Literature and the Discovery of Method in the English Renaissance

Literature and the Discovery of Method identity by looking at them without historical imagination. When Copernicus defined the earth as a planet, or when, by way of Harvey and Descartes, the heart came increasingly to seem a kind of engine," or when Van Helmont invented the word 'gas' (deriving it from 'chaos'), the meanings of 'earth ', 'planet', 'heart' and 'chaos' were transformed. They had not been seen quite that way before, and it would, afterwards, require an act of imagination to apprehend them in the old way again." The methodological consequences of such observations for scholarship are fairly plain: to understand the real profundity of, say, Newton's contribution to human thought we should first try to discover something of the state of mechanics and astronomy as he received them. This inquiry will then soon lead to our further discovery of Newton's quasi-theological attitudes to these subjects, and we shall learn how his mathematics, for instance (inherited from the Copernican and Keplerian tradition through the Cambridge Platonists), was tinged with Hermetic and magical elements. These in part encouraged Newton to seek for nature's hidden harmonies and secret signatures, while simultaneously preventing him from seeing just how much his own theories would eventually divest classical scientific thinking altogether of Nco-Platonist metaphysics.6 Today, in short, a child can readily enough apprehend and apply Newton's laws ," but only a patient reconstruction of the context within which the great man worked will educate a just admiration of his achievement. How often true knowledge of profound things follows such a pattern of initial, apparent simplicity followed by patient rediscovery is teasing to consider. But it is worth noting also that such a pattern can operate in reverse. For instance, it is not difficult to imagine our ingenuous child as an adolescent first picking up Plato, the seminal genius of Western thought to whose mathematical interests (he might now know) Newton's discoveries can be traced. How does such a young reader react, at first, to those fabulously boring Socratic arguments which dispose, by such dubious means, of one dupe after another, all alike unable to see through the tirelessly blithe perpetrations of false analogies and inconclusive demonstrations? The reaction is likely to be (mine was) a kind offascinated puzzlement, crossed with moments which are, simply, flabbergasting. The issue here clearly enough resembles the one raised for Literature and the Discovery