The History of England, from the Accession of James the Second - Volume 1 by Thomas Babington Macaulay (diy ebook reader .txt) π
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reckoned among the highest achievements of
the human intellect. Bacon had sown the good seed in a sluggish
soil and an ungenial season. He had not expected an early crop,
and in his last testament had solemnly bequeathed his fame to the
next age. During a whole generation his philosophy had, amidst
tumults wars, and proscriptions, been slowly ripening in a few
well constituted minds. While factions were struggling for
dominion over each other, a small body of sages had turned away
with benevolent disdain from the conflict, and had devoted
themselves to the nobler work of extending the dominion of man
over matter. As soon as tranquillity was restored, these teachers
easily found attentive audience. For the discipline through which
the nation had passed had brought the public mind to a temper
well fitted for the reception of the Verulamian doctrine. The
civil troubles had stimulated the faculties of the educated
classes, and had called forth a restless activity and an
insatiable curiosity, such as had not before been known among us.
Yet the effect of those troubles was that schemes of political
and religious reform were generally regarded with suspicion and
contempt. During twenty years the chief employment of busy and
ingenious men had been to frame constitutions with first
magistrates, without first magistrates, with hereditary senates,
with senates appointed by lot, with annual senates, with
perpetual senates. In these plans nothing was omitted. All the
detail, all the nomenclature, all the ceremonial of the imaginary
government was fully set forth, Polemarchs and Phylarchs, Tribes
and Galaxies, the Lord Archon and the Lord Strategus. Which
ballot boxes were to be green and which red, which balls were to
be of gold and which of silver, which magistrates were to wear
hats and which black velvet caps with peaks, how the mace was to
be carried and when the heralds were to uncover, these, and a
hundred more such trifles, were gravely considered and arranged
by men of no common capacity and learning.181 But the time for
these visions had gone by; and, if any steadfast republican still
continued to amuse himself with them, fear of public derision and
of a criminal information generally induced him to keep his
fancies to himself. It was now unpopular and unsafe to mutter a
word against the fundamental laws of the monarchy: but daring and
ingenious men might indemnify themselves by treating with disdain
what had lately been considered as the fundamental laws of
nature. The torrent which had been dammed up in one channel
rushed violently into another. The revolutionary spirit, ceasing
to operate in politics, began to exert itself with unprecedented
vigour and hardihood in every department of physics. The year
1660, the era of the restoration of the old constitution, is also
the era from which dates the ascendency of the new philosophy. In
that year the Royal Society, destined to be a chief agent in a
long series of glorious and salutary reforms, began to exist.182
In a few months experimental science became all the mode. The
transfusion of blood, the ponderation of air, the fixation of
mercury, succeeded to that place in the public mind which had
been lately occupied by the controversies of the Rota. Dreams of
perfect forms of government made way for dreams of wings with
which men were to fly from the Tower to the Abbey, and of
doublekeeled ships which were never to founder in the fiercest
storm. All classes were hurried along by the prevailing
sentiment. Cavalier and Roundhead, Churchman and Puritan, were
for once allied. Divines, jurists, statesmen, nobles, princes,
swelled the triumph of the Baconian philosophy. Poets sang with
emulous fervour the approach of the golden age. Cowley, in lines
weighty with thought and resplendent with wit, urged the chosen
seed to take possession of the promised land flowing with milk
and honey, that land which their great deliverer and lawgiver had
seen, as from the summit of Pisgah, but had not been permitted to
enter.183 Dryden, with more zeal than knowledge, joined voice to
the general acclamation to enter, and foretold things which
neither he nor anybody else understood. The Royal Society, he
predicted, would soon lead us to the extreme verge of the globe,
and there delight us with a better view of the moon.184 Two able
and aspiring prelates, Ward, Bishop of Salisbury, and Wilkins,
Bishop of Chester, were conspicuous among the leaders of the
movement. Its history was eloquently written by a younger divine,
who was rising to high distinction in his profession, Thomas
Sprat, afterwards Bishop of Rochester. Both Chief Justice Hale
and Lord Keeper Guildford stole some hours from the business of
their courts to write on hydrostatics. Indeed it was under the
immediate direction of Guildford that the first barometers ever
exposed to sale in London were constructed.185 Chemistry divided,
for a time, with wine and love, with the stage and the gaming
table, with the intrigues of a courtier and the intrigues of a
demagogue, the attention of the fickle Buckingham. Rupert has the
credit of having invented mezzotinto; from him is named that
curious bubble of glass which has long amused children and
puzzled philosophers. Charles himself had a laboratory at
Whitehall, and was far more active and attentive there than at
the council board. It was almost necessary to the character of a
fine gentleman to have something to say about air pumps and
telescopes; and even fine ladies, now and then, thought it
becoming to affect a taste for science, went in coaches and six
to visit the Gresham curiosities, and broke forth into cries of
delight at finding that a magnet really attracted a needle, and
that a microscope really made a fly loom as large as a
sparrow.186
In this, as in every great stir of the human mind, there was
doubtless something which might well move a smile. It is the
universal law that whatever pursuit, whatever doctrine, becomes
fashionable, shall lose a portion of that dignity which it had
possessed while it was confined to a small but earnest minority,
and was loved for its own sake alone. It is true that the follies
of some persons who, without any real aptitude for science,
professed a passion for it, furnished matter of contemptuous
mirth to a few malignant satirists who belonged to the preceding
generation, and were not disposed to unlearn the lore of their
youth.187 But it is not less true that the great work of
interpreting nature was performed by the English of that age as
it had never before been performed in any age by any nation. The
spirit of Francis Bacon was abroad, a spirit admirably compounded
of audacity and sobriety. There was a strong persuasion that the
whole world was full of secrets of high moment to the happiness
of man, and that man had, by his Maker, been entrusted with the
key which, rightly used, would give access to them. There was at
the same time a conviction that in physics it was impossible to
arrive at the knowledge of general laws except by the careful
observation of particular facts. Deeply impressed with these
great truths, the professors of the new philosophy applied
themselves to their task, and, before a quarter of a century had
expired, they had given ample earnest of what has since been
achieved. Already a reform of agriculture had been commenced. New
vegetables were cultivated. New implements of husbandry were
employed. New manures were applied to the soil.188 Evelyn had,
under the formal sanction of the Royal Society, given instruction
to his countrymen in planting. Temple, in his intervals of
leisure, had tried many experiments in horticulture, and had
proved that many delicate fruits, the natives of more favoured
climates, might, with the help of art, be grown on English
ground. Medicine, which in France was still in abject bondage,
and afforded an inexhaustible subject of just ridicule to
Moliere, had in England become an experimental and progressive
science, and every day made some new advance in defiance of
Hippocrates and Galen. The attention of speculative men had been,
for the first time, directed to the important subject of sanitary
police. The great plague of 1665 induced them to consider with
care the defective architecture, draining, and ventilation of the
capital. The great fire of 1666 afforded an opportunity for
effecting extensive improvements. The whole matter was diligently
examined by the Royal Society; and to the suggestions of that
body must be partly attributed the changes which, though far
short of what the public welfare required, yet made a wide
difference between the new and the old London, and probably put a
final close to the ravages of pestilence in our country.189 At
the same time one of the founders of the Society, Sir William
Petty, created the science of political arithmetic, the humble
but indispensable handmaid of political philosophy. No kingdom of
nature was left unexplored. To that period belong the chemical
discoveries of Boyle, and the earliest botanical researches of
Sloane. It was then that Ray made a new classification of birds
and fishes, and that the attention of Woodward was first drawn
towards fossils and shells. One after another phantoms which had
haunted the world through ages of darkness fled before the light.
Astrology and alchymy became jests. Soon there was scarcely a
county in which some of the Quorum did not smile contemptuously
when an old woman was brought before them for riding on
broomsticks or giving cattle the murrain. But it was in those
noblest and most arduous departments of knowledge in which
induction and mathematical demonstration cooperate for the
discovery of truth, that the English genius won in that age the
most memorable triumphs. John Wallis placed the whole system of
statics on a new foundation. Edmund Halley investigated the
properties of the atmosphere, the ebb and flow of the sea, the
laws of magnetism, and the course of the comets; nor did he
shrink from toil, peril and exile in the cause of science. While
he, on the rock of Saint Helena, mapped the constellations of the
southern hemisphere, our national observatory was rising at
Greenwich: and John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal, was
commencing that long series of observations which is never
mentioned without respect and gratitude in any part of the globe.
But the glory of these men, eminent as they were, is cast into
the shade by the transcendent lustre of one immortal name. In
Isaac Newton two kinds of intellectual power, which have little
in common, and which are not often found together in a very high
degree of vigour, but which nevertheless are equally necessary in
the most sublime departments of physics, were united as they have
never been united before or since. There may have been minds as
happily constituted as his for the cultivation of pure
mathematical science: there may have been minds as happily
the human intellect. Bacon had sown the good seed in a sluggish
soil and an ungenial season. He had not expected an early crop,
and in his last testament had solemnly bequeathed his fame to the
next age. During a whole generation his philosophy had, amidst
tumults wars, and proscriptions, been slowly ripening in a few
well constituted minds. While factions were struggling for
dominion over each other, a small body of sages had turned away
with benevolent disdain from the conflict, and had devoted
themselves to the nobler work of extending the dominion of man
over matter. As soon as tranquillity was restored, these teachers
easily found attentive audience. For the discipline through which
the nation had passed had brought the public mind to a temper
well fitted for the reception of the Verulamian doctrine. The
civil troubles had stimulated the faculties of the educated
classes, and had called forth a restless activity and an
insatiable curiosity, such as had not before been known among us.
Yet the effect of those troubles was that schemes of political
and religious reform were generally regarded with suspicion and
contempt. During twenty years the chief employment of busy and
ingenious men had been to frame constitutions with first
magistrates, without first magistrates, with hereditary senates,
with senates appointed by lot, with annual senates, with
perpetual senates. In these plans nothing was omitted. All the
detail, all the nomenclature, all the ceremonial of the imaginary
government was fully set forth, Polemarchs and Phylarchs, Tribes
and Galaxies, the Lord Archon and the Lord Strategus. Which
ballot boxes were to be green and which red, which balls were to
be of gold and which of silver, which magistrates were to wear
hats and which black velvet caps with peaks, how the mace was to
be carried and when the heralds were to uncover, these, and a
hundred more such trifles, were gravely considered and arranged
by men of no common capacity and learning.181 But the time for
these visions had gone by; and, if any steadfast republican still
continued to amuse himself with them, fear of public derision and
of a criminal information generally induced him to keep his
fancies to himself. It was now unpopular and unsafe to mutter a
word against the fundamental laws of the monarchy: but daring and
ingenious men might indemnify themselves by treating with disdain
what had lately been considered as the fundamental laws of
nature. The torrent which had been dammed up in one channel
rushed violently into another. The revolutionary spirit, ceasing
to operate in politics, began to exert itself with unprecedented
vigour and hardihood in every department of physics. The year
1660, the era of the restoration of the old constitution, is also
the era from which dates the ascendency of the new philosophy. In
that year the Royal Society, destined to be a chief agent in a
long series of glorious and salutary reforms, began to exist.182
In a few months experimental science became all the mode. The
transfusion of blood, the ponderation of air, the fixation of
mercury, succeeded to that place in the public mind which had
been lately occupied by the controversies of the Rota. Dreams of
perfect forms of government made way for dreams of wings with
which men were to fly from the Tower to the Abbey, and of
doublekeeled ships which were never to founder in the fiercest
storm. All classes were hurried along by the prevailing
sentiment. Cavalier and Roundhead, Churchman and Puritan, were
for once allied. Divines, jurists, statesmen, nobles, princes,
swelled the triumph of the Baconian philosophy. Poets sang with
emulous fervour the approach of the golden age. Cowley, in lines
weighty with thought and resplendent with wit, urged the chosen
seed to take possession of the promised land flowing with milk
and honey, that land which their great deliverer and lawgiver had
seen, as from the summit of Pisgah, but had not been permitted to
enter.183 Dryden, with more zeal than knowledge, joined voice to
the general acclamation to enter, and foretold things which
neither he nor anybody else understood. The Royal Society, he
predicted, would soon lead us to the extreme verge of the globe,
and there delight us with a better view of the moon.184 Two able
and aspiring prelates, Ward, Bishop of Salisbury, and Wilkins,
Bishop of Chester, were conspicuous among the leaders of the
movement. Its history was eloquently written by a younger divine,
who was rising to high distinction in his profession, Thomas
Sprat, afterwards Bishop of Rochester. Both Chief Justice Hale
and Lord Keeper Guildford stole some hours from the business of
their courts to write on hydrostatics. Indeed it was under the
immediate direction of Guildford that the first barometers ever
exposed to sale in London were constructed.185 Chemistry divided,
for a time, with wine and love, with the stage and the gaming
table, with the intrigues of a courtier and the intrigues of a
demagogue, the attention of the fickle Buckingham. Rupert has the
credit of having invented mezzotinto; from him is named that
curious bubble of glass which has long amused children and
puzzled philosophers. Charles himself had a laboratory at
Whitehall, and was far more active and attentive there than at
the council board. It was almost necessary to the character of a
fine gentleman to have something to say about air pumps and
telescopes; and even fine ladies, now and then, thought it
becoming to affect a taste for science, went in coaches and six
to visit the Gresham curiosities, and broke forth into cries of
delight at finding that a magnet really attracted a needle, and
that a microscope really made a fly loom as large as a
sparrow.186
In this, as in every great stir of the human mind, there was
doubtless something which might well move a smile. It is the
universal law that whatever pursuit, whatever doctrine, becomes
fashionable, shall lose a portion of that dignity which it had
possessed while it was confined to a small but earnest minority,
and was loved for its own sake alone. It is true that the follies
of some persons who, without any real aptitude for science,
professed a passion for it, furnished matter of contemptuous
mirth to a few malignant satirists who belonged to the preceding
generation, and were not disposed to unlearn the lore of their
youth.187 But it is not less true that the great work of
interpreting nature was performed by the English of that age as
it had never before been performed in any age by any nation. The
spirit of Francis Bacon was abroad, a spirit admirably compounded
of audacity and sobriety. There was a strong persuasion that the
whole world was full of secrets of high moment to the happiness
of man, and that man had, by his Maker, been entrusted with the
key which, rightly used, would give access to them. There was at
the same time a conviction that in physics it was impossible to
arrive at the knowledge of general laws except by the careful
observation of particular facts. Deeply impressed with these
great truths, the professors of the new philosophy applied
themselves to their task, and, before a quarter of a century had
expired, they had given ample earnest of what has since been
achieved. Already a reform of agriculture had been commenced. New
vegetables were cultivated. New implements of husbandry were
employed. New manures were applied to the soil.188 Evelyn had,
under the formal sanction of the Royal Society, given instruction
to his countrymen in planting. Temple, in his intervals of
leisure, had tried many experiments in horticulture, and had
proved that many delicate fruits, the natives of more favoured
climates, might, with the help of art, be grown on English
ground. Medicine, which in France was still in abject bondage,
and afforded an inexhaustible subject of just ridicule to
Moliere, had in England become an experimental and progressive
science, and every day made some new advance in defiance of
Hippocrates and Galen. The attention of speculative men had been,
for the first time, directed to the important subject of sanitary
police. The great plague of 1665 induced them to consider with
care the defective architecture, draining, and ventilation of the
capital. The great fire of 1666 afforded an opportunity for
effecting extensive improvements. The whole matter was diligently
examined by the Royal Society; and to the suggestions of that
body must be partly attributed the changes which, though far
short of what the public welfare required, yet made a wide
difference between the new and the old London, and probably put a
final close to the ravages of pestilence in our country.189 At
the same time one of the founders of the Society, Sir William
Petty, created the science of political arithmetic, the humble
but indispensable handmaid of political philosophy. No kingdom of
nature was left unexplored. To that period belong the chemical
discoveries of Boyle, and the earliest botanical researches of
Sloane. It was then that Ray made a new classification of birds
and fishes, and that the attention of Woodward was first drawn
towards fossils and shells. One after another phantoms which had
haunted the world through ages of darkness fled before the light.
Astrology and alchymy became jests. Soon there was scarcely a
county in which some of the Quorum did not smile contemptuously
when an old woman was brought before them for riding on
broomsticks or giving cattle the murrain. But it was in those
noblest and most arduous departments of knowledge in which
induction and mathematical demonstration cooperate for the
discovery of truth, that the English genius won in that age the
most memorable triumphs. John Wallis placed the whole system of
statics on a new foundation. Edmund Halley investigated the
properties of the atmosphere, the ebb and flow of the sea, the
laws of magnetism, and the course of the comets; nor did he
shrink from toil, peril and exile in the cause of science. While
he, on the rock of Saint Helena, mapped the constellations of the
southern hemisphere, our national observatory was rising at
Greenwich: and John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal, was
commencing that long series of observations which is never
mentioned without respect and gratitude in any part of the globe.
But the glory of these men, eminent as they were, is cast into
the shade by the transcendent lustre of one immortal name. In
Isaac Newton two kinds of intellectual power, which have little
in common, and which are not often found together in a very high
degree of vigour, but which nevertheless are equally necessary in
the most sublime departments of physics, were united as they have
never been united before or since. There may have been minds as
happily constituted as his for the cultivation of pure
mathematical science: there may have been minds as happily
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