‘The Invisible College’

Abstract

T | SHIS annual lecture was founded in memory of a man who did much for economic history and for the study of international affairs. Any contribution which I can make to these questions must necessarily be limited to the outlook and experience of one who has spent half his working life in academic science and teaching and the rest in the application of science and its organization. Science and its applications have, of course, extremely significant social, economic, historical, and international aspects. I will try to touch on some of them which are, I think, not particularly well known outside the scientific world and need attention both inside and outside the scientific hive. Much has been said and is continuing to be said, more or less well, of the impact of science on society. We are made forcibly aware each day of the degree to which this impact has changed the material surroundings of man and has influenced his way of life. I thought it might be interesting to examine here the reverse of this picture; to look at the impact of the scientific revolution on the scientist himself. I would propose to look, not at the world we live in, but at the world the natural philosopher lives in. Let us first of all glance at a much earlier period, when scientific seeds first sent up vigorous shoots. It was in the seventeenth century that natural philosophers, encouraged by princely patronage, were able to organize themselves into enduring academies, associations, and societies to develop what Robert Boyle called 'The Invisible College'. This they did both for the advancement of science and for self-protection. The difficulties of Galileo, the fate of Giordano Bruno were recent memories. They knew clearly what they wanted to do. Their aims, in Francis Bacon's words, were to obtain 'knowledge of the causes and secret motions of things' and 'to enlarge the bounds of human empire to the effecting of all things possible', 'to change, transmute and fundamentally alter nature'. In other words: to develop both science and its offspring, technology. It was in the tolerant climate of the seventeenth century that these ideas, these seeds planted by the Ionian Greeks, by Paracelsus, Copernicus, Galileo, and Gilbert-Queen Elizabeth's great physician-were able to grow. Even then they were subject to clerical enmity, and not a little