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III. Swift and Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Colin Kiernan
Colin Kiernan
Affiliation:
The University of New South Wales
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Extract

While Swift's contribution to most fields of thought has generally been well received, his science is normally considered along with the third book of Gulliver's Travels; and the usual practice is to condemn both. At first it was thought that Swift's criticism of Newtonian science in the third book of Gulliver's Travels was written at short notice, in which case it would be peripheral to the work as a whole. In this event, science would be of little concern to Swift. The important achievement of Professors M. Nicolson and N. M. Mohler was to demonstrate diat Swift's assault on Newton's science was not only premeditated, but carefully executed as well: ‘The sources for nearly all the theories of the Laputans and the Balnibarians (sic) are to be found in the work of Swift's contemporary scientists and particularly in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.’

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 14 , Issue 4 , December 1971 , pp. 709 - 722
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1971

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References

1 Lamont, C., ‘A Checklist of Critical and Biographical Writings on Jonathan Swift, 1945–65’ in Jeffares, A. N. (ed.), Fair Liberty Was All His Cry (London, 1967), pp. 356–91,CrossRefGoogle Scholar gives an excellent bibliography of Swift scholarship since 1945. The period before 1945 is covered by Teerink, H., A Bibliography of the Writings of Jonathan Swift (Philadelphia, 1963), pp. 405–31,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and by Landa, L. and Tobin, J. E., Jonathan Swift: A List of Critical Studies Published from 1895 to 1945, to Which is Added ‘Remarks on Some Swift Manuscripts in the United States’ by Davis, Herbert (New York, 1945), pp. 17–62.Google ScholarQuintana, R., ‘A Modest Appraisal: Swift Scholarship and Criticism, 1945–65’ in Fair Liberty Was All His Cry, pp. 342–55,Google Scholar gives a very fair summary of the state of the question of interpretation in Swift scholarship. This can be supplemented by Voigt, M., Swift and the Twentieth Century (Detroit, 1964), pp. 29–164,Google Scholar and by Mayhew, G. P., ‘Recent Swift Scholarship’ in Jonathan Swift 1667–1967. A Dublin Tercentenary Tribute (Dublin, 1967), pp. 187–97.Google Scholar

2 Swift's science has never been the subject of a monograph. The most extensive investigation of Swift's science is by Nicolson, M. and Mohler, N. M., ‘The Scientific Background of Swift's “Voyage to Laputa”’, first published in Annals of Science, ii (1937), 299–334, 405–30,CrossRefGoogle Scholar It is tne reprinted version in Fair Liberty Was All His Cry, pp. 226–69, that is employed here. The scope of the present essay extends beyond the ‘Voyage to Laputa’ to look at all of Swift's science, and at its relationship with his thought on other matters. Potter, G. R., ‘Swift and Natural Science’, Philological Quarterly, xx (1941), 97–118,Google Scholar is more general still in its scope and findings, but is a useful introduction to the subject. Moog, F., ‘Gulliver was a Bad Biologist’, Scientific American, CLXXIX (1948), 52–55 is useful, though it differs from this writer's point of view.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Some examples will illustrate: ‘The third part of Gulliver's Travels is at once the longest and the worst … By common consent of readers it is the least interesting of all’, Eddy, W. A., Gulliver's Travels: A Critical Study (London, 1923), pp. 157, 48;Google Scholar ‘Swift's ridicule of human activities in the natural sciences, which occurs in the third voyage of Gulliver's Travels, is artistically the least effective part of his satire in that work’, Potter, G. R., ‘Swift and Natural Science’, Philological Quarterly, xx (1941), 97;Google Scholar ‘Swift's opinion of the scientific achievement of his day is, in itself, inadequate, and considered as an attack on science, the third book must seem wrongheaded and unfair’, Williams, K. M., Jonathan Swift and the Age of Compromise (London, 1959), p. 166.Google Scholar This line of criticism was the chief one also in contemporary England where, Swift wrote to Pope, Alexander, ‘Dr. Arbuthnot likes the Projectors least, others you tell me, the Flying Island’, The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. Williams, H. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), pp. 111, 189. Henceforth referred to as Correspondence.Google Scholar

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11 ‘The Scientific Background of Swift's “Voyage to Laputa”’, p. 235.Google Scholar The incident in question is one where a mistaken calculation in Newton's Principia was discovered by his contemporaries. It finds its parallel in a like mistake in geometrical calculations soon after Gulliver's arrival in Laputa. Gulliver's Travels, Works, xi, 162.Google Scholar

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23 While it is essential here to analyse the satire on Paracelsian science, this was not Swift's only reason for ridiculing the Aeolians. For example, R. H. Hopkins gives reason to believe that Swift also intended to ridicule Hobbes. Hopkins, R. H., ‘The Personation of Hobbism in Swift's Tale of a Tub and Mechanical Operation of the Spirit’, Philological Quarterly, XLV (1966), 372–8.Google Scholar

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27 A Tale of a Tub, p. 152.Google Scholar Paracelsus' Christian names were Philip Theophrastus. Originally the family name was Banbast, corrupted into Bumbast, and later into Bombast, called ‘of Hohenheim’ after their ancient seat, Castle Hohenheim. He later called himself Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombast and later still Paracelsus: ‘I mean to surpass them all – even the renowned Roman physician of the first century, Aurelius Cornelius Celsus. I intend to be para-Celsus – beyond Celsus – beyond them all. Para-Celsus – that's it. That's the name I've been looking for.’ Quoted in Hargrave, J., The Life and Soul of Paracelsus (London, 1951), pp. 16, 45.Google Scholar Bombast's surname was useful to Swift because the unfortunate Paracelsus, partly from his own flamboyance, partly through his own detractors, gave new meaning to the word ‘bombast’ in the English language. Hargrave, J., op. cit. p. 109.Google Scholar

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31 Ibid. p. 169.

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35 Ibid. p. 51.

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45 First published in 1936. It is the London 1953 edition that is employed here, p. 53.

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47 For a more thorough analysis of the scientific origins and philosophical entailments of these ‘scientific extremes’ (realism and subjectivism in science) refer to the present author's Science and the Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1968), pp. 21–46.Google Scholar

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49 Correspondence, i, 117.Google Scholar

50 The Sentiments of a Church of England Man with Respect to Religion and Government, Works, ii, 17.Google Scholar

51 Ibid. p. 18.

52 Ibid.

53 A Project for the Advancement of Religion and the Reformation of Manners, Works, II, 44.Google Scholar

54 Gasking, E. B., Scientific Investigation of Generation 1650–1910 (London, 1967), pp. 62–136.Google Scholar This material is re-worked here. Farber, E., ‘Variants of Preformation Theory in the History of Chemistry’, lsis, LIV (1963), 443–60.Google Scholar

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61 Wasiolek, E., ‘Relativity in Gulliver's Travels’, Philological Quarterly, XXXVII (1958), 115.Google Scholar

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65 Ibid. pp. 111–12.

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67 Case, A. E., Four Essays on Gulliver's Travels (Princeton, 1945), pp. 50–68,Google Scholar argues for the logic of Swift's cartography. The alternative point of view, that Swift's cartography is faulty, is put by Moore, J. R. in ‘The Geography of Gulliver's Travels’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, XL (1941), 214–18,Google Scholar who posed three possible explanations: ‘(1) that Swift intended an extravagant burlesque in the voyages, or (2) that he was ignorant of geography, or (3) that he intended a burlesque and knew too little to carry it out accurately.’ While Moore wavers between the second and third explanations, the argument of this paper comes closest to the first position outlined by Moore: in Swift's view nature is changing all the time so that it is a hopeless task for a cartographer to give anything more than general directions which even then can be only temporarily correct.

68 Gulliver's Travels, Works, xi, 296.Google Scholar

69 E.g. Moog, F., ‘Gulliver was a Bad Biologist’, Scientific American, CLXXIX (1948), 52–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

70 W. B. Carnochan itemizes four possible interpretations of Gulliver's spectacles: ‘a sign of his moral myopia’; ‘the loss of man's original faculties at the Fall’; ‘they also reinforce his role as scientific observer’; ‘he is still looking outside himself, not within’; ‘Gulliver's Travels’, Modern Language Quarterly, xxv (1967), 8, 9.Google Scholar

71 Even his Anglicanism represented a compromise between two extremes: ‘He laid down principles… which form an important contribution to Anglican thought on the relations of Church and State, and might have guided the Church into a middle way between the fantastic unrealities of the Non-jurors and the blank erastianism of the Hanoverian bishops’, Becket, J. C., ‘Swift as an Ecclesiastical Statesman’, in Fair Liberty Was All His Cry, p. 165Google Scholar