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The close association of natural theology and natural history in British thought has been a source of chagrin, if not of actual embarrassment, to many historians. The shade of Archdeacon William Paley haunts the imaginations of these scholars. His notorious logical ineptitude has presented them with a problem to which there would seem to be no ready solution. How could so many capable naturalists allow themselves to be persuaded by such feeble philosophy? ~ Admirers of John Ray, Robert Boyle, and others have felt it necessary to explain away or, at least, to justify this unbecoming enthusiasm. Others have simply brushed the whole issue of natural theology impatiently or amusedly aside as merely another British eccentricity: a manifestation of national character, religious piety, or cultural uniqueness.Partly, of course, such reactions stem from a residual whiggish or positivistic indignation at the improper mixing of science and religion. As we have moved away from the presuppositions of whiggery and positivism, historians have attempted to find explanations for the striking prominence of natural theology in British intellectual culture. Its importance as an organizing principle in scientific work has often been pointed out, as has its role as an instrument of acculturation and social control. But much of this discussion, while more insightful than the whiggish dismissal, has continued to treat natural theology as a more or less normal feature of the British intellectual landscape --as something "there," which, after its toadstool-like emergence in the seventeenth century, lacked significant development or history thereafter; as something that is essentially the same in whatever writer or in whatever era one finds it. I wish to suggest here a more specific historical explanation of when and why the close 1. Robert H. Hurlbutt, Hume, Newton, and the Design Argument (Lincoln:
The close association of natural theology and natural history in British thought has been a source of chagrin, if not of actual embarrassment, to many historians. The shade of Archdeacon William Paley haunts the imaginations of these scholars. His notorious logical ineptitude has presented them with a problem to which there would seem to be no ready solution. How could so many capable naturalists allow themselves to be persuaded by such feeble philosophy? ~ Admirers of John Ray, Robert Boyle, and others have felt it necessary to explain away or, at least, to justify this unbecoming enthusiasm. Others have simply brushed the whole issue of natural theology impatiently or amusedly aside as merely another British eccentricity: a manifestation of national character, religious piety, or cultural uniqueness.Partly, of course, such reactions stem from a residual whiggish or positivistic indignation at the improper mixing of science and religion. As we have moved away from the presuppositions of whiggery and positivism, historians have attempted to find explanations for the striking prominence of natural theology in British intellectual culture. Its importance as an organizing principle in scientific work has often been pointed out, as has its role as an instrument of acculturation and social control. But much of this discussion, while more insightful than the whiggish dismissal, has continued to treat natural theology as a more or less normal feature of the British intellectual landscape --as something "there," which, after its toadstool-like emergence in the seventeenth century, lacked significant development or history thereafter; as something that is essentially the same in whatever writer or in whatever era one finds it. I wish to suggest here a more specific historical explanation of when and why the close 1. Robert H. Hurlbutt, Hume, Newton, and the Design Argument (Lincoln:
Summary One of the major achievements of Britsh linguistic scholarship before the 19th century was John Wilkins’ (1609–72) Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668), which attempted to construct, for scientific purposes, a language in which the elements were isomorphic with the categories of reality (as they were perceived by Wilkins). Immediately after its publication, the Essay was presented to the scientists of the newly-founded Royal Society for their critical appraisal. Since the committee appointed to examine it never reported, it has usually been assumed that they were uninterested or disapproving. It can now be shown, however, that it was certainly not lack of enthusiasm among Wilkins’ contemporaries that led to the absence of a report, and that three members of the original committee took part in a project to revise the Essay after its author’s death. It has long been known that a small group were informally engaged on its revision in 1678, according to a report of the antiquarian John Aubrey (1626–97), F.R.S., but hitherto nothing has been known of the enterprise. Recently, their correspondence has been discovered among Aubrey’s collection of manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, and these letters, besides showing links with the original committee, illustrate the growth of linguistic insight in the would-be improvers, particularly in respect of semantic classification and various problems in the phonetics of English. The course of their discussion is traced here, and the reasons for their eventual rejection of Wilkins’ scheme. Yet the immense undertaking was never wholly forgotten; it aroused the interest of at least one eminent 18th-century scientist, and became one source of inspiration for Peter Mark Roget (1779–1869), creator of the famous Thesaurus.
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