The London meetings were held often at Gresham College and, when Wren was fulfilling his duties as Professor of Astronomy at the College, after his Wednesday lectures and after Rooke’s Thursday lectures. Lord Brouncker, the friend of Pepys, John Evelyn and others were frequently at the meetings, and the Royal Society took formal shape, after one of Wren’s lectures, on November 28, 1660, when Brouncker, Robert Boyle, Rooke, Wilkins and others withdrew to Wren’s private room and decided to constitute themselves formally as a college or society. It was after Wren’s next lecture on December 5, 1660, that Sir Robert Moray notified to the meeting the King’s pleasure at the constitution of the society and his promise of encouragement. The Society of Philosophers into which the young Wren found himself plunged owed its inspiration above all to the writings of Bacon. Bacon was not himself a man of science in the sense that Galileo or even Descartes was, for he made no observations and arrived at no discoveries in any particular branch of science. But he summed up all the Renaissance revolt against Scholasticism, and had set forth in a noble literary form a definite system of knowledge that could be opposed to the so-called Aristotelianism which hitherto had held sway over the minds of men. Bacon’s guiding principle was the appeal to experiment, for his famous “method of induction” amounts to that. The Scholastic writers worked by deduction. They laid down their premisses, they worked out the laws of formal logic by which they could draw deductions from them, and they accepted the conclusions without enquiring whether the premisses could bear the weight of the superstructure built upon them. Bacon opposed to this his dictum, “hypotheses non fingo;” the business of the man of science is to collect the facts without any preconceived theory, and to let the facts themselves reveal the law which binds them together. Actually, scientific discovery does not proceed in this way. Without a guiding hypothesis the mind is lost in a wilderness of facts, but the value of the hypothesis must be checked continually by its capacity to embrace the known facts and to predict new ones. None the less, Bacon’s method was at the time a necessary summons to experiment, and under its stimulus the young men of the day attacked the problem of the natural world about them with the enthusiasm of crusaders. For as a corollary to his method Bacon had insisted upon the necessity of studying the common arts and crafts hitherto regarded as beneath the dignity of philosophy. In the operations of the mechanic or the smelter, and in the growth of crops, were to be found the materials of science. So the new philosophers were universally curious and their curiosity about things was the note of the society in which Wren grew up and the dominant feature of his own mind until he settled down to architecture.