Oliver Hill: An Impertinent Ass

The early Royal Society was an intellectual movement with remar­kably homogenous epistemological and methodological features. Despite the petty squabbles fellows occasionally engaged in, general agreement existed among them about the principles, methods, and aims of their collective enterprise. On rare occasions, however, the society was genuinely infiltrated by someone with incompatible conceptions and principles, upsetting the sober equilibrium of society meetings. One spectacular example of such an intruder was the Cambridge-educated Oliver Hill who was fellow of the society from 1677 to 1682. This paper offers an account of Hill’s short tenure and studies some possible sources for better reconstructing two discourses, today lost, that he presented at meetings in December and January 1677/78. The paper aims to show how Hill, most often presented as a puritan mystic, also pursued a natural philosophical project in which he defended a specula­tive philosophy and spiritualist cosmology not unlike Henry More’s.