The Age of Wonder (76 page)

A second meeting of the fledgling Association took place at Oxford in 1832. A fine theatrical performance from Professor William Buckland on the subject of geology and the courtship of primitive reptiles received some praise. This time
The Times
deigned to notice the occasion, but loftily dismissed it as ‘a mere unexplained display of philosophical toys’, and pointed out that Buckland sometimes seemed to forget that he lectured ‘in the presence of ladies’.
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But with the third meeting in June 1833 the British Association really began to make a national impact. It was held at Cambridge, itself considered a major coup, and the capture of the heartland of progressive rational thought in Britain. Cambridge was also Newton’s shrine, and the base of the powerful ‘Trinity and John’s’ group of scientific academics. This time the list of those attending included almost all those who would soon become the rising stars in the firmament of early Victorian science: Michael Faraday, Sir John Herschel, John Dalton, Charles Babbage, Sir David Brewster, Adam Sedgwick, William Whewell, Thomas Chalmers, Thomas Malthus and William Somerville. The only notable absentee was Charles Darwin, just then botanising in Uruguay during the
Beagle
’s voyage.
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Some of ‘the ladies’ were also pressing for admittance, including several powerful scientific wives, like Margaret Herschel and Mary Somerville. They pretended to be fully engaged in hosting receptions and choosing the menus, while unofficially they listened at the back of the lecture halls, took notes, and critically judged the quality (and appearance) of the speakers. The major debate was on the nature of the Aurora Borealis, which symbolically called upon a wide range of scientific interests including meteorology, optics, electricity, magnetism, polar exploration and solar astronomy. It was held at the heart of the university, in the Cambridge Senate House, on King’s Parade. The main luncheon, a cold collation for 600 members, was staged at Trinity, with guests drifting across Great Court to toast the statue of Newton. Then came fireworks, and a ‘botanical barge’ energetically punted up the Cam. One other noticeable participant, now ill and frail, but still intellectually formidable, was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, aged sixty.

Coleridge was put up in a friend’s rooms at Trinity itself, and remarked appreciatively that his bed was ‘as near as I can describe it a couple of sacks full of potatoes tied together…Truly I lay down at night a man, and arose in the morning a bruise.’ This, rather than opium, might explain why he was never able to rise till the afternoon, though he always had ‘a crowded levee’ at his bedside. Nevertheless he stayed for three days, attended many of the meetings, and always found undergraduates and professors crowding round to talk to him. He certainly was one of the lions, though from a disappearing age.

All his old enthusiasm for scientific matters came sweeping back, and he was soon in the thick of it, boldly announcing that ‘Lyell’s system of geology is half truth-but not more’; while Descartes’ vortices ‘were not a
hypothesis:
they rested on no facts at all…Your subtle fluid etc is pure gratuitous assumption.’ Then he delighted everyone by suddenly saying: ‘That fine old Quaker philosopher Dalton’s face was like-like All Soul’s College.’ This was a very
Oxford
joke in Cambridge.
³⁵

He was up to the minute with Herschel’s
Natural Philosophy,
and gave an impressively Coleridgean account of the role of ‘hypothesis or theory’ in the inductive philosophy. ‘The use of a Theory in the
real sciences
is to help the investigator to a complete view of all the hitherto discovered parts relating to it; it is a Collected View, θεωρια [
Theoria
], of all he yet knows
in one.
Of course whilst any facts remain unknown, no theory can be exactly true, because every new part must necessarily displace the relation of all the others. A theory therefore only helps investigation:
it cannot invent or discover.’
³⁶

Memories of Humphry Davy must have come flooding back, in all the glow of his Bristol youth, for Coleridge got on particularly well with the young Michael Faraday. Unlike Lady Davy, he was favourably impressed by Faraday’s fine open face, with its mop of curling hair and gazing wideapart eyes, and his modest manner, with its peculiar directness and intensity. ‘I was exceedingly pleased with Faraday, he seemed to me to have the true temperament of Genius-that of carrying on the spring and freshness of youthful, nay boyish, feelings into the mature strength of manhood.’

This was a signal recognition by Coleridge, who had defined such ageless energy as a characteristic of literary genius some seventeen years before, in Chapter 4 of his
Biographia Literaria
(1816). In a passage describing the poetry of Wordsworth, he wrote: ‘To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar-
with sun and moon and stars throughout the year, And man and woman
-this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius from talent.’
³⁷
He was now applying these literary criteria to a man of science. In his last published work,
On Church and State
(1830), he had included men of science as an essential part of what he christened ‘the clerisy’: that is, the diffuse body of thinkers, writers, teachers and opinion-formers who made up the intelligentsia or informing culture of a nation.
³⁸

At one meeting, chaired by William Whewell, Coleridge was drawn into a passionate discussion of semantics. It revolved around the question of what exactly someone who works ‘in the
real sciences
’ (as he had phrased it) should be
called.
This is how Whewell reported the British Association debate in the
Quarterly Review
of 1834:

Formerly the ‘learned’ embraced in their wide grasp all the branches of the tree of knowledge, mathematicians as well as philologers, physical as well as antiquarian speculators. But these days are past…This difficulty was felt very oppressively by the members of the BAAS at Cambridge last summer. There was no general term by which these gentlemen could describe themselves with reference to their pursuits.

‘Philosophers’ was felt to be too wide and lofty a term, and was very properly forbidden them by Mr. Coleridge, both in his capacity as philologer and metaphysician. ‘Savans’ was rather assuming and besides too French; but some ingenious gentleman [in fact Whewell himself] proposed that, by analogy with ‘artist’, they might form ‘scientist’-and added that there could be no scruple to this term since we already have such words as ‘economist’ and ‘atheist’-but this was not generally palatable.
³⁹

The analogy with ‘atheist’ was of course fatal. Adam Sedgwick exploded: ‘Better die of this want [of a term] than bestialize our tongue by such a barbarism.’ But in fact ‘scientist’ came rapidly into general use from this date, and was recognised in the OED by 1840. Sedgwick later reflected more calmly, and made up for his outburst by producing a memorable image. ‘Such a coinage has always taken place at the great epochs of discovery: like the medals that are struck at the beginning of a new reign.’
⁴⁰

This argument over a single word-‘scientists’-gave a clue to the much larger debate that was steadily surfacing in Britain at this crucial period of transition 1830-34. Lurking beneath the semantics lay the whole question of whether the new generation of professional ‘scientists’ would promote safe religious belief or a dangerous secular materialism. Hitherto, either austere intellectual Deism, held for example by William Herschel, or else the rather more picturesque Natural Theology conveniently accepted by Davy (at least in his public lectures) had disguised this problem, whatever the revelations of astronomy or geology, or the inspired ragings of Shelley.

For many Romantic scientists, with a robust intellectual belief in the ‘argument by Design’, there was no immediate contradiction between religion and science: rather the opposite. Science was a gift of God or Providence to mankind, and its purpose was to reveal the
wonders
of His design. This indeed was the essence of ‘natural’ religion, as promoted for example by William Paley in his
Natural Theology
(1802), with its famous analogy with the divine watchmaker. It was the faith that brought Mungo Park back alive from his first Niger expedition. It was the faith that inspired Michael Faraday to become a Deacon in the Sandemanian Church in July 1832.

But public faith often differed from private beliefs. Whatever he said in his famous lectures, Davy’s poetry and his posthumous writings, such as
Consolations in Travel,
suggested a kind of science mysticism that certainly precluded a Christian God, and possibly even any kind of Creator at all. Others, like William Herschel, had been content to rely on an instinctive, perhaps deliberately unexamined, belief in a benign Creator somewhere distantly behind the great unfolding scheme of nature. Though in Herschel’s case, his own observations had shown how extremely-
appallingly
-distant, both in time and space, that Creator must be. Moreover, his sister Caroline never once mentioned God anywhere in her journals.
⁴¹
As for Joseph Banks, his sister Sophia had had no high opinion of his natural piety.

Yet with the growing public knowledge of geology and astronomy, and the recognition of ‘deep space’ and ‘deep time’, fewer and fewer men or women of education can have believed in a literal, Biblical six days of creation. However, science itself had yet to produce its own theory (or myth) of creation, and there was no alternative Newtonian Book of Genesis-as yet. That is why Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species
appeared so devastating when it was finally published in 1859. It was not that it reduced the six days of Biblical creation to myth: this had already been largely done by Lyell and the geologists. What it demonstrated was that there was no need for a divine creation at all. There was no divine creation of species, no miraculous invention of butterflies’ wings or cats’ eyes or birds’ song. The process of evolution by ‘natural selection’ replaced any need for ‘intelligent design’ in nature. Darwin had indeed written a new Book of Genesis.
^♣

Over the following five years, the well-meaning 8th Earl of Bridgewater would commission a whole series of booklets by the leading men of science, intended to show how British scientific research and discovery unfailingly underpinned Christian-and specifically Anglican-belief. They were to illustrate what might have been called an unproven hypothesis: ‘The Goodness of God as Manifested in the Creation’. The thankless task of composing these
Bridgewater Treatises
(1830-36) was piously or sportively undertaken by Chalmers (on astronomy), the humorous Professor Buckland (on geology), Whewell (on mathematics), Charles Bell (on anatomy) and several others of lesser note. Thanks to the Duke of Bridgewater’s bequest, they were all outstandingly remunerated at £1,000 each, plus all profits.
⁴²

Reading Buckland on geology, Mary Somerville mournfully observed: ‘facts are such stubborn things’. Faraday, a lifelong Sandemanian, refused to make any comment. Charles Babbage threatened to write a ninth and scathing last treatise, but he never finished it.
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On a more whimsical note, William Sotheby, Coleridge’s old friend and the translator of Dante, celebrated this third conference with a long, prismatic piece of light verse, ‘Lines on the 3rd Meeting of the BAAS at Cambridge, 1833’. He set out a new tradition, the roll-call of the great ‘scientists’. Among others he saluted Bacon, Newton, William Herschel, Wollaston, Davy, Faraday, Dalton, John Herschel, Babbage, Roget, Hutton, Playfair and Lyell. But he only mentioned one woman: not Caroline Herschel, but Mary Somerville; and she was noticed, ironically, for her official absence.

Why wert thou absent? Thou whose cultured mind,
Smoothing the path of knowledge to mankind
Adorn’st thy page deep stored with thought profound…
While Cambridge-glorying in her Newton’s fame-
Records with his, thy woman’s honoured name,
High-gifted Somerville!…
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Later meetings of the British Association took place, as planned, rotating round the great provincial capitals, but studiously avoiding London. There was now increasing competition to be the host metropolis, as it was realised that the Association was beginning to attract both international recognition and a considerable local boost to city finances. Edinburgh was chosen in 1834, followed by Dublin in 1835, Bristol in 1836, Liverpool in 1837, Newcastle in 1838, Birmingham in 1839 and Glasgow in 1840. By this time over 2,000 people were attending each year, the press coverage was huge, and the official membership had risen to over 1,000.

But the early press reception-now increasingly important in British science-was surprisingly rough, and revealed all sorts of class and cultural anxieties.
The Times
leaders thundered out disapproval annually from 1832 to 1835: ‘It is the necessary consequence of the Spirit of the Age…The principle of humbug, the principle of Penny Magazines, and Mechanics Institutes, the principle of spreading the waters of knowledge over a large surface without caring how shallow they may be-The Association, we prophesy, will soon see its end.’
⁴⁵
To emphasise its unimpeachable accuracy,
The Times
consistently spelt Michael Faraday as ‘Farraday’.