0:00:05 > 0:00:07My name is Adam Nicolson.
0:00:07 > 0:00:10I'm a writer and ever since I was a teenager,
0:00:10 > 0:00:13I have been gripped by the 17th century.
0:00:13 > 0:00:16It was Britain's most revolutionary century,
0:00:16 > 0:00:21when all the forces of modernity began to stir under the old order,
0:00:21 > 0:00:25slugging it out on the great battlegrounds of religion
0:00:25 > 0:00:28and politics.
0:00:28 > 0:00:31Two civil wars, one king was blown up,
0:00:31 > 0:00:36another had his head cut off, a third simply got rid of.
0:00:37 > 0:00:41But more important than any of that was the factor which drove
0:00:41 > 0:00:46the revolutionary changes in this first truly modern century.
0:00:46 > 0:00:48Writing.
0:00:50 > 0:00:52Writing was everywhere.
0:00:52 > 0:00:55Notebooks, chat books, account books,
0:00:55 > 0:01:00business correspondence, letters, diaries, pamphlets, newspapers.
0:01:00 > 0:01:04This was the century of the written word.
0:01:04 > 0:01:07It was the first great age of self-depiction.
0:01:07 > 0:01:11All kinds of people were learning to read and write, and through
0:01:11 > 0:01:16their writings, we can know them like never before in history.
0:01:16 > 0:01:20A woman sent to prison for her conscience.
0:01:20 > 0:01:25A sailor who wanted to share his adventures.
0:01:26 > 0:01:30A solitary genius who used his notebooks to unlock
0:01:30 > 0:01:33the secrets of the universe.
0:01:33 > 0:01:37Reading and writing allowed people to question what they'd been
0:01:37 > 0:01:39told, to engage in fierce debate
0:01:39 > 0:01:43and to rewrite the rules of politics and self-expression.
0:01:43 > 0:01:46This was the beginning of the age we now live in.
0:01:46 > 0:01:49The moment we left the Middle Ages behind
0:01:49 > 0:01:52and set out on the track to modernity.
0:01:52 > 0:01:54And that transformation
0:01:54 > 0:01:57is what fascinates me about the 17th century.
0:02:22 > 0:02:26In this programme, I'm going to explore the great 17th-century
0:02:26 > 0:02:32revolution in our attitudes to the universe and our place within it.
0:02:32 > 0:02:36This is when science and religion begin to take their modern form.
0:02:42 > 0:02:47Before 1600, only a tiny number of people in England had
0:02:47 > 0:02:51accepted the idea that the Earth orbited the sun.
0:02:51 > 0:02:55Most were stuck in a mind world that hadn't developed since antiquity.
0:02:55 > 0:02:58But that was all about to change.
0:02:59 > 0:03:04The new literate century was different from what came before
0:03:04 > 0:03:06because it was essentially curious.
0:03:06 > 0:03:11It wanted to find out and then write its discoveries down.
0:03:11 > 0:03:14What were we made of? What was the world made of?
0:03:14 > 0:03:18How did the stars work? How did God work?
0:03:21 > 0:03:23How did the 17th century think?
0:03:23 > 0:03:26And how did it use writing to do its thinking?
0:03:26 > 0:03:30What part did writing play in the greatest intellectual
0:03:30 > 0:03:32revolution there has ever been?
0:03:32 > 0:03:37The giant shift from the pre-modern to the scientific frame of mind.
0:03:59 > 0:04:02By the first half of the 1600s, medieval Christianity,
0:04:02 > 0:04:06where people had lived unquestioningly in the embrace
0:04:06 > 0:04:10of a deeply hierarchical church, was long gone.
0:04:10 > 0:04:15The Reformation 50 or 60 years earlier had changed all that.
0:04:15 > 0:04:18Zealous Protestants were now suspicious of the idea
0:04:18 > 0:04:21of bishops and priests,
0:04:21 > 0:04:24of even making the sign of the cross, of baptisms,
0:04:24 > 0:04:26or even kneeling in church.
0:04:32 > 0:04:36The Reformation had left the individual naked before God
0:04:36 > 0:04:39and although His purpose was revealed in the words
0:04:39 > 0:04:43of the Bible, He was everywhere around them too.
0:04:43 > 0:04:46And for those Puritans anxiously writing in their diaries, God
0:04:46 > 0:04:51was the great headmaster, equipped with a terrifyingly all-seeing eye.
0:04:52 > 0:04:57God is watching and there is no escape
0:04:57 > 0:04:58from His unforgiving gaze.
0:05:07 > 0:05:10The committed Puritan began to describe in painful
0:05:10 > 0:05:13detail his every thought and deed.
0:05:13 > 0:05:19His diary was the only place where in seclusion from the world,
0:05:19 > 0:05:22but in the full presence of God, sin could be washed away.
0:05:26 > 0:05:28The first character in this journey across
0:05:28 > 0:05:32the 17th century from a passive acceptance of God's will to
0:05:32 > 0:05:37an active scientific investigation of the world is the classic Puritan.
0:05:37 > 0:05:42Someone who wrote down every minute particular of his agonised life.
0:05:42 > 0:05:48A man standing for years at a time in the court of God's judgement.
0:06:05 > 0:06:11Ralph Josselin was a clergyman and farmer from Earls Colne in Essex.
0:06:11 > 0:06:16But more important than that, he was a Puritan and a diarist.
0:06:16 > 0:06:17And his diary,
0:06:17 > 0:06:22which covers his life from his birth in 1617 to the last
0:06:22 > 0:06:28harvest before his death in 1683, is the account of a particularly
0:06:28 > 0:06:33anxious, passionate and questioning man's inner life.
0:06:33 > 0:06:38But a man who was living in such a God-soaked universe
0:06:38 > 0:06:42that his reality scarcely meshes with ours.
0:06:42 > 0:06:44By his own account,
0:06:44 > 0:06:49Ralph Josselin seems to be a voice from a pre-modern world.
0:06:54 > 0:06:56But why did he write his diary,
0:06:56 > 0:07:02nearly a third of a million words, so consistently, so voluminously?
0:07:02 > 0:07:05How was his vision of himself, his god
0:07:05 > 0:07:09and his life bound up with the act of writing?
0:07:09 > 0:07:14Was writing the diary somehow the holiest thing he could do,
0:07:14 > 0:07:19the place in which he struggled to encounter the truth of existence?
0:07:19 > 0:07:22Was this 17th-century itch to write down your life,
0:07:22 > 0:07:27at least in his case, an attempt to still the often devastating
0:07:27 > 0:07:29turbulence of everyday life?
0:07:37 > 0:07:41In Ralph Josselin's world, God was everywhere.
0:07:41 > 0:07:44Nothing that happened to him or his family,
0:07:44 > 0:07:47no sign in the weather or in the animals he kept,
0:07:47 > 0:07:52no thought that went through his head, no piece of good fortune
0:07:52 > 0:07:56or bad luck, did not seem to him to be part of God's detailed design
0:07:56 > 0:07:58for the world.
0:08:03 > 0:08:06As well as looking after his church, Josselin was a very good
0:08:06 > 0:08:10and careful farmer, spending his life building up his stock,
0:08:10 > 0:08:13establishing a real estate in the world.
0:08:13 > 0:08:16And the diary he wrote is really an attempt to
0:08:16 > 0:08:20reconcile his idea of a good and loving god
0:08:20 > 0:08:24with his own life, which was one of real pain and suffering.
0:08:32 > 0:08:36When the dew fell, it was a sign of God's mercy.
0:08:37 > 0:08:41When they had plenty of fuel in the woodshed,
0:08:41 > 0:08:46this was because "the Lord was good to us in our health and peace,
0:08:46 > 0:08:52"providing warm house wood firing in the cold beyond any former years".
0:08:55 > 0:08:58In a world with no insurance policies, he looked
0:08:58 > 0:09:03everywhere for signs that this was a goodness-providing cosmos.
0:09:03 > 0:09:10"Leaping over the pails, I scratch my face, but God be praised, I had
0:09:10 > 0:09:15"no further hurt, though I might if providence had not preserved me.
0:09:15 > 0:09:17"And also in our fall,
0:09:17 > 0:09:20"when my wife and I, pulling down a tree with a rope,
0:09:20 > 0:09:25"with our pulling all fell together, but no hurt, God be praised.
0:09:25 > 0:09:30"Such falls my children have many times and yet safe."
0:09:34 > 0:09:38"Mary fell out of the parlour window with her face against the bench
0:09:38 > 0:09:42"and had no hurt. A strange providence.
0:09:42 > 0:09:45"All the wit of the world could not have given such a fall
0:09:45 > 0:09:50"and preserved from hurt. To God be the praise."
0:09:55 > 0:09:59Josselin had learned to read and write at school as a boy.
0:09:59 > 0:10:01He began his diary when he was 27,
0:10:01 > 0:10:05giving a summary of his life up until that moment.
0:10:05 > 0:10:10And then going on day by day for decades to come.
0:10:10 > 0:10:14He called it "A Thankful Observation Of Divine Providence And
0:10:14 > 0:10:19"Goodness Towards Mee And A Summary View Of My Life."
0:10:19 > 0:10:23He never writes about sex, except once, incredibly obliquely, when he
0:10:23 > 0:10:29talks about a wantonness in my heart and private converse with my wife.
0:10:29 > 0:10:33But everything else, his despairs, his hopes, his ambitions,
0:10:33 > 0:10:38his regrets, his moments of self-congratulation,
0:10:38 > 0:10:42of self-loathing, his friends, his family, his neighbours,
0:10:42 > 0:10:47his animals, his lands, his house and other buildings,
0:10:47 > 0:10:51his money, all of it finds a place in one of the most private
0:10:51 > 0:10:55documents to have survived from the 17th century.
0:10:55 > 0:11:01And all of it written in this tiny, exceptionally private handwriting.
0:11:01 > 0:11:06There's no sense of this being a performance or an advertisement.
0:11:06 > 0:11:10This is a man alone with himself and with his creator,
0:11:10 > 0:11:16the god who he refers to at one point as "my dear angrie Lorde".
0:11:19 > 0:11:24Josselin's diary, with its intense transcribing of daily life,
0:11:24 > 0:11:28is almost like an account book of the soul.
0:11:28 > 0:11:30Why did he have to write all this down?
0:11:30 > 0:11:34Why could he simply not experience the difficulties of living
0:11:34 > 0:11:38in a god-dominated world like this? What is it about actual writing?
0:11:38 > 0:11:41Well, I think the writing is about forgetting
0:11:41 > 0:11:43and an anxiety about forgetting.
0:11:43 > 0:11:47He's desperate to remember and therefore log every tiny
0:11:47 > 0:11:51little sin or indiscretion in order to come back to it and interpret it.
0:11:51 > 0:11:54But why? Why do you need to remember those details?
0:11:54 > 0:11:58Because those details, those very apparently minute trivial
0:11:58 > 0:12:02details, are the markers, the signs, of God's presence in your life.
0:12:02 > 0:12:06It's all the Puritans had... It's one of the sources that the
0:12:06 > 0:12:09Puritans had for making sense of God's presence in their life
0:12:09 > 0:12:11and if Puritans are constantly trying to discern
0:12:11 > 0:12:16whether they're elect or not, whether they're destined for heaven or not,
0:12:16 > 0:12:20they can't, like Catholics, rely on good works and move towards salvation in that way.
0:12:20 > 0:12:24They have to sit back and read what happens to them in a rather more passive way.
0:12:24 > 0:12:29So there's no such thing as luck or chance in a Puritan's life.
0:12:29 > 0:12:31Everything is significant.
0:12:31 > 0:12:35Everything is significant, from standing in a puddle of water
0:12:35 > 0:12:38to falling off your horse to that magnificent moment in the diary
0:12:38 > 0:12:41where he gets stung on the nose by a bee
0:12:41 > 0:12:46and covers it with honey and is very delighted that seems to have done the trick, in terms of the sting.
0:12:46 > 0:12:50But also, he notes the moral of that, which for him is that the Lord
0:12:50 > 0:12:54intervenes in the most apparently trivial minute ways in his life.
0:12:54 > 0:12:57Do you think you can say that in the 17th century, something
0:12:57 > 0:13:01happened to the culture which made people write diaries?
0:13:01 > 0:13:04Protestantism and Puritanism is one great catalyst.
0:13:04 > 0:13:07The events of the mid-17th century, the Civil War,
0:13:07 > 0:13:10and the sense of the world not being the way you always thought it
0:13:10 > 0:13:14might be also prompted people to think about their place in that
0:13:14 > 0:13:16- world, in a new order. - What do you mean by that?
0:13:16 > 0:13:21- The actual social change meant that people had to think of themselves in different ways?- Yeah.
0:13:21 > 0:13:24If suddenly the monarchy, which seems like an entirely natural,
0:13:24 > 0:13:29inevitable, God-given construct, is suddenly abolished,
0:13:29 > 0:13:32that must on a very profound level shake your sense of your world
0:13:32 > 0:13:35and your community and how you fit into that world.
0:13:35 > 0:13:40And also this is a period in which print publication explodes.
0:13:40 > 0:13:44There are masses of printed books and lots of short printed books on an unprecedented scale.
0:13:44 > 0:13:47People were reading more, literacy rates were rising.
0:13:47 > 0:13:51Josselin is reading all the time, we know that from the diary.
0:13:51 > 0:13:54And if you're reading books, often books about people's lives,
0:13:54 > 0:13:58that's providing you with new models for thinking about your own life.
0:13:58 > 0:14:03For Josselin, it was a precarious world, full of unknowns,
0:14:03 > 0:14:07with inadequate medicine and lives lived in consistent danger,
0:14:07 > 0:14:10at home, at work and on the farm.
0:14:12 > 0:14:14"A bullock died almost suddenly.
0:14:14 > 0:14:18"Lord, there is nothing sure but thy self."
0:14:20 > 0:14:23People fell off their horses so often,
0:14:23 > 0:14:28it was as if the entire population were riding dodgy motorbikes.
0:14:28 > 0:14:31Your average English family suffered on a daily
0:14:31 > 0:14:36and weekly basis in ways few of us now could comprehend.
0:14:39 > 0:14:43If things went wrong, and they did, that could only be
0:14:43 > 0:14:46because Josselin had done something wrong.
0:14:46 > 0:14:52As far as he was concerned, God's punishment was a sign of God's love.
0:15:00 > 0:15:05Josselin's diary gives a powerful sense of a life lived under siege.
0:15:05 > 0:15:09It's a constant, almost obsessional discussion of pain,
0:15:09 > 0:15:12sickness and death.
0:15:15 > 0:15:19Most of us now only bury our parents and grandparents.
0:15:19 > 0:15:23In the 17th century, a man my age, in his mid-50s,
0:15:23 > 0:15:27would on average have buried one in three of his children,
0:15:27 > 0:15:31one in two of his own adult siblings and probably his wife.
0:15:31 > 0:15:36It was more usual then to bury someone younger than someone
0:15:36 > 0:15:40older than you. Ralph Josselin was no exception.
0:15:40 > 0:15:44His whole life was surrounded by death.
0:15:44 > 0:15:46Before he was ten, his mother died,
0:15:46 > 0:15:50two of his sisters. His father died in his teens
0:15:50 > 0:15:53and his grandfather and his grandmother.
0:15:53 > 0:15:57In his 20s, his father-in-law, followed by an uncle,
0:15:57 > 0:15:59a cousin, another uncle,
0:15:59 > 0:16:02an aunt. In his 30s, a great uncle,
0:16:02 > 0:16:07a son, another son and a daughter.
0:16:08 > 0:16:12Nothing in our lives is comparable to this experience.
0:16:12 > 0:16:14In his 30s, it went on.
0:16:14 > 0:16:20His mother-in-law, two cousins, an uncle, another aunt.
0:16:20 > 0:16:24Death was more present in 17th-century England than
0:16:24 > 0:16:25anywhere on Earth today.
0:16:25 > 0:16:30The figures, far worse than for modern Afghanistan or even
0:16:30 > 0:16:34the poorest country in sub-Saharan Africa.
0:16:38 > 0:16:43Josselin struggled with these often devastating realities.
0:16:43 > 0:16:45How could a good God allow such suffering?
0:16:45 > 0:16:49What had he done personally to deserve it?
0:16:49 > 0:16:53Could affliction be a sign of divine love...is never clearer than in his
0:16:53 > 0:16:59terrible detailed accounts of the lingering deaths of his children.
0:16:59 > 0:17:06In February 1648, Jane gave birth to their second son, a little Ralph.
0:17:06 > 0:17:09From the beginning, he was going downhill
0:17:09 > 0:17:14and his father always refers to him in his diary as "it",
0:17:14 > 0:17:19perhaps as a way of keeping any possible grief at bay.
0:17:19 > 0:17:23"My wife persuaded herself it would die.
0:17:23 > 0:17:27"It was a very sick child indeed.
0:17:27 > 0:17:33I took my leave of it at night, not much expecting to see it alive.
0:17:33 > 0:17:36"But God continued it to morning.
0:17:36 > 0:17:42"And it seemed to me not hopeless, but it's thine, Lord.
0:17:42 > 0:17:45"I hand it to thy disposal.
0:17:45 > 0:17:51"Only I pray thee, give me and my wife a submitting heart."
0:17:51 > 0:17:57A submitting heart, the instruction of a pious man to himself not
0:17:57 > 0:18:01to question divine wisdom, but to accept it.
0:18:07 > 0:18:09"Ralph is not so tedious to us
0:18:09 > 0:18:14"because he does not shriek or cry in his fits, but lieth quietly.
0:18:16 > 0:18:19"We gave him breast milk at last and little else."
0:18:24 > 0:18:29On February the 21st, Josselin wrote these words -
0:18:30 > 0:18:34"This day, my dear babe Ralph quietly fell asleep
0:18:34 > 0:18:36"and is at rest with the Lord.
0:18:36 > 0:18:41"Oh, Lord, spare the rest of us that are living for thy name's sake,
0:18:41 > 0:18:43"we entreat thee.
0:18:43 > 0:18:48"We looked on it as a dying child three or four days.
0:18:48 > 0:18:54"It died quietly without shrieks or sobs or sad groans.
0:18:54 > 0:18:58"It breathed out the soul with nine gasps and died.
0:19:00 > 0:19:05"The Lord learn me wisdom and to know His mind in this chastisement."
0:19:15 > 0:19:20In the days that followed, he chewed over the agony of his predicament.
0:19:20 > 0:19:26What had he done to deserve this? Could God not reveal His purposes?
0:19:35 > 0:19:40"And when I had seriously considered my heart and ways,
0:19:40 > 0:19:43"and compared them with the affliction
0:19:43 > 0:19:49"and sought unto God, my thoughts often fixed on these particulars.
0:19:49 > 0:19:54"Whereas I would have given my mind to unseasonable playing at chess,
0:19:54 > 0:20:00"now it run in my thoughts, in my illness, as if I had been at chess.
0:20:00 > 0:20:04"I shall be very sparing in the use of that recreation."
0:20:07 > 0:20:09So that is the reason this Puritan minister
0:20:09 > 0:20:11gave for the death of his son.
0:20:11 > 0:20:14It wasn't that he was playing at chess or he'd been playing
0:20:14 > 0:20:17at chess on a Sunday, but that when he was ill,
0:20:17 > 0:20:21he had been thinking of playing at chess.
0:20:21 > 0:20:23That is why Ralph was dead
0:20:23 > 0:20:27and that is why the rod of chastisement had fallen.
0:20:43 > 0:20:47Josselin and people like him lived in an angry
0:20:47 > 0:20:49and unforgiving universe,
0:20:49 > 0:20:53full of argument, rage and punishment.
0:20:53 > 0:20:55In effect, he suffered the world, virtually
0:20:55 > 0:20:57impotent in front of it,
0:20:57 > 0:21:01but there were many in the 17th century who wanted to substitute
0:21:01 > 0:21:06the disputatious Christianity that filled Josselin's diary with
0:21:06 > 0:21:11curious investigation, a rational attempt to make sense of the world.
0:21:13 > 0:21:17The founding of the Royal Society in London in 1660 is often
0:21:17 > 0:21:21seen as marking the birth of science in this country.
0:21:21 > 0:21:24But in fact, that gathering of learned gents grew
0:21:24 > 0:21:28out of a world of proto-scientists and investigators,
0:21:28 > 0:21:32who had been examining, experimenting with
0:21:32 > 0:21:35and writing down what they found in the natural world for many decades.
0:21:40 > 0:21:43At the end of the 16th century,
0:21:43 > 0:21:48what was most people's attitude to nature and the material world?
0:21:48 > 0:21:50How did they approach it?
0:21:50 > 0:21:52I guess most people had a very literal
0:21:52 > 0:21:56understanding of the Bible and so what was written in the Bible
0:21:56 > 0:21:59was how they understood the natural world.
0:21:59 > 0:22:02Coupled of course with what they saw around them.
0:22:02 > 0:22:05But it was very much dependent on authority.
0:22:05 > 0:22:08What is the change that happened then during the century?
0:22:08 > 0:22:10Francis Bacon, I guess, is the key figure there.
0:22:10 > 0:22:13He was a philosopher, an English philosopher,
0:22:13 > 0:22:18writing at the beginning of the 17th century and it was really his ideas
0:22:18 > 0:22:23about experiment that sparked what we call the Scientific Revolution.
0:22:23 > 0:22:26Bacon was suggesting that we could conduct experiments to find
0:22:26 > 0:22:31out about the natural world and that meant thinking of an idea
0:22:31 > 0:22:35and then going out and testing it, so he was very keen on collecting
0:22:35 > 0:22:38a lot of information about all aspects of the natural world.
0:22:38 > 0:22:42What was he after in that? What was the point of this new method?
0:22:42 > 0:22:46I guess it was the sense that there was more to be
0:22:46 > 0:22:49discovered about the world than people knew at the time.
0:22:49 > 0:22:52It's easy to think that science is an enemy of religion,
0:22:52 > 0:22:55but that isn't really true of this period.
0:22:55 > 0:22:58No, it's certainly not true for this period.
0:22:58 > 0:23:01And in fact, a lot of the people who were doing what we think of as
0:23:01 > 0:23:05science were in fact very devout Christians, many of them
0:23:05 > 0:23:08were trained as clergymen as well. So, for example,
0:23:08 > 0:23:11someone like Robert Boyle spent his whole time talking about how
0:23:11 > 0:23:16science would support Christian ideas, that there was probably
0:23:16 > 0:23:19a limit to how much men could understand about the world
0:23:19 > 0:23:24- and beyond that limit was God. - God the great designer.- Exactly.
0:23:24 > 0:23:26So this is a copy of Robert Hooke's Micrographia,
0:23:26 > 0:23:30which we've got out of the Royal Society's library here.
0:23:30 > 0:23:32On this page, you can see his microscope.
0:23:32 > 0:23:35He made some improvements on the microscope himself.
0:23:35 > 0:23:39So this is the first illustrated book of microscopy
0:23:39 > 0:23:43and I'll just show you the first image here.
0:23:43 > 0:23:48It shows the point of a needle, a printed full stop
0:23:48 > 0:23:50and the edge of a razor.
0:23:50 > 0:23:54And he's chosen those things because to the human eye, they look
0:23:54 > 0:23:59perfect, but through the microscope, you can see that they're imperfect.
0:23:59 > 0:24:04And his point, I think, was that manmade objects,
0:24:04 > 0:24:07the more you looked at them, the less perfect they became
0:24:07 > 0:24:12but the natural objects that he looks at in the rest of the book - the closer you look at them,
0:24:12 > 0:24:16- the more beautiful and the more perfect they become.- Fantastic.
0:24:16 > 0:24:21And there is his flea. I absolutely love that.
0:24:21 > 0:24:23HE LAUGHS
0:24:23 > 0:24:27- What a magnificent thing, isn't it? - Exactly, it is magnificent.
0:24:27 > 0:24:29If you can imagine seeing it for the first time,
0:24:29 > 0:24:31it's just opening up a whole new world for people
0:24:31 > 0:24:35and I think that's what the microscope and the telescope,
0:24:35 > 0:24:38which were the two key instruments of the period, did.
0:24:38 > 0:24:41They showed people that there was a new world to be seen.
0:24:45 > 0:24:49In the rising swell of 17th-century curiosity, the urge to question
0:24:49 > 0:24:54inherited wisdom, to look at the world and note down all its oddities
0:24:54 > 0:24:59and rarities, there was one man who stood out among his contemporaries.
0:24:59 > 0:25:01His name was Sir Thomas Browne.
0:25:15 > 0:25:20Thomas Browne, a Norwich doctor, knighted late in life by Charles II,
0:25:20 > 0:25:22was a member of a new generation
0:25:22 > 0:25:25inspired by the works of Francis Bacon,
0:25:25 > 0:25:29who began to look at the world in a different way from the Josselins.
0:25:29 > 0:25:32They were going to test it,
0:25:32 > 0:25:35not relying on the inherited wisdom of the ancients,
0:25:35 > 0:25:40but using their eyes to experiment and investigate,
0:25:40 > 0:25:45teasing out the truth of the instruments of likelihood and logic.
0:25:45 > 0:25:49They were going to write the world down in a new way.
0:25:53 > 0:25:56Browne was completely entranced by the world
0:25:56 > 0:26:00in which he was lucky enough to find himself alive.
0:26:00 > 0:26:04Everything written and everything on which he chanced,
0:26:04 > 0:26:07every creature and plant of sea, river and air,
0:26:07 > 0:26:11all came under his voraciously examining eye
0:26:11 > 0:26:15and in the human being, the two most valuable qualities
0:26:15 > 0:26:18were the ability to encounter the world as it was
0:26:18 > 0:26:21and then to apply reason to it.
0:26:24 > 0:26:26As he wrote in his notebook,
0:26:26 > 0:26:30those were the two great pillars of truth, experience and solid reason.
0:26:30 > 0:26:34Restless curiosity was his watchword,
0:26:34 > 0:26:38an unending sequence of enquiries into the real world,
0:26:38 > 0:26:42gathering its materials around him like a curator of reality.
0:26:45 > 0:26:50Throughout his life, he jotted down his thoughts and observations in notebooks.
0:26:50 > 0:26:52Nature was there to be read.
0:26:52 > 0:26:55God had written in nature the meaning of the universe
0:26:55 > 0:26:59in shorthand, like a secretary.
0:26:59 > 0:27:03So much was opaque in the world but those who had eyes to see could see.
0:27:05 > 0:27:10For Browne, the meaning of the universe was apparent in nature, if you looked for it.
0:27:10 > 0:27:12And as he wrote in his notes,
0:27:12 > 0:27:16"Not in capital letters yet in stenography,
0:27:16 > 0:27:24"in shorthand which, to wiser reason, seem as luminaries in the abyss."
0:27:24 > 0:27:28If you looked hard enough at nature, you could see what it meant.
0:27:37 > 0:27:42After studying medicine in Europe, Browne returned to England
0:27:42 > 0:27:46in the early 1630s, still not 30 years old, and set up as a doctor.
0:27:49 > 0:27:53He would marry a Norfolk girl, Dorothy Mileham, in 1641,
0:27:53 > 0:27:58and have 11 children with her, six of them surviving till adulthood.
0:28:00 > 0:28:06But happy as they were, the focus of Browne's life wasn't domestic bliss.
0:28:06 > 0:28:10It was much more the wonders of the world around him.
0:28:10 > 0:28:16He and Mrs Browne lived in a house full of dazzling possibilities
0:28:16 > 0:28:20and when John Evelyn, the diarist, came to visit them in 1671,
0:28:20 > 0:28:22he described their house and garden
0:28:22 > 0:28:26being a paradise and cabinet of rarities,
0:28:26 > 0:28:31"..especially medals, books, plants, natural things,
0:28:31 > 0:28:35"a collection of eggs of all the fowls and birds he could procure.
0:28:35 > 0:28:41"Cranes, storks, eagles, et cetera, and a variety of waterfowl."
0:28:41 > 0:28:45Basically, anything Thomas Browne could get his hands on.
0:28:48 > 0:28:52Browne was intrigued by nature's detail.
0:28:52 > 0:28:57For him, it's minutiae were its most compelling ingredients.
0:28:57 > 0:29:02He wrote, "ruder heads stand amazed at those prodigious pieces of nature;
0:29:02 > 0:29:05"whales, elephants, dromedaries and camels.
0:29:05 > 0:29:11"These, I confess, are the colossus and majestic pieces of her hand.
0:29:11 > 0:29:16"But in these narrow engines, there is more curious mathematics
0:29:16 > 0:29:22"and the civility of these little citizens more neatly set forth the wisdom of their maker."
0:29:24 > 0:29:28Browne's house was absolutely stuffed with all the odds and ends
0:29:28 > 0:29:31he had collected and his working papers are, in a way,
0:29:31 > 0:29:34the written equivalent of that.
0:29:34 > 0:29:40Open-ended, nearly chaotic but driven by an endless curiosity about the natural world.
0:29:42 > 0:29:46His note-taking may have been fragmentary or anarchic
0:29:46 > 0:29:49but he became one of the century's great writers.
0:29:49 > 0:29:53He published many books which earned him a reputation throughout Europe.
0:29:57 > 0:30:01The enterprise of 17th-century science is very often
0:30:01 > 0:30:04deliberately fragmentary in its sensibility.
0:30:04 > 0:30:07It knows that it's never going to produce a system or a treatise,
0:30:07 > 0:30:11it's only going to be able to fill in the odd bit of the jigsaw
0:30:11 > 0:30:15and I think that Browne's writing very much illustrates that.
0:30:15 > 0:30:19That he will say all that it's possible to say, but no more.
0:30:19 > 0:30:23He will occasionally speculate about scientific conclusions,
0:30:23 > 0:30:25but not very often.
0:30:25 > 0:30:28But when you look at his handwriting in those notes,
0:30:28 > 0:30:32it's so fluent, so quick. There is a kind of hunger for the world.
0:30:32 > 0:30:34It's rapacious, isn't it?
0:30:34 > 0:30:37It's not meticulous like a modern scientist would be.
0:30:37 > 0:30:39If you look at the original notebooks,
0:30:39 > 0:30:42the ones that are in the order in which he wrote them,
0:30:42 > 0:30:44they are a complete jumble of stuff
0:30:44 > 0:30:49and there'll be one page that is a letter to his son about ostriches
0:30:49 > 0:30:52and the next page will be about church bells or about echoes
0:30:52 > 0:30:55or about what you can see from the top of Norwich Cathedral
0:30:55 > 0:30:59so it really goes everywhere and he doesn't organise his knowledge,
0:30:59 > 0:31:01at least at that level.
0:31:01 > 0:31:04It's not that he is actually living in anarchy.
0:31:04 > 0:31:06I...
0:31:06 > 0:31:10Well, I think there's a certain anarchy of observation
0:31:10 > 0:31:13and I think that's part of, that's part of the deal.
0:31:13 > 0:31:16That's what you're doing as a 17th-century scientist.
0:31:16 > 0:31:20Nobody said, "You can't work on that because it's not quite botany and you're working on botany."
0:31:20 > 0:31:24If something interests you because it reminds you of botany, you will go and look at it.
0:31:24 > 0:31:27And doesn't that feel so much more exciting
0:31:27 > 0:31:30and alive than later cut and dried science
0:31:30 > 0:31:34which is so shut within little cabins, confined areas like that.
0:31:34 > 0:31:37This is a great, roaming mind.
0:31:37 > 0:31:40He's a very untrammelled writer.
0:31:40 > 0:31:42That's probably what makes him good.
0:31:42 > 0:31:47There's no, there is no structure that he is bound to observe
0:31:47 > 0:31:50and so his works probably evolve
0:31:50 > 0:31:56in ways that are slightly different from everybody else's because he's unshackled in that way.
0:31:56 > 0:32:00Can you tell what sort of man he was from his writing?
0:32:00 > 0:32:03I think you get a very strong sense of Browne
0:32:03 > 0:32:11as first of all quite modest but also somebody who is sure of the things that he is sure of.
0:32:11 > 0:32:15So I think the sense that you get of him as a highly, highly intelligent,
0:32:15 > 0:32:18highly learned man who wears his learning very lightly.
0:32:18 > 0:32:21- And you love him.- I love him. HE LAUGHS
0:32:21 > 0:32:24- I want to be him. - I think you are him!
0:32:28 > 0:32:31As the new world he was discovering was largely uncharted,
0:32:31 > 0:32:38he even found he needed new language to describe and communicate his observations.
0:32:44 > 0:32:48He was an incredibly inventive maker of new words,
0:32:48 > 0:32:50dragging them into English from Latin and Greek
0:32:50 > 0:32:55and adding to the word pile used by other 17th-century writers.
0:32:55 > 0:32:58Over 100 of the words now in the Oxford dictionary
0:32:58 > 0:33:01were used by him for the first time.
0:33:01 > 0:33:06Antediluvian, approximate, aquiline, analogous,
0:33:06 > 0:33:11bisect, carnivorous, coexistence, coma, cryptography,
0:33:11 > 0:33:16compensate, computer, cylindrical, disruption, electricity,
0:33:16 > 0:33:22exhaustion, follicle, generator, gymnastics, hallucination,
0:33:22 > 0:33:29herbaceous, insecurity, jocularity, literary, locomotion, medical,
0:33:29 > 0:33:32mucous, prostate, protuberant,
0:33:32 > 0:33:36polarity, precocious, pubescent,
0:33:36 > 0:33:40suicide, ulterior and ultimate.
0:33:40 > 0:33:44He was a word-making machine.
0:33:47 > 0:33:51This life of curiosity and invention found its most popular outlet
0:33:51 > 0:33:56in his bestseller, Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Vulgar Errors.
0:33:56 > 0:34:00First published in 1646 but reprinted many times,
0:34:00 > 0:34:04it was that classic 17th-century thing,
0:34:04 > 0:34:08an encyclopaedia of wrong ideas.
0:34:10 > 0:34:14People had always said that badgers were lopsided
0:34:14 > 0:34:17so that they could run along hillsides better.
0:34:17 > 0:34:20But were they? Clearly not.
0:34:25 > 0:34:31It was always said that toads and spiders hated each other
0:34:31 > 0:34:34but was that true? Browne had to do an experiment.
0:34:34 > 0:34:39He put a toad in a jar with several spiders and watched what happened.
0:34:39 > 0:34:41This is what he wrote in his notebook,
0:34:41 > 0:34:45"having in a glass included a toad with several spiders,
0:34:45 > 0:34:50"we beheld the spiders without resistance to sit upon his head
0:34:50 > 0:34:53"and pass over all his body."
0:34:53 > 0:34:56So obviously, the spiders didn't hate the toad.
0:34:56 > 0:35:00"But what, at last, the toad upon advantage,
0:35:00 > 0:35:02"he swallowed down."
0:35:02 > 0:35:05Toads clearly ate spiders.
0:35:05 > 0:35:08"And that in a few hours unto the number of seven."
0:35:08 > 0:35:12So toads didn't hate spiders, they had them for lunch.
0:35:16 > 0:35:20Perhaps the oddest of all Browne's encounters with the natural world
0:35:20 > 0:35:24came when he somehow got hold of an ostrich to study.
0:35:24 > 0:35:28The specimen, which arrived in his Norwich garden,
0:35:28 > 0:35:30stood over seven feet tall.
0:35:32 > 0:35:36It soon ate up all the gilliflowers and the tulip leaves
0:35:36 > 0:35:40and everything that was green; lettuce, endives, sorrel.
0:35:40 > 0:35:42It would feed on oats and barley,
0:35:42 > 0:35:45that's what we've got in this bucket, here.
0:35:45 > 0:35:50He spent hours observing these really strange creatures
0:35:50 > 0:35:54and by observing their strangeness, almost brought them
0:35:54 > 0:35:58within the compass of knowledge that everyone could share.
0:35:58 > 0:36:00What do you think?
0:36:00 > 0:36:05Browne had a particular fascination with what the ostrich would eat.
0:36:05 > 0:36:08He managed to persuade his ostrich to eat an onion
0:36:08 > 0:36:10and watched the onion descending, spiral ways,
0:36:10 > 0:36:13down the strange gullet of the ostrich.
0:36:13 > 0:36:18He tried to make her drink a pint of beer. Have some beer!
0:36:19 > 0:36:22I think, with not much success.
0:36:22 > 0:36:26Olives, and also iron wrapped in pastry,
0:36:26 > 0:36:31which is one of these old myths that ostriches like eating iron
0:36:31 > 0:36:34because that's the only reason their feathers were so large
0:36:34 > 0:36:38and needless to say, his ostrich only ate the pastry
0:36:38 > 0:36:45and left the iron behind so this was another truth proved by experiment.
0:36:46 > 0:36:48And that was something that went
0:36:48 > 0:36:51into the next edition of Pseudodoxia Epidemica.
0:36:51 > 0:36:55Some of the ignorance of the past dispersed
0:36:55 > 0:36:57and some of the light of knowledge
0:36:57 > 0:37:00brought into the world of the ostrich.
0:37:05 > 0:37:08Sir Thomas Browne was friends with many others
0:37:08 > 0:37:12who were feeling their way into this new understanding of nature
0:37:12 > 0:37:16but for all that, and perhaps because he was busy with his practice as a Norwich doctor,
0:37:16 > 0:37:19he was essentially working alone.
0:37:19 > 0:37:22But Browne had a contemporary whose life was dedicated
0:37:22 > 0:37:27to making connections between the investigating minds around him.
0:37:28 > 0:37:31His name was Samuel Hartlib.
0:37:45 > 0:37:48Samuel Hartlib, part German, part English,
0:37:48 > 0:37:52lived here in London in a house probably a little poorer than this
0:37:52 > 0:37:57in Duke's Place, hopelessly improvident and living hand-to-mouth
0:37:57 > 0:38:00with his virtually destitute family.
0:38:00 > 0:38:02For him, the written word was all.
0:38:02 > 0:38:05Letter-writing, information-gathering, spreading knowledge.
0:38:05 > 0:38:07Not for personal gain.
0:38:07 > 0:38:11In fact, he largely bankrupted himself with his various schemes,
0:38:11 > 0:38:14but because he believed that a good society
0:38:14 > 0:38:17depended on what he called correspondency.
0:38:17 > 0:38:19Linkages, networks.
0:38:19 > 0:38:24The most fruitful exchange of information that could be devised.
0:38:24 > 0:38:27He grasped the key fact of the century,
0:38:27 > 0:38:33that communication lay at the heart of the new civilisation.
0:38:33 > 0:38:37To a good Puritan like Hartlib,
0:38:37 > 0:38:41this burgeoning world of knowledge was seen as part of God's purpose,
0:38:41 > 0:38:45a sign that England, particularly in the 1650s,
0:38:45 > 0:38:48as Cromwell's new government began to rid the country
0:38:48 > 0:38:51of its old Royalist ways,
0:38:51 > 0:38:54was on the brink of a new heaven and a new Earth.
0:38:56 > 0:38:59It was time for a communications revolution
0:38:59 > 0:39:02and a moment of great optimism.
0:39:02 > 0:39:04Hartlib himself wrote,
0:39:04 > 0:39:08"Instead of fear, a great door of hope is open to us
0:39:08 > 0:39:11"that we shall be firmly and fully settled
0:39:11 > 0:39:15"in all abundance of peace and truth."
0:39:15 > 0:39:20He would gather knowledge and spread it through letters and printed books.
0:39:20 > 0:39:22He would be a kind of knowledge fountain,
0:39:22 > 0:39:26improving lives in all kinds of practical ways,
0:39:26 > 0:39:30in winemaking, in farming, in gardening
0:39:30 > 0:39:34and even in scent distilling, an idea he got from Italy.
0:39:34 > 0:39:37He had lots of new inventions too,
0:39:37 > 0:39:39a whole scheme for a new kind of ink
0:39:39 > 0:39:43which could make multiple copies from a single written sheet.
0:39:43 > 0:39:47Another idea, an actual multi-copy writing machine
0:39:47 > 0:39:50attached to the pen of a single scribe,
0:39:50 > 0:39:53generating several sheets as he wrote.
0:39:53 > 0:39:58Even a new kind of seed dressing that he called a philosophical dung,
0:39:58 > 0:40:04that would create huge and unheard of miraculous yields,
0:40:04 > 0:40:07Hartlib was going to change the world.
0:40:13 > 0:40:17He became the great intelligencer of Europe,
0:40:17 > 0:40:20working alongside teams of scribes and scholars,
0:40:20 > 0:40:23writing to anyone who might have information to offer him
0:40:23 > 0:40:27all across England and Ireland, from Transylvania to Germany,
0:40:27 > 0:40:29Virginia and the Caribbean,
0:40:29 > 0:40:34he felt that communication would make man happy.
0:40:34 > 0:40:36As he wrote in 1651,
0:40:36 > 0:40:42"It is nothing but the narrowness of our spirits makes us miserable."
0:40:47 > 0:40:50The classic product of the Hartlib knowledge factory
0:40:50 > 0:40:54was a book called The Reformed Commonwealth Of Bees.
0:40:56 > 0:40:58Published in London in 1655,
0:40:58 > 0:41:04it was a compendium of all kinds of knowledge and expertise on the keeping of bees.
0:41:08 > 0:41:12For Hartlib, it was the perfect subject for his method.
0:41:12 > 0:41:17You can see that a 17th-century man looking at this perfect organisation
0:41:17 > 0:41:21would think of it as a model of the way people could be.
0:41:21 > 0:41:25He could get all kinds of information from England, Europe,
0:41:25 > 0:41:28even the other side of the Atlantic,
0:41:28 > 0:41:32and bring it all together for the common good.
0:41:32 > 0:41:35This was writing by the people for the people.
0:41:35 > 0:41:39It's a chaotic ragbag of a book but that's partly the point.
0:41:39 > 0:41:43Hartlib didn't believe in singular authority.
0:41:43 > 0:41:47Everybody, every bee, should and could be able to contribute.
0:41:48 > 0:41:52Mr Carew in Cornwall recommended burying a dead calf
0:41:52 > 0:41:57and then exhuming it and collecting the bees that gathered in the rotting corpse.
0:41:57 > 0:41:59A Dr Brown was adamant
0:41:59 > 0:42:04that if you had his newly-invented multi-storey beehive,
0:42:04 > 0:42:06you didn't have to kill your bees to collect your honey.
0:42:06 > 0:42:09If you followed this instruction,
0:42:09 > 0:42:13the bees would live happy in their own little commonwealth.
0:42:13 > 0:42:17Your bees shall always be provided of a sweet dwelling,
0:42:17 > 0:42:19large enough for themselves and their increase
0:42:19 > 0:42:23and whereby they shall easily be kept together, in all probability,
0:42:23 > 0:42:26by God's blessing and your own moderate care,
0:42:26 > 0:42:28you shall have multitudes of bees
0:42:28 > 0:42:31and consequently, abundance of honey.
0:42:33 > 0:42:36The contributors to the new commonwealth of bees
0:42:36 > 0:42:39were driven by a new kind of idealistic thinking.
0:42:39 > 0:42:43If men could use their senses to get a true grasp of nature
0:42:43 > 0:42:47and their reason to understand how the world works
0:42:47 > 0:42:51and revelation in the words of the Bible to interpret God's will,
0:42:51 > 0:42:56there was a good chance of making a good society here in England
0:42:56 > 0:42:58and the way to do that, to tell each other.
0:42:58 > 0:43:01To spread the word.
0:43:02 > 0:43:05To help build this utopian commonwealth of happy,
0:43:05 > 0:43:10well-informed citizens, Hartlib hatched an ambitious plan.
0:43:10 > 0:43:12Parliament had triumphed in the Civil War,
0:43:12 > 0:43:16imprisoning and executing King Charles I in 1649,
0:43:16 > 0:43:19establishing the only Republican government
0:43:19 > 0:43:21this country has ever known.
0:43:21 > 0:43:23Hartlib felt the time was right
0:43:23 > 0:43:26to set up one of the most extraordinary schemes
0:43:26 > 0:43:30in 17th-century England, an Office of Address.
0:43:31 > 0:43:34It was to be a combination of employment agency,
0:43:34 > 0:43:38counselling centre, commodities exchange,
0:43:38 > 0:43:40marriage bureau, patent office,
0:43:40 > 0:43:45public library and a living, ever-revisable encyclopaedia.
0:43:46 > 0:43:48Connection was all.
0:43:51 > 0:43:54He wanted, "..a centre and meeting place for advices,
0:43:54 > 0:44:00"of proposals, of treaties and all manner of intellectual rarities,
0:44:00 > 0:44:04"freely to be given and received to and from,
0:44:04 > 0:44:08"by and for all such as may think themselves concerned."
0:44:08 > 0:44:11Just like the Royal Exchange,
0:44:11 > 0:44:14where English merchants had derived huge material benefit
0:44:14 > 0:44:19from being able to trade whatever anyone needed or wanted,
0:44:19 > 0:44:21Hartlib's Office of Address
0:44:21 > 0:44:26was going to give England exactly what it needed - info.
0:44:30 > 0:44:35You could go there and have any questions that you liked answered.
0:44:35 > 0:44:40This was his idea. It's like Google, like a search engine, in a way.
0:44:40 > 0:44:46- Brilliant idea, isn't it? Kind of crazy.- It's absolutely crazy.
0:44:46 > 0:44:49Well, you know, beautifully idealistic, you could say.
0:44:49 > 0:44:53Hartlib was devoted to, if I can put it bluntly,
0:44:53 > 0:44:56creating a kind of paradise on Earth.
0:44:56 > 0:44:59He believed that before the last judgement would take place,
0:44:59 > 0:45:01a universal reformation had to occur
0:45:01 > 0:45:07in which humankind can be lifted from its baser instincts
0:45:07 > 0:45:09to a more sublime level.
0:45:09 > 0:45:13And that's why it was important, at least Hartlib felt it important,
0:45:13 > 0:45:17that all his energies should be put in to pursuing this universal Reformation.
0:45:17 > 0:45:19He's not unique in that.
0:45:19 > 0:45:23All the great 17th-century scientists, if you can call them that,
0:45:23 > 0:45:26are people who are deeply involved with the idea
0:45:26 > 0:45:28that this is God's world
0:45:28 > 0:45:32and that real human understanding of the world
0:45:32 > 0:45:36is a route to a sort of godly world.
0:45:36 > 0:45:40I think it becomes, however, more latent with these figures
0:45:40 > 0:45:44and as the century wears on, as experimental science rises,
0:45:44 > 0:45:49there seems to be more of a separation between the two aspects.
0:45:49 > 0:45:52Of course you could be, and you probably would be,
0:45:52 > 0:45:56deeply interested in millenarian ideas or apocalyptic ideas
0:45:56 > 0:45:59if you were a natural philosopher in the 17th century.
0:45:59 > 0:46:03But for Hartlib, this was the defining blueprint
0:46:03 > 0:46:06towards which all projects had their end
0:46:06 > 0:46:08and all innovations had their end.
0:46:08 > 0:46:11And I think that's what separates him.
0:46:11 > 0:46:14How essential was the written word to his life?
0:46:14 > 0:46:18It was absolutely essential. He did a lot of writing.
0:46:18 > 0:46:21He spent, in one letter he mentioned spending, you know,
0:46:21 > 0:46:26more than his yearly salary on costs of letters
0:46:26 > 0:46:29of corresponding with people.
0:46:29 > 0:46:33His whole life and project is inconceivable without writing,
0:46:33 > 0:46:36without, in fact, the level of literacy
0:46:36 > 0:46:40- that was around in the mid-17th century.- Absolutely. Absolutely.
0:46:40 > 0:46:42For him it was about communicating information.
0:46:42 > 0:46:45Initially within his networks but ultimately
0:46:45 > 0:46:47for communicating it to the public at large.
0:46:47 > 0:46:51- Do you think he was just really naive?- Yeah.
0:46:51 > 0:46:53He's almost a tragic figure.
0:46:53 > 0:46:56That's how I kind of see him, in a way.
0:46:56 > 0:46:59He was thwarted at every turn, almost, in England,
0:46:59 > 0:47:04by changes of government and things, frankly, beyond his control.
0:47:04 > 0:47:09And I think his persistence really makes him a lovable figure.
0:47:10 > 0:47:13But for all his zeal and determination,
0:47:13 > 0:47:16Hartlib's big idea was doomed.
0:47:16 > 0:47:20One pilot office was set up in Threadneedle Street in London
0:47:20 > 0:47:27but on the whole, Hartlib's scheme for a universal information service failed to take off,
0:47:27 > 0:47:32and this was because of the completely chaotic conditions in Cromwellian London.
0:47:32 > 0:47:35Different factions of the Parliamentary party
0:47:35 > 0:47:39at each other's throats, footpads on the roads making travel dangerous,
0:47:39 > 0:47:44demobbed soldiers clamouring for the food and money they'd never been given.
0:47:44 > 0:47:47A total breakdown of local justice.
0:47:47 > 0:47:55It just wasn't the situation to set up a network of sweet, communal idealistic information centres.
0:47:59 > 0:48:02After the collapse of the Cromwellian Commonwealth
0:48:02 > 0:48:06and the restoration of Charles II in 1660,
0:48:06 > 0:48:10the idealism of that Republican moment gave way to the
0:48:10 > 0:48:14place-seeking and corruption of the Restoration court.
0:48:14 > 0:48:16Samuel Hartlib's time was up.
0:48:17 > 0:48:21After 1660, his whole world fell apart.
0:48:21 > 0:48:24All his connections with the Cromwellian regime
0:48:24 > 0:48:26really meant he was yesterday's story.
0:48:26 > 0:48:28The Royalists weren't interested in him.
0:48:28 > 0:48:31His eyes were troubling him, his kidneys were hell,
0:48:31 > 0:48:37he was drinking sulphuric acid to try and cure the kidney stones.
0:48:37 > 0:48:39In the end, they killed him.
0:48:39 > 0:48:42But the only thing left of his great monument
0:48:42 > 0:48:45was his mound of correspondence.
0:48:57 > 0:49:01The final figure in this cavalcade of 17th-century idealists
0:49:01 > 0:49:04and dreamers is a deeply isolated man
0:49:04 > 0:49:07who was intent on discovering nothing less
0:49:07 > 0:49:09than the structure of the universe.
0:49:09 > 0:49:14Who pored over four million words in some of the most precious notebooks to have survived in this country.
0:49:14 > 0:49:19The jottings and revelations of the century's greatest man.
0:49:41 > 0:49:44This wasn't going to be a cabinet of curiosities,
0:49:44 > 0:49:48a collection of oddities and rarities in the manner of Thomas Browne,
0:49:48 > 0:49:53nor a blind Josselin-style wondering about the mind of God,
0:49:53 > 0:49:58but an attempt to understand the underlying principles of the universe.
0:49:58 > 0:50:01This notebook was an agenda for revolution.
0:50:05 > 0:50:08Newton was exchanging the world of inherited wisdom
0:50:08 > 0:50:10for observation and measurement.
0:50:10 > 0:50:14He wrote down 45 headings under which he was going to arrange
0:50:14 > 0:50:17the truths he was setting out to discover.
0:50:17 > 0:50:21The nature of matter and time and place and motion.
0:50:21 > 0:50:27The cosmic order, rarity, fluidity, softness, violent motion,
0:50:27 > 0:50:31light, colours, vision, sensation.
0:50:31 > 0:50:35Every statement in these pages is an implicit experiment
0:50:35 > 0:50:38and the notebook was the key instrument.
0:50:38 > 0:50:42Only there would experiments be described, theories tested,
0:50:42 > 0:50:45hypotheses proved.
0:50:45 > 0:50:49The notebook is where Newton's life was going to come to fruition.
0:50:52 > 0:50:57And it was here in 1666, at his yeoman farmer family home at Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire,
0:50:57 > 0:51:00on the run from the plague in Cambridge,
0:51:00 > 0:51:05that he conducted his most famous optics and light experiments.
0:51:07 > 0:51:10For Newton, it was vitally important first
0:51:10 > 0:51:14to know how he saw what he saw, and so,
0:51:14 > 0:51:19armed with his trusty notebook, he started to explore his own vision.
0:51:19 > 0:51:22He was incredibly reckless with his own experiments.
0:51:22 > 0:51:26He took a bodkin, a sort of blunt darning needle
0:51:26 > 0:51:29and as he wrote about it in his notebook, put it,
0:51:29 > 0:51:32"..betwixt my eye and the bone,
0:51:32 > 0:51:35"as near to the back side of my eye as I could
0:51:35 > 0:51:38"and pressing my eye with the end of it..."
0:51:38 > 0:51:42That is with the bodkin inside the eye!
0:51:42 > 0:51:47"..there appeared several white, dark and coloured circles."
0:51:47 > 0:51:51And his drawing here shows this great lump of a steel thing
0:51:51 > 0:51:54shoved into the eye and then these concentric circles
0:51:54 > 0:51:59that this distortion of the eyeball made him see.
0:51:59 > 0:52:01How he didn't go blind I just don't know.
0:52:05 > 0:52:07But the thing he wanted to prove most
0:52:07 > 0:52:10was his intuition about the nature of light itself.
0:52:14 > 0:52:19Ah, so this is the great experiment room. Newton's light laboratory.
0:52:19 > 0:52:26Before Newton, they thought that white light was the real thing.
0:52:27 > 0:52:30- That light was essentially white. - Yes.
0:52:30 > 0:52:34People thought that white light was pure,
0:52:34 > 0:52:37homogeneous and God-given
0:52:37 > 0:52:43and that it was being somehow mixed up, it was being dyed or coloured.
0:52:43 > 0:52:46So this is a page from Newton's own notebook
0:52:46 > 0:52:50that he kept at the time, experiments with prism.
0:52:50 > 0:52:54And number seven, "Taking a prism into a dark room..."
0:52:54 > 0:53:00which we do indeed have here, "..into which the sun shone through only one little round hole
0:53:00 > 0:53:04"and laying it close to the hole in such a manner that the rays,
0:53:04 > 0:53:10"being equally refracted, cast colours on the opposite wall."
0:53:12 > 0:53:15- And now we are illuminating something there.- There it is! There it is!
0:53:15 > 0:53:18We've got the spectrum over there. Quite nice.
0:53:18 > 0:53:22- That is exactly what Newton would have seen.- Yes, pretty well.
0:53:22 > 0:53:24But then that didn't prove anything really,
0:53:24 > 0:53:28- because people believed what the prism was doing was actually colouring the light.- Right.
0:53:28 > 0:53:33The critical thing was the next bit, the second part of the experiment.
0:53:33 > 0:53:36To test his theory is that the prism itself was not somehow
0:53:36 > 0:53:41adding colours to white light, Newton brought in a second prism.
0:53:41 > 0:53:44- Now we've got it. Now we've got it.- Ay, ay, ay!
0:53:44 > 0:53:45And what we're doing here
0:53:45 > 0:53:49is if we can just introduce the prism into the red light
0:53:49 > 0:53:52and the red light is here, you can see where my finger's touching it,
0:53:52 > 0:53:54we've only got red light going into the prism now
0:53:54 > 0:54:00so we're getting red light because we're only intercepting red light.
0:54:00 > 0:54:02So what it has shown is that light is,
0:54:02 > 0:54:05the colours in the light are of their own nature.
0:54:05 > 0:54:08They are essentially homogeneous,
0:54:08 > 0:54:11whereas a white light is heterogeneous, or mixed.
0:54:11 > 0:54:13And this, this is the great,
0:54:13 > 0:54:16- this is the experiment he called the crucial experiment.- Yes.
0:54:16 > 0:54:19This is the crucial experiment which had never been done by anybody else before.
0:54:19 > 0:54:23So it completely changes the way in which people look at light.
0:54:23 > 0:54:27That white light is no longer the original,
0:54:27 > 0:54:30regal source from the sun.
0:54:30 > 0:54:33Because of this you can know that white light
0:54:33 > 0:54:36- is a muddle of coloured lights. - Exactly.
0:54:36 > 0:54:41This is like truth appearing in a dark room in Lincolnshire, isn't it?
0:54:41 > 0:54:44- Yes, yes, yes. That's very well put. - Beautiful.- Yes.
0:54:45 > 0:54:49Always accompanying Newton's experiments were copious notes.
0:54:51 > 0:54:56Can we read anything of him, of the man, from what you see in this page?
0:54:56 > 0:55:00They seem to indicate that he had this phenomenally penetrating desire
0:55:00 > 0:55:04to understand, and everything he did was to try and penetrate
0:55:04 > 0:55:06more deeply into his subject.
0:55:06 > 0:55:09He had an intellect which was almost vicious.
0:55:09 > 0:55:12Once he got hold of a problem, he would concentrate on it
0:55:12 > 0:55:17to such an extent that in the end, it would yield to him.
0:55:17 > 0:55:20It really reflects his intensity of intellect.
0:55:20 > 0:55:23He said of himself that he didn't look upon himself
0:55:23 > 0:55:26as having genius but what he could do was concentrate
0:55:26 > 0:55:30and it's the concentration that you see in everything he ever did,
0:55:30 > 0:55:32particularly his writing.
0:55:32 > 0:55:35And it's difficult to see how one person writing 24 hours a day
0:55:35 > 0:55:38could produce this vast amount of written work.
0:55:38 > 0:55:40But it doesn't seem to be anything
0:55:40 > 0:55:43that wants to communicate with anyone else.
0:55:43 > 0:55:47- This is him talking to himself. - Yeah, I think that's probably right.
0:55:47 > 0:55:50When you look, for instance, with the problem with colour,
0:55:50 > 0:55:53he found that when he did try and communicate,
0:55:53 > 0:55:56people were so opposed to his ideas
0:55:56 > 0:55:59that he said he would give up trying to publish
0:55:59 > 0:56:02and he would just get on and find out for himself.
0:56:02 > 0:56:04One of the major things that he was interested in
0:56:04 > 0:56:07was finding out where God intervened.
0:56:07 > 0:56:11He was obsessed about trying to find out exactly what part God
0:56:11 > 0:56:13was playing in the physical universe.
0:56:13 > 0:56:17So the notebook is really a correspondence
0:56:17 > 0:56:21- between him and truth, or him and his god.- Yes, yes, yes.
0:56:21 > 0:56:25I don't think that it was for public consumption
0:56:25 > 0:56:28until people discovered what he had done
0:56:28 > 0:56:31and then he was certainly flushed out of his study.
0:56:33 > 0:56:36Newton had arrived at a kind of reality
0:56:36 > 0:56:40and the whole modern history of radiation flows from that moment.
0:56:40 > 0:56:42And in this notebook too,
0:56:42 > 0:56:46Newton's writing had arrived at a new maturity
0:56:46 > 0:56:49so the notebook is not just a vessel for observation
0:56:49 > 0:56:52but an instrument for understanding.
0:56:54 > 0:56:58Where Browne used writing to report on the details of the world,
0:56:58 > 0:57:03an essential Baconian task, and not think about it much beyond that,
0:57:03 > 0:57:07and Hartlib used writing to promote a good society,
0:57:07 > 0:57:11Newton used it to think about the nature of the world
0:57:11 > 0:57:17and, using mathematics, to tease out its underlying structure.
0:57:20 > 0:57:23By 1700, England was beginning to realise
0:57:23 > 0:57:27that Newton had described, with arithmetical precision,
0:57:27 > 0:57:29the workings of the universe.
0:57:30 > 0:57:33God was no longer a capricious deity
0:57:33 > 0:57:36who taunted people with his cruelties.
0:57:36 > 0:57:40His rationality was now evident in a universe
0:57:40 > 0:57:43that was observable and measurable through telescope
0:57:43 > 0:57:46and microscope, barometer and thermometer.
0:57:48 > 0:57:51The 17th century is such an exciting time.
0:57:51 > 0:57:55Partly for its strangeness, its muddle of maths and magic,
0:57:55 > 0:57:59its fierce beliefs and high idealism,
0:57:59 > 0:58:04its long and intricate struggle to understand the material world.
0:58:04 > 0:58:08But also because its people are so knowable through what they wrote.
0:58:08 > 0:58:13Their journals, diaries, letters and notebooks.
0:58:13 > 0:58:16It's the first great age of self depiction.
0:58:20 > 0:58:22In the next programme,
0:58:22 > 0:58:25I'll explore how the literacy revolution of the 17th century
0:58:25 > 0:58:30spread its energies and ambitions out across the Atlantic Ocean,
0:58:30 > 0:58:35allowing people to experience an expanding world.
0:59:03 > 0:59:05Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd