Abstract
It seems appropriate to consider the Royal Society in its early years in a symposium concerned with the shapes of knowledge, because the foundation of this Society in 1660 is often taken—either symbolically or literally—as a significant event in the evolution of attitudes towards different forms of learning, and particularly in the process of upgrading empirical and inductively-based knowledge at the expense of deduction and erudition. What is more, quite a number of statements of principle emanated from the Society and its active supporters in its early years about the most effective method of scientific inquiry, the proper ends of knowledge, and the demarcation between science and other intellectual pursuits. Perhaps the best known of such statements is the promotional History of the Royal Society written by Thomas Sprat and published in 1667. But there are a number of others, which I will refer to in the course of this essay, both by Fellows of the Society and by other contemporaries associated with the new philosophy, whom I will quietly conflate with the Society, since all of them enthusiastically supported the Society’s role as a figurehead for enterprise of the kind to which it was devoted.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Michael Hunter, Establishing the New Science (Woodbridge, 1989), 47.
Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society, ed. J. I. Cope and H. W. Jones (St Louis, 1959), 117–118.
Charles Webster, The Great Instauration (London, 1975), passim.
Michael Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England (Cambridge, 1981), 153.
Michael Hunter, John Aubrey and the Realm of Learning (London, 1975), 94.
M. C. W. Hunter, “The Royal Society and the Origins of British Archaeology,”Antiquity, 45 (1971), 116.
David Stevenson, “Masonry, Symbolism and Ethics in the Life of Sir Robert Moray, F. R. S.,”Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 114 (1984), 405–431
K. T. Hoppen, “The Nature of the Early Royal Society,”British Journal for the History of Science, 9 (1976), 1–24, 243–273.
Meric Casaubon, A Letter ⋯ to Peter du Moulin (Cambridge, 1669), 3.
Hooke, Micrographia (London, 1665), sig. gl.
Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society (London, 1756-7), ii. 131–132.
Rhoda Rappaport, “Hooke on Earthquakes: Lectures, Strategy and Audience”, British Journal for the History of Science, 19 (1986), 129–146.
Hooke, Posthumous Works, ed. Richard Waller (London, 1705), 407.
Michael Hunter, “Science and Astrology in Seventeenth-century England: an Unpublished Polemic by John Flamsteed,”in Patrick Curry, ed., Astrology, Science and Society (Woodbridge, 1987), 288.
A. R. and M. B. Hall, eds., The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg (Madison, 1966-86), vi. 372.
N. C. Gillespie, “Natural History, Natural Theology and Social Order: John Ray and the ’Newtonian Ideology,’ ”Journal of the History of Biology, 20 (1987), 1–49.
Michael Hunter and Simon Schaffer, eds., Robert Hooke: New Studies (Woodbridge, 1989), 16–17.
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1991 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hunter, M. (1991). The Early Royal Society and the Shape of Knowledge. In: Kelley, D.R., Popkin, R.H. (eds) The Shapes of Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Idées / International Archives of the History of Ideas, vol 124. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3238-1_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3238-1_11
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-010-5427-0
Online ISBN: 978-94-011-3238-1
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive