Charles Singer: A Short History of Scientific Ideas to 1900

One of my favorite books from Ward's Lifetime of Reading so far has been E.H. Gombrich's The Story of Art.  Instead of just discussing various movements and their proponents, he wove a narrative of art as the constant interplay between the Turners and the Constables of the world, the Caravaggios and the Caraccis.  The story of art has been that of a pendulum swinging constantly between what we see and what we know.  Between our senses and our mind.  Reading that book has influenced how I see art more than any other experience.

This is probably responsible for my glee once I realized a few chapters in that Singer's intent was to do the same for scientific thought.  The story he tells, though he takes a well-calibrated amount of space to explain the various theories and discoveries themselves, is largely one of the constant push and pull between Plato and Aristotle--between mind and matter.  Scientific thought--and intellectual inquiry of all flavors--can never resist the urge to extrapolate beyond what we see.  To Platonize things and look for the underlying principle, the ideal.  Neither can it long stay in the theoretical, and before long it returns to the concrete, skeptical world of Aristotle. 

Which is why the story is filled with characters who, sensing the approach of the parabolic arc, turn their attention in the other direction.  Some look inward for answers, as Singer observes in his lovely treatment of Kepler:

"That Kepler sought so persistently for a simple mathematical scheme of the material worlds and, having found one, he regarded it as fitting his scheme of the moral world, suggests certain reflections on the workings of the human mind itself.  Whatever reality may be, we seem to be so made that we aspire towards an interpretation of the universe that shall hold together in a complete and reasonable scheme.  The fact that we thus aspire does not in the least prove that such a scheme corresponds to reality" (239).

And even as those forces draw the pendulum in one direction, others are gathering their momentum.  Those such as Giordano Bruno, easily the most fascinating figure in Singer's treatment of the subject.  He is described as a renegade monk who "showed a lofty indifference to common sense that cannot fail to command our respect--at a distance" (218).  Bruno's willingness to completely jettison Platonic models of existence makes him a far more engaging character than his predecessor, Copernicus, although it is this latter whom we remember.  His notion of space as being without a center and, therefore infinite, was diametrically opposed to the contemporary anthropocentric models.  This vision went far further than, preceded, and is more sustainable than Galileo's.

Of course all of this ties in nicely to my general framework for existence: the interplay between the nacheinander and the nebeneinander.  The series and parallel  natures of our experience.  Where will the pendulum fall?  Is reality what we see, or what we know, Subhuti?  Singer presciently closes his book with a supposition on that matter:  "It seems probable that Science itself is now reaching a stage in which an adequate scientific equipment will involve some regard to the world as an interconnected whole, in other words, in which Science and Philosophy will dwell less apart . . . Notably it seems probable that the conceptions of the separation of mind from mind and of mind from matter may need modification" (516).  No pendulum can swing forever.  At some point, Van Gogh and Monet, Linnaeus and Cuvier, will have to come to rest.