Robert Hooke: new studies

MICHAEL HUNTER and SIMON SCHAFFER (eds), Robert Hooke. new studies, Woodbridge, Suffolk, Boydell Press, 1989, 8vo, pp. x, 310, illus., £39.50. The studies under review are new in that they come from a conference on Hooke that took place in 1987. Recency does not guarantee freshness, however, and, with a few exceptions, the studies only, though competently, add epicycles to the known world of Restoration science. Thus we have J. A. Bennett on Hooke's instruments for astronomy and navigation; A. D. C. Simpson on Hooke's relations with opticians; Patri J. Pugliese on Hooke's ideas on the dynamics of gravitating bodies; David R. Oldroyd on the dispute between Hooke and Wallis over Earth physics; and Lucinda McCray Beier on Hooke's hypochondria. Of this group of studies, Beier's will be the most useful for readers of this journal. Hooke swallowed quantities of drugs made fashionable by hearsay ("Mr Moor ... told me of a Woman-in the Tower cured divers of the vertigo by stone horse dung") and employed his body often as a pharmaceutical testing apparatus. Of the remaining four studies, one deserves special mention for its richness of detail. Michael Wright, an Assistant Keeper at the Science Museum, London, analyses and reconstructs Hooke's longitude timekeeper on the basis of a brief manuscript that he gives in full. Wright's many clear illustrations make it possible for diligent readers unpractised in chronometry to admire Hooke's mechanical skill and inventiveness, which, however, no more solved the practical problem he set himself than did his thirty ways of flying. We are left with three studies of interest for their wider perspectives: John T. Harwood on the Micrographia; John Henry on "magical" elements in Hooke's thought; and Steven Shapin on Hooke's several social and anti-social roles. Harwood considers the Micrographia as a companion piece to Thomas Sprat's history of the Royal Society. Both were apologetic works; where Sprat told, Hooke showed. The Fellows acted as a communal check on Hooke's accuracy of observation and rendering; they understood that the Micrographia could be a most effective advertisement of their group labours; and they were right. Shapin continues the discussion of the role of Fellows as witnesses by reference to books of etiquette and the ideal of the gentleman. He shows that the seventeenth century reckoned trustworthiness as proportional to social status; hence the witness of the gentlemanly and aristocratic Fellows of the Royal Society had greater weight than that ofcurators and mechanics. Fellows felt as little uncomfortable in presuming to correct Hooke's discourses and demonstrations as they did in ordering him to do them. Shapin contrasts the productive mechanic Hooke with the cross between a gentleman and a Christian virtuoso that made up the complete and ideal natural philosopher as incarnated in Robert Boyle. And, stressing that the same label scarcely fits both men, Shapin advises us to apply "scientist" gingerly to seventeenth-century people. Indeed, the application should be prohibited altogether. John Henry worries whether the mechanic Hooke can be said to have been a mechanist, observing that Hooke invoked occult active causes, especially in explanation of the phenomena of light and gravity, which were also the two great divisions of Newtonian philosophy, and, further, that Hooke had in the concept of "congruity" the fuinctional equivalent of Newton's "sociability". So far so good. But Henry insists on deriving these active occult qualities from "the magical tradition". That is nonsense, unless all peripatetic philosophy is to be counted as magical. The confusion arises from placing "natural magic" as a bridge between "magic" and "experimental philosophy". Hooke was most certainly a natural magician-so are Dupont and General Electric-but that did not make him a magus. He says so himself, in a passage Henry quotes. The passage is a defence of John Dee's writings about his discussions with angels, certainly a most magical and mystical business if taken literally; but Hooke interprets Dee's registers as cryptographic reports of straightforward and effective natural-magical experiments. An active cause may be mechanical or non-mechanical, depending on definition. An occult cause is neither the one nor the other, but an asylum ignorantiae, or a reservation ofjudgment. Newton tried to distinguish the cause ofgravity, which he declined to specify, from an occult one.