Solomon's Child: Method in the Early Royal Society of London (review)

In this book, William T. Lynch argues that the methodology of the early Royal Society was based on a coherent and subtle understanding of the views of Francis Bacon—this in contrast to those who have seen the society's Baconianism as a slogan adopted to disguise a more eclectic and heterogeneous set of explanatory and methodological views.

He does so by giving a detailed exegesis of selected writings by six active Fellows of the Society in its early years—John Evelyn, Robert Hooke, John Wilkins, Thomas Sprat, John Graunt, and Sir William Petty. In each case Lynch has interesting and important points to make. Evelyn is not usually considered in a such a context, but Lynch is able to make quite a strong case for the sophistication of the position that he adopted in his Sylva, particularly the way in which he saw inquiries into causation as germane to the essentially practical purposes to which that work was devoted. The chapter on Hooke and his Micrographia argues that the hypotheticalist streak in that book has been exaggerated; in fact, Hooke saw his speculations as justified by their empirical basis, the findings of the microscope in themselves apparently confirming the mechanical view of nature which he there elaborated. In the case of John Wilkins and his Essay towards a Real Character, Lynch gives a lucid exposition of the problems that language planners faced in striking a balance between communication and analysis in achieving the Baconian goals to which they aspired.

With Sprat, Lynch wants to argue that The History of the Royal Society consciously advocated Baconianism as a distinctively English philosophy that would heal the wounds of society and provide the basis for consensus. Lastly, Lynch sees Petty and Graunt as exemplifying the application of Baconian principles to political and economic problems, in terms of the way in which data were used to suggest and test hypotheses, on the basis of which consensual policies might be devised.

The book contains much of interest, discussing various ancillary aspects of the ideas of each thinker as well as the main themes just outlined. Each chapter also itemizes and discusses the extant secondary literature at length, sometimes excessively so, as when rather trivial or tangential works are cited. On the other hand, there are certain significant gaps in the coverage, notably Patri Pugiese's important 1982 thesis on Hooke and Liah Greenfeld's treatment of Sprat's History in her Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (1992). Greenfeld makes a case very similar to that argued here but is nowhere cited. There is another flaw: nobody has explained to Lynch how to cite an unpaginated seventeenth-century book by its signatures, and so for the prefatory matter to Micrographia he has invented a pagination of his own.

And there are certain deeper problems about the book. The most important is that the argument for the homogeneity of the Royal Society and the Baconianism of its Fellows depends to a significant extent on an extreme narrowness in relation both to the range of authors considered and the works analyzed. In the case of Hooke, the emphasis is almost exclusively on the first fifty pages of Micrographia and especially his theory of congruity; though Lynch's discussion is suggestive, it seems wrong to ignore the rest of Hooke's writings, which might give a rather different picture of the degree of his Baconian purity.

The choice of authors considered, dominated by Hooke, Wilkins, and Sprat, is also rather predictable (though Boyle is conspicuous by his absence). It would be interesting to try out Lynch's thesis on other prominent early Fellows. The extent to which the argument depends on its narrowness of focus is indicated by the fact that, in discussing how the homogeneity that he discerns in the society in its...