Henry, Descartes and The Importance of Laws of Nature-2

Metaphysics and the Origins of Modern Science: Descartes and the Importance of Laws of
Nature
Author(s): John Henry
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Source: Early Science and Medicine, Vol. 9, No. 2 (2004), pp. 73-114
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METAPHYSICS AND THE ORIGINS OF MODERN
SCIENCE: DESCARTES AND THE IMPORTANCE OF
LAWS OF NATURE*
JOHN
HENRY
University of Edinburgh
Abstract
This
paper
draws attention to the crucial
importance
of a new kind of
precisely
defined law of nature in the Scientific Revolution. All
explanations
in the me-
chanical
philosophy depend upon
the interactions of
moving
material
particles;
the laws of nature
stipulate precisely
how these
interact; therefore,
such
explana-
tions
rely
on the laws of nature. While this is
obvious,
the
radically innovatory
nature of these laws is not
fully acknowledged
in the historical literature.
Indeed,
a number of scholars have tried to locate the
origins
of such laws in the medieval
period.
In the first
part
of this
paper
these claims are
critically
examined,
and
found at best to reveal
important aspects
of the
background
to the later
idea,
which could be drawn
upon
for
legitimating purposes by
the mechanical
philoso-
phers.
The second
part
of the
paper argues
that the modern
concept
of laws of
nature
originates
in Ren6 Descartes's work. It is shown that Descartes took his
concept
of laws of nature from the mathematical
tradition,
but
recognized
that
he could not
export
it to the domain of
physico-mathematics,
to
play
a causal
role,
unless he could show that these laws were underwritten
by
God. It is
argued
that
this is
why,
at an
early stage
of his
philosophical development,
Descartes had to
turn to
metaphysics.
In a
paper published
in the USA in
1942,
the
emigre
German
Marxist
historian,
Edgar
Zilsel,
first drew attention to the fact that
the
concept
of the law of
nature,
which had been
only very
occa-
sionally explicit
in
theological
discussion
throughout
the Middle
Ages
and the
Renaissance,
suddenly
became so
frequently
invoked
in
seventeenth-century
natural
philosophy
that,
by
the end of the
*
Earlier
(barely recognizable)
versions of this
paper
were read at the
History
Department, University
of Durham
(1999),
and the
History
and
Philosophy
of
Science
Departments
at the Universities of Melbourne and Leeds
(2002). I
am
grateful
to all those
present
who tried to
help
me make sense of the
topic, espe-
cially
Helmut
Heit,
Jonathan Hodge,
Keith
Hutchison,
Martin
Leckey,
and Ho-
ward
Sankey.
I am also
grateful
to two
anonymous
referees who
helped
me to
improve
this
paper.
I must also
apologise
to
them, however,
for not
being
able to
carry
out all their
suggestions.
Would that I had the
knowledge,
and the skills as
an
historian,
philosopher,
and writer to have done so.
?
Koninklijke
Brill
NV, Leiden, 2004
Also available online
-
www.brill.nl
Early
Science and Medicine
9, 2
74
JOHN
HENRY
century,
it had become a
commonplace
in scientific discussion
(and
has remained
so,
ever
since).' Indeed,
since the end of the
seventeenth
century
it seems true to
say
that a
major aspect
of the
scientific
enterprise
has
precisely
been to discover those observed
regularities
in nature which are assumed to reflect an
underlying
causal
necessity
and which are then
designated
as laws of nature.
The
discovery
and
understanding
of "Laws of Nature"
is,
as Zilsel
noted,
the basic task of science. It
might
even be said to be its de-
fining
characteristic:
"Where
there is no
law,"
wrote Emile
Meyer-
son,
"there is no
science."2
So,
this
presents
us with an historical
problem. Why
was it that the
concept
of laws of nature came to be
seen as an essential element of natural
philosophy
in the seven-
teenth
century,
while
previously,
for centuries
past,
this
way
of
understanding
natural
phenomena
had attracted little or no atten-
tion?
Given the
importance
of the
concept
of laws of nature in mod-
ern
science,
it
might
be
expected
that the literature on this
topic
in the
history
of science would be extensive.
Remarkably,
this is not
the case. In
spite
of a number of
attempts
to understand the his-
torical
development
and
importance
of the
concept
of laws of
nature,
it remains true to
say
that "the full historical
novelty,
con-
text,
and extent of this
general
idea has not
yet
received its
due."3
It is almost as
though
the idea of laws of nature is so
prominent
in
1 Edgar
Zilsel,
"The Genesis of the
Concept
of
Physical
Law,"
Philosophical
Re-
view 51
(1942),
245-79. Now
reprinted
in Diederick
Raven,
Wolfgang
Krohn,
and
Robert S. Cohen
(eds.), Edgar
Zilsel: The Social
Origins of
Modern
Science
(Dor-
drecht, 2000),
96-122.
Throughout
this
paper
I use the
phrase "law(s)
of nature"
rather than the more succinct "natural
law(s),"
to avoid
any
confusion with the
legal
and ethical notion of "natural
law,"
i.e. moral laws
which,
generally speak-
ing,
are held to be either
intuitively
obvious to
everyone,
or
capable
of
being
arrived at
by reasoning
from obvious and undeniable
premises.
So far the historio-
graphy
of these two
concepts
of laws in nature have been
largely separate,
but
there
may
well be much to be learned on both sides
by considering
the two no-
tions
together.
I have not
attempted
to enter this
comparatively
unbroken
ground
here,
however. Our concern is
entirely
with laws of nature in the scientific sense.
For a discussion which does
bring
the two
concepts together
see,
for
example,
Thomas
Ahnert,
"De
Sympathia
et
Antipathia
Rerum: Natural
Law,
Religion
and the
Rejection
of Mechanistic Science in the Works of Christian
Thomasius,"
in T.
J.
Hochstrasser and P. Schr6der
(eds.), Early
Modern Natural Law Theories: Contexts
and
Strategies
in the
Early Enlightenment (Dordrecht, 2003),
257-77.
2 Emile
Meyerson, Identity
and
Reality (London, 1930),
25. See
p.
19 for sam-
ple quotations showing
the
importance
of the notion of laws of nature to various
scientists.
3
Eugene
M.
Klaaren,
Religious Origins of
Modern Science:
Belief
in Creation in
Seventeenth-Century Thought (Grand Rapids, 1977),
164.
METAPHYSICS AND THE ORIGINS OF MODERN SCIENCE 75
our modern
understanding
of the world that its
presence
in the
historical record is taken for
granted
and
scarcely examined.4
The
aim of this
paper
is to draw attention to this
lacuna,
and to
begin,
perhaps,
to fill it.
Accordingly,
the
paper begins
with a
survey
of
the recent literature which has
specifically
dealt with the
concept
of laws of
nature,
in order to
show,
firstly,
that writers on the
topic
have failed to
provide
a
satisfactory
historical
understanding
of
its
origins,
and
secondly,
to indicate the fundamental
importance
of the
concept
for the Scientific Revolution. I
pursue
this latter
point
further in the second half of the
paper, by arguing
for the
absolutely
crucial
importance
of the laws of nature in Cartesian
natural
philosophy,
and in the mechanical
philosophy
more
gen-
erally.
The Laws
of
Nature: A
Survey of
Recent
Historiography
There have been a number of
attempts
to sketch out a
history
of
the
concept
of laws of
nature,
and
although
such accounts differ
from one
another,
they
all seem to
point
to one of three
general
conclusions. What I want to do here is to assess these
differing
approaches,
and to see if we can decide between these rival claims
about the
origins
and
significance
of the
concept
of laws of nature.
Following
Zilsel's
lead,
scholars who have tried to account for
the rise of the
concept
of laws of nature have offered brief
surveys
of the use of the
concept
of laws of nature in
pre-modern thought.5
4
This
feeling
is based
upon my
extensive
reading
of the
secondary
literature
on
early
modern science. Indeed this
paper
arises out of
my
own frustration about
the lack of extensive treatments of the
topic
which I noticed while
writing
a short
text-book on the Scientific Revolution which
incorporated
a detailed literature
survey: John Henry,
The
Scientific
Revolution and the
Origins of
Modern Science
(Ba-
singstoke,
1997,
revised
2002). I
felt unable to refer students to a
good guide
to
the
topic,
and
consequently
could not
give
the
emphasis
to it in
my
own discus-
sion that I felt it deserved. It was at this
point
that I determined to write this
paper.
For confirmation of the lack of focus on laws of nature in the literature
see H. Floris
Cohen,
The
Scientific
Revolution: A
Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago,
1994), which,
quite justifiably,
offers no
specific
discussion of this
topic (although
the laws of nature are often mentioned in
passing, e.g. 453-5).
Cohen did
regard
Zilsel's
recognition
of the historical
problem
as his "most
perceptive
contribution
to the
history
of
science,"
453. All the more
reason,
in
my
view,
to consider it
more
fully.
5
See
Zilsel,
"Genesis of the
Concept,"
247-67. See also
Joseph
Needham,
"Hu-
man Law and the Laws of
Nature,"
in
idem,
The Grand Titration: Science and
Society
in East and West
(London, 1969),
299-331
(first
published
in
Journal of
the
History
of
Ideas
12, 1951) especially
299-311; idem,
Science and Civilization in
China,
vol. 2
76
JOHN
HENRY
A look at
any
one of these
surveys
is
enough
to convince us that
the
concept
of laws of nature
played
at best a
very
minor role in
natural
philosophy before
the seventeenth
century,
and it was a far
cry
from the kind of
concept
we see in
Descartes,
Newton and
subsequent
science. If we look at all of the
surveys,
however,
some-
thing
else becomes clear. The
significance
of
pre-Cartesian
in-
stances where laws of nature seemed to be invoked
is,
perhaps
inevitably, judged
in accordance with each scholar's
preconceived
explanation
of the
origins
of the
concept.
So,
for
example,
Zilsel,
who wants to
explain
the
origin
of laws
of nature in terms of social and economic
changes
in the sixteenth
and seventeenth
centuries,
is able to dismiss all
pre-modern
no-
tions of laws of nature as irrelevant to our historical understand-
ing.
One of the worst cases of
special pleading
here is Zilsel's claim
that
Augustine's
and Thomas
Aquinas's
discussions of God's eter-
nal law as it is
imposed
on all
creatures,
not
just humankind,
can
be dismissed on the
grounds
that
they
are "identical with the im-
penetrable providence
of God" and are
considerably
distant from
the modern
concept
of
physical
law.'
Needham,
who believed that
Zilsel's
explanation
"must
surely
be in
principle
the
right
one,"
similarly emphasizes
the evidence that
suggests
the newness of the
idea of laws of nature in the
early
modern
period.7
By
contrast,
Francis
Oakley
and
John
R.
Milton,
who both wish
to
explain
the rise of the
concept
of laws of nature in terms of
medieval nominalist
philosophy,
voluntarist
theology
and,
pace
Zilsel,
other
aspects
of "the idea of divine
providence,"
concentrate
upon
what
they
see as the richness of discussions about natural law
and laws of nature in the Middle
Ages.
So,
although
Milton is will-
ing
to
agree
with Zilsel that the ancient references to laws of na-
ture were so few in number that
they
could be
disregarded,
he
refuses to
agree
with Zilsel's dismissal of the medieval references
on the same
grounds.
Milton insists that the medieval references
are
sufficiently
numerous that
they
cannot be "brushed
aside,"
even
though
the number of medieval authors he cites is no
greater
than the number of ancient authors cited
by
Zilsel or
Needham.8
(Cambridge, 1956), 518-83;
Francis
Oakley,
"Christian
Theology
and the New-
tonian Science: The Rise of the
Concept
of the Laws of
Nature,"
Church
History
30
(1961), 433-57,
see
433-37;
John
R.
Milton,
"The
Origin
and
Development
of
the
Concept
of the Laws of
Nature,"
Archives
Europ~ennes
de
Sociologie
22
(1981),
173-95,
see 173-77.
6 Zilsel,
"Genesis of the
Concept,"
256-7.
7 Needham,
"Human
Law," 309,
see also Science and
Civilisation,
2: 542.
8
Milton, "Origin
and
Development,"
183.
Milton dismisses
many
of the
reported
allusions to laws of na-
ture
by
ancient thinkers on the
grounds
that
they
are often anach-
ronistic
translations,
in which a
post-Newtonian
translator has read
modern ideas into the classical text.'
Nonetheless,
it seems hard
to dismiss the ancient
examples provided by
Needham
or,
to in-
troduce another contributor to this
debate,
by
Alistair Crombie.
Admittedly
laws of nature
play
a somewhat
taken-for-granted
role
in Crombie's monumental and
magisterial Styles of Scientific
Think-
ing
in the
European
Tradition,
but it is
by
no means
possible
to
reject
all the instances of
early
uses of laws of nature which he mentions.
The belief that "laws" are immanent in the nature of
things,
so that
knowledge
of their natures leads
inexorably
to a
knowledge
of
their relations with all other
things,
which
Oakley
sees as
"typified
by
Stoic...
views,"
is found
by
Crombie in Plato and the ancient
Atomists.10
Furthermore,
the shift from ideas of immanent law to
the
supposedly
Semitic
concept
of
imposed
laws of
nature,
which
Oakley
locates in the Christian Middle
Ages,
is noticed
by
Crombie
in the
writings
of Philo
Judaeus.
It was
Philo,
according
to Crom-
bie,
who
rejected
earlier Greek ideas of "laws of nature
arising
entirely
out of
necessity
in the nature of matter
alone,"
which he
found in
Platonic,
Aristotelian and Stoic
thought,
and conceived
of a
"system
of
principles
introduced in the act of creation into the
world as its immutable laws." Philo's ideas found their
way
into
early
Christian
thought,
as can be seen in the
writings
of Basil of
Cappadocia
in the fourth
century
AD,
and in those of
Augustine
of
Hippo
in the sixth
century.11
9
Milton
"Origin
and
Development,"
174. See
also,
Sophie
Roux,
"Les lois de
la nature au
XVIIe
siecle: le
probl&me terminologique,"
Revue de
synthise,
4e Se-
ries, 2-4
(2001),
531-76.
10
Oakley,
"Christian
Theology
and the Newtonian
Science,"
435. Alistair
Crombie,
Styles of Scientific Thinking
in the
European
Tradition: The
History of Argu-
ment and
Explanation especially
in the Mathematical and Biomedical Sciences and
Arts,
3
vols.
(London, 1994),
1: 119-22. It has to be
said, however,
that a
systematic
ex-
amination of all the references to laws of nature in Crombie's index will
prove
that Milton has a
point.
In some cases an indexed
page
bears no
explicit
mention
of laws of nature but is concerned with
regular operations
of nature or beliefs
about the
necessary
connection of cause and effect.
See,
for
example,
257-8,
which is cited in the index under
"nature,
laws of'
(3:2446).
On the other
hand,
as far as A. N. Whitehead is
concerned,
the
regular
order of nature and belief in
a
necessary
connection between cause and effect is tantamount to a belief in laws
of nature. See A. N.
Whitehead,
Adventures
of
Ideas
(Cambridge,
1933),
139.
11
Crombie,
Styles of Scientific Thinking,
120,
and 294-300. See
also, idem,
"Infi-
nite Power and the Laws of Nature: A Medieval
Speculation,"
in
Science,
Art and
Nature in Medieval and Modern
Thought
(London, 1996),
67-87.
78
JOHN
HENRY
In a recent revisitation of the
history
of laws of nature for the
Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, John
Milton illus-
trates the
familiarity
of the notion of laws of nature to seventeenth-
century
audiences
by quoting
Francis Bacon:
"Kings
ruled
by
their
laws as God did
by
the laws of
nature,
and
ought
as
rarely
to use
their
supreme prerogative
as God doth his
power
of
working
mira-
cles." Milton's
point
is that a remark like this would not have been
made if Bacon
thought
that it was too obscure to be understood.
But this is
surely
an
argument
of universal
application."2
What are
we to make of Plato's occasional use of the
concept
of law of na-
ture? Would he have
said,
in
passing
as it
were,
that when a
per-
son is sick their blood extracts
components
of their food
"contrary
to the laws of
nature,"
if he did not think his audience would
understand what he
meant?"3
Would
Ulpian,
the Roman
jurist
whose works later came to make
up
a
significant proportion
of the
Justinian Corpus Juris
Civilis,
have
opened
the
Digest
with a refer-
ence to natural law as "That which all animals have been
taught by
Nature,"
if he had
anticipated
baffled
responses
from his fellow
jurists?'4 "Curiously,"
wrote
Needham,
"it is in Ovid... that we find
the clearest statements of the existence of laws in the non-human
world." It would be
especially
curious,
would it
not,
if Ovid used
the notion of laws of nature in his
poetry
with no realistic
expec-
tation that his readers would have a clue as to what he was
talking
about?'5
We could
say
the same of all the
pre-seventeenth-century
references to laws of
nature,
from the Stoics to
Georgius Agricola
and from the
Vulgate
Bible to Richard
Hooker,
unearthed
by
Zilsel, Needham,
Oakley,
and Milton.
In the
light
of these
references,
scattered
though they may
be
over a
period
of two
millennia,
it seems hard to resist the conclu-
sion that the educated in all
ages
(Zilsel
and Needham even find
"12
John
Milton,
"Laws of
Nature,"
in Daniel Garber and M.
Ayers (eds.),
The
Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Cambridge, 1998), 680-701,
684.
See also
Milton,
"Origin
and
Development,"
182-3; and,
for the
original
source,
Francis
Bacon,
Advancement
of Learning,
Book
II,
in
J. Spedding,
R. L. Ellis and D.
D. Heath
(eds.),
The Works
of
Francis
Bacon,
7 vols.
(London, 1857-1861),
3: 429.
13
Plato, Timaeus,
83e.
Quoted
in
Zilsel,
"Genesis of the
Concept,"
250;
Need-
ham,
"Human
Law," 302;
Milton's caution
against being
misled
by
anachronistic
translations
("Origin
and
Development," 174)
is
evidently
not relevant
here,
as
this seems to be a
very
clear case where Plato
really
does use the word law
(nomos).
14 The
Digest ofJustinian,
I, 1,
3.
Quoted in,
and cited
from, Needham,
"Human
Law," 305; Zilsel,
"Genesis of the
Concept,"
255.
15
Needham,
"Human
Law,"
303. Cited also
by
Zilsel,
"Genesis of the
Concept,"
251.
references to laws of nature
among
the
Babylonians,
which take us
back
nearly
four
millennia'6)
found it
easy
to understand the
gen-
eral notion that
physical phenomena
took
place
in accordance
with,
or as
though they
were
governed by,
"laws" of nature. Per-
haps,
then,
Emile
Meyerson
was
being
less fanciful than he seemed
when he attributed the
concept
of laws of nature even to
"primi-
tive man.""7 The unmistakable conclusion from all these accounts
is that the notion of laws of
nature,
in some form or
other,
can be
found
very early
in Western
(if
not
world)
civilization and could
be said to be an idea which was
always readily
understood
by
the
educated. Needham
largely acknowledged
the
agelessness
of the
concept by referring
to the idea of laws of nature as "a
theological
commonplace
in
European
civilization." There is no
need,
there-
fore,
for historians to
explain
the rise of the
concept,
whether
gradual
or sudden. It seems reasonable to
suppose,
from its
longue
duree,
that it was a
metaphor
which could occur almost
naturally
to the human mind.
Perhaps
an
attempt
to discover the
origins
of
the
metaphor
of laws of nature is as futile as
trying
to discover the
origins
of the
suggestion
that a
great
warrior was as fierce as a lion.
We should not let this be the last word on the
subject,
however.
It is
perfectly
clear that all these
early
references to laws of nature
are
merely
references to the
regularity
of nature.
According
to this
usage
it is one law of nature that the sun rises in the
morning,
and
another that bees make
honey.
This is not what modern scientists
mean
by
laws of nature. Our concern here is with the
concept
of
a law of nature as a
specific
and
precise
statement which codifies
observed
regularities
in nature but which is also assumed to denote
an
underlying
causal
connection,
and therefore can be said to
carry explanatory
force.'" A law of nature in this sense is not sim-
ply
a statement of an observed
regularity
but a formalized state-
16
Needham,
"Human
Laws," 301,
and Science and
Civilisation, 2: 533.
"
Meyerson, Identity
and
Reality,
20.
1s
This
is,
of
course,
only
a
working
definition,
which I
hope
serves our
pur-
poses
here. Needless to
say,
the nature or status of laws of nature continue to
attract the attention of
philosophers
of
science,
and there are a number of rival
definitions which are
incompatible
with one another. For a convenient and ex-
cellent
summary
of the
philosophical
state of
play
see the editor's
introduction,
"Laws of Nature-Laws of
Science,"
in Friedel Weinert
(ed.),
Laws
of
Nature: Es-
says
on the
Philosophical, Scientific
and Historical Dimensions
(Berlin, 1995),
3-64.
I
have included "causal connection" in
my working
definition for reasons that will
become
apparent
later. In the
meantime,
in
my
defence,
I should
perhaps
remind
the reader that we are concerned here with ideas about the laws of nature before
David Hume.
80
JOHN
HENRY
ment of a fundamental
regularity
which can be shown to
explain
a wide
range
of
physical phenomena.
The clearest
examples
of
laws of nature in this sense are
found,
of
course,
in Descartes's
Principia philosophiae
of
1644,
and Newton's
Principia
mathematica of
1687.
According
to Zilsel this
conception
of laws of nature was
entirely
new in the seventeenth
century.
He
effectively disregarded
the earlier instances of laws of nature which he had
uncovered,
therefore,
and asked
why
this new
conceptualization
of laws of
nature
suddenly
became so
important
in
seventeenth-century
natu-
ral
philosophy.
For
Needham, likewise,
the historical
problem
which needed to be addressed was not how the
concept
of
physi-
cal laws
originated,
but
why
it
suddenly
became so
radically
differ-
ent,
and so
crucially important
in "the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries."'9
Similarly, although
Crombie had a marked
tendency
to take the notion of laws of nature for
granted
as an essential
ingredient
in all
"styles
of scientific
thinking,"
from ancient times
onward,
he nevertheless discerned a
major
transformation of the
idea in the seventeenth
century."0
More
recently,
Friedrich Steinle
in a
thorough
and
judicious
examination of the
concept
of laws of
nature has
pointed
out that in the seventeenth
century
there was
"a
process
of fundamental
change
in what one is
willing
to
accept
as causes of
phenomena," culminating
in
"an
intimate connexion
of causes and
laws,"
so that "causal
explanations
cannot be con-
structed without laws."2'
There is no consensus on this
matter,
however. There is a
pow-
erful
group
of historical studies devoted to the claim that the trans-
formation of the laws of nature from loose
metaphors
of nature's
regularity
to more
precise
codifications of
underlying
causal con-
nections took
place
in the medieval
period.
For Francis
Oakley,
John
R. Milton and Amos
Funkenstein,
the transformation of laws
of nature took
place
in the thirteenth
century
and was
ready
to be
taken
up by
Descartes and others in the seventeenth
century
when
they began
to
develop
the so-called "new"
philosophies.
For all
three of these
historians,
the
important
thinkers were a
group
of
scholastic
theologians, chiefly
in the thirteenth
century,
concerned
with the nature of divine
providence. Jane
E.
Ruby,
on the other
19 Needham,
"Human
Law,"
309.
20
Crombie,
57-8.
21 Friedrich
Steinle,
"The
Amalgamation
of a
Concept-Laws
of Nature in the
New
Sciences,"
in Weinert
(ed.),
Laws
of
Nature, 316-68,
see
317,
337.
hand,
taking
her lead from earlier work
by
Alistair
Crombie,22
has
made a
major
claim for the
origins
of the "modern"
concept
of
laws of nature in a
completely
different
group
of medieval think-
ers,
from the thirteenth
through
the fifteenth
century. Ruby
is
convinced of this
by
a
usage
of 'laws' in
Roger
Bacon's
optics,
and
in the
astronomy
and mathematics of
Regiomontanus,
and other
medieval
mathematicians,
which is
"indistinguishable
from
ours,"
and which shows "no
vestige
of the idea of divine
legislation."23
These three claims about the source of the transformation of
the idea of laws of nature-in
Cartesianism,
in medieval
provi-
dentialism,
or in medieval
mathematics-represent
the
major
his-
toriographical positions relating
to this issue. What we must do
now, therefore,
is examine each of these in turn to see
which,
if
any, emerges
as the most
convincing.
Zilsel's solution to the historical
problem
he noticed
evidently
derived from his socialist
political
orientation and his socialist view
of
history.24 Consequently,
he saw the rise in
importance
of the
concept
of laws of nature as a concomitant of "the decline of feu-
dalism,
the
beginnings
of
capitalism,
and the
appearance
of
royal
absolutism."25 According
to
Zilsel,
the idea of God as a
supreme
lawmaker
imposing
his laws even
upon
inanimate nature could not
have occurred to medieval
thinkers,
living
under the kind of local-
ized
political system
which was characteristic of feudal
Europe:
How could medieval
theologians speak
of the
legislature
of
God,
when the
power
of the
prince
was
very
limited? The
idea, however,
had not
originated
in feudalism. It had been conceived under
entirely
different
sociological
conditions. Its authors were
Jews
who had
outgrown
their
past
of Bedouin
clan-organization...
and its
sociological pattern
was the
despotism
of ancient
oriental states. The idea could be
preserved
in a
rudimentary
form
through
two thousand
years,
even
through
a
period
in which it did not fit the socio-
logical
conditions,
till it awoke to new life in
early capitalistic absolutism.26
There were two
aspects
to Zilsel's
explanation
of the
early
modern
22 Alistair
Crombie, "The
Significance
of Medieval Discussions of Scientific
Method for the Scientific
Revolution,"
in Marshall
Clagget (ed.),
Critical Problems
in the
History of
Science
(Madison, 1959),
79-101.
23 Jane
E.
Ruby,
"The
Origins
of Scientific
'Law',"
Journal of
the
History of
Ideas
47
(1986), 341-59, 343,
now
reprinted
in Weinert
(ed.),
Laws
of
Nature,
289-315.
24 See the Introduction
by
Diederick Raven and
Wolfgang
Krohn,
in
Raven,
Krohn and Cohen
(eds.), Edgar
Zilsel, xix-lix,
for an account of Zilsel's
philoso-
phy
of
history
and its
relationship
to his
political
views.
25
So
says Oakley,
"Christian
Theology
and the Newtonian
Science," 434,
but it
is a fair comment. See
Zilsel,
"Genesis of the
Concept ," 276-79,
and
Needham,
Science and
Civilisation, 2: 543.
26 Zilsel,
"Genesis of the
Concept,"
279.
82
JOHN
HENRY
re-awakening
of this idea. On the one
hand,
artisans and crafts-
men,
stimulated
by
economic
competition, began
to innovate and
improve upon
their normal craft
techniques.
"In all
civilizations,"
Zilsel
declaimed,
"experimentation originates
in handicraft."
In the
period
of nascent
capitalism experimenting
artisans
began
to look for
quantitative
rules of
operation.
The roots of these mechanical
rules,
there-
fore,
must be searched for in the
sociological
and
technological
conditions
of handicraft in the
early
modern era.
They
rose to science in
Galileo.27
On the other
hand,
the
development
of the
political theory
and
practice
of absolutism
gave
rise once
again
to the dormant idea of
God as the
supreme legislator.
It is not a mere chance that the Cartesian idea of
God,
the
legislator
of the
universe,
developed forty years
after
[Jean]
Bodin's
theory
of
sovereignty.
Perhaps
it is not even a coincidence that both thinkers were French: France
was the native
country
of centralized absolutism. At
any
rate the doctrine of
universal natural laws of divine
origin
is
possible only
in a state with rational
statute law and
fully developed
central
sovereignty.28
It is difficult to find these claims
historically convincing.
Zilsel
provides
an
example
of the
quantitative
rules of
experimenting
artisans
by referring
to Niccolo
Tartaglia's recognition
of the rela-
tionship
between elevation and
range
of cannons. But A.
Rupert
Hall undertook a detailed
history
of the
development
of ballistics
in the seventeenth
century
and was able
convincingly
to refute
Zilsel's claims about the role of
artillery
men in
working
out this
relationship.29
Zilsel's more
general
claim that
experimentation
originated
in handicraft is also
highly
contentious.30 This is not the
place
to enter into a detailed account of the
origins
of the
experi-
mental
method,
but suffice it to
say
that the
general
consensus of
historians of science is that the
experimental
method owes its
emergence
to
developments among
mathematical
practitioners,
to
natural
philosophers paying greater
attention to the natural
magic
tradition and to a
rejection
of ancient
authority
stimulated not
just
by
observations of new fauna and flora made
upon
Renaissance
voyages
of
discovery,
and not
just by
new astronomical observa-
27
Ibid., 276,
see also 263-64.
28
Ibid., 278-79.
29
Ibid., 264. Zilsel cites Niccolo
Tartaglia, Quesiti
et inventioni diverse
(1554),
1:1. A. R.
Hall,
Ballistics in the Seventeenth
Century (Cambridge, 1952).
30
Zilsel deals with this issue in another
article,
"The
Origins
of William Gil-
bert's
Experimental
Method,"
Journal of
the
History of
Ideas 2
(1941),
1-32. I
have
attempted
a detailed refutation of this in
my
"Animism and
Empiricism: Coperni-
can
Physics
and the
Origins
of William Gilbert's
Experimental
Method,"
Journal
of
the
History of
Ideas 62
(2001),
99-119.
tions,
but also
by
the Renaissance
discovery
of numerous ancient
philosophical
texts
providing unexpected
alternatives to the domi-
nant Aristotelian
philosophy.3' Although
some of these
develop-
ments
might
look as
though they
could be made to fit in with the
economic focus of socialist
accounts,
the historical details do not
easily support
that
interpretation.
Consider the
example
of the
role of mathematical
practitioners by way
of
example.
While
some
historians have tried to
suggest
that the
major
stimulus towards
empirical
science
among
mathematicians was connected with navi-
gation, surveying,
and other
obviously pragmatic
and
ultimately
economic
concerns,
others have
pointed
to
disputes
over the best
means of
attaining certainty,
so that mathematics came to be seen
as a model of
good practice
in
science,
and the use of
instruments,
long
used in
mathematics,
came to be
accepted
in natural
philoso-
phy
and led to new
ways
of
understanding
the
world.32
Besides,
as Milton has
pointed
out,
the first
specific
laws of na-
ture,
as seen in Descartes's
Principia philosophiae, patently
do not
derive from the kind of low-level
generalization
that one would
expect
to be derived from craft rules of thumb."
Moreover,
it
would be hard to see
why
or how craft rules could be
culturally
elevated in such a
way
that
they
came to be seen as laws
imposed
upon
nature
by
God. If the work of
Oakley
and Milton shows
any-
thing (as
we shall see
shortly),
it shows that when laws of nature
emerged
in the field of scientific
enquiry, they
were
very quickly
assimilated with earlier
pre-existing theological
doctrines about
God's
relationship
to the world and its creatures.
As to the
putative
links with
absolutism,
what can we
say?
It is
possible
that broad
changes
in
political organization
affect
peo-
ple's
consciousness in such a
way
that
they begin
to think of God
31
For a
summary
of these
developments
and references to further
readings
see
Henry,
The
Scientific
Revolution,
14-60.
32
See,
for
example, J.
A.
Bennett,
"The Mechanics
Philosophy
and the Me-
chanical
Philosophy," History of
Science 24
(1986), 1-28; idem,
"The
Challenge
of
Practical
Mathematics,"
in S.
Pumfrey,
P. Rossi and M. Slawinski
(eds.), Science,
Culture and
Popular Belief
in Renaissance
Europe (Manchester, 1991), 176-90;
Peter
Dear,
Discipline
and
Experience:
The Mathematical
Way
in the
Scientific
Revolution
(Chi-
cago, 1995);
Nicholas
Jardine,
"The Status of
Astronomy,"
in
idem,
The Birth
of
History
and
Philosophy of
Science:
Kepler's
A Defence of
Tycho against
Ursus with
Essays
on its Provenance and
Significance (Cambridge, 1984), 225-57;
James
M.
Lattis,
Between
Copernicus
and Galileo:
Christoph
Clavius and the
Collapse of
Ptolemaic Cosmol-
ogy (Chicago, 1994);
and Robert S.
Westman,
"The Astronomer's Role in the Six-
teenth
Century:
A
Preliminary Survey," History of
Science 18
(1980),
105-47.
13
Milton,
"Origin
and
Development,"
179.
84
JOHN
HENRY
and his
relationship
to the world in a new
way,
but it is
very
diffi-
cult for the historian to
pin
this down. The
argument
has to be
made
impressionistically,
and as such it differs
markedly
from the
kind of
argumentation
and
accompanying
evidence
upon
which
historians
usually
like to
depend.
If, then,
it is safer to
reject
the
claim,
perhaps
we need
simply
to
point,
as
Oakley
and Milton both
do,
to the existence of absolute monarchies in other
parts
of the
world,
and at other
periods,
where the
concept
of laws of nature
never
developed.34 Alternatively,
we
might point
out the
absurdity
of Zilsel's
suggestion
that medieval
theologians
could not have
conceived of the
legislature
of God when the
power
of their
prin-
ces was so limited. In
fact,
as
Oakley
and Milton have no
difficulty
in
showing, theologians
were
discussing
the absolute
power
of God
with
great philosophical sophistication
from at least the eleventh
century
onwards. Milton
suggests
that,
if
anything,
the direction of
influence was from
theology
to
political theory,
rather than the
other
way around.35
It could still be the
case, however,
that such
theological
ideas did not
impinge upon
natural
philosophy
until
after they
had
begun
to affect
political thought
and
practice. Again,
this is an
impressionistic
claim that cannot
easily
be refuted. But it
cannot
easily
be
proved
either. And one
thing
is
abundantly
clear,
in the
seventeenth-century
discussions of the laws of
nature,
the
context is
essentially theological,
not
political,
and
Oakley
is cer-
tainly
correct to see these discussions as continuous with medieval
voluntarist
theology.36
34 Oakley,
"Christian
Theology
and the Newtonian
Science," 434-5, Milton,
"Origin
and
Development,"
180.
Indeed,
it is a
major part
of Needham's inten-
tion in his
study
of the
concept
of laws of nature to
explain why
the
concept
never
emerged
in Chinese
thought
when,
according
to Zilsel's
philosophy
of
history,
it
should have. See
Needham,
"Human Law" and
Needham,
Science and
Civilisation,
passim.
35
Milton,
"Origin
and
Development,"
180. See also
Oakley,
"Christian Theol-
ogy
and the Newtonian
Science," 438-449,
and
Oakley, Omnipotence,
Covenant and
Order:
An Excursion in the
History of
Ideas
from
Abelard to Leibniz
(Ithaca, 1984).
36 The
possible exception
to this is the
dispute
between Leibniz and the
Eng-
lish
Newtonians,
as manifested in his
epistolary exchange
with Samuel Clarke.
The
political background
to this
dispute
is
emphasized
in Steven
Shapin,
"Of
Gods and
Kings:
Natural
Philosophy
and Politics in the Leibniz-Clarke
Disputes,"
Isis 72
(1981), 187-215;
and in Gideon
Freudenthal,
Atom and Individual in New-
ton's Natural
Philosophy (Dordrecht, 1985). My
own
view,
for what it is
worth,
is
that both are
right
to
point
to a
political
dimension in this
particular dispute.
With
regard
to
Shapin's paper,
however,
it is fair to
say
that thanks to the
long-
standing
nature of the
theological
debate in which Leibniz and Clarke were en-
gaged,
the
general
themes of their
dispute
over the nature of God's
power
were
bound to occur no matter what the
political
situation. No doubt the
protagonists
We can now turn our attention to
Oakley's
solution since Need-
ham
simply
takes Zilsel's solution for
granted,
and
spends
most of
his
energies
in
trying
to account for the
(consequently) paradoxi-
cal fact that absolutist China did not
develop
a
concept
of laws of
nature.37
Oakley perceives
a clear
continuity
between medieval
theology
and
seventeenth-century
natural
philosophy,
and insists that the
theology
somehow accounts for the rise to
prominence
of laws of
nature in natural
philosophy.
What
Oakley
does in
response
to
Zilsel's
paper
is to
provide
a
history
of
changing
ideas of Pro-
videntialism. Whereas Zilsel
rejected
the relevance of
Augustine
and
Aquinas
to the
development
of the
concept
of laws of nature
on the
grounds
that
they
were
really
concerned with ideas of God's
providence, Oakley
insists that it is in these
very theological
ideas
that we find the solution to our
problem.
"The real
problem
is
this,"
Oakley
wrote,
"Why,
after so
many
centuries of almost total
noticed the
political
echoes of what
they
were
saying, they may
even have believed
that their
politics
reflected their
theology,
but I
very
much doubt that
they
would
have
changed
their
theologically inspired,
and
highly
traditional
arguments
to fit
in with their
politics.
In other
words,
Shapin presents
the
dispute
as a case
study
which illustrates his
principle
that
any
natural
philosophy
can be made to serve
any political
stance. For a statement of this
principle
see S.
Shapin, "History
of
Science and Its
Sociological
Reconstructions,"
Histoy of
Science 20
(1982), 157-211,
191,
194. This cannot be used to undermine the claim of
Oakley
and others that
the
theological
tradition,
continuous from the thirteenth
century, predominates
in the
dispute.
Freudenthal,
on the other
hand,
offers a much more
precise argu-
ment in which Newtonian views on absolute
space
and the behaviour of atoms
reflect the
bourgeois socio-political theory
of the
individual,
while Leibniz's
phi-
losophy
is much more in
keeping
with the
non-bourgeois political
tradition of
which he was a
part. Notwithstanding
the
vigorous
criticisms of Keith
Hutchison,
"Individual,
Causal
Location,
and the
Eclipse
of Scholastic
Philosophy,"
Social
Studies
of
Science 21
(1991), 321-50,
this remains an
enthralling
and
powerfully
argued
thesis. Even if
true, however,
it remains a lone
example
which does little
to undermine
Oakley's general
claim that the usual context of discussions of laws
of nature is
theological.
For a more
philosophical
account of the main issues in
the Leibniz-Clarke
exchange
see Ezio
Vailati, Leibniz
and Clarke: A
Study of
Their
Correspondence
(Oxford, 1997);
for the text see H. G. Alexander
(ed.),
The Leibniz-
Clarke
Correspondence (Manchester, 1956).
For an
explanation
of
why
the context
is
theological
see
later,
and Amos
Funkenstein,
Theology
and the
Scientific Imagina-
tion: From the Middle
Ages
to the Seventeenth
Century (Princeton, 1986).
3
Needham,
"Human
Law," 311-30;
Science and
Civilisation,
2: 543-83. On the
face of
it,
it looks as
though
Needham could
equally
well have used the Chinese
case to refute Zilsel's claims about the link between absolutism and laws of na-
ture.
Presumably
he didn't because he shared Zilsel's
political
view of the world
and believed that absolutism
ought
to be linked to the rise of the science which
they
both saw as
part
of the
capitalist enterprise;
so China had to be anomalous.
On Needham's
sympathetic
admiration for Zilsel see his "Foreword" in
Raven,
Krohn,
and Cohen
(eds.), Edgar
Zilsel,
xi-xiv.
86
JOHN
HENRY
submersion in Greek ideas of immanent
law,
did the Semitic con-
cept
of
imposed
laws of nature burst into
prominence
in seven-
teenth
century
scientific
thought?"38 Oakley
sees the
concept
of
immanent laws of nature as
deriving
from Stoic
philosophy,
in
which the world is seen as
"impregnated
with
reason,"
and natural
laws are
"universally
valid and inherent in the
very
structure of
things."
In the Semitic
concept
of
imposed
laws of
nature,
how-
ever,
all is
ultimately dependent upon
the will of
God,
and "there
can be no
question
of these laws
being
intrinsic to the nature of
things."
In the Christian Middle
Ages, Oakley
claims,
the two views
were
effectively
united in a
perhaps uneasy compromise position.
He
provides
the
following
illustration:
This somewhat
uneasy compromise
is evident in
Aquinas.
His God
is,
admit-
tedly,
a Christian
God,
omnipotent
and
transcendent,
but his eternal
law,
which orders to their
appointed
ends all created
things,
irrational as well as
rational,
is
undoubtedly
immanent in the
universe.3"
Oakley
wants to
suggest
that the
prominence
of laws of nature in
natural
philosophy
in the seventeenth
century
is the end result of
a
gradual
shift in
theological sensibility
from this
"quasi-immanent
view of natural law" to a stricter adherence to the view of laws as
imposed by
an
omnipotent
God.
Oakley's story
involves the rise to
prominence
of voluntarist
theology,
so that it comes to overshadow
the necessitarian
theology
which is more
easily
linked to notions
of immanent law.40
There can be no doubt that
Oakley
succeeds in
general
terms
in
revealing
the
theological background
to the
speculations
of the
leading, religiously
minded,
mechanical
philosophers,
like Des-
cartes,
Boyle
and Newton. It is less
clear, however,
that he succeeds
38 Oakley,
"Christian
Theology
and the Newtonian
Science,"
437.
9 Oakley,
"Christian
Theology
and the Newtonian
Science,"
436. See also 441-
2.
Oakley
cites
Aquinas's
Summa
Theologica, Ia
2ae,
qu.
94,
art. 2
Resp. Oakley's
assessment of medieval
theology
at this
point
is
evidently
drawn from A. N.
White-
head's Adventures
of
Ideas
(New York, 1937),
142-47.
40
Oakley effectively expanded
this same
argument
in his
Omnipotence,
Covenant
and Order.
Oakley's
work,
along
with that of
others,
has
recently
been attacked
for
claiming
a link between voluntarist
theology
and the
development
and char-
acter of modern science. See Peter
Harrison,
"Voluntarism and
Early
Modern
Science,"
History of
Science 40
(2002),
63-89. This is not the
place
to
pursue
this,
but suffice it to
say
that I
support Oakley's
views in this
regard,
and
hope
to ad-
dress a refutation to Harrison in a
forthcoming paper.
In the meantime for an-
other
important
account of the role of voluntarist and necessitarian
theologies
in
early
modern science see
Margaret J.
Osler,
Divine Will and the Mechanical Philoso-
phy:
Gassendi
and Descartes on
Necessity
and
Contingency
in the Created World
(Cam-
bridge, 1994).
in
solving
the historical
problem pointed
out
by
Zilsel. After
all,
as
Oakley
himself
insists,
"the idea of laws of nature
imposed by
God
upon
the world was
undoubtedly
common
coinage
in the sixteenth
and seventeenth
centuries,
even before
Descartes,
Boyle
and New-
ton made it a
commonplace
in scientific
thinking." Oakley goes
on
to
say
that it was so
widespread "precisely
because it was the ex-
pression
of a tradition in natural
theology
which dated back well
beyond
the late thirteenth
century."41
What
Oakley
fails to
do,
therefore,
is
explain why
Descartes,
Boyle
and Newton were
among
the first to make laws of nature a
commonplace
of "scientific"
thinking. Why
was it not taken
up by
natural
philosophers
before
this,
if it was an obvious concomitant of a natural
theology
which
had been available since the late thirteenth
century?
It is one
thing
to
claim,
as
Oakley
does,
that
This remarkable coincidence between the views of
fourteenth-century
theo-
logians
and
seventeenth-century
scientists can
only
serve to confirm what we
have
already suggested-that they
were linked
by
an
enduring theological
tradition.
It is
quite
another to
explain why
these scientists-or natural
phi-
losophers,
as we should more
properly say-quite suddenly
saw the
need to
replay
these old
theological arguments
in their natural
philosophies.42
Nowhere
in
Oakley's
account do we find
any
kind
of historical motor
driving
the
philosophical theology
of
John
Duns Scotus and William of Ockham
steadily
towards seventeenth-
century
natural
philosophy.
In
fact,
it is
quite
clear from
Oakley's
own
meticulously
detailed
account that
although
the
disputes
over the nature of God's
provi-
dence have been a
major
element of Western
theological
debate
since at least the eleventh
century,
the notion of laws of nature
does not much
figure
in these debates until
after
the
appearance
of the laws of nature in the scientific literature of the seventeenth
century.
It is
certainly possible
to
imagine,
therefore,
that the dis-
putes
over the nature of Providence
might
have continued into the
modern
period
without the new focus
upon
laws of
nature,
if the
laws of nature had not come to
prominence
in the
way
that
they
did at that time.
Conversely,
these
theological
debates about the
41
Oakley,
"Christian
Theology
and the Newtonian
Science,"
446.
42 Ibid., 445. This is
particularly
remarkable
given
the
separation
between the-
ology
and natural
philosophy,
on which see Edward
Grant,
The Foundations
of
Mod-
ern Science in the Middle
Ages:
Their
Religious,
Institutional,
and Intellectual Contexts
(Cambridge, 1996).
88
JOHN
HENRY
nature of Providence do not
appear
in the
writings
of medieval
natural
philosophers,
and so their
appearance
in the
writings
of
thinkers like
Descartes,
Boyle, Spinoza,
Newton and Leibniz
sug-
gest
that
something
else has
happened,
to
bring
about
changed
perceptions
of what
pertains
to natural
philosophy. Oakley
offers
no real evidence that there is an historical
continuity
of this de-
bate within natural
philosophy.
It seems to me
that,
in
fact,
the
debate does not
appear
in natural
philosophy
until the
appearance
of the laws of nature as
major
elements in
physical explanations
in
the
writings
of the first mechanical
philosophers.
It can
hardly
be
denied that the
theological
discussions of the nature of God's
providence
were
waiting
to be
exploited by
natural
philosophers,
as soon as
they recognised
the need to have recourse to laws of
nature. But this is a far
cry
from
establishing
that the
theological
debates,
current since at least the thirteenth
century, suddenly
caused the new
emphasis upon
laws of nature in the seventeenth.
Even with all its
illuminating
richness, therefore,
Oakley's
thesis
seems to leave serious doubts as to
why
the laws of nature became
so
important
when
they
did.
A similar
point
can be made
against
the related claims of Alistair
Crombie and Amos Funkenstein.
Although
Crombie
categorically
states that "The
theological concept
of ordained law became trans-
formed into the scientific
concept
of natural
laws,"
he does not
explain
how this
happened.
After
describing
the
importance
of the
medieval distinction between God's absolute and ordained
powers
and its role in voluntarist
theology,
Crombie
simply
states that
these ideas were "to have a
long
reach,"
and
immediately
switches
to the
early
modern
period, showing
how these ideas
appeared
in
the work of Francisco
Suarez,
Rene
Descartes,
Robert
Boyle,
and
Isaac
Newton.43 Similarly,
Funkenstein,
in what is the most detailed
account of these
matters,
leaves the reader in no doubt about the
intellectual
continuity
between the ideas of
Scotus, Ockham,
and
other medieval voluntarist
theologians,
and
Descartes,
Boyle,
New-
ton and
Leibniz,
but he
says nothing
about the actual historical
continuity.
The
juxtaposition
of the medieval and the seventeenth-
century arguments
is
evidently expected
to
speak
for itself. Fun-
kenstein talks of the role of scholastic
thought
in
establishing
some
of the conditions
necessary
for the
emergence
of
early
modern
4
Crombie,
400-08,
quotation
at
407;
also in
idem,
"Infinite Power and the Laws of
Nature,"
quotation
at 86.
science,
but he
only provides
an
impressionistic
account of that
role.44
We can
reject
the conclusion of Milton's re-assessment of the
origins
of the
concept
of laws of nature on the same
grounds.
Like
Oakley,
Milton sees "the
beginnings
of the
change
in
thought
which led men to think of the
physical
world as
being governed by
laws" in the fourteenth
century
when there was a
synthesis
of nomi-
nalist
philosophy
and voluntarist
theology.45
Milton is
surely
cor-
rect to
say
that this
synthesis "provided
a context within which the
idea of a law of nature was both
comprehensible
and
natural,"
but
this in itself is not sufficient to
explain
the sudden
importance
of
the laws of nature in
seventeenth-century
natural
philosophy.46
The
question
remains:
why
did the
early
mechanical
philosophers
suddenly begin
to
exploit
that
theological
context?
Milton himself has
recognized
the
incompleteness
of his
origi-
nal thesis in a more recent
survey
of the
history
of laws of nature.
Here he writes that "The idea that one of the main
aims-perhaps
the main aim-of a natural
philosopher
should be the
discovery
of
the laws
governing
the natural world
emerged clearly
for the first
time
during
the seventeenth
century." Although
he still takes the
line that the medieval
background
is essential for a
proper
under-
standing
of the
way
in which the
concept
of the laws of nature de-
veloped
and became
accepted,
Milton nevertheless insists that the
concept
first
appeared
"as
centrally important
to scientific think-
ing
in the seventeenth
century."47
It would
seem, therefore,
that
Milton now
accepts
that Zilsel had noticed a
genuine
historical
problem,
as to
why
the laws of nature became so
important
in
natural
philosophy
when
they
did,
and that this
problem
is not
solved
simply by looking
back to the medieval
background.
Besides,
Milton's latest excursion into the
history
of the
concept
of laws of nature
explicitly
undermines
Oakley's
and his own ear-
lier thesis. While Milton
previously accepted
that the most
impor-
tant of the crucial elements in the
development
of the idea of laws
of nature was "a belief in the radical
contingency
of the
world,
and
hence of the laws of nature
also,"
he now
freely acknowledges
that,
in the seventeenth
century,
laws of nature could
be,
and
were,
conceived as
being logically necessary.48 Among English
thinkers
44
Funkenstein,
Theology,
117-201,
quotation
at 152.
45
Milton,
"Origin
and
Development,"
184,
and 190.
46
Ibid.,
191.
47
John
Milton,
"Laws of
Nature,"
680-81.
48
Milton,
"Origin
and
Development,"
194, Milton,
"Laws of
Nature,"
693-99.
90
JOHN
HENRY
the
contingency
of the laws of
nature,
as Milton
rightly says,
ac-
quired
the status of an
orthodoxy,
but
Spinoza developed
an ex-
treme necessitarian
conception
of the laws of
nature,
in which the
laws were so
absolutely necessary
that even God's
omnipotence
could not
change
or
suspend
them.49
Although
Leibniz took a less
extreme
position,
he is more
correctly
seen as a necessitarian than
a voluntarist in his
theological position.
Leibniz's God was
morally
obliged
to create the best of all
possible
worlds,
and so the laws of
nature which Leibniz believed God had established could not have
been
freely
chosen,
as an extreme voluntarist
might
have wished
to
claim.50
Indeed,
even Descartes fails to conform to the standard
Ockhamist tradition of voluntarist
theology
which
Oakley
sees as
so
important
in the
origins
of the notion of laws of nature. Al-
though
Descartes believed that God was
completely
free to estab-
lish whatever laws he
wished,
having
chosen,
God's
immutability
(a
foundational
premise
of Descartes's natural
philosophy)
en-
sured that He could not
change
them.
Accordingly,
Descartes was
able to claim that the laws could be established a
priori,
in a
way
that
entirely contingently
maintained laws could not
be.5"
In view of all this it seems hard to
accept
the
implication
of
Oakley
that the laws of
nature,
as
they appeared
in the seven-
teenth-century
mechanical
philosophy,
were
merely
the latest ma-
nifestation of an idea that had been
entirely
current since the
thirteenth
century
in the tradition of voluntarist
theology.
I believe
the work of Francis
Oakley, John
Milton,
Alistair Crombie and
Amos Funkenstein
points
to
extremely important aspects
of the
background
to the historical
problem
of the radical transforma-
tion of the
concept
of laws of
nature,
and
play
an
important part
in our
understanding
of the historical
development
of that con-
49
Milton,
"Laws of
Nature,"
694. On
Spinoza's theology
see,
for
example,
Ri-
chard
Mason,
The God
of Spinoza:
A
Philosophical Study (Cambridge,
1997).
5o
Milton,
"Laws of
Nature,"
693. On Leibniz see A.
O. Lovejoy,
The Great Chain
of Being:
A
Study of
the
History of
an Idea
(Cambridge,
Mass., 1936);
and
Oakley,
Omnipotence,
Covenant and
Order, Funkenstein,
Theology,
195-201;
Jacques Jalabert,
Le Dieu de Leibniz
(Paris, 1960);
Donald
Rutherford,
Leibniz and the Rational Order
of
Nature
(Cambridge, 1995),
7-21.
51 Milton,
"Laws of
Nature,"
694. On
Descartes,
see
Funkenstein,
Theology,
179-
92;
and
Margaret J.
Osler,
Divine Will and the Mechanical
Philosophy.
For the
major-
ity
of
English
natural
philosophers,
the radical
contingency
of laws of nature went
hand-in-hand with their
empiricism.
See,
for
example, John Henry,
"Occult
Quali-
ties and the
Experimental Philosophy:
Active
Principles
in
pre-Newtonian
Matter
Theory," History of
Science 24
(1986), 335-81; idem,
"Henry
More versus Robert
Boyle:
The
Spirit
of Nature and the nature of
Providence,"
in Sarah Hutton
(ed.),
Henry
More
(1614-1687): Tercentenary
Studies
(Dordrecht, 1990),
55-75.
cept. Certainly,
there can be no doubt of the relevance of
pro-
videntialist
disputes,
and
theological
voluntarism in the efforts of
Descartes,
Boyle,
Newton and Leibniz to
justify
their use of laws of
nature. We
only
have to look at
Principle
36 in Part
II
of Des-
cartes's
Principia philosophiae
(1644)
which
precedes
his introduc-
tion of the laws of
nature,
Boyle's
Free
Enquiry
into the
Vulgarly
Received
Notion
of
Nature
(1686),
and the Leibniz-Clarke
correspondence
of
1715-1716,
to see
this.52
But all this is best seen as the
exploitation
of a
ready
made
theological
tradition in
support of
their innova-
tions,
rather than as an
explanation for
those innovations.
This
brings
us to the alternative medieval source of laws of na-
ture,
as
proposed by Jane
E.
Ruby. Taking
her lead from earlier
work
by
Alistair
Crombie,
Ruby
makes a
major
claim for the
origins
of the "modern"
concept
of laws of nature in the medieval
pe-
riod."3
Ignoring
the undeniable fact that for
Descartes,
Boyle
and
Newton,
to mention no
others,
laws of nature were
inseparably
connected with notions of God's
providence, Ruby says
that al-
though
"the
explanation
of scientific 'law' as
arising
from the idea
of divine
legislation
is
highly plausible
it is for the most
part
mis-
taken."
Ruby
is convinced of this
by
a
usage
of "laws" in
Roger
Bacon's
optics,
and in the
astronomy
and mathematics of
Regio-
montanus,
which is
"indistinguishable
from
ours,"
and which
shows "no
vestige
legislation."54
The
assump-
tion that Bacon's use of laws in
explicating
his
geometrical optics
"was derived from the idea of divine
legislation
is
quite
un-
founded,"
she insists.
Similarly,
law was used in
fifteenth-century
mathematics in "a
recognizably
modern
sense,"
but
"again,
the
idea of divine
legislation played
no
part"
in the
origins
of this us-
age.55
Ruby
sees the
origin
of
Roger
Bacon's use of notions like the law
of
multiplication,
or the law of
refraction,
in
concepts
of rules used
52 See, for
example, Klaaren, Religious Origins of
Modern
Science;
Oakley, Omnipo-
tence,
Covenant and
Order, Funkenstein,
Theology; John Henry, "Henry
More versus
Robert
Boyle";
H. G.
Alexander,
The
Leibniz-Clarke
Correspondence;
Ezio
Vailati,
Leibniz and
Clarke;
John Henry, "'Pray
do not ascribe that notion to me': God and
Newton's
Gravity,"
in
James
E. Force and Richard H.
Popkin (eds.),
The Books
of
Nature and
Scripture:
Recent
Essays
on Natural
Philosophy, Theology
and Biblical Criti-
cism in the Netherlands
of Spinoza's
Time and the British Isles
of
Newton's Time
(Dor-
drecht, 1994),
123-47.
5
Chiefly,
Alistair
Crombie,
Robert Grosseteste and the
Origins of Experimental
Sci-
ence,
1100-1700
(Oxford:
Clarendon
Press, 1953).
54 Ruby, "Origins,"
342,
343.
55
Ruby, "Origins,"
342-3.
92
JOHN
HENRY
in
geometry
and
logic.
The
principle
of contradiction was seen as
so certain a
rule,
Ruby suggests,
that
by
1250 it was
being
referred
to as the lex contradictionis. It seems reasonable to
suppose,
as she
says,
that Bacon used the term law in his
geometrical optics
to
give
similar
emphasis
to some of his
optical principles. Ruby pursues
the
history
of such
optical
laws to the seventeenth
century,
insist-
ing
that "Descartes
might
contend that even mathematical verities
are the work of
God;
but the lex of
optics
reached modern times
before
him,
independent
legislation."56
Simi-
larly,
she finds the notion of laws of nature
evolving
in the as-
tronomical tradition from
Regiomontanus,
in whose
writings
the
word means little more than
regularities
in
nature,
to
Copernicus,
who is said to use the
concept
"as
we
do.""57
A similar line is taken
by
Nicholas
Jardine
in his
study
of the
background
to
Kepler,
when
he declares that the notion of
leges
motuum was
in
common use
among
astronomers
throughout
the sixteenth
century.58
We have to be careful
here,
however. There seem to be two dif-
ferent
usages
of the term "law" in the mathematical traditions. On
the one
hand,
the term law is used in the familiar loose
way,
to
refer
simply
to the
regularity
of nature. When
Copernicus
talks of
the "fixed laws of motion of the
planets
in the
firmament,"
he is
hardly doing
more than
extending
the
commonplace
notion that
the sun will rise tomorrow
by
the law of nature. But there are some
cases where law seems to refer to
something
more
specific. Ruby
cites Bacon's often
repeated
talk of
"law(s)
of
reflection," "law(s)
of
refraction,"
and
"law(s)
of
multiplication
of
species."
It is this
kind of talk about laws of nature which
Ruby
declares to be "indis-
tinguishable from ours."
59
The
problem
with
Ruby's approach
is that it fails to note the
significant
difference-for late
medieval, Renaissance,
and even
early
modern thinkers-between the mathematical sciences and
natural
philosophy.
It is this
presumed
fundamental difference
which militates
against any easy
claims that laws of nature in the
mathematical tradition were
indistinguishable
from our
present-
56 Ruby, "Origins,"
352.
57 Ibid., 353,
354.
s
Jardine,
Birth
of History
and
Philosophy of
Science, 240.
According
to
Jardine
the
heavenly
bodies were held to move in accordance with
leges
motuum
prescribed
by
God at the Creation. This doesn't sound
very
far removed from the loose use
of laws of nature to refer to
regularities.
59 Ruby, "Origins,"
343.
Ruby provides
numerous
specific
citations to Bacon's
works in her footnote at this
point.
day conception
of
physical
laws. More to the
point,
this difference
also casts doubt on the
implicit
claim of
Ruby's paper
that math-
ematical laws
gave
rise to the later
physical
laws,
simply by being
carried over into natural
philosophy.
According
to the Aristotelianism
prevailing among
scholastic
natural
philosophers,
mathematics was
essentially
irrelevant to
natural
philosophy,
because it did
not,
could
not,
deal with
physi-
cal
causation,
and so could not
provide
the kind of
physical expla-
nation in terms of causes which was the aim of natural
philosophy.
Although optics
and
astronomy,
and a number of other math-
ematical
sciences,
clearly
dealt with
physical phenomena,
because
they
used mathematical
assumptions
and
procedures, they
were
considered
by
Aristotle to be subordinate to the
higher discipline
of
mathematics,
not
physics.
Given the
supposed inadequacy
of
mathematics for
providing understanding
of
physical phenomena,
this meant that
astronomy, optics,
and the other mathematical
sciences,
were also
regarded
as inferior to
physics.60
Now,
this state of affairs was
changing during
the late Re-
naissance
period,
as the
certainty
and
practical
usefulness of the
mathematical sciences became
increasingly recognized,
and as
Aristotelian natural
philosophy began
to
appear
to be
increasingly
fallible and misconceived. In an historical reversal of fortunes
which was to have tremendous
consequences,
natural
philosophy
came to be seen as
speculative
and uncertain while the certainties
of mathematics came to be seen as
capable
of
providing adequate
explanations
for the nature of
things.
As
early
as
1540,
Georg
Rheticus declared in his Narratio Prima of
Copernicus's system
that
the motion of the earth had to be decided "not
by plausible opin-
ions
[in
natural
philosophy]
but
by
mathematical
laws."''61
And it is
well known that the
gradual acceptance
of the
Copernican theory
went hand in hand with the new belief that mathematics
was,
in
spite
of
Aristotle,
sufficient to reveal and demonstrate
physical
truths.62
Nevertheless,
it would be
wrong
to see laws of nature as
60
For a fuller discussion of these matters see
Dear,
Discipline
and
Experience;
Nicholas
Jardine, "Epistemology
of the
Sciences,"
in Charles B. Schmitt and
Quentin
Skinner
(eds.),
The
Cambridge History of
Renaissance
Philosophy (Cam-
bridge, 1988), 685-711;
Richard D.
McKirahan,
Jr.,
"Aristotle's Subordinate Sci-
ences,"
British
Journal for
the
History of
Science 11
(1978), 197-220;
and
James
G.
Lennox, "Aristotle, Galileo,
and 'Mixed
Sciences',"
in William A. Wallace
(ed.),
Reinterpreting
Galileo
(Washington
DC, 1986),
29-51.
61
Edward
Rosen,
Three
Copernican
Treatises
(New York, 1939), 393,
quoted
in
Ruby, "Origins,"
357.
62
Westman, "The Astronomer's Role." There is now an extensive literature on
94
JOHN
HENRY
mathematicians'
concepts
that were
simply imported
into natural
philosophy.
In
spite
of
Ruby's
best
efforts,
the evidence
suggests
that laws of nature
developed
in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries as
part
of the
process
of
working
out
just
how abstract
mathematics could be said to relate to the
physical
world. This
process
was conducted
by
natural
philosophers
as much as
by
mathematicians. "All the familiar modern uses of 'law' were in
place" by
1540,
Ruby
declares,
but
"they
did not
yet
have their
eventual
currency.""6
It
was,
she
admits,
the laws of nature of Des-
cartes's
Principia philosophiae,
and of Newton's
Principia
mathematica,
which were to have "a
generality
and a force unmatched in the
uses so far dealt with
[by
mathematicians]."164
As an
example
we can consider the law of refraction. The earli-
est statement of a law of refraction is found in Robert Grosseteste's
De iride
(ca. 1235),
but here the law is
simply
a
geometrical descrip-
tion: the amount a
ray
of
light
is refracted is determined
by
bisect-
ing
the
angle
the incident
ray
makes to the normal. The
only
explanation given
for this is that
light obeys
the
principle
of
economy
and takes the shortest
path possible.
This is not an ex-
planation
in terms of
physical
causes.
By
the
beginning
of the sev-
enteenth
century,
however,
mathematicians like Thomas Harriot
and
Johannes Kepler
were
trying
to
develop physical explanations
to fit in with their
geometrical analyses.
When Descartes discov-
ered the law of refraction sometime between 1626 and
1629,
he
tried to show the reasons for the
geometrical
behaviour
by
anal-
ogy
with a tennis ball
breaking through
a thin
cloth,
representing
the surface of the
refracting body,
and
having
its
speed
altered.65
The
process
is not one of
turning
a
geometrical
law into a
physical
law but one of
seeking
for
physical explanations
to make sense of
a
geometrical
law.
the rise of the intellectual status of mathematics.
See,
for
example,
Paul Lawrence
Rose,
The Italian Renaissance
of
Mathematics: Studies on Humanists and Mathemati-
cians
from
Petrarch to Galileo
(Geneva, 1975);
Mario
Biagioli,
"The Social Status of
Italian
Mathematicians, 1450-1600,"
History of
Science 27
(1989), 41-95;
Peter
Dear,
Discipline
and
Experience.
63 Ruby, "Origins,"
357.
64 Ibid.
65 See
Gaukroger,
Descartes: An Intellectual
Biography
(Oxford, 1995), 139-46;
William R.
Shea,
The
Magic of
Numbers and Motion: The
Scientific
Career
of
Rene
Descartes
(Canton, Mass., 1991),
156-7;John
Schuster,
"Descartes
opticien:
The Con-
struction of the Law of Refraction and the Manufacture of its
Physical
Rationales,
1618-1629,"
in
Stephen Gaukroger, John
Schuster,
and
John
Sutton
(eds.),
Des-
cartes' Natural
Philosophy
(London, 2000),
258-312.
This
brings
us to the end of our
survey
of the three
major
claims
about the
origins
of "scientific" laws of nature in recent historio-
graphy.
Let us
recapitulate
to see where we are.
Zilsel insists that the
concept
of laws of nature
appeared only
in
the seventeenth
century,
at first in the work of
Descartes,
and that
this was a result of the
development
of the
politics
of absolute
monarchy, incipient capitalism
and the concomitant
recognition
of the
importance
of the work of artisans and craftsmen. Zilsel
notices hints of laws of nature in the Middle
Ages
but dismisses
these as
merely
the accidental result of
theologians' thinking
about
"the
impenetrable providence
of
God,"
which for Zilsel must
be,
prima facie,
irrelevant.
Oakley
and
others,
by
contrast,
point
out
that
by dismissing
the relevance of medieval discussions of
provi-
dence,
Zilsel is
closing
off the
path
to
discovering
the
origins
of
laws of nature. These writers have no
difficulty showing
the conti-
nuity
between the
providential theology
of various medieval writ-
ers and the
theological
discussions raised in connection with laws
of nature
by
Descartes, Hobbes,
Boyle,
Newton,
Leibniz and oth-
ers. Since the
seventeenth-century
natural
philosophers
turn to
theology
to establish the truth of laws of
nature,
it seems
clear,
Oakley
and his fellow travellers
argue,
that the
origins
of laws of
nature are to be found in medieval discussions of
providence.
Fi-
nally,
we have
Ruby arguing
that the notion of
precise
laws of
nature did
originate
in the Middle
Ages,
but not in discussions of
"divine
legislation" (which,
like
Zilsel,
she sees as
irrelevant),
but
in the use of a Euclidian axiomatic method in subordinate math-
ematical sciences which is
subsequently
translated into natural
philosophy.
Descartes and the
Importance of
Laws
of
Nature
It seems
perfectly
clear that all three of these
differing approaches
bring something important
to our
understanding
of the
origins
of
laws of nature. We cannot eliminate
any
one of them without los-
ing
valuable information.
By
the same
token,
it is
equally
clear that
none of them are sufficient on their own to
provide
the full
story.
Zilsel and
Ruby
are
clearly wrong
to dismiss the
theological
back-
ground
as an
irrelevance,
but
Oakley,
Milton,
Crombie and Fun-
kenstein
go
too far in their claims for the
theological origins
of
laws of nature. There is little or no talk of laws of nature in the
original
medieval discussions of God's
providence they examine;
96
JOHN
HENRY
it is the
seventeenth-century
thinkers who
bring
these medieval
debates to bear
upon
the
essentially
new notion of laws of nature.
Nevertheless,
it seems to me that Amos Funkenstein
provides
the
key
to
understanding
the transformation of laws of nature from a
loose
metaphor
in
general
use,
or a restricted statement of
prin-
ciple
in
mathematics,
to a
specific explanatory proposition
in
natural
philosophy.
This
key
is
provided
in the Introduction
to Funkenstein's
magisterial Theology
and the
Scientific Imagination
(1986).
Introducing
the theme of his
book,
which
might
be said
to be the
theological principles
of
seventeenth-century
natural
philosophy,
Funkenstein writes:
A new and
unique approach
to matters
divine,
a secular
theology
of
sorts,
emerged
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to a short career. It was
secular in that it was conceived
by laymen
for
laymen.
Galileo and
Descartes,
Leibniz and
Newton,
Hobbes and Vico were either not
clergymen
at all or
did not
acquire
an advanced
degree
in
divinity. They
were not
professional
theologians
and
yet they
treated
theological
issues at
length.
Their
theology
was secular also in the sense that it was oriented toward the
world,
ad se-
culum. The new sciences and
scholarship, they
believed,
made the traditional
modes of
theologizing
obsolete;
a
good many professional theologians
agreed
with them about that. Never before or after were
science,
philoso-
phy,
and
theology
seen as almost one and the same
occupation.66
Shortly
after these
opening
words,
Funkenstein insisted that this
secularization of
theology
was "a fact of fundamental social and
cultural
importance,"
and he went on to indicate
briefly
how it
might
have come about. These
indications, however,
all
depend
upon
what he calls the "erosion" of
"protective
belts" around the-
ology.
The
implication
of Funkenstein's discussion is that once
these
protective
belts are
breached,
laymen
will enter into theol-
ogy quite naturally.67
I do not consider this to be a
sufficiently convincing explanation
of a historical
phenomenon
of such "fundamental social and cul-
tural
importance."
It is
my
contention that the real stimulus to-
wards the
development
of a secular
theology,
which was to
change
the character of natural
philosophy,
if
only
for a "brief career" in
the Scientific
Revolution,
was the need to
justify
the
concept
of
laws of
nature,
with its awkward inherent
implication
that inani-
mate bodies are somehow
capable
of
"obeying"
such laws.
If this is
correct,
it allows us to combine the three historio-
graphical
rivals for the
origins
of laws of
nature,
accepting
their
66
Funkenstein,
Theology,
3.
67 Ibid., 4, 4-6.
best
features,
and
omitting
their
misconceptions.
Descartes,
writ-
ing
not so much as a
post-Bodin
Frenchman
inspired by
absolute
monarchy
(as
Zilsel would have
it),
but as a mathematician in the
forefront of efforts to
develop
the new
physico-mathematics pro-
poses precise
laws of interaction in
physics (inspired,
as
Ruby
might
have
said,
by
the use of laws in the subordinate mathemati-
cal
sciences).
Almost
immediately,
however,
Descartes realizes he
is now
playing
a somewhat different
game.
While
putative
laws in
the abstract
system
of mathematics needed no
justification beyond
their
definition,
the new
physical
laws that he was
proposing
need-
ed a
metaphysical underpinning.
In
pursuit
of this new
metaphys-
ics,
Descartes had to consider the nature of God's interactions with
the world and
turned,
accordingly,
to traditional
providentialist
theology. By claiming
this
theology
led to the
concept
of laws of
nature,
Oakley,
Funkenstein and their fellow travellers were
put-
ting
the cart before the horse: in
fact,
the
theology
was taken
up
in order to make sense
of,
and to
persuade contemporaries
of the
validity
of,
the
concept
of laws of nature. In
short, therefore,
we
can
say
that Zilsel was
right
about the
pivotal importance
of Des-
cartes in
single-handedly formulating
the modern
concept
of laws
of
nature,
but he was
wrong
about the reasons for this. The two
medievalist
views,
the
theological
and the
mathematical,
each went
too far in
claiming
to
provide
the
origins
of the modern notion of
laws of
nature,
but both uncover essential
aspects
of the historical
background.
There are a
couple
of
things implicit
in this account which I
want to make
explicit. Firstly,
it should be
recognized
that the laws
of nature are the
lynch-pin
of Cartesian and other mechanical
phi-
losophies.
All
explanations
in the mechanical
philosophy depend
upon
the interactions of
moving particles
of
matter;
the laws of
nature
stipulate precisely
how
pieces
of
moving
matter can and do
interact; therefore,
all
explanations
in the mechanical
philosophy
derive from the laws of
nature.68
In some
respects
this
hardly
needs
saying;
it is
perfectly
obvious that the laws of nature are the foun-
dations
upon
which Descartes builds his kinematic
physics.69
In
68 This is summed up
in articles
199-203,
in Part IV of the
Principia philosophiae.
See also Friedrich
Steinle,
"Amalgamation
of a
Concept,"
336-7;
and
Stephen
Gaukroger,
Descartes'
System of
Natural
Philosophy (Cambridge, 2002), 13-14,
18-19
69 Like
Galileo,
Descartes eschewed the use of forces in his
conception
of
physics
and
sought
to
explain everything
in terms of motion and
impact (forces
of
impact
where the
only
forces considered to be
intelligible
and
legitimate).
See
98
JOHN
HENRY
spite
of the obviousness of
this, however,
or indeed
perhaps
be-
cause it is so
very
obvious,
accounts of Descartes's
philosophy
all
too often discuss the laws as
though
in
passing,
or late in the ac-
count instead of at the
outset,
or
simply
without
drawing
sufficient
attention to their seminal
importance.70 Secondly,
if the laws were
to be seen as
legitimate aspects
of natural
philosophy, they
had to
serve an
explanatory,
not
merely
a
descriptive,
function. It should
be
noted,
for
example,
that the incursions of
mathematicians,
and
their mathematical
ways,
into natural
philosophy
did not
negate
the traditional natural
philosophical
concern with
explanation,
but
merely
tried to extend it to
accept
certain mathematical
proofs
as
explanatory
in themselves. In some
cases,
of
course,
this could
only
be achieved
by taking contemporary
natural
philosophers through
intermediary positions. Johannes Kepler
saw his
archetypes (geo-
metrical and
musical),
for
example,
as the indirect
way
to convince
doubters of the
utility
of mathematics for
revealing physical
truth.
Accepting
that mathematics could not establish
physical
causes,
Kepler
insisted it could reveal a divine
"archetype";
that
archetype
could then
provide
the causal account
missing
from the mathemat-
ics itself.
Archetypes,
he wrote in
Mysterium cosmographicum
(1597)
"are the cause of natural
things."
Yet
"they
would have
possessed
no
force,"
he
continued,
"if God himself had not had
regard
to
Gary
Hatfield,
"Force
(God)
in Descartes'
Physics,"
Studies in
History
and
Philosophy
of
Science 10
(1979), 113-40;
Daniel
Garber,
Descartes'
Metaphysical Physics (Chicago,
1992), 293-9;
Dennis Des
Chene,
Physiologia:
Natural
Philosophy
in Late Aristotelian
and Cartesian
Thought (Ithaca, 1996), 312-41;
Patrick
Suppes,
"Descartes and the
Problem of Action at a
Distance,"
Journal of
the
History of
Ideas 15
(1954), 146-52;
and
John Henry,
"Galileo, Descartes,
and the
Importance
of
Kinematics,"
in
Juan
Jose
Saldafia
(ed.),
Science and Cultural
Diversity. Proceedings of
the
XXIst
International
Congress of
the
History of
Science,
Mexico
City,
7-14
July
2001
(Mexico,
D.
F., 2004?),
in
press.
70
It is
always
unfair,
of
course,
to criticize other authors for
failing
to share
one's own
preoccupations,
so with
apologies
I
merely
cite in
support
of this claim
three recent
major
studies on Descartes's natural
philosophy.
Shea,
Magic of
Num-
bers and
Motion,
brings
the laws of motion into his account in a sub-section of
Chapter
11,
269-73
(the subsequent chapter
entitled "The Laws and Rules of
Motion," 279-315 is
chiefly
concerned with vortex
theory
and other
aspects
of the
system, though
there is a sub-section on the collision
rules, 295-99).
Daniel Gar-
ber,
Descartes'
Metaphysical Physics, brings
the laws into
play
in
chapters
7-9,
197-
305
(at
least
they get
a
very
full
treatment). Gaukroger,
in his Descartes: An Intellectual
Biography,
introduces the laws of motion in a sub-section of
chapter
7,
237-49. I
note also that there is no article devoted to the laws of nature in
Gaukroger,
Schuster and Sutton
(eds.),
Descartes' Natural
Philosophy, although
Peter
McLaugh-
lin's
"Force,
Determination and
Impact,"
81-112,
comes
close,
and
provides
ex-
cellent new
insights.
them in the act of Creation."
So,
while mathematics itself is insuf-
ficient to reveal
physical
causes,
by revealing
an
archetype,
it shows
that God caused the
physical
world to conform to the mathemat-
ics.71 Accordingly,
if Descartes
sought
to base his new
philosophi-
cal
system,
at least in
principle,
on three laws of
nature,
they
had
to be
explanatory
laws,
not
just
mathematical
rules,
nor shorthand
expressions
for
regularities
in nature. In other
words,
the laws had
to
codify
the nature of causation in the Cartesian universe. It
would not have taken Descartes
long
to realize that he could not
claim causal
efficacy
for his laws without
invoking
God,
and hence
his turn to the
theology
of
providence,
and a
thorough
concern
with the
metaphysical underpinning
of his natural
philosophy.
I believe there is circumstantial evidence for
my
view of the
piv-
otal
importance
of laws of nature in Descartes's
philosophy
(if
any
is
required)
in the well-known details of Descartes's intellectual bi-
ography.
It is
generally acknowledged
that Descartes started out as
a
mathematician,
and
began
to consider natural
philosophy only
after his chance
meeting
with Isaac Beeckman in November
1618,
when he took
up
the
enterprise
of
physico-mathematics.
Before
long,
however,
he entered
seriously
into the realm of
metaphysics,
thereby guaranteeing
his
place
in the
philosophical
canon,
long
after his natural
philosophy
was discreditied. It is
important
for
our
purposes
to know when and
why
Descartes took
up metaphys-
ics.
There is no
explanation
for Descartes's move into
metaphysics
in what
might
be
regarded
as mainstream
philosophical
litera-
ture-it is as
though
Descartes took
up metaphysics simply
because
he was
deeply thoughtful.
In order to discover discussions of this
point
we need to look at those historians of
philosophy
who have
recognized
the
importance
of
seeing
Descartes as a natural
phi-
losopher seeking
to
replace
Aristotelian natural
philosophy
with a
more accurate account of the
physical world.72
Such historians of
71 Johannes Kepler,
The Secret
of
the
Universe,
translated
by
A. M. Duncan
(New
York, 1981), 125;
or
Johannes Kepler,
Gesammelte
Werke,
edited
by
V. W.
Dyck,
M.
Caspar,
and F.
Hammer,
21 vols.
(Munich,
1937-2002
),
8: 62. For a full account
of
this,
see Rhonda
Martens,
Kepler's Philosophy
and the New
Astronomy (Princeton,
2000), especially
109.
72
Daniel Garber has
pointed
out,
for
example,
that the
philosopher
Bernard
Williams has drawn a distinction between "historians of ideas" for whom histori-
cal context is
paramount,
and historians of
philosophy,
for whom
"articulating
philosophical
ideas" is
paramount:
Bernard
Williams, Descartes:
The
Project of
Pure
Enquiry
(Harmondsworth, 1978),
9-10.
Preferring
the second
approach,
Williams
100
JOHN
HENRY
philosophy
are
generally agreed
that Descartes turned to meta-
physics
to back
up
his
physics. Gary
Hatfield,
who discerns what
he calls a clear
"metaphysical
turn" in Descartes's
career,
suggests
that this is "best understood in the context of Descartes's
attempts
to
provide
secure foundations for his
physics."
He
goes
on,
how-
ever,
to see this
entirely
in terms of a "reformulated
theory
of the
human intellect and its
objects.""
Hatfield locates the
metaphysi-
cal turn around 1628 or the
following year. Stephen Gaukroger,
by
contrast,
sees Descartes's interest in
metaphysics beginning only
in
1633,
after Descartes heard of the condemnation of Galileo and
felt
obliged
to
suppress
his Le Monde. At this
point
in his
career,
according
to
Gaukroger,
Descartes's "creative
period
in natural
philosophy
comes to an
end,
and a creative
period
in
legitimatory
metaphysics begins."
Like
Hatfield, however,
Gaukroger
also con-
siders the main focus of the
metaphysics
to be "the
question
of the
legitimation
of
knowledge
in a new and radical
way."74
It is worth
considering
what we know of Descartes's
"metaphysi-
cal turn" from the historical sources. In
my
view,
there is no hint
of
any metaphysical
concern in Descartes's
correspondence
until
the letter to Mersenne written at the end of 1629. On the face of
it,
the stimulus seems to
be,
as
Gaukroger
would have wished
it,
an
anxiety
about
possible religious opposition
to the doctrines of
Le Monde.
Having
said that he does not want to
publish
his
system
until it has been scrutinized
by
Mersenne and other
trustworthy
readers,
Descartes writes: "I wish this
mainly
on account of theol-
ogy,
which has been so
deeply
in the thrall of Aristotle that it
is almost
impossible
to
expound
another
philosophy
without its
seeming
to be
directly contrary
to the Faith." It is at this
point
that
himself reconstructs Cartesian
thought
in a
way
deemed
interesting
for a twenti-
eth-century philosophical
audience. See Daniel
Garber,
Descartes Embodied: Read-
ing
Cartesian
Philosophy through
Cartesian Science
(Cambridge, 2001),
4-5.
Admittedly,
the number of
philosophers
who take Descartes's natural
philosophy
seriously
is now
growing apace,
but for a while there were
only
Garber,
Stephen
Gaukroger, Gary
Hatfield and
Roger
Ariew,
at least in the
Anglophone
world.
17 Gary
Hatfield, "Reason,
Nature and God in
Descartes,"
in
Stephen
Voss
(ed.), Essays
on the
Philosophy
and Science
of
Rene
Descartes
(Oxford, 1993), 259-87,
259. See also the same author's Descartes and the Meditations
(London, 2003),
15-
7.
74
Gaukroger,
Descartes,
292.
Garber,
in his Descartes'
Metaphysical Physics,
does
not
really
address this issue. He
simply designates metaphysics
as one of Des-
cartes's first
projects (16).
It is evident that
Gaukroger regards
Descartes's Prin-
cipia philosophiae
(1644)
as
essentially
a
systematic
re-statement of the natural
philosophy
of Le
Monde,
combined with his
subsequently developed metaphysics.
he indicates that he now feels the need to
stray
out of natural
philosophy:
Apropos
this
topic, please
tell me whether there is
anything
definite in reli-
gion concerning
the extension of created
things,
that
is,
whether it is finite
or
infinite,
and whether in all these
regions
called
"imaginary spaces"
there
are
genuine
created bodies.
Although
I was not keen to touch on this
topic
I believe nevertheless I shall have to
go
into
it...75
The same letter contains more on
God,
but we'll return to this
shortly.
First,
it is worth
pointing
out that for Descartes such issues
are to be considered
metaphysical,
not
just theological.
This is
clear from a
subsequent
letter to Mersenne:
Your
question
of
theology
is
beyond my
mental
capacity,
but it does not seem
to me outside
my province,
since it has no concern with
anything depend-
ent on
revelation,
which is what I call
theology
in the strict
sense;
it is a
metaphysical question
which is to be examined
by
human reason.76
It is in this same letter where we find the hint which I
presume
led
Gary
Hatfield to
suppose
that the
major
issue in Descartes's meta-
physics
was a
theory
of the human intellect. It is
sufficiently impor-
tant to merit
quotation
in full.
I think that all those to whom God has
given
the use of this
[sc. human]
reason have an
obligation
to
employ
it
principally
in the endeavour to know
him and to know themselves. That is the task with which I
began my
studies;
and I can
say
that I would not have been able to discover the foundations of
physics
if I had not looked for them
along
that road. It is the
topic
which I
have studied more than
any
other and in
which,
thank
God,
I have not alto-
gether
wasted
my
time. At least I think that I have found out how to
prove
metaphysical
truths in a manner which is more evident than the
proofs
of
geometry-in my opinion,
that is: I do not know if I shall be able to con-
vince others of it. I think that
you
heard me
speak
once before of
my plan
to write
something
on the
topic;
but I do not think it
opportune
to do so
before I have seen how
my
treatise on
physics
is
received..."77
On the face of
it, then,
we have clear
support
here for Hatfield's
view of the
why
and when of the
"metaphysical
turn." He took this
75
Descartes to
Mersenne,
18 December
1629,
quoted
from
J. Cottingham,
R.
Stoothoff,
D. Murdoch and A.
Kenny (eds.),
The
Philosophical Writings of
Descartes,
Vol.
III:
The
Correspondence (Cambridge, 1991),
14. Hereafter cited as
Correspond-
ence. See also: Charles Adam and Paul
Tannery (eds.), (Euvres
de Descartes: Cor-
respondance,
5 vols.
(Paris, 1974-76),
1:86. Hereafter cited in
parentheses
after the
reference to the
English
edition,
in the form: AT 1:86. We will not
pursue
the
answer to Descartes's
questions
here,
but for those who are
interested,
see Edward
Grant,
Much Ado About
Nothing:
Theories
of Space
and Vacuum
from
the Middle
Ages
to
the
Scientific
Revolution
(Cambridge, 1981).
76
Descartes to
Mersenne,
15
April
1630,
Correspondence,
22
(AT 1:143-4).
77
Ibid.
(AT 1:144)
102
JOHN
HENRY
turn as soon as he arrived in Holland late in
1628,
and he did so
in order to know God and to know
himself,
which we
might per-
haps interpret
as a reference to a
quest
to understand the intellect.
Furthermore,
Descartes is
sufficiently proud
of his achievements
that he sees them as
emulating
the
certainty
of
geometry.
If we read
on, however,
this letter also offers
support
for
my
con-
tention that the
concept
of
specific
laws of nature led Descartes to
turn to
metaphysics:
in
my
treatise on
physics
I shall discuss a number of
metaphysical topics
and
especially
the
following.
The mathematical truths which
you
call eternal have
been laid down
by
God and
depend upon
him no less than the rest of his
creatures. Indeed to
say
that these truths are
independent
of God is to talk
of him as if he were
Jupiter
or Saturn and to
subject
him to the
Styx
and the
Fates. Please do not hesitate to assert and
proclaim everywhere
that it is God
who has laid down these laws in nature
just
as a
king lays
down laws in his
kingdom.
There is no
single
one that we cannot
grasp
if our mind turns to
consider it.
They
are all inborn in our minds
just
as a
king
would
imprint
his laws on the hearts of all his
subjects
if he had
enough power
to do
so.78
To be sure there is a concern
here,
at the
end,
with the
certainty
of our
knowledge.
Descartes wants to insist that the laws he has
seen to be
operating
in the
physical
world cannot be dismissed as
mere
opinions
or theoretical constructs of
his,
but are undeniable
to
any right-thinking person.
So,
we do see the
beginnings
of Des-
cartes's
thinking
about
intuitions,
clear
ideas,
and so forth. These
ideas are called
upon,
however,
to
support
the notion that the
world can be understood in terms of laws of nature.
Admittedly,
there are some difficulties in the
interpretation
of
this
passage.
Descartes
begins by discussing
the "mathematical
truths,"
presumably taking
issue with
something
said in Mersenne's
no
longer
extant letter about them
being
eternal truths. When he
mentions "these laws of
nature," therefore,
it looks as
though
he is
simply using
the term in the
way
it was used in the mathematical
tradition to refer to
mathematical,
and
by
extension other
suppos-
edly
"eternal,"
truths. There is an extensive literature on the con-
cept
of eternal truths in
Descartes,
but we need not
pursue
that
78 Ibid.,
22-3
(AT 1:145).
On the eternal truths see also the letters to Mersenne
dated 6
May
and 27
May,
1630,
Correspondence,
24-6
(AT 1:148-54).
For considera-
tions of the
importance
of God's creation of the eternal truths see
Funkenstein,
Theology,
179-192;
Emile
Brehier,
"The Creation of the Eternal Truths in Des-
cartes's
System,"
in Willis
Doney (ed.),
Descartes: A Collection
of
Critical
Essays
(Notre Dame, 1968), 192-208;
and Etienne
Gilson,
La liberte
chez Descartes et la
theologie (Paris, 1982);
and
Jean-Luc
Marion,
Sur la
theologie
blanche de Descartes:
Analogie,
creation des
verites
eternelles et
fondement
(Paris, 1981).
here.79 For our
purposes,
the
important thing
is whether this
pas-
sage
can be taken as evidence for
my
claim that Descartes first
turned to
metaphysics
as a
way
of
legitimating
his notion of
physi-
cal laws of nature. It
might
be
said,
for
example,
that in this refer-
ence to laws of
nature,
Descartes
simply
has in mind
something
like the "law" that the
angles
of a
triangle
must add
up
to two
right
angles."80
It cannot be
said, however,
that at this time Descartes had not
yet
formulated a notion of
physical
laws of nature. On the con-
trary,
it is
perfectly
clear from earlier letters to Mersenne that
Descartes was
already working
with versions of at least one of the
laws he was to set down in Le Monde. Even in the letter in which
Descartes first announces to Mersenne that he is
writing
a treatise
"to
explain
all the
phenomena
of
nature,
that is to
say,
the whole
of
physics"
(November 1629),
he makes use of
something
like his
first law while
explaining
acceleration due to
gravity:
"I make the
assumption
that the motion
impressed
on a
body
at one time re-
mains in it for all time unless it is taken
away by
some other
cause;
in other
words,
in a vacuum that which has once
begun
to move
keeps
on
moving
at the same
speed."81
What is
more,
in this same
letter,
Descartes returns to an account of the motion of a
pendu-
lum which he
provided
in his letter of 8 October. It is clear that
Descartes was
already using something
like his first law in
October,
even
though
he
only
clarifies that for Mersenne in the November
letter:
As for
your question concerning
the basis of
my
calculation of the time it
takes the
weight
to fall when it is attached to a cord
2, 4,
8 and 16 feet
long
as the case
may
be,
I shall have to include this in
my Physics.
But
you
should
not have to wait for
that;
so I shall
try
to
explain
it.
Firstly,
I make the as-
sumption
that the motion
impressed
on a
body
at one time remains in it for
all time unless it is taken
away by
some other
cause;
in other
words,
in a
vacuum that which has once
begun
to move
keeps
on
moving
at the same
speed.82
79
On the eternal truths see references in
preceding
note.
so This would fit
perfectly,
for
example,
with
Jane Ruby's
claims about the
origin
of the
concept
of laws of nature. See
Ruby, "Origins."
81 Descartes to
Mersenne,
13 November
1629,
Correspondence,
7,
8
(AT 1:70,
71).
82 Ibid.,
Correspondence,
8
(AT 1:71).
The reference to his
Physics
is
clearly
a
reference to the
forthcoming
Le Monde. It is
interesting
to note that Descartes has
not
yet
committed himself to
plenism, although
while
discussing
another
prob-
lem later in the same letter
(the
motion of a
plucked string),
the
plenist
alterna-
tive,
linked to a concomitant
circularity
of
movement,
as in the
vortexes,
dawns
on him:
'Yet
I am not sure about
this;
perhaps
on the
contrary
the air even aids
104
JOHN
HENRY
The same law is invoked
again
in connection with free fall in the
letter of 18 December
1629,
and
again
in
explaining
the rebound-
ing
of a ball in letters in
January
and
February 1630.83
It seems to
me, therefore,
that there is sufficient evidence in
these
early
letters to Mersenne to show that Descartes had
already
seen how to
explain
natural
phenomena
in terms of
physical
laws
of
nature,
and this was to be the
mainstay
of his
Physics,
or of his
Le Monde.
Moreover,
his
urgent
call to
Mersenne,
in
April
1630,
not to "hesitate to assert and
proclaim everywhere
that it is God
who has laid down these laws in
nature,"
can
only
derive from
Descartes's concern to
persuade
his
contemporaries
of the
legiti-
macy
and
importance
of his
physical
laws of nature. It seems hard
to
imagine why
Descartes would think it was
"especially" important
to discuss the
metaphysics underlying
the Euclidean claim that the
angles
of a
triangle
add
up
to two
right angles,
much less
why
he
would want Mersenne to
continually proclaim
this.
(Presumably
Descartes is concerned about how Mersenne is
going
to
pass
on to
his other
correspondents
what he is
doing).
It is not hard to
see,
however,
why
he
might regard
it as
important
to discuss the meta-
physics underlying
what he could
quite justifiably
consider to be a
completely
new
conception
in natural
philosophy, namely, physi-
cal laws of
nature.84
It is also
easy
to see
why
he
might
have
con-
flated his
thinking
about such laws with mathematical
"laws,"
or
"truths,"
at least in a letter to Mersenne written before he has ar-
rived at his final
position, given
that the
original
model for his
thinking
is
likely
to have been
geometrical optics
or one of the
other mixed mathematical sciences.85
the motion at the
end,
since the motion is circular"
(ibid., 10;
AT I:
74).
I take
this to be an
example
of how the letters
provide
hints towards Descartes's
thought
processes,
which I am
trying
to
exploit
here.
83
Descartes, Correspondence, 15, 17,
18-19
(AT 1:89-90, 107, 117).
84 It should be noted
that,
as various scholars have
pointed out,
many
of the
now famous "laws" discovered
during
the Scientific Revolution have
only
been
designated
as laws
retrospectively
and would not have been
thought
of as laws of
nature
by
Descartes.
So,
Galileo's law of free
fall,
for
example,
and
Kepler's
laws
of
planetary
motion were not known as laws until after the
appearance
of Des-
cartes's laws. See
Milton,
"Origin
and
Development";
Steinle,
"Amalgamation
of
a
Concept,"
320-1;
J.
L.
Russell,
"Kepler's
Laws of
Planetary
Motion:
1609-1666,"
British
Journal for
the
History of
Science 2
(1964),
1-24.
85 Again,
this last
suggestion
is in accordance with
Jane Ruby's
views. It seems
a
highly plausible
reconstruction of Descartes's
thinking, given
that he also
(though perhaps later)
reduced material bodies to extension to enable him to
imply
that
body
was
completely quantifiable.
See
Funkenstein,
Theology,
183-4.
It seems
clear, therefore,
that Descartes
began
to think of the
necessity
for a
metaphysical underpinning
to his new
physics
as he
was
writing
Le Monde.
Furthermore,
as the letter of 15
April
1630
suggests,
an
especial aspect
of the
metaphysics
was
directly
linked
to his
thinking
about laws of nature.
Announcing
what
metaphysi-
cal
topics
he will discuss he mentions
only
God's creation of the
mathematical
truths,
before
calling upon
Mersenne to
"proclaim
everywhere"
that God has created the laws of nature.
This view seems to be confirmed even
by
a
superficial glance
at
Le Monde itself. The
opening
four
chapters
familiarize the reader
with a
corpuscularian
universe,
in which all bodies are
composed
of
invisibly
small
particles
and all
change
is
brought
about
by
movement and
reorganization
of the constituent
particles. Chap-
ter 5 sets the seal on this
by defining
the three kinds of
particles
(differing
in size and
shape)
which are
designated
as "elements."
God,
and we
might say metaphysics, appears
for the first time in
Chapter
6,
where Descartes sets
up,
for the kind of
theological
reasons alluded to in his letter to Mersenne of December 1629
(where
theology
is declared to be in the thrall of
Aristotle),
the
notion that what follows is
only
a fable of a world "in which there
is
nothing
that the dullest mind cannot
conceive,
and which
nev-
ertheless could not be created
exactly
the
way
I have
imagined
it."86
It is
only
in the next
chapter
that
God,
or
metaphysics, begins
to
play
an
active,
and
indispensable,
role in the new
physics.
Des-
cartes indicates that the
foregoing chapters
have all been
merely
preamble,
but now "I do not want to
delay any longer."
He wants
to tell us "what the laws of Nature that God has
imposed
on it
[Nature]
are."87
As well as
outlining
the
laws,
Descartes also
repeat-
edly
tells his readers about the
immutability
of God and his con-
serving power,
and
even,
that "we must
say
that God alone is the
author of all the motions in the world in so far as
they
exist and in
so far as
they
are
straight."88
I
believe that
Gaukroger's suggestion
that Descartes
only
turned
to
metaphysics
after he noticed the need for
theological justifica-
tion in the wake of the Galileo affair fails to take
seriously
the
metaphysical problems
inherent in a
physics
based
upon precise
laws of nature
by
which God is said "to cause the nature of this new
86
Rene
Descartes,
The World and Other
Writings,
translated and edited
by
Ste-
phen Gaukroger (Cambridge, 1998),
24.
87
Ibid., 24-5.
88
Ibid., 30, see also
25, 28, 29, 31,
32.
106
JOHN
HENRY
world to act."89 Even without
entering
into an
argument
about the
vigour
and
consistency
of Descartes's
philosophical acuity,
we can
see from the historical evidence that the nature of the laws of
nature themselves forced Descartes to confront what he called
"metaphysical
considerations.""90
Similarly,
I remain unconvinced
by
Hatfield's
suggestion
that the
metaphysical
turn stemmed from
the
hyperbolic
doubt used not
only paradoxically
to
guarantee
certain truths
(as
in the Discourse on the
Method),
but also to dem-
onstrate to the reader the
proper
function and
objects
of the in-
tellect,
in
particular
that the
pure
intellect,
withdrawn from the
senses,
is
capable
of clear and distinct intuitions about the exist-
ence of God and the
soul,
and the essence of material
things
(as
in the
Meditations).91
I have no
difficulty
with the substance of Hatfield's
thesis,
which
seems to me to
provide
a
truly illuminating
account of the mature
metaphysics
as it related to Descartes's
physics. My objection
is sim-
ply
that the historical
evidence,
such as it
is,
suggests
that these
highly sophisticated metaphysical
ideas were
developed
later,
after
Descartes had
already
been led
by something
else to
turn,
as a
novice,
to
metaphysical
considerations. This remains
true,
notwith-
standing
Descartes's claim to Mersenne in
1637,
quoted by
Hat-
field,
that he wrote "the
beginnings
of a treatise of
metaphysics"
dealing
with the
immateriality
of the soul
eight years
before,
which
would be
1630.92
Certainly
this tallies with the letter of 15
April
of
that
year,
in which Descartes links the foundations of his
physics
to "the endeavour to know
[God]
and to know
themselves,"
but it
is difficult to
imagine
that Descartes had at this time more than an
inkling
(albeit
a brilliant
one)
of what he would not
fully
work out
until
1640.93
Daniel Garber
suggests
that the
"metaphysics
of Dis-
course
IV,
a
preliminary
sketch of the
Meditations,
represents
a later
89
Ibid., 25.
Gaukroger, Descartes, 292.
90
Ibid. I am
taking
for
granted
here,
as
Gaukroger
and Hatfield
do,
that
Descartes has not
yet
formed the ambition to
replace
the whole of scholastic
philosophy.
Had he
already
done
so,
there would be no need to
explain why
he
should include
metaphysics
in his
scheme,
since
metaphysics
was a
major aspect
of scholastic
philosophy.
It seems clear from his
correspondence
and the nature
of his
early writings,
however,
that Descartes saw himself first of all as a mathema-
tician,
then a
physicist,
and natural
philosopher,
and
only subsequently
formu-
lated the idea of
completely superseding
Aristotle.
91
Hatfield, "Reason,
Nature and
God,"
262-6.
92 Descartes to
Mersenne,
27
February
1637
[or
end of
April
1637?],
Correspond-
ence,
53
(AT 1:350).
"3
Garber,
Descartes'
17.
stage
in his
thought,"
and that we cannot know what the
early
writings
on
metaphysics may
have contained. He does
note,
how-
ever,
that the
early metaphysics
is
"clearly
connected with his
phys-
ics."
It seems to
me, therefore,
that Hatfield has
undoubtedly
re-
vealed the direction that Descartes's
metaphysical speculations
took,
but he does not
satisfactorily explain why
Descartes turned
to
metaphysics
in the first
place
(or, indeed,
at
all).94
I believe the
answer to this
problem
lies in the formalities of Descartes's
phys-
ics,
and in
particular
in its
innovatory
use of
physical
laws of na-
ture.
Nobody
is in
any
doubt,
after
all,
that Descartes's
physics
preceded
his
metaphysics.
When Descartes told Mersenne that his
six Meditations contained "all the foundations of his
physics,"
the
sense that the
metaphysics
was written in order to
support
the
physics
is reinforced
by
Descartes's
request
that Mersenne
keep
this under his hat. It seems clear that Descartes believed his ideas
on God and the soul had a better chance of
succeeding
if their
service to his
physics
was not known. It seems
equally
clear,
how-
ever,
that his ultimate aim was to see his natural
philosophy
estab-
lished.95
I want to
suggest,
then,
that there are sufficient
grounds
in the
concept
of laws of
nature,
as Descartes conceived
them,
to force
him to consider the role of God in his
physics,
and therefore to
set him off on what he called
"metaphysical
considerations" and
what Funkenstein saw as his "secular
theology."
We can see in the
account Descartes
gives
of them in both Le Monde and the
Principia
that the laws of nature are bound
up
with the distinction of mat-
ter into
separate parts.
In Le
Monde,
for
example,
Descartes asks
his readers to
imagine
the universe filled with matter-not the
94
Few other
writers on Descartes seem to consider this
question
at all. Most
historians of
philosophy,
as far as I can
tell,
simply
take it for
granted
that a
gen-
ius
of Descartes's calibre would turn to
metaphysics,
and confine themselves to
discussing
when he did so. In so far as
any
reason for the
metaphysical
turn is
given
it
usually hinges upon
Descartes
meeting
with Cardinal
Berulle,
who en-
couraged
Descartes's
philosophical
studies
(which
is
usually
taken to
imply
meta-
physical
studies,
but I can't see
why),
which Baillet
reports
as
taking place
late in
1628,
but which Genevieve Rodis-Lewis
suggests
took
place
in November 1627.
Genevieve
Rodis-Lewis, Descartes,
His
Life
and
Thought,
translated
by Jane
Marie
Todd
(Ithaca, 1998),
66-7.
95
Mersenne
to
Descartes,
28
January
1641,
Correspondence,
173
(AT 3:298).
Hatfield also
acknowledges
the role of the
metaphysics
in
providing contempo-
rary
readers with would-be
persuasive
foundations for the
physics.
Hatfield,
"Rea-
son,
Nature and
God," 265-6.
108
JOHN
HENRY
prime
matter of the Aristotelians which has no
reality
without
form,
and which Descartes considers to be
incomprehensible,
but
matter which constitutes "a
real,
perfectly
solid
body,
which uni-
formly
fills the entire
length,
breadth,
and
depth
of this
great
space." Evidently
this is not the
way things
are,
so Descartes asks
us to
imagine
this
great body
to be broken
up
into
parts.
He is
careful to
insist, however,
that the
parts
are not divided from one
another
by being separated
in
space,
so that there would be void
between them. The differences between the
parts
of matter are
discernable
by,
one
might
even
say
defined
by,
a
diversity
in their
motions. Here then we have the two
major principles
of the me-
chanical
philosophy:
matter and motion. Without motion in the
system,
there could be no differentiation between the
parts
of
matter,
since all matter is uniform and fills all of
space,
thus creat-
ing
a uniform continuum. As soon as motion is introduced into
the
account,
so are the laws of nature. "From the first instant of
their
creation,"
he
says, referring
to the
parts
of matter defined
by
their
movements,
"He causes them to continue
moving
thereafter
in accordance with the
ordinary
laws of nature." Descartes now
declares that these laws have been so well contrived
by
God that
nothing
further is
required
to
explain
how our world comes about:
the result will be "a world in which one will be able to see not
only
light,
but all the other
things
as
well,
both
general
and
particular,
that
appear
in the actual
world."96
Clearly
God is built-in to the Cartesian
account,
but the
ques-
tion
arises,
does He have to be? Could Descartes have offered an
atheist version of his
physics?
We know that atheist versions of the
Cartesian
philosophy
were soon to
appear
in the seventeenth cen-
tury,
so
might
not Descartes himself have excluded God from his
concerns? The nature of historical
argument
does not allow us to
96 Descartes, World, Chapter 6, 23. Cf.
Principia philosophiae,
II, ?36.
The
pro-
duction of our world
requires
not
just
the laws of nature but the
right starting
conditions,
this is
implicit
in the account. It also
hinges upon
the
immutability
of
God which is introduced in the next
chapter
of Le Monde when the laws are dis-
cussed in
detail,
and mentioned
immediately
in the
Principia,
II, ?36. Presumably
when Descartes talks of the
"ordinary
laws of nature" he means to
imply
that these
are what we are familiar
with,
albeit
unconsciously,
from
everyday phenomena.
There
may
be an echo here of the
theological
distinction between God's
potentia
ordinata and His
potentia
absoluta;
the latter
being responsible
for miracles and
other
exceptional
events,
while the former was held to be
responsible
for main-
taining
the
ordinary
concourse of events. See the
quotation
from Robert
Boyle
at
note 107
below;
Oakley, Omnipotence,
Covenant and
Order, 67-92;
and
Funkenstein,
Theology,
124-52.
say
that an atheist Descartes would have been
impossible,
but it
seems
abundantly
clear that
subsequent
atheist versions of the
mechanical
philosophy
were
only historically possible
as a result of
the enormous
impact,
and
subsequent
influence,
of the Cartesian
system.97
Once Descartes had shown how the
system
worked,
and
how it was
possible,
in
principle
at
least,
to
explain
all the
phenom-
ena of nature in terms of matter
moving
in accordance with laws
of
nature,
it was
easy
for the atheist to
appropriate
the
system.98
At
the moment of their first
formulation, however,
laws of nature
would have been
unintelligible
and
untenable,
unless
they
were
underwritten
by
God.
The reason for this
unintelligibility
was
precisely
because Des-
cartes wanted to claim that the laws of nature
operated
as causes.
It is hard for us
today
(in
spite
of David
Hume)
not to think of
Newton's laws as causes of
physical phenomena
(Newton being
our
Descartes),
but for
contemporaries
of Descartes his laws were so
unfamiliar,
and so unlike the kinds of causes
usually
discussed in
natural
philosophy,
that the
opposite
was true. Part of the
prob-
lem was the
austerity
of the Cartesian scheme. Scholastic causal
explanations
tended to be couched in terms of the active
powers
of one or other of the
interacting things.
The
power
in
question,
of
course,
was all too often
simply
defined in accordance with the
required
effects-the dormitive
power
of
opium,
as we all
know,
caused
sleep-and
so traditional scholasticism was
already subject
to much criticism.99 Even
so,
the Cartesian
system
seemed to take
97
Although, right
from the
outset,
the Cartesian
system
was seen to be
fraught
with
problems,
it was
widely
seen as
pointing
the
way
to a
system
of
philosophy
capable
of
replacing,
lock,
stock and
barrel,
the
comprehensive systematic phi-
losophy
of Aristotelianism.
Accordingly,
Cartesianism was far more successful and
influential than
might
be
expected
on the basis of a critical evaluation. The lit-
erature on Cartesian influence is vast but useful
starting points
are: Nicholas
Jolley,
"The
Reception
of Descartes'
Philosophy,"
in
John Cottingham
(ed.),
The
Cambridge Companion
to Descartes
(Cambridge, 1992), 393-423;
and Thomas M.
Lennon,
The Battle
of
the Gods and Giants: The
Legacies of
Descartes and
Gassendi,
1655-1715
(Princeton, 1993).
98
Descartes claimed to be able to
explain everything,
not
only
at the outset of
Le Monde
(see previous note),
but also at the end of the
Principia,
IV,
?199.
99
For
a fuller discussion of these matters see
Stephen
Nadler,
"Doctrines of
Explanation
in Late Scholasticism and in the Mechanical
Philosophy,"
in Garber
and
Ayers
(eds.), Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy,
513-52. There
is relevant material also in Alan
Gabbey,
"The Mechanical
Philosophy
and Its
Problems: Mechanical
Explanations, Impenetrability,
and
Perpetual
Motion,"
in
J.
C. Pitt
(ed.), Change
and
Progress
in Modern Science
(Dordrecht, 1985), 9-84; idem,
"Mechanical
Philosophies
and their
Explanations,"
in
Christoph Lfithy,
John
Murdoch,
and William Newman
(eds.),
Late Medieval and
Early
Modern
Corpuscular
110
JOHN
HENRY
things
too far.
According
to Descartes the
only
cause of
change
in
the world was collision between
particles
of matter.
Impacts
be-
tween
particles,
and the
subsequent changes
of relative
positions
and motions were the
only explanatory
resources in Cartesian
physics.100
It wasn't
just
the
austerity
of this that caused
problems
for con-
temporaries.
It was also
highly
unfamiliar to those not conversant
with,
say,
ballistics or other
aspects
of the mathematical sciences
concerned with forces of
impact.
This can be seen in an extreme
form in
Henry
More's comment on Descartes:
But he is
fabricating
some kind of life in that when two bodies
meet,
he is
able to accommodate their motions so that each of them notified
by
the
other,
the one about acceleration of its
motion,
the other about retardation
of its
motion,
finally agrees
on the same course of motion. And it is the same
thing
for the other laws of
transport.
For Descartes himself
scarcely
dares to
assert that the motion in one
body passes
into
another...'?
The
problem
for More here was that he still
regarded
motion as a
mode of
body (comparable
to
shape,
another mode of
body)
and
the traditional scholastic
assumption
was that modes cannot be
transferred from one
body
to another. In his earlier
correspond-
ence with
More,
Descartes had
actually
conceded that this was the
case but he
escaped by referring, obliquely,
to God:
You observe
correctly
that
"motion,
being
a mode of
body,
cannot
pass
from
one
body
to another." But that is not what I
wrote;
indeed I think that
motion,
considered as a
mode,
continually changes...
But when I said that
the same amount of motion
always
remains in
matter,
I meant this about the
force which
impels
its
parts,
which is
applied
at different times to different
parts
of matter in accordance with the laws set out in articles 45 and follow-
ing
of Part Two.102
In Descartes's austere world there is no force other than
God,
so
this is a clear case of Descartes
having
to
rely
on God for the causal
Matter
Theory (Leiden, 2001), 441-65;
and
Hutchison, "Individual,
Causal Loca-
tion,
and the
Eclipse
of Scholastic
Philosophy."
I cannot
help remarking,
however,
that laws of nature are
largely
overlooked in these studies.
100 On this see
McLaughlin,
"Force,
Determination and
Impact,"
86;
and Stein-
le,
"Amalgamation
of a
Concept,"
336-7,
and 356-7.
101
Henry
More,
"Responsio
ad
fragmentum
Cartesii"
(July/August
1655),
quoted
from Alan
Gabbey, "Philosophia
Cartesiana
triumphata: Henry
More
(1646-1671),"
in T. M. Lennon
(ed.),
Problems
of
Cartesianism
(Toronto, 1982),
171-250, 212-3. See also
McLaughlin,
"Force,
Determination and
Impact,"
97.
102 Descartes to
More,
August
1649,
Correspondence,
382
(AT 5:404-5).
See also
381
(AT 5:403),
where Descartes
explicitly
mentions God as the
"power causing
motion."
efficacy
in
colliding
bodies.'03
Since modes cannot be
transferred,
and motion is a mode of
body,
motions cannot be
directly
trans-
ferred but must be
exchanged by
God.
Descartes's laws were also
heavily dependent upon
the
principle
of the
immutability
of God.
Although,
as Garber
says,
the
princi-
ple
"that motion in and of itself
persists"
was
"very
much in the air"
when Descartes was
incorporating
it into his laws of
nature,
it was
still a
highly
counter-intuitive notion for most thinkers.104 The
Aristotelian
dictum,
omne
quod
movetur ab
alio movetur,
was held to
be a diachronic
principle;
when the mover
stops
the action of
moving,
so motion ceases. There were
ways
of
considering
contin-
ued
motions,
by invoking
the notion of
impetus,
for
example,
but
the
assumption
was that motion would cease once an
impetus
was
exhausted. It is hard to
imagine
how Descartes could have
pro-
posed
the indefinite
persistence
of motion as a
principle
without
immediately asking
himself how this could
be,
much less how he
could
present
it to the educated
public
without some account of
what
kept things
in motion. The same
applies,
of
course,
for his
third law and the associated rules of
impact, detailing
how motions
are
(seemingly)
transferred from one
body
to another in collisions.
The natural
assumption
for most
people,
based on
experience
leading
to an entrenched
intuition,
would be that motions
rapidly
die
away
in a series of
impacts.
Until those intuitions
changed
(as
perhaps they
have in a
post-Newtonian
world?),
thinkers would
need to be reassured of the conservation of motion
by
an
omnipo-
tent God.
Another
problem
for the Cartesian
position,
of
course,
was the
intelligibility
of inanimate
objects obeying
"laws." This is
perhaps
a more
general aspect
of the kind of ideas
expressed
above
by
Henry
More,
when he
suggested
an animistic
interpretation
of the
behaviour of bodies in collision. At one
point
in the
Principia
Des-
cartes
specifically
tried to correct this kind of
thinking:
When I
say
that these little
globules
strive... to recede from the centers
around which
they
revolve,
I do not intend that there be attributed to them
any thought
from which that
striving might
derive;
I mean
only
that
they
are
so
situated,
and so
disposed
to
move,
that
they
will in fact recede if
they
are
not restrained
by any
other cause.105
10"
See
Hatfield,
"Force
(God)
in Descartes'
Physics";
Garber,
Descartes' Meta-
physical Physics,
293-9;
Dennis Des
Chene,
Physiologia,
312-41.
104 Daniel
Garber,
"Descartes'
Physics,"
in
Cottingham (ed.), Cambridge
Com-
panion
to
Descartes, 286-334,
at 315.
105
Descartes,
Principia,
III, ?56
112
JOHN
HENRY
Although
Descartes does not mention God
here,
the attentive
reader who
pursued
this would realize that the
disposition
of these
globules
to move
centrifugally
is in fact an otherwise
inexplicable
by-product
of God's
perpetual
endeavour to
keep
them
moving
in
a
straight
line. This kind of account led some of Descartes's fol-
lowers,
as is well
known,
to
develop
occasionalist theories in which
the incessant action of God was
fully acknowledged.
Descartes was
too much of a natural
philosopher
to ever
fully
embrace this theo-
logical position,
but it is sometimes difficult to see how he man-
aged
to avoid
it.'06
There was
always
a
strong tendency, anyway,
to
acknowledge
that the
phrase
"laws of
nature,"
applied
to inanimate
creatures,
could
only
be a shorthand
expression
for the action of
God. As Robert
Boyle
was to
insist,
It is
plain
that
nothing
but an intellectual
being
can be
properly capable
of
receiving
and
acting by
a law... And it is
intelligible
to me that God should...
impress
determinate motions
upon
the
parts
of
matter,
and that... he should
by
his
ordinary
and
general
concourse maintain those
powers
which he
gave
the
parts
of matter to transmit their motion thus and thus to one another.
But I cannot conceive how a
body
devoid of
understanding
and
sense,
truly
so
called,
can moderate and determine its own
motions,
especially
so as to
make them conformable to laws that it has no
knowledge
or
apprehension
of.107
In the
Principia
Descartes declares that the causes of motion are
twofold. God is "the
general
cause of all the movements in the
world,"
but the laws of nature are the
"secondary
and
particular
causes of the diverse movements which we notice in individual
bodies."108 There remains a residual
sense, however,
in which the
laws of nature in Descartes's
physics
are not
really
causes at all.
They
are
merely descriptions
of the
way
bodies
behave,
as
though
for use in
analyzing given
interactions. We can see
here, therefore,
their antecedents in the mathematical traditions of laws of nature
which
Jane Ruby
has
brought
to our attention. It is difficult to see
how Descartes could have moved from here to laws which were
genuinely
casual without
having
to take what Hatfield calls a meta-
physical
turn,
and
introducing
God into his
story.
It is
important
106
See, for
example,
C.
J. McCracken,
Malebranche and British
Philosophy (Ox-
ford, 1983);
Daniel
Garber,
"How God Causes Motion:
Descartes,
Divine Suste-
nance,
and
Occasionalism,"
Journal of Philosophy
84
(1987), 567-80;
and
Garber,
Descartes'
299-305. I
explain
what I mean
by
"too much of a
natural
philosopher"
at the end of the
paragraph.
107 Robert
Boyle,
A Free
Enquiry
into the
Vulgarly
Received Notion
of
Nature
[ 1686],
edited
by
Edward B. Davis and Michael Hunter
(Cambridge, 1996),
Section
II,
24.
108
Descartes, Principia, II, ?36, ?37.
to
note, however, that,
as a natural
philosopher,
Descartes could
not have been content to refer all his
explanations directly
to God.
As Edward Grant has
recently
reminded us in a series of
impor-
tant
books,
although
natural
philosophy
was seen as a handmaiden
to
theology,
it was
recognized
to be different from
theology,
and
to be concerned
exclusively
(at
least as far as
possible)
with natu-
ralistic
explanation.109 Bearing
this in
mind,
we can see that it was
important
for Descartes to
present
the laws of nature as
explana-
tory
causative
principles
in their own
right.
The nature of these
laws, however,
demanded a
unique
and detailed
metaphysics
to
justify
and underwrite his new
physics.
Since this
metaphysics
de-
pended upon
the intervention of
God,
Descartes had to
develop,
as Funkenstein
pointed
out,
a secular
theology.
As is well
known,
Descartes's laws of nature failed to
capture
with sufficient
accuracy
the
phenomena
of nature.
Besides,
many
of his
explanations
of natural
phenomena
were so
vague
that there
was no need to refer back to the laws in
any explicit way.
The ex-
planations
of
phenomena provided
in the Cartesian
system
looked
in
many respects just
like those
provided
in ancient
atomism,
or
in the less
rigorous corpuscularianism
of a Pierre
Gassendi,
or a
Robert
Boyle. Certainly,
there was little
sign
that the founder of
Cartesianism had
begun
as a
gifted
mathematician,
inspired
to
extend the
rigorous
certainties of mathematics into natural
philo-
sophy."l0
Nevertheless,
it remains hard to overestimate Descartes's
importance
for the
history
of science and the
history
of Western
culture more
generally.
The
importance
of
discovering
the correct
laws of nature exercised the
greatest
mathematical minds in the
succeeding generations up
to and
beyond
the
publication
of Isaac
Newton's
Principia
mathematica."'
After
Newton it became
accepted
that the
discovery
and confirmation of laws of nature
is,
and
should
be,
a
defining enterprise
of the hard
sciences,
if not of all
109
Edward
Grant, Planets, Stars,
and Orbs: The Medieval
Cosmos,
1200-1687
(Cam-
bridge, 1994); idem,
The Foundations
of
Modern
Science in the Middle
Ages;
and
idem,
God and Reason in the Middle
Ages (Cambridge, 2001).
110
On the lack of mathematics and mechanics in Descartes's mechanical
phi-
losophy
see,
for
example,
Alan
Gabbey,
"Descartes's
Physics
and Descartes's Me-
chanics: Chicken and
Egg?,"
in
Voss,
Essays
on the
Philosophy
and Science
of Reni
Descartes, 311-23;
and Daniel
Garber,
"A Different Descartes: Descartes and the
Programme
for a Mathematical
Physics
in His
Correspondence,"
in
Gaukroger,
Schuster and Sutton
(eds.),
Descartes' Natural
Philosophy,
113-130.
111
This is another
aspect
of the
importance
of laws of nature in the Scientific
Revolution,
but which has also never been
properly
examined. I
hope
to make a
contribution to this
part
of the
story
in another
paper.
114
JOHN
HENRY
sciences. Newton's friend David
Gregory
once remarked that
"every
Problem in terrestrial
Physics
is
very operose
and
perplex'd,
but on the
contrary
in the Celestial
Physics, they
are most
easy
and
simple,"
and
suggested, accordingly,
that the "Laws of Nature are
to be learn'd" most
easily
in
astronomy."'2
He
might
have had in
mind Descartes's noble
failure,
and Newton's
astonishing
success.
Whatever the truth of
this,
we can
certainly
add that Newton was
lucky
to have followed Descartes and to have been
able,
as he
might
have said
himself,
to stand on Descartes's shoulders.
I
hope
I have shown that Descartes was
effectively responsible
for
single-handedly introducing
the notion of laws of nature into
natural
philosophy.
He did
so, however,
by drawing upon
his back-
ground
in mathematics.
Moreover,
realizing
that he could not
proceed
without
developing metaphysical
foundations for his
phys-
ics he
turned,
as Funkenstein and others have
noted,
to the
pro-
videntialist
theologies developed
in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries and turned them into a secular
theology
for his own
purposes.
To be
sure,
those
purposes quickly
went
beyond
what
was
required merely
to underwrite his laws of
nature,
but this is
where
they
found their
original
stimulus. Descartes's secular the-
ology
in turn was another
important aspect
of Descartes's influ-
ence: it is
surely
thanks to his lead that a number of the more
devout,
or
philosophically thoughtful, among
his near
contempo-
raries also
began
to
believe,
in a
way
that natural
philosophers
had
not
previously,
that "to treat of God from
phenomena
is
certainly
a
part
of natural
philosophy."113
112 David Gregory, "Author's
Preface,"
The Elements
of Physical
and Geometrical
Astronomy (London, 1715), reprinted
in Paolo
Casini,
"Newton: The Classical
Scholia,"
History of
Science 22
(1984), 1-58,
48-9.
113 Isaac
Newton,
The
Principia.
Mathematical
Principles of
Natural
Philosophy,
a
new translation
by
I.
B. Cohen and Anne Whitman
(Berkeley, 1999),
943.
I
can-
not resist
observing
that the thinkers in the Scientific Revolution who are taken
to be in the first rank coincide with those who were most concerned with meta-
physics
and
theology. Huygens
and Hooke have never
really
been
given
their
due,
for
example,
but have been
regarded
as second-rank thinkers. The fact that
Robert
Boyle
is
regarded
as a more
significant
thinker than Robert Hooke can
have little to do with their achievements in science
(since
posterity
would seem
to favour Hooke in that
regard),
but must reflect
scholarly
interest in a thinker
who not
only performed experiments
but also reflected on the nature of God and
other
metaphysical
issues
(including
the status of laws of
nature).
But this is an-
other
paper.

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