It seems that first of all this Lecturer is in private duty bound to celebrate the name of that revolutionary bishop and oecumenical philosopher John Wilkins (1614 to 1672). He was probably the only man who ever became both Warden of Wadham and Master of Trinity—certainly the only one who married the sister of the Lord Protector and yet was raised to the episcopate under King Charles the Second. The first of all our Secretaries, he had been prominent among the members of the Invisible College in 1645, and occupied the chair at that meeting of 1660 which brought the Society towards its definitive form. ‘At Cambridge’, wrote Burnet, ‘he joined with others who studied to propagate better thoughts, to take men off from being in parties or from narrow notions, from supersititious conceits, and fierceness about opinions. He was a great preserver and promoter of experimental philosophy, a lover of mankind, and had a delight in doing good.’ The subject of this afternoon’s discourse would, I believe, have had the interest of John Wilkins, and his blessing. For his first work, published in 1638 and 1640, bore the title :
The Discovery of a World in the Moone; or, a Discourse tending to prove that 'tis probable that there may be another Habitable World in that Planet : together with a Discourse concerning the Possibility of a Passage thither
. I cite this title not so much for the strange contemporaneity of its econd half, but because the book formed part of that great movement of thought, led by such men as Bruno and Gilbert, which destroyed the solid crystalline spheres of Aristotelian-Ptolemaic tradition, And elsewhere it has been possible to show that one of the influences here at work was the new knowledge of Europeans that the astronomers of China had always believed in the floating of the heavenly bodies in infinite space.
The visit of Comenius to London in 1641-1642 and its bearing on the origins of the Royal Society
