Europe: A History (122 page)
‘And I saw… that the light, tending to [one] end of the Image, did suver a Refraction considerably greater than the light tending to the other. And so the true cause of the length of that Image was detected to be no other, than that Light consists of
Rays differently refrangible
which… were, according to their degrees of refrangibility, transmitted towards divers parts of the wall.’
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It was a nice irony that the properties of light eventually gave Einstein the clues which eventually overthrew .the Newtonian system, [e =
mc
2
]
Newton, as a Unitarian, was debarred from many formal honours, but he did not miss out on fame and fortune. He even dabbled in alchemy. He described himself charmingly as ‘a boy playing on the sea-shore … while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me’.
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Pope wrote an epitaph intended for Newton’s tomb in Westminster Abbey:
Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night;
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.
The exploitation of Newton’s principles was assisted both by improvements in technology and by parallel advances in other sciences. The Royal Observatory (1675) at Greenwich developed superior telescopes; the British Admiralty, by offering a prize of £20,000, was given the chronometer. In mathematics the Leipziger Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) may well have discovered calculus independently before Newton did. In biology and, more specifically, in botany, the Swede Carl von Linne (Linnaeus, 1707–78), brought order from chaos in his system for classifying plants expounded in the
Systema naturae
(1735) and
Fundamenta botanica
(1736). In chemistry, fundamental steps were taken by Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), who explored the compound nature of air, by Henry Cavendish (1731–1810), who demonstrated the compound nature of water, and above all by Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743–94), who finally discovered the workings of chemical reactions,
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The interest in the theory of knowledge, when added to the growing corpus of information, had a natural corollary in a mania for encyclopedias. Compendia of universal knowledge had been common enough in the Middle Ages; but they had fallen out of fashion. Early attempts to revive the genre included those of J. H. Alsted, published in Holland in 1630, and of Louis Moreri, published at Lyons in 1674. The father of the modern medium, however, is generally taken to be Pierre Bayle (1647–1706). The first folio of his
Dictionnaire historique et critique
appeared in Rotterdam in 1697. In England the genre was represented by the
Lexicon technicum
(1704) of John Harris FRS, and by the
Cyclopaedia
(1728) of Ephraim Chambers; in Germany by J. Hübner’s
Reales Staats Zeitungs- und Conversations-
Lexicon
(Leipzig, 1704) and by J. T. Jablonski’s
Allgemeines Lexicon
(Leipzig, 1721); in Italy by G. Pivati’s
Dizionario universale
(Venice, 1744); and in Poland by B. Chmielowski’s
NoweAteny
(1745–6). A vast illustrated
Universal Lexicon
in 64 volumes and 4 supplements was published in Leipzig by J. H. Zedler between 1732 and 1754. In France, the great project of the
Encyclopédie
or
Dictionnaire raisonné des arts, des sciences, et des métiers
, undertaken by Denis Diderot (1713–84) and Jean d’Alembert (1717–83), was originally inspired by a French translation of Chambers. It appeared in Paris in 17 volumes of 16,288 pages between 1751 and 1765, with further supplements, illustrations, and indexes appearing up to 1782. It was programmatic, opinionated, anticlerical, and highly critical of the regime; and its editors were regularly harassed by officialdom. Yet it was a monument to the age. It aimed at nothing less than a summary of the whole of human knowledge. The first edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, less distinguished but longer-lived, appeared in Edinburgh in 1768. In the meantime, Hübner’s
Lexicon
had run into many editions and translations. Its copyright would eventually be bought in 1808 by the publisher F. A. Brockhaus (1772–1823), who used it as the basis for the most celebrated of all German encyclopedias.
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1765 the Russian ambassador at Berlin was authorized to invite a one- eyed man to St Petersburg and not to spare the cost. Leonhard Euler (1707–83) accepted on condition that he receive the directorship of the Russian Imperial Academy, a vast salary of 3,000 roubles, a pension for his wife, and high appointments for his four sons. His conditions were met without demur. Five years earlier, when the Russian army had vandalized his farm at Charlottenburg, the Tsar had compensated him richly. For Euler was the supreme mathematical wizard of the age. By common accord, his only peer in the history of mathematics was C. F. Gauss (1777–1855), who was born in Brunswick ten years after Euler left Berlin.
It was said that ‘Euler calculated as other men breathe, or eagles soar’. Son of a Swiss pastor and educated at Basle, he possessed a phenomenal memory. He could recite the whole of Virgil’s
Aeneid
including the numbers of the lines and pages. He first went to Russia as a young man in the company of the Bernouilli brothers, before being ‘head-hunted’ by the agents of Frederick the Great. His output was as prolific as it was original. He wrote 886 scientific works and c.4,000 letters, at an average rate of two printed pages per day over five decades. The Russian journal
Commentarii Academiae Scientiarum Imperialis Petropolitanae
was still publishing the backlog of his articles forty-five years after his death. He discovered any number of theorems, invented the calculation of sines, completed the search for the numerical evaluation of pi, and posited the existence of transcendental numbers. ‘Euler’s Theorem’ demonstrated the connection between exponential and trigonometric functions:
e
i
x
= cos
x
+
i
sin
x
Euler’s prestige brought the Russian Academy into the mainstream of European science. The brilliant school of mathematics at St Petersburg long outlasted him. But he was reluctant to talk about it. When pressed on the matter at Potsdam by Frederick the Great’s mother, he replied, ‘Madam, in that country they hang those who talk.’
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Such however was Euler’s authority that the symbols employed in his textbook
Introductio in analysis infinitorum
(1748) were to provide the basis for standard mathematical notation. He was instrumental in promoting for mathematicians a universal medium of communication of a type which, for the purpose of everyday life, Europeans never developed. (See Appendix III, p. 1243.)
Religious thought was profoundly influenced by rationalism—especially in the sphere of biblical scholarship. The initial problem was how to distinguish between the rival claims of Catholics and Protestants, both of whom gave scriptural backing to their dogmas. An early start had been made in
The Religion of Protestants
(1637) by William Chillingworth, an Oxford Fellow who had studied with the Jesuits at Douai and who, typically, was falsely accused of being a Socinian. The biggest advance was made by the French Oratorian Richard Simon (1638–1712), who applied the classical rules of French literary criticism to his
Histoire critique du Vieux Testament
(1678). Simon’s book was attacked by Bossuet and placed on the Index, and all copies of the first edition destroyed. But the method survived.
In due course, reasoning about religion gave rise to an intellectual fashion for Deism. This was religious belief reduced to its minimal core: belief in a ‘Supreme Being’, in God the Creator, or in Providence. Its early manifestations surfaced in England in various shaky credos, notably the
De Veritate
(Paris, 1624) of Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648) and J. J. Toland’s
Christianity Not Mysterious
(1696). It reached its peak in the 1730s, when Voltaire was in England, but was much diminished after the publication of
The Analogy of Religion
(1736) by Bishop Joseph Butler—of whose lasting influence Queen Caroline was once told: ‘No Madam, he is not dead, but he is buried.’ Deistic positions were reached in France in attempts to find the middle ground between traditional Christianity and the more extreme free-thinkers, such as Baron d’Holbach (1723–89) and Claude Helvetius (1715–71), who had begun to express openly Atheist opinions. Diderot, for example, writing the entries for his
Encyclopédie
on ‘Christianity’, ‘Faith’, and ‘Providence’, took a Deist stance. Voltaire, whose attacks on established religion were unrelenting, none the less sprang to defend the existence of God against the attacks of d’Holbach’s
Système de la nature
(1770). Reflecting on the sky at night, he wrote: ‘One would have to be blind not to be dazzled by this sight; one would have to be stupid not to recognise its author; one would have to be mad not to worship him.’ ‘Si Dieu n’existait pas,’ he quipped, ‘il faudrait l’inventer.’
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(If God did not exist, He would have to be invented.)
The struggle of the
philosophes
against the authorities of Church and State inevitably created the impression that Catholicism and absolute monarchy were united in their blind opposition to all reason and change. Diderot has been credited with the uncharitable comment about Salvation arriving when ‘the last King was strangled with the entrails of the last priest’. He was only one step away from the simplified revolutionary vision of the universal war between progress and reaction. In due course the Catholic publicist Joseph de Maistre (1754–1821)
accepted the same extreme position but from the opposite point of view, maintaining in his
Considérations sur la France
(1796) that rebellion and impiety are synonymous.
Rational economics stood high on the Enlightenment’s list of priorities. The general notion of progress found expression in the particular idea of economic improvement. At the micro-level, gentlemen were absorbed by the rising science of estate management, convinced that their properties could not simply be put in order but could be transformed into thriving businesses. Land reclamation by the Dutch or on the Dutch model changed the face of several low-lying regions, from the fenlands of East Anglia to the delta of the Vistula. The enclosure movement gained speed, especially in England, threatening the peasantry but promising larger agrarian units suitable for commercial cultivation. Systematic stock-breeding, plant selection, soil nutrition, crop rotation, and drainage, as practised by ‘Farmer George’ at Windsor in the 1770s or by Thomas Coke of Holkham in Norfolk, was rewarded by dramatically improved yields. In those countries where serfdom prevailed, some enlightened landowners convinced themselves that their serfs would work more efficiently if freed from their obligations. Instances of voluntary emancipation can be found from France to Poland.
At the macro-level, mercantilism of the autocratic variety long held sway. Its great exponent was Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–83), minister to Louis XIV. State manufactories were started. Colonies were planted, taxation rationalized, ports, roads, and canals constructed, transport improved. The great Canal du Languedoc (1681) had its counterparts right across Europe, from the canalized Guadalquivir in Spain to the Eskilstuna Canal in Sweden, the Augustów Canal in Lithuania, and the great Neva-Volga complex in Russia.
Yet the conviction grew that economic life could not expand beyond a certain point unless shorn of artificial curbs and restrictions. This trend found early expression in the work of the Irish banker Richard Cantillon (d. 1734), who was quoted by Mirabeau senior in the highly popular work
L’Ami des hommes
(1756). But it gained currency with the economists or ‘Physiocrats’ associated with the
Encyclopédie
—Francois Quesnay (1694–1774), Jean de Gournay (1712–59), and J. P. Dupont de Nemours (1739–1817). The celebrated slogan ‘Pauvres paysans, pauvre royaume’ encapsulated the revolutionary notion that national prosperity could only be assured through the personal prosperity and liberty of all. Quesnay’s disciple Jacques Turgot (1727–81) failed in the attempt to apply the movement’s principles to practical government. But the Scots professor Adam Smith (1723–90), residing in Paris in 1765–6, made the close acquaintance of Quesnay’s circle. It was a formative experience for the founder of modern economics,
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Rationalist political theory was long associated with support for absolute monarchy, which accorded well with the classical spirit of order and harmony. It was seeking for the most efficient means of cutting through the maze of local and feudal privilege. Hobbes’s conclusions, if not his argumentation, were not all that different from those of French divines such as the great J. B. Bossuet, Bishop of
Meaux (1627–1704), chief advocate of the divine right of kings. In the eighteenth century, however, the arguments changed. Locke’s two
Treatises on Government
(1690) proposed that government should be subject to natural law, and opposed the hereditary principle. He demanded some form of neutral authority for settling disputes between ruler and ruled. Most importantly, whilst underlining the rights of property, he developed the idea of government through a social contract, and hence the principle of consent, the corner-stone of liberalism. Though he had little to say about the judiciary, he advocated the separation of powers, and the need for checks and balances between the executive and the legislative. These two last principles were most clearly formulated in
L’Esprit des lois
(Geneva, 1748) of Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755), who drew his inspiration partly from Greek and Roman republicanism and partly from the English constitutional settlement of 1689:
In each state, there are three sorts of powers: the legislative power, the executive power over things dependent on the rights of the people, and the executive power relating to the civil law… All would be lost if the same man… were to exercise all three of these powers: the power of making laws, the power of putting public resolutions into effect, and the power of judging crimes.
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