the intellectual origins of the royal society

The Intellectual Origins of the Royal SocietyAuthor(s): P. M. RattansiSource: Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Dec., 1968), pp. 129-143Published by: The Royal SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/530982 .

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I29

THE INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY

By P. M. RATTANSI

Fellow, King's College, Cambridge

I

FEW decades ago historical studies of the background to the English scientific movement of the seventeenth century tended to involve dis-

cussions of the influence of utilitarian motives in drawing men to the study of nature. At one extreme, the technical needs of the 'English bourgeoisie' were said to be of primary importance (I). Other studies made utilitarian considerations part of a constellation of attitudes which supplied a religious motivation for engaging in scientific activity (2). Although some of these issues were recently raised anew, they wear a faded air, having been pushed to the periphery of historical interest by a number of brilliant explorations of the intellectual structure of the new mechanical world-view (3).

Once the Earth had been 'hurled into the skies' by Copernicus, and the finite, graded universe of Aristotle with its associated qualitative and teleo- logical physics had been discredited, it was the enormous intellectual adven- ture of fashioning a new world-picture which called forth the deepest energies of the creators of modern science. Problems were essentially set and solved by an inner dialectic of advance.

Scientists lived in society and had to convince an incredulous world of the worth of their labours. Hence, they gave sporadic attention to techno-

logical problems, or indicated the relevance of their work for their solution. That is far from saying that such concerns inspired their work. To hold the

contrary view would be fundamentally to misunderstand what the new science was about. In England, the scientific movement had hangers-on like Petty and Evelyn, with their projects of flat-bottomed boats and the planting of fruit-trees, or the Hartlib circle which studied nothing 'but as it hath a

tendency to use'. But their approach is far removed from that of a Galileo or Newton, wrestling with the profound and complex problems of a strange new conceptual world. Too marked an interest in practical applications furnishes us really with a criterion for separating the 'scientists' from the 'non-scientists' (4).

The view outlined above is now widely accepted. To re-examine the problem of utilitarian and 'Puritan' motives may seem like raking the



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embers of a dead controversy. In this paper it is hoped to show that some of the issues involved still merit further investigation and are relevant in understanding the intellectual background to the foundation of the Royal Society.

II

William Petty (1623-1687) seems to provide an excellent example of one drawn to scientific activities almost entirely by practical interests. He had been closely associated with Samuel Hartlib for a time. His scientific ideal is summed up in his The Advice of W.P. to Mr. S. Hartlib (1648), sketching a great institution where, among other things, skilled artisans would be set to work on technical problems. By systematizing observations gathered in the course of such activities, a new body of natural philosophy would grow up almost as a by-product (5).

This crudely 'Baconian' view is also expressed in a letter from Petty to Hartlib in 1648, criticizing Henry More's enthusiasm for the Cartesian philosophy. The test of any new set of scientific principles was whether they explained all natural phenomena equally well, and that 'soe easily, as that a meane capacity may be able to foretell the effects of nature before they happen, and consequently produce great and noble peeces of art tending to ye happiness of Mankind'. But had telescopes been improved by Descartes's Dioptrics? Could one foretell the weather by his Meteors? Of what diseases had he discovered a certain cure? Until Descartes had justified himself in these terms, Petty would prefer someone like Cornelius Drebbel, the Dutch inventor and Master Mechanician to James I, who had 'done more though said less' (6).

Yet Petty is not an insignificant figure in the Oxford group or the early Royal Society. At Oxford the meetings were held at his lodgings until he left for Ireland (7). Its initial plans for compiling 'histories' of all inventions and experiments, and experiments were closely modelled on some of the proposals in his Advice (8). He came to Oxford as an anatomist, and was one of the three physicians celebrated for their revival of a hanged woman (9). He became Professor of Anatomy in I650. After conducting a masterly and profitable survey of forfeited lands in Ireland for the State, he returned to take an active part in the early Royal Society and later in the Dublin Philosophical Society (Io). He must be considered a representative virtuoso of a certain sort.

Moreover, it is oversimplifying to discuss him as devoid of theoretical interests. In the 1648 letter he described himself as having been wearied by the search through ancient and modern scientific systems, and especially



13 1

attracted by the Cartesian one. But now he confined himself to experiments and thought he understood nature better, though he had not yet attained to axioms. The list of moderns given by Petty is significant: besides Descartes, they were Paracelsus, Campanella and Helmont. Some indication of the sort of theory he would have considered satisfactory is given by a discourse to the Royal Society which was printed in 1674 (II). He sketched a corpuscular theory which classified atoms as males and females, a distinction which he insisted was substantial and not merely metaphorical. Such a theory would have the great advantage of removing the objection that atoms were nowhere mentioned in the Bible. The words of Genesis, 'male and female He created them', would now be seen as true of the smallest parts of the first matter. In the same discourse, Petty stressed the importance of giving a mathematical character to various corpuscular explanations, and outlined a 'duplicate proportion' which was applicable to such phenomena as the propagation of light, the period of the pendulum, and elasticity.

The paradoxes seem to multiply. Petty appears to be set apart from the 'real scientists' not merely by his utilitarianism, but by such features as a certain animism and a search for scientific knowledge in the text of Scrip- ture, so that the dominant concerns of the mechanical philosophy, cor- puscularianism and mathematization, are given a strange new twist when he turns his attention to them.

But it is to be suggested that this combination of a utilitarian approach to science, together with a seeming animism and the assumption of a scientific content in the text of Scripture, is not peculiar to Petty, but is a defining characteristic of an alternative tradition of scientific inquiry which was influential in the sixteenth and through much of the seventeenth century. It was not completely vanquished by the rise of the mechanical philosophy. Without taking full account of that tradition, it is impossible to do justice to the problem of utilitarian motives, or to attain a full picture of the new science.

For Petty in 1648 the new philosophies of nature were those of Descartes, Paracelsus, Campanella and Helmont. Robert Boyle, in a letter written in the same year, described how he was studying the 'book of nature', aided by 'the glosses of Aristotle, Epicurus, Paracelsus, Harvey, Helmont, and other learned expositors of that instructive volume' (I2). In another account, he said he was weaned away from Aristotelian principles partly by the opposition of Telesio, Campanella ('and his ingenious epitomist Comenius'), Bacon, Gassendi, and Descartes among others (I3). Before the mechanical philosophy had been articulated coherently by Descartes and Gassendi, Paracelsus, Campanella, and Helmont were thought to typify the 'new philosophies' to



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which men most often turned when seeking an alternative to the discredited Aristotelianism of the schools.

These pre-mechanical 'new philosophies' are very different in their details; but the differences are outweighed so much by a basic similarity of philosophical outlook that they may be seen as variants of a certain Renais- sance 'Hermetic' tradition. Implicit opposition to Aristotle and the ideal of a new kind of knowledge which would at once give deep insight into the natural world and make it possible to command it are cardinal features of the first influential modern revival of Hermeticism in the late fifteenth century by the Florentine Platonists.

The weight of scholastic opinion, as typified by St Thomas Aquinas, was against the hope of 'marvellous' powers over nature being accessible to man except through demonic aid. In his classic discussion of miracles, he pointed out that all efficient causation in the natural world took place in accordance with natural laws. Since there was a strict proportionality between cause and effect, only superhuman effort would make it possible to exploit a knowledge of natural laws to achieve 'astonishing' results (I4).

For Hermeticism, by contrast, man was a magus or operator who, by reaching back to a secret tradition of knowledge which gave a truer insight into the basic forces in the universe than the qualitative physics of Aristotle, could command these forces for human ends. Nature was linked by correspondencies, by secret ties of sympathy and antipathy, and by stellar influences; the pervasive nature of the Neo-Platonic World-Soul made everything, including matter, alive and sentient. Knowledge of these links laid the basis for a 'natural magical' control of nature. The techniques of manipulation were understood mainly in magical terms (incantations, amulets and images, music, numerologies) (I5).

The fortunes of Hermeticism through the sixteenth century present complex historical problems which cannot be discussed here. An important change was the fusion of Renaissance Hermeticism and alchemy to produce a new kind of alchemy which for Paracelsus and his followers was a universal science for explaining the natural world. The basic problems of the Creation, the structure and properties of matter, and bodily processes and diseases were all discussed in this framework (I6). Not the transmutation of metals but revolutionizing the art of medicine was the end aimed at. Un- compromising opposition was openly expressed against received scientific authority. Over reliance on blighted human reason had been the cardinal error of the logical and dialectical approach of'heathen' Aristotle and Galen. Instead, knowledge was to be gathered from tracing correspondencies between the greater and the lesser world, from the experience of craftsmen,



I33

from the text of Genesis, from direct illumination, and especially from

unremitting labour in manual operations. Such knowledge was to be dedicated to the Christian-social end of relieving suffering (I7).

The ideal of Hermetic natural philosophy as part of a much larger social and religious reform was enunciated in the late sixteenth century by Giardano Bruno, allied with a mystic Copernicanism. Hermeticism became a heresy in Bruno: it was the true ancient 'religion of the world' of which

Christianity was a corruption (I8). Formally more orthodox was Hermetic

utopia described in the 'City of the Sun' of another Dominican, Tommaso

Campanella. The encouragement of scientific investigations and inventions for the good of the community and the practice of Hermetic astral magic was given a central place (I9). When Petty, Boyle, and others referred to Campanella's scientific ideas, they had works like his De Natura Rerum (1617) in mind. But his Hermetic utopian vision had a great influence, too. It influenced a group of reformers in the German cultural-area who planned a

far-reaching reform of a social, religious, and educational sort. Prominent

among them were J. H. Alsted (I588-I638), J. V. Andreae (I586-I654), and the Bohemian, J. A. Comenius (I592-167I) (20). Andreae sketched a utopian society in his Christianapolis (I619) which is heavily debted to Campanella's similar work (21). These ideas were to play an important role in mid- seventeenth-century England.

III

Robert Fludd (I574-I637), the English physician and Rosicrucian, was among the most famous Hermeticists of the first half of the seventeenth century. When Mersenne and Gassendi attacked Hermeticism from the mechanical standpoint, they chose Fludd as their target (22). It is difficult to gauge his influence in England during his own lifetime. Paracelsian iatro- chemistry had its adherents in England, but there is little evidence of their interest in his larger ideas for the reform of natural philosophy before 1640 (23).

The spread of Hermetic ideas on the lines of the German reformers just before the Puritan Revolution seems to owe more to the efforts of the circle of Samuel Hartlib (1599-I670?), the Palatinate refugee who had settled in England. Hartlib remained in close touch with Andreae, and was largely instrumental in having Comenius invited to England in 1641-1642 with the support of influential men in the Long Parliament and the Church. His ideal of scientific knowledge was starkly utilitarian: he had proposed abolishing the professorships in divinity, civil laws, and rhetoric at Gresham College and replacing them with technical subjects like working in glass and



I34

metal (24). But it was the grandeur of his reforming ideas which cast a spell over younger men like Robert Boyle and William Petty. In an early letter, Boyle described the members of Hartlib's 'Invisible College' as 'men of so

capacious and searching spirits, that school-philosophy is but the lowest region of their knowledge', and who practised 'so extensive a charity, that it reaches unto everything called man', taking 'the whole body of mankind for their care' (25). Schools, universities, and workhouses were to be planted throughout the land; education was to be reformed and made encyclo- paedic; clearing-houses were to collect and communicate information on every subject; science was to be cultivated in great research institutions and applied to human welfare; the Protestant countries were to be allied in

peace and tolerance (26). According to Thomas Sprat, writing after the Restoration, the study of

nature attracted many during the Civil War period as a refuge from 'the

passions and madness of that dismal age' (27). It is important to note, however, that both then and earlier, science (of a Hermetic cast) exercised fascination as a subordinate but essential part of a great programme of social, religious, and educational reform.

Boyle's intellectual development perhaps best illustrates the significance of Hermeticism in England. While completing his private education on the Continent, he underwent a religious experience (recapitulating a crucial event in Luther's biography): a violent thunderstorm seemed to him to presage the end of the world and he vowed to dedicate himself to a religious and watchful life if spared. It was, he said, 'an accident, which he always used to mention as the considerablst of his whole life' (28). Soon after his return to London in 1644, he came to be acquainted with the Hartlib circle, probably at the home of his sister, Lady Ranleagh, who was their great patroness. It was an exciting period, when it seemed possible not only to dream of far-reaching changes in society, religion and education, but to believe them fully capable of realization within a new political framework. There is no irony in Boyle's remark in a letter to his tutor (1646) that he studied 'natural philosophy, the mechanics, and husbandry, according to the principles of our new philosophical college, that values no knowledge but as it hath a tendency to use' (29). The next year he enthusiastically approved Hartlib's plans for having Campanella's City of the Sun and Andreae's Christianapolis translated into English. Of both he says that they deserved 'to be taught in our language' (30).

Boyle's interest in the science par excellance of the Hermetics, chemistry, is evident immediately he settled at his Dorset manor of Stalbridge (I645- 1652), where he says members of the Hartlib circle visited him from time to



135

time (3I). Against the background sketched above, it can be seen that it was not merely his hypochondriac self-medication which focused his interest on a science whose claims as a universal science (in its Hermetic version) he was later to criticize. During this period, 'his love of chemistry and his desire to use science as a witness of God's plan for the universe grew to be a passion' (32). At Stalbridge, and during his sojourn in Ireland (1652-1654), he devoted his time to experiments and to reading a wide variety of authors.

It was an important scientific decade. In 1644 the major works of Descartes, setting forth a new and powerful natural philosophy in a coherent form, were published by the Elzevirs of Amsterdam. In 1648, the same publishers issued the posthumous works of one of the most significant figures in the Hermetic tradition of scientific inquiry, J. B. van Helmont. Gassendi's corpuscular and mechanical views made their appearance in 1649 in the three volumes of his Animadversiones. Boyle's attempts to blend these two divergent traditions provide a guiding thread through his complex intellectual development.

Boyle's 1648 reference to Helmont has already been noted. Helmont opposed various features of the Paracelsian approach, especially the attempt to derive scientific truths by employing the analogy between the microcosm and the macrocosm. His searching criticism of the Paracelsian three-element theory and its supposed experimental basis anticipates Boyle's later work; instead, he substituted water as the primary element (33). Writing to Hartlib in 1647, Boyle spoke of Gassendi as a 'great favourite of mine'; Hartlib, in turn, informed Boyle in 1648 of the impending publication of Gassendi's own philosophy in a work on Epicurus (34). In contrast to Descartes, Gassendi gave an appearance of greater traditionalism and historical continuity to the mechanical and corpuscular approach by presenting it as a rehabilitation of a true and ancient natural philosophy, with modifications to remove atheistic implications (35).

In some of his earliest writings, Boyle examined and criticized the Peripatetic and chemical theories of matter on Helmontian lines, without making extended use of corpuscular notions (36). His very cautious attitude to atomism, to whose atheistic associations he was sensitive, is shown by his marking 'These Papers are without fayle to be burnt' on a I650 manuscript, urging atomism to the attention of natural philosophers (37). The mechanical and corpuscular view can be recognized as central to his work after he joined the group at Oxford in about 1654 at the invitation ofJohn Wilkins and began his long series of works which proved so important in establishing it in preference to the Aristotelian and Hermetic alternatives (38).

The late I640's and the early I65o's are rich in conversions from the 2



136

Hermetic to the mechanical viewpoint in England. Isaac Barrow, later Newton's predecessor in the Lucasian Chair, hesitated between the two in a Latin oration at Cambridge in I652, on the theme that'Descartes's hypothesis of matter and motion does not satisfactorily explain the principle natural

phenomena'. Descartes had furnished elegant explanations of the motions of celestial bodies and projectiles, tides, colours, light and the formation of

images: 'But by the principal phenomena of nature I mean the generations, properties and specific operations of animals, plants, minerals, stone, and other natural bodies.' He continued: 'Against him I pit... the Chymists, the teachers of Natural Magic, as it is called, those who profess to understand natural sympathies and antipathies'; but above all Bacon, who, warning against premature hypothese, 'condemned this philosophy before it was born' (39). In 1654 Walter Charleton, royalist physician, who had published the first translations of various works by Helmont into English in I65o, publicly recanted his former allegiance to Helmont and proclaimed himself a Gassendist (40). In the same period, Henry More undertook the task of

reconciling the Neo-Platonic system, which had provided the philosophical background to Hermeticism, with the Cartesian principles which he

enthusiastically embraced (41). In understanding these conversions, the revolutionary background must

be taken into consideration. With the breaking up of the anti-Royalist coalition and the proliferation of sects, Hermetic reform was no longer an ideal confined to the moderate Hartlib group, hoping to realize their plans by influencing the new establishment. Boyle showed increasing alarm at the danger of the sectaries. In 1646 he had reported to his former tutor the wish of many that the Government would restrain 'the spreading impostures of the sectaries', who held 'no less than 200 several

opinions on points of religion' in London (42); a few months later he feared that religion itself was menaced by their factional disputes. When the outbreak of hostilities in 1642 caused Comenius to depart from England without fulfilling his plan of setting up 'a universal college wholly devoted to the advancement of the sciences' under parliamentary aegis, John Wallis had commented: 'A great pity it is that so worthy a design is not persecuted as a publick charge, that such a shining Light should be extinct for want of

Oyl ... ' (43). By 1653 Seth Ward, member of the Oxford group to which Wallis now belonged, had to sharply differentiate their programme from that of the Hermetics and to discourage the idea that natural philosophy should be taught to all the students as their main business (44). Ward was

refuting John Webster, who, like some other radical sectaries, proposed the

teaching of Hermetic science at the universities (Paracelsus, Helmont, and



137

especially Fludd), the scholars being made to 'put their hands to the coals and furnaces, where they might find ocular experiments to confute their fopperies, and produce effects that would be beneficial to all posterities ... '(45).

It would be misleading to suggest that Boyle and Charleton rejected Hermeticism and accepted the mechanical philosophy because of social and political exigencies. That would be to ignore the momentous impact of the mechanical philosophy as what was felt to be a superior conceptual system for investigating and ordering knowledge of the natural world. The enormous sense of liberation given by an approach which, beginning with a set of clear, simple, and 'self-evident' principles, methodically proceeded to explain all natural phenomena, is strikingly evident in the English response to Cartesianism. But the reiterated stress on the 'intelligibility' of mechanical explanations, in contrast to the empty subtleties of Aristotelianism and the 'mysticism' of Hermeticism, indicate a change in sensibility, in explaining which the social and religious background must be taken into account. The relevance of that background is clearer in the Cambridge Platonists who saw Hermeticism and radical heresies as supporting each other (46). The emotionally-charged and mystical flavour of Hermeticism, its rejection of corrupted reason and praise of'experiment' (which meant mystical illumination as well as manual operations), and its search for knowledge in arbitrary Scriptural interpretation: these were at the root of the heresies which threatened religion and society (47). A sober and disenchanted system of natural knowledge, harmonized with traditional religion, was essential to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of the Aristotelian-scholastic synthesis. Hence the eagerness with which Henry More, who had little interest in detailed scientific inquiries, championed the Cartesian philosophy (48). A more congenial climate for the mechanical philosophy was thus generally created.

Henry More had no sympathy with those who studied natural philosophy for practical and technical ends. The contemplation of ultimate causes 'and the more noble pleasure of the minde arising therefrom' was a sufficient profit. Writing to Hartlib in 1649 on Petty's criticism of Descartes, he retorted: '. . so far as I see Mr. Petty would measure the work of all Philosophy by what it can procure for ye back, bed and bord.' If men lived more morally, nature and whatever had already been discovered by ances- tral art and industry was sufficient, without reaching out for 'that so highly and eagerly pursu'd invention' (49). Boyle, on the other hand, always remained convinced that the 'imputation ofbarrenness' must be removed by showing the usefulness of natural philosophy (50). But he now distinguished



138

between those who 'care only to know nature' and those who 'desire to command her'; Cartesian, atomic, and other such principles were the most satisfactory ones for the first sort; the others would make many great discoveries to advance utility (51). But considerations of immediate usefulness were often enemies of greater ultimate benefits, just as a hazel-tree was less immediately productive than peach or orange, but may help to discover hidden mines, 'if it be true what is reported by good authors of the hazel wand' (52).

IV

The above discussion shows that it is unwise to equate too marked an interest in the practical application of scientific knowledge with a 'non- theoretical' orientation, since it was one of defining characteristics of the Hermetic tradition of inquiry. Although after Paracelsus it was mainly represented by a chemical art applied to medicine, it advanced its claims as a universal science which would make it possible to explain all nature. That was the claim Henry More condemned in saying that the chemist was

normally pitiful as a philosopher when 'from a narrow inspection of some few toys in his own art, [he] conceives himself able to give a reason of all

things in Divinity and Nature . ..' (53). Boyle asked how the tria prima of the chemists could serve as the basis of a new universal science, when they could not explain magnetism, the generation of chicks or plants, motion, or

gravity (54). Those who have stressed the influence of 'Puritanism' in attracting men

to scientific activities have suggested that the religious motive of studying the 'book of nature' as complementing the book of God's word, a stress on

experience rather than a purely intellectual or dialectical approach, and the aim of using knowledge for Christian-social ends defines a 'Puritan' ethos whose consonance with modern science gave the latter an assured and

significant place in the intellectual culture of seventeenth-century England (55). Such a fusion of religious motives and scientific interests is, however, more characteristic of Hermeticism from the latter part of the sixteenth

century. The Protestant background may throw some light on the manner in which Hermetic-utopian schemes took root in the Germanic culture- area, and stress on certain elements of that tradition (Scriptural interpretation, anti-traditionalism, the importance of manual operations) at the

expense of others. But no simple 'Puritan-science' affiliation can do

justice to the complexity of the historical problems involved. The failure to take the sixteenth-century developments into account or to define key terms



139

like 'science' and 'scientist' in terms of conceptual structures are other weaknesses of these studies.

The completeness of the victory of the mechanical philosophy over Hermiticism by the mid-seventeenth century must not be overestimated. To move from one to the other was to change one conceptual scheme for ordering natural knowledge to another, with an accompanying shift in the choice of problems, methods, and explanatory models. But in Boyle, for example, many of the problems that obsessively recur in his work are of the sort that were of central importance for Hermeticism: the curative power of amulets and weapon-salves; stellar virtues; the Alkahest; and transmutation. No doubt, they are all explained in impeccably mechanical terms (amulets, for example, are believed to send out health-giving effluvia which enter the body through the pores in the skin), but their importance for him becomes less puzzling in the context of his earlier commitments (56).

Many other English 'mechanical philosophers' convey this impression of a not wholly satisfactory compromise between Hermeticism and mechanism (57). Two of the earliest English expositions of the mechanical philosophy were given by Sir Kenelm Digby and Walter Charleton. Digby's work is an amalgam of Aristotelian, Hermetic, and mechanical motifs (58); Charleton presented a more rigorous account, based on Gassendi, but devoted a sixth of the work to the mechanical explanation of prodigious and fabulous occurrences (59). The Cambridge Platonists re-interpreted Cartesianism as a restatement of the fundamental Neo-Platonic entities (60).

The Hermetic influence is seen, too, in the limitations that were placed on the scope of mechanical explanations, and the readiness to introduce 'non-mechanical' entities into the structure of explanations. In his earliest exposition of the mechanical philosophy, Boyle exempted a wide class of

phenomena, such as the growth of metals and gems in the earth, the apparent self-renewal of saltpetre-bearing earth, and the growth of plants, which could only be explained by 'seminal' forms; later he admitted the importance of final causes in studying nature (6I).

Newton provides the most outstanding example of this interweaving of Hermetic and mechanical ideas. He was deeply read in the Hermetic literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and used it to justify his making gravitational attraction, a true action at a distance, central to his system of the world. Publicly, it was sufficient to silence 'mechanistic' criticism by pointing out that such a force 'does really exist, and acts according to the laws which we have explained'. But in his private thoughts (partially published by disciples like James Gregory and Colin MacLaurin), he believed that the truth of his system was guaranteed by the Hermetic



140

prisca sapientia (62). Henry More and Ralph Cudworth had exploited this characteristic Hermetic tactic, which is to be found in Ficino, Pico, and

others, to reconcile Neo-Platonism and the mechanical philosophy. It was

supposed that intimations of the true divinity and true natural philosophy had been given by God in the remotest antiquity through a chain of sages, including the legendary Hermes. Henry More contended that these truths reached the Greeks in divided streams, the theological part being incorporated in Plato's philosophy, while the natural philosophical part was taken up by the atomists, Leuccipus and Democritus, who 'atheized' it. Descartes had now brought the two halves together and restored the true 'Mosaic' system. Newton broadly accepted this thesis, but concluded that not Cartesianism, but his own system of the world, was a restoration of the original revelation. He spent a great deal of effort in attempting to demonstrate that the Universal Law of Gravitation had been known to the ancients, and lay concealed in the enigmatic concepts of the 'harmony of the spheres' and 'Pan and his pipe'. These truths were not to be recovered by unravelling ancient texts; rather, they had to be discovered first by a rigorous inductive- mathematical method, which would uncover the true meaning of these texts. Discoveries were, thus, to be retrospectively legitimated by the ancient sources; but it was quite proper to search through the vast corpus of Hermeticism for clues about the nature of the gravitational force.

In studying the intellectual origins of the Royal Society we must take account of a number of different traditions of scientific inquiry, including Hermeticism, neo-Aristotelianism (as represented by William Harvey, Francis Glisson, and others), and the mechanical philosophy, which were influential both in the London and Oxford groups, and in the early Royal Society. The resulting picture may be less 'rational' or secularized than the

image of 'New Science' which has been popular since the Enlightenment, but it does greater justice to its total character.

NOTES

(i) Boris Hessen, 'The Social and Economic Roots of Newton's Principia', in Science at the Cross-Roads, London, 1931, pp. I5I-I76.

(2) R. K. Merton, 'Science, Society and Technology in Seventeenth Century England', Osiris, 4, 414-565 (I938).

(3) Especially in the works of Ernst Cassirer, E. A. Burtt and Alexandre Koyre. (4) These points have been discussed by A. Rupert Hall in 'Merton Revisited', Hist. Sci. 2,

I-IS (i963); also 'The Scholar and the Craftsman in the Scientific Revolution', in M. Clagett, ed., Critical Problems in the History of Science, Madison, I959; 'The

Changing Technical Act', Technology and Culture, 3, 501-515 (1962). (5) The Advice of W.P. to Mr. Samuel Hartlibfor The Advancement of somle particular Parts of

Learning, London, 1648.



I4I

(6) Partially quoted by G. H. Turnbull in 'Hartlib's Influence in the Early History of the

Royal Society', Notes & Records Roy. Soc. Lond. IO, IOI-I30 (1952). I am grateful to Mr Charles Webster for the extended quotation.

(7) John Wallis, A Defence of the Royal Society, etc. London, 1678; discussed in D. McKie, 'The Origins and Foundation of the Royal Society of London', Notes & Records, Roy. Soc. Lond. 15, I-37 (1960).

(8) Seth Ward's letter of 1652, cited in McKie, op. cit. pp. 26-27.

(9) On Petty and the Dublin Philosophical Society, see Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift, the Man, His Works, and The Age, London, 1962, I, pp. 78-82.

(io) Commemorated in R. Watkins, ed., Newesfrom the Dead, I65I. (II) Discourse made before the Royal Society, London, 1674; discussed from a different point

of view, by R. H. Kargon in 'William Petty's Mechanical Philosophy', Isis, 66, 63-66 (I965).

(12) The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, 2nd ed., 1772, I, p. 262.

(13) Boyle Papers, Vol. 38, cited by Marie Boas, Boyle and Seventeenth Century Chemistry, Cambridge, 1958, p. 27.

(I4) Summa Contra Gentiles, Bk. 3, pt. 2, Chapters CI-CVIII.

(I5) On Hermeticism, see esp. F. A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, London, 1964; D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magicfrom Ficino to Campanella, London, I958.

(16) Allen G. Debus, The English Paracelsians, London, 1965, pp. 13-48. (I7) Walter Pagel, Paracelsus, Basel-New York, 1958, pp. 65-72. (I8) Yates, op. cit., esp. pp. I90-305.

(I9) The Citta del Sole was probably written about 1602; a modified Latin version was

published in Frankfort in 1623, and in Paris in 1637; Yates, ibid. pp. 367-385. (20) Alsted published a Physica Harmonica, 1616, as well as an encyclopaedia, Herborn, 1620,

1630, Lyons, I649.

(21) J. V. Andreae, Reipublicae Christianopolitanae descriptio, Strasburg, 1619; F. A. Yates, 'The Hermetic Tradition in Renaissance Science', in Art, Science, and History in the Renaissance, ed. C. E. Singleton, Baltimore, 1968, pp. 155-274; Allen G. Debus, The Chemical Dream of the Renaissance, Cambridge, 1968.

(22) R. Lenoble, Mersenne ou la naissance du mecanisme, Paris, 1943, esp. pp. 83-167. (23) Debus (note I6), pp. I77-I78.

(24) G. H. Turnbull, Hartlib, Dury and Comenius, London, 1947, p. 49. (25) Boyle to Francis Tallents, 20 February 1646/7, Works, 4, xxxiv-xxxv.

(26) Turbull (note 24), pp. 36-60.

(27) Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society of London, London, 1667, p. 53. (28) Works, I, xxi.

(29) Ibid. I, xxxiv.

(30) G. H. Turnbull, 'Iohn Hall's Letters to Samuel Hartlib', Review of English Studies, n.s. 4, 1953, quoting Boyle's letter of 8 April 1647; Hartlib noted in his Ephemerides in 1653 that Campanella's and Andreae's utopias were superior to Bacon's New Atlantis (1627) since more Christian; on the 'Baconianism' of the Hartlib circle, H. R. Trevor-Roper, 'Three Foreigners: The Philosophy of the Puritan Revolution', in Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change, London, 1967, pp. 237-293.

(3 ) Boyle, Works, I, xxxiv; see also R. E. W. Maddison, 'Studies in the Life of Robert

Boyle, F.R.S., Part IV', Notes & Records, Roy. Soc. Lond. 18, 104-124 (I963).



142

(32) L. T. More, The Life and Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, Oxford, 1944, p. 66.

(33) On Helmont, Walter Pagel, 'The Religious and Philosophical Background ofJ. B. van Helmont's Science and Medicine', Bull. Hist. Med. Suppl. 2, I944; J. R. Partington, A History of Chemistry, London, I96I, 2, pp. 209-243.

(34) Boyle to Hartlib, 8 May I647, in Works, I, xli. Hartlib to Boyle, May 1648, ibid. 6, p. 77.

(35) Charleton, in his Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana, London, 1654, saw Descartes as the greatest of the 'innovators' and Gassendi of the 'renovators', pp. 3-4.

(36) Marie Boas, 'An early version of Boyle's Sceptical Chymist', Isis, 45, I53-168 (I954).

(37) R. S. Westfall, 'Unpublished Boyle Papers relating to Scientific Method', Ainn. Sci. 12, 103-II7 (1956).

(38) Boyle came to Oxford probably by the end of I655 and early I656, according to Maddison, op. cit.

(39) Isaac Barrow, Theological Works, ed. A. Napier, Cambridge, 9, vii (I859); 'Cartesiana

hypothesis de materia et motu haud satisfacit praecipuis naturae phaenomenis', (1652), pp. 79-I04.

(40) Physiologia, p. 58; in I650 Charleton had published A Ternary of Paradoxes, which included Helmont's writings on the weapon salve, on tartar in wine, and on the theme of reason not being an essential part of the soul; and Deliramnenta Catarrhi by Helmont.

(41) Henry More, The Immortality of the Soul, London, 1659, Bk. 2, Ch. xii.

(42) Boyle to Marcombes, 22 October 1646, Works, I, xxxii-xxxiii.

(43) Ibid. I, xxxiv-xxxv, Boyle to Francis Tallents, 20 February 1646/7; also Boyle to

Dury, May 1647, ibid. I, xxxix.

(44) Seth Ward, Vindiciae Academiarum, Oxford, I654, p. 5o.

(45) John Webster, Academiarum Examen, etc. London, 1654, p. 71; another reply to Webster was by Thomas Hall, Historio-Mastix. A Whip for Webster ... where the Sophistry, Vanity, and insufficiency of his New-found light (tending to the subversion of Universities, Philosophers, Physitians, Magistrates, Ministers) is briefly discovered, and the contrary truth asserted, London, 1654.

(46) In his Observations on the Anthroposophia Theomagica of Eugenius Philalethes, London, I650; and Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, London, I656, with six sections on Paracelsus as a warning to 'that more Mechanical Kind of Genius that loves to be tumbling off, and trying tricks with the Matter (which they call making Experiments) when desire

of knowledge has so heated it', leading to the 'wildest hallucinations imaginable' (sec. xlix).

(47) P. M. Rattansi, 'Paracelsus and the Puritan Revolution', Anbix, 11, 24-32 (1963). (48) In a letter appended to Joseph Glanvill's A Prefatory Answer to Mr. Hen. Stubbe,

London, 1671, p. 155, More said the great usefulness of the Royal Society in collecting 'experiments' (i.e. ghost stories, etc.) proving the existence of incorporeal spirits.

(49) Letter of 12 March 1648/9 in Hartlib Papers, xviii, Sheffield University; I owe the reference to Mr Charles Webster.

(50) In his 'Usefulness of Experimental Philosophy', Works, 2, pp. 1-246.

(51) 'Experimental Essays, ibid. I, 3I0.

(52) Ibid. p. 3I5.

(53) See note 46.



143

(54) The Sceptical Chymist, London, I66I, pp. 301-313; discussed by Allen G. Debus, 'Fire

Analysis and the Elements in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries', Attn. Sci. 23, I26-147 (1967).

(55) See note 2.

(56) See Peter Shaw's 1738 defence of 'exceptionable things' in Boyle's writings, like Butler's stone, the weapon-salve, the alkahest, and transmutation, quoted in Boyle, Works, I, cxlvii-viii; L. Thomdike, A History of Magic and Experimlental Science, New York, 8, pp. I70-20I.

(57) See the discussion in Charles Webster, 'Henry Power's Experimental Philosophy', Ambix, 14, I50-I78 (1967).

(58) Two Treatises, Paris, 1644 (London, 1645, 1658, 1669); Powder of Sympathy, London, 1658 (tr. of Paris, I658).

(59) In Physiologia (note 36); cf. Kurt Sprengel's remarks on Charleton's wavering between Descartes and Helmont, Versuch einer pragmatischen Geschichte der Arzneykunde, Halle, I827, IV, p. 40.

(60) See note 41; cf. Henry Power on the aetherial vehicle in Experimental Philosophy, London, 1664, pp. 7I-72; Joseph Glanvill to the Duchess of Newcastle post-I66o, 'I am not so fond a mechanist, as to suppose all Phoenomena of the World to be raised meerly by those Laws; but most of them perhaps by a Principle that is Vital; And the Anima Mundi I take to be a very likely, and convenient Hypothesis', in Letters and Poems in honour of the . . . Duchess of Newvcastle, Savoy, 1676, p. Io2.

(6I) See note 50, part I, essay 4: 'A Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural Things', in Works, 5, pp. 392-452 (I688).

(62) J. E. McGuire and P. M. Rattansi, 'Newton and the "Pipes of Pan" ', Notes & Records, Roy. Soc. Lond. 21, Io8-I43 (1966).



the intellectual origins of the royal society

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