36 ON SOME ASPECTS OF THE 



History of the Royal Society; whether the Virtuosi there 

 do not pursue the projects of Campanella for reducing 

 England into Popery'. 1 



The hostility to that authority of reason, which is the 

 mainspring of the scientific method, has continued down 

 to the present day. It was shown in the virulence with 

 which natural selection and evolution were attacked ; it 

 displays itself in the peculiar temper of Christian 

 scientists, and such other exponents of modern free 

 thought, who regard with suspicion that appeal to reason 

 which the scientific method demands. 



The particular character of scientific work. 



The enthusiasm of the scientific men of the seventeenth 

 century made them inquire into the truth of current 

 opinions, even those which were in themselves highly 

 improbable. Impatient to sift the true from the false, 

 some of the earlier scientific investigators lost their 

 sobriety in the search for strange and extraordinary 

 phenomena. ' There was,' says Disraeli, in the Mis- 

 cellanies of Literature, ' an almost infantine simplicity 

 in the work of some of the early members of the Royal 

 Society.' In a memorial in Sprat's History, entitled 

 ' Answers returned by Sir Philliberto Vernatti to certain 

 inquiries sent by order of the Royal Society ', are some 



1 Campanella, who was an Italian philosopher and a contemporary of 

 Bruno, advocated the views of the universal vitalists. He considered 

 the whole world, down to its simplest elements, to be capable of sensation 

 and to be endowed with properties analogous to the consciousness of 

 human beings. With these he combined extraordinarily restricted poli- 

 tical views, for, although he desired to shake off the yoke of authority in 

 philosophical matters, he strenuously upheld the necessity of establishing 

 a universal autocracy of the most stringent type in all matters connected 

 with conduct and social life. He spent almost his whole life in the 

 prisons of the Inquisition. 



