Samuel Johnson and the New Science

x, 188 pp. Richard B. Schwartz shows Johnson as a man deeply involved with the new science, treading a carefully considered middle ground between the province of science and that of religion and morality. Schwartz shows Johnson to have approved of the Baconian scientific methodology, its utilitarian orientation, and its Modern triumphs. Like so many of Bacon's successors, however, Johnson was skeptical of cooperative projects and unduly hasty results. Johnson assailed the Restoration and eighteenth-century satirists of science, and took pains to defend science, even in its most trifling forms.