All language subtitles for Civilisation.08of13.The.Light.of.Experience.720p.BluRay.YIFY

(Cock crows)

(Cattle lowing)

(MUSIC) Le Tombeau de M de Chambo

Light.

The light of early morning.

The light of Holland.

It spreads over the flat fields,

it's reflected in the canals

and it picks out distant towers and spires.

This was the inspiration
of the first great school of landscape,

one might almost say, skyscape painting.

This is a painting
done in the middle of the 17th century

of the square in Haarlem.

You can see it's an old painting
because of the clothes the people are wearing.

But l can walk into this picture,

or rather, into the square.

Looks very much the same, doesn't it?

Before the 17th century,

the idea that one could walk into a picture
this way would have been almost unthinkable.

It seems quite natural to us,

and, no doubt, seemed natural
when it was painted.

But like so many things we take for granted,

it goes back
to a revolutionary change in thought.

The revolution in which divine authority
is replaced by experience,

experiment and observation.

I'm in Haarlem not only because Dutch painting
is a visible expression of this change of mind,

but because Holland
economically and intellectually,

was the first country to profit from the change.

When one begins to ask the question,
"Does it work?" or even "Does it pay?"

instead of asking, "ls it God's will?"

one gets a new set of answers.

One of the first of them is this:

that to try and suppress opinions
which one doesn't share

is much less profitable than to tolerate them.

This conclusion should have been reached
during the Reformation.

It permeated the writings of Erasmus
who, of course, was a Dutchman.

Alas, a belief in divine authority
of our own opinions

afflicted the Protestants
just as much as the Catholics.

Even in Holland, they continued
to burn and torture each other

right up to the middle of the 17th century.

And the Jews

who, in Amsterdam, were at last exempt
from persecution by the Christians,

the Jews began to persecute each other, too.

Still, when all this is said

the spirit of Holland in the early 17th century
was remarkably tolerant.

One proof is that nearly all the great books
that revolutionised thought

were first printed in Holland.

What sort of a society was it

that allowed these intellectual time bombs
to be set off in its midst?

Inside this charming old almshouse at Haarlem,

which is now a picture gallery,

there's plenty of evidence.

(MUSIC) MARAIS: Suite de Pieces de Violes

We know more about
what the 17th-century Dutch looked like

than we do about any other society,

except perhaps the 1st-century Romans.

Each individual wanted posterity
to see exactly what he was like,

even if he was a member of a corporate group.

And the man who tells us all this most vividly,

the man who painted these pictures,

was the Haarlem painter Frans Hals.

He is the supreme extrovert.

l used to find his works - all except the last -
revoltingly cheerful and odiously skillful.

Now, l love their unthinking conviviality,

and l value skill more highly than l did.

But l will admit that his sitters don't look like
representatives of a new philosophy.

But out of these all too numerous group portraits
of early 17th-century Holland,

something does emerge
which has a bearing on civilisation.

These are individuals

who are prepared to join in a corporate effort
for the public good.

One can't imagine groups like this
being painted in 17th-century Italy,

even in Venice.

They're the first visual evidence

of bourgeois democracy.

Dreadful words.

So debased by propaganda
that l hesitate to use them.

And yet, in the context of civilisation,
they really have a meaning.

They mean that a group of individuals
can come together

and take corporate responsibility,

that they can afford to do so
because they have some leisure,

and that they have some leisure
because they have money in the bank.

This is the society
which you see in the portrait groups.

They might be meetings of local government
committees or hospital governors today.

They represent the practical, social application

of the philosophy
that things must be made to work.

(MUSIC) Baroque harpsichord

Amsterdam was the first centre
of bourgeois capitalism.

It had become, since the decline of Antwerp,

the great international port of the North
and the chief banking centre of Europe.

Drifting through its leafy canals,
lined with admirable houses

one may speculate on the economic system
that produced

this dignified, comfortable,
harmonious architecture.

l don't say much about economics
in this programme,

chiefly because l don't understand them,

and perhaps, for that reason,

believe their importance has been overrated
by post-Marxist historians.

But, of course, there's no doubt

that, at a certain stage in social development,

fluid capital is one of the chief causes
of civilisation.

Because it ensures three essential ingredients:

leisure, movement and independence.

It also allows that slight superfluity of wealth

that can be spent on nobler proportions,

a better doorframe
or even a more extraordinary tulip.

Please allow me two minutes' digression
on the subject of tulips.

Because it really is rather touching

that the first classic example of boom and slump
in capitalist economy,

should have been not sugar, nor railways nor oil,
but tulips.

It shows how the 17th-century Dutch combined
their two chief enthusiasms -

scientific investigation and visual delight.

The first tulip had been imported from Turkey
in the 16th century.

But it was a professor of botany at Leiden,

the first botanic garden of the North,

who discovered its attribute
of unpredictable variation,

which made it such an exciting gamble.

By 1634,

the Dutch were so bitten by the new craze,

that for a single bulb of one tulip, the Viceroy,

one collector exchanged 1000lb of cheese,

four oxen, eight pigs, 12 sheep,
a bed and a suit of clothes.

When the bottom fell out of the tulip market
in 1637

the Dutch economy was shaken.

(MUSIC) Baroque harpsichord

However, it survived for over 30 years

and produced superfluities
of the most seductive kind.

What about this little clavichord?
Isn't it enchanting?

(Faint twang)

Better to look at than to listen to, I'm afraid.

And large, spacious rooms.

Black-and-white marble pavements.

Carved furniture.

An agreeable way of life.

Along the walls is gold-stamped leather,

the most sumptuous wall covering l know.

Unfortunately, this kind of visual self-indulgence
very soon leads to ostentation.

And this, in bourgeois democracy,

means vulgarity.

One can see this happening in Holland

in the work of a single painter,

Pieter de Hooch.

In 1660, he was painting these beautiful pictures
of clean, simple interiors.

Ten years later, they were very elaborate,

hung with gold Spanish leather.

The people are richer

and the pictures are less beautiful.

Bourgeois capitalism led to a defensive
smugness and sentimentality.

No wonder that early Victorian painters
imitated pictures of this kind.

"Every picture tells a story."

It was a Dutch invention.

This one is called A Visit To The Nursery.

In addition to trivial anecdotes

the philosophy of observation involved
a demand for realism

in the most literal sense.

In the early 19th century, Paul Potter's Bull was
one of the most famous pictures in Holland.

It was one of the first pictures
that Napoleon wanted to steal for the Louvre.

It's fallen out of favour now.

But l must say, l do find it absolutely fascinating.

There are many ways of achieving reality.

This simple-hearted, laborious way
that Potter has followed

does seem to me to achieve something
which couldn't be done in any other way.

Isn't that fleecy neck of the sheep extraordinary?

And look at those wild flowers.

Above all, look at the cow's eye.

The intensity with which
Potter has looked at its forehead

at its strong hair

and wet nose

is obsessive

what we've come to call Surrealist.

Of course, it's a young man's picture.

It has the intensity of the early Pre-Raphaelites,

and indeed
there is something almost nightmarish

in the way that the young bull dominates the
beautifully-painted landscape in the distance.

However, one must admit
that bourgeois sentiment and realism

can produce the most deplorable kind of art.

And the determinist historian reviewing
the social conditions of 17th-century Holland

would say that this was the kind of painting
the Dutch were bound to get.

But they also got Rembrandt.

Rembrandt was the great poet
of that need for truth

and that appeal to experience
which had begun with the Reformation,

had produced the first translations of the Bible,

but had had to wait almost a century
for visible expression.

At first, truth meant realism.

Behind me is his earliest self-portrait.

Yes, that is the same man
that you saw just now.

In this vein, he painted the picture

which is his most obvious link
with the intellectual life of Holland

and his first great success in Amsterdam,

The Anatomy Lesson.

It represents a demonstration given by the
Leading Professor of Anatomy, named Tulp.

The men surrounding him are not of course
students or even doctors

but members of the Surgeons' Guild -
a sort of Board of Trustees.

Vesalius, the first great modern anatomist,
had been a Dutchman.

And Tulp liked to be called Vesalius Reborn.

l fancy he was a quack. He recommended
his patients drink 50 cups of tea a day.

However, he was very successful.

His son became an English baronet.

But it wasn't in such external
and quasi-official ways

that Rembrandt associated himself
with the intellectual life of his time

but by his illustrations to the Bible.

An example is this picture of Bathsheba

pondering the contents of David's letter.

We may think that we admire it as pure painting,

and, in fact, it is a masterly piece of design.

But, in the end, we return to the head

where Bathsheba's thoughts and feelings are
rendered with an insight and a human sympathy

which a great novelist could scarcely achieve
in many pages.

From the first
Rembrandt wanted to record' his experience

of how human beings reveal their emotions.

And as his art grew deeper, he succeeded
in doing so with ever greater subtlety.

To my mind, one of the most moving examples

is the picture known as The Jewish Bride.

Nobody knows what its real title should be.

But the subject
that Rembrandt had in mind is evident.

It is a picture of grown-up love.

A marvellous amalgam
of richness, tenderness and trust.

The richness expressed
in the painting of the sleeves,

the tenderness in the placing of the hands,

the trust in the expression of the heads.

Marvellous as Rembrandt's paintings are,

l find more of his thoughts on human life,

certainly his deepest
and most intimate thoughts,

in his drawings and etchings.

His etchings are the fullest communication
any artist has made

since D�rer's engravings.

And as with D�rer

Rembrandt has put as much into them
as into any of his paintings.

This is one of the most famous
and elaborate of them

Christ Healing The Sick.

And what a marvellous
and completely original conception it is.

Suffering humanity,

poor people coming out of the shades,

like the prisoners in Fidelio,

lugging their sick on wheelbarrows and biers,

into the light of Christ's divinity.

And on the left, these prosperous people,

wondering, doubting, criticising.

How extraordinary that this great
Tolstoyan picture of human life

was done in the time of Richelieu

and the beginning of Versailles.

One can't talk about Rembrandt

without describing the human and, if you like,
the literary element in his work.

His mind was steeped in the Bible.

He knew every story by heart
down to the minutest detail.

This is one of his favourite stories
the Prodigal Son.

Just as the early translators felt
that they had to learn Hebrew

so that no fragment of the truth
should escape them,

so Rembrandt made friends
with the Jews in Amsterdam

and frequented their synagogues,

in case he could learn something
that would shed more light

on the early history of the Jewish people.

But in the end, the evidence he used
for interpreting the Bible

was the life he saw around him.

In his drawings and etchings,

one often doesn't know if he's recording
an observation or illustrating the scriptures,

so much had the two experiences
grown together in his mind.

Did Rembrandt wish to illustrate St Peter
at prayer before the raising of Tabitha?

Or had he seen a pious old neighbour
whose attitude of devotion touched his heart

and reminded him of the Acts of the Apostles?

Sometimes his interpretation of human life
in Christian terms

leads him to depict subjects
that hardly exist in the Bible,

but that he felt convinced must have existed.

An example is this etching of Christ preaching
the forgiveness of sins.

It's a classical composition.

In fact, it's based upon two famous Raphaels,

which Rembrandt had completely assimilated.

But how different is this small congregation

from Raphael's ideal human specimens.

They are, as you see, a very mixed lot.

Some thoughtful,

some half-hearted

some concerned only with keeping warm
or keeping awake.

And the child in the foreground,

to whom the doctrine of the remission of sins
is of no interest

is concentrating upon drawing in the dust.

Rembrandt reinterpreted the Bible
in the light of human experience.

But it's an emotional response
based on a belief in revealed truth.

The greatest of his contemporaries
were looking for a different kind of truth,

a truth that could be established by intellectual,
not emotional, means.

This could be done
either by the accumulation of observed evidence

or by mathematics.

And of the two, mathematics seemed to offer
to the men of the 17th century

the more attractive solution.

In fact, mathematics became a kind of, religion
to the finest minds of the time

the means of expressing a belief
that experience could be married with reason.

The guiding spirit of this new religion

was the French philosopher, Descartes.

He's become a symbol of the pure intellect.

But l find him a sympathetic figure.

He started life as a soldier
he wrote a book on fencing',

but he soon discovered
that all he wanted to do was think.

Very, very rare, and most unpopular.

Some friends came to call on him
at 11 o'clock in the morning

and found him in bed.

They said, "What are you doing?"

He replied, "Thinking."

They were furious.

To escape interference,
he went to live in Holland.

He said that the people of Amsterdam
were so occupied with making money,

they would leave him alone.

However, he continued to be
the victim of interruptions.

And so, he moved about from place to place.

Altogether, he moved house in Holland
24 times.

In the end, he was run to earth by that tiresome
woman, Queen Christina of Sweden,

who carried him off to Stockholm

to give her lessons in the new philosophy.

She made him get out of bed
early in the morning.

As a result, he caught a cold and died.

But earlier in Holland at some point,

he evidently lived near Haarlem,
where he was painted by Frans Hals.

He examined everything
rather as Leonardo da Vinci had done

the foetus, the refraction of light, whirlpools...

All the Leonardo subjects.

These are the original illustrations
of Descartes' ideas.

He thought that all matter
consisted of whirlpools,

with an outer ring of large, curving vortices

and an inner core of small globules
sucked into the centre.

And whatever he meant by this -

and perhaps he was only thinking of Plato -

it's odd that he should have described exactly
Leonardo's drawings of whirlpools,

which l suppose he had never seen.

But in contrast
to Leonardo's restless, insatiate curiosity,

Descartes had, almost to excess

the French tidy-mindedness.

All his observations were made to contribute
to a philosophic scheme.

It was based on absolute scepticism,

the inheritance of Montaigne's summing-up
"Que sais-je?" "What do l know?"

Only, Descartes arrived at an answer.

"l know that l think."

And he turned it the other way around -
"l think, therefore l am."

His fundamental point is that he can doubt
everything, but not that he was doubting.

Descartes wanted to cut away
all preconceptions

and get down to bedrock of experience,

unaffected by custom and convention.

Well, one needn't look far in Dutch art
to illustrate this state of mind.

There has never been a painter

who has stuck so rigorously
to what his optic nerve reported

as Vermeer of Delft.

His work is without a single prejudice

arising from knowledge
or the convenience of a style.

It's really quite a shock to see a picture which
has so little stylistic artifice as his view of Delft.

It looks like a coloured photograph,

and yet we know that it's a work
of extreme intellectual distinction.

It not only shows the light of Holland,

but what Descartes called
the natural light of the mind.

In fact, Vermeer comes close to Descartes
at many points.

First of all, in his detached, evasive character.

Vermeer didn't change house
every three months.

On the contrary,
he loved his house in the square at Delft,

and he painted it continually.

His quiet interiors are all rooms in his house.

But he was equally suspicious of callers.

He told one eminent collector
who had made a special journey to visit him,

that he had no pictures to show him,

which was just untrue,

because when he died, his house was full
of unsold pictures of all periods.

(MUSIC) Baroque harpsichord

All that he wanted was tranquillity,

in order to enjoy fine discrimination.

"Study to be quiet."

Ten years before this picture was painted,

Issak Walton had inscribed these words
on the title page of The Compleat Angler.

And in the same period,

two religious sects had come into being -

Quietism and the Quakers.

As far as l know, the first painter
to feel Descartes' need

to tidy up sensations by the use of reason

was Pieter Saenredam
the scrupulous master of church' interiors.

He did drawings from nature in the 1630s,

and often kept them for ten or 15 years

until he could give them the stillness and finality

which make them ideal meeting places
for the Society of Friends.

The precision with which
he places each accent -

those dark heads, for example,

reminds one of Seurat.

In a picture like this,

the balance is tilted towards reason
rather than experience.

Vermeer manages to preserve
an air of complete naturalism.

Yet what a masterpiece of abstract design
he creates

out of frames and windows
and musical instruments.

One is reminded of the most severely intellectual
of modern painters,

his compatriot, Mondrian.

Are Vermeer's intervals and proportions
the result of calculation?

Or did he discover them intuitively?

No good asking such questions.

Vermeer had a genius for evasion.

But as soon as one mentions Mondrian

one remembers
that one of Vermeer's characteristics

separates him entirely
from abstract modern painting -

his passion for light.

It's in this, more than anything else, that he links
up with the other great men of his time.

All the chief exponents of civilisation
from Dante to Goethe

had been obsessed by light.

One could take it
as the supreme symbol of civilisation.

But in the 17th century,

light passed through a crucial stage.

The perfection of the lens was giving it
new range and power.

Vermeer himself recorded the increased
importance of scientific investigation

in pictures like this.

He used the utmost ingenuity

to make us feel the movement of light.

He loved to show it passing over a white wall,

and then, as if to make its progress
more comprehensible,

passing over a slightly crinkled map.

At least four of these maps
appear in his pictures,

and, apart from their pleasantly
light-transmitting surfaces,

they remind us that the Dutch were
the great cartographers of the age.

Thus the mercantile sources
of Vermeer's independence

penetrate into the background of this quiet room.

In his determination
to record exactly what he saw,

Vermeer didn't at all despise those mechanical
devices of which his century was so proud.

The man seated at table
talking to a laughing girl -

it's a fairly early picture,

later on, Vermeer's figures wouldn't have broken
the stillness with extrovert laughter -

this man has the exaggerated proportions
that one sees in photography.

l fancy that Vermeer looked through a lens
into a box

with a piece of ground glass squared up,

and painted exactly what he saw.

He must have begun
this scientific practice quite early.

One finds it in this picture
of a woman pouring milk,

painted before he had perfected
his peculiar stillness.

The light's rendered by those little beads
that one doesn't see with the naked eye,

but which appear on the finder
of an old-fashioned camera.

And yet, this scientific approach to experience
ends in poetry.

And l suppose that this is due to an almost
mystical rapture in the perception of light.

The enlightened tidiness
of De Hooch and Vermeer

and the rich, imaginative, experience
of Rembrandt

reached their zenith about the year 1660.

And in that year,

on the night of May 30th,

Charles II of England dined in the Mauritshuis.

And the next day, he embarked
from the Dutch beach at Scheveningen

to regain his kingdom.

And thus ended the isolation and austerity

which had afflicted England under Cromwell
for almost 15 years.

And as so often happens,

a new freedom of movement
led to an outburst of pent-up energy.

(MUSIC) PURCELL: Dido And Aeneas Act Ill

(MUSIC) Come away, fellow sailors, come away

(MUSIC) Your anchors beweighing

(MUSIC) Time and tide will admit no delaying

(MUSIC) Take a bowsey short leave
of your nymphs on the shore

(MUSIC) And silence their mourning
with vows of returning

(MUSIC) But never intending to visit them more

(MUSIC) No, never intending to visit them more

(MUSIC) No, never...

(MUSIC) No, never intending to visit them more

(MUSIC) Come away, come away

(MUSIC) Come away, come away, come away

(MUSIC) Your anchors beweighing

(MUSIC) Time and tide admit no delaying

(MUSIC) Take a bowsey short leave
of your nymphs on the shore

(MUSIC) And silence their mourning
with vows of returning

(MUSIC) But never intending to visit them more

(MUSIC) No, never intending to visit them more

(MUSIC) No, never...

(MUSIC) No, never intending to visit them more

There are usually men of genius
waiting for these moments of expansion,

like ships waiting for a breeze.

And, on this occasion, there was, in England,
the brilliant group of natural philosophers

who were to form the Royal Society.

Christopher Wren, the young geometer,

who at that date was a professor of astronomy.

Robert Boyle, who used always to be described
as the son of the Earl of Cork

and the father of chemistry.

Halley, the discoverer of comets.

And towering above
all these remarkable scientists was Newton

one of the three or four Englishmen whose fame
has transcended all national boundaries.

l can't pretend that I've read the Principia.

If l did, l wouldn't understand it

any more than Samuel Pepys did,

when, as President of the Royal Society,
it was handed to him for his approval.

One must just take on trust

that it gave a mathematical account
of the structure of the universe

which for 300 years seemed irrefutable.

It was both the climax of the age of observation

and the sacred book of the next century.

Pope, who had probably not read
as much of the Principia as l have,

summed up the feelings of his contemporaries:

"Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night,

God said, let Newton be: and all was light."

Parallel with the study of light
was the study of the stars.

This is the Octagon Room of the original
Royal Observatory at Greenwich,

founded, as Charles II's warrant puts it,

"in order to the finding out
of the longitude of places,

and for perfecting navigation and astronomy."

And it draws together
the threads of this programme -

light, lenses, observation,
navigation and mathematics.

One can walk into that print

almost exactly as one can walk
into the square at Haarlem.

And in this bright, harmonious room,

one seems to breathe the atmosphere
of humanised science.

That was Flamsteed's telescope, or very like it.

This is similar to the quadrant
with which he tried to establish the correct time.

It was the great age of scientific instruments -

Huygens's pendulum clock,

Leeuwenhoek's microscope.

Flamsteed himself made a giant sextant.

They don't look very scientific to us.

Indeed, the telescopes really look like
something out of a ballet.

One can't see through them at all.
At least, l can't.

But, nevertheless, the telescope, invented
in Holland although perfected by Galileo,

seemed to bring the heavenly bodies
within reach of understanding.

This is the view of the moon
which Newton would have seen.

And the microscope allowed a Dutch scientist,
named Leeuwenhoek

to discover new worlds in a drop of water.

This ferocious monster is a water flea.

What beautiful pieces of design
and craftsmanship astrolabes are,

and continued to be for 400 years.

And this armillary sphere is really
what we think of as a work of art, a mobile.

By twiddling it around, one can produce
a kind of visual counterpoint.

Even this equinoctial dial shows the impress
of human personality,

what you can call a style.

And what about this diptych dial?

One can't imagine a prettier bibelot,

and yet, it was genuinely scientific...

..l suppose.

Art and science haven't yet drawn apart.

And these instruments
are not only means to an end but symbols.

Symbols of hope that Man might learn
to master his environment

and create a more reasonable society.

And such they remained
until the end of the 19th century.

When Tennyson was told
that a Brahmin had destroyed a microscope

because it revealed secrets
Man should not know

he was profoundly shocked.

Only in the last 60 years or so,

have we begun to feel

that the descendants
of these beautiful, shining objects

may destroy us.

This room full of light,
this shining enclosure of space,

was designed by Sir Christopher Wren.

It was built on the spur of a hill
overlooking the old palace of Greenwich.

This, too, was rebuilt by Wren,
transformed from a palace into a naval hospital.

How much of what we see is from his design
is hard to say.

By the time the buildings were going up,

he was prepared to leave their execution to his
two very able assistants at the Board of Works,

Sir John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor.

But he certainly provided the plan.

And the result is the greatest architectural unit
built in England since the Middle Ages.

It's sober without being dull,

massive without being oppressive.

What is civilisation?

A state of mind where it's thought desirable
for a naval hospital to look like this,

and for inmates to dine
in a splendidly decorated hall,

in fact, one of the finest rooms in England,

with a magnificent painted ceiling
in the Baroque manner.

(MUSIC) PURCELL: Trumpet Sonata

By the time this building was completed,

Wren had long been
the most famous architect in England.

But as a young man,

people had thought of him
only as a mathematician and an astronomer.

Why, at the age of 30, he took up architecture,

isn't altogether clear.

l suppose he wanted to give, visible form
to his solutions

mechanical and geometrical solutions.

But of course he had to learn
the rudiments of style.

And so, he bought some books
and he went to France

drew the buildings and met leading architects.

He even met Bernini
who was in Paris at the time

and he saw Bernini's drawing for the Louvre.

"l would have given my skin for it," he said,

"but the reserved old Italian
gave me but a view."

On his return, he was consulted as an engineer,

about old St Paul's
which was in danger of collapsing.

He proposed replacing the tower by a dome.

But before this very questionable project
could be considered

the Fire of London broke out in 1666.

It ended on September 5th.

And six days later, Wren submitted a plan
for rebuilding the city.

And only then was the ingenious Dr Wren
fully committed to architecture.

Ingenious is the word
for the results that followed.

The 30 new city churches.

Each is the solution of a different problem.

Wren's powers of invention never failed.

But when he came to the crown and centre
of the whole scheme

the new St Paul's

then he revealed
something more than ingenuity.

(MUSIC) PURCELL: The Gordian Knot Untied

Wren's buildings show us
that mathematics, measurement, observation

all that goes to make up
the philosophy of science,

wasn't hostile to architecture, nor to music

because this was the age of one of the greatest
English composers, William Purcell,

whose noble strains have accompanied
our inspection of Wren's buildings.

But what was the effect
of the scientific attitude on poetry?

Well, at first, l think it was harmless

even beneficial.

When Vaughan wrote,
"l saw Eternity the other night,

Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm as it was bright,"

he was giving poetic expression

to the same impulse that induced Flamsteed
to look through his telescope.

l don't suppose that all the members of the
Royal Society were hostile to the imagination.

After all, most of them remained
professing Christians.

In fact, Newton spent - we could say, wasted -

a lot of his time on Biblical studies.

And they continued to use a celestial globe

in which the constellations were grouped
in the form of men and animals.

They continued to accept
the kind of personifications

that one gets on the ceiling of the Painted Hall,

on which gods and goddesses associate
with Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal.

But all the same

they recognised that all these were fancies

and that reality lay elsewhere,

in the realm of measurement and observation.

A rather ridiculous character called Spratt,
who wrote a "History of the Royal Society",

published the same year
as Milton's Paradise Lost

said, "Poetry is the parent of superstition."

And so began that division
between scientific truth and imagination

which was to kill poetic drama

and give a slight feeling of artificiality
to all poetry during the next 100 years.

However, there was a compensation -

the emergence of a clear, workable prose.

It was a tool of the new philosophy,

almost as much as Stevins's decimal system
was a tool of the new mathematics.

This was particularly true of France.

For about 300 years, French prose was the form

in which the European intelligence
shaped and communicated its thoughts

about history, diplomacy, definition, criticism,
human relationships.

Everything, really, except metaphysics.

It's arguable that the non-existence
of a clear, concrete German prose

has been one of the chief disasters
of European civilisation.

There's no doubt that, in its first glorious century,

the appeal to experience

achieved a triumph for the Western mind.

Between Descartes and Newton

Western man created
those instruments of thought

that set him apart
from the other peoples of the world.

And if you look at the average
19th-century historian, a man like Buckle,

you'll find that, to him, European civilisation
seems almost to begin with this achievement.

The strange thing is that none of these writers,
except perhaps Ruskin,

seemed to notice that the triumph
of rational philosophy had resulted

in a new form of barbarism.

If l look beyond the order
of Wren's naval hospital,

l see stretching as far as the eye can reach

the squalid disorder of industrial society.

It's grown up as a result of the same conditions

that allowed the Dutch to build
their beautiful towns and support their painters

and print the works of philosophers.

Fluid capital, a free economy,

a flow of exports and imports,
a dislike of interference

a belief in cause and effect.

Well, every civilisation seems
to have its nemesis

not only because the first, bright impulses
become tarnished by greed and laziness,

but because of unpredictables.

In this case, the unpredictable
was the growth of population.

The greedy became greedier,
the ignorant lost touch with traditional skills,

and the light of experience narrowed its beam

so that a grand design like Greenwich
became simply a waste of money.

(MUSIC) PURCELL: Trumpet Sonata