Observation as a Way of Life: Time, Attention, Allegory

Figure 9: Magnified needle, Robert Hooke, Micrographia: Or some Physiological Descriptions of
Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses (London: John Martyn and James Allestry, 665), n.p.
Courtesy of the Library of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.
So pencil-thin and intense was the beam of attention that it
could hardly be sustained over long periods. Hence the observer
must return over and over again to the same object, picking out
different details, different aspects each time and multiply confirming
what had already been observed. 5 Still better was the repetition
of observations by several observers, not because the veracity
of the initial observations was in doubt, but rather to widen the
panorama of different perspectives on the same object 6 – a kind of
institutionalization of the blind-men-and-the-elephant procedure,
in which one reports on the tail, another on the tusks, still another
on the ears. Bonnet urged Italian naturalist Lazzaro Spallanzani to
repeat the observations of others, including his own: “Nature is so
varied that we can hardly vary our attempts too much.” 7 The most
ingenious efforts of early modern observers were directed towards
the discernment of the most fleeting details, the finest nuances.
5 Senebier, L’Art d’observer, vol. , p. 88.
6 Benjamin Carrard, Essai qui a remporté le prix de la Société Hollandoise des Sciences de Haarlem en 1770
sur cette Question. Qu’est-ce qui est requis dans l’Art d’Observer & jusques-où cet Art contribue-t-il à perfectionner
l’Entendement? (Amsterdam: Marc-Michel Rey, 777), p. 207.
7 Bonnet to Spallanzani, 27 December 765, in Bonnet, Oeuvres d’histoire naturelle, vol. 5, p. 0.