ABSTRACT
Samuel Hartlib's was a pioneering scientific spirit, and his practical schemes for agriculture and industry was widely esteemed; indeed, they had so impressed Governor Winthrop of New England that he had called him "the Great Intelligencer of Europe". A remark of Comenius's indicates with what firmness the European mind had taken on the shape of a new progressive mentality. A ringing epithet—"dreaming rabbis"—which Marchamont Nedham used in a slanging match between the estranged revolutionary camps, suggests the great divide between the two types of revolutionary mentality increasingly in conflict during the convulsive European epoch we have been considering. Hartlib was close to the center of one of the most extraordinary intellectual sets to leave an important mark on early modern European history. Johann Valentin Andrae's contribution to the inspiration of the Hartlib circle was rather of a different order. He was a prophet of "light in darkness" and the herald of "the blessed dawn" that would soon appear.
