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‘An object is frequently not seen, from not knowing how to see it, rather than from any deficit in the organ of vision … I will instruct you how to see them.’
The point was that science must always be more than the simple observation of phenomena or data. It was simultaneously a subjective training in observational skills,
self-criticism and interpretation: a complete education.
It was a profession first proposed by Bacon, based on the fundamental value of free enquiry.15
He argued that common to all of them was the three-part ‘inductive’ method.
First, the precise gathering of quantitative data by observation and experiment; second, the emergence of a general ‘hypothesis’ from this data; and third, the testing of this hypothesis once more by experiment and observation, to see if it could be disproved.17
‘Above all other things, Man is distinguished by his pursuit and investigation of TRUTH’ — an interesting assertion.
The most ‘trifling natural objects’, such as a soap bubble, an apple or a pebble, could reveal a scientific law (respectively, the laws of aerostatics, gravitation or geology).
Shakespeare had such a mind in view when he describes a contemplative man finding Tongues in trees — books in the running brooks Sermons in stones — and good in everything
Where the uninformed and unenquiring eye perceives neither novelty nor beauty, he walks in the midst of wonders.21
he listed a series of simple discoveries and technological inventions that had hugely improved human safety: among them the lightning conductor, the lighthouse lens, the safety lamp, iodine and chlorine disinfectant (the last three being Davy’s).22
Developing from the errors of alchemy and phlogiston theory, chemistry had been ‘placed in the ranks of the exact sciences — a science of number, weight and measure’. It had produced practical applications in every sphere: medicine, agriculture, manufacturing, aerostation and meteorology, for example. But it had also advanced pure science: the doctrines of oxygen, latent heat, atomic weight, polar electricity and the prime elements (of which more than fifty were now known).
Herschel prophetically implied that electricity and electro-magnetism still hid many secrets, and that their investigation would become the leading science of the new age. This
would indeed be Faraday’s coming field of triumph.
This notion of a great network or connection of sciences, beginning to form a single philosophy and culture, was crucial to his book.
Herschel argued that science, while often going against common sense or intuition, expanded the human imagination with previously inconceivable ideas of movement or magnitude.
For one undergraduate at Cambridge the book was like a summons to arms. ‘Humboldt’s Personal Narrative and Herschel’s On Natural Philosophy stirred up in me a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science. No one of a dozen other books influenced me nearly so much as these two.’ The undergraduate was twenty-two-year-old Charles Darwin, and his humble contribution was to be On the Origin of Species (1859).27
This time the list of those attending included almost all those who would soon become the rising stars in the firmament of early Victorian science: Michael Faraday, Sir John Herschel, John Dalton, Charles Babbage, Sir David Brewster, Adam Sedgwick, William Whewell, Thomas Chalmers, Thomas Malthus and William Somerville. The only notable absentee was Charles Darwin, just then botanising in Uruguay during the Beagle’s voyage.34
‘To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar — with sun and moon and stars throughout the year, And man and woman – this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius from talent.’37
but some ingenious gentleman [in fact Whewell himself] proposed that, by analogy with ‘artist’, they might form ‘scientist’ — and added that there could be no scruple to this term since we already have such words as ‘economist’ and ‘atheist’ — but this was not generally palatable.39
But in fact ‘scientist’ came rapidly into general use from this date, and was recognised in the OED by 1840.
Lurking beneath the semantics lay the whole question of whether the new generation of professional ‘scientists’ would promote safe religious belief or a dangerous secular materialism.
For many Romantic scientists, with a robust intellectual belief in the ‘argument by Design’, there was no immediate contradiction between religion and science: rather the opposite. Science was a gift of God or Providence to mankind, and its purpose was to reveal the wonders of His design.
But public faith often differed from private beliefs.
Yet with the growing public knowledge of geology and astronomy, and the recognition of ‘deep space’ and ‘deep time’, fewer and fewer men or women of education can have believed in a literal, Biblical six days of creation.
However, science itself had yet to produce its own theory (or myth) of creation, and there was no alternative Newtonian Book of Genesis — as yet. That is why Darwin’s On the Origin of Species appeared so devastating when it was finally published in 1859.
Darwin had indeed written a new Book of Genesis.♣
Scenting a good story, Charles Dickens launched a satirical series in Bentley’s Miscellany in 1838, entitled ‘The Full report of the First Meeting of the Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything’.
His experiment with magnetic coils and a galvanometer (which was made to move without physical contact), carried out at the Institution’s laboratory on 29 August 1831, was said to have ended ‘the Age of Steam’ at a stroke, and begun the new Age of Electricity’.48
Christmas Lectures for Children, which are still given annually (and now televised).
‘The Chemical History of a Candle’.
‘The Chemical History of a Candle’ was eventually adapted by Dickens, without any satirical intent, for his family magazine Household Words in 1850.
It would ultimately provide the supportive authority for Charles Darwin, his great friend, to accept the deep time necessary for evolution by natural selection to take place.
But during these five years of intense controversy from 1829 to 1834, it was the publication of four literary works that contributed most powerfully to the debate about what ‘a scientist’ really was, or should be.
Consolations in Travel, or The Last Days of a Philosopher
David Brewster’s Life of Sir Isaac Newton, the first ever major scientific biography in Britain, was also issued in Murray’s Family Library in 1831.
Brewster had in fact visited the orchard at Woolthorpe in 1814, to him a sacred site, and inspected the legendary apple tree, and even attempted to take a graft from it.
the most glorious and perhaps misleading Eureka story in British science.
He also emphasised the importance of biography for understanding ‘the scientific process by which a mind of acknowledged power actually proceeds in the path of successful enquiry’.
Newton’s most famous remark about the process of scientific discovery: ‘I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great Ocean of truth lay all before me.’ It was a modest and yet thrilling image, which would be carried by thousands of Victorian schoolchildren – and their parents — to the holiday beaches and sea-bathing that were just becoming popular.
Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus had
She presented this as a moment of terrible, blasphemous and irreversible scientific hubris.
Mary Somerville’s On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences
She quietly suggests that ‘not only man, but the globe he inhabits — nay the whole system of which it forms so small a part — might be annihilated, and its extinction be unperceived in the immensity of creation’.
Unperceived by God? Or without any God to perceive it?
none of man’s physical perceptions is ultimately capable of yielding any objective account of the surrounding universe at
no object is seen by us in its true place, owing to aberration;
Here our knowledge ends; the mysterious influence of matter on mind will in all probability be for ever hid from man.’63
Erasmus Darwin’s grandson, Charles Darwin,
‘No opinion can be heretical but that which is not true,’ declared Sedgwick stoutly at the Geological Society. ‘Conflicting falsehood we can comprehend; but truths can never war against each other. I affirm, therefore that we have nothing to fear from the results of our enquiries, provided they be followed in the laborious but secure road of honest induction.’
