Flesh in the Age of Reason (15 page)

moves Matter not
Mechanically
but
Vitally
, and by
Cogitation
only. And that a
Cogitative Being
as such hath a
Natural Imperium
over
Matter
and
Power
of Moving it without any
Engines
or
Machines
, is unquestionably certain, even from our own
Souls
: which move our Bodies and Command them every way, meerly by
will
and
Thought
.

God’s relation to the universe was mirrored in the soul’s relation to the body.

Taking his cue from Plato’s
Timaeus
, Cudworth – reflecting, one surmises, upon his own experience as the Master of a Cambridge college – held that God presided over Creation not immediately but indirectly, through an intermediary ‘plastic nature’, a subordinate deputy executing His design. The voluntarist or Calvinist tenet that ‘God himself doth all
immediately
, and as it were with his own hands, form the body of every gnat and fly, insect and mite’ was demeaning to the Deity. The role of ‘plastic nature’, this subservient or executive instrument, moreover allowed the anti-Calvinist to resolve the old theodicy problem of why evil existed – surely God could not be its author? Nature’s apparent imperfections, Cudworth insisted, were not of his willing, but arose from the inadequacies of that ‘plastic nature’ in the teeth of the ‘indisposition’ of matter (were the college porter and butler entirely trustworthy?).

While metaphysics was Cudworth’s forte, he was not indifferent to facts. ‘If there be once any Invisible ghosts or Spirits acknowledged as Things Permanent,’ he asserted, ‘it will not be easie for any to give a reason why there might not be one
Supreme Ghost
also, presiding over them all.’ Those ghosts became crucial to the case against Descartes, against Hobbes, and against all other atheist onslaughts: they were scientific proofs of the spiritual.

Among the Cambridge divines, however, it was Henry More, as befitted a fellow of the Royal Society, who turned to what Robert Boyle would call ‘matters of fact’, so as to prove the spirit through science. In both the third book of his
An Antidote against Atheism
(1653) and throughout
The Immortality of the Soul
(1659), More presented accounts of witchcraft and possession, miraculous cures, ‘
Apparitions
’, and such ‘extraordinary effects’ as ‘speakings, knockings, opening of doores when they were fast shut, sudden lights in the midst of a room floating in the aire, and then passing and vanishing’.

On the trail of spiritual manifestations, divine and diabolical, More collaborated with a fellow enthusiast, Joseph Glanvill, an Oxford graduate and Somerset clergyman who devoted himself to promoting Baconian philosophy. His first book,
The Vanity of Dogmatizing
(1661), was an attack on the errors of the peripatetic philosophy; his
Plus
Ultra
(1668) extolled the new science; while his
Philosophia Pia
(1671) taught the harmony of science with Christianity.

Initially entitled
A Philosophical Endeavour towards the Defence of the Being of Witches and Apparitions
, Glanvill’s demonology was greatly expanded to form his
Saducismus Triumphatus
, published posthumously by More in 1681.
*
The first part canvassed the theoretical possibility of witchcraft, the second mustered evidence for the reality of witches. Pitching into Hobbes’s
a priori
denial of witchcraft, Glanvill denounced materialism as crude, bigoted and against the facts. There were many things beyond human reason – what vanity in dogmatizing! – while it was reasonable to believe in spirits on many grounds: well-attested experience, the weight of received opinion, and the gradated nature of the Chain of Being, rising from gross matter up to God. Glanvill also attacked Descartes – whom he too, like More, had initially admired – as a two-faced sophist who affirmed the existence of spirit while perversely excluding spirits from the world. If, as Christians held, the soul had an existence separate from the body, what was the problem about its being transported through the air, or even possessing another body? Descartes was thus a lurking Hobbist, and Hobbes a closet atheist.

To prove his point, Glanvill piled up reports to confirm that the soul acted upon its physical location. His aim was to show that spirit possession and fascination, albeit brought into disrepute by shady faith-healers and wild enthusiasts, should rightly become the territory, indeed the prize, of experimental philosophy. Himself a fellow of the Royal Society, Glanvill’s sightings of the supernatural were received by that august body. Assuring the Society in 1682 that the soul had ‘a much bigger sphere of influencing power, and thereby may extend it… even out of the Body’, no less a scientist than Robert Hooke cited Glanvill’s accounts of fortune-telling, mind-reading, and of what would later be called hypnotism.

Witchcraft was a phenomenon which Glanvill urged the Society
to study, in an impassioned plea prefixed to
A Blow at Modern Sadducism
(1668), where he pointed to the compatibility of its investigation with the Society’s ethos of free inquiry. Between them, More and Glanvill came up with many sightings. In 1670 the former involved himself in ‘psychic’ phenomena at Cookhill Priory near Ragley Hall, the home of his cherished friend Anne, Lady Conwell. Through a stone slab in the floor of a cottage constructed in the abbey ruins strange sightings and callings were observed, and ghosts were said to glide through it. More had the slab lifted and boldly descended with a candle. Dripping water and whistling draughts might, More speculated, explain the sounds that distressed the cottagers, but his eagerness to lend credence to such phenomena was typical of his mind-set.

The principal supernatural phenomenon which came to his notice was that of the ‘drummer of Tedworth’. In 1661 the Mompesson family of that Wiltshire village were persecuted by a drummer – they had, rumour had it, been stingy with alms – through loud bangings and other poltergeist-like noises. This business seemed to many, notably Glanvill who published it with great fervour, concrete evidence for the activity of spirits, and it was welcomed accordingly – by More as well – as a weapon against scepticism and mortalism.

The conviction that the new philosophy could confirm the spirit realm led to an outpouring of books, including Richard Bovet’s
Pandaemonium, or the Devils’s Cloyster, Being a Further Blow to Modern Sadducism
(1684), a work alluding to Glanvill and dedicated to More. The hope of proving the supernatural through science was no eccentric foible – it was common to the age and central to the endeavours of none other than Robert Boyle, the so-called father of modern chemistry.

As envisaged by that noble investigator, experimental natural philosophy required precise demarcation. It was to be sharply distinguished from neo-Aristotelian scholasticism and from every other ‘-ism’ which falsely attributed to Nature what was properly to be credited to the will of God – ever the pious Protestant, Boyle was unswervingly hostile to concepts of Nature, not least Cudworth’s
Neoplatonic ‘plastic nature’, which detracted from a proper appreciation of Divine majesty.

What then was the constitution of Nature? Boyle always returned to the primacy of matter and motion: perceptible (‘secondary’) qualities depended on the size, shape, motion and arrangement of the (‘primary’) component parts. There were no other hidden agents or occult forces: the workings of Nature were truly the will of God. All his life Boyle was moved by religious impulses. His earliest writings were works of pious moral exhortation, before a second ‘conversion experience’ in the late 1640s – he had already experienced the conventional
religious
rebirth – turned him into the apostle of experimental science. Thereafter his fervent piety found expression mainly through the medium of natural philosophy, in such works as
The Christian Virtuoso
(1690–1). In his will he set up what became known as the Boyle Lectures, to be delivered annually from a London pulpit to teach how natural science led to Nature’s God.

Boyle fretted about the threats which dogmatic rationalism posed for faith – like the Cambridge Platonists, he regarded humble reason as perfectly compatible with mysteries. Imperious rationalism was linked in his mind with the dismissiveness about the Resurrection and the immortality of the soul which he identified with such murky Renaissance figures as Pomponazzi, who in their turn had drawn their inspiration from Aristotle and the Greek atheists. Boyle thus shared the Cambridge Platonists’ fear of the ‘atheist’ threat, singling out ‘Socinians’ (Arians) for over-reliance on reason. Strictly defined, Socinianism was the anti-trinitarian credo; more broadly, however, it was a smear word implying stiff-necked rationalism. Urging systematic investigation to quell such threats, Boyle held that observation and experiment proved the activities of ‘spirit’ in Nature, thus avoiding the dual pitfalls of materialist atheism on the one hand and the excesses of the enthusiasts on the other.

To counter such tendencies, Boyle touted the role of scientific research to support the plausibility of the Resurrection. ‘We have really yet but a very small Insight into the true Nature of Bodys,’ he insisted, addressing the case for the soul’s immortality, ‘& a much
lesser into that of Spirits.’ His air-pump experiments, for instance, which proved, against scholastic precepts, the reality of the vacuum and the springiness of the air (hence ‘Boyle’s Law’), were assumed to confirm the presence of spirit in the atmosphere. Experimental ‘pneumatics’ (air studies) also showed that efficient causes might be not just material but vital and spiritual, analogous to the action of the human soul. Trials with phosphorus and other igniting and exploding chemicals similarly pointed to the presence of spirits. With a similar aim, in the mid-1670s Boyle published essays on celestial magnetism and alchemy.

Ever wary about his own reputation and fearful that adversaries would distort his meanings, Isaac Newton – himself a closet alchemist – predictably found Boyle’s decision to publish such opinions rash: they were ‘not to be communicated without immense damage’, and he called his co-worker to ‘high silence’. Yet the pious Boyle was not deterred from his mission to lay bare the spiritual world through science. In a letter ‘Of celestial Influences or Effluviums in the Air’, for example, he later offered an ‘apology for astrology’ which stressed the spiritual dimension: ‘Our spirits are more near and more analogous to the nature of light than the air, so they must be more prone to and easy to be impressed than it.’

Boyle adopted a two-pronged strategy to validate and vindicate the spiritual. There were aspects of spiritual activity, particularly what fell within traditional ‘natural magic’, which could be harnessed by the new science. Once thus ‘demonstrated’ in the laboratory, spirit could be effectively integrated into Nature and hence natural philosophy. Experimental pneumatics or chemistry revealed at the bench the innate principles active in what had once been judged merely occult: instruments and apparatus showed spirits at work, the genie in the lamp.

Then there was a residue of ‘supernatural phenomena’, such as ghosts. While these eluded laboratory scrutiny, apparitions could be sufficiently affirmed and attested, in due Baconian manner, by authorized witnesses, and thus established as ‘matters of fact’. Boyle shared Glanvill’s and More’s confidence as to the reality of witchcraft
and similar phenomena that manifested God’s (or Satan’s) first-hand intervention in the world, making explicit his support for Glanvill’s demonological project and plying him with verified accounts of witchcraft. Yet just as Newton chid Boyle, the latter in turn wagged his finger at Glanvill: he must be ‘very carefull to deliver none but well attested narratives’.

Boyle continued to file such data for the rest of his life. Remarkable stories of supernatural powers appear in the notes made by Bishop Gilbert Burnet after a meeting with the aged experimentalist. Similar material was earmarked for a work entitled ‘Strange Reports’ which Boyle partly published. Lists of ‘Supernaturall phaenomena’ included ‘A person that saw spirits in the day tyme’, ‘Apparitions in a magicall looking glasse’, ‘An absent witch tormented’, and so forth.

Anxious to vindicate the new philosophy and to demonstrate God through it, yet temperamentally given to soul-searching, Boyle walked a tightrope. He deplored reductionist rationalism, with its atheistic undertow, and even entered into correspondence in the 1670s and 1680s with Quakers and other marginal figures – letters dismissed in an eighteenth-century inventory as ‘Enthusiastic’ and ‘unintelligible’. Yet he was afraid – witness his caution to Glanvill – of appearing credulous and thereby risking discrediting his science.

Such fears were not Boyle’s alone. Fellows of the infant Royal Society, while being prepared to use the methods and credit of science to authenticate the spirit world, were troubled lest the attempt would seem gullible, draw the ridicule of the wits around Charles II’s court, and thus disgrace the enterprise. Just as Newton did not publish his alchemical experiments, the Royal Society did not follow up Glanvill’s pleas to research witchcraft. Where, then, was the line to be drawn? Where did the spiritual forces of (lawful) natural magic and (satanic) black magic begin?

It was a question which perturbed Boyle. He was always fascinated by diabolical and magical phenomena, in 1658 sponsoring the English translation of a book by François Perreaud as
The Devill of Mascon
, and planning to publish a sequel to the collection of ‘Strange Reports’ dealing with ‘Supernatural’ phenomena. But he pulled back. One
should beware of magic, he reasoned, not because it was false, but because, being real, it was too hot to handle.