174 THE NEW SCIENCE AND ENGLISH LITERATURE 



fore, while the new ideas of the late seventeenth century were furn- 

 ishing inspiration and imagery to certain pious poets, the new phil- 

 osophy in prose filled "a class of books which cannot be called 

 literature". Its direct expression is to be found in such books 

 as Desaguliers 's A Course of Experimental Philosophy, Stephen 

 Gray's Experiments in Electricity, and the volumes of the Philo- 

 sophical Transactions. But in these books "the graces were tacitly 

 and gradually excluded from all treatment of purely utilitarian 

 problems and exact observations, and this exclusion divided the 

 vast body of what was written into literature and non-litera- 

 ture 'V" 



The human philosophers, with the exception of Shaftesbury, 

 however much they may have been subtly influenced by the scien- 

 tific method and discovery, established their attitude by casual 

 reference. "I deny not", says Locke in his Essay on Human 

 Understanding, "but, a man, accustomed to rational and regular 

 experiments, shall be able to see farther into the nature of bodies, 

 and guess righter at their yet unknown properties, than one thai 

 is a stranger to them ; but yet, as I have said, this is but judgment 

 and opinion, not knowledge and certainty. The way of getting 

 and improving our knowledge in substances only by experiences 

 and history, which is all that the weakness of our faculties in this 

 state of mediocrity we are in in this world can attain to, makes 

 me suspect that natural philosophy is not capable of being made a 

 science"."^ And then he adds, in the manner of an apology, — 

 "I would not therefore, be thought to disesteem or dissuade the 

 study of nature.""^ To the Idealist, Berkeley, the search for na- 

 tural causes is misdirected effort. "It is the searching after and 

 endeavoring to understand this Language (if I may so call it) of 

 the Author of Nature, that ought to be the employment of the 

 natural philosopher; and not the pretending to explain things by 

 corporeal Causes, which doctrine seems to have too much estranged 

 the minds of men from the Active Principle, that Sunreme and 

 "Wise Spirit 'in whom Ave live, move, and have our being' "."* 



*" Ctosse, Edmund, History of 18th Century Literature, p. 376. 



^ Essay, Bk. IV, chap. 12, p. 423. 



"a Ibid. p. 424. 



^* Principles, Sects. 65, 66. 



