What Can Be a Scientific Object?

Reflections on Monsters and Meteors

Author(s): Lorraine Daston
Source: Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 52, No. 2 (Nov. - Dec.,
1998), pp. 35-50
Published by: American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3824838
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 MEETING
STATED REPORT

WhatCanBe a Scientific
Object?Reflectionson
Monstersand Meteors
Lorraine Daston
Professorand Director,Max-Planck-
,i'
J Institutfir Wissenschaftsgeschichte,
Berlin

Introduction: of
of the History
PeterGalison,Professor
Harvard
Science, University
It's a great pleasure to welcome LorraineDaston,
our speakerthis evening. Ms. Daston completedher
Ph.D. at HarvardUniversity and was an assistant
professorat both Harvardand Princeton, as well as
associateprofessorof the history of science at Bran-
deis. In 1992 she assumedthe position of professor
of the history of science at the University of Chi-
cago. Most recently,she has become both professor
and directorof the Max-Planck-Institutfir Wissen-
schaftsgeschichtein Berlin-an institution that has
rapidlygrown, underher codirectorship,into one of
the most exciting interdisciplinarysites for research
in the humanities and the social sciences.
There are three main lines of Ms. Daston's inquiry.
First, she is concernedwith probabilityand the his-
tory of what has come to be called the probabilistic
revolution. In collaborativework, she has produced
two volumes, The ProbabilisticRevolution(1987)
and TheEmpireof Chance(1989). Her own mono-
graph on the subject, ClassicalProbabilityand the
Enlightenment,is a remarkablebook that situates
probabilisticreasoningin a much broaderintellec-
tual, social, and cultural context than we've previ-
ously known. That is, she identifiesprobabilitynot
just as a branchof mathematicsor statisticsbut also
as an enterprisethat aimed to capturewhat it meant

wasgivenat the 1809thStatedMeeting,held

Thispresentation
at theHouseoftheAcademyin Cambridge onMarch11, 1998.

35 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER
1998
by reasoningin the Enlightenment, to locate what
common sense was, and to put reasoning into a
formalizedlanguagewith applicationeverywhere-
from insuranceto jurisprudence,from the classifica-
tion of objects to the nature of demonstration.
The second domain of Ms. Daston's interest has
been that of monstersand wonders. In a remarkable
volume entitled Wondersand the Order of Nature
(1998), she and her coauthor, KatharinePark,have
situated the notion of wonder in historicaldevelop-
ment as a way of tracking how the experience of
nature itself functioned in the Renaissanceand the
Enlightenment. Their work has broadenedour no-
tion of culturalhistory by, for example,historicizing
the categoriesof curiosity, wonder, and experience.
In this way, they recognizein the naturalsciences a
historicalcomponent that is itself fundamentallyaf-
fective as well as logical-empirical.

Finally, Ms. Daston has been concerned with the

problem of objectivity in all its complicated philo-
sophical, methodological, procedural,and material
components. The understandingof objectivitymay
be thought of as a complementary project to the
understandingof wonder. It is a development that
aims to understandnot only dispassionateor impar-
tial assessmentof the world but also a wide varietyof
approachesto the accuratedepiction of nature.
In all her work in these three areas,Ms. Daston is
interested in a formal conceptual history that has
been nourishedand animatedby philosophy and, as
a result,has floweredinto a fundamentallynew kind
of culturalhistory from which all of us have much
to learn. She is an intellectual presence in my
generation- one of the people whose work and in-
sights I most value.

WhatCanBea ScientificObject?
Reflections
on Monsters
andMeteors
Lorraine
Daston
What can become an object of scientific inquiry,
and why? Why don't we have a science of dust
wreathson windy days?Why do we have a science of

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER1998 36
the interior of animal bodies, or of the shapes of
crystals,or the genealogyof languages?What onto-
logical, epistemological, methodological, func-
tional, symbolical, and/or aesthetic featuresqualify
or disqualifydreams, the motion of projectiles,the
waxing and waning of the gross national product,
monstrous births, or electron valences as scientific
objects?
Aristotle'sanswerto this question is at once the old-
est and, in somewhat dilute form, the most endur-
ing. Sciences can be made only out of regularities,
out of "that which is always or for the most part"
(Metaphysics). Yet regularityalone seldom sufficesto
pick out scientificobjects from the ordinaryobjects
of quotidianexperience:whethera classof phenom-
ena is quantifiable,manipulable, beautiful, experi-
mentally replicable, universal, useful, publicly
observable,explicable,predictable,culturallysignif-
icant, or metaphysicallyfundamentalare all criteria
that have fortified claims to scientific objecthood
beyond mere regularity.These criteria sometimes
overlapbut seldom entirely coincide. The intensity
of psychologicalattitudes may be quantifiablewith
the aid of ratingscales,but it is not publicly observ-
able; evolutionarytheory explains without predict-
ing, and statistical forecasts, both economic and
meteorological, predict without explaining; the
eventsof high-energyphysicsmay be metaphysically
fundamental but are rarelyexperimentallyreplica-
ble. A study of what can and cannot become a sci-
entific object must take into account how these
multiple grids are superimposed upon raw experi-
ence to highlight some phenomena and to occlude
others.If we do not have a science of dust wreathson
windy days,it is not solely or even primarilybecause
the phenomenon is irregular.

If regularityis not a sufficientcondition for scientific

objecthood,is it at leasta necessaryone?My purpose
in this lecture will be to dispute even this minimal
claim by means of a historical counterexample.In
the late sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies,natural
philosophers and even some mathematicians fo-
cused their attention on anomalous phenomena-
those that Francis Bacon described as "deviating

37 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER1998
instances:such as the errorsof nature,or strangeand
monstrous objects, in which nature deviates and
turns from her ordinarycourse."These phenomena
were, in the language of the day, praeter naturam
(beyond nature), being remarkable divergences
from "thatwhich is alwaysor for the most part."The
category of the preternaturalencompassed the ap-
pearanceof three suns in the sky; the birth of con-
joined twins; the tiny fish that could stop a ship in
full sail;a Medusa'shead found in a hen's egg; land-
scapesfiguredin Florentinemarble;the occult prop-
ertiesof certainanimals,plants, and minerals;exotic
speciessuch as giraffesand birdsof paradise;rainsof
wheat or blood; the force of the imagination to im-
print matter-in short, to quote from Meric Causa-
bon's Treatise ConcerningEnthusiasm (1655), all
that happens "extraordinarily,(as to the ordinary
course of nature) though not lesse naturally."

The proviso "thoughnot lesse naturally"was key to

what I shall call preternaturalphilosophy, for how-
ever marvelousor even incredible its objects might
seem, they were sharplydistinguishedfrom the mi-
raculousand supernatural.Among practitionersof
preternatural philosophy, it was an inflexible
premisethat all such anomaliesmight be ultimately
explained by recourseto natural causes. Hence its
claim to the title "philosophy,"the repository of
causal explanations,as opposed to mere "history,"
an assemblageof disconnected particulars.Indeed,
preternaturalphilosophy set the most ambitious
standardsfor scientific explanationin the earlysev-
enteenth century. Even natural philosophers as
deeply skeptical of marvels as Rene Descartes acr
cepted the challenge its objects flung down to any
systematic account of natural causes; Descartes
promised that therewere "no qualitiesso occult, no
effects of sympathy or antipathy so marvelous or
strange,finallyno other thing so rarein nature"that
his mechanicalphilosophy could not explain.

The challenge of preternaturalphilosophy to early

modern naturalphilosophy,both traditionaland re-
formed,was twofold. First,the oddities that were its
objects greatlyexpandedthe domain of phenomena
requiringphilosophicalexplanation.Although Aris-

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER
1998 38
totelians had never disputed the existence of rare
exceptions to nature's ordinary course or doubted
that these could be tracedto naturalcauses,they had
excluded such oddities from the purview of natural
philosophy as neitherregularnor, afortiori, demon-
strable. In contrast, early modern philosophers of
the preternatural,such as Pietro Pomponazzi,Giro-
lamo Cardano, BernardPalissy,and FrancisBacon,
shifted the marvelsof nature from the peripheryto
the center of their philosophy and attempted expla-
nations of even the most singularphenomena.

Second, preternatural philosophy expanded the

rangeof explanationsas well as that of objects to be
explained. Whereas medieval naturalphilosophers,
following Galen, had acknowledgedthe existenceof
hidden or occult properties in certain animals,
herbs, and stones, they had been content to ascribe
these simply to "substantialforms" rather than to
the manifest propertiesof hot, cold, dry, and wet,
whose combinations accounted for the ordinary
courseof nature.Borrowingfrom the Neoplatonism
of MarsilioFicino, medicaland naturalhistorytrea-
tises on the secretvirtuesof herbsand gems, Avicen-
na's writings on the soul, and a miscellanyof other
sources, the early modern preternaturalphiloso-
phers introduced new kinds of causes-astral influ-
ences, plastic virtues, the imagination, sympathies
and antipathies-to meet the challengeof their new
explananda.The "nature"of preternaturalphiloso-
phy was thus doubly transformedin both its causes
and its effects.Despite the unflinchingcommitment
of its practitionersto naturalexplanation,firmlyex-
cluding both the demonic and the divine, preternat-
ural philosophy looked distinctly unnatural from
the standpointsof the naturalphilosophies that had
both precededand succeededit.

It is my aim in this essayto explorehow and why the

objects of preternaturalphilosophy came, in the
mid-sixteenth century, to cohere into a category
amenableto scientificstudy-a categoryI shallepit-
omize by just two of its most prominent members,
monsters and meteors-only to dissolve again into
scatteredoddities and anomalieslargelyignored by
scientists since the earlyeighteenth century. Preter-

39 1998
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER
 naturalobjectscontinuedto exist,but theywereno
longerscientificobjects.I shallarguethat the glue
that made the categoryof the preternatural hold
was
together compounded of a distinctive
ontology,
epistemology,andsensibility.Althoughforanalytic
clarityI shall discusseach theme separately,they
werein facttightlyinterwoven. Whenpreternatural
philosophydisintegrated,it was not becauseits
characteristicobjects or forces were summarily
discarded-some,likeetherealfluidsandthe imag-
ination, remained central to Enlightenment
science- but ratherbecauseits unifyingprinciples
cameunraveled.

Ontology: Rare
Things andRarified
Preternatural objectswerefirstselectedon ontolog-
ical grounds.Earlymodernphilosophersfollowed
ancientandmedievalScholasticsourcesin opposing
the naturalto at leastthreeothercategories(in ad-
ditionto theartificial):
thesupernatural(supranatu-
ram, "abovenature"),the preternatural(praeter
naturam,"beyondnature"), andtheunnatural(con-
tranaturam,"against nature").The supernatural re-
ferred exclusivelyto God and the genuinely
miraculous,(i.e.,whenGodsuspendedhis ordinary
providenceto warn,punish,or reward).The unnat-
uralwasalsomorallyfreightedand referredto par-
ticularlyheinousacts,suchaspatricideor bestiality,
thatviolatedthenormativeorderof bothnatureand
humannature.In contrast,the preternatural was,
with one exception,a morallyneutralcategory,re-
ferringto thingsor eventsoutsidethe quotidianor-
derof naturebutstilldueto naturalcauses,however
oddlyconcatenated. The exceptionwastheworkof
demons, who could not usurpthedivineprerogative
of suspendingthe orderof nature,but who could
work marvelsif not miraclesby cleverlyknitting
togethernaturalpropertiesand forces ordinarily
found asunderto producepreternatural phenom-
ena.Of sharperintelligence,fleeterfoot, andlighter
touchthanhumans,demonscouldmanufacture re-
markableeffects,but they were nonethelesscon-
strainedto work by naturalcauses.Preternatural
philosophywas the scienceof naturalmarvels-a

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER
1998 40
bold attempt to push inquiry "until the properties
and qualitiesof those things, which may be deemed
miracles, as it were, of nature, be reduced to, and
comprehended in, some form or law; so that all ir-
regularityor singularitymay be found to depend on
some common form,"as Bacon put it.

What could count as a marvelof nature?The criteria

were multiple and intertwined,and none held for all
members of the class. Some phenomena were mar-
vels because their mode of operation was hidden
from perception. Such were magnetic attraction,or
poisons, or the propertiesof certainanimals,plants,
and minerals:for example,the power of the urine of
a wild boarto cure earaches,or of amethyststo repel
hail and locusts. Sympathies and antipathies be-
tween speciesof animalsand plants also belonged to
this category of occult properties: why wolf and
sheepwere eternalenemies, so that a drum made out
of sheepskinwould not sound in the presenceof one
made of wolfskin, or why "theApe of all other things
cannot abide a Snail."These were examplesof nat-
uralattractionsand repulsionsthat could neither be
inferrednor predictedfrom the manifest properties
of hot, cold, wet, and dry. Although occult proper-
ties were in principleas regularin their operationas
manifest ones, they were opaque to observationand
intractableto explanation-except by resource to
equallyinscrutable"substantialforms"-and therefore
beyond the ken of conventional naturalphilosophy.

Other objects and phenomena belonged to preter-

naturalphilosophy because they were rare:bearded
grapevines, earthquakes,three suns in the sky, rains
of blood, two-headed cats, people who slept for
months on end or washed their hands in molten
lead, visions of armies battling in the clouds. Not
only rare individuals but also rare species might
qualifyas objectsof preternaturalphilosophy.Justas
stuffed crocodiles and birds of paradise dangled
from the ceilings of well-stocked Wunderkammern,
so they also made their appearancesin the pages of
treatises on preternaturalphilosophy. The French
surgeon Ambroise Pare regaledhis readerswith il-
lustratedaccounts not only of the colt born with a
man's head nearVeronain 1224, but also of whales,

41 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER1998
ostriches,giraffes,and other species exotic to Euro-
peans. Of coursetherewas nothing intrinsicallyrare
about these creatures-giraffes would certainlynot
have astonished an African, nor elephants an East
Indian. Their raritywas an artifactof an ethnocen-
tric European perspectiveacquainted with foreign
species by at best a single stuffed exemplar (or per-
hapsonly a clawor hoof) and more often by a wood-
cut drawn from secondhand reports and endlessly
plagiarized,as in the case of Diirer's rhinoceros.
The challengeof explaining individualoddities was
twofold. First, many of them-particularly mon-
strous births and celestial apparitions-had been
traditionallyinterpretedas portents, signs sent di-
rectly from God to herald religious reformationor
impending disaster. During the political and reli-
gious upheavals of the sixteenth and early seven-
teenth centuries, the hermeneutics of prodigies
flourishedin both vernacularbroadsidesand Latin
treatises throughout Europe. Viewed as divine
warnings, strangephenomena teetered on the edge
of the supernatural,not amenableto naturalor even
to preternaturalexplanation. Second, even when
prodigies were classifiedas naturalwonders rather
thandivineportents,theywereascribedto "chance"-
that is, to a tangledknot of accidentsexceptionally
conjoined.To unravelsuchcoincidenceson a case-by-
casebasiswas the arduousand often insolubletaskof
the preternaturalphilosopher.
If the preternaturalphilosophers were dogged in
their adherenceto exclusivelynaturalexplanations,
they nonetheless often invoked causes fully as ex-
traordinaryas the effectsto be accounted for. Celes-
tial influences, subtle effluvia, the vis imaginativa
chance, vegetativeand sexualprinciplesextended to
minerals, plastic virtues, and the sheer whimsy of
nature were all causes that might be given a some-
what dubious Aristotelian pedigree, but which in
fact derived at least as much from the writings of
Pliny, Avicenna, and Marsilio Ficino as from the
Meteorologyor On theHeavens.What was character-
istic of many but not all of thesepreternaturalcauses
was the action of rarefiedvapors upon soft, pliable
matter. If comets presagedthe death of princes, it

1998
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 42
was becausethe samedry exhalationsthat fed the
comet,afflictedthehighandmighty,whosedelicate
and luxurioustastesrenderedthem susceptibleto
vividimpressions andacutediseases.Womensome-
timesborechildrenwithhornsandtailsnot because
they had actually slept with demons but because
theiroverwrought hadimprinteda di-
imaginations
abolicalshapeuponthesoftmatterof thefetus.The
famousagateof KingPyrrhus,depictingApolloand
the nine muses, was originallya painting on marble
left by chance "whereagatesare customarilyengen-
dered,"so that the nascent,waxy stone absorbedthe
image.
What is strikingaboutthe tone of these explana-
tions, if not their content, is their militant natural-
ism. Firstandforemost,theyweremilitantin their
explanatory ambitions,reachingfromthemarvelous
almostto the miraculous.In the caseof the appari-
tion of SaintCelestine,portentouscomets,andcer-
tain ominousmonsters,philosophersstretchedthe
preternaturalperilouslycloseto the boundarywith
the supernatural.Moreover, the explanationswere
doggedlymatter-of-factand materialistic.If the
imaginationcould work materialchangesupon a
fetus,anotherperson'sbody,or evenan inanimate
object,it did so by an invisiblebut nonethelessma-
terialemissionof effluvia.Baconpointedlytreated
such allegedcasesof the powerof the imagination
alongside "thetransmissionor emission of the thin-
ner and moreairypartsof bodies;as in odorsand
by degreesto the "emission
infections,"progressing
of immateriate virtues" in the case of sympathies
betweenindividuals."Airybodies"becomegradu-
ally attenuatedinto attractionsat a distance,such as
electricityandmagnetism,theninto "influxesof the
heavenlybodies,"suchasheatandlight,andfinally
into "the infection from spirit to spirit,"as in fasci-
nation or blushing.In all cases, the underlying
model was that of contagion by miasma, and the
implicationwasthateventhemostprodigiouspow-
ers of the imaginationoperatedby principlesas
mundaneas those by which "Guiney-pepper ...
provoketh a continual sneezing in those that are in
the room."

43 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER
1998
 TheHidden,the Rare,andthe Difficult
Epistemology:
The objects of preternaturalphilosophy were rare
and heteroclite, their causes hidden and irregular.
Whereas Aristotelian natural philosophy had re-
quired only the most lightweight epistemological
apparatusto study manifest properties and com-
monplace regularities,early modern preternatural
philosophy needed heavier machinery to warrant
knowledge of such elusive and ornery phenomena.
First, there was the problem of how preternatural
philosophycould be calledknowledgeat all, since its
treatises were crammed with particular instances
ratherthan with the universalstraditionallythought
to be the stuff of philosophy. Although preternatu-
ral philosophersstrove to provide explanationsfor
their odd particulars(in pointed contrastto natural
historians), the work of collecting and accounting
for even these raritiesmight well "nevercome to an
end," as Cardano sighed at the end of his four-
hundred-page treatise. When Descartes plumped
for a natural philosophy of "common things of
which everyone has heard," it was because he re-
coiled from the laboriousand open-ended investiga-
tions of preternaturalphilosophy: "for it would be
necessaryfirst of all to have researchedall the herbs
and stones that come from the Indies, it would be
necessaryto haveseen the Phoenix, and in short not
to overlook anything of all that is most strange in
nature."

Descartes'sreferenceto the Indies raisedthe second

epistemologicalquandaryfor preternaturalphiloso-
phy: it traffickedin rarities and marvels, but for
whom were those things rareand marvelous?What
astonished the homebound lay readermight elicit
only a yawn from a seasonedtraveleror naturalist.In
a dynamic that closely paralleledthe economics of
Wunderkammer collecting in the sixteenth and sev-
enteenth centuries,preternaturalobjects could lose
their cachet through overexposure.Just as flooding
the market with narwhal horns brought the price
of a "unicorn horn" down from 6,000 florins in
1492 to about 32 florins in 1632, so yesterday's
wonder might be today's commonplace. An epis-

1998
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 44
 temology of the rare was exquisitely sensitive to
local context.
Natural philosophyhad its own traditionalcriterion
of the marvelous, if not of the rare: ignorance of
causesprovokeswonder, which in turn is the origin
of philosophy. Conversely,knowledge of causesde-
stroyswonder, just as peeking behind the curtainat
a marionetteshow deflatesthe marvelof the appar-
ently self-propelledlittle figures (an image first in-
voked by Aristotle). Although their subject matter
could hardly have been less Aristotelian-Aristotle
thought the first philosophers commenced their
wondering with the most obvious phenomena, not
the most esoteric-the preternaturalphilosophers
understood their mission in Aristotelian terms: to
explain away wonder. Theirs were to be the Her-
culean laborsof a naturalphilosophy that quenched
wonder with knowledge.
The preternaturalwas all that slipped through the
meshes of Aristotelian epistemology-the subsen-
sible, the variable,the rare.Bacon'sepistemological
reflections echo this theme of difficulty by empha-
sizing that not only the infirmities of the human
mind (the idols of tribe, cave, marketplace,and the-
ater) but also the deviousness of nature are full of
"deceitfulimitationsof things and their signs, wind-
ing and intricate folds and knots," which impede
naturalphilosophy.

andPower
Wonder
Sensibility:
The explanatoryambitions of preternaturalphilos-
ophy were a double-edgedaffair.On the one hand,
preternaturalphilosopherswere the virtuosi of their
discipline, boldly stretchingnaturalexplanationsto
cover marvelsor even miracles.As naturalizers,they
were sworn enemies of wonder, dedicatedto pulling
back the curtainto expose the manipulationsof the
puppeteers.In this vein, Cardanoloftily pronounced
rainsof frogsandfish"nowonder,"sincetheycouldbe
explainedby strong winds that carriedanimalsand
even stones to greatheights. But on the other hand,
preternaturalphilosopherswere aficionadosof won-

45 1998
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER
der, their treatisesoverflowingwith stories and ex-
amples that could and did find their way into
unabashedlypopular compilations of marvels.
The uses and abuses of wonder in naturalphiloso-
phy was a theme that received considerableatten-
tion in the middle decades of the seventeenth
century, in part because of the prominence of pre-
ternaturalphilosophy. Bacon claimed that "by the
rare and extraordinaryworks of nature the under-
standing is excited and raised to the investigation
and discoveryof forms capableof including them,"
but he also scorned the empiricists whose aimless
trials "ever breaketh off in wondering and not in
knowing."Descarteswas perhapsthe cleareston the
delicate balance to be struck between just enough
wonder and too much. He recognizedthe utility of
wonder "in making us learn and hold in memory
things we have previously been ignorant of." But
this serviceable"wonder [admiration]"is to be dis-
tinguished from a stupefying "astonishment[eston-
nement],"which "makes the whole body remain
immobile like a statue, such that one cannot per-
ceive any more of the object beyond the first face
presented, and therefore cannot acquire any more
particularknowledge."Astonishment and wonder
differ in degree-"astonishment is an excess of
wonder"-but their cognitive effects are diametri-
cally opposed. Whereaswonder stimulatesattentive
inquiry, astonishment inhibits it and is therefore,
Descartesasserted,alwaysbad.

The managementof wonder had social and political

as well as cognitive overtones,for wonder was inter-
twined with secrecy,and secrecywas the provinceof
princes. Since at least the fourteenth century,
courtly displays of magnificence had featured all
manner of wonders to impress subjects and espe-
cially foreign guests with the wealth and power of
the rule. Cardano described how the Emperor
Charles V was feted in Milan at the Sforza court
with "marvelousthings [that] enchanted the eyes of
all present."Galileo sought the favorof the Medicis
by offering them "particularsecrets, as useful as
they are curious and admirable." To dazzle with
wonders was a form of courtly competition, par-

1998
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 46
 ticularly at weddings and coronations, when am-
bassadors and visiting potentates would be in
attendance. Princes who beguiled their guests
with marvels similarly basked in the reflected
wonder, perhaps even to the point of inspiring
awe as well as admiration. The marvels of the
prince would ape the miracles of God.

TheDemiseof thePreternatural
Preternaturalphilosophy did not, so to speak, die a
naturaldeath. Its characteristicontology, epistemol-
ogy, and sensibilitywere insteadcannibalizedby the
naturalphilosophy of the late seventeenthand eigh-
teenth centuries. The fascinationwith what Bacon
called the "new, rare, and unusual"persisted well
into the first decades of the eighteenth century, as
the early numbers of the PhilosophicalTransactions
of the Royal Societyof London and the Histoire et
Memoiresde lAcademie Royaledes Sciencesin Paris
bear ample witness. Titles like "A Girl in Ireland,
who has several Horns growing on her Body" or
"Rareand SingularNew Phenomenon of Celestial
Light" or "Descriptionof an ExtraordinaryMush-
room" could easily have been taken from the trea-
tises of preternatural philosophy published a
hundred years earlier. If anything, philosophical
ambitions had sunk in the interim, for very few of
these reports to fledgling scientific societies on
strangephenomena hazardeda causal explanation.
Robert Boyle, describing his experiments on an
"aerialnoctiluca"that glowed eerilyin the dark,was
typical in his restraint:"it is not easy to know, what
phaenomena may, and what cannot, be useful, to
frame or verify an hypothesis of a subject new and
singular, about which we have not as yet (that I
know of) any good hypothesis settled." One can
imagine how Pomponazzi and Cardano, men who
had ventured to explain miracles and prodigies,
must have sneeredin their graves.
When late seventeenth-and eighteenth-centurynat-
ural philosophers did advance causal hypotheses,
they often availedthemselvesof the samesubtle spir-
its and rarefiedeffluviathat had been the staple ex-
planatory resources of preternaturalphilosophy.

47 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER1998
The "Queries"appendedto IsaacNewton's Opticks
(1704) are perhaps the most celebrated of these
latter-dayappeals to what were to become "active
principles"and "imponderablefluids"to explainev-
erything from electricityand magnetism to percep-
tion, but even the mechanicalphilosophy that had
preceded Newton was rife with "occult qualities."
Indeed, Descartes's own "first element," divided
into "indefinitelylittle parts"so fine as to fill every
intersticebetween bodies, resembledthe effluvia of
the preternaturalphilosophersin function as well as
in form, for Descartes revealinglyinvoked it to ex-
plain the mysteriousattractionsof the magnet and
amber and "innumerableother admirableeffects."
The orthodox theories of electricity, magnetism,
light, and heat, as well as the heterodox theories of
animal magnetismof the eighteenth and earlynine-
teenth centuries,cheerfullyrecycledthe subtle spir-
its of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century
preternaturalphilosophy. BenjaminFranklin'selec-
tricalfluids and Antoine Lavoisier'scaloricwere lin-
eal descendantsof Bacon's airy emanations.

Yet despite these ontological and epistemological

survivals,preternaturalphilosophy itself had disin-
tegratedby the late sevehteenth century. Although
popular anthologies of wonders continued to pour
from the pressesin every Europeanvernacular,and
although leading scientific societies crammed their
annals full of strange reports, few natural philoso-
phers reputableenough to belong to these societies
thought any longerto collect these odditiesand their
explanationsinto a volume. Preternaturalphiloso-
phy had ceased to be a genre. It was not that its
examples had been discreditedas fabulous, at least
not in any wholesale fashion. Although early mod-
ern naturalistsprofessed skepticism about this or
that item from Plinian natural history-Conrad
Gesner doubted that mandrake roots screamed
when pulled up; Thomas Browne doubted that ele-
phants lacked knee joints (but not that they could
talk)-any empirical debunking was of necessity
slow and piecemeal.Nor was preternaturalphiloso-
phy the casualtyof a sweeping elimination of what
are now called the "occult sciences"by the new ex-
perimentalphilosophy. Aside from the fact that re-

1998
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 48
cent scholarshiphas shown how indebted leading
figures like Boyle and Newton were at least to al-
chemy, the modern category of occult sciences
lumps together intellectual traditions-astrology,
alchemy, Paracelsianism,natural magic, hermeti-
cism, emblematicnaturalhistory-which were con-
ceptually (and sometimes morally)distinct for early
modern thinkers. Finally, preternaturalphilosophy
was not the target of the last seventeenth-century
polemic againstsecrecyin science: unlike the alche-
mists, the Paracelsians,and many naturalmagicians,
preternaturalphilosophershad not trickedout their
works in deliberatelyobscure language or withheld
causal conjectures. They studied secrets, but they
were not secretive.

Why, then, did the category of the preternatural

dissolve in the late seventeenthcentury?Its solvents
were a new metaphysicsand a new sensibility,which
loosened its coherence without destroying its ele-
ments. The new metaphysics replaced the varied
and variablenatureof preternaturalphilosophywith
one that was uniformand simple;the new sensibility
replaced wonder with diligence, curiosity with
utility.
The sensibility that had glued preternaturalphilos-
ophy into a coherentcategoryof scientificinvestiga-
tion had dissolved by the mid-eighteenth century.
But simply to pronounce nature uniform, regular,
and simple could not eliminate the anomalies and
variability studied by the preternaturalphiloso-
phers. The annalsof the history of electricity,phos-
phorescence,and magnetism are full of results that
could not be stabilizedby the originalexperimenter,
much less replicatedby others.And if, in retrospect,
it seems only rational that Enlightenment natural
philosophersbeganto rejectout of hand many of the
phenomena creditedwithout demur by the preter-
naturalphilosophers,we should also recallthat they
refusedto believein the existenceof meteor showers
becausesuch reportsreekedof the prodigious.
To returnto the question with which I began:What
can be a scientific object, and why? In the case of
preternaturalphilosophy, the problem is doubly
challenging:not only do its characteristicphenom-

49 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER1998
ena no longer excite sustained scientific attention;
the coherenceof the categoryas a whole bafflesus.
What do three-headedsheep have to do with rocks
fallingfrom the sky?What these strangephenomena
had in common, in the context of early modern
natural inquiry, was that they defied conventional
explanation-and thereforearousedwonder. They
stimulated what was arguablythe most ambitious
naturalizing program science has seen before or
since, unrivaled in its comprehensiveness and
tough-minded determinism. Vaulting explanatory
ambition in science survivedthe demise of preter-
naturalphilosophy,but wonder did not. Only in the
edifying public presentationsof science, in the mu-
seums and Nova programs,is wonder still permissi-
ble. It has become an emotion for the consumers,
not the producers,of science. Woe betide the scien-
tist (or for that matter, the historian)who confesses
to being wonderstruck at a professional meeting.
But for Bacon, Descartes,and their contemporaries,
wonderwas still a cognitivepassion-and the maker
of scientific objects.

? 1998 by Lorraine Daston.

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER1998 50