Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
interested in building a reformed religious community would have as much
to gain by such an identification as natural philosophers did. Once Bacon
had succeeded in showing that the new experimental philosophy was an
offshoot of Protestant reform, the growth of science came to signify the
merits of the broader educational and social reforms that clergymen such
as Comenius wished to advance. The growing popularity of the Pansophic
movement in turn worked to reinforce the earlier Baconian connection
between science and religious reform. When Comenius credited Bacon
in his
Way of Light
with the “first suggestion and opportunity for common
counsel with regard to the universal reform of the sciences,” he was assert-
ing that science coincided with Protestant ideals but also the inverse of
this—that the Reformation was validated by the success of science.
39
This
implication also surfaced in the first chapter of the Moravian clergyman's
visionary
Panorthosia
, his treatise on “universal reform,”
where he reasoned
that just as human beings needed to restore their true relationship “with
God through true Religion,” they also needed “a true relationship with
Nature through true Philosophy” and “with each other through true Poli-
tic s.”
40
If the success of the new science reflected its unique fidelity to the
revelation of the first topic, these triumphs of natural philosophy also bore
witness to the triumphs of Protestantism as “true Religion” and its poten-
tial to found a “true Politics.”
t
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The emergence of the Hartlib circle as both an offshoot of Comenius'
Pansophic movement and an antecedent of the Royal Society exemplifies
that general pattern which the sociologist Robert K. Merton dubbed the
“Puritan spur,” the sometimes controversial notion that the variety of dis-
senting sectarian groups now remembered (though perhaps with insuffi-
cient rigor) as “Puritans” played a vital part in creating England's scientific
revolution.
41
Merton argued in his 1938 monograph
Science, Technology and
Society in Seventeenth-Century England
that this occurred because Calvinist
theology had “transfused ascetic vigor into activities which, in their own
right, could not as yet achieve self-sufficiency. It so redefined the relations
between the divine and the mundane as to move science to the front rank
of social values.”
42
Although scholars continue to quibble about the precise character of this
association and the specific way that Merton instrumentalized the Puritan
demographic, the general linkage between science and various dissenting
