The Philosophical Breakfast Club

by Laura J. Snyder

  Herschel was extremely unhappy during the next few years. He had to spend long periods separated from his family in gloomy rooms he had taken in Harley Street in London. He was not always able to get home to Collingwood over the weekends; one year he even missed Margaret’s birthday.

  Between his work at the mint and for the Royal Commission, Herschel was rising each morning at six, working at home on business of the Royal Commission until nine, then hurrying in to the mint, where he spent most of the day, rushing from there to the Great Exhibition every afternoon, and when the gates of the Crystal Palace closed for the night he would return wearily to Harley Street, where he would stay up finishing all his mint correspondence. His health got even worse; letters from this time find Herschel complaining about insomnia (for which Faraday sent him a “healing liquid,” some particularly fine whiskey), migraine headaches, nervous system disorders, and depression. In addition to Faraday’s whiskey, Herschel began to treat his discomfort and sleeplessness with opium and laudanum. The pain got so bad that, for a time, he was confined to a wheelchair, and looked old beyond his years, completely white-haired and with huge pouches under his eyes (as testified by a photograph taken of him around this time). He complained that his life had become “unendurable.” One bright spot came in December 1852, when his son Willy graduated with brilliant success from the Haileybury College, thanks to the extra tutoring he received from Jones. In May of 1853, Herschel tried to resign from the mint, but was implored by the assistant secretary to the treasury, Charles Edward Trevelyan, to stay on a little longer. He longed for the day he could leave the mint and return to Collingwood.

  HERSCHEL’S SITUATION was all the more bleak because of his service on the Royal Commission charged with proposing reforms of the curriculum and examination system at the University of Cambridge, a position that put him at odds with Whewell (and took up more of his time). As Master of Trinity and vice-chancellor of the university, Whewell had tried to be a force for change at Cambridge, pushing for rules requiring professors to lecture on material covered by the Tripos, and requiring students to attend the lectures of at least one professor. He was unsuccessful in these attempts to undermine the entrenched—and expensive—system of private tuition. But Whewell was victorious in another battle, one that helped establish science as a true profession, with a recognized form of training.

  In 1848, Whewell was responsible for introducing a new Tripos exam in the Natural Sciences, which covered anatomy, physiology, botany, geology, mineralogy, and chemistry—and the history and philosophy of science, for which Whewell’s books served as the main texts. (Whewell also supported a new Tripos in Classics and one in the Moral Sciences, which included moral philosophy, political economy, jurisprudence, English law, and modern history.) It took Whewell years of lobbying the other heads of colleges before the Natural Sciences Tripos was accepted as an avenue to degree the way the Mathematics Tripos was. At first, students could only sit for the exam after taking the Mathematics Tripos. This delay upset Whewell, who called the “fear of innovation” on the part of the university “very childish.”86 This requirement was overturned in 1860; finally, at that point, students could graduate with a degree in the natural sciences. Because of Whewell, the university was established as a place to train scientists as well as clergymen and mathematicians. Henry Sidgwick, who would later be appointed to the chair in Moral Philosophy previously held by Whewell, remarked that “it is to Whewell more than to any other single man that the revival of [natural and moral] Philosophy in Cambridge is to be attributed.”87

  At the same time as he pushed for reform at the university, however, Whewell bitterly resented the idea that change could be forced on Cambridge by the government, and he was dismayed that some of his old friends, such as Herschel, Peacock, and Sedgwick, were taking part in that effort by serving on the Royal Commission. Being on the opposite sides of this dispute upset both Herschel and Whewell, who argued good-naturedly about their differences, especially related to the power structure of the university: the commission was recommending a change to the old “caput” system, under which the heads of colleges exerted a disproportionate amount of power in university decisions.88 As one of those heads, Whewell was, naturally, loath to let that power go, complaining about “the democratic frenzy” that would be unleashed.89 With his usual mordant humor, Jones told Whewell after listening to his complaints about the Royal Commission, “I heartily wish they would make you dictator. The multitude of cooks will spoil the broth I fear.”90

  THE WINTER OF 1853–54 was a bitterly cold one. Whewell was spending the New Year’s holiday with Cordelia at Lowestoft, on the coast of Suffolk, in a cottage perched on a cliff over the sea. They had spent the last several winters there, and had purchased the house, called “Cliff Cottage,” two years earlier for £2,100. Whewell was advised in the transaction by Jones, who was also overseeing the investment of Cordelia’s marriage portion for his friend.91 Whewell wrote to Herschel, “We are here in the middle of intense winter; the ground covered with snow to the water’s edge, the wind howling, and the shore strewn with wrecks in various gradations of destruction.”92 He sent his regards to Herschel’s daughter Maria, who had spent three months with the Whewells over the summer in Kreuznach, near Bingen, in Prussia, where Cordelia was taken yearly for the spa cure they hoped would improve her rapidly failing health. The Carlyles had been correct, though cruel, to refer to Cordelia as “the sick one.”

  Whewell told Herschel that his new book had just appeared. At around the same time he informed his niece Kate Marshall, who had also accompanied the Whewells to Prussia that summer, “The murder (of the inhabitants of Jupiter) is out!”93

  Ever since Copernicus had shown that the earth was not the center of the universe, but just a planet circling the sun like all the others, most people assumed that other planets could, like earth, contain intelligent life. This notion that there was a “plurality of (inhabited) worlds” had even become an accepted tenet of natural theology, it being believed that empty planets, devoid of life, would indicate wastefulness on the part of God. Why would God have created so many worlds, if not to be the seats of life? Babbage had ended his book On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures with a rhapsodic depiction of the vastness of our universe, filled with so much life: as all these planets and moons and stars were “the work of the same Almighty Architect,” he argued, it was not credible that “no living eye should be gladdened by their forms of beauty, that no intellectual being should expand its faculties in deciphering their laws.”94

  Whewell had agreed with this view in 1833, in a passage of his Bridgewater Treatise that seems influenced by his reading of Babbage’s book, which had been published the year before. In this work Whewell agreed that it was possible that stars other than our sun might “have planets revolving about them, and these may, like our planet, be the seats of vegetable and animal and rational life.”95 Yet twenty years later in his work Of the Plurality of Worlds he reversed himself, rejecting out of hand the existence of intelligent life on other planets. Although the book argued against the mainstream view—or perhaps because it did—it became an instant sensation, selling out five editions by 1859.

  Whewell published the book anonymously, yet his authorship was no secret. One reviewer expressed a commonly held view both as to the argument and the author of the work:

  We scarcely expected that in the middle of the nineteenth century, a serious attempt would be made to restore the exploded idea of man’s supremacy over all other creatures in the universe; and still less that such an attempt could have been made by one whose mind was stored with scientific truths. Nevertheless, a champion has actually appeared, who boldly dares to combat against all the rational inhabitants of other spheres; and though as yet he wears his visor down, his dominant bearing, and the peculiar dexterity and power with which he wields his arms, indicate that this knight-errant of nursery notions can be none other than the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.96

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bsp; Another reviewer derided the author’s “moral Ptolemaism”: he was trying to put humans back to the center of the universe, if not literally as Ptolemy’s geocentric universe had it, then morally, in the sense that the whole universe was said to exist for us alone.97

  The brouhaha over Whewell’s book reminded Herschel of what had transpired while he was at the Cape of Good Hope nearly twenty years earlier, when all the world had been transfixed by reports that Herschel had seen “bat-men” on the surface of the moon.

  In 1833, Herschel had published his Treatise on Astronomy in Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopedia series (the same series in which his Preliminary Discourse had appeared). In this work, meant as a popular introduction to the topic, Herschel had speculated freely on the possibility of intelligent life existing on the planets and their moons, and even on the sun. He was following his father’s path; William Herschel had always believed that the sun was host to intelligent life, arguing that below a hot and gaseous atmosphere the sphere’s surface was actually cool enough to support life. In 1835, an American edition of John Herschel’s book appeared. While Herschel toiled away at the Cape of Good Hope, an American journalist decided to take advantage of the publicity surrounding Herschel’s expedition to increase circulation of his newspaper.

  Richard Adams Locke, a reporter for the New York Sun, used Herschel’s astronomical researches as the basis for a series of articles containing reports of a fantastical discovery. On August 21, 1835, the Sun referred to an article it had found in the pages of the Edinburgh Courant, announcing that Sir John Herschel had “made some astronomical discoveries of the most wonderful description, by means of an immense telescope of an entirely new principle.”98 Four days later the newspaper began to run “excerpts” purported to be from a report in the Edinburgh Journal of Science (Brewster’s publication).

  The first article detailed, in staid scientific language, the workings of this new kind of telescope, which supposedly had a magnifying power of 42,000, capable of almost unlimited resolution.99 (This was not as obviously outrageous a claim as it sounds; the public was aware that William Herschel’s telescopes had been so much more powerful than those of other telescope makers of his day that he was often accused of seeing things that no one else could, with their inferior instruments.) The next installment described the discovery of strange creatures on the moon: animals resembling small reindeer, moose, elk, horned bears, and bipedal beavers that carried their young in their arms “just like humans.”100 Finally, in the fourth article, it was revealed that Herschel had observed “flocks of large winged creatures” that greatly resembled men, with flesh-colored faces and large, broad foreheads. These “Vespertilio-homo,” or bat-men, had been observed in groups, gesticulating with each other, as if engaged in rational conversation.101

  As the American writer Edgar Allan Poe later noted enviously, the affair was “decidedly the greatest hit in the way of sensation … ever made by any similar fiction.”102 The Sun claimed that it had reached circulations of nearly twenty thousand a day while the articles ran. It later put out a pamphlet bringing the articles together with some fanciful drawings of the bat-men. Copies and translations of this pamphlet appeared in London, Glasgow, Hamburg, Paris, Cadiz, Lausanne, Lille, Seville, Florence, Livorno, Naples, Ravenna, Havana, and Mexico City.103

  Herschel first heard of the hoax at the end of the year (news traveled slowly to the Cape of Good Hope in those days).104 The Herschels seemed inclined at first to laugh the whole thing off. “Have you seen a very clever piece of imagination in an American Newspaper?” Margaret asked Caroline Herschel by letter. “Birds, beasts and fishes of strange shape, landscapes of every coloring, extraordinary scenes of lunar vegetation, and groups of the reasonable inhabitants of the Moon with wings at their backs, all pass in review before his … astonished gaze.”105 Basil Hall, writing from Paris, reassured Herschel that “at all events, it is fame—in its way.”106 But by the start of 1837 a now-exasperated Herschel told his aunt, “I have been pestered from all quarters with that ridiculous hoax about the Moon—in English French Italian and German!”107 Even into the 1840s, some continued to believe that Herschel had seen bat-men on the moon.108 Although Herschel felt “pestered” by the attention given to this hoax, he never gave up the belief that the celestial bodies were populated by all kinds of intelligent life, sprinkled throughout the universe—though by the 1860s he had rejected his father’s view that the sun could support life.109 When he heard that his friend Whewell was arguing other intelligent life out of existence, Herschel chided him gently, raising the specter of Voltaire’s Pangloss: “So this then is the best of all possible worlds? Oh dear, oh dear, ’tis a sad cutting down!”110

  Most reviews of Whewell’s book disparaged his position, but none were as harsh as the attacks by David Brewster, who had remained fiercely antagonistic toward Whewell ever since their dispute over the decline-of-science issue, decades before. Brewster had reviewed each of Whewell’s subsequent works with increasing rancor. He criticized Whewell’s Bridgewater Treatise for making natural theology “hostage” to science (the opposite of Babbage’s criticism of the book!).111 His complaints about Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences—mainly for ignoring his own important contributions to science—led Whewell to complain to Airy that Brewster seemed to think that not only did he despise Scottish men of science, but that “I even hate Scotchwomen!” Thinking of Mary Manning, Whewell could not help but add that “this last charge is hard, but what can I say?”112 Of his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Brewster sneered that Whewell’s view of scientific method was one that “no rational man can admit.”113 By the time the Plurality of Worlds appeared, Brewster’s venom toward Whewell was spilling over. Brewster’s review accused the Master of Trinity of being possessed of “an ill-educated and ill-regulated mind, a mind without faith and without hope—a mind dead to feeling and shorn of reason!”114 Whewell responded to some of Brewster’s criticisms in later editions of the work, causing Brewster to expand his arguments into a book-length screed aimed against Whewell, which caused Whewell to groan to Murchison, “Why is he so savage?”115 Their dispute became so heated that it makes an appearance in Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers—published in 1857—when Charlotte Stanhope asks a guest during a moonlit stroll, “Are you a Whewellite, or a Brewsterite, or a t’othermite, Mrs. Bold?”

  Whewell took a certain delight in his “heterodoxy,” as he gleefully admitted to Herschel. One reason was that it gave Whewell the opportunity to press his point about the need for a proper scientific method to an even larger audience.

  He had by this time amply publicized his view that scientific discoveries are not made by accident, through a series of guesses or conjectures, but rather arise from gradual inductive reasoning using concepts—like the concept of an ellipse—that had been clarified over time and with effort. Yet looking at the writings on the question of extraterrestrial life, Whewell found that the plurality position had become the stuff of science fiction rather than science. When he first took up the issue in the Bridgewater Treatise, there was no real evidence one way or the other. Now, however, the scientific evidence seemed to render the hypothesis of intelligent life on other worlds extremely improbable.

  For example, Jupiter, the largest planet, was the one most likely to be hospitable to intelligent life, according to many proponents of life on other worlds (the Herschels’ prominence notwithstanding, most astronomers did discount the possibility that the sun could be a congenial home for life). Brewster had gone so far as to claim—clearly a provocation to a Cambridge man—that Jupiter was inhabited by beings with “a type of reason of which the intellect of Isaac Newton is the lowest degree.” In contrast to Brewster’s “wild fancies,” Whewell drew heavily upon the most recent astronomical studies of Jupiter. The observational evidence pointed to Jupiter being composed mainly of water and water vapor. Given the known density of the planet, gravity on its surface would be 2.5 times that on earth; therefore it is no
t likely that any of its inhabitants could have a skeletal system. Thus, Whewell argued, if there were any life on Jupiter, it must consist of “cartilaginous and glutinous masses; peopling the waters with minute forms.” These glutinous masses were unlikely to have the intelligence of Newton, though whether they could have that of a certain Scottish physicist was another matter! By arguing against the wild fancies and conjectures of the pluralists, Whewell could strongly make his point about the importance of an evidence-driven scientific method, driving it home with the use of a popular and much-discussed example.

  But if the scientific evidence seemed against the plurality position, what about natural theology? In his Bridgewater Treatise, Whewell had suggested that God’s creation of lifeless worlds that served no purpose whatever would be inconsistent with His intelligent design of the universe. Would Whewell be forced to choose between science and theology after all? Happily for his desire to accommodate both science and religion, Whewell’s schoolmate from his Lancaster days, Richard Owen—now the most famous British comparative anatomist, who had recently gained acclaim as the man who reconstructed an entire extinct bird simply from an excavated fossil of a thighbone—was developing a theory Whewell could use to show that natural theology need not conflict with an anti-plurality-of-worlds position.

  Owen—following the work of colleagues in Germany—argued that individual vertebrate animals could be seen as modified instantiations of patterns or “archetype forms” that existed in the Divine Mind—archetypes that functioned as a kind of blueprint that God used in creating the universe and its inhabitants. Homologies—similar structures that had quite different purposes, such as the wing of a bird and the fore-limb of a quadruped—were explained by Owen as being variations on the archetype used by God in designing vertebrates. Similarly, Owen was able to explain the existence of structures without apparent purpose, such as male nipples. In Owen’s view, such structures did not contradict the claim that all of creation was designed; rather they were the result of the application of general archetypes—all mammals, whether female or male, were given nipples by God, because He created all mammals on the same general plan or blueprint.116