CHAPTER I 



The New Science 



The new science, or the new experimental philosophy, arose in 

 England as a fresh intellectual impulse, too subtle and too penetrat- 

 ing to be readily confined within the bonds of a definition. Its 

 manifestations may be observed, its more obvious qualities may be 

 studied, yet back of all these there is an elusive psychological prob- 

 lem that fairly challenges solution. As the waters of a stream are 

 lost in the sea, where they are driven by unknown forces to break 

 on unexpected shores, so new ideas entering the minds of men are 

 lost to analysis only to reappear as ncAv points of view, new methods 

 of thinking, new attitudes toward life. Straightway men possessed 

 of these new ideas set to work reforming human thought. Simi- 

 larly, experimental philosophers in seventeenth century England, 

 quickened by this new intellectual impulse, began to lay, broad and 

 deep, the foundations for reconstructing the natural history of the 

 world. 



Scientific interest had existed in England long before the seven- 

 teenth century,^ of course, and can be called a new interest in that 

 period only in the sense that it received a new impetus. This new 

 impulse came from the influence of four men, two foreigners and 

 two Englishmen, Galileo and Descartes, Bacon and Harvey. When 

 Galileo made his telescope and saw the proof of the Copernican 

 theory, there was introduced the fundamental new principle, — 

 namely, the application of mechanical apparatus to the solution 

 of the problems of natural philosophy. ' ' Since that Galileo, ' ' wrote 

 John Wallis, "and (after him) Torricelli, and others have applied 

 Mechanick Principles to the salving of Philosophical Difficulties; 

 Natural Philosophy is well known to have been rendered more in- 

 telligible, and to have made a much greater progress in less than a 

 hundred years, than before for many ages".^ To Bacon is attrib- 

 uted the inductive method for scientific research, although as Pro- 



' Of . Adamson's Roger Bacon; the Philosophy of Science in the Middle Ages; Berthe- 

 lot's Introduction to a Collection of Ancient Treatises on Chemistry and Alchemy ; Bridges's 

 Introduction to Roger Bacon's Opus Ma jus ; Bon's Roger Bacon; Charles's Roger Bacon 

 et Sa Tie; La Croix's Science and Literature in the Middle Ages; Phillips's Science in 

 England from Elizabeth to Charles II ; Wright's Science Written During the Middle Age*. 



'Wallis, John, PhU. Trans, vol. Ill, p. 264, Letter to the R. S. 



