The sketch of Wren’s activities at Wadham (in Chapter II) shows the variousness of his mind, but clearly his many inventions, though they make an astonishing list, were juvenilia. His contemporary Hooke said of him, “Since the time of Archimedes there scarce ever met in one man in so great perfection such a mechanical hand and so philosophical a mind”; and he describes a method of determining the parallax of comets “invented by that incomparable mathematician Dr. Christopher Wren.”
In estimating the value of such an opinion, one of very many, I am bound to rely on the judgment of scientific friends who have generously helped me with this chapter, because I can only repeat Professor Lethaby’s comment on the same text: “These things are beyond my knowledge, but I know that they represent wonderful powers.”
We shall only understand the part played by Wren in the development of natural science if we see that development as the work of a team rather than of individuals. Wilkins, Boyle, Lawrence Rooke, Hooke, Seth Ward, Wallis, Scarborough, Oughtred, Wren and many another shared a common enthusiasm for the advancement of knowledge which showed itself in common effort. Wren was the man to whom his associates turned for help in solving their individual problems, because of his extraordinary ingenuity in inventing apparatus which would establish or dispel the truth of some scientific idea, and still more because of his ready kindness and modesty. During the early days of the Royal Society he was not only in an especial manner the cement which kept together the whole fabric, but the inspirer of much work which was carried to fruition by others.
In 1645, the year when Wren invented, as a boy of thirteen, a new astronomical instrument, the first meetings took place at which was sown the seed from which the Royal Society sprang. Dr. Wallis, the mathematician, Dr. Goddard, Wilkins, later Warden of Wadham, and Sir Christopher’s father, Dr. Wren, were amongst the attendants at weekly gatherings, when philosophy and especially natural science were discussed.
When Wallis, Wilkins, and Goddard went to Oxford in 1648-49, the London meetings continued, but new meetings were held also at Oxford, first in Dr. Petty’s rooms and afterwards at the apartments of Wilkins at Wadham. When Wilkins went to Trinity, Cambridge, the Oxford men enjoyed the hospitality of Robert Boyle.
The London meetings were held often at Gresham College and, when Wren was fulfilling his duties as Professor of Astronomy at the College, after his Wednesday lectures and after Rooke’s Thursday lectures. Lord Brouncker, the friend of Pepys, John Evelyn and others were frequently at the meetings, and the Royal Society took formal shape, after one of Wren’s lectures, on November 28, 1660, when Brouncker, Robert Boyle, Rooke, Wilkins and others withdrew to Wren’s private room and decided to constitute themselves formally as a college or society. It was after Wren’s next lecture on December 5, 1660, that Sir Robert Moray notified to the meeting the King’s pleasure at the constitution of the society and his promise of encouragement.
The Society of Philosophers into which the young Wren found himself plunged owed its inspiration above all to the writings of Bacon.
Bacon was not himself a man of science in the sense that Galileo or even Descartes was, for he made no observations and arrived at no discoveries in any particular branch of science. But he summed up all the Renaissance revolt against Scholasticism, and had set forth in a noble literary form a definite system of knowledge that could be opposed to the so-called Aristotelianism which hitherto had held sway over the minds of men. Bacon’s guiding principle was the appeal to experiment, for his famous “method of induction” amounts to that. The Scholastic writers worked by deduction. They laid down their premisses, they worked out the laws of formal logic by which they could draw deductions from them, and they accepted the conclusions without enquiring whether the premisses could bear the weight of the superstructure built upon them. Bacon opposed to this his dictum, “hypotheses non fingo;” the business of the man of science is to collect the facts without any preconceived theory, and to let the facts themselves reveal the law which binds them together. Actually, scientific discovery does not proceed in this way. Without a guiding hypothesis the mind is lost in a wilderness of facts, but the value of the hypothesis must be checked continually by its capacity to embrace the known facts and to predict new ones. None the less, Bacon’s method was at the time a necessary summons to experiment, and under its stimulus the young men of the day attacked the problem of the natural world about them with the enthusiasm of crusaders. For as a corollary to his method Bacon had insisted upon the necessity of studying the common arts and crafts hitherto regarded as beneath the dignity of philosophy. In the operations of the mechanic or the smelter, and in the growth of crops, were to be found the materials of science. So the new philosophers were universally curious and their curiosity about things was the note of the society in which Wren grew up and the dominant feature of his own mind until he settled down to architecture.
Wren’s scientific equipment was primarily that of a mathematician, and to this he added an inventive turn of mind, which developed first in the construction of apparatus and was afterwards so nobly turned to account in his building. As a man of science he touched everything and adorned it, but he cannot be regarded as a supreme pioneer in any particular direction, nor is his name associated with any fundamental discovery. As mathematician he was abreast of all the knowledge of the day; he contributed to the advancement of knowledge therein as in his discussions of the cycloid, but even in that particular subject his work lacks the luminous intuition displayed by Pascal. Nor did he break fresh ground and conceive new methods which afterwards developed into part of the fundamental texture of mathematics, as Wallis did with his theory of infinitesimals, or as Newton did a few years later in a larger field.
Wren’s activity at the Royal Society in the multifarious problems which its members examined must not be allowed to obscure the fact that, professionally, he was an astronomer. Gresham Professor at twenty-five, and Savilian Professor at twenty-eight, he achieved little that has survived. The world and his own nimble mind called him to an excess of enterprises. In 1662, his indulgent friend Sprat wrote, “The Vice-Chancellor [of Oxford University] did yesterday send for me to enquire where the Astronomy Professor was, and the reason of his absence so long after the beginning of term.... He most terribly told me that he took it very ill you had not all this while given him any account of what hindered you in the discharge of your office.” Sprat stoutly defended Wren and urged on the angry Vice-Chancellor that the rebuilding of St. Paul’s and the fortifying of Tangier (Wren toyed with the latter but refused it) were of greater “concernment for the benefit of Christendom” than “the drawing of lines in Sir Harry Savill’s school.” It was not until 1673, however, that Wren officially turned his back on astronomy by resigning the Savilian professorship. The chief document of his astronomical career is his inaugural Gresham lecture in 1657, of which Latin and English versions are printed in Parentalia. A manuscript lecture, De corpore Saturni ejusque phasibus Hypothesis, flits irritatingly by us as having been possessed by one William Jones, Esquire, but after that—silence. The Gresham oration was a little pompous and for the “politer genii” whom he espied in his audience.