Natural Philosophy 195Jacobin science, as he and Lichtenberg called it, was dangerous as well as
wrong. The true natural philosopher, the lover of wisdom, had to oppose
it for the good of chemistry and the salvation of Europe.^54 This may show
suffi ciently that self- professed truth lovers are as liable to self- deception as
other mortals. Still, there may be something useful in the concept.
Isaac Newton once drew up a list of nine “candid promoters of truth”;
in his limited experience, most other so- called philosophers were “con-
tentious and noisy for the sake of fame or preferment.”^55 It would make
a good game for historians of science to guess the names of the nine:
Tycho, Kepler, Hevelius, Guericke, Galileo, Torricelli, Huygens, Cassini,
and Bianchini. Bianchini? We may well regard the obscure monsignor
Francesco Bianchini as Newton’s model truth seeker, for he was the only
one of the nine living when Newton compiled his list and the only one
with whom Newton had ever talked. Now, this Bianchini represented ev-
erything that Newton most detested in religion and politics. He was a
papist, indeed, the right hand of Pope Clement XI; Newton considered the
Roman Catholic Church a font of evil and the pope the Whore of Baby-
lon. Again, Bianchini was a friend and sometime guardian of the Stuart
pretender James III, whom Clement supported in his claims to the throne
of England; Newton, a fi erce Whig, favored the Hanoverian succession
that ended the Stuart reign.^56 We are left with the hypothesis that Newton
truly admired Bianchini.
Bianchini was at home everywhere in the Republic of Letters. Accom-
plished as an astronomer, chronologist, geodecist, archeologist, and his-
torian, he built the beautiful solar observatory in Santa Maria degli Angeli
in Rome, straightened out calendars and early Christian history, made
the fi rst trigonometric survey of the Papal States, supervised digs and de-
ciphered inscriptions, and composed a “universal history” of human kind
during its fi rst thirty- two centuries of existence. His reports as consultant
to the Roman censorship could well serve as models for advisors of uni-
versity presses. Perhaps Bianchini’s report to Newton that he and some
colleagues in Rome had managed to reproduce some contentious experi-
ments from the Optice may help explain Newton’s admiration for him. But
then everyone admired Bianchini: Leibniz, Mabillon, and the academi-
cians of Paris, who elected him one of their eight foreign associates, and
the English savants whom he met during his visit to England in 1713.
Apparently he won them all with a rare blend of affability, responsibility,
and modesty.^57
Bianchini may stand for many humbler citizens of the Republic of
Letters who took an interest in natural knowledge not because there was a
career or money in it, but because they believed that any educated person