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Some early critics of the Royal Society

1950; Royal Society; Volume: 8; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1098/rsnr.1950.0002

1743-0178

R. H. Syfret,

History and Developments in Astronomy

The most voluble and outspoken antagonist of the Royal Society in its early years was Henry Stubbe. He does not appear to have been original in his criticism; he concerned himself with all the charges which, to judge from the implications of Sprat’s History had already been brought against the Royal Society.1 But he elatv orated them at length, and with copious illustration and reference vehemently protested upon the theme of the harm to Church, State, Universities and the medical faculty intended by, or inevitably to result from, the Royal Society’s activities. He endeavoured to expose the Royal Society’s propagandists, Sprat, Glanvill and their supporters, as both ignorant and subversive. The immediate occasion of Stubbe’s quarrel with the Royal Society was given in 1667. Joseph Glanvill, Rector of the Abbey Church at Bath, Fellow of the Royal Society, and long an admirer of the new philosophy, who had already written in enthusiastic praise of it and of its chief supporters, 2 was brought into discussion with Robert Crosse, Vicar of Great Chew in Somerset, who had the local reputation of being a great Aristotelian. Crosse was a much older man than Glanvill: he had been elected a Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1627, thirty years before Glanvill himself moved there as a graduate from Exeter College. Crosse, therefore, had not only been educated according to older ideas and methods but had himself taught by them, as Glanvill mentioned to his discredit.