The “Mechanical Operation” of Air and Madness in Swift’s Early Satire on Natural Philosophy
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This paper proposes a new reading of Jonathan Swift’s early satire on Modern “Madness” in A Tale of a Tub, The Battel of the Books, and A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit in the specific intellectual contexts of the vacuum debates and associated pneumatic experiments over the crucial decades leading to the consolidation of the new, experimental philosophy. The great vacuum debates prompted by Evangelista Torricelli’s 1644 baroscope experiment and continued by Robert Boyle’s air pump experiments in the 1660s and the subsequent Boyle-Hobbes controversy were at the center of seventeenth-century natural philosophical inquiry into the nature of “matter” in relation to “spirit” and the cause of “motion.” These were issues of immense theological and cosmological importance for every keen intellectual in the “pre-disciplinary” milieu of the time, and Swift was a fascinated if disapproving reader of the new philosophy that evolved around what he referred to as the “long Dispute among the Philosophers about a Vacuum.” His early satire on the typically Modern “Madness” as “Mechanical Operation of the Spirit” or “Vapours” mocks both the mechanical and discursive expertise of pneumatic experiments and debates in palpable detail. His satire in the Tale, Battel, and Discourse operates by confronting the philosophers against one another, that is, the dualist Descartes against the anti-dualist Hobbes and the experimentalist Boyle against the anti-experimentalist Hobbes, in such a manner that they mutually subvert their contentions and dissensions, which he ridicules are but the same “Madness” caused by the rise of “Vapours” from “within,” just like the air mechanically pumped up and down within Boyle’s “pneumatic engine.”
Abstract
This paper proposes a new reading of Jonathan Swift’s early satire on Modern “Madness” in A Tale of a Tub, The Battel of the Books, and A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit in the specific intellectual contexts of the vacuum debates and associated pneumatic experiments over the crucial decades leading to the consolidation of the new, experimental philosophy. The great vacuum debates prompted by Evangelista Torricelli’s 1644 baroscope experiment and continued by Robert Boyle’s air pump experiments in the 1660s and the subsequent Boyle-Hobbes controversy were at the center of seventeenth-century natural philosophical inquiry into the nature of “matter” in relation to “spirit” and the cause of “motion.” These were issues of immense theological and cosmological importance for every keen intellectual in the “pre-disciplinary” milieu of the time, and Swift was a fascinated if disapproving reader of the new philosophy that evolved around what he referred to as the “long Dispute among the Philosophers about a Vacuum.” His early satire on the typically Modern “Madness” as “Mechanical Operation of the Spirit” or “Vapours” mocks both the mechanical and discursive expertise of pneumatic experiments and debates in palpable detail. His satire in the Tale, Battel, and Discourse operates by confronting the philosophers against one another, that is, the dualist Descartes against the anti-dualist Hobbes and the experimentalist Boyle against the anti-experimentalist Hobbes, in such a manner that they mutually subvert their contentions and dissensions, which he ridicules are but the same “Madness” caused by the rise of “Vapours” from “within,” just like the air mechanically pumped up and down within Boyle’s “pneumatic engine.”
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