First Look at Pseudo-science

Historiography

Science, Pseudo-science, and Utopianism in Early Modern Thought

Stephen McKnight, ed., 1992

There’s a lot in this book and I should probably take another, closer look at it. My initial impressions included these items:

“The term pseudo-science was introduced into the history of science by George Sarton and the other founders of the discipline, and it reflects their positivistic conviction that the history of science is a narrative of the progressive victory of the physical, mathematical sciences over religious, metaphysical, and occult views of nature.” This is an interesting thought, that the early professionalization of science involved creating a fortified border between what counted and what did not count as legitimate. McKnight continued, “In Comte’s account [in Cours de philosophie positive, 1830-42], the decisive epochal break separating the dark ages of religion and metaphysics from the Age of Reason and Enlightenment is the result of the Scientific Revolution and the consequent utilization of science by the intellectual and political elite to master nature and perfect society.” But apparently, in order to do this it had to be very clear who was authorized to speak for “science” and who was not.

But, McKnight continued, “Recent scholarship showing the persistence of ancient traditions of esoteric religion and occult philosophy well into the modern epoch poses a fundamental challenge to these historiographical models—particularly when primary sources show that Bacon, Newton, and other founders of the modern age had a deep reverence for the truths hidden in the myths and symbols of the prisca theologia.”

Okay, so starting at the top: Pseudo-science assumes there was a regular, authoritative science that people were being silly, backward, or perverse in trying to evade. This seems clear, looking backward. We believe we understand how science progressed from its primitive roots to its mature, legitimate current form. But, as Conner has shown in his A People’s History of Science and as even Kuhn hinted, that assumption too may be incorrect. And certainly, the people who were driving “science” forward in the early modern period had no roadmap showing them which were the “legitimate” and which the erroneous elements of their studies.

So, we have “natural philosophers” like Bacon, Boyle, and Newton. All of them had classical educations (this may have been the main thing that distinguished them from the “low mechanicks” who produced a lot of the technological innovation leading to new scientific theories, following Conner again), so they presumably believed in some sort of continuity in the “grand design.” This meant that, whether they believed in an active, historical god or in Spinoza’s deistic/pantheistic absent god or in a watchmaker that had wound his contraption and then turned away, they believed in order. Newton was looking, after all, for a universal law of gravity; not a local one.

Next, there’s the issue of periodization. A hard split between a dark age and an Enlightenment makes sense, for the enlightened. What about everybody else? I suspect the two designations obscure a lot of change that may have been happening in the lives and societies of regular people during the “dark” ages; just as they hide the fact that a lot stayed the same for most people after the “Enlightenment”. Tied to this is the idea of learning to “master nature and perfect society.” For whom?

The fact that superstition persists to this day doesn’t necessarily challenge the scientific world-view or the history of science. On the other hand, the idea that early scientists may have found social, moral, and even scientific insights in esoteric and mythological documents that were part of the classical canon doesn’t seem far-fetched. The implications of their scientific discoveries were often scary, because they directly challenged the “truths” that formed the basis of early-modern society. So they’d be expected to try to reconcile their scientific insights with those of “other magisteria.”

But there is evidence the new scientists had a sense they were doing something fundamentally different. John Friend (1675-1728) was a disciple of Newton’s and wrote a history of science in 1725-6 in which “the mystical religious outlook of the Paracelsians could not be tolerated. Friend rejected Paracelsus as an idle systematizer whose whole cosmology and religious-vitalistic outlook toward nature were the very antithesis of the new science.” Some other people to read more about:

John William Draper (1811-1882), see his History of the Intellectual Development of Europe (1863) and History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874).

Andrew Dickson White, The Warfare of Science (1877).

James Joseph Walsh (1865-1942) made the case for religion. His 1907 book, The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries, claimed that the church had done much to encourage medicine, including supporting anatomical studies in the Italian universities and establishing hospitals.

See also Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, (1931).