Chapter 1 examines the relationship between Old and New Mechanism and uses it to illuminate the relations between metaphysical and methodological conceptions of mechanism. This historical examination will directly motivate our new deflationary account of mechanism developed in the subsequent chapters. We start by focusing on the role of mechanistic explanation in seventeenth-century scientific practice, by discussing the views of René Descartes, Christiaan Huygens, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Robert Boyle, and the attempted mechanical explanations of gravity by Descartes and Ηuygens. We thereby illustrate how the metaphysics of Old Mechanism constrained scientific explanation. We then turn our attention to Isaac Newton’s critique of mechanism. The key point is that Newton introduced a new methodology that freed scientific explanation from the metaphysical constraints of the older mechanical philosophy. Last, we draw analogies between Newton’s critique of Old Mechanism and our critique of New Mechanism. The main point is that causal explanation in the sciences is legitimate even if we bracket the issue of the metaphysics of mechanisms.

This chapter engages two clusters of long-run, big-picture issues. One concerns relations between art and nature. Aristotle’s views on this were challenged in the late seventeenth century by Robert Boyle in defending the new mechanical philosophy. Darwin is aligned with neither Aristotle nor Boyle; nor with German Romantic philosophers, such as Schelling. The agrarian contexts of Darwin’s science, and its alignments with agrarian rather than industrial forms of capitalism, illuminate Darwin’s views, including his natural theological views, of art-nature relations. A second cluster of issues concerns the role of the selection analogy in later controversies about natural selection, notably involving Alfred Russel Wallace and Francis Galton in the nineteenth century, and Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright in the twentieth century. We stress that Darwin’s theorising is sometimes ancient in its resources and sometimes modern, which is not surprising given the intellectual life he was leading. His analogical argument belongs in the science classroom not because it is up-to-date but precisely because, like all science, it is of its time.

This chapter locates Spinoza’s scientific interests and contributions in the context of the disciplinary categories of the seventeenth century, investigates the authorship of two small treatises (on the rainbow, and on the calculation of chances) often attributed to him, describes his scientific correspondence, evaluates his strengths and weaknesses as an expositor of Cartesian physics, assesses the role of Cartesian physics in his own philosophy, and explores his conception of methodology in the natural sciences.

Historians consider the “Scientific Revolution” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the period in which the foundations of modern scientific practice and methodology first took shape. Francis Bacon (1561-1626), sometimes known today as the creator of the scientific method, inspired the formation of the first scientific societies, including the Royal Society of London and the French Académie Royale des Sciences, and their members made experiment and empiricism central to the study of nature. More recently, however, historians have had to wrestle with an interesting conundrum: some of those long hailed as pioneers of scientific experimentalism, such as Robert Boyle (1627-1691) and Isaac Newton (1643-1727), were also committed alchemists. Their dedication to this mysterious and misunderstood art led some modern biographers to deny or even suppress evidence of their alchemical pursuits. Yet, alchemical ideas were central to how Boyle, Newton, and others understood nature. In fact, Newton’s groundbreaking scientific achievements owe a particular debt to alchemical theories, without which his revolutionary vision of the cosmos would not have existed.