(^202) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
preconceptions. Forget the ancients, they boasted; "we found the con
trary." Garcia d'Orta, son of converso parents and himself a loyal but of
course secret Jew, learned medicine and natural philosophy in Sala
manca and Lisbon, then sailed to Goa in 1534, where he served as
physician to the Portuguese viceroys. In Europe, intimidated by his
teachers, he never dared to question the authority of the ancient Greeks
and Romans. Now, in the nonacademic environment of Portuguese
India, he felt free to open his eyes. "For me," he wrote, the testimony
of an eye-witness is worth more than that of all the physicians and all
the fathers of medicine who wrote on false information"; and further,
"you can get more knowledge now from the Portuguese in one day
than was known to the Romans after a hundred years."^3
Method: Seeing alone was not enough. One must understand and
give nonmagical explanations for natural phenomena. No credence
could be given to things unseen. No room here for unicorns, basilisks,
and salamanders. Where Aristotle thought to explain phenomena by
the "essential" nature of things (heavenly bodies travel in circles; ter
restrial bodies move up or down), the new philosophy proposed the
converse: nature was not in things; things were (and moved) in nature.
Early on, moreover, these searchers came to see mathematics as im
mensely valuable for specifying observations and formulating results.
Thus Roger Bacon at Oxford in the thirteenth century: "All categories
depend on a knowledge of quantity, concerning which mathematics
treats, and therefore the whole power of logic depends on mathemat
ics."^4 This marriage of observation and precise description, in turn,
made possible replication and verification. Nothing so effectively un
dermined authority. It mattered litde who said what, but what was
said; not perception but reality. Do I see what you say you saw?
Such an approach opened the way to purposeful experiment. In
stead of waiting to see something happen, make it happen. This re
quired an intellectual leap, and some have argued that it was the
renewal and dissemination of magical beliefs (even Isaac Newton be
lieved in the possibility of alchemy and the transmutation of matter)
that led the scientific community to see nature as something to be
acted upon as well as observed.^5 "In striking contrast to the natural
philosopher," writes one historian, "the magician manipulated na
ture."^6
Well, at least he tried. I am skeptical, however, of this effort to con
flate personal confusions with larger causation. The leap from obser
vation to experiment, from passive to active, was hard enough, and the
temptations of magic, this "world of profit and delight, of power, of
nora
(Nora)
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