MISCONCEPTION AND MISREPRESENTATION 48 



creatures it consists of. He will not admit that his intercourse 

 with men of science in any degree disposes him to atheism, and 

 he thinks that there are not so many speculative atheists as men 

 are wont to imagine. Having had a tolerably wide familiarity 

 with naturalists, not only of this but of foreign countries, he 

 declares that he has met with ' so few true atheists that I am 

 very apt to think that men's want of due information or their 

 uncharitable zeal has made them mistake or misrepresent many 

 for deniers of God, that are thought such, chiefly because they 

 take uncommon methods in studying His works, and have other 

 sentiments of them than those of vulgar philosophers.' l 



Notwithstanding Boyle's earnest and eloquent Apologia, the 

 charges against science and scientific men which he so well 

 refuted continued to be brought forward all through the centuries. 

 They are hardly ever to be heard now, but there are not a few 

 living Fellows of the Royal Society who remember when they 

 were still from time to time fulminated from pulpit and platform. 



Now and then depreciatory comments on the aims and objects 

 of the Royal Society were to be heard even within the walls of 

 the Universities. Thus on July 9, 1669, at the Oxford Encaenia, 

 as Evelyn records, ' Dr. South, the university Orator, made an 

 eloquent speech, which was very long, and not without some 

 malicious and indecent reflections on the Royal Society, as 

 underminers of the University, which was very foolish and untrue, 

 as well as unseasonable.' There must have been many who 

 listened with surprise to this attack, when they remembered the 

 noble share that the Warden and some of the Fellows of 

 Wadham College had taken only a few years before in the 

 fostering of science and the foundation of the Royal Society. 



The popular misconception of the aims and practice of the 

 experimental philosophers found its fullest expression in the 

 writings of some of the more eminent literary men of the latter 

 half of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth 

 century. It requires no great effort of imagination to realize how 

 easily this misconception arose and why it lasted so long. That 

 a company of intelligent men should think it worth their while 

 to devote themselves to inquiries into the most ordinary every- 



1 Boyle's Works, 1792, vol. v, p. 515. 



