Milton, Leibniz, and the Measure of Motion

Abstract

Milton’s description of the “high capital / Of Satan and his peers,” the aptly named Pan-daemonium, leads to a memorable account of its architect’s expulsion from heaven: Men called him Mulciber; and how he fell From heaven, they fabled, thrown by angry Jove Sheer o’er the Crystal Battlements; from morn To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, A summer’s day; and with the setting Sun Dropped from the zenith like a falling Star, On Lemnos the Aegaean Isle: thus they relate, Erring; for he with this rebellious rout Fell long before; nor aught availed him now To have built in heaven high towers; nor did he scape By all his engines, but was headlong sent With his industrious crew to build in hell. (I: 740-751) Here, as often in Milton’s epic, time provides the measure of motion – recall, for instance, the war in heaven, which concludes with the anarchic descent of the defeated angels: “Nine days they fell; confounded Chaos roared, / And felt tenfold confusion in their fall” (VI: 871-72). Elsewhere space provides the measure of both time and stasis, as in an earlier, parallel description of the aftermath of this defeat: “Nine times the space that measures day and night / To mortal men, he with his horrid crew / Lay vanquished (I: 50-52). In these examples, falling – a continuous change in location over a duration – is measured by time’s succession, whereas the duration of immobility is imagined as spatial extension,the “space” that the fallen “lay vanquished.” Such shifting articulations of time and spaceare not surprising, since at stake are precisely motion and stasis, both of which necessarily demand relating the spatial to the temporal.