Plurality of Worlds

The Origins of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant

STEVEN J. DICK
U.S. Naval Observatory, Washington, D.C.

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS 1984

London Cambridge New York Neiv Rochelle Melbourne Sydney

5
CARTESIAN VORTICES, THE INFINITE UNIVERSE, AND THE PLURALITY OF SOLAR SYSTEMS
It seems to me that the mystery of the incarnation and all the other advantages which God bestowed on man do not preclude the possibility that he might have granted infinitely many others, very great, to an infinity of other creatures. And, not even inferring from this that there may be intelligent creatures on the stars or elsewhere, I still do not see that there would be any reason by which to prove that there are not; but I always leave these questions, once posed, suspended, preferring not to deny and not to affirm anything. Descartes (164J)1 If the fix'd Stars are so many Suns, and our Sun the centre of a Vortex that turns round him, why may not every fix'd Star be the centre of a Vortex that turns round the fix'd Stari Our Sun enlightens the Planets; why may not every fix'd Star have Planets to which they give light? Fontenelle (1686)2

Even as the aged Galileo faced the condemnation of the Church in Rome following the publication of his Dialogue in 1632, and as Gassendi was turning from Aristotelianism to atomism, the young French philosopher Ren Descartes (15961650) was completing the first sketch of his new physics and cosmology. In every way this cosmology was more innovative and more revolutionary than Galileo's: it included a modified Copernicanism spread throughout an infinite universe; furthermore it embodied not only a new physics and metaphysics but also new principles of epistemology and methodology. The publication of Descartes's Principia philo-sopbiae [Principles of Philosophy] in 1644 signaled the birth of the first complete physical system since that propounded by Aristotle 2,000 years earlier. Although subsequently superseded by Newtonian mechanics, the Cartesian system caught the imagination and withstood the scrutiny of many a natural philosopher in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The old atomist problem of more than one cosmos received a direct answer in the Cartesian system. The essence of that system, as set forth in the Principles, was the identification of extension 106

l'I UH A I I IV (II' S O L A R SYS I I MS

and m a t t e r ; lo ilu- mind ol Descartes, it was a self-evident or "clear and d i s t i n c t " idea that whatever was extended was a material body. The atomist conception of void space was an impossible one; such purported "space" was obviously extended, and thus was not empty space at all, but had to be matter according to Descartes's precept. Two principles in Descartes's treatise made the controversy over other kosmoi a closed case, if one accepted this basic idea of the identity of extension and matter. In Principle 2i in Part II Descartes held that the extension of the world was indefinite, thus reserving the term "infinite" only for God. He could not clearly conceive any limit to the world, therefore there was no limit, a classic illustration of the application of his principle that a "clear and distinct idea" must be true. Principle 22 asserted the uniformity of matter that must result, and concluded that "even were there an infinitude of worlds, they would all be formed of this matter": From which it follows that there cannot be a plurality of worlds, because we clearly perceive that the matter whose nature consists in its being an extended substance only, now occupies all the imaginable spaces where these other worlds could alone be, and we cannot find in ourselves the idea of any other matter.3 For Aristotle the problem was not enough matter: beyond our finite cosmos there was no matter out of which another world might be composed; indeed there was neither space, nor void, nor time. For Descartes the problem was too much matter: the plenum filled all the infinite spaces, forming one continuous world. There was no room for another world in the sense of an Aristotelian cosmos.4 While the Aristotelian cosmos was thus destroyed and the possibility of more than one cosmos precluded, the third part of the Principles set forth a cosmology that would add a new dimension to the plurality of worlds tradition. Descartes opened his section on the visible astronomical world by asserting the greatness and power of the Creator, and by cautioning that man cannot presume to know for what ends all things were created, except that in all probability they were not created for man himself. It is necessary to keep this nonanthropocentric view in mind "in order that we
107

PLURALITY OF WORLDS

may philosophise correctly in this matter."5 With characteristic selfconfidence Descartes proceeded to the task. The first 41 of 157 principles of Descartes's cosmology discussed the distances and sizes of the sun, moon, planets, and fixed stars (principles 5-8), along with their physical nature (9-13), and apparent motions (1441). Here Descartes appears as a modified Copernican, although he claimed to "deny the movement of the earth more carefully than Copernicus, and more truthfully than Tycho," 6 because he believed the heavens to be composed of a subtle matter with respect to which the denser Earth and planets were at rest. He clearly distinguished between the planets and the sun, the former shining by reflected light and the latter by its own light. In principles 9 and 13 Descartes identified the sun and the fixed stars as being of precisely the same nature, the apparent differences being caused only by distance. That the stars were suns was an idea championed by Bruno and admitted by Kepler and others. But Descartes was the first to incorporate it into a widely acceptable physical system and to utilize it as a prominent axiom of the system. The middle set of principles (4293) set forth the details of the vortex theory, a uniquely Cartesian concept that emerged as a direct and inescapable consequence of motion in a plenum. In a universe completely filled with particles, the movement of one particle required another to move out of its path, and yet another to move into that vacated position, in a continuous process. In this way a circulation was set up, a vortex (or tourbillon, in the French translation of the Latin), each of which had a center, such as that of the sun in our planetary system. Here was a physical mechanism that might be used to explain the movements of the planets in the solar system defined by Kepler's laws (which were, however, unknown to Descartes at this time).7 But our sun was only one such center; the fixed stars, which were identical in nature to the sun, were also centers of their respective vortices. This group of principles also set forth the Cartesian cosmogony, the means by which, from one uniform type of matter, three "elements" were separated from each other by the vortical motion of the particles, a motion that God had impressed upon them in the beginning. These elements composed the various parts of the visible world. The most subtle was luminous and formed the sun and
108

TI II M A I I IV Ol

SO I, AK S Y S TI MS

fixed stars, the second element was transparent and diffused throughout the heavens, and the third constituted the Earth, planets, and comets, and was opaque. Descartes expounded the details of planetary and stellar formation, the nature of light, and the flow of material between vortices. His concluding set of principles presented specific explanations of phenomena that could be derived from the vortex theory, including sunspots (94101), new stars (119-39), and planetary motions (140-57). The final product that emerged from Part III of the Principles was epitomized in a diagram (see Figure 7) that appeared again and again in Descartes's treatise and in subsequent discussions, until it must have been as familiar to the seventeenth-century reader as the earlier schematized concentric spheres of the Aristotelian cosmos. It depicted a universe of vortices, and at the center of each vortex was a fixed star. As our sun had precisely the same status as the other fixed stars, these stars could not be construed as being imbedded in a sphere, because the sun itself clearly was not. Instead, the sun was "completely surrounded by a vast space, where there is no fixed star at all, in the same way that each fixed star is very distant from all the others, and each one of these fixed stars is as distant from us and from the sun as from each other. So that, if S for example is the Sun, F and f will be the fixed stars, and we can conceive others without number, above, below, and beyond the plane of that figure, scattered throughout all the dimensions of space."8 This system propounded by Descartes set the stage for the introduction of new strains of argument into the discussion of the plurality of worlds. The Cartesian plenum that precluded the possibility of more than one cosmos at the same time gave rise directly to an infinite number of large vortices, each of which was analogous to our solar system. It was the inexorable motion of the plenum that initially divided all matter into particles, and it was mechanical necessity that in turn forced these particles to rotate around centers now visible as fixed stars. Given Cartesian principles operative in an infinite universe, orthodox Cartesians must arrive at the same conclusion as Descartes that "there are as many 1 oy

!> 4 rfS

PLURALITY OF SOLAR SYSTEMS

Figure 7 Descartes' vortex cosmology from his Principia philosophia (1644).

different vortice as there are now stars in the world."9 Small wonder that the Cartesian system has often been viewed as the chief vehicle

by which the idea of a plurality of worlds was spread in the seventeenth century.10 Descartes's emphasis on a nonanthropocentric outlook at the opening of his cosmological section gave the reader every reason to consider each vortex of matter as analogous in every detail to our solar system. Both this metaphysical precept and the doctrine of the uniformity of Nature's laws embraced by Descartes pointed to vortices not only endowed with planets but also with inhabited "planets. Given the obvious example of our solar system, the mechanical necessity for the universal formation of planets would seem just as necessary as the initial formation of rotating vortices of particulate matter. Compelling though the inference from vortices to an infinity of inhabited planets might be, it was not one that Descartes made in the Principles itself or in his private correspondence. In particular, Descartes's cosmogony allowed for the formation of planets from the stars of other vortices: "It may also happen that a whole vortex, in which some such fixed star is contained, is absorbed by other surrounding vortices and its star drawn into one of those vortices

turns into a planet or comet."11 In this way, referring to the familiar Cartesian diagram (Figure 7), Descartes held that star N could be captured by vortex H. Depending on its speed compared to the revolving particles of the plenum, the captured star could travel along the fringes of vortex H and into other vortices, following the path marked 12345678, and appear as a comet, or it could descend further into the vortex until its speed was equal to that of the surrounding particles, and become a planet. How often this happened was anybody's guess, and Descartes did not venture a guess, much less explicitly assert the existence of an infinite number of planets, inhabited or otherwise. It was not for lack of interest that Descartes failed to discuss other worlds. In his early correspondence he had expressed an interest in determining with improved telescopes "whether there are animals on the moon," and at the end of his life still wondered whether "perhaps elsewhere there exist innumerable other creatures of higher quality than ourselves."12 Descartes's pregnant silence on the issue of an infinite number of planets reflects his sen111

PLURALITY Of WORLDS sitivity to the fate of Bruno it Rome less than a half-century before and of Galileo at Rome a dozen years before. If the condemnation of Galileo had led Descartes to withhold the first sketch of his cosmology because it championed Copernicanism,13 the explicit assertion of an infinite number of planets was clearly even more dangerous. In spite of Descartes's silence, the obvious implications of his vortex cosmology were not lost to many of his readers. A case in point was his friend and patron Christina, Queen of Sweden, who was disturbed by the implication that a Cartesian must "most probably hold that all these stars have inhabitants, or, still better, that they have earths around them, full of creatures more intelligent and better than he."14 Descartes's guarded reply followed in 1647: It seems to me that the mystery of the incarnation and all the other advantages which God bestowed on man do not preclude the possibility that he might have granted infinitely many others, very great, to an infinity of other creatures. And, not even inferring from this that there may be intelligent creatures on the stars or elsewhere, I still do not see that there would be any reason by which to prove that there are not; but I always leave these questions, once posed, suspended, preferring not to deny and not to affirm anything.15 Thus, the question of other worlds was left to Descartes's followers to ponder. By all accounts it was Holland, the long-time refuge of Descartes from his native France, that at the outset was most receptive to his ideas. In spite of official prohibitions and the protestations of orthodox theologians and peripatetics, the two great universities of Holland responded strongly to Descartes, and became the sprouts from which Cartesianism sent forth its most vigorous branches. Already at Utrecht in the early 1640s, Reneri taught the Discours and the Essais, and his successor Henry de Roy (Regius) taught the Meditations and the Principles. Later at Leiden under Herreboord and Jean de Raey, Cartesianism found an open forum, if not always a friendly one. After a period of initial resistance, and despite a reaction from peripatetics around 1670,

PLURALITY OF SOLAR SYSTEMS Cartesian ideas enjoyed great popularity in Dutch universities until the end of the century when they began to give way to Newtonian concepts.16 An early and influential Dutch Cartesian treatise was the Fundamenta physices [Foundations of Natural Philosophy] of Henry Regius, which appeared in 1646. Its numerous editions contained the standard exposition of Cartesian vortices, but placed no emphasis on the implications for an infinity of potentially inhabited planets. The reluctance of Regius to intimate even the existence of extrasolar planets is graphically illustrated in a novel diagram that depicts Descartes's extension of the Copernican system. 17 Undoubtedly for the clarification of those still unfamiliar with the meaning of the standard picture of vortices, Regius showed first the usual Copernican scheme encircled by fixed stars, and then each of the fixed stars themselves encircled in order to indicate that they too were systems (see Figure 8). But while the path of each planet in our solar system was clearly shown, the analogy to the other systems was not made complete by the addition of planetary paths within their indicated boundaries, as it easily could have been had Regius wanted to stress the point in what was, after all, a textbook. Although the uniformity of Nature's laws pointed to precisely analogous systems, when Regius was faced with making a more explicit comparison between our solar system and others, he not only placed our system at the center of the world but also refused to allow each of the other systems their respective planets. The same is true of perhaps the sole orthodox English Cartesian, Antoine LeGrand, who in his Institutio philosophiae [Fundamentals of Philosophy] adopted Regius's diagram unchanged.18 In France, where the universities were stringently controlled by the ecclesiastical authorities with political sanctions, the official condemnation of Cartesian doctrines was enforced in the universities. Outside them, however, enforcement was not possible. In private gatherings and in the academies, Cartesianism flourished. Marin Mersenne was a faithful friend of Descartes, and through him and dedicated adherents like Jacques Rohault, Claude Gad-roys, Cordemoy, and Pierre-Sylvain Rgis, the Cartesian philosophy was widely disseminated throughout France.19 The treatise of Regius influenced Jacques Rohault's Trait de

112

113

IM UK Al II V Ol S O I AU S V S I I M S (physique (1671), the most popular and widespread of Cartesian treatises, and one typical of t he treatment given to Descartes's cosmology by his followers. Cosmology was only a small part of the treatise, which included physics and chemistry, geology and meteorology, and physiology. Although Rohault placed more emphasis upon expounding the actual phenomena of motion of the various heavenly bodies than did many of his Cartesian counterparts, in compact form he nevertheless touched upon all the major points basic to the Cartesian cosmology. The section on the nature of the celestial bodies {astrae) especially contained many of the ideas that directly bear upon the concept of other worlds. It appeared from observation, Rohault stressed, that the moon was a rugged body, and similarly "we cannot but think that the planets are very like our earth," because they all shine by light reflected from the sun, and because "the pretended smoothness of the superficies of the planets does not agree with experience."20 The sun shines by its own light, and "the fixed stars are so many suns, placed in different parts of the world"; the detailed explication of the nature and properties of the sun thus served to explain the nature and properties of all the stars.21 Just as our sun was formed in the center of its vortex when matter of the first element was forced there by mechanical principles, so, he emphasized, would other stars be formed at the center of their respective vortices. Nowhere, however, did Rohault stress that planets circle their respective suns. A similar treatment will be found routinely in the cosmological sections of most Cartesian treatises, and Rohault's is typical in that these ideas basic to the Cartesian cosmology are no further developed than they were in Descartes's Principles. Far from stressing the idea of a universe filled with inhabited planets circling an infinite number of suns, Rohault concluded his section on the Figure 8 The Copernican system (top) and its Cartesian extension (bottom) as it appeared in the textbook of the Dutch Cartesian Henry Regius, Philosophia naturalis (1654), and in the textbook of the English Cartesian Antoine LeGrand, An Entire Body of Philosophy, according to the Principles of the famous Renate Descartes (1694). The lower diagram indicates a belief in a plurality of systems, but does not depict planetary orbits. 115

PLURALITY Of WORLDS nature of the celestial bodies with the remark that he would not even "venture to affirm that there are living Creatures in the moon, or that they generate in the same manner as upon the Earth, because though this be a thing possible, yet it is also possible that it may not be so."22 Even a French treatise devoted exclusively to an exposition of the Cartesian cosmology, Claude Gadroys's Le systme du monde (1675) did not champion the idea of a plurality, much less an infinity, of Earthlike worlds. As a good Copernican and Cartesian, Gadroys was only too happy to admit that the planets were "hard, opaque, and solid bodies."23 But to populate them with inhabitants was another matter. In his discussion of the moon Gadroys acknowledged that Anaxagoras, Democritus, Heraclides, Pythagoras, "and several moderns among whom are Galileo and Kepler," had held the moon to be a world with its own plains, seas, forests, and mountains like the Earth. Gadroys himself, however, offered only that "this is indeed an extraordinary opinion, but for all those who have seen that body, it is not one to be rejected," 24 an openminded but hardly enthusiastic statement. In contrast to the Cartesian caution, in Germany - where orthodox Cartesianism never gained a foothold - several prominent thinkers embraced the belief that the fixed stars were surrounded by planets and spread throughout an infinite universe. The Iter exstaticum coeleste [Ecstatic Celestial Journey], 1656, by the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher explicitly characterized the fixed stars as suns with encircling planets, although it denied inhabitants even to the planets of our solar system and to the moon.25 And Otto von Guericke, famous for the "Magdeburg experiments" proving the existence of a vacuum, devoted a section of his Exprimenta nova (1672) to an examination and endorsement of Kircher's view of other planetary systems.26 Von Guericke also noted the possibility of an inhabited moon and planets, and emphasized (following Galileo) that any inhabitants would not be men, but rather diverse creatures beyond all our imaginings.27 But von Guericke denied Descartes's equation of extension and matter, and instead traced his ideas to Galileo, Kepler, Antonius de Rheita, Mersenne, Bruno, and Nicholas of Cusa. At the same time he cited Descartes's statement from the Principles that God's omnipotence in these matters could not be underestimated.
116

PLURALITY OF SOLAR SYSTEMS

How does one explain the reluctance of Cartesians to promote a concept toward which their physical system so clearly pointed? Although most of Descartes's disciples did not accept his theory of planetary formation,28 the infinite number of planets still beckoned from the uniformity of Nature's laws. The answer must be found chiefly in the ongoing assessment of the proper balance between the Scriptural objections, recognized by the early Coperni-cans, and the doctrine of God's omnipotence, which pointed directly to an infinitely populated universe. Among early Cartesians Scripture apparently prevailed over Divine omnipotence on this particular issue. Moreover, the absence even of a discussion of the theological factors indicates that the majority of the followers of Descartes, no less than Descartes himself, simply did not wish this issue to become associated with Cartesian cosmology, which had enough intrinsic difficulties. That Descartes's followers were not entirely successful in divorcing Cartesian cosmology from the issue of other solar systems is apparent from the treatises on the plurality of worlds written in the half-century following the publication of the Principles. Only two years after that work appeared, Henry More's Democritus Platonissans, or, An Essay upon the Infinity of Worlds (1646) enthusiastically urged upon the English-speaking world the belief in an infinite number of inhabited planets. We have seen in chapter 3 that More, who was among the earliest to embrace important elements of Cartesian thought,29 extended Descartes's belief that every star was a sun to the doctrine that every star was the center of a solar system, and explicitly held that Descartes's cosmology led to a belief in infinite worlds. The mechanical details of vortices and of planetary formation, however, were unimportant at More's level of argument. What was important was his acceptance of the cosmological framework of an infinite plenum, which, together with other principles found in Descartes and the atomists, brought More face to face with an infinite number of solar systems, even though it had initially seemed a "monstrous" opinion and one with "much difficultie and seeming inconsistencie." Eleven years after More's treatise, Descartes's countryman Pierre Borei published his Discours nouveau prouvant la pluralit des mondes [A New Discourse Proving the Plurality of Worlds], 1657. Borei, a practicing physician noted for his collection of nat117

PLURALITY OF WORLDS ural and historical artifacts from his native Castres, became physician to the king in 1653 and wrote treatises on the origin of the telescope (1655), on the life of Descartes (1656), and on observations made with the microscope (1656). In 1674 he became an active member of the Acadmie des Sciences.30 The Discours nouveau was so titled in deference to a work that had appeared in 1655 called Le monde dans la lune, by I. de la Montagne, which in reality was a translation of Wilkins's 1638 Discovery of a World in the Moone. This was undoubtedly the book referred to in the preface, which Borei claimed had prompted the publication of his own work, ready for the printer in 1648 but published only in 1657 at the demand of those who had seen Borel's manuscript and judged it much superior to Wilkins's recent translation into French. Under such pressure Borei depicted himself as having finally broken his silence, in contrast to "many of the most subtle minds of France," who "have similar opinions, but keep them secret for fear of being ridiculed by the vulgar ignorant."31 Borel's treatise contained more than would offend simply the vulgar ignorant. Like More, he deduced from Copernican heli-ocentricity that the planets within our own solar system were earths, and the Earth a planet. Having weighed the arguments of Galileo, Kepler, Campanella, and Wilkins, of the ancient atomists, and even of the HermeticPlatonic philosophy found in Bruno and More, Borei argued that this belief was in accord with Scripture and was compatible with the nature of the Creator. Moreover, he embraced the idea of the "infinite spaces of the Aire, wherein are lodged an infinite number of great Globes of diverse natures, or inhabited by several living Creatures."32 In spite of these similarities with the Democritus Platonissans, there is a crucial difference between it and the Discours. Borei was still a man between two worlds: the old anthropocentric Aristotelian world, and the emerging infinite universe with all of its implications for man's diminished stature.33 Nowhere is this more evident than in Borel's belief that the infinite number of inhabited globes of the universe are all enlightened by our central sun.34 The idea of fixed stars as suns, so prominent in the third part of Des-cartes's Principles and in More's treatise, is not to be found in the Discours. Nowhere are Descartes's vortices hinted at, because

PLURALITY OF SOLAR SYSTEMS Borel's universe Is not one of a plurality of systems, but simply of an infinite number, of Earthlike bodies. The influence of Descartes's vortices on Borei is thus negligible, but the influence of his infinite universe is profound. Borei was compelled to his vision of an infinity of inhabited worlds not by the physical principles of Descartes's infinite mechanical universe, but rather by a metaphysical principle born of the Copernican revolution and thoroughly embraced by Descartes: Borei could not persuade himself to believe that the immense number of visible stars, much larger in size than the Earth, were created for man alone: "natural reason doth sufficiently disswade us to believe, that the greater things serve the lesser; and that those that are the noblest, serve the vilest."35 The Copernican theory had jolted man from the center of the solar system, made the Earth one of many planets, and increased the size of the universe to the point where Descartes had declared it effectively infinite. The search for purpose in such an immense universe was a powerful idea that led many directly to the concept of inhabited planets, even if, like Borei, one did not accept the vortex cosmology. In addition, Descartes's call in his Discourse on Method for the use of reason freed from all prejudice undoubtedly influenced Borei, whose admiration for the thinker was evident in his biography of Descartes. In opening his treatise on the plurality of worlds, Borei, too, decried "this age wherein men live but by imitation, wherein learned men are despised . . . wherein no new proposition can be admitted . . .," and thrust an eloquent challenge at his reader: Why open ye not your eyes, O ye learned and wise men? And why awake ye not out of your slumber, and deep sleep? Awake up the eyes of your Understanding and Reason towards the Heavens, contemplating the wonderful things thereof.36 If Borei had not read or accepted the Principles, a reference to Descartes in the treatise shows that Borei had read the Discourse on Method (1637) and the accompanying essays, which had been published for ten years when Borei began to write his treatise.37 Borel's challenge represented not merely the argument currently

118

119