The revival of Aristotelian doctrines
led by Aquinas and Albertus Magnus had been of incalculable benefit
to pre-renaissance thought. Opposing the tendency to regard the
natural world as merely an agglomeration of largely disjunct symbols,
expressing moral or theological truths, it had re-established
it as a worthy object of study in its own right. Holding that
to differing fields of speculation pertained, particular and independently
valid methods of enquiry, it relieved the stultifying pressure
produced by the attempt to make continuous reference at each point
to theological standards, and to bring all knowledge into too
immediate and unequivocal conformity with them. Its teachings
on the status of universals and on the function of "illumination"
had, in contrast to Anselm's position, insisted on the necessity
of admitting observation as an original datum for the discovery
of truth in many departments of knowledge, instead of merely stigmatising
it as a very fallible operation that might sometimes be usefully
employed to illustrate truths which the intellect was able quite
independently to attain, without recourse to any assistance from
the senses. Of the defects of the preceding Augustinian Platonism,
Mandonnet writes: "Les inconvenients etaient dans la methode
peu didactique, visant a la speculation ideale en negligeant les
donnees experimentales de la science, et utilisant la raison et
la foi sans definir sufficamment leur domaine," and while
here there was an "absence d'une distinction formelle entre
le domaine de la philosophie et de la theologie, c'est a dire
entre l'ordre des verites rationelles et celui des Verites revelees,"
for the Thomists "l'objet de la science et celui de la foi
sont strictement definis, et declares irreductibles l'un a l'autre
et les traites de science pure executes sans toucher jamais a
une question theologique."(62)
Truth, it has been said, emerges
more readily from error than from confusion. Aristotelianism
provided a method of analysis and an orderly framework for the
rational correlation and interpretation of natural phenomena.
Taken as "an example of a majestic inductive generalization
appealing to the obvious facts, and neglecting the welter of minor
differences, Aristotle's general conception of the physical universe
remains unsurpassed. For every feature in it there is an appeal
to observation, and for every observation to which appeal is made
there is the possibility of indefinite repetition."(63)
As a detailed illustration: "La theorie du lieu naturel,
telle qu'Aristote l'avait proposee, etait une bonne theorie de
Physique, car, au moyen d'un petit nombre d'hypotheses elle permettait
de classer une multitude de phenomenes connus, de prevoir une
foule de repos ou de mouvements."(64) It thus represents
a step forward in the unification of the world through the mediation
of general concepts and natural "laws." In many respects
- the instance above is a noticeable one - its potentialities
had been fully exploited in a period prior to the Renaissance,
and it became more and more inadequate as a means of fruitfully
resolving problems, and problems which to a large extent it may
be said to have originally been itself responsible for revealing
and clarifying. Its gradual, sometimes piecemeal abandonment,
was not the result of any direct refutation. The rise of the
new scientific methods and physical theories is rather an indication
of the way in which "ideas which make sense in one age, in
illuminating and co-ordinating its intellectual experience, do
not necessarily make sense in the same way in another. Therefore
there is likely to be a shift in the philosophical analogies which
will commend themselves as self-evident in different periods of
thought."(65) The scientific "neoplatonism" of
the Renaissance was not a single coherent body of doctrine suddenly
set up in formal and total opposition to previous thought; it
made considerable efforts to incorporate with a minimum of change
as much as possible of earlier findings and theory, particularly
in various sciences such as medicine; it is characterised, rather,
by a change in standpoint, and a change in the distribution of
emphasis as regards the relative importance and priority of various
aspects of knowledge.
Some typical features of Aristotelian
thought reveal clearly the causes of its increasing inadequacy
or irrelevancy for the scientific demands of the Renaissance.
It had sought to categorise and explain the natural world in
terms of the qualitative experiences of the normal man, taking
the complex and dangerously uncoordinated syntheses made with
a deceptive appearance of "naturalness" and "inevitability"
by common sense, as simple and fundamental. "It is the familiar,"
Aristotle had declared flatly, "that is intelligible."(66)
A general process of extrapolation based on ideas of the "familiar"
produced such assertions as that the earth can be nowhere except
at the centre of the world, because it would clearly sink to that
place were it ever anywhere else, since "only a careless
mind would not wonder at the suggestion that though a small
piece of earth falls if unsupported, if one held the whole
earth in the air and let it go it would not move"(67);
a view reflected by the argument Galileo puts in the mouth of
Simplicius; that the acceptance of Copernicus' theories would
mean the subversion of the fundamental criterion of Natural Philosophy
- since "Sense and Experience" must always be
taken as guides. But checked rather than assisted by the way
these were interpreted by Aristotelianism, that is in terms which
possessed much superficial plausibility and immediate appeal but
were internally extremely complex and refractory to further analysis,
the Renaissance was to find that more abstract concepts were not
merely more useful in practice but intellectually more simple
and satisfactory.(68)
Aristotelianism provides a sharp
contrast with what is perhaps the central most fundamental procedural
assumption of Platonism, which, insisting that "knowledge"
of things is dependent on and determined by the reason, ascribes
"Reality" and "Being" to these in the degree
to which they manifest "intelligibility," and therefore
regards their essence as produced by the same principles from
which true discursive reasoning proceeds, which principles forming
a hierarchy of more and more generalised "truths" are
to be attained by employing discourse reflexively to reveal its
own structure; meaning therefore, as a result of such an analysis
of discourse is resolved into coherency, and the conditions under
which a proposition is admitted as intelligible within the systems
are also taken as the grounds for any predication of "existence."
In contrast with this approach Aristotelianism presents a "meroscopic"
view: the principles of discursive knowledge are held to be undemonstrable,
and intuitive, no metaphysical significance is consciously granted
them, they have no synthetic content, reason is not productive
or formative but only a method of ordering previously known facts
and special sciences have particular principles, produced, or
at least determined, as it were from below, by the particular
nature of the subject matter with which they deal. The world
is built up of original atomic facts to which, rather than to
the generalisations to be obtained from them by reason, "reality"
is to be ascribed. But in regarding the concept as something
obtained merely by "abstraction," from things themselves,
a priori assumptions, in a particularly vicious form because unobserved,
have been made, for the concept has already been essentially presupposed
in the generalisation that selected the group of "similar"
things from which it is to be abstracted. But the drawbacks are
concealed, some immediate advantages obvious. It is an attempt
to save the appearances by departing from experience as little
as possible. A "copy" theory of knowledge results:
a noumenal reality is constructed closely analogous to a selected
range of perceptions and employed to account satisfactorily for
appearance (69). From the confused flux of sense data are to
be extracted a set of qualitative manifolds which, granted unity,
necessity and permanence, will form the basis of knowledge, which
could not be built merely on the succession of appearances of
things "which are subject to change and never remain in the
same state."(70)
The standard of objectivity is here
thoroughly qualitative, and ultimately unintelligible. For while
Platonism tended to regard the thing only as existing in, as generated
by, a context of ideas which allowed of a complete rational analysis,
here substantiality is prior to formula, things are set beyond
the mind and given independent status in themselves, since they
have essences, which are what each thing "is said to be per
se," "what a thing is said to be of its own nature";
and though this essence is expressed by a definition (71), the
elements, or qualitative simples which the definition uses are
themselves unanalysable further, they are entities existing beyond
the scope of definition: "we cannot say what silver is
though we can say that it is like tin."(72)
The multitude of "forms"
which compound the world may be classified in a manner that reflects
Aristotle's biological predilections - they are arranged, not
causally related. Methods which attempt a more fundamental correlation
of phenomena, seeking thus to unify the mass of disparate, independent
irreducible qualitative fragments which form the unexplained explanation
of Aristotelian nature, are rejected or denigrated. Physics and
sciences employing mathematics are declared not to study "being
qua being" for quantity as applied to things is always
changing, and itself is only "notional," which quality
is not "sweetness such as it has never yet changed, and that
which is to be sweet is necessarily of such a nature."(73)
But "there is nothing permanent in respect of quantity....It
is by the form that we recognise everything,"(74) and thus
"Essence depends upon quality and this is of a determinate,
whereas quantity is of an indeterminate nature."(75)
Despite its appearance of continual
reference to concrete externals, there is truth in the charge
so frequently made by seventeenth century thinkers that Aristotelianism
really dealt with words not things. For the justification of
its analysis of reality rests heavily on the assumption that there
is direct access to facts through language - or rather a certain
way of using language. For truth is not sought as in a Platonic
dialectic, by an examination of the forms in which language conditions
the discriminations and evaluations made by the mind, which its
analysis of the interrelations of ideas amounts to, but is supposedly
reached by an uncritical acceptance of the false objectifications
which occur in its everyday use. "Names" it is argued
stand for "passions of the soul," which are "images
of things" and "the same for all men." They must
be accepted as having one, or a limited number of meanings, for
"if they have an infinite number there can be no discourse,
for not to have one meaning is to have no meaning," and this
single meaning is supposed to have a qualitative, perceptible
nonrelational reference, which when definable, is taken as expressed
by that definition, as being what the word was "intended
to mean" (e.g., "man," "two-footed animal")(76).
The complex of qualities that names so definable denote is held
to be not a mere summative plurality but a genuine unity (77).
It is as "wholes" that essences have reality, since
they can apply to an indefinite number of discrete particulars,
and the qualities by which such particulars are distinguished
from each other are sharply differentiated in status from those
making up the features they have in common; they are labelled
"accidental - that which is not necessary or usual,"(78)
but the "necessity" is of course, merely given by the
defined name; which is in turn only allowed to be known from the
things themselves (while the word "usual" indicates
the inadequately critical foundations on which this division of
natural appearances rests). For while it is strongly asserted
that things are not merely collections of accidents - that there
must always be something primary, relatively unchanging, to serve
as a genuine subject in predicative statement (79), the criteria
serving, by the instrumentality of defined forms, to distinguish
the accidental from the essential features of a thing are drawn
from the contents of an average educated perception presented
in, and conditioned by, normal linguistic usage.
The picture thus offered of reality
might be compared to a map which eschewing abstract symbolism
indicates towns, forests, escarpments, etc. by miniature, only
slightly formalised, representations of them all: it makes a
certain appeal to the imagination, what information it offers
is readily intuitively laid hold on, but it obscures many essential
connections. Thus the belief that all true causality was to be
found in quiddity, and that the technique of syllogistic reasoning
accurately symbolized the rationalism underlying physical process,
meant that the middle term of syllogism became confounded with
what was causative in Nature (80), and the implication of a consequence
seemed therefore identical with the mechanical production of an
effect (Socrates, it is concluded is mortal since he is a man,
his being "man" is therefore the cause of his
death). The type of thought resulting from this hypostatising
of the qualitatively definable concepts - which function as formal
causes - and its disadvantages for the new science is well illustrated
by a passage from Robert Recorde's Castle of Knowledge
(81). Recorde, a coadjutator and friend of Dee's, here offers
instruction in astronomy to a scholar who, apart from mathematics,
seems already to have received a fairly good education, possibly
a university one, along traditional lines. After dealing with
the daily movement of the sun, Recorde is about to describe the
annual motion producing the variation in the time it is above
the horizon on successive days throughout the year, but the scholar
breaks in. "Yet the reason of that is easy enough to be
conceaved, for when the daye is at the longest, the Sonne must
needes shyne the more tyme, and so must it needes shyne the lesser
tyme, when the daye is at the shortest: this reason I have hearde
many men declare." This, comments Recorde, may well be called
a crabbed reason "for it goeth backwards lyke a crabbe,"
and proceeds to enquire further from his scholar of the cause
of the longer or shorter days, and is answered "I have heard
wise men say, that Sommer maketh the longe dayes and wynter maketh
the longe nyghtes."
This passage is part parody, but
it points to a genuine danger. Aristotle had declared that "it
is impossible for the same attribute at once to belong and not
to belong to the same thing and in the same relation,"(82)
but the significance of the final all important phrase, could
easily be overlooked, particularly after a thoroughgoing objectification
of quality. If hot and cold were to be conceived as opposing,
mutually exclusive substances, it became a real problem as to
how different things might be respectively warmed or cooled by
the same breath. Nevertheless, employing such an approach, an
orderly and imposing scheme of nature had been already constructed
by the time alternative philosophies began to make their appearance
in the Renaissance. It referred constantly to experience, and
attempted experiment. The type of experimentation it gave rise
to and the conclusions drawn from them are illuminating. It could
be demonstrated sensibly (i.e., by touch) that water was
colder than the surrounding air, or when turned to ice was colder
than the air it had frozen in, and exposed in winter cooled below
the level of coolness perceptible in its container. This "intrinsic
reduction," was ascribed to "the form" of water
by Avicenna, and with more verbal precision to its "virtual
frigidity" by Albert of Saxony (83). Again if two open vessels
of water were taken, and one of them stood on a fire until its
contents boiled, and then both were placed in the snow, the boiling
water, it was maintained, might always be observed to freeze sooner
than the cold water (a consequence of the rapid evaporation of
much of the boiling water) which experimentally confirmed the
prediction which could rationally be drawn from accepted physical
theories, that the natural tendency of water to cool would be
accelerated by the repulsion produced by the heat with which it
had been enforcedly and unnaturally associated, since opposite
qualities such as hot and cold violently repelled each other when
brought into proximity. (Since indeed the rate of cooling in water
is at any moment directly proportional to the amount by which
its temperature exceeds that of its surroundings and the process
becomes increasingly "slow," this Aristotelian thesis
might claim to be "confirmed" by general observation.)
Now it is quite irrelevant to urge that the plausibility of these
two typical experiments rests merely on the facts that, in the
one instance the thermometer had not been invented, in the other
that the quantities of water left in each vessel, at the
conclusion of the experiment were never measured. They represent
a completely different orientation of the attention to the one
which we are accustomed to regard as normal in scientific practice.
The complete lack of interest in quantitative considerations
is a product of a philosophical outlook not of technical difficulties.
There is every reason to suppose that such experimenters would
have regarded the behaviour of mercury in a tube as by far the
less preferable and reliable guide to reality and the truth of
things than direct perception, and would have defended the position
that the quantity of water is irrelevant to the study of the rate
and manner in which water cools in accordance with its own nature.
On such methods a fairly comprehensive,
self sufficient schematization of the world was drawn (84), which,
if "the recording augmentation, and rational correlation
of those elements of our experience which are actually or potentially
common to all normal people"(85) be allowed as an
adequate definition of Science, cannot be denied that name, though
its qualitative foundations prevent it being called so in the
sense of being "a particular scheme of correlation of experience,
which is not intrinsically limited with respect to the kind or
amount of experience with which it may deal,"(86) but which
is distinguished by the character of the single type of simple,
rational, but not necessarily imaginable, universally applicable,
correlation it aims to establish. Such a scheme mathematics offers,
and Aristotelianism persistently trying to preserve the qualitative
richness of perception and to defend its "reality,"
was driven into realms quite as abstract but far less accessible
to reason. Thus "the forms of qualities and the matter of
natural bodies" admits Alfarabi, "are not sensible,
we are certain of their existence only by syllogism and apodeictic
demonstration."(87) Tymme, an alchemist friend of Dee's
writes of Form, Substance and Quality "I doe not thinke that
anything can be defined concerning these which is either certaine,
constant, or approved by generall consent, so long as man's minde
is shut up in the prison of his body, neither can he know by his
sense what Matter and Form is."(88) An analysis of the world
into such terms as these had little practical utility; its connection
with "natural magic" will appear later, but generally
it was of little help in providing a method for the further investigation,
or imitation or control of nature.(89) It was based on a purely
contemplative survey of "experience," and it satisfied
by its arrangement of the elements it discriminated therein the
needs of the intellect to discover order and coherency there.
The defects of its method of doing so, Roger Cotes points out
in his Preface to the second edition of Newton's Principia:
those who follow it "have attributed to the several species
of things specific and occult qualities, on which in a manner
unknown they make the operations of the several bodies to depend.
The sum of the doctrine of the schools derived from Aristotle
and the Peripatetics is herein contained....And being entirely
employed in giving names to things, and not in searching into
things themselves, we may say, that they have invented a philosophical
way of speaking, but not that they have made known to us a true
philosophy." Such occult qualities remarked Newton at the
close of the Optics "put a stop to the improvement
of natural Philosophy," since "to tell us that every
Species of Things is endowed with an occult specifick Quality
by which it acts and produces manifest Effects, is to tell us
nothing."(90)
The chief method of investigating
these formal causes was held to be the determination of the end,
the perfection, to which they tended, their appearance or expression
in matter at any moment could then be interpreted as a stage in
a predictable course of development. But such ends were particular
to each species. Hence while later science has almost consistently
rejected a division of nature into a multitude of small "Wholes"
in favour of the fewest possible number, however "unimaginable,"
of large ones (thus reducing the number of unanalysable, and therefore
perhaps unintelligible elements employed, unanalysable because
it is in terms of them that everything else is to be explained),
their sphere of validity extending as they become progressively
more abstract, Aristotelianism, following the normal manner of
operating evidenced by "common sense," did the reverse.
The usual assumption of Platonism was, as Cusa expressed it,
that all things were ultimately related, in a manner which, however
directly inconceivable to the mind or senses, made them into a
genuine structural unity, sprung from the all containing unity
of God.(91) Some of the applications of such a doctrine, as will
later appear, may seem fantastic or perverse, but it played a
part in the evolution of ideas of universal law, and leads on
to the attitude Newton expresses, in the continuation of the passage
just quoted "to derive two or three general Principles of
Motion from Phaenomena, and afterwards to tell us how the Properties
and Actions of all corporeal things follow from those manifest
Principles, would be a very great step in Philosophy, though the
Causes of those Principles were not yet discovered." In
the Aristotelian scheme there is excessive and crippling heterogeneity.
For instance, despite continuous attack from platonist critics
- Grescas is a good example here - the dogma of the complete discontinuity,
in type and principles of motions, maintaining in the sub- and
supra-lunar regions, as well as in the constitution of the bodies
occurring in each of these, was not seriously weakened until the
Renaissance. Again special Arts and sciences were governed by
separate unconvertible methods, and the validity of their principles
restricted to particular ranges of subject matter. Cardan quotes
as authoritative Aristotle's declaration in the Posterior Analytics
that "it is not possible to demonstrate from any genus to
another superior one, as from Arithmetic to Geometry: and Averroes
states in his great commentary explaining these words: Demonstration
cannot be transferred from one Art to another." Thus although,
Cardan argues, there must be three worlds, corporeal, incorporeal,
and that of living beings, they are utterly discrete, "there
is no proportion among them, nor can they be defined by number."(92)
Such "universal" laws as might be admitted had no necessary
relation with those governing particulars. An interesting example
is the treatment of the rise of water - against its own nature
- into a vacuum, as treated by Joannes Canonicus in his Quaestiones
on Aristotle's Physics (93). It is not considered there
as representing the resolution of a previous conflicting interaction
of forces or "laws," but is explained in effect, as
the temporary complete abrogation of the law governing the particular
nature of water causing it to tend downwards, in a situation that
has called into operation the universal therefore more privileged
"law" which does not permit a vacuum to exist in the
world.
One consequence of this, directly related to Aristotle's rigid distinction between the three branches of speculative philosophy, i.e., Theology, Mathematics and Physics, was markedly alien to a widespread intellectual outlook in the Renaissance. This was the comparatively low level of value ascribed to human reason insofar as it might profess to aim at the discovery of ultimate truth, and the very restricted province, that on this evaluation might, logically, only be allowed to it. Even Aquinas, who strongly attacked the Averroist doctrine of a "double truth (94), seems in this respect to assert only the compatibility of reason and faith, and to allow philosophical reasoning merely a negative role - that of purging away errors - while philosophy for Platonic thinkers, such as Pico, "c'est la foi elle meme presentee sous l'aspect rationnel."(95) But the doctrine of the "double truth" was a logical if extreme consequence of the heterogeneity admitted into the Aristotelian picture of the world. It was thrown into greater prominence when Aristotelianism was brought into close conjunction with Christian orthodoxy, more especially as scholars, still maintaining Aristotle's authority, gradually stripped away the superimposed, modifying neo-Platonic features, which had considerably assisted the original reconciliation. Nevertheless, though there can be little doubt that a "Christian Averroism" is chiefly responsible, and provided perhaps the only possible framework, for the growth in the Middle Ages of an autonomous and thoroughly empirical physic, as, for instance, at Padua, yet such an attitude as Siger's, who "lorsqu'il expose quelques-unes de ses theses les plus hardies et en contradiction manifeste avec l'enseignement chretien, il declare ne pas determiner ses solutions selon la verite, mais bien suivant l'intention d'Aristote, et il laisse clairement entendre que ses conclusions sont celles de la raison naturell," (96) wherever it was held sincerely, as it would widely seem to have been, did not offer encouragement, or much inducement to the study of the natural sciences insofar as they were not of immediate and apparent utility. Moreover, whether sincerely professed or not - and for example one may perhaps legitimately suspect irony in Pomponazzi's submission of his reason to the higher otherwise incredible truths of revelation, or that Francis Bacon, recommending a similar denial and violation of reason in religious matters, is merely resolving with conscious sophistry a question for which he feels no great concern (97), wherever it appears, such an attitude nearly always implies a neglect or denigration of such purely intellectual disciplines as mathematics, since on the one hand they do not make direct reference to naturally existing things, and for Aristotelianism even where they are apparently applicable in that field, they are of uncertain validity, and on the other hand being merely rational they are a priori denied any part in revealing that form of "truth" which concerns man as a spiritual being. The rehabilitation of mathematics was one of the consequences of a reviving Platonism that resolved this dilemma by offering a system in which such doctrines as the eternity of the world, and the soul's existence only as the "form" of the body, did not figure as inescapable and necessary conclusions of the reason, which on other grounds had to be adjudged false. From the unity of the world followed the essential unity of Nature, Reason and Faith. Final truth could be reached in any of these spheres, for to attain it represented a need and its discovery a natural activity of man and in Berkeley's expression of fundamentally the same position as this of Renaissance Platonism, "we should believe that God has dealt more bountifully with the sons of man, than to give them a strong desire for that knowledge, which he had placed quite out of their reach....Providence..., whatever appetites it may have implanted in the creatures, doth usually furnish 'em with such means as, if rightly made use of, will not fail to satisfie them."(98) Reason could be trusted to the uttermost (its detailed relations with Nature and Faith will be discussed later), and the most abstract conclusions that could be established in mathematics could be regarded as being, potentially, of the gravest import.