Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
scientific history. The symbolic role played by evolutionism now represents
the endpoint of what has been a continuous effort to adapt scientific interests
to the evolving historical consciousness of its patron societies. Evolutionism
is certainly a radical notion, no less than Puritanism was for seventeenth-
century Anglicans, but like this ancestral rationalization for science, it rep-
resents a process of symbolic conservation. It may at first seem to champion
a scientistic ideal that would seem to have little currency for most Ameri-
cans; nevertheless, it grounds its scientism in notions of historical progress
that remain as mainstream as ever—postmodernism notwithstanding.
Taken in their original context, Bacon's messages clearly represent one
of the conservative moments in this ongoing dialectic. Despite the anti-
establishment themes that later generations would draw from his writings,
his topics were originally addressed to a series of reigning monarchs who
were notorious for their resistance to the religious reforms favored by Cal-
vinists. But writers do not have the power to choose their audiences. Seem-
ingly already aware of the divergent constituencies that were destined to
take up his cause, Bacon opens the fourth topic of his
Advancement
by tak-
ing a posture of neutrality. He declares himself a “trumpeter, not a com-
batant,” an intermediary such as “might go to and fro everywhere unhurt,
between the fiercest and bitterest enemies.”
32
The Lord Chancellor was not
so naive as to suppose that his ideas would come to fruition in any of the
specific ways he envisioned. He confesses in his
Novum Organum
that he is
only “sowing in the meantime for future ages the seeds of a purer truth, and
performing . . . towards the commencement of the great undertaking,” and
he acknowledges in the dedication to his
Instauratio Magna
that “there is
something of accident (as we call it) and luck as well in what men think as
in what they do or say.”
33
And he was right. Bacon had sought the patronage
of kings, but the most significant result of his efforts was the embrace of his
message by a powerful offshoot movement of the Reformation that was des-
tined to eclipse the monarchy. Eventually, this amalgam of pious reformers,
utopian visionaries, political radicals, and scientific practitioners would in
fact draw in the kind of mainstream patronage that Bacon had envisioned,
but initially it achieved this in the more informal way that movements so
often do, by building a broad network of social alliances. What Charles
Webster describes as the “evolving complex of scientific 'societies,' 'colleges'
or 'clubs' which emerged in England between 1640 and 1660,” created an
informal infrastructure without which the great successes of the Newtonian
era would have been impossible.
34
This was not patronage in its conven-
tional sense as monetary support; indeed, even the formal sponsorship of
