John Aubrey, Hint-Keeper: Life-Writing and the Encouragement of Natural Philosophy in the pre-Newtonian Seventeenth Century

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

In a prose satire written by Samuel Butler, 'An Occasional Reflection on Dr Charleton's feeling a Dog's Pulse at Gresham-College', the physician Walter Charlton is said to have invaded the Royal Society's fastnesses 'by Surreptition and Inviolation, and to have secretly deprived the Hint-Keeper' of a precious gift to the Society, the 'King of Macassar's Poison', and to have experimented on it in secret.1 Butler, an acute and well-informed satirist of scientific culture, also talks of the 'Hint-Keeper' in his character of 'A Pretender'. Here, the puffed-up pretender to knowledge 'fancies himself as able as any Man, but not being in a Capacity to try the Experiment, the Hint-keeper of Gresham College is the only competent Judge to decide the Controversy'.2 The character, seemingly Butler's invention, is thus an instrument of moral argument. But who is he, what does 'hint-keeping' involve, and what is the connection between keeping hints and the expression of an ethical position? I propose to answer these questions by considering the idea of the hint and practice of hint-keeping in the writing and scientific pursuits of Butler's friend and biographer John Aubrey, and his circle. I suggest that if we pay attention to the forms of knowledge transmitted and preserved by the hint we may find it to be a containing structure for some distinctive qualities of the culture and values of the early Royal Society. For both Aubrey's scientific practice and the rhetorical forms in which he commemorated the 'fine Notions and Inventions' of his biographical subjects are characteristic of a short-lived moment in the history of science, that of the pre-Newtonian seventeenth century, or the period before the publication of Newton's Principia in 1687.But what is a hint? To begin to answer this, we may revisit the central anecdote of seventeenth-century natural philosophy, in the form in which it was recorded by the antiquary William Stukeley. Stukeley records that he spent a warm April day in 1726 with Isaac Newton. Drinking tea under some apple trees, Newton told him howthe notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasion'd by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to him self. Why should it not go sideways or upwards, but constantly to the earth's centre? Assuredly, the reason is, that the earth draws it. There must be a drawing power in matter: and the sum of the drawing power in the matter of the earth must be in the earth's center, not in any side of the earth. Therefore dos this apple fall perpendicularly, or towards the center. If matter thus draws matter, it must be in proportion to its quantity. Therefore the apple draws the earth, as well as the earth draws the apple.and so on.3 Newton is represented in this anecdote as intuiting his theory in a perfect nutshell, one fine afternoon under a tree, in pastoral solitude in Lincolnshire, with no mention of any scientific community, subsequent correspondence with Hooke, meetings with Halley or any kind of false starts or interruptions: a pre-Adamic, immediate, creation of light. Its narration in this form, as an exquisitely coherent tale, focussed exclusively on its intellectual content, has encouraged Newton's worshippers in their wish to imagine that his theory was 'Invented and perfected at the same time', the praise which, when voiced by Sir John Hoskins at the reception of the first book of the Principia at the Royal Society, so angered Hooke and prompted him to cry plagiary.4 By telling his friend a tale of a theory, so comprehensively intuited in retirement in a garden, rather than a more socialised narration of the path to the mathematically-demonstrated 'perfected' state of the Principia, and its subsequent extraordinary acclaim, Newton gave the world its most powerful biographical image of genius. Paolo Frisi tells the story of the twenty-two months' unbroken solitary concentration which produced the Principia: but it is the divine inspiration, rather than the human perspiration, which gave the apple anecdote its power. …