The Philosophical Breakfast Club

by Laura J. Snyder

  In his History of the Inductive Sciences, first published in 1837, Whewell had asserted point-blank that man’s origin must stand outside science and law; on this question, he believed, geology “says nothing, but she points upwards.”73 In other words, there could be no “scientific view” of the origin of man. By 1864, however, Whewell seemed resigned to accept that there was a scientific view, and that it was an evolutionary one. Publicly, he continued to reject this position. But in his letter to David Forbes, where he would stoke no flames of controversy, Whewell showed that he took quite seriously the possibility that evolution might turn out to be true, and that it would then have to be reconciled with the religious point of view. Whewell was nearly seventy years old, and strongly committed to his religious views, which had helped sustain him in the loss of his dear friend Jones and his wife, Cordelia; but it was not part of these religious views that well-confirmed scientific theories seeming to conflict with our understanding of scripture must be rejected just for that reason.

  That same year, Babbage, Herschel, and Whewell each pointedly declined to sign the infamous “Declaration on Science and Religion,” a petition that claimed to support a “harmonious alliance between Physical Science and Revealed Religion,” but which was seen by many as attempting to put theological restraints on scientific inquiry. (Of their friends and acquaintances, only Sedgwick and David Brewster signed it.) Herschel went so far as to publish several ringing denunciations of the document, causing De Morgan to marvel, “So honey-bees have stings as well as wasps!”74

  The reaction of the remaining members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club—especially Whewell and Herschel—to Darwin’s theory laid the foundation for modern-day notions of the relation between Darwinism and religious faith, a way to reconcile the two. As Galileo had put it centuries before, the Bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.75 Herschel and Whewell, scientific experts of the age, helped to promote the view that the Bible was not meant to be a science textbook, no more a biology text than an astronomy text. A true natural philosopher (and here even Whewell was happy to retain the old-fashioned term, with its broader meaning) should have faith in God, but also, no less, faith in scientific method.

  Herschel and Whewell’s view of the relation between science and religion would finally prevail (at least outside of the United States). By the time of Darwin’s death in 1882, he was no longer reviled as a murderer of faith: rather, he was seen as a hero of science, and of England—and was accordingly buried in Westminster Abbey.

  ON JULY 18, 1860, scientists and interested onlookers from Oregon through Canada to Spain and North Africa eagerly awaited the total eclipse of the sun.76 Whewell traveled to Orduna, south of Bilbao, to view it, in the company of his wife of two years, Lady Everina Frances Affleck. Lady Affleck, the widow of Sir Gilbert Affleck, was the sister of Whewell’s friend Robert Leslie Ellis. In 1857, Ellis and two associates had published a fifteen-volume edition of the collected works of Bacon, which would remain for over a century the standard edition of Bacon’s writings. Whewell wrote a long and laudatory review of the new collection, which gave him the opportunity to praise Bacon again for having “divined in a remarkable manner the characters of the true progress of science.” While writing this review, Whewell spent time with Ellis, a former fellow of Trinity who had been an invalid for some years. During his visits to Ellis’s house in Trumpington, near Cambridge, Whewell came to know Lady Affleck, who had moved into her brother’s home to nurse him after her husband died. Whewell had been a widower for nearly two years by then, and was lonely. As he lamented to his sister-in-law, Susan Myers, soon after Cordelia’s death, “I don’t know whether you are quite aware … how necessary it is for me to have somebody to love me!”77 He and Lady Affleck were wed on July 1, 1858, at St. George’s Church, Hanover Square, London.

  The trip to Spain to view the eclipse was a second honeymoon of sorts (during the first one, the couple had visited Whewell’s old in-laws in the Lake District, and spent a week with the Herschels in Kent). They were both excited to see the solar eclipse. Describing the sight afterwards, Whewell admitted that “I had not imagined anything so sudden and luminous.” Although cloud cover made it difficult to see the four planets that would have been visible in clear skies, Whewell and his wife, whom he called Fanny, saw “an extraordinary saffron dawn in the horizon, when all was very dark about us.” He told his friend Forbes that the total eclipse “was quite a thing to see in one’s lifetime, if possible”—it was worth even the discomfort of the Spanish inns.78

  A total solar eclipse occurs when the moon passes between the sun and the earth, completely obscuring the light of the sun as viewed from some locations on earth. Such perfect alignments of the earth, moon, and sun occur every sixteen months or so, last only three to seven minutes, and are visible from less than one percent of the earth’s surface (often in the middle of the ocean or other uninhabited zones). It is, as Whewell had said, an awe-inspiring sight. As the moon obscures more and more of the sun, the sky darkens to a shimmering violet, temperature drops, and cicadas begin to sing, confused by the daytime night.79 The air gets cold as it gets darker. The light changes, altering the colors of the landscape. One modern observer has described the earth being painted in metallic color, like a nineteenth-century silver nitrate photograph in which the tints have faded, leaving only the metallic etching.80 The sky eats away at the sun, until at last it is abruptly dark, with a tiny ring of light marking where the sun used to be.

  Photography made its international scientific debut at the eclipse. William Henry Fox Talbot was in Spain, taking photographs of the eclipse; in October, when he dropped his son off in Cambridge to begin his studies at Trinity College, Whewell invited him to stay at the Master’s Lodge, asking him to bring along his photographs of the eclipse.81 Talbot was not the only one photographing the event: at Rivabellosa, Warren de la Rue made images using the Kew “photoheliograph,” of which he had devised and supervised the construction between 1854 and 1858. The photoheliograph was a refracting telescope that could produce 10-centimeter images of the solar disk by means of a shutter fast enough to avoid the overexposure of the wet collodion plates—glass plates that had been coated with guncotton and potassium iodide dissolved in alcohol or ether, and then dipped into a silver nitrate solution just before use. The device was first used, as Herschel had suggested over a decade earlier, to take photographs of sunspots.82 At Desierto de la Palmas, 400 kilometers to the southeast, Father Angelo Secchi from the Collegio Romano observatory and his team were also photographing the eclipse. Both parties obtained clear images of four rose-pink projections from the disk of the sun during the total darkness, thus proving, by a kind of consilience, that the prominences really were objective features of the sun, not merely artifacts of the photographic process or optical illusions.83 Francis Baily had first observed these projections during the eclipse of July 1842, and astronomers had been divided since then on whether these were real phenomena or merely reflections from the remaining ring of light around the sun during the eclipse. Babbage had published a note in the Proceedings of the Royal Astronomical Society on these pink projections after they were again observed during the total eclipse of 1851.84 By the use of photography on glass, a process first developed by Herschel, the existence of this phenomenon was confirmed, and another part of nature was decoded.

  13

  ENDINGS

  DURING THE 1850s, HERSCHEL’S SONS AND DAUGHTERS HAD treated the childless Whewell—who was a frequent visitor to Collingwood—as a beloved uncle. Maria and Louisa helped take care of Cordelia during her extended final illness, each of Herschel’s daughters took turns visiting Whewell and his second wife, Lady Affleck, and Alexander (“Alick”) went up to Trinity under the careful tutelage of the Master. The informal relationship became official in 1857, when a proud Whewell was called upon to perform the wedding ceremony of Louisa and his own nephew, Reginald Marshall, the son of Cordelia’s brother John Marshall II. Whe
well reported on the marriage to his sister Ann afterwards, noting with satisfaction, “And so the rising generation is forming itself into new circles according to the usual course of events.”1 The wedding was, he felt, “one of the happiest events of my later life.”

  In January 1861, Louisa suddenly died, at the tender age of twenty-seven. Whewell wrote immediately to Herschel, lamenting, “It makes my heart bleed for you.”2 As he told his niece, this was the “first great affliction” that his friend’s family had had to bear.3 How different his friend’s life had been from his own, so full of loss: the premature deaths of his parents and a younger brother, and the loss of his closest friend and an adored wife. “Yet, my dear Herschel,” he consoled his friend, “you are still richer in objects of love and sources of earthly happiness than any one whom I know.… And with regard to [Louisa] we may feel, persons at your age and mine, that the separation cannot be long.”4

  The remaining members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club, Babbage, Herschel, and Whewell, knew they were entering the final stages of their lives. By January 1861 they were all nearing seventy—Babbage would turn seventy at the end of the year, Herschel was sixty-nine, Whewell sixty-seven—at a time when the life expectancy for a child at birth was only thirty-eight, and even those who survived until fifteen could not expect to live much past sixty.5 Their days of revolutionizing the sciences, and of being at their most productive in their own researches, were over.

  OF THE THREE friends, Whewell was the least touched by the ravages of age. His mind remained vigorous until the end—he was as “thunderous” in intellectual discussion as ever, with only the occasional habit of falling asleep in the midst of conversation in which he had just taken an animated part.6 In 1860 he published the last volume of his new edition of the Philosophy. He believed in the success of the Philosophical Breakfast Club’s Baconian project to the last, telling Augustus De Morgan, “The projects of Solomon’s House … and the like, are not quite visionary, as the British Association has shewn. And though such machinery can only collect facts at first, collected facts will suggest discoveries, especially now that we know in a good degree the way of extracting laws from facts.”7

  Whewell returned briefly to political economy. Prince Albert asked him to lecture privately on economics to his son, the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII) to help prepare him for the throne. When Whewell distributed a pamphlet of the printed lectures to friends in 1861, he told one of them that the most interesting lectures expressed views “important and new to the literature of the subject,” though “their novelty is not mine, but my dear friend Jones’s.”8 Two years later, Whewell was invited to Windsor Castle for the Prince of Wales’s wedding to Princess Alexandra of Denmark.

  It would not be until 1901 that Whewell’s student ascended the throne as Edward VII. But he did not forget the influence of his old tutor. One of King Edward’s first acts was to institute the Order of Merit, recognizing contributions to the arts and sciences. Babbage’s shrieking demands in the 1820s and 1830s for some such honor for which scientists would be eligible had resulted in a bit of talk about it; in 1844, Prince Albert had met with Robert Peel, and the two men had decided on a system of two orders, one for scientific and one for artistic contributions. The idea was vetoed by the president of the Royal Academy of Arts, and the matter was dropped.9 Whewell’s quieter influence—by his example and his teaching—finally led to the establishment of an honor for scientific accomplishment.

  It was too late for Babbage, Herschel, and Whewell. But among the first recipients of the Order of Merit was a Cambridge man, William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, deviser of the method of harmonic analysis and the tide-predicting computer. Like so many others of his generation, Thomson’s work was influenced by Whewell in numerous ways: he had read Whewell’s works to prepare for the Tripos examinations—by the 1840s the general paper, comprising Logic, Political Economy, Ethics, and Metaphysics, was known as the test on “Whewell’s books”—he later requested Whewell’s advice about how to conduct his experimental researches, and he asked Whewell to invent some terms for his work in electrostatics.10

  Whewell returned to his interest in the classics, translating one of the earliest collections of Plato’s dialogues into English from the original Greek, a full ten years before Benjamin Jowett at Oxford would publish his definitive version. Even after Jowett’s edition appeared, Whewell’s was considered valuable as a popular and elementary introduction to the texts. Whewell’s edition was for general readers, not for scholars—who in his day would still have been expected to read them in the original Greek—and he abandoned the dialogue form and condensed the material, when he thought it would benefit this audience.11

  Whewell continued to write book reviews, and to lecture on diverse topics: the history of science, education policy, architecture, and others. He preached sermons, including one in 1862 in which he made clear his position on the American Civil War by referring to the abolition of West Indian slavery decades before as “the noblest national act of which history contains a record.”12 His old philosophical adversary John Stuart Mill—whose disagreements with Whewell over moral philosophy, economics, and science were so heated that he had refused to meet Whewell when his good friend, Whewell’s brother-in-law James Garth Marshall, offered to introduce them—was sufficiently moved to write his only letter to Whewell, saying, “No question of our time has been such a touchstone of men … as this one; and I shall all my life feel united by a sort of special tie with those … who have been faithful when so many were faithless.”13 Much time was taken up by college and university business. He corresponded with friends and made visits, frequently going to see the Herschels. As Whewell told one correspondent, “I feel very strongly that we cling to old friends the more closely, the fewer they become.”14

  Whewell enjoyed his domestic life with Lady Affleck. She was considered a better “fit” for Trinity than Cordelia had been; Isaac Todhunter would relate that Whewell’s second wife was more “admirably suited to be the wife of the Head of a College.”15 No doubt class played a role in this assessment: Cordelia was the daughter of a wealthy family, but that wealth had been earned through manufacturing, not through generations of primogeniture, and so her family was viewed with lingering disdain in some quarters. Lady Affleck, on the other hand, was the widow of the fifth Baronet of Affleck, the title having been created by George II for the bravery and success of the first baronet in naval battles in defense of the nation. Another problem was that, as Wordsworth had recognized, Cordelia was shy, and “appeared cold to strangers,” though she was quite affectionate to those who knew her well,16 while Lady Affleck was more gregarious. Whewell and Lady Affleck were compatible, and similarly inclined for adventure; not only did Lady Affleck happily put up with the discomfort of the Spanish inns in order to witness the eclipse of 1860, but three years later, at the age of fifty-six, she went mountain-climbing with her still-spry husband when he was seventy years old.17

  Over the summer of 1863, Whewell and his wife traveled to the Swiss Alps, where they climbed Mount Rigi, which rose nearly six thousand feet above Lake Lucerne and was known as the “Queen of the Mountains.” In 1845, J. M. W. Turner had painted an evocative image of the mountain at the moment just before sunrise, a view that English travelers promptly added to their list of must-see destinations in Europe (Turner made three different paintings of Rigi, depicting it at various times of the day). Whewell reported to a friend that their climb had been “rewarded with a beautiful sunrise.” Visitors to the mountaintop opposite had had the same idea, and at sunrise the two parties waved at each other over the wide valley.18 This was before the 1871 opening of a cog railway built to bring visitors to the mountain’s summit—so the Whewells must have climbed mainly by foot, an ascent “steep and tiresome,” and involving clambering over “steep ravines,” as described by a young American man having a European adventure. (They may have had the use of mules for part of the way, according to the reminiscences of an
other proud American traveler.)19

  A year and a half later, Lady Affleck became ill; it had been a severe winter, followed by a chilly and tardy spring. In early March, Whewell told a niece that “we are in great trouble with the consequences of neglected colds!”20 By the end of March, it was clear that Lady Affleck would not survive. Whewell admitted to his friend Forbes that he anticipated “with terror” the “desolation which seems to await me when she is gone.”21 By the first of April she was dead. He groaned to his niece that “life no longer has any value or meaning!”22