Content area
Full Text
In 1722, a Jesuit natural philosopher by the name of Louis-Bertrand Castel (1688–1757) made a series of bold assertions about the action of man on nature. Offered in response to the query of an unnamed correspondent, these assertions found their way into the Jesuit-run Journal de Trévoux in an open letter Castel hoped would stir controversy. With characteristic ease, he ventured to claim that human industry occasions:
all variety of mixed bodies, plants, animals, minerals; all kinds of meteors, fogs, winds, clouds, rains, snows, hails, flashes, thunders, lightnings; and […] all the various main arrangements and diverse mechanisms of the earth, both internal and external: mountains, plains, seas and continents, rivers and fountains; in a word, the organization and circulation of the entire globe.
(Castel, "Lettre à M. C." 2080–81)
Playing with the meaning of the French expression "faire la pluie et le beau temps" (literally "making rain and fair weather," i.e., calling the shots), Castel argued that humans could, and in fact did, exert a profound influence over meteorological, climatic, and geological phenomena (2074–75). He went so far as to suggest that terrestrial compounds and even life itself owed their continued existence to artificial disruptions in the regular course of nature.
In the months following the publication of this letter, Castel developed his conjectures into a full-fledged philosophical system. This system would make up nearly 300 pages of his first book, the Traité de physique sur la pesanteur universelle des corps (1724), and echo throughout several subsequent publications.1 His overarching goal was twofold: to reconcile the reductionist agenda of the mechanical philosophy with the tenets of the Catholic faith; and to showcase the superiority of free spirits over matter. By "free spirits," Castel meant spiritual agents capable of interacting with the material world of their own accord rather than by necessity. Among these he included God (understood as primary cause), angels (God's immediate proxies), and human beings (understood as secondary causes and stewards of the earth). Although rooted in the Christian doctrine of free will and couched in the traditional language of stewardship, Castel's system called for a reassessment of the relationship between man and nature that sounded as extravagant to his contemporaries as it appears prescient today (Glacken 150–68; 293–313).
I...