Aw, what the hell. I know it will be waaaay over vegetablehead's head and most others, too, but here's part 1 of Chapter 1 (the content wasn't changed, but I had to do some editing):
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
BACKGROUND
CHAPTER I
The Rejection of Scholasticism
' " I perceive", said the Countess, "Philosophy is now become very Mechanical.'' "So mechanical”, said I, "that I fear we shall quickly become ashamed of it; they will have the World to be in great, what a watch is in little; which is very regular, & depends only upon the just disposing of the several parts of the movement. But pray tell me, Madam, had you not formerly a more sublime Idea of the Universe?" ' [Fontenelle, Plurality of Worlds, 1686.]
TO give a 'philosophical' account of matters which had formerly been explained 'unscientifically', 'popularly', or 'figuratively'—this, it would probably be agreed, has been the main intellectual concern of the last three hundred years. In a sense, no doubt, the separation of the 'true' from the 'false', the 'real' from the 'illusory', has been the task of thought at all times. But this winnowing process seems to have been carried on much more actively and consciously at certain times than at others. For us in the West two such periods are of especial importance, the period of Greek philosophy and the centuries following the Renaissance. It was in the seventeenth century that modern European thought seems first to have assumed, once more, that its appointed task was La Recherche de la Verite, the discovery and declaration, according to its lights, of the True Nature of Things. It is in that century that we meet once again the exhilaration which inspired Lucretius in his address to Epicurus—the sense of emancipation from inadequate notions, of new contact with reality. It was then, too, that the concepts of 'truth', 'reality', 'explanation' and the rest were being formed, which have moulded all subsequent thinking. There is some reason, then, for supposing that it may be worthwhile to watch these concepts in process of formation.
First it may be well to enquire, not with Pilate— 'What is Truth?' but what was felt to be 'truth' and 'explanation' under seventeenth century conditions. As T. E. Hulme and others have pointed out, it is almost insuperably difficult to become critically conscious of one's own habitual assumptions; 'doctrines felt as facts' can only be seen to be doctrines, and not facts, after great efforts of thought, and usually only with the aid of a first-rate metaphysician. It is, however, less difficult to detect the assumptions of an age distant from our own, especially when these have been subject to criticism. At this distance of time it should be possible, I think, to state fairly accurately what the seventeenth century felt as 'true', and what satisfied it as 'explanation'. In reading seventeenth century writers one feels that it was as 'explanation' that they chiefly valued the 'new philosophy', and it is for this reason that I wish first to enquire, briefly, what is 'explanation'?
Dictionary definitions will not help us much here. 'To explain', we learn, means to 'make clear', to 'render intelligible'. But wherein consists the clarity, the intelligibility? The clarity of an explanation seems to depend upon the degree of satisfaction that it affords. An explanation 'explains' best when it meets some need of our nature, some deep-seated demand for assurance. 'Explanation' may perhaps be roughly defined as a restatement of something—event, theory, doctrine, etc. in terms of the current interests and assumptions. It satisfies, as explanation, because it appeals to that particular set of assumptions, as superseding those of a past age or of a former state of mind. Thus it is necessary, if an explanation is to seem satisfactory, that its terms should seem ultimate, incapable of further analysis. Directly we allow ourselves to ask ' What, after all, does this explanation amount to? ' we have really demanded an explanation of the explanation, that is to say, we have seen that the terms of the first explanation are not ultimate, but can be analysed into other terms—which perhaps for the moment do seem to us to be ultimate. Thus, for example, we may choose to accept a psychological explanation of a metaphysical proposition, or we may prefer a metaphysical explanation of a psychological proposition. All depends upon our presuppositions, which in turn depend upon our training, whereby we have come to regard (or to feel) one set of terms as ultimate, the other not. An explanation commands our assent with immediate authority, when it presupposes the 'reality', the 'truth', of what seems to us most real, most true. One cannot, therefore, define 'explanation' absolutely; one can only say that it is a statement which satisfies the demands of a particular time or place.
A general demand for restatement or explanation seems to have arisen from time to time, perhaps never more vehemently than in the period we are considering. Such a demand presumably indicates a disharmony between traditional explanations and current needs. It does not necessarily imply the 'falsehood' of the older statement; it may merely mean that men now wish to live and to act according to a different formula. This is especially evident in our period whenever a 'scientific' explanation replaces a theological one. For example, the spots on the moon's surface might be due, theologically, to the fact that it was God's will they should be there; scientifically they might be 'explained' as the craters of extinct volcanoes. The newer explanation may be said, not so much to contain 'more' truth than the older, as to supply the kind of truth which was now demanded. An event was 'explained'—and this, of course, may be said as much of our own time as of the seventeenth century—when its history had been traced and described. A comet, for example, or an eclipse, was explained when instead of being a disastrous omen which 'with fear of change perplexes monarchs' it could be shown to be the 'necessary' result of a demonstrable chain of causes. No one, it need hardly be said, wishes to deny that this explanation had and still has a more 'satisfying' quality than the one it superseded. But why was it more satisfying? It was more satisfying, we may suppose, because now, instead of the kind of 'truth' which is consistent with authoritative teaching, men began to desire the kind which would enable them to measure, to weigh and to control the things around them; they desired, in Bacon's words, 'to extend more widely the limits of the power and greatness of man Interest was now directed to the how, the manner of causation, not its why, its final cause. For a scientific type of explanation to be satisfying, for it to convince us with a sense of its necessary truth, we must be in the condition of needing and desiring that type of explanation and no other.
The seventeenth century was the first of the modern centuries which, on the whole, have increasingly fulfilled these conditions. We have said that an explanation is acceptable when it satisfies certain needs and demands. What demands were met by the scientific movement in our period? To answer this question we may enquire a little into the general effects of explanation upon the minds of those who are being enlightened. Considered as a psychological event, an explanation may be described as a change in the quality of our response towards an object or an idea. An explanation invites and—if it is in accordance with our felt or unfelt needs—produces a new attitude towards its subject-matter. here we had formerly felt fear, pain, curiosity, dissatisfaction, anxiety or reverence, we now experience relief, and regard the object with easy familiarity and perhaps contempt. An explained thing, except for very resolute thinkers, is almost inevitably 'explained away'. Speaking generally, it may be said that the demand for explanation is due to the desire to be rid of mystery. Such a demand will be most insistent when the current mysteries have become unusually irksome, as seems to have been the case in the time of Epicurus, and again at the Renaissance. At those turning-points men wanted 'scientific' explanations because they no longer wished to feel as they had been taught to feel about the nature of things. To be rid of fear—fear of the unknown, fear of the gods, fear of the stars or of the devil—to be released from the necessity of reverencing what was not to be understood, these were amongst the most urgent demands of the modern as of the ancient world; and it was because it satisfied these demands that scientific explanation was received as the revelation of truth. Not immediately received by everybody, we should remind ourselves. There are always those like Donne for whom new philosophy 'puts all in doubt', for whom, in fact, new explanation explains nothing, but merely causes distress and confusion ; and those, like the Fathers of the Inquisition, for whom new philosophy is simply old error. But there is a deepening chorus of approval as the century wears on, and after the Restoration the unanimity is wonderful.
More was demanded than mere release from traditional hauntings. Men demanded also to feel at home in this brave new world which Columbus and Copernicus and Galileo had opened up to them, and to recognise it as 'controlled, sustained and agitated', by laws in some way akin to those of human reason. To be no longer at the mercy of nature, no longer to be encompassed by arbitrary mystery—these benefits were to be accompanied by the great new gift of power, power to control natural forces and to turn them, in Bacon's phrases, to the 'occasions and uses of life', and 'the relief of man's estate'. All this the new thought promised and indeed performed ; no wonder, then, that the types of explanation which it offered seemed the only 'true' ones. Were these promises the enticements of Mephistopheles to Faust? and has the Adversary, at any time since then, actually reappeared and demanded payment of his bond? This disturbing possibility is one which, at any rate, we shall not do ill to bear in mind as we pursue our enquiries.
We began, it will be remembered, by enquiring what was felt to be most true, most real, most explanatory,under seventeenth century conditions. Let us guard against any implied over-simplification ; no one thing answered to that description, then or at any time. Different kinds of truth were acknowledged (as we shall see later in more detail), for instance truths of faith and truths of reason; different orders of reality were recognised, and different kinds of explanation seen to be relevant in varying contexts. Nevertheless it may be said that if there was then any outstanding intellectual revolution in process of enactment, it was a general transference of interest from metaphysics to physics, from the contemplation of Being to the observation of Becoming. In Bacon's classification of the Sciences, final causes and Form are consigned to Metaphysics, while Physics deals with efficient causes and Matter. But although Metaphysics is thus given its status by the buccinator novi temporis, the main significance of the great instauration was to lie in the enormous extension of the field of physical or ' natural ' causation, the field of efficient causes and matter '. In the mighty ' exantlation of truth—of which Sir Thomas Browne lamented that he should not see the end, or more, indeed, than ' that obscured Virgin half out of the pit '—no event counted for more than the realisation that almost all the phenomena of the physical world could be ' explained ' by the laws of motion, as movements of particles of matter in space and time. As Glanvill says, the Aristotelian philosophy had prevailed, until the present age disinterred ' the more excellent Hypotheses of Democritus and Epicurus'. Although not all mysteries, by any means, had yet been reduced to mechanics, what is important for us is that now mechanico-materialistic explanations began to be 'felt as facts', felt, that is, as affording that picture of reality, of things-in-themselves, which alone would satisfy contemporary demands. It was only when you were interpreting any phenomenon—a colour, a movement, a condition, an attraction—in terms of the motion of atoms, their impingement on each other, their cohesion, collision or eddying, that you were giving an account of how things actually and really happened. The mechanical explanation was the 'philosophical' explanation; all others were, on the one hand, vulgar, superstitious, and superficial; or, on the other hand, they were 'Aristotelian' or 'scholastic'.
