SCIENCE IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND
 

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?experimentalism initiated by Gilbert, Bacon and Galileo, the mitigated skepticism of Mersenne and Gassendi, the mechanical hypothesis of Mersenne and Descartes, the creation of a government-sponsored scientific society for organizing an stimulating scientific research, and, finally, a compelling answer to the question of what keeps the planets in their orbits around the sun.
 

..takes place in the context of the English Revolution?stretched from the late 1630?s to the Revolution of 1688-89. During this half-century England was finally transformed from being a hereditary monarchy with the king in charge into a constitutional government in which the king?s power was limited by the laws of parliament.
 

?early Baconians, in the 1630?s?Isaac Newton in the 1680?s.
 

THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION
 

?1630?s?Charles asserted the royal prerogative?to raise taxes, on his own authority without having to obtain the consent of parliament.
 

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In religion?king?to govern the state church from the top down through bishops appointed by himself?
 

?and the Puritans?lay participation in the government of the church at the expense of the bishops? power?
 

? ?purification? of church ritual?in the direction of Calvinism.
 

?sinners are saved by faith, not by works, and church services should emphasize the preaching of god?s word rather than the performing of elaborate ceremonies.
 

?state church strayed?towards? ?popery? ?
 

By 1641 the king had been forced to call parliament because he needed to raise taxes to build an army.
 

?widespread belief that the Millennium was fast approaching.
 

?a new order to last a thousand years.
 

Among these millenarians were many scientific thinkers and artisans, followers of Francis Bacon?
 

?also Puritans and friends to parliament.
 

?Samuel Hartlib (d.1662).
 

?science should be empirical, experimental and practical, dedicated to relieving misery and improving the human lot.
 

?the state should be responsible for funding and directing scientific activity?New Atlantis realized and the Millennium achieved.
 

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Gabriel Plattes (c.1600-44), wrote A Description of the Famous Kingdome of Macaria, which Hartlib published in 1641?
 

?councils of husbandry, fishing and trade should be established.
 

?should be a government-sponsored College or Society of Experimenters modeled on Bacon?s Salomon?s House?
 

The council of Husbandry?impose a five percent death duty on ?every man?s goods? for the improvement of trade and farming?expected to improve their lands "to the utmost ? pay a penalty to be yearly doubled, till his lands be forfeited, and he banished out of the Kingdom, as an enemy to the commonwealth."
 

?religious opinions being vetted by the state before being published so that conformity might be encouraged?
 

The king and parliament could not agree in 1641 and the next year took to the battlefield to decide their differences. ?six years of bloody civil war?Charles I?executed for treason 30 January 1649.
 

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?censorship of pulpit and print collapsed.
 

?radical sects (small groups of like-minded religious believers) flourished as never before or since.
 

?Levellers?universal manhood suffrage?
 

?Independents attacking?state church; the Seekers?every person, man or woman, to find his or her own way to God; the Ranters?absolute freedom of expression; the Quakers exalting the light within each person?attack every vestige of hierarchy?
 

Diggers?Gerrard Winstanley (c.1609-after 1660), asserted that God and nature are one and argued for a redistribution of land so that it could be worked communally?
 

Quaker James Naylor (c.1617-60) entered Bristol on a donkey
 

?Diggers actually set up communal farms by going out and "digging up? land that did not belong to them, but which they claimed should be available for the use of the poor and needy.
 

Landowners would not tolerate a threat to property rights and eventually won out over their enemies. The hereditary monarchy, the hereditary House of Lords and the Episcopal state church were all brought back to power in the so-called Restoration of 1660?Charles II (1660-85)?
 

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?natural philosophy also developed in some striking new directions. In addition to the Hartlib group.
 

Thomas Hobbes and the revival of Paracelsianism.
 

HOBBES AND HOBBISM
 

Hobbes (1588-1679).
 

Leviathan (1651)?political truths, Hobbes argued, were as self-evident as those of the most demonstrable science of all, namely, geometry.
 

1. MATERIALISM AND THE HUMAN PREDICAMENT
 

?correct premises. For Hobbes this meant materialism.
 

?material particles in motion. Like Mersenne and Gassendi, who were Hobbes?s friends?
 

?universe conceived as a vast machine made up of moving atoms.
 

?unlike the other two?no distinction between body and soul.
 

?no empty space?no separate spiritual realm; souls or spirits?
 

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Hedging on the question, he asserted God?s existence but denied that we can say much else about Him?
 

?finite creatures cannot pretend to fathom?
 

?either self-deluded or deliberately set out to deceive the ?the simple people? in order to gain power over them.
 

We are driven by two kinds of material motions inside ourselves, namely, our appetites and aversions.
 

Perception is thus crucial?
 

?Mersenne, Gassendi and Descartes, Hobbes?radical skeptic as to the validity of sense experience.
 

The three French philosophers, however, relied on God?
 

?probable certainty (and in Descartes? case, even rationally deduced truth) can be reached.
 

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?Hobbes?psychological individualism, solipsism?
 

?the war of all against all. Hobbes gives three reasons for this: ?First, Competition; Secondly, Diffidence; Thirdly, Glory.?
 

2. Leviathan
 

?only way out of this impasse is for people to enter into a contract to create a sovereign with enough power to enforce obedience and its fruit?
 

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The sovereign?s power, if peace and order are to be kept, must extend not only to land and wealth, but also to religion and education, and even to scientific research.
 

Hobbes?s obsession with the need for thought control as a guarantee of unity and peace even extended to science. He was deeply suspicious of a scientific society, like the Royal Society of London, founded in 1660?
 

What better way to jump-start the peace process, he thought, than to instruct the children of the gentry in his perfect science of politics?
 

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PARACELSIAN ENTHUSIASM
 

For a century the ideas of Paracelsus and his followers had spread in England and affected the practice of alchemy and chemical medicine?
 

?medications rather than by Galenic methods.
 

?compromise?physicians might use either Galenic or Paracelsian therapies or for that matter both.
 

?1640?s Paracelsianism developed a new ideological edge reminiscent of its earlier career and of Paracelsus? own thinking.
 

?revolt against the monarchy saw an attack of royal monopolies in law, manufacturing and trade. There was also a medical monopoly?
 

?Royal college of Physicians?excluded surgeons and apothecaries, who were likely to be Paracelsians.
 

?champions of the excluded?called for a new, democratic system of public health inspired by Hermetic natural magic, Paracelsian alchemy, chemical remedies.
 

?writings of Paracelsus and his followers were translated?
 

Hartlib himself was at the center?
 

?idea of a Paracelsian chemical Millennium took a new lease on life in mid-seventeenth-century England.
 

?Hartlib circle, like Frederick Clodis (fl.1640-60), Robert Child (fl.1640-60), and Cressy Dymock (fl.1640-60)?
 

?all secrets of nature would be revealed and a new world order of peace and prosperity established by chemical means. The Hartlibians were Baconians and  Paracelsians?
 

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John Webster (1610-82)?Paracelsian-Baconian alliance. In The Examination of Academies (1654)?attack on the traditional curriculum, based on Aristotle and Galen?
 

Seth Ward (1617-89) and John Wilkins (1614-72)?The Defense of the Academy ?1654, ?there are not two ways in the whole world more opposite than those of the Lord Verulam [Bacon] and Dr Fludd, the one founded upon experiment, the other upon mystical ideal reasons.?
 

?comparable to the attack launched on Fludd and the magicians by Mersenne and Gassendi in France a few decades before?
 

?conservative Baconianism?was distancing itself from radical Paracelsian influences?former that would go forward as the mainstream scientific movement?
 

A WATERSHED IN ENGLISH SCIENCE
 

1. WILKINS AND THE LATITUDINARIANS
 

?Wilkins, the warden of Wadham College, Oxford, and the University?s defender against attacks by radicals like Webster and Hobbes.
 

?married to the sister of Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658)?
 

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Wilkins??writings have been called ?a popular version of Mersenne.? Only God can know things as they really are; we must rely on our fallible senses. But this is enough to allow science to be done.
 

?rejected the claims of all those, like Fludd, the Rosicrucians and radical Paracelsians, who asserted that their knowledge comes from divine inspiration.. ?This was the mystical way, repeatedly rejected by Mersenne as nonsense; only God can know the essences of things??
 

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?human beings are not utterly depraved creatures who must depend entirely on God?s mercy for salvation, the view shared by strict Puritans, including many radical sectaries. On the contrary, the latitudinarians held that humankind has a natural capacity for goodness and the free will to act upon its generous impulses.
 

Science is one important avenue for such beneficial cooperation?promote trade and industry, Protestant unity, peace and prosperity, the welfare of each and all.
 

2. THEIR MORAL THEOLOGY
 

Hobbes?s materialism called all religion into question and offered a particularly pessimistic view of humankind as ruthlessly acquisitive.
 

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?Wilkins??and?his latitudinarian colleagues?moral theology and social ideology in which Baconian science played a key role.
 

?latitudinarians thus distanced themselves from Hobbist and Plattist statism and absolutism just as they did from Paracelsian and Rosicrucian magic and illuminationism...
 

?we are endowed by nature with enough reason to allow us, with God?s help, to earn our own happiness both in this life and hereafter?
 

?virtue requires effort and discipline, but it leads to pleasure and happiness.
 

?the study of God?s word, which is scripture, and the study of God?s work, which is nature. Religion and science together will nurture the virtues and excite their exercise in honest work, charity towards others, and the discovery of natural knowledge.
 

3. THEIR SOCIAL IDEOLOGY
 

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?not to be conceived in bleak Hobbist terms as the product of a ?perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after Power, that ceaseth only in Death.? Rather wealth?wholesome pursuit of ?sufficiency??
 

?according to Wilkins, there is a sufficiency corresponding to each social level, and what is enough at each rank is just so much and no more.
 

For Wilkins the principal agency for promoting sufficiency and discouraging reckless avarice is true religion.
 

?diligence, sobriety, and thrift?
 

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In contrast to the extremes of wealth and poverty which marred ancient times, ?now there is employment enough for all, and money little enough for everyone.?
 

According to Wilkins, the world, with England leading the way, is on the threshold of the achievement of an ideal harmony?history is moving in then right direction?in which ?the flourishing of arts and sciences? will spur human beings to greater and greater private industry, whose outcome will be private wealth distributed to provide a sufficiency proportioned to social station. . and the engine driving the whole process is true (that is, Wilkins?) religion.
 

?increased leisure can then be devoted to scientific and religious studies.
 

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4. THEIR ANSWER TO HOBBES AND THE RADICAL SECTS
 

Wilkins and his colleagues?thinking represents a continuation of the utopianism that Bacon had initiated and that flourished in Hartlib?s circle?
 

?earlier thinkers, like Hobbes, saw a powerful state, with virtually total authority over even the property and religious opinions of its subjects?
 

?absolutism that Wilkins and the others now disavowed, and in its place argued for self-discipline and self-help?
 

?an optimistic estimate of man?s intellectual and moral capacities that rejected the views of Hobbists and radical sectaries?
 

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?according to Wilkins?the sectaries err on the other extreme when they claim that the saints, men and women inspired by God, are so capable of perfection that they should be left free to chart their own course.
 

Instead, they must learn the discipline and self-restraint prescribed by the principle of ?sufficiency.?
 

?Wilkins? protégé, Matthew Wren (1629-72)..cousin...Christopher Wren (1632-1723)?
 

Wren?s views are based on contract theory but are not Hobbist?they recall Gassendi?s political thought. Men, Wren argued, should enter into a contract to set up a strong government, which is necessary to protect the obedient majority against the criminal element, a perennial minority who are prone to break the law and foment disorder. But the government must not be too strong, that is, so oppressive as to lord it over and coerce the peace-loving majority.
 

?can devote themselves to earning a livelihood. But they do not want a government that uses its power to inhibit them in this enterprise.
 

18?most men are driven not by insatiable (Hobbist) greed but by ?a desire of moderate riches, such as are subservient to the necessaries and conveniences of man?s life, or to the attaining innocent and honest pleasures?? Wilkins agreed??the generality of a people,? are rational enough to learn, with the help of the Church, to exercise such self-restraint, that Leviathan is therefore uncalled for?
 

?principle of ?sufficiency??limited state power.
 

?latitudinarian?grow virtuous and prosperous at the same time; in fact, to do well by doing good.
 

?not through utopian statism but utopian individualism.
 

?setting limits to getting and spending because the alternative, letting it rip, was fraught with danger?instability, disorder, faction, sedition and civil war.
 

?.response to all the ?excesses???capitalistic??Hobbist and Plattist?in revolutionary and postrevolutionary England.
 

BOYLE
 

Robert Boyle (1627-91)?most important natural philosopher in the Wilkins group at Oxford and in the early Royal Society?
 

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?youngest son of the earl of Cork?
 

?social outlook similar to that of Wilkins and Petty.
 

Influenced by Hartlib, he complained, like Plattes, of idle landlords and gentlemen?
 

?attacked covetous, ambitious men whom he called ?Macchiavillians.?
 

?combination of science and religion, the worship of God, that is, through the study of his work.
 

1. NATURAL RELIGION
 

? ??if nature be a temple, man sure must be the priest?? All creatures embody evidence of God?s glory, but man alone is endowed with the gift of reason and so, being ?the most obliged and most capable? creature, ?is bound to return thanks and praises to his Maker, not only for himself, but for the whole creation.? Not only is man ?obliged? and ?bound,? he is also preprogrammed by God to carry out this mission: ??to engage us to an industrious indagation [investigation] of the creatures?God made man so indigent and furnished him with such a multiplicity of desires; so that whereas other creatures are content with those few obvious and easily attainable necessaries that nature has almost everywhere provided for them; in man alone, every sense has store of greedy appetites??
 

We are not born wise and good, but [we] are wired by divine plan to become so?.industry?curing idleness and ?sensuality.?
 

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?nature revealed is a great moral teacher, presenting to the student a model of harmony with God?s purpose: each creature functions in such a way as to conduce to the end of all. The lesson is clear.
 

The state is not the instrument of Boyle?s moral reformation. Like Wilkins and Wren, Boyle makes us responsible for reforming ourselves?
 

Boyle?s?Wilkins and Wren?Oxford in 1655?until 1668?ample opportunity for mutual influence?
 

?1665, Boyle? ?A great or rich man?s mind? can be ?distempered with ambition, avarice, or any immoderate affection??
 

?fortune can give much?the mind that makes that much enough??
 

??the usefulness of the passions should not hinder us from?employing the methods?afforded us by reason and religion to keep them within their due bounds.?
 

...?needs and conditions??determined by ?a man?s particular quality or station.? Boyle?s agreement with Wilkins and Wren?complete, and, like Wilkins, he provides a religious foundation for the ethic they all three share.
 

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Like Wilkins?concerned?with?threat to private property and to ?propriety??by the radical sectaries?Wilkins?1654 as that ?gang of the vulgar Levellers.?
 

?close friend, Peter Pett (1630-99)?radical millenaries ?who would disturb civil Societies?by destroying propriety? should be dealt with ?as enemies of mankind.?
 

2. CORPUSCULAR PHILOSOPHY
 

??Boyle?read Galileo?s work in Florence while on the grand tour in 1642.
 

?introduced to Hartlib in London?commitment to chemistry and Baconianism?
 

?active in the Royal Society and in latitudinarian circles?
 

?read Gassendi, Descartes and the Paracelsians?
 

?conducting chemical experiments and devising his own atomic or particulate theory?
 

?corpuscular (rather than mechanical) philosophy.
 

?corpuscularianism to invalidate Aristotelian and Paracelsian?chemical phenomena.
 

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?for him many chemical processes could not be reduced to simple mechanical terms, the result of particles bouncing off, or rubbing against, one another as a Cartesian would claim.
 

?he did not hesitate to refer to the role played by Paracelsian volatile spirits, active substances or seminal principles in certain kinds of chemical change.
 

?phenomenon not reducible to mechanical terms.
 

?reading Gassendi?favorably disposed to ancient Greek atomism.
 

But?motion must not be thought of as inherent in matter either from all eternity, as Epicurus and Lucretius had claimed, or as imparted by God at the moment of creation?Gassendi?
 

?remains ever susceptible to God?s absolute power to intervene.
 

?Boyle and fellow latitudinarians, like Wilkins?Glanvill?against the threat posed by Hobbists and extreme Cartesian mechanists that they took seriously?witchcraft.
 

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Boyle?could incline to a strictly mechanical theory of chemical change.
 

For many years he searched for ways to transmute gold and traded alchemical secrets with other thinkers like John Locke (1632-1704) and Isaac Newton, who were also avid alchemists.
 

?explicitly mechanical terms:
 

?once framed by God?all upheld by his incessant concourse?the phenomena of the world thus constituted are physically produced by the mechanical affections of the parts of matter, and what they operate upon one another according to mechanical laws.
 

Motion is not inherent in matter but continually imparted by God.
 

?is not Cartesian but?experimental corpuscular philosophy.
 

3. EXPERIMENTALISM
 

Boyle?Petty?Wilkins circle?scientific knowledge lies not in academic debate such as Scholastics engaged in, nor in secret revelations from on high such as extreme Paracelsians claimed, nor in ?logically deductive metaphysical systems?Aristotelian, Cartesian or Hobbist?surest road to discovery?experimentation.
 

Petty ? ??all knowledge must be brought before their true judges which are either demonstration or sense and experiment, the rest is mere wit or rhetorick.?
 

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Boyle?consulted?academics?scholar-gentry?artisans, travelers and men of affairs?
 

?Galileo and Mersenne?material world can best be understood by measuring it?explanations of natural phenomena?rely on quantification?
 

?new device known as the barometer. A prototype?Rome in the early seventeenth century.
 

A glass tube, with one end open and the other end closed, was suspended vertically in a pan of water with the open end submerged in the water.
 

?34 feet: why no more or no less?
 

?space was left between the top of the column of water and the closed end of the tube: what, if anything, was in there?
 

?34 feet?weight of the water in the tube equaled the weight of the atmosphere on the outside which sustained it.
 

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Some philosophers were inclined to argue that the space is empty and constitutes a true vacuum. But Aristotle? "nature abhors a vacuum??not mechanically but animistically?
 

Descartes was also a plenist but of a different sort. The universe?two substances, corporeal and incorporeal, body and soul? bodies are extended, souls unextended. Empty space, incorporeal extension, is?a contradiction in terms, and a vacuum cannot exist in nature.
 

Plenists maintained?
 

Perhaps?full of vapors given off by the liquid?
 

But Blaise Pascal (1623-62)?two barometers, one of water and the other of wine.
 

?known to be more vaporous?
 

?Pascal asked his brother-in-law?1648 on the mountain called the Puy de Dome in east central France. As the barometer was carried to the summit, the height of the column of fluid fell because the weight of the air dropped.
 

?Aristotelian or Cartesian, were refuted.
 

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?that natural phenomena can be understood to the extent that they can be quantified and those quantifications confirmed by experimental investigation?
 

?Pascal put it this way: ??Let all the disciples of Aristotle?learn that experiment is the true master one must follow in Physics; that the experiment made on the mountains has overthrown the universal belief in nature?s abhorrence of a vacuum;?and that the weight of the mass of the air is the true cause of all the effects hitherto ascribed to that imaginary cause.?
 

?against the dogmatic Cartesians as well.
 

Boyle?To claim that nature abhors a vacuum, he said, is to endow brute matter with foresight and purpose?
 

??that brute and inanimate creature, as water, not only has a power to move its heavy body upwards, contrary (to speak in their language) to the tendency of its particular nature, but knows both that unless it succeed the attracted air, there will follow a vacuum; and that this water is withal so generous, as by ascending, to act contrary to its particular inclination for the general good of the universe, like a noble patriot, that sacrifices his private interests to the publick ones of his country.?
 

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Boyle saw that strictly mechanical explanations of natural processes overcame this threat by preserving the proper distinction between rational humanity and stupid matter.
 

Descartes?dualistic metaphysics?to answer the same threat?
 

?echoed the heretical naturalism and pagan vitalism associated with Pomponazzi, Bruno and Vanini that Mersenne was so concerned to refute.
 

Some radical sectaries preached that the soul was mortal and died with the body, and Winstanley, the Digger leader, conflated God and nature.
 

?1654 the air pump?
 

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Boyle?had one constructed for his own use by his gifted assistant Robert Hooke (1635-1703), who later became Curator of Experiments at the Royal Society.
 

Going beyond earlier findings as to the weight of the air, he demonstrated, for instance, that sound cannot be transmitted through a vacuum, that a flame is extinguished and animals and plants perish without air, and that air is elastic.
 

?air particles behave like tiny coiled springs and do so in a regularly variable way relative to the amount of space they occupy.
 

?Boyle?s Law?air exerts a pressure which varies inversely with the volume of space it occupies.
 

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The members of the Society, called Fellows, associated it with Salomon?s House in Bacon?s New Atlantis?utopian and millenarian: science would bring peace, prosperity and Protestant victory?
 

?latitudinarian social and religious vision would be realized.
 

?Thomas Sprat (1635-1713), Joseph Glanvill (1626-80), Samuel Parker (1640-88), John Beale (1608-83), and John Evelyn (1620-1706)?Wilkins? party in the post-Restoration English Church?
 

...though chartered by the king, it was not funded by the state at all during its first twenty years?modest endowment the king finally bestowed in 1682?
 

?envious of the resources?provided by the French king to the newly founded Royal Academy of Sciences?
 

The Society?s meetings?experiments should be performed in front of the members present.
 

?the legacy of Bacon, Mersenne, Wilkins and Boyle.
 

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Hooke was responsible for demonstrating experiments at the weekly meetings of the Society during its early years.
 

?invented improved versions of the telescope, barometer and microscope.
 

?Micrographia?1665?
 

?words and graphic printed images?world too small to be seen by the naked eye.
 

?.contributions in a number of fields?clockmaking, the theory of light and the theory of gravity?
 

?may have influenced Newton.
 

?accomplished architect.
 

?Oldenburg?new journal, the Philosophical Transactions, in 1665?research reports and book reviews?
 

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It was through Oldenburg?s efforts, and under the aegis of the Society, that a national and international scientific community was knitted together for the first time.
 

?the royal Society?satirical wits who poked fun at it, pious Christians?preoccupation with the natural world might lead to neglect of the supernatural?radicals like Hobbes and his anticlerical followers?new kind of priestcraft destructive of civil peace.
 

NEWTON
 

1. EARLY DEVELOPMENT
 

?closely associated with Cambridge University?
 

?a Fellow of Trinity College and from 1669 the Lucasian Professor of mathematics?
 

?number of fields?including alchemy, biblical chronology and church history as well as the mathematics, optics and astronomical physics?
 

?absorbed?Descartes, Gassendi, Boyle, Hobbes, Charleton and Henry More (1614-87).
 

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?early scientific thinking was provided by the mechanical and corpuscular philosophies which exposed the deficiencies of Aristotelianism?
 

?nature is in terms of moving particles of matter.
 

But Newton was a devout Christian?Cartesian metaphysics?restricted the power of God to act in nature and thus??a path to Atheism.?
 

?like Boyle, Newton early believed that matter is inert and incapable of self-motion, that God is the ultimate source of all motion and order in the world.
 

?lengthy alchemical studies and his reading of the ancient Stoics the view that there is in nature a ?vital alchemical agent that acts in the formation of everything? and that through this agent God constantly molds the universe to His design.
 

?late 1660?s?infinite three-dimensional space is not only the scene of God?s acting, the theater of His Providence?such space is itself uncreated and divine, that is, ?God?s property and, in effect, his immensity.? In 1713?God ?endures forever and is everywhere present?constitutes duration and space.? ?following the Cambridge Neoplatonist Henry More?
 

?More adopted the Stoic world-picture of our finite world surrounded by infinite void space. From there he went on, like Gassendi, to divinize this space, to identify it with infinitely extended spiritual substance or God.
 

?1680?s?still enough of a mechanical philosopher to think that an ether of fine moving particles is the cause of gravity and holds the planets in their orbits in a fashion reminiscent of the Cartesian vortices.
 

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?planetary orbits remained the big question in physical astronomy. Copernicus, Brahe, Galileo and Kepler had unhinged the planets and stars from their spheres and argued (but not proved) that the earth revolves around a stationary but rotating sun. How then can we explain why the heavy earth moves at all? (Aristotelians said that a moving earth is a contradiction in terms.
 

How?stay in orbit?perfect spheres, which used to be thought of as tracks, are gone?
 

The Cartesian vortices?Kepler had suggested a combination of magnetism and an immaterial force emanating from the sun.
 

2. NEWTONIAN SYNTHESIS
 

From the legacy left by Galileo, Kepler, Descartes and Gassendi he derived his solution. He was a creative synthesizer?
 

?Kepler?1) that the planets move in elliptical orbits around the sun, 2) that in these orbits they sweep out equal areas in equal times, and 3) that the squares of their times around the sun are proportional to the cubes of their mean distances from the sun.
 

?Newton?s associates in the Royal Society, Hooke, Christopher Wren and the astronomer Edmund Halley (1656-1742) in particular, speculated that there must be a measurable force of gravity operating between the sun and each of the planets which holds them in their elliptical orbits?inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the sun and each planet.
 

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?could not provide a mathematical demonstration?
 

?Halley turned to Newton for help in 1684?
 

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?Newton claimed already to have calculated gravity?s force many years earlier?mislaid the papers?
 

?mathematical explanation of the behavior of moving objects in space?in 1687 of the Principia Mathematica (The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy)?
 

?universal force of gravity?
 

The same force that famously causes apples to fall from trees helps to keep planets in orbit around the sun.
 

Galileo had calculated the rate of acceleration at which things, like apples, fall to earth; Newton found that the same rate of fall applies to the planets in the heavens. The force of gravity is everywhere the same?
 

?every body attracts every other with a force directly proportional to the product of he two masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.
 

?the old binary world-picture based on Aristotelian tradition was finally disproved and replaced.
 

?.two motions, a continual falling motion towards the sun combined with an inertial motion in a straight line tangential to their orbits around the sun. from Descartes Newton borrowed this idea of inertia?
 

?every body will continue in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line unless compelled to change by external forces impressed upon it.
 

How could an object move in a straight line forever unless the space through which it moved were infinite and absolute?
 

Descartes had denied the existence of such space, but Gassendi and More had asserted it?Newton borrowed?from them, who in turn had taken it from the ancient Stoics.
 

The planet?would soon leave the solar system and sail out into limitless space were it not for the pull of gravity.
 

Newton?show this in mathematical terms and so to synthesize the Cartesian concept of inertia with Galilean terrestrial physics and both of these with Kepler?s three laws of planetary motion?all within the framework of a neostoic cosmos updated by Gassendi, More and finally Newton himself.
 

?mid-career (1665-1704)?
 

?1) in mathematics the discovery of the calculus in 1665-6?with?Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) ?independently?
 

?2) the invention in 1668 of the reflecting telescope, which uses mirrors rather than lenses to concentrate light and obtain magnification; and 3) another great book, the Opticks (1704)?a new corpuscular theory of light.
 

3. BUT WHAT IS GRAVITY
 

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?measured mathematically, but what is it substantially?
 

?Cartesian mechanists, led by Leibniz, ridiculed Newton?s gravity for reintroducing into natural philosophy this mysterious action at a distance.
 

?occult qualities associated with a discredited Scholasticism or of a new kind of magic?.
 

?Newton and his latitudinarian followers?insist that gravity?demonstrates the power of God acting in the universe and sustaining the order of nature.
 

?blow struck against?radical freethinkers influenced by Hobbes and an unorthodox reading of Descartes.
 

Many of these freethinkers were deists?
 

?world-machine can run on its own because God has created it perfect in the first place.
 

?pantheists who, harking back to Bruno and Winstanley?God and nature are one?
 

Who can claim that gravity is a force imparted by God, when one may just as logically say that it is a property of matter itself?
 

Contrary to the view of Newton?matter is not dead and lifeless, created and acted upon by divine agency, but alive and uncreated, eternal, infinite and intelligent.
 

?organizes and governs itself?gravity inherent in matter?
 

?this self-governing capacity. Both deists and pantheists?
 

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?what need is there of the clergy or the Bible to explain the ways of God to humankind, especially when science can do the job without resort to miracles and mystery?
 

?dual legacy, divided between those who used it to uphold orthodox Protestant Christianity and those who used it to tear it down.
 

?Newton?s own position was ambiguous.
 

?defend the Church against the freethinkers, ?to come,? as he said, ?to the knowledge of a Deity by the frame of nature.?
 

On the other hand?secret (but not a public) Antitrinitarian?
 

Newton?s social conservatism won out over his theological scruples.
 

?he called an ?active principle.? In Newton?s hands the subtle matter or breath of the Stoics was spiritualized and became the divine immaterial substance, permeating everything, aware of everything, and directly responsible for universal gravitation.
 

?Antitrinitarianism led him eventually to believe that the Supreme Deity was transcendent, completely removed form the day-to-day operations of the universe.
 

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Francis Hauksbee (1670-1713)?experiments on electricity at the Royal Society?
 

Electricity, so elastic as to fill universal space but so weightless as to offer no resistance to the planets, might?causes gravity?
 

THE REVOLUTION IN MEDICINE: VESALIUS TO MALPIGHI (1543-1661)
 

?discovery of the circulation of the blood by the English physician, William Harvey (1578-1657).
 

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?education at the University of Padua?best in Europe at the turn of the seventeenth century?
 

?previous sixty years, its anatomy professors?Andreas Vesalius (1514-64), Matteo Realdo Colombo (c.1510-59), Andrea Cesalpino (1524-1603)?Harvey?s teacher, Fabricius ab Aquapendente (c.1533-1619)?careful anatomical studies?subtle examination of medical theories and doctrines deriving from several ancient traditions.
 

Cesalpino expounded this blood flow and coined the term ?circulation.? He also spoke of the continuous return of venous blood and its outflow through the arteries but never demonstrated it?
 

?Fabricius demonstrated to his students, including Harvey, the valves of the veins but did not understand their true function.
 

The standard sixteenth-century teaching on the subject of the heart and the blood derived from Galen. There was no place in the Galenic view of the blood for its circulation.
 

Blood, once formed in the liver, then flowed out thorough a network of veins that reached every part of the body and provided it with life giving nutrition. The blood?was literally used up?
 

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?right ventricle into the left ventricle?mixed with air received form the lungs by the pulmonary artery (our pulmonary vein)?delivered by the aorta to the network of arteries that reached every part of the body. The purpose of this new mixture was to supply vital heat to the whole body?
 

?be completely consumed once it reached its destination?
 

?no place?for any idea at all of circulation
 

?after 1616, Harvey?developed techniques for studying living, beating hearts?using dying animals?
 

?he could see it as a pump?
 

?he calculated the amount of blood?coursing through the heart from the veins to the arteries.
 

?realized?that the total blood supply would be soon depleted?in no time at all, if the blood flowed on one direction only.
 

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?adopted the idea of the uninterrupted circulation of all the blood from the veins to the arteries through the heart.
 

De Motu Cordis (On the Motions of the Heart) in 1628.
 

?Marcello Malpighi (1628-94) announced his discovery of capillary blood vessels, linking arteries and veins, in the lung tissue of frogs.
 

?microscope?invented in 1624?
 

Harvey was an Aristotelian?
 

?as circular motion is, according to the Aristotelians, the principle of order and harmony in the heavens, so is it the principle of perpetual renewal in the bodies of animals.
 

?blood??It is also celestial, for nature, the soul, that which answers to the essence of the stars, is the inmate of the spirit, in other words, it is something analogous to heaven, the instrument of heaven, vicarious of heaven.?
 

?the heart and the blood, operates teleologically through its forms and correspondences and not from mechanical principles or by mathematically measurable forces.
 

CONCLUSION
 

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Science in seventeenth-century France and England, as we said in the Introduction, developed in response to two major stimuli, the search for truth about nature and the religious beliefs and commitments that helped to motivate that search and gave it added meaning.
 

In France?triumph of Cartesianism and the creation of the royal Academy of Sciences; in England?triumph of Newtonianism and the emergence of the Royal Society.
 

?common aspiration?progressive purification of religion and a moral reformation?to which science?was seen as being crucial?
 

?know more and to live more healthily and securely?
 

?to become more civilized, to live more virtuously and civilly, in better order and grater comity.
 

?fears of heresy and religious conflict, moral decay and social breakdown?hopes born of scientific discoveries, biblical prophecy and social idealism?
 

?Gassendi, Descartes, Wilkins, Boyle and others?committed themselves to moral theologies founded in part on a Christian humanist tradition and in part on ancient classical sources, especially Stoic and Epicurean teaching? made compatible with Christianity?
 

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?Wilkins and Boyle?particularly distinctive?reaction to the radical Puritanism and Hobbism?thought to jeopardize social order and private property.
 

Robert Merton?1930?s that Puritanism and capitalism spurred the development of science in seventeenth-century England.
 

It was rather a reaction?to?the excesses of Puritan enthusiasm and Hobbist materialism.
 

?Wilkins, Boyle?Royal Society?