England as royal physician, science acquired another center of public fame. In
1616, the very year Harvey announced his mechanical theory of circulation of
the blood, his fellow physician Fludd launched a campaign for Cabalistic
science that brought him into controversy with Kepler and soon after with
Mersenne and Gassendi. Scientific links between England and the Continental
group were now multiplying. The intellectuals of the English court circle had
been predominantly literary; but Raleigh’s protégé Harriot was a mathemati-
cian, a correspondent of Kepler; and in 1620 the poet John Donne paid a visit
on Kepler. The creative energy focused at the English court was now flowing
into attention to science. The opportunistic politician Bacon was promoting it
with all his literary skill; his protégé Hobbes—the friend of Harvey and of Ben
Jonson—was traveling to meet Galileo, and eventually to a rendezvous with
the Mersenne circle and Descartes.
With this we are in the mid-1600s, and into the self-conscious social
organization of modern science. The discovery-making network had taken over
the mainstream of the intellectual community, the center where the most
attention was focused. Contact with the philosophical networks had been
important all along, since 1500 or even earlier, in imparting to scientists and
mathematicians the competitive dynamics of innovation over matters of high
generality. Now, for a period, the networks were virtually fused. At this
moment the world became aware of the scientific revolution.
The Philosophical Revolution: Bacon and Descartes
The philosophical revolution began as the announcement of the supremacy of
science as the one true path to knowledge. Appropriate hedges were expressed
to avoid infringing on the status of religion, but the thrust was clear enough.
The names that became famous for expressing this were Bacon and Descartes;
they represent the networks on the observational and mathematical sides of
the scientific revolution, respectively. But why should fame for this move have
gone to philosophers, instead of to the statements of the scientists themselves?
And indeed, why should philosophy have continued to exist at all after this
point, since the avowed ideology was to replace the old philosophy with new
science?^30
There was in fact no dearth of general arguments by the leading scientists
on behalf of their methods. Nevertheless, there was a difference in the attention
space commanded by the scientists and the philosophers. What constitutes
philosophy is the most general claim to attention, the arguments of widest note
which frame all the others. The scientists’ and mathematicians’ specialized
techniques of discovery making were turning the social organization of their
fields into a tighter structure than existed on the philosophers’ turf. Whether562 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Western Paths