...
"Intellectually eithteenth-century America was very much part of the
European Enlightenment...Almost everywhere the philosophes embraced
a common body of ideas, subscribed to a common body of laws, shared a common faith.
They were all natural philosophers - what we call scientists - and if they were not all trained
in science, they were fascinated by it and dabbled in it: Voltaire, who early provided a
simplified Newton; Goethe, who wrote learnedly (if mistakenly) on optics; Priestly,
who invented not only Unitarianism, but Oxygen and soda water, wrote a history
of electricity.[...]; and in America the members of the Philosophical Society -
Franklin, Jefferson, Rittenhouse, Dr. Rush - and [ ...] Benjamin Thompson of
Woburn Mass. who became Count Rumford of the Holy Roman Empire and
founded the Royal Institution in London and endowed the Rumford chair
of Natural Sciences at Harvard College."[ Commager]
Natural philosophy originally refferred to the whole of science. In the 19th century it was specialized to mean what we now call physics.
"They accepted the Newtonian world governed by laws of nature..." (Commanger)
Franklin discovered electricity and the Gulf Stream. He invented bifocals, the lending library the Franklin stove, the lightning rod, the catheter, and the battery.
"Jefferson wrote on everything from architecture to law, from religion to literature, from agriculture to morals....Jefferson created the Library of Congress and provided it with it a classification system." [Commanger]He invented the the dumb waiter and, "a new seed box for sewing clover (which reduced the cost from six shillings to two shillings an acre), ,...Most important of his inventions was the mouldboard plough, specifically designed for the soil of Virginia. From Italy he imported the Lombardy Poplar...figs from France, vetch from England, grapes from Italy"(Commanger)
Dr. WIlliam Small, proffesor of Natural Philosophy at William and Mary College, Was Jefferson's most influential teacher...[Brodie]
Jefferson also carried out the first archaelogical expedition in America.
"A third common denominator of the enlightenment was a prerequisite and a product of the first: commitment to freedom of the mind - freedom from religious and social superstitions, freedom from the tyranny of the Church, the state, and the academy, freedom to follow the teachings of science and of reason wherever they led." [Commanger]
"The philosophes shared a fourth passion and commitment: a humanitarianism which imagined and fought for the abolition of torture and the amelioration of the barbarous penal code that still disgraced the statute books of even the most civilized nations; an end to the Inquisition; improvements in the lot to the peasants and the serfs; the abolition of the slave trade and even of slavery itself..." [Commanger]
Farganis writes about the influence of physics on eighteenth-century attitudes about government:
Enlightenment Philosophes like Montesquieu were the eighteenth-century precursors of the classical sociological theorists. The philosophes were impressed by the revolutionary advances wrought in the natural sciences, particularly by Newtonian physics, and sought to discover the scientific truths about society:
What is new and original about Enlightenment thought, therefore, is the wholehearted adoption of the methedological pattern of Newton's physics; and what is even more important for our consideration of the philosophical foundations of sociological theory is the fact that immediately with its adoption it was generalized and employed in realms other than the mathematical and physical. (Zeitlin 1968, 7).(Farganis)
The natural philosophers in Europe had a more difficulties in attaining their goals.
"...but the agenda of the old world philosophes was not exhilarating; it was almost wholly negative. For the philosophes were helpless against the weaponry of the state, the Church, the Inquisition, the law, the military, even the universities, which bristled on every quarter of the horizon....Diederot cast into jail, and the Encyclopedie banned; Voltaire in hiding or in exile, Rouessau on the run; Tom Paine outlawed;... even the great Buffon forced to retract all those portions of his Historie Naturelle to which the Church objected. Before the philosophes could begin the great task of reconstruction there had to be a clearing away of censorship, the Inquisition, torture, corruption..." [Commanger]
Later, Lincoln made reference to The Great Task, The Unfinished Work, and The Cause in his Gettysburg Address.
The University of Virginia was designed by Jefferson. It was the first university in the world that was not under the control of a church. Jefferson believed that the concepts of intellectual freedom could not survive long without the proper setting to allow succeeding generations to understand the ideas involved.
"...Jefferson who was chairman of the Board of Trustees, and the first Rector of the University. It was Jefferson who designed every building, every column, every door, every mantlepiece;...Jefferson who provided the library, chose the professors and students, too, and drew up the curriculum. And it was Jefferson who dedicated the institution to 'The illimitable freedom of the human mind...The university was, at its birth, not only 'the most eminent in the United States' as Jefferson said, but the most enlightened and the most liberal, the most nearly like some of the great Universities of the Old World." (Commanger)
"To the crusade againt religious establishmentsand fanaticism Jefferson, for example, contributed the idea of complete separation of Church and State - something not wholly accepted in the Old World two centuries later. To the crusade against ignorance he added the secularization of education... and a democratization of education that carried past the elementary school into higher education."(Commanger)
Jefferson also helped set up the land grant colleges in the new western states, so that the University of Virginia would not be the only secular institution..
By 1773 John Locke's natural rights theories had become as commonplace
for discussion as the Epistles of St. Paul, and for a surprising number of colonists the science of
Newton and the political and legal teaching of Locke, Voltaire, Burlamaqui, Rousseau,
Beccaria, Grotius, Pufendorf, and Vattel had edged out John Calvin altogether. For Jefferson
the old Trinity was replaced by a new trinity, Newton, Locke, and Bacon.
[Brodie]
"An era of educational reform was underway. It was as much a part of the attack against corruption as were the calls for civil service, tarriff, and currency reform that coalesced in the liberal political movement of the early 1870s."( Daniel J. Kelves, "The Physicists, The History of a Scientific Community in America," pg 22
"In the University of California at Berkeley, Daniel Coit Gilman was astir...Gilman was a type-cast advocate of science. He no sooner introduced a cultivated curriculum at the University of California than the State grange and the Mechanic's Deliberative Assembly issued demands for more bread-and-butter courses.....Gilman, 'infinitely disgusted,' was eager to leave, and two years later was eager to accept the presidency of the newly formed Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore." (Kelves, pg 23)
"At Gilman's inaugral in 1876, Thomas Henry Huxley delivered the oration and the ceremonies closed without prayer...Gilman, who had coped enough with undergraduate matters in Berkeley, proposed a different way of promoting science for cultivated purposes."
"The goal of Hopkins would be 'the encouragement of research' - not for practical ends, but for it's own sake. Gillman had to satisfy the more undergraduate-minded trustees and could not manage a complete breakaway from the traditional college. The best teachers, he deftly argued, were those 'free, competent, and willing to make original researches.'..."By the time Hopkins opened, various other colleges had inaugurated nominal graduate work, but none had given the sheer advancement of knowledge so prominent and serious a place in their programs. A bright becon for cultivated Americans everywhere, the Hopkins idea was the capstone of the movement for educational reform." (Kelves, pg 24)
Selling the Enlightenment
I ran across "The Business of the Enlightenment, A Publishing history of the 'Encyclopedie' " in a library the other night. (12-5-2001) Selling the Enlightenment
I ran across "The Business of the Enlightenment, A Publishing history of the 'Encyclopedie' " in a library the other night.
It seems that the cost of publishing a large set of volumes created a vested interest that was able to oppose censorship that would normally have prevented disemination of the ideas in a book at that time.
In 1751 the first volume of the first encyclopedia appeared.
"...it is important to take account of a basic fact that became apparent to the authorities in France as soon as the first volume of the first edition reached the subscriber: The book was dangerous."
But why wasn't this dangerous project stopped then?
"It did not merely provide information about everything from A to Z; it recorded knowledge according to scientific principles expounded by d'Alembert in the Preliminary Discourse. Although he formally acknowledged the authority of the church, d"Alembert made it clear that knowledge came from the senses and not from Rome or Revelation. The great ordering agent was reason, which combined sense data, working with the sister faculties of memory and imagination."
...
"Thus everything man knew derived from the world around him and the operations of his own mind. The 'Encyclopedie' made this point graphically with an engraving of a tree of knowledge showing how all the arts and sciences grew out of the three mental faculties. Philosophy formed the trunk of the tree, while theology occupied a remote branch, next to black magic. Diderot and d'Alembert had dethroned the ancient queen of the sciences. They had rearranged the cognitive universe and reoriented man within it, while elbowing God outside."
"They knew that tampering with world views was a dangerous business, so they hid behind subterfuge, irony, and false protestations of orthodoxy. But they did not hide the epistemological basis of their attack on the old cosmology. On the contrary, the Primary Discourse made it explicit in a brief history of philosophy that established the intellectual prdigree of the philosophes and struck down orthodox Thomism on one side and neo-orthodox Cartesianism on the other, leaving only Locke and Newton standing."
The french philosophes imported the English philosophies.
"Thus Diderot and d'Alembert presented their work as both a compilation of information and a maifestation of 'philosophie'. They meant to merge the two sides of the book, to make them seem like two sides of the same coin: Encyclopedism." ...
"Traditional learning, they implied, amounted to nothing but prejudice and superstition. So beneath the bulk of the 'ENcyclopedie's" twentyeight folio volumes and the enormous variety of its 71,818 articles and 2,885 plates lay an epistemological shift that transformed the topograpy of everything known to man."
The "shot heard 'round the world" was really after the main battle had already been won for the minds of the intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic.
"Having made the break, and having learned to look for knowledge from the viewpoint of the Preliminary Discourse, readers could see smaller heresies throughout the book. Finding them bacame a game. I would not do tto look in obvious places, where the encyclopedists had to be most careful about the censorship..."
"In this way, the encyclopedists stimulated their readers to seek for meaning between the lines, and to listen for double-entendre." "Once a reader learned to exercise his reason in this manner, he would discover unreason in all spheres of life, including the social and political."
... "Not only did Diderot seem to reduce the authority of the King to the consent of the people...but also d'Holbach advocated a bourgeois type constitutuonal monarchy...; Rosseau radical arguments of his 'Contract social'...; and Jacourt popularized natural law theory in dozens of articles that implicitly challenged the ideology of Bourbon absolutism."
... "From the appearance of the first volome in 1751 until the great crisis of 1759, the 'Encyclopedie' was denounced by defenders of the old orthodoxies and the Old Regime, by Jesuits, Jansenists, the General Assembly of the Clergy, the Parlaiment of Paris, the king's council, and the Pope. the denunciations flew so thick and fast that the 'Encyclopedie' seemed doomed. But the pulishers had invested a fortune in it, and they had powerful protectors, notably...the liberal Directeur de la librarie, who superintended the book trade during the crucial years between 1750 and 1763."
"Charles Diehl Brought a lot to Memphis when he moved this college. Perhaps more than just it's possesions, though, he brought a couple of simple, basic ideas. Ideas that were formed, as professor Jack Taylor has reminded me, when Charles Diel was a young physics student at Johns Hopkins -- ideas of genuiness and excellence." Troutt, Rhodes, winter 20000
"A native Virginian, Dr. Rhodes left the University of Virginia in 1926 with a masters degree in Chemistry and a Ph.D. in physics and headed by train - the Memphis Special - to a small liberal arts college he'd never even visited before..." Dr. Rhodes taught Physics for 23 years...In 1949 he was named president...After his retirement in 1965, Dr. Rhodes was drafted several time to fill top level positions on an acting basis." Rhodes magazine, Sesquicentennial Edition, 1998
Lately, The Union of Concerned Scientists has started sending missionaries into the churches to explain some important details:
" This inspirational video, "Keeping the Earth: Religious and Scientific Perspectives on the Environment," calls on all Americans to serve as good stewards of the natural world. Prominent scientists and religious leaders offer their perspectives on the need to protect our environment and the diverse species that share it. The 27 minute video, narrated by James Earl Jones, demonstrates that, although scientists and religious leaders do not agree on all things, they want to work together to preserve nature. UCS produced the video and discussion guide as an educational tool for congregations and interested individuals."
The Union of Concened Scientists.
Hypatia, the last scientist at Alexandria, was killed by a Christian mob in AD 415..
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