Daniel Joseph Boorstin - The Discoverers

BOOKS BY DANIEL J. BOORSTIN
The Discoverers
*
The Creators
*
The Seekers
*
The Americans: The Colonial Experience
The Americans: The National Experience
The Americans: The Democratic Experience
*
The Mysterious Science of the Law
The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson
The Genius of American Politics
America and the Image of Europe
The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America
The Decline of Radicalism
The Sociology of the Absurd
Democracy and Its Discontents
The Republic of Technology
The Exploring Spirit
The Republic of Letters
Hidden History
Cleopatras Nose
The Daniel J. Boorstin Reader
The Landmark History of the American People (with Ruth F. Boorstin)
A History of the United States (with Brooks M. Kelley)

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, February 1985

Copyright 1983 by Daniel J. Boorstin
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Random House, Inc., in 1983.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Boorstin, Daniel J. (Daniel Joseph), 1914
The discoverers.

1. CivilizationHistory. 2. Discoveries (in geography) 3. ScienceHistory. I. Title.
CB69.B66 1985 909 84-40056
eISBN: 978-0-307-77355-5

v3.1

FOR RUTH

Nay, the same Solomon the king, although he excelled in the glory of treasure and magnificent buildings, of shipping and navigation, of service and attendance, of fame and renown, and the like, yet he maketh no claim to any of those glories, but only to the glory of inquisition of truth; for so he saith expressly, The glory of God is to conceal a thing, but the glory of the king is to find it out; as if, according to the innocent play of children, the Divine Majesty took delight to hide his works, to the end to have them found out; and as if kings could not obtain a greater honour than to be Gods play-fellows in that game.

FRANCIS BACON , The Advancement of Learning (1605)

M Y hero is Man the Discoverer. The world we now view from the literate Westthe vistas of time, the land and the seas, the heavenly bodies and our own bodies, the plants and animals, history and human societies past and presenthad to be opened for us by countless Columbuses. In the deep recesses of the past, they remain anonymous. As we come closer to the present they emerge into the light of history, a cast of characters as varied as human nature. Discoveries become episodes of biography, unpredictable as the new worlds the discoverers opened to us.

The obstacles to discoverythe illusions of knowledgeare also part of our story. Only against the forgotten backdrop of the received common sense and myths of their time can we begin to sense the courage, the rashness, the heroic and imaginative thrusts of the great discoverers. They had to battle against the current facts and dogmas of the learned. I have tried to recapture those illusionsabout the earth, the continents and the seas before Columbus and Balboa, Magellan and Captain Cook, about the heavens before Copernicus and Galileo and Kepler, about the human body before Paracelsus and Vesalius and Harvey, about plants and animals before Ray and Linnaeus, Darwin and Pasteur, about the past before Petrarch and Winckelmann, Thomsen and Schliemann, about wealth before Adam Smith and Keynes, about the physical world and the atom before Newton and Dalton and Faraday, Clerk Maxwell and Einstein.

I have asked some unfamiliar questions. Why didnt the Chinese discover Europe or America? Why didnt the Arabs circumnavigate Africa and the world? Why did it take so long for people to learn that the earth goes around the sun? Why did people begin to believe that there are species of plants and animals? Why were the facts of prehistory and the discovery of the progress of civilization so slow in coming?

I have included the story of only a few crucial inventionsthe clock, the compass, the telescope and the microscope, the printing press and movable typewhich have been essential instruments of discovery. I have not told the story of the shaping of governments, the waging of wars, the rise and fall of empires. I have not chronicled culture, the story of Man the Creator, of architecture, painting, sculpture, music, and literature, much as these have multiplied the delights of human experience. My focus remains on mankinds need to knowto know what is out there.

The plan of the book as a whole is chronological. In detail it is a shingle scheme. Each of the fifteen Parts overlaps chronologically with its predecessor as the story advances from antiquity to the present. I begin with Time, the most elusive and mysterious of the primitive dimensions of experience. Then I turn to Western mans widening vistas of the Earth and the Seas. On to Naturethe physical objects in the heavens and on earth, plants and animals, the human body and its processes. Finally to Society, finding that the human past was not what had been imagined, to the self-discovery of Man the Discoverer, and to the Dark Continents in the atom.

This is a story without end. All the world is still an America. The most promising words ever written on the maps of human knowledge are terra incognitaunknown territory.

TIME

Time is the greatest innovator.

FRANCIS BACON, OF INNOVATIONS (1625)

The first grand discovery was time, the landscape of experience. Only by marking off months, weeks, and years, days and hours, minutes and seconds, would mankind be liberated from the cyclical monotony of nature. The flow of shadows, sand, and water, and time itself, translated into the clocks staccato, became a useful measure of mans movements across the planet. The discoveries of time and of space would become one continuous dimension. Communities of time would bring the first communities of knowledge, ways to share discovery, a common frontier on the unknown.

THE
HEAVENLY
EMPIRE

God did not create the planets and stars with the intention that they should dominate man, but that they, like other creatures, should obey and serve him.

PARACELSUS , Concerning the Nature of Things (c. 1541)

F ROM far-northwest Greenland to the southernmost tip of Patagonia, people hail the new moona time for singing and praying, eating and drinking. Eskimos spread a feast, their sorcerers perform, they extinguish lamps and exchange women. African Bushmen chant a prayer: Young Moon! Hail, hail, Young Moon! In the light of the moon everyone wants to dance. And the moon has other virtues. The ancient German communities, Tacitus reported nearly two thousand years ago, held their meetings at new or full moon, the seasons most auspicious for beginning business.