Author: Peter Watson
Quotes of Author: Peter Watson
Cardinal Bellarmino, whom we shall meet in Chapter 25 as the leader of the Catholic Church's resistance to Copernicus, also said: 'God wills that man should in some measure know him through his creatures, and because no single created thing could fitly represent the infinite perfection of the Creator, he multiplied creatures, and bestowed on each a certain degree of goodness and perfection, that from these we might form some idea of the goodness and perfection of the Creator, who, in one most simple and perfect essence, contains infinite perfections.'32 On this reading, Copernicus' breakthrough was an infinitesimal increase in man's ascent to God. Rousseau, in Émile, said: 'O Man! Confine thine" book-quoteAt its most simple, the notion underlying The Great Chain of Being, as identified in the first instance by Plato, is that the universe is essentially a rational place, in which all organisms are linked in a great chain, not on one scale of low to high {for Plato could see that even 'lowly' creatures were perfectly 'adapted', as we would say, to their niches in the scheme of things} but that there was in general terms a hierarchy which ranged from nothingness through the inanimate world, into the realm of plants, on up through animals and then humans, and above that through angels and other 'immaterial and intellectual' entities, reaching at the top a superior or supreme being, a terminus or Absolute. book-quoteThe discipline of history is particularly important in this context because while science has had a direct impact on how historians write, and what they write about, history has itself been evolving. One of the great debates in historiography is over how events move forward. One school of thought has it that 'great men' are mostly what matter, that the decisions of people in power can bring about significant shifts in world events and mentalities. Others believe that economic and commercial matters force change by promoting the interests of certain classes within the overall population. In the twentieth century, the actions of Stalin and Hitler in particular would certainly seem to suggest that 'great' men are vital to historical events. But the second half of the century was dominated by thermonuclear weapons, and can one say that any single person, great or otherwise, was really responsible for the bomb? No. In fact, I would suggest that we are living at a time of change, a crossover time in more ways than one, when what we have viewed as the causes of social movement in the past – great men or economic factors playing on social classes – are both being superseded as the engine of social development. That new engine is science. book-quote
