For one brief period, at all events, no one could speak of two cultures in England, and that period was the Restoration. The decades that surround the founding of the Royal Society in 1660 are full of the intellectual excitement that might ideally arise from the free interchange of ideas among scientists, poets, and philosophers. In no other age has it been so: no Elizabethan poet can be shown to have taken an active interest in scientific discovery, unless we call geography a science—though it is conceivable that Ben Jonson, lecturing in rhetoric at Gresham College in London in the very centre of the ferment that eventually produced the Royal Society, had access to new scientific ideas. Bacon’s
Advancement of Learning
(1605) was merely a manifesto for the public encouragement of knowledge, and for years after his death it remained unfulfilled. Milton wrote
Paradise Lost
indifferent, apparently, to the question whether the Ptolemaic or Copernican system were true, and probably preferred the discredited Ptolemaic system for no better reason than that, in its picturesque detail, it suited his epic purposes better. And the record of English poets and philosophers after the appearance of Newton’s
Principia
in 1687 is hardly better. His
Opticks
of 1704, it is true, had a perceptible influence on eighteenth-century poets which has already been studied; but what is much more remarkable is the general avoidance of scientific discovery by the literary world of Augustan London.
emil wohlwill, galileo and his battle for the copernican system
