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From superstition to science

The contrasting economic fortunes of the different parts of Europe were matched by a contrast in intellectual Endeavour. The Renaissance and Reformation had broken upon a world penetrated at every level by superstitious beliefs—beliefs in religious relics and priestly incantations, beliefs in the magic potions and talismans provided by ‘cunning men’, beliefs in diabolical possession and godly exorcism, beliefs in the ability of ‘witches’ to cast deadly spells and of the touch of kings to cure illnesses.8 Such beliefs were not only to be found among the illiterate masses. They were as prevalent among rulers as among peasants. Kings would collect holy relics. Men as diverse as Christopher Columbus, Oliver Cromwell and Isaac Newton took prophecies based on the biblical Book of Revelation seriously. A Cortez or a Pizarro might ascribe victory in battle to divine intervention, and a king (James VI of Scotland, soon to be James I of England) could write a treatise on witchcraft.

Such beliefs went alongside ignorance of the real causes of the ills that afflicted people. Life for most was short. Sudden death was common and all too often inexplicable given the level of knowledge. The ignorance of doctors was such that their remedies were as likely to make an illness worse as to cure it. An epidemic of plague or smallpox could wipe out a quarter or more of a town’s population. Devastating harvest failures—and sudden hunger—could be expected by most people once or more a decade. A single fire could burn down a whole street or, as in London in 1666, a whole city.

The only long term solution to any of these problems lay in beginning to understand the natural causes behind apparently unnatural events. But science was still not something fully separate from superstition. Knowledge of how to separate and fuse natural substances (chemistry) was mixed in with belief in the transmutation of  base metals into gold (alchemy). Knowledge of the motions of the Platonist or even Pythagorean picture in which there were universal patterns to be found in different sectors of reality. Such a belief could justify astrological predictions as well as astronomical calculations, since what occurred in one part of reality was believed to follow the same pattern as what occurred elsewhere. Kepler was quite prepared to make astrological forecasts. In Prague in 1618 he predicted, ‘May will not pass away without great difficulty.’ The forecast turned out to be correct, since the Thirty Years War began—but hardly because of celestial movements.

Kepler was by no means alone in believing in the mystical influences of some bodies on others. ‘Neo-Platonism’ remained influential at Cambridge University until well into the second half of the 17th century, with people believing that treating a knife which has cut someone could help heal the wound—just as a magnet can affect a piece of iron some distance away. Galileo did most to win acceptance of the Copernican picture of  the universe when, using the recently invented telescope in 1609, he discovered craters and mountains on the moon. This showed that it was not made of some substance radically different to the Earth, as the Aristotle-Ptolemy account argued. He also developed the elements of a new physics, providing an account of how bodies move, which challenged Aristotle’s. But his was still not a full break. Galileo accepted, for instance, that the universe was finite, and he rejected Kepler’s notion that the planets moved in ellipses. To this extent he was still a prisoner of the old ideas. He was soon to be a prisoner in another sense as well—put on trial by the Inquisition, forced to denounce the Copernican system and held under house arrest until his death.

The arguments over physics and astronomy became intertwined with the general ideological arguments of the period. In 1543 Copernicus had been able to publish his views without fear of persecution by the Catholic church to which he belonged. Indeed some of the hardest attacks on his views came from Luther’s disciple Melanchthon, while the reform of the calendar by the Catholic church relied on computations based on Copernicus’s model.

But things changed with the counter-Reformation. Its supporters mobilized behind the Aristotelian model as adopted by the theologian Thomas Aquinas 250 years earlier to resolve the philosophical arguments of the 13th century—a model imposed on doubters at the scientists had been able to gather in the liberated atmosphere of Oxford after the New Model Army had taken it from the royalists and set up a society for scientific advance.  Hobbes feared he might be burned at the stake for heresy, at the time of the Restoration. But in fact he received a royal pension and the society became the ‘Royal Society’. Science was beginning to be identified with an increase in control over the natural world which paid dividends in terms of agriculture, industry, trade and military effectiveness.

This did not mean the battle against superstition was won. Vast numbers of people in advanced industrial countries still put their faith in astrologers and charms, whether religious or ‘magical’. And this is not just true of supposedly ‘uneducated’ people. ‘World leaders’ such as Ronald Reagan, Indira Gandhi and former French prime minister Edith Cresson have consulted astrologers. In the 18th century the influence of magic was even greater. 

But a change did occur. The professional witch finder Matthew Hopkins had been able to push 200 convictions for witchcraft through the courts in England’s eastern counties in the mid-1640s amid the chaos of the unresolved civil war. This was a far greater number than at any time previously. By contrast, the occupation of Scotland by the New Model Army brought a temporary end to prosecution for witchcraft, and by 1668 one commentator could note, ‘Most of the looser gentry and the smaller pretenders to philosophy and wit are generally deriders of the belief in witches’. The last witchcraft execution in England took place in 1685, although the crime remained on the statute book for another 50 years. A change in the general ‘mentality’ had resulted from the economic, social and political changes of the previous century.

A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE WORLD

Planets and the stars (astronomy)—essential for working out dates and charting ocean voyages—was still tied to systems of belief which purported to predict events (astrology). A serious interest in mathematics could still be combined with faith in the magic of numerical sequences. And it was possible to reject most of these confusions but still believe scientific knowledge could be gained simply from the study of old Greek, Latin or Arabic texts.

There was a vicious circle. Magical beliefs could not be dispelled without the advance of science. But science was cramped by systems of magical beliefs. What is more, the difference between a set of scientific beliefs and a set of unscientific beliefs was not as obvious as it might seem today. Take the belief that the planets, the sun and the stars moved around the Earth. This was based on the views of Aristotle, as amended after his death by Ptolemy.9 There had long existed a different view, holding that the Earth moved round the sun. It had been developed in the ancient Graeco-Roman world by Heracliedes of Pontus and in the medieval period by Nicole Oresme and Nicolas Cusanus. But hard as it may be to understand today, the most learned and scientifically open minds rejected the view that ‘the Earth moves’ for a millennium and a half, since it contradicted other, unchallenged Aristotelian principles about the motion of objects. The new account of the Earth and planets moving round the sun presented by the Polish monk Copernicus in 1543 could not deal with this objection. It was far from winning universal acceptance, even among those who recognized its utility for certain practical purposes. For instance, Francis Bacon—whose stress on the need for empirical observation is credited with doing much to free science from superstition—rejected the Copernican system since ‘a teacher of the modern empirical approach does not see the need for such subversive imaginings’.10 Skepticism was reinforced by inaccuracies discovered in Copernicus’s calculations of the movements of the planets. It was half a century before this problem was solved mathematically by Kepler, who showed the calculations worked perfectly if the planets were seen as moving in elliptical rather than circular orbits. But Kepler’s own beliefs were magical by our standards.

He believed the distances of the planets from each other and from the sun were an expression of the intrinsic qualities of numerical series, not of physical forces. He had turned from the Aristotelian picture of the world to an even older, and if anything more mystical,  time by the newly born Inquisition. Aristotle (and Aquinas) had taught that everything and every person has its own place in the scheme of things. There was a fixed hierarchy of celestial bodies and an equally fixed hierarchy on Earth. This was the perfect world view for kings and classes which wanted not just to destroy the Reformation but to force the rebellious middle and lower classes to submit to the old feudal order. From such a perspective the Copernican world- view was as subversive as the views of Luther or Calvin. In 1600.

Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for suggesting there were an infinity of worlds. The ideological climate in the Catholic states worked against further scientific investigation. On hearing about the trial of Galileo, the French mathematician and philosopher Descartes suppressed a finding that foreshadowed the later discoveries of Newton.13 It is hardly surprising that the centre of scientific advance shifted to the Dutch republic and post-revolutionary England—and to Boyle, Hook, Huygens and, above all, Newton, whose new laws of  physics solved the problems which had plagued Copernicus’s, Kepler’s and Galileo’s accounts of the universe.

This was not because the Protestant leaders were, in themselves, any more enlightened than their Catholic counterparts. As Keith Thomas notes, ‘theologians of all denominations’ upheld the reality of witchcraft. But the popular base of Protestantism lay with social groups - artisans, lesser merchants—who wanted to advance knowledge, even if it was only knowledge of reading and writing so as to gain access to the Bible. The spread of Protestantism was accompanied by the spread of efforts to encourage literacy, and once people could read and write, a world of new ideas was open to them. What is more, the mere fact that there was a challenge to the old orthodoxy opened people’s minds to further challenges. This was shown most clearly during the English Revolution. The Presbyterians who challenged the bishops and the king could not do so without permitting censorship to lapse. But this in turn allowed those with a host of other religious views to express themselves freely. Amid the cacophony of religious prophecies and biblical interpretations, people found it possible for the first time to express doubts openly about them all. One drunken trooper in the New Model Army could ask, ‘Why should not that pewter pot on the table be God?’ The conservative political theorist Thomas Hobbes published a thoroughly materialist work, Leviathan, which contained attacks on the notion of religious miracles.