Imaginative literature is the subject of this book, yet our discussion must begin elsewhere, in the field of ideas and the history of religion. There the contextual interests of literature are linked to one startling development: a broad-based radical change in fundamental attitudes, a shift generated by the rise of early modern science. During the frightful conflict of the Second World War, Lucien Febvre looked back to a somewhat parallel period; he wrote that throughout Europe there had been “a problem of unbelief in the sixteenth century,” a picture few historians would care to contradict.¹ Turbulent collisions of ideological conviction...

Most scientists even today, in an age of extreme mathematical complexity, are able to use their own native languages in describing what they are looking for, at least roughly. Without actually measuring cubic centimeters or gallons, a researcher finds it helpful to be able to say, “Trees grow in relation to various factors, such as water supply.” Measurement usually comes later. While early modern scientists, especially the astronomers, went beyond their medieval precursors in their search for revealing as well as accurate mathematical expressions, they simultaneously employed natural language—in effect, words—to express natural process. Let us remember that...

During the later Renaissance, a wide range of discoveries in what was called alternatively the New Philosophy or the New Science began to transform the entire metaphysical enterprise of European thought, and in this transformation no single challenge to research was more critical than the problem we have singled out: What is motion? What are its different forms? Where is it significant? How does it relate to time and space? Plus many other more detailed questions. Distinguishing the innovations in this field has been the laborious task of philosophers and historians of science, leaving the subject immensely rich in scientific...

Renaissance authors discovered number everywhere in their poetry, because every poem, unlike a piece of prose, is a metric structure designed to move with marked recurrent verbal rhythm. For them a poem that fails to move verbally—that is, musically—is not a poem in one essential aspect: it abandons its own proper abstract goal and instead tries to be written or sung in such a way as to refer solely to isolated things lying outside its embodying order. But a poem, unlike so many written today, should not be an engine of prosaic, positive, material reference. Not only does...

The unrivaled fame of Shakespeare has been such that he makes the exercise of abstract intellect, the savage kind Christopher Marlowe displays, appear a far inferior achievement. To be sure, Marlovian thought veils its implicit metaphysic under clouds and surges of relentless hyperbolic eloquence, to the extent that one wonders if a line like, “Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?” is scarcely more than a mere conceit, all the while failing to notice that throughoutDoctor Faustusthere is a play upon the magic visage and epiphanic beauty of a mythic Helen. By holding his concepts to...

One knows few poets so time-beguiled as Shakespeare, yet few are as free from ritual repetitions of the temporal theme. He uses the word “time” well over a thousand times in the plays, making it a memorable usage, as also in the sonnets, where its idea virtually dominates the drama of two love stories. InShakespeare’s Words, David and Ben Crystal adduce fifteen categories of temporal usage, whereby “time” can imply an age or epoch in human society or world history; a present state of affairs; a lifetime or life; a person’s age; a past period of history; the future;...

Like many another ancient memorial, Ben Jonson’s epitaph cuts two ways. Carved into stone at Westminster Abbey, the epitaph suggests at once the opposite ideas of dreaming hope and ultimate fact, for while the inscription obviously praises the poet, it also conveys a thought beyond that praise. At first sight, the famous words seem clear enough: “O Rare Ben Jonson.” But some, perhaps thinking of his jovial life and Christian redemption, have believed that the words intended to say, in Latin, “Pray for Ben Jonson”—Orare Ben Jonson. I like the rhyme of “prayer” and “rare,” for it points in...

Donne shares with the New Philosophy a special obscurity, since neither the poet nor the natural scientist can describe any clear link or difference between fundamental questions of time or space and questions of ethical value. The natural philosopher and the metaphysical poet may see God as omnipresent in all senses, spatially and temporally; but such absolute power must be spiritualized, if we speak of God, and at that moment there is no obvious fashion for saying how we humans share in the divine space or time. Only when these two dimensions are aligned with motion—their consequent, in effect...

Galileo is mentioned three times inParadise Lost, once in epithet as “the Tuscan artist.” As artist he may be the maker of telescopes—theartifex, or inventor of new devices for acquiring knowledge. Along with Columbus, who appears in Book IX of the poem at its climax, Galileo belongs to secular history; and more dramatically he is the only contemporary of Milton to be actually named in the whole vast composition. As a distinct historical agent of immediate importance to the early modern world—indeed, as maker of that world—Galileo alone among other great thinkers is not anonymous,...

Crossing many intersections between poetry and the scientific question, hoping to gain a finer sense ofwhatmovement is andhowtime and even space are aspects of movement, we have seen how these dimensions of nature help to structure the poetic imagination. That such concerns have the power to structure the most important metaphysical questions ought not to shock anyone, including those holding orthodox religious beliefs. At the end of this discussion I am reminded of Herbert Butterfield’s avowal in hisOrigins of Modern Science:“Of all the intellectual hurdles which the human mind has confronted and has overcome...