How Modern Science Came into the World

Front matter

H. FLORIS COHEN

How Modern Science Came Into The World

FOUR CIVILIZATIONS, ONE I7TH-CENTURY BREAKTHROUGH

Preface

PROLOGUE: SOLVING THE PROBLEM OF THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

The historiography of the Scientific Revolution: Past and present state The toolkit Major questions here resolved Users’ guide Notes on literature used

II II

A tale of two cities

Athens and Alexandria compared

Athens and Alexandria: Rare efforts at unification

Greek knowledge of nature: Upswing and downturn

Chinese knowledge of nature

Chinese and Greek nature-knowledge compared

Theory — a latent developmental potential and conditions for its realization Notes on literature used

GREEK NATURE-KNOWLEDGE TRANSPLANTED: THE ISLAMIC WORLD Upswing Downturn On the threshold of a Scientific Revolution?

Notes on literature used

GREEK NATURE-KNOWLEDGE TRANSPLANTED IN PART: MEDIEVAL EUROPE Upswing Downturn

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XV XVII XX XXIX XXXIII XXXIX vi Nature-knowledge in Islamic civilization and in medieval Europe: A comparison 90 Notes on literature used 97 IV GREEK NATURE-KNOWLEDGE TRANSPLANTED, AND MORE: RENAISSANCE EUROPE 99 Athens replayed in full 99 Alexandria: A replay with a difference 100 Europe’s coercive empiricism 113 At the dawn of the Scientific Revolution 141 Notes on literature used 152 PART II THREE REVOLUTIONARY TRANSFORMATIONS 157 v THE FIRST TRANSFORMATION: REALIST-MATHEMATICAL SCIENCE 159 Johannes Kepler 161 Galileo Galilei 178 The knowledge structure of Alexandria-plus 195 Causes of the first transformation 201 Notes on literature used 216

vI THE SECOND TRANSFORMATION: A KINETIC-CORPUSCULARIAN PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE 221 Revival continued 222 Beeckman and the transformation of ancient atomism 224 The Cartesian variety of kinetic corpuscularianism 226 Causes of the second transformation 238 Notes on literature used 243 VII THE THIRD TRANSFORMATION: TO FIND FACTS THROUGH EXPERIMENT 245 Bacon’s vision 245 Bacon’s proposed practice: The natural history of sound 247 Gilbert: Lodestone and amber treated the Baconian way 249 Harvey: Bodily processes revised 252 Van Helmont: Paracelsianism reformed 255 Theory: Experimentation, theorizing, and background worldview 258 Causes of the third transformation 260

Vil

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CONCURRENCE EXPLAINED An explanatory overview Causal gaps identified An underlying sense of values shared across the culture An upswing luckily not interrupted The achievement still at risk

Chronology and continuities

Dynamics of the revolution, in brief Notes on literature used

Part III Dynamics Of The Revolution XI

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The classic Alexandrian subjects absorbed

Scholastic concepts mathematized

Craft techniques mathematized

Mathematical instruments

Analogies of motion

From Euclidean ratios to the calculus

Power and pull of realist-mathematical science Notes on literature used

ACHIEVEMENTS AND LIMITATIONS OF KINETIC CORPUSCULARIANISM Musical sound as moving corpuscles: An explanatory sample Rapid adoption Modifications of the doctrine Whirlpools for a revolving Earth Another sort of power; another sort of pull Notes on literature used

Strangeness: Three successive clashes

Strangeness: Against common sense

Sacrilege: Three successive clashes

Strangeness and sacrilege: A looming crisis of legitimacy Notes on literature used

281 281 284 287

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XVI

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ACHIEVEMENTS AND LIMITATIONS OF FACT-FINDING EXPERIMENTALISM Facts collected and categorized Instrument-driven fact-finding Subject-driven fact-finding Craft techniques improved through experimental science Problems with facts and how to ascertain them Pooling of efforts Power and pull of fact-finding experimentalism Notes on literature used

NATURE-KNOWLEDGE DECOMPARTMENTALIZED Whence the breakdown of barriers?

Quantities and corpuscles Revolutionary fusion in the making Notes on literature used

THE FOURTH TRANSFORMATION: CORPUSCULAR MOTION GEOMETRIZED Motion, four principal ways Anomalous refraction revisited

THE FIFTH TRANSFORMATION: THE BACONIAN BREW Kinetic corpuscularianism crosses the Channel Spirit and active principles in kinetic corpuscularianism The Baconian Brew

LEGITIMACY OF A NEW KIND The edges off controversy, and a shift of center Europe-wide Strangeness mitigated Sacrilege insulated Utility sanctioned in the Baconian Ideology Sustenance for nature-knowledge in monotheist surroundings — a comparative summing up Notes on literature used

509 511 515 517 519

521 522 539 546

549 549 552 554 564

565 566 568 572 578

590 595

XVIII NATURE-KNOWLEDGE BY 1684: THE ACHIEVEMENT SO FAR Predecessors on their way out 17th-century props Advances on many fronts: the big picture The force knot Notes on literature used

XIX THE SIXTH TRANSFORMATION: THE NEWTONIAN SYNTHESIS The Newton knot Toward the Principia Principia Toward the Opticks Opticks Two fragments and one whole Notes on literature used

EPILOGUE: A DUAL LEGACY Expanding modern science Science and values

ENDNOTES NAME INDEX SUBJECT INDEX

599 600

606 611 621

719 722 731 740

743 767 779

XI

PREFACE

Once upon a time ‘the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century’ was an innovative and inspiring concept. It yielded what is still the master narrative of the rise of modern science. The narrative has meanwhile turned into a straitjacket — so often events and contexts just fail to fit in. In the classroom we make the best of the situation; in our researches most of us prefer just to drop the concept altogether, regarding it as beset by truly unmanageable complexity. And yet, neither the early, theory-centered historiography nor present-day contextual and practice-oriented approaches compel us to drop the concept altogether. Instead, in the present book I provide a narrative restructured from the ground up, by means of a comprehensive approach, sustained comparisons, and a tenacious search for underlying patterns.

Key to my analysis is a vision of the Scientific Revolution as made up of six distinct yet tightly interconnected revolutionary transformations, each of some twenty-five to thirty years’ duration. This vision equally enables me to explain how modern science could come about in Europe rather than in Greece, China, or the Islamic world.

In the prologue that follows I set forth all this at greater length, with proper attention given to the present state of the historiography and to the theoretical views that have served me as guidelines for my effort at fresh conceptualization.

I began writing this book in 1994. Since then I have been fortunate to receive numerous benefits.

Regarding institutions, I owe a great deal to the Dibner Institute, where (under the highly appreciated co-directorship of Jed Buchwald and Evelyn Simha) I was a fellow from February through June 1995; to the history-of-science group at the University of Twente with its frequent, no-holds-barred but also friendly discussions of work-in-progress; to the Department of Humanities of Utrecht University for a generous grant and (at the same university) to the Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, which under the visionary leadership of Wijnand Mijnhardt has since 2006 provided me with a most congenial working environment.

As for individuals who helpfully commented on portions of the book, I beg forgiveness from those I may fail to list against my best intentions. Critical readers of the entire book in its various stages include John Heilbron, John Henry, Peter Pesic, Bert Theunissen, and (last but definitely not least) Bob Westman; also, with her familiar hawk’s eye, Pamela Bruton. I

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PREFACE further received useful comments on ideas, sections, and chapters from Klaas van Berkel, Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Mario Biagioli, Michel Blay, Rens Bod, Henk Bos, Geoffrey Cantor, Peter Dear, Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis, Mark Elvin, Peter Engelfriet, Moti Feingold, Rivka Feldhay, Dan Garber, Stephen Gaukroger, Penelope Gouk, Jehane Kuhn, Dick van Lente, David Lindberg, Frans van Lunteren, Nancy Nersessian, Lodewijk Palm, Larry Principe, Jamil Ragep, John Schuster, William Shea, Nathan Sivin, Noel Swerdlow, Edith Sylla, Steve Turner, Tomas Vanheste, John Walbridge, the late Sam Westfall, Catherine Wilson, Joella Yoder, and also, with friendly incisiveness, from Rob Wentholt, who died as this book went to the press. I dedicate it to his memory.

Dear friends and colleagues, I am truly grateful for how all of you have helped me in your various ways. Thanks to you, this has become a better book.

And thanks to Marita’s loving support, the author has become a better man.

The affairs of the Empire of letters are in a situation in which they never were and never will be again; we are passing now from an old world into the new world, and we are working seriously on the first foundation of the sciences.’

Dom Robert Desgabets OSB, 18 September 1676

Around 1600 the pursuit of nature-knowledge was radically transformed. This happened in Europe over the course of a few decades, and our modern science is what grew out of the event. The transformation and its immediate aftermath have for quite some time been known as the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. In a book published in 1994, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry, I subjected to critical scrutiny some sixty views on the event selected from the vast literature for their boldly creative, interpretive sweep. I now present my own view. It has taken shape in critical dialogue with those sixty and several more-recent interpretations and also with many more narrowly focused studies. In good measure, it also rests upon firsthand familiarity with the subject. In the final chapter of my historiographical book I presented a preliminary sketch of my own budding view. That sketch has served me well as a stepping-stone, but my thinking has taken many a new turn in the meantime. I hereby discard that final chapter, with thanks for the encouragement it once gave me.

In tracing over time a range of events which culminated in 17th-century Europe, I seek answers to two basic questions. The first is: How did modern science come into the world, and (as part of that question) why did this happen in Europe rather than in China or in Islamic civilization? The other question is: Why did this 17th-century breakthrough in the pursuit of knowledge about nature instigate the as-yet-unbroken chain of scientific growth that we are wont to take for granted in our own time, four centuries later? Why did it not peter out, as every previous period of florescence suggests it very well might have? In short, the questions this book claims to resolve are whence the onset, and whence the original staying power, of modern science?

On the first question, the principal point I shall be concerned to make is that modern science came into the world by way of a threefold transformation. Transformed in revolutionary fashion were three mutually very different and also very much separate modes of acquiring knowledge about nature. The mathematical portion of the Greek corpus of

XVI nature-knowledge, after several centuries of reception and enrichment in Islamic civilization and then in Renaissance Europe, was unpredictably turned by Galileo and by Kepler into the beginnings of an ongoing process of mathematization of nature experimentally sustained. Another portion of the Greek corpus, the speculative, contained four distinct, rival systems of natural philosophy, with Aristotle’s paramount. It was replaced, at the instigation of Descartes and other corpuscularian thinkers, by a natural philosophy of atomist provenance that was decisively reinforced by a novel conception of motion broadly similar to Galileo’s. Thirdly, a specifically European-colored mode of investigation intent upon accurate description and practical application that had arisen by the mid-15th century began to consolidate around 1600, under the aegis of Francis Bacon’s calls for a general reform of nature-knowledge, into a fact-finding, practice-oriented mode of experimental science.

Thus, the onset of the Scientific Revolution yielded three distinct modes of nature-knowledge of a kind that the world had never seen. If we wish to understand how modern science could arrive in the world, we must ask how, around 1600, these three almost simultaneous transformations could come about. Most answers to be given here are specific to each distinct case of revolutionary transformation. Insofar as answers pertain to the question of ‘why in Europe and not elsewhere?’ they hinge on a comparison between Greek and Chinese nature-knowledge and on a historical theory of upswing, downturn, and chances for refreshment yielded by feats of cultural transplantation — all of which I unfold in a foundational first chapter. If, next, we wish to understand how kernels of “recognizably modern science”? managed to stay in the world once they had arrived there, we ought to note first that their very survival was a close call — by midcentury the revolutionary movement was undergoing a veritable crisis of legitimacy. But, rather than losing momentum for good, a new political climate and the emergence, by the early 1660s, of an ideology for innovative nature-knowledge allowed the movement to regain pace. Three distinct driving forces propelled it forward. One was a specific dynamics built into the 17th-century practice of mathematization of nature experimentally sustained; another was a similar yet characteristically different dynamics built into the 17th-century practice of fact-finding experimentation. And I shall make a case for a midcentury event that has so far not been conceptualized at all. This is the unprecedented breaking down of barriers between the Galilean, the Cartesian, and the Baconian modes of nature-knowledge, leading in the 1660s to mid-1680s to three more revolutionary transformations marked by hugely productive mutual interaction. In sum, the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century may fruitfully be regarded, not as one monolithic event, but rather as being made up of six distinct revolutionary transformations, each of some twenty to at most thirty years’ duration.

So much by way of an outline of the argument to be unfolded in the present book in the format of an ongoing, chronological narrative.

To any reader — professional historian of science or not, student or not — the book has a story to tell. Between ancient Greece and Newton’s Principia and Opticks it covers the major episodes and the major figures (also numerous minor ones). I take pains to avoid jargon and to present successive issues as clearly and simply as I can. Details not directly relevant to the story line (e.g., biographical data that go beyond the brief characterization or the telling anecdote) are left out. Even so, the book builds its message up from a long concatenation of topics, and my detailed treatment of certain issues may tax the patience of the nonprofessional. For over and above its providing a story, this book is meant to be an argument. It is directed in the first place at convincing my co-professionals in the history of science that the conception here unfolded of how modern science came into the world is worth considering in earnest. In view of how history-of-science writing has developed over the past decades, this may not be an easy task — it runs up against an ingrained skepticism concerning the very questions I now claim to have resolved.

The historiography of the Scientific Revolution: Past and present state

The concept of the Scientific Revolution was coined in the 1930s, as one product of a major historiographical overhaul that took place between the mid-1920s and the early 1950s. It was meant to identify a period in European history that covers roughly the second half of the 16th and almost all of the 17th century (i.e., between Copernicus and Newton) as marking a uniquely radical, conceptual upheaval out of which modern science emerged essentially as we still know it. This view quickly began to be articulated in the budding profession of historians of science. It did so in ways that turned the previously customary listing of one heroic scientific achievement after another into the careful reconstruction of such conceptual knots as those individuals who brought the Scientific Revolution about actually faced and strove to disentangle.

Out of the concept-focused mode of history writing thus emerging came a range of pathbreaking narratives. These shared, at a minimum, a focus on how the once self-evident conception of our Earth as a stable body at the center of the cosmos gave way to the core of the modern worldview — the Earth and the other planets placed in a solar system, itself a tiny portion of an infinite universe. The major vehicle to bring about this fundamental reversal, along with several other major, closely related accomplishments (a new conception of motion; deliberate creation of void space), was held to be a quickly expanding process of ‘mathematization of nature’. By this was meant the subjection of increasing ranges of empirical phenomena to mathematical treatment in ways suitable as a rule to experimental testing. Key figures in the process were held to be Copernicus, as the man first to compute down to the required detail planetary trajectories in a Sun-centered setting; Kepler, as the man first to turn Copernicus’ setup into a previously unthinkable ‘celestial physics’ leading to his discov-

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XVIII ery of the planets’ elliptical paths; Galileo, as the man first to mathematize with success a significant terrestrial phenomenon (falling and projected bodies) in an effort to counter major objections to Copernicus’ setup; Descartes, as the man first to conceive of the universe and of the particle-governed mechanisms at work in it mathematically; Newton, as the man to cap the whole development by uniting terrestrial and celestial physics in his mathematically exact, empirically sustained conception of universal gravitation. Not that these men and their principal accomplishments were taken to represent all there really was to the Scientific Revolution. Still, for decades historians were inclined to treat other noteworthy attainments of a modern-scientific nature, such as Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood or Boyle’s chemical-testing procedures, as by-products, somehow, of the major development.

Starting in the 1960s, a range of perspectives was introduced that led to a widening of this ‘master narrative. Our history-of-science forebears unreflectively identified the present-day definition and classification of scientific disciplines with their apparent 17th-century counterparts. This habit has been given up in favor of a still-increasing awareness that what we now call ‘mechanics’, for example, scarcely had a counterpart in the early 17th century, so different, and differently aligned, was the intellectual context in which problems of motion used to be considered from the ancient Greeks onward. Even ‘science’ as a general expression is on its way out. It carries too many associations far removed from 17th-century realities (e.g., the professional identity of ‘scientist’ is a term of the 19th century, not earlier).

Further, research subjects and/or people previously left wholly or partly in the margins have come to be included in the narrative. Examples are subjects that (at the time) were nonmathematical and chiefly descriptive, like magnetism and illness; subjects that are scarcely practiced anymore, like musical science, and/or are held under grave suspicion, like alchemy; but also previously neglected contributors not of the first or even quite the second rank (e.g., hosts of ably experimenting Jesuits).

Most important of all, the goal of putting the history of scientific ideas in institutional and other sociocultural contexts has become a fixture of most articles and books on the subject. History writing in the vein of ‘this major thinker brought this particular conceptual breakthrough about, then that thinker that one’ has not come to an end, but a sense has emerged that a proper understanding of scientific accomplishment requires an awareness of how it was situated in time and place. In this way, for example, we have learned of the considerable extent to which practitioners depended upon Europe’s patronage market. Also, an influential argument has been made for a constitutive link between the contested viability of instrument-aided experimentation per se as articulated in Boyle’s and Hobbes’ early-1660s dispute over the void and the politics of the Stuart Restoration. As a result, local particularity has in recent decades been gaining the upper hand over the universal validity claimed with ever diminishing vigor for the most seminal outcomes of the Scientific Revolution. One genuine accomplishment of this context-oriented approach is a greater concern for the day-to-day practice of experimental research and for the trustworthiness of results so attained. Another has been a heightened sense that there is room for contingency in the story — not everything that happened was bound to happen, or was bound to happen the way it did happen. Historians of science have further become aware that there were more significant reasons for contemporary perceptions of modern-science-in-the-making as innately strange and disturbing than sheer backwardness and/or superstition.

With regard to the concept of the Scientific Revolution, the net effect of this plurality of mostly productive, novel viewpoints has been resignation. What numerous historians of science have in the meantime given up is not, to be sure, the ongoing production of novel interpretations of episodes in 17th-century science but the very idea that, deeply underneath the surface of individual events, something identifiable holds so complex a series of events together. And it is certainly true that a once-enlightening yet too one-sided formula like ‘Scientific Revolution = mathematization of nature’ can no longer be accepted. But is this conclusion tantamount to giving up the quest for underlying coherence altogether?

In everyday practice, it surely is. True, publishers keep inviting authors to produce texts for the classroom. The dozen or so up-to-date surveys to result from such requests are of as great a use to the students taught therefrom as they are vital for the health of the profession. But inevitably they obey a format that precludes a concentrated effort to seek an underlying coherence.

The reigning atmosphere of skeptical resignation does not, to be sure, stem solely from the manifold perspectives brought to bear upon the Scientific Revolution over the past decades or solely from a despair-inducing sense of the ever more apparent complexity of the event. Resignation stems in perhaps equal measure from the apparent elusiveness of all those big ‘why?’ questions once raised about the origins of modern science. The causal adventure, enthusiastically embarked upon in the 1930s, has ended in failure and disillusion. Starting in the 1980s it has gradually petered out. But should it have?

The difficulty with much causal debate at the time rested neither in its vivacity nor in the vital nature of the questions asked but rather in the peculiar habit historians of science acquired to investigate them. Efforts at explanation almost invariably took shape as a thesis, usually named after the historian to put it forward, about the one and only, all-encompassing cause of the Scientific Revolution. The Zilsel thesis explained the Scientific Revolution through an alleged, early-17th-century closing of the perennial gap between scholars and craftsmen. The Merton thesis was made by adherents and opponents alike to explain the Scientific Revolution through the contemporary adoption of Puritan values in a capitalist setting. The Yates thesis explained the Scientific Revolution as the next step both extending and opposing a magical worldview of Hermeticist origin. The Duhem thesis explained the Scientific Revolution as a 14th-century revolt against Aristotle. The Eisenstein thesis explained the Scientific Revolution through Europe’s move from script to print. And such piling up of ex-

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XX planations went on and on, without much exchange taking place between adherents over the respective merits of these theses, each of which was shown by acute critics to fail to clinch the all-encompassing case made for it. It is small wonder that explanatory habits so unsubtle have in the end induced a sense of resignation. True, Thomas S. Kuhn once proposed to cut such causal theses down to size by restricting their scope to one identifiable portion of the Scientific Revolution rather than to the whole of innovative 17th-century science. And in my historiographical book I broadened his constructive proposal into a plea for “judicious combination and cross-fertilization leading to consciously applied transformation” of available conceptions of the Scientific Revolution.’ But the drift of history writing has gone in another direction — that of giving up the causal quest altogether.

The message that such a posture of resignation manifestly conveys to outside scholarship is that the advent of modern science — a decisive event in world history, really the most outstanding among prime motors of our modern world — was in effect due to chance. But, as the great pioneer of cross-culturally comparative history of science Joseph Needham remarked in another context, “to attribute the origin of modern science entirely to chance is to declare the bankruptcy of history as a form of enlightenment of the human mind”* He made the point half a century ago. As globalization gains pace by the day, scholars from other venues want to understand even more than they already have why modern science arose in Europe rather than in any of the other great civilizations of the past. Scholars from other venues have a manifest and rightful interest in being presented with accounts of how modern science arose and fared in Europe that seek and find coherent pattern and order in the event other than by arranging an array of episodes to meet the needs of the classroom.

Nor are historians of science compelled by any necessity to keep their fellow scholars waiting. A great deal of material, as well as numerous partial interpretations of penetrating profundity, is ready to hand to seek solutions to the big questions involved. No more is required for bringing these materials and these interpretations to bear upon them than a determination to shake off the reigning sense of resignation and to rethink from scratch ways and means to go about such a quest. No return to the ways of the forefathers is desired or even possible — who cares any longer for a monolithic answer? Instead, we must inspect our toolkit all over again and refresh it from the bottom up. Here is how I have done it.

The toolkit

First and foremost, this book is meant to be analytical. I have sought to make storytelling and analysis go well together; but wherever I had to choose, analysis has prevailed. What, then, does the writing of what may be called ‘analytical history’ actually entail?

Not only in the natural but also in most human sciences as also in philosophy, clear-cut conceptualization is a cardinal requirement. A failure to define one’s concepts sharply and to delineate one’s theories and hypotheses carefully causes the investigation to go astray. But historians tend to avoid clear-cut conceptualization. We seem to be happiest keeping our concepts a bit fuzzy. Many academics — philosophers and sociologists at the forefront — uncharitably ascribe what they regard as our mindless fact-grinding to a congenital lack of capability for abstract thought (‘history is sociology with the brains left out’). There are some good reasons for the apparently lax habit, though. The prime commodity we are uniquely dealing in is change over time. But change over time cannot be captured well by means of fixed concepts imposed upon a subject in flux. If the concepts selected to handle it are just modern ones projected back upon the past, the investigation tends to end in presentism (anachronistic accounts written as if history were destined to move toward some preordained end finally attained in modern times). Also, a gap between the facts reported and the concepts invoked to capture them is bound to remain. If, on the other hand, the concepts selected are confined to those employed by one’s protagonists themselves (so-called ‘actors’ categories’), the historian robs himself of the enhanced understanding that flows from his privilege to look beyond the temporal horizon to which his subjects were inevitably confined. Indeed, maintaining some conceptual fuzziness provides the middle way needed here.

But conceptual fuzziness is not a virtue in itself. One may easily slip into giving one’s key terms a multiplicity of meanings, which is as unreflective as it is confusing. Insofar as conceptual fuzziness exceeds the exigencies of the historian’s inevitable predicament, then, it ought to be combated. That is, we should seek to make our concepts as clear-cut as our sense of the past — its manifold complexity, the sheer richness and endless variety of human life over time — allows us.

To the extent that historians are sensitive to philosophers’ and sociologists’ condescension toward our ingrained methods of dealing with concepts, they often seek to mimic those other disciplines, borrow a conceptual apparatus there, adopt it wholesale, and inform accordingly the historical tale to be told. One major example is how social-constructivist conceptions that in the 1980s emerged from work in the philosophy and the sociology of present-day scientific knowledge were adopted in certain accounts of 17th-century episodes in nature-knowledge. Thus imported, the conceptual apparatus served as a useful searchlight that nonetheless turned history-of-science writing into a battle scene for ideological contests of questionable relevance to the core business of the historian — to make sense of past events in their otherness from, and in their likeness to, our present-day concerns.

Sensitive likewise to a preference for restricting fuzziness of concept formation and theory building to the minimum that our predicament as historians dooms us to, I have sought in the present book for a solution other than parachuting a ready-made conceptual apparatus smack into the premodern world. Avoiding presentist categories as much as an a priori limitation to actors’ categories while also refraining from squeezing the facts of history into

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XXII concepts imported wholesale from elsewhere, I have found myself exploring a process perhaps best called ‘conceptualization as we move along’.

In the writing of history, pattern must be discerned, not imposed. Wishing neither to press my causal accounts into preset conceptual schemata nor, on the rebound, to refrain from conceptualization altogether, I have coined my concepts and conceived the historical theories that bind them together as I went along, in ongoing dialogue with the empirical material I found myself handling at every stage. ‘Dialogue’ is the key word here. This ongoing process of concept formation and theory building has not been inductive only — as if facts could ever speak for themselves. The process has been deductive as well, insofar as I have selected the facts to go into the making of these concepts and theories with such broad conceptions in mind as work on my historiographical book had alerted me to. Also, in the course of my historiographical inquiries I have found certain fertile conceptualizations of numerous authors (e.g., Joseph Ben-David, Thomas S. Kuhn, Richard S. Westfall) that with a little adaptation proved well suited for pressing my analyses further.

As far as I can tell, the procedure here followed is an uncommon one, and it seems advisable to mark it. Wherever in the book that follows I have solidified my factual material into concepts and theories by means of this partly inductive, partly deductive process, I have put the reader on the alert by inserting the term “Theory in the titles of the relevant sections. Chapter I, where I discuss the problem of ‘decline’ and develop one of the key concepts of part I, ‘cultural transplantations, abounds with conceptualizations of this kind.