David Wootton has written a long book to save science from something, even if he’s not quite sure what that something is. The demystification, deconstruction, and doubt of post-modernity, maybe. Or revitalized religious faith, from Radical Islam to Protestant Fundamentalism. Certainly, Wootton wants to rescue modern science from its historians. He calls this a new history, and he means it: The text would be a third shorter if Wootton could keep himself from diatribe, from savaging nearly every author who has had the temerity to write about the history of science before David Wootton came along to save the day.
As it happens, the day that Wootton particularly wants to save is November 11, 1572, when the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe identified a new star shining brightly in the midst of the Cassiopeia constellation. This was the moment, he insists, when the most important transformation in recorded human history began. And by the time Isaac Newton published his Opticks in 1704, only 132 years later, the glorious revolution of science was complete. The stupefying goo of medieval thinking had been permanently replaced with the sharp sword of scientific method—reason’s razor edge, with which the universe would be forever slashed open to human view.
Or maybe not permanently. Wootton knows the wonder-working power of modern science. He possesses a sure and certain hope in its future, and a love of its past in his heart. He has faith in science, he trusts it—and not just in the way that a philosopher might trust a proof for the existence of God, but in the way that a mother trusts her son. He believes that science has helped us, and will continue to help us, so long as we are true to the scientific method.
But he’s grown uneasy in recent years, uncertain and unsure. Despite work from Kant to Husserl, science remains without a sure philosophical ground, and the clarity of its truth has been muddied by postmodern doubts. Ever since Thomas Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), historians of science have been working to subordinate science to history, its discoveries increasingly seen as dependent on the presumptions of their particular time. Wootton has undertaken a full-throated defense of the scientific revolution because, he believes, hardly anyone these days appreciates just how revolutionary that revolution was. Just how much the world changed from 1572 to 1704, how much we emerged from medieval darkness to stand beneath the enlightening sun and live in a world without shadows.
The curious thing is that Wootton is mostly right. The reader will want to quibble with him about some of his points, but he has read deeply in the texts of the scientific revolution and he understands that the modern age doesn’t emerge without the turn to science. The scientific revolution is not achieved when Brahe looks in Cassiopeia or Newton breaks light in a prism; it follows from the way their observations led them to experiment and reason. The actual results of science formed the modern age, Wootton knows, and the successes of science lent an air of glory to scientific thinking—a prestige that forced all other modes of thinking, from theology to politics, to attempt to imitate it.
But even if Wootton is right, more or less, in his sweep through the scientific revolution, the overall effect of The Invention of Science is a feeling of wrongness. And to understand why, we have to do a little work to situate the book—work, it needs to be said, that Wootton refuses to do, thereby creating the weaknesses of what could have been a first-rate study of the early moments of modernity.
The problem is that modern times brought us not only astonishing gains in medicine, domestic comfort, civil culture, artistic expression, and all the rest. They also brought a curious sense of loss, which has lasted through the centuries. “Disenchantment,” Max Weber called it—the emptying of the world, the stripping-away of supernatural meaning, as the various forces of modernity demythologized and deconstructed everything they touched. Weber insisted that those modern forces had an “elective affinity” for one another. They weren’t causally related, but they always seemed to combine to move us in a single direction. Thus, for example, Enlightenment philosophy fed democratic theories of politics, which aided the rise of the bureaucratic nation-state, which meshed with the reformations of Protestant theology, which helped swell capitalist economics, which encouraged the spirit of invention and scientific experiment, which (to cycle back around) encouraged Enlightenment philosophy.
More to the point, no one of these necessarily demands a disenchantment of reality. Magisterial Protestantism had its mystics, perceiving the world as rich with meaning. Enlightenment philosophy could argue for an ethical structure to existence. The modernizing force of bureaucracy was, perhaps, always soul-deadening, but the modern nation-state often insisted on its own mythopoeic power. Even science can, in the hands of its truest acolytes, seem rich with wonder and mystical meaning.
David Wootton is one of those acolytes. For him, science is a thick worldview, an enchantment of reality, and he can’t understand why everyone else fails to see the deep stuff of meaning that the scientific method reveals. Unfortunately, for most other modern people, science doesn’t exist in isolation: Any one of the forces of modernity could conceivably provide enchantment, but in combination, they produce only disenchantment. Wootton fears that science is under attack by unmodernity, premodern and postmodern forces stabbing it from either side. But it is modernity itself that refuses to allow anything, even one of its originating forces, to maintain an enchantment for the world.
Situated this way, it’s easy to see why The Invention of Science fails in its goal to be more than just a history of the scientific revolution. Wootton wants us to see that modernity was a radical shift in Western history, and science was both the sole significant cause of the shift and the sole enduring pattern for the world in its new position. As a historical thesis, it’s improbable. Was Enlightenment philosophy nothing? At the dawn of Romantic poetry, William Blake raged against Newton, but also against Voltaire and Rousseau alongside him—all of them emblems of a world gone mad. Even if Wootton were right about the origin of the modern age, science cannot halt the disenchantment, the caustic demythologizing, that eats at every sense of meaning in modernity.
Still, in the details it relates, The Invention of Science is a fascinating book by an author steeped in the material of the age he covers. Wootton often turns to the language of early science, arguing that the need to invent new words proves the radical newness of the ideas and facts they represent. Even the word fact, he points out, was a word that had to be created to describe what scientists were doing. Hypothesis, experiment, evidence, a hundred other words—some of them were borrowed from Euclid’s Geometry, some from the law courts, but all of them were put to strange new usages as science struggled to name what it was doing.
This proof-from-vocabulary is surprisingly persuasive, but it also points to a pattern of argument here, as Wootton consistently prefers to look to writing as the center of science. It’s as though the article on looms and weaving in Diderot’s 1751 Encyclopédie were much more important than the technological work the author describes. He does mention metal casting, double-entry bookkeeping, and glassblowing as precursor activities, but generally sees the printing press as the only physical object contributing profoundly to the rise of modern science. The square sail, the mechanics of ships, and the mathematics of navigation are only one of many sets of technological work that arrived before the science explaining them.
It’s his insistence on the radical novelty of the scientific revolution that forces Wootton to ignore or downplay such prescientific technologies. It forces him to dismiss as scientifically illiterate anyone who lived before the birth of modernity. The mistakes of early modern science demonstrate how dynamic modern science can be as it advances, while the errors of the Greeks and Romans prove that “ancient science” is an oxymoron.
Can a bad book in general be a good book in particular? As an explanation of modernity, The Invention of Science is incomplete. As a tale of history, it’s willfully truncated. As a call to embrace the enchantments of science in order to solve the modern problem of caustic doubt, it’s hopelessly naïve. But as an account of the scientific revolution, especially in the early modern age, The Invention of Science is the best book anyone has written.
Joseph Bottum is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
