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The Restoration > Major genres and major authors of the period

A comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific discovery in mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses, a native easiness.” Sprat's work and a series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning with The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an experimental approach to natural phenomena against both the old scholastic philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a real struggle was involved can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary satires to the labours of the Royal Society's enthusiasts (see, for instance, Butler's The Elephant in the Moon, probably written in 1670–71, and Thomas Shadwell's The Virtuoso, 1676)—a tradition to be sustained later by Pope and Jonathan Swift.

Photograph:Title page from Isaac Newton's De Philosophiae Naturalis Principia …
Title page from Isaac Newton's De Philosophiae Naturalis Principia …
Courtesy of the Joseph Regenstein Library, The University of Chicago

However, evidence of substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was being published throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle's Sceptical Chymist (1661), Robert Hooke's Micrographia (1665), John Ray's Historia Plantarum (in three volumes, 1686–1704), and, above all, Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687). Newton's great work, composed in Latin, was written for fellow mathematicians rather than for gentlemen virtuosi. Only a select few were able to follow his workings (though his later Opticks [1704] was aimed at a much wider readership). Yet his theories were popularized by a small regiment of Newtonians, and by the early 18th century he had become a hero of his culture.

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