ABSTRACT
Milton and Cowley have documentable connections both to major Baconian ideas and the contemporary Royal Society, as reflected in the similar education reforms respectively proposed in Milton’s Of Educationtion (1644) and Cowley’s Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophyion for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy (1668). Yet Cowley’s early work favors the “Ancients” early rejected in Milton’s Prolusions, while also diverging from Bacon’s account of the causes, effects, and recuperability of the human Fall, an accountclosely followed in Paradise Lost. Even Cowley’s “To the Royal Society” praises Bacon far more ambivalently than William Harvey or Thomas Hobbes (for whom he pens comparable tributes), in part because he far prefersadvocate Hobbesian certitude to Baconian probability. Finally, Cowley’s unfinished epic, Davideis, remains strongly attached to the old cosmology and scientific outlook clearly absent from Paradise Lost, making Milton the truer Baconian.
