Similarities appear when the scientific and philosophical conditions of the seventeenth century are compared with the present world. Hope and despairs existed then as they do now, but the great philosophical revival of the past seems to fail us now. Possible reasons are explored and new parallels discovered. It is the author's faith that the present syndrome of dissatisfaction and unbelief will pass again a there can be no contentment but in proceeding’.
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References
1.
See, for example, GriersonHerbert, Cross Currents in English Literature of the Seventeenth Century, Chatto, London (1929); Basil Willey. The Seventeenth Century Background, Chatto, London (1934); G. N. Clark, The Seventeenth Century 2nd Ed. Oxford University Press, Oxford (1947); W. Notestein, The English People on the Eve of Colonization, Harper and Row, New York (1954); Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, Cornell University Press, Ithaca (1959); Maurice Ashley, England in the Seventeenth Century, 3rd Edn. Penguin, London (1961); H. R. Trevor-Roper, Religion, the Reformation and Social Change, Macmillan, London (1967).
2.
WilliamsonGeorge, Mutability, decay and seventeenth century melancholyJ. Eng. Lit. Hist. 2, 121–150 (1935).
3.
HillChristopher, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1965).
4.
NicolsonMarjorie Hope, Two Voices: Science and Literature, The Rockefeller Review, 1, no. 3, 1–11 (1963). Reproduced by permission of the Rockefeller University Press.
5.
See, for example, PurverMargery, The Royal Society: Concept and Creation, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London (1967) and a number of papers in Vol. 23, 2 December (1968) of Notes and Records of the Royal Society.
6.
For England in particular, see Christopher Hill, op. cit., note 3; JohnsonF. R, Astronomical Thought in Renaissance Britain, Octagon, Baltimore (1937).
7.
England at the time of the Armada was a prosperous country, and it became so again in the reign of Queen Anne; the period I am discussing, however, was marked by a high level of unemployment and a number of major economic slumps, not to mention the English Civil War; moreover the reputation of England abroad sank to a specialty low level in the latter part of James I's reign and during the reign of Charles I. This was also the period of the great emigrations to Massachusetts.
8.
LeckyWilliam, The Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe, London (1865); see especially H. R. Trevor-Roper, op. cit., note 1.
9.
J. V. Andreae's Description of the Republic of Christianopolis was first published in 1619 (see F. Held, Christianopolis, an Ideal State of the Seventeenth Century, Urbana (1914); Tommaso Campanella published The City of the Sun in 1623 (English translation by T. W. Halliday in Ideal Commonwealths, London (1885). There is an extensive literatu re on Utopia n and chil iastic specu lation, some of it rather feeble. The following are specially relevant to the idea of progress and of human improvement: J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress, Dover Publications, London (1932); E. L. Tuveson, Millenium and Utopia, Peter Smith, Berkeley (1949); CohnNorman, The Pursuit of the Millenium, Oxford University Press, New York (1957).
10.
In a sermon delivered in Whitehall, 24 February (1625).
11.
In Hydriotaphia, his discourse on urn-bunal. For a history of the idea of time, seeToulminS. and GoodfieldJ., The Discovery of Time, Hutchinson, London (1965).
12.
An Apologie of the Power and Providence of God, Oxford (1627), an answer to Godfrey Goodman's The Fall of Man, London (1616).
13.
AllenSee D. C., ‘The degeneration of man and Renaissance pessimism’, Stud. Philol.35, 202–227 (1938).
14.
Louis Le Roy's remarkable work, addressed to ‘all men who thinke that the future belongeth unto them’ became known in England through Robert Ashley's translation. Of the Interchangeable Course or Variety of Things (1594).
15.
Cited by Hakewill, op. cit., note 12.
16.
Experimental Philosophy, Preface, London (1664); Compare John Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation, 2nd Edn., pp. 164–165; 1st Edn., London (1961).
17.
GodwinWilliam, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice3rdedn, Oxford University Press, London (1797); 1st Edn. (1793). Compare Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh (1767).
18.
See myJayneLectures, Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia and Methuen, London (1969). The idea of ‘stretched experience’ and of the experimenter as the ‘archmaster’ who ‘completes experience’, comes from John Dee's Mathematical Preface to Henry Billingsley's English transflation of Euclid, London (1570).
19.
LewisC. Day, A Hope for Poetry, p. 107. London (1934).
20.
This simile occurs more than once in Hobbes; the passage I have in mind is from his Human Nature, London (1650).
