACON, DESCARTES and others before and many since
throw a special light on an essential characteristic of the Western scientific tradition : its persistent attention to the definition of norms of
rational thought, applying to every kind of subject-matter and every
aspect of life. The light may be as special as the reforming vision and
historians are well advised to combine it with that of established contemporary practices. Together they illuminate the beliefs and motives
arising from the whole intellectual and social ambience, as well as the
scientific experience, which have given diversity to definitions of the
rational, the possible, the desirable and the acceptable. ROGER BACON'S
vision of rational human happiness and dignity foresaw the restoration
of one true wisdom founded on the Scriptures equally with rational
science as he conceived it. * Visions of happiness, of science and of BACON himself have all since changed selectively with human expectations.
Discussions of the discoverable and the discovered as well as of the reputations of predecessors show how the commitments at a particular
time of an individual or a society to general beliefs about nature, man
and science can make certain kinds of question appear cogent and give
certain kinds of explanation their power to convince, and exclude
others, because they establish, in anticipation of any particular research, the kind of world that is supposed to exist. They give satisfaction
because the supposedly discoverable has been discoverer and they point
to what to do in research. The comparative historical study of the intellectual and social commitments that may make certain kinds of scientific understanding, discovery or practical application intellectually
and socially possible in one society, but difficult or impossible in another,
has an immediate relevance for the diverse cultures brought into contact with the science of our contemporary world. Its matching relevance
to our understanding of ourselves may be illustrated by trying to identify some very general characteristics of our continuing rational tradition.
After the medieval West had received its first intellectual impetus
from antiquity with the recovery of Euclidean geometry and of Ari1. Gf. CROMBIE, Some attitudes... (1975) 221-2.
18
stotelian logic and later of natural philosophy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the philosophical community of the universities may
be credited with two major achievements : the grasp and elaboration
of the construction of a deductive explanatory system, whether in logic,
mathematics, cosmology or physiology; and the grasp and elaboration
of logical precision in the use of evidence in deciding an argument,
including decision by experiment. Characteristic of this intellectual
inheritance, at least as it was received, was a geometrical or mathematical
rationalism which is evident, for example, in Euclid's two fundamental
treatises on optics and on music. * Each demonstrated a stable relation
between perceiver and perceived by postulating in the one linear rays
of vision and in the other motions propagated from a sounding body,
from whose specified angles or speeds were demonstrated what specific sizes and shapes must be seen or pitches and intervals heard. Reaching
the West first mainly through Boethius and then through Arabic compendia (Euclid's texts became known only in the sixteenth century),
these theories were made in the twelfth century part of philosophical
programmes for the sciences which included also : The science of
engines (scientia ingeniis)... which taught the ways of contriving
and finding out how natural bodies may be fitted together by some
artifice according to number, so that the use we are looking for may
come from them. 2
A programme is not an achievement but we are looking for mental
attitudes, and it seems to me that we find already expressed in such
words that urge towards rational analysis and ingenious contrivance
for the mastery of nature, which was to be expressed in action by the
artists, engineer-architects and musicians who from the fourteenth
century were to give such an impressive practical demonstration of
their theoretical control of visual space, material construction and
instrumented sound. These groups introduced a new style of rationality
into Western culture, adding to the logical control of argument and
1. Cf. CROMBIE, The mechanistic hypothesis and the scientific study of vision*,
Proceedings of the Royal Microscopical Society, ii (1967) 3 sqq., Mathematics,
music and medical science*, Actes du XHe Congres international d'histoire des
sciences 1968, i.B (Paris, 1971) 295 sqq., and for full discussion Styles of Scientific
Thinking in the European Tradition (Gerald Duckworth, London, 1994).
2. DOMINICUS GUNDISSALINUS, De divisione philosophiae, ed. L. BA.UR (Beitrage. .., iv. 2-3; Miinster, 1903) 122; cf. LYNN WHITE j r., Medieval engineering and
the sociology of knowledge*, Pacific Historical Review, xliv (1975) 1 sqq.
19
calculation achieved by the academic philosophers and mathematicians

a matching control of materials. All these arts and sciences, LEONARDO
DE VINCI insisted were born of experience, mother of all certainty*,1
designed in the mind and issued through the hands. Typically of his
period, he saw the art of design and the science of nature both as expressions of the rational necessary laws laid down by the art of Deus
naturae artifex.* There is a parallel artistic rationalism in his philosophical contemporary MARSILIO FICINO'S vision of man acting like
nature from rational principles within but freely and inventively, coming
through his intellectual and material constructions to know by imitation
God's creations, and becoming no longer nature's slave but rival.
The goals of the arts should not be confused with those of philosophy and the sciences, but it does not seem difficult to recognize both
the early modern arts and the early modern sciences as typical products
of the same society. In both, experience of nature was mediated through
the style and interests of a tradition. They were linked through their
common foundation on rational and quantitative theory and also on
knowledge of instruments and machines. Some historians8 have suggested that a Western disposition to base not only these, but activities
of many different kinds, on a common foundation of reason and calculation may offer a possible explanation of the unique development
of modern science in the West. Other examples are the rational quantification of time in the calendar and the abstract units of the mechanical clock; the introduction of mathematical cartography related to
astronomical navigation; and the methods of book-keeping, commerce
and fiscal administration, beginning in thirteenth-century Italy, operated by the calculation of exchanges and obligations in increasingly
standardized abstract units. Can it be supposed that the habits of reason
and calculation growing up through Western society in all these diverse
activities provided an efficacious condition for the rise of mathematical and experimental science, that for example the habit of weighing,
measuring and accounting in each of these activities encouraged the
1. Treatise on Painting : Codex Urbinas Latinus 1270, i.19, transl. A. P.
McMahon, i (Princeton, 1956) 11; cf. CROMBIE, .Styles...
2. MARSILIUS FICINUS, Theologica Platonica, xiii.3 (Opera, Basileae, 1576)
295-7; Crombie, ibid.
3. Gf. especially MAX WEBER'S famous Introduction (1920) to The Protestant
Ethic, transl. T. PARSONS (New York, 1958); also CROMBIE, Quantification in medieval physics*, Isis, Hi (1961) 143 sqq.
20
same habit in the others. The possible connection between methods

of numerical recording in commerce and in theoretical and practical
sciences is just one specific question for research. Does this all indicate
a mental and social disposition, a dedication of will as much as of intelligence towards enlightenment and power, that provided a uniquely
favourable set of circumstances enabling the West to exploit the intellectual opportunities offered by the recovery of Greek science, with
an energy and purpose found in no other society.
However these large questions of intellectual sociology are to be
answered, dedication to quantity and logic did eventually lead to decisions on the fundamental question of identity both of science and of
nature. During the sixteenth century the kind of physical world men
thought themselves to inhabit, what they should ask about it, the appropriate methods of investigating it, what constituted a satisfactory
explanation of it, and what could be known about it for certain, still
remained in varying degrees open questions for the philosophical and
scientific community at large. Dissatisfaction with the Aristotelianism
established in the universities as the common basis for all education was
encouraged by the arrival of other philosophies in credibly systematic
form. The debates touched on natural philosophy sometimes at length,
but within the consideration of general problems of knowledge and
existence. They promoted not so much the accumulation of the technical content of science from one generation to the next, as the specificity
of their intellectual outlook, commitment and expectation. As much
part of this specificity, as of that of any intellectual reorientation, and
at least as much its engine as the achievement of objectively successful
scientific progress, was the style and method of opposition, of disagreement as well as agreement, of dealing with tension over the whole range
of culture. The style of intellectual and moral behaviour in natural philosophy, in the individual and social processes by which discoveries
and inventions have been made and have come to be accepted, may
be illuminated as much by that in religion, law or art as by the natural
philosophy itself. This evident, for example, in the styles of the thirteenth-century attempts to combine the newly translated Aristotelian
philosophy with the theology of an omnipotent and providential creator,
of the challenges made by the new Platonism of the fifteenth century
and by the new scepticism of the sixteenth, and of GALILEO'S quantitative
science as simply the latest in a succession of old and new philosophies.
In some areas of natural philosophy as well as of religious, legal and
21
artistic theory and practice, old and new remained in uncertain competition long after GALILEO was dead.
It was nevertheless the generations of GALILEO and DESCARTES
who finally clarified and defined science as a mode of rational thinking
in the modern world and who gave it a recognizable and enduring identity in relation to other fields of inquiry and decision. The first half
of the seventeenth century is then a genuine turning-point in the potentialities of Western culture, throwing light on what came both before and after. From that time a scientific community has come into
existence with conditions of education and communication providing
for both agreement and disagreement by a specific kind of rationality,
and now globally providing standards which even if not always realized
are a normal requirement for objective scientific success. Of immediate
relevance for us all is the relation of this specific rationality to beliefs
about man's moral nature and true end.
This side of paradise, moral tension sacred or profane must accompany any framework of thought or society that gives meaning to
existence. An obvious characteristic of the Western scientific tradition
is that it has been from the beginning a moral enterprise as much as
a means of solving physical problems. One form of this was the view
established in different ways by Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and other
ancient philosophers of nature as at once a deductive system and a
moral order, a view that has profoundly affected both the specifib intellectual character and the political role of science in Western culture.
Plato's vision of knowledge producing virtue, and of the rational progress of human knowledge through mathematical abstraction to the
eternal truths expressing the morally as well as intellectually normative
economy and harmony of the real world, has deeply influenced the whole
history of scientific explanation and education. It was used to justify
the systematic introduction of mathematics into modern university
teaching in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.1 The conception
of the world as a work of divine art, whether in its Platonic, Aristotelian,
Stoic or Christian versions highly charged with moral values of economy,
proportion and fitness, has provided an enduring model and sufficient
reason for physical behaviour : from the perfect circles of ancient cosmology and the perfect ancient consonant ratios between low numbers,
to KEPLER'S planetary intervals, the eighteenth-century principle of
least action and practically the whole theory of biological adaptation
1. GROMBIE, Styles. . .
22
before CHARLES DARWIN. Matching this in Christian thinking was

the conception of a benevolent Creator inviting man to use his gifts
of reason and the senses to uncover the designs in nature towards his
providential end and to teach and use his knowledge for the good of
all mankind. The tensions generated by morally charged cosmology
have come from its encounters with other sources of belief or with original thought. The moral charge quickly becomes a political charge.
Some historians have seen the deepest consequences for the potentialities of scientific thinking in Western culture in encounters at the
level of theology, most dramatically in that brought about in the thirteenth century by the introduction into the Latin West of the Aristotelian theory of the world as a necessary and eternal emanation from
the First Cause. This carried with it the powerful belief that men could
discover not only how the world was constructed, but also the necessary reasons in the First Cause why it must be so, was best so and could
not be otherwise; a belief which Christian theologians and philosophers
quickly rejected in defence of the freedom and responsibility of both
God and men. It has been argued that by maintaining the fundamental
revelation of God's creative freedom, they maintained also the liberty
of man's inquiring mind; for man was then free to explore hypothetically
the possible worlds which God might have created had he chosen.1
Whatever the historical cogency of this particular argument, the rejection then or later of any form of rigid historical determinism is by
definition an essential condition for belief in free inquiry. Moreover
even so qualified a secularization of the world must surely have been
a liberation for both theology and natural science, a liberation to be
extended when such divine attributes as economy were converted into
variational principles of nature or regulative principles of science.
But when one remembers some aspects of the extended cosmological
debate, continuing through GALILEO'S Copernican controversies, the
concern for the providential government of the world raised by geology
and then by Darwinian evolution, and the agonies over man's alleged
devaluation in our own century, one must admit that the meaning of
this separation of categories is not one which our society has hastily
sought.
It may be argued that it was above all GALILEO who showed how
to disembarrass nature of its moral charge, and who through his in1. Cf. especially PIERRE DUHEM, Etudes sur Leonard de Vinci ii (Paris,
1909) 411 sqq.; also CROMBIE, The relevance . . . (1963) 40 sqq.
23
dividual thinking, public controversies and personal tragedy focussed

the Western scientific tradition as a moral enterprise of freedom for
the inquiring mind. GALILEO'S assumption of the right to intellectual
freedom and truth represents perhaps the greatest moral contribution
of science to the humane conception of a responsible, rational man.
In defining the identity of natural science within contemporary intellectual culture, he distinguished both nature and science objectively
from human wishes. In nature man was not the measure of all things.
Engineers who attempted the impossible as if with their engines they
could cheat nature* and her ((inviolable laws x cheated only themselves
and their employers. For Nature, deaf and inexorable to our entreaties,
will not alter or change the course of her effects .2 Nature could not
be exploited in the spirit of magic or commerce, interrogated in the style
of a legal hearing, or made the subject of mere academic disputation
or literary search for philosophical or theological concordance. He
himself, being used to study in the book of nature, where things are
written in only one way, would not be able to dispute any problem ad
utranque partem or to maintain any conclusion not first believed or
known to be true.3 To all attributions of moral design in nature he
replied : We must not ask nature to accommodate herself to what
might seem to us the best disposition and order, but we must adapt our
intellect to what she has made, certain that such is the best and not
something else.4 He begged theologians, in his argument for the true
moral agreement between the true cosmology and theology but in categories which logically did not meet, that they would consider with
all care the difference that there is between opinable and demonstrative
doctrines; so that, having clearly in front of their minds with what force
necessary inferences bind, they might the better ascertain themselves
that it is not in the power of professors of demonstrative sciences to
change opinions at their wish, applying themselves now on one side
and now on the other; and that there is a great difference between commanding a mathematician or a philosopher and directing a merchant or
a lawyer; and that the demonstrated conclusions about the things of
nature and of the heavens cannot be changed with the same ease as
1. GALILEO, Le mecaniche (c. 1593; Le opere, ed. naz.., ii, Firenze, 1968)
155; GROMBIE AND CARUGO , Styles . . .
2. GALILEO, Terza Lettera delle macchie del Sole* (1612; Le opere, v) 218;
GROMBIE, ibid.
3. GALILEO in 1612 (Le opere, iv) 248; GROMBIE, ibid.
4. GALILEO in 1612 (Le opere, xi) 344; GROMBIE, ibid.
24
opinions about what is lawful or not in a contract, rent or exchange.1

The issues over which GALILEO felt obliged to make his stand,
paralleled before and since whenever reason has seemed to challenge
other sources giving meaning to existence, have made him from his
own lifetime an historical symbol of the conflict of loyalties that can
take place both within the minds of individuals, and externally in the
relation of free inquiry to the habits of society and its institutions. GALILEO asserted the right to the truth as a moral norm for all men, the
unavoidable objective truth. He claimed freedom to find and state
the truth as an established right with precedence in all policy, and in
the long run essential for all good policy. He knew the price of his political failure, writing to a friend in 1635 from his perpetual house-arrest at Arcetri: I do not hope for any relief, because I have not committed any crime. I could hope for and obtain mercy and pardon if I
had erred, for faults are matters upon which a prince can exert mercies
and dispensations, whereas upon someone who has been innocently condemned it is convenient to be rigorous, so that it seems that it has been
done according to the law.2 But, he continued, his conscience was
clear, and his hope for the acceptance of truth remained undiminished
as he went on to produce what became his most distinguished contribution to science. Some private notes he wrote during that last Copernican campaign have an obvious application to many later situations :
In the matter of introducing novelties. Who doubts that the novelty just introduced, of wanting minds created free by God to become
slaves to the will of others, is going to give birth to very grave scandals?
And that to want other people to deny their own senses and to prefer
to them the judgement of others, and to allow people utterly ignorant
of a science or an art to become judges over intelligent men and to have
power to turn them round at their will by virtue of the authority granted
to them-these are the novelties with power to ruin republics and overthrow states... Be careful, theologians, that, if you want to make the
propositions concerning the movement and the rest of the Sun and of
the Earth a matter of faith, you will expose yourselves to the risk of
being in need of condemning perhaps in the long run as heretical those
who asserted that the Earth stays at rest and the Sun moves from one
1. GALILEO, Lettera a Madama Cristina di Lorena (1615; Le opere, v) 326;
CROMBIE, ibid.,
and Sources of Galileo's early natural philosophy;* in
Reason, Experiment, and Mysticism in the Scientific Revolution, ed. M.L. RIGHINI
Bonelli and W.R. Shea (New York, 1975) 157 sqq.
2. GALILEO, Le opere, xvi., 215; CROMBIE, Styles. . .
25
place to another : I say in the long run, when it has been demonstrated
by the senses or by necessity that the Earth moves and the Sun stays
fixed... Your doctrines are the new ones that harm, as you want... to
force the mind and the senses not to understand and not to see...
With novelties you cause great ruins in religion.1
The generations of GALILEO and DESCARTES established the specific rationality of modern science and gave confidence to its methods
of research and criteria of acceptability by defining it as the art of the
soluble. The act of definition required first a restriction, the delimitation
of the questions as well as of the answers to be admitted. The questions
had to be answerable by acceptable means, eventually if not immediately. These generations came to see experimental science as a deliberate union of the theoretical search for reduction to common forms of
explanation and logical mastery of argument achieved by philosophy,
with the practical demand for accurately reproduceable results required
by technology. Later came an expansion of the initial restriction to exclusively answerable questions in all realms of experience and thought,
with a development and diversification of methods along with that of
subject-matter and theory. Modern science has developed its power to
solve problems by its selectivity and by its programme of reduction of
more and more classes of phenomena to increasingly general theories.
From this it has eliminated all values except truth and the aesthetic
economy of theories which must also pass the test of truth, and all
questions of motive and of the meaning of existence. To all other values
and to all such questions its clear logic has made it explicitly neutral.
Yet natural science has emerged as the rational norm in the Western
search for universally and exclusively true principles in all regions of
thougth and action. This has made it a notable source first of conflicting
certitudes and then of disquiet in Western societies, and a notable solvent of the confidence of other cultures to which the West has brought
not simply its science, medicine and technology but its questioning of
the meaning men give to existence as a whole and to human life, decision and disease within it. The paradoxical culmination of reasoned
decision in our time has been an increasing magnification of means with
a matching neutralization of ends.
The paradox lies in a contradiction between the powerful logic
of science and the notion of a responsible individual, the notion that
created science, if man's moral nature it held to be confined within that
1. GALILEO, Le opere, vii, 540 541, 544; CROMBIE, ibid.
26
logic. In trying to understand human nature itself, by its programme of

selection and reduction science inevitably eliminates all data irrelevant
to its current problems and theories, but these may be the most relevant to existence and experience outside a particular scientific scheme.
There are many examples of this in the study of perception.1 The
scientific understanding of human nature built up from biological,
neuropsychological and psychiatric theory inevitably falls into the
pattern of any general system, which must logically eliminate from
consideration each individual's unique consciousness of attention,
intention, thinking, anticipation, logical and moral choice, decision,
purpose, responsibility. These are irreducible, yet they belong to our
experience. Some people seem to have found in our scientific culture
a need to use the discovered regularities of human psychology and social behaviour to deny individual responsibility, to treat all human
acts as caused, all sins as sickness,2 all social injustices and all crimes
as products of the system. But this does not follow from evident experience, it lacks the commonsense of proportion supplied by humour,
and it contradicts the possibility of reasoned science on which it is
presumably based.
If the logic of science must eliminate meaning from the individual
who yet remains paradoxically responsible for it, the organization of
modern industrial society is likewise neutral to all values except its
own logic and yet imposes what we have learnt to call its own quality
of life. It is as if our whole society were in the grip of a vast theory,
a reflection of the specific rationality of science, obliged by necessity
to gear its programme of selection and reduction to one end alone,
the mindless competitive acquisition of material advantage and power.
It is no accident that rational science and rational power have arisen
together in the experience of nature. But must we accept the committal of our society whatever the political system, Western or Communist, developed or developing, towards this single goal? The specific
rationality of science, mirrored in industrial society, has indeed obliged
us now to recover and retain for the quality of life the responsible decisions from which the individual is eliminated by faceless organization,
and by obsession with power and achievement which is only one expression of science. Thus science which as the truest available account
of nature can yet offer us no moral values, yet also obliges us if we
1. Gf. R. L. GREGORY, Eye and Brain, (London, 1966) 122 sqq.
2. Gf. P. LAIN ENTRALGO, Mind and Body (London, 1955)
27
are to remain civilized to seek reasons for restraint. Science can show
us as individuals and as societies the consequences our actions may have
for our well-being or our survival. The greatest gift of scientific reason
to the practical arts of civilization has surely been to provide mankind
with both a true guide for our actions and the material capability of
choice. Through our scientific tradition, we have liberated ourselves
both from ignorance and from a purely biological regime of existence.
Science has given us responsible information and practical power for
making the difficult decisions between combinations of good with bad
in medical practice, in legal pleading of diminished responsibility (in
a society concerned for its own welfare a persistent disposition or intention to lie must presamably disqualify from responsibility whether
psychiatric, criminal or political in motivation), in the use of the environment and of natural resources, or in military need. But what
reasons can be offered to restrain the powerful from doing whatever they
have power to do for their own selfish advantage, against nature, against rivals, or against the weak? Why should those with the power
not feel entitled to exploit all opportunities? It is a question as bleak
for us as it was for Thucydides, in which the weak are restrained more
than the strong only by their weakness.
One answer of course would be to find agreement on the true moral nature and end of man. That belongs to paradise, to some extent
perhaps to a paradise lost. The Christian view of cosmological and human history, inherited from Hebrew theology, was elaborated by St.
Augustine as the fulfilling through an extended time of the providential purpose of the creation. This conception of the benevolent destiny
provided for responsible man had already by the thirteenth century,
for example in ROGER BACON, x given that evangelical flavour, that
desire to discover and spread true knowledge, which has characterised
the Western sense of mission in science as in religion. The geologists,
biologists and mechanistic philosophers, both social and natural, whose
thinking notably from the eighteenth century dismissed design from
time and history, inevitably gave the mission of science a rather
different flavour. If the order of nature and of society were simply
sequences through time of states of statistical equilibrium, if time and
history were merely a meaningless, open-ended, interminable succession, and if something like that was the whole truth about existence,
1. Cf. CROMBIE, Some attitudes... (1975) 222, and Styles. . .
28
it could be argued that moral values could be regarded only with profound frivolity or profound despair. 1 Yet if the paradise of providence
has been lost, Western scientific culture retains its sense of mission if
only because, in a plural human society, it offers pragmatic agreement
on specific limited ends. It offers also something deeper.
Reasoned truth from which these gifts have come is hard to find
and hard for fallen man to keep. It is hardest of all when truth is made
ambiguous policy. The authors of an analysis published thirty years
ago of the Soviet genetical disputes of that period distinguished among
the modes of argument used what they felicitously called alogical discourse, which intermixed with logical argument appeals to authority,
heresy, practical utility and attributed motives. In the last especially
it seems that the Marxist geneticists were following a procedure much
favoured by LENIN. 2 The procedure has been well illustrated by C.S.
LEWIS through the fictitious character of EZEKIALBULVER, who should
perhaps be better known and who used to attribute his formula for
political power to a dispute between his parents overheard at the age
of three. His father was routed in an attempt to prove to his mother
that the sum of the internal angles of a triangle is two right angles by
her finally defeating reply, that he said that only because he was a
man. Hence our word bulverism. The suggestio falsi intended in this
procedure may take various forms. Bulver learnt from his mother that
it was much more effective in dispute not to meet the reasoning of
your opponent, but rather to fix him in a category of motivation from
which all his reasoning and behaviour was made to follow. Whether
the category was false or irrelevant did not matter. Another common
version has the logical form of the vulgar : Why doesn't he stop beating
his wife? I once had the pleasure of seeing Senator JOSEPH MCCARTHY
routed by a witness who with clear head simply unpacked the innuendos
loaded into the questions put to him. The procedure is of course political, its goal not truth but advantage, and its motives, to quote locally from another context, needed to have very little to do with the
arguments in which they were expressed. Whatever its form or context,
in result : ((Technically it was a smear; but it was also a myth, and,
1. Gf. GROMBIE, Some attitudes...)) (1975) 225; also Lettres incites de
John Stuart Mill a Auguste Comte, publics avec les rgponses de Comte, ed. L.
LEVY-BRUHL (Paris, 1899), especially Mill to Comte on 3 April 1844.
2. P.S. HUDSON and R.H. RICHENS, The New Genetics of the Soviet Union
(Imperial Bureau of Plant Breeding and Genetics, Cambridge, 1946) 23 sqq.
29
like all powerful myths, it retained its potency even when its credibility
had gone*.1
To meet reasons with attributions of motive, to make words mean
what you choose, may be thought an insult to human intelligence. To
promote in the open innuendos started in malicious corners, in corners
of universities as of wider worlds, may be thought an insult at least
to common sense. Such forms of violence against both truth and person
have become too obviously part of the disreputable procedure for political advantage in our time. Mean spirited, naively cynical and usually
transparent, its impudent mendacity is calculated on the assumption
that enough even of our ostensibly honest fellow men prefer almost
any formula for self-delusion, hypocrisy or sanctimonious betrayal to
facing an uncomfortable truth or an indisputable lie. Paradoxically,
an attempt to persuade by means of something less than the truth need
not be criminal. It is essential to legal defence when justice assumes
innocence until guilt is proven. And in the following appraisal by a
military correspondent there is a disturbingly inverted kinship with
pastoral care for virtue : In the communist world the truth or falsehood of a statement is much less important than its effect. The aim is
not primarily to convey information but to induce a response*.2 Those
who accept persuasion from the devil need a long spoon and when dealing with smaller monsters at least to cease to be naive. But nature
cannot be cheated. Nor need men. Effective science demands standards
of truth beyond treachery, and even of the treacherous. Its criteria
offer a political warning, and a moral therapy.
I have tried then to sketch how the intellectual and moral history
of science, medicine and technology, looking back with unavoidable
impressionism to the orientations of our culture, can illuminate the
continuity as well as the mutations of the Western tradition of scientific objectivity which has now, whether in welcome or reluctance,
become the property of most of the world. As intellectual history indeed,
as scientific thinking studied through the reconstruction of its cultural
ambience, this subject has been developed during two decades and more
in my own university of Oxford, with enough momentum now to continue in that style, linked equally and necessarily with the sciences,
the various other histories and philosophy. This does not of course
1. The Spectator (London, 15 March 1975) 306.
2. The Times (London, 10 September 1975) 14.
30
preclude other lines of study, even those most peripheral to the central
subject of scientific thought. A wish to impose a narrow view must
surely reflect an immature conception of history, indeed an immature
character, just as a pretence that history has been other than it has
may reflect some more disreputable calculation.
Historical Perceptions of Medieval Science
Quanta juniores, tanto perspicaciores. William of Conches in his gloss on this

phrase of Priscian epitomised the earliest perception of medieval science by
those bright generations of secular scholars who effectively launched the
modern scientific movement in the first half of the twelfth century. Their
outlook was at once dependent and optimistic. For if 'the moderns are able to
see better than the ancients', this was because 'the ancients had only the
writings which they composed themselves, but we have all their writings and all
those as well which were composed from the beginning up to our time. Hence
we see more, but we do not know more'. He repeated the famous image of
Bernard of Chartres: 'We are like a dwarf put on the shoulder of a giant. He
sees farther than the giant not from his own size but from the size of his
support'.1 So placed they saw a way to independence. They had witnessed,
together with an intellectual revival, also the beginnings of a modest but
pregnant technological revolution. They possessed, as a fundamentally
essential assumption of all rational thinking, a strong belief in the dignity and
intelligibility of man and nature and of the relations of God with his creation.
'The human mind was made', runs another phrase attributed to William of
Conches, 'With the capacity to know all things . . . This is its greatest worth'.2
Likewise Adelard of Bath: Those who are now called authorities gained their
first credence among those less adept only because they followed reason'. He
demanded reason independent of authority, even if only to exchange
authorities, for: 'Nothing is difficult unless you despair. Therefore hope, and
you will find the capability'.3 The way to knowledge of nature was through
training in the mathematical quadrivium, as Thierry of Chartres insisted in
offering from Plato's Timaeus a rational exegesis of the cosmogony of Genesis.
1
E. Jeauneau, ' "Nani gigantum humeris insidentes": essai d'interpretation de Bernard de
Chartres', Vivarium, v (1967) 79-99, see p. 84; cf. for a full treatment of the subject of this paper
A.C. Crombie, Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition (London, 1994), and also
Science, Optics and Music in Medieval and Early Modern Thought (London, 1990).
2
C. Ottaviano, Un brano inedito delta 'Philosophia' di Guglielmo di Conches (Naples, 1935)
19; cf. R.W. Southern, Medieval Humanism and Other Studies (Oxford, 1970) 39 sqq.
3
Adelard of Bath, Quaestiones naturales, hrg. von M. Miiller (Beitrdge zur Geschichte der
Philosophic des Mittelalters, iv.l; Minister, 1923), 12, 58.
32
Thierry, according to his epitaph, could see through all the perplexities of the
seven liberal arts, and 'he made quite clear to everyone what was hidden in
obscurity for Plato and Socrates'.4 This he could seem to do by a perspective of
superior science, enriched by the new translations into Latin such as Adelard's
version of Euclid's Elements from the Arabic.
The history of science is the history of vision explored and controlled by
argument: a vision and an argument initiated in the West by the ancient Greek
philosophers, mathematicians and physicians in their search for principles at
once of nature and of argument itself. Argument has been deployed in
different styles, in different periods and contexts and in different subjectmatters, to justify a vision of the nature of things able to solve specific
problems. Of the essence of the scientific movement have been its genuine
continuity, even after long breaks, based on the study by any generation of
texts written by its predecessors; its progress equally in scientific knowledge
and in the analysis of scientific argument; and its recurrent critique, varying
considerably in different historical contexts, of its presuppositions about
nature, about scientific cogency and validity, and about the intellectual,
practical and moral justification of the whole enterprise. A subtle question is
what continued and what changed through different historical circumstances,
in scientific argument and its criteria of cogency and validity, and in the
cultural vision through which experience is mediated, when education and
practice could furnish options for a different future. Styles of thinking and
making both intellectual and practical decisions, established with the intellectual and moral commitments with which they began, are maintained by habit
and education as long as these remain. From such commitments come the
specific identities of cultures and the structural differences between different
cultures and societies whose enduring persistence have become in our present
world daily more evident. Vectorial treatment is of the essence of historiography, yet there can be therapy in viewing the still life of a present moment
unrelated to past or future. We, then, the historians of the scientific
movement, who belong at the same time to its history, must look in a true
intellectual anthropology at once with and into the eye of its beholder.
Historical perceptions of the scientific movement in the middle ages have
from the start been mediated through interpretations of the past and present
motivated by expectations of a desirable future, interpretations that have
varied with visions of the nature of human existence and with degrees of
historical knowledge, prejudice or ignorance. In the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries the texts translated from the Greek and the Arabic, and the new
compositions written in their light, were of two different kinds: those
concerned primarily with general questions of knowledge and existence, and
those concerned with specific problems in the mathematical and natural
A. Vernet, 'Une epitaphe inedite de Thierry de Chartres' in Recueil de travaux offert a C.

Brunei, ii (Paris, 1955) 670; cf. Southern, Medieval Humanism.
33
sciences. There could of course be mixtures of the two. In a philosophical

community sharing a common education in all these subjects, both were seen
to belong to an integrated intellectual whole. The first provided a general
programme for investigating the nature of things, the second provided specific
advances of knowledge. The interactions of programmes with realisations, and
within those of episteme with techne, scientia with ars, have been central to the
whole subsequent dynamics of the scientific movement.
Medieval perceptions of the history of science (as distinct from perceptions
of scientific problems as such) focused primarily on the programme of man's
relation to God and to nature as his creation. The context of human existence
was defined by the scheme of providential history presented by Augustine.
Thus Hugh of St Victor, the most systematically historical of the early twelfthcentury scholars, in an universal history written on Augustinian lines, traced
the restoration of the divine likeness in fallen man by the development of the
arts and sciences. The arts and sciences, invented under the spur of practical
necessity and reduced to rule by reason, had been brought to perfection before
Christ. It was their fulfilment in the return of man to God's grace that was
promised for the future. For this 'entire sensible world is like a sort of book
written by the finger of God';5 and in the contemporary image of Bernard
Silvestris: There, marked down by the finger of the Supreme Scribe, can be
read the text of time, the fated march of events, the disposition made of the
ages'.6
Roger Bacon with much greater knowledge a century and a half later
likewise looked first to the recovery of a wiser past as an essential step towards
a happier future. Again from Augustine, he remodelled the historical belief
that God had revealed to the Hebrew patriarchs and prophets, long before the
Greek philosophers, the plenitude of wisdom entirely adequate for human
needs and the source of all the arts and sciences and of untold powers over
nature. This had been lost in ages of sin and foolishness and revived by virtue,
and it could be recovered again in man's long return from divine alienation
only by keeping to true belief and moral law. Hence, in his analysis of the
'causes of error'7 and of scientific stagnation in contemporary Christendom,
the moral emphasis on the habits of prejudice and vanity as well as ignorance
making obstacles to truth, for it was the paramount duty of Christians to grasp
the truth and spread it to all the world. When Bacon sketched his programme
for the restoration of experimental and mathematical science, with the
invention of flying machines and submarines and so forth, he was describing
5
Hugh of St Victor, Didascalicon, de studio legendi vii.4, ed. J.P. Migne, Patrologia Latino,
clxxvi (Paris, 1854) 814; cf. ed. C.J. Buttimer (Washington, D.C., 1939), transl. J. Taylor (New
York, 1961).
6
Bernard Silvestris, De mundi universitate, hrg. C.S. Barach und J. Wrobel (Innsbruck, 1986)
13; cf. M.D. Chenu, La theologie au douzieme siecle (Paris, 1957, 1976) 170.
7
Roger Bacon, Opus maius i.l sqq., 14, ii.9, iii.i, ed. J.H. Bridges, i (Oxford, 1897), iii
(London, 1900).
34
what he believed had been known already to the ancients. He cited with
approval Seneca's respect alike for ancient wisdom and for intellectual
progress of the elite who alone among foolish mankind would not misuse it,
and he insisted that 'the study of wisdom can always increase in this life,
because nothing is perfect in human discoveries. Hence we of a later age
should supply what the ancients lacked, because we have entered into their
labours, by which, unless we are asses, we can be aroused to better things;
since it is wretched to be always using and never making discoveries. Christians
should . . . complete the paths of the unbelieving philosophers, not only
because we are of a later age and should add to their works, but also in order
that we may bend their labours to our own ends'.8 He saw the recent and future
progress of scientific knowledge as the product as much of the recovery of
ancient texts, and the discovery by the learned elite of their true hidden
meaning, as of the direct investigation of nature. Hence his vision of the
reform of education and knowledge within a theological scheme of man's
providential destiny in the fulfilment of time to the end of the world.
Such theological interpretations of the history of the arts and sciences
persisted in various forms and contexts for several centuries after Bacon, but a
different style of historical orientation came to be offered by the humanist
scholars and philosophers who from the fourteenth century established so
much of the basic methods and conceptions of modern historiography. The
pedagogic function of history, the effectiveness of interpretations of the past
that carried with them formulae for present action, was well understood in
antiquity. The Italian scholars who introduced the threefold division of
European history into ancient, medieval and modern gave to these periods an
evaluation beyond mere chronology. It seems to have been Petrarch who first
used the term medius tempus with the sense of a dark age lasting for a thousand
years until his own time, when Latin poetry was revived and Italian vernacular
poetry reborn (renatum).9 He was offering a programme. The image of
medieval darkness was repeated at the end of the fourteenth century by the
Florentine historian Filippo Villani, who described certain events as happening 'in ancient, medieval and modern times (priscis, mediis, modernisque
temporibusy. When Dante revived the art of poetry he 'recalled it as from an
abyss of shadows into the light', just as painting was raised again to life in
modern times first by Cimabue, who 'began to recall it to the imitation of
nature', and then by Giotto, 'who not only can be compared with the illustrious
Ibid, ii.15, vol. iii.

Cf. T. Mommsen, 'Petrarch's Conception of the Dark Ages', Speculum, xvii (1942) 226-42;
W.K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Perspective (Boston, Mass., 1948); D. Hay,
'Historians and the Renaissance During the Last 25 Years' in The Renaissance (London, 1982) 132; M.L. McLaughlin, 'Humanist Concepts of Renaissance and Middle Ages in the Tre- and
Quattrocento', Renaissance Studies, ii (1988) 131-42 with further references.
9
35
painters of antiquity, but surpassed them all in skill and genius'.10 (It is a pity
that he was unaware of the lively and accurate naturalistic illustrations of
Frederick IPs Art of Falconry and of many others made in Italy, France, the
Netherlands and England during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.)
That the modern arts had come to revive (rinascere) and to surpass ancient
models, and the historical term media tempestas,11 became commonplaces in
the fifteenth century. Some scholars maintained that philosophy had flourished without interruption through the scholastic period and needed no
revival.12 But in general the humanists gave to the medieval term a sense of
total darkness, in order to promote the enlightenment they saw coming from
ancient models of all kinds, whether in politics, Latin style or painting and
sculpture.
On similar lines philosophical historians like Machiavelli and Jean Bodin,
looking for the causes of the progress or regress of civilisation in different
periods, could project their historical analyses into programmes for present
advantage or reform and future advance, or perhaps into diagnoses of decline.
They studied history in order to manage or at least to anticipate its course.
Hence the search for the best ancient models, and the successive proposals for
true methods, whether for philosophy or science or art or theology or
government, which were so evident in Western intellectual culture from the
age of Roger Bacon to that of Francis Bacon and Descartes. Hence also the
recurrent claims to novelty: to have discovered like the sixteenth-century
Neoplatonist Francesco Patrizi the 'new, true, complete philosophy of the
universe', ambitiously so 'proved with divine oracles, geometrical necessities,
philosophical reasons and the clearest experiments'13 or other fashionably
convincing criteria; or more realistically the claims to be practising like
William Gilbert a 'new sort of philosophising',14 or to have invented like
Francis Bacon a novum organum or like Galileo 'new sciences'.15
Reforming visions may show us the intellectual tradition of European
science in varied and peculiar lights, as necessary for a true historical
anthropology as the solving of problems and related contemporary practices.
They show us the historical diversity of conceptions of the rational, the
possible, the desirable and the acceptable. These may change with changing
10
Filippo Villani, Liber de civitatis Florentinae famosis civibus, ii.2, 7, iii.7, ed. G.C. Galletti
(Florence, 1847).
11
Cf. Hay, 'Historians and the Renaissance'; McLaughlin, 'Humanist Concepts'; P. Lehmann,
Vom Mittelalter und von der Lateinischen Philologie des Mittelalters (Quellen und Untersuchungen
zur Lateinischen Philologie des Mittelalters, v.l; Munich, 1914).
12
E.g. Alamanno Rinuccini, Lettere ed orazione, a cura di V.R. Giustiniani (Florence, 1953)
106-7; cf. McLaughlin, 'Historians and the Renaissance'.
13
Francesco Patrizi, Nova de universis philosophia, 'Panurgia' i (Ferrara, 1591) f.l r .
14
William Gilbert, De magnete, Praefatio (London, 1600).
15
Galileo Galilei, Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienze (Leiden,
1638).
36
human expectations, or they may persist as definitions of norms of rational

thought for every kind of subject-matter and every aspect of life, or as a
specified intellectual competence to solve problems, or as a deep moral
commitment to discover and spread true and useful knowledge. The critical
question is whether the vision casting its objects in this reforming light can
stand the light of historical evidence.
To the historiography of a political and literary and artistic renaissance
centred in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy, Erasmus added a further
European element with his conception of close causal connection between the
decline or revival of learning and those of religion. The renaissance of religion
then came to be identified in Protestant historiography with the fortunes of the
Protestant reformation. Science was brought into the historiography of a
renaissance at this time first by such philosophical reformers as Peter Ramus16
and Francis Bacon, using the warning of past stagnation to promote their new
optimism for mathematical and experimental methods, and later when in the
dispute of the Ancients and Moderns the recent scientific triumphs replaced
antiquity with progress as a guiding vision. An exemplary linking of the revival
of classical learning, the Protestant reformation and the rise of the new
philosophy as stages in the liberation of the inquiring mind was set out in the
Dictionnaire historique (1697) by Pierre Bayle.17
Put together over two centuries through a series of disparate issues in
politics, religion, literature, art, science and technology, this scheme has had
its full influence on that large part of the historiography of science developed
since the sixteenth century in which it has been assumed, in Walter Ralegh's
phrase, that is was 'the end and scope of all historic, to teach by example of
times past, such wisdome as may guide our desires and actions'.18 Historiography of science was an evaluation entailing a programme. Whatever
wisdom history may teach us, the obvious disadvantage of a periodisation in
evaluative terms like dark ages or renaissance, or like reformation or scientific
revolution or enlightenment, as also the obvious disadvantage of simply
assuming a linkage of apparently separate issues whether in the pursuit of
some view of the human condition or even of truth or liberty, or in some causal
series, is that these can cloud factual investigations. They tell us more about
the periods in which they were invented than about those to which they
referred. It is a curious fact that in the course of the successive controversies
over the arts, religion and science the period of medieval darkness was moved
forward to the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Such terms distract
attention from the apprehension of an intellectual culture in its historical
context and in its own terms. They obstruct the analysis of connections of
reason and motive both manifest and hidden, and the interaction of internal
16
17
18
Petrus Ramus, Scholarum mathematicarum . . . (Basel, 1569).

Vol. ii (Rotterdam, 1697) 1123.
Ralegh, History of the World, Preface and ii.21.6 (London, 1614) 537.
37
intellectual needs with external social pressures evident in complex societies.

Antecedent assumptions in historical as in scientific investigations may indeed
direct our attention to questions otherwise overlooked, as likewise away from
other questions indicated by other assumptions. Human historiography, like
natural science, must proceed by means of a body of theory. Suitably distanced
by time and experience, we can recognise fairly easily the theoretical
assumptions generated in early modern historiography by the diverse disputes
in which the innovating parties needed to define their position in relation to
their immediate predecessors and current opponents.19 They used history in
an exercise of persuasion to influence present attitudes and actions.
This has been done by no means only on one side, nor despite its obvious
dangers does it necessarily produce bad scholarship. European interest in
medieval history, powerfully stimulated by Romanticism, led on the Continent
during the nineteenth century to the methodical study of medieval thought and
to some exemplary, especially German, technical studies of medieval philosophy and science. A little later that great man Pierre Duhem, under the
pressure of opposition from French academic positivists, embarked on his
magisterial exposition of medieval scientific thinkers and their relation to their
early modern successors. Duhem was explicitly making a point with more than
medieval historical relevance, and he has been justly criticised for certain
historical distortions that have come from it. Yet all subsequent historians of
medieval science, however much we may criticise and object, are to some
extent his disciples. It was he beyond all others whose heroic vision of medieval
natural philosophy and cosmology projected bright shafts of understanding
through the cloudy darkness of academic prejudice. He gave fresh excitement
to medieval science, and in consequence this gave academic careers to
generations of young scholars. Yet on many details and perhaps on much of the
whole vision we must criticise and differ.
When we read a text in the history of science we need to identify the
questions to which the text was directed and to which it offered answers. The
questions may be explicit or they may be implied by the answers given.
Aristotle, the first historian of science, assumed that his predecessors had been
asking the same questions as himself but had not answered them so well. Our
historical perceptions now make it clear that the questions, whether explicit or
implied, can change so much as to be scarcely the same questions at all. The
most fundamental changes, often obscured by the inertia of language and
terminology, are those brought about by changes in the conceptions of nature
19
Ample evidence of the continuing interest in medieval natural philosophy during the
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is provided by the printed editions recorded e.g. by G.
Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science, 3 vol. (Baltimore, Md., 1927-47); cf. also A.C.
Crombie, Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science (Oxford, 1953,1971) 278-9;
A. Pacchi, Convenzione e ipotesi nella formazione della filosofia naturale di Thomas Hobbes
(Florence, 1965), 'Ruggero Bacone e Roberto Grossatesta in un inedito hobbesiano del 1634',
Rivista critica di storia della filosofia, xx (1965) 499-502.
38
and of science presupposed by the questions being posed. Such changes can
alter both the way in which particular scientific problems are formulated and
the criteria for an acceptable scientific explanation.
It is clear that the questions put or presupposed in the answers given by
medieval natural philosophers were not identical with those put or presupposed in the seventeenth century. Structural changes in scientific thinking such
as occurred over this period make the whole subject of predecessors extremely
tricky, and it is tricky not only for the medieval predecessors dear to Duhem,
but likewise for those of Darwin in the theory of evolution and equally
throughout the history of science. We need to examine continuity and change
at all the levels involved, from those of factual discovery and mathematical
formulation to those of scientific demonstration and causal explanation. In the
famous case of inertial motion, for example, the seventeenth-century concept
was basically different from that formulated in the fourteenth century on the
Aristotelian principle that, since every effect requires a cause, every motion
requires a mover. Again, the analysis of the rainbow by Descartes starting
from a general quantitative law was structurally different from that of
Theodoric of Freiberg, whose sophisticated experiments with models were
designed to discover the particular causal conditions for particular phenomenon. Yet again, Kepler came to make a structural break from his own first
approach to the analysis of optical physiology, based on the assumption
inherited from the Greeks that the process by which vision is effected through
the living eye must yield an immediate explanation of visual perception. This
had been accepted by Alhazen in his brilliant geometrical model of the eye and
by all his successors. It led to insoluble problems like that of the inversion and
reversal of the image. Kepler generalised the subject by treating the eye as a
physical optical instrument like any other, as in fact a camera obscura, and thus
he could separate its optical operation for analysis independently of the
problem of perception. The question changed because the presuppositions
generating them changed. Valuable light can be thrown on all this by the study
of scientific and philosophical terminology, but here also there are dangers.
Language can misrepresent or lag behind practice. It takes great care to
interpret such important terms as lex naturae, resolutiva et compositiva, ratio,
machina, experimentum and scientia experimental. So then: quanta juniores,
tanto perspicaciores, sed caveat emptor.
Robert Grossteste (c. 1168-1253)
Grosseteste was the central figure in England in the intellectual movement of

the first half of the thirteenth century, yet the only evidence for his life before
he became bishop of Lincoln in 1235 is to be found in fragmentary references
by Matthew Paris and other chroniclers, by Roger Bacon, and occasionally
in charters, deeds and other records.1 His birth has been variously dated
between 1168 and 1175, but since he is described as 'Magister Robertus
Grosteste' (the first appearance of his name) in a charter of Hugh, bishop of
Lincoln, of probably 1186-1190, the earlier date is the more likely. Tradition
places his birth in Suffolk, of humble parentage. He may have been educated
first at Lincoln, then at Oxford, and was in the household of William de Vere,
bishop of Hereford, by 1198, when a reference by Gerald of Wales suggests
that he may have had some knowledge of both law and medicine. After that it
seems likely that he taught at Oxford in the arts school until the dispersion of
masters and scholars during 1209-1214. He must have taken his mastership in
theology, probably at Paris, during this period, some time before his
appointment as chancellor of the University of Oxford, although with the title
magisterscholarum, probably about 1214-1221, when he must have lectured on
theology.
Grosseteste was given a number of ecclesiastical preferments and sinecures,
including the arch-deaconry of Leicester in 1229; but in 1232 he resigned them
all except for a prebend at Lincoln, writing to his sister, a nun: 'If I am poorer
by my own choice, I am made richer in virtues.'2 From 1229 or 1230 until 1235
he was first lecturer in theology to the Franciscans, who had come to Oxford in
1224. His influence there was profound and continued after he left Oxford in
1235 for the see of Lincoln, within the jurisdiction of which Oxford and its
schools came. He contributed largely to directing the interests of the English
Franciscans toward the study of the Bible, languages, and mathematics and
natural science. Indispensable sources for this later period of his life are his
own letters and those of his Franciscan friend Adam Marsh.
1
2
See D.A. Callus, ed., Robert Grosseteste.

Epistolae, H.R. Luard, ed., p. 44.
40
Grosseteste's career thus falls into two main parts, the first that of a
university scholar and teacher and the second that of a bishop and ecclesiastical statesman. His writings fall roughly into the same periods: to the former
belong his commentaries on Aristotle and on the Bible and the bulk of a
number of independent treatises, and to the latter his translations from the
Greek. Living at a time when the intellectual horizons of Latin Christendom
were being greatly extended by the translations into that language of Greek
and Arabic philosophical and scientific writings, he took a leading part in
introducing this new learning into university teaching. His commentary on
Aristotle's Posterior Analytics was one of the first and most influential of the
medieval commentaries on this fundamental work. Other important writings
belonging to the first period are his commentary on Aristotle's Physics,
likewise one of the first; independent treatises on astronomy and cosmology,
the calendar (with intelligent proposals for the reform of the inaccurate
calendar then in use), sound, comets, heat, optics (including lenses and the
rainbow), and other scientific subjects; and his scriptural commentaries,
especially the Moralitates in evangelica, De cessatione legalium, Hexaemeron
and commentaries on the Pauline epistles and the psalms. Having begun to
study Greek in 1230-1231, he used his learning fruitfully during the period of
his episcopate by making Latin translations of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics
and De caelo (with Simplicius' commentary), of the Defide orthodoxe of John
of Damascus, of Pseudo-Dionysius and of other theological writings. For this
work he brought to Lincoln assistants who knew Greek; he also arranged for a
translation of the psalms to be made from the Hebrew and seems to have
learned something of this language.
Although in content a somewhat eclectic blend of Aristotelian and
Neoplatonic ideas, Grosseteste's philosophical thinking shows a strong
intellect curious about natural things and searching for a consistently rational
scheme of things both natural and divine. His search for rational explanations
was conducted within the framework of the Aristotelian distinction between
'the fact' (quid) and 'the reason for the fact' (propter quid). Essential for the
latter in natural philosophy was mathematics, to which Grosseteste gave a role
based specifically on his theory, expounded in De luce seu de inchoatione
formarum and De motu corporali et luce, that the fundamental corporeal
substance was light (lux). He held that light was the first form to be created in
prime matter, propagating itself from an original point into a sphere and thus
giving rise to spatial dimensions and all else according to immanent laws.
Hence his conception of optics as the basis for natural science. Lux was a
instrument by which God produced the macrocosm of the universe and also
the instrument mediating the interaction between soul and body and the bodily
senses in the microcosm of man.3 Grosseteste's rational scheme included
E.G., Hexaemeron, British Museum MS Royal 6.E.V (14 cent.), fols 147v-150v; L. Baur,
'Das Licht in der Naturphilosophie des Robert Grosseteste' in Abhandlungen aus dem Gebiete
Robert Grosseteste
41
revelation as well as reason, and he was one of the first medieval thinkers to
attempt to deal with the conflict between the Scriptures and the new Aristotle.
Especially interesting are his discussions of the problems of the eternity or
creation of the world, of the relation of will to intellect, of angelology, of divine
knowledge of particulars, and of the use of allegorical interpretations of
Scripture.
Grosseteste's public life as bishop of Lincoln was informed by both his
outlook on the universe as a scholar and his conception of his duties as a
prelate dedicated to the salvation of souls. Analogous to corporeal illumination was the divine illumination of the soul with truth. He extended the
luminous analogy to illustrate the relationship between the persons of the
Trinity, the operation of divine grace through free will like light shining
through a coloured glass,4 and the relation of pope to prelates and of bishops to
clergy: as a mirror reflects light into dark places, he said in asserting his
episcopal rights against the cathedral chapter of Lincoln, so a bishop reflects
power to the clergy.5
In practice Grosseteste was governed by three principles: a belief in the
supreme importance of the cure of souls; a highly centralised and hierarchical
conception of the church, in which the papacy, under God, was the centre and
source of spiritual life and energy; and a belief in the superiority of the church
over the state because its function, the salvation of souls, was more vital. Such
views were widely accepted, but Grosseteste was unique in the ruthlessness
and thoroughness with which he applied them, for example, in opposing the
widespread use of ecclesiastical benefices to endow officials in the service of
the crown or the papacy. As a bishop he had attended the First Council of
Lyons in 1245, and in a memorandum presented to the pope there in 1250 he
expounded his views on the unsuitability of such appointments while accepting
the papal right to dispose of all benefices. Likewise, his opposition to the
obstruction of the disciplinary work of the church by any ecclesiastical
corporation or secular authority brought him into conflict both with his own
Lincoln chapter and with the crown over royal writs of prohibition when
secular law clashed with church law and when churchmen were employed as
judges or in other secular offices. Grosseteste was a close friend of Simon de
Montfort and took charge of the education of his sons, but the degree to which
he shared in or influenced Montfort's political ideals has probably been
exaggerated. Above all he was a bishop with an ideal, an outstanding example
of the new type of ecclesiastic trained in the universities.
der Philosophic und ihrer Geschichte. Eine Festgabe zum 70. Geburtstag Georg Freiherrn von
Herding (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1913), pp. 41-55.
4
De libero arbitrio, caps. 8 and 10, in L. Baur, Die philosophischen Werke des Robert
Grosseteste, pp. 179, 202.
5
Epistolae, pp. 360, 364, 389.
42
Scientific Thought
Some of Grosseteste's scientific writings can be dated with reasonable
certainty, and most of the others can be related to these in an order based on
internal references and on the assumption that the more elaborated version of
a common topic is the later.6 From the evidence for his method of making
notes on his reading and thoughts to be worked up into finished essays and
commentaries,7 and from these writing themselves, it may be assumed that
many of them arose out of his teaching in the schools. Gerald of Wales's
description of Grosseteste at Hereford as a young clerk with a manifold
learning 'built upon the sure foundation of the liberal arts and an abundant
knowledge of literature'8 is borne out by what is probably his earliest work, De
artibus liberalibus. In this attractive introduction he described how the seven
liberal arts at once acted as apurgatio erroris and gave direction to the gaze and
inclination of the mind (mentis aspectus et affectus). Of particular interest is hi
treatment of music, of which his love became proverbial, and of astronomy. As
for Boethius, music for him comprised the proportion and harmony not only of
sounds produced by the human voice and by instruments but also of the
movements and times of the celestial bodies and of the composition of bodies
made of the four terrestrial elements - hence the power of music to mould
human conduct and restore health by restoring the harmony between soul and
body and between the bodily elements, and the related power of astronomy
through its indication of the appropriate times for such operations and for the
transmutation of metals. Related to this essay was his phonetical treatise De
generatione sonorum, which he introduced with an account of sound as a
vibratory motion propagated from the sounding body through the air to the
ear, from the motion of which arose a sensation in the soul.
Grosseteste developed his mature natural philosophy through a logic of
science based on Aristotle and through his fundamental theory of light. In
their present form most of the works concerned were almost certainly written
between about 1220 and 1235. De luce and De motu corporali et luce, with his
cosmogony and cosmology of light, seem to date from early in this period. The
structure of the universe generated by the original point of lux was determined, first, by the supposition that there was a constant proportion between
the diffusion or 'multiplication' of lux, corresponding to the infinite series of
natural numbers, and the quantity of matter given cubic dimensions,
corresponding to some finite part of that series. Second, the intensity of this
6
For the basic works on this question, see Baur, Die philosophischen Werke; and S.H.
Thomson, The Writings of Robert Grosseteste - with the revisions by Callus, The Oxford Career of
Robert Grosseteste' in Robert Grosseteste; A.C. Crombie, Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of
Experimental Science (1953, 1971); and R.C. Dales, 'Robert Grosseteste's Scientific Works,'
Commentarius in viii libros.
7
From William of Alnwick, as first noticed by A. Pelzer. See Callus, The Oxford Career of
Robert Grosseteste,' pp. 45-47.
8
Giraldus Cambrensis, Opera, J.S. Brewer, ed., I (London, 1861), 249.
Robert Grosseteste
43
activity of lux varied directly with distance from the primordial source. The
result was a sphere denser and more opaque toward the centre. Then from the
outermost boundary of the sphere lumen emanated inward to produce another
sphere inside it, then another, and so on, until all the celestial and elementary
spheres of Aristotelian cosmology were complete. Another seemingly early
work in this series, De generatione stellarum, shows Grosseteste dependent on
Aristotle in many things but not in all, for he argued that the stars were
composed of the four terrestrial elements. Later, in his commentary on the
Physics, he contrasted the imprecise and arbitrary way man must measure
spaces and times with God's absolute measures through aggregates of
infinities.
In all these writings Grosseteste made it clear that by lux and lumen he
meant not simply the visible light which was one of its manifestations, but a
fundamental power (virtus, species) varying in its manifestation according to
the source from which it was propagated or multiplied and in its effect
according to its recipient. Thus he showed in De impressionibus elementorum
how solar radiation effected the transformation of one of the four terrestrial
elements into another and later, in De natura locorum, how it caused
differences in climate. An explanation of the tides begun in De accessione et
recessione maris or De fluxu et refluxu maris (if this work is by him)9 was
completed in De natura locorum, in which he argued that the rays of the rising
moon released vapours from the depth of the sea which pushed up the tide
until the moon's strength increased so much that it drew the vapours through
the water, at which time the tide fell again. The second, smaller monthly tide
was caused by the weaker lunar rays reflected back to the opposite side of the
earth from the stellar sphere.
In De cometis et causis ipsarum Grosseteste gave a good example of his
method of falsification in arguing that comets were 'sublimated fire' separated
from their terrestrial nature by celestial power descending from the stars or
planets and drawing up the 'fire' as a magnet drew iron. Later, in De calore
solis (c. 1230-1235), he produced perhaps his most elegant exercise in analysis
by reduction to conclusions falsified either by observation or by disagreement
with accepted theory, finally leaving a verified explanation. He concluded that
all hot bodies generated heat by the scattering of their matter and that the sun
generated heat on the earth in direct proportion to the amount of matter
incorporated from the transparent medium (air) into its rays.
Grosseteste set out and exemplified the formal structure of his mature
scientific method in his Commentaria in libros posteriorum Aristotelis, his
Commentarius in viii libros physicorum Aristotelis,10 and four related essays
9
See R.C. Dales, The Authorship of the Questio de fluxu et refluxu maris Attributed to Robert
Grosseteste,' in Speculum, 37 (1962), 582-588.
10
See the ed. by Dales. Grosseteste wrote probably about 1230 a summary of Aristotle's views
in his Summa super octo libros physicorum Aristotelis.
44
giving a geometrical analysis of the natural propagation of power and light. It

seems likely that he began the commentary on the Posterior Analytics when he
was still a master of arts, that is, before 1209, and completed it over a long
period, finishing after 1220 and probably nearer the end of the decade. The
commentary on the Physics was written later, likewise certainly over a period
of years, probably around 1230. It has striking parallels with some of the
scientific topics of the Hexaemeron but shows less than even the limited
knowledge of Greek found in this work, suggesting that it just precedes it.
For Grosseteste, as for Aristotle, a scientific inquiry began with an
experienced fact (quid), usually a composite phenomenon. The aim of the
inquiry was to discover the reason for the fact (propter quid), the proximate
cause or natural agent from which the phenomenon could be demonstrated:
Every thing that is to be produced is already described and formed in some way
in the agent, whence nature as an agent has the natural things that are to be
produced in some way described and formed within itself, so that this description
and form itself, in the very nature of things to be produced before they are
produced, is called knowledge of nature.11
His method of discovering the causal agent was to make first a resolutio, or
analysis of the complex phenomenon into its principles, and then a compositio,
or reconstruction and deduction of the phenomenon from hypotheses derived
from the discovered principles. He verified or falsified these hypotheses by
observation or by theory already verified by observation.
Besides this double method, Grosseteste used in the analysis of the causal
agent as the starting-point of demonstration another Aristotelian procedure,
that of the subordination of some sciences to others, for example, of
astronomy and optics to geometry and of music to arithmetic, in the sense that
'the superior science provides the propter quid for that thing of which the
inferior science provides the quia.'12 But mathematics provided only the
formal cause; the material and efficient causes were provided by the physical
sciences. Thus 'the cause of the equality of the two angles made on a mirror by
the incident ray and the reflected ray is not a middle term taken from
geometry, but is the nature of the radiation generating itself in a straight path
. . . '13 The echo belonged formally to the same genus as the reflection of light,
but the material and efficient cause of the propagation of sound had to be
sought in its fundamental substance: 'the substance of sound is lux incorporated in the most subtle air . . . '14 This introduced a fundamental addition to
11
12
13
14
Commentarius in viiiphysicorum Aristotelis, lib. I, Dales, ed. pp. 3-4.

Commentaria in libros posteriorum Aristotelis, I, 12 (1494), fols. llr-12r.
Ibid., I, 8, fol. 8r.
7Wd.,II,4,fol. 29v.
Robert Grosseteste
45
the very similar discussion of the propagation of sound in De artibus liberalibus

and De generatione sonorum.
Grosseteste developed his geometrical analysis of the powers propagated
from natural agents in the four related essays written most probably in the
period 1231-1235. He said in the first, De lineis, angulis et figuris seu
fractionibus et reflexionibus radiorum: 'All causes of natural effects have to be
expressed by means of lines, angles and figures, for otherwise it would be
impossible to have knowledge propter quid concerning them.'15 The same
power produced a physical effect in an inanimate body and a sensation in a
animate one. He established rules for the operation of powers: for example,
the power was greater the shorter and straighter the line, the smaller the
incident angle, the shorter the three-dimensional pyramid or cone; every agent
multiplied its power spherically. Grosseteste discussed the laws of reflection
and refraction (evidently taken from Ptolemy) and their causes, and went on in
De natura locorum to use Ptolemy's rules and construction with plane surfaces
to explain refraction by a spherical burning glass. 'Hence,' he resumed, 'these
rules and principles and fundamentals having been given by the power of
geometry, the careful observer of natural things can give the causes of all
natural effects by this method.' This was clear 'first in natural action upon
matter and later upon the senses. . . . '16
An example of the analysis of a power producing sensation is provided by
Grosseteste's De colore. The resolutio identified the constituent principles:
colour was light incorporated by a transparent medium; transparent media
varied in degree of purity from earthy matter; light varied in brightness and in
the multitude of its rays. In the compositio he asserted that the sixteen colours
ranging from white (bright light, multitudinous rays, in a pure medium) to
black were produced by the 'intension and remission' of these three variable
principles. 'That the essence of colour and a multitude of the same behaves in
the said way,' he concluded, 'is manifest not only by reason but also by
experiment, to those who know the principles of natural science and of optics
deeply and inwardly. . . . They can show every kind of colour they wish to
visibly, by art [per artificium].'11
The last of these four essays, De iride seu de iride et speculo, is the most
complete example of Grosseteste's method and his most important contribution to optics. The resolutio proceeds through a summary of the principle of
subordination and its relation to demonstration propter quid into a discussion
of the division of optics into the science of direct visual rays, of reflected rays,
and of refracted rays, in order to decide to which part the study of the rainbow
belonged. It was subordinate to the third part, 'untouched and unknown
15
16
17
De lineis angulis et figuris, in Baur, Die philosophischen Werke, pp. 59-60.

De natura locorum, ibid., pp. 65-66.
De colore, ibid., pp. 78-79.
46
among us until the present time';18 and it is his treatment of refraction that has
the greatest interest.
This part of optics [perspectiva], when well understood, shows us how we may
make things a very long distance off appear to be placed very close, and large
near things appear very small, and how we may make small things placed at a
distance appear as large as we want, so that it is possible for us to read the
smallest letters at an incredible distance, or to count sand, or grain, or seeds, or
any sort of minute objects.19
The reason, as he had learned from Euclid and Ptolemy, was 'that the size,
position and arrangement according to which a thing is seen depends on the
size of the angle through which it is seen and the position and arrangement of
the rays, and that a thing is made invisible not by great distance, except by
accident, but by the smallness of the angle of vision.' Hence 'it is perfectly clear
from geometrical reasons how, by means of a transparent medium of known
size and shape placed at a known distance from the eye, a thing of known
distance and known size and position will appear according to place, size and
position.'20
Grosseteste followed this account of magnification and diminution by
refracting media with an apparently original law of refraction, according to
which the refracted ray, on entering a denser medium, bisected the angle
between the projection of the incident ray and the perpendicular to the
interface. 'That the size of the angle in the refraction of a ray may be
determined in this way,' he concluded, 'is shown us by experiments similar to
those by which we discovered that the reflection of a ray upon a mirror takes
place at the angle equal to the angle of incidence.'21
It was also evident from the principle that nature always acts in the best and
shortest way. Grosseteste went on to use a construction of Ptolemy's to show
how to locate the refracted image, claiming again that this 'is made clear to us
by the same experiment and similar reasonings'22 as those used in a similar
construction for locating the reflected image. The first of these references to
experimental verification, since it would have been so inaccurate, may throw
doubt on all such references by Grosseteste. As was true for a great many
medieval natural philosophers, most of these references came from books or
from everyday experiences. Clearly his interest was directed primarily towards
theory. Yet he advocated and was guided by the principle of experiment and
developed its logic.
Besides these works related to optics, Grosseteste wrote important treatises
on astronomical subjects. In De sphaera, of uncertain date between perhaps
18
De irlde, ibid., p. 73. See L. Baur, Die Philosophic des Robert Grosseteste, pp. 117-118;
Crombie, Robert Grosseteste (1971), pp. 117-124.
19
De iride, in Baur, Die philosophischen Werke, p. 74.
20
Ibid., p. 75.
21
Ibid., pp. 74-75.
22
Ibid., p. 75.
Robert Grosseteste
47
1215 and 1230, and De motu supercaelestium, possibly after 1230, he

expounded elements of both Aristotelian and Ptolemaic theoretical astronomy. In a later work, De impressionibus aeris seu deprognosticatione, dating
apparently from 1249, he discussed astrological influences and, again, his
mature explanation of the tides. More original were Grosseteste's four
separate treatises on the calendar: Canon in kalendarium and Compotus;
correcting these, Compotus correctorius, probably between 1215 and 1219; and
Compotus minor, with further corrections in 1244. He showed that with the
system long in use, according to which nineteen solar years were considered
equal to 235 lunar months, in every 304 years the moon would be one day, six
minutes and forty seconds older than the calendar indicated. He pointed out in
the Compotus correctorius (cap. 10) that by his time the moon was never full
when the calendar said it should be and that this was especially obvious during
an eclipse. The error in the reckoning of Easter came from the inaccuracy both
of the year of 365.25 days and of the nineteen-year lunar cycle.
Grosseteste's plan for reforming the calendar was threefold. First, he said
that an accurate measure must be made of the length of the solar year. He
knew of three estimates of this: that of Hipparchus and Ptolemy, accepted by
the Latin computists; that of al-Battani; and that of Thabit ibn Qurra. He
discussed in detail the systems of adjustments that would have to be made in
each case to make the solstice and equinox occur in the calendar at the times
they were observed. Al-Battani's estimate, he said in the Compotus correctorius (cap. 1), 'agrees best with what we find by observation on the advance of
the solstice in our time.' The next stage of the reform was to calculate the
relation between this and the mean lunar month. For the new-moon tables of
the Kalendarium, Grosseteste had used a multiple nineteen-year cycle of
seventy-six years. In the Compotus correctorius he calculated the error this
involved and proposed the novel idea of using a much more accurate cycle of
thirty Arab lunar years, each of twelve equal months, the whole occupying
10,631 days. This was the shortest time in which the cycle of whole lunations
came back to the start. Grosseteste gave a method of combining this Arab
cycle with the Christian solar calendar and of calculating true lunations. The
third stage of the reform was to use these results for an accurate reckoning of
Easter. In the Compotus correctorius (cap. 10), he said that, even without an
accurate measure of the length of the solar year, the spring equinox, on which
the date of Easter depended, could be discovered 'by observation with
instruments or from verified astronomical tables.'23
And with Grosseteste's optics, it was Roger Bacon who first took up his
work on the calendar; and Albertus Magnus first made serious use of his
commentary on the Posterior Analytics, as did John Duns Scotus of that on the
Physics. These attentions marked the beginning of a European reputation that
23
Compotus, R. Steele, ed., pp. 215, 259.
48
continued into the early printing of his writings at Venice, the collecting of his
scientific manuscripts by John Dee, and interest in them by Thomas Hobbes.24
BIBLIOGRAPHY
i. ORIGINAL WORKS. The earliest dated printed ed. of a work by Grosseteste
is Commentaria in librosposteriorum Aristotelis (Venice, 1494; 8th ed., 1552).
It was followed by his Summa super octo librosphysicorum Aristotelis (Venice,
1498; 9th ed., 1637); Libellus dephisicis lineis angulis etfigurisper quas omnes
actiones naturales complentur (Nuremburg, 1503); De sphaera, pub. as
Sphaeraecompendium (Venice, 1508; 5th ed., 1531); and Compotus correctorius (Venice, 1518). His Opuscula (Venice, 1514; London, 1690) includes De
artibus liberalibus, De generatione sonorum, De calore solis, De generatione
stellarum, De colore, De impressionibus elementorum, De motu corporali, De
finitate motus et temporis (appearing first as the concluding section of his
commentary on the Physics), De lineis, angulis etfiguris, De natura locorum,
De luce, De motu supercaelestium, and De differentiis localibus. All these
essays, with De sphaera and the hitherto unprinted De cometis, De impressionibus aeris and De iride, were published by L. Baur in Die philosophischen
Werke des Robert Grosseteste (see below). For further modern texts see Canon
in Kalendarium, ed. by A. Lindhagen as 'Die Neumondtafel des Robertus
Lincolniensis,' in Archiv for matematik, astronomi och fysik (Uppsala)., 11
no. 2 (1916); Compotus, factus and correctionem communis kalendarii nostri,
R. Steele, ed., in Roger Bacon, Opera hactenus inedita, VI (Oxford, 1926),
212 ff.; S.H. Thomson, The Text of Grosseteste's De cometis,' in Isis, 19
(1933), 19-25; and "Grosseteste's Questio de calore, de cometis and De operacionibussolis,' in Medievalia ethumanistica, 11 (1957), 34-43; Commentarius in
viii libros physicorum Aristotelis . . . , R.C. Dales, ed. (Boulder, Colo., 1963);
and R.C. Dales, The Text of Robert Grosseteste's Questio defluxu de refluxu
maris with an English Translation,' in Isis, 57 (1966), 455-474. See also Roberti
Grosseteste episcopi quondam Lincolniensis epistolae. H.R. Luard, ed.
(London, 1861).
II. SECONDARY LITERATURE. For the fundamental work of identifying and
listing Grosseteste's writing see L. Baur, Die philosophischen Werke des
Robert Grosseteste, Bishop von Lincoln, vol. IX of Beitrdge zur Geschichte
der Philosophic des Mittelalters (Miinster, 1912); and S.H. Thomson, The
Writings of Robert Grosseteste Bishop of Lincoln 1235-1253 (Cambridge,
1940). For further discussions of his scientific writings with reference to
additional items, see D.A. Callus, The Oxford Career of Robert Grosseteste,'
24
See Crombie, Robert Grosseteste (1971); A. Pacchi, 'Ruggero Bacone e Roberto Grossetesta
in un inedito hobbesiano del. 1634,' in Rivista critica distoria dellafilosofia 20 (1965), 499-502; and
Convenzione e Ipotesi nella formazione dellafilosofia naturale di Thomas Hobbes (Florence, 1965).
Robert Grosseteste
49
in Oxoniensia, 10 (1945), 42-72; D.A. Callus, ed., Robert Grosseteste, Scholar

and Bishop (Oxford, 1955); A.C. Crombie, Robert Grosseteste and the Origins
of Experimental Science, 1100-1700 (Oxford, 1953; 3rd ed., 1971) and the
comprehensive bibliography therein; and R.C. Dales, 'Robert Grosseteste's
Scientific Works,' in Isis, 52 (1961), 381-402. The first modern biography was
F.S. Stevenson, Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln (London, 1899), while
Callus, Robert Grosseteste, judiciously sums up more recent scholarship. The
pioneering account of his scientific thought is L. Baur, Die Philosophic des
Robert Grosseteste, Bischofs von Lincoln, XVIII, nos. 4-6 of Beitrdge zur
Geschichte der Philosophic des Mittelalters (Miinster, 1917).
Further References
See A.C. Crombie, Science, Optics and Music. . ., ch. 6 (1990) 137; J.D. North, Stars, Minds and
Fate (London, 1989) 119-33; R. W. Southern, Robert Grosseteste, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1992), the basic
biography; with Robert Grosseteste, Hexaemeron, ed. R.C. Dales and S. Gieben (London, 1982);
Metafisica delta luce: Opuscolifilosofici e scientific!, introduzione, traduzione e note di Pietro Rossi
(Milano, 1986).
All science requires mathematices. . . . But only in mathematics . . . are

what are known to us and what are known in nature, or known simply,
the same.
(Roger Bacon, Opus maius iv. 1.3)
Roger Bacon (c. 1219-1292)

[with J.D. North]
Apart from some brief references in various chronicles, the only materials for
Robert Bacon's biography are his own writings. The date 1214 for his birth was
calculated by Charles, followed by Little, from his statements in the Opus
tertium (1267) that it was forty years since he had learned the alphabet and that
for all but two of these he had been 'in studio.'1 Taking this to refer to the years
since he entered the university - the usual age was then about thirteen - they
concluded that in 1267 Bacon was fifty-three and thus was born in 1214. But
Crowley has argued that his statements more probably refer to his earliest
education, beginning about the age of seven or eight, which would place his
birth about 1219 or 1220. Of his family the only good evidence comes again
from Bacon himself. He wrote in the Opus tertium that they had been
impoverished as a result of their support of Henry III against the baronial
party, and therefore could not respond to his appeal for funds for his work in
1266.2
After early instruction in Latin classics, among which the works of Seneca
and Cicero left a deep impression, Bacon seems to have acquired an interest in
natural philosophy and mathematics at Oxford, where lectures were given
from the first decade of the thirteenth century on the 'new' logic (especially
Sophistici Elenchi and Posterior Analytics) and libri naturales of Aristotle as
well as on the mathematical quadrivium. He took his M. A. either at Oxford or
at Paris, probably about 1240. Probably between 1241 and 1246 he lectured in
the Faculty of Arts at Paris on various parts of the Aristotelian corpus,
including the Physics and Metaphysics, and the pseudo-Aristotelian De
vegetabilibus (or Deplantis) and the De causis, coincident with the Aristotelian
revival there. In arguing later in his Compendium studii philosophic for the
necessity of knowledge of languages,3 he was to use an incident in which his
Spanish students laughed at him for mistaking a Spanish word for an Arabic
word while he was lecturing on De vegetabilibus. He was in Paris at the same
1
2
3
Opus tertium, Brewer ed., p. 65.

Ibid., p. 16.
Compendium studii philosophic, Brewer ed., pp. 467-468.
52
time as Albertus Magnus, Alexander of Hales (d. 1245)4 and William of

Auvergne (d. 1249).5
The radical intellectual change following Bacon's introduction to Robert
Grosseteste (c. 1168-1253) and his friend Adam Marsh on his return to Oxford
about 1247 is indicated by a famous passage in the Opus tertium:
For, during the twenty years in which I have laboured specially in the study of
wisdom, after disregarding the common way of thinking [neglecto sensu vulgi], I
have put down more than two thousand pounds for secret books and various
experiments [experientie], and languages and instruments and tables and other
things; as well as for searching out the friendships of the wise, and for instructing
assistants in languages, in figures, in numbers, and tables and instruments and
many other things.
Grosseteste's influence is evident in Bacon's particular borrowings, especially
in his optical writings, but above all in the devotion of the rest of his life to the
promotion of languages and of mathematics, optics (perspectiva), and scientia
experimentalis as the essential sciences.
He was in Paris again in 1251, where he says in the Opus maius1 that he saw
the leader of the Pastoreaux rebels. This story and some later works place him
there for long periods as a Franciscan. He entered the Franciscan order about
1257 and, soon afterwards, he also entered a period of distrust and suspicion probably arising from the decree of the chapter of Narbonne, presided over by
Bonaventura as master general in 1260, which prohibited the publication of
works outside the order without prior approval. Bonaventura had no time for
studies not directly related to theology, and on two important questions,
astrology and alchemy, he was diametrically opposed to Bacon. He held that
only things dependent solely on the motions of the heavenly bodies, such as
eclipses of the sun and moon and sometimes the weather, could be foretold
with certainty. Bacon agreed with the accepted view that predictions of human
affairs could establish neither certainty nor necessity over the free actions of
individuals, but he held that nevertheless astrology could throw light on the
future by discovering general tendencies in the influence of the stars, acting
through the body, on human dispositions, as well as on nature at large. In
alchemy Bonaventura was also sceptical about converting base metals into
gold and silver, which Bacon thought possible.
Whatever the particular reasons for Bacon's troubles within the order, he
felt it necessary to make certain proposals to a clerk attached to Cardinal Guy
de Foulques; as a result, the cardinal, soon to be elected Pope Clement IV
(February 1265), asked him for a copy of his philosophical writings. The
4
Opus minus, Brewer ed., p. 325; Opus tertium, Brewer ed., p. 30; Compendium studii
philosophic, p. 425.
5
Opus tertium, Brewer ed. pp. 74-75.
6
Ibid., p. 59.
7
Opus maius (1266-1267), Bridges ed., I, 401.
Roger Bacon
53
request was repeated in the form of a papal mandate of 22 June 1266.8 Bacon
eventually replied with his three famous works, Opus maius, Opus minus, and
Opus tertium, the last two prefaced with explanatory epistole in which he set
out his proposals for the reform of learning and the welfare of the Church. It is
reasonable to suppose that after twenty years of preparation he composed
these scripture preambule to an unwritten Scriptum principale between the
receipt of the papal mandate and the end of 1267. In that year he sent to the
pope, by his pupil John, the Opus maius with some supplements, including De
speciebus et virtutibus agentium in two versions9 and De scientiaperspectiva,10
followed (before the pope died in November 1268) by the Opus minus and
Opus tertium as resumes, corrections, and additions to it. The pope left no
recorded opinion of Bacon's proposals.
Perhaps at this time Bacon wrote his Communia naturalium and Communia
mathematica^ mature expressions of many of his theories. These were followed
in 1271 or 1272 by the Compendium studii philosophic, of which only the first
part on languages remains and in which he abused all classes of society, and
particularly the Franciscan and Dominican orders for their educational
practices. Sometime between 1277 and 1279 he was condemned and imprisoned in Paris by his order for an undetermined period and for obscure
reasons possibly related to the censure, which included heretical Averroist
propositions, by the bishop of Paris, Stephen Tempier, in 1277. The last known
date in his troubled life is 1292, when he wrote the Compendium studii
theologii.11
Scientific Thought
The Opus maius and accompanying works sent to the pope by Bacon as a
persuasio contain the essence of his conception of natural philosophy and
consequential proposals for educational reform. He identified four chief
obstacles to the grasping of truth: frail and unsuitable authority, long custom,
uninstructed popular opinion, and the concealment of one's own ignorance in
a display of apparent wisdom. There was only one wisdom, given to us by the
authority of the Holy Scriptures; but this, as he explained in an interesting
history of philosophy, had to be developed by reason, and reason on its part
was insecure if not confirmed by experience. There were two kinds of
experience, one obtained through interior mystical inspiration and the other
through the exterior senses, aided by instruments and made precise by
8
9
10
11
Brewer, p. 1.
Cf. Opus maius, Bridges ed., pt IV, dist. ii-iv; and De multiplicatione specierum, Bridges ed.
Cf. Opus maius, pt. V.
Rashdall, pp. 3, 34.
54
mathematics.12 Natural science would lead through knowledge of the nature

and properties of things to knowledge of their Creator, the whole of
knowledge forming a unity in the service and under the guidance of theology.
The necessary sciences for this programme were languages, mathematics,
optics, scientia experimentalis and alchemy, followed by metaphysics and
mortal philosophy.
Bacon leaves no doubt that he regarded himself as having struck a highly
personal attitude to most of the intellectual matters with which he dealt, but his
writings are not as unusual as the legends growing about him might suggest.
They have, on the whole, the virtues rather than the vices of Scholasticism,
which at its best involved the sifting of evidence and the balancing of authority
against authority. Bacon was conscious of the dangers of reliance on authority:
Rashdall draws attention to the irony of his argument against authority
consisting chiefly of a series of citations. Most of the content of his writings was
derived from Latin translations of Greek and Arabic authors. He insisted on
the need for accurate translations. When it was that he learned Greek himself
is not certain, but his Greek grammar may be placed after 1267, since in it he
corrected a philological mistake in the Opus tertium. He also wrote a Hebrew
grammar to help in the understanding of Scripture.
One of the most interesting and attractive aspects of Bacon is he awareness
of the small place of Christendom in a world largely occupied by unbelievers,
'and there is no one to show them the truth.'13 He recommended that
Christians study and distinguish different beliefs and try to discover common
ground in monotheism with Judaism and Islam, and he insisted that the truth
must be shown not by force but by argument and example. The resistance of
conquered people to forcible conversion, such as practised by the Teutonic
knights, was 'against violation, not to the arguments of a better sect.'14 Hence
the need to understand philosophy not only in itself but 'considering how it is
useful to the Church of God and is useful and necessary for directing the
republic of the faithful, and how far it is effective for the conversion of infidels;
and how those who cannot be converted may be kept in check no less by the
works of wisdom than the labour of war.'15 Science would strengthen the
defences of Christendom both against the external threat of Islam and the
Tartars and against the methods of 'fascination' that he believed had been used
in the Children's Crusade and the revolt of the Pastoreaux, and would be used
by the Antichrist.
Bacon's mathematics included, on the one hand, astronomy and astrology
(discussed later) and, on the other, a geometrical theory of physical causation
related to his optics. His assertions that 'in the things of the world, as regards
12
13
14
15
Opus maius, VI, 1.

Ibid., Bridges ed., Ill, 122.
Ibid., II, 377.
Opus tertium, Brewer ed., pp. 3-4.
Roger Bacon
55
their efficient and generating causes, nothing can be known without the power
of geometry' and that 'it is necessary to verify the matter of the world by
demonstration set forth in geometrical lines'16 came straight from Grosseteste's theory of multiplicatio specierum, or propagation of power (of which
light and heat were examples), and his account of the 'common corporeity'
that gave form and dimensions to all material substances. 'Every multiplication is either according to lines, or angles, of figures.'17 This theory provided
the efficient cause of every occurrence in the universe, in the celestial and
terrestrial regions, in matter and the senses, and in animate and inanimate
things. In thus trying to reduce different phenomena to the same terms,
Grosseteste and Bacon showed a sound physical insight even though their
technical performance remained for the most part weak. These conceptions
made optics the fundamental physical science, and it is in his treatment of this
subject that Bacon appears most effective. Besides Grosseteste his main
optical sources were Euclid, Ptolemy, al-Kindi, and Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen). He followed Grosseteste in emphasising the use of lenses not only for
burning but for magnification, to aid natural vision. He seems to have made an
original advance by giving constructions, based on those of Ptolemy for plane
surfaces and of Ibn al-Haytham for convex refracting surfaces, providing eight
rules (canones) classifying the properties of convex and concave spherical
surfaces with the eye in various relationships to the refracting media. He
wrote:
If a man looks at letters and other minute objects through the medium of a
crystal or of glass or of some other transparent body placed upon the letters, and
this is the smaller part of a sphere whose convexity is towards the eye, and the eye
is in the air, he will see the letters much better and they will appear larger to him.
For in accordance with the truth of the fifth rule [Fig. 1] about a spherical medium
beneath which is the object or on this side of its centre, and whose convexity is
towards the eye, everything agrees towards magnification [ad magnitudinem],
because the angle is large under which it is seen, and the image is larger, and the
position of the image is nearer, because the object is between the eye and the
centre. And therefore this instrument is useful for the aged and for those with
weak eyes. For they can see a letter, no matter how small, at sufficient
magnitude.18
According to the fifth rule,19 if the rays leaving the object, AB, and refracted at
the convex surface of the lens meet at the eye, E, placed at their focus, a
magnified image, MN, will be seen at the intersections of the diameters passing
from the centre of curvature, C, through AB to this surface and the projections
of the rays entering the eye. As he did not seem to envisage the use of
16
Opus mains, Bridges ed., I, 143-144.

Ibid., p. 112.
18
Ibid., V.iii.ii.4 (Bridges ed., II, 157).
19
Figure I is redrawn and relettered from Opus maius, V.iii.ii.3, British Museum MS Royal
V.f.viii, 13th cent., f. 93r.
17
56

E
Fig. 1
combinations of lenses, Bacon got no further than Grosseteste in speculating
about magnifications such that 'from an incredible distance we may read the
minutest letters and may number the particles of dust and sand, because of the
magnitude of the angle under which we may see them.'20
But he did make an important contribution to the history of physiological
optics in the West by his exposition of Ibn al-Haytham's account of the eye as
an image-forming device, basing his ocular anatomy on Hunayn ibn Ishaq and
Ibn Sma. In doing so, he seems to have introduced a new concept of laws of
nature (a term found in Lucretius and numerous other authors more widely
read, such as St Basil) by his reference to the 'laws of reflection and refraction'
as leges communes nature.21 His meaning is clarified by his discussion
elsewhere of a lex nature universalis22 requiring the continuity of bodies and
thus giving a positive explanation, in place of the negative horror vacui, which
he rejected, of such phenomena as water remaining in a clepsydra so long as its
upper opening remained closed - an explanation comparable to one found in
Adelard of Bath's Natural Questions. Universal nature constituted from these
common laws, including those de multiplication specierum, was superimposed
on the system of particular natures making up the Aristotelian universe - not
yet the seventeenth-century concept but perhaps a step toward it.
'Having laid down the roots of wisdom of the Latins as regards languages
and mathematics and perspective,' Bacon began Part VI of the Opus maius, 'I
wish now to unfold the roots on the part of scientia experimental, because
without experience [experientia] nothing can be known sufficiently.23 This
science, 'wholly unknown to the general run of students,' had 'three great
20
Ibid., Bridges ed., II, 165.

Opus tertium, Duhem ed., pp. 78, 90; Opus maius, Bridges ed., II, 49.
22
Ibid., 1,151; De multiplicationespecierum, ibid., II, 453; Communia naturalium, Steele ed.,
fasc. 3, pp. 220, 224.
23
Opus maius, Bridges ed., II, 167.
21
Roger Bacon
57
prerogatives with respect to the other sciences.'24 The first was to certify the
conclusions of deductive reasoning in existing speculative sciences, including
mathematics. As an example he gave an investigation of the shape and colours
of the rainbow involving both theoretical reasoning and the collection of
instances of related phenomena in order to discover their common cause. The
second prerogative was to add to existing sciences new knowledge that they
could not discover by deduction. Examples were the discovery of the
properties of the magnet, the prolonging of human life by observing what
plants produced this effect naturally in animals, and the purification of gold
beyond the present achievements of alchemy. The third prerogative was to
investigate the secrets of nature outside the bounds of existing sciences,
opening up knowledge of the past and future and the possibility of marvelous
inventions, such as ever-burning lamps and explosive powders.
It is clear that Bacon's scientia experimentalis was not exactly what this term
might now suggest, but belonged equally to 'natural magic' aimed at producing
astonishing as well as practically useful effects by harnessing the hidden powers
of nature. His approach had been profoundly influenced by the pseudoAristotelian Secretum secretorum, of which he had produced an annotated
edition variously dated between 1243 and sometime before 1257, but he also
insisted that his new science would expose the frauds of magicians by revealing
the natural causes of effects. The 'dominus experimentorum' of the Opus
tertium25 who may have been Pierre de Maricourt, the pioneer investigator of
magnetism, is praised for understanding all these essential characteristics. In
the Opus minus,26 Bacon described possibly original experiments of his own
with a lodestone held above and below a floating magnet, and argued that it
was not the Nautical (Pole) Star that caused its orientation, or simply the north
part of the heavens, but all four parts equally. It was in this work, and in the
Opus tertium27 that he inserted his main discussion of alchemy, including the
conversion of base metals into gold and silver. There is a further discussion in
the Communia naturalium,28 together with sketches of the sciences of
medicine and agriculture. In the Communia mathematical and the Epistola de
secretis operibus artis et naturae et de nullitate magiae,30 he described more
wonderful machines for flying, lifting weights, and driving carriages, ships and
submarines, and so on, which he believed had been made in antiquity and
could be made again.
Despite his occasional references to them, Bacon in his accredited writings
deals with neither instruments nor mathematical tables in any but a superficial
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
Ibid., p. 172.
Brewer ed., pp. 46-47.
Ibid., pp. 383-384.
Little ed., pp. 80-89.
Steeleed.,fasc. 2, pp. 6-8.
Steele ed., fasc, 16, pp. 42-44.
Brewer ed., p. 533.
58
way. For this reason it is hard to measure his stature by comparison with that of
his contemporaries whom we should call astronomers and mathematicians.
We are not encouraged to set great store by the stories that while in Paris he
constructed astronomical tables and supplied the new masters with geometrical problems that none of their audiences could solve.31 His mathematics and
astronomy were in fact almost wholly derivative, and he was not always a good
judge of competence, preferring, for instance, al-Bitruji to Ptolemy.
Bacon is often held to have achieved a deep and novel insight in regard to
the role of mathematics in science, an insight that to the modern mind is almost
platitudinous. In this connection it is easy to forget the large numbers of
astronomers of antiquity and the middle ages for whom mathematics was an
essential part of the science, and the smaller numbers of natural philosophers
who had made use of simpler mathematical techniques than those of
astronomy. It is more to the point to notice that Bacon argues for the
usefulness of mathematics in almost every realm of academic activity. Part IV
of the Opus maius is devoted to the usefulness of mathematics (1) in human
affairs (this section was published separately as the Specula mathematica); (2)
in divine affairs, such as chronology, the fixing of feasts, natural phenomena,
arithmetic and music; (3) in ecclesiastical affairs, such as the certification of
faith and the emendation of the calendar; and (4) in affairs of state, under
which heading are included geography and astrology. When Bacon sang the
praises of mathematics, 'the first of the sciences,' 'the door and key of the
sciences,' 'the alphabet of philosophy,' it has to be remembered that he used
the word in an unusually wide sense. Bacon seemed to fear that mathematics
would be dismissed as one of the blacker arts, as when arithmetic was applied
to geomancy. He sought 'per vias mathematics verificare omnia que in
naturalibus scientias sunt necessaria', and yet in the last resort, experience was
still necessary, and in a sense supreme.32
So loud and long were Bacon's praises of the mathematics that it is hard to
avoid the conclusion that his love of the subject was unrequited. He could
compose his De communibus mathematice and mention, in geometry, nothing
beyond definitions, axioms, and methods. Apart from mathematically trivial
results in such practical contexts as engineering, optics, astronomy and the
like, his works apparently contain not a single proof, not a single theorem; and
we must take on trust the story of the difficult problem he devised for the
young Paris masters. As for his analytical skills and his views on the citation of
authority, rather than try to resolve the geometrical paradox of the doctrine of
atomism - that it can make the hypotenuse and side of a square commensurable - he preferred simply to dismiss it as being contrary to Euclid.
The standard discussion of ratios in Euclid, Book V, did not include a
numerical treatment of the subject, for which the standard medieval authority
31
32
Opus tertium, Brewer ed., pp. 7, 36, 38.

See, e.g., Opus maius, Bridges ed., II, 172-173.
Roger Bacon
59
was the Arithmetica of Boethius. There the different species of ratio are
tediously listed and subdivided, and the absence of a similar logical division of
ratio in Euclid was complained of by Bacon in Communia mathematical3 He
was not to carry out the programme at which he might seem to have hinted,
and not until Bradwardine's Geometria speculativa did the Schoolmen make
any progress toward a numerical description of irrational ratios, except
perhaps in some halting attempts to elucidate Proposition III of Archimedes'
De mensura circuit.
As for the relation of logic to mathematics, Bacon inverted, in a sense, the
logistic thesis of our own century: without mathematics, for instance, the
categories were unintelligible.34 Mathematics alone gave absolute certainty.
Bacon was unusual in that he generally named his sources, citing such authors
as Theodosius, Euclid, Ptolemy, al-Farabi, and - among modern writers Jordanus de Nemore (De triangulis and Arithmetica} and Adelard. Despite his
criticism of Jordanus, by any reckoning a better mathematician than Bacon, he
had praise for 'the only two perfect mathematicians' (of his time), John of
London and Pierre de Maricourt. He also condescended to praise Campanus
of Novara and a 'Master Nicholas,' teacher of Amauri, son of Simon de
Montfort. In the last analysis, almost everything Bacon wrote under the title of
mathematics is best regarded as being at a metaphysical level. His view that in
mathematics we have perfect demonstration reinforced his theory of natural
action. His philosophy of science, however, was inherently empiricist: rational
argument may cause us to dismiss a question, but it neither gives us proof nor
removes doubt.
It was held in the Opus maius that a more accurate knowledge of the
latitudes and longitudes of placed was needed for (1) knowledge of mankind
and the natural world; (2) facilitation of the spiritual government of the
world - missionaries, for example, would be saved from danger and from
much wasted labour; (3) knowledge of the whereabouts of the ten tribes and
even of the Antichrist. His geography was nevertheless a compilation of works
on descriptive geography (in which he gave, as it were, an extended verbal map
of the world) by such writers as Ptolemy and al-Farghani, supplemented by the
reports of Franciscan travellers, especially to the East.
In the Opus maius35 he stated the possibility of voyaging from Spain to
India. The passage was inserted, without reference to its source, in the Imago
mundi36 of Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly (d. 1420). Humboldt argued that this
passage, quoted by Columbus in a letter of 1498 to Ferdinand and Isabella, was
more important in the discovery of America than the Toscanelli letters.
Thorndike suggests that Columbus probably did not read the vital work until
33
34
35
36
Steeleed.,fasc. 16, p. 80.

Opus maius, Bridges ed., I, 102; cf. Communia mathematica, Steele ed., fasc. 16, p. 16.
Bridges ed., I, 290 ff.
Imago mundi was first published at Louvain in 1480 or 1487.
60
his return from the first voyage of 1492.37 It is immaterial, as Thorndike points
out, whether Bacon was merely optimistically citing Aristotle, Seneca, Nero,
and Pliny on the distance of Spain from India. In fact Bacon argued as cogently
from such longitudes and latitudes as were available in the Toledan tables as he
did from classical authors.
For the radius of the earth Bacon took a figure of 3,245 miles (al-Farghani).
He stated that the earth's surface was less than three-quarters water. In both
cases he selected good figures from a great many authoritative but bad ones. It
is clear, nevertheless, from his repetition of the method of determining the size
of the earth - a method he took from al-Farghani - that he had no appreciation
whatsoever of the practical difficulties it involved.
Bacon appears to have sent a map to the pope with his Opus mains.
Although it is now lost, from the description he gave it appears to have
included the better known towns of the world plotted by their latitudes and
longitudes as found in many contemporaneous lists.38 We have no knowledge
of the projection adopted, but the description is compatible with the use of a
rectangular co-ordinate system.
Bacon used the words 'astronomia' and 'astrologia' in a typically ambiguous
manner, but there is no doubt that he believed in the reasonableness of what
we would call astrology. In the Opus tertium he spoke of astrology as the most
important part of mathematics, dividing it into a speculative, or theoretical,
part, presumably of the sort included in Sacrobosco's Sphere, and a practical
part, 'que dicitur astronomia,'39 concerned with the design of instruments and
tables.40 A remark in the Opus maius,41 written in 1267, confirms a similar
remark made four years later by Robertus Anglicus,42 to the effect that
conscious efforts were being made to drive what amounts to a clock (in Bacon's
example the spherical astrolabe was to be driven) at a constant rate. This
seems to confirm approximately the terminus ante quern non previously
determined for the mechanical clock.
On many occasions Bacon emphasised at length that the two sorts of
'astrology' were essential if man was to learn of the celestial influences on
which terrestrial happenings depended. By reference to Ptolemy, Haly Ibn
Sina, Abu Ma'shar, Messahala, and others, he showed that the best
astrologers had not held that the influence of the stars subjugated the human
will, and that the Fathers who objected to astrology on these grounds had
37
A History of Magic and Experimental Science, II, 645.

Bridges ed., I, 300.
39
Cf. Communia mathematica, Steele ed., fasc. 16, p. 49.
40
Brewer ed., p. 106. Since in ch. XII of the same work he seems to have used the word 'tables'
to refer primarily to almanacs, i.e., ephemerides, and to have spoken of instruments only as a
means of verifying tables, it is probable that here he meant to refer only to the astrolabe and the
equatorium.
41
Bridges ed., II, 202-203.
42
See L. Thorndike, The Sphere ofSacrobosco and Its Commentators (Chicago, 1949), p. 72.
38
Roger Bacon
61
never denied that astrology could throw light on future events. It was possible
to predict human behaviour statistically but not with certainty in individual
cases. Astrology might strengthen faith in the stability of the Church and
foretell the fall of Islam and the coming of the Antichrist; and all these things
'ut auctores docent et experiencia certificat.'43 On occasion he likened
astrological influence to the influence of a magnet over iron.
In his main works Bacon did not discuss the technicalities of astronomy or
astrology, but in both of the works ascribed to him with the title De diebus
creticis44 the standard medical astrology of the time is rehearsed. These works
are not merely compilations of older authorities. Although technically they are
in no sense new, they have a rational cast and even include the testimony of
medical men of the time. The first of these two works is interesting because it
incorporates the whole of the De impressione aeris attributed to Grosseteste
and printed among his works by Baur. Little45 suggests that Grosseteste (d.
1253) collaborated with Bacon. Internal evidence suggests a date of composition of about 1249. Some planetary positions quoted for that year are
sufficiently inaccurate to suggest that the work was written before 1249 rather
than after, and that the author was by no means as skilled as the best
astronomers of the time.
The Speculum astronomic, of doubtful authorship (see below), is inconsistent with certain of Bacon's accredited writings. It is essentially a criticism of
Stephen Tempier's decree of 1277 attacking 219 errors, several involving a
belief in astrology. As already seen, Bacon's prison sentence was probably
related to the bishop's decrees.
Bacon's astronomical influence was slight in all respects, although through
Paul of Middleburg he is said to have influenced Copernicus.46 His writings on
the calendar were frequently cited.47 Theologians treated the calendar with a
respect it did not deserve, regarding it as a product of astronomy, while
astronomers would have treated it with more disdain had they been detached
enough to perceive it in a historical context. Here Bacon's scepticism was
useful, and whatever the depth of his astronomical knowledge, he wrote on
calendar reform with as much insight as anyone before Regiomontanus Nicholas of Cusa notwithstanding. In discussing the errors of the Julian
calendar, he asserted that the length of the Julian year (365 1A days) was in
excess of the truth by about one day in 130 years, later changing this to one day
in 125 years. The length of the (tropical) year implied was better than
43
Opus maius, I, 385.

Steele ed., fasc. p, appendices ii and iii, ed. Little.
45
Little, ibid., p. xxx.
46
Bridges ed., I, xxxiii, 292.
47
See bibliography. Note that the same passage occurs, word for word, in Opus tertium,
Brewer ed., pp. 271-292; and in Opus maius, Bridges ed., I, 281. Notice, however, that the
Computus, written 1263-1265, does not contain any passage from either of these works, and that it
acknowledges Arabic, rather than paying lip service to Hebrew, sources.
44
62
Ptolemy's, and indeed better than that accepted in the Alphonsine tables
compiled a few years after the Opus maius. (The correct figure for Bacon's
time was one day in a little over 129 years.) The Alphonsine tables imply that
the Julian error is one day in about 134 years. There is no reason whatsoever to
suppose, as many have done following Augustus De Morgan, that Bacon's
data were his own. Thabit ibn Qurra made the length of the year shorter than
the Julian year by almost exactly one day in 130 years, and according to a
curious passage in the Communia naturalium Thabit was 'maximus Christianorum astronomus.' In the Computus, however, Thabit is grouped with alBattanl and others who are said to have argued for one day in 106 years, while
Asophus ('Abd al-Rahman ibn 'Umar al-Sufi) appears to have been the most
probable source of influence, with his one day in 131 years.48
As a means of reforming the calendar, Bacon seems finally to have
recommended the removal of one day in 125 years (cf. the Gregorian method
of ignoring three leap years in four centuries), and in connection with Easter,
since the nineteen-year cycle is in error, the astronomical calculation of the
feast; otherwise a lunisolar year like that of the eastern nations should be
adopted. (Grosseteste had previously made this proposal.) He tempered this
rash suggestion with the pious qualification that if an astronomical calculation
of Easter was to be adopted, Hebrew astronomical tables should be used. His
proposals may be compared with the much less radical ones of Nicholas of
Cusa, who in his Reparatio calendarii (pre-1437?) merely suggested a
temporary patching up of the calendar, eliminating a number of days to alter
the equinox suitably (Gregorian reform, supervised by Clavius, took the same
superfluous step) and changing the 'golden number' so as to make the
ecclesiastical moon correspond for a time with reality. These solutions were
inferior to Bacon's, including fewer safeguards against a future state of affairs
in which Church usage and the ordinances of the Fathers might differ
appreciably. It is worth noting that Stoffler proposed to omit one day in 134
years (an obviously Alphonsine parameter), while Pierre d'Ailly followed
Bacon explicitly in advocating a lunisolar cycle. Again, in connection with a
proposal for calendar reform in England, we find that in 1582 John Dee
commended Bacon to Queen Elizabeth as one who had 'instructed and
admonished' the 'Romane Bishopp,' who was now 'contented to follow so
neare the footsteps of veritye.'49 Judging by the speed of English legislation in
the matter of calendar reform, it seems that Bacon was a little less than five
centuries ahead of most of his countrymen.
Little wrote in 1914, The extant manuscripts of Bacon's works show that the
"Doctor mirabilis never wanted admirers,"'50 and cited as evidence the
48
49
50
Steele ed., fasc. 6, pp. 12-18.

Corpus Christi College, Oxford, MS C. 254, f. 161r.
Pp. 30-31.
Roger Bacon
63
existence of twenty-seven manuscripts of the Perspective?1 alone, dating from

the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Apart from his proposals for the
calendar it was on Bacon's optics that most scientific value was placed, by his
contemporary Witelo as well as by Francesco Maurolico, John Dee, Leonard
Digges, Hobbes, and the first editors of his works. At the same time his
accounts of alchemy and natural magic gave him more dubious fame, varying
from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries with current popular prejudices.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
i. ORIGINAL WORKS. A number of Baconian problems must remain unsolved
until there is a complete critical edition of his works: see the bibliography by
Little in Roger Bacon: Essays (Oxford, 1914), pp. 375-426; compare G.
Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science, II (Baltimore, 1931), 963-967;
and L. Thorndike and P. Kibre, A Catalogue oflncipits of Mediaeval Scientific
Writings in Latin (2nd ed., Cambridge, Mass. 1963.
The earliest of Bacon's authentic works to be printed was the Epistola de
secretis operibus artis et naturae (De mirabili potestate artis et naturae) (Paris,
1542; Basel, 1593); in the Opera, J. Dee, ed. (Hamburg, 1618); in French
(Lyons, 1557; Paris, 1612,1629); in English (London, 1597,1659); in German
(Eisleben, 1608); and other eds. After this appeared the De retardandis
senectutis accidentibus et de sensibus conservandis (Oxford, 1590; in English,
London, 1683); and Specula mathematica (part of Opus maius IV); in qua De
specierum multiplication earumdemque in inferioribus virtute agitur and
Perspectiva (Opus maius V), both ed. J. Combach (Frankfurt, 1614). There
were other early eds. of the doubtful Speculum alchemiae (Nuremburg, 1541;
in French, 1557; English, 1597; German, 1608; with later reissues) and the
collection De arte chymiae scripta (Frankfurt, 1603, 1620).
The 1st ed. of the Opus maius was by S. Jebb (London, 1733), followed by
an improved ed. (Venice, 1750), both including only pts. I-VI. Pr. VII was
included in the new ed. by J.H. Bridges, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1897), with a supp.
vol. (Ill) of revisions and additional notes (London, 1900). This ed. was trans,
into English by R.B. Burke (Philadelphia, 1928). Pt. VII of the actual MS sent
to the pope has been ed. by E. Massa, Rogeri Baconi Moralis philosophia
(Zurich, 1953). The eds. of Jebb and Bridges (Vols. II and III, pp. 183-185)
both include De multiplication specierum, a separate treatise forming part of a
larger work; a further section of this has been ed. with a discussion of its date
and associations by F.M. Delorme, 'Le prologue de Roger Bacon a son traite
De influentiis agentium,' in Antionianum, 18 (1943), 81-90.
The 1st eds. of the Opus minus and the Opus tertium, together with the
Compendium studii philosophic and a new ed. of the Epistola de secretis
51
Opus maius, pt. v.
64
operibus, were by J.S. Brewer in Fr. Rogeri Bacon Opera quaedam hactenus
inedita (London, 1859). Further sections of the first two works have been ed.
by F. A. Gasquet, 'An Unpublished Fragment of Roger Bacon,' in The English
Historical Review, 12 (1897), 494-517, a prefatory letter and other parts of
Opus minus; P. Duhem. Un fragment inedit de I'Opus tertium de Roger Bacon
(Quaracchi, 1909), on optics, astronomy, and alchemy; and A.G. Little, Part
of the Opus tertium of Roger Bacon, British Society of Franciscan Studies, IV
(Aberdeen, 1912). The last two items include Bacon's De enigmatibus alkimie.
For further parts of the Opus minus, including discussions of alchemy, still
unpublished, see A. Pelzer, 'Une source inconnue de Roger Bacon, Alfred de
Sareshel, commentateur des Meteorologiques d'Aristote,' in Archivium
Frandscanum historicum, 12 (1919), 44-67.
Other works have been ed. by E. Nolan and S.A. Hirsch, The Greek
Grammar of Roger Bacon, and a Fragment of His Hebrew Grammar
(Cambridge, 1902); H. Rashdall, Fratris Rogeri Baconi Compendium studii
theologii, British Society of Franciscan Studies, III (Aberdeen, 1911); S.H.
Thomson, 'An Unnoticed Treatise of Roger Bacon on Time and Motion,' in
Isis, 27 (1937), 219-224; and in Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Baconi, R.
Steele, ed. (unless otherwise stated), 16 fasc. (Oxford, 1905-1940): (1)
Metaphysical De viciis contractis in studio theologie (1905); (2-4) Communia
naturalium (1905-1913); (5) Secretum secretorum cum glossis et notulis (1920);
(6) Computus (1926); (7) Questiones supra undecimum prime philosophic
Aristotelis (Metaphysica, XII) (1926); (8) Questiones supra libros quatuor
physicorum Aristotelis, F.M. Delorme, ed. (1928); (9) De retardatione
accidentium senectutis cum aliis opusculis de rebus medicinalibus, A.G. Little
and E. Withington, eds. (1928); (10) Questiones supra libros prime philosophic
Aristotelis (Metaphysica, I, II, V-X) (1930); (11) Questiones altere supra libros
prime philosophic Aristotelis (Metaphysica, I-IV), Questiones supra de plantis
(1932); (12) Questiones supra librum de causis (1935); (13) Questiones supra
libros octo physicorum Aristotelis, F.M. Delorme, ed. (1935); (14) Liber de
sensu et sensato, Summa de sophismatibus et distinctionibus (1937); (15)
Summa grammatica, Sumule dialectices (1940); and (16) Communia mathematica (1940). The Chronica XXIV generalium ordinis minorum (ca. 1370) was
pub. inAnalecta Franciscana, 3 (1897).
II. SECONDARY LITERATURE. The best critical study of Bacon's life is T.
Crowley, Roger Bacon: The Problem of the Soul in His Philosophical
Commentaries (Louvain-Dublin, 1950). The pioneering study by E. Charles,
Roger Bacon: Sa vie, ses ouvrages, ses doctrines d'apres des textes inedits (Paris,
1861), is now mostly of historical interest. Essential studies are A.G. Little,
ed., Roger Bacon: Essays Contributed by Various Writers (Oxford, 1914),
especially contributions by Little (life and works), L. Baur (Grosseteste's
influence), Hirsch (philology), E. Wiedemann, S. Vogl, and E. Wiirschmidt
(optics), Duhem (vacuum), M.M.P. Muir (alchemy), E. Withington (medicine)' and I.E. Sandys (English literature); Little, Franciscan Letters, Papers
and Documents (Manchester, 1943); L. Thorndike, A History of Magic and
Roger Bacon
65
Experimental Science, II (New York, 1929), 616-691; S.C. Easton, Roger

Bacon and His Search for a Universal Science (Oxford, 1952), with bibliography; and F. Alessio, Mito e scienza in Ruggero Bacone (Milan, 1957).
Studies of particular aspects are E. Schlund, Tetrus Peregrinus von
Maricourt: Sein Leben unsd seine Schriften,' in Archivum Fransiscanum
historicum, 4 (1911), 445-449, 636-643; L. Baur, 'Die philosophischen Werke
des Robert Grosseteste,' in Beitrage zur Geschichte der Philosophic des
Mittelalters, 9 (1912), 52-63 and 'Die Philosophic des Robert Grosseteste,'
ibid., 18 (1917), 92-120; P. Duhem, Le systeme du monde (Paris, 1916-1958),
III, 260-277, 411-442, V, 375-411, VIII, 121-168; A. Birkenmajer, 'tudes sur
Witelo, i-iv,' in Bulletin international de I'Academie polanaise des sciences et
des lettres, Classe d'histoire et de philosophis (1920), 354-360 and 'Robert
Grosseteste and Richard Fournival,' in Mediaevalia et humanistica, 5 (1948),
36-41; R. Carton, L'experience physique chez Roger Bacon, L'experience
mystique de I 'illumination interieure chez Roger Bacon, La synthese doctrinale
de Roger Bacon, nos. 2, 3, 5 in the series Etudes de philosophic medievale
(Paris, 1924); C.B. Vandewalle, Roger Bacon dans I'histoire de la philologie
(Paris, 1929); G. Meyer, 'En quel sens peut-on parler de "methode scientifique" de Roger Bacon,' in Bulletin de litterature ecclesiastique (Toulouse), 53
(1952), 3-25, 77-98; A.C. Crombie, Roger Grosseteste and the Origins of
Experimental Science 1100-1700, 3rd imp. (Oxford, 1971), pp. 41, 139-162,
204-207,213-218,278-281, with bibliography and The Mechanistic Hypothesis
and the Scientific Study of Vision,' in Proceedings of the Royal Microscopical
Society, 2 (1967), 20-30, 43-45; M. Schramm, 'Aristotelianism: Basis and
Obstacle to Scientific Progress in the Middle Ages,' in History of Science, 2
(1963), 104-108; and A. Pacchi, 'Ruggero Bacone e Roberto Grossatesta in un
inedito hobbesiano del 1634,' in Rivista critica di storia filosofia, 20 (1965),
499-502.
Further References
See A.C. Crombie, Science, Optics and Music . . . (1990) 258, 284, Styles of Scientific Thinking
. . . (1994); J.N.G. Hackett, The Meaning of Experimental Science (Scientia experimentalis) in the
Philosophy of Roger Bacon (University of Toronto doctoral thesis, 1983), Roger Bacon: An
annotated bibliography (New York, forthcoming); D.C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from AlKindi to Kepler (Chicago, 1976), Studies in the History of Medieval Optics (London, 1983); with
Roger Bacon, Philosophy of Nature, a critical ed. with English trans!., introd. and notes of De
multiplication specierum and De speculis comburentibus by D.C. Lindberg (Oxford, 1983).
The most customary course of all this nature has certain natural laws
of its own according to which both the spirit of life, which is in a
creature, has in some way certain settled desires of its own, which even
malevolence cannot overcome, and the elements of this corporeal world
have their settled power and quality, what any one of them may or may
not effect and what may or may not come from what.
(St. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram ix. 17)
Infinite Power and the Laws of Nature:

A Medieval Speculation
A fundamental problem for any system of thought is the validation of its first
principles. This was the problem to which the earliest Greek mathematicians and
philosophers had to address themselves in their search for principles which established the characteristically Western style of abstract thinking. They assumed that
they were dealing with a stable world, both of thought and of existence, of which
the principles had to be found. But what if an even more fundamental principle
was postulated on which that Stability depended, a principle of unlimited or infinite
power capable of changing the principles of the world? What, further, if this principle was essentially inscrutable? That was the question to which Western philosophers
had to address themselves when dealing with the confrontation, during the 13th
and 14th centuries, of Greek cosmology and metaphysics (especially of Aristotle)
with the accepted Christian doctrine that the world had been created by an omnipotent and utterly undeterminable agent. I want to consider briefly the consequences
for natural philosophy of that doctrine. We are familiar with the effects on physical
science of fundamental conceptual changes, such as those brought about by using
statistical instead of mechanical postulates and by the postulates of relativity. We
may look at the effects of this Hebrew-Christian postulate of creation on Greek
physics and metaphysics in a similar way, remembering of course that this was not
a scientific postulate but one believed to have been handed down to mankind by
revelation from the First Principle itself.
The postulate of creation obliged medieval natural philosophers to rethink some
basic assumptions of the Greek physics and metaphysics, with which they became
familiar through the texts and Latin translations made available in Western Europe
during the 12th and 13th centuries. They had to rethink the question of natural
necessity involved in the regularities of nature, and the conception of causality both
as existing in nature and as knowable by man. Out of these considerations came
a new conception of laws of nature, in the form to become a scientific commonplace
in the writings of Descartes, Boyle and Newton. So let us look briefly at the history
of conceptions of natural necessity, law-like regularities and eventually laws of nature,
as they appeared with diverse meanings depending on the context of assumptions
about the nature of things. Essentially they were of two kinds: (1) as conceived
68
by Plato, Aristotle, the Greek atomists and the Stoics, intrinsic in the existing world;
(2) as conceived in Hebrew and Christian thought, laid down by the external creator
of the world. Both involved a comparison between moral laws of mankind and physical laws of nature, a comparison requiring clarification in the course of scientific
history. I will first say something briefly about the history of these questions, and
then come finally to the effect of the postulate of the infinite power of the creator
of nature upon the conception of laws of nature as established by the 17th century.
The notion that nature followed inescapable laws or regularities was a fundamental conception introduced by the earliest Greek philosophers in contrast with earlier
beliefs. The Babylonian astronomers for example had developed highly sophisticated
arithmetical methods of calculating and predicting the movements of the heavenly
bodies, within a system of beliefs in which those movements (and indeed everything
that happened in the world) were carried out by the arbitrary wills of supernatural
beings. The order of things was then a kind of legal or sociological order of arrangements between these beings. By contrast, the Greeks introduced two fundamental
and related concepts: that of causality, which allowed for no freedom of action
outside an exclusive causal order of things (I pass over the questions of chance
and uncertainty which they also discussed); and that of proof from established or
assumed first principles. These were related: effects followed from postulated causes
just as consequences followed from postulated premises. Related also were the decision of questions by argument and evidence, as distinct from edict, custom, revelation etc., and the introduction of models embodying mathematical necessity and
physical causality, such as Eudoxus's cosmological model postulating the celestial
spheres.
The order of nature so postulated was at once mathematical and physical, and
also moral, and this combination was to characterize conceptions of nature (in different ways according to varying contexts of general beliefs) down through the 19th
century, and in some respects residually does so still. For Homer and Hesiod nature
(physis) was at once a physical and a moral order, in the sense that what was allotted
by destiny (tnoira) happened both necessarily and also rightly in the physical world
and in human affairs alike. A notion of law as distinct from custom or usage appeared
in the meaning given to nomos as the dispensation of Zeus. Nomos then came to
signify, beyond the normal processes and habitual behaviour of nature and mankind,
the regular and rightful functions that ought to be exercised within the allotted
limits of necessity 0). The changing significance of nature, necessity, law and related terms in Greek, Latin and later languages marked the changing contexts and
contents of European natural philosophy. When the divine craftsman of the Timaeus
0) Cf. F. M. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy, Cambridge 1912; Idem, The Laws of Motion
in the Ancient World, Cambridge 1931; P. Brunei and A. Mieli, Histoire des sciences: Antiquite, Paris
1935; F. Heinimann, Nomos und Physis, Basel 1935; H. and H. A. Frankfort, J. A. Wilson and T.
fakobsen, The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, Chicago 1946; B. Snell, The Discovery of the Mind,
trans. T. G. Rosenmeyer, Oxford 1953; G. Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity, Providence,
R. I. 19572; W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, 6 vols., Cambridge 1962-81. This paper
s based on my discussion of the subject in my: Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition,
London 1994, > with full documentation and bibliography.
Infinite Power and the Laws of Nature
69
fashioned the world by imposing his moral design upon the materials given in the
nature of the universe by the laws of destiny (TKXV-CO? qnicnv v6[xou$ TOU<; eifiapfjievou<;)
(4IE), the consequence was a mixed results of the combination of necessity and
reason. Reason overcame necessity by persuading her to guide the greatest part of
the things that become towards what is best (48A). The demiurge could in this
way fashion the world, but he did not create it, as did the omnipotent Jehovah
in contemporary Hebrew doctrine, out of nothing, with an existence entirely external
to and dependent upon himself. In the Latinized and Christianized Plato, this distinction was to be confused, as was the Platonic conception of law as a necessity
rather arising from the materials given than laid down by divine decree. Thus Calcidius in the fourth or fifth century A.D. translated Timaeus (4IE) as [...] universae rei
naturam spectare iussit kgesque immutabilis decreti docuit ostendens (2). Ficino translated this a millemum later as monstravit universi naturam, at leges fatales edixit,
and another phrase contrary to the established use of nature (rcapa TOU? -afc (puae<oc
v6|iou$) as ex confronts praeter naturae Ieges (83E) (3). It was their ambiguous use
of leges, both for the necessity inherent in the nature of things and for the normal
processes of natural things, that confused the issue in Plato, and pointed towards
the naturales leges of a different intellectual context in which nature was constituted
entirely of laws laid down by an omnipotent and eternal creator and remained entirely dependent upon his will. This conception of nature and of naturales leges was
to be established in Latin Christian philosophy by Augustine of Hippo.
The alternative atomist conception of laws of nature arising entirely out of
the necessity in the nature of matter alone, without any divine lawgiver or provindential design, was set out by Lucretius, following essentially Epicurus. For in the nature
given in his title De rerum natura, deliberately recalling many earlier treatises, it
stands ordained what all things severally can do by the laws of nature (per foedera
natural), and what too they cannot* (I, 586) (4). In the generation of the world
from the common first-beginnings of things (primordia rerum) it was of great importance with what others and in what position they are held together and what
movements they mutually give and receive*; for the same primordia constituted the
sky, earth, sea, living things and other things of all kinds, but only when mingled
and moving with different things in different ways. Likewise in his own verses
many common letters or many elements (elementa) common to many words gave
rise to many differences in both sense and sound: So great is the power of elements
by a mere change of order. But the first-beginnings of things can bring more means
(2) Plato, Timaeus, a Calcidio translates commentarioque instructus, ed. J. H. Waszink, London &
Leiden 1962; cf. M. B. Foster, The Christian Doctrine of the Creation and the Rise of Modem Natural
Science, in Mind, N.S. XLIII (1934), pp. 446-68; Idem, Christian Theology and Modern Science of Nature,
ibid., N.S. XLIV (1935), pp. 439-66, and XLV (1936), pp. 1-27; L. Spitzer, Classical and Christian
Ideas of World Harmony, in Traditio II (1944), pp. 409-64, and III (1945), pp. 307-64; J. C. M.
Van Winden, Chalcidius on Matter, Leiden 1959; J. H. Waszink, Studien zur Timaios Kommentar des
Calcidius, Leiden 1964.
(3) Plato, Operum a Marsilio Ficino tralatorum tomi quinque..., Lyons 1550, vol. IV, pp. 889, 964.
(*) Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. C. Bailey, 3 vols., Oxford 1947; cf. Virgil, Georgics, I, 60-1;
Seneca, Naturales quaestiones, VI, 1, 12; Pliny, Naturalis historia, II, 5, 27 and 27, 97; Epicure, Opere,
ed. by G. Arrighetti, Turin 19732; C. Bailey, The Greek Atomists and Epicurus, Oxford 1928; K. Reich,
Der historische Ursprung des Naturgesetzbegriffs, in Festschrift Ernst Kapp, Hamburg 1958, pp. 121-134.
70
to bear, by which all diverse things may be created* (I, 817-29). But in nature
not by design did the first-beginnings of things place themselves each in their
order with keen intelligence*, but rather, by trying every kind of motion and union,
at length they fall into such dispositions as those of which this created sum of
things consists* (I, 1021-2, 1026-8). Thus
the bodies of the first-beginnings in the ages past moved with the same motion
as now, and hereafter will be borne on forever in the same way; such things as
have been wont to come to being will be brought to birth under the same conditions
[II, 297-301].
In this endless process
neither can the motions of destruction prevail for ever, and bury life in an eternal
tomb, nor yet can the motions of creation and increase for ever bring things to
birth and preserve them. So war waged from time everlasting is carried on by balanced strife of the first-beginnings. Now here, now there, the vital forces of things
conquer and are conquered alike [II, 569-76].
Just as the common letters of the alphabet gave rise to many different words
and meanings, so the first-beginnings common to many things* could make up
wholes different from one another* (II, 695-8). But just as in living things all
are born of fixed seeds and a fixed parent and can as they grow preserve their
kind, so always what happened must come about in a fixed way (certa fieri ratione).
It was not only living things in their generation that were bound by these laws
(teneri legibus hisce), but the same condition (ratio) sets a limit to all things* (II,
707-10, 718-9). We should not then assume purpose in asking by what law (foedus)
all things are created, and how they must of necessity abide by it, nor can they
break through the firm ordinances of everlasting time (aevi [...] leges) (V, 56-58).
By the same laws of nature arose everything attributed to the gods. The world
was too imperfect to be of divine origin, so great are the faults with which it
stands beset* (199). Thus each of these things comes forth after its own manner,
and all preserve their separate marks by a fixed law of nature (foedere naturae certo)
(923-4). One should look for such laws in everything, as in the generation of living
things, or as one asked by what law of nature it comes about that iron can be
attracted by the stone which the Greeks call the magnet, from the name of its
native place* (VI, 906-8). Or again one must look similarly for the law that gave
rise to language, by which man got the first power to know and see in his mind
what he wanted to do* (V, 1049).
The first systematic confrontation of Greek thought with the Hebrew theology
of creation came in the 1st century B.C. with Philo Judaeus of Alexandria (5). The
last great thinker of a line of Hellenized Jews in Alexandria who set out to reformulate Greek philosophy in terms of that theology, Philo in turn came both directly
(') Philo ludaeus, Opera, Geneva 1613; with English translation by F. H. Colson and G. H. Whitaker, 10 vols. with 2 supplements trans. R. Marcus, London 1929-62; Lei oeuvres, ed. by R. Arnaldez,
J. Pouilloux, C. Mondesert, 16 vols., Paris 1961-67; cf. H. A. Wolfson, Pbilo, 2 vols., Cambridge,
MA 1947; R. Arnaldez et Al, Philon d'Alexandrie, Paris 1967.
71
and through Augustine and other routes to affect profoundly the formulation of
later Christian, Moslem and Jewish thinking about the relation of God to the world
and to mankind. Philo accepted the Greek conception of immutable causality which
determined the order of the world, but he was at pains to identify the true source
of that order. He made use of the Stoic terms logos and logos spermatikos, seminal
principle or reason (6), but gave them a different meaning. He argued with the support of Scripture that God did not act as Aristotle had maintained as an essentially
passive first cause coeternal with the world emanating by necessity from the divine
reason, that God did not make the world out of preexisting matter as in the Timaeus,
that God was neither material nor within the world as supposed by the Stoics,
and that God was in no way necessitated, but that he had acted with entirely
free omnipotence in creating ex nihilo a world separate from himself. Philo used
the term logos for principles that entered into this process first as the rational pattern
on which God modelled his creation like a city which was fashioned beforehand
within the mind of the architect* (De opificio mundi, 5,20) so that
the world discerned only by the intellect is nothing else than the reason (logos)
of God when he is engaged in the act of creation. For (to revert to our illustration)
the city discernible by the intellect alone is nothing else than the reasoning faculty
of the architect in the act of planning to found the city [6,24, cf. 4,16-7,29].
Finally the logos was the system of principles introduced in the act of creation
into the world as its immutable laws, God's power existing within the world itself.
These were found in the natures of the heavenly bodies and the movements of
the stars and numberless other operations of nature*, often
obscure to us, for all things are not within the ken of mortals, yet working together
for the permanence of the whole; operations which are invariably carried out under
ordinances and laws (Oeo(ioT( xoti v6|xoi() which God laid down in his universe as
unalterable [19,61].
The cause for the sake of which this universe was created* (5,21) was as
Plato had written God's desire to share his goodness, by an act not necessitated
by his perfection but of wholly free providence not propotional to his acutal powers,
for these are without end or limit, but in proportion to the capacities of the recipients* (6,23). The logos existing in nature provided thus for its harmony and for
the perpetuation of species by means of the seminal essences (spermatikai ousiai)
within which hidden and imperceptible are the logoi of all things* (13,43, cf. 44).
But if God had so chosen, he could have created a different world, so that if
the existent One had willed to employ his skill, by which he made amphibious
creatures, in making a new kind of creature living in all the elements* (Quod detenus
potion insidiari solet) (42,154) (7), he could have changed the existing natural order.
God was absolute lord of the universe: For this world is the great city, and it
has a single polity and a single law (nomos), and this is the reason (logos) of nature,
commanding what should be done and forbidding what should not be done* (De
(6) Cf. Diogenes Laertius, VII, 134, 136, 147.
(7) Cf. Lucretius, op. cit., Ill, 784-787; V, 128-131.
72
Josepho, 6,29); and as absolute lord he could overrule that law and order as in
the miracles well attested by Scripture. Philo saw in Scripture both literal and underlying meanings, from which he could apply the concept of law to God as an analogy (8), but it was no more than an analogy. For God's nature was so unlike created natures as to be unknowable by human reason, a conclusion that was to take
a central place in subsequent Christian, Moslem and Jewish philosophy.
The survival and revival in the West of Platonic and atomist thought, as of
the equally influential Greek scepticism and Stoicism, depended in the first place
on the survival of the Greek texts and the making of Latin versions. Their survival
and revival depended at the same time on the ideas presented. Platonism, atomism
especially in its Epicurean form, and Stoicism each offered at once an account of
the origin and nature of things and a morality for the human condition appropriate
to that account. Sceptical criticism forced each alike to defend its principles and
in turn was forced into defence against counterattack. These philosophies diversified
the intellectual context of scientific thinking in antiquity, and again in medieval
and early modern Europe, by relating the sciences of nature to more general problems
of knowledge and existence. They promoted in the culture of each society or period
a certain specificity of commitment and expectation. Platonic thought, with a deceptive similarity to Christianity which at first captivated Augustine, was promoted
by him through the essential mediation of Plotinus with the firm proviso that, in
its fundamental doctrines of God, the creation and the soul, it was very different.
Augustine was much influenced, in his use of the scriptural theology of creation
as a cardinal principle of his natural philosophy, by Philo Judaeus. He established
a Platonized Latin Christian philosophy with the historically pregnant conception
of the world as the work of an eternal omnipotent, omniscient, providential and
wholly distinct creator.
Augustine offered with his theological insight into the inexorable objectivity
of the laws of nature, indifferent to human wishes even if alterable by their creator,
an encouragement to rational knowledge of them, and a scientific conception of
methods of acquiring and exercising such knowledge. God the creator of all things
knew beforehand, without any beginning, all things to come in time. [...] And with
respect to all his creatures, both spiritual and corporeal, it is not because they are
that he knows them, but because he knows them they are. For he was not ignorant
of what he was to create; hence he created because he knew, he did not know
because he created [De Trinitate XV, 13.22] ().
(8) De Josepho, 6, 28; Quaestiones in Genesim IV, 90, 151, 184, 205; Quaestiones in Exodum II,
19, 59.
(9) Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis Ep., Opera, 20 vols., Venice 1584; Opera omnia, ed. J. P.
Migne, 16 vols., Paris 1861; with individual works in Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinomm, XXV..., Prague, Vienna & Leipzig 1891-..., and in Corpus Christianum, Turnhout, 1954-...; also Oeuvres,
vol. V, 2 (De quantitate animae), ed. P. de Labriolle, Bruges 1939; De civ. Dei, trans. H. Bettenson,
Harmondsworth, Middlesex 1972; cf. A. Schubert, Augustins lex-aetema-Lehre nacb Inhalt und Quellen,
Beitrage zur Geschichte der Philosophic des Mittelalters, XXIV, 2, Miinster 1924; J. F. Callahan,
Four Views of Time in Ancient Philosophy, Cambridge, MA 1948; R. M. Grant, Miracle and Natural
Law in Graeco-Roman and Early Christian Thought, Amsterdam 1952; E. Portalie, A Guide to the Thought
of Saint Augustine, trans. R. J. Bastian, London 1960; A. C. Crombie, Some Attitudes to Scientific Progress:
Ancient, Medieval and Early Modem, in History of Science XIII (1975), pp. 213-30.
73
So
God created nothing in ignorance; which cannot be truly said of any human artificer.
Then if God created all things knowingly, he created things which he already knew.
This appears surprising but yet as something true: that this world could not be
known to us if it did not already exist, but it could not have existed if it had
not been known to God [De civ. Dei XI, 10.3].
As for men:
Some people, in order to discover God, read a book. But there is a great book:
the very appearance of created things. Look above and below, note, read. God,
whom you want to discover, did not make the letters with ink; he put in front
of your eyes the very things that he made (10).
The laws of nature were the laws of numbers, exemplified to the senses in
time and space in the rational proportions of sounds and of the growth of plants
and general order of the visible universe. All things appearing in the universe
have in fact originally and primarily already been created in a kind of web of the
elements; but they make their appearance only when they get the opportunity. For
just as mothers are pregnant with their young, so the world itself is pregnant with
things that are to come into being, things that are not created in it except from
that highest essence where nothing either springs up or dies, nothing has a beginning
or an end.
But when appropriate conditions arose, then
those things which are contained and hidden in the secret bosom of nature may
break out and be outwardly created in some way by the unfolding of their proper
measures and numbers and weights, which they have received from him who has
ordered all things in measure and number and weight [De Trin. Ill, 9, 16, quoting
Wisdom 11, 21].
Just as in music, the provindential unfolding of the history both of nature
and of mankind required time for its rational pattern to appear, and that rational
pattern was in all cases embodied in the unchanging laws of nature that generated
the process through time. Thus:
The most customary course of all this nature has certain natural laws (naturales leges)
of its own according to which both the spirit of life, which is in a creature, has
in some way certain settled desires of its own, which even malevolence cannot overcome, and the elements of this corporeal world have their settled power and quality,
what any one of them may or may not effect and what may or may not come
from what. From these, as it were, origins (primordia) of things, all things which
come to be, whatever they are and of whatever genus, take their beginnings and
progresses, their departures and ends. So it is that a bean is not born from a grain
of wheat, nor wheat from a bean, nor a man from a beast, nor a beast from a
man. Above this natural motion and course of things the power of the Creator
(10) Sanctus Augustinus, Novos ex codicibus vaticanis Sermones, Nova patrum bibliotheca, Sermo
CXXVI, 6, ed. A. Mai, vol. I, Rome 1852, p. 292; cf. E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the
Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. R. Trask, New York 1953.
74

has in himself the ability to make from all things something other than is in accord
with their, as it were, seminal principles (rationed seminales), but he cannot by himself
or from any things make that which was not ordained in those things. For his
power is not an unruly one, but he is omnipotent through the strength of this
wisdom. He makes from any one thing in its due time that which in it he had
previously made possible. Therefore there are different arrangements of circumstances by which this herb generates thus and that one thus, by which this season
is fruitful and that one not, by which a man can speak and a beast cannot [De
Genesi ad litteram IX, 17; cf. De civ. Dei VI, X, 24, XIV, 2, XXI, 8].
If the certainty of belief in the rational and providential creation of nature

and destiny of mankind encouraged a disposition towards scientific inquiry (ll), Augustine's further insights into the conception of natural laws offered a context for
the exercise of scientific knowledge. To acquire knowledge we could argue from
natural signs or from general laws. Thus we argued from smoke to fire, from track
to animal, from facial expression to emotion. We could also use conventional signs
to convey information, as we did through language and as both we and the animals
did through voice and gesture (12). We could prognosticate either legitimately or
illegitimately:
For it is one thing to say: If you drink the juice of this herb, your stomach will
not hurt, and quite another to say: If you hang this herb round your neck, your
stomach will not hurt. The first course is recommended as a healthful remedy; the
second is to be condemned as a superstituous sign.
But more effective were arguments from general laws and starting conditions
as in astronomy. For:
It contains beyond a demonstration of present circumstances an element akin to
historical narration, since on the basis of the present position and motion of the
stars it is possible to trace their past courses according to rule. It also includes
predictions concerning the future made according to rule which are not superstituous
and portentous but certain and fixed by calculation. We do not seek to learn from
these any application to our deeds and fates in the manner of the ravings of the
astrologers but only information that pertains to the stars themselves. For just as
he who computes the phases of the Moon, when he has observed its condition
today, can determine its condition at a given period of years in the past or in
the future, so in the same way those who are competent can make assertions about
any of the other stars [De doctrina christiana II, 29].
Likewise in the arts whether of construction or of medicine, agriculture and

navigation or of dancing and wrestling: In all of these arts experience with the
past makes possible inferences concerning the future, for no artificer in any of them
performs operations except in so far as he bases his expectations of the future on
past experience* (II, 30). Such predictions were made from the unchangeable laws
of numbers instituted by God in nature, and discovered by men as the measure
of the past and future:
( u ) Cf. De civ. Dei, XXII, 24; cf. A. C. Crombie, Some Attitudes..., cit.
(12) De doctrina christiana, II, 2-3, trans. D. W. Robertson, Indianapolis & New York 1958; cf.
R. A. Markus, St. Augustine on Signs, in Phronesis II (1957), pp. 60-83.
75
It is perfectly clear to the most stupid persons that the science of numbers was
not instituted by men, but rather investigated and discovered. Virgil did not wish
to have the first syllable of Italia short, as the ancients pronounced it, and it was
made long. But no one could in this fashion because of his personal desire arrange
matters so that three threes are not nine, or do not geometrically produce a square
figure, or are not the triple of the ternary, or are not one and a half times six,
or are evenly divisible by two when odd numbers cannot be so divided. Whether
they are considered in themselves or applied to the laws of figures, or of sound,
or of some other motion, numbers have immutable rules not instituted by men but
discovered through the sagacity of the more ingenious [II, 38].
By whatever mysterious means it may be that the future is foreseen, it is possible
to see only something that exists; and whatever exists is not future but present.
So when we speak of foreseeing the future, we do not see things that are not yet
in being, that is, things that are future, but it may be that we see their causes
or signs, which are already in being. In this way they are not future but present
to the eye of the beholder, and by means of them the mind can form a concept
of things that are still future and thus is able to predict them. These concepts
already exist, and by seeing them present in their minds people are able to foretell
the actual facts which they represent. [...] Suppose that I am watching the break
of day. I predict that the Sun is about to rise. What I see is present, but what
I foretell is future. I do not mean that the Sun is future, for it already exists,
but that its rise is future, because it has not yet happened. But I could not foretell
the sunrise unless I had a picture of it in my mind, just as I have at this moment
while I am speaking about it. Yet the dawn, which I see in the sky, is not the
sunrise, although it precedes it; nor is the picture which I have in my mind the
sunrise. But both the dawn and my mental picture are seen in the present, and
it is from them that I am able to predict the sunrise, which is future. The future
then is not yet; it is not at all; and if it is not at all, it cannot possibly be seen.
But it can be foretold from things that are present, because they exist now and
can therefore be seen [Confessions XI, 18] ( ).
Roger Bacon moved towards a new conception of nature by making the particular regularities which he called the laws of reflection and refraction examples of
the common laws of nature. Likewise it was a lex nature universalis requiring the
continuity of bodies that prevented the water from running out of a clepsydra,
a vessel with a hole at the top and a perforated bottom, so long as the upper
opening remained closed. This provided a positive cause for a positive phenomenon
instead of the negative horror vacui .which Bacon rejected as contrary to the whole
doctrine of adequate causation. The real cause he wrote in an early discussion of
the question was the orderly regulation of the bodies of the universe and the congruence of the machine of the world (ordinatio corporum universi et mundi machine
congruentia) (14). This he developed by explaining that the particular nature of water remains in position upwards not by itself but by the power (virtus) of universal
(1}) Trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin, Harmondsworth, Middlesex 1961, with changes.
(M) Roger Bacon, Quaestiones supra libros quattuor Physicorum Aristotelis, ed. F. Delorme in Opera
hactenus inedita, vol. VIII, Oxford 1928, pp. 200-1; cf. A. C. Crombie, The Significance of Medieval
Discussions of Scientific Method for the Scientific Revolution, in Critical Problems in the History of Science,
ed. M. Clagett, Madison, WI 1959, pp. 66-101; Idem, The Relevance of the Middle Ages to the Scientific
Movement, in Perspectives in Medieval History, ed. K. F. Drew and F. S. Lear, Chicago 1963, pp. 35-57;
A. C. Crombie and J. D. North, Bacon, Roger (c. 1219-c. 1292), in Dictionary of Scientific Biography,
I, New York 1970, pp. 377-85; M. Schramm, Aristotelianism: Basis and Obstacle to Scientific Progress
in the Middle Ages, in History of Science* II (1963), pp. 91-113.
76
nature, for it was held up by a law of universal nature (ex lege nature universalis) (15). This natura universalis acted as both efficient and final cause. Universal
nature constituted from its common laws thus subordinated to itself the system
of particular natures with their natural tendencies making up the Aristotelian universe. Its laws were necessary and general. The idea seems to have been suggested
by Avicenna to whom Bacon referred in explaining in De multiplicatio specierum
(I, 6) how although by a law of particular nature (ex lege nature particularis) there
is aptitude* for certain actions on the part of certain substances, nevertheless by
divine ordination and a law of universal nature, about which Avicenna makes mention in Metaphysics VI, the capability is cut off and the act excluded* (16). The
common laws of natural multiplication (leges communes multiplicationum naturalium)
were shared by the propagation of light and other forms of energy, but these again
could be dispensed for the benefit of natural order by the capability of the power
of the soul in completing the act of vision (Opus maius V, 1,7). This occurred
at the ultimate seat of sensory perception in the brain. Alhazen had argued that
all that was required for true visual perception was that the image formed in the
eye should preserve the proper arrangement of its parts corresponding to those of
the object seen. To explain how this image was transmitted through the hollow
optic nerves for presentation in the brain it was not then required that it should
follow in these sentient organs the rectilinear propagation followed in non-sentient
transparent media. Bacon brought this into his system as a further regular mode
of propagation:
After I have shown the power of mathematics, I have come to the position of
optics (perspectiva) [...]. Next I show the origin and composition of the eyes, because
without this we cannot know how vision is effected. Therefore I disclose how the
evidently concave optic nerves in which is the visual power arise from parts of
the brain, and how they are composed of a threefold membrane and intersect like
a cross in the surface of the brain, in which intersection and not in the eye is
the principle organ of seeing. [...] After this I show that the image (species) of a
thing is sent forth to sight [...] because images come to every part of the pupil
from the separate parts of the thing. [...] Next because vision would be ruined
unless there were a refraction of the image between the pupil and the common
nerve where there is the common section of the nerves of which I spoke above,
and right would be seen left and vice versa, therefore I demonstrate this by the
law of refraction (per legem refractionutn), set out geometrically, so that vision is
thus saved. Yet it is necessary nevertheless that the image of the thing seen should
propagate itself by a new kind of propagation, so that it should not transgress the
laws which nature keeps in the bodies of the world. For the image at its place
of refraction advances according to the tortuosity of the visual nerve, and does
not keep to a straight path, which is wonderful, but nevertheless necessary for the
completion of the operation. So that the power of the soul makes the image relinquish
the common laws of nature (leges communes nature) and advance in a way that suits
its operations [...] (17). That the laws of reflection and refraction are indeed common to all natural actions I have shown in the treatise on geometry [...] but principal(l3) Roger Bacon, Liber primus Communia naturalium, ed. R. Steele in Opera hactenus inedita, cit.,
vol. Ill,
Oxford 1911, pp. 220, 224.
(16) Idem, De multiplicatione specierum, ed. D. Lindberg in Roger Bacon's Philosophy of Nature,
Oxford17 1983, pp. 84-5.
( ) Roger Bacon, Un fragment inedit de I'Opus tertium, Quarracchi 1909, pp. 75-8.
77
ly in a separate work where I have explained the whole generation and multiplication
and action and corruption of power (species) in all the bodies of the world (18).
It was the moral law of God that Thomas Aquinas looked for in nature. A11
the moral precepts of law come from the law of nature (lex naturae) (Summa tbeologiae, I, q. 60, art. 5) he wrote; and the law of God is the natural inclination
imprinted in any creature to act in a way suited to it according to nature*. Then
came the question whether God can do anything outside the established order of
nature. Aquinas answered with an exemplary account of the omnipotent freedom
of the Hebrew and Christian God as the creator of the world, by contrast with
the rational necessity of the Aristotelian God as its first cause. It might seem that
God could not do anything outside the order of nature which he established, for
if he did he would be acting against the order of justice which he had established
likewise and moreover he would seem to be changeable. Aquinas distinguished the
total freedom of God as the first cause from the necessity of secondary causes to
follow the higher causes to which they were subject. We could suppose that God
as the first cause would not act against his foreknowledge, or his will, or his goodness*, but
he is not subject to the order of secondary causes. On the contrary this order is
subject to him, since it proceeds from him not by natural necessity but by the
choice of his own will; for he could have created another order of things. Therefore
God can do something outside this order created by him when he chooses: for
example by producing effects of secondary causes without them, or by producing
certain effects to which secondary causes do not extend. So Augustine says: God
acts against the wonted course of nature, but by no means does he act against
the supreme law, because he does not act against himself.
Then since the order of nature is given to things by God, if he does anything
outside this order, it is not against nature. Hence Augustine says: That is natural
to each thing which is caused by him from whom is all limit, number and order
in nature* (I, q. 105, art. 6) (19).
The problem for the philosophers was at once epistemological and theological.
The epistemological problem of defining what could be known about different subjectmatters and with what degrees of certainty was subordinated to the theological principle that the entire created world was contingent upon the inscrutable omnipotence
of the Creator. William of Ockham in developing his theory of evidence under
this principle limited the knowledge of the creation available to us to our immediate
experience of the regularities found in particular objects. Empirically established
connections were validated universally by the assumed principle that all individuals
of the same kind (ratio) are so made as to have effects of the same kind in a
subject of the same kind disposed in the same way (Super Quattuor libros SententiaC8 Ibidem, p. 90, referring to Comm. nat. and De mult, spec.: cf. ed. D. Lindberg in Roger Bacon's Philosophy..., cit., pp. 365-6.
(19) Quoting Augustine, Contra Faustum XXVI, 3 (Opera omnia, ed. J. P. Migne, cit., vol. XLII,
p. 480), and De utilitate credendi XVI (ibidem, p. 90).
78
rum, Prol. q. 2, K) (20). Hence there is between cause and effect indeed an essential order and dependence* (Prol. q. 9, F), but effect and cause were separate things
and knowledge of one thing did not contain knowledge of another. For I say that
although God acts through the mediation of secondary causes*, such action is voluntary, not necessary*. This did not make secondary causes superfluous, because God
does not act in any action with his whole power*. But from the omnipresence of
divine power
it follows that it is not possible to demonstrate that some effect is produced by
a secondary cause: because although combustion always follows the bringing of fire
near combustible material, it could still stand that fire is not its cause. Because
God could have ordained that always when fire is present the nearby subject itself
alone causes combustion, just as he has ordained with the Church that when certain
words are brought forth grace is caused in the soul. Hence it is not possibile to
prove by an effect that someone is a man, especially by an effect that appears in
us, because everything we see in a man can be done by an embodied angel, as
eating, drinking etc. That is evident from the angel of Tobias* [II, q. 4-5, R] (21).
He argued in a subtle analysis that the intuitive notion (notitia intuitiva) gained
through sensory perception of something that existed was naturally infallible in providing evident knowledge* of this fact to which we gave assent*. But God can
cause a creditive act by which I believe that a thing that is absent is present*
(Quodlibeta, V, 5). For whatever God produces with secondary causes mediating
he can produce and conserve immediately without them*. Then God can make
us see without a created object on which vision depends only as on a secondary
cause* (VI, 6) (22). This doctrine placed natural philosophy and with it the relation
(M) William of Ockham, Super Quattuor libros Sententiarum annotations..., Lyons 1495; Scriptum
in lib. I Sentent. Prologus, ed. G. Gal and S. Brown, in Opera philosophica et theolagica, vol. I, St.
Bonaventura, N.Y. 1967, pp. 91, 241; cf. R. Guelluy, Philosophic et theologie chez Guillaume d'Ockham,
Louvain & Paris 1947; A. C. Crombie, Robert Grosseteste, Oxford 1953, 2nd cd. with corrections 1971;
Idem, Augustine to Galileo, London & Cambridge, MA 1959, 3rd ed. reprinted 1979; L. Baudry, Lexique
philosophique de Guillaume d'Occam, Paris 1958; F. Oakley, Christian Theology and the Newtonian Science:
the Rise of the Concept of Laws of Nature, in Church History* XXX (1961), pp. 433-57; Idem, Medieval
Theories of Natural Law: William of Ockham and the Significance of the Voluntarist Tradition, in Natural
Law Forum* VI (1961), pp. 65-83; M.A. Pernoud, Innovation in William of Ockham's References to
the Potentia Dei, in Antonianum XLV (1970), pp. 65-97; Idem, The Theory of the Potentia Dei according
to Aquinas, Scotus and Ockham, ibid. XLVII (1972), pp. 69-95; W. J. Courtenay, Nominalism and Late
Medieval Religion, in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, ed. C. Trinkaus
and H. A. Oberman, Leiden 1974; A. Maurer, Ockham and the Possibility of a Better World, in Medieval
Studies* XXXVIII (1976), pp. 291-312; D. W. Clark, Voluntarism and Rationalism in the Ethics of Ockham, in Franciscan Studies* XXXI (1971), pp. 72-87; Idem, Ockham on Human and Divine freedom,
ibid. XXXVIII (1978), pp. 122-60; F. Oakley, Omnipotence, Covenant, and Order, Ithaca, N.Y. 1984,
incorporating earlier papers and further discussion.
(21) Ed. 1495, Quaestiones in lib. II Sent., q. 3-4, ed. G. Gal and R. Wood, in Opera philosophica,
cit., vol. V, 1981, pp. 72-3; cf. Tobias 12, 19.
(22) Quodlibeta septem, first complete ed., Strasbourg 1491, ed. J. C. Wey, in Opera philosophica,
cit., vol. IX, 1980; cf. P. Boehner, The notitia intuitiva of Non-existents according to William of Ockham,
in Traditio I (1943), pp. 223-75; A. C. Pegis, Concerning William of Ockham, ibid. II (1944), pp.
465-80; M. M. Adams, Intuitive Cognition, Certainty, and the Scepticism of William of Ockham, ibid.
XXVI (1970), pp. 389-98; J. F. Boler, Intuitive and Abstractive Cognition, in The Cambridge History of
Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. N. Kretzmann, A. J. Kenny and J. Pinborg, Cambridge 1982, pp. 460-78;
K. H. Tachau, The Problem of species in medio at Oxford in the Generation after Ockham, in Medieval
Studies* XLIV (1982), pp. 394-443.
79
of perceiver to perceived in a wholly new context. The order of nature as known

to us as an order of observable facts depended on God not being a deceiver.
The dominance of Christian thinking by the theology of divine omnipotence
had specific consequences for natural philosophy in the 13th and 14th centuries
through the distinction drawn between God's absolute and his ordained power (potentia Dei absolute et ordinate) (2i). The recovery and incorporation into the educational system of the entire body of Aristotle's writings in the 13th century restructured treatment of the relation of philosophy to theology and of reason to faith, and
provided a new apprehension of the relation of God to the world and to mankind
and hence of nature as the object of scientific inquiry. Discussion focused on the
nature of God and the opennes of divine to human knowledge. The Platonic God
as the good whose reason generated the world in accordance with the eternal ideas
and the Aristotelian God as the rational first cause from which everything eternally
emanated were alike necessitated by their rational perfection to produce the best
of all possible worlds. Human reason moreover could know that divine reason in
such a way as to discover not only the true constitution of the world but also
why it must necessarily be so constituted and not otherwise, both morally and physically. The God of Abraham and of Christian theology by contrast, in his act of
creating a world utterly distinct from himself, was absolutely free and inscrutable
to man except in so far as he chose to reveal his providential plan through the
patriarchs and prophets and through Christ and his Church. This was the historical
world of Christian belief and expectation, a world of which the creation by God's
providential will established the beginning and sequence of time in which under
divine rule man was free to fulfil his ordained destiny. The contrast offered by
the Aristotelian God as reason, of whose discovered essence and perfection the
world was an eternally necessary consequence without beginning or end, was the
sharper because Aristotelian metaphysics entered the Latin West accompanied by
Arabic paraphrases and commentaries which stressed its determinism. Muslim as
Christian theologians had had to defend God's omnipotent freedom against the same
Aristotelian determinism, but when the philosophers Avicenna, Alfarabi and especially Averroes introduced the idea of creation into their interpretations of Aristotelian
metaphysics they appeared in doing so to deny alike free providence to God and
free responsibility to man (24). The Christian response was to examine the nature
of God's power and its relation to his other attributes of will, reason, goodness
and foreknowledge. Out of this examination came the distinction developed notably
by Albertus Magnus and Aquinas between God's power considered absolutely in
itself (potentia absolute), without regard to the order of the creation which he had
established, and his ordained power (potentia ordinata) by which he acted in his
(") See on this subject especially F. Oakley, Omnipotence, Covenant..., cit., by which I have been
guided in what follows.
(24) Cf. F. Van Steenberghen, Aristote en Occident, Louvain 1946; Idem, Introduction a I'histoire
de la philosophic medievale, Louvain 1974; L. Gardet and M. M. Anawati, Introduction a la theologie
musulmane, Paris 1948; Majid Fakhey, Islamic Occasionalism and its Critiques by Averroes and Aquinas,
London 1958; W. J. Courtenay, The Critique of Natural Causality in the Mutakallimun and Nominalism,
in ^Harvard Theological Review* LXVI (1973), pp. 77-94; H. A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of Kalam,
Cambridge, MA 1976.
80
creative plan in accord with his providence and goodness (25). Absolutely then God
could do as he liked, but in dealing with his creation he voluntarily restrained that
absolute power within the providential order which he had created, except only
when he chose to transcend it with a miracle. From each side of this distinction
came specific consequences for natural philosophy.
When Bishop Etienne Tempier of Paris in 1277 condemned a collection of
philosophical theses his main purpose was to defend God's absolute power against
any attempt to limit it by current Aristotelian philosophy (26). Thus a number of
propositions asserted explicitly what God could not do: he could not make more
than one world (34), make a man without the agency of a human father (35), move
the world in such a way as to produce a vacuum (49), move anything differently
from the way it moved (50), make an accident exist without a subject or more
than three dimensions (141), or perform the absolutely impossibile (147). Tempier
also condemned the proposition that there was no question disputable by reason
which a philosopher ought not to dispute and decide by argument (145). Despite
this last, the effect of the theological affirmation of God's absolute power seems
to have been to have liberated the more enterprising natural philosophers from such
Aristotelian limitations so that they could explore in speculation a variety of possible
worlds which God might have created had he so chosen, possibilities involving the
void, infinity and a plurality of universes. The condemned propositions were cited
in the 14th century among others by Thomas Bradwardine, Jean Buridan, Nicole
Oresme and Albert of Saxony and as late as the 17th century in defence of Galileo's
cosmological arguments by Tommaso Campanella (27). The doctrine of the absolute
and inscrutable power of God was to have a long reach in expanding the domain
of the supernaturally and speculatively possible at the expense of accepted certainties
of experience and demonstrations of philosophy.
It was God's voluntary restraint of his absolute by his ordained power that
preserved the established order of nature as a possible and proper object of human
inquiry. That order was identified by Ockham as the order of laws that God had
ordained and established: for I say that God can do one thing by ordained power
(23) Cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa tbeologiae I, q. 25, art. 5 and Augustine (sec note 19); M. A.
Permoud, The Theory of the Potentia Dei..., cit.; W. J. Courtenay, Nominalism and Late..., cit.,; B.
Hamm, Promissio, Pactum, Ordinatio, Tubingen 1977, and especially F. Oakley, Omnipotence, Covenant..., cit.
(26) Chartularium Univenitatis Parisiensis, ed. H. Denifle, A. Chatelain, vol. I, Paris 1889, pp. 54355, of which the numbering is followed here; cf. E. Grant (ed.), A Source Book in Medieval Science,
Cambridge, MA 1974, pp. 45 ff.
(") Cf. P. Duhem, Etudes sur Leonard de Vinci, vol. II, Paris 1909, pp. 41-4; Idem, Le systeme
du monde, vols. VI, VIII, Paris 1954, 1958; A. Maier, Die Vorlaufer Galileis im 14. Jabrbundert, Rome
1949, pp. 155-215 (2nd ed. 1966); Idem, Metapbysische Hintergriinde Spatscholastischen Naturphilosophie,
Rome 1955, pp. 381; A. C. Crombie, The Significance of Medieval..., cit.; J. E. Murdoch in The Cultural
Context of Medieval Learning, ed. J. E. Murdoch and E. D. Sylla, Dordrecht & Boston, MA 1975,
pp. 271-348; Idem, Infinity and Continuity, in The Cambridge History of Late Medieval Philosophy, cit.,
pp. 566-9; J. F. Wippel, The Condemnations of 1270 and 1277 at Paris, in Journal of Medieval and
Renaissance Studies* VII (1977), pp. 169-201; E. Grant, The Condemnation of 1277, God's Absolute
Power, and Physical Thought in the Late Middle Ages, in Viator X (1979), pp. 211-44; Tommaso Campanella, Apologia pro Galileo, Frankfurt 1622, p. 24, English trans, by G. McColley (Smith College Studies
in History XXII, 3-4, Northampton, MA 1937); Italian trans, by L. Firpo, Torino 1969; R. Hissette,
Enquete sur les 219 articles condamnes a Paris le 7 man 1277, Louvain 1977; L. Bianchi, L'errore di
Aristotele: La polemica contra I'etemita del mondo nel XIII secolo, Firenze 1984.
81
and another by absolute power. These were of course a single power in God, who
did nothing that was not ordained.
In this way we should understand that he can do something, whenever this is taken
according to the laws ordained and established by God (secundum leges ordinatas
et institutes a Deo) and that means what God can do by ordained power. In the
other way, to be able to do something is taken for being able to do everything
that does not involve a contradiction, whether God ordained this to be done or
not, because God can do many things which he does not want to do [...]; and
that means what God can do by absolute power. Thus the Pope cannot do something
according to the law (jus) established by him which however he can do absolutely
speaking.
Again in the scheme of salvation ordained by Christ to replace the Old Law
(lex defuncta), what was then possible according to the laws then established is
no longer possible according to the law now established, although absolutely speaking
it is possible* (28). Ockham in effect applied to the created world in general, alike
to the moral order governing human behaviour and to the natural order governing
the behaviour of irrational beings, the metaphor of laws decreed by a ruler, here
the inscrutable God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, of the Christian creed. With God's reasons no longer in any degree transparent to human reason
as they still had been for Aquinas, mankind had no option but to accept the order
of things as it was given in experience <nd in revelation through Holy Scripture.
God by his absolute power could reverse the universal law (communis lex) of the
existing moral order, making good actions evil and evil good if then they were
to agree with divine precept P), just as he could upturn the existing physical order of things if he so chose. The only safeguard of constancy both moral and physical
was the goodness of God, in which man must have faith, by which he freely bound
himself to preserve a stable world. That, explained Ockham's contemporary Robert
Holcot, was God's covenant with man and that alone guaranteed the consistency
of the creation and of the economy of salvation and grace. For
there is a distinction between compulsory necessity (necessitas coactionis) and unfailing
necessity (necessitas infallibilitatis). In God compulsory necessity has no place, but
an unfailing necessity comes in God from his promise and covenant or established
law (ex promisso suo et pacto sive lege statuta). This is not an absolute but rather
a consequential necessity (>0).
It was the necessitee condicionel of Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale, by which

God granted free choice despite his foreknowledge, by contrast with the symple
necessitee by which something had to be done (11. 4433-41) (}1).
() William of Ockham, Quodlibeta VI, 1, ed. J. C. Wey, cit., pp. 585-86; cf. F. Oakley, Christian Theology..., cit.; Idem, Medieval Theories..., cit.; Idem, Omnipotence, Covenant..., cit.
(w) William of Ockham, Quaest. in lib. II Sent., q. 15, ed. G. Gal et R. Wood, cit., p. 352,
cf. q. 3-4, pp. 58-60; F. Oakley ibid, with further references.
C0) Quoted with changes from H. A. Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology, Cambridge,
MA 1963, p. 168 n.; Idem, Forerunners of the Reformation, New York 1966, p. 149; cf. W. Kolmel,
Von Ockham zu Gabriel Biel: zur Naturrecbtslehre des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderto, in Franziskanische Studien*
XXXVII (1955), pp. 228-59.
(3l) Cited with Holcot from F. Oakley, Omnipotence, Covenant..., cit., p. 64.
82
The attribution of the natural order entirely to laws of nature imposed from
without by God's ordained will, and the elimination from the concept of nature
of any intrinsic principle of rationality such as Aristotle had postulated, assimilated
nature to a product of art. It was the product of a divine art not transparent like
that of the Timaeus to human reason, but utterly impenetrable, its order discoverable
only so far as it was directly observable or divinely revealed. Hence the evident
empiricism of 14th-century natural philosophy and its focus not on any ultimate
purpose which the natural order might have in the divine economy, but rather on
the regularities of nature visible to man and on explanations postulated to account
for them in a creation separated from its Creator. Thus Buridan in applying the
dynamics of impetus to the celestial spheres:
One could say in fact that God, when he created the universe, set each of the
celestial spheres in motion as it pleased him, impressing on each of them an impetus
which has moved it ever since. God has therefore no longer to move these spheres,
except in exerting a general influence similar to that by which he gives his concurrence to all phenomena. Thus he could rest on the seventh day from the work he
had achieved, confiding to created things their mutual causes and effects (32).
Hence likewise the new relevance of analogies between the contrivance of the
divine artificer, whose reasons man could not penetrate, and the contrivances which
man could understand because he made them himself. The gravitational clock, propelled first by water and then mechanically by weights, had become gradually part
of daily life by about the middle of the 14th century in many Western towns,
where clocks had been set up in public places over the previous hundred years.
Some appear to have been planetaria or astronomical clocks paralleling the motions
of the celestial bodies, others to have been designed to measure the terrestrial hours.
Elaborate astronomical clocks were devised and constructed by the Oxford mathematician Richard of Wallingford and in Italy by Giovanni de' Dondi. Perhaps the
most famous terrestrial clock was that erected by Henri de Vick in Paris on the
Palais Royal (now the Palais de Justice) in 1370, when Charles V of France ordered
all churches in the city to ring the hours and quarters according to the equal divisions
of the day incorporated in this instrument. Clocks came to interest philosophers
as programmed mechanisms capable of self-regulation. Seven years after de Vick
had installed his clock, Nicole Oresme completed his Le livre du del et du monde,
commissioned by Charles V within his plan for translating into French the whole
of Aristotle with commentaries. In this he wrote that it could be supposed that
when God created the heavens, he put in them motive qualities and powers just
as he put weight in terrestrial beings, and he put in them resistances against these
motive powers. [...] And these powers are so adjusted, tempered and harmonized
to the resistances that the movements are made without violence; and except for
violence it is doubtless like a man making a clock and letting it go and be moved
by itself. Thus God left the heavens to be moved continually according to the propor()2) Johannes Buridanus, Subtilissime Questiones supra octo Pbisicorum libros Amtotelu, VIII, q. 12,
Paris 1509; cf. A. Maicr, Die Impetustheorie (1940) revised in Zwei Grundprobleme der Scbolastischen
Naturpbiloiopbie, Rome 1951, p. 212; Idem, Metaphysische Hintergriinde..., cit.; A. C. Crombie, Augustine
to Galileo, cit., vol. II, p. 82.
83
tions which the motive powers have to the resistances and according to the established order [II, 2].
That order God respected even when extraordinarily he performed a miracle,

for as Oresme argued in explaining that he could have lengthened the day for Joshua
far more economically by stopping a rotating Earth than the whole rotating heavens:
When God performs a miracle, it must be supposed and held that he does this
without disturbing the common course of nature more than the least that is necessary (II, 25) ().
These ideas were all to have a long reach. Thus the Jesuit Francisco Sudrez
in his Tractatus de legibus ac Deo legislator (1612) distinguished among the meanings
of the term lex naturalis not only that law which is in mankind but also that
which fits all things, in accordance with the inclination imparted to them by the
Author of nature*. But this latter
acceptation of law is metaphorical, since things lacking reason are not properly speaking capable of law, just as they are not capable of obedience. Hence the efficacy
of divine power and the natural necessity resulting therefrom in these things are
called law metaphorically [I, 1].
God's free acts in so far as they operated externally might be said to relate
to art, and in so acting he observed a law
which God as artist (artifex) has imposed upon himself, so that he may carry out
his works in accordance with it. For although God could have made and ruled the
world in various ways, he has decided to constitute and govern it according t'o a
certain definite law
applying to both the physical and the moral order. Hence it is said that
God cannot do certain things according to ordinary law, namely which he has imposed upon himself, or that he cannot according to his ordained power (secundum
potentiam ordinatam), that is reduced to such order by the same law. [...] Thus the
free works of God are ruled by a law established by himself [II, 2] (M).
Similarly Descartes was to insist that even the mathematical truths, which
you call eternal, have been established by God and depend on him entirely as well
(") Nicole Oresme, Le livre du del et du monde, ed. A. D. Menut and A. J. Denomy, trans.
A. D. Menut, Madison, WI 1968; cf. for clockwork E. Zinner, Aus der Friikzeit der Raderuhr, in Deutsches Museum: Abhandhungen und Berichtc* XXII (1954), 3, pp. 1-64; H. A. Lloyd, Mechanical Timekeepers, in A History of Technology, ed. C. J. Singer et AL, vol. Ill, Oxford 1957, pp. 648-75; D.
J. de S. Price, On the Origins of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices and the Compass, in ^Smithsonian
Institution Bulletin* CCXVIII (1959), pp. 81-112; S. A. Bedini and F. R. Maddison, Mechanical Universe:
The Astrarium of Giovanni de Dondi, ^Transactions of the American Philosophical Society* N.S. LVI,
5, Philadelphia, PA 1966; J. D. North, Richard of Wallingford, Oxford 1976; J. Le Goff, Pour un autre
moyen age: Temps, travail et culture en Occident, Paris 1977; D. S. Landes, Revolution in Time, Cambridge,
MA 1983; also A. C. Crombie, Augustine to Galileo, cit.
()4) Francis Suarez, S. ]., Tractatus de legibus..., Coimbra 1612, pp. 7-8, in Selections from Three
Works, with introduction by J. B. Scott, vol. I, Oxford 1944, pp. 103-104; cf. F. Oakley, Omnipotence,
Covenant..., cit.
84
as do all other creatures*. For it is God who has established these laws in nature,
just as a king establishes laws in his kingdom*, and likewise he could change them
just as a king does his laws. [...] But I comprehend them as eternal and immutable.
[...] But his will is free [...] yet his power is incomprehensible* (35). If it were asked
what has necessitated God to create these truths [...] I say that he has been as
free to make it untrue, that all the lines drawn from the centre to the circumference
were equal, as not to create the world* (36). We could not comprehend that divine
power, by which again God could make it untrue that twice four was eight (37).
Robert Boyle likewise was to be in no doubt that if we suppose God to be
omnipotent, (that is, to be able to do whatever involves no contradiction, that it
should be done)*, the possibility of human science depended entirely upon his freely
chosen constancy. For
if we consider God as the author of the universe, and the free establisher of the
laws of motion, whose general concourse is necessary to the conservation and efficacy
of every particular physical agent, we cannot but acknowledge, that, by withholding
his concourse, or changing these laws of motion, which depend perfectly upon his
will, he may invalidate most, if not all the axioms and theorems of natural philosophy: these supposing the course of nature, and especially the established laws of
motion among the parts of the universal matter, as those upon which all the phaenomena depend (}8).
As these were established, he thought that

God's agency in the world [...] is like a rare clock, such as may be that at Strasburgh,
where all things are so skilfully contrived, that the engine being once set a moving,
all things proceed, according to the artificer's first design.
As for the term law, although for brevity and by custom he spoke of the
laws of motion and rest* as the laws of nature*, this like Suarez he regarded as
but an improper and figurative expression*. For to speak properly, a law being
but a notional rule of acting according to the declared will of a superior, it is plain,
that nothing but an intellectual being can be properly capable of receiving and acting
by a law*. God as the supreme and absolute Lord, [...] when he made the world,
and established the laws of motion, gave them to matter, not to himself*. What
he created he also disposed, and
though I think it probable, that, in the conduct of that far greatest part of the
universe which is merely corporeal, the wise Author of it does seldom manifestly
()3) R. Descartes to Marin Mersenne 15, IV, 1630, in Oeuvres, ed. by Ch. Adam and P. Tannery, vol. I, Paris 1897, pp. 145-6; cf. A. Funkenstein, Descartes, Eternal Truths, and Divine Omnipotence,
in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science* VI (1975), pp. 185-99; H. Frankfurt, Descartes and
the Creation of the Eternal Truths, in Philosophical Review* LXXXVI (1976), pp. 36-57.
(J6) R. Descartes, letter of 27, V, 1630, in Oeuvres, cit., pp. 151-2.
(") Idem, Meditationes prima philosophia, Responsio ad sextes objectiones (1641); Oeuvres, vol. VII,
(1904), p. 436; cf. Pliny, Nat. hist., II, 5, 27 and 27, 97 (note 4 above).
(38) R. Boyle, Some Considerations about the Reconcilableness of Reason and Religion, sects. 2, 3
(1675), ed. T. Birch, Works, vol. Ill, London 1744, pp. 515, 516; cf. J. A. H. Murray et Al., A
New English Dictionary, VI, 1, ed. H. Bradley, Oxford 1903: Law; E. M. Klaaren, Religious Origins
of Modem Science: Belief in Creation in Seventeenth-Century Thought, Grand Rapids, MI 1977; F. Oakley,
Omnipotence, Covenant..., cit.
85
procure a recession from the settled course of the universe, and especially from
the most catholic laws of motion
yet where men were concerned

I think it becomes a Christian philosopher to admit, in general, that God doth
sometimes, in a peculiar though hidden way, interpose in the ordinary phenomena
and events of crisis's; but yet that this is done so seldom, at least in a way that
we can certainly discern, that we are not hastily to have recourse to an extraordinary
providence, and much less to the strange care and skill of that questioned being
called nature, in this or that particular case, though perhaps unexpected, if it may
be probably accounted for by mechanical laws, and the ordinary course of things.
For
the omniscient and almight author of things having once framed the world, and
established in it the laws of motion, which he constantly maintains, there can no
irregularity, or anomaly, happen, [...] that he did not from the beginning foresee
and think fit to permit, since they are but genuine consequences of that order of
things, that, at the beginning, he most wisely instituted.
Only on some special occasions, this instituted order, either seemingly or really,
has been violated* (}9). Against the deist use of the argument against God's special
providence, that after the first formation of the universe, all things are brought
to pass by the settled laws of nature, Boyle insisted that God's special providence
was evident above all in the first formation of things*. For the laws of motion,
without which the present state and course of things could not be maintained, did
not necesarily spring from the nature of matter, but depended upon the will of
the divine author of things*. Besides, he repeated,
I look upon a law as a moral, not a physical cause, as being indeed but a notional
thing, according to which, an intelligent and free agent is bound to regulate its
actions. But inanimate bodies are utterly incapable of understanding what a law
is, or what it enjoins, or when they act conformably or unconformalby to it; and
therefore the actions of inanimate bodies, which cannot incite or moderate their
own actions, are produced by real power, not by laws; though the agents, if intelligent, may regulate the exertions of their power by settled rules ( ).
Boyle's attempt to restrict the term law to its proper human and moral context
did not succeed, but the long tradition behind his insistence on the utter dependence
of human science upon God's omnipotent will received an interesting extension by
Isaac Newton. For God who created the world, who governs all things [...] as
Lord over all*, and who knows all things that are and can be done* (41), could
as easily if he so chose vary the laws of nature, and make worlds of several sorts
in several parts of the universe* (42).
(39) R. Boyle, A Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature, sects. 1, 2, 5, 6, 7
(1666-82); in Works, cit., vol. IV, (1744), pp. 362, 367, 385, 398, 403.
() Idem, The Christian Virtuoso (1690); in Works, cit., vol. V, (1744), p. 46.
(41) I. Newton, Philosophiae naturalis Principia mathematica, vol. Ill, Scholium generale, Londini
1687.
() Idem, Opticks, 4th ed. query 31, London 1730, pp. 379-80.
86
Within this intellectual context the essentially theological concept of laws implanted by God in the creation of nature came to offer an invitation to man to
discover and draw out these laws of nature by scientific observation and analysis.
The theological concept of ordained law became transformed into the scientific concept of natural laws, not as moral imperatives sanctioned by right reason but as
physical principles, albeit of a nature still with moral attributes. By the time of
Newton the term laws of nature had come to designate the object of all scientific
inquiry: the principles or axioms to be discovered by experimental and theoretical
exploration, or postulated for experimental control. By itself the concept of laws
of nature could scarcely have been a guide to how to conduct such an inquiry.
What made it scientifically effective was its amalgamation with two matching concepts. First the analogy of natural with human art offered an invitation to simulate
natural effects with artifacts made by and therefore understood by man: by discovering how to control hypothetical models of his own contrivance man could thus
gain insight into the laws controlling nature itself. Secondly the concept of laws
of nature became quantified by association with that of mathematical functions expressing the quantitative dependence of effect on cause in concomitant degrees (43).
Thus changes in an effect (as the dependent variable) expressed as an algebraic
function of the conditions necessary and sufficient to produce it (as the independent
variables) could be precisely calculated from those conditions. It may be argued
that the concept of functions can be found implicitly but effectively in antiquity:
in tabulated correspondences of celestial motions in Babylonian and Greek astronomy, in the linkage made by musical theorists, from Archytas of Tarentum and Plato
to Boethius, of different sensations of pitch with variations in the speeds of the
motions producing sound, in Ptolemy's systematic correlation of the degrees of refraction of light with increasing angles of incidence, and so on. The concept may
seem to be implied also by the Aristotelian principle that a cause must be adequate
to produce an effect, and therefore that there must be a quantitative proportion
between a cause and its effect. Yet it was evidently not until the 13th or 14th
centuries that the implied notion of functional dependence between variable quantities was explicitly recognized in the West. Then it was developed first only in principle, without the systematic practice of measurement that was necessary to incorporate
it effectively into experimental science. That practice was to develop first in the
technical arts. It was not until the 17th century that systematic measurement was
(43) Cf. my Styles of Scientific Thinking..., cit.,ptiv: Hypothetical Modelling, and for the concept
of functions 'cns.~ 3, 5, 7, 9
with E- Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophic und
Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit, vol. m, Berlin 1923; J. L. Coolidge, The Origins of Analytical Geometry,
in Osiris I (1936), p. 231-50; Idem, History of Geometrical Methods, Oxford 1940; C. B. Boyer, The
Concepts of the Calculus, New York 1939; Idem, History of Analytical Geometry, New York 1956; A.
Maier, Der Funktionsbegriff in der Physik des 14. Jahrhunderts, in Divus Thomas XIX (1946), pp. 147-66;
On the Threshold of Exact Sciences, ed. and trans, by S. D. Sargent, Philadelphia, PA 1982; A. C.
Crombie, Robert Grosseteste, cit.; Idem, Quantification in Medieval Physics, in Isis LII (1961), pp. 145-60;
A. P. Youschkevitch, Geschichte der Mathematik in Mittelalter, Leipzig 1964; Idem, The Concept of Function
up to the Middle of the Nineteenth Century, in Archive for History of Exact Sciences XVI (1976),
pp. 37-85; M. Schramm, Steps towards the Idea of Function, in History of Science* IV (1965), pp.
70-102; E. Grant, A Source Book..., cit.; O. Pedersen, Logistics and the Theory of Functions, in Archives
internationales d'histoire des sciences* XXIV (1974), pp. 29-50; Oberwolfach Mathematisches Forschungs
Institut, Proceedings of a Conference on the Development of the Concept of Function, Basel 1975.
87
to be made essential to all physical research. It was combined then with a rational
theory of quantity expressed in linear scales, replacing the inhibiting Greek conception that the properties of substances were present and had to be expressed as
pairs of opposites, and with the analytical formulation of functional dependence
by means of increasingly precise and powerful mathematical symbolism. By this time
the mathematically defined general laws of nature had come to be seen to offer
possibilities not given by the Aristotelian specific natures or forms or causes as
the object of scientific inquiry. It was the mathematicization alike of the form and
the content of scientific argument that brought about an essential change in natural
science from the syllogistic logic of subject and predicate, within which the causal
conditions for specific phenomena were defined, to the mathematical logic of linear
demonstration, defining general relations of dependence within which the specific
phenomena were included.
All this can obviously not be seen as a consequence simply of a theological
concept of infinite power. What can be seen as its consequence are expectations
about the possibility of certain scientific knowledge. These appeared most dramatically in the cross-purposes that bedevilled Galileo's controversies with theologians. When
Galileo in his first letter about the sunspots (1612) announced his hope to discover
the true constitution of the universe; for such a constitution exists, and exists
in only one, true, real way, that could not possibly be otherwise* (Opere, V,
102) (44), he used the language Aristotle used for a completed and closed system
of scientific knowledge. That was the constitution of the universe that must follow
from true and certain knowledge of the First Principle. To achieve his goal Galileo
in fact relied on the open-ended criterion of range of confirmation, by his telescopic
observations and dynamical arguments, but theologians thought that by asserting
that the discovered constitution of the universe could not be otherwise, he was
imposing limitations on divine omnipotence. Neither side grasped clearly the difference that mathematical thinking made to the possibilities of apodeictic proof as
envisaged traditionally in Aristotelian logic. But that is another story discussed
elsewhere (43).
(") Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, ed. A. Favaro, 20 vols., Florence 1890-1909.

(45) Cf. A. C. Crombie, Sources of Galileo's Early Natural Philosophy, in Reason, Experiment and
Mysticism in the Scientific Revolution, ed. M. L. Righini Bonelli and W. R. Shea, New York 1975,
pp. 157-75, 303-5; A. Carugo and A. C. Crombie, The Jesuits and Galileo's Ideas of Science and of
Nature, in Annali dell'Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze VIII, 2 (1983), pp. 3-68;
Crombie and Carugo, Galileo's Natural Philosophy (forthcoming).
Galileo Galilei, from II Saggiatore (1623): frontispiece. The brilliantly witty

rhetoric of his argument in this work delighted the newly elected Pope Urban
VIII but infuriated the Jesuit object of his irony, the mathematician and
architect Orazio Grassi.
Experimental Science and the Rational Artist

in Early Modern Europe
HE ESSENTIAL TERM IS THE ITALIAN VIRTU, which Leon

Battista Albert! used in the fifteenth century for "those
excelling gifts which God gave to the soul of man, greatest
and preeminent above all other earthly animals."1 A man of virtu in
Renaissance Italian, coming from the Latin virtus meaning power or
ôn Battista Alberti, I libri della famiglia, ed. Cecil Grayson (Opere volgari, vol.
i, Ban, Italy: Laterza, 1960), p. 133; cf. for full documentation of this paper with
bibliography Alistair C. Crombie, Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European
Tradition (London: Duckworth and Co., 1994); also "Science and the Arts in
Renaissance: The Search for Truth and Certainty, Old and New," History of
Science 18 (1980), pp. 133-46, and in Science and the Arts in the Renaissance, ed.
John W. Shirley and F. David Hoeniger (Washington, DC: The Folger
Shakespeare Library, 1985), pp. 15-16, "Philosophical Presuppositions and
Shifting Interpretations of Galileo" in Theory Change, Ancient Axiomatics and
Galileo's Methodology: Proceedings of the 1978 Pisa Conference on the History
and Philosophy of Science, vol. i, ed. Jaakko Hintikka, David Gruender, and
Evandro F. Agazzi (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1981), pp. 171186,
"Historical Commitments of European Science," Annali dell'Istituto e Museo di
Storia della Scienza di Firenze, 7 (i) (1981), pp. 19-51: these and other papers are
included in A.C. Crombie, Science, Optics and Music in Medieval and Early
Modern Thought (London: Hambledon Press, 1990). A shorter version of this
present paper was given at Williams College, MA, while Visiting Bernhard
Professor, at the conference organized there by Professor Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr.
in October 1984 on "Art and Science in Related Revolutions." For the relations
between the arts and the sciences in this period there are Rafaello Caverni, Storia
del metodo sperimentale in Italia, 6 vol. (Florence: 1891-1900); Leonardo
Olschki, Geschichte der neusprachlichen wissenschaftlichen Literatur, vol. i
(Heidelberg: 1919), vol. ^ (Leipzig: 1911), vol. 3 (Halle an der Salle: 1917);
Hedley Rhys, ed., Seventeenth Century Science and the Arts (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1961); Erwin Panofsky, "Artist, Scientist, Genius:
Notes on the 'Renaissance-Dammerung'" in The Renaissance: Six Essays by
Wallace K. Ferguson et al. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961), pp. 111-81;
William P.D. Wightman, Science in a Renaissance Society (London: 1971); and
Shirley and Hoeniger, eds., Science and the Arts in the Renaissance; and for most
of the persons named the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles C.
Gillispie, 16 vol. (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1970-80).
90
capability, was a man with active intellectual power to command any

situation, to do as he intended, like an architect producing a building
according to his design; by contrast with someone at the mercy of
fortuna, of chance or luck, of the accidents of fortuitous circumstance, unforeseen and hence out of control.
The conception of the man of virtu, the virtuoso aiming at
reasoned and examined control alike of his own thoughts, intentions,
and actions and also of his surroundings, points to the essence of the
moral and intellectual commitments by which the Western scientific
movement was generated. The conception of virtu embodied a
program for relating man to the world as perceiver and knower and
agent in the context of his integral moral, social, and cosmological
existence. The program presupposed the stability of nature and
mankind and of their relations; it entailed a commitment to an
examined life of reasoned consistency in intellectual, practical, and
moral life alike and it generated a common style in the mastery of self,
or nature and of mankind alike by the rational anticipation of effects.
To understand that common style we must take a long view
reaching back to the Greek philosophers, mathematicians, medical
men, historians, and dramatists who provided the models equally for
the medieval and early modern scientific movement, as for the
contemporary visual, musical, and literary arts. It was surely no
accident that the same culture produced sciences and arts based alike
on stable expectations, whether physical or moral: a mathematically
and causally structured science of nature, a morally structured
drama, and painting and music each structured mathematically to
make their aesthetic or dramatic effects. The virtuoso was then the
rational artist in all things, designing his intentions first by antecedent
analysis in the mind, before executing them through the hands,
whether he was aiming at mathematical or experimental investigation, at artistic composition, at the cultivation of private or public
good by habit guided by right reason, or as an expedient politician at
calculating from the regularities of human experience the most
effective form of machination. We could take the virtuoso in this
sense as diagnostic of Western civilization, as distinct from other
civilizations of comparable or greater age and magnitude.
Also diagnostic is a particularly rational form of being blinded by
reason, which we could call the blind idiot syndrome. This refers to
a computer programmed to make translations. It was asked to
translate from English into Russian, and then back again into
Experimental Science and the Rational A rtist
91
English, the phrase: "Out of sight, out of mind." The phrase came
back from the Russian: "Blind idiot." Problems of this kind have
arisen from perceptions that oversimplify or in other ways fail to
comprehend what exists, in this case what existed in the English
language. In every culture at any time men have experienced their
world through the mediation of a particular vision of existence and of
knowledge. This defines their cultural style. Failures of European
vision to comprehend what existed, because it was unexpected,
appeared in abundance in the intellectual and pictorial records of
European expansion overseas, whether into various parts of Asia, or
the Americas, or the South Pacific.2 Failures of scientific comprehension have regularly accompanied the revelations of such new scientific instruments as the microscope and telescope.3 The history of
scientific thought is strewn with examples of even the most original
scientific minds failing to comprehend or even to acknowledge
certain phenomena, which could not exist within their powerful
theoretical vision. Technical frontiers may leave phenomena out of
sight; conceptual frontiers put them out of mind.
The style common to the Western sciences and arts may be
illustrated by a collage of examples, through which will become
evident the pattern in which in a diversity of contexts virtu imposed
structure eventually even upon fortuna itself.
Thus wrote Plato: an architect used technical theory, providing
antecedent analysis and design, as a "directive science" (Statesman
2,60 AB) to control the construction of a building by means of
measurement and calculation. For "all arts and forms of thought and
all sciences employ ... number and calculation" (Republic, vii, 52,2
C). Any artist or craftsman in making something "has before his
2
Cf. Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific: A Study in the History
of Art and Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960); Barbara M. Stafford,
Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account,
1760-1840 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984).
3
Cf. Gerard L'E Turner, "The Microscope as a Technical Frontier in Science" in
Proceedings on the Royal Microscopical Society 2 (1967), pp. 175-197; Bernard
Cohen, "The Influence of Theoretical Perspective on the Interpretation of Sense
Data: Tycho Brahe and the New Star of 1572, and Galileo and the Mountains on
the Moon," Annali dell'Istituto e Museo di Storia delta Scienza di Firenze 5 (i)
(1980), pp. 3-13; Ian Hacking, "Do We See Through a Microscope?" Pacific
Philosophical Quarterly 62 (1981), pp. 305-22; Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr.,
"Galileo, Florentine 'disegno,' and the 'Strange Spottedness' of the Moon," Art
Journal (Fall 1984), pp. 225-32, and "The Renaissance Development of Scientific
Illustration" in Science and the Arts, ed. Shirley and Hoeniger, pp. 168-97.
92
mind the form or idea" (x, 596 B) of what he was to make. This was
his model, just as the divine maker modelled the world from the
eternal forms (Timaeus 2,8A-3oC, 466-480, 536). Sometimes in
our perceptions "we are satisifed with the judgement of our senses"
(Republic, vii, 52.36), but sometimes the senses alone could not
resolve the apparent contradictions or illusions produced by nature
or by art, as when apparent size varied with distance or when a
straight stick partly in water looked bent, or in "many tricks of
illusion, like scene-painting and conjuring. But such illusions can be
dispelled by measuring, counting and weighing. We are no longer at
the mercy of the senses; reason takes control" (x, 602.0-36). Art then
lay across the boundary between true representation and deceit. On
one side was "the making of likenesses, as in creating a copy that
conforms to the proportions of the original in all three dimensions
with every part properly coloured": this was fairly called a likeness
[eikon]. But when for example the true proportions of a large
sculpture were distorted to make them appear correct when seen
from below, this only "seems to be a likeness" but is in fact merely "a
semblance [phantasma]" produced by art (Sophist 2.25D-6C). Visual
art then was like sophistry, which imposed upon its listeners "by
means of words that cheat the ear, exhibiting images [eidola] of all
things in a shadow-play of discourse so as to make them believe that
they are hearing the truth" (2346).
The sophistries of rhetoric were aimed not at truth but only at
persuasion; but a master of persuasion might share common methods
of argument with a true scientist seeking a different goal. Plato
likened the methods of rhetoric to those of medicine. Each, in order
to reach its goal, had to discover the true nature of its object. Rhetoric
had to grasp the nature of the soul in order to see how it was
persuasible; medicine had to grasp the nature of the body in order to
see how it was healthy or curable: "In both cases you must analyze
a nature... if you are to proceed scientifically, not merely by practice
and routine, to impart health and strength to the body by prescribing
remedies and diet, or by proper discourses and training to give to the
soul the desired belief and virtue." At the end of his analysis the
scientific rhetorician "will classify the types of discourse and the types
of soul, and the various ways in which souls are affected, explaining
the reasons in each case: suggesting the types of speech appropriate to
each type of soul, and what kind of speech can be relied upon to
create belief in one soul and disbelief in another, and why." For "a
certain type of hearer will be easy to persuade, by a certain type of
93
speech, to take such and such action, for such and such reason; while
another type will be hard to persuade. All this the orator must fully
grasp, and next he must watch it actually taking place in men's
conduct." When the student of rhetoric, having grasped the theory,
could place any individual person in this classification of characters,
and could know how to seize the occasion for the appropriate tricks,
"then and not till then he has well and truly achieved the art." There
was "absolutely no need for the budding orator to concern himself
with the truth about what is just or good conduct" or "who are just
and good men In the law courts nobody cares about the truth in
these matters, but only about persuasion, and that is concerned with
what seems most likely" for the purpose. The would-be master of
persuasion must then suppress or substitute facts according to need
and say "goodbye to the truth forever." Then he will be "equipped
with the art complete" (Phaedrus 269D-73A).
Plato delineated very clearly in this account the goal of rational
power over its subject matter that was to define the whole Western
rational tradition, whether in seeking to find the truth or to persuade
to belief or action. He set out systematically for the first time in his
various writings the historic fact that mastery of rational scientific
understanding brought with it power to manipulate matter and mind
alike. Physical engineering and social engineering had the same form,
and persuasion of the scientific (as of the artistic) acceptability of
whatever was proposed or done became as much part of the scientific
tradition as demonstrative proof.
According to Aristotle, everything constituted by nature "has
within itself a principle of motion and of stationariness" (Physics, ii.
i, i92,b 14-15). Art by contrast imposed an external principle of
change, but "art imitates nature" and hence was part of natural
science (ii. 2,1943 22-23). For "if a house had been made by nature,
it would have been made just as it is now by art; and if things made
by nature were made also by art, they would be made in just the same
way ...; in general art partly imitates nature, and partly completes
what nature cannot complete." Thus "if the ship-building art were in
the wood, it would produce the same results by nature" (ii. 8, 1993
12-17, b28).
Art, entailing the ability to invent by rational deliberation and
choice and to learn, distinguished man from other animals. Man
alone "lives by art and reasonings." Hence man alone could progress.
Aristotle distinguished "mere experience" of particular sensory perceptions from "connected experience" where memory of particulars
94
led to knowledge of general regularities. In the latter sense "experience seems pretty much like science and art, but really science and art
come to men through experience." For "knowledge and understanding belong rather to art than to mere experience, and artists are wiser
than men of mere experience...; because the former know the cause,
but the latter do not" (Metaphysics, i. i, 980025-981328). The
"with things made the principle is in the maker; it is either reason or
art or some faculty" (vi. i, iO25b22-3), and "all makings proceed
either from art or from a faculty or from thought ...; from art
proceed the things of which the form is in the soul of the artist" (vii.
7, 1032,32,5^1). Thus, whether in the practical, productive, or
theoretical arts and sciences, two things were essential: "One is the
choice of the right end or aim, the other is the discovery of the actions
that will bring it about In all the arts and sciences both the end
and the means should be within our control" (Politics, vii. 13, i33ib
25-37). Likewise in his moral behaviour man alone could choose and
initiate his actions, and could, through practice guided by right
reason, cultivate skill in virtue or vice as in any other art. Hence
"choice is either desiderative reason or ratiocinative desire, and such
an origin of action is a man" (Nicomachean Ethics, vi. 2, i i39b4~5).
For "art is identical with a state of capacity to make, involving a true
course of reasoning. All art is concerned with coming into being, that
is, with contriving or considering how something may come into
being which is capable of either being or not being, and whose origin
is in the maker and not in the thing made"; it was in nature not in art
that things existed "by necessity" (vi. 4,11403 1-16). By art then, by
practice guided by reason, men acquired skill to control every aspect
of their lives, whether in making material artifacts, or in managing
the plants and animals and their own bodies or their fellow men, or
in cultivating moral virtue or vice.
The fulfillment of human intelligence in the arts and sciences was
made possible by the fact that "of all animals man alone stands erect,
in accordance with his godlike nature and essence" (De partibus
animalium, iv. 10, 686a 27-29), for this raised up with his head the
most exact senses of vision and hearing, and liberated his hands as an
instrument for making both artificial things and other instruments.
Thus by mind, eye, and hand man was the animal alone equipped for
technical advance.
There was an analogy between the rational art of nature and the
rational art of man: "Our wonder is excited first by phenomena
which occur in accordance with nature but of which we do not know
95
the cause, and secondly by those which are produced by art despite
nature for the benefit of mankind. Nature often operates contrary to
human expediency; ... when therefore we have to do something
contrary to nature, the difficulty of it perplexes us and we must call
art to our aid." Then by "mechanical skill...: Mastered by nature,
we overcome by art" (Mechanica, c. i, 8473 lo-b 16). One could say
of anyone who had grasped the revolutions of the heavens that "his
soul is like that of whoever fashioned them in the heavens. For when
Archimedes fastened on to a [metal] sphere the movements of the
moon, the sun, and the five planets, he did the same as the god of
Plato who built the world in the Timaeus; he made one revolution of
the sphere control several movements utterly unlike in slowness and
speed. Now, if in this world this cannot be done without a god,
neither could Archimedes have been able to imitate those same
movements upon a sphere without divine genius" (Cicero, Tusculanae quaestiones, i. 25. 61-3).
To investigate all the diverse subject matters of art and science
upon which Aristotle imposed a similar rational form, he employed a
likewise similar method of argument by analysis and synthesis. Thus
he applied to politics as to physics "the method that has hitherto
guided us. As in other departments of science, so in politics, the
compound should always be resolved into the simple elements or
least parts of the whole" (Politics, i. i, 12523 19-24). As with
physical phenomena, so with the state and human society, the
complex whole must first be analyzed into its elementary constituents, so that it could be reconstructed from those elements and so
scientifically understood (Physics, i. i, 18439^1).
Apart from the Timaeus, Plato's main works became known to the
Latin West only with Marsilio Ficino's Latin translations made
towards the end of the fifteenth century, followed by editions of the
Greek. By contrast, practically all of Aristotle was known by the
middle of the thirteenth century, mostly through the translations
made during the previous hundred years. Hence philosophical conceptions of the relation of natural science to art, and of the structure
of scientific argument, whether leading to scientific understanding or
beyond that to artistic construction or engineering, were in early
modern Europe at first predominantly Aristotelian. Later during the
sixteenth century came the influence of Plato and with that of Greek
mathematicians, especially Archimedes, in addition to Euclid, who
had provided a model of scientific argument since the twelfth century.
The original insight by which the Greek mathematicians had
96
discovered an abstract order behind the chaos of immediate

experience was into a realm of simple relations, as in the mathematical sciences of astronomy, optics, mechanics, and acoustics,
which they had developed most successfully. Their inquiry into the
explanation of a phenomenon became a search for the simplest
and fewest principles that would produce it. Then, when the
principles were postulated, the phenomenon must follow. Thus
they exploited the speculative power of geometry by imposing
upon phenomena at once its deductive logical structure and an
appropriate model delineating for each its form in space. Euclid
had established the classical postulational style first by developing
in the Elements a rational theory of geometrical space. From this
he developed in the Optics a geometrical theory of what must be
seen in specified situations, accepting his postulates, which took
the eye as the point of origin of straight lines of vision. Similarly,
in the Sectio canonis, he developed a theory of acoustical perception from the postulate that sounds were produced by motions
standing in a numerical ratio to each other in which pitch was
determined by frequency. Euclid and other Greek mathematicians
aimed ideally to develop their research into the phenomena purely
theoretically within their geometrical or arithmetical model. Later
they came to realize, as did Ptolemy in his Optics, that in exploring
complex phenomena postulation must be controlled by observation and experiment, in order to decide whether a possible
theoretical model yielded the consequences found in the actual
world. The style of scientific argument in optics came thus
especially through Ptolemy, and likewise later through Alhazen, to
be seen in the thirteenth-century West as one of experimentally
controlled postulation.
This was to be the style of Renaissance art. It was already in the
twelfth century envisaged as a program by Domingo Gundisalvo,
following the tenth-century Arabic philosopher al-Farabl: "The artist" he wrote "is the natural philosopher who, proceeding rationally
from the causes of things to the effects, and from effects to causes,
searches for principles." Thus for "what appears in vision," whether
true or illusory, optics "assigns the causes by which these things are
brought about, and this by necessary demonstrations." Likewise for
music, and for engineering: "The science of engines is the science for
contriving how one can make all those things..., of which the
measures are expressed and demonstrated in mathematical theory,
agree ... in natural bodies. ... The sciences of engines therefore
97
teach the ways of contriving and finding out how natural bodies may
be fitted together by some artifice according to number, so that the
use we are looking for may come from them."4 Again, Robert
Grosseteste wrote in the thirteenth century: "All causes of natural
efforts have to be given by means of lines, angles and figures, for
otherwise it is impossible to have knowledge of the reason [propter
quid] concerning them."5 Hence the need for mathematics in all
natural philosophical investigations. Likewise, according to the
French architect Villard de Honnecourt a generation later, in building
and making machines, in design and portraiture alike "the art of
geometry commands and teaches"; and "in order to work easily," it
must be kept in high regard by anyone "who wants to know how
each must work."6 Without going into the questions of precisely
what these general programmatic utterances meant in particular
practice, and of what mathematics meant in different contexts and
periods, we may see in them a style of rational justification to be
repeated again and again. No one was to argue more insistently than
Roger Bacon for "the power of mathematics in the sciences and in the
affairs and occupations of this world. ... Of these sciences the gate
and key is mathematics" (Opus maius, iv. i. i). That effective
natural philosophy required also practical experimental art was
eloquently stated by Bacon's contemporary Pierre de Maricourt in
his letter of 1269, De magnete. For he wrote "while the investigator of this subject must understand nature . . . he must also
diligently use his own hands." Then "he will be able in a short time
to correct an error which he could not do in eternity by natural
philosophy and mathematics alone, if he lacked care with his
hands. For in hidden operations we greatly need manual industry,
without which we can usually accomplish nothing perfectly. Yet
there are many things subject to the rule of reason which we
4
Dominicus Gundissalinus, De divisione philosophae, ed. L. Baur (Beitrage zur

Geschichte der Philosophic des Mittelalters, 4 (1-3) Miinster: 1903), pp. 10,17,
iiz, 122; cf. Alpharabius, De ortu scientiarum, ed. C. Baeumker (ibid., 19 (3)
Miinster: 1916).
5
Robert Grosseteste, De lineis, angulis et figuris in Die philosophischen Werke, ed.
L. Baur (Beitrage zur Geschichte der Philosophic des Mittelalters, 9 Miinster:
1912), p. 60; cf, A.C. Crombie, Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science 1100-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953, 1971).
6
Villard de Honnecourt, Kritische Gesamtausgabe des Bauhuttenbuches ms. fr.
19093 der Pariser Nationalbibliothek ed. H. R. Handloser (Vienna: 1935), folios
iv, i8v, i9v.
98
cannot investigate completely with the hand."7

Matching this rather with practical art than with natural philosophy in view, a contemporary asked of Alberti "in what class of
learned men" to put him. He answered: "Among the natural
scientists [physici].... Certainly ... he was born only to investigate
the secrets of nature. And what kind of mathematics does he not
know? Geometer, arithmetician, astronomer, musician, he wrote
marvellously better than anyone for many centuries on perspective.
... He wrote on painting, he wrote on sculpture ... and he not only
wrote but also made with his own hands."8 Alberti himself explained
in 1435: "In writing about painting ... we will, to make our
discourse clearer, first take from mathematicians those things which
seem relevant to the subject. When we have learned these, we will go
on, to the best of our ability, to explain the art of painting from the
basic principles of nature. ... We will now go on to instruct the
painter how he can represent with his hand what he has conceived
with his mind."9 Alberti exemplified in his account of the painter the
active self-conscious man of virtu, the rational artist who made
himself effective by means of knowledge, technique, and continual
practice. Governing all his thinking was his perception of analogy
within diversity. He searched in all his work for an economy of
explanation and of practice reached by thinking out the general
principle behind each subject, whether in perspective painting, in the
anatomical variations of the human body as in De sculptura, in
architecture as in De re aedificatoria, in surveying as in the Descriptio
urbis Romae and Ludi rerum mathematicarum, in the relation of
Italian vernacular to classical Latin as in the Regule lingue florentine,
in the art of ciphering as in De componendis cifris, or in his theory of
moral life. He looked everywhere also for the issue of theory in
practice and thereby its confirmation by observation. Thus moral like
scientific virtu was to be cultivated by reasoned analysis of personal
and contemporary experience, and by discourse with other men both
present and past who recorded the experience and reflections of
mankind. The ultimate aim of man in his natural life on this Earth
7
Petrus Peregrinus Maricurtensis, De magnete book i, ch. 2., ed. G. Hellman (Kara
magnetica; Neudriicke von Schriften und Karten iiber Meteorologie und Erdmagnetismus 10 Berlin: 1898).
8
Cristpforo Landino, Commento... spora la Comedia di Danthe Algheri (Florence:
1491), folio iv1.
9
Alberti, De pictura book i, sections i and Z4, ed. Grayson in On Painting and On
Sculpture (London: Phaedon Press, i97z), p. 36, 58.
99
was to cultivate himself by reason, technique, and letters as a wellcomposed and controlled work of art. This was an Aristotelian
humanist ideal viewed perhaps with skepticism by some contemporaries engaged more roughly with the real world, but its principle of
reasoned control in an examined life had long been made part of
traditional Christian moral theory. For Alberti it was the basis of
both the personal and the social responsibility that all human
activities and works entailed. Hence the necessity both for education
and for that continual effort of practice in virtu, which alone could
restrain the hazards of "unjust and malevolent fortuna" (I libri delta
famiglia, prologue, p. 3). God had endowed man with an inborn
virtu, and this it was our duty to cultivate both for our own sakes and
by our work "so that times past and those present will be of service
to those that have not yet come" (Profugiorum ab aerumna i, pp.
122-3). "Our first and proper use is to exert the power of our soul
towards virtu," for: "To man alone among mortals is it given to
investigate the causes of things, to examine how true are his thoughts
and how good are his actions" (De iciarhia i, pp. 198, 212). At the
same time he must live responsibly for the benefit of others, above all
for "justice and truth" (ii, p. 286).10
All the practical arts proceeded then from a rational analysis of the
subject matter and objectives of the art to their achievement in an
appropriate representation or manipulation or use of the products of
the analysis. Practical art like natural science became at once both
highly intellectualized and precisely controlled. This was the intellectual bond uniting Alberti with his contemporaries, Nicolaus of Cusa,
Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, Georg Peurbach, and Piero della Francesca, in their common search for a quantified geometrical space and
techniques for its measurement in astronomy and cartography, optics
and painting alike; and again later uniting Leonardo da Vinci and
Albrecht Diirer, and likewise the musicians Franchino Gaffurio,
Lodovico Fogliano, and their successors in their search for an
arithmetically quantified music that accommodated the requirements
of the human ear. When Diirer wrote that "a good painter is
inwardly full of figures," which pour forth "from the inner ideas of
which Plato writes,"11 he was presenting the aesthetic theory of an
artist with both philosophical education and technical knowledge of
10
Alberti, Opere volgari, ed. Grayson, vol. i (1960) and vol. 2 (1966).
E. Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Diirer, 4th ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1955), p. 280.
100
practical mathematics. The program became a commonplace. Thus

Giorgio Valla: "the artist reasons when he wants something for
himself, fashions and forms it inwardly, and accordingly makes an
image for himself of everything that is to be portrayed."12 Marsilio
Ficino: "What is a work of art? The mind of the artist in matter
separate from it. What is a work of nature? The mind of nature in
matter united with it. ... And what is remarkable, human arts
construct by themselves whatever nature herself constructs, as if we
were not slaves of nature but rivals." But "not just anybody can
discern by what principle and in what way the work of a clever artist,
artistically constructed, is put together, but only he who has the same
power of artistic genius [artis ingenium].... And he who discerns on
account of similarity of genius could certainly construct the same
things when he had recognized them, provided materials were not
lacking." Since therefore man had seen and measured the order of the
heavens, "who will deny that he has a genius (so to speak) almost the
same as that of the Creator of the heavens and that he could in a
certain way make the heavens if he obtained the instruments and
celestial matter; since he makes them now, though of other matter,
yet very similar in arrangement."13 Leonardo da Vinci: "Astronomy
and the other sciences proceed by means of manual operations, but
first they are mental as is painting, which is first in the mind of him
who theorizes on it, but painting cannot achieve its perfection
without manual operation."14 But "although nature starts from the
reason and finishes at experience, for us it is necessary to proceed the
other way round, that is starting... from experience and with that to
investigate the reason."15 "There is no effect in nature without
reason: understand the reason and you do not need experiment."16
"Oh speculator on things, I do not praise you for knowing the things
that nature through her order naturally brings about ordinarily by
herself; but, I say, rejoice in knowing the end of those things which
12
Giorgius Valla, De expetendius et fugiendis rebus opus, book i, ch. 3, (Venetiis:

1501).
13
Marsilius Ficinus, Theologica Platonica, book 4, ch. i, book 13, ch. 3 (Opera,
Basilae: 1576), pp. 1x3, 2.95-7.
14
Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting, Codex Urbinas Latinus 1270, book i,
chs. 19, 35 trans. A.P. McMahon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1956): a posthumous compilation.
15
Leonardo da Vinci, Les manuscrits ... de la Bibliotheque de I'Institut, Codex E.,
ed. Charles Ravaisson-Mollien, folio 55r (Paris: Institut de France, 1888).
16
Leonardo da Vinci, // Codico Atlantico nella Biblioteca Ambrosiana di Milano,
transcribed by G. Piumati, folio i47v (Milan: 1894-1904).
101
are designed by your own mind."17

Four ancient works that were to propel in this same direction
conceptions developed in the sixteenth century of the relations
between the arts and sciences were the Aristotelian Mechanica, Hero
of Alexandria's Automata, Proclus's neoplatonic commentary on the
first book of Euclid's Elements, and Vitruvius's De architectura. Thus
Vitruvius on the architect: "His works are born from both construction and reasoning" (i. i. i). Men learned to devise the machines
[machinae] and instruments [organi] necessary for improving the
material arts by imitating the "devised nature [natura machinata] "
(x. i, 4) exemplified in the celestial revolutions. An exegesis of these
terms given in the philological commentary on the earliest Italian
translation (in 152.1) made the essential point: "Machinatio ... may
be derived from I cunningly contrive,... I deliberate, I think out,...
stratagem, ... whence undertaking, thinking, machine and ...
mechanic or mechanical operator."18 "Machina Mechanics... is
commendable whether for its basic imitative resemblance to the
divine work of the construction of the world, or for the great and
memorable usefulness reached. ... And that furthermore ... has
been put into practice through a burning desire to produce in sensible
works with their own hands that which they have thought out with
the mind."19 Daniele Barbaro in the principal sixteenth-century
Italian commentary on Vitruvius wrote of Michelangelo that "the
artist works first in the intellect and conceives in the mind, and then
signs the external matter with the internal habit."20 But "the intellect
of man is imperfect and not equal to the divine intellect, and matter
so to speak is deaf, and the hand does not respond to the intention of
art." Hence "the architect must think very well and, in order to make
more certain of the success of the works, will proceed first with the
design and the model...; and ... he will imitate nature, which does
not do anything against its maker. Yet he will not search for
17
Leonardo da Vinci, Les manuscrits Codex G., ed. Ravaisson-Mollien, folio 47'
(Paris: 1890).
18
Marcus Lucius Vitruvius Pollio, De architectura libri dece, traducti de latino in.
vulgare, affigurati, commentati, book i, ch. 3 (Como: 1521) folio 18: begun by
Cesare Cesariano and completed by Benedetto Giovio and Bono Mauro; see
Paolo Galluzzi, "A proposito di un errore dei traduttori di Vitruvio nel '500,' "
Annali dell'Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze i (z) (1976), pp.
78-80.
19
Vitruvius, ibid., book 10, ch. i commentary folio i6zv.
20
See the preface of Daniele Barbaro, I died libri dell' Architettura di M. Vitruvio,
tradutti e commentati (Venice: 1556), p. 9.
102
impossible things, either as to the matter or as to the form, which

neither he nor others can accomplish."21
The limits of the possible in nature were brought into sharp focus
by these rational artists whose essential purpose was to succeed in the
practical execution of their projects. Thus Giuseppe Ceredi, engineer
and scholar of Greek mathematics, insisted that "I am accustomed to
practice both with the mind and with works"; for "I remembered, as
was well said by Aristotle and Galen, that no science or art aimed at
action can be perfectly possessed by anyone who may know its
precepts but does not then confirm them with a variety of experiments [esperienze] many times and finally succeeding." There was a
powerful precedent for "putting into execution so many beautiful
mathematical and physical reasons, seeing that nature herself, as if
become mechanical [quasi divenuta mecanica] in the construction of
the world and of all forms of things, seems to be striving designedly
to produce every hour more ingenious instruments [artificiosi organi]." Theory had been opened up for Ceredi by his being sold some
manuscripts of Hero of Alexandria, Archimedes, Pappus, and other
Greek mathematicians from the collection made at Milan by Giorgio
Valla. Putting theory into practice, he offered as a method of
antecedent analysis in any undertaking the construction of "small
and large models [modelli], adding, changing, and removing many
things according to whether the condition of the material, or the
coming together of many far and near causes, or the variety of means,
or the degree of the proportions, or the force of motions, or many
other impediments that one can encounter, required it." Thus he
could conveniently bring together the "numerous observations" that
had to be made and kept "in the mind in order to achieve some new
and important effect." For in order "to bring them properly together
and to direct them firmly to the prescribed work," errors had to be
recognized "from experience and so corrected by reason that at last
one comes to the perfection of art and to the stable production of the
effect that is expected."22 Again Guidobaldo del Monte pointed out
that "art with wonderful skill overcomes nature through nature
herself, by so arranging things as nature herself would do if she
21
Ibid., i (3), p. z6.

Giuseppe Ceredi, Tre discorsi sopra il modo d'alzar acque da' luoghi bassi, book
i (Parma: 1567).
22
103
decided that such effects should be produced by herself."23

Art then could not cheat nature, but by discovering, obeying, and
manipulating natural laws, with increasing quantification and measurement, art was seen to deprive nature of her mysteries and to
achieve its mastery by reasoned foresight, whether in the representation of a visual scene, the design and control of a machine, the
composition of music, the navigation of a ship across the ocean, or
optimistically the diagnosis, prognosis, and control of a disease or
even of the affairs of state. Galileo was defining the identity at once
of nature and of natural science when he commented on engineers
who "would apply their engines to works of their own nature
impossible: in the success of which both they themselves have been
deceived, and others also defrauded of the hopes they had conceiv'd
upon their promeses ...; as if, with their engines they could cosen
nature" and her "inviolable laws." For "this is according to the
necessary constitution of nature Nay if it were otherwise, it were
not only absurd, but impossible And... all wonder ceases in us
of that effect which goes not a poynt out of the bounds of nature's
constitution."24 Galileo's last pupil and first biographer Vincenzo
Viviani wrote significantly that for him "the book of nature" was
"always open to those who enjoyed reading and studying it with the
eyes of the intellect." He said that the letters in which it was written
were the propositions, figures, and conclusions of geometry, by
means of which alone was it possible to penetrate any of the infinite
mysteries of nature. If the intellect did the reading, the "main doors"
through which it entered in order to do so were "observations and
experiments, which could be opened by the noblest and most
inquisitive intellects by means of the keys of the senses." Viviani drew
attention to Galileo's training both in music (through his father
Vincenzo Galilei), showing in the First Day of the Discorsi e
dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienze (1638) "a
marvellous understanding of" the theory of music," and in perspective
drawing (at the Florentine Accademia del Disegno), delighting in
painting, sculpture, architecture, "and all the arts subordinate to
23
Guidobaldus e Marchio Montis, In duos Archimidis Aequeponderantiutn libros

paraphrasis scholiis illustrate, Preface (Pesauri: 1588), p. z.
24
Galileo Galilei, Le mecaniche, national edition, ed. Antonio Favaro (Le Opere z
Florence: G. Barbara, 1968), p. 155, trans. Robert Payne (1636): transcribed
from the British Museum MS Harley 6796, f. 317', by Adriano Carugo.
104
design."25
Living from Michelangelo's death to Newton's birth, Galileo
marks the transition between two great European intellectual movements each in its own way dominated by mathematical rationality:
the transition from the world of the rational constructive artist to that
of the rational experimental scientist. The common element in these
intellectual movements and the channel of their mutual influence
seems to have been their common form of argument: their common
use of postulation controlled by practical experience and experiment.
That is what emerges from our collage of examples stretching from
Plato to Galileo. It extended much more widely than those examples,
to the whole conduct of life by the man of virtu, who knew how to
proceed with rational intent in the control at once of argument and
of a variety of materials and activities. This was the style also of the
right reason of Aristotelian ethics, exemplified by the moral and
political philosophy of Thomas More and more ambiguously of
Machiavelli. But we should not confuse Machiavelli's moral intentions with his analysis of the technique that would enable the political
virtuoso to succeed as a blackguard if he so chose. In the same style
the rational artist achieved a common mastery of his materials,
whether in the mechanical, plastic, visual, or musical arts or in the
experimental sciences, by an antecedent analysis providing a rational
anticipation of effects. Thus Galileo wrote of his law of falling bodies:
"I argue ex suppositione, imagining a motion"26 that might be
possible, following the example of Archimedes. This then led him to
the experiments by which he decided whether that possible motion
was realized in the actual world.
The experimental philosopher as rational artist might make his
antecedent analysis by means of theory alone, quantified as the
subject matter allowed, or by modelling a theory with an artifact
25
Vicenzo Viviani, "Racconto istorica della vita di Galileo" (1654; Le Opere 19), pp.
625, 627; cf. A.C. Crombie, "The Primary Properties and Secondary Qualities in
Galileo Galilei's Natural Philosophy" in Saggi su Galilei (Florence: G. Barbera,
preprint 1969), Styles of Scientific Thinking, Chs. 9-11; A. Carugo and
Crombie, "The Jesuits and Galileo's Ideas of Science and of Nature," Annali
dell'Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze 8 (2) (1983), pp. 1-68,
26
Galileo to Pierre de Carcavy, June 5,1637, Le Opere 17, pp. 90-1; cf. to Giovanni
Battista Baliani, January 7, 1639, ibid., 18, pp. 11-13.
\05
analytically imitating and extending the natural original. Galileo was

behaving in a way just like his exact contemporary Shakespeare,
when he offered an analysis of human character in his imaginary
world which we recognize at once as true of our real experience.
Scientist and artist alike were creating possible worlds that would
in some way explain the real world of experience. They were both in
different ways creating theoretical models, and it is through the
model in its various forms that the interpenetration of art and science
can be seen at its most telling. Painters from the time of Alberti used
scientific optics to carry out an analysis of visual clues, by means of
which they could construct a painting by simulating those clues: that
is as a perceptual model imitating the natural clues in true perspective. To make then they had first to know. At the same time their
perceptual models affected the way people looked at the natural
world and what they saw in it. Conversely, in explaining the
technique of perspective painting, they also provided models for the
physiological operation of the eye. Kepler solved the problem of the
formation of the retinal image by first isolating the geometrical optics
of the eye from the questions of causation and perception, inherited
within the package of ancient and medieval theories of vision, which
inhibited a purely geometrical physical analysis. He treated the eye as
a camera obscura containing a lens.27 To know then we might say
that physiologists, at least when they tackled some problems, had first
to learn how to make. The invasion of science by art through the
method of hypothetical modelling went very deep during the seventeenth century. For some natural philosophers indeed art seemed to
have taken over the epistemology of natural science altogether.
Thus wrote Marin Mersenne: "One is constrained to acknowledge
that man is not capable of knowing the reason for anything other
than that which he can make, nor other sciences than those of which
he makes the principles himself, as one can demonstrate in considering mathematics."28 Again in examining physical things "we must
not be surprised if we cannot find the true reasons for the way they
27
A.C. Crombie, "The Mechanistic Hypothesis and the Scientific Study of Vision,"
Proceedings of the Royal Microscopical Society ^ (1967), pp. 3-111, republished
in Science, Optics and Music.
28
Marin Mersenne, Les questions theologiques, physiques, morales, et mathematiques, question 22 (Paris: 1634) in; cf. Robert Lenoble, Marin Mersenne, ou la
naissance du mecanisme (Paris: J. Vrin,e 1943); Crombie, "Mathematics, Music
and Medical Science," Actes du XII Congres International d'Histoire des
Sciences, Paris 1968 (Paris: A. Blanchard, 1971), pp. 195-310.
106
act or are acted upon, because we know the true reasons only for
things that we can make with the hand or with the mind; and
because, of all the things that God has made, we cannot make a single
one, whatever subtlety or effort we bring to it; besides which God
could have made them in some other way."29
The experimental natural philosophers and the rational artists
were creating possible worlds for themselves and each other and for
a wider public in more ways than one. The analysis of visual clues
carried out for the purposes of perspective painting showed what
must be seen when these were present. At the same time it generated
expectations in those familiar with it of what they should be seeing to
produce a given set of clues received. Thus Galileo with training in
perspective and chiaroscuro saw and drew through his telescope in
1609 mountains and valleys on the moon, just as they could be seen
and touched on an indented stone ball; Thomas Harriot with no such
training saw through a comparable instrument in the same year only
strange spots.30 Likewise the exact measurement and true scaling
required by linear perspective completely transformed the communication of information in the sciences and technical arts through
pictorial illustrations. The immediate effects were apparent in the
views and in the sixteenth-century plans drawn of cities, in cartography, and in the depiction of the external and internal structures of
animals, plants, minerals, and of machines. Depiction became an
instrument of scientific research. It seems that the engineers Mariano
di Jacopo, called Taccola, and Francesco di Giorgio Martini, to name
only two, designed their machinery by inventive drawing before
construction;31 and that Descartes expected to find in the animal
body a kind of mechanism analogous to mechanisms made familiar
in printed illustrations.32
29
Marin Mersenne, Harmonic universelle, vol. 2, "Nouvelles observations physiques

et mathematiques" (Paris: 1637), p. 8.
30
Edgerton, "Galileo, Florentine 'disegno,' and the 'Strange Spottedness' of the
Moon," pp. 12532.
31
Edgerton, "The Renaissance Development of Scientific Illustration," pp. 168-97;
also Joan Gadol, Leon Battista Alberti: Universal Man of the Early Renaissance
(Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1969).
Eg. Salomon de Caus, Les raisons des forces mouvantes avec diverses machines
tant utiles que plaisantes, aus quelles sont adoints plusieurs desseigns de grottes et
fontaines (Frankfurt, Germany: 1615); cf, Willem van Hoorn, As Images
Unwind: Ancient and Modern Theories of Visual Perception (Amsterdam:
University of Amsterdam Press, 1972).
32
10 7
Matching perspective painting within the mathematical and experimental arts and sciences, which established a unique style of
thought and action in early modern Europe, was music. The science
of music, like that of perspective, was concerned primarily with the
identification and quantitative analysis of clues to sensations: the
acoustical quantities expressible in numbers which stimulated the
diversities of auditory perception. It was Mersenne who finally
developed the science of music as a systematic exploration of a whole
subject matter. Again he aimed to show how through scientific
analysis to achieve rational control: of musical perception and its
effects on the emotions, of composition through a calculus of
permutations and combinations of notes, and of information communicated through sound leading to a theory of language. "Music is
a part of mathematics" he opened his first musical essay, the Traite de
I'harmonic universelle (1627), "and consequently a science that
shows the causes, effects and properties of sounds, tunes, concerts,
and of everything that belongs to them." The science of music
depended then on arithmetic and geometry "but also on physics from
which it borrows knowledge of sound and of its causes, which are the
movements, the air, and the other bodies that produce sound."33 He
developed his science of music as a program of systematic measurement of the acoustical quantities effecting hearing, combined with an
analysis on one side of the physics of sound producing these external
quantities, and on the other of the internal processes mediating
sensation and its effects on the soul. As in painting, all attempts to
establish a scientifically rational control over musical composition
foundered on the pecularities of auditory as of visual perception in
providing aesthetic pleasure through art. The judgements of the ear
could often differ from the expectations of mathematical theory. The
33
Mersenne, Traite de I'harmonie universelle, book i, theorem i (Paris: 1617), pp.

2, 9-, cf. for music Claude V. Palisca, "Empiricism and Musical Thought" in
Seventeenth Century Science, ed. Rhys, pp. 91-137, "The Science of Sound and
Musical Practice" in Science and the Arts, ed. Shirley and Hoeniger, pp. 59-73;
D. Perkin Walker, Studies in Musical Science in the Renaissance (London:
Warburg Institute, 1978); Crombie, "Mathematics, Music and Medical Science,"
pp. 295-310, "Marin Mersenne (1588-1648) and the Seventeenth-Century
Problem of Scientific Acceptability," Physis 17 (1975), pp. 186-204, Styles of
Scientific Thinking, ch. 3, section 4, Marin Mersenne and the Science of Music
(forthcoming); Jamie C. Kassler, "Music as a Model in Early Science," History of
Science zo (1982), pp. 103-39; H. Floris Cohen, Quantifying Music: The Science
of Music in the First Stage of the Scientific Revolution, 1580-1650 (Dordrecht: D.
Reidel, 1984).
108
science of music, developed during the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries, clarified this important question, notably in exploring the
relation of aesthetic pleasure to mathematical proportions and physical motions in consonance and dissonance, and the effects of cultural
habits, familiarity, the expectations of the ear, and their changes.
Aesthetic judgements thus differed essentially from those of science,
even though there might be general agreement among knowledgeable
persons within any particular period or culture.34 Mersenne recognized this, but he exemplifies once more the rational artist in his aim
to stabilize all auditory experience by scientific theory covering
sounds and sensations, their aesthetic effects, and their functions in
human and animal communication.
Through his systematic conception and practice of acoustical
"experiences bien reglees et bien faites"35 Mersenne became a major
architect of the modern experimental argument. He based his experimental analysis on the logic of agreement, difference, and concomitant variations with an explicit use of experimental controls. Thus to
investigate the acoustical phenomena of vibrating strings (fundamental in musical theory since Pythagoras) he stretched two strings on a
monochord. One was the control. In the other he kept all the relevant
quantities (length, tension, specific weight) constant except one, and
adjusted the remaining variable quantity in this string until it sounded
in unison with, and hence vibrated with the same frequency as, the
control. In this way he completed the work 'of Giambattista
Benedetti, Vincenzo Galilei, Isaac Beeckman, and others in establishing the relations of frequency (hence pitch) to these quantities.
Beyond that, by measuring the actual frequencies (as distinct from
their ratios) producing different pitches and intervals he demonstrated experimentally for the first time that the musical intervals
were determined by frequencies of vibrations of the air, whatever
their source. He went on to explore, distinguish, and measure further
acoustical quantities: the upper and lower limits of audible frequency
and pitch and their variation in different individuals, the speed and
loudness of sound, and the relation of loudness to distance, the
34
Cf. Palisca, "Scientific Empiricism and Musical Thought"; Walker, Studies in

Musical Science in the Renaissance; Cohen, Quantifying Music; Crombie, Styles
of Scientific Thinking.
35
Mersenne, Harmonie universelle vol. i, "Traitez de la nature des sons, et des
mouvemens de toutes sortes de corps," Book 3, proposition v (Paris: 1636), p.
167.
109
phenomena of resonance, consonance, dissonance, temperament,

harmonics, and so on.36
Mersenne's style as a rational artist is well illustrated by two
examples concerning in two different ways the control of information. By treating the ratios of the frequency of strings to the quantities
determining it as in effect an acoustical function, he showed how a
"deaf man could put them at any consonance he wished," without
hearing anything, by adjusting these quantities in accordance with the
"general rules" embodied in this function. For the benefit of the deaf
he drew up a table showing the quantities that would produce the
different notes of an octave.37 Thus he could generalize experimental
information beyond its receipt by a particular sense. Even more
generally, his conception of human and animal language as both
biological and social phenomena, his attempt to account for the
reception and communication of information in men and animals
firmly by empirical and experimental investigations, and his rethinking of the physiological coordination of behavior, led him to look for
the common elements in all human languages and beyond these in all
forms of communication whether by human beings, animals, or
machines. In this analysis he saw a possible means of inventing a new
universal language for communication among all mankind. This
would redeem the scandal of Babel, and would reunite mankind
whose common understanding of meaning through a common
reason had been disintegrated by the diversification of languages
following the diverse and separate historical experiences of different
peoples. Again Mersenne's model was music. Basing his linguistic
experiments on a calculus of permutations and combinations of a
given set of elements that he had already developed for musical
composition, he proposed to devise a system of notations that could
be expressed symbolically in music.38 Increasing European awareness
of the diversity of the cultures of the world and of the relativity of
human values and expectations directed attention in the seventeenth
36
See for these investigations Crombie, "Mathematics, Music and Medical Science,"
and "Mersenne, Marin (1588-1648)" in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography 9
(1974), pp. 316-22.
37
Mersenne, Harmonic universelle vol. z, "Traitez des instrumens," vol. 3, prop, vii
(1637), pp. 123-6, cf. prop, xvii, pp. 140-6, vol. i, props, xvi-xx, pp. 42-52.
38
Ibid., vol. i, "Traitez de la voix ...," book i, especially props, xii, xlvii-1, pp.
12-13, 65-77, "Traitez ... des sons ...," book i, props, xxii, xxiv, pp. 39-41,
43, vol. 2, "De Putilite de Pharmonie," prop, ix, also La verite des sciences, book
3, ch. 10 (Paris: 1625), pp. 548, 544-80, Les questions theologiques, physiques,
110
century to the diversity of the perceptual worlds inhabited by

different peoples, and also by animals.39 Deaf mutes likewise raised
the question of the mental world of persons deprived of a sense.
Following his analysis of music and the voice he proposed a method
(already used in Spain by Pedro Ponce of Leon) of teaching the deaf
to speak by showing them how to form the tongue and lips in
appropriate positions and then associating these with written words
and with the things they signified.40 Thus the science of music,
including in it all the phenomena of sound, could restore personal
dignity and bring about the unity of mankind within the rational and
stable harmonic universelle that God had chosen to exhibit, both in
the structure of his physical creation and in the information about it
that men were able to discover and communicate.
Antecedent theoretical analysis could direct the experimental argument in different ways. Theoretical expectations could open inquiry in certain directions and close it in others. Within a general and
conventional agreement that trial by experiment was the ultimate
test, a diversity of theories of what existed or could exist in nature,
both in general and in particular, created expectations of what could
or what could not be found by experimental inquiry. The boundaries
of rationality either of nature or of scientific knowledge, however
clearly defined by some leading scientific virtuosi in the seventeenth
morales, et mathematiques question 34 (Paris: 1634), pp. 158-65 (expurgated

edition); cf. Lenoble, Marin Mersenne, ou la naissance du mecanisme; Crombie,
"Mathematics, Music and Medical Science," "Marin Mersenne (15881648) and
the Seventeenth-Century of Scientific Acceptability," and Styles of Scientific
Thinking, ch. 3, section 4, ch. 7, section i; Mersenne, Les questions theologiques,
physiques, morales, et mathematiques, and Traite de I'harmonie universelle; Arno
Borst, Der Turmbau von Babel: Geschichte der Meinung iiber Ursprung und
Vielfalt der Sprachen und Volker, 4 vol. (Stuttgart: 1957-63); Hans Aarsleff,
From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual
History (Minneapolis, MN: 1982); Mary Slaughter, Universal Languages and
Scientific Taxonomy in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
39
Mersenne, Les preludes de I'harmonie universelle, question 6 (Paris: 1634), pp.
150-7, Questions harmoniques, questions 13 (Paris: 1634), Harmonie
universelle, "Traitez de la voix ...," book i prop, lii, pp. 79-81, cf. props, v-xiv,
xxxviii-xli. pp. 7-15, 47-55; Thomas Willis, De anima brutorem (Oxford:
1672).
40
Mersenne, "Traitez de la voix ...," book i props, x-xi, li, pp. 11-12, 77-9; cf.
David Wright, Deafness (London: Allen Lane, 1969); Crombie, "Mathematics,
Music and Medical Science"; Harlan Lane, When the Mind Hears: A History of
the Deaf (New York: Random House, 1984), The Deaf Experience (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
111
century, were never accepted within all the diverse intellectual and
social contexts concerned. Thus experiment and mathematics could
have different meanings within inquiries directed by different preconceptions of what was discoverable in nature, and their results could
give different satisfactions according to whether what was supposed
to be discoverable could be interpreted as having been discovered.
Kepler, for example, looked with neoplatonic vision for harmony in
nature expressed in simple mathematical proportions supported by
sound metaphysical reasons, and he insisted throughout that the
proportions postulated must agree with observation. His quarrel
with Robert Fludd, who shared something of the same vision, was
that Fludd would not agree to acceptable experimental criteria for
believing rather in one kind of world than in another, so that when
Fludd cited measurements made with his weather glass (a kind of
thermometer), they could not agree even on what was being measured. Between the absolutely different mental worlds they inhabited,
the one as a scientific rational artist and the other as a Hermetic
magician, there could be evidently no communication.41 Theory well
supported by experimental argument could also blind even the most
rational natural philosophers to unexpected experimental novelties.
William Gilbert's theoretical expectations obstructed for a generation
recognition that the declination of the magnetic needle from true
north varied in the course of time, even though the evidence was
available.42 William Harvey refused to accept that the lacteal vessels
and thoracic duct discovered by Gasparo Aselli and the receptaculum
chyli discovered by Jean Pequet had any function in the transport of
nourishment from the intestines to the body: he objected theoretically
on the grounds that these vessels were not found in all animals
whereas the necessity for such transport was universal, that the
mesenteric veins were sufficient, and that "nature never does anything thoughtlessly."43
Harvey was well aware of the analogy between the rational artist,
who formed in his mind a conception of what he would represent in
41
Cf. Wolfgang Pauli, "The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific Theories
of Kepler" in Carl G. Jung and Pauli, The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955).
42
Cf. Eva G.R. Taylor, The Mathematical Practitioners of Tudor and Stuart England
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1955).
43
William Harvey to Robert Morrison, April 28, 1652 in The Circulation of the
Blood, trans. Kenneth J. Franklin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 86.
112
his painting and how he would do so, and the rational experimental
scientist who proceeded likewise by an antecedent theoretical and
quantitative analysis of his subject matter. For "art itself is nothing
but the reason of work, implanted in the artists minde. And in the
same way by which we gaine in art, by the very same we attain any
kinde of science or knowledge whatever: for as art is a habit whose
object is something to be done, so science is a habit, whose object is
something to be known; and as the former proceedeth from the
imitation of exemplars; so this latter, from the knowledge of things
naturall. The source of both is from sense and experience" (with the
Aristotelian meanings respectively of particular sensory perceptions
and connected experience of their regularities), "since it is impossible
that art should rightly be purchased by the one, or science by the
other, without a direction from ideas."44 Experimental scientist and
rational artist were then both alike exemplary men of virtu, achieving
their objectives by a similar intellectual behavior, mastering their
subject matters by an analytical anticipation of effects, and committed to an examined life of reasoned consistency in all things. In this
context the rapid extension in the seventeenth century of scientific
experience of the exploration of nature generated its own critical
response. This was twofold, scientific and epistemological. The
response in scientific method was a dramatic increase in the power,
precision, and range of techniques of logical, mathematical, and
instrumental analysis. The response in epistemology was a stricter
and stricter examination of what scientific investigation could be
accepted as having established. Within the ambience of a certain
general philosophical skepticism, the contrast between the acknowledged successes of the mathematical and technical sciences and arts in
solving specific and clearly defined problems, and the disputed claims
of metaphysicians to true and certain knowledge of the whole essence
of existence, led to the conclusion that scientific art alone could yield
the only certainly true science of nature available to us. Scientific
thinking has nearly always been guided or stimulated by ideas or
beliefs coming from outside the strict boundaries of scientific demonstration. Through the seventeenth century, scientific experience
itself brought about a recognition, within an increasingly professional
scientific community, that positive reasons must be required for
^Harvey, Exercitationes de generatione animalium, Preface (London, 1651), translated as Anatomical Exercitations Concerning the Generation of Living Animals
(London: 1653).
113
accepting such beliefs as valid or relevant within a scientific argument. The scientific movement, propelled by a deliberate combination of a theoretical search for common forms of explanation with a
practical demand for accurately reproducible results, came then to
base the acceptability of scientific explanations on a criterion of art:
the range of experimental confirmation on an open frontier, capable
of yielding not certainty but only probability to a degree increasing
with its range.
The triumphal march of rational virtu towards control of scientific
ideas of all kinds received at this point a check, indicated by
Mersenne, from experienced scientific skepticism supported by theology: the doctrine of the omnipotent Creator which reduced the
world from the human point of view to contingent regularities of
fact.45 What then about the realm of fortuna that virtu aimed to
master, the realm of untidy accidents and unfathomable motivations,
of contingent expectation and uncertain choice? One aspect of that
realm was mastered by reason through the calculus of probability,
developed first in the context of commercial insurance and partnerships from the fourteenth century in Italy, and reduced by Pascal and
Christiaan Huygens to an exactly calculated expectation at any point
of time. Thus as Pascal wrote "what was rebellious to experience has
not escaped the dominion of reason. Indeed we have reduced it by
geometry with so much security to an exact art, that it participates in
its certainty and now boldly progresses. And so, joining mathematical
demonstrations with the uncertainty of chance, and reconciling what
seemed contraries, taking its name from both, it justly arrogates to
itself this stupendous title: the geometry of chance [aleae geometria]."46 Scientifically that may be said to have removed some
aspects of the game of life from the long accepted realm of irrational
fortune and personal luck into that of impersonal calculation.
But what about those other seemingly irrational aspects of
45
Cf. A.C. Crombie, "Infinite Power and the Laws of Nature: A Medieval Speculation" in L'infinito nella scienza (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1986),
republished in Crombie, Historical Studies in Scientific Thinking.
46
Blaise Pascal, "Adresse a 1'Academic Parisienne" (1644), ed. Louis Lafuma
(Oeuvres completes, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1963), pp. 101-3; cf. A.C. Crombie,
"Contingent Expectation and Uncertain Choice: Historical Contexts of Arguments from Probabilities" in The Rational Arts of Living, ed. A.C. Crombie and
Nancy G. Siraisi (Northampton, MA: Smith College Studies in History, 1987);
cf. Styles of Scientific Thinking, ch. 18.
114
human motivation that have always been recurrently part of our

culture: the temptations of magic or demonology for example, or
the apparently deliberate cultivation of evil or the desire to destroy
or deconstruct from whatever motive but for no evidently positive
end? Out of sight in ages of reason, the dramatic irrationalism of
our time has sensitized our minds to its counterparts in earlier
periods. It has reverberated through our century like a Wagnerian
opera: too loud, too long. How should a historian of virtu treat
it? Certainly not like a blind idiot. Rather he can use his rational
judgement as a kind of comparative historical anthropologist,
getting to the viewpoint of its motivations, commitments, and
expectations, in the past as in the present, in the minds of its
historians as of their subjects, however irrelevant it may seem to
the history of the problems solved by science or art.
8
Mathematics and Platonism in the Sixteenth-Century
Italian Universities and in Jesuit Educational Policy1
Chairs or lectureships for different parts of the Arts 'quadrivium' seem to have
existed from the end of the fourteenth century in Bologna (arithmetic 1384-5,
astrology with the duty to teach Euclid and algorithm 1405, arithmetic and
geometry 1443)2 and perhaps elsewhere in Italy. Domenico Maria Novara
(1454-1504) of Ferrara held a lectureship in Bologna in astronomy from 1483
to 1504, Luca Pacioli one in mathematics in 1501-2, and Girolamo Cardano
(1501-76) worked there on mathematics while holding a lectureship in
medicine from 1562 to 1570.3 At the reform of the University of Rome by Leo
X in 1514 two professors of mathematics were appointed, one being Pacioli;
other major chairs were in philosophy, astronomy and medicine.4 The Roman
philosophers according to the historian of the university5 were predominantly
1
This paper is based on A.C. Crombie and A. Carguo, Galileo's Natural Philosophy
(forthcoming). The use by the original publisher of inverted commas instead of italics in the titles
of books and journals has been left unchanged. Information has been supplied by Dr. Carugo for
nn. 6 and 95.
2
Bortolotti, 'La storia delle matematiche nell' Universita di Bologna' (1947) 22, 8, 24. What
follows is based on published sources: there is a great need to pursue these questions in university
archives. For mathematics in 16th-century Italy cf. Tiraboschi, 'Storia della letteratura Italiana',
vii (1791) 107 sqq.; Libri, 'Histoire des sciences mathematiques', iii (1840) 101 sqq; Bortolotti,
'Studi e ricerche sulla storia della matematica in Italia . . . ' (1928), 'La matematica in Italia . . . '
(1933); dTrsay, 'Histoire des universites', i (1933) 240, ii (1935) 2-3.
3
Bortolotti, 'La storia . . . ' (1947) 20, 24-33, 74-6; cf. Olschki, 'Geschichte' . . . i, 151 sqq.
4
Renazzi, 'Storia dell' Universita . . . di Roma', ii (1804) 24-30, 44-51, esp. 50-1, 61-6. For the
name Sapienza revived for the university by Gregory XIII in 1568 see pp. 165-7; and for Cardano
at Rome during 1571-76 see pp. 219-20.
5
Renazzi, ibid.,'ii, 173-4: 'Seguica la filosofia di Aristotele a dominar nelle Scuole della
Romana Universita, ne ancor sorto era alcuno a contrastarle 1'antico suo impero. Que' raggi di
vivo splendore, che cominciavano altrove a lampeggiare sul vasto campo delle filosofiche
discipline, non erano ancor giunti a penetrare nelle Scuole Romane. Aveva, egli e vero, il Vives al
principio del secolo XVI, su cui noi qul c'aggiriamo, nel suo eccellente libro 'De corruptis
disciplinis', segnato le dritte vie, che batter conveniva per rettamente filosofare. Gia secondo il
consiglio di Platone, allo studio della filosofia i piu accorti e saggi facevano agl'iniziandi premettere
quello degli elementi dell'algebra, e della geometria. Imperciocche si era da quelli capita, che i
difetti degli studj sin'allora usitati, nascevano specialmente dal non accopiarvi lo studio delle
matematiche. Gio mosse nel secole XVI parecchi profondi ingegni a coltivarle, e illustrarle con
116
medical and Aristotelian; mathematics on the contrary was cultivated on

Plato's advice as the best introduction to philosophy. Giambattista Raimondi
(c. 1536-1614),6 appointed to the mathematical chair in 1576 and also an
oriental linguist, is said to have led the way through his lectures in toppling
Aristotle from the philosophical throne and replacing him by Plato. Galileo's
friend Luca Valeric (1552-1618), who taught mathematics at Rome about
1600, likewise had Platonic affiliations.7
From the middle of the sixteenth century an effort was made to foster the
mathematical sciences by establishing chairs or lectureships in other Italian
universities. Pisa had a mathematical chair in 1484.8 With the renovation of the
impegno maggior; e per tal'opportunissimo fine circa la meta di quello 1'intermessa lettura di
matematiche ricomparve nella Romana Universita. In fatti la giustezza di pensare, la precisione
dell'idee, 1'esattezza del metodo, che in seguito s'introdussero a poco a poco in tutte le scienze, fu
il sostanzioso e utilissimo frutto, che il dilatamento, e i progress! dello studio delle matematiche
felicemente produssero. Lo spirito geometrico nato da tale studio e di maggior importanza e
giovamento, che le astratte verita, le quali dalla geometria propongonsi, e si dimostrano. Ma tra
noi i filosofi troppo altamente erano prevenuti per le dottrine peripatetiche, e oltre modo imbevuti
delle scolastiche sottigliezze. Chi si maravigliera percio, se persistessero tenacemente attaccati ai
vecchi loro pregiudizi, e se nel tempo di cui qui trattiamo, continuassero a spiegar, e sostenere
dalle cattedre Aristotele con indefessa fatica, e con ardente entusiamo? La maggior parte dei
Romani Maestri erano medici di professione come andremo divisando nel produrne qui ora il
catalago; poiche allora congiungevansi quasi sempre gli studi prattici di medicina cogli astratti
della fiosofia'; cf. pp. 174-7.
6
Ibid. 177: 'Un'altra cosa pure del Raimondi deesi qui accennare, che cioe fu esso un dei primi
ad alzar nei suoi discorsi bandiera contro Aristotele e a preparar in Roma la letteraria rivoluzione
di rovesciarlo dal filosofico trono, e rimettervi il gia abbandonato Platone, di che diremo a suo
luogo': cf. G.O. xx 515. Raimondi was in great favour with Pope Clement VIII (Ippolito
Aldobrandini) and especially with his nephew Cinzio Aldobrandini. On G.B. Raimondi see
Girolamo Lunadoro, 'Relatione della corte di Roma e de 'riti da osservarsi in essa e de'suoi
Magistrati et Officii, con la loro distinta giurisdittione' (Venezia, 1635) 63-5, where he is
remembered as having 'belli pensieri circa la doctrina di Platone, et di Aristotele, per essere
versatissimo, in ambi due questi auttori', and for his dedication to mathematical sciences. Notable
achievements were his Latin translations from Greek, such as of Euclid's 'Data', 'uno delli libri
necessarii per la intelligenza della scienza resolutiva, che e nelle mathematiche', and from Arabic,
such as of Apollonius's eight books 'De Conis' (!). Lunadoro adds that Raimondi 'ha commentato
i cinque (!) libri di Pappo' (books 3-5 ?) and 'Ha scritto poi Comentari, e dotti, et esquisiti sopra
tutti i libri di Archimede'. He also mentions his work on Arabic, Persian and Turkish dictionaries
and his learning in theology. This passage from Lunadoro's book was excerpted by John Pell, in an
autograph memorandum now in the Brit. Mus., MS Add. 4458, ff. 95-96. Raimondi left an
unprinted commentary on Pappus, now in the Bibl. Naz. Cent, di Firenze, MS Magi. cl. XI, no.
107. Under his supervision, in the famous 'Stamperia medicea' attached to the Collegio Romano,
were printed many important works in Arabic, including Avicenna's 'Canon' (1593) and Nasir addin's edition of Euclid (1594).
7
Renazzi, 'Storia . . . ', iii (1805) 36, 85.
8
Fabronius, 'Historia Academia Pisanae', i (1791) 326-7:
'Difficile est reperire quid de illius aetatis mathematicis dicas. Prorsus illi ignorabant quid Graeci
omnis praeclarae artis inventores, ac praesertim Archimedes vir prope divinus contulissent ad
amplificandos geometriae fines, adjungendumque illius usum ad physicas res; et qui hanc
profitebantur scientiam, nullum aliud praeceptum artis esse putabant, quern quod ni Euclide
continentur'.
Mathematics and Platonism
111
university begun in 1543 under Duke Cosimo I three mathematical appointments were made in the same year 1548: Juliano Ristoro, a Carmelite
described as having already professed mathematics in Siena and Florence, to a
chair in astronomy with a view to facilitating astrology,9 and two others to
positions as 'mathesis praeceptores'.10 It was to one of these latter posts that
Galileo was to be appointed in 1589 through the interest of Guidobaldo's
younger brother Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, after he had failed in
the previous year to get a similar position at Bologna.11 The mathematical
chair at Padua, to which Galileo moved in 1592 with the help of Giovanni
Vincenzo Pinelli12, had been initiated in 1520 by Federico Delfino, who at his
death in 1547 was succeeded by an undistinguished logician, Pietro Catena,13
who held it until his death in 1576. During 1559-60 Catena was joined briefly by
Francesco Barozzi.14 Catena's successor from 1577 to 1588, Gioseffe Moleto,
was a man who showed some originality, for example in recognising that all
bodies should fall with the same speed and dealing with the contradiction
between this conclusion and Aristotelian physics.15 He and Galileo were in
Fabbruccio, 'De Pisano Gymnasio . . . ' (1960) 112-6; Fabronius, op. cit. ii (1792) 385-6 470;
Baldi, 'Cronica' (1707) 122.
10
Fabronius, op. cit. ii 385-6; cf. Schmitt, The Faculty of Arts at Pisa at the time of Galileo'
(1972).
11
Fabronius, op. cit., p. 392; Favaro, 'Galileo Galilei e lo Studio di Padova', i (1883) 30-2.
12
G.O. x 42, 47-60, xix 111-2 117-25; Favaro, ibid. pp. 48-53, 'Cronologica Galileiana' (1892),
'Scampoli Galileiani, ser. ix' (1894).
13
Favaro, 'Galileo Galilei e lo studio di Padova' i, 100-36, esp. 133-6; see also Favaro, 'Intorno
alia vita . . . di Prosdrocini de'Beldomandi' (1879) 46-55; 'Le matematiche nello Studio di Padova'
(1880), 'I lettori di matematiche nella Universita di Padova' (1922) 61-7; Baldi, 'Cronica' (1707)
112, 135-6, Affo 'Vita di . . . Baldi' (1783) 9; Tiraboschi, 'Storia . . . ' vii (1791) 657; Crapulli,
'Mathesis universalis' (1969) 42-62. Catena was much concerned with mathematical demonstration in Aristotle, writing in one of his books. 'Universa loca in logicam Aristotelis in
mathematicis disciplinas hoc novum opus declarat' (1556) 4:' . . . etiam si exiguas (nam apprime
novi quam sit mihi curta suppellex) expederem in eruendo Aristotele ex illo obscuro, id autem tarn
comode apte fieri putabam, si mathematica exempla sua expressiora redderem, quibus in
explicandis logicis usus fuit ipse presertim hoc tempore quo publicis lectionibus mathematicis in
Paduano Gimnasio incumbebam . . . .' He went on in commenting on 'Post. Anal.' i.i, 71a 19-22
(= text 3) to make the contrast: ' . . . Neque id ostenditur per inductionem Topicam quae a
particularibus ad universalem procedit, et contrariatur huic posterioristico processui, qui fit ab
universali and particularia . . . ' (p. 25). He followed this with another work: Petrus Cathena,
artium et theologiae doctor, professor publicus artium liberalium in Gymnasio Patevino, 'Super
loca mathematica contenta in Topicis et Elenchis Aristotelis', nunc et non antea in lucem aedita
(1561).
14
Boncompagni, 'Intorno alia vita ed ai lavori di Francesco Barozzi' (1884) 796-7.
15
Favaro, 'Galileo Galilei e lo Studio di Padova', i, 21-36, 135-6, 'Giuseppe Moletti' (1917).
118
contact through correspondence during the year before he died in 1588.16

From both Padua and Florence, the greatest influence on mathematical
teaching in Italian universities was eventually to be that of Galileo himself. His
pupil and friend Benedetto Castelli (1578-1643) was to be appointed at Pisa in
1613, and to move from there to the mathematical chair at the Sapienza in
Rome in 1626.17 Another pupil, Bonaventura Cavalieri (1598-1647), was to
hold the chair at Bologna from 1629 until his death. One of Castelli's pupils in
Rome, Evangelista Torricelli (1608-47), was to succeed Galileo as mathematician to the Tuscan court in 1642; another, Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608-79),
was to be appointed about 1635 to a mathematical lectureship in Messina,
whence he moved in 1656 to the chair at Pisa. In the same year Marcello
Malpighi (1628-94) went from a lectureship in logic at Bologna to the chair of
theoretical medicine at Pisa, finally returning by way of the main medical chair
at Messina to that at Bologna in 1666.18 Borelli and Malpighi, both members of
the Accademia del Cimento, and Borelli's pupil Lorenzo Bellini (1643-1704)
who succeeded Malpighi in the chair of theoretical medicine at Pisa, were to be
primarily responsible for carrying the Galilean mathematical programme into
biology.
It was however the Jesuits who made the teaching of mathematics most
explicitly part of an educational policy. The Jesuit 'Constitutiones' (1556) laid
down that 'the end of the Society and of its studies is to aid our fellow men to
the knowledge and love of God and to the salvation of their souls'.19 The
principal emphasis of Jesuit universities was to be placed upon theology as the
most appropriate means to this end, but a full range of other humane and
useful subjects was to be taught: literature and history, classical and oriental
languages, and 'the arts or natural sciences' since they 'dispose the intellectual
powers for theology, and are useful for the perfect understanding and use of it,
and also by their own nature help towards the same ends'.20 From Ignatius
Loyola himself came the injunction: 'Logic, physics, metaphysics and moral
science should be treated and also mathematics in the measure suitable to the
end proposed'21. Medicine and law, being more remote from this end, were
not to be taught in Jesuit universities or at least not by members of the society.
16
G.O. i, 183-5; x, 21, 30, 42, 77; xix, 111, 606.

Fabronius, op. cit. ii, 404-9; Renazzi, op. cit. iii, 86-8: Favaro, 'Benedetto Castelli' (1907-8):
Zannini, 'La vita di Benedetto Castelli' (1961).
18
For these authors see the 'Dictionary of Scientific Biography' (1970).
19
'Constitutiones Soc. Jesu', iv. 12 ('Mon. hist. Soc. Jesu', 1936) 468; Ignatius of Loyola, The
Constitutions . . .' iv. 12, transl. Ganss (1970) 50-4, 213-4; cf. 'Constitutiones', iv. 12 (1583) 15961; 'Mon. paed. Soc. lesu' i, ed. Lukacs (1965) 281-5.
20
'Constit. SJ.' iv. 12 (1936) 470, (1965) 482; cf. (1583) 160-1.
21
Ibid. For Jesuit education see Antoniano, 'Dell'educazione cristiana e politica dei figliuoli'
(1926); Farrell, 'The Jesuit Code of Liberal Education' (1938); Dainville, 'Les Jesuites et
1'education . . . : La naissance de 1'humanisme moderne' (1940) (note p. 75, Ignatius to Diego de
Mendoza, 1553; cf. above n. 46 eh), 'Les Jesuites . . . : La geographic des humanistes' (1940). A
convenient summary of Jesuit hisotry is 'Synopsis hist. Soc. Jesu', preface by Groetstouwers
(1950).
17
119
In the central Jesuit university, the Collegio Romano founded by Ignatius in

1550, a chair of 'Mathesis (cum Geometria et Astronomia)'22 was established
in 1553 with Balthassar Torres as the first professor. After him it was held more
or less continuously by Christopher Clavius from 1565 until his death in 1612.
Both were in touch with Francesco Maurolico (1494-1575) in Messina: Torres
corresponded with him about Jesuit mathematical teaching; Clavius developed
a closer relationship after visiting him in 1569 and became largely responsible
for the appearance of his major posthumous mathematical and optical
writings. He gave a number of his manuscripts to Clavius on a further visit from
him in 1574.23 Clavius was joined at the Collegio Romano in 1595 by his pupil
and eventual successor Christopher Grienberger (1561-1636), another of
Galileo's future friends, who likewise taught mathematics there, with interruptions, over a long period, until 1633.24 In 1553-4 a Balthassar Torres also
initiated the chair in metaphysics, whence he moved in 1554-5 to that in
'Physica (seu Philosophia Naturalis)'. These two chairs as well as that in logic
were also held at different times between 1559 and 1567 by Benito Pereira,
Francisco de Toledo and Achille Gagliardi (1537/8-1607).25 It was Clavius who
by his defence of mathematics within the context of Jesuit educational goals,
and by creating a mathematical school at the Collegio Romano where most of
the society's scientists studied, was principally responsible for establishing
Jesuit policy and eventual achievements in the mathematical sciences. His
'Modus quo disciplinae mathematicae in scholis Societatis possent promoveri'
indicates the kind of doubts he had to overcome within the society and gives his
arguments for mathematics on the grounds of both intellectual necessity and
practical utility:26
The way in which the mathematical disciplines could be promoted in the schools
of the Society.
First a master must be chosen with uncommon erudition and authority; for if
either of these is absent the pupils, as experience shows, seem unable to be
attracted to the mathematical disciplines. Now in order that the master should
22
Villoslada, 'Storia del Collegio Romano' (1954) 59, 335.

Scaduto, 'II matematico Francesco Maurolico e i Gesuiti' (1949) 132-4,137-41, cf. 'Le origini
dell' Universita di Messina' (1948) 9; Rosen, 'Maurolico's attitude towards Copernicus' (1957)
179, 187-8; for Torres also 'Mon paed. Soc. Jesu . . . ' ed. Gomez Rodeles et al. (1901) 477-8.
24
Villoslada, op. cit. 187-99, 335; Sommervogel, 'Bibliotheque' . . . iii (1892) 1810-2.
25
Villoslada, op. cit. 51-2, 78-9, 326-7, 329, 331; for these professors see below nn. 44, 99;
Sommervogel, op. cit. iii, 1095-9; cf. 'Mon. paed. Soc. Jesu' (1901) 150-62, 491-3, 500, 504, 515,
522, 571, 728.
26
'Mon. paed. Soc. Jesu' (1901) 471-3: autograph, 'Manu P. Christophori Clavii'; see Dainville,
'Les Jesuites . . . : La naissance de l'humanisme' (1940) 88 sqq., 139 sqq., 'L'enseignement des
mathematiques dans les colleges jesuites . . . ' (1954) 7-8; Cosentino, 'L'insegnamento delle
matematiche nei collegi Gesuitici nell'Italia settentrionale' (1971) 207 sqq.; cf. Phillips The
correspondence of Father Christopher Clavius S.I. (1939) 205-20, with Possevino (1585), Baldi,
Galileo and Guidobaldo del Monte (1588), and other mathematicians down to 1611. The debates
about mathematics can be found in 'Mon. paed. Soc. Jesu' (1901) and 'Mon. paed. Soc. lesu', i
(1965); cf. Farrell, 'The Jesuit Code of Liberal Education', pp. 153-362, esp. 338, 343, 370-1.
23
120
have greater influence over his pupils, and the mathematical disciplines
themselves be of greater value and the pupils understand their utility and
necessity, the master must be invited to take part in formal acts in which doctors
are created and public disputations held, in such a way that if he is capable he too
may sometimes put forward arguments and help those who are arguing. For by
this means it will easily come about that the pupils, seeing the professor of
mathematics together with the other teacher taking part in such acts and
sometimes also disputing, will be convinced that philosophy and the mathematical sciences are connected, as they truly are; especially because pupils up to now
seem almost to have despised these sciences for the simple reason that they think
that they are not considered of value and are even useless, since the person who
teaches them is never summoned to public acts with the other professors.
It also seems necessary that the teacher should have a certain inclination and
propensity for lecturing on these sciences, and should not be taken up with many
other occupations; otherwise he will scarcely be able to help his pupils. Now in
order that the Society should have capable professors of those sciences, some
men should be selected apt and capable for carrying out this task who may be
instructed in a private school in various mathematical subjects; otherwise it does
not seem possible that these studies should last long in the Society, let alone be
promoted; although they are a great ornament to the Society and are very
frequently the subject of discussion in colloquia and meetings of leading men,
where they might understand27 that our members are not ignorant of mathematical matters. Whence it comes about28 that our members necessarily become
speechless in such meetings, not without great shame and disgrace; as those to
whom this very thing has happened have often reported. I do not mention the fact
that natural philosophy without the mathematical disciplines is lame and
incomplete, as we shall show a little later.
So much for the master of mathematical disciplines; now let us add a few words
about his students.
Secondly then, it is necessary that the pupils should understand that these
sciences are useful and necessary for rightly understanding the rest of philosophy,
and that they are at the same time a great ornament to all other arts, so that one
may acquire perfect erudition; indeed these sciences and natural philosophy have
so close an affinity with one another that unless they give each other mutual aid
they can in no way preserve their own worth. For this to happen, it will be
necessary first that students of physics should at the same time study mathematical disciplines; a habit which has always been retained in the Society's schools
hitherto. For if these sciences were taught at another time, students of philosophy
would think, and understandably, that they were in no way necessary to physics,
and so very few would want to understand them; though it is agreed among
experts that physics cannot rightly be grasped without them, especially as regards
that part which concerns the number and motion of the celestial circles ('orbes'),
the multitude of intelligences, the effects of the stars which depend on the various
conjunctions, oppositions and other distances between them, the division of
continuous quantity into infinity, the ebb and flow of the sea, winds, comets, the
rainbow, the halo and other meteorological things, the proportions of motions,
qualities, actions, passions and reactions etc. concerning which 'calculators'
write much. I do not mention the infinite examples in Aristotle, Plato and their
more celebrated commentators, which can by no means be understood without a
27
28
Reading 'intelligant' for 'intelligunt' (p. 471).

As the editor points out, the preceding does not lead immediately to what follows (p. 472).
121
moderate understanding of the mathematical sciences; indeed, because of their

ignorance of these, some professors of philosophy have very often committed
many errors, and those most grave, and what is worse they have even committed
them to writings some of which it would not be difficult to bring forward.
By the same token teachers of philosophy should be skilled in mathematical
disciplines, at least moderately, lest they run onto similar rocks, with great
disgrace and loss of the reputation which the Society has in letters.
I do not mention the fact that the professors would hereby gain great influence
over their students, if they understood that they treated as they deserved the
passages in Aristotle and other philosophers which concern the mathematical
disciplines. Whence it will also come about that the pupils understand better the
necessity for these sciences. It will also contribute much to this if the teachers of
philosophy abstained from those questions which do not help in the understanding of natural things and very much detract from the authority of the
mathematical disciplines in the eyes of the students, such as those in which they
teach that the mathematical sciences are not sciences, do not have demonstrations, abstract from being and the good,29 etc.; for experience teaches that
these questions are a great hindrance to pupils and of no service to them;
especially since teachers can hardly teach them without bringing these sciences
into ridicule (which I do not just know from hearsay).
The influence of Clavius is evident in the first Jesuit 'Ratio Studiorum' of 1586
and in the definitive version of 1599. Both outlined a full programme of
philosophical and mathematical studies.30 The course of natural philosophy set
out in 1586 covered the whole range of Aristotelian subjects from the heavens
and their motions and influences (to be treated by a philosopher when there
was no professor of mathematics), through the elements, meteorology,
generation and the soul. Aristotle was to be followed except where detracting
from or repugnant to faith.31 Quoting Loyola's injunction from the 'Constitutiones'32 the section 'De mathematicis' went on:33
Constitutions, part 4, ch. 12, C:
There will be treated, they say, logic, physics, metaphysics, moral science, and
also mathematics but only in so far as it is conducive to the end proposed to us.
Now it seems no little conducive, not only because without mathematics our
academies would lack a great ornament, indeed they would even be mutilated,
since there is almost no fairly celebrated academy in which the mathematical
disciplines do not have their own, and indeed not the last, place; but much more
because the other sciences also very much need their help, because, for poets
they supply and expound the risings and settings of the heavenly bodies; for
historians the shapes and distances of places; for the Analytics examples of solid
29
Cf. Plato, 'Republic' vii, 533-4.

'Ratio Studiorum', iii, 'De studio philosophiae' (1586) 171 sqq., iv, 'De mathematicis', pp.
198 sqq.; ed. Pachtler, 'Ratio Studiorum', ii (1887) 125 sqq. (1586), cf. 256, 348 (1599).
31
'Rat. Stud.', iii (1586) 193-7; ed. Pachtler, ii (1887) 138-41.
32
Above n. 21.
33
'Rat. Stud.', iv (1586) 198-9; ed. Pachtler, ii (1887) 141-2; cf. Barbera, 'La Ratio Studiorum
. . . ' (1942) 126; Cosentino, 'Le matematiche nella 'Ratio Studiorum . . . ' (1970), and op. cit.
(1971) 2078-11; Dainville, 'Les Jesuites . . . : La naissance de 1'humanisme' (1940) 71-88, op. cit.
(1954) 7-8; Villoslada, op. cit. (1954) 96 sqq.
30
122
demonstrations; for politicians admirable arts for good administration at home

and in time of war; for physics the forms and differences of heavenly revolutions,
light, discords, sounds; for metaphysics the number of spheres and intelligences;
for theologians the main parts of the divine creation; for law and ecclesiastical
custom the accurate computation of times; not to mention what advantages
redound to the state from the work of mathematicians in the care of diseases, in
navigations, and in the pursuit of agriculture. Therefore we must try to bring it
about that, just like the other disciplines, so mathematics too may flourish in our
schools, so that from this too our students may become more suited to serving the
various interests of the Church, especially as, to our great disgrace, we lack
professors who can give the teaching of mathematics that is needed for so many
and excellent uses. At Rome too, if you except one or two, scarcely anyone will
be left who is qualified either to profess these disciplines or to be at hand at the
Apostolic Seat when there is discussion about ecclesiastical times.34
Two professors of mathematics were to be appointed. One should teach

students of logic, who in their first year were 'preparing themselves for the
Posterior Analytics, which can scarcely be understood without mathematical
examples'. In their second year they would be studying physics, when 'the
remaining part of the mathematical compendium which is to be completed by
Father Clavius will be expounded'. The second professor in Rome, 'but only if
he can be Father Clavius, is to provide a fuller knowledge of mathematical
things over three years and is to teach privately about eight or ten of our
students, who are at least moderately intelligent and not unmathematical and
have studied philosophy, and who would be summoned from various
provinces, if possible one from any one'.35
But Jesuit views on mathematics were by no means uniform even after these
dates. For example Clavius had maintained in his commentary on Euclid
(1574) that mathematics offered the most certain demonstrations but that
these were not syllogistic. On the power of mathematical demonstrations he
agreed with Francesco Barozzi.36 The philosopher Benito Pereira in his 'De
communibus omnium rerum naturalium principiis' (1562,1576) had agreed on
the contrary with Alessandro Piccolomini. He wrote: 'It is the opinion of many
that the kind of most powerful demonstration ("demonstratio potissima"),
which is treated in the Posterior Analytics i, is to be found either nowhere, or
surely above all in the mathematical disciplines'. Among the reasons given
were that this kind of demonstration was the goal of mathematical resolution,
and that mathematical demonstrations did not suffer from the variety and
disagreement of opinion found in those of physics and metaphysics. 'But
although this opinion is very common and accepted by many, I however can in
no way approve it: for I think that most powerful demonstration which is
34
I.e. the calendar.

'Rat. Stud.' iv (1586) 199-210; ed. Pachtler, ii (1887) 142-3.
36
Cf. Boncompagni (1884) appendix i: 'Lettera di Francesco Barozzi al P. Christoforo Clavio'
(pp. 831-7).
35
123
described by Aristotle in the Posterior Analytics i can in no way, or only with

difficulty, be found in mathematical sciences'.37
'My opinion', he wrote, 'is that mathematical disciplines are not proper
sciences . . . To have science ("scire") is to acquire knowledge of a thing
through the cause on account of which the thing is; and science ("scientia") is
the effect of demonstration: but demonstration (I speak of the most perfect
kind of demonstration) must be established from those things that are "per se"
and proper to that which is demonstrated, but the mathematician neither
considers the essence of quantity, nor treats of its affections, as they flow from
such essence, nor declares them by the proper causes on account of which they
are in quantity, nor makes his demonstrations from proper and "per se" but
from common and accidental predicates'. He confirmed this from Plato who
had written in the 'Republic' vii that 'mathematicians dream about quantity,
and in treating their demonstrations proceed not scientifically, but from
certain suppositions. Therefore he does not want to call their doctrine
intelligence ("intelligentia") or science, but only acquiring knowledge ("cognitio"); on which judgement Proclus wrote much in book i of his Commentaries on Euclid'.38 To illustrate the use by mathematicians of non-causal
demonstrations Pereira cited from Proclus, as Piccolomini had done, Euclid's
proof that the sum of the internal angles of a triangle equals two right angles.
The proof depended on a construction projecting one side to make an external
angle, but this did not make the property demonstrated of the internal angles:
'Who does not see that this middle term is not the cause of that effect which is
37
Pererius, 'De communibus', iii.4 (1576) 72.

Pererius, 'De comm.', i 12, p. 24. Isaac Barrow in his 'Lectiones . . . in ... Acad. Cantab.
An. Dom. MDCLXIV, v (1683) 89 quoted these 'Words of Pererius, who was no mean
Peripatetic' ('Mathematical Lectures', transl. Kirkby, v, 'Containing answers to the objections
which are usually brought against mathematical demonstration', 1734, p. 80) in discussing the
same question. In these lectures given at Cambridge during 1664-6 Barrow continued the 16thcentury discussions of the relation of mathematical demonstrations to the theory of demonstration
set out in the 'Posterior Analytics', and of the question whether mathematical entities have any
existence outside {he mind, citing those 'who will have Mathematical Figures to have no other
Existence in the Nature of Things than in the Mind alone. And it is wonderful to me that this
Opinion should be embraced by Persons, who are otherwise most excellently skilled in the
Mathematics: Among whom we may reckon Blancanus ('Libro de Natura Mathem.' p. 7), whose
words are these: "Though Mathematical Beings have no real Existence, yet because their Ideas do
exist both in the Divine and Human Mind, as the most exact Types of Things, therefore the
Mathematician treats of those Ideas which of themselves are primarily intended, and are true
Beings" ': Barrow, ibd., 1683, p. 85; 1734, p. 76; Blancanus, 'De mathematicarum natura' (1615)
7. Giuseppe Biancani was a Jesuit pupil of Clavius and professor of mathematics at Bologna; cf. his
'Aristotelis loca mathematica ex universis ipsius operibus collecta et explicata' (1615). Barrow in
his second published series of 'Lectiones' (1684) also cited Clavius on Euclid (see Lect. vi, pp. 2767). Cf. the well known contrast between the axiomatic ideal of Greek geometry and the
demonstrations possible in physics made by Huygens in the preface (1690) to his 'Traite" de la
lumiere'; also Newton, 'Opticks', query 30 (1706).
38
124
demonstrated'.39 This literal insistence on the identity of reasoning and

causation in true science measures the gulf separating the logic of Aristotelian
physics from that of the mathematicians.
Again like Piccolomini, Pereira went on to argue: 'mathematical things are
abstracted from motion, therefore from all kinds of cause';40 mathematics, as
Proclus had said, gave several demonstrations of the same conclusion of which
one was no better than another, except perhaps in brevity; mathematical
demonstrations owed their certainty primarily to their subject-matter, abstract
quantity. These views remained unchanged in later editions of his book. He
concluded:41
Now they are called mathematical sciences, as a synonym for disciplines, not on
account of the excellence of their demonstrations, but on account of the very
great ease of learning them, and of the very beautiful order and wonderful
connection of the demonstrations with each other. Now mathematical demonstrations are the most certain, most evident, and easiest, by reason of the subjectmatter, namely quantity; for quantity is the most sensed ('maxime sensata') since
it is perceived by all the senses, and is the middle or principle of mathematical
demonstrations. They can be expounded and declared in such a way that they lie
open to the senses themselves, which cannot be done in natural or divine things.
Moreover the principles of mathematics do not require long experience and
diligent observation like the principles of physics or medicine. And Aristotle in
the sixth book of the Ethics42 gives this as the reason why boys can become
mathematicians but not physicists or wise. Lastly mathematical things afford very
easy abstraction from matter, because quantity is not tied to and dependent on
any fixed and determinate matter, as are other physical accidents, and therefore
it can easily be abstracted and conceived by the intellect. Hence too it comes
about that mathematical things are called by Aristotle beings from abstraction
('entia ex abstractione'), doubtless because of the ease of abstraction; and what is
easily abstracted from matter is also easily understood. It remains then that for
these reasons mathematical demonstrations are the most certain, most evident
and easiest for us wherefore they are called by philosophers perfect or absolute
demonstrations. We are speaking at present of purely mathematical disciplones,
such as geometry and arithmetic, for in astronomy, perspective and others called
middle or mixed, things are otherwise. But that is enough for the present
question. Next we must see whether knowledge of all the causes which a thing has
is necessary to the understanding of that thing . . . .
These differences of opinion, as well as the scope of the Jesuit commitment
to mathematics, are indicated in the 'Bibliotheca selecta qua agitur de ratione
studiorum' (1593) by the Jesuit scholar and diplomatist Antonio Possevino
(1533/4-1611), a friend of Clavius and one of the authors of Jesuit educational
39
Pererius, ibid. 24. Barrow, op. cit., vi (1683) 108 ('Of the causality of mathematical
demonstrations' ed. 1734) again cited Pereira's comment on this theorem (Euclid, 'Elements', i.
32) in a discussion comparing geometrical and syllogistic demonstration.
40
Pererius, 'De comm.', iii, 3, pp. 69-70.
41
Pererius, 'De comm.', iii, 4, pp. 73-4.
42
Aristotle, 'Ethica Nicomachea', vi. 8, 1142a 12-19.
125
policy.43 Possevino entered the society in 1559 with the three brothers Achille,
Leonetto and Ludovico Gagliardi, who had been horrified by the suspect and
atheistic tendencies of the Averroist philosophy they had heard at the
University of Padua.44 Apostolic and diplomatic journeys in Savoy and France
led to three years as first rector of the new Jesuit college in Avignon,45 at the
end of which he published in his 'Coltura de gl'ingegni' (1568)46 an account of
the aims, methods and content of education in Jesuit universities throughout
Europe. This he introduced with a brief history of Christian philosophy. Two
periods as Papal Nuncio to the King of Sweden (1568, 1577-80) involved
further travels in Germany and Poland.47 Another mission took him in 1581-82
to Moscow, where Pope Gregory XIII sent him in response to a request from
Czar Ivan IV, the Terrible, for negotiation of an end to the long war between
himself and the King of Poland. Peace was concluded with both Poland and
Sweden in 1582. Possevino's reports of this mission, with descriptions of
political and religious conditions in Russia and neighbouring lands, and an
account of a discussion of the Catholic religion held with Czar Ivan on 21
February 1582, were published in part in his 'Moscovia' (1586).48 Papal policy
aimed to bring about an alliance of these Christian princes against the Turks,
and religious unity on the basis of the Council of Florence. Possevino
continued his diplomatic missions during 1583-7 in Poland and Hungary,49
according to his biographer well fitted for these tasks by 'un savoir eminent,
une facilite prodigieuse a apprendre les langues' as well as by 'un zele
apostolique, un courage a 1'epreuve des plus grandes difficultes, une dexterite
a traiter les affaires les plus epineuses, des manieres tout a fait engageantes
surtout avec les grands, une connoissance parfaite des cours du nord, des
interets et des coutumes de toutes ces nations'.50 His intervention played an
important part in the introduction of the reformed Gregorian calendar into
43
Antonii Possevini Societatis lesu 'Bibliotheca selecta', 2 partes (Romae, 1593); revised ed., 2
torn., Coloniae Agrippinae, 1607. For Possevino see Dorigny, 'La vie du Pere Antoine Possevin'
(1712); Sommervogel, 'Bibliotheque' . . . vi (1895) 1061-93; Dainville, 'Les Jesuites . . . : La
geographic des humanistes' (1940) 47; 'Mon. paed. Soc. lesu' (1965) 107, 127.
44
Dorigny, op. cit. 4, 13-18, 25-7; Castellani, 'La vocazione alia Compagnia di Gesu del P.
Antonio Possevino' (1945) 102-4, 108, 114-5. For the Gagliardis see Sommervogel, op. cit. iii,
1095-9; and for the following discussion of the Jesuits in Padua, Cozzi, 'Galileo Galilei e la societa
veneziana' (1968) 10-14.
45
Dorigny, op. cit. 27 sqq., 105-6, 115-6, 135-6.
46
Vicenza, 1568; a Latin version was published in his 'Bibl. sel.', lib. i (1593) i, 13-65.
47
Dorigny, op. cit. 166-252; Possevini 'Missio Moscovitica', ed. Pierling (1882) 109-20; see next
note.
48
Vilnae 1586, republished Antverpiae 1587; further documents in the Vatican archives were
published as Antonii Possevini 'Missio Moscovitica', curante Pierling (1882); see also Dorigny, op.
cit. pp. 253-438; Pierling, 'Un nonce du Pape en Moscovie' (1884) 146,180 sqq., 'La Russie et la
Sainte-Siege' (1896) 375 sqq.; 'Synopsis hist. Soc. Jesu' (1950) 86.
49
Dorigny, op. cit. 438-94.
50
Ibid. 259; cf. 496, 499.
126
Poland.51 In 1587 he returned to Padua to teach at the Jesuit college, the

'Gymnasium Patavium Societatis Jesu'.52 He was one of G.V. Pinelli's Jesuit
friends in a circle which included Robert Bellarmine, the Gagliardi brothers,
and the Cardinals Cesare Baronio and Ippolito Aldobrandini (to become in
1592 Pope Clement VIII) as well as Gabriele Falloppio, Cardano, Sperone
Speroni, Gioseffe Moleto, Guidobaldo del Monte, Mark Welser and Girolamo Fabrizio d'Acquapendente.53 In Padua during 1587-91 he wrote the
'Bibliotheca selecta'.54
This major work is an encyclopaedia and bibliography of current learning
covering education, Scriptural history, theology, religious orders, schismatics
and heretics, the Jews, the Mahometans, the beliefs of the peoples of India,
Japan, China and the New World, the history of philosophy, jurisprudence,
medicine and the mathematical sciences, the ancient and modern secular
history of the world and its chronology since the creation, poetry, painting,
and the art of writing letters. Book xiii on philosophy reflects current Italian
preoccupations and controversies, with a massively eclectic, critical knowledge
of ancient, medieval and modern authors. Possevino commended Francesco
Bonamico for his adherence to the Greek text of Aristotle, reproval of
Averroes, and use of Archimedes in dealing with heavy and light bodies.55 He
warned frequently against the Arabic interpreters.56 He praised among
Christian interpreters Aquinas, Albertus and other scholastics, Giovanni Pico
della Mirandola (with caution)57 for drawing out true philosophy from
Aristotelian shadows, and above all in recent times Chrisostomo Javelli,
Caietanus, Domingo de Soto, Francisco de Toledo, Francisco Valles and
51
Ibid. 481-4; cf. 483 on Clavius.

Ibid. 497-9; Favaro, 'Galileo Galilei e lo Studio di Padova', i (1883) 75-99.
53
Paolo Gualdo, 'Vita Joannis Vincentii Pinelli' (1607) 14-15,18-19,29, 38-40, 45,73,100,103,
117; Dorigny, op. cit. 512-4: cf. Tiraboschi, 'Storia', vii (1791) 243-5. Luca Pinelli was a Jesuit:
Sommervogel, 'Bibliotheque . . . ', vi, 802.
54
Dorigny, op. cit. 499-502, 512-4.
55
Possevinus, 'Bibl. sel.' xiii, 'De philosophia' (1593) ii, 120-1: 'Franciscus Bonamicus
Florentinus primarius Pisis Professor, qui decem libros De Motu emisit: quo sat magno volumine
generalia naturalis philosophiae principia continentur. Sane vero ut viri eruditissimi, licet mihi de
facie ignoti, testimonium catenus praebeam, quatenus qui eius labores non legerunt, avidius
excipiant, haec possum dice re: modestus philosophus est, ac satis tutus, Graecis potius adhaeret;
Simplicii, sensus explicat liquidius, quam plerique fecerint alii, uti et aliorum Graecorum; Graece
enim novit, atque ad textum Graecum plura revocat; Averroem saepe, ac quidem merito
reprobat; ubi agit de gravibus et levibus, multa ex Archimede desumens, apte explicat; misce
pulchra problemata; sextum, et septimum Physicorum interpretatur copiose; idque agit, ut
offendat, an recte concludat Aristoteles'.
56
Ibid. 99-101, 106-9 (107 on Averroism in the universities).
57
Ibid. 104: 'quae ad Aristotelem intelligendum, atque ad veram philosophiam e tenebris
eruendam pertinent, in quo tamen unum id fortasse cavendum est, ne quoniam perspicasissimo
fuit ingenio, Hebraeaque volumina, et Platonicam, Pythagoricamque philosophiam cupiditate
omnia percipiendi avidissime versavit'; cf. 115, 206-7.
52
127
'Benedictus Pererius noster'.58 But the religious end to which he saw

philosophy leading gave him a preference for Plato, with a very definite caveat,
as a guide to knowledge. Philosophy had arisen from man's natural desire to
find God.59 Among a full range of recent Platonists he cited with general
though qualified approval Marsilio Ficino60 and Giovanni Pico,61 with special
praise Javelli62 and Fox Morcillo,63 and for specific points Francesco Patrizi64
and Jacopo Mazzoni.65 The main source of his view of the history of
philosophy was Pereira.66 Many had received the light of philosophy from
Plato, more from Aristotle;67 many had been against Plato, many for, so he
would separate the correct use of him from the abuse.68
Plato's chief errors concerned the human soul (belief in its transmigration to
and from the brute animals, existence from eternity or from the beginning of
time, and presence not as the true form of an individual but like the pilot of a
ship) and the origin of the world from a chaos of already existing elements.
Those who vindicated him called him the wisest and holiest of philosophers
and the Attic Moses, and these included not only Cicero and Plutarch, but
Jerome, Augustine, Basil and Clement.69 It was agreed by Christian scholars
that Pythagoras, from whom Socrates and Plato learnt so many doctrines, had
been the disciple of a Nazarine Jew. Plato himself could have consorted with
Jews when he was in Egypt.70 But Augustine both in The City of God' and in
the 'Retractationes' confessed that he had been deceived by Plato and came to
reject his doctrines: they were against both Catholic faith and natural reason.71
The gentile philosophers had to be read with caution.72 Possevino shared the
58
Ibid. 104, 106, 113-4, 120-1. For the conciliatory policy of the 16th-century Dominican
Aristotelian, Javelli, who held Aristotle valid for the natural sciences but Plato better for morality
and religion, see Garin, 'Storia . . . ' (1966) 586-7. By the time Possevino was writing
reconciliation of Plato and Aristotle seems to have lost much of its charm in Padua: cf. Nardi,
'Saggi' (1958) 363.
59
Possevinus, ibid. lib. xiii. 1, p. 59; c.3, p. 62: 'Origo philosophiae, instrumentaque
noscendarum rerum homini collata a Deo', caput iii. Naturale homini desiderium ad sciendum a
Deo inditum est, quod omnes sentimus, philosophique ipsi sempte inculcarunt'.
60
Ibid. 87-8.
61
Ibid. 65, 68, 75-8, 104, 181.
62
Ibid. 79, 82, 86-8.
63
Ibid. 88: 'Sed et Sebastianus Foxius Morxillus magna cum laude Platonem interpretatus est';
cf. 112, 225.
64
Ibid. 88, 98, 109, 225.
65
Ibid. 117, 181, 200; cf. ibid. (1607) 28, 31-2, 50 where he cited also Mazzoni's 'De
comparatione Platonis et Aristotelis' (1597); below nn. 74, 104.
66
Possevinus, 'Bibl. sel.' (1593) 72-4, 104, 113-4, cf. 69-72, 115-9; cf. Pererius, 'Comm. . . . in
Genesim', i, praefatio (1601) -16; below nn. 127 seq., also 97.
67
Ibid. 59.
68
Ibid. 78.
69
Ibid. 78-9.
70
Ibid. 82-4.
71
Ibid. 79-80, 84.
72
Ibid. 88, cf. 100.
128
contemporary belief in the concordance of all authorities in an essentially

theological truth. Thus, he wrote, some had held that God was indifferent to
nature, others that the natural world was all there was. The first was heretical,
the second atheistic. Against both errors Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics agreed
that God governed all, whether natural or supernatural, by reason and
conducted it to its end.73
In Book xv on mathematics Possevino made it clear that mathematics and
Platonism mutually reinforced each other in Jesuit educational policy. He had
been helped in writing this book by Clavius. Mathematics was practically
useful, necessary for physics, a parry to scepticism, and it also provided a
means of exegesis of the abstract ideas of the Creator:74
Since this is so the necessity, worth and utility of the mathematical disciplines
are shown by the fact that Plato and Aristotle have included them in the
principles of contemplation and of action. So Plato, taking the whole mathematical genus, including arithmetic and geometry, away from the senses, in his own
words calls them 'the drawer, the leader, the summoner, the energiser, the turner
of mind, thought, vision, truth':75 that is, such that it draws, impells, excites,
arouses and turns intelligence, reasoning, contemplation and truth. And by these
words he means, not sophistical shadows, but the logical action of the mind,
whereby the demonstration of truth is more purely and more accurately
considered. And indeed the Timaeus of Plato and the Physics of Aristotle are
very great proof of how much light mathematics itself sheds on philosophy.76 For
in the Timaeus Plato makes God construct the soul of the world from arithmetical
ratios and proportions and its body from geometrical shapes. Therefore Plato's
physics, being made from numbers and lines, is arithmetical and geometrical; and
it certainly cannot be understood by those ignorant of geometry. Hence it came
about that there was fixed by Plato over the entrance to the Academy that saying:
'Let no-one ungeometrical enter';77 let nobody without geometry enter. In fact
all that Aristotle says about motion and rest, about time and the heavens, and
73
Ibid. 117-8: 'Antequam ad Elenchum interpretum Physices accedam, pauca praemonenda
sunt. Vidimus apud duo genera hominum, cum ab eorum magistris in haec studia inducerentur, sic
in prolegomenis agi, ut alii inter Deum, et Naturam nihil interesse docerent: atque eodem tempore
libellos obtruderent, qui specie pietatis fucati, mentes ab interiore, ac solida caussarum
contemplatione avertebant. Alii vero dum una cum Plinio, et eiusmodi reliquis pergerent
Mundum ita vocare Universum; ut videlicet ipso nihil praestantius, maius, melius esset, fecere, ut
plerique ex philosophiae studiis felicitatem in eo constituerent, quem neque ortum fuisse, neque
interiturum, sese demonstraturos pollicebantur. Prioris generis, haeretici quidam adhuc sunt,
reliqui neque haeretici, neque catholici, sed potius ad atheismum vergentes'; cf. 90,99-105,130-5.
74
Ibid. lib. xv, 'De mathematicis', c. 1, 'Mathematica generatim', (1593) ii, 175-9; cf. also 1812; for Clavius's help 173, cf. 114; and for the history of mathematics 175 sqq. See Phillips, 'The
correspondence of Father Christopher Clavius' (1939) 205 (with Possevino, 1585). In the 1607 ed.
Possevino added a new c. 2, 'Disciplinarum mathematicarum certitudo quaenam' (torn, ii, 217-8)
in which he cited Alessendro Piccolomini and Pereira in agreement on this question.
75
In Greek, followed by Latin translation.
76
The lines following come almost verbally from Ramus, 'Scholarum mathematicarum', ii
(1569) 46-7; cf. Timaeus' 35A - 37C, 41D - 44B.
77
In Greek, followed by Latin translation: this remark occurs in Philoponus, 'Comm. in lib. De
anima Aristotelis', i, comm. 45 (1535) sig. D iii, and in Franciscus Barocius, 'Opusculum' (1560) f.
39 r; cf. above n. 14.
129
about the progression and history of animals, and the whole of his physical
discussions abound, not only with examples but also with foundations drawn
from geometry. For in the first book78 he brings forth the tetragon of Antiphon in
order to refute it. In the second book he quotes examples concerning the two
right angles in a triangle, besides what he did in the Posterior Analytics. In the
third book he mentions certain points about the construction of gnomons. In the
remainder he mentions the infinity of magnitude, motion and time; so that
learned men have formed the opinion that a complete exposition of those books
should be left out by most people, because they have not studied the
mathematical disciplines deeply enough . . . .
Archytas too and Eudoxus, so Plutarch says in his life of Marcellus,79 when
they had transferred geometrical contemplations from the mind, and from things
falling within the contemplation of thoughts alone, to examples of sensible and
corporal things, they enriched geometry with a variety of demonstration not only
logical but practical. Aristotle too taught mechanics, and by publishing it made it
common knowledge. Nor indeed were these the only fruits seen to result from
this: that Archytas80 gave flight to a wooden dove which he had suspended with
weights in such a way that it was propelled by hidden wind of breath; or that
Archimedes and Posidonius fashioned those spheres by attaching to which, so
Cicero81 says, the motions of the Sun and Moon and the five planets, they
brought about the same effect as that god who built the world in the Timaeus,
namely that one revolution ruled motions very dissimilar in slowness and speed;
or that the Nuremberger82 exhibited a fly and an eagle fitted with geometrical
wings; or the new near-miracles of nature that Claudius83 seems to have
performed in recent years in the gardens of Cardinal Atestinus84 by the Tiber,
when he brought it about that by the soft and placid falling of water the motion,
voice and song of a little bronze bird, opportunely pausing at the arrival of a night
owl, and more opportunely being resumed on its departure, so closely imitated
the truth, that anyone who has called it artificial deserved to be thought rash,
rather than anyone judging it real deserved to be thought too credulous (he also
added a water-organ from which a most sweet and harmonious sound was heard);
and that (a thing that was indeed still more remarkable) at his will he so elegantly
and truthfully projected a heavenly rainbow which the Latins call 'iris', that God
was to be praised for having given such acumen to human brains, even in a matter
of this kind . . . .
And these things would certainly seem more than enough to excite minds
('ingenia') towards those disciplines, were it not that two other things add to their
reputation: the one said by Plato, which (so Plutarch says) smacks of Plato's
character , although it does not survive in his dialogues, namely that 'God above
78
I.e. of the Physics.

The lines following come almost verbally from Ramus, 'Schol. math.', i (1569) 16-19; cf. i-iii,
pp. 1-112.
80
Cf. Ramus above, citing Aulus Gellius, 'Noctes Atticae', x, 12.8.
81
Cicero, Tusculanae quaestiones', i, 25.63, 'De republica', i. 14. 22.
82
Cf. Baldi,'Discorso', in Herone Alessandrino'De gli automati', trad . . . Baldi(1589)ff. 56r.
83
Marg.: Claudius Galius.
84
I have not found the source of this story.
79
130
all geometrises';85 the other having regard to their origins, for they have spread
down from the most ancient patriarch Abraham86 to other men. Indeed He, by
whose divine mind everything is providently administered, for the safety and
presentation of all, has been said by Plato to govern and control this universe by
geometrical proportion; seeing that every function of God is included in it, not
only that which consists of contemplation but also that which comprises the
building and administration of the world. And indeed Plutarch says that God, in
the creation of the world, geometrised so much that he made up this geometrical
problem: given two figures, to construct a third equal to the one and similar to the
other. This, according to Plutarch, was that very celebrated problem upon the
solution of which Pythagoras or Thales87 is said to have sacrificed; but there was
85
(p. 178); cf. Plutarch 'Quaest, conviv.', viii.2.1,718C-E, ed. and transl. Minar ('Moralia', ix,
1061) 118-21: 'Diogenianus, making a new start, said: If you please, let us on Plato's birthday take
Plato himself as partner in the conversation, and since we have spoken about the gods, consider
what he had in mind when he asserted that God is always doing geometry- if indeed this statement
is to be attributed to Plato. I remarked that while this statement is not made explicitly in any of
Plato's writings, it is well enough attested and is in harmony with his character, and Tyndares
immediately took up the argument: Do you think, Diogenianus, that this saying conceals a
reference to some recondite or difficult doctrine, and not merely to what he himself said and wrote
many times, when he sang the praise of geometry for drawing us away from the world of sense to
which we cling, and turning us toward the intelligible and eternal level of existence, the
contemplation of which is the goal of philosophy, as being a viewer is the goal of a mystery-rite?
For the nail of pleasure and pain, by which he represents the soul as fastened to the body, seems to
have this as its greatest disadvantage, that is makes the objects of sense-perception clearer than
those of intellectual knowledge, and forces the understanding to judge by emotion rather than by
reason. Being habituated, through the experience of intense pain and pleasure, to paying heed to
the shifting and changeable aspects of physical things, as though they were true being, the
understanding is blinded to truth and loses that organ - that light within the mind, worth thousands
of eyes [Plato, 'Republic', vii. 527E], by which alone the divine may be contemplated. Now in all of
the so-called mathematical sciences, as in smooth and undistorted mirrors, there appear traces and
ghost-images of the truth about objects of intellectual knowledge; but geometry especially, being,
as Philolaos says, the source and mother-city of the rest, leads the understanding upward and turns
it in a new direction, as it undergoes, so to speak, a complete purification and a gradual deliverance
from sense-perception. It was for this reason that Plato himself reproached Eudoxus and Archytas
and Menaechmus for setting out to remove the problem of doubling the cube into the realm of
instruments and mechanical devices, as if they were trying to find two mean proportionals not by
the use of reason but in whatever way would work. In this way, he thought, the advantage of
geometry was dissipated and destroyed, since it slipped back into the realm of sense-perception
instead of soaring upward and laying hold of the eternal and immaterial images in the presence of
which God is always God'.
86
Cf. Pereira above n. 66, below nn. 97, 127 sqq.
87
Plutarch, ibid, viii.2.4, 720A - C, pp. 128-31: 'You will easily see the point, I replied, if you
recall the threefold division, in the Timaeus, of the first principles from which the cosmos came to
birth. One of them we call, by the most appropriate of names, God, one matter, and one form.
Matter is the least ordered of substances, form the most beautiful of patterns, and God the best of
causes. Now God's intention was, so far as possible, to leave nothing unused or unformed, but to
reduce nature to a cosmos by the use of proportion and measure and number, making a unity out
of all the materials which would have the quality of the form and the quantity of the matter.
Therefore, having set himself this problem, these two being given, he created a third, and still
creates and preserves throughout all time that which is equal to matter and similar to form,
namely, the cosmos. Being continuously involved in becoming and shifting and all kinds of events,
because of its congenital forced association with its body, the cosmos is assisted by the Father and
131
also that other problem which is ascribed to Pythagoras by Proclus88 and by all
the ancients, that is where in a right-angled triangle the square of the side
opposite the right-angle is proved equal to the squares of the other two sides. In
such a way then, God, in Plato's opinion, constructed the world. For that of
which the first origin of the world consists Plato89 divides into three, God, matter
and idea; that is, God as the most excellent of efficient causes, matter as the most
unordered substance of all things, and idea as the fairest of all examples.
Therefore if anyone mentally conceives God as wisest and as Geometrical
Architect for all, for whom matter and idea are proposed as two dissimilar figures
and who has to construct the world as a third figure from the two proposed,
similar to the one, equal to the other, he will understand that the world has been
joined together by God from all substances and from the whole of matter; but
since he wished to leave nothing discordant and unordered, but to adorn it with
ratio, measurement and number (for nothing was to be fairer than the world or
more excellent than its maker), therefore the Craftsman of the world ('Opifex
mundi') imitated the fairest and eternal exemplar.
Therefore he formed the world in such a way that it should be a copy of that
eternal exemplar and form which we call the Idea . . . .
In his discussion of the mathematical sciences, pure and mixed, Possevino

essentially followed Geminus's division as reported by Proclus.90 The large
range of authors cited points to Clavius's excellent guidance to the mathematicians and Possevino's own scholarship and eclectic concern with their relation
to philosophical and theological issues. Thus on arithmetic he cited, for
example, on the one hand Clavius himself, Cardano and Pacioli, and on the
other hand Gianfrancesco Pico, Francesco Barozzi's work 'De numero
Platonis' and Mazzoni's 'De triplici hominum vita'.91 On music he cited among
many others Aristoxenus, Ptolemy, Gioseffe Zarlino, Giorgio Valla, Vincenzo
Galilei, Francesco Giorgio ('sed qui sit expurgatus') and Mazzoni, and
published a revision of Jean Pena's edition of Euclid's 'Musica' made from
further Greek manuscripts.92 On geometry and the subordinate sciences of
astronomy, geodesy, mechanics, optics, catoptrics, painting, sculpture and
architecture he again cited Mazzoni and named Euclid, Archimedes and
Ptolemy as preeminent. His authorities included Euclid's 'Elements' in Greek,
Latin and Italian, Federico Commandino's editions of Apollonius and
Archimedes, Proclus's Euclid, Michael Psellus's 'Compendium mathematicum', Ptolemy's 'Almagest' and 'Geographia', Copernicus's 'De revolutionibus', Clavius's commentary on Sacrobosco's 'Sphaera' (1593), 'Apologia pro
Creator, who, by means of reason, and with reference to the pattern, gives limits to that which
exists. Thus the aspect of measure in things is even more beautiful than their symmetry'; cf.
Euclid, 'Elements', vi.25.
88
Proclus, 'In primum Eucl. Elem.' props.ii.47 (= ed. Friedlein, pp. 426 sqq.).
89
Plato, Timaeus' 27D - 34 B, 48E sqq.
90
Possevinus, ibid. 173,179,200. Possevino (pp. 179-81) also cited the divisions of mathematics
made by Boethius and Hugh of St Victor.
91
Ibid. 181-2, 200, cf. 87-8, 176.
92
Ibid. 182-200; cf. Euclidis 'Rudimenta musices, eiusdem sectio regulae harmonicae', . . .
loanne Pena Regio Mathematico interprete (Parisiis, 1557).
132
Kalendario' and 'Euclid', Hero's 'Spiritalia', 'De machinis bellicis' and

'Automata', works of Ctesibus and Philo of Byzantium in the Vatican Library,
Athenaeus's 'De machinis bellicis', Aristotle's 'Mechanica' in Niccolo Leonico's version, Allesandro Piccolomini's Taraphrasis', Niccolo Tartaglia's
'Nova scientia' and 'Quesiti', Guidobaldo del Monte's 'Mechanica' and
'Aequeponderantium', Giuseppe Ceredi's Tre discorsi sopra il modo d'alzar
acque', Albrecht Diirer's 'Geometricae institutiones', 'Symmetria' etc., Euclid's 'Optica' and 'Catoptrica', Egnazio Danti's Trospettiva d'Euclide',
Alhazen's and Vitelo's 'Opticae', Daniele Barbara's 'Perspectiva', Vitruvius's
'Architectura' in the editions of Philander and Daniele Barbaro, and Leon
Battista Alberti's 'Architectura'.93 He went on to give a refutation of judicial
astrology, finding support from Pereira's commentary on 'Genesis'.94 His
account of the origins and parts of architecture was based on Vitruvius,
Alberti, Palladio and Daniele Barbaro but included a discussion of the
building of Solomon's Temple.95 Cosmography and geography he again based
on Biblical, as well as ancient Greek and Latin and modern sources.96
Sympathy for Platonism such as that shown by Possevino and Pereira should
not obscure the basically Thomist character of Jesuit philosophy. Pereira had
made it plain in his preface to 'De communibus'97 that he was looking for a
93
Possevinus, ibid. 200-2.

Ibid. 176, 202-7; cf. 104; above n. 66.
95
Ibid. 207-12. Cf. Villapando's massive commentary on the building of Solomon's temple,
largely devoted to mathematical sciences and mechanics, which was published as vol. 3 of a large
commentary on Ezechiel's prophesies: Hieronymi Pradi et loannis Baptistae Villelpandi e
Societate lesu, 'In Ezechielem explanationes et Apparatus urbi et templi Hierosolymitani,
commentariis et imaginibus illustratus', opus tribus tomis distinctum (Romae, 1596-1605). Juan
Batiste Villalpando (1552-1608), a Spanish Jesuit, learned in mathematics and philosophy, had
joined Jeronimo Prado, another Spanish Jesuit, in the ambitious task of preparing such a
commentary and for this purpose they both moved to Rome, to work in the Collegio Romano.
After Prado's death in 1595 Villalpando carried on the work, and managed to publish the first
three volumes, the third being the 'Apparatus urbis et templi Hierosolymitani' (Romae, 1604), a
large folio of 655 pp., containing a series of treatises of arithmetic, geometry, weights and
measures, mechanics, etc. Its sources range from Girolamo Cardano to Giovanni Battista
Benedetti and Clavius. Duhem, in 'Etudes sur Leonard de Vinci', i (1906) 511 sqq., maintains that
Villalpando's discussion of the centre of gravity reproduces a treatise on local motion by
Leonardo, now lost. Villalpando's discussion on the centre of gravity was set out again by
Mersenne in the 'Mechanicorum libri' included in his 'Synopsis mathematica' (Paris, 1626).
Excerpts from Villalpando's treatise 'De ponderibus et mensuris' ('Apparatus', pp. 249 sqq.) are
to be found in Thomas Harriot's papers, Brit. Mus. MS Add. 6788, ff. 109-11, among other
excerpts and notes on specific weights, written in 1604-1605.
96
Possevinus, ibid. 215-8.
97
Cf. Pererius, 'De comm.', iv 'De antiquis philosophis', c. 20 (1576) 164: 'De veterum igitur
opinionibus, quae pertinent ad principia rerum naturalium (ut aliquis tandem huic libro terminus
et finis imponatur) ita sit a nobis non (ut opinor) indiligenter, nee ineptem disputatum. De Platonis
autem opinione mirum nemini videri debet, nihil a nobis hoc in libro dictum esse: nam cum de
principiis rerum plurimae atque gravissimae quaestiones et controversiae sint inter Platonem et
Aristotelem nequaquam satis adhuc explicatae, aliis quidem hos duos philosophos non rebus, sed
verbis tantum dissidere affirmantibus, aliis autem contendentibus eos inter se omnino discrepare,
non debuit tanta quaestionum moles in hunc libellum intrudi, et opinio Platonis simul cum aliorum
94
133
concordance of Plato and Aristotle in truth as known by reason and revelation.

Some unpublished lectures on 'De anima'98 given in Rome in 1566-67 show the
same policy of reconciliation. Part of the attraction towards Platonism came
from repulsion from Averro'ist interpretations of Aristotle. Pereira himself
became regarded as unorthodox in the Collegio Romano. In 1567 he was
moved from the chair in metaphysics first to that in scholastic theology and
then in 1576 to that in scripture. A year or so later, another occupant of the
theology chair, Achille Gagliardi, who was also prefect of studies, took the
lead in opposing publication of Pereira's writings on the grounds that he was
inclined to Averroi'sm." Gagliardi went from Rome to teach during 1579-80 at
the Jesuit 'Gymnasium' in Padua, and after various other postings returned to
the region in 1599 as superior of the Jesuit house in Venice. 10 By that time the
Averroi'sm of the University of Padua had gained strength from the appointment in 1590 of Cesare Cremonini (1550-1631) from Ferrara to a chair in
philosophy at Padua.101 Possevino's book no doubt reflects this hostility
between the two institutions. The proposal made in 1602 by Gagliardi 'with
some gentlemen' of Venice to found an 'Accademia della dottrina Platonica'102
indicates a general concern about the social consequences of the university's
philosophorum sententiis involui, et communi iudicio cognosci, sed satius fuit ea destinato in id
libro aliquo, separatim explicari, et subtiliter ac proprie diiudicari'. Another effort at concordance
is indicated by Possevino, 'Bibl. sel.' XIII (1593) ii, 87: 'Accedit ad haec perutile sane Seminarium
Platonicae simul et Peripateticae philosophiae, quod collegit loannes Baptista Bernardus, vir, qui
summis muneribus in Republica Veneta perfunctus, mirabili ordine, et labore universum
philosophiam per locos, ordinemque collegit: rei nempe cuiusque, qua de agitur, propositiones,
quae in earn in universum cadunt, turn divisiones, inde definitiones, deinceps causas, et ortus,
atque ad extremum, si quid dilucidius agendum sit, liquidiorem lucem ex ipso Platone, et
Platonicis afferens. Inter Platonicos autem, e quibus illud Seminarium confecit (licet Platonis
dialogos non redegerit in eas classes, in quas supra redactae sunt) philosophos tamen, et alios
auctores Christianos numeravit; qui sunt hi': a list follows beginning with 'Mercurii Trismegisti
Pimander, Asclepius' and including at the end Patrizi, Fox Morcillo and Piccolomini; cf. 98; and
'Bibl. sel.' xii.12 (1607) ii, 31-2: 'Quinam conciliare Aristotelem cum Platone, vel attentarunt, vel
polliciti sunt'; above nn. 66, 86, 74, below nn. 127 sqq.
98
Mendendez Pelayo, 'De las vicisitudes de la filosofia platonica en Espana' (1889/90), in
'Ensayos' (1948) 82; Villoslada, 'Storia del Collegio Romano' (1954) 78-9; Kristeller, 'Iter
Italicum', i (1963) 287: 'Bened. Pererius, Lectiones super libros de anima (Rome, 1566-67)', Bibl.
Ambrosiana, Milan, MS D 497 inf. (16 cent.).
99
Villoslada, op. cit. 79-80, 323-4, 327. On 16th-century Averrosim and its background cf.
Nardi, 'Saggi sull' Aristotelisrno Padovano' (1958).
100
Castellani, 'La vocazione . . . del Possevino' (1954) 105 n.
101
Cremonini studied philosophy at the University of Ferrara with Federico Pendasio and
became there a friend of Patrizi and of Torquato Tasso, and was called to the chair of philosophy in
1590. In the same year he was called to Padua, where he transferred in 1591: G.O. XX, 429-30;
Garin, 'Storia . . . ' (1966) 558 sqq., 580.
102
Pirri, 'II P. Achille Gagliardi . . . ' (1945) 33; see Cozzi, 'Gesuiti e politica sul finire del
Cinquecento' (1963), 'Galileo Galilei e la soceita veneziana' (1968) 12,15; cf. Favaro, 'Lo Studio
di Padova e la Compagnia di Gesu sul finire del secolo decimosesto' (1878). The Jesuits were
expelled from the Venetian Republic in 1606.
134
philosophy, especially its anticlericalism. On its part the Pinelli circle, after
Moleto's death in 1589, discussed Galileo in connection with the vacant
mathematical chair and at the same time the possibility of introducing the
study of Plato at the university. After Galileo had accepted the mathematical
post at Pisa, Benedetto Zorzi, a Venetian patrician who was an admirer of both
Plato and the Jesuits, wrote on 2 December 1589 to the Florentine Baccio
Valori (1535-1606) :103
. . . . I heard about Galileo from Signer Pinelli, and I am pleased that the way has
been opened to that man to show his learning publicly in a University. I am afraid
that the chair will still be vacant this year, because there is a lack [i.e. of
competent people] especially in this subject, the name of which Signer Contarini
and I kept alive in the memory of those who govern the University; in which I
should like on my part to see the study of Plato introduced, as I believe that His
Highness is likely to bring it back in Pisa; and I would be glad if you would kindly
let me know how this goes.
In 1588 the Grand Duke of Tuscany had in fact brought Mazzoni to teach
Platonic philosophy at Pisa.104 When Galileo eventually did go to the Paduan
mathematical chair in 1592 Pinelli's friendship drew him into his circle, as
distinct from that of Cremonini.105 But the university introduced no chair in
Platonic philosophy.
Platonic philosophy seems to have been first officially recognised in
university teaching at Pisa, when in 1576 the Grand Duke Francesco I
authorised Francesco Vieri ('il Secondo Verino') to give extraordinary lectures
on Plato in addition to his ordinary ones on Aristotle. Vieri had been active in
the Florentine Academy, and from 1553 had taught first logic and then natural
philosophy and medicine at Pisa.106 He was a friend of Baccio Valori107 and of
Antonio Persio,108 and was opposed to the kind of Aristotelianism taught at
103
G.O. x, 42; see for Zorzi G.O. xx, 561, Cozzi, op. cit. (1968) 13n.; for Valori G.O. xx, 551.
Cf. Serassi, 'La vita di Jacopo Mazzoni' (1790); Rossi, 'I. Mazzoni. . .' (1893); G.O. x, 446, xx, 479; Corsano, 'Per la storia . . . iv. 1: Mazzoni . . . ' (1959); Garin, 'Storia . . . ' (1966)
607-8, 614; Purnell, 'Jacopo Mazzoni. . .' (1972); Crescini, 'II problema metologica . . .' (1972)
365 sqq.; above n. 65, below nn. 133 sqq.
105
Cozzi, op. cit. (1968) 14; Gualdo, 'Vita . . . Pinelli' (1607) 29, 115. On Galileo and the
Jesuits at Padua cf. Nelli, 'Vita . . . di Galileo', i (1793) 25,112; Favaro, 'Galileo Galilei e lo Studio
di Padova', i (1883) 4, 72-99: Favaro (pp. 98-9) rejected Nelli's opinion that Jesuit hostility to
Galileo began at Padua.
106
See Fabbruccio, 'De Pisano Gymnasio . . . ' (1760) 132-4; Fabronius, 'Historia Academia
Pisanae', ii (1792) 96 sqq., 346 sqq., 469; and for a brief account of the introduction of Platonism
into Italian universities, Kristeller, 'Studies . . . ' (1956) 291-3, esp. 292 n. for the date 1576.
107
See Fabbruccio, ibid. 134; Viviani, 'Vita ed opera di Andrea Cesalpino' (1922) 170-1; cf.
Kristeller, ibid. 295, 323 n. and 290 n. for his correspondence with Patrizi; Bandini, 'Memorie per
servire alia vita del senator Pier Vettori' (1756) for his acquaintance at Pisa with Cesalpino;
Cochrane, The Florentine background . . .' in McMullin (ed.), 'Galileo' (1967) 126-7,136-7; and
cf. Campanella on Valori, G.O. xvii, 352 (1638).
108
Cf. Gabrieli, 'Verbali. . . dalla prima Accademia Lincei (1603-1630)' (1927), 'Notizio . . .
di Antonio Persio Linceo' (1933); G.O. iii, 366-8, xi, 298, 301-3.
104
135
Pisa by Bonamico109 and Girolamo Borri.110 He manoeuvred in various ways

to follow the tradition of concordance between Plato, Aristotle and orthodox
Catholic theology initiated by Ficino. The essentially moral and religious aim
of his Platonism is indicated by his definition of philosophy in the educational
scheme set out in the 'Discorso' (1568): 'Speculative philosophy is a habit of
the human spirit by which all those things become known which depend on
God and on nature, and which guides us finally to knowledge of the
intelligences and of God himself, in the contemplation of whom consists the
supreme human happiness in this mortal and earthly life . . . . Again it can be
defined with other words, as it is defined by the divine Plato, when he says that
"philosophy is a knowledge of divine and human things through which man
makes himself similar to God so far as is possible for him" '.m Of the three
contemplative disciplines, he saw mathematics and natural science as essentially means by which the mind rose up to the science of the divine, so that in St
Paul's words 'through visible creatures it ascends to the invisible God', their
Creator.112
Within this scheme mathematics had a central place, for 'mathematics is a
science of quantities considered without matter and substance (although
always existing in some matter and substance) in order to give us knowledge in
the factive things of the arts and of human activities governed by action, and in
the natural and divine substances speculated about in natural and in divine
science; all that, which in all these things concerns either continuous or
discontinuous quantity, . . . proclaiming the usefulness to be got from this
mathematical science'.113 It made known true demonstrations as illustrated by
Euclid's geometry, and their rules as set out in Aristotle's 'Posterior
Analytics'. Hence it served all the demonstrative sciences and the f active arts
using machines, such as architecture and military art, teaching the theory
('ragione') and mode of construction of different instruments, military
formations, camps and fortifications, measurements of heights of towers and
so forth.114 'Mathematics', he wrote again, 'are useful, indeed necessary to the
speculative sciences'.115 Among these, in subject-matter divine science came
first in excellence and perfection, natural science concerned with natural
corporal substances came next, and mathematics came last because it was
concerned with accidents, those of'quantity. But in certainty and exactness of
demonstration mathematics came first because it was more abstract than
natural science, and more open to human reason than the divine obscurities
109
Fabbruccio, ibid. p. 133; Fabronius, ibid, ii, 341 sqq., 353 sqq.
Fabbruccio and Fabronius, ibid.
111
Vieri, 'Discorso' (1568) 9; cf. his similar definition to Valori in 1590; Viviani, 'Andrea
Cesalpino' (1922) 170; Cochrane, op. cit. 136-7, nn. 48, 52.
112
Vieri, ibid. 75, cf. 72-75.
113
Ibid. 73-4.
114
Ibid. 79-80; citing Plato, 'Rep.' vii and Polybius.
115
Vieri, ibid. 84 sqq.:'. . . le matematiche sono utili anzi necessarie alle scienze specolative'.
110
136
made known to us only superhumanly. He accepted the Platonic argument that

in education mathematics, being simply open to grasp by reason, should be
taught first, then natural science, and lastly metaphysics.116
Vieri's view of the arts and sciences exemplifies the strength of the rational
Florentine tradition specified by Leonardo da Vinci and Ficino. 'Art (to start
from the first and lowest grade)', he wrote, 'is nothing other than a habit of our
spirit which proceeds with a right reason concerning those things that we call
factive and which are all those which serve the body. Its subject is all the factive
things such, so to speak, that they depend on our operations which always
terminate in the completion of something material outside ourselves'.117
Reason meant the mathematical sciences, embracing the arts and natural
philosophy. Thus 'geometry is not only useful for knowing how to measure the
Earth, to build buildings with rule and measure, and for other similar arts
which use machines, but serves also for the understanding and contemplation
of the whole universe and for skilful operation, and in sum serves for
everything where in some way there is continuous quantity. Whence it can be
defined from the subject and from the end in this way, by saying that it is a
speculative science of continuous quantity, without being applied to anything
natural and sensible, which can serve later for sensible things'.118 One
subalternate of geometry to which he gave attention was astronomy and
especially its derivative, judical astrology. His attitude was traditionally
Catholic, based on Augustine and the councils, lastly that of Trent. He held
that it was possible to predict general and simple effects such as rain, winds,
snow and so on depending immediately on the heavens and their light, which
could be calculated from observations with good instruments.119
But as for more composite effects, such as are those which can happen to man,
the astrologer cannot prescribe as in those more simple and more general effects
because, although man in many operations depends on the heavens nevertheless
in voluntary and free acts he is not subjected to the heavens, or else very
indirectly in so far as the intellect and will make use of the senses and corporeal
power; and so in his free acts man is not necessitated or constrained, even though
he may be influenced. Otherwise divine, natural and civil laws would be banished
away, all of which command him to act well and forbid him to act badly, offering
fit reward to whoever acts well and penalty to whoever does the contrary. Thus he
116
Ibid. 88-96.
Ibid. 6.
118
Ibid. 96-7.
119
Ibid. 99; he wrote concerning the proposition that astrology 'predice le cose avvenire: la
quale scienza quanto agl' effetti piu universali, e piu semplici, come pioggie, vend, nevi, e altri
simili, i quali immediatamente dependono dal cielo, e dal lume suo, e certissima, e vera, di
maniera che di cotali effetti si apporra sempre 6 il piu delle volte il buono astrologo ogni volta,
purche oltre all'essere eccell. in cotal dotrina e'sia ancora diligente in calculare bene; usi buoni
stormenti, pigli el pun to vero; e in somma, osservi tutto quello, che si richiede'. For his reference
to Augustine and the Councils see p. 106. He made no reference to Copernicus.
117
137
does the contrary. Thus he would not take council in his acts because everything
would happen of necessity, and yet it is evident from experience that those who
take council act much better than those who act by chance. Otherwise justice
would be taken away . . . . Finally our most holy and true Christian religion, and
the Catholic and Roman Church, master of all truth and unable to err, teach that
man is free and that the heavens cannot constrain him.120
He made an interesting choice of topics, linking the arts and sciences

through mathematics, in his brief discussion of optics and music. After
stereometry, astronomy, cosmography, geography and chorography came
another part of mathematics concerned with continuous quantity
called perspective because it applies lines to seeing, considering them in so far as
they go out from the eyes and come to things, speaking however in the manner of
the perspectivists, who think that we see things because rays go out of our eyes
and come as far as the things seen in the shape of a pyramid of which the apex
would start from the eyes and the base terminate at the surface of the thing seen.
But speaking in the manner of Aristotle and of the truth, these lines of sight are
boundaries of the species ('specie') of the thing seen, which species or true image
starts from the thing seen, terminating its apex in our eye. When we are so far
away that the apex of the species or image of the thing does not arrive at our eyes,
we cannot see; and according to whether we are more or less near the things, and
the angle of the said apex opposite to the base and to the thing is larger or smaller,
whence by the teaching of Euclid in the first book of the Elements the base which
terminates at the thing seen will be larger if the angle is larger and smaller if the
angle is smaller, so that the thing appears larger or smaller according to whether it
is seen through a larger or smaller angle; and it is seen through a larger angle if it
is nearer to us and through a smaller one if it is farther away. The perspectivist
then considers that the line from our eye either goes out from it and comes to the
thing, or comes from the thing to the eye; this for the present does not matter.
Enough that perspective is a science which reasons from a line that goes out from
the eye and comes from that, or that is the boundary of the image of the thing
which starts from the thing itself and terminates in the eye, drawing together by
virtue of the blackness of the eye, which colour has power to unite, or by virtue of
the eye's round shape which shape also unifies it, as is seen in convex and round
mirrors in which our face appears very small and foreshortened and by contrast in
concave mirrors much larger. Perhaps the images of the thing unite with each
other when they arrive at the eye for the one reason or the other.121
120
Ibid. 100,102. He illustrated his argument (p. 101) with the story of the Stoic Zeno's slave,
who claimed that he had broken his master's vase by necessity, to which Zeno replied that he
chastised him by necessity.
121
Ibid. 108-10; cf. Crombie The mechanistic hypothesis and . . . vision' (1967).
138
Going on to discuss the three divisions of perspective, dealing respectively

with direct, reflected and refracted visual lines, he drew attention to Aristotle's
analogies between the reflection of images from a mirror, the bouncing of a
ball from a wall, and the echoing of the voice from a cavern 'down to the last
syllable'.122 Perspective explained illusions such as a stick appearing bent in
water, problems of natural philosophy such as the shape and colours of the
rainbow, and the foreshortening used by painters. Arithmetic like geometry
was also both speculative and practical: 'the speculative is called by Plato in the
Philebus the arithmetic of philosophers, and the other that of the common
people', as used by merchants.123 So likewise was music. As with geometry and
its subalternates, so with 'arithmetic, which is more certain than music,
because arithmetic treats numbers which it does not apply to any sensible
matter, and music treats the same numbers while applying them to sensible
things, as are sounds, high-pitched and low-pitched'.124 Thus speculative
music applied the science of discrete quantity to notes which together could
produce harmony and consonance. Through these practical music played in
various ways could excite the concupiscent or irascible appetites of the senses
shared with the animals, or in man alone a third 'rational appetite for those
things which help and delight the soul, such as the appetite and longing to
know natural, mathematical and divine things, and to act in short virtuously
according to moral and to speculative virtue'.125 This last was that understood
by the divine Plotinus which led men to transcend 'the eye of the body' so that
'the intellect, which is divine, would rise to think that if man has been able to
form notes of such proportion, with how much greater harmony had God, who
in knowledge, will and power is so far ahead of men and every other creature,
composed this universe and such marvellous orders of creatures, all directed to
the services of man . . . '.126
A year after he had begun his lectures on Plato at Pisa, Vieri published
another work aiming at concordance: 'Compendio della dottrina di Platone in
quello che ella e conforme con la fede nostra' (1577). True 'virtuosi', he wrote
in the preface, embellished the spirit in three ways: with knowledge above all
of divine things, secondly of visible things, and thirdly of the teaching of Plato.
Josephus had said that Plato imitated Moses: 'Numenius the Pythagorean,
having read the books of Moses and of Plato, considered Plato to be another
122
Vieri, ibid. Ill; Aristotle, 'De anima', ii.8, 419b 25-35. For perspective Vieri (pp. 112-3)
cited Euclid, Archimedes, Pecham and Witelo.
123
Vieri, ibid. 114-5; citing also the 'Republic' vii and the 'Laws'.
124
Vieri, ibid. 91-2.
125
Ibid. 115-6; see 113-20, esp. 117-8; the ancient Lydian and loniam modes excited the
concupiscent and amorous appetite; the Phyrigian mode the irascible and warlike; and the Dorian
the contemplative.
126
Ibid. 118-9, citing Plotinus and Aristotle's 'Polities', viii.7.
139
Moses who spoke in the Attic tongue';127 Justin Martyr, Augustine and Ficino
confirmed the conformity of Plato's doctrines with Christian theology. Cosimo
de' Medici, through his encouragement of Gemistus surnamed Plato because
he was 'almost a new Plato', of Ficino and the formation of a Platonic
Academy, and thereby of Pico della Mirandola, had by the will of Divine
Providence resurrected there in Tuscany the pious and divine philosophy of
Plato: 'which had originated from Zoroaster with the Persians, succeeded
among the Egyptians thanks to Mercurius Trismegistus and among the
Thracians through the work of Orpheus and Aglaophemus, and grew with the
Greeks and Italians under Pythagoras and with the Athenians through the care
of Plato'.128 Vieri paid attention in this work to concordance over the whole
range from moral teaching to accounts of the creation: 'God has produced the
whole universe as is said by Moses in the beginning of Genesis and by Plato in
the Timaeus', and also by Hermes Trismegistus in the 'Pimander'.129 His last
effort at concordance appeared in his final year at Pisa: 'Vere conclusioni di
Platone conformi alia dottrina Christiana et a quella d'Aristotile' (1590). This
was a polemical reply to his Aristotelian colleague Borri's 'De peripatetica
docendi atque addiscendi methodo' (1584). From Vieri's dedicatory preface to
Baccio Valori it seems that he had been obstructed by the Aristotelians in
giving his lectures and had been forced to abandon them.130
Meanwhile in Ferrara Patrizi is listed as lecturing on Plato's 'Republic' in
1578 and on Platonic philosophy in a number of subsequent years down to
1587. In that year he left, but Platonic courses seem to have continued in the
university.131 Patrizi was an all-out Platonist, concerned about concordance
with Christian theology but not with Aristotle. In the University of Rome the
Platonic impetus given by the mathematical scholar Raimondi was strengthened by Patrizi's appointment to a new chair in Platonic philosophy there in
1592, through the Neoplatonic interests of Ippolito Aldrobrandini, who had
in that year become Pope Clement VIII, and his family.132 A chair for the
introduction of lectures on Plato in Bologna had been discussed in 1588 and
Mazzoni proposed for it.133 But in that year he joined Vieri at Pisa, where he
127
Vieri, 'Compendio', dedicatory preface to Giovanna d'Austria, Gran Duchessa di Toscana
(1577) sig. a4-2; cf. for Numenius Pythagoricus of Apamea in Syria (2nd cent, A.D.) Sarton,
'Introduction', i (1927) 298; for Josephus, 'Against Apion', ii, 15-17, cf. Dewish, 'Antiquities'
i.2.3; and for his Hermetic Neoplatonic view of intellectual history, advocated in the 15th century
by Georgius Gemistus Pletho, Kieszkowski, 'Studi . . . ' (1939) 113 sqq.; Kristeller, The
Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino' (1943) 13 sqq., 'Studies . . . ' (1956) 36-7, 233; Saitta, 'II pensiero
italiano', ii (1950) 75 sqq.; Garin, 'L'umanismo italiano' (1953) 108 sqq., 'Studi. . . ' (1958) 153
sqq., 216 sqq., 'Storia . . .' (1966) 358 sqq.; Yates, 'Giordano Bruno' (1964) 14 sqq.; Wind, 'Pagan
Mysteries . . .' (1967) 241 sqq.; Walker, The Ancient Theology' (1972); cf. above nn. 66, 86,97.
128
Vieri, ibid. sig. a4+3; this Cosimo was 'Padre della Patria' (1389-1464); see for Algaophenus
etc. Kristeller, Studies . . . (1956) 233.
129
Vieri, ibid, c.ll (1577) index, and pp. 85 sqq., citing these three ancient authors.
130
Cf. Fabronius, op. cit. ii (1792) 347, 469; Kristeller, Studies . . . (1956) 292; Garin,
L'umanismo italiano (1952) 165, Storia . . . (1966) 587-8.
131
Solerti, 'Documenti riguardanti lo Studio di Ferrara' (1892) 32-48; Kristeller, Studies . . .
(1956) 191-2.
132
Renazzi, Storia dell'Universita di Roma, iii (1805) 31-2, 224-5.
133
Costa, Ulisse Aldrovandi e lo Studio Bolognese (1907) 90; Kristeller, ibid. 292.
140
remained until 1597 when he was brought by Clement VIII to succeed Patrizi
in Rome.134 In Pisa Mazzoni was eventually succeeded in his chair by another
of Galileo's academic colleagues, Fortunio Liceto (1577-1657), who held it
from 1605 until he moved to Padua in 1609.135 In the sixteenth century Platonic
philosophy seems to have been officially recognised only in Pisa, Ferrara and
Rome, followed briefly at the beginning of the seventeenth century by
Pavia.136
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Sources of Galileo's Early Natural Philosophy
'He exalted Plato to the skies for his truly golden eloquence, and for his
method of writing and composing in dialogues; but above everyone else he
praised Pythagoras for his way of philosophising, but in genius he said that
Archimedes has surpassed all, and he called him his master'. The omission of
Aristotle's name from this honours list by Galileo's second seventeenthcentury biographer, Niccolo Gherardini, is no surprise; nor is his preceding
remark that, far from following current fashion in running Aristotle down,
Galileo praised his marvellous writing on literature and ethics but found that
'this great man's way of philosophising did not satisfy him, and that there were
in it fallacies and errors' (Galileo, Opere, xix, 645). Nevertheless, I shall
respond to the invitation given to me to discuss briefly some 'wider issues'
relating to Stillman Drake's very interesting paper, by taking up just one
question on which I shall argue that Aristotle had a far more profound
influence on Galileo's scientific thinking than remarks such as Gherardini's
might suggest.
Professor Drake make a point of stressing Galileo's alleged decision 'to limit
the scope of his inquiries to separate and well-defined areas, and not to seek a
general theory of the universe'. He seems to refer to the range of content or
subjects Galileo was prepared to consider. But going on to say that this is 'an
extremely important part of his scientific methodology', he cites the Dialogo
and // Saggiatore for examples of Galileo's limit being place on the expectation
of certainty rather than the range. Galileo's performance in scientific inquiry
was undoubtedly guided by his policy of selecting acceptably answerable
questions as much as by his criteria for acceptable answers. But whether
Professor Drake means that Galileo limited the range or the certainty he
expected science ultimately to achieve, I should argue that the opposite is true.
First Galileo's very effective method of limiting problems in order to solve
them was nearly always aimed in the end, whether through the science of
motion and mechanics or through telescopy, precisely at establishing not only
true methods of natural philosophy, but also the true general theory of nature.
This was a theory comprising matter and its properties as discovered by both
terrestrial and celestial inquiries, their bearing on cosmology, the relation of
150
perceiver to perceived and of knower to known, and the bearing of all on

theology.
Secondly, throughout his scientific inquiries and debates, Galileo wrote
continually of finding 'true and necessary demonstrations' (Opere, ii, 155; v.
330) of his conclusions, and on one famous occasion, in his First Letter about
the Sunspots (1612), he looked forward not un-typically to solving 'the greatest
and most admirable problem there is, the true constitution of the universe. For
such a constitution exists, and exists in only one, true, real way, that could not
possibly be otherwise' (Opere, v. 102). Strong words; in fact, the words of
Aristotle's Posterior Analytics (i.2, 71b9-72a24; 6, 74b5-6; 10, 76a31-b31), well
known in Galileo's day to every educated person. We have unqualified
scientific knowledge of something, Aristotle had written, when 'we know the
cause on which the fact depends, as the cause of that fact and no other and,
further, that the fact could not be other than it is' (i.2, 71b9 = text. 7, Opera
omnia, i, 1552, f.!30v); 'Demonstrated knowledge must rest on necessary first
principles; for the object of scientific knowledge cannot be other than it is' (i.6,
74b5 = text. 44, f.!42v). I should argue that Galileo aimed in the end at total
certainty, that is was Aristotle and no other who provided him with this ideal of
truly scientific certain knowledge, and that he retained this ideal from his
earliest to his latest writings, even as he rejected the methods and destroyed
the content of Aristotle's physics, and even when he recognised that
demonstration truly scientific by Aristotelian criteria eluded his grasp.
We might say that by attempting to prove so much so powerfully Galileo got
himself scientifically and personally into a lot of unnecessary trouble. But
given his background and education in sixteenth-century Italy, to say nothing
of his own quite specific intellectual vision, it was very natural for him to see
beyond the solutions of particular problems to a general philosophical reform
to which they would effectively contribute. In this he was certainly encouraged
by early influences to make a characteristic response to the striking variety of
current intellectual attitudes and aims, themselves the products of successive
European responses to successive recoveries of ancient thought.
Most relevant was the well-known difference between the philosophers on
the one hand, and the mathematicians and artists on the other. Both sides had
been exposed in different ways to a mathematical rationalism imposed on art
and nature through mathematical theories of painting, music and machines,
and on philosophy through Neoplatonic visions of a morally normative and
therapeutic numerological harmony, and of mathematics as a stage in the
education of the mind for theology. Mathematics became an antidote to the
threat of scepticism. But the recovery of alternatives to the academic Christian
Aristotle, and especially of this new Plato, made much sixteenth-century
philosophy notably eclectic, tolerant of opposing systems, seeking concordance between authorities, circling in the habit of scholastic disputation, seeing
mathematics as a means of moral education rather than of solving scientific
problems. Jacopo Mazzoni (1548-98), friend of Galileo's father and professor
of both Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy at Pisa from 1588 to 1597, was the
151
most obvious and intelligent philosophical contemporary giving mainly this

meaning to mathematics.
By contrast the artists, engineers and mathematicians concerned with their
problems were obliged by the practical crafts to make clear limited decisions.
The Florentine ambience provided by Galileo's father, as an eminent practical
as well as theoretical musician, and by his friends among artists and
mathematicians, was strongly scientific in this sense and unsympathetic
towards the more numerological and cosmic aspects of Platonism. Moreover,
Vincenzo Galilei (c. 1520-91) in his experimental analysis of the mathematical
basis of music looked beyond the Pythagorean proportions, like Aristotle, for
some process of physical causation. We could say perhaps that Galileo Galilei
tried to carry the decisiveness of the mathematical arts into natural philosophy
through the discovery of true processes of physical causation, as distinct from
those accepted by conservative contemporary Aristotelians. Out of this, above
all under the guidance of Archimedes, came the distinction he made between
what he called the mathematical 'definitions' (e.g. Discorsi on two new
sciences, 1638; Opere, viii, 197 sqq.) and the physical causes which he never
ceased to look for. He was to carry the consequent decisions of his natural
philosophy into theology. His earliest surviving philosophical writings show
however an influence on his intellectual formation that was neither mathematical, not artistic, nor Platonic but conservatively Aristotelian. To these I must
now turn.
During 1969 and 1971 my colleague Adriano Carugo, then working at
Oxford and now at the University of Venice, and I solved the main problem of
the sources of Galileo's early writings in his own hand, published by Favaro as
Juvenilia (Opere, i). These comprise two incomplete treatises, each in two
parts, on major Aristotelian themes: the Tractatio prima de mundo with the
Tractatio de caelo concerned essentially with questions of cosmology and
cosmogony raised for Christian theology by Aristotle's De caelo; and the
fragmentary Tractatus de alteratione with the Tractatus de dementis concerned
with the theory of elements and qualities put forward by Aristotle in the
Physics and the De generatione et corruptione. We have also studied a third
autograph treatise, again incomplete and in two parts, which Galileo left in
manuscript but of which Favaro published only a small section, describing it as
'some scholastic exercises' (Opere, ix, 273). This is the Disputationes de
praecognitionibus et de demonstratione (Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di
Firenze, MS Galileiano 27; Fig. 1), a commentary on Aristotle's Posterior
Analytics with a detailed analysis of questions of the logic connecting cause
with effect, of types of scientific demonstration, and of the relation between
mental assent, as in a mathematical proof, and demonstration of actual
existence. I shall summarise our conclusions about the sources, dates and
nature of these three treatise, and then briefly discuss some of the philosophical views Galileo expressed in them and their relation to those he expressed in
later life.
152
Fig. 1 Beginning of Galileo's autograph Disputationes de praecognitionibus et de

demonstratione (Biblioteca Nazionale Centrals di Firenze, MS Galilaiano 27, f.
4r).
153
I myself began studying the Tractatus de alteratione et de elementis in 1964

when I was looking for the sources and earlier thinking behind the famous
distinction which I discussed in my article, 'The Primary Properties and
Secondary Qualities in Galileo Galilei's Natural Philosophy', for the Saggi su
Galileo Galilei and in more detail in the unpublished volume Galileo's Natural
Philosophy in which Adriano Carugo collaborated, both completed in 1968
(see the Bibliographical Note). By that date I had become interested in a
further range of ancient, medieval and more recent sources cited in Galileo's
treatise as well as in the Tractationes de mundo et de caelo and the
Disputationes, of which I began to make a preliminary study and got a
microfilm in the autumn of 1967. The next stage in this story was that in 1968
Adriano Carugo began to suspect and in 1969 showed conclusively that many
of Galileo's citations of ancient and medieval sources in the Tractatus de
alteratione et de elementis and the Tractatio prima de mundo came from the
textbooks of two Jesuit professors of philosophers at the Collegio Romano,
both Spaniards: Benito Pereira (c. 1535-1610) and Francisco de Toledo, or
Toletus (1532-96), who became a Cardinal. These textbooks were Pereira's De
communibus omnium rerum naturalium principiis et affectionibus libri quindecim (published at Rome, 1576; first edition with a different title 1562), and
Toletus's commentaries on Aristotle's Physics (published at Paris, 1581) and
Degeneratione et corruptione (published at Venice, 1579). Carugo showed that
Galileo used Pereira's book as his main source of information for his discussion
in De motu of the dynamical theories of Philoponus, Hipparchus, Avempace,
Averroes, Julius Caesar Scaliger and other ancient, medieval and more recent
authors. Then in June 19711 discovered that important parts of the Tractatio de
caelo, including the earliest appearance in Galileo's hand of the name of
Copernicus (Fig. 2), whose location of the Earth in an orbit round the Sun is
there rejected, all came from a well-known textbook by another Jesuit
professor at the Collegio Romano, In Sphaeram loannis de Sacro Bosco
commentarius (published at Rome, 1581) by the German mathematician
Christopher Clavius (1527-1612). So Galileo's basic sources were three
prominent contemporary Jesuits of the Collegio Romano.
These identifications required some luck as well as cunning, for although
Galileo clearly indicated Pereira as a source, he named Clavius only once and
Toletus not at all; but of course they were based essentially on considerable
and sometimes tedious reading of sixteenth-century natural philosophy, made
in order to explore and understand Galileo's intellectual background and its
relevance to his own thought. Sometimes Galileo took from his sources whole
passages verbatim, including lists of references, not always copied accurately.
Sometimes he went through these to the ancient or medieval originals. But he
did not simply copy, but organised and often rearranged the materials for his
own sharply independent arguments. I have shown that he used another work
by Pereira, a commentary on Genesis (first volume, published at Rome, 1589),
in the same way for his discussion in his Lettera a Madama Cristina di Lorena
(1615) of the exegetical rules for relating demonstrated science to the authority
154
Fig. 2 Autograph page of Galileo's Tractatio de caelo with the earliest reference in his
hand of Copernicus's great work: 'Nicol. Copn: in op. de revolutione orbinum
caelestinum' (Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, MS Galileiano 46, f.
22r).
155
of revealed Scripture. In the Disputationes he cited some two dozen ancient,

medieval and more recent authors, but again he seems to have used
intermediate sources, here mainly the Dominican philosopher Thomas de Vio
Caietanus's In . . . libros Posteriorum Analyticorum Aristotelis castigatissima
commentaria (published from 1505 in many editions, including one at Venice
in 1565) and the sixteenth-century Averroi'st logician Girolamo Balduino's
Quaestia aliquot. . . logica et naturalia (available in various editions including
one published at Venice in 1563 with his commentary on the Posterior
Analytics). We have a complete transcription made during 1970-71 by Adriano
Carugo of the unique manuscript of the Disputationes (MS Galileiano 27), and
we are publishing with an English translation the parts of this most relevant to
scientific thought.
All three treatise comprise closely reasoned arguments, scholastic in form,
making often fine distinctions between opposing opinions. Apart from
Aristotle, cited continuously, the highest rates of citation are scored by his
commentator Averroes, followed by Aquinas and the Thomistae' (Opere, i,
76, 117-118, 144), chiefly Italian and Spanish. This is matched by agreement
with Thomist opinions especially on cosmology, for example for the world
created being the best possible, for the heavens being probably incorruptible
but not necessarily so because no natural power could limit God's absolute
freedom, and so on. If we look at Galileo's Jesuit sources themselves, we find
an astringently rational view of nature, natural causation and natural
philosophy very like so many later expressions of his own. Pereira, for
example, argued that the disproof of alchemical gold came not from the theory
that alchemists had no access to celestial fire, which he himself thought was the
same as terrestrial fire, but from the fact that no one had ever produced if (De
communibus, viii, 21, pp. 299-300). He was equally sceptical of magic and
astrology. Clavius gave a brilliantly lucid exposition of the criteria for deciding
whether or not the spheres and epicycles, postulated in astronomical theory to
account for the observations, had any real physical existence (In Sphaeram,
c.4, pp. 434-437). Galileo did not discuss this in the Tractatio de caelo, but we
may see a kinship between his later position on Copernicus and Clavius's
insistence that celestial like terrestrial science must argue from effects to their
real physical causes, that it was only the syllogistic form that made the
dialectical rule that truth can follow from falsehood seem plausible, that
Copernicus himself had postulated his new arrangement of spheres and
epicycles not as fictitious but real, and that while he himself was not convinced
by Copernicus' arguments he would thank heartily anyone who could produce
a better system than any so far produced.
What are these writings? We have derived a possible order and dating from
their content and from the paper used. The chronology in the Tractatio prima de
mundo, deriving from a combination of Biblical and ancient Greek chronology
total of 5,748 years from the creation, with 1584 years from the birth of Christ
'down to the present time' (Opere, i, 27; cf. Favaro's editorial comment on p.
12), might be thought to make this at least its earliest date of composition, even
156
if it was all copied from another source. Since the Tractatio de caelo is written
on the same kind of paper, watermarked with a faint CT or CL, they seem to
belong to the same period. Should both be placed at the end of Galileo's period
as a student at Pisa, before his return to Florence in 1585? But, as William
Wallace has pointed out to me, Galileo corrected mistakes in writing down this
total chronology (MS Galileiano 46, f.!0r) and when repeating it later wrote it
as 6,748 years without correction (f.!5v; corrected in Opere, i, 36), so it seems
to be fragile evidence. Moreover, in the Tractatio de caelo he quoted Clavius.
He visited Clavius in Rome in 1587 and evidently discussed astronomy, for in a
subsequent letter of 8 January 1588 (Opere, x, 22-23) he referred to the Jesuit's
still unpublished defence of the new Gregorian calendar. In his letter of 15
November 1590 (Opere, x, 44-45) to his father from Pisa, a year after he had
returned there as lecturer in mathematics, he awaits the arrival from him of 'la
Sfera', which could have been Clavius's. So perhaps we should date the
Tractationes de mundo et de caelo from his period either with his father at
Florence (when in 1588 he wrote his cosmographical lectures on Dante's
Inferno, on different paper however) or as a young lecturer at Pisa.
The Disputationes is written on paper without watermark. Since here he
does not mention Archimedes, explicitly the new enlightenment of his
Theoremata circa centrum gravitatis solidorum (dated late 1587 or early 1588:
see Carugo's edition of the Discorsi, 1958, pp. 840-847) and thereafter of the
lectures on the Inferno, the dialogue and treatise De motu, and La bilancetta
(dated 1586 by Favaro on Vincenzo Viviani's not always reliable testimony, but
plausibly later on other evidence to be discussed in our forthcoming book), it
seems that the Disputationes must probably precede these works. Of these La
bilancetta, the Dialogus de motu and part of the Tractatus de motu were written
on similar paper without watermark. He wrote the Tractatus de alteratione et de
elementis on the kind of paper, watermarked with a device of a lamb and flag
(Fig. 3), which he used also for the Inferno and for another part of the
Tractatus de motu. It has been argued, mainly from the doctrines proposed,
that he wrote both the dialogue and the treatise De motu after his return to Pisa
in 1589. If the paper is a guide to the date of the Tractatus de elementis, this
would connect the sudden appearance of citations of Galen in this work with
the seven volumes of Galen which Galileo said in the same letter of 15
November 1590 that he was expecting from his father with the Sfera. Some
years after giving up medicine, it was Galen the philosopher whom he cited.
In this letter he told his father that he was 'studying and having lessons with
Signer Mazzoni, who sends you greetings'. Must we then conclude that the
Tractatus de alteratione et de elementis was a study of these questions of
Aristotelian natural philosophy written by the young lecturer in mathematics
under the influence of Mazzoni, side by side with the critique of Aristotle he
was developing in De motu under the influence of Archimedes and Plato? The
targets for criticism are also indicated by Mazzoni: Aristotle's lack of
mathematics and his uncritical reliance on the senses. Galileo contrasted both
with his own new mathematical method, but neither criticism is incompatible
157
Fig. 3 The watermark showing a backward-looking lamb with flag enclosed in a

circle: Briquet no 48 (Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, MS Galileiano
46, ff. 71, 74: the paper is folded and bound across the middle of the circle).
with his making at the same time a serious study of Aristotle's theory of the
elements and qualities and its ancient rivals.
In the unpublished volume I have already mentioned, I suggested that
Galen's exposition of atomist doctrines in his De elementis secundum
Hippocratem could have been a source of Galileo's later distinction between
primary properties and secondary qualities which he had known from that
time. This was also suggested by William Shea in his article 'Galileo's Atomic
158
Hypothesis' (Ambix, xvii, 1970, p. 23). Moreover in De motu itself Galileo

retained scholastic forms of argument alongside the mathematical form learnt
from Archimedes, and continued not only citing philosophical commentaries
but also using Pereira as an important source of information. Already in De
motu Galileo used Archimedes and Plato to replace Aristotle's ideological
structure of the universe with a structure that was the resultant, still
providentially designed, of mechanical forces, and at the same time to begin
replacing the whole Greek theory of pairs of contrary qualities with quantitative linear scales of weight, density, heat and so on. The full integration of his
new mathematical method with a new theory of matter was something he
brought about only much later, precisely through a further critique of
Aristotle.
We may then dismiss the hypothesis that Galileo's three earliest treatise
were notes he took of philosophical lectures heard as a student at Pisa. The
long-standing candidate for the lecturer, Francesco Bonamico, has in any case
been shown by Eugenio Garin (Scienza e vita civile, 1965, pp. 124-127, 144145, 165-166) to be impossible, and this was confirmed in 1969 by Adriano
Carugo's further comparisons of Bonamico's De motu (Florence, 1591) with
the Juvenilia. Bonamico was no Thomist and he disagreed with Galileo too
often. Galileo was to take him on years later in his Discorso (1612) on floating
bodies, and interestingly was to cite from him the logical rule for discovering
the cause of effects through presence or absence, which he used in experiments
for that work (Opere, iv, 52; cf. 19, 22, 27). But that is another question. I do
not think it possible to say what Galileo wrote these treatises for, or indeed
exactly when he wrote them. Was he lecturing on these subjects and were they
his own lectures? Were they simply for his own edification? For that matter
why, and indeed over what years, did he write De motul
Before we made the discoveries I have described no one known to us, no one
we had been in touch with or whom we knew to be working on Galileo, had
identified any of these sources. It seems that we looked back across nearly four
and a half centuries to something known before perhaps only to Galileo
himself. But someone was bound to identify them fairly soon, and in fact
William Shea did independently discover Galileo's use of Clavius a couple of
years after me. William Wallace noticed certain similarities with Pereira and
Toletus, but saw them only among others through a glass darkly and failed to
identify them as sources. Full details of our work will be published in our
forthcoming book, but meanwhile we thought it might be useful to make
authorised information available. It seems likely that Galileo used other
secondary sources not yet identified. The sheer number of references, not just
to ancient, medieval and modern philosophers and astronomers but also to
points of theology in Scripture, patristic writings and the decisions of Councils
of the Church, suggests some common source. Perhaps someone, not me, will
look further. Nevertheless these early writings impress by their scholarship.
They show Galileo then as indeed he appears in his later writings (despite his
biographers) as the highly literate, well-read man of his time and ambience
159
that he was, a match for anyone in learned dialectical debate, and a

philosopher who in wanting to show forth the true system of the universe and
of knowledge, wanted also the support of the truest ancient model. He
famously asked to be entitled 'philosopher' as well as 'mathematician' to the
Grand Duke on his return to Florence in 1610 (Opere, x, 353).
The theory of the truly scientific demonstration expounded by Aristotle in
the Posterior Analytics was a model on which everyone in Galileo's time had
been educated and which was widely accepted as the ideal goal of knowledge.
Galileo's Disputationes de praecognitionibus et de demonstratione was his
account of that model. It is significant that he should have written it as one of
his earliest philosophical essays. Let me conclude by looking briefly at its place
in Galileo's thought.
We are caused to have knowledge, Galileo wrote in De praecognitionibus,
by the first principles we grasp (disputatio ii, quaestio, MS Gal. 27, f.5v). We
may know these in various ways: the most universal only through knowledge of
terms, as that the whole is greater than its part; others only through the senses,
as that fire is hot; others through various forms of inductive or hypothetical
argument; others through experience, as in medicine; others only through
habit, as those of moral science which we cannot understand unless we practice
them (ii.l, f.4r). But whereas in nature an effect must necessarily follow from
its sufficient cause, man is free and cannot without his assent be made to have
knowledge (iv.2, f.!2v).
This leads to a discussion in the Tractatio de demonstratione (disputatio i,
quaestio i, f.!3r) of Aristotle's criteria for the first principles of truly
demonstrated knowledge: these must be true, primary and immediate in not
being themselves demonstrated from any prior principles, and related to their
conclusions as cause to effect (Post. Anal. i.2). Galileo argued that only true
propositions can actually be known, because true knowledge of things is had
through the causes by which they exist. Demonstrations of true conclusions
from false premisses can only be per accidens, not per se, and we cannot
actually know such things as the void and the infinite for they are nothing. The
proper object of true knowledge in ens reale, real being, not just ens rationis (ii,
1, ff.!7v-18r). He went on to analyse at length Aristotle's criterion that truly
scientific demonstrations must-proceed from true causes, though we have first
to discover these from our more immediate knowledge, for example through
the senses. The premisses of mathematics cause knowledge and are as
immediately knowable to us as their conclusions, but mathematical entities do
not exist (ii.6, f .22). The sciences subordinate to mathematics (as astronomy,
music etc) do not have truly scientific demonstrations because they must
proceed ex suppositione from principles assumed from the superior science
(ii.4, f.20v). We may give our certain assent with evidence as to knowledge
through the senses, or without evidence as in our faith, but we come to rest
most agreeably in knowing a conclusion because it follows from true premisses
(ii.6, ff.22v-23r).
160
He concluded with a discussion of the recognised kinds of demonstration:

ostensiva, ad impossibile, quia, propter quid, potissima (iii.1-2, ff.29r-30r, cf.
i.l, f.!3r). Here, as elsewhere, he seems to be using Proclus' commentary on
Euclid, as well as Averroes and other authors whom he named, but he took an
independent line. Demonstration ad impossibile is not truly scientific because
it proceeds by raising questions from false premisses in order to find the true
ones (f.29r). Truly scientific demonstration could be reduced to two kinds,
demonstratio quia which demonstrates the existence of an effect and from that
a posteriori its cause, the demonstratio propter quid which demonstrates both
the cause and hence the existence of the effect (f.30rv). That demonstratio quia
is truly scientific is proved on the authority of Aristotle and all commentators,
and because like demonstratio propter quid it proceeds from true and necessary
premisses to true and necessary conclusions, and so generates knowledge and
not probable opinion (f.30r). That an attribute is connected with a subject we
know from experience; that the connection is naturally necessary when it
always occurs we know by the light of our intellect, for otherwise nature would
have been improvident; it can be truly demonstrated by intrinsic, extrinsic or
other kinds of cause (f.30r). This seems to be the origin of Galileo's later
designation of demonstration both from observation and from theory as
'necessary demonstration'.
The scientific argument, he went on, especially in the physical sciences
where we began by not knowing the physical causes, alternated in a
'demonstrative regress' (iii.3, f.31rv) in both directions, from effect to cause
and vice versa. In mathematics the regress is little needed because premisses
are as immediately known as their conclusions. In any case it is not circular
because, starting from an effect which one knows better than its reason, it
demonstrates the reason for that effect. The complete true cause and the effect
entail each other reciprocally and uniquely (f.31v).
Parts of the Disputationes (despite its containing no precisely scientific
illustrations of the logic) resonate with many of Galileo's well-known later
practices and sentences. This is not the occasion to discuss the organisation of
his experimental argument, for example in De motu and in the Discorso (1612)
on the floating bodies, on the logic of la progressione demonstrativa, the
methodo resolutiva, and the reductio ad impossibile or ad contradictionem
(Opere, i, 260-265, 284-285, 318; iv, 19, 22, 27, 67). But it is relevant to note
that he continued to carry on about 'true and necessary demonstrations' and
'the necessary constitution of nature' (as he put it in Le mecaniche, 1593;
Opere, ii, 155, 189), and 'true demonstrations' from 'the true, intrinsic and
total cause' (Discorso, 1612; opere, iv, 67), from his earliest writings and
throughout the telescopic, mechanical and Copernican debates of 1610-16 and
down to the Dialogo (1632). The great attraction for him of his argument, firs
put forward in 1616, from the tides to the Earth's motions seems to have been
that here he had a truly scientific demonstration by Aristotle's criteria: this
cause must produce those effects, and those effects must entail this cause and
no other (Opere, v 377-381, 393; vii, 443,470-472). Galileo hedged by claiming
161
this as perhaps only the most probable cause advanced so far, but he exposed
himself of course to a double accusation: that he was committing the logical
fallacy of affirming the consequent, for phenomena could not uniquely
determine their causes; and that he was claiming to demonstrate something
necessary not just about the world that existed but also about its omnipotent
Creator (cf. Antonio Rocco in 1633 on the Dialogo: Opere, vii, 628-629,
699-700).
Galileo's necessity surely belonged to a conception inherited from Greek
philosophy, that of the possibility of a completed and bounded knowledge of
all that does and can exist. God's omnipotence made this existentially
untenable, and this Galileo was to be careful to accept, by distinguishing his
arguments about the world God had in fact created from any suggestion that
God could be bound by any natural necessity (cf. Dialogo: Opere, vii, 128-131,
488-489; Lettera a Madama Cristina di Lorena: Opere v. 316-321). In his
scientific practice, the open-ended character of mathematics and experiment
and of the Archimedean argument ex suppositione (as in his letter of 7 January
1639 to Baliani: Opere, xviii, 12-13, aptly quoted by Stillman Drake), his
appreciation of the complexity of natural causes themselves in such phenomena as light and heat, above all his use of range of confirmation as the test of a
theory, notably of the new cosmology, effectively killed the scientific ideal of
necessary truth imposed by Aristotle's logic. What are we to make then of
Galileo's apparent blindness to this in expressions of continuing hope? Perhaps
just words. But it seems to me that we have here in the slow general
understanding of the difference that mathematical thinking made to traditional logic and to scientific explanation, found after all in sixteenth-century
attempts to put Euclid into syllogisms, a phenomenon in European intellectual
history, in European scientific methods mediated through cultural habits and
inherited preconceptions, that greatly merits attention.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The subject of this paper (which has been checked by Adriano Carugo and is
presented as a result of our joint researches) is discussed in detail in our
forthcoming book to be published as: A.C. Crombie and Adriano Carugo,
Galileo's Arguments and Disputes in Natural Philosophy. This work is a
considerably revised version of our unpublished volume, Galileo's Natural
Philosophy (1968), which was awarded the Galileo Prize and is deposited in
the Domus Galilaeana, Pisa.
All citations of Galileo's published writings refer to Le Opere di Galileo
Galilei, A. Favaro, ed., 20 vols. (Florence, 1890-1909): cited in the text as
Opere. References are made to the major Latin edition Aristotelis Stagiratae
Omnia quae extant opera . . . Averrois Cordubensis In ea opera omnes qui ad
162
nos pervenere commentarii . . ., 11 vols. (Venetiis apud luntas, 1550-52);

Galileo seems to have used a reprint of 1573-76.
Relevant secondary publications are C.M. Briquet, Les filigranes: Dictionnaire historique des marques du papier des leur apparition vers 1282 jusqu'en
1600, a facsimile of the 1907 edition with supplementary material, ed. A.
Stevenson, 4 vols. (Amsterdam, 1968); A.C. Crombie, The Primary Properties and Secondary Qualities in Galileo Galilei's Natural Philosophy', Saggisu
Galileo Galilei, a cura di C. Maccagni (preprint, Firenze, 1969; published 1972);
Galileo Galilei, Discorsi e dimostrazione matematiche intorno a due nuove
scienze, a cura di A. Carugo e L. Geymonat (Torino, 1958); E. Garin, Scienza
e vita civile nel Rinascimento italiano (Bari, 1965); A Procissi, La collezione
Galileiana della Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze, i, 'Anteriori', 'Galileo',
compilata da Angiolo Procissi (Roma, 1959); William R. Shea, Galileo's
Intellectual Revolution (London, 1972); William A. Wallace, 'Galileo and the
Thomists', in St Thomas Aquinas 1274-1974 Commemorative Studies (Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Toronto, 1974) 293-330: an innacurate note
on p. 330 about the discovery of Galileo's early sources is to be corrected.
The study of the paper used by Galileo for these early autograph writings
was begun by Adriano Carugo and extended with certain precisions by myself.
All the paper is made with parallel wire lines 28-30 mm apart, at right angles to
which are fainter parallel textural lines about 1 mm apart. The watermarks,
always consistently related to the wire lines, appear on the folios at fairly
regular intervals according to the foldings. By this criterion the writings may be
grouped as follows:
1 On paper without watermark: Disputationes de praecognitionibus et de
demonstration (Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, MSS Galileiani 27, ff. 3-31; Procissi p. 106; Galileo, Opere, ix, 279-282, 291-292);
Plutarch, Opere morali (MSS Gal, 27, ff. 34-42; Procissi p. 106; Opere, ix,
285-290); Sonetti (MSS Gal, 27, f. 45; Procissi p. 107; G.O. ix, 289-290);
La bilancetta and Tavola delleproporzioni delle gravita in specie del metalli
e delle gioie pesate in aria ed in aqqua (MSS Gal. 45, ff.55, 60-62; Procissi
p. 120; Opere, i, 215-20, 225-8); Fragment of Greek-Latin vocabulary
(MSS Gal. 70, f.4; Procissi p. 148); Dialogus de motu (MSS Gal. 71, ff. 435; Procissi p. 151; Opere, i. 367-408)' Tractatus de motu (MSS Gal. 71,
ff.43-60; Procissi p. 151; Opere, i, 344-366).
2 On paper showing a mark CT or CL (cf. Briquet no.9553): Tractationes de
mundo etde caelo (MSS Gal. 46, ff. 1-54; Procissi p. 123; Opere, i, 14-111).
3 On paper with watermark showing a backward-looking lamb with a flag
enclosed in a circle: Fig. 3 (Briquet no. 48): Due lezioni all'Accademia
fiorentina circa lafigura, sito e grandezza dell'inferno di Dante (1588; Bibl.
Naz. Cent, di Firenze, MSS Filza Rinuccini 21, insertion 19, ff. 1-29;
Opere, ix, 31-57); Tractatus de alteratione etde elementis (MSS Gal. 46, ff.
57-100; Procissi p. 123; Opere, i. Ill-Ill, cf. 133); Tractatus de motu (MSS
Gal. 71, ff. 115-124; Procissi p. 151; Opere, i, 326-340); Isocratis ad
163
demonicum admonino (MSS Gal. 71, ff. 125-132; Procissi p. 151; Opere,
ix, 283-284).
4 On paper with watermark showing a forward-looking lamb with flag
enclosed in a circle with a cross above: Tractatus de motu (MSS Gal. 71, ff.
61-104, 133-134; Procissi p. 151; Opere, i. 251-312, 341-343).
5 On paper with watermark showing a swan on three semicircles (Briquet
no. 12550): Tractatus de motu (MSS Gal. 71, ff. 105-114; Procissi p. 151;
Opere, i, 312-326). This paper is whiter than that of the preceding and
succeeding folios. There are linking marks H on ff. 104V and 105r and 7 on
ff. 114V and 115r. Corrections and some repeated words throughout the
Tractatus de motu suggest that Galileo was making a fair copy on different
kinds of paper. In fact all the longer of these autograph writings show such
mistakes.
6 On paper with watermark showing a ladder in a shield; Dialogus de motu
(MSS Gal. 46, ff. 102-104: Procissi p. 123; Opere, i, 375-378, cf. 248);
Memoranda de motu (MSS Gal. 46, ff. 102, 104-110; Procissi p. 123:
Opere, i, 409-417); Italian-Latin vocabulary (MSS Gal. 46, f. 112; Procissi
p. 123; Opere i, 246), MSS Gal. 46, f. 113 continuing the vocabulary has a
watermark showing a star above the shield with the ladder (Briquet no.
5926), and this appears also on blank ff. 121-126.
Further References
A. Carugo, 'Les J6suites et la philosophie naturelle de Galilee: Benedictus Pererius et le De motu
gravium de Galilee' in Science: The renaissance of a history, ed. P. Redohdi (History and
Technology, iv; London, 1987) 321-33; J.M. Lattis, Ch. Clavius and the Sphere ofSacrobosco in
Further references to ch. 8.
For an up-to-date discussion of the dating of Galileo's writings see below ch. 10, with Appendix
(a).
Galileo Galilei, Dialogo (1632), Dialogo III: diagram of the Copernican system
with the Sun in the centre, surrounded by the orbits of Mercury, Venus, the
Earth with the Moon, Mars, Jupiter with its satellites, and Saturn.
10
The Jesuits and Galileo's Ideas of Science

and of Nature
with A. Carugo
1. Let us begin by saying first what is not the subject of this paper.
We will not discuss the personal relations between Galileo and the
Jesuits, because these have already been adequately discussed by the
Jesuit Fathers Adolf Miiller (1909) and Bellino Carrara (1914)'. Nor
are we concerned with any questions about the relation of the medieval
* This paper was presented in briefer form at the Novita Celesti e Crisi del Sapere:
Convegno Internationale di Studi Galileiani Pisa-Venezia-Padova-Firenze 19-26 marzo
1983. Since it is too long for the Atti of the Convegno, it is published instead here
in the Annali.
1
A. MULLER, Galileo Galilei und das Kopernikanische Weltsystem (Freiburg im
Breisgau, 1909); B. CARRARA, La S. Scrittura, i SS. Padri e Galilei sopra il moto delta
terra (Verona, 1914), I Gesuiti e Galileo (Verona, 1914).
166
philosophical tradition to sixteenth and seventeenth century natural

science.
Our subject is the relation of the ideas developed by Galileo of
science and of nature to the scholastic revival of Aristotelianism and
Thomism, promoted by the Council of Trent and articulated in the late
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries by the Jesuits. It is one of
the main subjects treated in our forthcoming book on Galileo's natural
philosophy2. The policy of this scholastic revival was to defend a rational philosophy of science and of nature,; and with this to establish the
possibility of rational knowledge for men both of God and of nature,
against what were perceived as two current threats from within the
Catholic world. One threat was seen to come from the conglomerate
of Neoplatonism, Hermeticism and magic launched especially into Italian philosophy mainly by Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and sustained more recently in different ways by Francesco Patrizi and Giordano Bruno. Their aim was to bring about a truly
Christian reform of education and religion through the knowledge and
cultivation of occult harmonies believed to exist between the creation
and the human soul. The whole of existence was a pattern of occult
powers, and through these man could know God3. The other threat
2
A. C. CROMBIE and A. CARUGO, Galileo's Natural Philosophy (forthcoming),
which contains full documentation and bibliography; see for various questions
discussed therein CROMBIE, "The primary properties and secondary qualities in Galileo
Galilei's natural philosophy", Saggi su Galileo Galilei (preprint, Firenze, 1969, wrongly
dated 1967), "Sources of Galileo's early natural philosophy" in Reason, Experiment and
Mysticism in the Scientific Revolution, ed. M. L. RIGHINI BONELLI and W. R. SHEA (New
York, 1975a), "Mathematics and Platonism in the sixteenth century Italian universities
and in Jesuit educational policy" in Prismata: Naturwissenschaftsgeschichtliche Studien:
Festschrift fur Willy Hartner, hrg. Y. MAEYAMA und W, G. SALTZER (Wiesbaden, 1977),
"Philosophical presuppositions and shifting interpretations of Galileo" in Theory Change,
Ancient Axiomatic*, and Galileo's Methodology: Proceedings of the 1978 Pisa Conference
on the History and Philosophy of .Science, ed. J. HINTIKKA,. D. GRUENDER and.E. AGAZZI,
I (Dordrecht etc., 1981), "Galileo in Renaissance Europe" in Firenze e la Toscana dei
Medici nell'Europa del Cinquecento, a cura di P. GALLUZZI (Firenze, 1983); and CARUGO,
"Giuseppe Moleto: mathematics and the Aristotelian theory of science at Padua in the
second half of the sixteenth century" in Aristotelismo Veneto e scienza moderna: Atti del
25 Anno Accademico del Centro per la storia della tradizione aristotelica nel Veneto, a
cura di L. OLIVIERI, I (Padova, 1983), with also his extensive notes in Galileo Galilei,
Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienze, a cura di A. CARUGO
e L. GEYMONAT (Torino, 1958). The present paper is based on our independent researches,
as will be specified in our book. Here we have brought together some of these researches
into a coherent argument. We have presented the dating of Galileo's writings as a series
of problems, and their problematic character is further emphasised by our not always
agreeing on all the possible solutions suggested.
3
Cf. BENEDICTUS PERERIUS, Adversus fallaces et superstitiosas artes, id est, de
magia, de observatione somniorum et de divinitione astrologica, libri tres (Ingolstadti,
1591); D. P. WALKER, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London,
1958), The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism (London, 1972); F. YATES,
The Jesuits and Galileo's Ideas of Science and Nature
167
was seen to come from the revival especially in France of Greek

scepticism promoted notably by Michel de Montaigne and Pierre Charron, which denied the possibility of any certain human knowledge,
scientific or theological or otherwise4. The question of Galileo's relation to this neoscholastic philosophical policy arose from our discovery
of the sources of Galileo's misnamed Juvenilia. We were concerned
first with the short closely reasoned essays in Galileo's own hand on
Aristotelian natural philosophy comprising two incomplete treatises,
each in two parts: the Tractatio prima de mundo with the Tractatio de
caelo concerned essentially with questions of cosmology and cosmography raised for Christian theology by Aristotle's De caelo; and the
fragmentary Tractatus de alteratione with the Tractatus de elementis
concerned with the theory of the elements and qualities put forward by
Aristotle in the Physics and De generatione et corruptione (both in the
Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Ms. Galileiano 46) 5 . At the
same time we were making a study of another autograph scholastic
treatise left unpublished by Galileo, the logical Disputationes de
praecognitionibus et de demonstrations to be discussed below, which
Antonio Favaro did not include among the Juvenilia. We showed that
the two autograph treatises on natural philosophy which he published as
Juvenilia were based on textbooks, sometimes copied word for word,
by three well-known Jesuit professors at the Collegio Romano. Since
in this joint paper we need sometimes to distinguish its two authors,
we do this henceforth simply if a little inelegantly by using the name of
the author concerned. Carugo then established during 1968-69, while
revising parts of the monograph on Galileo's natural philosophy for
which we were awarded the Galileo Prize in 1969, that the Tractates
Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London, 1964); CROMBIE (1975a) 165-6,
above n. 2, below nn. 4, 35, 76.
4
Cf. ANTONIUS POSSEVINUS, Bibliotheca selecta qua 'agitur de ratione studiorum,
XV: "De mathematics" (Romae, 1593); H. Bus SON, La pensee religieuse franqaise de
Charron a Pascal (Paris, 1933), Le rationalisme dans la litterature franqaise de la renaissance (1533-1601) (Paris, 1957); R. LENOBLE, Mersenne ou la naissance du mecanisme
(Paris, 1943); D. C. ALLEN, Doubts Boundless Sea: Skepticism and faith in the Renaissance (Baltimore, Md., 1964); R. H. POPKIN, "Scepticism, theology, and the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century" in Problems in the Philosophy of Science, ed I.
LAKATOS and A. MUSGRAVE (Amsterdam, 1968) 1-39, and The History of Scepticism from
Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif., 1979); C. B. SCHMITT, "The recovery and assimilation of ancient scepticism in the renaissance", Rivista critica di storia
della filosofia, XXVII (1972) 363-84; A. C. CROMBIE, "Marin Mersenne (1588-1648) and
the seventeenth century problem of scientific acceptability", Physis, XVII (1975b) 186-204;
and Clavius, Mazzoni etc. below nn. 29 sqq., 43-45, 76.
5
Cf. A. PROCISSI, La collezione Galileiana della Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di
Firenze, I (Roma, 1959); Le opere di Galileo Galilei, direttore A. FAVARO, 20 vol. (Firenze, 1890-1909), ristampa 1968: all references to Galileo's published writings are given
simply by volume and page in this edition.
168
de alteratione et de elementis and the Tractatio prima de mundo were

based on Benito Pereira's De communibus omnium rerum naturalium
principiis et afectionibus libri quindedm and Francisco de Toledo or
Toletus's commentaries on Aristotle's Physics and De generatione et
corruptione. Benito Pereira's book was published first with a different
title in 1562 and as De communibus... in 1576. Toletus's commentary
on the Physics was published first in 1581 and that on De generatione
et corruptione in 1579. Crombie discovered Christopher Clavius as a
third source in June 1971, showing that important parts of the Tractatio de caelo all came from his In Sphaeram loannis de Sacro Bosco
commentarius. His commentary on Sacrobosco's Sphaera was published
in 1581 in its second enlarged edition which includes the addition used
by Galileo. All three sources were republished in several later editions 6.
Crombie gave an authorized account of our discoveries, of their
relation to the work of other scholars, and of the bearing of our
studies on Galileo's attempt to construct a conception of scientific
inquiry and scientific knowledge, in 1974 in his paper "Sources of
Galileo's Early Natural Philosophy", published in 1975 7. Our identifications, to quote from that paper, have "solved the main problem of the
sources of Galileo's early writings in his own hand" (p. 160). More
than that, by showing that "Galileo's basic sources were three prominent contemporary Jesuits at the Collegio Romano" (p. 164), they
have provided an entirely new and unexpected perspective both on
Galileo's intellectual biography and on its context in the contemporary
European scene. We had not then solved the problem of the sources
of the unpublished logical Disputationes, essentially a commentary on
Aristotle's Posterior Analytics. Like the other two scholastic treatises
this is again incomplete and in two parts: De praecognitionibus and
Tractatio de demonstration 8. It contains a detailed analysis of such
topics as the model expounded by Aristotle and later commentators of
truly scientific demonstration as that which makes us know, the various
kinds of first principles and ways of knowing them, the different forms
of scientific demonstration in physics and mathematics, the arguments
for establishing the connection of cause with effect and the existence
of causes postulated, and related questions. Carugo solved the major
6
Cf. below nn. 7, 11.

See above n. 2; and for these Jesuits and their writings C. SOMMERVOGEL, Bibliotheque de la Compagnie de Jesus, I-IX (Bruxelles et Paris, 1890-1930), X-XI (Paris, 19091932), XII (Toulouse, 1930).
8
Section headings were published by FAVARO as "some scholastic exercises" in IX,
273, 279-82; cf. CROMBIE (1975a) above n. 2.
7
169
problem of its sources in April 1975, when he established similar

word-for-word direct copying by Galileo, in the first part of his treatise,
of Ludovico Carbone's Additamenta ad F. Toleti Commentaria una cum
Quaestionibus in Aristotelis Logicam, first published in 15979. A
complete list of textual correspondences will be presented in our book,
where we show how closely Galileo followed point by point some long
and complex arguments developed by Carbone. Most of the particular
questions discussed by Galileo in De praecognitionibus were not
commonly included in books on logic at that time. In discussing them
Carbone, and later the Jesuit Paolo Delia Valle (Latinized as Paulus
Vallius) in his Logica (Lugduni, 1622), were exceptional. In the
prefaces to both volumes of Delia Valle's book we read that he had
lectured on logic at the Collegio Romano in 1587-88. No such lectures
are extant. In the same prefaces he referred to publications on logic
identifiable as Carbone's, with the accusation that in them their author
had plagarized his lectures. He named the Additamenta in the second
of these prefaces, but there is no evident correspondence between Delia
Valle's much more diffuse text and that of Galileo. The following are
some examples of correspondences between Galileo and Carbone in
single passages:
Galileo, Disputationes de praecognitionibus et praecognitis in particulari
(Ms. Galileiano 27)
Ludovico Carbone, Additamenta ad

commentaria D. Francisci Toleti in logicam Aristotelis, (Venetiis, apud Georgium Angelerium, 1597) "Tractatio de
praecognitionibus et praecognitis"
scientias participates non solere praecognoscere talia principia, non quia illorum notitia non sit necessaria, sed
quia per se nota supponuntur ab illis;
adde accendetem ad scientias debere
esse ita dispositum ut, cognitis principiis per se notis, illis assentiatur (f. 4v).
particulares scientiae, non ideo non

cognoscunt ista principia, quod eorum
notitia non sit aliquo modo necessaria,
sed quia, cum sint per se nota, supponuntur tanquam vera. Quia is qui
docendus accedit ad aliquam scientiam,
debet esse dispositus ad assentiendum
primis principiis (f. 42va).
propria scientiae demonstrativae principia actual!ter sunt praecognoscenda.

Turn quia ita docet Aristoteles p. post
tex. 5, 16, 2 post, cap.6 ultimo, 6
eticorum cap.6 3, quibus locis docet
Aristoteles non posse cognosci conclusionem aliquam nisi praecognitis illius
principia propria demonstrationis praecognoscenda sunt actu... Probatur ex

Aristotele qui variis in locis (Lib. I.
poster, t.5 et 15. Li.2.ca.ult.li.6 eth. c.
3) hoc docet, dum ait, nihil posse
cognosci, nisi intelligantur propria principia eius quod cognoscitur. Secundo,
Carugo announced in April 1975 at a conference held at Santa Margherita that

he had made this discovery.
170
principiis. Turn quia ilia principia

sunt causa efficiens scientiae; ergo non
potest haberi cognitio scientiae actualis
nisi praehabeatur ipsorum principorum
(f. 5v).
horum principiorum notitia... est caussa

efficiens proxima conclusionis: ergo
non potest actu cognosci conclusio, nisi
eius principia actu cognoscantur (f.
42va).
Dignitates quae ingrediuntur demonstrationem aliquam imperfectam, qualis est ilia quae ducit ad impossibile,
actu praecognosci debent. Probatur
ex Aristotele tex. 16, Philopono in
tex. 2, Temistio passim cap.6 12. Secundo, eadem ratione qua superiori;
nam dignitates quae ingrediuntur aliquam demonstrationem sunt principia
tanquam propria illius (f. 5v).
si prima principia et dignitates actu

ingrediantur aliquam demonstrationem
saltern imperfectam, ut est ilia quae
ducit ad impossibile, praecognoscenda
sunt actu. Primum patet haec positio
ex doctrina Aristotelis, qui hoc aliquando docuit (I.Post. t.26): cui consentit
Philoponus (I.Post. t.2), Themistius
(cap. 11.12) et alii. Deinde confirmatur eadem ratione, qua probata fuit
prima conclusio. Caeterum quando
prima principia ingrediuntur demonstrationem, non habent propriam dignitatum rationem, sed potius quorundam
principiorum particularium et propriorum illius conclusionis (f. 43ra).
ilia principia actu sunt praecognoscenda,

a quibus intrinsece pendet conclusio;
sed a dignitatibus conclusio non pendet
intrinsece, cum illae neque actu neque
virtute ingrediantur demonstrationem;
ergo. Dices: si conclusio nullo modo
pendet ex his dignitatibus, quare habitualiter sunt praecognoscenda? Respondeo, primo, quia licet conclusio non
pendeat in esse ab illis, pendet tamen
in cognosci aliquo modo. Secundo, ut
possimus protervos convincere (f. 5v6r).
ilia (sell, principia) sunt cognoscenda

actu, ante demonstrationem, a quibus
conclusio proxime dependet; atqui ab
hoc principorum genere (sett, a dignitatibus) non dependet proxime cognitio conclusionis... dicta principia non
ingrediuntur actu demonstrationem,
cum non sint propria; neque virtu te,
cum res non pendeat intrinsece ab
illis... ergo non est necesse, ut actu
praecognoscantur. Sed dices, si ita
est, quare necessario praecognoscenda
sunt aliquo modo, ut est probatum?
(ie. dignitates seu prima principia ante
demonstrationem cognoscenda sunt
saltern habitu). Respondeo, quia licet
non sint caussae in essendo, sunt
tamen caussae in cognoscendo... Adde
etiam quod praecognoscenda sunt ad
convincendos protervos (f. 42vb-43ra).
principia prima et immediata nullo modo posse probari, quia alias non essent
prima, quia darentur priora illis per
quae probarentur. Dices: Quid dicendum quando principia prima sunt ignota
et non possunt ostendi a posteriori?
Respondeo: pertinere ad scientiam
subalternantem probare talia principia
prima principia... non possunt probari

a priori... quoniam si possent demonstrari a priori non essent prima, quia
haberent ilia priora ex quibus penderent... Quod si petas, quod si ilia
(soil, prima principia) ignota fuerint
et non possint probari a posteriori,
quaenam scientia ilia demonstrabit?
171
quoad propria, ad dialecticam quoad

probabilia, ad Metaphisicam quoad
communia (f. 6v).
Respondeo, probari debere a subalternante sive a superiore scientia: et a

Dialectica ex probabilibus, a Metaphysica vero ex communibus (f. 44ra).
authores in hac quaestione in duobus

convenire. Primo, in principle adquisitionis scientiae fuisse necessariam
actualem existentiam rei; cuius ratio,
est, quia, cum omnis nova cognitio
ortum habeat ex sensu, qui versatur
tantum circa existentiam, sequitur
etc. Secundo, in progressu scientiae
esse praecognoscendum de subiecto esse. Differre autem quid nomine huius
esse secundi intelligendum sit, de quo
loquitur Aristoteles (f. 7r).
Sunt autem duo in quibus omnes

conveniunt. Primum, in acquisitione
scientiae opus fuisse subiectum esse in
rerum natura, quia nostra scientia
habet ortum a sensu, qui solum versatur circa ea quae actu existunt. Secundum, in ipso etiam scientiae progressu
praecognoscendum esse... subiectum esse. Sed dubium est, quid nomine esse
intelligendum sit, et quid Aristoteles
intelligat cum ait etc. (f. 46rb).
Tria esse quae quaestionem hanc perdifficilem reddunt. Primo, an de subiecto semper praecognoscendum sit esse existentiae actuale, quia multa
sciuntur a nobis semper, quae tamen
non semper existunt. Secundo, quare
non sufficiat praecognoscere esse essentiae tantummodo de subiecto.
Tertio, quare in aliquibus demonstrationibus non sit necessarium praecognosere an sit subiecti (f. 7r).
Tria sunt quae hie difficultatem faciunt. Primum, an de subiecto semper

praecognoscendum sit esse existentiae..
cum videamus de multis esse scientiam
quae non semper existunt. Secundum,
cur de aliqua re non sufficiat tantum
praecognoscere esse essentiae. Tertium,
an aliqua possit esse demonstratio de
subiecto, cuius nullum esse praesupponatur (f. 46vb).
Scientiae abstrahunt ab existentia;

ergo non poterunt praecognoscere
existentiam suorum subiectorum. Respondeo, si spectemus rationem formalem scientiarum, illas quidem abstrahere ab existentia subiectorum: cum
enim considerent universalia, non possunt ilia ut existentia cognoscere; si
autem attendamus conditionem sine
qua non, nego illas abstrahere ab
existentia (f. 7v).
Omnes scientiae abstrahunt ad existentia; igitur non praecognoscunt illam de

suis subiectis. Respondeo, scientias
abstrahere ab esse existentiae, si
spectemus rationem formalem ipsarum; quia cum versentur circa universalia formaliter, non possunt considerare
subiectum ut formaliter existit; sed si
consideremus conditionem sine qua
non ipsius subiecti, nego abstrahere ab
existentia (f. 47vb-48ra).
Tria esse genera rerum, quae reperiuntur in scientiis.

Quaedam sunt
omnino notae, et haec non possunt
demonstrari; nam demonstratio ad
ignota tantum probanda exigitur; quae
enim per se notae sunt, non egent
probatione.
Quaedam sunt ignotae,
et haec, vel a priori vel a posteriori saltern probari possunt. Quaedam
sunt quae partim notae sunt, partim
ignotae, et haec, licet non possint
Tria sunt genera rerum quae in aliqua

scientia reperiuntur; aut enim sunt res
omnino notissimae, aut sunt omnino
ignotae, aut... partim notae et partim
ignotae. Si sint prioris generis nullo
modo probari queunt, quia demonstratio est instituta ad probandum ignota.
Si secundi, probari potest eas existere
vel a priori vel saltern a posteriori.
Si vero tertii, non possunt probari...
genere aliquo demonstrationis, sed
172
demonstrari aliquo genere demonstrationis, tamen vel inductione vel silogismo ipotetico ostendi possunt (f.
8v).
solum aliqua inductione vel syllogismo

hypothetico (f. 48rb).
Carbone was not a Jesuit, but he had been educated in Jesuit

colleges and had attended lectures at the Collegio Romano. The
discovery that Galileo's source was the Additamenta published first in
1597, and reprinted several times thereafter as an appendix to Toletus's
commentary, establishes 1597 as the earliest possible date for the
Disputationes, when Galileo was at Padua as a mature man of thirtythree. A copy of an unspecified edition of Toletus's commentary was
among the books owned by Galileo 10. Hence we are forced to make a
radical reexamination of Galileo's intellectual biography, which we had
not yet done when Crombie's article on "Sources..." was completed in
1974. This means that we must reexamine the traditional dating of
Galileo's main undated writings. The available evidence comes mostly
from such conceptual and material connections as can be found between
these and the writings that are dated n.
10
A copy of Toletus's commentary on Aristotle's logic was entered as "Logica del

Toleto. 4" in the "Inventario di tutti i libri trovati serrati in uno scaffale del salotto
terreno dell'abitazione della Sig.ra Sestilia Bocchineri Galilei il di 23 e 24 Genn. 1668
ab Inc." (Ms. Gal. 308, f. 168). Favaro, in his reconstruction of the list of books owned
by Galileo, specified for no apparent reason the edition Toleti Francisci Commentaria una
cum quaestionibus in universam Aristotelis logicam (Coloniae Agrippinae, 1596): see
A. FAVARO, ' La libreria di Galileo Galilei' in Miscellanea galileiana inedita (Venezia 1887),
entry no. 486, and Bullettino di bibliografia e di storia delle scienze naturali e fisiche,
XIX 11(1886), entry no. 78.
We announced our discoveries for the first time to anyone else in a letter written
by Crombie on 31 March 1972 to William Wallace in response to a letter of 16 July 1971
from him with information about his own work and a typed copy of his paper on
"Galileo and the Thomists". Crombie wrote:
"You may not know that in a volume entitled Galileo's Natural Philosophy,
written by myself with the collaboration of Adriano Carugo, we went into considerable
detail in the study of Galileo's so-called Juvenilia as well as of his Disputationes de
praecognitionibus et de demonstratione (Ms. Galileiano 27) into the sources he used.
We have a complete transcription of the text of the latter work of which we are publishing a substantial section with English translation in our book. In 1969 this book was
awarded the Galileo Prize [...] So far as the sources of the Juvenilia are concerned, we have
shown that three main sources, sometimes copied word for word, are Clavius's commentary
on Sacrobosco's Sphaera, Pereira's De communibus omnium rerum naturalium and Toletus's
commentaries on the Physics and on De generations et corruptione. Certainly there is no
evidence for, and there is negative evidence against, his using Bonamico. [...] We have
in fact gone into the question of dating of most of Galileo's early writings in some detail,
using watermarks as well as other evidence, and have proposed some revision of the
accepted dates. [...] Besides the Juvenilia etc. we have a lot of new material on Galileo's
Platonism and its background, cosmology of light, the sources of his distinction of
primary and secondary qualities, his father's and his own contributions to scientific
musical theory, and other matters."
173
We need then to establish some fixed points in Galileo's intellectual

biography, and first to relate this to his background. We know that
especially during the years 1585-1589 when he was living with his
father Vincenzo Galilei in Florence, between his two periods at Pisa,
Galileo developed a strong interest in mathematics and the mathematical sciences and arts. His association with the Accademia Fiorentina del Disegno was the beginning of a life-long fascination with the
techniques of perspective painting and sculpture12. His father's
Francesco Bonamico had of course been proposed as Galileo's source by Favaro
on the supposition that Galileo's essays were lecture notes taken as a student at
Pisa. Before we informed William Wallace of our discoveries which focussed attention
on the Collegio Romano, he had begun to look in the right direction. In his paper
"Galileo and the Thomists", published in St. Thomas Aquinas 1274-1974 Commemorative Studies (Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Toronto, 1974), he had noted some
resemblances between parts of the Juvenilia and commentaries by various scholastics
including Pereira and Toletus, but he failed to identify any specific sources. In his
concluding discussion of different hypotheses about the sources of the Juvenilia, he
wrote that "there is no evidence of direct copying from any of the Thomist authors mentioned in this study". He observed perspicaciously that if the source were a professor
at Pisa, he "would appear to be sympathetic to the writings of two members of the
newly-founded Society of Jesus, Pererius and Toletus" (p. 327). But he did not identify
these two Jesuits as Galileo's sources, and he did not mention Clavius at all. The purpose
of his letter enclosing his paper with these suggestive but "largely negative results" (p.
329) was in fact to ask for support for a proposal to the American National Science
Foundation for a study of the natural philosophy of the Juvenilia and their background
and the identification of their sources. Jesuit authors and the Collegio Romano were not
mentioned in the copy of this proposal which he later sent us (noted as received by
the National Science Foundation on 30 September 1971), which specified quite other
directions of search for Galileo's sources, directions suggested very naturally by his
own earlier work and the residue of accepted beliefs: cf. for the first part of his programme W. A. WALLACE, Galileo's Early Notebooks: The Physical Questions (Notre Dame,
Ind., 1977). After Crombie's letter of 31 March 1972 and after Wallace had visited
both him and Carugo later in that year, Crombie sent him at his request the relevant
typed sections of our book setting out our evidence. Carugo gave him also for his
private use a copy of his transcription of Galileo's logical Disputationes. In the following
year he announced, without consulting us, and gave in the public domain of the Annual
Conference of the American History of Science Society at San Francisco on 29 December 1973, a paper based on our discoveries and evidence with the title: "Christopher
Clavius: a source of Galileo's early notebooks" (History of Science Society, Newsletter,
II.3, 1973, p. 10). He agreed not to publish this; he proposed to send it with his report
to the National Science Foundation. He added to the published version of his "Galileo
and the Thomists" (1974) a misleading footnote about our discoveries, writing that our
"work confirms the thesis only tentatively advanced in this study, namely that the
Juvenilia were probably composed by Galileo himself, with little or no direct use of
primary sources but with a recognisable dependence on the writings of Pererius and
Toletus, and also with some borrowings from Christopher Clavius's commentary on
the Sphaera of Sacrobosco" (p. 330, n. 133). This is contradicted by the paper itself,
which contains no thesis about these Jesuits and no reference to Clavius. After promising to set the record straight at the earliest opportunity, he compounded the error yet
further in a footnote to another paper: "Galileo and reasoning ex supposition: the
methodology of the Two New Sciences", Boston Studies in the Pilosophy of Science,
XXXII (1976) 100-1, n. 3a. Here he stated he had requested funds from the National
174
unpublished manuscripts indicate that some of the acoustical experiments to be reported in the D iscorsi (1638) were carried out by
Vincenzo during those years. Thus Galileo would have been introduced
by his father through the art of music both to experimental science
and also perhaps to a conception of natural philosophy. Vincenzo
became strongly antipathetic to the more numerological and cosmic
aspects of Platonism, and he insisted that an explanation of musical
experience must reach beyond Pythagorean conceptions of musical
harmony and proportion and look with Aristotle for some process of
physical causation13. It is strictly relevant to Galileo's intellectual
biography that Italian mathematicians and mathematical scholars in the
Science Foundation in 1971 to enable him to check the texts of these three Jesuit
authors: their names do not appear in the copy of his proposal which he sent
to us. Following the lines of research then going on independently, no doubt someone
was bound to have identified these Jesuit sources, even in a sea of possibilities. William
Shea did independently discover Galileo's use of Clavius about two years after us, without knowing of our work. We trust that these precisions will finally, in this small affair,
set the record straight.
More recently, Wallace has tried to show that Galileo used different Jesuit sources
from those we have identified. He has made a study of manuscript reports or summaries
of lectures given at the Collegio Romano during the last decades of the sixteenth century: see his Prelude to Galileo: Essays on medieval and sixteenth-century sources of
Galileo's thought (Dordrecht etc., 1981). This has provided the useful and interesting
information that Jesuit treatment of natural philosophy, in lectures as in books, followed
a similar pattern with similar contents, and that books and manuscripts alike have a
general resemblance to each other and to Galileo's scholastic writings. This has enriched
our knowledge of sixteenth-century scholasticism, of Jesuit university teaching, and of
the European intellectual scene. But it proves nothing about Galileo's sources. There
are evidently no specific resemblances between Galileo's writings and any of these manuscripts, which cannot be found also, and more closely, in the printed books. This is
not surprising, since it seems unlikely that Galileo would have spent time chasing
up in obscure manuscripts what he had already found in well-known publications in
print. We do not propose to discuss this line of speculation, because for Galileo there
is nothing
specific to discuss.
12
Cf. VIVIANI in XIX, 599-605, 627-8, cf. 36, 636-7, 645, II, 607-8; L. OLSCHKI,
Geschichte der neusprachlichen wissenschaftlichen Literatur, I (Heidelberg, 1919), II
(Leipzig, 1922), III (Halle a.S., 1927); E. PANOFSKY, Galileo as a Critic of the Arts (The
Hague, 1954); A. C. CROMBIE, "Science and the arts in the Renaissance: the search for
certainty and truth, old and new", History of Science, XVIII (1980) 233-46, and (1981)
above13 n. 2.
Cf. GALILEO, Discorsi, ed. with notes by CARUGO (1958) 702-14, above n. 2; C. V.
PALISCA, "Scientific empiricism in musical thought" in Seventeenth Century Science and
the Arts, ed. H. H. RHYS (Princeton, 1961); A. C. CROMBIE, "Mathematics, music and
medical science", Actes du XIIe Congres International d'Histoire des Sciences Paris
1968 (Paris, 1971) 295-310, (1983) above n. 2, and the forthcoming Marin Mersenne: Science,
Music and Language; S. DRAKE, "Renaissance music and experimental science", Journal of the
History of Ideas, XXXI (1970) 483-500; D. P. WALKER, "Some aspects of the musical theory
of Vincenzo Galilei and Galileo Galilei", Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, C
(1973-74) 33-47, Studies in Musical Science in the Late Renaissance (London & Leiden, 1978).
The Jesuits and Galileo 3s Ideas of Science and Nature
175
sixteenth century were deeply rooted in Aristotelian science. Thus

Francesco Barozzi in his translation of Proclus's commentary on Euclid
tried to bring out its basic Aristotelian structure by marginal references
to the Posterior Analytics 14. Giuseppe Moleto opened his unpublished
discourse (in the Ambrosian Library in Milan) on the mathematical
sciences with an account of the Aristotelian idea of a demonstrative
sciences as presented in the Posterior Analytics15.
Writers on
mechanics from Alessandro Piccolomini to the Galileis's friend Guidobaldo del Monte all looked, with the Aristotelian Mechanica, for a
science of physical causation. The tradition of the rational arts in
perspective painting, music and mechanics shared then the Aristotelian
conception of a rational science of nature. We could say that Galileo
and others were later to use the decisiveness of the mathematical arts
in order to replace the Aristotelian causes by discovering the true
physical processes of nature 16.
Galileo's earliest dated, or easily datable, writings were mathematical, starting in 1587 or early 1588 with his theorems on centres
of gravity for which he used Archimedes 1?. Also in 1587 he visited
Clavius in Rome (X, 22-3). His mathematical treatises on fortification
and on the compass of proportion can be dated by the inclusion of
copies in the collection of manuscripts made by G. V. Pinelli, who
died in 1601. Also in this collection, now in the Ambrosian Library,
Carugo discovered a purely mathematical treatise on cosmography (an
extensive summary of the first book of Ptolemy's Almagest), different
from that published by Favaro which in one of its copies is dated
1606 18. These mathematical treatises copied for Pinelli were written at
Padua and must date therefore from the years 1592-1600. At Padua
Galileo had been drawn into the Pinelli circle which included Guidobaldo del Monte and several prominent Jesuits. One was the remarkable
Antonio Possevino, a friend of Clavius and author of the encyclopaedic
Bibliotheca selecta rationum studiorum (1593), for which Clavius contributed help on mathematics and its history 19. In writing to Guido14
Published at Padua, 1560: cf. A. CARUGO (1983) above n. 2; below n. 46.

To be analysed in our book by Carugo.
16
Cf. E. PANOFSKY, "Artist, scientist, genius: notes on the ' Renaissance Dammering'" in The Renaissance: Six Essays by W. K. FERGUSON et al. (New York, 1962);
CROMBIE (1975b), (1980), (1981), (1983) above nn. 2, 4, 12, "Historical commitments
of European science". Annali dett'Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze, VII
(1982) 29-51, and Styles of Scientific Thinking (London, 1994).
17
I, 179-208; cf. X, 22-36, GALILEO, Discorsi, ed. with notes by CARUGO (1958)
840-7, above n. 2.
18
II, 206-7; the Ambrosian Ms. is being edited by Carugo, and excerpts will be
published in our book.
19
Cf. G. Cozzi, "Galileo Galilei e la societa veneziana", Saggi su Galileo Galilei
15
176
baldo del Monte in 1602 with his first reference to the isochronism of
the pendulum and on the descent of bodies along the arcs and chords
of circles, he commented that "when we begin to have to do with
matter, because of its contingency the propositions considered in the
abstract by geometry begin to alter", so that they could not be regarded
as "certain science" such as was mathematics itself (X, 100). To Paolo
Sarpi he wrote in 1604 of his earliest (mistaken) law of free fall, that
since "I lacked a totally indubitable principle which could be taken as
an axiom in order to demonstrate the accidents I have observed, I have
been reduced to a very natural and evident proposition (ha molto del
naturale et deU'evidente}" (X, 115). From these distinctions much of
his future conception of science was to follow20.
In 1597 Galileo made his first dated references to Copernicus, in
his letters to Jacopo Mazzoni and to Kepler. The purpose of his letter
to the former was to refute with a mathematical demonstration (using
figures the same as in Clavius's Sphaera) an argument just published by
Mazzoni against Copernicus, whose Pythagorean opinion Galileo held to
be "much more probable" 21 than the opinion of Aristotle and Ptolemy.
To Kepler he wrote with congratulations on his Mysterium cosmographicum (1597), which he promised to read, rejoicing "to have
such a companion in the search for truth" when there were so few
"who do not follow a perverted method of philosophizing". He would
read the book the more willingly "because I came to the opinion of
Copernicus many years ago and the causes of many natural effects have
been found by me from such a supposition (post'tto) which are without
doubt inexplicable by the generally accepted hypothesis. I have written
down many reasons and refutations of counter arguments which
(1968), reprinted in his Paolo Sarpi tra Venezia e I'Europa (Torino, 1978); E. C.
PHILLIPS, "The correspondence of Father Christopher Clavius S. J. ...", Archivum
historicum Societatis lesu, VIII (1939) 193-222; Crombie (1977) above n. 2; below
nn. 28
sqq.
20
Cf. W. L. WISAN, "The new science of motion: a study of Galileo's De tnotu
locali", Archive for History of Exact Sciences, XIII (1974) 103-306, "Galileo's scientific
method: a reexamination" in New perspectives on Galileo, ed. R. E. BUTTS and J. C.
PITT (Dordrecht etc., 1978), "Galileo and the emergence of a scientific style" in
Theory
Change etc., ed. HINTIKKA, GRUENDER and AGAZZI (Dordrecht etc., 1981).
21
II, 198; referring to JACOBUS MAZONIUS, In universam Platonis et Aristotelis
philosophiam praeludia, sive De comparatione Platonis et Aristotelis (Venetiis, 1597):
Galileo's figures for the dimensions of the world in II, 201 are the same as those in
CHRISTOPHORUS CLAVIUS, In Sphaeram loannis de Sacrobosco commentarius (Romae,
1581) 209, 211; cf. W. HARTNER, "Galileo's contribution to astronomy" in Galileo: Man
of Science, ed. E. McMuLLiN (New York, 1967); W. R. SHEA, Galileo's Intellectual
Revolution (London, 1972); A. VAN HELDEN, "Galileo on the sizes and distances of the
planets", Annali dell'Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze, VII (1982) 70;
below n. 45.
177
however I have not dared until now to bring into the open, being
frightened by the fortunes of Copernicus himself, our master".
Copernicus had been derided by an infinity of "fools", hence he would
not himself "publish my thoughts" (X, 68). Kepler replied urging Galileo to have confidence and asking for further information (X, 70). He
guessed that Galileo had in mind proofs from the tides a, but Galileo
did not answer.
It seems clear that Galileo's serious commitment to Copernicus came with his telescopic discoveries of 1609-1610. He showed in his
remarkable response to the new star of 1604, with his strange Aristotelian explanation, almost an aversion to the new cosmology23.
Clavius had argued already in his Sphaera (1585 ed., pp. 191-5) in
agreement with Tycho Brahe that, since the new star of 1572 had no
observable parallax, it was to be considered a celestial body beyond the
Moon. He thought that the new stars and comets might be generated
in the celestial region. If this were true, it was up to the Aristotelians
to find arguments for Aristotle's opinion on the matter of the heavens.
He supposed that probably we should say that was not a fifth essence but
a mutable body, though less corruptible than sublunary bodies. Only
fragments remain of Galileo's autograph public lectures at Padua on the
new star of 1604. After stating some disagreements with Tycho Brahe
and Kepler, he gave his own explanation, resembling one given of comets
by Aristotle (Meteorologica 1.6, 343al-23, c.7, 344a5-37), that the new
star was not a star at all but an effect produced by the reflection of
sunlight from condensed vapours rising from the Earth to the celestial
sphere (II, 277-84, cf. 269-72). This was scarcely compatible with the
immense distance of the fixed stars cited in his refutation of Mazzoni's
argument against Copernicus. He cited observations he had made to
locate the phenomenon, on which Clavius wrote to him at the end of
the year (X, 121, cf. 117-9, 133, 136). He cited also a list of authors
who had written on new stars, including the Spanish scholastic philosopher Francisco Valles, or Vallesius, who had published a recent
commentary on the Meteorologica (1588) with another optical explanation. Another correspondent Leonardo Tedeschi sent him an account
of this and mentioned also Clavius and his opinions (X, 130-2, cf.
124-9, 137-41). Galileo wrote to a further correspondent in 1605
that the planned to publish his lectures, but not wanting to expose
"to the censure of the world what I think not only about the location of this light, but also about its substance and generation, and
22
KEPLER, Gesammelte Werke, hrg... W. VAN DYCK und M. CASPAR ... F. HAMMER,
XIII 23(1945) 192-3.
Cf. HARTNER (1967) above n. 21; below nn. 28-29.
178
believing that I have come upon an opinion that has no evident

contradictions and that on that account could be true, I must for my
own security go slowly" (X, 134). He wanted to make more observa
own security go slowly" (X, 134). He wanted to make more observa
that what he had already written applied likewise to the new star of
1604. Galileo published nothing, but we know that he was granted a
licence on 26 February 1607, repeated on 1 March 1610, to publish
a work entitled Astronomica denuntiatio ad astrologos24. Was this
his projected work on new stars and comets?
Again as late as 1606 in his Trattato delta sfera ovvero Cosmografia,
written for his students at Padua, despite a reference to "the greatest
philosophers and mathematicians who, considering the Earth to be a
star, have made it mobile" (II, 223), he offered a purely traditional
astronomy with the standard Aristotelian and Ptolemaic arguments
against such a proposition. The "subject of cosmography" he wrote
was the "description of the world" (mondo), but only that part of the
theory (la speculazione) dealing with the number and arrangement of its
regions and their shape, size and distance and motions found therein.
The consideration of their "substance and quality" was left to "natural
philosophy". As to "method, usually cosmography proceeds in its
theorizing with four". First there are "sensory observations (osservazioni sensate)" of the appearances of phenomena. Secondly there are
hypotheses (ipotesi), that is "suppositions (supposizioni) concerning the
celestial orbs such that they agree with the appearances", as that the
heavens were spherical and moved in circles with diverse motions, and
the Earth was at rest at the centre. Thirdly there were geometrical
demonstrations by which, from the properties of the circle and the
straight line, the particular properties (accidenti) following from the
hypotheses were demonstrated. Lastly there were arithmetical calculations which reduced the results to tables for practical convenience. We
could distinguish in the world as a whole two regions, and because
"it is true that our intellect is guided to knowledge of the substance
by means of the properties", we found between these two regions
notable differences. In one there were mutable elements always in a
process of generation and corruption and with a natural rectilinear
motion; the other, celestial region was immutable except for its eternal
circular motions (II, 211-2). Whether or not from motives of prudence, or from lack of interest, or because of specific teaching duties, he
seems to have paid little attention to Copernicus.
24
A. FAVARO, "Intorno alia licenza di stampa del ' Sidereus Nuncius' di Galileo
Galilei", Rivista delle biblioteche, n. 18-19 (1889) 98-103; cf. XIX, 227-8; below n. 37.
179
All this changed with the Sidereus nuncius (1610). Describing in

his dedication to the Grand Duke Cosimo II of Tuscany how Jupiter
with its satellites revolved "round the centre of the world, that is round
the Sun itself", he added: "But why do I use probable arguments,
when I can decide and demonstrate it with almost necessary reasoning?" (II, 56-7). So, as the Pythagoreans had held, was "the Moon
like another Earth" (65). All this he would treat more fully in his
book De systemate mundi where, against "those who exclude the Earth
from the dancing whirl of stars", he would "demonstrate the Earth to
be a wandering body", and "this we will confirm with an infinity of
physical reasons (naturalibus rationibus)" (75). Galileo's situation also
changed. In writing then with new celebrity on 7 May 1610 to
Belisario Vinta to apply for a return to Florence, he listed the works
which he proposed to complete there: "two books De sistemate seu
constitutione universi, an immense conception full of philosophy,
astronomy and geometry; three books De motu locali, an entirely new
science in which no one else, ancient or modern, has discovered any of
the most remarkable laws which I demonstrate to exist in both natural
and violent movement: hence I can reasonably call this a new science
and one discovered by me from first principles; three books on
mechanics, two relating to demonstrations of its principles and foundations and one concerning its problems". Besides these he had various
opuscoli on sound, vision, the tides, the continuum, animal motion and
other subjects. He concluded with his request concerning his "title and
function" in the service of the Grand Duke: that "in addition to the
title of mathematician, His Highness will add that of philosopher; for I
claim to have studied more years in philosophy than months in pure
mathematics" (X, 351-3). Later in a letter of 16 July 1611 asserting
that we knew that the Moon had mountains and valleys like the Earth
"no longer from imagination but from sensory experience and from
necessary demonstration (per sensata esperienza et per necessaria demonstrazione}", that is from the telescopic "observations from which I
deduce (deduco] my demonstrations" (XI, 142), he wrote that "as I
show elsewhere" Aristotle had not demonstrated that the heavens were
immutable and in substance "quite different from our inferior substances". The contrary was the sounder opinion (147). He referred
here again perhaps to De systemate mundi.
This list raises some problems. Should we suppose that he had
already begun the philosophical work on cosmology which became the
Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, Tolemaico e Copernicano (1632)? We know that during the years 1602-1609 he was
developing the theorems on the isochronism of the pendulum and on
falling bodies and related problems on which he was to found his new
180
kinematics and dynamics, and which were to be published in the

treatise "De motu locali" in the Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche,
intorno a due nuove scienze (1638) 25 . But what were these three
books on mechanics? As for his philosophical studies, we should not
take Galileo's claims about himself too literally, but we have an indication of his philosophical knowledge and commitments two years later
in the First Letter about Sunspots (1612) published in his Istoria e
dimostrazioni intorno die macchie solari e loro accidenti (1613). His
Jesuit opponent Christopher Scheiner concerning these phenomena, a
man he wrote "of free and unservile mind", was "beginning to be
moved by the force of so many novelties and to give ear and assent
to the true and good philosophy, especially in that part which concerns
the constitution of the universe". But he had not freed himself from
certain beliefs to which the intellect became "accustomed by long habit
to give assent", as where "he continues to keep as true and real" those
eccentrics, epicycles etc. "supposed by pure astronomers (posti da i puri
astronomi} to facilitate their calculations, but not to be maintained as
such by astronomers who are philosophers (astronomi filosofi). These,
in addition to the task of somehow saving the appearances, try to
investigate, as the greatest and most admirable problem there is, the
true constitution of the universe. For such a constitution exists, and
exists in only one, true, real way, that could not possibly be otherwise"
(V, 102) 26. In these words he stated with great force the goal of truly
scientific demonstration as presented by Aristotle in the Posterior
Analytics2?.
A decade later when in II Saggiatore (1623) Galileo was defending
himself against the accusation by another Jesuit opponent that he was
ignorant of logic, he displayed a considerable acquaintance with the
methods of another part of Aristotle's logic: the probable and persuasive, as distinct from demonstrative argument, and the analysis of
fallacies, presented in the Topics and the Sophistici Elenchi. He dated
this acquaintance from the time when he "was young and still under
a pedantic tutor" and used "to engage with pleasure" in logical
25
Cf. R. CAVERNI, Storia del metodo sperimentale in Italia, IV (1895) 267 sqq.;
GALILEO, Discorsi, ed. CARUGO (1958) 694 sqq., above n. 2; L. Sosio, "I ' Pensieri' di
Paolo26 Sarpi sul moto", Studi Veneziani, XIII (1971) 315-92; WISAN (1974) above n. 20.
Cf. SHEA (1972) above n. 21, CROMBIE (1975a) above n. 2.
27
Post. Anal, 1.2, 71b9-72a24, 6, 74b5-6, 10, 76a31-b31, see translation with notes
by J. BARNES (Oxford, 1975); also BARNES, "Aristotle's theory of demonstration", Phronesis, XIV (1969) 123-52; L. A. KOSMAN, "Understanding, explanation and insight in
the Posterior Analytics" in Exegesis and Argument, ed E. N. LEE et al. (Assen, 1973);
J. H. LESHER, "The meaning of NOUS in the Posterior Analytics", Pbronesis, XVIII
(1973) 44-68; and Articles on Aristotle, I: Science, ed. BARNES, M. SCHOFIELD, R. SORABJI
(London, 1975).
The Jesuits and Galileo }s Ideas of Science and Nature
181
"altercations" (VI, 245, question 12). He described one argument made

by his opponent as not even "a good topical argument for persuading
anyone" (VI, 257, q. 13). It was indeed "possible to reach true
conclusions through false arguments, paralogisms and fallacies" (VI,
273, q. 18, cf. 14, 15, 16, 17), but he wanted to do so through true
demonstrations. We may suppose that Galileo was given the normal
foundation in logic at Pisa, and that he was made as familiar as any
educated person with the standard types of Aristotelian argument (cf.
IV, 65, 659, VII, 59, XVIII, 234, 248). We are still left with the
problem of when he resumed his logical studies in order to write the
Disputationes. This treatise as we have said cannot be dated before
1597.
2. We may look briefly at the conception of true science expounded
by Clavius, who remained an evident influence upon Galileo to the
end of his life. Galileo in this Tractatio de caelo refuted Copernicus's
location of the Earth in an orbit round the Sun with the same
arguments in the same words as Clavius in his Sphaera (1581)28.
What he did not cite in organising the case against Copernicus was
Clavius's lucid exposition of criteria for deciding whether or not the
circles and their arrangement, postulated in astronomical theory to
account for the phenomena, had any real physical existence. Clavius
insisted firmly that "just as in natural philosophy we arrive at
knowledge of causes through their effects, so too in astronomy, which
has to do with heavenly bodies very far away from us, we must attain
to knowledge of them, how they are arranged and constituted, through
the study of their effects, that is, stellar movements perceived through
our senses". Hence it was "highly rational" that astronomers should
"search out" the circles and their arrangements that would carry the
planets round in their observed motions "on condition that causes can
be thereby suitably assigned to all the motions and appearances, and
that nothing absurd or inconsistent with natural philosophy can be
inferred therefrom". He set out then to rebut the sceptical argument
of "Averroes and his followers", who said that "they concede that all
the phenomena can be saved by postulating eccentric circles and
epicycles, but it does not follow from this that the said circles are found
in nature; on the contrary they are entirely fictitious; for perhaps all
28
Compare I, 38-41, 41-7, 47-54, 48-50, 50-4 respectively with CLAVIUS, Spbaera
(1581) 42-6, 55-7, 63-4, 134-43, 68-70; Clavius in the 1594 edition of his book referred
to "Nicolaus Copernicus Prutenus, nostro hoc seculo astronomiae restitutor egregius"
(pp. 67-8) while still opposing his views; cf. CROMBIE (1975a) above n. 2; above nn.
21, 23.
182
appearances can be saved in a more suitable way, though it is not yet

known to us". Thus "the appearances may be truly saved" by circles
that were "themselves entirely fictitious, and in no way the true cause
of those appearances, just as one may reach a true conclusion from a
false premise, as is evident from Aristotle's Dialectics". This refers
to the Priori Analytics (II, 1-4, 53b4-57bl7).
Clavius first strengthened the Averroist argument from Copernicus,
who "saves all the phenomena in another way" than Ptolemy, so that
"eccentrics and epicycles are not necessary for saving the phenomena".
Then he countered with a complex rebuttal beginning with a challenge
to his opponents, that "if they have a more suitable way of saving
the appearances, let them show it to us, and we shall be satisfied and
thank them heartily... But if they cannot show us a more suitable way,
then they should at least accept this one, deduced as it is from such a
variety of phenomena; unless they wish not only utterly to destroy
natural philosophy as it is expounded in the schools, but also to bar the
way to all the other arts which discover causes through the study of
effects. For whenever anyone infers some cause from its visible effects,
I will say just what my opponents do; namely that perhaps another
cause, at present unknown to us, can be furnished from those effects".
The dialectical argument that "a true conclusion can be drawn from
false premises" would ruin natural philosophy, but it was "irrelevant",
because it was only the syllogistic form that made this kind of inference
possible. It was something quite different from accounting mathematically for the phenomena by means of eccentrics and epicycles. Moreover "by the assumption of eccentrics and epicyclic circles not only are
all the appearances already known preserved, but also future phenomena
are predicted, the time of which is altogether unknown", such as the
occurrence of an eclipse. As for Copernicus, "he did not reject
eccentrics and epicycles as fictitious and contradictory to philosophy".
Indeed "if the supposition of Copernicus involved nothing false and
absurd it would certainly be doubtful which opinion, that of Ptolemy or
of Copernicus, should rather be adhered to (as regards saving the
phenomena of this kind)". But since Copernicus's supposition did
contain many absurdities and errors contrary to the established natural
philosophy, and also seemingly to the Holy Scriptures, that of Ptolemy
was to be preferred. God had perhaps handed over "the constitution
of the heavens and their motions" (pp. 434-7) for disputation with
always something left over, so that men would never cease to inquire
admiringly into his works 29.
29
Cf. P. DUHEM, "SOZEIN TA PHAINOMENA. Essai sur la notion de theorie

physique de Platon a Galilee", Annales de philosophic chretienne, VI (1908), reprinted
183
Clavius thus decided between rival hypotheses in astronomy by

means of two criteria: the variety of phenomena covered, and
agreement with accepted natural philosophy. The distinction indicated
between mathematical and physical astronomy had of course been made
in the well-known passage of Geminus quoted by Simplicius in his
commentary on Aristotle's Physics (11.2, comm. 12). The physicist
looked for causes inherent in the substance of bodies by which to
demonstrate effects, including the consideration of "its being better that
things should be as they are"; the mathematical astronomer investigated
external qualities and invented hypotheses using epicycles and eccentric
circles by which to save the phenomena. He must "go further and
examine in how many different ways it is possible for these phenomena
to be brought about, so that we may bring our theory concerning the
planets into agreement with that explanation of the causes which
follows an admissible method". Thus "a certain person" had even
postulated that the Earth moved round the Sun30. One notable feature
of Clavius's argument was his insistence that the form of reasoning in
mathematical science was quite different from the syllogism, so that
comparisons between them were irrelevant and misleading31. Another
was his failure to meet the central logical point made by Averroes.
Averroes wrote of the epicycles and eccentrics in his commentary on
Aristotle's De caelo (II.6, comm. 35) that astronomers "suppose the
existence of these circles as principles" and deduced from them consequences corresponding precisely to what was observed; but "they
demonstrate in no way that the suppositions which have served them
as principles are necessitated in return by these consequences". There
was then no reciprocal implication between the phenomena and such
principles, for phenomena could not uniquely determine their causes.
To assert that they did would be to commit the logical fallacy of
affirming the consequent. Averroes wanted to undermine the Ptolemaic
epicycles and eccentrics in order to establish the Aristotelian homocentric spheres as the true basis of an astronomy consistent with the true
physics. Without taking sides on this astronomical issue, Aquinas in
the Summa theologicae (I, question 32, art. 1) refined the logical point
by distinguishing the kind of "principle as in natural science where
Paris, 1982; A. M. BLAKE, C. J. DUCASSE and E. H. MADDEN, Theories of Scientific
Method: the Renaissance through the nineteenth century (Seattle, Wash., 1960); CROMBIE
(1977) above n. 2; N. JARDINE, "The forging of modern realism: Clavius and Kepler
against the sceptics", Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, X (1979) 141-73;
C. NAUX, "Le Pere Christophe Clavius, sa vie et son oeuvre", Revue des questions
scientifiques,
LIV (1983) 55-68, 181-94; above n. 28.
30
Cf.
T.
L. HEATH, Aristarchus of Samos (Oxford, 1913) 275-6.
31
Cf. below n. 43.
184 Science, Art and Nature in Medieval and Modern Thought
sufficient reason can be brought to show that the motions of the

heavens are always of uniform velocity" from the kind where the
reasons adduced "do not sufficiently prove the principle", as with the
astronomical system of eccentrics and epicycles. Here accounting for
the phenomena "is not sufficient proof, because possibly another
hypothesis might also be able to account for them". This argument
became a commonplace. It was repeated by the sixteenth-century
Italian Averroi'st Agostino Nifo in contrasting different kinds of
demonstration: "a good demonstration is one in which the cause is
convertible with the effect". But since the epicycles and eccentrics
were not reciprocally implicated by the appearances, they must be
regarded as "provisional, until another better cause is discovered, which
is convertible with them. Hence their proponents are mistaken,
because they argue from a proposition having several causes to the truth
of one of them; for these appearances can be saved both in this way and
in others not yet discovered" 32. Montaigne used the same argument
to illustrate how undecidable were such questions, so that it did not
matter whether one believed Ptolemy or Copernicus, and who knew but
that one day a third opinion might overthrow both33. Pereira used
it in De communibus..., where he also gave an account of demonstration
in mathematics and in the Posterior Analytics strongly contrasting with
that of Clavius 34. Cardinal Robert Bellarmine was to use it in advising
Paolo Antonio Foscarini and Galileo in 1615 to be prudent in their
advocacy of the Copernican system35. Clavius ignored the logical point,
and looked in the manner indicated by Geminus to natural philosophy
to decide between equally accurate mathematical hypotheses.
Galileo pursued essentially the same strategy, first to argue in the
Trattato delta sfera and Tractatio de caelo against the Earth's motion,
32
AUGUSTINUS NIPHUS, In Aristotelis libros De coelo et mundo commentaria (Venetiis, 1553) f. 90vb; cf. DUHEM (1908) above n. 29; P. MANSION, "Note sur le caractere
geometrique de 1'ancienne astronomic", Abhandlungen zur Geschichte der Mathematik, IX:
Festschrift... Moritz Cantor (1899) 275-92; G. E. L. OWEN, "TITHENAI TA PHAINOMENA" in Aristote et les problemes de methode, ed. S. MANSION (Louvain, 1961); J.
MITTELSTRASS, Die Rettung der Pbdnomene (Berlin, 1962); W. H. DONAHUE, "The
solid planetary spheres in post-Copernican natural philosophy" in The Copernican Achie
vement, ed. R. S. WESTMAN (Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1975); G. E. R. LLOYD, "Saving
the appearances",
Classical Quarterly, XXVIII (1978) 202-22.
33
MONTAIGNE, Essais, XII: "Apologie de Raimond Sebond", texte etabli par R.
BARRAL
avec P. MICHEL (Oeuvres completes, Paris, 1967) 237-8.
34
BENEDICTUS PERERIUS, De communibus omnium rerum naturalium principiis et
affectionibus
libri quindecim (Romae, 1576) 47-48; cf. CROMBIE (1977) above n. 2.
35
XII, 171-2, cf. V, 351, 357-61; X. M. LE BACHELET, "Bellarmin" in Dictionnaire
de theologie catholique, II (Paris, 1905) 560-99, "Bellarmin et Giordano Bruno", Gregorianum, IV (1923) 193-201; G. DE SANTILLANA, The Crime of Galileo (Chicago, 1955);
U. BALDINI, "L'astronomia del Cardinale Bellarmino" in the Atti of the Convegno (1983).
185
and then later to argue for its motion. He used Clavius's two criteria
in the anxious years 1615-1616 to argue for Copernicus from the new
evidence of his telescopic discoveries and from his new dynamics and
mechanics, with which he aimed to destroy Aristotelian physics and to
replace it with a true system. Hoping to persuade above all Bellarmine,
he set out these arguments in his letter of 23 March 1615 to Piero
Dini, his Considerazioni circa I'opinione Copernicana, his Lettera a
Madama Cristina di Lorena, and his Discorso del flusso e reflusso del
mare finished in January 1616. Astronomers, he wrote in the Considerazioni, "have made two sorts of suppositions: some are primary
and concerned with the absolute truth in nature; others are secondary,
and these have been imagined to provide the reasons for the appearances in the movements of the stars, and they show how these
appearances are in a certain way not concordant with the primary and
true suppositions". Thus Ptolemy supposed "not as pure astronomer
but as purest philosopher" that the celestial movements were all
circular and uniform, that the Earth was immobile at the centre of
the celestial sphere, and so on. Then he introduced his secondary
suppositions as epicycles and eccentrics to account for the phenomena,
but certainly not as fictions. Copernicus likewise put the mobility of
the Earth "among the primary and necessary positions in nature (posizioni prime e necessarie in naturaY'. Galileo then made the remarkable
assertion that, "if discursive reasoning is not enough to make us
understand the necessity of having to put the eccentrics and epicycles
really in nature, we must be persuaded of it by the senses themselves"
(V, 357-60), for in the Copernican system the orbits of Venus and
Mercury like those of Jupiter's four satellites were literally epicycles
and the orbits of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn literally eccentrics. Far
from these having been introduced as fictions, "they must be admitted
in our time with absolute necessity, since they are shown to us by the
senses themselves" (V, 298). This seems vindication of Qavius indeed.
Galileo's final argument from the tides in the Discorso was again
remarkable for its criteria of decision. He introduced with this a new
physical criterion for identifying, the true astronomical system, as that
which was uniquely possible within a single uniform system of terrestrial
and celestial dynamics. It was an ambitious attempt to extend the
Archimedean method, with its use of models, from terrestrial to celestial
phenomena. At the same time it was an attempt to give a truly
scientific demonstration in the Aristotelian sense, by means of an
hypothesis "that seemed reciprocally to harmonize the mobility of the
Earth with the tides, taking the former as the cause of the latter,
and the latter as an indication and argument for the former" (V, 393).
Then cause and effect would be convertible: this cause must necessarily
186
produce those effects, and those effects must necessarily entail this cause
and no other. The search for convertibility presupposed the framework
of the syllogistic modus ponendo ponens and modus tollendo fattens.
Here the aim of true demonstration was to discover definitions in which
cause and effect, or substance and properties, were convertible: the
substance was defined uniquely by those properties and those properties
were uniquely properties of that substance. Hence, beginning with
the observation of properties, it was necessary to know exhaustively
all the possible substances of which they could be properties. Then
if those were eliminated one after the other, what remained must be the
one true substance and definition concerned. Mersenne and Newton
were to object to this form of argument in science. Galileo's scientific
originality in the great cosmological debate lay in his use of range of
confirmation as the decisive test of a true theory. Thus he insisted
in his First Letter about the Sunspots (1612) that his discovery that
Venus had phases like the Moon "will leave no room for anyone to
doubt what the revolution of Venus is, but will decide with absolute
necessity, in conformity with the positions (posizioni] of the Pythagoreans and of Copernicus, that the rotation of Venus is round the Sun,
round which, as the centre of their revolutions, revolve all the other
planets" (V, 99). This was "indubitably demonstrated" by this "single
experience" (199). In this way he wrote later, his telescope had
provided through "sensory observations that can in no way be adapted
to the Ptolemaic system, but are very sound arguments for the
Copernican" (328), evidence not available to Copernicus himself (VII,
349-50, 363). The criterion of range of confirmation gave to the
experimental and mathematical sciences their open-ended character.
But Galileo never came to see clearly, at least in his Copernican
disputes, that their different logical form led to different logical
consequences from the Aristotelian truly scientific apodeictic demonstration. Nor did his opponents. Hence the cross-purposes so evident in
the later stages of these disputes. Bellarmine had demanded such a
demonstration of the Earth's motions. One of Galileo's most hostile
critics, the Aristotelian philosopher Antonio Rocco, a former student
at the Collegio Romano, dismissed his arguments in the Dialogo (1632)
from tides and telescope alike with the challenge: "But come on, if
there is a necessary truth and conclusion such that it is also evident
as you say, show the evidence, bring in the reasons and the causes,
leave persuasion to rhetoric, and no one will contradict you" (VII,
629). Since there were several ways of saving the appearances, Galileo
by "putting forward only one, fell into the error of the consequent".
Galileo noted in reply: "You are mistaken because you do not
understand what you are saying...: but the structure of the world is just
187
one, and it has never been otherwise: therefore someone looking for
something other than this one that exists is looking for something false
and impossible" (699-700).
We may introduce at this point a document found by Carugo in the
Pinelli collection in the Ambrosian Library which, if authentic, would
be profoundly puzzling for the history of Galileo's Copernicanism.
This is an unaddressed, unsigned and undated letter in handwriting
resembling Galileo's but not clearly identifiable. Since it is among the
Pinelli manuscripts it should date from before his death in 1601.
The author was writing to replace an earlier letter with "notes on
mechanics" which had gone astray. He continued: "Concerning my
treatise De motu celesti, I may say that it is in three books which make
twenty-one folios... The figures will be rather numerous, as in Sacrobosco's Sphaera ... In my doctrine I show not only the necessity of lines
and numbers, but also the necessity of physical (naturali] operations
The treatise is by way of introduction... In this way an easy route is
opened, not only into the apparent motions of the fixed stars and
planets, but also the calculations of the distances and motions of the
comet: a thing considered impossible by previous writers. Furthermore
by experience I can affirm this, that those who feel uneasy with the
usual theories of planets do not find any difficulty whatever in our
Pythagorean theory but on the contrary great satisfaction, so that it
seems to me that I would not have as many copies as could be sold.
The same hypotheses have been followed by Copernicus, a truly singular
man to whom I am much indebted. But he left there a gross scale
of useless revolutions and fictional motions alien to reason and to the
nature of things and to the necessity of appearances" 36. If this letter
was by Galileo, what was the treatise De motu celesti? Could it have
been a Copernican revision of a now unknown work to which Galileo
referred in De motu gravium as "our lost commentaries on the
Almagest of Ptolemy, which... will be published in a short time"
(I, 314)? Could it have been the projected Astronomica denuntiatio
ad astrologos? We know that Galileo once projected a work on
comets, which were in fact discussed at length by Clavius in his
Sphaera37. The unidentified letter shared Galileo's preference for
theoretical simplicity and belief in natural as well as mathematical
necessity, but unlike both Galileo and Clavius it seems to accuse
Copernicus of introducing fictions. Nothing has been established.
Necessity was a central theme alike of Galileo's logical Disputationes and of his scientific writings to the end of his life. An account
36
37
Biblioteca Ambrosiana Ms. I. 231 inf. (Codice Pinelliano), f. 187rv.

Cf. above nn. 23-24.
188
of his intellectual biography should include an examination of the

relation of this treatise, a series of questions on the Posterior Analytics,
to the development of the general conception of scientific knowledge
within which he always presented his solutions of particular problems.
We have done this in detail in our book on Galileo's natural philosophy,
in which we are publishing relevant sections of the Latin text with an
English translation. Here we can only indicate some relevant points.
Galileo started in De praecognitionibus from the fundamental Aristotelian doctrine that it was principles that gave us knowledge: "The
primary principles must be in some way presupposed as known, in
order that the conclusion itself may be perfectly known" (disputatio
II, quaestio 1, Ms. Galileiano 27, f. 4r; cf. II. 3, f. 5v). Principles
could be known in various ways: the most universal solely through
their terms, as that the whole is greater than its part; others solely
through the senses, as that fire is hot; others by induction, division and
hypothetical arguments; others by experience, as in medicine; others
solely by habit, as those of moral science which we cannot understand
unless we practice them. Primary and immediate principles were those
that could not be proved in any way. He insisted that principles in\ essendo, that is existing in the objects of knowledge (as distinct from in
cognoscendo, principles of knowledge) could be proved in the particular
sciences a posteriori from their effects, for otherwise "the question of
existence would be excluded from all sciences except metaphysics" (II,
4, f. 6r). "The principles in a demonstration a priori are known
beforehand, whereas in a demonstration a posteriori they are sought" (f.
6v). Accepting that "all new knowledge originates from the senses"
(III. 1, f. 6v) whose objects must exist, he distinguished scientiae
redes which began with actually existing objects from scientiae
rationales concerned only with objects of knowledge (f. 7rv). But he
insisted that while the sciences, because they considered universals,
abstracted formally from the existence of their objects, they must all in
the end be concerned with existence. They were concerned not with
the contingent existence of individuals, but with the existence of species
of things "which, the universe being supposed, is necessary at least
in its time". This was "the existence that follows universal nature,
not in the abstract but in something individual". For indeed "nature,
is more completely realized by species than by individuals" (f. 7v).
Mathematics likewise abstracted from existence, but it demonstrated
the properties of existing objects (f. 8r). Throughout he used the
Aristotelian analogy between the causation of knowledge in man and
of effects in nature: "for every natural cause sufficient to produce its
effect, provided that its requirements are given, operates by necessity;
but the intellect together with the knowledge of principles is a natural
189
and sufficient cause to produce scientific knowledge". Still, "why must

we necessarily assent to the conclusion once we know the premises?"
He replied with Saint Thomas, "because there are some things that
necessarily, follow from known principles; therefore, once these are
known, the conclusions, which are virtually contained in them and
are suited to be inferred, are necessarily known" (f. 12v). But there
was a difference for, "because man is free" (f. 13r), he might not
assent even when all the requirements were given.
The Tractatio de demonstratione was a critical analysis of the
account given by Aristotle and later Greek and medieval commentators
of scientific demonstration and its kinds according to the subject-matter.
The premises of truly demonstrated knowledge according to the
Posterior Analytics (I. 2) must be "true, primary, immediate, better
known than, prior to, and the causes of the conclusion" (Tr. de dem. I.
1, f. 13v). Immediate meant that the primary premises were not
themselves demonstrated, but were self-evident; and the cause must be
of that effect alone, which itself could not be otherwise. Galileo
argued, with Averroes and St. Thomas, that only true propositions
could be actually known. True conclusions could be inferred from
false premises only per accident, not per se, and to know something
required not only inference but demonstration from true premises.
Scientific demonstration gave knowledge of "a thing through the causes
by which it exists". The proper object of knowledge was ens reale,
something real, not just ens rationis, a thing of reason. Hence of the void
and infinite and suchlike "there can be no science, because they are
nothing" (II. 1, ff. 17v-18r). Demonstratio quia, ' demonstration that'
in the scholastic terminology used by Galileo, demonstrated the cause a
posteriori from its effect known through the senses, while demonstratio
propter quid, ' demonstration because ', gave us scientific knowledge
of the effect by demonstrating it a priori from its discovered cause.
Galileo argued that since "only those causes by which a thing exists
are true and proper causes in being (in essendo], therefore demonstration propter quid must proceed only through such causes". This kind
of demonstration "makes us know a thing without qualification (simpliciterY, but this was not so with "demonstration which proceeds from
virtual causes, for these are ex suppositione and therefore do not make
us know things without qualification" (II. 2, ff. 18v-19r). To know
was simply "to assent certainly and evidently to the conclusion", but
such assent required that the premises were not only true but immediate. This was not so when a science was subordinate to another,
as astronomy and music to mathematics. Hence "a subordinated
science, as imperfect, cannot have perfect demonstrations, since it
supposes its primary principles to be proved in a superior science, and
190
therefore it generates knowledge ex suppositione and only in a certain

respect (secundum quid)" (II. 4, f. 20v). Thus we could have
"scientific knowledge (scientia) of something in two ways, either simpliciter and absolutely, or secundum quid and within a determinate genus".
The former "required that a resolution should be made into all its
principles and causes, even the primary and most universal", and that
these should be known per se (II. 5, ff. 21v-22r). As for the
requirement that the premises should be better known than the
conclusion, whether better known to us or in nature, he agreed with
St. Thomas that for an absolute demonstration they must be better
known in nature. This was not contradicted by cases where we might
assume premises in order to prove something else; or where, as in
mathematical demonstrations, "the causes are better known than the
effects both to us and in nature, though such demonstrations are not
the most powerful (pottssimae)"; or where the conclusion could be
better known than the premises as "by the senses or by faith".
Sciences were the more perfect according to their object, as the divine
was more perfect than the perishable; to their independence, so that
subordinate sciences were imperfect; to their certainty; and to their
evidence. This could be either intuitive evidence through knowledge of
the terms alone, as of first principles; or discursive evidence through the
cause, as of demonstrative science. Evidence always carried certainty,
but we could assert with "certainty without evidence, as is clear in
subordinated sciences and even clearer in our faith" (II. 6, ff. 22rv).
In any case "we come to rest in knowledge of the conclusion, but
because of knowledge of the principles" (f. 23r, cf. 22v).
Galileo concluded his scholastic treatise with a discussion of the
main kinds of demonstration distinguished by Aristotle and the
commentators: ostensiva, ad impossibile, quia, propter quid, potissima
(III. 1-2, ff. 29r-30v; cf. I. 1, f. 13r). Ostensive demonstration was
that which proved from true principles that something was true (f. 13r).
As a form of inference "a demonstration that leads to an impossibility
(ad impossibile) is not a true and perfect demonstration, since it
proceeds from false propositions and, by raising questions, comes to
deny both premises" (III. 1, f. 29r; cf. 13r, 30r). Avicenna was
said to have held that there was only one kind of demonstration,
propter quid (f. 29r). Galileo agreed with St. Thomas and others
who had maintained that there were two, but only two kinds, quia
and propter quid: for "we know a thing either a posteriori or a priori:
we know it a posteriori by demonstration quia, a priori by demonstration propter quidn (f. 29v, cf. 30r). That demonstration quia was a
true kind of demonstration was proved "on the authority of all
commentators" as of Aristotle himself, for it "proceeds from necessary
191
propositions and infers something necessary (ex necessariis procedit et

insert aliquid necessarium), and does not generate opinion (opinio)\
therefore it generates scientific knowledge (scientiaY' By contrast
"induction is not a demonstration at all,... for it proceeds from particulars" and "by itself does not lead to any necessary conclusion". The
demonstration of the cause of some effect showed us by its very nature
at the same time the existence of the effect: thus "demonstration
propter quid, so far as it is in its power, makes us know the cause
and the existence of a thing" (f. 30r, cf. 29r). Hence it was useless
of Averroes to add a further kind of demonstration potissima of
existence as well as cause. But there were within demonstration
propter quid itself " something like two kinds of demonstration, the one
proceeding through extrinsic causes, the other showing through intrinsic
causes the attribute of its primary and adequate subject by means of
principles that are actually indemonstrable, and the latter can with
perfect right be called potissima". In a demonstration propter quid
"it must be known either in the premises or before them that the
cause has a necessary connection (necessaria connexio) with its effect,
whereby it will then be possible in the demonstration to give the reason
why this connection exists in the subject". By comparison demonstration quia might seem to be "a topical or probable syllogism", but in
itself it was a true demonstration which " infers from necessary premises
a necessary conclusion" (f. 30r). Continuing his analysis with an
example, man's ability to laugh, he wrote: "we know the connection of
the attribute with the subject by experience: for from the beginning of
the world up to now the ability to laugh has always been known to
be connected with man; secondly, by induction...; thirdly, by the light
of our intellect, which knows that this connection is necessary: for in
most cases those things that always happen are natural; hence, since
the ability to laugh always belongs to man, our intellect understands
that it is natural. This can be confirmed by the consideration that
otherwise nature would have badly provided man with universal
properties, since it would not have provided things with their necessary
conditions and properties. And... we do not know the cause of the
effect, but the connection of the cause with the effect" (f. 30v).
Demonstration propter quid and quia were then analogous, for both
"proceed from true and necessary propositions". One and the same
conclusion could be demonstrated by either, but not formally in the
same way. Hence demonstration quia was called by Aristotle
"demonstration of sign (demonstratio signi)n and "it proves the existence
of a thing"; by Averroes "demonstration of evidence (demonstratio
evidentiae), since it proceeds from things that are better known to us";
by Latin writers "demonstration from the effect, or a posteriori-, by the
192
Greeks conjectural (conjecturalis}". Within it various distinctions

could be made. For example when it "proceeds from an effect to its
cause" as "there is smoke, therefore there is fire", the demonstration
could proceed also "from one effect to another, or from a sign or
whatever accident is necessarily connected with its cause to the cause
itself". Another distinction came from considering the middle term
of the syllogism, where the demonstration might consist of "convertible
terms, such as: there is an eclipse, therefore there is an interposition
of the Earth", or not, "such as: it is hot, therefore there is fire".
Yet another distinction was between demonstrations of "simple being",
as by Aristotle of primary matter and the first mover, and demonstrations a posteriori of more complex propositions. These were especially
useful, "since the principles of a science are sometimes unknown and
cannot be proved except by demonstrations of this kind", and without
their help "we cannot know anything at all about abstract and divine
things" (III. 2, f. 30v). Finally Galileo came to the question (III.
3, f. 31rv):
Whether a demonstrative regress can occur. The first opinion was
that of those more ancient philosophers who are reported by Aristotle to
have claimed that in a demonstration a perfect circle is given, so that
it is possible to know perfectly both the conclusion by the premises and
the premises by the conclusion38.... Aristotle... denies that a perfect circle
can be permitted in a demonstration, yet he admits an imperfect circle.
We consider this opinion as most true. In order to understand it, we
should note, first: two things are required for a demonstration. First,
that what proves and what is proved should be connected with each
other, otherwise it would not be possible to infer one necessarily from
the other. Secondly, that which proves, as it is better known, should
come first in the demonstration. We should note, secondly: the cause
and the effect can be taken in three ways. In the first way, under
the formal relation of cause and effect; in the second way, in so far as
they are different things; in the third way, they can be considered in so
far as the cause is necessarily connected with the effect...
He argued that a demonstrative regress was not possible in the

first way because one relative thing is not better known than the other,
and would not be circular in the second way if the things were
necessarily connected: for "the demonstrative regress is the progress of
reasoning in a demonstration which goes from the effect to the cause
38
Cf. ARISTOTLE, Post. Anal. 1.3, translated with notes by J. BARNES (Oxford,
1975); DESCARTES, Discours de la methode, VI, texte et commentaire par E. Gilson
(Paris, 1947) 181-91, 470-4; N. JARDINE, "Galileo's road to truth and the demonstrative
regress", Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, VI (1976) 277-318; above
n. 27.
193
and vice versa". But a regress was possible in the second way only
"provided that it takes place in a different kind of cause, or in the same
kind but not in the same respect (ratio] and does not lead to the same
thing". For "it could happen that someone knows the effect but not
the cause", and then "from the existence of the effect he proves the
existence of the cause", but still "he does not know the reason why it
belongs to the effect... Now this can be proved through a demonstrative
regress, for it has a necessary connection such as that of the reason
for the effect with the cause, and one of the two can be assumed as
better known in order to prove the other". To an objection that, for
example, "vapour is the material cause of rain and rain is the material
cause of vapour" was circular, he replied that here the causes were
different, for we demonstrated rain by condensation and vapour by
rarefaction, so there was no circle. To the question whether the
progress from the cause to the reason for the effect showed the
existence of the effect, he replied with St. Thomas that here "indeed
existence cannot be proved by a perfect demonstration absolutely and
simpliciter, but it can be propter quid." Then:
You will ask secondly: in which sciences do we think that there is such
a circle. I reply: the demonstrative regress is useful to the completion
of all sciences, but it is most frequent in the physical sciences. The
explanation for this is that in most cases the physical causes are unknown
to us. In mathematics there is almost no use for such a demonstrative
regress, because in such disciplines the causes are better known both by
nature and to us. You will ask thirdly: what are the requirements of a
demonstrative regress. I reply, they are these...: that in it there should
be two progressions of demonstration, one from effect to cause, the other
from cause to effect. Second: that we should start from demonstration
quia... Third: that the effect should be better known to us... Fourth:
that once the first progress has been completed, we should not immediately start the second, but we should wait until the cause, which
we know materially, becomes known to us formally. This is the reason
why demonstration propter quid cannot take place unless we know
beforehand the cause formally. You will object: then it would follow
that the demonstration propter quid is useless, as it is made for the very
purpose of knowing the formal cause. I deny this consequence: for
although someone who knows the formal cause knows virtually the
reason why (propter quid] the attribute belongs to the subject, yet he
does not know it actually unless he makes a true demonstration. From
this it follows that a regress is not properly a circle, since it proceeds
from the effect to the material cause and from the cause known formally
to the reason for (propter quid] the effect. Fifth condition: that the
demonstrative regress should take place through convertible terms. For
if the effect had a wider extension than the cause, it would make
the first progress impossible. Therefore the following inference is not
valid: there is light, therefore there is the Sun. On the other hand,
if the cause has a wider extension than the effect, it would make the
194

second progress impossible. As is evident: for although the following
inference is valid: he breathes, therefore he has a soul; yet the reverse
is not valid, for breathing requires many organs, which the soul may
lack. Lastly it is required that it should have the form of the first figure
of the syllogism.
The Disputationes, with Galileo's other scholastic treatises, give

biographical substance to Ernst Cassirer's perception that Galileo shared
with his Aristotelian opponents a fundamental agreement on the object
of truly scientific knowledge, despite his rejection of their syllogistic
methods of trying to reach and form of expressing such knowledge39.
They establish the longevity and depth of his enduring commitment to
their common assumption that true natural philosophy must demonstrate the necessary connections underlying the regularities of phenomena
perceived by the senses. They establish the depth likewise of his
commitment to a philosophical strategy aimed at once to solve particular
problems and to lead to the apprehension of universal first principles.
This he continued to share with contemporary philosophers, even when
he came to differ from them sharply in his specification of effective
methods of scientific inquiry, and hence of exactly how particular
solutions must make it necessary to accept the principles from which he
tried to demonstrate that they followed. By this strategy he aimed
to establish a new identity at once for natural philosophy and for
nature.
All three of Galileo's scholastic treatises showed an explicit agreement on many questions with Thomist opinions, for example in the
Disputationes on there being only two kinds of demonstration, quia and
propter quid, and as in the Tractatio prima de mundo (I, 29-31) on the
perfection of the world and its realization rather through species than
individuals40. After Aristotle, he cited Averroes and Aquinas more
than any other authorities in the three treatises together, with the latter
equalled by Themistius and Philoponus in the Disputationes. All three
used syllogistic arguments without mathematics. He seems to be
siding, in the debate whether the most powerful demonstration was that
described in the Posterior Analytics or that provided by mathematics,
with Alessandro Piccolomini and Pereira against Francesco Barozzi and
Clavius when he wrote in the Disputationes that mathematical demonstrations "non sint potissimae" (f. 22r, cf. 31v)41. He followed in
39
E. CASSIRER, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophic und Wissenschaft der
neueren
Zeit (Berlin, 1906) 134-41.
40
Ms. Galileiano 27, ff. 7v, 29r, 30r; cf. I, 29-31 where the argument corresponds
almost word for word to AQUINAS, Summa theologica, I, q, 25, art. 6, Summa contra
gentiles,
1.75, 81, 11.45, 111.71.
41
P. GALLUZZI, "II ' Platonismo' del tardo Cinquecento e la filosofia di Galileo",
195
this treatise the Aristotelian tradition that made demonstration quia

and propter quid the central method of natural philosophy, and he
kept to that terminology with only a passing reference to "resolutio et
compositio" (f. 14r) as belonging to demonstration. At the same time
he showed a strong independence. With Aristotle he denied tha
argument in a circle could be permitted in a demonstration, and gave an
example to show that in a proper demonstrative regress this was not so.
But with Aristotle he admitted as "most true" an imperfect circle,
of which he made an analysis. For the progression of a demonstrative
argument went in two directions: starting from an effect better known
that its cause, we searched for its cause so that we could demonstrate
that effect from this. A significant condition was that the cause and
effect had to be convertible, that is coextensive (f. 31rv). This according to the accepted interpretation of Aristotle was the condition for
a perfect scientific demonstration, in which the complete cause and the
effect entailed each other reciprocally and uniquely. All three scholastic
treatises have the same decisive manner. It seems reasonable to suppose from their resemblance in style and interests that they were written at nearly the same time. If so, Galileo might have followed the
traditional order of topics in which commentators began with logic and
went on to cosmology and then to physics. This would date them all
after 1597. Descartes similarly was to follow in Les meteores (1637)
the order of topics discussed in Aristotle's Meteorologica and followed
by commentators.
There are many resemblances likewise both in terminology and in
conception of science between the Disputationes and Galileo's other
writings on natural philosophy, but in these another model also makes
its appearance: that of mathematics. The sixteenth-century debate on
mathematics had centred on the opposing conceptions of its relation to
natural philosophy attributed to Plato and to Aristotle. Both sides
claimed support from Proclus's commentary on the first book' of
Euclid's geometry. Barozzi, in putting the Platonic view against the
Aristotelian Piccolomini, argued that mathematics provided in itself the
most powerful demonstrations, even if in subordinate sciences like
astronomy and music they were not the most certain. Mathematics
was necessary to natural philosophy because it was concerned with " mid
dle essence" lying between the "sensible essence" of things and the
purely "intelligible essence" of the divine. Hence both "in the order
with respect to nature" and "in the order of learning and in terms
in Ricerche sulla cultura dell'Italia moderna, a cura di P. ZAMBELLI (Bari, 1973); L.
OLIVIERI (a cura di), Aristotelismo veneto e scienza moderna (Padova, 1983); CROMBIE
(1977) and CARUGO (1983) above n. 2; also n. 34.
196
of utility Plato placed the mathematical not only prior to the natural but
prior to all sciences " and to all arts 42. Clavius made the same point, again
strongly influenced by Proclus, in his own influential commentary on
Euclid. For "the mathematical disciplines deal with things without any
sensible matter, but really they are immersed in matter". From their intermediate position " they demonstrate everything they undertake to dispute
by the firmest reasons and confirm them so that they truly produce
scientia in the mind of the hearer, and they utterly remove all doubt;
something which we can scarcely ascribe to other sciences". Mathematics were thus an antidote to the Pyrrhonists, "philosophers who
decided nothing but doubted about everything". He insisted that the
"linear demonstrations" of geometry were not syllogisms, and that
dialectical arguments (as in the Topics] were very different from
mathematics: "For in a dialectical problem either one or the other
part of a contradiction being undertaken is only probably confirmed,
so that each man's intellect is in doubt which part of it is true; but in
mathematics, whichever part a man chooses he will prove with firm
demonstration, so that there is no doubt left at all" 43. Hence his
argument that mathematics should be made an essential subject of study
at the Collegio Romano, for "natural philosophy without the mathematical disciplines is lame and incomplete" 44. This was matched by the
note written by Galileo in 1612 during his hydrostatical controversies
that he "being used to study in the book of nature, where things are
written in only one way, would not be able to dispute any problem
ad utranque par tern or to maintain any conclusion not first believed or
known to be true" (IV, 248).
Likewise Mazzoni in his In universam Platonis et Aristotelis
philosophiam praeludia (1597), the work about which Galileo had
written to him in that year, maintained that mathematics was essential
to all physical demonstrations. Once more he acknowledged Proclus.
Mathematics was not concerned with the final cause, but demonstrated
through the formal cause and in "mixed mathematics" which "include
matter and motion" also through other appropriate causes: "something
42
FRANCISCUS BAROCIUS, Opusculum, "Questio de medietate mathematicarum" (Patavii,431560) ff. 38r-39v.

CHRISTOPHORUS CLAVIUS, Eudidis Elementorum libri XV, Prolegomena (Romae,
1574) and I.I, f. 22; cf. N. W. GILBERT, Renaissance Concepts of Method (New York,
1960) 44 16, 90; above n. 4.
CROMBIE (1977) 65, above n. 2; cf. A. P. FARRELL, The Jesuit Code of Liberal
Education (Milwaukee, Wise., 1938); G. COSENTINO, "Le matematiche nella ' Ratio
Studiorum' della Compagnia di Gesu", Miscellania storica Ligure, II (1970) 171-213,
"L'insegnamento delle matematiche nei collegi Gesuiti nelTItalia settentrionale", Physis,
XIII (1971) 205-17.
19 7
shown clearly in Archimedes's little book De insidentibus, in which that

most acute man very often completes his demonstrations by means of
an active cause such as through the impulsive power which is in a liquid
or in some other heavy body" (lib. XV, pp. 159-60)45. Then: "The
question is whether the use of mathematics in physical science, as an
instrument of proof (ratio probandi) and a middle term of demonstration, is opportune or not". He replied that "Plato believed mathematics to be especially fitted for physical investigations" and he proposed
to defend Plato, and to show that "Aristotle has run on to the rocks",
because just "where good sense showed that mathematical demonstrations should be used... he wrongly rejected mathematics". By postulating geometrical bodies prior to the four elements, and therewith accounting both for physical change and for the production in us of the
different sensible qualities, Plato had made "not an error into which
his love of mathematics drove him" but "a stroke of the greatest
genius". But "Aristotle, from failure to apply mathematical demonstrations in the proper places, has widely departed from the true method
of philosophizing (vera philosophandi ratio)" (XVIII, 188-90). Both
were mistaken in separating theory from practice, for "theoria and
praxis do not divide philosophy into two generically different parts,
but everything theoretical also has either as a side-effect or as its fruit
something practical" (XXIII, 231). Thus in natural philosophy and
mathematics "all theories have their praxis, and conversely praxis their
theories" (p. 233 bis). But there was a difference of purpose between
theoretical reasoning "for the sake of truth" that aimed to show the
"essence" of particular existing things, and reasoning that aimed to
"make truth a means" to some practical end, as "when a mathematician
is concerned with mechanics". A good example to show that in both
cases "experience not only precedes the grasp of universals, but also
follows it" was astronomy (XXIV, 245-6). He took up the Copernican
debate here in the context of a rejection of Pyrrhonic and other
sceptical "doubts against the investigation of truth" (VII, 72), concluding with the argument against the Pythagorean opinion of Copernicus
(X, 129-34) about which Galileo was to write. Each in his own way,
Mazzoni as Galileo later, was trying to establish criteria for science that
would embrace alike the particular sciences of the diverse phenomena
perceived by the senses and the "perfect science in an absolute sense,
which understands by eternal reasons". For the former kind of science
45
Cf. A. KOYRE, "Galileo and Plato", Journal of the History of Ideas, IV (1943)
420-1; CROMBIE (1969) above n. 2; F. PURNELL JR., "Jacopo Mazzoni and Galileo",
Physis, XIV (1972) 273-94; GALLUZZI (1973) above n. 41; JARDINE (1976) above n.
38; also nn. 4, 21.
198
Aristotle provided for Mazzoni the best criteria, for the latter Plato,
who showed how reason could ascend "to the principles and causes
of things" (XVI, 175-6).
This was a suitable distribution of favours by the incumbent of the
chair at Pisa in both Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy which Mazzoni held from 1588 to 1597. Galileo met him, a friend both of Vincenzo Galilei and of Guidobaldo del Monte, on his return to Pisa as
mathematical lecturer in 1589. In writing to his father in 1590 about
some volumes of Galen and "la Sfera" which he was expecting, he
added that he was "studying and having lessons with Signer Mazzoni",
an association evidently pleasing also to Guidobaldo del Monte and to
Mazzoni himself (X, 44-7, 55, XIX, 34-41, 627). In his letter to Mazzoni of 1597 Galileo wrote from Padua with warm appreciation of the
many kindnesses he had received at Pisa from his old mentor, colleague
and friend and of the "universal learning" shown by his book. He
continued that he was greatly satisfied and consoled to see Mazzoni, "in
some of the questions which in the first years of our friendship we used
to dispute together with such delight, incline to the side that had
seemed true to me and the opposite to you". Perhaps this had been
"to give scope to the arguments", or to save "intact in every detail,
the genuineness of the learning of so great a Master, under whose
discipline it seems that all who dedicate themselves to search for the
truth do and must gather together" (II, 197-8). The Master must have
been either Aristotle or Plato, but for Mazzoni surely Plato.
The model used in their different ways by Clavius and Mazzoni, and
perhaps following these two preceptors also by Galileo, was the
account given by Proclus of the relation of mathematics at once to
existence and to human understanding and practice, in his In primum
Euclidis Elementorum librum Commentariorum ad universam mathematicam disciplinam principium eruditionis tradentium libri IV (1560)46.
Proclus gave to the Platonic scheme of existence set out in the Republic
the Aristotelian logical structure of the Posterior Analytics. Mathematical existence, in its intermediate position between the highest simple
realities grasped only by intellectual intuition and the complex extended
objects of the senses, was explored by discursive reasoning. Mathematical knowledge then could lead both upwards to the apprehension of
the absolutely intelligible principles of all existence, and downwards
into the investigation of the detailed construction of the material
46
Latin translation by Barozzi (Padua, 1560); quotations below are with slight
modifications from the English translation by G. R. MORROW (Princeton, 1970): the
suggestion that Galileo used Proclus was made by JARDINE (1976) 317, above n. 38;
cf. also n. 14, and CROMBIE, Stvles... above n. 16.
199
universe and the operations of the practical arts. Going upwards it

discovered its own primary principles, and its common axioms as that
of equality and common methods as "the method of proceeding from
things better known to things we seek to know and the reverse path
from the latter to the former, the methods called analysis and synthesis"
(Prologue, I. 3). Always "it is the higher sciences that provide the first
hypotheses for the demonstrations of the sciences below them" (I. 4).
Mathematics "takes its principles from the highest science and, holding
them without demonstration, demonstrates their consequences" (I. 10).
Mathematical knowledge was generated in its intermediary position
by the internal activity of the understanding, but it was at the same
time stimulated by and projected downwards upon the objects of the
senses. Reaching by its dialectical power both upwards and downwards, the understanding thus replicated with a cosmos of ideas the
complex cosmos of existence: "All mathematical are thus present in the
soul from the first... This then is a second world-order which produces
itself and is produced from its native principles...; and when it projects
its ideas, it reveals all the sciences and the virtues" (I. 6). The function
of mathematics was "discursive thinking", and in this differed both
from pure intellectual intuition and from "opinion and perception, for
these forms of knowing fix their attention on external things and
concern themselves with objects whose causes they do not possess. By
contrast mathematics, though beginning with reminders from the
outside world, ends with the ideas that it has within; it is awakened to
activity by lower realities, but its destination is the higher being of
forms". Thus "it unfolds and traverses the immaterial cosmos of
ideas, now moving from principles to conclusions, now proceeding in
the opposite direction, now advancing from what it already knows to
what it seeks to know, and again referring its results back to the
principles that are prior in knowledge". Hence "it advances through
inquiry to discovery", working in two ways, sometimes exploring into
diverse particulars and speculations, at others assembling these diverse
results for reference "back to their native hypotheses... The range of
this thinking extends from on high all the way down to conclusions in
the sensible world, where it touches on nature and cooperates with
natural science, in establishing many of its propositions, just as it rises
up from below and nearly joins the intuitive intellect in apprehending
primary principles. In its lowest applications therefore it projects all of
mechanics as well as optics and catoptrics and many other sciences bound
up with sensible things and operative in them. While as it moves
upwards it attains unitary and immaterial insights that enable it to
perfect its partial judgements" (I. 7).
Mathematics then "makes contributions of the very greatest value to
200
natural sciences. It reveals the orderliness of the ratios according to

which the universe is constructed and the proportion that binds things
together in the cosmos... All these I believe the Timaeus sets forth,
using mathematical language throughout in expounding its theory of the
nature of the universe. It regulates by numbers and figures the
generation of the elements, showing how their powers, characteristics
and activities are derived therefrom and tracing the causes of all change
back to the acuteness or obtuseness of their angles, the uniformity or
diversity of their sides, and the number or fewness of the elements
involved". Likewise "as Socrates says in the Philebus, all the arts
require the aid of counting, measuring and weighing, of one or all
of them; and these arts are all included in mathematical reasonings and
are made definite by them" (I. 8).
Mathematics thus projected upon sensible and imaginable things "its
demonstrations about them existing previously in the understanding"
(II. 1). Geometry "makes use of synthesis and analysis, always starting
from hypotheses and principles that it obtains from the science above
it". Then it uses "demonstrations and analysis in dealing with the
consequences that follow from the principles, in order to show the more
complex matters both as proceeding from the simpler and also conversely
as leading back to them" (II. 2). At a certain "level of mental
exploration it examines nature, that is, the species of elementary
perceptible bodies and the powers associated with them, and explains
how their causes are contained in advance in its own ideas". Then
"when it touches on the material world it delivers out of itself a variety
of sciences, such as geodesy, mechanics and optics, by which it benefits
the life of mortals" (II. 3). Geometry like all mathematics in its
intermediate position was based on hypothesis: "For no science
demonstrates its own principles or presents a reason for them; rather
each holds them as self-evident, that is, as more evident than their
consequences... This is the way the natural scientist proceeds, positing
the existence of motion and producing his ideas from a definite principle.
The same is true of the physician and of the expert in any other science
or art" (II. 8). Principles had to be clearly distinguished from their
consequences.
He went on to describe methods discussed by Plato, Aristotle and
Euclid common in logical form to both mathematics and natural science.
The "best is the method of analysis, which traces the desired result
back to an acknowledged principle... A second is the method of
division, which divides into its natural parts the genus proposed for
examination and which affords a starting-point for demonstration by
eliminating the parts irrelevant for the establishment of what is
proposed". These were both used by Plato. "A third is the reduction
201
to impossibility, which does not directly show the thing itself that is
wanted but, by refuting its contradictory, indirectly establishes its
truth... Reduction is a transition from a problem or a theorem to
another which, if known or constructed, will make the original proposition evident" (Propositions, I. 1). His example was the reduction of
the problem of doubling the cube to that of finding two mean proportionals. In the third method he explained: "Every reduction to impossibility takes the contradictory of what it intends to prove and from
this as a hypothesis proceeds until it encounters something admitted to be
absurd and, by thus destroying its hypothesis, confirms the proposition
it set out to establish" (I. 5). This corresponds logically in natural
science to a form of experimental falsification within a defined number
of possible hypotheses.
Galileo combined in De motu gravium mathematical with syllogistic
arguments in his analytical search for true relations of cause and effect.
The writings, for which following E. Alberi we use this title, are
collected in Ms. Galileiano 71. They were first published in part by
Alberi in 1854 in his edition of Galileo's Opere, and later in full
with the title De motu by Favaro in the first volume of the Edizione
Nazionale (1890). Galileo appears in De motu gravium deeply preoccupied with the issues that dominated his scientific life: the proper
methods of inquiry and demonstration in natural philosophy, and the
discovery with them of the true constitution of the universe. His style
of argument came from the twin models of the postulational method of
Archimedes and the Aristotelian syllogistic structure leading to either
the confirmation or the falsification of the premises by confronting their
conclusions with experientia or ratio. This term meant both, reasoning
and accepted theory. Terminology in this mixture got some changed
applications. Thus he wrote: The method (methodus) that we shall
observe in this treatise will be such that what ought to be said always
follows from what has been said; nor shall I ever (if I may) assume
as true what ought to be demonstrated. This is the method which my
mathematicians have taught me: but it is not adequately observed by
certain philosophers..." (I, 285). Notable among these was Aristotle
in his physics, "because he assumed as known axioms what are not
only not clear to sense, but neither ever demonstrated nor even
demonstrable, since they are absolutely false" (I, 277-8). But Galileo
habitually put his argument in the form of a hypothetical syllogism,
usually to refute some opposing opinion by leading it to a reductio ad
contradictionem, ad impossibile, or ad absurdum47. His own characte47
Cf. A. C. CROMBIE, Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science

(Oxford, 1953, 1971), and (1975a) above n. 2; LESHER (1973) above n. 27; quotations
202
ristic style appears in the use and content of ratio and its relation to
experentia. Aristotle, he wrote, had kept too close to superficial
experience, but he himself would "always use reasons more than
examples (for we search for the causes of the effects, which are not
given in experience)" (I, 263). Essential to the ratio of physics was
mathematics, and he repeated the criticism that "Aristotle was not very
well versed in geometry" (I, 302). An illustration was the demonstration of the falsity of one of his relevant conclusions by "the divine
Archimedes" (I, 303). At the same time true ratio must be based on
true experientia, but the relation between them was subtle. Sometimes
plausible but false opinions gained currency because no one bothered to
scrutinize them, as the "common opinion" that things appeared larger
under water. When he "could not discover a cause for such an effect,
at length turning to experience" he found that there was no such effect,
at all with things seen simply under water, but only with things seen
through the curved sides of a glass vessel containing water (I, 314).
Sometimes our situation was the converse, as he wrote later of odours
given off by fruit and flowers. For "we never can observe those
odoriferous atoms", whether evaporating or condensing, but "when
sensible observation is wanting, argument (discorso) must take its place,
by whose help we shall be sufficiently able to apprehend the motion to
the rarefaction and resolution of solids, as well as that to the condensation of the finest and most rare substances" (VIII, 105). But it was
not always easy to discover the nature of things. So he concluded
of the continuing motion of projectiles that such "a movable body
moving with other than natural motion is moved by a power impressed
(virtus impressa) on it by a mover. But what that power is, is hidden
from our knowledge". A deleted addition continued: "And in the
same way what power it is that makes strings resound is also hidden
from our knowledge" (I, 374).
De motu gravium was an essay in physical cosmology. Archimedes
supplied Galileo with a new model not only for scientific method, but
also for the primary physical problem with which he was concerned, the
disposition and motions of the four elements in relation to the central
Earth. From this model much else for physics followed. Galileo
agreed with Plato in the Timaeus that the disposition and motions of
the elements were the result of their relative gravities. He then
introduced Archimedes in order to reduce the cosmological order of the
elements to a problem of hydrostatics on the model of bodies floating
here are with slight modifications from the English translation by I. E. DRABKIN in
GALILEO GALILEI, On Motion and On Mechanics, by DRABKIN and S. DRAKE (Madison,
Wise., 1960).
203
or sinking in water. Thus he transformed Aristotle's teleological

arrangement of the universe into the resultant of mechanical forces.
He dismissed lightness as a separate property contrary to heaviness;
it was simply relative to the heaviness of the medium. Thus the
syllogism: "The cause of a positive effect must be positive: therefore
the cause of motion cannot be lightness (levitas), which is a negative
quality (privatio). It remains therefore that it is heaviness (gravitas);
even things that are moved upwards, are moved by heaviness" (I, 416,
cf. 362n). Likewise for all "alterative motions" or changes in quality:
for "that alterative motion (motus alterativus), when the movable body
is moved from lightness to heaviness, is a single and continuous motion.
As when water becomes per accidens cold from hot it is moved with a
single motion towards coldness, and the motion from hot to warm is no
different from the motion from warm to cold", so too when a body
moved from being light through neither heavy nor light to heavy.
"So far then are these motions from being contraries that they are
actually only one, continuous and coterminous. Hence also the effects
that flow from these causes should not truly be called contraries, since
contrary effects depend on contrary causes" (I, 322-3; cf. I, 159). In
this way Galileo came to reject the whole Greek doctrine of pairs of
contrary properties, and to replace it by a single linear quantitative scale
by which gravity and temperature and so on could be measured and
measuring instruments devised. Despite the ambiguity behind Viviani's
particular claim that Galileo "discovered thermometers (termometri)"
(XIX, 607), there can be no doubt about the effects of this radical
conceptual change in the very possibility of quantification upon the
fundamental theory and practice of all natural science48.
Why then did "provident nature (prudens natura)" distribute the
positions of bodies in the order found? It was not sufficient to say
that "it pleased Highest Providence" to give them "the capacity to
move to some particular place": light bodies upwards, heavy downwards. For "granted that heavy bodies move towards the centre
because they move towards the Earth, our next question is: why was
the Earth placed at the centre, and not in the place of (say) fire?" He
found it "impossible to believe that nature was not constrained by
necessity, or at least from expediency, to make this kind of distribution,
48
Cf. Tractatus de dementis (I, 157-60) and VIII, 634-5, XI, 350, 506, 545, XII,
139-40, 157-8, 167-8, XV, 12-15, XVII, 377-8; J. P. ANTON, Aristotle's Theory of Contrareity (London, 1957); G. E. R. LLOYD, Polarity and Analogy: Two types of argumentation in early Greek thought (Cambridge, 1966); F. SOLMSEN, Aristotle's System of
the Physical World: A companion to his predecessors (Ithaca, N.Y., 1960); F. S. TAYLOR,
"The origin of the thermometer", Annals of Science, V (1942) 129-56; W. K. MIDDLETON,
A History of the Thermometer (Baltimore, Md., 1966); below nn. 59, 62.
204
but merely did as she fancied and as chance would have it". He
racked his brains "to think of some expedient and suitable, if not
necessary, cause: and indeed I discovered that it was not without the
best of reasons that nature had chosen this order. For since there is
a single matter for all bodies, and those bodies are heavier that enclose
more particles of that matter in a narrower space, it was certainly
rational that those bodies that contained more matter in a narrower
space should also occupy the narrower places such as those that are
nearer the centre" (I, 344-5, cf. 252-3). Thus, as suggested perhaps by
the Timaeus and the atomists, he reduced relative gravity to the relative
condensation and rarefaction of matter. "In accordance with reason,
therefore, we shall say that motion towards the centre is natural, and
motion away from the centre unnatural": the intrinsic cause of all
motion was weight, and at the centre bodies came to rest (I, 352-4).
Archimedes and "the ancients" (I, 359), which in the scholastic
tradition meant the Greek atomists and Plato in contrast to Aristotle,
thus taught Galileo how he might reduce the whole physical world to a
coherent uniform system of mechanics. Archimedes taught him also the
analytical device of reducing physical problems to their mathematical
essence by idealized abstractions from which all material accidents such
as friction and irregular shape had been eliminated, and in which
unimportant departures from strict physical truth were ignored. GaKleo followed his example with skill in his analysis in De motu gravium
of motion on an inclined plane. He argued that "a movable body
having no external resistance on a plane inclined no matter how little
below the horizon will descend naturally, without the application of
any external force", whereas on "a plane inclined upwards, no matter
how little" it "does not ascend except by force". Hence "on the
horizontal plane itself the body is moved neither naturally nor violently" and so "can be made to move by the smallest force of all".
In demonstrating this he used an argument from the balance for which
he assumed "as true what is false: namely, that weights suspended from
a balance make right angles with the balance, when really the weights
tending to the centre converge". Covering himself "with the protecting
wings of the superhuman Archimedes" who had made the same assumption, he commented that Archimedes "did so perhaps to show that
he was so far ahead of others that he could draw true conclusions
even from false assumptions". We must not suppose that his
conclusion was false, for he had proved it by another demonstration.
Hence we must say either that the suspended weights do make right
angles "or else that it is of no importance that they make right angles"
but enough that the angles are simply equal. The latter seemed
sounder, unless we wanted to call it "geometrical licence" as when
205
Archimedes assumed that surfaces had weight. That was not the end
of the problem of relating mathematics to matter. For "our demonstrations must be understood of movable bodies free from all external
resistance. But since perhaps it is impossible to find these bodies in
matter, someone making a trial on them (de his periculum faciens)
should not be surprised if the experiment fails (si experientia frustretur]
and a large sphere, even though it is on a horizontal plane, cannot be
moved with a minimal force". Further, there was in addition the fact
that "a plane cannot actually be parallel to the horizon. For the surface
of the Earth is spherical, and a plane cannot be parallel to this". Since
"the plane touches the sphere at only one point (piano in uno tantum
puncto sphaeram contingente], if we move away from .such a point,
we must be moving up", and so it would be impossible to move the
sphere "with an arbitrarily minimal force" (I, 299-301, cf. 296-9, 340,
407-8, VII, 52, VIII, 190, 197, 202-3)49.
If Archimedes supplied the mathematical method, De motu gravium
remained in much of its physical theory and methods of argument, and
in its metaphysical expectations, fundamentally Aristotelian. Galileo
based its dynamics on the Aristotelian principle that motion like any
positive effect required an adequate cause, hence a continuing velocity
required a continuing motive power and a change in velocity a change
in effective power. He retained the distinction between natural and
unnatural motion. In searching for the changing effective power
bringing about the acceleration of falling bodies, he wrote that "we
shall use this resolutive method (resolutiva methodo) to track down
what we believe to be the true cause of this effect" (I, 318). His
resolution was nonmathetaatical, and was in fact based on Pereira's
De communibus... as we show below (I, 318-20). Most characteristic
in its resemblance to the Disputationes was his search for necessary
causes and demonstrations.
These were essential likewise to any practical science of mechanics.
"Before I descend to the speculation of mechanique instruments," he
wrote in the version of Le mecaniche published by Favaro, " I have
thought it very fitt to consider in generall the commodityes that are
drawen from them. The rather, because (if I deceive not my self) I
49
Cf. on this question N. KOERTGE, "Galileo and the problem of accidents", Journal
of the History of Ideas, XXXVIII (1977) 389-408; also Vocabulario degli Accademici
della Crusca (Venezia, 1612): "Cimentare, cimento, vedi Esperimentare, Esperimento"
(p. 182); "Tentare. Far prouva, cimentare. Lat. tentare, experiri, periculum facere" (p.
881). These terms were common synonyms and were used by Galileo as such, without
distinguishing active testing from passive observation, despite C. B. SCHMITT, "Experience and experiment: a comparison of Zabarella's view with Galileo's in De motu",
Studies in the Renaissance, XVI (1969) 114 sqq.
206
have scene all enginiers deceiv'd, while they would apply their engines
to works of their owne nature impossible; in the success of which
both they themselves have bene deceiv'd, and others also defrauded of
the hopes they had conceiv'd upon their promeses...; as if, with their
engines they could cosen nature (ingannando... la natura], whose
inviolable lawe it is, that noe resistence can be overcome by force which
is not stronger than it. Which belief how false it is, I hope by true
and necessary demonstration to make most manifest" (II, 155, cf. 156,
158, 179-80)50. Citing in this treatise not only Archimedes and the
Aristotelian Mechanica but also Pappus's Mathematicae collectiones, he
stressed the generality of mechanical principles. Thus he wrote of the
effects of percussion, as with a hammer: "the cause of which, though
it be in nature somewhat obscure and hard to be unfolded", he would
try to make "clere and sensible, shewing at last the beginning and
original (// principle ed origine] of this effect to be deriv'd from no
other fountaine than that from whence flow the causes of other
mechanicall effects". Force, resistance, space and velocity "goe alternately following such a proportion and answering such a law (leggeY as
they followed in every mechanical operation; "and this is according
to the necessary constitution of nature (la necessaria constituzione delta
naturaY "Arguing by the converse,... if it were otherwise, it were not
only absurd, but impossible". So "all wonder ceases in us of that
effect, which goes not a poynt out of the bounds of nature's constitution" (II, 188-9).
Again in his Discorso intorno alle cose che stanno in sull'acqua
(1612) Galileo continued to use the terminology of the Disputationes
to point to the same scientific objectives. As in De motu gravium he
combined Aristotelian with Archimedean models both in form of
argument and in physical concepts, and he tried to reduce general
questions of the constitution of matter and the universe to specific
problems soluble by natural science. This work was his first published
contribution to experimental physics. If he contradicted so great a man
as Aristotle, he wrote, this was not by caprice or because he had not
read and understood him, "but because reasons persuaded him to it,
and Aristotle himself had taught him to quieten the intellect (quietar
I'intelletto] by what has convinced me by reason, and not only by the
authority of the master" (IV, 65). His first aim then was "to
introduce true demonstrations" from "the true, intrinsic and total
cause" (IV, 67, cf. 79). His method of identifying the true cause was
"to remove, in making the experiment (I'esperienza], all the other
50
English translation by ROBERT PAYNE (1636): transcribed by A. CARUGO from

British Library Ms. Harley 6976, ff. 317r, 329v-30r; cf. below nn. 57, 58.
The Jesuits and Galileo 3s Ideas of Science and Nature
207
causes that can produce this same effect" (IV, 19), leaving only this
one. For the "cause is that which, when present, the effect follows
and, when removed, the effect is removed" (IV, 27, cf. 22). The
quantitative relation between an adequate cause and its effect had been
well defined by Luca Valeric in commenting to Galileo in 1609 on
"principles of a middle science". A "geometrical intellect with some
light, either natural or acquired, from metaphysics" would, he wrote,
understand "that when the power of the efficient cause is multiplied it
is necessary that the quantity of the effect should be multiplied according to the same multiplication, deducting from it every kind of
impediment". For "we measure the quantity of the cause with the
quantity of the effect" (X, 248, cf. 245)51. Archimedes had demonstrated that floating or sinking depended on the excess in gravity of the
water or of the body relative to each other. Galileo continued: "By
a different method and by other means I shall manage to prove the
same, by reducing the causes of such effects to more intrinsic and
immediate principles... And since this is required by the demonstrative
progress (la progressione dimostrativa\ I shall define some terms and
then explain some propositions which I could use, as true and known
things, for my purposes" (IV, 67).
True scientific demonstration depended then for Galileo upon a
conception of laws both of logical reasoning and of nature discovered in
existence and confirmed by all experience. This done, as he put it
in the Dispufationes, "we come to rest in knowledge of the conclusion,...
because of knowledge of the principles" (Ms. Galileiano 27, f. 23r);
for, as he repeated in the Discorso (1616) on the tides, "bringing to
rest the mind of those who desire, in theorizing (nelle contemplezioni]
about nature, to penetrate beneath the skin... is reached only when
the reason produced as the true cause of the effect easily and openly
satisfies all the particular symptoms and properties (sintomi ed accidenti) that are seen distinctly connected with this effect" (V, 377). During
this period 1610-1616 of many disputes over the telescope, floating
bodies, the sunspots and the Copernican system, through which he
articulated his campaign at once for a new physics and cosmology and
for a new conception of natural science, Galileo wrote often on the
proper methods of science and the point at which they could bring
the mind naturally or by force of available possibilities to rest. He
51
Galileo (IV, 52) cited Francesco Bonamico for the rule of presence and absence,
which had been stated in much the same words by William of Ockham: cf. E. CASSIRER,
"Some remarks on the question of the originality of the Renaissance", Journal of the
History of Ideas, IV (1943) 49-56; also for Galileo's use of this rule and the rule of
concomitant variations CROMBIE, Robert Grosseteste (1953, 1971); KOERTGE (1977)
above n. 49; WISAN (1978) above n. 20; and for the Topics etc. below.
208
developed in print during those years all the main characteristics of

his natural philosophy: his insistence that the object of natural science
was the one true world existing to be discovered; his methods of
exploring and demonstrating that one true world; and what kind of
world he expected to find and with what degree of certainty. In fact
he used a variety of methods of scientific argument and exploration
adapted to different kinds of problems and subject-matters, and related
to a variety of scientific and philosophical sources and models. His
exploration might be primarily theoretical or primarily experimental
according to the simplicity or complexity of the subject-matter and its
problems. What he claimed to have been able to demonstrate truly and
with certainty might depend again on the subject-matter, on his
scientific experience in using different philosophical models, and also on
his personal circumstances at different periods of his life. Winifred
Wisan in her reexamination of "Galileo's scientific method" (1976) has
rightly emphasized the effect on his presentation of his scientific
conclusions of the prohibition in 1616 that forbad him to teach or
write anything more in defence of the Copernican system.
The form of Galileo's scientific argument with problems involving
simple variables was postulation or argument ex suppositione on the
model of Euclid and above all Archimedes. It was Archimedes who
provided the ideal, as in his reduction by purely theoretical analysis
of the possible postulates that could yield the phenomena of the balance
or lever to an unique set certified by self-evidence or sufficient reason.
Thus he could give a complete account of an experimental phenomenon
without the need for any experiments. Galileo explicitly followed this
model in describing his discovery of his definition or law of acceleration
of falling bodies in the Discorsi (1638; VIII, 197, 205-8); and in his
letters of 1637 to Pierre Carcavy (XVII, 90-1) and of 1639 to G. B.
Baliani (XVIII, 12-13, 78). He postulated ex suppositione a definition
without asserting its existence in nature, and demonstrated therefrom
the "many properties of such a motion". The subject-matter did not
allow him like Archimedes to reduce the possible definitions by a
purely theoretical analysis to the one actually true in nature, but "if
experiment showed that such properties happened to be verified in the
motion of naturally falling heavy bodies, we could assert without error
that this is the same motion that was defined and supposed by me"
(XVII, 90). His experiments in this kind of situation, here with the
inclined plane, were made then to test whether his postulated theoretical world was the one actual world. They amounted to "very little
less than a very necessary demonstration" (VIII, 205). Again in using
the pendulum as an instrument of analysis he began with "a postulate,
the absolute truth of which we shall hereafter find established by seeing
209
other conclusions built upon this hypothesis, to correspond to and most

exactly to agree with the experiment" (208) 52 . He saw the arguments
developed ex suppositione by Ptolemy and by Copernicus for the much
more complex motions of astronomy as likewise aiming to demonstrate,
as he wrote in 1612, the one "true constitution of the universe" which
"could not possibly be otherwise" (V, 102, 351, 357-61, VII, 148-50,
470, XII, 171-2). This was a truly Aristotelian vision of a completed
science.
A passage from Galileo's hydrostatical controversy specifies a change
of model from the Aristotelian to the mathematical conception of
analysis and synthesis, or resolution and composition. It also harks
back to the Disputationes. The main question in dispute concerning
scientific method was the efficacy of mathematics in physics, and hence
of Archimedes against Aristotle. A passage in Galileo's hand published
in 1615 in a work under Benedetto Castelli's name contrasts the proper
method of argument in formulating problems for scientific decision with
the circular syllogisms used by their opponents. They "commit the
gravest mistakes" because "using mainly, but not well, the resolutive
method (// metodo resolutivo] (which, if well used, is the best method
of discovery), they take the conclusion as true and instead of going
on deducing from it this and then that and then that other consequence,
until they come across one that is manifest either by itself of because it
has been demonstrated, from which then the intended conclusion is
reached by the compositive method (il metodo compositivo}; instead, I
say, of making good use of such a progression, they form with their
imagination a proposition that squares immediately with the conclusion
they intend to prove, and without falling back even a single step, they
take it as true, though as false or equally doubtful as the conclusion,
and immediately they construct on it a syllogism, which leaves us
without any gain in our original uncertainty" (IV, 521, cf. 13-15).
This account of resolution and composition corresponds to that given by
Pappus in the Mathematicae collectiones (VII, praefatio 1-3) of the
two kinds of analysis used by the Greek geometers, and more briefly
by Proclus as analysis and synthesis 53.
52
53
Cf. on this WISAN (1974) 124 and (1978) 42, above n. 20.
PAPPUS ALEXANDRINUS, Matbematicae collectiones a Federico Commandino in
Latinum conversae... (Pisauri, 1588); cf. T. L. HEATH, History of Greek Mathematics,
II (Oxford, 1921) 400-1. Pappus and Proclus were both known in manuscript to
GIORGIO VALLA, De expetendis et fugiendis rebus opus, X.I (Venezia, 1501); Pappus
was cited by GUIDOBALDO DEL MONTE, Mechanicorum liber, Praefatio (Pisauri, 1577);
cf. A. P. TREWEEK, "Pappus of Alexandria: the manuscript tradition of the Collectio
mathematical, Scriptorium, XI (1957) 195-233; GILBERT (1960) above n. 43; JARDINE
(1976) above n. 38; WISAN (1978) above n. 20; also n. 46. For another historical ac-
210
Galileo elaborated his account in the Dido go (1632) to embrace

both mathematics and physics. He believed that the method by which
Aristotle himself had expounded his physical doctrine was not that "by
which hee investigated, for I hould for certaine that hee first of all
procured, by way of senses, of experiments and observations, to assure
himselfe as much as might be of the conclusion, and that afterwards
he sought the meanes to demonstrate it; for that is for the most part
the use in demonstrative sciences; and this comes to passe because when
the conclusion is true, if we make use of a resolutive method, we easily
encounter some proposition that hath alreadie beene demonstrated, or
we arrive to some principle which is of itselfe knowne (prindpio per se
notoY (VII, 75). Of some principles "humane understanding... hath
so absolute a certaintie as nature herself e hath, and such are pure
mathematical sciences... I beleeve that this knowledge equalls the divine
knowledge in the objective certaintie, seeing it arrives so farre as to
comprehend the necessitie, above which I cannot see that there is
greater certaintie" (VII, 129)54. Physical principles were less certain.
He regretted that the great magnetical experimenter William Gilbert's
lack of mathematics and especially of geometry had made him so rash
"in accepting of those reasons for the concluding demonstrations which
hee produceth for the true causes of the true conclusions by him
observed". But a well conducted experimental investigation on which
to base a conclusive scientific argument could "make it little lesse to
mee than a mathematical demonstration". He went on to bring the
resolutive method into the experimental argument: "In searching the
reasons of the conclusions unknown to us, wee must have the fortune
from the beginning to direct our discourse towards the way of truth
by which when a man walkes, it easily falls out that hee meets now
count following CASSIRER (above n. 39) and its critics cf. J. H. RANDALL, "The development of scientific method in the school of Padua", Journal of the History of Ideas, I
(1940) 177-206, The Career in Philosophy, I (New York, 1962) 256-360 and "Paduan
Aristotelianism reconsidered" in Philosophy and Humanism: Renaissance essays in honor
of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed E. P. MAHONEY (Leiden, 1976); CROMBIE (1953, 1971)
above n. 47; N. W. GILBERT, "Galileo and the school of Padua", Journal of the History
of Philosophy, I (1963) 223-31; W. F. EDWARDS, "Randall on the development of
scientific method in the School of Padua - - a continuing reappraisal" in Naturalism
and Historical Understanding: Essays in the Philosophy of John Hermann Randall jr., ed.
J. P. ANTON (Albany, N.Y., 1967), "Niccolo Leoniceno and the origins of humanist discussion of method" in Philosophy and Humanism, ed. MAHONEY (1976); H. SKULSKY,
"Paduan epistemology and the doctrine of the one mind", Journal of the History of Philosophy, VI (1968) 341-61; C. B. SCHMITT (1969) above n. 49 and A Critical Survey
and Bibliography of Studies on Renaissance Aristotelianism 1958-1969 (Padova, 1971)
38-46.
54
English translation by Joseph Webbe, British Library Ms. Harley 6320 (c. 1634):
quoted here and below.
The Jesuits and Galileo}s Ideas of Science and Nature
211
with some, and then with other propositions knowne for true, either
by discourse or by experience, from the certaintie whereof the truth of
ours getts force and evidence" (VII, 432, 434-5). Castelli in writing
to Galileo in 1637 described an experimental analysis of a problem
concerning the absorption of heat from the Sun's rays as "ordering
all the reasoning first by the resolutive method and then by the
compositive" (XVII, 160).
Galileo's form of scientific argument with more complex subjectmatters was a combination of experimentally controlled postulation
with more immediate experimental and observational exploration. He
conducted his experimental analysis of the causes of effects according
to the "laws of logic" (leggi logicali) or "physical logic" (logica naturale) (VI. 252, 333), which were the scholastic rules of inference: presence
and absence, and concomitant variations. The last was specified by
Aristotle in the Topics as a rule for the predication of properties by
which to "argue from greater or lesser degrees... See whether a greater
degree of the predicate follows a greater degree of the subject... Now...
if an increase of the property follows an increase of the subject,...
clearly the property belongs; while if it does not follow, the property
does not belong. You should establish this by induction" (Topics,
II. 10, 114b37-115a6, cf. IV. 6, 127bl8-25, VI. 7, 145b33-6a36;
FRANCIS BACON, Novum organum, II. 13). These were the logical
rules that Galileo stated for his inquiries into hydrostatics and sunspots,
into comets in II Saggiatore (VI, 339-40, q. 45), and into the connection between the motions of the tides and of the Earth in the
Dialogo: "I say therefore, that if it be true that of one effect one
only is the primarie cause and that betweene the cause and the effect
there is a firme and constant connection, it is necessarie that whensoever there is a firme and constant alteration in the effect, there is a
firme and constant alteration in the cause". Then since annually and
monthly the tides "have their firme and constant periods, wee must
of force say that there falleth out a regular alteration in the same
times in the primary cause of the fluxes and refluxes". Demonstrating
this with his model of water moving in a vessel, he argued that the
motion observed was "a compounded motion resulting from the coupling together of the two proper motions whereof the diurnall whirling
with its now adding to, and then drawing from the annuall moving,
is that which produceth the difformitie in compounded motion".
Similarly to account for the regular seasonal variations in the tides
"(if we will retayne the identitie of the cause) we must finde out
alterations in these additaments and subtractions which make them
more or less powerful! in producing these effects which have dependance
on them" (VII, 471-2).
212
The Aristotelian rules of inference used the criterion of range of

confirmation to establish that a given property belonged to a given
subject. Galileo extended the quantification of the argument "from
greater or lesser degrees" from the example of mathematics and the
practical mathematical arts. These rational arts, of perspective painting
and measured music but above all of mechanics and engineering,
provided a distinctive intellectual model for Galileo's experimental
investigations no less important than those taken from his other sources.
The rational arts offered a distinctive method of analysis by means of
artificial models imitating the processes of nature. Thus the Venetian
Daniele Barbaro wrote in his well known commentary on Vitruvius
(1556) that "the architect must think out very well and, in order to
make more certain of the success of the works, will proceed first with
the design and the model... Yet he will not search for impossible things,
either as to the matter or as to the form, which neither he nor others
can accomplish. Whence art, observer of nature, wanting also to make
something, takes the matter of nature put into existence with sensible
and natural form... and forms that matter with that idea and with that
sign which is reposing in the mind of the artist" 55. The engineer
Giuseppe Ceredi of Piacenza, inspired at once by Greek mathematical
thinking and by the example of "nature itself, as if become mechanical
in the construction of the world", offered in 1567 as a method of
antecedent analysis in designing any desired result the construction of
"models (modelli}, adding, changing and removing many things" as
required. In this way he could bring together conveniently the many
observations needed to bring about "some new and important effect",
recognize errors by experience and correct them by reason, and so direct
the whole enterprise "to the stable production of the effect that is
expected" 56. Again Guidoba'ldo del Monte, taking up ideas from the
influential Aristotelian Mechantca in a paraphrase of Archimedes
published in 1588, wrote that "if art overcomes nature by imitating
her so that those things which are done by art happen contrary to
nature", that was possible because "art with wonderful skill overcomes
nature through nature herself, by so arranging things as nature herself
would do if she decided that such effects should be produced by
herself" 57. Galileo was to write likewise in Le mecaniche, and in
55
DANIELE BARBARO, 7 died libri dell'Architettura di M. Vitruvio, tradotti e commentati... 1.3 (Vinegia, 1556) 26; cf. V. P. ZOUBOV, "Vitruve et ses commentateurs du
XVIe56siecle" in La science au XVIe siecle: Colloque de Royaumont 1957 (Paris, 1960).
GIUSEPPE CEREDI, Tre discorsi sopra il modo d'alzar acque da' luoghi bassi
(Parma,
1567) 5-7; cf. CROMBIE (1982) and Styles... above n. 16.
57
GUIDOBALDUS E MARCHio MONTIS, In duos Archimedis Aequeponderantium libros paraphrases scholiis illustrata, Praefatio (Pisauri, 1588) 2; cf. the Aristotelian Me-
213
criticizing "the model of a machine" proposed by an engineer, that

"already a long time ago I had found, and confirmed by many many
experiences, the concept that nature could not be overcome and cheated
(defraudata) by art" (VIII, 572)58.
Galileo's writings on natural philosophy were all disputations in
which he combined his scholastic and mathematical methods to argue
for or against the various positions or hypotheses being proposed. His
method of argument was to eliminate rival proposals by means of these
rules of inference, and then to try to demonstrate the truth of his
own favoured proposal by showing that it alone was confirmed by
agreement with the whole range of the known phenomena. Thus he
wrote in his Second Letter on the Sunspots (1612) of two rival suppositions, that the spots were either small circling stars or actually
on the solar body, "this second, it seems to me, is true, and the other
false; just as any other supposition (posizione] whatsoever that might be
assumed will be found false and impossible, as I shall try to demonstrate by means of obvious disagreements and contradictions. All the
appearances agree concordantly with the hypothesis that they are
contiguous with the Sun and that they are carried round by its
revolution, without meeting any inconvenience or difficulty" (V, 118,
cf. 117, 127). Having shown that this rival which did save a good
part of the phenomena was nevertheless false, he did not want "to
waste time in disproving every other imaginable supposition" (V, 130).
If his true observations meant that celestial matter must be alterable,
this was a conclusion closer than the opposite view to Aristotle
himself, who surely would have agreed if he had known "the present
sensory observations. For he not only admitted manifest experience
(le manifeste esperienze] among the powerful means of reaching conclusions about natural problems, but gave it first place". For "I am sure
that he never held the conclusion of inalterability to be as certain as that
all human reasoning must take second place to evident experience (evident e esperienza)". For all that he continued, "in order to remove
every ambiguity, to some come, inspired by a superior power, necessary
methods (metodi necessarily by which we understood these phenomena,
"though this is not enough to persuade those whose minds cannot be
reached by the necessity of geometrical demonstrations" (V, 138-40).
Repeating this interpretation of Aristotle in the same context in the
Dialogo (1632), he made Sagredo challenge his opponent as represented
chanica (847a); S. DRAKE and I. E. DRABKIN, Mechanics in Sixteenth Century Italy
(Madison, Wise., 1969); P. L. ROSE and S. DRAKE, "The pseudo-Aristotelian Questions
of Mechanics in Renaissance culture", Studies in the Renaissance XVIII (1971) 65-104.
58
Cf. VIII, 559-61; above n. 50.
214
by Simplicio "to produce all the particular reasons, experiments and

observations, as well naturall as astronomicall, whereby others may be
persuaded" of their opinion (VII, 71, cf. 75-6). As for Galileo's own
preliminary arguments for the Earth's motion from simplicity and
economy and so on, these "I bring you not as lawes infrangibile (leggi
infrangibili], but as motives (motivi] which have some appearance.
And because I know full well that one onely experience, or concluding
demonstration, which could be brought to the contrarie were sufficient
to beat downe these and an hundred thousand other probable arguments unto the ground, we must not stay heere, but go forward..."
(VII, 148).
There is a striking contrast between Galileo's apodeictic confidence
about astronomy and mechanics and his much more cautious estimate
of what could be truly and certainly discovered about the real world
existing behind the more complex and enigmatic problems of matter
and its composition and properties 59. This corresponded to the distinction which placed the former in the mathematical middle sciences and
the latter in natural philosophy or physics. Natural philosophy he had
written in the Trattato della sfera (1606) was concerned with "substance and quality" and "our intellect is guided to knowledge of the
substance by means of the properties (accidenti}" (II, 211, 212). The
proper object of natural scientific inquiry was then the substances and
hence causes bringing about the properties which made up the world
we could observe. With his first telescopic discoveries he set out to
destroy the Aristotelian division of the world into regions of celestial
and elementary substances (XI, 147, cf. 280-5, 289, 298-303; above
nn. 23-24), just as in De motu gravium and the Discorso (1612) on
floating bodies he set out to destroy the division of properties into
contrary pairs. Both he wanted to reduce to a linear quantitative
uniformity amenable to mathematics and measurement. His problems
began in looking beyond that to the physical substance and causality
59
Cf. for Galileo's scientific style especially L. S. OLSCHKI, "The scientific personality of Galileo , Bulletin of the History of Medicine, XII (1942) 248-73, "Galileo's
philosophy of science", Philosophical Review, III (1943) 349-65; A. C. CROMBIE, Galilee devant les critiques de la posterite (Les Conferences du Palais de la Decouverte,
Paris, 1956), translated in part as "Galileo: a philosophical symbol", Actes du VHIe
Congres International d'Histoire des Sciences, Florence-Milan 19% (Vinci & Paris, 1958)
1089-95, (1969), (1975a), (1981) and (1983) above n. 2, and Styles... above n. 16;
JARDINE (1976) above n. 38; KOERTGE (1977) above n. 49; WISAN (1978) and (1981)
above n. 20; with his researches into different subject-matters classically exemplified by
A. KOYRE, Etudes galileennes, I-III (Actualites scientifiques et industrielles, nos. 8552-4;
Paris, 1939); L. GEYMONAT, Galileo Galilei (Torino, 1957), English translation (New
York, 1965); E. McMuLLiN (ed.), Galileo: Man of Science (New York, 1967); M.
CLAVELIN, La philosophic naturelle de Galilee (Paris, 1968); SHEA (1972) above n. 21;
WISAN (1974) above n. 20; also nn. 47-58.
215
behind the phenomenal world. One such problem arising out of the
Sidereus nuncius (1610) was the nature of light, the means by which
the telescope gave us its information. The Roman philosopher Giulio
Cesare La Galla reported an occasion in Rome in 1611 when he had
lamented the impossibility of deciding even on "our general classification of it, as to whether it is substance or property, body or something
incorporeal, quality or relation; for such is the weakness of our intellect
that it can easily be made to fit all these categories or equally be
excluded from them". Galileo agreed "and firmly avowed that he
would willingly allow himself to be shut up in a dark cell and fed
on bread and water, provided that, when he was restored to light in
due course, he could perfectly grasp its nature and understand it" 60.
Again in his First Letter about the Sunspots (1612) he wrote that
"for me it is much more difficult to find the truth than to show
convincingly what is false, and it seems, to me that I know what the
sunspots are not, rather than what they are" (V, 95). So "we could
not blame in any way the philosopher who confessed that he does not
know, and cannot know, what the matter of the sunspots may be"
(106). He was prepared to speculate but, he wrote in his Third Letter,
"in our speculating we either try to penetrate the true and intrinsic
essence of natural substances, or content ourselves with coming to
know some of their properties (affezioni]. An attempt upon the essence
I hould to be an undertaking no less impossible and a labour no less
vain in the nearest elementary substances than in the most distant and
celestial ones... But if we wish to stop at the apprehension of some
properties, it does not seem to me that we should despair of being
able to reach them in the bodies most distant from us as well as in the
nearest ones" (V, 187-8).
Perhaps Winifred Wisan (1976, p. 24) was correct in detecting a
further nuance from the prohibition of 1616 in the Platonic imagery
of the remark in the Discorso delle comete (1619) published under
Mario Guiducci's name, that "we must be content with what little we
can conjecture here among the shadows, until we are shown the true
constitution of the parts of the world" (VI, 99). But this expressed
yet once more a consistent estimate of our knowledge of physical causes,
if not of geometrical structures. He commented famously in the Dialogo (1632) on the assertion that everyone knew that the cause of bodies
falling downwards was gravity, that rather "every man knows that it is
called gravitie", but of the "essence you know no whitt more than you
60
JULIUS CESAR LA GALLA, De phoenomenis in orbe Lunae, De luce et lumine

disputatio (Venetiis, 1612) 57-8; cf. GALILEO, Le opere, III, 325-6; CROMBIE (1969)
above n. 2.
216
know of the essence of the movent (movente] which turnes the starres
about, excepting the name..." (VII, 260-1). Likewise in the Discorsi
(1638) he refused "to inquire into the cause of the acceleration of
natural motion, concerning which various opinions have been pronounced by various philosophers". It was enough at present for him "to
search out and demonstrate to us some passions (passtones] of an
accelerated motion (let the cause of that acceleration be what it will)..."
(VIII, 202). Galileo suggested in the Discorsi (VIII, 87-89) methods
for deciding by measurement whether or not light was a form of motion
with a finite speed. But from his first discussions of the nature of
light, through II Saggiatore (VI, 350, 352), down to his last correspondence on the subject with Fortunio Liceti in 1640-41 he
maintained that the evidence could show us only how light behaved,
not what it was. His comment to Liceti in 1640 on "the essence
of light, about which I have always been in the dark" could be applied
to his physical investigations over many years: "Here I would not like
to be told that I have not stopped at the truth of fact; for experience
shows me that it happens in this way; which, I could say, in all the
effects of nature admired by me, assures me of the an sit but brings me
no gain in the quomodo" (XVIII, 208).
Galileo's philosophical campaign was dedicated to establishing the
identity at once of the true science and, as he wrote in his First Letter
about the Sunspots, of "the true and real world which, made by God
with his own hands, stands always open in front of us for the purpose
of our learning" (V, 96, cf. XI, 530, XII, 20). What he expected to
find by reason in existence behind the appearances perceived by the
senses was governed by the interaction between his philosophical and
scientific sources and his scientific experience in exploring nature by
means of geometrical postulation, the logic of experimental elimination
and confirmation, analogical modelling, measuring instruments, and the
extension of the natural senses with the telescope and microscope, to
say nothing of the exigencies and expediencies of debate and persuasion.
Galileo's rhetorical image in // Saggiatore (q. 6) of the mathematical
book of philosophy recalls Proclus's account of the Timaeus "using
mathematical language throughout in expounding its theory of the
nature of the universe" and the generation of the elements and their
powers "by numbers and figures" (1.8: above, n. 46) and recalls also
Clavius and Mazzoni (cf. nn. 42-45). Galileo had quoted biblical passages comparing the heavens to a book in his Tractatio de caelo (I, 64).
His point in II Saggiatore was to distinguish the book of philosophy
from books of fiction like the Iliad and Orlando furioso "in which the
least important thing is whether what is written in them is true" (VI,
232). By contrast, as he repeated in his last account of the image to
217
Liceti in 1641, "the book of philosophy is that which stands perpetually open before our eyes, but because it is written in characters different
from those of our alphabet it cannot be read by everybody; and the
characters of this book are triangles, squares, circles, spheres, cones,
pyramids and other mathematical figures fittest for this sort of reading"
(XVIII, 295, cf. XIX, 625). Thus, as in the Timaeus, Euclid and
Proclus it was essentially a geometrical, not an arithmetical book61.
The Timaeus and related Greek sources offered Galileo also something further in his search for a rational philosophy of nature. He had
been forced to defend the validity not only of his telescopic observations but also of unaided vision against sceptical doubts about the
certainty of mathematics when applied to sensible subjects. Practical
difficulties in using this unfamiliar instrument reinforced the suspicion
that the telescope was just another of the optical devices for producing
illusions well known to theatrical magic. Clavius and other mathematicians at the Collegio Romano formed this opinion when they tried
to confirm Galileo's observations in the autumn of 1610, until with
advice from Galileo himself they succeeded. Christopher Grienberger
wrote to him frankly that things so difficult to believe should not be
accepted lightly and that it was hard to give up opinions held for so
long by so many philosophers, but that at length "I have examined
with my own eyes the wonders you were the first to introduce to the
world... I have learned from experience (experientia) that it is not an
illusion that you have seen four satellites in motion around Jupiter,...
the irregularities of the Moon..." and so on (XI, 33, cf. X, 430-45,
480-501, XI, 253, 272-7). La Galla in his ambiguous defence of the
telescope in 1612 linked the question to Aristotle's critique of Plato for
his prejudicial introduction of mathematics into physical inquiries and
to the further question of "sensible forms and qualities". It was he
wrote "asserted by philosophers and known from experience" that "the
senses are deceived over the common sensibles, namely motion, rest,
number, size and shape; although they are normally either not at all or
to the least degree at fault over the proper sensibles, such as colour or
taste" (III, 323-5). He gave as an illustration the ancient illusion of
a stick half in water which appeared bent to vision but straight to
touch. Galileo replied like Plato (Republic X. 602C-E) that such
optical illusions were corrected by optical science (III, 323-5) and
likewise for other such apparent deceptions.
Later in II Saggiatore (q. 48) he argued that "when I conceive of a
61
Cf. for the book of nature M. CURTIUS, Europaische Literatur und lateinisches
Mittelalter (Bern, 1948) 323-9, English translation (New York, 1953) 319-26; E. GARIN,
La cultura filosofica del Rinascimento italiano (Firenze, 1961) 451-65.
218
piece of matter or a corporal substance, I certainly feel myself necessarily obliged at the same time to conceive" that there must be attributed to it a set of irreducible minimum "conditions (condizioniY':
shape, relative size, location in place and time, motion or rest, touching
other bodies or not, and number. He felt "no compulsion to hold that
it must necessarily be accompanied by such conditions" as colour, taste,
sound etc. "Rather, if the senses had not escorted us, reason or
imagination by itself would perhaps never have arrived at them".
Having no justification by reason, these qualities evidently had no place
in his theory of the real physical world. They "are on the side of the
object in which they seem to be placed no more than mere names
(puri nomi], but have a place only in the sensitive body (corpo sensitivo}" of living things. The "primary and real properties (primi e reali
accidenti}" required in external bodies for exciting these sensory
qualities in us were no more than "sizes, shapes, numbers and slow or
swift motions" (VI, 347-50). Galileo's primary properties apart from
one refinement had been listed by Aristotle (De anima III. 1,
425al5-17, cf. II. 6, 418a8-19, III. 1, 425al4-blO; Categoriae c.6,
4b20-6a35, cf. c.8, 9a27-bll; De sensu c.l, 437a4-16, cf. c.4, 442a30-b!7) as quantities not qualities, and as objects common to more than
one sense rather than proper to each sense. His distinction between
the mere names and the real properties corresponded to the account
given by Galen of Democritus's distinction between the qualities "by
convention (lege}" or for us and those existing "in reality (vere}n in
things 62 . Again according to Sextus Empiricus "Plato and Democritus
held that the only real things were those discernable by reason" 63.
Both recognized as real only actual as distinct from potential qualities,
and both agreed also in reducing all the other senses to modes of touch.
Aristotle had criticized his predecessors for precisely these opinions (cf.
I, 123-9, 157-60). Except for making irreducible geometrical shapes
and not solid atoms the primary constituents of matter, Plato in the
Timaeus (56B-68D) added to the real properties listed by the atomists
two fundamental items: numbers, and variations in the speeds of
motion. Thus the numbers of particles accounted for density and
texture, their shapes and speeds accounted for the different sensations
of heat, and above all variations in speeds expressible in numerical
62
GALEN, De elementis secundum Hippocralem libri duo, I, Latin version by

Niccolo Leoniceno in GALEN, Omnia quae extant in Latinum sermonen conversa, I (Venetiis, 1556) f. 2rv; cf. CROMBIE (1969) above n. 2 and his Appendix: "Sources for Galileo's accounts of the primary properties and secondary qualities etc." in our book;
SHEA63 (1972) 100-4, above n. 21; also nn. 48, 59.
SEXTUS EMPIRICUS, Adversus mathematicos, VIII.6, Gentiano Herveto Aurelio interprete (Parish's, 1569) 184-5, (Genevae, 1621) 222.
219
ratios accounted for the different qualities of sensation experienced

as the pitch and consonance of sounds (67A-C, 80A-B). This was
the refinement of "slow or swift motions" that Galileo added to
Aristotle's common sensibles in listing his primary and real properties.
It had been developed by the Greek musical theorists from Archytus
of Tarentum and Plato, Aristotle himself (De anima II. 8, 419b4420b4) and Aristoxenus, to Ptolemy and Theon of Smyrna, and
was discussed explicitly by Boethius in his influential textbook on
music. The connection of the frequencies of vibratory impulses with
musical sensations had been investigated in the sixteenth century by
Giovanni Battista Benedetti and by Vincenzo Galilei probably assisted
by Galileo himslef64. Galileo like Plato (61C-62A) introduced the
question of the causation of the sensory qualities by asking what we
meant by heat, looking then for the "true property, affection and
quality (vero accidente, affezzione e qualitd] that really resides in the
material" (III, 347). Like Plato he was concerned to distinguish
between things and sensations designated by names. After considering
common problems of sensation he followed Plato's order and essential
ideas in explaining the five special senses (65B-68D). It seems evident
that he based his treatment on the Timaeus, and possible that these
were the subjects of the De sono et voce and De visu et coloribus
included in his programme for Vinta in 1610.
By defining in this way a stable and calculable relation of perception
to the world perceived, Galileo met one essential condition for a
rational science of nature. He provided against the sceptics for the
validity, and against the magicians for the consistency of the information received through the senses. He focused attention on the relevance to this question of the scientific study of the senses themselves and
of sound and light as the media of hearing and vision. In his analysis
of the more complex properties of materials and of heat and light in the
Discorsi he introduced yet another ancient model, Hero of Alexandria.
Whereas Plato and the atomists had been concerned primarily with the
general problem of establishing what existed through changing appearances, Hero had aimed to find more limited explanations of specific
physical phenomena of the structure of matter. Likewise in his
treatment of sound Galileo gave preference to technical over philosophical questions and authors in acoustics. In keeping with these
sources he shifted his focus from that of // Saggiatore to more technical
and experimental aspects of the argument from observable phenomena
to the inobservable structures and motions postulated by reason to
64
Cf. CROMBIE (1969) above n. 2, (1971) and the forthcoming volume on Mersenne etc. above n. 13.
220
produce them. He appeared at his most sophisticated as a philosopher

who was an engineer, looking not so much for the nature of things as
for the way to specify precisely in defined situations how to get accurately reproducible results. His search for the true identity of science
and of nature then seems to have ended in the conclusion that in
practice it was this rational experimental art, and not any vision of a
completed and demonstrated necessary truth of the essence of things,
that could lead us most truly to the only science of nature available.
3. We turn now to the difficult problem of placing in Galileo's
intellectual biography important undated writings on natural philosophy.
The problem has two aspects: the order of composition, and the dates.
The only evidence available comes from comparisons of contents, from
references and citations, and from material connections in the same
or related manuscripts. Much has to be probable and persuasive, little
demonstrative. There are more questions than answers. Hence our
approach must be problematic, despite any temptation there may be to
play the role as Galileo put it "of someone who has conceived some
perfect demonstration but who does not assent to its conclusion" (Ms.
Galileiano 27, f. 13v): to offer irrefutable proofs for what cannot be
believed, like the clever Oxford scholar who proved irrefutably that
Queen Victoria was the author of the Iliad.
The main problem is the dating of the Latin dialogue and treatise
De motu gravium (Ms. Galileiano 71) and the scholastic Tracfafiones
de mundo et de caelo and Tractatus de alteratione et de elementis
(Ms. Galil. 46) all in Galileo's hand. The last pages of Ms. Galileiano
46 which contains these scholastic treatises are filled with fragmentary
notes (excerpts from books and drafts of passages) on motion. The
second note was written in dialogue form for insertion in the dialogue
and so must have followed it (I, 375-8, 409) 65 . Then comes a series
of notes used in the treatise De motu gravium, which Galileo must
have written after the unfinished dialogue and before or while writing,
or while revising, the treatise. All the fragmentary notes are written
on paper with the same watermark as the dialogue which they follow
immediately in the manuscript. The first draft of the treatise (Ms.
Galileiano 71, ff. 115-24; I, 247, 326-40) is on paper with the same
watermark as the Tractatus de alteratione et de elementis. The Tractationes de mundo et de caelo is on a third kind of paper66. These
65
Cf. I. E. DRABKIN, "A note on Galileo's De motu", his, II (1960) 271-7, and
in GALILEO,
On Motion... (1960) 124, above n. 47; WISAN (1974) above n. 20.
66
Cf. CROMBIE (1975a) above n. 2.
221
material connections are matched by the use made of Pereira's De communibus..., which use matches the order of composition: dialogue,
notes, treatise. There are no references to Pereira in the dialogue, but
Galileo used his textbook for some of the notes for the treatise and for
the treatise itself. He used it also for the Tratatio prima de mundo
where he cited it for a specific argument concerning the eternity of
the world (I, 22-24, 32-37; cf. Pereira XV) and for the Tractatio de
dementis (I, 123-4, 138-9, 143-6,151-2; cf. Pereira III. 1, X, 10-11,
22-3).
Three passages in De motu gravium offer compelling evidence that
Galileo was using Pereira's textbook here. The first is that in which
he adopted a theory that projectiles were kept in motion by a virtus
impressa (I, 307-15, 412) in the form which Pereira (XIV. 4-5) had
expounded in order to reject. The other two passages are those in
which he discussed Philoponus's criticism of the Aristotelian argument
for the impossibility of motion in a void and Hipparchus's theory of the
acceleration of falling bodies. The former began as a fragmentary note
(I, 410) which was expanded into an addition to the chapter on the
question in De motu gravium (I, 284). Galileo reported the argument
in a way not presented by Philoponus in his commentary on the Physics
IV, but evidently conflated from two passages by Pereira (XL 10-11).
Again in reporting Hipparchus's theory Galileo falsely referred to
Alexander of Aphrodisias instead of to Simplicius's commentary on De
caelo (comm. 86) where it is to be found, and reported it in an
incomplete and distorted form which he proceeded to criticize (I, 31920). A clue is found in a fragmentary note on Hipparchus's theory (I,
411), with in another fragment (ibid.} and in a marginal note to De
motu gravium (I, 318 n. 1) an explicit quotation from the chapter in
which Pereira (XIV. 3) presented it in the same incomplete and
distorted form as that criticized by Galileo. Further, Galileo's account
of the "horizontal plane" of the Earth (I, 299-301, cf, 340, 407-8;
above n. 49) is the same as that given by Clavius in his Sphaera (1581,
pp. 132-2). In view of his very detailed use of Clavius for his
Tractatio de caelo it is reasonable to suppose that he based his account
on this textbook here also67.
De motu gravium was linked then with the scholastic treatises
through these common Jesuit sources, and this link we have to take
into account in trying to place both in Galileo's intellectual biography.
67
Cf. for the same point with the same diagrams FRANCESCO MAUROLICO, Dialogbi
de cosmographia (Venetiis, 1543), whose work was known to Clavius; A. MASOTTI,
"Maurolico, Francesco (1494-1575)", Dictionary of Scientific Biography, IX (New York,
1974) 190-4; above n. 28.
222
Unhappily there seems to be no firm evidence for the date when he read
any of these sources. All we have are some fragile hints for Clavius.
It seems likely that Galileo used figures for the dimensions of the world
taken from Clavius for his letter of 1597 to Mazzoni (above n. 21).
One later manusctipt (c. 1624) of the version of his Trattato della sfera
(1606) published by Favaro contains a "Tabula climatum" (II, 244-5,
cf. 207, 209) closely similar to that in Clavius (1581, pp. 413-4) but
not found in earlier copies or in the earlier unpublished version of the
Trattato (1601) in the Ambrosian Library. Although he did not
mention Clavius in what remains of his lectures on the new star of
1604, where he cited a series of other authors, it seems certain that
he must have known of his extensive discussion in the Sphaera of the
earlier new star of 1572 (above n. 23). This was mentioned by one of
Galileo's correspondents at the end of 1604 (X, 132), when Clavius
himself also wrote to him about his own observations (X, 121).
Evidence for the dating of De motu gravium is to say the least
undecisive. The main physical issue with which it was concerned was
the nature of gravity and hence the cosmological arrangement and
motions of the four terrestrial elements. The geocentric cosmology
made explicit in the introduction to the final version but also assumed
throughout (I, 252-3, 342-5) could hardly have been written during
the period of Galileo's public campaign for Copernicus opened with
the Sidereus nucius (1610). He cited Copernicus's De revolutionibus
once in De motu gravium (I, 326) but not in connection with the
motions of the Earth. He named him also in the Tractatio de caelo
(I, 43, 47-54; cf. above n. 28) explicitly to refute his opinion. These
geocentric doctrines might seem to place both treatises before Galileo's
Copernican declarations of 1597 to Mazzoni and Kepler, but he
continued after that for whatever reason to assume the old cosmology in
his lectures on the new star of 1604 and in his Trattato della sfera
in 1606. He introduced in De motu gravium a critique of Aristotle,
based on Plato and Archimedes, for his general failure to understand
mathematics and his particular theory of gravity. This is absent from
the Tractationes de mundo et de caelo. If we assume a progressive
intellectual development this would place De motu gravium after the
Tractationes. If all three scholastic treatises were written about the
same time, and all after 1597 because of the use of Carbone for the
Disputationes, this would place De motu gravium still later. Their
common use of Jesuit sources might suggest composition at nearly the
same time. So might their common syllogistic style of argument. This
might not seem a specific resemblance because Galileo continued to
combine scholastic with Archimedean methods in his later works, but
the Aristotelian dynamics of De motu gravium seems to link it more
223
definitely with his scholastic treatises on cosmology and natural philosophy 68.
A reference in the dialogue De motu gravium (I, 379) to his
reconstruction in La bilancetta of the exact method by which Archimedes
assessed the proportion of gold and silver in King Hiero's crown places
that and hence the treatise after this work. Then can we date La
bilancetta? The story of Hiero's crown had been told by Vitruvius,
but according to Galileo with a crude method unworthy of Archimedes's
superior intellect. After examining Archimedes's treatises on floating
bodies and the balance he had found his true method (I, 215-6, cf.
211-4). Galileo's boasted reconstruction resembles a version of Archimedes's method given in the Carmen de ponderibus et mensuris, a work
on weights and measures dating from about 500 AD which is the
second extant source for the story of Hiero's crown. It was published
with the grammarian Priscian's works in 1516 and 1584 69. An account of the method closer to the Carmen than to Galileo was
published by Giovanni Battista della Porta in the edition of his Magia
naturalis of 1589 70. Like Galileo he claimed to be offering a new
discovery of Archimedes's method. Galileo and Porta seem to have
become acquainted only after the publication of the Sidereus nuncius,
when they were put in touch by Federico Cesi and both became
members of the Accademia dei Lincei (X, 252, 508, XI, 175, 345,
XX, 511). Galileo referred to Priscian in his undated commentary on
Tasso (IX, 130, cf. 12-16, X, 244, XIX, 627, 645). His autograph
manuscript of La bilancetta is followed by an autograph table of
relative weights of metals in air and in water (I, 223-8). The values
given here and in the Carmen and by Porta are sufficiently different
for it to be supposed that he and Porta made independent measurements. La bilancetta is not mentioned in Galileo's earliest surviving
correspondence of 1588-90 which is devoted largely to Archimedes (X,
22-30). It seems to have had some circulation in manuscript before
its eventual publication in a work entitled Archimede redivivo in 1644
(I, 213), but neither it nor Porta nor the Carmen were mentioned by
Mazzoni in his discussion of Hiero's crown in his In universam...
68
Galileo's reference to a question "amicissimi nostri Dionigii Fontis" (I, 368)
could have been written before or after his friends's death and so does not help with
dating; nor in fact does the discussion in the Discorso (1612) on floating bodies of a
problem similar to one in De motu gravium, for the problems were different and so the
one discussion was not a correction of the other: cf. SHEA (1972) 19-20, above n. 21.
69
PRISCIANI CAESARIENSIS, Institutiones grammaticae, adiectis nuper praetermissis
Libello de XII carminibus (Parrhisiis, 1516) f. 127rv and Libri omnes (Basileae, 1584)
863-4.
70
lo. BAPT. PORTA NEAPOLITANUS, Magiae naturalis libri XX, XVIII.8 (Neapoli,
1589) 285-6.
224
(1597, p. 232). Another reconstruction of Archimedes's method

resembling Galileo's with a description of the hydrostatic balance was
published by Marino Ghetaldi in his Promotus Archimedis (Romae,
1603), writing in the preface that he had been urged to publish it by
Clavius 71. But since the Carmen had been available in print throughout
most of the sixteenth century all this throws no clear light on the
date of La bilancetta. The date often given as 1586 is based on the
sole evidence of a manuscript note added by Viviani in the margin of
his life of Galileo in 1654 (XIX, 605, cf. I, 211).
A further problem is presented by Le mecaniche. This exists in
two versions, a shorter version of lectures dated 1594 in a manuscript
discovered by Favaro72 too late to be included in the Edizione Nazionale,
and the longer and much more developed version which he did include.
This longer version contains a discussion (absent from the shorter
version) of the motion of a body on an inclined plane which seems
less developed than that found in De motu gravium. Both discussions
were based on the idea that heavy bodies could be moved on a
horizontal plane by any force however small. This was presented in
the former work as an obvious consequence of "the constitution of
nature with regard to the movements of heavy bodies" and stated as an
"undoubted axiom" (II, 179-80). But in the latter Galileo thought
that it "seems quite hard to believe" and set out to demonstrate it
from the principle of the balance (I, 299; cf. above n. 49). He
referred also to an earlier discussion of the problem (I, 296). On
this rather slender evidence should we conclude that De motu gravium
was written after the longer Le mecaniche? Then when was the latter
written? He mentioned to Vinta in 1610 that he had in hand "tre
libri delle mecaniche" (X, 352). In a short piece of uncertain date
from Florence about a machine he wrote that he had formed "already a
long time ago" (VIII, 572; cf. above nn, 50, 58) the concept given
prominence in Le mecaniche that nature cannot be cheated by art.
These remarks suggest composition well before he returned to Florence
in 1610. But it appears that a demonstration in the work concerning
the proportion of the force required to pull a weight on planes with
different inclinations was unknown to Galileo until G. B. Baliani sent
it to him on 17 June 1615 (XII, 186-8). From a much later letter by
71
See "Quomodo Archimedis argenti mixtionem deprehendit in auro" (pp. 51 sqq.);
L. CAMPEDELLI, "Ghetaldi (Ghettaldi), Marino (1566 [1568?] -1626)", Diet. Set. Biog.,
V (1972)
381-3.
72
Cf. FAVARO, "Delia meccaniche lette in Padova 1'anno 1594 da Galileo Galilei",
Memorie del R. Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, XXVI (1899) and WISAN
(1974) above n. 20, for the resemblances between Le mecaniche and De motu gravium.
225
Baliani of 1 July 1639 (XVIII, 68-71) we learn that many years before
Baliani had sent Galileo, from a manuscript treatise on mechanics by
Francois Viete in his possession, an improvement on a solution by
Pappus concerning the inclined plane, and that Galileo had replied
claiming the treatise as his own. In the longer Le mecaniche the
solution is introduced with a criticism of Pappus (II, 181). Again
this version contains a precise definition of the concept of momenta
absent from the shorter version (II, 159). Does all this place the
longer Le mecaniche after Baliani's letter of 1615?
Some further circumstantial evidence might support such a dating.
When in 1620 Elie Diodati wrote to Galileo saying that he had never
seen any work by him on mechanics, Galileo replied that this was no
wonder, since his many disputes over several years had delayed the
completion both of "my Mechanics and my System", ie. of the World
(XIII, 48, 53). There is no copy of Le mecaniche in the Pinelli
collection, where one might expect to find it if Galileo had written it
at Padua before 1601, since Pinelli was interested in the subject. The
titles of other treatises written at Padua describe Galileo as "matematico dello Studio di Padova" or "lettore di matematica nello Studio di
Padova" (e.g. II, 207), but in the manuscript copies of Le mecaniche
the author is indicated simply as "il Galileo" or as Galileo Galilei
"Accademico Linceo" or just "Fiorentino". This seems to point to a
later date, when he was famous, living in Florence, and a member of
the Lincei. Again in Le mecaniche Galileo discussed the apparent
paradox of the Archimedean screw in the same way as Guidobaldo del
Monte in De cochlea, published posthumously in 1615. But how can
composition after this date be squared with his remarks quoted above?
But we could go on. If this various evidence displaces Le mecaniche
to a date so much later than the traditional 1590s based on Vincenzo
Viviani's notoriously unreliable witness, it might seem to make De
motu gravium even later. We may suppose that it was written with
revisions over several years. The mature style of arguing in this
treatise, with its sophisticated use of Archimedes, should warn us
against considering it as an unsuccessful attempt by a young mathematical lecturer at Pisa or Padua to discuss traditional questions relating
to the motion of bodies. The mention of an extensive commentary on
Ptolemy's Almagest, which the author claims to have just completed
and to be about to publish (I, 314), confirms the impression that here
we have the work of an experienced scholar. Since no such commentary
is extant among Galileo's writings, can this refer to something that
was to be incorporated in the Dialogo? We know from correspondence
that it was in 1624 and 1625 that what was originally planned as a
Dialogo del flusso e reflusso developed into a larger discussion of the
226
Ptolemaic and Copernican systems (XIII, 236, 282) 72a . The eventual
Dido go (1632) was linked again with both De motu gravium and the
scholastic treatises on cosmology and natural philosophy through the
fragmentary notes in Ms. Galileiano 46 and through their use of
common Jesuit sources. Thus two of these notes (I, 416) on Aristotle
refuting Plato's involvement with geometry became the celebrated
assertion by Simplicio in the Dido go (VII, 229) that mathematics might
be true in the abstract but not so true in matter, both citing the same
example of sphaera tangit planum in puncto (cf. I, 301) 73 . Again
Salviati's criticism of Aristotle's merely probable reasons for there being
only three dimensions and demonstration of the same thing by mathematics (VII, 34, 38) are identical with those given in Clavius's Sphaera
(1581, pp. 13-15). In a further exchange between Simplicio and
Sagredo (VII, 256) we find at least an echo of the distinction made
by Pereira in De communibus... (I. 16) between physics as a science
based on sensory evidence and probable reasons and mathematics as a
science based on intellectual evidence and necessary demonstrations,
even if mathematical demonstrations were not potissimae. We find
a specific citation in the expression used by Simplicio for Plato's theory
of knowledge: nostrum scire est quoddam reminisci. This appears
nowhere in Ficino's Latin translation of Plato, but is given by Pereira
as a quotation from Plato saying "nostrum scire nihil aliud esse, quam
quoddam reminisci" (III. 6).
Can we find a date for De motu gravium? We know from
correspondence that Galileo was writing a general treatise on motion in
the years 1628-31. Cesi wrote on 9 September 1628 urging him not to
waste time in answering opponents, but to carry on working to
complete his writings on various subjects including the "knowledge of...
the nature of all motions (la natura di tutti i moti}" (XIII, 448).
Cavalieri wrote on 3 December 1630 saying that he was glad to hear
that Galileo had resumed his "theorizing on motion (speculationi del
moto}... seeing that with such science and mathematics coupled together
it is possible to undertake theorizing about natural things" (XIV, 171).
Galileo himself wrote on 29 November 1631 to Cesare Marsili to say
that he was planning to publish the "first book on motion (primo libro
del motoY (XIV, 312) immediately after his forthcoming Dialogo.
Was this the treatise "De motu locali" to be published in the Discorsi
(1638)? Its three books correspond to his description to Vinta in
1610. Parts of this treatise can be dated to the years 1602-9, and
724
Cf. CARUGO, Gli avversari di Galileo ed il loro contribute alia genesi e immediata fortuna del Dialogo..., Saggi su Galileo Galilei, IIP (Firenze, 1972) 128-207.
73
Cf. ARISTOTLE, Metaphysics, 11.2, 995al4-16, III.2, 997b34-998a6; above n. 49.
22 7
Galileo could have resumed work on it after his many years of

controversy. But it is a purely mathematical treatise and if the correspondence refers to a philosophical treatise on the nature of motion,
it may refer to the De motu gravium, which is such a treatise on the
causes of the natural motion of heavy bodies. To what else could it
refer? Was he writing two treatises, the one to complement the other?
Does the assorted evidence we have indicated justify so massive a
displacement of De motu gravium from its conventional dating at Pisa
or Padua to the eve of the Dido go or even later? If this seems like
attempting to prove the unbelievable that is not our intention. We put
the question for the evidence itself to reveal a believable answer.
The answer must affect the dating also of Galileo's scholastic
treatises on cosmology and natural philosophy and on logic. All are
linked with each other and also, though not necessarily immediately,
with the Didogo through their common use of Jesuit sources. We
know that the logical Disputationes must have been written after 1597,
but apart from that we have no direct evidence for dating any of the
other scholastic treatises. Did they all belong to the years of philosophical studies, some time between 1597 and 1610, of which he boasted
to Vinta? We can date Galileo's use of another work by Pereira, a
commentary on Genesis published in 1589 which was the source of the
exegetical rules for relating demonstrated science to scriptural revelation
discussed in his Lett era a Madama Cristina de Lorena (1615; V,
333-4)74. Likewise he used for this letter a comment added by Clavius
on the recent astronomical discoveries to his last edition of his Sphaera
in 1612 (V, 328). May we then suppose that Galileo read his other
scholastic sources some time during these years 1610-1616 when his
various cosmological controversies had launched him firmly beyond
mathematics into philosophy? His disputes obliged him to clarify his
ideas of science and of nature, and his writings of that period are an
evident product of such a clarification. A stylistic feature may also
relate De motu gravium to this period or later. Galileo in one of the
fragmentary notes in Ms. Galileiano 46 complained of people who read
his writings not to see "whether what I have said is true" but only to
"undermine my arguments" (I, 412). This may seem to belong to a
context of controversy and it became a familiar complaint in his
writings on floating bodies (1612), sunspots (1612), science and the
interpretation of Scripture (1613-15), and comets (1618-23). Alternatively his assumption that the world was inhabited largely by hostile
fools and knaves may simply be an enduring diagnostic symptom of
74
Cf. CROMBIE (1975a) 165, above n. 2.
228
Galileo's character. Another stylistic feature relating to the Jesuits but

not to the question of dating is the dialogue form used by Galileo in
the Dialogo. Galileo's dialogues differ from Plato's, where Socrates's
interlocutors simply raise questions and listen patiently to his answers.
They are an elegant form of the scholastic disputatio, revived by the
Jesuits, in which each speaker put forward a definite point of view
closely argued from experience, reason and relevant authorities, and all
aimed to clarify the topic and reach critical assessments of the solutions
proposed.
Galileo in his disputes aimed clearly to win not only the truth but
also the argument. He showed himself a master of all the dialectical
and topical skills of debate and persuasion7S. At the same time he
continued to be haunted to the end by an apodeictic vision of certainty,
however unobtainable. His scientific experience with a diversity of
problems made him well aware in practice of the degrees of certainty,
analysed by logicians, available in different kinds of subject-matter.
Central to his treatment of cosmology to the last was the distinction
such as made by St. Thomas Aquinas and discussed in the Dialogo
(VII, 30, 369, 488) between possible mathematical hypotheses which
saved the astronomical appearances and demonstrations through true
causes. He adapted his scientific methods and his immediate expectations to the subject-matter. The on-going physical argument through all
his major writings on natural philosophy aimed to dispute and reject the
Aristotelian conception of physical causes and to establish in its place
the truly certified conception which in the end he saw as uniformly
mechanical.
If we may so characterize Galileo's contribution to the promotion
of a rational philosophy of science and of nature articulated by the
Jesuits, against on one side scepticism and on the other Neoplatonic
and Hermetic magic, the direction of his argument led him inevitably
into often bitter disputes with the Jesuit Aristotelians themselves. But
these should not blind us to the underlying similarity of their rational
policy. Nor was Galileo in this alone among prominent natural
philosophers. Mersenne, Gassendi and Descartes promoted the same
sort of rational philosophy against the same sorts of opponents. "Car
la nature ne peut etre trompee, ni ceder a ses droits", wrote Mersenne
with evident satisfaction in opening his Les mecaniques de Galilee
(1634) 76 . Together with others of similar outlook they established an
75
J. D. Moss, "Galileo's rhetorical strategies in defense of Copernicanism" in the

Atti 76of the Convegno (1983).
Ed. B. ROCHOT (Paris, 1966); cf. LENOBLE (1943), POPKIN (1979), CROMBIE
(1971) and (1975b) above nn. 3-4, 13; and R. PINTARD, La libertinage erudit dans la pre-
229
identity for natural philosophy in their time, by closing many still open
questions through their insistence upon specific rational criteria for
Admitting questions, as well as answers, into acceptable scientific inquiry.
Galileo himself wrote no explicit critique of scepticism or magic or
Neoplatonism, which he.virtually ignored except for the brief period
of his Neoplatonic theological letters of 1613-15, but his sharp
awareness of these different kinds of philosophy is obvious in numerous
comments specifying his own. An interesting difference is that Mersenne and Gassendi were sufficiently sceptical to disbelieve that certainty
was possible in the search for causes in natural science. Mersenne
therefore insisted upon experimental precision. Galileo and Descartes
still on this question stayed with Aristotle. This could considerably
affect the relative weight given to experimental measurement as distinct
from mathematical or logical demonstration in scientific inquiry.
"The most subtle Galileo, easily the chief of the mathematicians of
our time, and likewise a noted philosopher", Liceti wrote of him towards
the end of his life in a book devoted to many questions unanswerable
by Galileo's criteria, including whether or not the universe was
infinite77. Galileo in 1639 acknowledged his copy with its account
of opposing opinions: "I cannot stop wondering how one single human
mind can store all the doctrines scattered in a thousand books by a
thousand other rare minds". As for the question of infinity: "The
reasons given for both sides are very acute, but in my brain neither
of them reaches a neceessary conclusion". Perhaps in the end "this
is one of those questions that happen to be inexplicable by human
reasonings, resembling perhaps predestination, free will and other matters, where only the Holy Scriptures and the divine assertions can set us
piously at rest" (XVIII, 106).
mitre moitie du XVIIe siecle (Paris, 1943); I. DAMBSKA, "Meditationes Descartes'a na tie
sceptycyzmu frankuskiege XVII wieku", Kwartalnik filosoficzny, XIX (1950) 1-24 with
French summary; H. COURIER, "Doute methodique ou negation methodique? ", Etudes
philosophiques, IX (1954) 135-62, La pensee religieuse de Descartes (Paris, 1972); T.
GREGORY, Scetticismo e empirismo: Studi su Gassendi (Bari, 1961); O. R. BLOCK, La
philosophic de Gassendi (La Haye, 1971); G. RoDis-LEWis, L'oeuvre de Descartes (Paris, 1971); R. MANDROU, Des humanistes aux hommes de science XVIe et XVlle siecles
(Paris, 1973); J. A. SCHUSTER, "Descartes' Mathesis universalis: 1619-1628" in Descartes:
Philosophy, mathematics and physics, ed. S. GAUKROGER (Brighton, 1980); B. V. BRUNDELL, Pierre Gassendi 1592-1655: From Aristotelianism to a new natural philosophy
(University of New South Wales Ph.D. dissertation, 1982).
77
Cf. CROMBIE (1969) 23, above n. 2.
Galileo Galilei, by Mario Leoni 1624 (Musee de Louvre).
11
Galileo and the Art of Rhetoric
with A. Carugo
Galileo's idea of rhetoric and his attitude towards it are unequivocally conveyed by the following passage from the Dialogo
(1632) on the two greatest systems of the world, which carries in
the margin the note: In the natural sciences the art of rhetoric is
ineffective . He wrote:
If this about which we are disputing were some point of law or of
other human studies, where there is neither truth nor falsehood, we could
rely a lot on sharpness of wit, on quickness in replying and on better
knowledge of writers, and hope that whoever excelled in these matters
would make his own reasoning appear and be judged superior. But in the
natural sciences, the conclusions of which are true and necessary, and
where there is no place for human judgment, one should be cautious not
try to maintain something that is false. For a thousand Demosthenes and
a thousand Aristotles would be left defenceless by anyone of little intelligence who has had the chance of knowing the truth (VII, 78) *.
i
Despite Galileo's disparagment of rhetoric recent literary critics

have claimed to have unveiled what they call rhetorical strategies
devised by him in his battle for a new idea of science and a new
philosophy of nature.
Jean Dietz Moss, in her study of Galileo's rhetorical strategies
in defence of Copernicanism2, has claimed that in his Lettera a
Madama Christina di Lorena (1615) Galileo closely followed the conventions of letter writing developed by medieval rhetoricians and
1
The Roman and Arabic numbers in brackets refer by volume and page to the
National Edition of Le opere di Galileo Galilei, 20 vol. (Firenze, 1890-1910). See for
a full discussion of Galileo's intellectual style A. C. CROMBIE and A. CARUGO, Galileo's
Arguments and Disputes on Natural Philosophy (forthcoming); also A. CARUGO and A. C.
CROMBIE, The Jesuits and Galileo's ideas of science and of nature, Annali delTIstituto
e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze , VIII.2 (1983) 3-67; A. C. CROMBIE, Styles
of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition (London, Gerald Duckworth, 1994).
2
Novita celesti e crisi del sapere, a cura di P. Galluzzi (Supplemento agli Annali
..., 1983, 2), 95-103.
232
adopted by the humanists, in particular the an dictamini which formulated the principles of epistolary composition with its distinctions
of salutatio, captatio benevolentiae, narratio, petitio and conclusio. But
Moss's own paraphrase of Galileo's letter hardly justifies the application to it of such rigid distinctions. As far as the Dialogo is concerned, she maintains that the arguments presented by Galileo are
not rigorous demonstrations in the sense of fulfilling the canons of
Aristotle's Posterior Analytics. They are instead dialectical in nature,
the probable type of reasoning treated in Aristotle's Topics and
Rhetorica. She has also remarked that the manner in which
Galileo presents his arguments is rhetorical, in that they are intended to induce assent from his fictional and real audience . But statements like these only show that Moss seems to be unaware of the
clear distinction made by Aristotle and familiar to Galileo between
dialectical and rhetorical arguments and to have vague and confused
ideas about the nature of rhetorical arguments, an impression confirmed by her random discussion of scattered passages from the
Dialogo.
A more rigorous and systematic analysis of the rhetorical structure of the Dialogo, and a more subtle discussion of the rhetorical
devices exploited by Galileo in presenting various forms of arguments, are be found in Brian Vickers's essay on Epideictic rhetoric
in Galileo's Dialogo \ Vickers claims to be the first to have noticed that the dominant rhetorical technique in the Dialogo is the
simultaneous use of praise and blame, elevating the Copernican
world-system and debasing the Ptolemaic (p.71). In other words,
the Dialogo exemplifies a brilliant application of epideictic rhetoric
as described in Aristotle's Rhetoric, book I, chapter III. Moreover,
according to Vickers the epideictic mode clearly lent itself to the
dialogue form(p:73), not so much to the Platonic one, in which a
priviledged and dominant speaker exposes the limitations of his partners' thinking, but rather to the Ciceronian form, in which distinct
characters espouse distinct philosophical points of view and each
speaker argues for his case. Hence Galileo's adoption of the rhetorical concept of persona or mask, which protected him from being
identified with his characters and allowed him to give a living reality
to philosophical ideas. Analyzing the topics that are praised or
blamed in the Dialogo, Vickers argues that, beside the encomia to
God and to the acuteness of human mind, which are part of the stan3
Annali dell'Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze, VIII.2

(1983), 69-102.
233
dard epideictic repertoire, the truly original feature of the Dialogo

[is] the fact that every other instance of praise and blame concerns
the new science, its heroes and enemies, and its positive contribution to knowledge (p. 81).
Despite the brilliance of Vickers's arguments and the evident
care with which he has studied the Dialogo, he does not seem to have
paid sufficient attention to what Galileo understood by rhetoric and
to what it meant for him. A clear indication of this can be gathered
from the passage of the Dialogo which we have quoted at the beginning. Rhetoric was regarded by Galileo as an art of speaking wittingly
and brillantly on legal or ethical and political issues so as to persuade
an audience to judge a case in one way rather than another, by means
of arguments that are only apparently conclusive and that lead to conclusions that are not necessarily true and may even be false. The natural sciences or natural philosophy, on the other hand, were conceived
by Galileo as a form of knowledge based on arguments not only persuasive but also logically sound, that is to say necessary demonstrations
leading to true conclusions. Therefore rhetorical arguments according
to Galileo were not only ineffective, but had no place in natural
philosophy and ought to be avoided in any philosophical discussion. If
any philosopher tried to resort to this sort of argument in a dispute
on how nature is structured and how it operates, he should be exposed
by those philosophers who were aiming at the knowledge of truth.
The classical distinction between modes of discourse aiming at
truth and at mere persuasion had been made by Plato in the
Phaedrus. This became well known in Marsilio Ficino's Latin version
composed at the end of the 15th century and was echoed by Galileo
as will appear later. Socrates in his analysis of true love starts by
trying to discern the nature of soul (245 C). He characterizes the
essential human soul as the soul that has beheld truth and the
soul of the philosopher alone as that which could rise on wings so
that it ever approaches to the full vision of divine perfection (249
B-C). Thus those who live a life of philosophy did honour to the
music of the eldest of the Muses, Calliope and Urania, whose
theme is the heavens and the story of gods and men, and whose
song is the noblest of them all (259 D). Then what was good discourse? Must it presuppose a knowledge in the mind of the speaker
of the truth about his subject? Must the intending orator know,
for example, what is truly just, or good or noble, or only what will
be thought so, since it is on the latter, not the former, that persuasion depends (259 E - 260 A)?
234
Supposing, Socrates continues, that neither he nor Phaedrus

knew what a horse was, he might persuade his companion to buy
a donkey by calling it a horse. It was the same when a master of
oratory, who is ignorant of good and evil, employs his power of persuasion on a community as ignorant as himself, not by extolling a
miserable donkey as being really a horse, but by extolling evil as being really good, and when by studying the beliefs of the masses he
persuades them to do evil instead of good (260 C). The art of
rhetoric was a kind of influencing of the mind by means of
words, not only in courts of law and other public gatherings, but
also in private ; and anyone possessing the art can make the same
thing appear to the same people now just, now unjust, at will, and
likewise now good, and now the reverse of good. The trick was
to make out everything to be like everything else , but then anyone who intends to mislead another, without being mislead himself,
must discern precisely the degree of similarity and dissimilarity between this and that. How can he do this if he does not know
the truth about a given thing (260 C - 2A)? Socrates contrasted
rhetoric with dialectic, the method of inquiry for the truth by means
of correct question and answer using the taxonomic procedures first
of collection, by which we bring a dispersed plurality under a single form in order to define it, and then of division, by which in
reverse we are enabled to divide into forms, following the objective
articulation . Thus by dialectic we could discern an objective unity
and plurality (265 D - 6B) and discover the truth. But rhetoric
aimed not at truth but at mere persuasion.
According to the manuals of rhetoric, after opening a speech
with a preamble, next comes exposition accompanied by direct evidence; thirdly indirect evidence; fourthly probabilities ; then in addition proof and supplementary proof, followed by refutation
and supplementary refutation both for prosecution and defence;
with covert allusion and indirect compliment and ... indirect censure and other tricks of those like Gorgias, who realized that
probability deserves more respect than truth (266 D - 7 A). But
it was not enough simply to have picked up the antecedents of the
art, as if people who had done that with medicine or dramatic
poetry or music knew anything about the actual practice of those
arts; for it is because they are ignorant of dialectic that they are
incapable of defining rhetoric (269 B) or of practising or teaching
it. The true rhetorician, the real master of persuasion aimed at
that and nothing else, but the art shared certain common methods
235
with scientific argument aiming to find the truth. All the great arts
need supplementing by a study of nature (269 D - E). Socrates
likened the method of rhetoric to that of medicine. Each, in order
to reach its goal, had to discover the true nature of its object.
Rhetoric had to grasp the nature of the soul in order to see how
it was persuasible; medicine had to grasp the nature of the body in
order to see how it was healthy or curable: In both cases you must
analyze a nature ... if you are to proceed scientifically, not merely
by practice and routine, to impart health and strength to the body
by prescribing remedies and diet, or by proper discourses and training to give to the soul the desired belief and virtue . This was the
method attributed to Hippocrates, but we must no,t just rely on
the authority of Hippocrates, but we must see also if our reason
agrees with him on examination. At the end of his analysis the
scientific rhetorician will classify the types of discourse and the
types of soul, and the various ways in which souls are affected, explaining the reasons in each case: suggesting the types of speech appropriate to each type of soul, and what kind of speech can be relied
upon to create belief in one soul and disbelief in another, and why .
For a certain type of hearer will be easy to persuade, by a certain
type of speech, to take such and such action, for such and such reason, while another type will be hard to persuade. All this the orator
must fully grasp, and next he must watch it actually taking place
in men's conduct. When the student of rhetoric, having grasped
the theory, could place any individual person in this classification of
characters, and could know how to seize the occasion for the appropriate tricks, then and not till then he has well and truly
achieved the art. There was absolutely no need for the budding
orator to concern himself with the truth about what is just or good
conduct or who are just and good men ... In the law courts nobody cares about the truth in these matters, but only about persuasion, and that is concerned with what seems most likely for the
purpose. The would-be master of persuasion must then suppress or
substitute facts according to need and say goodbye to the truth
forever. Then he will be equipped with the art complete (269
D - 73 A).
If the multitude get their notion of probability as the result
of a likeness to truth, ... these likenesses can always be best discovered by someone who knows the truth (273 D). Socrates rebuked
Phaedrus for suggesting that apparently it makes a difference who
the speaker is, and what country he comes from; you do not ask
236
simply whether what he says is true or false (275 C). The art of
dialectic transcended rhetoric because its aim was truth, and when
the dialectician wants to persuade he selects a soul of the right
type, and in it he plants and sows his words founded on knowledge,
words that can defend both themselves and him who planted them,
words that instead of remaining barren contain a seed from which
new words grow up in new characters, giving the seed immortality,
and its possessor the greatest blessedness attainable by man. The
conditions were that first you must know the truth about the subject that you speak or write about; ... secondly you must have a corresponding discernment of the nature of the soul being instructed
and arrange your discourse accordingly. Then you will become
competent as a scientific practitioner of speech, whether you propose to expound or to persuade (276 E / 7 C). Someone who has
thus done his work with a knowledge of the truth, and can defend
his statements when challenged, could fittingly be called a
philosopher . But a composer of merely literary works on whose
phrases he spends hours, twisting them this way and that, pasting
them together and pulling them apart, will rightly I suggest be called
a poet or speech writer or law writer (278 C - E).
Galileo's assessment of the scope and limits of rhetoric was not
particularly new and original, for similar ideas were commonly
shared by any learned person of his time. A clear and detailed picture of what was generally understood by rhetoric in the learned circles in which Galileo moved can be found in an Italian paraphrase
of Aristotle's Rhetoric produced in 1565 by Alessandro Piccolomini,
a philosopher whose works were familiar to Galileo and with whom
he had many points in common.
Piccolomini had acquired a great reputation as a philosopher
when, still very young, he published in 1547 an enlightening commentary in Latin to Aristotle's Mechanical Questions, together with a
learned treatise also in Latin on the question of what degree of certainty can be achieved in the mathematical sciences. Both these works
were very influencial in promoting among philosophers new debates
on the principles of mechanics and on the nature of mathematics and
its place among other speculative disciplines such as natural
philosophy and theology. Subsequently Piccolomini produced a series
of works covering the whole range of philosophical disciplines. They
were written in Italian and aimed to show that the vernacular was
as powerful and as flexible as Latin in conveying philosophical and
scientific ideas and arguments. Copies of some of Piccolomini's works
237
were owned by Galileo, whose style of writing in Italian show sometimes a striking resemblance to Piccolomini's. For instance a phrase
such as sensate esperienze e certe dimostrazioni which is recurrent
in Galileo's writings was coined by Piccolomini4.
After publishing treatises in Italian on logic, natural philosophy
and cosmology as well as on ethics and politics Piccolomini produced
a series of three volumes giving an extensive and detailed commentary or paraphrase on Aristotle's Rhetoric. In the preface to the
first volume, published with the title Copiosissima pamfrasi nel primo
libro delta Retorica d'Aristotele (Venice 1565), Piccolomini praised
Aristotle's style or method of exposition for being straightforward
and free from rhetorical embellishments, and preferred it to Plato's
poetic style which veiled the truth with obscure fables:
If we consider carefully the reason why of the two greatest luminaries
of learning, Plato and Aristotle, the latter has for so many centuries
predominated and is still predominating in the schools of sciences, we shall
find that undoubtedly this is so not because he is superior in learning: in
fact, although there have been and still are many who would not agree to
put Plato before Aristotle as far as sciences are concerned, nevertheless no
learned man has yet considered Plato inferior in learning. But we shall
clearly see that the true reason for Aristotle's superiority is none other
than the method, that is the way of presentation that he has followed in
his books: he has presented and expounded the matters of his treatises in
a clear, neat, proper and ordered manner, free from superfluities, without
enveloping them in obscure fables or veiling them with poetical imagery
(senza velo di poetica imitatione) and, lastly, without masking them with rhetorical ornaments (senza maschera di retorico omamento).
Aristotle's unrhetorical style of writing was regarded by Piccolomini as the most suitable for the study of nature. He warned
natural philosophers against using rhetorical trappings which would
unnecessarily increase the natural difficulty of discovering what is hidden in nature: Nature has unfortunately concealed and hidden its
things more deeply than man would wish or need: therefore > for
learned men, who struggle to discover and explain them, their intrinsic
and natural difficulty should be enough, without adding further dif4
ALESSANDRO PICCOLOMINI, La sfera del mondo (Venezia 1566), p. 4: E mancando le frequent! sensate esperientie tnanca ancora la certezza delle conclusion!; p. 246:
La certezza ... delle loro dimostrationi puo supplire in gran parte a quanto in prima,
per Pimperfettione che portano le cose sensate, si fusse mancato . A. FAVARO, Miscellanea Galileiana inedita, xii: La libreria di Galileo, Memorie del R. Istituto Veneto di
Scienze, Lettere e Arti, XXII (1887), 982-1034, lists three of Piccolomini's works
(nos. 384-386) including La sfera del mondo.
238
ficulty by resorting to poetical and rhetorical complications (con

poetici e retorici involgimenti) (p. 2). Piccolomini's warning against
the use of rhetoric in natural philosophy was clearly echoed in the
passage from Galileo's Dialogo which we quoted at the beginning.
The same note was struck by Galileo over and over again in his
writings, as we shall see later. For the time being we stay with Piccolomini and we follow his competent guidance in order to get a
proper understanding of Aristotelian rhetoric.
To justify why he thought it necessary to produce and publish his
own account of Aristotle's rhetoric, Piccolomini denounced the inadequacy of existing translations of and commentaries on it. He argued
that previous translators had corrupted and made a mess of the
Aristotelian text either by producing an unintelligible word for word
translation or by giving a misleading interpretation of their own:
When I examined those who have translated these books into another
language to see if I could find in their translations anything that could
throw light on some passage ... I found that they had really not translated,
but rather corrupted the whole text, since most of the passages had been
either painted (depinti) or misunderstood (contro il vero sentimento intesi}.
By painted I mean those passages which the translators, being aware that
they do not understand them, transpose from one language to the other by
using the same number of words in the same order. As a result, since different
languages require different arrangements of words and different forms of locution, those passages which are translated so closely to the original are rendered
unintelligible, besides being misunderstood by the translators themselves.
This is the way in which the translators paint the passages which they are
aware that they do not understand. On the other hand, as far as those passages
are concerned which they presume that they understand though they do not,
they depart from the author's true meaning (p. 3).
Faced with the task of expounding Aristotle's Rhetoric, Piccolomini soon realized that he had to adopt a different method of
exposition from the one that he had used in his previous works, in
which he had given accounts of Aristotle's treatises on logic, natural
philosophy, ethics and mechanics, and of Ptolemy's work on astronomy. In those works be had faithfully followed the opinions of the
authors so far as the substance of the matters treated was concerned, whereas for the method he had adopted a freer style, writing as it pleased me, by expanding or abridging the original, by adding things or leaving things out, by explaining and clarifying, and
by doing anything that could show more clearly the author's meaning and mind and make the matters easier (pp. 7-8).
239
But in expounding Aristotle's Rhetoric it was necessary not

only to show clearly, to penetrate, to expand and to disentangle
its substance and its pith and marrow, but also to explain step
by step Aristotle's meaning and mind. To do this Piccolomini
decided that the best method of exposition was to paraphrase,
since this was most suited to express the auther's mind by sometimes freely expanding the original in order to unveil and show
the substance of his ideas without ever departing from him (p.
8). The kind of paraphrase adopted by Piccolomini was one that
allowed him to make long digressions in order to strengthen and
clarify Aristotle's opinions by adding arguments and examples of
his own without abandoning his footsteps. By doing this Piccolomini was explicitly following the example of the ancient commentator
Themistius and particularly of his commentary on Aristotle's De
anima.
Rhetoric, says Piccolomini at the beginning of his paraphrase
closely following Aristotle's text, bears great resemblance and affinity to dialectic in dealing with subjects that are not confined to
any particular science, and in using propositions, terms, concepts
and arguments that are adapted to the common knowledge of men
rather than belonging to any particular science or to the deep
and precise knowledge of a specialist (p. 13). Knowledge of
rhetoric as well as of dialectic is so easily accessible to everyone
that anyone can understand and practise these arts without
difficulty. Rhetoric and dialectic are different from particular
sciences in that, whereas the latter treat their subject-matters with
a precise scientific method which is proper to each of them, rhetoric and dialectic instead form their propositions and arguments in
a way that is adapted to the common understanding of men.
In fact they use propositions that are not scientific and precise,
but apparently true and probable, and by means of such propositions they form probable arguments and proofs, so that their way
of proceeding is entirely proportionate and suited to the judgment
and understanding of men most of whom are unskilled (p. 14).
In rhetoric as well as in dialectic propositions, premises, causes
and arguments are derived not from specific sciences and arts,
but from common life, and are adapted, formed and used in such
a way that anyone can understand them who is not mentally blind
and deprived of almost all the senses (p. 15). But whereas dialectic concerns equally all sorts of subject-matters, rhetoric deals
more usually with civil affairs (ibid.}.
240
The strength of rhetoric consists in the ability of an eloquent

public speaker to persuade his listeners by means of arguments that
have only the appearance of demonstration, such as that which is
called enthymeme, which is an imperfect form of syllogism lacking
one of the premises. The enthymeme is different from the syllogism
in that, whereas in the syllogism both the premises are explicitly formulated and arranged in their proper order, in the enthymeme one
of the premises is always omitted, and it is left to the listener himself to supply it in his own mind. This is so because the speaker
does not have to talk in a learned manner nor for the purpose of
teaching, as he must in scientific disputations, but he can speak in
a popular manner suited to his listeners and therefore very similar
to the common way of speaking that is normally used in the activities of everyday life. As a consequence, he does not need to lay out
and arrange terms, propositions and arguments according to the
schemes and rules of deduction, as one must do when treating or
discussing some scientific topic the purpose of which is not just to
persuade, but to find truth itself (p. 33).
Rhetoric or the art of speaking (arte del dire, as Piccolomini
called it from the Latin expression ars dicendi which was often used
to translate the title of Aristotle's treatise) deals not just with what
is truly probable and persuasive , but also with what is only apparently so. And it requires knowledge not only of the true enthymeme,
but also of the apparent one. From this point of view rhetoric is
again similar to dialectic which requires knowledge not only of the
true syllogism, but also of the syllogism that is not true but has only
the appearence of being so. But from another point of view there
is a fundamental difference between rhetoric and dialectic which
derives ultimately from their different aims, dialectic aiming at gaining the truth, rhetoric at gaining the listener's approval.
Though the dialectician must know the apparent as well as the false
syllogism besides the true syllogism, yet he knows it not for the purpose
of using it deliberately, but in order to be on his guard against being deceived by it and to be able to expose and demolish it if it is used against
him. Someone who uses a false syllogism deliberately must be regarded as
a sophist rather than a dialectician, that is as someone who uses false and
deceitful arguments. But in the art of speaking things are different: the
rhetorician or orator does not aim to win the argument in a dispute by
using probable arguments in order to get as near as he can to the truth,
but he aims to win the audience over by any possible means. Therefore
whether he achieves this result by means of a true enthymeme and of a
241
truly probable or apparently true proof, or by means of an only apparently

probable argument, nevertheless he is still essentially an orator or a rhetorician, and is still called by that name (p. 41).
Piccolomini did not agree with other commentators who believed that the difference between a rhetorician and a dialectician
in the use of apparent and fallacious arguments was only a difference of names. He maintained that when a dialectician uses apparent arguments, he only changes his name and is called a sophist,
while nevertheless remaining truly a dialectician, whereas a rhetorician does not change his name because he uses such arguments. Piccolomini argued instead that their difference lies in the thing itself:
the deliberate use of fallacious syllogisms is forbidden to a dialectician, whereas it is allowed to a rhetorician for reasons based on the
different aims of these two arts (p. 42): for the dialectician tries
to get to the truth, whereas the rhetorician tries to persuade an audience.
The practice of the art of speaking required three things: a
speaker, an audience and the cause for which one speaks. Correspondingly there are three ways of inducing belief and persuasion:
one is based on the good opinion that the audience has of the speaker's behaviour; the second consists in making the audience favourablely disposed towards one's cause; and the third consists in being
able to argue and to show that one's cause is reasonable. In order
to master these three ways of persuading one must know three
things: first, one must be capable of arguing with good reason and
of exploiting the strength of syllogisms; secondly, one must know
the qualities and conditions of virtues and good behaviour so that
one's speech may produce a good opinion of one self ; and finally,
one must have a good knowledge of all human feelings, that is
one must know what they are, how and by what they are aroused,
and what effect they have. Knowledge of the various forms of
reasoning and argument depends on dialectic which deals with the
nature of the syllogism and therefore helps to strengthen any sort
of reasoning and argument. The other two kinds of knowledge, one
relating to the behaviour and virtues of man and the other to the
motion of the passions, derive their strength from the moral and
political disciplines: it belongs indeed to the moral and civil
philosopher to know what sort of actions depend on human will and
produce an inclination either to vices or to virtues, which entail
either praise or blame and induce people to have a good or bad
242
opinion of us. As for the feelings, though it belongs to the natural

philosopher to consider in what part of the soul they are placed;
nevertheless, since we are influenced by our feelings in taking a
good or bad decision in our actions, knowledge of how they are
aroused and of what their effects are belongs to the moral or political disciplines.
Piccolomini defined the art of rhetoric as a branch or shoot
of dialectic and of moral or political philosophy and separated it
from natural philosophy. He argued that whereas the natural
philosopher studies the feelings from the point of view of the subject in which they are placed, which is the appetite sensitive or physical desire, a faculty of the soul, the rhetorician instead considers
them as the stuff of which our virtues and vices are made and as
the principles of most human actions. From this point of view they
are the concern rather of the civil or political philosopher than of
the natural philosopher. Therefore civil and political actions are the
subject-matter proper to rhetoric.
From what has been said so far we can draw the conclusion
that Piccolomini's account of the Aristotelian rhetoric or art of
speaking eloquently stresses its distinction from a speculative discipline such as natural philosophy and its close connection with a
practical discipline such as political or moral philosophy. Rhetoric
has nothing to do with knowledge of nature and with the acquisition
of truth, but its main aim is to influence human actions. Rhetorical
arguments are entirely different from scientific arguments: they are
based on reasonings that are only apparently conclusive and lead to
conclusions that may be false, whereas scientific arguments are based
on necessary demonstrations leading to true conclusions. A rhetorical
speech is addressed generally to an unlearned audience, who can easily be persuaded to take one course of action rather than another
by an eloquent speaker who knows how to stir their feelings and
passions. But a scientific argument can be followed and understood
only by a learned person who is trained in the techniques of necessary demonstrations.
It was to this idea of rhetoric so competently described by Piccolomini that Galileo referred in his arguments and disputations every time he wanted to define as clearly and as precisely as possible
what he thought natural philosophy was about, that is its proper object, its method and its aim, in order to expose his opponent as incompetent or deceitful in using rhetorical arguments to support a
false picture of nature. Galileo's familiarity with and high esteem of
243
Aristotle's Rhetoric is confirmed by one of his earliest biographers,

Niccolo Gherardini who, writing in 1654, pointed out that it is far
from truth that he ... did not think very highly ... of Aristotle, as some
of those who profess to be his followers foolishly say ... Among Aristotle's works he praised above all the Rhetoric and the Ethics, saying that
he had written beautifully on this art (XIX. 645).
Among the notes and drafts that Galileo jotted down in 1612
while he was engaged in the controversy on the cause of the floating
of bodies, there is a passage in which he sets nature's operation in
opposition to human actions. Nature, argued Galileo, follows necessary laws and is not influenced by the sort of probable reasons that
form the rhetorical arguments by which some tried to persuade
other men to follow their deliberations and opinions:
Since nature does not change its operations in the least as a result of
men's consultations, what is the point of arguing so fiercely between ourselves in order to win the argument for one of our opinions: in fact our
influence on nature's deliberations is no greater than the effect that the
disputes and controversies between the members of the Venetian council
of nine magistrates have on the resolutions of the Emperor of China. Nature's deliberations are good, univocal and perhaps necessary, so that our
opinions and advice have no place in them; nor do probable reasons: hence
whatever argument we produce about them is either good and true, or bad
and false. If it is bad and false, we must laugh at it and demolish it, but
we should not hate whoever has produced it. If it is good and true, the
hatred against whoever has put it forward is impious, perfidious and sacriligious. It is nonsense to say that truth is hidden so well that it is difficult
to distinguish it from lies: it remains well hidden for as long as nothing
but false opinions are produced, leaving large room for probability; but as
soon as truth comes forward, its light shines as brightly as the Sun's and
dispels the darkness of falsehood (IV, 24).
From this contraposition between nature's operations and man's

deliberations, between the necessary laws of nature and the contingent laws of men, between demonstrative arguments leading to true
consequences and fallacious arguments which, though persuasive and
apparently convincing, entail false consequences, Galileo derived the
idea that rhetoric has no place in discussions on natural philosophy.
This opinion, which he shared with such authoritative philosophers
of the time as Piccolomini, was expressed by Galileo with strength
and conviction over and over again in many different writings, especially in the Dialogo where three interlocutors respectively voicing
Aristotle's opinions and reasonings (Simplicio), Galileo's arguments
244
and ideas (Salviati) and an amateur's observations (Sagredo), gather

together for the purpose of arguing , as the full title reads, about
the two greatest systems of the world, the Ptolemaic and the Copernican, by producing philosophical and natural reasons for the one
and for the other.
At the beginning of the Dialogo, after Simplicio has produced
Aristotle's argument to prove that the world is perfect from the fact
that it has only three dimensions and that three is a perfect number,
Salviati exposes the fallacy of this apparent syllogism which turns
out to be no more than a rhetorical trick:
I do not feel bound by all these reasonings to grant any more than
that what has a beginning, a middle and an end can and must be called
perfect: but I cannot grant by any reason that, because beginning, middle
and end are three, the number three is perfect and has the power of conferring perfection on those things that have such a number. I can neither
understand nor believe, for instance, that for legs the number three is more
perfect than the number four or two; nor do I think that the number four
is an imperfection in the elements, and that they would be more perfect
if they were three. It would have been better, therefore, if Aristotle had
left such plaisanteries to the rhetoricians and had proved his point by a
necessary demonstration, since this is what one has to do in the demonstrative sciences (VII, 35).
Again Galileo warns against mixing rhetoric with science and

against entangling rigorous demonstrations with rhetorical embellishments in the second Day of the Dialogo, during a discussion of some
of the traditional objections to the Copernican system of the world.
Simplicio relates an argument put forward by an Aristotelian
philosopher, Scipione Chiaramonti, in his book De tribus novis stellis
(1628): the Copernican hypothesis would bring a great confusion
and darkness into the system of the world by placing the Earth,
which is the dump of all corruptible matters, among the uncorruptible celestial bodies, which are regarded as noble and
pure even by Copernicus, who states that they are arranged in
the best order and removes from them any changeable property.
What better arrangement, and more suitable to nature and to the
Divine architect himself, than to separate the pure from the impure,
the mortal from the immortal, as they do in the other schools,
where they teach that those impure and perishable matters are enclosed within the narrow bounds of the concave surface of the
sphere of the Moon, above which the celestial things rise in an unin-
245
terrupted series (VII, 292). Salviati agrees that the Copernican system brings disruption into the Aristotelian world, but he points out
that what is being discussed is the true and real world. He goes
on then to expose the fallacy of Chiaramonti's argument:
When this author, following Aristotle, derives the essential difference
between the Earth and the celestial bodies from the incorruptibility of the
latter and the corruptibility of the former, and then from this difference
he pretends to draw the conclusion that motion must belong to the Sun
and the fixed stars and immobility to the Earth, he is falling into a paralogism by supposing that which is in dispute. For Aristotle derives the incorruptibility of the celestial bodies from their motion, whereas it is disputed
whether motion belongs to them or to the Earth. But we have already
talked more than enough about the vanity of these rhetorical illations. Besides, is there anything sillier than to say that the Earth and the elements
are separated from the celestial spheres and relegated and confined to the
sphere of the Moon? Is not the sphere of the Moon one of the celestial
spheres and, according to their opinion, placed in the middle of all the
other spheres? This a new way indeed of separating the pure from the impure and the healthy from the sick by providing room for the infected
right in the heart of the city! I tought that the lazaret should be removed
as far away from it as possible. Copernicus admires the arrangement of the
parts of the world because God placed the great lamp, which was to illuminate the whole of his temple with the greatest brightness, right in the
middle of it, and not on one side (VII, 292-293).
Salviati rounds off his tirade with the usual attack on the improper use of rhetoric in scientific arguments: But, please, let us not
entwine the firm foundations of demonstrations with these rhetorical
florid ornaments, and let us leave them to rhetoricians or rather to
poets, who have been able to extol and praise worthless, and sometimes
even wicked, things by means of their pleasantries (VII, 293).
The identification of rhetorical arguments with fallacies and
paralogisms which have only the appearance of demonstrations had
been strongly stressed by Piccolomini, and was reiterated by
Galileo, who exploited it in the many disputes in which he was
involved by denouncing his opponents as being more rhetoricians
than philosophers.
In a draft containing a reply to objections raised against his Discorso on floating bodies by Aristotelian philosophers such as
Cristoforo delle Colombe, Galileo stigmatized him for behaving
more like a rhetorician than a philosopher, and for using rhetorical
tricks to win popular applause:
246
My opponents, moved by those feelings towards me that they clearly

show in their writings, try any trick that could gain them popular applause
or at least could keep the crowd undecided. One of such tricks is that of
shouting frequently in to their ears, pointing out the apparent strangeness
of conclusions which are simple and true but which are removed from the
commonly accepted opinions of those who have the reputation of being
learned. And they do so in order that their listeners will keep to their old
ideas and will not bother to listen to any of the contrary arguments.
Another trick, which is amazingly exploited by Signer Colombo, is that of
answering all the arguments produced by his opponent, even those that are
insoluble. I said answering, though neither has he in the least understood those arguments, nor is there anyone who could understand his answer, which are not even understood by him. I think that he has learned
at a good school of rhetoricians how effective it is, in order to gain general
approval, to speak a lot and with boldness, so that the simple reader remains confused and undecided whether to give or to refuse his assent to
that which he thinks he does not understand because of his own limitations
(IV, 445).
Galileo's concluding remark shows the usual mixture of irony
and complacency with which he scores another victory on one of his
opponents:
I cannot deny that I have taken particular pleasure in seeng with what
skill Signer Colombo finds answers where there are none, forms arguments
from meaningless ideas and produces doctrines which he has never seen,
let alone studied. And he does all this with subtle smartness in order to
gain from cunning the profit that he cannot hope to obtain from reasoning
(IV, 445).
Galileo's disparaging comments on the use of rhetorical arguments in scientific discussions were tactical moves within a wider
strategy aiming at defining with clarity and precision the scope and
the methods of natural philosophy as distinct from other intellectual
activities such as historiography and poetry as well as rhetoric. The
purpose of rhetoric was to choose the most effective words and to
construct the most apparently persuasive, though often fallacious, arguments in order to influence the decision and judgment of the unlearned crowd. The aim of philosophy, on the other hand, was to
read the book of nature, and this task required men of great intellectual skill.
The proposition that philosophy is the proper nourishment for
men of great intellectual power and is what separates them from
247
common people was vigorously asserted by Galileo right at the outset of the Dialogo, in the dedicatory epistle addressed to the Grand
Duke of Tuscany. He argued that the book of nature was made by
an omnipotent Craftsman and that those parts of nature are more
noble and worth studying that reveal his craftsmanship to a higher
degree. The most noble of all is the system of the world, and accordingly the investigation of this subject is reserved for those who
are endowed with the greatest mental powers:
The difference between men and animals, however great, can reasonably be said to be very similar to that between men themselves ... Such
differences depend on the different powers of their minds, and I regard
this as amounting to being or not to being a philosopher: for philosophy,
as a nourishment suited to those who can be nourished by it, separates
them from the common people to a higler or lower degree according to the
variety of such nourishment. Those who look higher are separated by a
greater difference; and to look at the great book of nature, which is the
proper object of philosophy, is a way of raising one's eyes: though everything that can be read in such a book is extremely well proportioned, since
it has been made by an omnipotent Craftsman, nevertheless that part is
better constructed and more worthy in which we can see more clearly his
work and craftsmanship. The system of the world can be ranked, in my
opinion, among the highest natural things that can be apprehended by our
mind: since as a universal container it surpasses everything else in size, as
the rule and support of all things it must also surpass everything in nobility. Therefore, if ever there was a man who surpassed everybody else in
intellectual ability, Ptolemy and Copernicus were such men, for they raised
their eyes so high as to be able to read the book of nature and to
philosophize about the system of the world (VII, 27).
If then natural philosophy as a form of intellectual knowledge

for which only a few speculative minds are suited was to be kept
separated from rhetoric which is a kind of pratical knowledge accessible to common people of lower intellectual capability, likewise,
since it is based on sense experience and on necessary demonstrations, it must be clearly distinguished also from historical knowledge
which is based on recollection and on authority.
At the beginning of the second Day of the Dialogo Simplicio
asks with dismay: But if we abandon Aristotle, who is going to be
our guide in philosophy? Name some author, please! (VII, 138).
Salviati replies: We need to be escorted in unknown and wild
countries, but in open and clear places only the blind need a guide.
Those who are blind would better stay at home, but those who have
248
eyes in their face and in their mind must use them as their guide .
But Salviati's rejection of Aristotle's guidance is immediately qualified as a refusal to subscribe to Aristotle's statements, not as a
refusal to understand his arguments:
I do not say that we should not listen to Aristotle; on the contrary,
I approve of reading and studying him carefully, and I blame only those
who let themselves become enslaved to him so that they blindly subscribe
to every statement that he has made and, without looking for other reasons, take it for granted and regard it as a decree that cannot be violated.
This is an abuse which entails another extremely dangerous consequence,
that is that others give up any effort to try to understand the strength of
his demonstrations (ibid.).
Those who rely on Aristotle's authority and quote Aristotelian

texts in the course of philosophical disputations should be called
rather historians than philosophers, since they replaced arguments
with compilations of text:
What is more shameful than to see, during public disputes about conclusions that can be demonstrated, someone coming in with a text written often
for another purpose to shut his opponent's mouth with it? But if you want
to carry on with this way of studying, you should give up the name of
philosophers and call yourselves historians or doctors of memory (VII, 139).
Galileo took care to define as clearly as possible the scope of

natural philosophy by separating it not only from rhetoric and history,
but also from poetry. Natural philosophy aims at reaching true conclusions about the real world by means of necessary arguments based
on mathematical demonstrations; poetry, instead, aims at creating a
fictional world by imitating the style of celebrated authors. This point
is eloquently illustrated by Galileo in a famous passage in // Saggiatore
(1623) (chapter 6) which contains the powerful image of the book
of nature written in mathematical language. This passage is usually
misunderstood as a declaration of philosophical allegiance to Platonic
ideas. A more appropriate understanding of it can be obtained if it
is interpreted in the light of Galileo's constant efforts to give a precise
characterization of natural philosophy:
I think I perceive in Sarsi the strong belief that in philosophy it is necessary to rely on the opinions of some famous author, so that our mind would
remain completely sterile and infertile if it were not married to someone
else's reasoning. And perhaps he thinks that philosophy is a book produced
by a man's imagination, such as the Iliad and Orlando Furioso, books in
249
which the least important thing is that what is written is true. Signer Sarsi,
this is not how the things stand. Philosophy is written in this great book
which stands always open in front of our eyes (I mean the universe), but
it cannot be understood unless one first learns the language and the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language and the
characters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which
it is impossible for man to understand a single word of it (VI, 232).
As a natural philosopher Galileo would not resort to the kind

of rhetorical arguments which he was so keen to expose in his opponents. Similarly he would neither rely on quotations from authorities
nor let his imagination create a fictional picture of the world like those
concocted from various sources by such Renaissance philosophers as
Ficino, Cardano, Telesio and Bruno, all of whom Galileo ignored or
at least claimed that he had never read. What has been written by
Cardano and Telesio, I have not seen he declared in // Saggiatore
(chap. 9), rejecting Sarsi's insinuation that Galileo seemed to have
derived something relating to the comets from the sterile and barren
philosophy of Cardano and Telesio (VI, 236, 118). But as a natural
philosopher Galileo was also constantly engaged in disputes on issues
raised by his published works, and in order to fight successfully with
his opponents he had to learn the art of arguing. He could find little
help in rhetorical tricks, but had to turn to the more subtle techniques
of arguing developed by Aristotle in the Posterior Analytics, the Topics
and the Sophistical Refutations.
The theory of scientific demonstration contained in the Posterior Analytics was closely studied by Galileo in a series of still unpublished logical disputations (preserved among the MSS of the Galilean
Collection at the National Library in Florence, with the shelfmark
MS Gal. 27) on the nature of principles of scientific knowledge and
on the structure of scientific demonstrations, that is demonstrations
that lead to true conclusions by means of necessary arguments'.As
for the Topics and the Sophistical Refutations, there is no evidence
that Galileo devoted to them the same attention as he paid to the
Posterior Analytics. Nevertheless many of his works, particularly II
Saggiatore and the Dialogo, show him as a skilful practitioner of the
art of developing the kind of dialectical and sophistical arguments
described in these two Aristotelian treatises.
5
See references in note 1. above; also A. C. CROMBIE, Sources of Galileo's early natural philosophy , in Reason, Experiment and Mysticism in the Scientific Revolution,
ed. M. L. Righini Bonelli and W. R. Shea (New York, Science History Publications,
1975), 157-175, 303-5 : ch. 9 above.
250
The Topics treats forms of reasoning which, while syllogistically

correct, fall short of the conditions of scientific accuracy. The purpose of the Topics is to discover a method by which we shall be
able to argue from probable opinions about any subject or problem
presented to us, and shall ourselves, when sustaining a dispute,
avoid saying anything self-contradictory (methodum invenire per
quam poterimus syllogizare de omni proposito problemate ex probabilibus, et ipsi disputationem sustinentes nihil dicamus repugnans)6. In
other words, it has the purpose of making the two participants, the
questioner and the answerer, able to sustain their parts in a
dialectical discussion. The subject of the Topics was described by
Aristotle as the dialectical syllogism based on premises that are
merely probable (dialecticus syllogismus est qui ex probabilibus est
collectus] and was contrasted with the demonstrative or scientific
syllogism, the subject of the Posterior Analytics, which is based on
premises that are true and immediate (demonstratio est quando ex
veris et primis syllogismus erit}. In the Sophistical Refutations Aristotle
deals with the sophistical syllogism, which is based on premises that
seem to be probable, but are not really so (litigiosus est syllogismus
ex us, quae videntur probabilia, non sunt autem}. A knowledge of this
way of arguing was part of the necessary equipment of a philosopher,
as was pointed out by Piccolomini, not in order that he might himself make use of it, but that he might avoid it and prevent being
trapped in sophistical arguments used by his opponents. Galileo followed Piccolomini's advice and learned the techniques of the dialectical and sophistical syllogisms so that he could expose any fallacy
in the arguments produced by his opponents.
Throughout the Dialogo Galileo does not miss any chance of
showing off his mastery of the art of arguing and disputing by exposing fallacies and paralogisms in most of the arguments put forward by Aristotelians against the motion of the Earth. After arguing
that, whether the Earth moves or stands still, the shots of a piece
of artillery would not show any observable variation, Salviati warns
Simplicio to be cautious in acknowledging as true many experiences produced by those who never made them, but insistently
claim that they are exactly as they should be in order to support
their case (VII, 208). The simple truth, adds Salviati, is
6
This is the old mediaeval Latin translation of Aristotle which was still largely
used in the 16th century: see for example ARISTOTELIS STAGIRITI Opera omnia, i (Lugduni, 1580), 390-1, Topicorum libri, i, c. 1 on demonstratio, syllogismus, dialectus, syllogismus litigiosus and paralogismus.
251
that the effects of these shots must be exactly the same whether the
terrestrial globe moves or is at rest. The same will be true of all the
other experiments that have been or can be produced, which at first
sight appear to be true in so far as the old idea of the immobility
of the Earth keeps us caught among equivocations (VII, 209). Salviati's argument is further supported by Sagredo who joins forces to
unmask the fallacy of the traditional argument: I understand very
well that whoever will imprint in his imagination this idea of all terrestrial things sharing the daily rotation as something that belongs
to them by nature, in the same way as in the old idea they thought
that it belonged to them to be at rest around the centre, will discern
without difficulty the fallacy and equivocation which made the argument produced for the immobility seem conclusive (ibid.).
For all his admiration for Aristotle's skill in arguing, Galileo
does not hesitate to attack some of the most commonly established
Aristotelian arguments by showing that they are based on paralogisms. After Simplicio has presented Aristotle's argument to prove
that heavy bodies move in order to go to the centre of the universe,
Salviati not only does not agree with Simplicio in regarding it as a
conclusive demonstration, but he declares:
I am amazed that you need to be shown Aristotle's paralogism, since
it is so obvious, and that you have not noticed that Aristotle presupposes
what is in question (VII, 59).
This direct attack delivered against Aristotle's reputation as the

greatest authority on logic and the art of arguing provokes Simplicio's immediate reaction:
I beg you, Signer Salviati, to speak with a greater respect for Aristotle. How could you persuade anyone that he who was the first and only
one to explain wonderfully the form of syllogism, demonstration, sophistical refutations, the way of discovering sophisms, paralogisms, and in a
word all parts of logic, could then equivocate and make such a serious mistake as to suppose as known that which is in question? (VII, 59).
Simplicio's rhetotical tirade in defence of Aristotle is effectively

deflated by Salviati who, wittingly playing on words and deliberately
exploiting the equivocal or ambiguous meaning of the word organum
traditionally used as the title for the collection of the Aristotelian logical treatises, compares logic to an organ and argues that one thing is to
know the rules of an art, another thing is to be skilful in practicing it:
252
Logic, as you know very well, is the organ with which we

philosophize. But, as it can happen that a craftsman is excellent in building
organs, but is not trained to play them, so someone can be a great logician
but have little skill in using logic. Similarly, there are many who know the
whole of the art of poetry by heart, but are incapable of composing even
four lines. There are others who have learned all Leonardo's prescriptions,
but would be incapable of painting a single chair. One does not learn to
play the organ from those who build organs, but from those who play
them; one learns poetry by reading poets all the time; one learns to paint
by makins drawings and paintings all the time; one learns to make demonstrations by reading books full of demonstrations, and such are only the
mathematical, not the logical, books (VII, 59-60).
This impressive and convincing use by Galileo of the literary
form of the simile should not be regarded as an example of rhetorical ways of arguing, but only as a document of his mastery of the
art of poetry. Galileo's poetical style was not a substitute for
philosophical arguments, but an important aspect of them. In fact
the simile is used by Salviati as an essential part of his argument
aiming at showing that even Aristotle sometimes resorts to
paralogisms:
Now he goes on returning to the object of our discussion, I say
that what Aristotle sees in the motion of light bodies is the moving away
of the fire from any place of the surface of the terrestrial globe and its
rising straight upwards. This motion is truly towards a circumference greater than the Earth; indeed Aristotle Jihnself makes it move towards the concave surface of the sphere of the Moon. But that such a circumference is
that of the world or is concentric with it, so that to move towards it is
also to move towards the circumference of the world, this cannot be stated
unless one presupposes first that the centre of the Earth, from which we
see light bodies rise and move away, is the same as the centre of the world,
that is to say that the terrestrial globe is placed in the centre of the world.
This is what we doubt, and what Aristotle intends to prove. And do you
say that this is not a manifest paralogism? (VII, 60).
This stringent argument leaves Simplicio's position defenceless;
his reaction is an acknowledgment of defeat: This way of
philosophizing aims to overthrow the whole of natural philosophy
and to ruin the heavens and the Earth, and the whole world (VII,
62). Salviati, being the winner, can afford to be more confident and
to reassure Simplicio that philosophy itself cannot but benefit from
our disputes, for if our ideas are true, we shall have gained new ac-
253
quisitions; if they are false, by refuting them the old doctrines will
be further confirmed. You should instead worry about some of the
philosophers and should try to help and support them, for as far as
science itself is concerned it cannot but advance (VII, 62).
Salviati's remark about the benefits to be derived from philosofical disputes is further stressed by a marginal note stating that
philosophy can receive increment from disputes and oppositions between philosophers. This remark draws our attention to an important aspect of Galileo's way of philosophizing, that is to the fact
that throughout his life he produced and developed his ideas of
science and of nature by engaging in disputes with his opponents.
Most of his works, from the Discorso on floating bodies of 1612 to
the Dialogo of 1632, are in the form of disputations on specific and
precise questions, for which different and opposing arguments are
analyzed. In them Galileo displays all his skill in the art of arguing.
He seemed to take such pleasure in the practice of this art that
often in his disputes he aimed clearly to win not only the truth but
also the argument. This is particularly noticeable in those cases
where he is so keen to show off his virtuosity in arguing that he
first pretends to add arguments apparently supporting his opponent's
point of view, only to surprise in the end both him and his audience
by revealing their faults and paralogisms and thus destroying the
thesis being maintained.
An example of this way of arguing is offered by Salviati when
he discusses in the second Day of the Dialogo Ptolemy's objection
that a rotation of the Earth would fling off everything on its surface. At first Salviati pretends to add further support to the argument, which Simplicio considers so strong as to be irrefutable: I
want also, Signor Simplicio, to strengthen even further the knot of
the argument, by showing in a way which is even more obvious to
the senses how true it is that heavy bodies which are turned at a
great speed around a stable centre acquire an impetus or impulse to
move away from this centre, even though by nature they have a tendency to go there (VII, 216). Salviati's refutation of the argument
is all the more surprising as it is accomplished through reasoning
based on simple mathematical ideas which even Simplicio can understand and accept. Salviati brings Simplicio step by step to acknowledge that, in the case of the rotation of the Earth, the impulse
to fly off along the tangent to the surface is overcome by the tendency to move towards the centre of the world, so that all heavy
bodies lying on the surface of the Earth are kept firmly in their
254
place. At the end of a long and complicated discussion where all the
concessions apparently made by Salviati to Simplicio turn out to
weaken and finally destroy the latter's position and to consolidate
that of the former, Salviati cannot hide his satisfaction and pride
in having won:
You can see now how great is the strength of truth, for while you try
to knock it down, your very attacks help it to stand up and to become
stronger (VII, 230).
The disputational style of the Dialogo was not just a literary

form based on rhetorical conventions, as some recent critics believe,
but was required by the nature of Galileo's scientific enterprise,
which aimed to provide new solutions to old problems by showing
that the old solutions were based on unacceptable principles and on
fallacious arguments, and by building new arguments on the ruins
of the old ones. That style also reflects Galileo's experience of public debates in which he was engaged at crucial moments of his life.
A vivid portrait of Galileo in the act of disputing and of displying
his extraordinary skill in arguing to overpower his opponents
emerges from Antonio Quarengo's letters written from Rome between December 1615 and January 1616 to inform the Cardinal
Alessandro d'Este about the developments of the discussions which
Galileo was having with opponents of the Copernican system in order to persuade influental members of the Church to take a position
in favour of it. Galileo is here , announced Querengo on the 30th
of December, and often in gatherings of people endowed with intellectual curiosity he produces stupenduous arguments about the
Copernican opinion, which he believes to be true (XII, 212). On
the 20th of January Querengo sent a description of what was going
on in these gatherings that would be perfectly fitting for most of
the discussions in the Dialogo between Salviati and Simplicio:
You would enjoy it greatly if you could hear Galileo argue, as he often
does, among fifteen or twenty people who deliver cruel assaults on him,
sometimes in one house sometimes in another house. But his position is
so fortified that he can make fun of everybody: though the novelty of his
opinion is not very convincing, nevertheless he convincingly shows that
most of the arguments by which his opponents try to knock him down are
fallacious. Particularly last Monday, in Signor Federico Ghislieri's house,
he put on a wonderful show. What gave me the greatest pleasure was that,
before answering his opponent's reasons, he amplified and strengthened
255
them with new arguments which seemed very well grounded, but only in
order to destroy them later and make his opponents appear the more
ridiculous (XII, 226-7).
Galileo was after all sincere in his deposition at the trial in

Rome on the 30th of April 1633, when he acknowledged that his
main mistake in writing the Dialogo had been to indulge in that
natural complacency which everybody has of his own subtelties, by
showing that I was more clever than any common man in finding
ingenious and apparently probable arguments even for false conclusions (XIX, 342).
D I ALD O
G
O
I
GALILEO GALILEI LINCEO
MATEMATICO SOPRAORDINARIO
D E L L O S T V D I O DI P I S A .
Filofofo, e Matematico frimario dd

SERENISSIMO
GR.DVCA DI TOSC ANA.

Doue ne i congreflidi quattrogiornate fidifcorre
fopra i due
MASSIMI SISTEMI DEL MONDO

TOLEMAICO, E COPERNICANO*
7rofonendo indetertninatamente le ragioni TilofoficJjc, e Naturali
tantoper I'vna, quanto per I'altrapartf.
CON PRI
VILEGI.
IN FIORENZA,PerGio:BatiftaLandini MDCXXXII.
CON L1CENZA DE' SVPEÎORI.
Galileo Galilei, Dialogo (1632): title page: the disputation that precipitated
Galileo's trial, and made him a cultural symbol to suit many tastes.
12
Galileo Galilei: A Philosophical Symbol
Commenting some half century ago on the conventionalist view of the

Copernican system put forward by Cardinal Bellarmine1, following the
example of Osiander, Pierre Duhem famously declared2 that it was they, and
not the scientific realists Galileo and Kepler, who had grasped the exact
significance on the experimental method. Protesting, in his recent study3,
against this assertion, Professor de Santillana has pointed out that a wider
reading of Bellarmine's writings shows that his view of astronomy, so much in
keeping with Duhem's own philosophy of science, is an isolated island of
conventionalism surrounded by a sea of scholastic metaphysical realism
concerning all other subjects. De Santillana questions, moreover, whether
Duhem's conventionalist or positivist conception of science could in fact give
an adequate account of the work of the great constructive geniuses who have
actually created our experimental science - of the work of Galileo, for
example, as distinct from that of critics like Bellarmine or of other, more
systematic, logicians.
It is an indication of the permanent philosophical interest of Galileo's
writings that any historical account of his scientific activity must involve the
issue of interpreting his philosophy of science. Was his new science of inertal
motion, the 'very new science dealing with a very ancient subject'4 upon which
he pinned his conviction of the physical truth of the Copernican system, a
discovery of the real physical world or a conceptual invention, a fiction that
enabled him to predict?
If it were necessary to defend Galileo's intransigently absolute conception of
verified scientific theories against such critics as Duhem, one could legitimately
do so by pointing out that with the concrete philosophical and scientific
Roberto Bellarmino a Paolo Antonio Foscarini, 12 aprile 1615\ in Le Opera di Galileo Galilei,
ed. naz., (Firenze, 1902, xii), pp. 172-2.
2
P. Duhem, Essai sur la notion de theorie physique de Platan a Galilee, 'Annales de philosophic
chretienne', vi (1908), 588, 584-5.
3
G. de Santillana, The Crime of Galileo, (Chicago, 1955), pp. 107-8.
4
Galileo, Discorsi e dimonstrazioni matematiche, intorno a due nuove scienze, iii (Opere, ed.
naz., viii), p. 190.
258
situation and the actual methodological and technical problems which he had
to face, it was the one most calculated to be effective. But when one looks at
the many different and contradictory interpretations that have been given of
Galileo's philosophy of science and of its significance in the history of thought,
one is tempted to conclude that no such defence is is really necessary. The
critics may safely be left to cancel each other out. In fact Galileo has been
made to occupy almost every position on the line of antithesis between his and
Bellarmine's contributions to the Copernican debate. Philosophers looking for
historical precedent for some interpretation or reform of science, which they
themselves are advocating, have all, however much they have differed from
each other, been able to find in Galileo their heart's desire.
For his contemporaries, Galileo's fame was chiefly that of the telescopic
observer of the heavens, the discoverer of the mountains on the moon, the
rotation of the sunspots. Jupiter's satellites and the author of the mathematical
law of free fall, who had destroyed the Aristotelian cosmology and won the
martyr's palm by his advocacy of the new system of Copernicus5. By a direct
appeal to observation he had ruined the dogmatic belief of the schools that the
great problems of physics could be solved by pure reason alone, and by the use
of mathematics he had shown how to solve them. Although Mersenne failed to
be able to get Galileo's results when he repeated his famous experiments with a
ball rolling down an inclinical plane6, Galileo was regarded by the end of the
seventeenth century, for example in the Royal Society, as the founder, with
Francis Bacon, of the experimental method, of the New or Experimental
Philosophy7. This was his chief reputation during the eighteenth century also,
when Voltaire8 and David Hume9 pointed out that whereas Bacon had only
preached the use of experiment, Galileo had both practised it and married it
with mathematical reasoning. Montucla10 and Lagrange11 asserted that the
laws Galileo discovered in mechanics implied a profounder genius than the
novelties he detected in the sky. It was no doubt his reputation as the founder
of the experimental method, accepted for example in Whewell's Philosophy of
the Inductive Sciences (1840)12, that encouraged the strange elaboration in the
5
R. Dugas, Le mecanique au XVHe siecle, (Neuchatel, 1954), p. 88.

Marin Mersenne, Traitez de la nature des sons, et des mouvements de toutes sortes de corps',
ii, prop, vii, corollaire i, ii, Harmonic Universelle (Paris, 1636), i, 112; A. Koyre, Etudes
Galileennes, (Paris, 1939), ii, 73.
7
Cf. Dr Wallis's Account of some Passages of his own Life in Peter Langtoft's Chronicle, ed.
Thomas Hearne, (London, 1725), I, clxi.
8
Siecle de Louis XVI (1752), Ch. 31, Oeuvres, (Geneva, 1769), xii, 36-38; Essai sur les moeurs
et I'esprit des nations (1756), Ch. 121, Oeuvres, ix, 371-2.
9
History of Great Britain, under the House of Stuart, 2nd. ed., (London, 1759), i, 129.
10
S.F. Montucla, Histoire des mathematiques, (Paris, 1758), ii, 260.
11
J.L. Lagrange, Mecanique analytique, 2nd. ed. (Paris, 1811), i, 221.
12
Book xii, Ch. 10 (London, 1840), pp. 379-83; cf. Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences
(1837), Book v, Ch. iii, 3 and Book vi, Ch. ii, 5. For other examples see J.F.W. Herschel, A
Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, (London, 1830), pp. 113 sqq., 167-8;
Biographic universelle, 2nd by M. Michaud, (Paris, 1856), xv, 412, 417.
6
259
nineteenth century of the story of Galileo dropping two different weights from
the Leaning Tower of Pisa, in order to prove, as his law of falling bodies stated,
that all bodies fall with the same acceleration, and to disprove the Aristotelian
teaching that the speed would be proportional to the weight. In his account of
the history of this story, Lane Cooper13 has shown that half a page written sixty
years after the date of the alleged event by Galileo's disciple and biographer,
Viviani, is the origin of the full nineteenth-century version14 of the young
professor toiling up the winding stair of the Leaning Tower with two different
weights (in some accounts the larger one was almost as large as himself) to
make his great challenge to the elderly Aristotelians, and of the gasp of
surprise and indignation from the vast assembly of the professors and students
gathered below when the two objects struck the ground with the same
resounding blow. An experiment of this kind had in fact been mentioned in
various writings since late classical times, and in his De Motu, written about
1590 when he was at Pisa, Galileo claims to have performed it 'from a high
tower'15. In 1612, and again in 1641, two acquaintances of Galileo claimed to
have dropped weights from the Leaning Tower.16 The results were always the
same. The heavier body always reached the ground considerably before the
lighter. 'Oh how readily are true demonstrations drawn from true principles!'17, exclaimed Galileo in 1590, when in fact he was not disagreeing with
Aristotle on this point. The truth is that it was not on experimental grounds,
but because he came to re-think the whole theory of motion, that Galileo
finally parted company with Aristotle. The experimental results in fact
disagreed with both the old and the new dynamics, for the Aristotelians had
predicted an incorrect proportion between the velocities of different weights,
and Galileo predicted that the velocities would be the same. But this did not
upset Galileo at all. He incorporated the inconsistency into his new dynamics,
and made it agree with his experiment, by attributing it to air resistance.18 In
making this move he showed that genius not for pure experiment but for
theoretical reasoning using experiment, and that confidence in theoretical
reasoning even in the face of immediate experimental contradiction, which
marks the success of all his scientific inquiries.
One reason for the nineteenth-century elaboration of this story is undoubtedly that Galileo's reputation as the founder of the experimental method
had led Auguste Comte, equally unembarrassed by any great knowledge of the
actual historical circumstances of his experiments, to annex him in 1830 as also
a founder of positivism. Comte held that the real object of science had always
been 'savior, pour prevoir', knowing in order to foresee, and foreseeing in
13
14
15
16
17
18
Lane Cooper, Aristotle, Galileo, and the Tower of Pisa, (Ithaca, 1935), pp. 26-7.
See Lane Cooper, op. cit.; cf. O.M. Mitchell, The Orbs of Heaven, (London, 1851), pp. 63-5.
Galileo, De Motu (Opere, i), p. 334: Lane Cooper, op. cit., pp. 86-7, 54-5.
Lane Cooper, op. cit., pp. 28-32.
De Motu, p. 334.
Galileo, Discorsi, i (Opere, viii), p. 116; iv, p. 279.
260
order to gain control. His view of the history of the matter was very clearly
described by his friend J.S. Mill. The fundamental doctrine of a true
philosophy, according to M. Comte', wrote Mill, 'and the character by which
he defines Positive Philosophy, is the following: - We have no knowledge of
anything but Phaenomena: and our knowledge of phaenomena is relative, not
absolute. We know not the essence, nor the real mode of production, of any
fact, but only its relations to other facts in the way of succession or of
similitude. These relations are constant: that is, always the same in the same
circumstances. The constant resemblances which link phaenomena together,
and the constant sequences which unite then as antecedent and consequent,
are termed their laws. The laws of phaenomena are all we know respecting
them. Their essential nature, and their ultimate causes, either efficient or final,
are unknown and inscrutable to us'.
'M. Comte claims no originality for this conception of human knowledge.
He avows that it has been virtually acted on from the earliest period by all who
have made any real contribution to science, and became distinctly present to
the minds of speculative men from the time of Bacon, Descartes, and Galileo,
whom he regards as collectively the founders of the Positive Philosophy'.19
Even more explicit was the positivist interpretation of Galileo given towards
the end of the century by the great Viennese historian and critic of mechanics,
Ernst Mach, the grandfather of the modern school of logical empiricism.
'The modern spirit that Galileo discovers is evidenced here, at the very
outset', he wrote of Galileo's treatment of the problem of falling bodies, 'by
the fact that he does not ask why heavy bodies fall, but propounds the
questions, How do heavy bodies fall? in agreement with what law do freely
falling bodies more? The method he employs to ascertain this law is this. He
makes certain assumptions. He does not, however, like Aristotle, rest there,
but endeavours to ascertain by trial whether they are correct or not. We see
thus . . . that Galileo does not supply us with a theory of the falling bodies, but
investigated and established, wholly without preconceived opinions, the actual
facts of falling'.20
The great opponent of Comte and Mill in the philosophy of science and the
interpretation of scientists was William Whewell21, and Whewell's views were
largely influenced by Kant, who is the principal source of the modern school
most opposed to positivism. Embracing the apparent paradox that it was
Aristotelian science and not Galileo's that was primarily empirical, Kant
characterised the the significance of Galileo's methods as residing in their
recognition of the essentially theoretical character of scientific inquiry. The
19
J.S. Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism, 2nd. ed., (London, 1866), p. 6; cf. Auguste Comte,
Cours de philosophic positive, (Paris, 1830), i, Premiere lecon.
20
E. Mach, The Science of Mechanics, Ch. 2, 2,8, transl. from the second German ed. by T. J.
McCormack, (London, 1893), pp. 130, 140.
21
Prilosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 2nd. ed., (London, 1847), ii, 295 sqq., 317, 320 sqq.
261
'new light that flashed upon all students of nature', with the great work of
Galileo and his contemporaries, as seen for example in Galileo's treatment of
falling bodies, was their recognition that physics must determine its objects a
priori. 'They comprehended', he wrote, 'that reason has insight into that only,
which she herself produces on he own plan. . . . Reason, holding in one hand
its principles, according to which concordant phenomena alone can be
admitted as laws of nature, and in the other hand the experiment, which it has
devised according to those principles, must approach nature, in order to be
taught by it: but not in the character of a pupil, who agrees to everything the
master likes, but as an appointed judge, who compells the witness to answer
the questions which he himself proposes'.22
Developing this line of thought, that Galileo's chief merits were rather as a
theorist than an experimenter, some modern critics have been tempted to
suppose that Galileo was really indifferent to experimental tests.23 'Io senza
experienza son sicuro che 1'effetto seguira come vi dico', said Salviati,
Galileo's spokesman in the Dialogue, 'perche cosi e necessario che segua'.24
And indeed it is very often difficult to distinguish Galileo's thought experiments from his actual ones.
Turning from this sample of Galileo's critics to his own words and deeds, it is
clear that he was neither an early Comtean positivist nor a Machian
phenomenalist nor a Kantian rationalist, neither a Millian empiricist nor an
unempirical theorist, neither an unqualified Platonist nor a wholesale enemy
of Aristotle. Galileo's normal method was to deal with problems piecemeal,
and he often used different arguments for tactical reasons which cannot each
be generalised into a total point of view. When he decided to ignore the cause
of the acceleration of falling bodies and concentrate on the descriptive law,
'whatever the cause may be',25 as he said, and when he showed up the
Aristotelian causes and substances in physics as mere names, he wrote like a
positivist. But this was in order to put aside irrelevant questions and isolate his
problem. It was certainly no positivist who debated so passionately the truth of
the Copernican system or who claimed to be reading in mathematical language
the real book of Nature and to be discovering in verified theories the real
physical world of the primary qualities and their laws. These were no
economical summaries such as Mach conceived scientific laws to be, but a
world of real substances and causes, Platonic in that they were mathematicall
determined, Aristotelian in that they were inherent in matter, but Archimedean in their mathematical form.
22
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Preface to the second edition (1787).

Cf. Koyre, Etudes Galileennes, ii, 72-3, iii, 60, 66-67; Dugas, Le mecanique au XVIIe siecle,
pp. 80-89.
24
Galileo, Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, ii (Opere, ed. naz.), p. 171.
25
Discorsi, iii (Opere, viii) 202. See A.C. Crombie, Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of
Experimental Science, 1100-1700, (Oxford, 1953), pp. 285, 303-10.
23
262
Similarly, when Galileo wrote cavalierly of experiment, he did so to assert

the superiority of the theoretician, able to foresee yet unobserved results, over
the pure empiricist who can see only the facts already observed.26 On other
occasions he wrote that one negative instance was enough to demolish a
theory.27 It is clear, as Kant perspicaciously indicated, that the method of
theoretical and experimental enquiry which Galileo described in so many
passages is what we should now call hypothetico-deductive, and the final test of
a true hypothesis was by agreement with experiment.
It is the utterly metaphysical character of a science that was so technically
successful that is the most arresting feature of all Galileo's inquiries. We may
disagree with his conviction that a verified theory is an absolute truth, we may
treat his Neoplatonic realism as a regulative belief and his mathematical
primary qualities as physical models, we may see his methods as a new syntax
and as the origin of philosophies that developed only after he was dead. All
these are the insights we may get into our own problems from the study of a
great thinker of the past. But these insights are not the same as the dead man's
own philosophy. Faithful to the paradoxical battle-cry of reform, stare super
vias antiquas, philosophers have extracted from Galileo's writings an almost
endless variety of meanings suited to present objectives. To justify this use of
history, Comte proposed the dangerous formula, that if no precedent can be
found in what the chosen authority states his methods and aims to be, then
precedent can be claimed in what he must really have been doing to be
successful28, even if he denies it. Certainly this distinction is not totally invalid.
But the formula universally applied would destroy the validity of historical
evidence altogether and would make all historical distinctions and precedents
entirely meaningless. It is not by reading our own problems backwards that
historical experience is enlightening, but by exposing ourselves to the surprise
that thinkers so effective should have had aims and presuppositions so
different from our own.
Postscript
See above, ch. 10, with Appendix (a), for the dating of Galileo's writings.
26
Discorsi, iv (Opere, viii), p. 296.

Dialogo, ii (Opere, vii), p. 148.
28
i.e. what the scientist was 'really' doing according to the interpreter's view of the methods
and content of science.
27
13
Alexandre Koyre and Great Britain:
Galileo and Mersenne
I REMEMBER vividly the occasion when I first encountered the work
of Alexandre Koyr6. It must have been in 1946. By this time I had
been introduced at Cambridge by CD. Broad to the classical study of
the history of philosophy through conceptual analysis, and I had been
much taken by the advice given by R.G. Collingwood to look in the
study of texts for the questions assumed in the answers given. I had
become particularly interested in the approach to the subject made by
L6on Brunschvicg in Les etapes de la philosophie mathematique and
by the work of Etienne Gilson on the history of medieval philosophy.
In 1946 I had just accepted an academic post in the history and
philosophy of science, and I was completing my last biological paper,
which was published in 1947. I was checking some French publications which had arrived in the Cambridge University Library after
the gap of the war years, among them the Actualites scientifiques et
industrielles, where in the volumes for 1939 I found the three parts of
Koyre"'s Etudes Galileennes. About the same time I encountered also
another French wartime publication, Robert Lenoble's Marin
Mersenne ou la naissance du mecanisme (1943). Contact with these
captivating intelligences (as I said on another occasion) was like
Galileo's description of the stimulation given to the ear by the musical
interval of the fifth, seeming at the same time to kiss and to bite, at
once seducing and awakening.1 They showed the enlightenment that
can be gained only by looking beneath the surface of immediate
scientific results and by seeking to identify the intellectual assumptions and the technical capabilities that made certain discoveries
possible and explanations acceptable to a particular generation or
group, and the assumptions and capabilities that made them impossible or unacceptable to earlier generations. They focused attention
on the need to study in depth the particular intellectual contexts in
1. Galileo Galilei, Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienze
(1638), i, in Le opere, direttore A. Favaro, 20 vol., Firenze, G. Barbera, 18901909, ristampa 1968, viii, p. 149; A.C. Crombie, "Premio Galileo, 1968", Physis,
1970, xii, p. 106-108.
264
which scientific changes have been brought about, and with them the
assumptions about both the nature of scientific knowledge and the
nature of the world that have generated resistence to change. This
conception of the history of science was very inspiring, and it was
especially Koyre who through his series of publications and his
personal influence inspired those of us in Great Britain, as also in the
U.S.A. and of course in France, who took up the subject professionally just after the Second World War. Koyre and Lenoble, and also
we should add Edwin Burtt with his much earlier Metaphysical
Foundations of Modern Physical Science (1924, revised 1932),
intellectualized the historiography of science. They made it part, and
showed that it had to be often a central part, of a more general historiography of thought. I knew them all, and especially Alexandre
Koyre, whom I first met in Brussels, and then many times in Paris,
London, Oxford and Princeton during the 1950s and later. In many
long conversations I discovered this extraordinary man, always fascinating in the intellectual perceptions deployed over his formidable
range of learning, not easily persuaded to change but always open to
disagreement, from which with his beguiling smile he would draw
some fresh and unexpected insight. I spent some time with him in
Paris about six months before he died, when he was being treated for
leukemia, and I saw him for the last time in hospital just before his
death on 28 April 1964. He greeted me with his usual courage and
gentleness, and we said farewell.2
One might say that by intellectualizing the historiography of
science Koyre risked disembodying the history of scientific ideas. It is
true that his example may have entailed a risk, despite the perception
and skill evident in all his work, although I cannot think of any
damage that may have come from his particular style of deploying his
insights. But one can both benefit and differ from even the most
inspiring of examples. This I shall illustrate briefly from some more
recent work on Galileo and Mersenne, but first I want to establish a
viewpoint, relevant to Koyre's own vision of the history of science.
The Western scientific movement with which we are concerned has
been, as I have said elsewhere, the history of men's relations with
nature and their fellow beings as perceiver and knower and agent,
mediated through particular visions of existence from which the arts
2. Cf. C.C. Gillispie, "Koyre, Alexandre (1892-1964)" om Dictionary of Scientific

Biography, New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973, vii, p. 482-490; for publications A. Koyre, De la mystique a la science, ed. P. Redondi, Paris, Ecole des
Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1986, p. 216-221; and for comments on
myself and on the historiography of science A. Koyre, "Les origines de la science
moderne", Diogene, 1956, xvi, p. 3-31, and "Commentary" in A.C. Crombie
(ed.), Scientific Change, London, Heinemann, 1963, p. 847-865.
Alexander Koyre and Great Britain: Galileo and Mersenne
265
and sciences have followed.3 It can be identified most precisely as an

approach to nature effectively competent to solve problems of two
kinds: those presented by particular phenomena, and those
concerned with general systems of explanation. By the scientific
movement I mean then the history of a specific vision created within
Western culture, initially by the ancient Greeks, at once of knowledge
and of the object of that knowledge, a vision at once of natural
science and of nature. We can trace this vision to the commitment of
some ancient Greeks, within a much wider intellectual movement, to
the decision of questions of all kinds, ethical and practical as well as
scientific and metaphysical, by argument and evidence as distinct
from custom, edict, revelation or some other habitual means. The
Greek philosophers, mathematicians and medical thinkers developed
thereby the notion of a problem as distinct from a doctrine, and the
consequent habit of envisaging thought and action in all situations as
the perceiving and solving of problems. They developed with this the
conception of a rational scientific system incorporating the solutions
of particular problems, a system in which formal reasoning matched
natural causation. From these two fundamental matching conceptions, of formal proof and of causal demonstration, each entailing a
capacity for self-correction, have followed all the essential character
and style of Western philosophy, mathematics and natural science
and their competence to control subject-matters of all kinds, from
abstract ideas to material things. This specific and selective Western
scientific vision at the same time closed elsewhere open questions of
what kind of world men found themselves inhabiting and so of what
means they should use to explore, explain and control it.
Historical questions arise then at different levels, some given by
nature, and some made by man. At the level of scientific thinking,
both in the perception and solution,of problems within the technical
possibilities available, and in the justification of the enterprise
whether intellectual or moral or practical, the history of science has
been the history of argument. Scientific argument has been diversified
explicitly through its history into different particular forms in accordance with the demands of different subject-matters, of different
theories of scientific demonstration, and of different conceptions of
the nature of things as the object of scientific inquiry. It has
proceeded by postulating principles as in the Greek mathematical
sciences, by deploying within its discourse designed observation and
3. Cf. A.C. Crombie, "Historical commitments of European science", Annali dell'
Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze, 1982, vii. 2, p. 29-51, "What is
the history of science?", History of European Ideas, 1986, vii, p. 21-31, "Experimental science and the rational artist in early modern Europe", Daedalus, cxv. 3,
Summer 1986, pp. 49-74; Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition,
London, G. Duckworth, 1994.
266
experiment using appropriate instruments and apparatus, by hypothetical modelling and analogy, by taxonomy, by probabilistic and
statistical analysis, by historical derivation as in the study of languages
and of living organisms. It has been aimed in different social contexts
almost as much at persuasion as at demonstration. But always if an
argument was either to demonstrate or to persuade acceptably it has
been expected to satisfy the stable criteria of logical consistency and
agreement with the evidence: criteria formalized by the Greeks themselves and their successors within the scientific movement. Of course
this kind of stratospheric view of nearly three millenia of intellectual
history sweeps insouciantly over periods or circumstances of incompetence or indifference; but whenever Western scientific thinking has
been revived or refocused or transferred from one culture to another,
this has been done explicitly as the revival or appropriation of an
existing tradition. This is not very surprising since the tradition has
had its existence both in living people and in texts available for
recovery and translation, and whether from the one or from the other
there has been an explicit continuation of education in the same styles
of thought and practice.
The historiography of science is concerned then with the history of
scientific argument, and with intellectual and moral behaviour in
relation to such argument. On this I shall make two further
comments. First, if we insist upon the cultural specificity of the
Western scientific tradition in its origins and initial development, and
upon its enduring identity in diffusion to other cultures, we do not
have to look far below the surface of scientific inquiry and its
immediate results to see that the whole historical process has gone on
in a context of intellectual and moral commitments, expectations,
dispositions and memories that have varied greatly with different
periods, societies and circumstances. These have affected both the
problems perceived and the solutions found acceptable, and also the
evaluations of desirable and undesirable ends and their motivations.
The whole affair as I have said elsewhere is an invitation to treat the
historiography of science as a kind of comparative historical anthropology of scientific thinking. Before all we must be concerned with
people and their vision, with their perceptions of problems and their
expectations in the uncertainty of an unknown future, and with their
response both in accepting and in opposing innovation and change.
As ourselves products of a particular time and culture, we may then
give ourselves the therapeutic surprise that effective scientific thinking
could be based on assumptions and have aims and motivations so
various and so different from our own.
Secondly, accepting all this, we do not likewise have to look far
into the scientific tradition to see that the whole programme has
presupposed the stability at once of nature and of human thinking.
267
Nobody knows what nature is, Koyre once said to me, except that it is
whatever it is that falsifies our hypotheses. The scientific movement
has comprised distinct kinds of knowledge which have had to be
tested in different ways. Propositions asserting factual regularities
could be tested directly by observation and have been the most stable.
Propositions asserting theoretical explanations must be tested by their
observable consequences and have tended to be replaced with the
development of more precise or more general theories. Propositions
asserting beliefs about the fundamental nature of the world have not
usually been proposed for testing but have been assumed in the
development of theories, until they have been replaced by the
rethinking of the foundations. From whatever level of its activity, the
Western scientific movement has generated through its history a
progressive accumulation of objective and reproducible knowledge,
and of methods and techniques for acquiring and developing it, that
are communicable to all mankind. This is an historical phenomenon
of the profoundest human importance of which historians and philosophers are, or should be if they have any intellectual responsibility,
obliged to take account. When Galileo insisted that we cannot cheat
nature, however much we may cheat our fellow men, he was defining
the identity at once of nature and of natural science.4 For it was
impossible to solve problems in nature whether theoretical or
practical by magic or by commercial bargaining or political convenience or chicanery. A large part of the argument within the scientific
movement, notably in the 17th century, has been directed towards
establishing its identity as distinct from other forms of contemporary
erudition. The specific history of science as a problem-solving activity
is not then the same as the history of ideas or ideology lacking its
identifying modes of self-correction and criteria of acceptability. Only
someone with no grasp of scientific knowledge, little of the history of
thought, and motivated no doubt by some catastrophic ideology,
would want to think it was.5
The illumination given by Koyre to our understanding of Galileo
came from his perception of Galileo as primarily a theoretical thinker
by contrast with the dedicated experimenter then currently presented.
There can be no doubt of the importance and influence of that illumination, which has guided the reshaping of all subsequent studies of
4.
Galileo, Le mecaniche, in Le opere, ii, p. 155, cf. Lettera a Madame Cristina di

Lorean (1615), in ibid. \, p. 326-327.
5 Unawareness of a specifically scientific movement seems to be exemplified by
Paolo Rossi-Monti, so far as one can diagnose from his somewhat undiscriminating comments on Koyre, Ernst Cassirer, J.H. Randall and myself: see his
"Aristotelici e moderni: le ipotesi e la natura" in L. Olivieri (ed.), Aristotelismo
veneto e scienza moderna, Padova, Antenore, 1983, i, p. 125-129, published also
in English in Annali... (as above n. 3), 1982, vii. 1, p. 3-7.
268
Galileo and of much else. In his brilliant demolition of this older

image of Galileo, he argued ingeniously that Galileo's Platonism had
led him to believe that experiments were really unnecessary to
confirm demonstrations established by reason.61 suppose that no one
would now agree with that extreme interpretation. Koyre also
showed that Galileo's principal model for mathematical physics was
not Plato but Archimedes. This gives us a better insight into Galileo's
conception of the place of experiment in a scientific argument.
Archimedes, for example in his treatise On the Equilibrium of Planes,
set out by purely theoretical analysis to reduce the possible postulates
that could yield the phenomena of the balance to an unique set,
rationally certified either by self-evidence or by sufficient reason: for
what sort of world would we have if they were not true? Then, since
he had so discovered the one possible set of true postulates, he could
derive from these a complete account of the experimental phenomena
without any need for experiments. Galileo took the "superhuman
Archimedes"7 as his model, but he realized very clearly that in the
more complex subject-matter of the science of motion he could not
reduce the postulates to the one true set by a purely theoretical
analysis. He went as far as he could in postulating possible theoretical
worlds but, as he pointed out on several occasions, notably in describing how he discovered the ratio of distance to time in falling bodies,
he had to decide by experiment whether his postulated ratio was that
found in the one actual world.8
To control theoretical postulation was then one way in which
Galileo brought experiment into a scientific argument, but he did so
even more extensively in another way: in order to explore ever more
complex subject-matters by experiment, as distinct from controlling a
primarily theoretical exploration. This was ignored by Koyre, but
A. Koyr6, "Galileo and Plato", Journal of the History of Ideas, 1943, v, p. 400428; cf. A.C. Crombie and A. Carugo, Galileo's Natural Philosophy,
(forthcoming), with full bibliography.
7. Galileo, De motu gravium, in Le opere, i, p. 300.
8. Cf. Galileo to Pierre Carcavy, 5 June 1637, in Le opere, vii, p. 90-91, and to G.B.
Baliani, 7 January 1639, in ibid, xviii, p. 11-13; A.C. Crombie, "The primary
properties and secondary qualities in Galileo Galilei's natural philosophy", in C.
Maccagni (ed.), Saggi su Galileo Galilei, Firenze, G. Barbera, preprint 1969,
"Sources of Galileo's early natural philosophy", in M.L. Righini Bonelli and W.R.
Shea (ed.), Reason, Experiment, and Mysticism in the Scientific Revolution, New
York, Science History Publications, 1975, p. 157-175, 303-305, "Philosophical
presuppostions and shifting interpretations of Galileo", in J. Hintikka, D.
Gruender and E. Agazzi (ed.), Theory Change, Ancient Axiomatics, and Galileo's
Methodology: Proceedings of the 1978 Conference on the History and Philosophy
of Science, Dordrecht, D. Reidel, 1981, i, p. 271-286; A. Carugo and A.C.
Crombie, "The Jesuits and Galileo's ideas of science and of nature", Annali...
(as above n. 3), 1983, viii. 2, p. 3-68, with further references; A.C. Crombie and
A. Carugo, Galileo's Natural Philosophy (forthcoming).
6.
269
without it any account of Galileo would be incomplete, and in

relation to Koyre's image of Galileo it is interesting because here
Galileo was strongly Aristotelian. In his inquiries into hydrostatics
and sunspots, into comets, and into the connection between the
motions of the tides and of the Earth, he conducted his experimental
and observational analysis of the causes of effects according to the
"laws of logic" or "physical logic",9 which were the Aristotelian rules
of inference as developed by scholastic natural philosophers:
presence or absence, and concomitant variations in degree, together
with the reductio ad contradictionem or ad impossible. Thus Galileo
used two main forms of scientific argument: (1) the Archimedean
theoretical postulation controlled by experiment for the simpler
phenomena of motion; and (2) these Aristotelian rules of inference
for the more complex phenomena of material change. Both can be
found together in De motu graviwn. Both led to demonstration, with
a shift during the years 1612-16 from an Aristotelian scholastic
conception of the demonstrative progression and of analysis and
synthesis (or resolution and composition) to a mathematical conception akin to that described by Pappus and Proclus. But Galileo
retained to the end of his life the fundamentally Aristotelian expectation, coming from a conception of a completed and closed system
of knowledge, that scientific inquiry could discover the one "true
constitution of the universe" which "could not possibly be
otherwise"10 and could be established by "necessary demonstrations".11 Yet despite this apodeictic talk, he based his scientific
practice on the open-ended conception of inquiry coming from
mathematics and experiment and on range of confirmation as the test
of a theory. The paradox is that Galileo never seems to have recognized the difference being made to the traditional logic and epistemology of science by the mathematical thinking in physics of which he
was himself a supreme virtuoso.
I have discussed much of this long ago in various papers and most
recently in my joint paper with Adriano Carugo on "The Jesuits and
Galileo's ideas of science and of nature" (1983).12 Clearly of the
greatest significance for Galileo's intellectual biography is Carugo's
discovery of Galileo's use for his scholastic essays on natural philosophy, and for De motu gravium, of well known- textbooks by Jesuit
9. Galileo, // Saggiatore (1623), questioni 12 and 42, in Le opere, vi, p. 252, 333.
10. Galileo, Prima Lettera circa le Macchie Solari (1612) in Le opere, v, p. 102.
11. Galileo, Lettera a Madame Cristina di Lorena (1615), in Le opere, v, p. 330; cf.
Crombie, 1975, and Carugo and Crombie, 1983, note 8 above.
12. Note 8 above, with Crombie 1975 and other references; also Galilee devant les
critiques de la posterite, Paris, Les conferences du Palais de la D6couverte, , ser.
D, no. 45, 1956, Augustine to Galileo, 2nd ed., London, Heinemann Educational
Books, and Cambridge, Mass., 1959, reprinted with revisions 1979.
270
professors, Benito Pereira and Francesco di Toledo, of the Collegio

Romano. This wholly unexpected new perspective focused attention
on that institution, and was followed by my own identification of
Christopher Clavius as another and very influential source there; and
finally by Carugo's identification of Ludovico Carbone as a further
source, again connected with the Collegio Romano, for his logical
Disputationes de praecognitionibus et de demonstratione, essentially a
commentary on the Posterior Analytics. All this we have discussed in
the revised version of our book, Galileo's Natural Philosophy, in
which we are publishing Carugo's edition of the Disputationes, with
an English translation.13 If this new work, and that of other scholars,
notably Winifred Wisan and Maurice Clavelin, seems to take us
beyond the image of Galileo presented so brilliantly by Alexandre
Koyre, that indeed is just what he would have wished, and it does
nothing to dim the light he cast upon the whole subject and thereby
upon the whole historiography of science.
In conclusion I shall move again farther from Koyre's own
contributions, yet to a subject on which he again cast light: Galileo's
relations with Mersenne. I shall not retread Koyre's ground.
Mersenne as I have said elsewhere makes an interesting contrast in
scientific style with both Galileo and Descartes: they aimed at
certainty in physical science; he, disbelieving in the possibility of
certainty, aimed at precision.14 Hence the priority he gave to experimental measurement, and his criticism of Galileo's experiments. I am
going to sketch a detective story about the discovery of the ratio of
the period to the length of the pendulum and some related matters in
the science of music. It was Cornelis de Waard who noted that
Mersenne had published this ratio in his Harmonic universelle (1636)
and Harmonicorum libri (1636) two years before Galileo published
it in his Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove
scienze (1638) and one year before he mentioned it in his letter of 5
June 1637 to Laurens React.15 In fact Mersenne published this ratio
four years before Galileo, by 30 June 1634, in Les mechaniques de
Galilee.^ I have established from correspondence and references
13. This book was awarded the Galileo Prize in 1969, and is deposited in the Domus
Galileana, Pisa; cf. note 1 above.
14. Cf. A.C. Crombie, "Mersenne Marin, (1588-1648)", in Dictionary of Scientific
Biography, 1974, ix, p. 316-322, with further references, "Marin Mersenne
(1588-1648) and the seventeenth-century problem of scientific acceptability",
Physis, 1975, xvii, p. 186-204, Marin Mersenne: Science, Music and Language
(forthcoming).
15. Galileo, Le opere, xvii, p. 100-102; cf. Marin Mersenne, Correspondance, ed. C.
de Waard, 1955, iv, p. 444-455, appendice iii: "Les etudes de Mersenne sur le
funependule"; cf. notes by A. Carugo in Galileo, Discorsi... (1638), ed. Carugo
e L. Geymonat, 1958, Torino, Paolo Boringhieri, p. 699-708.
16. Ed. B. Rochot, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1966, viie Addition.
2 71
within their works that Mersenne must have written his theorems,
deriving the ratio by considering bodies falling perpendicularly, on an
inclined plane, and then in a circle, by the end of 1633,17 whereas
Galileo seems almost certainly to have written his first statement of it
between 7 April and 9 June 1635. The former date is established by
his correspondence with Fulgenzio Micanzio in Venice who with
others there commented on his progress in writing the First Day of
the Discorsi (dealing with the pendulum and acoustics) as he sent
him successive pages of his manuscript; the latter date is established
by Galileo's letter to Elie Diodati saying that on it he had sent a
manuscript including the First Day to Giovanni Pieroni in Germany.
This survives in Florence as the only extant manuscript of the
Discorsi.18 There is no positive evidence that Galileo knew the
pendulum ratio before he wrote this part of the Discorsi, and there is
negative evidence that he did not.19 But Diodati sent Galileo a copy
of Mersenne's Les mechaniques de Galilee on 10 April 1635, just
when he would have reached the appropriate point in his manuscript.20 Galileo has left no comment.
Apart from these dates, other circumstances and coincidences are
sufficiently arresting to invite the suspicion that Galileo learnt the
ratio from Mersenne. First, his bare announcement in the Discorsi of
so important a proposition contrasts strikingly with his usual practice
of offering full mathamatical and experimental demonstrations of his
novelties. Again, even if he never received or never read Les mechaniques de Galilee, Mersenne had sent in advance of publication printed
sections of his Harmonie universelle containing his theorems both to
Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc in Aix-en-Provence and to Giovanni Battista
Doni in Rome during 1634.21 Both were in touch with Galileo and his
close friends in Florence, and these in turn were in touch with over17. See for the pendulum ratio Mersenne, Harmonie universelle, "Traite des
instrumens", i, props, xix-xx, and "Traitez de la nature des sons et des
mouvemens de toutes sortes de corps", ii, props, xii-xvi; and Mersenne to Peiresc,
10 March 1634, and subsequent correspondence in Correspondance, iv, p. 81-82,
105, 134, 175-177, 181-182, 186-187, 218-219, 225-227, 240-241, 253-255,
259-260, 267-269, 280-281, 286-287, 345, 368, 379, 388, 392-394, v, p. 33, 35,
136-137; cf. A.C. Crombie, "Mathematics, music and medical science", in Actes
du XII* Congres International d'Histoire des Sciences, Paris, 1968, Paris, Albert
Blanchard, 1971, i. B, p. 295-310 (reprinted in Science, Optics and Music in
Medieval and Early Modem Thought, London, Hambledon Press, 1990),
Crombie 1974 (note 14 above), Styles . . . ch. 10, (note 3 above), Marin
Mersenne (note 14 above), Crombie and Carugo, Galileo's Natural Philosophy
(notes 8,13 above).
18. MS Banco Raro 31; cf- Galileo, Le opere, xvi, pp. 271-274 with Pieromi to
Galileo, 11 and 18 August and 15 December 1635, ibid. pp. 300-304, 359-361;
Crombie 1971, n. 24, with other references in note 17 above.
19. Cf. Crombie, Styles . . . ch. 10,1994 (note 3 above), Crombie and Carugo, ibid.
20. Galileo, Le opere, xvi, p. 255; Mersenne, Correspondance, v, 132, cf. vi, 242.
21. Cf. Crombie, Crombie and Carugo (notes 17, 19 above).
272
lapping circles of Galileo's friends in Rome, round Benedetto Castelli

which included Rafaello Magiotti, round Cardinal Francesco
Barberini which included Doni, and round Francois de Noailles.
These circles included friends with whom Mersenne corresponded
about his work, besides Doni especially two Frenchmen, JeanJacques Bouchard and Pierre Michon Bourdelot.21
The correspondence in particular of Magiotti shows how aware
Galileo's friends were of Mersenne and his writings, an awareness
sharpened by hostility and suspicion after his criticisms of Galileo's
experiments. It also points to a possible channel of relevant information from Rome to Galileo. On 5 November 1634, Magiotti wrote
to Galileo urging him to get his work into print, because there were
people ready and eager to trick him out of "a great part of your long
labours". He added that the young mathematician Famiano
Michelini, just returning to Florence after a visit to Rome, "will talk
to you more openly about this".22 In Rome Michelini had formed a
warm friendship with Castelli, who appreciated especially his attachment to Galileo.23 Before he left Rome a relevant section of
Mersenne's Harmonic universelle and probably also Les mechaniques
de Galilee had reached Doni.24 If it was Mersenne who was Magiotti's
putative plagiarist, Michelini could have got information about his
writings from Doni, Bouchard or Michon Bourdelot. There is no
evidence that either he or Galileo did receive any such information
from Rome, but later in 1637 Magiotti directly accused Mersenne in
letters to Galileo and to Michelini of both denigrating and appropriating Galileo's work. He had read his "large and numerous bad
books" in French.25 Mersenne himself in his comments on the
Discorsi, which he read first in manuscript during the winter of 16361637, claimed priority only for some of the contributions to the
science of music which Galileo also announced in the First Day.26
These are a further complication of the story which I do not have
22. Galileo, Le opere, xvi, p. 152; Michelini was known in his order as Francesco di
San Giuseppe or delle Scuole Pie.
23. Cf. Castelli to Galileo and Michelini to Galileo, both 8 April 1634, in Le opere,
xvi, p. 75-76.
24. Mersenne to Peiresc, 28 July 1634, Correspondence, iv, p. 267-268, Doni to
Mersenne, ibid., p. 384-385, and 392-394 on Harmonie universelle, "Traite des
instrumens", ii; cf. note 17 above.
25. Magiotti to Galileo, and to Michelini, both 25 April 1637, in Le opere, xvii, p. 6364, and again to Galileo, 16 May 1637, in ibid., p. 80-81; also in Mersenne,
Correspondance, vi, p. 241-243, 255.
26. See Mersenne, "Premiere observation" and "Seconde observation" inserted in the
second volume of Harmonie universelle (1637) immediately following the "Table
des matieres", and Les nouvelles pensees de Galilee (1639), livre i, arts. 17, 2024, ed. P. Costabel et M.-P. Lerner, Paris, J. Vrin, 1973; cf. Crombie, references
in notes 14 and 17 above.
273
space to discuss here. So impressed was Mersenne with Galileo that

he seems to have supposed that Galileo must have discovered the
pendulum ratio for himself. The evidence points otherwise. We have
then a detective story about a possible murder without a body, but
with strong circumstantial grounds for suspicion.
Vincenzo Galilei, Dialogo della musica antica, et della moderna (1581): title pageGalileo's father Vincenzo Galilei (c. 1520-1591) was a leading and controversial
musical theorist, experimenter and scholar, and a skilled lutanist. It was he
who may have introduced Galileo to experimental science by his investigations
into the laws of vibrating strings, while Galileo was living in his house during
158589. Galileo reported results, corresponding to those described in his
father's books and manuscripts, in his DLscorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a
due nuove scienze (1638).
14
Marin Mersenne and the Origins of Language
Mersenne made language an exemplary subject of analysis into its elements

and of modelling from those elements.1 There were a number of distinct
questions: whether there was an original natural language of mankind, the
relation of the diverse existing languages to each other and to any supposed
original language, the language of the deaf and dumb, the relation of human to
animal language, and the invention of an artificial universal language for
communication among all men and of a philosophical language capable of
representing the truth of things clearly and without equivocation. Treatment of
these questions came from a variety of approaches guided by the basic
principles enunciated by Aristotle in De interpretatione (c.l, 16a 4-8), that
spoken sounds were symbols of affections of the soul and written marks were
symbols of spoken sounds, and that although these symbols were not the same
for all men, the affections and the things they referred to were the same. The
question whether there was a natural original human language in which the
names of things signified their natures, or whether all languages had grown up
by fortuitous use in which words acquired their meaning by convention, went
back to ancient Greek discussions of the origins of mankind and of civilisation.
The former view was implied by the story in Herodotus's History (ii.l) of the
isolation of children from birth to find out what unprompted words they would
first utter, and was presented ambiguously by Plato together with the latter
especially in the Cratylus. The conventional theory of language and its origin,
asserted briefly in the Hippocratic treatise The Art (2), had been developed
especially by the Greek atomists and was reported by Lucretius (v. 1028-90),
Diodorus Siculus (i.8) and Diogenes Laertius (x.75-6). The question became
complicated by the account in Genesis (2. 19-20) of how God arranged for
Adam to name all the other creatures, which led to the Patristic and scholastic
supposition that the original and natural language of mankind was Hebrew,
and again from the thirteenth century by the Neoplatonic and Cabalistic
1
This essay is based on my book Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition, ch. 14
(London, 1994) with full bibliography; the subject is elaborated in my Marin Mersenne: Science,
Music and Language (forthcoming).
276
assertion that possession of the true name gave occult power over the thing
named.2
The need for an effective means of intellectual communication among men
of different languages and cultures had been stressed by Augustine (De civitate
Dei, xix.7), and the problem was recognised with renewed urgency in the
thirteenth century in the theological and geographical context of Western
Christendom. The natural language of mankind might be Hebrew, but its
pristine universality had been lost in the confusion of Babel. The universality
of Latin stopped at the boundaries of the West. Christians had a religious
obligation to communicate the truth revealed to them. At the same time,
whether there was a natural language of mankind and whether it was Hebrew,
again became disputed questions. The Emperor Frederick II was said to have
'tried to find out by experiment what language or speech boys would have
when they grew up, if they could speak to no one'.3 Roger Bacon located the
problem within Augustine's distinction in De doctrina Christiana (ii.2-4)
between natural and conventional or given signs. Natural signs were those
which, 'without any desire or intention of signifying, make us aware of
something beyond themselves', as smoke signified fire, or a track a passing
animal. Given signs were those which living creatures made to each other
intentionally in order 'to produce and transfer to another mind what happens
in the mind of the person who makes the sign'. Bacon, after citing Augustine,
went on to ask what was 'the first language of Adam and how he gave names to
things; and whether boys reared in solitude would use any language by
themselves, and if they met each other how they would indicate their natural
states of mind'.4 Dante, in De vulgari eloquentia (i.6), had no doubt that the
original human language was Hebrew, for 'a certain form of speech was
created by God, together with the first soul', comprising both names and
grammatical structure, and this was inherited after the confusion of Babel only
by the Hebrews. Others took a different view in a much more scientific spirit.
Thus his French contemporary Jean de Jandun in his questions 'Super De
sensu' returned critically to the case of the isolated child, which he compared
to that of a deaf mute:
It has been said that because such a mute has not heard any meaningful speech,
he cannot utter any. In question is: if a boy were reared in a forest, where he had
never heard any kind of language, whether he would speak any language. . . .
Some say that he would speak Hebrew, and that that language is natural; but this
is not true, because then it would be adapted to all men and all would speak
naturally that, which is false and evident to sense. Likewise there is no habit of
2
Cf. Roger Bacon, Opus mains, iv, ed. John Henry Bridges (Oxford), i, p. 395-7, Opus tertium
c.26 (as below n. 4); Marsilio Ficino, De vita coelitus comparanda, iii.21 in Opera (Basileae, 1576);
Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, i.69-74 (Antwerpiae, 1531).
3
Salimbene de Adam, Cronica, a cura di Giuseppe Scalia (Bari, 1966), i, p. 510.
4
Roger Bacon, Opus tertium, c.27 in Opera quaedam hactenus inedita, ed. J.S. Brewer
(London, 1859), i, p. 100-2.
211
any speech unless through the social intercourse of men, and hence I say that he
would not speak a language; he could well from natural appetite form sounds, but
no consistent
expressions unless he were later to have intercourse with others
5
(q-7).
Later in the fourteenth century, in a commentary attributed to Nicole Oresme

and Albert of Saxony, Hebrew was again rejected and the case of the isolated
child analysed further:
It must be said therefore that that boy would speak a single language entirely
peculiar to himself, and when he saw outside things he would have concepts
naturally representing them and therefore he would be able to impose on them an
idea and express them by a word; and if two boys were brought together and fed
at the same time, they would speak a language common to both; the same would
happen if there were several boys. But if they were placed separate, then it would
be possible for them to speak a similar language and it would be possible for them
to speak totally different ones. From this it seems to follow that it would be
possible for there to be two men, of which one never saw nor knew the other, who
would speak each in his own way, and yet they would mutually understand each
other and agree in language (q.3).6
Another contemporary philosopher, Marsilius of Inghen, yet again rejected

the naturalness of Hebrew as 'silly and ridiculous' and concluded 'that that boy
would remain mute until he was established by other men in a definite
language; but if there were two boys placed together . . . these could mutually
set up between themselves a new language'.7
Renewed linguistic efforts made in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
towards restoring the religious unity of Europe, and towards realising through
conversion the ancient ideal of the unity of mankind, by finding a common
means of communication for all nations and peoples, took two directions. One
was the examination of the relation of existing languages to each other; the
other was the attempt to devise a new artificial universal language. The deaf
and dumb would likewise be restored to humanity by scientific knowledge and
by devising means of communicating through the eyes and other senses. A new
search for the common elements of diverse human languages began with the
comparative studies of ancient and modern tongues carried out among others
notably by Sigismundus Gelenius in his Lexicon symphonicum (1537), by
5
Joannes de Janduno, Quaestiones super Parvis naturalibus (Venetiis, 1589), f. A7r; cf. Agrimi
as in next note.
6
Le 'Quaestiones De sensu' attribute a Oresme e Alberto di Sassonia, a cura di Jole Agrimi
(Firenze, 1983), pp. 71-2.1 am grateful to Chiara Cristiani for this important reference. There are
certain parallels in the story by the 12th-century Hispano-Muslim philosopher Ibn Tufail, Hayy
Ibn Yaqzdn, texte arabe . . . et traduction franchise par Leon Gauthier, 2e ed. (Beirut, 1936). The
story was translated first into Latin by Edward Pococke (1671); cf. Gul A. Russell,' "The Rusty
Mirror of the Mind": Ibn Tufayl and Avicenna's Psychology' in Interdesciplinary Perspectives on
Ibn Tufayl, ed. Lawrence I. Conrad (Oxford, forthcoming).
7
Marsilius of Inghen, Questiones De sensu et sensato, q. 3, quodlibet 1, MS Erfurt F. 334, f.
7(8)r: translated from Agrimi as in preceding note.
278
Conrad Gessner in his Mitridates (1555) where he applied the methods of

natural history to the problem, and by Joseph Just Scaliger in his 'Diatriba de
Europaeorum lingua' (1599) published in his Opuscula varia (1610). From this
work emerged the recognition that languages formed groups, each united by
grammatical structure and vocabulary in which it differed from others, so that
all ancient and modern European languages (and Persian) formed one group,
all Semitic languages another, Chinese and related languages yet another.
Scaliger introduced an important principle by distinguishing in the first group
more ancient matrices linguae from their more recent derivatives, an idea that
was to be taken up by Mersenne's friend Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc,8 and was to
control subsequent inquiries into the genetic history of human languages, into
the supposed original language of mankind, and into the causes of its
diversification through time and place. Parallel with this line of comparative
analysis was that into the anatomy and physiology of the human and animal
vocal organs and into the language of animals. Following Aristotle in the
Historia animalium (iv.9; cf. De anima, ii.8), Girolamo Fabrici took up the
first subject in his De visione, voce, auditu (1600) and De locutione et ejus
instruments liber (1601), and the second in his De brutorum loquela (1603). In
an area dominated from antiquity by philosophical disputes over sceptical
doubts cast on the uniqueness of human language and reasoning by alleged
examples of the same in animals, and over the alleged occult magical power of
words and related issues, Fabrici introduced systematic observations of the
actual ways in which such animals as the domestic hen and dog communicated
with each other.
The conception of a new universal language that could compensate for the
division into national tongues had its dual origin in the Aristotelian linguistic
principles developed by the scholastic grammarians, and the scholastic vision
of the unity of truth evident in such as Roger Bacon and Ramon Lull. 'In order
to convert the infidels easily and quickly from universal principles' wrote Lull,
'one should make a treatise which is universal to all sciences, and which leads
by necessary conclusion to the truth, and can teach the way to find the specific
object desired'.9 Lull offered in his combinatory symbolic logic an infallible art
providing a universal method capable of demonstrating the one and certain
truth to all who learnt to use it. The grammarians who advanced on scholastic
ideas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came to offer essentially
universal lexicons as means of multilingual communication. It was Francis
Bacon, in the Advancement of Learning (1605), who gave a fresh direction to
the project by insisting that a true universal language must be more than simply
verbal, but must be capable of communicating true notions of the real world
8
See Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, Lettres a Claude Saumaise et a son entourage (16201637), ed. A. Bresson, (Firenze, 1992).
9
Raimundus Lullus, Tractatus de modo convertandi infideles' (1292) in Opera latina, ed.
Maioricensis Scholae Lullisticae, Mallorca, Publicaciones de la Consejo Superior de Investicaciones Cientificas, 1954, fasc. iii, p. 104-5.
279
based on a proper understanding of nature, that is on true scientific

observation and reasoning. Hence his analysis of language became an essential
part of his novum organum or new scientific method, and an ideal artificial
language became what was to be called not simply a universal but also a
philosophical language. Mersenne entered these disputes and projects in order
to refute both the magical and the sceptical assertions of those whom he
regarded as enemies of truth, continued Fabrici's empirical methods and a
form of combinatory calculus, and developed his own theory of language.
The originality of Mersenne's approach to language and its modelling by
symbols or gestures lay in his combination of scientific with historical analysis,
starting in his earliest publications. He encountered the question of natural
human language first in the Cabalistic belief in the power of words, a doctrine
which in Quaestiones celeberrimae in Genesim (1623) he violently rejected
along with the whole of magic and the occult. He left open the possibility that
God might have revealed the natural names of things to Adam in Hebrew, and
he remained at first undecided whether language had developed by chance or
by revelation. He still supposed in his discussion of Timposition des noms' in
La verite des sciences (1625) that, since 'les noms ne nous servent que pour
entendre et signifier ce que nous voulons dire, et ce que nous avons dans
I'esprit', in our dealings with other men 'plus les noms approachent des choses
qu'ils signifient, et plus les representent ils naiifvement, et meillieurs sont-ils'.
Perhaps with the ancients, before they were given Hebrew letters,
du moins leurs prononciations representoient les choses: c'est peut estre
pourquoy les Chinois ont quasi autant de characteres que de choses. . . . On
pourroit aussi former autant de dictions diverses comme il y a de diverses
individus au monde, mais on ne peut en inventer, qui signifient la nature, et
1'essence des choses, d'autant que nous ne la cognoissons pas; il n'y a que Dieu
qui le puisse faire, ou qui le puisse commander aux anges: peut estre que les noms
qu'Adam imposa, avoient ce privilege: mais depuis ce temps la les noms se sont
tellement eloignez de leur premiere origine, que nous n'en recognoissons plus
aucun vestige. Nous voyons neantmoins que les peuples inventent diverses
langues a cause de leurs divers temperamens. . . . Voyla d'ou sont venues en
partie les diverses langues, ce qui a commence a la confusion de Babel avec une
grande perte des sciences, car s'il n'y avoit qu'une langue au monde, on
s'entrecommuniqueroit plus facilement les sciences, et on emploieroit tout le
temps a les apprendre, qu'on passe a etudier aus langues etrangeres (i.6).
Later in his unpublished continuation of Quaestiones in Genesim he hardened

his position, insisted that spoken words were simply physical sounds made with
the mouth and tongue which functioned as arbitrary signs by means of which
the same meaning could be expressed in different languages, and firmly
concluded that 'there is no language natural to men besides this or that which
they learn from parents or teachers'.10 It was false to say that Hebrew was
natural.
10
Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, MS lat. 17, 262, pp. 511, 536, cf. MS lat. 17, 261, pp. 3-6;
280
Mersenne set out his notable theory of the origins, history and empirical
science of language finally in his Harmonie universelle (1636-37) and Harmonicorum libri (1636). He insisted that a true language must be a vehicle of
conscious meaning, and that this was possible only for human beings. Spoken
words were physical sounds just as written words were visible symbols which
had been given meanings in the course of human history arbitrarily by use. The
sounds made by animals, like their visible signals, were means of communication with functions in their bodily lives, but they operated within systems of
unconscious physical stimulus and response. They were no more a language in
the human sense than the communications within a machine, even though the
analogy of animal and mechanical communication could provide a means of
analysis of true human language. He proposed to model meaning. Just as the
effects of music varied with race, way of life, period and culture, so different
groups of men had come to express their common understanding of meaning in
a variety of languages diversified by their different historical experiences,
environments, needs, temperaments and customs. Because men shared reason
it was possible to translate the expression of a common meaning from any
language into any other, but no existing language was naturally prior to all
others. He ingeniously explored the acquisition of language in Harmonie
universelle. Traitez de la voix, et des chantes', i: 'De la voix, des parties qui
servent a la former, de sa definition, de ses proprietez, et de 1'ouye'. He
insisted:
La voix des animaux est necessaire, et celle des homines est libre; c'est a dire que
1'homme parle librement, et que les animaux crient, chantent, et se servent de
leurs voix necessairement . . . ; car leur appetit sensitif estant echauffe par
1'impression de 1'imagination, commande necessairement a la faculte motrice de
mouvoir toutes les parties qui sont necessaires a la voix (prop. viii).
This led to the question: 'A scavoir si 1'homme pourrait parler ou chanter s'il
n'entendoit point de sons ni de paroles'. The answer seemed to depend on a
virtually impossible experiment, that was to isolate a child from all sounds and
words from the day of its birth for twenty or thirty years.
C'est pourquoy il faut se servir de la seule raison, qui dicte qu'un homme ne
parleroit point s'il n'avoit iamais ouy de paroles, parce qu'il ne s'imagineroit pas
que les paroles peussent servir a expliquer les pensees de 1'esprit, et les desirs de
la volonte: et quand il se 1'imagineroit, il ne sc.auroit pas de quelles dictions il
devroit se servir pour se faire entendre. On peut done ce semble conclure que
1'homme ne parleroit point s'il n'avoit appris a parler.
Nevertheless, since birds sang naturally, and a man could imagine that high
and low notes could represent different things, Ton peut dire que 1'homme
parleroit encore qu'il n'eust point oily parler, pourveu qu'il eust quelqu'un a
Robert Lenoble, Mann Mersenne ou la naissance du mecanisme (Paris, 1943), p. 514-5, 517.
281
qui il addressast ses paroles' (prop. x). If the experiment with one isolated
child was too difficult:
Suppose que Ton nourrist des enfans en un lieu ou ils n'entendissent point parler,
a sc.avoir, de quelle langue ils se serviroient pour parler entr'eux. le suppose que
les enfans . . . inventeroient des sons, et des dictions pour signifier leurs desirs,
car nous ne sommes plus dans la difficulte precedente, qui considere un homme
tout seul qui n'a personne a qui parler. Or si nous ne supposions la verite de la
foy, qui nous apprend que le premier homme a este cree droit, juste et servant,
nous croirions avec les philosophes payens, que les premiers hommes ont invente
la premiere langue, qui peut estre appellee langue originaire ou matrice, d'ou les
autres ont este tirees: . . . ie dy premierement qu'ils formerent des sons pour se
communiquer leurs pensees. Secondement, qu'il est impossible de sc.avoir de
quels sons ou de quelles paroles ils useroient pour se faire entendre les uns aus
autres; car toutes les paroles estant indifferentes pour signifier tout ce que Ton
veut, il n'y a que la seule volonte qui les puisse determiner a signifier une chose
plustost qu'une entre (prop. xi).
This led again to the question of a natural language, or failing that whether
through 'la science des sons dont les langues sont formees . . . un musicien
philosophe . . . peut inventer la meillieure langue de toutes les possibles'. He
was not asking for 'une langue qui signifie naturellement les choses', for 'il n'est
pas necessaire qu'une langue soit naturelle pour estre la meillieure de toutes,
mais il suffit qu'elle exprime le plus nettement et le plus briefvement qui peut
se faire les pensees de 1'esprit, et les desirs de la volonte'. But by means of a
combinatory calculus described in the Traitez . . . ' book ii, 'Des chants',
showing how many dictions could be made with any number of letters, it could
be possible 'establir une langue universelle, qui seroit la meillieure de toutes
les possibles, si 1'on sc,avoit 1'ordre des idees que Dieu a de toutes choses'
(prop. xii). He went on to ask:
Si nous avions une langue naturelle, . . . si nous la pourrions establir, suppose
qu'elle se perdist: et parce que nous confessons que nous ne sgaurions maintenant
trouver une langue naturelle, encore que nous soyons de mesme condition que
celle ou nous serions apres 1'avoir perdue, il faut semblablement avoiier que 1'art
et la raison que nous avons ne pourroit nous fournir les mesmes voix qui nous
servent naturellement a expliquer nos passions, si nous en avions perdu 1'usage.
For no one could foresee that, among various possible signs, tears and sobs
would indicate sadness and laughter joy. Moreover 'si Ton remarque les voix
dont les animaux expriment leurs passions et leurs affections, on les iugera
aussi indifferentes pour signifier lesdites passions, comme sont les paroles pour
signifier nos conceptions, ou les autres choses dont nous voulons parler'. Thus
the syllable kik, by which a hen (as described by Fabrici in De brutorum
loquela) told her chickens to run and hide, had no more relation to events than
the syllable glo by which she called them back. The fundamental difference
between animal and human speech was not that 'la nature les auroit privez des
organes necessaires a la parole', as we might have thought if we had not taught
birds to speak, but that TAuteur de la nature, ou la nature intelligente
282
determine les animaux, et les conduit tellement, qu'ils n'ont nulle liberte en
leurs actions' (prop. xiv). He went on to discuss in some detail how the muscles
of the vocal organs of different peoples became habituated to pronouncing
their own languages and refractory to pronouncing others (prop, xxxvii), and
to raise again the question, presented by the comparative anatomy studied by
Fabrici, of what was lacking in some birds and in all quadrupeds that prevented
them from being taught to imitate human speech. As for animal language, 'il
n'y a nul doute que le jargon des oiseaux, et les cris des animaux, leurs servent
de paroles, que Ton peut appeller la langue, et I'idiome des bestes, car Ton
experimente que celles qui sont de mesme espece s'entendent aussi bien par
leur voix differentes, que les hommes par leurs paroles' (prop, xxxix). The
elements of speech could be explored also by the imitation of the animal and
human voice by musical instruments, and by the methodical study of
comparative anatomy and physiology. For 'la langue et les autres instrumens
de la voix usent de differens mouvemens en prononc,ant les syllables et les
lettres, comme il est difficile de les expliquer, a raison que nous ne pouvons
voir ces mouvemens' (prop, xliii).
Mersenne saw in his analysis of human knowledge and of its expression
through the common elements of language an opening into the possibility of
inventing a perfect system of communication for all men, a new universal
language capable of conveying information without error. He began experimenting with the idea of making a new artificial universal language by means of
the combinatory calculus showing the number of possible permutations and
combinations of a given set of elements with which he had tried, in La verite
des sciences (iii.10), to devise the best tune from among the number that could
be composed from a given set of notes. In 1629 he forwarded to Descartes a
project by an unnamed author for a new universal language. Descartes in his
reply proposed as a model for the true, as distinct from an artificial, universal
language, not the generalised structure that could be extracted from existing
languages, but mathematics. But Tinvention de cette langue depend de la
vraie philosophic', and even if it were achieved so that it represented to the
judgement 'si distinctement toutes choses, qu'il lui serait presque impossible
de se tromper', this could be expected only in 'un paradis terrestre'.11
Mersenne went ahead on the assumption that such an universal language could
be usefully established before the perfection of the true philosophy. He argued
that the only certain knowledge of things available to us was of their
measurable quantities. He proposed then to combine his linguistic with his
musical investigations by using his combinatory calculus to construct a system
of sounds and notation for representing such quantities. Thus he wrote in
Harmonie universelle, 'Traitez de la nature des sons', i: 'L'on peut se servir des
sons de chaque instrument de musique, et des differens mouvenmens que 1'on
11
Descartes a Mersenne 20 novembre 1629, in P. Marin Mersenne, Correspondance, edits et

annote par Cornelis de Waard avec la collaboration de Rene Pintard (Paris, 1945), ii, pp. 327-8.
283
leur donne pour discourir de toutes sortes de suiets, et pour enseigner et

apprendre les sciences' (prop. xxii). Then
Ton peut representer tout ce qui est au monde, et consequemment toutes les
sciences par le moyen des sons, car puis que toutes choses consistent en poids, en
nombre et en mesure, et que les sons representent ces trois proprietez, ils
peuvent signifier tout ce que Ton voudra, si Ton excepte la metaphysique. . . .
D'ou il s'ensuit que le parfait musicien peut inventer des dictions, et une langue
parfait, que signifie naturellement les choses, et qu'il peut enseigner les sciences
sans user d'autre langage que celuy d'un luth, ou de quelque autre instrument
(prop. xxiv).
'Je me suis imagine une sorte d'escripture et un certain idiome universel', he

wrote of this language of quantities in a dedication to Peiresc, 'en dressant un
alphabet qui contient tous les idiomes possibles, et toutes les dictions qui
peuvent servir a exprimer chasque chose en telle langue qu'on vouldra. II a
ceste propriete que sa seule lecture peut tellement enseigner la philosophic
accomodee a son ordre, qu'on ne peut 1'oublier ou si on 1'oublie, qu'on peult la
restablir sans 1'ayde d'aulcun'. He hoped that it would help 'pour inventer la
maniere de communiquer avec tous les peuples du Nouveau Monde'.12 He
described this language in his 'Livre de la voix', propositions xlvii, where he
showed that Ton peut inventer la meillieure langue de toutes les possibles',
and xlviii-xlix, and in his 'Livre des chants', propositions xiii-xix, specifying
that the best language must be both economical and clear, applying to
languages his tables for all possible tunes, and providing tables for all possible
pronunciations. Besides mathematics and music and the comparative philology of ancient and modern phonetic tongues, the discovery of Chinese
characters as both ideophones and ideographs had opened European eyes yet
further to the variety of human language and its potentiality for constructed
innovation. Mersenne's insights into the question were to have a decisive
influence on later English projects for universal languages.13
Mersenne's study both of the physiology and comparative phonetics of
natural human speech, and of the imitation of human vowels and consonants
by musical instruments and by animals, led him to a further question: that of
deaf mutes and how to communicate with them. Here again his empirical
approach promoted scientific and experimental analysis by contrast with
philosophical speculation. Thus he rejected the widely accepted ancient idea
that there was a sympathetic association between the nerves of the ear and the
vocal organs, so that the deaf were incurably dumb. This had been questioned
from the end of the thirteenth century. Thus Jean de Jandun asked in his
Quaestiones super Parvis naturalibus, 'Super De sensu', q.7:
12
A Monsieur de Peiresc vers 20 avril 1635, in Mersenne, Correspondance, ed. cit., 1959, v, p.
136-7.
13
Cf. Hans Aasleft, 'Wilkins, John (1614-1672)' in Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New
York, 1976), xiv, pp. 366-8; Mary M. Slaughter, Universal Languages and Scientific Taxonomy in
the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1982).
284
Whether all the congenitally deaf are dumb. Some have maintained that speech is
convertible, namely that all the deaf are dumb and vice versa because, since some
powers are mutually connected, if there is an impediment in one there will also be
one in the other. . . . But this is not valid. . . . And therefore I say that someone
congenitally deaf is necessarily dumb because anyone who cannot learn how to
form meaningful speech at will is in that way necessarily dumb. This is selfevident, because knowing how to form meaningful speech at will comes about
only through habit and social intercourse with people, but someone congenitally
deaf cannot become accustomed to the expression of meaningful speech, because
this requires that he hears speech of this kind.14
Again in the sixteenth century some medical authorities recognised that the
deaf were dumb only because they had never heard speech. Girolamo Cardano
insisted that deaf mutes were just as intelligent as the rest of humanity and
could be educated through vision.15 Mersenne reported with enthusiasm the
pioneering Spanish work in teaching deaf-mutes to speak. He cited in 'De la
voix' the account given by the king's physician Francisco Valles of the method
devised by Pedro Ponce de Leon:
Quant aux muets, encore que plusieurs croyent qu'ils n'est pas possible qu'ils
parlent autrement que par les signes ordinaires qu'ils font avec les mains, les
yeux, et les autres parties du corps, parce qu'ils ne peuvent oiiir aucune
instruction, a raison qu'ils sont sourds; il n'y a neantmoins nul doute que Ton peut
tellement leur apprendre a remuer la langue, qu'ils formeront des paroles, dont
on pourra leur apprendre la signification en leur presentant devant les yeux, ou
leur faisant toucher les choses qu'elles signifient. D'ou Ton peut conclure qu'il
faut commencer par 1'escriture pour faire parler les sourds, comme Ton
commence par la parole pour enseigner a parler aux autres: de sorte que la parole
et 1'escriture sont quasi une mesme chose. . . . Or 1'unique moyen d'enseigner a
lire et a escrire aux sourds et aux muets consiste a leur faire comprendre que les
caracteres dont on use, representent ce que Ton leur montre, et ce qu'ils voyent:
car la pronunciation des lettres et des vocables, c'est a dire la parole, ne
represente pas plus naturellement les choses signifiees que 1'escriture quelle
qu'elle soil, puis qu'elles dependent toutes deux egalement de la volonte et de
1'institution des hommes, sans laquelle elles ne significient rien. . . . Cecy estant
pose, il est facile d'enseigner a escrire toutes sortes de choses aux sourds,
pourveu qu'elles puissant tomber sous le sens de la veue, ou du toucher, ou
qu'elles puissent estre goustees, ou flairee; main il est plus mal-aise de les faire
parler, dautant que Ton ne peut leur monstrer tous les mouvemens de la langue,
et des autres parties qui forment la parole. . . . Valesius dit que son amy Ponce
enseignoit tellement les sourds par le moyen de 1'escriture, qu'il les faisoit parler
en leur monstrant premierement au doigt les choses qui estoient signifiees par
1'escriture, et puis en leur faisant remuer la langue jusques a ce qu'ils eussent
profere quelque parole, ou fait quelque espece de son ou de voix (prop, li).16
14
Cf. above n. 5; and for the supposed irremediable link between the ear and the vocal organs
Galen, Deplacitis Hippocratis et Platonis, ii.4. 12-15, 40-2, 5.1-97, De usu partium, xvi.3-4, ix.12,
xi.10, De locis affectis, iv.9.
15
Cardano, Opera omnia, ii (Lugduni, 1663), pp. 72-3, x, p. 462.
16
Cf. Franciscus Vallesius, De sacra philosophia, c.3 (Lugduni, 1588), p. 78; Lorenzo Hervas y
Panduro, Escuola Espanola de sordomudos (Madrid, 1795), 2t.; Abraham Farrar, 'Histrocial
Introduction' to Juan Pablo Bonet, împlication of the Letters of the Alphabet and Method of
285
It was especially in France that effective teaching methods were to be

developed systematically, as described by the Abbe Charles-Michel de 1'Epee
in La veritable maniere d'instruire les sourds-muets, confirmee par une longue
experience (1784). These, as Mersenne indicated, were a consequence of the
empirical theory of language which he had done so much to promote, and
which thus restored the deaf and dumb to the full human dignity and
responsibility of which they had been for so long deprived by nature and
society.
Teaching Deaf-Mutes to Speak, transl. H.N. Dixon (Harrogate, 1890); Ruth Elaine Bender, The
Conquest of Deafness (Cleveland, Ohio, 2nd ed., 1970); Harlan Lane, When the Mind Hears: A
History of the Dea/(New York, 1984); with also A.C. Crombie, 'Mathematics, Music and Medical
Science' (1971), reprinted in Science, Optics and Music in Medieval and Early Modern Thought
(London, 1990), pp..363-78.
286
Further References
Mersenne, Les mechaniques de Galilee, ed. B. Rochot (Paris, 1966), Les nouvelles pensees de
Galilee (Paris, 1639), ed. P. Costabel et M.-P. Lerner, 2 vol. (Paris, 1973); C.S.F. Burnett, M.
Fend and P. Gouk, The Second Sense: Studies in hearing and musical judgement from antiquity to
the seventeenth century (London, 1991); V. Coelho (ed.), Music and Science in the Age of Galileo
(Dordrecht, 1992); H.F. Cohen, Quantifying Music (Dordrecht, 1984); P. Dear, Mersenne and the
Learning of the Schools (Ithaca, NY., 1988); A.E. Moyer, Musica scientia: Musical scholarship in
the Italian Renaissance (Ithaca, N. Y., 1992); and for language K. O. Apel, Die Idee der Sprache in
der Tradition des Humanismus von Dante bis Vico (Bonn, 1963, 3rd ed. 1980); H. Arens,
Sprachwissenschaft (Miinchen, 1955, 2nd ed. Freiburg, 1969); A. Borst, Der Turmbau von Bable,
4 vol. (Stuttgart, 1957-63); O.V.C.M. Funke, Zum Weltsprachenproblem in England im
17'.Jahrhundert (Anglistische Forschungen, xlix; Heidelberg, 1929); G. Gusdorf, Les sciences
humaines et la pensee occidentale, ii, iii.2 (Paris, 1967-69); J.R. Knowlson, Universal Language
Schemes in England and France 1600-1800 (Toronto, 1975); G. Mounin, Histoire de la linguistique
(Paris, 1967); R.H. Robins, A Short History of Linguistics (New York, 1967); Paolo Rossi, Clavis
universalis (Milano/Napoli, 1960), V.G. Salmon, The Study of Language in 17th-Century England
(Amsterdam, 1979); M.M. Slaughter, Universal Languages and Scientific Taxonomy in the 17th
Century (Cambridge, 1982); G.F. Strasser, Lingua universalis, Kryptologie und Theorie der
Universalsprachen in 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden, 1988); F.A. Yates, Giordano Bruno
(London, 1964), The Art of Memory (London, 1966), Theatre of the World (London, 1969),
Collected Essays, 3 vol. (London, 1982-84); see also A.C. Crombie, Science, Optics and Music. . .
chs. 9, 13, 14, 15 (1990), Styles of Scientific Thinking . . . chs. 10, 14 (1994), and above ch. 13,
below ch. 15.
Appendix
Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc
Lettres a Claude Saumaise et a son entourage (1620-1637),
edited by Agnes Bresson (Florence, 1992).
A Monsieur, M. Nicolas Claude Fabry Sieur de Peiresc et de Callas, Baron de
Rians, Abbe et Seigneur de Guistres, et Conseiller du Roy en la Cour de
Parlement d'Aix en Provence. 'In this dedication to Peiresc of the Traitez des
Consonances. . . . ', which formed part of his great Harmonic universelle
(1636), Marin Mersenne offered a portrait of his friend, whose 'liberalite' had
provided so much for the 'honnestes gens' and 'hommes sgavans' of all of
Europe. 'Car vous ne leur fournissez seulement pas les tres-rares manuscrits,
1 es medailles et les autres reliques de la venerable antiquite dont votre Cabinet
est enrichi . . . mais vous leur faites venir tout ce qu'il y a plus curieux au
Levant, et dans toutes les autres parties de la terre, sans en pretendre autre
chose que d'ayder a faire valoir le talent d'un chacun, et a faire paroistre la
portee et 1'estendue de 1'esprit humain.' Anyone who visited Peiresc was left
with the impression 'que vous n'ayez dresse vostre Cabinet que pour luy, et
que tous vos biens soient aussi communs aux sgavans, que 1'air et 1'eau a tous
ceux qui respirent'.
Belonging to a family original from Pisa, Nicolas-Claude Fabri (1580-1637)
took the name Peiresc from a village in the Alpes de Provence inherited from
his mother. Education, travel and a wide circle of friendships established his
style of erudition essentially as a collector, patron and organiser, but also as a
practical researcher, over almost the whole range of the liberal arts and
sciences. His interests were eclectic in the style of his sixteenth-century
predecessors, by contrast with that of the contemporary generation of
systematic philosophers, but his curiosity had a purpose and could be sharply
focused. A Jesuit schooling introduced him to astronomy. On a journey to
Italy during 1599-1600, he met at Padua the antiquarian Giovanni Vincenzo
Pinelli and Galileo, and visited galleries, stimulating an interest in Antiquity,
and in the diversity of nature, that was to mature in the study of law at
Montpellier under the philologist Jules Pacius. Travel to England and the
Netherlands brought him in touch with Dutch botanists, to whom he was to
send seeds and the names of Provencal plants. After reading Galileo's Sidereus
nuncius, he and the Provencal astronomer Joseph Gaultier were the first in
288
France to observe in 1610 the four satellites of Jupiter with a telescope.

Afterwards, by organising systematic observations of their positions, and of a
lunar eclipse, from different points of the Mediterranean, he and Gaultier,
with Pierre Gassendi, were able to calculate the length of that sea with
considerably improved accuracy. Other scientific investigations carried out at
Belgentier, his country house near Aix-en-Provence, led to the discovery of
the lacteal vessels in man; to comparative dissections of the eyes of a variety of
animals; and to the collecting for his impressive garden of seeds and plants,
and of some exotic animals, from many parts of the world. With equal energy,
he collected objects of art and archaeology of all kinds, materials for
comparative investigations into the origins and filiations of languages, and
manuscripts and books for his library, all of which he made generously
available.
In the early seventeenth century, scholarly and scientific communication still
took place mainly be personal correspondence, and that of Peiresc, as of
Galileo, Mersenne and Descartes, is a major source for the intellectual and
practical life of the time. His regular exchange of letters with Mersenne over
twenty years has been published in the admirable edition of Mersenne's
Correspondance, begun by Cornelis de Waard and now completed by Armand
Beaulieu. Mersenne sent him material concerning the science and art of music
for forwarding to Rome; they discussed Galileo; Peiresc tried through
Cardinal Francesco Barberini to ease the restrictions imposed on Galileo after
his trial. A large part of his correspondence was published a century ago as
Lettres de Peiresc by Philippe Tamizey de Larroque in seven volumes (188898), with many inconvenient omissions; this was accompanied by Les
correspondants de Peiresc in twenty-one parts (1879-97). Raymond Lebegue
published Les correspondants de Peiresc dans les anciens Pays-Bas (1943), and
shortly before his death completed with Agnes Bresson a supplement with
corrections to Volume Seven of the Lettres (1985). Now Agnes Bresson has
published a major and immaculate edition, dedicated to the memory of her
late preceptor, who has written a foreword, of Peiresc's letters to the
philologist Claude Saumaise.
This edition of Peiresc's Lettres a Claude Saumaise et a son entourage (16201637) is a major event. It begins with a perceptive and informative historical
and textual introduction, which is followed by sixty-six previously unpublished
letters to Saumaise occupying 375 pages, omitting those from Saumaise which
are available in Tamizey de Larroque, but including in an appendix important
and relevant unpublished materials by him. The letters are accompanied by
historical exegeses in notes of extraordinary richness and erudition often as
long as the letters themselves. The result is a model of expert editing and
historical analysis, and a major contribution to intellectual and cultural
history. Equally impressive are the source and bibliographical materials,
glossary and indexes, comprising a further 170 pages. These, with their clear
analytical presentation and ample coverage, will be a necessary instrument of
research for all future students of the intellectual and cultural history of the
Appendix
289
period. The volume will be of particular value for the new historical interest in
collectors, collections and museums, for the history of science, for the history
of languages and for orientalists.
Peiresc is properly located for the first time in this splendid volume in the
variegated life especially of the Mediterranean world in the early seventeenth
century. He emerges as a savant for whom the natural sciences belonged as
much as literary learning to a humanist culture, and who organized his
collecting in the service of the whole Republic of Letters. The enthusiastic
intelligence of these letters and their vivid detailing of so many objects of his
curiosity make them a continuous pleasure to read. We meet his competition
with Lord Arundel for the purchase of the Arundel marbles now in the
Ashmolean Museum; postal facilities and travel in the Mediterranean area;
Turkish pirates who captured and threw overboard Pinelli's library, and the
recovery from the sea of those sections of it now in the Ambrosiana and
Marciana libraries. Pursuit of aspects of life in the ancient Mediterranean area,
Egyptian, Etruscan, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, leads to requests for information and manuscripts about systems of money, numerals and computing,
weights and measures, military arms and uniforms, strategy and tactics,
chronology, astronomy, music, divination, plants and animals. Peiresc
acquired in manuscript 'un livre arabe assez ample de 1'histoire des animaulx
ou il se trouvera possible quelque chose de plus que ce que nous en avons dans
les anciens grecs, puis qu'ils sont sur les lieux ou les animaulx estranges
habitent'. There is a long saga of attempts to identify a particular 'animal
etrange' which arrived from Ethiopia at Marseilles for the King: a kind of
antelope now called Oryx beisa. He collected ancient inscriptions, medals,
coins and bronzes, ivories, enamels, paintings and other works of art; he
researched into the history of medicine, drugs, epidemics and hygiene; and
from all these inquiries built up an important collection of manuscripts in
Greek, Latin, Italian, Arabic, Coptic and other European and oriental
languages.
It was in his investigations into the origins and filiations of languages that
Peiresc appears at his most inventive in this remarkable correspondence. He
was a pioneer in historical derivation by the comparative method. This had
been initiated for languages in the sixteenth century by Sigismundus Gelenius
and Guillaume Postel, and developed among others by Conrad Gessner, using
the methods of Aristotelian biological taxonomy. By the end of the century, it
had been recognised that there were correspondences between apparently
diverse languages, such as German and Persian, as between Arabic and
Hebrew. The guiding principle was introduced in 1599 by Joseph-Juste
Scaliger, by using common elements of European languages to show that these
could be arranged in a genetic order of more ancient matrices linguae and their
more recent derivatives. Scholars then looked for rules of etymological
derivation to explain the transition of one language into another. The first
approaches to historical philology could be arbitrarily formal and limited only
to the derivation of words, but the horizon was expanded empirically by such
290
scholars as Saumaise, and later conceptually by the recognition, notably by

Leibniz, that linguistic affinities must be determined also by grammatical
structure. Meanwhile, attention was given both to the circumstances promoting the preservation of forms of speech and writing, and to the causes of
linguistic diversification in time and space. It was to answer these questions
that Peiresc outlined a programme in this correspondence.
One central theme was his attempt to find in Coptic the key to the Egyptian
hieroglyphs, but he envisaged a comparative historical philology encompassing all the ancient and modern languages of Europe, the ancient Near Eastern
as well as classical languages of the polyglot Bible, Persian, Scythian and
languages farther East, with the decipherment of ancient texts and inscriptions
and of the occult symbolism of the Cabbala. The fundamental task of historical
philology was to trace the history of languages back through their secular
diversifications to the matrices linguae of each group and thence perhaps to the
original universal language of mankind. The Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, whose
interest was inspired by Peiresc, hoped to achieve this by using a Lullian art of
combinations, first to decipher the hieroglyphs and then to reduce all
languages to their pristine original. By contrast, the empirical method used by
Peiresc and Saumaise was to distinguish by comparative analysis the words and
idioms belonging to the matrix from the additions, modifications and losses
brought about by the contingencies of historical experience. Peiresc noted in
his study of Coptic that an older language could be preserved in a more recent
script, as when some ancient inscriptions on precious stones used Greek letters
for Egyptian or Hebrew words. He argued from analogies with the processes
of change observable in modern languages, for example through mixing,
addition or loss at the frontiers of France with Flanders, the Basque regions
and Genoa, and through invasions and migrations, how changes in remote
Antiquity could have come about. He looked behind the distortions of
pronunciation and spelling for the original 'matrice racine' of names of rivers
and towns, and thinking of the Etruscan inscriptions in his large collection of
ancient medals he wondered 's'il y avoit moyen de penetrer dans cette langue
etrusque par les regies de cez mattrices langues septentrionales'. He begged
Saumaise 'd'excuser la liberte possible trop grande de mes conjectures, qui
sont si subjectes a equivoque et par consequent a tomber dans 1'abbus'.
The style is the man, and for both correspondents the learned author of this
fascinating and elegantly produced edition cites Isaac Casaubon: 'Ubi cum
studio veritatis, viget studium antiquitatis.'
15
Le Corps a la Renaissance: Theories ofPerceiver
and Perceived in Hearing
Music has been strangely neglected by historians of science until very recently,
yet music was one of the fundamental Greek mathematical sciences, an important
part of the medieval mathematical quadrivium, and from the middle of the 16th
century the subject of active mathematical and experimental research1. The science of
music, like that of optics, was concerned primarily with the relation of perceiver to
perceived: with the identification and quantitative analysis of clues to sensations. For
music there were two basic questions : the discovery of the acoustical quantities
expressible in numbers that stimulated the diversities of auditory perception, and the
discovery of the anatomical structure and physiological functioning of the ear as the
receiver of those quantitative clues. In the first question science entered immediately
1. Cf. G. Reese, Music in the Middle Ages (New York, 1940), Music in the Renaissance, 2nd ed.
(London, 1954); M.R. Cohen and LE. Drabkin. A Source Book in Greek Scince (New York, 1948); C.A.
Traesdell, "The theory of aerial sound. 1687-1788" in Leonhard Euler, Opera omnia, 2 series, ed. A.
Speiser, E. Trost, C. Blanc, LG. du Pasqrier, xiii (Lausaimae, 1955), pp. vii-cxvii, "Hie rational
mechanics of flexible or elastic bodies, 1638-1788" in ibid, xi 2 (Turici, 1960). 15-141 ; C.V. Palisca,
"Scientific empiricism in musical thought" in Seventeenth Century Science and the Arts, ed. H.H. Rhys
(Princeton, NJ., 1961), 91-137, "The science of sound and musical practice" in Science and the Arts in
the Renaissance, ed. J.W. Shirley and F.D. Hoeniger (Washington, D.C., 1985a), 59-73 ; D.P. Walker,
Studies in Musical Science in the Late Renaissance (1967-76) (London, 1978) ; A.C. Crombie,
"Mathematics, music and medical science" (1971) in Science, Optics and Music in Medieval and Early
Modern Thought (London: Hambledon Press, 1990), Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European
Tradition, chs 3, 7, 10 (London: G. Duckworth, 1994), Marin Mersenne: Science, Music and
Language (forthcoming), A.C. Crombie and A. Carugo, Galileo Galilei's Natural Philosophy
(forthcoming); S. Dostrovsky, "Early vibration theory : physics and music in the seventeenth century",
Archive for History of Exact Sciences, xiv (1975), 169-218 ; F.W. Hunt, Origins in Acoustics : The
science of sound from antiquity to the age of Newton (New Haven, Conn., 1978) ; J.C. Kassler, The
Science of Music in Britain, 1714-1830, 2 vol. (London & New York, 1979), introduction : "The
'science' of music to 1830" reprinted in Archives Internationales d'histoire des sciences, xxx (1980),
292
into the problems of art through the analysis of consonance and dissonance,
resonance and related phenomena, and the devising of scales (to be embodied in the
tuning of musical instruments) that were at once ordered on some rational principle
and able to satisfy the needs of the ear. Why was the number of consonances limited,
and what determined the frontier between consonances and dissonances ? These were
fundamental questions for musical theory from the 14th century.
Musical theory in the medieval quadrivium was based primarily on Boethius's
De institutione musicae. Sound was propagated through the air as a succession of
impulses. Pitch depended on their frequency. Consonances were produced by the
blending of high and low notes with frequencies in the ratios of the perfect set of
numbers 1 to 4. They affected the soul because of its structural conformity through
these ratios with the harmonies alike of the cosmos and of musical sound. Hence the
moral power of music stressed in the Timaeus (35B-36B, 46C-47E), by Aristotle in
the Politics (viii, 5) and by Augustine. Within this context at once of educational
doctrine, natural philosophy and mathematical science, medieval students of music
had a choice of two main types of theory : that of Plato and the later Pythagoreans,
which related the consonances to purely numerical ratios, and was associated with
cosmic numerology ; and that of the Aristotelians, which began with experience and
looked beyond mere numbers for physical and causal explanations of sound and its
effects in sensation. Thus Aristoxenus made the ear and not numerical theory the
proper judge of consonance and dissonance. Grosseteste offered a sophisticated
explanation both of the physical propagation of sound and of its effects on sentient
beings. Later in the 13th century knowledge of Aristotelian theories was greatly
extended by the translation into Latin of the commentary or paraphrase by
Themistius on De anima, and of the Problemata then believed to be by Aristotle
himself. Scientific discussion of the whole subject entered a new phase with the
exposition of this work by Pietro d'Abano in the commentary which he completed at
Padua in 1310. Pietro d'Abano promoted a causal as distinct from simply numerical
treatment of the phenomena of sound (in particular pitch and consonance) that was to
re-establish the Aristotelian as opposed to the Platonic or late Pythagorean approach
to the science of music. His influence on musical theory was comparable to that of
Roger Bacon on optical theory through his exposition of Alhazen2.
From this time a number of different factors promoted the development of
musical science along with musical practice and of disputes that accompanied both.
111-36, "Music as a model in early science". History of Science, xx (1982), 103-39 ; P.M. Gouk, "Tlie
rede of acoustics and musical theory in the scientific work of Robert Hooke", Annals of Science, TOO. vii
(1980), 573-605, "Acoustics in the early Royal Society 1660-1680", Notes and Records of the Royal
Society, xxx vi (1982), 155-75, The Anatomy of Music : Sound and science in seventeenth - century
England (London : G. Duch worth, forthcoming) ; H.F. Cohen, Quantifying Music : The science of music
at the first stage of the scientific revolution, 1580-1650 (Dordrecht, 1984) ; F. de Buzon, "Science de la
nature et theorie musicale chez Isaac Beeckman (1588-1637)", Revue d'histoire des sciences, xxx viii
(1985), 97-120.
2. Cf. Palisca (1985), Crombie, Styles..., chs. 7,10.
Theories ofPerceiver and Perceived in Hearing
293
The attention given in the 14th century by mathematicians such as Walter of

Odington and Philippe de Vitry to musical problems, arising especially out of the
innovations of polyphony and in musical instruments, greatly improved the precision
of musical notation. Later in the 15th century knowledge of Greek musical theory
was extended far beyond that presented by Boethius and used in the medieval
quadrivium by the recovery and new availability of Greek and Latin texts. New
sources included Aristoxenus, Euclid, Nicomachus, Ptolemy, Porphyry, Adrastus,
Aristides Quintilianus and Theon of Smyrna. At the same time the revival of
Platonism led by Marsilio Ficino brought late Pythagorean purely numerical musical
theory into fresh confrontation with the Aristotelian insistence on starting from
experience and looking beyond numbers for causes. The new sources pulled musical
theorists, and practitioners concerned with scales and the tuning of instruments, in
both directions.
Between the middle of the XVIth century and the middle of the XVIIth the
science of music was tranformed by a number of happenings. Musical theorists were
forced by the striking innovations in more recent polyphony and in musical
instruments to reconsider the whole question of the theoretical limit fixed to
consonances by restricting them to ratios between the numbers 1 to 4. Recent music
exploited popular song in using intervals beyond this boundary and tunings other
than that of the Pythagorean scale of the Timaeus (35B-36B) as set out by Boethius.
Musical theorists following Aristoxenus in basing their perception of consonances
primarily on the complex factual responses and demands of the ear came to doubt
whether there was any precise boundary between consonance and dissonance. At the
same time they looked systematically for enlightenment on this question and on
acoustics generally in the texts of Greek authors, especially of Aristoxenus and
Ptolemy and of the Aristotelian De audibilibus and Problemata, becoming readily
available in Latin translations and sometimes in the vernacular. The problem for the
mathematical scientists was to discover what the grounds of music were in the
physical motions and propagation of sound and in the process by which sound
stimulated hearing in a percipient organism. They had to ask how numerical ratios
became sensations of pitch, consonance, dissonance and so on, and why some were
pleasant and others unpleasant. Their point of departure was in effect a physical
analysis of the relation between the quantitative primary properties of sound and the
secondary qualities of sensation generated by physiological and psychological
happenings through the ear.
Central to the whole of 16th-century acoustical theory was the musical problem
of devising on some mathematical principle scales and systems of tuning that would
meet the demands of the ear. This involved explanations of consonance and
dissonance. Gioseffo Zarlino in Venice broke new theoretical ground by extending
the realm of consonance from ratios within the first four numbers to ratios within the
first six, the so-called senarius or senario. In this he took into account recent
294
polyphonic practice by including among the consonances the major third (5:4), minor
third (6:5) and major sixth (5:3), and he also proposed rules of composition based on
the new limit3. It was in offering to the composer Cipriano de Rone an analysis of the
musical problems involved in tuning that the mathematician Giovanni Battista
Benedetti took the first step towards the mathematical and physical demonstration of
the fundamental proposition that pitch depended on frequency of vibrations or
impulses, and hence that the musical intervals were ratios of these frequencies,
whatever instrument produced them4. Benedetti proposed a physical explanation of
consonance which would account for these phenomena. Starting from the proposition
that the frequencies of two strings with the same tension were inversely proportional
to their lengths, he argued that the consonance of intervals depended on the
coincidence of the terminations of their vibrations. Then, since the the more frequent
the coincidence the higher the degree of consonance, he could arrange the
consonances in an order by multiplying the two terms of each of their ratios. This put
relative consonance and dissonance alike on a continuous scale which ignored the
boundary of the senario.
The complexity of the relation of science to art in this period is exemplified by
Vincenzo Galilei. He again was led by musical problems of consonance and tuning to
a scientific study of sound. As a skilled lutanist he was sent by his humanist patron
Count Giovanni Bardi in Florence to study musical theory with Zarlino in Venice,
just before Zarlino succeeded Cipriano de Rore at St. Mark's. On his return, Galilei
then became musical preceptor to the musical academy of the Camerata which met at
Bardi's home, and a composer. Starting in agreement with Zarlino he turned, under
the influence of the humanist musical scholar Girolamo Mei, who worked in the
Vatican Library, into his most ruthless critic. Mei argued for an empirical conception
of the art of music. How was it Galilei asked him "that the practitioner does not
follow at all the designs of the theorist, as he should, since the theorist gives the
reason why" ? Mei replied that "considering and understanding are one thing and
putting into operation another. The former belongs to the intellect and the latter to
sense. But the sense of hearing is not as perfect as the judgement of the intellect
because of the material and other circumstances that always necessarily accompany
the former". Hence "the practitioner, having simply to satisfy the sense"5, needed no
further precision than would achieve that end. The ear could tolerate considerable
deviations from any mathematical scale.
3. Gioseffo Zarlino da Chioggia, U istitutioni harmoniche (Venetia, 1558; new eds. 1573,1589); M.
Shirlaw, The Theory of Harmony (London, no date : 1917? reprinted De Kalb, DI, 1955) ; J.M. Barbour,
Tuning and Temperament, 2nd ed. (East Lansing, Mich., 1953) ; cf. Palisca (1961). Humanism in Italian
Renaissance Musical Thought (New Haven, Conn., 1985b) ; D.P. Walker (1978). Music, Spirit and
Language in the Renaissance (London, 1985). Cohen (1984).
4. Cf. Baibour (1953), Shirlaw (19177). Palisca (1961). (1985a). Cohen (1984).
5. C.V. Palisca, Girodamo Mei (1519-1594) : Letters on Ancient and Modern Music to Vincenzo
Galilei and Giovanni Bardi (American Institute of Musicology, 1960), 65, 66,103,125-6.
295
Galilei's main target became Zarlino's attempt to restrict music to consonant

ratios within the numerical senario. He launched his attack on Zarlino in his Dialogo
della musica antica et della moderna (1581), dedicated to Giovanni Bardi. His work
is a good example of the contemporary search at once for the best system and for its
true ancient model. He gave in the Dialogo an analysis of the vohime published in
1562 of Latin versions by Antonio Gogava of Aristoxenus, Ptolemy and the
Aristotelian De audibilibus, as well as of the Latin version by Jean Pena of Euclid's
Sectio canonis (1557). Among the manuscripts inherited by his son Galileo he left a
translation of Aristoxenus into Italian6, and he explicitly followed Aristoxenus in
trying to build a rational art of music up from auditory sensation instead of imposing
on it a rigid mathematical scheme in the style of the Platonists and Pythagoreans. He
pointed out that intervals and tunings that sounded pleasant or harsh on some
instruments could sound the reverse on others, and that familiarity could accustom
the ear to change its preferences7. Galilei was unsympathetic towards the more
numerological and cosmic aspects of Platonism, and he looked in the Dialogo
beyond the mere numerical harmony of Zarlino's "harmonic numbers" or "sounding
numbers" for the physical basis of sounds and their effects on the ear.
To a reply by Zarlino, Galilei again pressed his attack with \\isDiscorso intorno
all' opere di messer Gioseffo Zarlino da Chioggia (1589). Central to the interest of
the dispute for scientific and artistic thought was Galilei's rejection of Zarlino's
conception of what was natural, in the sense of given in nature as distinct from made
artificially by man or in man by his cultural experience and history. Galilei argued
that it was "natural" that the ratios of the octave and the fifth were concords, but that
the division of the former into seven and the latter into four intervals "is entirely a
matter of art" (p. 21). All scales were made by man and so were "artificial" (p. 31).
"In the same way it can be said of speech that it is natural and artificial" (pp. 81-82).
Thus all systems of intonation had to be learnt. For although "the material of singing,
which is the voice..., is given by nature, to know then how to place it to form the
intervals both consonant and dissonant, and also what are needed in measure and
proportion, belong to an" (p. 99; cf. 127-8). Systems of intonation like languages in
so far as they were made by man could undergo historical development.
In the course of his critique Galilei described an important acoustical discovery
which he used against Zarlino's numerical explanation of consonances. He showed in
the Discorso, and in manuscripts apparently written between its completion and his
death in 1591, that the traditionally accepted Pythagorean ratios of the consonances
were ratios only of lengths. Thus while the octave ratio for the lengths of strings was
6. Biblioteca Ntzionale Centrale di Firenze, MSS Gtlilciani 8, ff. 3'-38* ; cf. A. Procissi, La
colltxione Gal'deiana della Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, i (Roma, 1959), 8 ; Aristoxeni...
Harmonicorwn elemenlorium libri iii, Q. Ptolemaei Harmonicorum seu De musica libri Hi, Aristotelis
De obiecto auditus fragmentum ex Porphyrii commentafiis, omnium mine primum latine conscript* et
editt ab Ant Gogavino Gnwknsis (Venetiii, 1562).
7. Vincentio Galilei, Dialogo... (Fiorenza, 1587), 32,47-8,55.
296
2:1, for their tensions it was the squares of these numbers 4:1, and he asserted that for
organ pipes it was their cubes 8:1, the ratio of their volumes. Likewise the ratios of
tensions of strings were for the fifth 9:4 and for the fourth 16:9. It seems clear that, as
he claimed, Galilei must have made his experiments with strings, but he cannot have
reached his proportion for pipes by experiment for the pitch of a pipe is proportional
to its length, not its volume. He could easily have discovered this from an organ
builder. Galilei seems to have been captivated by a neat mathematical sequence
making the consonances depend successively on the unit, square and cube (for the
octave 2:1, 4:1 and 8:1) of the three quantities he considered8. Nevertheless he
showed not only that the accepted story of Pythagoras's experiments with hammers
must be false, but also that if other quantities besides length of strings were
considered, ratios outside Zarlino's senario produced recognized consonances. Like
Benedetti (who had not explicitly drawn this conclusion) Galilei showed that there
was no natural or numerical boundary between consonance and dissonance, but that
they were distinguished by ear. Moreover an could complement nature, could yield
conclusions about nature, and could transcend nature in artificial things.
Galilei's analysis of the relation of perceiver to perceived in hearing was to be
developed into a systematic doctrine by Isaac Beeckman, Descartes and Mersenne.
Using essentially Benedetti's theory of consonances, Descartes wrote in 1630 to
Mersenne that the "calcul que je faisois des retours des sons pour faire consonances"
showed that in terms of the physical motions or blows producing them some intervals
were simpler than others. "Je dis plus simple, non pas plus agreable [...] Mais pour
determiner ce qui est plus agrdable, il faut supposer la capacit6 de 1'auditeur, laquelle
change comme le goust, selon les personnes [...]; de mesme que Tun aime mieux ce
qui est doux, et 1'autre ce qui est un peu aigre ou amer, etc."9. Thus concerning the
perfection of consonances, "il y a deux choses a distinguer, a sâvoir ce qui les rend
8. Vincentio Galilei, Discorso... (Fiorenza, 1S89), replying to Zarlino, Sopplimenti maicali (Venelia,
1588), with Galilei, "Discorso particolare intomo alia diversita delle forme del diapason" MSS Galileiani
3, ff. 45'-47r, 54", "Discorso partioolare intomo all* unisono", ibid., ff. 5^-57'; cf. Procissi, i (1959), 3-6,
8 ; Nicomachus, Harmonicos manuale c.6, Macrobius, Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis ii.l, and
Boethius De institution* musica i. 10-11 for the story of Pythagoras's alleged discoveries ; Galileo
Galilei, Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienze Giomata i (Leida, 1638) in
Le Opere, ed. nazionale, viii (Fircnze, 1898), 138-50, cf. x, 86-87, xix, 594, 599, 602, 604, and the
Discorsi a cure di A. Carugo e L. Geymonat (Torino, 1958) for similar acoustical experiments perhaps
bagun with his father at Florence ; Palisca (1961), (1985a), D.P. Walker, "Some aspects of the musical
theory of Vincenzo Galilei and Galileo Galilei", Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, c (197374), 33-47, reprinted with changes in (1978). Unfortunately Walker's assertion in this article, that Galileo
could not possibly have made his famous experiments with a file and with a goblet of water to show that
the musical intervals were ratios of frequencies (Opere, viii, 141-5), was based on his failure to
understand that Galileo was dealing not with vibrations but with what are now called standing waves: cf.
Crombie, Styles..., ch. 10.
9. Descartes to Mersenne L 1630 in Mersenne, Correspondence, publiee et annotee par C. De Waard
avec R. Pintard, ii (Paris. 1937), 370-1 ; cf. A. Pino, Descartes et la musique (Paris, 1907) ; B. Augst,
"Descartes'* Compendium on Music", Journal of the History of Ideas, xxvi (1965), 119-32 ; Buzon,
(1981), Cohen (1984).
297
plus simples et accordances, et ce qui les rend plus agreables a 1'oreille. On, pour ce
qui les rend plus agr&bles, cela depend des lieus ou elles sont employees, et il se
trouve des lieus ou mesme les fausses quintes et autres dissonances sont plus
agreables que les consonances, de sorte qu'on ne scauroit determiner absolument
qu'une consonance soit plus agitable que 1'autre." Musical perceptions then were
often subjective and influenced by their context. "Mais on peut dire absolument
quelles consonances sont les plus simples et plus accordantes, car cela ne depend que
de ce que leurs sons s'unissent davantage Tun avec I'autre, et qu'elles approchent
plus de la nature de 1'unisson ; en sorte qu'in peut dire absolument que la quarte est
plus accordante que la tierce majeure, encore pour I'ordinaire elle ne soit pas si
agr6able; comme la casse est bien plus douce que les olives, mais non pas si agr&ble
a nostre goust"10. Mersenne was to elaborate this line of analysis into a comparative
physiological and ethological inquiry into the variation of the effects of music on the
ear and the emotions according to age and temperament, to the musical context, to
the cultural habits of different peoples, and in different kinds of animals. In his great
Harmonic universelle (1636-37), in which he presented his own fundamental
researches, together with those of relevant predecessors, into the mathematical
physics and the psychology of sound, he established for the first time a systematic
science of music in all its aspects11.
Those inquiring into the way in which sound effected sensations in a sensitive
body found themselves confronted by a number of different kinds of problem : the
physical propagation and motions of sound and their acoustical quantities, the
physiological mechanisms by which the ear responds to them, the means of relating
these physical quantities and motions to the sensations they produced, and the
empirical phenomena of auditory perception. Before the work of Mersenne,
Descartes and other contemporaries made these distinctions explicit, invertigators
working in different intellectual and academic contexts did focus during the 16th
century on different kinds of problems which they developed into different subjectmatters for research. Thus while students of music as a mathematical science and art
were inveitigating the acoustical quantities and their effects in musical sensation, and
philosophers were explaining in their own ways the interactions between body and
soul, anatomists in the medical schools had been looking into the physiology of the
ear. Anatomical research, starting in Italy early in the 16th century not far in advance
of where Galen had left off, had by the beginning of the 17th century clarified and in
large part discovered the main macroscopic details of the human auditory mechanism
and its innervation12. According to the current theory derived from Aristotle (De
10. Descartes to Mersenne 13.i. 1631, ibid., iii, 2* ed. par B. Rochot (1969), 24-25.
11. Cf. R. Lenoble, Marin Mersenne, ou la naissance du mecanisme (Paris. 1943) ; A.C. Crombie,
"Mersenne, Marin (1588-1648)" in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. C.C. Gillitpie, ix (New Yoik.
1974), 316-22, Styles... ch. 10, Science, Optics and Music..., Marin Mersenne.
12. Cf. A. Politzer, Geschichte der Okrenkeilkunde, i (Stuttgart, 1907); A.C. Crombie, The study of
the senses in Renaissance science" (1964) in Science, Optics and Music...
298
anima ii. 8), the motion transmitted from a sounding body through the air produced a
corresponding motion of the air enclosed in the ear. Elaborating this with anatomical
details, the Dutch physician Volcher Goiter in his "De auditus instrumento" (1573)13,
the first special monograph to be written on the ear, identified the proper organ of
hearing as the internal air in the cavity of the middle ear. "To have a sensation of
anything" he wrote, "there must be a mutual action and affection (actio et passio)
between the sentient thing and the thing sensed, and for this there must be mutual
agreement between the two. Whence it follows that when the external air acts, the
internal or implanted air is affected, the internal air receiving the alteration of the
external air and being moved in the same way from outside. But this does not happen
immediately, but through the interposition of the membrane and of certain ossicles
wonderfully designed by nature". The external air "affected by the quality of sound"
transmitted its pulsations to the drum, whence they were transmitted through the
ossicles to the "enclosed air" and thence through the windings of the ear unaltered to
"the auditory nerve. By means of this passage and agency, the image of the sound
(strepitus imago) is at last transmitted to be seat of sensation (principiwn sentiendi)"
(c. 1). He thought that the bony labyrinth and cochlea of the inner ear acted like the
coils of a musical instrument to augment the sound (c. 15). Discussion of the
physiology of hearing concentrated on the identification of the sensitive organ and on
its mode of operation with that of the other parts, on the analogy of the operation of
the eye in focusing visual images. Somewhat earlier than Goiter the Italian anatomist
Guido Guidi had proposed that "the principal instrument of hearing" was the air
enclosed in the inner ear, adding that his proposals "are to be understood more as
conjectures than as scientific knowledge"14. Later in 1600 Andre* du Laurens located
the proper organ of sensation in the cochlea, but insisted that it was not the enclosed
air but must be the termination of the auditory nerve15. Guilio Casserio insisted on
this likewise in his De vocis auditusque organis historia anatomica (1600-01), a
marvellously illustrated work which with Girolamo Fabrici'sDe visione, voce, auditu
(1600) systematized auditory anatomy16.
Attempts at more quantitative investigations of auditory physiology followed
Mersenne's prescription that no one could succeed in this "unless he combines the
13. Volcher Colter, "De auditus instrumento" in Exiernarum et internarum principalium Humani
corpora partium tabulae (Nurembergae, 1573) ; cf. Politzer (1907), Crombie (1964), R. Herrlinger,
Volcher Colter, 1534-1576 (Nuremberg, 1952).
14. Vidus Vidius, De anatomia carports humani libri vii, vii, c.5 (Ars medicinalis, iii, Venetiis, 1611),
322-3.
15. Andrea Laurentius, Historia anatomica humani corporis, xi, quaestiones 9-10 (Francofurti,
1600), 428-9.
16. Cf. L. Premuda, "Casseri (or Casserio), Giulio (c. 1552-1616)" in Diet. Sci. Biog. iii (1971), 98 100 ; B. Zanobio, "Fabrici, Girolamo (or Fabricius ab Aquapendente, Geronimo Fabrizio) (c. 15331619)" in ibid., iv (1971), 507-12.
299
principles of physics and medecine with mathematical reasoning"17. This was to be

done at the Academic Royale des Sciences, with a considerable debt to the still
qualitative comparative studies of Thomas Willis of Oxford18. In 1667 Claude
Perrault proposed for the Academic a programme of comparative research into the
structures and functions of all the organs composing the bodies of animals ; in 1677
he undertook "d'examiner a fond tout ce qui appartient au sens de 1'ouye"19. The
culmination of this pan of his programme was the Traitt de I'organe de I'owe (1683)
by Joseph Guichard Duverney in which, with acknowledgements to the physicist
Edme Mariotte, Duvemey proposed an explanation of the analysis of pitch by the ear
modelled on the selective sympathetic resonance of the strings of a lute. He would
"tirer de la mechanique de ces parties quelques consequences par lesquelles on peut
expliquer leur usage et la maniere dont nous appercevons les sons et les bruits
differens... ; mes conjectures me paroissent asses vraisemblables, mais d'autres
seront peut-estre d'un autre goust. Quoy qu'il en soit, je croiray avoir bien reussi, si
je puis les obliger par cette essay a nous dormer quelque chose de meilleur"20.
17. Marinus Mersennus, Quaestiones in Genesim, c.iv., vers 21, q. 57, art. 16 (Lutetiae Parisiorum,
1623), 1696b.
18. Thomas Willis, De anima brutorum, pan i, cc. 10, cf. 3-15 (Oxonii, 1672) ; G.S. Brett, The
Philosophy of Gassendi (London, 1908) ; P.P. Cranefield, "A sevcntcenth-ccntuiy view of mental
deficiency and schizophrenia : Thomas Willis on 'stupidity or foolishness", Bulletin of the history of
Medicine, xxxv (1961), 219-316 ; A. Meyer and R. Hierons, "On Thomas Willis's conception of
neurophysiology", Medical History, ix (1965), 1-15,142-55.
\9.Histoire de I'Acadtmie Royale des Sciences, i (Paris, 1733), 18, 35-37 (1667), 117 (1670), 223
(1677).
20. Joseph Guichard Duvemey, Trait/ de I'organe de I'owe (Paris, 1683), 68-9 ; cf. R.S. Stevenson
and D. Guthrie, A History of Oto-Laryngology (Edinburgh, 1949) ; Crombie (1964).
Rene Descartes, curious portrait by an unknown artist, drawn perhaps in 1642

in Holland (see Oeuvres, ed. C. Adam et P. Tannery, xii, 1910, pp. xvxvi, 75).
16
Expectation, Modelling and Assent in the

History of Optics
Part I: Alhazen and the Medieval Tradition
KEPLER'S MEDICAL friend Johann Brengger wrote to him in 1604 after the
publication in that year of his account of the formation of the optical image in
the eye: 'From what I have seen before on the operation of the camera obscura
of Giambattista Porta . . . I have always persuaded myself that vision occurred
by the reception of the images (species) of visible things on the retina. But I am
in doubt, for everything would be received there inverted, whereas vision
occurs erect'.1 The contemporary force of this to us perhaps trivial difficulty
directs us at once to the presuppositions and expectations that gave rise to it.
From there in turn we can reach some measure of Kepler's originality and of
his limitations. Brengger's comment alerts us also to the role of models, in
particular during the preceding century that of the camera obscura, in the
investigation of ocular physiology. A model of course embodies a theory,
whether it is a scale model of selected significant features of the situation
modelled or an analogical model of the formal relations between phenomena
without identity of material parts, whether it is an abstract postulate or is
actually constructed, and whether its function in scientific argument is exploratory or explanatory. A model according to the 16th-century Italian engineer
Giuseppe Ceredi, with 'nature itself as if become mechanical in the construction of the world and of all the forms of things', could enable the investigator,
by modifying it as required, to come 'to the perfection of art and to the stable
production of the effect that is expected'.2 Likewise Leibniz was to point to the
'Brengger to Kepler 23.xii.1604, in Kepler's Gesammelte Werke, W. von Dyck, M.Caspar,

F. Hammer (eds), 18 vol. (Munich, 1937-1959), xv, pp. 90-91. See on the subject of this paper A.
C. Crombie, The mechanistic hypothesis and the scientific study of vision', Proceedings of the
Royal Microscopical Society, 2 (1967), 3-112 with extensive bibliography, reprinted in Science,
Optics and Music in Medieval and Early Modern Thought (London, 1990); 'Science and the arts in
the Renaissance', History of Science 18 (1980), 233-246; 'Experimental science and the rational
arts in early modern Europe', Daedalus 115 (1986), 49-74; 'La Dioptrique et Kepler', in Le
Discours et sa methode, N. Grimaldi and J.-L. Marion (eds) (Paris, 1987), pp. 131-144; and Styles
of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition (London, 1994), with further discussion, documentation and bibliography.
2
G. Ceredi, Tre discorsi sopra il modo d'alzar acque da' luoghi bassi (Parma, 1567), pp. 5-7.
302
Fig. 1. Euclid: the geometry of vision.
usefulness of 'analogies . . . in making predictions about matters of which we

have as yet little experience' and 'in investigating the true causes of things, for
it is always easier to discover the cause of a phenomenon which several things
have in common'.3 A model then offered a means of exploring a natural
phenomenon through the known properties of an artifact, by reducing both to
a common form provided by an appropriate general theory which defined their
common scientific provenance and guided the inquiry to their common explanatory principles. It offered an antecedent theoretical analysis that could
suggest new questions to put to nature. It operated in scientific argument
within a framework of generally accepted theoretical commitments, concerning
both the nature of the world and the appropriate style of reasoning, which
determined the expectations of those involved and the assent they would give
to its conclusions. For the historian attempting to unravel these commitments
and their consequences it is essential to pay close attention to the contextual
meanings of terms, to philosophical philogy: Ceredi's term mecanica for
example meant not simply machinary in its later sense, but rather as the Greek
mechane a contrivance or device of any kind.
To understand the commitments of the science of vision at the time of
Kepler, as at that of Alhazen, we must take a long view. The Greek natural
philosophers in their search for the simplest and most economical principles of
nature established theoretical modelling as a method of inquiry at the very
beginning of Western scientific thinking. Thus they exploited the speculative
power of geometry by reducing astronomy to the properties of the sphere and
its radii, and the phenomena of visual perspective to those of the straight line
and the angle. They could then develop their research into the phenomena
primarily theoretically within the model itself, with a minimum of immediate
reference to observations. Greek optical theory was essentially a theory of
visual perception which aimed to make the process of vision yield the perceptions we had of the visible scene. Euclid created the science of geometrical
3
Leibniz, Elementa physicae, ii (c. 1682-1684) in Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. and transl.
L. E. Loemker (Dordrecht, 1969), p. 284.
The History of Optics: Alhazen and the Medieval Tradition
Fig. 2. Euclidean
vision: from
303
Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi... historia: Microcosmus

(Oppenheim, 1618).
optics and perspective by taking the eye as the point of origin of lines of vision,
of which he postulated the essential properties: that they were rectilinear, that
they formed a perspective cone with its apex at the eye and its base at the
object seen, that things appeared to be equal, larger or smaller according to
whether the angles subtended at the eye were equal, larger or smaller, and so
on. In this way he could demonstrate from his premises, without immediate
observation, the appearances that things must have in direct vision and in the
extension of visual space in plane and curved mirrors (Figs 1 and 2). The
problems recognized in Greek optics all followed from the primary commitment of all its theories after Euclid, whether geometrical, physiological or
philosophical, to making the process by which vision was effected yield an
immediate explanation of visual perception. This was the commitment of
Ptolemy in his combination of experimental measurement with geometry, of
Galen in his inquiry into the physiological functions of the different parts of
the eye and his identification of the anterior surface of the crystallinus (the
modern lens) as the sensitive receptor, and of the philosophers whether
Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic or Epicurean in their theories of how vision was
caused.
304
The specific character of Greek optics can be defined by comparison with

what happened later. This exemplifies the need in the history of thought to
examine problems not only at their own horizon of time but also in the
sequence of subsequent insights offering solutions in other contexts. The
striking difference between Greek and later medieval and modern optical
theory is the absence of any Greek conception of the eye itself as an imageforming optical instrument and hence of any analysis of its dioptrical function.
This was surely related to the absence of any purely physical conception of
light, independent of the perceptions it generated but the only intermediary
between object and eye. Related to this again was the absence of any
understanding of the dispersion of light into colours (despite well-known
examples of this phenomenon) and hence of any understanding of the physical
nature of colour. The explanation of perception by the Stoic visual flux emitted
from the eye, or by the entry into it of the ready-made Epicurean images, or by
some incorporeal process, made any geometrical analysis of the formation of
images irrelevant. The technical capacity was there, but conceptually attention
was directed elsewhere.
The conceptual change that made this the central problem for visual theory
was initiated in the context of 1 Ith-century Arabic thought by the physicist Ibn
al-Haytham, known in Latin as Alhazen. Taking the eye as an optical
instrument analagous to any other, Alhazen carried out a mathematical and
experimental analysis to show how it formed images within itself of the objects
from which it received rectilinear rays of physical light. His essential postulate
was that the image was formed by the stimulation on the sensitive anterior
surface of the crystallinus of points corresponding to the points in the visual
field from which the rays came. The image was a pattern of stimulation, not a
focused optical image. But by offering this as an immediate explanation of
visual perception, he left still unanalysed the different categories of question
involved but not distinguished in the Greek theory of vision. The most obvious
difficulty was to show how the eye, which on his optical analysis formed an
inverted and reversed image, could yet cause us to see as we did. The eventual
solution was given by a second change in conceptual strategy initiated by
Kepler and made explicit by Descartes. A dead eye as Aristotle had insisted
might be an eye only in name. Kepler's reply was effectively that in order to
find out how the living eye enabled us to see as we did, the physiological
problem of how it functioned as an optical instrument had first to be solved in
isolation. He separated the optical geometry of the eye from the perspective
geometry of visual perception. Then he turned this round and showed how the
rays coming from an apex at each point in the visual field made up a multitude
of cones with a common base on the crystallinus, now recognized as a focusing
lens, whence each was brought to a focus on the retina where together they
formed an inverted and reversed image. Thus the eye functioned dioptrically
305
like a dead camera obscura containing a lens. The other problems of the
relation of perceiver to perceived, the empirical psychology of perception, and
the causation by a physical agent of sensation in sentient beings, could then
likewise all be liberated from each other, investigated separately, and their
relations re-examined.
From the viewpoint of the seventeenth century we can distinguish then four
quite different kinds of question wrapped up together in the visual theory
inherited from the Greeks, which were separated in the new theory coming
from Kepler and Descartes. The first was physical and physiological: the
operation of the eye as an optical instrument like any other physical instrument. Secondly there was the relation of the formation of images in the eye to
the perception of the objects of these images, and more generally the relation
of visual perception to the physiological clues involved. Thirdly there was the
ontological question of the relation of a physical stimulus as cause to sensation
as an effect in a quite different category. Fourthly there was the empirical
psychology of visual perception as a matter of independent autonomous
observation apart from physiological or philosophical theory.
Alhazen accepted as his starting point the Greek commitment of optics to
finding an immediate explanation of visual perception, but he transformed the
subject both conceptually and by his style of argument. He transformed optical
theory by explicitly distinguishing light from vision, and by investigating first
the properties of light and then on that basis the process by which light effected
vision by means of the eye. At the same time he developed systematically a
specifically experimental as well as mathematical argument in exemplary
combination. He took from Alkindi the basic principle that everything in the
world emits rays in every direction and applied this to light. In a series of
experiments with sighting tubes and other devices, and with a camera obscura
of which he studied the operation, he demonstrated the basic postulates of his
optics: that light was emitted rectilinearly in all directions from all points on
the surface of both luminous and illuminated bodies, whether these were
terrestrial or were celestial like the Sun and Moon; and that its propagation
was rectilinear whatever its form, whether direct, reflected or refracted. He
recognized with brilliant originality that the eye did not simply receive the
likenesses of things seen, but must be treated as an optical instrument that
itself formed images of them from the light entering it. He rejected the
extromission theory that sight was brought about by some kind of action sent
out by the eye as supposed in their different versions by Euclid, Ptolemy and
Galen; and he rejected the Epicurean intromission theory supposing that
already-formed copies of objects entered the eye. The pain inflicted by very
bright light, after-images both of bright objects and of bright colours, and a
variety of other observations showed that 'light produces some effect in the
eye', that 'illuminated colours act on the eye' and that light and colour were
306
Science,, Art and Nature in Medieval and Modern Thought
Fig. 3. The anatomy of the eye from a contemporary illustration inserted by Risner in editing
Alhazen, Optica I, 4 (Basel, 1572).
virtually identical so that colours were apprehended only through light.4 His
problem then was to discover how the eye formed images of bodies from the
light emitted from all their points in all directions.
Alhazen adopted the basic ocular anatomy which Galen had related to
Ptolemy's geometrical optical analysis and which had been described in detail
by Hunain ibn Ishaq (Fig. 3).5 In the globular body of the eyeball with its coats
*Opticae thesaurus Alhazeni Arabis libri septem . . . Vitellionis Thuringopoloni libri x, omnes
instaurati... a Federico Risnero (Basel, 1572); i, 1.1, p. 1 and i, 3.3, p. 3. All references in the text
are to this edition. See Al-Hasan ibn al-Haitham, The Optics, books i-iii: "On direct vision",
transl. with introduction and commentary by A. I. Sabra, 2 vols. (London, 1989). On Alhazen see
also M. Schramm, 'Zur Entwicklung der physiologischen Optik in der arabischen Literatur',
Sudhoffs Archiv 43 (1959), 289-316; M. Schramm, Ibn al-Hay (hams Weg zur Physik (Wiesbaden,
1963); M. Schramm, 'Ibn al-Haythams Stellung in der Geschichte der Wissenschaften', Fikrun Wa
Fann 6 (Hamburg, 1965), 1-22; G. F. Vescovini, Studi sulla prospettiva medievale (Turin, 1965a);
Crombie (1967: above n. 1); R. Rashed, 'Le Discours de la lumiere d'Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen)',
Revue d'histoire des sciences, 21 (1968), 197-224; R. Rashed, 'Optique geometrique et doctrine
optique chez Ibn al-Haytham', Archive for History of Exact Sciences 6 (1970), 271-298; S. M.
Straker, Kepler's Optics (Indiana University Ph.D. Thesis, 1971; Ann Arbor, Mich., 1980); A. I.
Sabra, 'Ibn al-Haytham... (965-c. 1040)', in Dictionary of Scientific Biography 6 (New York,
1972), pp. 189-210 (for writings in Arabic including those on the camera obscura, etc. not
translated into Latin); A. I. Sabra, The physical and the mathematical in Ibn al-Haytham's theory
of light and vision', in Commemoration volume of Biruni International Congress in Tehran (Tehran,
1976), pp. 439-478; A. I. Sabra, 'Sensation and inference in Alhazen's theory of visual perception',
in Studies in Perception, P. K. Machamer and R. G. Turnbull (eds) (Columbus, Ohio, 1978),
pp. 160-185; D. C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago, 1976); G. A.
Russell, 'The emergence of physiological optics', in Science in Islamic Civilisation, R. Rashed and
R. Morelou (eds) (London, 1990). For Greek geometrical optics see Euclid, L'optique et la
catoptrique, transl. into French by P. Ver Eecke (Paris and Bruges, 1938); Ptolemy, IS optique,
A. Lejeune (ed.) (Louvain, 1956); A. Lejeune, Euclide et Ptolemee (Louvain, 1948); A. Lejeune,
Recherches sur la catoptrique grecque (Brussels, 1957).
'Hunain ibn Ishaq, The Book of the Ten Treatises on the Eye, M. Meyerhof (ed.) (Cairo, 1928).
307
Fig. 4. From The 'Opus Majus' of Roger Bacon, v. /. Hi. 3, ed. Bridges ii. 24 (Oxford, 1897). The
diagram is not anatomical, but a geometrical model showing the curvatures of the different refracting
media according to Alhazen's optical theory of the eye. The 'centre of the eye' (centrum oculi, b)
coincides with the centres of curvature of the cornea, the aqueous humour (albugineus) and the
anterior surface of the glacialis. In front of this are the centres of the vitreous humour and the choroid
(uvea), and behind it is the centre of the sclerotic (consolidativa). The object al sends rays which pass
perpendicularly through the cornea at m, o and strike the anterior surface of the glacialis
perpendicularly at c, d, thus passing through without refraction. At the posterior surface of the
glacialis the rays are refracted away from the centre so that they do not intersect; thus an erect image
of the object reaches the entrance of the optic nerve at the back of the eye.
surrounding its transparent humours each part had its ordained function. He
accepted and extended Galen's argument showing that the anterior surface of
the crystallinus and that alone was the sensitive receptor, of which all the other
parts were the instruments. (The crystallinus formed the anterior part of the
spherical glacialis, and was sometimes called the anterior glacialis or simply
308
glacialis; the posterior part was the vitreus humor.) But he formulated the
problem of image-formation in the tradition not of medical physiology but of
the mathematical sciences. His stroke of genius was to impose on ocular
anatomy and physiology a geometrical-optical model that would meet the
requirements of his theory of visual perception. He postulated that in the
optical system of the eye all the surfaces were spherical, with centres on the line
passing from the centre of the pupil to the centre of the termination of the
optic nerve at the back (i.4.4-12, pp. 3-7; Fig. 4). When light entered through
the pupil, it was known 'that it is a property of light to act on the eye and that
it is the nature of the eye to be affected by light' (i.5.14, pp. 7-8). But if all the
forms of light and colour entering the pupil from every point on the surface of
an object stimulated the crystallinus, all would be confused and no clear image
could be formed. His solution was to postulate that only the forms striking its
anterior surface perpendicularly, and without weakening by refraction, would
cause sensation. As Risner (the editor of the 1572 Latin edition) summarized it
in his heading: 'Distinct vision is brought about by straight lines coming from
the visible object perpendicular to the surface of the eye and thus single points
of the visible object maintain the same position on the surface of the eye as on
the visible object'. Alhazen justified his choice of the perpendicular by arguing
that among all the lines that reached the eye at different angles it was unique,
whereas none of the others could be distinguished from any other as 'more
fitting', and that 'the action of the light coming along that perpendicular is
stronger than the action of light coming along oblique lines. It is therefore
more fitting that the crystallinus should sense from any point only the form
coming to that particular point along the rectilinear perpendicular, and should
not sense from that point what comes to it along refracted lines' (i.5.18,
pp. 9-10). This postulate of his theory of visual perception required the further
postulate of his anatomical geometry that the centres of curvature of both
surfaces of the cornea, of the albugineous (or aqueus) humour, and of the
anterior surface of the crystallinus should all coincide at the centre of the
eyeball, so that the forms falling perpendicularly on the first should pass
perpendicularly without refraction through them all (i.4.4-12, pp. 3-7; Fig. 4).
Thus his style of argument was to impose on both ocular anatomy and on
optical physiology geometrical postulates that would satisfy the immediate
expectations of vision.
'Vision is brought about through a pyramid of which the apex is in the eye
and the base on the visible object' (i.5.19, pp. 10-12), as Risner headed
Alhazen's account of the construction of the visual cone or pyramid which he
followed Ptolemy and Galen in taking over from Euclid. This would be
geometrically the same whether vision took place by intromission or extromission, but Alhazen having refuted extromission composed it only of the forms
of light and colour entering the eye along the perpendiculars. Because the
309
crystallinus was optically both transparent and dense, it received the forms but
prevented them from passing right through: 'Thus the forms are fixed in its
surface and body, but weakly: it is the same with any transparent body that is
somewhat dense'. Now 'the glacialis is disposed (praeparatus) both to receive
those forms and to sense them. Therefore the forms pass into it because of its
receiving and sensing power (propter virtutem sensibilem recipienteni). When
the form reaches the surface of the glacialis it acts on it and the glacialis is
affected (patitur) by it, because it is a property of light to act on the eye and a
property of the eye to be affected by light'. This action passed into the glacialis
'only along straight radial lines, because the glacialis is disposed to receive the
forms of light vertically on radial lines'. The light was accompanied by colour,
'and from this action and affection will arise the sensation of the glacialis from
the forms of visible things that are at its surface and pass into its whole body;
and from the ordering (ordinatio) of the parts of the form at its surface and in
its whole body will arise its sensation from the ordering of the parts' (i.5.25,
p.15).
This action which light effects in the glacialis is of the same kind as pain . . . . From
there this sensation occurring in the glacialis is extended to the optic nerve and
comes to the anterior part of the brain, and there resides the ultimate sensation and
the ultimate sentient (ultimus sensus et sentiens ultimum), which is the sensitive power
(virtus sensitiva) that is in the anterior part of the brain. That power apprehends the
sensible things (comprehendit sensibilia), but the eye is only an instrument of that
power, because the eye receives the forms of things seen and sends them to the
ultimate sentient, and the ultimate sentient apprehends those forms and apprehends
from them the visible things that are in them. That form at the surface of the
glacialis is extended into its body, and thence into the subtle body that is in the
concavity of the nerve until it reaches the common nerve, and with the arrival of the
form at the common nerve vision is completed. By means of the form arriving at the
common nerve the ultimate sentient apprehends the forms of things seen (i.5.26, pp.
15-16).
Alhazen thus took over from Galen both his basic ocular anatomy and his
conception of the process of visual sensation and perception completed in the
brain. He also adopted and adapted from Aristotle his conception that the
forms of light and colour, transmitted in straight lines as qualities of visible
objects, brought about vision by altering in turn the transparent medium and
through that the eye, where they endowed the anterior glacialis with those
qualities. Thus 'essential light (lux essentialis) is apprehended by the sentient
from the illumination of the sentient body, and colour is apprehended by the
sentient from the alteration (alteratio) of the form of the sentient body and
from its coloration'. Accidental light coming from illuminated objects was
apprehended in the same way (ii. 2.18, p. 35; cf. i.5.28, i.5.30, pp. 17-18; ii.
2.16, pp. 34-35). The anterior glacialis was naturally disposed or prepared
(nr0nnmtu<!\ hoth to receive and to sense these forms, but to sense them onlv
310
selectively in the direction of the perpendicular, from which they were also
stronger (i.5.14, pp. 7-8; i.5.18, pp. 9-10; i.5.25, p. 15; ii.1.4, p. 26; ii.2.42^4,
pp. 57-58). Of the forms emitted by each point of the visible object, those
which stimulated corresponding points of the anterior glacialis reproduced
there the form of the whole object, made up of the forms of these separate
points which maintained the order they had in the object. This form was a
pattern of stimulations perceptible only from within by the sensitive power
itself; it was not an optical image visible to an external observer such as was
produced in a camera obscura.6 Each of the eyes corresponded exactly to the
other in structure and in position relative to the common nerve, so that in
normal binocular vision, when both their axes were directed towards an object,
the form of the object would be reproduced at corresponding points in each
eye. Thus the object was seen as one 'because the two forms coming from a
single thing to the two eyes run together on reaching the common nerve and
are superimposed one on the other and made into one form: and by means of
that form made up of two forms the ultimate sentient apprehends the form of
that thing'. If the spectator pushed one eye out of place he would see two
things instead of one, so that the thing must be apprehended, sometimes as one
and sometimes as two, not in the eyes but beyond them in 'another sentient' to
which the two forms came either united or separately. The evidence that the
forms of things seen are extended through the concavity of the nerve and come
to the ultimate sentient, and after that vision is completed, is that an obstruction in that nerve destroys vision and when the obstruction is destroyed vision
is restored. The art of medicine attests this'. But what it was that passed
beyond the eyes was a problem. 'It could be said that the forms coming to the
eye do not come through to the common nerve, but a sensation (sensus) is
extended from the eye to the common nerve, just as the sensations of pain and
touch are extended, and the ultimate sentient then apprehends that sensible
thing'. Certainly 'the sensation reaching the common nerve is a sensation of
light and colour and ordering, and that by means of which the ultimate
sentient apprehends light and colour in some kind of form' (i.5.27, pp. 16-17).
The problem was: what kind?
The relation of the forms of light and colour to the optical physiological
requirements of his theory of visual perception remained a problem to the end.
Alhazen argued that 'transparent bodies are not changed by colours, nor are
they altered (alterantur) by them with a fixed alteration, but the property of
colour and light is that their forms are extended along straight lines' (i.5.28,
p. 17). Nor were the lights and colours passing through a transparent medium
affected by each other, as he showed by an experiment with a camera obscura.
For
6
Cf. Sabra (1972: above n. 4).
The History of Optics: Alha&n and the Medieval Tradition
311
when in one place several candles are put at various different points, all opposite an
opening leading into a dark place (locus obscurus), with a wall or an opaque body
opposite the opening, the lights of those candles appear on the body or that wall
distinctly according to the number of the candles. Each one of them appears
opposite one candle on a line passing through the opening. If one of the candles is
screened off, only the light opposite that one candle disappears, and if the screen is
removed the light reappears. This can be tried at any time: for if the lights
intermixed in the air they would become intermixed in the air in the opening and
would have to pass through intermixed, and they would not become separate later.
But we do not find this so. Hence the lights are not intermixed in the air, but each
one of them extends on straight lines.
Thus the 'form of each and every light' was extended through the transparency
of the air 'which does not lose its own form. And what we say about light and
colour and air is to be understood of all transparent bodies, and the transparent coats of the eye' (i.5.29, p. 17). But the camera obscura was not a model
for the eye, for in it all the forms of light and colour passing rectilinearly
through the aperture to the screen would contribute to the image there,
whereas in the eye only those falling on the anterior glacialis perpendicularly
would contribute to the form of the object seen. 'Indeed the sentient member
(membrum sentiens), namely the glacialis, does not receive the form of light and
colour as the air and other nonsentient transparent bodies receive it, but in a
way different from that way. Since that member is disposed (praeparatum) to
receive that form, so it receives it in so far as it is sentient and in so far as it is
transparent'. As he had already explained (i.5.26), 'its affection (passio) by that
form is of the same kind as pain. Hence the quality of its reception from that
form is different from the quality of reception by nonsentient transparent
bodies'. Thus 'the glacialis is altered (alteratur) by light and colour to the
extent that it senses (sentiat)\ by an 'alteration (alteratioy that 'is necessary but
with a nature not fixed', for it disappeared when the light did. The glacialis was
so 'disposed to be affected by colours and lights and to sense them' in a way
that air and other transparent bodies and the transparent coats of the eye
anterior to it were not. As again he had already explained (i.5.19), of the many
forms of light and colour emitted into the air and transparent bodies, 'the
eye... apprehends those according to the pyramid which is distinguished
between them and the centre of the eye' (i.5.30, pp. 17-18). In the whole
process the eye and all its parts 'are instruments by which vision is completed'.
The cornea covering the pupil (foramen uveae) retained the fluid albugineous
humour, which like the cornea was transparent 'so that the forms would pass
through it and reach the glacial humour'. The black, strong, spherical uvea
which contained the albugineous humour 'is black so that the albugineous
humour and glacialis would be obscured in such a way that the forms of light
would make their appearance in them weak: because weak light is more visible
in a dark place and escapes notice in a place full of light'. This seems to suggest
312
Fig. 5. From Roger Bacon, Opus maius, v. i. viii. /: Oxford MS Bodleian Library, Digby 234 (15
cent.) f. 247.The rays from the right (dextrum m) and left (sinistrum p) ends (labelled in reverse in
MS) of the visible object pass perpendicularly through the anterior surface of the flattened glacialis
(g, f) and are refracted at its posterior surface (q, u) so that instead of intersecting (below a) they
reach the optic nerve (c) with the image correctly orientated. The rays passing into the vitreous
humour (held to be optically denser than the glacialis) are refracted according to Ptolemy's rules
towards the perpendiculars (bl, bs) meeting at its centre of curvature (b).
that the eye was like a camera obscura with the glacialis as its screen. The
glacialis had 'many properties by which sensation is completed', but it was still
an instrument to that end. 'But the optic nerve, on which the whole eye is
constructed, is hollow so that the visual spirit may run through it from the
brain and may reach the glacialis and may in turn give to it sensitive power
(virtus sensibilis), and so that the forms may pass through in the subtle body
running in its concavity until they reach the ultimate sentient which is the
anterior part of the brain' (i.6.33, pp. 20-21).
Alhazen's treatment of the fundamental problem that followed from this
analysis exemplifies the decisive dominance of his optical theory by his
commitment to finding an immediate explanation of visual perception. For
313
how did the 'sensible image' of the object made on the anterior glacialis
maintain its necessary order in its passage through the posterior transparent
media of the eye to the common nerve where it was finally perceived by the
ultimate sentient? The first stage of the problem was geometrical, for if the
forms coming on the visual pyramid reached its vertex at the centre of the eye
they would be reduced to a point, which being dimensionless had no order; and
if they passed beyond the vertex their order would be inverted and reversed.
His solution again was to contrive further optical and anatomical postulates to
prevent these happenings. He supposed that the centre of curvature of the
posterior surface of the anterior glacialis forming its interface with the
posterior glacialis or vitreous humour and that interface itself were in front
of the centre of the eye, and that the anterior and posterior glacialis had
different transparencies, that is optical densities. Then, applying Ptolemy's
rules and constructions for refraction at plane surfaces to sections of spheres,
he argued that the forms would be refracted at the posterior surface of the
anterior glacialis in the directions preventing their meeting at the vertex of the
pyramid (Figs 4 and 5). This would require that the vitreous humour was the
denser. He structured his argument formally in hypothetical syllogisms leading
by elimination to the one true conclusion:
If therefore the form does not reach the concavity of this nerve arranged as it is on
the glacialis, neither will it reach the common nerve with its proper arrangements.
But the form cannot extend from the surface of the glacialis to the concavity of the
nerve in straight lines and still preserve the proper positions of its parts: for all those
lines meet at the centre of the eye, and when they continued straight on past the
centre their positions would be reversed: what is right would become left and vice
versa, and what is above would become below and below above.
Thus, if the form was extended on straight radial lines it would be congregated at the
centre of the eye and become as it were a single point. And . . . if it was extended on
straight radial lines and passed through the centre, it would become reversed in
accordance with the reversal of the intersecting lines along which it was extended.
Therefore the form can come from the surface of the glacialis to the concavity of the
nerve with its parts in their proper positions only on refracted lines, cutting across
radial lines.... This refraction must occur before it reaches the centre, because if
the lines were refracted after passing through the centre they would be reversed. It
has been shown [i.5.18] that this form passes through the body of the glacialis on
straight radial lines:... therefore the form is refracted only by its passage through
the body of the glacialis. It has been said [i.4.4]... that the body of the glacialis is o
unequal transparency and that its posterior part, called the vitreous humour, has a
different transparency from the anterior part. There is no body in the glacialis
different in constitution (forma) from the anterior body except the body of the
vitreous. It is a property of the forms of light and colour that they are refracted
when they meet another body of different transparency from the first. Therefore the
forms are refracted only at their entry into the vitreous humour. This body has a
transparency different from that of the body of the anterior glacialis only in order
314
that the forms can be refracted in it. Its surface must be in front of the centre of the
eye so that the forms are refracted at this surface before they pass through the
centre; and this surface must be correspondingly ordered, because if it were not the
form would appear monstrous after refraction (ii.1.2, p. 25).
The second stage of the problem concerned what happened after the forms
had passed into the vitreous humour. For
the radial lines play no part in the ordering of the thing seen except only at the
glacialis, because at this member is the origin of sensation. It has also been shown
[i.5.15, 16, 18] that it is impossible for the form of the thing seen to be ordered on the
surface of the eye with the likeness (imago) of the thing seen and the smallness of the
sentient thing except through these lines. These lines are then nothing but the
instrument of the eye through which the apprehension of things seen is completed
with their proper arrangement. But the arrival of the forms at the ultimate sentient
does not require the extension of these lines rectitudinally (ii.1.3, pp. 25-26; cf. ii.1.8,
p. 29).
Moreover, as he had asserted (i.5.30), the glacialis did not receive the forms
like other transparent bodies 'because the sentient member receives these forms
and senses them and they pass through it because of its transparency and the
sensitive power that is in it. Thus it receives these forms according to the
reception of sensation (sensus). But transparent bodies receive them only with
the reception by which they receive for reflection (ad reddendwri), and they do
not sense them'. Because of this difference 'the extension of the forms into the
sentient body does not have to be in straight lines, as transparent bodies
demand'. Hence 'only the anterior part of the glacialis is made appropriate for
the reception of the forms on straight radial lines; but the posterior part, which
is the vitreous humour, and the receptive power which is in that body, is not
made appropriate to the sensation of those forms but only to the preservation
of their ordering' (ii.1.4, p. 26). Therefore forms are refracted at the vitreous
humour by two causes, of which one is the difference of transparency of the
two bodies, and the other the difference of the quality of reception of sensation
between these two bodies'. If their transparencies were the same, the form
would be extended into the vitreous humour along the straight radial lines
without refraction; 'but it would be refracted because of the difference of the
quality of sensitivity (sensus); and thus because of refraction the form would be
monstrous, or because of its arrangement there would be two forms'. In fact
both causes acted corroboratively so that after refraction a single form passed
from the glacialis through to the optic nerve. Therefore the forms reach the
vitreous humour ordered according to their order on the surface of the eye,
and this body receives them and senses them'. They were refracted by the two
causes on entering the vitreous humour, and 'then this sensation and these
315
forms are extended through this body until they reach the ultimate sentient', by
way of the hollow optic nerve, 'like the extension of the sensations of touch
and of pain to the ultimate sentient' (ii.1.5, p. 26; cf. i.5.25, p. 15; i.5.27, p. 16).
The forms were not refracted on passing through the posterior surface of the
vitreous humour into the visual spirit or 'sentient body, which is in the
concavity of the nerve', because their transparency or density was the same
(ii. 1.6, p. 27).
Despite his geometrical model, Alhazen confined his whole analysis of the
properties of the eye within the inherited Greek conception of it as a living
sentient organ. He did not distinguish exclusively and consistently the different
kinds of question involved in vision, which were to become clear only in the
different conceptual context of the 17th century: fundamentally those of the
physical properties of light and the operation of the eye as an optical
instrument independently of its function in perception. It operated like a dead
optical instrument only in so far as it shared the optical properties of insentient
transparent bodies, but it was unlike them in being itself an active agent of
perception. Alhazen's forms of light and colour were emitted in straight lines
by all luminous or illuminated bodies whether or not there was an eye present
to see them, and they entered the pupil just as they might enter any optical
instrument. But once they had struck the anterior glacialis they were sorted,
not by a purely geometrical optical process but by its selective directional
sensitivity, into a sensible and not a geometrical optical image of the object
seen. He tailored ocular anatomy to the requirements of this theory of
sensation. These included the symmetry of the two eyes and optic nerves so
that each of their images would be formed at corresponding points and could
unite as a single image at the common nerve filled with the visual spirit, so to
reach the ultimate sentient (i.5.27, pp. 16-17; cf. ii.1.6, pp. 26-27; ii.2.16, pp.
34-35; Hi.2.2-17, pp. 76-87; vii.6-36, pp. 267-268). He described how the eye,
by its selective directional sensitivity operating through the central axis of the
visual pyramid on which the forms struck the surface of the anterior glacialis
perpendicularly, certified its perception of the whole visible object by means of
rapid movements taking the axis over the separate points from which the forms
were emitted (ii. 1.7-9, pp. 27-30; ii.2.42-44, pp. 57-58; ii.3.64-69, 75,
pp. 67-71, 73-74; vii.6.37, pp. 268-270). But he never made clear whether it
was the form of light and colour coming from the object seen, or its action in
producing a sensible image in the anterior glacialis, or both together, that
passed inwards from the posterior surface of that body to the ultimate sentient
located in the region extending from the common nerve to the anterior part of
the brain. Exactly how far its propagation continued to be optical and
rectilinear, and where it became something different, remained ambiguous.
Following Galen he distinguished between the sensation occurring in the
anterior glacialis and the discriminative perception made by the ultimate
316
sentient. Essential to this was that the sensation should retain its order as it
passed through the visual spirit connecting them. Again the ambiguity over
what passed produced a matching ambiguity as in Galen over the relative
functions of those sentient bodies, but Alhazen explained the process of
perception very clearly. The particular qualities (intentiones) that are
distinguished by the sense of vision' he wrote 'are many, but generally divided
into 22'. These included light, colour, distance, location, shape, size, number,
motion, transparency, shadow. Others were perceived by combinations of
these, as straightness or curvature, increase or decrease, dryness or wetness by
the relative stability or movement of the parts, and emotions by the
expressions produced by the movements of the face (ii.2.15, p. 34; cf. ii.2.12,
p. 31). The qualities of light and colour going from the object seen into the eye
thus differed in different ways which had to be distinguished and interpreted:
And since it is so, distinction and inference (argumentatio) by the distinctive power
(virtus distinctivd), and recognition of the forms and their signs, will occur only by
the recognition or distinction of the distinctive power of the forms coming into the
concavity of the common nerve to the apprehension of the ultimate sentient, and by
the recognition of the signs of these forms. And so the sentient body extended from
the surface of the sentient member all the way to the concavity of the common nerve,
namely the visual spirit, is sentient throughout, because the sensitive power is in the
whole of this body. Since therefore the form is extended from the surface of the
sentient member all the way to the concavity of the common nerve, any part of the
sentient body will sense the form; and when the form reaches the concavity of the
common nerve, it is apprehended by the ultimate sentient, and then distinction and
inference will occur.... In this way apprehension of the forms of visible things will
occur in the sensitive power, the ultimate sentient, and the distinctive power.....
But distinction occurs only by the distinctive, not the sensitive, power (ii.2.16, pp.
34-35).
Alhazen's Optica provided on its arrival in the Latin West in the 13th
century a model of scientific argument, a guide to the relation of perceiver to
perceived not simply in vision but in general, and the definitive treatment of
optics in all its aspects for nearly four hundred years. The Latin Optica
established the subject as a major experimental and mathematical physical
science in the scheme of medieval theoretical and practical knowledge. Historically most important of all was the adoption by Roger Bacon, especially in the
Opus maius (completed by 1267), followed by John Pecham and Witelo, of
Alhazen's geometrical model of the eye as an image-forming device. Witelo
wrote his Perspectiva or Opticae libri decem (in 1270 or soon afterwards) as a
compendium of Alhazen's Optica and provided jointly with the latter the
essential account of the subject (eventually to be published by Risner in 1572 in
one integrated volume) until the 17th century. Bacon (in Opus maius v. 3.2.2-4)
also developed Robert Grosseteste's conception of a magnifying glass by
317
means of constructions based on those of Ptolemy for plane and of Alhazen

for curved refracting surfaces. Spectacles were invented in northern Italy at the
end of the 13th century.7 Some particular questions arose in two different
contexts, that of the camera obscura and that of the eye, over Alhazen's
assertion that rectilinear propagation was a fundamental property of light. The
camera obscura became a familiar instrument in the second half of the 13thcentury, used for example in observing solar eclipses.8 The question here was
how to account by means of rectilinear propagation for the circular shape of
the image cast through an angled aperture with straight sides of a certain size
at a certain distance from the screen. Why was it that when the aperture was
relatively small or its distance from the screen relatively large the image
assumed the shape of its luminous source independently of the shape of the
aperture? Lacking the analysis into superimposed images made by Alhazen in
an Arabic work not translated into Latin, different kinds of answer were
proposed. Their essential features for present purposes, without going into
details, was that they preserved the principle of rectilinear propagation within
the wider principle that nature always acts for the best, and they made the
operation of the camera obscura a familiar problem.
The question for the eye was that faced by Alhazen concerning the propagation of the sensible image from the crystallinus or anterior glacialis through the
vitreous humour and then through the winding optic nerves to the ultimate
sentient in the brain. Bacon expounded Alhazen with an interesting new
terminology. Since the rays of the visual pyramid or cone carrying the image
must travel rectilinearly through the vitreous humour in accordance with the
principles of geometrical optics, if they continued all the way in the same
straight line they would intersect and then 'what was right would become left
and vice versa, and what was above would be below, and so the whole order of
the thing seen will be changed'. To prevent this 'nature has contrived' the
position and the transparency of the vitreous humour so that the rays would be
refracted at its interface with the anterior glacialis, and that there would be no
further refraction of the images (species) on their passage from the vitrous
humour into the nerve which 'is filled with a similar vitreous humour as far as
the common nerve' (Opus maius v. 1.7.1). These optical principles belonged to
what he called the common laws of nature and they operated necessarily in all
inanimate media. But propagation in an animate medium
7
See E. Rosen, The invention of eyeglasses', Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied
Sciences 11 (1956), 183-218; Crombie (1967: above n. 1); V. Illardi, Occhiali alia corte di Francesco
e Galeazzo Maria Sforza (Milan, 1976a), and 'Eyeglasses and concave lenses in fifteenth-century
Florence and Milan', Renaissance Quarterly 29 (1976b), 341-360.
"See D. C. Lindberg, The theory of pinhole images from antiquity to the thirteenth century',
Archive for History of Exact Sciences 5 (1968), 154-176; 'A reconsideration of Roger Bacon's
theory of pinhole images', ibid. 6 (1970a), 214-223; The theory of pinhole images in the fourteenth
century', ibid. 6 (1970b), 299-325. See also Straker (1971: above n. 4), and his 'Kepler, Tycho, and
the 'Optical part of astronomy': the genesis of Kepler's theory of pinhole images', Archive for
History of Exact Sciences 24 (1981), 267-293.
318
Fig. 6. Alberti's grid (1435): from Diirer, Underweysung der Messung (1538).
Ciuitaiij I poM
Fig. 7. A painting as a cross-section of the visual pyramid: from Fludd (1618).
does not hold to the common laws of nature (leges communes nature), but claims for
itself a special privilege. This propagation does not take place except in an animate
medium, as in the nerves of the senses; for the image follows the tortuosity of the
nerve and pays no attention to the straight path. This happens through the power of
319
the soul in regulating the path of the image, according to what the operations of an
animate thing require (iv.2.2).
Thus for the benefit of natural order 'the capability of the power of the soul'
could dispense the image from the 'common laws of natural propagations
(leges communes multiplicationum naturalium)' (v. 1.7.1) shared by light and
other forms of energy.9 Pecham a little later used similar terminology and
noted in discussing the possibility of deviation from rectilinear propagation in
the camera obscura that this must happen in the visual spirits in the optic nerve
in order to preserve the image. Here 'the mode (via) of the spirits brings about
that advance of the image partly outside the rectitudinal', but in the camera
obscura this would be done by a 'natural fittingness (convenientta)'. But, he
added, 'these things are asserted without prejudice to a better opinion'.10
The Latin perspectivists established Alhazen's geometrical model of vision
and made these related optical problems familiar in the West equally for
mathematical natural philosophers and for visual artists. Thus Lorenzo
Ghiberti, belonging to the first generation of artists to exploit the new
technique of linear perspective invented early in the 15th century by Filippo
Brunelleschi, used in his discussion of the theory and practice of the method in
sculpture all the main optical writers from Aristotle and Euclid to Bacon,
Witelo and Pecham and an Italian version of Alhazen's Optica made in the
century before.11 The theory of perspective, described for the first time by his
younger contemporary Leon Battista Alberti, was based on the visual pyramid
or cone extending from the eye as its apex to the object seen as its base. A
drawing in true perspective was then a plane cross-section of this pyramid: he
described how to make it correctly by viewing the object through a chequered
screen or grid (Figs 6 and 7).12 The technique of perspective, showing by means
of calculated visual clues how to represent a three-dimensional object on a
plane surface, produced in effect a perceptual model of the scene before the
eyes. Its exact measurement and true scaling introduced into science and
technology a completely fresh means of communicating information through
pictorial illustrations, and at the same time a new conception of modelling.
Especially dramatic were the effects on the depiction of the external and
9
Cf. Roger Bacon, De multiplicatione specierum, ii.2, ed. and transl. by D. C. Lindberg in Roger
Bacon's Philosophy of Nature (Oxford, 1983), pp. 102-103; Lindberg (1970a: above n. 8).
'"John Pecham, Perspectiva communis, ed. and transl. by D. C. Lindberg in John Pecham and the
Science of Optics (Madison, Wisconsin, 1970), i. 7 revised, pp. 78-81.
"Lorenzo Ghiberti, 7 Commentarii, i. 1, ii. 12, 22, iii. 2, J. von Schlosser (ed.) (Berlin, 1912); cf.
G. F. Vescovini, 'Contribute per la storia della fortuna di Alhazen in Italia', Rinasdmento 2nd
Series, 5 (1965b), 17-49.
12
Leon Battista Alberti, De pictura (1435) in On Painting and On Sculpture, C. Grayson (ed.)
(London, 1972); cf. Albrecht Diirer, Underweysung der Messung (Nuremberg, 1525, revised 1538);
E. Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Diirer (Princeton, N.J., 1943, revised 1955); S.Y.
Edgerton Jr., The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New York, 1975); F. Borsi, Leon
Battista Alberti (Oxford, 1977; M. Kemp, The Science of Art (New Haven, Conn., 1990).
320
internal structures of animals, plants and minerals and their arrangements and
of those of machines. Depiction became an instrument of research. Most
compelling in the exact information they could provide were the views showing
sections cut through an anatomized corpse or a machine at different angles and
through different parts, the views with the outside cut away to reveal the
internal parts in position, the rotated view as developed by Albrecht Diirer,
and above all the transparent view of the internal arrangements and the
exploded view depicting both the whole and the parts taken out and shown
separately in accurately scaled diagrams. Through the 15th century the new
techniques of perspective and chiaroscuro rapidly transformed the working
drawings of architecture and engineering as they had the design of paintings.
The Sienese engineer Mariano di Jacopo called Taccola, who knew Brunelleschi, and a generation later Francesco di Giorgio Martini, both seem to have
designed their machinery by means of inventive drawing on paper before
building it. The new pictorial language was used with even greater sophistication by Leonardo da Vinci, and with the printed book it became in the 16th
and 17th centuries as normal a means of finding out and conveying information as the written word. Thus appeared the presentation of the mechanisms of
pumps, water-driven mills and other devices by Agricola in his treatise on
mining and metallurgy, and by Jacques Besson, Agostino Ramelli and Vittorio
Zonca in their richly illustrated volumes on machines. There was likewise the
increasingly sophisticated presentation of their anatomical researches by
Leonardo da Vinci with his drawing of the skull and its contents; by Andreas
Vesalius with his illustrations also of the skull, of the opened heart and its
valves, and of the eye as a whole and in transverse vertical section accompanied by the dissected parts taken out and shown separately; by Felix Plater
with his exploded views of the parts of the eye; by Girolamo Fabrici da
Aquapendente and later by Giulio Casserio depicting the organs of the five
senses with attention to comparative anatomy.13
Comparisons of living organs with inanimate artifacts were not at this time
new, but the familiarity of two such artifacts provided especially efficacious
conditions for modelling the eye. The glass or crystal lens became well known
during the 16th century as a focusing device in spectacles. The camera obscura
was likewise widely used both in astronomy for observing solar eclipses and in
art for demonstrating the projection of a scene in perspective upon its
translucent screen. Artists as well as mathematicians and natural philosophers
began to turn their attention to how the eye itself, receiving the visual clues
from the scene or painting in front of it, operated as an instrument of vision. It
seems to have been Leonardo who first proposed a camera obscura
"Cf. S. Y. Edgerton Jr., The Renaissance development of scientific illustration', in Science and
the Arts in the Renaissance, J. W. Shirley and F. D. Hoeniger (eds) (Washington, D.C., 1985),
pp. 168-197; Crombie, Styles chs. 8,13 (above n. 1).
321
Fig. 8(a). From Leonardo da Vinci, Codex Atlanticus, f. 337 illustrating his comparison of the eye
with a camera obscura. In this construction the rays intersect for a second time in the centre of the
lens in order to preserve the correct orientation of the image at the optic nerve. The ocular anatomy is
peculiar, showing the aqueous humour extending all round inside the dark choroid (uvea), and the
vitreous humour in front of the spherical crystallinus.
322
Fig. 8(b). From Codex D,f.3v: model of the eye (top right). A hollow glass sphere cut away at the
top ( right) is fitted in a box with a small hole in the bottom as the pupil, and filled with water:
inside is a smaller glass sphere as the crystallinus. With his face in the water the observer's eye would
receive the image of the object seen on the visual pyramid entering the pupil hole on the rays coming
from s t. At the left is a matching diagram of the eye itself with the optic nerve emerging on the right
at a place corresponding to the observers eye in the model.
323
Fig. 9. From Gemma Frisius, De radio astronomico et geometrico (Antwerp, 1545) f.31rv:
observing a solar eclipse in a camera obscura.
incorporating a glass lens as a model of the eye, and thus he introduced the
conception of the image formed in the eye as a picture on a screen (Fig. 8).14
He introduced at the same time into the analysis of vision the idea of exploiting
the conformity of nature with art and of living with dead. But he still looked
with Alhazen his analysis for an immediate explanation of visual perception.
He recognized the need to explain optically the path through the eye of the
rays forming the image. He assumed that the visual power lay not in the
crystallinus but in the widened extremity of the optic nerve, which received the
images and transmitted them to the common sense in the seat of judgement.
The crystallinus was simply a refracting device whose essential function was to
prevent the image from reaching the visual power inverted, as in a camera
obscura. The eye was not simply a passive instrument like a camera obscura,
but a living organ with active vital powers of selection, but for it to see
correctly the image must be orientated as well as ordered in the same way as its
object. This brilliant model was not known in print in time to have any
influence, but the camera obscura itself was widely publicized by writers both
on astronomy and on art. Gemma Frisius described and illustrated how to
observe solar eclipses in a darkened room in which sunlight admitted through
a small hole would produce an inverted image of the Sun on a suitably placed
14
Leonardo da Vinci, Codex D in Les manuscrits, M. C. Ravaisson-Mollien (ed.), 6 vols. (Paris,
1881-1891); // Codico Atlantico nella Biblioteca Ambrosiana di Milano, transcribed by G. Piumati,
8 vols. (Milan, 1894-1904); cf. The Notebooks, arranged etc. by E. MacCurdy, 2 vols. (London,
1938); M. Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci: The marvellous works of nature and art (London, 1981).
324
screen (Fig. 9).I5Daniele Barbaro in his standard textbook on perspective gave

an account of a similar darkened room with an eyeglass set in the small hole,
through which the external scene would be projected onto a sheet of paper
placed at the correct distance. There it could be traced with a paint-brush.16
The attention given meanwhile to the eye itself indicates the problems
perceived and the characterization of its essential visual parts. Vesalius in his
classical dissection published in De humanis carports fabrica libri septem (1543),
with woodcuts of the whole eye in transverse vertical section and of the parts
taken out and drawn separately, established the standard ocular anatomy to be
copied or imitated even when corrected for nearly a century (vii. 14,
pp. 643-646). He described the crystallinus as magnifying like eyeglasses
(specilla) and its shape, flattened front and back, as 'like a lentil' (ad lentis
similitudinem): hence what was to become the standard term 'lens' (p. 646).17
He doubted whether this was the principal organ of the eye, but on how the
eye functioned and the controversies of philosophers and medical men he
could say nothing (pp. 649-650). Of the retina he wrote enigmatically that 'this
c o a t . . . is considered by many the principal organ of sight' (iv. 4, p. 424) but
nothing further. Vesalius was corrected later on some important details by
Realdo Colombo who pointed out that the lens was located forward of the
centre of the eyeball and was flatter in front than behind; and by Giulio Cesare
Aranzi who noted that in horses and cattle the optic nerve entered the eyeball
to one side, although he still supposed that it entered centrally in man. Aranzi
tried to demonstrate vision by means of an experiment on the eye of an ox.
After dissecting it out of its socket, he cut an opening in the back as far as the
vitreous humour, set it 'in a dark place' illuminated in front of it, then closed
one eye and applied the other to the opening in the position of the optic nerve:
'the visual power (vis visiva) of the observer comes through the vitreous to the
crystallinus and thence to the cornea through the opening of the uvea to the
objects' illuminated.18
Later Felix Plater, professor of medicine at Basel, asserted for the first time
explicitly that the retina was the sensitive visual receptor. In his De corporis
humani structura et usu (1583) he wrote that through the pupil: 'The illumination of external things irradiating the cornea is sent into the dark chamber
(camera obscura) of the eye'. This led him to:
l5
Cf. Straker (1981: above n. 8).

Daniele Barbaro, La prattica della perspettiva (Venice, 1568).
The term specilla, short for ocularia specilla as used by Girolamo Fabrici, meant eyeglasses, as
perspicillum used by Felix Plater meant eyeglass (see below), not mirror as supposed by Lindberg
(1976: above n. 4) 173 n. 137, 275 n. 151; similarly Francesco Maurolico used conspicilia (below),
and later Galileo in the Sidereus nuncius (1610) introduced his telescope under the name
perspicillum, in which he was followed by Francis Bacon, Novum organum, ii.39 (1620) in Works,
J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis and D. D. Heath (eds), i (London, 1857), pp. 307-308.
18
Iulius Caesaris Arantius, Anatomicarum observationum liber, cc. 18, 21 (Venice, 1587), pp. 71.
l6
17
325
The primary organ (pars) of vision, namely the optic nerve dilated into the grey
hemispherical retina (retiformis) after it enters the eye: which receives and discriminates the forms (species) and colours of external things that fall with the illumination
into the eye through the aperture of the pupil and are presented to it by its eyeglass
(perspicillwri) It has affinity with the substance of the brain, with which through
the nerve it is continuous.
Later he came to:
Three very clear humours, which in distinct situations fill the cavity of the eye and
assist the act of vision.... First, the crystalline humour, which is the eyeglass of the
visual nerve: placed facing this nerve and the aperture of the pupil, it collects the
images (species) or rays falling into the eye and, spreading them over the area of the
whole retiform nerve, it presents these magnified, in the manner of an internal
eyeglass (perspicilli penitus modo), so that the nerve can take possession of them
more easily (pp. 186-187)."
Plater like Vesalius did not consider how the eye operated as the instrument of
vision. Hence the question of the inverted image did not arise. They illustrate
the insulation of the anatomists of the medical faculties from the mathematical
sciences and arts and the fundamental illumination they had brought to the
physiology of vision, as likewise of hearing. But clearly, besides Plater's radical
identification of the retina as the sensitive visual receptor, reducing the
crystallinus simply to a lens, an accurate general ocular anatomy was essential
for a true optical analysis of its physiology.
The culmination of these anatomical investigations was the superbly illustrated triple treatise by Girolamo Fabrici, De visione, voce, auditu (1600), with
'De oculo visus organo liber' as its first book. Fabrici incorporated in 'De
oculo' the corrections to Vesalius made by Colombo and others, with an
accurate woodcut of the crystallinus (p. 35), but he still showed the optic nerve
entering the eyeball centrally (iii.8, p. 105). His visual theory was essentially a
combination of the formulations of the problem by Aristotle and Galen with a
version of the optical scheme with which Alhazen had prevented the reversal of
the image as the visual cone passed through the transparent media. He likened
the crystallinus to eyeglasses (ocularia specilla), 'in which art excells nature' in
restoring youth to old eyes by means of refraction (iii.5, pp. 82-83; cf. iii.l, 2,
pp. 61, 73-78, iii.7, pp. 102-103). But the crystallinus was also 'the special
organ of vision' (iii.7, p. 96) entirely responsible for visual perception within
the eye (ii.7, pp. 51-54; iii.7, pp. 96-104). He specifically denied visual sensitivity to the retina and the arenea (iii.8-9, pp. 104-106), and insisted that any
transmission of images beyond the crystallinus was both anatomically and
optically impossible (iii.10-11, pp. 106-114). With some concessions to optical
science, he remained firmly within the medical tradition.
"Cf. Crombie (1967: above n. 1); H.M. Koelbing, Renaissance der Augenheilkunde 1540-1630
(Bern. 1967).
326
It was the mathematicians who came to reform visual theory by proceeding

through an optical analysis of ocular physiology, exploiting the models of
eyeglasses and the camera obscura, and thus reformulating the problem itself.
The Sicilian mathematician Francesco Maurolico completed in 1554 an optical
analysis of both the camera obscura and the eye without connecting the two.
His Photismi de lumine et umbra with Diaphanorum panes containing these
original results were published only in 1611, and although his manuscripts may
have been known, through Christopher Clavius or otherwise, they had no
known influence. He based his optics on Alhazen, Roger Bacon, Pecham and
Witelo and departed from them only in specific innovations. In Photismi he
solved for the first time the fundamental optical problem of how the camera
obscura focused the image on its screen. The essential variables were the size of
the aperture and its distance from the screen. Maurolico demonstrated geometrically that the inverted image, formed by the superimposed images of the
separate points of a luminous source, must come to conform to the shape of
the source, regardless of that of the aperture, as these variables came to a
certain ratio. He gave the solar and lunar images, in eclipse or not, as
particular examples of this general theorem (Theorem 22, corol. 1 and 2, 1611,
pp. 17-22).20 He defined the problem of vision in Diaphanorum panes iii: 'On
the structure of the visual organ and the forms of spectacles (conspicilid)\
writing that 'since the organ is transparent, the matter is entirely one of
transparent bodies'. Sharing the accepted commitment to the orientation of the
image in the eye, he attempted to trace the paths of the rays through it, by the
conformity of its refractions to those of eyeglasses, in such a way that this
orientation would be preserved. 'Among those parts that pertain to vision' he
wrote, 'the summit of rank is held by the glacialis or crystalline humour, which
in my opinion we can call also the pupilla, in which the visual power takes its
position as on a throne. This is convex on both sides, but not spherical but
compressed, and more so in front'. Under the heading 'On spectacles' he made
apparently for the first time an analysis of nonspherical lenses as exemplified
by spectacles and applied the properties of this model to the eye. The
crystallinus or pupilla was in effect a biconvex lens, placed in front of the
middle of the eyeball
but not spherical lest the perpendicular visual rays should pass through the centre of
the sphere, intersect there, and carry to the optic nerve an altered, that is inverted
orientation (situs) of the thing seen, so that things appear inverted to the
spectator . . . . So it happens that the visual rays falling on the anterior surface of the
20
Cf. Crombie (1967: above n. 1), Straker (1971: above n. 4), Lindberg (1976: above n. 4): the last
by a double misreading (pp. 180, 276 n. 7) applied to Maurolico what I wrote of Leonardo da
Vinci in my Robert Grosseteste (Oxford, 1953, 1971), p. 281, and my 'Kepler: de modo visionis', in
Melanges Alexandre Koyre, i (Paris, 1964) p. 141; cf. Crombie (1967), 45-46 n. 72 for my
correction of a mistake I did make in supposing that Maurolico had shown the focusing of the
image on the retina.
327
pupilla and carried through its depth without meeting, that is before coinciding, are
carried in their own proper orientation (in suomet situ) to the optic nerve and present
the image (species) in its proper position (in sua positione).
The pupilla (crystallinus) was not simply a lens but also the sensitive visual
receptor, constituted 'for suffering affection' (adpatiendwri) and 'for sensation'
(ad sentiendwri): it received the images of things at its anterior surface and
transmitted them from its posterior surface through the optic nerve to the
common sense. 'But how vision is effected, whether under some law of
refraction (lex fractionis) or of spirits, was by no means easy to decide'. He
wished that he could take his account either 'from natural philosophy (physica)
or from mathematics alone: because we would reach the goal of truth by
following either the one or the other, whether by borrowing the sensitive power
from natural philosophy or the law of the refraction of rays from mathematics'
(pp. 72-74). He went on to adapt Alhazen's construction for bringing about a
point-point correspondence between object and image to show how the
crystallinus, with its 'lenticular shape' (figura lenticularis) (p. 75, cf. 76), must
refract and transmit the rays according to the law of refraction in such a way
that there was no inversion. If he remained bound by the spell of the erect and
correctly orientated image, his technical analysis of lenses marked a considerable advance in scientific knowledge of the natural organ and the artificial
model alike. He related defective types of vision to the shape of the lens, and
prescribed different kinds of spectacles to 'correct the failure of nature' in short
and long sight (pp. 76-78). Thus, again using pupilla for crystallinus, 'because
the transmission of the visual rays through the pupillae happens no differently
from that through spectacles convex on both sides, we may not at all unjustly
define the pupillae as the spectacles of nature' (p. 80).
Maurolico's optical writings, like Leonardo's, did not become publicly
known until after the crucial period of these investigations. It was Giovanni
Battista Benedetti who, two years after Plater, published a geometrical comparison of the eye with a camera obscura in which the images of external things
were projected through the pupil onto the retina. Benedetti was familiar with
Daniele Barbaro's account of a camera obscura with a lens, which he paraphrased in one of the letters included in his Diversarum speculationum mathematicarum et physicarum liber (1585; p. 270). He published his geometrical
comparison of the optics of the eye with that of a camera obscura in another
brief letter 'De visu'.21 In the eye the rays that would form the optical image of
an object were projected through the small pupil and the refracting humours
onto the branching nerve (i.e. retina) at the back of the eye as onto the screen
of a camera obscura, and the same would happen if they were to proceed
directly without refraction 'yet not in its place (in suis locis)\ By this laconic
2l
Cf. T. Frangenberg, 'II "De visu" de G. B. Benedetti', in Giovan Battista Benedetti e il suo
tempo, presented by A. Ghetti (Venice, 1985), pp. 271-282.
328
comment he seems to have meant that without refraction the image would be
inverted, as it was in his geometrical account of the camera obscura which had
no lens or other refracting medium. These puzzles indicate how difficult these
optical problems were both technically and conceptually even for a mathematical scientist as sophisticated as Benedetti.
Benedetti's analysis of vision like that of music published in the same
volume was apparently not read by contemporaries, but a comparison of the
eye with a camera obscura first mentioned briefly by Giambattista della Porta
in the first edition of his Magia naturalis (1558) became widely known in the
much enlarged edition of 1589. He presented it in the context not of science but
of entertainment and optical conjuring. After describing the inverted and
reversed scenes that could be projected onto the screen of a camera obscura, he
wrote: 'If you put a small lenticular crystal glass (crystallina lens) to the hole',
these could be made clearer and restored 'upright, as they are'. The instrument
could be used to copy a sunlit picture by placing a white sheet of paper inside
the hole, and moving it forwards or backwards until a 'perfect representation'
of the picture was cast upon this table (tabula) or screen: then one 'must lay on
colours where they are in the table', so that when all is done and the original
picture removed,
the picture (impressio) will remain on the table.... From this it may be clear to
philosophers and opticians where vision is effected; and an end is put to the question
of intromission agitated for so long, nor can both be demonstrated by any other
artifice (artificium). The image (idolum) is sent in through the pupil, as by the
opening of a window, and the part of the crystalline sphere located in the middle of
the eye takes the place of the screen (tabula).... It is described more fully in our
optics (xvii. 6, pp. 266-26V).22
In his optical work De refractione (1593) Porta firmly located the full power of
vision in the crystallinus, where the image was received correctly orientated to
correspond to the object seen. To prevent inversion he argued contrary to
Vesalius that the crystallinus must be found in front of the centre of the eyeball
where the intersection of the rays would occur (iii.l, 13-15, pp. 65-68, 83-86).
It was then the anterior surface of the crystallinus that corresponded to the
screen of the camera obscura: 'I say that just as light passing through the
confined opening of a window represents bodies illuminated by the Sun on a
paper underneath, so likewise it depicts on the crystallinus the images (spectra)
of seen things entering through the opening of the pupil' (iv.l, p. 91; cf. iv. 1-2,
pp. 87-95). He rejected as anatomically impossible Alhazen's theory that
vision was completed by the transmission of images beyond the crystallinus
through the optic nerves (vi. 1, pp. 139-146).
"Porta, Magiae naturalis libri xx (Naples, 1589), transl. as Natural Magick (London, 1658) with
corrections; De refractione optices parte libri novem (Naples, 1593).
Part II: Kepler and Descartes

WHEN KEPLER took up the problem of vision no one had questioned the
essential assumption that ocular physiology must yield an immediate explanation of visual perception, so that what was seen in the object was only and
exactly what was present in the image formed in the eye. The essential
geometry remained that of the Euclidean perspective cone, with its base on the
visible object and its apex in the eye, as developed by Alhazen into a pointpoint correspondence between the image and the object. Alhazen's account of
the ocular image as an internal pattern of stimulated points formed by a
combination of optical refraction and selective sensitivity left the relation of
the physical to the animate aspects of the process ambiguous, and his theory
that visual perception was completed in the common sense located in the brain
left the persistent enigma of the nature of the image or information transmitted
from the sensitive ocular receptor inwards through the non-optical medium of
the optic nerves. The separation of the physical from the animate began with
the identification of the crystallinus with a glass lens and the analogy of the
whole eye with a camera obscura which formed a wholly different kind of
image, an optical image focused on its screen. But the essential commitment to
finding an exact correspondence in orientation and order between the image
and the visible object remained as an obstruction to a purely optical analysis.
Porta made the front of the crystallinus analogous to the screen in his eye.
When Plater identified the retina and not the crystallinus as the sensitive ocular
receptor he did not consider the optical geometrical consequences. If Benedetti's optical analysis located an inverted image on the retina as on the screen of
a camera obscura he did not consider the consequences for the whole science of
vision. It remained for Kepler to begin the explicit separation of the distinct
questions involved. Kepler was led to his reluctant philosophical innovation,
breal^ng with fundamental commitments of the Greek conception of optics, by
the inescapable precision of his scientific argument. To the form and expectations of that argument we must pay close attention.
Kepler had been introduced to the problem of image formation in a camera
obscura by the anomalous results obtained by Tycho Brahe in using this
330
instrument to measure the apparent sizes of the sun and moon in solar eclipses.
Having adapted a form of dioptral camera for the purpose, Tycho came to
realize that systematic allowance had to be made in his observations for the
size of the aperture. He measured this and subtracted it from that of the image
from which he computed the apparent solar diameter. Then he found to his
surprise that the apparent diameter of the moon calculated from observations
of the solar eclipse of 1598 was about one fifth smaller during the eclipse than
it was at other times when astronomical theory showed the moon to be equally
distant. Since he found the same anomaly on all occasions he revised his lunar
tables accordingly, and looked for an optical cause in the moon itself. When
Kepler, already familiar with the camera obscura for observing solar eclipses,
heard of this 'optical paradox' he looked first in the same direction, but he
refused to accept Michael Mastlin's anodyne comment that 'observation
cannot be perfectly exact', and hoped that 'I could elicit a sure response by
means of skilful methods'. After visiting Tycho near Prague in 1600, he
returned in June to Graz ready for the solar eclipse expected in July 'with a
skilful observation which I am considering' and 'especially to explore by
observation ... the striking affirmation' made by Tycho.1 This he did with a
dioptral camera with a movable screen. Having learnt from Tycho to measure
not only the object being observed but also the essential variables of the size of
the aperture and its distance from the screen in the instrument, what he came
to explore was the optics of the camera obscura and the experimental error to
which the method of observation itself gave rise. He recorded his results in his
'Eclipse Notebook' written during July 1600 and concluded with a set of
numbered propositions.2 Early on he asserted the principle that light was
propagated rectilinearly in all directions from all points of a luminous source
(proposition 6), and then developed his analysis by treating a finite aperture as
an assembly of points through each of which an inverted image of the source
was cast on the screen (proposition 13). Like Maurolico he demonstrated that
at a given ratio between the size of the aperture and its distance from the
screen the composite image must conform to the shape of the source; if the
aperture were enlarged or its distance decreased the image would assume the
shape of the aperture (proposition 14). During July, he reported later in the
year to Mastlin, 'I have written a Paralipomena to the Second Book of the
'Kepler to Herwart von Hohenburg 30.v. 1599, in Kepler's Gesammelte Werke, edited by W. von
Dyck, M. Caspar and F. Hammer. 18 vols (Munich, 1937-1959), xiii, 339; Mastlin to Kepler
2.V.1598 and Kepler to Mastlin 8.xii.l598, ibid., 213, 253; cf. S.M. Straker, Kepler's Optics
(Indiana University Ph.D. thesis, 1971; Ann Arbor, Mich., 1980), and 'Kepler, Tycho, and the
"Optical part of astronomy": the genesis of Kepler's theory of pinhole images', Archive for History
of Exact Sciences 24 (1981), 267-293. On Kepler's optics see also F. Hammer, 'Nachbericht', in
Gesammelte Werke, ii (1939), 393-436; A.C. Crombie, 'The mechanistic hypothesis and the
scientific study of vision', Proceedings of the Royal Microscopical Society 2 (1967), 3-112, reprinted
in Science, Optics and Music in Medieval and Early Modern Thought (London, 1990); and D.C.
Lindberg, Theories of Vision from al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago, 1976).
2
So named with essential references and analysis by Straker (1981: above note 1).
The History of Optics: Kepler and Descartes
3 31
Optics of Witelo'. As for Tycho's anomaly, this was an artifact arising from the
instrument: 'Therefore any eclipses that have been observed in this manner
stand in need of correction'.3 He wrote again about the camera obscura in
December 1601: 'Why should it not happen in the eye what I demonstrated in
the aperture, that lights are amplified and shadows are constructed? For there
is an aperture in the eye'.4
Kepler's Eclipse Notebook was in effect a draft for Ad Vitellionem paralipomena, quibus astronomiae pars optica traditur (1604): Things appended to
Witelo, in which the optical part of astronomy is treated, a critique using
Risner's standard Latin edition of 1572 of the texts of both Witelo and
Alhazen. This he set out over the following three years in the same order of
topics, linked by his analysis of image formation in the camera obscura. In the
first five chapters he covered critically the optical questions of the nature of
light and colour, the camera obscura, the location of the image reflected by
plane and curved surfaces, the measurement of refraction in different media,
and the operation of vision. In the last six chapters he dealt with the
application of optics to astronomy. He explained this programme in his
dedicatory letter to the Emperor Rudolph II, concluding: '... nor have I
satisfied the mind with the speculations of abstract geometry, to wit with
pictures . . . but I have tracked down geometry through the manifest bodies of
the world, having followed the footsteps of the Creator with sweat and
panting'.5 Since light was the vehicle of observation and also of its deceptions,
knowledge of its properties was necessary for scientific practice. Because, he
wrote in chapter I 'De natura lucis', 'nature must exhibit God the primary
founder of all things in so far as it could', and the spherical form assumed by
light was 'the image of the Trinity', and light was likewise 'the natural and
fittest image of the corporeal world', introduced by Moses as 'a sort of
instrument of the Creator' and 'the link between the corporeal and the spiritual
world', knowledge of it was essential for fundamental physical and metaphysical theory. Kepler started from 'Euclid, Witelo and others'. Light he continued 'illuminates everything all around' (chapter I, proposition ii); 'the lines
of these emissions are straight, called rays' and 'the shape of a sphere is
assumed by light' (proposition iv); its 'motion is not in time, but in a moment'
therefore 'the speed of light is infinite' (proposition v). But the 'ray of light is
not the light itself going out' for 'the ray is nothing but the motion of light.
Just as in physical motion the motion is a straight line, but the physical thing
that moves is a body, so in the same way in light the motion itself is a straight
line but what moves is a certain surface' (proposition viii). This led to the
photometric law: 'As with spherical surfaces having a source of light for centre
'Kepler to Mastlin 9.ix.l600, Ges. Werke, xiv, 150-151.
Kepler 10/20.xii.l601, ibid. 207.
s
Ges. Werke, ii, 8-10. References in the text are to this edition, where they are indicated by GW.
332
the wider is to the narrower, so is the strength or density of the rays of light in
the narrower to that in the wider spherical surface, that is conversely' (proposition ix; GW\\, 18-22).
He devoted the whole of chapter II 'De figuratione lucis' (GW ii, 46-61) to
the camera obscura, starting with the history, from Aristotle through Witelo
and Pecham to Gemma and Tycho, of unsuccessful attempts to solve the
problem of the shape of images projected through small openings, and
concluding with a long presentation of his true solution in its most general
form. He described how he came to see the truth by an experiment in which the
geometry was displayed by threads replacing rays so that he eliminated 'the
cover of the arcane nature of light' into which both Pecham (called here
Pisanus) and Witelo had retreated. Diirer had explained perspective in 1525 by
means of a similar physical model, but Kepler did not mention that.6 Kepler
showed how the threads, and likewise the rectilinear rays, would produce an
image either of the aperture or of the luminous or illuminated source entirely
according to their geometrical disposition. Later in the astronomical part of his
book he showed how he made the camera obscura an essential instrument for
his solar observations, corrected Gemma's and Tycho's understanding of it,
published his own computations, and so on (chapters VIII, XI; GW ii, 256257, 288-301). Essential for the accuracy of astronomy was the measurement
of refraction to which he devoted his long chapter IV (GW ii, 78-143). He
developed a theory of the causes of refraction explicitly by the use of varieties
of analogy. This involved a study of conic sections, presented as a system, for
which he introduced the term focus (literally, hearth). 'We must use the
geometrical languages (voces) of analogy' he wrote; 'for indeed I greatly love
analogies, the most trustworthy of my instructors, the confidants of all the
secrets of nature: especially to be esteemed in geometry', where 'they brilliantly
put in front of the eyes the whole essence of any thing' (chapter IV, pp. 91-92).
He proposed an approximation to the still undefined ratio between the angles
of refraction and incidence, and improved on Ptolemy's tables as published by
Witelo.7
He came to the central subject in chapter V: 'De modo visionis' (GW\\, 143197).8 The 'deception of vision' in the recorded measurements of planetary
diameters and of solar eclipses, he began, 'arises partly from the instruments of
observation, as we discussed above in chapter two, and partly just from vision
itself; and this, as long as it is not counteracted, makes considerable trouble for
'Straker (1971: above, note 1) 390 sqq. (1981, above note 1), and The eye made "other": Diirer,
Kepler, and the mechanization of light and vision', in L. A. Knafla, M. S. Staum and T. H. E.
Travers (eds), Science, Technology, and Culture in Historical Perspective (Calgary, Canada, 1976),
pp. 7-24.
7
Cf. G. Buchdahl, 'Methodological aspects of Kepler's theory of refraction1, Studies in History
and Philosophy of Science 3 (1972), 265-268.
"Translated by Crombie, 'Kepler: de modo visionis', in Melanges Alexandre Koyre, i (Paris,
1964), p. 141, with slight changes; see alsoCrombie (1967: above note 1).
333
Fig. 1. From Kepler, Ad Vitellionem paralipomena, v. 2 (Frankfurt, 1604), after Plater, De

corporis humani structura et usu, tabula xlix (Basel, 1583). The two unshaded diagrams at the
bottom right are of the middle ear.
investigators and detracts from scientific judgement. The source of the errors in
vision is to be sought in the structure and functioning of the eye itself. Had
Alhazen and Witelo and then the anatomists dealt with the matter properly he
would not have had to add this chapter to his Paralipomena ad Vitellionem. As
334
it was he would 'put together, as it were as principles, an account of the

relevant parts of the eye based on the most approved anatomists'; secondly
'sketch in summary the way vision takes place'; thirdly 'demonstrate each
particular point'; fourthly 'lay bare what escaped the reasonings of the
opticians and medical men concerning the functioning of the eye'; and lastly
'explain deceptions of vision arising from instruments, and apply this to
astronomical practice' (pp. 143-144). His authorities for ocular anatomy, for
which he had 'never seen or taken part in' a dissection, were 'the illustrations
in Felix Plater's De corporis humani structura et usu, which were published in
1583 and reprinted this year, 1603' (Fig. 1); and the Anatomia Pragensis (1601)
of his friend Johannes lessen. In 1600 lessen had been professor of medicine at
Prague where he had assisted in the negotiations for Kepler to work there with
Tycho Brahe, leading on Tycho's death in 1601 to his own appointment as
Imperial Mathematician.9 lessen, according to Kepler, had profited 'by
following Aquapendentius' (Girolamo Fabrici) as well as from his own
'anatomical experience'. He himself was a 'mathematician' (v.l, p. 144), but he
did not hesitate to choose what he thought correct and relevant to his problem.
Contrary to lessen, 'I agree more with Platter' he wrote on the important
question whether the crystallinus was anatomically joined to the retina. lessen
needed this because he followed Witelo in supposing that 'the power of
recognizing visible things' lay in the crystallinus to which it was transferred
through this connection from the optic nerve. Platter did not need the
connection because he 'left the power of recognizing in the retina, which is
nearer the truth' (v.l, p. 150, cf. v.2, pp. 156-157, v.4, p. 183). Kepler disagreed
with lessen also on the shape of the crystallinus (p. 151), and noted the control
of the light entering the eye by the dilation and contraction of the circular
pupil (v. 2, p. 158). He reproduced Plater's plate with its explanatory notes
showing the whole eye in vertical section and the parts dissected out and drawn
separately, with the slightly bulging cornea (as observed by Leonardo de Vinci)
indicated by a dotted line (Fig. 1; v.2, pp. 159-161).
In his account in Ad Vitellionem paralipomena (v.4; GW \\, 183-189) of the
failings of his predecessors, Kepler identified two sources of ideas for his new
theory of vision and stated how he differed from them. 'Plater' he wrote after
discussing lessen 'grasped the office of the crystallinus much better, although
again not clearly its function. Vision he said happens by the ministry of the
retiform coat'. But Kepler corrected Plater's conception of the crystallinus as
an internal eyeglass, and showed exactly how changes and defects of vision
corresponded precisely to what was painted on the retina: 'For as is the
picture, so is vision'. Plater had not understood the difference between the
image seen when we looked through a lens at something and the real picture
9
Cf. M. Caspar, Kepler, translated and edited by D. Hellman (New York, 1959), pp. 105-107,
121-123, 166.
335
painted on our retina, which Kepler had pointed out in his proposition xxiii
(below). 'It seems that Plater was led to this opinion by that anatomical
experiment, of which I have heard from other medical men, namely that if the
crystalline humour, having been taken out from the other humours, is placed
on top of tiny letters it shows those larger. But this is something different from
this matter. For vision occurs by means of the picture on the retina. But this
deception happens not through a picture, but because of the image. Hence this
magnification of letters by the crystallinus (or something analogous to it in the
eye) does not fashion vision'. Thus he concluded: 'Compare the true mode of
operation (modus) of vision proposed by me with that given by Plater, and you
will see that this famous man is no farther from the truth than is compatible
with being a medical man who deliberately does not treat mathematics' (pp.
185-187). Of Porta he wrote that it was he who 'in Magia naturalis xvii.6 first
proposed the artifice (artificiwri) of that matter of which in the second chapter
above I have set out a formal demonstration: namely by what cause all the
things outside illuminated by the Sun are seen with their colours in the
darkness' of the camera obscura. Next, Kepler continued, Porta 'added a few
words de modo visionis1, and he quoted Porta's passage on making it 'clear to
philosophers and opticians where vision is effected' and how 'the crystalline
sphere located in the middle of the eye takes the place of the screen'. But, he
addressed Porta, 'if I understand you well, when you ask where vision is
effected, you reply on the surface of the crystallinus or screen'. For Porta had
said that 'vision comes from that kind of picture (picturd)' which Kepler had
demonstrated in his second chapter (prop, vii): 'and so to conclude, most
skilful Porta, if you had added to your opinion only this': that the picture on
the crystallinus is still confused by the wide opening of the uvea, and vision
does not come about by the conjunction of light with the crystallinus, but the
light descends onto the retina, with the separation and then reunion of the
radiation to a point, 'and the place of gathering together to a point is on the
retina itself, which exhibits the clearness of the picture, and it comes about that
through that intersection the image (imago) is inverted and through this
gathering together that it is most distinct and clear: if you had added this I say
to your opinion, clearly you would have unravelled the mode of operation
(modus) of vision' (pp. 187-189; cf. v.2, pp. 151-158; below). Kepler here made
explicit his debt to Porta's artifice or model. He followed Porta in his
comparison between a camera obscura and the eye as far as the anterior
surface of the crystallinus onto which an optical image was cast as onto a
screen (cf. v.2, p. 155; v.3, pp. 162, 177-178; below); then going beyond Porta
he identified the function of the crystallinus as a lens which focused the image
onto the retina, and he dealt with the geometry of how this happened. The
image, as Porta had failed to understand, was inverted and reversed on the
crystallinus and remained so on the retina. In an autographical passage Kepler
336
described how he himself like all his predecessors was at first embarrassed by
the inverted and reversed image and looked hard for means to show that it was
rectified (p. 185; see below). But he was forced to accept the conclusions of his
geometrical optical analysis which he set out in chapter V 2-4.
In a new intellectual context Kepler's treatment of the operation of the eye
as an optical instrument marked a radical change in the conception of vision
accepted by his ancient and medieval predecessors, which enabled him to open
a new approach to the relation of physiology to perception, even while he used
many of the same analytical techniques. The analogy of the camera obscura, a
formal analogy without identity of material parts, enabled him to isolate the
geometrical optics of the eye as an immediately soluble physical problem to be
treated first and apart from all questions of sensation and perception. With this
new conception of the subject-matter he could reduce physiological optics to
inanimate physics and banish from this passive physical mechanism any active
sensitive power to look at an object or to receive stimuli selectively. He could
formulate the fundamental problem of the image not as Alhazen had done, as
that of how the eye produced an internal pattern of stimulated points, but as
the wholly different problem of how the eye focused a completely different
kind of image, an optical image itself visible from without like the inverted
image focused on the screen of a camera obscura. Alhazen's eye did not focus
but selected the image; he attributed to it explicitly vital sensitive properties
which enabled it to deliver to the back of the eye an erect image both ordered
and orientated as its object appeared to the viewer. Kepler's image made the
need to avoid confusion by the selective perception only of the perpendicular
rays irrelevant.
The camera obscura became the true model of the eye. Kepler's restructuring of optical geometry to make it not a vital perceiver of a correctly
ordered and orientated image conducted on the Euclidean persective cone, but
like any inanimate focusing device, immediately raised in a precisely geometrical form the question of the identity and location of the sensitive receptor on
which the image was cast. He could undertake a purely geometrical analysis of
the paths of the rays of physical light through the crystalline lens and other
physical refracting media until they were focused as an optical image on the
retina as a screen. Of the innumerable physical rays, going in all directions
from every point of a luminous or illuminated source, some fell on the pupil.
He demonstrated how an inverted and reversed image must be focused in the
eye by means of a construction which at the same time showed that the image
must fall on the retina, and hence that this (as Plater had suggested) must be
the sensitive receptor. He demonstrated how from an apex at each point on the
visible object a multitude of radiant cones passed through the pupil, intersected, and went to a common base on the anterior surface of the crystalline
lens, where their positions were reversed and inverted. This surface corres-
337
Fig. 2. From Descartes, La dioptrique, v (Leiden 1637): illustrating Kepler's ocular dioptrics. Rays
from each point on the object (VXY) are refracted through the cornea (BCD) and lens (L) to foci
(RST) on the retina where they form an inverted image of the object. The man looking at the eye,
with its back removed, set in a camera obscura would see the inverted image on the translucent retinal
SCREEN.
ponded in this way to the screen of a camera obscura, which became as Porta
had recognized the true model of the eye up to this location. But Kepler for the
first time and for good anatomical reasons carried his optical analysis beyond
this. He showed how the lens then focused each radiant cone from the common
base in a matching cone to a point on the retina corresponding to that on the
object from which it came. The multitude of such points recomposed the image
SHIPS 22:1-G
338
of the object (Fig. 2), just as did analogously the multitude of double pyramids
in the camera obscura without a lens.10 He related this inverted and reversed
image to the scene perceived by a simple geometrical rule making the points of
this composite picture correspond to their sources on the object but not in
orientation. But at the retina optics ended and the rays of light were succeeded
by a different kind of motion. This, and how the visual faculty of the soul
effected perception by means of the retinal image, he put outside his optical
analysis as a problem for natural philosophy. Thus:
I have described how vision takes place in such a way that the functions of each
separate part can be seen, these so far as I know, having been investigated and
discovered by no one else. And so I ask mathematicians to study this carefully, so
that something certain about this noblest of functions may at last take its place in
philosophy. I say that vision occurs when the image (idolum) of the whole hemisphere of the world which is in front of the eye, and a little more, is formed on the
reddish white concave surface of the retina (retina). I leave it to natural philosophers
(physici) to discuss the way in which this image or picture (picturd) is put together by
the spiritual principles of vision residing in the retina and in the nerves, and whether
it is made to appear before the soul or tribunal of the faculty of vision by a spirit
within the cerebral cavities, or the faculty of vision, like a magistrate sent by the
soul, goes out from the council chamber of the brain to meet this image in the optic
nerves and retina, as it were descending to a lower court. For the equipment of
opticians does not take them beyond this opaque surface which first presents itself in
the eye. I do not think that we should listen to Witelo (book iii, proposition xx), who
thinks that these images of light (idola lucis) go out farther through the nerve, until
they meet at the junction half way along each optic nerve, and then separate again,
one going to each cerebral cavity. For, by the laws of optics (leges optices), what can
be said about this hidden motion which, since it takes place through opaque and
hence dark parts and is brought about by spirits which differ in every respect from
the humours of the eye and other transparent things, immediately puts itself outside
the field of optical laws? (And yet it is this motion that brings about vision, from
which the name optics is derived; and so it is wrong to exclude it from the science of
optics simply because, in the present limited state of our knowledge, it cannot be
accommodated in optics)... This image (species) existing separately from the
presentation of the thing seen is not present in the humours or coats of the eye, as
shown above; hence vision takes place in the spirits and through the impression
(impressio) of these images (species) on the spirit. But really this impression does not
belong to optics but to natural philosophy (physicd) and the study of the wonderful.
But this by the way. I will return to the explanation of how vision takes place.
Thus vision is brought about by a picture of the thing seen being formed on the
concave surface of the retina. That which is to the right outside is depicted on the
left on the retina, that to the left on the right, that above below, and that below
'"See Straker (1981: above note I) 291-292. Lindberg (1976: above note 1) 202-206 seems
perverse in denying this debt and in continuing to maintain that 'Kepler himself remained firmly
within the medieval framework' (p. 207), and similarly later, e.g. 'Continuity and discontinuity in
the history of optics: Kepler and the medieval tradition', History and Technology 4 (1987), 431448; followed in this by J.V. Field, Two mathematical inventions in Kepler's Ad Vitellionem
Paralipomena', Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 17 (1986), 449-468.
339
above. Green is depicted green, and in general things are depicted by whatever
colour they have. So, if it were possible for this picture on the retina to persist if
taken out into the light by removing the anterior parts of the eye which form it, and
if it were possible to find someone with sufficiently sharp sight, he would recognize
the exact shape of the hemisphere compressed into the confined space of the retina.
For a proportion is kept, so that if straight lines are drawn from separate points on
the thing seen to some determined point within the eye, the separate parts are
depicted in the eye at almost the same angle as that at which these lines meet. Thus,
not neglecting the smallest points, the greater the acuity of vision of a given person,
the finer will be the picture formed in his eye.
So that I may go on to treat this process of painting (pingendi) and prepare myself
gradually for a demonstration of it, I say that this picture (picturd) consists of as
many pairs of cones as there are points on the thing seen, with both always having
the same base, namely the width of the crystallinus or part of it. Thus while one of
the cones has its vertex at the point seen and its base on the crystallinus (varied to
some extent by refraction on entering the cornea), the other has the same base on the
crystallinus as the first one and the vertex extends to some point of the picture on the
surface of the retina; this cone undergoes refraction on passing out of the crystallinus
(Figs 2 and 3). All the outer cones meet in the pupil, so that they intersect in that
space, and right becomes left... In fact more or less the same thing happens as we
showed in chapter ii in a closed chamber (camera clausd). The pupil (pupilld)
corresponds to the window and the crystallinus to the screen (tabula) opposite it,
provided that the pupil and crystallinus are not so near that intersection is incomplete and everything is confused.... And so if finally straight lines are drawn from
points on the visible hemisphere through the centre of the eye" and the vitreous
humour, these lines will imprint points forming a picture of the radiating points on
the retina opposite. If this did not happen the size of things seen indistinctly to the
side would keep changing when the eyes were turned, as happens when spectacles are
worn. For these, although fixed immovably in relation to the eye, if they are moved
round with it represent things at rest as having some motion, because of the varying
amount of the hemisphere appearing at the sides Finally the sensory power
(virtus sensorid) or spirit diffused through the nerve is more concentrated and
stronger where the retina meets direct cones, because of its source and where it has
to go: from that point it is diffused over the sphere of the retina, gets farther from
the source, and hence becomes weaker Thus when we see a thing perfectly, w
see it within the whole surrounding area of the visible hemisphere. For this reason
oblique vision satisfies the soul least and only invites the turning of the eyes in that
direction so that they may see directly . . .
The pupil did not affect the focusing of the light, but by dilating or contracting
controlled the amount of light entering the eye. Thus the position of the
aperture (foramen) is where the rays intersect, and it exists for the sake of the
crystallinus...' (v. 2, pp. 151-158).
Demonstration of the conclusions stated concerning how vision takes place through
the crystallinus. Nearly everything said so far about the crystallinus can be observed
in everyday experiments with crystal balls and glass urinary flasks filled with clear
water. For if one stands at the glazed window of a room with a globe of this kind of
"The sense requires oculi instead of retinae as in the printed texts.
340
Fig. 3. From Kepler, Ad Vitellionem paralipomena, v. 3, prop xxiii (Frankfurt, 1604): illustrating
his model for demonstrating ocular dioptrics using for simplicity a spherical lens made of a flask of
water (a) placed inside the small window fe f) of a camera obscura. Kepler explained how rays from
each point (i) of the object were brought together through n m to form in his model a somewhat
indistinct image on the screen placed at k 1.
crystal or water, and arranges a sheet of white paper behind the globe at a distance
equal to half the diameter of the globe, the glazed window with the fluted wooden or
leaden divisions between the lights will be very clearly painted on the paper, but
inverted. The same effect can be obtained with other things, if the place is darkened
a little. Thus, using a globe of water set up in a chamber opposite a small window, as
we described above in chapter ii, proposition vii, everything that can reach the globe
through the width of the small window or opening will be depicted very clearly and
341
delightfully on the paper opposite. Since the picture is clear at this one distance
(namely with the paper a semi-diameter of the globe away from it), it will become
indistinct at positions in front of or behind this one. But the direct opposite happens
using the eyes...
If the eye were put in the place of the paper, things would be seen erect where
they had been inverted on the paper.
Since the crystallinus is convex and is denser than the surrounding humours, just as
the water in the glass flask is denser than the air, therefore whatever we have
demonstrated in this way with the globe of water, and using these media, will have
been proved also for the crystallinus, except in so far as it has a different convexity
from the globe. So let us proceed with the demonstration of matters belonging to the
crystalline or glass globe... (v. 3, p. 162).
'Definition. Whereas up to now the image (imago) has been an entity of

reason (ens rationalis), the shapes (figurae) of things really present on the
paper, or on any other screen, will be called pictures (picturae)' (p. 174). To
demonstrate the focusing of the picture in the eye he used in proposition xxiii
the simplified model of a spherical globe of water (a) placed inside the aperture
(ef) of a camera obscura (Fig. 3), but he argued that the radiation entering the
eye was refracted by the crystallinus not alone but in combination with the
cornea and the aqueous humour. His phrase 'within the limit of the intersections of the parallels' meant within the caustic of refraction formed by a
spherical lens refracting parallel rays (cf. props, xv-xvi, xx). He explained how
rays from each point (i) on the visible object (hi) were brought together
through their intersections in the width mn to form in this model a somewhat
indistinct reversed picture on the screen placed at kl.
When a screen with a small window is placed in front of the globe within the limit of
the intersections of the parallels, and the window is smaller than the globe, a picture
of the visible hemisphere is projected onto the paper, formed by most of the rays
brought together behind the globe at the limit of the last intersection of the rays
from a luminous point. The picture is inverted, but purest and most distinct in the
middle. So great is the uncertainty in this matter and indeed such its novelty that,
unless we take the greatest care, it may easily become confused. Indeed I was held up
myself for a long time, until I convinced myself that all the different effects had the
same explanation.
'Thus' he added in a note, 'we may seek some light from method', for there was
one 'form of refraction through a globe by which vision is deceived by
imagining to itself simulacra which are not real (we called them imagines)' (cf.
props, vii, xvii-xviii), and another 'by which real pictures of things are formed'
(cf. props, xix-xxii and xxiii). He concluded with the corollary: 'Here is seen the
function of the pupil (foramen uveae) in the eye; also why the sides of the retina
are nearer the crystallinus than the bottom' (prop, xxiii, pp. 177-178). In the
next proposition he used his knowledge of conic sections, citing Apollonius, to
342
demonstrate the operation of his model lens, concluding with the corollary:
Thus is seen the design of nature concerning the posterior surface of the
crystalline humour in the eye. She wants all the rays entering the pupil from a
visible object to come together at one point on the retina, both so that each
point of the picture will be so much the clearer, and so that the other points of
the picture will not be accidentally confused with other, unfocused or focused
rays. It is also seen that the dilation of the pupil has no other purpose than that
which I said above, nor does it confuse the picture but only makes it clearer'
(prop, xxiv, pp. 178-179),
He went on to face the question of visual perception:
The sensation (passio) of vision follows the action of illumination, in measure
(modus) and proportion. The retina is illuminated distinctly point by point from
individual points of objects, and most strongly so at its individual points. Therefore
in the retina, and nowhere else, can distinct and clear vision come about. This is so
much the more evident because distortion of the proportions of the picture leads to
faults of vision, as has been demonstrated. And I do not know whether Democritus
was celebrating with his name idolum rather this picture, by which vision happens,
than that mirroring ...
But 'the inversion of my picture can be brought against me, which Witelo with
great assiduity dodged And I really tortured myself for a long time in
order to show that the cones, having turned right into left in the entrance of
the pupil, are made to intersect again behind the crystallinus in the middle of
the vitreous humour, so that another inversion is brought about, and what
were made left again become right, before they reach the retina'. But he gave
up 'this useless trouble'.
And so if you are bothered by the inversion of this picture and fear that this would
lead to inverted vision, I ask you to consider the following. Just as vision is not an
action (actio), simply because illumination is an action, but contrary to an action an
affection (passio), so also, in order that the positions may correspond, the capacity
for affection (patientia) must be in a direction opposite to the agents. Now the
positions are perfectly opposite when all the lines connecting opposite points run
through the same centre, which would not have been so if the picture had been erect.
And so in the inverted picture, although right and left are interchanged everywhere
and with respect to any common line, nonetheless with respect to themselves the
right-hand parts of the object are perfectly opposed to the right-hand parts of the
picture, and the upper parts of the object to the upper parts of the picture, as a
hollow to a hollow . . . Therefore with the picture inverted none of that absurdity is
committed from which Witelo so much ran away, and in which lessen followed . . .
(v.4, pp. 184-186).
In this somewhat contrived way Kepler was saying that so long as the parts
of the image retained with respect to themselves the order found in the visible
object, the reversal and inversion of their orientation did not matter. The
question nevertheless still puzzled contemporaries like Johann Brengger.
343
Kepler never found a satisfactory way of answering this question which he

rightly placed outside optics in natural philosophy, or more specifically in what
became sensory physiology and psychology, but without being able to conceive
in any fresh way what happened to the image beyond the retina. He made his
next and final contribution to optics in his Dioptrice (1611), written in response
to Galileo's Sidereus nuncius as a theoretical, mathematical analysis of how
images were formed by lenses singly and in combination. One result was his
new astronomical telescope. At the same time he developed his theory of light
and vision. Intromission and extromission were for certain purposes
interchangeable he wrote, but 'if we are concerned with the nature of luminous
things, it is an advantage to express ourselves clearly and to insist on having
nothing but the emissions of rays from luminous points' (Praefatio; GW iv,
341). Again he preceded his discussion of vision with an account of the camera
obscura: To paint visible things on a white screen with a convex lens (lens)'
(problema xliii); The picture with the lens is inverted' through the pairs of
cones sharing a common base on the lens (prop, xliv); Tor the sake of
instruction we shall call each of such pairs a paint-brush (penicillum)''; these
painted the picture on the retina when 'all the paint-brushes of all the points
come together on the lens as on the common base of the cones' and pass
through inverted to it (definitio xlv; GW\\, 367-368). Kepler seems to have left
no doubt of the provenance of his ocular model in the visual arts.12 But when
he came to what happened next in vision he could only remain puzzled:
Vision is the sensation (sensio) of the affected (affectd) retina filled with visual spirit;
or, to see is to sense the affected retina to the extent that it is affected. The retina is
painted with the coloured rays of visible things. This picture or representation
(pictura seu illustratio) is a kind of affection (passio), but not superficiary,13 as when
chalk is rubbed on a wall or light shines on it, but a qualitative affection penetrating
the spirits . . . But this picture does not complete the whole of vision unless the image
(species) on the retina, capable in this way of affection (patiens), passes through the
continuity of the spirits to the brain and is there delivered to the threshold of the
faculty of the soul . . . But inside within the brain is something, whatever it may be,
which is called the sensus communis, on which is impressed the image of the
instrument of the affected vision, that is painted by the light of the visible thing ...
But this impression is hidden from our understanding . . . (prop. Ixi, pp. 372-373).
Some years later in 1620 the English diplomat Henry Wotton described to
Francis Bacon a moving visit he had made to Kepler at Linz. This 'famous
man in the sciences', to whom Wotton proposed to bring one of Bacon's
books, was using a camera obscura as an aid to painting a scene just as Daniele
Barbaro had advised. Kepler had in his study a landscape which he said that
l2
Cf. dedicatory letter, Ges. Werke, iv, 331, and Dissertatio cum Nuncio Sidereo (1610), ibid. 293
on Porta's 'perspicilla'; Straker (1971: above note 1), 467-479, with M. Caspar und F. Hammer,
'Nachbericht' in Kepler, ibid, iv (1941) 415^21.
"The term superficiaria in Roman law meant situated on another man's land
344
he had done himself, 'non tanquam pictor, sed tanquam mathematicus'. He

described how he set up a little black tent with a small hole in it 'to which he
applies a long perspective-trunke... through which the visible radiations of all
the objects without are intromitted, falling upon a paper, which is accommodated to receive them, and so he traceth them with his pen in their natural
appearance, turning his little tent round by degrees till he hath designed the
whole aspect of the field' (GW xviii, 42).u Just after this Jean Leurechon
published in his popular Recreation mathematique (1624) an account of the
camera obscura, for artists as an aid to painting, and 'for philosophers, it is a
fine secret to explaine the organ of the sight, for the hollow of the eye is taken
as the close chamber, the balle of the aple of the eye, for the hole of the
chamber, the crystalline humour for the lens of glasse (respond ... a la lentille
de verre), and the bottome of the eye, for the wall, or leafe of paper' (probleme
ii).15
Kepler's intellectual behaviour when investigating the operation of the eye
conforms exactly to the precept and practice of his investigation of the
operation of the celestial system. He would not remain satisfied with anodyne
indecision but drove his analysis of each problem to its end in either an
acceptable solution or an acknowledged defeat. This he did by attending
strictly to quantitative details. He insisted in the Mysterium cosmographicum
(1596) that while the Ptolemaic and Copernican hypotheses were observationally equivalent, the reason for this must itself be investigated, and one could
not remain undecided for there were important phenomena for which the
former could provide no causes whereas in Copernicus their relations were 'so
beautifully apparent, there must be some inherent cause of all these things' (c.l;
GW i, 15-16). He made the discovery of that cause his research programme.
Likewise he refused to retreat from the problem of the camera obscura either
with Witelo and Pecham into ignorance of the obscure nature of light or with
Mastlin into the unavoidable inaccuracy of all human observation. Again he
insisted in his astronomy both that 'an hypothesis is built upon and confirmed
by observations' and that he was looking for 'physical causes', so that he could
show that 'the celestial machine' was like 'not a divine living thing' but 'a
clockwork' in which 'manifold movements' came from a simple 'corporeal
force', which could 'be determined by numbers and geometry'.16 This was his
approach to the operation of vision. The key to his success in both of his
principal inquiries was that in each he set out by heroic analytical labours to
identify the essential scientific questions belonging to the subject-matter, to
'"Wootton to Bacon 1620, in Kepler, Ges. Werke, xvii, 42; cf. Straker (1976: above note 6).
''French edition published under the pseudonym Henri Van Etten (Pont-a-Mousson, 1624),
English transl. as Mathematical Researches (London, 1633) with the 'for the lens of glasse'
substituted for a mistranslation of the bracketed French.
l6
Kepler to David Fabricius 4.vii.l603, Ges. Werke, xiv, 412, and to Herwart von Hohenburg
10.ii.1605, ibid, xv, 146.
345
distinguish these according to their categories, and to answer them in the

appropriate order. This involved the extraction and separation of the quite
different questions confused in the received presentation of the subject, and the
recognition that despite the ancient tradition of both astronomy and optics
within the mathematical sciences and natural philosophy, both contained
essential questions that remained still open. Thus in astronomy the primary
question was to establish the geometry of the planetary orbits, after which
came the question of how these were caused. In the optics of the eye and the
camera obscura the primary question was to establish the geometry of the rays
that formed the image, after which came the question of how this enabled us to
see with the eye as we do. In both subject-matters he broke with received
commitments: in astronomy with the circularity imposed by ancient metaphysical beliefs; in ocular physiology with the ancient supposition that since the eye
was a living sentient organ, any account of its operation must provide an
immediate explanation of our visual perception. Kepler rethought the
geometry and more fundamentally the essential commitments of both subjects
from as near to the beginning as he could get.
Kepler's new theory made possible a precise geometrical analysis, led by
himself in his Dioptrice, of the functions of the different parts of the eye in
focusing and controlling the picture on the retina. By his decision to solve first
this geometrical problem of vision, isolating the operation of the eye as an
optical device from whatever might follow from it, he opened the way to
formulating purely physiologically or physically numerous further problems of
accommodation, myopia and hypermetropia, astigmatism, cataract, binocular
vision, the design of spectacles to correct visual defects, and the design of
optical instruments. It was the mathematicians who pursued these lines of
inquiry, and from them that the medical profession came eventually to grasp
the new ocular physiology and its medical applications. Influential in this were
Vopiscus Fortunatus Plempius with his Ophthalmographia (1632, 1648) who as
professor of medicine at Louvain began to promote Descartes's physiological
programme; Descartes himself; and later Isaac Newton's physician friend
William Briggs with his Ophthalmographia (1676, 1686).17 Kepler's methods
were notably exploited by Christopher Scheiner at the Collegio Romano.
Scheiner in his Oculus (1619) published for the first time a vertical section of
the eye showing the optic nerve entering the eyeball to one side (Fig. 6; i.1.9, p.
17). He made a study of refraction through the different parts of the eye and its
fluids which he put into glass ampullae (ii.1.5-12, pp. 61-73; ii.2.1-16, pp. 77122) and described a model of the whole eye which consisted of a camera
obscura with a cornea and lens, a spherical glass retina, and aqueous and
"Cf. J. Hirschberg, Geschichte der Augenheilkunde, iii.l (Leipzig, 1908); G. Ovio, Storia
deU'oculistica (Cuneo, 1950-1952); H. M. Koelbing, 'Ocular physiology in the seventeenth century
and its acceptance by the medical profession', Analecta medico-historica 3 (1968), 219-224.
346
Ar<i5

et
Naiur*,TuI>i
ct
Oculj,
in
ipecielui
ioUritj
patienUndis
con&nfuf'.
N.
3.
Fig. 4. from Schemer, Rosa ursina, ii. 23 (Bracciani, 1630): illustrating his comparison between the
eye and a camera obscura with a lens system, and the effects on each of using further lenses.
vitreous humours enclosed in two glass chambers (iii.1.1-11, pp. 123-161).

Beginning with the heading 'Applicatio dictorum ad oculum' (iii.1.12, pp. 161163), he applied his model to show that in the eye a reversed and inverted
image or picture of the visible object was thrown onto the retina (iii. 1.12-26,
pp. 161-193), and that this and not the lens was the sensitive organ (iii.1.27-34,
pp. 193-216). Later in his Rosa ursina (1626-1630) he described experiments
carried out in Rome in 1625, in which the formation of the image on the retina
was observed directly. This he wrote 'I saw most clearly in the human eye here
in Rome in the Jubilee year, where, after the sclerotic had been scraped off the
bottom of the eye, the light of a candle sent in through the pupil, the rays
having intersected, fell upon the retina; something that has often been proved
by experiment in the eyes of many animals' (ii.23, pp. 110-112). He went on to
347
exemplify 'the admirable agreement of nature and art' (ii.23-33, pp. 106-136)
in a detailed comparison between the eye and a camera obscura containing a
system of lenses, studying the effects on each of adding further lenses as with
spectacles and in the telescope, helioscope and microscope (cf. Fig. 4).18
Scheiner helped to establish the camera obscura as a model of the eye. Thus
Johann Christoph Kohlhans in his Tractatus opticus (1663) cited Schemer's
two books for his account: 'Of the application of the camera to the eye' (ii.2.3,
p. 257); 'The agreement of art and nature is wonderful: thus as the eye is a
natural camera obscura, so is the camera obscura an artificial eye' (p. 501).
Likewise Johann Christoph Sturm in his Collegium Experimentale (1676)
asserted 'the eye to be nothing other than a little camera obscura' (ii, p.7).19
More original was Christiaan Huygens's demonstration in his Dioptrica (prop,
xxxi; 1703), written probably during 1667-1691, of the optical system of a
simplified eye reduced to a single spherical refracting surface and of a model
constructed as a camera obscura with a cornea, a lens and a diaphragm
corresponding to the iris.20 But the new theory was by no means evidently true
even to everybody competent to understand it. The Jesuit mathematician
Francois Aguilon in his Opticorum libri (i.l, 27, 1613, pp. 2-6, 26-27), a work
covering the whole range of optical science from ocular physiology and
perception through physics to perspective and geometrical projection, argued
that the sensitive organ was the lens capsule (aranea), which he believed to be
an extension of the retina and the optic nerve.21 Edme Mariotte provoked a
long controversy, centred in the Academic Royale des Sciences and involving
especially Jean Pequet and Claude Perrault, with Jean Mery and Philippe de
La Hire, by questioning whether his discovery of the blind spot at the entry of
the optic nerve still allowed the retina to be regarded as the sensitive organ of
vision.22 If Kepler himself provided an exemplary model for the analysis of the
composite problem of vision into its parts, so that his solution of ocular optics
allowed the further psychological and philosophical questions of vision to be
reintroduced on that scientific foundation, he still left these questions largely
"Cf. M. von Rohr, 'Ausgewahlte Stiicke aus Christoph Scheiners Augenbuch', Zeitschrift fur
opthalmologische Optik 7 (1919), 35^4, 53-64, 76-91, 101-113, 121-133, 'Zur Wurdigung von
Scheiners Augenstudien', Archiv fur Augenheilktinde 86 (1920), 247-263; Crombie (1967: above
note 1).
"Cf. also Johann Andrea Volland, Oculus (Altdorf, 1679) on the eye as a camera obscura; and
Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr, Dissertatio visionis sensum (1699), published Gottingen (1748), 169,
on Schemer's experiments removing the back of the eye.
20
Huygens, Dioptrica in Opera posthuma (Louvain, 1703), 112-116; cf. J. P. C. Southall, 'The
beginnings of optical science1, and 'Early pioneers in physiological optics', Journal of the Optical
Society of America 6 (1922), 292-311, 827-842.
21
Cf. M. von Rohr, 'Auswahl aus der Behandlung des Horopters bei Fr. Aguilonius um 1613',
Zeitschrift fur opthalmologische Optik 11 (1923), 41-59.
22
Cf. M. D. Grmek, 'Un debat scientifique exemplaire: Mariotte, Pecquet et Perrault a la
recherche du siege de la perception visuelle', History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 7 (1985),
217-255.
348
unformulated, let alone answered. There were such psychophysiological problems as the relations between direct and indirect vision and between the visual
fields of the two eyes. There was the perennial philosophical problem of the
relation between physical stimuli of any kind and unphysical sensations.
It was Descartes who explicitly clarified the analysis of vision into its
component problems, with full acknowledgement to Kepler.23 In doing so he
showed how to use the modelling of nature by art as an instrument not simply
of technical, but more generally of logical and conceptual analysis and
exploration. Following Kepler's convincing lead, the mathematicians from
Scheiner and Descartes down to Huygens and Newton who investigated the
technical frontiers of visual physiology came to see in the precise relating of
perceiver to perceived a central problem of the scientific movement. Descartes
shared with all concerned the ancient ambition to improve nature by art, for he
opened La dioptrique (i, 1637; Oeuvres, vi): 'The whole conduct of our life
depends on our senses, among which vision being the noblest and most
universal, there can be no doubt that inventions serving to increase its power
are the most useful there can possibly be'. It would be difficult to find a better
example than the telescope, but 'to the shame of our sciences this invention, so
useful and so admirable, was found first only by experiment and chance' by
someone without mathematical knowledge. He proposed to develop a true
science of optics. His more general contribution to scientific thinking was to
show that by liberating systematically from each other the different kinds of
question and frontier involved in the traditional formulation of vision, each
could then be explored without confusion from the others. Descartes, with
Marin Mersenne, approached the question left by Kepler of how the retinal
image could give us sensations and perceptions by distinguishing, on more
"Descartes to Mersenne 31.iii.1638, Oeuvres, eds C. Adam and P. Tannery, 12 vols (Paris, 18971913), ii, 86; cf. for Descartes's optics J. Pucelle, 'La theorie de la perception exterieure chez
Descartes', Revue d'histoire des sciences 12 (1935), 297-339, M. H. Pirenne, 'Descartes and the
body-mind problem in physiology', The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 1 (1950), 4359, Vision and the Eye, 2nd edn (London, 1967), G. Leisegang, Descartes Dioptrik (Meisenheim am
Glan, 1954), R. L. Gregory, Eye and Brain (London, 1966), The Intelligent Eye (London, 1970),
Crombie (1967: above note 1), N. Pastore, Selective History of Theories of Visual Perception: 16501950 (New York, 1971), W. Van Hoorn, As Images Unwind: Ancient and modern theories of visual
perception (Amsterdam, 1972), G. Simon, 'On the theory of visual perception of Kepler and
Descartes' in A. Beer and P. Beer (eds), Kepler: Four Hundred Years (Vistas in Astronomy 18;
Oxford, 1975), G. C. Hatfield and W. Epstein, The sensory core and the medieval foundations of
early modern perceptual theory', Isis 70 (1979), 363-383, A. M. Smith, Descartes' Theory of Light
and Refraction. (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 77) 3; (Philadelphia, Pa.,
1987); and for the discovery of the sine law of refraction J. W. Shirley, 'An early experimental
demonstration of Snell's law', American Journal of Physics 19 (1951), 507-508, E. Rosen 'Harriot's
science: the intellectual background', in J. W. Shirley (ed.), Thomas Harriot: Renaissance Scientist
(Oxford, 1974), pp. 2-4, J. A. Lohne, 'Zur Geschichte der Brechungsgesetzes', Sudhoffs Archiv 47
(1963), 152-172, D. J. Struik, 'Snel, Willebrord (1580-1626)', in Dictionary of Scientific Biography
12 (1975), 499-502, P. Costabel, Demarches originates de Descartes savant (Paris, 1982), pp. 63-76.
After the announcement of the sine law by Descartes to Marin Mersenne in June 1632, it was the
latter who published it for the first time in his Harmonie universelle, Traitez de la nature des sons
...', i, prop, xxix (Paris, 1636), 65-66, cf. Correspondance, ed. C. De Waard, 2nd edn, iii (Paris,
1969), pp. 316, 318-319.
349
general philosophical grounds, the case of men from that of animals acting
simply as natural automata made by God, responding to physical stimuli from
which God had given them no capacity to receive sensations. The image
formed in the eyes of animals was purely physiological. In the animal machine
he could push Kepler's optical analysis to the limit by asking what purely
physiological motions followed from this physiological image and passed
through the body. Thus he could complete the technical isolation of the
formation of the image from the logical or ontological problem (recognized
since Plato) of how any physical image or motion could cause sensation and
perception, effects in a different category, in a sentient body.
La dioptrique is an essay at once in mathematical and experimental science
and in the use of hypothetical models, the most elegant and the most successful
of his scientific writings. In it he disposed of certain technical advantages over
his predecessors, in particular by his knowledge of the sine law of refraction,
discovered independently long before by Thomas Harriot and Willebrord Snel
and perhaps also independently by himself. He surpassed them all in
presenting a new science of vision within the context of a new science of the
senses in general. By this time he had developed several different and not
wholly reconcilable hypothetical physical models for light and its effects in
vision. He would begin his account of vision with 'the explanation of light and
its rays' but, since he was concerned here only with how it entered and was
refracted through the eye, 'there is no need for me to undertake to say what
truly is its nature'. Our embodied soul could know external objects only
through the motions which these produced in our nerves. We were in a
position like that when we found our way about in the dark with a stick, or
that of men born blind who had found their way about by touch all their lives
so that 'one could almost say that they see with the hands'. Now we could
suppose that light is nothing but 'a certain movement, or a very rapid and very
lively action' that passed through transparent media into our eyes, just as the
movement or resistance encountered by the stick passed into the hands of the
blind man (i). The operation of the senses in animals was purely physical and
physiological. But in man 'we know already well enough that it is the soul that
senses, and not the body . . . And we know that it is not properly speaking
because it is in the members that serve as organs of the external senses that it
senses, but because it is in the brain, where it exercises that faculty called the
common sense . . . Finally we know that it is through the nerves that the
impressions that objects make on the external members reach the soul in the
brain'. But we must
take care not to suppose that, in order to sense, the soul needs to look at images
which may be sent by the objects as far as the brain, as our philosophers commonly
do; or, at least, we must conceive the nature of these images quite otherwise than
they do. For . . . they do not consider in them anything else except that they must
350
have a resemblance to the objects with they represent... instead of considering that
there are several other things besides images that can stimulate our thought; as for
example signs and words, which do not resemble in any way the things which they
signify. And if, in order to separate ourselves as little as possible from the opinions
already received, we prefer to acknowledge that the objects which we sense really
send their images as far as the interior of our brain, we must at least note that there
are no images which must resemble in everything the objects which they represent.
Just as Kepler had used the experience of painting to form his conception of
the retinal picture, so Descartes did likewise to replace this simple conception
by the sophisticated conception of symbolic representation of an object by
sensory clues:
Just as you see that engravings, made only of a bit of ink put here and there on a
piece of paper, represent to us forests, towns, men and even battles and storms, even
though, from the infinity of diverse qualities which they make us conceive in these
objects, there may be none but the shape alone to which they have properly a
resemblance; and even then it is a very imperfect resemblance, seeing that they
represent on an entirely flat surface bodies elevated and sunk and that even,
following the rules of perspective, they often represent circles better by ovals than by
other circles, and squares by lozenges than by other squares, and likewise with all the
other shapes: so that often, in order to be perfect as images, and to represent an
object better, they must not resemble it. Now we must think in just the same way of
the images that are formed in our brain, and we must note that it is only a question
of knowing how they can furnish the soul with the means of sensing all the diverse
qualities of objects to which they correspond, and not at all how in themselves they
resemble them. Just as, when the blind man of whom we have spoken above touches
some bodies with his stick, it is certain that those bodies do not send anything else to
him except that, by making his stick move diversely according to the diverse
qualities that are in them, they move by this means the nerves of his hand and then
the places in his brain from which these nerves come; this is what gives occasion to
his soul to sense as many of the diverse qualities in these bodies as there are varieties
in the movements that are caused by them in his brain (La dioptrique iv).
'You see well enough then that, in order to sense, the soul does not need to
look at any images similar to the things which it senses; but that does not stop
it being true that the objects which we look at imprint quite perfect images in
the bottom of our eyes'. This 'some people have already very ingeniously
explained by comparison with what happens in a chamber', a camera obscura:
'For they say that this chamber represents the eye' with all its essential parts.
One could demonstrate this by 'taking the eye of a man freshly dead, or failing
that of an ox or some other large animal', cutting away the back and replacing
it with a translucent white body such as a piece of paper or eggshell, and
putting the eye into a hole in a dark room with its pupil facing a sunlit scene
outside (Fig. 2). Then 'if you look at the white body RST you will see, not
perhaps without admiration and pleasure, a painting which will represent very
naturally in perspective all the objects that are outside towards VXY, proportioned to their distance, at least if you make sure that this eye keeps its natural
351
Fig. 5. From Descartes, La dioptrique, v (Leiden, 1637): illustrating the transmission of light from
the object (VXY) to form a visual image in each eye (RST, rst), and then of these images through
the optic nerves to form corresponding patterns (789) in the cerebral cavities.
shape'. Now, 'having seen this painting in the eye of a dead animal, and having
considered its causes, one cannot doubt that an entirely similar painting is
formed in that of a living man, on the internal skin, in the place of which we
have substituted the white body RST . . . Moreover, the images of objects are
not only formed at the bottom of the eye, but they also pass beyond as far as
the brain, as you can easily understand if you suppose that, for example, the
rays that come into the eye from the object V (Fig. 5) touch at the point R the
extremity of one of the little threads of the optic nerve which takes its origin at
the place 7 on the interior surface of the brain 789'. Similarly for the other
objects X and Y. 'From which it is clear that once more a painting 789 is
formed, sufficiently similar to the objects V, X, Y, on the interior surface of the
brain facing its cavities' (La dioptrique v). Thus 'although this painting, in
passing thus as far as the inside of our head, always retains something of a
resemblance to the objects from which it proceeds', vet it is not 'bv means of
352
this resemblance that it makes us sense them . . . but rather . . . it is the

movements by which it is composed that, acting immediately upon our soul in
as much as it is united to our body, are instituted by nature to make it have
such sensations'. And 'because it is the soul that sees, and not the eye, and
because it sees immediately only by the intervention of the brain' (vi), any
disturbance in the brain or the nerves must produce corresponding disturbances and illusions of vision.
Descartes remained committed to his attempt to understand how the soul
was related to the body, but by his line of analysis he, like the more sceptical
Mersenne, turned the inquiry towards more immediately answerable questions.
Stepping aside from the ontological question of how physical motions of any
kind could cause sensations, events belonging to different categories, they
directed attention to the physical and physiological clues that determined
different sensations and perceptions. Together they pioneered, in the two
major senses of vision and hearing, the empirical and experimental exploration
of the correlation of sensations and perceptions with states both of the external
world and of the nervous system, as these were observed and conceived in
current physical and physiological theory. In this way they launched in the
17th century a new programme for the science of the special senses and more
generally of the mediation of sensory information and its coordination in the
behaviour of the animal body and in the perceptions of the human soul. It was
in this context that consideration of other senses finally dissolved the visual
model of the representative image, for if the pictorial resemblance of the retinal
image to its object was merely accidental to the essential information received
through the eye, an image of sound could more obviously mean likewise only
an ordered correspondence of its motions with its source. Just as Mersenne did
in his quantitative analyses of both musical and optical sensations, Descartes
in L'Homme and in La dioptrique vi explored quantitatively how different
visual clues and their relations gave us perceptions of the position, distance,
size and shape of objects. He tried to show not only how our different
sensations and perceptions were correlated with different physiological states
of our nervous system, but also that if a particular physiological state were
postulated, then particular sensations or perceptions must follow.24
The new empirical programme for the science of the senses was endorsed
and developed by philosophers, physiologists and mathematicians alike,
despite some considerable disagreements on both fundamental and more
particular issues. Thomas Hobbes and Pierre Gassendi in somewhat different
24
Cf. Descartes, L'Homme (Oeuvres, xi), pp. 143-144, 174-177 and Meditationes de prima
philosophiae, ii, vi (1641), Principia philosophiae, ii. 1-2, iv. 189 (1644), Les passions de I'dme, arts.
23, 36 (1649); A. C. Crombie (1967: above note 1), The study of the senses in Renaissance science',
in Actes du X' Congres International d'Histoire des Sciences: 1962 (Paris, 1964), pp. 93-114,
'Mathematics, music and medical science', Actes du XIf Congres ... 1968 (Paris, 1971), pp. 295310, 'Marin Mersenne and the seventeenth-century problem of scientific acceptability', Physis 17
(1975), 186-204, Marin Mersenne (forthcoming).
353
Xr
Fig. 6. From Schemer, Oculus, /. /. 9 (Oeniponti, 1619): showing the structure of the eye, with the
refracting media of the cornea (E) and lens (MN), and the optic nerve (O) entering the eyeball to
one side of the point of central vision on the retina (D).
ways met Descartes's stark division of the created world into extended
unthinking body and unextended thinking mind by offering other accounts of
the mediation and coordination of the information received through the
senses. Hobbes elaborated especially in his optical writings a purely corporeal,
mechanistic psychology.25 Gassendi set out from the Greek atomists to devise
another conjectural model.26 Both agreed with Descartes that objects in the
external world were represented symbolically in the motions they produced
through the senses; both attempted to formulate clearly the problems of
correlating sensory with physiological states; and both made valuable observations on this subject. A basic principle of the whole programme, however often
it was breached, was that the speculative models designed to explore these
problems should lead to solutions testable by observation. This opened two
interesting questions. One concerned the differentation of the senses. Descartes
had argued in La dioptrique and L'Homme that while the special sense organs
were so designed that they were normally stimulated only by specific kinds of
physical motion (as light, sound or pressure), the kinds of sensation that
resulted were determined not by those kinds of external motion but by the part
of the brain to which they were conducted. Against this Thomas Willis,
influenced by Gassendi, maintained that it was the different kinds of external
motion or particle that determined the specificity of the senses, and that those
'proportionate to one sensory are incommunicable to most others'.27 It was not
technically possible to settle this dispute, but the second question proved
easier. Descartes had assumed that the coordination of the information
received through the different senses had been included in the inherited design
of the animate body, so that a blind man groping about with two sticks would
form a conception of the geometry of space exactly as did a sighted man.
"Hobbes, 'Opticae', first published by Mersenne, Universae geometricae, mixtae mathematicae
synopsis (Paris, 1644), pp. 567-589, and in Objectiones iii to Descartes, Meditationes ii.
26
Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, Physica, iii.2.2.1-4, vi.2, viii.2-4 in Opera, ii (Lyon, 1658),
237 sqq., 338 sqq., 402 sqq., and in Obj. v to Descartes, Meditationes ii, vi.
"Willis, De anima brutorum, i.10 (Oxford, 1672), p. 159.
354
Nicolas Malebranche on the contrary argued that coordination was a question

for empirical research,28 and this was to be formulated precisely in the famous
problem put by William Molyneux to John Locke: whether a man born blind
and given sight would be able at once to recognize with his eyes differences in
shape which he had already learned by touch with his hands.29 Molyneux and
Locke thought not, and with this George Berkeley agreed for particular
reasons. He argued that physiological theory could not determine what the
man would see, and that in general we learnt by experience to judge shape,
distance, size and so on for each sense separately and also by experience how
the diffferent senses were coordinated. Results of operations for congenital
cataract were to confirm this argument.30 Berkeley thus pointed to an explicitly
autonomous empirical psychology of perception able to explore its subjectmatter independently of current physics and physiology.
Alhazen, Kepler and Descartes were three supreme virtuosi who by creating
expectations and commanding assent each dominated their subject for long
periods. All were masters of the art of theoretical modelling. Kepler displaced
the Greek commitment to an immediate explanation of visual appearances
accepted by Alhazen, by accepting a different commitment making demonstrated physical principles apply as strictly to the animate organ modelled as to
the inanimate model itself. Descartes succeeded in addressing afresh the
problems of the cerebral physiology of perception left standing by Kepler, by
pushing the mechanistic analysis still farther and asking what purely physical
motions followed the focusing of the image on the retina, so reducing the
whole physiological process involved in vision and sensation in general to one
of purely physical coordination within an animal machine. Thus he could
define physiology, and liberate the distinct physiological, psychological and
ontological questions encountered in the animate and sentient body all from
each other. 'The nature of things, hidden in darkness', Marcello Malpighi
wrote a little before Leibniz's remarks on the subject, 'is revealed only by
analogizing. This is achieved in such a way that by means of simpler machines,
more easily accessible to the senses, we lay bare the more intricate'.31 It would
be ill-advised to think that 'the human mind has uncovered all the secrets of
nature', but it could 'uncover a good part of its artifices'. An inquirer
examining the parts of the body
"Malebranche, De la recherche de la verite, i (Paris, 1674), text established by G. Lewis (Paris,
1946).
M
Locke, Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, ii.9 (London, 1690).
"Berkeley, Essay toward a New Theory of Vision (Dublin, 1709) and The Theory of Vision, or
Visual Language ... Vindicated (London, 1733); cf. M. von Senden, Space and Sight: The
Perception of Space and Shape in the Congenially Blind Before and After Operation (London;
1960).
"Malpighi, Anatomes plantarum idea (1675), in Opera omnia (Louvain, 1687), p. 1 cf. Leibniz,
Elementa Physica, ii. (c. 1682-4) in Philosophical Papers and Letters, translated and edited by L.E.
Loemker, 2nd edn. (Dordrecht, 1969), p. 284.
355
and so proceeding a priori has come to form models (moduli, modelli) and figures
(typi) of them, with which he places before the eyes the causes of these effects and
gives the reason for them a priori and, aided by their rational sequence, understanding the mode of operation of nature, he constructs physiology and pathology
and then the art of medicine. A clear experimental proof of this is the optical
camera, in which the mathematician produces all the effects that are observed in
vision in the state of health and disease in animals, demonstrating a priori the
necessity of those effects that follow from variation in the shape of the lens and from
the too great distance or nearness of the parts; so that the mode of operation (ratio
modo) and the defects of vision are demonstrated from knowledge of the mechanism
made by man analogous to the eye.32
"Malpighi, Opera posthuma (Amsterdam, 1698), pp. 276, 289-290: completed 1687; in Latin and
Italian.
And so, joining mathematical demonstrations with the uncertainty of

chance, and reconciling what seemed contraries, taking its name from
both, it justly arrogates to itself this stupendous title: the geometry of
chance.
(Pascal, Adresse a I'Academie Parisienne)
17
Contingent Expectation and Uncertain Choice:
Historical Contexts of Arguments from Probabilities1
i
HE STORY of Aristomenes in the Roman novel Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass of Apuleius offers a peculiar view
of chance and luck in the ancient world. Apuleius was
writing in the second century A.D. His character Aristomenes
finds on a journey a long lost friend miserably reduced to half-starvation in filthy rags. His friend responds to his greeting by urging
him to keep away and let Fortune do what she would with him as
long as she pleases. Instead Aristomenes takes him to the baths,
scrubs him down, and gives him fresh clothes, a good meal, and a
bed at the inn. But his friend's warning was just. Bad luck is
catching, and soon Aristomenes becomes himself likewise afflicted, forced into exile, never again to return to home or happiness.
We are here in a different moral cosmology from that of the Good
Samaritan. We are in a different world also from that of Aristotle's
ethics and of Greek medicine, let alone astronomy, for we are in
an arbitrary world of chance whose consequences might be feared
but were essentially unpredictable. We are in a region which Aristotle had placed for that reason essentially outside rational knowledge, yet it was part of the total world in which some people saw
themselves living. That total world is something we should always
i. This paper is based on corresponding chapters of my book Styles of Scientific
Thinking in the European Tradition (London: Gerald Duckworth and Co., 1994),
which contains full documentation both of original sources and of my considerable
debt to other scholars. An earlier version was published as "Pari sur le hazard et
choix dans 1'incertain", in Medicine et probabilities: Actes de la journ&e d'etudes
du 15 decembie 1979, 6d. A. Fagot (Paris, 1982), pp. 1-42,. Basic information about
most of the persons discussed will be found in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. C. C. Gillispie (New York, 1970-80; 16 vols.)
358
keep in mind when we try to penetrate into the more scientific

thinking of any period, meaning by that the thinking that solved
problems and made discoveries which we can recognize as continuing features of nature and of human knowledge.
The subject of contingent expectation and uncertain choice is
the world of experience identified by Aristotle as being usually and
for the most part consistent and regular, but not invariably or
necessarily so. Hence arguments, demonstrations and conclusions
about it could be only probable in varying degrees, never certain
as in geometry. This was recognized by Plato and Aristotle and
other Greek thinkers as the common experience of medical diagnosis and prognosis, of legal judgements, of weather prediction, of
expectations from planting to harvest, of navigation, of outcomes
of battles, and so on. To deal with this kind of experience a characteristic style of thinking came to be developed with a common
form of argument for the variety of contingent situations and
subject-matters in which it was met, a form distinct from that
developed for such a subject as geometry and its applications for
example in astronomy and optics. We can define what I call a
scientific style by three characteristics: (i) its form of argument:
its methods of discovery and demonstration,- (2) its conception of
nature: beliefs about what there is in existence to be discovered;
and (3) habits of mind: especially the expectations of and responses
to innovation and change, the dispositions of a society and of
individuals within it. The sources of an intellectual style of this
kind must obviously be looked for not simply in natural science,
but much more generally in the intellectual and moral commitments and history of a culture or society, commitments antecedent to any specific science. Commitments to a style may have a
long gestation, and likewise a tenacious life. But a style may also
be imposed by the subject-matter.
The common problem in all contingent and uncertain subjects
and situations was that those concerned, facing a succession of
uncertain outcomes, might be obliged to make a decision, but on
insufficient grounds: the march of events might force a decision,
but the grounds available could make it only to some degree likely
to be proved correct. The problem had a similar form equally for
theoretical and for practical choice whenever the subject-matter
Contingent Expectation and Uncertain Choice
359
could not be reduced to a simple logical or mathematical or dogmatic certainty. An experimenter exploring a complex subjectmatter could assent to a scientific hypothesis only contingently
on the evidence obtained so far, just as a physician or judge or a
navigator or a military commander or a merchant or a gamester
must decide at the moment of action only on a contingent expectation from the choice which he judged the most likely to gain his
ends.
The history of Western thinking in probabilities on this kind of
subject-matter has had then two main concerns, ( i ) It has been a
search for dependable criteria of judgement that would reduce
uncertain expectation to as exact a probability as the subject-matter would allow. We can ask historically then: On what grounds
did people give, or not give, assent to evidence, explanations,
theories, courses of action? (2) At the same time Western thinking
has been an exploration of nature and its expectations, of the
relation of expectations available to us to expectations embodied
in nature, hence of possible conceptions of nature and its knowability. On what grounds then did people of a particular period
expect that future events would happen, and that past events had
happened, in any context?
It is illuminating, indeed essential, to look at these issues comparatively in different historical contexts. Thereby we can see how
some questions came to be asked (while others remained unasked)
which came to establish the intellectual character of an age. I can
best illustrate the comparative history of thinking in probabilities
by pointing briefly to its central focus in examples from suitably
different historical circumstances: ancient, medieval, and early
modern, with a final glance at the theory of natural selection as a
general theory of decision applied to human and natural choice
alike. In each of these periods problems appeared under its own
distinctive vision and in each the attempts to reduce uncertainty
to probability were made within the limitations imposed both by
that vision and by the subject-matter: persuasive when they could
not be demonstrative, qualitative in antiquity, and quantified in
early modern Europe by bringing the contingent and variable
within the realm of mathematical order. Each through the survival
of texts made its distinctive contribution to its successors.
360

II
The Greeks developed thinking in probability with great originality in medicine and law. Focusing on the different types of argument appropriate to different subject-matters, they provided a
classification in which to place probable judgement of the uncertain situations both of nature and of practical human life. Let me
illustrate this with a brief collage of quotations. First the Hippocratic Prognostic: "I hold that it is an excellent thing for a physician
to practice forecasting. For if he discovers and declares unaided at
the side of his patients the present, the past and the future, and
fills in the gaps in the account given by the sick, he will be believed
to understand the cases, so that men will confidently entrust
themselves to him for treatment. Furthermore he will carry out
the treatment best if he knows beforehand from the present
symptoms what will take place later." But some diseases did kill:
"it is necessary therefore to learn the nature of such diseases, how
much they exceed the strength of men's bodies, and to learn how
to forecast them. . . . For the longer you plan to meet each
emergency, the greater your power to save those who have a chance
of recovery . . . " (c. i).
Hippocratic diagnosis and prognosis was an inference, from collections of symptoms usually present, to their probable antecedents and consequences. Thus the famous signs of death (c. 2). The
possibility of predicting the course of a disease was based on a
classification both of patients and of diseases, so that patients of
a type would all react alike to the same disease, and diseases of a
type would always run the same course, within the same general
environmental conditions. But Hippocratic authors also noted
considerable differences in the predictability of different ailments.
Some authors were more impressed by the essential natural uniformity of human beings, indeed of men with animals, of kinds of
disease, and of comparable environmental conditions. Others were
more impressed by the irreducible uncertainty introduced by a
variability so great, both in the human body and in external conditions, as to make each individual case virtually unique. Individual
bodies differed so much in general, as well as according to sex and
age and type, that except in specific ailments such as lesions
prognosis seemed virtually impossible. In all cases it was essential
361
to follow adequate procedures for evaluating information got from

patients, and for detecting what they might consciously or unconsciously misrepresent or conceal. Most authors held that despite
the uncertainty of the evidence medical prognosis was both possible and useful, just as it was possible within limits to forecast
weather from likewise variable signs. For, taking due account of
environmental conditions, "in every year and in every land" good
and bad signs remained uniform in their indications, and proved
"to have the same significance in Libya, in Delos, and in Scythia".
Hence "it is not strange that one should be right in the vast
majority of instances, if one learns them well and knows how to
estimate and appreciate them properly". One need not trouble
oneself about "the name of any disease. For it is by the same
symptoms in all cases that you will know the diseases that come
to a crisis at the times stated" (c. 25).
We have here the recognition of a science of usual though not
invariable, and not necessary, connections or regularities of events
when observed in adequate numbers. It offered objective descriptive knowledge that could be established inductively, without
having to know their causes, by observing and recording these
stable contingent regularities. The empirical probability so established, that sequences of events already observed would likewise
be observed in the future, yielded then a rational expectation.
Thus on medical correlations the Hippocratic Aphorisms: "Those
who are constitutionally very fat are more apt to die quickly than
those who are thin" (ii.44); "Those with an impediment in their
speech are very likely to be attacked by protracted diarrhoea" (vi.
32). Similarly the Aristotelian Problemata: "Why is it that the
plague alone among diseases infects particularly persons who
come into contact with those under treatment for it?" (i.y); "Why
are people more liable to fall ill in the summer, while those who
are ill are more liable to die in the winter?" (i.2,$); "Why are boys
and women less liable to white leprosy than men, and middle aged
women more than young?" (x.4J; "Why is it that fair men and
white horses usually have grey eyes?" (x.n).
Greek thinkers recognized probability essentially within the
context of a search for certainty and a qualitative analysis of degrees of certainty in different subject-matters. Thus the Greek
physicians might match the astronomers in aspiring to infer both
362
antecedents and consequences from any present state of affairs,

making past and future in effect a property of that present, but
with an essential difference. The past and future expected from the
mathematical postulates of the astronomers were necessary could
not be otherwise, and presented no choices for decision on their
outcome. But the contingent expectations from the stable but not
invariable regularities found in the complex subject-matter of
medicine presented a continual series of uncertain choices both
about the nature of the medical situation and about appropriate
action. The physicians then, ancient and modern, facing successive stages of a process of uncertain outcome, might be obliged to
make a decision only to some degree likely to be proved correct.
It was the same with law, but with a practical difference. Thus
Plato: "in the law courts nobody cares for truth (dAnOeia, veritas)
. . . but only about persuasion (neiOco, persuasio) and that is concerned with what is likely (eiKoq, verisimile)"; for "the people get
their notion of the probable [piobabile] from its likeness (ouoioinc;,
similitude) to truth, and . . . these likenesses can always be best
discovered by someone who knows the truth" (Phaedrus 272.DE,
273D). Likeliness or probability were then to be measured against
demonstration and necessity (dn68eiîq, dvdyKq), and the force of
argument had to be appropriate: "If a mathematician . . . elected
to argue from probability in geometry, he would not be worth
anything". Mathematical questions could not be settled by "appeals to plausibility (mOavoAoyia, piobabile}" (Theaetetus i62E),
but by contrast in the sciences of nature we had to be content with
something less than mathematical demonstration: "We must be
content then if we can furnish accounts no less probable (probabiles) than any other, remembering that I who speak and you my
judges are only human, so that it is enough that in these matters
we should accept the likely story (eiKoxa uu6ov, probabilia dicentur) and look for nothing further" (Timaeus ipCD). Here Plato
seems to be assimilating natural science to legal persuasion, a
point of great historical interest when we remember the essential
part played by persuasion in the acceptance or rejection by any
community of scientific as of other novelties. The whole enterprise of persuasion in ancient legal and moral and political life, the
subject of Aristotle's Rhetoric and Topics and Sophistic! Elenchi,
which should always be set beside the demonstrative logic of the
363
Analytics and the scientific and ethical works in any account of

his scientific method, was a rich and natural field for the analysis
of probable arguments, of the credibility of evidence, and of the
matching possibility of error.
Aristotle's development of this classification was to resonate
through history, just as the Latin versions of his words were to
provide much of our philosophical terminology. Aristotle offered
an exemplary analysis of scientific arguments appropriate to
"things that come about by necessity and always, or for the most
part", from which he excluded "a third class of events" attributed
to chance. For "chance is supposed to belong to the class of the
indeterminate and to be inscrutable to man" (Physics ii.s, ip6b
12-14), but really "chance obscure to human calculation is a cause
by accident and in the unqualified sense a cause of nothing"
(Metaphysics xi.8,10653 33-5). Hence: "There is no understandin
through demonstration of what holds by chance. For what holds
by chance is neither necessary, nor for the most part, but what
comes about apart from these,- and demonstration is of one or
other of these. For every deduction is either through necessary or
through for the most part propositions; and if the propositions are
necessary, the conclusion is necessary too; and if for the most part,
the conclusion too is such" (Posterior Analytics i.3O, 8yb 18-25,
trans. Barnes, 1975). He identified probability then as a descriptive
regularity observable in his second class of events: those which
"nature produces for the most part" lying between what nature
produced "without exception" and the accidents of "fortune"
which were "beyond expectation", as in the good luck of receiving
some benefit or of "escaping some evil that might reasonably be
expected" (Magna moralia ii.8, iO26b 38-73 4,30-33). Within
reasonable expectation: "Most of the things about which we make
decisions, and into which therefore we inquire, present us with
alternative possibilities. . . . A probability (eiKo<;, verisimile) is
something that usually happens, but only if it belongs to the class
of the contingent or variable" (Rhetoric i.2, 13573 34-7). Also: "A
probability is something generally approved" (ev8oôq, piobabilis):
what men know to happen or not to happen, to be or not to be, for
the most p a r t . . . , for example the envious hate, the beloved show
affection". The argument might use signs: "for anything such that
when it is found another thing is found, or when it has come into
364
being the other has come into being before or after, is a sign of the
other's being or having come into being" (Prior Analytics ii.27, /oa
3-9). Signs might be infallible as a woman's "giving milk is a sign
that she has lately borne a child", or fallible as "that a man
breathes fast is a sign that a man has a fever" (Rhet. i.2, 13573
2
3~37/ b3, 15, 18) but he might do so without a fever. But "no
particular probability is universally probable. . . . For what is
improbable does happen, and therefore it is probable that improbable things will happen" (ibid, ii.24, 104239-12).
Central to Aristotle's whole treatment of probability was his
insistence that human beings could initiate choice both in their
opinions and in their actions. Within the subject-matter of
mathematical and natural necessity "understanding is universal
and through necessities, and what is necessary cannot be otherwise"; whereas "opinion is about what is true but can also be
otherwise" (Post.An.al. 1.33, 88b 30-8934), and was as unstable as
its object. Hence in dealing with human behaviour above all "we
must be content..., in speaking about things that are only for the
most part true and with premises of the same kind, to reach
conclusions that are no better...; for it is the mark of an educated
man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the
nature of the subject admits. It is evidently equally foolish to
accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand
from a rhetorician scientific proofs" (Nicomachean Ethics i. 3,
io94b 19-27). Opinion was open to persuasion, and persuasion
could likewise be turned simply to winning a case, for: "If you
have no witnesses on your side, you will argue that the judges
must decide from what is probable. . . . If you have witnesses and
the other man has not, you will argue that probabilities cannot be
put on their trial" (Rhet. i, 15, 13763 18-22).
By contrast with the pragmatic motives of politicians and
lawyers aiming rather at effect than truth, the first aim of persuasion in ancient philosophy was to persuade oneself. Some diverse
examples will illustrate the drive of ancient as of later analysis to
stabilize the uncertain by defining the limits and degrees of its
probability in comparison with the certain. Of particular interest
were the criteria offered by the Greek sceptic Carneades of Gyrene
by which to distinguish, in between the clearly true and the clearly
false, the limits and degrees of what could be known only as more
365
or less probable. Carneades accepted the Pyrrhonic questioning of

all theoretical knowledge so that the only dependable guide in life
was the success or failure of previous experience. He aimed to
make this precise by a critical analysis of the presentation of
sensible evidence to our judgement. Presentations could be true,
or false, or at once both true and false to what they presented, but
since we had no means of knowing this object, to us as "the subject
experiencing the presentation" they could be only "apparently
true" or "apparently false". Our judgements could be only more
or less "probable" likewise, "for neither that which itself appears
false, nor that which though true does not appear so to us, is
naturally convincing to us". The presentation that was "of such a
nature as to persuade us ... to assent" was "that which appears
true" clearly. This was the first "criterion of truth" (Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians, i. 169-73) which ensured "that both
our judgements and our actions are regulated by the standards of
the general rule"; but "since no presentation is ever simple in form
but, like links in a chain, one hangs from another", it had to be
supported by further inquiry. The second criterion was then that
a presentation had to be supported by other circumstantial evidence: "just as some physicians do not deduce that something is
a true cause of fever from only one symptom, such as too quick a
pulse or a very high temperature, but from a syndrome, such as
that of a high temperature with a rapid pulse and soreness to the
touch and flushing and thirst and analogous symptoms". Then
when nothing "in the syndrome provokes in him a suspicion of its
falsity, he asserts that the impression is true" (ibid. i. 175-9). The
third and most trustworthy criterion was that the presentation
should be not only circumstantially uncontradicted but also
thoroughly tested. Thus "we scrutinize attentively each of the
presentations in the syndrome", just as an aspirant to judicial
office was scrutinized before appointment. The scrutiny in natural
inquiries would cover observer, medium and observed: vision and
mental capacity, illumination and distance, size and arrangement,
and so on. Likewise just as in the trivial affairs of life a single
witness might be questioned, in the more important several witnesses, and in still more important "we cross-question each of the
witnesses on the testimony of the others" (ibid. i. 182-4), so also
in natural inquiry. For these reasons such philosophers as Car-
366
neades would "prefer the probable and tested to the simply probable, and to both of these the presentation that is probable and
tested and uncontradicted" (Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, 1.2.29). They "use probability as the guide of life" (ibid,
i. 231); and they held that in all natural inquiries it was by expert
observation that false arguments were detected: for "it is not the
dialectician who will expose them, but the experts in each particular art who grasp the connection of the facts" (ibid. 11.236).
For Carneades then as for most other ancient philosophers the
need for a method of probable argument arose from the uncertainty
not of natural causation but of our knowledge of it. It was only the
Epicurean "swerve" of atoms from their course "at quite uncertain
times and uncertain places" (Lucretius, Dererumnatura, ii. 218-9)
that introduced a systematic intrinsic indetermination into Greek
conceptions of the nature of things. Thus the Stoics in their debates with the sceptics resolved the evident contradiction between
the possible and the determined by agreeing that to designate a
realm of the possible implied no objective contingency, but designated only what seemed possible to us. Hence the meaning of
chance was simply "that chance is a specific relation of men
towards cause, and thus the same event appears to one as chance
and to another not, depending on whether or not one knows the
cause" (Alexander of Aphrodisias, De anima ii, "De fortuna":
Scripta minora, ed. Bruns, 1892, p. 179).
It was in the practical contexts of medicine and law that ancient
writers developed their criteria of probable judgement in most
detail. Cicero in his programme of making Greek philosophy available in Latin established probabalis as the technical term best
expressing the range of meanings in its Greek equivalents. No one
"could conduct his life without decisions". Hence the wise man,
when he could not have certainty, "employs probabilities
(Academica ii: Lucullus, 34.109-11). Then: "That is probable
(probabile) which for the most part comes to pass, or which is part
of the ordinary beliefs of mankind" (De inventions, i. 19.46). Arguments for probability came from signs, credibility, previous judgements, and comparability: "some principle of similarity running
through diverse materials" (ibid. i. 20.48). A powerful argument
used in both law and medicine was the convergence of evidence.
Faced with indications of murder "some one or two of these things
367
can by chance have happened in such a way as to throw suspicion

upon this defendant". But if he were known to have quarrelled
with the victim, had been seen making preparations before the
crime, at the appropriate place contrary to his usual habits when
it occurred, with blood on his clothes afterwards, and so on: "for
everything to coincide from first to last he must have been a
participant in the crime. This cannot have happened by chance"
(pseudo-Cicero, Rhetorica ad Heiennium, ^.41.53). Quintilian in
his well known account of forms of legal proof and evidence elaborated this argument from convergence on the model of Aristotle's
commensurate universal, aiming at an enumeration of signs or
indications that would uniquely define the event, so that "what
was only suspected may appear certain" (Institutio oratoria, v.p.i11). Short of certainty he distinguished degrees of credibility, ranging from that of what usually happened to that of which there was
nothing contradictory in its happening. Law then and medicine
established the essential forms of ancient arguments for probability. Their criterion of the convergence of as wide as possible a rang
of evidence, accompanied by the insistence that assent was to be
given only to propositions supported by all the relevant evidence
available, was to have a crucial function in the whole development
of scientific argument in every subject-matter.
Ill
The whole complex question of reasonable assent and expectation,

of estimating the possible and the probable, of apportioning probabilities from incomplete or uncertain evidence, and of divine and
human knowledge of the future, was to be given a new existential
context by the presuppositions of the theology, and later by their
secularization in the economy and philosophy, of the new society
of Western Christendom. The providential theology of the creation
of the world revealed in the Hebrew scriptures presupposed a
transcendently divine creator, whose omnipotent freedom and
inscrutability made all events and their connections ultimately
contingent from the human point of view. But within that contingency conjectures about possible connections and their probable consequences had a basis in the assurance of a uniform causal-
368
ity in nature. The theology of creation presupposed also a new

conception of time as a linear dimension. This was quite different
from any conception of time found in antiquity. The Western
vision of time and of man's place in history was sharply and
enduringly refocused by St. Augustine (De civitate Dei xi.io, xii.
10-22,, xxii.26; De Trinitate 111.9, xv.is).2 He attacked especially
the Stoic theory of cyclical dissolutions and regenerations of the
world and the human race in an endless determined repetition
without responsibility or hope, and he attacked likewise the Epicurean reduction of the origins and history of all that exists to meaningless chance. He established a specifically Christian conception
of time as a linear dimension along which the world and mankind
could fulfill an unique historical purpose and each person could
act with individually responsible initiative. With these Christian
expectations came a reorientation of Western thinking about both
past and future. Mankind was seen with an eternal destiny, to be
fulfilled through the advances and retreats of historical trial, but
always with hope. The conception of the natural world as the
product of a rational and benevolent Creator, and of rationally
responsible man made in his image to fulfill a providential purpose, offered a standing invitation to use the gifts of reason and the
senses to discover, as Kepler was to put it, God's thoughts in the
creation (Kepler to Herwart von Hohenburg, 9/10. iv. 1599, in
Gesammelte Weike, hrg. Dyck, Caspar et al., XIII, 1965, p. 309). It
was also an invitation to discover the benefits placed there for
mankind. If we are looking for those large sociological commitments that send a whole culture in one direction rather than
another, we could argue that this kind of hope for human purpose
and human intelligence could provide at least a strong predisposition towards an active rational drive to scientific thinking and
technical invention.
2. Cf. L. Spitzer, "Classical and Christian ideas of world harmony", Tiadito, 2
(1944), 409-64, 3 (1945), 307-64; J. E Callahan, Four Views of Time in Ancient
Philosophy (Cambridge, MA, 1948); T. E. Mommsen, "St. Augustine and the Christian idea of progress: the background of the City of God", Journal of the History of
Ideas, 12 (1951), 346-74; C. A. Patrides, The Phoenix and the Ladder: The rise and
decline of the Christian view of history (Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1964); A. C.
Crombie, "Some attitudes to scientific progress: ancient, medieval and early modern", History of Science, 13 (1975), 213-30; R. Sorabji, Time, Creation and the
Continuum: Theories in antiquity and the early middle ages (London, 1983).
369
In any case medieval philosophers and mathematicians, taking

up ancient problems in this new context, identified and explored
further areas of contingent possibility and probability in a variety
of uncertain situations. I shall discuss two such explorations, one
concerned with judgement and assent and the other with expectation. Both had a profound influence on Western intellectual and
social life.
Assent: From the twelfth century, philosophical theologians,
educated in the newly recovered texts of Euclid and of Aristotle's
logic, set out to incorporate all the products of reason and revelation alike into a single logically structured theology and metaphysics. The resulting tension forced some necessity for choice
and also an attitude to the nature of error, both within Christendom and in relation to Islam and Judaism and paganism outside.
Given the dual source of human knowledge in the divine gifts of
true reason and undeniable revelation, the whole enterprise then
made an urgent issue of the possibility of error in good faith, of the
treatment to be given to unpersuadable heretics and infidels, and
generally of the commitments and expectations involved in disagreement as well as agreement.
The crucial question of assent concerned the acceptability and
credibility of evidence for events and for beliefs that could not be
clearly and infallibly demonstrated. The probability of an alleged
event was then said to depend on the frequency with which it
usually occurred, together with the credibility or authority of
whoever alleged it. Thus in the twelfth century John of Salisbury:
"Something is probable if it seems obvious to a person of judgement, and if it occurs in a given way in all instances or in some
other way only in very few. Something that is always or usually so
either is or seems probable, even though it could possibly be
otherwise" (Metalogicon 11.14). But probable arguments were also
included with a somewhat different purpose in dialectic and
rhetoric: "for the dialectician and the orator, the one trying to
persuade an adversary and the other a judge, are not too much
concerned about the truth or falsity of their arguments, provided
only that they have likelihood". Even worse "sophistry, which is
seeming rather than real wisdom, merely wears the guise of probability or necessity" (ibid. ii.3J. Alexander Neckam exemplified
"the power of persuasion" with a story of a cleric at the end of the
370
twelfth century who asserted on his deathbed that "he would

never believe in a future resurrection unless he was persuaded of
it with probability" (De naturis rerum . . . ii.i73, ed. T. Wright,
1863^.297). He was persuaded that he could not lose by believing
in his resurrection, because if it were true he would not have put
his salvation at risk by unbelief, and if it were not he would never
know. Between sophistry and persuasion there was a wavy line.
Central to the question of assent was that of the degree of
certainty of knowledge possible in different subject matters. Starting from the Aristotelian maxim "the mode of knowledge must
correspond to the matter" (cited by Aquinas), philosophical logicians during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries made a
sophisticated analysis and classification of logical procedures for
the control of argument and evidence that deeply affected the
development of the natural sciences along with other theoretical
and practical disciplines. It is important to note once more how
common forms of argument could be applied to diverse subjects
which could be treated as formally the same, even if materially
different. This was central to the intellectual movement of which
sciences of nature were an integral part. Thomas Aquinas for
example distinguished what he called three modes of "rational
procedure in the sciences". The first was the pure rationality
possible in abstract mathematics, where scientific demonstration
starting from self-evident first principles could yield absolutely
certain conclusions. The sciences of nature, starting from assumed
rather than self-evident principles, could not aspire to that degree
of certainty, but they could nevertheless achieve reliable knowledge by following the regular and uniform causal processes of
things. Least certain of all were the moral and practical sciences,
with far from uniform subject-matters. For "the closer any science
conies to singulars, as in operative sciences like medicine and
alchemy and ethics, the less certainty they can have because of the
multitude of singulars that have to be considered", for "error
follows if any are omitted", and also "because of their variability"
(Expositio super librum Boethii De Trinitate . . . q.6, art.i, rec.
Decker, 1959, pp. 205, 207, 209). But even if in these sciences, as
in human affairs in general, it was not possible to have "demonstrative and infallible proof", but possible to have only "a
certain conjectural probability", this was nevertheless genuine
371
knowledge. So for example "although it may be possible for two

or three witnesses to agree in a lie, yet it is neither easy nor
probable that they will agree. Hence their testimony is accepted
as true, especially if they do not waver in it, and if they have not
been suspected on other occasions" (Summa theologiae, ii.i, q.ios,
art. 2 ad 8).
From this elaborate analysis of the diverse possibilities open to
human inquiries carried out by the philosophical community of
the universities came then a highly sophisticated control of argument and evidence to decide a question, including decision in the
sciences of nature by observation, experiment and calculation.
The different intellectual disciplines acquired specific identities
defined by their subject-matters and forms of argument.3 The
3. Cf. T. Schiitz, Thomas-Lexicon, 2 ter Aufl. (Paderborn, 1895); A. Gardeil, "La
certitude probable", Revue des sciences philosophiques et theologiques, 5 (1911),
237-68.441-85; T. Richard, Leprobabilisme morale et laphilosophie (Paris, 1922);
T. Deman, "Notes de lexicographic philosophique m6die>ale: Probabilis", Revue
des sciences philosophiques et theologiques, 22 (1933), 260-90, and "Probabilisme" in Dictionnaire de theologie catholique (Paris, 1936), vol. XIII.i, 417619,- V. Cioffari, Fortune and Fate from Democritus to St. Thomas Aquinas (New
York, 1935), The Conception of Fortune and Fate in the Works of Dante (London,
1941), Fortune in Dante's i4th Century Commentators (Cambridge, MA, 1944);
W. S. Howell, The Rhetoric of Alcuin and Charlemagne (Princeton, 1941); R.
McKeon, "Rhetoric in the middle ages", Speculum, 17 (1942), 1-32; M. J. Junkersfeld, The Aristotelian-Thomistic Concept of Chance (Notre Dame, IN, 1945);
R. I. Defferari, M. I. Barry and L. McGuiness, A Lexicon of St. Thomas Aquinas
(Washington, DC, 1948): "Certitude", "Probabilis", "Probabilitas", etc.,- A. C.
Crombie, Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science 1100-1700
(Oxford, 1953; revised reprint 1971), Augustine to Galileo: Medieval and Early
Modern Science, revised 2nd ed., reprinted with further revisions (London & Cambridge, MA, 1979,- 2 vols.), and Styles of Scientific Thinking, ,chs. 7-8 (note i
above); .E. R. Curtius, European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. Tras
(New York, 1953); G. Preti, "Dialettica terministica e probabilisimo nel pensiero
medievale", in Le crisi dell'uso dogmatico della ragione, a cura di A. Banfi (Roma
& Milano, 1953), pp. 61-97; M. D. Chenu, La theologie comme science au xiiie
siecle, 36 6d. (Paris, 1957), La theologie au xii siecle, 2e 6d. (Paris, 1976); J. R.
Weinberg, Abstraction, Relation and Induction: Three essays in the history of
thought (Madison, Wl, 1968); E. F. Byrne, Probability and Opinion: A study in the
medieval presuppositions of post-medieval theories of probability (The Hague,
1968); J. E. Murdoch, "Mathesis in philosophiam scholasticam introducta: the rise
and development of application of mathematics in fourteenth-century philosophy
and theology", in Arts liberaux et philosophie au moyen age (Montreal & Paris,
1969), pp. 215-54, "The development of a critical temper: new approaches and
modes of analysis in fourteenth-century philosophy, science, and theology", in
Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. S. Wenzel (Chapel Hill, NC, 1976); P.
Michaud-Quantin avec . .. M. Lemoine, Etudes sur le vocabulaire philosophique
372
occasions were distinguished on which it was appropriate to use

demonstration or persuasion, and to appeal to the senses, reason,
faith, authority, tradition, usage and so on. The central area of
probability was that where an exiguous demand for action required
decision that could not in the circumstances be certain. A practical
problem in dealing for example with heresy and unbelief was to
diagnose states of mind and to establish rules for a doubting conscience. A humane rule was to act on the most probable judgement
with an inherent likelihood.4 The problem was parallel in the
diagnosis of diseases, of witchcraft and magic, of the perpetrators
of crimes, and so forth. The identification of a state of things
depended in all such cases on antecedent assumptions about what
existed and what was possible. Accepting such assumptions,
theologians, lawyers, physicians and philosophers responding to a
variety of practical demands developed a certain systematic precision in collecting and weighing evidence: for example in dealing
with heresy and spiritual error (a basic practical question in view
of their accepted consequences both for the individual person and
for the order of society),5 and in dealing with leprosy, smallpox,
du moyen age (Roma, 1970); A. Maieru, Terminologia logica della tarda scolastica
(Roma; 1972); J.}. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages (Berkeley & Los Angeles,
1974); The Cultural Context of Medieval Learning, ed. J. E. Murdoch and E. D.
Sylla (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. XXVI; Dordrecht & Boston,
MA, 1975); Lexikon des Mittelalters, hrg. von L. Lutz et al. (Aachen, 1977-85; 3
vols.); G. R. Evans, Old Arts and New Theology: The beginnings of theology as an
academic discipline (Oxford, 1980); F. Oakley, Omnipotence, Covenant and Order:
An excursion into the history of ideas from Abelard to Leibniz (Ithaca, NY, 1984).
4. Cf. Deman, "Probabilisme" (1936; note 3 above), pp. 418 ff, 431 ff, 442 ff.
5. Cf. Deman, ibid.; H. C. Lea, The Inquisition in the Middle Ages: Its organization and operation (London, 1963); J. B. Russell, Dissent and Reform in the Early
Middle Ages (Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1965), Religious Dissent in the Middle Ages
(New York, 1971), Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 1972), A History of
Witchcraft: Sorcerers, heretics and pagans (London, , 1980), and J. B. Russell and
C. T. Berkhout, Medieval Heresies: A bibliography (Toronto, 1981); G. Leff, Heresy
in the Middle Ages (Manchester, 1967,- 2 vols.); Heresies et societes dans 1'Europe
pre-industrielle (ne-i8e siecles) (Paris, 1968); H. C. E. Midelfort, Witch Hunting
in Southwestern Germany, 1562-1684: The social and intellectual foundations
(Stanford, CA, 1972); E. LeRoy Ladurie, Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 a 1324
(Paris, 1975); R. Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials: Their foundations in popular
and learned culture (Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1976); M. Lambert, Medieval Heresy
(London, 1977); G. Schormann, Hexenprozesse in Nordwestdeutschland (Hildesheim, 1977); E. M. Peters, The Magician, the Witch and the Law (Hassocks,
Sussex, 1978); Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe: Documents in transla-
373
plague, and venereal and other diseases,6 and with usury.7 Rules
were developed likewise for the exegesis of the Scriptural revelation.8 In all these diverse contexts the search for grounds for
tion, ed. E. M. Peters (Philadelphia, 1980); G. Henningsen, The Witches'Advocates:
Basque witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition, 1609-1614 (SanRemo, NV, 1980).
6. Cf. the sections by M. McVaugh on methods of diagnosis etc. in A Source Book
in Medieval Science, ed. E. Grant (Cambridge, MA, 1974), pp. 745-808, and also
the preceding sections on medical theory, pp. 700 ff ; K. Sudhoff, "Pestschriften aus
den ersten 150 Jahren nach der Epidemic des Schwarzen Todes 1348", Archivfur
Geschichte der Medizin, 2-17 (1909-1925), Aus der Friihgeschichte der Syphilis
(Studien zur Geschichte der Medizin, vol. IX; Leipzig, 1912); M. Neuburger, Geschichte der Medizin (Stuttgart, 1911), vol. II; A. C. Klebs et E. Droz, Remedes
contre la peste: Facsimiles, notes et liste bibliographique des incunables sur la
peste (Paris, 1925); A. M. Campbell, The Black Death and Men of Learning (New
York, 1931); D. P. Lockwood, Ugo Benzi: Medieval philosopher and physician,
1376-1439 (Chicago, 1951); P. Richards, The Medieval Leper and his Northern
Heirs (Cambridge, 1977); G. Baader und G. Keil, "Mittelalterliche Diagnostik: ein
Bericht", in Medizinische Diagnostik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, hrg, C. Habrich, E Marguthund J. H. Wolf (Munchen, 1978), pp. 135 ff.; J. AgrimieC. Crisciani,
Malato, medico e medicina nel medioevo (Torino, 1980); L. E. Demaitre, Doctor
Bernard of Gordon: Professor and practitioner (Toronto, 1980); S. Jarcho, The
Concept of Heart Failure from Avicenna to Albertini (Cambridge, MA, 1980); N.
G. Siraisi, Taddeo Alderotti and his Pupils: Two generations of Italian medical
learning (Princeton, 1981), and the next article in this volume; D. Palazzotto, The
Black Death and Medicine: A report and analysis of the tractates written between
1348 and 13 so (Ann Arbor, MI, 1980); D. Williman, The Black Death: The impact
of the fourteenth-century plague (Binghamton, NY, 1982).
7. Cf.}. T. Noonan, The Scholastic Analysis of Usury (Cambridge, MA, 1957),- J.
W. Baldwin, The Medieval Theories of the fust Price: Romanists, canonists, and
theologians in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Transactions of the American
Philosophical Society, n.s. 49, part 4; Philadelphia, 1959); J. Gilchrist, The Church
and Economic Activity in the Middle Ages (London, 1969); B. Nelson, The Idea of
Usury, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1969); R. de Roover, La pensee economique des scolastiques: doctrines et methodes (Montreal, 1971), "The scholastic attitude toward
trade and entrepreneurship", in Business, Banking, and Economic Thought in Late
Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Selected studies, ed. J. Kirschner (Chicago,
J
974)/ PP- 336-45; J. Le Goff, Marchands et banquiers du moyen age, 2e e"d. (Paris,
1972); L. K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe
(London, 1978).
8. Cf. H. Caplan, "The four senses of scriptural interpretation and the medieval
theory of preaching", Speculum, 4, part 2 (1929), 282-90; B. Spicq, Esquisse d'une
histoire de 1'exegese latine au moyen age (Paris, 1944); B. Smalley, The Study of
the Bible in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1952); R. M. Grant, A Short History
of the Interpretation of the Bible, revised ed. (London, 1965); R. E. McNally,
"Exegesis, medieval", in New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York, 1967), vol. V,
707-12; G. W. H. Lampe, J. Leclercq, B. Smalley, E. I. J. Rosenthal, "The exposition
and exegesis of Scripture", in Cambridge History of the Bible, ed. P. R. Ackroyd et
al. (Cambridge, 1969), vol. II, 155-279,- The Bible and Western Culture, ed. W.
Lourdaux and D. Verbalist (Louvain, 1970).
374
reasoned assent or dissent, and for distinguishing the kinds of

argument and authority with power to convince, were part of the
style of the whole intellectual culture.
Expectation: Ancient insights into probability were qualitative.
For whatever reason, the Greeks never developed either the conceptions or the techniques for a mathematical mastery of chance
and uncertainty in any subject-matter. The treatment of assent in
the main contexts discussed by medieval philosophers was again
essentially qualitative. The need to stabilize uncertain choice by
quantitative measures of probable expectations was something
grasped in the different practical circumstances of the commercial
expansion of late medieval Europe. Moral philosophers exploring
the moral context of the new enterprises met the objection that
profit gained by interest on the investment of money as a loan was
usury, by arguing that profit was justified by risk. Gilles of Lessines
for example described, at the end of the thirteenth century, a
mentality of expectation in which a business partner or a lender
or an insurer could calculate a just rate of profit or interest in
proportion to the risk on capital outlay assumed (De usuris... c.6,
J
593/ fols. i4iv-2r). Such calculations became established practice
notably in fourteenth-century Italian marine insurance, with
graded premiums, estimated from accumulated experience, for
distance and season and dangers from storms and pirates.9 The
9. Cf. F. E. de Roover, "Early examples of marine insurance", Journal of Economic
History, 5 (1945), 175-200, R. S. Lopez and I. W. Raymond, Medieval Trade in the
Mediterranean World (New York, 1955); G. Stefani, Insurance in Venice from the
Origins to the End of the Serenissima (Trieste, 1958; 2 vols.); with E Hendricks,
"Contributions to the history of insurance, etc.", Assurance Magazine, 2 (1852),
121-50, 222-58, 393-5, 3 (1853), 93-120, cf. 10(1863), 205-19; E. Bensa, IIcontratto
di assicurazione nel medio evo (Genova, 1884); A. Chaufton, Les assurances (Paris,
1884), vol. I,- W. Gow, "Marine insurance" in Encyclopedia Britannica, nth ed.
(Cambridge, 1910-1911); C. T. Lewis and T. A. Ingram, "Insurance" in ibid.,- C. E
Trenerry, The Origin and Early History of Insurance (London, 1926); G. Valeri, "I
primordi dell' assicurazione attraverso il documento del 1329", Rivista del diritto
commerciale, 26, part i (1928), 600-41; A. Checchini, "I precedenti e lo sviluppo
storico del contratto d' assicurazione", Atti dell'Istituto Nazionale delle Assicurazione (Roma, 1931), vol. Ill; T. O'Donnell, History of Life Insurance in its
Formative Years (Chicago, 1936); E. Besta, Le obbligazioni nella storia del duetto
italiano (Padova, 1937); I- Heers, "Le prix de 1'assurance a la fin du moyen age",
Revue d'histoire economique et sociale, 37 (1959), 7-19; A. Tenenti, Naufrages,
corsaires et assurance maritime d Venise 1592-1609 (Paris, 1959); H. Braun, Geschichte der Lebensversicherung und der Lebensverischerungstechnik, 2te Aufl.
(Berlin, 1963); L. A. Boiteux, La fortune de mei; le besoin de securite et les debuts
375
rational pursuit of profit from any of its sources required thus both
personal enterprise and the habit of quantitative order, assisted
technically by the new commercial arithmetic and the new financial methods of double-entry bookkeeping and the bill of exchange.10 Bernardino of Siena in the fifteenth century advised
merchants, in a sermon, that if they were not assiduous in "subtly
estimating risks and opportunities, they are certainly not fit for
this business" (Sermo 33: "De mercationibus et artificibus . ..",
art.i,c.i,i427: Opera omnia, IV, 1956, p. 142). Merchants he insisted should be honest, should sell unadulterated goods with
correct weights and measures; and partners should settle up honestly at least once a year, and then go to confession (p. 143, cf.
i6i-2).u A merchant wrote his younger contemporary Benedetto
Cotrugli must above all estimate the future expectations guiding
his actions from a systematic record of past gains or losses, for:
"Mercantile records are means to remember all that a man does,
from whom he must take and to whom he must give, the costs of
wares, the profits and the losses, and every other transaction on
which a merchant is dependent. It should be noted that knowing
how to keep good and orderly records teaches one how to draw up
contracts, how to do business, and how to make a profit. A merchant should not rely on memory, for that has led to many misde 1'assurance maritime (Paris, 1968); F. Melis, Origini e sviluppi delle assicurazioni in Italia (secoli XIV-XVI) (Roma, 1975), vol. i.
10. Cf. A. P. Usher, "The origins of banking: the primitive bank deposit (12001600)", Economic History Review, 4 (1932-34), 399-428, The Early History of
Deposit Banking in Mediterranean Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1943); R. de Roover,
"Aux origines d'une technique intellectuelle: la formation et 1'expansion de la
compatabilite' partie double", Annales d'histoire economique et sociale, 9 (1937),
171-93, 270-98, Involution de la lettre de change (Paris, 1953), "The development
of accounting prior to Luca Pacioli according to the account books of medieval
merchants", in Business, Banking ... (note 7 above), pp. 119-79; E. Peragallo, The
Origin and Evolution of Double-Entry Bookkeeping: A study of Italian practice
from the fourteenth century (New York, 1938); F. Melis, Storia della ragioneria
(Bologna, 1950); R. S. Lopez, The Three Ages of the Italian Renaissance (Charlottesville, VA, 1970), The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950-1350 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1971); Lopez and Raymond, Medieval Trade... (note 9 above),
PP- 359ffn. Cf. R. de Roover, San Bernardino of Siena and Sant'Antonio of Florence: Two
great economic thinkers of the middle ages (Boston, MA, 1967), especially pp.
13-14, "The scholastic attitude . .." (note 7 above), pp. 343-4; cf. M. G. Kendall,
"The beginnings of a probability calculus", Biometrika, 43 (1956), 1-14 for his
sermon on games of chance.
376
takes" (Delia meicatum et del mercante perfetto, i. 13, 1573, fols.

37r-38r: written I458).12
All this matched the rational habit of foresighted design in the
mathematical arts and sciences, in perspective painting and in
engineering and architecture, and the systematic recording of
techniques and results in an experimental investigation.
It is surely no accident that it was in this same practical ambience that appeared the numerical estimation both of future expectations a posteriori, from the numerical regularities of past experience, and of expectations a priori, arising from the theoretical
concept of an exhaustive division into equally possible outcomes
in games of chance.13 Luca Pacioli14 in the fifteenth century and
12. Trans, modified from Lopez and Raymond, Medieval Trade (note 9 above),
pp. 360, 375-7, cf. 416-8.
13. Cf. for the history of probability theory and statistics G. Libri, Histoire des
sciences mathematiques en Italie, depuis la renaissance des lettres jusqu' a la fin
du dix-septieme siecle (Paris, 1838-41; 4 vols.), II, 188 ff.; I. Todhunter, History of
the Mathematical Theory of Probability (Cambridge & London, 1865); V. John,
Geschichte der Statistik (Stuttgart, 1884); F. E. A. Meitzen, Theorie und Technik
dei Statistik (Berlin, 1886); M. Cantor, Vorlesungen iiber Geschichte der
Mathematik, 2te Aufl. (Leipzig, 1894-1901,- 3 vols.), I, 522, II 327 ff. ; The History
of Statistics: Their development and progress in many countries, ed. J. Koren (New
York, 1918); H. M. Walker, Studies in the History of Statistical Method (Baltimore,
MD, 1929); H. Westergaard, Contributions to the History of Statistics (London,
1932); A. Wolf, A History of Science, Technology and Philosophy in the Sixteenth,
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, new ed. by D. McKie (London, 1951-52; 2
vols.); M. Kline, Mathematics in Western Culture (New York, 1953); F. N. David,
"Dicing and gaming (a note on the history of probability)", Biometrika, 42 (1955),
1-15, Games, Gods and Gambling: The origins and history of probability and
statistical ideas from the earliest times to the Newtonian era (London, 1962); M.
G. Kendall, "The beginnings of a probability calculus" (note 11 above), "Where did
the history of statistics begin?", Biometrika, 47 (1960), 447-9; O. Ore, "Pascal and
the invention of probability theory", American Mathematical Monthly, 67 (1960),
409-19; E. Coumet, "Leprobleme des parisavant Pascal", Archives Internationales
d'histoire des sciences, 18 (1965), 245-72, "La the"orie du hasard-est elle nee par
hasard?", Annales ESC, 25 (1970), 574-98; Studies in the History of Statistics and
Probability, ed. E. S. Pearson, M. G. Kendall and R. L. Plackett (London & High
Wycombe, 1970-77; 2 vols.); L. E. Maistrov, Probability Theory: A historical
sketch, trans, from the Russian and ed. S. Kotz (New York, 1976); O. B. Sheynin,
"On the prehistory of the theory of probability", Archive for History of Exact
Sciences 12 (1974), 97-141, "Early history of the theory of probability", ibid., 17
(1977), 201-59, "On the history of the statistical method in biology", ibid., 22
(1980) 323-71; I. Schneider, Die Entwicklung des Wahrscheinlichkeitsbegriffs in
der Mathematik von Pascal bis Laplace (Habilitationsschrift Universitat Munchen, 1972), "Die mathematisierung der Vorhersage kiinftiger Ereignisse in der
Wahrscheinlichkeitstheorie von 17. bis zum 19. Jahrhundert", Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 2 (1979), 101-12, "Mathematisierung des Wahrscheinlichen
377
Girolamo Cardano in the sixteenth dealt with both questions

within the context of writings on commercial arithmetic. At any
moment of time, they argued, a partner who had invested a certain
amount in a company was in the same position as a player who
had gained a certain number of points in a game of chance. What
was the value of their investment or stake at that moment? Cardano offered a solution making the fundamental principle that of
fair expectations: that there should be for all partners or players
equal possible outcomes under equal conditions: "The most fundamental principle of all in a game of chance is the equality
whether of players, of bystanders, of money, of situation, of the
dice box, of the dice itself. To the extent that you depart from that
equality, if you do so in your own favour you are unjust, if in that
of your opponent you are a fool" (Liber de ludo aleae, c.6, Opera, I,
und Anwendung auf Massenphanomene im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert", in Statistik
und Staatsbeschieibung in derNeuzeit vornehmlich i6.-i8. Jahrhundert, hrg. von
M. Rassen und J. Stagl (Paderbom, 1980), pp. 5 3-73,1. Schneider und K. Reich, "Die
wirtschaftliche Entwicklung des Mittelalters im Spiegel der arithemetischen Aufgabensammlungen und ihrer Nachfolger, der Rechenbucher des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts", Aus dew. Antiquariat, no. 52 (1978), 217-29; I. Hacking, The Emergence
of Probability: A philosophical study of early ideas about probability, induction
and statistical inference, covering the period 1650 to 1795 (Cambridge,
I
975); I- van Brakel, "Some remarks on the prehistory of the concept of statistical
probability", Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 16 (1976), 119-36; M. Ferriani,
"Stori e 'prehistoria' del concetto di probabilita nell' eta moderna", Rivista di
filosofta, 10 (1978), 129-53; A. Fagot, L'explication causale de la mort (Universite
de Paris, these de doctoral non publiee, 1978), "Probabilities and causes: on life
tables, causes of death, and etiological diagnoses", in Probabilistic Thinking, Thermodynamics, and the Interaction of the History and Philosophy of Science, ed. J.
Himtikka, D. Gruender and E. Agazzi (Dordrecht & Boston, MA, 1981), pp. 41-104;
K. Pearson, The History of Statistics in the ijth and i8th Centuries against the
changing background of intellectual, scientific and religious thought: Lectures...
1921-33, ed. E. S. Pearson (London & High Wycombe, 1978); L. J. Cohen, "Some
historical reflections on the Baconian conception of probability", Journal of the
History of Ideas, 41 (1980), 219-32; D. L. Patey, Probability and Form: Philosophic
theory and literary practice in the Augustan age (Cambridge, 1984); A. C. Crombie,
Styles of Scientific Thinking, chs 17-20 (note 1 above).
14. Cf. Lucas de Burgo (Luca Pacioli), Summa de arithemetica, geometria et
proportionalita, ix, tract. 1-2 (rules for companies), 4-6 (exchange and money), 7
(division of gains and losses), 10 (games of chance), 11 (double-entry bookkeeping)
(Venice, 1494); L. Olschki, Geschichte der neusprachlichen wissenschaftlichen
Literatur (Heidelberg, 1919), vol. 1,151 ff.; R. E. Taylor, No Royal Road: Luca Pacioli
and his times (Chapel Hill, NC, 1942); David, "Dicing . . .", Games . . . (note 13
above), pp. 36 ff.; Coumet, "Le probleme de paris ..." (note 13 above), pp. 248 ff. ;
Schneider und Reich, "Die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung ..." (note 13 above).
378
1663, p. 263).15 The same applied by general agreement among all

commercial and moral writers to business. Then the instantaneous saleable value of a stake whether in a business or in a game
was the amount that should be risked on its future expectations
of gain or loss. Thus as the Jesuit Leonard Leys (Lessius) was to put
it: "The uncertain risk on capital outlay must be reduced to a price
that is certain" ("Periculum sortis incertum debet reduci ad certum pretium", in De iustitia et iure... ii.iii, "De contractibus", c.
25, dubitatio 2, and c. 16, i6o6).16 Interesting attempts were made
to establish the equivalence in value of an investment of money
by one partner and of work by another. Moral philosophers tried
also to make the equality of possible outcomes under equal conditions an explicit principle of jurisprudence for fair trial by law17
IV
In these various ways a calculus of expectation and choice was

already by the sixteenth century transferring the whole experience
of contingency and variability and chance from a context either of
purely qualitative probability, or of irrational hazard or accident or
personal luck, into one of the rational mathematical order. Mathematical expectation stabilized the future outside the uncertainty
of time, by rationalizing risk and hope as a proportion of the
possibilities present at every stage of any enterprise. Then an
15. Trans, modified from S. H. Gould in O. Ore, Cardano: The gambling scholar
(Princeton, 1953), pp. 189 ff; cf. A. Bellini, Girolamo Caidano e il suo tempo
(Milano, 1947); C. Gini, "Gerolamo Cardano e i fondamenti del calcolo della
probabilita", Metron, 2* 11958), 78-96; David, Games . . . (note 13 above), pp. 55
ff.; Coumet, "Le problime des paris..." (note 13 above), 26off. ; M. Fierz, Girolamo
Cardano (1501- '$76): Artz, Naturphilosoph, Mathematiker, Astronom und
Traumdeutei (liasel & Stuttgart, 1977).
16. Cf Coumet, "La thôrie du hasard . . ." (note 13 above); C. Sommervogel,
Bibhotheque de la Compagnie de Jesus, nouvelle ed. (Bruxelles & Paris, 1893), vol.
IV, cols. 1726-51.
17. Cf. Domingo de Soto, Libri decem de iustitia et iure, iv. q.5, art. 2: "Utrum
per ludum dominium transferatur", vi, q.i: "De usuris", q.6: "De contractu
societatis", q.y: "De contractu assecurationis" (Lyon, 1559); Petrus a Navarra, De
ablatorum restitutione in foro conscientiae, iii: "De laedente in rebus fortunae",
c.2: "De restitutione rei alienae ex contractu", pars 3: "De restitutione rei alienae
ex contractu societatis adquisitae"; A. Palau y Dulcet, Manuel del librero Hispano
Americano (Barcelona & Oxford, 1957), vol. X, 428.
379
uncertain future, and likewise an uncertain past, could be reduced

to a probable expectation that was a measurable property of every
present. This was the programme to be established with a new
elegance and power in one aspect above all by Blaise Pascal, Christiaan Huygens, Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, Gottfried Withelm Leibniz and Jakob Bernoulli, and in another by John Graunt,
Jan de Witt, William Petty and Edmund Halley.
The context of this programme was a fresh awareness of the
similarity in form of a variety of theoretical and practical situations requiring decision: in religion and morality, in law and politics, in gambling and commerce, in medicine and natural science.
A re-examination of dependable knowledge was required first by
the renewed challenge of scepticism initiated from the sixteenth
century editions of Sextus Empiricus and its other Greek sources
principally by Michel de Montaigne, and then by the expansion of
scientific experience.18 The significant response to sceptical assertions of the undecidability of important questions, whether of just
or effective action or of religious or scientific belief, was the development of a systematic new logic for the uncertain area lying
between the traditional bimodality of simply true or simply false,
a new logic by which the uncertainty could be stabilized in kinds
and degrees of assent or of expectation appropriate to the material.
Thus Francis Bacon explained that the principle of his new method
of inquiry was "that we should establish degrees of certainty (cei18. Cf. H. G. Van Leeuwin, The Problem of Certainty in English Thought 16301690 (The Hague, 1963); D. C. Allen, Doubts Boundless Sea: Skepticism and faith
in the Renaissance (Baltimore, MD, 1964); C. Vasoli, La dialettica e la retorica dell'
Umanesimo (Milano, 1968); P. France, Rhetoric and Truth in France: Descartes to
Diderot (Oxford, 1972); C. B. Schmitt, Cicero Scepticus: A study of the influence
of the Academica in the Renaissance (The Hague, 1972), "The recovery and assimilation of ancient scepticism in the Renaissance", Rivista critica di storia della
ftlosofia, 27 (1972,), 363-86; L. A. Jardine, Francis Bacon: Discovery of the art of
discourse (Cambridge, 1974), "Lorenzo Valla and the intellectual origins of
Humanist dialectic", Journal of the History of Philosophy, 15 (1977), 143-64,- C. J.
R. Armstrong, "The dialectical road to truth: the dialogue", in French Renaissance
Studies:
1540-70: Humanism and the Encyclopaedia, ed. p. Sharratt (Edinburgh,
I
976), pp. 36-51; N. Jardine, "The forging of modern realism: Clavius and Kepler
against the sceptics", Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 10 (1979),
141-73; R. H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza, 3rd ed.
(Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1979); B. J. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, 1983); Patey, Probability and Literary Form
(note 13 above); and Crombie, Styles of Scientific Thinking (note i above) for
detailed discussions of what follows with bibliographical references.
380
titudinis gradus}" in our knowledge of nature (Novum organum,

Preface, 1620, Works, ed. Spedding et al., I, 1857, p. 151). Religious
writers argued that if belief could be made neither apodeictic like
mathematics or metaphysics, nor certifiable by the senses like
physics, it could be given nevertheless a moral certainty beyond
reasonable doubt by the accumulation of reliable testimony. The
whole question provided an occasion to investigate the grounds
for reasonable assent, and for distinguishing degrees of assent,
both to the reliability of the evidence and to the credibility of the
events and beliefs concerned. Hence Herbert of Cherbury's scale:
"Of Truth, so far as it is distinguished from revelation, from probability, from possibility, and from falsehood" (De veritate . . . ,
1624). Also Hugo Grotius: "so are there divers wayes of proving or
manifesting the truth. Thus there is one way in mathematics,
another in physics, a third in ethics, and lastly another kinde when
a matter of fact is in question: wherein verily wee must rest
content with such testimonies as are free from all suspicion of
untruth: otherwise downe goes all the frame and use of history,
and a great part of the art of physicke, together with all dutifulness
that ought to be between parents and children: for matters of
practice can no way else be knowne but by testimonies" (De
veritate . . . ii. 24, 1633; English trans., 1632, p. 148).
William Chillingworth offered the reasonable rule that we
should not "expect mathematical demonstrations . . . in matters
plainly incapable of them, such as are to be believed, and if we
speak properly, cannot be known". It would be equally unreasonable for anyone to demand "a stronger assent to his conclusions
than his arguments deserve" and to want "stronger arguments for
a conclusion than the matter will bear" (Religion of Protestants,
Preface to the Author, 1638). We had to be "content . . . with a
morall certainty of the things" we "believe" which "are only
highly credible, and not infallible" (ibid. ii. 154, p. 112). So our
"judges are not infallible in their judgements, yet are they certain
enough, that they judge aright, and that they proceed according to
the evidence given" (ibid. iii. 26, p. 140). Something short of
"truths, as certain and infallible as the very common principles of
geometry and metaphysics", with "an adherence to them as certain as that of sense or science", were and had to be sufficient in
many circumstances for reasonable calculated risk and prudent
381
action. For "the evidence of the thing assented to, be it more or

lesse, is the reason and cause of the assent in the understanding
(ibid. vi. 51, p. 371). So then: "Do you think that there is such a
city as Rome or Constantinople?" Properly speaking "I could not
say that I knew it, but that I did as undoubtedly believe it, as those
things which I did know". For while in their testimony "every
particular man may deceive or be deceived, it is not impossible,
though exceedingly improbable, that all men should conspire to
do so". Hence with sufficient witnesses already, "my own seeing
these cities would make no accession, add no degree to the strength
and firmness of my faith concerning this matter, only it would
change the kind of my assent, and make me know that which
formerly I did but believe" ("An answer to some passages in
Rushworth's Dialogues", Works, Additional Discourses ix, 1704,
P. 47)In all our judgements what "we call experience", according to
Thomas Hobbes, "is nothing else but remembrance of what antecedents have been followed by what consequents", in many
particular observations or experiments whether natural or contrived: "Thus after a man hath been accustomed to see like antecedents followed by like consequents, whensoever he seeth the like
come to pass to any thing he had seen before, he looks there should
follow it the same that followed them". So "consequent upon that
which is present, men call future; and thus we make remembrance
to be the prevision of things to come, or expectation or presumption of the future". Conversely there was a "conjecture of the past,
or presumption of the fact", when a man who "seeth the consequent, maketh account there hath been the like antecedent;
then he calleth both the antecedent and the consequent, signs one
of another, as clouds are signs of rain to come, and rain of clouds
past". But "the signs are but conjectural; and according as they
have often or seldom failed, so their assurance is more or less; but
never full and evident. . . . If the signs hit twenty times for one
missing, a man may lay a wager of twenty to one of the event; but
may not conclude it for truth" (Humane Nature, ch. 4. 6-10, 1640,
English Works, ed. Molesworth, IV, 1840, pp. 16-18).
It was by reducing present judgement to an exactly calculated
expectation of the future that Pascal and Huygens provided the
essential mathematical model for the successive decisions that
382
must be made through the uncertainties of all terrestrial existence,

whether by nature or by men. This model was their calculation of
expectations a priori among the closed possible outcomes of a
game of dice. Thus, wrote Pascal, "what was rebellious to experience has not been able to escape from the dominion of reason.
Indeed we have reduced it by geometry with so much security to
an exact art, that it participates in its certainty and now boldly
progresses. And so, joining mathematical demonstrations with
the uncertainty of chance, . . . it justly arrogates to itself this
stupendous title: the geometry of chance (aleae geometria)" ("Adresse a 1'Academie Parisienne", 1654, Oeuvres, pub. par Brunschvicg et al., Ill, 1908, pp. 307-8; presentation de Lafuma, 1963,
pp. 102-3). They showed then how to calculate the present value
of a stake in a game from the proportion of favourable to possible
expectations exhaustively enumerated. This measured the
mathematical expectation at every stage, a central principle defined by Huygens: "One's hazard or expectation (sors seu expectatio] to gain any thing, is worth so much, as, if he had it, he could
purchase the like hazard or expectation again in a just and equal
game" ("De ratiociniis in ludo aleae" in Schooten, Exercit. math.,
I
657 / pp. 52,1-2,; English trans. Arbuthnot, Of the Laws of Chance,
1692, p. 3).
It was likewise to stabilize decision under uncertainty that Arnauld and Nicole at Port-Royal incorporated these insights into
their analysis of judgement a posteriori among the open possible
outcomes of experience. Hence their title: La logique ou Tart de
penser, contenant outre les regies communes plusieurs observations
nouvelles propre a former le judgement (1662). Here they delineated
for the whole period the question of how to estimate the objective
probability alike of historical and legal evidence for the past, and
of predictions leading to action for the future. The absolute rule of
impartial objectivity was that we must discount all personal motives and interests in "what we desire should be true. Nor is there
any other truth than this, that ought to be found in the thing itself
independent from our desires, which ought to prevail over us" (La
logique . . . iii. 20.1, 5e ed., 1683; English trans., 1685 revised).
When presented with accounts of two possible events: "How then
shall we resolve to believe the one rather than the other, if we judge
them both possible?" The rule here was that an event "must not
383
be considered nakedly, and in itself, like a proposition in geometry;

but all the circumstances that accompany it, as well internal as
external, are to be weighed with the same consideration. I call
internal circumstances such as belong to the fact itself, and external those that relate to the persons, whose testimonies induce as
to believe it". Then "if all the circumstances are such that it never
or very rarely happens, that the same circumstances are accompanyed with falsehood", we were persuaded to believe it as a
"moral certainty", and conversely (ibid., iv. 13). With this rule La
logique located the developing critique of the external reliability
of evidence for historical events within the conception of their
internal credibility determined by current scientific knowledge. It
epitomized the common intellectual commitments alike of the
rationally critical history of mankind envisaged by Jean Bodin and
Francis Bacon and the rationally critical natural science of Galileo
and Marin Mersenne and Descartes. Critical estimates of historical evidence, and frequencies of associations of events, yielded
degrees of probability within a world of physical law eliminating
myth and magic. In all reports of events "we must examine them
by their particular circumstances, and by the credit and knowledge
of the reporters". Hence "circumstances are to be compared and
considered together, not considered apart. For it often happens,
that a fact which is not very probable in one circumstance, which
is ordinarily a mark of falsehood, ought to be esteemed certain,
according to other circumstances", and the other way round (ibid,
iv. 14). Likewise: "These rules that serve us to judge of things past,
may be applied to things to come. For as we probably judge a thing
to have come to pass, when the circumstances which we know are
usually joined to the fact, we may as probably believe that such a
thing will happen, when the present circumstances are such as are
usually attended by such an effect. Thus it is that the physicians
can judge of the good or bad success of diseases, captains of the
future events of war, and that we judge in the world of the most
part of contingent affairs". But in all cases "for that we may judge
what is fit to be done, to obtain the good and avoid the evil, we
ought not only to consider the good and that evil in itself, but also
the probability whether it may happen or no,- and geometrically to
consider the proportion which all the things hold together" (ibid,
iv. 16).
384
That scientific treatment of contingent expectation and uncertain choice had been transformed in concept and technique together by Pascal's aleae geometria, by Huygens's mathematical
expectatio, by the measure given in La logique of "la probabilite
qu'il arrive ou n'arrive pas" of an event as "geometriquement la
proportion que toutes ces choses ont ensemble"; and also by the
contemporary analysis in England and the Netherlands of life
expectancy was noted by the historically observant Leibniz. From
that viewpoint of explicit scientific recognition; the antecedent
and subsequent history alike of the calculus of expectation and
choice, both a priori and a posteriori, could be brought into intellectual perspective. Leibniz himself had looked independently for a
logic of degrees of probability for the contingent and the uncertain
first on the model of Roman jurisprudence. Turning then to
mathematics he came to look for a general calculus of inquiry
giving degrees of certainty according to the subject-matter, from
an ars combinatoria such as Ramon Lull had invented and more
recently Mersenne had used to calculate the possible combinations of a set of elements from which there could be realizations
in fact, whether of musical tunes or languages or natural events.
He seems to have brought together these two lines of inquiry only
after he had studied, in Paris during 1672-76, the treatment of
mathematical expectations a priori in games of chance by Pascal
and Huygens, and a posteriori in life insurances by Jan Hudde and
Jan de Witt and again by Huygens, himself then in Paris. Leibniz
aimed to develop an ample scheme of human knowledge in which
provision would be made for "a new logic for knowing degrees of
probability", an exact "art of weighing probabilities" (Leibniz to
Jean Frederic 1679, in Werke, hrg. Klopp, IV, 1865, pp. 422-23)
applicable to law and politics and medicine and the study of history and so on, "where one must come to a decision and take a
part even when there is no assurance" ("Nouvelles ouvertures",
Opuscules, par Couturat, 1903, pp. 225-27). Technical mastery of
this new style of scientific thinking was brought to its first maturity by Jakob Bernoulli in his Ars conjectandi (1713), concluding
in Part iv by "setting forth the use and application of the preceding
principles in civil, moral and economic affairs". In these and similar matters which we could not strictly know for certain, we had
to conjecture, and: "To conjecture about something is to measure
385
its probability; and therefore the art of conjecturing or the stochastic art (ars conjectandi sive stochastice) is defined by us as the art
of measuring as exactly as possible the probabilities of things with
this end in mind: that in our decisions or actions we may be able
always to choose or to follow what has been perceived as being
better, more advantageous, safer or better considered; in this alone
lies all the wisdom of the philosopher and all the prudence of the
statesman" (ibid. iv. 2).
In this truly seminal work Jakob Bernoulli identified problems
and offered solutions that were to guide inquiry for a century. The
new mathematical grasp of the regularities of numerical frequencies present in adequately numerous populations gave a mastery
of rational expectation and consequential action, within the limits
of errors both of events and of estimations, that was to be diversified thereafter into the varied subject-matters of nature and of
human society. Philosophical mathematicians and naturalists, in
their search for stable knowledge and reasoned decision, established through their insights, at once into the conception and into
the techniques of probable and statistical inference, both new
methods of scientific exploration and in the end a new economy
of nature. The term statistics appeared in this period in the traditional context of "civile, politica, statistica e militare scienza"
(Ghilini, Annali di Alessandria, "A'lettori lo stampatore", 1666) as
a comparative description of states, and the term was to retain also
that essentially descriptive meaning after it had been applied as
"statistik" as well to the numerical condition and the inferred
prospects of a society (Achenwall, Abriss dei neusten Staatswissenschaft. . ., 1749). It was under the different name of "political
arithemetick", supplied by William Petty (Political Arithmetick,
Dedication, 1690), that the new "application of mathematics to
economico-political matters" (Leibniz to Thomas Burnet i/n. ii.
1697, in Die Philosophischen Schriften, hrg. Gerhardt, III, 1887, p.
190) brought with it the first systematic collection of numerical
data made explicitly for the calculation of rates of change and
probabilities a posteriori, on which to base decision and action.19
From the numerical frequencies so discovered was then to come
the calculation, for any given moment, both of the individual
19. Cf. W. L. Letwin, The Origins of Scientific Economics: English economic
thought 1660-1776 (London, 1963).
386
Science, Art and Nature in-Medievaland Modern Thought
probability of an event such as the death of a particular individual

or the loss of a particular ship, and of the statistical probability of
such an event occurring in the population.
This kind of calculation was given a new model especially by
English and Dutch writers on vital statistics and demography, who
provided thereby an immediate application to social and medical
policy. John Graunt in his pioneering Natural and Political Observations ... made upon the Bills of Mortality (1662,) set out explicitly
the fundamental discovery that statistical regularities appeared in
large numbers which were lost in small numbers. Graunt's scientific method established a new dimension of experimental
medicine. From the records of births and of deaths with their
symptoms kept for London for over half a century, he initiated
inquiries based on the insight that stable mortality rates and sexratios and so on could be translated immediately into approximate
probabilities a posteriori. This then provided for inferences in two
directions: directly to the likelihood of a possible event coming
about, and conversely to the likely causes of events already
brought about. He insisted that records should include consistent
and regular information about all diseases and other calamities,
environmental and social conditions, ages and longevities, and so
forth; and that account should be taken only of symptoms and
other observable facts and not of opinions. In this way he made an
analysis of the proportions of deaths in the population to be attributed to different causes. For example he attributed chronic diseases
providing a constant proportion of the total deaths to constant
conditions of the environment, and epidemic diseases providing
fluctuating proportions to fluctuations in those conditions. Accepting the theory that these diseases came from alterations in the
air, then: "as the proportion of acute and epidemical diseases
shews the aptness of the air to suddain and vehement impressions,
so the chronical diseases shew the ordinary temper of the place,
so that upon the proportion of chronical diseases seems to hang
the judgement of the fitness of the country for long life". Thus he
observed in his numerical data for London that "among the several
casualities some bear a constant proportion unto the whole
number of burials; such are chronical diseases, and the diseases,
whereunto the city is most subject; as for example, consumptions,
dropsies, jaundice" and so on; and "some accidents, as grief,
387
drowning, men's making away themselves, and being kiPd by

several accidents, etc. do the like, whereas epidemical, and malignent diseases, as the plague, purples, spotted-feaver, small-pox,
and measles do not keep that equality, so as in some years, or
moneths, there died ten times as many as in others" (Natural and
Political Observations . . . ch. 2, pp. 13-18). Among the epidemic
diseases he made a detailed analysis of the supposed causes of
plague by the method of comparing their "greater or less degrees"
(Aristotle, Topics ii.io, ii4b 37~sa6; cf. Bacon, Novum organum,
ii. 13) and eliminating those that did not match the phenomena
(Natural and Political Observations... ch. 4, pp. 33-36). His rather
English conclusion was that only the weather matched the plague
in its sudden fluctuations.
Graunt seems to have initiated here the analysis of inverse
probability to be developed by Jakob Bernoulli, Abraham de Moivre
and above all by Thomas Bayes, Pierre-Simon Laplace and Antoine-Augustin Cournot. Likewise his "inference from the numbers and proportions we finde in our Bills" (ibid, c.3, pp. 22-3) to
the likelihood of dying from various particular diseases initiated
the direct analysis of expectations developed especially by
Huygens, de Witt and Halley as well as by Jakob Bernoulli.
Halley provided a model for the calculation of statistical expectations a posteriori by taking Breslau, an isolated town where
virtually all who died had been born, as a pure sample of mankind
for pricing life annuities. The data for Breslau gave "a more just
idea of the state and condition of mankind, than any thing yet
extant that I know of", because virtually the whole population
lived out their lives there without immigration or emigration. He
showed that "the purchaser ought to pay for only such a part of
the value of the annuity, as he has chances that he is living; and
this ought to be computed yearly, and the sum of all those yearly
values being added together, will amount to the value of the annuity for the life of the person proposed". Thus "the sum of all the
present values of those chances is the true value of the annuity"
("An estimate of the degrees of mortality of mankind . . .",
Philosophical Transactions, 17, 1693, pp. 600-3). The theory of
decision implied here was to be elaborated by Buffon and Daniel
Bernoulli into a theory of moral advantage or utility, based on the
real value for our way of life of our expectations at particular times
388
and in particular circumstances. Thus Daniel Bernoulli wrote:

"Ever since geometricians first began to study the measurement
of risks (sortes], everyone has affirmed that the value of an expectation is obtained by multiplying the values of each expected particular by the number of chances by which they can be obtained,
and then dividing the aggregate of these products by the total
number of chances". The chances to be considered must be
"equally possible (aeque proclives)", and the "value should be
estimated not from the price of a thing, but from the utility
(emolumentum) which each takes therefrom. The price is estimated for the thing itself and is the same for everyone, the utility
from the circumstances of the person" ("Specimen theoriae novae
de mensura sortis", 1730-31, trans. Sommer, 1965). Likewise Buffon: "The mathematician in his calculation estimates money by
its quantity; but the moral man must estimate it otherwise . . . ;
and since the value of money in relation to the moral man is not
proportional to its quantity, but rather to the advantages which
money procures, it is obvious that this man ought to take a risk
only in proportion to the expectation of these advantages" ("Essai
d'arithmetique morale", 16,1730, Histoirenatuielle, Supplement
IV, 1777, p. 80). Meanwhile from these statistical methods was to
come a new statistical conception of an economy of nature generated through time by a sequence of decisions on instantaneous real
values, by natural necessity as by human choice.
V
An alternative to the economy of nature produced either by

chance as proposed by the Greek atomists and Lucretius, or by the
providential design of each separate creature preadapted to its
circumstances within the whole creation, was developed by PierreLouis Moreau de Maupertuis in three essays begun before 1741
with his Essai de cosmologie and concluding with his Systeme de
la nature published in 1751.20 Beyond alike those who believed
20. Cf. P. Brunei, Maupertuis (Paris, 1929; 2 vols.); E. Guyenot, Les sciences de
la vie aux xviie et xviiie siecles: 1'idee de 1'evolution (Paris, 1941); A. C. Crombie,
"P.L.M. de Maupertuis, F.R.S. (1698-1759), precurseur du transformisme", Revue
de synthese, 78 (1957), 35-56; B. Glass, "Maupertuis, pioneer of genetics and
389
that a blind mechanism could have produced all the wonderful

adaptations to needs daily visible in organized bodies, and those
who believed too readily that they had grasped providence in every
contradictory detail, Maupertuis looked for a unifying principle
truly characteristic of the Creator: a principle to be found "in
phenomena of which the simplicity and universality suffered no
exception and left no equivocation" (Essai de cosmologie, "Avantpropos", Oeuvres, i, 1756, p. xi). He found what he sought in his
principle of least action. From this principle he claimed to deduce
the general laws of all movement and change, which "being found
precisely the same as those observed in nature, we can admire its
application to all phenomena, in the movement of animals, in the
vegetation of plants, in the revolution of the stars: and the spectacle of the universe becomes so much greater, so much more beautiful, so much more worthy of its Author. . . . These laws, so
beautiful and so simple, are perhaps the only ones that the Creator
and Ruler of things has established in matter in order to effect all
the phenomena of this visible world" (ibid. pp. 42-45).
Maupertuis approached the whole argument through the calculus of probability, applied to the political arithmetic of nature.
Newton had thought that it was impossible that "a blind destiny"
could have made the planets all move in the same direction in
almost concentric orbits almost in the same plane. But if one
supposed this "as the effect of chance", while very improbable
"some probability nevertheless remains", so that one could not
say that it must be the "effect of a choice" by the Creator. Likewise
The argument drawn from the adaptation of the different parts of animals
to their needs. . . . Does not all this indicate an intelligence and a design
which presided over their construction? This argument struck the ancients as it struck Newton: and in vain the greatest enemy of providence
replies to it that use has not been the goal at all, that it has been the
consequence of the construction of the parts of animals; that chance
having formed the eyes, the ears, the tongue, they have been used for
sense, for speaking. But could it not be said that in the fortuitous combination of the productions of nature, since it would be only those that had
certain adaptive relations (rapports de convenance) that could survive, it
is not surprising that this adaptation is found in all the species that exist?
evolution", in Forerunners of Darwin, ed. B. Glass, O. Temkin and W. L. Strauss,
Jr. (Baltimore, MD, 1959), with other relevant papers therein; J. Roger, Les sciences
de la vie dans la pensee fianfaise du xviiie siecle (Paris, 1963).
390
Chance, it could be said, had produced an innumerable multitude of

individuals; a small number were so constructed that the parts of the
animal could satisfy its needs; in another infinitely greater number there
was neither adapation nor order. All these latter have perished: animals
without mouths could not live, others without reproduction organs could
not perpetuate themselves. Only those have remained in which there was
order and adaptation, and these species, which we see today, are only the
smallest part of those which a blind destiny had produced (ibid. pp. 7-12;
cf. Lucretius i. 1021-51, ii. 573-6, iv. 833-5, v. 56-7, 519-31, 837-77, and
Empedocles in Aristotle, Departibus animalium, i. i, 6403 17-25).
Yet this could prove the perfection of providence: for "everything would be so ordered that a blind and necessary mathematics
executes what the most enlightened and free intelligence prescribed" (Maupertuis, ibid. p. 2,5). Thus, extending the Cartesian
mechanistic model from the biology of the individual organism to
the biology of populations, Maupertuis saw in the numerical proportions and the adaptations of living species to their needs and
environments, no longer the immediate operation of providence,
but the necessary generation of order out of chance and chaos by
the blind statistics of the least quantities required: varied birth and
selective survival. The economy of nature was not then a perpetual
pre-established harmony, but a shifting balance of perpetual trial
for survival or exclusion. The history of living things on the Earth
was a succession of states of dynamic equilibrium which had
generated through time the adaptive diversity that we now observed. This simple statistical principle he combined next with a
genetical hypothesis, giving to his "sketch of a system which we
have proposed to explain the formation of animals . . . only the
degree of assent that it deserves" (Venus physique, ii. 8, 1745,
Oeuvres, II, 130-1). Then:
Could we not explain by that how from only two individuals the multiplication of the most dissimilar species could have followed? They would
have owed their first origin only to some fortuitous productions in which
elementary particles would not have kept the order which they had in the
father or mother animals; each degree of error would have made a new
species; and by means of repeated deviations would have come the infinite
diversity of animals that we see today: which will perhaps go on increasing
with time, but to which perhaps the sequence of centuries will bring only
imperceptible increments (Systeme de la nature, xlv, Oeuvres, II, 148*49*)-
391
"But should the system we propose be confined to animals?...

Have not plants, minerals, and even metals a similar origin? Does
not their production lead us to the production of other more organized bodies?" (ibid. xlvii, p. 150*). All this concerned "what
man has in common with the beasts, the plants, and in some way
with all organized creatures". Man has in addition a principle by
which he could "know God, and in which he finds moral ideas of
his duties", and by which he could abstract from particular physical perceptions and "rise to this knowledge of a wholly different
order" ( Ivii, p. 160*).
"To make natural history a true science", Maupertuis wrote in
his Lettre sur le piogres des sciences (1752), "we must apply ourselves to researches that make us know not the particular shape
of this or that animal, but the general processes of nature in its
production and its preservation" (Oeuvres, II, 386). He rescued
design in the history of nature, from a vision projected unmistakably from Lucretius and Empedocles, and he avoided the embarrassment of having to attribute misadaptations and adaptations
alike to the individual attention of providence, by looking for the
simplest and most universal principle through which, in animate
as in inanimate matter: "A blind and necessary mechanics follows
the designs of the most enlightened and free Intelligence" ("Accord
de differentes loix de la nature", 1744, Oeuvres, IV, 21). From his
approach through probabilities, Maupertuis looked, like Aristotle
and like Descartes, for a world that could not be otherwise. By his
highly original identification of varied birth and selective survival
as the least quantities from which a blind statistics must generate
progressively divergent adaptation, he brought the origination of
species then within the calculus of the probability of success or
failure at every stage of the process. Thus he could postulate that
without any other cause progressive order, progressive genetic
diversification with adaptation to variations of the environment,
progressive complexity and novelty, must be generated in time
with automatic necessity from unordered inherited variations
(some fortuitous, some initiated by the environment) by the purely
statistical process of different rates of survival. Maupertuis's
speculative originality was to identify this necessary statistical
process of the vectorial transformation of species by the accumulation of random changes through survivals and exclusions.
392
In this whole intellectual context we can surely see in the conception of an instantaneous real value developed from Halley to
Daniel Bernoulli and Buffon, with its immediate relevance to
economic life, a description likewise of the situation of a biological
species. It was Maupertuis who suggested to Daniel Bernoulli that
he should calculate the real advantage for mankind of inoculation
against smallpox. Considering the "total quantity of life" of a
sample born at the same time until the death of the last individual,
or the "average life" of each newborn child, Bernoulli offered a
theorem by which "we should decide whether to reject or to introduce inoculation for newborn children, in so far as we wished to
adopt the principle of the greatest utility for all mankind" ("Essai
d'une nouvelle analyse de la mortalite causee par la petite verole,
et des advantages de 1'inoculation pour la prevenir", 12, 14,
1760, pp. 27, 33, trans. Bradley, 1971, with changes). But the relative advantage for individuals had to be weighed against the risk
at every age, so that as d'Alembert pointed out "the interest of the
state and that of the individual should be calculated separately"
("Sur 1'application du calcul des probabilities a 1'inoculation de la
petite verole", 1761, p. 38).
Again Adam Smith saw in economic society a statistical
mechanism designed for an end which followed from "the order,
the regular and harmonious movement of the system, the machine
or economy by means of which it is produced" (Theory of Moral
Sentiments, iv. i, 1759, p. 348). Businesses in competition faced
the options of survival in various degrees or exclusion through the
statistical accumulation of gains or losses, or of transformation to
meet new circumstances. Competition stimulated structural and
technical innovation and expansion into new markets : for "increase in demand" for goods "encourages production, and thereby
increases the competition of the producers, who, in order to undersell one another, have recourse to new divisions of labour and new
improvements of art, which they might never otherwise have
thought of" (Wealth of Nations, 1776, ed. Campbell et al., V.i.e. 26,
1976, p. 748).
For individual or business or state, for part or whole, advantage
or disadvantage however marginal must accumulate with repetition and so with time must generate divergence. Laplace showed
that regularities hidden by the complexity of phenomena could be
393
revealed by the analysis of adequate numbers (Th&orie analytique

des probability, ii.s, 1812). Seemingly echoing Thomas Malthus,
he wrote that it was "principally by the lack of subsistence that
the progressive march of the population is arrested. In all the
species of animals and plants, nature tends without ceasing to
augment the number of individuals until they are at the level of
the means of subsistence" (Essaiphilosophique swlesprobabilites,
3e ed., 1816, p. 171). He continued: "By the repetition of an advantageous event, simple or compound, the real benefit becomes more
and more probable and increases without ceasing : it becomes
certain in the hypothesis of an infinite number of repetitions".
Dividing it by the total number of events, "the mean benefit of
each event is the mathematical expectation itself, or the advantage
relative to the event. It is the same with a loss which becomes
certain in the long run, however little the event may be disadvantageous". This theorem with others like it "proves that regularity
ends by establishing itself in the very things most subordinated to
what we call chance. When events are in large numbers, analysis
gives again a very simple expression of the probability that the
benefit will be confined within determined limits". The same
went for loss. On the truth of this theorem "depends the stability
of institutions based upon probabilities. But in order that it can be
applied to them, it is necessary that these institutions should
multiply the advantageous events by means of numerous transactions" (ibid. pp. 174-75). They must also base their decisions on
the real value for a way of life of expectations at particular times
and in particular circumstances. The real advantage expected of
any event in sufficient numbers could be calculated then, for all
participants alike, as a proportion of the possibilities present at
every stage of any enterprise, whether the participants were biological species or varieties or commercial enterprises or players in a
game, each competing for limited resources or hazardous outcomes. Thus the uncertain future could be stabilized for all alike
in mathematical regularity by computing the probable expectation
of gain or loss, growth or decline, as a measurable property of each
participant at every instant.
We know that Charles Darwin, in developing his theory of natural selection, became at some stage aware of the analysis by
Malthus of the ratios of births to survivals. Perhaps the account
394
given by Adam Smith of transformation as an alternative to the

exclusion of a business by competition might have suggested the
same for species. With natural selection Darwin in effect applied
to the economy of nature the economic principle of net marginal
advantage applied by Laplace to human commerce.21 He wrote in
21. Darwin referred in his "Notebooks on Transformation of Species" (transcribed by P. H. Barret in H. E. Gruber, Darwin on Man, London, 1974) to Mai thus
(D 134 6-135 e, 3:1838), and to Adam Smith (M 108, 155: 1838, and N 184), and
later he gave full credit to Malthus in his Autobiography, ed. N. Barlow (London,
1958), p. 120; cf. on Malthus also C. Darwin and A. R. Wallace, Evolution by
Natural Selection, ed. G. R. de Beer (Cambridge, 1958), pp. 7-8 (Wallace, 1858),
46-68 (Darwin 1842), 116-9 (1844), 259 (1858), 273-9 (Wallace 1858); and on Adam
Smith the reference in Darwin, Natural Selection . . . written from 1856 to 1858,
ch. 6, ed. R. Stauffer (Cambridge, 1975), p. 233. Darwin wrote in the 3rd ed. of The
Origin of Species, ch. 14 (London, 1861), pp. 517-8, in discussing whether life
originated with one or many creations, that "Maupertuis' philosophical axiom of
'least action' leads the mind more willingly to admit the smaller number"; cf. his
Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Introduction (London,
1868), pp. 12-13. He never referred to Laplace but the entomologist William Kirby
(whose work Darwin knew) in the seventh of the Bridgewater Treatises, On the
Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God as Manifested in the Creation of Animals
and in their History, Habits and Instincts, Introduction (London, 1835), vol. I, pp.
xxiv ff., xxxii ff., xl ff., accused both Laplace and Lamarck of trying "to ascribe all
the works of creation to second causes; .. . without the intervention of a first" (p.
xxiv). He adapted Adam Smith to argue that the Malthusian struggle brought about
by the growth of populations to the limits of subsistence was the means used by
the Creator to maintain the order and harmony of the system as a whole (ch. 3, vol.
I, 141-4, ch. 18, vol. II, 243-4). Karl Marx wrote to Friedrich Engles on 18. vi. 1862:
"It is remarkable how Darwin recognises among beasts and plants his English
society with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets,
'inventions', and the Malthusian 'struggle for existence'. It is Hobbes's bellum
omnium contra omnes . . . " (Selected Correspondence, Moscow & London, 1956,
pp. 156-7). Engles commented to P. L. Lavrov on 12-17. ix. 1875: "The whole
Darwinist teaching of the struggle for existence is simply a transference from
society to nature of Hobbes's doctrine of bellum omnium contra omnes and of the
bourgeois-economic doctrine of competition, together with Malthus's theory of
population. When this conjurer's trick has been performed . . . , the same theories
are transferred back again from organic nature to history and it is now claimed that
their validity as eternal laws of human society has been proved" (ibid., pp. 367-8).
Cf. T. Cowles, "Malthus, Darwin, and Bagehot: a study in the transference of a
concept", Isis, 26 (1936), 341-8; A. Sandow, "Social factors in the origin of Darwinism", Quarterly Review of Biology, 13 (1938), 315-26; A. C. Crombie, "Darwin's scientific method", in Actes due IX e Congres International d'Histoire des
Sciences: Barcelona-Madrid 1959 (Barcelona & Paris, 1960), pp. 354-62,- R. M.
Young, "Malthus and the evolutionists: the common context of biological and
social theory", Past and Present, no. 43 (1969), 109-45, "Darwin's metaphor: does
nature select?", TheMonist, 55 (1971), 442-503; M. Ruse, The Darwinian Revolution: Science red in tooth and claw (Chicago, 1979); R. G. Mazzolini, "Stato e
organismo, individui e cellule nell' opera di Rudolf Virchow negli anni 1845-1860",
Annali dell'Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento, 9 (1983), 153-293.
395
his "Notebooks on Transmutation of Species" opened in July 1837

after his return in the previous year from his long voyage in the
Beagle: "Seeing the beautiful seed of a bull rush I thought, surely
no 'fortuitous' growth could have produced these innumerable
seeds, yet if a seed were produced with an infinitesimal advantage
it would have better chance of being propagated" ("Notebooks...,"
E 137, 1839, in Gruber, Darwin on Man, 1974, p. 460). Five year
later in his Essay of 1844 he wrote that in the struggle for existence
"less than a grain in the balance will determine which individuals
shall live and which perish". In changing conditions "there is a
most powerful means of selection, tending to preserve even the
slightest variation, which aided the subsistence or defence of those
organic beings, during any part of their whole existence, whose
organization had been rendered plastic "(in Evolution by Natural
Selection, ed. de Beer, 1958, p. 24i).22 Darwin, like Maupertuis,
was making a point about the survival of even marginal advantage
quite different from anything found in ancient atomism, for he
was reducing the uncertain expectations of the fortuitous beloved
by the atomists to the exact necessity of a statistical law. He wrote
in the long manuscript of Natural Selection (18 5 7) of which On the
Origin of Species (1859) was published as an abstract: "mere fluctuating variability, or any direct effect of external conditions . . .
are wholly inadequate to explain the infinitude of exquisitely
correlated structures, which we see on all sides of us The most
credulous believer in the 'fortuitous concourse of atoms' will
surely be baffled when he thinks of those innumerable and complicated yet manifest correlations". Hence: "No theory of the derivation of groups of species from a common parent can be thought
satisfactory until it can be shown how these wondrous correlations
of structure can arise. I believe that such means do exist in nature,
analogous, but incomparably superior, to those by which man
selects and adds up trifling changes" in cultivating domesticated
animals and plants. This "means of selection" in nature was "that
severe, though not continuous struggle for existence, to which...
all organic beings are subjected, and which would give to any
individual with the slightest variation of service to it (at any period
of its life) a better chance of surviving, and which would almost
22. Cf. R. A. Fisher, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (Oxford, 1930);
A. C. Crombie, "Interspecific competition", The Journal of Animal Ecology, 16
(1947), 44-73-
396
ensure the destruction of an individual varying in the slightest

degree in the opposite direction. I can see no limit to the perfection
of this means of selection" (Natural Selection, ch. 5, ed. Stauffer,
I
975> PP- 1 74~5)- Hence the fundamental efficacy of the "Principle
of Divergence. . . . For in any country, a far greater number of
individuals descended from the same parents can be supported,
when greatly modified in different ways, in habits, constitution
and structure, so as to fill as many places, as possible, in the polity
of nature, than when not at all or only slightly modified". More
generally "a greater absolute amount of life can be supported in
any country or on the globe, when life is developed under many
and widely different forms, than when under a few and allied
forms". Divergence into new varieties and species was then a
necessary consequence of the unlimited accumulation of marginal
advantages opened into the economy of organisms by "the greatest
amount of their diversification", which doctrine is in fact that of
'the division of labour'" (ibid. ch. 6, pp. 227-8, 233). With something of Adam Smith as the author of this doctrine Darwin had
been familiar for many years (cf. "Notebooks . . ." M 108, 155,
1838, and N 184 in Gruber, ibid. pp. 286, 296, 351, 390).
It is difficult to tell how far Darwin himself was aware of the
ideas crystallized by Laplace, or of the form of argument used by
Maupertuis in his identification of varied birth and selective survival or exclusion as the least statistical quantities from which the
adaptive transformation of species must necessarily and automatically be generated.23 Like them both he envisaged a form of argument in which the consequences of statistical postulates followed
with the certainty of a physical law, and like Maupertuis he saw
in this a truer conception of the Creator than that of a series of
independent creations: "how much more simple and sublime
power: let attraction act according to certain law; such are inevitable consequences. Let animal be created, then by fixed laws of
generation, such will be their successors . . . " ("Notebooks . . . "
B= II101-2, 1837, ed. de Beer et al., 1960, p. 53). In this form he
looked from the start for "laws of change, which would then be
main object of study, to guide our speculations with respect to past
and future" (ibid. B = II 228-9, p. 69). Like Laplace he estimated
23. See note 20 above.
397
the probability of a theory by its range of predictions: "these

speculations, even if partly true, they are of the greatest service
towards the end of science, namely prediction; till facts are
grouped and called there can be no prediction. The only advantage
of discovering laws is to foretell what will happen and to see
bearing of scattered facts" (ibid. D = IV 67, p. 137). For, he wrote
long afterwards: "In scientific investigations it is permitted to
invent any hypothesis, and if it explains various large and independent classes of facts it rises to the rank of a well-grounded theory"
(Variation . . . , 1868, p. 9). He cited "the greater simplicity of the
view of a few forms or of only one form having been originally
created, instead of innumerable miraculous creations having been
necessary at innumerable periods"; and "this more simple view
accords well with Maupertuis's philosophical axiom of 'least action' " (ibid. pp. 12-13).
Darwin laid out the argument of the Origin of Species itself with
legal advocacy, showing why its premises should be accepted and
what followed from them, stating the difficulties of his theory and
demolishing them one by one: "For I am well aware that scarcely
a single point is discussed in this volume on which facts cannot
be adduced, often apparently leading to conclusions directly opposite to those at which I have arrived. A fair result can be obtained
only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on
both sides of each question" (Origin, ch. i, 1859, p. 2). He had to
prove that the visible order of nature was the result of an historical
process, brought about by stable statistical probabilities discoverable only by careful analysis beneath the immediately observable
surface of things: "Throw up a handful of feathers, and all must
fall to the ground according to definite laws; but how simple is
this problem compared to the action and reaction of the innumerable plants and animals which have determined, in the course of
centuries, the proportional numbers and kinds" found anywhere
upon the Earth (ibid. ch. 3, p. 75). He concluded: "I cannot believe
that a false theory would explain, as it seems to me that the theory
of natural selection does explain, the several large classes of facts
above specified" (ibid., 2nd ed., ch. 14, 1860, pp. 480-1).
"To my mind" Darwin wrote finally, "it accords better with
what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator,
that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabit-
398
ants of the world should have been due to secondary causes. . . .

Thus, from war in nature, from famine and death, the most exalted
object which we are capable of conceiving, namely the production
of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this
view of life, with its powers, having been originally breathed into
a few forms or into one,- and that, whilst this planet has gone
cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a
beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have
been, and are being, evolved" (ibid., ch. 14, 1859, pp. 488, 490). But
this evolution of living things, brought about by the statistical
probability at every moving point of time that the decision would
be success or failure, had no general direction. It was propelled
only by the necessity for survival that advantage should be taken
of every available opportunity: a kind of statistical principle of
plentitude with in itself no evident purpose except to generate
adaptive diversity and hence increase the total quantity of life. "I
cannot think that the world, as we see it, is the result of chance"
Darwin repeated; "and yet I cannot look at each separate thing as
the result of design" (Darwin to Asa Gray 26. xi. 1860, in Life and
Letters, ed. F. Darwin, II, 1887, p. 353). Each separate thing was
rather the product of general laws, but the problem for him remained whether "the existence of so-called natural laws implies
purpose. I cannot see this" (Darwin to W. Graham 3.vii. 1881, in
ibid, i, 315). The Duke of Argyll recorded the aging Darwin's
response to his remark that it was impossible to look at the many
"wonderful contrivances for certain purposes in nature" discovered by Darwin himself "without seeing that they were the effect
and the expression of mind". Darwin replied: "Well, that often
conies over me with overwhelming force; but at other times . . . it
seems to go away" (ibid. p. 316).
Thomas Henry Huxley in his treatment of Evolution and Ethics
(1893) placed the question of design and purpose firmly within the
horizon of human responsibility. He described "attempts to apply
the analogy of cosmic order to society" (CollectedEssays, IX, 1894,
p. 82) as simply "reasoned savagery" (ibid. p. 115): "The history of
civilization details the steps by which men have succeeded in
building up an artificial world within the cosmos. Fragile reed as
he may be, man, as Pascal says, is a thinking reed" (ibid. p. 83;
399
Pascal, Pensees 2oo^Lafuma =347 Brunschvicg). That was his true

expectation.
Surely all this points to the fundamental logic of evolutionary
and of moral expectation and choice alike. For we can place the
biological theory of the evolutionary transformation of living organisms by varied birth and selective survival, that is by natural
selection, within a theory of decision, whether made impersonally
in nature or voluntarily by man, in its most general form. This was
a distant outcome of the analogy of economic expectation and of
choice according to real value and their quantification. The quantified concept of future things, formed in the mind from numerical
data collected in rational anticipation of action, introduced into
business and games, as it was to do into politics and war, the style
of a mathematical rational art. The mathematical science of statistics, developed with the calculus of probabilities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, offered something beyond the
traditional descriptions of the natural and human resources of
states. It was transposed, especially in eighteenth-century France
and Britain, into a new statistical economy at once of human
society and of nature. The essential concept of the instantaneous
real value of a stake in a game or a commercial enterprise, measured by the amount that should be risked on its future expectations of gain or loss, was transferred to the formally identical
situation of a biological species. We may see then a formal identity
between the economic concept of net marginal advantage, which
Laplace showed must with repetition generate an ever increasing
divergence between enterprises or states, and Charles Darwin's
biological concept of natural selection generating an evolution of
species. The measure of the instantaneous value of a variety or
species as a contributor to the total quantity of life, like that of a
commercial enterprise or of a player for stakes, was its expectations in the circumstances of that instant. The same applies to a
decision fittest for the occasion, whether in a choice of action or
a choice of theory. The difference is that men in their decisions
may be free and responsible, may by free choices accelerate or
retard or reverse a process of gain, whether in things or in knowledge, and may beyond the quantity choose the quality of life.
The conformity of logical style so discovered in scientific think-
400
Science, Art and Nature in Medieval.and Modern Thought
ing, through different historical periods and over a wide variety of

subject matters, provides an illuminating insight into very deep
characteristics of our intellectual culture. It also raises the question of the limits of a scientific style, and of the motivation of
scientific change. It is an insight that can come only from a comparative historical analysis. It is only through such philosophical
history that we can see how problems and their solutions came to
be formulated, promoted, and accepted or rejected. As historians
of a movement through the past we can only interpret the signs
we have now in the present, and the signs seem to indicate that
what I call the intellectual and moral commitments of any major
culture have a very tenacious life. In that sense we may conclude
indeed: Veritas ftlia temporis.
401
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(Maupertuis, Essai de Cosmologie i)
18
P.-L. Moreau de Maupertuis, F.R.S. (1698-1759).
Precurseur du Transformisme
I
Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, fils de Ren6 Moreau,

seigneur de Maupertuis, naquit a Saint-Malo en 1698; mort
a Bale en 1759, il est bien connu comme un des grands
mathematicians francais de la premiere moitie du xvme siecle
et comme Fauteur du principe physique qui porte le nom de
principe de moindre action. II est important aussi dans Phistoire de la science comme le premier protagoniste en France
des idees newtoniennes, et comme le createur effectif et le
premier president de 1'Academic de Frederic le Grand a Berlin.
Un aspect de son ceuvre scientifique qui n'est certainement
pas moins important que ceux susmentionn^s, aspect qui,
jusqu'ici, n'a pas attire beaucoup 1'attention, c'est sa contribution a la thorie du transformisme organique. II est, en
effet, 1'auteur du premier essai systematique en vue de formuler une th6orie des causes du transformisme, et c'est cette
contribution qui forme le sujet de cet expose.
Maupertuis etait, en effet, comme le demontra feu Pierre
Brunet par son etude eclaire1 et interessante J, une personne
de vitalite etonnante. Avant de discuter le probleme de 1'origine des especes selon les ide"es de ses contemporains, et la
solution qu'il y proposa, je devrai dire quelques mots de
sa vie. Cette vie ne manque certainement pas d'interet,
tenant en effet quelque chose de ce caractere bizarre du si
1. P. BRUNET, Maupertuis, Paris, 1929, 2 parties Cf. [J.-H.-S. FORMEY],
Eloge de M. de Maupertuis, Histoire de I'Academie royale des Sciences, annee
1759, Berlin, 1766, pp. 464-512; see A. C. Crombie, Styles of Scientific Thinking
in the European Tradition, ch. 20 (London, 1994) for up to date bibliography.
408
souvent a des incidents qui surviennent a des personnes de

bonne volonte et d'intelligences perspicaces, mais qui ne sont
pas entierement affermies par le bon sens.
On dit que la mere de Maupertuis Fidolatrait plutot qu'elle
ne Faimait; enfant, il semble bien avoir 6t6 quelque peii gate
et pendant toute sa vie il continua de manifester son esprit
independant dans la plupart des circonstances. Jeune homme,
11 passa deux ans a Farmee comme officier de cavalerie. Puis,
apres avoir acquis en France un certain renom comme mathematicien, le premier grand tournant dans sa vie tournant
dans lequel il entraina bientot la science franâise tout entiere
fut sa visite a Londres en 1728, Fannee qui suivit la mort
de Newton. II passa six niois a Londres, et fit la connaissance
de Samuel Clarke partisan de Leibniz dans la polemique
celebre a propos de la conception de Newton sur Pespace
absolu et de la theologie naturelle et celle d'autres membres eminents de la Royal Society.
Peu de temps apres, le contraste entre la physique cartesienne et celle de Newton se trouva caracterise d'une facon
spirituelle par Voltaire dans cette lettre bien connue,
numero 14 des Lettres philosophiques (1734), qui dit 2 : Un
Franâis qui arrive a Londres trouve les choses bien changees
en philosophic comme dans tout le reste. II a laisse le monde
plein, il le trouve vide. A Paris on voit FUnivers compose de
tourbillons de matiere subtile; a Londres on ne voit rien de
cela. Chez nous c'est la pression de la lune qui cause le flux
de la mer; chez les Anglais c'est la mer qui gravite vers la
lune... Chez nos Cartesiens tout se fait par une impulsion
qu'on ne comprend guere; chez M. Newton, c'est par une
attraction dont on ne connait pas mieux la cause. A Paris
vous vous figurez la terre faite comme un melon; a Londres,
elle est aplatie des deux cotes. La lumiere, pour un Carte'sien,
existe dans Fair; pour un newtonien, elle vient du soleil en
six minutes et demie... Voila de serieuses contrarietes!
Maupertuis etait convaincu que le point de vue de Newton
sur ces questions etait correct et celui de Descartes faux, et
des son retour a Paris, il se mit a encourager un mouvement
en faveur du systeme newtonien. C'est lui qui persuada Voltaire de la valeur scientifique de la theorie, avancee par
Newton, de Fattraction universelle nous verrons comment
2. VOLTAIRE, (Euvres completes, d. Beuchot, Paris, 1879, XXII, 127-8.
P.-L. Moreau de Maupertuis
409
il adapta cette derniere a sa propre th6orie g^neiique et

de I'lnferiorite de tout systeme rival de la physique et de la
cosmologie de Newton. Comme dit d'Alembert au sujet de
Maupertuis, le premier qui ait os^ parmi nous se declarer
ouvertement newtonien , dans son Discours preliminaire a
I'Encycloptdie 3 : Maupertuis a cru qu'on pouvoit etre bon
citoyen, sans adopter aveuglement la physique de son pays
[le cart^sianisme]; et pour attaquer cette physique, il a eu
besoin d'un courage dont on doit lui savoir gre\
Par un des premiers et des plus heureux essais de vulgarisation scientifique, Voltaire introduisit dans le grand public
en France le systeme newtonien.
Apres quelques annees passees a 1'etude de Fastronomie,
Maupertuis attira Tattention du public par un voyage audacieux, en 1736-1737, en Laponie, destine a resoudre la question
de la forme de la terre en mesurant un arc de m^ridien situ
le plus au nord possible. On avait fait en 1735 des mesures
semblables vers le sud, au Perou. Maupertuis ecrivit une description du voyage a travers les montagnes et les forets; la
gene epouvantable causee par les mouches, qu'on ne pouvait pas ^carter meme en s'entourant d'une paisse fumê;
les cataractes qu'il fallait franchir sur les bateaux tres lagers
des Lapons. Par son sang-froid, sa bonne humeur, sa tenacite,
il semble avoir maintenu I'unit6 de Texp^dition. Ses Observa~
tions... faites par ordre du Roy au Cercle Polaire 4, qui d^crit
leurs aventures, est un des livres de voyages les plus captivants. En 1738, peu apres son retour, Voltaire ami aussi bon
que-pouvait 1'etre une personne toujours disposed k sacrifier
1'amitie a la vanite et a Fambition personnelle recommanda
a Frederic de Prusse d'appeler Maupertuis pour former a Berlin une Academic des Sciences, ecole newtonienne qui d^passerait en importance 1'Academic de Paris. En 1740, 1'annee de
son accession au trdne, Fre"d6ric invita Maupertuis a Berlin
pour mettre ce projet a execution; mais il fut bientot arr^te,
temporairement, par un incident bizarre.
Au moment de Tarrivê de Maupertuis a Berlin, la Prusse
etaft en eiat de guerre avec TAutriche, pour la possession de
la Sil&sie. En Janvier 1741, Maupertuis ecrivit a Frederic,
3. D'ALEMBERT, (Enures philosophiques, historiques et litteraires,
Paris, 1805, I, 281. Cf< R. DUGAS, La m&canique OB XVII" sietle* Nettchitel, 1954, pp. 586-92.
4. (Euvres de M. de Maupertuis, Lyon, 1756, III, 69 sqq.
410
lui demandant la permission de venir au camp royal pour lui

soumettre des plans pour 1'Academic. Frederic envoya cette
reponse laconique : Venez ici, Ton vous attend avec impatience 5. Mais le tableau charmant des conversations sur le
front entre le Roi-Philosophe et son philosophe particulier
n'allait pas durer. Quelques jours apres son arrivee, Maupertuis se trouva pris dans la bataille de Molwitz; son cheval
s'emballa et Fentraina derriere les lignes de 1'ennemi. Pendant
quelques jours, on crut au camp prussien qu'il etait mort.
Nous en sommes touches aux larmes , crivit Voltaire, en
apprenant les nouvelles; Mon Dieu! Quelle fatale destinee! 6. Mais un peu plus tard, Voltaire re$ut de nouveaux
details. J'apprends dans le moment, ecrivit-il, que Maupertuis est a Vienne, en bonne sante. II fut depouill par les
paysans dans cette maudite Foret-Noire, ou il etait comme Don
Quichotte faisant penitence. On le mit tout nu; quelques
housards, dont un parlait franc.ais, eurent pitie de lui, chose
peu ordinaire aux housards. On lui donna une chemise sale,
et on le mena au comte Neipperg [Neuperg]. Tout cela se
passa deux jours avant la bataille. Le comte lui preta cinquante louis avec quoi il prit sur-le-champ le chemin de
Vienne, comme prisonnier sur sa parole : car on ne voulut
pas qu'il retournat vers le roi, apres avoir vu 1'armee ennemie,
et on craignit le compte qu'en pouvait rendre un geometre... 7
On permit a Maupertuis d'aller de Vienne a Paris, ou le
roi attendit qu'il retournat a Berlin. Mais Frederic, comme
Voltaire, avait traite 1'afFaire avec un manque de serieux qui
offusqua Maupertuis, et ce n'est, en effet, qu'en 1745 qu'il
oublia definitivement son ressentiment et s'etablit a Berlin,
ou il se fixa vite par son mariage avec une Prussienne.
L'arrivee de Maupertuis a 1'Academie de Berlin fut un vrai
succes; il y attira Euler, Meckel, Condillac, La Mettrie,
Lalande, et d'autres savants et ecrivains distingues8. Tout
alia a merveille jusqu'a ce que Voltaire, dont Maupertuis
trouvait deja quelque peu ennuyeux les sarcasmes perânts,
decidat en 1750 que lui aussi se fixerait a Berlin. Une querelle
5. BRUNET, op. cit., I, 90.
6. VOLTAIRE, Lettre A M. l'Abt>6 de Valori, 2 mai 1741. (Euvres completes,
70 vol. (Paris, 1785-89), XXXVI, 46. Cf. ibid., I, 20; BRUNET, op. cit., I, 91.
7. VOLTAIRE, (Euvres, XXXVI, 46-47.
8. BHUNET, op. eft., I, 110, 123, 137.
411
eclata entre les deux philosophes, ostensiblement au sujet de

ce que Voltaire qualifia de tentative ridicule de la part de
Maupertuis, c'est-a-dire de son essai de se servir du principe
de moindre action comme argument pour prouver 1'existence
de Dieu 9, mais querelle envenimee par une hostility personnelle de plus en plus profonde. Voltaire y parait sous un jour
des plus defavorables. Maupertuis essaya de s'en tenir au
fait; le but de Voltaire, c'eiait de gagner dans cet echange
de polemique et de faire paraltre son ennemi a la fois cretin
et canaille. Pour ce qui est de ses ecrits, il y reussit. Dans
sa Diatribe du Docteur Akakia (1752), il repr^sente Maupertuis comme un homme qui aurait, par exemple, douze cents
ducats de pension pour avoir parle1 de mathematique et de
metaphysique, pour avoir disseque deux crapauds, et s'etre
fait peindre avec un bonnet fourr6 10. (On avait peint le
portrait de Maupertuis en costume lapon.) II dit aussi qu'il
etait un ignorant ayant en recompense une imagination
singuliere , et un Arlequin d^guise en archeveque u.
Le roi fut choque de ces critiques sur le president de son
Academic, et Voltaire dut quitter la Prusse, rendant son
Ordre de Merite et sa clef de Chambellan, selon sa propre
expression : au Salomon du Nord, pour ses etrennes, les
grelots et la marotte 12. Voltaire ne pardonna jamais a
Maupertuis; de sa nouvelle demeure en Alsace, il continua
de Tattaquer13 et, dans L'Homme aux quarante 4cus, il le
ridiculisa meme apres sa mort en 1759.
L'interet que Maupertuis prit a la biologic date des premiers temps de sa carriere scientifique. Dans une des premieres conferences 14 qu'il soumit a 1'Academic des Sciences,
en 1727, il fit crouler la vieille croyance que les salamandres
etaient spontanement combustibles sujet singulier de
recherches a cette epoque; mais la conference contient aussi
une description d'experiences prouvant que la salamandre
est ovovivipare (c'est-a-dire que les oeufs peuvent 6clore dans
9. Ibid., I, 128-58. Cf. E. MACH, La Mecanique, traduction franâise,
Paris, 1925, IV, 2, p. 425 sqq.
10. VOLTAIRE, CEuvres, XXIII, 562; BHUNET, op. cit., I, 148.
11. VOLTAIRE, (Euvres, XXIII, 563, 565. Cf. Vie de Voltaire par
Condorcet , ibid., I, 231 sqq.
12. BRUNBT, op. cit., I, 152.
13. Dans Histoire du Docteur Akakia et du natifde Saint-Malo (1753).
14. Histoire de I'Acadtmie royale des Sciences, annte 1727, Mtmoires,
pp. 27-32.
412
et hors de la mere). En 1731, il publia un autre article excellent sur les differentes especes de scorpions15. II tait, en
effet, naturaliste de pure race, chose rare pour un math^maticien. Un ami decrivit sa maison a Berlin comme etant une
veritable menagerie, remplie d'animaux de toute espece, qui
n'y entretenaient pas la proprete. Dans les appartements,
troupes de chiens et de chats, perroquets, perruches, etc. II
fit venir une fois de Hambourg une cargaison de poules rares
avec leur coq. II etait dangereux quelquefois de passer a travers la plupart de ces animaux, par lesquels on etait attaque...
M. de Maupertuis se divertissait surtout a creer de nouvelles
especes par 1'accouplement de differentes races; et il montrait
avec complaisance les produits de ces accouplements, qui
participaient aux qualites des males et des femelles qui les
avaient engendres. J'aimais mieux voir les oiseaux, et surtout les perruches qui etaient charmantes 16.
Le meme ecrivain a decrit aussi comment M. de Maupertuis rassemblait avec beaucoup de peine et a grands frais
des animaux etrangers ou singuliers, pour observer leurs
allures et etudier en quelque sorte leur caractere .
II
Maupertuis ecrivit sa premiere oeuvre importante sur la

production de nouvelles especes pendant le sejour qu'il fit a
Paris pour reprendre des forces, apres le malheureux incident
de Molwitz; d'autres ceuvres suivirent, a Berlin. Avant d'en
parler, il faut etudier en raccourci 1'etat du probleme de
1'origine des especes a cette epoque, c'est-a-dire 1'etude dans
toute son ampleur de la raison pour laquelle tous les animaux
et toutes les plantes connus en sont venus a assumer leurs
formes actuelles.
II est utile de distinguer deux aspects de la question gen6rale. Par exemple, quand on donnait des explications dans
le sens du transformisme, deux problemes principaux se
trouvaient engages : 1 la preuve, d'apres la morphologic
comparative, la paleontologie et les experiences de reproduction, qu'un processus historique de transformisme avait, en
effet, eii lieu; 2 les theories sur les causes de ce processus,
une s6rie de lois a 1'aide desquelles on pouvait d&luire, et
15. Tbid., 1731, pp. 223-9.
16. BRUNET, op. cit., I, 179-80.
413
ainsi expliquer a la maniere classique, le processus evolutionniste, de meme que Ton explique les mouvements des planetes
par la mecanique newtdnienne. En effet, pendant un siecle
environ, avant que, dans la deuxieme moitie du xixe siecle, la
theorie du transformisme ne soit generalement acceptee, beaucoup de biologistes se rendirent compte que bien des elements
militaient en faveur du processus historique, mais ils n'etaient
pas satisfaits des essais contemporains faits pour 1'expliquer17.
Dans un sens tres general, sans application particuliere a la
biologic, les explications evolutionnistes sont parmi les plus
anciennement connues de la science. Les premiers cosmologistes grecs ont cherche a montrer que toute la complexite du
monde que nous observons derivait d'un etat plus simple.
Mais, pour une raison ou pour une autre, de telles explications avaient passe de mode et une grande partie de 1'evidence de base par laquelle la theorie du transformisme organique s'etait renouvelee au xvnr siecle, fut, en effet, rassemblee par des biologistes qui ne la consideraient aucunement
en termes de transformisme. Au xvn* siecle et aux premieres
annees du xviii", le probleme le plus important pour les botanistes et pour les zoologistes, c'6tait d'elaborer un systeme
efficace de classification. Cela occupa tout biologiste d'importance (a part les physiologistes), depuis Belon et Cesalpino
au xvi' siecle, en passant par John Ray, Tournefort, Tyson et
d'autres, jusqu'k Linne, dont le Systema Naturae en 1735
resuma toute la serie des essais anterieurs 18. Dans le Syst&me
de Linne, les lignes principales de la classification moderne
des plantes avec la nomenclature binome se trouvaient etablies; la classification zoologique de Linn6 reussit moins bien
et il fallut la modifier considerablement plus tard. Mais ce
qui nous concerne le plus, ce sont les principes. Linne montra
comment mettre precisement en rapport logique avec tous les
autres, chaque espece, genre, ordre et classe, et comment
identifier un organisme inconnu, lui donner un nom, et le
mettre dans le Systeme de la Nature.
17. Cf. E. GtrrfNor, Les Sciences de la vie aux XVII" et XVIII" siecles,
Paris, 1941; P. G, FOTHERGILL,
Historical Aspects of Organic Evolution,
Londres, 1952; et pour1 une bibliographic excellente voir C.-C. GILUSPIE,
Genesis and Geology, Cambridge, Mass^ 1951, pp. 23 sqq. Cf. aussi
J.-T. MERZ, A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century,
Loadres, 1903, II, et E.-S. RUSSEL, Form and Function, Londres, 1916.
18. Cf. H. DAUDIN, Etudes d'histoire des sciences naturelles, Paris.
1926, I.
414
Le but immediat des tentatives de Linne, c'etait de resoudre

le probleme pratique de ramener 1'ordre un monde divers
et chaotique; mais, comme ses contemporains, il pretendait
que la classification devait montrer non settlement un ordre
commode, mais le vrai ordre de rapports entre les individus.
C'est-a-dire que la classification devait etre non settlement
un systeme artificiel, mais aussi ce qu'on appelait un systeme
naturel , qui exprimat ce que Linne appelait 1'ordre
souverain de la Nature 19.
Get ordre souverain de la Nature , selon les conceptions
du xvn* et du xviii" siecle, possedait plusieurs caracteristiques
qui sont importantes, car elles formaient Farriere-plan des
theories evolutionnistes du xvme siecle.
D'abord, c'etait un ordre essentiellement immuable, dans
lequel toute chose et toute substance dans 1'univers, les astres
et les planetes dans leurs mouvements, les elements chimiques, les etres vivants, avaient chacun leur place et leur role
definis. Galilee et Descartes avaient detruit la conception particuliere de 1'ordre naturel derivee d'Aristote, mais la croyance
qu'il y avait un ordre stable dans 1'univers physique, ordre
qui etait reste sans changement depuis la creation, persistait
largement. De notre point de vue, la chose la plus importante
en rapport avec cet ordre fixe de la nature, c'est qu'on considerait que les especes biologiques etaient fixes et avaient des
limites definies. L'opinion de Linne etait que toutes les especes
d'organismes avaient et6 creees par Dieu des le commencement, et n'etaient pas susceptibles de changement sauf en des
deiails non essentiels20; a son avis, cette thôrie se trouvait
appuyee par roeuvre de Harvey, de Redi et de Swammerdam,
d^montrant que des organismes se reproduisaient par des
reufs. Dans la reproduction, c'etait la nature specifique qui
etait transmise : toute difference remarquee entre parent et
rejeton devait etre accidentelle et temporaire 21.
Un deuxieme trait de 1'ordre souverain de la Nature de
Linne, c'etait qu'il estimait que les organismes formaient une
echelle, s'etendant de 1'etre vivant le plus primitif, a peine
19. Caroli LINNAEI, Systema naturae, 13s ed., Vienne, 1767, I, 13.
20. Plus tard, comme resultat d'experiences avec 1'hybridation, Lannd
admit la possibilite de mutations limitês des especes dans nn genre
particulier, qui avait ele cree par Dieu. Sur toute cette question, ses
disciples Etaient beaucoup plus dogmatiques que Linne mme.,
21. Caroli LINNAEI, Philosophia botanica, Stockholm, 1751, p. 99. Cf.
DAUDIN, op. cit., I, 65. Cf. ARISTOTE, De generatione animalium, I, 21-22;
II, 1, 731 b 33-35; III, 3-4.
P. -L. Moreau de Maupertuis
415
susceptible de se distinguer de la matiere inorganique, au

degr le plus bas de 1'gchelle, en passant par les plantes, les
zoophytes (Sponges, etc.), les animaux, jusqu'a 1'homme, au
degr le plus lev&22. Cette idee d'une chelle de la nature
organique derivait, en premier lieu, d'Aristote 23. Tout d'abord,
on supposa l'6chelle lineaire; puis, lorsqu'on connut mieux
le probleme, on assigna aux plantes et aux betes des rameaux
diffgrents, y ajoutant des groupes subordonn^s ou des
rameaux plus petits, et ainsi de suite, tout comme s'il s'agissait d'Un arbre24. Get arbre devint les donnes > que les
theories de transformisme devaient expliquer. Cela peut se
voir dans la notion de gradation traitSe par 1'anatomiste
anglais, Edward Tyson, en 1699, dans son e"tude bien connue
du chimpanzS. Tyson dit qu'en faisant une elude comparative de cet animal et d'un singe, une guenon et un homme...,
on peut mieux observer les gradations de la nature dans la
formation des corps animaux, et les transitions faites entre
un animal et un autre 25.
Une troisieme caracteristique de 1'ordre de la Nature, c'elait
la croyance qu'il y avait dans 1'univers une harmonic. On
supposait qu'il y avait adaptation parfaite des parties d'un
organisme avec son ensemble, et aussi des organismes avec
leur milieu physique et de 1'un a 1'autre : par exemple, que les
plantes s'alimentaient du sol, les insectes des plantes, les
oiseaux des insectes, les oiseaux plus grands des oiseaux plus
petits, et ainsi de suite, le tout maintenant un gquilibre parfait de population26. Tous les savants se trouverent impressionne's par cette harmonic; Newton regarda la structure de
1'ceil de la mouche comme extant une preuve thôlogique
sMeuse; John Ray d^crivit la sagesse de Dieu, manifested
dans les CEuvres de la creation 27; la soi-disante preuve des
22. Cf. A.-O. LOVEJOY, The Great Chain of Being, Cambridge, Mass.,
1936.
23. Cf. ARISTOTE, Historia animalium, VIII, 1, 588 b 4; De gen. animal,
II, 1, 733 b 1-17.
24. Cf. DAUDIN, op. cit., I, 159-73.
25. Edward TYSON, Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sglvestris, Londres, 1699,
preface, p. vn. Cf. M.-F. Ashley MONTAGU, Edward Tyson, M.D., FJR.S.,
1650-1708, and the rise of human and comparative anatomy in England
(Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, XX). Philadelphia, 1943,
pp. 240-1.
26. LINN, Systema naturae, 6d. cit, I, 10-11, 17-18, 535. Cf. DAUDIN,
op. cit., pp. 174-5.
27. The Wisdom of God manifested in the Works of the Creation,
Londres, 1691.
416
causes finales, raisonnant de la montre a 1'Horloger Divin,

devint un des lieux communs de la thSologie naturelle,
comrae, par exemple, dans I'Analogy of Religion de Bishop
Butler, et dans les ecrits de Paley. Les moralistes du xvur
siecle firent appel a rharnionie de 1'univers physique pour
appuyer leurs vues sur la gouvernance morale du monde.
Une voix dissidente fut celle du docteur Johnson, martyre de
la goutte, qui ne trouvait aucune explication rationnelle de
la douleur physique.
Cette conception de 1'ordre, de Pharmonie dans le monde
biologique devint un probleme important pour les protagonistes d'explications evolutionnistes, car ils essayaient essentiellement de demontrer comment du chaos pourrait sortir
Pordre. Avant que Maupertuis et d'autres evolutionnistes
eussent mis a jour leurs idees, on trouvait cela impossible.
Cela se voit clairement dans le fameux discours de degr^s ,
prononce par Ulysse dans le Troilus and Cressida de Shakespeare. Apres avoir decrit comment
The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre
Observe degree, priority and place
et ainsi de suite, en descendant par Pordre naturel et social
tout entier, Ulysse dit :
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy. 28
S'il n'y avait pas un ordre exterieur a observer, la vie se
trouverait reduite a un chaos de lutte entre les individus. On
verra de quelle maniere Maupertuis, dans sa theorie du transformisme, se servait d'une telle lutte comme moyen pour
developper Pordre.
Cette comparaison entre les mondes social et naturel vient
bien a propos, car, a partir de la fin du xvne siecle, Popinion
sur la question d'un ordre fixe commencait a donner partout
des signes de modification. II est impossible d'examiner ici
le developpement de Pidee de progres historique, mais on
peut citer quelques evenements significatifs 29. La controverse
entre les Anciens et les Modernes > ouvrit toute la question
28. Troilus and Cressida, I, 3.
29. Cf. F. BRUNETI&RE, La formation de 1'idSe de progres au
xviiie siecle , Etudes critiques sur I'histoire de la litterature frangaise,
5 serie, 2 ed., Paris, 1896, pp. 183-350; J.-B. BURY, Th Idea of Progress, Londres, 1920; R.-F. JONES, Ancients and Moderns (Washington
417
de savoir si la pense'e et la civilisation s'etaient ameliorees;

et, en grande partie grace aux triomphes de la science, elle se
termina par une victoire retentissante pour les Modernes.
L'opinion elait an changement historique. Ceux qui e"crivaient
sur 1'histoire les sociologues , comme on les appelle
aujourd'hui eherchaient a formuler les lois du developpement social inspire'es directement par le modele des lois de la
meeanique de Newton. Us prenaient en consideration 1'influenee de P ambiance, de la nourriture, de la geographic, des
etudes, et ainsi de suite. Les ecrivains les plus influents en
matiere de progres historique et de transformisme biologique
se connaissaient tous tres bien; en effet, la plupart d'entre
eux dtaient des Francais. Voltaire, qui par son Siecle de
Louis XIV (1752) et son Essai sur les mceurs et I'esprit des
nations (1756), produisit les premiers essais valables dans le
domaine de Fanalyse des causes de 1'histoire, histoire philosophique comme il la nommait, connaissait particulierement
Maupertuis (comme nous 1'avons vu) et aussi Buffon 30. Diderot, qui traita de la sociologie et de la biologic, engagea une
controverse contre Maupertuis31. Le developpement parallele
des idees de progres social et de transformisme biologique est
un des aspects les plus se*duisants de toute 1'affaire et fournit
en me'ine temps un exemple frappant de Tinfluence dans plusieurs spheres differentes d'une forme particuliere de la
pensee ou de la maniere de regarder les choses, a un moment
donne.
Pour ce qui regardait la biologic, en meme temps que Linne
pr^parait son tableau magnifique d'un ordre souverain de
la Nature immuable, d'autres biologistes rassemblaient en
differents endroits les faits evidents qui s'opposaient a cette
conception des choses, surtout a 1'idee que toutes les especes
connues avaient et4 creees a la fois et que jamais aucuii
changement ne s'etait produit. Par exemple, la vraie nature
des fossiles dtait connue de certains ecrivains depuis Fepoque
University Studies, N. S., Language and Literature, VI), Saint-Louis, 1936;
W. K. FERGUSON, The Renaissance in Historical Thought, Boston, Mass.,
1948, pp. 68-112.
30. Cf. Thomas PENNANT, Tour on the Continent 1765, 6d. G. R. de
Beer, Londres, 1948, pp. 38-39 : Madame de Buffon told me that Voltaire was worth 113.000 livres a year and 700.000 in cash, that he
traded in cattle, insured ships, etc.; that his original estate was only
500 pr Annum.
31. Cf. MAUPERTUIS, (Enures II, 169-84, Cf. A. VARTANIAN, Diderot and
Descartes, Princeton, 1953.
418
classique &*, et Robert Hooke, ail xvir siecle, avait signal^ que
1'histoire des fossiles montrait, selon son expression, qu'il y
a eu aux epoques anterieures beaucoup d'autres especes de
creatures, dont nous ne pouvons trouver aucun exemple
actuellement; et il se peut qu'il y ait actuellement beaucoup
de nouvelles especes, qui n'existaient pas au commencement S3. Buff on donna un premier compte rendu de la
succession de formes differentes dans les couches geologiques,
dans son Histoire de la Terre (1744), et une description plus
etendue, dans les Epoques de la Nature (1778).
L'evidence experimentale que des changements he're'ditaires
pouvaient avoir lieu dans 1'organisnie eiait attested par les
horticulteurs, en particulier par ceux qui cultivaient la fraise
et la tulipe (1'industrie des oignons hollandais commenc,ait a.
se developper), et par les eleveurs de pigeons et de chiens,
comme aussi par les anomalies humaines, telles que 1'albinisme chez les negres (un cas fut cite par Tyson34) et la
polydactylie.
Se basant sur tout cela, Buff on, en 1753, dans 1'article bien
connu de son Histoire Naturelle au sujet de L'Ane , donnait un aperû brillant d'une conception ^volutionniste de
1'origine d'une meme souche de tous les animaux. Linne avait
classe le cheval (Equus cauda undique setosd) et 1'ane (Equus
cauda extreme setosa) comme deux especes du meme genre
(ou famille); pour Buff on, cela impliquait qu'ils devraient
avoir le meme parentage. Car, si Ton admet une fois qu'il
y ait des families dans les plantes et dans les animaux ,
ecrivit-il, que 1'ane soit de la famille du cheval, et qu'il n'en
differe que parce qu'il a degdnere, on pourra dire egalement
que le singe est de la famille de 1'homme, que c'est un homme
degenere, que l'homme et le singe ont eu une origine commune comme le cheval et 1'ane, que chaque famille, tant dans
les animaux que dans les vegetaux, n'a eu qu'une seule
souche, et meme que tous les animaux sont venus d'un seul
animal, qui, dans la succession des temps, a produit en se
32. Cf. P. DUHEM, Etudes sur Ldonard de Vinci, II, Paris, 1909, pp. 289,
307-8, 316-7, 323-4, 336-9; A.-C. CROMBIE, Avicenna's influence on the
medieval scientific tradition , dans Avicenna: scientist and philosopher, 6d. G. M. Wickens, Londres, 1952, pp. 97-99.
33. Robert HOOKE, A Discourse of Earthquake , Posthumous
Works, ed. R. Walter, Londres, 1705, p. 291.
34. Ashley MONTAGU, Edward Tyson, pp. 212-3.
419
perfectionnant et en ddgn6rant, toutes les races des autres

animaux 35. Si tous les organismes sent ainsi censes tirer
leur origine d'ancStres communs, et avoir subi des modifications dues au climat, & 1'alimentation, etc., au cours de
1'histoire gSologique, ceci expliquerait le fait, sur lequel se
basalt la classification, que, par exemple, un groupe comme
les vertelwe's tait une s6rie de variations sur un plan de base
commun. De ce point de vue, conclut Buffon, on peut regarder
tous les animaux comme appartenant a la meme famille, ce
qui n'empeche pas que dans cette grande et nombreuse
famille, que Dieu seul a conûe et tirSe du ndant, il y ait
d'autres petites families projete"es par la Nature et produites
par le temps... .
De par ces passages tire's hors du contexte, L'Ane se
trouve souvent citd en t&moignage de I'Svolutionnisme de
Buffon. Mais a lire 1'article tout entier, il est evident que,
quelles que fussent ses ide~es plus tard M, tout le but de la
discussion dans L'Ane , c'elait d'attaquer la conception
de families d'ou suivaient ces consequences radicales. En
effet il ne pr6sente la possibility du transformisme que pour
la detruire. Quant aux families de Linn6 premier objet de
son attaque37 il ecrivit : Ces families sont notre ouvrage ... la Nature ... ne connait point ces pr^tendues families,
et ne contient en effet que des individus.
Le seul terme de classification qui r^pondait a quelque
chose de rêl, c'6tait 1'espece, la succession d'individus susceptibles de se reproduire par croisement, engendrant ainsi un
rejeton fecond. L'usage d'expressions telles que la famille
pour toute autre chose que la commodity leur emploi pour
signifier une parente de descendance, etait reprehensible.
Malgr la presence chez les plantes, les animaux et les hommes, de variations hereditaires, il n'y avait aucune Evidence,
declarait Buffon, pour que ces dernieres aboutissent a de nouvelles especes, tandis qu'il y avait des difficultes considerables
a supposer que tel e"tait le cas, par exemple, le fait que la
plupart des variations observers etaient des monstruosites,
1'absence d'especes intermMiaires, et I'lmprobabilite qu'une
variation se produisit chez des individus de 1'autre sexe de
35. Histoire naturelle, Paris, 1753, IV, 381-2.
36. Cf. De la degeneration des animaux , ibid., 1766, XJV, 311-74.
37. Ibid., IV, 378; cf. Maniere d'eludier et de trailer 1'histoire naturelle , ibid., 1749, 1-20 sqq.
420
sorte qu'elle put se reproduire38. Quoiqu'on ne puisse pas

demontrer que la production d'une espece par la degeneration
soit une chose impossible a la Nature, conclut-il, le nombre
des probabilites contraires est si enorme, que philosophiquement meme on n'en peut guere douter.
L'Ane occupe ainsi une position curieuse dans 1'histoire de la theorie du transformisme, car quoique Buffon
avance la theorie expres pour 1'attaquer, il donne neanmoins
la le premier apercu systematique de la possibility qu'un procede historique du transformisme ait pu avoir lieu. Mais ce
n'est pas a Buffon qu'il faut attribuer 1'honneur d'avoir ete
a 1'origine de la theorie moderne du transformisme, c'est
plutot a Maupertuis, que cite Buffon et dont les vues sur ]a
variation genetique se trouvaient indubitablement le but
d'attaque par Buffon dans L'Ane . Maupertuis semble avoir
ete le premier qui trouva I'idee que tous les organismes tirent
leur origine, avec modification, d'ancetres communs; on trouve
cela dans son Essai de Cosmologie, ecrit avant 1741 quoique
public seulement en 1750. II avait public entre temps un autre
livre a ce sujet, avec le titre charmant, pour un traite scientifique, de Venus physique (1745). Dans ces O3uvres, Maupertuis presenta le premier une explication - systematique et
causative du processus transformiste.
Maupertuis abordait le probleme de 1'origine des especes
entierement du cote de la genetique, et il ecrivit la Venus
physique en premier lieu pour donner Fexplication d'un
phenomene specifique, et ensuite, en generalisant, de tout
phenomene semblable. Le phenomene specifique, c'etait un
garcon negre, albinos, amene a Paris de TAmerique du Sud,
qu'il avait vu dans le salon d'une dame a la fois elegante et
intellectuelle, en 1744. Vu que 1'ambiance dans laquelle la
curiosite intellectuelle s'exprime est aussi importante a 1'histoire de la science qu'a 1'histoire de la pensee en general, il
vaut la peine de rappeler qu'a cette epoque la science naturelle etait tres a la mode dans la haute societe frangaise.
Voltaire a decrit cette periode comme une epoque ou tout
honnete homme devait etre philosophe, ou une dame pouvait
38. Ces difficultes sont tout a fait suffisantes pour expliquer le rejet,
de la part de Buffon, dans L'Ane , du transformisme. On ne devrait
pas attribuer trop d'influence, comme par exemple le fait Guyenot
(op. cit., p. 397), a son exclamation : Mais non, il est certain, par la
revelation, que tous les animaux ont egalement participe a la grace de
la creation....
421
oser 1'etre sans ambages. II existe une histoire de deux dames

qui contracterent la passion de Peiude de 1'anatomie, ce qu'on
regardait comme extravagant, me'me en ces temps de pensee
avanc6e. Une certaine dame gardait dans son boudoir un
cadavre qu'elle disse'quait pendant ses heures de loisir; tandis
qu'une autre avait un dispositif special, fixe dans sa voiture,
de fagon a pouvoir diss&juer tin cadavre pendant de longs
voyages, tout comme d'autres dames d'un gout plus conventionnel auraient pu s'adonner k la lecture.
Maupertuis donna dans sa Vdnus physique une description
du petit negre, qui commence, en temoignant d'une sympathie tout humaine :
J'oublierais volontiers ici le phenomene que j'ai entrepris
d'expliquer : j'aimerais bien mieux m'occuper du reveil d'Iris,
que de parler du petit monstre dont il faut que je vous fasse
1'histoire. 39
II continue :
C'est un enfant de 4 ou 5 ans qui a tous les traits des
negres, et dont une peau tres blanche et blafarde ne fait
qu'augmenter la laidenr. Sa tMe est couverte d'une laine
blanche tirant sur le roux : ses yeux d'un bleu clair paraissent
blesses de I'^clat du jour : ses mains grosses et nial faites
resscmblent plutot aux pattes d'un animal qu'aux mains d'un
homme. II est n6, a ce qu'on assure, de pere et mere africains,
et tres noirs.
11 fait ensuite mention de m^moires au sujet d'autres negres
albinos, de ralbinisme parmi les merles, les corbeaux et les
poules, et d'autres changements hereditaires dans les plantes
acclimatees et chez les animaux apprivoises 40. Son but immediat est, done, de trouver une theorie de Theredite susceptible d'expliquer ces ph6nomenes, tout aussi bien que 1'heredite normale 41.
Pendant la premiere moitie du xvnr siecle la theorie dominante de la generation et de 1'heredite 42, c'etait celle de la
pr^formation , qui existait sous deux formes : dans 1'une,
on supposait rembryon derive entierement de 1'ceuf, la fonc39. MAUPERTUIS, (Euvres, II, 115-6.
40. Ibid., pp. 118-9.
41. Gf. C. ZIRKLE, The early history of the idea of the inheritance
of acquired characters and of pangenesis , Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, XXXV (1946), 139-40, 131.
42. Cf. GuvfiNOT, op. cit., pp. 208-312 ? E.-J. Ck)LE, Early Theories of
Sexual Generation, Oxford, 1980.
422
tion du male n'etant que de stimuler 1'ceuf a commencer a

se developper; dans 1'autre, avancee apres la decouverte par
Hartsoeker et Leeuwenhoek, en 1674-1677, du spermatozoide
resultat direct du nouveau microscope c'etait le germe
male seulement qui se transformait en embryon, la femelle
se bornant a fournir la nourriture 43. La theorie de 1'heredite
etait la meme, quelle que fut la forme de preformation
qu'on preferat. Considerons 1' ovisme , comme s'appelait
la premiere. On soutenait que chaque partie de 1'adulte contribuait a 1'ceuf par une particule, 1'oeuf etant ainsi un adulte
en miniature; pendant le developpement embryologique, les
particules ne faisaient que se dilater jusqu'a devenir des
parties a dimensions adultes. On supposait le premier individu
de chaque serie la femelle avoir ete cre avec toutes les
generations subsequentes dedans, 1'une a I'int^rieur de 1'autre,
telle une boite chinoise; dans le cours du temps, les generations ne faisaient qu'eclore et se developper, 1'une apres
1'autre. Selon 1' ovisme , les males de chaque generation ne
faisaient naitre aucun autre individu. L'autre forme de !a
theorie preformationiste, connue sous le nom de animalculisme , etait exactement pareille, sauf que le germe male
etait I'element operateur.
Maupertuis fit remarquer que ni 1'une ni 1'autre des formes
de la theorie preformationiste ne pouvait expliquer certaines
observations : la ressemblance avec les deux parents, ou avec
des ancetres eloignes mais pas avec les ancetres immediats,
les hybrides, et les nouvelles caracteristiques qui se montraient de temps en temps dans des plantes, des animaux et
des hommes44. Pour expliquer ces phe"nomenes, il dit, en
premier lieu, qu'il fallait supposer que 1'embryon se formait
de 1'union des germes des deux parents, le male et la
femelle 43. A cette epoque-la, le role des cellules dans la repro43. Cf. MAUPERTUIS, (Euvres, II, 21-24.
44. Ibid., pp. 64-71, 80-85, 93, 109-10. Cf. Lettres, XIV, ibid., pp. 267-82;
Lettre sur le progr&s des sciences, ibid., pp. 385-90. Cf. B. GLASS, Maupertuis and the beginnings of genetics , Quarterly Reviews of Biology,
Baltimore, XXII (1947), 196-210; P. OSTOYA, Maupertuis et la biologic ,
Revue d'Histoire des Sciences, VII (1954), 60-78.
45. II me semble, ecrivit-il, que Pidee que nous proposons sur la
formation du foetus satisfairoit mieux qu'aucune autre aux phenomenes
de la generation; a la ressemblance de 1'enfant, tant au pere qu'a la
mere; aux animaux mixtes qui naissent des deux especes differentes;
aux monstres, tant par exces que par defaut : enfln cette idee paroit la
seule qui puisse subsister avec les observations de Harvey. MAUPERTUIS, (Euvres, II, 93. Sur Harvey, cf. pp. 36-50.
423
duction etait mal connu, et il supposait que le germe etait

un produit fluide. II dit que chaque liquide seminal se composait de particules, chacune desquelles derivant d'une partie
donnee du parent. Par 1'union entre les parents, les deux
liquides se melangeaient et les particules se combinaient en
paires, une de chaque parent; la serie entiere de paires faisait
naitre 1'embryon. II y avait beaucoup plus de particules qu'il
n'etait necessaire pour former 1'embryon, par consequent, il
y avait un degre de largeur considerable dans la serie particuliere de caracteristiques actuellement heritee par le rejeton.
Maupertuis soutenait que c'etaient les membres normaux
de 1'espece, dans un leger degre de variation, qui se reproduisaient, parce que chaque particule avait un plus grand
rapport d'union avec les particules habituellement voisines,
qu'avec d'autres. Ces rapports d'union , dit-il, pouvaient
s'expliquer en supposant qu'il y avait une force d'attraction
qui fonctionnait entre eux, force analogue la gravitation de
Newton et a I'attraction suggeree comme explication de la
combinaison chimique 46. Mais on ne peut pas concevoir cette
attraction comme etant simplement une force physique. II
y a un instinct des animaux, dit-il, qui leur fait rechercher
ce qui leur convient, et fuir ce qui leur nuit , et n'appartient-il point aux plus petites parties dont 1'animal est forme?
Get instinct, ... ne suffit-il pas cependant pour faire les unions
necessaires entre ces parties? 47. Plus tard, dans son
Systeme de la Nature (1751), Maupertuis etait encore plus net.
Les elements propres a former le foetus, dit-il, nagent dans
les semences des animaux pere et mere : mais chacun extrait
de la partie semblable a celle qu'il doit former, conserve une
espece de souvenir de son ancienne situation; et 1'ira reprendre toutes les fois qu'il le pourra, pour former dans le foetus
la meme partie. 48
S'il se produit un defaut d'attraction, de sorte que des
combinaisons anormales de particules se fassent, le resultat
dans ces circonstances est une variation ou un monstre en
quelque sorte. D'abord, les particules venant d'ancetres normaux, avec le plus d'affinite pour 1'union normale, sont plus
nombreuses, dans le fluide seminal de la variele, que celles
46. Ibid., pp. 88-92; cf. pp. 139-41. Cf. NEWTON, Opticks, 4e ed. 1730.
Query, 31.
47. MAUPERTUIS, GRuvres, II, 31.
48. Ibid., pp. 158-9.
424
de la disposition nouvelle, de sorte qu'apres quelques generations, la variete peut retourner au type normal49. Mais si
les facteurs qui produisent la variety continuent a f onctionner
pendant plusieurs generations, alors les particules donnant
de nouveaux assemblages, avec des souvenirs des nouvelles
situations, en viennent peu a peu a surpasser en nombre
celles propres a faire les traits originaires, de faôn que la
variete soit etablie. Maupertuis suggera qu'on pouvait verifier cette theorie par 1'experience simple de trancher la queue
a des souris pendant plusieurs generations, pour voir s'il
serait possible de produire une race de souris sans queue. Les
particules de queue dans les liquides seminaux seraient peu
a peu reduits en nombre et finiraient par disparaitre.
Selon Maupertuis, les causes de ces nouvelles dispositions
de particules sont de deux sortes. D'abord, il y a des recombinaisons dans les liquides seininaux, produites par le
hasard , c'est-a-dire par certaines circonstances inconnues
fonctionnant dans les fluides mmes, dans lesquelles les
parties elementaires n'auroient pas retenu 1'ordre qu'elles
tenoient dans les animaux peres et meres 50.
D'autre part, des changements peuvent se produire du fait
du milieu, par exemple, par le climat, la nourriture, la mutilation. Etant donn6 la theorie de Maupertuis, les variationsvenant de ces deux causes seraient heritees. Parce que des
enfants negres nes de parents blancs se trouvaient incomparablement plus rares que des negres albinos, Maupertuis soutenait que le blane etait la couleur humaine primitive, et que
la chaleur de la zone torride fomenta les parties qui rendent
la peau noire 51. Un negre albinos etait ainsi un retour au
type primitif. Cette theorie tout entiere soulevait toutes les
difficult^s qu'il pouvait y avoir a accepter le recit de la
Genese sur la descendance de toute la race humaine partir
de deux parents originaux52.
Dans son Essai de Cosmologie et son Syst&me de la Nature,
Maupertuis se servit de cette theorie de Theredit^ pour donner
une explication generale de 1'origine des especes. Fai&ant la
supposition que de nouvelles dispositions des particules elementaires avaient eu lieu par le pass6 sans interruption, alors
dit-il : Chaque degr d'erreur aurait fait une nouvelle
49.
50.
51.
52.
Ibid.,
Ibid.,
Ibid.,
Ibid.,
pp. 119-21.
p. 148*.
p. 123.
p. 128.
425
espece : et a force d'ecarts repetes, seroit venue ia diversity

infinie #es anhaaux que nous Toyons aujourdlrai. *
Mais comment les nouvelles Tarietes s'adaptaient-eHes mi
miheu? Maupertuis n'etait plus a meme d'accepter la vieille
notion que Diea avail cre les organismes en adaptation parfaite a leurs conditions et a leurs besoms, et de plus, il dit
que Ton avait beaueoup abuse de la preuve des causes finales.
II y avait dans la nature une Evidence considerable de gaspillage et de mal-adaptation; et, tout en admettant que la gouvernance des choses se trouve eventuellement sous la gouverne
de la Providence, les causes qu'on est a meme d'observer
immediatement semblent etre de pur hasard. I/explication de
1'adaptation de Torganisme est a la fois une anticipation
remarquable de la theorie de la selection naturelle de Charles
Darwin, et la reflexion de Finfluence dÊmpedocle et de
Lucrece.
4 Mais ne pourroit-on pas dire, ecrit-il, que dans la combinaison fortuite des productions de la Nature, comme il n'y
avoit que celles ou se trouvoient certains rapports de convenance, qui pussent subsister, il n'est pas merveilleux que cette
convenance se trouve dans toutes les especes qui actuellement
existent? Le hazard, diroit-on, avoit produit une multitude
innonabrable d'individus; un petit nombre se trouvoit construit de maniere que les parties de ranimal pouvoient satisfaire a ses besoins; dans un autre infiniment plus grand, il
n'y auroit ni convenance, ni ordre; tous ces derniers ont peri;
des animaux sans bouche ne pouvoient pas vivre, d'autres
qui mamquoient d'organes pour la generation ne pouvoient pas
se peipetuer : les seuls qui soient restes sont ceux ou se trouvoient Fordre et la convenance; et ces especes, que nous
voyons aujourd*hui, ne sont que la plus petite partie de ce
qu*un destin aveugle avoit produit. M
En faisant valoir cette explication de la diversification des
organismes comme un processus qui avait eu lieu dans le
temps, Maupertuis tourna sens dessus dessous tout le probleme de Tadaptation. Ray et Linne" avaient essaye1 de pr6senter une image du monde organique tel qu'il avait et6 cree
par Daeu dans un etat d'harmonie autoregulatrice, chaque
creature s'adaptant parfaitement a son mode de vie; ceci
entraina la consequence que des cas de mal-adaptation cons53. Ibid., p. 148 *.
54. Esscri de Cosmologie, (Euvres, I, 11-12.
426
tituaient un embarras theologique et biologique considerable.

Pour Maupertuis, au contraire, Tadaptation ne s'achevait que
par un processus de lutte et d'elimination, en commeânt
par un monde en chaos, quand, comme dans le discours
d'Ulysse, each thing meets in mere oppugnancy . L'ordre
fut retabli par la loi de la jungle.
Un autre probleme que Maupertuis devait confronter, c'etait
d'expliquer 1'apparition d'innovations pendant le processus du
transformisme dans le temps, de telle faôn que les organismes montrassent non seulement une diversification dans
des milieux differents, mais formassent aussi une Echelle de
perfection ou d'amelioration. Tel est le sujet principal de son
Systeme de la Nature. Maupertuis s'interessait particulierement a 1'emergence de nouvelles facultes intellectuelles que
Ton pouvait observer en montant I'^chelle, depuis les creatures tres modestes telles que les vers, jusqu'au chien, au
singe et a rhomme. Son probleme 6tait d'expliquer Emergence de facultes intellectuelles en termes de sa thôrie de
1'heredite, a Taide de nouvelles combinaisons de particules
elementaires. II decida tout de suite qu'il etait possible de
faire deriver des qualites telles que la m^moire, rintelligence
ou le desir, d'une conception de particules, et de forces telles
que 1'attraction, destined seulement a manier la matiere inorganique; des caracteres intellectuels de ce genre ne trouvaient
absolument aucune place dans cette conception 55. Sa solution
du probleme suivit les lignes ^tablies par Leibniz 56.
11 fit remarquer que Descartes avait rendu insoluble le probleme, en etablissant une separation absolue entre les intelligences qui pensent et les corps qui s'etendent dans 1'espace.
Mais 1'existence d'animaux et d'hommes demontrait que la
pensee et 1'etendue pourraient etre toutes les deux des qualites de la meme substance de base. Les phenomenes intellectuels observes dans certains organismes pouvaient s'expliquer, dit-il, en dotant les particules elementaires d'un degre
de perception selon son expression57. Ensuite, tout
comme de nouvelles combinaisons des particules memes produisirent de nouveaux organes et fonctions du corps, de meme
les nouvelles combinaisons concomitantes de perceptions Elementaires donnerent lieu a de nouvelles facultes intellects. (F.uvres, II, 152-5.
58. Cf. BRUNET, Maupertuis, II, 391-408.
57. MAUPERTUIS, (Euures, II, 155M61; Cf. pp. 147-9, 157-49*.
P.-L. Moreau de Maupertuis 427
427
tuelles, car toutes etaient unies dans une seule et nouvelle

perception, qui etait quelque chose d'autre que la totality de
ses parties. En faisant usage de cette theorie, Maupertuis
chercha a expliquer le caractere hereditaire de qualites intellectuelles, telles que le talent pour les mathematiques dans la
famille Bernoulli et pour la musique chez les flls de J.-S. Bach.
II chercha aussi a expliquer I'origine d'organismes (la vie)
venant des combinaisons de la categorie la plus simple de
particules elementaires en des molecules plus complexes, et
1'evolution de 1'intelligence depuis les creatures les plus humbles jusqu'a rhomme. La seule exception qu'il fait au processus general, c'est chez 1'homme la connaissance de Dieu, le
sens du devoir moral, et le raisonnement abstrait, tous, a son
avis, d'un ordre different de 1'intelligence qui resulte des
perceptions reunies des Elements 58. II n'offrit pas d'expliquer 1'origine chez rhomme de ces facultes superieures, mais
se contenta de faire remarquer leur existence.
II serait absurde d'exiger de la theorie de Maupertuis qu'elle
soit plus qu'une analyse formelle remarquable de quelquesuns des problemes de base par rapport au transformisme. Si
Ton compare la richesse d'observations et d'exemples qu'on
trouve dans VOrigine des Especes de Charles Darwin, aux
ecrits de Maupertuis, ceux-ci paraissent bien na'ifs et un peu
minces. Mais dans 1'histoire du probleme, son travail est de
la plus haute importance. II n'est nullement exagere de dire
qu'il reorienta toute la question de I'origine, de la diversification, de 1'adaptation, et du transformisme emergeant des
etres vivants. Ses idees furent le point de depart des discussions de Buff on et de Bonnet sur ces problemes; elles influencerent Lamarck59, quelques-uines meme d'entre elles se
retrouveront, ayant sans doute parcouru une route indirecte,
dans la theorie genetique de pangenese de Charles Darwin,
et dans sa theorie de la selection naturelle, comme dans
la theorie de rhereditS par le souvenir, de Samuel Butler. En
dehors de la sphere immediate de la biologie, sa notion d'ordre
sortant du chaos et ses contributions a la theologie naturelle du transformisme, se trouvaient discutees avec acharnement par Voltaire, Diderot et d'autres 6crivains associes a
58. Ibid., p. 160*.
59. Cf. BRUNET, op. cit., pp. 166, 288-9, 326-36, et La notion d'6volution dans la science moderne avant Lamarck , Archewn, Rome, XIX
(1937), 37-43.
428
1'Encyclopedic franchise 60. Des questions semblables devaient

ressusciter lors de la potemique sur le darwinisme, an xix"
siecle.
Certes, Maupertuis ne trouva pas la solution du probleme,
il ne decouvrit pas une thôrie satisfaisante du transformisme. II fallait toutes les preuves detaille'es de Charles
Darwin pour convaincre les biologistes de 1'operation de la
selection naturelle; et il fallait Mendel et la geneiique
moderne pour eviter les difficult^ de Buffon et pour montrer
comment les variations h&reditaires les mutations pouvaient etre preserves dans la race, et ne pas etre fusionnees
de nouveau dans le type normal. Et on ne peut pas dire d'ailleurs que nous ayons encore trouve la solution de tous les
problemes suscites par Maupertuis.
Done, si nous pouvons retenir une des insultes de Voltaire,
et admettre la description qu'il fait de son ancien ami comme
un vieux capitaine de cavalerie travesti en philosophe 61,
nous pouvons aussi voir le Philosophe du Roi, maintenant
le chef de la cohorte evolutionniste, chevauchant avec une
volonte plus tenace, et d'une maniere plus Elegante, que lors
de Tattaque malencontreuse qu'il fit seul a la bataille de
Molwitz.
60. La pensê de Maupertuis sur la theologie naturelle arrivait a

exercer une influence importante. Dans son Examen de la preuve de
I'existence de Dieu employee dans I'Essai de Cosmologie (Histoire de
I'Academic des Sciences, Mtmoires Ann6e 1756, Berlin, 1758, pp.389-424),
Maupertuis avait discute le caractere relatif des assertions mathe"-*
matiques et metaphysiques, et avait refuse" k ces dernieres tout caractere
de necessite. En consequence de ce m^moire, les Acaddmiciens de Berlin
mirent au concours le probleme : Les rente's metaphysiques sont-elles
susceptibles de la mme Evidence que les rente's mathematiques, et
quelle est la nature de leur certitude? Le prix alia a Moi'se Mendelsohn
et Kant eut un accessit. C'est dans ce me"moire, ou 1'influence de Maupertuis apparait nettement, que Kant faisait pour la premiere fois sa
distinction entre analyse et synthese, et il en resta toujours au point de
vue critique y adopte. Voir MOSES MENDELSOHN, Abhandlung fiber die
Evidenz in metaphysischen Wissenschaften..., Berlin, 1764. Le memoire
de Kant suit, sans no,m d'auteur, pp. 67-99 : Untersuchungen iiber
die Dentlichkeit der Grundsatze der naturlichen Theologie und der
Moral, zur Beantwortung der Frage welche die Konigl. Akademie der
Wissenschaften zu Berlin auf das Jahr i763 aufgegeben hat. Cf. Kant,
Sammtliche Werke, &d. G. Hartenstein, Leipzig, 1867, II, pp. vii-vm,
281-309.
61. L'Art de Men argumenter en philosophic reduit en pratique par
un vienx capitaine de cavalerie travesti en philosophe (1753), dans
VOLTAIRE, (Euvres, XXIII, 581; cf. BRUNET, op. cit., I, 153.
19
The Public and Private Faces of Charles Darwin

When Charles Darwin's elder brother Erasmus read The
Origin of Species, he wrote off a letter of congratulations saying :
the d priori reasoning is so entirely satisfactory to me that if the
facts won't fit in, why so much the worse for the facts is my
feelings.1 Charles's response to this compliment is not recorded,
but he must have been surprised. He had tried in his book to
overwhelm the reader with facts. But his unscientific brother had
been struck by one characteristic that indeed gave power to Darwin's argument : its highly theoretical form. A second characteristic that now strikes us ishe kind of explanation used. This cut
through all the qualitative diversity that was making biological
theory so unmanageable and aimed to be strictly quantitative and
mechanistic.
The fact that The Origin of Species succeeded in making
evolution accepted while previous writers on the subject had failed
has raised a problem for historians of science. Neither the idea of
evolution nor the theory of natural selection to explain it was
original with Darwin. How did he alone manage to convince his
contemporaries? Some unsympathetic critics, in the nineteenth
as well as the twentieth century, have looked for the answer in
external circumstances. They have said that Darwin was lucky
with his timing, that his book appeared just at the moment when
his fellow scientists and the public were ready to accept it. They
have also accused Darwin of playing up to public opinion, and of
being unfair to precursors who had anticipated all his main ideas.
To these unsympathetic explanations of his success Darwin
himself made the obvious and just reply that scientists had been
persuaded to accept evolution for good reasons and that it was in
the main he who had persuaded them. He had spent over twenty
years, virtually since his return to England in the Beagle
in 1836, collecting evidence to test his theories. His organisation
i. The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin, London,
1887, ii. 234; see A.C. Crombie, Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European
Tradition, ch. 24 (London, 1994).
430
of the evidence was immensely superior to that of any of his

precursors. He might have added that the history of science is
littered with precursors including many of those that became
attached to himself who became interesting only when someone
after them succeeded where they failed. He could also have said
thad effective originality consists not only in having ideas but also
in knowing how to exploit their scientific consequences to the full.
Darwin is one of the most interesting of all scientific authors
for the modern reader because, in addition to his pleasant style,
he was himself intensely interested in all these questions of scientific method and scientific originality that were involved in his
work. For example he wrote to one of his sons in 1871 that he had
been speculating about what makes a man a discoverer of undiscovered things, and a most perplexing problem it is. He went on :
aMany men who are very clever much cleverer than discoverers , never originate anything. As far as I can conjecture, the
art consists in habitually searching for causes or meaning of everything which occurs. This implies sharp observation and requires
as much knowledge as possible of the subject investigated*.2 Darwin did not formulate any systematic philosophy of science, any
more than Newton did. Practising scientists rarely do. But both
left a trail of informal evidence, especially when forced to justify
particular scientific conclusions, showing how they actually used
ideas and why they believed their explanations to be scientifically
satisfactory and the alternatives unsatisfactory. The materials for
studying these questions in Darwin's case are all available in his
correspondence, note books and diaries as well as his published
works. They throw considerable light not only on how his mind
in fact worked, but also on how he came to make evolution scientifically acceptable.
One of Darwin's main criticisms of his predecessors not an
entirely just one was that they had relied too much on indirect
evidence simply for the occurrence of evolution, without looking
for an adequate explanation. So their conclusions remained superficial. He proposed a different approach : first to look for an
adequate cause of evolution, and then to see whether this was able
to account for the various different phenomina concerned. In the
introduction to the Origin he made public a description of how
2. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, ed. Nora Barlow, London, 1958,
p. 164
Charles Darwin
431
he ad set about this process of discovery. This leads us into

the central problems of his intellectual biography and scientific
method.
In the famous opening paragraph of the Origin, Darwin
presented himself as a thinker not at all corresponding to his
brother's praise, but, on the contrary, slow to use ideas until
forced to do so by patiently accumulated facts. He described how
he ad been struck while on the Beagle by the geographical
distribution of related animals in South America and the relation
of living to fossil forms ; how he thought these facts might throw
light on the origin of differences between species ; how, when he
got home, he collected still more facts. Eventually, he wrote,
"After five years" work I allowed myself to speculate on the
subject*. He added : I have not been hasty in coming to a decision*. The picture built up is repeated elsewhere. I worked
on true Baconian principles*, he wrote in the Autobiography,
and without any theory collected facts on a wholesale scale*.8
To Joseph Hooker he wrote in 1844 that he was determined to
collect blindly every sort of fact* bearing on the problem. But,
he admitted, At last gleams of light have come, and I am at
last convinced (quite contrary to the opinion I started with) that
species are not (it is like confessing a murder), immutable*.* Now
this was written in the same year that Darwin wrote the long
Essay on evolution by natural selection of which part was to be
read at the Linnean Society in 1858 together with A. R. Wallace's
paper on the same subject. The Essay was based on an even earlier
sketch. In many ways it is the clearest and most attractive presentation of Darwin's ideas. The Origin follows its argument
closely, simply adding much more supporting evidence. So when
Darwin wrote disingenuously to his friend Hooker about gleams
of light* having come, he had in fact already worked out his
theory in full detail.
No doubt Darwin chose to present this picture of his progress
as a shield against the accusation that evolution was merely speculative. Certainly this was the usual current view of the idea. His
published self-portrait also fitted in with some contemporary ideas
on scientific method, especially those of J. S. Mill. It was a
picture of a great discoverer that gave public satisfaction. But it
3. Ibfd., p. 119.
4. Life and Letters, ii. 23.
432
was largely false. In his private thoughts Darwin was a very

different character.
Darwin's correspondence is notorious for the number of contradictory statements it contains. But from his letters together
with the other evidence it is possible to build up a well-documented
intellectual biography. One thing becomes immediately certain.
((Collecting facts to give us ideas*, as Buffon had once put it, was
the reverse of Darwin's method. How odd it is*, he wrote to a
correspondent in 1861, that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any
service!*5 In 1857 he wrote to Wallace: I am a firm believer
that without speculation there are no good and original observations*.8 Let theory guide your observations*, he wrote with pleasant candour to another correspondent, but till your reputation
is well established, be sparing in publishing theory. It makes persons doubt your observations*.7 His son Francis, who worked
as his assistant during his last years, confirms this picture. He
wrote that his father often said that no one could be a good
observer unless he was an active theoriser. This brings me back
to what I said about his instinct for arresting exceptions : it was
as though he was charged with theorising power ready to flow into
any channel on the slightest disturbance, so that no fact, however
small, could avoid releasing a stream of theory, and thus the fact
became magnified into importance. In this way it naturally happened that many untenable theories occurred to him ; but fortunately his richness of imagination was equalled by his power of
judging and condemning the thoughts that occurred to him*.8
To be overflowing with ideas is surely the basis of all great
originality, whether in the sciences or the arts. Darwin's main
problem was not to get ideas, but to give his ideas effective scientific form in which they could be tested.
The autobiography of Darwin's discoveries shows that he was
driven to them all by his gifts for active speculation. Without
those gifts he might have remained simply an inspired naturalist,
a collector of unexplained information. He describes in his Autobiography his intense satisfaction as a boy with Euclid's clear
5. More Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin and A. C. Seward,
I/ondon, 1903, i. 195.
7. More Letters, ii. 323.
8. Life and Letters, i. 149,
Charles Darwin
433
geometrical proofs and later with the logical form of Paley's

Evidences for Christianity. Shortly before he sailed in the
Beagle he was much struck by an incident with Adam Sedgwick,
Professor of Geology at Cambridge, with whom he went on a
geological investigation in North Wales. A labourer at Shrewsbury
had shown Darwin a typically tropical shell found in a local gravel
pit. He told Sedgwick, but Sedgwick merely said that someone
must have thrown it there. He added that if it really did belong to
the area it would be the greatest misfortune to geology, as it
would overthrow all we know about the superficial deposits in the
midland counties*.9 Nothing before, Darwin wrote, had ever made
him so thoroughly realise that science consists of a structure of
laws and generalisations. Another experience on the same trip
struck him later. Sedgwick was looking for fossils. Neither of
them noticed the evidence of glaciation that is so characteristic
of the area a striking instance, as he said, of how easy it is to
overlook phenomena, however conspicuous, if you don't expect
them.
It was in geology that Darwin first learnt to be a scientist.
When he sailed in the Beagle in December 1831 he had had no
proper formal training in any scientific discipline. This was not
unusual at the time but it was at first a considerable disadvantage.
The piles of papers he brought back describing rough dissections
made on the voyage were almost useless. But he describes how
having to work out the geology of an unknown area taught him
the necessity of reasoning in advance and using predictions to
guide his observations. He worked out his whole theory of coral
reefs, which cleared up the whole question, on the west coast of
South America before he had ever seen a true coral reef. Only
when the B eagle* crossed the Pacific was he able to test the
theory by examining actual reefs.
Darwin's note books show that his work on evolution began
in the same highly speculative spirit. Like many great innovators,
like Kepler and Galileo with the new cosmology, he became convinced himself long before he had enough evidence to convince
others. He first considered the question at the very beginning of
his serious work as a biologist, when the Beagle called at the
g. Autobiography, pp. 69-70.
10. Charles Darwin and the Voyage of the Beagle, ed. Nora Barlow,
London, 1945, pp. 246-7.
434
Galapagos Islands in 1835." He was then twenty six. His attention, as he said later, was aroused by the way the animals and
plants varied slighttly from island to island of this group. In 1837
he opened his first note book on atransmutation of species*,11 and
wrote that the Galapagos species and the South American succession of fossils related to living forms were the origin of all his
views. In this note book he speculated optimistically on the unexplained phenomena evolution would be able to explain, and described the form of theory that would give the explanatory power he
was seeking. He shows that he was looking for a theory in which
the whole production of all past and present organic forms could
be shown to follow from given laws on the model of Newton's
theory of gravitation. This was before he had any clear idea of
what the laws of evolution might be. Thus he wrote : let attraction act according to certain law, such are inevitable consequences
let animals be created, then by the fixed laws of generation
such will be their successors*.12 These laws of change* would
then become the main object of study, to guide our speculations*.
Again and again in his writings he was to take Newtonian mechanics as the model for a scientific explanation. He had already
by 1837 connected the problem of extinction with that of adaptation. Then in 1838 he read Malthus on the pressure of population
against the means of subsistence. So, he concluded a famous autobiographical passage, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and
unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result would be the formation of a new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory with
which to work*.13 For the public he was writing at this time, in
the Journal of Researches, in terms of old concepts such as the
uniformity of action of the creative power* in producing similar
organisms in a given area.14
The prodigious labours in collecting facts to which Darwin
dedicated the rest of his life all stemmed from this new theoretical
source. Far from working ablindly*, without any theory* as
11. Life and Letters, ii. 5-8, i. 276; CHARLES DARWIN, Journal of Researches, London, 1839, pp. 474-5; Autobiography, p. 118; CHARLES DARWIN
and A. R. Wallace, Evolution by Natural Selection, ed. Sir. Gavin de Beer,
Cambridge, 1958, pp. 5-6, 25-26.
13. Autobiography, p. 120.
14. Journal of Researches, pp. 212, 469, 474,
Charles Darwin
435
if that were possible! all his observations bore on very precise

questions. The whole point of the vast labour he undertook in
collecting facts about the selection of domesticated varieties of
animals and plants by breeders was in order to explore the hypothesis that tnatural selection* had produced natural species and
evolution by an extension of the same process. As he wrote :
tl assume that species arise like our domestic varieties with much
extinction ; and then test this hypothesis bv comparison with as
many general and pretty well-established propositions as I can
find made out in geographical distribution, geological history,
affinities, etc. ....15 And this seems to me the only fair and
legitimate manner of considering the question by trying whether it explains several large and independent classes of facts*.1"
Far from being the classical example of a Baconian he tried
to paint himself, Darwin appears as an almost extreme exponent of
speculative thinking. In modern jargon the form of his thought
might be called hypthetico-deductive or retrodictive. He became puzzled by various observations and always used hypotheses
to probe the question with further observations. The test of his
hypothesis of evolution by natural selection was its range of application. He laid it out in the Origin like a legal argument, showing
why its premisses must be acceped and what followed from them,
stating the difficulties of the theory and demolishing them one by
one. He concluded that a theory that explained so much could not
be false.
Besides the form of Darwin's argument, the second characteristic that strikes the modern reader is liis conception of the
kind of material explanation of evolution that would de scientifically satisfactory. This aspect of his discussion of evolution
was a contribution to biological thought as important as natural
selection itself. Biology at that time was a field of confused issues.
Natural theology and untestable ad hoc notions about innate organic
drives towards improvement were mixed up with testable, analytical science. Darwin, and Wallace independently, made explicit the
criteria of scientific explanation by which they judged all attempts
to account for the facts. They took their stand on the model of
physics and aimed to be strictly mechanistic. In contrast with
15. Life and Letters, ii. 78-9.
16. CHARLES DARWIN, Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, and ed., London, 1875, i, 9.
436
biology, physics consisted of theories and laws that were testable,

allowed no discontinuities in their field of explanation, and eliminated mysteries. Darwin comparied his treatment of natural selection with contemporary physicists' treatment of theories of gravitation, light and the ether. The theory of evolution by natural
selection required two sets of laws : laws of heredity and variation,
and laws of survival. Darwin and Wallace contributed the second,
and for their law of natural selection they took an idea from the
social sciences and organised it on the phvsical model. Natural
selection was a statistical law of the redistribution of matter and
energy among competing consumers. It showed how increasing
order would be automatically generated from unordered variations
by the operation of purely mechanistic principles. Wallace compared its action to that of the governor of a steam engine. Thus
the built-in responses of a Cartesian mechanism would lead it to
multiply, evolve and inhabit the earth. Darwin and Wallace each
argued that natural selection, like a physical law, offered a sufficient and testable explanation of all the facts. Thus if it were
confirmed no other kind of explanation would be necessary.
Darwin has recently been criticised because in face of one
large difficulty, concerning the first set of laws required by his
theory of evolution, he later retreated from this position. According to the views on heredity and the best reasoning then available
the mathematical odds against successful variations being transmitted were overwhelming. He felt himself forced to admit that
hereditary variations might be produced by the direct action of
the environment, thus giving evolution a direction independent
of natural selection. Perhaps it was weak of him to make this
retreat. But it is asking a lot to expect him to have guessed that
the theoretical solution to his problem lay behind an innocent-looking title in the Royal Society Catalogue of Scientific Papers :
Experiments in Plant Hybridization by Gregor Mendel.
When we remember the state of biological theory, in the first
half of the nineteenth century, it is easy to appreciate the force
of Darwin's remark that the chief obstacle to the new ideas was
that of looking at whole classes of facts from a new point of view.
Yet he also admitted that biologists were waiting for a theory in
which all the diverse facts that were being accumulated would fall
into place. oLooking backs, he wrote to Sir Charles Lyell on
reading the last proof sheet of the Origin, I think it was more
Charles Darwin
437
difficult to see what the problems were than to solve them. 17 The
problem as he saw it was to make evolutionary theory quantitative
and predictive. Natural selection is still supported by far less
direct evidence than most contemporary physical theories. But few
biologists would deny its potential explanatory power. Not the
least part of Darwin's intellectual success was that he knew what
he was doing. Perhaps the most deceptive thing about his intellectual biography is that he reached his main conclusions so early.
He was fifty when the Origin was published, but he knew the
kind of evolutionary theory he wanted by the age of twenty-eight
and wrote out his first sketch of it at thirty-three.
17. Life and Letters, ii. 170,
The best part of human language, properly so called, is derived from

reflection on the acts of the mind itself.
(Coleridge, Biographia literaria xvii)
20
The Language of Science
May I say first how honoured I am to be invited to participate in this Forum,

and at the same time how alarmed I feel at doing so 'dans 1'espace
francophone', with all the accompanying hazards for someone whose native
tongue is English. I should like to say also that I am, as for myself, entirely in
sympathy with the aim of the Forum 'de montrer la vitalite de la science dans
1'espace francophone', except that I should put the question differently. The
vitality of scientific thought in French is after all evident to all the world. The
practical problem is rather that of maintaining the language as a medium of
communication in a world increasingly, and it seems unstoppably, dominated
by English. This has great dangers for English itself, which risks becoming
disintegrated into a diversity of dialects scattered round the globe, as classical
Latin was disintegrated after the fall of the Roman empire into the different
Romance languages of Europe. The beauty and sophistication achieved by
these languages, pioneered by Italian and reaching a new dominance with
French, may seem to offer some hope for a disintegrated English; but only
after many, many generations. I hope that at least in Europe we will find a
different solution which will maintain our languages more or less as they are. I
believe that a monoglot Europe would be a cultural disaster, and that thought
of all kinds, including scientific, would be enormously impoverished by having
effectively only one language. A language after all embodies and expresses a
way of thinking, the perspective of a whole cultural experience. To translate
that perspective from one language into another requires far more than
knowledge simply of the languages themselves, as anyone who tries to
translate even between English and French very soon discovers. There are of
course great practical problems, in the world as it is becoming, both for French
and for English and indeed for other major languages. Events tend to go the
way of least resistance. We must keep our nerve.
Concerning more specifically the subject of this Table ronde, I shall
comment briefly, and inevitably impressionistically, on some historical relations between language and scientific thinking and their changes. History
illuminates the present and no doubt the future, and we must take a long view.
When we speak today of natural science we mean a specific vision, created
within Western culture, at once of knowledge and of its object, at once of
440
science and of nature. We can trace this vision to the commitment of the
ancient Greek philosophers, mathematicians and physicians, for whatever
reason, to the decision of questions by argument and evidence as distinct from
custom, edict, authority, revelation, rule-of-thumb or whatever else. In this
way they developed the notion of a problem as distinct from a doctrine, and
they initiated the history of science as the history of argument in a search for
principles at once of nature and of argument itself. They discovered two
fundamental principles from which the essential style of Western scientific
thinking has followed: those of exclusive natural causality, and matching that
of formal proof. The marvellous and fascinating scholarship which during
recent decades has so much enriched our knowledge of other major ancient
cultures has not, so far as I can see, revealed there a grasp of these principles,
whether in Babylon or Egypt, India or China, or Central America. They had
impressively ingenious and inventive technologies, including highly original
mathematical technologies as in Babylonian arithmetic and astronomy, in an
ambience of myths scarcely related to technical knowledge. In Western terms
they had no system of rational science.
The idea that the style of thinking arises from the intellectual and moral
commitments which provide the expectations, dispositions and memories of a
culture in an invitation to treat the history of science as a kind of comparative
historical anthropology of scientific thinking. This must be concerned before
all with people and their vision; we must learn to look at once with and into the
eye of the beholder. Styles of thinking and making decisions, established with
the commitments with which they began, habitually endure as long as these
remain. Hence the structural differences between different civilisations and
societies and the persistence in each of a specific identity, continuing through
all sorts of changes. It is an important question, as we look at the
westernisation of the globe, to ask at what levels general moral and intellectual
commitments are altered, and what remains the same.
Restricting the question to an historical anthropology only of Western
science, language is an indispensable guide both to theoretical ideas and to real
actions. Any language embodies a theory of meaning, a logic, a classification
of experience, a conception of perceiver, knower and agent and their objects,
and an apprehension of existence in space and time. We need to ask how
language conditioned scientific thinking and was in turn altered by it. We may
distinguish three levels: those of the structure of a language itself, of general
conceptions of the nature of things expressed in it, and of particular theories.
The language of causality for example is closely related to conceptions of
causality. It is hard to say which came first, but there is an obvious structural
conformity between the grammar of subject and predicate found in all
European languages, and the ontology of substance and attribute developed
most systematically by Aristotle. Aristotle's logic imposed on Western science
for many centuries a form of demonstration, relating cause to effect as premise
to conclusion, expressing this grammar and ontology of subject-predicate,
substance-attribute. His conception of causality was structural and non-
The Language of Science
441
temporal and was focused on the definition, which explained both the
behaviour and the existence of something by its defining attributes. Parallel to
this the Greek mathematicians exploited the speculative power of geometry by
imposing upon the phenomena at once its deductive logic and an appropriate
geometrical model delineating for each its form in space. Thus they reduced
the phenomena of visual perspective to the properties of the straight line and
the angle, of astronomy to the properties of the sphere, of mechanics to the
relations of weights determined by the properties of the straight line and the
circle. They could then develop their immediate research into the phenomena
purely theoretically within the model itself. The geometrical conception of
causality was again structural and nontemporal, focused on space and place,
not on the sequence of events in time.
These conceptions, and specifically Aristotle's logic of subject and predicate, were to become a major obstacle to the medieval and early modern
natural philosophers and mathematicians of Latin Christendom who, in a
different intellectual context, came to develop a new conception of causality
based not on static structure by on rates of change. They came to express
causality in the language not of subject and predicate but of algebraic
functions, and they devised a new Latin terminology to express such
fundamental quantities as velocity, acceleration, instantaneous velocity, and
so on. These quantities were defined in the fourteenth century by mathematicians in Paris and Oxford, and their terminology was to be used by Galileo and
Newton. This new functional causality of classical physics related events as
sequences in time brought about only by contact or through a medium or field;
the disputed choice between these was based on wider ontological beliefs.
Starting with Roger Bacon causality came to incorporate a theology of laws of
nature laid down by the Creator: for as Dante put it 'dove Dio senza mezzo
governa, la legge natural nulla rileva (where God governs without intermediate the natural law has no relevance)' (Paradiso xxx. 122-3). Created law reestablished the stable predictability of nature within Hebrew-Christian
doctrine. Newton was to combine this theology with Euclid in calling his
fundamental dynamical principles 'axioms, or laws of motion' (Principia
mathematica). Such language clearly arises not from the interior of natural
science but from its intellectual context.
Must science in different linguistic cultures always acquire differences of
logical form, and must a language always impose its ontological presuppositions on the science developing within it? The technical language of science has
often been developed partly to escape from just such impositions, and to
detach a specific scientific meaning from misleading analogies coming from its
source in common vocabulary. The word current', wrote Michael Faraday, 'is
so expressive in common language that, when applied in the consideration of
electrical phenomena, we can hardly divest it sufficiently of its meaning, or
prevent our minds from being prejudiced by it' (Experimental Researches in
Electricity, i, London, 1839, p. 515). With the aid of William Whewell he
devised a new terminology to fit the exact context of electro-chemistry, for
442
example replacing the word 'pole', inconveniently suggesting attraction, with

the neutral 'electrode'. From the fourteenth century radically new technical
languages were gradually built up, precisely symbolised first for mathematics
and music. From the end of the fifteenth century the mathematical symbols +,
, x, -f-, > , < , , / , = etc. came into use to represent operations or relations
previously written out in words. Later in the seventeenth century Francois
Viete began to systemise the essential general principle of modern algebra by
designating quantities by letters, distinguishing knowns, unknowns, powers
and so on. Thus was launched the universal numerical language of mathematics, and during the same period that of music, both transcending all national
boundaries and transparently comprehensible within their explicit limits.
Their message was precision and economy, but of course precision alone is
useless without content, which comes from scientific or artistic imagination.
This depends on vision beyond such limits, and it is vision controlled by a
precise critique that establishes, usually in advance of any particular research,
the kind of world that is supposed to exist. This in turn established the kind of
explanation in science, and presentation in art, that will give satisfaction
because the supposedly discoverable has been discovered. But all this needs to
be expressed in our natural languages, and that leaves our problem there just
as I indicated at the beginning of these brief comments.
Note: see my Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition
(London, 1994).
21
Some Historical Questions about Disease
Under this very general title I want to talk briefly about the relations between
medical science, the medical art of healing, and conceptions of disease. But
first it may be helpful to put this question within a much larger context of what
we may call a comparative historical anthropology of science and medicine,
focusing on people and their vision, and their circumstances both human and
physical.* The central history of science as I see it is the history of argument:
an argument initiated in the West by ancient Greek philosophers, mathematicians and physicians in their search for principles at once of nature and of
argument itself. Of its essence have been periodic re-assessments, varying
considerably in different historical contexts, of its presuppositions about the
nature of what exists, about scientific cogency and validity, and about the
intellectual, practical and moral justification of the whole enterprise. Of its
essence also have been its genuine continuity, even after long breaks, based on
education and the study by any generation of texts written by its predecessors;
and its genuine progress both in scientific knowledge and in the analysis of
scientific argument with its various logical, experimental and mathematical
techniques. It has been a subtle historical question to assess what has
continued through different periods and societies and what has changed.
We can characterise the vision and the circumstances of people at different
times and places by what we may call their commitments. It is their intellectual
and moral commitments, involving their expectations, dispositions and
memories, that give to people their vision and their style of thinking and of
making decisions. We can distinguish two kinds of intellectual commitment in
the history of science:
1 Commitments to conceptions of nature and its knowability to man, within
the context of general beliefs about the nature of existence, and of man in
See A.C. Crombie, Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition (London, 1994)
with 'Historical Commitments of biology', The British Journal for the History of Science, iii (1966)
97-108, 'Historical Commitments of European Science', Annali dell'Istituto e Museo di Storia delta
Scienza di Firenze, vii. 2 (1982) 29-51, 'Pari sur le hasard et choix dans 1'incertain' in Medecine et
probabilities, ed. A. Fagot (Paris, 1982) 3-41; and for various questions indicated below
Hippocrates, ed. W.H.S. Jones, i (London and New-York, 1923), P. Lain Entralgo , Mind and
Body: Psychosomatic Pathology (London, 1955), La Historia Clinica, 2nd ed. (Barcelona, 1961),
O. Temkin, 'The Scientific Approach to Disease: Specific Entity and Individual Sickness' in
444
mental and bodily health or disease: such conceptions tend to be strongly

conditioned by language.
2 Commitments to conceptions of science, that is of scientific methods of
argument, inquiry and explanation.
From the interaction of these two intellectual commitments come the
perception of problems, as distinct from doctrines; conceptions of
acceptable questions to put to a subject-matter as well as of acceptable
answers; and to a considerable extent the direction of attention and
inquiry towards certain types of problems and of solution and away from
others. They establish in advance the kinds of problem that will be seen
and so they foster certain kinds of discovery, and at the same time they
establish the kinds of explanation that will give satisfaction because the
supposedly discoverable has been discovered. Scientific change comes
from a combination of scientific experience, especially of failure, with
rethinking of basic principles, again with a deep involvement of language.
Any language itself embodies a theory of meaning, a logic, a classification
of experience in names, a set of presuppositions about exists or seems to
exist behind experience. Language mediates man's experience of nature
and of himself; hence philology, both of traditional languages and of the
technical languages of the sciences and arts (given precision in symbols
first in mathematics and music), can be an indispensable guide to
theoretical ideas and real actions.
3 A third kind of commitment giving people their vision is to conceptions of
what is desirable and possible, in view of evaluations of the nature,
purpose and circumstances of human life. Such commitments concern
right human action, what should and can be done, both morally, and
scientifically and technically in the sense of being capable of achieving
their ends. To this kind of commitment are linked dispositions, both of
individuals and of societies, generating habitual responses to events:
dispositions to expect to master or to be mastered by events, to change or
to resist change both in ideas and in practices, to accept or to reject the
possibility of truth within supposed error and hence to integrate within
reasoned argument both agreement and disagreement. Here education
and experience can furnish options for the choice of a different future.
4 Besides these three kinds of intellectual and moral commitment giving
people their vision there is a fourth kind of commitment involving their
circumstances. This is the commitment to the physical and biological
environment in which they find themselves: they may try to change it, but
first it is given.
A comprehensive comparative historical anthropology of science and
medicine would address itself to questions at the different levels indicated by
Scientific Change, ed. A.C. Crombie (London, 1963) 629-58, T. McKeown, The Rise of Modern
Population (London, 1976), W.H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, (Oxford, 1977), M.D. Grmek,
Some Historical Questions About Disease
445
these commitments, some given by nature, some made by man. Thus at the
level of nature there is historical ecology: the reconstruction of the physical
and bio-medical environment and of what people made of it, from both written
records and physical remains, as in striking recent work on palaeopathology,
palaeodemography, palaeobotany, and the history of climate.
Reconstruction at the levels of people and their vision requires the exegesis
of evidence including in its scope religion, law, politics and so on far beyond
simply scientific thought. At all levels historical questions demand in the
historian exact scientific and linguistic knowledge (as well as much else of the
intellectual, visual and other sorts of culture that mediate human experience)
to enable him to control the view of any present recorded through the eyes and
language of those who experience it.
It does not have to be demonstrated here that the road to understanding of
our human condition at any time, including the present, lies as much through
the study of history as through that of the nature and people immediately in
front of us. This is as true of scientific and medical thinking and practice as it is
of any other of our activities and habits. Styles and forms of thinking and
behaving become established with the commitments with which these began
and they persist as long as they remain. Hence the structural differences
between different civilisations, cultures and societies. Of course there is
development, change and occasionally revolution, but more often than not
retaining a structural similarity throughout from habit and education. One
may cite the persistent differences between China and Europe, and the
persistent similarities between Russia before and after 1917. Hence the need
for an historical dimension for a true perception of ourselves as human beings
in all our cultural diversity, and for an educated understanding of change itself.
This, like most human behaviour, begins in the mind.
I come now to medical science, medical art, and conceptions of disease. We
may start with the definition of medicine given in the Hippocratic Epidemics (i.
11): The art consists of three things: the disease, the patient and the physician.
The physician is the servant of the art. The patient must help the physician to
combat the disease'. The historian must study all three. They present the
subtle question of the relation of medical science to medical art, with goals that
are different, but intricately tied together.
Medical science aims through the analysis of its subject-matter at theoretical
understanding to be expressed in general statements. Since antiquity it has
been concerned with two main activities: (1) the observation and recording of
regularities of symptoms and their course through the duration of diseases:
this is found in the case-histories developed by Egyptian and Babylonian
physicians; but the whole method was transformed by (2) the search for
causes, introduced by the Greeks under the name of Hippocrates. The Greek
Les Maladies a I'aube de la civilisation occidentale (Paris, 1983), A. Fagot-Largeault, L'homme

bio-tthique (Paris, 1985).
446
physicians, in accordance with their general habit of mind, madephysiologia,

knowledge of nature, essential to the science and art of medicine. There was
really no general conception of nature before the Greeks, anyhow in the
Western ancient world. There was an often detailed discernment of empirical
connections and regularities, in medicine as in astronomy (which involved
sophisticated mathematical predictions), but no conception of nature as a
system of exclusive natural causality, and no associated form of argument for
demonstrating causal connections by an explicit logic. 'Each disease has a
natural cause' wrote the author of the Hippocratic Airs, Waters, Places ( 22),
'and nothing happens without a natural cause'.
With the Greek search for causes in medicine came the concept of the
natural norm (e.g. the balance of the four Galenic humours), after all an
abstraction, and of disease as deviation from that norm. Causes of disease
came to be conceived of as of two kinds: (1) physiological disturbances of the
body or psychological disturbance of the soul arising from within; and (2)
effects on the patient of external agents. Conceptions of these two kinds of
cause, whether of internal disturbances or of agents that may invade the body
as specific entities, have provided the substantial programme for Western
medicine ever since. Diseases are identified and distinguished by the regular
appearance of specific symptoms, given names, and allocated causes within
current medical theory. This raises historical questions of its own in the
identification of diseases recorded from the past. Some like Thucydides's
plague of Athens correspond in symptoms to no known current disease, while
others like diptheria, bubonic plague and smallpox have persisted through the
centuries with recognisably the same diagnostic symptoms, which became
attributed to persisting specific microbial pathogenic agents.
Medical art by contrast with science aims not at generalities by at restoring
and preserving the health of particular individuals. To do that of course it has
used the results of medical science, but it cannot treat an individual patient as
simply an example of general phenomenon. It is concerned with an individual
person who is unique and irreplaceable by any other person. It shares this
concern rather with the traditional religions than with analytical science.
Where it differs is in the means. Its relation to medical science is like that of
other practical arts, aiming at the composition of an effect, to their
corresponding sciences: of painting for example to optics, or of the gaining of
political ends to the analysis of rhetorical manipulative skills. Here the
complexities begin. A politician acting with no regard to truth may still provide
for the public good; a physician acting on his best understanding of scientific
theory may propel his patients to disaster; while desired effects may be
produced with what may seem to be no real understanding of causes, as for
example by traditional Chinese or Indian medical practices and by Western
psychiatry. Theories of disease have obviously affected treatment and are not
neutral or innocent, whether physicians looked like Thomas Sydenham for
specific drugs to act on specific diseases as Cinchona acts on malaria or for
specific remedies as did Edward Jenner and Louis Pasteur, or they insisted as
447
did others like Francois Broussais and some modern physicians dealing with
degenerative disorders and neuroses that diseases are abstractions and that it is
the patient who has to be treated.
It is the perception of the unique and responsible human individual that has
given rise to the ethical questions of Western medicine. People who saw their
lives within at once a physical and a moral cosmology took corresponding
attitudes to disease and calamity and choice of all kinds, stressing natural
causation or moral responsibility according to their beliefs. Job saw his
ailments within an entirely moral context and complained because, as a just
man, he should be so unjustly afflicted. In the ancient world there was an
immediate contrast between Greek medical thinking, which might reduce sin
to sickness, and Hebrew moral thinking reducing sickness to sin. This contrast
continued through the Christian middle ages, and it persists in some legal
attitudes to crime, and in the whole conception of diminished responsibility as
a pathological as distinct from a moral phenomenon. Boundaries have been
drawn differently in different periods and circumstances between the normal
and the abnormal: for example deaf-mutes were classified as imbeciles until it
was discovered by science in the seventeenth century that they were dumb
because they could not hear. Again personal attitudes to suffering and death
through illness, as to hard decisions like that of Thomas More which could lead
only to martyrdom, have differed fundamentally according to general beliefs
about human existence and its purpose. It made a difference whether the
prospect was Christian hope or simply extinction, and whether ultimate death
was of the body or of the soul.
It was through the form of argument and procedure developed through the
Hippocratic case-history, then the recognition of statistical regularities, and
eventually the clinical trial, that medical art and science found a way to come
together to relate individual illnesses to the general explanations reached by
scientific analysis. The Greeks remained purely qualitative in the regularities
they observed and the prognoses made from them. It was in the different
practical circumstances of the commercial expansion of late medieval Europe
that mainly Italian mathematicians began to grasp the idea of quantitative
expectation for such purposes as insurance and the division of profits. In the
seventeenth century Blaise Pascal, Christiaan Huygens and Jakob Bernoulli
showed with great mathematical sophistication how, from the regular numerical frequencies present in adequate numbers of things, to stabilise uncertain
expectations as probabilities. This offered a new mastery of rational choice and
action in a whole range of subject-matters, from the sciences of nature to
commerce and politics. In medicine John Graunt in his Natural and Political
Observations . . . made upon the Bills of Mortality (1662) set out explicitly the
fundamental discovery that statistical regularities appeared in large numbers
of things which were lost in small numbers. This was a phenomenon new to
science whose recognition came to transform scientific thinking. Starting from
the records of births and of deaths with their symptoms kept for London for
over half a century, Graunt arranged for a further regular recording of
448
information about all diseases and related data in the area, insisting that his
helpers should record only observed symptoms and other facts and should
ignore opinions, medical or otherwise. He saw that stable mortality rates, sexratios etc. could be translated immediately into approximate probabilities a
posteriori. This then provided for inferences in two directions: directly to the
probability of a possible event coming about, and conversely to the probable
causes of events already brought about. In this way he made an analysis of the
proportions of deaths in a population to be attributed to different causes,
distinguishing chronic or endemic diseases from epidemic diseases, and so on.
The next century and a half witnessed through the work of Buff on, Daniel
Bernoulli, Thomas Bayes, Laplace and many others an elaboration and
sophistication of statistical analysis and theory of probability without which the
quantitative study of disease would scarcely have been possible.
This began seriously with the institutional facilities provided by the modern
hospitals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here, by means of new
techniques of medical examination, quantitative data were accumulated for
describing individual illnesses in new and precise detail; by observing many
cases of the same disease standards and limits of normality were established;
clinical symptoms were related to physiology and pathology; a scientific
taxonomy of disease was developed. All this followed from a statistical
approach to the normal and the abnormal, and it led eventually to an
experimental approach to clinical science. The science and art of medicine
would scarcely be what they are now without the controlled therapeutic trial
for exploring the actions of drugs, and the statistical methods that have
revealed such hitherto obscure connections as that between smoking and
cancer. The essential scientific insight came here from R.A. Fisher's book The
Design of Experiments (1935).
I will conclude with three final historical questions. (1) The appearance of
disease as recorded historically must always depend on the eye of the
beholder: we must then examine the credentials, beliefs and methods of
observation of the witnesses who describe and identify diseases, as well as the
symptoms they describe. Likewise we must examine the eye of the modern
historian: we are inevitably alerted to phenomena of the past by current
interests, and that also we must monitor critically. The same applies to high
modern technology: could quantitative epidemiology itself invent diseases
existing only it its own results? (2) Our enthusiasm for medical science, with its
fascinating intellectual problems, can blind us to more mundane aspects of
medical history. For example the death rate in England, where full records
have been kept from the beginning of the eighteenth century, declined steadily
from that time, but the discoveries of causes of disease and the therapies
introduced over two centuries had no general effect on that steady decline
before the general use of sulphur drugs and antibiotics about fifty years ago.
The cause of the decline was not medical science but hygiene (town drains,
water supply), improved general nourishment, and public health. This might
have some bearing on some developing countries and groups in industrialised
449
counties now afflicted with AIDS. Like most aspect of human behaviour, the
problem begins in the mind. There is a case for making intensive studies both
of the historical ecology and of the historical anthropology of Africa, which
presents special problems for historical investigation because of the relative
lack of documentary evidence. (3) Lastly this: the self-critical European
tradition, which includes science and is unique among the cultures of the
world, has generated a capacity, albeit often uncertain, to see Western values
through alien eyes and all in comparison with each other. Hence Western
anthropology, and historiography of thought of many kinds and in many
contexts and periods. To do this is of course an immensely difficult exercise in
critical imagination, empathy and reasoning. We may the more easily grasp
other mentalities by exploring the scientific origins and development of our
own from the Greek search for principles at once of a subject-matter and of
argument about it. A true comparative intellectual anthropology must look
not only with, but also into the eye of the beholder.
The choice: to be conscious participants in, or victims of, historical

tradition.
22
Historians and the Scientific Revolution
To a generation made more aware than any previous one of the

division between science and the humanities, there is a particular interest
in the treatment of the ' Scientific Revolution' by the earliest modern
historians who discussed the history of science!. As observers living during
or just after the event, writers of ' philosophical history' from Francis
Bacon to Voltaire set out to give a systematic account of the meaning,
for an educated person, of the scientific movement as a revolution in
ideas, methods and attitudes. They had inherited the techniques and conceptions of the historical discipline that had been developed by scholars
since the fifteenth century, contemporaneously with modern science itself,
and they used them to show how science had emerged in the history of
civilization. In doing so, they gave analyses both of the nature of scientific thought itself, as they saw it, and also of the conditions that favoured
or discouraged its progress, that have left their mark on subsequent conceptions of the history of science down to the present day.
The writer who summed up the whole of this early conception of the
scientific revolution as an historical event was Voltaire2. A product of the
1
An earlier version of this paper was published in Endeavour, xix (1960) 9-13. On the historiography
of science, cf. also O. Temkin, An essay on tbt usefulness of medical history for medicine, ^Bulletin of the History
of Medicine*, xix (1946) 9-47, The study of the history of medicine, Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital*, civ
(1959) 99-106, and Scitntfic medicine and historical research, ^Perspectives in Biology and Medicine*, iii (1959)
70-85; F. N. L. Poynter, below, n. 28; H. Butterfield, below, n. 20; A. C. Crombie, Science, Optics and Music in
Medieval and Early Modern Thought, chs. 1-2 (London, 1990) and Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European
Tradition, chs. 1-2, 22 (London, 1994).
2
Cf. J. H. Brumfitt, Voltaire Historian (Oxford, 1958); G. Lanson, Voltaire, 5eme ed. (Paris, 1924).
452
age in which both modern science and modern historiography reached

maturity, Voltaire was not only the first systematic historian of civilization and the first to make extensive use of the comparative method, but
also the first historian to treat the history of science systematically as
part of the history of civilization. In this, his conception of history stands
in striking contrast with that of nineteenth-century historians, who concentrated their attention almost entirely on political and constitutional
events, a limitation from which historians have by no means yet entirely
freed themselves. Voltaire became known on the Continent as the most
influential popularizer of Newtonian physics and of English empirical
philosophy. He interpreted the scientific movement to educated Europe
and projected it in a conception of history that, in spite of criticisms to
which it is open both in general and in particular, still forms a recognizable part of the historical outlook of a large part of the educated Western world.
The view of the scientific movement that Voltaire incorporated into
his systematic reconstruction of history came in the first place largely
from the publicists of contemporary science, especially Francis Bacon
and Fontenelle, and from the great scientists themselves. But he also
made use of a view of history that had originated with the humanist historians of fifteenth-century Italy and had become modified by science,
during the seventeenth century, in the controversy between the Ancients
and Moderns. Voltaire presents a picture of the historical consciousness
of an age in which all educated people shared a common background in
the humanities and in which the ' new philosophy', of experimental and
mathematical science, had recently become established as an essential part
of general culture. He gave expression to what many thought, or were
ready to think. The view of history into which all the early modern historians fitted the origins of modern science was based on a specific conception of a great revival in European civilization between the fifteenth
and the seventeenth centuries. This conception not only established a
periodization of history, into Ancient, Medieval and Modern, that has
become conventional; it made value judgements and offered explanations
of the course of events that carried with them formulae for future advance.
By Voltaire's time the conception had gone through three main stages of
development: humanist, religious, and scientific.
The concept of a renaissance in the fifteenth century, after a thousand
years of ' dark ages' following the fall of Rome, was developed during
the period of the Renaissance itself3. In the fourteenth century Petrarch,
3
See W. K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five centuries of interpretation
(Cambridge, Mass., 1948); H. Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, 2nd ed., i (Princeton,
1966).
453
inspired by a romantic admiration for pagan Latin literature, the city of

ancient Rome, and the ideal of republican virtue, had divided history into
'ancient' (antiqua) before Constantine's adoption of Christianity, and
' modern ' (nova) the long succeeding period of barbarism and ' darkness ' (tenebrae) that had continued to his own time. From the end of
the fourteenth century, humanist historians of art and of the Italian city
states, especially of Florence, added to this periodization the notion of a
recent revival, the beginning of which they often placed in the thirteenth
century.
The term ' middle age' (media tempestas) was introduced in the fifteenth century in Germany in reference to Nicholas of Cusa4. From the
first, this conception of antiquity, a middle period of barbarism, and a recent revival was far from merely descriptive; it made an historical judgement that influenced contemporary action. For example, the fifteenth-century Florentine historian Leonardo Bruni, who first explicitly used this periodization in political history, made the recent political progress of his city
an explicit revival of the model of republican Rome. In 1483 Flavio Biondo, a papal secretary and student of the monuments of ancient Rome, defined the chronological boundaries of world history, with A.D. 410 to A.D.
1410 as a period different from those preceding and following it. Other Italian historians, especially Machiavelli, were even more precise in their use
of history for contemporary political purposes. Similarly, historians of the
arts, in presenting the contemporary development of painting, sculpture
and literature as a revival of classical models, wrote to encourage the new
styles. They knew little and cared less about medieval Latin literature
and the Gothic art beyond the Alps. For example Filippo Villani, writing
at the end of the fourteenth century, mentions no poets for nine centuries
before Dante and no artists before Cimabue, who recalled art to nature,
and Giotto, who not only can be compared with the illustrious painters
of antiquity but surpassed them in skill and genius 5 . Practising artists
like Ghiberti and Alberti were content to accept this account of their
relation to the past, and in the sixteenth century it became finally established in Vasari's phrase for the new style, la rinascita. The whole movement was crowned, he wrote, by that excellence which, by surpassing the
achievements of the ancients, has rendered this modern age so glorious 6 .
The humanist historians made the conception of a revival, leading
on to new conquests, an explicit part of their historical thinking, but half4
P. Lehmann, Vom Mittelalter und von der lateinischen Pbilologie des Mittelalters, Quellen und
Untersuchungen z. lateinischen Philologie des Mittelalters, v. i (1914); G. Gordon, Medium Aevum
and the Middle Age (Society for Pure English Tract No. xix; Oxford, 1925); M. L. McLaughlin, Humanist
concepts of renaissance and middle ages in the tre- and quattrocento*, Renaissance Studies, ii (1988) 131-42;
Crombie, Styles. . . Ch. i above n. i. For Petrarch see Ferguson, op. cit., p. 8.
5
Quoted by Ferguson, op. cit., p. 21; see pp. 9-21.
6
Ferguson, op. cit., p. 64; see pp. 59-67.
454
consciously it had for long been an element in the restless mentality of

the ' barbarians' who had entered into the lands and heritage of the
western Roman Empire. It began to find expression by writers in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries who could observe the effects on intellectual life of the translations being made, from the Greek and Arabic
into Latin, of scientific and philosophical works, and who were witnessing
also a modest technical revolution in the development of machinery for
harnessing the power of wind, water, and draught animals, and in building, glassmaking, metallurgy, warfare, .surgery, navigation and other
activities. According to John of Salisbury, in the twelfth century, the
French scholar Bernard of Chartres used to compare us to dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants, so that we see more and farther than they
can, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because
we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature 7 . A century
later, Roger Bacon could assert the progress of knowledge more confidently :
We of later ages should supply what the ancient lacked, since we have entered
into their labours, by which, unless we are asses, we can be aroused to better things;
because it is most miserable always to use old discoveries and never to be on the
track of new ones Christians should ... complete the paths of the unbelieving
philosophers, not only because we are of a later age and should add to their works,
but so that we may bend their labours to our own ends 8.
The activist attitude that is essential to the research mentality, prepared not simply to contemplate knowledge gained from past writers but
to use it as a base for further advance, can already be seen in formation
in the writings of scholastic natural philosophers and mathematicians
such as Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Thomas
Bradwardine or Nicole Oresme. It was the motive behind the numerous
proposals for scientific method already characteristic of the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries, as they were to become more abundantly of
the seventeenth. Moreover, Roger Bacon anticipated (with differences)
his namesake Francis in offering an analysis of the causes of error 9
and of the stagnation of science in contemporary Christendom, including
among the most important the neglect of mathematics and experimental
science 10 and the under-valuation of true learning. The low opinion of
7
loannes Saresberaensis; Metalogicon libri iv, iii-4, recognovit... C. C. J. Webb (Oxford, 1929).
The same remark is quoted by Alexander Neckam, De naturis rerum libri duo, i. 78, ed. T. Wright
(London, 1863); cf. R. Klibansky, Standing on the shoulders of giants, Isis , xxvi (1936) 147-98
Roger Bacon, Opus Majus, ii. 15, ed. J.H. Bridges, iii (London, 1900) 69-70.
Ibid., i.
10
Opus Majus, vi, De scientia experimental!, ed. Bridges, ii. On this cf. A. C. Crombic,
The relevance of the middle ages to the scientific movement, in Perspectives in Medieval History ,
ed. K. F. Drew and F. S. Lear (Chicago, 1963) 35-57, and with }. D. North, Bacon, Roger, in
Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York, in press); M Schramm, Aristotelianism basis and obstacle to scientific progress in the middle ages, History of Science , ii (1963) 104-9.
455
medieval culture held by the humanists was based on literature and

Gothic art rather than on science and philosophy, in which at first they
took little interest. But both the scholastic and the humanist reformers
applied the same activist formula to history, taking an attitude to the
past determined by the needs and aspirations of the present and providing a programme for future action. Such an attitude seems to be a
deeply persistent element in modern European historical thinking.
To the humanist doctrine of the Renaissance, the religious controversies of the sixteenth century added a new interpretation that was
to become a second important element in later accounts of the rise of
modern science. To justify their own position, both humanist and Protestant writers agreed in seeing the immediate past as a revolting spectacle of ignorance, superstition and corruption, polluting the pure stream
of style or doctrine that had existed in an earlier, ideal period of their
choice. Throughout the first two centuries of Protestant historiography, Wallace K. Ferguson has written in his recent study, The Renaissance in Historical Thought11, a medieval culture meant scholasticism, and scholasticism meant a peculiarly pernicious state of ignorance.
The Catholic Erasmus attacked medieval education, to which he attributed the decline. The English Protestant Bishop John Bale, in 1548
described the great scholastic writers as that obscure and ignoble breed
of sordid writers of sentences and summulae, the mere recording of
whose names should move generous and well-born minds to nausea 12 .
Ferguson continues: Taking over the Erasmian conception of the close
causal relation between the revival of learning and that of religion... the
Protestant historians blandly assumed that any improvement in learning
must have led to a clearer perception of truth and therefore must have
aided the acceptance of Protestant doctrine 13 .
The connection between humanism, Protestantism, and the rise of
modern science became established in historical doctrine at the end of
the seventeenth century, when each movement was seen as part of a
common revolt against authority the authority of scholastic education
which still dominated the universities, the authority of Aristotle and Galen. In each case the reformers appealed from authority accepted in the
immediate past, to an earlier state of things which they held belonged
to a tradition that had been broken. The humanists turned from the
' dog' Latin and barbarous jargon of the scholastics to the pure style of
classical literature, especially of Cicero. The Protestants appealed from
the institutionalized sacerdotal guidance of the medieval Church to the
11
12
P. 51.
Quoted by Ferguson, ibid., p. 51

" Ibid., p. 54.
456
plain text of Scripture and private judgement of its meaning, such as

they held had existed in the primitive Church. The humanist-trained
scientific reformers appealed first from medieval ' corruptions' to the
pure Greek text of Aristotle, Galen or Ptolemy, and later from these
texts to direct observation of nature such as had been practised in Greek
times. The complete doctrine was succinctly expressed by the American
writer Cotton Mather in his American Tears upon the Ruines of Greek
Churches published in Boston in 1701: Incredible darkness was upon
the Western parts of Europe, two hundred years ago: learning was
wholly swallowed up on barbarity. But when the Turks made their descent so far upon the Greek churches as to drive all before them, very
many learned Greeks, with their manuscripts, and monuments, fled into
Italy, and other parts of Europe. This occasioned the revival of letters
there, which prepared the world for the Reformation of Religion too;
and for the advances of the sciences ever since 14 . The same form of
the doctrine making a close connection between the literary revival, the
Reformation, and the rationalism of modern science is found in Pierre
Bayle's Dictionary, published in 1697 and a source of many of Voltaire's
historical opinions.
The need of the innovating parties in the literary and religious controversies to define their position in relation to the immediate past affected the historiography of science rather by their general attitude to
the past than by an special interest they had in science. Humanist editors
of Archimedes, Hippocrates or Aristotle were more interested in establishing a good Greek text or making a good Latin translation than in
the mathematics or biology the texts contained. There are cases of literary scholars such as Conrad Gesner being led by by the text to the study
of nature, and in Gesner's case to becoming a first-rate observer and
naturalist. Similarly, the sixteenth-century reconstructions of the original
text of Archimedes required mathematical as well as linguistic skill, and
in this tradition the young Galileo himself was led to reconstruct Archimedes' methods before extending them to new scientific problems15. But
humanist interest in Greek science, as in other aspects of ancient literature, had its origin in a backwards-looking admiration for antiquity;
before it looked forwards it had to become something more than merely
literary.
Early in the seventeenth century, a new group of scientific commentators upon history arose with a completely different outlook upon the
past and the future. These writers, Campanella, Francis Bacon, Descartes and their followers, mark the third major stage in the conception
14
15
Pp. 42-3; Ferguson, op. cit., p. 55.

Galileo Galilei, La Bilancetta (1586), Opere ed. naz., i (Firenze, 1890) 211-6.
457
of history that was to find full expression in Voltaire. They combined

a full measure of contempt for the medieval past with an entirely new
estimation of the importance of the scientific revival. Like their predecessors, they made their interpretation of history in the interests of a
contemporary movement of which they were spokesmen. But, except in
so far as these had prepared the ground for science, they were in general
unsympathetic towards the humanist and religious reformers, whose
controversies they were inclined to find either uninteresting or unintelligible. They turned their eyes to the future and saw a favourable prospect. They held that the new science was something essentially different
from anything found in classical antiquity, let alone the barbarous middle
ages; something which they themselves were adding to civilized life. Their
attitude was similar to that taken by some sixteenth-century artists to
the relation of their own work to classical models. Writing more and
more in the vernacular, the new scientific propagandists stressed the material benefits brought by science and rational technology, most famously by the invention of printing, gunpowder, and the mariner's compass16,
and by the general advance of industry, commerce, geographical discovery and medicine. The source of power over nature, as Francis Bacon was most emphatic in pointing out, was knowledge. The age began
to bristle with works on scientific method and with schemes for scientific Utopias such as Campanella's City of the Sun (1623) and Bacon's
New Atlantis (1627). Explanations of the past stagnation and present
progress of science were used to provide the formulae for future advance. Common to them all was the stress laid, in varying degrees, on
experiment, mathematics, and the usefulness of science. All were optimistic about the success that could be expected from the right organization and methods. This optimism about the progress of humanity
through natural knowledge was accompanied by a renewed hope in nature itself. In its light the sixteenth-century doctrine that the powers of
nature and mankind were in decay was rejected, later to be replaced by
the eighteenth-century belief in their limitless perfectibility17.
The most influential of the early seventeenth-century analyses of
the history of science and of contemporary science were undoubtedly
those by Francis Bacon and Descartes. Their accounts were comple16
Cf. R. F. Jones, Ancients and Moderns, and ed. (St. Louis, 1961).
See J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress (London, 1920); Jones, op. cit.; H. Baron, Towards a
more positive evaluation of the fijteenthcentury renaissance, Journal of the History of Ideas , iv
(1943) 21-49, The ' Querelle ' of the Ancients and Moderns as a problem for renaissance scholarship,
ibid. , xx (1959) 3-22; V. I. Harris, All Coherence Gone (Chicago, 1949). Cf. G. Hakewill, An
Apologie of the Power and Providence of God in the Government of the World, or An examination
and censure of the common errour touching natures perpetuall and universall decay, 3rd ed., revised
and augmented (Oxford, 1635).
17
458
mentary and comprehensive, and they became the starting points for
disagreement as well as for development. Bacon stressed experiment and
utility; Descartes stressed mathematics and utility. This combination
provided the standard two-fold formula for future progress. Both writers used history, according to the commonplace repeated in Sir Walter
Ralegh's phrase, to teach by examples of times past, such wisdom as
may guide our desires and activities 18 . In both, the key to their conceptions of scientific method can be found in their view of the history
of science. In his peremptory references to the history of philosophy,
Descartes described how he found that only in mathematics, pure and
applied, had there been any grasp of truth 19 . His analysis of scientific
method was aimed at realizing the ideal of a universal mathematics
embracing all the sciences. Bacon went into the history of science much
more thoroughly than Descartes and offered the first detailed modern sociological and historical analysis of the conditions for, and causes of,
scientific progress and decline.
In the Advancement of Learning (1605) Bacon divided the study
of human history into three kinds, civil, ecclesiastical, and literary, each
with its own sources and problems. In his discussion of the third kind,
he set out a remarkable design for an intellectual history that would not
only include the origin and development of scientific thought in different
societies, but would also relate scientific progress and decay to the disposition of the people and their laws, religion and institutions. Bacon
had called for something which he found lacking in his time, a history
of the general state of learning to be described and represented from
age to age, as many have done the works of nature and the state civil
and ecclesiastical; without which the history of the world seemeth to
me to be as the statua of Polyphemus with his eye out; that part being
wanting which doth shew the spirit and life of the person.
He wanted something more than the small memorials of the schools,
authors, and books in the divers particular sciences and barren
relations touching the invention of arts or usages. What he wanted from
intellectual history, he wrote, was a just story of learning containing the
antiquities and originals of knowledges, and their sects; their inventions,
their traditions; their diverse administrations and managings; their flourishings, their oppositions, decays, depressions, oblivions, removes; with
the causes and occasions of them, and all other events concerning learning, throughout the ages of the world; I may truly affirm to be wanting.
The use and end of which work I do not so much design for curiosity,
or satisfaction of those that are the lovers of learning; but chiefly for a
18
19
History of the World, book ii, ch. xxi, 6 (London, 1614) 537.
Descartes, Regulae ad directionem tngfftii, iv; Discours de la methods, i.
459
more serious and grave purpose, which is this in few words, that it will
make learned men wise in the use and administration of learning 20 .
This was in effect a plea for the study of the history of science, and
characteristically, its conclusions were to be applied in contemporary
problems.
Bacon complained in the preface to The Great Instauration that
in the intellectual sciences there was no search for new knowledge. They
stand like statues, worshipped and celebrated, but not moved or advanced)). The mechanical arts had shown some progress, just because
they were by their nature in close touch with experience and practice.
Experiment, as he said famously, was essential for the a inquisition of
nature 21 ; it was the essential method of discovery; but in the past it
had not been properly conceived. In the Novum Organum (1620) he
described how, on the one hand, philosophers and men of learning had
failed to test their theories critically by a comparison with systematic
experiments and observations; whereas, on the other hand, the large
number of experiments made in the course of technological practice provided few of most use for the information of the understanding22. Philosophers had spun out general systems with too little reference to facts,
while mechanics were only interested in particular technical problems
and did not search for causes. Bacon believed that they should combine
their interests. His new experimental science was a method of acquiring
knowledge of causes, tested by designed experiments, that would provide
both explanations of nature and a rational basis for technology.
Bacon's analysis, in the Advancement of Learning and the Novum
Organum, of why science had not progressed in the past provided later
historians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with their basic
views on the subject. He said that the sciences had fluorished during
only three short periods of history: among the ancient Greeks, among
the Romans, and, recently, among the nations of Western Europe. But
even in those relatively favourable periods scientific progress had not
been as great as it should have been. He gave several reasons for this.
Besides the lack of understanding of the experimental method and of an
effective approach to the ' inquisition of nature ', he emphasized the
lack of opportunity for a proper scientific education, of a scientific profession commanding proper respect and position, and of government
20
Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning, book ii. See P. Smith, A History of Modern Culture, i (London, 1930) 255-7; H. Butterfield, The history of science and the study of history, Harvard Library Bulletin , xiii (1959) 329-47; P. Rossi, Francis Bacon: From magic to science (London,
1968).
21
Instauratio magna, in Francis Bacon, Worlds, collected and edited by J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis
and D. D. Heath, i (London, 1864) 126, 132, iv (1860) 14, 20; cf. Novum organum, i. 98.
22
Novum organum, i. 99; see i. 78-105.
460
interest in science. Scholars had concentrated their main attention on

other disciplines, the Greeks and Romans on moral philosophy and the
moderns on theology. There were no full-time scientists, except perhaps
for some monk studying in his cell, or some gentleman in his country
house 2 3 . In the universities natural philosophy was studied only at
an elementary level as a preparation for some other profession; there
was no proper scientific education, including the essential training in
experiment, and there was no scientific profession in which men could
specialize in particular sciences and earn a proper living. This state of
affairs hath not only had a malign aspect and influence upon the growth
of sciences, but hath also been prejudicial to states and governments 24 .
In fact, Bacon's blunt appraisal remained largely applicable down to
the university reforms and the development of a scientific profession in
the nineteenth century. He said that the goal of natural science had not
been appreciated: to enrich human life with new discoveries and powers. The right method of discovery had not been understood: designed
experimentation, ordered in relation to axioms. There had been too
great a respect for antiquity: but true antiquity belonged to our
own times a 2 5 , with all the experience of earlier centuries behind them.
There was too much complacency with existing knowledge and technical achievements, and too great a readiness to assume that nature was
inscrutable and could not be mastered or understood. There was the fear
that progress in science and philosophy would end in assaults on religion 2 6 . Above all there was a lack of rational optimism.
Bacon's attitude to the history of science, his claim that his analysis
had not only exposed the mistakes of the past but also provided the
means of avoiding them in the future, above all his emphasis on the past
neglect of experiment and the dangers of philosophical systems and his
optimism for the future of scientific discovery and its applications, all
deeply influenced the outlook of the founders of the Royal Society and
contributed to the emotional energy behind their enterprise. They criticised Bacon for his neglect of mathematics, but they soon remedied that
themselves; they also respected Descartes. The same combination of beliefs and attitudes can be found in the Academic royale des Sciences. In the
literary war between the Ancients and Moderns, by the end of the seventeenth century the Moderns were able to use the recent progress of
science to gain total victory over the humanist rearguard and to convince
the educated public of the superiority of modern over ancient achieve23
24
25
26
Ibid., i. 80; see i. 78-79.

Advancement of Learning, book ii; cf. book i, and Novum organum, i. 90-91.
Nov. org., i. 84; cf. i. 80-81, 85, 103-5.
Ibid., i. 89; cf. i. 92-94.
461
ments in the arts and sciences. The scientific revolution was seen as the
most important part of the recent revival of the West. Is it not evident,
John Dryden wrote in 1668, not in a scientific work but in his Essay of Dramatic
Poesy, in the last hundred years (when the study of philosophy has been the
business of all the Virtuosi of Christendom), that almost a new Nature has
been revealed to us? that 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? so true it is, that nothing
spreads more fast than science, when rightly and generally cultivated17.
During the second half of the seventeenth century and the first half
of the eighteenth, the new science radically changed the type of culture
of educated Europeans. It had been demonstrated that experimental and
mathematical analysis could solve interesting problems with useful applications. Theology and literary culture began to give way as dominant interests to a concern with the aims, methods, achievements, applications
and consequences of science. Science began to develop as one of the
learned professions, earning respect and sometimes reward, especially
in France where the government gave direct support. Scientists acquired
a new sense of solidarity among themselves. This is evident both in Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society, published in 1667 partly to
justify the policy of the Society,- and in the Eloges, obituary biographies
of great scientists of all nations, which Fontenelle wrote in the exercise
of the office of permanent secretary of the Academie des Sciences, which
he held from 1699 till 1741. Fontenelle popularized the scientific movement; books on botany were written for young ladies and on mathematics for the general public; Voltaire created literary events with his
exposition of English empirical philosophy and science in his Lettres
philosophiques, or Lettres sur les Anglais (1734), and with his exposition
of Newton's natural philosophy. Leading writers on many subjects
Locke, Hume, Vico, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot, Condorcet, Goethe studied science seriously and explored the possibility of extending
its methods, the only sources of certain knowledge, to all aspects of human life, behaviour, and history. Just as science had discovered the fixed
laws of nature, so they would try to discover those governing human behaviour and the progress and decline of civilizations. And just as scientific knowledge could be applied in technology, so they wrote history not
simply to interpret society but also to change it.
27
See P. Smith, A History of Modern Culture, 2 vols. (London, 1930-34); L. M. Marsak, Bernard de Fontenelle: the idea of science in the French Enlightenment, Transactions of the American
Philosophical Society , n. s. xlix. 7 (1959); above n. 17. Cf. W. Wotton, Reflections upon Ancient
and Modern Learning (London, 1694).
462
It was these interests and attitudes that initiated the first detailed
studies of the history of science, and of science as part of civilization. A
history of medicine by Daniel Le Clerc published in 1696 is an early
example of the Baconian analytical approach to intellectual history in a
particular science. There is, he wrote, abundance of difference between a History of Physick, that is, a collection of all that relates to their
persons, the titles, and number of their writings, and a History of Physick, that is, to set forth the opinions of the Physicians, their Systems,
and Methods and to trace step by step all their discoveries.... This History ... is obliged to penetrate into the very soul of every age, and every
Author; to relate faithfully and impartially the thoughts of all, and to
maintain everyone in his right, not giving to the Moderns what belongs
to the Antients, nor bestowing upon these latter what is due to the former;
leaving every body at liberty to make reflections for himself upon the
matters of Fact as they stand related"28.
Leibniz followed Bacon in proposing the writing of a history that
would include science, literature and religion as well as politics29. In 1751,
in the Preliminary discourse of the Encyclopedic, D'Alembert wrote:
The metaphysical exposition of the origin and of the liaison of the
sciences has been of great use to us in forming the encyclopaedic tree;
the historical exposition of the order in which our sciences have followed
one another will be no less advantageous in enlightening us on how to
transmit these sciences to our readers 30 . The next year, 1752, saw the
publication of Voltaire's Siecle de Louis XIV, followed in 1756 by his
Essai sur les moeurs et I'esprit des nations, written to convince his friend
Madame du Chatelet, the translator of Newton's Principia into French,
that the study of history could be as interesting as that of mathematics
and natural science and could give rise to principles of equal importance31. In these works Voltaire set out to give an example of history
written en philosophe, to discover the causes of progress and decline and
to teach by the results. One of his greatest achievements was to replace
the picture of world history guided by the hand of providence, as presented by Bossuet, by one in which events were explained by natural
causes. His contemporaries Maupertuis and Buff on were doing the same
28
D. Le Clcrc, The History of Physic^, Author's preface (London, 1699); ist ed., Histoire de
h medecine (Genevre, 1696). See F. N. L. Poynter, Medicine and the historian, Bulletin of the History
of Medicine , xxx (1956) 424; cf. W. Pagel, Aristotle and seventeenth-century biological thought, in
Science, Medicine and History , essays in honour of Charles Singer, i (Oxford, 1953) 509.
29
G. W. Leibniz, Sdmtliche Schriften, hrg. von der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften,
I Reihe, i (Darmstadt, 1923) 91, 103 (1670).
30
Cf. Smith, op. cit., ii, 250 sqq.
31
See Voltaire's introduction to the Siecle de Lotus XIV; his La philosophic de 1'histoire ,
printed as an introduction to the Essai; and his Remarques pour servir de supplement a 1'Essai ,
i-iii, xvii.
463
for the history of nature, of the earth and its plant and animal inhabitants through geological time32. Voltaire's basic theme was a survey of
European civilization from the time of Charlemagne to his own day, but
in pursuing his analytical objective he cast the civilization of Europe
against the background of world history. His account included a description of the history of the arts and sciences, religion, politics and commerce, populations and social structure, geography, climate and natural
resources of ancient Egypt, Babylon, Greece and Rome, India and China,
and of the life of savages, for comparison with the history of Europe.
Science had provided him with a model of analytical and comparative
methods of investigation; in return, he included in his comparative history of civilization a description of the history of science and technology.
Other historians in the second half of the eighteenth century, notably
Hume, Robertson, Gibbon and Condorcet, gave similar recognition, albeit sometimes peremptory, to the influence of science and technology
in history. The same period saw the appearance of specialized histories
of particular sciences. The publication of J. E. Montucla's great Histoire
des mathematiques, in fact a history of the physical sciences, in 1758 was
followed by other works of varying value including Joseph Priestley's
histories of electricity and optics and J. S. Bailly's history of astronomy33.
At the end of the century and in the early nineteenth century the succession
continued with the historical writings of Laplace, Cuvier, Thomas Young,
Delambre and, later, of Guglielmo Libri and William Whewell. Auguste
Comte now succeeded Francis Bacon as the formative influence on the
historiography of science34.
But by this time the general character of historiography had changed: it had become more accurate, but also more restricted. The eighteenth-century historians whose outlook had been formed by the intellectual revolution of early modern times may have seen history in the mirror of their own aspirations. They drew from the new science their model
of rational investigation; in repaying their debt, by making the history
32
See Bury, above n. 17; A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass. 1936);
A. C. Crombie, P. L. Moreau de Maupertius, F. R. S. (1698-1759), precurseur du transformisme, Revue de synthese , Ixxviii (1957) 35-56; B. Glass, O. Temkin, W. L. Straus, jr. (editors), Forerunners of Darwin: 1745-1859 (Baltimore, 1959); J. Roger, Les sciences de la vie dans la pensee franfoise
du XVIII* siecle (Paris, 1963). For the parallel interest in the history of nature and the history of
mankind cf. R. Hooke, A Discourse of Earthquakes , Posthumous Worfa, ed. R. Waller (London,
1705) 291, 334, 426-7, 433-6; Fontenelle, Histoire de I'AcadSmie Royale des Sciences, Annee 1710
(Paris, 1731) 22; Button, Les Epoques de la nature, ed. critique, par J. Roger (Paris, 1962); A. C. Crombie and M. A. Hoskin, The scientific movement and the diffusion of scientific ideas, in New Cambridge Modern History , vi (Cambridge, 1969) 60-71.
33
Cf. Bailly, Lettres sur I'origine des sciences, et sur celles des peuples d'Asie, addresses a M.
dt Voltaire (Londres et Paris, 1777).
34
Cf. A. Comte, Cours de philosophic positive, i, Premiere lec.on (Paris, 1830); W. Whewell,
Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 2nd ed., ii (London, 1847) 320 sqq.; J. S. Mill, Auguste Comte
and Positivism, 2nd ed. (London, 1866) 6-8; Bury, op. cit., ch. 16.
464
of science and technology part of the history of civilization, they may

have written polemically in order to extend the reign of ' reason' in their
own day. The political and constitutional historians who dominated nineteenth-century historiography no longer felt that debt and they made
history into the history of government. One reason for this may have been
the influence of the classical seminar in German universities on the nineteenth-century conception of historical research. At the same time there
was a hardening of the division in university education between science
and the humanities. Classically trained historians excluded from their
consideration all aspects of life not conventionally included among the
'humanities'. Also, during this formative period of nineteenth-century
historiography, the general upset in the structure and concepts of government following the revolutionary wars in Europe, and the business of
acquiring and governing empires, gave constitutional and political history an immediately topical and practical interest.
Historiography must perhaps always reflect the problems of its own
time. The character of life in our own day gives a new relevance to the
eighteenth-century historians whose view included the whole of civilization. The present interest in social, intellectual and scientific history
and in the comparative method are in a sense a return to the ideas with
which mature modern historiography began in the age of Voltaire. Once
more, historians in their analysis of human behaviour and human society are seeking enlightenment from all aspects of civilized life. Historiography is again becoming the study of civilization as a whole, with
the potentiality of providing a bridge, instead or reflecting a division, between the scientific and humanistic sides of our education.
23
The Origins of Western Science'
The purpose of this book, according to the preface, seems to be to replace

earlier accounts of ancient and medieval science, rather prominently for the
latter my Augustine to Galileo, first published in 1952 but revised and greatly
enlarged in 1959. Bruce Eastwood concludes in his generous but valedictory
essay on my book and its influence in Isis (Ixxxiii, 1992, pp. 84-99): 'We can
now reasonably hope for an up-to-date textbook on medieval science in David
Lindberg's forthcoming survey'. Mine 'has completed its useful life' but as 'an
old friend' it 'remains a connection to historical controversies and philosophical commitments of our disciplinary past'. Perhaps so, perhaps not, but it may
be worth mentioning that the latest edition in English published by Harvard
(1979) is still on the market and that of the eight editions in foreign languages,
that in Italian (reprinted in 1982) remains especially active, and that in Spanish
has been reprinted five times since its first publication in 1974. The Greek
edition was handsomely reprinted in 1992, and others are in prospect.
A book like The Beginnings of Western Science needs a vision of its subject,
with the main lines of its perspective illustrated by telling details. Instead we
have here a survey, written in an elementary style seemingly for a popular
public knowing very little. 'My concern' Dr Lindberg writes, 'will be with the
beginnings of scientific thought1 (p. 3), not with technology or methodology or
anything else, but with the ideas and contents of science, or less ambiguously,
natural philosophy. Some very brief indications or prehistoric attitudes to
nature and of ancient Babylonian and Egyptian mathematics and medicine
lead him to the true beginnings of scientific theory with the Greeks.
The history of scientific thought, as I put it (History of Science, xxvi, 1988,
pp. 1-12; above, ch. 1) is the history of a vision explored and controlled by
argument. It is a vision and an argument initiated by ancient Greek
philosophers, mathematicians and physicians in their search for principles at
once of nature and of argument itself. By natural science we mean then a
David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in
Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450 (The University of
Chicago Press, 1992).
466
specific vision, created within Western culture, at once of knowledge and of

the object of that knowledge, at once of natural science and of nature. We may
trace the characteristically Western tradition of rational science and philosophy to the commitment of the ancient Greeks, for whatever reason, to the
decision of questions by argument and evidence, as distinct from custom,
edict, revelation, authority or whatever else. Of course all people as rational
beings may decide questions by argument and evidence. It was the Greek style
of rationality to make this explicit by the analysis of the reasoning involved, in
the manner of Socrates. The Greeks developed thereby the conception of a
problem as distinct from a doctrine. At the same time by deciding that, among
the many possible worlds as envisaged in other cultures, the one existing world
was a world of exclusively self-consistent and discoverable rational causality,
they committed their scientific successors exclusively to this effective direction
of thinking, and closed to them elsewhere still open visions of things. They
introduced in this way the conception of nature, comprising a rational scientific
system, in which formal reasoning matched natural causation, so that natural
events and reasoned conclusions must equally follow exactly from true
principles. Hence the two fundamental conceptions from which the characteristic style of all Western rational thinking has followed: causal demonstration
and formal proof.
The Western scientific movement has been concerned with man's relations
with nature as perceiver, knower and agent. It can be identified most precisely
among the great historical cultures as an approach to nature effectively
competent not only to solve problems, but also to determine what counts as a
solution, whether in particular cases or in general systems of theoretical
explanation. Thus it offers rational control of subject-matters of all kinds, from
mathematical to material, from ideas to things. A similar rational style is
evident over the whole range of Western intellectual and practical enterprise,
in ethics and metaphysics, in law, government and commerce, in drama and
music, in the visual and constructive arts, and in technology and manufacturing.
Of the essence of the scientific movement as a tradition have been its genuine
continuity, even after long breaks, based on the study by any generation of
texts written by its predecessors; its progress equally in scientific knowledge
and in the analysis of scientific argument, for innovation is a product of
continuity; and its recurrent critique of its practical and moral justifications. A
subtle question then is what continued and what changed through different
historical contexts, in the scientific argument and in the cultural vision through
which experience is mediated, when education, experience and innovation
could furnish options for a different future.
The scientific argument comprises both the form and the subject-matter. It is
obviously absurd, in analysing how a particular problem or phenomenon has
been treated at a particular time, to consider the one without the other. But the
same phenomenon may be treated in different forms or styles of argument,
and a common form of argument may unite an assembly of diverse though
cognate subject-matters. The Western scientific movement brought together
The Origins of Western Science
467
within a common restriction to answerable questions a variety of forms or

styles of scientific inquiry, demonstration and explanation, diversified by their
subject-matters, by general conceptions of nature and the expectations they
entail, by presuppositions about scientific cogency and validity, and by
scientific experience of the interactions of creative thinking with testing, of
programmes with their realisation, modification or rejection. The diversification and testing of these different forms of argument was the highly
intellectualised product of many generations. A scientific style identifies
certain regularities in the experience of nature which become its object of
inquiry and define the questions put to the subject-matter within that style.
The interactions between style and subject-matter then generate appropriate
methods of inquiry and kinds of argument and evidence for finding acceptable
answers. We can establish in the scientific movement a taxonomy of styles,
distinguished by their objects of inquiry and forms of argument. Three were
developed in the investigation of individual regularities, and three in the
investigation of the regularities of populations ordered in space and time.
The primary style invented by the Greeks was what I call postulation, in two
different forms, mathematical and syllogistic. The former exploited the
demonstrative power of geometry and arithmetic and eventually united all the
mathematical sciences and dependent arts, from optics and music to mechanics, astronomy and cartography, under a common form of proof. The latter
exploited the demonstrative power of logic as established by Aristotle in all the
natural sciences as well as other subject-matters of philosophy. The second
style I call the experimental argument, both to control postulation and to
explore by observation and measurement the observable relations of more
complex subject-matters in the search for their principles. Ptolemy used well
designed experiments to control the postulations of optics and Galen did
likewise to explore the operations of the ureters, the spinal cord, and other
physiological phenomena. The experimental argument, in its various forms
arid contexts, was logically designed to bring in experiment, with the necessary
apparatus and instrumentation, at the relevant points of decision. The third
style, hypothetical modelling, proceeds by exploiting the properties of a
theoretical or physical artifact, which we know because we designed it
ourselves, and with which we can simulate and thus explore and explain the
phenomena of nature. Perhaps the most striking original model of all was
Eudoxus's geometrical model of the cosmos, which transformed astronomy as
developed with great arithmetical sophistication by the Babylonians into an
entirely new style of scientific thinking. Hypothetical modelling was developed
in a mature form by its transposition from art to science in early modern
Europe: perspective painting was a perceptual model of the natural scene;
Kepler solved the problem of the formation of the retinal image by using the
camera obscura as a model of the eye; Descartes generalised the whole style.
Taxonomy as the fourth style was again developed by the Greeks, notably
Plato, Aristotle and Theophrastus, as a logical method of ordering variety in
any subject-matter by comparison and difference, raising the question of
468
discovering natural affinities. The fifth style, probabilistic analysis of contingent expectation and uncertain choice, was also broached qualitatively by
Greek logicians and physicians and Roman lawyers faced with making
decisions with incomplete but probable evidence, and it reappeared in
medieval treatments of similar cases. It was quantified practically in the fifteen
and sixteenth centuries in dealing with insurance and other commercial
questions, and theoretically in its two forms, analytic and synthetic, in the
seventeenth century. At the same time came the explicit discovery of a new
kind of regularity, the statistical regularities in adequately numerous populations of economic, medical and other events. Lastly, the method of historical
derivation, or the analysis and synthesis of genetic development, was again
used first by the Greeks in application to human cultures and civilisations,
before being appropriated in early modern Europe for the evolution of
languages, of the Earth, and then later of living organisms. The subject-matter
of historical derivation was defined by the diagnosis, from the common
characteristics of diverse existing things, of a common source earlier in time,
followed by the postulation of causes to account for the diversification from
that source.
Each style then defines the questions to be put to its subject-matter, and
those questions yield answers within that style. A change of style changes the
questions put to the same subject-matter, as the Aristotelian analysis of
motion in a qualitative taxonomy of causes was replaced, from the fourteenth
to the seventeenth century, by its analysis into quantitative functional
relations. Thus each style of questioning can exclude others, a point made
vigorously in this example by Galileo. But usually different styles are
combined in any particular research. Each style introduces a specific conception of causality, and hence the fundamental differences in the physical worlds
envisaged by geometrical postulation, but qualitative taxonomy, and by the
quantified mechanistic and the probabilistic conceptions of nature. Each style
again introduces new questions about the existence of its objects in nature as
distinct from their being products of its methods of abstraction, classification,
measurement, sampling and so on, or of its language.
Lindberg's survey is very different from the kind of intellectual analysis just
outlined. He begins his sketch of ancient science, occupying about a third of
the book, with a rapid conventional run through Greek ideas from Homer and
Hesiod to Plato and Aristotle. He rightly indicates that the fundamental
questions for Greek philosophy were those of the nature of the identity
persisting through change, causality, the structure of the cosmos and its
relation to its first cause, and the nature and knowability of that cause. No
sensible historian is likely to disagree with the statement that the 'proper
measure of a philosophical system is not the degree to which it anticipated
modern thought, but its degree of success in treating the philosophical
problems of its own day.' (p. 67), but similar remarks dotted through the book
seem to anticipate a fairly uneducated audience. Next come a brief account of
Hellenistic natural philosophy with some interesting references to ancient
469
schools and education, followed by a sketch of the Greek mathematical

sciences, essentially of astronomy, optics, and the science of weights. He
indicates correctly that both Euclid in his optics and Archimedes in his analysis
of the balance exploit the demonstrative power of geometry to develop
experimental sciences without experiments. An illustration of scientific style
not mentioned is the Babylonian source of Ptolemy's tables correlating
planetary positions, which became the model for those correlating angles of
incidence and refraction. The science of optics was later substantially
developed by astronomers. After this comes an account of Greek and Roman
medicine, dealing with both clinical diagnosis and physiology from Hippocrates to Galen. The case histories and rational diagnostic procedures in the
Hippocratic corpus (with their more primitive antecedents in the very different
contexts of Egyptian and Babylonian medicine) matched the sophistication of
the mathematical sciences, while the systematic physiological theory culminating the Galen matched in the microcosm of man the theory of the macrocosm.
No mention is made of Galen's well designed experimental investigations
which were to become a model for William Harvey. The narrative of ancient
science concludes with the Roman popularisers and encyclopedists, most
substantially Pliny, Latin translations and epitomes of Greek science notably
by Calcidius with his version of the Timaeus, and Boethius, with a brief
account of Roman and early Latin medieval education. There is no mention of
the basic importance of Cicero as the author of the essential Latin philosophical terminology translated from the Greek, from which came that of modern
European languages. It would have been useful also to include some account
of the development of technical language and terminology, a subject
pioneered in philosophy by Etienne Gilson and Alfonso Maieru and in science
and mathematics notably by students of fourteenth-century kinematics and
dynamics. No mention is made either of the development of vernaculars for
science and philosophy, in which Dante, Geoffrey Chaucer and Nicole
Oresme played so prominent a part.
Another important omission, in a brief discussion of the role of Christianity,
is the confrontation of Greek philosophy with the Hebrew and Christian
theology of creation over the fundamental nature of God's relation to the
world and to mankind. The confrontation began systematically in the first
century B.C. with Philo Judeaus of Alexandria, the last great thinker in the
line of Hellenised Jews. Directly and indirectly, through Lactantius, Augustine of Hippo, and other routes, Philo affected profoundly later Jewish,
Christian and Moslem thought on this question and with it on natural
philosophy. Philo accepted the Greek conception of the order of nature
determined by unchanging causes, but the source of that order was not the
Platonic god of the Timaeus, who made the world by a necessary act of his own
perfection out of pre-existing matter, nor the eternal divine reason of Aristotle
from which the world emanated as a necessary consequence of causes
discoverable by human reason, nor the material divinity of the Stoics. The God
of Abraham was in no way necessitated, but acted with an entirely free
470
omnipotence to create ex nihilo a world entirely separate from himself, for

reasons unknowable by man apart from divine revelation. Philo used the term
logos for the principles on which God modelled his creation, like a city
fashioned within the mind of an architect, from which followed with invariable
regularity all the operations of this universe. But God could overrule these
regularities just as he could have created another kind of universe had he so
chosen. Philo saw in Scripture both literal and underlying meanings, from
which he could apply the analogy of law to God's actions. In the Christian
context the created world was then reduced to a mechanism operating
according to a system of laws. Lactantius likened God's creation to Archimedes's modelling of the cosmos with his brass armillary sphere. Basil of
Cappadocia likened it to a spinning top. The most pervasive route through
which these ideas passed into Latin medieval thought was Augustine, for
whom the naturales leges which God had ordained were the laws of measures,
numbers and weights. He applied the concept of natural laws, or laws of
nature, to the motions of the heavenly bodies, the generation of living things,
and the development of the world itself pregnant with things to come. God
could then be discovered in the great open book of nature, as well as in the
revealed book of Holy Scripture. These ideas were to become fundamental
principles of Western medieval and early modern natural philosophy. See my
'Infinite Power and the Laws of Nature: A Medieval Speculation' in L'infinito
nella scienza, a cura di G. Toraldo di Francia (Roma, 1987) 223-43 (reprinted
above, ch. 6); and with J.D. North, 'Univers' in Les caracteres originaux de
I'Occident medieval, ed. J. Le Goff et J.-C. Schmitt (Paris, forthcoming).
A brief and inadequate chapter on Byzantinum and Islam skips through
Hellenistic commentaries on Aristotle, the translation of Greek science into
Arabic, and the Islamic scientific achievement and decline, on which it raises
some interesting questions but does little to explore them. No reference is
made to the fundamental work of Roshdi Rashed and GUI Russell on Arabic
optics and on the cultural situation of Islamic science in general. Next we have
a standard account of the revival of learning in the West from the Carolingian
reforms to the development of education in the schools of the eleventh and
twelfth centuries, natural philosophy with its expansion through the translations from Greek and Arabic into Latin during the twelvth and thirteenth
centuries, and the assimilation of this new learning in the universities. The
confrontation of Aristotelian metaphysics with the Christian theology of
creation again led to a vigorous defence of divine omnipotent freedom and
human moral responsibility against determinist interpretations of Aristotle.
On these central issues in the condemnations of 1270 and 1277 the recent work
of Luca Bianchi (not cited here) has thrown new light. A chapter on the
medieval cosmos summarises studies of Grosseteste, the terrestrial region with
a brief sketch of cartography and of Jean Buridan and Nicole Oresme on the
Earth's possible rotation, astronomy and its instrumentation, and astrology.
This is all useful and the illustrations are excellent, but one misses any
discussion of Richard of Wallingford or Chaucer and the profound and precise
471
studies of them by John North. Also missing in a book making the claims of its
subtitle is any reference to Dante. Coming to the physics of the sublunar
region, after a few pages on matter and alchemy, Lindberg reaches the
fundamental studies of his mentor, and his mentor's mentor, on the fundamental science of motion. This is well described in a few pages on the conception of
motion in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, its mathematical
representation, and dynamics and its quantification.
Next comes the science of optics on which Lindberg himself has published
good work, especially on the pinhole camera. The essential sources were
Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy and Alhazen, with for the eye also Galen, and the
essential medieval authors were Roger Bacon and Witelo. The study of the
history of optics were pioneered by Vasco Ronchi, and that of medieval optics
by myself, followed by A.I. Sabra, Lindberg, Stephen Straker with his
fundamental Kepler's Optics (1971; Ann Arbor, Mich., 1980) and 'Kepler,
Tycho, and the "Optical part of astronomy": The Genesis of Kepler's Theory
of Pinhole Images' in Archive for History of Exact Sciences, xxiv (1981) 267-93,
and later by others. Ronchi made his mistakes, as who does not, but he
established the field in which we have all worked and put us all in his debt, just
as Pierre Duhem did for medieval science in general. I note that Lindberg does
not cite me in his section on medieval optics. This is a mistake, because my
original monograph (1967) on the subject which he used is well known and is
now readily available in my collection Science, Optics and Music in Medieval
and Early Modern Science (London, 1990), and my more recent study,
'Expectation, Modelling and Assent in the History of Optics: i, Alhazen and
the Medieval Tradition; ii, Kepler and Descartes', has a direct bearing on some
of Lindberg's controversial opinions, especially on Kepler's relation to the
medieval tradition. This long article was published in Studies in History and
Philosophy of Science, xxi (1990) 605-32, xxii (1991) 89-115 and is reprinted
above, ch. 16. The last chapter of any substance is an account of medieval
medicine and natural history written under the guidance mainly of Nancy
Siraisi and Michael McVaugh. On the latter subject a strange omission is the
classic work of Agnes Arber on herbals, and more recently there are the
original and indispensable studies of the manuscript tradition by Evelyn
Hutchinson, Wilma George and, as further evidence of activity in the field, by
the contributors to Die Kunst und das Studium der Natur vom 14. zum 16.
Jahrhundert, herausgegeben von W. Prinz und A. Beyer (Weinheim, 1987).
Lindberg has missed the opportunity offered by this book to develop a
systematic historical study of important themes showing the character of
scientific thinking in particular contexts and its changes. For example, his
references to experiment are minimal, even though this is a subject of lively
and serious discussion by medievalists such as myself, Jole Agrimi and Chiara
Crisciani, and others. There is no reference at all to Pierre de Maricourt and
his systematic experimental investigation of magnetism, to be respectfully
acknowledged by William Gilbert. The well designed systematic experimental
investigation of the rainbow by Theodoric of Freiberg, with a telling use of
472
models, is mentioned in three lines without any indication of the experimentation but only as offering 'an explanation very close to the modern one' (p. 253;
no reference in the attendant footnote to my basic analysis in my Robert
Grosseteste and articles in Science, Optics and Music). This questionable
judgement entirely misses the opportunity to point out the change of scientific
style between Theodoric and Descartes. The change involved the fundamental
structure of scientific thinking and in the object of scientific inquiry. Theodoric
looked by an Aristotelian taxonomic analysis for the necessary and sufficient
causal conditions defining a particular phenomenon. Descartes looked for a
general quantitative law from which this and other such phenomena could be
quantitatively deduced.
Another example is the general question of quantification in medieval
physics. Theodoric gave a false figure for the maximum elevation of the
rainbow, which Roger Bacon had reported correctly from measurements with
an astrolabe. There is no reason to doubt that Bacon's contemporary Witelo
(only a passing reference by Lindberg) carried out original experiments which
he described showing the production of colours by refraction through
hexagonal crystals and spherical glass vessels filled with water, but there is
every reason to doubt whether he made his alleged experimental measurements, like those of Ptolemy, correlating angles of incidence and refraction (as
I pointed out in my Robert Grosseteste, pp. 223-5, and in my article of 1961 on
quantification reprinted in Science, Optics and Music, p. 79). Why was there
such manifest indifference to actual measurement? As I showed in this article,
we must look at the context. Physics as developed from Aristotle in the
universities, even the powerful procedures for representing qualitative change
quantitatively leading to new sciences of kinematics and dynamics, required no
reference to experiment or measurement in its internal logic, nor was this
imposed by external professional or practical pressure. Experiments in the
academic context were made in the mathematical scientiae mediae, notably
optics, or in the realm of natural magic like magnetism. Accurate measurements were made when they were required by practical need as in astronomy.
In my article I showed by comparing the treatment of three quantities, time,
space and weight, in the academic context and in that of the practical arts, that
it was practical demand that produced consistent measurement.
The penetration of causal physics by the concepts of the mathematical
scientiae mediae profoundly affected the whole structure and style of scientific
thinking. This is evident in the influence of the Timaeus in the twelvth century;
in the distinction by Grosseteste between the primary mathematical properties
of matter and the secondary sensory qualities they produced in us; and in the
conceptual shift in the fourteenth century that moved the object of inquiry
away from the definition of natures to the discovery of relations between
quantities expressible by what became algebraic functions. Corresponding to
this was the use of the term laws of nature (leges naturae) by Roger Bacon in a
scientific sense for the laws of reflection and refraction, with the notion of a
universal nature constituted by such laws (Science, Optics and Music, pp. 68-9,
473
77-8,148-50). In the end from Galileo onwards it was within the mathematical
middle sciences that physical problems were formulated, so that the certification of their conclusions by measurement came to yield there, and not in the
traditional conception of causes, the only true science of nature that could be
discovered.
It is a serious omission, both for understanding the scientific thinking and
for relating it to its cultural context, to exclude from a book like this a
discussion of the practical rational arts. The ingenious mechanism sketched in
the thirteenth century by the architect Villard d'Honnecourt, the mechanical
clock itself, the planetaria of Richard of Wallingford and Giovanni de' Dondi
in the fourteenth century, and many other devices, were all rationally designed
to facilitate the control of movements and the representation of quantities, the
last two by academic men. Scientific instruments, notably in astronomy, were a
product of the intercourse between theory and practice. Mechanisms also
provided analogies for scientific theory, as they did for Jean Buridan and
Nicole Oresme in likening the created world to a clock set going by God. At
the end of the fourteenth century the universities went into decline and the
leaders in original thought and action became a different group, largely outside
them, of what Leonardo Olschki called artist-engineers. Their expertise lay in
the rational control of materials, processes and practices of all kinds, from
painting to music, from architecture to machinery, from cartography and
navigation to accountancy. They brought about a general transformation of
European intellectual life. An obvious example is the control of visual
representation by means of the linear perspective invented by Filippo
Brunelleschi at the beginning of the fifteenth century and explained by Leon
Battista Alberti in his Depictura (1435). The analogy of artificial devices used
to explain and apply perspective in painting came later to transform the science
of vision. As I have shown in my article on Alhazen and Kepler (1990-91)
mentioned above, using Straker's excellent account of the camera obscura,
Alhazen in his brilliant geometrical model of ocular physiology did not make
the reception of the forms of visible objects in the eye a purely geometrical
inanimate process, as it was in inanimate transparent bodies, but a process
modified geometrically by the sensive power in the receptor. Kepler, by taking
the inanimate camera obscura as a true model of the eye, made ocular
geometry a purely physical process and, by separating this from the questions
of sensation and perception that had confused the issue since antiquity,
demonstrated the formation of the image on the retina. Certainly, as Lindberg
likes to insist, Kepler used his knowledge of existing optical theory in making
his analysis: what else? His solution required a radical conceptual change,
facilitated by the innovations and the innovative mentality of the rational arts.
Aspects of this subject are well presented in three recent books: Science and
the Arts in the Renaissance, edited by John Shirley and David Hoeniger
(Washington, D.C., 1985), The Science of Art by Martin Kemp (Yale
University Press, 1990), and The Heritage of Giotto's Geometry: Art and
Science of the Eve of the Scientific Revolution by Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr.
474
(Cornell University Press, 1991). To conclude this litany of omissions, a book

like this should address a further important aspect of the mentalities involved,
the perception or otherwise of original progress by the natural philosophers
building on the recovery of ancient learning: see my article 'Some Attitudes to
Scientific Progress: Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern' (1975) reprinted in
Science, Optics and Music.
In my article 'Historical Commitments of European Science' (1982), also
reprinted in Science, Optics and Music, I wrote:
We may see the origins of modern science in the recovery, exegesis and
elaboration of the Greek conceptions of rational decision and proof and of a
rational system by medieval and early modern Europe. The recovery was made in
a series of responses to ancient thought by a new society with some different
mental and moral commitments and expectations, with a different view of nature
and of man and his place in nature and his destiny, a different theology, a
different economy and a different view of technology, but also with a vision of
continuity. Much light can be thrown upon the intellectual orientations of
European society, in making these responses, by attention to its apprehensions of
continuity or discontinuity with the past and programmes projected therefrom.
When philosophers pictured themselves in the twelfth century as dwarfs standing
on the shoulders of giants, or looked in the fifteenth century for guidance from a
Hermetic wisdom of supposedly Mosaic antiquity, or insisted in the seventeenth
century that they were doing something entirely new, they were all making
evaluations of the past which entailed programmes for future action. The same
applied to the evaluative use of the historical terms middle ages, renaissance,
reformation, scientific revolution, enlightenment and so on. These may tell us
more about the periods in which they were invented than about those to which
they refer.
To characterise the process by which the science of nature developed its
identity within the intellectual culture of medieval and early modern Europe is
not easy. We may distinguish three broad stages of intellectual response and
orientation brought about by the recovery and exploitation and then transcendence of ancient models. Each acquired a characteristic style of formulating and
solving its problems. With the first intellectual impetus given by the recovery of
ancient philosophical, scientific and mathematical texts in the twelfth and early
thirteenth centuries came a primary intellectual achievement. This was the grasp
and critical elaboration by the philosophical community of the medieval schools
and universities of the construction of a demonstrative explanatory system on the
models of Euclid's geometry and Aristotle's physics and metaphysics. Together
with this came a critical elaboration of logical precision, from methods formalised
by Aristotle, for the control of argument and evidence to decide a variety of
questions, including decision by calculation and observation and experiment.
I continued:
The movement of intellectual orientation generated in Western Europe first then
an organised capacity to act with rational intent in the control at once of
argument and calculation. It generated at the same time an organised capacity to
control a variety of materials and practices. We may distinguish this matching of
logical control of argument by a likewise theoretically designed and measured
control of matter as the second stage of European response to ancient
475
models. . . . The painters, sculptors, architects, engineers, metalsmiths,

assayers, surveyors, navigators, musicians, accountants and so forth comprising
this group generated an effective context for seeing and solving the exemplary
technical problems shared by the mathematical sciences with the visual, plastic,
mechanical, musical, navigational and commercial arts. Training in the arts
provided for both theory and practical skill. Their practitioners responding to a
diversity of particular demands brought about a general transformation of
European intellectual life by their search for precise understanding and control of
materials in a variety of circumstances. . . .
At the same time, for the philosophical and scientific community at large, the
nature and range of the effects that might be anticipated still remained at the
beginning of the seventeenth century in varying degrees open questions. There
was by no means general agreement on the kind of world men thought
themselves to inhabit, how they should investigate it and what kind of
explanation should be accepted as satisfactory, how best to control it and to what
ends control was most desirable.
In this context the confident establishment during the seventeenth century of
the rational experimenter and observer as the rational artist of scientific inquiry,
designed first in the mind and proceeding by antecedent theoretical analysis
before execution with the hands, marked the culmination of European orientation in response to ancient scientific sources in its third stage. The experimental
philosopher as the rational artist might make his analysis by means of theory
alone, quantified as the subject-matter allowed, or my modelling a theory with an
artifact analytically imitating and extending the natural original. Both artist and
philosopher could obtain the effect sought only as Galileo put it 'according to the
necessary constitution of nature. . . . For if it were otherwise, it would be not
only absurd but impossible. . .' (Le Opera, ed. naz., ii, 155,189). Art then could
not cheat nature, but by discovering, obeying and manipulating natural laws,
with increasing quantification and measurement, art was seen to deprive nature
of its mysteries and to achieve a mastery exemplified by rational prediction,
whether in the representation of a scene or the prognosis of a disease or the
navigation of a ship. Galileo himself marks the connection and transition
between two great European intellectual movements: from the world of the
rational constructive artist to that of the rational experimental scientist. It was
above all as the designer of an explicit scientific style, providing a philosophical
strategy for the sciences of nature, that he illuminates the specific identity of
natural science within the contemporary intellectual scene (pp. 9-17).
This article is based on the historiographical introduction to my Styles of
Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition: The History of Argument and
Explanation Especially in the Mathematical and Biomedical Sciences and Arts,
3 vols. (London, 1994). The work offers an analysis of these questions, some of
them discussed above, from antiquity to the nineteenth century.
In my Augustine to Galileo, under the heading The continuity of medieval
and seventeenth-century science', I summarised 'the original contributions
made during the middle ages to the development of natural science in Europe'
(1959, 1979, same pagination ii, 117-30). These I list as being in the logic of
experimental argument, the application of mathematics to physics, theories of
space and motion, the technical arts, descriptive medicine and natural history
aided by naturalistic art, and conceptions of the purpose of natural science and
of its knowability. I continued:
476
But when all is considered, the science of Galileo, Harvey and Newton was not
the same as that of Grosseteste, Albertus Magnus and Buridan. Not only were
their aims sometimes subtly and sometimes obviously different and the achievements of the later science infinitely the greater; they were not in fact connected by
an unbroken continuity of historical development. . . .
Apart from anything else, the enormously greater achievements and confidence of the seventeenth-century scientists make it obvious that they were not
simply carrying on the earlier methods though using them better. But if there is
no need to insist on the historical fact of a Scientific Revolution in the
seventeenth century, neither can there be any doubt about the existence of an
original scientific movement in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The
problem concerns the relations between them.
One of the indispensable contributions made by medieval Western Europe

was to provide in the universities a secure institutional context for learning and
teaching over a wide range of subjects: the seven liberal arts, the three
philosophies (natural, metaphysical and ethical), and medicine, law and
theology. No such context was established in the ancient or Islamic worlds, and
this certainly left the natural sciences in a much weaker position in those
societies than was achieved in the West. One important cause of the
discontinuity between fourteenth and sixteenth century science was the
decline of the universities. I went on to consider briefly 'what the scientists of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in fact knew of the medieval work, and
how the similarities and differences of their aims may be characterised'. The
answer is that they knew quite a lot, as we might expect. The universities
revived in the sixteenth century, especially in Italy, and scientific activity
revived with them; learning in general also found new institutions in the new
philosophical, literary, artistic and finally scientific academies. As for the
differences of aims, I characterised this by saying that the 'main interest of
scientists since Galileo has been in the ever-increasing range of concrete
problems that science can solve', whereas the medieval natural philosophers
were 'primarily philosophers' interested rather in clarifying the kinds of
problems addressed by natural science than in solving them in particular. I
added: 'It was a direction of interest that could have been fatal to Western
science'. But the direction changed.
This is all old stuff, so what is the point of Lindberg's somewhat bizarre
presentation of what he calls 'the continuity debate', starting with Duhem,
quoting from the unrevised edition of my Augustine to Galileo (1952) and out
of context from my Robert Grosseteste (1953), citing my old friend Alexandre
Koyre's criticism in a nevertheless flattering review, and so on? I find myself
credited with a 'defense of the continuity thesis' (p. 361). I confess that I find
this 'debate' as it has 'erupted' (p. 357) especially in the United States
something less than rivetting. The question of what continued and what
changed from one period to another, and what at any time was thought to have
continued or changed, is a subtle one, not only from medieval to early modern
and not only for scientific thought. It needs and deserves subtle and
sophisticated treatment, and scholarly respect for the real thought that has
477
been given to it, not a rhetorical travesty. Since I seem to figure prominently in
this comedy, I have quoted some of my own continuing thoughts on the subject
above. Koyre greatly illuminated our understanding of Galileo, and much
else, by his brilliant demolition of the older image of Galileo as primarily
rather a dedicated experimenter than a theoretician, but he was not himself
much interested in experimental science and he misinterpreted Galileo's
attitude to experiment. I have discussed this in my articles 'Galileo Galilei: A
Philosophical Symbol' (1956) and 'Alexandre Koyre and Great Britain'
(1987), reprinted above, chs. 12,13. The history of the historiography of any
subject can be of profound and valuable interest for historians, and one of the
most interesting perceptions of it can come from the intellectual and social
contexts of knowledge and beliefs and prejudices within which the historical
vision of scholars like Duhem and Koyre developed. But that is beyond the
range here. Lindberg terminates his book with a list of medieval scientific
achievements somewhat different from the one I published in Augustine to
Galileo (1959), but coming to the same rather obvious conclusion: something
continued, something changed. The truly dramatic cultural change brought
about with the emergence of the new mentality of the Renaissance man of
virtu, the rational artist designing the control of all his thoughts and actions,
between the scholastic natural philosophers and the seventeenth century
rational experimental and mathematical scientists, is not noticed. Is this a
'landmark book' as the publisher claims on the back cover? I hardly think so. It
misses the lively innovative thought and research into the subject that has
continued since Federigo Enriques, Marshall Clagett and I and others
published our early books, and indeed to which some of us continue to
contribute. But it is written by a distinguished scholar who is also an
experienced teacher, and it will offer a valuable introduction to many
interesting aspects of the beginnings of Western science.
Postscript
H.F. Cohen, in his eccentric The Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 1994) 105-10,
153, manages to characterize me in a way similar to the above (p. 476), citing
Koyre on me but not me on Koyre (as above chs. 12, 13, cf. also ch. 1), and
referring to nothing published by me after 1963. This has some bizarre
consequences. He writes that "in the early eighties, William Wallace (roughly
simultaneously with Adriano Carugo and Alistaire Crombie) established a
direct link between Galileo and previous thought on nature through the Jesuit
Collegio Romano" (pp. 109-10; cf. 281-2, 573 n. 99). Everyone familiar with
this subject knows that Carugo discovered this link first during 1969-71
through Pereira and Toletus, then in 1975 through Carbone, that I discovered
in 1971 the link through Clavius, and that we gave this information to Wallace
in 1972: see above ch. 9 and ch. 10, n. 11 with Appendix (a), and my Styles of
Scientific Thinking . . . (1994) 549-51, 766 nn. 165-6, with for historiography
Part I, pp. 3-89 of this work.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave,

When first we practice to deceive!
(Walter Scott, Marmion v.17)
Appendix to Chapter 10
(a)
Sources and Dates of Galileos Writings

[with Adriano Carugo]
The essential facts of the discovery by Adriano Carugo and myself that Galileo
used, for his three sets of scholastic essays, sources connected with the Jesuit
Collegio Romano, are outlined above in Chapter 10 on pp. 167-74 and in n. 11;
see also ch. 9. Further details are set out in my review of W.A. Wallace's
Galileo and his Sources (Princeton, 1984) in the Times Literary Supplement (22
November 1985, pp. 1319-20) and in subsequent correspondence (3 January
1986, pp. 13, 23,14 February p. 165, 25 July p. 815, and 29 August p. 939). In
that review and correspondence I addressed two questions: Wallace's treatment of the authorship of our discoveries on which his book is based, and his
treatment of those discoveries. I shall comment here only on his conception of
evidence concerning Galileos logical Disputationes (MS Galileiano 27).
The evidence is quite specific: the correspondence between Carbone's
Additamenta published in 1597 and Galileo's MS 27. There is also the
accusation published long afterwards by the Jesuit Paolo Delia Valle (Latinized as Paulus Vallius) in his Logica (1622) that someone identified with
Carbone (naming the Additamenta) had plagiarized his lectures given at the
Collegio Romano in 1587-88. No such lectures have been found, nor is there
any mention of them in Jesuit records at present known. Moreover, supposing
the Carbone had plagiarized Delia Valle's lectures, there is no evidence
whatsoever, either from the contents of the Logica or from other sources, to
connect them with Galileo. Undaunted by this Wallace imagined a connection:
namely that Galileo had used for MS 27 a set of Delia Valle's alleged lecture
notes, that these were obtained for him by Christoph Clavius on his request,
that Carbone had plagiarized the same notes which Delia Valle allegedly
distributed to his students, thus accounting for the correspondence between
his and Galileo's texts, and that MS 27 must have been written by Galileo
'around 1590' when he was mathematical lecturer at Pisa (Galileo and his
Sources, pp. 9, 89-94). For each and every one of these speculative assertions
there is no evidence whatsoever: about Galileo's alleged request, about Delia
Valle's ghostly lectures and their alleged distribution, about Carbone's alleged
plagiarism, and for the date. Early in 1588 Galileo, after visiting Clavius in
480
Rome at the end of the previous year, exchanged some letters with him about
the demonstrations he had given in his theorems on centres of gravity (Opere,
x, 22-30; cf. above n. 17). Clavius suspected in these quotpetitur principium,
and perhaps also in Archimedes. Galileo explained more precisely. Clavius
remained unconvinced. The correspondence was entirely mathematical, with
no reference to logic or to Delia Valle or any other Jesuit, as was that
contemporaneously on the same subject with Guidobaldo del Monte (x, 2536). There is no evidence for any discussion of logic. The petitio principii is
evidently catching.
Since our paper was published Carugo has made a thorough examination of
the two massive volumes of Delia Valle's Logica and compared it with
Carbone and Galileo. He has written to me with his new conclusions as
follows:
I found no evidence that either was in any way dependent on Delia Valle.
Although similar questions were discussed by all three, as well as by many other
contemporary authors both in print and in manuscript (contrary to what we
believed in 1983; above p. 169), using the same stereotyped terminology, there is
no textual correspondence between either Carbone or Galileo and Delia Valle.
Beyond that there is positive evidence that Delia Valle could not have been the
source for Galileo. Focusing on questions treated by both, in particular the
praecognitiones, the species demonstrationis and the regressus, I found that Delia
Valle drew extensively from, and actually plagiarized, Zabarella's logical tracts
on these topics, frequently reprinted from 1586. For example:
Zabarella, Opera omnia, (Venetiis
1600): 'Liber de speciebus demonstrationis',
Vallius, Logica, ii, (Lugduni 1622):

Disput. 2, Pars 3: 'De speciebus
demonstrationis',
Caput iii: 'De demonstratione a

causa remota' (p. 302).
Quaest. 2, Caput iv: 'Qualis debeat

esse demonstratio a causa remota
etc.' (p. 305a).
Demonstrationem a causa remota

docet Aristoteles negativam semper
construi et in secunda figura in
Camestres. Cuius ratio est, quoniam causa remota ut plurimum est
amplior effectu: quare ea posita,
non ponitur necessario effectus;
proinde non potest effectus
affirmative colligi ex ilia causa; ea
vero ablata, effectus ex necessitate
aufertur . . .
Quando vero est demonstratio a

causa remota, docet Aristoteles
necessario de bere esse in secunda
In omni demostratione tres terminos esse oportet . . . Termini igitur

erunt causa, effectus et subiectum
In omni enim demonstratione tres

terminos reperiri necesse est; quare
in hac demonstratione tres erunt
figura et in Camestres, ac prohinde
conclusionem illius semper debere

esse negativam . . . Cuius ratio est,
quia causa remota ut plurimum
solet esse universalior effectu:
quare ea posita, non ponitur necessario effectus; ergo non potest ex
huiusmodi causa colligi effectus
affirmative; tamen ilia ablata, aufertur necessario effectus . . .
tertium, cui ambo insunt, sive a quo
ambo negantur; et causa ipsa
remota erit terminus medius, effectus maior extremitas, subiectum
vero minor extremitas . . .
termini: nimirum causa, effectus et

subietum, cui utrumqe inest, vel de
quo utrumque negatur; et causa
remota erit medius terminus, effectus maior extremitas, subiectum
minor extremitas . . .
In propositione quidem maiore

manifestum est poni medium terminum cum maiore extremitate, pro
inde causam et effectum. Quare
maiorem necesse est esse affirmativam, quoniam ex effectu et causa
non potest nisi affirmativa enunciacio fieri: non enim hoc illius causa
esset, si alterum de altero negaretur.
In maiore autem propositione ponitur maiore autem extremitas cum

medio termino, consequenter causa
cum effectu. Quare maior debet
esse affirmativa, quia de causa affirmari debet effectus vel de effectu
causa, non autem negari, si propositio vera est fututa.
At vero si ea maior debeat esse

universalis, oportet causam de
effectu predicari, non effectum de
causa: quam effectus, non potest
effectus de causa universaliter praedicari.
Maior autem debet esse universalis

. . . ergo debet necessario praedicari causa de effectu, non autem
effectus de causa, quia cum causa
sit universalior effectu, non potest
de illo universaliter praedicari.
"Liber de speciebus
demonstrationis",
Cap. xix: "In quo ostenditur etiam
respectu nostri nullam demonstrationem notificare propter quid est,
quin notificet etiam quod est."
(p.333).
Disp. 2, Pars 3: "De specie bus

demons rationis",
Quaest.3, Caput ix: "Ostenditur
non posse per demonstrationem
cognosci propter quid, quin simul
cognoscatur an sit" (p.321 a).
Ostendere possumus quod non

modo naturam demonstrationis
spectando, verum etiam nos ipsos
demonstrantes respiciendo, omnis
demonstratio notificans propter
quid est notificat etiam quod est, et
nobis tradit novam utriusque cognitionem quam ante demonstratio
nem non habebamus.
Non solum naturam demonstrationis considerando, sed etiam si nostri

et intellectus demonstrantis ratio
habeatur, omnem demonstrationem
perfectam ostendere propter quid et
an sit rei, ita ut semper nobis per
huiusmodi demonstrationem nova
cognitio adveniat et ipsius propter
quid et an sit ... etiam si antea
habita sit cognitio aliqua ipsius an
sit.
Aristoteles in 39. particula secundi

libri Posteriorum, reddens rationem
cur ille, qui rem esse cognoscit sine
cognitione causae, non cognoscat
quid ea sit, hanc rationem adducit:
quia ille neque quod res ilia sit cognoscit, nisi leviter et ex accidenti:
Quod possumus colligere ex lib.2.

Post. Text. 8 vel 9, qui reddens
rationem cur ille, qui cognoscit rem
esse sine cognitione causae, non
cognoscat quid ilia res sit, ait hoc
ideo contingere, quia ille neque
quod res sit cognoscit, nisi leviter et
481
482
quum enim res ita cognosci debeat

uti est, ut autem sit habeat a sua
causa, sequitur tune vere cognosci
quod ea sit quando per causam per
quam est cognoscitur.
ex accidenti; quia cum res eo modo,

quo est, cognosci debeat, et esse
habeat a sua causa, ideo tune vere
et perfecte cognoscitur esse, quando
cognoscitur causa prop ter quam
est.
Zabarella's detailed and subtly argued analysis of the mental process called
negotiatio intellectus or mentalis consideratio, by which the cause discovered
through the first phase of the regressus (demonstratio quia) becomes known
perfectly and precisely and can thus constitute the starting point of the second
phase (demonstratiopropter quid), was closely followed and often copied almost
word for word by Delia Valle:
Zabarella
'Liber de regressu', Caput iv: 'In
quo declaratur qualis sit in regressu
primus processus etc.' (pp. 350351).
Vallius
Quaest. 2: 'Quid sit regressus
demonstrativus et quomodo fiat',
Caput iii: 'Ostenditur qualis sit processus in demonstratione quia, quae
est prima in regressu.' (pp. 344345).
Cognitio nostra duplex est, alteram

confusam vocant, alteram vero distinctam; et utraque turn in causa,
turn in effectu locum habet.
Cum duplex possit esse rerum cognitio, altera confusa, altera distincta; et utraque possit esse vel in
causa vel in effectu.
Effectum confuse cogniscimus

quando absque causae cognitione
novimus ipsum esse, distincte vero
quando per cognitionem causae; ilia
quidem dicitur cognitio quod est,
haec vero propter quid et simul
etiam quid est.
Effectum quidem tune distincte cognoscere dicamus quando cognosciumus ilium per cognitionem causae,
quando vero cognoscimus sine hoc,
confuse; et haec cognitio confusa
vocatur quod est, alia vero propter
quid, in qua simul etiam cognoscimus quid est.
Causa vero quatenus causa est per

causam sciri non potest, quia causam aliam non habet; si namque
causam habet priorem, earn habet
quatenus est effectus, non quatenus
est causa.
Causa temen quatenus causa non

potest cognosci per causam, quia
non habet aliam causam; et si
habet, sub hac ratione non est
causa, sed effectus.
Datur tamen causae qui que cognitio turn confusa, turn distincta: confusa quidem, quando ipsum esse
cognoscimus, sed quidnam sit ignoramus; distincta vero, quando cognoscimus etiam quid sit et ipsius
naturam penetramus.
Datur tamen illius cognitio confusa

et distincta eodem modo quo datur
congnitio effectus; ita ut tune confuse causa cognoscatur, quando
illius esse seu existentia cognoscitur;
tune vero distincte, quando illiusnatura penetratur.
Exemplum aliquod nobis proponamus, in quo ipsam regressus
naturam melius inspiciamus . . .
Sumamus demonstrationem Arist.
in lib. I Physicorum, qua ex generatione, quae substantiarum est,
ostendit materiam primam dari ex
effectu noto causam ignotam:
generatio enim sensu nobis cognita
est, subiecta vero materia maxime
incognita.
Qualis sit regies us facile intelligemus: id quod otime explicat Zabarella exemplo desumpto ex Arist. in
lib. I. Phys. ubi ex generatione,
quae convenit substantiis, ostendit
materiam primam dari. Ex effectu
omnibus noto, qui est generatio,
investigat existentiam materiae nobnis ignotissimae, quae est illius
generationis causa.
Caput v: "Quod facto primo processu non statim regredi ad effectum possumus, sed mediam
quandam considerationem interponi
necesse sit" (p.351-354)
Caput iv: "Ostenditur post primam

demonstrationem non sequi immediate deonstrationem propter quid,
sed debere intercedere aliquid
medium" (p.345-346)
Causa inventa, videtur statim ab ea

regrediendum esse ad effectum
demonstrandum propter quid: attamen hoc nondum facere possumus
. . . Per regressum quaeramus cognitionem effecttus distinctam; hanc
nobis causa confuse tantum cognita
tradere non potest, sed earn prius
distincte cognitam fieri oportet
quam ab ea ad effectum regrediamur. Facto itaque primo processu,
qui est ab effectu ad causam, antequam ab ea ad effectum retrocedamus, tertium quemdam medium
laborem intercedere necesse est,
quo ducamur in cognitinem distinctam illius causae . . .
Cum ergo in hoc primo discursu

non habeamus cognitionem causae
et effectus distinctam, neque cognoscamus causam et effectum formaliter . . . sed solum materialiter,
et in premissis demonstrationis
propter quid cognosci debeant
causa et effectus formaliter . . .,
non potest immediate post demonstrationem quia sequi demonstratio
propter quid, sed debet intercedere
aliquid morae . . . et illo tempore
intermedio debeant aliqua considerari. . . quibus possimus cognoscere
causam et effectum formaliter.
Hune aliqui vocarunt negotiationem

intellectus, nos mentale ipsius causae examen appellare possumus seu
mentalem considerationem . . .
Hanc intermediam intellectus considerationem aliqui vocant negotiationem intellectus, alii mentalem
examen. . .
483
Zabarella goes on to explain what this mentalis consideratio is and how it takes
place by examining in detail two examples of regressus taken from Aristotle. He
claims that nobody else has ever explained it in the same way. Delia Valle also
refers more briefly to the two Aristotelian examples of regressus examined by
Zabarella and adds this remark: 'Quae duo exempla ex Aristotele desumpta
explicat Zabarella Cap. 4, 5 et 6 de regressu, ubi audit se primum advertisse et
explicasse artificum Aristotelis in his duobus locis et regressibus, ab aliis antea
non animadversum' (p. 345). In Galileo's autograph the question 'An detur
regressus demonstrativus' is discussed without mentioning either Zabarella or his
explanation of the mentalis consideratio. Something corresponding to the latter is
484
only briefly hinted as one of several requirements or 'conditiones regressus': 'ut

facto primo progressu non statim incipiamus secundum, sed expectemus donee
causam, quam cognoscimus materialiter, formaliter cognoscamus' (MS. Gal. 27,
f. 31 v). Even if there was a purely theoretical possibility of a common source for
Carbone and Galileo, this could not have been lectures given by Delia Valle.
Since Carbone's text was published from 1597 in successive editions of Toletus's
Commentaria, of which Galileo owned a copy (above p. 172, n. 10), it is
reasonable to conclude that Galileo drew the excerpts with which he compiled his
logical Disputationes either directly from Carbone as well as from other so far
unidentified sources, or from some also unidentified existing compilation
including these excerpts from Carbone. In either case Galileo's autograph of the
Disputationes could not have been written on present evidence before 1597'.
Carugo's new work disposes of speculation that Delia Valle could have been
a source of Galileo's MS 27. In 1988 Wallace published with the Universita di
Padova a volume entitled ' Tractatio de praecognitionibus et praecognitis and
Tractatio de demonstration, transcribed from the Latin autograph by William
F. Edwards, with an introduction, notes and commentary by William A.
Wallace' (Padua 1988). From his preface we learn that Edwards had made an
incomplete transcription some years before which he had made available (see
also Wallace in the Times Literary Supplement, 3 January 1986, p. 13). Before
that Wallace had already used Carugo's transcription of MS 27 for his Galileo
and his Sources. He had now in his possession one complete and one seemingly
partial transcription. The relation between them will not be discussed here. It
is regrettable that Wallace's wild conjectures, repeated here, should be
mistaken for established facts by some, even if happily only very few, scholars
unfamiliar with the documentary evidence, including that in the Edizio
Nazionale, and with critical scholarship. Thus Anthony Grafton in his recent
review in Isis (Ixxx iii, 1992, p. 656) of the 1988 volume writes uncritically that
Wallace 'has redated' the logical essays in MS 27 'to the years 1589-1591', and
'identifies their ultimate source, convincingly, as a transcript or reportatio of
one of the courses in logic held at the Collegio Romano', then 'pinpointing the
course that Galileo probably used: that of Paulus Vallius'.
Wallace's principal objective, since we informed him of Galileo's use of
Jesuit textbooks for his scholastic essays on logic, cosmology and natural
philosophy, seems to have been to show that Galileo's Jesuit sources were
different from those which we have identified. Thus in his Prelude to Galileo he
wrote (omitting any reference to our information) that, following his article
'Galileo and the Thomists', his own 'subsequent research . . . has revealed that
the physical questions' (i.e. the Tractatus de alteratione et de elementis) 'are
based . . . on reportationes of lectures given by Jesuit professors at the Collegio
Romano around the year 1590' (p. 181). What Wallace has in fact shown is
nothing of the kind about either the content or the date of Galileo's essays, but
simply, in laborious detail, that these successions of lecture notes from the end
of the 16th century have general similarities in content and organization among
themselves and with Galileo's scholastic writings. This we might expect if they
were all based on the same Jesuit textbooks. But there are no specific
485
correspondences of Galileo's manuscripts with those of the reportationes such

as we found with the printed textbooks, including corresponding lists of
references to ancient and medieval authors. All of these are fully documented
in the sections of our book which were sent to Wallace in 1973 (acknowledged
in the preface of his Galileo's Early Notebooks, 1977). In Galileo and his
Sources Wallace vacillated between claiming that there is a closer correspondence of Galileo's essays with the manuscript reports and lectures than with
the printed books (with the possible exception of Clavius's) and admitting the
contrary. Thus, after comparing parallel texts of the Jesuit Mutius Vitellesch's
manuscript lectures with Pereira's printed book, he wrote that Galileo's
composition is much closer to Pererius's than to Vitelleschi's (p. 87). The
obvious conclusion would be that Galileo used Pereira's textbook, easily
available in several editions, rather than taking notes from any unique and
obscure manuscript containing Vitelleschi's lectures or any others. Nothing in
Wallace's book, or in his Prelude to Galileo (pp. 200-17), or in Galileo's Early
Notebooks, supports his later claim in the TLS (3 January 1986, p. 23) that this
'was presented by way of exception' to the many closer parallels alleged with
Vitelleschi. But Wallace found 'more likely' an even more bizarre conclusion:
that Galileo's source was Delia Valle's lectures on the same subject, 'that Valla
had himself used Pererius when writing a revised version of his notes, and that
Galileo appropriated these for his own use, thus basing himself on Pererius at
second remove' (Galileo and his Sources, p. 87). This is absurd.1
Galileo is notorious for seizing the opportunities of the moment. When we
attempt to evaluate what was written by so complex and contentious a person,
and what was written about him, or may seem to have been connected with
him, as evidence for his thoughts, intentions, discoveries or sources, we need
to be critically wide awake, or just normally awake. We must be strictly guided
by the critical criteria established in his own time, equally in classical textual
scholarship and in experimental science, for deciding the boundaries between
what, on the evidence, we know and what we do not know. Galileo habitually
made claims unsupported by any known evidence and frequently refuted by it.
When he heard of a discovery or contribution to science he would claim that he
had made it himself, even many years before, as with Santorio's thermometer
(Opere, xi, 350, 506), and Bonaventura Cavalieri's demonstration of the
parabolic trajectory of a projectile (xiv, 386). Sometimes he would appropriate
the work without acknowledgement, as perhaps with Francois Viete's treatise
on mechanics (above p. 225) and with Mersenne's formulation of the law
relating the frequency of a pendulum to its length (see below ch. 13). He would
use every rhetorical device to misrepresent the scientific competence and
arguments of opponents, as he did with the Jesuit mathematician and
1
Cf. Michael Sharratt, Galileo: Decisive innovator (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994) 47-60,
226-8, for a scholarly account of these questions, refreshingly contrasting with the
neoscholastic axe-grinding, ideological posturing, and omissions currently plaguing too
much of the Galileo industry.
486
astronomer Orazio Grass! in their dispute over comets, while obstinately

rushing himself into some wrong headed and untenable conclusion (see Pietro
Redondi, Galileo eretico, Torino, 1983; below appendix b). He was capable of
ignoring almost completely fundamental contemporary theoretical and experimental discoveries, as he did with Kepler's astronomy and optics. He would
opportunistically present an opinion, or even change his own opinion, in order
to cultivate some possible supporter or patron, as in his apparent conversion to
Neoplatonic cosmology in his exegetical letter of 23 March 1615 to Piero Dini,
meant for the eyes of Cardinal Bellarmino (Opere, v, 297-305, xii, 151-2). He
could take up a succession of contrary positions in the same assertive style
without any reference to any change, as in his treatment of Copernican
cosmology. Should we accept literally his outline of work in progress, and
claim to years of studying philosophy, in his letter to Vinta in 1610? (above p.
179). Self-promotion was usual with those wanting to impress a patron and
gain a position, but Galileo's gladiatorial competitiveness and slipperiness
seem to have been excessive even in his context (cf. Mario Biagiolo, Galileo
Courtier, Chicago, 1993; below appendix c).
Evidence of Galileo's engagement in astronomy and in philosophy has a
direct bearing on the problem of dating his three sets of scholastic essays in
MSS 46 and 27. According to the records of the University of Pisa he lectured
during 1589-91 on Euclid and in 1591 on the 'caelestium motuum hipotheses',
which was probably Sacroboscos Sphaera (C.B. Schmitt, The Faculty of Acts
at Pisa at the time of Galileo', Physis, xiv, 1972, p. 262). He wrote to his father
on 15 November 1590 to thank him for the Galen in '7 tomi' as well as 'la Sfera'
which his father was sending and added that he was 'studying and having
lessons with Signor Mazzoni, who sends you greetings' (Opere, x, 44-5). It was
Galen the natural philosopher whom he cited in the Tractatus de elementis (cf.
above ch. 9, pp. 156-8). When Galileo wrote from Padua in 1597 to
congratulate Mazzoni on his book In Universam Platonis et Aristotelis (1597)
and to refute his argument there against Copernicus (above pp. 176,196-8), he
added warmly his 'satisfaction and consolation' at finding that his old mentor,
'in some of the questions which in the first years of our friendship we used to
dispute together with such delight, inclined to the side that had seemed true to
me and the opposite to you'. It would be hard to believe that these disputed
questions did not include those to which Mazzoni had devoted his book:
general questions such as the necessity of mathematics for physical demonstrations, and more particular questions of natural philosophy concerning
relative gravity, the elements, Archimedes, Plato versus Aristotle, etc.
Accepting that Galileo could have developed a serious interest in natural
philosophy as well as in mathematics after his return to Pisa in 1589, nothing
yet follows for the dating of his scholastic essays or of De motu gravium. A
common feature in all these undated writings is his use of Jesuit publications.
He continued over a long period to draw from Jesuit textbooks simplified
accounts of traditional theories which he discussed in his original works. Thus
he used Pereira's De communibus . . . for the Tractatio prima de mundo and
487
Tractatus de elementis and also for falling bodies in De motu gravium (above
pp. 220-3; and see Carugo, 'Les Jesuites et la philosophic naturelle de Galilee:
Benedictus Pererius et le De motu gravium de Galilee', History and Technology, iv, 1987, pp. 321-33). He used Clavius's Sphaera for the Tractatio de caelo
and again for his account of the 'horizontal plane' of the Earth in De motu
gravium, a question recurring in the Dialogo (Opere, vii, 174 sqq.; above pp.
221-2, cf. 177-8,226-7). He used Clavius yet again and another work by Pereira
for his dated Lettere a Madama Cristina (1615), and, as Carugo has informed
me, he drew from Giovanni Giorgio Locher, Disquisitiones mathematicae de
controversiis et novitatibus astronomicis (Ingolstadt, 1614), the formulation of
traditional arguments against the motion of the Earth discussed in the Dialogo
(1632).
Galileo's changes back and forth between Copernican and traditional
cosmology are an object lesson in the dangers of trying to link his undated with
his dated writings. In 1597 he defended Copernicus against Mazzoni and
claimed to Kepler, characteristically congratulating him for having avoided 'a
perverted method of philosophizing', that he himself had come to accept
Copernicus 'many years ago' but had not dared 'until now' to bring his
arguments into the open. A few years later in 1604 he assumed the traditional
cosmological arrangement to assert an explanation of the new star scarcely
compatible with his mathematical refutation of Mazzoni. Again in his Trattato
delta sfera, despite his reference to Copernicans, he assumed the old
cosmology. In the undated Tractatio de caelo he explicitly refuted Copernicus,
while in De motu gravium he cited him once on another subject but assumed
the geocentric cosmology throughout and made it explicit in the final draft of
the introduction (above pp. 176-8, 222-3). We cannot then draw any
conclusions about dating from this series of contradictory opinions presented
in the same assertive style, not even that Galileo could not have written De
motu gravium during his public campaign for Copernicus which opened in
1610. It seems clear that he composed the parts forming this work over a long
period, but for how long remains a problem. In several parts of De motu
gravium (Opere, i, 254-7, 269-72, 350-2) he applies to the motion of falling
bodies some theorems on floating bodies that he had first conceived early in
1612, when he reworked an account, drafted late in 1611, of an experimental
and philosophical dispute on floating bodies into the mathematical, experimental and philosophical treatise published in the summer of 1612 as the
Discorso (iv, 69). Again, as noted by Carugo, one of the writings De motu
gravium (i, 297-8) contains a mathematical demonstration of the motion of
bodies on inclined planes which was based on a theorem ascribed to Viete sent
by Giovanni Battista Baliani to Galileo in 1615 (xii, 186-8; above pp. 224-5).
Yet again, in these writings (ii, 261-6) there is a draft of the correct analysis and
definition of the accelerated motion of falling bodies, which Galileo first
published in the Discorsi (1638; viii, 197-8; cf. above pp. 226-7). Since there is
no mention of this in the Dialogo (1632), where Galileo makes a point of
informing the reader of his most interesting results concerning motion, should
488
we date this draft after 1632? As already shown above (pp. 225-6), the
Dialogo, planned in 1624-25, was linked with De motu gravium and the
scholastic essays on cosmology and natural philosophy both through the
fragmentary notes in MS 46 and through their common use of Jesuit sources. If
we must accept that MS 27 was written after 1597, is it absolutely impossible
that the essays in MS 46, with their links with Galileo's earlier interests at Pisa,
were written before that date? What about the passages in MSS 27 and 46 for
which no sources have come to light anywhere? Perhaps they all come from
some undiscovered Jesuit compendium hidden in some library?
'Far from it being true that he spoke with scorn and little respect of the
ancient philosophers, and particularly of Aristotle, as some of those who
profess to be his followers foolishly and wrongly assert', wrote Niccolo
Gherdardini, who had known him, 'he said only that this great man's way of
philosophizing did not satisfy him, and that there were in it fallacies and errors'
(Opere, xix, 645; see above ch. 9, p. 149). He defined his position in two letters
to Fortunio Liceti shortly before his death. 'I believe . . .' he wrote on 15
September 1940 'that to be truly a Peripatetic, that is an Aristotelian
philosopher, consists principally in philosophizing in conformity with Aristotelian teaching, proceeding with those methods and with those true suppositions
and principles on which scientific reasoning (discorso) is based, supposing
those general notions from which deviation would be the greatest flaw. Among
these suppositions is everything that Aristotle taught in his Dialectics (i.e.
Posterior Analytics), taking care to avoid fallacies of reasoning, directing and
disciplining it to syllogize well and to deduce from the admitted premises the
necessary conclusion; and such doctrine concerns the form of arguing directly.
With regard to this part, I believe that I have learnt from innumerable
advances in pure mathematics, never fallacious, such certainty in demonstration that, if not never, at least extremely rarely, have I in my arguments
fallen into equivocation. Here then I am a Peripatetic' (xviii, 248). Galileo was
confirming here his lifelong adherence to the conception of truly scientific
demonstration set out by Aristotle in the Posterior Analytics and most
perfectly examplified in mathematics (cf. above ch. 9, below ch. 13). He went
on in a letter of January 1641 to insist that, concerning the content as distinct
from the the form of natural philosophy, he was far from being a Peripatetic.
Natural philosophy, as he had said so often before, was not 'what is contained
in Aristotle's books', but rather 'I truly hold the book of philosophy to be that
which stands perpetually open before our eyes; but because it is written in
characters different from those of our alphabet, it cannot be read by everyone:
and the characters of such a book are triangles, squares, circles, spheres,
cones, pyramids and other mathematical figures, fittest for this sort of reading'
(xviii, 295). As his old friend Mazzoni had declared and he had illustrated in all
his mature investigations: 'Aristotle, from failure to apply mathematical
demonstrations in the proper places, has widely departed from the true
method of philosophizing' (above p. 197). Galileo himself failed to understand
that the criterion of range of confirmation as the test of a theory, which he so
brilliantly used, put an end to the possibility of reaching in natural philosophy
Aristotle's epistemological goal of necessary apodeictic demonstration (cf.
above ch. 9, p. 161).
(b)
Pietro Redondi, Galileo eretico (Torino, 1983)

[with Adriano Canugo]
This fascinating and important book is a brilliantly perceptive and learned

study of the cultural context of Galileo's Copernican disputes. Unfortunately it
is flawed by an untenable specific thesis based on a document of dubious
authorship. The following are comments by Adriano Carugo and myself
published in the Times Literary Supplement on 28 October - 3 November 1988,
p.1203:
Sir, - Your reviewer of Pietro Redondi's Galileo: Heretic (September 23-29)
correctly casts some doubts on the authorship of the document on which alone
the entire argument of the book is based, but he seems none the less to agree
with the argument itself: namely, that the first and main motive that started the
sequence of events which led to Galileo's trial and recantation was his atomistic
explanation in // Saggiatore of the sensory qualities and its heretical implications for the dogma of the Eucharistic transubstantiation; and that this motive
was deliberately kept secret and never surfaced in the documents relating to
the trial because Pope Urban VIII, an old friend of Galileo and the dedicatee
of // Saggiatore, wanted to avoid the scandal of condemning him for heresy.
Anyone familiar with the National Edition of Galileo's works and writings,
which contains every document hitherto known concerning his life, is aware
that the new document brought to light by Redondi has nothing to do with the
trial, but is connected with a much less dramatic event already well known
through the National Edition.
The Jesuit Orazio Grassi, who had been violently attacked by Galileo in //
Saggiatore, replied with a lengthy and detailed rebuttal in which he exploited
every chance of paying back Galileo in the same coin of mockery and
insinuation. When he came to discuss Galileo's digression on the cause of heat,
Grassi, among many other things, expressed en passant 'some scruple' about
the difficulty of reconciling Galileo's explanation of the sensory qualities as
pure names with the miracle taking place in the Sacrament of the Eucharist,
where the properties of bread and wine are preserved while the substance is
transformed. At first Galileo dismissed such a scruple as nonsense. In his own
copy of Grassi's work he annotated: 'I leave this scruple for you, since //
Saggiatore was printed in Rome, with the permission of the superiors, and
490
dedicated to the supreme head of the Church; it was revised by those who are
responsible for the protection of true faith and who, by approving it, must also
have thought of the way to remove such a scruple' (National Edition, Volume
VI, page 486). On the other hand, Galileo was quick to point out, Grassi had
encountered the opposition of the Jesuits themselves over having his own book
printed in Rome and had to publish it abroad, in Paris, as Galileo wrote
'without his superiors' permission' ('senza licenza dei superiori').
Later on Galileo must have had some scruple himself, for in January 1628 he
wrote to his Benedictine friend Benedetto Castelli in Rome to ask him to
inquire of Padre Riccardi, Maestro del Sacro Palazzo, whether he was taking
Grassi's objections seriously. Castelli assured Galileo that Padre Riccardi was
on his side: 'He said that your opinions are not against the Faith, since they are
merely philosophical . . . and he intends to help you if any trouble should be
caused to you in the Tribunal of the Holy Office' (XIII, 393). The question was
never raised again in Galileo's correspondence, nor is it mentioned in any
other document in the National Edition.
The new document found by Redondi, which is an anonymous assessment of
Galileo's atomism in relation to the dogma of transubstantiation, and is
addressed to an unnamed Padre (possibly Padre Riccardi himself), throws
further light on this episode in Galileo's life. As such it constitutes an
interesting and important addition to the National Edition, but that is all.
As for 'Why the Church really quarrelled with Galileo', as announced on the
front page of the TLS, the unique issue of Copernicanism is unequivocally
documented in the records of the trial. There is no other doctrinal issue there,
but there was a disciplinary issue concerning Galileo's behaviour in breaking
his promise formally made in 1616 to Cardinal Bellarmine 'not to maintain,
teach, or defend in any way, in words of writing', the Copernican opinion.
Urban did not know of this promise, neither had Galileo informed him, when
in 1630 he gave Galileo permission to publish a dialogue discussing nonconclusively the philosophical and physical arguments for and against both the
Copernican and the Ptolemaic systems. This permission was given on
condition that the book was published in Rome with the imprimatur of the
Maestro del Sacro Palazzo. Because of the plague Galileo decided to have it
printed in Florence, and in order to start this he asked Riccardi to send him a
formal imprimatur on condition that he sent Riccardi the proofs sheet by sheet
for final approval. Galileo did not send the proofs except for those of the
preface and conclusion. The Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo
was published in 1632 in Florence with Riccardi's imprimatur, which applied
only in Rome, together with a second imprimatur from the Florentine
Inquisitor. When the Pope received his copy he was furious. The documents do
not state explicitly why. The first Commission which he appointed to examine
the case discovered among the earlier records that of Galileo's promise to
Bellarmine. The trial proceeded from there.
It seems to us that, like many complex and influential historical events, the
trigger was probably something accidental and even trivial, namely Urban's
491
irritation at the apparently deceptive way in which Galileo had manipulated his
permission to publish his book. Rivers of inky imagination have dramatized
this event in ways that distort the real intellectual importance of its
consequences. Recent writing on seventeenth-century history has been
plagued, notoriously by the neo-puritan, neo-Marxist persuasion, with supposititious 'reasons of state' and other hidden motives behind the plain
evidence of the documents. It would be a pity if Galileo studies were to go the
same way.
(c)
Mario Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of

Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago, 1993);
review published in the Washington Post; Book
World, 12 December 1993, p. 9.
'It is in the royal interest to keep everybody suspended between fear and hope'
(p.20). The author of the contemporary handbook on court manners under
absolute princes quoted here went on to describe 'how the natural instability of
favour is in the interest of the powerful' (p.325), how the successful competitor
for 'the fruits of servitude' under princely patronage was permanently exposed
to danger from mutations of princely interest of which he had neither intimate
understanding nor control, and how on falling 'from the summit of favour one
does not descend through the same steps which lead to the top. Often nothing
stands between one's highest and lowest status' (p.327). The fallen favourite
could not comprehend what he had done wrong; he found himself shunned by
former friends at court; he did not just lose his privileges but had to be
humiliated. The mythology of the system required that the princely patron
possessed everything that he could possibly want. He received gifts, as he
provided favours, by pure grace. Yet in fact both sides needed the other, the
one for the benefits acquired, the other in order to manifest the honour and
power on which his position rested. The problem for the ambitious client lay in
the asymmetry of a relationship in which the prince alone had the power and
could demand unlimited service and honour without any obligations. It is
within a fascinating account of this courtly system that Mario Biagioli places
the second and most celebrated half of Galileo's long scientific career.
Galileo seems to have embarked in 1601 at the age of thirty-seven on the
strategy that would enable him to escape from his position as a mathematical
professor at Padua into an enhanced status at court. Along this social
trajectory he constructed what Professor Biagioli calls 'a new socioprofessional identity for himself (p.5) as a philosopher creating at once a new natural
philosophy and an audience for it. After some false starts with his military
compass presented to the Gonzaga at Mantua, and an adroitly flattering
emblematic play on the words cosmos and Cosimo II equating the attractive
power of the ruling Grand Duke of Tuscany with that of William Gilbert's
493
great cosmic magnet, he hit upon the right formula with his discovery of
Jupiter's four satellites early in 1610. By getting permission to call these the
Medicean stars and to dedicate the Sidereus Nuncius describing them to the
Grand Duke, he obliged this prince to endorse his discoveries. Since, he wrote
in his preface, 'under Your auspices, Most Serene Cosimo, I discovered these
stars unknown to all previous astronomers' (p. 132), they should rightly have
his family name. His reward was his invitation back to Florence as the Grand
Duke's chief mathematician and philosopher, a privileged entry into the world
of the court. Galileo particularly requested that his title should include
philosopher as well as mathematician, and this raises the interesting question
of when and how he acquired his quite considerable knowledge of Aristotle.
Certainly it was not as a student at Pisa, but some light may be thrown by the
discovery some years ago by Adriano Carugo and myself that three unpublished essays in his hand on Aristotelian logic, physics and cosmology were
based on well known textbooks written by, or associated with, Jesuit
professors at the Collegio Romano. These (despite some unhappy American
publications on the matter) cannot be dated by any known evidence, except
that, as we have shown, the logical essay cannot have been written before
1597. Since Galileo's earlier interests were essentially in mathematics and its
applications, it could be that his philosophical studies were part of his strategy
of 'self-fashioning as a court philosopher' (p. 11).
Besides this crucial move to the Florentine court, Biagioli gives detailed
treatment on the same sociological lines of some further important episodes in
Galileo's life: the dispute in 1611-13 over floating bodies which involved the
fundamental difference between Aristotelian and mathematical (here Archimedean) physics; the transfer of his patronage focus to Rome; the dispute in
1619-28 with the distinguished Jesuit Orazio Grassi over comets to which
Galileo contributed his brilliantly dialectical // Saggiatore (1623); and the
publication of the Dialogo (1632) on cosmological systems, followed by his
trial.
The whole book makes interesting reading, despite its frequent repetitiveness, and it was a good and original idea to locate Galileo within the world of
the courts, of which Biagioli gives so learned an account. Thus 'Galileo is
presented not only as a rational manipulator of the patronage machinery, but
also as somebody whose discourse, motivations, and intellectual choices were
informed by the patronage culture in which he operated throughout his life'
(p.4). He insists that Galileo's science was not 'determined by these concerns
. . . Power does not censor or legitimate some body of knowledge that exists
independently of it' (p.5). For all that he asserts repeatedly that Galileo's
position and title as court philosopher was 'a crucial resource for the
legitimation of Copernicanism and mathematical physics' (p.49); that this
connection 'gave Galileo credibility' (p.58); that 'Galileo's strategy was aimed
at legitimizing scientific theories by including them in the representation of his
patron's power' (p. 125); that his recognition by the Medici 'allowed him to
become even more credible and draw further assent to his discoveries from
494
others' (p. 133). Galileo certainly knew what he was doing in getting court
patronage, both in Florence and in Rome, to support his scientific work and his
personal career, but while he was a master of all the arts of rhetoric, persuasion
and political manoeuvre, he certainly did not confuse the presentation and
acceptance of his discoveries according to the manners of courtly culture with
their credibility to his scientific peers. Court culture was irrelevant to scientific
knowledge. Confirmation of the reliability of the telescope and of Galileo's
discoveries made with it were requested by Cardinal Bellarmine from the
competent Jesuit mathematicians at the Collegio Romano, and by the
Emperor Rudolph II and the Medici ambassador from Kepler. They knew
what they were doing. You cannot cheat nature was a favourite of Galileo's
aphorisms, however much you may cheat your fellow men; and in the margin
of the Dialogo: 'In the natural sciences the art of rhetoric is ineffective' (Opere,
vii, 78; cf. below ch. 11).
I had a sense in reading Professor Biagioli's reconstructions that Galileo and
his contemporaries and disputes were being translated from 17th-century Italy
into the world of 20th-century transatlantic sociology. Anthropological
comparisons across cultures far apart in time and place may indicate certain
constants of human behaviour, but may abstract these from recognizable
distinctions of different cultures and from the individuality of real people. For
all that the exercise can be illuminating, as in Biagioli's plausible, though not
necessarily credible, interpretation of Galileo's fall from Papal favour. 'I do
not hope for any relief, because I have not commited any crime', Galileo wrote
on 21 January 1635 to Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc, who had been trying through
the Pope's nephew Cardinal Francesco Barberini to get some relaxation of
Galileo's house arrest at Arcetri. 'I could hope for and obtain mercy and
pardon if I had erred, for faults are matters upon which a prince can exert
mercies and dispensations, whereas upon someone who has been innocently
condemned it is convenient to be rigorous, so that it seems that it has been
done according to the law' (Opere, xvi, 215). Galileo certainly knew the score,
even as a fallen favourite.
Corrections to Science, Optics and Music

in Medieval and Early Modern Thought (1990)
p. vii, ch. 12: for Theory and Change read Theory Change.
p. xvii: Science, Art and Nature 1995, Styles of Scientific Thinking 1994.
p. 24, para. 3, line 9: "overweening".
p. 29, para 3, line 3: "assertion".
p. 55, Fig. 1 caption line 7: for "respectively; the rays" read "respectively, the
rays".
p. 117, line 2 from bottom: for "local" read "logical".
p. 195, Fig. 17 caption line 4: after "ends" add "(labelled in reverse in MS)",
and line 7: after "with" add "the".
p. 228, Fig. 33 is printed upside down: see Fig. 49.
p. 258, line 3 from bottom: for "(1986)" read "(1983)".
p. 417: Further references were inadvertently omitted and will be found in the
present volume at the ends of chapters 13 and 14.
This page intentionally left blank
Index
(Sub-headings are in alphabetical order, except where chronological order is more

helpful)
Abano, Pietro d' 292
Abd al-Rahman ibn 'Umar al-Sufi
(Asophus) 62
Abu Ma'shar 60
academies:
, Academia Fiorentina del Disegno
173
, Academie Royale des Sciences 299,
347, 409, 411, 460, 461
, see also colleges and universities
acoustics see hearing; music; sound
Adam 275, 276, 279
Adelard of Bath 16, 31, 32, 56, 59
Adrastus 293
Agricola 320
Agrimi, Jole 471
Aguilon, Francois 347
AIDS 449
Ailly, Cardinal Pierre d' 59, 62
Aix-en-Provence 271, 287
al-Battani 47, 62
al-Bitruji 58
al-Farabi, Abu Nasr 59, 79, 96
al-Farghani 59, 60
al-Kindi see Alkindi
Albert of Saxony 80, 277
Alberti, Leon Battista 89, 98-9, 132, 453
, and history of optics 319, 473
, and origins of language 277
Albertus Magnus 47, 52, 126, 454
albinism 418, 421,424
alchemy 52, 54, 57, 63, 155
Aldobrandini, Ippolito see Clement
VIII, Pope
Alembert, Jean le Rond d' 392, 409, 462
Alexander of Aphrodisias 221
Alexander of Hales 52
Alexandria (city) 70
Alfarabi, Abu Nasr 59, 79, 96
Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham) 55, 56, 132,
292, 336
, critics 331, 333, 334
, and history of optics 76, 305-17, 323,
326-7, 471, 473
, , model of eye 38
, , Optica 316, 319
, visual theories 304, 325, 327-8, 329,
354-5
Alkindi (Al-Kindi) 55, 305
Alphonsine tables 62
Ambrosian Library of Milan 175, 187,
288
America see United Sates
anatomical research 278, 320, 334
'Ancients and Moderns' 36, 453, 454,
460-1
Anglicus, Robertus 60
animals:
, and albinism 421
, antelope 288
, ass 418, 420
, chickens 412, 421
, dogs 418
, monkeys 418
, and origins of language 278, 280, 282
, pigeons 418
, salamander 411
, scorpion 412
antelope 288
antibiotics 448
Apollonius 341-2
Apuleius, Lucius 357
Aquinas, St Thomas 77, 81, 126, 183-4,
228
498
, and assent 370

, and Galileo 189, 190, 193
Arabic texts 32-3
Aranzi, Giulio Cesare 324
Arber, Agnes 471
Arcetri (Italy) 24, 494
Archimedes 95, 102, 126, 129, 131
, and the balance 208, 224, 469
, and Galileo's undated writing 222,
223, 224, 225
, and gravity 175
, and mathematics 59, 151, 197
, and scientific revolution 456
, and theology 470
, alluded to 149, 204, 486
architects/architecture 101, 103, 132,
212, 320
Archytus of Tarentum 9, 129, 219
argument, history of 12, 180-1, 357-400,
443-9, 467
Argyll, Duke of 398
Aristides Quintilianus 293
Aristotle 60, 190, 191, 192, 261
, and acoustics 297-8
, on art & nature 93-5
, and causality 440-1
, and Christian theology 22, 151, 470
, on comets 177
, and ethics 16
, and expectation and choice 358, 3624, 367, 387, 390, 391
, and false premise 182
, and gravity 259, 260
, as historian of science 37
, and influence on Galileo 149-61
, and logic 51, 369, 440-1, 467
, on mechanics 129
, on morals 94
, and music 292
, and origins of language 275, 278
, and philosophy 20, 21, 127
, and physics 16
, on politics 95
, and primary & real properties 218,
219
, and rhetoric 232, 236-40, 243, 247-8,
250-2, 362-3
, and scientific style 159, 467, 468
, and undated writing of Galileo 222,
226
, alluded to 17-18, 40, 42, 43, 68, 71,

82-3, 87, 102, 121, 128, 132, 180, 183,
189, 206, 211, 357, 358, 414, 469, 470,
483,486, 488
Aristotelian/Thomist revival 166
Aristoxenus 131, 219, 292, 293, 295
arithmetic 59, 115, 178
, commercial 377
, political 385
Arnauld, Antoine 379, 382-4
artists, rational 89-114
art(s) 19
, and geometry 99
, and nature
, , Aristotle on 93-5
, , Ficino on 100, 136
, rational 473
Arundel, Lord (Thomas Howard) 288
Aselli, Gasparo 111
Ashmolean Museum 288
Asophus (Abd al-Rahman ibn 'Umar alSufi) 62
assent/judgement 367, 369-74, 380, 381
asses 418, 420
astrology 61, 115, 132, 136, 470
, R. Bacon on 52, 54, 58, 60-1
, Bonaventura on 52
, Grosseteste on 47
, and Possevino 132
, Vieri on 136
astronomy 42, 181, 209, 257, 470, 471
, Babylonian 86
, and R. Bacon 54, 58, 61
, and calendar reform 61
, and camera obscura 320-3
, and Clavius 155, 177, 178
, clocks 82
, and Copernicus 155, 209
, education in 115, 117
, and Galileo 178, 185, 209, 258, 486
, Greek 86, 413, 441
, Grosseteste on 40, 42, 46, 47
, Hebrew tables 62
, Leonardo da Vinci on 100-1
, mathematical, & celestial motion 99,
155, 183
, new star of 1604 177, 178
Atestinus, Cardinal 129
Athenaeus132
Athens, plague of 13
atomism 58, 71, 72, 157, 158, 490
atomists 68, 204
auditory perception 107-10, 291-9
Index
Augustine, St (Augustine of Hippo) 69,
72, 127, 469, 470
, and expectation and choice 368
, and hearing 292
, on laws of nature 69, 72-5, 77
, and Platonism 139
, and providential creation 27, 33
Augustine to Galileo (Crombie) 475-6
Avempace 153
Averroes 79, 126, 153, 189, 191
epicycles & eccentrics 181-2, 183
Avicenna (Ibn Sina) 56, 76, 79, 190
Avignon 125
Babel 109, 276, 279
Babylonian astronomy 86
Bach, J. S. 427
Bacon, Francis 211, 258, 387, 454
, and expectation and choice 379-80,
383
, and history of optics 343
, and intellectual reform 17
, and new science 35, 36, 279, 459
, and scientific revolution 456, 457-60,
463
, and universal language 278
Bacon, Roger 276, 278, 471
, biography
, , birth, date of 51
, , family background 51
, , education 51, 54
, , and Franciscan order 52, 53
, , imprisonment 53, 61
, , last written work 53
, on alchemy 57, 63
, analytical skills of 58
, on astrology 52, 54, 58, 60-1
, and astronomy 54, 58, 61
, and benevolent destiny 27
, and calendar reform 58, 61, 62, 63
, and causality 441
, on church reform 53
, on experience 53-4
, and geography 59
, on geometry 58
, and Grosseteste 39, 47, 52, 55, 56,
61
, and language 51, 52, 56, 276
, on mathematics 52, 54, 56, 60, 97
, , and logic 59
, , usefulness of 58
, nature, and laws of 75-7, 472
, optics 52, 54, 55, 56, 63, 292
499
, , history of 316, 317-19, 326

, at Oxford 51, 52
, at Paris 51, 52,58
, on radius of earth 60
, and rainbows 472
, and reform 16-17, 33
, scientific thought 53-63
, on truth 53
, written work 51, 52, 53, 57-8, 62-3
Bailly, J.S. 463
balance, theories of 208, 224, 469
Balduino, Girolamo 155
Bale, Bishop John 455
Baliani, Giovanni Battista 161, 208, 2245,487
Barbaro, Daniele 101, 132, 212
, and history of optics 324, 327, 343
Barberini, Cardinal Francesco 272, 287,
494
Bardi, Count Giovanni 294, 295
Baronio, Cardinal Cesare 126
Barozzi, Francesco 117, 122, 131, 175,
194
, and mathematics 195
Basel 324
Basil, St (of Cappadocia) 56, 127, 470
al-Battam 47, 62
Bayes, Thomas 387, 448
Bayle, Pierre 36, 456
'Beagle' voyages of Darwin 429, 431,
433
Beaulieu, Armand 287
Beeckman, Isaac 108, 296
The Beginnings of Western Science
(Lindberg) 465, 468-74, 476-7
belief and doubt 166, 490
, 'Bibliotheca selecta' (Possevino) 126
, Christian 54, 61,68
, Hebrew thought 68, 69
, Islam 54, 61
, Judaism 54
, see also Catholicism; Creator; God;
theology
Bellarmine, Cardinal Robert 126, 184
186, 257, 258
, Galileo's promise to 490
, alluded to 185, 486, 494
Bellini, Lorenzo 118
Benedetti, Giovanni Battista 108, 132n,
219, 294, 296
, and optics 327-8, 329
benevolent destiny, concept of 27
Berkeley, George 354
500
Berlin Academy of Frederick the Great

407, 410
Bernard of Chartres 31, 454
Bernardino of Siena 375
Bernoulli, Daniel 448
Bernoulli, Jakob 384-5, 387, 388, 392,
427
, and expectation and choice 379, 384
Besson, Jacques 320
Biagioli, Mario 492-4
Bianchi, Luca 470
Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze
167
Bibliotheca selecta (Possevino) 126-32
biology 21-2, 27, 106, 118, 435
Biondo, Flavio 453
al-Bitruji (Alpetragius) 58
Bodin, Jean 35, 383
Boethius, Anicius Manlius 18, 59, 219,
469
, and music 42, 292, 293
Bologna 115, 117, 118, 139
Bonamico, Francesco 126, 158
Bonaventura, St 52
Bonnet, Charles Etienne 427
Borelli, Giovanni Alfonso 118
Borri, Girolamo 135, 139
Bossuet, Jaques Benigne 462
Bouchard, Jean-Jacques 272
Bourdelot, Pierre Michon 272
Boyle, The Hon. Robert 67, 84-5
Bradwardine, Thomas 59, 80, 454
Brahe, Tycho 177, 329-30, 331, 334, 471
Brengger, Johann 301, 342
Breslau (town) 387
Bresson, Agnes 287
Briggs, William 345
Britain 264, 399
, see also England
Broad, C.D. 263
Broussais, Francois 447
Brunelleschi, Filippo 319, 320, 473
Brunei, Pierre 407
Bruni, Leonardo 453
Bruno, Giordano, 166, 249
Brunschvicg, Leon 263
Brussels 264
Buff on, George-Louis Leclerc, Comte
de 387, 388, 417, 418, 432
, and classification of species 418, 427
, on geology 418
, and history of science 462
, and statistical analysis 448

Bulver, Ezekial (fict) 28
bulverism 28
Buridan, Jean 80, 82, 470, 473
Burnet, Thomas 385
Burtt, Edwin 264
Butler, Bishop Joseph 416
Byzantinum 470
Caietanus, Thomas de Vio see Cajetan
Cajetan (Thomas de Vio) 126, 155
Calcidius 69, 469
calendar reform 19, 47, 61, 62
, and al-Battani 47, 62
, R. Bacon on 58, 61, 62, 63
, Gregorian 62, 125-6, 156
, Grosseteste on 40, 47, 62
Cambridge 263, 433
camera obscura 340, 345-7, 350
, in astronomy 320-3
, experiments with 305, 310-11
, as model of the eye 38, 105, 327,
329, 336-8
, and ocular physiology 301
, and painting 343
, and screen image 326, 332
, and solar eclipses 329-30, 332
, Straker's account of 473
, and visual theory 326
Campanella, Tommaso 80, 456, 457
Campanus of Novara 59
Carbone, Ludovico 169, 222, 270, 480
, and correspondences with Galileo's
texts 169-72, 479
, and undated writing of Galileo 222
Carcavy, Pierre 208
Cardano, Girolamo 115, 126, 131, 132n
, and rhetoric 249
Carneades of Cyrene 364-6
Carrara, Bellino 165
cartography 19, 99, 106
Carugo, Adriano 155, 156, 158, 484, 489
, and Galileo's Jesuit sources 269-70,
479-80, 486, 493
, and Pinelli collection 175, 187
, and sources of Galileo's scholastic
essays 151, 153, 156, 167-9, 487
Casaubon, Isaac 289
Casserio, Giulio 298, 320
Cassirer, Ernst 194
Castelli, Benedetto 118, 209, 211, 272,
490
Index
Catena, Pietro 117
Catholicism 135, 166
, see also belief and doubt; Creator;
God; theology
causality 68, 71, 455, 459, 466-7
, language of 440-1
cause and effect 86, 446
Cavalieri, Bonaventura 118, 226, 485
Ceredi, Guiseppe 102, 132, 212, 301, 302
Cesi, Frederico 223, 226
chance, games of 381, 382, 384
Charles, E. 51
Charles V, King, of France 82
Charron, Pierre 167
Chatelet-Lomont, Gabrielle Emilie,
Marquise du 462
Chaucer, Geoffrey 81, 469, 470
Chiaramonti, Scipione 244, 245
chickens 412, 421
Children's Crusade 54
Chillingworth, William 380
Chinese medical practice 446
Chinese and origins of languages 278,
283
Christian moral theory 99
Christian theology 5, 72, 79, 99, 469
, and Aristotle 22, 151, 470
Christianity and cosmology 27
church reform 36, 53, 456
, see also belief and doubt
Cicero, Marcus Tullius 51, 127, 455, 469
, and expectation and choice 366-7
Cimabue, Giovanni 34, 453
Cimento, Academia del 118
Clagett, Marshall 477
Clarke, Samuel 408
classical languages 118
classification of species 413
Claudius Galius 129
Clavelin, Maurice 270
Clavius, Christopher 119, 122, 132n, 182
, on astronomy 155, 177, 178
, Galileo visits 156, 175, 479
, and influence on Galileo 176, 181,
194, 269-70
, and influence on Possevino 128, 131
, and mathematics 119-21, 122, 196,
198, 216
, and MS Galileiana 27, 479, 480
, and optics 326-7
, and science 181-3, 184, 185, 187
, and telescope 217
501
, and undated writings of Galileo 2212, 224, 226, 227, 486-7

Clement of Alexandria, St 127
Clement IV, Pope 52, 53, 60
Clement VIII, Pope (formerly Ippolito
Aldobrandini) 116n, 126, 139, 140
clepsydra 56
climate 43, 387
clinical trials 447
clock, mechanical 19, 473
clocks 60, 82
Goiter, Volcher 298
colleges and universities 115-40, 455
, Academic Roy ale des Sciences 299,
347, 409, 411, 460, 461
, 'Accademia della dottrina Platonica'
133
, Basel 324
, Berlin Academy of Frederick the
Great 407, 410
, Bologna 115, 117, 118, 139
, Cambridge 433
, Cimento, Academia del 118
, Collegio Romano 132n, 153, 154,
165, 167, 168
, , and Carbone 172
, , and Clavius 217
, , founded 119
, , and Pereira 133, 270
, , and Rocco 186
, , and Scheiner 345
, , and Vallius 169
, decline of 476
, Ferrara 139, 140
, Fiorentina del Disegno, Academia
103, 173
, Florentine Academy 134
, Gymnasium Patavium Societatis Jesu
126
, Louvain 345
, Messina 118
, Padua 140, 172, 175, 177, 198, 484
, , and Galileo 178, 225, 227, 492
, , and mathematics 117, 118, 134
, , and philosophy 125, 133
, , and Possevino 126
, Pavia 140
, Pisa 116, 117, 118, 134-5, 139-140,
150, 486
, Prague 334
, Rome 133, 139, 140, 153
, , mathematics at 115, 116, 122
, Venice 151, 294
Collingwood, R.G. 263
502
Colombe, Cristoforo delle 245-6

Colombo, Realdo 324, 325
colour and light 45
Columbus, Christopher 59
comets 43, 177, 178, 187, 211, 269, 485
, Galileo v Grassi dispute 493
Commandino, Frederico 131
commerce/book-keeping methods 19
communism and truth 29
compass 175, 492
computer 90
Comte, Auguste 259, 260, 262, 463
Condillac, Etienne Bonnet de 410
Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas
de Caritat, Marquis de 461, 463
Constantine I 453
Cooper, Lane 259
Copernicus 61, 131, 182, 187, 258
, and astronomy 155, 209
, and Galileo 153, 176, 177, 181, 186
, , and undated writings 222
, and rhetoric 244
, alluded to 344, 486, 487
coral reefs 433
Cosimo I, Grand Duke of Tuscany 117
Cosimo II, Grand Duke of Tuscany 179
cosmography see cosmology
cosmology 22, 178, 228, 486
, and Christianity 27
, and Duhem 37
, and Galileo 23, 80, 155, 167, 177,
487
, and Grosseteste 470
, and Kepler 433
, and Maupertuis 420
Cotrugli, Benedetto 375
Council of Trent 136, 165, 166
Cournot, Antoine-Augustin 387
court manners 492
creation 27, 33, 67, 139
Creator 389, 396, 397, 441
, benevolent 20, 22
, eternal/onmnipotent 69, 72, 87, 113,
161
, see also belief and doubt;
Catholicism; God; theology
Cremonini, Cesare 133
crime 372
Crisciani, Chiara 471
Crombie, Alistair C. 168, 172, 465-77,
471,472
Crowley, T. 51
Ctesibus 132
Cuvier, Georges 463
d'Abano, Pietro see Abano, Pietro d'

d'Ailly, Cardinal Pierre see Ailly,
Cardinal Pierre d'
d'Alembert, Jean le Rond see Alembert
Dalton, John 9
Dante, Alighieri 156
, on origins of language 276, 441
, and vernacular philosophy 469
, and poetical revival 34
, and Western science 471
Danti, Egnazio 132
Darwin, Charles
, and 'Beagle' voyages 429, 431, 433
, and biology 21-2, 435
, criticism of predecessors 430
, and evolutionary theory 9, 38
399
, and letters 430, 432
, and natural selection 425, 431, 435,
436, 437
, rhetoric of 6
scientific method 429-37
, and transmutation of species 434
, see also evolution
Darwin, Erasmus 429
Darwin, Francis Charles 432
de Honnecourt see Villard de
Honnecourt
de 1'Epee, Abbe Charles-Michel 285
De Morgan, Augustus 62
De motu gravium (Galileo) 201-5
deaf and dumb 109, 110, 276, 279, 283-4
Dee, John 48, 62, 63
Delambre, Jean Joseph 463
Delfino, Frederico 117
Delia Valle see Paulus Vallius
Democritus 218
demography, population 385
Descartes, Rene 67, 83-4, 106, 408, 414
, and expectation and choice 383, 391
, and history of optics 345, 348-52,
353, 354
, , and camera obscura 350
, and intellectual reform 17
, on laws of nature 67, 83-4
, and natural philosophy 228
, and rainbow 38
, and rhetoric 6
, and scientific revolution 456, 457-8,
460
, and scientific style 229, 270, 467, 472
, and sound 296
Index
d'Este, Cardinal Alessandro see Este,
Cardinal Alessandro d'
destiny, benevolent 27
determinism 22, 79
Dialogue (Galileo) 210-11
Diderot, Dennis 417, 427, 461
digestive system 111
Digges, Leonard 63
Dini, Piero 185
Diodati, Elie 271
, and undated writing of Galileo 225
disease 372, 372-3, 443-9
, AIDS 449
, records 386, 386-7
, smallpox 392
Disputationes (Galileo) 187-95
dissection 420, 433
dogs 418
Dominican order 53
Dondi, Giovanni de' 82, 473
Doni, Giovanni Battista 271, 272
Drake, Stillman 149, 161
Dryden, John 461
du Chatelet, Madam see ChateletLomont, Gabrielle Emilie, Marquise
du
du Laurens, Andre 298
Duhem, Pierre 37, 38, 132n, 257, 471
Duns Scotus, John 47
Diirer, Albrecht 99, 132, 320, 332
Duverney, Joseph Guichard 299
dynamics 180, 185
Earth, planet 160, 179
, movement of 183, 184-5, 470, 487
, orbit of 181
, radius of 60
Eastwood, Bruce 465
eclipses 52, 329-30
ecology 7
economy 16, 22, 392
Edgerton, Samuel Y., Jr 473
education 115-40
, arts/natural science 118
, in astronomy 115, 117
, classical languages 118
, history 118
, literature 118
, logic 118
, mathematics 118-40
, metaphysics 118
, moral science 118
, oriental languages 118
, physics 118
503
, theology 118
Edwards, William F. 484
Elizabeth I, Queen of England 62
Empedocles 391
empiricism 262
Engels, Friedrich 394n
engineering 23, 58, 96-7, 106, 320
England 35
, Peiresc travels to 286
, see also Great Britain
English philosophy 452
enlightenment 35
Enriques, Federigo 477
Epee, Charles Michel de L' 285
Epicurus 69
epicycles and eccentrics 181-2, 183, 184,
185
Erasmus 36, 455
Este, Cardinal Alessandro d' 254
ethics, Aristotelian 16
Ethiopia 288
Euclid 122, 123, 131, 132, 175, 486
, on acoustics 96
, and geometry 16, 17, 96, 217, 432-3,
469
, and logic 369
, and mathematics 96, 161, 196, 200
, and music 18, 293, 295
, and optics 55, 302-3, 305, 308, 471
, , and perspective 46, 137
, , treatise on 18
, andProclus 101, 175
, on ratios 58-9
, and science, language of 441
, and scientific argument 95
Eudoxus of Cnidus 68, 467
Euler, Leonhard 410
European groups and origins of
languages 278
European interest in medieval history 37
ever-burning lamps 57
evolution 22, 398, 407, 412, 428, 429-37
, see also Darwin, Charles; natural
selection; transmutationof species
evolution and the ass 418
expectation and choice 357-400
experience 53-4
experimental method 257
experimental philosophy 258, 262
experimental science 89-114, 467, 471
explosive powder 57
eyes 303-17, 319-28, 329, 333-42, 344-55
504
, and camera obscura 38, 105, 327,

329, 336-8
, see also under Alhazen; Ptolemy; see
also optics
Fabrici d'Acquapendente, Girolamo
126, 279
, and language 278, 281, 282
, and optics 320, 325, 334
falling bodies 104, 176, 208, 215-16, 268,
486, 487
Falloppio, Gabriele 126
false/true premise 182
falsification, method of 43
al-Farabi, Abu Nasr 59, 79, 96
Faraday, Michael 3, 441
al-Farghani 59, 60
Favaro 175, 205
, and writings of Galileo 151, 156,
167, 222, 224
Ferdinand The Catholic' (Ferdinand II
of Aragon) 59
Ferguson, Wallace K. 455
Ferrara 133, 139, 140
Ficino, Marsilio 19, 69, 95, 127
, on art and nature 100, 136
, and Catholicism 135
, and music 293
, and philosophy 166
, and platonism 139
, and rhetoric 249
, and undated writings of Galileo 226
First Cause theory 22
First Council of Lyons (1245) 41
First Letter about the Sunspots (Galileo)
87, 150, 180, 186, 215, 216
Fisher, R.A. 448
Florence 156, 158, 159, 173, 271, 493-4
, and Galileo's writings 224, 225, 490
, Michelini returns to 272
Florence, Council of 125
Florentine Academy 134
Florentine Accademia del Disegno 103
Fludd, Robert 111
flying machines 33, 57
Fogliano, Lodovico 99
Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de 461
fossils 418, 433, 434
France 35, 125, 264, 287
, deaf and dumb teaching 285
, economy 399
, and science 461
Francesca, Piero della see Piero della

Francesea
Francesco I, Grand Duke of Tuscany
134
Franciscan order 39, 52, 53, 59
Frederic, Jean 384
Frederick II, (the Great) King of Prussia
35, 276, 409-10, 411
Frisius, Gemma 323-4
Gaffurio, Franchino 99
Gagliardi, Achille 119, 125, 126, 133
Galapagos Islands 434
Galen (Claudius Galenus) 218, 305, 306,
456, 457, 471
, atomist doctrine 157
, and hearing 297
, and micro/macrocosm 469
, and optics 303, 307, 308, 309, 31516, 325
, as philosopher 156
, alluded to 102, 486
Galilei, Galileo see Galileo
Galilei, Vincenzo 103, 108, 150, 156,
173, 486
, and acoustics 174
, and music 131, 151, 219
, and sound 294-6
, death 1591 295
Galileo 105, 260, 414
, biography
, , background 173
, , biographers 103-4, 149, 259
, , career
, , , at Padua 134, 492
, , , at Pisa 117, 134, 198, 479
, , as court philosopher 493
, , critics 261
, , friends 24, 272
, , intellectual 168, 172, 173, 188
, , trial & house arrest 24, 489, 493,
494
, and Aristotelian theories 149-61,
229, 259
, and astronomy 178, 185, 209, 258
, and causality 441
, and Clavius 176, 181, 194, 270, 479
visits Clavius 156, 175, 479-80
, on comets 177, 493
, and Copernicus 153, 176, 177, 181,
186
commitment to 22, 177
Index
, and correspondences with Carbone's
texts 169-72, 479
, and cosmology 23, 80, 155, 167, 177
, and court patronage 492-4
, and dynamics 185
, Earth, on motion of 184-5
, on epicycles and eccentrics 185
, and experimental enquiry 258, 262
, and experimental physics 206-7
, on gravity 104
, on heat and light 219, 489
, and Koyre's understanding of 26770, 477
, letters 488
, , to Baliani 208
, , to Carcavy 208
, , to/from Castelli 211, 490
, , to Dini 185, 486
, , to father 198, 486
, , to/from Liceti 216-17, 229
, , to Mazzoni 198, 486
, , to Mazzoni/Kepler 176-7
, , to Vmta 179, 486
, and light 215
, and mathematics 118, 196, 197, 198,
212
, , his interest in 173, 217
, Mazzoni, studies with 486
, and mechanics 23, 103, 185, 212-13
, and moon 106
, and music 103, 219
, and natural philosophy 23, 139-61,
167, 208, 213, 267
, and new star of 1604 177
, and optics 217, 343
, meets Peiresc 286
, on pendulum 179, 208, 279-3, 485
, pendulum ratio, and discovery of
270-3
, and philosophy 179, 257-62, 486
, and properties/qualities 218
, and Redondi's document 490
, and rhetoric 6, 180-1, 216, 231-55,
494
, and science 20, 35
, science, and language of 441
, on science and nature 165-229
, and scientific style 270, 468
, on sunspots 211
, , First Letter 87, 150, 180, 186,
215, 216
, , Second Letter 213
505
, , Third Letter 215

, and telescope 106, 177, 185, 214
, and theology 229
, on tides 185-6
, on truth 23, 24, 25
, writings
, , chronology/paper 155-8, 162-3
, , dating of 155, 165, 166n, 172-4n,
220-8, 487-8
, , dated 175
, , undated 172, 220-8, 486, 493
, scholastic essays of 151-61, 168, 187
, sources of 167-9, 221-2, 226-8, 26970, 486
, , scholastic essays 151, 155, 165,
221, 479-94
, , Carbone, Ludovico 169, 172,
269-70, 479, 484
, , Clavius, Christopher 153, 168,
269-70, 479
, , Paulus Vallius 479, 484
, , Pereira, Benito 153, 158, 168,
205, 269-70
, , Toledo, Francisco de 153, 158,
168, 205, 269-70
, watermarks of paper 156, 157, 162-3
, highest rates of citation 155, 194
The Galileo Prize 161, 167
Garin, Eugenio 158
Gassendi, Pierre 228, 229, 287, 352-3
Gaultier, Joseph 286-7
Gelenius, Sigismundus 277, 288
Geminus 131, 183
Gemistus 139
genetical disputes, Soviet 28
geography 59, 132
geology 22, 27, 418, 433
geometry 55, 58, 115, 131, 178, 441
, analysis 45
, and art 99
, of Euclid 16, 17, 96, 217, 432-3, 469
, of Greek mathematicians 4, 95-6
, of Pascal 113
George, Wilma 471
Gerald of Wales 39, 42
Germany 37, 125, 271, 453, 464
Gesner, Conrad 278, 288, 456
Gessner see Gesner
Gherardini, Niccolo 149
Ghetaldi, Marino 224
Ghiberti, Lorenzo 319, 453
Gibbon, Edward 463
Gilbert, William 35, 111, 210, 471, 492-3
Gilles of Lessines 374
506
Gilson, Etienne 263, 469

Giorgio, Francesco 131
Giotto 34-5, 453
God 33, 71, 72, 79-81,85, 182
, omnipotent 71, 77, 79, 84, 85
Catholicism; Creator; theology
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 461
Gogava, Antonio 295
Gondisalvo, Domingo 96
Gorgias and rhetoric 234
Grafton, Anthony 484
Graham, W. 398
Grassi, Orazio 485, 489, 490, 493
Graunt, John 379, 386-7, 447-8
gravitational clocks 82
gravitational theories 117-18, 215-16,
259, 260, 434
, and Archimedes 175
, of Galileo 104, 480
Gray, Asa 398
Graz, solar eclipse at 330
Great Britain 264, 399
, see also England
Greek astronomy 86, 413, 441
Greek grammar 54
Greek language 68
Greek mathematics 4, 95-6, 265, 441
Greek optical theory 302-4, 315
Greek philosophy 16, 265, 456, 469
, causal continuity 3-4
, causality in medicine 446, 447
, and natural science 1, 21, 440, 443
, and probability 360-7
, scepticism 71, 72, 167
, and theology 70
Greek science 16, 265, 456
Greek texts 32-3
Gregorian calendar 62, 125-6, 156
Gregory III, Pope 125
Grienberger, Christopher 119, 217
Grosseteste, Robert 39-47, 472
, background 39
, career
, , as bishop & statesman 40
, , clerk at Hereford 42
, , at Oxford 39
, , as scholar & teacher 40
, ecclesiastical appointments 39, 41
, Aristotle, influence of 42, 43
, on astrology 47
, and astronomy 40, 42, 46, 47
, and R. Bacon 39, 52, 55, 56, 61
, on calendar reform 40, 47, 62
, and cosmology 470

, and falsified conclusions 43
, and Franciscans 39
, and geometry 55
, letters 39
, on light 40, 41, 42-3, 44, 45
, on methodology (4 essays on) 43-6
, and music 42
, and optics 316-17
, philosophy of 40, 42-3
, scientific writing 42
, and sound 292
, written work 40, 42, 43, 44, 45-6,
47-8
Grotius, Hugo 380
Guidi, Guido 298
Guiducci, Mario 215
Guy de Foulques, Cardinal see Clement
IV, Pope
Gymnasium Patavium Societatis Jesu of
Padua 126
Halley Edmund 379, 387
Haly Ibn Sma 60
Harriot, Thomas 106, 349
Hartsoeker, Nicolaas 422
Harvey, William 111, 112, 414, 469
hearing 96, 107-10, 291-9
, see also music; sound
heat and light 219, 489
Hebrew.
, astronomical tables 62
, doctrine 68, 69
, grammar 54
, language 275, 276, 277, 279
, theology 27, 70, 469
Henry III, King of England 51
Herbert of Cherbury 380
Hereford 39, 42
heresy 372
Hermes Trismegistus 139
Hero of Alexandria 101, 102, 132
Herodotus 275
Hesiod 68
Hiero II, King of Synacuse, and undated
writings of Galileo 223
hieroglyphics 289
Hipparchus 47, 153, 221
Hippocrates, and medical science 445
, and rhetoric 235
Index
'Historical Commitments of European
Science' (Crombie) 474-5
history
, of argument 12, 180-1, 357-400, 4439,467
, human 458-9
, Jesuit education 118
, of science 451-64
Hobbes, Thomas 48, 63, 352-3, 381,
394n
Hoeniger, David 473
Hohenburg, Hewart von 368
Holcot, Robert 81
Holy Scriptures 41, 53, 182, 470
Homer 68
Hook, Robert 418
Hooker, Joseph 431
Howard, Thomas, 2nd Earl of Arundel
288
Hudde, Jan 384
Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln 39
Hugh of St. Victor 33
humanists and scientific revolution 455
humankind, Western visions of 1-12
Humboldt, Alexander Baron von 59
Hume, David 258, 461, 463
Hunain (Hunayn) ibn Ishaq 56, 306
Hungary 125
Hutchinson, Evelyn 471
Huxley, Thomas Henry 398-9
Huygens, Christiaan 113, 347, 379, 3812,387
hydrostatic balance 224
hydrostatics 209, 211, 269
hypothesis 262, 467
Ibn al-Haytham see Alhazen
Ibn Sfna (Avicenna) 56, 76, 79, 190
Ignatius see Loyola
Indian medical practice 446
infinite power 67-88
inoculation 392
insurance 374, 384, 447
intellectual reform 16-17, 33
intellectual styles 2-6
Isabella of Castile 59
Islam 5, 54, 61, 470
isolated child, origins of language and
275, 276, 277, 280-1
Italian historians 453
Italian mathematicians 447
507
Italian universities, mathematics and

Platonism in 115-40
Italy 35, 36, 82, 150, 452
, Greeks flee to 456
, Peiresc journey's to 286
, spectacles invented in 317
Ivan IV, Czar (the Terrible) 125
Jandun, Jean de 176, 283-4
Japanese thinking 4
Javelli, Chrisostomo 126, 127
Jenner, Edward 446
Jerome, St 127
Jessen, Johannes 334, 342
The Jesuit 'Constitutions' (1556) 118,
121
Jesuits 134, 165-229
, Aristotelian/Thomist revival 166
, education
, , arts/natural science 118
, , classical languages 118
, , history 118
, , literature 118
, , logic 118
, , mathematics 118-40
, , metaphysics 118
, , moral science 118
, , oriental languages 118
, , physics 118
, , theology 118
, philosophy 132
, as source of Galileo's writings 165,
167-9, 269-70, 493
, and undated writing of Galileo 221,
222, 226, 227, 228
Jewish philosophy 72
Jews 127
Jews in Alexandria 70
John of Damascus 40
John of London 59
John (pupil of Roger Bacon) 53
John of Salisbury 369, 454
Johnson, Dr Samuel 416
Jordanus de Nemore 59
judgement/assent 369-74
Julian year 61, 62
Jupiter 185, 217
satellites 258, 287, 493
Justin, St (the Martyr) 139
Kant, Immanuel 260, 262
Kemp, Martin 473
Kepler, Johann 111, 176, 331, 334, 473
, and astronomy 471, 485
508
, and camera obscura 332, 336-8, 343

, and cosmology 433
, and history of optics 304-5, 329-45,
347-8, 350, 354-5, 485
, and innovation 7
, letters from Galileo 176, 487
, and optical physiology 38
, and planetary intervals 21
, and retinal image 105
, and solar eclipse 330
kinematics 180
Kirby, William 394n
Kircher, Anthanasius 289
Kohlhans, Johann Christoph 347
Koyre, Alexandre 263-4, 267-70, 476,
477
La Galla, Giulio Cesare 215, 217
La Hire, Philippe de 347
La Mettrie, Julien Off ray de 410
Lactantius 469-70
Laertius, Diogenes 275
Lagrange, Joseph Louis de, Comte 258
Lalande, Joseph Jerome Le Francois de
410
Lamarck Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine
de Monet de 394n
language 54
, of animals 278, 280, 282
, Arabic 288
, Babel 276
, and R. Bacon 51, 52, 56, 276
, of causality 440-1
, Chinese groups 278
, deaf and dumb 276, 277, 283-4
, and electro-chemistry 441-2
, English 91, 439
, European groups 278, 288
, French 439
, German 288
, Greek 68
, Hebrew 275, 276, 277, 279, 288
, history of 275-89
, isolated child theory 275, 276, 277,
280-1
, Italian 439
, Latin 3, 68, 276, 439, 441, 453
, of mathematics 442
, of music 442
, new terminology 3, 442
, and the occult 276, 278, 279
, origins of 275-85, 288-9
, Persian 278, 288
, philosophical 279
, of science 3, 439-42
, and Semitic groups 278
, technical 442
, universal 277, 278, 282
Laplace, Pierre-Simon, Marquis de 394,
396, 399, 448, 463
, and analysis of numbers 392-3
, and inverse probability 387
Larroque, Philippe Tamizey de 287
Latin language 3, 68, 276, 439, 441, 453
latitude/longitude 59, 60
laws of nature
, defined 86
, St Augustine on 69, 72-5, 77
Le Clerc, Daniel 462
Leaning Tower of Pisa 259
least action, principal of 21, 389, 411
Lebegue, Raymond 287
Leeuwenhoek, Anton van 422
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 289, 408,
426, 462
, and expectation and choice 379, 384,
385
, and history of optics 301-2, 354
Leicester 39
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 28
Lenoble, Robert 263
lens 55, 56, 303, 304, 320, 343
Leo X, Pope 115
Leon, Pedro Ponce de 284
Leonardo da Vinci 19, 99, 100-1, 132n,
136, 252
, and history of optics 320-3, 327, 334
1'Epee, Abbe Charles-Michel see Epee,
Charles-Michel de L'
Lessius (Leonard Leys) 378
letters, unidentified, of Galileo 187
Leurechon, Jean 344
Lewis, C.S. 28
Leys, Leonard (Lessius) 378
Libri, Guglielmo 463
Liceti, Fortunio 140, 216, 217, 229, 488
light 40, 42, 42-43, 44, 45, 215-6
Lincoln 39, 41
Lindberg, David C. The Beginnings of
Western Science 465, 468-74, 476-7
linear scale 203
Linnaeus, Carolus (Carl von Linne) 41314, 414-15, 417, 418, 425
Linnean Society 431
Linz, Wotton 343
literature 118, 453, 455-6
Little, A.G. 51, 61, 62
Index
Locher, Giovanni Giorgio 487
Locke, John 354, 461
logic 51, 118, 260, 369, 440-1, 467
London 264
, population statistics 447
Louvain 345
Loyola, St. Ignatius 118-9, 121
Lucretius, Titus 56
, and expectation and choice 366, 390,
391
, nature, laws of 69-70, 388
Lull, Ramon 278, 384
Lavrov, P.L. 394n
Lyell, Charles 6, 436
McCarthy, Senator Joseph 28
Mach, Ernst 260, 261
Machiavelli, Niccolo 35, 104, 453
macrocosm/microcosm 40
McVaugh, Michael 471
magic 57, 63, 278
Magiotti, Rafaello 272
magnetism 57, 59, 97, 111, 471, 493
magnification 55, 56, 316-17
Maieru, Alfonso 469
Malebranche, Nicolas 354
Malpighi, Marcello 118, 354
Malthus, Thomas 393, 434
Mantua 492
manual industry 97-8, 98, 100
Marciana library 288
Maricourt, Pierre de 57, 59, 97, 471
Mariotte, Edme 299, 347
Mars 185
Marseilles 288
Marsh, Adam 39, 52
Marsili, Cesare 226
Marsilius of Inghen 277
Martini, Francesco di Georgio 106, 320
Marx, Karl 394n
Mastlin, Michael 330, 344
mathematics 57, 87, 97, 442
, 16th century debate 21, 195-201
, and Archimedes 59, 151, 197
, and astronomy 99, 155, 183
, and Bacon, R. 52, 54, 56, 60, 97
, , and logic 59
, , and usefulness of 58
, at Bologna 115
, and Clavius 119-21, 122, 196, 198,
216
, and Euclid 96, 161, 196, 200
, and Galileo 118, 196, 197, 198, 212,
488
509
, , his interest in 173, 217

, Italian 447
, in Jesuit education 118-40
, and Platonism 115-40
, and Possevino 128-31
, at Rome 115
, students 120-1
, tutors 119-20
Mather, Cotton 456
Maupertuis, Pierre Louis Moreau de 407
, biography/background 407, 410
, , Battle of Molwitz 410, 412, 428
, and albinism 418, 421, 424
, and animal studies 411-12
, and cosmology 420
, critics (Voltaire) 409, 410, 411, 417,
427
394n, 395, 396
, and history of science 462
, least action, theory of 411
, and probability 389-92
, and salamander 411
, and scorpion 412
Maurolico, Francesco 63, 119, 326-7, 330
Mazzoni, Jacopo 127
, and Galileo 156, 176, 177, 198, 222,
486, 487, 488
, , letters from 176
, and mathematics 196, 197, 198, 216
, at Pisa 134, 139-40
, and Platonism 139-40, 150
, and Possevino 131
measurement and physical research 86-7
mechanical clock 60
mechanics
, clock 60
, Guidobaldo del Monte and 212
, Galileo and 23, 103, 185, 212-13
Meckel, Johann Friedrich 410
medical astrology 61
medical science 445-9
Medici, Cosimo de' 139
medicine, history of 462
medicine, university teaching of 115
Mediterranean Sea, measurement of 287
Mei, Girolamo 294
Mendel, Gregor 436
Mercurius Trismegistus 139
Mercury (planet) 185
Mersenne, Marin 132n, 186, 258, 286,
383, 384
510
, and Jesuits 228

, on language 285
, on mathematics 105-6
, and music 107-10, 296, 297
, and Neoplatonism 229
, and origins of language 275-85
, and pendulum ratio debate 270-3,
485
, and sound 296, 297
, and virtu 113
Mery, Jean 347
Messahala 60
Messina 118, 119
metaphysics 52, 54, 79, 118
Micanzio, Fulgenzio 271
Michelangelo 101, 101-2
Michelini, Famiano 272
microcosm/macrocosm 40
microscope 91
Milan 102
Mill, John Stuart 260, 431
Mirandola see Pico della Mirandola,
Giovanni
Moivre, Abraham de 387
Moleto, Gioseffe (Giuseppe) 117-18,
126, 134, 175
Molwitz 410, 412, 428
Molyneux, William 354
monkeys 418
Montaigne, Michel de 167, 184, 379
Monte, Cardinal Frances^.. Maria del
117
Monte, Guidobaldo del 102-3, 126, 132,
175-6
, and mechanics 212
, and undated writings of Galileo 225,
480
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat,
Baron de la Brede et de 461
Montpellier 286
Montucla, John Etienne 258, 463
moon 43, 47, 106, 177, 179, 186
, mountains on 258
moral science in Jesuit education 118
morals 94, 99, 118
Morcillo, Sebastian Fox 127
More, Thomas 104, 447
mortality records 386-7
Moscow 125
Moses 139
Moslem philosophy 72
Moss, Jean Dietz 231-2
motion, inertial 38
Miiller, Adolph 165

Miiller, Johannes see Regiomontanus
music 18, 96, 103, 174, 219
, arithmetically quantified 99
, and astronomy 42
, fifth interval 263
, and hearing 291-9
, history of 291-9
, new language of 442
, and origins of language 282-3
, pendulum ratio debate 270-3
, science of 107-10
, theories of 86
, and vibration 219
, see also hearing; sound
musical academy of the Camerata 294
Muslim theology 79
mutation of species 418
National Edition of Galileo 489, 490
natural philosophy 20, 82, 149-61, 153,
228
, and Galileo 23, 139-61, 167, 208,
213, 267
natural selection 425, 431, 435, 436, 437
, see also Darwin, Charles; evolution;
transmutation of species
nature, laws of 67, 68, 69, 75-7, 470, 472
, and St Augustine 69, 72-5, 77
, and R. Bacon 75-7
, Descartes on 83-4
, designation of 86
, and Lucretius 69-70, 388
, medieval conceptions of 67-88
, and Newton 67, 85, 186
, and Philo Judaeus of Alexandria
70-2
, and Suarez 83
, and Bishop Etienne Tempier 80
, and William of Ockham 77-8
nature, Western visions of 1-12
navigation/cartography 19
Neckham, Alexander 369
Neoplatonism and Catholicism 166
Nero 60
Netherlands 35, 286
Neuperg, Comte 410
new cosmology 177, 433
new philosophy see experimental
philosophy
New Star of 1604 177, 178, 487
Newton, Sir Isaac 408, 409, 415, 417,
430
Index
, and causality 441
, and language of science 441
, and laws of gravitation 434
, on laws of nature 67, 85, 186
, and mechanistic theory 434
, translated by Madame du Chatelet
462
'Nicholas, Master' (teacher) 59
Nicholas (Nicolaus) of Cusa 61, 62, 99,
453
Nicole, Pierre 379, 382-4
Nicomachus 293
Nifo, Agostine 184
Noailles, Francois de 272
North, John 471
Novara, Domenico Maria 115
objectivity, scientific 13-30
Olschki, Leonardo 473
omnipotent Craftsman 247
Opus tertiwn (Bacon, R.) 52
Optica (Alhazen) 316, 319
optics 54, 55, 56, 58, 63, 99
, and art 105
, and colour 45
, and Galileo 217, 343
, history of
, , Alhazen 38, 301-28, 471, 473
, , Bacon, R. 52, 292, 316, 317-19,
326
, , Crombie 471
, , Descartes 345, 348-52, 354
, , Euclid 55, 302-3, 305, 308, 471
, , Fabrici 320, 325, 334
, , Galen 303, 307, 308, 309, 315-16,
325
, , Grosseteste 316-17
, , Kepler 38, 304-5, 329-45, 347-8,
350, 354-5
, , Leibniz 301-2, 354
, , Lindberg 471
, , Mersenne 348, 352
, and ocular physiology 301, 473
, see also eyes
Oresme, Nicole 80, 82-3, 277, 454
, and earth's rotation 470
, and the world clock 473
, and scientific vernaculars 469
oriental languages 118
The Origin of the Species (Darwin) 6,
429, 431, 435, 436
Oryx beisa (antelope) 288
511
Osiander, Andreas 257

Oxford 39, 52, 151,264
Pacioli, Luca 115, 131, 376
Pacius, Jules 286
Padua 140, 172, 175, 177, 198, 484
, and Galileo 134, 178, 225, 227, 492
, Peiresc explores 286
, and philosophy 125, 133
, and Possevino 126
, see also under colleges and
universities
painting 34, 96-7, 173, 320, 343
Paley, William 416, 433
Palladio 132
Pappus 102, 206, 225, 269
Paris 39, 52, 80, 82, 153, 264, 490
, Leibniz studies in 384
Paris, Matthew 39
Pascal, Blaise 113, 379, 381-2, 384, 3989,447
Pasteur, Louis 446
Pastoreaux rebels 52, 54
Patrizi, Francesco 127, 139-40, 166
Paul of Middleburgh 61
Paul, St 135
Pavia 140
Pecham, John (also Pisanus) 316, 319,
326, 332, 344
Peiresc, Nicolas Claude Fabri de 271,
278, 286-9, 494
, background 286
, collections of 288
, correspondence 287
, Lettres a Claude Saumaise et a son
entourage 287-9
, and origin of language 288-9
Peiresc (village) 286
Pena, Jean 131, 295
pendulum 179, 208, 270-3, 485
Pequet, Jean 111, 347
perception 26
Pereira, Benito 119, 122-4, 127, 132-3
, on astromomical hypotheses 184
, as source for Galileo's writings 153,
158, 168, 205, 269-70, 485
226, 227, 486, 487
, and Vallius 485
, alluded to 123
periodisation (ancient, medieval,
modern) 34, 36, 452, 453
512
Perrault, Claude 299, 347

Persian language 278
Persio, Antonio 134
perspective 46, 98, 105, 106, 320, 473
, and Greek mathematicians 441
, Vieri on 137-8
persuasion see rhetoric
Petrarch, Francesco Petrarca 34, 452-3
Petty, William 379, 385
Peurbach, Georg 99
Phaedrus (Plato) 133-6
Philander 132
Philo of Byzantium (2nd C B.C.) 132
Philo Judaeus of Alexandria (1st C
A.D.) 70-2, 469-70
Philoponus, John 153, 221
philosophers, mechanistic 27
philosophy 35, 37, 52-3, 54, 126
, Christian 72
, empiricism 262
, English 452
, ethics 16
, of Galileo 179, 257-62, 488
, Greek see Greek philosophy
, of Grosseteste 40, 42-3
, history of 458, 459
, humanism 455
, Italian 166
, Jesuit 132
, metaphysics 52, 54, 79, 118
, natural 149-61, 166
, Neoplatonism 166
, Platonic 127, 134
, positivism 259, 260, 261
, psychology 26
, rationalism 89-114
, scepticism 20, 72, 128, 167
, Stoics/Stoicism 21, 68, 71, 72, 128
, see also God; logic; truth
physical research and measurement 86-7
physick, history of 462
physics
, experimental 206-7
, Greek 16
, in Jesuit education 118
Piccolomini, Alessandro 122, 124, 132,
194, 195
, and mechanics 175
, and rhetoric 236-42, 243, 245, 250
Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni 126,
139, 166
Pico, Gianfrancesco 131
Pico, Giovanni 127
Piero della Francesca 99

Pieroni, Giovanni 271
pigeons 418
pin hole image see camera obscura
Pinelli, Giovanni Vincenzo 117, 126,
134, 175, 286
, and library 288
, manuscripts 187
Pinelli library 288
Pisa 156, 173, 181, 198
, and Galileo's writings 227, 479, 486
, Peiresc's background 286
universities
Pisa, Leaning Tower of 259
Pisanus see Pecham, John
planets 54, 61, 99, 178, 181, 185
, Jupiter 179, 217, 287
, planetary intervals 21
, Venus 186
, see also astronomy; cosmology;
telescope
plants and longevity 57
Plater, Felix 320, 324-5, 329, 334, 335
Plato 32, 134, 139,261,275
, and acoustics 292
, and architecture 91-2
, and creation 71
, critics of 127
, and mathematics 123, 196, 197, 198,
200
, and nature
, , as a deductive system 21
, , laws of 68, 69
, and origin of language 275
, philosophy 127, 134
, and properties/qualities 219
, and rhetoric 92-3, 237, 362
, and scientific style 467
226
, alluded to 31, 95, 149, 358, 486
Platonism 115-40, 150
Platter see Plater, Felix
Plempius, Vopiscus Fortunatus 345
Pliny the Elder 60, 469
Plotinus 72, 138
Plutarch 127, 129, 130
poetry 34
Poland 125, 126
political
, bulverism 28
Index
, history 453
, role of science 21
politics 21, 28, 29, 95, 453
Ponce de Leon, Pedro 110, 284
population 385
Porphyry 293
Port-Royal 382
Porta, Giambattista della, 223, 301, 328,
329, 335
Posidonius 129
positivism 259, 260, 261
Possevino, Antonio 124-32
, on astrology 132
, and calendar reform 125-6
, diplomatic missions 125
, friendships 175
, and influence of Clavius 128, 131
, and Jesuit society 125, 126
, as Papal Nuncio 125
, written work
, , Bibliotheca selecta 126-32, 133,
175
, , on Jesuit universities 125
, , on peace mission to Russia 125
Postel, Guillaume 288
postulation, theoretical, of Galileo 268-9
power 27, 67-88, 79-81
power, propogation of 55
Prado, Jeronimo 132n
Prague 334
Priestley, John 463
primary properties/secondary qualities
157, 218-19
Princeton 264
Priscian (Priscianus Caesariensis) 31, 223
probabilities 359, 468
, history of 360-7, 369-74
, , arguments from 357-400
, , and natural selection 388-400
, see also expectation and choice
probability theories 360-7,387, 389-92
Proclus 123, 131, 217, 269
, analysis and synthesis 209
, on Euclid 101, 175
, and mathematics 195, 196, 198, 216
proof, concept of 68, 466
Protestant reformation 36
Protestantism 455
Psalms, translation of 40
Psellus, Michael 131
psychiatry, Western 446
psychology 26
Ptolemy 59, 60, 62, 131, 175
, and astronomy 209
513
, and R. Bacon 55, 58

, and calendar 47
, and Clavius 182
, and experimental argument 467
, and Grosseteste 45, 46
, and music 293, 295
, and optics 96, 303, 308, 313, 317, 471
, , eye, history of the 305, 306
, and planetary tables 469
, primary properties/secondary
qualities 219
, and refraction 86, 472
, and rhetoric 238
, and scientific style 467
, and tables of refraction 332
public health 448
Pythagoras 127, 131, 139, 149, 296
Querengo, Antonio 254
Quintilian, Marcus Fabius 367
Quintilianus, Aristides 293
Raimondi, Giambattista 116, 139
rainbows 38, 40, 45, 57
, studies of 471-2
Ralegh (Raleigh), Sir Walter 36
Ramelli, Agostino 320
Ramus, Peter 36
Rashdall, H. 54
ratio 58-59, 268, 270-3, 332
rational artist 89-114
Ray, John 413, 415, 425
Reael, Laurens 270
Redi, Francesco 414
Redondi, Pietro 485, 489, 490
reefs, coral 433
reflection 56, 177
Reformation of Religion 36, 456
refraction 55, 56
Regiomontanus 61
religion and scientific revolution 455
religious reform 36, 456
renaissance 96, 452, 455
reproduction, theories of 422-3
resolution and composition (Galileo)
209
rhetoric 92-3, 231-55, 436
, and Aristotle 232, 236-40, 243, 2478, 250-2, 362-3
, and Cardano 249
, and Colombe 245-6
, and Copernicus 244
514
, and Darwin 6
, and Descartes 6
, and Ficino 249
, and Galileo 6, 180-1, 216, 231-55,
485, 494
, and Gherardini 149, 239
, and Gorgias 234
, and Hippocrates 235
, and J.D. Moss 231-2
, and Plato 92-3, 237, 362
, and Ptolemy 238
Riccardi, Padre, Maestno del Sacro
Palazzo 490
Richard of Wallingford 82, 470, 473
Ristoro, Juliano 117
Robertson, William 463
Rocco, Antonio 161, 186
Romanticism 37
Rome 271, 272, 346, 453, 489, 490, 494
universities
Ronchi, Vasco 471
Rose, Cipriano de 294
Roshdi Rashed 470
Rossi-Monti, Paolo 267n
Rousseau, Jean Jacques 461
Royal Society Catalogue of Scientific
Papers 436
The Royal Society 258, 460, 461
Rudolph II, Emperor 331, 494
Rushworth, William 381
Russell, Gul 470
Sabra, A.I. 471
Sacrament of the Eucharist 489
Sacrobosco, Johannes de 60, 486
'Sagredo' (and Galileo) 226, 244, 251
salamander 411
'Salviati' as Galileo 226, 243-5, 247-8,
250-3, 261
Santillana, Giorgio de 257
Santorio Santorio 485
Sarpi, Pietro 176
Saturn 185
Saumaise, Claude 287, 289
Savoy 125
Scaliger, Joseph-Juste 278, 288
Scaliger, Julius Caesar 153
scepticism 20, 72, 128, 167
, see also Stoics/Stoicism
Scheiner, Christopher 180
and history of optics 345-7
science:
, and Clavius 181-3, 184, 185, 187
, experimental 89-114
, history of 31-8, 263-70, 440, 443-4,
451-64
, and Islam 54
, language of 3, 439-42
, of music 107-10
, and nature 1, 19, 54, 165-229
, new science 35, 36, 279, 459
, quantitative 20
, of vision 302
, , see also optics
, Western visions of 1-12
scientific language 439-42
scientific method of Darwin 429-37
scientific method of inquiry 10, 11, 12,
467-8
scientific objectivity, Western experience
of 13-30
scientific revolution 451-64
scientific style 159, 229, 270, 467-8, 472
scientific thought of R. Bacon 53-63
scorpion 412
Scriptures, Holy 41, 53, 182, 470
sculpture, Galileo's interest in 173
Sedgwick, Adam 433
Semitic groups and origins of language
278
Seneca, Lucius ('the Younger') 34, 51,
60
Sextus Empiricus 218, 365, 366, 379
Shakespeare, William 105, 416
Shea, William 157, 158
shell, tropical, at Shrewsbury 433
Shirley, John 473
Siculus, Diodorus 275
Silvestris, Bernard 33
Simon de Montfort 41, 59
'Simplicio'
, as Aristotle 243, 247, 250, 252, 253
Simplicius 183, 221
Siraisi, Nancy 471
Smith, Adam 392, 394, 396
Snel, Willebrord 349
social responsibility 99
, see also virtu
Socrates 32, 200, 233-6, 466
solar eclipses 329-30, 332
solar radiation 43
Soto, Domingo de 126
sound 42, 108-9, 219, 292, 296, 297-8
, see also hearing; music
South America 431, 434
Spain 110, 284
Index
species, classification of 413
Speculum astronomic, authorship
question of 61
Speroni, Sperone 126
Sprat, Thomas 461
stars 43, 57, 177, 178, 179
, see also astronomy; cosmology;
planets
statistics 11, 385-8, 399, 447, 448
, and economy 392
, and evolution 398
, and Maupertuis 390
Stoffler, Johannes 62
Stoics/Stoicism 21, 68, 71, 72, 128
, see also scepticism
Straker, Stephen 471, 473
Sturm, Johann Christoph 347
Suarez, Francisco 83, 84
submarines 33, 57
sulpher drugs 448
sun 179, 186, 211, 213
sunspots 207, 269
, Galileo on 211
, , First Letter 87, 150, 180, 186,
215, 216
, , Second Letter 213
, , Third Letter 215
Swammerdam, Jan 414
Sweden 125
Sydenham, Thomas 446
Taccola (Mariano di Jacopo) 106, 320
Tartaglia, Niccolo 132
Tartars 54
Tasso, Torquato 223
taxonomy and scientific style 11, 467-8
technology, modern 448-9
Tedeschi, Leonardo 177
telescope 87, 91, 186, 207, 217, 494
, discoveries 177, 185, 214
, of Kepler 343
, observations 106, 179, 217, 286-7
Telesio 249
Tempier, Bishop Stephen 53, 61, 80
Thabit ibn Qurra 62
Thales 130
Themistius 239, 292
Theodoric of Freiberg 38, 471-2
Theodosius 59
theological letters of Galileo 229
theology 23, 34, 54, 151
, and Archimedes 470
, and Aristotle 22, 151, 470
, Christian 5, 72, 79, 99, 469
515
, and Galileo 229

, Hebrew 27, 70, 469
, Islamic 5
, and Jesuit education 118
, and modern science 16, 461
, Muslim 79
Catholicism; Creator; God
Theon of Smyrna 219, 293
Theophratus 467
thermometers 111, 203, 485
Thierry of Chartres 31, 32
Thomas Aquinas see Aquinas, St
Thomas
Thomas de Vio see Cajetan
Thorndike, Lynn 59-60
Thucydides 13, 14, 27
tides 43, 47, 160, 179, 185-6, 211
Times Literary Supplement 479, 484,
489-91
Toledan tables 60
Toledo, Francisco de (Toletus) 119, 126,
153, 158
, written work 168, 172, 269-70, 484
Toletus see Toledo, Francisco de
Torres, Balthassar 119
Torricelli, Evangelista 118
Toscanelli, Paolo dal Pozzo 59, 99
Tournefort, Joseph Pitton de 413
Tractationes de mundo et de caelo
(Galileo) 151-60, 167, 194
transmutation of species 434
, see also Darwin, Charles; evolution;
natural selection
Tribunal of the Holy Office 490
true/false premise 182
truth 23, 24, 53, 381
, and bulverisation 28
, and communism 29
, in modern science 25
Turks' invasion of Greek churches 456
Tuscany 139
Tuscany, Grand Dukes of 134, 159, 247,
492-3
Tycho see Brahe, Tycho
Tyndall, John 3
Tyson, Edward 413, 415, 418
United States 59, 264, 476
universal language 277, 278, 282
universities see colleges and universities
Urban VIII, Pope 489, 490-1
Valerio, Luca 116, 207
Valla, Giorgio 100, 102, 131
516
Valle see Vallius

Vallesius (Francisco Valles) 126, 177,
284
Vallius, Paulus (Paolo della Valle) 169,
479
, and Galileo's writings 484
, and Pererius 485
, and Zabarella's tracts compared
480-4
Valori, Baccio 134, 139
Vasari, Giorgio 453
Vatican Library 294
Venice 48, 133, 153, 155, 271, 293
universities
, Vincenzo Galilei studies in 294
Venus 185,186
Vere, William de 39
Vesalius, Andreas 320, 324, 325, 328
Vick, Henri de 82
Vickers, Brian 232-3
Vico, Giovanni Battista (Giambattista)
461
Vieri, Francesco 134-9
, background 134, 138
, and astrology 136
, on perspective 137-8
, Platonic philosophy
, written work 135, 138, 139
Viete, Francois 225, 442, 485, 487
Villalpando, Juan Batiste 132n
Villani, Filippo 34, 453
Villard de Honnecourt 97, 473
Vinta, Belisario 179, 224, 227
Vio, Tommaso de see Cajetan
Virgil 75
virtu 89-91, 98-9, 104, 112, 113
, and the Renaissance 89, 453, 477
Vitelleschis, Mutius 485
Vitelo see Witelo
Vitruvius 101, 132, 212, 223
Vitry, Philippe de 293

Viviani, Vincenzo 103, 156, 203, 224,
225, 259
Voltaire 258, 408, 409
, on Maupertuis 409, 410, 411, 417,
427
, and scientific revolution 451-2, 456,
457, 461, 462-3
Waard, Cornelis de 270, 287
Wallace, Alfred Russel 431, 432, 435
Wallace, William 156, 158, 172-4n, 479,
484, 485
Walter of Odington 293
watermarks on Galileo's paper 156, 157,
162-3
weather 43, 387
weather glass 111
weather, prediction of 52, 136
Welser, Mark 126
Whewell, William 3, 258, 260, 441, 463
William of Auvergne 52
William of Conches 31
William of Ockham 77-8, 80-1
Willis, Thomas 299, 353
Wisan, Winifred 208, 215, 270
witchcraft 372
Witelo 63, 132, 316, 330-1, 342, 344, 471
, critics 331, 333, 334
, Ptolemy's tables 332
, and rainbows 472
Witt, Jan de 379, 384, 387
world, conceptions of 21, 22
Wotton, Henry 343
Young, Thomas 463
Zabarella, Giacomo 140n
, and Vallius tracts compared 480-4
Zarlino, Gioseffe 131, 293, 294, 295, 296
Zonca, Vittorio 320
Zorzi, Benedetto 134

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SCIENCE,

ART AND NATURE

Nuper fe reperti bencficiofunt obferuata in LVN FACIE, FIXIS IN-.

Circa IO VI S Stellam difparibus interuallis, atque periodis, celeri.

V E N E T I I S , Apud Thomam Baglionum. M DC X.

SCIENCE, ART AND

THE HAMBLEDON PRESS

Published by Hambledon Press 1996

Printed on acid-free paper and bound in Great Britain

Science, Art and Nature in Medieval and Modern Thought

21 Some Historical Questions about Disease

Appendix to Chapter 10:

History of Science, xxvi (1988), pp. 1-12.

Proceedings of the 3rd International Humanistic Symposium 1975: The

In Italian in Federico II e le Scienze: Proceedings of the International

Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. C.C. Gillispie, v (New York:

Ibid., i (1970), pp. 377-85.

L'infinito nella scienza, a cura di G. Toraldo di Francia (Roma:

Daedalus, cxv (1986), pp. 49-74.

Prismata: Naturwissenschaftsgeschichtliche Studien: Festchrift fur Willy

Reason, Experiment and Mysticism in the Scientific Revolution, ed. M.L.

Science, Art and Nature in Medieval and Modern Thought

13 The Renaissance of a History: Proceedings of the International Conference

Galileo Galilei, Sidereus nuncius (1610): title page

Figure illustrating Roger Bacon's fifth rule

Galileo Galilei, from // Saggiatore (1623) : frontispiece

The beginning of Galileo's autograph Disputationes

Autograph page of Galileo's Tractatio de Caelo

Watermark showing a backward-looking lamb

Diagram of the Copernican system, with the Sun in the centre,

Pope Urban VIII facing Galileo

Galileo Galilei by Mario Leoni (1624)

Galileo Galilei, Dialogo (1632): title page

Vincenzo Galilei, Dialogo della musica antica (1581): title page

Rene Descartes, by an unknown artist

Euclid: the geometry of vision

Euclidian vision: from Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi. . . historia:

The anatomy of the eye (1572)

Diagram of the eye, from Roger Bacon, Opus Majus

Alberti's grid (1435)

A painting of a cross-section of the visual pyramid: from Fludd (1618)

Science, Art and Nature in Medieval and Modern Thought

Leonardo da Vinci, Codex Atlanticus, f. 337, illustrating his

Leonardo da Vinci, Codex D, f. 3v

Observing a solar eclipse in a camera obscura (1545)

Kepler, Ad Vitellionem paralipomena (Frankfurt, 1604), after

Descartes, La dioptrique (Leiden, 1637), illustrating Kepler's

Kepler, Ad Vitellionem paralipomena (Frankfurt, 1604),

Scheiner, Rosa ursina (Bracciani, 1630), comparing the eye and

Descartes, La dioptrique (Leiden, 1637), illustrating the transmission

Scheiner, Oculus (Oeniponti, 1619), showing the structure of the eye

Science, Art and Nature in Medieval and Modern Thought

Further Bibliography of A.C. Crombie

Acknowledgements should have been made in Science, Optics and Music to

Stili di pensiero scientifico agli inizi dell' Europa moderna.

Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition: The History of

'Le corps a la Renaissance: Theories of Perceiver and Perceived in

1990/91 'Expectation, Modelling and Assent in the History of Optics, i:

Science, Art and Nature in Medieval and Modern Thought

Review of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, Lettres Claude Saumaise

The Origins of Western Science', Metascience, n.s. ii, pp. 1-16.

Reviews of Elspeth Whitney, Paradise Restored: The Mechanical Arts

'Boundaries of normality' in Malatia i cultura: Seminari d'Estudis