| | Spinoza and the Natural Law | In August 1663 Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, and one of the closest observers of British and European science of the age, wrote to Spinoza*, urging that he and Robert Boyle (1627-91), then the leading figure in English science, should join forces: 'unite your abilities in striving to advance a genuine and firmly based philosophy'—that is, an account of the universe: 'may I urge you especially, by the acuteness of your mathematical mind, to continue to establish basic principles, just as I ceaselessly try to coax my noble friend Boyle to confirm and illustrate them by experiments and observations frequently and accurately made.' Spinoza's notable absence, or marginality, in most histories and lexicons of science might make this seem a bizarre proposal on Oldenburg's part. Far more usual is the claim that 'as far as the natural sciences and mathematics are concerned... though Spinoza was thoroughly competent and acquainted with some of the best work of his time, he contributed little of importance to research and theory.' Yet there are grounds for arguing, as Oldenburg implied, that Spinoza does in fact have a special place in the history of scientific thought. An accomplished practitioner of science himself, being a leading contributor to the development of the microscope before Leeuwenhoek, Spinoza's general philosophy was profoundly influenced by this conception of science and scientific method. Indeed, he would undoubtedly have been horrified by any suggestion that he and his philosophy are remote from modern science, not just because he spent much time experimenting, studying experiments, and discussing experimental results with scientists, as well as assembling microscopes and telescopes, but still more, because it was basic to his conception of his philosophy that his thought should be firmly anchored in the rules and procedures of mathematics and science. For Spinoza, as a thinker, claims to be seeking 'true ideas' about nature and how nature operates, conceived in terms of mathematically verifiable cause and effect. This led him to adopt a uniquely exacting and comprehensive notion of scientific rationality, driving him to reject, unremittingly and often scornfully, arguments, beliefs, and traditions which conflict with the laws of nature expressed in mechanistic, mathematically verifiable terms. Being more extreme, more of a maximalist, in this respect than any other scientific thinker before La Mettrie and Diderot—and considerably more so than Boyle or Newton—this in itself makes him an exceptional and noteworthy figure in the history of modernity and scientific thought. Cartesians postulated a dichotomy of substance, conceiving reality to operate within two totally separate spheres or sets of rules governing reality, only one of which was mechanistic and subject to the laws of physical cause and effect. Boyle, Newton, and other English empiricists insisted that only what is proven to operate mechanistically, by experiment, is definitely known to be subject to cause and effect, leaving much else beyond what is humanly knowable. Hence, only Spinoza and his adherents claim that the mechanistic concepts yielded by the scientific advances of the seventeenth century are universally applicable, so that everything which exists obeys the same set of rules with no other reality, or mode of being, possible beyond or outside the laws of motion governing Nature. 'Nothing, then,' concludes Spinoza, 'can happen in Nature to contravene her own universal laws, nor anything that is not in agreement with these laws or that does not follow from them.'... The discussion of 'miracles' in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus vividly illustrates the centrality of scientific criteria and modes of explanation in the overall structure of Spinoza's system. He rebukes critics of 'those who cultivate the natural sciences', who prefer to remain ignorant of natural causes, because to close one's mind to science is to shut oneself off from the only certain and reliable criterion of truth we possess. Nothing happens or exists beyond Nature's laws and hence there can be no miracles; and those that are believed, or alleged, to have occurred, in fact had natural causes which at the time men were unable to grasp. ... At the core of Spinoza's philosophy, then, stands the contention that 'nothing happens in Nature that does not follow from her laws, that her laws cover everything that is conceived even by the divine intellect, and that Nature observes a fixed and immutable order,' that is, that the same laws of motion, and laws of cause and effect, apply in all contexts and everywhere. | — Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750, Chapter 14 – Spinoza, Science, and the Scientists * Baruch Spinoza, 1632 – 1677, Netherlands: One of the most important philosophers — and certainly the most radical — of the early modern period. | Indexes/22 |
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