Isaac Beeckman played a significant role in the history of science, since he devised a physico-mathematical philosophy to investigate nature that influenced, if not inspired, René Descartes amongst others. Yet, Beeckman's role in the history of science should not be restricted to his precarious relationship with Descartes. On the contrary, he held a pivotal position that lays bare an important attempt to account for natural phenomena and bodies within a systematic theory of mathematical physics. His Journal (written between 1604 and 1637, and published in its entirety only in 1939-1953) is a useful source for unearthing the attempt to apply a systematic theory of mathematical physics to the study of nature. In other words, his natural philosophy combines mechanical ingenuity and mathematical methodology with a theoretical view. By means of his method, he fostered, if not anticipated, the modern approach to nature. In this sense, Beeckman was a son of his country. The Dutch Provinces of the time were a laboratory of practices and ideas and a crossroads between cultures, systems, and knowledge, as Delphine Antoine-Mahut and Catherine Secretan have recently shown.

Moving from these premises, in this chapter I explore Beeckman's focus on plants, one of the less-studied subjects of his broad range of interests. Although Beeckman may not be defined as a botanist nor as a botanical virtuoso in a strict sense, his attempt to deal with vegetation within his corpuscular, atomistic, and mechanical theory importantly surfaces in a few notes in his Journal and significantly anticipates a modern understanding of the vegetal realm of nature.

The discovery and publication, in the first half of the twentieth century, of Isaac Beeckman's Journal made it possible to understand the role played by Beeckman in the development of the new ‘mechanistic’ physics, of which the principal actors were already well-known: Marin Mersenne, René Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, and Thomas Hobbes. In this context, Beeckman was first perceived as the missing piece in an already fully-formed puzzle, one in which he simply had to be fitted, with perhaps some rounding off at the edges where the new piece failed to fit perfectly into the space allocated for it. Since then, studies more specifically centred on Beeckman – including Klaas van Berkel's eminent and pioneering work – have made it possible to better understand the particularities of Beeckman's ‘mathematico-physical’ philosophy without measuring him against the standards of this ‘greater picture’ in which his philosophy had haphazardly been integrated, as was done previously.

A third step, which I aim to sketch here, might involve trying to understand how Beeckman's original philosophy was created by situating itself into a fabric of local relationships, through intensive and ongoing exchanges on specific well-defined questions that bore not so much on the great scientific discoveries of Galileo Galilei or Johannes Kepler, but on what made these discoveries possible in the first place.

No historian of science has contributed more to the study of Isaac Beeckman than Cornelis de Waard, the somewhat reclusive teacher of mathematics and physics from the city of Vlissingen in the Dutch province of Zeeland. Before 1905, the year in which De Waard rediscovered Beeckman's long-lost scientific notebook, the latter, a schoolmaster from Dordrecht, was just a shadowy figure in the margins of the study of Descartes, both in France and elsewhere. Through Adrien Baillet's biography of Descartes (1691), scholars knew that Beeckman was in some way involved in the maturing of Descartes’ ideas, but little else was known. After 1905, however, Beeckman gradually became better known to historians of science and philosophy. Certainly after De Waard's masterful edition of the Journal tenu par Isaac Beeckman de 1604 à 1634 in 1939-1953, it was possible to reconstruct Beeckman's own ideas about nature and its mechanisms, to study his dealings with Descartes and others, and to assess how he fits into what came to be called the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century.

De Waard's edition of the Journal was a major contribution to the history of science, but, as we know, every edited publication is in some ways a distortion, and the Journal tenu par Isaac Beeckman de 1604 à 1634 is no exception. Every editor has to make choices about what to include and what not, how to arrange the material, and how to proceed with the annotation.

Introduction: Beeckman and the Zilsel Thesis

Isaac Beeckman was both a craftsman and a scholar. He was trained by his father as a candle maker and a constructor of waterworks, but he also studied philosophy, mathematics, theology and medicine. This mixed education seems to be the key to Beeckman's innovative attitude towards the study of nature. In his 2013 monograph on Beeckman his biographer Klaas van Berkel claims that this early modern researcher ‘was the first to devise a completely mechanical philosophy of nature, and thus introduced an approach that would become a cornerstone of the new science’. Van Berkel even goes further to stipulate that ‘Beeckman played a crucial but not always recognized role in the early stage of the Scientific Revolution’, even in such a way that Beeckman could be seen as ‘the missing link between artisanal knowledge and mathematical science’. With this latter statement Van Berkel refers to the thesis formulated in 1942 by Edgar Zilsel, namely that the new science emerged from the empirical work of artisans and from the interaction between craftsmen and scholars. Hands-on knowledge of materials and craftsmanship, combined with theoretical academic knowledge, or, succinctly put, ‘the union of hand and mind’, had resulted in the empirical and experimental methodology that formed the core of the new science of the seventeenth century.

In 1634, the Polish naturalist Jon Jonston (1603-1675) complained to the London-based intelligencer from Elbląg, Samuel Hartlib (c. 1600-1662), that ‘the rector of Dordrecht Beeckman has something like a thousand experiments and sounds like a great philosopher, but he is morose and incommunicative’. Indeed, the only text that Isaac Beeckman (1588-1637) published during his lifetime was his 1618 dissertation for a medical degree at Caen. This survives in only a single, incomplete imprint. Beeckman kept his extraordinary body of scientific work confined to his manuscript daily notes, the Loci communes. Yet, in Hartlib's next and only other discussion of Beeckman in his own copious daily notes, the Ephemerides, Hartlib noted Beeckman's desire to establish a ‘college of inventions’, hardly the mark of an incommunicative individual. How might we square Hartlib's two remarks and make sense of Beeckman's communicative strategies?

In his chapter in this volume, Arjan van Dixhoorn argues that Beeckman should be understood through the lens of a very long-standing culture centred on sociable communication: the consten-culture of the chambers of rhetoric, which prized joking, ingenuity, and cognitive exercises through engagement with the liberal arts. Van Dixhoorn argues that through the consten-culture, ‘explicit, bookish, academic, theoretical learning and tacit, bodily, artisanal, practical, experience-oriented knowledge had already been “interpenetrating” for two centuries’. Van Dixhoorn's criticisms of a misleading dichotomy between artisanal and textual approaches and identities are well taken. However, waves of emigration cutting across national and linguistic boundaries brought varied and sometimes competing forms of knowledge into conversation and spurred dynamic experiments in how to communicate and collaborate. Beeckman's ‘college of inventions’, which he called the Collegium Mechanicum, was one such experiment that distinguished itself from already extant forms of sociability, such as the joyful companies gathered by chambers of rhetoric.

Isaac Beeckman included around 240 images of his own making in his Journal. In addition, there are some musical scores and images taken from books studied or referred to by Beeckman and inserted in the Journal by its editor, Cornelis de Waard. In itself, the number of 240 images is not excessively high. The printed Journal has some 1,270 pages, so, on average, there is an image on every fifth page of the book. Nevertheless, it is a substantial number, and it is therefore strange that Beeckman's images have not been the subject of scholarly study before. All the more so since we know that Beeckman himself had a strong preference for Anschaulichkeit (picturability), both in the context of discovery and in the context of the dissemination of natural philosophical ideas. Beeckman only accepted explanations that could be represented by a real or mental image. Until the 1980s, historians of science in general were inclined to overlook the presence of images in texts and manuscripts. Since then, however, the importance of these visual tools has become widely recognized. It is therefore about time to ask what kind of images Beeckman used in his notebook, what these images were used for and, most importantly of all, what they tell us about the development of his mechanical philosophy. I will argue that these images are not merely illustrations of the text, but form an integral part of the argument that Beeckman wishes to make.

Isaac Beeckman has paid much attention to music all his life, and it seems likely that the seed for this fascination was laid during his youth. Middelburg appears to have had a lively musical culture in Beeckman's times; yet, it has never been mapped out. This essay aims to give an impression of a number of aspects related to music in Beeckman's hometown and its environment, and in doing so, to sketch a background that may have influenced Beeckman in his earlier years.

Although it is difficult to determine with certainty to what extent Beeckman possessed musical talent, the many remarks related to music in his Journal reveal a profound interest that is beyond any doubt. Beeckman does not discuss polyphonic music from the Renaissance in his Journal. By contrast, much attention is paid to Genevan Psalms, in particular relating to questions of modality, intonation, the practice and notation of leading tones (musica ficta), correct harmonization, etc. Born in 1588 in the Reformed milieu of a city in which many Protestants had settled down after the fall of Antwerp in 1585, this cannot come as a surprise. The explicit presence of keyboard instruments (organs, harpsichords) and bells (the introduction of the carillon) in Middelburg as well as the tuning of keyboard instruments seem to have aroused Beeckman's serious interest: he discusses matters of tuning (and the differences between organs and harpsichords related to this) rather in depth. The ‘floating’ of a pitch which is out of tune (against a properly tuned tone) is described by him with a fine term, wywauwen – in Dutch serving as an onomatopoeic word.

In 1905, the discovery of the so-called Journal of Isaac Beeckman was a major event in the small community of historians of science in Europe. The manuscript not only contained precious information about Beeckman's meeting with René Descartes in 1618 and their collaboration in deriving the law of falling bodies, but also copies of some unknown letters by Descartes to Beeckman, and an abundance of notes concerning various topics that were of interest to historians of the early modern period, such as the invention of the telescope, the principle of the conservation of movement, the refraction of light, the concept of air pressure and the corpuscular theory of matter in general. Although Beeckman had not been completely unknown before, from this point on his name became firmly entrenched in the grand narrative of what was soon to be called the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. In his famous book The Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800 (first published in 1949), Herbert Butterfield refers to Beeckman as ‘a man who stimulated others to take an interest in important problems and initiated a number of ideas’, though without specifying what these ideas were. In The Mechanization of the World Picture (English translation 1961), E.J. Dijksterhuis devoted no less than five pages to Beeckman's work, focusing on his work, with Descartes, on the law of free-falling bodies. In the same vein, John Henry in his slim volume The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science (second edition, 2002) pointed to Beeckman in the context of the mathematization of natural philosophy. Isaac Beeckman, he says, ‘set an impressive example of how to use mathematics in physics’. In his more recent The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution (2015), David Wooton also mentions Beeckman regularly.

Nonetheless, even though it would be incorrect to say that Beeckman has been neglected since his notebook was discovered more than a century ago, it is true that to this day the enormous richness of the Journal has not been fully exploited. Like Butterfield, Dijksterhuis only hints at the wealth of interesting topics discussed in Beeckman's notes by saying that although he did not publish his findings, Beeckman's ideas in his Journal are to be valued because they give the reader ‘some notion of the scientific thought of a gifted man of the early seventeenth century’.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century science came to be seen as providing the model for seeking truth. This led to a reorganization of all of the disciplines, including theology. We have also come to see the nineteenth century as a period in which a new set of assumptions about science and religion was introduced that continues to shape how we currently view their relationship. The appearance of Draper’s History of the Conflict between Science and Religion in 1874, in which the conflict thesis is fully developed for the first time, is no coincidence. One of the things that historians can do is open up current discussions by showing the paths not taken that were live options at one point, before new assumptions constrained and narrowed thinking. This chapter examines how scientific naturalists like T. H. Huxley attempted to constrain thinking about science and religion, how those constraints began to shape debates, and how major Christian theologians of the period responded to this development, whether through resistance or conformity.

This chapter examines the importance of teleology (purposiveness) in the understanding of consciousness and nature. Goal-orientation is most evident in human conscious intention. However, this establishes a disjunction between conscious mind and wider nature; the latter, according to much modern science, is not purposive. How, then, does purposive mind arise in a non-purposive universe? It is argued that modern natural science rejects a particular variety of teleological explanation. More sophisticated varieties, particularly in Aquinas’s understanding of action and intention, can be recovered which do justice to our basic intuitions concerning the purposiveness of nature. However, modern natural philosophy rejects a number of metaphysical concepts which make teleological explanation intelligible. Amongst those concepts is ‘habit’. This chapter examines the Aristotelian natural philosophy of habit proposed by the nineteenth-century philosopher Félix Ravaisson. For Ravaisson, habit is a mediating category between matter and conscious intention which indicates that the goal-orientation of mind is, in an analogous sense, present throughout nature. This points to the possible recovery of a teleological understanding of nature, gleaned from a broad Aristotelian Thomism, which views creation as an expression of divine intention while avoiding crude accounts of teleology in modern design arguments for God’s existence.

This chapter examines the importance of teleology (purposiveness) in the understanding of consciousness and nature. Goal-orientation is most evident in human conscious intention. However, this establishes a disjunction between conscious mind and wider nature; the latter, according to much modern science, is not purposive. How, then, does purposive mind arise in a non-purposive universe? It is argued that modern natural science rejects a particular variety of teleological explanation. More sophisticated varieties, particularly in Aquinas’s understanding of action and intention, can be recovered which do justice to our basic intuitions concerning the purposiveness of nature. It is argued, however, that modern natural philosophy rejects a number of metaphysical concepts which make teleological explanation intelligible. Amongst those concepts is ‘habit’. This chapter examines the Aristotelian natural philosophy of habit proposed by the nineteenth-century philosopher Félix Ravaisson. For Ravaisson, habit is a mediating category between matter and conscious intention which indicates that the goal-orientation of mind is, in an analogous sense, present throughout nature, pointing to the possible recovery of a teleological understanding of nature, gleaned from a broad Aristotelian Thomism, which views creation as an expression of divine intention whilst avoiding crude accounts of teleology in modern design arguments for God’s existence.

The chapter takes a historical perspective and asks us to consider the long and overlapping concerns of both scientists and religious believers with truth, beauty and creative ordering. Science is no enemy of religion but a casual reductive materialism, often presented in the media under the auspices of ‘science’, and fails to see the sophistication and glory of religious belief that God created all that is (creation ex nihilo), and that this conviction is fully compatible with robust modern science.