172 The Life and Work of John Ray, and
politics ; and patriotic thinkers, representing many forms of
mind, active in fresh examination of the framework of society,
sought to find their way to the first principles on which
established forms of government are founded, and part false
from true. It entered into religion ; and devout men, also
representing many forms of mind, went straight to the Bible
as the source of revealed truth, seeking to find their way to
the first principles on which established forms of faith are
founded, and part false from true. It entered into science;
and followers of Bacon, hoping to draw wisdom from the
work of the All-wise, went straight to Nature as the source
of all our material knowledge, and sought, by putting aside
previous impressions where they interfered with a new search
for truth, to find their way to the first principles upon which
a true science is built." At the close of his life, the
philosopher best known to us as Lord Bacon wrote :—"For
my name and memory I leave it to men's charitable speeches,
and to foreign nations, and the next age" ; and it was upon
the next age that his scientific work, example, and influence
really told. The age of Elizabeth, pre-eminent in creative
imagination, was not perhaps to be expected to be equally
signalised by the critical spirit of scientific enquiry ; and the
only important discovery in English science before the
Restoration was that of the circulation of the blood by Harvey.
When the study of science was first passing from the
empiricism of mere speculation, superficial observation, and
unsystematic enumeration to the stage of causal correlation,
it was to the method of Bacon that our thinkers first
appealed. In the words of the late Mr. J. B. Green:—
"Even before the outburst of the Civil War a small group of
theological Latitudinarians had gathered round Lord Falk-
land at Great Tew. In the very year when the King's
standard was set up at Nottingham, Hobbes published the
first of his works on Government. The last Royalist had
only just laid down his arms when the little company who
were at a later time to be known as the Royal Society
gathered round Wilkins at Oxford. It is in this group of
scientific observers that we catch the secret of the coming