438 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



on much more philosophical principles.^ All this work was the direct outcome 

 of early discussions in the Royal Society. 



Let us turn to the like movement in Germany— a land now teeming with 

 great Academies, but which possessed none till near the end of the seventeenth 

 century. When tlifi land recovered from the horrors of the Thirty Years' 

 "War, and began to show the first signs of rivalry with Italy, France, and 

 England, we find' the spirit of the Eenascence in general culture combined 

 with the new enthusiasm for the investigation of nature, and the sense 

 of liberty produced by the creed of the Eeformation. We have seen in the 

 instance of the Lynxes that this last was not a necessary factor in the 

 development, as Harnack seems to think. Academies were founded both 

 earlier and later under the patronage of the Eoman Church, and even at 

 Kome, when the Lynxes broke loose from control, there is an ecclesiastical 

 Academy of the same name, which, in our own day, gave a splendid jubilee 

 feast. But the right of private judgment in religion was, no doubt, a great 

 stimulant to the same right in science; and so there were several now 

 forgotten private societies of this kind in Germany from about 1660 onward. 



The first prince, however, who took up the idea warmly was the man known 

 as the Great Elector of Brandenburg, father of the first King of Prussia, whose 

 conception of a Cosmopolitan Academy of Science is expressed in language 

 that seems to us now like the dreaming of an intellect which has lost its 

 balance. He actually issued a patent in 1667 for a Brandenburgian Universal 

 University of the modern sciences and arts. It was to be a free home for 

 all spirits, and an asylum for all the persecuted scholars of Europe, a place of 

 refuge for all oppressed creeds, a centre for all pure and applied sciences, a 

 union of minds, and the palace of the loftiest sovereign in the world, even of 

 Wisdom. It will enjoy everlasting peace; for during wars it will be declared 

 inviolable under international treaties ; even amid the din of arms the 

 Muses will not there be silenced. Every liberal art will be taught without 

 limitation; they will all manage their own affairs, and stand under no 

 authority but that of the Elector ; all aids for prosecuting sciences will be 

 granted them. The Platonopolis which the pupils of Plato had dreamed, 

 the poets of the Eenascence seen in visions, was now to be the creation of the 

 Protestant State of Brandenburg ! Learned men would find there on the 

 Parnassus of the Greeks the Maecenas of the Eomans, great novelties indeed, 

 I may add, for exiled Jesuits and Calvinists, who, whether they played the 

 part of the lion or the lamb— indeed they had played them both in turn — would 



•As Adolf Hamack says in his full' and accurate Geschiehte der k. preussischen Akademie der 

 Wissemchttften, Berlin, 1906, which has been my guide. 



