Thayne R. Ford and Professor Lee Butler, History
Jose de Acosta’s Historia Natural y Moral de Las Indias 1 is both a reflection of and a response to the scientific turmoil that the New World had caused in Renaissance Europe. While Italy and France were overtaken by the Scientific Revolution, Spain was left stewing in its religious orthodoxy, wondering how to incorporate the innovations and breakthroughs of sixteenth-century science. Yet in Acosta’s writings there is no hesitation; rather a scientific fervor is revealed, illustrating that perhaps within certain religious circles empirical sentiments were becoming prevalent. Spain was not the sixteenth-century scientific quagmire that some have purported it to be; rather it was full of “intellectual excitement … of observation and perception.”2 In this sense, Acosta’s ideas are a reflection of his time.
Acosta’s ideas were also a response to the perplexities and contradictions that the New World posed for science and religion. In one way or another, the western hemisphere had to be incorporated into the corpus of classical and Renaissance thought. Historia Natural is an account for the Americas in Western terms. Acosta used a pseudo-scientific model and yet at the same time never overlooked his theological paradigm. Acosta, then, becomes a symbol of the manner in which zealous nations blended the science of the Renaissance with the orthodoxy of their self-confident religions. In this way, Acosta was an important proponent for developing notions of science in southwestern Europe.
While Acosta’s methods are alien to the modern paradigms and scientific approaches, this did not mean his method yielded no significant results. Acosta’s remarkable observations were far more surprising than his anachronistic methodology which was in use among Jesuits evangelizing throughout Asia and the rest of the world. What is also significant about Acosta’s research, and for that matter most of the “breakthroughs” leading up to the Scientific Revolution, is that he evaluated the natural world from premises which, in light of contemporary scientific methodology, were subjective and highly metaphysical. The fact that Acosta used an approach which is now obsolete, and yet produced conclusions which still retain a certain amount of validity, highlights his ideas in the golden age of Spanish intellectual and scientific history.
References
- Jose de Acosta, Historia Natural Moral de las Indias, Mexico (1962).
- Karl Butzer, Annals of Association of the American Geographer, Vol. 82, #3, Sept.1992, p. 558.