In fact, the pedigree of giant shoulders includes so much interest and weight of material that the great sociologist of science, Robert K. Merton, wrote one of the wittiest, yet deepest, works of modern scholarship by devoting an entire volume to pre-Newtonian uses of the image—On the Shoulders of Giants (New York, Free Press, 1965). Merton traces the depiction at least back to the twelfth-century lancet windows in the south transept of the Cathedral of Chartres, where the four Gospel writers of the New Testament appear as dwarfs sitting upon the shoulders of four great Old Testament prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, depicted as giants. To show how rich, how picky, how contentious, how nuanced, and how subtle the history of this image can be, Merton devotes several learned chapters (of wonderfully light touch) to the seemingly endless wrangles among scholars about whether the Moderns who see farther by sitting atop Ancient shoulders must be depicted (as at Chartres) as dwarfs—so that the Renaissance conviction about superiority of the Ancients may be respected, even while we affirm the growth of knowledge—or whether the Moderns may be envisioned as equal in stature to the Ancients. (Some kind souls even objected that full-sized Moderns would surely strain the backs and bones of enfeebled Ancients, and that dwarfs must be preferred if only to spare poor Plato and Isaiah, thus making their yoke easier and lightening their literal burden.)
To show how far this wrangle could extend, and to quote from one of the most delightful documents of the time (a treatise that both Merton and I would love to rescue from its undeserved oblivion), George Hakewill, the Archdeacon of Surrey (and therefore not a practicing scientist, but a theologian who proves, thereby, that this seventeenth-century struggle did not pit science against religion) crafted a spirited defense of Modernist convictions in his prize essay, written for the official philosophical disputation at the Cambridge commencement of 1628. Hakewill (1578–1649) lit into the common and pessimistic belief that the entire universe, from the history of planets to the geography of landforms to the chronology of civilizations, marched inexorably into continuous decrepitude and decay—a process that must soon culminate in the earth’s destruction. To the contrary, Hakewill argued, physical history has been stable, or quieting down from an initially distressing chaos, whereas the chronology of civilizations has featured continual progress in knowledge, morals, and sensibility, just as the Moderns argued against claims for the superiority of Ancient wisdom.
Following his generation’s penchant for generous titles, Hakewill called his treatise An Apologie or Declaration of the Power and Providence of God in the Government of the World. Consisting in an Examination and Censure of the Common Error Touching Nature’s Perpetual and Universal Decay. The book surely enjoyed some initial éclat. John Milton composed Latin hexameters for distribution during the Cambridge debate, and Samuel Pepys said of Hakewill’s volume, “I fell to read a little in it, and did satisfy myself mighty fair in the saying that the world do not grow old at all.”
Hakewill’s spirited argument proceeds in a clear and persuasive order. He first dismisses all claims for physical decay either of the cosmos or the earth. He then takes up the strongest case for progress in human history: the accumulation of empirical knowledge about physical and organic phenomena—in other words, the improvement in what we would now call scientific understanding. Hakewill even dares to criticize the ultimate Greek and Roman standards of Aristotle and Pliny: “It is most certain that even Aristotle himself and Pliny were ignorant of many things, and wrote many not only uncertain, but now convinced of manifest error and absurdity.”
Hakewill then moves to his most difficult task of arguing that manners and morals, and not only the more obviously accumulative character of purely factual information, have also improved through time, making modern Europe a paragon of rectitude in comparison with the supposed refinement of Greek and Roman society. The titles of Hakewill’s numerous chapters provide a good summary of both his general argument and the force of his prose. Hakewill particularly emphasizes Roman excess: “Of their long and often sitting and usual practice of vomiting, even among their women, as also of the number of their courses at a sitting, together with the rarity and costliness of their several services.” “That their riot did not only show itself in the delicious choice of their fare, but in voracity and gormandizing, in regard of the quantity some of them devoured at a meal.” “Of the Romans’ excessive luxury in dressing and apparel. How effeminate they were in regard of their bodies, especially about their hair.”
Hakewill’s texts are endlessly entertaining, ranging from infanticide through human sacrifice to this description of the laws of Lycurgus, the traditional (but perhaps mythical) founder of the practices of Sparta in the seventh century B.C.:He ordained other laws so much in favor and furtherance of lust and all carnality, yea in the worst kind, that it might justly be said he made his whole commonwealth worse than a bordello. For he instituted certain wrestlings and dances, and other exercises of boys and wenches naked, to be done in public at divers times of the year, in the presence both of young and old men, which what effect it might work in the minds and manners of their citizens any man may easily judge.
But moving back to the shoulders of giants, Hakewill strongly affirms that we cannot ascribe any putative superiority of Ancient ways to an inherent decay in nature, but only to the bad, yet eminently correctable, habits of modern folks: “For matter of learning and knowledge if we come short of the Ancients, we need not impute it to nature’s decay; our own riot, our idleness and negligence in regard of them, will sufficiently discharge nature, and justly cast the blame upon ourselves.” Hakewill then quotes the sixteenth-century Spanish scholar Juan Luis Vives, strongly rejecting the polite and diplomatic tradition of depicting Moderns as dwarfs upon the shoulders of Ancient giants. We are all, Hakewill asserts, the same size, as he translates Vives’s Latin statement into English (fifty years before Newton invoked the same image):For a false and fond similitude it is of some, which they take up as a most witty and proper one, that we being compared to the Ancients, are as dwarfs, or they giants, but we are all of one stature, save that we are lifted up somewhat higher by their means, conditionally there be found in us the same studiousness, watchfulness and love of truth as was in them: which if they be wanting, then are we not dwarfs, nor set on the shoulders of giants, but men of a competent stature groveling on the earth.
I readily confess my chief aim in presenting the famous seventeenth-century quarrel of Ancients and Moderns as, at least in part, a birth pang of the Scientific Revolution, and a way of understanding an inevitable suspicion that arose at this time between nascent scientists and entrenched humanists, a mistrust that should have dissipated long ago, but has unfortunately persisted as our legacy today. That is, I wish to show the complexity and multifaceted character of this founding debate, so that we do not conceptualize the birth and later history of modern science as a war with two unambiguous sides, a clean dichotomy between dogmatic and hidebound humanists holding the fort of Antiquity against a progressive assault and inevitable breach by defenders of free inquiry and the power of new discovery. First of all, no mutual hatred ever existed; nearly all founders of the Scientific Revolution revered (and liberally quoted) the great sources of Antiquity. They also believed (and proved) that knowledge could progress by building upon those admirable foundations—the point of both Bacon’s paradox and, particularly, Newton’s admirable image of Antiquity as a firm foundation anchored by intellectual giants. Second, insofar as we may specify sides in the quarrel between Ancients and Moderns, the scorecard of disciplinary affiliations does not identify the players of this particular game. In particular, the ranks of Modernists did not include only the new scientific scholars, but also encompassed many prominent intellectuals from literary and other humanistic callings, including the theologian Hakewill.
As a closing example of interdisciplinary medley among the Moderns, and to forsake anglophonic parochialism by a short jog across the Channel (for the so-called quarrel of Anc
ients and Moderns broke at the same time, and with equal intensity, in both England and France), the story of a remarkable French family should forestall, within its own microcosm, any temptation to view this important historical episode as a dichotomous battle between science and the humanities. If the later revolutionary motto of liberté, égalité, fraternité could ever be aptly applied to any minimal group of three, then I nominate the Perrault brothers as exemplars of all three virtues—the last by a literal bond of biology beyond their choice, but the first two by their own splendid accomplishments. A fourth brother became a noted theologian, a supporter who remains on the sidelines of this particular account.
Claude Perrault (1613–1688), the most prominent scientist among the brothers, joined the extensive ranks of martyrs to his profession—a tradition admirably initiated by the most prominent of Ancients, when Pliny died in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. For Perrault expired, at age seventy-five, albeit in a peculiar way that scarcely evokes a conventionally heroic image of death in battle—from an illness contracted after dissecting a camel. Among Claude’s numerous talents, he served on the committee that redesigned the eastern façade of the Louvre under Louis XIV. But his chief fame, arising from his medical training, resides in a grand zoological project that he conceived and directed for many years: the establishment of a committee of experts within the Royal Academy of Sciences of Paris, convened to dissect and describe the major forms of vertebrate life by objective procedures of unparalleled care and rigor—particularly by doing each dissection in the presence of several skilled biologists who could reach consensus about their results, and by observing, when available, several specimens and not assuming that a single individual must represent all general features of its type (see figures 17 and 18 for the frontispiece of their book and an example of their classically inspired mode of illustration).
Their resulting volume, published anonymously to emphasize the collective and objective nature of the program, bears the triumphant and lengthy title in my English translation of 1702: The Natural History of Animals, Containing the Anatomical Description of Several Creatures Dissected by the Royal Academy of Sciences of Paris, Wherein the Construction, Fabric, and Genuine Use of the Parts Are Exactly and Finely Delineated in Copper Plates, and the Whole Enriched with Many Curious Physical and No Less Useful Anatomical Remarks, Being One of the Most Considerable Productions of That Academy.
In his preface, Perrault extols the virtues of repeatable observations, objectively verified by several experts, in the codification of an optimal methodology for the growing Scientific Revolution:That which is most considerable in our memoirs is that unblemishable evidence of a certain and acknowledged verity. For they are not the work of one private person, who may suffer himself to be prevailed upon by his own opinion, who can hardly perceive what contradicts his first conceptions, for which he has all the blindness and fondness which everyone has for his own children. . . . Our memoirs contain only matters of fact that have been verified by a whole Society, composed of men which have eyes to see these sorts of things. . . . Even as they have hands to seek them with more dexterity and success.
Figure 17.
Figure 18.
Perrault then explicitly weighs in on the Modern side by professing his admiration for the Ancients, while asserting the inevitability of their errors, the progress of modern scientific knowledge, and the right of Moderns to honor their Ancient forebears most truly by correcting their mistakes and thereby advancing a collective enterprise of the ages:We pretend only to answer some matters of fact, which we advance, and that these facts are the sole powers whereby we would prevail against the Authority of the great persons which have writ before us; seeing that speaking of them with all the respect they deserve, we do own that the defects which are seen in their works are there only because it is impossible to find any thing which has acquired the utmost perfection. . . . For we do think we render a great honor to the merit of the Ancients by demonstrating that we have discovered some small slight errors in their works, than if after that manner of those who distrust their own understanding, and never ground the judgment which they do make of the value of any thing but on prejudices, we should esteem them only because we thought they were done by great Personages, and not by reason of the Knowledge which we have of what they have done well or ill.
As a curious footnote to brother Claude’s biology, and as evidence of the hold that the mystique of the Ancients continued to exert over the most committed of Moderns, let me cite the least modest statement that I have ever read in the literature of science. In the closing paragraph of his preface, Claude Perrault, following custom and near necessity, praises the great monarch of France, the Sun King, Louis XIV, who had put his money by his mouth in supporting the committee’s labors on vertebrate dissection. Perrault exalts Louis by likening him to Alexander the Great. But why compare an aged monarch in a stable nation with a peripatetic warrior who conquered half of the world and died so young in his boots? The reason for such an odd choice becomes obvious after a moment of reflection. Who had served Alexander as a private tutor in his youth? None other than Aristotle himself. So, as the textual evidence suggests, brother Claude probably selected Alexander not primarily for Louis’s sake, but in order to make the comparison of his own scientific work with the labor of Aristotle himself!Our memoirs thus being composed, it is to be hoped that they will afford matter for Natural History, which will not be unworthy of the greatest king that ever has been; and that if in this to equal Alexander, as he equals and surpasses him in all other things, he wants [in the old meaning of “lacks”] so great a person as Aristotle, the care which His Majesty has taken to supply this defect by the number of persons which he has chosen for this employ [that is, for dissecting animals and writing this volume of results], and by the order observed to perform the things with an absolute exactness, will make this work, which was undertaken by his command, not inferior perhaps to that which has been done for Alexander.
The second brother, Pierre Perrault (1611–1680), did not work primarily in science, but followed successive careers in law and government service. He did, however, write one great and enduring scientific treatise that established the modern study of hydrology and, in one vital sense, introduced a key proposition of the mechanical worldview as a substitute for an older style of thinking that had symbolized, perhaps more than any other general conviction, the Ancient concept of material reality then under strong attack by the Scientific Revolution. In his 1674 volume, De l’origine des fontaines (On the Origin of Springs), brother Pierre advocated the Modernist view of mechanical causality against the Renaissance conviction, dating back to classical times and supported by religious authority as well, that the earth, as the macrocosm and central body of the universe, may be compared in form and action to the microcosm of the human body. (Such a view, for example, underlay Leonardo’s geological and geographic writings about landforms and water—see Gould, Leonardo’s Mountain of Clamp and the Diet of Worms, 1998.)
In this venerable comparison, the bones, blood, breath, and internal heat of the human body—representing the four Greek elements of earth, water, air, and fire—found their counterparts in the rocks, streams, atmosphere, and volcanic heat of our planet. Moreover, just as these elements cycle through the human body, thus maintaining a living entity in steady state, so too must their earthly counterparts cycle through the planet, also (and therefore) construed as an organic and self-sustaining object. Under this concept, the water flowing in streams from the mountains to the seas must then ascend through underground channels (or some other internal system) to the tops of mountains, thus to repeat their descent and maintain the cycle. The “obvious” alternative that we all understand and recognize as factual today—that water returns from the seas to the mountains by evaporation and rain—could not suffice, or even be conceived, under the controlling analogy of microcosm and macrocosm, for the blood of the human body flows through internal channels, and the water of the
earth must behave in a similar manner.
Leonardo and others knew about evaporation and rain, but they regarded this source of water as trivial and entirely insufficient to resupply the mountain streams (which must therefore be fed by internal pumping from channels analogous with human blood vessels). Brother Pierre won his small but lasting place in the history of science by proving, and providing numbers and measurements for the Seine to back up his claim, that rainwater could indeed supply all rivers, and that no recourse to internal channels need be sought. The known, and measurable, mechanical forces of evaporation and precipitation thus prevailed over an organic analogy that had nourished centuries of human belief (but not the earth).
Nonetheless, I rest my case for ecumenicism among supporters of the Modern side in this grand debate, and particularly for the allegiance of scientists and humanists—all the varied skills of foxes, united by deepest ties, blood itself in this case, to secure the hedgehog’s one great goal of a good and examined life—upon the third and most famous brother, Charles Perrault (1628–1703), the leading literary light of this extraordinary family. Brother Charles became a major figure in the Académie Française, and one of the most celebrated literary men of his time. We may remember him best today—and why not?—as the author, in 1697, of a collection of stories for children entitled Contes de ma mère l’oye, or Tales of Mother Goose. But, in his own time, brother Charles won more renown for his vigorous defense of the Moderns, carried out largely among the literati and within the august Académie, in France’s intense version of the debate between Ancients and Moderns.