Servants of Nature: A History of Scientific Institutions, Enterprises and Sensibilities

COPYRIGHT

Fourth Estate

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First published in Great Britain by

HarperCollinsPublishers 1999

Copyright © Lewis Pyenson and Susan Sheets-Pyenson 1999

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PRAISE

‘A considerable achievement.’ CASPAR HENDERSON, New Scientist

‘At best a heroic visionary, at worst a megalomaniac Frankenstein: either way triumphant individualism is taken for granted in the stereotypical scientist. So too is the disinterested purity of research conducted under lab conditions, all external considerations excluded like so many bacteria from a sterile vessel. Yet the reality has always been quite otherwise: the world refuses to stop at the laboratory door, and that has led to some of science’s greatest breakthroughs as well as its worst abuses. This highly readable, subtle and thought-provoking scientific history goes beyond whistle-blowing to consider more subtle and ultimately perhaps more interesting questions of how a changing institutional context has constrained the content and direction of we too unquestioningly take to be ‘pure’ science.’

Scotsman

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

PRAISE

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION: Science and Its Past

The discipline of history of science

Inspiration and method

The end of science

PART I: INSTITUTIONS

1 Teaching: Before the Scientific Revolution

The Mediterranean world

Eastern cultures

Islam

The Middle Ages

2 Teaching: From the Time of the Scientific Revolution

The Scientific Revolution

The rise of the German university

The German research university in context

Universities elsewhere

3 Sharing: Early Scientific Societies

Engines of the Scientific Revolution

The rise of the scientific correspondent

Eighteenth-century expansion

Nineteenth-century consolidation

The emergence of specialized societies

4 Watching: Observatories in the Middle East, China, Europe and America

The Islamic observatory

Chinese astronomy

Innovation in instruments

Time and prediction

Astronomy and related disciplines

5 Showing: Museums

The development of modern museums

The British Museum and the ‘new museum idea’

Museums in Europe and the United States

Colonial museums

Colonial and metropolitan museums: some comparisons

Descriptions of colonial museums

Museums in Canada, South America, and Australasia

6 Growing: Botanical Gardens and Zoos

The development of botanical gardens

Kew Gardens

The evolution of zoological gardens

The rise of public zoos

PART II: ENTERPRISES

7 Measuring: The Search for Precision

Measurement in antiquity

Syncretism and measuring instruments

Newtonian measurement

Timepieces

Standardization

The ideology of precision

Measurement and industrial progress

Absolute measurement and error analysis

The transformation of mechanical precision

Old programme, new effects

Philosophy and practice

Precision regnant

Precision and the human spirit

8 Reading: Books and the Spread of Ideas

From script to print

Facilitating the birth of modern science

The rise of the scientific journal

New forms for new audiences

Showing science: the art of illustration

9 Travelling: Discovery, Maps and Scientific Expeditions

Who discovered whom?

Travellers in antiquity

Maps

Progression of people and ideas in the Malay Archipelago

European expansion

A century of wonders

The new encyclopaedia

Classifying nature

The scientific expeditions

10 Counting: Statistics

The odds

Precision and numbers

Surveying and statistics

Terrestrial means

Statistics physical and social

Doctrine of certainty

Twentieth-century uncertainty

Average lives

The popular triumph of averages

11 Killing: Science and the Military

Gunpowder

The vocabulary of military science

French military builders

Naval stars

The star chart

Military mappers

Military weathermen

Applications and prestige

PART III: SENSIBILITIES

12 Participating: Beyond Scientific Societies

The rise of literary and philosophical societies

Associations for the advancement of science

The common scientist

Scientific clubs for everyone

The overseas extension of European models

Women in science

The example of Madame du Châtelet

Women elsewhere

13 Appropriating: Science in Nations Beyond Europe

Colonial scientific societies

Early colonial universities

Independent universities

The research university in the United States

Scientific migration

Australasia

Scientist missionaries in South America

Science at American universities

Science at Japanese universities

British India and Dutch Indonesia

14 Believing: Science and Religion

Science in the Counter-Reformation

The Merton thesis

The Webster thesis: millenarianism and science

The Enlightenment

Deism

Natural theology

The argument against Darwinian evolution

Twentieth-century developments

15 Knowing: Progressing and Proclaiming

Magic and science

Baconianism

Encyclopaedism

Materialism

Positivism

The polemical positivism of Auguste Comte

The eclipse of positivism

16 Knowing: Relativizing

The century of relativity

Mach and Einstein

The reception of Einstein’s thought

Eclecticism and hope

FURTHER READING

INDEX

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

NOTES

THE FONTANA HISTORY OF SCIENCE SERIES

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

PREFACE

Science, Ernest Gellner has contended, is the mode of cognition of Western industrial society. These words beat a ragged, fading tattoo across the twentieth century. The music asks: why do we seek to know? What is science? Who sees with Western eyes? The pipers form a splendid procession. But will it last? Will we continue to think scientifically? Or does the spectacle mark the end of an epoch? In view of its past, does science have a future?

A reader may ask how science can disappear. With all our modern contrivances and information, how – short of an environment-wrenching catastrophe – could science come to an end? Yet the circumstance has occurred before, when past civilizations like Rome and China expressed little interest in seeking explanations for natural phenomena. They delighted in mechanical contrivances; they celebrated canonical wisdom; they published enduring works of art and literature. But they were not driven to push back the frontiers of knowledge, to use a metaphor associated with European expansion.

The present book has emerged as an enquiry into science as a social activity. It relates directly to the prospect of science in our time. We do not proceed by appealing to the heavy theoretical machinery and the long-distance sentences that are now fashionable in our discipline. We fly no philosophical, political, or methodological colours. We celebrate the observation attributed to writer Marcel Proust, that methodology, when visible in writing, is like a price tag worn on a suit of clothes. We are mindful of poet John Keats’s sentence about rejecting poetry that has a design on us.

As we enter a new millennium, the words of Francis Bacon possess a freshness and special pertinence. To invoke his phrase ‘servants of nature’ is to offer relief from those who would exaggerate or minimise the interpretation of science broadly conceived. This phrase balances the self-satisfaction, if not the hubris, of some scientists with Bacon’s recognition that nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. Bacon knew that evidence from the natural world comes in many forms; evidence, in some manner going beyond prejudice, can produce general judgments and, on occasion, laws.

Our method will be apparent from the Table of Contents. We identify and elaborate a number of themes that we believe are central to exploring the role of science in society. The themes fall under three headings: institutions, enterprises, and sensibilities. We trace the themes through the recent and more distant past, through Western and non-Western cultures. Our work is grounded in the belief that history may help us see clearly today. We draw inspiration from the great works of French scholarship that celebrate history as a craft based upon a manipulation of concrete particulars, a tradition inaugurated by Marc Bloch and perfected by Theodore Zeldin.

This book is in fact a child of French North America. Conceived in French Canada, where we taught at Université de Montréal and Concordia University, it finally emerged in French Acadiana, where we work at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. While writing it we ran up many debts. We wish to thank our students and colleagues, who heard us elaborate these ideas. We owe special thanks to Eliane Kinsley and Marc Speyer-Ofenberg, and we are grateful to Roy Porter, Crosby Smith, and Bill Swainson for critical comments. Anyone who has lived through a marital collaboration knows what is involved, but children are the most perceptive observers of it. We dedicate this book to our three spirits.

Lafayette, Louisiana

May Day 1996

Introduction: Science and Its Past

Our thirteen-year-old daughter is studying the history of the United States of America. She is memorizing lists of warriors and battles, statesmen and treaties. She sees pictures of people in powdered wigs and frock coats, on horseback and in carriages. Ordinary people wearing rags and buckskin also appear in her books and films. She learns about hopes and fears in times past. Previously, she learned about history from a German perspective. (She can recite the fiercest North Sea storms of the past fifty years.) Our older son learned history first from the point of view of French-Canadian nationalists and then in a traditional English-Canadian vein, before he, too, had to acquaint himself with American facts and foibles. We hope that our children will achieve the level of cultural literacy now being established by prominent intellectuals. If, decades from now, they do not quite recall why George Washington crossed the Delaware or why Chappaquiddick stands for more than an island off the coast of Massachusetts, they will nevertheless retain the notion that what is told about the past is a function of language and politics.1

Whatever gaps there may be in our children’s schooling, in some sense they will have been educated. Schooling substitutes for travel, for direct experience of distinct cultures. Yet today the distinctness is disappearing. Electronic media and air travel have brought people nearly everywhere in the world into contact with clinically tested drugs, prewashed blue jeans, and the internal-combustion engine. The signs of this convergence have provoked commentary for much of the twentieth century. However the great mixing up is understood, it certainly qualifies as one of the key phenomena of our time.

How did it happen? How did we arrive in our present circumstances? These are the questions posed by historians. They offer many kinds of answer. It has to do with the price of corn over the past 150 years, an economic historian might say. More important are the precedents of Common Law, a legal historian might counter. It is the art of war, thunders a military historian. Everything is family demographics, a social historian counters. Each of these explanations is a splendid room in the mansion of our collective past. But they do not seem to help us understand the form of the objects we use on a daily basis. Does any one of them on its own explain what we see as we go out to purchase the ingredients for dinner or as we watch the evening news on television?

Regardless of the special values that we hold – the religious creed, political persuasion, aesthetic preference, and moral sensibility that together define our character and give meaning to existence – what we experience every day derives from our grasp of the natural and physical world. The following pages investigate how this perception has related to the world of human activity over time. Philosophers and social commentators have argued about how knowledge relates to social dynamics – the regimes of family structure, governmental taxation, religious celebration, and professional obligation that loom large in cultures and civilizations. Perceptions do vary with time and circumstance, but they are not necessarily grounded in incommensurable systems of belief. Microelectronics and molecular biology, for example, which allow all people to share in computer games and biochemical therapy, seem to follow one set of principles everywhere, even though the context of their use varies considerably. The present book explores how knowledge of nature has found a place in society in times past. Sometimes it has transcended language and place. Sometimes it has been anchored firmly in a particular culture.

Our understanding of past knowledge has its own past. Early writings in history of science legitimized a temporal institution, intellectual tendency, or moral lesson. In 1667 Thomas Sprat (1635–1713) promoted the aims of experimental science in his history of the Royal Society of London, the most prestigious association of men of science in the seventeenth century. Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) defended Benjamin Franklin’s (1706–1790) notions of electricity against traditional European views in a history of science first published in 1767. And a portion of Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel’s (1770–1831) lectures on the history of philosophy, appearing in the 1820s and 1830s, served to instruct readers in his opinions about natural philosophers like Francis Bacon (1561–1626), whom Hegel surprisingly admired. Use of the word history was then as much a synonym for narrative and inventory as a by-word for polemic.2

With the nineteenth century, histories of science reverted to the distant and remote past. The impetus came from the crystallization of the historical profession and its installation in European universities. Proponents of the discipline of history required a method to distinguish themselves from the naive, descriptive narrators of previous generations. The discipline came to centre around the treatment of manuscript documents, which had found their way in large numbers to central repositories like the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and the Library of the British Museum in London. The task of the historian became one of transcription, translation, and commentary. Here were the building blocks for synthetic treatments. Historians required their students to master dead languages, old-fashioned handwriting, and ancient chronologies.

The painstaking examination of past science appealed to a number of people throughout the nineteenth century. There were physicians and chemists who, at the end of their career, sought to describe how the method of their own science had evolved. There were mathematicians and astronomers who, having been trained in classics, sought to transcend the ennui of a provincial school or government office by scrutinizing the work of significant predecessors. There were philologists who recognized that the languages of European colonies – notably Sanskrit and Arabic – held a key to a significant literature about ancient and medieval writings on nature.

Nineteenth-century discoveries about knowledge in the remote past are remarkable. The astronomical innovations of medieval Islam, both observational and theoretical, were discussed in the research of Louis-Amélie Sédillot (1808–1875). Euclid’s geometry, studied for nearly two millennia as the primary model for clear thinking, received a canonical expression at the hands of Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1854–1928). The notion of medieval Europe as a scientific wasteland came into question through Pierre Duhem’s (1861–1916) elaboration of the writings of philosophers at the University of Paris. The deciphering of planetary tables on Babylonian clay tablets by Joseph Epping (1835–1894) established the first reliable chronicle of antiquity.

Learned periodicals arose to circulate findings among the committed band of historians of science. By the last third of the nineteenth century, courses of instruction provided a showcase for the esoteric speciality. As academic philosophy spun out into hundreds of camps and factions, history of science found a practical use in the burgeoning field of epistemology – the philosophical discussion about how we know things. And as the rise of mass education stimulated an interest in teaching methodology, history of science emerged as the most reasonable way to teach physics, chemistry, and natural history. The so-called genetic presentation of scientific disciplines like chemistry and physics, according to which students received an appreciation of old ideas in chronological order, dominated much of science instruction up to the middle of the twentieth century.

The discipline of history of science

Nineteenth-century writings about history of science are grounded in the notion that modern science is a gift of Western Europe. Writers believed that scientific method and practice distinguished the people of the West from the civilizations that the West had conquered. Art, music, and literature were matters of taste; Japanese painting and poetry, for example, could be held only to differ from European painting and poetry. Science, however, was a matter of truth. All peoples, furthermore, could acquire it. A convenient justification for imperialist domination of the world came in the form of instruction in the canons of Western reason. Historians of science were among the firmest apologists for the superiority of European intellect.