Essays in Idleness

It seems only fair that some Dutchman should have invented the microscope, but they are a disputatious breed, and their claims and counter-claims drive the inquirer to distraction. It is the compound microscope I am discussing, which has two lenses, not the single spherical lens of melted glass that Baruch Spinoza was polishing, in the XVIIth century. The Italians had been making spectacles from the XIIIth, because, really, the Italians invented everything; but the English polymath, Robert Hooke, made the first truly serviceable compound microscope, and started doing clever things with it — vastly extending the area of human observation, after 1700.

Indeed, he was a kind of British Galileo, for he identified the rotations of Mars and Jupiter, and came up with the inverse square law before Newton clinched it. He explained the refraction of light, and contributed the wave theory. He also manufactured the gas pumps for Robert Boyle (him of Boyle’s Law), and it would seem he was architect for half the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire. Indeed, his rivals found many reasons to hate him: over-achievers are generally despised.

In Hooke’s book, Micrographia, we first encounter the word, “cell,” which has had such a distinguished history through the last four centuries. More broadly, biology — in the modern, sterile, technocratic sense — only became possible with the invention of the microscope. (Think what Aristotle could have done with one!)

Nevertheless, biology, as a precise science, preceded the microscope in the West, and was the invention of artists. They were Italian, of course; but towards the end of the XIVth century the invasion of Burgundy, France, Flanders, and Germany by naturalism was rapidly proceeding. They — artists but also scientists by accomplishment — took interest not only in identifying the visible plants and animals (farmers and housewives could already do that, and city-dwellers already could not). The draughtsmen and painters observed and communicated from nature the perfect organic forms, in outline and in the minutest detail. Among their successors, too, only the artists have studied actual morphology, except in the spirit of engineering. Our botanical and zoological collections have likewise deteriorated, where statistical principles have triumphed, to match-box collecting. We collect death; the classical biologists depicted the living, in their “environmental” landscapes.

Biology — the major science of observation — became the principal stronghold of nescience when Darwin and the boys took over, with their (unrealizable) evolutionary obsessions. Prior to their triumph, a wonderful science had developed among nature-loving amateurs. (See, for instance, Carl Berger, Science, God, and Nature in Victorian Canada, 1983.) For genuine “science” is (or was) not bureaucracy; it is done out of love.

We should discard the cloying propaganda terms, and restore the reign of Natural Philosophy. Let us start again with the Theory of Forms.