Virgin Minds: Innocence and Objectivity

This chapter explores connections between ideas about childish innocence and the emergence in the seventeenth century of something like the modern scientific virtue of objectivity, as well as the implications of this link for our understanding of the historical development of the latter concept. Defined partly as freedom from worldly prejudice and preconception, as well as a state of prelapsarian moral perfection, childlike innocence was increasingly held up as an epistemological as well as an ethical ideal, facilitating perceptual lucidity and accuracy. In particular, childish ignorance of worldly standards of value was both used to satirize the similarly indiscriminate collections of seventeenth-century philosophers and as evidence for their innate insight and piety in preferring divinely created things over the bogus glitter of earthly treasures. Ancient ideas about the autotelic character of play were also important in this regard, allowing thinkers to postulate a form of experiment which was productive precisely insofar as it was purposeless.