Victorian Scientific Naturalism

Community, Identity, Continuity

Bernard Lightman, Gowan Dawson, Bernard Lightman, Gowan Dawson

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780226109503
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226109640
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Biological Sciences

Victorian Scientific Naturalism examines the secular creeds of the generation of intellectuals who, in the wake of The Origin of Species, wrested cultural authority from the old Anglican establishment while installing themselves as a new professional scientific elite. These scientific naturalists—led by biologists, physicists, and mathematicians such as William Kingdon Clifford, Joseph Dalton Hooker, Thomas Henry Huxley, and John Tyndall—sought to persuade both the state and the public that scientists, not theologians, should be granted cultural authority, since their expertise gave them special insight into society, politics, and even ethics.

           

In Victorian Scientific Naturalism, Gowan Dawson and Bernard Lightman bring together new essays by leading historians of science and literary critics that recall these scientific naturalists, in light of recent scholarship that has tended to sideline them, and that reevaluate their place in the broader landscape of nineteenth-century Britain. Ranging in topic from daring climbing expeditions in the Alps to the maintenance of aristocratic protocols of conduct at Kew Gardens, these essays offer a series of new perspectives on Victorian scientific naturalism—as well as its subsequent incarnations in the early twentieth century—that together provide an innovative understanding of the movement centering on the issues of community, identity, and continuity.

Notes

Introduction

1. Thomas H. Huxley, prologue to Essays upon Some Controverted Questions (London: Macmillan, 1892), 35.

2. James G. Paradis, T. H. Huxley: Man’s Place in Nature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), 180.

3. See James E. Strick, Sparks of Life: Darwinism and the Victorian Debates over Spontaneous Generation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 90–91.

4. Arthur James Balfour, The Foundations of Belief (London: Longmans, Green, 1895), 134; and Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1900), 2:396.

5. John Tyndall, “Scope and Limit of Scientific Materialism,” in Fragments of Science for Unscientific People (London: Longmans, Green, 1871), 107–24.

6. See Frank Miller Turner, Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974).

7. See, for instance, David Ray Griffin, Religion and Scientific Naturalism: Overcoming the Conflicts (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000).

8. T. H. Huxley, prologue, 35.

9. Thomas H. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1893), 49.

10. See Thomas Dixon, The Invention of Altruism: Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

11. See Ruth Barton, “‘Men of Science’: Language, Identity and Professionalization in the Mid-Victorian Scientific Community,” History of Science 41 (2003): 73–119; and Paul White,Thomas Huxley: Making the “Man of Science” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

12. “The Word ‘Scientist,’” Science-Gossip 1 (1894–95): 242.

13. “Professor Lewis’s Naturalism,” Literary World 6 (1850): 560. Lewis’s lecture was later published as Nature, Progress, Ideas (Schenectady, NY: G. Y. Van Debogert, 1850).

14. Tayler Lewis, “Hickok’s Rational Psychology,” Bibliotheca Sacra 8 (1851): 377.

15. [T. H. Huxley], “The Vestiges of Creation,” British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review 13 (1854): 433, 438.

16. David Brown, “On Some Recent Utterances of Scientific Men,” Sunday Magazine 4 (1867), 174, 170.

17. M. A. Doudney [W. B. Rands], “Ideas of the Day,” Contemporary Review 37 (1880): 838, 844, 839, 843.

18. W. K. Clifford, “The Unseen Universe,” Fortnightly Review, n.s., 17 (1875): 780.

19. “Pleas of a Convert,” Secular Review 2 (1878): 45.

20. “Spiritualism,” Secular Review 2 (1878): 77–78.

21. “Not ‘Spiritualism,’ but Freethought,” Secular Review 2 (1878): 110.

22. See A. Gowans Whyte, The Story of the R.P.A., 1899–1949 (London: Watts, 1949), 22.

23. Quoted in Adrian Desmond, Huxley: Evolution’s High Priest (London: Michael Joseph, 1997), 145.

24. See Bernard Lightman, “Huxley and Scientific Agnosticism: The Strange History of a Failed Rhetorical Strategy,” British Journal for the History of Science 35 (2002): 271–89.

25. T. H. Huxley, prologue, 37, 40.

26. Ibid., 49, 52, 53.

27. “Mr. Johnston’s Account of the Meeting of Naturalists at Hamburgh,” Edinburgh Journal of Science, n.s., 4 (1831): 212.

28. George Cornewall Lewis, An Essay on the Influence of Authority on Matters of Opinion (London: John W. Parker, 1849), 25.

29. Tayler Lewis, The Six Days of Creation (Schenectady, NY: G. Y. Van Debogert, 1855), 201–2.

30. See Thomas Henry Huxley, “On the Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences” [1854], in Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews (London: Macmillan, 1870), 91.

31. L. Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, 1:94.

32. [R. H. Hutton], “Pope Huxley,” Spectator 43 (1870): 135.

33. R. H. Hutton, “Is ‘Lapsed Intelligence’ a Probable Origin for Complex Animal Instincts?” [17 December 1878; 2], in Papers Read at the Meetings of the Metaphysical Society, 3 vols. (London: privately printed, 1869–80), 3:2657e.1025, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

34. Michael Ruse, introduction to Evolutionary Naturalism: Selected Essays (London: Routledge, 1995), 1. See, for example, Paul F. Boiler Jr., American Thought in Transition: The Impact of Evolutionary Naturalism, 1865–1900 (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1969).

35. On the problems of using only actors’ categories, see Harry Collins, “Actors’ and Analysts’ Categories in the Social Analysis of Science,” in Clashes of Knowledge: Orthodoxies and Heterodoxies in Science and Religion, ed. Peter Meusburger, Michael Welker, and Edgar Wunder (Heidelberg, Germany: Springer, 2008), 101–10.

36. Barton, “Men of Science,” 75.

37. Ralph O’Connor, “Reflections on Popular Science in Britain: Genres, Categories, and Historians,” Isis 100 (2009): 333–45.

38. James Secord, “The Electronic Harvest,” British Journal for the History of Science 38 (2005): 463–67.

39. Robert M. Young, Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1–2, 4, 68, 79.

40. Ibid., 191, 240.

41. Turner, Between Science and Religion, 9–12, 24–30.

42. Frank M. Turner, “The Victorian Conflict between Science and Religion: A Professional Dimension,” Isis 69 (1978): 358, 360, 364–65.

43. Frank M. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

44. Peter Allan Dale, In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture: Science, Arts, and Society in the Victorian Age (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 6.

45. Bernard Lightman, The Origins of Agnosticism: Victorian Unbelief and the Limits of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); and Ruth Barton, “‘An Influential Set of Chaps’: The X-Club and Royal Society Politics, 1864–85,” British Journal for the History of Science 23 (1990): 53–81.

46. Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (London: Michael Joseph, 1991); Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995); and Desmond, Huxley.

47. Peter J. Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).

48. See Gowan Dawson, “First among Equals,” Times Literary Supplement, 9 January 2009, 7–8.

49. Desmond and Moore, Darwin; and Desmond, Huxley.

50. Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 20.

51. Anne Secord, “Science in the Pub: Artisan Botanists in Early Nineteenth-Century Lancashire,” History of Science 32 (1994): 269–315.

52. James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

53. John van Wyhe, Phrenology and the Origins of Victorian Scientific Naturalism (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004).

54. Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

55. Evelleen Richards, “Redrawing the Boundaries: Darwinian Science and Victorian Women Intellectuals,” Victorian Science in Context, ed. Bernard Lightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 119–42; Suzanne Le-May Sheffield, Revealing New Worlds: Three Victorian Women Naturalists (London: Routledge, 2001); Ann B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760 to 186...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction, Gowan Dawson and Bernard Lightman
• Forging Friendships
• Institutional Politics
• Broader Alliances
• New Generations
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography of Major Works on Scientific Naturalism
• List of Contributors
• Notes
• Index