The Royal Society

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On the evening of 28 November 1660, a dozen men gathered in a room at Gresham College in London after hearing a lecture on astronomy by Christopher Wren. Before they left they had agreed to form what their minutes called “a Colledge for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning” — a sentence that, stripped of its seventeenth-century spelling, is a precise description of the enterprise that became the Royal Society of London. The founding twelve included John Wilkins, Robert Moray, William Brouncker, Robert Boyle, and Wren himself; a supplementary list named some forty more to be invited. Within two years the group had a royal charter, a Latin motto, and a program that would reshape how educated Europe understood the relationship between knowledge and authority.

Charter and Motto

The Society received its first royal charter on 15 July 1662, under which it adopted the motto that has defined its public identity ever since: Nullius in verba. The phrase is lifted from Horace’s first epistle — “Nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri” (“not bound to swear by the words of any master”) — and the Fellowship took from it a single governing conviction: that statements about nature are to be verified by experiment, not settled by the authority of Aristotle, Galen, or any other canonical voice. A second charter of 22 April 1663 fixed the full name: the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge. The Society’s early program, elaborated in Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667), was both scientific and rhetorical: Sprat argued for a new style of reporting — plain, spare, exact — and the frontispiece of his book shows Francis Bacon enthroned on one side of the king’s bust, an implicit claim about the intellectual genealogy of experimental philosophy.

The Invisible College

The Society did not materialize without prehistory, and the shape of that prehistory has been the subject of sustained scholarly controversy. The phrase “invisible college” was used by Robert Boyle in a cluster of letters written between 1646 and 1647 — to his former tutor Isaac Marcombes, to Francis Tallents at Cambridge, and to Samuel Hartlib in London — to describe a company of like-minded natural philosophers devoted to the advancement of learning through experimental investigation. Modern scholars identify at least two distinct networks feeding into this phase: a London group that had been meeting since around 1645, convened initially by the Bohemian émigré Theodore Haak in the rooms of Samuel Foster at Gresham College; and the more celebrated Oxford Philosophical Club that formed under John Wilkins at Wadham College between 1648 and 1659, gathering Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, and Boyle himself. Thomas Birch’s eighteenth-century identification of the Gresham group as “the invisible college” became scholarly orthodoxy, but later historians have questioned it: Margery Purver argued that Boyle’s 1647 reference described, more narrowly, the circle around Hartlib engaged in lobbying Parliament for a proposed Office of Address. Whether “invisible college” named one group or several, and whether Boyle’s phrase pointed toward the Oxford networks or the London ones, is still discussed.

Into this evidentiary difficulty Frances Yates carried a larger argument. In The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972), she proposed that the name carried a resonance beyond informal meeting culture: the Rosicrucian manifestos of 1614–16, with their central image of an invisible brotherhood of learned reformers working secretly for the transformation of the world, had put an idealized model into circulation across educated Europe, and the phrase “invisible college” in Boyle’s letters was haunted by that model. Yates identified a symbolic echo, not a direct institutional descent, but her critics found even that much too speculative. Brian Vickers and others argued that the pathway from a literary fiction produced in the Lutheran-Paracelsian Württemberg of Andreae’s circle to the experimental philosophy meetings of mid-century England was too long and indirect to support the weight she placed on it. The rosicrucianism entry carries that argument in full. What is not disputed is that Hartlib and Comenius — whose pansophic program of universal knowledge reform, with its roots in Andreae’s Christianopolis and the Christianae societatis tracts of 1620, circulated widely in England from the 1630s onward — provided one intellectual tributary to the pre-Royal Society milieu. The founders drew on Baconian language and the Hartlib networks even if they distanced themselves from both. When the Royal Society was constituted in 1660, the irony was sharp: Hartlib and most of his circle were excluded from membership, only William Petty gaining admission from that network. Hartlib died in March 1662 without seeing his reform vision institutionalized.

Esoteric Fellows: Ashmole, Boyle, Newton

The Society’s founding roll was not composed of men who had sorted themselves neatly into “scientists” and “occultists.” That sorting was itself one of the things the Society was in the process of accomplishing, and in the first decades the line was far from drawn.

Elias Ashmole became one of the founding Fellows in 1661 — the year of the Society’s effective organization before the first charter. His interests were described even by his contemporaries as simultaneously antiquarian, mystical, and natural-philosophical: he was a compiler of English alchemical verse, a practicing astrologer, and (as his 1646 diary entry records) an initiate of speculative Freemasonry. He proposed the design for the Society’s coat of arms and appears to have been a member of standing rather than an active contributor to its experimental program. That combination — founding Fellow, alchemist, astrologer — was unusual only in its completeness, not in its kind.

Robert Boyle’s case is more complex. He is properly described as a founder of experimental chemistry and one of the principal architects of the new philosophy. He is also a figure who believed that the transmutation of metals was achievable, pursued alchemical experiments throughout his career, and successfully lobbied in 1689 for the repeal of the medieval statute of Henry IV against multiplying gold and silver — a campaign premised on the conviction that metallic transmutation was both possible and desirable. His Sceptical Chymist (1661) subjected the Paracelsian doctrine of tria prima to rigorous criticism while preserving the possibility that matter could be transformed; his later alchemical writing, much of it unpublished in his lifetime, shows sustained engagement with the practical and philosophical dimensions of the alchemy he had publicly critiqued. The Boyle who sat on the Royal Society’s first council was both the Boyle of the pneumatic experiments and the Boyle who maintained an active laboratory pursuit of the philosopher’s stone — not as inconsistency, but as what a unified program of inquiry looked like before the demarcation had been drawn.

Isaac Newton is the most celebrated instance. The economist John Maynard Keynes, having purchased and read a substantial portion of Newton’s manuscript hoard at the 1936 sale, prepared a judgment for the Royal Society’s Newton tercentenary: Newton was not “the first of the age of reason” but “the last of the magicians.” Keynes died in 1946 and the address was read at the Society on his behalf. The verdict has framed the subject ever since, and the isaac-newton entry carries the full account of what Keynes had read — a million words on alchemy, biblical chronology, and the reconstruction of Solomon’s Temple, pursued in parallel with the Principia and drawing, as Newton himself understood it, on the same hidden forces of nature that the alchemical canon described. Newton was elected to the Royal Society by 1672 and served as its President from 1703 until his death in 1727. During that presidency he ran the Society with formidable authority, commissioning the first Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed’s data and publishing a star catalogue over Flamsteed’s objections. The President of the Royal Society who had spent decades seeking the transmutation of metals presided over the most powerful scientific institution in England. The Society did not know what his private papers contained; it learned what Keynes told it in 1946.

Philosophical Transactions and the Journal Form

Henry Oldenburg, appointed Secretary to the Society in 1662, launched Philosophical Transactions on 6 March 1665. The journal’s priority claim requires care: the French Journal des sçavans appeared in January of the same year and has the edge by first issue date, but Philosophical Transactions holds the distinction of being the longest continuously published scientific journal in the world, and its model — correspondence-based, experimentally focused, reporting findings to a community — shaped what a scientific periodical could be. The first issue contained accounts of optical improvements, Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, comet predictions, and Boyle’s experimental reviews. What it represented institutionally was a new organ: knowledge circulated not through the confidential letters of scholars or the alchemical manuscripts of adepts but through a public record, reproducible, correctable, open to reply.

The Demarcation Arc

The process by which the Royal Society’s program displaced the older intellectual culture it partially emerged from was neither sudden nor complete. The same men who wrote Nullius in verba on their seal had, many of them, grown up reading Paracelsus and found in the idea of a hidden wisdom of nature the animating premise that drove them into the laboratory. The Society did not abolish renaissance-magic by fiat; it produced, over generations, a different framework for understanding causation — one in which the sympathies and antipathies of the older natural magic gave way to mechanical and chemical mechanisms, and in which the proper response to a claim about nature was an experiment rather than a citation. Scholars of esotericism have established that this transition was not a simple displacement of error by truth but a renegotiation of the criteria by which claims about nature were to be evaluated and communicated. The demarcation sharpened only gradually, and some Fellows operated well into the eighteenth century in both registers.

Victorian Fellows and Psychical Research

The Society’s later history contains a significant episode that turns the demarcation question in a new direction. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the boundary between natural philosophy and the investigation of the apparently paranormal had hardened — which made William Crookes’s position all the more conspicuous when he crossed it.

William Crookes had been elected to the Royal Society in 1863 on the strength of his discovery of the element thallium. By 1871 he had turned the methods of his laboratory on spiritualist mediums and was reporting results he could not account for — an apparent “psychic force” registered by instrumented measurement. The Society had elected him for thallium; it declined to publish his first paper on the new force, submitted in June 1871. Crookes published in his own Quarterly Journal of Science instead. His investigations of Daniel Dunglas Home and the materializing medium Florence Cook, collected in Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism (1874), produced claims that the scientific establishment refused and that have remained contested ever since: the william-crookes entry carries the full record of what he reported and how it was received. The Society’s institutional distance from these inquiries was consistent: it had created no machinery for the systematic investigation of psychical phenomena, and when the Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882 — by Henry Sidgwick, F. W. H. Myers, Edmund Gurney and others, none of them Crookes — it did so as a separate body with its own methods and mandate. Crookes later served as president of the SPR (1896–1899) and, remarkably, as president of the Royal Society itself (1913–1915): the same figure occupied the presidency of both institutions in the same decade, a biographical fact that measures how completely the experimental scientist and the psychical investigator could coexist in a single career, even if the institutions they respectively headed did not speak for each other.

The eusapia-palladino investigations drew on many figures who moved in Royal Society circles; the victorian-psychical-research-spr entry covers that institutional history. What belongs to the Royal Society’s story is the structural fact: the Society that had gathered alchemists and astrologers among its founding Fellows, that had watched Newton pursue the philosopher’s stone behind closed doors, and that declined to publish Crookes’s psychic-force paper in 1871 was, throughout its history, a demarcation institution — a body whose authority derived partly from what it chose not to investigate, as well as from what it did.

The Society Today

The Royal Society today continues to elect Fellows from the natural sciences and mathematics, advises government on scientific policy, and administers prize funds and research grants. Its archive holds the correspondence of three and a half centuries of natural philosophy, including Newton’s papers and the early letters of Fellows whose interests would not now pass the threshold of election. The institution that began in a room at Gresham College with twelve men agreeing to meet again is also the repository of the documentary record through which the transition from the older knowledge culture to the new can still be traced.

Records and histories

The Society keeps its own institutional record: the official history pages carry the founding narrative, the charters, and the archive’s catalogues. The wider documentary frame is readable through the standard reference articles on the Invisible College, on Thomas Sprat, whose 1667 History fixed the Society’s self-image while the institution was still young, on Gresham College, where the founding meeting convened, and on the Philosophical Transactions, the journal that outlived every rival claim to priority. Frances Yates’s The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (Routledge, 1972) remains the most ambitious argument for the esoteric prehistory — an argument the scholarship has pared back without discarding the milieu it described.

→ Related: Rosicrucianism · Johann Valentin Andreae · Isaac Newton · Elias Ashmole · William Crookes · Freemasonry · Alchemy · Esotericism · Renaissance Magic · Eusapia Palladino · Victorian Psychical Research Spr · Spiritualism