Synthetic Philosophy of the Seventeenth Century

Abstract

IN his Herbert Spencer Lecture for 1945, “Synthetic Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century : a Study of Early Science” (Oxford : Basil Blackwell. 2s. net), Canon. C. E. Raven maintains that popular writers on the history of science are giving us a defective accont of the breakdown of the medieval and the development of the modern world, and a caricature of the characters and intentions of the founders of the Royal Society ; their metaphysical and religious interests are minimized and the progress which they made towards a synthetic philosophy ignored. Secondly, he points out that almost all the recent histories of science neglect the biological sciences, and especially botany and zoology, treating the subject as if mathematics were the sole primary theme, with astronomy and physics as its derivatives. Canon Raven contends that the remarkable group of men who gathered as the 'Invisible College' meeting at Cambridge, inspired by Robert Boyle and John Wilkins, and expanded in 1662 into the Royal Society, not only brought Britain into the front rank intellectually and almost succeeded in creating an alternative for the medieval synthesis, but were also men of sincere and deep religious conviction, and possessed of a genuine passion to see life as a whole and no less genuine faith that in the study of the “works of creation” they were enlarging man's knowledge of the wisdom of God. They pursued a synthetic philosophy, and the progress they made in the half-century of their greatness was large in extent and true in direction. Though they accepted data which we with nearly three centuries of further study rightly reject, it was their catholicity of outlook, and their willingness to prove all things, that made possible the speed and range of their achievements. If they had been less hospitable to old or new, if they had refused fresh notions through subservience to the past or renounced authority recklessly and in revolt, they would neither have laid the foundations for scientific inquiry nor effected so large and permanent a revolution. Canon Raven believes that it is arguable that there has never been so fine an attempt to formulate a synthetic philosophy as that which the Cambridge Platonists projected and Culverwel succeeded in expressing. Like the best of the medievals, they saw the world as emblematic or sacramental : like the best of the moderns, they see it objectively and accurately.