Hippocrates’ complaint and the scientific ethos in early modern England

SUMMARY

Among the elements of the modern scientific ethos, as identified by R.K. Merton and others, is the commitment of individual effort to a long-term inquiry that may not bring substantial results in a lifetime. The challenge this presents was encapsulated in the aphorism of the ancient Greek physician, Hippocrates of Kos: vita brevis, ars longa (life is short, art is long). This article explores how this complaint was answered in the early modern period by Francis Bacon’s call for the inauguration of the sciences over several generations, thereby imagining a succession of lives added together over time. However, Bacon also explored another response to Hippocrates: the devotion of a ‘whole life’, whether brief or long, to science. The endorsement of long-term inquiry in combination with intensive lifetime involvement was embraced by some leading Fellows of the Royal Society, such as Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke. The problem for individuals, however, was to find satisfaction in science despite concerns, in some fields, that current observations and experiments would not yield material able to be extended by future investigations.

Acknowledgments

I thank the members of the editorial team of this journal for their advice, and for soliciting expert referees. These anonymous referees made very helpful suggestions, for which I am most grateful. I thank Mary Louise Yeo for improving a near-final version. For permission to consult manuscript material, I thank the Royal Society of London and The British Library.

Notes

1 Abraham Cowley, ‘To the Royal Society’, in Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society of London, for the Improving of Natural Knowledge (London: T. R. for J. Martyn, 1667), stanza V, sig.B2^v. Cowley, who wrote this ode at the request of his friend, John Evelyn, could not resist remarking on the oddity of the fact that the Society, founded in 1660, ‘could be/At five years Age worthy a History’ (stanza IX, sig.B2(2)^r).

2 Cowley, ‘To the Royal Society’ (note 1), stanza V, sig.B2^v.

3 Abraham Cowley, A Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy (London, 1661), preface; sig.A4(1)^r. For ‘official’ statements to foreign savants about the need for on-going research, see Henry Oldenburg (a founding secretary of the Society) to Peter van Dam, 23 January 1663, in The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, edited and translated by A. R. Hall and M. B. Hall, 13 vols (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965–1986), vol. 2, pp. 13–15; and to René Sluse, 23 October 1667, vol. 3, p. 537.

4 Graham Rees, ‘Introduction’, The Instauratio magna, Part II: Novum organum and Associated Texts, vol. 11 of The Oxford Francis Bacon (hereafter OFB), edited by Graham Rees (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), pp. xx and xlvi.

5 For desiderata lists as setting out future collaborative research, see Vera Keller, ‘The “New World of Sciences”: the temporality of the research agenda and the unending ambitions of science’, Isis, 103(2012), 727–34; but also Vera Keller, Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575–1725 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 18–21 for their challenge to traditional disciplines. See Paul Slack, The Invention of Improvement: Information and Material Progress in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 108 on projects as not only cumulative but ‘endless’.

6 Hippocrates, The Aphorismes of Hippocrates, Prince of Physitians (London: H. Moseley, 1655), p. 1 (sig.B^r).

7 Lucius Annaeus Seneca, ‘On the Shortness of Life’, in Dialogues and Letters, edited and translated by C. D. N. Costa (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 59: ‘the dictum of the greatest of doctors: life is short, art is long’ expressed the ‘complaints from even distinguished men’.

8 See Owsei Temkin, Hippocrates in the World of Pagans and Christians (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 44–46 for responses to the first aphorism extending beyond medicine into philosophy and life more generally. See also Harald Weinrich, On Borrowed Time: The Art and Economy of Living with Deadlines, translated by Steven Rendall (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 1–9.

9 David Cantor, ed., Reinventing Hippocrates: the history of medicine in context (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); Nancy G. Siraisi, History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), pp. 79–89 and passim; Peter Anstey, ‘The Creation of the English Hippocrates’, Medical History, 55(2011), 457–78.

10 The OED entry for ‘ethos’ shows that in Classical times it denoted the permanent quality, or character, of a person; its application to the spirit of a community or institution only appeared in the nineteenth century.

11 Robert K. Merton, ‘The Normative Structure of Science’, in The Sociology of Science: theoretical and empirical investigations, edited by Norman W. Storer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 267–78 (pp. 269–78).

12 Merton, ‘The Normative Structure of Science’ (note 11), pp. 274–75.

13 Newton to Hooke, 5 February 1675/6 (letter no. 154), The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, edited by H. W. Turnbull, 7 vols (Cambridge: Royal Society at the University Press, 1959), vol. 1, p. 416.

14 Robert K. Merton, On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript (London: MacMillan, 1965), pp. 1–3, 8–9, 31–32; George Sarton, Isis, 24(1935), 107–09; R. E. Ockenden, Isis, 25(1938), 451–52.

15 Merton, Shoulders (note 14), pp. 80, 86. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, vol. 4 of the OFB, edited with introduction, notes and commentary by Michael Kiernan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 29: ‘These times are the ancient times when the world is ancient, & not those which we count antient Ordine retrogrado, by a computacion backward from our selves’.

16 Sprat, History (note 1), p. 48 wrote of standing on the ‘shoulders’ of the ancients, but not of giants. As far as I can tell there is no mention of this aphorism in Bacon, Boyle or John Locke.

17 Edgar Zilsel, ‘The Genesis of the Concept of Scientific Progress’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 6 (1945), 325–49 (pp. 327–28). For the argument that ancient astronomers stressed the need to collect data over many generations in order to compensate for very short lifetimes, see Daniel Špelda, ‘Veritas filia temporis: The origins of the idea of scientific progress’, Annals of Science, 73 (2016), 376–91.

18 Gianna Pomata, ‘Sharing Cases: The Observations in Early Modern Medicine’, Early Science and Medicine, 15 (2010), 193–236.

19 Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Naturales quaestiones, with an English translation by Thomas H. Corcoran (London: Heinemann, 1971-72), VI. 25 in vol. 2, p. 279. See also Špelda, ‘Veritas filia temporis’ (note 17), p. 380.

20 Thomas S. Kuhn, ‘Mathematical versus Experimental Traditions in the Development of Physical Science’ [first published 1976], in The Essential Tension: selected studies in scientific tradition and change (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), pp. 31–65 (pp. 41–52 for meteorology, magnetism and electricity).

21 Robert Boyle, ‘The Aretology or Ethicall Elements’ (1645), in The Early Essays and Ethics of Robert Boyle, edited by John T. Harwood (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), pp. 1–141 (p. 9). On these early writings, see Michael Hunter, Boyle: Between God and Science (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 57–69.

22 Robert Boyle, Some Considerations Touching the Usefulnesse of Experimentall Naturall Philosophy (1663), in The Works of Robert Boyle (hereafter Boyle Works), 14 vols, edited by Michael Hunter and Edward B. Davis (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999-2000), vol. 3, pp. 198–560 (p. 414).

23 See title page (unpaginated and unfoliated), Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana (Venice), MS Lat. VII, 22. I thank Peter Anstey for this transcription.

24 This issue predates the mention of fast versus slow science in Brian Owens, ‘Long-term research: Slow science’, Nature, 495 (21 March 2013; issue 7441).

25 Galen, Three Treatises on the Nature of Science, translated by Richard Walzer and Michael Frede (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1985), p. 11.

26 Francis Bacon, ‘Great Instauration preliminaries’, in The Instauratio magna Part II (note 4), p. 13; also Novum organum (1620), in The Instauratio magna Part II, (note 4), Book 1, aphorism no. 47, p. 85 on the human tendency to be ‘swayed by those things that can strike and enter the mind suddenly and in one go’.

27 Bacon, Novum organum (note 26), Book 1, aphorism no. 93 on the prophecy in Daniel 12:4. See Brian Vickers, ‘Francis Bacon and the Progress of Knowledge’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 53 (1992), 495–518 (pp. 495–96); Mordechai Feingold, ‘“And Knowledge Shall Be Increased”: Millenarianism and the Advancement of Learning Revisited’, Seventeenth Century, 28 (2014), 363–93.

28 Hartlib copied this into a letter to John Worthington, 26 August 1661; cited in Richard Yeo, Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014), p. 149; transcript of original in British Library, Add. MS 32498, fols 73–77 at fol. 75.

29 Bacon, ‘Great Instauration preliminaries’ (note 26), p. 25.

30 Boyd Haycock, Mortal Coil: a short history of living longer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 33–34 (for Bacon). On Descartes’ hopes for a long life, see Steven Shapin, ‘Descartes the Doctor: rationalism and its therapies’, The British Journal for the History of Science, 33 (2000), 131–54 (pp. 139–41); and Gerald J. Gruman, A History of Ideas about the Prolongation of Life (New York: Arno Press, 1966), p. 129 for the claim that the desire for longevity ‘evolved as a corollary of the idea of progress’.

31 Francis Bacon, Translation of the De augmentis scientiarum (1623), in The Works of Francis Bacon (hereafter Works), 14 vols, edited by J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. Heath (Stuttgart: F. Frommann Verlag G. Holzboog, 1963. Reprint of 1857-1874 edition), vol. 4, pp. 273–498 and vol. 5, pp. 3–123, at vol. 4, pp. 383 and 390.

32 Francis Bacon, ‘Translation of the Historia vitae et mortis’ (1623), in Works (note 31), vol. 5, pp. 213–335 (p. 217). For the Latin, see Historia vitae et mortis, in Works (note 31), vol. 2, pp.101–226; and the opening reference to ‘vita brevi et arte longa’ at p. 105.

33 Bacon, Vitae et mortis (note 32), p. 254. Compare the less respectful tone in his unpublished ‘The Masculine Birth of Time’, in which Hippocrates stands for excessive empiricism and Galen for undisciplined theory. See Spedding, Preface to ‘Temporis Partus Masculus’, in Works (note 31), vol. 3, pp. 523–26.

34 Francis Bacon, De sapientia veterum, translated in Works (note 31), vol. 6, pp. 687–764 (p. 749). For other favourable comments on the pre-Socratics, see Novum organum (note 26), Preface, p. 53; Book 1, aphorism no. 71, p. 115.

35 Bacon, Vitae et mortis (note 32), p. 256. Compare Peter Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 166–68 for the Protestant belief that longevity and hence the accumulation of experience had been reduced by the Fall.

36 Bacon, Vitae et mortis (note 32), p. 244. For the matter theory behind Bacon’s hope, see Bacon, Novum organum (note 26), p. 403; Graham Rees, ‘Introduction’ in Francis Bacon, Philosophical Studies c. 1611-c. 1619, vol. 6 of the OFB, edited by Graham Rees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. lxv–lxix; Stephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 95–100, 212–20.

37 Bacon, Vitae et mortis (note 32), p. 217. For the caveat, see Robert Leslie Ellis, ‘Preface to the Historia vitae et mortis’, Works (note 31), vol. 2, pp. 91–99 (pp. 91–92).

38 Francis Bacon, Valerius Terminus of the interpretation of nature (c. 1603), Works (note 31), vol. 3, pp. 215–52 (p. 225).

39 Siraisi, History, Medicine (note 9), pp. 187–88. For the connection with note-taking in the seventeenth century, see Yeo, Notebooks (note 28).

40 Galen, Three Treatises (note 25), p. xxx; and p. 33.

41 Bacon, Valerius Terminus (note 38), pp. 226–27. On this work, see Richard Serjeantson, ‘Francis Bacon’s Valerius Terminus and the Voyage to the “Great Instauration”’, Journal of the History of the Ideas, 78 (2017), 341–68.

42 Bacon, Advancement (note 15), pp. 99–100. See editor’s ‘Commentary’, pp. 294–95.

43 Pomata, ‘Sharing Cases’ (note 18).

44 René Descartes, A Discourse on the Method (1637), translated by Ian Maclean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 52. See Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 121 for Blaise Pascal’s image in his ‘Preface to the Treatise on Vacuum’ (1650s) of ‘a whole sequence of men being substituted for the growth of the single individual’.

45 See Thomas Shadwell, The Virtuoso, edited by Marjorie Hope Nicolson and David Stuart Rodes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), for example at V.iii.78–9. More generally, see Robert Iliffe, ‘The Masculine Birth of Time: temporal frameworks of early modern natural philosophy’, The British Journal for the History of Science, 33 (2000), 427–53.

46 Meric Casaubon, Generall Learning: A Seventeenth-Century Treatise on the Formation of the General Scholar, edited by Richard Serjeantson (Cambridge: RTM Publications, 1999), p. 186. This work appeared in 1677. Meric Casaubon (1599-1671) was the son of Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614), the Genevan-born classical scholar and philologist.

47 Meric Casaubon, A Letter … to Peter du Moulin … , concerning Natural Experimental Philosophy (Cambridge, 1669), p. 25; also pp. 4–5, 14. For the context, see Michael R. G. Spiller, Concerning Natural Experimental Philosophie: Meric Casaubon and the Royal Society (The Hague: M. Nijhoff and Boston: Hingham, Mass. 1980).

48 Casaubon, A Letter (note 47), p. 26.

49 Casaubon did not mention Bacon; but in Generall Learning (note 46), p. 90 he referred favourably to him as one who rejected the unwarranted use of ‘Pedant’ as a derogatory term. This respect may have been due to Bacon’s courteous relationship with Casaubon’s father. See Bacon to Isaac Casaubon, 1609, in Bacon, Works (note 31), vol.11, pp. 146–47.

50 TT [Thomas Tenison], ‘An Account of all the Lord Bacon’s Works’, in Baconiana. Or Certain Genuine Remains of Sr. Francis Bacon (London: J. D. for Richard Chiswell, 1679), pp. 3–104 (p. 10).

51 Casaubon, Generall Learning (note 46); Mordechai Feingold, ‘Science as a Calling? The Early Modern Dilemma’, Science in Context, 15 (2002), 79–119.

52 Rebecca Lemon, ‘Scholarly Addiction: Doctor Faustus and the Drama of Devotion’, Renaissance Quarterly, 69 (2016), 865–98.

53 Seneca, The Workes of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, both morall and natural, trans. Thomas Lodge (London: William Stansby, 1614), sig.C3^v and p. 296.

54 Johannes Kepler, New Astronomy, trans. by William H. Donahue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 183.

55 Johannes Kepler, The Harmony of the World, translated into English with an Introduction and Notes by E. J. Aiton, A. M. Duncan and J. V. Field (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1997), Book V, p. 391.

56 Bacon, Advancement (note 15), p. 61.

57 Bacon, Advancement (note 15), p. 58.

58 Bacon, De augmentis (note 31), vol. 4, p. 286.

59 Bacon, ‘Thoughts and Conclusions’ (‘Cogitata et visa’, c.1607), in Benjamin Farrington, The Philosophy of Francis Bacon: an essay on its development from 1603 to 1609 with new translations of fundamental texts (Aylesbury: Liverpool University Press, 1964), pp. 73–102 (p. 77); for the original Latin, see ‘Cogitata et visa’, Works (note 31), vol. 3, p. 595; also Bacon, Advancement (note 15), p. 181 for the claim that ‘controversies of Religion, … have so much diverted men from other Sciences’.

60 Bacon, ‘The Masculine Birth of Time’ (‘Temporis partus masculus’ c. 1603), in Farrington, Philosophy of Bacon (note 59), pp. 59–72 (pp. 61, 68).

61 Bacon, ‘The Masculine Birth of Time’ (note 60), ‘Thoughts and Conclusions’ (note 59); see Gaukroger, Bacon (note 36), pp. 110–18.

62 Bacon, ‘Great Instauration preliminaries’ (note 26), pp. 15 and 17.

63 Bacon, De sapientia veterum (note 34), p. 753. He also made this point in ‘The Refutation of Philosophies’ (Redargutio philosophiarum, by 1609), in Farrington, Philosophy of Bacon (note 59), p. 106.

64 Bacon, De sapientia veterum (note 34), p. 746.

65 Francis Bacon, Parasceve ad historiam naturalem. Translated as Preparative to a Natural History, in The Instauratio magna Part II (note 4),pp. 448–85 (pp. 450–53); and Works (note 31), vol. 4, p. 252.

66 Bacon, ‘Great Instauration preliminaries’ (note 26), p. 37.

67 Seneca, ‘On the Shortness of Life’ (note 7), p. 59.

68 Bacon, De augmentis (note 31), vol. 4, p. 286. For the notion of ‘one man’, see also pp. 417, 422–23, 435 (‘except a man be also deep and full’).

69 Bacon, ‘First letter of advice to the Earl of Rutland’ (1595), in Francis Bacon, Early Writings 1584–1596, vol. 1 of the OFB, edited by Alan Stewart with Harriet Knight (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012), pp. 638–50 (p. 647). The addressee, Roger Manners (1576–1612), was the fifth Earl of Rutland.

70 Thomas Aquinas, Catechetical Instructions of St. Thomas, translated by J. B. Collins (New York: Wagner, 1939), in The Collected Works of St. Thomas Aquinas. Electronic Edition (ISBN: 978-1-57085-000-4), p. 90.

71 See Bacon, Valerius Terminus (note 38), p. 250 for his admission that ‘the period of one age cannot advance men to the furthest point of interpretation’.

72 Bacon, Advancement (note 15), p. 61.

73 Bacon, De augmentis (note 31), vol. 4, p. 383.

74 Francis Bacon, New Atlantis, Works (note 31), vol. 3, pp. 119–68 (pp. 156–57).

75 Bacon, De augmentis, (note 31), vol. 4, p. 424.

76 See R. K. Merton and Elinor Barber, The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Sean Silver, ‘The Prehistory of Serendipity, from Bacon to Walpole’, Isis, 106 (2015), 235–56.

77 Bacon, De sapientia veterum (note 34), pp. 708 and 713; also De augmentis (note 31), vol. 4, pp. 319, 324, 326. More generally, see Rhodri Lewis, ‘Francis Bacon, Allegory and the Use of Myth’, The Review of English Studies, 61(2010), 360–89.

78 Descartes, Discourse (note 44), pp. 54–55.

79 Descartes to Constantijn Huygens, 6 June 1639, The Correspondence, translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 136.

80 Bacon, ‘Letter of advice to Fulke Greville’ (c.1589) in Early writings (note 69), pp. 207–12 (p. 208). Fulke Greville (1554–1628) was a courtier and poet. For the contemporary concerns about what we now call information overload, see Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

81 Bacon, Advancement (note 15), pp. 84–85. See his other metaphors: ‘the jungle of experience’, in ‘The Masculine Birth of Time’, in Farrington, Philosophy of Bacon (note 60), p. 67; and ‘the woods of experience’, in Bacon, Novum organum (note 26), Book 1, aphorism no. 82, p. 131.

82 Bacon, Novum organum (note 26), Book 1, aphorism no. 83, p. 131. Compare the translation in Works (note 31), vol. 4, p. 81: ‘infinite in number, and minute in subtlety’. For the original Latin, Works (note 31), vol. 1, p. 190.

83 Bacon, Novum organum (note 26), Book 2, aphorism no. 26, p. 287.

84 For this concept, see Bacon, Advancement (note 15), p. 111; also ‘The Refutation of Philosophies’ in Farrington, Philosophy of Bacon (note 59), pp. 118–19; and Latin original, Works (note 31), vol. 3, pp. 572–73; De augmentis (note 31), vol. 4, p. 413. For commentary, see Works (note 31), vol. 1, p. 623, n. 1 (Spedding’s note).

85 Bacon, Novum organum (note 26), Book 1, aphorism no. 103, p. 161. In urging the need for a history of ‘Mechanical’ arts, Bacon explained that such a collation of material meant that ‘the experiences of severall misteries shall fall under the consideration of one mans minde’. See Advancement (note 15), p. 65; and De augmentis (note 31), vol. 4, Book 2, p. 297: ‘fall under the observation and consideration of one man’s mind’.

86 Bacon, Advancement (note 15), p. 85.

87 I cite from the relevant enlarged passage in De augmentis (note 31), vol. 4, pp. 361–62. See the Latin original in Works (note 31), vol. 1, p. 567. On the pyramidal structure, see Peter Anstey, ‘Francis Bacon and the Classification of Natural History’, Early Science and Medicine, 17 (2012), 11–31 (pp. 20–21).

88 Bacon, De augmentis (note 31), vol. 4, p. 422. This link between the ‘art itself of discovery and invention’ and the art of memory is signalled by the treatment of these two topics in consecutive chapters (two and three) of Book five of this work.

89 For ‘external memory’, see Andy Clark and David Chalmers, ‘The extended mind’, Analysis, 58 (1998), pp. 10–23; Richard Yeo, ‘Notebooks, recollection, and external memory: some early modern English ideas and practices’, in Forgetting Machines. Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe, edited by Alberto Cevolini (Brill: Leiden and Boston, 2016), pp. 128–54.

90 For the use of ‘virtuosi’ in early modern scientific circles, see Michael Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), ch. 3; Yeo, Notebooks (note 28), pp. 6–13.

91 Boyle’s list of desiderata drawn up in the 1660s began with ‘Prolongation of Life’ and ‘Recovery of Youth’, both present in Bacon’s list of 50 ‘deficiences’ in De augmentis (note 31). For a transcription from Boyle Papers (BP), 36, fols 77^v-78, see Michael Hunter, Boyle Studies: Aspects of the Life and Thought of Robert Boyle (1627 –91) (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 28–31.

92 William T. Lynch, Solomon’s Child: Method in the early Royal Society of London (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), chapter 6.

93 William Petty, The Advice of W. P. to Mr. Samuel Hartlib for the Advancement of some Particular Parts of Learning (London, 1647), pp. 12–13, 21–22. Hartlib recorded Petty as saying that ‘the only course in ordinarie is for the present to follow mainly the exampel [sic] of Hippocrates by way of industry and observations … ’. See Hartlib, Ephemerides 1648, part 1, Hartlib Papers, Sheffield University, 31/22/9A; cited in Yeo, Notebooks (note 28), p. 130.

94 Petty, Advice (note 93), p. 22.

95 Petty to Robert Southwell, 21 September 1685, in The Petty-Southwell Correspondence, 1676-1687, edited from the Bowood Papers by the Marquis of Landsdowne (New York: A. M. Kelley, 1967; first published, 1928), p. 159. He made this point when criticizing Blaise Pascal’s contention that geometers were the most ‘Sagacious men’ (p. 158). For similar material among Petty’s papers, see British Library, MS Sloane 2903 fol. 49^r-v. See also Rhodri Lewis, ‘Francis Bacon and Ingenuity’, Renaissance Quarterly, 67 (2014), 113–64 (pp. 113–16).

96 Boyle, Royal Society MS 198 (c. 1680), fol. 104^r.

97 See Robert Boyle, Occasional Reflections (1665) for the view that if one man makes ‘a great number of Observations’ in a ‘small compass of time’ then ‘such a man’s Experience’ must count as equal to that of a long-lived but ‘less heedful’ person. Boyle Works (note 22), vol. 5, pp. 3–187 (pp. 29 and 30–31). See also Yeo, Notebooks (note 28), pp. 138–40.

98 Boyle, Usefulnesse of Experimental Naturall Philosophy (note 22), p. 486; also p. 332; and Boyle, Of the Reconcileableness of Specifick Medicines to the Corpuscular Philosophy (1685), in Boyle Works (note 22), vol. 10, pp. 352–435 (p. 425); also p. 34.

99 Boyle, Usefulnesse of Experimental Naturall Philosophy (note 22), p. 206. Methuselah died at the age of 969 years (Genesis 5:27).

100 Robert Boyle, The Excellency of Theology, compar’d with Natural Philosophy (1674), in Boyle Works (note 22), vol. 8, pp. 3–98 (p. 92).

101 John Evelyn to John Beale, 11 July 1679, British Library, Add. MS 78299, fol. 2^v.

102 Boyle, Excellency of Theology (note 100), p. 58.

103 Boyle, Excellency of Theology (note 100), pp. 82–83.

104 Sprat, History (note 1), p. 31.

105 Sprat, History (note 1), p. 243.

106 See Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), ch. 4.

107 Robert Boyle, Some Considerations Touching the Usefulness of Experimentall Naturall Philosophy. The Second Tome (1671), Boyle Works (note 22), vol. 6, pp. 390–505 (p. 459); BP 38, fol. 77^r.

108 Boyle, Excellency of Theology (note 100), p. 57. More generally, see Rose-Mary Sargent, The Diffident Naturalist: Robert Boyle and the Philosophy of Experiment (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 64–69; 131–38; also p. 313, n. 40 for the draft in BP 8, fols 153–59 (fols155^r-v). The manuscript shows that the adjective ‘severe’ was added (fol. 155^v).

109 Robert Boyle, A Proemial Essay (in Certain physiological essays, 1669), in Boyle Works (note 22), vol. 2, pp. 23–24. For this point, see Alan Chalmers, ‘Intermediate Causes and Explanations: the key to understanding the scientific revolution’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 43(2012), 551–62 (p. 553). See also Boyle, Unpublished Writings, c. 1670-91, in Boyle Works (note 22), vol. 14, p. 169.

110 Bacon, Novum organum (note 26), book 1, aphorism no. 56, p. 90.

111 Peter Anstey, John Locke and Natural Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 46–69; Yeo, Notebooks (note 28), pp. 9–10, 196–97.

112 John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, edited by Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), IV. xx. 11.

113 See Boyle to Hartlib, 8 April 1647, in The Correspondence of Robert Boyle, 1636-1691, 6 vols, edited by Michael Hunter, Antonio Clericuzio, and Lawrence M. Principe (London, Brookfield, VT: Pickering and Chatto, 2001), vol. 1, p. 55: ‘the dissenting opinions of the Ptolemeans, the Tychonians, the Copernicans, … . and the other novelists, are both so irreconcilable among themselves’.

114 See James Tyrrell to Locke, 3 July 1677, in The Correspondence of John Locke, edited by E. S. de Beer, 9 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976-1989), letter no. 343, vol. 1, p. 498; De Beer’s translation, referencing Martial, VI. xxix. 7.

115 Descartes, Principles of Philosophy (1644), dedication, in Oeuvres de Descartes, edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, 12 vols (Paris: L. Cerf, 1897-1920), vol. 8A, pp. 1–2, 4 cited in Anthony Grayling, The Age of Genius: the seventeenth century & the birth of the modern mind (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 137.

116 Robert Hooke, ‘A General Scheme, or Idea of the present state of Natural Philosophy’, in Posthumous Works of Hooke, edited by Richard Waller (London: S. Smith and B. Walford, 1705), pp. 1–70 (pp. 20–21).

117 Robert Hooke, ‘To the Reader’, An Attempt to Prove the Motion of the Earth (London: T. R. for John Martyn, 1674), sig. A2, 2^r-v.

118 Robert Hooke, ‘The Preface’ to Micrographia, or, some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies made by Magnifying Glasses (London: Printed by Jo. Martyn and Ja. Allestry, 1665), sig.d1^r. See also Yeo, Notebooks (note 28), pp. 93–94, 251–52.

119 One anonymous referee helpfully noticed the range of metaphors through which early modern authors tried to expound the nature of intellectual progress. This topic requires more attention that I can give it here.

120 Max Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge, 1948), pp. 129–56. See p. 152: ‘Science today is a “vocation” organized in special disciplines in the service of self-clarification and knowledge of interrelated facts’. The lecture was first published in 1922 as Wissenschaft als Beruf.

121 Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’ (note 120), p. 138.

122 Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’ (note 120), p. 134. See also Steven Shapin, The Scientific Life. A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 45–46.

123 See Richard Yeo, ‘Genius, Method, and Morality: Images of Newton in Britain, 1760-1860’, Science in Context, 2 (1988), 257–84.

124 Isaac Newton, Opticks (1704), Query 31, cited in Richard Westfall, The Life of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 255–56.

125 Claude Bernard, Introduction à l'étude de la médecine expérimentale (1865); translated as An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, by H. C. Greene (New York: Dover Publications, 1957), p. 24.