In spite of vigorous opposition by a number of historians it has now become a commonplace that the rapid development of the ‘new philosophy’ sprang from the ideology of Puritanism. What began its career as the ‘Merton thesis’ has now been refined, developed, and so often repeated that it seems to be almost unassailable. However, the two foremost historians in the entrenchment of this new orthodoxy are willing, in principle, to concede that ‘in reality things were very mixed up’, and (...) that non-Puritan natural philosophers at the time were operating ‘in a precisely similar manner’ to their Puritan contemporaries. Indeed, it would be impossible not to concede this in the face of the many critiques launched against the Merton thesis. (shrink)

Central to Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society was the description and justification of the method adopted and advocated by the Fellows of the Society, for it was thought that it was their method which distinguished them from ancients, dogmatists, sceptics, and contemporary natural philosophers such as Descartes. The Fellows saw themselves as furthering primarily a novel method, rather than a system, of philosophy, and the History gave expression to this corporate self-perception. However, the History's description of their method (...) was not necessarily accurate. Rather, as will be argued below, by a combination of subtle misrepresentation and selective exposition, Sprat portrayed a method which would further the aims of social and ecclesiastical stability and material prosperity, essential for the Royal Society since its continued existence depended upon the creation of a social basis for the institutionalized pursuit of natural philosophy. Some link had to be forged between the activities of the Society and the intellectual and social aspirations of the Restoration. To understand the intent and meaning of Sprat's History and the method there portrayed, we must therefore look to the institutional needs which it fulfilled. (shrink)

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. (shrink)