182 THE NEW SCIENCE AND ENGLISH LITERATURE 



to form modern style ' '. 5 There is a contagious enthusiasm in much 

 that they wrote, from the earlier men like Wilkins, through Evelyn, 

 Boyle, Hooke, and Newton. But there was no literary genius 

 among the virtuosi directly inspired of the new science ; their work 

 had a permanent effect on English thought, but not on English 

 literature. Even Newton, with his "brooding mind, took no thought 

 for literary expression ". Then, once again, the new science was 

 "exposed" by satire, in those exceedingly clever attacks in prose. 

 Eachard, the schoolmaster, King, Brown, Swift, the Scriblerus 

 Club, conjointly, Arbuthnot, The Toiler, The Spectator, The Guard 

 ian, Defoe, and The London Spy, all launched satiric darts at the 

 new philosophy. It was another exploitation of a humor, with 

 more discrimination, to be sure, than comedy and verse possessed. 

 The tone throughout is little varied; the raillery is good-natured, 

 except in Swift; the fairness and candid good-sense of The Tatler 

 and The Spectator are remarkable. In the last mentioned peri 

 odicals the absurdities of the new interest are fairly characterized, 

 and the great men and their splendid achievements find some ap 

 preciation. Addison, in particular, had caught the vision of "the 

 heavens of the new astronomy". There is no re-action in this 

 period to counterbalance the satire. Locke and Berkeley only 

 touch upon the new science in the midst of a hundred other in 

 terests; the deistic controversy, which found its culmination in 

 Butler's Analogy, drew from the new experiments the new con 

 ception of the physical universe; Shaftesbury, alone, among the 

 human philosophers and theologians, gave an appreciative expres 

 sion to the new philosophy in his idealization of the virtuoso. 

 Further than this, the new science received a direct exposition in 

 a non-literary style of its own, and separating itself from history, 

 theology, human philosophy, and classical learning, took its honor 

 able place among the other branches of human thought. 



Here the investigation stops, though the literary phenomenon 

 is not complete. With the passing away of Pope, however, there 

 ended a satiric, inappreciative attitude; at that time, too, natural 

 science ceased to be on the defensive, and the movement toward 

 the literary use of the results of experiments and observations had 

 begun. The new intellectual impulse had entered the minds of 



8 Elton, Oliver, The Augustan Ages, p. 420. 



