The History of England, from the Accession of James the Second - Volume 1, Thomas Babington Macaulay [ebook pc reader txt] 📗

reckoned among the highest achievements of

the human intellect. Bacon had sown the good seed in a sluggish

soil and an ungenial season. He had not expected an early crop,

and in his last testament had solemnly bequeathed his fame to the

next age. During a whole generation his philosophy had, amidst

tumults wars, and proscriptions, been slowly ripening in a few

well constituted minds. While factions were struggling for

dominion over each other, a small body of sages had turned away

with benevolent disdain from the conflict, and had devoted

themselves to the nobler work of extending the dominion of man

over matter. As soon as tranquillity was restored, these teachers

easily found attentive audience. For the discipline through which

the nation had passed had brought the public mind to a temper

well fitted for the reception of the Verulamian doctrine. The

civil troubles had stimulated the faculties of the educated

classes, and had called forth a restless activity and an

insatiable curiosity, such as had not before been known among us.

Yet the effect of those troubles was that schemes of political

and religious reform were generally regarded with suspicion and

contempt. During twenty years the chief employment of busy and

ingenious men had been to frame constitutions with first

magistrates, without first magistrates, with hereditary senates,

with senates appointed by lot, with annual senates, with

perpetual senates. In these plans nothing was omitted. All the

detail, all the nomenclature, all the ceremonial of the imaginary

government was fully set forth, Polemarchs and Phylarchs, Tribes

and Galaxies, the Lord Archon and the Lord Strategus. Which

ballot boxes were to be green and which red, which balls were to

be of gold and which of silver, which magistrates were to wear

hats and which black velvet caps with peaks, how the mace was to

be carried and when the heralds were to uncover, these, and a

hundred more such trifles, were gravely considered and arranged

by men of no common capacity and learning.181 But the time for

these visions had gone by; and, if any steadfast republican still

continued to amuse himself with them, fear of public derision and

of a criminal information generally induced him to keep his

fancies to himself. It was now unpopular and unsafe to mutter a

word against the fundamental laws of the monarchy: but daring and

ingenious men might indemnify themselves by treating with disdain

what had lately been considered as the fundamental laws of

nature. The torrent which had been dammed up in one channel

rushed violently into another. The revolutionary spirit, ceasing

to operate in politics, began to exert itself with unprecedented

vigour and hardihood in every department of physics. The year

1660, the era of the restoration of the old constitution, is also

the era from which dates the ascendency of the new philosophy. In

that year the Royal Society, destined to be a chief agent in a

long series of glorious and salutary reforms, began to exist.182

In a few months experimental science became all the mode. The

transfusion of blood, the ponderation of air, the fixation of

mercury, succeeded to that place in the public mind which had

been lately occupied by the controversies of the Rota. Dreams of

perfect forms of government made way for dreams of wings with

which men were to fly from the Tower to the Abbey, and of

doublekeeled ships which were never to founder in the fiercest

storm. All classes were hurried along by the prevailing

sentiment. Cavalier and Roundhead, Churchman and Puritan, were

for once allied. Divines, jurists, statesmen, nobles, princes,

swelled the triumph of the Baconian philosophy. Poets sang with

emulous fervour the approach of the golden age. Cowley, in lines

weighty with thought and resplendent with wit, urged the chosen

seed to take possession of the promised land flowing with milk

and honey, that land which their great deliverer and lawgiver had

seen, as from the summit of Pisgah, but had not been permitted to

enter.183 Dryden, with more zeal than knowledge, joined voice to

the general acclamation to enter, and foretold things which

neither he nor anybody else understood. The Royal Society, he

predicted, would soon lead us to the extreme verge of the globe,

and there delight us with a better view of the moon.184 Two able

and aspiring prelates, Ward, Bishop of Salisbury, and Wilkins,

Bishop of Chester, were conspicuous among the leaders of the

movement. Its history was eloquently written by a younger divine,

who was rising to high distinction in his profession, Thomas

Sprat, afterwards Bishop of Rochester. Both Chief Justice Hale

and Lord Keeper Guildford stole some hours from the business of

their courts to write on hydrostatics. Indeed it was under the

immediate direction of Guildford that the first barometers ever

exposed to sale in London were constructed.185 Chemistry divided,

for a time, with wine and love, with the stage and the gaming

table, with the intrigues of a courtier and the intrigues of a

demagogue, the attention of the fickle Buckingham. Rupert has the

credit of having invented mezzotinto; from him is named that

curious bubble of glass which has long amused children and

puzzled philosophers. Charles himself had a laboratory at

Whitehall, and was far more active and attentive there than at

the council board. It was almost necessary to the character of a

fine gentleman to have something to say about air pumps and

telescopes; and even fine ladies, now and then, thought it

becoming to affect a taste for science, went in coaches and six

to visit the Gresham curiosities, and broke forth into cries of

delight at finding that a magnet really attracted a needle, and

that a microscope really made a fly loom as large as a

sparrow.186


In this, as in every great stir of the human mind, there was

doubtless something which might well move a smile. It is the

universal law that whatever pursuit, whatever doctrine, becomes

fashionable, shall lose a portion of that dignity which it had

possessed while it was confined to a small but earnest minority,

and was loved for its own sake alone. It is true that the follies

of some persons who, without any real aptitude for science,

professed a passion for it, furnished matter of contemptuous

mirth to a few malignant satirists who belonged to the preceding

generation, and were not disposed to unlearn the lore of their

youth.187 But it is not less true that the great work of

interpreting nature was performed by the English of that age as

it had never before been performed in any age by any nation. The

spirit of Francis Bacon was abroad, a spirit admirably compounded

of audacity and sobriety. There was a strong persuasion that the

whole world was full of secrets of high moment to the happiness

of man, and that man had, by his Maker, been entrusted with the

key which, rightly used, would give access to them. There was at

the same time a conviction that in physics it was impossible to

arrive at the knowledge of general laws except by the careful

observation of particular facts. Deeply impressed with these

great truths, the professors of the new philosophy applied

themselves to their task, and, before a quarter of a century had

expired, they had given ample earnest of what has since been

achieved. Already a reform of agriculture had been commenced. New

vegetables were cultivated. New implements of husbandry were

employed. New manures were applied to the soil.188 Evelyn had,

under the formal sanction of the Royal Society, given instruction

to his countrymen in planting. Temple, in his intervals of

leisure, had tried many experiments in horticulture, and had

proved that many delicate fruits, the natives of more favoured

climates, might, with the help of art, be grown on English

ground. Medicine, which in France was still in abject bondage,

and afforded an inexhaustible subject of just ridicule to

Moliere, had in England become an experimental and progressive

science, and every day made some new advance in defiance of

Hippocrates and Galen. The attention of speculative men had been,

for the first time, directed to the important subject of sanitary

police. The great plague of 1665 induced them to consider with

care the defective architecture, draining, and ventilation of the

capital. The great fire of 1666 afforded an opportunity for

effecting extensive improvements. The whole matter was diligently

examined by the Royal Society; and to the suggestions of that

body must be partly attributed the changes which, though far

short of what the public welfare required, yet made a wide

difference between the new and the old London, and probably put a

final close to the ravages of pestilence in our country.189 At

the same time one of the founders of the Society, Sir William

Petty, created the science of political arithmetic, the humble

but indispensable handmaid of political philosophy. No kingdom of

nature was left unexplored. To that period belong the chemical

discoveries of Boyle, and the earliest botanical researches of

Sloane. It was then that Ray made a new classification of birds

and fishes, and that the attention of Woodward was first drawn

towards fossils and shells. One after another phantoms which had

haunted the world through ages of darkness fled before the light.

Astrology and alchymy became jests. Soon there was scarcely a

county in which some of the Quorum did not smile contemptuously

when an old woman was brought before them for riding on

broomsticks or giving cattle the murrain. But it was in those

noblest and most arduous departments of knowledge in which

induction and mathematical demonstration cooperate for the

discovery of truth, that the English genius won in that age the

most memorable triumphs. John Wallis placed the whole system of

statics on a new foundation. Edmund Halley investigated the

properties of the atmosphere, the ebb and flow of the sea, the

laws of magnetism, and the course of the comets; nor did he

shrink from toil, peril and exile in the cause of science. While

he, on the rock of Saint Helena, mapped the constellations of the

southern hemisphere, our national observatory was rising at

Greenwich: and John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal, was

commencing that long series of observations which is never

mentioned without respect and gratitude in any part of the globe.

But the glory of these men, eminent as they were, is cast into

the shade by the transcendent lustre of one immortal name. In

Isaac Newton two kinds of intellectual power, which have little

in common, and which are not often found together in a very high

degree of vigour, but which nevertheless are equally necessary in

the most sublime departments of physics, were united as they have

never been united before or since. There may have been minds as

happily constituted as his for the cultivation of pure

mathematical science: there may have been minds as happily