Margaret Cavendish was a writer notorious for a number of reasons, very few of them positive. The nickname that her contemporaries bestowed upon her was "Mad Meg", owing to certain peculiarities in her personality and means of expressing herself. She was the first woman ever to be invited to attend a meeting of the Royal Society of London, the members and methods of which she despised. (Her distaste for them was matched only by their distaste for her.) The flights of fancy that she wrote were very likely only endured by people who surrounded her because of her high social standing. Today she's viewed as a woman far ahead of her time, but during her time, she was a curiosity at best and a frustrating nuisance at worst.
The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World (hereafter referred to for brevity's sake as The Blazing World) is one such (arguably tedious) flight of fancy, originally published alongside Cavendish's Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy. The latter work detailed her view on the way that science ought to be practiced, and involved a scathing criticism of Robert Hooke's Micrographia and experimental natural philosophy in general. That was nothing out of the ordinary, and nothing that hadn't been done before; but The Blazing World is comparatively fascinating because of the form that it takes—that of a science fiction novel, well before that genre was established and hundreds of years before the term was even coined.
Of course, when it was published it wasn't seen as revolutionary so much as it was passed over as simply another example of Cavendish's incorrigible strangeness. (And it is undeniably strange.) But its strangeness makes it an interesting relic of its time: as Cavendish was a woman writer when there were not very many woman writers, it can be taken as an example of the female perspective frustrated by a society that seeks to stifle its expression attempting to make itself heard. It also demonstrates a curious dilemma common to much early modern fiction—the distinction between fiction and fact; in the novel, Cavendish herself appears as a character, with all her real-life peculiarities, in a highly fictionalised setting. (In the novel, however, the criticism that the real-life Cavendish endured is glossed over, and her nobility exaggerated.) Most importantly for its genre, The Blazing World satirised the scientific practices of its day, in the guise of fiction, and in the name of changing opinions (or at least making existing opinions more scornful). Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels is a better example of this technique employed to greater effect, but The Blazing World was its precursor.
The satirical-scientific element of The Blazing World is what I'll be focusing on here, though first it will involve a digression into what exactly was going on in the scientific community in the seventeenth century.
The emergence of early modern science fiction (anachronistically speaking) was roughly contemporaneous with the advent of new approaches to natural philosophy, and new technology to go with them. Experimentalism came into vogue with the written work of Francis Bacon, to some extent replacing the wholly theoretical approach of earlier science with empirical data and experimental demonstrations of theories; in accordance with the new emphasis on data collection, new instruments were developed to measure and observe phenomena with greater precision and in greater detail. (It could also be said that the influence worked in the opposite direction as well—better technology led to deeper investigations of phenomena after it became possible to observe them). The invention of the telescope allowed for observation of far-off celestial phenomena, and the subsequent invention of the microscope using similar optical principles made it possible for scientists to observe miniscule things.
But not everyone felt that such experimentalism or empiricism had a place at all in scientific practices, which had, in the view of some, been progressing quite well enough based on theory alone, and had been doing so for thousands of years. For some anti-experimentalist writers of science fiction, the new science and technology simultaneously presented ends to use imaginatively—discovering new worlds in the cosmos seen with telescopes, and so far unexamined tiny 'worlds' seen through microscopes—and an experimental means to rebel against. Nowhere is this reaction more evident than in The Blazing World.
The philosophical reasoning behind experimentalism in scientific practices is perhaps most clearly articulated by Francis Bacon in the preface to his New Organon, published in 1620 (some forty-six years prior to the publication of The Blazing World):
Those who have taken upon them to lay down the law of nature as a thing already searched out and understood, whether they have spoken in simple assurance or professional affectation, have therein done philosophy and the sciences great injury. For as they have been successful in inducing belief, so they have been effective in quenching and stopping enquiry; and have done more harm by spoiling and putting an end to other men's efforts than good by their own. (Organon, 143)
That is, Bacon felt that to practice science with dogmatic, pre-determined theories in mind—rather than tentative theories that could be altered when new evidence demonstrated that they were incorrect—inhibited real understanding. This is a not-so-subtle jab at natural philosophy prior to Bacon, which was nothing if not dogmatic. For instance, a large part of Aristotelian natural philosophy revolved around distinguishing between sublunary (terrestrial) and superlunary (celestial) objects and dealing with them separately, as though each behaved differently from the other by its very nature (where its nature was tied up inextricably with its position in the heavens). There was little experimental proof to corroborate the conclusions that were drawn from Aristotelian cosmological principles (e.g. that the stars were embedded in a series of concentric crystalline spheres); instead, conclusions were drawn from reason alone (clearly the stars are embedded in something, or else they would not remain in their correct places in the sky), and were accepted as indisputable by natural philosophers for centuries.
For Bacon, this was unacceptable: in his view, blindly following the traditions of one's field instead of questioning them "serves rather to fix and give stability to the errors which have their foundations in commonly received notions than to help the search after truth. So it does more harm than good" (Aphorisms, 145). Similarly, practicing science with an eye to the existence of certain unequivocal truths at the bottom of everything, waiting to be uncovered, is just as unproductive as considering "the law of nature as a thing already searched out and understood": "[a]s the sciences which we now have do not help us in finding out new works, so neither does the logic which we now have help us in finding out new sciences" (Aphorisms, 145).
To that end, new scientific methods were as necessary as the new scientific philosophy outlined above. Bacon concedes that just as reason alone is inadequate to understanding nature, so too is the unaided eye or hand inadequate to observing nature in any meaningful detail. Since "[n]either the naked hand nor the understanding left to itself can effect much", Bacon says that "[i]t is by instruments and helps that the work is done, which are as much wanted for the understanding as for the hand" (Aphorisms, 144). Where "instruments of the mind"—presumably scientific methods designed to avoid the dogmatism that plagued earlier natural philosophy—"supply either suggestions for the understanding or for cautions", the "instruments of the hand either give motion or guide it" (Aphorisms, 144-5). These "instruments of the hand" are the new technologies that were being developed and honed even as Bacon was writing, undoubtedly the most important (or at least prominent) of which were the telescope and the microscope.
This instrumental aspect of Bacon's approach to natural philosophy was appropriated, applied to microscopy, and put into practice by Hooke in his Micrographia. In Hooke's writing, there is a great deal of emphasis on the microscope as a tool for ameliorating the naked eye, not for replacing it as an observational tool. (It is a very apologetic approach that seems to pander specifically to those who would be inclined to be suspicious of the new technology, about whom more presently.) Hooke identifies two causes for "infirmities of the Senses" that do not allow for us to observe everything that nature has to offer: it is "either from the disproportion of the object to the Organ, whereby an infinite number of things can never enter into them, or else from error in the Perception, that many things, which come within their reach, are not received in a right manner" (Micrographia, 151). That is, things are either too small or too large to be seen clearly or at all with the naked eye (these are the things that can be observed through microscopes and telescopes), or things that the human eye is simply not equipped to observe (for instance, that white light is comprised of the entire spectrum of colours). Hooke also makes mention of the apparent fact that human senses are "in many particulars much outdone by those of other Creatures" (e.g., a hawk can apprehend the movement of its prey from hundreds of feet away, where such a movement would not be discernable to the human eye); this points nips in the bud a potential counter-argument that things our senses are unable to pick up are things that ought not be sensed at all.
The cure for these sensory deficiencies, following after Baconian experimental natural philosophy, is to use instruments to make up for them. Writes Hooke,
The next care to be taken, in respect of the Senses, is a supplying of their infirmities with Instruments, and, as it were, the adding of artificial Organs to the natural; this in one of them has been of late years accomplisht with prodigious benefit to all sorts of useful knowledge, by the invention of Optical Glasses. By the means of Telescopes, there is nothing so far distant but may be represented to our view; and by the help of Microscopes, there is nothing so small, as to escape our inquiry; hence there is a new visible World discovered to the understanding. [...] By this the Earth it self, which lyes so neer us, under our feet, shews quite a new thing to us, and in every little particle of its matter, we now behold almost as great a variety of Creatures, as we were able before to reckon up in the whole Universe it self. (Micrographia, 151)
This point—where there are no dogmatic prevailing scientific theories to follow, where reason alone as a means toward scientific insight is overshadowed by the importance of experiment and empirical data gleaned therefrom, and where human senses are improved by mechanical instruments to the extent that they can apprehend things that they could not have without aid—is where the critique of scientific practices and theories presented by Margaret Cavendish in The Blazing World begins. There is no doubt that Cavendish's writing is deeply indebted to the very things that it attacks—speculation on worlds other than our own was not a possibility under Aristotelian cosmology, for instance, which system was supplanted by the heliocentric universe only after the invention of the telescope allowed deeper investigation into the cosmos than had previously been possible. The Blazing World does not present criticism of technology (specifically the microscope and telescope) itself—as it had led to some discoveries not entirely without value—but rather a satirical critique of the theories and methods associated with it.
The critique is very pointed and even more thinly-veiled, presented as it is in the guise of fiction. (All the same, it is clear that Cavendish's main target is the Royal Society of London, the prevailing scientific organisation of her day and location.) In the Blazing World, natural philosophy is practiced by the Bear-men, whose exact physical nature is mysterious but whose temperaments are eminently suitable for science (which, as we will see, means that they tend toward arguing about everything without ever reaching a consensus). The stage for the critique is set when the Empress, wishing to have pressing scientific problems resolved, asks her natural philosophers to use their equipment to observe phenomena for what they really are:
[T]o avoid hereafter tedious disputes, and have the truth of the Phænomena's of Celestial bodies more exactly known, [the Empress] commanded the Bear-men, which were her Experimental Philosophers, to observe them through such instruments as are called Telescopes, which they did according to her Majesties Command; but these Telescopes caused more differences and divisions amongst them, then ever they had before; for some said, they perceived that the Sun stood still, and the Earth did move about it; others were of opinion, that they both did move; and others said again, that the Earth stood still, and the Sun did move... (Blazing World, 169)
The problems being addressed by the Bear-men put the critique that is to follow into context, where the Blazing World serves as a sort of Bizarro early modern Europe: the Aristotelian position was that the Sun moved about the Earth (geocentrism), where the Copernican position that superseded it was that the Earth in fact moved about the Sun (heliocentrism); the intermediary position held by some Ptolemaic natural philosophers was that both Earth and Sun moved through space. Clearly, according to Baconian natural philosophy, if reason created such conundra, experimental science and its accompanying technology could help to solve them, particularly as the technology to observe the heavens in detail existed in early modern telescopes. The same technology exists in the Blazing World (unsurprisingly), and the Empress feels that it ought to be used to resolve the debates that are delaying scientific progress:
After they had thus argued, the Emperess began to grow angry at their Telescopes, that they could give no better Intelligence; for, said she, now I do plainly perceive, that your Glasses are false Informers, and instead of discovering the Truth, delude your senses; Wherefore I Command you to break them, and let the Bird-men trust onely to their natural eyes, and examine Celestial objects by the motions of their own sense and reason. (Blazing World, 170)
This is a direct assault on Hooke's insistence that technology makes up for sensory deficiencies. (Hooke was writing about microscopes specifically, but the same could be said for the telescope.) That could well be the case, but does it really tell us anything useful? The thrust of Cavendish's satire is that it does not; telescopes allow the Bear-men to see the cosmos in greater detail than with the naked eye, but the details do not provide solutions for any of the problems that the Bear-men set out to solve. The implication here, evidently, is that the same thing goes for the scientists that were contemporaries of Cavendish—their telescopes didn't solve any problems, either. And if technology gets its users nowhere, perhaps they would be better off using the observational tools that nature gave them—the naked eye and naked hand.
The Bear-men offer a cursory defence of telescopes and their use by claiming "[t]hat it was not the fault of their Glasses, which caused such differences in their opinions, but the sensitive motions in their optick organs did not move alike, nor were their rational judgments always regular"—blaming their own deficiencies instead of their equipment (Blazing World, 170). The Empress answers:
That if their glasses were true informers, they would rectifie their irregular sense and reason; But, said she, Nature has made your sense and reason more regular then Art has your Glasses, for they are meer deluders, and will never lead you to the knowledg of Truth ... for you may observe the progressive motions of Celestial bodies with your natural eyes better then through Artificial Glasses. (Blazing World, 170)
In other words, any "infirmities of the Senses" that would limit the understanding of phenomena that can be gleaned from observing them cannot be compensated for by artificial means. (Perhaps the greater implication here is that such infirmities are magnified by telescopes, just as telescopes magnify the objects under observation.) The Bear-men are eventually forced into admitting that they "take more delight in Artificial delusions, then in natural truths", and that their goal is to propagate falsehood so that they might continue to indulge in the "pleasure ... of confuting and contradicting each other" (Blazing World, 170). Cavendish attacks microscopy in a similar way: the Bear-men are able to observe things through their microscopes that are invisible to the naked eye, like the thousands of "small Pearls or Hemispheres" arranged on the heads of flies, but their microscopes do not tell them what it really is that they are observing—it shows only that there are hemispheres, not what it is that they do (Blazing World, 171-2). Applied to the early modern European scientists toward whom this satire was directed, it is a damaging implication and scathing criticism indeed.
None of Cavendish's criticisms of telescopy and microscopy in The Blazing World are satirical without purpose, however; and the criticism is not levelled so much at the technology itself, but rather at the people who use it. (This is made evident when the Empress allows the Bear-men to keep their telescopes instead of having them destroyed.) Instead of a wholesale condemnation of technology, The Blazing World can be read as a warning to scientists not to let intuition and reason fall by the wayside, assuming that Baconian experimentalism in science is the only way forward. Experimentation that is not tempered by reason directed toward solving problems—much like the Bear-men's scientific practices—is just as fruitless as the blind following of established scientific paradigms that Bacon and the other experimentalists were rebelling against in the first place.
Cavendish, Margaret. "The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World". Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader, eds. Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2000. 151-251.
Bacon, Francis. "Preface to The New Organon". Oster, 143-44.
-------. "Aphorisms Concerning the Interpretation of Nature and the Kingdom of Man". Oster, 144-49.
Hooke, Robert. "Preface to Micrographia". Oster, 149-52.
Oster, Malcolm, ed. Science in Europe, 1500-1800: A Primary Sources Reader. Hampshire: Palgrave, 2002. |
