The Philosophical Breakfast Club

by Laura J. Snyder

  In the third edition of his History of the Inductive Sciences, published in 1857, Whewell praised the magnetic campaign as “by far the greatest scientific undertaking the world has ever seen.”95 This may seem to be vastly overstating the case. But Whewell was thinking not only of the results for magnetic science, but of those gained by science as a whole: especially the “recognition and execution of the duty of forwarding science in general by national exertions.” What he had begun with his tide researches—international cooperation in and public funding of scientific enterprises—the magnetic crusade had continued on a grand scale never before seen.

  ON THE EVE of the new year of 1840, John Herschel gathered with his family for their last holiday celebration at their home in Slough. The great forty-foot telescope, used by his father to discover Uranus and to peer beyond the galaxy, had been dismantled, the timbers of its mounting having become dangerously decayed. The family assembled inside the tube, where royalty and archbishops had walked so many decades before. Together they raised their talented voices in harmony, singing a “Requiem of the Forty Feet Reflector at Slough,” composed by John Herschel:

  In the old Telescope’s tube we sit,

  And the shades of the past around us flit,

  His requiem sing we with shout and din,

  While the old year goes out and the new comes in.

  Merrily, merrily, let us all sing,

  And make the old telescope rattle and ring.

  The tube was then sealed, and laid horizontally on three stone piers in the garden at Observatory House in Slough. Today nothing remains but a monument to the Herschels on Windsor Road, near where the house once stood.96

  10

  ANGELS AND FAIRIES

  WILLIAM WHEWELL WAS NOW FORTY-SIX YEARS OLD. LONELY, feeling ancient, surrounded by younger men coming up as fellows at Trinity, he suddenly realized that he was no longer content with his life. He confided his despair to his old friend Hare, by now archdeacon in his comfortable living at Herstmonceux, at the end of 1840. “My inducements to stay in college diminish. Friends depart or become separated from me by change of habits. I do not make new intimacies easily, hardly at all. College rooms are no home for declining years.”1 It was time, Whewell felt, to marry. He began to desire the “warmth of a shared hearth.” His life at Cambridge had become “morally and spiritually unwholesome.”2 Perhaps, like many of the fellows, Whewell had been visiting the prostitutes in Barnwell, or even in London (his discreet Victorian biographer, Isaac Todhunter, remarked in his private notes for his book on Whewell that in the 1830s “his incessant journeys to London [are] very remarkable,” suggesting some kind of illicit purpose to them).3 But in order to marry, he would have to give up his fellowship. He had been Professor of Moral Philosophy since 1838; this position could be held by a married man, but it did not pay enough to support a family. Whewell began to consider his other options.

  In December 1840, Whewell heard that George Waddington was about to leave his parish of Masham in Yorkshire, in the north of England. Waddington had been at Trinity with Whewell, first as an undergraduate and then as a fellow; the two men had gone through the process of being ordained ministers of the Church of England at the same time. Waddington, who had a reputation as a historian of some note, was appointed to the vicarage of Masham in 1834. Whewell learned that Waddington was giving up the position there to become dean of Durham. As Whewell told Hare, Masham had been “improved by commutation”—thanks to the work of Jones and his colleagues at the Tithe Office, the position was now worth a reasonable amount of money each year, indeed it was “a tolerably good living.” Although Whewell’s professorship could be held at the same time as a parish position, Masham was nearly two hundred miles from Cambridge, so Whewell would either have to give up his lecturing or live part of the time in Cambridge, away from the parish. Previous to Whewell’s tenure, there is no record of any holder of the Moral Philosophy professorship giving lectures; Whewell, however, believed that professors should lecture, as he had argued with Babbage many times over the years. Whewell’s lectures on moral philosophy were attended by up to fifty students at a time, not bad in the days before the Moral Sciences Tripos, and when the charismatic and popular Sedgwick was getting only thirty students—who were outnumbered, sometimes, by local ladies—at his geology lectures.4

  Whewell asked Hare for his opinion. “Am I fit to take care of souls?” Whewell plaintively asked his friend. “Am I not too adverse to business? Too unsympathizing with common people?” Hare’s answer was measured. He agreed that Whewell appeared to need a change. When they had seen each other a year ago, Hare admitted to his friend, he did seem to be “outliving” his contemporaries at Trinity. Whewell was right, he felt, that “college rooms are not a fit home for one’s later years.” Already in the eighteenth century, the Anglican theologian George Faber had pronounced that “a fellowship is an excellent breakfast, an indifferent dinner, and a most miserable supper.”5 On the other hand, Hare cautioned, it was most important to avoid an “uncongenial calling.” Hare recalled how depressed he had been during the two years he was studying law after graduating from Cambridge; he was still grateful to Whewell for “rescuing” him from his “misery” by having him invited back to Cambridge as the lecturer in Classics. Hare told Whewell frankly that “your ministry in this world seems to me to be that of a doctor, rather than a pastor; and what I should wish for you would be a post where you might fulfill that ministry—the Mastership of Trinity, a deanery, or something of that sort.” He reminded Whewell ominously that “a country parson’s life is almost infallibly one almost devoid of everything like intellectual society.”6

  Still, Whewell continued seriously to consider the life of a country clergyman. Over the Christmas holiday, he joined a large party from Cambridge in visiting Ely, where his friend George Peacock had been appointed dean the year before (Peacock was soon known as “the scientific Dean”).7 Jones was there as well; he wrote to Herschel that “I have been to Ely with Peacock. Whewell and Sedgwick were there and we joked and talked as in olden time—Whewell is getting (between ourselves) moody and uneasy at Cambridge and will partially leave I think as soon as a living which he likes [opens up] keeping his Professorship and taking to himself a wife—I hope he may find a good one.”8 (Jones also informed Herschel that he and his colleagues had finally settled the issue of the tithes owed by Herschel for his Kent property: “I had a world of plague” about it, he confided.) On January 1, Whewell left Ely to travel to Masham, to meet with Waddington and to examine the parish for himself.

  It was so unusual for a Cambridge don to travel to Masham that even the nearby Lancashire newspapers reported on Whewell’s visit.9 But by February Whewell had decided not to seek the position in Masham. As he told his sister Ann, “The parish is very large, very populous, and in various ways very laborious.”10 To Murchison’s wife, Whewell admitted, “I could not make out to my satisfaction that it would do for me or I for it; so I wait another chance.”11 Soon, another chance opened up for him.

  PART OF WHEWELL’S restlessness arose from his feeling that, as he told Hare, he had accomplished all he had wanted in his position as a fellow of Trinity. He had done his best to improve mathematical studies at the university, by helping to initiate the reforms sought by the Analytical Society decades earlier. He had completed his magisterial survey of the history of science, and had just published his major work on scientific method, Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. As Whewell explained in his preface to the Philosophy, his friend Sedgwick had suggested, after reading his History of the Inductive Sciences, that he “ought to add a paragraph or two at the end, by way of Moral to the story.” Whewell had replied to Sedgwick that “the Moral would be as long as the story itself!”12 By the “moral” of the story, Sedgwick meant the conclusions that could be drawn about scientific method from the study of the history of science. But Whewell had intended all along to draw such conclusions from that work.

  Whewell had long
believed that in order to prescribe how scientists ought to invent their theories, it was first necessary to study how they have, in fact, invented their theories throughout history. “Armchair” philosophizing about scientific method was useless. One criticism he had made of Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse in his review of the book was that its author had presented his view of scientific method without first showing that this method had been used to make the great discoveries of the past. Whewell purposefully wrote his History of the Inductive Sciences before writing his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, and he drew attention to this fact by the subtitle of the latter work, which pointed out that the philosophy of the sciences contained within it was Founded upon Their History.

  When the History of the Inductive Sciences appeared in 1837, in three volumes totaling 1,600 pages, it was the first comprehensive work on the topic ever published. In it Whewell was able to showcase his extensive knowledge of every major scientific field: astronomy, mechanics, optics, mineralogy, botany, geology, acoustics, comparative anatomy, and others. He gained this expertise not only by his own reading and researches into the topics, but also by taking advantage of his friendships with leading scientists in each of these fields, including Herschel, Faraday, Sedgwick, Airy, and Richard Owen, each of whom answered queries from Whewell on the history and present state of their respective areas.

  Whewell cast the entire history of science as the history of progressive development, leading men and women ever closer to the truth—a view not surprising in an age of such optimism, when Britain was expanding its international empire and its scientists were expanding the empire of knowledge. Whewell described every scientific discipline as having a dramatic form, with major discoveries marking “epochs” in the field, preceded by “preludes” and followed by “sequels.” (In the Preliminary Discourse, Herschel had used the term “epoch” to describe important stages in the history of science; it was a term already in use in astronomy and geology.)13 Whewell dedicated the work to Herschel, dating the dedication from Jones’s house on Hyde Park Street, to show how important the two had been in the project, which, Whewell told Herschel, had been “growing closer to my heart, ever since our undergraduate days.”14 Babbage did not make it to the dedication page, having already distanced himself from the shared project of the Philosophical Breakfast Club.

  Whewell found that the history of science testified to the value of Bacon’s inductive method. Like Bacon, Whewell believed that gaining scientific knowledge required a method that struck a middle course between two kinds of approaches to knowledge: the purely empirical, focused only on the information received from the senses, and the purely rational, focusing on the ideas or concepts found in the mind. Whewell wished to develop a scientific method appropriate for the scientific bee, as Bacon had put it, not for the ant or the spider, and he used his study of the history of science to cultivate such a view.

  In his Philosophy, Whewell accordingly described all knowledge of the world as requiring both an empirical dimension, something that comes from the world itself, and a rational element, something derived from our minds. The elements that come to us from outside are the perceptions or sensations that give us information about the world. The elements that come from inside are the ideas and concepts of the mind. Whewell explained that the idea of space is what enables us to understand objects as existing in a particular place, with a particular shape and size. Each idea gives rise to more-specific concepts, such as, for the idea of space, the concepts of “triangle” and “straight line,” or, for the idea of cause, the concept of “force” (which is one type of cause).

  In order to have knowledge of the physical world, we use our ideas and concepts as the “thread” on which we string the facts about the world, the “pearls.” We do this by a process Whewell called “colligation”—bringing together a number of distinct facts by the use of a concept or idea. It is the concept or idea that provides a way to organize that “blooming buzzing confusion” of facts, as the philosopher William James would put it half a century later.

  Whewell revealed that the astronomer Johannes Kepler had used this kind of reasoning when he discovered the law that planetary orbits are elliptical, rather than circular as had been thought for thousands of years before. His expertise in mathematics, especially geometry, ensured that Kepler had in his mind very clear concepts of the geometrical shapes, including the ellipse (a type of oval figure). He used this concept to colligate the observed places of the planet Mars, showing that this concept accounted for the observations more accurately than did the concept of a circle. The orbit is extremely close to circular; Kepler’s achievement was not a trivial matter of plotting the observed points of Mars’s orbit on a piece of graph paper, connecting the dots, and seeing that the proper curve was an ellipse. Rather, it required insight based on great mathematical skill to see that the orbit described an ellipse. Kepler next inferred that if Mars’s orbit was elliptical, then—since it had always been assumed that the orbits of all the planets would describe the same curve—all the planetary orbits were elliptical. He thus invented his first law of planetary motion, which states that the orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the sun at one focus (one end of the ellipse).

  One important innovation in Whewell’s view of scientific discovery was his recognition that in many cases finding the correct concept to use in colligating the facts is the most difficult and most crucial part of discovering a new theory. Kepler’s mentor and employer, the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, had made the extraordinarily precise and accurate observations of Mars later used by Kepler. Yet even Brahe did not colligate these data using the concept of an ellipse—he continued to “see” the orbit as circular. The revolutionary aspect of Kepler’s discovery was not making the observations of the planet’s positions—though these were a necessary precondition for the discovery—but putting these together using the new concept of an ellipse.

  This insight led Whewell to the claim that, as he put it, “no discovery is the work of accident.” The mind of the scientist must be “prepared,” with clear concepts that are the correct ones to use to colligate the facts, in order to make new discoveries. Although Lord Byron, in his poem “Don Juan,” publicized the apocryphal story of Newton discovering the law of universal gravitation because an apple fell before his eyes (“And this is the sole mortal who could grapple / Since Adam, with a fall, or with an apple”), Whewell pointed out that many thousands of people had seen apples fall prior to Newton, and yet it required the genius of Newton to see that the planets were moved in their orbits by the same force that caused an apple to fall perpendicular to the ground. Newton’s mind, like Kepler’s, was “well prepared” for his discovery. Whewell’s view of scientific method thus differs radically from that famously proposed in the twentieth century by Karl Popper, who argued that discovering scientific theories is not a rational matter, but is more often than not purely accidental. According to Whewell, even though the moment of discovery might seem to the scientist himself or herself to be a “eureka” moment coming out of the blue, in fact it is an insight for which the scientist’s mind was prepared by his or her prior study of nature and its laws.

  The inspiration for Whewell’s belief in the crucial role of clearly formulated concepts in scientific knowledge originated from an unlikely source: Whewell’s study of architecture. He had been interested in architecture for years. When Whewell helped found the Cambridge Philosophical Society in 1819, the first paper he delivered to the group was on architecture. In 1823 he had toured Normandy with his pupil Kenelm Digby, who would later become an important writer on ecclesiastical architecture. At the end of the decade Whewell studied Gothic architecture in the Rhine region of Germany, publishing a work on this topic in 1830. In the summer of 1832 he toured Picardy and Normandy with Thomas Rickman, then the most eminent architectural historian in England. Whewell, at that time professor of mineralogy at Cambridge, was at work on the second edition of his Architectural Notes on German Chu
rches. The two men had quite an adventure on that trip. As Whewell recalled:

  “A serjeant-major [sic] of the national guard of Norrey considered our attention to his church to be alarming, and declared us his prisoners; and as the mayor of that place was from home, having gone to market to sell his corn, we were … marched under a guard of three sabers and two fowling-pieces to the next village, Bretteville, where the mayor was reasonable enough to decide that antiquaries were not dangerous people, and dismissed us.”15

  Rickman and Whewell sought to create a “science of architecture”—to make architectural studies more precise, avoiding haphazard speculation and focusing on careful description before theorizing about the causes of the rise of new architectural styles. Whewell explicitly compared architecture to the classifying sciences, such as botany, rather than the other arts such as painting.16 The student of architecture should construct “taxonomies” of the different parts of buildings, just as a botanist would describe a plant by detailing its kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species.17 In later years Whewell would have a friendly argument with the art critic John Ruskin, who wanted the study of architecture to be less scientific and more romantic, full of poetical language and feeling.18