The Reverend William Whewell (1794-1866) was an early Victorian Baconian and his distinguished career, the breadth of his interests and the significance of his contributions make him worth listening to. He attended Trinity College, Cambridge as an undergraduate, eventually being elected as Master. The range of his scientific, philosophical, academic and literary interests rivals those of Priestley, Jameson, Young, and Foster. Apart from winning a Royal Medal for work on the ocean tides, translating Goethe, and publishing sermons, he wrote poetry (but not what one might call ‘distinguished’). He was surprisingly adept at coining neologisms, among them ‘anode’, ‘cathode’, ‘linguistics’, and, most appositely, considering that the geologist Sir Charles Lyell was his contemporary, ‘uniformitarianism’. He also invented the Whewell equation. (Before Whewell, mathematicians had conventionally used an equation to a curve, which expressed a relationship between coordinates, these being constant for every point in the curve. Whewell’s equation, however, allowed a mathematician to determine the shape of a curve without reference to a system of co-ordinates.)
Apart from works on such matters as mechanics, physics, geology, and economics, he also produced one of The Bridgewater Treatises entitled Astronomy and General Physics considered with reference to Natural Theology. His formidable oeuvre also included, in 1837, A History of the inductive sciences and, in 1840, The Philosophy of the inductive sciences in which he explored the Baconian project to connect ideas and data in a scientific system which would explain how things work.
In 1858 Whewell went so far as to up-date one of Bacon’s major works. In his version of the ‘Novum Organum’ his praise for Bacon is fulsome.
It is to our immortal countryman, Bacon, that we owe the broad announcement of this grand and fertile principle; and the development of the idea, that the whole of natural philosophy consists entirely of a series of inductive generalizations, commencing with the most circumstantially stated particulars, and carried up to universal laws, or axioms, which comprehend in their statements every subordinate degree of generality; and of a corresponding series of inverted reasoning from generals to particulars, by which these axioms are traced back into their remotest consequences, and all particular propositions deduced from them ; as well those by whose immediate considerations we rose to their discovery, as those of which we had no previous knowledge.
Whewell recognises that despite Bacon’s breadth of vision, his ‘particular precepts’ are now useless because he did not have at his disposal what Whewell and his contemporaries have – ‘a large actual progress of solid truth to look back upon’ and ‘the prospect of better success.’ Whewell here treads on common ground, but in fact, is careful and generous to emphasise the difference between himself and Bacon by recognising the restrictions under which the latter laboured.
His attitudes to the ancients differs further from Macaulay’s since he claims that it might be possible to learn some valuable lessons from what has gone before: ‘to extract from the past progress of science the elements of an effectual and substantial method of Scientific Discovery’. Not every Baconian, then, was as iconoclastic as Thomas Babington. Whewell bases his claim on a wide-ranging study of both ancient and modern texts, including the works of Plato, Aristotle, Roger Bacon, Francis Bacon, Newton and Herschel. He regards knowledge of their work as essential to the task which he has set himself of adapting Baconian principles to contemporary scientific work. Whewell wants nothing less than to create a ‘Newer Organ’, a task which he judges to be not at all presumptuous based as it is on the knowledge of physical science which the ‘present generation’ commands. In fact, he has an unalloyed confidence in the knowledge which has been either inherited or acquired by the present generation, a confidence which was a constituent element of early Victorian optimism.
Whewell incorporates into the programme which he is proposing Bacon’s radical revision, not rejection, of Aristotle. According to Whewell, ‘The name Organum was applied to the works of Aristotle which treated of Logic, that is, of the method of establishing and proving knowledge, and of renting error, by means of Syllogisms’. Bacon designed his Novum Organum as a replacement for what he considered to be ‘a method which did not promote the augmentation of real and useful knowledge’ (again a key term emphasising expansion and accumulation). However, Whewell, consistently with what he has already stated, recognises that ‘Plato and Aristotle in the ancient world, Richard de Saint Victor and Roger Bacon in the middle ages, Galileo and Gilbert, Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, in modem times, were led to offer precepts and maxims, as fitted to guide us to a real and fundamental knowledge of nature’. Previous scientific thinkers, contrary to Macaulay’s claim, have not been completely blinded by the Ancients to the value of applied science because the best writers on the philosophy of science have emphasised something authentically Baconian which some leading Victorians thought their age had realised: ‘instances of the application of scientific truths, which are subservient to the uses of practical life; to the support, the safety, the pleasure of man’.
Indeed, Whewell notes that Bacon himself mentions the invention of gunpowder, glass, and printing, the introduction of silk, and the discovery of America. But he does so as the prelude to asking important questions about them that were ignored by those of his contemporaries who more interested in market success than he was: ‘Yet which of these can be said to have been the results of a theoretical enlargement of human knowledge?’ That question implies a further one — ‘How much of the progress which human beings have made to date has been the product of applied science?’ He concedes that Columbus’ discovery of America was partly a result of his conviction that the earth was round, but there he draws a line between the pre-Victorian and the Victorian. He asserts that, while previous discoveries may have been spectacular and fulfilled what was to become a Victorian ideal — an increase in man’s ‘power of adding to his comforts and communicating with his fellow-men’ — they have not resulted in any significant increase in our ‘theoretical knowledge’. Former scientists have not in fact achieved what his contemporaries have done and furthered the development of inductive science.
Whewell is clearly very satisfied with contemporary scientific practitioners who have exploited the benefits of applied science, and he offers their achievements a most fulsome tribute to them. In ‘the history of most of the useful arts in our time’, contemporary applied science offers ‘abundant proofs & illustrations of the benefits which can now be enjoyed’. He is proud to list such valuable devices as the barometer for use as a weather-glass, the air-pump, the diving-bell, the balloon, the invention of steam engines, steam boats, screw-propellers, locomotive engines, railroads and bridges and structures of all kinds, and improved lightning-conductors for buildings and ships. As one might expect from a Baconian, no argument can be advanced without a multiplicity of supporting examples. Victorian habits of accumulating were shaping the culture in ways which some would be proud of and others learn to perceive as an alarming and sometime confusing new phenomenon.
Whewell now presents a catalogue of what he clearly admires as notable achievements in which theory and practice have been creatively combined. There may have been something accidental in the discovery of the telescope but both Roger Bacon and Descartes had already taught which principles were involved in its operations; Newton had invented a reliable thermometer by paying attention to natural laws; Watt’s improvements in the workings of the steam engine offer an example of how superior applied science is to ‘the blind gropings of mere practical habit’; the improvements in lightning conductors are the work of Sir William Snow Harris, who has based his experiments on his careful studies in electrical theory and ‘has used theory and calculation at every step’; Cavendish and Lire have taught how to measure the quantity of oxygen in the air; Lussac and Graham have devised methods for measuring the bleaching power of a substance; while Davy has constructed his safety-lamp according to his researches into the behaviour of flames and has used his discoveries about galvanic batteries to protect ships’ bottoms. Theory has been married to practice and the results benefit humanity. This is a triumphant ‘general statement’.
10. inductive science and Commerce
However, in the Victorian age, as in any other, one cannot not divorce the applications of applied science and their results from commercial considerations. In fact, Whewell celebrates the achievements in the land sciences in part because skilled surveying by geologists saves potential investors in mining projectsfrom ruin by not investing in schemes for digging coal where none is to be found. But, one wonders, given that Victorian culture was deeply penetrated and shaped by obsessions with gross material accumulation, how deeply was it shaped by men like Whewell? Were the businessmen, the investors and the consumers aware of the propositions which Whewell was advancing? Were they concerned about them at all? The answer is probably not. They were probably far more interested in the results of the work of men like Sir Roderick Murchison whom Whewell praises for accurately calculating the existence of gold in abundance in Australia years before the actual digging began. Perhaps, for investors and speculators, material gain was simply far more important than a Cambridge academic singing the praises of inductive science.
In providing what he obviously thinks is a convincing case for the triumph of applied science, Whewell, as I noted above, feels obliged to provide a plethora of examples. In this, he is following Bacon’s principle that ‘General statements depend on the accumulation of accurate observations and careful experiments’ (Moffett, p. 119). Thus, on the basis of the evidence which he has accumulated, Whewell offers a triumphal ‘general statement’ on the present condition of the national sciences: i.e. ‘clear and theoretical insight’ has replaced ‘blind trial’. Michael Faraday’s work certainly exemplified this ‘general statement’.
Other parts of “Francis Bacon, Inductive Science, Empire, & the Great Exhibition”
- Introduction
- Francis Bacon’s inductive science and its Victorian Consequences
- Thomas Babington Macaulay and Charles Kingsley Celebrate the Baconian ‘Revolution’
- Michael Faraday celebrates the Beauty of the Useful
- British Imperialism and Natural Science
- Francis Bacon, Inductive Science, Empire, & the Great Exhibition
Bibliography
Bacon, Francis: ʻEssays, Advancement of Learning, New Atlantis and Other Piecesʼ: ed. R. F. Jones. New York: Odyssey Press, Inc: 1937.
Bacon, Francis: ‘Distributio Operis’ (1620) in ʻSelections from the Works of Lord Bacon: e. Thomas W. Moffettʼ. Dublin University Press: 1847.
Gillispie, Charles: ʻThe Edge of Objectivity.ʼ Princeton: The Princeton University Press: 1960.
Gillispie, Charles: ʻGenesis and Geology.ʼ Cambridge: Harvard University Press: 1969.
Houghton, Walter E: ʻThe Victorian Frame of Mind 1830-1870.ʼ New Haven and London: Yale University Press: 1963.
Macaulay: ‘Essay on Bacon’ edited by H. Whyte. Clarendon Press: Oxford: 1915.
Richards, Thomas: ʻThe Commodity Culture of Victorian England.ʼ Stanford: Stanford University Press: Verso edition 1991.
Wulf, Andrea: ‘A Generation of Gentlemen Naturalists and the Birth of an Obsession.ʼ London: Vintage Books: 2008.
Last modified 7 January 2018