Newton and the ordering of nature

The reconciliation of rationalism and empiricism, and the construction of

something approaching a coherent structure of scientific knowledge, was
first achieved by Isaac Newton. His Principia Mathematica of 1687 can be
seen as the culmination of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, presenting a unified
theory of gravitation that had profound consequences
for the way in which matter was to be understood (Newton [1687]
1995). Like Boyle and Hooke, Newton was part of the experimental
tradition that had been founded by Bacon, yet he shared with Descartes a
belief that nature obeyed a series of laws which could be expressed in mathematical
form. He simply held that those laws should be directly accessible
by empirical means. Like Hooke, he believed that all things could be known
by science, yet he acknowledged that some natural laws were more general
in their applicability than others. Newton’s work also followed on from that
of Descartes and Bacon in that it elaborated the mind/body dichotomy. He
argued that human experience involved the re-presentation of the outer
world in an ‘Inner Theatre’ or sensorium communae. The nervous systems and
sensory apparatus had the function of bringing information about the world
to this inner space, and taking back the mind’s commands to the executive
faculties (Toulmin 1990: 108). On this basis, Newton contrived to argue
both that there was a real order in nature, and that it could be fully comprehended
by the systematic gathering of sensory evidence (Cassirer 1951: 8).
Like Descartes, Newton imagined the structure of the universe to be
something like a complex mechanism. On the other hand, he also believed
that this mechanism was effectively regulated by God, who, having created
the cosmos, actively intervened in its preservation (Coley 1991b: 223). Most
significantly, Newton followed Copernicus and Galileo in arguing that there
was a single universe which obeyed a uniform set of laws (Pickstone 2000:
87). This was effectively a refutation of the Aristotelian cosmology, in which
the physics of the heavens were distinct from those of the earth (Shapin
1996: 17). Aristotelianism had held that the elements which resided below
the moon were affected by change and decay, and moved in a rectilinear
fashion. The celestial bodies, by contrast, were perfect, eternal, and underwent
no change. The burden of Newton’s argument was that principles that
had been demonstrated by experiment on earth could be expected to apply
elsewhere in the universe.
Newton’s ideas are significant, not simply because they transformed the
ways in which physics, astronomy and mathematics were to operate but also
because any fundamental change in the conception of nature had immediate
consequences for the understanding of human society. For Newton, scientific
knowledge is knowledge of God’s creation. Science is the means by which
reason apprehends the work of God. Newton presents nature as something
like a clockwork machine, the cogs and wheels of which have been
assembled by God. This places God in an external relationship to the orrery,
still a creator, but one who stands back from His creation. In contrast, the
Renaissance had seen God as present within nature. Giordano Bruno,
for instance, had argued that God was the internal principle of motion in
nature, so that nature itself was continually coming into being, rather than a made thing that was
‘finished’ (Cassirer 1951: 40). Clearly, this was a variation on the Aristotelian theme of the
continuous movement of things
towards their telos. Bruno presents the world as a whole as being animate,
through the immanent presence of the deity, just as Aristotle had seen
worldly entities as having something like a ‘soul’. The implication of the
Newtonian view is that material things do not and cannot move themselves;
they are only ever subject to external agency, whether human or divine.
Newton’s vision promoted a more thoroughly instrumentalist conception
of the universe. Not only was God a creator, the world was a product. The
more that the material world came to be seen as a created substance that
obeyed physical laws, and the more that reason became the prerogative of a
mind that operated under quite different conditions, the more it became
possible to separate humanity from the rest of creation. Bruno Latour has
argued that the hallmark of modernity is a kind of conceptual ‘purification’
in which the knowledge of physical things is held apart from that of politics
and social power (Latour 1993: 3). The laws of nature could be distinguished
from the conventions of society, and yet once the two had been separated,
similarities could be identified between them (ibid.: 130). Most importantly,
reason was capable of elucidating both natural and social order.
However, while nature had been created by God, and the investigations of
the scientist should lead one to marvel at His handiwork, society was made
by people. Thus the work of reason in understanding human relations might
be expected to result in the improvement of the conditions under which
people lived. That is to say, reason could produce progress and civilisation in
the human world, as well as mastery over the natural world.
However, to begin with, the potentially radical implications of Newton’s
work were not fully worked through. The emphasis on order, structure and
stability proved congenial in a political climate where cohesion and certainty
were to be desired (Toulmin 1990: 109). It is highly significant that the
idea of a scientific analysis of society emerged at the very point when modernity
was gaining its coherence (Smart 1992: 7). However, those commentators
who initiated this form of study were not necessarily seeking new, utopian
social forms. Hobbes, for instance, was much influenced by Descartes’
mechanical conception of nature, and argued that the state is like a machine
or a body composed of organs (Goodman 1991: 22). Just as nature is made
up of stable systems that obey causal laws, so humans can use reason to
create stability in society. In this process, the overcoming of wilfulness and
emotion may involve submitting to established authority. For Hobbes, the
state is made up of the wills of many individual persons, who together
constitute a collective will (Cassirer 1951: 19). This picture of innumerable
separate entities coming to form a greater whole is clearly related to the
corpuscular conception of matter. Both Hobbes and Locke suggested that
human beings exist in the first instance in a state of nature, and are transformed
by a civilising process (Taylor 1985: 190). The implication is that
the state of nature has both a conceptual and a historical priority, so that as well as humans being
socialised in the course of their lives, there was
presumably a time when all people existed in a ‘natural’ condition. Locke
places these arguments into the context of education, arguing that a
new-born child is a ‘blank slate’ of which anything can be made by learning.
Hobbes, however, argued that human nature was essentially evil and violent.
It was the task of reason to replace this condition with order. In Leviathan,
Hobbes ( [1651] 1996) argued that it was necessary for the monarch to
impose a total authority on the populus in order to overcome the negative
aspects of humanity.
In the work of Hobbes and Locke there is an emerging tension between
the individual and society. The individual human being has now come to be
associated with reason and will, and exists prior to the social. Yet the social
can be understood as an entity in itself, operating in something like a
law-like fashion. The polarisation of the individual will and the social will
had the effect of enhancing the growing dichotomy between the person and
the community, while the community itself came to be seen as the product
of the acts of individual persons. These tendencies would mature into the
‘social physics’ of Smith and Ricardo, in which it came to be recognised that
there may be unintended consequences of human actions (Appleby et al.
1996a: 7). Thus while society is created by individuals, the collective whole
may operate in ways that are not willed by individuals. Although the notion
of social order goes back at least as far as Plato, Hobbes in particular was to
emphasise the role of consciousness in reflecting on that order. Moreover, the
understanding that social order was a human achievement lay behind the
development of statecraft and what we would now call ‘social engineering’.
We have argued that Newton’s era, the end of the seventeenth century,
was one that found or created order in nature and society. One of the
consequences of this was that the practice of classification took on a much
greater importance. Natural history was now dominated by the description
of objects, and their positioning within taxonomic schemes (Foucault 1970:
137). While the Renaissance had relied upon similarities of appearance, it
was now held that God’s ordering of the world was sufficiently complex as
to be hidden. On the surface, nature appeared to be chaotic and confused,
but on a deeper level there would be some form of organisation. Taxonomic
classification was the means by which the order of nature might be made
apparent. What is particularly significant about this way of thinking is that
it shows the first hint of the importance of the distinction between surface
appearance and hidden depths, which must be uncovered by human effort.
This is another distinctively modern conception, and one that would become
much more significant at the start of the nineteenth century with the
emergence of the notion of hidden structures.
As we have seen, classification places all things within a grid or table.
They are thus rendered as equivalents, or signs within a classificatory system.
While this approach was first applied to living things, it soon provided the
format for the ordering of files, archives and libraries (Foucault 1970: 132).
Given the close connections that we have already noted between natural
history and antiquarianism, it is not surprising that these methods were
also applied to artefacts. Indeed, Edward Lhwyd was to move towards the
typological ordering of antiquities on the basis of work that he had already
undertaken on fossils (Piggott 1976: 20). Schnapp (1996: 266) refers to the
way in which Aubrey, Caylus and Winckelmann were able to recognise that
typology might provide a means of seriating and dating artefacts. However,
it is important to recognise that their achievements were built upon a fundamental
change in the way in which the material world was understood. We
have seen that within the early cabinets of curiosities and museums little
distinction was made between geological or botanical specimens and objects
of human manufacture. The temptation is to suggest that this is a measure
of the relative ignorance of the collectors concerned. Yet it is instructive at
this point to note the contrast that Foucault draws between two natural
historians, Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605) and John Jonston (1603–75).
Aldrovandi’s works are concerned with animals, both real and mythical, and
represent an exhaustive chronicling of all of the information that could be
assembled concerning particular creatures (Figures 1.5, 1.6). This included
descriptive material, travellers’ tales, myths and legends. Jonston’s writings,
however, are concerned with more exclusively classificatory information:
anatomical details, means of locomotion, diet, means of reproduction, and so
on (Figure 1.7). Within half a century, there had been a complete change in
natural history, from relational chronicle to descriptive ordering (Foucault
1970: 129). Rather than seek the connections between creatures, the
imperative was now to segment and classify them.
Significantly, one of the collections to which histories of archaeology
sometimes refer was that of Aldrovandi himself, which contained both stone
axes and flint arrowheads of prehistoric date (Piggott 1976: 103). These
objects were not separated from the biological and geological specimens.
However, Aldrovandi himself was active in the continuing debate over the
possible human origins of such artefacts, and presented different arguments
at different times (Daniel 1980: 35; Trigger 1989: 53). So Aldrovandi was
not ignorant of the character of the objects that he possessed. Rather, we
could suggest that with the change in the organisation of human knowledge
that took place during the seventeenth century came a further change in the
significance of collections. For Aldrovandi, the collection might already be a
store of potential knowledge, but the form that it took was that of a microcosm
of the physical world, in which all relationships were potentially significant.
Just as a book or a library should gather together all the knowledge that
might be worth knowing, so any interesting specimen might throw light
onto any other. Aldrovandi’s collection was ordered by correspondences and
relational sequences, including alternations of like and unlike things, and
sought to bring art and nature together (Hooper-Greenhill 1992: 124). In some cases, items were
grouped thematically rather than according to
physical similarity. While Aldrovandi’s cabinet may not have represented
the kind of occult machinery that some of the early Renaissance collections
amounted to, it was nonetheless integrated by ties of meaning rather than
taxonomic structures.
By the later seventeenth century, though, information existed to be classified
and organised. Collections and museums provided the raw material for
systems of classification, which are fundamentally exclusionary. Taxonomical
ordering defines which aspects of a phenomenon are not significant, as much
as which are. In the wake of Newton, the separation between the human and
non-human worlds, culture and nature, was absolute, and this now provided
the principal basis for ordering collections of material things. If the cabinets
of curiosities had been the materialisation of a cosmology structured around
meaning and significance, the subsequent development of museums demonstrates
the attempt to make the classificatory table manifest. Description was
now prioritised over meaning, and museum collections were gathered in
such a way as to assure representative coverage of species, genera, and types
(Pickstone 2000: 61). Rather than mystical influence, the museum collection
now enabled the observer to gain mastery over the things of the world from
a position of exteriority, looking down on the array of specimens and appreciating
their classificatory order (Hooper-Greenhill 1992: 45). The museum
now became the world-picture, facilitating the understanding of a world
that was expanding rapidly through commerce and colonialism.
This desire to apprehend the world in its entirety was matched by new
strategies of graphical representation. The ‘realistic’ images of architecture
and landscape that were made possible by linear perspective have been linked
by a number of authors to the development of the object/subject dichotomy,
and the separation between people and things fostered by capitalist economic
relations (Berger 1972: 16; Cosgrove 1984). We can identify a connection
between this kind of art and the naturalistic depiction of objects
in science, including the convention of drawing things to scale (Pickstone
2000: 63). Implicitly, this mode of representation relies on the notion that
material things have an unproblematic character which is fully available to
the sensory apparatus, and that by rendering them accurately as they appear
to one viewing subject, their fundamental character can be conveyed to
another. Both perspective art and scientific drawing are evidence of the
eviction of meaning from the world. The project of realism in representation
relies on the understanding that the depicted thing is what it is: a meeting
of matter and light. Meaning is always secondary to the way that the thing
objectively is, and the way that it is conveyed to us by our senses. As
Andrew Jones has pointed out, the kind of standardised scientific graphic
depiction that emerged in the seventeenth century is one of the fundamental
disciplinary practices of archaeology ( Jones 2001: 337). Any excavation report
contains large numbers of scale drawings of objects, while the ‘corpus’
publication depicts all known examples of a given class of artefacts, according
to a standardised set of conventions. All of these objects are therefore
‘seen’ from a single point of view, and this has the effect of constituting
artefactual categories. Arguably, then, the way in which archaeologists define
the kinds of things that they find is a consequence of the early modern
project of presenting the world in such a way as to be viewed by a transcendental
subject.