LAUD, THE LEVELLERS, AND THE VIRTUOSI 



not attained. It was inevitable that the scientists should be with the 

 Presbyterian and Republican "centre," the party of the rising economic 

 individualism, since only capitalism, with its encouragement of 

 technology, would afford science with the means for its development. 

 But the relation between the Presbyterian merchants and the 

 Leveller Independents was, of course, much closer than the relations 

 of either to the Anglican and Royalist party. Science and Industry 

 were therefore connected broadly with the Puritan movement, a 

 link which constantly manifests itself in this period. The complaint 

 of a conservative Anglican divine after the Restoration is in this 

 respect especially revealing. Samuel Parker, in his Discourse of 

 Ecclesiastical Politic wrote as follows: "I confess I cannot but smile 

 when I observe how some that would be thought wonderfully grave 

 and solemn statesmen labour with mighty projects of setting up this 

 and that manufacture. . . . To erect and encourage trading combina- 

 tions is only to build up so many nests of faction and sedition, and 

 to enable these giddy and humoursom people to create public dis- 

 turbances. For 'tis notorious that there is not any sort of people so 

 inclinable to seditious practises as the trading part of a nation. And 

 if we reflect upon our late miserable distractions, 'tis easy to observe 

 how the quarrel was chiefly hatch'd in the shops of tradesmen and 

 cherished by the zeal of prentice-boys and city-gossips." 



The Rise of Mechanistic Economics. 



Drawing these many threads together now a little, we may refer to 

 one of the most fascinating aspects of the seventeenth century, namely, 

 the rise of "mechanistic economics." In pure science the concept of 

 mechanical causation (or, to be more accurate, the concentration of 

 interest on the Aristotelian eflicient cause, to the exclusion of the 

 other Aristotelian causes), was of enormous importance. No advance 

 beyond pure descriptive biology, for instance, could be made without 

 it. And it was just at this time that such advances were made. Thus in 

 1644 Sir Kenelm Digby,^ discussing embryology, in his Treatise on 

 Bodies^ took the example of a germinating bean: "Take a bean," 

 he wrote, "or any other seed, and put it in the earth; can it then 

 choose but that the bean must swell } The bean swelling, can it choose 

 but break the skin.^ The skin broken, can it choose (by reason of 



^ Digby, Sir K., Two Treatises, in the one of which the Nature of Bodies, in the other 

 the nature of Man s Soule, is look' d into, in way of discovery of the Immortality of Reason- 

 able Soules (Williams, London, 1664). 



8s 



