Science and the Secrets of Nature

"This book gives fantastic context for how people have thought about nature as a treasure trove of secrets. It goes back to the question of whether it is acceptable to pursue your curiosity. William Eamon has a very nice section on religious attitudes to curiosity in the Middle Ages, when trying to find out nature’s secrets was very much frowned upon. The book also takes us through to the idea that began to emerge in the middle of the 16th century, of nature as full of secrets that we could decode. The story centres around 1559, with the publication of the Italian philosopher Giambattista Della Porta’s book Natural Magic . There was a whole vernacular style of “books of secrets” that were being released at that time, extremely strange compendia of information which linked into older, magical ideas. Della Porta’s volume was a classy version of these popular booklets. But behind it there was a philosophy of natural magic, that by then had matured into the concept of nature as a network of hidden or occult forces governing everything that happened. The aim of a natural philosopher like Della Porta was to be able to understand these forces and manipulate them, bringing about things that wouldn’t occur in the normal course of nature. One of the classic examples which was much debated in the 16th century, often attributed to [Renaissance physician and occultist] Paracelsus is called the weapon salve. This was the theory that you could heal a weapon-inflicted wound by applying an ointment not to the wound but to the weapon. It makes no sense and sounds like complete nonsense from our perspective, but the idea was that there was a hidden, occult force connecting the two, so you were transmitting the agency from one to the other. If you think about it in the terms of the day, it wasn’t an obviously crazy notion, and that’s why it created so much debate – according to natural magic, there was no reason to think why it couldn’t work. You would imagine that anyone who tried it would find out soon enough that it had no effect whatsoever. But then again, most medicine at that time was worse than useless, it was positively harmful, so anything medical that was equivalent to doing nothing perhaps stood a better chance of putting things right than any of the conventional medicine."