by Loren Eiseley

"For that matter, astronomy still reflected much of its ancient attitude toward Empyrean space as inviolable and unchangeable. Newton, a deeply religious man, was of this persuasian. Kepler had written earlier that the celestial machine is not something like a divine organism, but rather 'something like a clockwork in which a single weight drives all the gears.' Newton, with his formulation of the laws of gravity, had supplied the single weight. God had been the Creator of the machine, but it could run without his interference. At the most, only an occasional interposition of his power would be needed to set the clock right. In contrast to earlier periods, knowledge of natural forces led to less need for divine intervention in earthly affairs. Newton, however, remained devout in a way that many of his followers of the 18th century did not.

The growing interest in mechanics through the 18th century, the passionate fondness for mechanical devices of all sorts, led to an enthusiastic interest in the Machina Coelestis. Miracle was in the process of disappearance save at the moment of creation. The world of science was growing increasingly skeptical as its knowledge increased. Signs in the heavens, wonders in the animal world, were decreasing. The machine reigned. God, who had set the clocks to ticking, was now an anomaly in his own universe. The question of celestial and earthly origins, which Newton had abjured, emerged first in astronomy. It would be Immanuel Kant and the French skeptic Laplace who would introduce cosmic evolution, and who would extend backward into time the laws which Newton had extended across space. The wheels and cogs of the celestial machine for the first time would be pursued backward until they dissolved in spinning vapor. By the midpoint of the century, time was clearly seen as necessary to the development of the cosmos. Thomas Wright had identified as a galactic universe the Milky Way, of which our sun is a minor inhabitant.

The philosopher Kant, drawing inferences of galaxial rotation from Edmund Halley's detection of star movement in 1717, proposed the nebular hypothesis of star and planetary origin in clouds of rotating gas. Kant, at last, was seeking to derive the complex from the simple--"the simples," as he wrote, "that can succeed the Void."

Loren Eiseley, "The Firmament of Time"

Return to Table of Contents