Science Teaching in Early Modern Europe

Experimenting in the Jesuit Classroom

Experiment came to prominence as an approach to natural philosophy in the 17^th century. Jesuits throughout Europe were prominent in this development. In Germany, for example, Caspar Schott encountered Otto von Guericke's air-pump, debated its significance with its inventor, and in 1657 published the first account of what would become the paradigmatic experimental instrument of the later 17^th and early 18^th centuries. Despite this, experimental natural philosophy did not figure prominently in the curriculum of the Jesuit colleges in Germany. Lectures courses on physics, the second year of the philosophical triennium, barely mention experiments until the early 18^th century. The earliest recorded purchase of an air-pump by a Jesuit college occurred in 1727 at Ingolstadt, and it is not until the 1730s and even the 1740s that the Jesuit were performing experimental demonstrations as part of their natural philosophical instruction.
What accounts for this delay? It was not because of any inherent Jesuit opposition to experimental philosophy. I want to highlight several factors. One is the career structure of Jesuit professors. More important is the distinction between mathematics and natural philosophy. Mathematics had a practical, applied orientation that dealt with devices. Natural philosophy in contrast was speculative. Thus it is not surprising that it was Jesuit mathematicians, such as Schott, who were most interested in experimental devices. Natural philosophers on the other hand did not see artificial instruments as being capable of solving the speculative questions they addressed in their physics lectures.