Alexander Wragge-Morley's enjoyable volume provides a compelling interpretation of how members of the Royal Society of London represented nature in their works through aesthetic thinking in the seventeenth century. The author challenges the notion of the early Royal Society as a staple of a dispassionate—and what is often called objective today—approach to empirical sciences. Instead, he argues that the subjective sensory experience, particularly the pleasure that often accompanies such, could be instrumental in the natural philosophers’ production of knowledge. Building on the recognition that Royal Society members used affective images to communicate their ideas, Wragge-Morley further demonstrates how the concept of the aesthetic was expressed in the works of Robert Boyle, Nehemiah Grew, Robert Hooke, John Ray, and Thomas Willis, among others. Emphasizing the “regime of experience” (17), the author considers both text and image as integral in his analyses.
The small but rich volume contains five chapters that can more or less be divided into two parts. Chapters 1 and 2 delve into the design argument—the identification of intelligent design through empirical evidence that deduces God's existence for such design—by (re)examining how the selected natural philosophers wrote about their observation and sensory experience. The author begins by questioning the relationship between science and religion through physico-theology, an aspect of natural philosophy that is based on the design argument. Using the descriptions mainly of Ray and Boyle, Wragge-Morley shows that these proponents did not simply regard physico-theology as an apologetic way to adhere to religious conventions of the time, but as central to how these physico-theologians interpreted and presented their empirical studies. Chapter 2 unpacks the connections between the design argument and natural philosophy through entities that are beyond the perception of the senses. Using Boyle's chemical experiments with corpuscles to demonstrate the possibility of resurrection as a primary example, the author unpacks how the natural philosopher attempted to represent the inconceivable, both natural things and God, as perceivable sensory experience.
The second part of the book turns to the visual, verbal, and rhetorical devices in the Royal Society members’ pursuit of aesthetic science. Chapter 3 is the most visual of the volume. Drawing parallels between natural history and architecture, Wragge-Morley lays out how the idea of corrupted or lost design was used by figures, including Hooke, when facing the challenge of explaining natural entities that did not reach the natural philosopher's aesthetic standards. The imperfect natural things are similar to architectural ruins; they do not show their full excellence, but their original design can be recovered. Chapter 4 rethinks the relationships between image and text, particularly through the work of Ray. Despite the use of image being an important part in the representation of nature, including pictures in a book was sometimes practically infeasible, and the primary qualities of natural things that can be pictorially depicted may not always be sufficient for identification. Thus, description was still the predominant means of communication, and rhetorical devices such as vivid description enabled the natural philosophers to verbally picture their empirical studies. The last chapter further argues that by applying rhetorical strategies, the plain language that is heavily associated with the Royal Society is a communication style that does not exclude affective states in their knowledge production. The author then analyzes how natural philosophers utilized the plain style to evoke the feeling of and cultivate a taste for pleasure for their readers.
Despite not explicitly claiming so, the book is remarkably interdisciplinary. Wragge-Morley traverses a wealth of sources that often can be regarded as materials of different disciplines or history fields, including architectural debates and natural history. Careful consideration is also seen in how the author brings concepts or discourses from different disciplines together, always providing a brief definition or summary of ideas to orient readers before his arguments. This makes the book not only easily digestible for a wide range of readers, but also particularly useful for students who are at the beginning of grasping the various ways of thinking in the early modern period.
Among the increasing literature on scientific images, Wragge-Morley delivers a solid case study that engages words and pictures with nuance. While the images are discussed in the service of natural philosophers, the importance of image makers or collaborators is not dismissed. The author's approach presents a lively contrast to a recent project, Making Visible, led by Sachiko Kusukawa. While Making Visible focuses strongly on images and has brought forward ample visual examples from the early Royal Society, Wragge-Morley presents a mere dozen figures. However, this limited number underscores his position that description was the major mode of representing nature within the Royal Society.
