Abstract
The Scientific or Philosophical Revolution depended significantly on a new notion of the self. Crises of “knowability,” that is, challenges to established definitions of knowledge and established methods for identifying and transmitting it during the early modern period were driven in part by new ideas of what human beings can achieve.1 Philosophers developed new schools of thought predicated on the idea that the limits of human knowledge were the fault of human error: errors of the body, of the mind, and of the methods for gathering knowledge. Capable of acquiring an accurate understanding of the workings of nature, the self simply needed the right combination of training, tools, and technique. In this view, humans are not limited to certain truths by our place in the cosmos. Certainly philosophers of the revolution such as Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and Isaac Newton recognized that the search for knowledge was hindered by a flawed body and a flawed mind. The body’s perceptions, the workings of its sense organs, were limited and unreliable—humans can only see so far or so small and their eyes can be tricked, for example. The mind’s workings could also be derailed, such as by unfortunate habits of mind or by desire. “Thoughts, for Bacon, are shaped by ways of living,” John E. Leary observes.2
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Notes
Timothy J. Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003);
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989);
Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986);
and Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).
John E. Leary, Jr., Francis Bacon and the Politics of Science (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1994), 146.
Just how long depends on which scholars one consults. Dror Wahrman regards the development of the modern self as complete by the turn of the nineteenth century; Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison see it as just beginning at that point. Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004);
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity, paperback ed. (New York: Zone Books, 2010).
Francis Bacon, “The New Organon,” in The Complete Essays of Francis Bacon, ed. Henry LeRoy Finch (New York: Washington Square Press, 1963), 195–96.
Thomas Willis, An essay of the pathology of the brain and nervous Stock in Which Convulsive Diseases are Treated of, trans. Samuel Pordage (London: J. B., 1681).
Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 6.
Misty G. Anderson, “Tactile Places: Materializing Desire in Margaret Cavendish and Jane Barker,” Textual Practice 13, no. 2 (1999): 329–30.
Robert Boyle, The Christian Virtuoso I, in The Works of Robert Boyle, ed. Michael Hunter and Edward B. Davis, vol. 11, “The Christian Virtuoso” and other publications of 1687–91 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000), 295.
Robert Hooke, Preface to Micrographia (London: Jo. Martyn and Ja. Allestry, 1665), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15491/15491-h/15491h.htm.
See also Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason; Eve Keller, “Producing Petty Gods: Margaret Cavendish’s Critique of Experimental Science,” ELH 64, no. 2 (1997): 457, doi:10.1353/elh.1997.0017. Wahrman dates the primary phase in the reorganization of ideas of self too late, after the middle of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, his larger point that “the supposed universality of the individual subject with a well-defined, stable, unique, centered self is in truth a charged, far from natural, recent Western creation” remains valid. Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self, xii. This self ought not to be confused with the objective self discussed at great length by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison in Objectivity. While Daston and Galison’s characterization of seventeenth-century epistemology and what they call science is unfortunately totalizing given the debates of that period, their definitions of objectivity and the practices it required and created are indeed different from those of seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century natural philosophers.
Under “Gender,” the Index to Steven Shapin’s The Social History of Truth says, “See Women,” as if women have gender but men do not. Steven Shapin and Simon Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Including and Translation of Thomas Hobbes, “Dialogus Physicus de Natura Aeris,” by Simon Shaffer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985);
Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 473;
Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain, 1660–1800 (Harlow: Pearson, 2001).
Donna Haraway, “Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium,” in The Haraway Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004), 225.
Elizabeth Potter, Gender and Boyle’s Law of Gases (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 3.
Potter, Gender and Boyle’s Law; Haraway, “Modest Witness”; Rachel Carnell, Partisan Politics, Narrative Realism, and the Rise of the British Novel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 17–23.
Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).
See also Kathryn Shevelow, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (New York: Routledge: 1989), 12–13; Carnell, Partisan Politics;
Rachel Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family, and Political Argument in England, 1680–1714 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1999);
Elizabeth Fox Genovese, Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 16–17. This absorption lingers on: Galen Strawson explains that “a human being (a man, in Locke’s terminology, in which ‘man’ refers equally to male and female)” without considering the ramifications of this maneuver by either himself or by Locke.
Galen Strawson, Locke on Personal Identity: Consciousness and Concernment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 7, original italics.
Erica Harth, Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 9.
Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 25, eBook.
Laura Brown, “Feminization of Ideology: Form and the Female in the Long Eighteenth Century,” in Ideology and Form in Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. David H. Richter (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1999), 226, 231.
Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990);
Karen Harvey, Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004);
Karen Harvey, “The Substance of Sexual Difference: Change and Persistence in Representations of the Body in Eighteenth-Century England,” Gender & History 14, no. 2 (August 2002): 202–23;
Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
Isaac Newton, “Preface to the Reader” in Principia Naturalis, trans. J. Bruce Brackenridge, in Brackenridge, Key to Newton’s Dynamics: The Kepler Problem and the Principia: Containing an English Translation of Sections 1, 2, and 3 of Book One From the First (1687) Edition of Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 230, eBook.
Dear, Discipline, 2–3, 210–48. See also Peter Dear, The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 26–31.
Judith P. Zinsser, “The Many Representations of the Marquise Du Châtelet,” in Men, Women, and the Birthing of Modern Science, ed. Judith P. Zinsser (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005), 55.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 6th ed. (Kitchener, ON: Batoche Books, 2001), II.xxvii.9, eBook, original italics.
For more discussion of Locke and Newton’s recognition of the affinity between their ideas and method see, for example, Peter Walmsley, Locke’s “Essay” and the Rhetoric of Science (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2003), 20;
Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton, paperback reprint ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 488–93;
Michael Hunter, “The Debate over Science,” in Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy: Intellectual Change in Late Seventeenth-Century Britain (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1995), 119;
Mordechai Feingold, The Newtonian Moment: Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture (New York: The New York Public Library and Oxford University Press, 2004), 44;
Robert Iliffe, Newton: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 35, 103–4, eBook.
Thomas Burnet, Remarks upon an Essay concerning Humane Understanding, in a Letter to the Author (London: M. Wotton, 1697), 5.
See, for example, John W. Yolton, A Locke Dictionary (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993), 53;
J. Joanna S. Forstrom, John Locke and Personal Identity: Immortality and Bodily Resurrection in 17th-Century Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2010); Walmsley, Locke’s “Essay”; Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason, 55–77;
Edwin McCann, “Locke’s Philosophy of Body,” in The Cambridge Companion to Locke, ed. Vere Chappell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 56–60;
Steven Shapin, Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It was produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 169–70;
Patricia Sheridan, Introduction to Catharine Trotter Cockburn: Philosophical Writings, ed. Patricia Sheridan (Toronto: Broadview, 2006), 17–19.
For a more thorough review of the debates over the nature of the self as it involved a soul see, for example, Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason, 60–76; Christopher Fox, Locke and the Scriblerians: Identity and Consciousness in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 14–17; McCann, “Locke’s Philosophy of Body,” 76–86. See also Funkenstein on theology’s replacement by natural philosophy and the idea of the scientist as “secular theologian” in Theology and the Scientific Imagination. A sampling of texts from the 1720s that rejected Locke’s theories include Henry Felton’s Resurrection of the same numerical body (Oxford, 1725), Philips Gretton’s A review of the argument a priori, In Relation to the Being and Attributes of God (London: Bernard Lintot, 1726), and Richard Greene’s The Principles of the Philosophy of the Expansive and Contractive Principles (Cambridge: Cornelius Crownfield, 1727).
George S. Rousseau, Enlightenment Borders: Pre-And Post-Modern Discourses: Medical, Scientific (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1991), 269;
Barbara Shapiro, “History and Natural History in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England: An Essay on the Relationship between Humanism and Science,” in English Scientific Virtuosi in the 16th and 17th Centuries, papers read at a Clark Library Seminar, February 3, 1977, ed. Barbara Shapiro and Robert G. Frank (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1977), 321; Michael Hunter, “Introduction: Fifteen Essays and a New Theory of Intellectual Change,” in Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy, 6;
I. Bernard Cohen and Richard S. Westfall, General Introduction in Newton: Texts, Backgrounds, Commentaries, ed. I. Bernard Cohen and Richard S. Westfall (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), xiv. Shapiro asserts that it was the Principia, not the Opticks that had such a significant impact, but she was speaking of the impact on natural philosophy and I am speaking of the impact on culture.
Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse: Newton’s “Opticks” and the Eighteenth-Century Poets (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), 1–14; Feingold, The Newtonian Moment, 169–90.
Winch Holdsworth, A Sermon Preached Before the University of Oxford at St Mary’s on Easter-Monday…. (Oxford: 1920); Catherine Trotter Cockburn, A Letter to Dr. Holdsworth, Occasioned by His Sermon Preached Before the University of Oxford…. (London: Benjamin Motte, 1726); Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed. … (Dublin: J. Jones, 1736); Vincent Perronet, A Vindication of Mr. Locke (London: James, John, and Paul Knapton, 1736).
René Descartes, Discourse on Method, in Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Donald A. Cress, 4th ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 8, 13.
See, for example, Peter Harrison, “Curiosity, Forbidden Knowledge, and the Reformation in Natural Philosophy in Early Modern England,” Isis 92, no. 2 (June 2001): 265–90, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3080629;
Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1660–1740 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987);
Brian Worden, “The Question of Secularization,” in A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration, ed. Alan Houston and Steve Pincus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 20–40; Barbara Shapiro, “Natural Philosophy and Political Periodization: Interregnum, Restoration and Revolution,” in Houston and Pincus, A Nation Transformed, 303; Shapiro, “History and Natural History,” 3–55;
Laura Baudot, “An Air of History: Joseph Wright’s and Robert Boyle’s Air Pump Narratives,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 46, no. 1 (Fall 2012): 1–28.
Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe, 2. See also Taylor, Sources of the Self, 139–40; Peter Dear, “From Truth to Disinterestedness in the Seventeenth Century,” Social Studies of Science 22, no. 4 (November 1992), 628, http://www.jstor.org/stable/285457.
Shapin, Never Pure, 119–23. See also Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
Lorraine Code, “Taking Subjectivity into Account,” in Feminist Epistemologies, ed. Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 17.
Dear, Discipline and Experience, 210, 216, 232, 247; Shapiro, “Natural Philosophy,” 319–20. Dwight Atkinson notes, for example, that in 1725 the reports in Philosophical Transactions were more mathematically based than in the late seventeenth century. Dwight Atkinson, Scientific Discourse in Sociohistorical Context: “The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London,” 1675–1975 (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999), 77, 85, 145–47.
Jesse Molesworth, Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Realism, Probability, Magic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 9.
Helene Moglin, although dating the realist novel to much later in the century than most scholars and certainly than Molesworth or Carnell, contends that realism’s interior self excluded any notion of female self-hood or female experience. Helene Moglin, The Trauma of Gender: A Feminist Theory of the English Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Carnell, Partisan Politics.
William Harvey, On the Motion of the Heat and Blood in Animals, trans. Robert Willis (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1993), 9.
See, for example, Michael Honeybone, “Sociability, Utility and Curiosity in the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society, 1710–60,” in Science and Beliefs: From Natural Philosophy to Natural Science, 1700–1900, ed. David M. Knight and Matty D. Eddy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 63–76;
Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1500–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Robert Boyle, Some Considerations Touching the Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy. The First Part, in The Works of Robert Boyle, ed. Michael Hunter and Edward B. Davis, vol. 3, “The Usefulness of Natural Philosophy” and sequels to “The Spring of the Air,” 1662–3 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999), 199.
Christine Gerrard, Aaron Hill: The Muses’ Projector, 1685–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 39–40.
Eliza Haywood, The Female Spectator, in Selections from “The Female Spectator”, ed. Patricia Meyers Spacks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), III, XV, 195.
Karen Harvey, “Refinement in a Teacup? Punch, Domesticity and Gender in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Design History 21, no. 3 (Autumn 2008): 205–21, doi:10.1093/jdh/epn022;
Terry Lovell, “Subjective Powers?: Consumption, the Reading Public, and Domestic Woman in Early Eighteenth-Century England,” in The Consumption of Culture, ed. Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (New York: Routledge, 1995), 34–35.
See, for example, Will Pritchard, Outward Appearances: The Female Exterior in Restoration London (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2008).
Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle, Introduction to Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England, ed. Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle (Burlington: Ashgate, 2007), 4.
See also Jo Wallwork and Paul Salzman, ed., Early Modern Englishwomen Testing Ideas (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011);
Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
Diana B. Altegoer, Reckoning Words: Baconian Science and the Construction of Truth in English Renaissance Culture (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000). See also Walmsley, Locke’s “Essay”;
Hannah Dawson, Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007);
Jan Golinski, “Robert Boyle: Skepticism and Authority in Seventeenth-Century Chemical Discourse,” in The Figural and the Literal: Problems of Language in the History of Science and Philosophy, 1630–1800, ed. Andrew E. Benjamin, Geoffrey N. Cantor, and John R. R. Christie (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1987), 64–65;
John T. Harwood, “Rhetoric and Graphics in Micrographia,” in Robert Hooke: New Studies, ed. Michael Hunter and Simon Schaffer (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1989), 119–47;
Sarah Hutton, “The Riddle of the Sphinx: Francis Bacon and the Emblems of Science,” in Women, Science and Medicine 1500–1700: Mothers and Sisters of the Royal Society, ed. Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1997), 7–28; Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 28–29.
Michael Hunter, Boyle: Between God and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 93–95; Leary, Francis Bacon, ix; Jo Wallwork, “Disruptive Behaviour in the Making of Science: Cavendish and the Community of Seventeenth-Century Science,” in Wallwork and Salzman, Early Modern Englishwomen, 49–50. Other examples of contemporary texts concerned with the reformation of language, particularly to support “the new learning,” include Francis Lodowyck, The Ground-Work, or Foundation, Laid (or so Intended) for the Framing of a New Perfect Language…. (London: [s.n], 1652); Henry Edmundson, Lingua Linguarum…. (London: T. Roycroft, 1655); R. F., The Pure Language of the Spirit of Truth…. (London: Giles Calvert, 1655); or John Webb, An Historical Essay Endeavoring a Probability that the Language of the Empire of China is the Primitive Language (London: Nathaniel Brook, 1669).
See also Anne Bratach, “Following the Intrigue: Aphra Behn, Genre, and Restoration Science,” Journal of Narrative Technique 26, no. 3 (Fall 1996): 213.
See, for example, Jane Donawerth, “Conversation and the Boundaries of Public Discourse in Rhetorical Theory by Renaissance Women,” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 16, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 181–99, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rh.1998.16.2.181; Wallwork, “Disruptive Behaviour,” 41–53;
Ros Ballaster, “Taking Liberties: Revisiting Behn’s Libertinism,” Women’s Writing 19, no. 2 (May 2012): 165–76, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09699082.2011.646861.
Amy Elizabeth Smith, “Naming the Un-‘Familiar’: Formal Letters and Travel Narratives in Late Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain,” The Review of English Studies 54, no. 214 (May 2003): 180. For more discussion of epistolary subgenres and their use, particularly in seventeenth-century natural philosophy, see for example Diana Barnes, “Familiar Epistolary Philosophy: Margaret Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters (1664),” Parergon 26, no. 2 (2009): 39–64;
Diana Barnes, “The Restoration of Royalist Form in Margaret Cavendish’s Sociable Letters,” in Women Writing 1550–1750, ed. Jo Wallwork and Paul Salzman, special issue of Meridian: The La Trobe University English Review 18, no. 1 (2001): 201–214;
Anne L. Bower, “Dear-: In Search of New (Old) Forms of Critical Address,” in Epistolary Histories, ed. Amanda Gilroy and W. M. Verhoeven (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 155–75.
Anonymous, “A Narrative Concerning the Success of Pendulum-Watches at Sea for the Longitudes,” 13, 14. “Major Holmes” is something of a shady character, evidently. In addition to his contributions to natural philosophy, this Major Holmes appears to have abetted Lord Argyll’s escape from prison in 1681 and supported the Rye House Plot in 1683. Dictionary of National Biography (1886; Hathi Trust Digital Library), ed. Leslie Stephen, vol. 8 (London: Smith, Elder, 1886), 336–37.
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Gevirtz, K.B. (2014). Notions of the Self. In: Women, the Novel, and Natural Philosophy, 1660–1727. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137386762_2
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