Ian Lawson’s “Bears in Eden, or, This Is Not the Garden You’re Looking for: Margaret Cavendish, Robert Hooke and the Limits of Natural Philosophy

摘要

Ian Lawson's main purpose here is to shed light on Margaret Cavendish's disparaging characterization of the Royal Society's early fellows (especially Robert Hooke) as bear- men in her utopian satire the Blazing World (1666). In particular Cavendish turned her ire on microscopical observation, whose techniques were enjoying considerable popularity, thanks in large part to Hooke's Micrographia (1665). Lawson's introduction sets out the belief among the Royal Society's fellows that newly built instruments were enabling microscopy to exceed by far the limitations of human sight, as well as Cavendish's reservation that this ambition inevitably elevated humans above their natural station and could not but generate dangerous misconceptions. Next, he introduces the Blazing World and its population of anthropomorphized characters, dwelling on the role and standing of the philosopher bear-men. The following section explores seventeenth-century microscopy more deeply, arguing that the age's natural philosophers presented optical instruments in terms suggesting them as natural, rather than artificial, extensions of the sense of sight. Turning to bears, Lawson sketches some early modern perspectives on bear-baiting and ursine nature, as well as some ways in which the behaviour of experimental scientists recommended itself to Cavendish's pen for this kind of lampooning. He then turns to the status of knowledge after "the Fall," setting out the Royal Society's ambition to reconstruct what fragments of Adamic learning may be recovered, and its inevitable collision with Cavendish's organic sense of epistemology, as knowledge, for Cavendish, inheres in all creation's objects to the extent, and no further than, divinely apportioned. Observation, Cavendish believed, could not generate new knowledge in humans beyond that which was naturally theirs. Finally, Lawson emphasizes the importance he feels Cavendish attached to social and political, as well as natural rank, concluding with a discussion of her visit to the Royal Society in 1667 and a suggestion that Cavendish approached the Society on this occasion as she would any other public entertainment