Whewell expanded on these ideas in his Philosophy of 1840. In W hewell’s conception of how scientific discovery occurred, an important balance was to be achieved between the discoverer’s intellect and his imagination. Asserting that "No scientific discovery
can, with any justice, be considered due to accident', Whewell insisted that there were very particular faculties and elements that were involved in a discovery. Amongst these, the nature of the configuration of the discoverer’s mind was important: Tn whatever manner facts may be presented to the notice of a discoverer, they can never become the materials of exact knowledge, except they find his mind already provided with precise and suitable conceptions by which they may be analysed and connected. The nature of sound scientific intellect was also key, as Whewell indicated in part of his discussion of Newton:
Tf it were true that the fall of an apple was the occasion of Newton’s pursuing the train of thought which led to the doctrine of universal gravitation, the habits and constitution of Newton’s intellect, and not the apple, were the real source of this great event in the progress of knowledge. The common love of the
Michael Ruse, ‘William Whewell: omniscientist’, in Fisch and Schaffer (eds), William Whewell, pp. 87-116: pp. 96-98; see for instance William Whewell, ‘On the empirical laws o f the tides in the Port of London: with some reflections on the theory’. Philosophical Transactions, 124 (1834), 15-45; also Yeo,
Defining Science, p. 54.
marvellous, and the vulgar desire to bring down the greatest achievements of genius to our own level, may lead men to ascribe such results to any casual circumstances which accompany them; but no one who fairly considers the real nature of great discoveries, and the intellectual processes which they involve, can seriously hold the opinion of their being the effect of accident/
Whewell hence turned the flash of insight of the genius into something that depended on a well-prepared intellect, one that had been dedicated to constant contemplation of scientific phenomena:
‘Such accidents never happen to common men. Thousands of men, even of the most inquiring and speculative men, had seen bodies fall; but who, except Newton, ever followed the accident to such consequences? And in fact, how little of his train of thought was contained in, or even directly suggested by, the fall of the apple! If the apple fall, said the discoverer, why should not the moon, the planets, the satellites fall? But how much previous thought, what a steady conception of the universality of the laws of motion gathered from other sources, were requisite, that the inquirer should see any connexion in these cases! Was it by accident that he saw in the apple an image of the moon, and of every body in the solar system?’^^
W hewell’s work thus synthesised elements of the conception of genius with those of the moral Baconian inductivist. In Bacon’s division of the faculties of the mind, reason and intellect were usually reserved for the higher of man’s spiritual natures: his soul. The role of the imagination, performed by the (lower) spirit rather than the (higher) soul,
was for Bacon not to be privileged: men who aimed to achieve their goals through the working of their imagination, by-passed the necessary labour: ‘those noble effects which God hath set forth unto man to be bought at the price of labour,’ were then not ‘to be attained by a few easy and slothful observances’.^® His was a dualistic philosophy of
Whewell, Philosophy, II, pp. 189-190. Whewell, Philosophy, II, p. 190.
Francis Bacon, The Works o f Francis Bacon, Baron ofVerulam, Viscount St. Alban, and Lord High Chancellor o f England, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (London: Longman and Co., 1859), 7 vols.. Ill, part 3: Advancement o f Learning, Book 2 o f 2, pp. 321-491: quote p. 381; D.P. Walker, ‘Francis Bacon and Spiritus', in Allen G. Debus (ed.). Science, Medicine and Society in the Renaissance: Essays to honor Walter Pag el (New York, 1972), 2 vols.. I, pp. 121-130; especially pp. 127,128. On Whewell's assessment o f Bacon’s method see Yeo, ‘Idol’, pp. 272-277.
science, but one in which the imaginative element, although essential, and previously central to the conception of genius, was ultimately subordinate to the rational, reasoning intellect. Thus hypotheses were key in discoveries:
‘Hence advances in knowledge are not commonly made without the previous exercise of some boldness and license at guessing. The discovery of new truths requires, undoubtedly, minds careful and scrupulous in examining what is suggested; but it requires, no less, such as are quick and fertile in suggesting. What is invention, except the talent of rapidly calling before us the many possibilities, and selecting the appropriate one?’*^
Yeo is right to flag W hewell’s inclusion of elements of genius such as the imagination within his scientific methodology, elements that Bacon had firmly excluded, but it also reveals more about the way in which the role of genius within science was tempered. W hewell’s description of the discoverer was one that emphasised reason and intellect over imagination and intuition. As he had explained in his History in relation to the rise of dogmatism after the decline of the Roman Empire, when ‘the love of speculation’ found ‘no secure and permitted paths on solid ground’, that is, when wild ideas were not checked by sober reasoning, they ‘went off into the regions of mysticism’.
For Whewell, celebration of the intellect as against the imagination was fully in keeping with the beliefs of the natural theology of the Anglican Church, which, in contrast to the rising Evangelical movement, emphasised rationality over the spiritual element of religion.^^ In his History, Whewell had taken the proven capacity to discover the laws of nature and to express them mathematically as evidence o f an affinity between the human and divine mind. If the human mind was capable of revealing the intelligibility of nature, then a secure scientific knowledge was p o s s i b l e . W h e w e l l believed that respect for the divine mind must be maintained in order for human authority to be respected. For Whewell, the mental habits involved in unravelling the fabric of nature, and the importance of the imaginative faculty for forming hypotheses acting on facts, encouraged in the discoverer the belief in a benevolent Creator, since the inductive
** Whewell, Philosophy, II, p. 221. Whewell, History, I, p. 355.
See Elizabeth Jay, ‘Introductory essay’, in Elizabeth Jay (ed.). The Evangelical and Oxford Movements
(Cambridge, 1983), pp. 1-19.
intellectual path of discovery revealed how order was made from disorder.^^ For Whewell the imagination of man was ‘itself the work of God’, but this was not a spiritualised interpretation of the faculty. The imagination and the intellect, both gifts from God, were to be put to use to find God, the source of order, through the chaos of nature. Indeed, as Whewell described the deity in his Bridgewater treatise, God was
‘the union of all perfection, the highest point of all intellectual and moral excellence’.
W hewell’s scientific ideology as it developed in his Philosophy was therefore orientated more towards a rational, but fundamentally Christian, system where reason dominated the intellectual process. Whewell was therefore adamant that the discoverer should be dispassionate and as objective as possible;
‘In the first place, facts, when used as the materials of physical science, must be
referred to conceptions o f the intellect only, all emotions of fear, admiration, and the like, being rejected or subdued. Thus the observations of phenomena which are related as portents and prodigies, striking terror and boding evil, are of no value for purposes of science. ... We cannot make the poets our observers. Moreover, Whewell contrasted the spiritual imagination that produced works of artistic genius, with the rational intellect necessary for scientific discovery:
‘It appears probable that neither poetry, nor painting, nor the other arts which require for their perfection a lofty and spiritualized imagination, would have appeared in the noble and beautiful forms which they assumed in the fourteenth and fifteenth century, if men of genius had, at the beginning o f that period, made it their main business to discover the laws of nature, and to reduce them to a rigorous scientific form.’^*
In connection with W hewell’s work in his Bridgewater treatise, Yeo argues that Whewell was able to promote an image of science that was free of irreligious and pragmatic connotations because he championed an epistemology which emphasised the spiritual character of mind.^^ However such an interpretation glosses over the
Yeo, Defining Science, p. 120.
Whewell, Astronomy and General Physics Considered with Reference to Natural Theology, pp. 378- 379, quotes p. 379.
Whewell, Fhilosc
Whewell, Philosophy, II, p. 339. Richard Yeo, ‘William Whewell,
century Britain’, Annals o f Science, 36 (1979), 493-516: p. 499. Whewell, Philosophy, II, p. 197, Whewell’s emphasis.
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difference in Whewell’s use of ‘genius’. W hewell’s description of the human mind, while insisting on the importance of imagination, was not a spiritualised interpretation. Indeed, the latitudinarian Anglican core members of the British Association, Whewell included, were judged to be threatening the spiritual nature of mankind by their espousal of the natural theological collective endeavour. The Tractarians, the name given to the High Churchmen at the University of Oxford, and the most hostile opponents of scientific institutions, feared the development of a secular morality founded on the latitudinarian interpretation of science. While not attempting to disparage learning, the Tractarians insisted that true learning consisted of more than simply the cultivation of the intellect. Knowledge, i.e. knowledge of God, was not to be gained through wholly rational reasoning, but by encountering the Deity spiritually, through revelation. For them, material phenomena were the types and instruments of things unseen.^® The British Association’s rhetoric of natural theology was characterised by Tractarians such as John Henry Newman as allowing Dissenters, such as Dalton, access to Oxbridge by the back door.^^
That W hewell’s philosophy of science was not spiritualised enough for the Tractarians is highlighted by their fear that the philosophy of science championed by the broad church scientists, threatened to institute a secularisation of spiritual hierarchies and thus place a limitation of the power of God. The High Churchmen at Oxford were characterised by a profound conservatism, and were focused on preserving existing spiritual and temporal hierarchies. Emphasising patristic learning, an archaic and unemotional form of religion that stuck to the traditional liturgy, they were staunchly averse both to the emotional outbursts of the Evangelicals, and to non-episcopal Protestantism.^^ Newman, for instance, argued that genius was ‘intuitive knowledge’ and believed that ‘they who have a corresponding insight into moral truth (as far as they have it) have reached that especial perfection in the spiritual part of their nature, which
^ On the strongly spiritual nature of the Oxford Movement and the Tractarians, see Peter Benedict Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760-1857 (Cambridge, 1994), esp. pp. 184-227; also Geoffrey Rowell, “ Church principles’ and ‘Protestant Kempism’, some theological forerunners of the Tractarians’, in Paul Vaiss (ed.). From Oxford to the People: Reconsidering Newman & the Oxford Movement (Leominster, 1996), pp. 17-59.
See Whewell, History, III, pp. 152-153, and above pp. 103-104.
is so rarely found, and so greatly prized among the intellectual endowments of the soul.’^^ However, such genius was nothing compared with the deity:
‘We know that philosophers of this world are men of deep reflection and inventive genius, who propose a doctrine, and by its speciousness gather round them followers, found schools, and in the event do wonderful things. These are the men, who at length change the face of society, reverse laws and opinions, subvert governments, and overthrow kingdoms; or they extend the range of our knowledge, and, as it were, introduce us into new worlds. Well, this is admirable, surely, so vast is the power of mind; but, observe how inferior is this display of intellectual greatness compared with that which is seen in Christ and His saints, inferior because defective. These great philosophers of the world, whose words are so good and so effective, are themselves too often nothing more than words.
Yet the Tractarians perceived other threats in the emphasis being given to collectivism within science by the liberal Anglican organising core of the British Association. The Tractarian John William Bowden for instance portrayed collectivism as injurious to the value of individually governed inquiry, arguing that any advantages gained by the clubbing together of men of science were counterbalanced by ‘disadvantages, both scientific and moral, of a serious kind.’ He feared not only a dumbing down, with great individuals potentially being restrained by the ‘dwarfish proportions of the duller and less aspiring’ majority, but also the effect of dilution that absorbing a vast number of smaller minds into the scientific process could result in unconfirmed or, worse still, controversial findings being discussed in public forums, rather than being confined to the private discussions of savants.^^ Indeed, Newman, in his sermon, entitled ‘The Nature of Faith in Relation to Reason’ given in 1839, insisted on the pre-eminent place of genius in the mathematical sciences, and contrasted the abilities of the genius with the meaner intellects of the masses:
John Henry Newman, ‘Personal influence, the means o f propagating the truth’, in John Henry Newman,
Sermons, Chiefly on the Theory o f Religious Belief, Preached before the University o f Oxford (London, 1843), pp. 60-85: p. 70.
John Henry Newman, ‘The three offices of Christ’, in John Henry Newman, Sermons, Bearing on the Subjects o f the Day (London, 1843), pp. 59-71: p. 68.
John William Bowden, ‘The British Association for the Advancement o f Science’, The British Critic, and Quarterly Theological Review, XXV, no. XLIX (1839), 1-48, pp. 16 and 17; also discussed in Yeo,
‘The most remarkable victories of genius, remarkable both in their originality and the confidence with which they have been pursued, have been gained, as though by invisible weapons, by ways of thought so recondite and intricate that the mass of men are obliged to take them on trust, till the event or other evidence confirms them. Such are the methods which penetrating intellects have invented in mathematical science, which look like sophisms till they end in truths. ... Or, let it be considered how rare and immaterial (if I may use the words) is metaphysical proof; how difficult to embrace, even when presented to us by philosophers in whose clearness of mind and good sense we fully confide; and what a vain system of words without ideas such men seem to be piling up, while perhaps we are obliged to confess that it must be we who are dull, not they who are fanciful; and that, whatever be the character of their investigations, we want the vigour or flexibility of mind to judge of them.’^^
However, men other than Whewell also began to emphasise the role of the intellect over that of the imagination. James Manby Gully (1808-1883), a member of the Royal College of Physicians, and a Fellow of the Royal Physical Society of Edinburgh, had his
lectures on the Moral and Physical Attributes o f Men o f Genius and Talent, delivered at the Western Literary and Scientific Institution in London, printed for private circulation in 1836. Examining genius from the point of physiology, Gully stressed the importance of the nervous system, the seat of the excessive sensibility, which he believed was a fundamental feature of genius.^^ In his descriptions of genius, which he insisted were not ‘to be viewed as a professional effusion’, genius balanced imagination with a properly disciplined intellect, as well as certain moral qualities. Thus,
‘the profound mathematician, the superior naturalist, the clear-sighted physical philosopher, the skilful physician, even the consummate general, is a man who unites in himself a vast range of thought with an exquisite judgment and precise tact; one, in short, who imagines and observes, who conceives and experiments, who invents and applies.
^ John Henry Newman, ‘The nature of faith in relation to reason’ (13 January 1839), in Newman,
Sermons, Chiefly on the Theory o f Religious Belief, pp. 194-214: pp. 209-210.
James Manby Gully, Lectures on the Moral and Physical Attributes o f Men o f Genius and Talent
(London, 1836), pp. 1-41. Gully, Lectures, p. 55.
However, Gully was not writing on genius out of mere intellectual curiosity: he had an ulterior motive. Gully, an ambitious social climber, targeted those he believed to be men of genius to be his patients. At the time of writing his Lectures, Gully was working at a fashionable London practice, and seeking an élite clientele. He subsequently constructed his water-based cure (establishing his practice at Malvern in the 1840s) around the appealing notion that excessive mental activity could lead to nervous breakdown: through his techniques, a physically vigorous regime to stimulate the circulation, eminent Victorians such as Tennyson and Carlyle, were offered soothing for their overworked minds.^^ In this context of attempting to attract a particular élite patient base. Gully’s description of genius consisted of combinations of virtues, highlighting the role of the intellect: an ‘exquisite sensibility, readily excited, ever active, with a methodical and positive reasoning pow er’, and ‘exaltation with precision of soul, ardour with perseverance, power of conception with patience in execution; such is the rare, the invaluable coalition which gives genius its inappreciable, yet irresistible
sway.’^°®
Others also stressed the importance of the correctly disciplined mind and intellectual habits over flights of genius. Focusing on what he perceived to be the proper habits of the mind, rather than genius, John Abercrombie, following the example of the Scottish anatomist and surgeon Charles Bell (1774-1842), recast John Hunter as an assiduous investigator, a mode of description that redefined what characterised distinction within the medical profession:
‘According to a common mode of expression, we attach great importance to that which we call genius, and which we consider as an original quality of particular minds. But what is of greater value, than that which often receives the name of genius, is not to be considered as an original quality, but a habit of the mind. It