THE PRESIDENT S ADDRESS. 



369 



exhausted. The defeat of the Fronde and the consequent establish- 

 ment of a paternal despotism in France, injuriously affected science 

 in that country. With the decline of interest in religious questions 

 a change came over the intellectual temper of Europe. Though, in 

 the north-west of the continent, knowledge was becoming every year 

 more widely diffused, and the spirit of investigation and discovery 

 was very active, there was throughout the entire civilized world 

 during the period between 1650 and 1750 as compared with the 

 periods preceding and following it an absence of lofty dominating 

 impulse's. 



It is a noteworthy fact that during this period the greatest intel- 

 lectual activity was manifested in the country which made the greatest 

 political progress, and that the single scientific name of the highest 

 rant, that of Newton, belongs to the same country. 



The Royal Society was one of the results of the same intellectual 

 ferment which produced in the political sphere the civil war and the 

 changes in the English constitution which resulted from it, in the 

 religious sphere the first great English sceptics and the break-up of 

 the national church into sects, and in the literary sphere the poetry 

 of Milton. Its inception dates back to 1645, the last year of the- 

 civil war, but it was not organized as the Royal Society until the 

 Restoration. It was one of the marks of the beginning of a new 

 age in England — of an age which, accepting as final the solutions of 

 religious and political questions resulting primarily from the civil 

 war, but thrown into their ultimate shape by the revolution of 1688, 

 devoted itself with a single eye to material progress. For about a 

 century, or from about 1660 to 1760, England was almost destitute of 

 enthusiasms affecting great masses of people. The most typical part 

 of this period is the administration of Walpole. An examination 

 of its character reveals to us a slumbering church and a politically 

 apathetic people governed by a corrupt parliament. Manufactures- 

 are increasing, the colonies are growing, foreign trade is developing, 

 waste lands are being reclaimed, population is advancing. Every- 

 where the evidences of a smug material prosperity are to be discov- 

 ered. It was a prosaic age. It was likewise, in the most literal 

 sense, an age of prose. Between Milton and Wordsworth we had 

 no poetical writer of the first order of merit. More than this, our 

 modern English prose style was then formed. The long, involved, 

 highly eloquent, but strangely worded, and strangely arranged sen- 



