Not infrequently in recent years,
attention has been given to Dee's scientific importance (3), and
recognition of this has led to the demand for a re-examination
of his work that will once more accord him "his rightful
place as the central figure in the beginning of modern science
in England." (4) Dee's historical significance in this sphere
is chiefly due to the fact that he became one of the principal
propagandists in England for an approach to nature which proved
of immense value in the hands of later experimentalists, and laid
the foundations of the methods of modern physical science. Yet
Dee supported these views not from any intuitive precognisance
of the profitable results - their pragmatic justification - which
would follow from their extensive application in succeeding centuries,
but rather because they formed an intrinsic part of a general
scheme of thought, which was largely evolved and defended by as
pure an a priori theorising as the most involved logistic subtleties
of that earlier scholasticism which Dee's intellectual legatees
of the seventeenth century, in conscious superiority, so frequently
and vociferously derided. There were other philosophies of the
day, seemingly as cogent, offering much greater favourable empirical
evidence, than this stubborn assertion of discoverable, all-permeating
numerical harmonies which flew frequently in the face of "common
sense" in its interpretations of observed fact, and of which
the few demonstrable advantages were almost ridiculous compared
with the vastness of its pretensions, and though, finally, these
rival systems fell into entire discredit it was only because they
were found not to be so congruent with the mechanical world, which
the later unification of scientific theory, accompanying material
progress, seemed increasingly to insist on.
Moreover it is to be observed that
many of the apparent eccentricities of Dee's thought, the intricate
and unprofitable mazes of cabala and occultism in which he inextricably
involved himself, were, in some respects, no more than rigorously
derived consequences of the general philosophy he had so heartily
embraced; and though this, in other hands, provided the framework
for the ordered world of Newton, the watch-universe of Huygens
(5), there was not to be found implicit in its premisses, as Dee
accepted them, any just cause for an invidious division between
mathematical activities concerned with quantitative measurement
of natural phenomena, and esoteric numerological fantasy. Those
of his contemporaries who achieved a greater measure of practical
success, or who did not involve themselves so deeply as Dee in
these fields, were men who were more fortunate or less consistent
in their employment of the "new" methods. The charge
has been too often reiterated that Dee "allowed his imagination
to dominate his scientific knowledge, and he adopted the baseless
superstitions of the day." (6) Only by an unjustifiable
application of the standards of modern knowledge, (7) is it possible
to separate as intrinsically different those elements in Dee's
work which survived the test of "usefulness" in future
generations from those sterile speculations which to him, and
to his age, seemed to be fully as necessary in completing a coherent
picture of the world.(8)