LEADING THINKERS OUTSIDE THE UNIVERSITIES
LEADING THINKERS OUTSIDE THE UNIVERSITIES. During the seventeenth century,
and largely during the eighteenth as well, the extreme conservatism of the
universities, their continued control by their theological faculties, and
their continued devotion to theological controversy and the teachings of
state orthodoxy rather than the advancement of knowledge, served to make
of them such inhospitable places for the new scientific method that
practically all the leading workers with it were found outside the
universities. This was less true of England than other lands, but was in
part true of English universities as well. As civil servants, court
attaches, pensioners of royalty, or as private citizens of means they
found, as independent scholars reporting to the recently formed scientific
societies, a freedom for investigation and a tolerance of ideas then
scarcely possible anywhere in the university world.