The Competitiveness of Nations in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
H.F. Kearney *
Merton Revisited
Science Studies, 3 (1) Review Issue
Jan. 1973, 72-78.
Robert K. Merton, Science
Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England (New York: Howard Fertig, 1970).
Barbara Shapiro, John Wilkins 1614-1672: An
Intellectual Biography (Berkeley: University of Calif. Press, 197o).
Theo Hoppen, The Common Scientist in the Seventeenth Century (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1970).
Joseph Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatising:
The Three Versions with a
* Department of History, University of
Edinburgh
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critical introduction by Stephen Metcalf (Hove, Sussex: The
Harvester Press, 1970).
Antonia McLean, Humanism and the
Rise of Science (London: Heinemann, 1972).
Peter J. Finch, John Dee: the world of an
Elizabethan Magus (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972).
Robert Merton, the young
American graduate student who wrote a doctoral dissertation in 1933 on the
topic, ‘Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England’, could
scarcely have expected that he would be asked to write the introduction to a
new edition nearly forty years later. Yet
against all odds, the Merton thesis is still alive in the sense that historians
of science spend some time in discussing the interraction
of Puritanism and ‘the Scientific Revolution’. Merton himself abandoned the bleak fields of
the history of science for the lush pastures of sociology some little time ago
and much of the credit, or blame, for the continuing vivacity of the Merton
thesis must be laid at the door of that vigorous historian of Puritanism,
Christopher Hill. A reprint of the
original work, long unobtainable, deserves consideration.
Merton’s book is not so
much a classical study, to quote the blurb, as a ‘locus classicus’.
It lacks the literary quality of, say, Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, but it
does provide the standard starting point for any discussion of the
interrelationship between Puritanism and the rise of science. The drawback lies less in the facts as in the innocence
of the young author. Scientists, he
tells us, ‘seek not only technical efficiency but consider as well the economic
advantages of a strictly rational adaptation of means to ends’. There is a whole world contained in that term
‘rational’ which needs a closer analysis in 1973 than it presumably did in
1933. Perhaps historians of science
would be well advised to scrutinize Merton’s concept of ‘science’, which seems
too all-embracing and almost tautologous, as if
‘science’ was ‘what scientists did’ on Merton’s definition of ‘scientist’.
Also open to criticism is
Merton’s interpretation of seventeenth century England. A great deal has changed since he wrote,
the changing class structure of the time reinforced the
Puritan sentiments favouring science since a large
proportion of Puritans came from the rising class of bourgeoisie, of merchants.
They manifested their increasing power
in at least three ways. First, in their
positive regard for both science and technology which
reflected and promised to enhance this power. Equally notable was their increasingly fervent
belief in progress, a profession of faith which stemmed from their growing
social and political importance. A third
manifestation was their hostility towards the existing class structure which
limited and hampered their participation in political control, an antagonism
which found its climax in the Revolution.
The views expressed here no
longer have the ring of self-evident truth. The tendency of many historians now is to
stress the aristocratic nature of English
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society during this period. It is true that the late fifteenth century and
the first half of the sixteenth witnessed considerable commercial activity, but
the late sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth was a period in which
the possession of a landed estate and crown office offered the best prospects
of economic security and advancement. In
his book The Crisis of the Aristocracy (1965) Lawrence Stone points out
that the hundred or so greater merchants of London went through the anxieties
of acquiring a fortune in order to buy a landed estate and become landowners. Land was the key to status and to political
power. The Civil War, far from being a
clash between a rising bourgeoisie and a declining feudal aristocracy, is
perhaps best seen as a spirit within the landed elite itself. It might be helpful for us all if the term
‘the English Revolution’ was quietly dropped in favour
of Edward Hyde’s description ‘the Great Rebellion’. It is much more difficult to link up ‘the
Scientific Revolution’ with ‘the Great Rebellion’ than with something called
‘the English Revolution’, but if no ‘English Revolution’ occurred (I write in
Scotland) the truth would be much better served.
Historians are also less
willing than they were in 1933 to make a simple identification between
Puritanism and belief in progress. The
recent work of Dr William Lamont and of Christopher Hill himself has shown that
Puritans were ‘forward looking’ according to the style of Daniel or the Book of
Revelation rather than that of Comte or Marx. Anti-Christ and Armageddon, as well as the
conversion of the Jews, loomed large in Puritan considerations. John Cotton, for example, regarded the Song of
Solomon as a kind of prophetic history or historical prophecy in which the
divine plan for the world was revealed. All this leads us to be sceptical
of Merton’s emphasis upon the rationality, in any unitary sense, of Puritanism,
when he tells us,
The exaltation of the faculty of reason in the Puritan
ethos - based partly on the concept of rationality as a crushing device for the
passions - inevitably led to a sympathetic attitude towards those activities
which demand the constant application of rigorous reasoning.
If our notion of English
social structure and Puritanism is open to debate so also is our understanding
of seventeenth century science itself. The
work of Maguire, Rattansi and Webster has raised the
key question, ‘what did the seventeenth century scientists think they were
doing?’ Is, in fact, the concept of
scientist appropriate to this period, or should we think in terms of
‘virtuosi’, or ‘natural philosophers’? Too
narrow a view of what constitutes scientific activity and scientific truth
leads to the exclusion of many activities which appeared worthwhile and
scientific at the time.
To say all this is perhaps
to say that the young Merton was not sufficiently critical of the assumptions
upon which he was writing. But the book
survives to challenge the reader and force him to justify his contradictions
where he is tempted to contradict.
A new biography of the
Elizabethan ‘scientist’ John Dee by Peter J. French shows up some of the
limitations involved in Merton’s approach. Dee himself is not referred to in Merton’s
book but the deficiency is remedied in post.
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Mertonian terms by Christopher Hill in his
Intellectual
Origins of the English Revolution.
On this interpretation, Dee is seen as a scientist
connected with the ‘forward-looking’ movements of the age - trade, Puritanism,
the city of London. Dr French approaches
Dee from an entirely different point of view. For him, Dee is a Renaissance Magus linked
with the Neo-Platonic world of Agrippa, Marsilio Ficino and the Hermetic tradition. There is undoubtedly a great deal to be said
for this approach. Dr French analyzes
Dee’s library list, and shows that it included many titles - Lull, Hermes, the Cabbala - which appeal to a mind formed in the Hermetic
tradition. So far as his religious views
are concerned, Dee emerges not as a Puritan, but as a believer in toleration
for opposing creeds, seeking the truth not in the Bible exclusively, but, like
Pico, in a wide range of intellectual positions.
Dr French’s study also
reminds us that the problem of patronage ought to figure as prominently in the
history of science as it does in the history of art. In showing Dee’s connection with Henry Percy,
‘the Wizard Earl’, and his circle of Syon House, Dr
French exposes the rigidity of the Mertonian framework.
For men of Dee’s cast of mind, the
attraction of science lay in the possibility of discovering further mysteries
of Divine revelation locked up in nature. This does not fit in easily with Merton’s
emphasis on forward-looking, rational, no-nonsense science, which perhaps makes
more sense for the twentieth century than it does for the sixteenth.
Antonia McLean’s book Humanism
and the Rise of Science in Tudor England overlaps to some extent with John
Dee. She makes some of the same
points about Neo-Platonism, for example, but she is aiming at a more general
audience and does not claim to be providing more than an up-to-date general
survey. Her judgments have a
conventional ring about them. Of Dee she
says ‘like all great men, he stood on the shoulders of the past’. This is a useful if unexciting book, based on wide general reading, with an up-to-date
bibliography.
Barbara Shapiro’s John
Wilkins 1614-1672, also shows up the deficiences
of Merton. Wilkins himself is a key
figure for both Merton and Christopher Hill. He was son-in-law of Oliver Cromwell, master
of Wadham College, Oxford, during the. 1650s when the Wadham circle of
Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle and others was involved in scientific
experiments, and after 166o he was involved with the Royal Society. Merton uses Wilkins along with Sprat, Boyle
and others to press home the relationship between Puritanism and science.
Puritan sentiments and beliefs prompting rational, tireless
industry were such as to aid economic success. The same considerations apply
equally to the close connections between Puritanism and science (p. 82).
the combination of rationalism with empiricism, which is
so pronounced in .the Puritan ethic, forms the essence of the spirit of modern
science (p. 92).
He quotes Wilkins’s Mathematical
Magick to illustrate the practical temper of
Puritanism,
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our best and most Divine knowledge is intended for
action; and those may justly be counted barren studies, which do not conduce to
practice as their proper end (p. 94 footnote).
Dr Shapiro’s book, the
first full-length study of Wilkins, strikes a different note. She argues that he was not a Baconian and that his religious views were latitudinarian
or Erasmian rather than Puritan. When he was appointed Bishop of Chester in 1668,
his patron was George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham,
‘A man so various that he seemed to be not one but all mankind’s epitome’.
The latitudinarian bishop Tillotson was one of Wilkins’ protégés. In some ways, however, the persuasiveness of
Dr Shapiro’s approach lies in her reluctance to commit Wilkins to neat
categories. She sees him as Puritan in
some ways, Anglican in others. Wilkins
did not renounce the puritan outlook which he inherited as the grandson of John
Dod, but he had a wide range
of friends and acquaintances in all camps. His reaction to the cataclysmic events of the
Civil War and its aftermath was to move towards a more latitudinarian position,
which makes sense of the patronage of Buckingham.
So far as Wilkins’
‘scientific’ activities are concerned, Dr Shapiro places him nearer to Galileo
than to Bacon. For example, he was the
only Englishman during the 1630s to present Galileo’s viewpoint on the
relationship of the scriptures and science. On the other hand, Dr Shapiro notes an
increased respect for Bacon in Wilkins during the 1650s, perhaps as a reaction against
what he saw as excessively subtle theological disputation. She sees Wilkins’ hand in parts of Sprat’s History
of the Royal Society, in particular the sections dealing with the ‘plain
style’ and with latitudinarianism. Thus
from these pages, Wilkins emerges as a complex personality, to describe whom as
a ‘Puritan’ is to oversimplify to the point of caricature.
At first sight Dr Theo Hoppen’s The Common Scientist in the Seventeenth
Century: a Study of the Dublin Philosophical Society 1683-1708 appears to
have little relevance for a discussion of the Merton thesis. In fact, however, the implications of this
study are wide indeed. The author has
made this study of a group of ‘scientists’ who, though living in Dublin, were
closely affiliated with the Royal Society and with the Oxford Philosophical
Society. Not much need be made of the
Irish locale. The Dublin Philosophical
Society had a membership of just under fifty
individuals, most of whom were ‘Englishmen’ living in a quasi-colonial
situation.
One of Dr Hoppen’s targets is Merton, of whose work he writes,
Robert K. Merton has made a study of the minutes of
the Royal Society for the year 1686 and has concluded that 57.3% of the
activities of that society were devoted to work ‘related to socio-economic
needs’. Now my Royal Society figure for
technological research for 1686 is 17.5%. This, I feel, is more indicative of the real
situation as regards ‘useful’ work.
The comparable figures so
far as Dublin was concerned for 1684, 1685 and 1686 were 14.8%, 22.0% and 17.9%,
respectively.
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Dr Hoppen’s
analysis of the religious views of the members suggests that the position of
the majority was latitudinarian. William
Petty, a founding member, thought
Religion’s natural,
and good
For King and state, if
understood;
If not, ‘tis but a meere illusion,
Begetting
bloodshed and confusion.
Seven of the thirty-three
members who joined before December 1684 were either present or prospective
Anglican bishops, all but one of whom took a strong line against the
Presbyterians. Dr Hoppen
has some interesting paragraphs here but the whole question deserves to be
looked at in more depth, taking into account the contemporary situation in
Scotland where a philosophical society was founded at Aberdeen and at St
Andrews. The religious situation c.
1680 was far more inflamed and violent than Dr Hoppen’s
restrained pages might suggest.
As a postscript it is a
pleasure to welcome a new facsimile reprint series ‘The Harvester Renaissance
Library’; General Editor: Gamini Salgado of the
University of Sussex. The first volume
contains three versions of The Vanity of Dogmatising
by Joseph Glanvill, with a critical introduction by
Stephen Medcalf, also of the University of Sussex. Glanvill, of course,
appears in Merton as one of ‘a few far-sighted exceptions, foremost among whom was Joseph Glanvill’, (p.
79). He is linked with Bacon, Hobbes and
Boyle as one of those ‘who turned from the conviction that the world was degenerate
and designed for destruction to the belief in an imminent and unequalled
brilliant future’ (p. 217). Merton also
refers to the ‘utilitarian and optimistic attitude’ of Glanvill
(p. 232). In Merton’s assessment of Glanvill it is difficult to make room for the author of Sadducismus Triumphatus
in which the existence of witches was defended as an answer to atheism. Mr Medcalf reminds us that Glanvill
was a complex person, not always intellectually consistent, in ‘the tradition
of Renaissance scepticism’ of Erasmus, Montaigne, Charron and Sir Thomas
Browne alike.
Glanvill’s religious views do not fit in easily with the Merton
thesis. In Medcalf’s
view, he turned away from the Puritanism of his early background towards a
Platonist rationalism, in which Descartes loomed large. Even his preaching had ‘a strong and probably
conscious Cartesian flavour’. In the third version of Vanity published under
the title, Against Confidence in Philosophy (1676), Glanvill
moves towards a clear and distinct style. The imaginative loss involved here may be seen
by comparing two passages in the Vanity. Glanvill
wrote,
If after a decoction of hearbs
in a Winter night, we expose the liquor to the frigid
air; we may observe on the morning under a crust of ice, the perfect appearance
both in figure and colour, of the Plants that were
taken from it.
In the Essay the
particularity of this description has taken on the appearance of a general law.
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… after a decoction of Herbs
in a frosty night the shape of the Plants will appear under the ice in the
morning.
Mr Medcalf rightly draws our
attention to the loss in vividness and detail. Alas, there is nothing of this kind of
sensitivity in Merton’s own treatment of the Scientific Revolution.
The implication of most of
these books seems to be that ‘Puritanism’ is too narrow a concept in the
history of science. It confines the
historian to England when he should be dealing with a wider European frame of
reference. It also leads him to limit his
attention to religious issues raised during the Reformation period. Most dangerous of all it seems to be in danger
of becoming an orthodoxy in the text books. The time has come to re-adjust the balance
towards the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, to re-examine the Restoration
period in Britain and to allow Puritanism and the English Revolution to rest
for a while. The re-publication of
Merton, welcome on some grounds, is to be regretted if it gives ancient
controversies new life.
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