We do not know how profound a thinker Copernicus was, except through this immeasurable influence of his work. With him modernity begins.With him secularism begins.With him reason makes its French Revolution against a faith immemorially enthroned, and man commences his long effort to rebuild with thought the shattered palace of his dreams. Heaven becomes mere sky and space and nothingness, or it descends upon the earth and breeds visions of Utopia in the hungry hearts of men who once had hoped for Paradise. It was as in the fable Plato told, of the gods who had cared for man till he had come of age, and then had disappeared, leaving him to the devices of his own intelligence. It was as in the ancient savage days, when the Old Man of the tribe drove the young men forth and bade them seek some other soil and raise upon it their own homes and their own happiness.With the Copernican revolution man was compelled to become of age.
6. SIR FRANCIS BACON He did not falter at this sudden maturity. On the contrary, the century that followed Copernicus was one of youthful audacity and courage in every field. Little vessels began to explore the now round and limited earth; frail minds began to explore the intellectual globe, careless of dogma, unharassed by tradition, and never dreaming that mankind would fail. Oh, the zest of those bright Renaissance days, when the poverty of a thousand years was almost forgotten, and the labor of a thousand years had made men richer and bolder, scornful of barriers and bounds! The flash of those alert eyes, the rich blood in those strong frames, the warm color of their luxurious raiment, the spontaneous poetry of that impassioned speech, the creative insatiable desires, the search and sweep and fearlessness of newly liberated minds—shall we ever know such days again?
Whom can we name as voice and symbol of that fermenting age? Leonardo?—painter, musician, sculptor, etcher, architect, anatomist, physiologist, physicist, inventor, engineer, chemist, astronomer, geologist, zoologist, botanist, geographer, mathematician, and philosopher! Alas, our definitions and criteria exclude him: he was (was he not?) an artist primarily, and only secondarily a philosopher or a scientist; it is by his Last Supper and his Mona Lisa that we remember him, and not by his theory of fossils, or his anticipation of Harvey, or his majestic vision of universal and everlasting Law.—Or shall it be Giordano Bruno, that forever seeking soul, unsatisfied with the finite, hungry for an immeasurable unity, impatient of divisions, sects, dogmas, and creeds, only less controllable than the winter’s winds, only less fiery than Etna, and doomed by his own turbulent spirit to a martyr’s death?
No; it cannot be Bruno, for there was one greater than he: “the man who rang the bell that called the wits together” who sent out a challenge to all the lovers and servants of truth everywhere to bind themselves together in the new order and ministry of science; who proclaimed the mission of thought as no vain scholastic dispute, no empty academic speculation, but the inductive inquiry into nature’s laws, the resolute extension of the mastery of man over the conditions of his life; the man who mapped out as with royal authority the unconquered fields of research, pointed a hundred sciences to their tasks, and foretold their unbelievable victories; who inspired the Royal Society of Great Britain and the great Encyclopedie of France, who turned men from knowledge as meditation to knowledge as remolding power; who despised worship and longed for control; who overthrew the Aristotelian logic of unobservant reason and turned the gaze of science to the self-revealing face of nature; who carried in his brave soul, beyond any other man of that spacious age, the full spirit and purpose of the modern mind. Of course it was Francis Bacon.
7. SIR ISAAC NEWTON From that day to ours the history of the European intellect has been predominantly the progress of the Baconian as against the medieval conception of the world.
Predominantly but not continuously; there are many great figures that stood aside from this main road. In Descartes the new struggles in the arms of the old, and never quite liberates itself; in the great unifying soul of Leibnitz the medieval tradition is still powerful enough to turn a mathematician into a precarious theologian; and in Immanuel Kant the voice of ancestral faith speaks amid the skepticism of the Enlightenment. Strangely bridging these two streams of thought—the scientific and the religious—stands the figure of Spinoza: polisher of lenses and God-intoxicated man; silent devotee of lonely speculation, and formulator of the metaphysics of modern science; lover of mechanics and geometry, and martyr equally with Bruno to philosophy, dying only a slower and obscurer death. Every profound mind after him has felt his power, every historian has attested the quiet depth of his wisdom. But we have bound ourselves to judge these heroes of the mind in objective terms of influence rather than by personal estimates of wisdom, and even a lover of Spinoza must confess that the healing touch of the “gentle philosopher” has fallen upon the rarer and loftier souls rather than upon the masses or even the classes of mankind. He belongs to the islanded aristocracy of thought, and the world has not mounted to him yet.
But of Sir Isaac Newton there can be no similar dispute. “Every schoolboy knows” the story of his absent-minded genius; how the great scientist, left for a moment to his own culinary wits, and told to boil an egg three minutes for his lunch, dropped his watch into the water and watched the egg while the time-piece boiled; or how the absorbed mathematician, going up to his room to change his clothes for dinner, undressed and went contentedly to bed (it would be sad if these delightful stories were not true). Not so many schoolboys know that Newton’s Principia marked the quiet assumption, by science, of its now unchallenged mastery over modern thought; that the laws of motion and mechanics as established by Newton became the basis of all later practical advance, of that reordered surface of the earth and that extended and intenser life which are the miracles of science in our day; the discovery of gravitation illuminated the whole world of astronomy and brought the bright confusion of the stars into an almost organic unity. “Not long ago,” said Voltaire, “a distinguished company were discussing the trite and frivolous question” (alas, this is an untimely quotation!), “who was the greatest man—Caesar, Alexander, Tamerlane, or Cromwell? Someone answered that without doubt it was Isaac Newton. And rightly: for it is to him who masters our minds by the force of truth, and not to those who enslave them by violence, that we owe our reverence.” Even in his lifetime the world understood that Newton belonged to its heroes.
8. VOLTAIRE It was Voltaire who introduced to France the mechanics of Newton and the psychology of Locke, and thereby began the great age of the Enlightenment. It will shock scholastic minds to see Voltaire included among the supreme thinkers of mankind; they will protest that his thought was borrowed rather than original, and that his influence was immoral and destructive. But which of us is original except in form? What idea can we conceive today that has not enjoyed, in one garb or another, a hoary antiquity of time? It is easier to be original in error than in truth, for every truth displaces a thousand falsehoods. An honest philosopher will admit, like Santayana, that truth, in its outlines, is as old as Aristotle, and that all we need do today is to inform and vary the design with our transient needs. Did not Spinoza, profoundest of modern thinkers, take the essentials of his thought from Bruno, Maimonides, and Descartes? Did not Ramus defend, as his thesis for the doctorate, the modest proposition that everything in Aristotle is false except that which he pilfered from Plato? And did not Plato, like Shakespeare, borrow lavishly from every store, making these stolen goods his own by transforming them with beauty? Granted that Voltaire, like Bacon, “lighted his candle at every man’s torch” it remains that he made the torch burn so brightly that it enlightened all mankind. Things came to him dull and he made them radiant; things came to him obscure, and he cleansed and scoured them with clarity; things came to him in useless scholastic dress, and he clothed them in such language that the whole world could understand and profit from them. Never did one man teach so many, or with such irresistible artistry.