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joseph wright of derby
An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768 (oil on canvas). National Gallery, London, UK / Bridgeman Art Library.
See p. C-7 in the color insert for a full-color reproduction of this image.
UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT
How does each spectator project or represent a possible opinion about science?
Does the scientist seem more like an experimenter or a showman? What might Joseph Wright of Derby be suggesting about science through this figure?
Why does the painting focus on an act of cruelty that does not seem to have any scientific value?
How does the lighting of the picture function symbolically? What is the symbolic significance of the candle on the table?
Why is the servant lowering the curtain? How might this act figure into the symbolic drama?
6. What overall view of scientific experimentation, progress, and technology comes through in the painting?
MAKING CONNECTIONS
Compare the scientist in An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump with Liberty in Liberty Leading the People (p. 494). If both figures symbolize revolutions, one scientific and one political, could both paintings be considered "revolutionary"?
An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump dates from about the same time as Hogarth's Gin Lane (p. 548). Compare these works' treatments of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions and of those revolutions' effects on society.
WRITING ABOUT THE TEXT
Using An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump as a model, choose a contemporary scientific discovery or new field of inquiry, such as cloning, genetic engineering, or virtual reality, and propose an allegorical artwork conveying that phenomenon and responses to it.
Translate the symbolism in An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump—the use of light and darkness, the figures, the allegorical significance—into words.
Consider An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump in terms of research involving animals, which sometimes results in injury or death. Is the acquisition of knowledge always worth the costs?
How might Wright's portrayal of the scientist as entertainer apply to contemporary scientists? Read and contrast media portraits of, for example, laboratory researchers and the authors of books that popularize scientific ideas. Does showmanship invalidate good science?
william paley
from Natural Theology
[1802]
WILLIAM PALEY (1743-1805) was born in Peterborough, England, where his father was a schoolmaster. He studied at Christ's College of Cambridge University and was later elected to be a fellow there, where he taught a course on moral philosophy. He later published his lectures in book form as Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1786), which became required reading at Cambridge and was one of the bestselling works of philosophy in Britain.
But it was in the field of Christian apologetics—the branch of theology devoted to making factual, historical, or scientific arguments for the truth of Christianity—that Paley was to make his greatest mark. His book View of the Evidences of Christianity (1794) was required reading for all students at Cambridge well into the twentieth century. Among its most fervent admirers was the young Charles Darwin, who studied at Christ's College in the 1820s. The popularity of this book led Paley to receive several prestigious ecclesiastical appointments.
Paley's most famous book, and the one that would shape debates between science and religion for more than 200 years, is Natural Theology (1802). In it, Paley argues that all of creation points to a benevolent creator who wants human beings to be happy. He argues for the existence of a creator using God's creations as evidence. The selection here—the most famous passage in the book—argues that a traveler discovering a watch on the ground would immediately assume that somebody had created it. Similarly, when we consider the true complexities of nature, we must assume the existence of a creator of the world.
Like most of the ideas in Natural Theology, the notion of God as a watchmaker did not originate with William Paley. Eighteenth-century deists such as Thomas Jefferson had employed the imagery of a watchmaker or clockmaker God for years. But Paley excelled in identifying the strongest arguments, stripping them of unnecessary commentary, and presenting them to common readers as brief, understandable, and rhetorically powerful. As such, his work offers the most powerful argument for the existence of God to come out of Enlightenment Europe.
State of the Argument
In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer, that for any thing I knew to the contrary it had lain there for ever; nor would it, perhaps, be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that for any thing I knew the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for the stone; why is it not as admissible in the second case as in the first? For this reason, and for no other, namely, that when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive—what we could not discover in the stone—that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose, e.g. that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day; that if the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, or placed after any other manner or in any other order than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use that is now served by it. To reckon up a few of the plainest of these parts and of their offices, all tending to one result: We see a cylindrical box containing a coiled elastic spring, which, by its endeavor to relax itself, turns round the box. We next observe a flexible chain—artificially wrought for the sake of flexure—communicating the action of the spring from the box to the fusee. We then find a series of wheels, the teeth of which catch in and apply to each other, conducting the motion from the fusee to the balance and from the balance to the pointer, and at the same time, by the size and shape of those wheels, so regulating that motion as to terminate in causing an index, by an equable and measured progression, to pass over a given space in a given time. We take notice that the wheels are made of brass, in order to keep them from rust; the springs of steel, no other metal being so elastic; that over the face of the watch there is placed a glass, a material employed in no other part of the work, but in the room of which, if there had been any other than a transparent substance, the hour could not be seen without opening the case. This mechanism being observed—it requires indeed an examination of the instrument, and perhaps some previous knowledge of the subject, to perceive and understand it; but being once, as we have said, observed and understood, the inference we think is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker—that there must have existed, at some time and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer, who comprehended its construction and designed its use.