The Royal Society

“Nearly all the great books which revolutionised thought were first printed in Holland.”

Kenneth Clark is referring, in his Civilisation, to the earlier seventeenth century. (I am quoting from the printed text, not the similar television commentary.) I suppose this book reads like elementary stuff, and the power of his work was as television. I’m happy to quote from it anyway.

“The enlightened tidiness of de Hooch and the rich imaginative experience of Rembrandt reached their zenith about 1660. Spinoza’s Tractatus was printed in 1670. During that decade the leadership of intellectual life passed from Holland to England. The change began in 1660, when Charles II embarked from the Dutch beach at Scheveningen to return to England, and ended the isolation and austerity which had afflicted England for almost fifteen years. As so often happens, a new freedom of movement led to an outburst of pent-up energy. There are usually men of genius waiting for these moments of expansion, like ships waiting for a high tide; and on this occasion there was in England the brilliant group of natural philosophers who were to form the Royal Society – Robert Boyle, who used always to be described as the father of chemistry, Robert Hooke, the perfector of the microscope, Halley, who predicted the reappearance of a famous comet, and Christopher Wren, the young geometer who at that date was a professor of astronomy.

“Towering above all these remarkable scientists was Newton, one of the three of four Englishmen whose fame has transcended all national boundaries.”

Among the leading spirits in the Western World towards the close of the seventeenth century there was a deliberate transfer of spiritual treasure from religious controversy to the promotion of science and to its application for use in technology. This was a deliberate act of policy. During the Wars of Religion, religious controversy had proved to be a source of hatred and malice and uncharitableness, whereas, in the seventeenth century, science and technology were thought to be possibly useful and certainly harmless. During these last two hundred and fifty years, this secularizing movement has spread through wider and wider circles of our Western society, but unhappily the aims and hopes and expectations of the seventeenth-century fathers of the movement have not been fulfilled. Most of the originators of the movement wanted, not to kill religion, but to salvage religion by liberating it from the fanaticism that had rightly brought it into discredit. In the year 1666 a history of the Royal Society [which had been founded in 1660] was published in London by an Anglican clergyman named Sprat who was the Society’s secretary. The Royal Society was one of the earliest scientific societies to be founded in the English-speaking part of the Western World, and in Sprat’s book you will find an interesting account of this society’s origin. After the Civil War in England, a number of moderate-minded people were tormented by the political and theological hatred and rancor which had accompanied the Civil War, and they also felt oppressed by the tyranny of the military government which had unexpectedly established itself after the overthrow of the royal power; so they gathered together in Oxford, to take shelter there from the storms of contemporary political and religious life. Many of them were people of keen intelligence. They did not want to let their minds rust; but they had a horror of theological and political discussion, because they felt that this was what had bred all the mischief. They therefore applied themselves to the study and discussion of physical nature. They felt that this was a field in which it was possible to ascertain facts, a field in which there were no political or theological parties, a field in which agreement could be reached on the basis of demonstration and experiment, and, above all, a field in which no ill feelings would be aroused. This Oxford group of students of science was formally constituted into the Royal Society after the restoration of the Monarchy.

The Society’s secretary and first historian, Sprat, was not only a clergyman of the Church of England; he eventually rose to be a bishop; and he and those who felt as he did were in no sense anti-Christian or anti-religious. Their calculation was that, if only public interest could be diverted from theology to technology, the temper of the Western World might perhaps cool down to a degree at which it would become possible once again to be religious-minded without being intolerant. Unhappily this calculation turned out to be erroneous. The attack against religious fanaticism passed over in the eighteenth century into an attack on religion itself; and in the twentieth century we have found that religion has been weakened in the West by the West’s spiritual history during the last two hundred years, but that fanaticism has not been eradicated. During the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century it looked as if fanaticism had been banished forever from our Western life. Any reasonable common-sense observer in the Western World in those centuries would have said that fanaticism, at any rate, was an enemy of Civilization that had now been extirpated. But we in our time know that fanaticism had not even been banished, but had merely gone underground [a fine and a typically Toynbeean distinction] until it could find a new object to which it could attach itself. In the twentieth century, fanaticism has come back into our life, animating, this time, not our ancestral Western Christianity but our twentieth-century Western ideologies, Nationalism and Communism.

Toynbee saw the low-point of fanaticism in Western civilisation as being c 1760: He says that Sprat’s calculation was to preserve religion by side-lining it. Clark calls him merely unpoetic.

“It is a curious fact that in the same year that Paradise Lost was published, 1667, there appeared a book which can be quoted as the supreme example of anti-poetic rationalism – Sprat’s History of the Royal Society. ‘Poetry,’ says Sprat, ‘is the parent of superstition.’ Indeed all products of the imagination are dangerous falsities and even ornaments of speech are a form of deceit. But from the time in which real philosophy has appeared, ‘the course of things,’ says Sprat, ‘goes quietly along in its own true channel of natural causes and effects.’ ”

Toynbee was humbly ignorant of science, but his worry about science was that of a man who had lived into the age of the atomic bomb. The most optimistic age of science was, roughly, the last two thirds of the Baroque. We have been so overwhelmed by the problems that science has thrown up recently that we haven’t celebrated it much: another Baroque age may be due; there is a disreputable reaction against science in the States; and we depend on it to solve the problems it has helped to cause. Clark’s view of the aftermath of the optimistic age was typical of its time in England.

“There is no doubt that in its first glorious century the appeal to reason and experience was a triumph for the human intelligence. Between Descartes and Newton western man created those instruments of thought that set him apart from the other peoples of the world. And if you look at the average nineteenth-century historian you will find that to him European civilisation seems almost to begin with this achievement. The strange thing is that none of these mid-nineteenth-century writers (except for Carlyle and Ruskin) seemed to notice that the triumph of rational philosophy had resulted in a new form of barbarism. If, from the balcony of the Greenwich Observatory, I look beyond the order of Wren’s hospital I see, stretching as far as the eye can reach, the squalid disorder of industrial society. It has grown up as a result of the same conditions that allowed the Dutch to build their beautiful towns and support their painters and print the works of philosophers: fluid capital, a free economy, a flow of exports and imports, a dislike of interference, a belief in cause and effect.

“Every civilisation seems to have its nemesis, not only because the first bright impulses become tarnished by greed and laziness, but because of unpredictables – and in this case the unpredictable was the growth of population.”

I have quoted an instance of shoddy prophecy based on the the fact of population growth. And Clark was of a generation that tended not to see skill in scientific terms.

“The greedy became greedier [no, the greedy were always the same; the rest of this is electrifying, and true], the ignorant lost touch with traditional skills, and the light of experience narrowed its beam so that a grand design like Greenwich would now be thought of as a waste of money that no accountant could condone.”

Christianity among the Religions of the World, New York, Scribner, 1957; London, OUP, 1958