Sympathetic Attractions – Magnetic Practices, Beliefs, & Symbolism in Eighteenth–Century England: Magnetic Practices, Beliefs, and Symbolism in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton Legacy Library) - Hardcover

Fara, Patricia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691010994 ISBN 13: 9780691010991

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1996

Synopsis

In this interdisciplinary study of eighteenth-century England, Patricia Fara explores how natural philosophers constructed magnetism as a science, appropriating the skills and knowledge of experienced navigators. For people of this period, magnetic phenomena reverberated with the symbolism of occult mystery, sexual attraction, and universal sympathies; in this maritime nation, magnetic instruments such as navigational compasses heralded imperial expansion, commercial gain, and scientific progress. By analyzing such multiple associations, fara reconstruct cultural interactions in the days just prior to the creation of disciplinary science. Not only does this illustrated book provide a kaleidoscopic view of a changing society, but it also portrays the emergence of public science. Linking this rise in interest to the utility and mysteriousness of magnetism. Fra organizes her discussion into themes, including commercialization, imperialism, instruments and invention, the role of language, attitudes toward the past, and the relationship between religion and natural philosophy. Fara shows that natural philosophers, proclaiming themselves as the only true experts on magnetism, actively participated in massive transformations of English life. In their bids for public recognition as elite specialists, they engaged in controversies that resonated with religious, economic, moral, gender, and political implications. These struggles for social and scientific authority in the eighteenth century provide the background topography of modern society.

About this title

About the Author

Patricia Fara is a Research Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge, and lectures in the History and Philosophy of Science Department at Cambridge University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Sympathetic Attractions

Magnetic Practices, Beliefs, and Symbolism in Eighteenth-Century England

By Patricia Fara

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1996 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-01099-1

Contents

LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES, ix, 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, xi, 
ABBREVIATIONS, xiii, 
INTRODUCTION, 3, 
CHAPTER ONE Mapping Enlightenment England: Practitioners and Philosophers, 11, 
CHAPTER TWO "A Treasure of Hidden Vertues": Marketing Natural Philosophy, 31, 
CHAPTER THREE The Direction of Invention: Setting a New Course for Compasses, 66, 
CHAPTER FOUR An Attractive Empire: Mapping Terrestrial Magnetism, 91, 
CHAPTER FIVE Measuring Power: Patterns in Experimental Natural Philosophy, 118, 
CHAPTER SIX God's Mysterious Creation: The Divine Attraction of Natural Knowledge, 146, 
CHAPTER SEVEN A Powerful Language: Images of Nature and the Nature of Science, 171, 
CONCLUSION, 208, 
APPENDIX Magnetic Longitude Schemes, 215, 
NOTES, 219, 
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 269, 
INDEX, 319, 

CHAPTER 1

Mapping Enlightenment England: Practitioners and Philosophers

Ephraim Chambers has won renown as the English initiator of Enlightenment projects to systematize rational learning in comprehensive encyclopedias. He followed earlier classifiers by visualizing the organizational scheme of his Cyclopædia as a map of knowledge. Employing geographical metaphors, he claimed to guide his readers through the wilderness of knowledge, indicating the flourishing growth of well-tilled areas of expertise and marking where the limits of the terra cognita could be extended. Like the French encyclopedists who imitated his enterprise, Chambers expressly articulated the arbitrariness with which he had divided his two largest territories, the arts and the sciences, into their subordinate provinces. It was time, he argued, to demolish the partitions established by earlier discoverers and explore those rich tracts which had for too long lain neglected beyond the pale.

Examining eighteenth-century maps and trees of knowledge underlines the mutability of classification systems. Enlightenment plans differed not only from each other but also from modern layouts of disciplinary concerns. Following Chambers' map, an intellectual traveller would arrive at the domain of natural philosophy by following the signpost marked "Rational," which also led to religion, mathematics, and metaphysics. But—unexpectedly for readers today—the lands of optics, pneumatics, and astronomy did not lie along this road: they could only be reached by backtracking to a major fork and then heading off in the same direction as voyagers to falconry, alchemy, and sculpture. One tree of this period showed the fruit of "Physicks" dangling from a small branch next to "Thaumaturgicks," the science of conjuring and wonders. Another chart compiler equated natural philosophy with physics and geology, the study of "this Earth with its Furniture." But the French philosophes trimmed the tree to fit their rhetoric of the primacy of reason, shown in the Encyclopédie as the sturdy central trunk carrying two leafy limbs of mathematics and physics.

None of these mapmakers surveyed any territory labelled either electricity or magnetism. Most historians, reared in a world of electromagnetic fields, unthinkingly bracket together the study of electrical and magnetic forces. But throughout the eighteenth century, people viewed them as two distinct powers of nature. This ontological differentiation belonged to a constellation of features which distinguished electrical and magnetic practices. Another pervasive misperception is to view the eighteenth century as the progressive development of Newtonian ideas entailing the mathematization of philosophical pursuits. Generations of polemicists have rendered Newton's image into a powerful icon whose influence is hard to escape. Perpetuating their obliteration by Newtonian rhetoricians, modern writers too often ignore the voices of those eighteenth-century critics who opposed Newton's theories. Many of these regretted that natural philosophy was unwarrantedly invading moral domains or judged that mathematics was an inappropriate tool for investigating the natural world. As late as 1833, Whewell felt it necessary to invent the word "scientist" in order to legitimate his colleagues' activities. He wanted to accord status to men like Faraday, consolidating the bonds between electrical and magnetic phenomena. Studying the construction of magnetism as a scientific discipline—a demarcated cartographical entity—contributes to understanding how the foundation of professionalized science formed part of the cultural transformations reflected by the shifting territories of knowledge. Retrieving marginalized historical actors, and viewing the creation of disciplinary magnetism as a contested process, rectifies the glib reiteration of Newtonian rhetorics. Separating out the anachronistic fusion of electrical and magnetic interests exemplifies the historical rewards of using contemporary rather than modern criteria for envisaging terrains of the past.

Magnetic concerns were scattered across any geographical or cultural map of the eighteenth-century world. People living in different places and engaged in different activities held various types of magnetic knowledge. English natural philosophers were not engaged in the same types of magnetic projects as their Continental counterparts, while within England natural philosophers disagreed over the best approach to learning about God's magnetic creation. It was only towards the end of the century that magnetism became a coherent subject of scientific study. Until then, magnetic information was valued for its usefulness—by practical men such as navigators, surveyors, and miners, as well as by natural philosophers justifying their investigations of the natural world.

As the century opened, maritime practitioners displayed the greatest interest in magnetic behavior. Navigation manuals discussed the problems posed to international travel by the vagaries of terrestrial magnetism and described the types of compass appropriate for voyages overseas. Elsewhere, writers categorized magnetic information and devices in ways alien to modern opinions. So when he catalogued the Royal Society's Museum collection in 1681, Nehemiah Grew classified the magnetic equipment alongside scale models and canoes. For Chambers, magnets lay within mineralogy, the study of the earth's history forming part of descriptive natural history rather than rational natural philosophy. Books on natural philosophy gave magnetic attraction only a passing mention amongst forces such as cohesion, gravity, and electricity. If mentioned at all, magnetic phenomena belonged in mechanics. Benjamin Worster, for instance, included magnetic demonstrations in his lectures at Thomas Watts' Academy in London during the 1720s. Author of a text which remained influential for many years, he squeezed in "Experiments with the Load-Stone" amongst discussions of tides, phases of the moon, and bodies descending inclined planes. At a popular level, magnetic and sympathetic attraction were virtually synonymous, entering into accounts of weapon salves, religious enthusiasm, and medical therapy.

As people utilized magnetic powers in different ways, élite natural philosophers defined a boundary for the new scientific discipline of magnetism. Inside it they placed their own types of experiments and ideas, including the information about terrestrial magnetism they had taken over from navigators and subsequently expanded. Beyond this limit they set older associations with sympathies, medicine, and the occult, together with the practice of animal magnetism which flourished in London during the late 1780s. Natural philosophers explored the relationship of this new territory of magnetism to other categories of knowledge about the natural world, removing it from the domains of mechanics and navigation to place it uncertainly next to electricity.

This opening chapter explores this book's own boundaries by mapping attitudes towards investigating and utilizing magnetic effects. It is divided into two sections. The first emphasizes the distinctiveness of magnetic practices in England, which differed markedly from those of its Continental neighbors. Magnetic research exemplified Voltaire's famous quip contrasting the full world of vortical Paris with the empty space of Newtonian London. Unlike today, activities related to magnetic and electrical phenomena were sharply differentiated from each other. The second section focuses on the beliefs and practices of different groups of people writing about magnetic phenomena: it compares their opinions about magnetic behavior and explores their interaction with other communities. Mathematical practitioners, the traditional experts on navigational techniques, made vital contributions to magnetic investigations. Very few natural philosophers wrote extensively on magnetic topics, but as they polemically deployed their ideas, experiments, and inventions to consolidate their own positions, and to attack those held by others, they affected the outlooks of their contemporaries and their successors in many fields.

Mapping the Boundaries of Magnetic England in the Eighteenth Century

Participating in the recent revival of interest in the eighteenth century, now perceived as a key period in Britain's history, eminent scholars have chosen to demarcate the century's start and finish in various ways. Some have selected dates of important political events, such as the Glorious Revolution of 1689 or the Reform Bill of 1832, to bound eighteenth centuries of varying lengths. But events unroll continuously, so that confining them in the straitjacket of dates highlights the historian's authorial role. In particular, historians of science, concerned to move away from heroic accounts of scientific discovery, are wary of investing too much importance in specific episodes. There was no single magnetic practice, and no such precise chronological limits can be set for this study. However, significant transformations in attitudes and practices make it analytically useful to describe a magnetic eighteenth century stretching from roughly 1690 to 1800.

Much of the seventeenth century had been dominated by William Gilbert's De Magnete, conveniently published in exactly 1600. Gilbert's audiences immediately interpreted his book as a magnetic philosophy, one in which he successfully demarcated magnetic power from assorted Renaissance sympathies, elevating it into the central principle of his vitalist terrestrial cosmology. Various maritime, philosophical, and religious communities sustained intense interest in his work. Natural magicians appropriated Gilbert's authority as endorsement for their practices, Jesuits enrolled his philosophy to underpin their cosmological arguments, and natural philosophers sought greater understanding of the patterns of terrestrial magnetism, so important for commercial navigation. In Restoration England, mechanical philosophers turned to magnetic phenomena for furnishing a model of cosmic forces, a solution to the longitude problem, and evidence of a corpuscular mechanistic nature. But after the mid 1680s, their interest collapsed: their research into mineral magnets became subsumed into a more general study of effluvia, and they found measurements with magnetic instruments insufficiently accurate for substantiating theoretical predictions of the changes in terrestrial magnetism.

This lull in English magnetic research forms a natural break between two centuries which can be broadly characterized as Gilbertian and Halleyan. During the eighteenth century, people were generally less interested in the properties of loadstone or magnetic bars than in terrestrial magnetism and compasses, potential resources for improving navigation. Halley first presented his ideas about terrestrial magnetism to the Royal Society in 1683, but his paper of 1692 was far more influential: Figure 6.2 portrays him holding an explanatory diagram. He proposed a nuclear model of the earth's internal structure, one which he intended to account for the behavior of compasses as ships travelled round the world. After two Atlantic voyages of exploration and magnetic measurement, he marketed a chart based on his ideas, claiming it would be invaluable for international navigators. Throughout the eighteenth century, writers on terrestrial magnetism invariably referred to Halley. Although natural philosophers criticized his theories, they devised no viable competitor, and his suggestions were being incorporated into revised models well into the nineteenth century. But although Halley's name continued to dominate theoretical discussions, the organizational frameworks within which data were collected and represented changed substantially. In 1801—when Matthew Flinders set out for Australia—governmental, scientific, and commercial institutions were cooperating to an unprecedented degree. Flinders' compass experiments heralded a new era in international magnetic measurement.

The boundaries for the investigations into mineral magnets are less clearly defined. Natural philosophers undertook systematic programs of methodical experimental research, often in the hope of gaining financial rewards. After the abandonment of Gilbertian magnetic philosophy, some natural philosophers in Oxford and London continued to explore the mechanical properties of iron and loadstone. They tried to derive a simple law of magnetic force paralleling Newtonian gravity, and sought ways of making iron and steel more strongly magnetic. The pattern changed radically in the middle of the century, when Knight successfully marketed powerful artificial magnets made from steel bars. This innovation stimulated further research, the manufacture of more precise measuring instruments, and the incorporation of magnetic topics into educational courses. By 1787, magnetism had acquired sufficient identity as a topic of study for Tiberius Cavallo, Knight's successor as the Royal Society's magnetic expert, to judge it worthwhile to devote an entire book to the subject. Again, the year 1801 acts as an appropriate symbolic flag marking the advent of a new magnetic era: John Robison published novel techniques in the Encyclopædia Britannica for analyzing magnetic phenomena.

Well before the Napoleonic initiation of overtly nationalistic sciences, natural philosophy was firmly tied to chauvinist ideologies and rooted in political rivalries. John Desaguliers, for instance, was an entrepreneurial projector and experimental demonstrator at the Royal Society who commemorated the accession of George II with a long poem celebrating the Newtonian system. In his book of popular lectures, he used the enigma of magnetic phenomena for reinforcing his patriotic denunciation of French Cartesianism: "It is to Sir Isaac Newton's Application of Geometry to Philosophy, that we owe the routing of this Army of Goths and Vandals in the Philosophical World." Although Enlightenment philosophers were keen to proclaim the existence of an invisible Republic of Letters, protagonists with other interests propagated nationalist messages of superiority rather than supranational unity. As John Bull and Britannia became familiar symbols creating and reinforcing a united British identity, natural philosophers stressed their contribution to Britain's commercial supremacy.

Continental authors frequently vaunted English practices as the embodiment of Enlightenment ideals, admiring the country's liberal democracy and progressive natural philosophy. But the English themselves did not wholeheartedly embrace what are now portrayed as major Enlightenment values: many of them clung to a traditional hierarchical society bonded with the Church of England. Modern writers are increasingly recognizing this distinctiveness of Enlightenment England and exploring the gaps between ideologies and actualities. In addition, for the last couple of decades, historians of science have emphasized the importance of local concerns in the closure of scientific controversies. Many have undertaken detailed analyses of specific episodes in very limited spaces, such as a single laboratory. But even on a larger scale, location remains an important analytical tool. Recent scholars synthesizing closely focused studies to provide a broader picture have restricted their accounts to England, acknowledging that the country's geographical boundaries corresponded with cultural ones.

The magnetic activities of English natural philosophers differed from those of their Continental counterparts in several important ways. With no state funding or control, magnetic researchers in England were interested in experimental demonstration and in marketing magnetic texts and apparatus. Magnetic theories had been central to René Descartes's bid to displace occult explanations by mechanical ones, and European natural philosophers continued to construct neo-Cartesian magnetic theories. Newton, on the other hand, had made only passing and contradictory references to the behavior of magnets. One book reviewer, scathingly condemning a French neo-Cartesian author, articulated a common English attitude: "This theory consists in an imaginary motion of magnetic vortices, which he impels, directs, and diverts, just as it will suit the several phenomena of his experiments. An hypothesis like this, altho' ingeniously forged, and pliable as the iron rods in his own experiments, doth not fall within the compass of my design, which is to exhibit nature, and not to transcribe romances." English magnetic researchers eschewed theoretical speculation and publicly promoted the value of experiment. They prized the utilitarian benefits of loadstone more highly than postulating complex explanatory mechanisms. In France, magnetic phenomena were seen to be so important that for Jean-Jacques Rousseau they provided the pre-adolescent Emile's first introduction to studying nature. But in England, they scarcely received a mention in Tom Telescope's lessons, the century's publishing success in the new genre of children's didactic literature. Tom's end-of-century successor was called William Magnet, but he emphasized the importance of loadstones for navigation, not for natural philosophy.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Sympathetic Attractions by Patricia Fara. Copyright © 1996 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0691010994
• ISBN 13: 9780691010991
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 340