Abstract
Robert Boyle (1627–91) would have been an appropriate and archetypal target for an attack on the new natural philosophy, despite some critics finding its satiric effectiveness doubtful. His many achievements included demonstrating the role of atmospheric pressure, the function of air in respiration, and that sound could not be transmitted in a vacuum. Boyle was therefore one of Wotton’s key players in the overthrow of ancient knowledge, with the ‘Comparison between the Ancient and Modern Physicks’ in the Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694) primarily designed to ‘determine who Philosophized best, Aristotle and Democritus, or Mr. Boyle and Mr. Newton’.2 As one of the Tale’s main objectives was to pour scorn on Wotton and his Reflections, ridiculing Boyle would have served this purpose well. However, such a tactic would have to be carried out with subtlety. In his attacks on Wotton and Bentley, Swift received vital support from the ‘wits’ of Christ Church, including Robert Boyle’s great nephew Charles, the future Earl of Orrery. To satirize the relative of a key ally in a blatant lampoon would have provoked more tension in an intellectual scuffle already tense and reduced to personal attack. From a practical point of view also, to name Robert Boyle as a champion of the Moderns within The Battel of the Books would have confused the action, in which Charles Boyle is heavily involved as a defender of the Ancients.
The sword of wit, like the scythe of time, cuts down friend and foe, and attacks every object that lies accidentally in its way. But, sharp and irresistible as the edge of it may be, Mr. Boyle will always remain invulnerable.1
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Notes
John Boyle, Fifth Earl of Cork and Orrery, Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift, ed. João Fróes (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), p. 145 (Letter VIII).
See Miriam Starkman, Swift’s Satire on Learning in ‘A Tale of a Tub’ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950; repr. New York: Octagon Books, 1968), p. 119,
Jon Rowland, ‘Another Turn of the Screw: Prefaces in Swift, Marvell, and Genette’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 21 (1991), 129–48 (p. 138),
and Marjorie Nicolson and Nora M. Mohler, ‘The Scientific Background of Swift’s Voyage to Laputa’, Annals of Science, 2 (1937), 299–334 (pp. 324–25, 328, 332).
See Steven Shapin, Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), pp. 125–27.
See Occasional Reflections upon Several Subjects (London, 1665), sig. A2r, in WRB, V, 10, and H. Fisch, ‘Bishop Hall’s Meditations’, The Review of English Studies, 25 (1949), 210–21.
See Jane E. Jenkins, ‘Arguing about Nothing: Henry More and Robert Boyle on the Theological Implications of the Void’, in Rethinking the Scientific Revolution, ed. Margaret J. Osler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 153–79 (pp. 155, 168). On the date of composition, see WRB, V, xi.
See Shapin, Never Pure, p. 100, as well as Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985; repr. 1989), pp. 60–69.
See Marie-Louise Coolahan, ‘Redeeming Parcels of Time: Aesthetics and Practice of Occasional Meditation’, The Seventeenth Century, 22 (2007), 124–43 (pp. 134–35).
See A Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately Entered into Holy Orders (1707?), in PW, IX, 68, Ann Cline Kelly, ‘After Eden: Gulliver’s (Linguistic) Travels’, ELH, 45 (1978), 33–54 (p. 51),
and Ian Higgins, ‘Language and Style’, in The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift, ed. Christopher Fox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 146–60 (pp. 147–49).
J. Paul Hunter, ‘Robert Boyle and the Epistemology of the Novel’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 2 (1990), 275–91 (p. 280).
Hunter, ‘Robert Boyle and the Epistemology of the Novel’, p. 278, and the same author’s Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990), pp. 201–208. See Lawrence M. Principe, ‘Virtuous Romance and Romantic Virtuoso: The Shaping of Robert Boyle’s Literary Style’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 56 (1995), 377–97 (esp. p. 395).
Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society of London, For the Improving of Natural Knowledge (London, 1667), p. 113, and PW, XI, 185–86. See Ann Cline Kelly, Swift and the English Language (Philadelphia, PN: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), pp. 77–79.
See esp. Juliet Cummins and David Burchell, ‘Introduction: Ways of Knowing: Conversations between Science, Literature, and Rhetoric’, in Science, Literature and Rhetoric in Early Modern England, eds Cummins and Burchell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 1–12 (p. 9).
Samuel Butler, ‘Miscellaneous Observations’, in Hudibras Parts I and II and Selected Other Writings, eds John Wilders and Hugh de Quehen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 285; John Wilkins, An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (London, 1668). On Boyle’s natural philosophical writings themselves featuring a ‘heavily figurative and syntactically convoluted prose style’,
see Robert Markley, Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660–1740 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 114.
Thomas Shadwell, The Virtuoso, eds Marjorie Hope Nicolson and David Stuart Rodes (London: Arnold, 1966), pp. 18–19 (I i 267–75).
See esp. Peter Anstey, ‘Literary Responses to Robert Boyle’s Natural Philosophy’, in Science, Literature and Rhetoric in Early Modern England, eds Cummins and Burchell, pp. 145–62, and Claude Lloyd, ‘Shadwell and the Virtuosi’, PMLA, 44 (1929), 472–94.
This classification is also mocked in Rochester’s A Satyre against Reason and Mankind (ll. 6–7, in The Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Harold Love [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999], p. 57).
See also Uwe Pauschert, ‘“It Should Be Only Rationis Capax”’, Swift Studies, 1 (1986), 67. On designs to bring ‘universal improvement’ through natural philosophy,
see Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform, 1626–1660 (London: Duckworth, 1975), pp. 67–77 and passim.
Barbara M. Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 49–51.
On ‘personation’, see Tale, p. 7, and Richard Terry, ‘Swift’s Use of “Personate” to Indicate Parody’, Notes and Queries, 239 (1994), 196–98. Occasional Reflections has been suggested as an object of inspiration as well as parody for Swift. The Biographia Britannica: Or, The Lives of the Most Eminent Persons who Have Flourished in Great Britain and Ireland, from the Earliest Ages (ed. Andrew Kippis, 2nd edn, 5 vols [London, 1778–93], II, 501n.)
and Clive T. Probyn (‘Gulliver and the Relativity of Things: A Commentary on Method and Mode, with a Note on Smollett’, Renaissance and Modern Studies, 18: 1 [1974], 63–76 [pp. 70–72]) each note the similarity between the Travels and Boyle’s proposal for a ‘Romantick story’ in which an ‘Observing Native’ of the ‘Southern Ocean’ visits Europe and gives an account of customs and manners ‘to condemn, or perhaps laugh at them’ (WRB, V, 171–72). The satiric value of travel writing was not unique to Boyle or Swift, and such parallels could be accidental.
See also WRB, V, 43, 44, 50, 147, and Leslie Moore, ‘“Instructive Trees”: Swift’s Broom-Stick, Boyle’s Reflections, and Satiric Figuration’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 19 (1986), 313–32 (p. 328).
See ‘A Defence of An Essay of Dramatic Poesy’, where Dryden argues that ‘a man cannot but be a rational creature’ (Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, ed. George Watson, 2 vols [London: Dent and Dutton, 1962], I, 120).
Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A. D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 3 (Book I, ll. 84–85); Cratylus, 399c, in Works of Plato, trans. H. N. Fowler and others, 12 vols (London: Heinemann, 1926), VI, 59. For Metamorphoses in Swift’s library, see LRJS, II, 1355–56. Swift owned two editions of Plato (see LRJS, II, 1437–40), and in a letter to Pope (1 May 1733) mentions ‘reading Plato many years ago’ (CJS, III, 637). See also Irene Samuel, ‘Swift’s Reading of Plato’, Studies in Philology, 73 (1976), 440–62.
See C. A. Patrides, ‘Renaissance Ideas on Man’s Upright Form’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 19 (1958), 256–58; revised in Premises and Motifs in Renaissance Thought and Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 83–89.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, Chap. 7, 1098a, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), II, 1735. Swift was very familiar with Aristotle’s writings, and the Nichomachean Ethics, which was required reading for undergraduates at Trinity College Dublin (Ehrenpreis, I, 59), and Parts of Animals (see note 37 below) feature in an anthology he owned: see LRJS, I, 85–86.
Sylva Sylvarum, VI, 607, in The Works of Francis Bacon, eds James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis and Douglas Denon Heath, 14 vols (London, 1857–74), II, 530.
See A. B. Chambers, ‘“I Was But an Inverted Tree”: Notes toward the History of an Idea’, Studies in the Renaissance, 8 (1961), 291–99. While Chambers’ account includes the Broom-Stick (pp. 297–98), he does not comment upon the significance of this tradition to Swift’s satiric purpose. Apparently unaware of the image’s long history, Clarence M. Webster suggests that Swift draws upon George Gascoigne, who in The Viewe of Worldly Vanities (1576) asks ‘what is man […] but a tree turned topsie turvey?’ (‘A Source for Swift’s A Meditation upon a Broomstick’, Modern Language Notes, 51 [1936], 160). On Gascoigne and the connection of the inverted tree to human degradation in the ascetic tradition, see Valerie Rumbold, ‘Headnote to the Broom-Stick’, in Hoaxes, Parodies, Treatises and Mock-Treatises (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
On this ancient trope, see A. D. Nuttall, ‘Fishes in the Trees’, Essays in Criticism, 24 (1974), 20–38. Verbally echoing the Broom-Stick, the Scriblerians’ Peri Bathous: or, Martinus Scriblerus, His Treatise of the Art of Sinking in Poetry (1727) argues that poetics has been corrupted by artificial thought: ‘When an audience behold […] a man’s head where his heels should be; how are they struck with transport and delight? [An author] ought therefore to render himself master of this happy and anti-natural way of thinking’ (Chap. V, in
The Prose Works of Alexander Pope, eds Norman Ault and Rosemary Cowler, 2 vols [Oxford: Blackwell, 1936–86], II, 192).
See Charles Peake, ‘Swift and the Passions’, Modern Language Review, 55 (1960), 169–80.
Douglas H. White, ‘Swift and the Definition of Man’, Modern Philology, 73: 4, Part 2 (May 1976), S48–55 (S52, 50).
See also R. S. Crane, ‘The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos, and the History of Ideas’, in Reason and the Imagination: Studies in the History of Ideas, 1600–1800, ed. J. A. Mazzeo (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), pp. 231–53,
Clive T. Probyn, ‘Swift and the Human Predicament’, in The Art of Jonathan Swift, ed. Probyn (London: Vision Press, 1978), pp. 57–80 (esp. pp. 65–66),
and J. A. Downie, ‘Gulliver’s Fourth Voyage and Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding’, in Reading Swift: Papers from the Fifth Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift, ed. Hermann J. Real (München: Fink, 2008), pp. 453–64.
Peter Harrison, ‘Original Sin and the Problem of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 63 (2002), 239–59.
See Arthur Pollard, Satire (London: Methuen, 1970), p. 21.
Douglas Lane Patey, ‘Swift’s Satire on “Science” and the Structure of Gulliver’s Travels’, ELH, 58 (1991), 809–39 (pp. 828–33).
See Joseph M. Levine, Dr. Woodward’s Shield: History, Science, and Satire in Augustan England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 284–87, Ehrenpreis, II, 179–80, 189, 191, and Oxford DNB, s.v. ‘Herbert, Thomas’. Swift discussed antiquarian topics (half-jokingly, at least) with Fountaine and Pembroke: see Swift to Pembroke, 13 June 1709, in CJS, I, 253.
On the usual charges made against the virtuoso, see esp. Walter E. Houghton, ‘The English Virtuoso in the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 3 (1942), 51–73, and 190–219, and Shapin, Never Pure, p. 171.
As a common Scriblerian target, see Roger D. Lund, ‘The Eel of Science: Index Learning, Scriblerian Satire, and the Rise of Information Culture’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 22: 2 (May 1998), 18–42.
Observations upon Anthroposophia Theomagica, and Anima Magica Abscondita (London, 1655), facs. reprt in Henry More: Major Philosophical Works, ed. G. A. J. Rogers, 9 vols (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1997), III, 73;
Phillip Harth, Swift and Anglican Rationalism: The Religious Background of ‘A Tale of a Tub’ (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 85; Thomas Stanley, The History of Philosophy, 3rd edn (London, 1701), Part XI, Chap. ix, Section I V, p. 464. Harth has demonstrated Swift’s use of Stanley’s History elsewhere in the Tale (Swift and Anglican Rationalism, pp. 66–67).
See Margaret G. Cook, ‘Divine Artifice and Natural Mechanism: Robert Boyle’s Mechanical Philosophy of Nature’, Osiris, 2nd series, 16 (2001), 133–50 (pp. 140–41).
The Christian Virtuoso, in WRB, XI, 299, 300. See Marie Boas, ‘The Establishment of the Mechanical Philosophy’, Osiris, 10 (1952), 412–541 (p. 487).
See Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy, Part I, in WRB, III, 268, and John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 132.
See Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason, foreword by Simon Schama (London: Allen Lane, 2003), pp. 87, 89–90.
See Theodore M. Brown, ‘Physiology and the Mechanical Philosophy in Mid-seventeenth-century England’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 51 (1977), 25–54 (p. 54).
See esp. Carol Houlihan Flynn, The Body in Swift and Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990),
and William Freedman, ‘The Grotesque Body in the Hollow Tub: Swift’s Tale’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 51 (2009), 294–316.
John Locke, for instance, suggested that God might ‘superadd to Matter a Faculty of Thinking’ (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979], p. 541 [Book I V, Chap. III]).
See John W. Yolton, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1983; repr. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), esp. pp. 14–48.
Martin Price, Swift’s Rhetorical Art: A Study in Structure and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953), p. 89.
The Rehearsal Transpros’d: The Second Part, in Andrew Marvell, The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, eds Annabel Patterson and others, 2 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), I, 266.
A. C. Guthkelch suggests Wotton’s RAML (p. 193) as the target of this allusion, but Boyle’s Occasional Reflections offered Swift further confirmation of the Moderns’ delight in anatomy. See A Tale of a Tub &c., eds Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith, 2nd edn, corrected (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 123n.
See Michael V. DePorte, ‘Digressions and Madness in A Tale of a Tub and Tristram Shandy’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 34 (1970), 43–57 (p. 44), and the same author’s Nightmares and Hobbyhorses: Swift, Sterne, and Augustan Ideas of Madness (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1974), pp. 60–65.
Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Machine Man and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Ann Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 28.
C. J. Rawson, Gulliver and the Gentle Reader: Studies in Swift and our Time (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 33–36, 143. Ronald Paulson compares the passage with dissection accounts in the Philosophical Transactions, whilst Frederick N. Smith notes its resemblance to Thomas Willis’s description of ‘dissecting the Carcase of a Maid’.
See Paulson, Theme and Structure in Swift’s ‘Tale of a Tub’ (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960; repr. Hamden, CT: Archon Books (Shoe String Press), 1972), pp. 62–63, and
Smith, Language and Reality in Swift’s ‘A Tale of a Tub’ (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979), pp. 63–64, 69n40.
See Christopher Fox, ‘How to Prepare a Noble Savage: The Spectacle of Human Science’, in Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains, eds Christopher Fox, Roy Porter and Robert Wokler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 1–30 (p. 6), and the same author’s ‘Swift and the Spectacle of Human Science’, in Reading Swift: Papers from the Third Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift, eds Hermann J. Real and Helgard Stöver-Leidig (München: Fink, 1998), pp. 199–212 (pp. 199–200).
See Roger D. Lund, ‘Martinus Scriblerus and the Search for the Soul’, Papers on Language and Literature, 25: 2 (Spring 1989), 135–50 (p. 142).
See Peter J. Schakel, ‘Swift’s Voices: Innovation and Complication in the Poems Written at Market Hill’, in Reading Swift: Papers from the Fourth Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift, eds Hermann J. Real and Helgard Stöver-Leidig (München: Fink, 2003), pp. 311–25 (pp. 313–14),
and Carole Fabricant, Swift’s Landscape (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982; repr. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), pp. 207–208.
Arno Löffler, ‘The Dean and Lady Anne: Humour in Swift’s Market Hill Poems’, in Reading Swift: Papers from the Second Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift, eds Richard H. Rodino and Hermann J. Real (München: Fink, 1993), pp. 113–24 (pp. 118–19).
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Lynall, G. (2012). Meditations and Mechanisms: Swift and Robert Boyle’s Occasional Reflections upon Several Subjects . In: Swift and Science. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137016966_2
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