The British Empire

The British Empire like most other empires started by chance. In the 16th and 17th century with the discovery of the new world, Spanish sailors managed to find the route to the gold and silver mines of Latin America. From Peru and Mexico huge amounts of precious metal ore started being shipped back to the Spanish treasury, laying down the backbone of Spain’s burgeoning economy. The Portuguese had amassed a huge area of land as well and were trading from Brazil to China. Thus Englishmen feverent with the desire to discover “gold and riches” were sent out from the Royal Navy. This economic threat posed by other European heavyweights added on to the now present religious duty of a newly reformed England to create a protestant empire to rival catholic Spain.
The answer to end England’s lackluster economical success came in the form of “Informal” imperialism. Pirates and buccaneers were born. British ships, mostly private funded started raiding the Spanish Main. “Privateering” as it was called, was soon made royally legitimate by Elizabeth 1 as she realized its benefits to Britain. However these were humble beginnings, since even with the loot obtained from Spanish ships the British treasury didn’t make more than 200,000 pounds a year.
The change in British fortunes did take a while to come. The re-exporting of tobacco, sugar and tea to parts of northern Europe started them on an upward economic growth spurt which was to continue for the better part of the next 250 years. This was followed by the discovery of sub-continental India’s rather advanced and massive textile and raw material sector. Thus still following a form of informal imperialism the east India Company was set up. The real boost however came from the adaptation of the Dutch financial banking system, ideas of credit and concept of national public debt. The British economy was up and running.
After the formation of the premature empire, the British kept it alive and fed its growth using a variety of factors. Settler colonialism was one of them. In its south pacific island colonies and dominions, hundreds and thousands of convicts were sent. This helped lessen the drain on government resources for their upkeep and also helped in the securing of the raw materials which helped the British private industry boom. When this great exodus started occurring from England, it was more than just people seeking freedom from religious oppression or trying to build a new way of life, it was the expansion of the British idea of a free market. The settlers also led to the extermination of the local population of the land, be it the aborigines in Australia, the Native Americans in the USA, the Maoris in New Zealand and the Zulus in southern Africa. Being in control of the land resources and paying taxes to the Queen, Britain efficiently built up a system of grand monetary return.
In the New World, plantations sprung up. They started out with tobacco, but the majority was cotton. While in the West Indies sugar plantations were becoming increasingly popular. The colonials needed cheap labor that wouldn’t mind the back breaking work in the fields. This started the British slave trade; a business that would help Britain rake in enormous profits while ensuring a steady supply of raw materials was available to its post-industrial revolution industry. It helped to subsequently acquire domination over a previously untapped area of land called Africa.
Britain’s policies towards most of its colonies existed on direct rule. The British didn’t try to hide the fact that they were empire builders, infact they took pride in it. They were involved in political, economic and cultural aspects of every country they took or governed. Thus for example they didn’t let India or Ireland have an autonomous government and insured that “natives” stayed out of the higher level positions. The rule was absolute, where the people of the nation paid taxes to the empire, were under the jurisdiction of British officials and had their markets controlled by the empire.
There were however, some instances of indirect rule. The government of Egypt between 1882 and 1922 was heavily influenced by the British Empire. Especially with the installation of Tewfiq Pasha as a puppet, that took orders from the English government. Thus Egypt was a protectorate, and not till 1922 did it gain independence from British rule. In Nigeria with Frederick Lugard, who assumed the position of high commissioner of the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria in 1900 a powerful indirectly ruled system was in place. The emirs and kings paid homage and got advice and orders on ways to run the country from the high commissioner.
The British Empire even though driven by economic greed and racial and religious arrogance brought about some positive changes. It helped create a complex grid of trade routes. It brought the textiles from India, tea from china, coffee from Brazil and sugar from the West Indies to Europe. On the flipside, European ideals of government, free market systems, the English language and in countries like India, the extensive railway systems were exports of the British Empire. Even though being avidly involved in the slave trade from Africa, the British did try to put a bottleneck on this dehumanizing business, using the royal navy to hunt down merchant slave vessels. The upper class of nations like India were exposed to western ideas and educated in Oxford and Cambridge. This helped foster the nationalist movements which were spearheaded by intellectuals and crucial in gaining independence and creating a stable autonomous rule. The industrial revolution which began in Britain did spread to its colonies due to the growing demand of raw materials in England, thus the British did help mechanize the workforce of its acquired nations.
The good done by the empire often seem redundant and pale in comparison to the devastation and disharmony the English brought to most of their colonies. First of, genocide; the British systematically “ethnically cleansed” the natives of any country they invaded. The massacre of the Native Americans, Maoris, aborigines, Zulus and Indians are staggering. The classical ideology of the empire builder was social Darwinism. A concept they used when committing atrocities against the lesser humans. Another destructive force was the introduction of the free market. The British imports from their colonies was mostly raw materials , which they obtained at hugely unequal prices, which they then turned into high ended items and exported to the same colonies. This ensured that the local private industry wasn’t allowed to grow. In essence the British wanted their subjects to be beggars, and thus always dependant on the empire for material as well as military support. Therefore just in India, British import and export fetched a mind-boggling profit of 200%.
Cultural imperialism was the buzzword of the Victorians. No longer satisfied with just economically exploiting the colonies where they didn’t practice settler colonialism, they wanted to export to these nations the whole British way of life including Christianity. Thus the British who were mostly ignorant of local customs, tribal rivalry, religious differences and political structures went ahead and geographically and communally divided the world. British ideas of “divide and rule” and low understanding or care for Indian culture resulted in the partition of India in 1947 which ended in a carnage that resulted in the deaths of over 12 million Indians and led to a harrowing legacy of warfare between Hindus and Muslims. In Africa, missionaries like Livingstone were interested in helping the Africans with disease and better implementation of agricultural techniques; however their primary aim was to create a society of people that they could then convert to Christianity. Livingstone even wanted to build a European society on the banks of the river Zambezi and open up the heartland of Africa to trade, commerce and Christianity.
British entrepreneurs like Cecil Rhodes and the East India Company of India, were epicenters for exploitation of a nations resources. Right from acquiring of gold mines to the rather perfectly executed economic annexation of the DeBeers diamond mines, to the building of railroads to support the needs of capitalist giants like the East India company, the empire through private industries and governmental limitations and military force managed to divert the majority of the profits coming from the colony back to Britain.
The similarities between the informal and clandestine empire built by the USA and the days of the British rule are many. To start off, the methods the British used to get into a nation usually constitute of starting a trading outpost which slowly turns into an economic monopoly taking over regulating the import and export sector and crippling the local competitors. In the case of the British, the effects that the East India Company had on the economy of India, is the best example of such a venture. The Americans have used the same tactics all over the world. From the creation of banana republics in the Caribbean, where large multinationals like Union fruit practically decided the lives and deaths of the population, to companies like Exxon Mobil and Enron which have huge market shares in the oil rich Middle East. In the case of either “empire”, a blockade or restriction against the expansion of the markets in the various different countries, have been met with military force. Thus the first gulf war and the present operation Iraqi freedom added to the hundreds of proxy wars the US fought during the cold war era were mostly the Empire’s attempts to allow their entrepreneurs a safe space to grow and take over the economic structure of a nation.
However the most significant similarity between the two empires is the export of cultural values to its colonies. In the globalized world of today, McDonalds and Wal-Mart have mushroomed in hundreds of nations all over the world, most home PCs are run on Windows Operating systems, Hollywood movies have become household names, American clothing and above all, a culture of consumerism and love for instant gratification has penetrated deep into the heart of many societies all over the world. The Victorians in particular believing in their cultural superiority wanted to “civilize and Christianize” the native. Thus right from drinking afternoon tea, to the governmental structures, to driving on the left side of the road, the British impregnated its colonial Diaspora with the quintessential aspects of England. In essence this imposition of a certain way of life was another structure of control, using which the metropole made the periphery dependant on its good graces for even the ideology by which they lived their life.
The British depended greatly on local officials and leaders in order to rule. By bribing or choosing the officials they ensured their control on the larger civilian population. The ruling of India, a country of over 200 million people by 10,000 British officials is this theory at work. The Americans chose to use the same tactics all over the world, be it arming Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein in Iraq, or installing puppet governments in Bolivia and Nicaragua. The British use of military presence was also an important factor in “taming” the wild countries. To keep up with this imperialist tradition, the USA has over 725 military bases effective in the world today. This legacy of restrained yet, universally present military might allows the US to mobilize their forces at very short notice whenever the policies of the national rulers do not humor their own strategic or economic interests.
Even though suggested in the text that the British Empire was the least of all the evil empires and a rather noble enterprise which took on the role of saving the world even at the cost of personal destruction, the logic seems a little skewed. Genocide, communal violence, extermination of national resources, crippling of local economies, atrocities against human rights, cultural and religious imposition – the crimes committed by the empire were against everything that people hold sacrosanct. A moral argument cannot be created by an institution which holds racism, limitless economic gain and a penchant for dehumanizing at its very core. In retrospect, even as industrial revolution spread and the illusionary free market took over, the British Empire was visible in its full glory – an institution religiously committed into transforming the world into a neo-England, populated by sub-human native beggars, that looked up to the white man for lessons on civilization and spirit. A world order created at the cost of justice and human liberty.

The Formation of the Western Scientific Ideology from a social perspective: Aristotle to Galileo

Understanding the growth of an ideology which created the most precise and factually supported methods of doing “science”, or as it was called “Natural Philosophy”, needs to take into account the different accepted paths of learning. From intuition to empiricism, from instrumentalism to rationalism, various different schools of thought helped create the conclusive products. Added on was another essential component – the ability and commitment of individuals such as – Aristotle, Kepler and Galileo, which changed the way society, looked at the world.
An essential understanding of science in the Western world emanates from the ancient Greeks and their views on reasoning and the natural world. In the Republic, Plato states his rather concrete definition of science as opposed to opinion. Science, as defined by Plato is “necessarily true and unchanging” (Cushing). This essential platonic ideal of science being a fundamental constant led it to be often linked to the divine. The mortal world was limited by sensory perception of humans. It was forever changing and mostly lacked the ability to create the true reality. Even though relatively more progressive than their peers, in their intellectual sphere, Aristotle and Plato both believed in the existence of an “external world”; a world beyond the grasp of the intellect. A proponent of the realist school of thought, Aristotle believed in deduction of first principles about the genuine nature of anything from sensory observation. This would then be utilized and logically demonstrated to create true knowledge.. Moving away from the Platonic rule of inherent destiny and form, Aristotle assigned considerable value to the art of collecting observations; something rather revolutionary in 4th century B.C.
The evolution of the antecedent and consequent form of syntax occurred during this time as well. The classical “if p, then q” was extensively used by Aristotelians in most forms of deductive logic hypotheses. In this system of thought intuition played a critical role. The validity of antecedents was determined by the comprehension of certain “self-evident” truths that according to Rene Descartes “disciplined mind saw as certain”. Concordantly another school of thought was at work - the empiricists that relied on experimentation and arrived at conclusions after thoroughly discussing the data. Fundamentally the rationalist and the empiricists followed two distinct tools. The rationalist used deduction, a method of arriving at individual conclusions based on the universal general assumption: the empiricist used induction, a method of arriving at a general conclusion by proving its validity at the individual level.
Rene Descartes laid out certain rules that led a person to absolute truth. In the “Regulae” Descartes says:
“Only those objects should engage our attention, to the sure and indubitable knowledge of which our mental powers seem adequate.”(Cushing)
I find different inherent flaws in this statement. Descartes’ inability to account for the fallibility of our mental powers is the most obvious. Our sensory perceptions are not always limited to what is. They often border on what can be, or even what we want it to be. The classic example of this is a mirage. The fact that different people observe different illusions when confronted with a mirage is adequate justification for the rather biased observational abilities we posses.
Descartes’ rhetoric poses another problem. He talks about the “sure and indubitable knowledge” however, no concrete precedents are laid down which would lead to the recognition of such knowledge when we are confronted with it. As an example, to Hitler it may have seemed that it was sure and indubitable that the Aryan race was more superior, however that by itself doesn’t suffice as justification enough to believe in it. Therefore, Descartes totally undermined the cultural, religious and social bias which would taint a person’s mental powers subconsciously and consciously while making such a value based conclusion.
In his third rule Descartes states that:
“In the subjects that we propose to investigate our inquiries should be directed not what others have thought nor to what we ourselves conjecture but to what we can clearly and perspicuously behold and with certainty deduce; for knowledge is not won in any other way”(Cushing)

The rather blatant warning against the opinions of others in the statement above seems to be a counterproductive suggestion. Any form of learning is constructive; it builds on what has been discovered in the past. Even though I realize that Descartes’ warning might be against letting public opinion sway our beliefs, it also seems to me as if he asked us to not take into account the intellectual achievements of other people. The second flaw arises when he talks about the fallibility of conjecture and desires rather to focus on “what we can clearly and perspicuously behold”. This statement is in itself a contradiction. Looking at it definitively it seems rather clear that a conjecture is just as much an assumption as is what we can clearly behold, this problem exists due to the nature of the human mind. Since bias is inherent in doing science using such ideology, people will have different concepts of what they consider being absolute truths and what is just weak assumption. Since Descartes does not clearly delineate one universal way of infallible deduction of the truth, his third rule leaves many conceptual gaps when defining the absolute truth and fails to account for the biases of culture, society, religion and political aspirations.
Aristotle was the most influential scientist of the ancient western world. His influence however was not always a true gauge of his competence. This is a testimony to the social power he exercised over the common masses. Even though thinkers like John Philoponus and Thales had equally persuasive arguments about the nature of things, the Aristotelian view of the world was rather hard to over-rule. I am not trying to steal any of the glory that Aristotle deserved, however, I am suggesting that his connections with emperors like Alexander and a forum like the university that he and Plato created allowed for his ideas to acquire more validity and reach more of the populous. The problems with Aristotle stem from his rejection of all that wasn’t organic. This concept of an organic world essentially conveys that all objects that exist in the world are inherently bound to each other by a rather personal “nature” that is found within all. A “God of the Gaps” ideology is found in the work of most of the ancient Greeks and Aristotle is no exception to this rule. He immediately delineates the divine from the mortal and prophesizes the constant inability of the mortal to understand the will of the gods. This slows down the developmental and evolutionary aspects of learning. By relegating the vaguely understood areas of nature to the whim of the gods, Aristotle created the picture of a society that was constantly at the mercy and moods of the celestial beings. This concept of a clear divide between the “heavens” and the “earth”, created two different sets of rules for physical governance, an ideology so powerful that it existed till the 17th century. Due to Aristotle’s rather wide area of expertise he had contributions in many intellectual fields, from biology to philosophy. However to better understand the specific goal of this paper; I will focus on his treatises on motion and form of earthly objects and heavenly bodies.
The Organic view of the world as held by Aristotle was his way of imagining every object in nature to contain an extension of human senses. Therefore behaviorally even inanimate objects were said to follow a certain path based on their own “nature”. Thus a stone wanted to return to earth and fire went up towards the sky. Since a circle was supposed to be the naturally perfect motional path, the theory that heavenly bodies exhibited circular motion was propagated. In the Aristotelian world this made perfect sense since a circle was an unchanging fundamental path which obviously was something the “heavenly bodies” followed. Along with this belief came the idea that since the earth by nature sought out the center of the universe, it was most likely situated at the center (Cushing). This belief in the geocentric universe was later propounded by Claudius Ptolemy using the best data available. However a lot of ad-hoc terms and arguments were created in order to explain the uniform circular motion of the planets and also the stellar parallax viewed by the ancient Greeks. Even though the geocentric model was the majority held view, it wasn’t the only one. Aristarchus of Samos, from the 3rd century B.C. advocated for the heliocentric model of the heavens. However the lack of sufficient data to support his hypothesis and his inability to prove the presence of a stellar parallax in his system didn’t make his ideas very scientifically viable or commonly understood. Thus the absence of precise methods of data collection and the absence of algebraic math crippled the evolution of science in the ancient world.
Understanding the Ptolemaic view of the solar system is of utmost importance. It helps us realize the necessity of the Copernican view and also the paradigm shift which occurred with the realization that a dichotomy didn’t need to exist when it came to the natural laws of governance. Uniform circular motion was the cornerstone all heavenly and natural movement. Driven by the sense of unparalleled pride and arrogance and an understanding of “natural place” and the earth’s ability to find the center of the universe (its natural place) put the earth in the center of a spherical universe. This world view though debunked by modern methods of observations and math seemed very obvious when you consider that the ancients saw the planets and the stars move in relation to the earth. The lack of almost all movement in relation to each other when it came to stars strengthened the world view that the entire universe was part of a celestial sphere which revolved around the earth while displaying uniform circular motion. Due to the difference in the planetary revolutionary times, the orbits of the known planets were just concentric circles around the earth with paths that were circular and proportionally longer with their time period of motion. The two observational problems: varying planetary brightness and retrograde motion were explained by the creation of entities like the eccentric which was a point around which a circular orbit was traced. On this orbit a smaller circle called the epicycle defined the actual orbit of the planet, and even as the planet followed the epicycle, the epicycle itself followed the deferent which was the circumference of the circle transcribed around the eccentric as the center. The earth which was within this circle therefore was affected by two different kinds of circular motions, one of the planets around the epicycle and the other of the epicycle around the eccentric. Using the creation of these ad-hoc conditions the Greeks, sought to explain the phenomenon that they saw and couldn’t conceptually explain.
Ptolemy’s greatest contribution to the geocentric model of the universe was the hypothesis and the subsequent proof that the planets swept out equal areas in equal intervals of time. The equant, as Ptolemy called it, was a point around which the epicycle now moved sweeping out equal areas in equal intervals of time. This ideology later proved and perfected by Kepler (using the observations of Tycho Brahe) was instrumental in understanding how the model given by the Aristotelians needed to change. Thus Ptolemy showed a deeper respect for the data than those that preceded him. He actually decided to ensure that the model followed the data, rather than create data to justify his model – this methodology is the beginning of a paradigm shift from the idea of the inherent moral and intrinsic end that every body possesses to one that embraced the idea of cause and effect. Ptolemy cannot be assigned credit for moving past the Aristotelian model of inherent purpose. His beliefs which extended from the acceptance of uniform circular motion to subsequent additions to his universal model to accommodate for the discrepancies that more accurate data brought out, Ptolemy was still governed by the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic ideas of the universe.
The conflict between realism and instrumentalism was present throughout the science of the ancients. Realists believed in making broad assumptions based on individual observations and were intuition driven philosophers. The instrumentalists were faithful to their data even if it challenged the intuitive world view, and thus constructed a theory after in-depth consultation with the observable events. Even as the ancient Babylonians worked to gather empirical information about the heavens, Greeks took their ideological astronomical creations rather instrumentally. The lack of a definitive proof that would mathematically rationalize the truth behind the data rendered the creation of sensory ideas of the universe which were steeped in cultural, social and religious thought and often technically flawed.
It took a quiet, unassuming man, an arrogant eccentric with great wealth and social status and a mystic mathematician from an impoverished noble family to overthrow the existing world order and forever cement the heliocentric view of the universe in the western world. In order to understand this rather revolutionary shift in physics, it is important to understand what the social and religious milieu of the time was. Not only does this view foster added appreciation for the individuals it also helps one understand why, these ideas were resisted so vehemently and how they finally overcame popular opinion.
In the last half of the 15th century, Europe was in the middle of the renaissance, a period which witnessed the revival of classical ideology. Along with reconstruction and discovery of the natural sciences came the reformation of the religious world view. Due to the Protestant reformation which was taking Europe by storm and shaking the foundations of the Catholic thought structure, the priests were incredibly stringent when it came to any text that refuted the scenarios or concepts as propounded by the scriptures. Therefore, the rather deep Aristotelian base that Christianity had acquired had infused the Christian society with the geocentric view of the universe. Anyone who decided to challenge this view, stood to be labeled as a heretic or even worse, a blasphemer. Within this atmosphere of strictly governed learning by the church, Nicolaus Copernicus, a god fearing, fatherless mathematician raised by his uncle started the first steps to a mighty revolution.
The Copernican model which was heavily influenced by the ideas of Aristarchus was a rather simple system of the universe. The heliocentric model needed just two factors for all practical purposes – the radius of the planets orbit and the speed of the planet. It placed the sun in the center of the solar system and the order of the different planets was solved by doing Pythagorean calculations of the (sin) of the angle, using the Radii of the two different planets. This view of the heavens also explained the apparent nature of the stellar parallax in closer bodies such as planets. Thus it could be mathematically shown and then observationally proven, why mercury and Venus appeared so close to each other for observers on the earth. Thus the small difference in the radii of the orbits led to a minute angular separation and hence the phenomenon viewed between the two inner planets.
Copernicus was a theologian at heart and even though his “science” went against the established world view of his age, his belief in what was true was fundamentally governed by Christianity. His famous words about his work, “De Revolutionibus”, were, “Mathematics are for Mathematicians” (Boorstin). Another problem was the lack of dependable and adequate data. Intuition and imagination were growing at a rate that instrumentation could not keep up with. Observations were rudimentary at best and to compensate for it Copernicus had to employ Ptolemaic devices like equants, deferrants, epicycles and eccentrics. Copernicus’ ideology was subdued and controlled by his religious affiliations. Thus the Copernican model as proposed by Copernicus was at best an attempt to fit Aristarchus’ world view by explaining it with Ptolemaic principles and devices. In the light of this argument, it seems as if too much credit has been ascribed to Copernicus.
Tycho Brahe was a phenomenon, an eccentric that lost his nose in a duel with his friend to decide who was a better mathematician. He spent 20 years on the island of Hven collecting the most comprehensive astronomical data that had ever been compiled in the western world. Even though born in the “age of reason”, Tycho could not let go of his belief of a motionless earth at the center of the universe. Along with his growing volumes of data came a realization that the heliocentric world would sufficiently simplify certain aspects of the heavenly model. Thus he came up with a compromise. His model consisted of the immovable earth in the centre around which the sun moved in a circular orbit as the planets circled around the sun (Boorstin). The true genius of Tycho was not in the pages of his intuitive theories of the heavens or the theologically motivated hypothesis he produced, it was in empirical data collection. A rather traditional upbringing exposed him to liberal arts at the Lutheran University where “he ingested a heavy dose of Aristotle” (Boorstin). He was torn between two worlds. Even as he produced the revolutionary methods and inventions for collecting data, he tried to ensure their usage in justifying the validity of the scripture demanded world view. Tycho’s contribution to the evolution of theoretical scientific ideology is rather insignificant, however he raised the standard for data collection thus making the observational method much more important. Tycho’s legacy was the extensive and rather accurate data that his colleagues and he had collected laboriously over a period of 20 years. After his death, his records was passed on to “a younger, more liberated and erratic mind” (Boorstin).
Johannes Kepler was young, liberated and erratic. He was a German Lutheran-Catholic who was preparing himself to join the ministry when his dreams were put on hold due to his family’s chronic poverty. Reluctantly he accepted a math tutorship in southern Austria. It was the lack of finances that ensured that the world was given Kepler the mathematician and not Kepler the priest. After his meeting with Tycho, Kepler was fascinated by the observable data that Tycho had access to. Finding a way to reconstruct a picture of the universe using the data from Tycho and the weak framework of the heliocentric model left by Copernicus, Kepler came up with his three laws of planetary motion. Here presented for the first time were planetary orbits that weren’t circles, but ellipses. However Kepler’s greatest contribution to astronomy is arguable. A rather important change in thought was propagated by him. It was the idea that the sun was more than merely a celestial body which illuminated the heavens. He put forth the notion that the sun actually had an effect on the motion of the planets. This was a revolutionary concept because of two things: it expounded the idea of a force that the sun exercised and secondly it found a cause for the different periods of motion that the planets displayed. Kepler took the first steps towards the shift from “an organic to a mechanical explanation of the universe” (Boorstin). It seems intuitive to assume that Kepler was straying away from the more theologically motivated thought processes of his peers, however in truth Kepler found the Copernican model lacking when it came to spirituality. In his model of the heavens the religious allegory was hidden but absolutely essential. According to him, the sun as the source of light and power was like God, the immovable stars stood as examples for the Son and the sun’s moving force which existed in between was the Holy Ghost (Boorstin).
A vital aspect which arose from this combination of Brahe and Kepler was something which soon became the “hallmark of modern science” (Cushing). It was “the need for accurate quantitative agreement between theory and experiment” (Cushing). This application was first observed in practice when, while calculating the orbit of Mars, Kepler realized that Tycho’s data was more accurate than his speculations. In the Epitome Astronomae Copernicus Kepler laid out his planetary laws which had taken him over twenty years to perfect.
Even as the Copernican and the Ptolemaic views of the universe battled against each other, to come up as the more scientific and comprehensive concept, another vital physical idea was in the process of change. Motion or natural motion had baffled the scientists of antiquity. What made objects move faster or slower and more importantly what made them move, was an enigma. Aristotle following the platonic frame of thought believed in the dichotomous universe. The heavens and the earth were governed by a distinctly different set of laws. Therefore on earth, all objects had an intrinsic goal or end which had been divinely decided and all motion or activity was in keeping with this final goal. Natural motion of a stone was to return to the earth and of fire was to go towards the heavens. Forces were always acting on bodies in rest and in motion to create unnatural motions, however following the intrinsic path led objects on a path of natural motion or rest. Aristotle had very little faith in a physical quantity that could hold together the universe, instead like most other thinkers of his age he infused his science with theology.
In Aristotle’s, On the Heavens, he says “bodies have their natural motions produced by weight and that the distance a given body will cover in a fixed time increases with its weight” (Cushing). Aristotle believed in a different definition of weight, than is modernly available to us. According to Aristotle, “the speed with which a body fell was a measure of its weight” (Cushing). Since he used the variable of velocity to define the quantity of weight it would then have been logical for him to theorize their proportional existence. Of the two fundamental variables that regulated Aristotelian motion, one was the concept of motion to a natural place driven by the intrinsic end and the other was the resistance offered by the medium within which the motion occurred. Since he was driven by the organic universe concept, his ideology in the physical world often mirrored his understanding of the biological human world. Just as people were slowed down in their process of life to reach an inherent end that had been pre-decided by the world they lived in , objects were hindered their natural place by the resistance posed by the medium. Mathematically Aristotle’s ideas of motion had three variables – velocity, weight of the object and resistance offered by the medium(velocity was directly proportional to the weight of the object and inversely proportional to the resistance offered by the medium). Logically it can be deduced that Aristotle did not believe in the presence of motion in the absence of a medium. The Aristotelian world view did not have space for anything that was not finite. This was motivation for his rejection of a situation that would produce motion that was infinite and therefore in some way without a final cause and a divine plan.
It is important to understand Aristotle’s concepts of natural motion and place, since it sheds light on what he thought regulates it all and how this regulation was achieved. According to Aristotle, natural place has a dual nature. The first is “the innermost motionless boundary of what contains” (Machamer). Using this concept the extended view of the earth can be taken to be its natural place. Therefore the natural place of the earth is defined by what surrounds it. The second idea of motion talks about place “in terms of the order of the cosmos” (Machamer). The existence of this “place” is determined by the mathematics of the universe and not by the organic unity that is present on the earth. Thus the first sense of place is relative, while the second absolute. In order to achieve stability and organic unity the two concepts of place need to coincide. This was the theoretical argument Aristotle used for the presence of the earth in the center of the universe. However nowhere in his works does Aristotle suggest that natural place is a cause for natural motion. Even though he believes that all objects strive for organic similarity, the cause for this inherent need isn’t the organic whole itself. Aristotle believes that in-animate objects cannot display “self-motion”. Thus movement has to be begun by something more distinctly powerful. There is also the need of a medium that can relay the force from the “mover” to the “moved”. This medium or as Aristotle calls it “direct proximate cause” is air. According to him air is what assists in transporting the causation of the force. Now that we have a transmitter and a moveable object, the final criteria of the mover is filled by the sun. The sun as Aristotle calls it is “the original source” and it ultimately gets its ability from the Unmoved Mover. Therefore even though attributing an inherent nature of inanimate objects to return to their elemental constituents, Aristotle assigns the actual impetus for the motion of these objects to the Unmoved Mover. The sun being the “Mover’s” medium of relaying the nature is what doesn’t allow objects to remain in their natural states. By its heat and its constant “coming-to-be” and “passing-away” the sun “transforms” elements from one form to another. (Machamer). Here a lot of questions can be raised to which Aristotle gives no definite or valid answers. Why would the sun being a vehicle of the divine want to remove an object from its natural place, which it has already reached? How does air help in natural motion (helping objects reach their natural places) and unnatural motion (moving them away from their places) at the same time? Given the fact that there is constant changing of the forms of elements and change in the order of their place, when is the cosmos ever in order?
Aristotle’s ideas on motion were full of metaphysical explanations, theological suppositions and very little experimentational data. Keeping in mind the platonic ideals of total rejection of an instrumental more mechanistic model of the universe, which were ingrained in him, it seems as though his own bias stopped him from getting rid of the many different ad-hoc quantities he had to create to join together his explanations.
Due to the rather strong character of the Aristotelian dogma and the lack of a better representation of ideas on the physical sciences, the Aristotelian concepts prevailed as the “scientific views” in the western world till the 14th century. Even though the brilliance of philosophers like John Philoponus who debunked Aristotle’s ideas of “weight – speed proportionality”, was existent in society, it was never recognized and thus never gained enough momentum to overthrow the existing ideology. Finally in the 14th century a revolutionary paradigm shift occurred. William of Ockham stated that “motion once it existed did not require a continuing cause to maintain it” (Cushing). This went against the belief which had been fundamental to the very understanding of motion. It was the suggestion that something other than the nature of an object or the Unmoved Mover could control the motion of an object. Therefore, an impetus was a permanent force that was impressed onto an object and would thus remain their indefinitely. With the oncoming of the renaissance in Europe this methodology and path of thought was passed onto, Galileo Galilei, an impoverished mathematician from Pisa.
It has often been said that Galileo was the creator of the modern scientific method in the western world. By the mid-nineteenth century most people hailed him as the reformer of natural philosophy and he was “the archetypical empiricist”. (Wisan) The eternal conflict within Galileo’s work was one between “empiricism and rationalism”. However, the true genius of Galileo was not in his experimental methods or advancement as an instrument builder, it was in his evolution as a scientist and philosopher. Thus where Aristotle stubbornly held on to most of his platonic metaphysics till he died and Newton lost most of his intellectual prowess by the last decade of his life, Galileo’s career which encompassed two generations of learning, show his growth as a scientist and thinker. In essence, Galileo “maintained sufficient mental prowess to become in effect his own best disciple” (Wisan). Popular wisdom would place Galileo rather high , if not at the top of the list of people that helped popularize the Copernican model of the universe, however “in 1597 Galileo himself was actually supporting the Ptolemaic system in a series of lectures at Padua…”(Boorstin). The invention of the telescope changed that. Thus his ability to accept the shift in fundamental laws of the universe is a testimony to the importance Galileo put on observations and also brings out his true nature, that of an eternal learner.
In De Motu Locali and De systemate mundi, Galileo talked about his ideas of motion. Galileo was forced to break off from the Aristotelian ideology when he realized “through his Archimedean analyses of bodies in water” (Wisan), that there can be no natural motion upward. This break off is revolutionary and brings us to his idea of the brachistochrone (the path of quickest descent). Even though devoid of the major Aristotelian dogma, the concept of natural circular motion was still central in his philosophy, thus he tried to prove that “bodies naturally descend faster along a circular path” (Wisan).
Conceptually Galileo’s greatest breakthrough was the determination that time was an independent variable and thus followed its own uniform rate. This proved monumental in his experiments with velocity and projectile motion. Using his inclined plane experiments Galileo determined his time squared law and also his theorem of accelerated motion. Conjunctive to this was the principles of “length-time theorem” that he devised to understand the movements of objects which were on the surface. Another major intuitive formulation was the treatment of the horizontal and vertical components separately in projectile motion. Using this assumption he went on to claim that projectile motion actually followed a parabolic path. This was later proved when the algebraic equations of the parabola confirmed Galileo’s geometric argument. (Wisan, Cushing)
Galileo was always more concerned with “kinematics” (“the quantitative description of the motion of bodies” (Cushing)), than “dynamics” (inquiring into the causation for the motion seen). He believed that his mind wasn’t “acute” enough to discover the causation of motion, thus he gave himself the easier task of understanding the nature of motion. Moving past the Aristotelian concept of motion required the reconstruction of decades of science and Galileo was faced with three major problems while doing so. In no particular order of difficulty they were: “evading the problem of gravity, ignoring his ambiguous experimental results, and finally solving the critical problem of representation” (Wisan). A central deficiency in representing scientific theory before the Newtonian age, as I have mentioned before, was the lack of adequate math to explain the ideas that were being thought of. Galileo was instrumental during his long career to set down the framework which allowed him and then later scientists to adequately explain their results without using complex geometrical analysis.
In treating the problem of gravity Galileo observed in his later observations (around 1600), “that all bodies, regardless of absolute weight or specific gravity, fall with equal speeds” (Wisan). He tried to solve the problem of what determined the speed of fall and the relation between the weight and tendency of a body to move down an inclined plane by, creating an ad-hoc quantity called “moment of gravity”. He assumed that acceleration is generated by such moments of gravity. As he later postulated Galileo believed that the speed obtained by an object depended on the vertical distance of fall. Thus bodies acquired equal velocities when they descended along planes of equal heights, and the length of the plane had no effect on velocity. Without the Newtonian revolution of gravity, Galileo’s attempts to explain it or understand it were rudimentary at best and didn’t really create any real break through. Galileo realized this reality and thus moved from mechanics to kinematics to evade the problem of gravity, when understanding motion.
To conclude about Galileo, it is important to realize that he paved the way for the understanding of inertia. Even though his ideas on it weren’t intuitively achieved or works of brilliance, it was his break from the Aristotelian concept , which created a new line of thought from Galileo to Newton and finally , led to the law of inertia and the concept that “the universal motion for all freed bodies was uniform straight line motion(or rest)”(Cushing). Last but not least, recognition needs to be given to his ability to deduce very accurate measurements from rather crude instruments and the lack of precise clocks.
Galileo was the unassuming genius. He was the quintessential methodical and humble scientist. He didn’t have the pomp and grandeur that Aristotle commanded and neither did he enjoy the wealthy upbringing and a sense of arrogance bred by nobility that was a hallmark of Newton’s career. He lacked confidence and his life was marked by poverty and social responsibilities of feeding and clothing his rather large family. Till the end of his life he was plagued by the problem of gravity and never really could come up with answers sufficient to silence his critics or further his ideas on uniformly accelerated motion.
The evolution of the scientific methodology till Isaac Newton can be divided into two distinct paradigms: the Aristotelians and the post-Aristotelians. Even though, Aristotle’s influence pervaded into the post-Aristotelian doctrines and ways of thought, some fundamental differences in ideology set them apart. The single most important ideology change from the Aristotelian era to the post-Aristotelian era might have been the acceptance of a more mechanistic world view and a reverence for the empirical and instrumental methods of learning. A common social thread which held true for most of this era and may have been rather detrimental to the progress of learning was the acceptance and usage of usually the best advertised and seemingly divinely mandated ideas rather than the ones best supported by observational data. In some ways, the most frustrating aspect of doing science in the pre-Newtonian era was the lack of advanced algebra and the almost total absence of variables. This comparatively slower development of math led to the problem of representation which often forced philosophers and scientists to use complex and inadequate geometry to explain a concept which a couple of algebraic variables would have precisely defined.
With time the shift from a more dichotomous view, to a universal set of laws is evident. Even though thinkers during the renaissance still believed in the laws of governance put in place by the almighty, they had gotten past the Aristotelian concept of motion which was eventually governed by the Unmoved mover. This shift of ideas which strayed away from concepts of inherent nature and form, towards acceptance of laws like inertia and universal motion in a straight line eventually brought about a more mechanistic view of the universe.
The presence of “self-evident” first principles as propagated by Descartes does not hold up to the present scrutiny of learning under the lenses of culture, religious bias and social pressures. The formation of a thought process where reality for the most part is an elastic idea, is a post-modern world view. However, human intuition has been instrumental in looking past these biases imposed by culture and tradition. A rather weird dynamic arises here, since the political and religious climate of the world did not allow for existing world views to be challenged. The true time duration for the creation and publication of some of these ideas have to be viewed against the background of immense social and religious pressures.
To truly understand the various aspects of “thought” requires one to understand why that thought is needed. More than anything the evolution of the scientific ideology in the western world was driven by this need. The need to know why.

Bibliography

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