e" (Rabkin 39). This rhetoric has provenance extending back to the English Renaissance.
Those sensitive to change and those prepared to embrace a rhetoric of change need not be scientists. While scientists address a discourse community of scientists, novelists address a wider discourse community of the literate. If we can accept the earlier argument that science and poetry are not ontologically antagonistic, then we might well hope to find fictional uses of the rhetoric of science . . . in texts scattered from [Francis) Bacon's time to the present. These uses would change as the prevailing first principles of the time evolved under the impact of the advances wrought by science and as the consequent needs of artists also changed. . . .
In the early seventeenth century, when the prevailing first principles in the artist's discourse community were theological, Bacon, as we have seen, used the authority of theology to validate the rhetoric of science. As science and technology--and the persuasiveness of the rhetoric of science--changed the world and the way people viewed it, the competing authorities changed their balance until today the rhetoric of science is used to lend authority to religion (Rabkin 35, 37).
Tillyard confirms the provenance of science and technology as firmly established in Shelley's lifetime by quoting a contemporaneous book on Homer that declared England's arts improving and its sciences advancing. Tillyard's point is that "the eighteenth-century myth of liberty [in England) included the doctrine of prog
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