Physics at Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Leiden: Philosophy and the New Science in the University

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2 result of the attitudes characteristic of the small group of permanent residents at the schools, the academic scholars. This conservatism, however, was not everywhere equally efficacious. In the sixteenth century, the universities of northern Italy, Padua above all, had nurtured an intellectual ferment of considerable significance to the rise of the new science, and they continued to be penetrated by the influence of that science throughout the seventeenth century. The Uni­ versity of Oxford momentarily played host to' leading members of the English scientific community during the Commonwealth period, and Cambridge was shortly to boast the genius of Isaac Newton. Indeed, a small number of the one-hundred-odd universities in Europe strove more or less purposefully to come to grips with the new science and to in­ at least, within the body of learning for which they corporate facets of it, 2 held themselves responsible. Among the most notable of these more progressive schools must be included the University of Leiden, recently founded by the Lowlanders in revolt against the King of Spain, Philip II. The doors of the University of Leiden had first opened, to be sure, in the midst of rebellion, and had been forced open, as it were, by rumors of peace. In 1572, the revolt, with the Calvinists now clearly in the van, acquired what was to prove an enduring foothold in the maritime prov­ inces of Holland and Zeeland.