The Library of the American Philosophical Society

Abstract

The Library of the American Philosophical Society was born in colonial days. It grew and flourished in the early national period down through the forties. Following that, it was overshadowed and temporarily eclipsed by the extraordinary growth of public and university libraries till the early twentieth century, when it emerged from a more or less dormant state in response to the impact of the extraordinary interest in specialized libraries. As the library of the oldest scientific and learned society of the country, it has shared, better or worse, the fortunes and vicissitudes of that society over a period of nearly two hundred years. It is the product therefore, not of a great collector or Maecenas, but of the interest and devotion of the officers and members-scientists and scholars-of a great society, united, so says the charter, for promoting useful Not till the thirties of the present century did the Library attain some degree of the financial strength so marvelously utilized in the promotion of scholarship, by the great libraries like the Henry E. Huntingdon, the John Carter Brown, William L. Clements and others discussed in this series of articles. But if large private endowments were not the fashion in the Age of Enlightenment, an intense interest in science and learning was paramount, and the beginning of the Library of the American Philosophical Society, like the Society itself, is a living memorial to the spirit of inquiry and search knowledge so characteristic of the eighteenth century. In the spirit of the Renaissance and the tradition of Copernicus and Galileo, men eagerly espoused the Newtonian approach to the physical world. They turned to the study of nature and of man. Science and experimental philosophy became the vogue among the intellectuals of every country, even though they did lip service to Bacon's House of Soloman and all branches of knowledge. In their enthusiasm they