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On November 23rd, 1664, the President of the Royal Society was "desired to sign a licence for printing of Mr. Hooke's microscopical book." At this time the book was mostly printed, but it was delayed, much to Hooke's disgust, by the examination of several Fellows of the Society.
Here a most noble French dinner and banquet, the best I have seen this many a day and good discourse. Thence to my bookseller's and at his binder's saw Hooke's book of the Microscope, London, 1665," a very remarkable work with elaborate plates, some of which have been used for lecture illustrations almost to our own day.
To my office till past 12, and then home to supper and to bed, being now mighty well, and truly I cannot but impute it to my fresh hare's foote. Before I went to bed I sat up till two o'clock in my chamber reading of Mr. Hooke's Microscopicall Observations, the most ingenious book that ever I read in my life. Up, leaving my wife in bed, being sick of her months, and to church.
Young did not know of Hooke's guess until he himself had fully formulated the theory, but he hastened then to give his predecessor all the credit that could possibly be adjudged his due by the most disinterested observer. To Hooke's contemporary, Huygens, who was the originator of the general doctrine of undulation as the explanation of light, Young renders full justice also.
But here again Huygens played a prominent part by first applying the coiled balance-spring for regulating watches and marine clocks. The idea of applying a spring to the balance-wheel was not original with Huygens, however, as it had been first conceived by Robert Hooke; but Huygens's application made practical Hooke's idea.
Halley eventually urges Newton to consider Hooke's claim in some of the details, and Newton yields to the extent of admitting that the great fact of gravitational force varying inversely as the square of the distance had been independently discovered by Hooke; but he includes also Halley himself and Sir Christopher Wren, along with Hooke, as equally independent discoverers of the same principle.
When we follow Goethe in this way he comes before us in characteristic contrast to Robert Hooke. There can be no doubt how Goethe, if the occasion had arisen, would have commented on Hooke's procedure.
Actually he did nothing more than has since been done times without number; for the scientist has become more and more willing to allow artificially evoked sense-perceptions to dictate the thoughts he uses in forming a scientific picture of the world. In the present context we are concerned with the historical import of Hooke's procedure.
Hooke's writings show that even in his day the idea that both light and heat are modes of motion had taken possession of many minds. 'First, he says, 'that all kind of fiery burning bodies have their parts in motion I think will be easily granted me.
Hooke's line of thought is briefly as follows: In past ages men subscribed to the naive belief that what they have in their consciousness as thought pictures of the world, actually reproduces the real content of that world.
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