ysis based upon careful observation.
Before proceeding to a consideration of these novels, we may follow the spirit of nineteenth century moral physics by laying out the groundwork on which this attitude toward the world was founded. The early development of classical physics, as applied to large objects such as cannonballs and planets, took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Social and moral thought lagged behind; the period from Copernicus to Newton corresponds closely to the age of religious wars in Europe. Literature likewise lagged; Cervantes in the early seventeenth century could satirize the older tradition of fabulous fiction, but Milton, several decades later, still was drawn to the epic mode.
In the course of the eighteenth century, social and moral attitudes caught up with science. Traditional religious views gave way among the educated to Deism, which posited a scientific minded God whose moral laws operated through naturalistic processes, and who refrained from interfering in them: belief in miracles was disallowed. By the late eighteenth century, the author of the Declaration of Independence could speak of the laws of Nature and Nature's God. This was the world in which Jane Austin grew up, and which led her and her successors to write realistic novels.
In the nineteenth century, science proceeded along the lines already established, and thereby achieved great successes. The laws of thermodynamics demonstrated that heat could be explained and its properties determined through applying Newtonian laws on the invisibly small molecular level. This in turn confirmed the mechanistic Newtonian world view. The physicists' model can be summarized as a billiard ball Universe. On an ideal pool table, if we accurately specify the position of the balls relative to one another and the side cushions, and the initial movement and direction of the cue ball, we can predict where every bal...