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[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]
A few days ago I was showing off the antiquarian books in my library to the distinguished philosopher of physics and scholar of early modern natural philosophy, Katherine Brading, she made herself comfortable and started reading my copy of one (!) of the translations of Fontenelle's (1686) Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (known as Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds). The title-page of my copy announces it is a "new translation from the last edition of the French with great additions extracted from the best modern authors, on many curious and entertaining subjects" (and also proudly announced a glossary for technical terms). The book is dated 1760 and the translator as "A Gentleman of the Inner-Temple." There is also a second 1767 edition of this translation.
Google.books has a scan of this edition from the British Library. Somewhat oddly, despite this prominent location, this translation is omitted when people discuss translations of Fontenelle's Entretiens. So, for example, Wikipedia states: "The first English translation was published in Dublin by Sir William Donville or Domville in 1687, followed by another translation by Aphra Behn in 1688, under the title A Discovery of New Worlds and a third by John Glanvill later in 1688." In the translator's preface of recent translation (p. xlviii), H.A. Hargraves includes these three, and mentions a fourth (1715) by William Gardiner. But seems unfamiliar with this fifth, 1760 translation. There is also a sixth (1803) English translation, as Wikipedia notes, by Elizabeth Gunning that (Wikipedia omits this) includes La Lande's notes.* (The 1803 edition also gives a nice overview of French 17th editions of the work.)
In The Great Chain of Being (1936), Lovejoy exhibits familiarity with all of these, except with 'my' 1760 and the translation by Donville. And he is confident enough to claim that the 1715 by Gardiner is largely plagiarized from Glanvill's (p. 348, note 57 in the 1966 Harvard University press edition circulayed in the UK by OUP). Lovejoy acknowledges his debt to the early polymath and Newton scholar, D. Brewster's More Worlds than One. Brewster seems also unfamiliar with the 1760 translation. (Brewster was also a fine scientist!) I indirectly return to Lovejoy’s interests at the end <hint>.
My friend Helen de Cruz, plausibly treats Fontenelle's work as an early contribution to hard science fiction (that is, a speculative genre that is constrained by scientific knowledge). Often commentators treat the book also as popularization of then recent primarily Cartesian science and cosmology. In both cases the fact that the new science supports the real possibility of alien life forms is part of the recurring interest. In his introduction to the 1803 edition, Lalande gives a history of respectable/scientific speculation on extraterrestrials, and shows ample evidence this can be found all over eighteenth century natural philosophy. Fontenelle's work attracts the attention, in addition, of scholars interested in the role of learned women because the narrator's interlocuter in the book is a woman and the role of women translators of the book.
However, and this is key to what follows, when Fontenelle's book appeared it was arguably also the first book that pulled together a century’s worth of astronomical observations to put these into a coherent framework/narrative provided by the new science, in a wide sense, to be read fruitfully by natural philosophers and the educated public alike. In this latter learned 'Enlightenment' genre the book risked being quickly out of date, first surpassed by the mathematically challenging Principia of Newton and then in the more accessible Cosmotheoros written by Newton's great rival Huygens (and posthumously published by Huygens' brother Constantijn). (I showed Brading my copy of the first edition of the English translation of it, too.) But Fontenelle updated his editions to keep his book in the Enlightenment genre.* And I assume -- I need to check this carefully -- that the 1760 translation is based on the revised 1742 edition (which appeared in Fontenelle's Œuvres complètes). Fontenelle died aged nearly 100, in 1757!
At some point (ca 1700), one may well think that further interest in Fontenelle's work would by antiquarian. However, both the 1760 translation as well as the 1803 updated translation, hybridize Fontenelle's original work with a great deal of additions that reflect new scientific findings (as well as some refutations of Fontenelle's earlier speculations). This can be readily ascertained by the fact that the fifth and sixth English translation are much larger than the original or the modern (1990) English translation (mentioned above) by H.A. Hargreaves, which appeared in a pleasant, slim paperback with University of California Press, and that I used in one of the first undergraduate courses I ever taught back in the 1990s at The University of Chicago. (This 1990 edition is a translation of the first edition and so lacks the sixth evening dialogue that Fontenelle added to his 1687 edition..)
The 1803 edition and translation really are conceived as a kind of popularization (Lalande is explicit on this). But the additions of English translation of 1760 are of a different kind. These consider a wide variety of topics and new findings, and so the 1760 translation (based as it claims to be on Fontenelle's own 1742 edition) is very much in the spirit of the original Enlightenment sense of the work. It competes, in fact, with the ambitious kind of works now shunted aside as 'natural religion' (associated with names like Derham, Nieuwentijt) and works that are now slotted into the pre-history of biology like Buffon. I return to this below. One very nice feature of the 1760 translation is that all the translator’s additions are listed, descriptively, in a table of contents (and, thereby, also reveal many of the translator's non Fontenelle/Huygens/Newton sources, including Boerhaave, Desaguliers, Gravesande, Lovett, etc.).**
I am unsure who the 1760 translator -- "a gentleman of the Inner-temple" — is. But one of the additions by tthe1760 translator has attracted modest scholarly attention. In a footnote (14) to a recent paper by Huib Zuidervaart and Tiemen Cocquyt, they speculate on the following.
Intriguing is the fact – unnoticed so far – that in 1760 a text was published devoted to the optics of the human eye and the properties of light concerning colours, written by “a gentleman of the Inner Temple.” Chester Moor Hall frequently added the phrase “of the Inner Temple” to his family name, for instance in various book subscription lists, so the text (an appendix to a new English translation of a famous French cosmology book by Fontenelle) could be his. See Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds by M. de Fontenelle. A New Translation from the Latest Edition of the French with Great Additions, on Many Curious and Entertaining Subjects by a Gentleman of the Inner Temple (London: R. Whity a.o., 1760), pp. 239–263.
Their paper, "The Early Development of the Achromatic Telescope Revisited," is very much worth reading because it involves priority disputes, court cases, deception, lies of omission, etc.+ These page-numbers (pp. 239-263) are, in fact, part of the translator's addition to the fourth evening. The addition starts on p. 216 with an account of fire. Then a brief digression on dilation. And then on p. 228 starts the material on the "inflexions of the rays of light" with six definitions that lead into the text briefly described by Zuidervaart and Cocquyt (and which I consider an integral part of)!
As an aside, the history of the Inner-Temple itself originated "when a contingent of knights of the Military Order of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem moved from the Old Temple in Holborn (later Southampton House) to a larger site between Fleet Street and the banks of the River Thames." Some readers may well wonder if they have landed on Justin Smith-Ruiu’s Hinternet, but no I am not going to lead you to templar knights. The Inner-Temple was later an inn and law school, amongst many other social functions.
Despite the many bewildering range of additions, the main point of the 1760 edition is actually not hard to discern, especially if one is familiar with eighteenth century cosmology and natural religion. Or so I claim next.
At first sight the 1760 translation ends with the optimistic cosmic economy of nature familiar of the closing paragraphs of the first edition of the Principia: the universe is teaming with life, and comets bring the necessary building and replenishing materials of life (and even suns) to other solar systems (pp. 385-401, "Of Comets.") So, I first thought this book is a kind of Newtonian, deist providential domestication of Fontenelle's more skeptical spinozism. "Of Comets" is added, as a kind of appendix, beyond the translator's additions to the sixth evening.
However, I suspect this is a deceptive ruse. The main part of the book — we are very deep into the translator's additions to the sixth evening — nearly concludes with a short section "of chance." (In the table of contents this is listed as "of chance, applicable to what Mr. Fontenelle mentions in his work.") The translator here denies, in his own words, the so-called 'doctrine of chance' or Epicureanism. So far so good.
Now, during the eighteenth century the doctrine of chance is opposed to doctrine of order. This doctrine of order, is sub-divided between the equally heretical Spinozist doctrine of necessity which creates order immanently, and the ordered doctrine (which comes in deist and theist varieties). This is no surprise because the whole book assumes that nature has order (and often seems to appeal to various versions of the PSR). In fact, our translator goes on to claim that:
Every reasonable perfon will allow that this World, that the Universe, that every thing, we fee or know of which is great or good, was at firft formed, and is yet fupported, by a great and omnipotent Being, which we call GOD: a Being whofe attributes man knows little of, and can only judge concerning from his works, which we fee, and which when compared to what we may guefs of, Worlds unnumbered that float fufpended over our heads, in immenfe unbounded fpace are scarce any thing; therefore, as we know but little of the works of the DEITY, we can know but little of their Author it is therefore impoffible to form an adequate idea of him: here even imagination fails us, and we can only fay, he is great beyond our utmost comprehenfion. This we can judge of him with certainty; we know fufficient to anfwer all our purpofes, and therefore confequently to convince us Chance is a chimera without foundation, and that there is not any fuch thing in Nature. It is felf-evident, and does not require a demonftration: it is like an intuitive truth, as evident to our reafon as that 2 and 2 makes 4. (pp. 378-379--spelling left unmodernized)
This may seem, at first blush, a relatively orthodox Newtonian inductive claim in favor of a cautious species of deism. But extrapolating from the argument of the General scholium and reminding us of the immensity of the university, and our lack of ignorance of it, the translator basically argues we really have almost no inkling of God at all. (And this goes well beyond Newton's own view that we lack knowledge of his inner substance.) In fact, all we can really know of this god is that his existence denies the reality of chance, and so -- despite all the providential language -- Spinozism is slid back in. (This is not a surprise because Fontenelle's own work slides, despite regularly evoking deism, into Spinozism at various points.)
And in case one misses it, in the very next, and formally the last of the translator's explicit additions to Fontenelle's sixth evening, the "modern discoveries concerning the fixed stars," the translator immediately teaches his readers that it is the astronomical consensus that the cosmos is teeming with new stars and stars that go extinct. And then, after a book that has celebrated a universe teeming with life on innumerable planets, this book closes with the following chilling, even shocking line: "It is no ways improbable, that these Stars loft their brightnefs by a prodigious number of spots, which intirely covered, and as it were, overwhelmed them. In what dismal condition must their Planets remain, who have nothing but the dim and twinkling rays of the Fixed Stars to enlighten them." (383) And so, in conclusion, we come face to face with the mass extinction of aliens, and (by implication) the possibility of a very cold death of our own species (if we can't figure our interstellar flight).
*In the preface to her translation Hargreaves notes that the 1708, 1714, The 1724 (seventh), and the 1742 are all expanded editions (p. xli). There is a 1966 critical edition by Calame, which should be consulted by scholars.
**That the 1760 is very much a new hybridized book not of the late seventeenth century but of the middle of the eighteenth century, is, for example, ignored by F.J Tipler in his "A Brief History of the Extraterrestrial Intelligence Concept published in the prestigious" Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1981). Based on Lovejoy, Tipler asserts (correctly) that Fontenelle's Entretiens was a bestseller and "was translated at least three times into English" (p. 127). In fact, Tipler's quotes from Fontenelle are derived from the 1760 translation (and luckily only material already present in the first)!
+If the 1760 translation is indeed by Moor Hall, it would be nice to figure out which translation he repeatedly criticized in his introduction.
In the recent philosophical reception of Newton there is an understandable tendency to focus on the inverse square law of universal gravitation. I don't mean to suggest this is the only such focus; arguably his views on Space have shaped -- through the good works of Stein and Earman -- also debates over spacetime theories.
The effect of this telescoping has also impacted, I think, the way in which the debate between the mechanical and Newtonian philosophy has been understood. The former is said to posit a contact model in which contact between very small corpuscles explains a lot of observed phenomena. A typical mechanical philosopher creates a hypothetical model, a machine with pulleys and levers (etc.), that can make observed phenomena intelligible. In the mechanical philosophy, which itself was directed against a variety of Aristotelian and Scholastic projects, efficient causation -- once one of four canonical causes (including formal, final, and material) -- has achieved a privileged status.
The scholarly fascination with the status of action at a distance is, thus, readily explicable because it violates the very model of intelligibility taken for granted in the mechanical philosophy. As Newton notes in the General Scholium (first published in the 1713 second edition of the Principia), universal gravity "operates, not according to the quantity of the surfaces of the particles upon which it acts, (as mechanical causes use to do,) but according to the quantity of the solid matter which they contain, and propagates its virtue on all sides, to immense distances, decreasing always in the duplicate proportion of the distances."
Before I get to the main point of today's post, I offer two asides. First, with its emphasis on hypothetical explanations, the mechanical philosophers (and here I use the term to cover people as diverse as Beeckman, Descartes, Boyle, and Huygens) also exhibit a deep strain of skepticism about the very possibility of truly grasping nature's innards as it were. Spinoza's natura naturans and even Kant's ding-an-sich are the enduring expressions of this strain of skepticism (allowing that Kant is much less a mechanical philosopher). To put this as a serious joke: the PSR is, thus, not an act of intellectual hubris, but a self-limitation of the knower when it comes to fundamental ontology. Second, by showing that there is something wholly unintelligible about the way motion is supposed to be transferred from one body to the other (Essay 2.23.28), Locke, who gets so little credit among contemporary philosophers, had already imploded the pretensions of the mechanical philosophy on conceptual grounds. Okay, so much for set up.
The mechanical philosophers were not so naïve to think that models that relied on mere impulse, matter in motion, could create hypothetical models of sufficient complexity to provide hypothetical explanations of the phenomena. This is especially a problem because the mechanical philosophers posited a homogeneous matter. So that in addition to matter and motion, they posited size and shape not merely as effects of motion, but also as key explanatory factors in the hypothetical models of visible phenomena (this can be seen in Descartes, Gassendi, and Boyle, whose "The Origin of Forms and Qualities according to the Corpuscular Philosophy" (1666), I take as a canonical statement of the mechanical philosophy). So that the mechanical philosophy is committed to privileging (to echo a felicitous phrase by Biener and Smeenk [here; and here]) geometric features of bodies.
Even leaving aside the inverse square law and its universal scope, Newton's experimental work on gravity demolished a key feature of the mechanical philosophy: size and shape are irrelevant to understand gravity. I quote from Henry Pemberton's View of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy (1728):
Pemberton (who was the editor of the third, 1726 edition of the Principia) goes on to give Boyle's famous vacuum experiments with falling feathers and stones as evidence for this argument. That is, Pemberton uses Boyle's experimental work to refute Boyle's mechanical philosophy.
Now, in the Principia, references to Boyle's experiment got added only to the (1713) second edition in two highly prominent places: Cotes added a reference to it in his editor's introduction and Newton added a reference to it in the General Scholium at the end of the book. In both cases Boyle's experiment is used as a kind of illustration for the claim that without air resistance falling bodies are equally accelerated and for the plausibility of positing an interstellar vacuum. That is, if one reads the Principia superficially (by looking at prominent material at the front and end), it seems as if Newton and Boyle have converging natural philosophies.
Of course, neither Pemberton nor Newton rely exclusively on Boyle's vacuum experiment to make the point that shape and size (or geometry) is not a significant causal factor when it comes to gravity. The key work is done by pendulum experiments with different metals. (These can be found in Book II of the Principia, which is often skipped, although he drives the point home in Book III, Prop. 6 of Principia.) These show that quantity of matter is more fundamental than shape. And, crucially, shape & size and quantity of matter need not be proportional to or proxies of each other. This fact was by no means obvious, and at the start of the Principia. even Newton offers, as Biener and Smeenk have highlighted, a kind of geometric conception of quantity of matter in his first definition before suggesting that 'quantity of matter' is proportional to weight (and indicating his pendulum experiments as evidence thereof).
Let me wrap up. What's important here is that even if Newton had been wrong about the universal nature of the inverse square law, he showed that the mechanical philosophy cannot account for the experimentally demonstrated features of terrestrial (and planetary) gravity. (So, that the mechanical philosophy is not a natural way to understand Galilean fall.) And this means that in addition to Locke's conceptual claim, Newton shows that the mechanical philosophy's emphasis on just one kind of efficient causation, by way of contact, is not sufficient to explain the system of nature.
What I say here is not surprising to students of Newton. But it's also not really much emphasized. To be sure, Newton, too, accepted a kind of homogeneous matter, but rather than its size and figure, he showed that an abstract quantity (mass) is more salient. Of course, how to understand mass in Newton's philosophy opens new questions, for as Ori Belkind has argued it should not be taken as a property of matter, but rather as a measure.
But that the Nature of Discourse may be more throughly understood, it must first be known, that there is a two-fold Obligation respecting Discourse, whether exprest with the Voice, or written in Characters. The first is, that those who make use of the same Language, are obliged to apply such certain Words to such certain Things, according as Custom has made them to signify in each Language. For since neither any Words nor any particular Strokes form’d into Letters can naturally denote any certain Thing (otherwise all Languages and Characters for writing would be the same; and hence the Use of the Tongue would be to no purpose if every Man might call every Thing by what Name he pleas’d;) it is absolutely necessary among those who speak the same Language, that there be a tacit Agreement among them, that this certain Thing shall be so, or so call’d, and not otherwise. So that unless an uniform Application of Words be agreed upon, ’twill be impossible for one Man to gather the Meaning of another from his Talk. By virtue then of this tacit Compact, every Man is bound in his common Discourse to apply his Words to that Sense, which agrees with the receiv’d Signification thereof in that Language: From whence also it follows, that albeit a Man’s Sentiments may differ from what he expresses in Words, yet in the Affairs of Human Life he must be look’d upon as intending what he says, tho’, as was said, perhaps his inward Meaning be the clear contrary. For since we cannot be inform’d of another’s Mind otherwise than by outward Signs, all Use of Discourse would be to no purpose, if by mental Reservations, which any Man may form as he lists, it might be in his power to elude what he had declar’d by Signs usually accepted to that end.--Pufendorf, Samuel and Barbeyrac, Jean. The Whole Duty of Man According to the Law of Nature (1673, 2003). Liberty Fund, 1673. pp. 120-121
As regular readers know I have been directed toward Pufendorf's account of tacit consent because of my reading of Martin Lenz's entertaining and stimulating Socializing Minds (recall this post, especially; but also this one). Lenz (pp. 138-139) explicitly quotes the passage above, and notes four key anticipations of Locke in Pufendorf:
Lenz is surely right about this, and I accept his contention that Locke's account of the conventionality of language (especially at Essay 3.2.8 and 3.11.11) is inspired by Pufendorf's De Officio hominis civis, or at least that it would have evoked it to contemporary readers then.
So, this raises the question to what degree what I call recall 'the Humean template' for analyzing convention is already present in Pufendorf. The elements of the Humean template are: (i) a sense of common interest (i*) felt in each person's breast; (ii) and it (that is, (i)) observed in others; (iii), this fact (the existence of (i&ii) creates collaboration; (iv) the collaboration is structured in non-trivial ways; (v) and this has good consequences or positive externalities for society. (I avoid the language of 'utility' to avoid issues pertaining to utilitarianism.) And (vi) a Humean convention is contrasted with practices founded in promises and in practice regulated by formal governmental law. In addition, (vii), the process (i-iii) need not be verbalized at all. It can be entirely tacit. And I argued (recall) that Locke articulates the Humean template at Essay 2.28.10 in the context of describing how moral terms are structurally the same in each language even though they can refer to locally different moral behaviors and characters/character-traits. (And that we can also find (recall) the template in the Second Treatise, paragraph 50 in his account of the value off money.)
If we then look at the quoted passage from De Officio, we can read that Pufendorf treats the convention in terms of an existing "custom." And while this is fully compatible with the elements of the Humean template, we are left without an account how the custom could arrise. That's to say while Pufendorf makes, as Lenz notes, the obligatory character of the convention quite clear, he leaves its origin quite mysterious. For, earlier, Pufendorf defines custom as "the frequent Repetition of Actions of the same kind does also incline the Will to do certain Things" (pp. 34-35). But why linguistic practices get repeated in particular patterns is simply contingent now.
This absence of a mechanism of how tacit consent arises is actually notable when Pufendorf explicitly treats of the practice:
Consent is usually made known by outward Signs, as, by Speaking, Writing, a Nod, or the like; tho’ sometimes it may also be plainly intimated without any of them, according to the Nature of the thing and other Circumstances. So Silence in some Cases, and attended with some Circumstances, passes for a Sign expressing Consent. To this may be attributed those tacit Contracts, where we give not our formal Consent by the Signs generally made use of among Men; but the Nature of the Business, and other Circumstances make it fairly supposable. Thus frequently in the principal Contract, which is express, another is included which is tacit, the Nature of the Case so requiring: And it is usual, in most Covenants that are made, that some tacit Exceptions and imply’d Conditions must of necessity be understood.--pp. 111-112
Pufendorf is undoubtedly correct that even in explicit covenants lots of tacit exceptions and implied conditions are presupposed and understood. (In a later passage he treats as plainly resulting "from the Nature of the Thing." (p. 127)) That there is often a social scaffolding on which a formal contract is built is pretty much a shared insight of all critics of Hobbes. But how we should think of the character and sources of this 'necessity' is left opaque in Pufendorf.
I don't mean to suggest Pufendorf never has a mechanism when he is discussing custom. So, for example, when it comes to price formation of prices in the market place (so called vulgar prices) he writes the following.
But the Vulgar Price, which is not fix’d by the Laws, admits of a certain Latitude, within the Compass whereof more or less may be, and often is, either taken or given, according to the Agreement of the Persons dealing; which yet for the most part, goes according to the Custom of the Market. Where commonly there is Regard had to the Trouble and Charges which the Tradesmen generally are at, in the bringing home and managing their Commodities, and also after what manner they are bought or sold, whether by Wholesale or Retail. Sometimes also on a sudden the Common Price is alter’d by reason of the Plenty or Scarcity of Buyers, Money, or the Commodity. For the Scarcity of Buyers and of Money, (which on any particular Account may happen) and the Plenty of the Commodity, may be a Means of diminishing the Price thereof. On the other hand, the Plenty of Buyers and of Money, and the Scarcity of the Commodity, inhanses the same. Thus as the Value of a Commodity is lessen’d, if it wants a Buyer, so the Price is augmented when the Possessor is solicited to sell what otherwise he would not have parted with. Lastly, it is likewise to be regarded, whether the Person offers ready Money, or desires Time for Payment; for Allowance of Time is Part of the Price.--pp. 143-144
Here it is quite clear that the customary price itself reflects underlying costs and even disutility of production and procurement ("the Trouble and Charges which the Tradesmen generally are at, in the bringing home and managing their Commodities") and also reflects supply/demand conditions ("plenty or scarcity"/"plenty of buyers...wants a buyer") in the market-place as well as what we would call inflation, but in Pufendorf's time is felt in terms of the availability of coins [say because the local gold/silver/copper value of coins has made it attractive to melt them down or export them], or "ready money." Interestingly enough buying on credit ("time for payment") is not treated as pure equivalent for buying with coin, presumably not just in virtue of the delay ("allowance of time"), but also the implied risk. Here Pufendorf has a relatively clear account of the mechanism by which the vulgar price can change, but again, he has no account of how it can become customary (except that conditions of change are not operative).
I have not done an exhaustive survey of Pufendorf. (You go read, Of the Law of Nature and Nations: Eight Books!--Seriously, I welcome suggestions.) But Locke deserves some credit for recognizing that Pufendorf's account of convention and tacit contract left too much unexplained. And while I have not defended the adequacy of the Humean template, the fact that Locke adopts it in non-trivial ways is no small advance over Pufendorf's analysis.
FreshRSS 