And yet, not one character is jaded. A powerful awe pervades their faces, the room, the ill-fated bird. Nothing suggests that science is disenchanting the world; quite the opposite, the scientist is casting a spell over the room. Looking at An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, we might feel that, if we could only accept his invitation and find a way into the painting, he would lead us to a secret kingdom of endless miracles, no less astonishing for being ‘scientific’.
Wright’s scientist – part scholar, part showman – was an ‘itinerant professor’, a well-known breed in eighteenth-century England. These professors would travel from town to town, like actors in a touring theatre company, to give lectures, perform spectacular experiments, sell books and gadgets – and then move on. Some of them even went on tour abroad: the blind lecturer Henry Moyes, a Scot, toured the United States for two years between 1784 and 1786, impressing audiences from Boston to New York to Charleston with his wit, his knowledge and his round-rimmed dark glasses.
The very idea of science was young and fresh, and it opened a space for private entrepreneurs. Moyes and his ilk were creating a new form of entertainment, while at the same time teaching real science to real people. A contemporary journalist praised them for being ‘midwives of other people’s discoveries’.1 They awed their audiences with scientific miracles and inspired some to carry out experiments of their own, thus creating new touring opportunities for aspiring scientist-showmen. Science was offering a different kind of magic, alluring and terrifying.
Our third key lies concealed deep in the roots of modern science. In order to unearth it, we will first turn to a mercenary-soldier-turned-philosopher, named René Descartes.
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Were Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia alive today, she would rightly be recognized as a first-rate intellectual. But she was born to the ‘Winter King’ Frederick V and his wife, Elizabeth, daughter of King James I of England (VI of Scotland), in 1618, when it was a pipe dream for a woman to achieve intellectual recognition. She was gifted, though, very much so, and came from scholarly inclined parents, who spent most of their time and money surrounding themselves with books and philosophers. Good scholars rarely make good politicians, and Elisabeth’s parents managed to hold on to power in Bohemia for one meagre year. Still, they made sure that their clever daughter received an excellent education – and she would certainly make the most of it.
In the 1640s, Elisabeth entered into a correspondence with the French thinker René Descartes. He was one of the philosophers that were shaping the Enlightenment – that is, the era that did away with the notion that some questions cannot be answered. During the Enlightenment, our modern notion of ‘rationality’ was born.
In their letters, Elisabeth and René discussed all sorts of matters at length. Descartes recognized the princess as ‘the keenest sort of intellect’, though she posed as a clueless damsel in cultural distress, who looked up to Descartes ‘as someone who can help her to remedy the weakness of her own mind’.2 Elisabeth was an accomplished thinker in her own right, and her pose was a disingenuous one. No mere muse, she was not too shy to challenge Descartes, criticizing him, pushing him to think harder. She convinced Descartes to mine their correspondence to produce a treatise on passions.
This Descartes did, and in 1649 he came up with Les passions de l’âme (Passions of the Soul), in which he uses the cold light of reason to understand its apparent polar opposite, the passions (what we would call the ‘emotions’ today). He began by turning his attention to the emotion of wonder.
Up to that moment it had been accepted that our emotional life was based on two basic impulses, that is, whether we were attracted to something, say a happy puppy, or repulsed by something, say a decomposing badger. Every other feeling was a variation on this theme. Descartes didn’t stray too far from this template, and five out of six of the ‘fundamental’ passions he listed (love, hatred, desire, joy, sadness) fit it perfectly. But there is another passion, he said, which comes before you decide whether something is good for you or not. It is the passion that grabs you when you encounter something entirely new – when you witness a curious experiment, when you meet a good-looking stranger, when you embrace a new experience. In the moment before you decide whether that as yet unknown thing is good or bad, you feel a sense of wonder (in French, admiration).
You feel it when you are faced, all of a sudden, with something you did not expect. A tree is nothing remarkable, but a walking tree, that would fire up your sense of wonder. Father Christmas was so impressive to me as a child because, as far as I knew, sledges were not supposed to fly, elderly men were not supposed to come down the chimney, and giving away stuff was not something that trustworthy individuals generally did. I didn’t believe such things were possible until my older brothers assured me that on Christmas Eve, and only on Christmas Eve, they were. This discovery enchanted my Decembers.
Think back to an experience of wonder you had. You will probably find that it had to do with something you had not noticed before, and not necessarily because it was something new. You have seen a full moon a hundred times and more, but when you saw it that night on the beach, then, it filled you with awe; then, you noticed the gentle strength of her light for the first time.
Wonder comes when you notice something, or something happens, that you did not expect. Coming first, when no other passion has arrived yet, wonder sets the stage for them all. Without wonder you would feel no other emotions, because something that does not make you wonder won’t grab your attention at all.
Descartes’ era was brimming with bright new things. Natural philosophers, astronomers, alchemists and other intellectual adventurers were inventing science, which was then far from being common sense. The Sun rotating around the Earth was common sense. But the idea that the Earth might be rotating around the Sun? That was weird and dangerous, that was wild and wondrous.
Science was opening up new, counter-intuitive ways of thinking, ways that shouldn’t work and yet did. Itinerant professors made a living out of demonstrating impossible things – they could kill a bird without touching it! Since the dawn of humanity, the power to smite down hapless mortals with invisible fire had been the preserve of gods. And yet the new philosophers proclaimed that mortals need never be hapless again: they had stolen the fire from the heavens and now it was them doing the smiting.
When people emerged from these professors’ lectures, they were roused. The professors were using a sense of wonder to teach science, and in so doing they were nurturing a sense of wonder in their audiences, showing them a host of new, unexpected things. It was a perfect match – for a while.
It didn’t last long. By the early nineteenth century, John Keats was already mourning the end of enchantment. Science had become commonplace, wonder-phobic. As Keats put it, ‘Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings, / Conquer all mysteries by rule and line / Empty the haunted air, and gnomèd mine.’3 In the century in which Keats lived most of his short life, so many angels were having their wings clipped that, as we have seen, an insurgency of magicians started fighting to save at least a few of them. Keats fought on the front line.