Abstract
Abraham Cowley’s well-known ode, “To the Royal Society,” which prefaces Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667) contains the simile that likens Bacon to Moses. Alluding to the Novum Organum, with its enumeration of the idols of the cave, tribe, marketplace, and theater, which Bacon intends to deliver his reader from, Cowley casts him as a modern Moses in the desert, who safeguarded his people from idols of a different sort, all the while leading them to the promised land. Like Moses, Bacon is granted a Pisgah-vision of the land, but he is not permitted to cross over and dwell there.
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Notes
See Michael Hunter, Establishing the New Science: The Experience of the Early Royal Society (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1989), 18. Hunter notes that “it was thus mooted at the Society’s initial meeting ‘that the stated number of the society be fifty-five,’ although supernumeraries were to be admitted in the form of those above the rank of baron or above, professors at Oxford and Cambridge and perhaps fellows of the College of Physicians.”
See Nahum Sarna, “Gideon,” Encyclopedia Judaica, 2nd ed., 22 vols., ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnick (Detroit, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), 7:586–88. Sarna notes that the story of Gideon enjoyed some popularity in England Cowley’s time. “Probably the first treatment occurs in the early 17th-century Old Testament dramatic cycle known as the Stonyhurst Pageants, in which an English writer devoted some 300 lines to the Hebrew judge.”
See Scott Mandelbrote, “The Uses of Natural Theology,” Science in Context 20, no. 3 (September 2007): 451–80, esp. 452. Mandelbrote argues for two approaches to seventeenth-century natural theology, one championed by Wilkins and the Cambridge Platonists, the other by Boyle and the mechanists.
Michael Hunter, “Robert Boyle and the Early Royal Society: A Reciprocal Exchange in the Making of of Baconian Science,” British Journal of the History of Science, 40, no. 1 (March 2007): 1–23, esp. 1.
For a discussion of how later writers such as George Dalgarno and John Wilkins sought to recuperate the “real character” of language before the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11:1–9), if not the language of Adam himself, see Robert Markley, Fallen Languages: The Crisis of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660–1740 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 63–94.
Boyle’s arguments in this passage tend to bear out Barbara Kaplan’s suggestion that Boyle’s move to Oxford in 1656 may be viewed at least in part as signaling his decision to distance himself from London’s scientific radicals and expressing his solidarity with the moderates who had preceded him to Oxford. “Divulging of Useful Truths in Physick”: The Medical Agenda of Robert Boyle (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 41–42, 184n. Kaplan bases her argument on James R. and Margaret C. Jacob, “The Anglican Origins of Modern Science: The Metaphysical Foundations of the Whig Constitution,” Isis 71 (1980): 251–67, esp. 253–54.
Robert Boyle, A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature, ed. Edward B. Davis and Michael Hunter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), xxi, 73, 92–93. Davis and Hunter note Boyle’s “Hostility to Galenism.”
William Derham, Physico-Theology: or, a Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, from His Works of Creation, 4th ed. (1716; New York: Arno Press, 1977), 111.
Timothy Shanahan, “Teleological Reasoning in Boyle’s Disquisition about Final Causes” in Robert Boyle Reconsidered, ed. Michael Hunter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 177–92, esp. 177.
Robert Boyle, A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature (1686), in The Works of Robert Boyle, 14 vols., ed. Michael Hunter and Edward B. Davis (1999–2000; rpt. Charlottesville, VA: InteLex, 2003), VII: xxvi, 39. In answering his own question, Boyle is at pains to balance any claim for perfection against a voluntarist theology that posits a God capable both of creating laws of nature and creating niracles not beholden to those laws.
Quoted in Frederick Denison Maurice, Religions of the World and Their Relations to Christianity (London: J. W. Parker, 1847), 1. Maurice’s book is in fact a series of eight Boyle Lectures.
Richard G. Olson, Science and Religion, 1450–1900: From Copernicus to Darwin (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), 122–23. Bentley also alludes to Gabriel Harvey, Boyle, Thomas Burnet, and Copernicus, and van Helmont, among others.
See Richard Bentley, “A Confutation of Atheism from the Structure and Origin of Humane Bodies, Part I,” in The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism, Demonstrated from the Advantage and Pleasure of a Religious Life, The Faculties of Human Souls, The Structure of Animate Bodies, & The Origin and Structure of the World (1692; London: H. Mortlock, 1693), 3:22–25; and “A Confutation of Atheism from the Structure and Origin of Humane Bodies, Part II,” 4:32–33.
Derham, Physico-Theology, A4r-A5v. Alexander Cockburn (fl. 1675), whose doctoral dissertation, Philosophical Theses (Edinburgh: Andrew Anderson, 1675) shows up in the second edition of the Wing Catalogue as number 4799, is the only “Dr. Cockburne” I have been able to discover. Derham also mentions in passing “the eloquent Arch-Bishop of Cambray [François Fénelon]” and “the ingenious Mons. [Charles] Perrault,” whose work Derham admits that he has not read.
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© 2012 Stuart Peterfreund
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Peterfreund, S. (2012). Leaving Bacon Behind: Robert Boyle’s Legacy and the Mechanization of Natural Theology. In: Turning Points in Natural Theology from Bacon to Darwin. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137015273_3
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