Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/113

Rh political and religious passion, a little group of persons, not more than ten or twelve in number at first, assembled in a private house to reason without fear or prejudice upon the laws of nature. There was a certain element of danger in their proceedings, for it would have been difficult for them to justify their purpose to the jealous courts of the day. What they proposed to do was absolutely unprecedented. There existed, of course, in Italy and in France, as well as in England, solitary investigators; and some of these were professors, and taught classes of disciples. But anything like an academy or society instituted on equal terms of membership to pursue scientific experiments or examine physical discoveries was a thing absolutely unknown. The Académie des Sciences in Paris was not started until 1666, and was therefore a little later than the Royal Society in London. Both these famous bodies have the College of Invisible Philosophers of 1645 to look back to as their parent and their pioneer.

It is from casual records and fragmentary correspondence that we have to build up an impression of the character of the proceedings of the Invisible Philosophers. It seems that the person who originally suggested the meetings was a German clergyman settled in London, Nicholaus Haak, of whom little is known. But they were held at the lodgings of the famous astronomer, Jonathan Goddard, in Wood Street, because he kept "an operator in his house for grinding glasses for telescopes and microscopes." The first rule of the society—and it was an amazing one in those days of fanaticism and political prejudice—was that theology and statecraft were never once to be mentioned. In the little body there were men of every shade of opinion, meeting

there, though they could meet nowhere else, on terms of perfect amity. The famous Dr. Wallis, the mathematician, who was one of the original Invisibles, has left a note of the subjects which their deliberations included; they were "physics, anatomy, geometry, astronomy, navigation, statics, magnetics, chemics, mechanics, and natural experiments, with the state of these studies, as then cultivated at home and abroad."

The attitude of this little society, the seed out of whoso early germination we may say that the life of all future scientific corporations arose, was wonderful in its freedom from all controversial taint. The Invisible Philosophers in that age