In one of his works Bacon had quoted from Proverbs, “It is the glory of God to conceal a thing, but the honor of Kings to search out a matter.” The microscope accordingly became the means of searching out what God has chosen to conceal from man’s naked sight, a way of magnifying the “Wisdome of the great Architect of Nature,” in the words of Matthew Wren, a cousin of Christopher Wren’s and a political writer and proponent of monarchy. As the microscope began to expose the surprising complexity of the smallest insects, natural philosophers and theologians alike mused that by studying these creatures we could come to understand God as never before. The Northern Brabant minister Johannes Feylingius exclaimed in a work titled De wonderen van de kleyne werelt (The wonders of the small world), “God has deposited his holiness in all things; / He can be read in the tiniest ant and stone.” The Englishman Thomas Moffett would go so far as to say that, apart from man, nothing in the universe is more divine than insects. While some wondered why God would have bothered to create structures so small that we could not see them, others were content to assume that God foresaw that man would invent devices with which such intricacy could be observed and admired.
Similar claims had been made about the structure of the heavens—with its faraway stars and moons only now visible to men and women. An admirer of Galileo’s, Thomas Seggett, had even noted that by enabling humans to behold what was until then the prerogative of heavenly dwellers, the telescope rendered mortals similar to Gods. Constantijn Huygens similarly rhapsodized, “At last mortals may, so to speak, be like gods / If they can see far and near, here and everywhere.” Swammerdam, who would later cease his scientific examinations to devote himself full-time to theology, enthused that the study of the smallest visible things, by allowing us to peruse “the book of Nature,” would be a way by which “God’s invisibility becomes visible.” Leeuwenhoek himself would proclaim that there was “no better way to glorify God than observe in amazement his omniscience and perfection in all living things no matter how small.” One of his own draftsmen, while drawing the leg of a flea, would, Leeuwenhoek reported, “often burst out with the words, ‘dear God, what wonders there are in such a small creature!’”
Constantijn Huygens ended his autobiography with an account of the emotion that overtook him when he first looked through Drebbel’s microscope.
Nothing can compel us to honor more fully the infinite wisdom and power of God the Creator unless, satiated with the wonders of nature that up till now have been obvious to everyone . . . we are led into this second treasure-house of nature, and in the most minute and disdained of creatures meet with the same careful labor of the Great Architect, everywhere an equally indescribable majesty.
For the English and Dutch natural philosophers, nature was God’s second book, a treasure-house given to us by our Creator. Microscopes and telescopes were new instruments that would enable us to peer more deeply into this treasure-house than ever before.
Excerpted from “Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing” by Laura J. Snyder. Published by W.W. Norton and Co. Copyright © 2015 by Laura J. Snyder. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
Fulbright scholar Laura J. Snyder is the author of The Philosophical Breakfast Club, a Scientific American Notable Book, winner of the 2011 Royal Institution of Australia poll for Favorite Science Book, and an official selection of the TED Book Club. She is also the author of Reforming Philosophy. Snyder writes about science and ideas for the Wall Street Journal. She is a professor at St. John’s University and lives in New York City.
So, that was part one. Part two is, well, constructionism is saying there’s these underlying dimensions, like concepts and core affect, they’re the moving parts, they’re the parts of the engine that make the car run and you can try to directly target those in interesting ways. So, rather than focusing on, “Well does disgust go with this? And this anger go with that?”—those are emotion-specific questions—we say to go deeper, go into these fundamental questions of categorization and affect, and move those around in fun ways.
At the very end of our review, we do suggest one prediction that’s a way of complicating things further, it takes a constructionist logic to its final extreme. Constructionism is saying if you take the category of emotions, different emotions, fundamentally they’re not biologically distinct, they’re made real in the minute, when you yourself use your own concepts to categorize your core affect as a specific emotional state of being. Same thing for moral content, moral foundations. There may not be these fundamentally distinct foundations, there only made real in your mind when you categorize core affect as harm in a specific situation.
But, then go to another level, you could begin to wonder, “Well, is there a real stark difference between an emotion and a moral judgment or moral content?” If they’re both built from the same underlying ingredients—core affect, and conceptual knowledge about the world—then the line between them becomes a little bit blurry. So there been a variety of philosophical points about how some of the classic mental faculties are categories in mind, like emotion, cognition, memory, moral judgment, etc. We talk about them as if those are distinct things that happen in our minds, as if it’s almost like a phrenologist: Here is where the emotions happen. Here’s where the moral judgments happen, etc.
What if those boundaries are actually kind of fluid? And they’re only heuristics we use for making sense of how we talk about mental function?, But actually, we can manipulate people so that the same basic ingredients—the flour, the butter, the sugar—can be used to make it either a muffin or a cake, and depending on what situation we put you in, those same things can manifest as an emotions or as a moral judgments?
I thought this was a particularly fascinating point, which defies some deeply-held assumptions. So, I’d like to ask if you could make it more specific, more concrete for people, to help drive it home.