Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
played in providing a unifying point of reference for this emerging conscious-
ness.
29
While at a technical level England's scientific revolution followed on
the heels of the same new emphases and methods—those of Descartes and
Gassendi especially—that were becoming prominent in Continental centers
of scientific inquiry, it was Bacon's dramatic reimagining of science's social
meaning, a reimagining that had special resonance for Puritans, that moved
this small country into its front ranks. Although Bacon may have fashioned
himself as a philosopher of science, it was his “fundamentally religious and
poetical view of the world,” as Harold Fisch summarizes this, his “transfer-
ence of the energies of Faith into the region of technology,” that made him
the symbol of the new science in the next generation.
30
As was true for science in its other European centers, it had been devel-
oping by fits and starts in England at least since the century and a half
leading up to the generation of Boyle and Newton, but after the middle
of the seventeenth century it was all starts. Charles II's chartering of the
Royal Society of London in 1662 was the obvious watershed moment in
this process. But as is always true of such triumphs of institutionalization,
this was the outcome of a process of social construction that had been afoot
for several decades, a process that, initially at least, was carried on by the
Puritan faction rather than the Royalist one that was now regaining some
of its power alongside the restored monarchy. This religious constituency
had been closely associated with those who had beheaded Charles' father
in 1649, but by the time the new king presented the Royal Society with his
mace, the symbolic associations that had allied the new science with Calvin-
ist reforms had lost some of their radical edge. As a new religious and social
establishment was emerging (a kind of Hegelian synthesis of Anglicanism
and Puritanism), Bacon's rationale had begun to symbolize a new Protestant
unity. For these more moderate heirs of Puritanism, as Margaret Jacob has
interpreted this, the new science still remained “an alternative to the old
Aristotelian philosophy taught in established universities under the spon-
sorship of the British throne and a corrupt religious establishment,” but it
also inspired hope as an alternative religious avenue for mediating the sort
of sectarian disputes that had brought political instability to the country in
the middle decades of the century.
31
Ideas that had at first set the English
Parliament against the throne were fast being integrated in a new compro-
mise, so that by the end of the century the Baconian scientific ideology had
become a fixture of the emerging social order and would remain in place, as
we will see at the end of this story, until subsequent social upheavals of the
nineteenth century conspired to unsettle it.
