A History of English Language

The appeal to authority, 1650-1800 239
In the 1660s the Royal Society, which served as coordinator and clearing house for
English scientific endeavors, proposed a solution in which the English language would
play a crucial role. Among the membership, the leading proponents of this solution were
religious moderates: Latitudinarian Anglicans and moderate Puritans. They argued that
the English prose of scientists should be stripped of ornamentation and emotive language.
It should be plain, precise, and clear. The style should be non-assertive. Assent was to be
gained not by force of words but by force of evidence and reasoning. An author writing
on scientific subjects, as one of them said, should convey “a sense of his own
fallibility…. [He] never concludes but upon resolution to alter his mind upon contrary
evidence…he gives his reasons without passion...discourses without wrangling, and
differs without dividing.” 2 Essentially this amounted to a repudiation of classical
principles of rhetoric, which had accented powers of persuasion and could easily be used
to project mirages of plausibility. Language, it was urged, should be geared for
dispassionate, rational—literally prosaic—discourse. It was also recommended that the
higher or “Liberal Arts” should be brought in closer contact with the baser “Mechanick
Arts.” In this way English prose could facilitate a national unity built around scientific
honesty and social utility.
1
The Duke of Newcastle, quoted by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air-
Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, 1985), p. 290. Chapters 7 and 8 of this
book offer useful background for the discussion of language.
2
Joseph Glanvill, quoted by Barbara J.Shapiro, “Latitudinarianism and Science in Seventeenth-
Century England,” Past and Present, 40 (1968), 40.