The Scientific Revolution

Lesson 6: Science gets organized

The Royal Society

The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge was the first enduring public organization devoted to scientific research. In 1660, the monarchy was restored in England after the civil war and the rule of Oliver Cromwell. The same year, a group of natural philosophers met to establish a society for advancing natural knowledge.

King Charles II chartered their group as the Royal Society 15 July 1662. The Society followed on and involved many of the same people as earlier informal groups. These men had been interested in natural philosophy in London and Oxford during the English Interregnum.

The Society was nonsectarian in that membership was theoretically open to all adult men, regardless of religious affiliation, even including Catholics. Even some supporters of Cromwell were included in the Royal Society. It was claimed that diverting people’s attention from religious and political to scientific disputes would lessen the possibility of another civil war.

In practice, the Society was dominated religiously by members of the Church of England, and socially by men of gentlemanly status. Initially the members, or Fellows, of the Royal Society included magicians like the astrologer Elias Ashmole (1617-1692) as well as natural philosophers representing a variety of viewpoints and disciplines, most notably Robert Boyle. It also included many amateurs, headed by King Charles.

Chartering gave the Society rights under English law, including the right to license books for publication, to correspond with foreigners, and to hold property. The Society exercised this last right to acquire a museum, which became a leading London tourist attraction, a collection of instruments, an elaborate archive, and a library.

The Society was governed by an annually elected President and Council of twenty-one Fellows. New members were elected by votes of the Fellows. Persons could have many reasons for joining the Society. Part of its allure was the prospect of interesting conversation, the witnessing of dramatic or entertaining experiments, and social prestige. The Society would be divided between working scientists and more intellectually passive Fellows into the nineteenth century.

The Society was largely in uncharted organizational territory. Since it received no ongoing state support, one of its biggest problems was money. Meetings were full of plans to get Fellows to pay their subscriptions and schemes for reform and reorganization, most of which were ineffectual.

Ideologically, the Society was united behind the banner of Baconian empiricism, particularly useful in establishing that the Society was English and not a slavish follower of foreign trends. Baconianism, with its emphasis on collaborative fact-gathering, was well suited for a group. The Society extended beyond mere Baconian fact-gathering, however, by proclaiming its devotion to experimental knowledge.

Meetings generally involved experiments, demonstrations and dissections followed by discussion, as well as the reading of papers describing natural phenomena and experiments held elsewhere. The Society was also Baconian in the stressing the economic usefulness of its activities. There were projects for the histories of trades, and occasional drives to recruit merchants and tradesmen as Fellows.

The early Society was sometimes involved in development projects, like that of a gentleman who wished to abolish famine in England by spreading potato cultivation, but in the end contributed little to English economic development. Oster’s document 9.2 is two excerpts from Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society, a quasi-official work. For what qualities does Sprat praise the Society?

  1  2  3  4  5  6  7