MGK has pointed at an interesting reading that posits T.S. Eliot as the discursive founder of the hierarchy of data, information, and wisdom. I’m not so sure. The roots of this hierarchy are deep and twisted, and I think better explained by the rhetoric of science.
Alan Gross argues that there was a shift between the science of Descartes which valued reason over observation, and the science of Newton placed observation as the final arbiter of fact. Reason, in this context, seems allied with wisdom and belief rather than information. I don’t think contemporary readers see the true nuances of the split easily. William Blake plays on the duality of “reason” which functions as both a descriptor of belief and a descriptor of logic in this notebook fragment:
You dont believe I wont attempt to make ye
You are asleep I wont attempt to wake ye
Sleep on Sleep on while in your pleasant dreams
Of Reason you may drink of Lifes clear streams
Reason and Newton they are quite two things
For so the Swallow & the Sparrow sings
Reason says Miracle. Newton says Doubt
Aye thats the way to make all Nature out
Doubt Doubt & dont believe without experiment
That is the very thing that Jesus meant
When he said Only Believe Believe & try
Try Try & never mind the Reason why
Blake actually had high respect for Newton and the rational belief of Descartes. He thought answers and errors were to be found in both. The indications of this are well illustrated in his letter to an editor regarding the persecution of an astrologer:
[To] Richard Phillips Esqr N 6 Bridge Street,
Black Friars17 Sth Molton St Oct 14 [1807]
Sir,
A circumstance has occurred which has again raised my Indignation
I read in the Oracle & True Briton of Octr 13, 1807–that a Mr Blair a Surgeon has with the Cold fury of Robespierre caused the Police to sieze upon the Person & Goods or Property of an Astrologer & to commit him to Prison. The Man who can Read the Stars. often is opressed by their Influence, no less than the Newtonian who reads Not & cannot Read is opressed by his own Reasonings & Experiments. We are all subject to Error: Who shall say
that we are not all subject to Crime My desire is that you would Enquire into this Affair & that you would publish this in your Monthly Magazine I do not pay the postage of this Letter because–you as Sheriff are bound to attend to it.
WILLIAM BLAKE
My point is that there was a sense that something was lost in the empiricist emphasis of evidence over belief was present long before the onset of literary modernism. Observations are often faulty, and produce bad data. This culminates, in my mind at least, in C.S. Peirce’s rewrite of phenomenology to address the problem of observation. Belief and observation have been almost constantly under attack as modes of knowledge. In one of his final letters to George Cumberland, Blake was steadfast in not accepting the primacy of one over the other:
I know too well that a great majority of Englishmen are fond of The Indefinite which they Measure by Newtons Doctrine of the Fluxions of an Atom. A Thing that does not Exist. These are Politicians & think that Republican Art is Inimical to their Atom.
For a Line or Lineament is not formed by Chance a Line is a Line in its Minutest Subdivision[s] Strait or Crooked It is Itself & Not Intermeasurable with or by any Thing Else Such is Job but since the French Revolution Englishmen are all Intermeasurable One by Another Certainly a happy state of Agreement to which I for One do not Agree.
God keep me from the Divinity of Yes & No too The Yea Nay Creeping Jesus from supposing Up & Down to be the same Thing as all Experimentalists must suppose
In a sense, Blake foreshadows Gross’s assertion that science is just as rhetorical as any other human endeavor. Scientists are “politicians” (or perhaps better, rhetoricians) who convince others that things can be measured by the same sort of yardstick they use.
