By investigating the motivations and assumptions behind the use of visual and verbal images in works by five English naturalists associated with the early Royal Society—Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, John Ray, Nehemiah Grew, and Thomas Willis—Wragge-Morley makes a strong case for the necessity of far-reaching interdisciplinarity in intellectual historical work. He convincingly shows that early modern representations of nature were the fruit of questions pertaining to natural philosophy, natural theology, epistemology, physiology, rhetoric, and art theory at the same time. The common denominator of these questions had to do with the possibility of making available to the senses the invisible agents behind the phenomenal surface of the world (whether material corpuscles, immaterial natural agents, or God) and of investing sensible representations with the capacity of creating the kind of pleasurable experience that may win viewers-readers over to the physico-theological project. By carefully unpacking this rich nexus of early modern concerns, Aesthetic Science succeeds in its plea for the need of “incorporating the history of experience— including its affective and subjective dimensions—into the history of the empirical sciences.”One gain from this historiographic perspective is that it throws new light on the physico-theological project itself. In chapter 1, Wragge-Morley puts to rest traditional interpretations according to which the early modern design argument was either vestigial or apologetic. He shows that the intent in Ray’s or Boyle’s physico-theological tracts was to provide the means for the reader’s affective and morally transformative encounter with the divine attributes expressed in creation. These efforts took the form of the painstakingly detailed descriptions of the minute mechanisms of form and function in natural objects (the eye was a favorite example), making use of the latest natural philosophical insights (such as mechanical optics). The discussion of the techniques and rationale of description is taken up again in chapter 3, where a useful distinction is offered between “classificatory” and “anatomical” description (the former is concerned with the depiction of natural kinds, the latter with that of form and function, and by extension, final causes). Both are contrasted with an understanding of description as exact reproduction. (That Francis Bacon was a representative of the latter is, however, questionable.)In addition, chapter 3 gives us a spectacular demonstration of the work that assumptions about design in nature did for “the material and intellectual practices of natural history.” By comparing Hooke on snowflakes with Inigo Jones on the ruins of Stonehenge, Wragge-Morley shows how both the verbal and the pictorial account of the uncomfortably imperfect shapes of snowflakes were rooted in Hooke’s decision to “interpret natural bodies as if they were ruins that, like those ancient monuments, exhibited clues about the existence of former, more perfect designs.” Both types of ruins were explained as weathered remnants of previous perfectly regular, geometrical forms. While intended as a recognition of the “harmonious combination of utility and beauty” in nature and therefore as a “form of moral and theological edification,” design was often projected onto (rather than discovered in) natural objects, and became thus the fruit of an imaginative reconstruction.Wragge-Morley prepares the ground for this realization by introducing us, in chapter 2, to the conflicting early modern attitudes toward the faculty of the imagination and its production of mental images. The empiricism of Boyle, Ray or Hooke, he shows, rested on a paradox: “the aim of the empirical project was to drag entities that could neither be perceived nor imagined [both atoms and God] into the realm of sensory experience.” Although in principle impotent and unreliable, the senses and the imagination were invested with the ability to gain some partial, approximate, workable knowledge of the invisible realm grounding the visible world. This is the rationale behind the use of analogy in natural philosophical hypothesizing about the corpuscular foundation of matter, and of comparisons and images in representing God’s attributes or the mysteries of faith. All of these representational strategies rested on an assumption of continuity between the visible and the invisible realms, which Wragge-Morley beautifully exemplifies with Boyle’s attempt at representing the theological mystery of the resurrection of bodies in terms of the process at work in the chemical experiment of camphor reduction, itself taken to represent the mechanical dispersal and re-aggregation of imperceptible material corpuscles.Wragge-Morley continues to build up the striking picture of an “empiricism of the imagination” in chapter 4 with further examples of attempts at illustrating the unseen, such as Ray’s classificatory descriptions of natural kinds. Given our lack of epistemic access to the internal constitution of things (a position Ray shared with Locke), the descriptions had to include as many experiential details as possible, i.e., both visual images of exterior features and verbal descriptions of internal features. But the descriptions of internal features often availed themselves of the help of comparisons with familiar objects, which were less than precise. To explain their role, Wragge-Morley opens up a discussion of the “rhetorical ideal of vivid description known as enargeia” and its role in representing nature. This chapter discusses the early modern echoes of this ancient topic and thus adds its contribution to the mounting evidence in early modern scholarship that the so-called neutral, objective “plain style” advocated by the Royal Society was itself the result of a stylistic technique, looking for specific rhetorical effects rather than pristine epistemic transparency.Chapter 5 gives a further and much more detailed example of the same, through a stylistic analysis of Willis’s comparisons meant to represent the fabric of the brain. The effect sought for by such comparisons of unseen, complicated inner features with familiar objects, Wragge-Morley proposes, was to offer pleasurable, easily recognizable, vivid images that would only partially approximate the natural objects represented (they were thus products of “wit” under its less than favorable Lockean description), but would be supremely effective in stimulating admiration and pleasure. Enargeia was thus marshaled in the service of creating the right kind of mental and bodily disposition in readers (Willis’s nervous theory was indeed perfectly suited to revealing the physiological counterpart of psychological states)—that is, the kind that would win them over to the study of nature, which, let us not forget, was also seen as a study of divine design.The reader may be left wondering whether the vivid familiar comparisons discussed here and the analogical comparisons discussed in chapter 2 are of a similar stylistic and rhetorical make-up. While descriptions are neatly separated into the classificatory and anatomical groups, comparisons seem to inhabit a still undifferentiated territory. In any event, Wragge-Morley persuades us that, by the combined efforts of all of these representational strategies, what was intended was a training of the readers’ capacity for pleasure and knowledge, indeed a “cultivation of taste” via an embodied type of habituation. These are, he also proposes, elements that may encourage a reconsideration of the history of objectivity as a history of intersubjectivity, as well as a historiographic assembling of the family of disciplines that center on “the affective dimensions of experience.” For the time being, Aesthetic Science has established that the empirical sciences are legitimate members of this family.