Conclusion

Abstract

Though the rise of science in the seventeenth century was undoubtedly responsible for the myth of progress to which our modern civilisation gives such unquestioning allegiance, the new philosophers of Casaubon’s time were inclined in their writings to give as much prominence to the freedom of science as to ‘th’encrease of its winning.’ The previous chapters have shown in detail that it was the newness of the new science, rather than its hopes of future conquests, which aroused Casaubon’s suspicions, and made him see in every claim that was made for independence from the clogs of the past the working of a promiscuous spirit of innovation, which had already been raised up by ‘Chimists, Behemists and Enthusiasts’ as well as by the crudely or academically revolutionary in all ages. His pamphlet is the most intelligent of all the criticisms of the new science,¹ because it unifies the various rejections made by the new philosophers in the name of intellectual freedom into one massive abandonment of an old culture by a new one. He asks, summarising at the outset (p. 1–2)