Nobody remembers Antonie van Leeuwenhoek because nobody can pronounce Leeuwenhoek.  We can all thank God he didn’t name his invention, the microscope, after himself, or nobody would have graduated medical school.

Van Leeuwenhoek originally wanted to inspect fibers he was using in his drapery business and ended up turning the academic world on its head.  In 1676 Van Leeuwenhoek realized he was in over his head after discovering a whole new dimension of life in microscopic scales of existence.  Van Leeuwenhoek began a correspondence with the Royal Society in 1676 in a series of letters reporting what he was discovering under his microscope.  The series ran in excess of 190 reports of discovery.

The leap from Galileo’s telescope to Van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope only seems far-fetched to the uninitiated.  Technically speaking, telescopes do precisely what microscopes do, magnify images which appear very small.  The only true difference is found in the physical constraints and focal depths of microscopy compared to telescopy.  Van Leeuwenhoek modifications to lenses and eye pieces made the telescope useful in magnifying very small objects that were close.

After Van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope became known to Europe’s gentlemen scholars, a new age had officially begun.  What we all regard as the Enlightenment gained empirical legs, and unlimited license of thought due to the microscope.  Skeptics will argue that the Enlightenment in Europe was just the Renaissance resonating in the stacks of Europe’s Universities, for the scholars of the Enlightenment were standing on the shoulders of earlier giants, expounding on but not adding to the contribution of others.

That argument is certainly debatable, until Van Leeuwenhoek invented the microscope.  With one invention an obscure Dutchman let the Enlightenment’s thought leaders off leash.

In the modern world we regard microscopes and microscopy as commonplace, even retrograde technology, a contraption from the 18^th century which has been surpassed in orders of magnitude by electron microscopes, X-Rays and MRI machines.

True thought that is in terms of strict resolution, neither the electron microscope, X-Ray machine or MRI machine have revealed an entire sphere of life hitherto unknown to Mankind.  Microscopes did.  Van Leeuwenhoek, for obvious reasons, was the first person to witness for himself the cellular structure of life and, before he knew what he was describing in letters to the Royal Society, Van Leeuwenhoek had been credited with identifying cellular composition of muscle fibers, the existence of bacteria – which called animalcules – and even red blood cells.

Trust me, until Van Leeuwenhoek, there was nothing whatsoever which could have predicted the existence of life forms at such small scales of biology.  Everyone jumped on board Van Leeuwenhoek’s band wagon and, in short order, it was confirmed that every tissue of every living creature was composed exclusively of cellular forms of life.

This was an astounding discovery in its day, one with which no church anywhere was prepared to cope.  Not the Roman Catholic Church, not the Lutheran Church, not the Presbyterian Church, nobody foresaw the world Van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope revealed.

If you thought Galileo was rubbing the orthodoxy the wrong way, you can multiply Galileo’s challenges one hundred-fold and reach a fair assessment of the epiphany which lent the Enlightenment legitimacy.  Had not the religious doctrines been teaching all along that the body was merely a temple, it is nearly certain society would have come unglued on the spot.  Gratefully, Church fathers could nod knowingly, and feign prescience in the affirmation all beings were built of little bricks science was calling cells.

But, at the perceptual level, where it matters most, Van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope forced everyone from the most devout believer to the most vehement atheist to answer the essential question:  If human beings are just a collection of millions, maybe billions of little life forms that arrange themselves like a mosaic tile floor, what are human beings?  For that matter, what is a cat or a dog?

At the time, though, the greatest interest lay in the more immediate question, what the heck is a bacteria?  Were they part of the human body?  If not, where does the human body begin and where does it end?  I am certain that a scientific, ecclesiastic and political crisis would have resulted had this essential question been answered at the time, but gratefully it would take until 1905 for scientists to learn bacteria and viruses cause disease.

In Van Leeuwenhoek’s day, the church retained authority on that matter.  Diseases were punishments for sin.  My audience can likely predict how much damage that dogma would do to the credibility of the church in 1905.  In 1905, when it was finally proven that bacteria, not God, was inflicting diseases on humanity, the hubris of science ran rampant across Europe.  Two wars of extinction and the Holocaust was the result.

But let’s not put the cart before the horse.  I am attempting to explain to Gen Z why the world they live in appears so irrational and dangerous.  It appears irrational and dangerous because it is irrational and dangerous.  What I am attempting to impress on Gen Z is that every generation was born into ignorance, and every generation has contributed toward the Enlightenment of Mankind.

The Enlightenment is an historical process, not a point in time.

God forbid the Enlightenment ever end.

But there, in the 1700’s just after Cromwell’s bloody rampage throughout the British Isles, a newly restored Monarchy, professing the divine origins of its system of government was beset on all sides by anyone and everyone with a microscope.  Granted, the Church was the Arbiter in the moral relationship between citizen and Crown, but in England the Crown was the head of the church.

The Crown wisely chose not to advance an official opinion until scientific method had run its course.  And run its course science did.  What followed the invention of the microscope was an examination and re-evaluation of every species in existence, indeed, a reordering of the taxonomical order itself.

Tragically, human beings were not exempt from such examinations and the Crown quickly discovered all the universities they had founded over the years were wandering out of bounds on the moral front.  Two distinct classes of academics formed two distinct schools of thought. 

Classical Scholars grounded their efforts in the moral doctrines and philosophies which had withstood the test of time, not in newly emerging “facts”. 

Empirical Scholars abandoned all doctrines and philosophies in the name of eliminating bias, and bravely went where no man had gone before, into the microscopic dimensions of life.

I emphasize the concept of “facts” in quotations, not to denigrate the factual basis of observations being made by the Empiricists, just to call attention to the fragile grasp that Empiricists had on their own perceptions. 

You don’t want to read a scientific text from these, the early days of microscopy, unless you want a good laugh.  If you do, it will be immediately clear that everyone was on to something, but in the rush to be first to publish, some very comical hypotheses were offered on life as observed at the microscopic level of creation.

And yes, nearly every scientist of that age still believed in God and in Creation, at least until they did not.  Atheists in accredited academia were primed for legitimacy the minute scientific method required all bias be eliminated, that every scientist abandon their pre-existing beliefs and apply reason in their experiments.  That, some argued, necessarily meant that science had to suspend its belief in a Creator, if only temporarily.

Within a single generation of scholars agnostic scholarship was making headway while Classical scholars were bogged down in apologetics.  Classical scholars were more motivated toward rehabilitating church doctrines, at revising church doctrines to make them more consistent with newly observed phenomena, so the lions share of scientific contributions were being made by agnostics.

Within the agnostic school of thought, one could be a believer and still practice science, as long as one entertained hypotheses which precluded a Creator from the assumptions defining experimentation and discovery.  In terms of modern scientific method, what the agnostics proposed and implemented in excluding a Creator as a starting assumption, was the “null set”, a control group against which to compare and contrast hypotheses.

It was because agnostic scholarship made significant advances early in the Enlightenment that atheist gained a foothold in accredited academia.  Their contributions to science compounded to lend legitimacy to even academic sanction of atheistic method, science pursued exclusively in the absence of a Creator as a starting assumption.

The problem with both ecclesiastical science and atheist science is that both impart bias in the genesis of every phenomenon.  For this reason, I prefer agnostics science over the alternatives.

But I wasn’t around in 1676 when Van Leeuwenhoek sent his first letter to the Royal Society in London.  He was initially received with incredulity, for the man was clearly barking mad, but either sufficient reason or sufficient modesty existed in the Royal Society to entertain all comers.

I can personally attest to the fact open mindedness remains a coin of the Realm in the United Kingdom today, at least among Royal institutions.  If not for the patience and tolerance of institutions which shall remain nameless for the present, I would not have been welcomed back into the United Kingdom after first making this discovery.  I applaud and celebrate Her majesty’s government for affording me the intellectual latitude to put a very difficult puzzle together at my leisure.

The United Kingdom’s leading Universities and Museums, on the other hand, were gob smacked to put it mildly.  I attribute the differences in my reception to the burden each institution bears and the scope of their institutional responsibility. 

Crown institutions appear to have become conditioned to expect blame for anything and everything which goes awry, and must needs be aware of where, when and how things do go awry.  I may, therefore, be flattering myself when I conclude it was patience and tolerance, and not sheer anxiety which compelled Her majesty’s governments in Wales, Scotland and England to indulge my repeated inquiries.

The United Kingdom’s academic institutions, in contrast, appear to be convinced they are the repositories of all that is known, the locus of all that will become known and they are faultless in the service and station.  Institutional psychology could not cope with a three-time high school drop out arriving unannounced with a discovery in hand that gutted the humanities department.

And that is also precisely what happened in 1676 when Van Leeuwenhoek put pen to paper and began reporting all he was learning with his new invention directly to the Royal Society.

Full stop.

The Crown has been accused of many things since the Enlightenment, and I still subscribe to a few points on the list, but on the matter of the Crown vs. Academia I am obligated to defend the Crown.  The Crown has been accused in most sources of resisting even fighting the “Enlightenment”, but that is a patented lie.  Van Leeuwenhoek personally wrote over 190 letters directly to the Royal Society which was then and remains a penultimate mediator in the empirical sciences.

Immediately upon restoring the Monarchy, King Charles II founded the Royal Society precisely to safeguard academia from populism in academia, that impulse which never fails to frustrate the course of progress in “Great Leaps Forward”.  Cromwell was a disaster for the nation, not just the Crown.  No sooner had Cromwell ensconced himself on the throne and declared himself Lord Protector (of God knows what), did he begin plotting to establish a dynasty of his own.

It didn’t take long for the British people to realize that, if they were destined to have a Monarch, they preferred one which understood what the job entailed.  The coronation of Charles II was the antidote to Oliver Cromwell, which leaves everyone who has visited West Minster Palace since wondering, why the hell is there a triumphal statue of Oliver Cromwell on prominent display outside those hallowed halls?

Cromwell serves as the populist “bogeymen”, a grim sentinel standing vigil against an aspirant Crown, or so Parliamentarians would have us all believe.  I’d be willing to accept that at face value, were it not for the fact that it was Cromwell who conspired to murder a King, not the other way around.

The point I am making is precisely this: The social upheavals leading to the English Civil War were precisely the social upheavals the Roman Catholic Church feared the year Galileo announced his discovery.  Society was ill-prepared for any erosion in the moral authority of its age.  That was true in Ibn Sahl’s day.  It was true in Galileo’s day.  It was true in Van Leeuwenhoek’s day, and it will remain true, I am convinced, until the Day of Days.

In forming the Royal Society, King Charles II was leading in a domain of British life which was beyond the mandate of the Parliament.  King Charles correctly appraised the true character of progress and decided, rather than reforming the system beginning from the sewer of politics, Royalists and Loyalists should begin at the spring. 

King Charles II was an extraordinary student of history and probably the British Monarch who receives the least credit for his accomplishments.  King Charles II’s Royal Society moderated academia not through exclusion but through inclusion.  Van Leeuwenhoek only wrote to the Royal Society because the Royal Society accepted all comers, regardless of their origins in the world or standing in society. 

The Royal Society’s openness has not always yielded the desired result, for the policy attracted as many flies as it did bees, but the bees were doing the heavy lifting for British Academia, so the flies were tolerated until their theses were refuted by Peer Review. 

Among British Academia, however, the Royal Society bridged the divide between Classical Scholars, who could not tolerate scientific inquiry that could plausibly erode long held doctrines, and Agnostic Scholars, who could not entertain a Creator in any starting assumption. 

The Royal Society insisted, though it was never documented per se, that agnostics in the laboratory were producing results, but everything that emerged from the lab had to conform to moral standards.  Through the Royal Society’s leadership, detente was achieved in accredited academia, a balance, if not a peace, which persisted until 1905.

That observation burdens me with a wide gap in history to fill. 

The years between 1676 and 1776 alone is wide enough.  The gap between 1676 and 1905 seems unfathomable.  But that is only because we, in the 21^st century, are acclimated to exponential growth on the innovation curve.  I sit on my couch with my laptop and toil away in full confidence that, were I to get seriously ill at any moment, there are scores of doctors within a five-mile radius who know which antibiotic will cure me.

Between 1676 and 1905, prayer was the only recourse any had for a cure.  Don’t mistake me for knocking prayer.  Enough studies have been done over the years confirming prayer has more than just a placebo effect, but today, even Christians “also pray” about health concerns.  Between 1676 and 1905, when nobody could cure anything anyway, it was reasonable to assume, if all those cellular life forms in our veins and in our guts were in fact little creatures, God could, if He chose, to cure us of whatever mischief they were up to.

Most were not convinced bacteria were up to any mischief at all.  The question didn’t even occur in earnest until the late 1800s.  What occupied the minds of Van Leeuwenhoek and his colleagues was the essence of being.  What is a person if all the organs and tissues of the body are just a mosaic of cells? 

Classical scholars refused to entertain such non-questions and agnostics refused to refuse.  Classists nodded knowingly, citing scriptures which consistently describe the body as a temple.  Of course, the body would be made of bricks.  Round one went to the classists, the agnostics just didn’t hear the bell.

Agnostics, shackled by their self-imposed starting assumptions, unable to entertain a Creator in their hypotheses, found themselves with no way to explain the ultimate paradox: If we are all just an aggregation of cells, each of them life forms distinct from us as persons, what exactly is a person.

The Classical School was amused at the confusion of their colleagues.  For decades they had argued God could not be proven so should not be entertained, and here they were unable to explain anything life form above the cellular level of existence.  The same question being asked about a human being applied to every plant, insect, fish, bird and mammal in existence.

The laughter was deserved, and don’t think for a minute it passed.  Quite the opposite.  Science has failed to identify the origins and locus of consciousness in a human being, and the same applies to every sentient species in the taxonomical chart.  Ask the Royal Institute today and you’ll be informed the closest we have come to identifying where the individual psyche resides within the human brain is the brain stem.  But that is like saying there is a star somewhere inside our own galaxy, for that is about how many neurons are in the human brain stem. 

I guess we should be grateful we’ve at least identified the neurological neighborhood.  In 1676, though, there was little to be grateful for, other than increasingly powerful microscope optics.  The one contribution which scientific method made toward resolving the question, “who are we?” was in confirming that human beings, and all life forms, were all made of the same components.  At the microscopic level of existence, there was nothing at all distinguishing human tissues from any other mammalian tissue.

Reptiles had distinct differences, and more so fish.  Plants, obvious, were unlike all the others.  Most perplexing were spores and molds which appeared to have no cells at all.  Spores and molds would have to wait for better microscopes, so all the attention fell on the animal kingdom.

What were animals actually?  More importantly, what were human beings?  If you started taking apart a building brick by brick, what remained should be the “unique individual”.  By the end of the century every tissue of the human body had been dissected, sliced and examined under Van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope, but nowhere was the seat of the soul identified.

That was no problem for the Classical School since they were all taught from a very young age the soul departs the body in the moment of death.  Agnostics countered that, since dogs and cats had no soul, there should be a difference between human neurology and all other mammals, but there was, apparently, not.  Not in structure, only in size.

Everyone born between 1920 and 1960 probably already knows where this is going, but I’ll spell it out for the little ones.

This is leading directly to the National Socialist Worker’s Party’s Holocaust.  Neither Classical Scholars or their Agnostic Colleagues in the Empirical School could plausibly have predicted just how slippery the slippery slope was.  A few more dots had to be connected, and half of them weren’t even born yet.

The next dot to be connected was a man named James Oglethorpe.  Oglethorpe connected the dots between accredited academia and the pure, unadulterated evil of slavery.  Next