64 THE NEW SCIENCE AND ENGLISH LITERATURE 



eighteenth century, for new ideas, new physical conceptions must 

 fight their way today. But this transition period has offered such 

 phenomena as can be duplicated in more modern times only by the 

 mid-years of the nineteenth century, when evolution first became 

 a revolutionizing factor in human thought. The new ideas were 

 making their way slowly toward an adequate literary expression, 

 and toward a place of dignity in the minds of thinking men. With 

 the last years of the seventeenth century there came a scientist 

 whose genius was so superior, whose character was so irreproach 

 able that all he did and all he said was looked upon with interest 

 and attention. Men had only words of praise for Sir Isaac New 

 ton. 



Our study has revealed these facts : ( 1 ) The poets of the transi 

 tion period, who were brought into close contact with the new 

 scientific ideas, such as Cowley, Waller, Denham, and Sprat, were 

 not able to throw off the yoke of conventional, outworn imagery 

 of a discarded science. The influence of the new material upon 

 them was surprisingly slight, both in inspiration and imagery. 

 However much these men might support the new philosophy as 

 thinkers, as poets they were uniformly of an earlier period of 

 science. (2) In Milton was found the great scientific evasion, be 

 cause he stood in doubt at the parting of the ways, distrusting the 

 old and fearing the new. He was, therefore, forced to equivocate. 

 Thus far, at least, he was a man of his period, and was fettered by 

 the transition. (3) Here, too, was the final defeat of the long- 

 accepted belief in witchcraft and sorcery among learned men; its 

 last defense finding expression in the work of Joseph Glanvil, a 

 man of unusually clear vision and sane judgment, and imbued with 

 the new scientific spirit, but limited by inherited belief and super 

 stition. (4) Likewise, there was the destruction of the power of 

 ancient classical authority and a triumph for a ''free and un- 

 possest Reason". (5) Old false hypotheses, patched up with 

 new facts but dimly understood, were fully refuted, as in the case 

 of Thomas Burnet. It was in this destructive process that the 

 "wary and circumspect disposition" of the scientists made itself 

 felt most powerfully. (6) The pseudo-science of astrology was 

 laughed to scorn by Swift, as Ben Jonson had earlier served 

 alchemy. It was this new attitude of reason and commonsense 



