Enchanting automata: Wilkins and the wonder of workmanship

ABSTRACT

Since Aristotle, it has been common to understand wonder as a psychological state characterized by an absence of rational understanding. Drawing on this idea, a number of historians have suggested that the wonder which had long characterized the experience of automata, declined in the early modern period alongside the increased availability of theoretical treatises on mechanics. This article seeks to challenge this view by examining the relationship between rational and practical modes of technical understanding in John Wilkins’ Mathematicall Magick (1648). My aim is to show that a close reading of the second book of the Mathematicall Magick reveals an alternative conception of wonder as an experience of skilled workmanship that both tolerates theoretical understanding and is increased through practical experience. It will be my claim that the conception of technical wonder which emerges from Wilkin’s descriptions of automata, reveals how the concept of Aristotelian wonder is too reductive to capture the variety of ways in which mechanical technology was experienced in early modern England.

KEYWORDS:

• Technology
• wonder
• automata
• tacit knowledge
• Wilkins
• skill

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Sorin Bangu, Harald Johannessen and anonymous reviewers at Technology and Culture for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes on contributor

Mark Thomas Young is a PhD candidate in the philosophy department at the University of Bergen and is currently working on a dissertation in the history and philosophy of technology. His research concerns scientific instruments, craft practices and tacit knowledge in the history of science, with a particular focus on the early modern period.

Notes

1. Aristotle, Metaphysics A, 982b.

2. Nightingale, Spectacles of Truth, 254.

3. Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 118.

4. F. Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, 8.

5. Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, 355.

6. Bynum, “Wonder”, 4.

7. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 983a12.

8. Aristotle, Mechanical Problems, 848a34.

9. Sawday, Engines of the Imagination, 186.

10. Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, 233.

11. Dee, “Maethematical Praeface”.

12. Della Porta, Natural Magick, 4.

13. Bates, Mysteryes of Nature and Art, 35.

14. De Caus, New and Rare Inventions, 30.

15. Leurechon, “By Way of Advertisement”.

16. Descartes, “The Search for Truth”, 405.

17. Grafton, Magic and Technology, 43.

18. Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 113.

19. Zetterberg, “The Mistaking of ‘the Mathematicks’”.

20. Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, 36.

21. Mayr, Authority, Liberty and Automatic Machinery, 55.

22. Eamon, “Technology as Magic”, 172.

23. Sherwood, “Magic and Mechanics in Medieval Fiction”, 574.

24. de Vaucanson, Account of the Mechanism of an Automaton, 22.

25. Vermeir, “Wonder, Magic and Natural Philosophy”, 51.

26. Wilkins, “To the Reader”, in Mathematicall Magick.

27. Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 112.

28. R. Bacon, “Letter on Secret Works of Art and Nature”.

29. Marr, “Gentile curiosité”, 150.

30. See, for example, Truitt, Medieval Robots; Kang, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines.

31. See, for example, Schaffer, “Enlightened Automata”; Wolfe, Humanism, Machinery and Renaissance Literature.

32. Popplow, “Why Draw Pictures of Machines?”, 46.

33. Epstein, “Transferring Technical Knowledge”, 53.

34. Ferguson, Engineering and the Mind's Eye, 58.

35. Smith, “What is a Secret?”, 50.

36. Fisk, Working Knowledge, 27.

37. Somers, “The ‘Misteries’ of Property”, 74.

38. Dear, “The Meanings of Experience”, 109.

39. Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 54.

40. Cuomo, Pappus of Alexandria, 105.

41. Del Rio, Investigations into Magic, 51.

42. Wilkins, Mathematicall Magick, 9.

43. Ibid., 278.

44. Ibid., 225.

45. Ibid., 288.

46. Ibid., 290.

47. Ibid., 276.

48. Ibid., 222.

49. Ibid.

50. Truitt, Medieval Robots, 117.

51. Grafton, “The Devil as Automaton”, 50.

52. Wilkins, Mathematicall Magick, 295.

53. Wolfe, Humanism, Machinery and Renaissance Literature, 196.

54. Wilkins, Mathematicall Magick, 133.

55. Ibid., 225.

56. Wolfe, Humanism, Machinery and Renaissance Literature, 196.

57. Wilkins, Mathematicall Magick, 171.

58. Ibid.

59. Ibid., 172.

60. Cardano, De Subtilitate, 840.

61. Zinner, Regiomontanus: His Life and Works, 135.

62. Wilkins, Mathematicall Magick, 191.

63. Wilkins, Principals and Duties of Natural Religion, 80.

64. Browne, Religio Medici, 25.

65. Houghton, “The English Virtuoso”, 197.

66. Sawday, Engines of the Imagination, 243.

67. Derham, Astro-Theology, 106.

68. Browne, Religio Medici, 27.

69. Wilkins, Principals and Duties of Natural Religion, 80.

70. Wilkins, “To the Reader”, in Mathematicall Magick.

71. Wilkins, Mathematicall Magick, 192.

72. Ibid., 197.

73. Van Dyck and Vermeir, “Varieties of Wonder”, 485.

74. Gell, “Technology of Enchantment”, 163.

75. Ibid., 166.

76. Ibid., 169.

77. Ibid., 172.

78. Ibid., 167.

79. Ibid., 181.

80. Ibid., 173.

81. Wolfe, Humanism, Machinery and Renaissance Literature, 64.

82. Lightsey, Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture, 1.

83. Bynum, “Wonder”, 14.

84. Sherwood, “Magic and Mechanics in Medieval Fiction”, 591.

85. Grafton, Magic and Technology, 48.

86. Stafford, Artful Science.