Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science 1100-1700 by A. C. CrombieReview by: Marshall ClagettIsis, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Mar., 1955), pp. 66-69Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/226834 .Accessed: 09/05/2014 19:00

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66 BOOK REVIEWS The original title of the Almagest is stated

(p. 43) to be hi mathematike syntaxis, mean- ing the mathematical synthesis. Heiberg, however, has shown that syntaxis was not in the title. It merely means treatise or work, and the Almagest was referred to as the mathimatike or megali syntaxis to distin- guish it from the apotelesmatiki or tetrabib- los syntaxis. The actual title was simply Mathematika, meaning Mathematics.

Professor Sarton defends Ptolemy's lapse into pseudo-science in the Tetrabiblos by at- tacking our newspapers for their columns on astrology. He thinks (p. 62) they "should be punished just as one punishes the pur- veyors of adulterated food." This is an inter- esting proposition, but highly debatable. Indiana University AUBREY DILLER

A. C. CROMBIE: Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science IIoo- 1700. Xii + 369 pp. Oxford, at the Clar- endon Press, I953.

The principal purpose of this volume on Grosseteste is to argue with supporting evi- dence the position that the origins of the experimental method employed by modem science are found in the medieval period. As Crombie himself puts it: "The thesis of this book is that the modem systematic under- standing of at least the qualitative aspects of this method was created by the philoso- phers of the West in the thirteenth century. It was they who transformed the Greek geometrical method into the experimental science of the modem world (p. i)." In the course of developing this thesis Crombie enters into a summary description of science in the twelfth century and an examination of Grosseteste's writings on the theory of sci- ence, including his principal conclusions re- garding induction, verification and falsifica- tion in natural science. Crombie shows how these conclusions relate to the opinions of Aristotle and Galen and how they influenced the discussions of succeeding Latin school- men, such as Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, William Ockham, and others. As a particular science illustrating, in Crombie's opinion, the new grasp of the experimental science, he presents a most valuable history of certain aspects of medieval optics from Grosseteste

to Newton. In this history he pays particular and detailed attention to the theory of the rainbow as developed in the thirteenth cen- tury, a theory culminating in the De iride etc. of Theodoric of Freiberg. This treatment of optics as a detailed example of medieval science is supplemented by brief remarks on medieval mechanics as developed in the four- teenth century.

As I have stated in a review of Crombie's Augustine to Galileo (Isis, 44: 399), I do not believe that Crombie has fully demonstrated his thesis, although I fully agree with him as to the importance of the continuous develop- ment of the substance of medieval science, and particularly of medieval optics, for the subsequent achievements of modem science. I fail to see, for example, how Grosseteste or even Theodoric presents any fundamental advance in method beyond the experimental and mathematical procedure of Ptolemy in his optics. Between the medieval writers and their Greek predecessors, there may be a difference of degree but not one of kind in their respective procedures. Furthermore, I am not convinced, as Crombie seems to be, that the discussions of methods that arose in medieval commentaries on the Posterior Analytics of Aristotle from the time of Grosseteste had any paramount or causative influence on the "actual" development of medieval scientific procedure, although, to be sure, these discussions are most interest- ing and are worthy of study, being reflective of the increased interest in scientific meth- ods. For example, it would be difficult, if not impossible, on the basis of present evidence to relate the brilliant achievements in med- ieval statics associated with the name of Jordanus and his successors to medieval dis- cussions of methodology. Rather it seems to me that the development of statics was the outcome of close attention to and the study of Greek mathematical statics considered in the light of Aristotelian physical ideas. Al- most certainly Jordanus antedated the inten- sive discussion of the Posterior Analytics. It may be that the discussions of the theory of science played a more important role in the fruitful investigations of kinematics and dynamics at Oxford and Paris in the four- teenth century. But even here it does not appear to me that logicians like Swineshead and Heytesbury in their logical-mathematical works were in fact following Grosseteste's

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BOOK REVIEWS 67 prescriptions as to method. I do not mean to deny of course that there is a continuous history of methodological discussions, a his- tory which demonstrates the increasing ma- turity of these discussions from the time of Grosseteste to that of Galileo, and Crombie does a superb job of tracing the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century backgrounds to the discussions of methodology undertaken by the Italian natural philosophers already ex- amined by Randall.' One can have nothing but praise for Crombie's account of the suc- cessive examination of the discussions of the various schoolmen on the question of the theory of science, even if one does not accept the causative role of these discussions, and even if one raises certain doubts as to Crombie's interpretation and evaluation of the scholastic ideas.

While space forbids a discussion of the many details of medieval science presented in this volume, I would like to present and criticize Crombie's discussion of medieval scientific methodology. In his second chap- ter, "Empiricism and Rationalism in Twelfth- Century Science," Crombie traces the con- cern of medieval education with practical and technical matters. At the same time he attempts to show how the Aristotelian dis- tinction between "experimental facts and rational or theoretical knowledge of the cause of the fact" came into the Latin West with the New Logic of Aristotle and Galen's medi- cine. With it came the Greek distinction be- tween analysis and synthesis, between the procedure going from the composite to the particular and that going from the particular to the composite -a distinction in short between resolutio and compositio. As a nec- essary part of the treatment of twelfth-cen- tury science the author treats briefly of the translations made from Greek and Arabic. Here we notice a few unimportant slips. For example, there is no evidence at all that Adelard of Bath translated Euclid's Elements in I 1 26, as Crombie asserts (p. 3I). Further there is no extant copy of a translation of the Conics of Apollonius as listed by Crom- bie (p. 36), for there is only a fragment of that work existing as an introduction to

1 J. H. Randall, "The Development of Scien- tific Method in the School of Padua," Journal of the History of Ideas, I940, z: I77-206. Cf. D. P. Lockwood, Ugo Benzi (Chicago, I95), pp. 222-227.

Alhazen's De speculis comburentibus. Thabit ibn Qurra, the author of the Liber karastonis, so far as I know is not known in Arabic as Ibn Thebit, the form which Crombie uses (p. 36).

With the discussion of twelfth-century em- piricism and rationalism completed, Crombie feels he has set the stage for Grosseteste, who, Crombie claims, unites "the two twelfth- century traditions of technology and logic." A brief outline of Grosseteste's life is fol- lowed by a discussion of his scientific writ- ings, and an attempt to order them by date. As an additional note to this discussion I would like to call attention to a brief frag- ment from Simplicius' Commentary on the Physics, which Grosseteste probably trans- lated.2 Then follows a discussion of Grosse- teste's views on the nature of science, as developed in his commentaries on the Pos- terior Analytics and the Physics of Aristotle. "The conception of science which Grosseteste . . .learnt from Aristotle was one in which there was a double movement, from theory to experience and from experience to theory (p. 52)." For Grosseteste as for Aristotle, scientific knowledge was the "demonstrative knowledge of things through their causes, and its instrument was the demonstrated syllogism, which established the connexion between premises and conclusions, or causes and their effects, through the middle term (pp. 52-53)." Grosseteste makes what was to become the conventional distinction be- tween knowledge of the fact (quia) and knowledge of the cause of the fact (propter quid), and Grosseteste certainly held that for investigation into physical things we must begin with effects, that is, with the knowledge of facts. Crombie here points to what I assume he would believe is an un- Aristotelian opinion of Grosseteste. "Grosse- teste said physics was uncertain because there could be only probable knowledge of change- able natural things (p. 59)." It would seem to me that here Crombie is introducing the word "probable," not existing in the pas- sages quoted, that he is making Grosseteste out to be an early probabilist. It is true that Grosseteste does say: "Similiter in naturali- bus est minor certitudo propter mutabili- tatem rerum naturalium." But "minor cer-

2I am publishing this fragment in a forth- coming volume to be presented to Professor A. P. Evans of Columbia University.

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68 BOOK REVIEWS titudo" is not necessarily equivalent to "only probable knowledge," for in the first place it is doubtful whether Grosseteste means to imply by "minor certitude" that all physics is subject only to probable knowledge, as Plato would hold, and in the second it is even more doubtful that he implies the prin- cipal conclusion of the fourteenth century probabilists, that knowledge of nature is only probable because there is no demonstration of the principle of causation in natural events.

While the knowledge of physics may be less certain than other kinds of knowledge, according to Grosseteste, certain procedures were to be followed for ascertaining that knowledge. Crombie has pointed out that such a procedure was twofold: (i) the dis- covery of causal definitions by the combined use of resolution and composition, and (2) the certification of the causal definitions by verification and falsification. "By relating these logical methods to scientific practice Grosseteste made the first moves toward the creation of modem science (p. 6i)." The causes or causal definitions that Grosseteste was seeking were the four Aristotelian causes: formal, material, efficient, and final. In maintaining the Aristotelian causes as his scientific objective, Grosseteste could hardly be called heralding modem scientific proced- ures, and in my opinion Crombie does not sufficiently discuss the distinctions between the causal objectives of medieval and early modem science.

But let us take as an example given by Crombie of Grosseteste's scientific search for causes, his discovery of the causes for homed animals having homs. The formal cause is found to be "not having teeth in the upper jaw," which cause he arrived at by examining the common nature of homed animals. The material and efficient causes are for Grosseteste that the earthy matter which ordinarily would go to form teeth forms homs instead. The final or purposeful cause is to provide a means for the animal to protect himself.

In asserting causal connections in universal form, Grosseteste held that the mind by an intuitive induction jumped from the single instances to the general statement. Now not much of this whole first procedure of finding causes and causal connections was original with Grosseteste, as Crombie shows. The

originality Crombie claims for Grosseteste is in the latter's exposition of the further tests needed to establish causal connections. Crom- bie suggests that the reason why Grosseteste held that there need be further tests is that there may be a plurality of causes that could produce a given effect. In support of assign- ing a doctrine of plurality of causes to Grosseteste, Crombie cites the following pas- sage: "If one determinate cause cannot be reached from the effect, since there is no effect which has not some cause, it follows that an effect, when it has one cause, may have another, and so that there may be sev- eral causes of it (p. 8i)."

This remark demands some comment. While I do not have Grosseteste's commen- tary on the Posterior Analytics at hand so that I may check the context of this passage, I wonder if Grosseteste really believed in a plurality of specific causes, or whether, like Aristotle, he was not merely raising the point as a dialectical question. I ask this question because in his De calore solis Grosseteste says that there is a univocal cause for every univocal effect (omnis enim passionis univoce est causa univoca). It is true that sometime we might confuse the cause of an effect as specific which is really generic, and thus it appears there is a plural- ity of specific causes when in fact there is only one generic cause. The Aristotelian example is that there might be several differ- ent herbs producing the same cure. The conclusion we would draw from this is not that there is a plurality of causes, but rather that there is a single generic cause producing that effect, i.e., all the herbs producing the cure must belong to the same genus, and it is the generic property of such herbs to pro- duce such a cure.

Whether or not there are in Grosseteste's view of the physical world unique and truly ascertainable causes, or merely the most likely of several possible causes, each of which could cause a given effect under dif- ferent conditions, Grosseteste's achievement, according to Crombie, was to develop "the method of verification into a systematic method of experimental procedure." Grosse- teste's technique of deciding between possible causes was to show either that a given theory had consequences which contradicted the facts of experience and thus must be discarded, or that it had consequences in accord with other

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BOOK REVIEWS 69 phenomena and thus would be certified. I must confess that the examples of how Grosse- teste actually used his methods as reported by Crombie appear to me to be much more inept science than the best of Greek and medieval science. The actual so-called ex- perimenting for the most part turns out to be largely passive observations.

Grosseteste's views on the relation of mathematics and physics are of considerable interest. He was basically Aristotelian in holding mathematics to be an instrument which can be used to describe events in the physical world. He was assured, moreover, that the causes he sought in physical science are not themselves mathematical, but rather are physical. Crombie presents, still under the head of mathematical physics, Grosse- teste's "light metaphysics." While it is true that Grosseteste's light metaphysics turned his study to mathematical optics, much of which is experimentally verifiable, I would hesitate to say with Crombie that Grosse- teste's light metaphysics was thereby made experimentally verifiable (p. io6). Such veri- fication that experimental-mathematical op- tics brought light metaphysics was solely in terms of gross analogies between the experi- mentally verifiable laws of light propagation and Grosseteste's curious ideas of the role in nature of lux as a corporeal form. The details of his metaphysical system were, I believe, in no way "verifiable" by experi- mental optics. Be that as it may, this whole discussion leads Crombie to a most fertile in- vestigation of optics in the middle ages.

While I have tended in this review to em- phasize points of disagreement with the au- thor let me assure the reader that this is one of the most stimulating and carefully pre- pared studies in medieval science that has come forth in some time. Nowhere else do we have so much material assembled for the study of medieval scientific methodology. Final note should be made of the rich bibliog- raphy appended to this volume, which de- serves commendation for its completeness.

MARSHALL CLAGETT University of Wisconsin

NICOLAUS COPERNICUS: On the Revolu- tions of the Heavenly Spheres. Trans- lated by Charles Glenn Walls. (Great

Books of the Western World, vol. i6.) Chicago: Encyclopedia Brittanica, Inc., 1952.

The following is a sample of misleading errrors:

p. 745, 1. 20: 62023' for 68023' p. 748, 1. 27 and 3I: 227037' for 277037' p. 756, 1. io: May for March p. 756, last L: 44012' for 440II p. 757, .-8: 5045' for 5?55' p. 759, L-26: KEO for KED p. 76o, 1. 22: GER for GES p. 768, ch. I5, 1. 6: 84020' for 74020' p. 770, 1. i6: 47050' for 670501 p. 77I, h. I6, 1. I0: 183020' for 133020' p. 77I, ch. I6,1. i6: 80?I8' for 700I8' p. 772,1.13: DE for DF p. 778, L 20: January for June P. 780,1. : 45047j' for 450571' p. 78I, ch. 23, 1. 4: "the eight (sic) month"

not in text and wrong

Incorrect figures (sample): p. 742: H omitted p. 749: line DC wrong; the idea of the proof

requires that EDC be on a straight line

p. 780: F and line GD omitted p. 78I: lines ED and FG omitted p. 787: point C incorrectly placed p. 788: point D incorrectly placed; line CH

wrong (should be FH) p. 790: line EF omitted

The translation is supposedly based "on the first edition" (p. 493), which would be Nuremberg 1543. I found, however, many instances where the translation follows the text which is exclusively given (correctly as well as incorrectly) in the Thorn edition (i873). The translation is also not trust- worthy in other details. Examples: p. 794, we read "the simple mean position of the sun was at 149048' from the spring equinox but in 26047' of Virgo, wherein the position of Mercury was approximately I3Y20." Mr. Wallis obviously did not understand the method of counting longitudes employed by Copernicus. The text really says "the mean position of the sun was at I49048' but, (counted) from the spring equinoX, 26047' of Virgo, and thus Mercury had an elonga- tion of 13/4O." The translator modified (without comment) the text and the final number to make them fit his incorrect inter- pretation.

In general Mr. Wallis' translation is often not much more than a simple replacement

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Article Contentsp.66p.67p.68p.69

Issue Table of ContentsIsis, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Mar., 1955), pp. 1-80Front Matter [pp.1-2]Soviet Views on the History of Science [pp.3-13]Galen on the Motions of the Blood in the Heart and Lungs [pp.14-21]The National Archives and the History of Science in America [pp.22-28]Franklin's Introduction to Electricity [pp.29-35]Herman Boerhaave and the Development of Pneumatic Chemistry [pp.36-49]Queries & Answers [pp.50-52]Notes & Correspondence [pp.53-55]Dissertations in Progress in the History of Science [p.56]Doctorates in the History of Science [p.56]Book Reviewsuntitled [p.57]untitled [pp.57-59]untitled [pp.59-61]untitled [pp.61-64]untitled [pp.64-65]untitled [pp.65-66]untitled [pp.66-69]untitled [pp.69-71]untitled [pp.71-72]untitled [pp.72-74]untitled [pp.74-76]untitled [pp.76-77]untitled [pp.77-78]untitled [pp.78-80]

Back Matter