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Science, Religion and Society in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

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Science, Religion and Society in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries Science, Religion and Society in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries Christopher Hill Past and Present, No. 32. (Dec., 1965), pp. 110-112. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-2746%28196512%290%3A32%3C110%3ASRASIT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-I Past and ...

Science, Religion and Society in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Science, Religion and Society in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries Christopher Hill Past and Present, No. 32. (Dec., 1965), pp. 110-112. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-2746%28196512%290%3A32%3C110%3ASRASIT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-I Past and Present is currently published by Oxford University Press. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/oup.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. http://www.jstor.org Sat Jul 21 14:19:16 2007 SCIENCE, RELIGION AND SOCIETY IN THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES I have been allowed so much space in recent discussions in Past and Present that I must only comment briefly on the contributions of Dr. Kearney and Mr. Rabb in No. 31 (July, 1965). I apologize to the former if my previous reply appeared ill-humoured. His new definition of Puritanism (p. 105) restores my good humour, since it differs substantially from all those he employed earlier and comes closer to that of Gardiner and Haller which I follow. But when I say "Puritanism is not to be identiJied with either Presbyterianism or Independency", this does not mean that my definition excludes members of these sects (pp. 105-6): a glance at the names with which I illustrated "the main stream of Puritan thought" would make this c1ear.l Dr. Kearney might consider some recent wise words by Professor Dickens and Mr. Yule on the existence within the Church of England of non-sectarian Puritans.? But after apologizing for misrepresenting me last time, Dr. Kearney really should not keep on doing it. I t is fair enough to speak of my "belief that there are no loose ends in history, no gaps for lack of evidence, no surprising contradictions in human behaviour" (p. I O ~ ) , since it is clear from the context that this is polemical hyperbole unsubstantiated by facts. But Dr. Kearney seems seriously to suggest that I am dejinilzg "seventeenth-century science" or "the Scientific Revolution" where (as any reader can see from his quotation) I am describilzg Bacon's programme (pp. 107-8). The whole of Dr. Kearney's second section in consequence tilts at wind- mills. "Nor was Pascal collecting facts'' is a good thundering phrase: but please, did I ever say he was ? I I Mr. Rabb argues at length that many early scientists outside England were Roman Catholics. I was not concerned to deny this. ' Hill, Society and Puritai~ism in pre-Revolutionary England (London, 1964), pp. 28-9. ". G. Dickens, Tlze English Refornzation (London, 1964), pp. 313-15; G. Yule, "Developments of English Puritanism in the Context of the Reforma- tion", Studies in the Puritan Tradition (a Joint Supplement of the Congregational and Presbyterian Historical Societies, 1964), p p 8-27. SCIENCE, RELIGION AND SOCIETY I11 My subject was not the scientific revolution, in which Dr. Kearney and Mr. Rabb are primarily interested; I was looking for origins of the political and intellectual revolution which took place in England in the sixteen-forties. As I explained in the Preface to my Intellectual Origins, I should have written a different book if I had been discussing the intellectual history of the period; it would have been different again if my subject had been the history of European science. To isolate one country has obvious limitations, which I pointed out (pp. 3-4, 8, chapter vi); but I could not otherwise have discussed the contribution of English science to the only one of the contemporaneous seventeenth-century revolutions which was successful. I suggested that a protestant environment was more favourable to the spread of scientific ideas than a post-Counter-Reformation Roman Catholic environment. Is it relevant to retort (p. 112) that Copernicus was a pre-Counter-Reformation Catholic, or that subjectively Galileo and Descartes wanted to remain Catholics? Nor was I primarily concerned with the quality of science, with "the great advances of anatomy, physics and astronomy" which interest Mr. Rabb (p. 112). The best early scientists naturally came from the old cultural centres. But in England, I argued, there was greater popular interest in science, a more widespread understanding of science, than in most Roman Catholic countries before 1640. I think this stands, and it is my main point. There was indeed a crucial break-through for science, as for so much else, in republican England (and I am grateful to Mr. Rabb for reinforcing my argument by reminding us that a similar break-through occurred thirty years earlier in the Dutch Republic -note 23). But the spread of popular scientific knowledge and appreciation before 1640 contributed to making possible the English Revolution as well as laying the basis for exceptional scientific progress afterwards. For the rest, readers must decide between us. They can see for themselves whether I "consider the practical applications and 'fruitful' results of English work a touchstone of its excellence" (p. I 18; my italics) by turning up the page reference which Mr. Rabb fortunately gives. They can compare his flat assertion that "in Bacon himself the religious impulse was almost entirely absent" with pages 85-96 of my Intellectual Origins where I try to document the contrary. They can judge from my text whether I in fact "placed Bacon's programme 'entirely in the Puritan tradition' . . . . with no more evidence than the Puritanism of Bacon's mother" (p. 115; my italics). And they can ponder Mr. Rabb's ingenuous argument that "there was no Protestant parallel to Galileo's enforced recantation I 12 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 32 perhaps (sic !) . . . . merely because no Protestant sect had quite as much power as the Catholics at the appropriate time" (p. 122). At "the appropriate time" James I was burning heretics condemned by Anglican bishops, and Gustavus Adolphus was King of Sweden! Mr. Rabb regards my remarks about the effectiveness of early Stuart censorship as "weakly documented" (note 11). I t is indeed difficult to establish what would have been written if no censorship had existed. But the censorship itself was not a figment of my imagination: for documentation see the index to my Century of Revolution or Intellectual Origins under that word.3 For something that is "essential to the issue" (p. 122)~ Mr. Rabb's chronology is curiously unstable. Roman Catholic opposition to scientific enquiry began to appear in the sixteen-tens, and to have effect in the sixteen-thirties (p. 122). I t was however still just beginning after 1640 and in the mid-century (pp. 125-6). Unlike Charles 11, it was an unconscionable time being born. I gave examples (Intellectual Origins, pp. 26-7; Past and Present, No. 27, pp. 70-2; No. 29, pp. 88-9) to suggest that it started well before any of these dates.4 Again readers will decide between us on the evidence. Finally, I see no contradiction in arguing that protest- antism contributed to the rise of science both by reducing the power of priests and by its doctrine and ethos (p. 124). The power of priests was reduced by the central reformation doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, and by doctrinal opposition to magic in most spheres. The doctrine and ethos spread as the authority of conscience and experience supplanted the authority of priests. The working out of these two complementary processes was what I had in mind when I spoke of "the relationship between protestantism and the rise of science". ' Balliol College, Oxford Christopher Hill Vrofessor Wickham (like many others) attributes "the decadence in Jacobean and Caroline dramatic writing" to the censorship: G. Wickham, Early English Stages, ii, 1576-1660, Part I (London, 1963), p. 94. Professor Trevor-Roper, whilst criticizing my interpretation, seems to accept an earlier dating than Mr. Rabb's: "Religion, the Reformation and Social Change", Historical Studies, iv (1963),,p. 44. "fear I must reject the hand of friendship even when Mr. Rabb extends it by referring to an "apt distinction" of mine (p. 119). Alas, I made the "apt distinction", with what I hoped everyone would recognize as heavy irony, in an attempt to reduce an argument to the absurd by summarizing it. Never try to be funny.
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