“The track which leads to it”: The Reverend Robert Belaney, “Our Lady of Mentorella,” The Ave Maria 51, no. 13 (Notre Dame, Ind., September 29, 1900).
there was a clerk “kept quite busy”: Filippo Buonanni, Musaeum Kircherianum, sive, Musaeum a P. Athanasio Kirchero in Collegio Romano Societatis Jesu . . . (Rome: Georgius Plachus, 1709), p. 1.
“Father Kircher’s Cabinet”: Maximilien Misson, A New Voyage to Italy: With Curious Observations on Several Other Countries . . . (London: R. Bonwicke, J. Tonson, et al., 1714 [1695]), vol. 2, p. 172.
Chapter 22. Closest of All to the Truth
“what the modern world’s about”: David Foster Wallace, Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), pp. 107–109.
“I hope to show—as it were, by my example”: In Casper Hakfoort, “Newton’s Optics: The Changing Spectrum of Science,” in John Fauvel et al., eds., Let Newton Be! (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 86.
“who find out, settle & do”: In James Gleick, Isaac Newton (New York: Pantheon, 2003), p. 127.
upholster much of what he owned in crimson: See ibid., pp. 231–232, n. 10.
“given the length of the space continuously”: In John Stillwell, Mathematics and Its History (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1989), p. 278.
“began to think of gravity”: In the introduction to John Fauvel et al., eds., Let Newton Be! (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 14.
“ground and polished glasses”: In Paula Findlen, “The Janus Faces of Science in the Seventeenth Century: Athanasius Kircher and Isaac Newton,” in Margaret J. Osler, ed., Rethinking the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 230.
correspondence between the colors of the spectrum: Penelope Gouk, “The Harmonic Roots of Newtonian Science,” in John Fauvel et al., eds., Let Newton Be! (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 118.
Years later, Voltaire heard: Bach, “Athanasius Kircher and His Method,” p. 91, n. 47. See also Findlen, “The Janus Faces of Science,” p. 227.
“the peerless alchemist of Europe”: Gleick, Isaac Newton, p. 99.
“The Fire scarcely going out either Night or Day”: In Gleick, Isaac Newton, p. 219, n. 6.
more than a million words on alchemy: R. S. Westfall, “Newton and Alchemy,” in Brian Vickers, ed., Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 321.
Newton and Hermes Trismegistus: Lawrence M. Principe, “The Alchemies of Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton: Alternate Approaches and Divergent Deployments,” in Margaret J. Osler, ed., Rethinking the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 212–213.
“penetrates every solid thing”: In Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 274.
“active principle”: Ibid., p. 209.
“vulgar” or “brute” . . . “propensity to associate”: Isaac Newton, Two incomplete treatises on the vegetative growth of metals and minerals, 1670–1675, NMAHRB Ms. 1031 B, Dibner Library, Smithsonian Institution, online via The Newton Project, http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk, at The Chymistry of Isaac Newton, http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/newton/index.jsp.
“This & only this”: In Dobbs, Janus Faces of Genius, p. 24. See Findlen, “The Janus Faces of Science,” p. 234.
“Whether by any Magnetick or whatother Tye”: In Bennett, “Cosmology and the Magnetical Philosophy,” p. 172.
“concerning the inflection of a direct motion”: Ibid., p. 173.
“I have not been able to discover the cause”: In John Henry, “Newton, Matter, and Magic,” in John Fauvel et al., eds., Let Newton Be! (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 141.
“For many things lead me”: Isaac Newton, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy: A New Translation, trans. I. B. Cohen and Anne Whitman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 382.
“occult quality” . . . “a supernatural thing”: In Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), pp. 268, 253.
“explained mathematically and mechanically”: Franklin Perkins, Leibniz: A Guide for the Perplexed (London and New York: Continuum, 2007), p. 74.
“invisible, intangible” . . . “must be a perpetual Miracle”: In Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, p. 268.
“Surely it is no coincidence”: Findlen, “The Janus Faces of Science,” p. 234.
“In my opinion the Egyptian system”: Ádám Ferencz Kollár, Ad Petri Lambecii Commentariorum de Augusta Bibliotheca Caes. Vindobonensi Libros VIII. Supplementorum Liber Primus Supplementorum Posthumus (Vienna: Johann Thomas Edler von Trattern, 1790), p. 357, in Stolzenberg, “Egyptian Oedipus,” p. 1.
Chapter 23. The Strangest Development
Kircher “had not even dreamed”: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. and trans. Leroy E. Loemker (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 1989 [1956]), p. 352.
“He understands nothing”: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese (1716), in Leibniz, Writings on China, ed. and trans. Daniel J. Cook and Henry Rosemont, Jr. (Chicago: Open Court, 1994), p. 133. See Findlen, Athanasius Kircher, p. 6.
Leibniz and the I Ching: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Explication de l’Arithmétique Binaire, 1703. See Eco, Search for the Perfect Language, pp. 284–287; Umberto Eco, Serendipities: Language and Lunacy, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harvest, 1999), pp. 69–73.
unlock the secret of the Egyptian hieroglyphic system . . . by studying Chinese: Don Cameron Allen, “The Predecessors of Champollion,” Proceedings of the American Philosophers Society 104 (1960), pp. 533–547.
“the obelisks were seen to enshrine”: Godwin, Athanasius Kircher, p. 6.
William Butler Yeats: See Neil Mann, “W. B. Yeats and the Vegetable Phoenix,” in Warwick Gould, ed., Influence and Confluence: Yeats Annual, No. 17 (Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 3–35.
She even quoted Rabbi Barachias Nephi: H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy (New York: Theosophical Publishing Company, 1888), p. 362. Mentioned in Stolzenberg, “Egyptian Oedipus,” p. 64.
a “monk” who “appeared among the mystics”: H. P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology (New York: J. W. Bouton, 1877), vol. 1, pp. 208–209.
Animal magnetism, he wrote, acts “at a distance” . . . “communicated, propagated”: Franz Anton Mesmer, Mesmerism: Being the Discovery of Animal Magnetism (1779), trans. Joseph Bouleur (Sequim, Wash.: Holmes, 2009), pp. 12, 26–27.
“a look of dignity” . . . “gently down the spine”: MacKay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, vol. 1, p. 279.
“Without the stunning progress”: Verschuur, Hidden Attraction, p. vi.
“more energy-like”: In Richard Panek, “Out There,” The New York Times Magazine, March 11, 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/magazine/11dark.t.html.
“Proof will require a lot more information”: John Glassie, “A Conversation with Edward O. Wilson,” Salon.com, January 14, 2002, http://www.salon.com/2002/01/14/eowilson_2/.
“To believe in evolution”: James E. Strick, Sparks of Life: Darwinism and the Victorian Debates over Spontaneous Generation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 2.
Duchamp and de Chirico: See Lugli, “Inquiry as Collection,” p. 124.
“Kircher and others imagine”: Edgar Allan Poe, “A Descent into the Maelström,” Graham’s Magazine, no. 18 (May 1841), p. 237, online at the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore website, www.eapoe.org.
Kircher’s influence on Poe and others is mentioned in Findlen, “The Last Man Who Knew Everything . . . Or Did He?,” p. 42.
“learned egoist”: Jules Verne, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, trans. William Butcher (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 4.
“a sage?”: Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before, trans. William Weaver (New York: Penguin, 1996), pp. 271–272.
“gladdened the World to the extreme”: Kircher, Itinerarium Exstaticum, pp. 1–2.
“remarkable” for its “very lofty rampart”: Thomas Gwyn Elger, The Moon: A Full Description and Map of Its Principal Physical Features (London: George Philip & Son, 1895).
“somewhat deformed”: John Wilkinson, The Moon in Close-up: A Next Generation Astronomer’s Guide (Berlin: Springer, 2010), p. 246.
SELECTED SOURCES
“An Accompt of Some Books.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, vol. 4 (1669), pp. 1086–1097.
“Account of Athanasii Kircheri China Illustrata.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, vol. 2(1667), pp. 484–488.
“An Account of Micrographia, or the Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies, Made by Magnifying Glasses.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, vol. 1 (1665), pp. 27–32.
Bach, José Alfredo. “Athanasius Kircher and His Method: A Study in the Relations of the Arts and Sciences in the Seventeenth Century.” Ph.D. diss., University of Oklahoma, 1985.
Baldinucci, Filippo. The Life of Bernini (1682). Trans. Catherine Engass. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006.
Baldwin, Martha. “Athanasius Kircher and the Magnetic Philosophy.” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1987.
______. “Magnetism and the Anti-Copernican Polemic.” Journal for the History of Astronomy 16 (1985), pp. 155–174.
______. “Reverie in Time of Plague.” In Paula Findlen, ed., Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything. New York: Routledge, 2004.
______. “The Snakestone Experiments: An Early Modern Medical Debate.” Isis 86 (1995), pp. 394–418.
Brauen, Fred. “Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680).” Journal of the History of Ideas 43, no. 1 (1982), pp. 129–134.
Breidbach, Olaf, and Michael T. Ghiselin. “Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) on Noah’s Ark: Baroque ‘Intelligent Design’ Theory.” Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences 57, no. 36 (December 28, 2006).
Buonanni, Filippo. Musaeum Kircherianum, sive, Musaeum a P. Athanasio Kirchero in Collegio Romano Societatis Jesu . . . Rome: Georgius Plachus, 1709.
Casciato, Maristella, Maria Grazia Ianniello, and Maria Vitale, eds. Enciclopedismo in Roma Barocca: Athanasius Kircher e il Museo del Collegio Romano tra Wunderkammer e Museo Scientifico. Venice: Marsilio, 1986.
Curran, Brian A. “The Renaissance Afterlife of Ancient Egypt (1400–1650).” In Tim Champion and John Tait, eds., Encounters with Ancient Egypt: The Wisdom of Egypt: Changing Visions Through the Ages. London: UCL Press, 2003.
Dear, Peter. Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500–1700. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001.
della Porta, Giambattista. Natural Magick, by John Baptista Porta, a Neopolitane: In Twenty Books . . . Wherein are set forth all the Riches and Delights of the Natural Sciences. London: Thomas Young and Samuel Speed, 1658.
Eco, Umberto. The Search for the Perfect Language. Trans. James Fentress. London: Fontana Press, 1997.
______. Serendipities: Language and Lunacy. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harvest, 1999.
Evelyn, John. Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn, F.R.S.: to which is subjoined the private correspondence between King Charles I and Sir Edward Nicholas, and between Sir Edward Hyde, afterwards Earl of Clarendon, and Sir Richard Browne. Ed. William Bray. London: Henry Colburn, 1850.
Feingold, Mordechai, ed. Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003.
Findlen, Paula. “The Janus Faces of Science in the Seventeenth Century: Athanasius Kircher and Isaac Newton.” In Margaret J. Osler, ed., Rethinking the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 221–246.
______. “Living in the Shadow of Galileo: Antonio Baldigiani (1647–1711), a Jesuit Scientist in Seventeenth-Century Rome.” In Maria P. Donato and Jill Kraye, eds., Conflicting Duties: Science, Medicine, and Religion in Rome, 1550–1750. London: Warburg Institute, 2009.
______. Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
______. “Scientific Spectacle in Baroque Rome: Athanasius Kircher and the Roman College Museum,” in Mordechai Feingold, ed., The Jesuits and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002.
______, ed. Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Fletcher, John. “Astronomy in the Life and Correspondence of Athanasius Kircher.” Isis 61 (1970), pp. 52–67.
______. “A Brief Survey of the Unpublished Correspondence of Athanasius Kircher, S.J. (1602–1680).” Manuscripta 13 (1969), pp. 150–160.
______. “Claude Fabri de Peiresc and the Other French Correspondents of Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680).” Australian Journal of French Studies 9 (1972), pp. 250–273.
______. “Medical Men in the Correspondence of Athanasius Kircher.” Janus: Archives Internationales pour l’Histoire de la Médecine et pour la Géographie Médicale 56 (1969), pp. 259–277.
Galilei, Galileo. Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo. Trans. Stillman Drake. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957.
Garrison, F. H. “Athanasius Kircher and the Germ Theory of Disease.” Science 31, no. 805 (June 3, 1910), pp. 857–859.
Gassendi, Pierre. The Mirrour of True Nobility & Gentility, Being the Life of the Renowned Nicolaus Claudius Fabricius, Lord of Peiresk. Trans. William Rand. London: J. Streater for Humphrey Moseley, 1657.
Gigli, Giacinto. Diario Romano, 1608–1670. Rome: Tumminelli, 1957.
Gilbert, William. On the Magnet: Magnetick Bodies Also, and on the Great Magnet of the Earth: A New Physiology, Demonstrated by Many Arguments & Experiments. Trans. S. P. Thompson and the Gilbert Club. London: Chiswick Press, 1900.
Godwin, Joscelyn. Athanasius Kircher: A Renaissance Man and the Quest for Lost Knowledge. London: Thames & Hudson, 1979.
______. Athanasius Kircher’s Theatre of the World: The Life and Work of the Last Man to Search for Universal Knowledge. Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2009.
Gorman, Michael John. “The Angel and the Compass: Athanasius Kircher’s Geographical Project.” In Paula Findlen, ed., Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything. New York: Routledge, 2004.
______. “Between the Demonic and the Miraculous: Athanasius Kircher and the Baroque Culture of Machines.” Unabridged essay published in abridged form in The Great Art of Knowing: The Baroque Encyclopedia of Athanasius Kircher, ed. Daniel Stolzenberg. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Libraries, 2001, pp. 59–70. http://hotgates.stanford.edu/Eyes/machines/index.htm.
______. The Scientific Counter-Revolution: Mathematics, Natural Philosophy and Experimentalism in Jesuit Culture 1580–c1670. Florence: European University Institute, 1998.
Hankins, Thomas L., and Robert J. Silverman. Instruments and the Imagination. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Hooke, Robert. Micrographia: or, Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses, with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon. London: J. Martyn and J. Allestry, 1665.
Ignatius of Loyola. Personal Writings. Ed. and trans. Joseph A. Munitiz and Philip Endean. New York: Penguin, 1996.
Iversen, Erik. The Myth of Egypt and Its Hieroglyphs in European Tradition. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Universit
y Press, 1993 (1961).
Kircher, Athanasius. Arithmologia, sive, De Abditis Numerorum Mysteriis . . . Rome: Varese, 1665.
______. Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, in Decem Libros Digesta . . . Rome: Scheus, 1646.
______. Ars Magna Sciendi: In XII Libros Digesta, Qua Nova & Universali Methodo . . . Amsterdam: Jansson and Weyerstraet, 1669.
______. China Illustrata, with Sacred and Secular Monuments, Various Spectacles of Nature and Art and Other Memorabilia (1677). Trans. Charles D. Van Tuyl. Muskogee, Okla.: Indian University Press, Bacone College, 1987.
______. Itinerarium Exstaticum Quo Mundi Opificium . . . Rome: Vitale Mascardi, 1656.
______. Magnes, sive de Arte Magnetica Opus Tripartum Quo Praeterquam Quod Universa Magnetis Natura . . . Rome: Scheus, 1641.
______. Magneticum Naturae Regnum, sive, Disceptatio Physiologica de Triplici in Natura Rerum . . . Amsterdam: Johann Jansson, 1667.
______. Mundus Subterraneus, in XII Libros Digestus . . . Amsterdam: Jansson and Weyerstraet, 1664–1665.
______. Oedipus Aegyptiacus, Hoc Est Universalis Hieroglyphicae Veterum Doctrinae Temporum Iniuria Abolitae Instavratio . . . Rome: Mascardi, 1652–1654 [1655].
______. Phonurgia Nova, sive Conjugium Mechanico-Physicum Artis & Naturae Paranympha Phonosophia Concinnatum . . . Kempton, England: Rudolph Dreherr, 1673.
______. Scrutinium Physico-Medicum Contagiosae Luis, Quae Pestis Dicitur . . . Rome: Vitale Mascardi, 1658.
______. Vita Admodum Reverendi P. Athanasii Kircheri, Societ. Jesu, Viri Toto Orbe Celebratissimi. In Hieronymus Ambrosius Langenmantel, Fasciculus Epistolarum Adm. RP Athanasii Kircheri. Augsburg: Utzschneider, 1684.
Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) Page 28
