CHAPTER VIII
EXPERIMENT
Zenith. Law. Investigate. Conceit. Gentleman. Love. Protestant.
Philosophy, alchemy, and mathematics were not the only branches of learning in which the Arabs had excelled. The appearance in English of such words as azimuth, nadir, and zenith towards the end of the fourteenth century suggests among other things that the thinking of this Syrian race contributed in no small degree to the rise in Europe of the new astronomy. These three Arabic words (two of them for the first time in English) are to be found in Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe, written in 1391 for the instruction of his little son, “Lowis”; and this interesting document contains many other words also for which the Oxford Dictionary does not give any earlier quotation, such as almanac, ecliptic, equinox, equator, horizon, latitude, longitude, meridian, minute (meaning one-sixtieth of a degree), while zodiac was used by Gower a few years before.
Such words show us that the Europe of the Dark Ages had been experiencing once more what the ancient scientists had known. Its learned men had been marking down recurrences of natural phenomena and orientating themselves on the earth by dividing its face up into imaginary rings and segments. For such purposes they had found Latin and Greek terms ready to their hand, and the survival of the Greek zodiac reminds us that they had, moreover, adopted the ancient system of mapping out the heavens into twelve “signs.” When, therefore, we find three Arabic words among these relics of classical wisdom, we need not be surprised to see that they express something which the ancients had, apparently, never felt the need of expressing—that is, an abstracted geometrical way of mapping out the visible heavens. These are conceived of as a vast sphere encircling the earth; the zenith and the nadir are its poles, while the azimuths are meridians of celestial longitude.
It is probable that, with the use of these words, there came for the first time into the consciousness of man the possibility of seeing himself purely as a solid object situated among solid objects. Of course, the Arab astronomer of the Dark and Middle Ages still saw the earth as the centre round which the universe revolved, and he would no more have dreamed of doubting the “astral” quality of the planets than the schoolmaster of to-day who instructs his pupils to write down “Let x = 20 oranges” doubts whether oranges have any taste. Nevertheless we may feel pretty sure that those minds which were apparently the first to think of cutting up the sky without reference to the constellations, and which could, moreover, develop so fully the great and novel system of abstraction which they called algebra, did their part in bringing about that extraordinary revolution in astronomical thought which is associated with the name of Copernicus. It is true that the astronomy of Plato’s time had been intimately connected with arithmetic and geometry; but Plato’s “number” and his geometry do not appear to have been quite the abstract sciences which these things are to-day. What we call their “laws” seem to have been felt, not as intellectual deductions, but rather as real activities of soul—that human soul which, as we saw, the philosopher could not yet feel to be wholly separate from a larger world Soul, or planetary Soul. The Zodiacal signs, for instance, had been as much, if not more, classifications of this Soul as they had been sections of space. The word comes from the Greek ‘zōdion’, a little animal, and not only was every sign distinguished by a constellation, of which the majority were associated with some beast, but human character and human destiny were believed to be bound up inextricably with the position of the sun and the planets among these signs.
If, therefore, there is any truth in the belief of the old Greek philosophers and of some modern historians that the study of mathematics has its origin in the observed movements of the stars, the progress is of the same nature as that which we noticed at the end of the [last chapter]. Is it too fanciful to picture to ourselves how, drawn into the minds of a few men, the relative positions and movements of the stars gradually developed a more and more independent life there until, with the rise in Europe first of trigonometry and then of algebra, they detached themselves from the outside world altogether? And then by a few great men like Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, these abstract mathematics were re-fitted to the stars which had given them birth, and the result was that cosmogony of infinite spaces and a tiny earth in which our imaginations roam to-day? When the Aryan imagination had at last succeeded in so detaching its “ideas” about the phenomena of the universe that these could be “played with,” as mathematicians say, in the form of an equation, then, no doubt, it was a fairly easy matter to turn them inside out.
The alterations wrought in the meanings of many of our common words by this revolution of physical outlook are not difficult to perceive and yet not easy to realize. As the discoveries of Kepler and Galileo slowly filtered through to the popular consciousness, first of all simple words like atmosphere, down, earth, planet, sky, space, sphere, star, up, ... underwent a profound yet subtle semantic change. And then, in the eighteenth century, as Newton’s discoveries became more widely known, further alterations took place. Weight,[39] for instance, acquired a new significance, differing from mass, which also changed, having formerly meant simply a lump of matter.[40] Gravity,[41] (from the Latin ‘gravitas’ ‘heaviness’) took on its great new meaning, and the new words gravitation and gravitate were formed, the later being soon adapted to metaphorical uses. If we cared to examine them closely enough, we should probably find that from this point a certain change of meaning gradually spread over all words containing the notion of attraction, or ideas closely related to it. The twin phenomena of gravitation and magnetism, contemplated by most of us at an early age, and impalpably present in the meanings of so many of the words we hear spoken around us, make the conception of one lifeless body acting on another from a distance easy and familiar.[42] But the very word attraction (from the Latin ‘ad-trahere’, ‘to draw’ or ‘drag towards’) may well serve to remind us that until the discovery of gravitation this conception must have been practically beyond the range of human intellection. There was formerly no half-way house in the imagination between actual dragging or pushing and forces emanating from a living being, such as love or hate, human or divine, or those “influences” of the stars which have already been mentioned.
A good illustration of this fact—and one which takes us back again to the seventeenth century—is the word law. The Latin ‘lex’ was first applied to natural phenomena by Bacon. Later in the century law was used in the same sense, but it did not then mean quite what it does to-day. The “laws of Nature” were conceived of by those who first spoke of them as present commands of God. It is noticeable that we still speak of Nature “obeying” these laws, though we really think of them now rather as abstract principles—logical deductions of our own which we have arrived at by observation and experiment.
Some account of Francis Bacon’s general influence, as a writer, on our language has already been given in [Chapter IV]. His influence on thought was far greater, for he was in some sense the moving spirit of that intellectual revolution which began to sweep over Europe in the sixteenth century. It was a revolution comparable in many ways to the change inaugurated by Aristotle twenty centuries earlier, and there is accordingly much in Bacon’s work that reminds us of the Greek philosopher. To begin with, he was thoroughly dissatisfied with the whole method of thought as he found it in his day, and, like Aristotle, he strove first of all to effect a reformation in this. Aristotle had written the Organum—that is to say, the “Instrument” (of Thought)—and Bacon intended his Novum Organum to go one step farther. He proclaimed himself satisfied with Aristotle’s legacy—the prevailing logical system of syllogism and deduction—as far as it went. Given the “premises,” it was the correct line of further discovery. What he questioned was the Scholastic premises themselves, and he propounded accordingly a new and surer method of establishing fresh ones. It is known as the “inductive method.” This is not the place to expound Bacon’s logical system, and it will suffice that it was based on an extensive and, above all, a systematic observation of Nature herself. Aristotle had indeed (though the Schoolmen had nearly forgotten it) pointed the way to such an observation, but it was left for Bacon to try and construct a prejudice-proof system of arranging and classifying the results. These instances, as they were called, were, on the one hand, to be manufactured by means of experiment, and on the other to be arranged and weeded out according to their significance. The word crucial comes to us from Bacon’s Latin phrase ‘instantia crucis’—the crucial instance—which, like a sign-post, decided between two rival hypotheses by proving one and disproving the other; and it may be said that he endeavoured, but failed, to alter the meaning of axiom itself from “a self-evident proposition” to “a proposition established by the method of experimental induction”.
Once more men turned the light of their curiosity upon the stubborn phenomena of the outside world, and as it was Aristotle’s works in which we first found the Greek anatomy, ‘cutting up’, so it is Bacon who first uses dissection (from the Latin for the same thing) in its modern technical meaning. After an interval of about 1,500 years, the weighing, measuring, examining, and cutting up had now begun again, and they have gone on ever since. How far Francis Bacon was responsible for the form subsequently taken by scientific thought will probably remain a matter of dispute. His views on ecclesiastical authority, on Scholastic philosophy, on Aristotle, on the Alchemists, certainly suggest that he possessed what the nineteenth century has called the “scientific attitude” to an extent which distinguishes him startlingly from any previous or contemporary writer; acid, hydraulic, and suction are among the words first found in his pages; but, above all, his consciousness of greater changes afoot is manifested linguistically in such things as his use of the words progressive and retrograde in an historical sense unknown, as we shall see, to the majority of thinkers until the middle of the eighteenth century, or his equally innovating distinction between ancient and modern. A marked increase over the second quarter of the seventeenth century in the number of words expressing the notion of doubt, such as dubious (used of opinions), dubiousness, dubitable, ceptic, sceptical, sceptically, scepticism, scepticity, scepticize, compares with an increase of only one or two during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. And at about the same time the words curious, curiosity, and inquisitive seem to have lost the air of pious disapproval which they had previously carried with them when used to express the love of inquiry. How much of this is due to novel combinations, such as “a natural curiosity and inquisitive appetite”, which we find in Bacon’s Advancement of Learning? We cannot say. There are symptoms of the coming metamorphosis already, before his time, in the appearance in English of the sixteenth century of such significant new terms as analyse, distinguish, investigate, together with the semantic change of observe from “to obey a rule”, or “to inspect auguries” into its modern meaning, and similar changes in the case of experiment and experimental. It is impossible to prove these things. As with Aristotle, so with Bacon, it is impossible to say whether his own intellectual volume displaced the great wave or whether he merely rose upon its early crest.