He says:--
"The register of knowledge of fact is called history. Whereof there
be two sorts, one called natural history; which is the history of
such facts or effects of nature as have no dependence on man's
will; such as are the histories of metals, plants, animals,
regions, and the like. The other is civil history; which is the
history of the voluntary actions of men in commonwealths."
So that all history of fact was divided into these two great groups of
natural and of civil history. The Royal Society was in course of
foundation about the time that Hobbes was writing this book, which was
published in 1651; and that Society was termed a "Society for the
Improvement of Natural Knowledge," which was then nearly the same thing
as a "Society for the Improvement of Natural History." As time went on,
and the various branches of human knowledge became more distinctly
developed and separated from one another, it was found that some were
much more susceptible of precise mathematical treatment than others. The
publication of the "Principia" of Newton, which probably gave a greater
stimulus to physical science than any work ever published before, or
which is likely to be published hereafter, showed that precise
mathematical methods were applicable to those branches of science such
as astronomy, and what we now call physics, which occupy a very large
portion of the domain of what the older writers understood by natural
history.
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