THE NEW SCIENCE AND PROSE 173 



was made to clironicle the new observations of science in the best 

 literary form of the age, but it could not be sustained ".^"^ The 

 splendid imagination of Burnet, awakened by the recent Cartesian 

 speculations, had caught new visions of beauty, to which he gave 

 expression in passages of literary eloquence. His Sacred Theory 

 became the centre of a theological storm whose mutterings did not 

 entirely die away for forty years.^"® From him leads a most allur- 

 ing trail into the land of speculative theology where dwell Bentley, 

 Clarke, Butler, and Mandeville. These men were ''occupied with 

 an intense and eager curiosity by speculation on the first principles 

 of natural religion ",^°^ striving to harmonize the "painful dis- 

 cord" between reason and revelation. "The scientific frontier be- 

 tween reason and revelation is in the hottest of the melee, and the 

 deists, extending the claims of reason, say or insinuate that the 

 results tell against the Church articles. The apologists like Clarke 

 and Bentley try to prove the being of God either a prion, or from 

 the world as understood by the new science "."° However alluring 

 this path, it is certainly a digression from the plan of study of this 

 work. And there is a second way from the Sacred Theory, 

 taken by the virtuosi themselves, which leads through Ray's Wis- 

 dom of God, Whiston's New Theory, and the polemical work of 

 Keil. The first two have have been treated, and the last has no 

 claim to literary merit. It may be seen, therefore, that in the 

 early years of the eighteenth century there were bounds set to 

 certain fields of speculation; (1) Locke had clearly discriminated 

 between the subject-matter of human philosophy and the problems 

 of natural philosophy, (2) the new science, breaking the yoke of 

 ecclesiastical authority, had asserted "the freedom of the scien- 

 tific intellect", (3) the problems of sociology, political economy, 

 and history, were distinguished from the investigations of natural 

 science. Each field of intellectual endeavor, thus specialized, 

 yielded its own harvest of books. 



Natural science was continued through these years with inde- 

 fatigable energy, but no great new discoveries were made. There- 



'"" Gosse, Edmund, History of 18th Century Literature, p. 375. 



"8 Supra, chap. II. 



><* Elton, Oliver, The Augustan Ages, p. 269. 



""Ibid. p. 270. 



