c CUNYB/Clarke December, :
Magic, Mathematics, and Mechanics The years during which Descartes was travelling and studying ‘in the
great book of the world’ (vi.)were a period when the familiar teachings
of centuries – about religion, politics, and science – were publicly ques-
tioned and sharply disputed across a war-torn Europe. The Protestant
Reformation of the sixteenth century and the on-going Catholic Counter-
Reformation, together with the proliferation of religious sects and the
foundation of new religious orders, highlighted the fragile intellectual
foundations on which the apparent unity of Christianity had relied.
There were many symptoms of the widespread distrust of traditional
learning, and of the openness to consider alternatives, in the early part
of the seventeenth century. Francis Bacon, the lord chancellor, had pub-
lishedThe Advancement of Learningin, and there were intimations
even there of a new age for mankind, of significant advances in under-
standing the natural world and its imminent exploitation for the benefit of
humankind. One of the features that particularly characterized this period
was a radical challenge to assumptions that the universe is finite and that
human beings are located at its centre. Giordano Bruno had speculated
about an infinite universe, and about a form of Christianity that could
adapt to such a radically new world. He paid a heavy price for dabbling in
dangerous speculations when he was condemned by the Inquisition and
burned at the stake in the Campo de’ Fiori, in Rome, in. Many oth-
ers contributed to this cacophony of modernist voices, all announcing the
advent in some sense of a new era, the abandonment of traditional learn-
ing, and the emancipation of those who had been seduced into intellectual
subservience by the cultivated obscurity of the schools.
Descartes was already aware of the fundamental challenge to the tra-
ditional picture of the universe that was implicit in the work of Coper-
nicus.On the Revolutions() was not just a new technical theory for
astronomers. It was an emphatic displacement of man from the centre
of creation and his relocation, on one tiny planet in space, as a much
less significant creature than a literal reading of the book of Genesis had
suggested to generations of Christians. Brahe and Kepler supported this
redefinition of the human world and its consequent reduction in stature.
Descartes was familiar with both of these authors, and he had heard reports
of new observations in astronomy by a contemporary Italian mathemati-
cian and astronomer called Galileo. However, he almost certainly failed
to acknowledge the significance of Galileo’s contribution. While the great
mathematician of Florence was ‘revealing the existence of a wholly new