These institutions for sharing became the dominating and distinguishing feature of science during the second half of the seventeenth century. Scientific societies were an essential component, not a mere by-product, of the Scientific Revolution. They became a vital instrument for formulating and transmitting scientific norms and values. They transcended the pedagogical tradition associated with universities and established a new routine, inspired by everyday circumstances. Scientific societies held meetings at regular intervals; they elected officers and set up committees. Such daily activity led to the establishment of ‘a seasonal calendar of ritual: the first formal meeting of the year, periods of election, ordinary meetings, breaks for religious and state holidays, public meetings, vacation’ and so forth.2 Scientific societies may have exalted the tedious and the dull, but they enshrined a secular calendar for these mundane affairs – an essential figure of modernity. In other words, time was organized without the traditional appeal to sacred celebrations or agricultural cycles.
What led natural philosophers to embrace a new ideology associated with sharing? Certainly they did not think that invention would cease to be the fruit of one mind and would become a collective procedure. They were, after all, proud of their own discoveries. Rather, they saw advantages to associating with a group of like-minded people. The form of their association departed from medieval guilds. Associations for promoting the new science ignored matters of faith and livelihood. Nor did scientific associations seek to train apprentices. They were an avocational service club – the seventeenth-century equivalent of the Odd Fellows or Rotarians.
The learned society or academy of the seventeenth century incited and rewarded independent work. It also provided an avenue for communicating the results of scientific investigations, at first by means of the private correspondence of a secretary, and later through formal minutes and journals. Scientific societies housed books in their libraries, displayed specimens in their museums, and collected instruments in their cabinets, all these services assisting the investigations of individual members. Groups were naturally better able to purchase the costly tools required by the new science, whether telescopes, microscopes, or burning-mirrors. In this way, scientific societies made the materiel for conducting science accessible in a convenient and relatively inexpensive form. By the end of the seventeenth century, any man of scientific reputation and accomplishment belonged to a learned society or academy.
Nascent scientific organizations fulfilled less obvious functions, as well. Just to be associated with these enterprises conferred prestige on a member. This has been true virtually from the beginning, and ‘FRS’ (Fellow of the Royal Society of London) or ‘membre de l’Institut’ (member of one of the national academies of France) is today a coveted designation. In addition to this honorific function, periodic meetings of societies provided a forum for individuals to meet and discuss their work. Universities had no real place for the exchange of ideas among equals (there were neither faculty clubs nor professorial offices), but in the halls of the academy, controversies could be aired, alliances forged, and criticisms vetted.
Whence the notion for these associations? Some of them found inspiration in an invocation of Platonic free assembly and corporate activity, beyond political control. Others looked back to the Renaissance, when learned men came together under the influence of a particular patron or court. Yet, as we shall see, the Royal Society of London represented a novel departure: For the first time, individuals united together in a public body dedicated to the corporate prosecution of scientific research.
Engines of the Scientific Revolution
The Royal Society of London, founded in 1660, promoted ‘a cluster of disciplines concerned with natural and mechanical phenomena to the exclusion of others, linked by common methods’. It aimed to advance the realms of natural philosophy and natural history (roughly equivalent to our physical and biological sciences), and distanced itself from discussions of theology or scholastic philosophy, which it perceived as sterile. The Society’s devotion to the production of knowledge, rather than to its dissemination, sets it apart from other contemporary institutions. Its importance and prestige was confirmed by royal incorporation at the hand of Charles II.3
Sir Francis Bacon, a lawyer and chancellor to James I, became the patron saint of the Royal Society and of many other scientific societies as well. Bacon’s scientific contributions were unremarkable, but he enjoyed tremendous posthumous influence as the principal polemicist for the new science. In the New Atlantis (1627), he called for the creation of research institutions to accommodate the new learning. There he described ‘Salomon’s House’ – a collaborative effort dedicated to ‘the knowledge of causes, and the secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible’. Bacon maintained that only by combining the efforts of individuals could humankind hope to tackle the enormous range of questions that should be raised about the natural world. This programme formed one of the components of his projected Great Instauration, a work incomplete at the time of his death, and it complemented the inductive approach sketched in his New Organon (1620).4
Baconian ideology infused the creation and early years of the Royal Society. As the Society’s apologist Thomas Sprat put it, Bacon’s writings contained ‘the best Arguments, that can be produced for the Defence of experimental Philosophy, and the best Directions, that are needful to promote it’. Bacon’s views not only permeated Sprat’s official History of the Royal Society (first published in 1667), but they also found expression in the Society’s charters, diffusion in the Philosophical Transactions, and reiteration in the writings of fellows like Robert Boyle (1627–1691) and John Evelyn (1620–1706). Baconianism so well reflected the motivations of diverse associations of scientifically inclined amateurs in England that historians still try to identify the group that led directly into the creation of the Royal Society. Depending on which historian’s arguments one believes, the Royal Society may be traced to a gathering of gentlemen associated with Gresham College in London, to a less pragmatic network of London philosophers and social reformers, or to a collection of natural philosophers who eventually came to reside in Oxford.
The first of these, Gresham College, had been founded in 1597 by a legacy of the London merchant Sir Thomas Gresham to provide a series of educational lectures on a variety of topics for the local townspeople. Gresham also established resident professorships in astronomy, geometry, and medicine. His former townhouse provided a natural meeting place for scientifically inclined men, including sometime lecturers Robert Hooke (1635–1702), Christopher Wren (1632–1723), and Isaac Barrow (1630–1677).
A second London group of Puritans and Parliamentarians, who flourished during the 1640s and 1650s, was attracted by the millenarian zeal exuded by Continental collaborators Jan Comenius (1592–1670), Samuel Hartlib (d. 1662), and Theodore Haak (1605–1690). John Dury (1596–1680), William Petty (1623–1687), and John Evelyn numbered among the reformers who viewed the association of scientists in a scheme by Hartlib for an ‘Office of Address’ as a mechanism for practical improvement and social advancement. The ‘office’, motivated by Protestant fervour, collected information about utilitarian discoveries and inventions.
Still another group – including Seth Ward (1617–1689), Thomas Willis (1621–1675),