Europe: A History (161 page)
Scientific thought provided one of the strands which furthered the traditions of the Enlightenment rather than of Romanticism. Pushed to extremes in the work of Auguste Comte (1798–1857), however, it led not just to the branch of philosophy called ‘positivism’ but to a new pseudo-religion replete with its own rites, dogmas, and priesthood. Comte held that all knowledge passed through three successive stages of development, where it is systematized according to (respectively) theological, metaphysical, and ‘positive’ or scientific principles. This ‘Law of the Three States’, first expounded in the
Système de politique positive
(1842), provides the key to his elaborate classification of the sciences and to his outline of a new ‘science of society’ which he presented in the
Philosophie positive
(1850–4). The discipline of ‘social physics’ would permit the reordering of human society along scientific lines. The corps of ‘social engineers’ was armed with the slogan: ‘Savoir pour prévoir, prévoir pour prevenir’ (To know in order to foresee, to foresee in order to prevent). Comte must be regarded as one of the fathers of modern sociology, which he placed at the top of the hierarchy of sciences. At the same time, by insisting on the necessity of institutionalized spiritual power and by launching what was in effect a scientific Church, he ended up in the paradoxical position of turning science into the object of a mystical cult. In the eyes of one of his critics, T. H. Huxley, Comte’s positivism was equivalent to ‘Catholicism minus Christianity’.
In this same period, science and technology forged ahead as never before. Although the nature of scientific discovery was perhaps less fundamental than that of Copernicus, Newton, or Einstein, whole new continents of knowledge were mapped out. Science moved into the forefront of public concern. The most distinguished names belong to the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, and biology—above all, Faraday, Mendeleev, Pasteur, Mendel, Hertz, and Darwin. The list of major discoveries and inventions began to be counted not in the scores or hundreds but in thousands (see Appendix III, pp. 1272–3). With the exception of one or two Americans of genius, it was entirely dominated by Europeans. The Great Exhibition of 1851, which took place in London under the patronage of Prince Albert and whose profits were given over to the Science Museums and to the Imperial College of Science and Technology, attracted millions of visitors from all over the world,
[ELEMENTA] [GENES]
The growing scientific challenge to traditional religious assumptions culminated in a major dispute over Darwin’s
Origin of Species
(1859) and the associated Theory of Evolution. Christian fundamentalists, schooled in the literal truth of the Book of Genesis, where God created the world in six days and six nights, saw no way to reconcile a theory that mankind had slowly evolved over millions of generations. It was odd that this particular row between science and religion did not break out much earlier. After all, the pioneering treatise of palaeontology, on the antiquity of fossils, had been written by the Dane, Nils Steno, as long ago as 1669. The first scientific computation of the age of the earth—G. Buffon’s
époques de la Nature
, which arrived at the figure of c.75,000 years—had been published in 1778; and the Nebular Hypothesis of Laplace, ascribing the origin of the universe to an expanding cloud of gas, had been in circulation since 1796. The French naturalist J.-B. Lamarck (1744–1829) had presented a theory of evolution based on the inheritance of acquired characteristics in 1809. Ever since Steno’s time, scientific geologists had been locked in battle with the so-called ‘diluvians’, who ascribed all physical land forms to the effects of the Great Flood,
[MONKEY]
ELEMENTA
O
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1 March 1869 the Professor of Chemistry at St Petersburg University, Dmitri I. Mendeleev (1834–1907) was preparing to make a journey to Tver. Though preoccupied with the preparation of his textbook,
Osnovy Khimii
(Principles of Chemistry), he was also deeply involved in liberal schemes to apply science to everyday life in Russia, and he had accepted a commission to study peasant cheese-making methods. He had reached the point in his textbook where he was looking for a system to classify the chemical elements; and that day, he suddenly saw the benefit of ordering them in a table which listed them according both to their atomic weights and to common properties.
Nine years earlier, Mendeleev had attended the first International Chemistry Congress at Karlsruhe, where the Italian, Stanislao Canizzaro, had drawn his attention to a list of elements arranged by atomic weight. Since then he had been playing a kind of mental patience, laying out the elements both by atomic values and by suits of properties. He now combined Canizzaro’s list with his own typological grouping. The result was a primitive version of the Periodic Table, and a provisional formulation of the Periodic Law: ‘Elements placed in accordance with the value of their atomic weights present a clear periodicity of properties.’ That month he read a paper at the Russian Chemical Society on ‘An Attempt at a System of Elements Based on Their Atomic Weight and Chemical Affinity’. It appeared in a German journal in March 1871.
Prior to Mendeleev, the elements were only understood in piecemeal fashion. The ancients recognized ten real elements, but their thinking was confused by their parallel belief in the ‘elemental forces’ of earth, fire, air and water. Lavoisier knew 23 elements. Humphry Davy isolated sodium and potassium by electrolysis. By 1860, at Karlsruhe, Canizzaro had 60 elements on his list—exactly two-thirds of the 90 which occur in nature.
Mendeleev’s findings did not gain much immediate support. They were rejected by leading British and German chemists, including Bunsen, with whom he had once worked at Heidelberg. The break came in 1875, when a Frenchman identified a new element called ‘gallium’. Mendeleev was able to show that this was one of the six undiscovered elements whose existence, atomic weights, and properties he had been able to predict. To the surprise of the profession, the Russian theoretician had proved himself in advance of the empirical research. International fame and fortune followed. In Russia, however, Mendeleev’s liberal opinions caused friction. In 1880 he failed to gain full membership of the Imperial Academy; and in 1890 he was forced to resign from the university. In his later years he served as a consultant on everything from gunpowder and icebreakers to weights and measures, aeronautics, and the petroleum industry.
Surprisingly, when Mendeleev learned of atomic structure, he felt the theory of radioactivity to be incompatible with his Periodic Law. In fact, it provided the ultimate confirmation of his great discovery. The electron count in the atom of each element is strictly related to its weight and properties,
[ELEKTRON]
When Mendeleev died, his students carried a copy of the Periodic Table over his coffin. By then, it had become the accepted basis for the chemical classification of matter, the meeting-point of modern chemistry and physics. In 1955, one of nineteen artificial radioactive elements, created by bombarding einsteinium-253 with helium ions, was named in his memory. It is Mendelevium (Me
101
).
Darwin’s impact must be explained partly by the fact that scientific debates appealed by his time to a much wider audience, but mainly by the human aspect—the sensational news that all people were descended not from Adam but from the apes: from ‘a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits’. Darwin had been collecting data on the formation of species ever since his voyage on HMS
Beagle
to South America and the Galapagos Islands in 1831–6; and his original flash of inspiration came after reading Malthus in 1838. More than twenty years passed before he was pushed into publishing his arguments in the
Origin of Species
, and more than thirty before he fully wrote them up in
The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex
(1871). Many particulars of Darwin’s account of natural selection, otherwise known as ‘the survival of the fittest’, have been overtaken by later criticisms; but the main contention of evolutionism, that all living species of the plant and animal world have progressed through constant interchange with their environment and competition among themselves—quickly gained almost universal acceptance. With time, mainstream Christianity did not find difficulty in accepting human evolution as part of God’s purpose. Social scientists adapted the evolutionary idea to numerous disciplines; and ‘social Darwinism’—the notion that human affairs are a jungle in which only the fittest of nations, classes, or individuals will survive— was due to have a long career.
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Saturday, 30 June 1860, seven hundred people crammed into an Oxford lecture room for a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In theory, they had come to hear a paper by an American scholar, Dr Draper, on The Intellectual Development of Europe considered with reference to the views of Mr Darwin’. In fact they had come to watch a contest between the paper’s two main discussants. On one side sat Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, a fierce adversary of the Evolution Theory, known as ‘Soapy Sam’. On the other side, in Darwin’s absence, sat Professor T. H. Huxley, palaeontologist, about to gain the label of ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’.
No one remembered Dr Draper’s paper. But Bishop Wilberforce, who took the stand in jovial mood, ended his remarks by asking whether Mr Huxley ‘claimed his descent from a monkey through his grandfather or his grandmother?’ Huxley kept cool, and explained that Darwin’s theory was much more than a hypothesis. ‘I would not be ashamed to have a monkey as an ancestor,’ he concluded, ‘but I would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth.’
1
A woman fainted amidst the uproar.
The meeting was a critical moment in the popular reception of modern science. It took place only one year after the publication of the
Origin of Species
, and two years after Darwin had read a joint paper ‘On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties: and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection’. Four years later, at a return match in the Sheldonian Theatre, Benjamin Disraeli could not resist a jibe in the style of ‘Soapy Sam’. ‘The question is this;’ he said, ‘Is Man an ape or an angel? My Lord, I am on the side of the angels!’
The subsequent career of Evolutionism is well-trodden history. One line of development fostered by Darwin himself came to be known as ‘Social Darwinism’. It preached the ominous proposition not just that the fittest had survived but also that the fittest alone had a right to survive. Another line was concerned with the practical science of ‘improving racial standards’, i.e. of human breeding. This was pioneered by a series of English scholars headed by Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911), Professor at University College London, and came to be known as eugenics. Its later advocates included Galton’s student and biographer, Karl Pearson (1857–1936), a statistician and Marxist, who founded a theory of ‘social imperialism’, and H. S. Chamberlain who publicized their ideas in Germany.
Francis Galton was responsible for some of the most influential research and pseudo-research of the age. His
Art of Travel
(1855) followed a pioneering expedition into the interior of South-West Africa, setting the fashion for African exploration. His
Meteorographica
(1863) launched the
modern science of
meteorology
. As an early psychologist, he conducted the first studies on the behaviour of twins, and set up the world’s first mental test centre. As an enthusiast for eugenics, he wrote a series of volumes on
Gregariousness in Cattle and Men
(1871), on
Inquiries into Human Faculty
(1883), and on
Natural Inheritance
(1889). Before that, he completed an extremely popular study of
Hereditary Genius: its Laws and Consequences
(1869). Applying statistical methods to the genealogies of a wide range of achievers from judges to wrestlers, he tried to show that ‘talent and genius, and an inclination to moral traits, tend to run in families’. In a final section, he analysed ‘The Comparative Worth of Different Races’. He graded the races on a scale from A to I, concluding that the ancient Greeks were ‘the ablest race of which history bears record’: that African negroes, despite outstanding individuals, could never attain the average grade of Anglo-Saxons: and that Australian aborigines were one grade beneath the negroes.
2
Darwin said that he had never read anything ‘more original or interesting’; but he rejected eugenic science as ‘Utopian’. At Darwin’s funeral in Westminster Abbey, Galton publicly called for the Abbey’s Creation Window to be replaced by something more suited to Evolution.
3
The point is: Galton, the advocate of ‘hereditary genius’, was Darwin’s cousin.
4
Indeed, the general conviction that scientific methods could and should be applied to the study of human as well as natural phenomena represented one of the characteristic changes of the age. Hence, in addition to economics and ethnography there appeared sociology, anthropology, human geography, political science, and eventually psychology and psychiatry. As the scope of the physical and social sciences expanded, the preserve of pure philosophy contracted until it was left with a handful of traditional fields—epistemology, logic, ethics, aesthetics, and political theory.
Religion
was resurgent. It found expression in a rich corpus of theological writing, in the fervour of the masses, in the strengthening of Church dogma and organization. The new climate was formed partly in revulsion against the excesses of the revolutionary era and partly through the termination of many earlier forms of religious discrimination. The Enlightenment was reaching its term, but not
before the principle of religious toleration was accepted. Discriminatory laws against Catholics dating from the seventeenth century were removed in most Protestant states. Protestants gained equivalent rights in most Catholic states. Judaism was readmitted in many places whence it had been excluded since medieval times. In Prussia, for example, a new national Church was created in 1817 through a merger of Lutheran and Calvinist elements; the Catholic Church was fully established by the Constitution of 1850. In Austria-Hungary, full religious toleration was guaranteed as part of the
Ausgleich
of 1867. In Great Britain, Roman Catholics were largely emancipated by Act of Parliament in 1829, and the Jews in 1888; though both continued to be excluded from the monarchy. In the Netherlands, similar measures were completed in 1853. In France, the Napoleonic Concordat remained in force until 1905, despite tension between Catholics and Republicans. Extreme French rationalists professed a zealotry of their own: at Limoges they staged a festival of mathematics to compete with the Feast of the Assumption.
