SAM RYAN

You may, if you are a science nerd, know Robert Hooke (1635-1703) as the author of the Micrographia, the accomplished observer who first identified cells; as the originator of Hooke’s law, a physical approximation of elasticity in springs; or as the man who claimed to have come up with gravitation before Newton. You may even know him as the cranky-but-loveable mascot of the Royal Society in Neal Stephenson’s historical-fiction epic The Baroque Cycle. But you probably don’t associate him with the birth of drug culture in England.

Along with his other duties as a university lecturer and a city surveyor charged with rebuilding London after the Great Fire of 1666, Hooke served as curator of experiments to the Royal Society. This meant, in practical terms, keeping rich dilettantes and impressionable visitors entertained at the regular meetings and trying to raise interest in the Society’s scientific projects. He was charged with procuring and figuring out every imaginable kind of experimental instrument, and arranging demonstrations of all kinds at the Society’s meetings. He was a founding member of the new generation of scientific “virtuosi” in seventeenth-century England. ¹

Living a stressful, experiment-based life, and being in addition a frail yet determined hypochondriac, it’s no surprise that Robert Hooke took all the drugs he could get his hands on....

Last semester, a required reading for one of my classes was the final chapter of George Santayana’s book Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion. The gist of this chapter, which is actually a lecture Santayana delivered at UC Berkeley in 1911, is that America started out as a Calvinist nation (in philosophical terms - concerned with guilt, salvation, etc.) and that subsequent philosophers from Franklin to Emerson failed to break free of that constraint, even as they chipped away at it. Santayana says that only William James finally managed a clean break from the Calvinist “Genteel Tradition” with his conception of Pragmatism.

The name of the book stuck with me as a good phrase, even though Santayana is a very confusing writer. I tend to remember good phrases and pick them up again in different contexts, in the same way that newly learned words will often appear to us in magazines or commercials where they hadn’t been before.

Plugging along through Carl Sandburg’s epic Abraham Lincoln: The War Years a few weeks later, I saw the same phrase. Sandburg gives a perfectly written character sketch of Senator Charles Sumner (he of the Sumner-Brooks Affair - more on that in a later post), in which he both admires Sumner for his anti-slavery crusading and complains of his impracticality. His lack of pragmatism, I guess you could say....