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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
During the Renaissance, the su was regarded primarily as a source of light which gave form to all things*; during the Enlightenment, paradoxically, the sun was regarded primarily as a source of heat. Paracelsian chemistry of the 1500s introduced salt as a third principle which embodied the other two, mercury and sulphur; salt was that universal mediating presence which represented earth. By the late 1700s salt was no longer a metaphysical principle but an acid-base compound, and volatile salts aroused most interest. These changes in scientific perceptions of sun and salt ran parallel to one another: beginning as transcendent sources of form, sun and salt came to be considered manipulable sources of energy. Our r-;odern approach to energy derives from a period during which Europeans gradually lost their belief in the creative agency of two essentials to human life.
1 Francesco Negri Arnoldi, "L'iconographie du soleil dans la Renaissance italienne," in Le soleil à la Renaissance. Science et mythes. Colloque international tenu en avril 1963. Travaux de l'Institut pour l'Etude de la Renaissance et de l'Humanisme, 11, Brussels and Paris, Presses Universitaires de Bruxelles, 1965, pp. 519-538; Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art, new ed., New York: Harper and Row, 1976, p. 29; G.F. Hartlaub, "The Sun in the Sign-Language of Alchemy," Graphis, 18 (March, 1962), 138-45, 264.
2 Marsilio Ficino, Letters, trans. Language Department, School of Economic Science, London, 2 vols. (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1975), I, 81; Michel Mollat, "Soleil et navigation au temps des découvertes," in Le soleil à la Renaissance, pp. 93-94; Vassili P. Zoubov, "Le soleil dans l'oeuvre scientifique de Léonard de Vinci," in ibid., pp. 181-82.
3 Contrast Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (New York: Random House, 1964), pp. 153-55; Edward Rosen, "Was Copernicus a Hermetist?" Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 5 (1970), 161-71; idem, "Was Copernicus' Revolutions Approved by the Pope?" Journal of the History of Ideas, 36 (1975), 531-41; S.K. Heninger, Jr., "Pythagorean Cosmology and the Triumph of Helicocentrism," in Le soleil à la Renaissance, pp. 33-54.
4 Arthur Edward Waite, ed. and trans., The Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Aureolus Philippus Theophrastus Bombast, of Hohenbeim, called Paracelsus the Great, 2 vols. (Berkeley: Shambhala, 1976), I, 89-100; Joachim Schroter, "Die Stellung der Paracelsus in der Mineralogie des 16. Jahrhunderts," Schweizerische Mineralogische und Petrographishe Mitteilungen, 21 (1941), 313-331; Bernard Palissy, Les Oeuvres, (Paris: Charavay, 1880), p. 294; Allen G. Debus, The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 2 vols. (New York: Science History Publications, 1977), I, 56-57, 80; J.R. Partington, A History of Chemistry, 4 vols. in 5 (London: Macmillan, 1961) II, 143-44; Marie Boas, "Structure of Matter and Chemical Theory in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," in Critical Problems in the History of Science, ed. Marshall Clagett (Madison, Milwaukee and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969) pp. 499-514; Robert P. Multhauf, The Origins of Chemistry (London: Oldbourne, 1966) 234. For detailed information on salt and salt production, see idem, Neptune's Gift: A History of Common Salt (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
5 See I. Bernard Cohen, The Birth of a New Physics (Garden City: Double day and Company, 1960) esp. pp. 125-28; Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (New York: Random House, 1959), pp. 147-55.
6 Palissy, Oeuvres, p. 305; Debus, The Chemical Philosophy, I, 57, and II, 412.
7 Stephen Straker, "The Eye Made ‘Other': Dürer, Kepler and the Mecha nisation of Light and Vision," in Science, Technology and Culture in Historical Perspective, eds. Louis A. Knafla, Martin S. Staum and T.H.E. Travers, University of Calgary Studies in History, 1 (Calgary: University of Calgary, 1976) p. 19.
8 Robert P. Multhauf, "Sal Ammoniac: A Case History in Industrialization," Technology and Culture, 6 (1965), 569-70, and see note 10 below.
9 Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution, pp. 245-46; Debus, The Chemical Philosophy, I, 258-60 and cf. 103-04 on the Paracelsian attraction to magnetism as further evidence for action at a distance.
10 Partington, A History of Chemistry, II, 34-53.
11 In the English language, one used a feminine pronoun in reference to the sun until the end of the sixteenth century; after that the sun was masculine. In alchemy and in Glauber's chemistry, salt was feminine, representing the anima mundi (world soul); later, salt was neuter. This transformation in the sexuality of sun and salt comes just as the two are losing metaphysical potency; one might suggest, à la Jung, that the splitting away of the feminine from both sun and salt was either the cause or the sign of their loss of transcendent status. See "Sun," Oxford English Dictionary, X, 151; C.G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the eparation and Synthesis of Psychic Oppo sites in Alchemy, trans. R.F.C. Hull, Bollingen eries, XX (New York: Pantheon, 1963), pp. 188-92, 221n., 239-57. Cf. Gaston Bachelard, La psychanalyse du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1965).
12 Francis Bacon, "Of the Dignity and Advancement of Learning," in The Works of Francis Bacon, 17 vols. (London: Longman, 1850-1874) IV, 403.
13 On sunspots and solar observations, see Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 6th ed. (London: W. Tegg, 1854 [1st ed. 1621, 6th ed. 1652]) 328-29; John A. Eddy, "The Maunder Minimum," Science, 192 (1976), 1189- 1202; idem, "The Case of the Missing Sunspots," Scientific American, 236 (May, 1977), 80-88, 92; John A. Eddy, Peter A. Gilman and Dorothy E. Trotter, "Anomalous Solar Rotation in the Early 17th Century," Science, 198 (1977) 824-29; Richard A. Proctor, The Sun: Ruler, Fire, Light and Life of the Planetary System, 3rd ed. (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1876) pp. 156-77.
14 See esp. A.I. Sabra's discussion in his Theories of Light from Descartes to Newton (London: Oldbourne, 1967) ch. 9. Cf. Jean Bernhardt, "Hobbes et le mouvement de la lumière," Revue d'histoire des sciences, 30 (1977), 3-24; Henry John Steffens, The Development of Newtonian Optics in England (New York: Science History Publications, 1977); Paul-Henri Michel, "Le soleil, Ie temps et 1'espace: Intuitions cosmologiques et images po6tiques de Giordano Bruno," in Le soleil a la Renaissance, pp. 402, 412.
15 Bacon, "Novum Organum," in The Works, IV, 131; Partington, A History of Chemistry, II, 463-64, 561; "An Account of a not ordinary Burning Concave, lately made at Lyons, and compared with several others made formerly," Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1 (1665), 95-98; "An Account from Paris Concerning a great Metallin Burning Concave, and some of the most considerable Effects of it," ibid., 4 (1669), 986-87; John Harris and J.T. Desagulier, "An Account of some Experiments tried with Mons. Villette's Burning Concave, in June 1718," ibid., 30 (1719), 976-77; W.E. Knowles Middleton, "Archimedes, Kircher, Buffon and the Burning Mirror," Isis, 52 (1961), 533-43; Douglas McKie, Antoine Lavoisier: Scientist, Economist, Social Reformer (London and New York: H. Schuman, 1952), pp. 98-100. On mirror manufacture in cultural context, see Martha Fischer, "My Friend, the Connoisseur, Reflects on Mirrors," House Beautiful, 52 (November, 1927), 538-39, 589-90, 592, 594.
16 Douglas McKie and Niels H. de V. Heathcote, The Discovery of Specific and Latent Heats (New York: Arno Press, 1975) p. 130 (Kirwan quote) and throughout; D.J. Lovell, "Herschel's Dilemma in the Interpretation of Thermal Radiation," Isis, 59 (1968), 46-60; Stephen J. Goldfarb, "Rumford's Theory of Heat: A Reassessment," British Journal for the History of Science, 10 (1977), 25-36. Several papers presented at the Helios Conference tempt me to exclude colonial New England from my generalization about the declining imoortance of sunlight vis-a-vis the sun's heat. Helen H. Naugle and Peter J. McGuire show that American Puritans had need of a bright and nourishing sun in their response to the New England wilderness, itself a New Jerusalem apart from the scorching sun of English Puritanism. Keith R. Burich shows the high value olaced on sunlight by Jonathan Edwards. See Naugle and McGuire, "A Light for Eden: The Sun in American Literary Symbolism 1650-1850," and Burich, "Images of the Sun in Jonathan Edwards' Theology," in Proceedings of Helios: From Myth to Solar Energy, comp. M.E. Grenander (Albany: SUNY Albany, 1978) pp. 365-72, 92-99.
17 Robert P. Multhauf, "Geology, Chemistry, and the Production of Common Salt," Technology and Culture, 17 (1976), 634-45; Marie Boas, Robert Boyle and Seventeenth-century Chemistry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), pp. 117-31. Contrast Debus, The Chemical Philosophy, II, 484, 502. For the relevant passages in Boyle's writings, see especially his "Sceptical Chymist" in The Works, ed. Thomas Birch, 6 vols. (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1966-1967) I, 468-71, 485, 532, 548.
18 Debus, The Chemical Philosophy, II, 357, 530; John Brown, "Observations and Experiments on the Sal Catharticum Amarum, commonly called the Epsom Salt," Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 32 (1723), 348-54, 372-81; Warwick E. Wroth and Arthur L. Wroth, The London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1896), on mineral springs and spas; R.S. Neale, "Bath: Ideology and Utopia, 1700-1760," Studies in the Eighteenth Century, 3 (1976). 38-54; "Sel," Dictionnaire de la lan.eue f rancaise, ed. Emile Littr6, 4 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1875) IV, 1880- 1881, on salt as liveliness and on smelling salts.
19 Cyril Stanley Smith, "The Development of Ideas on the Structure of Metals," in Critical Problems in the History of Science, pp. 467-98; Stephen Toulmin and Tune Goodfield, The Architecture of Matter (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 186-98.
20 E. Newton Harvey, A History of Luminescence From the Earliest Times
Until 1900, Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, 44 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1957). Robert Hooke, seeking to explain the mechanism of memory, would postulate the existence in the brain of a substance similar to phosphorus, which seemed to be able to receive and retain light in much the same manner that humans retain impressions. Hooke also used an analogy to the sun, but it was to the sun's radiation, which is felt more powerfully the closer the sun is. See the fine article by B.R. Singer, "Robert Hooke on Memory, Association and Time Perception;" Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 31 (July, 1976), 115-31.
21 Boas, Robert Boyle, p. 153; Harvey, A. History of Luminescence, pp. 136- 37, 154-55; "Salt," Oxford English Dictionary, IX, 59 (definition 4); Allen G. Debus, "The Paracelsian Aerial Niter," Isis, 55 (1964), 43-61; idem, The Chemical Philosophy, II, 367. Cf. also Everett Mendelsohn, Heat and Life: The Development of the Theory of Animal Heat (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964) on the gradual rejection of the analogy between solar heat and innate body heat
22 M.R. Bloch, "The Social Influence of Salt," Scientific American, 209 (July, 1963), 98; idem, "Salt in Human History," Interdisciplinary Science Review, 1 (1976) 345; Edward Hughes, "The English Monopoly of Salt, 1563- 1571," English Historical Review, 40 (1925), 334-50; Multhauf, "Geology, Chemistry, and the Production of Common Salt," 640; H.H. Lamb, The Changing Climate: Selected Papers (London: Methuen, 1966), pp. 65-66, 99-104, 212-13, some of which is graphically summarized in Samuel W. Matthews. "What's Happening to Our Climate?" National Geographic, 150 (November, 1976), 586, 614-15.
23 This paragraph relies heavily on Yi-Fu Tuan, The Hydrologic Cycle and the Wisdom of God: A Theme in Geoteleology, University of Toronto Deprtment of Geography Research Publications, 1 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), and idem, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1974), pp. 129-36, for which references I must thank Lucy K. Ludwig. See also S.K. Heninger, Jr., A Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968); Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963); H.F. Clark, The English Landscape Garden (London: Pleiades, 1948); Hillel Schwartz, "Games, Timepieces and Businesspeople," Diogenes, 99 (Fall, 1978) 66-70.
24 Cf. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970) pp. 46-77, 125-65; W.R. Albury and D.R. Oldroyd, "From Renaissance Mineral Studies to Historical Geology, in the Light of Michel Foucault's The Order of Things," British Journal for the History of Science, 10 (1977), 187-215. Note also Aaron J. Ihde, "Commentary on the Papers of Cyril Stanley Smith and Marie Boas," in Critical Problems in the History of Science, p. 523: "the collapse of the Ptolemaic system may have been a factor in the decline of the alchemical concept of the elements."
25 Timothy Byfield, Horae Subsecivae: Or, Some Long-Vacation Hours Redeemed, For the Discovery of the True Sal volatile oleosum of the Ancient Philosophers (London: J. Whitlock, 1965), pp. 18-23.
26 Nicolas Facio, Fruit-Walls Improved By Inclining them To the Horizon (London: R. Everingham, 1699) 113; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson Letters 109, f. 28; London, British Museum, Add. MSS 28,536, f. 238: Frank E. Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968) ch. 9; Nehemiah Grew, A Treatise of the Nature and Use of the Bitter Purging Salt… With Animadversions on a late corrupt
Translation publish'd by Francis Moult, Chymist (London, 1697), p. vii; John Brown, "Observations and Experiments on the Sal Catharticum amarum," pp. 350-52.
27 For further details about Byfield, Facio, Moult and the other French Prophets, see Hillel Schwartz, Knaves, Fools, Madmen, and that Subtile Effluvium : A Study of the Opposition to the French Prophets in England, 1706- 1710, University of Florida Social Sciences Monograph, 62 (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1978); idem, The French Prophets: The History of a Millenarian Group in Eighteenth-Century England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980).
28 A.E. Crawley, "Metals and Minerals," Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings, 13 vols. (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1961), VIII, 591; Jean Palou, "Le sel et la sorcellerie," in Le role du sel dans l'histoire, ed. Michel Mollat (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968) pp. 277-85; Edward Wenham, "The Significance of the Salt," House Beautiful, 52 (November, 1927), 517, 570, 572-73; "Sel," Dictionnaire de la langue française, IV, 1880, citing Voltaire; E.P. Deatrick, "Salt, Soil, Savior," Biblical Archaeologist, 25 (May, 1962), 41-48.
29 Arnoldi, "L'iconographie du soleil dans la Renaissance italienne," Le Soleil a la Renaissance, p. 536; Jacques Toussaert, "Le sel dans la liturgie," in Le role du sel dans l'histoire, pp. 287-303; William B. McDonald, "Christian Sun Symbols," Graphis, 18 (March, 1962), 132-37, 258; Gilbert Gadoffre, "Ronsard et le theme solaire," in Le soleil à la Renaissance, p. 510; Mariorie Hope Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse: Newton's Opticks and the Eighteenth Century Poets (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946); Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968) p. 119. Contrast Cesar Rouben, "Louis XIV: The Sun King," in Proceedings of Helios, pp. 355-64.
30 For an extensive recent summary of this issue, see Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) I, 129-36, 151-59, and throughout.
31 Vasco Ronchi, The Nature of Light: An Historical Survey, trans. V. Barocas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Universitv Press, 1970); disputed by David C. Lindberg and Nicholas H. Steneck, "The Sense of Vision and the Origins of Modern Science," in Science, Medicine and Society in the Renaissance. Essays to honor Walter Pagel, ed. Allen G. Debus, 2 vols. (New York: Science History Publications, 1972) I, 29-45; rebutted by Ronchi, "A Fascinating Outline of the History of Science. Two Thousand Years of Conflict Between ‘Reason' and ‘Sense,"' Atti della Fondazione Giorgio Ronchi, 30 (1975), 525-55; analyzed by Vincent Ilardi, "Eyeglasses and Concave Lenses in Fifteenth-Century Florence and Milan: New Documents," Renaissance Quarterly, 29 (1976) 341-60. For a fine example of a seventeenth-century distinction between lux and lumen, see Antoine LeGrand, An Entire Body of Philosophy according to Principles of the Famous Renata Des Cartes (New York and London: Tohnson Reprint Corp., 1972 [original ed. 1964]) Part V, xv, p. 160: "The Propension to motion, or pression, which is in the Lucid Body, as the Fountain, is properly called Lux: But when considered in its progress, that is, in the Heaven, or the matter of the second Element, then it is called Lumen, tho' Authors commonly confound both these words, using them promiscuously." See also Antonio Ferraz, "'Lux' et ‘lumen' aux XVIe et XVIIe siecles," Proceedings XIVth International Congress on the History of Science, 4 vols. (Tokyo, 1975) IV, 245-48; David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 1976), pp. 122-35 et passim.
32 Robert Boyle, A Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural Things(1688), cited in Tuan, The Hydrologic Cycle, p. 75; Proctor, The Sun, citing Herschel, p. 184; Harlow Shapley, "Prefatory Note," Conference on the Sun in the Service of Man, Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 79 (July, 1951), 184; Joseph W. Little, "Capitalization of the Sun," in Pro ceedings of Helios, pp. 274-82.
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