ABSTRACT
My purpose in exploring that texture is twofold. First, I want to show how ‘science’ or ‘natural philosophy’ in the seventeenth century (as much as in the twenty-first) never operates in isolation from other cultural practices. Second, I should like to suggest how the language of scientists in the period is rarely anything other than, at best, opaque. In other words, the ‘meaning’ of a seventeenth-century scientific text may be as difficult to confirm as the ‘meaning’ of the more familiar (to literary historians) poetic and imaginative texts of the period. Nor should this surprise us: this was, after all, an age in which the poets and the natural philosophers shared the same education in rhetoric at the universities, read the same authors, and belonged to the same intellectual circles. The poet John Dryden, we should recall, was one of the founder members of the Royal Society, whilst Abraham Cowley sensed no embarrassment in publishing, in 1661, A Proposition for the Advancement of
Experimental Philosophy which was to establish the Royalist poet as one of the foremost apologists for the ‘New Philosophy’ of reason. Moreover, in the case of scientific texts, opacity is not simply a function (as traditional historians of science have tended to assume) of the relative primitivism of scientific technique, and nor is it the inevitable outcome of poor (by modern standards) instruments of observation and calibration available to the natural philosophers. In this respect, perhaps we have been blinded by the contemporary rhetoric of science to the less familiar rhetoric of the contemporaries of Donne or Milton.
