“The eye to the object”: The question of demonstrative knowledge in Defoe’s The Consolidator

This article examines Daniel Defoe’s The Consolidator (1705), a prose fiction work on a voyage to China and to the moon, from the perspective of science in the early eighteenth century. By analysing the references to experimental inventions in the text and reconstructing their scientific background, this essay argues that in The Consolidator Defoe creates a fictional space in which readers can familiarise themselves with the epistemological ramifications of contemporary scientific ideas, particularly the Newtonianist standard of demonstrative knowledge. In doing so, this essay offers a reassessment of Defoe on two counts. First, it investigates Defoe’s attention to the questions raised by Newtonianism to challenge the claim that Defoe’s interest in science mainly lay in early Royal Society empiricism from the 1660s and the 1670s; and, second, it focuses on the imaginative qualities of The Consolidator to problematise its interpretation as a work mainly animated by topical concerns.