SCIENTIFIC METHOD 35 



the natural sight and made all things appear in an un- 

 natural and, therefore, false light. It was easy, he said, 

 to prove the deceitful and pernicious character of 

 spectacles ; for take two different pairs of spectacle 

 glasses and use them both at the same time, you will not 

 see so well as with one singly ; therefore your micro- 

 scopes and telescopes, which have more than one glass, 

 are impostors. Hostility went further than this ; it was 

 declared to be sinful to assist the eyes, which were 

 adapted to the capacity of the individual, whether good, 

 bad, or indifferent. It was argued that society at large 

 would become demoralized by the use of spectacles ; they 

 would give one man an unfair advantage over his fellow, 

 and every man an unfair advantage over every woman, 

 who could not be expected, on aesthetic and intellectual 

 grounds, to adopt the practice. 



That it was the newly-erected tribunal of reason which 

 was the mainspring of all this opposition is clear from 

 the circumstance that the hostility proceeded not only 

 from the extreme advocates of traditional authority, but 

 also from those who demanded the release of man's 

 thought from all authority, including that of reason. Men 

 of this stamp, ' in whose breasts the embers of the revo- 

 lution were still hot,' were panic-struck at the rapid 

 advance of the New Philosophy, and imagined ' that the 

 advocates of Popery and arbitrary power were returning 

 upon them disguised as natural philosophers'. In this 

 fear they were strengthened by the exclusive and, 

 to them, consequently, sinister character of the delibera- 

 tions of the Royal Society, and by the term used by 

 Boyle to describe its members, * the invisible college.' 

 Advantage was taken of these fears by writers of repute ; 

 thus Stubbe, a physician at Warwick, wrote a pamphlet 

 entitled ' Campanella revived, or an Enquiry into the 



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