The Royal Society

PRELUDE

“Ocular inspection”

IMAGINE A UNIVERSE IN WHICH THE SUN REVOLVED around the earth.

In fact, you wouldn’t have to imagine it. All you would have to do is believe the evidence of your own eyes. “Isn’t it obvious? Every morning the sun rises in the east. It tracks across the sky and then it sets in the west,” you might say. “You can see it happening. The very phrase ‘sunrise’ makes it clear that it is the sun which moves.”

And if someone were to suggest to you that it was really the earth that flew through space, and that it spun on its own axis as it did so, you’d be justified in asking how we managed to stand upright. If we were hurtling through the solar system at great speed, why wouldn’t there be a perpetual great wind blowing? Why wouldn’t we be hurled off into space?

But what if it wasn’t only common sense telling you the sun moved around the stationary earth, but that, in a rare display of unity, both Catholic and Protestant theologians were clear on the matter? Imagine the Catholic Church telling us that “the view that the sun stands motionless at the centre of the universe is foolish, philosophically false, and utterly heretical,” not least because it contradicted holy scripture: when Joshua asked God for help in his battle against the Amorites, “the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies.” Or Martin Luther poking fun at fools who claimed the earth went around “instead of the sky, the sun, the moon, just as if somebody were moving in a carriage or ship might hold that he was sitting still and at rest while the earth and the trees walked and moved.” Or John Calvin saying people were deranged, possessed by the devil, if they really thought the sun was still and it was “the earth which shifts and turns.”¹

If you turned to that other great bastion of authority, the writings of the ancients, you’d receive the same message. Aristotle and Ptolemy, who after all knew rather more about these things than we do, understood perfectly that the universe was geocentric, with the moon, the sun, the planets, and the stars moving around a fixed spherical earth in a series of concentric celestial spheres. Wouldn’t you be foolish to think otherwise?

This is the world into which the Royal Society of London was born. A world in which most people, if they thought of cosmology at all, still accepted the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic vision of the universe. True, a few more advanced thinkers were aware that the traditional view was being challenged. They knew of theorists like Nicolaus Copernicus, the Polish astronomer whose De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, 1543) was one of the first works to articulate a heliocentric worldview. (The very first was a work, now lost, by the ancient Greek astronomer Aristarchus of Samos, who, according to Archimedes, suggested in the third century BC that the earth revolved around the sun.) They knew of the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, and his theory that the planets moved in elliptical orbits around the sun. But they also knew of Tycho Brahe, who tried to reconcile Ptolemaic and Copernican explanations of the universe by suggesting that, although the five other planets—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn—did indeed move around the sun, the sun itself moved around the earth. And they had heard of Giordano Bruno, the Italian natural philosopher who, in February 1600, was burned at the stake for defending the Copernican system and maintaining that there were infinite worlds.

In 1633, while most of the founders of the Royal Society were still children (several weren’t yet born), Galileo Galilei was hauled before the Inquisition. On pain of death, he recanted his belief that the earth moved, but he was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.

In medicine, the humoral pathology of the ancient Greek physicians Galen and Hippocrates was still current in the seventeenth century. Medical men believed that good health relied on maintaining a balance among the four humors thought to be mixed together in the veins of the human body: blood was associated with the liver, and phlegm with the brain and lungs; black bile, or melancholer, was secreted by the spleen, and yellow bile, or choler, by the gall bladder. A marked humoral imbalance was regarded as the cause of most complaints and even dictated character. According to The Sick-man’s Rare Jewel, a popular medical treatise of 1674, “those in whom phlegm hath the dominion… are of a slow capacity, dull, slothful, drowsy, they do dream of rains, snows, floods, swimming and such like.”² Those of a choleric disposition “are of a quick and nimble wit, stout, hardy and sharp, vindicating of injuries received, liberal even to prodigality, and somewhat desirous of glory, their sleep is light, and that from which they are quickly awaked, their dreams are fiery, burning, quick and full of fury.”³ Most of the population held to these principles of pathology right through to the late seventeenth century, believing in the humors and the ebb and flow of blood from the liver. Galen of Pergamon, a Greek who lived and worked in Rome in the second century AD, had declared that this was how the body worked—even though, as far as we know, he never dissected an adult human being.

In the universities, classical authority underpinned scholarship. Undergraduates in the Faculty of Arts at Oxford had to spend four years “in the study of arts and in diligent attendance, according to the exigence of the statutes, upon the public lectures within the university.”⁴ This meant grammar, rhetoric, logic, moral philosophy, geometry, and Greek, with a heavy emphasis throughout on Aristotle. In petitioning for his degree, a student stated that his qualifications would “suffice for his admission to lecture on every book of Aristotle’s logic.” Lectures, which were in Latin, lasted a civilized forty-five minutes, and students were fined for nonattendance. Conversation at dinner and supper was also in Latin. Tutors directed students’ studies, read with them each morning, and pointed them in the direction of the right texts: the theologians Bartholomäus Keckermann and Robert Sanderson on logic; Cicero, Pliny, Caesar, and Livy for rhetoric and history; the New Testament in its original Greek; Franciscus Pavonius’s Summa Ethicae for moral philosophy. A master’s degree meant another three years of Aristotle together with Greek, Hebrew, classical history, natural philosophy, geometry, and astronomy. The few texts in the curriculum not written by long-dead authors were commentaries. And they were commentaries on those same long-dead authors.

Outside the universities, and perhaps inside their walls as well, there remained a popular belief in the existence of centaurs, unicorns, and giants; commentators could uphold in all seriousness the notion that serpents were generated from the brains of the dead, that the chameleon lived on air and the ostrich ate iron, that the elixir of youth was a reality, and that basilisks hatched from eggs laid by cocks. Most of the founding members of the Royal Society were born during the reign of James I (1603–1625), a king who firmly believed in magic and witchcraft. The world was a dark, confused place in which any deviation from accepted canons was a dangerous road to travel.

Yet there were challenges to orthodoxy. During a stay in Venice in May 1609, Galileo, then a professor of mathematics at Padua, heard a rumor of a Dutch invention “by the aid of which visible objects, although at a great distance from the eye of the observer, were seen distinctly as if near.”⁵ Back in Padua, he set about making his own telescopes (he had made four by January 1610, the last and most powerful of which had a magnification of 30x), and when he trained them on the heavens, he was astonished by what he saw. The moon’s surface was not smooth, as the Greeks had thought, but covered in mountains and valleys; Jupiter was a round disc with four moons; and, most startling of all, there was a multitude of stars that, invisible as they were to the naked eye, no one had seen before. “Upon whatever part of [the Milky Way] you direct the telescope,” wrote Galileo, “straightway a vast crowd of stars presents itself to view; many of them are tolerably large and extremely bright, but the number of small ones is quite beyond determination.”⁶

Initial reactions to Galileo’s discoveries were mixed: traditional Aristotelians refused point-blank to believe it was possible to see anything in the heavens not mentioned by Aristotle, while governments decided the stars could be left to themselves, seizing instead on the military potential of the telescope. But the ability to observe the previously unobservable universe opened up new worlds—quite literally transforming astronomy and offering unrivaled opportunities for research and wonder, as the English diplomat Sir Henry Wotton was quick to appreciate. In March 1610, Wotton, then James I’s ambassador in Venice, dispatched home a copy of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger), a pamphlet containing work based on his early observations with his new instruments. Wotton included a cover letter:

Eighteen years later, William Harvey, the physician to James I and Charles I, published De motu cordis (On the Motion of the Heart), the product of a decade of research and teaching about the theory that blood circulated around the body instead of ebbing and flowing from the liver. Harvey’s critics pointed to Galen to disprove him, arguing that if the blood circulated, all of humoral pathology would be brought into question. If the humors were mixed together, it would be impossible to modify them individually. Others simply asserted that Galen provided them with a working hypothesis, and that was quite enough for them, thank you.

For his part, Harvey—himself a conventional Aristotelian in many ways—couldn’t explain why blood circulated—but he was sure that it did, and this was the crucial point. Instead of accepting that classical authorities were right and therefore he must be wrong, as his predecessors had done, he urged the primacy of “ocular inspection.” Don’t accept things at face value: see for yourself.

He wasn’t alone. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the courtier and philosopher Francis Bacon, Viscount St. Alban, had argued for the rejection of traditional Aristotelian learning, suggesting that instead of using unproven hypotheses to test the validity of empirical observations, one should begin with those observations:

Bacon’s proposal, that learning could be advanced by experiment rather than by refining and interpreting the established authorities, was to prove enormously influential for the young Royal Society. All the founding members were followers of the Baconian method, proponents of experimental learning. Like William Harvey, they stressed the need for “ocular inspection.”

Bacon died in 1626. According to tradition, his commitment to experimentation proved to be the death of him. Thomas Hobbes told the antiquary John Aubrey that while Bacon was taking the air in his coach he had a notion to test whether snow would preserve flesh in the same way that salt does. So he stopped his coach and went into the house of a poor woman in Highgate, where he bought a hen from her and asked her to eviscerate it and stuff the body cavity with snow; he even showed her how to do it. It was apparently too much for him: “The snow so chilled him that he immediately fell so extremely ill that he could not return to his lodging,” Aubrey wrote.⁹ He died two or three days later.

But even in death, Bacon had a contribution to make to the origins of the Royal Society. In his posthumously published New Atlantis (1627), an unfinished fantasy in which a party of lost travelers comes upon a utopian island in the South Seas, the philosopher-courtier described Solomon’s House, an order of wise men who devised experiments and sought out reports of those that had been conducted in foreign countries. The order boasted extensive chemical laboratories, astronomical observatories, pharmaceutical and medical facilities, “a mathematical-house, where are represented all instruments, as well of geometry as astronomy,” gardens, and a repository containing “patterns and samples of all manner of the more rare and excellent inventions.” Solomon’s House members carried out research in optics, microscopy, magnetics, even genetic engineering, working together to discover “the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.” This early formulation of the idea of a scientific research institute, a college of like-minded Fellows who came together to dedicate themselves to promoting experimental philosophy, was to bear fruit thirty-three years later in a room at Gresham College in London. It was there that the Royal Society was born.¹⁰