Science in the Romantic Era

David Knight

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317242185
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1998. The Romantic Era was a time when society, religion and other beliefs, and science were all in flux. The idea that the universe was a great clock, and that men were little clocks, all built by a divine watchmaker, was giving way to a more dynamic and pantheistic way of thinking. A new language was invented for chemistry, replacing metaphor with algebra; and scientific illustration came to play the role of a visual language, deeply involved with theory. A scientific community came gradually into being as the 19th century wore on. The papers which compose this book have appeared in a wide range of books and journals; together with the new introduction they illuminate science and its context in the Romantic Era and follow its effects in the 19th century.

I The History of Science in Britain: A Personal View

DOI: 10.4324/9781315628820-1

Summary

Historians of science in Britain lack a firm institutional base. They are to be found scattered around in various departments in universities, polytechnics and museums. Their history over the last thirty-five years can be seen as a series of flirtations with those in more-established disciplines. Beginning with scientists, they then turned to philosophers, moving on to historians and then to sociologists: from each of these affairs something was learned, and the current interest determined which aspects of the history of science were seen as most interesting. At first it was settling who really discovered what; then an interest in concepts, methods and case-studies; then understanding the broader historical context of science; and after that seeing science in its social context, with special emphasis on institutions and professionalization. Where we shall go next is unclear: these vagaries may be no more than examples of intellectual fashion, but we may hope that they represent a zig-zag route towards deeper understanding.

Whereas Church History has an established institutional base usually in Theology Departments of British Universities, the History of Science remains marginal. Scientists seem less happy to take seriously the development of doctrine than are churchmen; though there are some who are interested in seeing how the spirit of truth has worked itself out through history. Among scientists, it is generally the development of theories now important which is attractive; they want to see how they have got to where they are now.¹ On this side of the German Ocean, this vision of history as more-or-less rapid progress towards the present is called ‘whig history’: after those like Macaulay in the last century who saw the reformed and liberal state of their day as the end to which the whole creation has been moving. Such ideas can make the more remote past seem very obscure, peopled with heroes and villains of superhuman proportions; while for contemporary history it can yield an anecdotal approach which is closer to popular science than to true history of science, seen as a critical discipline.

¹ A recent textbook in this genre is J. Marks, Science and the making of the Modern World, London, 1983; a distinguished monograph might be C. A. Russell, The History of Valency, Leicester, 1971. Zeitschrift für allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie XV/2 (1984) by kind permission! of Kluwer Academic Publishers

Scientists then perhaps tend to look into history for what is like the present, like geologists in the tradition of Charles Lyell and the so-called uniformitarians; while historians of science are more like Darwinians, seeing development over time leading to real differences. This means that relations between the groups are uneasy. Many scientists find history irrelevant to their activities, and fear that students will be muddled by being introduced to obsolete science; they would rather have them spend time on a microcomputer. Historians of science, on the other hand, find themselves tempted by a Kuhnian notion of science: in which it becomes a matter of ‘paradigms’ arrived at more-or-less intuitively by occasional men of genius, and taught dogmatically by lesser folk who practice ‘normal science’ within which they solve puzzles.² To look from one paradigm into another requires imagination and perhaps a steady nerve; it is easier to suppose that one is right and one’s predecessors were ignorant, even if this may seem a little defensive. Historians of science also grow tired of meeting the assumption that they must be interested in how things turned out: as though the student of the Austro- Hungarian Empire should necessarily be concerned about local government in present-day Budapest.

² T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed., Chicago, 1970. On science and culture, see M. Pollock (ed.) Common denominators in Art and Science, Aberdeen, 1983.

Zeitschrift für allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie XV/2 (1984) by kind permissiom of Kluwer Academic Publishers

Just as in the corrosive climate of the eighteenth century the history of the Church came to seem less then always edifying, so in the later twentieth century the reputation of science has become ambiguous. To T. H. Huxley a hundred years ago, science was unlike religion because it had never done anybody any harm. Whiggish historians saw progress in science that they failed to find in philosophy; the triumphs of the wave theory of light, and its extensions by Maxwell, Hertz and Röntgen seemed for example shining instances of real movement towards truth. The historian of science of the nineteenth century could feel that he was portraying an heroic enterprise, a search for truth above the petty nationalisms and cruelties of the ordinary world. Such episodes as the award to Sir Humphry Davy, by the Parisian Institut, of a prize for his electrochemical work in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars, were lovingly dwelt upon.

This story probably shows how unimportant science was in the early years of the nineteenth century: for with the World Wars of our century came the expulsion of enemy aliens from scientific societies and academies, the rise in secret government-supported research, and the development of chemical and nuclear weapons. The nineteenth century had produced terrible pollution, but science seemed a force that could cure it rather than its cause. The historian of science is dealing with something undoubtedly important and interesting, but not with something which transcends its cultural background like a good deed in a naughty world. Except perhaps in Faculties of Science and in the government Department of Education and Science, one meets alarm and unease about science, and there is no reason why its historian should also be its apologist.

For these reasons, historians of science are not often found in Britain in science departments in Universities and Polytechnics; and scientists there who are interested in the history of their field can feel lonely, and get the message that antiquarian researches should only be pursued after retirement from active science. Nevertheless, most historians of science have begun as scientists, at least to first degree level: and this arises from certain features of the cultural and educational system in Britain. During the nineteenth century, par excellence the scientific age in which the authority of religion and literature gave place to that of science, the word ‘science’ came to be used in a narrower and narrower sense. In the first half of the century it was set against merely practical or narrowly professional knowledge, or rule of thumb.³ Thus it was possible to speak of medical science, of the scientific parts of theology, and of cudgelling scientifically performed. Chemistry could be applied to the ‘arts’ – that is, in practical matters – but it was a science insofar as it was ‘philosophical’: that is, having a structure, a method, a collection of facts, and some theory which fitted them into a framework. The word ‘science’ could therefore include almost any academic discipline.

³ For terms and concepts in the history of science, see W. Bynum et al, ed., Dictionary of the History of Science, London, 1981; though one looks in vain for ‘pollution’, ‘poison’ or ‘weapon’.

Whereas in Scotland there were universities which taught a fair range of academic disciplines, at Oxford and Cambridge only classics and mathematics were systematically taught. There were Professors to lecture to any enthusiasts on Chemistry, Botany, Modern History or Modern Languages, but they cut little ice in the university and attending their courses did not count towards a degree. With the founding of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1831, and the coining of the word ‘scientist’ at the third meeting, two years later, the word ‘science’ came to stand for those activities carried on at the BAAS. These included Geology, and Statistics if mathematical rather than political; but although in 1800 many Fellows of the Royal Society had also been Members of the Society of Antiquaries, by 1900 historians and archaelogists were not deemed scientists. To this day, geographers and psychologists aspire (generally without much hope) to scientific status; but the lines drawn in the last century seem to hold.

This means that while the historian of science does not feel at home among the scientists, there is also no very obvious place for him among intellectual historians. The rigid separation of science from other activities has meant that the history of literature, religion, philosophy, and art has been studied separately from that of science; which may be illuminating when looking at the history of physics in positivistic periods but is generally very unhelpful. ‘Science’ used to mean something like ‘Wissenschaft’, for which there is now no obvious translation: and although the useful phrase ‘climate of opinion’ was invented by Joseph Glanvill, a Fellow of the Royal Society contemporary with Boyle, Geisteswissenschaft has no English equivalent. Though certain Polytechnics do now lay on interdisciplinary courses on History of Ideas which may include history of science, there are no Departmens of Intellectual History in which an historian of science should find a place.

Indeed the historian of science over the last twenty years begins to look a little like the ‘wallflower’ at the Ball, making eyes at various handsome – or even uprepossessing – suitors, but all in vain. Scientists failed to take much interest even in technical and internal histories. Worse, the teaching of science in schools and universities began to be increasingly separated from its history. Chemistry in particular had been taught historically, and also to some extent heuristically: the student was encouraged to put himself in the position of Boyle, Priestley, Lavoisier, Dalton, Wohler, Fischer and others, often attaching great names to reactions or techniques. This was hardly critical history, for those whose labours had not turned out positively, however eminent they were in their own day, were omitted; but it did give some idea of a discipline developing over time. From the 1960s new syllabuses in which matters were arranged logically rather then following the accidents of history became the vogue. It is ironical that since then chemistry has become the least popular of sciences among students in Britain: its presentation as a logical but dull and inhuman activity may have had something to do with this.

In the last ten years there has been more historical activity within the Royal Society of Chemistry, which now has a Historical Group arranging lectures at the Annual Congresses and also organising other meetings. But the numbers involved are small, and the prospects of much support for history of science from scientists seem poor: for them it remains a marginal activity. The next group with which historians of science therefore tried to ally themselves were the philosophers, who had since the time of Descartes (if not since Antiquity) been dazzled with the possibilities of scientific explanation. The ideas of the Vienna Circle had by the 1930s reached Britain, and the principle of verification – ‘if a proposition cannot be empirically verified, then it is meaningless’ – had been used to demolish the Hegelians and Idealists. Philosophers however tend to be like scientists in that they quarry the past, looking for nuggets to prise out of their matrix rather then seriously working out how things were.

Out of the alliance with philosophers came the idea that the history and the philosophy of science were really one subject. Unless anchored in history, with genuine case-studies, philosophy of science would be abstract and remote, a kind of intellectual game; while without some philosophy of science, the history of science would become mere erudition: the two joined together would form a really exciting and worthwhile activity.⁴ In various universities, including Cambridge, Leeds, and Durham, History and Philosophy of Science entered the syllabus and remains there; and many of those studying history of science willy-nilly study philosophy of science also.

⁴ See M. Hesse, Forces and Fields, London, 1961, for a good example of this genre; A. R. Hallam, A Revolution in the Earth Sciences, Oxford 1973, applies Kuhnian ideas to recent history. On ethics in science, see J. Ravetz, Scientific Knowledge, and its Social Problems, London, 1971.

Like scientists, philosophers are keenest on internal history. Dragging external factors – economic, social or institutional – into intellectual history seems reductive. What is really wanted is a history of scientific thought, and only the crucial experiments which forced choice between theories need be investigated in any detail: while philosophy of science had affinities with logic rather than with ethics, so that the stress was all upon method and explanation rather than upon the application of science. The slightly arid history which can go with this narrowing of focus had a long and respectable ancestry in Britain. William Whewell, an admirer of German philosophy and architecture, wrote his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences in 1840 as a systematic follow-up to his History of the Inductive Sciences of 1837. Whewell was opposed to the prevailing Baconian ideal of science, and stressed the importance of having appropriate leading ideas rather than merely collecting facts and generalising from them; and his books were written to vindicate his view historically. In view of Whewell’s importance in the BAAS and at Cambridge, where he was Master of Trinity College, his writings are of considerable interest.⁵

⁵ Whewell features in S. F. Cannon, Science in Culture, Folkestone, 1978, and in J. Morrell and A Thackray, Gentlemen of Science, Oxford, 1981. For bibliographies generally, see S. A. Jayawardene, Reference Books for the Historian of Science, London, 1982, and my Sources for the History of Science, Cambridge, 1975. The British Journal for the History of Science (BJHS) carries articles from time to time on collections in various centres.

Whewell was well described by a wit of his own day: ‘Science was his forte, and omniscience his foible’. But the suspicion of omniscience must hang more heavily over J. T. Merz, whose European Thought in the Nineteenth Century (1904–12) remains a monument to his enormous erudition. Two volumes of this work are devoted to science, in the narrow sense, and two more to philosophical thought outside the sciences. Much that has been later written on the sciences of that period can almost be seen as footnotes to Merz: except that the book has such formidable footnotes already that there is no room for more. Particularly interesting are the chapters where Merz compares the way science was carried on in France, Germany and Britain, because here he described the different educational and institutional systems which lay behind the different achievements. Other chapters cut across the divisions in the sciences, being concerned for example with the ‘vitalistic’ and the ‘statistical’ views of nature.

In more recent years it was probably the writings of A. O. Lovejoy and of Alexandre Koyré which boosted the vision of the history of science as a part of general intellectual history. An important figure in this development in Britain was A. C. Crombie at Oxford: his writings on medieval and early modern science were influential,⁶ and his pupils occupy various important posts in the history of science. The strength of the discipline in the early 1960s was shown by the launching in 1962 of two new journals, which joined Annals of Science started twenty-five years before when history of science was an appendage of science. The British Society for History of Science was founded in 1947, and produced for some years a Bulletin: this with the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• PART 1: WHAT IS HISTORY OF SCIENCE
• PART 2: ROMANTIC SCIENCE
• PART 3: ORGANIZATION AND UTILITY
• PART 4: PICTURES, DIAGRAMS AND SYMBOLS
• PART 5: SCIENTIFIC LANGUAGE
• PART 6: EPILOGUE
• Index