§37. Sapid Secrets
Galileo felt the allure of secrets hidden in nature, and thought himself pretty good at finding them out. “Particular secrets, as useful as they are curious and admirable, I have in great plenty” he tantalized a correspondent.
Nor did the passion for secrets wither with the success of Galileo's mechanical approach to natural philosophy. On the contrary, it evolved into a new paradigm of empiricism. Carlo Ginsberg names it venatic empiricism, from the Latin venatio, to hunt prey. Venatic reasoning is a version of the medical indicative sign, supplemented by the subtle consilience of many complementary signs, referring one to another and to their hidden source. In isolation, data may appear vague or insignificant, but in the hunter's mind hints add up. Ginsberg exaggerates only a little when he describes hunters squatting on the ground, studying their quarry's spoor, as engaged in “the oldest act in the intellectual history of the human race.” “Man,” he says,has been a hunter for thousands of years. In the course of countless chases he learned to reconstruct the shapes and movements of his invisible prey from tracks on the ground, broken branches, excrements, tufts of hair, entangled feathers, stagnating odors. He learned to sniff out, record, interpret, and classify such infinitesimal traces of trails as spittle. He learned how to execute complex mental operations with lightning speed, in the depth of a forest or in a prairie with its hidden dangers.105
Galileo led natural philosophers in a completely different direction. He did not hunt an elusive adversary; instead he teased out patterns in mathematically described data. “There could be no greater contrast than between the Galilean physicist professionally deaf to sounds and insensitive to tastes and odors [‘which I do not believe are anything more than names outside of the living animal,’ Galileo, Assayer], and his contemporary, the physician, who hazarded diagnosis by placing his ear on wheezy chests or by sniffing at feces and tasting urine.” The Lycenians knew their game when they let allegiance to Della Porta lapse and gravitated to Galileo’s rising star.106
Pierre Gassendi, a seventeenth-century admirer of Galileo, styled himself venator naturae. The image also appealed to Joseph Glanvill, praising the Royal Society.
“’Tis a pleasant spectacle to behold the shifts, windings, and unexpected Capprichios of distressed Nature, when pursued by a close and well managed Experiment.” And Robert Hooke. “Man is not indued with an intuitive Faculty, to see farther into the Nature of things at first, than the Superficies and out-sides, and so must go a long way about before he can be able to behold the Internal nature of things.” He thought we required a new logic, essentially that of Francis Bacon, and artificial “helps to the senses” like Hooke’s microscope.107The venatio image—“a sagacity and a kind of hunting by scent rather than a science”—strongly appealed to Francis Bacon. The goal of the new learning he advocates is “to discover and bring into sight all that is hidden and secret in the world.” He expects venatio-type inquiry to produce the essential discoveries that his new Organon is designed to formalize. Without these hints, the art of experiments would be even longer than it is. Common sense and untutored perception reveal nature’s outer appearance only, but the experienced hunter apprehends clues and tracks down their non-evident causes. Nature’s secrets, keys to the power of generation and corruption, are hidden beyond the reach of ordinary perception, and have to be hunted out by extraordinary means. Specialized instruments, as well as ingeniously contrived experiments, may be enrolled to, as Bacon put it, “twist the lion’s tail.”108