196 Heilbron
should cultivate it if he could. It would be futile to try to list those whom
contemporaries valued as lovers of science for its own sake. We may be
confi dent, however, that Joseph Priestley would fi gure among them. Petty
motives pained him. “Did it depend upon me, it should never be known
to posterity, that there had ever been any such thing as envy, jealousy, or
caviling among admirers of my favorite study.”^58 These words appear in
Priestley’s History and present state of electricity, drawn up with every effort
at fairness to provide the basis for further advance in the subject. We know
that Bianchini too was a thoughtful historian. Lichtenberg, whom De-
luc ranked among truth lovers, followed both Priestly and the Göttingen
Geist in cultivating the history of his science and general history. Their
example prompts the eccentric thought that a Diogenes looking for lov-
ers of science for its own sake would have a good chance of fi nding some
among natural philosophers attracted to the study of history.NOTES
- R. R. Palmer uses phrases now stereotypical of accounts of scientifi c revolutions:
“a crisis of community... struggles of opposed ideas and interests... incompatible
conceptions of what the community ought to be” (The Age of the Democratic Revolution
[Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959–64], 1:21–22). - Editor’s introduction to Elements of natural philosophy by John Locke (Berwick
upon Tweed: R. Taylor, 1764), iii. - “Address to my pupils” in Lectures on natural philosophy... with an appendix
containing a great number and variety of astronomical and geographical problems; also some
useful tables by Margaret Bryan (London: T. Davison, 1806); Samuel Johnson, A diction-
ary of the English language, ed. H.J. Todd, 4 vols. (London: Longman et al., 1818), s.v.
“Physicotheology.” Cf. Simon Schaffer, “Natural Philosophy,” in The Ferment of Knowl-
edge: Studies in the Historiography of Eighteenth- Century Science, ed. G.S. Rousseau and Roy
Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 68–91. - L’Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Paris:
Briasson et al., 1751–72), 12:539; Charles Hutton, Philosophical and Mathematical Dic-
tionary (London: F.C. Rivington et al., 1815), 2:185; Susan Faye Cannon, “The Inven-
tion of Physics,” in Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period, ed. Susan Cannon (New
York: Science History Publications, 1978), 116. - J. L. Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Study of Early Modern
Physics (New York: Dover, 1999), 10–11, 140–41. - J. L. Heilbron, Physics at the Royal Society during Newton’s Presidency (Los Angeles:
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library / UCLA, 1983), 7–15. - Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries, 14–15.
- Cf. Johann Carl Fischer, Geschichte der Physik (Göttingen: J.F. Röwer, 1801–08),