Totius in verba: Rhetoric and Authority in the Early Royal Society

Abstract

T HE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION reached a stage of consolidation in the second half of the seventeenth century. The ferment of new ideas, and the conscious rejection of old, had resulted in the formation of an identifiable community of practitioners with a shared ideal of natural inquiry. The clearest indicators of this consolidation are the scientific societies that arose in the 1650s and 1660s, foremost among them the Academie Royale des Sciences in Paris and the Royal Society of London. These groups stand as testimony to a new attitude toward knowledge of nature.1 This article, concentrating on the Royal Society, examines how the cooperative investigation of nature both shaped and was made possible by the new forms of natural knowledge generally associated with the Scientific Revolution. The present study, however, does not mean to suggest that these new conceptions emerged suddenly with the formation of the Royal Society, nor that they were especially English. (Some recent literature on the connections between experimental philosophy and ideological currents in Restoration England is curiously Anglocentric.)2 Instead, the Society is treated here as a convenient focus at the end of a process of change.