Civilisation (1969–1970): Season 1, Episode 8 - The Light of Experience - full transcript

(DAWN CHORUS)

(HARPSICHORD MUSIC)

Light...

the light of early morning,

the light of Holland.

It spreads over the flat fields,

it's reflected in the canals

and it picks out
distant towers and spires.

This was the inspiration

of the first great school of landscape -

one might almost say skyscape -
painting.



(MUSIC CONTINUES)

This is a painting done
in the middle of the 17th century

of the square in Haarlem.

You can see it's an old painting because
of the clothes the people are wearing.

But I can walk into this picture

or, rather, into the square.

Looks much the same, doesn't it?

Before the 17th century, the idea that
one could walk into a picture in this way

would have been almost unthinkable.

Seems quite natural to us and no doubt
seemed natural when it was painted.

But like so many things
we take for granted,

it goes back to a revolutionary change
in thought,

the revolution
in which divine authority was replaced

by experience, experiment
and observation.



I'm in Holland,
not only because Dutch painting

is a visible expression
of this change of mind,

but because Holland,
economically and intellectually,

was the first country
to profit from the change.

When one begins to ask the question,
"Does it work?"

Or even, "Does it pay?",

instead of asking, "Is it God's will?",

one gets a new set of answers,

and one of the first of them is -

that to try and suppress opinions,
which one doesn't share

is much less profitable
than to tolerate them.

This conclusion should have been reached
during the Reformation.

It's permeated the writings of Erasmus,
who, of course, was a Dutchman.

Alas, a belief in the divine authority
of our own opinions

afflicted the Protestants
just as much as the Catholics.

Even in Holland, they continued
to burn and torture each other

right up till the middle
of the 17th century.

And the Jews, who in Amsterdam
were at last exempt from persecution

by the Christians,

the Jews began
to persecute each other too.

Still, when all this is said,

the spirit of Holland in the early
17th century was remarkably tolerant.

And one proof is that nearly all the great
books, which revolutionised thought

were first printed in Holland.

What sort of a society was it

that allowed these intellectual
time bombs to be set off in its midst?

Inside this charming old
almshouse at Haarlem,

which is now a picture gallery,

there's plenty of evidence.

(# From
MARIN MARAIS: Pièces de Viole)

We know more about what the
17th-century Dutch looked like

than we do about
any other society,

except perhaps
the 1st-century Romans.

Each individual
wanted posterity to see

exactly what he was like,

even if he was a member
of a corporate group.

And the man who tells us
all this most vividly,

the man who painted these pictures,

was the Haarlem painter Frans Hals.

He was the supreme extrovert.

I used to find his works -
all except the last -

revoltingly cheerful
and odiously skilful.

Now I love their
unthinking conviviality

and I value his skill more highly
than I did.

But I'll admit
that his sitters don't look like

representatives of a new philosophy.

But out of these all-too-numerous group
portraits of early 17th-century Holland,

something does emerge,

which has a bearing on civilisation.

These are individuals,

who are prepared
to join in a corporate effort

for the public good.

One can't imagine groups like this

being painted in 17th-century Italy,
even in Venice.

They're the first visual evidence
of bourgeois democracy -

dreadful words,

so debased by propaganda
that I hesitate to use them.

And yet, in the context of civilisation,
they really have a meaning.

They mean that a group
of individuals can come together

and take corporate responsibility,

that they can afford to do so
because they have some leisure,

and that they have some leisure
because they have money in the bank.

This is the society, which you see
in the portrait groups.

They might be meetings
of local government committees

or hospital governors today.

They represent
the practical, social application

of the philosophy
that things must be made to work.

(HARPSICHORD PLAYS LIVELY TUNE)

Amsterdam was the first centre
of bourgeois capitalism.

It had become,
since the decline of Antwerp,

the great international port of the north

and the chief banking centre of Europe.

Drifting through its leafy canals,
lined with admirable houses,

one may speculate
on the economic system that produced

this dignified, comfortable,
harmonious architecture.

(MUSIC CONTINUES)

I don't say much about economics
in this programme,

chiefly because I don't understand them

and, perhaps for that reason, believe that
their importance has been overrated

by post-Marxist historians.

But, of course, there's no doubt that,
at a certain stage in social development,

fluid capital is one
of the chief causes of civilisation,

because it ensures
three essential ingredients -

leisure, movement
and independence.

It also allows that
slight superfluity of wealth

that can be spent on nobler proportions -

a better doorframe
or even a more extraordinary tulip.

But please allow me two minutes'
digression on the subject of tulips,

because it really is rather touching
that the first classic example

of boom and slump
in capitalist economy

should have been not sugar, nor railways,
nor oil, but tulips.

It shows how the 17th-century Dutch
combined their two chief enthusiasms -

scientific investigation
and visual delight.

The first tulip had been imported
from Turkey in the 16th century,

but it was a professor of botany
at Leiden,

the first botanic garden of the north,

who discovered its attribute
of unpredictable variation,

which made it
such an exciting gamble.

By 1634, the Dutch were so
bitten by the new craze that,

for a single bulb of one tulip,
the Viceroy,

one collector exchanged
1,000 lbs of cheese,

4 oxen, 8 pigs, 12 sheep,
a bed and a suit of clothes.

When the bottom fell out
of the tulip market in 1637,

the Dutch economy was shaken.

(MUSIC CONTINUES)

However,
it survived for over 30 years

and produced superfluities

of the most seductive kind.

What about this little clavichord -
isn't it enchanting?

(PLAYS VERY FAINTLY)

Better to look at than to listen to,
I'm afraid.

And large spacious rooms,
black and white marble pavements...

...carved furniture...

...an agreeable way of life.

And on the walls
is gold-stamped leather,

the most sumptuous
wall-covering I know.

Unfortunately, this kind
of visual self-indulgence

very soon leads to ostentation.

And this, in bourgeois democracy,
means vulgarity.

One can see this happening in Holland
in the work of a single painter,

Pieter de Hooch.

In 1660,
he was painting these beautiful pictures

of clean, simple interiors.

Ten years later,
they were very elaborate,

hung with gold Spanish leather.

The people are richer,
and the pictures are less beautiful.

Bourgeois capitalism led

to a defensive smugness
and sentimentality.

No wonder
that early Victorian painters

imitated pictures of this kind.

Every picture tells a story.

It was a Dutch invention.

This one is called
A Visit To The Nursery.

In addition to trivial anecdotes,

the philosophy of observation
involved a demand

for realism in the most literal sense.

In the early 19th century,
Paul Potter's Bull

was one of the most famous
pictures in Holland.

It's one of the first pictures

that Napoleon wanted
to steal for the Louvre.

It's fallen out of favour now, but I must
say I do find it absolutely fascinating.

There are many ways
of achieving reality,

and this simple-hearted,
laborious way that Potter has followed

does seem to me to achieve something,
which couldn't be done in any other way.

Isn't that fleecy neck of the sheep
extraordinary?

And look at those wild flowers.

Above all, look at the cow's eye.

The intensity with which Potter
has looked at its forehead,

at its strong hair

and wet nose

is obsessive -

what we've come to call "surrealist”.

Of course,
it's a young man's picture.

It has the intensity
of early Pre-Raphaelites.

And indeed there's something
almost nightmarish

in the way that the young bull dominates

the beautifully-painted landscape
in the distance.

However, one must admit
that bourgeois sentiment and realism

can produce the most deplorable kind
of art.

And the determinist historian,

reviewing the social conditions
of 17-century Holland,

would say that this was the kind
of painting the Dutch were bound to get.

But they also got Rembrandt.

Rembrandt was the great poet of that need
for truth and that appeal to experience,

which had begun with the Reformation,

had produced the first translations
of the Bible,

but had had to wait almost a century
for visible expression.

At first, truth meant realism.

Behind me is his earliest self-portrait.
Yes, that is the same man

that you saw just now.

In this vein, he painted the picture,
which is his most obvious link

with the intellectual life of Holland,

and his first great success in Amsterdam,

The Anatomy Lesson.

It represents a demonstration given by the
leading professor of anatomy named Tulp.

The men surrounding him are
not of course students or even doctors

but members of the Surgeons' Guild,

a sort of Board of Trustees.

Vesalius, the first great
modern anatomist, had been a Dutchman.

And Tulp liked to be called
"Vesalius reborn".

I fancy he was a bit of a quack.

He recommended his patients
to drink 50 cups of tea a day.

However, he was very successful.
His son became an English baronet.

But it wasn't in such
external and quasi-official ways

that Rembrandt associated himself
with the intellectual life of his time

but by his illustrations to the Bible.

An example is this picture of Bathsheba,

pondering the contents
of David's letter.

We may think that we admire it

as pure painting, and in fact
it is a masterly piece of design.

But in the end,
we return to the head,

where Bathsheba's
thoughts and feelings

are rendered with an insight
and a human sympathy,

which a great novelist could
scarcely achieve in many pages.

From the first, Rembrandt wanted
to record his experience

of how human beings reveal their emotions.

And as his art grew deeper, he succeeded
in doing so with ever greater subtlety.

To my mind,
one of the most moving examples

is the picture known as The Jewish Bride.

Nobody knows what its real title
should be,

but the subject that Rembrandt
had in mind is evident -

it is a picture of grown-up love,

a marvellous amalgam
of richness, tenderness and trust.

The richness expressed
in the painting of the sleeves,

the tenderness
in the placing of the hands...

...the trust
in the expression of the heads.

Marvellous as Rembrandt's paintings are,

I find more of his thoughts
on human life -

certainly his deepest
and most intimate thoughts -

in his drawings and etchings.

His etchings are the fullest
communication any artist has made

since Dürer's engravings.

And, as with Durer,

Rembrandt has put as much into them
as into any of his paintings.

This is one of the most famous
and elaborate of them,

Christ Healing The Sick.

And what a marvellous
and completely original conception it is.

Suffering humanity, poor people,

coming out of the shades

like the prisoners in Fidelio,

lugging their sick
on wheelbarrows and biers

into the light of Christ's divinity.

And on the left,

these prosperous people,

wondering, doubting, criticising.

How extraordinary that this great
Tolstoyan picture of human life

was done in the time of Richelieu
and the beginning of Versailles.

One can't talk about Rembrandt

without describing the human - and, if you
like, the literary - element in his work.

His mind was steeped in the Bible.

He knew every story by heart,
down to the minutest detail.

This one of his favourite stories,
The Prodigal Son.

Just as the early translators felt
that they had to learn Hebrew,

so that no fragment of the truth
should escape them,

so Rembrandt made friends
with the Jews in Amsterdam,

and frequented their synagogues,

in case he could learn something

that would shed more light
on the early history of the Jewish people.

But in the end, the evidence
he used for interpreting the Bible

was the life he saw around him.

In his drawings and etchings,

one doesn't know
if he is recording an observation

or illustrating the scriptures,

so much had the two experiences
grown together in his mind.

Did Rembrandt wish to illustrate St Peter

at prayer before
the raising of Tabitha

or had he seen a pious old neighbour

whose attitude of devotion
touched his heart

and reminded him
of the Acts of the Apostles?

Sometimes his interpretation
of human life in Christian terms

leads him to depict subjects
that hardly exist in the Bible

but that he felt convinced
must have existed.

An example is this etching of Christ
preaching the forgiveness of sins.

It's a classical composition.

In fact,
it's based upon two famous Raphaels,

which Rembrandt had completely
assimilated.

But how different
is this small congregation

from Raphael's ideal
human specimens.

They are, as you see, a very mixed lot -

some thoughtful,
some half-hearted,

some concerned
only with keeping warm

or keeping awake.

And the child in the foreground,

to whom the doctrine of
the remission of sins is of no interest,

is concentrating upon drawing in the dust.

Rembrandt reinterpreted the Bible
in the light of human experience.

But it's an emotional response,

based on the belief in revealed truth.

The greatest of his contemporaries were
looking for a different kind of truth,

a truth that could be established
by intellectual, not emotional, means.

This can be done either by the
accumulation of observed evidence

or by mathematics.

And of the two, mathematics seemed
to offer, to the men of the 17th century,

the more attractive solution.

In fact, mathematics became a kind of
religion to the finest minds of the time,

the means of expressing a belief

that experience could
be married with reason.

The guiding spirit of this new religion

was the French philosopher, Descartes.

He's become a symbol
of the pure intellect,

but I find him
a sympathetic figure.

He started life as a soldier,
he wrote a book on fencing,

but he soon discovered
that all he wanted to do was think.

Very, very rare.

And most unpopular.

Some friends came to call on him
at 11 o'clock in the morning

and found him in bed.

They said, "What are you doing?"

He replied, "Thinking."

They were furious.

To escape interference,
he went to live in Holland.

He said that the people of Amsterdam
were so much occupied with making money

that they would leave him alone.

However, he continued to be the victim
of interruptions,

so he moved about from place to place -

altogether, he moved house in Holland
24 times.

In the end, he was run to earth
by that tiresome woman,

Queen Christina of Sweden,

who carried him off to Stockholm
to give her lessons in the new philosophy.

She made him get out of bed early
in the morning,

and as a result,
he caught a cold and died.

But earlier in Holland, at some point,
he evidently lived near Haarlem,

where he was painted by Frans Hals.

He examined everything, rather
as Leonardo da Vinci had done -

the foetus, the refraction of light,
whirlpools,

all the Leonardo subjects.

These are the original illustrations

of Descartes' ideas.

He thought that all matter
consisted of whirlpools,

with an outer ring
of large, curving vortices,

and an inner core of small globules,
sucked into the centre.

And whatever he meant by this -

and perhaps he was only thinking
of Plato -

it's odd that he should have described
exactly

Leonardo's drawings of whirlpools,

which, I suppose, he had never seen.

But in contrast to Leonardo's
restless, insatiate curiosity,

Descartes had, almost to excess,
the French tidy-mindedness.

And all his observations were made
to contribute to a philosophic scheme.

It was based on absolute scepticism,

the inheritance of Montaigne's summing-up,
"Que sais-je?" - "What do I know?"

Only, Descartes arrived
at an answer,

"I know that I think,"

and he turned it the other way round -
"I think, therefore I am."

His fundamental point is that
that he could doubt everything

but not that he was doubting.

Descartes wanted to cut away
all preconceptions

and get down to the bedrock of experience,

unaffected by custom and convention.

Well, one needn't look far in Dutch art

to illustrate this state of mind.

There has never been a painter
who has stuck so rigorously

to what his optic nerve reported

as Vermeer of Delft.

His work is without a single prejudice

arising from knowledge
or the convenience of a style.

It's really quite a shock

to see a picture
which has so little stylistic artifice

as his View Of Delft

It looks like a coloured photograph.

And yet we know that it's a work
of extreme intellectual distinction.

It not only shows the light of Holland

but what Descartes called
"the natural light of the mind".

In fact, Vermeer comes close
to Descartes at many points.

First of all, in his detached,
evasive character.

Vermeer didn't change house
every three months -

on the contrary, he loved his house
in the square at Delft

and painted it continually.

His quiet interiors
are all rooms in his house.

But he was equally suspicious
of callers.

He told one eminent collector,

who had made a special journey
to visit him,

that he had no pictures to show him,

which was just untrue,
because when he died,

his house was full
of unsold pictures of all periods.

All that he wanted was tranquillity,

in order to enjoy
fine discrimination.

(HARPSICHORD PLAYS)

"Study to be quiet" -

ten years before
this picture was painted,

Izaak Walton had inscribed
these words

on the title page of
The Compleat Angler.

And in the same period,
two religious sects had come into being -

Quietism, and the Quakers.

As far as I know, the first painter
to feel Descartes' need

to tidy up sensations by the use
of reason was Pieter Saenredam,

the scrupulous master
of church interiors.

He did drawings from nature
in the 1630s

and often kept them for 10 or 15 years

until he could give them
the stillness and finality,

which make them ideal meeting places
for the Society of Friends.

The precision
with which he places each accent -

those dark heads, for example -

reminds one of Seurat.

In a picture like this,

the balance is tilted towards reason

rather than experience.

Vermeer manages to preserve
an air of complete naturalism.

Yet what a masterpiece
of abstract design he creates

out of frames and windows
and musical instruments.

One is reminded of the most severely
intellectual of modern painters,

his compatriot, Mondrian.

Are Vermeer's intervals
and proportions the result of calculation?

Or did he discover them intuitively?

No good asking such questions -

Vermeer had a genius for evasion.

But as soon as one mentions Mondrian,

one remembers that one
of Vermeer's characteristics

separates him entirely
from abstract modern painting -

his passion for light.

It's in this, more than anything else,

that he links up
with the other great men of his time.

All the chief exponents
of civilisation,

from Dante to Goethe,
had been obsessed by light.

One could take it as the supreme
symbol of civilisation.

But in the 17th century,
light passed through a crucial stage.

The perfection of the lens
was giving it new range and power.

Vermeer himself recorded the increased
importance of scientific investigation

in pictures like this.

He used the utmost ingenuity

to make us feel the movement of light.

He loved to show it passing
over a white wall

and then, as if to make its progress
more comprehensible,

passing over a slightly crinkled map.

At least four of these maps
appear in his pictures

and, apart from their pleasantly
light-transmitting surfaces,

they remind us that the Dutch were
the great cartographers of the age.

Thus, the mercantile sources
of Vermeer's independence

penetrate into the background
of this quiet room.

In his determination
to record exactly what he saw,

Vermeer didn't at all despise
those mechanical devices

of which his century was so proud.

The man seated at table
talking to a laughing girl...

It's a fairly early picture -

later on, Vermeer's figures
wouldn't have broken the stillness

with extrovert laughter.

...this man has the exaggerated
proportions that one sees in photography.

I fancy that Vermeer
looked through a lens

into a box with a piece
of ground glass squared up

and painted exactly what he saw.

He must have begun
this scientific practice quite early.

One finds it in this picture
of a woman pouring milk,

painted before he had perfected
his peculiar stillness.

The light's rendered by those little beads
that one doesn't see with the naked eye

but which also appear on the finder
of an old-fashioned camera.

And yet this scientific approach
to experience ends in poetry,

and I suppose that this is due
to an almost mystical rapture

in the perception of light.

The enlightened tidiness
of de Hooch and Vermeer,

and the rich, imaginative experience
of Rembrandt,

reached their zenith about the year 1660.

And in that year,
on the night of May 30th,

Charles II of England
dined in the Mauritshuis,

and the next day, he embarked
from the beach at Scheveningen

to regain his kingdom.

And thus ended
the isolation and austerity,

which had afflicted England
under Cromwell for almost 15 years.

And, as so often happens,
a new freedom of movement

led to an outburst of pent-up energy.

(# HENRY PURCELL: Come Away,
Fellow Sailors from Dido And Aeneas)

# Come away, fellow sailors
Come away

# Your anchors be weighing

# Time and tide
will admit no delaying

# Take a boozy short leave
of your nymphs on the shore

# And silence their mourning

# With vows of returning

# But never intending
to visit them more

# No, never intending
to visit them more

# No, never

# No, never intending
to visit them more. #

(CHORUS SUNG IN THE ROUND)

There are usually men of genius waiting
for these moments of expansion,

like ships waiting for a breeze.

And on this occasion,
there was in England

the brilliant group
of natural philosophers

who were to form the Royal Society...

Christopher Wren,
the young geometer,

who at that date was
a professor of astronomy.

Robert Boyle,

who used always to be described
as the son of the Earl of Cork

and the father of chemistry.

Halley, the discoverer of comets.

And towering above all these
remarkable scientists was Newton,

one of the three or four
Englishmen whose fame

has transcended
all national boundaries.

I can't pretend
that I've read the Principia -

if I did, I wouldn't understand it
any more than Samuel Pepys did,

when,
as President of the Royal Society,

it was handed to him for his approval.

One must just take on trust

that it gave a mathematical account
of the structure of the universe,

which, for 300 years,
seemed irrefutable.

It was both the climax
of the age of observation

and the sacred book of the next century.

Pope, who had probably not read
as much of the Principia as I have,

summed up the feelings
of his contemporaries -

"Nature and Nature's laws
lay hid in night:

"God said, 'Let Newton be!
and all was light.”

Parallel with the study of light
was the study of the stars.

This is the Octagon Room

of the original
Royal Observatory at Greenwich,

founded, as Charles II's warrant puts it,

"...in order to the finding out
of the longitude of places

"and for perfecting
navigation and astronomy."

And it draws together
the threads of this programme -

light, lenses, observation,
navigation and mathematics.

One can walk into that print

almost exactly as one could
walk into the square in Haarlem.

And in this bright, harmonious room,

one seems to breathe the atmosphere
of humanised science.

That was Flamsteed's telescope,
or very like it.

This is similar to the quadrant

with which he tried
to establish the correct time.

It was the great age
of scientific instruments.

Huygens's pendulum clock,

Leeuwenhoek's microscope,

Flamsteed himself,
who made a giant sextant.

They don't look
very scientific to us.

Indeed, the telescopes really look
like something out of a ballet.

One can't see through them at all -
at least I can't.

But, and nevertheless,

the telescope, invented in Holland,
although perfected by Galileo,

seemed to bring the heavenly bodies
within reach of understanding.

This is the view of the moon,
which Newton would have seen.

And the microscope allowed
a Dutch scientist named Leeuwenhoek

to discover new worlds
in a drop of water.

This ferocious monster is a water flea.

What beautiful pieces of design
and craftsmanship astrolabes are,

and continued to be for 400 years.

And this armillary sphere

is really what we think of
as a work of art - a mobile.

By twiddling it around, one can
produce a kind of visual counterpoint.

Even this equinoctial dial

shows the impress of human personality,

what you can call a style.

And what about this diptych dial?

Oh, one can't imagine a prettier bibelot

and yet it was genuinely scientific...

I suppose.

Art and science
hadn't yet drawn apart,

and these instruments are not only
a means to an end, but symbols.

Symbols of hope that man might
learn to master his environment,

and create a more reasonable society.

And such they remained
until the end of the 19th century.

When Tennyson was told that a Brahmin
had destroyed a microscope,

because it revealed secrets
that man should not know,

he was profoundly shocked.

Only in the last 60 years or so,
have we begun to feel

that the descendants of
these beautiful, shining objects

may destroy us.

This roomful of light,
this...shining enclosure of space,

was designed by Sir Christopher Wren.

It was built on the spur of a hill
overlooking the old palace of Greenwich,

and this too was rebuilt by Wren,

transformed from a palace
into a naval hospital.

How much of what we see
is from his design, it's hard to say.

By the time the buildings were going up,
he was prepared to leave their execution

to his two very able assistants
at the Board of Works,

Sir John Vanbrugh
and Nicholas Hawksmoor.

But he certainly provided the plan.

And the result
is the greatest architectural unit

built in England since the Middle Ages.

It's sober without being dull,
massive without being oppressive.

What is civilisation?

A state of mind
where it's thought desirable

for a naval hospital to look like this,

and for inmates to dine in
a splendidly-decorated hall -

in fact,
one of the finest rooms in England,

with a magnificent painted ceiling
in the Baroque manner.

(# PURCELL: Trumpet Sonata)

By the time this building was completed,

Wren had long been the most
famous architect in England.

But, as a young man,
people had thought of him only

as a mathematician and an astronomer.

And why, at the age of 30,
he took up architecture,

isn't altogether clear.

I suppose he wanted
to give visible form

to his solutions - mechanical
and geometrical solutions.

But of course he had to learn
the rudiments of style.

And so he bought some books
and he went to France,

and drew the buildings
and met the leading architects.

He even met Bernini,
who was in Paris at the time,

and he saw Bernini's drawing
for the Louvre.

"I would have given
my skin for it," he said,

"but the reserved old Italian
gave me but a view."

On his return, he was consulted,
as an engineer,

about old St Paul's,
which was in danger of collapsing.

He proposed replacing
the tower by a dome,

but before this very questionable project
could be considered

the Fire of London broke out in 1666.

It ended on September 5th,

and six days later, Wren submitted
a plan for rebuilding the city.

And only then

was the ingenious Dr Wren
fully committed to architecture.

Ingenious is the word
for the results that followed -

the 30 new City churches. Each
is the solution of a different problem,

and Wren's powers of invention
never failed.

But, when he came to
the crown and centre of the whole scheme,

the new St Paul's, then he revealed
something more than ingenuity.

(# PURCELL: The Gordian Knot Untied)

Wren's buildings show us

that mathematics,
measurement, observation,

all that goes to make up
the philosophy of science,

wasn't hostile to architecture,

nor to music,
because this was the age

of one of the greatest
English composers, William Purcell,

whose noble strains have accompanied
our inspection of Wren's buildings.

But what was the effect of
the scientific attitude on poetry?

Well, at first,
I think it was harmless, even beneficial.

When Vaughan wrote,
"I saw Eternity the other night,

"Like a great ring of pure
and endless light,

"All calm as it was bright;"

he was giving poetic expression
to the same impulse

that induced Flamsteed
to look through his telescope.

I don't suppose that all the members of
the Royal Society

were completely hostile
to the imagination.

After all, most of them remained
professing Christians -

in fact Newton spent, we would say wasted,
a lot of his time on Biblical studies -

and they continued
to use a celestial globe

in which the constellations were grouped
in the form of men and animals.

They continued to accept

the kind of personifications that one gets
on the ceiling of the Painted Hall

on which gods and goddesses associate
with Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal.

But, all the same, they recognised
that all these were fancies,

and that reality lay elsewhere,

in the realm of
measurement and observation.

A rather ridiculous character
called Sprat,

who wrote a history of the Royal Society,

published the same year
as Milton's Paradise Lost

said,
"Poetry is the parent of superstition.”

And so began that division between
scientific truth and imagination,

which was to kill poetic drama,

and give a slight feeling
of artificiality to all poetry

during the next hundred years.

However, there was a compensation -

the emergence of a clear, workable prose.

It was a tool
of the new philosophy,

almost as much as Stevin's decimal system
was a tool of a new mathematics.

This was particularly true of France.

For about 300 years,
French prose was the form

in which the European intelligence
shaped and communicated

its thoughts about history,
diplomacy, definition, criticism,

human relationships - everything,
really, except metaphysics.

It's arguable that the non-existence of
a clear, concrete, German prose

has been one of the chief disasters
of European civilisation.

There's no doubt that,
in its first glorious century,

the appeal to experience achieved
a triumph for the Western mind.

Between Descartes and Newton,

Western man created
those instruments of thought

that set him apart from the
the other peoples of the world.

And if you look at the average
19th century historian, a man like Buckle,

you'll find that, to him,
European civilisation

seems almost to begin
with this achievement.

The strange thing is, none of these
writers, except perhaps Ruskin,

seemed to notice that the triumph
of rational philosophy

had resulted in
a new form of barbarism.

If I look beyond the order
of Wren's Naval Hospital,

I see, stretching as far
as the eye can reach...

the squalid disorder
of industrial society.

It's grown up as a result of
the same conditions

that allowed the Dutch
to build their beautiful towns,

to support painters
and print the works of philosophers -

fluid capital, a free economy,
a flow of exports and imports,

a dislike of interference,
a belief in cause and effect.

Well, every civilisation
seems to have its nemesis,

not only because
the first bright impulses

become tarnished by greed and laziness,

but because of unpredictables.

In this case, the unpredictable
was the growth of population.

The greedy became greedier,

the ignorant
lost touch with traditional skills,

and the light of experience
narrowed its beam

so that a grand design like Greenwich

became simply a waste of money.

(# PURCELL: Trumpet Sonata)