ABSTRACT
The stages in Justus Lipsius' development as a philosopher can be clearly discerned. Lipsius' influence at least appears far and wide in many other English moral writings of the century, and it is recorded that his letters were sometimes used as Latin texts in English schools. Like Lipsius', his opposition to Cicero's sole authority is that of a school. Rhetorically, too, Montaigne affected his escape from humanistic orthodoxy through the Stoic doorway; and he asserted his freedom with more boldness and promptitude, perhaps actually became conscious of it at an earlier date, than Lipsius. A well-known pronunciamento of the Royal Society in England expressly dissociated the literary aims of that scientific body from the rhetoric of Roger Bacon and aligned them with the new taste for a plain and clear style. At first the natural sciences tended to give greater imaginative range and freedom to the new Attic prose.
