Читать книгу Adam Smith - Craig Smith - Страница 10

Perhaps the greatest inspiration for the Enlightenment was Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727). Newton’s towering achievements in the natural sciences made him the template for the successful public intellectual. Voltaire heaped praise on him as supplanting the thought of René Descartes (1596–1650), and his fame became such that he was even lauded in poetry by Alexander Pope (1688–1744). Newton’s heroic status rested on his refinement of the scientific method first mooted by Francis Bacon (1561–1626). The method was grounded on the importance of observation and the generation of simple general rules of cause and effect based on the regularities observed in nature. This method avoided the error of Descartes, whose search for first principles led him to theorize beyond what the evidence supported.

Newton’s Principia Mathematica (1687) popularized a new understanding of what science was and what we could expect from it. The Newtonian, or experimental, method also had a further decisive advantage over its rivals: it provided testable predictions. French expeditions to Peru in 1735 and to Lapland in 1736 appeared to confirm Newton’s description of the shape of the earth, while the reappearance of Halley’s Comet in 1758 again demonstrated the success of his ideas. Colin Maclaurin (1698–1746) popularized Newton’s work in the Scottish universities, ensuring that the young Scots whom he taught had the opportunity to experience cutting-edge science. By the time Smith was a student, the spirit of Newtonianism had become deeply embedded in the curriculum.⁴

Another major contributor to the modern science that Smith absorbed was John Locke (1632–1704). Locke’s writings on education and on the theory of knowledge became a staple part of the understanding of psychology during the Enlightenment. Locke argued that all knowledge was based on experience and observation. He rejected the idea that human minds came stocked with innate ideas. Instead humans arrive with a tabula rasa or clean slate, and then proceed to build the content of their minds through experience of the world. All of our ideas arise from sense perceptions or as the result of reflection on sense perceptions and come to form increasingly complex thought processes. In terms of education, this led Locke to stress the importance of socialization and the need to state ideas in as plain and straightforward a fashion as possible.