Alexander Wragge-Morley's Aesthetic Science presents a new perspective on how science was being constructed during the seventeenth century at the Royal Society of London through the relationship between art/aesthetics and science. Instead of following the traditional narrative that science was an enterprise completely guided by reason, Wragge-Morley focuses on how beauty, perception and rhetoric were crucial in the development of science at the Royal Society. This is argued over five chapters, the first three of which are related to the relationship between theology and science, while the others speak to the importance of rhetoric in the moment of presenting science to the public.
Wragge-Morley starts with an important concept used by the natural philosophers at the Royal Society during the seventeenth century: physico-theology. Whereas natural theology used deduction as a form of acquiring knowledge, physico-theology used perception for the construction of knowledge. As the natural philosopher of the Royal Society, John Ray, explained in his book Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation (1691), perception can access nature's design as a way to understand God's creation. With the adoption of empiricism by the Royal Society as a form of obtaining knowledge, natural philosophers thought that through perception of nature, humans could find evidence for the existence of God. In that sense, the physico-theology was completely different from other types of understanding the relationship between the humane and the divine.
Aesthetic Science touches upon the importance of imagination in discovering the laws of nature. Some of the members of the Royal Society, like Robert Boyle, believed the impossibility of reason to access to the mind of God. In his book Discourse of Things above Reason (1681), Boyle argued that humans could not access and analyse all the intricacies of God's work as they lacked the capacity and experience, especially concerning those human elements that are immaterial like the human soul. However, Boyle believed that imagination, in some way, could be a bridge between human intellect and God's mind. Some elements in nature, like atoms, could not be seen by the human eye. However, that was not a problem for postulating that humans could understand how atoms interacted by watching how the perceptible characteristics of objects changed. In the first part of his book Three Physico-theological Discourses (1693), Ray mentioned that he was impressed with the chemical experiments made by Boyle because those experiments showed how chemical reactions could affect the sensible properties of the objects that were worked upon, showing how perception could indirectly access the imperceptible realm.
Wragge-Morley argues that beauty is central to fully comprehending the development of scientific understanding at the Royal Society. During the seventeenth century, the members of the Royal Society were interested in the study of architectural design. The study of architecture by the members of the Royal Society was linked with the study of nature. At first glance these fields of study seem unrelated, yet the members of the Royal Society linked the aesthetic element of ruins with the objects that could be perceived in nature. In Micrographia (1665) Robert Hooke explained that the failure in human sensory perception was caused by the original sin and argued that the microscope could be an instrument of both sensory and moral regeneration. Using the microscope to study snowflakes, Hooke saw some geometrical irregularities that emerged from them and analysed them as ruins – a degradation of perfect design. Such ugliness was contrasted by Hooke with other snowflakes that he created by freezing his own urine under controlled circumstances. In those newly created crystals, Hooke believed that he saw the beauty that God wanted to transmit when he created the objects of nature.
What the members of the Royal Society found is that time affects nature's objects as it does the buildings designed by architects. The beliefs of the Royal Society members were close to those of Inigo Jones. In The Most Notable Antiquity (1655), Jones wanted to re-create how Stonehenge was just after it was built, showing what Stonehenge's architect wanted to transmit in terms of design and beauty. In that sense, architects wanted to re-create the original beauty of the building, comparative to the case of the members of the Royal Society, who wanted to discover the original beauty God created in nature's objects. Beauty was the main motivation for the members of the Royal Society to compare architecture with nature.
Wragge-Morley explores how rhetoric is used in presenting natural history. Some members of the Royal Society, principally Ray, held that images were more powerful than words when transmitting emotion to readers, and that images could provide a subjective experience that could produce more complex feelings than words. Ray applied his view when he wanted to add illustrations of plants in his book Historia Plantarum (1686–1704). Ray proposed using images as a way for shaking the reader's emotions – an intellectual energy related to the philosophical concepts of energeia.
Aesthetic Science concludes by highlighting the lack of scholarship surrounding the relationship between taste and science. In that sense, Wragge-Morley wants to add science to the category of other arts such as painting, theatre and architecture. It is ‘good’ taste that led the development of aesthetics, and Aesthetic Science is a book that adeptly makes connections between aesthetics and science, making the latter form of knowledge part of the arts.
