Book Description
Today the two cultures of "art" and
"science" have come to be treated as fundamentally
opposed, their aims incompatible. In this remarkable book,
Lisa Jardine makes clear that this distinction is both
artificial and historically inaccurate.
The intellectual revolution of the seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries was the single most formative event in
Western history, bringing together the humanities and natural
sciences in an unprecedented ferment of conceptual and
practical inventiveness. Isaac Newton was as fascinated with
the chemical processes involved in the transmutation of
metals as he was with the movements of the planets. John
Locke was as keen a physician and botanist as he was a
philosopher. Christopher Wren pursued anatomical dissections
and early blood transfusion with the same vigor as he did
architecture.
These men--among others--opened their minds to the widest
possible influences, allowing for huge and brilliant leaps of
imagination, for the ingenuity, quick-wittedness, lateral
thinking, and inspired guesswork that we now associate with
the humanities, not the sciences. But what unified their
activities was a genius for technological innovation, for
combining the workings of the hand and the brain in one
continuous creative process. And it is this that marks the
emergence of a distinctive, modern Western Intellectual
Tradition.
Ingenious Pursuits focuses on a series of virtuoso
advancements--among them the discovery of the circulation of
blood, the perfection of the mechanical clock, enhanced
astronomical observation, fundamental developments in
mathematics, selective animal and plant breeding, and the
development of chemical substance analysis--that transformed
the thinking of the early modern world and inaugurated forces
for change that laid the very foundations for modern thought.
Revisiting the largely unsung heroes of the Scientific
Revolution and their crowded, motley lives, Jardine
brilliantly illuminates the practice of science, showing how
the discoveries they made grew out of the preoccupations and
pressures of an active and engaged everyday life. Ingenious
Pursuits is a broad-ranging and highly readable look at
the very nature of creativity, at the impact of science on
the emerging modern world, and the intellectual revolutions
that still shape lives.
