JOURNAL of EARLY MODERN STUDIES-ROMANIA

The early Royal Society was an intellectual movement with remar­kably homogenous epistemological and methodological features. Despite the petty squabbles fellows occasionally engaged in, general agreement existed among them about the principles, methods, and aims of their collective enterprise. On rare occasions, however, the society was genuinely infiltrated by someone with incompatible conceptions and principles, upsetting the sober equilibrium of society meetings. One spectacular example of such an intruder was the Cambridge-educated Oliver Hill who was fellow of the society from 1677 to 1682. This paper offers an account of Hill’s short tenure and studies some possible sources for better reconstructing two discourses, today lost, that he presented at meetings in December and January 1677/78. The paper aims to show how Hill, most often presented as a puritan mystic, also pursued a natural philosophical project in which he defended a specula­tive philosophy and spiritualist cosmology not unlike Henry More’s.

Selon l’historiographie traditionnelle, le Novum organum se distingue dans l’histoire de la logique par une provocation majeure : la disqualification du syllogisme comme opérateur de la science, au profit d’une induction pensée à nouveaux frais tant du point de vue de sa place dans l’édifice logique que du point de vue de sa structure. Pourquoi Bacon envisage-t-il un tel renversement ? Comment s’y prend-il pour l’élaborer conceptuellement ? On se propose de contribuer à répondre à ces questions encore peu traitées par les interprètes, pour clarifier la fonction assignée par Bacon à sa logique. On étudie en ce sens le plus long des aphorismes composant l’ouvrage et qui est consacré à la distinc­tion de 19 mouvements primordiaux de la matière. Comment Bacon peut-il tout à la fois concevoir la logique comme un organon, c’est-à-dire comme l’instrument d’une philosophie naturelle à venir, et construire cette logique en prenant appui sur plusieurs des principes de cette philosophie ? On montre qu’il n’y a pas là une tension mais une nouvelle approche de l’instrumentalité logique. Bacon entend réfuter la logique d’Aristote, en tant que source de principes erronés de la philosophie naturelle, pour éviter qu’une fausse logique ne déteigne sur l’analyse de la nature.

Scholarship on the popular psychology of the early modern period has not infrequently neglected the English treatise on the government of thoughts, despite how prolific this species of writing came to be by the end of the seventeenth century. This literature was written by a highly diverse and eclectic group of authors, ranging from Cambridge theologians to High-Anglican clergymen and from natural philosophers to astrologer-physi­cians. It includes works by William Perkins (1607), Thomas Cooper (1619), Thomas Goodwin (1637), Robert Boyle (1645), Edward Reyner (1656), John Angell (1659), William Shewen (1679), William Penn (1682), Richard Saunders (1682), Richard Allestree (1694), John Sharp (1694), George Tullie (1694), and William Chilcot (1698). In this article, I look at two early treatises by Reformed theologians Perkins and Goodwin, and two late High-Anglican works by Allestree and Sharp. My aim is to reconstruct the precise concep­tion of human “thoughts” foregrounded in this literature and examine two important consequences that stem from this articulation: (1) the elevation of the imagination to the status of an “arch-faculty” of the mind that participates in all other operations of the soul and (2) the tension between depravity and diversion that shapes the practical rules for self-government offered in this lite­rature. I explore these alternatives to the standard faculty psychology and moral instruction found in competing genres of popular psychology and practical moral philosophy at the time, with the aim of complicating more traditional historical interpretations of Protestant self-regulation.