Climate of opinion

This metaphor describing prevailing beliefs and attitudes is often mistakenly attributed to W.H.Auden (1907-1973) but the expression was already in use before this. Alfred North Whitehead used it in Science and the Modern World (1925) but it first appears in the works of Joseph Glanvill (1636-1680) who wrote about “divers climates of opinion” in The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661).