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The Influence of Renaissance Thought on the Scientific Revolution

Conference Paper · March 2010

DOI: 10.13140/2.1.2778.4324

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Marina P. Banchetti

Florida Atlantic University

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THE INFLUENCE OF RENAISSANCE THOUGHT ON THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

Marina P. Banchetti

Florida Atlantic University

Introduction

Throughout the course of the 20th century, the majority of philosophers and historians

of science traditionally conceived of the Scientific Revolution as representing a radical

break with the cosmological views of the Classical period and the Middle Ages and as

representing the victory of reason and open inquiry over faith, mysticism, or dogma.

When we examine the history of science more closely, however, we find that this

traditional conception of the Scientific Revolution is not faithful to the actual historical

phenomenon. When the history of the Scientific Revolution is examined in a more

nuanced and complicated manner, we find that, far from being detached from mythical

ways of thinking, the developments of both science and medicine were significantly

influenced by the hermeticism and magical way of thinking that dominated the

intellectual and cultural milieu of Renaissance Italy and other parts of Europe. Historians

of science such as Lynn Thorndike, Frances Yates, Walter Pagel, and Eugenio Garin

argued, in fact, that the influence of hermetic, magical, and Neoplatonic thought on

science and medicine was felt well into the first half of the 18th century and is reflected in

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the work of such luminary scientific figures as Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Boyle,

Newton, and others. Although this new conception of the Scientific Revolution was, at

first, controversial, it has since generated a great deal of research on the topic of the

Renaissance revival of hermeticism, Neoplatonism, and ‘natural magic’ and of their

incontrovertible influence on the development of modern science and medicine.

The idea that the Scientific Revolution was influenced by Renaissance magic,

however, has not yet had an impact on how the non-academic world and the general

public think about the history of science. Yet, knowing the influence that Renaissance

Neoplatonic and hermetic philosophy had on the development of modern science up to

the 18th century is important from both a historical and a philosophical point of view,

since this history reveals something profound about the nature of reason and knowledge

and their relationship to analogical and metaphorical thinking and to the mythical and

poetic imagination.

Although we know that the intellectual and cultural life of 15th and 16th century

Florence was significantly shaped by the rediscovery and translation of many Classical

texts of ancient Greece and Rome, writers and philosophers also gained access to other

sources whose origins were believed to be much older than Aurelius, Aristotle, or even

Plato and were believed to have influenced these Classical authors. The most important

of these were the writings attributed to the supposed founders of the magical arts, Hermes

Trismegistus and Zoroaster. The Corpus Hermeticum and Oracula Chaldaica [Chaldean

Oracles] were magical writings of the second and third centuries C.E. that combined

Neoplatonic, Neopythagorean, Stoic, Persian and Gnostic Christian ideas and, in some

cases, elements taken from pre-Lurianic kabbalistic teachings. However, Renaissance

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scholars assumed that these writings, collectively referred to as hermetic writings, were

the genuine production of two ancient sages, Hermes and Zoroaster, who were widely

believed to have been contemporaries of Moses. Many leading philosophers, such as

Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Francesco Patrizi, believed that the

Hermetic and Chaldean writings represented an ancient wisdom derived, like that of

Moses, directly from God. This revival of interest in magic also led to an increased

appreciation of those medieval thinkers who were believed to have been the best

magicians; notably Roger Bacon, but also Islamic philosophers like Al-kindi and Ibn

Sina.

The common thread running throughout all of the hermetic writings was a

Neoplatonic conception of the cosmos that presented nature as dynamic and full of

hidden forces, among which there was a mutual interaction: between higher and lower

beings, between the characteristics of various planets and certain human characteristics,

between the macrocosm and the microcosm. These mutual interactions, as well as

analogies between the world as a huge animal and created things, between terrestrial and

celestial entities, and between the human body and its natural surroundings were the key

to an understanding of both human beings and the cosmos. In addition, many

hermeticists believed that numbers and combinations of numbers were symbolic

representations of the world and the key to understanding it. The hermetic writings also

offered a concept of man as not only created in the image of God, but as similar to God in

powers of creation and involvement in the universe. Knowledge of the world consisted

in the interpretation of analogies between things and capturing the influences working in

the cosmos. This knowledge could be gained through an intimate acquaintance with

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nature and through technical means, which in the Renaissance nearly always coincided

with magical techniques referred to as ‘natural magic’. These magical writings enjoyed a

tremendous vogue throughout the 15th, 16th, and well into the 17th centuries. During this

most exciting intellectual period, we discover a fascinating cross-fertilization taking place

between hermeticism, humanism, natural magic, and pre-modern natural philosophy.

According to many historians of science, this cross-fertilization and the impact of the

hermetic writings on Renaissance culture served as a necessary preliminary to the rise of

modern science.

My focus here concerns the manner in which these various intellectual trends,

collectively referred to as Renaissance hermeticism, influenced four of the major

developments that have traditionally been associated with the Scientific Revolution and

that helped to demarcate modern science from its pre-modern Aristotelian predecessors.

These four developments were:

1) The rejection of Aristotelian cosmology

2) The notion of the centrality of the sun in the universe or heliocentrism

3) The conceptual and methodological mathematization of nature

4) The empirical approach to the study of nature

The last two developments, combined as they were in the scientific method, are arguably

the aspects of modern science that guaranteed its unprecedented success as a heuristic

(i.e., knowledge seeking) enterprise. To the extent that the Scientific Revolution was a

historical phenomenon, deeply embedded in the cultural and intellectual life within which

it was situated, we should not be surprised to discover that, although it was clearly a

rational achievement, it was one that was deeply affected by the particularities of the

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intellectual traditions that dominated the cultural life of Renaissance and early modern

Europe.

The Microcosm-Macrocosm Analogy and Its Impact on Modern Scientific Cosmology

From the mid-17th century to the early 20th century, modern science was dominated

by a conception of nature as a mechanistic physical system consisting of inert matter

governed by deterministic causal principles. Up to the mid-17th century, however,

European natural philosophy tended to describe nature not in mechanistic terms but,

rather, as an organic and living whole, in which all aspects of the cosmos were

interdependent and connected in important ways. This conception of nature has been

referred to as vitalism, the idea that nature is alive, that ‘vital forces’ are causally

operative in nature, and that the presence of ‘vital force’ marks the difference between

organic and inorganic matter. Vitalism is a type of holistic and organismic conception of

nature that views the causes of motion as inherent within matter and treats all of nature as

if it were intrinsically active and self-organizing. Throughout the history of both

speculative and natural philosophy, vitalistic theories have been overlaid with theological

overtones of one sort or another, and the vitalistic theories that dominated natural

philosophy during the Renaissance and up to the early 17th century are no exception.

Renaissance and early modern natural philosophers believed that they lived in an

enchanted universe, that the physical universe did not consist of inert matter but was

either itself animate by virtue of containing a ‘world soul’ (anima mundi) or was

inhabited by vital forces and spirits that played a causal role in the occurrence of natural

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phenomena. For these philosophers, the presence of a world soul or of vital forces and

spirits was ultimately attributed either to divine emanation or to divine action.

Another characteristic of vitalism was that it affirmed a fundamental correspondence

between what is above, the macrocosm, and what is below, the microcosm. The theory

of a correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm was at the center of a group of

ideas derived from the mystical-alchemical tradition crossed with themes common to the

revived Neoplatonic mysticism and hermetic traditions. This idea of a correspondence

between microcosm and macrocosm, referred to as the microcosm-macrocosm analogy,

was inherited from the all-encompassing hermetic analogy that is expressed in the Corpus

Hermeticum as “What is Above is like what is Below, what is Below is like what is

Above.” This analogy informed all aspects of Renaissance culture, from philosophy to

science, from art to literature and architecture. This analogy also infused the work of

such important philosophers as Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola,

Tommaso Campanella, Cornelius Agrippa, and Giordano Bruno, to name only a few.

The microcosm-macrocosm analogy was one of the governing principles of

Renaissance magic and of the occult sciences of alchemy and astrology, according to

which the vital substances of objects were made up of invisible spirits or forces of nature.

It was the role of natural philosophers, or natural magicians as they were called in the

Renaissance, to not only study these vital forces and correspondences between

microcosm and macrocosm but to also learn how to deploy them for the purpose of

controlling or altering natural phenomena. The microcosm-macrocosm analogy,

however, was not only central to the thought of philosophers such as Ficino, Pico, and

Bruno and of natural magicians such as Fludd, Agrippa, and Paracelsus. It also had a

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profound impact on the work of Galileo and, particularly, on his rejection of the

Aristotelian cosmology that had dominated science throughout the Middle Ages.

For Aristotle, the laws governing terrestrial motions were distinct from the laws

governing planetary motions. Therefore, according to Aristotle, there existed two

different sets of natural principles, one that governed terrestrial dynamics and one that

governed celestial dynamics. One of the most significant theoretical shifts of the

Scientific Revolution came about when the laws that govern terrestrial motion were

unified with the laws that govern celestial motion. Although Isaac Newton is credited

with unifying celestial and terrestrial dynamics by introducing, in his Principia of 1687,

the idea that the motion of objects in the heavens and the motion of objects on the ground

can be described by the same set of physical laws, Galileo’s work with the telescope had

led him to make similar claims in 1609. There are many ways to describe Galileo's

findings but, for present purposes, they are remarkable because they indicate an early

attempt at dismantling the celestial/terrestrial distinction. As Paul Feyerabend has

claimed, perhaps the most unequivocal case of this occurs when Galileo analogizes the

mountains on the moon to mountains in Bohemia. The abandonment of the heaven/earth

dichotomy implied that all matter is of the same kind, whether celestial or terrestrial.

Further, if there is only one kind of matter there can be only one kind of natural motion,

and only one kind of motion that this matter has by nature. So it must be the case that one

law of motion will hold for earth, fire, and the heavens.

We see from this that Galileo clearly had scientific reasons for claiming, against

Aristotle, that both terrestrial and celestial motions are governed by the same sets of laws

of motion. However, the intellectual milieu in which this theoretical shift occurred is one

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that favored belief in the interrelationship between microcosm and macrocosm and

favored the unification of terrestrial and celestial dynamics, against the Aristotelian view

that regarded the terrestrial and celestial realms as disconnected from and independent of

one another. Instead, the notion that both terrestrial and celestial dynamics are governed

by one universal set of laws harmonized with the notion that causality is a vector that

relates what is above with what is below. It is also well known that Galileo’s position has

a lot in common with those of Girolamo Cardano and Bernardino Telesio, who embraced

the microcosm-macrocosm analogy and, therefore, conceived of the chain of being as

running unbrokenly between terrestrial and celestial phenomena, establishing a causal

correspondence between these and imputing all the properties of one to the other.

Essentially, the laws that Galileo applied to the terrestrial world were the same rules or

laws that accounted for the behavior of the objects that populate the heavens.

The Divinity of the Sun in Hermetic Philosophy and the Heliocentric Cosmology

It is well known that one of the defining moments of the Scientific Revolution

occurred when Copernicus questioned the validity of the Ptolemaic geocentric cosmology

and hypothesized, against this traditional theory, that the sun was central in the universe.

However, before Copernicus published On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres in

1543, in which he proposed his paradigm shift to a heliocentric cosmology, the idea of

the sun as holding a central place in the universe had already infiltrated Renaissance

philosophical thought in the writings of Ficino and other thinkers, influenced by the

Neopythagorean and hermetic idea of the sun as divine. Since hermetic thought held the

sun to be either itself divine or a manifestation of the divine in the physical universe,

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Renaissance Platonists like Ficino, who inherited these ideas from the hermetic tradition,

held that the sun had both metaphysical and physical centrality in the cosmos. In

particular, Ficino’s Liber de sole (1487) makes the hermetic origins of sun worship quite

explicit. He states: “In the heavens, definite spaces are noted in regard to the sun itself,

within which the planets wander and regularly change their motions. At conjunction with

the Sun they are at the highest point of their epicycles, at opposition they are at the lowest

point, and in quadrature they are at mean altitude. The Chaldeans, the Egyptians, and

others all locate the Sun, like a lord, in the center of the world, although for different

reasons so that the Sun, which proceeds as a king, takes the middle way.”

Despite the clearly religious and theosophical undertones of these ideas, one cannot

overestimate the impact that they had on the development of the heliocentric cosmology

in the work of Copernicus and on its positive reception by such scientists as Kepler and

Galileo. In fact, the general agreement between Ficino’s ideas regarding the sun and

those of Copernicus is not merely coincidental, nor is Copernicus’ advocacy of a central

sun in merely coincidental agreement with Neopythagorean mysticism. In the first

chapter of On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres (1543), Copernicus is very explicit

in his references to the Neoplatonic and Neopythagorean mystical traditions that were

embraced by Ficino and other Renaissance Platonists and hermeticists. Here, the

language used by Copernicus is not the language that one might expect from a scientist

who is systematically and solely committed to strictly rational method, unencumbered by

spiritual or mystical considerations. Rather, in the first chapter of this groundbreaking

work, Copernicus describes the sun by using the sort of language that one would expect

from an Egyptian high priest or a hermetic adept. He writes: “in the middle of all sits the

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Sun enthroned. In this most beautiful temple could we place this luminary in any better

position from which he can illuminate the whole at once? He is rightly called the Lamp,

the Mind, the Ruler of the Universe; Hermes Trismegistus names him the Visible God,

Sophocles’ Electra calls him the All-seeing. So the Sun sits as upon a royal throne ruling

his children the planets which circle around him.” Some scholars have gone so far as to

argue that Copernicus places the sun at the center of the universe, in part, to resolve the

incompatibility between the Neoplatonic notion of the sun as divine and the Ptolemaic

conception of a universe in which the sun holds a secondary position relative to the earth.

Besides heliocentrism, another aspect of Copernican thought that was influenced both

by scientific considerations and by hermetic and Neopythagorean sympathies was his

commitment to an astronomy that was mathematically simpler and more elegant than the

Ptolemaic astronomy. Thomas Kuhn makes exactly these points in his seminal book on

The Copernican Revolution, in which he states that “Neoplatonism and

Neopythagoreanism are explicit in Copernicus’s attitude toward the sun and toward

mathematical simplicity. These are essential elements in the intellectual climate that

gave birth to his vision of the universe.”

Despite his strongly Neoplatonic commitments, however, Copernicus persisted in

embracing the Aristotelian idea of circular orbits and it took another astronomer,

Johannes Kepler, to correct this error by hypothesizing that the planets move in elliptical,

rather than circular, orbits. Yet, although the scientific basis for Kepler’s reform was the

empirical research done by the Ptolemaic astronomer Tycho Brahe, Kepler’s new theory

concerning elliptical orbits was also decidedly shaped by his own firm adherence to the

Neopythagorean mystical idea of ‘the music of the spheres’ or ‘harmony of the spheres’.

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According to this idea, Kepler reasoned that planets moving in circles with unchanging

speed could only generate monotones, but a planet moving with regularly varying speed

on an ellipse would generate a range of notes. Kepler is also unequivocal about his

Neoplatonic conception of the sun as a divine power and about this being the main reason

for his preference for the Copernican hypothesis. He writes: “Of all the bodies of the

universe the most excellent is the sun. The sun is a fountain of light, rich in fruitful heat,

most fair, limpid, and pure to the sight, the source of vision. Hence by the highest right

we return to the sun who alone appears, by virtue of his dignity and power, suited for this

motive duty and worthy to become the home of God himself, not to say the first mover.”

It is also clear that Kepler’s development of the laws of planetary motion was also the

result of an interest that was deeply rooted in the search for mathematical perfection that

forms a central aspect of the Pythagorean and Neoplatonic traditions. Convinced of the

truth of the music of the spheres, Kepler sought a movement of the planets in the same

proportions that appear in the harmonious sounds of tones and regular polyhedra. No less

than the alchemist Robert Fludd did Kepler argue for a near-divine sun in the center of

the world and no less than Fludd did he believe in the stars as living entities.

It is very clear, however, that Copernicus and Kepler were not unique, within the

scientific community of their times, in embracing and being deeply influenced by the

central tenets of hermeticism and mystical Neoplatonism and Pythagoreanism. The

second edition of Isaac Newton’s Principia, for example, drew explicitly upon

Pythagorean ideas concerning the harmony of the spheres in order to justify and confirm

the concept of universal gravitation. Moreover, Newton carried his belief in the magical

notion of the harmony of the spheres into his studies of light for the Optiks (1704).

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Additionally, the classical scholia, a series of essays that were to form a part of Newton’s

revision of the Principia mathematica, reveal Newton as someone who not only

embraced hermetic ideas but who also embraced the general attitude about the esoteric

nature of knowledge that is embodied in the Corpus Hermeticum. These essays clearly

express Newton’s conviction that God revealed the eternal truths of the cosmos to a

chosen handful of sages at the dawn of civilization and that this knowledge was

subsequently obscured and lost. Thus his own mathematical work, Newton believed, was

essentially that of a modern theologus rediscovering the wisdom of the ancients. Newton

was quite earnest in his belief that the propositions of his natural philosophy were

rediscoveries of ancient wisdom. Time and again in the Royal Society scholia Newton

identifies himself as a Pythagorean.

Renaissance Pythagoreanism, Mathematical Magic, and the Scientific Mathematization of Nature

One of the most significant changes associated with modern, post-Aristotelian science

is the importance that it accords to mathematics in the study of nature. Yet, this

development was, without doubt, crucially influenced by Renaissance hermeticism and,

particularly, by its Neopythagorean elements that emphasize the priority and certainty of

mathematics and that find in mathematics the key to the essential nature of God, the soul,

and the universe. Thomas Kuhn explains that “hermetic movements promoted the status

of mathematics, encouraged attempts to find mathematical regularities in nature, and

occasionally licensed the simple mathematical forms thus discovered as formal causes,

the terminus of the scientific causal chain.” This influence ultimately culminated in the

modern scientific mathematization of nature, which constitutes one of the fundamental

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cosmological shifts associated with the Scientific Revolution. It is quite appropriate to

use the term ‘mathematization of nature’ because this shift was not merely a

methodological change regarding how nature was investigated. It was, most importantly,

a shift regarding how nature was conceived, a shift to a Pythagorean conception of nature

as essentially mathematical in structure and as governed by fundamentally mathematical

principles. For these natural philosophers, the Book of Nature is written in the language

of mathematics. This Pythagorean conception of reality was, clearly, a shift away from

the Aristotelian tradition of describing natural phenomena and efficient causes in

ultimately unsatisfactory qualitative terms.

However, it is interesting to note that one of the ways in which Pythagoreanism first

begins to influence the manner in which Renaissance thinkers conceive of nature is with

regard to the development of Renaissance mathematical magic, and one should not

underestimate the impact that mathematical magic exerted on the formation of a

mathematized natural science. There is much evidence indicating the magical

antecedents to the mathematization of early modern science. There is a clear tradition

within magic of regarding mathematical analysis as a means of guaranteeing the veracity

of magical theories. One thinker that clearly endorses this view is Cornelius Agrippa, the

significance of whose work rests on the contributions he made to mathematical magic

and to number theory. In fact, Agrippa is one of the more significant proponents of the

application of mathematics to natural magic and, therefore, to the study of nature. Book

II of his De occulta filosofia is almost entirely devoted to number theory and contains

passages that are strikingly similar to ones that are found in the writings of Galileo,

Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton. At the beginning of Book II, Agrippa states that “the

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mathematical disciplines are so necessary and cognate to magic that if anyone should

profess the latter without the former, he would wander totally from the path and attain the

least desired result. For whatever things are or are effected in the inferior natural virtues

are all effected and governed by number, harmony, motion, and light, and have their root

and foundation in these.”

It would seem, then, that the mathematical conception and analysis of nature that

stands as one of the most significant and defining characteristics of modern science was

not a radical innovation within natural science but, rather, was an appropriation from the

natural magic tradition and, in particular, from those aspects of that tradition that

emphasized mathematical magic. Although the most famous scientific proponent of the

mathematical understanding of nature in the first half of the 16th century was Johannes

Kepler, Copernicus before him and Galileo after him also clearly shared in this

Neoplatonic and Neopythagorean conviction that mathematics was the language in which

the most fundamental truths of the universe are expressed. In fact, Kepler was also

deeply affected by the mathematical tradition of numerology. It is well known that a

major stimulus to his work in cosmology was his attempt to answer the question why

there were only six planets. This is not a scientific question. Instead, it seeks to

understand the significance of the number six, that God should have used it and no other

number when creating the planets, and it was exactly the same belief in the mathematical

structure of the world which enabled Kepler to make his discovery that planetary orbits

are elliptical rather than circular.

Galileo is also tied to these Pythagorizing tendencies and could never be completely

free himself from this approach. The problem of employing mathematics in physical

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inquiries is often discussed by Galileo who, in the Dialogue on the Two Chief Systems of

the World (Dialogo dei Massimi Sistemi), proposes that “to want to treat questions

concerning nature without any knowledge of geometry is like to try to do what is

impossible.” In this same work, Galileo recognizes his indebtedness to the Platonic and

Pythagorean traditions when he states, “I know very well how much the Pythagoreans

held in the greatest esteem the science of numbers and that even Plato admired human

intellect and considered it a participant in divinity only because human beings understand

the nature of numbers. I myself am not too far from formulating the same judgment.” In

The Assayer (Il Saggiatore), Galileo further states “Philosophy is written in this grand

book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be

understood unless a person first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in

which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are

triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to

understand a single word of it.”

The Empiricism of Natural Magic and the Development of the Scientific Method

Besides acquiring a distinctively mathematical character, modern scientific method

also acquired a distinctively empirical character so that, ultimately, what came to be

called the modern scientific method was a fortuitous combination of hypothesis

formation using the language of mathematics coupled with testing of the empirical

implications of said hypotheses to either confirm or disconfirm them. Historians of

science now understand, however, that while Pythagorean mysticism and mathematical

magic impacted on the mathematical element of the scientific method, natural magic’s

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staunchly empirical approach to the investigation and manipulation of nature influenced

the empirical element in the modern scientific method. In fact, the emphasis on the

experimental method, which is regarded as one of the most fruitful aspects of early

modern science, derives from the magical tradition that assumed that the influence of one

thing upon another could only reliably be discovered by observation and by other

empirical methods. Cornelius Agrippa states that “natural magic is that which having

contemplated the virtues of all natural and celestial things and carefully studied their

order proceeds to make known the hidden and secret powers of nature. For this reason

magicians are careful explorers of nature only directing what nature has formerly

prepared so that things that are popularly held to be miracles are shown to be no more

than anticipations of natural operations. Therefore those who believe the operations of

magic to be above or against nature are mistaken because they are only derived from

nature and in harmony with it.”

One of the major premises of natural magic was that some (if not all) bodies are

endowed with occult or hidden powers capable of acting upon other bodies. Typical

occult qualities, acknowledged by all, were the different influences of the planets,

magnetism, and the ability of certain minerals, plants, and even animals to cure various

diseases. These occult powers were so called because they were insensible and non-

manifest. For example, we cannot perceive the magnetic power by means of our senses,

but we know of its existence by its effects. In traditional scholastic Aristotelianism, such

occult qualities were something of an embarrassment. It was difficult to accommodate

insensible causes in a natural philosophy based on explanation in terms of evident causes.

Renaissance natural magicians, on the other hand, emphasized the reality of these occult

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qualities by pointing to the empirically undeniable reality of their effects. Here was

another major stimulus to the empirical investigation of nature. The natural magician’s

way of accommodating occult qualities in natural philosophy, by putative insensible but

physical means, can be seen to also have been influential in the development of new

systems of mechanical philosophy which are another salient feature of the later stages of

the Scientific Revolution and to have influenced the notion of non-perceivable theoretical

entities, a concept without which most modern and contemporary science would not be

possible.

It is clear, of course, that the universe of Renaissance natural magicians and of most

philosophers of nature, like that of the Neoplatonists, was an enchanted world of

ensouled objects linked together and joined to a higher realm of spirit and absolute being.

Microcosm reflects macrocosm as man’s lesser world mirrors the greater world of

universal nature. Hidden symmetries and illegible signatures of correspondence energize

and symbolize a world charged with organic sympathies and antipathies. However,

although clearly embedded in a Neoplatonic and mystical conception of the universe, this

tradition of natural magic also had a firm experimental basis since the natural magician’s

job was to break these codes and uncover their secrets; his tools were experiential as well

as magical. He watched nature closely to learn her arcana, and then he manipulated them

for practical use. Alchemy, for example, was not merely the empirical search for

transmutation but also led to the discovery of many medicines and to the development of

iatrochemistry (pharmaceutical chemistry), especially through the work of the alchemist

Paracelsus. In fact, natural magic’s discovery of the secrets of nature and manipulations

of nature were explained not in supernatural, but in naturalistic, terms. The philosopher

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of nature and natural magician Giambattista Della Porta, for example, was involved in

clarifying the purely scientific character of natural magic that, for him, was the practical

part of all of natural science. The motto of the definitive edition of his important work

titled Natural Magic, or the Miracle of Natural Things is “Aspicit et inspicit” (Look and

scrutinize). In this work, Della Porta states that “one must watch the phenomena with the

eyes of a lynx so that, when the observation is complete, one can begin to manipulate

them. Nature has always made me interested in these things, so that I would bring to

light whatever there is of arcane and hidden.”

Of course, despite this commitment to empirical observation for the sake of

understanding phenomena and learning how to manipulate them, Della Porta is not a

modern scientist in our sense of the word, since he still regards nature as containing an

internal vitality and as harboring mysteries that cannot all be rationally explained. His

was a naturalism mixed with faith in a divine fountain of all natural forms. His was a

nature operating with an infinite vital potency that would escape the inquirer unable to

reach its mysterious core. It was a perspective linked to a dynamic, vital vision of nature.

Yet, although Della Porta, Agrippa, Paracelsus and other natural magicians had not made

the transition into what we would call a modern scientific perspective, the programs on

which these students of nature embarked would ultimately lead to the development of

full-blown experimental science. In fact, the analogical, metaphorical, and often

mythological way of thinking that characterized Renaissance hermeticism and

Neoplatonism persisted well into the seventeenth century and was weakened only by the

victory of Cartesianism and Baconianism, which proposed a different metaphor for

conceiving nature, that is, the mechanistic conception of the universe according to which

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material nature consists inert and inanimate particles of matter governed by deterministic

causal principles of motion. As Max Weber would put it, in the 18th century, the world

became ‘disenchanted’.

Conclusion

I have here discussed how four of the major developments that helped to define the

Scientific Revolution and that helped to demarcate modern from pre-modern science

were influenced by the traditions of hermeticism, Neoplatonic mysticism, and natural

magic. In part, the philosophical relevance of these ideas is that there was a clear overlap

between Renaissance and early modern science and between Renaissance and early

modern philosophy, so that most of the figures that contributed to development in one

field also contributed to development in the other. In fact, at the time, what we call

‘natural science’ today was still called ‘natural philosophy’.

More importantly, however, the history of Renaissance and early modern science is

philosophically relevant because of what it illustrates regarding the nature of reason and

knowledge and their relationship to analogical and metaphorical thinking and to the

mythical and poetic imagination. The traditional conception of the Scientific Revolution

as a radical break from the mythopoetic view of reality is informed by the idea that the

language of science, far from employing metaphorical and analogical techniques,

corresponds in a very literal manner to the extra-linguistic facts of the world. The

traditional view of the Scientific Revolution is also informed by a more general

conception of reason as something that, in its pursuit of knowledge, stands separate from

and above feeling and imagination. Reason, in this traditional view, is independent of

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everything other than its own ability to extract empirical data from nature and to

extrapolate knowledge from data in a way that conforms both to the facts of the world

and to timeless logical principles of thought. Such a conception of reason, which one

might call instrumentalist and Cartesian, is one that privileges a conception of the

knowing subject as a ‘theoretical’, ahistorical, and atomistic subject, whose epistemic

relationship to reality is disengaged from his bodily existence.

This Cartesian conception, however, has been and continues to be challenged by the

notion that reason, far from being something pure, disembodied, and independent of

historical and cultural context, must be situated within and be colored by the inflections

of the particular culture in which it emerges. Reason, under this view, does not function

in a historical and cultural void but is embodied within a ‘living’, historical, and cultural

community of subjects who are embedded in what the philosopher Edmund Husserl calls

the ‘lifeworld’ (lebenswelt). According to this alternative view of reason, which was also

defended by the anti-Cartesian 18th century philosopher Giambattista Vico, one cannot

separate reason from the particularities of the historical and cultural ‘lifeworld’ in which

it is embedded. Moreover, for Vico, the cultural world is always informed by its

dominant myths. To the extent that myth is the product of a people’s aesthetic and, more

specifically, poetic imagination, the development of reason and knowledge owes a great

deal to a culture’s mythopoetic traditions. Vico strongly argued against the Cartesian, but

not only Cartesian, view of reason as a faculty that operates according to timeless and

unchanging logical and heuristic principles. To put it in more contemporary terms, for

Vico, the principles that govern the work of reason must presuppose the grounding

worldview (or Weltenschauung, as Dilthey calls it) that infuses the dominant myths. The

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work of reason is that of working out the implications of the dominant paradigm or, as

Vico would put it, of the reigning myth.

In fact, science, philosophy, and literature have always employed metaphors and

analogies. Ideas such as the concept of an electric fluid or a psychological ‘state’ have

proved useful analogies for guiding research. According to Morris Cohen, metaphor and

analogy have influenced the scientist perhaps more than the person of letters. Indeed, as

he points out, the mythology of popular science is the result of a literal understanding of

what are really scientific metaphors. Nobel Prize winning chemist Roald Hoffmann has

said the following about the language of science: “The language of science is a language

under stress. Words are being made to describe things that seem indescribable in words –

equations, chemical structures and so forth. Being a natural language under tension, the

language of science is inherently poetic. There is metaphor aplenty in science. Emotions

emerge shaped as states of matter and more interestingly, matter acts out what goes on in

the soul.” If we take the Scientific Revolution as a case study of this dependence of

reason upon analogy, metaphor, and the mythopoetic imagination, we see that the

traditional conception of rational and logical thought as standing above the ‘lifeworld’ is

both a misguided and an impoverished view of reason. In fact, the success of the

Scientific Revolution was due precisely to its ability to leave aside historically de-

contextualized philosophical speculation and, instead, take the most effective analogies

and metaphors from earlier traditions, combine them with a new set of effective

metaphors, and create a method that would allow it to deploy the large body of empirical

evidence to decide which metaphors had outlived their fruitfulness, such as those of pre-

modern Aristotelian science, and to develop more fruitful and successful analogies.

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Selected Bibliography

Agrippa, Henry Cornelius, De Occulta Filosofia. Copenhaver, Brian P., “Natural magic, hermeticism, and occultism in early modern science”, in

Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, edited by David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Copernicus, Nicholas, De Revolutionibus orbium celestium (1543). Debus, Allen G., The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth

and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1977). Ficino, Marsilio, Liber de sole (1487). Henry, John, “Magic and Science in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries”, in Companion to

the History of Modern Science (London: Routledge, 1996). Henry, John, The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science, 2nd edition (New

York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). James, Jamie, The Music of the Spheres: Music, Science, and the Natural Order of the Universe

(New York: Springer-Verlag, 1993). Kepler, Johannes, Opera Omnia (Heyder & Zimmer, 1860). Kuhn, Thomas S., The Copernican Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

1959). Kuhn, Thomas S., “Mathematical vs. Experimental Traditions in the Development of Physical

Science”, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Summer 1976). Rossi, Paolo, The Birth of Modern Science, translated by Cynthia De Nardi Ipsen (Oxford:

Blackwell Publishers, 2001). Wallace, William A., “Traditional Natural Philosophy”, in The Cambridge History of

Renaissance Philosophy, edited by Charles B. Schmitt and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

Yates, Frances, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: The University of

Chicago Press, 1964).

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