LVII The Development of Material Knowledge THROUGHOUT the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the opening years of the nineteenth century, while these con- flicts of the powers and princes were going on in Europe, and the patchwork of the treaty of Westphaha (1648) was changing kaleidoscopically into the patchwork of the treaty of Vienna (1815), and while the sailing ship was spreading European influence through- out the world, a steady growth of knowledge and a general clearing up of men's ideas about the world in which they lived was in pro- gress in the European and Europeanized world. It went on disconnected from political life, and producing through- out the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries no striking immediate results in political life. Nor was it affecting popular thought very profoundly during this period. These reactions were to come later, and only in their full force in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It was a process that went on chiefly in a small world of prosperous and independent-spirited people. Without what the English call the " private gentleman," the scientific process could not have begun in Greece, and could not have been renewed in Europe. The universities played a part but not a leading part in the philo- sophical and scientific thought of this period. Endowed learning is apt to be timid and conservative learning, lacking in initiative and resistent to innovation, unless it has the spur of contact with independent nainds. We have already noted the formation of the Royal Society in 1662 and its work in realizing the dream of Bacon's New Atlantis. Throughout the eighteenth century there was much clearing up of general ideas about matter and motion, much mathematical advance, a systematic development of the use of optical glass in microscope and telescope, a renewed energy in classificatory natural history, a great revival of anatomical science. The science of w 337
