Today I offer four English books on cosmology from the second half of the seventeenth century. [From the Botton]. Burnet’s Theory of the Sacred Earth, Hale’sOrigination of Mankind, Grew’s Cosmologis Sacra. and on top Ray’s Discourses concerning the dissolution and changes of the World.
The second half of the seventeenth especially in England marked a period where, in hindsight it might seen easy to separate conservative, theological practitioners of Cosmology and those proto-enlightenment thinkers. These four books certainly challenge and exhibit the true nature of the complicated transformation and negotiation of changing ideas. What stands out is the desire not to change but rather integrate new interpretative methods with pre existing word views. Newton, Boyle, Digby, Margaret Cavendish, and Hook, as well as the authors of the books above were in constant modulation of their thoughts in writing, often abandoning the speculative think of the ramifications of their discoveries and to proceed with Experimentation and theorizing with out concern for the cosmological ramification.
I hope you can look to these four books not as books by authors resisting the further but rather placing their current developments in light of a future.
I begin with Burnet’s Sacred theroy of the earth, because of the wonderful frontice piece which depicts this conundrum.
In Stephen Jay Gould’s Time’s Arrow Time’s Cycle, Professor Gould makes the following comment of Burnet’s Frontispiece. (it)
“may be the most comprehensive and accurate epitome ever presented in pictorial form-for it presents both the content of Burnet’s narrative and his own internal debate about the nature of time and history.”
788J Thomas Burnet (at Charter House.) 1635?-1715
The theory of the earth: containing an account of the original of the earth, and of all the general changes which it hath already undergone or is to undergo till the consummation of all things. The two first books concerning the deluge and concerning paradise. (Wing; B5953)
Bound with
The theory of the earth: containing an account of the original of the earth, and of all the general changes which it hath already undergone, or is to undergo till the consummation of all things. The two last books, concerning the burning of the world, and concerning the new heavens and new earth. (Wing; B5953)
Bound with
A review of The theory of the earth and of its proofs, especially in reference to Scripture. (Wing; B5944)
(all 3 titles) London : Printed by R[oger]. N[orton]. for Walter Kettilby, at the Bishop’s-Head in S. Paul’s Church- Yard,1697 Price $4,000
Three Folio volumes bound together 31.5 x 19cm. (pt1&2). Π2 A4 a4,B-Z⁴ Aa-Ff4 (pt3&4). A6 B-U4 (Review). X-Z4, Aa6 Third editions of all parts. There is a Portrait of Burnet, two Additional engraved title pages. Title page printed in black with double border. Separate title page for the Second Book. Contains eleven engraved figures in the first, three in the second book. Two double page engravings of the earth (Western and Eastern Hemispheres), depicting the world as it was known then with California as an island, and one engraving in book three. In Stephen Jay Gould’s Time’s Arrow Time’s Cycle, Professor Gould makes the following comment of Burnet’s Frontispiece. (it) “may be the most comprehensive and accurate epitome ever presented in pictorial form-for it presents both the content of Burnet’s narrative and his own internal debate about the nature of time and history.” The first two parts were published in 1681 in Latin under the title “Telluris Theoria Sacra,” and three years later in its English translation; the second part, The Two Last Books containing the burning of the world, and concerning the new heavens and new earth, appeared in 1689 (1690 in English). The Review was published in 1690.Bound in contemporary full calf with hand written title on spine.
“Observation played only a minimal part in Thomas Burnet’s Telluris Theoria Sacra (1681), the English version of which was published three years later. The earth, he believed, was originally as smooth as an egg, and the Deluge caused by the crust caving in (and)great fragments fell down into the abyss, and the subterranean waters rushed upwards and covered the globe, and then slowly retreated again to fill the chasms that had been caused. [His calculations of the amount of water on Earth’s surface resulted in his belief that there was not enough to account for the Flood.] Burnet, who associated the terrestrial disorder with the Fall of Man and the ensuing curse on the earth, constructed his theory from what he found in the Bible, and then filled in the gaps by plausible conjecture. Moses had imputed the Deluge to a disruption of the abyss, and St. Peter had accounted for it by the fact that the earth was obnoxious to absorption in water. ‘But it was below the dignity of those sacred pen–men,’ Burnet explained, ‘to shew us the causes of this disruption: this is left to the enquiries of men.’ It was in fact part of the divine plan that men should use their reason, and by giving us merely the bare facts God intended ‘to excite our curiosity and inquisitiveness after the methods by which such things are brought to pass.’
Thus encouraged, Burnet let his fancy roam, and arrived at what, in 1681, was perhaps as good a guess as anyone else’s. But already his traditional assumption that mountains and seas were the marks of disorder after the Fall was becoming old–fashioned. […] One was or another, Burnet’s book provoked a considerable controversy, and called forth some ingenious theories, such as that of Edmund Halley (elaborated by William Whiston) that the Flood was caused by the earth passing through the tail of a comet.
“But if Burnet could be confuted as a man of science, he stood head and shoulders above his critics as a writer. The Sacred Theory shows how far a confident and rhythmical prose may go in making a reader accept statements that are very slenderly supported by the evidence. So convinced was Burnet himself that it is sometimes hard to remember that what he describes so vividly never actually occurred. In some passages we might be listening to an eye–witness account: The pressure of a great mass of earth falling into the abyss… could not but impel the water with so much strength, as would carry it up to a great height in the air, and to the top of anything that lay in its way, any eminency, high fragment, or new mountain. And then rolling back again, it would sweep down with whatsoever it rush’d upon, woods, buildings, living creatures, and carry them all headlong into the great gulph. Sometimes a mass of water would be quite struck off and separate from the rest, and tossed through the air like a flying river; but the common motion of the waves was to climb up the hills or inclin’d fragments; and then return into the valleys and deeps again, with a perpetual fluctuation going and coming, ascending and descending, ‘till the violence of them being spent by degrees, they settled at last in the places allotted for them…
“It will be observed how Burnet passes from ‘could’ and ‘would’ to the simple assertion of ‘was’ and ‘were;’ but the reader ‘stands secure amidst a falling world’ because Burnet pursues his great argument with a Miltonic grandeur and reverence that give to his wildest descriptions an air of authenticity. His prose is very far from the norm of the period; but it is significant that in an age which was becoming less imaginative in both poetry and prose, some of the most sustained flights of the imagination were achieved by writers who, under the influence of the Old Testament or the Book of Revelation, contemplated such cataclysmic events as the Flood, or dwelt pindarically with Pomfret and others on the Last Day and the General Conflagration and ensuing Judgment.”
(J. Sutherland, English Literature of the Late Seventeenth Century, page 389-391)
“Thomas Burnet was educated at Cambridge University, where he came under the influence of Ralph Cudworth and John Tillotson, and was elected a Fellow of Christ’s College in 1657. He was appointed Master of the Charterhouse in 1685, and is said to have been thought of at one time as a possible successor to Tillotson as Archbishop of Canterbury, but to have been passed over because of suspicions about his orthodoxy. Such suspicions, based on his Sacred Theory of the Earth, were no doubt increased by the publication of his Archaeologiae Philosophicae (1692), where he gave a non–literal interpretation of the first book of Genesis.” (Sutherland, page 389)
Anyone interested in this book, should surly read Stephen Jay Goulds” Time’s arrow, time’s cycle. Myth and metaphor in the discovery of geological time. 1987
To some extent influenced by Descartes’ writings on the creation of the earth in “Principia philosophiae” (1644), Thomas Burnet was criticized on those grounds by Roger North. Isaac La Peyrère’s views included the idea of the Flood not being universal, and Burnet’s theory was in part intended to pleurisyanswer him on that point. Isaac Newton admired Burnet for his theological approach to geological processes but was rejected by Burnet, in particular regarding Newton’s suggestion that God had originally created longer days.
From preface to the First Book: “Having given an account of this whole work in the first Chapter, and of the method of either Book, whereof this Volume consists, in their proper places, there remains not much to be said here to the Reader. This Theory of the Earth may be call’d Sacred, because it is not the common Philosophy of the Earth, or of the Bodies that compose it, but respects only the great Turns of Fate, and the Revolutions of our Natural World; such as are taken notice of in the Sacred Writings, and are truley the Hinges upon which the Providence of this Earth moves; or whereby it opens and shuts the several successive scenes wherof it is made up. This English Edition is the same in substance with the Latin, though, I confess, ’tis not so properly a Translation, as a new Composition upon the same ground, there being several additional Chapters in it; and several new-moulded.”
From the Introduction of the First Book: “Since I was first inclin’d to the Contemplation of Nature, and took pleasure to trace out the Causes of Effects, and the dependance of one thing upon another in the visible Creation, I had always, methought, a particular curiosity to look back into the first Sources and ORIGINAL of Things; tand to view in my mind, so far as I was able, the Beginning and Progress of a RISING WORLD… But when we speak of a Rising World, and the Contemplation of it, we do not mean this of the Great Universe; for who can describe the Original of that? But we speak of the Sublunary World, This Earth and its dependencies, which rose out of a Chaos about six thousand years ago; And seeing it hath faln to our lot to act upon this Stage, to have our present home and habitation here, it seems most resonable, and the place design’d by Providence where we should first imploy our thoughts to understand the works of God and Nature.”
From preface to the Third Book: “… The Conflagration of the World. The question will be only about the bounds and limits of the Conflagration, the Causes and the Manner of it. These I have fix’d according to the truest measures I could take from Scripture, and from Nature. I differ, I believe, from the common Sentiment in this, that, in following S. Peter’s Philosophy, I suppose, that the burning of the Earth will be a true Liquefaction or dissolution of it, as to the exterior Region. And that this lays a foundation for New Heavens and a New Earth; which seems to me as plain a doctrine in Christian Religion, as the Conflagration itself.”
From the Review: “To take a review of this Theory of the Earth, which we have now finish’d, We must consider, first, the extent of it: and then the principal parts whereoff it consists. It reaches, as you see, from one end of the World to the other: From the first Chaos to the last day, and the Consummation of all things. This, probably, will run the length of Seven Thousands Years: which is a good competent space of time to exercise our thoughts upon, and to observe several Scenes which Nature and Providence bring into View within the compass of so many Ages.”
Wing; B5953,
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825G Matthew Hale
The Primitive Origin of Mankind considered and examined according to the light of nature.
London: William Godbid for William Shrowsbery, 1677 $ 2,800
Folio 12 1/2 X 7 3/4 inches a-4,b2,B-Z4, Aa-Zz4, Aaa-Bbb4,Ccc2. First edition.
This copy is bound in full later calf. This copy has the book plate of Desmond Morris author of the book The naked ape and numerous TV shows sociobiology and Evolution.
“The problem of human origins, of how and when the first humans appeared in the world, has been addressed in a variety of ways in western thought. In the 17th century the predominant explanation for the origin of the world and the beings that inhabit it, especially human beings, was based on the biblical account of creation. It was almost universally accepted that humans had been created by a supernatural agent using supernatural means. But alternative explanations for the production of the first humans did exist, according to which the first humans were produced by nature through some form of spontaneous generation” (Matthew R. Goodrum).
The word evolution (from the Latin evolution, meaning “to unroll like a scroll”) appeared in English in the 17th century, referring to an orderly sequence of events, particularly one in which the outcome was somehow contained within it from the start. Notably, in 1677 Sir Matthew Hale, attacking the atheistic atomism of Democritus and Epicurus, used the term evolution to describe his opponent’s ideas that vibrations and collisions of atoms in the void — without divine intervention — had formed “Primordial Seeds” (semina) which were the “immediate, primitive, productive Principles of Men, Animals, Birds and Fishes.”[ Goodrum] For Hale, this mechanism was “absurd”, because “it must have potentially at least the whole Systeme of Humane Nature, or at least that Ideal Principle or Configuration thereof, in the evolution whereof the complement and formation of the Humane Nature must consist … and all this drawn from a fortuitous coalition of senseless and dead Atoms.”[ Goodrum]
While Hale (ironically) first used the term evolution in arguing against the exact mechanistic view the word would come to symbolize, he also demonstrates that at least some evolutionist theories explored between 1650 and 1800 postulated that the universe, including life on earth, had developed mechanically, entirely without divine guidance. Around this time, the mechanical philosophy of Descartes, reinforced by the physics of Galileo and Newton, began to encourage the machine-like view of the universe which would come to characterise the scientific revolution.[Bowler ] However, most contemporary theories of evolution, including those developed by the German idealist philosophers Schelling and Hegel (and mocked by Schopenhauer), held that evolution was a fundamentally spiritual process, with the entire course of natural and human evolution being “a self-disclosing revelation of the Absolute”.[Schelling]
In response to Isaac de la Peyrere‘s theory of polygenesis, Hale advanced his own theory that the earth was not eternal, but rather had a spontaneous “beginning,” and went on to defend “the Mosaic account of the single origin of all peoples” (Norman). He further believed “that in animals, especially insects, various natural calamities reduce the numbers to low levels intermittently, so maintaining the balance of nature” (Garrison & Morton). Hale anticipated Malthus in studying the growth of a population from a single family, and “seems to have been the first to use the expression ‘geometrical proportion” in respect to population (Hutchinson). Primitive Origination was written as the first part of a larger manuscript entitled Concerning Religion, the whole of which “was submitted to Bishop Wilkins, who showed it to Tillotson. Both advised condensation, for which Hale never found leisure” (DNB). This first part, called “Concerning the Secondary Origination of Mankind,” was published after his death as The Primitive Origination of Mankind. A lawyer by trade, Hale distinguished himself after the fire of London in 1666 by deciding many cases of owner and tennant dispute, and helped facilitate the rebuilding of the city. He also publically demonstrated his belief in witches when as a judge he condemned more than one suspected witch to death. Wing H-258 ;Norman 965 ;Garrison & Morton 215; Lowndes, 973.
Goodrum, Matthew R. (April 2002). “Atomism, Atheism, and the Spontaneous Generation of Human Beings: The Debate over a Natural Origin of the First Humans in Seventeenth-Century Britain”. Journal of the History of Ideas 63 (2): 207–224
Bowler, Peter J. (2003). Evolution:The History of an Idea. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-23693-9.
Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 1800
Brian Regal Human Evolution: A Guide to the Debates, 2004
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333J Nehemia Grew
Cosmologia sacra: or a discourse of the universe as it is the creature and kingdom of God. Chiefly written, to demonstrate the truth and Excellency of the Bible; which contains the Laws of his Kingdom in this Lower World. In five books. By Dr. Nehemiah Grew, Fellow of the College of Physicians, and of the Royal Society.
London: Printed for W. Rogers, S. Smith, and B. Walford: at the Sun against St. Dunstan’s church in Fleetstreet; and at the Prince’s Arms in St. Paul’s church-yard, 1701. $2,600
Folio, 12 x 8 inches π3, B2, A2,(a)-(e)8,A-Z2, Aa-Zz2,Aaa-Zzz2,Aaaa-Zzzzz, Aaaaa2,Bbbbb1
This copy is bound in its original full calf, it is a nice copy.
This is Grew’s last work was published in 1701. I. The argument is specially directed against Spinoza, the nature of God being deduced à priori and à posteriori, from the necessity of His being and from His handiwork. As in Ray’s ‘Wisdom of God in Creation,’ and other similar works, the argument à posteriori begins with much borrowed astronomical learning; but in a funeral sermon on the author we are assured, not only that he was ‘acquainted with the theories of the Heavenly Bodies, skill’d in Mechanicks and Mathematicks, the Proportions of Lines and Numbers, and the Composition and Mixture of Bodies, particularly of the Human Body,’ but also that he was ‘well acquainted with the whole Body of Divinity,’ and had studied Hebrew to more proficiency than most divines, so as to read the scriptures in the original.
“The greater part of this is in the ordinary style of apologetics, or a treatise upon the evidences of Christianity; and, so far as this part is concerned, the title, Sacred Cosmology, has no pertinence. But it also contains design-arguments, and a singular theory of a “vital principle” in matter generally, aside from vegetative and animal life,—a sort of hylozoism, or world-soul theory. So far it is cosmological, or treats of the cosmos.”” A Critique of Design-arguments: A Historical Review and Free Examination of the Methods of Reasoning in Natural Theology. Lewis Ezra Hicks: Charles Scribner, 1883
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793J John Ray (1627-1705)
Miscellaneous discourses concerning the dissolution and changes of the world : Wherein the primitive chaos and creation, the general deluge, fountains, formed stones, sea-shells found in the earth, subterraneous trees, mountains, earthquakes, vulcanoes, the universal conflagration and future state, are largely discussed and examined.
London: Printed for Samuel Smith,at the Prince’s Arms in St Paul’s Church Yard. 1692
Octavo: 10 x 7 cm. Signatures: A⁸a⁴B-R⁸S⁴./ Leaf S2 is mis-signed as R2. Bound in original calf rebacked preserving much of the original spine.
First edition of Ray’s most comprehensive treatment of fossils. ‘During much of the 1690s Ray was engaged in correspondence with Edward Lhwyd and others about the nature of fossils. In general he was inclined to accept that they were the remains of once-living creatures, and he also suggested that their current distribution might owe something to observable changes in the nature of the surface of the earth. He qualified these opinions, however, by stressing that the fossils which had so far been discovered were not unlike known plants and animals, and that their burial might owe something to the action of the biblical flood, as well as to natural effects. He argued that those remains which seemed to be unfamiliar might represent species of which the surviving representatives had not yet been discovered’ (ONDB).
Keynes Ray#81, Wing R397
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