Historians have long seen the search for a viable “science of man [sic]” as a central feature of eighteenth-century intellectual life. David Hume’s (1711–1776) desire to be “the Newton of the moral Sciences” and his insistence in 1740 that “’tis at least worthwhile to try if the Sciences of man will not admit of the same accuracy which several parts of natural philosophy are found susceptible of” have been taken to represent the views of a huge number of intellectuals throughout the century and across all nations of Europe and North America. Moreover, the centrality of the human sciences to the Enlightenment project is acknowledged not only by those sympathetic to the goals of that project and fundamentally optimistic about its liberating consequences but also by those who have found the goals misdirected and the consequences fundamentally destructive.

The issue of how to portray the relationships between such twentieth-century professional disciplines as anthropology, economics, geography, history, linguistics, psychology, or sociology and various eighteenth-century attempts to establish human sciences is both extremely complex and a matter of intense debate. Eighteenth-century authors and readers often thought in terms of categories that differ from those in use today. Thus, for example, the phrases “the natural history of man” and “philosophical history” were frequently used to include many topics now included in anthropology, linguistics, and sociology, along with some that now belong to political science and aesthetics. At the same time, “anthropology” was used in German speaking regions to cover physiology as well as topics from the first three twentieth-century disciplines.

During the eighteenth century the astronomy of the solar system became, in the words of William Whewell, “the queen of the sciences… the only perfect science… in which particulars are completely subjugated to generals, effects to causes.” The striking theoretical advances Whewell refers to were the work of Continental mathematicians, members of scientific academies in Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg, who, through elaborating the algorithms of the Leibnizian differential and integral calculus, elicited the consequences of Newtonian gravitation. Meanwhile, instrument-makers, chiefly British, so refined telescopes and graduated arcs that observational precision kept pace with theoretical prediction. Observatories, the chief of them nationally funded, took pride in contributing not only to the navigational needs of their nations’ navies and merchant marines but also to the supranational goal of a perfected astronomy.

Ancillary to planetary and lunar astronomy was the construction of star catalogs: it was in relation to star positions that the positions of planets and the Moon were determined. The puzzle of apparent systematic motions of the stars was unraveled by James Bradley between 1729 and 1748 – a sine qua non for an astronomy precise to arcseconds. Meanwhile, a few thinkers speculated as to the large-scale structure of the universe. If gravitation were universal, why did not the stars collapse into one another? Was the cosmos a stable structure or in the process of change? Toward the end of the century, dynamical arguments and observational evidence were brought to bear on these questions and led to a new vision of an evolving stellar world.

The engagement of eighteenth-century governments and monarchs in the patronage of science had predominantly utilitarian motives. It was inspired, to very different degrees in different countries, both by a belief in the value of scientific knowledge for manufacturing, agriculture, medical improvement, public works, and warfare and by a perception of science as a form of culture whose promotion would lend luster to any regime seeking to parade its adjustment, however cautious, to the beneficent forces of enlightenment and modernity. Some of these motives had already borne scientific fruit in the seventeenth century, tentatively in England, where Charles II’s patronage of the Royal Society had been no more than nominal, and in a far more concrete fashion in France in the new and existing institutions that were supported under the influence of Louis XIV’s minister Colbert. From its foundation in 1666, the Académie Royale des Sciences was an instrument of the state: its members received material support, in the form of salaries and facilities, and in return the monarchy looked for a source of glory that would outshine the Royal Society in London and for services and expert advice of the kind it requested and received on the water supply to Versailles and on the inventions and machines that were routinely submitted to the Académie for judgment. It was with a similar aspiration to bind the interests of science to those of the state that Colbert commissioned Claude Perrault to design the Observatory of Paris in the late 1660s.

In recent years philosophy of science and the history of philosophy of science have been subjected to a number of critiques by scholars from areas such as sociology of science and history of science. The following is a litany of some of their complaints. Philosophers of science (it is argued) do not deal with the practical engagement with the world that is the central part of scientific activity, and their view of the nature and function of scientific theory is fanciful and biased (“theory” is seen as prior to, and more historically significant than “practice”). Historians of philosophy anachronistically decide what constituted important problems in the past, selecting for study the works of great men whose doctrines they wrench from their historical contexts. They then misinterpret and present the corpus of an individual’s published writings as if it were coherent across various projects and over lengthy periods of time. Philosophers are taken to be in dialog with the timeless problems of their ancestors, and the “progressive, ” pure aspects of scientific work are divorced from other areas of an individual’s intellectual output, such as theology and economics, which are seen as inferior productions. In dealing with the legacy of Newton, “Newtonians” merely develop and never radically challenge powerful suggestions that are inherent within the public texts of the Master, whereas “anti-Newtonians” are lumped together, whatever their doctrines, and whatever the traditions within which they write. As one corollary of Newtonocentrism, historians have tended to argue that all decent examples of exact science in the eighteenth century are the result of successfully grappling with problems laid out or “hinted” at in Newton’s works.

No interested person in the eighteenth century would have accepted the recent insistence by a professor of biology and publicizer of science that art and science are entirely separate and different disciplines. Nobody was astonished in 1760, when the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, founded to promote scientific inventions for the benefit of the national economy, staged the first public art exhibition in Great Britain. In an age when politicians, scientists, and artists met in coffeehouses and clubs and debated subjects ranging from natural history to political scandals, the boundaries between art and science were not clearly marked. In eighteenth-century Europe, botany was not only a cutting-edge science but also the favorite subject matter for the drawings of aristocratic ladies; those who collected and classified shells were also the arbiters of Rococo taste, and the foremost anatomists were employed by art academies to lecture to their students. Each of these areas would be a suitable subject for a chapter dedicated to science and art in the eighteenth century. So, too, might the way that some artists represented the activities of experimental scientists and technologists. Yet it was not such experimental investigators but rather the “natural historians“ – descriptive explorers of the natural world – who were the central figures in the age of the Cult of Nature, and it is their concerns that intersect most clearly with those of artists in the eighteenth century. It is on the changing perceptions of landscape as they developed among artists and natural historians that this chapter will concentrate.

For much of the eighteenth century, the biological world was seen as a very ordered place. Plants and animals yielded to Linnean classification. Physiological functioning was envisioned in mechanistic terms. And the generation of new animals and plants proceeded from preformed germs that had existed since the creation. All this order arose from God, who had created and organized the world for humans to understand and thereby to appreciate His handiwork and lead moral lives. Even the seemingly disordered, such as monsters and wonders of Nature, were generally brought under the paradigm of order.

All this was to be challenged by mid-century. Mechanistic physiology, based on the analogy of living organisms with machines, was to be considerably broadened by the introduction of Newtonian forces into physiology. The clear borders between the animal and plant kingdoms, and even between the plant and mineral worlds, were to be called into question by new experimental evidence. And the comfortable synthesis of mechanism with reproduction from preexisting germs was to encounter serious opposition from new theories of gradual development that raised the specter of materialism.

Some scholars have characterized eighteenth-century life sciences as a move from mechanism to vitalism, from a view that living phenomena could be explained by matter and motion alone to one that argued that living organisms possess some special force or principle that makes them distinct from dead matter. Yet, as Thomas Hankins has pointed out, creating such absolute dichotomies can be misleading because it ignores the “middle ground.”

If there is one characterization of the Enlightenment that appears as a truism, it is the assertion that the Enlightenment adopted, extended, and completed the intellectual and social project usually characterized as the “Scientific Revolution,” a movement forged by Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) and Galilei Galileo (1564–1642), developed by René Descartes (1596–1650) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), and completed by Isaac Newton (1642–1727). In this view, the Enlightenment becomes both the inheritor of this legacy and its most persistent and dogmatic trustee. Because the Enlightenment is often seen as an age in which a “scientific paradigm” is accepted and transformed into “normal science,” the history of Enlightenment science has often been considered “a tiresome trough to be negotiated between the peaks of the seventeenth and those of the nineteenth century; or as a mystery, a twilight zone in which all is on the verge of yielding.” For many recent commentators even the twilight zone has been dispelled, revealing clear and close links between Enlightenment science and the “rational” imperatives of the Scientific Revolution, establishing the Enlightenment as the prototypical era in which scientific and instrumental reason became a defining characteristic of modern culture. These linkages between the Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment science, and a negative evaluation of modernity were first drawn by some intellectuals horrified by the destructiveness of modern civilization at the end of the Second World War. Max Horkheimer, for example, claimed in 1946 that “the collapse of a large part of the intellectual foundation of our civilization is … the result of technical and scientific progress.”

Considered broadly, mathematical activity in the eighteenth century was characterized by a strong emphasis on analysis and mechanics. The great advances occurred in the development of calculus-related parts of mathematics and in the detailed elaboration of the program of inertial mechanics founded during the Scientific Revolution. There were other mathematical developments of note – in the theory of equations, number theory, probability and statistics, and geometry – but none of them reached anything like the depth and scope attained in analysis and mechanics.

The close relationship between mathematics and mechanics had a basis that extended deep into Enlightenment thought. In the Preliminary Discourse to the famous French Encyclopédie, Jean d’ Alembert distinguished between “pure” mathematics (geometry, arithmetic, algebra, calculus) and “mixed” mathematics (mechanics, geometrical astronomy, optics, art of conjecturing). He classified mathematics more generally as a “science of nature” and separated it from logic, a “science of man.” An internalized and critical spirit of inquiry, associated with the invention of new mathematical structures (for example, non-commutative algebra, non-Euclidean geometry, logic, set theory), represents characteristics of modern mathematics that would emerge only in the next century.

Although there were several notable British mathematicians of the period–Abraham De Moivre, James Stirling, Brook Taylor, and Colin Maclaurin among them – the major lines of mathematical production occurred on the Continent, a trend that intensified as the century developed. Leadership was provided by a relatively small number of energetic figures: Jakob, Johann, and Daniel Bernoulli, Jakob Hermann, Leonhard Euler, Alexis Clairaut, Jean d’Alembert, Johann Heinrich Lambert, Joseph Louis Lagrange, Adrien Marie Legendre, and Pierre Simon Laplace.