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The Nature of the Early Royal Society: Part I

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

K. Theodore Hoppen
K. Theodore Hoppen
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Hull, Cottingham Road, Hull HUG 7RX.
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Extract

The foundation of the Royal Society marks an important step in the institutionalization of seventeenth-century British natural philosophy. The society's existence and activities provided a focus for the exchange of opinions, while its meetings and publications became forums for scientific debate. Some writers, however, have claimed much more than this for the society and have seen its establishment as marking a real watershed between, on the one hand, intellectually ‘conservative elements’ and, on the other, a set of ‘definite philosophical principles … inspiring … progressive minds’. Others have gone still further and argued not only that the society's activities ‘enormously’ accelerated ‘the development of natural sciences’, but that these activities were the result of the ‘working out of a conscious, deliberately-conceived ideal’. But views which see a single, logically consistent conception of the nature of the scientific enterprise informing the work and outlook of the Royal Society and its members involve a serious oversimplification of the complexity of natural philosophy in the late seventeenth century. Despite some important work published in recent years, we are still far from achieving a satisfactory understanding of the complicated web of traditions, sources, and intellectual systems that provided both an inspirational dynamic for the work of natural philosophers such as those in the Royal Society and patterns of expression through which their preoccupations could be articulated. Thus the many studies which have been devoted to establishing connexions between the scientific movement and patterns of religious or political belief have been flawed from the start by unreal assumptions about the degree of intellectual coherence presented by the natural philosophy of the time. And until we can present a more three-dimensional picture of what the 'scientific movement’ was in fact all about, and until wider agreement has been reached as to satisfactory definitions of various types of socio-theological attitude and behaviour, such studies are no more than attempts to tie together two unknowns by means of a rope of sand.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , March 1976 , pp. 1 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 1976

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References

NOTES

I should like to thank Professor H. F. Kearney and Professor P. M. Rattansi for their kindness in having read and commented upon an early draft of this study.

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17 Birch, , Royal Society, op. cit. (16), i. 367Google Scholar. One might also note the society's interest in drawing up lists of queries to be sent to persons in remote parts of the world. Good examples are those sent to Sir Philberto Vernatti in Batavia, which included ‘What grounds there may be for the relation, concerning Horns taking Root, and growing about Goa?’, which were printed in Sprat, T., The history of the Royal Society (London, 1667), pp. 158–72Google Scholar, and those drawn up to be sent to Hungary, which, among other things, asked ‘Whether the iron that is said to be turned into copper by the vitriolate springs at Chemnitz … do after that transmutation or precipitation contain a pretty deal of gold?’, printed in Philosophical transactions, ii (1667), 467–9.Google Scholar

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19 Birch, , Royal Society, op. cit. (16), i. 53, 271, 300, and 393.Google Scholar

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37 See The mathematical and philosophical works of the Right Rev. John Wilkins (2nd edn., 2 vols., London, 1802), ii. 89–96Google Scholar (from Mathematical magick). For the continuation of similar interests by Wilkins, once a member of the Society, see Stimson, D., ‘Dr. Wilkins and the Royal Society’, Journal of modern history, iii (1931), 554–7.Google Scholar

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