What Is Modern in the Eighteenth Century?–Not Science

Abstract

SYMPOSIUM: THE MODERNITY OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY What Is Modern in the Eighteenth Century?~Not Science Robert Schofield Every DISCIPLINE has its professional disease, some ailment of flesh or spirit to which its practitioners are peculiarly heir and against which they must guard themselves with particular care. For historians of science, possibly because priority disputes appear so prominently as dramatic elements in the sciences they study, the dis­ ease is that known as "precursoritis”—an endemic compulsion to locate some expression of a scientific law or discovery earlier than that commonly accepted as the first. It is, on the whole, a pleasant disease with no terminal complications, for the discovery of one precursor leads at once to the desire to find a precursor to that pre­ cursor, and so on through the span of time until one comes at last to rest with the Greeks. On the other hand, it is so infinitely con­ sumptive of time and ingenuity that professional historians of sci­ ence are inoculated against even the hint of precursors. To suggest, therefore, that one might find an aspect of modernity in the concepts of eighteenth-century science is to propose a viola­ tion of the canons of history of science on a centurial scale. Nor is this one of those rules established only for professional harmony, to be honored in cases like this one with canonical variations. For the rule is a realization of the nature of scientific ideas as products of creative imagination. An eighteenth-century novel is not modern because its plot employs the same elements employed in a modern novel. Tom Jones is not David Copperfield, and neither of these is Augie March, though all three are young men and each has experi­ 61 The Modernity of the Eighteenth Century ences with young women in his search for maturity. The tone, aim, and structure of the novel reflects the style of its age, and so it is with the concepts of science. The scientific style of an age is established by the way in which particular phenomena are set within a world view defined by selection from a limited set of fundamental dichot­ omies. The world may be finite or infinite, vitalistic or reductionist, static or changing, continuous or discontinuous, mechanistic or ma­ terialistic. Unless the selection of alternatives and the mode of order­ ing phenomena within that selection are both congruent to a mod­ ern view, there is no possibility of true precursority. If we look closely, every apparent case of conceptual similarity between eighteenth-century science and our own reveals just those incongruities which justify the canonical exclusion of comparisons. The elementary version of modern thermodynamics is a kinetic the­ ory reminiscent of eighteenth-century mechanical theories of heat. But only in the unpublished work of an anachronistic Henry Cav­ endish and in the scarcely-read suggestions of Daniel Bernouilli did that mechanical theory reach toward quantification, and their work scarcely approached the indeterminacies of twentieth-century statis­ tical mechanics. Eighteenth-century electricity was entirely static, while electrical theory from the nineteenth century to today is essentially current. Only the concept of charge conservation and the force law between charges remains unchanged from the eighteenth century. But con­ servation of charge, like that of heat, meant to the eighteenth century a conservation of material substance—that fluid of electricity which was also of conceptual significance in Coulomb’s determination of electrical force laws. Whatever electricity may be assumed to be —and the question is scarcely asked today, let alone answered—it is not regarded as a material fluid. Conceptually, eighteenth- and twentieth-century electricity are very different. Similar demonstrations can be produced for nearly every eigh­ teenth-century theory wistfully projected into the twentieth century. Newton’s light particles, with their periodic interactions with mat­ ter, are neither formally nor empirically equivalent to the photons of Einstein. Boscovich’s atoms, physically neutral point nodules of a forcefully described space, have no conjunction with modern atoms, 62 Symposium: Science filled to overflowing with strange particles and still stranger proper­ ties. The physiological speculations of iatro-physicists were not even related to the physical reductionism of the mid-nineteenth century and bear no...