Experimental Idol

Continuing in my occasional series on fairly random things that just deserve greater attention, I offer the following gem from Thomas Sprat's 1667 "History of the Royal Society of London". So, Sprat is in the middle of defending the innovations of the "new science" of experimentation as practiced among London's philosophers and he comes up with this beauty by way (I guess?) of explanation:

"There are two principal Ways of preserving the Names of those, that are pass’d: The one, by Pictures; the other, by Children: The Pictures may be so made that they may far neerly resemble the Original, then Children do their Parents: and yet all Mankind choose rather to keep themselves alive by Children, then by the other. It is best for the Philosophers of this Age to imitate the Antients as their Children; to have their blood deriv’d down to them; but to add a new Complexion, and Life of their own: While those, that indeavour to come neer them in every Line, and Feature, may rather be call’d their dead Pictures, or Statues, then their Genuine Off-Spring." (51)

This opening bit - - that pictures are a leading means of preserving the memory of the departed - - is a familiar trope of Renaissance image-hagiography. Leon Battista Alberti, for example, opens his second book of "De Pictura" (1434-6) with a famous passage in praise of painting in which he identifies its ability to make absent people present as one of the art's most important powers. Yet, Sprat turns this conceit around. Instead of utilizing the fidelity, truthfulness-to-nature or other typical talk attributed to painting as models for philosophy, Sprat reads these alleged properties as exactly the wrong kind of behavior.



Philosophy should not be imitative or even (using a central tenet of the artistic theory promulgated by Sir Joshua Reynolds almost exactly one hundred years after Sprat) emulative. It should be erotic, procreative and, following the gesture to "a new Complexion", exogamous.



The implication of these statements certainly seems to be that those philosophers who "indeavour to come neer [the Ancients] in every Line, and Feature" are committing idolatry. By worshiping Aristotle, Galen and other Classical authorities as exemplars who demand endless, meticulous replication, those philosophers become "their dead Pictures, or Statues": idolators in their thought. And if the passage doesn't quite allow us to say that such slavish devotion to tradition is also incestuous, they certainly are sterile bastards. Nice!