develop. A mere rough catalogue of some names will be sufficient, names of men who published to the world important work within these limits of time: Francis Bacon, Harvey, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, Huyghens, Boyle, Newton, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz. I have limited the list to the sacred number of twelve, a number much too small to be properly representative. For example, there is only one Italian there, whereas Italy could have filled the list from its own ranks. Again Harvey is the only biologist, and also there are too many Englishmen. This latter defect is partly due to the fact that the lecturer is English, and that he is lecturing to an audience which, equally with him, owns this English century. If he had been Dutch, there would have been too many Dutchmen; if Italian, too many Italians; and if French, too many Frenchmen. The unhappy Thirty Years’ War was devastating Germany; but every other country looks back to this century as an epoch which witnessed some culmination of its genius. Certainly this was a great period of English thought; as at a later time Voltaire impressed upon France.
The omission of physiologists, other than Harvey, also requires explanation. There were, of course, great advances in biology within the century, chiefly associated with Italy and the University of Padua. But my purpose is to trace the philosophic outlook, derived from science and presupposed by science, and to estimate some of its effects on the general climate of each age. Now the scientific philosopy of this age was dominated by physics; so as to be the most obvious rendering, in terms of general ideas, of the state of physical knowledge of that age and of the two
