Perception and analogy: Poetry, science, and religion in the eighteenth century

By Rosalind Powell

Perception and analogy explores ways of seeing scientifically in the eighteenth century. The book examines how sensory experience is conceptualised during the period, drawing novel connections between treatments of perception as an embodied phenomenon and the creative methods employed by natural philosophers. Covering a wealth of literary, theological, and pedagogical texts that engage with astronomy, optics, ophthalmology, and the body, it argues for the significance of analogies for conceptualising and explaining new scientific ideas. As well as identifying their use in religious and topographical poetry, the book addresses how analogies are visible in material culture through objects such as orreries, camera obscuras, and aeolian harps. It makes the vital claim that scientific concepts become intertwined with Christian discourse through reinterpretations of origins and signs, the scope of the created universe, and the limits of embodied knowledge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Oct 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526157034

Book preview

Introduction

Seeing scientifically involves the perception of order in a bewilderingly large universal landscape. It demands the ability to interpret the material nature of things and to recognise the laws and forces that govern them. In James Thomson’s 1727 celebration of Isaac Newton’s life, the natural philosopher’s discoveries and methods are framed in terms of eyesight:

All-piercing sage! who sat not down and dream’d

Romantic schemes, defended by the din

Of specious words, and tyranny of names;

But, bidding his amazing mind attend,

And with heroic patience years on years

Deep searching, saw at last the SYSTEM dawn,

And shine, of all his race, on him alone.¹

Newton’s recognition of universal laws governing physical phenomena is set out here as a Lockean process in which evidence is gradually acquired through observation and inductive law-making. Although Thomson emphasises that success is the result of ‘heroic patience’ rather than sudden inspiration, he does not outline the experimental methods employed but relies instead upon the trope of Newton’s superior ‘all-piercing’ vision which enables him to ‘see’ the ‘SYSTEM dawn’. The ‘penetrative eye’ (line 73) becomes an analogy for a particular kind of scientific understanding:²

All intellectual eye, our SOLAR ROUND

First gazing thro’, he by the blended power

Of GRAVITATION and PROJECTION saw

The whole in silent harmony revolve.

From unassisted vision hid, the MOONS

To chear remoter planets numerous pour’d,

By him in all their mingled tracts were seen. (lines 39–45)

Thomson’s references to eyesight in this passage function metonymically for the kind of knowledgeable perception that permitted Newton to establish laws of optics and motion and to communicate those laws to others. Thomson is not alone in making an association between Newton’s knowledge and his privileged sight: Richard Glover’s ‘A Poem on Sir Isaac Newton’ (1728) celebrates how his ‘quick sight pursu’d [light’s] darting rays’, in order to see accurately ‘How in the texture of each body lay / The power that separates the diff’rent beams’;³ in a patriotic poem of 1735, Jane Brereton compares Merlin’s erroneous astronomy to Newton’s correct laws of attraction, according the new discoveries to the latter’s ‘faculties enlarg’d’;⁴ and the anonymous 1750 poem A Philosophic Ode on the Sun and the Universe describes Newton’s genius with reference to his ‘piercing eyes’.⁵

Newton’s own works display a preoccupation with visual perception. In Opticks (1704), he demonstrates awareness of the need to shape readers’ visual and mental engagements with new scientific ideas through definition, explanation, demonstration, and prompts for replication. Both Laura Miller and Charles Bazerman have drawn attention to Newton’s exploitation of the monograph form – in preference to articles in Philosophical Transactions that provide an interactive arena for scientific debate and critique – as a space where he could establish his authority to propose new laws of natural philosophy. Bazerman argues that Newton creates in Opticks a ‘controlled experience’ that takes readers ‘from first principles to a fully articulated and fully imagined system’.⁶ We can see how this controlled experience is established through the opening ‘Definitions’, which equip readers with an apparatus of key terms such rays, refrangibility, and reflexibility. In the main body of Opticks, Newton encourages readers to adopt an empiricist approach to observing light and its properties. He notes that his accounts of experiments are designed to facilitate replication and not only to report evidence: ‘in the Description of these Experiments, I have set down such Circumstances by which either the Phaenomenon might be rendred more conspicuous, or a Novice might more easily try them’.⁷ Newton trains the would-be experimenter to arrange and observe these processes correctly, advising them to make the site of experimentation dark enough for light rays to be viewed, to use ‘good’ optical lenses, and to employ a ‘well wrought’ glass prism that is ‘free from Bubbles and Veins’ (Book I, p. 53). Each of these devices shows that Opticks cannot be read passively: axioms and diagrams need to be scrutinised, and experiments should be repeated. The outcome is that the reader will be able to observe light’s properties in a newly accurate and systematic way.

Perception and Analogy is about ways of seeing scientifically and how these ways are presented, explained, manipulated, and applied in eighteenth-century literature and science. Newton is a frequent touchstone throughout this study, both by virtue of his scientific publications and because his name becomes a shorthand for empiricist enquiry in this period under the banner of Newtonianism. Whilst a few of the instances of observation that I examine in this book do involve the replication of experiments in acts of direct witnessing of the kind invoked by Newton, the majority of my examples – from topographical poems, scientific reports, didactic textbooks and lectures, dialogues, and descriptions of models and instruments – employ what Steven Shapin has identified as ‘the literary technology of virtual witnessing’, that is, ‘the production in a reader’s mind of such an image of an experimental scene as obviates the necessity for either its direct witness or its replication’.⁸ I extend Shapin’s usage to encompass a whole range of literary and imaginative empirical sites where scientific perception needs to be employed, such as conceptions of outer space, the description of colour in a landscape, and explorations of the relationship between the senses and the body. I show how writers employ analogy within the virtual environment of the text to permit readers’ cognitive experiences of scientific perception without the need for direct observation.⁹ Reading, the witnessing of experiments and demonstrations, and empirical observations of celestial and terrestrial sites all demonstrate how seeing – and the cognitive experience of perception – is central to the new science and its communication in creative and didactic texts.

As a founding text for the empirical method, John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) prompts natural philosophers to consider processes of knowledge acquisition. With its new emphasis on sensation and reflection, science becomes literally a way of seeing things differently. Philosophical approaches to phenomenal reality and knowledge construction, such as discussion of Molyneux’s Question and Berkeley’s idealism, also raise questions about the relationship between the different senses and how sensation functions as the basis of knowledge. Finally, the lived experience of perception – from individual acts of seeing or feeling to medical intervention – raises further questions about the relationship between sensation, reflection, and knowledge. I show how these different accounts rub up against habitual analogies between light and knowledge and divine design, producing new analogical models for perception and its processes.

Studies on the role of the senses in the eighteenth century have proliferated in the past decade, and many critics have rightly looked beyond the ocularcentric discourse of the period to investigate touch, smell, and hearing.¹⁰ Perception and Analogy begins with vision as the key sense that governs empiricist encounters with the phenomenal world. However, the informative or knowledgeable encounter – mediated through popular accounts of science, descriptive poems, or even representative objects – is also shown to involve the other senses. Outlining eighteenth-century educational theory and practices, I show how touch and the tactile manipulation of objects are important for understanding the causal relationships between phenomena such as light and refracting prisms, for making planetary features and motions comprehensible through models of the universe, and for conceptualising infinite astronomical systems in outer space and hidden systems within the body. I explore, therefore, both the practical use of the senses in scientific and natural encounters and the treatment of these sensory encounters and processes in optical, medical, and literary texts.

In the chapters that follow, I uncover the tension between detached and objective models of eyes and sight, as found in the optical diagrams and experiments of Newton and William Chesselden and the poems of Henry Brooke, Richard Blackmore, and James Thomson, and the subjective experience of individual perception in cases of imperfect sight, impairment, and blindness as explored by George Berkeley or David Hartley, and presented in poems by Richard Jago, Edward Young, and Thomas Blacklock. Although I discuss the ways in which some ideas are revised in this period – new theories of colour production and perception, the shift from understanding the connection between the body and the senses in terms of animal spirits towards Hartley’s nervous fibres, the increasingly medicalised account of vision – I do not aim at a neat chronological exploration of the senses, science, knowledge, and belief in the period. As some models for perception and experience (such as the camera obscura or the idea of readable signs and tokens in the natural world) are replaced, others (such as the connection between light and knowledge or the limitation of human understanding) prove enduring even as the analogies that are used to express them change.

Four key subjects, together with perception, shape my approach to the period’s literature and science: poetry as a site for the interpretation, display, or acquisition of knowledge; the role of the imagination in scientific discovery, description, and learning; the method and effects of analogy; and, finally, the co-presence of science and religion in the period’s habitual physico-theological outlook. I outline these here.

Poetry

Topographical poetry, as a genre that seeks to represent the landscape and the experience of looking at it, can be read as an indicator of the developing figuration of sensory experience in this period. In the poems that I take as exempla, eyes scan skies and landscapes and focus on particular details, vision is facilitated by lenses and, occasionally, surgical intervention, or inhibited by impairment or natural light and meteorological conditions, and the processes of colour perception, binocular vision, and sensory communication are interrogated.

By paying attention to the readers, writers, and viewers in topographical poetry, it is possible to interpret these texts as engagements with optics and the science of vision as applied to subjective experience. This affects how the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘you’, indicating viewers, are to be approached: not as an ideal point of static or roving spectatorship, but as an imagined counterpart to the real viewer theorised in, for example, Locke’s Essay and addressed through the educational dialogues on astronomy. John Barrell’s account of formal prospect viewing in art and its relation to Thomson’s Seasons shows how a knowledgeable observer might render a landscape picturesque through an active process ‘of jockeying for position, of screwing up the eyes, of moving back and forth, [and] of rearranging objects in the imagination’.¹¹ Alternatives to this neat account of prospect viewing as political power move have been supplied in more recent criticism: Margaret Koehler has documented a shift in the course of the century from Locke’s passively receptive mind to models of alert, skilful associationism, and, more recently, Ingrid Horrocks has described the transition from the privileging of detached observers in Thomson to the recognition of the wanderer as the key observer in the topographical poetry of a ‘post-patronage poet’ such as Oliver Goldsmith.¹² Both of these approaches are comparable with my own identification of how objective models of vision and spectatorship become destabilised in the period.

In its framing of poetry as a route to knowledge acquisition, Perception and Analogy considers descriptions of observers within the texts and the ways in which topographical poetry facilitates perceptual experience for readers. Thomson’s frequent invocations of eyes (explored in Chapter 5) have attracted a great deal of critical attention, and they offer one way in to thinking about this topic. Whilst the poet certainly invokes specific individuals in some descriptions of observation, such as the appearance of Lord Lyttleton’s estate in Spring and Arthur Onslow’s appearance in Autumn, many of the eyes in Thomson’s poem are what Heather Keenleyside has described as ‘oddly detached body parts that could belong to any creature’.¹³ There is potential for the reader to adopt these eyes through imaginative perception. Kevis Goodman’s study of the affective techniques through which The Seasons and other descriptive poems of the period are able to bring historical landscapes to life provides a helpful account of how the somatic experience of observation can be transmitted to readers through the conflict between focused microscopic observation and its disturbance by external factors.¹⁴ Goodman’s interest is the transmission of historical detail, but her focus on sensation points towards the kinds of readerly involvement that my own study addresses.

Further ammunition for the interpretation of topographical poetry in this mode is supplied by its actual use in the eighteenth century. John Sitter’s explanation of how the ‘miniature dramas’ of the period’s poetry ‘are waiting to be produced by active readers’ who ‘see as well as hear’, corroborated more recently by Abigail Williams’s ground-breaking account of communal reading practices in the period, helps to show how the poems I address in this book are not to be viewed as static representations of spectatorship but as interactive texts that facilitate knowledgeable encounters with the more particular phenomena that make up a landscape, an astronomical vista, or a description of bodily processes.¹⁵ The poems frequently employ imperatives and deictic indicators (‘See!’, ‘Lo!’) that invite active participation from the reader. The quotation of verse examples in popular science texts gives some indication of what this participation might look like. For example, in Benjamin Martin’s The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Philosophy (1759–63), lines from Creation are integrated into the dialogue as a call to active viewing – ‘In the course of these Meditations, we shall (in the words of Sir R. Blackmore) See through this vast extended Theatre, / Of skill divine, what shining Marks appear!’ – and Henry Baker’s invitation in The Universe to observe the night sky are activated as part of a dialogue about the fixed stars: ‘The Evening seems to invite us abroad’, exclaims the young tutor to his sister, ‘in the Language of Mr. Baker, Come forth, O Man! yon azure Round survey, / And view those Lamps which yield eternal Day, / Bring forth thy Glasses, clear thy wond’ring Eyes’.¹⁶ Whilst these examples demonstrate the kind of quotation and repurposing practices visible in miscellanies, printed commonplaces and personal compilations, they also demonstrate a precise didactic function through a fluidity of pronominal reference (most commonly seen in hymns and religious lyrics) where the ‘you’ or ‘I’ becomes associated with the subjective sensory experience of the individual observing reader.

Imagination

The inclusion of the reader’s own perceptive capacities in poetic encounters is connected to the interpretative role of the imagination in producing new knowledge. Locke’s reconfiguration of the imagination as the internal processing of received sensations and reflections is one of the key ideas that writers take from the new empiricism, as exemplified by Addison’s explanations in his Spectator series ‘On the Pleasures of the Imagination’ (1712) and Akenside’s extensive verse rendering, The Pleasures of Imagination (1744). As Tita Chico explores in her important study of the imagination and literary epistemology, ‘experimental observation uses imaginative speculation, and imaginative fancy enables new forms of understanding’.¹⁷ The didactic texts I explore use analogy to prompt this kind of speculation as they require readers to imaginatively perceive distant or unseen phenomena and to picture themselves in various positions on globes or orreries; topographical poems also encourage imaginative perception when they depict their narrator taking prospect views, inspecting natural processes, or even taking imaginative flights through space.

A description of ‘ideal presence’ in Elements of Criticism by Henry Home, Lord Kames (1762), helps to demonstrate how experience brings together imagination and analogy. Kames accounts for experience through sensation as ‘a continued train of objects passing in [the] mind’, and he explains how understanding involves making connections between these perceptual snapshots.¹⁸ His concept of ‘ideal presence’ involves recalling or imagining and piecing together objects when they are not in view – a version of virtual witnessing – through the memory or as prompted by a written account:

An important event, by a lively and accurate description, rouses my attention and insensibly transforms me into a spectator: I perceive ideally every incident as passing in my presence. On the other hand, a slight or superficial narrative produceth only a faint and incomplete idea, precisely similar to a reflective recollection of memory. (I, 110)

Kames’s account permits a circumvention of empirical experience because ideal presence can facilitate new knowledge without the need for direct encounter. As it is understood in this book, analogy exploits the possibilities of imaginative perception in the same way by constructing moments of ideal presence that allow the reader to perceive and understand new concepts. Chapters 4 and 5 show how developments in medicine and physiology and the emergence of neurology in the course of the eighteenth century determine a reassessment of the relationships between the mind and the body and between sensory perception and the imagination.¹⁹ The analogical models of embodied perception that emerge at mid-century show how ideal presence and scientific perception are subjective and productive modes of seeing that collapse the hierarchical distinction between observer and object. Beginning with analogies that manipulate the observer’s perspective on outer space and imaginative cosmic travel and ending by turning inwards to the very workings of the perceiving body that relies on ideal and real presence for knowledge, this book shows how perception and analogy are central to practices of scientific observation in the eighteenth century.

Analogy

Both a method of explanation and a way of reading, analogy is used in the eighteenth century to demonstrate new scientific ideas, to facilitate their conceptualisation, and to explore their implications in different contexts and for different audiences. Analogy is, therefore, the key literary technology under examination in this book. Perhaps the most familiar application of analogy as an ordering and explanatory device in the eighteenth century is its use in the botany of Carl Linnaeus. Linnaeus’s novel method of plant classification through sexual analogies that categorise the plant kingdom according to human hierarchies and relationships (based upon the counting of stamens and pistils, which he describes as ‘husbands’ and ‘wives’) has already been explored in depth, particularly in relation to Erasmus Darwin’s didactic poem The Loves of the Plants and in discussions of how the analogy affects women’s botanical writing in the second half of the long eighteenth century.²⁰ Linnaeus’s usage reflects the ways in which analogy can help to establish or clarify general laws, systematise and explain phenomena, facilitate communication by providing a common lingua franca, and teach new concepts to amateurs through vivid comparisons. This book looks at different areas of natural philosophy that appear in poetry and popular science from the period, including optics, astronomy, and the science of the senses. The analogies that I investigate include simple domestic and familiar comparisons, staged dialogues, more elaborate philosophical debates about the analogous relationships between different concepts, analogies that draw attention to divine design, and physical models (such as orreries and Aeolian harps) that offer simplified and/or scaled-down approximations of phenomena.

Put simply, analogy is the practical or literary exploitation of likeness, and analogising is a process of making creative comparisons with known phenomena to formulate and explain new concepts. It is a productive tool for modelling new ideas about phenomena to which we have no first-hand sensory access and which can be experienced only cognitively (such as Newton’s analogy between observable laws of motion on earth and those seen in planetary motions, or Molyneux’s Question, which considers the implications of sensory analogies by asking about the relationship between touch and sight). As Mary Fairclough notes, this kind of thinking through analogy is connected in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with Baconian induction as a process of law-making and structuring, which enables empiricists to make creative connections as a ‘last resort’ after the possibilities of direct observation have been exhausted.²¹ Analogy also opens up a field of figurative language that facilitates the explanation of new knowledge by drawing comparisons with known phenomena (as in the description of the eye’s function as akin to a camera obscura) or by aligning new knowledge with accepted beliefs (as in the presentation of gravity as God’s attractive love).

Analogy’s capacity to generate new connections, and therefore new knowledge, is reflected in its critical treatment outside of literary contexts. In Creating Scientific Concepts, for example, Nancy J. Nersessian explores ‘analogical modelling, visual modelling, and thought-experimenting’ as ‘especially productive means’ of conceptual innovation.²² Keith J. Holyoak and Paul Thagard demonstrate in Mental Leaps how analogy constitutes an essential tool for negotiating new experiences and predicting events. This can involve constructing formal analogies based on known relationships – through the standard formulation ‘A is to B as C is to D’ – which is a skill developed in childhood, or it can involve more complex modes of recognising likenesses. Holyoak and Thagard offer the following instances:

When strange and surprising things happen, people naturally search for explanations. Why do sounds echo? Why did the dinosaurs become extinct? Why is Daddy grumpy today? One powerful way of producing explanations is to use analogy, making a leap from one’s understanding of one familiar happening to understanding of a surprising occurrence.²³

As I show in this book, the same process of explaining by analogy can be found in the laws of Newtonian celestial mechanics and the domestic analogies that are used to teach them to lay audiences (explored in Chapter 1), the extrapolation from Newton’s prism experiments to the explanation of colour’s appearance in physical objects (explored in Chapter 3), or Hartley’s use of vibrating strings to describe communication between different parts of the body in acts of perception (explored in Chapter 5). Holyoak and Thagard also note the capacity of analogy ‘to give rise to ideas that take us beyond sensory experience while still maintaining conceptual links to it.’²⁴ Employing the example of the Lord’s Prayer, in which God is addressed familiarly as ‘Our Father’ and conceptually located in a place called heaven, they show how analogy can facilitate a cognitive experience of things that are completely or partially unknown. For eighteenth-century users of analogy, this application can be related not only to considerations of God – significant as part of a habitual narrative of design, most commonly found in physico-theological discourse that applies new scientific concepts to formulate new accounts of the divine – but also to the understanding of the nerves, light, and outer space, all of which are only partially experienced.

The treatment of analogy in literary criticism has been most visible in approaches to nineteenth-century texts such as Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). Although Darwin developed his evolutionary theory through an ambitious, non-empirical kind of extrapolation that demanded conceptual leaps from the observed artificial selection of crops and pigeons to a governing principle of natural selection, the established critical approach to nineteenth-century developments in biology as examples of analogy offers a foundation for scholars of the eighteenth century. In The Age of Analogy (2016) Devin Griffiths employs a similar definition to my own when he claims that ‘analogies give voice to patterns that have no name’.²⁵ Bookended by considerations of the treatment of evolutionary thought in Erasmus Darwin’s 1794 Zoonomia (read as a static account) and his grandson’s more famous Origin of Species (read as a broadly comparative one), Griffiths’s study foregrounds how in the nineteenth century historical scholarship, and therefore ideas of large-scale biological history, begins to involve synthetic pattern-making rather than a whiggish narrative of progress. He explains how analogy is used ‘as a tool that brings the relation between previous ages and the present into focus, seeking the origin of contemporary social and natural order within the patterns of past events’.²⁶ This is, he explains, a fundamentally novel application of analogy that is facilitated by the rise of historical fiction in the nineteenth century and which displaces virtual witnessing in favour of narrative incidents that enable the writer or the scientist to envision ‘other worlds’.²⁷ Whilst he foregrounds a different kind of reading experience from the encounters with didactic texts and poems that dominate the current study, Griffiths reveals here a helpful account of how analogy can aid both the development of new ideas and their communication. Both Gillian Beer and Alice Jenkins have also looked to Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory to remind us of analogy’s plasticity as a mode of encounter and a process through which connections can be tested. Beer’s description of discovery as ‘redescribing what is known and taken for granted’ helps to demonstrate how analogies, as especially concise forms of description, are part of scientific concept-building that bring new and old ideas into contact.²⁸ Beer’s field-defining establishment of a two-way exchange between literature and science in terms of the ‘metaphors and thought-sets’ that they employ has long been central to literature and science studies, and it informs my own approach to thinking about seeing scientifically in the eighteenth century.²⁹ Finally, Alice Jenkins’s assertion that ‘analogy is perhaps the central gesture of literature and science studies’ in terms of ‘our methodological proceeding’ and ‘our form of argument’ helps to explain the reading practice I employ in Perception and Analogy, where poetry, scientific accounts, and theological publications are brought into dialogue.³⁰

Physico-theology

Religion is a ubiquitous element of the analogical approaches to perception and knowledge explored in this study, and it appears most frequently in the form of physico-theological writing that couples empiricism with evidence of design in the natural world. Whilst Rob Iliffe and others have established Newton in particular as a natural philosopher embedded in the religious and theological cultures of his day, and narratives of the Enlightenment as the harbinger of disenchantment have long been laid to rest, recent scholars of literature and science have remained unduly cautious about emphasising on the role of Christianity in the wider communication and cultural reception of natural philosophy in the period.³¹ One study that does bring together faith and figurative language is Courtney Weiss Smith’s account of ‘meditative empiricism’ in Empiricist Devotions.³² Taking Robert Boyle’s Occasional Reflections (1665) and Some Considerations Touching the Usefulness of Experimental and Natural Philosophy (1663) as a starting point, Smith’s monograph shows how close observation of minute particulars leads to the establishment of correspondences or patterns – expressed as tropes, analogies, or personifications – as provisional ways of explaining an ordered natural world. The main subject of enquiry in Empiricist Devotions is not scientific practices and ideas themselves, but the application of empiricist techniques to produce an ‘other empiricism’ that allows for these tropes to thrive in a range of non-scientific and non-devotional texts such as georgic poems, legal texts, and it-narratives.³³ Smith’s account of tropes that enable ‘writers to slip easily between the literal and the spiritual’ is similar to my own account of scientific seeing through analogy, though in the current study I argue for a re-centring of scientifically knowledgeable perception for all kinds of observers.³⁴

Boyle’s position as both natural philosopher and lay theologian has led a number of critics – including Tita Chico, Clare Preston, and Robert Markley – to explore his scientific language, employment of tropes, and emphasis on reading between the Book of God and the Book of Nature.³⁵ As my own focus is the later relationship between empiricist models of seeing, the rise of the scientific topographical poem, and the development of what might be called Newtonian popular science, the starting point for physico-theological writing in this book is the lectures endowed by Boyle in 1691 for the promotion of Christian ideas.³⁶ Margaret Jacob ascribes the popularisation and acceptance of Newton’s ideas to these sermons, suggesting that the ‘first Newtonians’ – Richard Bentley, John Harris (later author of Astronomical Dialogues), Samuel Clarke, William Whiston, and William Derham (who published his lectures of 1711 and 1712 as Physico-Theology) – were able to make religious principles attractive to the commercial classes:

In the most universal and widely read lectures ever delivered during the eighteenth century, the Newtonians soothed and assured their congregations, yet simultaneously exhorted them. … Social harmony and political stability complement an ordered universe explicated by Newton where matter is dead or lifeless, its motion controlled by the will of God.³⁷

In Jacobs’s account, physico-theology has a political role in presenting the Newtonian universe – ordered but not independent – as a defence against anti-materialist and anti-rationalist freethinkers and atheists. Newtonianism’s religio-political contexts have been explored most recently by Philip Connell, who argues for Anglican physico-theology as a promotion of the Protestant succession.³⁸ My purpose in addressing physico-theology, explored through the works of Boyle lecturers such as Whiston’s rewriting of the creation narrative according to Newtonian principles and William Derham’s exploration of design in natural and astronomical landscapes, is to understand how they bring together (scientific) perception and belief.

Physico-theological writing has a greater function beyond popularising the new empiricism: the tradition established by the Boyle lectures is visible in a range of literary, educational, and theological texts. Knit through the scientific analogies that dominate this book are figures that demonstrate a productive dialogue between natural philosophy and theology. Explanatory analogies that figure gravity as God’s attractive love or the spectrum as evidence of divine artistry enable writers to explain concepts in familiar ways, to maintain a sense of scale, to incorporate unseen or obscure phenomena into the new scientific schema, and to provide an acceptable theological framework for advancing new scientific theories. I show how some of these references are part of a discourse of limitation, exemplified in Pope’s famous statement that ‘the proper study of Mankind is Man’, which questions the extent to which humans can look into the mysteries of the universe.³⁹ This concept of limitation is also demonstrated in empiricist accounts that acknowledge the limitations of sensory perception and which often advertise a theological context for these restrictions. For example, in the ‘General Scholium’ to the Principia (1727, trans. 1729) Newton states that we can know only the external properties of things, illustrating his claim with an analogy between the blind man’s idea of colours and human ideas of God’s perception. In Chapter 1 of the current study, this restriction is figured through the contrast between an infinite universe and the limits of the senses and the imagination; by Chapter 5, this restriction is newly addressed through the variability