The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence Read Free

for asserting, among other things, the existence of a multiplicity of worlds beyond our Earth. Other adherents of the new mode of thought were silenced, like Galileo, or imprisoned for years, like Tommaso Campanella. Nonetheless, through the Seventeenth Century, the attention of the West moved gradually but inexorably away from the invisible world of spirit and toward the study and manipulation of matter.
    The concept of spirit was not immediately and totally discarded, but a sharp separation was made between spirit and matter. Two elements of spirit were still conceded, even by the most radical thinkers—God and the human soul. God was a cosmic clockmaker who, some long whiles past, had set the great machinery of the universe in motion, withdrawing discreetly to let it tick and whir its way to eternity. As for the human soul—one brave and tattered shred of spirit in a universe otherwise made of dead matter—why, that was the hope and promise of human specialness and purpose, and could not easily be surrendered. But the new prevailing materialistic philosophy of the West would not allow that God or the soul had any direct influence on the everyday cause-and-effect world.
    An appropriate date to mark the emergence of scientific rationalism as the leading mode of Western thought and culture is the year 1685. It is possible to argue that the old worldview still prevailed prior to that time. But after that year, we can say that the balance of opinion in Western society was in favor of rational materialism.
    We can see our point illustrated in two facts. The year 1685 was when the last execution for witchcraft in England took place. Also in England in 1685, Isaac Newton arrived at the Universal Law of Gravitation. In both cases, the passing of the old belief in the realm of spirit is indicated. After this, spirit-based witchcraft, for centuries the bugaboo of Western man, would no longer be given serious credence by leaders of opinion—the men who make and enforce the law. At the same time, a new rule of rational physics had proclaimed the high heavens—formerly considered to be a part of the spirit realm—to be subject to the same mechanisms that govern the motion of bodies on Earth.
    The shift from one worldview to the other is visible in the imaginative literature of the Seventeenth Century. In the early years of the Seventeenth Century, in Macbeth, Hamlet and The Tempest, Shakespeare might write of witches, ghosts and magic. Even as late as the 1660s and 1670s, in Paradise Lost and The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Milton and John Bunyan could still write with the old seriousness of Hell and Heaven. By the 1690s, this was no longer possible. The transcendent symbols of traditional mythic literature could no longer be considered plausible. As things of the spirit, they had no part in a material world.
    By the turn of the century, the old wonders and marvels could only appear as the stuff of simple entertainments, such as the literary fairytales like “Cinderella” and “Beauty and the Beast” that were the delight of the French court during the Age of Reason. One of these, “Princess Rosette” by Madame d’Aulnoy, who died in 1705, may serve as an example of the degree to which even fairytales were affected by the change in worldview. The one fantastic element in this story is the troop of fairies who come to the princess’s christening. But these once clearly transcendent beings apparently live in the vicinity of the court rather than in their own spirit realm of Faerie. And instead of giving the child traditional magical gifts—we are told “they had left their book of magic at home” 4 —their role is reduced to giving well-intentioned but incomplete and misleading advice.
    The new scientific doubt of the Seventeenth Century was a powerful weapon, a glittering inevitable razor. One slash—and all that was not subject to measurement, to proof or to rational argument was cut away!
    A great simplification was