It is not the first word that comes to mind when one thinks of Butterfield as a public figure; it may seem even less obvious in considering the private man. Yet much turns on what one intends by the term ‘science’. If its supposed context is the laboratory then Butterfield had little to say, apart from constant worries about what the people in laboratories wanted to do and how they often defeated God's purposes in doing it. If one means to refer instead to someone who brought to a range of thought the presuppositions of science, then that will not do, either. Butterfield's enormous output of printed and unpublished material leaves no doubt that he began elsewhere and more often contrasted the direction of his thinking with that of a scientist's than replicated that mentality. Yet neither of these truths defaces a picture of one who spent much of his life perplexed by the social reception of science and the history of its relationship to wider issues. He wrote a book about it – one rarely read now but extremely influential in its day and one often left out of account in descriptions of Butterfield's development and significance. He wrote about it in his private meditations, sometimes in the context of thinking through what the enterprise of history involved, sometimes baptizing scientists as agents of higher purposes of which they were unaware, sometimes seeing the laboratory as the enemy of poetry and a right view of the universe.