Allison P. Coudert Rethinking Max Weber’sTheoryof Disenchantment

Who says we are disenchanted?Not the leaders of the National Rifle Association, who are currentlyrewritingfairy tales to includefantastical stories in which Lit- tle Red Riding Hood doesn’tneed amanlywoodsman to come to her rescue be- cause Grannyhad the foresight to arm herself with ashotgun. And isn’titacom- fort to learn thatHansel and Gretel’sparents did not abandon them in the woods to starve because both children had guns and broughthomethe necessary bacon to keep the familytogether?¹ But while the NRA maybelieveitcan re-enchant the world with biggerand better guns, there has been along tradition of scholarship in the West claiming that from the Reformation onwards people experiencedthe world as increasinglydisenchanted. Accordingtothis narrative,science demys- tified the world, taking the magic and mystery out of nature. Asense of commu- nal identification waslosttobureaucratic connections and the rise of isolated and alienatedindividuals.Finally, instrumental reason undermined the power of the imagination. This was, of course, the view set forth by Max Weber in his 1918 lecture “Science as aVocation.”² In past decades anumber of scholars have seriously challenged Weber’sthe- sis, most recentlyEgil Asprem, who has problematized Weber’snotion of disen- chantment by presentingample evidence that there wasplentyofenchantment in the scientific and philosophicaltheories devised and discussed in the first half of the twentieth century.³ It is the object of this essaytoshow that the samecan be said of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The idea thatamaterialist and mechanicalphilosophyachieved canonicalstatus in the earlymodernperi- od is quitesimplywrong.AsIwill argue, eighteenth-century enlightenment sci-

 https://www.nrafamily.org/articles/2016/1/13/little-red-riding-hood-has-a-gun/ (last accessed August 17,2016).  “The fateofour times is characterizedbyrationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’” Max Weber, “ScienceasaVocation,” EssaysinSoci- ology,ed. and trans. Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1946), 129‒56;here155.This essaywas originallypublished as “Wissenschaft als Beruf.” It was deliv- eredatthe University of Munich in 1918 and published by Dunker &Humblot (Munich, 1919).  Egil Asprem, The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse, 1900‒1939. Studies in the History of Religions,147 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014).

Allison P. Coudert,University of California at Davis https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110557725-025

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM 706 Allison P. Coudert ence and philosophyand its nineteenth-century counterparts enchanted the world by revealing the marvelous and magicalpossibilities of science and by em- phasizing the sheer pleasures of the imagination. But it was not science alone that offered new kinds of enchantment; literature,art,and the new forms of en- tertainment that arose did as well. Reason,Icontend, wasnot the enemyof magic and enchantment but one of its greatest allies. In my Religion, Magic, and Science in Early Modern Europe and America Iar- gued thatthe attempt to rationalizethe early-modern world was aSisyphean ef- fort,much like the little Dutch boy trying to hold back the flood by putting his finger in the dyke.Labelingand classifying natural objects, writing catechisms to shore up religious dogmas,prescribingstricter rules of etiquette to civilize the hoi poloi,and devising schemestomake ordinary languageless vulgar were all aspects of the largerattempt to impose rational order on natureand society in the wake of the collapseofthe Aristotelian-Ptolemaic worldview and break- down of late medievalsociety under the impact of the Reformation and emer- gence of proto-capitalism.⁴ In actuality all these attempts to reestablish order wereonlypartiallysuccessful, but their limited success appeared to provide evi- dence for Weber’scontention that enlightenment rationality disenchanted the world. However,inarguing this Weber essentiallydrank the kool aid provided by anti-Enlightenmentand later Traditionalist thinkers from Edmund Burke (1729‒1797)toOswald Spengler (1880‒1936), who excoriated the enlightenment ideals of rationality, equality,and democracy as they looked back longinglyto alost golden agesuffused by religious faith and dedicatedtocommunal rather than individual good.⁵ This past perfect was, however,aform of nostalgia,afic- tion, autopia that, as the noun implies, existed nowherebut in the minds of en- lightenment critics. Iamnot denying that from the end of the seventeenth cen- tury onwards the world was in manyrespects rationalizedand disenchanted, although Ifollow AlexandraWalsham in preferringthe term “desacralized.” ⁶

 Allison P. Coudert, Religion, Magic,and Science in Europe and America. Praeger Series on the EarlyModern World (Santa Barbara, CA, Denver, CO,and Oxford: Praeger,2011), ch. 5.  TheEnlightenment and its Shadows,ed. Peter Hulme and Ludmilla Jordanova (London and New York: Routledge:1990); Zeev Sternhell, The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition,trans. David Mai- sel (New Haven, CT,and London: Yale University Press, 2010). Over the past decades God has returned to the Enlightenment with avengeance, as scholars have taken issue with the Tradi- tionalists’ view of the Enlightenment as anti-religious and secular.See God in the Enlightenment, ed. William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram (Oxfordand New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2016).  Walsham prefers the terms desacralization to secularism because she is principallyconcerned “with the decline of belief in divine immanence rather than the rejection or marginalization of

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM Rethinking Max Weber’sTheoryofDisenchantment 707

Iamarguingthat throughout Western history there have been periods of dis- enchantment,but in every case new forms of enchantment arose to fill the gap. This is particularlytrue of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when en- chantment escaped the confines of the church, enteringthe public realm of pleasure gardens,theaters,scientific societies, zoos, pubs, cabarets,circuses, freak shows, mountain trekking, bicycling,and out-door camping.⁷ But even more importantly,enchantment moved from outside of individuals into the human imagination. Exotic travel literature,the novel, and science developed in tandem in the earlymodern period, allowing individuals unprecedented ways to imagine, to getunder the skin of, spy on, or see inside of beingsdecid- edlydifferent from themselves, such as flies, cannibals, murderers, moon-peo- ple, monsters,mountebanks,quacks, even women.⁸ Henry Stubbe (1632‒1676), the English physician, writer,and member of the England’sprestigious Royal Society,went as far as to call natural philosophers “novellists”⁹ and with good reason because, like novelists, they alerted the pub- lic to all the new and wondrous thingsthathad been discovered about humans and the world around them: microscopes,telescopes, air pumps, the circulation of the blood, ahuman-powered submarine, pendulum clocks, the slide ruler, blood transfusions, adding and calculatingmachines, the pressurecooker, and Dom Perignon champagne.¹⁰ These new wonders did not fit neatlywithin aChristian framework that viewed enchantment as comingfrom externalsuper- natural forces. They werepart of the natural world.¹¹

religion per se.” Alexandra Walsham, “The Reformation and the Disenchantment of the World Reassessed,” American Historical Review 51.2 (2006): 497‒528; here504.Onthis issue, see Säku- larisierung,Dechristianisierung,Rechristianisierung im neuzeitlichen Europa: BilanzinPerspektiv- en der Forschung,ed. Hartmut Lehmann. Veröffentlichungendes Max-Planck Instituts für Ge- schichte, 130 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &Ruprecht,1997); and AnthonyGiddens, Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: StanfordUniversity Press,1990).  Foramagisterial examinationofthe manythings that Londoners paid to look at fromthe sev- enteenth to the nineteenth centuries,see RichardD.Altick, TheShows of London (Cambridge, MA: The BelknapPress of HarvardUniversity Press, 1978).  Iamindebted to Mary Baine Campbell for this observation, although Idisagree with her con- tention that the world became disenchanted as aresult of scientific advances in the earlymod- ern period. See her Wonder &Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY,and London: Cornell University Press,2004), 17.  Campbell, Wonder &Science (see note 8), 17.  http://theinventors.org/library/inventors/bl1600s.htm (last accessedonAugust 17,2016)  This point is emphasized by Jane Bennett: “My quasi-pagan model of enchantment pushes against apowerful and versatile Western tradition (in the disciplines of history,philosophy, and literature) that makeenchantment depend on adivine creator, Providence, or,atthe very least,a physical world with some original connection to adivine will.” See her TheEnchantment of Mod-

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM 708 Allison P. Coudert

The paradoxhere is thatone of the most vociferous earlyproponents of the disenchantment thesis was Edmund Burke (1729‒1797)inhis excoriation of the French Revolution; but this same Burke reintroduced eighteenth-century Europe- ans to Longinus’sconcept of the sublime, and with thatcame anew and marvel- ous sourceofenchantment found not onlyinnature but in the sciences and the arts as well.¹² Burke’sJanus-faced approach to disenchantment points to some- thing important,namely the idea that modernity is characterized by ambiguity, ambiguity expressed in the “fruitful tensions between seemingly irreconcilable forces and ideas,” to cite MichaelSaler.¹³ Iwould go even further and arguethat disenchantment occurs historically anytime anyone envisions aprevious ageasbeing enchanted, unlike his or her own. If disenchantment werenot an unavoidable fact of everyone’slife in every recorded age, whywould religion have arisen in the first place? What other than real or possibledisenchantment would motivateindividuals to sacri- fice thingsthey loveand value and perform complex, costly, and often painful rituals?Thanksgiving would be an obvious motive,but the obverse of thanksgiv- ing is always and inevitably disappointment or disenchantment,with death being the greatest disenchanterofall. Following Durkheim, one might saythat disenchantment comes to everyone who forsakes the community for purelypri- vateinterests. Durkheim claimed that it was the natureand function of commun- ity festivals and communal feasts to restore communal enchantment and the “ef- fervescence” lost to individuals estranged from the group.¹⁴ Thissuggests that disenchantment cannot be apermanent feature of life in general. There is a moral dimension to this analysis thatIwill come back to at the end of this essay. Before we gettoBurke’ssublimeand the aweand astonishment it produced in individuals, we need to go back acentury and consider Robert Boyle’sreaction to a “luminous” leg of veal discovered by aterrified servant just as Boyle was retiringfor the night.Boyle was so fascinated by the reportofthis luminous

ern Life: Attachments,Crossings,and Ethics (Princeton, NJ,and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 12.Bennett rejects this teleological framework, arguing with Epicureans that matter is “wondrous,evenwithout purpose” (13).  Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France. OxfordWorld Classics (1790;Oxford and New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2009); id., APhilosophical Enquiryintothe Origins of the Sublime and Beautiful. OxfordWorld Classics (1756; Oxfordand New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2015).  Michael Saler, “Modernity and Enchantment: AHistoriographical Review,” American Histor- ical Review 111 (June 2006): 692‒716; here699.  Émile Durkheim, TheElementaryForms of Religious Life,trans. Joseph Ward Swain (New York: Free Press, 1965). “Collective Effervescence” is mentioned six times in this work on pages250,258, 405,441,445, and 469.

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM Rethinking Max Weber’sTheoryofDisenchantment 709 leg thatheordered it to be placed in adark corner of his bedroom, where, as he later wrotetoafriend, “Iplainlysaw,bothwith wonder and delight,that the joint of meatdid, in diverse places,shinelike rotten wood or stinking fish; which was so uncommon asight,that Ihad presentlythoughts of inviting you to be asharer in the pleasure of it.”¹⁵ Despite the late hour and the cold he had previouslycaught trying out anew telescope, Boyle called for another shank “ennobled with this shiningfaculty” to be brought from the larder to his bedroom, and, intrigued by this “uncommon sight,” he stayed up until the earlyhours of the morning to investigate the phenomenon. As odd, even repugnant,aswemight find this incident,Boyle clearlybe- lieved his correspondent would experience the samewonder and urge to inves- tigate that he had, and, indeed, seventeenth-century natural philosophersdid consider wonder aprime motivation behind their investigations. René Descartes (1596‒1650) claimed that his researches wereoften preceded by “asudden sur- prise of the soul which makes it tend to consider attentively those objects which seem to it rare and extraordinary”¹⁶ Francis Mercurius vanHelmont (1614‒1698), whose biographyIwrote, claimed that “the beauty of this Living Earth when seen with amicroscope will make aman in Lovewith it.”¹⁷ VanHelmont’sgood friend Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz(1646‒1716) was pro- pelled by the same loveand wonder in his scientific investigations: “...the more one understandsnature and the solid truth of real sciences,which are so manyraysofdivine perfection, the more one is able to trulyloveGod.”¹⁸ Fran-

 Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150‒1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 13.  Daston and Park, Wonders and the OrderofNature (see note15), 13.Descartes described wonder as the first passion of the soul: “When the first encounterwith some object surprises us … this makesuswonder and be astonished. ...And sincethis can happen before we know in the least whether this object is suitable to us or not,itseems to me that Wonder is the first of all the passions.Ithas no opposite, because if the object presented has nothingin it that surprises us, we arenot in the least moved by it and regard it without passion.” René Descartes, ThePassions of the Soul,trans. Stephen Voss (Indianapolis,IN: Hackett Publishing Co, 1989), pt.2,arts.70and 53;56‒57 and 52.  “Some Observations of Francis Mer:Van Helmont ...,”British Library,Sloane MSS 5630,9th observation.  This passageappears in areview Leibniz wrote in 1695 of An account of W. Penns travails in Holland and Germany,anno MDCLXXVII for the service of the Gospel of Christ....(London: T. Sowle, 1694). G.W. Leibniz: Textes inédits,ed. Gaston Grua, 2vols.(Paris:Presses Universitaires de France,1948), I: 91. Leibniz’scomments,alongwith the previous ones, were astandardtrope of the period concerningthe “Book of Nature” as asecond “Scripture” revealingthe wonders and majesty of God. See TheBook of NatureinEarly Modern History,ed. Klaas van Berkel

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM 710 Allison P. Coudert cis Bacon (1561‒1626)had been similarly intrigued by the marvels and wonders of nature and included ahistory of them in his program to reform natural phi- losophy. He had called for natural histories of monsters,prodigious births, and anything new or rare. London’sRoyal Society took Baconathis wordand publishedinits journal ThePhilosophical Transactions manycases of strange phenomena or what were colloquiallyreferredtoas“wonders.” Theseincluded cases of monstrous births – one account describes the birth of atwenty-three pound monster without anybones or head. Other “wonders” included people claiming to fast for lengthyperiods or who appeared to survive without eating; “old agers,” whose liveswereexceedingly long;and people with unusual anat- omies – for example awoman in France with four breasts,a“pretty young her- maphrodite,” as wellasawoman pregnant for eighteen years.¹⁹ It is clear from accounts like these that reports of seemingly supernatural or miraculous events sparked the curiosity of natural philosophers and stimulated their urge to inves- tigate. What became increasingly valued in the earlymodernperiod was what was new and original and, because of this,wonderful. The connection was constantly made between the New World and the new discoveries made possiblebythe New Science. Nicholas Monardes (1493‒1588),for example, gave an enthusiastic endorsement of the “newe thyges and secrets” discovered in the Americasinhis Joyfull Newes out of the Newe Fonde World (1577). He was especiallytaken by “the rare and singular vertues of diverse and sundrie hearbes, trees,oyles,plantes, and stones,with theirapplications as well for physic as chirurgerie ....”²⁰ One of the reasons whycabinets of curiosities weresopopularinthe seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was to highlight just how farthe modernworld had come from classicalantiquity.Contrasting antique artifacts with modern instru- ments – telescopes, globes,lenses, microscopes – and specimens of floraand fauna from the new world demonstrated how the once dominant cultureof the past was receding before new forms of modernity.²¹ Jonathan Israel draws

and Arjo Vanderjagt.Groningen Series in Cultural Change, 17.2vols.(Leuvenand Dudley,MA: Peeters Publishers, 2006).  TheodoreK.Hoppen, “The Natureofthe EarlyRoyal Society,pt. 1,” TheBritishJournal for the HistoryofScience 9(1976): 1‒24;Peter Dear, “Miracles,Experiments and the Ordinary Course of Nature,” Isis 81 (1990): 663‒83.  Nicolás Monardes, Ioyfull nevves out of the Newe Founde Worlde, wherein is declared the rare and singular vertues of diuerse and sundrie hearbes, trees, oyles, plantes,and stones,with their applications, as wellfor phisickeaschirurgerie. ...Translated fromthe 1565Spanish edition by John Frampton(London: In PoulesChurch-yardbyWillyam Norton, 1577).  TheOrigins of Museums:The Cabinets of CuriosityinSixteenth- and Seventeenth-CenturyEu- rope,ed. OliverImpey and Arthur McGregor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Stephen Green-

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM Rethinking Max Weber’sTheoryofDisenchantment 711 attention to the essential role of journals in spreading an awarenessofnew ideas and turning people away from old authorities.²² Manyscholars have seen Francis Bacon (1561–1626)asakey playerinthe processofdisenchantment.²³ But if we look at his writing,weare struck by his completeand utter conviction that marvels both incite scientific investigation and create new and equallymarvelous things. Bacon was amajor figure in pro- moting the “modern” agenda of advancement and progress.²⁴ His writingswere immenselyimportant in this regard with his admonition that, unliketheir medi- eval predecessors, natural philosophers had the duty to produce practical “fruit” from theirscientific researches as well as intellectual “light.” Bacon practiced what he preached, becoming amartyr to the cause of science. Checking on the carcass of achicken he had buried in abank of snow to see if cold could arrest its decay, he caught the chill that killed him.²⁵ Bacon’s HistoryofLife and Death did much to legitimize the idea that restor- ing health and prolonging life werelegitimate and worthyhuman goals. In his New Atlantis he lists manywondrous thingsthat human could and should ex- pect from the work of natural philosophers, among which were “the prolonga- tion of life,”“the restitution of youth,” and “the retardation of age.” He describes the scientists employed in “Salomon’sHouse,” the scientific institution he de- scribes in his imaginary “New Atlantis,” who produce a “waterofParadise,”

blatt, Marvelous Possessions: TheWonder of the New World (Chicago:Chicago University Press, 1991); Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1992);Paula Findlen, PossessingNature: Museums,Collecting,and Scientific CultureinEarly Mod- ern Italy (Berkeley,CA: University of CaliforniaPress,1994); AnthonyAlan Shelton, “Cabinets of Transgression: RenaissanceCollectionsand the Incorporation of the New World,” TheCultureof Collecting,ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (Cambridge,MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1994), 177‒203.  Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity,1650‒ 1750 (Oxfordand New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2002), 142‒51.  See, for example, Carolyn Merchant, TheDeath of Nature (San Francisco, CA: Harper &Row, 1980).  Paolo Rossi, Francis Bacon: FromMagic to Science,trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (Chicago:Chi- cagoUniversity Press,1968); Stephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early- Modern Philosophy (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Deborah E. Harkness, TheJewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).  Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart arguethat the chicken reallystood for the opiatethat killed Bacon, but most historians accept that the chicken was indeed achicken. See Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart. Hostage to Fortune: TheTroubled Life of Francis Bacon (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999).

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM 712 Allison P. Coudert that is “very sovereign for health, and the prolongation of life.”²⁶ There were also special cavesonthe island with air that helped healand prolonglife and abath that restored “the very juiceand substance” of the human body.”²⁷ Salomon’s House contained laboratories for the dissection of animals and birds “that there- by we maytake light what maybewrought upon the bodyofman.” The fact that headless birds “leape and flutter” suggested to Bacon that it might be possible to resuscitate the dead, an idea that is still very much with us. He even proposed that organs could be transplanted. In their ownwonderful book Wondersand the Order of Nature Lorraine Das- ton and Katharine Park agree with manyother scholars that by the earlyeight- eenth century “the star of the marvelous had indeed waned, if not completely vanished.”²⁸ The wonder and excitement inspiring seventeenth-century natural philosophers like Boyle, Descartes, and Baconhad gone out of fashion,becom- ing asign of ignorance, childishness, and vulgarity.²⁹ But Iwould arguethis sim-

 Francis Bacon, The Collected WorksofFrancis Bacon,ed. James Spedding,Robert L. Ellis, and Douglas D. Heath, 14 vols.(London: Longmans,1868‒1901), 5: 400.  Bacon, TheCollected Works (see note 26), 5: 401.  Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature (see note15), 312.  Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature (see note 15), 304,see also 329, 333. Das- ton’sand Park’sworkisimportant in showingthat up to the mid-eighteenth century elites took differingapproaches to wonders;therewas hence no linear moveawayfromwonder and en- chantment. Princes and courtiers collectedmarvelous items to promotetheir worldlyambitions. Forsimilar reasons,physicians and naturalists collected and catalogued wonders.But natural philosophers,they argue, were moreambivalent inasmuch as wonders interfered with the idea of acomprehensible universe based on discoverable natural laws (703). By the seventeenth century,however,natural philosophers weremoreenthusiastic about investigating wonderful objects as aresult of the movetowardempiricism. This helps to explain,for example, whyRob- ert Boyle mayhavefunded an investigation of occult phenomena in Scotland. On this possibility, see The Occult Laboratory: Magic,Science and Second Sight in Late 17th-CenturyScotland: ANew Edition of Robert Kirk’sThe SecretCommonwealth and other texts, with an introductoryessay,ed. Michael Hunter (Woodbridge:The Boydell Press, 2001). It mayalso explain whyHenry Moreand Joseph Glanvill collaborated on an investigation of witchcraft in Saducismus triumphatus, Or,full and plain Evidence concerningWithcraft and Apparitions (London: Printed for A. L., 1681). Unlike most other historians, Dastonand Park arguethat disenchantment occurrednot because of in- tellectual reasons – the rise of science, the spread of instrumental reason,and the growthofsec- ularism – but for social and political reasons. As aresult of the proliferation of sects after the Reformation, the masses wereusingmarvels and wonders for their own purposes.Elites re- sponded to the threat of anarchy by regularizingnatureand marginalizingwonders.InDaston’s and Park’sview,anew dichotomyemergedbetween the rational elitesand the irrational hoi poloi,the enlightened and the vulgar(704). One could be “curious,” but wonder was unaccept- able (704). This is what Randall Styers means when he says to be modern is to reject magic. See his Making Magic:Religion, Magic,&Science in the Modern World (Oxfordand New York: Oxford

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM Rethinking Max Weber’sTheoryofDisenchantment 713 plyisnot the case. Wonder did not cease in the eighteenth century.While the En- lightenment rejected traditionalChristian sources of enchantment,itcreated new forms by fosteringanoptimisticview of human nature and agency that en- couraged all kindsofutopianaswell as practical schemes to improvelife in thor- oughlywonderful ways.Enlightenment thinkers revealed, even reveled in, the marvelous possibilities of science and technologyand in doing so piquedthe de- light and imaginations of their readers. During the long eighteenth century (1650‒1800) therewas an increasingre- sistance to the idea of human beingsasinnatelysinful and an emerging consen- sus that humans are social creatures, whose essentialgoodness and natural sym- pathyfor their fellow humans can be enhancedordestroyed by the treatment they receive from familyand society at large.Hans Erich Bödeker has justlyde- scribed this radical reevaluation of human nature as an “anthropological revolu- tion,” which wasnoless important than the Copernican or Newtonian Revolu- tions, both of which contributed to this positive view of human potential.³⁰ The idea that humans werebound to improveunder proper instruction became axiomatic for manyEnlightenment thinkers intoxicatedbythe Promethean vi- sion that,indeed, man does make himself.³¹ As Isaac Kramnick has pointed out,the Enlightenment “began the Western loveaffairwith science and technology.”³² In his Seconddiscours, sur les progrès successifs de l’esprit humain (1750), Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot(1727‒1781) sketched out the history of human progress.Inasimilar vein, the Scottish en- lightenment philosophers, Adam Smith (1723‒1790), Adam Ferguson (1723‒ 1816), John Millar (1735‒1801), and LordKames (1696‒1778)delineated the four stages of human progress from hunting to herding, agriculture, and commerce. The Marquis of Condorcet (1743‒1794) remained committed to his belief in prog- ress and the inevitable improvement of the human race even afterhehad been imprisonedduring the French Terror,eventually committing suicide to avoid the guillotine.Inhis Essai sur la manière de perfectionner l’espèce humaine (1756) the French physician Charles Augustin Vandermonde (1727‒1762)outlined the simple

University Press, 2004). While there is some truth to all these ideas,Iargueinthis essaythat curiosity and wonder often went hand in hand in the early-modern period and even until today.  Hans Erich Bödeker, “Menschheit,Humanität,Humanismus,” Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: HistorischesLexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland,ed. Otto Brunner,Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck. 8vols.(Stuttgart: E. Klett-Cotta, 1972‒1997), 3: 1063‒128.  This observation is made by Roy Porter, Fleshinthe Age of Reason: TheModern Foundation of Body and Soul (New York and London: W.W Norton &Company, 2003), 386‒87.  ThePortable Enlightenment Reader,ed. Isaac Kramnick (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), xii‒xiii.

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM 714 Allison P. Coudert rules and naturalprinciples thatwould make health, beauty,and strength he- reditary,while simultaneouslyinstructingparents how to train their children’s minds. The French originator of positivism and sociologyAuguste Comte (1798‒1857) sawimprovementasinevitable. Accordingto“The Lawofthe Three Stages,” which he announced, human civilization had advanced from an early “theological” stagetoa“metaphysical” stage, and from thereithad fi- nallymoved into the final “scientific” stage. The English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792‒1822) also believed that man could be “perfectionized.” He belonged to acircle of enthusiasts for vegetarianism, teetotalism, and nudism, which was institutedbyhis friend John Frank Newton (ca. 1770‒1827), the author of TheReturn to Nature,oraDe- fense of the Vegetable Regime (London, 1811). Newtontried to gethis family to return to the prelapsarian state when humans and animalswereherbivores and livedinpeace and harmony. AccordingtoShelley he had succeeded admir- ablywith his children, who, in Shelley’swords, “are the most beautifuland healthycreatures it is possibletoconceive;the girls are perfect models for a sculptor;their dispositions are also the most gentle and conciliating.”³³ Shelley, like so manyothers, secularized the Judeo-Christian millennium, presentingitas afuture golden age.³⁴ As he explainedtoafriend, “my golden age...will be the millennium of the Xians.”³⁵ Shelley accepted Locke’sconviction that human na- ture could be changed. LikeLockeand his father-in-lawWilliam Godwin, Shelley believed that nature was good and evil artificial and unnecessary.Everything that was not good wastherefore “unnatural” by definition. As Mary Shelley wroteofher husband: “Theprominent feature of Shelley’stheory of the destiny of the human species wasthat evil is not inherent in the system of the creation, but an accident that might be expelled ....That man could be so perfectionized as to be able to expel evil from his own nature, and from the greater part of the creation, was the cardinal point of his system.”³⁶ AccordingtoTristram Stuart, Shelley accepted the Zoroastrian belief that good and bad wereinanepic strug- gle, with good eventuallygaining the upper hand.

 Tristram Stuart, TheBloodless Revolution: ACultural HistoryofVegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times (New York and London: W.W. Norton &Company, 2007), 372.  Carl L. Becker, TheHeavenlyCity of Eighteenth CenturyPhilosophers. Yale NoteBeneSeries. 2nd rev.ed. (1932;New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2003). Foranevaluation of Becker’s work, see CarlBecker’sHeavenly City Revisited,ed. Raymond O. Rockwood (Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press, 1958).  Stuart, TheBloodless Revolution (see note 33), 385.  Stuart, TheBloodless Revolution (see note 33), 385‒86.

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM Rethinking Max Weber’sTheoryofDisenchantment 715

The idea that both the world and the human race could be perfected appears in Germany as well in the work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646‒1716) and the manyGerman philosophers influenced by him. As Ihaveargued in several books, if, as most commentators contend, Leibnizactuallybelieved what Voltaire claimed,namelythat this was “the best of all possibleworlds,” and if his con- cept of “pre-established harmony” inevitably led him to an inescapable form of determinism, how can we possiblyexplain his life-longcommitment to ecumen- ism, education, and science? The fact is that by the end of his life Leibniz came to think thatthis was indeed the best of all possibleworlds because, and only because, it has the capacity to become better and better. ³⁷As he wrote in his short treatise On the RadicalOrigination of Things (1697),

Manysubstances have alreadyattained great perfection. However,because of the infinite divisibility of the continuum, thereare always parts asleep in the abyss of things,yet to be roused and yettobeadvance to greater and better things,advance,inaword,togreater cultivation. Thus,progress never comestoanend.³⁸

The word “cultivation” in this quotation is atranslation of the German word Bil- dung. The notion of Bildung and idea of perfectibilitywas taken even further in the nineteenth century by the German research scientistand professor at the Univer- sity of Berlin, Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818‒1896).Inhis lecture, “Über die Übung” (ConcerningPractice). Du Bois-Reymond took the word Bildung to mean “to perfect oneself through practice.” He claimed that self-perfection is a quality of higher organisms, particularlyofhuman beings, but that it alsoap- plied to animals. One achieved Bildung onlythrough frequent repetition of a complex bodilyactivity with the assistance of the mind. Like agymnast on the bars, Du Bois-Reymond claimedthat through practice an experimenter, like himself, could step by step convert himself from an ugly,uneducated mass into an ideal, fullyeducated Apollo. Du Bois-Reymond included an illus- tration of this astonishingtransformation – with the “uneducated mass” symbol- ized by afrog – in his treatise.His claim mayseem bizarre, but it expressed the incredible optimism that manypeople felt as aresultofscientific developments

 Allison P. Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah (Dordrecht and Boston, MA: Kluwer, 1995). The argument in this book is summed up in ch. 13 of my book, TheImpact of the Kabbalah in the Seventeenth Century: TheLife and Thought of Francis Mercuryvan Helmont, 1614‒1698. Brill’sSer- ies in Jewish Studies,9(Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 1999).  G. W. Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Essays,ed. RogerAriew and Daniel Garb- er,trans. RogerAriew (Boston, MA: Hackett PublishingCompany, 1992),48.

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM 716 Allison P. Coudert and discoveries madefrom the seventeenth century onwards.³⁹ The idea that hu- mans could physicallyreshape themselvesthrough exercise laid the foundation for the fitness industry that is such apowerful forceintoday’seconomy. It must be noted that Du Bois-Raymond was himself amodel gymnast.⁴⁰ Francis Bacon’sinsistencethat science must produce “fruit” as well as “light” encouraged the idea that science was the perfect tool to ameliorate every aspect of human existence. By the end of the eighteenth century manyin- dividuals,not onlyinEngland but across the continent,agreed with Erasmus Darwin (1731‒1802) that “All natureexists in astate of perpetual improvement,” and this included human beings. This conviction was enshrined in the great manytreatises thatappearedinthe eighteenth and nineteenth centuries delin- eating the kind of progress humans had made in the past and would continue to make.⁴¹ In aletter to Joseph Priestley, Benjamin Franklin summedupthe sort of marvelous advances he and his contemporaries expected from science:

Ialwaysrejoicetohear of your beingstill employed in experimental researches intonature, and of the Success youmeet with. The rapid Progress true Sciencenow makes, occasions my regretting sometimes that Iwas born so soon. It is impossible to imagine the height to which maybecarried, in athousand years, the power of man over matter.Wemay per- hapslearn to deprive large masses of their gravity,and give them absolutelevity,for the sake of easy transport.Agriculture maydiminish its labor and double its produce; all dis- eases maybysuremeans be prevented or cured, not exceptingeventhat of old age, and our liveslengthened at pleasureevenbeyond the antediluvian standard.⁴²

Scientific as well as practical discoveries laybehind this tremendous spurt of op- timism about the malleability of nature and the possibility of perfecting the human mind and body. John McManners documents the more positive attitude towardillness and old agethat began to emerge among those he describes as

 Gabriel Finkenstein, Emil Du Bois-Reymond: Neuroscience, Self,and Society in Nineteenth- CenturyGermany (Boston: MITPress, 2013).  The classical ideal of male beauty championed by the art historian and archeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717‒1768) included the characteristics of manlyvigor,restraint,and physical fitness. Winckelmann wrote about the Greek gymnasium and helped to foster the rise of gymnastics.See George L. Mosse, TheImage of Man: TheCreation of Modern Masculinity (Lon- don and New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1996), ch. 3; Jacques Ulmann, De la gymnastique aux sports moderne: histoiredes doctrines de l’éducation physique (Paris:Vrin, 1965).  See Michel Baridon, “Lesconcepts de naturehumaine et de perfectibilité dans l’historiogra- phie des Lumières de Fontenelle àCondorcet,” L’Histoireaudix-huitièmesiècle,ed. Henri Coulet. Actes du Colloque d’Aix-en-Provence(Aix-en-Provence: Edisud, 1980).  Benjamin Franklin to Joseph Priestley, February 8, 1780.CitedinThePortable Enlightenment Reader,ed. Kramnick (see note 32), 73‒74.

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM Rethinking Max Weber’sTheoryofDisenchantment 717

“the affluent minority” in eighteenth-century England: “[T]heywerewantingto live longer,and they werediscovering the logic to insist on enjoying life and being useful at agreater age.”⁴³ In her highlyinformative book about medical practice in eighteenth-century Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, Mary Lindemann demonstratesthatitwas not onlythe affluent who actively sought medical help. In this community of predominantlysmall farmers, there wasagreat desire for health on the part of everyone. People werenot fatalistic, and even though highinfant mortality rates werethe norm, pediatric ailments werenot accepted as routine.⁴⁴ As Lindemann says, “the inhabitants of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel approximated us more than their two centuries’ removal in timesmight sug- gest.”⁴⁵ The growingfaith in medicalprogress wasfostered by nothing so much as the success of small poxinoculation. Inoculation was one of the great medical success stories of the eighteenth century and did much to encouragethe belief in medical progress.Abbé Roman chose this as the subject of his celebratory poem, ‘L’Inoculation, Poème en quatrechants.” Anew hairstyle for women was devised to commemorate the discovery, “coiffureàl’inoculation,” which consisted of an ornament depicting an olive tree with aserpent entwined about its trunk – symbols of wisdom and Asclepius,the hero and godofmedi- cine in ancient Greek mythologyand religion – with the sun, signifying enlight- enment,risinginthe background. This ornamental pin was insertedinto the hair,which had been artificiallypiled up into “une grande pouf.”⁴⁶ The conviction thatmedicine was improvingand doctors becomingmore competent was illustrated by the enhanced status of the medical profession. Sur- gery was the most upwardlymobile occupation of the eighteenth century.For the first time it was recognizedasaliberal profession, and professorships in surgery

 John McManners, Death and the Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death Among Christi- ans and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-CenturyFrance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 84.  Mary Lindemann, Health &Healing in Eighteenth-CenturyGermany (Baltimore,MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 349: “...parents did not facethe deaths and illnesses of their children with stoic fortitude. They took great pains to alleviatethe miseries of their off- springand consulted healers even for very youngchildren, often those just dayold.”  Lindemann, Health &Healing (see note44), 373.  Marie Antoinetteinaugurated these extravagant hairstyles or “poufs,” which could be up to ayardhighand illustrated sentimental or political themes.They wereformed from awirepad- ded with wool, cloth, horsehair,and gauze, interwoven with the woman’sown hair.The elabo- rate construction was stiffened with pomade and dusted with powder,which attracted vermin, requiringfashionable ladies to carry long handled head-scratchers.Marie Antoinettewore a “pouf àl’inoculation” to publicize the fact that she had persuaded the Kingtobeinoculated against smallpox.

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM 718 Allison P. Coudert openedupatuniversities. In 1731 the Académie Royale de Chirurgie was found- ed, and its members dared to claim equalitywith physicians.The reputation of French surgeons was the highest in Europe. Paris became the surgery capital of Europe, and studentsflocked to the city for instruction.⁴⁷ Julien Offray de La Met- trie (1709‒1751), who was both a philosophe and aphysician, claimed that “Doc- tors are the onlyphilosopherswho are useful to the Republic. ...The others are idlers and drones.”⁴⁸ Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries French surgeons continued to pioneer new surgical techniques such as removing cataracts, performing cesarean sections, and extracting bladder stones with manypatients surviving these lasttwo ordeals.While these operations wereob- viouslylife-saving when successful, French surgeons continued to innovateby engaginginanother form of radical surgery thatdid not so much save as trans- form the livesofpeople dubbed “monsters,” acategory that included those born with hair lips and cleft palates,thosewho developed hideouslydisfiguring tu- mors, and burnvictims with scar tissue that left them permanentlydisfigured. In her thoroughlyarrestingbiographyofthe American-born Dr.Thomas Dent Mütter (1811–1859), Cristin O’Keefe Aptowiczdescribes Mütter’ssojourn in Paris in 1831, wherehewas introduced to the new surgical techniquesinvolved in les operations plastiques or what is now known as plastic surgery.One has to remember that this was before the ageofanesthesia, which began slowlyand met with considerable resistanceinthe 1840s. Without anesthesia surgeons had to be not onlyimmenselyskilled but alsovery fast.AsAptowiczpoints out,itwas not uncommon for patients enteringthe operating theater for plastic surgery to be prepared to die rather than continue their miserable livesasfreaks and monsters,who “sawhow children howled at the sight of them” and adults flinched and turned away.When successful, these surgeries were “nothing short of miraculous”:

With acareful hand, asteady knife, and apieceofbone, asurgeon could reconstruct a man’snose with atwisted portion of his own forehead. Aburned woman’seye could close for the first time in ten years,thanks to asurgeon’sknife cuttingthe bindingscar tis- sue and replacing it with skin from her own cheek. Cleft palates werefused back together – trickier than it might seem, for the sensitivities when workingonthe roofofthe mouth

 Laurence W.B. Brockliss and Colin Jones, TheMedical WorldofEarly Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 554;Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, Dr.Mütter’sMarvels: ATrue Tale of Intri- gue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine (New York: Gotham Books, 2014).  La politique du médecin de Machiavel ou le chemin de la fortune ouvert aux médecins (Am- sterdam: Freres Bernard, 1746), xx. La Mettrie wrote this under the pseudonym Dr.Fum-Ho- Ham. CitedinJohn McManners, Death and the Enlightenment (see note 43), 50.

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM Rethinking Max Weber’sTheoryofDisenchantment 719

meant the patient was in constant threat of vomiting, which would tear open delicatesu- turesand ensureinfection.⁴⁹

It is understandable whythe physician and earlyhistorian of the AmericanRev- olution, David Ramsay(1749‒1815) referred to the physician’s “god-like work of alleviating human misery.”⁵⁰ One wayphysicians asserted their new celebrity and the power that accom- panied it was by commissioning portraits. Aromantic imageofphysicians emergedtocelebrate those who worked long hours and displayedgreat bravery and tenaciousness as they sacrificedtheir ownhealth in the service of others. One can see this not onlyinthis new genre of portraits but in the emergence of medicalbiographies as well. ⁵¹ Describing the psychological effects of these advances in medicine and the growingprestige of medicalmen, McManners con- cludes that “Among educated people there was an increased concern with prob- lems of health, agrowingreluctance to accept illness fatalistically, and an inten- sified shrinking in the face of pain.”⁵² Medical developments maynot have been instrumental “so much in prolonging life, as in making longer life worth while.”⁵³ Clear evidence of this interest in living longer can be found in the belief that the boundary between life and death was reversible and the concomitant fear of being buried alive,afear that inspired new models of coffins that had bells, whistles, and air pipes just in case the corpse revived.⁵⁴ Bacon and Descartes had been key advocates of the idea that in addition to improvinghuman nature and human health, physical natureitself might be ma- nipulatedand controlled for the benefits of humans.This became aguiding prin-

 Aptowicz, Dr.Mütter’sMarvels (see note47), 20‒21.  David Ramsay, AReview of the Improvements, Progress and State of Medicine in the XVIIIth Century (Charleston, SC: W. P. Young, 1801), 15.  Ludmilla Jordanova, NatureDisplayed: Gender,Science and Medicine, 1760‒1820 (London and New York: Longman, 1999), 79‒81; Romanticism and the Sciences,ed. AndrewCunningham and Nicolas Jardine (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press,1990); BritishMedicine in the Age of Reform,ed. RogerFrench and Andrew Wear (London: Routledge,1991).  McManners, Death and the Enlightenment (see note43), 47.  McManners, Death and the Enlightenment (see note43), 42.  Peter H. Reill, “Death, Dyingand Resurrection in Late Enlightenment Scienceand Culture,” Wissenschaft als kulturelle Praxis, 1750‒1900,ed. Hans Erich Bödeker,Peter Hanns Reill, and JürgenSchlumbohm. Veröffentlichungendes Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte, 154 (Göttin- gen: Vandenhoeck &Ruprecht,1999), 255–74;id, Vitalizing Natureinthe Enlightenment (Berke- ley,CA, LosAngeles,CA, and London: University of California Press,2005), 171‒82; Russell C. Maulitz, Morbid Appearances:The AnatomyofPathology in the Early Nineteenth Century (Cam- bridge:Cambridge University Press,1987); Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (London: Routledge and KeganPaul, 1988).

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM 720 Allison P. Coudert ciple of the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment.Bacon’sand Descartes’s optimism flew in the face of the skeptical conditioningthat was part and parcel of the classicaleducation and Christian upbringingofEuropean male elites,both of which emphasized the precarious nature of life and the helplessness of indi- viduals in the face of suffering and pain unlessthey possessed philosophical res- ignation or areligious cast of mind. But this mentality,along with the myth of a lost Golden Ageand the idea thatthe Ancients werevastlysuperior to the Mod- erns, came under increasingattack in the early-modern eraastrade, travel, de- veloping commerce, and the ingenuity of artisans,craftsmen, and natural philos- ophersopenedupvistas of previouslyunimagined possibilities and brought new and unprecedentedthingssuch as rhinoceri and ant eaters to the attention of Eu- ropeans,not to mention potatoes and tobacco.⁵⁵ Microscopes and telescopes mayhaveblown the minds of natural philoso- phers, allowing them to see thingsthey never knew existed, but air and water pumps, carriages with better springsfor fasterand more comfortable travel, newlydesigned houses with smaller,heated rooms, and more sophisticated, healthful, and appetizingfood served on pewter plates convincedmanyordinary people that,indeed, life was worth living and science apotent forcefor good. Giventhese improvements, it is understandable that “utility” and “fitness” be- came key concepts in the Enlightenment,joiningtogether notions of pleasure, enjoyment,morality,aesthetics, as well as economic efficiency, all of which wereaspectsofthe new kind of enchantment characterizingthe earlymodern period.⁵⁶ The disenchantment thesis was and still is based largely on the idea that the so-called mechanical philosophytriumphed in the seventeenth century,turning the dynamic and vibrant universe – in which everything was holisticallyconnect- ed in a “Great Chain of Being”–into amassofinert atoms.⁵⁷ As Max Horkheimer put it, “Nature lost every vestigeofvitalindependent existence, all value of its

 The classic account of the conflict between the so-called “Ancients” and “Moderns” is Ri- chardF.Jones’ Ancients and Moderns:AStudy of the Background of TheBattle of the Books (St. Louis, MO: WashingtonUniversity Studies,1936). Formoremodern evaluations,see Joseph M. Levine, TheBattle of the Books:Historyand Literatureinthe Augustan Age (Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press, 1994) and RichardNate, Wissenschaft und Literatur im England der frühen Neu- zeit. Figuren, 9(Munich: Wilhelm Fink,2001).  Lorraine Daston, “Attention and the Values of Natureinthe Enlightenment,” The MoralAu- thority of Nature,ed. Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press,2004), 100‒26.  Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being:The HistoryofanIdea (1936;New York: Harper & Row,2005).

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM Rethinking Max Weber’sTheoryofDisenchantment 721 own. It became dead matter – aheap of things.”⁵⁸ Peter Reill has challenged this idea in his revisionist history of the Enlightenment.Heclaims that while there is ageneral agreement among historians that from the late 1680s to the 1740s the mechanical philosophybecame dominant with the widespread acceptance of Newtonian science and an “overriding impulse” to translate knowledge into mathematical terms, this changed by mid-centurywhen nature was revitalized and the Cartesian distinction between mind and matter was largely dissolved.⁵⁹ Iwould go even farther and arguethat the mechanical philosophydid not become dominant at anytime duringthe seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries.Vitalism never disappeared, even in the work of thoselikeRobert Boyle and IsaacNewton, who are considered exponents of the mechanicalphi- losophy. Vitalism was alegacyofmedieval and Renaissance alchemy and Herme- ticism.The claim that Boyle embraced the mechanical philosophywhen he moved to Oxford in 1655 has been effectively refuted by Antonio Clericuzio. Cler- icuzio argues thatitwas onlyinthe eighteenth century that Boyle was takento symbolize the mechanical philosophy. ThisviewofBoyle ignores the fact that he believed there were non-mechanical forces in the naturalworld such as spirits, seminal principles, and ferments, all of which had the power to fashion matter.⁶⁰ In the General Scholium added to the second edition of the Principia of 1713, Newton postulated the existenceofasubtle spirit pervadingmatter: “And now we might add something concerning acertain most subtle spirit which per- vades and lies hid in all gross bodies.” Asimilar idea appears in the Queries ap- pended to Newton’s Opticks.⁶¹ Perhaps even more surprisingly,Sarah Ellenzweig

 Max Horkheimer, “Reason against itself,” What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-CenturyAn- swersand Twentieth-CenturyQuestions,ed. James Schmidt(Berkeley,Los Angeles,CA, and Lon- don: University of California Press,1996), 361  Peter Hanns Reill, Vitalizing Natureinthe Enlightenment (see note 54), 6. Forother historians whoalso take 1740 as aturningpoint,see Robert E. Schonfield, Mechanism and Materialism: BritishNatural Philosophy in an Age of Reason (Princeton, NJ:PrincetonUniversity Press, 1970); Thomas L. Hankins, Science and the Enlightenment (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,1985); Stephen Gaukroger, TheCollapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibil- ity:Science and the Shaping of Modernity,1680‒1760 (Oxfordand New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2010).  Antonio Clericuzio, “ARedefinition of Boyle’sChemistry and Corpuscular Philosophy,” An- nals of Science 47 (1990): 561‒89;here 563; id, “From van Helmont to Boyle: AStudyofthe Trans- mission of Helmontian Chemical and Medical Theories in Seventeenth-Century England,” British Journal for the HistoryofScience 26 (1993): 303‒43;here318.  On Newton’stheory of matter,see P. M. Heimann, “NatureisaPerpetual Worker”:Newton’s Aether and Eighteenth-Century Natural Philosophy,” Ambix 20 (1973): 1‒25;P.M.Heimann and J.E. McGuire, “Newtonian Forces and Lockean Powers: Concepts of MatterinEighteenth Century Thought,” Journal of the HistoryofIdeas 39 (1978): 271‒83;Alan Gabbey, “Newton, Active Pow-

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM 722 Allison P. Coudert demonstratesthat Spinoza’smonistic materialism, summed up in his notion of deus sive natura,drew on the vitalistic theories characteristic of Renaissance Hermeticism. She is one of the increasingnumber of scholars who reject the idea that the mechanical philosophytriumphed duringthe seventeenth and earlyeighteenth centuries.⁶² The fact that Boyle, Newton, and Lockeall practiced alchemyprovides more evidence that the mechanical philosophywas not trium- phant.⁶³ The same, Ibelieve, can be said of Leibniz, who was also interested in alchemyand the vitalistic philosophyofthe Kabbalah.⁶⁴ In his pioneering work on Mesmerism, Robert Darnton demonstrates thatvi- talistictheories likethat of Anton Mesmer(1734‒1815) wereeagerlyembraced in France at the end of the eighteenth century,and the predilection for spiritualist cosmologies on the part of elite and popular culturealike prepared the wayfor Romanticism. Mesmer’stheory of animal magnetism had agreat deal in common with the theories about electricity,magnetism, gravity,light,and fire proposed by supposedly “respectable” authors. Mechanical explanations failed to give an adequate or even plausible account of the wondrous effectsofthese invisible forces, which were reported assiduouslyinthe popular press.Thingsmay not have worked out so well for Dr.Frankenstein’smonster in terms of electricity, but electrical belts and electrical corsets wereadvertisedascures for weak backs, and it was claimed that electrical hair brushes not onlyincreased the lus- ter and abundanceofone’shair but actuallyprolongedlife. Electrical charges

ers, and the Mechanical Philosophy,” TheCambridgeCompanion to Newton,ed. I. Bernard Cohen and George E. Smith (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,2002), 329‒57.  Sarah Ellenzweig, “RichardBentley’s Paradise Lost and the Ghost of Spinoza,” God in the Enlightenment, ed., William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram (Oxfordand New York: OxfordUni- versity Press, 2016), 257‒77.See Catherine Packham, Eighteenth-CenturyVitalism: Bodies, Cul- ture, Politics (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Ann Thomson, Bodies of Thought: Science, Religion, and the Soul in Early Enlightenment (Oxfordand New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Forare-evaluation of the Scientific Revolution, see Margaret J. Osler, Rethinking the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).  LawrenceM.Principe, TheAspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and his Alchemical Quest (Princeton, NJ:PrincetonUniversity Press, 1998); William R. Newman and LawrenceM.Principe, Alchemy Tried by the Fire:Starkey,Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago and London: Chi- cagoUniversity Press, 2002). On Newton’sinterest in alchemy, see William R. Newman, Prome- thean Ambitions:Alchemy and the QuesttoPerfect Nature (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004); “The Unknown Newton,” The New Atlantis. AJournal of Technology and Society (Winter, 2015): http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-problem-of-alchemy (last accessed August 17,2016).  Allison P. Coudert, Leibnizand the Kabbalah (see note 37).

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM RethinkingMax Weber’sTheoryofDisenchantment 723 werereputed to make plants grow and cure gout.Areport was publishedabout a young boy who had regained the full use of his limbs after being thrown daily into atub with alarge electric eel – acure we might wellattribute to “natural” causes now.⁶⁵ The fact that scientificand pseudo-scientific explanations of the same phenomena wereoften so similar made it all the more difficult for ordinary people to distinguish fact from fiction,and the fuzzy line between the two was itself asourceofwonder and speculation. We should remember that Goethe’s Faust was aproduct of the eighteenthcentury,not the Middle Ages, and he ap- pealed to an eighteenth-century audience. In her wonderfullyentertainingaccount of electricity duringthe eighteenth century,Patricia Fara describes the awe, astonishment,aswell as dread aroused by public demonstrations involving electrical experiments inspired by the work of Thomas Willis (1621‒1675).⁶⁶ LuigiGalvani (1737‒1798) and his nephew Giovan- ni Aldini (1762‒1834) both entered the field of what became known as “medical electricity,” offering public experiments to show how dead animals and humans seemed to come alive once electrical currents passed through their limbs. Galva- ni’sspecialty was electrifying dead frog’slegs.Aldini’sexperiments involved drowninginnumerable dogsand cats and then electrifying them. Timingwas ev- erything because if submergedtoo long,noamount of electricity could revive these poor creatures. Others took Aldini’sexperiments even further,electrifying the bodies of exe- cuted criminals. TheNewgate Calendar (a record of executions at that famous, or infamous, London prison) describes the application of electricity to the bodyof the criminal George Foster: “On the first application of the process to the face, the jaws of the deceased criminalbegan to quiver, and the adjoining muscles werehorriblycontorted, and one eyewas actually opened. In the subsequent part of the process the right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs wereset in motion.”⁶⁷ An even more ghoulish spectacle involved electrical experiments performedonthe bodyofthe executed thief and murderer Matthew Clydesdale in 1818 by the Scottish physician and chemist Andrew Ure(1778‒

 Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 14.  Patricia Fara, An Entertainment for Angels: Electricity in the Enlightenment. Revolutions in Science(London: Icon Books, 2003). Thomas Willis was an English physician and neuroanato- mist consideredbymanytobethe founder of neuroscienceand an importantfigure in the his- tory of psychiatry.  TheNewgate Calendar,January 18, 1803 http://www.exclassics.com/newgate/ng464.htm (last access August 17,2016)

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM 724 Allison P. Coudert

1857). Uredescribed the experiment as well as the reactions of the crowd that had come to witness the spectacle:

The success of it was trulywonderful. Full, nay, laborious breathing,instantlycommenced. The chest heavedand fell; the bellywas protruded and againcollapsedwith the relaxing and retiring diaphragm ....Onmovingthe second rod from the hip to the heel, the knee beingpreviouslybent,the leg was thrownout with such violenceasnearlytooverturn one of the assistants,who in vain attempted to prevent the extension. ...⁶⁸

When electricity was applied to bothClydesdale’ssupra-orbital nerveand heel

[e]very muscle in his countenance was simultaneouslythrownintofearful action; rage,hor- ror,despair,anguish, and ghastlysmiles united their hideous expression in the murderer’s face,surpassingfar the wildest representations of aFuseli⁶⁹ or aKean.⁷⁰ At this period sev- eral of the spectators wereforced to leave the apartment from terror or sickness,and one gentleman fainted.⁷¹

When the electrical current was applied to the ulnar nerveatthe elbow, “the fin- gers now moved nimbly, like those of aviolin performer.” Then “he seemed to point to the different spectators, some of whom thoughthehad come to life.”⁷² One witness claimed that Clydesdale had opened his eyes and stood up. At this point, “Dr.Jeffrey pulled out his unerring lancet and plunged it into the jugular vein of the culprit,who instantlyfell down upon the floor like aslaughtered ox on the blow of abutcher.”⁷³ Of course, Clysdale could not pos- siblyhavestood up, but such was the excitement produced by these experiments that hyperbole came naturally. Electricity became all the rage.One of the most unusual usesofitoccurred in the Temple of Health constructed by James Graham (1745‒1794) in London’s

 TheLiteraryGazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Politics, etc.,no. 104 (Saturday, Jan- uary 16,1819), Pt.1. https://books.google.com/books?id=MGpEAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_- ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false (last accessed on August 17,2016).  Henry Fuseli (1741‒1825)was aSwiss artist and writer,who spent most of his life in Britain. Manyofhis painting, such as “The Nightmare,” dealtwith the demonic aspects of the superna- tural.  Edmund Kean (1787‒1833)was aBritish actor celebrated for his dramatic roles, especially Shakespearean characters.  TheLiteraryGazette (see note 68).  TheLiteraryGazette (see note 68)  Roseanne Montillo, TheLady and HerMonsters: ATale of Dissections, Real-Life Dr.Franken- steins and the Creation of Mary Shelley’sMasterpiece (New York: William MorrowPaperbacks, 2013), 216.

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM Rethinking Max Weber’sTheoryofDisenchantment 725

Adelphi. Known as “The Doctor of Love,” Graham openedwhat mayhavebeen the first electrical therapy spatoenhance the pleasures of sex and cure infertil- ity.The pièce de resistanceinGraham’sopulentestablishment was the famous “Celestial Bed.” Mounted on glass legs to insulate it from the ground, the bed was connected to wires in an adjoiningroom through which electrical currents werepassed. Thebed was surrounded by mirrors,and Graham suggestively claimed that the mattress was filled with hair from the tailsofEnglish stallions. When opened to the public, over 11,0000 visitors flocked to see the Palace in the first three months. Graham believed that decadent lifestyles were diminishing human sexual capacity.Hewas convinced that adiet of raw, rather than cooked, dead food,combined with plenty of fresh air,hard beds, earlyhours, and adaily routine of washing the body, particularlythe genitalia,inone of his mudbaths would reinvigorate his effete contemporaries.⁷⁴ Graham was eventuallycharged with indecency, fell into debt,and died of abrain hemorrhageatthe ageofforty- nine after about of religious mania.⁷⁵ But the promise he, Mesmer,and many others held out for the wonderful effects of electricity weresufficientlyalluring to convince people thatscience had the ability to cure all kinds of ailments while greatlyenhancing the pleasures of life. Graham was convinced that the human race could be regenerated and that a “New Jerusalem” of perfection could be in- stituted on earth. As Stuart comments, “This revival of millenarianism was typ- ical of extremists at the end of the eighteenth century,who fused theirhopes of democratic reform with the expectation of autopian future.”⁷⁶ The conviction that health could be improved along with actual advances in medicalcare was an aspect of what Peter Gayhas described as the “medicaliza- tion” of the Enlightenment by thoseauthorswho discussed the shortcomingsof society and social institutions – for example, religious fanaticism, political injus- tice, poverty,disease, the prevalence of ignorance and superstition – as “pathol- ogies” that could be “cured.”⁷⁷ The most effective waytocure these conditions was by improvinghuman reason and perfecting human nature.

 Stuart, TheBloodless Revolution (see note 33), 332.  The English romantic poet Robert Southey (1774‒1843) givesthe followingdescription of Gra- ham: “This man livedupon vegetables, and delightedindeclaimingagainst the sin of beingcar- nivorous,and the dreadful effects of makingthe stomach agrave and charnel-house for slaugh- tered bodies.Latterlyhebecame whollyanenthusiast,would madden himself with ether,run out into the streets, and strip himself to clothe the first beggarwhomhemet.” Cited in Stuart, TheBloodless Revolution (see note 33), 336.  Stuart, TheBloodless Revolution (see note 33), 332.  Peter Gay, “The Enlightenment as Medicine and as Cure,” TheAge of Enlightenment: Studies Presented to TheodoreBesterman,ed. William H. Barbour (Edinburgh:St. Andrews University Publications,1967), 375‒86.

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM 726 Allison P. Coudert

Alice Winter does for the nineteenth what Darnton did for the eighteenth century when she demonstratesthatMesmerism wasnot afringeorpseudo-sci- ence in nineteenth-century Britain but acentral one thatraised all kinds of in- teresting,evenmarvelous and terrifying, speculations about the hiddenpowers of the human mind. Even after Mesmerismhad been marginalized as medicine and became more professionalized, it did not disappear;itwas absorbed into other practices,particularlypsychical research, physiology,and psychoanaly- sis.⁷⁸ Winter offers athoroughlyenchanted view of manyaspects of Victorian life:

Farfromexhibitingthe stiflingconformity long associated with the period, Victorian Eng- land is now recognized as havingbeen populated by phrenologists, plebian spiritualists, mediums,and psychic researchers.They livedinabroth moreexotic than the so-called Monster soup of the Thames:apotent concoction of magnetic fluids,vital powers, and swarming spirits. ⁷⁹

George Eliot (1819‒1880) shavedher head for aphrenological reading.Herbert Spencer (1820‒1903) wrotearticles for amesmeric journal, and Michael Faraday (1791‒1867) built an apparatus for table-turning.Spiritualism made the mathe- matician and logician Augustus De Morgan (1806‒1871)question the nature of scientificproof, and femalemediums cast doubt on the ideologyof“The Angel in the House,” helping women expand theirmental and physical hori- zons.⁸⁰ In aletter to her father written after viewing the Great Exhibition of 1851, Charlotte Brontëdescribes the “magic” of the thingsshe had seen:

...none but super-human hands could have arranged it thus,with such ablaze and con- trast of coloursand marvelous power of effect.The multitude fillingthe great aisles seems ruled and subdued by some invisible influence.Amongstthe thirty thousand souls that peopled it the dayIwas therenot one loud noise was to be heard, not one irregular move- ment seen; the livingtide rolls on quietly, with adeep hum likethe sea heardfromthe dis- tance. ⁸¹

From Brontë’sdescription, it seems thatwonder wasthe order of the dayand not just at the Great Exhibition. New inventions greatlyenlargedthe boundaries of what waspossible, even plausible, and increasinglyobscured the dividing line

 Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago and London: Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 1998), 5‒8.  Winter, Mesmerized (see note 78), 9.  Winter, Mesmerized (see note 78), 10.  Winter, Mesmerized (see note 78), 27.

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM Rethinking Max Weber’sTheoryofDisenchantment 727 between the material and the spiritual as mechanical innovations produced signs of life and spirit.Charles Babbage’s(1791‒1871)salon is acase in point. Among the items on exhibitions weredancing automata thatseemed to exhibit “grace” and “imagination” and an engine that did arithmetic.⁸² Babbage claimed that even he did not know all the powers possessed by his machines, whose ac- tions seemed “incomprehensible without the exercise of volition and thought.”⁸³ In his 1832 book Natural Magic,David Brewster (1781‒1868) describes talking ma- chines, hallucinations, and pictures that simulated animation.⁸⁴ Accordingto Brewster western history passed through three stages: from the religious delu- sion characteristic of the medieval and earlymodernperiods, to amusement in the Enlightenment,and finallytothe wonders of modern industrial produc- tion.⁸⁵ Natural magic seized the imagination not onlybecause the phenomena it produced were mysterious, at least initially, but because the human minds that created these marvelous products werethemselvesmarvelous. The magic and wonder of science wasclear to see in the automata produced by eighteenth-century clock and furniture makers.Automata like Pierre Droz’ and Henri-LouisDroz’sharpsichord player, La Musicienne, and Wolfgangvon Kempelen’sChess Man – even though it was eventuallydiscovered to be a fake – encouraged spectators to try to figure out how they worked. In Man aMa- chine (1748) La Mettrie mentions Jacques de Vaucanson’sdefecatingduck and his flutist,describing their maker as a “new Prometheus.”⁸⁶ Because Cartesian mechanistic philosophyleft so manyquestions about the relationship between matter,force, and motion unresolved, the intriguingquestion arose in the minds of manyofthose who viewed these marvelous mechanical objects as to whether matter in and of itself could generate motion. The complexity and del- icacy required to construct automata that could move in human or animal-like ways as aresult of mechanicaldevices small enough to fit entirelyinside the fig- ures made them all the more awesome. Between 1750 and 1820 manywriters

 Babbage was amathematician, inventor,philosopher,and mechanical engineer,who,along with AdaLovelace(1815‒1852), Byron’sdaughter,iscreditedwith the concept of aprogrammable computer.  Winter, Mesmerized (see note 78), 38.  Brewster was aScottish scientistinterested in physics, mathematics, and astronomyand the inventororthe kaleidoscope.  David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic Addressed to Sir Water Scott, Bart. (1832;London: William Tegg &Co., 7th ed. 1856).  Adelheid Voskuhl, Androids in the Enlightenment: Mechanics,Artisans,and Cultures of the Self (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 25.

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM 728 Allison P. Coudert used android automata, either actual or imagined, to explore the boundaries be- tween machines and humans.⁸⁷ While several historians claim thatautomata contributed to disenchantment because they presagedthe perils of the industrial age, Adelheid Voskuhl con- tends that such disenchantment was not characteristic of the eighteenth but onlyoflater centuries.⁸⁸ Julie de Lespinasse (1732‒1776), who presided over one of the most prominent salon in Paris in the 1750s and 60s, informed acor- respondent that before dinner, she would go and see the automata on displayin anearby hall preciselybecause they are “astonishing, as they say.”⁸⁹ Shortly after citing this remark, however,Voskuhl claims surprisingly that individuals who sawautomata and left descriptions of them did “not displayany particular excitement ...about the androids or theirmetaphysical implications.”⁹⁰ If this wereindeed the case, one wonders whykingsand princes spent so lavishlyon these devices.Thisapparent nonchalance is contradicted by another reportcited by Voskuhl that described the streets leadinguptoadisplayofautomata as oc- cupied every daybycoaches and wagons. Even rain did not discouragepeople from attendingthe showing,which ranfrom six in the morning to seven or eight at night.⁹¹ As historians have pointed out,although the Enlightenment is generally characterized as an ageofincreasing liberty,fraternity,and equality,court cul- ture remained very powerful in the last decades of the ancient regimeand mili- tated against these very ideals. Court culture demanded rigid etiquette and os- tentatious displays of power,which included luxury commodities such as automata and an audience to appreciate them. In the words of Voskuhl,

 Voskuhl, Androids in the Enlightenment (see note 86), 170.  See Gaby Wood, Living Dolls: AMagical Historyofthe Quest for Mechanical Life (London: Faber &Faber,2003), xiv; Frank Wittig, Maschinenmenschen: Zur Geschichte eines literarischen MotivsimKontext von Philosophie, Naturwissenschaft und Technik. Epistemata: Würzburger wis- senschaftliche Schriften, 212(Würzburg: Königshausen &Neumann, 1997), 25.Voskuhl, Androids (see note 86), disagrees with those like Jessica Riskin, whoargue that eighteenth-century autom- ata werebuilt for scientific purposes: “Iunderstand the women automata. ..to be not epistemi- callyrelevant simulations of live bodies,but rather mechanicalreplications of cultural and po- litical bodypractices and ambitions” (21). See Jessica Riskin, The Restless Clock:AHistoryofthe Centuries-Long Argument about What MakesThings Tick (Chicago and London: University of Chi- cagoPress, 2016).  Cited in Voskuhl, Androidsinthe Enlightenment (see note 86), 67.  Voskuhl, Androids in the Enlightenment (see note 86), 65.  Voskuhl, Androids in the Enlightenment (see note 86), 65.

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM Rethinking Max Weber’sTheoryofDisenchantment 729

In this public and international courtculture, automata and related artifacts were suitable items of wonder and spectacle; they provided incentive for mechanical innovation, and they were also suitable items for gift exchange among parties of political power.Technical ornamentation of placeparks and gardens werepart of the same culture that inspired au- tomaton-making.⁹²

There wasapolitical dimension to court culture’sfascination with automata and mechanical devises because they appeared to provide evidence of amechanized universe set in motion by God, auniverse that God’sregents on earth liked to think of as amodel for theirown courtlyuniverses. The aesthetics of eighteenth-centuryEuropean court cultureweredecidedly neoclassical and centered on Burke’snotion of the beautiful rather than the sub- lime. Balance, proportion, and self-contained smallness werethe essence of the beautifulasone can see from the gardens at Versailles and the Palladian archi- tecturethat Neoclassicists favored. Although Burke excoriated French revolu- tionariesfor destroyingthe court cultureheidentified with, his own writing on the sublime contributed to revolutionary,and especiallyearlyromantic revo- lutionary,thought.Romanticsadopted Burke’sreverencefor the sublime, which he defined as vast to the point of infinity,obscure, awe-inspiring, powerful, and uncanny. Burke’sgoal was to explain how terror could cause delight.His answer was thatthe pleasure an individual receivesfrom the sublimeinvolvesthe sen- sation that accompanies the removal of danger.Inessence,coming to terms with the sublime necessitatedacertain amount of Schadenfreude,but one that did not preclude but encouraged empathy. One of the most important and characteristic aspectsofmodernity involved breakingdown the barriers between God,humans,and nature, barriers that,as NorbertElias has shown, took centuries of concerted human effort to erect.⁹³ Burke’sessayonthe sublime playedahand in this destruction. Farfrom disen- chanting the world, this elimination of borders enchanted the world in profound- ly new and exciting ways.Those who accepted this blurringofboundaries and sawthemselvesaspart of nature rather thanapart from it openedthemselves up to asympathetic appreciation of the world in holistic terms, whereeach part connected, reflected, and inflected every other.They realized that humans are thoroughly embedded in this cosmos;they are not aliens brought unwillingly

 Voskuhl, Androids in the Enlightenment (see note 86), 27.  Norbert Elias, TheCivilizing Process,vol. 1, TheHistoryofManners,trans. Edmund Jephcott (1939;New York: Urizen Books, 1978). In this regard it is interestingtonote that in the seven- teenth century some Puritan parents were reluctant to let their children crawllike animals sug- gestingthat they rejected anythoughtofhuman kinship with the animal world.

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM 730 Allison P. Coudert from some heavenlygnostic or platonic sphere, to which they long to return. This is the messageSamuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) presents in his poem “The Eolian Harp” (II: 26‒29):

O! the one Life within us and abroad, Which meets all motion and becomes its soul, Alight in sound, asound-like power in light, Rhythm in all thought, and joyanceevery where.

Hen kaipan,or“all in one,” became something of aclarion call for earlyRoman- tics and reflected the tremendous influenceSpinoza’sphilosophywith its iden- tification of God with Nature (Deus sive natura)had on Romantics across Europe and especiallyinGermany. Although no one willingly admitted Spinoza’sinflu- ence because he was excoriated as an atheist,Romanticsembraced his conten- tion thatGod was in all thingssince this made the commonplaceand ordinary marvelous, even divine. According to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743‒1819), under his proddingLessingconfessed he had lost faith in orthodoxChristianity and was aSpinozist: “The orthodoxconceptions of the divineare no longer for me; Icannot stand them. Hen kai pan! Iknow nothing else.” But it was actually Jacobi who put the words in Lessing’smouth when he queried, “Then youwould indeedbymore or less in agreement with Spinoza,” to which Lessingreplied: “If Iamtocall myself by anybody’sname,then Iknow none better.”⁹⁴ Lessing added, “That is also the tendencyinGoethe’swritings.” And, indeed, therewas. In his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811), Johann WolfgangGoethe (1749‒1832) admits he read Spinoza:

 TheSpinoza Conversations between Lessing and Jacobi: Texts with Excerpts from the Ensuing Controversy. Introduced by Gérard Vallée, trans. G. Vallée, J. BLawson, and C. G. Chapple (Lan- ham, MD:University of America Press,1988), 9‒10.The conversations took placeafew months beforeLessing’sdeath in 1781.They were published by JacobiasÜber die Lehredes Spinoza, in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn (Breslau: G. Lowe, 1785). Lessing’scontemporaries as wellasmodern scholars have widelydivergent views as to Lessing’salleged Spinozism, which rangefromadefinitive yestoatotal denial. See Johannes Schneider, Lessings Stellung zu The- ologie vor der Herausgabe der Wolfenbüttler Fragmente (‘s-Gravenger: Uiotgeverij Excelsior,1953), 7‒15.Vallée concludes, quiterightlyinmyopinion, that Lessingwas not aconfirmed Spinozist but apantheist whorejectedwhathesaw as the orthodoxidea of God as atranscendent anthro- pomorphicautocratfor atheology of immanence (24).

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM Rethinking Max Weber’sTheoryofDisenchantment 731

Ihastened back to the works [of Spinoza], to which Iowe so much, and the same breath of peacewafted towards me. Ibecame absorbed in reading and thought, as Ilooked within myself, that Ihad never seen the world so clearly.⁹⁵

The world Goethe sawwith such clarity was aholistic one: “All effects ...that we observe in the world of experience are interrelated in the most constant man- ner ....”⁹⁶ In this holistic universe revelation came from Nature, with acapital “N,” not God or scripture, but from the natural world as it impinged on our senses. Since Nature had to be felt through our senses, it was experienced emo- tionally and not justthrough reason:

Letthe eyes be closed,let the sense of hearing be excited, and from the simplest sound to the highest harmony, from the most vehement and impassioned cry to the gentlest word of reason, still it is but Naturethat speaks and manifests her presence, her power, her pervad- ing life, and the vastness of her relations,sothat ablind man, to whom the infinitelyvisible world is denied, can still comprehend an infinitevitality by means of another organ.⁹⁷

Goethe was very much influenced by his younger contemporary,the intrepid ex- plorer and most famous scientist of his ageAlexander vonHumboldt (1769‒ 1859), who alsoviewed the world in holistic terms.When climbing the volcano Chimborazo (now in Ecuador), Humboldt experiencedanepiphany: when the fog lifted, from his precarious perch at 19,413 feet Humboldt sawthe top of the volcano barely1,000 feet abovehim and mountain rangeafter mountain rangestretched out majesticallybefore him. It was then that he realized the earth was one great living organism, whereeverythingwas connected.⁹⁸ Nothing, not even the tiniest organism, could exist on its own: “In this great chain of caus- es and effects no single fact can be considered in isolation.”⁹⁹ Humboldt invent- ed the idea of the weboflife. Having seen at first hand the devastation caused by the colonial plantation at Lake Valencia in Venezuela in 1800,hewas the first to

 Goethe is cited in Alexander Rausch, “Neoclassicism and the Romantic Movement: Painting in Europe between Two Revolutions 1789‒1848,” Neoclassicism and Romanticism: Architecture, Sculpture, Painting,Drawings;1750 ‒ 1848,ed. Rolf Toman (Cologne: Tandem, 2006), 318‒479; here327‒28.  Cited in RogerH.Stephenson, “Binary Synthesis: Goethe’sAesthetic Intuition in Literature and Science,” Science in Context 18.4(2005): 553‒81;here556.  Goethe’sTheoryofColours,trans. with notesbyCharles Lock Eastlake(London: John Murray, 1840), xviii.  Andrea Wulf, TheInvention of Nature: Alexander Humboldt’sNew World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), 2.  Wulf, TheInvention of Nature (see note 98), 5.

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM 732 Allison P. Coudert explain the importance of forests to retain water and protect against soil ero- sion.¹⁰⁰ Both Goethe and Alexander vonHumboldt rejected the Cartesian view of an- imals as machines, investigatinginstead the vital forces that shaped organisms. Wulf claims that Goethe’sFaust has something of Humboldt in him and vice versa.Like Humboldt,Faust was trying to discover “all Nature’shiddenpowers.” Faust’sambition “That Imay detect the utmostforce/Which bindsthe world, and guidesits course” was Humboldt’saswell.¹⁰¹ Like Goethe and so manyRo- mantics,Humboldt was drivenbyasense of wonder.Yes, nature had to be meas- ured and analyzed – Humboldt was,after all, achild of the Enlightenment – but it must be viewed through the senses and emotions as well: “Nature must be ex- perienced through feeling,” not numbers or abstract mathematics.¹⁰² Goethe and Humboldt both read Erasmus Darwin’spoem “LoveofPlants,” which took Lin- naean sexual classification systems of plants to an extreme, making them love- sick, jealous, blushing, etc. While Goethe thoughtthe poetry rambling and pe- dantic, Humboldt admired it for advocating asympathetic and imaginative approach to nature. The Romantics’ concern with bringingthe human and the natural world into aharmonious whole reflectedthe incompleteness, fragmentation, and ruin they observed around them. Longbefore Max Weber,they reacted against what they perceivedtobethe disenchantment of the world as aresultofthe ali- enation and anomie that came with industrialization, urbanization, utilitarian- ism, and the emphasis on individual rights characteristic of the Enlightenment. It was the Romantics, in fact,from whom Weber took manyofhis ideas about disenchantment.¹⁰³ They lamented the decline of asense of community and the breakdown of the family with the rise of the competitive marketplaceand

 Wulf, TheInvention of Nature (see note 98), 5‒6. As Wulf points out,inaddition to Goethe, Humboldtinfluenced Jefferson, Darwin, Wordsworth, Coleridge,Thoreau, and Simon Bolivar, amongothers.His centenary was celebrated across the world but nowheremoresothan in the US.The stateofNevada was almost called Humboldtwhen its name was debated in 1860.While that didn’thappened, in the United States there are4counties,13towns,parks, mountains,bays, lakes, and ariver named after him, as wellasthe HumboldtRedwoods StatePark in California and HumboldtParks in Chicago and Buffalo. Almost 300 plants and morethan 100 animals are named after Humboldt. Wulf claims that “[m]oreplaces are named after Humboldtthan anyone else” (7). Jefferson called him “one of the greatest orna- ments of the age” (5).  Wulf, TheInvention of Nature (see note 98), 37.  Wulf, TheInvention of Nature (see note 98), 36.  Rüdiger Safranski, Romanticism: AGerman Affair,trans. Robert E. Goodwin (2007; Evan- ston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 126.

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM Rethinking Max Weber’sTheoryofDisenchantment 733 the eclipse of guilds. Even more importantly,they deplored the division between man and nature created by the growth of modern technology,which they be- lieved turned nature into amachine, taking away the beauty,mystery,and magic it once possessed. AnticipatingHorkheimer,Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg, 1772‒1801) complained that nature had been “demoted to the level of dull machinery.” Modernity had converted “the infinite, creative music of the universe into the uniformclattering of amonstrous mill.”¹⁰⁴ These obser- vations would seem to put Romanticssquarelyinthe disenchantment camp, but the opposite was actuallythe case. Instead of reactingwith despair and turning to religion, the state, or heroic individuals for the solution – as manylaterRo- mantics and anti-Enlightenment Traditionalists did – the earlyRomanticsset out to re-enchant the world. Although astandard interpretationofthe earlyGermanRomanticsisthat they wereapolitical and their central aim wastocreateanew romantic literature and criticism opposed to Neoclassicism and the Enlightenment,they werein- tenselypolitical.¹⁰⁵ In Athenäumsfragment 222Friedrich Schlegel makes this clear: “The starting point of moderncultureisthe revolutionary wish to realize the Kingdom of God on earth.”¹⁰⁶ While critical of what they sawasthe hedon- ism, materialism, and utilitarianism of some Enlightenment thinkers,earlyGer- man Romanticsaccepted key Enlightenment ideas, such as the right and duty to think criticallyfor oneself; the right to self-determination; the right to self-devel- opment free of external authority;the importance and value of education; and the need to overcome prejudice, superstition, and ignorance. These concepts be- came the basis for their project of re-enchantment through aholistic approach to nature and man’splace in it.Frederick Beiser argues thatRomantic holism “was one of the most remarkable events in natural science since the onset of the sci- entific revolution.” He claims that it is not exaggeration to regard it as “apara- digm shift,” involvingcompletelynew criteria for explaining natural events. While mechanical physics understood aphenomenon by placing it within aser- ies of efficient causes following one afterthe other,the organic theory explained

 Safranski, Romanticism (see note 103), 127.  ”...wemust abandon, onceand for all, one of the most common myths about romanti- cism: that it was essentiallyapolitical, an attempt to flee from social and political reality into the world of the literary imagination. Rather than escaping moral and political issues for the sake of literatureand criticism, the romantics subordinated their literatureand criticism to their ethical and political ideals.” Frederick C. Beiser, TheRomantic Imperative: TheConcept of Early German Romanticism (Cambridge,MA: HarvardUniversity Press,2006), 24.  CitedinBeiser, TheRomantic Imperative (see note 105), 180‒81.

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM 734 Allison P. Coudert aphenomenon in holistic terms as aproduct of multiple mutuallyinteracting forces:

...the romantics’ organic concept of natureimplies that everythingisreciprocallyboth means and ends.Dependingonour standpoint,wecan see each part of an organism as an instrumentfor the development of the whole, and the whole as an instrumentfor the development of each part.This means that it is possible to sayboth that man develops for the sakeofnature as well as nature develops for the sake of man.¹⁰⁷

Not onlyconcerned with man’sestrangement from nature,Romantics like Nova- lis alsosought to overcome the alienation that divided an individual from him- self with the split between mind and bodyand the realization that thereare di- visive forces and hidden drivesinhumans that required integration. Their solution once again was holism: the conscious,subconscious,reason, desire, and emotion had to be united in asingle personality.InÜber Anmut und Würde (OnGrace and Dignity,1793) Friedrich Schiller described this personality as “abeautiful soul,” which exhibited aharmonyofreason and sensibility.¹⁰⁸ Just as each of the driveswithin every individual had to be integrated, individ- uals must be integrated into aholistic community and organic state.Finally, na- ture must be seen as organic since everything from stones to humans are intrinsi- callyconnected. The utilitarian, disenchanted world “must be romanticized,” accordingtoNovalis,and this could onlybedone, as he says, “When Igive the commonplaceahigher meaning,the customary amysterious appearance, the known the dignity of the unknown, the finite the illusion of the infinite.” By doing this, “Iromanticize it.”¹⁰⁹ AccordingtoColeridge this was precisely the task Wordsworth set for himself in their joint venture, the Lyrical Ballads. While Coleridge was to make the unreal real, Wordsworth was “to give the charm of novelty to thingsofevery day, and to excite afeeling analogous to

 Beiser, TheRomantic Imperative (see note 105), 83,146.  Friedrich Schiller, “It is in abeautiful soul that sensuousness and reason,dutyand incli- nation areinharmony, and grace is their expression as appearance.” Schiller’s “On Grace and Dignity” in Its Cultural Context: Essaysand aNew Translation,ed. Jane V. Curran and Christope Fricker. Studies in German Literature,Linguistics,and Culture(Rochester,NY: Camden House, 2005), 153. Foracopyofthe original text, see http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/-3320/1 (last ac- cessed on August 17,2016).  Frederick C. Beiser, TheEarly Political Writings of the German Romantics. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 85.Andrea Nightingale describes the same kind of wonder that Thoreauexperienced at Walden Pondinher article “BrokenKnowledge,” TheRe-enchantment of the World: SecularMagic in a Rational Age,ed. Joshua Landyand Michael Saler (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 15‒37.

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM Rethinking Max Weber’sTheoryofDisenchantment 735 the supernatural, by awakeningthe mind’sattention from the lethargy of custom and directingittothe loveliness and the wonders of the world before us.”¹¹⁰ To the Romantic artist, nothing was beneath contempt;everything called for understanding and sympathy. Thiscomes out clearlyinthe Neo-Romantic Hugo vonHofmannsthal’s “The Letter of LordChandos” (1902).AsLordChandos writes to his unidentified patron and mentor,anything,eventhe simplest, most rustic, and plebian object can reveal the mystery and wonder of the world:

Apitcher,aharrowabandoned in afield, adog in the sun, aneglectedcemetery,acripple, apeasant’shut-all these can become the vessel of my revelation. Each of these objects and athousand others similar,overwhich the eyeusuallyglides with anatural indifference, can suddenly, at anymoment (which Iamutterlypowerless to evoke), assume for me a character so exalted and movingthat words seem too poor to describe it.¹¹¹

On another occasion “it wasanut-tree and ahalf-filled pitcher which agardener boy had left there” with “abeetle swimmingonthe surface from shore to shore” that occasioned an ecstatic response: “...this combination of trifles sent through me such ashudder at the presenceofthe Infinite, ashudder running from the roots of my hair to the marrow of mv heels.” LordChandos feels an in- timate connection with the natural world and all the creaturesinhabiting it,even the rats he had ordered exterminated, with whom he belatedlyexperiencesthe deepestempathy:

Recently, for instance, Ihad giventhe order for acopious supplyofrat-poison to be scat- tered in the milk cellars of one of my dairy-farms.Towards evening Ihad gone off for aride and, as youcan imagine, thoughtnomoreabout it.AsIwas trotting alongoverthe freshly- ploughed land, nothingmorealarminginsight than ascared covey of quail and, in the dis- tance, the great sun sinkingoverthe undulatingfields,there suddenlyloomed up before me the vision of that cellar,resounding with the death-struggle of amob of rats.Ifelt every- thingwithin me: the cool, musty air of the cellar filled with the sweet and pungent reek of poison, and the yellingofthe death cries breakingagainst the mouldering walls; the vain convulsions of those convoluted bodies as they tear about in confusion and despair;their frenzied search for escape, and the grimaceoficy rage when acouple collide with one an- other at ablocked-up crevice.

LordChandos’sability to imagine himself in the place of others, even such lowly creatures as rats, appears again in his reaction to Livy’sdescription of the hours

 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria,ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate. TheCollected WorksofSamuel Taylor Coleridge,7vols., gen. ed. Kathleen Coburn and Bart Winer.BollingenSeries,75(Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press,1983), 7: 6‒7.  Hofmannsthal, “Letter of Lord Chandos” http://depts.washington.edu/vienna/documents/ Hofmannsthal/Hofmannsthal_Chandos.htm (last accessed August 17,2016).

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM 736 Allison P. Coudert before the destruction of Alba Longa. This vision inspired him with asublime ter- ror that wasbothdivineand bestial, providinghim with agaze into the abyss of the infinitethatonlyconfirmed his own nothingness.How different his reaction was from Pascal’s. Pascal’sterror of the infinite was absolute; therewas nothing sublimeabout it.But here we see the frisson of excitement and the marvelous melancholy evoked by the romantic sublime:

Youremember,myfriend, the wonderful description in Livy of the hours preceding the de- struction of Alba Longa:when the crowds strayaimlessly through the streets which they are to see no more...when they bid farewell to the stones beneath their feet.Iassureyou, my friend, Icarried this vision within me, and the vision of burningCarthage,too;but there was more, somethingmoredivine, morebestial; and it was the Present,the fullest,most exalted Present.Therewas amother,surrounded by her youngintheir agonyofdeath; but her gaze was cast neither towardthe dyingnor upon the merciless walls of stone, but into the void, or through the void intoInfinity,accompanyingthis gaze with agnashing of teeth! Aslave struck with helpless terror standingnear the petrifyingNiobe must have experienced what Iexperienced when, within me, the soul of this animal baredits teeth to its monstrous fate.

LordChandosclaims that it wasnot pity he felt for these people about to be wiped off the face of the earth but an “immense sympathy” or “aflowing over into these creatures, or afeeling that an aura of life and death, of dream and wakefulness, had flowed for amoment into them.” The boundary between one thing and another,between one person and another,isobliteratedhere in what would laterbedescribed as an oceanic feeling of “cosmic conscious- ness”¹¹²:

In these moments an insignificant creature – adog,arat,abeetle,acrippled apple tree, a lane windingoverthe hill, amoss-coveredstone, mean moretomethan the most beautiful, abandoned mistress of the happiest night.These muteand, on occasion, inanimatecrea- turesrise towardmewith such an abundance, such apresenceoflove, that my enchanted eyecan find nothinginsight void of life. Everythingthat exists,everythingIcan remember, everythingtouched upon by my confused thoughts,has ameaning. Even my own heavi-

 RichardM.Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness:AStudy of the Evolution of the Human Mind (1901; New York: Dover Books,2009). The desire to obliterate the barriers between people and see all humankind as one shows us at our best, “touched ...bythe better angels of our nature,” to cite the last sentence of Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address (March 4, 1861). But throughout history these betterangels have been impeded by the inescapable fact that to know anything, humans must distinguish one thingfromanother.Unfortunately,this applies to creating one’s identity as well, and this has fueled the xenophobiaatthe root of so much human conflict and suffering. Forawonderfullyconcise discussion of this issue, see Albrecht Classen, “Other,The, European Views of,” New Dictionaryofthe HistoryofIdeas,ed. Maryanne Cline Hor- owitz, 6vols. (New York and San Francisco: Charles Scribner’sSons,2005), 4: 1691‒98.

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM Rethinking Max Weber’sTheoryofDisenchantment 737

ness, the general torpor of my brain, seems to acquire ameaning; Iexperience in and around me ablissful, never-endinginterplay, and amongthe objects playingagainst one another thereisnot one into which Icannot flow.Tome, then, it is as though my bodycon- sists of noughtbut ciphers which give me the key to everything; or as if we could enter into anew and hopeful relationship with the whole of existenceifonlywebegin to think with the heart.

These rapturous moments that allow individuals to overcome the limitations of their separate existenceand dissolve into the cosmic one – an experience Nietzsche would laterdescribeas“Dionysian wisdom”–are,LordChandos ad- mits, unfortunatelyfew and far between, which leaveshim deflated, even nause- ated, by ordinary life and filled with longing for the simple life and simple joys experienced, he imagines,bythe peasants who farm his estate:

my eye...seeks among all the poor and clumsyobjects of apeasant’slife for the one whose insignificant form, whose unnoticed being, whose muteexistence, can become the source of that mysterious, wordless, and boundless ecstasy.For my unnamedblissful feelingissooner brought about by adistant lonelyshepherd’sfire than by the vision of astarry sky,sooner by the chirpingofthe last dyingcricketwhen the autumn wind chases wintry clouds across the deserted fields than by the majestic boomingofanorgan.

LordChandosdescribes these moments of ecstatic insight as being “like asplint- er round which everything festers,throbs,and boils.” While exquisitelypainful, they are what make the terrible boredom of ordinary life bearable:

It is then that Ifeel as though Imyself wereabout to ferment,toeffervesce,tofoam and to sparkle. And the whole thing is akind of feverish thinking, but thinkinginamedium more immediate, moreliquid, moreglowing than words. It,too, forms whirlpools,but of asort that do not seem to lead, as the whirlpools of language, into the abyss,but intomyself and into the deepest womb of peace.

The experience LordChandos had of “aflowing over into these creatures” was predicated on the romantic idea that not onlywas all life endued with sensitivity but that all life was interconnected. UnlikeNeoclassicists, ugliness fascinatedRomantics, opening them up to an appreciation of aspectsofthe world Neoclassicists ignored as outside, even an- tagonistic, to the realm of art.Friedrich Schlegel claimed: “Der romantische Im- perativfordert die Mischung aller Dichtarten. All Natur und Wissenschaft soll Kunst werden – Kunst soll Natur werden und Wissenschaft” (“The Romantic im- perative stimulates the mixing of all sorts of poetry.All nature and knowledge

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM 738 Allison P. Coudert should be art – art should be nature and knowledge”).¹¹³ Romantic artists and intellectuals brokedown the borders between the various arts (literature, drama, painting,music), venturing into the realm of folklore (the Brothers Grimm),theology(Schleiermacher), and even law(Savigny) in an attempt to cre- ate a “universalpoetry.” Facets of the naturaland human world that Neoclassi- cists considered beneath contempt intrigued Romantics, invoking their compas- sion and sympathy. While neoclassical aesthetics marginalized and excluded entire groups of human beingsonthe basis of their alleged uglinessand low so- cial status, Romantic aesthetics with its penchant for the strangeand bizarre ef- fectively expanded the boundaries of human sympathytoinclude thoseprevi- ouslymarginalized – the old, sick, poor,deformed,and insane – as well as the animal kingdom and entire realm of nature. In their different ways,all of these provided enchantment. An important feature of manymodern kinds of enchantment from the Ro- mantics until todayisthatwhether they delight or horrify,they do not setout to delude. In TheArts of Deception James W. Cook takesP.T.Barnum and modern magicians as examples of the wayarational and skeptical public can be en- chanted without succumbing to delusions.Showmen used mass media to stim- ulate debates about the authenticity of their illusions and exhibitions, promoting endless curiosity that was never completelysatisfied. Theshowman’sillusions helped to wean Victorian cultureawayfrom the pursuit of truth and sincerity into apostmodern awareness of contingency and perspectivism.¹¹⁴ Illusions and hoaxes encouraged people to figure thingsout.Sodid the detective stories, which arose as agenre during the nineteenth century and delighted readers then as much then as they do today. Consumers, not all of them to be sure, but many, wereaware of the ways they werebeing manipulatedand took great pleasure in it. Simon During carries forward Cook’sargument.When confronted with mag- ical illusions,heclaims thataudiences honed their cognitive skills to detect the trickery behind them at the same time they experienced asense of wonder and enchantment inspired by the technical skill of the magician. During emphasizes the waythe imagination became acentral sourceofenchantment for earlyRo- mantics,with the “willing suspension of disbelief” proposed by Coleridge.

 From Schlegel’sNotebooks,1797‒1798. CitedinBeiser, TheRomantic Imperative (see note 107), xiv.  Michael Saler, “Modernity and Enchantment (see note 12),” 711; id., As If:Modern Enchant- ment and the LiteraryPre-HistoryofVirtual Reality (Oxfordand New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2012).

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM RethinkingMax Weber’sTheoryofDisenchantment 739

While people could distinguish fact from fiction, they took pleasure in the blur- red of the boundary between the two.¹¹⁵ As Imentioned at the beginning of this essay, there is amoral dimension to modernenchantment thatshould not be overlooked, although it is very different from the moraldimensions of traditionalforms of religious, especiallyChristian, enchantment.AsJane Bennettpointsout in her philosophical meditation on modernenchantment, “To be enchantedistobestruck and shaken by the extra- ordinary that livesamid the familiar and the everyday. ...”¹¹⁶ Thisiswhat No- valis,Hofmannsthal, and so manyotherRomantics had striventodiscover acen- tury or two earlier.Enchantment assumesjoyful attachment to the point of love and reverence. If we do not have these, Bennettasks, if we reallyliveinadisen- chanted world, what can we joyfullyattach ourselvesto? What is theretolove about an alienated existenceonadead planet? Without lovefor something in this world, how can one care about anything,includingoneself?With Bennett’s questions in mind, let me end this essaywith aquotation from Carolyn Bynum’s 1997Presidential Address to the AmericanHistoricalAssociation. Here she de- clares that it is the job of every scholarand every teacher to excite wonder and enchantment in their readersand students:

...surelyour job as teachers is to puzzle, confuse, and amaze. We must rearanew gen- eration of students whowill gaze in wonder at textsand artifacts,quick to puzzle over a translation,slow to project or to appropriate, quick to assume thereisasignificance, slow to generalize about it.Not onlyasscholars,then, but also as teachers, we must aston- ish and be astonished. Forthe flat,generalizing, presentist view of the past encapsulates it and makesitboring, whereas amazement yearns towardanunderstanding, asignificance, that is always just alittle beyond both our theories and our fears.¹¹⁷

This maybeadifficult injunction to follow,orisit?

 Simon During, Modern Enchantments: TheCultural PowerofSecularMagic (Cambridge,MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 2004).  Bennett, TheEnchantment of Modern Life (see note 11), 4.  CarolynWalkerBynum, “Wonder,” American Historical Review 102.1(February,1997): 1‒26; here26.

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM Magic and Magicians in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Time

The Occult in Pre-Modern Sciences, Medicine, Literature, Religion, and Astrology

Edited by Albrecht Classen

Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 10/24/17 12:00 AM