| Popis: |
In Samuel Butler’s (1613–1680) satire of the early Royal Society “The Elephant in the Moon,” a group of Fellows gather around a telescope, discovering and discussing life on the Moon.2 When the conversation turns to the ancient past, the Fellows’ characterizations are flawed, even inverted. For example, one member postulates that lunar peoples descended from Arcadians who “were reputed/Of all the Grecians the most stupid/Whom nothing … could bring/To civil Life, but fiddling” (ll. 103–6). However, past scholarship on “The Elephant in the Moon” effectively demonstrates that its satire targets not the “new science” but “particular scientists.”3 Building on this work, I argue that the poem faults particular philosophical practices of the Royal Society. Butler places the telescope and lunar observation at the center of his poem to foreground mediation—that which “intervenes, enables, supplements, or is simply in-between.”4 Using the central image of telescopic viewing to plumb the relationship between mediation and knowledge, Butler censures the Society’s engagement with the forms of collective vision burgeoning in the seventeenth century. |
