Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  Only a substantial injection of public funds could have reversed this trend, creating new teaching posts, academic facilities and scholarships; but rulers remained reluctant, mindful of the prominence of highly educated scholars in recent rebellions (see chapter 18 above). In Naples, although Viceroy Oñate repaired the university faculty (the palazzo degli studi), damaged in the revolution of 1647–8, and although he assigned fixed salaries to instructors, in return he exacted a promise that they would not teach certain controversial courses, and he insisted that all students must take an oath of loyalty. In France, part of Louis XIV's efforts to harass and then expel his Huguenot subjects involved shutting down their Academies, which trained hundreds of young men in theology, philosophy and languages because, in the words of a Catholic bishop, ‘the students here are serving their apprenticeship in rebellion and disobedience’. A Huguenot education, he asserted, was ‘the source of all seditions’.10 In England, in 1659 Lord Protector Richard Cromwell bowed to pressure from Oxford and Cambridge and refused to confirm the charter of Durham College, founded by his father, despite its rich store of ‘books and mathematical instruments and all other instruments … relating to the practice of any of the liberal sciences’, and a distinguished staff. That same year the marquis of Newcastle, Charles II's former tutor, wondered ‘what all the learning of the universities did, or doe, against the red coats? [the nickname for Cromwell's soldiers] What did all the sages of the law doe against the red coats?’11

  Such anti-intellectualism was not confined to Newcastle (a university ‘drop out’: in Cambridge he had ‘tutors to instruct him, yet they could not persuade him to read or study much, he taking more delight in sports, than in learning’). Similar hostility to higher education appeared in a verse of the popular English song ‘Heigh then up go we’, first heard in 1640:

  We'll down with universities where learning is professed,

  Because they practise and maintain the language of the beast.

  We'll drive the doctors out of doors and arts what ere they be;

  We'll cry all arts and learning down, and Heigh then up go we.12

  A decade later, English radicals likewise looked forward to the day when ‘the Lord will raise up his word in the midst of [the universities], to destroy them, for the more the word of the Lord shall blow upon the university, the more shall this grass wither’; and argued that in an ideal world ‘children shall not be trained up only to book learning, and no other employment’, because ‘through idleness and exercised wit therein they spend their time to find out policies to advance themselves to be lords and masters above their labouring brethren’ – which ‘occasions all the trouble in the world.’ The Quakers, for their part, wanted to shut down all universities because they prepared ministers for the Established Church which they despised.13

  Even had European universities received generous government support and general acclaim after 1650, it seems unlikely that they would have reformed their curricula to include new disciplines and methods, or even bought new books to create a ‘universal library’ that balanced authority with innovation. At Leiden University, violent disputes broke out between those who believed that mathematics offered the key to the universe (and therefore favoured an experimental approach in subjects such as astronomy, anatomy and botany), and those who saw no need to go beyond the published wisdom of the Greek philosopher Aristotle (who defined ‘science’ as the contemplation and organization of eternal truths already discovered). In 1648 a group of students invaded the class of a prominent Aristotelian philosopher, the émigré Scot Adam Steuart, and beat up his hearers, while others prevented Steuart from lecturing by stamping and banging, and disrupted doctoral exams on Aristotelian subjects. The university's Curators (equivalent to the Board of Trustees at a modern North American university) interrogated the professors (whom they held responsible for their students' behaviour) and, although they revoked Steuart's licence to teach metaphysics, they also insisted that only Aristotelian philosophy should be taught at Leiden. In addition, to reduce the risk of intellectual innovation, the Curators ruled that students could enter the university library on only two days per week, and forbade the library from purchasing any book that was not in Latin and on a traditional subject. The States of Holland, which had ultimate authority over public education, made clear its support for this conservative stance. It remained unchanged until 1689.14

  In China, too, after 1650 the government frowned on higher education. The Qing believed that the intellectual elite had played a critical role in fomenting the ‘troubles’ faced by their predecessors, and they therefore closed down all Academies and Learned Societies. Moreover, although they reintroduced the national system of civil-service examinations, holding special jinshi examinations in 1646, 1647 and 1649 before reverting to the traditional triennial pattern, they made some important changes. First, Manchu subjects received encouragement to compete in the examinations, and permission to submit answers in either Manchu or Chinese. Second, because there were never enough successful Manchu candidates, the Qing regularly filled senior positions with men who lacked a jinshi degree but boasted ‘other qualifications’ to govern. Finally, the new dynasty tolerated no irregularities in the examination process. In 1657 the Shunzhi emperor reacted savagely when evidence of cheating in the triennial juren examination came to light: he beheaded dozens of officials and examiners who had accepted bribes, as well as the intermediaries who had tampered with the scripts, and he deported hundreds of their family members to serve as slaves in Manchuria. Even successful candidates had to take the exam again.15

  The New Learning

  Nevertheless, government hostility to institutions of higher education failed to stifle intellectual speculation and innovation. On the contrary, to quote Jonathan Israel again:

  Down to around 1650, Western civilization was based on a largely shared core of faith, tradition and authority. By contrast, after 1650, everything, no matter how fundamental or deeply rooted, was questioned in the light of philosophical reason and frequently challenged or replaced by startlingly different concepts generated by the New Philosophy and what may still usefully be termed the Scientific Revolution.

  The timeline of the ‘New Philosophy’ in England proposed by John Aubrey, author of the first books in English entirely devoted to archaeology, place names and folklore, vindicated Israel's claim. ‘Till about the year 1649,’ Aubrey wrote,

  'Twas held a strange presumption for a man to attempt an innovation in learning, and not to be good manners to be more knowing than his neighbours and forefathers. Even to attempt an improvement in husbandry, though it succeeded with profit, was look't upon with an ill eie … 'Twas held a sinne to make a scrutinie into the waies of nature … In those times, to have had an invention and enquiring witt was accounted affectation, which censure the famous Dr. William Harvey could not escape for his admirable discovery of the circulation of the blood. He told me himself that upon his publishing that booke, he fell in his practice extremely.16

  Aubrey condemned scholarship in the sixteenth century as ‘Paedantry’, because ‘criticall learning, mathematics and experimental philosophy was not known’; and he considered even the first half of the seventeenth century ‘a darke time’ because ‘Things were not then studied. My lord Bacon first led that dance.’17

  Aubrey exaggerated – as even his own examples revealed. Before he published his findings in 1628, William Harvey refined his theory concerning the circulation of the blood for over a decade by the repeated dissection and observation of numerous animals and by lectures and debates at London's College of Physicians; while as early as 1592 ‘my lord Bacon’ – Francis Bacon, Lord St Albans – declared his intention ‘to bring in industrious observations, grounded conclusions, and profitable inventions and discoveries’, and to demonstrate how natural philosophy enhanced political power. He did this by preparing a six-part project for mapping all human knowledge, which he called The Great Instauration. Bacon published the first part i
n 1605, The advancement of learning, which boldly proposed that all knowledge could be organized according to the three intellectual faculties possessed by humans: memory (history), imagination (poetry) and reason (philosophy – including the sciences). This approach, he argued, both classified existing information and cleared the way for new discoveries. Bacon published the second part in 1620, entitled Novum Organum (a play on Aristotle's ‘Organon’ or ‘logical works’), which proposed a method of scientific inquiry very different to that of Aristotle. Let ‘the business be done as if by machinery’, he argued, collecting and reviewing relevant cases in order to find ‘certain and demonstrable knowledge’.18 Bacon sent a copy of Novum Organum to King James I, together with a letter announcing that he was ‘with hope’

  That after these beginnings, and the wheel once set on going, men shall suck more truth out of Christian pens, than hitherto out of heathen. I say ‘with hope’, because I hear my former book of The advancement of learning is well tasted in the universities here and the English colleges abroad: and this is the same argument sunk deeper.19

  Poor Bacon! Someone with good links at court spitefully reported that the king ‘cannot forbeare sometimes, in reading [Bacon's] last booke, to say that “Yt is like the peace of God, that passeth all understanding”’.20 Likewise, neither Oxford nor Cambridge showed the slightest interest in the ‘New Philosophy’, and so their alumni left with little or no scientific knowledge. John Wallis, later an eminent mathematician, complained that when he was a student at Cambridge in the 1630s, the discipline was ‘scarce looked upon as accademical studies, but rather mechanical, as the business of traders’. Therefore, ‘amongst more than two hundred students’ in his college, ‘I do not know of any two (perhaps not any) who had more of mathematicks than I, (if so much), which was then but little; and but very few, in that whole university.’ Wallis nevertheless managed to imbibe ‘the principles of what they now call the New Philosophy’ because:

  I made no scruple of diverting (from the common road of studies then in fashion) to any part of useful learning, presuming that knowledge is no burthen; and if, of any part thereof, I should afterwards have no occasion to make use, it would at least do me no hurt; and, what of it I might or might not have occasion for, I could not then foresee.21

  When ‘by our Civil Wars, Academical Studies were much interrupted in both our universities’ (namely Oxford and Cambridge), Wallis moved to London, where in 1645 he joined the weekly meetings of ‘divers worthy Persons, inquisitive into Natural Philosophy, and other parts of Humane Learning; and particularly of what hath been called the New Philosophy or Experimental Philosophy.’ One of those ‘worthy persons’ was Robert Boyle, son of the richest man in Britain and the leading light of ‘the invisible, or (as they term themselves) the philosophical college’. Boyle, like Wallis, applied himself to ‘useful learning’ – or, in his own words, to ‘natural philosophy, the mechanics, and husbandry according to the principles of our new philosophical college, that values no knowledge, but as it hath a tendency to use’. To this end, Boyle would consult ‘the meanest’ person, provided ‘he can but plead reason for his opinion’.22

  The ‘Philosophical College’ suffered from two handicaps. First, it numbered scarcely ten members; and, second, few scholars outside Great Britain read English. Francis Bacon eventually decided to have his Advancement of Science translated into Latin so it ‘will live, and be a citizen of the world, as English books are not’.23 He also sent complimentary copies to foreign scholars, including Galileo Galilei, who in 1609 had created a telescope powerful enough to carry out systematic observations of the moon (which he found to be irregular, not smooth) and Jupiter (where he detected four moons, which clearly rotated around the planet). The following year, Galileo published his findings in a short treatise in Latin (Sidereus Nuncius, ‘The starry messenger’), and also sent copies of both his book and his telescope to foreign courts so that others could verify his claim – just as Bacon had suggested in his Advancement. Harvey went one step further than Bacon: he did not even publish in England. His now famous book describing how blood circulates first appeared in Latin in Frankfurt, Germany, with the revolutionary overthrow of Aristotle's explanation tucked away at the end. But if he hoped that these stratagems would deflect criticism, he miscalculated: both his book and its argument were either ignored or condemned by his compatriots (and also by most other Europeans) for two decades.24

  René Descartes, a French philosopher living in Holland as a private scholar, proved an exception. In 1637 his influential Discourse on method for the correct use of one's reason and for seeking truth in knowledge, praised Harvey's theory (although even he did not name Harvey, citing merely ‘an English doctor’); and, in an earlier work, Descartes approved Bacon's approach (‘la méthode de Verulamius’) because, although he had read all the Classical authors, he had reached his conclusions by rigorous experiments that anyone could replicate. Descartes also praised Galileo's ‘application of mathematical reasoning to physics’ (again without naming the author) and argued that, since ‘all the things which come within the scope of human knowledge are interconnected’, if someone began with simple notions and proceeded step by step, ‘it does not take great skill and capacity to find them’ (Plate 27). Descartes thus exalted experiment over theory.25

  Just as Bacon's ‘project’ gained fame outside England, so Descartes's ‘method’ gained fame outside Europe. In Mughal India, the French traveller François Bernier, physician to Emperor Shah Jahan and his eldest son Dara Shikoh, translated some of Descartes's work into Persian in the 1650s. Prince Dara had recently translated from Sanskrit into Persian over 50 of the Upanishads, ancient Hindu philosophical texts, which he called Sirr-i Akbar (‘The Great Mystery’) and composed a philosophical work entitled Majma-ul-Bahrain (‘The Mingling of Two Oceans’), in which he stated that he ‘became desirous of bringing in view all the heavenly books’. He therefore examined the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Gospels, as well as the Upanishads and the Qu'ran, concluding that ‘he did not find any difference, except verbal, in the way they all sought and comprehended Truth’. The prince also collected an impressive library and attracted to the holy city of Benares (Varanasi) a group of Sanskrit scholars who pursued Navya Nayaya, or ‘new reason’ (with the sense of ‘evidence-based critical enquiry’). Bernier remained at Benares for four years, where he translated works by Descartes and other French ‘natural philosophers’ into Persian, while one of Dara's protégé's composed two treatises that confronted the ‘new reason’ and Cartesian philosophy.26

  In China, in 1608 (the year before Galileo turned his new telescope on the moon), the scholar-official Xie Zhaozhe published a 1,414-page treatise entitled Wa za zu (Fivefold Miscellany). Had he read the book, Descartes would no doubt have approved of Xie's desire to correct Classical writers (albeit followers of Confucius rather than of Aristotle) through systematic observation. For example, Xie dismissed the ‘popular saying’ that snowflakes at the winter solstice had five points because ‘Every year, as the winter moves into spring, I have gathered snowflakes and looked at them. All are six-pointed.’ Where Xie could not provide proof, he used his common sense: ‘Since the conjunctions and the eclipses of the sun and the moon depend on their regular orbit, and they can be foreseen in numerical detail several tens of years in advance, it is not possible to escape them.’ So ‘is it not erroneous to point to them as portents of heaven?’27 Xie's experimental approach did not stand alone. The ‘foundation charter’ of the Fu She (‘Restoration Society’) in 1629 expressed the hope that it would revitalize ‘the ancient learning and thus be of some use’; while in 1637 (as Descartes oversaw the publication of his Discourse), Chen Zilong, another scholar-official, published The Complete Book of Agricultural Science, the posthumous work of a colleague who had converted to Christianity, which included material from many Western sources (including the translation of a treatise on hydraulic theory by a Jesuit). Chen justified the inclusion of foreign sources b
y twisting the traditional Confucian saying, ‘If you have lost the proper way of doing things at court, search for it in the countryside’: in China's present emergency, he asserted, ‘If you have lost the proper way of doing things at court, search for it among the foreigners.’28 Two years later, Chen and two colleagues published Select Writings on Statecraft from the Ming Period, a compendium of memoranda and advice submitted by over 400 officials from the fourteenth century to their own day, in the hope that they might suggest solutions to current Ming problems.29