Abstract
Historians who write on Bacon’s Utopian college view it as an inspiration for the early Royal Society. They offer two versions of this inspiration as to the precise role of the Society: as an educational institute for training or as a research institute. Historians who advocate the version of the society as an educational institute view as the core of the Society the group of educational reformists that included Samuel Hartlib (the much-loved person who tried to prevent the civil war), Jan Amos Comenius, Sir William Petty, and later also Robert Boyle and John Beale. Historians who advocate the version of the Society as a research institute view the core of the Society the science study group that Boyle labeled “invisible college … or as they term themselves, the philosophical college”; it included John Wallis and John Wilkins, and later also Boyle, John Evelyn and Beale. Possibly the early Royal Society endorsed both ideas as it emerged as a union of these two groups. This depends on the ideas that these groups brought with them to the Society. The idea of the educational reformers was Bacon’s radical hostility to all established education. To repeat, the Society advocated radicalism but had to behave moderately.
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Notes
- 1.
A third precursor was Gresham College, the only one that was an institution proper (founded just before 1600). The parties to the current dispute overlook it—because their dispute is more ideological than institutional. Thus, Weld mentions in his History of the Royal Society many precursors that today historians utterly ignore. Thus, not Gresham College (or its several professors) but the informal meetings in it comprise the obvious though still overlooked precursor. Francis Johnson is different (Johnson 1940). The criterion that he offered (424) of the significance of members is of their contributions to science proper. No contribution to science occurred within the walls of Gresham College, yet Johnson appreciated it, as it “was a center of scientific activity in London from the beginning of the seventeenth century”. He found in this story sufficient ground for his claim that Gresham College is the true precursor of the Royal Society.
Founding Gresham College around 1600, just like founding the University of London in 1830 over two centuries later, required money and hardly anything else. Founding a philosophical society was hard in other respects but it cost almost nothing. Fellows paid membership dues that included subscription to its Philosophical Transactions; this was it. The first grant the Society received was in 1850.
- 2.
The famous view of the university as a school for teaching universal knowledge that Leibniz advocated is rudimentarily but explicitly stated in Bacon’s writings. They are as scanty as his ideas of Solomon’s House. Nevertheless, his Utopian enthusiasm excited readers to develop both. See below.
- 3.
“In the seventeenth century this Royal Society was in no sense a professional organization in its origin but rather a gentleman’s club for the discussion of scientific matters” (Stimson 1939, 40).
- 4.
The best evidence for this is the publication of the seminal works of Antonie Leeuwenhoek of Delft in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1673.
- 5.
It is not clear what made Wotton care for Vitruvius. Perhaps the following two details explain it. He was banished form the court of Queen Elizabeth because he said an ambassador is “an honest man, sent to lie abroad for his country”: it did not put her in good light. And he probably saw in Vitruvius an expression of ancient virtue: “commodity [= usefulness], firmness and delight”, as he put it in his translation.
- 6.
Bacon sent three copies of his Novum Organum to Wotton, who dutifully sent one of them to Kepler. The reticence of Kepler on the book may be indicative, but it need not be: there are many possible explanations for the reticence of a busy researcher regarding a book by an unfamiliar author.
- 7.
A passage form Boyle’s early Certain Philosophical Essays (1661), Proëmial Essay, first paragraph (Works 1999, 2, 10) reads: “Nor should I … have ever prevail’d with my self to present you so early these Discourses, since by keeping them longer by me, I might easily by second Thoughts, and fresh Experiences be enabled to correct and enrich them, did not the frequent and dangerous distempers to which my very sickly Constitution has of late render’d me obnoxious, make me justly doubt, whether or no, if I should long forbear to write, Death would not sooner come than the expected Maturity of Age and Judgment. And though I had no such Considerations to move me to make haste to render to you the ensuing Discourses, yet this would suffice to engage me to present them to you with all their present defects; that if I should keep them till I can make them less unworthy of you, I must keep them till you are grown past the need for them.”
Or, as Faraday has put it, “Work; finish; publish” (Thompson 1901, 267).
- 8.
This error is understandable: Boyle’s verbosity that was so useful then is intolerable now. In order to read it I had to write down a précis of it first. Only then could I find that it is not really theological.
- 9.
The idea that the universe is a temple, Boyle says, he borrowed from Philo Judeus. The idea that the researcher is a priest is his own, and it enhanced Philo’s idea by infusing it with a practical suggestion.
- 10.
This idea is usually ascribed to Spinoza, Boyle’s younger contemporary, as he was the first to elaborate on it. Berkeley repeated the same idea in a variant in his The World as Divine Visual language.
- 11.
“Hermetick thoughts” (scholasticism), “Hermetick language” (German), “superstructure”, “Protestant prejudices”. “Catholick matter” (universal primary matter), “Chymico-physical doubts”, and “Cosmical suspicions”, are some other examples.
- 12.
It is amusing that this great asset of the search for knowledge as means for improving judgment has dropped out of epistemology early in the twentieth century as the study centered on choice given evidence instead of the search for it. Abraham Wald’s decision theory brought this idea back to the fold, but philosophers ignore it.
- 13.
A conservative, Boyle rejects the strict demand for the suspension of judgment as politically radical (398).
- 14.
In his will he left much money for charity and for missionary work, not for the Society. In the clause where he left for the Society his valuable collection, he mentions “mineral (except jewels)”, clearly to avoid any possible misunderstanding and to emphasize that he wanted to leave for it no money and nothing of financial worth.
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Agassi, J. (2013). The Missing Link Between Bacon and the Royal Society. In: The Very Idea of Modern Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 298. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5351-8_12
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