PURE SCIENCE AND THE IDEA OF THE HOLY 



In an important monograph, R. K. Merton has conclusively shown 

 that the affiliations of all the early Royal Society Fellows, with very 

 few exceptions, were with the protestant and parliamentary side.^ 



In the light of facts such as these, the statement quoted by A. V. 

 Hill is to be seen in a rather different light. The early Fellows of the 

 Royal Society were no doubt, as a body, desirous of taking no par- 

 ticular political line, but that does not mean that individually they 

 had no political sympathies. There is significance in their meeting- 

 places, first at Oxford, then at Gresham College in London, and later 

 their close connection with Cambridge, the home of their greatest 

 ornament, Isaac Newton. The University of Oxford, where they met 

 first, and where a marked group of scientific men had gathered, was 

 not definitely royalist, as it became during the civil war. Posts there 

 were later taken from their holders and given to royalist supporters; 

 thus William Harvey was made Warden of Merton, but wisely rode 

 out over Shotover Hill with the retreating royalist army when Oxford 

 finally fell to the Parliament's arms. In London, Gresham College 

 had been founded by one of the most famous of London's six- 

 teenth century financiers. Sir Thomas Gresham, a member of my own 

 Cambridge College, Caius. He established there professors of such 

 useful sciences as astronomy, geography, navigation, and the like, 

 with the avowed intention of training the technicians required by the 

 new expanding capitalist enterprises. His school at Holt in Norfolk 

 could take care of less advanced education. And his third foundation, 

 the Royal Exchange, had a connection with the power of the City 

 which needs no emphasis. That the movement of science passed from 

 Oxford before the civil war to Cambridge afterwards is also interesting, 

 for Cambridge had been almost wholly on the progressive, revolu- 

 tionary, puritan, parliamentary side. Only two colleges sent plate to 

 the King's treasurer, and that had been neatly recovered before it 

 ever reached him. Cambridge w^as the headquarters of the Eastern 

 Counties Association, the backbone of the parliamentary army before 

 the establishment of the New Model. It was held for Parliament 

 throughout the war.^ What manner of men accepted posts in the 

 University under the revolutionary auspices may be seen by such 

 examples as Benjamin Whichcote and William Dell. 



^ R. K. Merton, "Science, Technology and Society in seventeenth century England" 

 in Osiris, 1938, 4, 360. 



^ Cf. Cambridge during the Civil War by F. J. Varley (Cambridge, 1935), and East 

 Anglia and the Civil War by A. Kingston (London, 1897). 



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