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In his Letters on England,1 Voltaire wrote:
A Frenchman arriving in London finds things very different, in natural science as in everything else. He has left the world full, he finds it empty. In Paris … for your Cartesians everything is moved by an impulsion you don’t really understand, for Mr Newton it is by gravitation, the cause of which is hardly better known … There you have some appalling clashes … Finally, the better to settle if possible every difficulty, he proves, or at least makes it highly probable … that a plenum cannot possibly exist, and he brings back the vacuum, which Aristotle and Descartes had banished from the universe.
In this opposition, Descartes’ Paris is a world full of dependent relations, leaving no place for the vacuum, a world where clarity and understanding impose on things their notion of what is evident – one only sees what one understands – and Newton's London is a world with a spirit emptied of dependent relations, determined to see, even if it costs the extinction of its lanterns, confronting what seems uncertain, doubtful or strange. For psychoanalysts, the contradiction between the worlds of Paris and London forms the limits of one and the same path – namely, the limits of the functioning of our thought. Thinking, it could be said, is an incessant journey back and forth between Paris and London.
The Newtonian conception is more the product of a powerful work of ‘figurability’, akin to that of the dream, than a process of rational thought: the universe is an infinite vacuum of which only an infinitely small part is filled by objects – objects that move across this limitless and bottomless void. Nonetheless, the identity and reciprocity between terrestrial and cosmic bodies, between apple
and planet, is absolute – each body stands in relation to all the other bodies and is united with them.
It is understandable that this fine figurability was disconcerting for the scientific mind of the epoch for which any notion of the existence o