Royal Society

A group of natural philosophers, including the architect and astronomer Christopher Wren, the chemist Robert Boyle and the diarist John Evelyn, had for some years held informal meetings in London and Oxford to discuss and demonstrate experimental science before formally constituting themselves as a society on 28 November 1660, following a lecture by Wren at Gresham College.

The new body adopted the motto Nullius in verba, roughly take nobody's word for it, to signal its commitment to establishing knowledge through experiment and observation rather than the citation of ancient authority, a stance aimed squarely at the scholastic method still dominant in universities. King Charles II granted the group a royal charter in July 1662, formally incorporating it as the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, and a second charter the following year confirmed its structure under a president and council elected by its fellows.

The Society began publishing Philosophical Transactions in 1665, generally recognized as the first scientific journal to establish continuous publication and peer review, and it quickly attracted the era's leading natural philosophers, with Isaac Newton serving as president from 1703 until his death in 1727, a tenure during which the Society's prestige as the arbiter of legitimate science in Britain became firmly established.

The Royal Society's standing as the ultimate gatekeeper of legitimate science in Britain meant claims of mesmerism, spiritualism and later psychical research were repeatedly measured against its judgment, even when the Society itself declined to investigate them formally. In the nineteenth century the chemist and Society fellow William Crookes conducted controversial personal investigations into spiritualist mediums, including Florence Cook, using instruments and methods drawn from his own laboratory work, but the Society never endorsed these investigations as its own, and Crookes faced sustained criticism from colleagues who felt he had risked the Society's collective authority on his personal enthusiasms.

The Society's general posture toward psychical research and mesmerism through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was one of institutional silence rather than active engagement, leaving the field to dedicated bodies such as the Society for Psychical Research, which drew heavily on Royal Society trained scientists as members without ever securing anything like a formal association between the two. This pattern, a research topic pursued by individually credentialed scientists but never adopted institutionally, recurs throughout the history covered by this Atlas, and the Royal Society remains its clearest example, continuing today as the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences and a major funder of mainstream scientific research.