The Science of Discworld II

1930s London or New York, and would probably have been more reliable when it came to disgorging the chocolate, if the Greeks had known about chocolate. The Greeks had elevators, too.
    The problem here is that information about the technical aspects of Greek society has been transmitted to us through a bunch of theologians. They liked Hero’s steam engine, and indeed many of them had a little glass one on their desk, a sort of Theologians’ Toy that they could spin with a candle flame. But the mechanical ideas behind such toys just passed them by. And, just as Greek engineering has not been transmitted to us by theologians, the spiritual attitude of the Renaissance has not come down to us through our ‘rational’ schoolteachers. Much of the attempted spirituality within the alchemical position was basically a religious stance, marvelling at the Works of the Lord as they were exposed by the marvels of changes of state and form, when materials were subjected to heat, to ‘percussion’, and to solution and crystallisation.
    This stance has been taken over by today’s innocents of rigorousthinking, the New Agers, who find spiritual inspiration in crystals and anodised metals, spherical spark-machines and Newton’s pendulums, but do not ask the deeper questions that lie behind these toys. We find the very real awe inspired by science’s quest for understanding to be considerably more spiritual than New Age attitudes.
    Today there are mystic massage-therapists, aromatherapists, iridologists, people who believe that you can ‘holistically’ tell what’s wrong with someone by examining their irises or the balls of their feet – only – and who root their beliefs in the writings of Renaissance eccentrics like Paracelsus and Dee. But those men would have been horrified to be cited as authorities, especially by such closed-minded descendants.
    Prominent among those who refer back to Paracelsus for authority are homeopathists. A basic belief of homeopathy is that medicines become more powerful the more they are diluted. This stance lets them promote their medicine as being totally harmless (it’s just water) but also extraordinarily effective (as water isn’t). They notice no contradiction here. And homeopathic headache tablets say ‘Take one if mild, three if painful’. Shouldn’t it be the other way round?
    Such people see no need to think about what they are doing, because they base their beliefs on authority. If a question is not raised by that authority, then it’s not a question they want to ask. So, in support of their theories, homeopaths quote Paracelsus: ‘That which makes disease is also the cure.’ But Paracelsus built his entire career on not respecting authority. Moreover, he never said that a disease is always its own cure.
    Contrast this modern spectrum of silliness with the robust, critical attitude of most Renaissance scholars to the idea that arcane practices can lay bare the bones of the world. People such as Dee, indeed Isaac Newton, took that critical position very seriously. To a great extent, so did Paracelsus: for example he repudiated the idea that the stars and planets control various parts of the human body. The Renaissance view was that God’s creation has mysterious elements, but those elements are hidden, 3 implicit in the nature of the universe, rather than arcane.
    This view is very close to Antonie van Leeuwenhoek’s marvelling at the animalcules in dirty water, or semen: the astonishing discovery that the Wonders of Creation extended down into the microscopic realm. Nature, God’s Creation, was much more subtle. It provided hidden wonders to marvel at as well as the overt artistic vision. Newton was taken with the implicit mathematics of the planets in just this way: there was more to God’s invention than was apparent to the unaided eye, and that resonated with his Hermetic beliefs (a philosophy derived from the ideas of Hermes Trismegistos). The crisis of atomism at the time was the crisis of pre-formation: if Eve had within her all her daughters, each having within her her daughters like a set of Russian dolls, then matter must be infinitely divisible. Or, if not, we could work out the future date of Judgement Day by discovering how many generations there were until we got to the last, empty daughter.
    A characteristic of Renaissance thinking, then, was a degree of humility. It was critical