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Protestant groups (among whom the Puritans were especially visible) has
held up well during the last seventy years.
43
Merton's thesis is affirmed, as
we have just seen, by the unprecedented significance that Comenius and his
English followers assigned to the new experimental science. They resonated
to Bacon's notion that secular inquiry of this kind was in keeping with the
same purity of heart which had restored doctrinal integrity in the theologi-
cal realm, and they expected, as Bacon had also argued, that the worldly
benefits of a science so practiced signified its importance as an instrument
by which providence was making all things new.
In this regard, Merton's thesis is certainly commensurate with the
significance I have attached to Bacon's crafting of the scientific identity,
but my greater accentuation of his role also represents a refinement of this
position. Merton seems to have assumed that the theological affinities that
connected science with Calvinism arose more or less spontaneously, but
the rhetorical interpretation I am advancing would suppose that this was
only a latent connection, one that needed to be actively engaged before it
could have any effect. If Puritanism facilitated science's integration into the
English consciousness, it was because a gifted architect made this linkage
salient. Bacon, in other words, gave what Chaim Perelman has called
effec-
tive presence
to this association.
44
A pattern of association was established in
England between the radical exclusion of Catholic teaching traditions from
Christian theology and the radical empiricism idealized in the new natural
philosophy because one towering public figure had actively drawn attention
to this idea. This interpretation is supported by the fact that, while Calvin-
ism was also prevalent elsewhere in Europe, it was only its English wing that
produced such institutional results. Another explanation for this difference
might be, as S. F. Mason has thought, that subtle variations in the English
interpretation of Calvin's theology invited greater emphasis upon the good
works that science was thought to advance and gave greater presumption to
natural causes.
45
But it seems unrealistic to suppose that subtle shadings in
English theology should have made more difference than an aggressive rhe-
torical campaign launched by the century's most visible public personality.
Like Merton, the numerous historians and sociologists who have advanced
and developed his thesis have recognized the important role that Bacon
played in establishing this religious identity for science, but they have not
recognized his rhetoric as a vital factor. The primacy of his inspiration is
sometimes strongly suggested, as when the historian Charles Webster chose
Bacon's phrase “Great Instauration”
as the title of his detailed history of
the Puritanism-science relationship, but like other scholars Webster treats
