(1979). William Whewell, natural theology and the philosophy of science in mid nineteenth century Britain. Annals of Science: Vol. 36, No. 5, pp. 493-516.

In this paper I discuss a cardboard dissected globe made in 1813 by Edward Mogg, a cartographer and map seller, to instruct children in the principles of astronomy. Since little is known about the maker or the specific object, I draw on evidence beyond the sphere itself to construct an account of how the object might have been used. In particular I address conversation as a key part of astronomical education and examine the way in which the cardboard plates of (...) the sphere, the presentation slipcase and the accompanying booklet would have prepared young learners for polite astronomical discourse around large instruments in later life.Keywords: Dissected globe; Edward Mogg; Educational toys; Astronomy; Conversation. (shrink)

Published within weeks of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, Isabelle Duncan's Pre-Adamite Man is the first full-length treatment of preadamism by an evangelical. Intended as a reconciliation of Genesis and geology, Duncan's work gained immediacy when it was published shortly after the September 1859 revelations that men had walked among the mammoths. Written in the tradition of evangelical ‘Christian philosophy’, Pre-Adamite Man deploys innovative biblical hermeneutics and recent trends in geology to set out both a biblical preadamite theory, and an (...) unorthodox angelology. Duncan responded to contemporary secular interpretations of geology by pushing evangelical concordist strategies to new frontiers, filling out an acceptance of an ancient earth with new biblically informed catastrophist proposals and extensions of salvation history, while simultaneously retaining a firm commitment to plenary inspiration. The product is a highly readable book that operates both as an accessible treatment of geology and a theological discourse. Running through six printings between 1860 and 1866, the book was reviewed by many of the period's leading journals and created a minor controversy among evangelicals. This study both brings to life this previously neglected episode in scriptural geology, and adds to recent work on Victorian popular science writing. (shrink)

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the opinion of science, as well as of philosophy and even religion, was, at least in Britain, firmly in the camp of the plurality of worlds, the view that intelligent life exists on other celestial bodies. William Whewell, considered an expert on science, philosophy and religion, would have been expected to support this position. Yet he surprised everyone in 1853 by publishing a work arguing strongly against the plurality view. This was even stranger (...) given that he had endorsed pluralism twenty years earlier in his contribution to the Bridgewater Treatises. In this paper I show that the shift in Whewell’s view was motivated by three factors: the influence of Richard Owen’s theory of archetypes on Whewell’s view of the argument from design, and Whewell’s perception of the need to strengthen such arguments in light of evolutionary accounts of human origins; important developments in his view of philosophy and his role as a scientific expert; and new findings in astronomy. An examination of the development of Whewell’s position provides a lens through which we can view the interplay of theology, philosophy and science in the plurality of worlds debate.Keywords: William Whewell; Plurality of worlds; Natural theology; Analogies; Archetypes; Conjectures; Evolution. (shrink)

The claim that the nineteenth century was a period of major transition for the relation between theology and natural science has become a historical truism. With its implications for the design argument and the doctrines of divine providence, Darwin's theory of evolution has rightly attracted the attention of scholars of Victorian science. Yet so much emphasis not only on Darwin himself, but on the life sciences generally, has tended to obscure some important issues concerning the relation of theology to natural (...) science in the first half of the nineteenth century. As John Brooke has argued recently, natural theology in this pre-Darwinian period was far from being an essentially static, autonomous, and monolithic set of presuppositions about the existence of design in nature, but was, for various reasons, in a fragmented and disordered state. The general aim of the present note is to suggest some further dimensions to historical debates about the nature of natural theology, and in particular to emphasize the need for an examination of the physical sciences as well as the life sciences in this period. (shrink)

In his comprehensive survey of the work of William Herschel, published in the Annuaire du Bureau des Longitudes for 1842, Dominique Arago argued that the life of the great astronomer ‘had the rare privilege of forming an epoch in an extended branch of astronomy’. Arago also noted, however, that Herschel's ideas were often taken as ‘the conceptions of a madman’, even if they were subsequently accepted. This fact, commented Arago, ‘seems to me one that deserves to appear in the history (...) of science’. From the time Herschel published his first paper in the Philosophical transactions in 1781, he was subjected to the suggestion of lunacy. His patron and friend William Watson, told him that after his claims for the extraordinary power of his telescopes, ‘your prognosis that some would think you fit for Bedlam has been verified’. On learning of Herschel's supremely accurate new micrometer, the astronomer Alexander Aubert exclaimed to Herschel that ‘we would go to Bedlam together’: Aubert wrote to Herschel in January 1782 that he should ‘mind not a few jealous barking puppies: a little time will clear up the matter, and if it lays in my power you would not be sent to Bedlam alone, for I incline much to be of the party’. (shrink)

The ArgumentIt is often assumed that all sciences travel the path of increasing precision and quantification. It is also assumed that such processes transcend the boundaries of rival scientific disciplines. The history of the personal equation has been cited as an example: the “personal equation” was the name given by astronomers after Bessel to the differences in measured transit times recorded by observers in the same situation. Later in the nineteenth century Wilhelm Wundt used this phenomenon as a type for (...) his experiments on reaction times. For historians of psychology, this has been taken to be an exemplary case where quantified laboratory science rescued astronomy by showing that this was really a psychological phenomenon measurable only in complication experiments. This paper challenges this story. Astronomers neither ignored, nor despaired of, the personality problem. Instead, the managers of the great observatories developed a new chronometric regime of vigilant surveillance of subordinate observers. The astronomers' solution was thus intimately connected with social and material changes in their way of life: a division of labor in the observatories, a network of observing sites, a mechanization of observation. The paper documents these changes and then presents a study of one case where managers, amateurs, and psychologists clashed for authority over the personality problem. Measurement is given its meaning when situated in specific contexts of styles of work and institutions. Disciplines give meanings to values, and often resist attempts by others to redefine these meanings or to gain authority over measurement. Quantification is not a self-evident nor inevitable process in science's history, but possesses a remarkable cultural history of its own. (shrink)

The ArgumentThe article explores the reasons for the rise to prominence of Newtonian natural theology in the period following the publication of thePrincipiain 1687, its continued importance throughout the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, and possible explanations for its rapid decline in the second half of the nineteenth century. It argues that the career of Newtonian natural theology cannot be explained solely in terms of internal intellectual developments such as the theology of Newton's clerical admirers or the (...) impact of the work of Hume or of Charles Darwin. While such intellectual movements are undoubtedly of considerable importance in accounting for the rise and fall of Newtonian natural theology, they do not of themselves explain why British society was more receptive to particular bodies of thought in some periods rather than in others. Hence this article – in common with a number of recent studies – attempts to draw some connections between the growth of Newtonian natural theology and the character of Augustan society and politics; it also attempts to link the decline of this tradition with such nineteenth-century developments as the growing separation between church and state and the secularization of the universities and of scientific and intellectual life more generally. (shrink)

Astronomers of the first half of the nineteenth century viewed our solar system entirely differently from the way twentieth-century astronomers viewed it. In the earlier period the dominant image was of a set of planets and moons, both of which kinds of bodies were inhabited by intelligent beings comparable to humans. By the early twentieth century, science had driven these beings from every planet in our system except the Earth, leaving our solar system as more or less desolate regions for (...) the most part bereft of intelligent life. This essay traces this extinction and its relation to religious thought, noting the role played in it by Sir John Herschel and especially by William Whewell. The inverse square laws for gravitation, heat radiation, and light receive special attention, as does the question of the relevance of the Christian notions of a divine incarnation and redemption. (shrink)

. The object is to examine strategies commonly used to heighten a sense of the sacred in nature. It is argued that moves designed to reinforce a concept of Providence have been the very ones to release new opportunities for secular readings. Several case studies reveal this fluidity across a sacred‐secular divide. The irony whereby sacred readings of nature would graduate into the secular is also shown to operate in reverse as anti‐providentialist strategies invited their own refutation. The analysis is (...) used to support the claim that the sciences have put fewer constraints on religious belief than is generally assumed. (shrink)