The “Toyish Art” of the Microscope: Experiment as Play

This chapter investigates the ways in which natural philosophers including Robert Hooke attempted to emulate or recreate a childlike perspective in their own experimental activities. For members of the early Royal Society, both the playfulness and the sensory lucidity of childhood could be partially recaptured in adulthood through the use of prosthetic aids. In particular, the telescope and microscope were—for all their technological complexity—sometimes understood in a very literal way as toys which nonetheless served a vital function, promising to restore something of this lost childlike sensibility. This effort, I suggest, was underpinned by a transformation in ideas about experience as a source of knowledge, as an Aristotelian model of “experience” as conferring understanding only gradually, over an extended period of time (and hence, as the exclusive preserve of the old), was replaced by a new, Baconian emphasis on the heuristic and probative value of experimental intervention in the present moment (a form of experience equally available to children).