Books: The Faltering Trajectory

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THE AGE OF LOUIS XIV by Will and Ariel Durant. 802 pages. Simon & Schuster. $10.

Louis branded the age with his name. He was, after all, the arbiter of its fashions, the patron of its arts, the instigator of its wars. He was the Sun King, and Le Brun painted him as a god on the vaults of Versailles.

But the age named after Louis (roughly 1648-1715) was perhaps more profoundly embodied in the frail frame of another Frenchman, Blaise Pascal. Pascal began as a youthful exponent of reason and science—most notably in his studies of atmospheric pressure and the calculus of probabilities—only to recoil in middle life from everything science and reason had apparently achieved. In his last testament, the famous Thoughts on Religion, he emerged as an eloquent defender of religious belief. Science, he declared, was mere presumption, and man could grope his way towards the truth only by renouncing the intellect and "placing his faith in feeling." And yet Pascal was torn. "I look on all sides," he wrote shortly before his death, "and everywhere I see nothing but uncertainty."

Other Breed. The age he lived in. Historian Will Durant suggests, suffered from the same obsessive doubt, and its great preoccupation was the confrontation of science and religion, rationalism and faith. In this book, Volume VIII of his massive The Story of Civilization, Durant explores that conflict, from the persecution of the Huguenots to the age's finest flowering in the minds of men like Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Bayle, Leibnitz.

As in his previous volumes, Durant scants parts of his story to speak at leisurely length of the poets, philosophers, and men of science he admires. He finds little space to discuss the great outward thrust that sent 17th century Englishmen, Frenchmen and Dutchmen around the globe. And although he writes of the statesmen and military leaders who helped shape the age—Cromwell, Marlborough, Peter the Great, Frederick William of Brandenburg—his sympathies lie with that other breed of 17th century men who made "all the motions of matter seem to fall into an order of law and the immensity of the universe seem to obey the predictions of the human mind."

The Accommodation. Common folk still sought a king's touch as the cure for scrofula, still believed that the twitching of a hazel twig betrayed the nearness of criminals, still looked to omens and cabalistic signs as a guide to the future. The Swedish poet Georg Stiernhielm was accused of witchcraft for burning a peasant's beard with a magnifying glass, and witches would continue to stalk the lands of Europe for as long as King Louis lived (Durant reports that in Scotland the last one was sent to the stake in 1722). But at the same time, Hooke was developing the compound microscope, which transformed the study of the cell; Nicolaus Steno was studying the development of the earth's crust; Olaus Roemer was determining the velocity of light. And John Locke, in his Second Treatise of Civil Government, was proposing a theory of representative government with such eloquence that Oswald Spengler was later to conclude that Locke was the architect of the Western Enlightenment.