Further Thoughts on Merton in Context

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Further Thoughts on Merton in Context

Dirk Struik

Science in Context / Volume 3 / Issue 01 / March 1989, pp 227 - 238DOI: 10.1017/S0269889700000788, Published online: 26 September 2008

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0269889700000788

How to cite this article:Dirk Struik (1989). Further Thoughts on Merton in Context. Science in Context, 3, pp227-238 doi:10.1017/S0269889700000788

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Science in Context 3, 1 (1989), pp. 227-238

DIRK STRUIK

Further Thoughts on Mertonin Context

Robert Merton may not remember it, but in the 1930s we met in Cambridge and tookone or more walks together - 1 think they were along Trapelo Road in Waltham, thena rural lane. Our conversation must have been interesting, since I remember theepisode, but I can only guess at the subject. Since Merton was working on thesociology of science in Newton's day and I had a long standing interest in the relationsbetween mathematics and society, especially at the dawn of capitalism, it is verylikely that we discussed the Hessen paper of 1931, published in Science at the CrossRoads. The paper had impressed me, as it had impressed several British scientists ofthe younger generation, including J. D. Bernal and Joseph Needham; Merton'sdissertation, when it appeared, showed that Hessen's "provocative essay" had madeits impression on his work as well. It also showed that he was aware of some of theoversimplifications of the Hessen lecture, as was G. N. Clark (see Clark 1937a; Clark1937b, chap. 3). The almost total omission of the religious factor was one of them.

In the preface to the 1970 edition of his dissertation, Merton recalls that in the1930s the sociology of science lay dormant. This was certainly true - well, almost true- for the United States; even in 1952 he could puzzle "over this state of continuedneglect." And this despite a slew of works in other branches of sociology, from familyand community to ethnic groups. Where Dijksterhuis once sighed that the history ofscience was Clio's stepchild, Merton could have added that the sociology of sciencewas the stepchild of Clio's stepchild (Merton [1938] 1970, 206-7).

We must add, however, that long before the dormant days of the 1930s, there hadbeen considerable signs of life in Europe. Hardworking German professors ofWilhelm's empire had created a Wissenschaftssoziologie as part of Wissenssoziologie,a sociology of science as part of the sociology of knowledge. One of these professors,Max Weber, had influenced Talcott Parsons, Merton's thesis advisor. Weber, how-ever, never spent much time on science, in contrast to another of these professors,Werner Sombart, who, in his studies on the sociology of capitalism in its historical

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setting, paid attention to mathematics, natural science, and technology from theRenaissance onward.

Merton stated in a 1939 paper, that the sociology of science should be concernedwith the types of influence involved, the extent to which these types are effective indifferent social structures, and the processes through which they operate. If we do nottake these conditions too strictly, and ask only for studies of the reciprocal relationsbetween science and society, we can go back even farther, to Comte or even toHerodotus. We can also find a good deal on this subject in Humboldt's Cosmos(1845^7) or in Conrad Busken Huet's Land van Rembrandt (1881-84), which placesthe scientists of the Dutch Golden Age in their socioeconomic setting. It is asfascinating and informative as Burckhardt on the Italian Renaissance, but Burck-hardt has little science. In a book on the sociology of the Renaissance, Alfred vonMartin, another German Wissenssoziolog, tried to include science, though not quitesuccessfully ([1932] 1941, 1945).x '

There was a good deal of Marxist influence on these German professors, thoughthey did not always like to acknowledge it. But Marx and Engels provided thefoundations for a sociology of science, in Merton's sense. They saw science andtechnology in their dynamic social setting. After the appearance of Darwin's "historyof nature's technology," Marx asked: "Does not the history of the productive organsof man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organization, deserve equalattention?"2 In 1859 he could have asked almost the same of science in connectionwith social organization. In the view of Marx and Engels, technology and sciencewere always interrelated, though Sombart, for one, denied that this was the case forthe seventeenth century (and Merton proved him wrong; see [1938] 1970, 155).Engels, in a letter of 1894 (to W. Borgius), exaggerated only mildly when he wrotethat "it has unfortunately become the custom in Germany to write the history of thesciences as if they had fallen from the heavens." This was true not only in Germany,and long after 1894.

There was little follow-up to Marx and Engels' ideas about science, technology,and society, unless we consider their influence on these German professors. In thedirect Marxian line was the book on Darwinism and Marxism by Anton Pannekoek(1909), a rebuttal of Social Darwinism. I do not know of much more, though a searchmay reveal some articles in the Neue Zeit and, under another ideological banner, inDurkheim's L'Annee Sociologique.

nThings changed after World War I, followed by rebellions, revolutions, and theeconomic-political upheavals that led to depression, fascism, the New Deal, the

1 Martin's book was reviewed by Dijksterhuis (1956).2 Capital, Modern Library edition, chap. 15, p. 406, n. 2. Marx and Engels' works, from "The Holy

Family" (1843) to "Feuerbach" (1888) and later, contain many implicit and explicit relations betweentypes, extent, and processes in the sociology of science and technology. See, e.g., Haldane 1938.

Further Thoughts on Merton in Context 229

Spanish Civil War, and much else, finally culminating in World War II. Even the ivorytowers of academia were affected. Scientists, brought up in the belief that their fieldwas guided exclusively by its own internal dynamic, began to see that there is arelationship between science and the social structure.

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was a powerful influence. As early as 1920-21the role of science was discussed in a seminar on historic materialism held atSwerdlov University in Moscow, led by N. Bukharin and J. P. Deniko. Out of it camea book by Bukharin with considerable space devoted to the relationship betweenscience and society, past and present, both in a general way and by means of (ratherelementary) examples taken from available textbooks, such as Moritz Cantor's onmathematics. The general principle was formulated as follows:

Every science originates in practice in the conditions and needs of the struggle forlife of social man with nature and of various social groups with the elementaryforces of society or with other social groups. (Bukharin [1922] 1925, 181)

This was the principle followed by Hessen in his address of 1931, wherein he appliedit with considerable finesse to a particular period, that of Newton and the mercantilistsociety of his day. Hessen may have attended the Moscow seminar; at any rate, hecame to London in 1931 as an associate of Bukharin, who led the Soviet delegation. Itis safe to say that Hessen's lecture at that London conference greatly encouraged thestudy of science as a social phenomenon, first in Great Britain and later in othercountries as well. But this was also due to the fact that the seed fell on receptive soil;there was now a (very select, of course) public willing to take the message in. TheGreat Depression had begun and had turned many persons, including scientists, intosocial reformers, trade unionists, antimilitarists, or civil libertarians, and hadsparked off scrutiny of the role of science under capitalism and under that novel"experiment" - Soviet Socialism. This led a number of these scientists, especially theyounger among them, either directly to Marxism or to a conviction that Marxism toohad a message, both practical and academic, for the liberal- or religious-minded.Hessen's article was an aid in understanding the role of science in history - anunderstanding that might give people the courage to examine the present and thefuture. This way of thinking has been particularly well expressed in the work ofBernal (1939).3 They organized the Social Relations in Science (SRS) movement,and during the ensuing years produced papers and books that contributed to thesociology of science, to educational reform, and to an understanding of the mutualrelationship of science, government, and industry. These include J. B. S. Haldane'sThe Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences (1938), with a good deal about Engels, andBernal's The Social Function of Science (1939, later extensively revised). On themore popular side were the highly successful Mathematics for the Million (1936) andScience for the Citizen (1938), both by Lancelot Hogben.

3 He and several other scientists are discussed by Werskey (1978). See also the articles by Filmer (1971)and by Kaiser (1982).

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The turn towards Marxism was facilitated by the publication of several seminal worksby Marx and Engels, first in Russian and then in other languages. These included theDialectics of Nature (1927) and the German Ideology (1932). Both works containmuch that can contribute to the sociology of science. Other works published in thosedays, not necessarily Marxian, that had a bearing on the subject included theZeitschrift fiir Sozialforschung, put out between 1932 and 1938 by the Institut furSozialforschung in Frankfurt, which published papers by Franz Borkenau ([1932]1987) and Henryk Grossmann ([1935] 1987) on the social foundations of earlycapitalism and the mechanistic outlook on the world. Borkenau also published abook about it (1935), which Grossmann attacked in the above-mentioned paper([1935] 1987). The issue, generally speaking, was whether the origin of capitalism inthe late Middle Ages should be sought in the activities of craftsmen or in theintroduction of machines (in mines, textiles, etc.).

The SRS movement was connected with the publication of the periodical TheModern Quarterly (1938); the Paris-based Cercle de la Russie Neuve was connectedwith that of A la lumiere du Marxisme (1935-36), which began with papers onmathematics by Paul Laberenne and on biology by Marcel Prenant. Laberennementions Hessen and Bukharin, as well as Ernst Kolman, the Czech-Russian mathe-matician, who had also spoken at the London congress. Another relevant volumewas Marxism and Modern Thought, a translation of a number of Russian papers,among others, S.I. Vavilov on physics and V. L. Komarov on biology (Bukharin etal. 1935).

This was not all sociology of science in the sense of Merton, though it couldcontribute to it. But there was another domain where the sociology of science hadgradually shown its necessity - medicine. We have only to think of the work ondiseases connected with overcrowding, on warfare, and on preventive medicine. Areal sociology of medicine in recent times can be connected with the cultivation of thehistory of medicine (John F. Fulton at Yale) and especially with the work of HenrySigerist at Johns Hopkins after 1925. In 1927 Bernard Stern of Columbia Universityhad published Society and Medical Progress, a book that Merton could appreciate, aswe see in his commemoration of Stern as a sociologist in 1957.

Stern was one of the founders, in 1936, of Science and Society, the Americancontribution to the emerging sociology of science; several SRS members appeared ascoeditors. In the first issue I published an article on the sociology of mathematics; mypapers in later issues included a review of the Clark critique, of Hessen.4

In a recent article in Science and Society (1986) I recounted how I becameinterested in the relationship between mathematics and society after reading Engelsand later Felix Klein's lectures on the history of mathematics in the nineteenthcentury; in the latter I was struck by how the course of mathematics was affected by

4 For Melton's opinion of the Clark critique, see his 1939 paper.


the French revolution and the foundation of the Paris Polytechnique in 1795 (Klein[1926-27] 1979, chap. 2).5

At the time, the sociology of mathematics had a mildly controversial aroma, sincemathematics was usually considered to be "fallen from the skies," a product of pure,socially untainted thought (as even Karl Mannheim, of the Frankfurt school,believed). Merton, of course, did not take this point of view; see, for example, hisdiscussion of the role played by advanced mathematics in the search for a method todetermine longitude at sea.

All this tends to show that Merton was not quite alone in the thirties, especially ifseen from an international point of view. But he worked on a larger scale than mostothers, and dug deeper. Nevertheless, his ideas were "in the air" - a subject on whichhe himself would later publish, namely, on that curious simultaneity of importantdiscoveries by different persons, combined with the often ensuing priority struggles,as exemplified by the squabble beween Newton and Leibniz, or that betweenPoncelet and Gergonne, both in mathematics.

Ill

In his dissertation Merton paid particular attention to the link between Puritanismand the pursuit of science in seventeenth-century England. As he writes in theintroduction to the new edition of his work (1970), in the early years of this century itwas gospel that the primary historical relation between religion and science was oneof conflict. The story of Galileo and the Inquisition was only too well known, andbooks such as Andrew White's History of the Warfare of Science and Technology(1896) added considerably more evidence. Yet here, in Merton's account, quiteanother type of interplay appeared. Following the work done by Max Weber,Troeltsch, Tawney, and others on the active role played by Protestantism, andespecially Calvinism, in the emergence of capitalism during the sixteenth and seven-teenth centuries, Merton extended their research into the realm of science, notablyin England, and concluded that the Puritan ethos was a stimulus to the ScientificRevolution. Other authors had looked into this issue before, such as the Swissbotanist and historian of science Adolphe de Candolle, who had commented on thepreponderance of Protestant scientists in France, Great Britain, and elsewhere (deCandolle 1885; also see Merton [1938] 1970, 135-36). Merton concentrated onEngland.

Many aspects of the Puritan ethos encouraged the study and exploration of nature.The Puritan could see such endeavor as one way to glorify God in His World. Sciencewas to be fostered as leading to the improvement of man's lot on earth by facilitatingtechnological invention. The Puritan praised hard work, which earned God's rewardin earthly blessings; he had a rationalistic mind open to scientific exploration andspeculation. He could see in God the great Artisan, who created the Universe like a

5 The Polytechnique has since figured prominently in the sociology of science.

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watchmaker makes a watch; in this period the clock was often taken as a model ofGod's creative labor. As Bacon had said, "Knowledge is Power"; and as Franklinwould later say, "Time is Money."6

To prove his thesis, Merton analyzed the dominant Puritan teachings, cullinginformation not "from esoteric theological treatises which had no direct influenceupon the social life of the period, but from the compilations of casus conscientiae,sermons and similar exhortations directed primarily toward the actual behavior ofindividuals" (Merton [1938] 1970, 60). He took the Reverend Richard Baxter, asometime chaplain to Cromwell's troops, as "the most representative Puritan inhistory," whose "Christian Directory" of 1664-65 appealed to us "to see the Creatorin all His Works." Merton adds: "This argument for the justification of science ischaracteristic of all Puritan sects" (ibid., 71). Scientists themselves expressed theirconvictions in a similar vein, as we can read in the works of such (Protestant) men asthe botanist John Ray, the chemist Robert Boyle, and Thomas Sprat, the firsthistorian of the Royal Society. Their effort, we are told, was "an earnest attempt tojustify the ways of science to God" (ibid., 91).

Worried ecologists have pointed out in recent years that in Genesis God gave man"dominion over every living thing that moves upon the earth," a commandmentparticularly attractive to the Puritan mind. It could sanctify technology and science asa way to this mastery. The seventeenth century could see nothing wrong in that; evenin the nineteenth century few showed sufficient ecological insight to warn againstthoughtless exploitation of nature.

The thesis defended by Merton has stirred up a good deal of controversy, and notonly on the role of Protestantism in England. Was Protestantism, and notablyCalvinism, everywhere a stimulator of scientific endeavor, against a reluctantCatholicism?7 After all, France and Italy made decisive contributions to the ScientificRevolution - think of the Jesuits. But consider also the hounding of Galileo, theJansenism of Pascal - and that Catholic Spain dropped quite out of the running.Professor Trevor-Roper, who has his own theories on the subject, has rather sharplytaken issue: "Both Weber and his followers argued that Calvinist doctrine led, asCatholic and non-Calvinist doctrine did not, to the empirical study of Nature; andthis theory has become an orthodoxy in America and elsewhere" (1968, 42; here hequotes Merton, Jones [1936], and Hooykaas [1956-57]).81 shall not enter into thiscontroversy, but confine myself to one aspect of the whole question: the roleProtestantism, and above all Calvinism, has played in promoting (or impeding)

6 Francis Bacon was, as Merton points out ([1938] 1970, 88), the son of a mother "full of puritanicalfervor." Franklin hailed from Puritan Boston.

7 There is a school of thought claiming that as far back as early medieval times Christianity stressedGod's role as an artificer and thus stimulated technology - and, by implication, also science. For more onthis see Ovitt 1986.

8 Trevor-Roper's thesis is that it was the Counter-Reformation state that extruded scientific advance,not Calvinist doctrine that created it. Orthodox Calvinism, he writes, opposed the advance of science, butArminianism, an offspring of Erasmianism, was the promoter. And Arminianism was not Calvinism, heclaims.


scientific advance in the country that in the seventeenth century bore the closestresemblance to England, namely the United Provinces, otherwise known as theDutch Republic.9

The seventeenth century was the Golden Age of the United Provinces, the age ofRembrandt; the new sciences flourished here as well as in England. The ties betweenthe two countries were close and of long standing; they were economic, cultural,theological, and also scientific. Calvinism in the United Provinces was perhaps in aneven more dominant position than in England. There was close British-Dutchcooperation between scholars and practitioners, between engineers and seafarers;attitudes toward science were very similar, and so were the topics of discussion -frommagnetism to mechanics, mathematics, and medicine. Neither country possessed anInquisition, though the spread of certain books could be impeded, such as those ofSpinoza in the Dutch Republic.

There were, of course, differences: between a monarchy (except in the days ofCromwell) and a republic, between a country with mountains and mining and a flatland with hundreds of windmills. There were three bloody navigational (but notideological) wars between the two countries. Even the Calvinist parsons - thoughseveral of them were in contact - seem to have behaved differently on occasion:Cartesianism and Copernicanism were hot issues in the United Provinces for a periodof two decades, but seem to have been taken quite calmly in England, to judge byMerton, who does not mention any conflicts on these issues. We know that this wasalso the case in Puritan New England (Hooykaas 1974).

The Dutch Republic was ruled by a wealthy merchant aristocracy, or, moreprecisely, by an elite of this aristocracy, the Regents. There existed a democracy ofsorts in the Calvinist churches, organized in the Dutch Reformed Church. Thoughmany, if not almost all, of the Regents were members of this church, with its oftenmilitant orthodox pastors, they possessed that characteristic of all mercantile classeswhich had to deal with Papist, Turk, Moor, or pagan - namely, a good deal oftolerance in matters of conscience (which, incidentally, did not extend to tolerance inquestions commercial).

Here we encounter what we may call the capitalist spirit - not just greed or thesimple search for profit, but this combined with the search for new inventions, newtechnology, and scientific probing. Though the utilitarian motive prevails, it may leadto a mental attitude in which knowledge is sought for its own sake - research for theglory of God. Where Calvinism was strong, as in the Dutch Republic, one might feelthe guidance of what Merton has called the Puritan ethos, or, in the Netherlands, theProtestant Calvinist ethos.

But stop a moment! Where first we met the restraining hand of Trevor-Roper, nowanother, no less authoritative hand is raised against us, that of the eminent Dutchhistorian Huizinga. In his essay on the culture of the Dutch Golden Age he warnsagainst "hypothetical concepts like capitalist spirit or even Calvinist bedryfslust

9 Also called, less accurately, Holland, since Holland was only one, though the wealthiest, of the sevenUnited Provinces. Other provinces, such as Zeeland and Frisia, also produced good science.

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[business appetite]," adding that "everything flows evenly out of medieval trends."In another place we read that "for the emergence of science, that tremendous bitseventeenth century, Calvinism has had no specific meaning, and this was indepen-dent of whether one scientific figure was a strict believer or the other was remiss."(Huizinga 1941, 38, 97). In this dismissal of Calvinism he comes close to Trevor-Roper. But the capitalist spirit did exist, and still does, even if in the Netherlands ithad slowly flowed from the trend of the Middle Ages. It was, however, greatlystrengthened in the enormous mercantile expansion that took place during and afterthe war with Spain.

It is a pity that no large-scale study like Merton's, taking into consideration theinfluence of social and technical factors on scientific endeavor as well as the vocationsand avocations of as many personalities as we have information on, and the influenceof the religious ethos, through the study of casus concientiae, has been undertakenfor the Dutch Republic. Here I shall confine myself to some observations on theinfluence of religion.

Dutch Calvinism was sharply divided into believers in a strictly orthodox confes-sion and less dogmatic believers. This division became official at the National Synodof Dordrecht of 1618-19, where the tolerant pastors, called Remonstrants, orArminians, were defeated and expelled from their positions in the Dutch ReformedChurch by their orthodox opponents, the Contra-Remonstrants or Gomarists. TheArminians differed from the Gomarists mainly in their milder interpretation ofDivine Predestination. They also displayed a certain amount of pious scepticismtoward other tenets of the Geneva catechism. The Arminians generally foundsupport among the tolerant Regent families, the Gomarists among the commonpeople. It was thus not only a theological, but also a class struggle. The Arminianswere more affected by the "capitalist spirit" than the Gomarists and therefore weremore sympathetic to scientific innovation. Because of the support of the Regentfamilies, the Arminians recovered their position; by 1634 they had their own Remon-strant Seminary, ultimately a forerunner of the Enlightenment, though it had little orno influence on the flowering of science.

Where Merton cites Baxter as a representative Puritan justifying scientific under-taking (if only in general terms), for the Dutch Republic we can consult a leadingGomarist, Gisbertus Voetius, professor theologiae at the new University of Utrecht(founded 1636) and a man with a strong "Puritan" conscience. He had been adelegate at the important Dordrecht synod to which even James I sent delegates, andremained in contact with English Puritans. A man of enormous erudition and energy,Voetius wrote on all aspects of life and death with force, conviction (and invective),and against Arminians, Papists, and other enemies of the true religion, while de-veloping what amounted to a canon of Calvinist dogmatics in the spirit of Beza andGomarus. He took pride in the possibilities science could find at "his" university,where he taught from 1636 till his death forty years later, but required that all science


be subordinate to Holy Scripture, "that Book of all Sciences, that Sea of all Wisdom,the Academy of Academies" (cited in Duker 1910, 2:134-35).10

Science was fine as long as it conformed to Scripture - essentially the position ofCalvin, but maintained with utmost strictness. Calvin had been willing to concedethat in Scripture God used layman's language in questions not bearing on salvation,such as we meet in astronomy; his opposition to Copernicus was not based on biblicalgrounds, but on common sense (cf. Hooykaas 1956-57, 637-38). But Voetius'position was not well suited to a period of scientific (and philosophical) revolution; hespearheaded a vigorous attack upon the recent doctrines of Descartes - which couldlead to atheism - and the older theories of Copernicus, also in conflict with the Wordof God. He called for support not only from the clerical, but also from the secularmagistrates, when he exhorted that witches not be allowed to live. He also wrote onthe forecasting power of comets, again a topic where religious belief was, or could be,involved. Merton paid little or no attention to these issues touching upon theCalvinist conscience, the Arminian as well as the Gomarist.

The Voetians eventually lost out; after around 1670 the new science and philos-ophy could flourish in the Republic without interference from the magistrates -thanks in part to the dynamics of the new thought itself, in part to the tolerance of theRegents, some of whom, like Johan Hudde, were themselves scientific pioneers. Thisattitude has been ascribed to the "Arminianism" of these magistrates. This may havebeen a factor in several cases, but many magistrates remained members in goodstanding of the Dutch Reformed Church, not tainted by Arminianism, or, what wasworse, Socinianism, or - worse still - Spinozism. Several orthodox Calvinists, evenpastors, were themselves promoters of the new science; for instance, the Reformedminister Philips Lansbergen, a distinguished astronomer and mathematician, wasamong the first to defend the Copernican system (1619), for which he was attacked bythe Anglican and "Laudian" (hence, presumably Arminian) clergyman NathanielCarpenter (ibid., 650-51). Isaac Beeckman, the Latinist educator, also from Mid-delburg in Zeeland, to whom Descartes owed more than he ever acknowledged, wasan active member of the Dutch Reformed Church. Many pursued their tasks, inscience as well, without bothering much with the limits or non-limits of predes-tination and free will.

Clearly the idea that Arminians were sympathetic and orthodox Calvinists antipa-thetic to the acquisition of new scientific knowledge must be taken with a grain ofsalt. If we need a catch phrase for the tolerant, sympathetic faction we should preferthe term Erasmian, after that Dutchman of an earlier age who preached peace andreligious tolerance - though he was not a particular admirer of the natural sciences.Then we can say that the "Erasmianism" of the Dutch capitalist spirit gave thego-ahead for the remarkable curiosity and inventiveness that led to the Dutchcontribution to the sciences - in many cases, a Calvinist ethos experienced with anErasmian conscience.

10 From the inaugural oration at the establishment of the university in 1636.

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There were limitations, in part due to the pressure of the Voetian-minded. Carte-sianism could be freely taught by 1670 or 1680 (and even criticized as too dog-matically old-fashioned by Huygens and Leibniz); so could Copernicanism and otherheresies against old Aristotle. One was free to disbelieve the predictive quality ofcomets. After all, comets were not explicitly mentioned in Scripture. Witches,however, most certainly were, and on the strength of this even most "Erasmians"were unwilling to doubt their existence. They were willing only to debate what to dowith them. It is a great plus for the tolerance of the magistrates that there were noprosecutions of witches in the seventeenth-century Republic, in contrast with whathappened abroad, even in the Southern Netherlands, a Catholic country, a Counter-Reformation state in the sense of Trevor-Roper, with a rulling class of courtiers ratherthan capitalists. Yet when dominee Balthasar Bekker, a Calvinist influenced byCartesianism, who had helped to demystify comets (1683), published his famousbook on "the world bewitched" (in Dutch, 1691-93), in which he did not deny theexistence of witches and Satan but claimed that they could do no harm (and that, onbiblical grounds), Calvinist orthodoxy turned against him and he lost his Amsterdampulpit. So much for the "Puritan ethos." Significantly, Bekker did keep drawing hissalary, because of the support of the magistrates.

We must not forget that there were dissenting Protestant sects in the Republic,whose ethos could be sympathetic to science, engineering, and the new philosophy.Spinoza found sympathy with the Collegiants, akin to Quakers. Then there were thetolerant Mennonites, flourishing mainly among the artisans. Swammerdam, thebrilliant student of insects, in admiration of God's glory, was the follower of amystical prophetess who eventually discouraged his work. Maria Sibylla Merian, thepainter of plants and insects, was a follower of a Calvinist heretic, Jean de Labadie.

The result of this brief survey of the influence of the Protestant, mainly Calvinist,ethos on the promotion of science in the Dutch Republic is not so positive asMerton's admittedly far more documented survey of the Puritan conscience inEngland. In general we can say that, in so far as the Protestant conscience stimulatedhard work for the glory of God and man, it could also inspire, especially underErasmian magistrates in an aggressive mercantile society, the pursuit of science andtechnology. But this same conscience, in Gomarist-Voetian breast and heart, couldoffer mighty, though in the long run impotent objections to the innovative currentsopposed (in appearance or fact) to the familiar old Aristotelian-biblical world view.The Scientific Revolution, with its phenomenal breakthroughs, was here to stay; inthe long run the Protestant, Puritan, Calvinist conscience had either to rejoice in it ormake the best of it - as was equally the case with the Catholic, Jansenist, Oratorian,and finally even the Inquisitional consciences.


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Department of MathematicsMassachusetts Institute of Technology

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