Samuel Hartlib’s influence on the early history of The Royal Society

Abstract

In a valuable article 1 on ‘The origins of the Royal Society’ Miss R. H. Syfret considers various possible influences on the foundation of the Royal Society, among them that of John Amos Comenius and his group of friends in England, particularly Samuel Hartlib and Theodore Haak. She mentions also J. V. Andreae, to whose writings Comenius owed much, but comes to the conclusion that he was only one of many influences on the schemes of what she calls the Comenian group and that his connexion with the Royal Society, depending as it does on his relation to the Comenian group and then on their relation to the Royal Society, is at best remote and indirect. 2 She then considers the question of the connexion between the Comenian group and the group that in 1645 began the meetings which led to the foundation of the Royal Society, and finds enough circumstantial evidence to show some connexion between the two groups.3 She holds that the publication of Comenius’s Via Lucis in 1668 and its dedication to the Royal Society supports, in a general way but by no means exclusively, the supposition of a connexion between the two groups. 4 She believes that, if the Invisible College were indeed, as has always been assumed, Dr Wallis’s scientific group, this fact would point quite conclusively to the Royal Society’s origins in the schemes of Samuel Hartlib ; but, after considering various points about the Invisible College, she concludes that it seems that it was something quite different from that group. 5