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Instruments and the Imagination
By Thomas L. Hankins, Robert J. Silverman PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1995 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-02997-9
CHAPTER 1
Instruments and Images: Subjects for the Historiography of Science
In the second aphorism of the Novum Organum Francis Bacon argued that "neither the naked hand nor the understanding left to itself can effect much. It is by instruments and helps that the work is done, which are as much wanted for the understanding as for the hand. And as the instruments of the hand either give motion or guide it, so the instruments of the mind supply either suggestions for the understanding or cautions" In this aphorism Bacon identified two wants of natural philosophy—a new method for investigating nature, and new instruments for carrying out that investigation. He succeeded in elaborating a method, but his suggestions about instruments were vague, going little beyond the insistence that real knowledge of nature lay in the hands of the craftsman and not the philosopher.
From our perspective Bacon could not help but be vague, because in 1620, when he wrote, the instruments that made the experimental philosophy possible were just beginning to arrive on the scene. Of course instruments to measure those things that Aristotle called quantities—that is, distance, angle, time, weight—are as old as recorded history. These include rulers, balances, clocks of different kinds, and instruments for surveying, navigation, and astronomy. In the early modern period they were called "mathematical" and were manufactured and employed by "mathematical practitioners." But in the seventeenth century a different kind of instrument made its appearance. The most important of these instruments was the telescope that Galileo used successfully in astronomy for the first time in 1609. Other new instruments in the seventeenth century were the microscope and the air pump—instruments that were to transform natural science. Instead of just measuring length, weight, or time, these instruments distorted nature in some way, either by magnifying it as in the case of the telescope and microscope, or by producing an unnatural condition as in the vacuum created in an air pump. Experiments performed with these instruments were called "elaborate" and were performed in an "elaboratory" or "laboratory." They were called elaborate because they went beyond mere observation and "tortured" nature in order to reveal her secrets. They were also called "philosophical" (as opposed to mathematical) and they were employed by philosophers, whose interests were more intellectual than practical.
Such devices as the telescope and the microscope had existed before the seventeenth century, but not as philosophical instruments. They were instead part of what was called "natural magic." The purpose of the instruments of natural magic was to produce wondrous effects. Natural magic differed from black magic in that the effects were natural rather than supernatural even though they may have appeared to be miraculous. As Giambattista Delia Porta explained in 1558:
There are two sorts of magic; the one is infamous, and unhappie, because it hath to do with foul spirits, and consists of inchantments and wicked curiosity; and this is called sorcery; an art which all learned and good men detest; neither is it able to yeeld any truth of Reason or Nature, but stands meerly upon fancies and imaginations, such as vanish presently away and leave nothing behinde them.... The other Magick is natural; which all excellent wise men do admit and embrace, and worship with great applause; neither is there anything more highly esteemed, or better thought of by men of learning.... I think that [natural] Magick is nothing else but the survey of the whole course of Nature.
The natural magician reveled in his ability to trick the senses of his audience and to conceal the causes of the effects he produced, and he did it with instruments. Delia Porta's Natural Magick (1558) was loaded with trick mirrors, secret speaking tubes, and automata of all kinds along with recipes for removing spots from clothes, curing diseases, removing pimples, making seeds grow, and other such "secrets." But among his tricks were the germs of the telescope, microscope, barometer, and air pump. It is not coincidental that the earliest known sketch of a telescope is by Delia Porta, that Galileo probably got the idea for his thermometer from Cornelis Drebbel's famous perpetual motion machine at the court of James I, that Robert Boyle learned of the air pump from reading the Mechanica hydraulico-pneumatica (1657) of the natural magician Gaspar Schott, and that even Newton got his prisms at a fair where they were sold as instruments of natural magic. Most of the "philosophical" instruments, which were the foundation of the experimental philosophy as it developed during the Scientific Revolution, had existed in an earlier version in natural magic.
Experimental philosophers like Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke put their instruments to new and different uses. But one cannot conclude that an enlightened experimental philosophy simply replaced a baleful natural magic in the seventeenth century. In the first place natural magic did not disappear. Athanasius Kircher (about whom we will have much to say in the following pages) happily compiled his enormous Latin tomes completely oblivious to the radical new methods of his contemporaries Descartes, Boyle, and Newton. Nor was Kircher by any means the last of the practitioners of natural magic. Instruments in the natural magic tradition continued to be invented well into the nineteenth century, even though they ceased to be called magical. Natural magic never really disappeared. It was merely subsumed under new categories such as entertainment, technology, and natural science.
One reason for the persistence of natural magic was its practicality. We tend not to think of magic as a practical art, certainly not in a utilitarian sense, but many of the goals of natural magic—creating realistic images where there is no substance, communicating instantly around the globe, imitating and preserving the human voice, revealing hidden sources of power, traveling under the sea, and flying through the air—are technologies we now take for granted. We no longer consider them magic, but in the seventeenth century they were, and their modern "inventors" such as Charles Wheatstone, David Brewster, and Alexander Graham Bell had more than a toehold in natural magic. One can ask, for instance, why Brewster wrote his Letters on Natural Magic Addressed to Sir Walter Scott in 1832. In the letters Brewster extols the triumph of modern science over dark superstition, but he is nonetheless captivated by the instruments of the magician, as his own invention of the kaleidoscope demonstrates. Or we can ask whether Wheatstone's telegraph and stereoscope were that far distant from his "enchanted lyre" and "concertina," or Bell's telephone so very different from the speaking machines of von Kempelen and Faber (chapters 7 and 8).
A second reason for the persistence of natural magic comes from its emphasis on instruments. If we approach the Scientific Revolution through a study of experimental method, we recognize an important divergence between the aims of natural magic and those of experimental philosophy—the goal of natural magic was to emulate the wonders of nature and glorify their "wondrousness"; the goal of the experimental philosophy was to establish "matters of fact." If, on the other hand, we study instruments, we see a continuity. Historians and philosophers of science have traditionally debated the relative roles of observation, experiment, and theory in science with the assumption that instruments are made and used in obvious ways in response to the demands of observation and experiment. More recently they have begun to recognize that instruments are much more problematic. Instruments have a life of their own. They do not merely follow theory; often they determine theory, because instruments determine what is possible, and what is possible determines to a large extent what can be thought. In this book we consider a number of instruments that came from the natural magic tradition but also became subjects of debate by experimental philosophers. Because they are part of both traditions, they raise questions about what counts as a scientific instrument, what is the proper method for studying nature, and ultimately, what is natural science.
Rather than trace out a sharp boundary between natural science and other human activity, we show how these instruments moved easily from natural philosophy to art and to popular culture; our investigation will follow the same paths. In so doing, we will use these instruments to consider such problems as the purpose of natural magic, the nature of demonstration, analogies between the senses, distortion versus duplication of the senses, language and signs, images of sight and sound, and alternative views of nature.
Instruments and the Senses
With the exception of the sunflower clock, all the instruments discussed in this book were used to replicate or investigate in some way the phenomena of sight and sound. To those who believed, as Robert Hooke did, that instruments were extensions of the senses, this would not have been surprising. Sight and sound were privileged senses in art, literature, and science. Therefore an instrument was often something with which to see or hear. What was seen or heard, of course, required interpretation, especially if the instrument intentionally magnified or in some other way distorted the image or sound. These were problems of which seventeenth-century investigators were well aware. Francis Bacon, for instance, assumed the existence of four mental faculties in order to explain how the mind learned about nature. These were sense, memory, imagination, and reason. According to Bacon, information coming from the senses had to be organized into images before the reason could operate on it, and this was the function of imagination (see fig. 1.1). The imagination was not limited to the senses, because it could also call up images that had been stored in the memory and could combine parts of images to create new ones. Thus the imagination was the creative faculty, because it had the ability to create entirely new images from old ones, even fantastical images as in dreams. It could also draw comparisons between them. In the Advancement of Learning Bacon wrote, "For the mind of man is far from the nature of a clear and equal glass wherein the beams of things should reflect according to their true incidence; nay, it is rather like an enchanted glass, full of superstition and imposture, if it be not delivered and reduced." In this analogy Bacon compared the imagination to a favorite instrument of natural magic and found both of them unreliable. Both instruments and the imagination were essential for creativity in natural science, but both could distort as well as create.
As Bacon planned his project for the reformation of all knowledge, he recognized that the images produced by instruments needed to be "delivered and reduced," just as did the images formed by the imagination. Natural magic produced wonders by tricking the senses, but it was, according to Bacon, "full of error and vanity," and thus he sought a new use for instruments that would correctly "deliver and reduce" the images that they created.
In certain cases a distorted image could be an advantage. The telescope and microscope distorted the image by magnifying it in order to make hidden things visible. But Bacon doubted the usefulness of these instruments, because their application seemed to him to be severely limited. He admitted that Galileo had, indeed, made "noble discoveries" with the telescope, but added that Galileo's "experiment stops with these few discoveries, and many other things equally worthy of investigation are not discovered by the same means." The air pump created a space that might or might not be a vacuum, but certainly it was a distortion of ordinary atmospheric space. This question of whether instruments should duplicate human perception exactly or distort it to the philosopher's advantage was not limited to the Scientific Revolution. It was argued as vigorously in the nineteenth century with respect to the stereoscope as it had been in the seventeenth with respect to the telescope, and it remains a question for all instruments that make visual images (chapter 7).
Likewise the substitution of one sense for another, or synesthesia, was an important issue raised by the instruments that we discuss. In some cases, such as graphical recording in acoustics, the only way to analyze sound "scientifically" rather than musically was to represent it visually by an instrument that made a graphic trace (chapter 6). It was not clear how far this substitution of one sense for another could be taken. Louis-Bertrand Castel, the inventor of the ocular harpsichord, and William Jones, the popularizer of the Aeolian harp, wanted to carry it very far indeed, as did the romantics who employed the Aeolian harp in their poetry (chapters 4 and 5).
Instruments and Language
The reduction from the imagination that Bacon required the reason to perform needed to be done carefully. He was particularly concerned about the reduction from images to words. Bacon complained that words often replaced substance altogether. Philosophers, who dealt only with words, lost contact with the objects of sense and built philosophical systems that did not correspond to experience.
Bacon's objection was, in part, a reaction against the methods of natural magic. In natural magic, words and things were bound closely together. Words were more than arbitrary symbols for things; they contained hidden signification, so that through the word one could learn about the thing. A good example is the emblem, which employed both words and images to create an allegory with a hidden meaning. It was a kind of secret language that signified more than the images and words taken by themselves could mean. It was also secret in the sense that only those learned individuals who had been initiated into the meaning of the images and words could understand it.
The natural magician shared this tradition. He operated by allegory and analogy, because that was the only way that he could operate. He believed that real causes were unknowable; they were occult and could not be observed directly, but through analogy he could discern them indirectly. He believed that both words and instruments pointed to the concealed essences of things. Thus Athanasius Kircher's sunflower clock (chapter 2) was more than a timepiece. It was emblematic of (and therefore revealed and made manifest) the occult cosmic magnetic force that was the cause of all change. Because the method of analogy willingly conflated words with things, natural magicians were entranced by both instruments and language.
The "new philosophy" of Bacon, Descartes, Boyle, and Locke turned against this way of looking at the world. If natural philosophers were to use instruments that they found in natural magic, they would have to get rid of the hidden sympathies and antipathies associated with them. Just as they called for a reformation of language, they also called for a reformation in the use of instruments—that is, a new experimental method. This created a dilemma for philosophers like John Locke. Locke was especially vigorous in his condemnation of figurative speech. "All the art of rhetoric," he wrote, "all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheats." Like Bacon before him, Locke vigorously attacked the confusion between words and things. He believed that the major source of error in our study of the natural world could be found in this misuse of language.
But how should one consider philosophical instruments? Are they more like words, or more like things, or are they halfway in between? They are certainly things, but things whose purpose it is to help us analyze and reason about other things. They are things that we construct to represent and interpret nature. In these capacities they act more like words. If figures expressed in words—that is, analogies like metaphor, simile, comparison, and so forth—are perfect cheats, are the figures presented by instruments cheats also? Would it not be better to depend on our direct unaided senses, rather than allow distorting instruments to come between us and the objects that we observe? Locke finally concluded that the microscope, while not exactly a cheat, would be of little use in studying nature. His criticism of figurative speech was directed especially against the figure of analogy, and to the extent that instruments were used as analogies to nature they were suspect. Not all were convinced, however. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, those seeking alternative approaches to the study of nature attempted to reinstate the magician's identity between words and things, and to reestablish the analogical and symbolical character of instruments (chapters 4 and 5).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Instruments and the Imagination by Thomas L. Hankins, Robert J. Silverman. Copyright © 1995 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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