Swift was an upper-class conservative who undoubtedly looked down upon, and frequently derided, mechanists and scientists
of the sort exemplified by the members of the Royal Society--disciples of Francis Bacon, who were even then threatening to
remake the world in their own image. He lived in a time when a great deal of what passed for science was, at best,
pseudo-science. He had little use for abstract science or technology--which he satirized unmercifully in the third book of
Gulliver's Travels, the voyage to Laputa--but he was not opposed to science or to scientific experiment if it could be genuinely
useful to mankind: he read and approved of Bacon's The Advancement of Learning, for example. He was not, that is,
anti-intellectual, but he was passionately opposed to the useless follies of the charlatans, the quacks, the cheats, the speculators,
and the virtuosi--to the "aerial studies" of the chymists, mathematicians, projectors, and the rest of that speculative tribe"--who
lost themselves in useless abstractions, who wasted time and money (their own, and more importantly, that of gullibles) in vain
or extravagant experimentation.

Most importantly, however, he perceived--long before others realized it--that science was ethically and morally neutral; that it
could be put to evil uses as easily as to good. Swift insisted that human beings be reasonable, and that their efforts be be both
useful and moral, and he found too little practicality and too little morality in the science of his day. He was unwilling to sacrifice
moral and ethical considerations to scientific abstractions: it seems unnecessary to remark that subsequent events seem to have
proven many of his assumptions correct.

David Cody, Associate Professor of English, Hartwick College