Samuel Hartlib (sen.)

Wikipedia

Samuel Hartli(e)b (ca. 1600 – 10 March 1662)[1] was a German-British polymath. An active promoter and expert writer in many fields, he was interested in science, medicine, agriculture, politics, and education. He settled in England, where he married and died. He was a contemporary of Robert Boyle whom he knew well, and a neighbour of Samuel Pepys in Axe Yard.

Hartlib is often described as an "intelligencer", and indeed has been called "the Great Intelligencer of Europe".[2] His main aim in life was to further knowledge and so he kept in touch with a vast array of contacts, from high philosophers to gentleman farmers. He maintained a voluminous correspondence and much of this has survived, having been lost entirely from 1667 to 1945;[3] it is housed in a special Hartlib collection at the University of Sheffield in England. He became one of the best-connected intellectual figures of the Commonwealth era, and was responsible for patents, spreading information and fostering learning. He circulated designs for calculators, double-writing instruments, seed-machines and siege engines. His letters, in German and English, have been the subject of close modern scholarship.

Hartlib set out with the universalist goal "To record all human knowledge and to make it universally available for the education of all mankind".[citation needed] His work has been compared to modern internet search engines.[4]

[edit] Life

Hartlib was born in Elbing, Royal Prussia. His mother was the daughter of a rich English merchant at Danzig. His father is said to have been a refugee merchant from Poland.[5] He studied at the Gymnasium in Brieg (Brzeg), and at the Albertina. At Herborn Academy he studied under Johannes Heinrich Alsted and Johannes Bisterfeld.[6] He was briefly at the University of Cambridge, supported by John Preston.[7]

Hartlib met the Scottish preacher John Dury in 1628; the same year Hartlib relocated to England, in the face of the prospect of being caught in a war zone, as Imperial armies moved into the western parts of Poland, and the chance of intervention by Sweden grew.[8][9] He first unsuccessfully established a school in line with his theories of education, in Chichester, and then lived in Duke's Place, London.[10] An early patron was John Williams, the bishop of Lincoln and hostile to William Laud.[11] Another supporter was John Pym; Pym would use Hartlib later, as a go-between with Dutch Calvinists in London, in an effort to dig up evidence against Laud.[12][13] It is Hugh Trevor-Roper's thesis, in his essay Three Foreigners (meaning Hartlib, Dury and the absent Comenius), that Hartlib and the others were the “philosophers” of the “country party” or anti-court grouping of the 1630s and early 1640s, who united in their support for these outside voices, if agreeing on little else.[14][15]

During the Civil War, Hartlib occupied himself with the peaceful study of agriculture, publishing various works by himself, and printing at his own expense several treatises by others on the subject. He planned a school for the sons of gentlemen, to be conducted on new principles, and this probably was the occasion of his friend John Milton's Tractate on Education, addressed to him in 1644, and of William Petty's Two Letters on the same subject, in 1647 and 1648.[5] Another associate of his in that period was Walter Blith, a noted writer on husbandry.[16]

For his various labours, Hartlib received a pension of £100 from Oliver Cromwell, afterwards increased to £300, as he had spent all his fortune on his experiments. But Hartlib died in poverty. His association with Oliver Cromwell and the Commonwealth resulted in him being sidelined after Charles II's Restoration. He lost his pension, which had already fallen into arrears. Some of his correspondents went as far as to ask for their letters from his archive, fearing that they could be compromised.[5][17]

[edit] Baconian

Hartlib was indebted to Francis Bacon for a general theory of education, and this formed common ground for him and Jan Comenius.[18] Hartlib published two studies of Comenius's work: Conatuum Comenianorum praeludia (1637) and Comenii pansophiae prodromus et didactica dissertatio (1639).[5] He also put much effort into getting Comenius, of the Protestant Moravian Brethren, to visit England. Hartlib's two closest correspondents were John Dury, and Comenius. The latter had the concept of a "tree of knowledge", continuously branching out and growing. He also put his own spin on Bacon's ideas. Shortly before the English Civil War broke out, John Gauden preached in 1640 to Parliament, recommending that Dury and Comenius be invited to England, and naming Hartlib as a likely contact.[19]

Men like Hartlib and Comenius wanted to make the spread of knowledge easier, at a time when most knowledge was not categorised or standardised by any widespread conventions or academic disciplines, and libraries were mostly private. They wanted to enlighten and educate, and to improve society, as religious people who saw this as the work of God. Comenius arrived in England in 1641, bad timing considering that war was imminent. His presence failed to transform the position in education, though a substantial literature grew up, particularly on university reform, where Oliver Cromwell set up a new institution. Comenius left in 1642; under Cromwell elementary schooling was expanded from 1646, and Durham College was set up, with staff from Hartlib's associates.[20]

Bacon had formulated a project for a research institute, under the title "Salomon's House" in his New Atlantis of 1624. This theoretical scheme was important for Hartlib, who angled during the 1640s for public funding for it. He was unsuccessful except for a small pension for himself, but gathered like-minded others: Dury, John Milton, Kenelm Digby, William Petty, Frederick Clod (Clodius).[21]

Milton dedicated his 1644 Of Education to Hartlib, whom he had come to know the year before and who had pressed him to publish his educational ideas. But he gave the Comenian agenda short shrift in the work. Barbara Lewalski considers his dismissive attitude as disingenous, since he had probably used texts by Comenius in his own teaching.[22] Hezekiah Woodward, linked at the time in the minds of Presbyterians and officialdom with Milton as a dangerous writer, was also significant as an educational follower of Comenius and Bacon, and friend of Hartlib.[23]

[edit] Hartlib Circle, Invisible College, and the Royal Society's background

The 'Hartlib circle' of contacts and correspondents, built up from around 1630, was one of the foundations of the Royal Society of London which was established a generation later, in 1660. The relationship, however, is not transparent, because Hartlib and close supporters, with the exception of William Petty, were excluded from the Royal Society when it was set up from 1660.

[edit] Economics, agriculture, politics

The utopian tract Description of the Famous Kingdome of Macaria appeared under Hartlib's name. It is now considered that it was written by Gabriel Plattes (1600–1655), a friend.[24][25] A practical project was the establishment of a workhouse, as part of the Corporation of the Poor of London. This initiative is reckoned a major influence on the later philanthropic schemes of John Bellers.[26]

In 1641, Hartlib wrote Relation of that which hath been lately attempted to procure Ecclesiastical Peace among Protestants.[5] After Comenius left England, and in particular from 1646 onwards, the Hartlib group agitated for religious reform and toleration, against the Presbyterian dominance in the Long Parliament. They also proposed economic, technical and agricultural improvements, particularly through Sir Cheney Culpeper, and Henry Robinson.[27] Benjamin Worsley, Secretary to the Council of Trade from 1650, was a Hartlibian.[28]

Hartlib valued useful knowledge: anything that could increase crop yields, or cure disease. One of Hartlib's great interests was agriculture. He worked to spread Dutch farming practices in England, such as using nitrogenous crops like cabbage to replenish the soil with nitrogen, to increase the yield of next season's crop. In 1652 he issued a second edition of Richard Weston's Discourse of Flanders Husbandry (1645).[5] Hartlib corresponded with many landowners, as well as academics, in his quest for knowledge.

From 1650 Hartlib was very interested in, and influential on, fruit husbandry. A letter by Sir Richard Child, surveying the area, received publication in one of his books Samuel Hartlib, his Legacy, or an Enlargement of the Discourse of Husbandry used in Brabant and Flanders;[5] and Hartlib introduced John Beale, another author on orchards, to John Evelyn who would eventually write an important work in the area, Sylva of 1664.[29] In 1655 Hartlib wrote The Reformed Commonwealth of Bees, featuring a transparent glass beehive, to a design by Christopher Wren.[30] John Evelyn showed him the manuscript of his Elysium Britannicum, at the end of the 1650s.[31]

[edit] Science and medicine

The work of Paracelsus, a 16th century physician and alchemist who made bold claims for his science, was also one of the inspirations to Hartlib and early chemistry. Harlib was very open-minded, and often tested the ideas and theories of his correspondents. For his own trouble with kidney stones Hartlib took to drinking diluted sulphuric acid — a cure that may have contributed to his death.[citation needed]

Hartlib was interested in theories and practices that modern science would deem irrational, or superstitious — for example, sympathetic medicine. Sympathetic medicine was based on the concept that things in nature that bear a resemblance to an ailment could be used to treat that ailment. Hence, a plant that looked like a snake might be used to treat snakebites, or a yellow colored herb might be used to treat jaundice.[32]

[edit] Work

• Hartlib's correspondence and notes, over 25,000 pages, were published in 1995 on CD.

[edit] Literature

• H. M. Knox. “William Petty's Advice to Samuel Hartlib,” British Journal of Educational Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (May, 1953), pp. 131–142

[edit] External links

• Samuel Hartlib at The Garden, the Ark, the Tower, and the Temple: Biblical metaphors of knowledge in early modern Europe. Published by the Museum of the History of Science at the University of Oxford.
• Gilman, Daniel Coit; Peck, Harry Thurston; Colby, Frank Moore (1905). " Hartlib, Samuel". New International Encyclopedia. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company. Wikisource 
•  "Hartlib, Samuel". Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900. 

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Annotations

• - Phil on Fri 15 Aug 2003, 02:02pm. Flag this

  Father of Samuel Hartlib junior: http://www.pepysdiary.com/p/1014.php

• - S. Spoelstra on Fri 15 Aug 2003, 03:25pm. Flag this

  I quote from “Dictionary of Seventeenth-Century British Philosophers”
  at http://www.thoemmes.com/dictionaries/hartlib.htm

  “Samuel Hartlib was born at Elbing, and educated at the Gymnasium, Brieg, and the University of K

• - vincent on Sun 29 Feb 2004, 10:25pm. Flag this

  The Hartlib Papers (second edition)
  Samuel Hartlib (c. 1600-62), a great seventeenth-century ‘intelligencer’ and man of science, set out to record all human knowledge and make it universally available for the education of all mankind. His correspondence, which runs to over 25,000 folios of original materials, came to the University of Sheffield Library in the 1960s. The full-text electronic edition of this correspondence realises Hartlib’s vision some 300 years later

  http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/hartlib.html

• - Pedro on Wed 27 Dec 2006, 02:17pm. Flag this

  Samuel Hartlib

  “Became an important figure in the life of John Evelyn…Sylva put the case for an enlifghtened transformation of the countryside that was no less ambitious that that advanced for the city in Fumifugium. Through its pages thread the utilitarian ideas of Samuel Hartlib, who had died in 1662, sick and disilusioned”

  (John Evelyn, Living for Ingenuity by Gillian Darley)
  

• - Michael Robinson on Thu 28 Dec 2006, 09:45am. Flag this

  Hartlib, his circle and “Biblical metaphors of Knowledge in early modern Europe”

  A fascinating exhibition; includes much about people known to Pepys.

  http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/gatt/

• - Pedro on Wed 14 Nov 2007, 09:47pm. Flag this

  From Michael’s site above…

  “At the same time, Hartlib and his friends searched for means to prolong and improve human life, in particular through alchemical discovery and the practice of chemical medicine, and strived to achieve dominion over nature through the application of new knowledge and new methods of understanding.”

  From Isaac Newton, The Last Sorcerer by Michael White…

  The London alchemists of the mid-seventeenth century had centred around Samuel Hartlib, and grew in importance during I640’s and I650’s and included (amongst others) Robert Boyle, These men operated covertly within the same city as the Royal Society and included many of their number.

  The circle aimed to rationalize alchemy by marrying alchemical lore within the interactive framework of mechanical philosophy.

  
  

References in the diary

None