The foundation of the Royal Society marks an important step in the institutionalization of seventeenth-century British natural philosophy. The society's existence and activities provided a focus for the exchange of opinions, while its meetings and publications became forums for scientific debate. Some writers, however, have claimed much more than this for the society and have seen its establishment as marking a real watershed between, on the one hand, intellectually ‘conservative elements’ and, on the other, a set of ‘definite philosophical principles … inspiring … progressive minds’. Others have gone still further and argued not only that the society's activities ‘enormously’ accelerated ‘the development of natural sciences’, but that these activities were the result of the ‘working out of a conscious, deliberately-conceived ideal’. But views which see a single, logically consistent conception of the nature of the scientific enterprise informing the work and outlook of the Royal Society and its members involve a serious oversimplification of the complexity of natural philosophy in the late seventeenth century. Despite some important work published in recent years, we are still far from achieving a satisfactory understanding of the complicated web of traditions, sources, and intellectual systems that provided both an inspirational dynamic for the work of natural philosophers such as those in the Royal Society and patterns of expression through which their preoccupations could be articulated. Thus the many studies which have been devoted to establishing connexions between the scientific movement and patterns of religious or political belief have been flawed from the start by unreal assumptions about the degree of intellectual coherence presented by the natural philosophy of the time. And until we can present a more three-dimensional picture of what the 'scientific movement’ was in fact all about, and until wider agreement has been reached as to satisfactory definitions of various types of socio-theological attitude and behaviour, such studies are no more than attempts to tie together two unknowns by means of a rope of sand.

The concepts of action and reaction before Newton have received so little attention from historians that the unwary student might easily get the impression that Newton was the first to concern himself seriously with the problem. In fact, the subject had a long prehistory extending back to Aristotle and it was actively discussed by physicists during the half-century preceding the publication of Principia mathematica in 1687. Although there is no evidence that Newton himself was much influenced by the views of others on the subject, they formed a part of the intellectual background of the Principia which should not be ignored.

During the decades following the publication of Darwin's Origin of species in 1859, religious belief in England and in particular the Church of England experienced some of the most intense criticism in its history. The early 1860s saw the appearance of Lyell's Evidence of the antiquity of man (1863), Tylor's research on the early history of mankind (1863), Renan's Vie de Jésus (1863), Pius IX's encyclical, Quanta cura, and the accompanying Syllabus errarum, John Henry Newman's Apologia (1864), and Swinburne's notorious Atalanta in Calydon (1865); it was in this period also that Arthur Stanley was appointed Dean of Westminster, and that Bills were introduced in Parliament to amend or repeal the ‘Test Acts’ as they affected universities. They were the years that witnessed Lyell present the case for geology at the British Association at Bath (1864), the first meeting of the X-Club (1864), and the award of the Royal Society's Copley Medal to Charles Darwin. These were the years in which, as Owen Chadwick has put it, ‘the controversy between “science” and “religion” took fire’.