The Enlightenment of Cadwallader Colden: Empire, Science, and Intellectual Culture in British New York

By John M. Dixon

Was there a conservative Enlightenment? Could a self-proclaimed man of learning and progressive science also have been an agent of monarchy and reaction? Cadwallader Colden (1688–1776), an educated Scottish emigrant and powerful colonial politician, was at the forefront of American intellectual culture in the mid-eighteenth century. While living in rural New York, he recruited family, friends, servants, and slaves into multiple scientific ventures and built a transatlantic network of contacts and correspondents that included Benjamin Franklin and Carl Linnaeus. Over several decades, Colden pioneered colonial botany, produced new theories of animal and human physiology, authored an influential history of the Iroquois, and developed bold new principles of physics and an engaging explanation of the cause of gravity.

The Enlightenment of Cadwallader Colden traces the life and ideas of this fascinating and controversial "gentleman-scholar." John M. Dixon’s lively and accessible account explores the overlapping ideological, social, and political worlds of this earliest of New York intellectuals. Colden and other learned colonials used intellectual practices to assert their gentility and establish their social and political superiority, but their elitist claims to cultural authority remained flimsy and open to widespread local derision. Although Colden, who governed New York as an unpopular Crown loyalist during the imperial crises of the 1760s and 1770s, was brutally lampooned by the New York press, his scientific work, which was published in Europe, raised the international profile of American intellectualism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Apr 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9781501703508

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THE ENLIGHTENMENT OF CADWALLADER COLDEN

Empire, Science, and Intellectual Culture in British New York

JOHN M. DIXON

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ITHACA AND LONDON

In memory of my parents

It is no consequence to the truth whether a discovery of it be made by a Greek or a Barbarian, by a Courtier or a Clown; or whether it be made in the Gardens of Epicurus, or in the Forests of America. The evidence of its truth only is properly the object of Philosophical enquiry.

CADWALLADER COLDEN, 1753

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

A Note on Dates

Introduction

PART I.  BEGINNINGS

1. Enlightened Age

2. Pursuit of Gentility

3. Intellectuals

PART II.  ACTIVE MATTERS

4. Knowledge of Empires

5. Otium

6. Philosophical Actions

PART III. POLITICS

7. Against Partisanship

8. Colden’s Ordeal

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliographic Note

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My most sincere thanks go to Ruth Bloch. I have benefited from her invaluable advice, kind encouragement, and astute insights for many years. Without her generous and expert mentorship, this book would not have been possible. I also owe a special debt of gratitude to Mary Terrall, who helped me understand Colden’s theories of aether and a lot more besides. For numerous enlightening seminars and conversations at the University of California, Los Angeles, I want to thank Perry Anderson, Joyce Appleby, Jenna Gibbs, Robert Hill, Margaret Jacob, Kevin Lambert, Naomi Lamoreaux, Inger Leemans, Christopher Looby, Muriel McClendon, Wijnand Mijnhardt, Anthony Pagden, Janice Reiff, Peter Reill, Arthur Rolston, Teofilo Ruiz, Geoffrey Symcox, and Craig Yirush. Laura McEnaney and Marie Francois provided important guidance as I further developed my ideas while teaching at Whittier College and California State University, Channel Islands, respectively. From 2009, I have relied on the good cheer and wise counsel of colleagues at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. I particularly want to recognize Zara Anishanslin and Jonathan Sassi, two specialists in early American history who generously shared their time and knowledge as I worked on this book. Bryan Averbuch, Melissa Borja, Marcela Echeverri (now at Yale University), Sandra Gambetti, Eric Ivison, Catherine Lavender, Mark Lewis, Ben Mercer (now at Australian National University), Susan Smith-Peter, and John Wing also provided fruitful leads and suggestions.

Numerous other scholars and friends have contributed in various ways. Both Roger Emerson and Ned Landsman read the entire manuscript. The importance of their thoughtful criticism and honest assessments cannot be overstated. Anonymous reviewers for Cornell University Press and the City University of New York supplied a wealth of additional comments and information. I am grateful to Patricia Bonomi and Joyce Goodfriend for providing considerable encouragement, help, and advice over several years. I similarly thank Joyce Chaplin for her friendly and constructive recommendations. And I am indebted to the participants at conferences in Houston, London, Montreal, New York, and Philadelphia who pushed me to think more heavily about my research. Mordechai Feingold, Anthony Grafton, James Green, Sara Gronim, and Richard Sher merit special mention.

For assistance during my research, I thank staff at the American Antiquarian Society; Bibliothèque de Genève; the British Library, London; City University of New York; Colby College Museum of Art; Columbia University; the University of Edinburgh; Göttingen State and University Library; Harvard University; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Massachusetts Historical Society; the Museum of the City of New York; the National Archives, London; the National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh; the New Jersey Historical Society; the New York Academy of Medicine; the New-York Historical Society; the New York Public Library; the New York State Archives, Albany; the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia; the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh; the Royal Society of London; the Stevens Institute of Technology; Tacoma Museum; the University of California, Los Angeles; and Yale University. Karl Kusserow, Henk Looijesteijn, and Peter Titcomb graciously and swiftly responded to specific queries. Grants from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the Professional Staff Congress–City University of New York Fund aided my scholarship.

It has been a pleasure to work with Michael McGandy, my editor at Cornell University Press, who saw potential in an early draft and then oversaw its revision with extreme patience and expertise. His insightful comments have improved this book no end.

I thank all of the family members who have lived with this book for more years than I dare count. Individual recognition must go to William Sater, my father-in-law, who read multiple unpolished chapters, and John Dixon, my uncle and namesake, who provided ample room and board while I completed research at Edinburgh. My greatest appreciation goes to my wife, Rachel, who gave endless support and encouragement. For better or worse, I conscripted our sons, Milo and Ewan, into the historical profession as I worked on this book. They provided help and distraction in equal measure. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once said that he wrote The Age of Jackson with a young child sitting on his knee, and I can now testify to the true benefits (and fine balance) of that methodology. I reserve my final thanks for my parents, Joe and Barbara Dixon. They taught me the most of what I know, and I dedicate this book to their memory.

A NOTE ON DATES

The Julian (Old Style or O.S.) calendar was used in Britain and the British colonies until 1752. It operated several days behind the Gregorian (New Style or N.S.) calendar that was followed elsewhere in Europe after 1582. To complicate matters further, Scotland adopted 1 January as the start of a new year from 1600, while England continued to use 25 March until 1752. This book takes 1 January as the start of a new year, but otherwise repeats Old Style dates where they appear in the original documents. For example, Colden’s birth date (known at the time as 7 February 1687 in England, 7 February 1688 in Scotland, and 17 February 1688 in other parts of Europe) is presented here as 7 February 1688.

INTRODUCTION

Nothing more prevents the advancement of any Art or Science than that of making it cheap & mean. So wrote a much-traveled New York politician in 1743 after he observed low legal fees, excessive litigation, and uninformed religious talk while passing through Connecticut. His comment expressed more than his views about New England. It reflected his overall opinion of mid-eighteenth-century British America. This provincial statesman had previously complained of the contemporary overproduction of inexpensive and inaccurate books, and he had even gone so far as to invent a printing technology to enable the commercial output of complex and authoritative works. Now he groaned that Connecticut’s litigeous humour and perpetual caballing hampered colonial business and undermined social unity. Furthermore, New Englanders who pretended to possess great skill in Theology showed no actual mastery of the Principles of Religeon. In short, there was too much uncultured noise and not enough enlightenment in the American colonies.¹

Cadwallader Colden was not only a well-traveled New York politician but also an intellectual. In 1743 he was on the verge of making his own philosophical breakthrough. Thirty-three years earlier he had arrived in America as a learned Scottish immigrant short in stature and dour in nature, gray-eyed with an oval, reddish face and a prominent nose that curled outward like an upturned cup handle. At that time he possessed little more than a university education and a rich knowledge of the natural sciences. Yet, his impressive understanding of medicine, physiology, astronomy, mathematics, and physics eventually won patrons and established his gentility. He gained an appointment as New York’s surveyor general and a seat on the province’s council in the early 1720s. Subsequently, he became a powerful local figure and a valuable imperial agent with an expert knowledge of the history and geography of New York and neighboring Iroquoia. However, the colonial statesman temporarily withdrew from public affairs after he developed a reactionary dislike for interest politics and popular mobilization during the 1730s. By 1743 he wanted nothing more than a secluded and contemplative retirement. He imagined himself as an eighteenth-century gentleman-scholar possessing all the leisure, erudition, and polish required to shape international thought and improve the condition of mankind. That winter, he immersed himself in books and developed an intriguing theory of active matter that appeared to reveal the cause of gravitation.

This colonial pursuit of Art and Science that was the very opposite of cheap & mean exposes some of the ideological, social, and political parameters of intellectual culture in British America and beyond. Colden and other imperial agents in New York played a constitutive role in the so-called Moderate Enlightenment during the first half of the eighteenth century. The Moderate Enlightenment was a mainstream and state-sponsored fusion of tradition, tolerant and reasonable religion, and new science and philosophy. It was typically reformist not revolutionary, and had its origins in the religious and political turmoil of the seventeenth century. The Moderate Enlightenment had an especially strong presence in Britain. Recoiling from the political volatility of the 1640s and 1650s, English and Scottish governing classes sought to establish an extended period of calm, order, industry, and innovation after the Glorious Revolution (1688–1689). In the early eighteenth century, Newtonian natural philosophy, particularly as it was espoused by latitudinarian clergymen, gave ideological support to this effort. It seemed that a new era of stable politics and useful knowledge was indeed possible. An elite intellectual culture that formed in New York around that time helped to imperialize this outlook by tying it to Protestantism, British expansionism, commerce, and social harmony in North America. Yet, aspirations for a High Moderate Enlightenment in New York ran up against several tall hurdles. The colony’s furious partisanship, the wider politics and patronage of the First British Empire, the commercial needs of European and American publishers, the rise of a literate and refined colonial middling sort, and the ambivalence of non-elites toward metropolitan scientific knowledge each posed sizable challenges. As a result, enlightened culture in eighteenth-century British New York became at once highly significant and worryingly fragile.

The Moderate Enlightenment was one wing of a larger movement that lasted approximately from the late seventeenth century until the early nineteenth century. The Enlightenment as a whole was an age of intellectual vitality, cultural experimentation, societal transformation, and political upheaval. Formerly considered the creation of a few Parisian philosophes, it is now more often thought of as a global and polycentric early modern phenomenon fanned by an unprecedented interaction of peoples, ideas, plants, animals, and technologies. Smart conversation in salons and coffeehouses, secretive rituals in masonic halls, the publication of polite periodicals, kite-flying during electrical storms, and declarations and revolutions of one sort or another are well-known and important features. All the same, the Enlightenment remains best defined by its ideological core, and most especially by its fundamental insistence on the capacity of human reason to deliver individual and societal improvement. Equally, it expressed an optimistic vision of the eighteenth century as a historic tipping point, a moment when centuries of stagnation, ignorance, and intolerance could finally give way to progress, knowledge, and cosmopolitanism.

British America’s particular relationship with the Enlightenment began long before the American Revolution and was shaped by imperial and elitist concerns, as well as by the unique interplay of European, African, native, scholarly, and artisanal knowledge that occurred in the colonies. Within this context, New York elites served a critical role as intermediaries between local knowledge producers and distant scientific institutions and patrons. They imported books and built large libraries, exported information and specimens to European aristocrats and royal societies, published scholarly tracts, and organized correspondence networks. These achievements quickened the production and circulation of knowledge, enabling American and transatlantic intellectual culture to thrive. In addition, they created valuable political connections and demarcated the gentility and social status of the colony’s ruling class.²

Intellectual activity proceeded in New York against a backdrop of European imperialism. Before the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, colonials were more concerned with defeating Catholic absolutism than with securing independence from British Protestant rule. Attachment to Britain was particularly strong in a colony that abutted French Canada, served as an administrative and military hub of the First British Empire, and provided an accessible gateway to the continental interior. Centrally positioned within the mainland British American colonies and blessed with a deep harbor and penetrative inland water routes, New York pivoted between land and ocean, profiting from both eastward trade with Europe and the Caribbean, and westward commerce with Native Americans.

Imperialism, intellectualism, and elitism combined to produce what was initially a socially and ideologically narrow form of enlightened culture in New York. Despite its contemporary reputation as a haven for crude, heavy drinkers, the colony contained numerous learned officials. A clique of well-informed deep thinkers gathered around Governors Robert Hunter and William Burnet, two Fellows of the Royal Society and two of the most capable minds in British America. Being a refined New York intellectual took on added social and political importance as the court parties of Hunter and Burnet engaged in intelligent conversation and practices, while also sneering at the crudeness of their rivals. For example, Hunter’s 1714 play, Androboros, the first theater piece authored and published in British America, compared opposition legislators to inmates of London’s notorious insane asylum, Bethlehem Hospital, or Bedlam. Later, a Latin poem by an associate of Burnet ridiculed New Yorkers on the basis of their chess skills and strategies. Wit and intelligence thus became markers of local social and political distinctions.³

It is no surprise that this environment attracted ambitious and smart men such as Colden. Like Hunter and Burnet, and several other New York imperial agents, he possessed a Scottish background. He was born in 1688, the year of the Glorious Revolution, and so lived through the traumatic religious conflict, depression, and famine that engulfed Scotland in the 1690s. The son of a Presbyterian minister, he entered the University of Edinburgh in the early eighteenth century with the expectation that he would go on to become a churchman. It was therefore shocking and disappointing to his pious parents that he graduated in 1705 with a deep interest in the natural sciences, some exposure to Scottish Newtonianism, and a determination to become a London physician rather than a Roxburghshire clergyman. Limited by his family’s modest wealth, he failed as a medical professional in the British capital and sailed for Philadelphia in 1710. Colden soon joined an Atlantic trading community and spent a sizable chunk of the next five years touring the Caribbean as a merchant. Although he developed warm and useful friendships with other educated Scots involved in commerce, his business faltered. In 1715 he sailed back to the British Isles, where he wedded a Scottish fiancée he had not seen for five years. While on that trip, he established his scientific credentials in London by circulating a manuscript on animal secretion. Returning to Philadelphia in 1716, Colden fashioned himself as a clever and cultured doctor. He swiftly became the town’s leading physician, but was nevertheless unable to secure a steady public position. Deciding there were more opportunities in New York, he moved to Manhattan in 1718 and joined the intellectual and political circle of Governor Hunter.

This relocation north brought handsome reward in April 1720 when Colden learned that he was appointed New York’s surveyor general. Soon thereafter, he gained a seat on the colony’s council, and thus became one of the most powerful figures in a large and important colony. In defense of the expansionist imperial policies of Governor Burnet and against the protestations of a rival political faction, he produced maps and reports that circulated in Whitehall, and influenced imperial policy. He wrote his most enduring work, The History of the Five Indian Nations, for similar reasons. Initially printed in New York in 1727, this account of the Iroquois later appeared in an extended and revised form as a commercial work printed in London. It reached a large European and American readership and was widely recognized from the 1750s as a standard scholarly resource. All the same, its author reaped few direct benefits.

In the meantime, the colony of New York endured political turmoil in the 1730s and a horrific sequence of theft, fires, conspiracy trials, and executions shocked Manhattan in 1741. These events initiated Colden’s turn toward despair and conservatism. He responded at first by withdrawing from public affairs and recast himself as a noble philosopher removed from the disruptions of commerce and politics. As he fashioned himself as a gentleman at leisure, he engaged in scientific practices that depended on the labor of slaves, servants, and family members, including his daughter Jane, who became a pioneering woman botanist. Colden was a pragmatist who understood the mechanics of eighteenth-century intellectual culture. He thought long and hard about how to use script and print to distribute knowledge. He also skillfully utilized a burgeoning scientific correspondence network partly of his own making. In particular, he relied on London merchant and plant collector Peter Collinson, a well-connected figure in the British capital who helped to arrange the European publication and distribution of his writings.

It was against this backdrop that Colden made his major philosophical breakthrough in the winter of 1743–1744. He spent the next two years cautiously preparing the international launch of his new physics of active matter. Finally, in the fall of 1745, he felt ready to share his thoughts with select scholars. He informed several correspondents of his plan to disseminate a printed account of his ideas to the Royal Society and other proper Judges.⁴ An Explication of the First Causes of Action in Matter; and, of the Cause of Gravitation appeared in New York a few months later. One of the most ambitious publications in the history of American scientific literature, this two-chapter treatise claimed to solve mysteries of the universe that had perplexed all of the great ancient and modern thinkers. Its author distributed copies to the up-and-coming Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia and to another leading colonial philosopher, the Reverend Samuel Johnson, in Stratford, Connecticut. When a political emergency called him back to Manhattan in June 1746, Colden placed a bundle on a London-bound ship. These pamphlets evaded French privateers, successfully reached Collinson that August, and circulated among Britain’s literati. They sparked enough interest to prompt an English printer to run off an unauthorized copy before the year ended. Translated versions later appeared in Hamburg and Paris.⁵

Unfortunately, scholarly interest in Colden’s theory of active matter did not last. Although a celebrated London publisher issued the colonial philosopher’s grand follow-up, The Principles of Action in Matter, in 1751, that sizable and costly book was a commercial and critical flop. Colden, who remained utterly convinced of the intellectual value of his work, cursed his age’s preference for cheap, ephemeral print and condemned European prejudices against American intellectualism. Both grievances had some merit. But, in truth, Colden’s theory of active matter was too speculative and convoluted to realize the advancements in practical knowledge that it promised. To make matters worse, the New Yorker’s self-confidence smacked of hubris, while his remoteness meant that he could not respond quickly to negative European reviews.

Colden’s intellectual authority declined in America as well as Europe. A group of young and largely Yale-educated professionals usurped his cultural authority in New York in the 1750s by announcing themselves as the colony’s new intelligentsia. These upstart thinkers clashed repeatedly with Colden, who became New York’s lieutenant governor in 1761. Worn down by decades of intellectual and political struggles, as well as by a succession of personal losses, the aging statesman endured a torrid spell as an inflexible and ineffective Crown loyalist faced with a series of prerevolutionary crises. He lost confidence that the eighteenth century could usher in a new enlightened age, lamented the destructive spread of self-interest, delusion, and discord in New York, and castigated his elite opponents for manipulating the people and stirring disorder. The defining moment of his late political life occurred during the Stamp Act crisis of 1765 when a riotous mob burnt his effigy and property. Colden saw nothing enlightened about his country’s descent into civil war and died dispirited in September 1776 not long after another enlightened figure, Thomas Jefferson, had declared America’s independence from the British Empire.

Imperialism, elitism, and conservatism are not the usual stuff of the American Enlightenment. But then most of our traditional narratives concentrate heavily on libertarianism and the American Revolution. The timing of Colden’s death invites us to revisit colonial thought and culture on its own terms, rather than as a precursor to a 1776 Declaration or a 1787 Constitution. In retracing Colden’s life, we find much scientific and philosophical activity that engaged with but also extended beyond the now well-documented liberal and republican ideologies, growing refinement of the colonial middling sort, and peculiar political battles of British New York. The general picture that emerges is not one of American detachment from Europe, but one of extensive and dynamic transatlantic exchange. Peoples, ideas, information, natural objects, and human inventions passed both ways across the Atlantic in the eighteenth century. By participating in the circulation of useful knowledge, New York elites with Crown appointments and metropolitan connections laid claim to gentility, asserted their social and intellectual superiority, and established a moral basis for their government. They found opportunities in print and public debate, but also feared any popular mobilization would breed discord, dissent, conspiracy, and anarchy. Enlightenment, in the opinion of Colden and many other leading colonials, had to be managed carefully from the top down.

This history of one of New York’s earliest intellectuals and his context offers a perspective on the Enlightenment that is at once local, colonial, and transatlantic. Colden arrived in Manhattan with a good Scottish education, solid links to leading Newtonian mathematicians and astronomers in London, and a track record of medical success in Philadelphia. He gained rewarding and influential posts as a provincial councilor and surveyor general, and developed close friendships with talented and informed thinkers such as Governors Hunter and Burnet. He became a central figure in the partisan broils of a famously factious colony, as well as in the development of local intellectual culture. Simultaneously, he looked beyond New York. By the 1740s, he was in regular correspondence with Franklin, John Bartram, Rev. Johnson, and other colonial men of science. Moreover, through his London agent, Peter Collinson, he struck up relationships with the celebrated European naturalists Carl Linnaeus and Johan Frederik Gronovius, as well as powerful British politicians, including George Montagu-Dunk, Earl of Halifax and president of the Board of Trade. Colden’s writings on active matter appeared in print in America and throughout Europe, challenging preconceptions on both sides of the Atlantic about the role of colonial thought and scientific practices in an enlightened age.

Such extensive participation in early modern intellectual culture deserves greater recognition and understanding. Colden, like many of his contemporaries, believed that humankind had a historic opportunity in the eighteenth century to achieve societal progress. Even while living in a remote part of New York, he sought to help realize that goal. As an eighteenth-century imperialist, elitist, and royalist, he may not fit comfortably into our standard historical narratives about early America and the Enlightenment. But that is all the more reason to consider his importance. It is as much to say that America’s Enlightenment was not just that of Thomas Jefferson and other patriots and revolutionaries. It was also the Enlightenment of Cadwallader Colden.

PART I

Beginnings

Chapter 1

ENLIGHTENED AGE

With a series of concussive booms, pyrotechnics created at a laboratory in Greenwich, London, not far from a recently built observatory, exploded above the River Thames in July 1688 in celebration of the birth of a new royal.¹ As the only legitimate son of the King of England, Ireland, and Scotland, the infant Prince of Wales was heir to three crowns and an empire of Caribbean islands and North American colonies. His family—the Stuarts—had returned to power in 1660, after eleven years of republicanism, and overseen an age of cultural splendor that encompassed the poetry and plays of John Dryden, the music of Henry Purcell, and the architecture of Sir Christopher Wren. The Restoration had also brought an unprecedented institutionalization and legitimization of English and Scottish science. The Royal Society of London, chartered in 1662, had added visibility and prestige to English natural history and natural philosophy. Meanwhile, in Scotland’s capital, the botanist, royal physician, and royal geographer, Sir Robert Sibbald, had founded Edinburgh’s first physic garden, co-organized the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, and gathered a virtuoso circle of scientifically minded gentlemen.²

These developments helped to nurture an exciting age of international intellectual innovation, cultural experiment, and political transformation that started in the second half of the seventeenth century and lasted well into the nineteenth century. This is by no means to say that the Enlightenment—as it is now known—began solely in England and Scotland, or for that matter in Europe. Rather, it was a global and polycentric phenomenon that owed much to the remarkable exchange of peoples, ideas, information, natural objects, and human inventions that happened during the early modern era, albeit often under the aegis of European imperialism and commercialism. The Enlightenment covered a great deal of ideological as well as geographical ground, combining diverse conservative, moderate, and radical opinions—some secular, some religious. Its intellectual coherence came from its general advocacy of reason, pursuit of self-improvement and societal progress, and assertion that the eighteenth century was a pivotal moment in a centuries-long battle against dogma and ignorance.³

Enlightenment Scotland and America enjoyed a particularly close intellectual relationship.⁴ Historians have paid a great deal of attention to the transatlantic reach of the mid and late eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Thomas Reid, and Adam Smith. By comparison, the sizable impact in America of learned Scots born around 1688 remains underappreciated. This generation came of age during a difficult period of religious tumult, famine, and exodus, but simultaneously benefited from modernizing academic reforms, the support of an aristocracy interested in scientific improvement, and the thrill of living at what seemed like a crucial point in intellectual history—a moment of sweeping philosophical change and scientific breakthroughs.

Cadwallader Colden was arguably the most important of the several educated Scots who immigrated to America in the early eighteenth century. After a period in Philadelphia, he moved to New York in 1718 and spent much of his remaining life constructing and justifying a transatlantic intellectual culture. Around 1760, he told his American grandchildren a historical narrative that he may well have learned more than fifty years earlier as a student at the University of Edinburgh.⁵ It was a stock eighteenth-century tale that recalled how Popish priests and Aristotelian scholars had imposed a cultural hegemony of useless knowledge on the world, and how two great thinkers, René Descartes and Sir Isaac Newton, had cleared away much of that intellectual fog in the seventeenth century. Colden acknowledged that more needed to be done, but also asserted that the world stood on the verge of an enlightened age. He then impressed upon his grandchildren that his own intellectual work was an integral part of that historic moment. In this way, he used a story of enlightenment to reflect on his life’s meaning and purpose.⁶

Colden was correct to view the decline of Aristotelian scholastic tradition and development of new understandings of the natural world as important precursors to eighteenth-century intellectual culture. The Aristotelian universe was very different from our own. Whereas we now accept that our planet rotates around the Sun, Aristotelians generally put the Earth at the center of the cosmos. They also usually agreed that the orbit of the Moon separated a celestial realm where stars and planets moved in perfect circles from a set of corrupt sublunary spheres composed of four elements—earth, water, air, and fire. Each of these elements had characteristic qualities and innate tendencies. Aristotelians claimed that cold, dry, and heavy earth constantly tried to reach the center of the world. So did cold, wet, and heavy water. By contrast, hot, wet, and light air and hot, dry, and light fire sought to rise upward. In this scheme, bodies fell downward not because of some external gravitational force, but because of the inner strivings of earth and water to reach their natural place at the Earth’s core.⁷

Aristotelian tradition additionally viewed terrestrial bodies as interactions of prime matter and substantial form. We are now used to thinking of matter as an actual material substance, but Aristotelians considered prime matter to be something else—an inert potential to become substance. Substantial form was the active principle that realized that latent transformation. It imbued prime matter with essential, as well as nonessential, qualities.⁸ The recovery of ancient pre-Socratic, Platonic, Hermetic, Epicurean, and Stoic writings during the Renaissance encouraged a significant number of