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Method and Mathematics: Peter Ramus's Histories of the Sciences
Author(s): Robert Goulding

Source: Journal of the History of Ideas , Jan., 2006, Vol. 67, No. 1 (Jan., 2006), pp. 63-
85
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3840400
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Method and Mathematics:
Peter Ramus's Histories ofthe Sciences
Robert Goulding
Peter Ramus (1515-72) was, at first sight, the least likely person to write
an influential history of mathematics. For one thing, he was clearly no great
mathematician himself. His sympathetic biographer Nicholas Nancel relat?
ed that Ramus would spend the mornings being coached in mathematics by
a team of experts he had assembled, and in the afternoon would lecture
on the very same subjects.1 But there can be no doubt that Ramus held
mathematics in particular esteem and even played a crucial role in linking
philosophical discourse to mathematics and in promoting the use of qua-
drivial reasoning in the study of the natural world.2
The origins for his enthusiasm for mathematics are to be found in his
account of the nature of the arts and critique of the curriculum of the uni?
versities. From his earliest career, Ramus was a logician and remained one
in all his works, whether writing on mathematics or Virgil, and he con-
1 Peter Sharratt, "Nicolaus Nancelius, Petri Rami vita., Edited with an English Transla?
tion," Humanistica Lovaniensia 24 (1975): 161-277, at 198-200.
2 See Timothy J. Reiss, Knowledge, Discovery and Imagination in Early Modern Europe:
The Rise of Aesthetic Rationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) and
Timothy J. Reiss, "From Trivium to Quadrivium: Ramus, Method and Mathematical
Technology," in The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of
Print, ed. Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday (London and New York: Routledge, 2000),
45-58. On Ramus's mathematics, see Isabelle Pantin, "Ramus et l'enseignement des ma-
thematiques," in Ramus et VUniversite, ed. Kees Meerhoff and Michel Magnien (Paris:
Presses de l'Ecole normale superieur, 2004), 71-86.
Copyright ? by Journal of the History of Ideas (january 2006)
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JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ? JANUARY 2006
ceived of all the arts, especially mathematics, as unchanging structures of

necessarily true propositions?not prima facie a position which lends itself
to notions of historical change and development.3 His career as a historian
of mathematics, I will argue, was directed by problems that arose in his
theoretical understanding of mathematics as he began to immerse himself
in the sciences of the ancient world.
RAMUS AND THE REFORM OF DIALECTIC
Ramus set out his fundamental logical positions in his very

work, the Dialecticae institutiones {Education in Dialectic) of
tribution to the ongoing humanist attack on scholastic lo
Ramus rehearsed many of the commonplace criticisms of the u
lectic. Humanists complained that logic no longer concerned it
human reasoning; instead, it had become a discipline studied
sake, using its own incomprehensible jargon, and was of no pr
est. The new humanist dialectics of Lorenzo Valla and Rud
attempted to teach the kind of practical reasoning useful fo
speech or letter, and they borrowed extensively from rheto
Cicero and Quintilian to develop a highly rhetoricized lo
about the formal validity of arguments were of little interest;
was whether the arguments were persuasive.4
In his Dialecticae institutiones, Ramus took this humanist
tion of dialectic a step further. Dialectic?or, in fact, any art
consisted of nature, doctrine, and exercise. The natural work
mind formed the most significant element. Doctrine was noth
a record of natural reasoning; in importance it paled next to
practice.5 The logic of the universities bore no resemblance to
ural dialectic, as he argued at length in the companion volume
tutiones, the innocuously titled but exuberantly offensive Ar
3 See, for instance, Petrus Ramus, Dialecticae institutiones (Paris,

". . . nam si res constantes sunt et aeternae, earum disputatio, explicatioq
spicuis, necessariis argumentis addici debet."
4 See Brian P. Copenhaver and Charles B. Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy
Western Philosophy, 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 29-3
223-25 on Valla's rhetoricizing of philosophy.
5 Ramus, Dialecticae institutiones, fols 5v-6r: "Comparatur igitur dialectic
um reliquarum, natura, doctrina, exercitatione. . . . Doctrina (cui perp
quum est) sola extrinsecus a magistris assumenda est."
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Goulding ? Histories of Science in Early Modern Europe
imadversiones (Observations on Aristotle).6 The question, then, remained:

how can we gain access to this "natural reasoning"?
Ramus's answer was surprising. He asks us to find a group of men?
not scholars, but completely uneducated vineyard workers. Question them
about the coming year: the fertility of the soil, the quality and quantity of
the crop. "And then," he writes "from their minds as from a mirror an
image of nature will be reflected."7 In the reasoned replies of these unedu?
cated men, says Ramus, we discover every part of logic needed for any
purpose, whether everyday discourse or composition of poetry: the inven-
tion of arguments, the assessment of their truth and their proper and order-
ly presentation. Other humanists had praised man's natural logical facul-
ties, elevating them over artificial technique, but Ramus was the first to
look beyond the walls of the university and the writings of the ancients to
find natural dialectic at work.
If even the uneducated have some possession of the arts, then the arts
taught at the university should do no more than clear away the misleading
junk in the mind, and allow its natural clarity to shine through.8 Logic
should be easy to learn?not because this is a pedagogic ideal, but from the
very nature of the art. And if logic as it is taught is not easy to learn (such
as the mind-boggling complexities of scholastic logic) then that is a good
sign that it is not the natural art, but something "fabricated" (commentiti-
um, one of Ramus's favorite critical terms).9
In order for an art to be returned to its natural simplicity, it needed
organization or "method," a word which became almost identified with
Ramus. Although the term does not occur in the 1543 works, the same
concept does, under the name "second judgment."10 There is, claims
Ramus, a unique way to organize any art: from the most general proposi-
tions to the most specific. In his later writings, he used a striking image.
Suppose that all of the "facts" of grammar or any other art were written
out onto hundreds of slips of paper, and then shaken up together into an
6 Petrus Ramus, Aristotelicae animadversiones (Paris, 1543).

7 Ramus, Dialecticae institutiones, fol. 6V: ". . . tum ex eorum ingeniis veluti speculis
imago naturae resultabit."
8 Ramus, Dialecticae institutiones, fol. 7V: ". . . ut hoc artificioso quasi speculo natura
formae suae dignitatem perspicere, et si qua macula sit aspersa, delere atque eluere
possit."
9 See Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Dis-
course to the Art of Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), 45-47
for Ramus's use of this term, beginning with his infamous master's thesis "Quaecumque
ab Aristotele dicta essent, commentitia esse."
10 Ramus, Dialecticae institutiones, fols 27r-30v.
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urn. The skilled dialectician could then pick out the slips one by one, and
place each in its unique position in the sweep from general to particular.11
The conclusion is that the order imposed on the discovered facts of an
art must be unique. Moreover, this order, says Ramus, is natural, in two
ways: it reveals the real structure of the world,12 and?as he has shown at
length in his discussions of natural capacities and art?it conforms to the
structure of the human mind.13 This is the crucial point. In the case of dia-
lectic, the methodized art is not just a useful way to arrange the precepts of
logic, but a representation of the deep structure of discourse, and hence of
the human mind, the instrument of discourse and the source of dialectic. In
exactly the same way, a methodized physics would itself be a reflection of
the structure of the world. Moreover, because such a physics would have a
dialectical structure, it would conform perfectly to the human mind. And,
in each case, this logical structure will reflect the order in the mind of God,
who created both the human mind and the physical world that it inhabits.14
Ramus makes the metaphysical linkage of nature, God, and dialectic
explicit in the central section of his 1543 work, a mysterious passage in
which Ramus's anti-Aristotelianism merges into an idiosyncratic form of
Platonism. Third judgment, he says, is the next and final step beyond sec-
ond judgment or method. Through third judgment, the entire structure of
all the arts is revealed to the human mind. He writes:
There remains the final step of dialectical judgment, concerned

with perceiving that power of the human sciences which is directed
towards the ultimate end of all things. Through it, the reward of
human labor can be judged and the most excellent parent and au-
thor of all things can be recognized.15
11 This image first appeared in the Dialectici commentarii tres, issued under Omer Talon's
name in 1546 while Ramus was banned from teaching philosophy. The relevant passage
is translated in Ong, Ramus, 245-46.
12 See, for instance, Ramus, Dialecticae institutiones, fol. 34v. Having described the affini-
ty of his "second judgment" with the Platonic notion of individuals emanating from
ideas, he writes: "Haec artis est cum naturae sapientia, pulcherrima contentio."
13 In the conclusion to the 1543 dialectic, he claims that a first approximation to the
untaught, natural logic can be found in his own logic, "qui . . . dialecticae naturalis
imaginem quamvis rudem, impolitamque, tamen veram constantemque membris omnibus
expresserit" (Ramus, Dialecticae institutiones, fol. 58r).
14 This point is made at length?based on a study of Ramus's Dialectique?in Craig Wal-
ton, "Ramus and Socrates," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 114
(1970): 119-39.
15 Ramus, Dialecticae institutiones, fol. 35r: "Postremus superest dialectici iudicii gradus
in perspicienda scientiarum humanarum virtute ad supremum rerum omnium finem refer-
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The process by which one attains such an intuition is banal enough. The
dialectician begins by constructing a methodized image of all the arts to-
gether, filling in as many details as he can. The highest point of education
consists of recovering this total structure, a process which will cleanse the
mind of its false beliefs and allow it to recognize its innate dialectical struc?
ture. The newly-cleansed mind which naturally takes up into itself the
whole universe of discourse is very nearly an image of the mind of God.16
Ramus illustrates his "third judgment" by means of Plato's myth of the
cave, in which shackled prisoners are compelled to look upon the shadowy
play of sensory particulars.17 In his interpretation, the light-source behind
the prisoners' heads is God; its light is human reason and dialectic. The
objects casting the shadows are "the genera of things and the species con-
tained in the arts, whose thin shadows, wavering with the lightest of mo-
tions, are all the things that can be touched, heard, seen and perceived
through the other senses."18 Freeing oneself from the chains in the cave,
and gazing upon these real objects thus represents the realization of the
dialectical structure of all things, spreading out like a web behind the dis-
crete particulars of the world.
It is from this lofty summit of his art that Ramus invokes the highest
science of all, mathematics. The mind, once freed from its shackles, takes
in the arts properly and entirely for the first time. Beginning with grammar
and rhetoric, it proceeds to moral philosophy and physics, and finds rest in
mathematics.19 In the passage which follows, there is an interesting, two-
way movement between mathematics and dialectic. The mathematical arts
will be approached in a special way through the dialectical third judgment,
giving them a privileged role in understanding the world.20 At the same
time, however, as Ramus develops his praise of mathematics over several
enda positus, ut laboris humani fructus possit aestimari, et optimus rerum omnium pa-
rens, atque author agnosci."
16 Ramus, Dialecticae institutiones, fols 37r-v: "Sed cum haec omnia dialectica libenter
admirabitur, tum in seipsam conversa vehementius incipiet admirari, et divinae mentis
imaginem non divinam non poterit arbitrari."
17 Plato, Republic 514A-517B.
18 Ramus, Dialecticae institutiones, fol. 36v: "Imagines medio interiectae spatio, genera
rerum, speciesque disciplinis et artibus comprehensae, quarum tenues, levissimoque motu
nutantes umbrae, sunt haec omnia, quae tangi, audiri, cerni, caeterisque sensibus percipi
possunt."
19 Ramus, Dialecticae institutiones, fols 36v-37r.
20 Ramus, Dialecticae institutiones, fol. 39v: "Itaque cum has disciplinas lumine suo dia?
lectica lustraverit, quanto iam plenius naturalium principia rerum, et umbrarum illarum
causae cernentur."
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pages, these arts take on the very qualities of dialectic itself: liberating our
minds from the chains in which they are held, and illuminating the world
and all of the arts?allowing us, in short, to transcend the limitations of the
human condition and approach the perfect knowledge of God himself.21
Mathematics is both perfected by dialectic and identical with dialectic; but
the paradox which seems to arise from this dual conception is only appar-
ent. All the arts are, in their deepest "methodical" structure, dialectical, as
is the world which forms their subject of investigation. Mathematics, how?
ever, is the most purely dialectical, insofar as everyone agrees that it is eter-
nally, indisputably and necessarily true. The fact that such a perfect science
existed, validated Ramus's metaphysics of art, tying together in the clearest
way the action of the human mind, the world which confronts it and the
deity who is the source of both the world and a commensurate structure
built into the human intellect.
THE TURN TO HISTORY
Ramus's theory of knowledge seems to leave little room for h

opment within the arts. There is, after all, only one possible
or mathematics, imitated from the structure of the human
pressed through a network of connections which obtain nec
eternally. His dissatisfaction with the sciences of the universi
however, compelled him to face a set of historical questions
ings have, in a sense, the structure of the arts built into the
did it come about that many are unaware of this structure,
dissent over the nature of the arts, that (in short) we need the
our natural skills?
In his Remarks on Aristotle, Ramus attempts a prelimina

these questions by way of a historical narrative. He writes t
dialectic was first formulated (though in a crude way) by Pro
tematized by Zeno of Elea and brought to perfection by Pla
thors built their art through observation and use; theirs was
lectic, just as Ramus had described it in the Institutiones. Yet
beginning was squandered:
21 Ramus, Dialecticae institutiones, fol. 40v: "Hominem corporis exig

angusti custodia constrictum querimur? Mathesis liberat, seu potius hom
universitate maiorem reddit."
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Up to this point, dialectical truth, and the employment of that

truth was simple and naked. Henceforth, it began to be distorted
and corrupted.22
The whole fault for the subsequent decline of dialectic (and hence the ef-
facement, through bad education, of our natural dialectic) must be laid at
the feet of Aristotle:
And so, as we can know from the remains of the ancients, Aristotle
was the first to spoil the simple truth and practice of the ancients
with his books.23
In a striking phrase, he accuses Aristotle's craven followers of "sui despera-

tio": losing faith in themselves.24 So little do they esteem their natural abili-
ties that they allow themselves to become intoxicated by their teacher's
claims to authority. This will become Ramus's central theme in his histories
of the arts. Each art, he imagines, once did possess a primal simplicity.
Through the ineptitude and arrogance of one author and his followers, a
process of corruption was initiated, as personal ingenuity and fabrication
were elevated over the unspoilt action of nature, eventually overshadowing
it altogether. It was hardly a coincidence that Ramus identified the origina-
tors of corruption with the standard university authors: Aristotle destroyed
dialectic, Cicero corrupted rhetoric and so forth. Students were estranged
from their natures and innate talents because the schools and universities,
which should have been gently polishing the mirrors of their natures, were
instead corrupting them with this false so-called knowledge.
In Ramus's account of dialectic, history was all but forced upon him.
The enormous mismatch between simple, natural reasoning and the artifi-
cial problems of the modern logicians demanded an explanation, which his
narrative provided. At this early stage in his work, Ramus saw no need for
a history of mathematics because, in its role as the ultimate end of third
judgment, it was essentially ahistorical. To put it another way, Ramus was
delighted to have in mathematics a necessarily true and unchanging science,
which (he thought) was also the purest expression of the natural dialectical
22 Ramus, Aristotelicae animadversiones, fol. 2V: "Hactenus veritas dialectica, veritatisque

utilitas simplex et nuda fuit, quae deinceps turbari et corrumpi coepit."
23 Ramus, Aristotelicae animadversiones, fol. 3r: "Primus igitur Aristoteles (quod ex vet-
erum monumentis intelligi possit) simplicem antiquorum veritatem et exercitationem
libris suis depravavit."
24 Ibid.
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order of the world. The unchanging existence of mathematics as a realized,

perfect science was the clearest indication that his conception of the arts
was essentially correct.
RAMUS ENGAGES WITH MATHEMATICS
Ramus's attacks on Aristotle and modern logic provoked imm

opposition from within the University of Paris. Through th
politically influential professors, in 1544 he was banned b
from teaching philosophy, and both his books were suppress
turned to the study of mathematics; although it was the culm
philosophical system, it seemed he had hardly studied it befor
few months of the ban, he published his first mathematical
edition of Euclid's Elements.27
This was hardly a great work of scholarship. Ramus print
text only, without any of the proofs or diagrams?that is, on
ments of the propositions. By the standards of the time, Ram
justification for his editorial decision to issue such a meager e
tradition maintained that Euclid had not, in fact, written the
were all the work of the Alexandrian mathematician Theon,
a millennium after Euclid. Ramus was aware of this tradition
fact, almost universally accepted in the Renaissance)28 but h
reasons for, as he put it in the preface to this edition, "remov
ments and figures of the interpreters."29 On a practical level,
the price of the book down,30 so that it could be used in eve
important consideration, given the place of mathematics in R
tional vision, in which Euclid's Elements would be an importa
in curricular reform.
But even more to the point, Ramus simply did not see th
25 See Charles Waddington, Ramus: Sa vie, ses ecrits et ses opinions (Pa
26 In an oration of November 1544, he announced his intention to de
mathematics, leaving the teaching of rhetoric and grammar to his coll
Alexandre. See Petrus Ramus, Collectaneae praefationes, epistolae, orat
1599), 229-39.
27 Euclides, Elementa, ed. P. Ramus (Paris, 1549).
28 On Ramus and the roles and identities of Euclid and Theon, see Robert Goulding,
Studies on the Mathematical and Astronomical Papers of Sir Henry Savile (unpublished
PhD dissertation, London: University of London [Warburg Institute], 1999), ch. 3.
29 Ramus, Collectaneae praefationes, 121: "semotis interpretum et commentis et figuris."
30 Ibid.
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demonstrations. He refers to them not as proofs, but as "explanations";

and even suggests that if a student has any difficulty understanding the
material, the teacher can "explain" it in a more appropriate way.31 Ramus
was still convinced (as he was in the Institutiones) that mathematics was an
expression of natural dialectic, and that the Elements was a perfect record
of that deep structure. In fact, he explicitly identified the propositions of
the Elements with the "golden chain" of dialectic linking God, the human
mind, and the created order, an image he had used in his 1543 works.32 As
a natural science (in the Ramist sense), the facts themselves will be easily
and immediately taken up by the student,33 because they are presented in
the order which corresponds both to the nature of things and to the human
mind. Ramus has no interest in the kind of mathematical demonstration
found in the Elements;34, to his very last writings on the subject, he will
continue to insist that mathematical proof has no place in a genuine science
founded upon nature.
Ramus had touched upon historical issues in the 1544 oration which
set out his manifesto for the inclusion of mathematics in the curriculum.
There, in a single sentence, he ran through the standard list of ancient prac?
titioners, beginning with Adam, and then showered extravagant praise on
Archimedes for his practical application of mathematics. Yet, in this epi?
deictic oration, he never addressed the question of how mathematics?a
frozen snapshot of the real dialectical structure of the human and divine
minds and the world?could have a "history."
This question seems to have occurred to him when he came to write
31 Ibid.: "Si quid autem obscurum fuerit, longe commodius viva praeceptoris intelligentis
oratio, quam picta in libris interpretum manus explicabit."
32 Ramus, Collectaneae praefationes, 120: "Hic enim prima mediis, media postremis, om-
niaque inter se, velut aurea quadam Homeri catena . . . vincta colligataque sunt. . . ."
("For here the first are connected and linked to middles, middles to final like some golden
chain of Homer"). For Ramus's use of this image with reference to dialectic, see Nelly
Bruyere, Methode et dialectique dans Vozuvre de La Ramee: Renaissance et dge classique
(Paris: J. Vrin, 1984), 124.
33 He very briefly makes the same point in the 1544 oration on mathematics, where he
describes the mathematical arts as the mind's "free thoughts." Ramus, Collectaneae prae?
fationes, 231: "mathematicas artes invisamus, et animis (quorum sunt liberae cogitati-
ones) velut praesentes et expositas intueamur" ("let us look upon the mathematical arts,
and let us contemplate them as though they were present and put before our minds [of
which they are the free thoughts]").
34 He does refer to "demonstrationes" at the conclusion of the passage quoted in the
previous note, but this refers to his own notion of "demonstration"?synonymous with
proper, methodical ordering. The actual proofs found in the Elements are, as we have
seen, merely elucidations and can be omitted without injury to the mathematical structure
of the work.
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the preface to his Euclid, very shortly after his 1544 oration. He attempted
to provide an answer through a highly idiosyncratic interpretation of the
Platonic theory of knowledge. He commends "Plato and Pythagoras" for
their notion that mathematics was something divine, lying beyond the
human senses; and echoes Proclus's opinion that its name "mathesis"
meant essentially the same as "reminiscence."35 The truths of mathematics
were, according to Plato, impressed in the mind in imitation of the eternal
exemplars of the first intelligence. But, in his gloss on this passage, Ramus
does not consider the possibility that each individual recalls mathematics,
like the slave boy of the Meno. Rather, as he puts it,
This is as if to say that so great a science was not invented by man

but was divinely impressed in our souls, and by recollection of
things that had been noticed was recovered little by little. But how
long was that forgetting, and how late a remembering?36
Ramus thus turns the Platonic notion of reminiscence into a process in his?
tory, and identifies it with his own theory of the origins of arts: it is a re-
collecting or recording (recordatio) of "things that are noticed"?in exactly
the same way that dialectic is an art formed by noticing the best practices
of natural reasoning. With this in mind, he retells a common narrative de?
rived from Josephus. The ancient Jewish historian had attributed to the
biblical patriarchs extraordinary accomplishment in the sciences, and had
identified them as the source of all later Greek learning.37 Ramus interpre-
ted this well-known story as one of gradual reminiscence or recovery. The
first patriarchs, with their preternaturally long lives, could devote decades
to observing and recording the mathematical action of the mind.38 Faced
with the impending Flood and concerned about human "forgetfulness,"39
35 Ramus, Collectaneae praefationes, 120.

36 Ibid.: "quasi tanta scientia non ab homine inventa, sed divinitus in animis nostris
impressa, recordatione animadversarum rerum paulatim recrearetur. Verumenimvero
quam longa oblivio, quam tarda recordatio ista fuit?" For other examples of Ramus's
assimilation of Platonic metaphysics to his own theory of knowledge, see Bruyere,
262-64.
37 For a full description of Josephus's popular narrative, see Nick Popper's article
forum.
38 Ramus, Collectaneae praefationes, 120: "Primi illi homines (ut Josephus antiquitatis
Judaicae scriptor ait) Adamus, Sethus, Enus, Noeus vitae et longissimae et contemplationi
deditissimae beneficio, in hanc recordationem incubuerunt."
39 Ibid.: "ne alia novae oblivionis caligine circumfusa teneretur. . . ."
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they recorded their already substantial results on two pillars, which could
withstand destruction by either fire or water. After the re-establishment of
humanity, this primitive wisdom was rediscovered and spread through a
continuous translatio studii: to Egyptians (via Abraham), Greeks, Italians,
Sicilians, Arabs, Spaniards, Germans, and, last of all, the French. Countless
men, he writes, have been involved in this "work of recollection" (recorda-
tionis opus), like so many smiths and architects bringing the edifice of math?
ematics to perfection.40
Although Ramus closely identified mathematics with dialectic, at this
point he used very different historiographical models for the two arts. The
story of dialectic was one of gradual discovery to a moment of perfection
and completeness (with Plato), followed by progressive corruption through
human pride and arrogance. Mathematics, on the other hand, had enjoyed
constant growth through "reminiscence" throughout history and was not
yet complete. Ramus tried to find a compromise between the record of a
prisca scientia stretching back to the very first human beings, and the un-
doubted ingenuity of Greek and modern mathematicians. Mathematics
may have begun with Adam and had been transmitted to Ramus's own time
in an unbroken chain, but the Jewish patriarchs were not doing anything
qualitatively different from any other mathematician involved in the great
act of remembering?despite Josephus's claim that Adam and Seth had a
superlative knowledge of mathematics which we can scarcely approach.
Finally, Ramus clearly valued the Greek achievement: it was the Elements,
after all, which had gathered together all the isolated mathematical facts
from earlier practitioners and?like the grammarian picking slips of paper
out of an urn?placed them all in just the right places.
In his next mathematical work, Ramus had come to very different con?
clusions. His Arithmetica of 1555 provided mathematics with a history that
looks much more like that of dialectic, complete with villainous and selfish
corrupters of the arts. What has happened? It seems that, by this time,
Ramus had devoted some time to learning mathematics himself, and had
discovered that it was not at all what he had assumed it to be. When he
published his Euclid, he clearly thought that mathematics was the most
natural and well-organized of arts; therefore, it would be easy to learn. In
40 Ramus, Collectaneae praefationes, 120-21: "Hinc tot, tamque excellentia ingenia exci-
tari . . . coeperunt, videlicet ad huius mathematicae recordationis opus exaedificandum,
tot fabros, tot architectos adhiberi oportuit. .. ."
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his intellectual apology Oratio de professione sua written in 1563, Ramus

recalls his change of heart, probably some time in the years 1551-55:41
There are 15 books of Euclid's Elements which I had thought had

been put together by the one and only instrument of Logic?just
like absolutely every other art. Thus, I thought, it could subse-
quently be analyzed by means of the same instrument. In fact, I
had long since devoted myself to logic, preparing it for the sake of
mathematics above all else. I was persuaded by my own argument
and tried to ignore the many great obscurities endemic to mathe?
matics; by hard work and my own sharp mind I got all the way
through to the 10th book. Pierre de Mondore42 had been most
eruditely explaining and clarifying that book for me. However, its
immense subtlety still exercised me enormously. One day . . . in
fact, I had been trying unsuccessfully to get to the end of a demon-
stration on the binomial and residue; I concentrated my mind on
it entirely; after keeping my body stuck in one position for a whole
hour, I felt all the muscles in my back seize up. And at that, I threw
away my drawing-board and ruler, and burst out in rage against
mathematics, because it tortures so cruelly those who love it and
are eager for it.43
Quite against his expectations, mathematics?the goal and paragon of his

natural, logical method?turned out to be difficult.
This defeat marks a crisis in Ramus's thought. He had invested great
intellectual capital into identifying (at some level) natural dialectic with
41 Ramus records that he had spent 8 years of his career teaching the trivium, followed by
four years of teaching mathematics (Ramus, Collectaneae praefationes, 409). He is most
likely dating the beginning of his career from the 1543 publications.
42 Pierre de Mondore, Euclidis Elementorum liber decimus (Paris, 1552).
43 Ramus, Collectaneae praefationes, 409: "Quindecim Euclidis libri sunt, quos (ut omnes
omnino artes) sicut uno Logicae organo contextos esse primum, sic eodem postea retexi
posse cogitabam. Organum autem illud una imprimis mathematum causa diu multumque
praecultum nobis ac praeparatum est. Quare persuasione hac inductus nihil reputans
quot et quantae mathematum per se obscuritates essent, prompto atque alacri animo ad
decimum usque librum penetravi, sed immensa subtilitate operis illius, licet eruditissimis
P. Montaurei vigiliis explicati et illustrati, tamen sic exercitatus sum . . . ut quodam die
cum binomii et residui cuiusdam demonstrationem summa animi intentione, corpore
horam integram idem vestigium premente nondum conclusissem, senserim collo nervos
obriguisse: tum vero abacum radiumque abieci, indignatusque mathematis succensui,
quod sui studiosos et amatores tam acerbe cruciarent." See also Waddington, Ramus,
108.
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mathematics?which now, it seemed, was not a natural, immediately grasp-

able science at all. In order to remedy this situation, Ramus did two things:
he wrote his own mathematics (in the form of his Arithmetic, and later his
Geometry, Algebra, and Optics) and he returned anew to writing the histo?
ry of mathematics.
In the preface to his 1555 Arithmetica, Ramus again begins with the
standard narrative of the origins of mathematics, just as he had in the pref?
ace to the Euclid. Adam, Seth, and Noah had spent their time contemplat-
ing mathematics "in order to appreciate God's mathematical work."44
Abraham passed on the sciences to the Egyptians, whence they were taken
up by the classical civilizations. In ancient Greece and even, to some extent,
Rome there was a golden age of mathematics. Boys studied mathematics,
practicing it by drawing in the sand. Furthermore, craftsmen such as paint-
ers and architects knew and used mathematics.45 In other words, an art of
mathematics existed, but one that conformed to natural mathematics, as it
was expressed in real mathematical behavior. Ramus is still thinking about
the relationship between mathematics and dialectic. But now he is not
thinking of the mysterious, Platonic "third judgment," but rather the native
dialectic found in his eloquent vine-dressers, the model for the useful dialec?
tic he intended to teach in the schools. Just so, he turns to those actively, but
unreflectively engaged in mathematical activity to learn the original form of
the art.
What happened after this Golden Age? There was a collapse into bar-
barism for many centuries, followed by a revival of mathematics, but only
in a limited sense: "they think that these arts are not like the others, which
are useful after they have been learnt, but only while they are being
learnt"46?that is, as tools to sharpen the mind before going on to "higher"
disciplines (such as philosophy). Their very difficulty became a recommen-
dation, for Ramus an absurd, even self-contradictory idea. And what was
the cause, both of their precipitous decline and their later perverse revival?
More than anything, it was the obscurity of the subject, the blame for which
Ramus lays before Euclid and Theon.
According to Ramus's reasoning, if Euclid really had put together the
Elements according to the natural method, then his work should pass the
44 Ramus, Collectaneae praefationes, 121: "Haec enim primorum generis humani parent-
um, Adami, Sethi, Noei divina contemplandis optimi maximique Dei mathematicis operi-
bus otia fuerunt."
46 Ramus, Collectaneae praefationes, 122: "sed opinantur prodesse has artes non caetera-
rum more, cum perceptae fuerint, sed cum percipiuntur."
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test of the three "laws of method" which Ramus developed after his return
to philosophical publication in 1551.47 Not surprisingly, Euclid fails miser-
ably as a Ramist logician. Arithmetical precepts are often expressed in
terms of general magnitude which properly is the province of geometry.
This breaks the "law of justice" or homogeneity: "arithmetic should be
taught arithmetically, geometry geometrically."48 Further, number is logi-
cally prior to magnitude (he argues), yet the Elements begin with geome?
try?clearly a violation of the "law of wisdom," which requires more gen?
eral sciences to precede more particular. Definitions are introduced in two
bunches at the beginning of books I and V; but as the grammarian with an
urn of grammatical facts knows, precepts of an art should be introduced
only where they belong in the natural order of things, not at arbitrarily-
chosen positions.49
Ramus concludes that Euclid, although no doubt a fine collector of
individually excellent mathematical truths (most of them unearthed by the
first human beings), was a dunce when it came to arranging them according
to their nature. The very fact that Theon thought it necessary to add expla-
nations to the originally naked text only confirms?and deepens?the ob-
scurity of Euclid's arrangement.50
Ramus required a properly arranged mathematics, "by which an abso?
lute beginner who wants a perfect and complete grasp of the art can be
perfectly and completely taught"51?a natural mathematics, in which there
would be no need of demonstrations. He exhorts his readers:
At last establish elements of mathematics according to these laws

of logic: the individual propositions arranged in place and order
will not only be statements of their own truth, but even demon?
strations of it.52
47 See Ong, Ramus, 258-62.

48 Ramus, Collectaneae praefationes, 123: "Itaque arithmetica arithmetice, geometrica
geometrice doceantur."
49 Ramus, Collectaneae praefationes, 123-24.
50 Ramus, Collectaneae praefationes, 124-26: "Atque haec elementa licet a primis usque
hominibus repetita, tamen hunc in modum et proposita et collocata ab Euclide existiman-
tur; quem virum mathematica singularum propositionum scientia tanquam singularem et
prope divinum suscipio . . . at logica recte et ex ordine docendi prudentia parem efficere
nequeo. . . . Quare licet Theonem mathematicarum rerum intelligentia non inferiorem
putemus, attamen videmus adhuc quam demonstrationibus suis elementa mathematica
non illustret, sed obscuret."
51 Ramus, Collectaneae praefationes, 123: "quibus perfecte et absolute rudis et imperitus
institui possit."
52 Ramus, Collectaneae praefationes, 126-27: "Denique mathematica elementa logicis
legibus illis institue; propositiones singulae loco et ordine collocatae, ipsaemet suae veri-
tatis non tantum propositiones, sed etiam demonstrationes erunt."
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Ramus tried to provide precisely this in his Arithmetica and other mathe?
matical books; although he was never completely satisfied with his re-
formed mathematics, they remained popular school textbooks for more
than a century after his death.53
Ramus had now constructed a history of mathematics which in outline
essentially matched his history of dialectic: an original, natural state, cor-
rupted by the pride and arrogance of Euclid, who, like Aristotle, elevated
his "contrived demonstration," over the natural structure of discourse.54
Ramus's narrative was beginning to take on the shape of the story of sacred
history itself: innocence, fall and redemption (through the application of
proper method). In the final stage of his thought, he made explicit the con-
nection between disciplinary and religious history.
THE SCHOLAE MATHEMATICAE
Some time in 1561 or 1562, Ramus converted to the Reform

no one's surprise, since he had long been suspected of crypto-
In 1562, Calvinists were expelled from Paris; Ramus?by th
most famous scholars in the world?was given royal safe-pass
tainebleau.55 He worked in the library there for several mont
the lectures on mathematics which he had been giving f
lectures which would become his Scholae mathematicae. In his oration De
professione sua, written on his return to Paris, he says that he had particu-
larly sharpened up the attack on the "futile subtlety" of mathematics.56 It
seems likely that those fearful days as a new convert were also responsible
for some of the heated religious echoes in the Scholae.
Ramus's last work on mathematics was published in two versions: the
Prooemium mathematicum of 1567,57 and the Scholae mathematicae of
1569,58 which contained the three books of the Prooemium plus another
twenty-eight books of criticism of Euclid, extending his brief remarks of
the 1555 Arithmetic in exhausting detail. The historical material is largely
confined to the three books of the Prooemium, where the basic structure of
53 See Walter J. Ong, "Christianus Ursitius and Ramus' New Mathematics," Bibliotheque
d'humanisme et renaissance 36 (1974): 603-10 for Ramus's continuous emendation of
his mathematical texts.
54 Ramus, Collectaneae praefationes, 126: "non Aristotelis commentitia illa quidem, sed
certe naturali et aperta demonstratione singulariter et eximie demonstrari."
55 Waddington, Ramus, 136, 149-50.
57 Petrus Ramus, Prooemium mathematicum (Paris, 1567).
58 Petrus Ramus, Scholarum mathematicarum libri unus et triginta (Basel, 1569).
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the translatio studii remains: the patriarchs, the pillars rediscovered by

Noah, Abraham, and the Egyptians, and the beginnings of Greek mathe?
matics. The notion of decline from primal simplicity continued to be cen?
tral, but now Euclid received a relatively minor role; Ramus had discovered
a new villain.
Ramus's final verdict on the origins of mathematics is quite buried in

the (ironically) rather chaotically-organized Scholae. Towards the end of
the historical section of his lectures, he surveyed the recent mathematical
accomplishments of all the nations of Europe, exhorting the rulers of each
state or city to encourage the study of mathematics in their schools. When
he comes to discuss Rome, the apostate Ramus is in the awkward position
of having to address the Pope. He does so by turning the austere Pius V
into a kind of pontifical Protestant. In his simplicity of life (writes Ramus),
the pope recalls the early Fathers of the church; surely he will restore a new,
primitive Christianity to the Catholic Church. And it is here that Ramus
makes the link between mathematics and sacred history explicit. The first
humans, he says, did not have grammar because they all spoke the same
language. Nor did they have any need for rhetoric, since there was no dis-
agreement at all in that blessed state. As for logic, their reason was utterly
unblemished, and they used their natural faculties without error. "And so
(he says) the mathematical arts were divinely given or discovered, so as to
reveal the power of God in the creation of the world, his wisdom in its
administration, and his faithfulness in providing so many benefits to the
human race." 59 He urged the Pope, even as he restored primitive religion,
to support the teaching of man's first knowledge in the schools, to the end
of healing the rifts in Christendom.
This seems to be a remarkable volte-face. In this passage, mathematics
is specifically divided from dialectic, which now alone he considered an
exercise of entirely natural faculties. Elsewhere in the Scholae, he had ar-
gued for a natural affinity between the human mind and mathematics (in
particular in his famous mathematical walk through the streets of Paris).60
Yet it seems the material out of which the science was constituted had been
handed over by God to the very first human beings.61 Under his new con-
59 Ramus, Scholae mathematicae, 109: "Ergo artes mathematicae divinitus vel oblatae vel
inventae, quae Dei potentiam in mundi creatione, sapientiam in administratione, pietatem
ex infinita bonorum omnium erga genus humanum largitate demonstrarent."
60 Ramus, Scholae mathematicae, 54-55. See also 82-83, where he criticizes the Aristote-
lian conception of the mind as a "tabula nuda."
61 Compare also Ramus's conception of theology in Petrus Ramus, De religione christiana
libri quatuor (Frankfurt a.M., 1576), 2, where he states that theology consists in the
methodical arrangement of scriptural quotations; the material is God-given, while the
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ception of the science, there was not much room for growth or even the
"reminiscence" which played a central role in his earliest history of mathe?
matics. The heroes in the final version of Ramus's history were those who
imposed order on the field, whose goals were uncannily like his own.
Ramus drew upon Proclus's famous list of Greek mathematicians,62 a
text which presented the history of mathematics as a transmission from
teacher to student (remarkably like the history of philosophy itself as it was
imagined in late antiquity), through which the sciences moved progressively
from the basely material to the purely spiritual. Ramus's ends were entirely
opposed to those of Proclus; yet he plundered this text?one of the very few
accounts of ancient Greek mathematical development?to compile a series
of "elementators," composers of "Elements." 63 The earliest of these are
just names to us, but Ramus loaded them with accolades for collecting and
preserving the divine, perfect, and undemonstrated mathematics of the first
humans. Euclid was the sixth and penultimate elementator, while Theon
took the final spot and much of the responsibility for the mess that mathe?
matics was in. The Elements would receive sustained abuse in the rest of
the Scholae, but Ramus's last insult to Euclid was to take away his author-
ship of them entirely, and even to question the authenticity of his minor
works "so that nothing is left to him except an empty name."64
Given Ramus's philosophical beginnings, it is surprising that, in these
Scholae, he blamed Plato, not Euclid, for the decline of mathematics. It was
Plato who hijacked mathematics?an art based in nature and practice?and
turned it into a vehicle for unworldly contemplation. He did this from a
privileged position, alone reuniting through his travels and education the
divergent strands of mathematics?Greek, Italian (that is, Pythagorean) and
Egyptian?whose emanation from a common Hebrew source Ramus had
traced in the early pages of the Scholae.65 The great opportunity to reestab-
lish the primitive state of mathematical knowledge was lost through Plato's
"almost womanly jealousy,"66 unwilling as he was to share his knowledge
form is in accordance with human reason, so that the practice of theology is easy and
open to all human beings.
62 Based on the history of geometry by the Peripatetic Eudemus of Rhodes. See Proclus, A
Commentary on the First Book of Euclid's Elements, trans. Glenn R. Morrow (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1992), 52-56. Proclus's commentary was first printed in Basel
in 1533 by Simon Grynaeus, and in Latin in 1560 by Francesco Barozzi (ibid., lxviii).
63 Ramus, Scholae mathematicae, 77 and 100.
64 Ramus, Scholae mathematicae, 39: "ut Euclidi praeter inane nomen nihil admodum
relinquatur."
65 Ramus, Scholae mathematicae, 12.
66 Ramus, Scholae mathematicae, 18: "ista pene muliebris zelotypia."
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with any but fellow philosophers. Completing the analogy between the his?
tory of mathematics and sacred history, he compares Plato to the Christian
theologians, who selfishly usurped the study of God as their own exclusive
province, denying any part of the science to the common people; in just the
same way, Plato closed off real mathematics to artisans and merchants. By
doing so, he quite deliberately provoked a schism in mathematics, which
has lasted to Ramus's own day. The learned world, cut off from utility,
was left with an enervated, "speculative" science. The very uselessness and
obscurity of this fragment of the body of mathematics killed off the last
interest in mathematics in the schools; the continuing neglect of mathemat?
ics at the University of Paris is ultimately due to Plato's "blind ambition."67
The recovery of mathematics will only be secure once the "insane zeal of
demonstration"68 has been abolished, in favor of a natural and immediately
applicable mathematics. Fix the abuses in mathematics and the other sci?
ences and (again completing the analogy) the rifts in Christendom will also
be healed.69
Ramus's history of mathematics, it need hardly be said, was highly
controversial, tied as it was to the development of his own polarizing phi?
losophy. Yet this did not detract from its significance, even to those who did
not accept his philosophical principles. Like Regiomontanus before him,70
Ramus extended the historiography of mathematics in two important ways.
He found a place for the contemporary practice of mathematics in his nar-
rative, and he opened up an "internalist" approach to the historiography
of the sciences, criticizing the inherited narrative through an examination
of the textual remains of ancient mathematics. In doing so, he framed the
terms of the debate over the history of mathematics and made it vitally
relevant, no longer just a subject for bland prefatory remarks in textbooks
of geometry and astronomy.
HENRY SAVILE'S HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS
The immediate impact of Ramus's history can be seen in the

lecture of Henry Savile (1549-1622), delivered at Oxford i
lectures were ostensibly concerned with mathematical astrono
7 Ramus, Scholae mathematicae, 30: "caeca ambitio."

5 Ramus, Scholae mathematicae, 89 and 92: "studium demonstrandi. ,
' Ramus, Scholae mathematicae, 110.
} See James Byrne's article in this forum.
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sist in part of a brilliant exposition of the mathematics both of Ptolemy's

Almagest and Copernicus's De revolutionibus?a mathematical exposition
which, it must be said, very few of the young students (or even faculty) in
his audience could have comprehended. They were prefaced, however, with
a history of the mathematical sciences, which occupies some sixty-five
closely-written pages of his extant manuscript.
Here, he traced the story of geometry and astronomy from the first
human beings through to Ptolemy. The work is extremely learned, parading
its authorities on every page. Yet Savile never acknowledged his single most
important source: Ramus's Prooemium, published three years previously.
He lifted phrases, sentences and even whole paragraphs from Ramus's his?
tory and silently incorporated them into his own. Ironically, however, more
than once in these same lectures he professed to despise Ramus above all
other writers on the subject. While Savile recognized the divine mission and
end of mathematics, Ramus, he said, enmired it in the physical world and
in base, commercial, and artisanal applications.
Throughout his lectures, Savile sought to restore the Platonic concep-
tion of mathematics as a propaedeutic to true philosophy, even refashioning
the narrative of his own education to coincide with Plato's account of the
philosopher king. His interest in mathematics, he says, was stimulated by a
"certain man" or "guiding spirit," who set him to working his way through
Euclid's Elements. He described his book by book progress:
. . . who would not be delighted by so noble, so pleasing, so agree-

able a variety of the most pleasant of things? I was greatly moved
by the certain and established passages from first principles to in-
termediate results, and from them to advanced theorems, set out
in a straightforward order of progression. It was pleasant to em-
bark on triangles. Debates on quadrilaterals pleased me greatly. I
delighted first to describe circles, and then to unite them with the
aforementioned flgures. Then, before I had grown tired of circles,
the sweet harmony of proportion seized me, in which I should
always wish to linger?but I did not wish to die having mastered
so little of geometry. And so, not irrationally, I applied myself to
irrationals. Why go on? I retired exhausted. I had scarcely made
my first acquaintance with stereometry when I bade farewell to
geometry.71
1 MS Savile 29, fol. llv.
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Abandoning the Elements, Savile set about reading the Almagest, yet found
himself unable to make any headway whatsoever. Realizing that he did
not have sufficient geometrical background, he tells us, he returned to the
Elements, and worked through the last three books on solid geometry: the
construction of cubes, pyramids, dodecahedra, and so on. Now properly
equipped, he was able to master planetary astronomy.
Despite the promise of personal revelation, this is a highly contrived
account, which probably bears no relationship whatsoever to Savile's actu-
al education.72 The pretext for abandoning the Elements should, in particu?
lar, arouse our suspicions. The reader of the Almagest has no need for un?
derstanding the construction of polyhedra; having completed the books on
plane geometry and arithmetic, Savile was as well prepared as anyone to
understand ancient astronomy. The motive behind Savile's strange asser-
tion is found in Plato's Republic. In book VII, as Plato describes the educa?
tion of the philosopher king, he passes from arithmetic to plane geometry,
and thence to astronomy, the study of "solid bodies in motion." Scarcely
have they begun to consider this subject, however, when Socrates calls
Glaucon to a halt: "... you must go back a bit, as we made a wrong choice
of subject to put next to geometry. . . . We proceeded straight from plane
geometry to solid bodies in motion without considering solid bodies first
on their own. The right thing is to proceed from second dimension to third,
which brings us, I suppose, to cubes and other three-dimensional figures."73
Thus Savile shaped his account of his own education in order to con-
form to the ideal education of the philosopher?even to the extent of pre-
serving a premature misstep into astronomy. Constantly in these lectures
Savile wished to present himself as an other-worldly Platonist, at one point
refusing even to consider applications of the sciences: "due to a sort of
disgust for external things [he writes] my mind has always shrunk from
consideration of such subjects." This was more than a personal quirk; Sa?
vile's Platonic program was one strategy for recommending mathematics to
his students and to the University as an institution. The unworldliness of
his presentation was intended in part to counter the prejudice among stu?
dents that mathematics was the proper task of merchants, sailors, and other
lower-class practitioners?at one point, straying on to the subject of navi-
72 Savile's personal copy of Euclid is in the Bodleian Library with shelfmark Savile W.9(l)
(Euclid, Stoicheia, ed. Simon Grynaeus, Basel, 1533). The volume is heavily annotated,
but offers no support for Savile's account. Note that Savile makes no mention of the
arithmetical books of the Elements-, his own copy of Euclid, however, suggests that he
read them continuously with the geometrical ones.
73 Republic 528A-B.
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gation, he quickly changes the subject, saying that he is aware this is a

subject they all hate.74
Savile's genuine education can be reconstructed, to some extent, from
the notes he made in the late 1560s, towards the end of his bachelor's de-
gree and throughout his MA studies, and the books he read and annotated
during the same period. To all appearances, Savile was an autodidact, sin-
gle-handedly mastering Euclid, Ptolemy, Archimedes, and Copernicus. His
guides through this material were above all the textbook writers of the
German universities, such as Erasmus Reinhold and Caspar Peucer, whose
volumes Savile extensively annotated. Their writings provided him with a
model for the teaching of the sciences at the English Academies: as he inter-
preted them, they advocated the committed study of a few central, highly-
technical texts, rejecting both the easy solution of handbooks or the pursuit
of practicality and immediate applicability?two of the principal sources
for the dire state of mathematics at Oxford, as he frequently reiterated.75
Savile's self-presentation was only preparatory to his reworking of Ra?
mus's narrative along Platonic lines, part of his campaign to attract philo-
sophically-minded students to the sciences. While the essential facts were
taken from the Prooemium, Savile entirely altered the emphasis and inter?
pretation of the material. His history, like Ramus's, begins with Adam and
Seth, and hews closely to the model of cultural transmission?combining
it, however, with a Proclan concern for a teacher-student lineage, stretching
back to the dawn of history.
For Savile, the crucial figure in the early history of mathematics was
Abraham, who acts, in his account, not only as a teacher and transmitter
between cultures (the "Chaldean" and the Egyptian), but as a filter of the
harmful accretions which had attached themselves to mathematics. Abra?
ham was, says Savile, a Chaldean who came to realize that the stars were
not gods, and was the first to assert the existence of a single god, creator of
all the stars. Persecuted because of his unorthodox beliefs, Abraham moved
first to Canaan (where he taught the Phoenicians, who subsequently devel-
oped mercantile arithmetic), and later to Egypt. The Egyptians at that time
had no inkling of the sciences, and they eagerly absorbed his lessons in
geometry and astronomy. Savile interrupts his narrative here to specify ex-
74 See Robert Goulding, "Testimonia humanitatis: The Early Lectures of Henry Savile" in
Sir Thomas Gresham and Gresham College: Studies in the Intellectual History of London
in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. F. Ames-Lewis (Aldershot: Ashgate,
1999), 125-45, especially 139, 142.
75 See Goulding, Studies, chaps. 1 and 2.
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actly what kind of mathematics Abraham taught: it was, he said, "that

pure, chaste and uncorrupt mathematics," cleansed of the kinds of "physi-
cal conjectures" and astrological predictions with which the Chaldeans had
muddied it.76 This type of mathematics was supported first by Alexander,
then by the Romans, who were anxious that mathematics should never die
out; this tradition, he says, extended from Abraham through Ptolemy to
Theon of Alexandria, surviving undamaged for 2,500 years. It was finally
only wiped out by "Turkish cruelty," along with all the other liberal arts;
then mathematics itself was homeless, and "this, the most holy of all the
arts, was forced to go in search of new dwelling places."77 Then, making
the link between his history and contemporary state of the sciences explicit,
Savile says:
But let us put aside this complaint. Let us rather concern ourselves
with how we may bring Alexandria to Oxford?or, if this is too
much to hope for, how the men of Oxford may understand the
Alexandrian Ptolemy.78
What is important throughout this passage is the emphasis on the

Egyptianness of Ptolemy (and, as he will argue elsewhere, of Euclid, whom
Savile, quite against scholarly opinion of the time, also supposes to have
been Alexandrian, rather than a Megaran disciple of Plato). The Greekness
of these authors is not as important as their existence within the pure tradi?
tion of Egyptian mathematics?a tradition which, through Abraham's edit-
ing, can claim to represent the original teaching from the Garden of Eden,
purged as it was of the harmful elements (physicality and association with
astrology) that it had picked up from the Chaldeans. It was a tradition
looking for a home and, by more than coincidence, was precisely the kind
of mathematics which Savile was convinced belonged at Oxford.
The Hebrew nature of Chaldean mathematics, at least in its purified
form, was crucial to Savile's account, since he knew that the astronomers of
76 MS Savile 29, fol. 30v: "Mathematicam illam intelligo puram, castam, incorruptam,
non physicis coniecturis, aut praedictionibus Chaldaicis contaminatam."
77 Ibid.: "Turcica barbaries crudelitasque non solum homines suis sedibus expulit, sed
ipsas etiam humaniores disciplinas et omnium sanctissimam mathesim nova domicilia
conquirere coegit."
78 Ibid.: "Verum eam querimoniam deponamus. Illud potius agamus, quomodo possit
Oxonium Alexandria transferri, aut si illud maius est, quam ut optari debeat, certe quo?
modo possit Alexandrinus Ptolemaeus ab Oxoniensibus intelligi." This passage is under-
lined for emphasis in the manuscript.
84

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Babylon had provided Hipparchus and Ptolemy with their most important
observational data. He thus sketched out a complex web of divergent Jew?
ish influences, which were artfully reunited by the genius of Greek mathe-
maticians. His was a progressive history, in which the very last steps were
more important and interesting. Although he acknowledged the astronomi-
cal accomplishment of Seth, he clearly saw the Greeks doing something
remarkably different. They may have drawn from the ever-branching
streams of Jewish wisdom, but they had transformed it into something new:
they introduced the notion of demonstration, built it into a synthetic struc?
ture and made new discoveries, in each of these ways going beyond the
mythical ancients. Savile's appreciation of the Greek contribution is partic?
ular ly apparent in his account of Hippocrates of Chios, who (says Savile)
introduced into mathematics most of the apparatus of demonstration
through his early edition of an "Elements" of geometry, while he was also
the first to consider the area of curvilinear shapes.79 In both cases, Hippoc?
rates did something entirely different from his barbarian predecessors, ex-
tending the province of mathematical reasoning beyond the rectilinear and
transforming its method through the introduction of demonstrative
proofs?as he saw it, the essence of mathematics, rather than its decadence.
Savile's recipe as an educator, then, looks very different from Ramus's.
While Savile saw Euclid and Ptolemy as part of an Egyptian transmission
of patriarchal science, for Ramus both are merely chapters in a peculiarly
Greek story of degradation and abandonment of natural reasoning for the
artificial and hypothetical. Savile wished Greco-Egyptian Alexandria to be
moved to Oxford; according to Ramus, mathematics will only be rebuilt by
cutting the Greek authors out altogether (or, at least, using their results very
cautiously) and scrutinizing the actions of merchants and artisans, who un-
knowingly practice the same art as the uncorrupted patriarchs, drawing it,
as they did, from the natural resources of the human mind. It is this science
which (paradoxically) like Savile he also sees as characteristic of German
scientists, that Ramus insisted should be taught at the University of Paris.
University of Notre Dame.
9 MS Savile 29, fol. 34v.
85

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Method and Mathematics: Peter Ramus's Histories of the Sciences

Author(s): Robert Goulding

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3840400

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Peter Ramus's Histories ofthe Sciences

Copyright ? by Journal of the History of Ideas (january 2006)

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ceived of all the arts, especially mathematics, as unchanging structures of

RAMUS AND THE REFORM OF DIALECTIC

Ramus set out his fundamental logical positions in his very

3 See, for instance, Petrus Ramus, Dialecticae institutiones (Paris,

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imadversiones (Observations on Aristotle).6 The question, then, remained:

6 Petrus Ramus, Aristotelicae animadversiones (Paris, 1543).

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There remains the final step of dialectical judgment, concerned

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THE TURN TO HISTORY

Ramus's theory of knowledge seems to leave little room for h

In his Remarks on Aristotle, Ramus attempts a prelimina

21 Ramus, Dialecticae institutiones, fol. 40v: "Hominem corporis exig

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Up to this point, dialectical truth, and the employment of that

In a striking phrase, he accuses Aristotle's craven followers of "sui despera-

22 Ramus, Aristotelicae animadversiones, fol. 2V: "Hactenus veritas dialectica, veritatisque

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order of the world. The unchanging existence of mathematics as a realized,

RAMUS ENGAGES WITH MATHEMATICS

Ramus's attacks on Aristotle and modern logic provoked imm

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demonstrations. He refers to them not as proofs, but as "explanations";

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This is as if to say that so great a science was not invented by man

35 Ramus, Collectaneae praefationes, 120.

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his intellectual apology Oratio de professione sua written in 1563, Ramus

There are 15 books of Euclid's Elements which I had thought had

Quite against his expectations, mathematics?the goal and paragon of his

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mathematics?which now, it seemed, was not a natural, immediately grasp-

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At last establish elements of mathematics according to these laws

47 See Ong, Ramus, 258-62.

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THE SCHOLAE MATHEMATICAE

Some time in 1561 or 1562, Ramus converted to the Reform

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the translatio studii remains: the patriarchs, the pillars rediscovered by

Ramus's final verdict on the origins of mathematics is quite buried in

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HENRY SAVILE'S HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS

The immediate impact of Ramus's history can be seen in the

7 Ramus, Scholae mathematicae, 30: "caeca ambitio."

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sist in part of a brilliant exposition of the mathematics both of Ptolemy's

. . . who would not be delighted by so noble, so pleasing, so agree-

1 MS Savile 29, fol. llv.

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gation, he quickly changes the subject, saying that he is aware this is a