Chapter 12 London Cambridge AD 1688

Ideas change the world.We are familiar with this sentence, but it is not universal.It was most fully realized only in seventeenth-century England. It is really hard to find such bright examples anywhere other than England in the 17th century.Copernicus changed the worldview of intellectuals, but ordinary people did not understand the importance of the center of the earth and the center of the sun; the thinkers of the Enlightenment brought the French Revolution, but after the revolution they returned to the empire and the capricious republic, and did not realize the rational state. ; Kant and Hegel pushed philosophy to the peak of history, but except for theoretical philosophers, other peoples do not feel close to it.These thinkers in all these countries have had a great influence on philosophy, but are often confined to the field of philosophy.

Only England in the 17th century was different.Two men changed the world, so much so that even an illiterate farmer and a weaver woman can discover the world changed by their ideas.One changed human knowledge, created modern physics and science, and laid the physical foundation of the Industrial Revolution; the other changed human politics, created democratic theory, and established the democratic system and the United States today.They didn't live to see it come to fruition, but their narratives have illuminated it all.They changed not only the face of the world, but also the way of thinking of the world, until today.

This is thought shining into reality. Someone said: God said, let there be light, so there was Newton. In our history tour, we have repeatedly mentioned three major stages of European history: ancient Greco-Roman, medieval, modern.The fall of the Roman Empire was the first turning of the pages of history: Antiquity ended and the Middle Ages began.This time we come to the eve of the second page-turning.This is our second visit to the UK, and it is also a heavyweight visit. Newton was the key figure in this page-turning. Isaac Newton was born in 1642.Galileo died the year he was born.Like the reincarnation of the soul, Galileo's mantle was passed on to Newton.Newton was born in an ordinary yeoman family. His father had a piece of parish land and a decent manor.Her mother was born in a lower-class squire family and received a little basic education.Young Isaac was gifted at an early age, "serious, taciturn, and thoughtful," fond of John Barth's The Mysteries of Nature and Art, and enjoyed building windmills with the village windmiller.As all famous people have to go through when they are remembered after becoming famous, many people look at Newton when he was a child, and think that he already possessed "all the qualities to be a great natural philosopher", such as insight, perseverance, etc. shifting and reasoning abilities, "heralds a remarkable future".

Little Newton was once at the bottom of his class and was asked by his mother to drop out of school because of violent behavior. With the help of Newton's uncle William, in 1661, Newton entered Cambridge as a fee-reduction student and studied at the famous Trinity College.His status is not high, just a richer self-paid servant.He had an interesting life at the academy, participating in tennis, balls and yachting.His gourmet list is enticing.He lent money to other students and managed to get it back.He was fascinated by astrology, thought Euclid's mathematics too simple, and studied Descartes' dreaded "Geometry".

Newton was a mathematical genius, almost born with it.In college, he found a method to find the slope of the curve, and proved the generalized binomial theorem by finding the area of ​​the curve. In early 1665, at the age of 23, Newton returned home to escape the plague, during which time he completed most of his creative work.He wrote down more than a hundred axioms of motion in a notebook called The Scrapbook, including what would later become the concept of inertia.He observed comets.He calculated the centrifugal force and found the basic form of gravity.He threw himself into visual experiments, seeing the sun with his eyes and breaking down the colors. In 1666, Newton published his treatise on "flow numbers," which eventually created calculus.

These achievements are so incredible that they are forgettable and enviable.They are so amazing and so focused that it is almost hard to imagine how a single person could accomplish so many derivations in such a short period of time.To understand the significance of these achievements, we need to know their historical place and the historical environment in which Newton lived. Newton stood at a brewing moment in history.Before Newton, science experienced Aristotle's speculation, the bleakness of the Middle Ages, the discovery of Copernicus, and the expansion of Kepler, and reached a bifurcation point.Aristotle was the first person to examine the world from a scientific perspective. He put forward propositions and explanations, and gave the world a practical and reliable rather than a mythological explanation.He wanted to attribute the occurrence of things to internal forms, external dynamics, or chance, in short, reasons that humans can analyze, rather than God's arbitrariness.However, Aristotle's argumentation methods are mostly intuitive examples.For example, when he described the principle of movement, he chose the two examples of bronze transformed into sculpture and patients restored to health.The characteristic of these examples is that they are clear and easy to understand, but the disadvantage is that the process is unclear, and many people can give many explanations for the same event.

In the Middle Ages, the task of studying the world was long forgotten.There were some pioneers who developed experiments, such as Roger Bacon and William of Occam.It was not until the appearance of Copernicus that science returned to the stage of history.Copernicus was a genius of a different kind.He is a priest, but has a very good mathematical ability and a very strong intuitive ability.Reading Copernicus's book, the clarity and beauty of the first part will make people intoxicated, and the complicated calculations of the second part will make people painful.With great enthusiasm and patience, Copernicus recalculated the universe model, changing from the earth-centered to the sun-centered, changing the model to bring about a change in vision, and some celestial body movements that require complex explanations are now clear and clear .While the math remained difficult, a new cosmic vision was born.

Then there are Kepler, who tirelessly studies data, and Galileo, who invents the telescope.Kepler summed up the law of the motion of the planets around the sun from the voluminous data left by his predecessor Tycho. The form is simple and beautiful, just like the sound of nature.Galileo used the combination of optical lenses to bring the distant planet closer, exposing the cold and mottled surface of the planet to everyone, removing the veil of mystery, and his research on inertia opened the prelude to mechanics. All these predecessors paved the way for Newton.Their results are Newton's most important starting point, and the method by which they work is the principle and cornerstone of Newton's system.However, all these people are missing a crucial step. They start with a problem and solve a single difficulty, or directly observe and come up with a single inductive conclusion.What Newton accomplished, however, was systematic science.His book is almost like a philosophical work, starting from the definition, proposing principles, axioms, and then deriving countless inferences from the axioms.His system is from top to bottom, from the inside to the outside, starting from the core definition and the simplest law, expanding outwards, expanding into the depths of things, expanding into reality, starting from a proportional relationship, and finally deriving The result is consistent with the complex motion of celestial bodies and things.These are not sporadic eddies, but active fountains.Using basic axioms as a starting point, outline what the world looks like.From its structure, you will be amazed at the simple core of the world.The seemingly ever-changing world, wind, cloud, rain, snow, sun, moon, and stars, is essentially the same in principle.

This is modern science in its most basic form. Newton did this with mathematics.His architecture is similar to that of the ancient Greek philosophers, yet he surpasses them in mathematics.When Heraclitus said that the principle of all things is combustion and eternal flux, when Empedocles said that the principle of all things is the encounter of love and struggle, they both have arguments and opinions.But what is right and what is wrong?How do their theories differ from theological theories?Before Newton, philosophy was just philosophy, and natural philosophy was just a thinker's view of the world. There was no way to compare the advantages and disadvantages of different schools of thought.But Newton, with a bolt of lightning, split the dense clouds.He said that mathematics is the principle of philosophy.Philosophical theory deals with the world, and the way of the world is mathematics.In The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Newton wrote: "In the first two volumes I have laid down the fundamental principles of philosophy; these principles are not philosophical but mathematical: namely, that in philosophical inquiry reasoning." This is a crucial step in philosophical inquiry.From then on, not every natural hypothesis is reasonable, not the battle between light and darkness, and the principles of mutual generation and mutual restraint can explain the world. Among all the hypotheses, some hypotheses began to be superior to others.In other words, truth begins to exist.Math is truth.

Newton thus created modern science.From this point on, science becomes science. When we were in school, we were amazed that there was Newton in every class.He was the founder of fields—the founder of mechanics, the founder of optics, the founder of cosmology, the founder of calculus.He proposed four rules for finding natural principles: the cause of things should be simple; the same phenomenon should be sought for the same cause; the stable and common properties of objects in experiments should be regarded as universal properties; the propositions induced in phenomena should be regarded as correct.These four principles remain the principles of scientific discovery today and will remain so for the foreseeable future.This is the light that penetrates the dark ages.Ancient China did not lack natural scientists, but lacked a Newton. This fact cannot be changed anyway.

Newton graduated from Cambridge University, which is the Garden of Eden of science.In addition to Newton, Darwin, another person who changed modern science, also came from Cambridge.The small town of Cambridge is simple and beautiful. Walking in the school, it seems to be an eternal castle outside of time.The campus has a long history. The buildings of King's College and Trinity College have passed through hundreds of years of history, with a wide courtyard, a holy Gothic church, a stone wall with climbing vines, dark wooden tables and chairs and bronzing ancient books.The small bar is next to the stone road, with a signboard that has not changed for hundreds of years, like a paradise for forgetting time.Old England can still be found in Cambridge after the Great Fire of London destroyed most of the palace buildings.Can feel the atmosphere of thought in the campus.The lawn is vast and peaceful, the Cam River passing through the city is gurgling under the green leaves, the sighs of students are left behind on the Bridge of Sighs, and the words of poets are left behind on the Bridge of Sighs. Founded by Henry VIII in 1546, Trinity College Cambridge has trained famous thinkers such as Bacon, Byron, Russell and Gandhi.Their sculptures are displayed in the chapel of Trinity College in silent glory.According to legend, Newton got the inspiration of gravity under an apple tree. Whether it is true or not, this story is already one of the most romantic legends in the history of the world.There is still an apple tree planted under the outer wall of Trinity College for tourists to take pictures.This is the most peaceful and low-key school in the world, and it is also the most glorious and proud place in the world. In 1687, Newton published "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy", which summarized the three laws of motion and universal gravitation. In 1688, the Glorious Revolution broke out.Britain completed the transition to democracy in a bloodless revolution. In 1689, Newton entered Parliament as a university representative and met his best friend in London, John Locke. John Locke is one of the most important thinkers in modern history. He is neither the deepest nor the most extensive. Compared with Machiavelli before him, he does not have the straightforward sharpness, and Jean-Jacques later Compared with Rousseau, he does not have that kind of idyllic romance.He was not the most moving philosopher, yet he left a lasting impression on posterity.He was the first person to formally express the idea of ​​constitutional democracy.The two main elements of modern politics are democracy and constitutionalism. In Britain in the 13th century, we traced constitutionalism, and in Britain in the 17th century, we saw democracy. What is democracy?Is it the anger of the poor, the madness of the masses, the rule of the majority, or the slogan of careerists?Probably both before Locke.But after Locke, democracy is rational liberty. Locke was the forerunner of constitutional democracy.Before him, ancient philosophers developed adequate discussions of democracy and the republic, medieval St. Augustine and St. Thomas discussed government on the basis of the Church, and the Protestant Reformation reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin discussed personal sin. Building politics on the basis of salvation and redemption, Florence in the Renaissance, Machiavelli wrote The Prince about the struggle for power, he talked about real politics, not the ideal state of the good, he discussed the monarch necessary to maintain rule Skill, with plenty of tact and the necessary brutality. The most important modern trailblazer is Thomas Hobbes in England.He inherited Machiavelli's boldness, proceeded from reality, and looked for the possibility of an ideal country from people with imperfect morals.He proposed the concept of national sovereignty, and he analyzed human nature, deriving natural law from the powerful emotions of man.He pioneered a new way of analysis: assuming that all people are in the original "natural state" without a country, and the inevitable war is derived from the natural desire for power, suspicion and competition of human beings, and in order to survive, human beings must give up their natural state. The power to do whatever they want, transfer part of the power, and form a country.He wrote down a sovereign state like life and named it "Leviathan" after the legendary giant.He bestows on the ruler the highest absolute powers, since the subjects, in constituting the state, have vested these powers in the Sovereign.He agrees with the rule of good monarchs and doubts popular democracy.He made the power to enact laws supreme to the ruler. All these political writings, half poetic and half theological, were inaugural for the modern state, but far from institutional.Locke truly transformed intellectual speculation into political reality. Locke graduated from Oxford University.Inheriting the fine old traditions of Oxford, he is simple and clear in thinking and good at rational speculation.His articles were not long, and his language was concise and easy to understand, but the principles he expounded became the principles of modern democracy.Locke worked with many scientists at Oxford, and later obtained a Bachelor of Medicine. He studied under the guidance of Dr. Nam in the Federal Republic of Germany, which laid an important foundation for his later book "On Human Understanding". In 1679, he began writing his important work, Treatise on Government. In 1683, because he was suspected of being involved in a conspiracy, Locke fled to the Netherlands. During this period, he reviewed and revised his works, and a large number of drafts were written into a book. "Government" was published at this time. natural human rights.Right to life, religion, property.natural law.Delegate legislation. "In society, the liberty of man means that he is not subject to any other laws except those enacted by the legislature under the entrustment of the whole people." These are the fundamentals of modern politics with which we are so familiar that we often forget where they came from.Locke's "Government" is a naive debate against the political proposition of absolute kingship at that time. Before Locke, almost all books have given the ruler too much power.They talk about rules, not limits.Locke is the development of the spirit of the British Parliament.He does not think that the natural state of man is purely war. He firmly believes that man is endowed with freedom and rationality, and natural law is natural rationality.The law of nature can be simply expressed as: Everyone has the duty to preserve himself and not to infringe others.Authority is needed to judge only when someone violates the law of nature.Government is an institution to which this power has been voluntarily vested.People have the right to choose to join, consider or overthrow a government. People in society are free and equal people who establish contracts. These proclamations for everyone are more precious than the ancient times when life and death were left to the authority.Locke's philosophy is not considered the pinnacle, but the rights and freedoms he proposed became the ideological basis for the establishment of modern America more than a hundred years later.His personality is as simple as his articles, but he is more remembered by history than many flashes in the pan.His political discourse directly influenced Jefferson, Madison, and many of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America. In 1689, when Newton met Locke, Locke had just returned from his flight in Holland.Over the next two years, Newton and Locke became best friends.The two exchanged numerous letters discussing Bible verses, and Newton confided to Locke his many emotional troubles.Sometimes it's hard to imagine how one pair of friends could change so much history in a short period of time.Locke and Newton maintained a sincere friendship and went through the troubled times doomed by history. Glorious Revolution.Eventful autumn. London in 1688 was destined to be different.After reading the history of the French Revolution one hundred years later and the history of the Russian and Chinese revolutions more than two hundred years later, one outstanding impression will be engraved on my mind: revolution is a history of blood and tears of sacrifice and battle.The Great Revolution invented the guillotine, and thousands of heads fell to the ground every day in a frantic cry; the Russian Revolution ended with Bolshevik despotism, and the dream of liberation ended with a harsher dictatorship; the Chinese Revolution was based on outright war, from civil war to From the War of Resistance to the Cultural Revolution, everyone fought against each other.The forces of the old era are renewed in alternation, and the artillery fires incessantly in the renewal.In such a history, revolution seems to equal endless blood. But there was one revolution in history that was not like this. British Revolution, no bloody war.It seemed a weak defeat, but it turned out to be a bloodless revolution.It looks like a normal transition of thrones, but actually brings about a regime change.Britain is not a peaceful country. There have been hundreds of years of fighting for the throne. The War of the Roses seems endless. The Whigs and Tories are at loggerheads. Still, the final switch went smoothly in a peaceful change.The modern nation was born, and the United Kingdom entered into a constitutional monarchy, with Parliament in control of power, and the political framework has continued since then. How did this happen?It sounds incredible. From the most objective point of view, Britain is not without fighting.In the half century before the Glorious Revolution, there was also a large-scale conflict between the Whigs who believed in Parliament and the Tories who believed in tradition.During the reigns of James I and Charles I, the tension between crown and parliament widened.The failure of the king's foreign policy, financial difficulties, increased borrowing, and religious issues also aroused public concern. In 1628, the well-known Cromwell, as a representative of the parliament, delivered a speech against the king, which caused the king to panic. The king mobilized the army and forcibly dissolved the parliament.After several years of dormancy, Cromwell became cavalry general and fought against the Royalists.He led his troops to triumph many times, defeated the army of the nobles, cleared the garrison of the royal party, and drove the king to Scotland.Parliament declared itself as the highest authority, but Cromwell did not resist the temptation of power, concentrated power, and became king.Although the war still ended in the crown, these victories established the parliamentary status half a century later.Cromwell's sculpture still stands out today outside the walls of the Palace of Parliament in Westminster. From a further perspective, the Glorious Revolution itself was not only a parliamentary revolution, but also a religious confrontation.The antagonism between Anglicanism and Catholicism has a long history, and almost every king has caused controversy because of his religious beliefs.On the eve of the Glorious Revolution, the Parliament, which adhered to the Anglican Church, feared that the next successor would still be Catholic after the death of the Catholic king, so they brought back a foreign son-in-law from across the strait, and William of Orange became the new king.It was a victory for the Church, and a victory for Parliament.The king, who had just arrived, was not familiar with the domestic forces, relied heavily on the parliament, and handed over a lot of direct power.The parliament thus became the main force in the decision-making process of the country, moving towards democratic cooperation in a compromise with the king. From the farthest point of view, this revolution is the rise of the whole group.They are often called bourgeois, but they are not just bourgeois.They are far more than businessmen and newly rich people, because there is no shortage of businessmen and rich people from ancient Greece to ancient China.Nor were they only followers of Protestantism, for Protestantism did not have such power in its birthplace in Germany and the Low Countries.They are a group of energetic people with clear eyes and firm hearts. They don't like crazy ecstasy, nor do they like conservative meekness. They are used to seeing things according to facts and logic, and acting according to rules. Purpose, believing in human pursuits and human limits, they value practical experience far more than transcendental gnosis, they like reason, rationality, and rationality. This is a group of people who worked out the principles for the modern world.It was they who made the British Revolution different from the thousands of violent uprisings throughout history.They not only pursue the throne and power, but also seek to formulate new institutional laws that everyone can accept rationally.They look for principles for everything.Because of force, there is movement.Because of rights, so the law.Because of contract and cooperation, there is a state. It's hard to imagine, if it weren't for such a special group of people who like rational speculation, when will human history be lingering in capriciousness.No matter before or after, there has never been a lack of bloody conflicts, overthrows of regimes, and power struggles in history. However, only Britain in the century of the scientific revolution can transform all these into a new era. Only then can the historical significance of Newton and Locke be understood. Cambridge Take a train from London King's Cross Station to Cambridge in about an hour.Completely walkable in Cambridge. ·Cambridge: The whole school is a small town with the most classical and elegant campus. The gurgling Cam River passes through the city and you can punt.King's College: Founded by Henry VI in 1441, it is famous for the most beautiful Gothic chapel.Trinity College: There is the legendary Newton apple tree under the courtyard wall, and there are sculptures of famous alumni in the chapel. ·London: 1.Palace of Westminster, Parliament: The Palace of Westminster has historically been both the palace of the King and the seat of Parliament.On the open day every year, you can visit the palace, the House of Lords and the House of Commons.The two courtyards are not only different in structure, but also in furnishings and decorations.Docents not only explain the architecture, but also explain the traditions and anecdotes of the Parliament. 2.Museum of London: The Barbican complex, a unique modern community, is open for free and tells the history of London from ancient times to the present, including the streets and alleys of the Victorian era. 3.National Gallery: Located in Trafalgar Square, it has a rich collection, including portraits of many historical celebrities.Here you can see famous paintings by famous masters from all over Europe, including Rembrandt, Van Dyck and Holbein.There is a painting called "Experiment of a Bird in an Air Pump" by the painter White, which is the best embodiment of the spirit of ordinary people in the era of industrial revolution. 4.The British Museum: The best testimony of the British prosperous period, but not famous for British utensils, but famous for ancient Greek and Egyptian treasures.This is both predation and protection.Just like the industrial revolution, it is both exploitation and development. "Leviathan" [English] Leviathan (1588～1679) Translated by Wu Kefeng "Leviathan" can be said to be the book that paved the way for all modern revolutions.Hobbes is a strange man who tried to think about the world with mechanical principles before Newton was born. Hobbes described the state as a living monster made up of many individuals, of which the Sovereign—a concept he coined—is the head.Although Hobbes's endorsement of the idea of ​​a single monarch displeased many later philosophers, he still created many firsts: the first to propose the natural state of war, the origin of the state, society from contract, the meaning of law, All of these have been used by later generations of thinkers to this day.The country began to rise as a monster. "Giving or transferring rights, expressed in the form of an agreement, is what people call a contract. Or simply speaking, a contract is the mutual transfer of rights. "In this natural law is contained the source of justice. The essence of justice consists in the observance of valid contracts. "This group, united in one personality, is the Nation...and this is the birth of the great Leviathan, or more reverently called the God of Man." "On Government" [English] John Locke (1632～1704) Translated by Feng Jungong Locke was less interesting to write than Hobbes.His advantages and disadvantages are simple and straightforward.He adopted many excellent insights from his predecessors and organized them into a logical political system. Russell criticized him for having no new insights, which is justified to a certain extent.The concepts of social contract and legal constraints have already been mentioned in Leviathan, and the natural law was given by Aquinas, but Locke replaced the rationality of knowing the laws of God mentioned by Aquinas with the rationality of natural rights. Locke was successful. His era was just after the Cromwell Revolution and the era of the rise of the bourgeoisie. Peaceful reforms transformed royal politics into a modern country with constraints, and Locke's theory followed Voltaire's. The preaching and the American Revolution spread throughout the world.He was not a first-rate genius, but he was a paragon of reason and generosity. "Reason is the law of nature, which teaches to all mankind, who will obey it, the truth that men are created equal and independent, and that no one has any reason to injure another's life, health, liberty, or possession of another's property. "In the state of nature, everyone can enforce the law of nature, so that all people have the power to punish those who violate the law of nature, so as to prevent violations of natural law from happening. "Man's natural liberty means, in a state of nature, to obey only the rules of natural law...In society, man's liberty means, not to be under any other laws than those enacted by the legislature at the trust of the people." "Age of Enlightenment" [English] Isaiah Berlin (1909～1997) Translated by Sun Shangyang and Yang Shen Isaiah Berlin was one of the most famous liberal intellectuals of the 20th century.Born in a Jewish family in Russia, he went to England in 1920 and entered Oxford University.His contribution to political philosophy was to create a line of liberal pluralism. Berlin's writing has a very good writing style, not gorgeous, but it describes the exciting things in history clearly and accurately. If you want to know a period or a genre of thought, you can't go wrong reading Berlin. Perhaps the best introduction to philosophy. Liberty and Its Betrayal, The Origins of Romanticism, and this volume, The Age of Enlightenment, all tell of the concentrated and distinctive thinkers of that century, as much philosophy as history. "The Age of Enlightenment" talks about Locke and eight important authors after that, and outlines a unique group portrait of the 18th century. "Eighteenth-century philosophers tried to make philosophy a natural science by making everything in the world obey the immutable laws of physics. "What is most needed is a reliable method of discovering answers, and the incomparable Mr. Newton has already employed a method that fits this description, and if his imitators follow the same precepts, they will also be found in the realm of the human spirit. Here, he achieved fruitful results no less than Newton. "The intellectual strength, honesty, clarity, courage, and disinterested love of truth of the genius thinkers of the eighteenth century are unmatched to this day. Their age was the most beautiful and hopeful movement in human life. "