26 THE NEW SCIENCE AND ENGLISH LITERATURE 



had a method that could be made practicable by which men could 

 fiiy. Besides all these there must have been scores of abortive at- 

 tempts. Lord Worcester's A Century of Inventions contains 

 hundreds of wild-eyed schemes for doing useful and extraordinary 

 things by mechanical contrivances. 



From the foregoing facts it is clear that the new philosophers 

 were sincere in their stated purpose to be practical and to make 

 their knowledge useful. This learned group of men did not con- 

 sider it beneath their dignity to give up a meeting to the discus- 

 sion of a new kind of "bee-house""^ or to a consideration of new 

 agricultural implements.^°^ Sir Robert Moray devoted one entire 

 letter to the Royal Society from Hungary to the description of a 

 new kind of airshaft for ventilating mines.^°'' There was a drawing 

 of a proposed speaking trumpet given Sept.-Nov. 1678. An article 

 found a place in the Philosophical Transactions on preserving ice 

 and snow by covering them with chaff. In the copy for March 25, 

 1669, on an equal basis with a new instrument for drawing an 

 object in perspective, observations of Saturn, and a paper by 

 Lower on the motion of the heart, is a letter from France on melons, 

 the best varieties and how to raise them. Certainly the new phil- 

 osophers did not despise the day of small things, and certainly they 

 desired to be practical, and however many of them were drawn 

 aside, and however far, into wild vagaries and the following of 

 false lights, the sum total of their efforts is a noble achievement. 



The movement has been defined, and its progress has been traced 

 through the period, with some account of the activity in the vari- 

 ous fields of interest. A general survey, therefore, should show 

 the scientific ideas revealed to the world by this company of ex- 

 perimenters. They preached, in the first place, a new scientific 

 attitude of mind that was fundamental and far-reaching, and that 

 would affect the mode of thinking of all men who came in contact 

 with it. It was an insistence upon absolute intelligibility in phil- 

 osophical discussions, — a "working upon Intelligible Principles in 

 an Intelligible Manner". The first element of Descartes 's method 

 "was to accept nothing as true which I did not clearly recognize 



- i^Ibid. July 21, 1693. 



"•Ibid. July 3, 1665; July 13, 1668. 

 >•» Ibid. July 3, 1665. 



