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The Dublin Philosophical Society and the New Learning in Ireland
Abstract
The study of the history of science has only within the last few decades attained the rank of an important field of enquiry for both scientist and historian. It was thus almost inevitable that, at first, attention should have been focused on the great and original thinkers like Boyle, Newton, Descartes, and Leibniz. But this type of approach frequently results in the presentation of a distorted picture, for few men are geniuses, and these are not truly representative of their age. The Irish scientists of the late seventeenth Century, who ranged from the very able to the pedantically dull, are far more typical examples of contemporary natural philosophers than are Newton or Boyle.
In 1680, science in Ireland was still a rare and infrequent study, and it must be admitted that the country had fallen behind the rest of Europe not only in the natural sciences but also in almost all other intellectual disciplines.
The article focuses on two Dutch doctors – the Boate brothers, Arnold (1606-1653) and Gerard (1604-1650) – medical graduates of Leiden University who moved to London in 1630 to work as practising physicians. The brothers contributed to diverse forms of knowledge as part of the new science, including agriculture, anatomy, entomology, geography, industrial history, medicine, metallurgy, mineralogy and theology, but are known primarily for Gerard’s posthumously published ground-breaking book, Irelands Naturall History (1652) for which Arnold did the spadework. The Boates collaborated on some of the most important intellectual enterprises of the seventeenth century, and worked alongside the leading intellectuals of the period, including innovative Irish thinkers James Ussher and Robert Boyle, and Samuel Hartlib, mainspring of a major knowledge network. The Boates’ activities in Leiden, London, Dublin and Paris furnish a prototype for interdisciplinary engagement. The brothers were key members of multiple interlocking extra-institutional groupings. Active as part of a Baconian Office of Address and engaged both in the Hartlib Circle and the more shadowy Invisible College, they laboured in the seedbed of what would later become the Royal Society and the Dublin Philosophical Society. Irelands Naturall History is a model of the regional history that Francis Bacon saw as a vital branch of cosmography.
The purpose of the essay is to demonstrate that study of quality of life can explore eras before our own. There are caches
of social data as early as the seventeenth century, and there were people who attempted to formulate social circumstances
close to today’s concepts of quality of life. Data from England and Ireland are presented and analyzed.