In this excellent book, Tita Chico considers literary technique alongside modes of scientific enquiry, beginning with the foundation of the Royal Society and ending with James Thomson's The Seasons (1726–1730), in order to show how necessary the former was to the latter. It was never possible, she argues, in the encounter between the scientific observer and the experimental object, to locate a naked impression of the thing free of the penumbra of representation or a sign denoting the thing that was not vulnerable to a pun or a trope. Despite the watchword of the newly founded scientific community of Gresham College—nullius in verba—words in figurative, rhetorical, and even generic formations were multiplying in order to give substantial weight to the vain endeavor of delivering in literal language nothing but the thing that is. Robert Boyle compared the vicissitudes of difficult experiments with reading a romance; Robert Hooke called the louse a traitor for shedding the blood of the “crown.” Without even trying, literature found itself recruited in a new epistemological venture. Far from timidly affirming nothing in order not to be accused of telling lies, it was endowed by the very people who held it in the least regard with the means of producing knowledge. Hence William Wordsworth's placement of the poet on an equal footing with the man of science and Erasmus Darwin's translation of the Linnaean taxonomy of plants into the erotic couplings of The Botanic Garden. Indeed, Chico is rediscovering an alliance between empirical science and the imagination that runs (at least) from Lucretius's honeyed verse to Bacon's mining of the truths hidden in myth and fable and beyond.

All partisans of the literary must find this kind of history of science attractive. However, it is clear that the mission of the Royal Society was to make discoveries of things not seen or known before and to record their appearance in words as simple and literal as possible. By these means Thomas Sprat believed it would be possible to represent “the whole Fabrick … of Nature … to have Eyes in all parts, and to receive information from every quarter of the earth” (Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society of London [1667], 20). This enterprise rested on theories of perception that were not unanimously supported by those engaged in it. How was it that an object created an impression upon the observer's sensorium—by light, motion, sound, touch? How did an impression become a sensation, or the sensation an idea? How would the interposition of a machine such as a microscope or a megaphone affect the authenticity of both? Is imagination the womb of things and memory the grave of them? It is evident from Chico's survey that Locke had scant regard for imagination, insisting on the rational union of ideas in the production of clear thoughts and expressions. Hobbes and Bacon, on the other hand, took very seriously the operations of imagination and invention, and they actively incorporated fictional and theatrical analogies into their epistemologies and politics.

These discriminations matter less to Chico's survey than exemplary manifestations of the alliance between scientific discourse and rhetorical technique. A notable instance is the comparison run between Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle's Entretiens sur la Pluralite des Mondes (1686), translated by Aphra Behn as A Discovery of New Worlds (1688), and Francesco Algarotti's dialogue on Newton's Opticks (1730), translated by Elizabeth Carter as Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy Explain'd for the Use of the Ladies (1737). Fontenelle was introducing his reader to the cosmic implications of the Cartesian theory of vortices; Algarotti was doing the same thing with Newton's analysis of light and color. Both authors used a dialogue between man and woman as the vehicle; both were translated by literary women; and both dialogues are organized by the correspondence between instruction and seduction. There is no doubt that the night scene in Fontenelle's original is meant to be erotic and was understood by contemporary female writers to be so: Chico gives the example of an excited Melliora in Eliza Haywood's Love in Excess (1719) reading Fontenelle in bed while thinking of D'Elmont. The process of understanding is represented as risky sexual complaisance.

Another exemplary association of the literary with scientific enquiry concerns the kind of nothing that Hooke finds in a naked point that, if it is to be observed as it really is, must be converted into something like a mud splash. In the third book of Gulliver's Travels (1726), Chico locates in the Flying Island a branch of musical and geometrical science that transcends the empirical world, philosophers so elevated in abstract speculation that their lips, ears, and eyes have to be alerted to the need to speak, taste, hear, and see if social life is to carry on. As it is, no phenomenon accessible to the senses is equal, in their view, to the Platonic form of its archetype: invisible, unheard, intangible, and flavorless. In the fourth book, the principle of essential purity is transferred from meditation to speech, which is restricted to saying nothing but the thing that is. How far the nakedness of ideas and words is consistent with communicability is the question Chico broaches, and it produces some interesting figurative results.

It would have been worthwhile if Chico had assembled a larger cast of philosopher-scientists and made some discriminations between them. Hobbes in the seventeenth century and Hume in the eighteenth broach theories of perception very different from Locke's in being much more hospitable to the imagination as a repository of representations and more sensitive to the fortuitous element in the association of ideas. They positively encourage the tendency to figuration, and they both believe that ideas can be reconstituted as impressions. There is no doubt that Tita Chico has written a book that adds an important insight to scholarship dealing with the history of the relations between literature and science in the Enlightenment. She shows how inevitably the determination among experimental scientists to say nothing but the thing that is slides into figurative language, usually litotes, whereby something is affirmed only by denying its opposite. She joins an impressive phalanx of scholars who have been investigating this sort of paradox: Sean Silver, Lucinda Cale, Jayne Lewis, Julie Park, and Wolfram Schmidgen.