Campanella and the more intelligent F. R. S. would alike, instead of advocating despotism in any shape, have asserted that if men were allowed to experiment, analyze, dissect, and philosophize "with the utmost freedom, the despotism of religion and politics would dissolve away in the weakness of its quiescent state." The truth is, the scholastics who opposed the experimental philosophy considered novelty of speculation, without regard to character or tendency, as heresy and treason. Perhaps Evelyn inadvertently raised this specter of Campanellaism. Maudé—whose book on libraries he translated for the Royal Society—was not only a skeptic and an advocate of absolute monarchy, but he was a warm friend and defender of Campanella, whose religious and political views are not very clearly defined.
Spratt, in his History of the Royal Society, eulogized Charles II for his interest in science; but Stubbes, his opponent, perhaps not wholly unmindful of the ignorant popular prejudice against Campanella, retorted that the natural philosophers were likely to demoralize the king (was anybody capable of that!), for "never prince acquired the name of great and good by any knickknacks, but by actions of political wisdom, courage, and justice."
It seems strange, when reading the literary and scientific history of the seventeenth century, to find Sir William Temple among the scoffers at the virtuosi. Personal dislike of some of the founders of the Royal Society was, no doubt, the reason in part of his opposition to experimentalists. He fancied the Fellows a "set of Sir Nicholas Gimcracks," and, with the wise men of Gotham probably in his thoughts, "contemptuously called them, from the place of their first meeting, 'men of Gresham.'"
In a letter to Cowley, urging the poet to write his poem in praise of the society an ode described by Macaulay as "weighty in thought and resplendent in wit" Evelyn indignantly exclaims: "There be those who aske, What have the Royal Society done? Where their colledge? I neede not instruct you how to answer or confound these persons, who are able to make even these informe Blocks and Stones daunce into order, and charme them into better sense. Or if their insolence presse, you are capable to shew how they [the F. R. S.] have layd solid foundations to perfect all noble Arts, and reforme all imperfect sciences. It requires an History to recite onely the Arts, the Inventions, and Phaenomena already absolved, improved or opened. In a word, our Registers have outdone Pliny, Porta, and Alexis, and all the Experimentalists, nay, the great Verulam himself e, and have made a nobler and more faithfull Collection of real seacrets, usefull and instructive than has hitherto been shewn. Sir, we have a Library, a Repository, and an assembly of as worthy and greate Persons as the World has any; and yet we are sometimes the
