During the eighteenth century, men and women of letters throughout the Atlantic world repeatedly celebrated the revolution they had witnessed in all the many branches of philosophy. Drawing on the rhetoric and historical vision of those who had championed the achievements of the “new science” of the seventeenth century, apologists for the Enlightenment claimed that humankind had finally been able to progress far beyond the narrow intellectual horizons of antiquity and the “dark ages” thanks to the new methods of inquiry forged by Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626), René Descartes (1596–1650), John Locke (1632–1704), and Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727). In this heroic reading of the genesis of modernity, Bacon was cast as the father of the experimental method, and Descartes played the tragic role of the flawed genius who used reason to liberate humankind from the shackles of scholasticism only to foist yet another false system of philosophy on the learned world. Locke was assigned the part of the humble reformer of metaphysics, who replaced meaningless verbal disputes with the patient empirical investigation of the mechanisms of mind and language and who carefully mapped the limits of human knowledge. But to the siècle des lumières it was Newton – apostrophized in Alexander Pope’s (1688–1744) couplet, “Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night./GOD said, Let Newton be! and all was Light.” – who towered above the other founders of the Enlightenment. Not only had Newton divined the secrets of Nature by demonstrating that his theory of universal gravitation explained the motions of both celestial and terrestrial bodies, but he had also taught the salutary lesson that philosophers could discover the truth only by eschewing arbitrary hypotheses in order to focus their attention on what could be proved using the combined tools of geometry and experiment.

Historians of science and technology have not identified the eighteenth century as one of the most significant periods in Chinese history. The ambitious examination of the world of science and civilization in China by Joseph Needham is explicitly confined to the period up to the end of the sixteenth century, and other works, examining the contributions of the Jesuits, stress the importance of the seventeenth century. The more conservative atmosphere of the mid-Qing (c. 1720–1820), marked by the orthodox neo-Confucianism promoted by the Manchu rulers, stands in contrast to the more open intellectual climate of the late Ming (c. 1550–1644) and early Qing (c.1644–1720). By the early eighteenth century, Jesuits were limited both by the relatively obsolete nature of their knowledge and by their closer integration at court level. Outside the imperial capital at Beijing, the most important trends in eighteenth-century scholarship were marked by a shift away from an interest in Jesuit science toward a rediscovery of ancient knowledge. In the Yangzi Delta, followers of evidential scholarship (kaozhengxue), or philological “search for evidence, ” were concerned with precise scholarship and practical matters, but they generally appropriated Jesuit science in efforts to “rediscover” their own presumed scientific tradition rather than attempting to contribute new knowledge to mathematics and astronomy.

JESUIT SCIENCE

If the seventeenth century was a significant period of cultural interaction between Jesuit missionaries and Confucian scholars, little further scientific knowledge was transmitted during the eighteenth century. Not only were the Jesuits mainly interested in using science as a way of achieving religious aims, but also the Church’s injunction in 1616 against the teaching of heliocentric astronomy, as well as other aspects of science, severely limited the nature of their knowledge.

Since Plato and Aristotle, philosophers of the Western tradition have placed a premium on the organization of knowledge. When knowledge is ordered, subdivided, and controlled we speak of trees, fields, maps, and bodies – metaphors suggesting definite structures and relationships. When knowledge is regarded as chaotic, overwhelming, or undifferentiated, we speak of labyrinths, mazes, or oceans – still perhaps implying that an order exists but acknowledging that it is not yet visible. The ancient philosophers endorsed the first, and positive, side of this dichotomy in two related ways: first, by privileging logically demonstrable, or at least systematically organized, bodies of knowledge as scientia or science, distinguishing them from other forms of knowledge, such as opinion, craft, or technical skills (techne); second, by seeking to demonstrate how the various sciences are related, in some rational manner, to one another in an overarching classification of knowledge. These maps or charts indicated appropriate paths of education and learning. Schemes of this kind were produced by the scholastic thinkers of the Middle Ages and they informed, and were themselves reinforced by, the pedagogy and curricula of the universities through to the Renaissance and beyond. To travel one of these paths was to master the “encyclopedy,” the circle of sciences.

CULTURES OF PRINT AT THE ONSET OF ENLIGHTENMENT

During the eighteenth century, natural knowledge became the focus, the vehicle, and the archetype of public enlightenment. This chapter describes some of the most important conditions underpinning that development. Its central subject is a distinctive realm of print that matured toward the end of the seventeenth century and lasted until the first quarter of the nineteenth – a realm differing in important respects from anything that had existed before. The chapter explains its principal characteristics, showing how they came about and why in the end they proved unstable. It outlines how printed materials were made, circulated, and put to use. From there it proceeds to explain how the features of this realm affected the creation and distribution of knowledge. The materials created by printers and booksellers – not only books themselves but also new objects such as periodicals – substantially changed the construction and representation of knowledge. The chapter’s major claims in this regard are of a general character. They are certainly applicable to what we would now call science; but they also extend far beyond that, and encompass knowledge of many other kinds.

The world of the book in the eighteenth century was simultaneously uniform and various. On the one hand, the régimes of custom and regulation guiding the conduct of printing and publishing in most countries rested, to a greater or lesser extent, on similar mechanisms of guilds, licensing, patronage, and privileges. In France, for example, Louis XIV’s reign saw the establishment of a comprehensive system of press regulation based on these foundations that would last until the revolution a century later.

The eighteenth century represents a distinct era in the organizational and institutional history of European science. Growing out of an “organizational revolution” that accompanied the intellectual transformations of science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the scientific enterprise became newly solidified in the eighteenth century. Indicative of this solidification, European governments increasingly supported and structured novel social and institutional forms for eighteenth-century science. Governments moved to support science for the perceived usefulness of expert knowledge of nature.

Science reorganized in the eighteenth century centered on national academies of science modeled after the Royal Society of London (1662) and the French Académie Royale des Sciences (1666). It also involved observatories, botanical gardens, and new forms of publication and scientific communication. This characteristic Old-Regime style of organized and institutionalized science matured over the course of the eighteenth century and was replaced in the nineteenth century by an equally distinct form for organized science that came to involve specialized societies, disciplinary journals, and a revived university system.