Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) (23 page)

But in many respects, it wasn't enough, least of all for Newton, who almost made himself crazy wrestling with questions about the cause of gravity. (In truth, his apparent breakdown in 1693 was more likely the effect of exposure to so much mercury in his alchemical shed.) He obsessed over the possibility that a very subtle material or semi-material explanation might be found after all, and over his inability to take his discoveries further. “
For many things lead me to suspect,” he'd written, “that all phenomena may depend on certain forces by which particles of bodies, by causes not yet known, either are impelled toward one another and cohere in regular figures, or are repelled from one another and recede.” At least Newton was content in his belief that the ancients had understood everything he'd found out, and much more besides. He believed he'd been able to restore some part of the old knowledge that had been lost along the way.

Newton's statement wasn't remotely enough for a number of the most fiercely intelligent intellectuals of the time. For people like Christiaan Huygens and Gottfried Leibniz, gravity had less to do with new mathematics than with, for example, the old salve that could heal the injured when applied to the weapon that had wounded them. Leibniz and Newton were still in the midst of their ugly dispute over who had been the first to develop calculus; they went at it for many years, publishing vicious attacks on each other under false names. Though an advocate of unity and accord in almost every political, philosophical, and religious circumstance, Leibniz felt intense enmity for Newton. To him, Newton's gravity was an “
occult quality” in the modern sense: it was magic. It was, he said, “a supernatural thing, that Bodies should attract one another at a distance, without any intermediate means.”

Leibniz was not actually against the idea of immateriality. He later came to understand the world as utterly immaterial, mere perception, a phenomenon composed of aggregations of pure soul-like substances. Borrowing from the Pythagoreans, he called them
monads
. These were “the real atoms of nature,” he said, which formed divine, sophisticated, lifelike agreements with one another through “pre-established harmony.” In Leibniz's conception, there was no need to distinguish between body and soul because even though the “material” world was real enough to experience with the senses and to be “
explained mathematically and mechanically,” there was no actual body.

Nevertheless, Leibniz's argument against Newton's conception of gravity was that it was an “immaterial and inexplicable virtue.” Not only was it “
invisible, intangible,” and “not Mechanical,” it was “unintelligible, precarious, groundless, and unexampled.” From Leibniz's point of view, it “must be a perpetual
Miracle
: And if it is not miraculous, it is false.”

Whatever gravity actually is—Einstein said it was not really a force, but a warp in the dimension of space-time; in the twenty-first century, scientists are somewhat hard-pressed to say—it came to be recognized as fact. And, of course, Kircher came to be associated with the fictions of the pre-scientific past. “
Surely it is no coincidence,” a modern historian says, “that the crystallization of Kircher's reputation as the most ridiculous of the late Renaissance encyclopedists and the emergence of Newton as the first man of science both occurred in the same period.” Pretty soon their fates were sealed.

But even a century after Kircher's death, there were still a few people for whom the distinction wasn't so clear-cut. “
In my opinion the Egyptian system of the world, which was based on the laws of attraction and repulsion, seems to be the closest of all to the truth,” wrote a Slovak intellectual named Adám Ferencz Kollár in 1790. “This opinion of mine now has the consent of all Europe, which approved it not so long ago, but attributed it to Newton, in his calculus. But Kircher came before Newton; and lest someone thinks that I am daydreaming, I would have him read carefully and with an unprejudiced mind those things that Kircher wrote.”

23

The Strangest Development

A
lthough Leibniz, for his part, had Kircher to thank for much of his early thinking and inspiration, over time he changed his opinion of Kircher's abilities, and in the end took apparent pleasure in scoffing at him. He'd sent Kircher oily praise in 1670 for
The Great Art of Knowing
, but by 1716 he'd decided that
Kircher “had not even dreamed of the true analysis of human thoughts.” The same year, about Kircher's interpretations of the hieroglyphs, Leibniz offered a final, offhanded conclusion: “
He understands nothing.”

But it was largely because of Kircher that Leibniz became interested in Chinese culture, philosophy, religion, and language. (Kircher's
China Illustrated
was published the year Leibniz turned twenty-one.) And if it hadn't been for Leibniz's interest in China, and his own subsequent correspondence with a number of Jesuit missionaries, he never would have found what he believed to be the ancient precedent for his system of binary arithmetic.
In 1701 a priest in Peking sent Leibniz a treatise on the
I Ching
, the text now popularly used for divination and the interpretation of events. It was composed of sixty-four hexagrams and said to be authored by an ancient Chinese philosopher-king. When Leibniz examined the sequence of hexagrams, he decided almost immediately that it was a rendering of binary numerical progression. (It wasn't.) In his view the
I Ching
was perhaps the very first mathematical-metaphysical text. And because he'd been persuaded by Kircher's arguments that Chinese culture had descended directly from that of the ancient Egyptians, he believed he knew the true identity of the king who had written it down: Hermes Trismegistus. With this assurance that he'd restored some part of the original wisdom, Leibniz published his description of the binary scheme in 1703, and made it so that, at least according to his conception of it, every bit (short for “binary digit”) of information in every modern digital device contains some combination of God (1) and nothingness (0).

Kircher's influence often worked this way: in spite of the negative opinions of his readers, and sometimes in spite of himself. His incorrect assertions about the Egyptian roots of Chinese society were responsible for the fact that, for more than a century after his death, many serious scholars tried to
unlock the secret of the Egyptian hieroglyphic system . . . by studying Chinese. But when Jean-François Champollion made his breakthrough with hieroglyphics (after the discovery of the Rosetta stone by Napoleon's forces in Egypt), he did it with Kircher's help.

More precisely, he did it with the help of Kircher's Coptic grammar and lexicon, something that Kircher himself had largely neglected in his attempt to read messages he assumed somehow transcended mere linguistics and were mystical in form as well as meaning. As it turned out, Kircher's hapless French mentor, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, had been right all along to push for an understanding of the language of the early Egyptian Christians. But without the Rosetta stone—which was inscribed with the same decree in three scripts: hieroglyphics, a later form of Egyptian script related to Coptic, and Greek—even Champollion might not have uncovered the somewhat mundane, phonetic component of the problem. Once the hieroglyphics were at last accurately deciphered, one historian writes, “
the obelisks were seen to enshrine not ‘the highest mysteries of Divinity,' as Kircher thought, but rather a dull record, for the most part, of the acts and attributes of kings.”

This is not to say Kircher's work on Egypt went entirely by the wayside, or was completely forgotten. As with much of what he did, it just wasn't remembered the way he'd hoped. Kircher is still sometimes called the father of Egyptology, though as such, as with his Chinese studies, he played at least some role in creating Eurocentric perceptions about the East—had something to do with the creation of the exotic Other that, as Edward Said argued in
Orientalism
in 1978, went hand in hand with cultural and political power, imperialism, and colonialism.

Otherwise, the great dubious contribution of
Egyptian Oedipus
was that it served as a reference work on the so-called sacred sciences and occult practices. Kircher included many halfhearted disclaimers for his own sake and for the sake of the censors, but his long considerations of just about every magical and mystical tradition helped preserve them for future study. In some cases he had an effect on the traditions themselves.

In some respects, Cartesian dualism, the boundary drawn between body and spirit, helped make the world safe for religious and spiritual practices of all kinds. If occult virtues were no longer legitimate explanations for natural phenomena, then physical science was often seen not to apply, or rather to fall short of applying, to mystical matters. Kircher's books, which provided at least some fodder for the development of the secret societies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, played an even greater role in the nineteenth century, when a fascination with spiritualism and parlor pastimes like spirit-conjuring and levitation emerged. His tree of life and many of his concepts of Kabbalah were adopted almost wholesale by such societies as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, in which the poet William Butler Yeats and his wife, George, were later active. (Yeats also tried to re-create the vegetable-phoenix phenomenon that Kircher had supposedly demonstrated for Queen Christina, but was unsuccessful in producing an apparition of a flower from its ashes.)

The self-proclaimed psychic known as Madame Blavatsky built her career arguing, in effect, against the Cartesian split. In her view,
both
modern science and Christianity existed in arrogant isolation from larger occult truths—truths she said were well understood by (who else?) the ancients. This mysterious Russian woman became a celebrity of sorts after she arrived in New York in the 1870s. At the salons and séances held in her apartment, she espoused an all-encompassing approach she called Theosophy (which means “divine wisdom”). In what might be called the Kircherian tradition, Blavatsky published impossibly erudite tomes such as
The Secret Doctrine
, in which she revealed the knowledge of the ancients and certain Eastern cultures, attempting to synthesize or at least to analyze every strain of spiritual and scientific belief held throughout human history. As it turned out, her erudition
was
more or less impossible; to write her books, she cribbed from encyclopedic nineteenth-century histories of these teachings, some of which had been taken, at least in part, from Kircher.
She even quoted Rabbi Barachias Nephi, the author of the manuscript that Kircher may or may not have invented, and which he never got around to translating. Blavatsky is generally credited, if that's the right word, with providing the foundation for the New Age movement of the twentieth century.

To her, Kircher was a “monk” who “appeared among the mystics” with a complete philosophy of universal magnetism. “He asserted that although every particle of matter, and even the intangible invisible ‘powers' were magnetic, they did not themselves constitute a magnet.
There is but one
MAGNET
in the universe, and from it proceeds the magnetization of everything existing.
This magnet is of course what the kabalists term the central Spiritual Sun, or God. The sun, moon, planets, and stars he affirmed are highly magnetic; but they have become so by induction from living in the universal magnetic fluid—the Spiritual light.”

—

KIRCHER'S MAGNETIC PHILOSOPHY
must have been a source of inspiration to the physician named Franz Anton Mesmer, whose elaborate, hypnotic cures became the rage among fashionable Parisians in the late 1770s. Mesmer studied at Jesuit universities in Bavaria and learned the art of magnetic medicine from a member of the Society in Vienna named Father Hehl (sometimes rendered in English as Father Hell), an education that must have drawn on Kircher's works as well as the old magnetic literature. Mesmer came to believe that mere magnets, vehicles of “mineral magnetism,” as he put it, were insufficient to treat certain ailments, especially “nervous” afflictions now known as mental or psychological illnesses. He thought many sicknesses were caused by blockages and imbalances of a much more subtle, universal magnetic “fluid” that ran through all things, living and nonliving, by virtue of a force he called “animal magnetism.” He used Newton's theories of universal gravity to bolster his arguments. Just as the moon's gravitational pull on the oceans caused the tides, he said, the movement of planets caused changes in the levels of this invisible fluid within the body. (
Animal magnetism, he wrote, acts “at a distance” on a principle of “Flux and Reflux,” though he might as well have described it as attraction and repulsion, sympathy and antipathy, or consonance and dissonance.) Mesmer developed new kinds of treatments based on his belief that this force could be “communicated, propagated, stored, accumulated, and transported,” by sound, light, touch, and even thought.

After meeting with skepticism and some high-profile failures in Vienna, he moved to Paris. The French—young French women, in particular—were somehow much more responsive to his therapies. Soon his house was so crowded with patients that he began to administer to groups of them at a time in multisensory healing rituals. There was incense, Aeolian harp music, mirrors, and colored light. Patients gathered around Mesmer's strange apparatus—a great tub filled with “magnetized” water, out of which protruded movable iron rods that were applied to afflicted parts of the body. Wearing a long lilac robe and “
a look of dignity,” he lingered with each patient, staring deeply “to magnetize them by the eye.” He stroked them “with his hands upon the eyebrows and down the spine; traced figures upon their breast and abdomen with his long white wand.” Mesmer's protégés meanwhile gave individual care to the others. They embraced them and rubbed them “gently down the spine and the course of the nerves, using gentle pressure upon the breasts of the ladies.”

His patients, thus “mesmerized,” as it came to be known, responded by going into reveries or into convulsions, sometimes by sobbing or screaming or laughing uncontrollably. Many said the treatment made them feel better. (Critics said that while Mesmer was successful with the young ladies, he couldn't seem to cure his own long-suffering wife.) Mesmer insisted that his therapy worked by acting on the magnetic fluid within his patients. He may actually have been hypnotizing them. In fact, although the concept of animal magnetism was eventually discredited, his techniques led to the development of therapeutic hypnosis. Disciples and others who practiced offshoot forms of his treatments learned to build what Mesmer called
rapport
, or harmony, with their patients, and began to concentrate on the role of the mind and the emotions in certain illnesses and their cures. As a result, almost every history of modern psychotherapy begins with a study of Mesmer.

Beyond this, although the influence of Kircher's magnetic studies and philosophy has faded, magnetism itself has taken on ever-increasing significance in almost every scientific and technological field, especially after a relationship between magnetism and electricity was discovered in the 1800s. “
Without the stunning progress made during the last several centuries in understanding the nature of magnetism, our modern technological civilization would not yet have come into existence,” an American professor of astrophysics named Gerrit Verschuur wrote in 1993. “Every facet of the civilized world rests, ultimately, on the widespread availability of electricity to drive the machines of industry. We would never have learned to produce electricity if it were not for the profound insights that arose from the study of magnetism.” It isn't just that magnetism is employed in the everyday generation of electricity, or that, for instance, satellite transmissions, cell-phone calls, and wireless connections exist as a flow of electromagnetic waves—that massive amounts of data are routinely transported from one given physical location to another, electromagnetically, invisibly, through the air. Light itself is electromagnetic in nature, as is every interaction between atoms, and almost every physical phenomenon besides gravity.

The realm of unseen energies that Kircher and many of his contemporaries imagined may not exist, but there is nevertheless a realm of unseen energies. In the late twentieth century, astronomers and cosmologists came to a bizarre conclusion: Only four percent of the universe is made up of stuff we understand. Twenty-three percent is made up of something known only by its gravitational effects that they call “dark matter.” Seventy-three percent is made up of some kind of antigravitational force they call “dark energy”; it is similar to dark matter, but, in the words of one cosmological theorist, it is “
more energy-like.” Maybe it wasn't completely and totally wrong for Kircher to suggest that the world is bound with secret knots.

Usually, of course, the practice of science makes the world seem less, not more, mysterious. Today, for example, evolutionary biologists are pretty well convinced that human consciousness is a Darwinian adaptation—that awareness and sense of self evolved over a very long period of time like everything else. In which case perhaps so did the feeling that some part of us might live after the body dies. “
Proof will require a lot more information about, for example, neuro-circuitry and the nature of memory and emotional inputs in reasoning,” eminent biologist Edward O. Wilson explained in 2002. Nevertheless, he thinks “the Cartesian notion of dualism between body and soul is dead forever. I'm sorry, but that's the way it is.”

Life itself may always be a mystery, if not a miracle. As it turns out, Francesco Redi's controlled experiments with decaying meat didn't end the debate about spontaneous generation, or the experimentation, which was conducted on increasingly microscopic, microbial, and bacterial levels for a few more centuries by scientists such as Louis Pasteur. In the second part of the nineteenth century, arguments for spontaneous generation became an integral part of the debate over evolution. It was the Darwinists—the modern scientists, the materialists—who found they had to contend with the problem of how life could be engendered from non-living matter. (Maybe every modern Darwinist still does.) One science historian expressed it this way: “
To believe in evolution and a completely naturalistic world-view required the belief that . . . living organisms must have been capable of arising from nonlife at least once on the early earth.”