by Will Durant
In 1810, before an audience at the Royal Institution, Davy performed experiments demonstrating the power of an electric current, in passing from one carbon filament to another, to produce both light and heat. He described the operation:
When pieces of charcoal about an inch long and one-sixth of an inch in diameter were brought near each other (within the thirtieth or fortieth of an inch), a bright spark was produced, and more than half the volume of the charcoal became ignited to whiteness; and, by withdrawing the points from each other, a constant discharge took place through the heated air, in a space equal to at least four inches, producing a most brilliant ascending arch of light…. When any substance was introduced into this arch, it instantly became ignited; platina melted as readily in it as wax in a common candle; quartz, the sapphire, magnesia, lime, all entered into fusion.6
The potentialities of this process of generating light and heat were not developed until cheaper ways of producing electric current were invented; but in that brilliant experiment lay the electric blast furnace, and the transformation of night into day for half the population of the earth.
In 1813, accompanied by his young assistant Michael Faraday, and armed with a safe-conduct issued by Napoleon while nearly all Europe was at war, Davy traveled through France and Italy, visiting laboratories, making experiments, exploring the properties of iodine, and proving that the diamond is a form of carbon. Returning to England, he studied the causes of mine explosions, and invented a safety lamp for miners. In 1818 the Prince Regent made him a baronet. In 1820 he succeeded Banks as president of the Royal Society. In 1827, his health having begun to fail, he gave up science for fishing, and wrote a book thereon, illuminated by his own drawings. In 1829, partly paralyzed, he went to Rome to be “a ruin amongst ruins,”7 but he died before the year was out. He had been allowed only fifty-one years, but he had crowded many lives into that half century. He was a good great man and one of those redeeming men and women who must be weighed in the balance against our ignorance and sins.
IV. BIOLOGY: ERASMUS DARWIN
Biology did not, as yet, do as well in England as physics, chemistry, and geography; these were akin and helpful to industry and commerce; but biology revealed the tragedy as well as the splendor of life, and troubled religious belief.
Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles, has already received our homage,*but he was a spark in the brilliance of this age, since it saw the publication of his Botanic Garden (1792), Zoonomia (1794–96), and The Temple of Nature (1803). These books were all written from an evolutionary point of view. They agreed with Lamarck in basing the theory upon the hope that adaptive habits and organs, developed by desire and effort, might, if strengthened through many generations, be written transmissibly upon nerves and flesh. The genial doctor, who bore a great name fore and aft, sought to reconcile evolution with religion by suggesting that all animal life had begun with “one living filament which the first great Cause imbued with animality,” leaving it to “improve by its own inherent activity, and to deliver down these improvements by generation to posterity, world without end.”8
The perennial debate between religion and science, though muted in this age, entered into the once guarded realm of psychology as Hartley and Priestley prepared a physiological interpretation of the association of ideas, and as anatomists progressively revealed the correlation between body and mind. In 1811 Charles Bell published A New Idea of the Anatomy of the Brain, in which he seemed to prove that specific parts of the nervous system convey sense impressions to specific parts of the brain, and specific nerves carry motor impulses to specific organs of response. The phenomena of hypnotism, increasingly abundant, seemed to indicate a physiological transformation of sensation into idea into action. The effects of opium and other drugs in inducing sleep, affecting dreams, stimulating the imagination and weakening the will (as in Coleridge and De Quincey) further called in question the freedom of the will, reducing it to the algebraic sum of competing images or impulses. And the rising status, scientific dispute, and social standing of the medical profession, compared with the lowered status and reduced vitality of the Anglican clergy, seemed to reflect the secret spread of religious indifference, or doubt, or unbelief.
V. MEDICINE: JENNER
The medical fraternity hardly deserved that name, for it fully reflected the British penchant for class or grade distinctions. The Royal College of Physicians, proud of its establishment by Henry VIII in 1518, limited its “associate” memberships to some fifty men who had taken a degree at Oxford or Cambridge, and its “licentiate” memberships to about fifty other distinguished practitioners. These hundred men served as a kind of House of Lords to the medicos of England. They earned substantial incomes, sometimes as high as twenty thousand pounds a year. They could not become peers, but they could be knighted, and might aspire to a baronetcy. Of markedly lower status was the Royal College of Surgeons, established in 1800. Below these were the accoucheurs, male midwives, who specialized in drawing embryos out of their warm security into the competitive world. At the bottom of the healers were the apothecaries, who provided nearly all the medical care available in rural areas.
Neither of these “colleges” offered medical education except for occasional lectures by famous physicians. Neither Oxford nor Cambridge had a school of medicine; students who desired university training in medicine had to seek it in Scotland. Otherwise the training of English doctors was left to the private schools that grew in the neighborhood of the great hospitals raised by private philanthropy. Sir Thomas Bernard spent much of his wealth in reforming the famous “Foundlings’ Hospital” in the north of London, and shared with other wealthy men in financing, in London and elsewhere, free clinics for the treatment of cancer, ophthalmia, and hernia. But the poor sanitation of the cities spread diseases, or generated new ones, as fast as medicine could cure them.
In 1806 London recorded a singular event: it had gone a full week without a death from smallpox—that pustulous, feverish, face-marring, and infectious disease which had once been epidemic in England, and might at any time swell again into a deadly plague.
A modest English physician, Edward Jenner—addicted to hunting, botany, composing poetry, and playing the flute or the violin—made the miracle week possible by a decade of inoculations that finally overcame the conservatism of British society. The prevention of smallpox by inoculation with weakened virus from a smallpox-infected human being had been practiced by the ancient Chinese; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had found it customary in the Constantinople of 1717; on her return to England she recommended the procedure there. It was tried upon criminals, then upon orphans, with considerable success. In 1760 Drs. Robert and Daniel Sutton reported that in thirty thousand cases of smallpox inoculation they had had twelve hundred fatalities. Could a surer method of preventing smallpox be found?
Jenner was led to a better way by noting that many milkmaids in his native Gloucestershire contracted cowpox from infected nipples of cows, and that these women were thereafter immune to smallpox. It occurred to him that a like immunity might be established by inoculating with a vaccine (vacca is Latin for cow) made from virus of a pox-infected cow. In a paper published in 1798 Jenner recounted a venturesome procedure which laid the foundations of experimental medicine and immunology.
… I selected a healthy boy, about eight years old, for the purpose of inoculation for [with] the Cow Pox. The matter was taken from a sore on the hand of a dairymaid who was infected by her master’s cows, and it was inserted, on the 14th of May, 1796, in the arm of the boy…. On the seventh day he complained of uneasiness,… and on the ninth he became a little chilly, lost his appetite, and had a slight headache…. On the following day he was perfectly well….
In order to acertain whether the boy, after feeling so slight an affection of the system from the Cow Pox virus, was secure for the contagion of the Small Pox, he was inoculated, the 1st of July following, with variolous matter [variola is Latin for smallpox] immediately taken from a
pustule…. No disease followed…. Several months afterwards he was again inoculated with variolous matter, but no sensible effect was produced in the constitution.9
Jenner went on to describe twenty-two other cases of similar procedure with completely satisfactory results. He met with condemnation for what seemed to be human vivisection, and he tried to atone for using a consenting minor by building a cottage for him and planting a rose garden for him with his own hands.10 In 1802 and 1807 Parliament voted Jenner £30,000 to improve and spread his methods. In the course of the nineteenth century smallpox almost disappeared from Europe and America, and when it occurred it was in unvaccinated individuals. Vaccination was applied to other ailments, and the new science of immunology shared with other medical advances, and with public sanitation, in giving modern communities as much health as is allowed by the harassments of poverty, the fertility of ignorance, the recklessness of appetite, and the patient inventiveness of disease.
CHAPTER XIX
English Philosophy
SCIENCE in the Britain of 1789–1815 had little influence on philosophy. “Natural philosophy”—i.e., the physical sciences—could be reconciled with a liberal theology, and even the idea of evolution could be domesticated by interpreting the six “days” of Creation as elastic aeons of development. The upper classes, now that their flirtation with Voltaire and the Encyclopedists had been ended by the Revolution, had come to distrust ideas as an infectious disease of youth; they considered weekly worship a wise investment in social order and political stability, and they complained that Prime Minister Pitt found no time to go to church. There were some privately skeptical bishops, but they were known for their public piety. Nevertheless, the old conflict continued. In the same year 1794 two opposite voices proclaimed it: Thomas Paine in The Age of Reason, and William Paley in A View of the Evidences of Christianity. A glance at both of them will suggest the temper of the time.
I. TOM PAINE ON CHRISTIANITY
“Tom” Paine, as two continents came to call him, was an Englishman, born to a Quaker family at Thetford, Norfolk, in 1737; but, on the advice of Benjamin Franklin, he emigrated to America in 1774, and took an active part in the American Revolution. General Washington credited Paine’s booklet Common Sense (January, 1776), with having “worked a powerful change in the minds of many men.”1 During the Revolutionary War, as an aide-de-camp to General Nathanael Greene, he issued a series of tracts—The Crisis—to keep up the spirit of the rebel army and citizenry; one of these began with a famous line—”These are the times that try men’s souls.” From 1787 to 1802 he lived chiefly in Europe, working for the French Revolution both in France and in England. We have seen him risking his head by voting for commuting the sentence of Louis XVI from death to exile. In December of that year 1793, apparently at the instigation of Robespierre,2 the Convention decreed the expulsion of all foreigners from its membership. There were only two: Anacharsis Cloots and Thomas Paine. Expecting arrest, Paine wrote hurriedly what is now Part I of The Age of Reason. He sent the manuscript to America with the following dedication.
To my Fellow-Citizens of the United States of America: I put the following work under your protection. It contains my opinions on religion. You will do me the justice to remember that I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that may be to mine. He who denies to another his right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.
The most formidable weapon against error of every kind is Reason, and I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall.
Your affectionate friend and fellow-citizen.
THOS. PAINE
Paris, Jan. 27, 1794
At the outset Paine gave an unexpected reason why he had written the book: not to destroy religion, but to prevent the decay of its irrational forms from undermining social order, “lest in the general wreck of superstition, of false systems of government, and false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity, and of the theology that is true.” And he added, reassuringly: “I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.”3
Then he drew his Occam’s razor:
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches… appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.4
He admired Christ as “a virtuous and an amiable man,” and “the morality that he preached and practiced was of the most benevolent kind”; but the story of his being fathered by a god was just a variation of a myth common among the pagans.
Almost all the extraordinary men that lived under the heathen mythology were reputed to be the sons of… gods… The intercourse of gods with women was then a matter of familiar opinion. Their Jupiter, according to their accounts, had cohabited with hundreds. The story, therefore, had nothing in it either new, wonderful, or obscene; it was conformable to the opinions that then prevailed among the people called Gentiles,… and it was those people only that believed it. The Jews, who had kept strictly to the belief of one God and no more, and had always rejected the heathen mythology, never credited the story.5
So the Christian mythology was merely the pagan mythology in a new form.
The trinity of the gods that then followed was no other than a reduction of the former plurality, which was about twenty or thirty thousand; the statue of Mary succeeded that of Diane of Ephesus; the deification of heroes changed into the canonization of saints. The mythologists had gods for everything; the Christian mythologists had saints for everything; the Church had become as crowded with one as the pantheon had been with the other… The Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient Mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue; and it yet remains to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious fraud.6
Paine then played his searchlight of reason upon the Book of Genesis, and, having no patience with parables, fell heavily upon Eve and the apple. Like Milton, he was fascinated by Satan, the first of all rebels. Here was an angel who, for trying to depose a monarch, had been plunged into hell, there to suffer time without end. Nevertheless he must have escaped those inextinguishable fires now and then, for he had found his way into the Garden of Eden, and could tempt most sinuously; he could promise knowledge to Eve and half the world to Christ. The Christian mythology, Paine marveled, did Satan wondrous honor; it assumed that he could compel the Almighty to send his son down to Judea and be crucified to recover for him at least a part of a planet obviously in love with Satan; and despite that crucifixion, the Devil still retained all non-Christian realms, and had millions of servitors in Christendom itself.
All this, said our doubting Thomas, was offered us most solemnly, on the word of the Almighty himself, through a series of amanuenses from Moses to Saint Paul. Paine rejected it as a tale fit for nurseries, and for adults too busy with bread and butter, sickness and mortality, to question the promissory notes sold to them by the theologians. To stronger souls he offered a God not fashioned like man, but conceived as the life of the universe.
It is only in the Creation that all of our ideas… of God can unite. The Creation speaketh an universal language;… and this word of God reveals to man all that is necessary for man to know of God.
Do we want to contemplate his power? We see it in the immensity of the Creation. Do we want to contemplate his wisdom? We see it in the unchangeable order by which the incomprehensible whole is governed. Do we want to contemplate his munificence? We see it in the abandon with which he fills the earth. Do we want to contemplate his mercy? We see it in his not withholding that abundance even from the unthankful. In fine, do we want to know what God is? Search not the book called the Scripture,… but the Scripture called the Creation.7
He was imprisoned from December 28, 1793, till the fall of Robespierre, July 27, 1794. On November 4 “the Convention, to repair as much as lay in their power the injustice I had sustained, invited me, publicly and unanimously, to return to the Convention,… and I accepted.”8 Amid the turmoil of the Thermidorean reaction he composed Part II of The Age of Reason; it was devoted to a laborious critique of the Bible, and added little to what more scholarly studies—many of them by clergymen—had already provided. Both in England and in America his protestations of belief in God were lost in his impassioned rejection of a Bible dear to the people and precious to the government, and he found himself without honor in both his native and his adoptive land. When, in 1802, he returned to New York (which had formerly rewarded his services to the American public by giving him a 300-acre estate at New Rochelle), he received a cool reception, only partly countered by Jefferson’s faithful friendship. His last seven years were darkened by addiction to drink. He died in New York in 1809. Ten years later William Cobbett had Paine’s bones removed to England. There his undiscourageable spirit, through his books, played a part in the long campaigns that produced the Reform Act of 1832.
Though Paine was a deist rather than an atheist, many believers in Christianity felt that his deism was only a polite cover for disbelief in a personal God. William Paley, rector of Bishop-Wearmouth, gave so able a defense of his faith in A View of the Evidences of Christianity (1794) that a reading of this book remained till 1900 a prerequisite for admission to Cambridge University. Still more famous was his Natural Theology (1802), which sought to prove the existence of a Supreme Intelligence by accumulating, from the sciences themselves, evidences of design in nature. If, he argued, a man who had never seen a watch came upon one and examined its mechanism, would he not take for granted that some intelligent being had designed it? But are there not in nature hundreds of operations indicating the arrangement of means to a desired effect?