The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600 (review)

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Reviewed by: The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600* Theodore M. Porter (bio) The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600. By Alfred W. Crosby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xii+245; illustrations, notes, index. $24.95. Alfred Crosby is well known as the author of an academic press best-seller, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). There he argued that the European success in conquering and settling other continents involved, in effect, importing large parts of their biological environments with them, especially crops, domestic animals, and diseases. The book provided a grand explanation, a big picture whose details, scope, and implications could be debated and refined by specialists. A readable text written with verve, it makes an excellent work for students and for professors willing to venture outside their bailiwicks. The Measure of Reality has similar ambitions. Crosby introduces it as part of the same project, “the third book I have written in my lifelong search for explanations for the amazing success of European imperialism” (p. ix). Here again we have lively and engaging prose, rich with similes and illustrations, aiming to define a big topic. Even more than in his previous work, he defies all provincialism. This is a book about the late medieval and Renaissance period with no evidence of research in Latin, or indeed any language but English, and very little reliance on primary sources. His use of scholarship is spotty and idiosyncratic. His reading in the history of technology and science shows a marked preference for older studies. He does [End Page 555] not even nod to the outpouring of work in the last two decades on the history of quantification since 1600. His grand argument has yawning gaps. The link between quantification and imperialism he takes largely for granted. Supposing he is right about the medieval origins of a quantitative mentality, he provides no elaboration of how it mattered beyond a nod to the well-worn Weberian tropes of rationalization and bureaucratization. Although the book purports to be about broad shifts of thinking, mentalités, virtually all its evidence relates to elite philosophers and artists. Crosby takes as self-evident that the modern world was made by science and technology. He further presumes that numbers and mathematics provide their natural language. Indeed, he construes a quantitative mentality as their precondition. We find, he writes, little of “science and technology as such” (?) at the “beginnings of western imperialism” (p. x). The vast expansion of European science and of European power alike, he tells us, was triggered by new, quantitative patterns of cognition. His topic, then, is an epochal “acceleration after 1250 or so in the West’s shift from qualitative perception to . . . quantificational perception” (p. 49). That shift flattened the richly symbolic, “venerable” world picture of the Middle Ages and replaced it with a more instrumental modernism. Crosby wants to document and explain the acceleration. He divides his explanation of this acceleration into two parts, roughly, material causes and efficient causes. In other words, he will account first for the combustibles and the oxygen and then identify the match that set them ablaze. The “necessary but insufficient causes” of his story emerge as familiar elements in standard accounts of the European Renaissance of learning and science. Among them are the recovery of ancient texts and the growth of universities. Inexplicably, given his insistence on the temporal and logical priority of quantitative thinking over “science and technology as such,” these background causes of quantification include also the compass, the mechanical clock, printing, calendrical reforms, Hindu-Arabic numerals, Copernican astronomy, and advances in mathematics. Their stories reach beyond the temporal span of the book, 1250–1600. So also do his illustrations of the “venerable model,” which, even according to his own evidence, was still very much alive in 1600. For the efficient cause—the “match” that ignited this conflagration of Western knowledge and power—Crosby invokes new forms of visualization. The striking of the match seems to have taken several centuries. We have no unmoved mover to light it. And it has a threefold aspect: music, painting, and bookkeeping. For music, the...