This one will explore how natural theology infused the imagination of John Bunyan. Among his imaginative works, Bunyan’s engagement with the book of nature grew between publication of the first part of Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) and the second part (1684) and his Book for Boys and Girls (1686). But Bunyan differed from the physico-theologians in his understanding of nature’s ideal audience and how far nature could bring people toward salvation. Unlike contemporary scientists, Bunyan held that no special training was required to read theological messages in nature; in fact, the book of nature was especially suitable for women and children. To derive any benefit from nature, however, a person needed a conscience already awakened to faith. Bunyan’s treatment of nature differs, on the one hand, from earlier emblem texts in which images were printed in the book—requiring no direct experience of the natural world—and, on the other, from physico-theology, which increasingly required an expert’s understanding of that world.

This chapter explains the nature of Baconian natural history and the philosophy of experiment that came to be associated with it in the late seventeenth century. It also documents the practice of this form of natural history in the early Royal Society and beyond. Baconian or experimental natural history is first set in contrast to classificatory natural history which focused on natural kinds. It was an architectonic program of experiment and fact gathering and fact ordering with a view to discovering the principles of the particular science at hand. Its subject matter ranged from celestial objects to the sea bed, from bodies, states of bodies, and qualities to natural processes. We then discuss the philosophy of experiment associated with this form of natural history as found in the writings of Boyle and Hooke who took inspiration from Bacon. We argue that it is best understood in terms of a typology of experiments, including luciferous and fructiferous experiments and crucial experiments, which were theorised and tried by the first generations of experimental philosophers. Many of the virtuosi in the early Royal Society and those within its ambit practised experimental natural history, and we illustrate this in the work and writings of Christopher Merrett, Thomas Henshaw, William Petty, and Robert Plot. We then discuss the eclipse of Baconian natural history in the wake of the emergence of a new mathematical approach to experimental philosophy that derived from the work of Isaac Newton.

This chapter traces the emergence of experimental philosophy in England from the late 1650s in the precursor groups to the Royal Society and, in particular, in the natural philosophical method of Robert Boyle. It provides a detailed examination of the development of Boyle’s experimental philosophy and an overview of the adoption of experimental philosophy by many virtuosi in the fledgling Royal Society. From there it turns to early opposition to experimental philosophy by the likes of Meric Causabon and Margaret Cavendish, and the application of the methodology in English medicine, particularly amongst the chymical physicians. The next sections of the chapter examine the spread of experimental philosophy to the Continent and its impact on religion. The new approach to natural philosophy was said to have a positive effect on those who practise it, and its principles were soon applied in both natural religion and Christian apologetics. Finally, we turn to the questions of the shifting speculative targets of the experimental philosophers, pointing out that Descartes’ vortex theory came in for particularly harsh criticism, and the conceptual question as to who qualifies as an experimental philosopher.

This chapter asserts the influence of Francis Bacon’s natural philosophy on the early modern English essay, noting in particular how the Baconian commitment to scientific experiment and empirical investigation informed the work of early essayists such as Robert Boyle, Samuel Hartlib, and William Cornwallis. The author argues that the humanist form of the essay was also harnessed to the practical and utilitarian ends of managed state capitalism, including agriculture and political economy.

This chapter examines natural philosophy in the early modern period (roughly 1600-1800), focusing on three areas: 1) the so-called mechanisation of nature, which presents a rival understanding of the natural order to that of medieval Aristotelianism; 2), the rise of experiment and laws of nature as tools for the knowledge of nature; 3) the emergence of new theologies of nature and new methods of biblical interpretation, which develop in concert with wider changes in natural philosophy. The chapter demonstrates how early modern thinkers inherit and transform the natural philosophy of the medieval Latin tradition, producing new philosophical and theological accounts of nature that are sufficiently comprehensive to rival the Christian-Aristotelian framework of the Middle Ages.

Margaret Cavendish thought of her work as her “childe,” perhaps compensating for her own lack of biological children with her conceptions of nature. In her early works, she claimed that she was too modest to examine the nature of procreation, but later investigates the ideas of both ancients and moderns about the physical and metaphysical aspects of generation. She criticized William Harvey’s biology and understood the possible sexual implications of Robert Boyle’s experimentation with the air-pump. Her developed natural philosophy, that everything was composed of matter in motion, allowed her to advance a non-sexed and non-gendered account of generation. The unitary asexual substratum of matter could allow a man to become a woman, or a woman a man; such gender fluidity was possible because of the diversity of matter and its capacity to change due to particular circumstances. Consequently, Cavendish could be both sexes and none, constructing natural philosophy and generating imaginary worlds. We are left with the question of whether Cavendish thought that gender and even sex are social and cultural constructs, thus anticipating the modern examination of these categories.

The Scientific Revolution completely transfigured the European intellectual landscape. Old divisions disappeared, while new fault lines emerged. Ancient philosophical sects had been replaced by new schools, featuring novel masters, disciples, and methodological commitments. However, the new schools still engaged in antagonistic discourse, attacking one another along new fronts—e.g., Cartesians against Gassendists, Newtonians against Leibnizians. This chapter presents the diverse philosophical camps that arose in the later stages of the Scientific Revolution by noting a shift in the use of the term ‘sect’. While it still signified something like an Ancient philosophical school for some, it could also take on a more negative polemical meaning, intended to disparage one’s opponents. Moreover, the individuals associated with the “sects” did not all faithfully subscribe to explicit, coherent, and systematic programs. On the contrary, declaring membership of a sect was as often a signal of opposition as of allegiance to a methodology or theory. Despite calls for conciliatory research programs, sectarian attitudes did not disappear by 1750, but delineated new battle lines between the Cartesians, the Leibnizians, and the Newtonians.

The last two decades have seen remarkable developments in our understanding of early modern natural history. Historians have closely scrutinized its research methods, experimental practices, and methodological and epistemological commitments. Building on this recent scholarship, this chapter focuses on a particularly important type of natural history deriving from Francis Bacon, namely, experimental natural history. We show that this new form of natural history provided many branches of natural philosophy with a method for organizing the study of nature—of determining their desiderata, applying experiment, and structuring and exploiting their evidential and observational bases. The most important contributions of experimental natural history to the Scientific Revolution were the elaboration of a new philosophy of experimentation and the introduction of new, practice-based systems of classification.

In the last thirty years, both the belief that the mechanical philosophy is an adequate historical category and the conviction that it made a positive contribution to the sciences were deconstructed. Hence the question addressed in this chapter: What to do with the mechanical philosophy? The chapter begins with a terminological enquiry about ‘mechanical philosophy’ as an emic category, and compares the use of the term on the Continent and across the Channel. It is then suggested that we examine controversies in which mechanical philosophers, having defined themselves in opposition to other natural philosophers, made explicit their expectations with regard to physical explanations. Three such controversies are discussed: one about the motion of the heart (Descartes versus Plempius); one about the elasticity of the air (Boyle versus More); and one about the universal attraction of bodies (Huygens and Leibniz versus Newton). Finally, to counter negative evaluations of the mechanical philosophy, the chapter points out the cognitive advantages of structural explanations, to which the mechanical explanations belonged.

Two root metaphors help us to interpret the world. The older, going back to the Greeks, sees the world as an organism, organicism. The younger, which came into play during the Scientific Revolution, sees the world as a machine, mechanism. The former sees the superiority of humans as part of the natural development of an organic world. The latter thinks that if science is to show humans superior, then it must show how and why. Prominent mechanists include Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary theory through natural selection. Prominent organicists, all owing a debt to the German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling, include Herbert Spencer, Henri Bergson, and Alfred North Whitehead.

This chapter investigates taste’s paramount importance to the production and legitimisation of experimental knowledge by early Royal Society members, including Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and Nehemiah Grew. Early scientists attempted to classify the properties of substances by reference to their flavours; in so doing, they aimed to develop medicines and technologies that could return humankind to prelapsarian felicity. Their efforts chime with Royal Society propaganda, which depicts taxonomical tasting as an inversion of Adam and Eve’s catastrophic gustation. Research into taste as a physiological process, however, presented gustation as subjective, disrupting the link between taste and objective knowledge that undergirded this rhetoric.