Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Charles II had not opened the royal treasury to science. This was patronage
built with symbols, a network of social relations that prospered scientific
work by situating it within an emerging historical consciousness.
As I noted earlier, those who took up this cause in the middle decades
of the century were certainly in tune with Bacon's philosophical program,
but their preeminent loyalties lay with the broader cause of the Reforma-
tion. Although this movement developed a more decidedly scientific focus
after 1660, it had a decidedly Protestant one during the decade of the inter-
regnum. It would even be fair to describe this as a Protestant rather than a
scientific movement. This contention gains much ammunition from the fact
that its central figure was a clergyman, the Czech divine Jan Amos Komen-
ský (1592-1670)—Comenius in Latin. A figure certainly as renowned in his
own day as Bacon had been, Comenius had visited England in 1641 at the
invitation of Parliament's Puritan faction, which held out some promise of
sponsoring the refugee minister's “Pansophic” schemes, his sweeping vision
for the universal reform of education.
35
By the time of his arrival, these
political patrons were too distracted by an impending civil war to attend to
such matters, but the sponsors of his visit, most notably the Prussian expa-
triate and gifted intelligencer Samuel Hartlib (1600-1662) and the Scottish
social reformer and ecumenist, John Dury (1596-1680), put this cause in
motion in a local reform movement.
36
This small band of followers, remem-
bered now as the “Hartlib circle,” developed during the interregnum into a
national network that joined together a broad and diverse array of Puritan
intellectuals who had taken common inspiration from Comenius' vision. It
seems doubtful that anyone observing this movement during these crucial
decades could have supposed that the Pansophists were destined to shape
English science. Scientific reform was certainly a part of this movement but
just as certainly not its main theme. However, various concrete links can be
found that tie the Hartlib circle to the development of the Royal Society.
The various intellectual hubs that developed within this social network,
which Robert Boyle famously called “invisible colleges,” clearly were ante-
cedent to the emergence of this revolutionary scientific institution.
37
Several
founding members of the Royal Society, including its chief architect, the
German Calvinist Theodore Haak, as well as its first secretaries, Henry Old-
enburg and John Wilkins, and the mathematicians John Pell and William
Petty, had first belonged to Comenius' broader movement.
38
That Comenius would have had a prominent role in setting English
science in motion makes sense once we recognize that any effort to iden-
tify science with a particular societal pattern cuts both ways. A clergyman
