than to choose, and to heap rather than to register." Bacon had started the great idea, but he had not carried it out. He is not the founder, he is only the prophet, of modern physical science. To be in direct touch with nature, to adventure in the unexplored kingdom of knowledge, and to do this by carrying out an endless course of slow and sure experiments, this was the counsel of the Novum Organum. In this sense that book started the whole enterprise; in another sense, the serious, patient, somewhat scornful Harvey, who did what Bacon merely talked about, was the father of English science. But in reality it was neither the eloquence of the one nor the energy of the other which gave the final start-word. It was the
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Portrait of the Hon. Robert Boyle
From a painting by Frederick Kerseboom (1632-1690)
unselfish enthusiasm of a group of anatomists, mathematicians, and chemists who met in a modest room in London in 1645, and who called themselves, or were called, the Invisible Philosophers. From their meetings directly sprang the Royal Society, and the whole system of scientific inquiry which has spread into such a mighty thing all over the English-speaking world.
In taking into consideration the state of European thought in the seventeenth century, the great activity of the chemists must not be overlooked. Their false ambitions waylaid the infant steps of science and perpetually tripped them up. It is difficult for us to realize that investigators who were otherwise wholly sound and sensible were drawn away, as if by a lodestone, by the hope of attaining boundless wealth "in transmutations and the Great Elixir." We can hardly be patient with men of genius who wasted their time in chasing the Philosopher's Stone, and in trying to "gain the Indies out of every crucible." It is disconcerting to find Robert Boyle, who was the Tyndall of the seventeenth century, and one of the wisest and best of men, trying to make hermetic gold by alchemy. But all this was part of the passionate groping after knowledge in the dark; it was such a fumbling for the door of light as was inevitable in the obscure condition of men's experience. And if the Invisible Philosophers had a tendency to try wild issues that led to nothing, they neither wandered far nor obstinately pushed forward upon them.
The "Invisible College" is first mentioned in a letter written by Robert Boyle to the French savant Marcombes, on the 22d of October, 1646. But by that time the meetings, out of which so much was to spring for the science of the world, had already been held for some months. In the midst of the Civil War, when all other men's minds were fiercely racked with
