From World Soul to World Machine
I. INTRODUCTION
The triumph of the idea of the modern mechanical universe, which was finally crowned by Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica in 1687, accompanied a broader shift in cultural and individual phenomenology and ideology. By the seventeenth century, most European intellectuals had begun to think of nature in mechanistic and technological terms, and Europeans in general began to experience the world in which they lived as a machine, a giant clockworks made up of dead matter responding deterministically to forces external to it. This shift in cultural paradigms from medieval ideas of cosmology and physics allowed for the emergence of agnosticism and atheism in Western culture.
In order to illustrate the transformation in European thought and experience during the period of the scientific revolution, Alexander Koyre focuses upon the destruction of the Aristotelian/Ptolemaic "closed world" and its replacement by the open, infinite universe of the modern paradigm.
What has motivated the enormous amount of research done recently around the scientific revolution has been a recognition that a more fundamental change than merely an idea of cosmology took place between the mediaeval and modern worlds, that the entire experience of human existence changed. To live in a closed world is a different experience from living in an infinite universe, and this difference included all classes of people, not just those involved in the scientific debate. Popular culture may have preserved remnants of the ancient pantheism and naturalism past the seventeenth century, but not much past it. (Koyre 23)
This change in the "experience of human existence" involved more than the question of the limits or limitlessness of the physical universe. There were few elements of medieval European life that did not undergo some degree of redefinition during this period. In addition to the remnants of ancient pantheism preserved in the popular tradition, Renaissance Europe inherited Judeo-Christian, Platonic (and Neoplatonic), and Aristotelian cosmologies. While Christian theology is not pantheistic, it had assimilated Neoplatonic mystical theology, and Aristotelian scholasticism during the Middle Ages and appropriated:
… the bastard concept of ‘emanation’. The absolute remains as the super-finite, the super-one, and the super-being, pure in itself. Nevertheless because of super-abundance it produces the multiformity of the universe, down to formless matter as the extreme limit of non-being. A look at the Pseudo-Dionysian writings has shown us that the Christian Middle Ages adopted this premise and reshaped it to suit its own ends. (Cassirer 18)
The concept of emanation was compatible with the experience of most medieval Europeans of the world as being imbued by a living intelligence (or intelligences) apart from the human, but subordinate to the absolute Godhead. This living principle was defined in various ways by medieval intellectuals and expressed as one or another form of the "world-soul." The world-soul, primarily associated with Platonic philosophy, appears in certain Presocratic philosophies of the sixth century BC. Thales, for instance, supposed that "the universe is ensouled and full of divinities." Anaximander held that the primary substance was divine, and Anaximenes taught that the primary substance was prior to the gods.
Plato’s Timaeus, by far the best known of his dialogues through the Middle Ages, gives an explicit mythological allegory of the creation of the world-soul by the Demiurgus:
Timaeus: …finding the whole visible sphere not at rest, but moving in an irregular and disorderly fashion, out of disorder he brought order, considering that this was in every way better than the other. … The creator…found that … intelligence could not be present in anything which was devoid of soul. For which reason, when he was framing the universe, he put intelligence in soul, and soul in body, … Wherefore, … we may say that the world became a living creature truly endowed with soul and intelligence by the providence of God. (Plato 11)
The world-soul is that which endows matter with form. It acts independently of the creator, but according to his initial design. It is the objective intellect which subjective human intellect struggles to perceive and, in some traditions, to achieve union with.
The idea of the world-soul was not only adopted from Plato by the long lived and influential Neoplatonic tradition, but was incorporated, with modifications, by Aristotle into his metaphysics, which became the basis for medieval scholasticism and certain elements of Catholic theology. "What Plato effected in the Timaeus by the introduction of the world-soul and the Demiurgus is here [in Aristotelian metaphysics] explained by the assumption of a teleological activity inherent in nature itself…" (Zeller 198). The difference between Plato’s world-soul and Aristotle’s teleological principle is a difference in abstract metaphysics, relevant only to philosophers and theologians. The experience of living in either world would be the same. That is, of being surrounded by an active but invisible intelligence/will responsible for giving form and meaning to the world and being the bridge across which the world becomes intelligible to us.
II. THE WORLD-SOUL DURING THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
…Father Marin Mersenne (1588-1648) of the Catholic order of Minims saw very dangerous consequences flowing from the Renaissance revival of the doctrine of the anima mundi, or world soul—the notion that matter was imbued with life and the associated identification of God with nature. (Shapin 43)
Mersenne developed a view of matter as completely passive and inert. This view was not invented during the Renaissance but existed as a powerful tradition among the Presocratic Ionians as well as among later Epicureans. Lucretius wrote in ca. 50 B.C.
Book V - Argument Of The Book And New Proem Against Teleological Concept
For sure 'tis quite beside the mark to think
That judgment and the nature of the mind
In any kind of body can exist-
Just as in ether can't exist a tree,
Nor clouds in the salt sea, nor in the fields
Can fishes live, nor blood in timber be,
… thou canst ne'er
Believe the sacred seats of gods are here
In any regions of this mundane world…
(Lucretius 87)
Mersenne’s view was elaborated by his friend Rene Descartes and developed in various forms by Thomas Hobbes, Robert Boyle, and many others (Shapin 44).
According to Shapin, the idea of a purely mechanical universe of passive matter was reasserted during the seventeenth century in support of monotheism, while the world-soul as a principle manifestly present in the natural world, by "blurring the distinction between natural and supernatural," tended to appeal to popular atheistic (or neo-pagan) tendencies. By advancing the world-machine paradigm, the "distinctions between what was natural and what was supernatural could be maintained" (Shapin 44). After Mersenne’s world-machine was taken to its logical limits by Descartes, however, a reaction against mechanicalism was offered not by atheists but by the Christian Neoplatonists of the Cambridge school.
In addition to popular pantheism, and Cambridge Platonism, University scholasticism was placed into opposition with the mechanical universe paradigm. Scholasticism had undergone continuous attack from humanist factions throughout the Renaissance, and by the seventeenth century, strict Aristotelianism was already on its way out of the European University. A comparison of the categories of Aristotelian science with the modern sciences reflects this transformation. As opposed to our classification of Chemistry, Biology, Physics, etc., Aristotle:
… distinguishes three sciences: theoretical, practical and poetical; furthermore the first is subdivided into physics, mathematics and the "first philosophy" (Metaphysics, cf. p.163), which is also called theology, while the practical philosophy falls under two headings, ethics and politics, although to the whole he gives the name Politics. (Zeller 187)
For Aristotle and the tradition of medieval scholasticism, then, physics was considered theoretical, while ethics was considered practical. Aristotelian science approached the physical universe not as a mechanism, operating according to relationships of force and mass, but "as tending rather towards a definite end. The end and aim of all becoming is the development of potentiality to actuality, the incorporation of form in matter" (Zeller 197). This "incorporation" is a qualitative rather than quantitative process. Such qualities as comprise universal material forms were manipulated to a practical end not through physics, but through astrology and alchemy. Scholastic physics was a theoretical science whose aim was to abstract principles of ideal forms from nature (which might then be put to syllogistic use in the "practical sciences" of ethics and politics). This demarcation between practical and theoretical survives in modern science.
NICHOLAS CUSANUS (1401-1464)
Although Nicholas of Cusa is credited with originating (or reviving) the idea of the infinite universe during the late Middle Ages, his cosmology is not mechanistic, but thoroughly Neoplatonic and mystical. "Cusanus constantly refers to the sources of this mysticism, especially to the writings of Meister Eckhart and the Pseudo-Dionysius" (Cassirer Individual 8). His justification for the doctrine of the indefinite extension of the world, often misunderstood in modern mechanical terms, is based on a Platonic idea that the sensible is an imperfect explicatio of the intelligible. The intelligible, being God and infinite, is imperfectly expressed in the indefiniteness of matter and number.
Despite his anticipation of the Cartesian distinction between positive infinity and indefiniteness, and his attempt to replace scholastic logic with "a new kind of mathematical logic" (Cassirer Individual 14), Cusanus’s concern is primarily with mystical theology, and his cosmology is distinctly non-mechanistic.
Neither is this earth a proportional, or aliquot part of the world, for as the world has neither maximum, nor minimum, neither has it a moiety, nor aliquot parts, any more than a man or an animal [has them]; for the hand is not an aliquot part of the man, though its weight seems to have a proportion to the body." (qtd. In Koyre 20).
Cusanus’ view of the cosmos is biological or physiological. He sees the world as a centerless body of indefinite extension, analogous rather to a man or animal than to a uniform mathematical structure. The idea of the whole of the cosmos amounting to more than the sum of its parts is reflected in the fourth century Neoplatonic rejection of atomism.
It is as hard to explain the world as a collection of atoms, as it is to understand the sense of a poem, say the Iliad as a collection of letters. In both cases the form is the absolute prius in respect to matter; the whole is prior to the parts and cannot therefore be derived from them. (Cassirer Platonic 136)
Cusanus can be seen, therefore, as laying the conceptual foundation for the abandonment of the Aristotelian/Ptolemaic closed world, but he is operating completely within the experience of an ensouled world.
POPULAR PANTHEISM AND PARACELSUS (1490-1541)
It was in the context of a phenomenology in which nature appeared to be imbued with invisible intelligences that ancient polytheistic mythologies had been constructed. Medieval metaphysics developed complex non-personal mythological systems of spiritual hierarchy below the holy trinity which allowed a monotheistic Christian theology to assimilate a pagan pantheistic phenomenology. Neoplatonism, scholastic Aristotelianism, and popular pantheism combined to create a tradition of "Renaissance naturalism…deeply rooted in the overall culture" (Shapin 43). Renaissance naturalism was a form of pantheism which rather than being based on the premise that God is the universe (a type of deism or atheism compatible with a purely mechanistic physics), implied the premise that the universe is God (a type of religious worship of a non-personal nature deity).
The former pantheistic position is represented by Benedict Spinoza (ca. 1675), in his Ethics Demonstrated in the Geometrical Manner.
Men do all things for an end, namely, for that which is useful to them, and which they seek. Thus it comes to pass that they only look for a knowledge of the final causes of natural events, and when these are learned, they are content, as having no cause for further doubt. If they cannot learn such causes from external sources, they are compelled to turn to considering themselves, and reflecting what end would have induced them personally to bring about the given event, and thus they necessarily judge other natures by their own. (Baumer 319)
Spinoza’s God/Nature has some characteristics of a world-soul. He believed that God or Nature was a thinking as well as a material thing, but his is a Nature in which "…good and evil fortunes fall to the lot of pious and impious alike," and to which only mathematics furnishes a "standard of verity in considering solely the essence and properties of figures without regard to her final causes…" (Baumer 320).
The theistical type of pantheism appeared in the form of multifarious personal and non-personal deities that inhabited the world of human experience. These deities responded to man’s presence and behavior and were often understood as related to man by virtue of the kinship of the human soul to the world-soul. They may have been understood by intellectuals as existing by virtue of some relation to Plato’s or Aristotle’s cosmology, or as remnants of popular paganism or of Judeo-Christian hierarchies of angels.
The pantheism of Paracelsus, although incorporated into sophisticated metaphysical ideologies was heavily influenced by popular neo-pagan traditions which embraced witchcraft, spiritual magic, demonic magic, incantations to provoke passions or to harm property or persons, fairies, nymphs, spirits, little men, wild people, sirens, giants, etc. The medicine of Paracelsus was an amalgamation of "acute clinical observations with insights gained from popular belief" (Webster Paracelsus 80).
The Devil and his legions were never far from the scene in the writings of Paracelsus. The hierarchy of good spirits…was matched by a formidable army of evil spirits, sent by God to test the faithful…They had once been angels and had been gifted with angelic wisdom. God permitted them to retain this intrinsic ability, which was exploited by the evil spirits to procure great knowledge about the powers of nature… (Webster Paracelsus 81)
The cosmology of Paracelsus was reflected in his approach to medicine. The practice of medicine as it was carried on in the Universities had been divided between physician and surgeon. This binary division, whereby the physician stood above the surgeon and dictated the steps of the operation while the surgeon did the cutting, reflected the scholastic dualism which elevated intelligible functions above the sensible. By mastering both arts, Paracelsus rejected this binary distinction in theory and practice. He abandoned the "entire body of knowledge handed down from antiquity" as "fundamentally unsound" and sought medical knowledge from "‘sheepshearers, barbers, experienced practitioners, wives, practitioners in the black arts’…[and] gypsies" (Webster Medicine 5) This inversion of traditional ideas of authority also served to collapse the Scholastic binary hierarchy that placed textual data above empirical data.
Paracelsus accepted the existence of the little men and wild people of popular legend, along with the idea of creatures spontaneously generated from the four elements. Therefore, although he removed popular demons "from the category of intelligentiae separatae" (Webster Medicine 14), and rejected scholastic dualism, his world was still imbued with living spirits capable of teleological activity.
His natural philosophy largely reflected that of the German miners around whom he grew up. Erasmus recognized the "‘traces of paganism’ (veteris paganismi)" in the Siena Carnival of 1509 (Burke 209). Although popular paganism probably did not involve the doctrine of a world-soul, it emerged out of an experience of the world as imbued with hierarchies of intelligences which were inseparable from nature. In opposition to polytheistic mythologies, world-soul doctrines had first been created by philosophers in the context of this ancient pagan phenomenology. "An effort was made by the Pythagoreans, and later by Plato, to put the supernatural back into astronomy; and, in fact, astronomy did not really make its way with the Greek public until it had been rescued from atheism (Farrington 94). Popular experience of nature imbued with the supernatural and teleological was reflected in the widespread "…interest in alchemy and astrology in the 1640s and 50s, not least among religious and political radicals……serious rational politicians…consulted professional astrologers…[as well as] Agitators, Anabaptists, Ranters and Quakers" (Hill 289). An understanding of soul as a property of the natural world resulted in the belief by some radical sectaries in the mortality of the soul, and in the conflation, as with the Digger leader, Winstanley of God and nature (Jacob 27). Both this phenomenology and its accompanying doctrines became transformed during the scientific revolution.
NICHOLAS COPERNICUS (1473-1543)
Nicholas of Cusa was commonly thought of as a forerunner of Copernicus in removing the Earth from the center of the world and positing an indefinite extension. While Copernicus’ model represents a giant step towards the world-machine, this step involved methodology rather than personal belief. "Copernicus’s new astronomy preserved Aristotle’s assumption about the perfection of circular motion…" (Shapin 67). And although De revolutionibus "is written for mathematicians" (Shapin 122), his mathematical techniques include not only those of Ptolemy, but refer back "to the golden age of Pythagoras and Plato" (Koyre 28).
…it is on account of its supreme perfection and value—source of light and of life—that the place it occupies in the world is assigned to the sun: the central place which, following the Pythagorean tradition and thus reversing completely the Aristotelian and mediaeval scale, Copernicus believes to be the best and most important one. (Koyre 30)
Despite his highly mathematical methodology, Copernicus’ cosmology is still based on idealist metaphysics rather than on mathematical necessity. The Copernican heliocentric model was developed in the context of the fifteenth century revival of Neoplatonism and Pythagoreanism, and the accompanying advances in the use of abstract algebraic symbols. Accordingly, planetary orbits were circular and the sun at the center of the world, not because of mathematical relationships between forces and matter and the principles of solar system formation, but because of the "perfection" of circular motion, the "dignity" of the central place, and the primacy of form over matter.
For the Neoplatonists, the universe was "fundamentally geometrical," while "the orthodox Aristotelian school minimized the importance of mathematics." For Aristotle nature was primarily qualitative rather than simply quantitative (Burtt 54). Although more mathematical, the Neoplatonic cosmos is no less teleological and requires the governing intelligence of a world-soul.
GALILEO (1564-1642)
Galileo began his astronomical research with the aim of supporting the model put forward by Copernicus (Shapin 20). He was also greatly influenced by the Neoplatonic and naturalistic movements in Renaissance Italy. His telescopic observations tended to confirm elements of Copernicus’ heliocentric world, and he continued Copernicus’s attack against the Aristotelian binary world. The perfection which Copernicus had attributed to circular motion was based on the idea that the sensible world was an approximation of a higher, super-sensible realm, which imposed its ideal forms from above. The Aristotelian binary world had been understood as a sensible emanation of this duality. That is, the dualistic relationship of sensible world to super-sensible world was reflected in the structure of the sensible world itself as divided between sublunary and superlunary realms.
[Aristotle] takes as his basis the distinction of two dissimilar halves which make up the universe. The sublunary and the superlunary worlds, the heavenly and the earth, the "Beyond" and the "Here". The imperishable nature of the stars and the unchangeable regularity of their motion proves, as Aristotle had attempted to establish from general grounds, that they are different in matter from the perishable things that are subject to constant change. The former consist of aether, the fifth element (quintessence), the body without an opposite which is capable of no change except that of position, and no motion except circular motion. But the things are composed of the four elements which stand to one another in a double opposition …On account of this opposition they pass constantly from one into the other…Hence follows not only the unity of the world, which is also secured by that of the first mover, but also its spherical shape… (Zeller 199)
Although remaining within the bounds of a material sphere, Copernicus’ model replaced the geocentric Ptolemaic world with the heliocentric Pythagorean world, and in doing so, removed the foundation of Aristotelian binarism.
Galileo provided empirical support for this position. The sun, according to the scholastic interpretation of teleology, being superlunary and made of aether, should be flawless. Ca. 1611:
…Galileo trained the newly invented telescope on the sun and observed dark spots, apparently on its surface. Galileo reported that the spots were irregularly shaped and varied from day to day in number and opacity. Moreover, they did not remain stationary but appeared to move regularly across the disk of the sun from west to east. (Shapin 15)
Galileo recognized the implications of this discovery for scholastic cosmology. Empirical observation of the sun, rather than deductions from authoritative universal principles, should determine the properties assigned to it. "For names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come first and names afterwards." (qtd. in Shapin 18).
The sovereignty of "names" or categories over formless matter is the basis of Aristotle’s teleological principle. Although Galileo did not explicitly question teleology, he refuted the mechanism on which it had traditionally been based and provided thereby the foundation for a mechanistic natural philosophy.
JOHANNES KEPLER (1571-1630)
Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion serve as one of the central foundations of modern mechanical cosmology. Nevertheless, as with Copernicus, his mathematical development, which prepared the way for the developed calculus of Newton and Leibniz, derived its metaphysical justification from his Neoplatonic background. Moreover, "founder of exact modern science though he was, Kepler combined with his exact methods and indeed found his motivation for them in certain long discredited superstitions including…sunworship" (Burtt 58).
The Platonic/Pythagorean position was that the visible world was an imperfect and unreal emanation of the real world which was a purely mathematical structure. As such natural philosophy was properly addressed to the domain of the mathematical ideal rather than that of the "concretely and particularly real." Kepler advocated this view. (Shapin 59) He was nevertheless able to state in 1605 that his aim was "to show that the machine of the universe is not similar to a divine animated being, but similar to a clock" (Shapin 33). This would seem to put him at odds with Platonic metaphysics, especially the premise by which Plato pursues his own mathematical reasoning.
And when reason, which works with equal truth … is hovering around the sensible world and when the circle of the diverse also moving truly imparts the intimations of sense to the whole soul, then arise opinions and beliefs sure and certain. But when reason is concerned with the rational, and the circle of the same moving smoothly declares it, then intelligence and knowledge are necessarily perfected. And if any one affirms that in which these two are found to be other than the soul, he will say the very opposite of the truth. (Plato 13)
It is through communion of the individual soul with the world-soul that reason operates and makes knowledge possible. If the machine of the universe were similar to a clock rather than an animated being, in strictly Platonic terms, no knowledge of its operation would be possible, and Kepler himself denies the possibility of certain knowledge. Likewise, his elliptical planetary orbits would seem to violate strict Platonic/Pythagorean assumptions about the perfection of circles, and he suggests "a combination of magnetism and an immaterial force emanating from the sun" (Jacob 33), in order to account for their centripetal motion.
While seeming to reject the Platonic ensouled world, Kepler retains a belief in astrology (Hill 287) and in the ideal nature of mathematics, ideologies which were traditionally founded upon some version of the world-soul. In this contradiction, Kepler can be seen to stand on either side of the world-soul/world-machine transformation
III. THE WORLD-MACHINE DURING THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
THOMAS HOBBES (1588-1679)
Hobbes stands clearly and completely on the side of the world-machine in his methodology and his explicit ideology. He also attempts to collapse the Aristotelian dualism between physics and mathematics as theoretical sciences and politics and ethics as practical sciences by insisting that society itself was subject to the laws of geometry.
Hobbes explicitly repudiates pantheism by showing that it is equivalent to atheism: "…those philosophers, who said the world, or the soul of the world was God, spake unworthily of him; and denied his existence. For by God, is understood the cause of the world; and to say the world is god, is to say there is no cause of it, that is, no God." (Hobbes 266)
His world is not ensouled but, as with his friends Mersenne and Gassendi, is only "material particles in motion…a vast machine made up of moving atoms" (Jacob 5).
For Hobbes, there was no distinction between body and soul, but neither could the body/soul unity be thought of as divine. He had been powerfully influenced by a 1635 visit with Galileo in Italy which altered his own perception of the natural world and the mathematical laws to which it was subject, and he proposed a deterministic mechanical model which included human actions and ethics. (Hobbes 14)
RENE DESCARTES (1596-1650)
While Hobbes's concern was with the formulation of an ideal society according to mechanistic premises, Descartes developed a similarly radical mechanicalism in his natural philosophy which provided the basis for the modern world-machine paradigm as it was to develop on the continent. "…Descartes’ God, in contradistinction to most previous Gods, is not symbolized by the things He created; He does not express Himself in them. There is no analogy between God and the world; no imagines and vistigia Dei in mundo; the only exception is our soul" (Koyre 100). Descartes goes to great lengths to remove God altogether from intervention in the material universe, which he reduces as utterly as possible to the status of pure mechanism. Even animals and the body of man.
…how many automata or machines can be made by human industry, although these automata employ very few parts in comparison to the large number of bones, muscles, nerves, arteries, veins, and all the other component parts of each animal. …therefore think of this body as a machine created by the hand of God, and in consequence incomparably better designed and with more admirable movements than any machine that can be invented by man. (Descartes 36)
Once created by the hand of God, the machine of nature operates on its own. It is governed by mechanical laws rather than by any teleological principle or animate world-soul.
Vacuums may not exist in Descartes’ world, because, in order to remove any active spiritual principle from the material world, he has drawn a radical dualism between the two, of which vacuums, being neither material nor spiritual, can have no part (Jacob 25). Descartes’ God, like his cogito is without extension and altogether removed from the world-machine.
ROBERT BOYLE (1627-1691)
Although Boyle often opposed the idea of a purely mechanical natural philosophy, he also rejected the scholastic principle that nature abhors a vacuum as an attempt to "endow brute matter with foresight and purpose…"
…that a brute and inanimate creature, as water, not only has a power to move its heavy body upwards, contrary (to speak in their [scholastics] language) to the tendency of its particular nature, but knows both that unless it succeed the attracted air, there will follow a vacuum; and that this water is withal so generous, as by ascending, to act contrary to its particular inclination for the general good of the universe, like a noble patriot, that sacrifices his private interests to the publick ones of his country." (qtd. in Jacob V,26)
The sardonic tone indicates to what degree the experience of the natural world as governed by teleological forces had become alien to the European imagination. Nevertheless, Boyle opted for the most part for a corpuscular, rather than a purely mechanical philosophy, and he "did not hesitate to refer to the role played by Paracelsian volatile spirits, active substances or seminal principles in certain kinds of chemical change" (Jacob 22).
Although his rejection of teleology would seem to incline towards a world-machine paradigm, Boyle (along with his fellow latitudinarians, Wilkins and Glanvill) was concerned that God not be denied access to intervention in the material world as He had been by the Cartesians and Hobbists. Boyle nevertheless recognized (after Mersenne) the value of mechanical explanations of natural processes for overcoming the threat of popular pantheistic atheism "by preserving the proper distinction between rational humanity and stupid matter" (Jacob V,27). Although not a strict mechanicalist, Boyle’s God acted upon the world from without, rather than within.
IV. THE CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS AND THE REVIVAL OF THE WORLD-SOUL
RALPH CUDWORTH (1617-1688)
The world-machine as it had been revived by Mersenne early in the century, had been designed to banish multifarious popular deities and intelligences, along with the authority of obsolete scholastic texts from the post-Renaissance European imagination, leaving all spiritual power in the hands of a single transcendent Biblical God, utterly removed from human manipulation. By restricting the territory of the soul in the material world to man alone and denying it to any part of nature, however, the world-machine paradigm removed the only mechanism by which God had heretofore been understood to operate upon the world in any capacity but as a function of man’s intellect.
Plato had described the relationship of the human soul to the world-soul in the Timaeus:
…and once more into the cup in which he [the Demiurgus] had previously mingled
the soul of the universe he poured the remains of the elements, and mingled
them in much the same manner; they were not, however, pure as before, but
diluted to the second and third degree. And having made it he divided the whole
mixture into souls equal in number to the stars, and assigned each soul to a
star…( Plato 18)
Judeo-Christian theology identified the human soul as created in God’s image and had developed its scholastic ideas of natural philosophy within this trinitarian structure in which Christ was variously cast (sometimes as the world-soul itself). By removing the world-soul component and the scholastic concept of emanation, the world-machine paradigm cut the connection both of God to the material world and of the material world to the human soul. This had the effect of reducing God to the status of little more than an idea. If organized religion and the popular experience of the individual’s relation to the material world had been stable throughout this period, intellectual debates would have retained the status of the scholastic disputation that had gone on for the past four centuries. Occurring during a period of political and religious upheaval however, the world-soul/ world-machine debate was appropriated by many factions in support of specific political ideologies.
The Cambridge Platonists, concerned that the immense movement towards a world-machine paradigm could only support the most radical Protestant and atheist factions in the ongoing religious and political conflicts attempted to refute its foundational premises and to reintroduce the world-soul into the intellectual understanding of nature.
The being and agency of the individual soul can be understood only under the assumption of the being and agency of the World-Soul…It is for ever creating forms, and it is concealed from us behind the profusion of its forms. We never see the soul itself, but only its cloak and drapery. All plant and animal, all vegetative and sensitive being is the creation of the unceasing activity of this vital force; all growth and decay are included in this creation. What we call nature is but the appearance of the original creativity, the fabric and veil which it had woven about itself. The essence of the soul lies in this vitality, which cannot be derived from materiality or corporeality, but forms on the contrary the foundation and source of the material world. Once more the original attitude towards nature of the Renaissance, its vitalism and dynamism, now are revived in full force in opposition to the materialism and mechanism of Hobbes's philosophy of nature. (Cassirer Platonic 139)
Ralph Cudworth argued that matter must be a product of intellect, as the ancient theistical philosophers held and that intellect cannot have sprung out of matter. For Cudworth:
…all events in the universe depend not on forces operating from without, but on a forming principle from within, an original ‘Plastick nature’. This nature operates unconsciously, and hence is not to be equated to God’s being, to the highest intelligence which controls and guides the cosmos. But it is the medium employed by God Himself. (Cassirer Platonic 140)
Cudworth’s "Plastick nature" is little more than a device to make the world-soul in its Plotinian form compatible with modern natural philosophical terminology.
HENRY MORE (1614-1687)
Henry More, similarly, attempts to transfer world-soul properties to a divine space. He raises space to the dignity of "an attribute of God, and of an organ in which and through which God creates and maintains His world…(Koyre 152). "More…persisted… in believing ‘with all the ancient Platonists’ that all substance, souls, angels and God are extended, and that the world, in the most literal sense of this word, is in God just as God is in the world" (Cassirer Platonic 123). He did not, however, embrace the mystical premises of Neoplatonism, but attempted to revive a purer original Platonism.
We cannot judge Plato’s teachings by Plotinus or Marsilio Ficino, for they have perverted his fundamental doctrine in their scurryings after the miraculous and the mystical. One cannot but be astonished at human short-sightedness when one observes how the later Platonists leave in the dark the excellent and profound teachings of the master regarding virtue, justice, and the state, and on the art of definition and classification of concepts, the knowledge of the eternal verities and the innate ideas of the mind. Instead, these men heed only what Plato said when he gave free rein to his genius and spoke rather as a poet than as a philosopher about the world-soul, the subsistence of ideas, independently of things, about the purifications of the soul, and so forth. (qtd. Cassirer Platonic 154)
More pursued his attempt to introduce a modified Platonic world-soul into natural philosophy partly by engaging in an epistolary debate with the most radical of world-machine proponents. He found it:
…difficult to understand or to admit the radical opposition established by Descartes between body and soul. How indeed can a purely spiritual soul, that is, something which, according to Descartes, has no extension whatever, be joined to purely material body, that is, to something which is only and solely extension? Is it not better to assume that the soul, though immaterial, is also extended; and that everything, even God, is extended? How could He otherwise be present in the world? (Koyre 110)
This extended God acts in the material world, in More’s cosmology, not through an intermediate world-soul, but through an intermediate divine space. "…More adopted the Stoic world-picture of our finite world surrounded by infinite void space. From there he went on, like Gassendi, to divinize this space, to identify it with infinitely extended spiritual substance or God" (Jacob 32). More arrives at a number of properties which God and space are understood to have in common:
One, Simple, Immobile, Eternal, Complete, Independent, Existing in itself, Subsisting by itself, Incorruptible, Necessary, Immense, Uncreated, Uncircumscribed, Incomprehensible, Omnipresent, Incorporeal, All-penetrating, All-embracing, Being by its essence, Actual Being, Pure Act, (Koyre 148)
and concludes that space is a "certain incorporeal subject or spirit, such as the Pythagoreans once asserted it to be" (Koyre 137).
While More "boasts that he has brought God back into the world by the same gate through which Descartes took Him out," it is paradoxically just this argument which decisively influenced Newton’s doctrine of space and paved the way for his doctrine of absolute space (Cassirer Platonic 150).
V. THE EMERGENCE OF THE MODERN WORLD MACHINE
ISAAC NEWTON (1642-1727)
Although it had some rivals on the continent, such as those of Leibniz and the Cartesians, Newton’s model of the world-machine remained dominant until the twentieth century. Following publication of the Principia Mathematica, he quickly became the recognized authority within an increasingly institutionalized and imperialistic English scientific community. His reduction of the laws of motion to mathematical formulas is the basis for modern thought and experience of the physical world.
Although Newton retained an interest in astrology and alchemy, and was called ‘the last of the magicians’ by Lord Keynes (Cassirer Platonic 140), he altogether removed questions of teleology and causality from his methodology.
"I have been unable to discover the cause of …gravity from phenomena, and I feign no hypotheses." He meant "only to give a mathematical notion of those forces, without considering their physical causes." The mathematization of the universe might then stand against the quest for causes, mechanical and material or otherwise. (Shapin 63)
Newton gives us the:
…first clear statement of that union of…experimental and mathematical methods which has been exemplified in all subsequent discoveries of exact science. …[There is a] separation in Newton of positive scientific inquiries from questions of ultimate causation. Most important, perhaps, from the point of view of the exact scientist, Newton was the man who took vague terms like force and mass and gave them a precise meaning as quantitative continua, so that by their use the major phenomena of physics became amenable to mathematical treatment. (Burtt 32)
Newtonian physics is therefore completely compatible with modern experience.
In his personal belief, however, Newton follows somewhat in the tradition of the Cambridge Platonists in introducing modified forms of the world-soul as an active principle in the cosmos. He saw Cartesian metaphysics as "a path to Atheism." Following Henry More, he therefore adopted the idea of absolute space and quantified it within his laws of motion. "…infinite three-dimensional space is not only the scene of God’s acting, the theater of His Providence…such space is itself uncreated and divine, that is, ‘God’s property and, in effect, his immensity’" (Jacob 32). Furthermore, although he believed that matter is inert and incapable of self-motion, his study of alchemy and the ancient Stoics revealed to him a "vital alchemical agent that acts in the formation of everything," through which God constantly molds the universe (Jacob 32).
The evidence for this vital agent he found largely in his newly discovered universal gravity. "Newton and his latitudinarian followers…insist that gravity…demonstrates the power of God acting in the universe and sustaining the order of nature." This was a contradiction both of the popular pantheists, for whom matter is not "dead and lifeless, created and acted upon by divine agency, but alive and uncreated, eternal, infinite and intelligent" (Jacob 36) and of the continental world-machine advocates who claimed that God, having once set the machine in motion, never intervened in its operation. …Leibniz …violently accused him of using the enormous cultural prestige of mathematics to reintroduce occult principles and of abandoning the dream of specifying a completely mechanical universe" (Shapin 63).
The force of gravity (and all forces) acted upon inert matter from without. The force itself, however, was the product of an active principle, a spiritualization of the Stoic subtle matter, a divine immaterial substance, permeating everything and aware of everything (Jacob 36). Newton created a synthesis of Descartes, Galileo, Kepler, the ancient Stoics, Gassendi and Henry More (Jacob 34). His sources were largely Platonists who contributed enormously to the modern world-machine paradigm, but who, in their personal belief, espoused some version of the Platonic world-soul. In the acceptance of Newton’s cosmology "…the old binary world-picture based on Aristotelian tradition was finally disproved and replaced" (Jacob 34), and with it the idea of a qualitative teleological principle. Newton attempted, however, to retain as much of the Platonic/Pythagorean mathematical teleology to support the existence of a present God, active in the processes of the natural world.
From our twentieth century vantage point we see the path of science advancing inexorably through the mechanical philosophy and the gradual elimination of magic from all spheres—except, unfortunately, the core of Newton’s law of gravity, the unexplained ‘force’ which acts by apparently non-material, non-mechanical means across vast distances. (Hill 292)
Newton’s unexplained ‘force’ was not such as might support the remnants of popular paganism or naturalism. Because universal gravity can easily be interpreted as a property of matter, it tended rather to support deism. The intellectual and popular philosophical and theological upheavals of the previous two centuries had dismantled the idea of any authoritative account of universal causality, and what was retained of Newton, as with Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler before him, was his mathematical methodology wholly abstracted from its metaphysical justification. Even Newton himself came "…eventually to believe that the Supreme Deity was transcendent [and] completely removed form the day-to-day operations of the universe" (Jacob 37).
VI. CONCLUSION
The French philosopher Michel Foucault refers to the scientific "episteme," whose reformation into its modern form followed the French Revolution. Foucault was influenced by Martin Heidegger’s belief that human beings live "in history." Heidegger believed that one of the major characteristics of twentieth century man's consciousness is its experience of the world as technology. Everything about our experience is technological, including our experience of other persons. He believed that technological consciousness is not an essential part of being human, but a change from an earlier way of being. Modern man has relinquished his dependence upon an ultimate "other," that is, upon God. One of the major characteristics of twentieth century man's consciousness is its experience of the world as technology. Modern man experiences himself and his world as utilities for his needs and purposes. Man is completely inside technology, with no glimpse of any thing or being which he cannot use technologically, such as God.
Foucault was concerned with the idea of the technologization of man which accompanied the shift to a quantifiable anthropology in the French eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to Christopher Hill, alchemy underwent a metamorphosis after the French Revolution into modern chemistry and modern sociology was partly derived from the assumptions of renaissance astrology (291).
While the technologization of human beings may have occurred after the French Revolution, the epistemological paradigm shift to a mechanistic universe had taken place in the seventeenth century with the metamorphosis from world soul to world machine. This was a shift in a broad cultural epistemology rather than in a narrow scientific perspective.
Although Isaac Newton’s physics might easily have been used to support a modern version of a world-soul cosmology, the violent ideological upheavals from which it had emerged had succeeded in shaking loose centuries old ideas from the greater part of the collective European imagination. In the radical uncertainty that ensued, only the unambiguity of a pure mathematical mechanicalism gained sufficient social currency to emerge as the dominant paradigm of the hegemonic culture.