To date there has been little detailed research into the history of institutional- ized science teaching in the eighteenth century, apart from work done on the British Isles, France, and the Netherlands. The paucity of data reflects the fact that until recently historians of eighteenth-century natural philosophy have taken little interest in the history of science in the classroom, assuming the subject of small importance. This chapter aims to demonstrate that such a judgment is misguided even if the conclusions of such a study must neces- sarily be provisional. The history of science teaching in the Age of Reason throws light on the speed and manner with which new theories and discov- eries became part of the European cultural inheritance. More important, it also advances our understanding of the way in which distinctive natural sciences came to be defined and stabilized and distinctive national scientific traditions began to emerge at the end of the period.
AROUND
Traditionally, public teaching in the natural sciences was the preserve of the universities, where the resposibility for teaching the gamut of human knowl- edge was divided among the faculties of arts, theology, law (sometimes divided into separate canon and civil law faculties), and medicine. By , after three centuries of expansion, the number of Europe’s universities had grown from to some , and they were to be found in all parts of the continent ex- cept Russia. A further fifteen or so universities or university colleges had also been founded in the New World, including three in the then English North American colonies: Harvard, Yale, and the College of William and Mary at Williamsburg. By the turn of the eighteenth century, however, the universities no longer had a monopoly on science teaching, for in a number of countries instruction had been relocated in municipal colleges. These had been initially founded as feeder schools for the local university, providing instruction in
Latin and Greek grammar and rhetoric, the languages of university learning, but in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they had frequently usurped the province of the university and had begun to teach philosophy and math- ematics, too. What distinguished these institutions from universities was that they were not empowered to grant degrees.
As a result of this development, the provision of institutionalized science teaching across the European world was very uneven. In the British Isles, where the grammar and Scottish burgh schools stuck to their last, or in the English-speaking colonies, where schools of any kind were few and far between, science was publicly taught only in the universities and university colleges. A similar situation pertained in the Spanish/Austrian Netherlands and the other parts of Protestant northern Europe. In Catholic Latin Europe and the Span- ish and Portuguese colonies, in contrast, instruction in the natural sciences was widely available in the university feeder schools, so provision was much more plentiful. In France, for instance, philosophy was no longer taught in the -odd universities at all but in some collèges de plein exercice. On the other hand, the density of the provision had little effect on the social character of the student populaton that attended these public courses. Broadly speaking, access to public science teaching was limited everywhere to relatively affluent males in their late teens who were destined for one of the three professional careers that university education primarily existed to serve: the Church, law, and medicine.1
Within the university and college system the study of the natural world in was divided into three separate subject areas or distinctive scientiae. Prin- cipally, the natural sciences fell under the head of philosophy, which comprised the four subsciences of logic, ethics, physics, and metaphysics. The order in which the last three were taught changed over the centuries, but logic was always studied at the beginning of the course because it provided the analyt- ical tools for an understanding of the other philosophical sciences. Physics, or the science of natural bodies, corpora naturalia, was thus as much a logical sci- ence as were ethics and metaphysics. There was no epistemological distinction between them. Physics and metaphysics in particular were customarily seen as intimately connected to the extent that the former provided evidence of di- vine goodness whereas the latter demonstrated God’s existence and attributes. The classroom science of physics at the beginning of the eighteenth cen- tury was a causal and deductive science: its purpose was to explain observed natural phenomena in terms of unimpeachable fundamental principles about the nature of matter through constructing water-tight causal chains. In this sense it was still an Aristotelian science whose epistemology was drawn
Science, Universities, and Other Public Spaces
1Willem Frijhoff, “Patterns,” in A History of the University in Europe (Cambridge University Press,
– ), vol. : Universities in Early Modern Europe (–), ed. Hilde de Ridder-Symoens (), especially pp.– (tables and patterns); Roger Chartier, Marie-Madeleine Compère, and Dominique Julia, L’Education en France du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: SEDES, ), chaps. –.
primarily from the Posterior Analytics. It was an Aristotelian science, too, in that its subject matter was largely determined by Aristotle’s surviving works on natural philosophy. The course would proceed from the general to the par- ticular, beginning by introducing students to the chief themes in Aristotle’s
Physics and then moving on to investigate topics in the De caelo, the De gen- eratione et corruptione, the De meteorologia, the De anima, and the De parvis naturalibus. Consequently, by the end of the course, which was usually a year
in length, the student would have been instructed in the principles of mat- ter and motion, the structure of the superlunary world, the process of change and decay on Earth, the characteristics of inanimate terrestial phenomena, and the mysteries of life – human, animal and vegetable.
In many parts of Catholic Europe and throughout Spanish and Portuguese America, the content as well as the structure of the physics course was equally Aristotelian. This was especially the case in the large number of colleges and universities controlled by the Society of Jesus. This did not mean that Jesuit and other Aristotelian professors taught a physics completely oblivious of con- temporary developments in the natural sciences: sixteenth- and seventeenth- century Aristotelianism was a vibrant and eclectic physical philosophy that successfully incorporated most of the new observational discoveries.2It meant,
rather, that Jesuit physics remained wedded to the Thomist Aristotelian po- sition that natural bodies were the amalgamation of matter and form, that forms were immaterial, and that only formalistic and qualitative explanations of natural phenomena were legitimate.
On the other hand, in the Protestant world and in Catholic colleges and universities where philosophy teaching was in the hands of lay or secular pro- fessors, the traditional Aristotelian kernel of the physics course had been al- ready or was in the process of being jettisoned. Instead, the professors had largely embraced some form of the new mechanical philosopy. The large ma- jority were, broadly speaking, Cartesians and taught their pupils that the uni- verse was a plenum in which natural phenomena, both sub- and superlunary, could be explained almost entirely in terms of indefinitely divisible particulate matter in motion. Only human beings (who could themselves move as well as be moved) and perhaps animals had superadded immaterial forms or souls, but even they, physiologically-speaking, were machines. In France, Catholic secular professors at the University of Paris followed closely Descartes’s for- mulation of his mechanical philosophy in his Principia. In the Protestant universities of northern Germany, on the other hand, the first two decades of the eighteenth century saw the rapid dissemination of an eclectic form of
Laurence Brockliss
2Charles B. Schmitt, “Towards a Reassessment of Renaissance Aristotelianism,” History of Science,
(), –; Christia Mercer, “The Vitality and Importance of Early Modern Aristotelianism,” in Tom Sorrell (ed.), The Rise of Modern Philosophy: The Tension Between the New and Traditional Phi-
Cartesian physics that drew on Leibniz’s theory of monads, at least for its ac- count of organic matter. This German variant was the creation of Christian Wolff (–) who took over the chair of natural philosophy and math- ematics at the new Prussian Pietist university of Halle (founded in ) in .
Very few mechanist professors, Catholic or Protestant, accepted the Gas- sendist variant of the mechanical philosophy, which argued that the universe was formed from indivisible atoms whirling around in a vacuum. This was partly because Gassendist atomism was too closely associated with Epicurian materialism but also because Gassendi seemed inconsistent and endowed his atoms with nonmechanical attributes.3 Not surprisingly, then, outside the
English-speaking world, no professor of physics accepted Newton’s develop- ment of Gassendist mechanism either. Mechanist professors on the European continent, if they discussed Newton’s work at all, found the concept of a two- or multiple-force universe impossible to comprehend: all motion (visible or invisible) had to be by physical contact. Even physics teachers in the British Isles found Newton’s work difficult to understand. By the s his theory of universal gravitation, as well as his work on light and color, was being dis- cussed by professors of philosophy in the Scottish universities, in particular at Edinburgh, but it took another decade for Newton’s critique of Descartes’s vortexes to be sympathetically received. Scottish professors at the turn of the eighteenth century preferred to attempt to accommodate the Englishman’s discoveries to Cartesian plenism and were reluctant to abandon an impul- sionist physics. In the Edinburgh professor Charles Erskine (–) produced a set of physical theses that were enthusiastically Newtonian. None- theless, he could still declare, “Leibniz has shown beyond doubt that gravity derives from the impulse of the surrounding fluid, as do magnetic actions; this is quite clear from his investigations into the causes of celestial motions.”4
The emergence of a strong Cartesian presence in college and university class- rooms around did not really signify that Europe’s professors of physics were dividing into ancients and moderns. In fact, the Cartesian course in many respects was traditionalist. Cartesian, as much as Aristotelian, physics
Science, Universities, and Other Public Spaces
3Edward G. Ruestow, Physics at Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Leiden: Philosophy and the New
Science in the University (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, ), chap. ; Michael Heyd, Between Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: Jean-Robert Chouet and the Introduction of Cartesian Science in the Academy of Geneva (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, ), especially chap. ; Brockliss, French Higher Education, pp. –;
Laurence W. B. Brockliss, “Descartes, Gassendi, and the Reception of the Mechanical Philosophy in the French Collèges de Plein Exercice, –,” Perspective on Science, (), –; Geert Van- paemel, Echo’s van een wetenschappelijke revolutie. De mechanistische natuurwetenschap aan de Leuvense
Artesfaculteit, – (Verhandelingen van de koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen, Let-
teren, en Schone Kunsten van België, Klasse der Wetenschappen, ; Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, ), chaps. –; Brendan Dooley, “Science Teaching as a Career at Padua in the Early Eighteenth Century: The Case of Giovanni Poleni,” History of Universities, (), especially pp. –.
4C. M. Shepherd, “Newtonianism in the Scottish Universities in the Eighteenth Century,” in R. H.
Campbell and Andrew S. Skinner (eds.), The Origins of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: John Donald, ), chap. , especially p. .
was a causal and verbal science based squarely on the study of Aristotelian logic. Moreover, in its classroom version, even the vocabulary of Cartesian physics retained many Aristotelian vestiges. Thus, the Paris professor Jerome Besoigne (–), in a course delivered at the Collège du Sorbonne- Plessis in –, could still use the term “substantial form,” merely giving it a Cartesian gloss: “Substantial or essential forms of bodies should be un- derstood as nothing other than a certain disposition of the whole body and its parts, or a congeries of accidents and qualities.” Besoigne could also declare that this was Aristotle’s own understanding of the concept: it was the Stagyrite’s Peripatetic followers who had invented the idea of nonmaterial substantial forms added to matter.5
The Cartesian courses, furthermore, had no mathematical content, and no attempt was made to enliven the traditional professorial dictation with experiments. Admittedly, some Protestant Cartesian professors, such as M. G. Loescher (d. ) at Wittenberg, described their course as one in experimen- tal physics, but the reality was different. Like other contemporary professors (both Cartesian and Aristotelian), such professors illustrated their course by
describing experiments that confirmed their position: they did not themselves perform them. Cartesian physics was a completely new type of physics in only
one respect: it emphasized that physics was a practical science. Aristotelians always argued that natural philosophy was a theoretical subject. In constrast, professors like Loescher took up the utilitarian rhetoric of the experimental philosophers. In his inaugural lecture Loescher argued that a knowledge of physics would eventually aid the progress of all the arts necessary for hu- man existence.6
Both the Aristotelian and the Cartesian classroom course of physics at the turn of the eighteenth century, then, only partially reflected the concerns of the new science. Most adepts of the experimental philosophy, whatever their natural philosophical allegiance, were primarily interested in the production of natural effects or “matters of fact.” The growing concern of its leading practitioners was not the creation of a traditional causal physics but rather the careful measurement and observation of natural phenomena in the hope of discovering mathematically describable laws underpinning their regular behavior. Nonetheless, the work of the contemporary experimental philoso- pher did find its way more directly into the classroom to the extent that it was taught as part of a course in mathematics. Although mathematics as a subject was deemed distinct from philosophy and subordinate to it – in that
Laurence Brockliss
5Biblothèque de Sainte-Geneviève, Paris, MS , “Physica,” fos. , .
6M. G. Loescher, “Oratio inauguralis habita die . ian. A. MDCCXIV de physica ad rem publicam
accommodanda,” in Loescher, Physica experimentalis compendiosa in usum juventutis academicae
adornata . . . (Wittenberg: G. Zimmermann, ), especially pp. –. Descartes had particularly emphasized the utility of his philosophy for medicine in the sixth part of his Discours de la méthode ): see Descartes, Oeuvres philosophiques, ed. F. Alquié, vols. (Paris: Garnier, –), vol. ,
it dealt with the natural body in the abstract – it had been an important part of the arts curriculum in the medieval university, embracing astronomy, optics, and music.7This tradition of teaching applied as well as theoretical
mathematics was continued in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Al- though many of the courses given in the colleges and universities were com- pletely elementary and embraced only the first books of Euclid, some insti- tutions developed the medieval inheritance further and in the seventeenth century began to offer lectures on the latest work in astronomy, optics, har- monics, and dynamics. The Jesuits were particularly important here in that many of their courses in mathematics were devised with prospective army and naval officers in mind, members of the nobility who (on the European con- tinent at least) did not traditionally attend college and university and whose scientific knowledge of the natural world was gained (if at all) from books rather than lectures. Although the Order was Aristotelian and anti-Copernican, their professors of mathematics, especially in France, were free to develop a noncausal science of practical mathematics that gave their limited audience a solid grounding in the sciences of ballistics, fortification, and navigation and even introduced them to new subjects such as electricity and magnetism that they themselves helped to develop. Typical was the textbook published by the Paris-based Jesuit Louis Bertrand Castel (–) in under the title Mathématique abrégée universelle.8
The teaching of mathematics played a particularly important role in the dissemination of the new science in Great Britain. By the end of the seven- teenth century there were endowed chairs at Cambridge, St. Andrews, Edin- burgh, Glasgow, and Oxford, where the two Savilian chairs in geometry and astronomy had been founded in . At Oxford and Cambridge, too, many colleges provided lectures in mathematics from the time of Elizabeth. By and large the teaching was in the hands of dedicated and proficient mathematicians who provided effective tuition in both theoretical and practical mathematics. Newton, holder of the Cambridge Lucasian chair (founded in ), was only the most exceptional of a bevy of talented mathematicians occupying univer- sity posts in the British Isles in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was these professors – especially the members of the Gregory dynasty who taught mathematics at St. Andrews, Edinburgh, and Oxford – who first unequivocally championed Newtonian physics in the universities. Mathe- matically adept, they were able to follow the argument in Newton’s Principia and grasp his critique of Descartes’s impulsionist explanation of planetary
Science, Universities, and Other Public Spaces
7John North, “The Quadrivium,” in Hilde de Ridder-Symoens (ed.), A History of the University in
Europe, vol. : Universities in the Middle Ages (), pp. –.
8François de Dainville, “L’Enseignement des mathématiques dans les collèges jésuites de France du seiz-
ième au dix-huitième siècle,” Revue d’histoire des sciences, (), –, –; Brockliss, French Higher
Education, pp.–, –. On Jesuit science tout court, see especially Steven J. Harris, “Transposing the Merton Thesis: Apostolic Spirituality and the Establishment of the Jesuit Scientific Tradition,” in Rivka Feldkay and Yehuda Elkana (eds.), “After Merton”: Protestant and Catholic Science in Seventeenth-
motion. Because theirs was an analytical and not a causal science, they were free to embrace Newton’s concept of a universe of different forces without having to trouble themselves about its epistemological status. Unlike their colleagues in philosophy, they were not constrained by the need to accom- modate Newtonian physics with a priori mechanist principles and could teach his mathematical philosophy technically and coherently.9
Yet if some college and university mathematics courses by the turn of the eighteenth century were sufficiently sophisticated, especially in the British Isles, to ensure that students with a mathematical bent could obtain a good idea of contemporary developments in mathematical physics, they were no more likely than courses in physics to introduce their auditors to the exper- imental philosophy tout court. They were principally courses in geometry and its many practical applications and were taught in Latin with little recourse to visual aids beyond the occasional printed diagram. To experience nature being put to the question in an official course given in the university world in , a student would have had to transfer to the faculty of medicine and attend the lectures in anatomy, botany, and chemistry. Whereas physics was a causal and mathematics an analytical science, anatomy, botany, and chem- istry were simple descriptive sciences taught by dissection and demonstration. In complete contrast to lectures in physics and mathematics, the emphasis was on visual learning. Indeed, the atmosphere bordered on the theatrical, and demonstrations, especially dissections, were commonly attended by in- terested laymen as well as medical students.
However, in many faculties of medicine the quality of the teaching was poor