VV(11): Any Sovereign or Broken British Yo-Yo

[Dave Monroe]

"Any sovereign or broken yo-yo" (V., Ch. 8, Sec. i, p. 217)

Continuing yet in Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty and Automatic Machinery
in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986), Chapter 3,
"The Clockwork Universe," pp. 54-101 ...

In Britain the clock metaphor flourished best in the second half of teh
seventeenth century ....  This flowering of the clock metaphor ...
roughly coincided with a series of revolutionary changes of major
importance.  The clock metaphor, it seems, became popular in the last
years of the English Civil War, culminated during the Restoration, began
its decline after the Glorious Revolution, and was put to rest when the
installation of the hanoverian kings cemented the permanent
establishment of a constitutional monarcy.  The same time span also
covere the triumph of the Scientific Revolution, from the founding of
the Royal Society to teh Newtonian synthesis, and the conclusion and
final settlement of the religious struggles that had been set in motion
by the Reformation. (81)

Robert Boyle (82 ff.)

John Locke (86 ff.)

Robert Hooke (89)

In Britain ... even early suggestions of animal automatism were rejected
from the start. (90)

... the farther reaching proposition of the man-machine was never taken
seriously. (91)

The main distinction was this: humans and, presumably to a lesser
degree, animals had teh capacity of discernemnt, judgment, and free
choice that distinguished them from automata and that was conventionally
called "the soul." (91)

Soul, then, was a label for the unexplained inetractions between body
and brain, but it had yet another meaning.  Traditionally teh concept,
oul, had served as symbol and criterion for that complex and dynamic
condition of teh animal mechanism known as life. (91)

The design argument began to appear frequently in British mechanist
writings in the middle of the seventeenth century ... (93)

Sir Isaac Newton never explicitly used the clock metaphor. (97)

He was persuaded that the cosmos could not run forever without God's
periodic intervention ... (97)

Newton's universe was clearly not an idealized clockwork that ran
flawlessly forever without rewinding or repair but a constantly changing
dynamic system needing constant attention and periodic adjustment from
God. (98)

Newton's voluntarism, that is, his conviction of the supremacy of God's
power, will, and providence was not a personal eccentricity ... but a
belief that had devleoped in England over some time and that was shared
by leading thinkers there.... At teh same time, Continental thinkers
were oriented along intellectualist lines.  The two opposing camps were
thrown into direct conflict by a curious chain of events. (98)

In 1714 Georg Ludwig, elector of Hanover, left his german court to
become King George I of England.  Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the
elector's librarian and historian who was left behind in Hanover, hept
up a correspndence with his patron's daugher-in-law, Caroline, now
princess of Wales ... Leibniz proabably hoped for an invitation to
rejoin the court in London.... motivated Leibniz to point out to the
princess the weaknesses of the philosophic system then predomonant in
Britain, namely, that opf his old rival and antagonist, Sir Isaac
Newton.... She showed the letter to Dr. Samuel Clarje (1675-1729), a
promising young theologian at court and loyal disciple of Newton. (98-9)

What Leibniz offred in place of Newton's alleged arrors was the
intellectualist image of the clockwork universe ... made on the basis of
his system of the preestablished harmony.   Clarke answered with the
familiar voluntarist argument that God's unlimited ability to exercise
his power and his sovereign will were his most important characteristics
and that to deny this would be to approach atheism.  If someone cliamed
that a kingdom was so well governed that the king had nothing to do,
that person should be suspected of wanting to depose the king. (100)

To identify the clock image as an accessory of determinism and, by
implication, an enemy of liberty was as accurate as it was effective
before an English audience. (100)

And there's more ...