For the early moderns, it was virtually an article of faith that innovation was to be feared. ‘God loves not innovations’, John Donne declared, a principle widely held in religion and politics (and law and learning and many other areas besides).Footnote 1 At first glance, the ‘new philosophy’ looks like an exception. Scholars have long noted the mania for newness in seventeenth-century science and medicine.Footnote 2 Kepler, Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Boyle and many others made liberal use of the language of the new: they advertised a ‘new’ astronomy, a ‘new’ Organon, two ‘new’ sciences, a ‘new’ method, ‘new’ experiments and so on.Footnote 3 Even ‘novelty’, long viewed as frivolous or outright dangerous, was increasingly embraced by English writers.Footnote 4 Yet the term ‘innovation’ itself remained in disrepute. Up through the eighteenth century, the meaning of ‘innovation’ – defined in one early English dictionary as ‘a making new: an alteration’ – was overwhelmingly pejorative.Footnote 5 Not only that, but it belonged primarily to religion and politics rather than to science or medicine. Puritans and Catholics, royalists and republicans, all accused each other of innovating and positioned themselves as the true defenders of ancient order.Footnote 6 In a recent monograph – the first devoted to the history of the concept – Benoît Godin calls this mentality the ‘prohibition episteme’. It was only in the nineteenth century, Godin argues, that ‘innovation entered science with a positive meaning’.Footnote 7
Yet this story overlooks a minority tradition that saw the concept in a very different light. From its earliest appearances in English, the term ‘innovation’ could be used in neutral and even positive senses too. We find antiquarians sympathetic to the linguistic ‘innovation in our tongue’, expert practitioners insisting that the arts and sciences must ‘innovate … continually’, politic authors teaching how to ‘make innovations take with the people’, religious reformers arguing that ‘Innovation is not to be feared where reformation is effected’, and republicans contending that the people ‘may lawfully innovate’.Footnote 8 Probably the best-known and most influential collection of maxims on innovation comes in the third principal edition of Bacon’s Essayes (1625). In his essay ‘Of Innovations’, Bacon gathers arguments on both sides of his topic. He makes no distinction between different fields of practice: the dictum that ‘every Medicine is an Innovation’ appears alongside warnings about ‘try[ing] Experiments in States’ and pursuing ‘Reformation’. Whether in medicine or politics or religion, Bacon allows for the ‘utility’ and ‘necessity’ of innovation yet insists that it must always ‘be held for a Suspect’.Footnote 9 He carves out room for innovation in the sciences as in any other domain, but he does not try to vindicate the concept from the suspicion that so often attended it.
Bacon’s caution, however, was not shared by all in the tumultuous decades of the mid-seventeenth century. This essay traces the shifting fortunes of the concept among English physicians and natural philosophers, roughly between 1650 and 1670. Leading lights of the early Royal Society, including Walter Charleton, Robert Boyle, John Evelyn and Thomas Sprat, defended the merits of innovation, or at least questioned the prejudice against it. So too did advocates for the Society of Chymical Physicians, including Marchamont Nedham, Richard Barker and William Simpson. Among the main drivers of the concept’s rehabilitation, I contend, was the spread of the meta-philosophical category of the novatores.Footnote 10 The term emerged in 1620s France as a pejorative epithet for a nebulous group of modern philosophers, generally including Telesio, Campanella, Kepler, Galileo, Bacon and (by the 1650s) Descartes. Rendered in English as ‘novelists’ or ‘innovators’, the category supplied Aristotelians and Galenists with a potent line of attack on the new philosophy. But not everyone feared the novatores. As the century wore on, a growing number of philosophers and physicians sought to reclaim the language of innovation from their critics.
These defences of innovation belong to a much-discussed and much-debated episode in the history of ideas: the so-called quarrel of the ancients and moderns. Well before the French Querelle and the English Battle of the Books at the turn of the eighteenth century, generations of writers vigorously debated the respective merits of the ancients and moderns in practically every field of thought. Joseph Levine has gone so far as to suggest that the controversy was a defining ‘obsession’ of the Restoration.Footnote 11 More recently, however, Dmitri Levitin has rejected this historiographical framework altogether. Because the disputants on all sides of seventeenth-century natural-philosophical debates relied on historical arguments, he contends, it makes no sense to speak of ‘ancients versus moderns’. The real battlefield was antiquity itself, constantly revised and retold for competing ends.Footnote 12 Levitin’s point is well taken. As we’ll see, defenders of innovation were perfectly capable of appealing to antiquity when it suited their purposes. But while the notion of a conflict between ancients and moderns may not yield an accurate picture of how seventeenth-century thinkers did natural philosophy, it nonetheless captures an important way in which they talked about how they did it. The point of the rhetoric of innovation was precisely to draw a sharp line between ancients and moderns, Aristotelians and innovators. What Daniel Garber writes of the term novatores was equally true of ‘innovation’: it was a ‘polemical category’, developed by Aristotelian controversialists to attack their rivals as ‘seekers of novelty rather than truth, as people who undermined religion and led ultimately to dissent and conflict’.Footnote 13 To recuperate the concept, the new philosophers would need to sever it from its long-standing association with religious and political subversion.
And that, I will argue, is exactly what they sought to do. For Aristotelians and Galenists, the epistemic and institutional innovations of the new philosophy were radical politics and theology conducted by other means. They used the language of innovation to implicate their antagonists in the violent upheaval of the previous decades. This was an especially effective criticism because, as decades of scholarship have shown, natural philosophers and physicians acutely felt the need to negotiate their place in the Restoration settlement.Footnote 14 One strategy was to deny the charge of innovation altogether. To vindicate the new experimental philosophy, many turned to an argument long used by religious controversialists: that they were merely renovating or reviving ancient knowledge long obscured by error.Footnote 15 But we also find a different rhetorical stance. Even some of those writers who leaned heavily on the authority of antiquity could accept the mantle of innovation in natural philosophy or medicine. Their premise, whether stated or not, was that new learning was categorically different from new theology or new politics. Divorced from the twin spectres of heresy and sedition, the concept of innovation could be made to serve rather than undermine the restored church and state.
The Restoration history of innovation, then, is to some extent a history of secularization. Innovation in religion was so widely detested that the concept could not be brought to natural philosophy without distinguishing between the two domains. Reclaiming the concept required what sociologists of science call ‘boundary work’: the rhetorical demarcation of science from non-science (in early modern terms, philosophy from divinity).Footnote 16 The result was a seemingly secular concept of innovation extracted from the sound and fury of religious controversy, defined and disciplined by the protocols of experiment. Yet the boundaries here were only ever provisional. No sooner was innovation secularized than it was put to explicitly religious ends. Philosophical innovation would furnish the clergy with a ‘new kind of weapons’ to combat the enemies of the church; the ‘new Experimental Learning’ would provide a rational, empirical method for discerning ‘the essence, and properties of God’.Footnote 17 For contemporary critics, this was tantamount to ‘a new Religion’ – a view not wholly dissimilar from recent appraisals of the ‘new hybrid discipline’ of physico-theology.Footnote 18 The same thinkers who drew a line between philosophy and divinity when it came to innovation went on to entwine the two in their natural-theological programs. Thanks to the work of John Hedley Brooke, this is now a familiar pattern in the history of science and religion: ‘New patterns of differentiation were often sought with a view to the reintegration of scientific and religious belief’.Footnote 19 So it was with innovation. My contention is that the concept was secularized for religious reasons: first to differentiate new philosophy from new religion, and then to reconcile the former with ecclesiastical authority and Christian doctrine. Depending on one’s theological yardstick, however, the result was as likely to resemble a heretical new religion as (in Boyle’s words) a ‘defence of our ancientest Creed’.Footnote 20 The controversies over innovation reflect rival efforts to pin down the cultural politics of the new philosophy at a time when the limits of orthodoxy seemed endlessly contestable.
The anti-innovation paradigm
Among the first to label the new philosophers novatores (more precisely novateurs) was the French librarian Gabriel Naudé. Like ‘innovation’ in English, novator came to philosophy from religious controversy, where it was used by both Protestants and Catholics to attack the alleged heresies of the other side. In the context of philosophy, the heresy at issue was anti-Aristotelianism.Footnote 21 Naudé’s broadside, published in 1625 but not translated into English until 1657, draws a stark line between Aristotelians and innovators. He dismisses in a single breath the
swarm of Moderns and Innovators [novateurs], daily encreasing under the banners of Telesius, Patricius, Campanella, Verulamio, Jordan, Brun, and Bassonius, out of no other designe, than to put a slur upon that Philosophy, and to undermine that great building which Aristotle, and above twelve thousand who have writ upon him, have spent so many ages to build up.Footnote 22
The term ‘innovator’ is clearly derogatory. Naudé treats the novatores as a faddish bunch – their numbers ‘daily encreasing’ – motivated not by the pursuit of truth but by petulant antipathy to the great edifice of Aristotelian learning.
This translation of Naudé – and another, which I will address in due course – helped bring the category of the novatores or ‘innovators’ to a wider English audience. By 1657, however, the term had already entered the arsenal of the enemies of the new philosophy. In Arcana Microcosmi (1651; 2nd edn 1652), the clergyman and polemicist Alexander Ross took up his pen on behalf of ‘the ancient Champions of Learning’ – Aristotle above all – against ‘some modern Innovators’.Footnote 23 Lest we wonder who these innovators are, Ross names and shames several of them on the title page of the enlarged second edition: Thomas Browne, Francis Bacon, William Harvey and Jan Amos Comenius (the Moravian pansophist and member of the Hartlib circle). His purpose is to establish (and refute) this new canon of innovators. The most grievous error of ‘these new Philosophers’, as Ross derisively terms them, is that they have rejected the ‘Aristotelian way’. It is not that their own ways are genuinely new, however. On the contrary, Ross punningly rebrands the new philosophy as ‘old pseudosophy’: their supposedly ‘new opinions’ are in reality ‘old obsolete and rejected errors’.Footnote 24 For Ross as for Naudé, the challenge to Aristotelianism is what defines the philosophical innovator.
Who were the innovators, then, according to Ross and his fellow Aristotelians? Across his works, Ross took aim at a host of figures, including not only Browne, Bacon, Harvey and Comenius, but also Copernicus, Galileo, Gassendi, Philip Lansberg and, among the English, Nathanael Carpenter, John Wilkins, Kenelm Digby and Thomas Hobbes.Footnote 25 Many of these also appear in the contemporary French catalogues of novatores.Footnote 26 Their pursuits ranged across (and beyond) the full spectrum of early modern science: astronomy and cosmology, physics and mechanics, physiology and natural history. For all their diversity, though, they shared – as Ross rightly noted – a willingness to depart from the doctrines of Aristotle and Aristotelianism.Footnote 27
The same was true in the closely related field of medicine, where accusations of innovation were even more frequent than they were in natural philosophy. The ‘Novelists’, as the physician Richard Short termed them, were those physicians who ‘bring innovations against Hippocrates and Galen’, the touchstones (along with Aristotle himself) of traditional medicine.Footnote 28 While the philosophical novatores were a highly heterogeneous bunch, the medical novatores largely adhered to a single system: the chymical philosophy embodied by Paracelsus and, in the later seventeenth century, Jan Baptist van Helmont.Footnote 29 Paracelsus himself famously brushed aside ‘the precepts of the ancients’ – Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna – in favour of first-hand observation and experience.Footnote 30 In Restoration England, the controversy centred on the efforts of a group of reformist physicians to establish a new Society of Chymical Physicians. They rejected the Galenic, learned medicine practised by the College of Physicians, advocating instead a Helmontian programme of empirical observation and chymical cures.Footnote 31 For critics such as Short, the innovators’ experimentalist ethos was as misguided as their anti-Aristotelianism.Footnote 32
At their most extreme, the attacks on innovation call to mind the old narrative of the Scientific Revolution, by which modern, experimental science had to be liberated once and for all from the shackles of scholasticism. This is no coincidence: the story of ‘revolution’ (although they rarely, if ever, called it that) originated with the defenders of the new philosophy themselves.Footnote 33 Yet scholars have long understood this account to be an oversimplification at best. The new philosophers owed quite a lot not just to the ancients but specifically to Aristotle and the Aristotelians.Footnote 34 To cite just two examples, Harvey was a self-professed follower of Aristotle, while Digby laboured diligently to reconcile atomism with Aristotelianism.Footnote 35 But the language of innovation told a different story. Like the Latin novatores, the terms ‘innovation’ and ‘innovators’ served to pit Aristotle and the Aristotelians against the new philosophers – and, in most cases, to the latter’s discredit. This was not a tool for impartial analysis but a way to condemn ideas and practices that were perceived to threaten long-established institutions and systems of thought.
This polemical thrust helps explain why the language of innovation gained currency among Aristotelians and Galenists during the Civil Wars and Interregnum. Defenders of tradition used the term to tie the new philosophers to the pernicious innovations of Puritans and Parliamentarians. This was a strategy determinedly pursued by Ross and Short, both High Church royalists.Footnote 36 In his anti-Copernican broadside The New Planet No Planet (1646), Ross insisted that cosmology and theology were inseparable. His target – a future founder of the Royal Society, John Wilkins – had defended the ‘Noveltie’ of the belief that the Earth is a planet on the ground that antiquity might be the surest guide in divinity, but not in philosophy, where learning is daily augmented ‘by fresh experiments and new discoveries’. But Ross rejoined that this was a false distinction. ‘You say it’s but a novelty in Philosophy, but I say it intrencheth upon Divinity’, he inveighed.Footnote 37 Short argued along much the same lines. In Peri psychroposias (1656), a polemic against those English ‘Novelists’ who prescribed – of all things – drinking water, he compared critics of Hippocrates and Galen to religious schismatics. ‘Have we new Ranters, and Quakers in Physick too?’ he demanded. Short’s solution – in medicine as in religion – is to return to the authority of antiquity. Citing St Paul and the First Council of Nicaea, he declares that ‘ancient customes are lawes: not only in physick, and Philosophy but in civill and Ecclesiasticall matters’.Footnote 38 Like Ross, Short contends that the strictures against innovation apply equally to religion and politics on the one hand, and to philosophy and medicine on the other.
These arguments only grew more vigorous after the Restoration. In his 1666 defence of ‘the ancient method of physick’, John Twysden (a fellow of the College of Physicians) likened the innovations of the chymical practitioners to the subversive political tactics that had plunged the nation into civil war.Footnote 39 The word ‘innovation’ appears twice in Twysden’s tract. Toward the end, he approvingly cites Boyle (to whom we will return) to warn against the Helmontians’ attempted ‘innovation’ of the Galenic method.Footnote 40 The other occurrence of the word, however, comes in the context not of medicine but of politics. The pamphlet opens with an appeal to England’s chief judicial authorities on behalf of the beleaguered College of Physicians. Not only have the medical reformers railed against the Galenic method in print, but – most egregiously of all – they have ‘endeavoured to draw His most Gracious Majesty’s concurrence to their undertakings, and by that dangerous way of innovating through subscriptions of Hands, laboured to erect a new Society of Chymical Physicians in London, in opposition to that Body already setled’.Footnote 41 The means of innovation here has nothing to do with science or medicine. It is instead a political practice that the restored monarchy regarded with intense suspicion: collective petitioning. Among the first Acts passed by the Cavalier Parliament in 1661 was a measure prohibiting petitions ‘for alteracion of matters established by Law in Church or State’ if they had more than twenty subscribers or were not endorsed by the appropriate local authorities. As its preamble makes clear, the statute was a direct response to the frequent mass petitions, contrived by ‘Factious & Seditious persons’, that were allegedly a principal cause of ‘the late unhappy Wars Confusions and Calamities in this Nation’. The Earl of Clarendon, Twysden’s principal dedicatee, was himself deeply suspicious of the mass petitions of the 1640s.Footnote 42 With thirty-five signatories, the chymical physicians’ petition for a royal charter ran the risk of violating the new law (although it had substantial support from powerful figures at court).Footnote 43 Twysden, then, clearly evokes the spectre of Civil War radicalism. By framing his pamphlet with two accusations of innovation, one political and the other medical, he aligns the chymical physicians with the factious and seditious agents of the English Revolution.
This view was by no means Twysden’s alone. Other supporters of the College of Physicians likewise accused the chymical physicians of innovation in language that alluded to the anti-monarchical ferment of the previous decades. At stake was not only the practice of medicine but also the institutional authority of the college, the universities and even the Crown. Leaning on its royal charter, the college had long tried (with mixed success) to police the medical profession.Footnote 44 The Society of Chymical Physicians posed perhaps the gravest threat yet to its medical monopoly. In their defence, the learned physicians – like Twysden – did not hesitate to align themselves with the king and their professional rivals with the rebels of the 1640s and 1650s. The chymical physicians, they alleged, were seditious ‘Innovators’ out to ‘demolish the ancient structure of Medicinal truths’, bent equally against ‘Rule and Method in Physick’ and ‘all Order and Government in the State’.Footnote 45 The point was to intertwine medicine with monarchy, so that innovating the former could not but subvert the latter.
This line of argument found its most vigorous exponent in the voluminous polemic of Henry Stubbe. In 1670–1, Stubbe published a barrage of pamphlets, some in multiple editions, lambasting both the Royal Society and the chymical physicians.Footnote 46 Among his central contentions was that the new philosophy would subvert not only traditional learning but also the traditional hierarchies of church and state. Aristotelianism for Stubbe was not merely a philosophical programme; it was inextricable from England’s civil and ecclesiastical government. Aristotle’s Politics ‘suit admirably with our Monarchy’, while his Logic and Metaphysics ‘are so entwisted with the established Religion … that without a miracle the neglect hereof must bring a change in the former’. Or, still more forcefully, ‘to Preserve our old Religion, tis absolutely necessary that we retain our Old Learning’.Footnote 47 Because good – that is, scholastic – education is the foundation of good government, to attack Aristotelianism is to attack the established regime. This is the same avenue of attack pursued over the previous decades by Ross, Short, Twysden and others. The only substantive difference is that orthodox Anglicans like Ross cast the new philosophers as Puritans, while Stubbe – himself a former Independent – turns them into papists. He accordingly accuses the virtuosi of the Royal Society of putting into practice the advice of the friar and novator Tommaso Campanella for ‘reducing England unto Popery’ by, among other means, ‘scatter[ing] abroad the Poyson of Desire of Innovation, and an earnestness to be instructed in the knowledge of Learning, namely in such new Sciences and Arts’.Footnote 48 For Stubbe, innovation names the conjoined threats of intellectual novelty and religious subversion.
Stubbe was among the most vituperative combatants in the controversies over the new philosophy. But his views were hardly atypical.Footnote 49 From Ross to Stubbe, the concept of innovation cast the danger of the new science in starkly political terms. The chymical physicians and fellows of the Royal Society claimed that they merely took issue with the Aristotelian orthodoxy, but many of their opponents were not convinced. They rejoined that to attack Aristotelianism was to attack the basis of all authority, royal and ecclesiastical no less than academic. On their side was the simple fact of contemporary usage: the language of innovation belonged primarily to religious and political controversy. When the concept came to science and medicine, it retained the stigma of heresy and rebellion. The precise threat looked different to different writers: Puritans and separatists to Ross and Short; Parliamentarian rebels to Twysden; Catholic saboteurs to Stubbe. What all shared, though, was a strong hostility toward innovation that extended from religion and politics to the constellation of intellectual movements that has come to be called the Scientific Revolution.
Innovation and experiment
According to Godin, this suspicion of innovation was ‘shared by every man of science’ in the seventeenth century, virtually without exception.Footnote 50 But, I will now show, this view is mistaken. Certainly the negative perception held by men like Ross, Twysden and Stubbe was dominant. Yet a surprising number of physicians and philosophers cast the concept in a more positive light. It is no coincidence that most, if not all, of these figures were associated with the new currents sweeping through scientific and medical thought. Many were fellows of the Royal Society, others were supporters of the Society of Chymical Physicians, still others had no clear institutional affiliation but were devotees of experimental philosophy or chymical medicine. There is a risk of overstating the lines that divided Aristotelians and Galenists from the so-called ‘innovators’. The new philosophers owed more to the Aristotelian tradition than they often cared to admit, and, conversely, many learned physicians incorporated doctrines associated with the new philosophy and iatrochemistry. There was substantial overlap at the institutional level too: some of the earliest members of the Royal Society, including Jonathan Goddard, William Petty, Christopher Merrett and Walter Charleton, also belonged to the College of Physicians.Footnote 51 As I have argued, however, the language of innovation hardly allowed for such subtleties. For most polemicists, its purpose was to emphasize the dangers of the new. But the thinkers examined below saw things quite differently. Under the aegis of experiment, they reclaimed innovation as an instrument of progress in philosophy and medicine.
Several of the earliest instances of the word ‘innovation’ in seventeenth-century science appear in the works of Charleton. While the connotations are not always unambiguously positive, it is clear that he did not share the prevailing antipathy toward the concept. In essays appended to his 1649–50 translations of Helmont – the first into English – Charleton mounted a lively defence of his author’s ‘Heterodoxicall’ thought and ‘Non-adhaerence to Antiquity’. In one prefatory address, he professed reluctance to vindicate ‘any of [Helmont’s] Innovations’ on the ground that the chymist did a much more convincing job of refuting the ancients than establishing a systematic theory of his own. Yet he immediately added that the innovation at issue here – Helmont’s attack on the Galenic doctrine of catarrh – was ‘sufficiently justifiable’ and, indeed, well overdue.Footnote 52 For Charleton, Helmont’s innovations are a necessary precursor to the advancement of medical knowledge.
Charleton spoke positively of the concept in his own works too. In the philosophical dialogue The Immortality of the Human Soul (1657), he ventriloquized the conventional scorn for innovation only to refute it in no uncertain terms.Footnote 53 When Athanasius (Charleton’s stand-in) delivers a glowing report of ‘the most considerable Novelties in Naturall Philosophy, Medicine, the Optiques, Astronomy and Geometry’ discovered by the English in recent years, Lucretius – representing John Evelyn – responds with scepticism. ‘Why may we not refer these Innovations’, he asks tartly, ‘rather to the English Humour of affecting new Opinions, than to any reall defects or errors in the Doctrine of the Ancients?’Footnote 54 Lucretius does not share Athanasius’s enthusiasm for novelty. For him, innovation points to the folly of the moderns rather than the errors of the ancients.
But Charleton quickly makes clear where he himself stands. Athanasius and the third interlocutor, Isodicastes, roundly reject Lucretius’s prejudice against innovation. Lifting their arguments directly from Bacon’s ‘Of Innovations’, they insist ‘that it hath been the Reformation, that drew on the Change; not the desire of Change, which pretendeth the Reformation’, that ‘they have precisely followed that counsel of the Scripture, which injoynes us, to make a stand upon the Ancient way, and then look about us, and discover, what is the straight and right way, and so to walk in it’, and ‘that those who too much reverence Old times, often become a scorn to the New’.Footnote 55 These were precisely the maxims that Bacon cited to justify innovation.Footnote 56 Charleton marshals Bacon’s considerable authority to vindicate innovation in the sciences – natural philosophy, medicine and mathematics – from the usual suspicion of newness.
Like Bacon, though, Charleton did not want to depart from the ancient way altogether. He adopted a self-consciously eclectic method, subjecting ancient and modern wisdom alike to the tests of ‘Reason’ and ‘Experiment’. The result was a lifelong effort to reconcile ‘ancient textual and modern empirical knowledge’.Footnote 57 In The Immortality of the Human Soul as in his other natural-theological tracts, Charleton strove to put the new philosophy – most notably an eclectic atomism derived from Epicurus, Gassendi, Digby and others – to the service of Christian doctrine. His rhapsodic praise of English innovations sits somewhat uneasily alongside the customary appeal to the authority of antiquity (‘that which is the most antient, is likely to be the most true’).Footnote 58 Although he does not fully resolve this tension, Charleton gestures toward a solution that others would develop in the years to come: that the criteria of truth in natural philosophy and religion are not entirely the same. Matters of human learning should be judged by the light of reason and experience – ‘by right reason, by autoptical or sensible demonstration, and by multiplied experience’ – while ‘the Antiquity of Religious principles’ is itself a strong argument for their validity.Footnote 59 Thus might philosophical innovation lend support to as venerable a theological doctrine as the immortality of the human soul.
Just a few years later, another sympathetic treatment of innovation in the sciences came from the very man who inspired Charleton’s Lucretius: his friend and fellow virtuoso John Evelyn. Unlike his literary proxy, Evelyn – an early devotee of the new philosophy and a founding member of the Royal Society – was hardly a sceptic of novelty.Footnote 60 Indeed, in his 1661 translation of Naudé’s Instructions Concerning Erecting of a Library (first published in French in 1627), Evelyn conscripted the novatores to the intellectual project of the early Royal Society. As we have seen, Naudé was among the French writers who first named and shamed the novatores. But Naudé, like Evelyn, was no dogmatic. His ideal library includes not only the ancients but also the ‘Novators’ (as Evelyn translates ‘Novateurs’), namely Telesio, Patrizi, Campanella, Bacon, Gilbert, Bruno, Gassendi, Basson, Goméz Pereira, Carpenter and Gorlaeus.Footnote 61 These are the same figures whom Naudé had attacked in 1625 for subverting the edifice of Aristotelian learning. Here, though, he sounds remarkably broad-minded. ‘Neither are you to omit all those which have innovated [innové] or chang’d any thing in the Sciences’, he instructs,
for it is properly to flatter the slavery, and imbecillity of our wit, to conceal the small knowledge which we have of these Authors, under the disdain which we ought to have, because they oppose the Antients, and for that they have learnedly examin’d what others were used to receive, as by Tradition.Footnote 62
Disdain for innovation, Naudé insists, is no excuse for ignorance. He has nothing but contempt for those who side reflexively with the ancients and cling to tradition for its own sake. Through his translation, Evelyn assimilated Naudé’s injunction to learn from the innovators to the mission of the Royal Society, so named for the first time in print in the preface to the volume.Footnote 63
At the same time, a series of Helmontian medical writers aligned innovation not just with the new philosophy in general but with the practice of experiment in particular. What the Galenists called an innovation, they argued, was really a new programme of experimental science that would improve medicine and natural philosophy alike. Noah Biggs (likely a pseudonym) satirized the Galenists’ fears of ‘an invasion and innovation into the Eutopian Empire of Galenical heathenish Physick’, while William Simpson mocked the scholastics’ peevish rage at the ‘innovators in Philosophy’ who ‘indeavour … to bereave a man of his beloved Notions’.Footnote 64 Each provides instead his own account of what this alleged innovation is really all about: ‘constituting more clear, natural and experimentall foundations and principles’ (Biggs); ‘ground[ing] upon an experimental Basis’ (Simpson).Footnote 65 Even as they dismissed their opponents’ feverish accusations, these writers suggested that innovation might not be such a bad thing after all. To innovate means replacing the old Galenic dogmas with the empirical principles of experiment. For defenders as well as critics of the new philosophy, experimentalism was both the source of innovation and an innovation itself.
This was a connection drawn too by one of the most influential practitioners of, and advocates for, the new philosophy: Robert Boyle. In his dialogue The Sceptical Chymist (1661), Boyle’s stubborn Aristotelian, Themistius, rails against ‘the whimseys of Chymists and other Modern Innovators’. His main criticism is that Aristotle’s theories are the product of deliberate reasoning applied to the wisdom of the ages, while the innovators’ hypotheses are entirely insubstantial, ‘built perchance but upon two or three Experiments’ and soon ‘destroyed by a third or fourth’.Footnote 66 Boyle adopts the same strategy as Charleton and the chymical physicians. By attributing the attack on innovation and experiment to the dogmatic Aristotelian, he suggests that this is in fact exactly how science ought to be done. After all, in the preface Boyle professes himself to be ‘a great Lover of Chymical Experiments’.Footnote 67 Themistius speaks only to be discredited – certainly when it comes to his distaste for the experimental method, and quite possibly in the case of his hostility to innovation too.
As the title of The Sceptical Chymist indicates, however, Boyle casts a sceptical eye on the chymists as well as the Aristotelians. His ‘addictedness to make Chymical Experiments’, as he himself puts it, is never in doubt, although he criticizes many supposed authorities for credulously accepting the validity of experiments ‘which questionless they never try’d’.Footnote 68 But while Boyle endorses the chymists’ methods and medicines, he rejects their (or at least the Paracelsians’) theory of matter and generation. The central thrust of The Sceptical Chymist is to refute both the Aristotelian doctrine of the four elements and the alchemical theory of the three principles in favour of a corpuscular theory of matter.Footnote 69 Boyle consequently maintains (via the freethinking arbiter of the dialogue, Eleutherius) that ‘some Chymists, and other modern Innovators in Philosophy’ are as mistaken as the Aristotelians.Footnote 70 Even as Boyle vindicates the chymists’ experimental method, he leaves the idea of innovation – associated with the dubious tenets of the Paracelsians – in some disrepute.
Boyle displayed the same ambivalence two years later in Some Considerations Touching the Usefulnesse of Experimental Naturall Philosophy (1663), this time in the context of medicine.Footnote 71 Here, Boyle at first seems to come down in favour of innovation. Reflecting on the many difficulties that beset the art of medicine – acknowledged by Galen and Paracelsus alike – he conjectures that his fictional addressee, Pyrophilus, ‘would perhaps think it no great presumption, if a man should attempt to innovate in any part of it, and consequently even in the Methodus medendi [the Galenic method of healing]’. After all, the entire second part of the treatise is devoted to the proposition that natural philosophy, and chymistry in particular, can improve every branch of medicine. Yet the moment he raises the possibility of innovation, Boyle immediately draws back. ‘Yet Pyrophilus’, he continues, ‘I am much too young, too unlearned, and too unexperienced, to dare to be dogmaticall in a matter of so great moment’. After protesting his own insufficiency, Boyle goes on to praise the learned physicians and condemn ‘the indiscreet practise of our common Chymists and Helmontians, that bitterly and indiscriminately raile at the Methodists’.Footnote 72 This ambivalence reflects the oft-remarked ‘nescience’, ‘diffidence’ or ‘epistemic modesty’ of Boyle’s natural philosophy.Footnote 73 By declining to take a side, he rejects doctrinal certainty in favour of experimental observation. This was the stance he adopted in The Sceptical Chymist, too: an unbiased arbiter of the controversies between the Aristotelians and the innovators, here represented respectively by the Galenists and the Helmontians.
But Boyle does not leave the matter there. No sooner has he criticized the chymists than he introduces yet another turn. ‘And yet, Pyrophilus’, he again interjects, laying out two reasons to justify innovating the art of medicine. First, the Galenists or ‘Methodists’ themselves acknowledge ‘the incompleatnesse of their Art’. And, second, some of the most renowned physicians in England disagree about how to treat ‘divers particular diseases’.Footnote 74 Given the incomplete and fractured state of Galenic medicine, Boyle suggests that the experimental natural philosopher is indeed licensed to innovate the methodus medendi after all. He consequently calls for ‘an impartial disquisition’ – presumably conducted by an impartial investigator such as Boyle himself – as to ‘whether … the new Anatomical discoveries … do not by innovating divers things in Pathology, require some alterations & amendments in the Methodus Medendi’.Footnote 75 New discoveries demand new methods. But Boyle hedges even here. Just as he seems about to conclude that not merely particular aspects or branches of medicine but its foundational method ought to be innovated, he hesitates again. ‘But in this particular, I dare yet affirme nothing’, he says, practically disclaiming his own argument.Footnote 76 Boyle would ultimately come down strongly against the Galenic methodus, although in a treatise that never saw print.Footnote 77 In his effort to mediate between the Galenists and the Helmontians, however, Boyle remains characteristically even-handed. He repeatedly points toward the benefit, even the necessity, of innovation, yet he ultimately pulls back from an unambiguous endorsement.
That ambiguity made Boyle a plausible ally for both sides in the escalating controversy over chymical medicine. In a series of pamphlets published in 1665–6, both supporters and opponents of the Society of Chymical Physicians cited his Considerations on their own behalf.Footnote 78 At issue was precisely the question about which Boyle equivocated: whether to innovate the methodus medendi. For Marchamont Nedham, the answer was a resounding yes. The title page of his Medela medicinae (1665) declares his intention to rescue England’s physicians ‘from the Pedantism of old Authors and present Dictators’ – namely, the Galenists. To this end, Nedham aligns chymical medicine with the new philosophy. Among the ‘new Inventors’ unjustly scorned by ‘the present Masters of several Professions’ he lists not only Paracelsus and Helmont but also many of the usual novatores – Galileo, Descartes, Harvey, Tycho Brahe – alongside other adherents of the new philosophy, not least of all ‘that noble Philosopher Mr Boyle’ himself.Footnote 79 This is no mere lip service. Nedham peppers his tract with approving quotations of Boyle’s Considerations, including one drawn from the passage that I discussed above. ‘Mr. Boyle saith plainly’, Nedham begins, before reproducing two long sentences that, in their original context, are anything but plain: Boyle’s argument that we may indeed depart from the ‘Methodists’ given the acknowledged deficiencies of their art and the fact that they disagree among themselves, followed by his call for ‘an impartial disquisition’ into whether recent innovations in pathology require the methodus medendi to be altered. Nedham’s point is to appropriate Boyle’s authority for the Helmontian programme, here described as a wholesale repudiation of ‘the antient Methods and Medicins’.Footnote 80
Unsurprisingly, Nedham’s tract provoked a furious response from the Galenists. They attacked not only its author and arguments, but also his use – or, they claimed, his misuse – of Boyle himself. Twysden, for instance, complained that Nedham distorted Boyle’s views by making him out to be ‘an Enemy to Method’ and even ‘mangling [his] words’ altogether.Footnote 81 So Twysden sets out to correct the record. He cites Boyle’s own admission that he is ‘not … an enemy to Method in Physick’ along with several other passages criticizing the chymists and treating the learned physicians with respect.Footnote 82 In closing, Twysden judges that he can do no better than give Boyle the last word. Returning to the same passage that Nedham had cited, Twysden paraphrases Boyle’s qualified endorsement of innovation – ‘perhaps, without presumption, some innovation might be made in the Methodus Medendi’ – before quoting his protestation of humility (‘I am much too young, too unlearned and too unexperienced’) and criticism of ‘our common Chymists and Helmontians’ at length.Footnote 83 No mention is made of Boyle’s subsequent call for an impartial disquisition. In the end, Twysden was as selective a reader as Nedham. Each writer excerpted a portion of Boyle’s deeply equivocal reflections on innovating the methodus medendi to support his own side. They saw in Boyle only what they wanted to see.
It is notable, though, that even an avowed defender of ‘the ancient method of physick’ such as Twysden might admit, via Boyle, ‘that perhaps, without presumption, some innovation might be made in the Methodus Medendi’.Footnote 84 ‘Perhaps’, ‘some’, ‘might’ – this is no ringing endorsement. Yet the mere fact that Twysden allows for innovation at all is quite unusual, especially coming in a work whose title proclaims its author’s devotion to medicina veterum, ‘the medicine of the ancients’. It was Twysden, as we saw above, who accused the chymical physicians of pursuing ‘that dangerous way of innovating through subscriptions of Hands’, casting the concept as an existential threat not just to the College of Physicians but to the Stuart monarchy itself.Footnote 85 Simply entertaining the prospect of innovation seems antithetical to his entire project. Yet, if only thanks to Boyle, he did so nonetheless. By the mid-1660s, it was evidently possible for both critics and defenders of ancient learning to disentangle the idea of innovation from the twin threats of sedition and heresy.
Between philosophy and divinity
As early as 1640, John Wilkins had drawn a corresponding distinction between philosophical and theological ‘Noveltie’. While divinity is founded on the infallible truths of scripture, he argues, philosophy ‘is made up of nothing else’ but novelty, for it ‘receives addition from every dayes experiment’.Footnote 86 Like many a new philosopher, Wilkins advocates an experimental programme by which learning is continually augmented through empirical observation and discovery. This is what he calls ‘novelty’, although – perhaps unsurprisingly, given its associations with vanity and frivolity – he ultimately draws back from a full-throated endorsement of the term.Footnote 87 Still, Wilkins makes a clear case for distinguishing novelty in philosophy from novelty in religion. This was an argument reiterated in the Restoration. In The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), Joseph Glanvill interrupts his attack on Aristotle and his defence of the new philosophy to caution ‘that nothing is here intended in favour of novelty in Divinity’. On the contrary, he maintains that ‘we may imbrace what is new in Philosophy, while we reject them in Theologie’. Novelty advances philosophy but subverts theology because the latter was already perfect at its inception – ‘Gospel-Light began in it Zenith’ – while the former is ‘scarse past the Dawn’. Glanvill consequently identifies theology with the ‘Ancient Truths’ of the past and philosophy with the ‘New Lights’ of the future.Footnote 88
If philosophical novelty might be divorced from its theological counterpart, however, the line was not so easily drawn in the case of innovation. To be sure, ‘novelty’ was often used interchangeably with ‘innovation’: both words flowed freely from the pens of polemicists. Yet ‘novelty’ also had a semantic range that ‘innovation’ generally did not. While the former ranged from fashion to philosophy, the latter was largely confined to religion and politics. A glance at the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions supports this impression. The word ‘novelty’ appears some two dozen times between the first issue in 1665 and the end of the seventeenth century, mostly in a positive sense. ‘Innovation’, by contrast, does not seem to appear until the second decade of the eighteenth century, and even then it remains something to be avoided or at least mitigated.Footnote 89 The concept, of course, had its defenders, as we saw in the previous section. But did the arguments of Charleton, Boyle, and the chymical physicians shift the dominant understanding of the concept? Could innovation really be cleared of the stigma of heresy? This section takes up these questions, examining how and for what ends innovation in philosophy was differentiated from innovation in divinity.
The basic contours of the argument generally echoed Wilkins’s and Glanvill’s treatments of novelty: philosophy and divinity were categorically different, and so innovating the former did not necessarily implicate the latter. This, at least, was the case made by the latitudinarian Simon Patrick in the early 1660s. In A Brief Account of the New Sect of Latitude-Men (1662), Patrick sets out to vindicate the so-called ‘latitude-men’ from the charge of heresy, a charge founded in no small measure on their enthusiasm for the new philosophy. He spends several pages mocking the Aristotelians and effusively praising the discoveries of the new philosophers in astronomy, physics, microscopy, chymistry, and anatomy. Toward the end of the pamphlet, he pauses to consider the objection that we have heard from Stubbe and others: that Aristotelianism and Anglicanism were so ‘entwisted’ (Stubbe’s word) that to innovate the former could not but alter the latter.Footnote 90 ‘But me thinks I hear some men say’, Patrick begins, ‘all innovations are dangerous; Philosophy and Divinity are so inter-woven by the School-men, that it cannot be safe to separate them; new Philosophy will bring in new Divinity’. To this he offers a simple rejoinder: ‘True Philosophy can never hurt sound Divinity’.Footnote 91 Against the scholastics, Patrick insists not only that philosophical innovation will not overthrow divinity, but also that it will actively serve true religion by supplying the English church with the natural knowledge needed to combat its enemies in a new age of learning. His purpose is to enlist the new philosophy in a natural theology governed by reason.Footnote 92 Even as he strips innovation of its theological implications, then, Patrick puts the concept right back into the heat of ecclesiastical controversy – but now on the side of orthodoxy.
A similar argument appeared in Thomas Sprat’s influential and controversial History of the Royal-Society (1667).Footnote 93 In the third book, Sprat advances a limited defence of the innovation to be effected by the new experimental philosophy. Like Patrick, he contends that the dissemination of the new philosophy will not harm but rather benefit religion and the church as well as every sphere of civil life: education, the trades, medicine and even ‘the Universal Interest of the whole Kingdom’.Footnote 94 He begins with education, and it is here that he invokes the idea of innovation. After refuting the charge that introducing experimental learning to England’s schools would impair the arts and sciences – including the language arts, morality, politics, history, mathematics and logic – Sprat concludes that in natural philosophy alone ‘there will be any alteration made’. ‘And after all the Innovation, of which they can be suspected’, he writes of the ‘new Experiments’, ‘we find nothing will be indanger’d, but only the physics of Antiquity’.Footnote 95 Sprat’s is no wholesale defence of innovation. He insists that experimental philosophy will merely overthrow one particular part of one particular division of learning: Aristotelian physics. But that narrow focus, I believe, is precisely the point. By reserving the term for a single branch of philosophy, Sprat distinguishes innovation in physics from innovation in other areas of learning, let alone religion or politics. This distinction in turn allows Sprat to follow in the footsteps of Charleton, Wilkins, Glanvill, Patrick and others, reconciling the new philosophy with both institutional authority – the church, universities and monarchy – and theological doctrine. Experimental philosophy becomes the foundation for ‘a rational Religion’ and ‘an ornament and defence’ for the English church.Footnote 96
It is no surprise to find the new philosophers and their allies parsing the idea of innovation in ways that would vindicate them from accusations of heresy and sedition. But the question remains: did they convince anyone beyond their fellow travellers that innovation could be a good thing, in science and medicine if not in religion or politics? We have already seen that at least one Galenist and champion of the ancients, John Twysden, seemed to agree that the methodus medendi might legitimately be innovated. This is all the more surprising given that he himself used the word ‘innovation’ to associate the chymical physicians with the spirit of revolution. Twysden, though, was not the only critic of the new philosophy to suggest that the concept might indeed be separated from the threat of religious and political change. Perhaps the clearest statement of this view came from the figure commonly credited with the century’s ‘most intelligent criticism of the new philosophy’: Meric Casaubon.Footnote 97 Casaubon, an Anglican divine, gestured toward the standard line of attack in his 1669 polemic against ‘natural experimental philosophie’. In response to Sprat’s claim (as he paraphrases it) ‘to abhor all innovations in [religion]’, Casaubon answers that the attempt to reconcile experimental philosophy with Christian theology in fact looks an awful lot like ‘a new Religion’.Footnote 98 For Sprat, the new epistemology of experiment provided a means to justify Anglican orthodoxy; for Casaubon, the result was practically the definition of heterodoxy.
Just a few years earlier, however, Casaubon had conceded that new philosophy and new religion were not quite the same after all. In the course of an exchange with the Catholic controversialist John Sergeant, Casaubon found himself named ‘an absolute stranger to Science’ for his supposedly blind faith in ancient authors.Footnote 99 Keen to rebut the accusation, he quickly responded that he in fact harboured no prejudice against new things, at least when they are justified. ‘I am not so addicted to old things’, Casaubon protests, ‘but I can embrace new, with thanks and congratulation, when I shall see just cause’. It is in this context that he takes up the question of innovation. ‘However’, Casaubon continues, ‘though some innovation in matter of humane Learning, or Science, may be born; yet in such a fundamental of Religion … no man truly sensible of Religion, but will abhorr it’.Footnote 100 His basic premise is the same as it would be in 1669: innovation in religion is to be abhorred. But his begrudging allowance of innovation in human learning cuts against his later view, namely that the new philosophy (at least as Sprat conceived it) would bring with it a new religion. Evidently needled by Sergeant’s criticism, Casaubon drew a line between secular and religious innovation that he was otherwise quite eager to blur.
Casaubon’s concession points to an emerging, if still quite tenuous, demarcation of innovation in philosophy from innovation in divinity. Further evidence for this conceptual division comes from a variety of quarters, including John Aubrey’s 1685 preface to his Natural History of Wiltshire, the sixth volume of the popular epistolary pseudo-history Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy (1693), and two English translations of Nicolas Malebranche’s De la recherche de la vérité (1674–5), both published in 1694.Footnote 101 Malebranche’s views are especially revealing. Like Wilkins and Glanvill, he argues that the search for truth requires different epistemic principles in different domains: reason in philosophy, tradition in divinity. That is why antiquity is the surest guide in matters of divinity, but ‘in Matters of Philosophy … we ought to love Novelty’. But this is a distinction, Malebranche believes, that most people mistake:
They confound Novelty with Errors, and Antiquity with Truth. Luther, Calvin, and others have introduc’d Innovations, and have been mistaken, therefore Galileo, Harvey, and Descartes are mistaken in their Discoveries … For this Reason it is, that they indifferently, bestow that Odious name of Innovators [novateur], both upon Hereticks and new Philosophers.Footnote 102
It is a fallacy, Malebranche believes, to judge theological and philosophical truths by the same standard. By allotting antiquity to the former and novelty to the latter, Malebranche redeems philosophical innovation from the stigma of heresy.
Yet there is a double irony here. First, English Protestant readers would be unlikely to agree that Luther and Calvin’s innovations were ‘mistaken’. At least in translation, the passage might well have achieved the opposite of what Malebranche intended: to raise the question whether theology ought to be guided by novelty too. Second, like the English natural philosophers discussed above, Malebranche differentiates philosophy from divinity only (in the words of one scholar) ‘to attempt their ultimate reunification’. His doctrine of occasionalism famously holds that God is the only true cause of every motion in the natural world, and consequently ‘Natural Causes are not true Causes, they are only Occasional ones, which act merely through the Power and Efficacy of God’.Footnote 103 Malebranche, then, continues the pattern traced through this essay: innovation is secularized for religious ends. Freed from the taint of heresy, the new natural philosophy can safely be assimilated to Christian orthodoxy. As we have seen, however, one writer’s ancient truth was another’s new religion. So it was that Malebranche quickly earned the odious name of innovator (novateur) himself.Footnote 104 The idea of innovation remained in tension with the religious orthodoxies to which it was conscripted, Protestant and Catholic alike.
There is no space here to consider in any kind of detail the developments of the next century. But the evidence suggests that the views of the new philosophers and chymical physicians shaped future treatments of the concept. Medical writers in particular had recourse to the same arguments, striving to ground ‘Innovations’ in ‘experimental Observations and demonstrable Principles’ and to vindicate ‘Innovations in Physick’ from the Aristotelians and Galenists’ ‘religious Horrour of Novelty’.Footnote 105 The distinction between philosophical and religious innovation was further affirmed by a biographer of Bacon and by two separate reprintings of Patrick’s defence of the new philosophy, one by the bookseller John Dunton and the other in a medical treatise.Footnote 106 In short, there is good reason to believe that the secular rehabilitation of innovation was among the legacies of Restoration science.
Even in secular learning, however, the idea of innovation continued to evoke the prospect of religious change. Probably the most vivid example of this view came not from a sceptic of new philosophy or new religion but from an English Dissenter: Robert Robinson, Baptist minister and author of what may well be the most extended discussion of innovation written before 1800. In his 1774 epistolary essay ‘On Innovation’, Robinson extols the virtues of his subject in learning and the practical arts. ‘It is the soul of science, and the life of a thousand arts’, he effuses. For Robinson, innovation is what sustains the ongoing progress of knowledge. ‘The truth is’, he maintains, ‘human knowledge is progressive, and there has been a gradual improvement in every thing; this age knows many things the last was ignorant of, the next will know many unknown to this, and hence the necessity of frequent innovations’.Footnote 107 One could hardly find a better statement of the Enlightenment idea of human progress. Yet the whole point of his essay is to make the case for innovation in religion and politics too. ‘If innovations in the state and in the schools were necessary’, he writes approvingly of the English Reformation, ‘they were more so still in the church’.Footnote 108 This is not merely a historical defence. Robinson’s purpose is to justify the Dissenting ministers’ petition for relief from the requirement that they subscribe to the doctrinal articles of the Church of England.Footnote 109 Even if the petitioners are ‘innovators’, Robinson argues, ‘innovation is neither for rain from the nature of things in general, nor from the british constitution in particular’.Footnote 110 The secular notion of innovation-as-progress becomes an argument for altering the constitution of the church and state – precisely what it had been formulated to oppose. Robinson’s essay suggests that the idea of innovation was not so easily divested of its radical connotations. Well into the eighteenth century, innovation in secular learning remained shadowed by its religious double.
Conclusion
Tracking the language of innovation through Restoration science and medicine shows that, pace Levitin, the conflict between ancients and moderns was not merely ‘an irrelevant side issue that flared up for a short time in the 1690s’.Footnote 111 Instead, as scholars have long recognized, it was a recurring theme in the history of ideas from at least the Renaissance.Footnote 112 This was certainly true of the debates around the new philosophy. Self-professed defenders of the ancients were quick to tar their rivals with the brush of innovation, while many of the alleged innovators were indeed critical of Aristotle and other ancient authorities. To defend innovation was to take the side of the moderns, the novatores. Levitin is surely right to note that even the novatores owed much to the wisdom of the ancients. Yet they were nonetheless defined, as their name suggests, by the rhetoric of newness. It was to vindicate this self-consciously new philosophy that a series of English writers sought to secularize the idea of innovation. But the evidence I have examined suggests that the line between philosophy and divinity was far from stable. For its critics and, if Robinson is any indication, even for some of its defenders, the newly secularized concept of innovation was as likely to herald new heterodoxies as it was to support the old orthodoxy. The point is not that these categories – ‘ancients’ and ‘moderns’, ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘heterodoxy’ – were meaningless, but that they were variously constructed and contested for specific, often polemical, ends.Footnote 113 ‘Innovation’ was among the key concepts used to draw those distinctions, at first to the detriment of the new philosophy and then, increasingly, in its defence. It is here, in the heat of seventeenth-century philosophical and theological controversy, that the story of innovation and science begins.
Acknowledgements
My thanks go to Hunter Heyck, Kathleen Crowther and the journal’s two anonymous reviewers for their incisive comments on earlier versions of this essay.
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