Of Science and Religion
Then and Now
Department of the History of Science
Cambridge, MA 02138
Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives.John Hedley Brooke (Cambridge History of Science Series, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991). Pages: x + 422. $44.50 (hardcover), $12.95 (paperback).
From Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 45 (June 1993):120.
It is 1942. From the Pyrenees to the heart of European Russia, from the North Cape to Crete, the Continent is swamped by Nazi forces. Italy is Hitler's partner; Spain collaborates. The liberation of Europe is under way. U.S. troops are marshalling in Britain. Montgomery and Eisenhower are sweeping across North Africa, aiming to slash the soft underbelly of the Axis. The Red Army, desperate for a Second Front, is regrouping to crush the Germans at Stalingrad, while the French dither and squirm to save their skins. For some there is no escape. The remnants of European Jewry are being rounded up for incineration - the "final solution" is in hand.
At this awful moment, with the outcome in the
balance, what does it mean to write history of science? What does one actually
say? Let three scholars speak.
Charles Raven, liberal clergyman and author of a vast new biography of John Ray, is preparing a series of Cambridge lectures for publication as Science, Religion, and the Future (1943). His message is unequivocal: the nineteenth-century failure to reconcile science and religion in a single, Christian vision has led directly to the present plight. The complacency with which "intellectual, moral and religious teachers" blame society, or Nazism, or the politicians, or the devil "makes it clear that they do not recognize their responsibility" for the emergence of "violently contrasted." ideologies.1
No such complacency for Charles Singer, writing anonymously in the Political Quarterly. He too is adamant: the history of science from Newton to Darwin shows that "the loathsome and satanic religion of National Socialism" has grown directly from the teachings of Christian theologians. "Those who have read the life of Martin Luther or Alexander VI need not be astounded at the life of Adolf Hitler. There is a stock whose root is rottenness and its fruit shall come up as dust." Singer, the son of a rabbi, is to reprint this indictment under his own name as The Christian Failure (1943), signing the preface "Christmas Day, 1942, being also the tercentenary of the birth of Newton.2
Finally, Joseph Needham in this momentous year. Having just decided to write "a work of some kind on the history of science and technology in the Chinese culture-area," he is on his way to China as the Royal Society's scientific attachÈ. The Anglo-Catholic socialist, so evident in his new book, Time: The Refreshing River (1943), is to become an "honorary Taoist." But before he leaves, the BBC requires his service. In a broadcast talk Needham pulls no punches: Protestantism and the profit-motive spurred scientific research until in the late nineteenth century "capitalism came...to be a brake upon its further progress." The "Nazi gangster leaders" have met the crisis of capitalism with industrial dictatorship and extreme nationalism; their ultimate defeat - Needham is in no two minds - will bring new "watchwords" to the fore: socialism, internationalism, and human unity.3
Heady stuff this, fifty years on. Then the world was simpler, science simpler, its historians simpler - surely. Facing a conflagration, they wrote with fire in their bones. Today, in Bonhoeffer's "world come of age" we see things differently: our passion is to be dispassionate, to stand above warring factions, to abjure apologetics and point the way to truth. Of necessity - surely. For otherwise our histories of "science and religion" will one day read as oddly as Needham's, or Singer's, or Raven's - if indeed they are read at all.
Some such conviction seems to inform John Brooke's remarkable new book, and my preamble is intended to point it up, to make both its reasonableness and its possible irrelevance as plain as possible. For Brooke's study is one of very few monographs, if not the first, on its subject deliberately to eschew an apologetic standpoint. What it offers are not historical "lessons" but "critical perspectives," and these in staggering abundance. Painstakingly contrived and crafted, Science and Religion moves by sure and stately steps, always judicious, guarded or noncommittal as fitting, and temperate on even the hottest topics. Yet the prose, far from bland, is elegant - it even entertains making this magisterial synthesis an ideal textbook, one I shall surely set.
A single example must do: Brooke offers a marvelous introduction to Darwin in his theological context (pp. 255-63, 276-81). The account of natural selection is splendid, and I was gratified to see how far, on controverted points, our judgements coincide. Of course I differ over minor details or emphases - who couldn't find something to take issue with in his or her own specialist field? But this is nothing compared to our broad areas of agreement, and in some cases I think much more can be said in favor of Brooke's interpretations. For instance, the impact of Darwin's first encounter with native Fuegians, which Brooke suggests may have pushed him towards evolution, must have been forceful indeed, heightened by his receiving three weeks beforehand, and presumably reading, the second volume of Lyell's Principles of Geology, which damned talk of man's ape ancestry.
But I digress. As the locus for my further reflections, I want to concentrate on the one hundred-plus pages - about a third of the text - devoted to natural theology, the historical sciences, and evolutionary theory. This will serve as my pretext for remarking on the book's general subject and its pursuit in the nineteenth century.
While disclaiming "apologetic intentions" (p. 12), Brooke makes a running case for the inherent complexity of his subject matter. He stresses ambiguities and telling ironies - Cuvier's paleontology as promoting evolution, Lyell's fragmentary fossil record as Darwin's boon, Paley's perfect adaptations as grist for natural selection - and he finds no neat patterns or correlations in the dialectic. Indeed, he shows time and again, with wonted scrupulosity, how "fine distinctions are required if the texture of past thinking is to be recovered" (p. 189). Now I have no objection to any of this in principle. Brooke offers us liberation from trite and tidy "conflict" theses, historical "harmonies," and other axe-grinding approaches to "science and religion." Only, personally, I am inclined to take generalization somewhat further. If Brooke tends towards splitting, I'm an unrepentant lumper. If the phenomena we have to deal with are only part of what Chauncey Wright called "cosmical weather," if history is a radically messy, contingent, non-teleological process, then I am less interested in discerning local patterns of precipitation or temperature than in tracing large-scale configurations, passing though they may be: the major depressions, the great storms, the frontal systems, the sunny highs, and even successive climatic changes.4
That being said, I am unhappy with the umbrella term, "science and religion," beneath which Brooke practices meteorology. Perhaps it was prescribed by the Cambridge History of Science Series editor, a rubric hallowed by over a century's usage and long enshrined as a subject heading in the U.S. Library of Congress catalog. In any case, I suspect that Brooke shares my view. "Science and religion" lumps too much; or rather, it lumps in the wrong way. For instance, as Brooke points out, "the existence of a political dimension" to the debates he covers "means that to abstract both the 'science' and the 'religion' and then try to establish their mutual relationships can be highly artificial." More than this, it begs the question: it takes nineteenth century actors' categories for granted, or engages our own a priori ones uncritically. But these categories are part of the problem to be addressed, not the starting point of analysis. In the end we may wish to speak, as Brooke does, of "the two spheres of science and religion" (p. 15), but meanwhile we need a discourse in which to analyze the debates he discusses, without reifying, without illicitly importing or imbedding normative notions of "science" and "religion" in the messy, recondite past.
Let me call this discourse Newspeak (without Orwellian connotations). In Oldspeak we refer to people and ideas as scientific, or religious, or sometimes both. Even while refusing, as Brooke does, to offer definitions and demarcations, we persist in describing our subjects as thus and so or as thus or so. Newspeak will be different. In this discourse we will privilege the terms in which societies, institutions, groups, and individuals have represented reality, constituted knowledge as understood by them - "Christian Science" as much as "computer science"; computer science as much as "creation science." Further, we will aim to understand how this knowledge, this reality, was constituted, and by whom, in tracts and Transactions, from pulpits and platforms, in oratories and laboratories.
From the standpoint of cultural anthropology or phenomenology of religion I make no new proposal, but it will require a fundamental shift of historical vision in the field - if there is a field - framed by the conventional phrase "science and religion." We will have to drop the old dualism and focus instead on broad new notions, or "covering concepts," of which I am suggesting three: language, practice, and vocation.
Briefly, language maps cultural change, as Raymond Williams has shown; usage determines meaning, which is socially fraught and fought. In the history of nineteenth-century science we have exemplary semantic studies to guide us - Schaffer on Whewell's linguistic reform, Rudwick on transposed concepts in Lyell's work, and Young and Beer on Darwin's metaphor, to name only a sample - as well as background studies in the history of philology.5 The sort of problem to be addressed appears in Brooke's discussion of the single European market in evolutionary ideas: he refers variously to England's chief export as "Darwin's theory," "Darwin's science," "Darwinism," and "popular Darwinism" (pp. 300-2). Such ambiguity may well be apt, but at another level what we have to deal with (as I've argued elsewhere) is a contentious lexicon - a point that Brooke himself recognizes in the parallel case of Haeckel, who, he says, "incorporated elements of Naturphilosophie into his vocabulary" (p. 301).6 Further studies in the social history of semantics will be most welcome: rich, textured analyses of contested terms such as chance, law, and miracle; matter, spirit, and body; and of course nature itself.
My second covering concept, practice. Speaking and writing are practical activities, but I want to include much more. For instance, large agendas for society were worked out in the laboratory and at the altar. In the communion wafer natural philosophy and theology merged. Transubstantiation, Huxley wisecracked, will be as "nothing" if abiogenesis "turns out to be true." The priests might as well "shut up...shop," for the "heretics" are fixing to outbid them. How so, and why?7 Or what did "research" mean in a divinity school and in a science faculty? What role for experience or experiment in an evangelistic mission and in a lab? (According to Charles Finney's classic 1835 do-it-yourself manual, Lectures on Revivals of Religion, a religious revival "is not a miracle, or dependent on a miracle, in any sense. It is a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means" as much so as any other effect produced by the applications of means." Perhaps then the Ulster Revival of 1859 and the reception of the Origin of Species could be looked at simultaneously.8 How did evidence in historical geology compare with "evidences" for Christianity? How were these compiled, presented, and assessed? What drew audiences to Westminster Abbey and the Royal Institution? How did they "hear" the likes of Friedrich Max M¸ller, who preached in both? What made a readership for Nature or the evangelical Record? How were the readers of the broad-church Reader expected to "read"? How indeed were sermons, research papers, and other discursive commodities produced, and under what conditions? Domestic servants and wives may yet prove to be the long-sought common bond between "science and religion" last century.9
Finally, vocation. The concept, biblical
in origin, was construed by the Protestant reformers as an occupation or trade
appointed by God. Even so, the word stands relatively inert in the nineteenth
century. A vocation could be a divine calling, a social function, or merely a
career ambition. Commitment was needed, as Jim Secord shows for Darwin, the
aspiring geologist: his failure to be moved by God's Spirit and take orders did
not rule out nature's numinous impact as he stood on the shimmering lava of St.
Jago. Heartfelt motivation - that was the key. Amateurs like young Darwin,
professional experts, people of every stripe who devoted themselves to a task
had found a vocation, a calling to serve, to lead, to ameliorate.10
Those who concern us chiefly were bent on interpreting reality, representing the
world by symbol or syllable to constitute true knowledge. They were priests and
naturalists - an elite; they were Pooters and Gradgrinds - nobodies. They
mediated universals to particulars, and always and everywhere their claims were
agonistic. Credibility had to be vouched for, authority won. In society's power
stakes, vocation and political identity were opposite sides of a coin.
So much for Newspeak, or my halting attempts at it. The payoff is this: by parsing "science and religion" in terms of language, practice, and vocation, we shall open up new fields as well as deal with the old one in new ways. Certainly we'll recognize "intermediate phenomena" that defy classification as "religious" or "scientific." Brooke refers to the men studied in Turner's Between Science and Religion (p. 397) and he generously features the surd case of Henry Drummond (pp. 16-17), whose writings remind me of Mark Twain's bon mot, "chloroform in print."11 This approach could be taken much further - for instance, to include the appropriation of terms like "New Reformation" for promoting naturalistic cultural change. Wilhelm B–lsche in Germany deployed the reformation metaphor, as Brooke acknowledges (p. 306); but a full-scale study is needed of the historical philosophy and changing social expectations invested in it within the British context, from George Combe in the 1830s, through Huxley, A. P. Stanley, F. D. Maurice, J. A. Froude, E. B. Tylor, and Frances Power Cobbe at mid-century, to Raven, Bernard Shaw, and Bishop John "Honest-to-God" Robinson in recent times.12
Such a study will further evince what Brooke calls "a secular religion pursued with all the fervor of the sacred" (p. 305), one indeed that was tackled with alacrity by the Victorian old guard. After Huxley, a self-styled "scientific Calvinist," emerged in November 1869 to chair the Sunday Lecture Society, a broad coalition offering weekly uplift to London's working classes in St. George's Hall, Langham Place, a counter-reformation got under way. Within months a Christian Evidence Society was formed under the chairmanship of the second Earl of Harrowby, a Tory diehard who still defended the trade in livings. The society swiftly mobilized a phalanx of prelates to give apologetic lectures at the same venue, beginning with a deliverance by the Lord Archbishop of York on "design in nature." To no avail. The Sunday Lecture Society flourished under Huxley: within ten years Tyndall, Spencer, and even Darwin himself were vice-presidents.13
Here then are phenomena that test Oldspeak to destruction. Vocation is the name of the game; public practice, rhetorical responsibility - Sundays were still sacred - and of course social clout. Partisans at the time, notably Huxley, may have claimed that science and religion" were at odds, but we mime them at our peril.
Or take another tack: consider cosmological ventures such as mesmerism, spiritualism, Christian Science, theosophy, and psychical research. Each made empirical claims in so-called scientific language; each embarrasses our Oldspeak with its syncretism and metaphysics. Yet how much we lose by talking these movements out of existence. Some had lower-class affinities, as Barrow and others have shown; some offered refuge to women, equipping them to make intellectual judgements while asserting their moral authority in a patriarchal world.14 Mary Baker Eddy, Harriet Martineau, and Annie Besant immediately come to mind, gifted sisters who had much to say about topics within the purview of Brooke's book. Newspeak will promote the gendering of its subject-area, augmenting Brooke's important but solitary references to ClÈmence Royer, Emma Darwin, and - not least - his own wife.
Appropriately enough, Alison Winter is showing us the way forward with a ground-breaking study of the personnel and the practices of mesmerism. This so-called science offered control over subjects' mental states by manipulation of imponderable force or matter. In religious hands, mesmerism illustrates graphically the ways in which order and belief were maintained in gendered forms of life. To mesmerize was a vocation, neither religious nor scientific but both and more. Male practitioners always took a leading role, public and visible, with females in a mental missionary position. Women's practice went on "downstairs"; it affected servants and children, and was socially inconspicuous. The broad potential of public mesmerism is apparent in the case of the Reverend William Scoresby, arctic navigator, student of geomagnetism, and vicar of Bradford from 1839 to 1847, years of Chartist revolt. To Scoresby, mesmeric and magnetic phenomena were all of a piece, manifestations of a power communicated to the earth and its inhabitants for maintaining order and working out God's will. This power was essentially a social force, and in Scoresby's hands a conservative one. But his efforts to control the Bradford body politic lacked punch. It was the Unitarian radical Harriet Martineau who achieved mesmeric results - and notoriety - at the time by ridding her body of a tumor.15
A topic that often gets short shrift even in enlightened Oldspeak is history's losers, the displaced intelligentsia - Cuvier and Agassiz, Paley and Whewell, Charles Hodge and John Henry Newman. Brooke shows them exemplary justice. He deserves emulation, I believe, on the premise that part of our task as historians is to offer perspectives for the critics as well as the ready consumers of today's science. Whether we fancy ourselves retrenchers or reformers, conservatives or radicals, the diehards may have something salutary to tell us about tendencies that resulted in what was later to be praised or deplored. They offer us, not pat "lessons" - which Brooke and I renounce - but contingent insights that, mutatis mutandis, may bear on our own situation.
The historical opposition, vast and boring though it may seem, was differentiated intriguingly by party, creed, and class. Its institutions and ideologies deserve careful study. The Christian Evidence Society was only one rear-guard faction to spring up in the post-Darwinian years. The Victoria Institute, founded in 1865, enrolled mainly London-based evangelicals, the largest group being clergy. But Philip Gosse and G. G. Stokes served as presidents; William Thomson, Balfour Stewart, J. Y. Simpson, and Louis Pasteur became members, and directors of Barclay's Bank joined en masse. Wertheimer's unpublished 200-page prosopography, now over twenty years old, should be the starting-point for a full-scale analysis of this genteel ginger group.16
Or consider the Religious Tract Society's major venture in the '80s and '90s, the "Present Day Tracts" series, which filled no fewer than eleven volumes. The authors were Reverends, D.D.'s, F.R.S.'s, and LL.D.'s; their subjects ranged from materialism, agnosticism, and evolutionary ethics to the world's religions, the authenticity of the Gospels, and the integrity of the family. At fourpence a time, believers scooped up these little treats to share with wavering friends. Were there many takers? Which titles did they prefer? Was there an overall message? The unanswered questions are endless.
Individuals, too, deserve to be read anew. Take John Wordsworth, later Bishop of Salisbury, delivering the 1881 Bampton Lectures:
In the search for truth - the pride of intelligence invests what it obtains with a kind of halo of interests as its own property; just as men, proud in this world, get to respect what lies about them, because of its nearness to the glories that flow from their own persons. The proud man seems to himself a sort of center of light and dignity, from which an effluence pours forth upon all which he touches, or at least gathers to himself; and this sentiment is hardly less common in the intellectual than in the secular sphere of life. This fault, in another type of character, becomes rather a species of avarice. Truth is looked upon as a kind of property, of which so much may be obtained by diligent and acquisitive habits, and as a property which lends glory to its possessor, just as acquired capital does honor to the successful merchant.
To which a footnote might be added to Evelleen Richard's splendid analysis of Richard Owen's lofty efforts to retain "property rights" in Von Baer's embryological anatomy.17
Other eclipsed intellectuals are sympathetically drawn to our attention in Brooke's book, two of whom, like Wordsworth, spoke from Oxford, the seat of all reaction. But in some ways they are fresh, prescient voices, echoing down the years. Brooke's reference to William Irons is the first I have seen in twentieth-century literature. Irons, a man of evident mettle, was only twenty-four in 1836 when his On the Whole Doctrine of Final Causes was published; the 200 pages are at times rather brash - anti-Deistical, anti-Broughamite, anti-Bridgewater Treatise - in short, a slap at what Irons calls "Naturalism." "The whole 'Argument from Design' is a fallacy," he declares. Imagine, "an effort on the part of a 'creature of a day,' to trace out the Designs of the Eternal! - "to comprehend the plans of the Incomprehensible! Recall, however, that almost within months Darwin would shower similar exclamations in his private notes. Recall, too, that a century later Karl Barth, the only German theology professor to refuse to take the state employee's oath of loyalty to Hitler without qualification, hailed the very prospect of Nazified natural theology with a single word: "Nein!"18
Brooke's second Oxford voice is Newman's. In 1841 Newman was at the height of his powers when Sir Robert Peel, opening a public reading room at Tamworth, afforded him one of his most memorable literary moments. Peel had dwelt grandiloquently on the service of science to religion in leading the mind up to God; works of "controversial divinity" would be unwelcome in the new library, he intoned. Newman, aghast, skewered the Tory leader with shafts of irony in seven letters to The Times. Again and again he drove the message home: natural knowledge is no basis for human values.
Hear him afresh:
Physical philosophers are ever inquiring whence things are, not why; referring them to nature, not to mind; and thus they tend to make a system a substitute for a God.
The material world, indeed, is infinitely more wonderful than any human contrivance; but wonder is not religion, or we should be worshipping our railroads.
To have recourse to physics to make men religious is like recommending a canonry as a cure for the gout, or giving a youngster a commission as a penance for irregularities.
f we commence with scientific knowledge and argumentative proof, or lay any great stress on it as the basis of personal Christianity, or attempt to make men moral and religious by libraries and museums, let us in consistency take chemists for our cooks, and mineralogists for our masons.
Are not virtue and vice, and responsibility, and reward and punishment, nothing else than moral matters, and are they not of the essence of religion? In what department, then, of physics are they to be found? Can the problems and principles they involve be expressed in the differential calculus? Is the galvanic battery a whit more akin to conscience and will, than the mechanical powers?...Astronomy witnesses divine power, and physiology divine skill; and all of them divine beneficence; but which teaches of divine holiness, truth, justice, or mercy? Is that much of a religion which is silent about duty, sin, and its remedies?
Or death? Sir Robert sees physical science as a " 'pleasure and consolation'" at life's close. "Meditate indeed on the wonders of nature on a death-bed! rather stay your hunger with corn grown in Jupiter, and warm yourself by the Moon."19
Newman and Irons, Darwin and Barth all shunned natural theology. Brooke, I think, joins me in sharing their doubts, although without adopting their particular premises. For beliefs like Newman's, that "religion - suggests to science its true conclusions; the facts come from knowledge, but the principles come of faith," can be cashed out in various ways, with alternative styles of transcendence20
In Brooke's later chapters the term "natural theology" usually refers to the argument from static design to God's existence and attributes. Sometimes the term stands for the bare "idea that divine wisdom could be discerned in nature" (p. 193), or for the larger effort to draw "moral lessons from nature" (p. 198); occasionally "natural theology" is used in the "wider sense of giving rational justification for a particular political system" (p. 199). It is this "wider sense" that I want to dwell on in conclusion, bearing in mind that, like natural theology in general, it presupposed belief in providence - the doctrine that God's will is expressed always and everywhere, in nature and history.
Belief in providence, as Brooke points out, practically entails addressing the problem of suffering, of natural and moral evil in the world (pp. 316-17). This is the traditional task of theodicy - justifying God's ways. Theodicy not only serves a defensive purpose, answering infidel objectors; it also reconciles people to the world's running, the natural order of things, including society. In this way theodicy is identical with natural theology in the wider, ideological sense of which Brooke speaks.
That theodicy, or political natural theology, can be divorced from belief in God may be less apparent. Yet any philosophy that takes responsibility for both the material and the spiritual well-being of humanity must sooner or later confront its own failures - failures to master not only nature, but human nature as well. It must account for the gap between reality and expectation, between the experience of pain and misfortune, and the hope of improvement that its own beliefs have instilled. Efforts to explain and bridge the gap, to plug or merely paper over it, serve to appease and reconcile, so fulfilling theodicy's traditional task.21 Secular theodicies, without a theistic basis, escape Kant's transcendental critique, which Brooke so rightly presses (pp. 206-7). They are alive and well - or are they?
It is, after all, 199. Communism has collapsed. Europe is pulling together, straining towards the east. Refugees are swarming, dying for the good life, while pundits seek a moral equivalent of the Cold War, which they preen themselves for winning. Capitalism is ascendant, the global market open. The planet groans. This will be a terrible Pyrrhic victory. Can the Earth sustain a billion private automobiles? If standard of living depends on car ownership, we are doomed - doomed either to defend permanent gross inequality or to lead radically altered lives22 What theodicy can handle this one prospect? Will Islam provide it, with mosques in every town? Christian fundamentalism, the imperial edge of the faith? Ancient orthodoxies with their old-boy enclaves and tarnished creeds? If nature is not our final source of value, scientists not our priests, whose transcendence will prevail?
What would a historian of science say?
1Charles E. Raven, Science, Religion, and the Future (Cambridge, 1943), p. ix. On Raven's unifying vision, see F. W. Dillistone, Charles Raven: Naturalist, Historian, Theologian (London, 1975) and James Moore, The Future of Science and Belief: Theological Views in the Twentieth Century (Milton Keynes, 1981), 5-22.
2Charles Singer, The Christian Failure (London, 1943), 9, 71.
3Henry Holorenshaw, "The Making of an Honorary Taoist," in Mikul·ö Teich and Robert Young (eds.), Changing Perspectives in the History of Science: Essays in Honor of Joseph Needham (London, 1973), 1-20, pp. 12-13; Joseph Needham, Time: The Refreshing River (Essays and Addresses, 1932-42) (London, 1943); idem, "Science, Capitalism and Fascism (A Broadcast Talk from London, 1942)," in idem, History Is on Our Side: A Contribution to Political Religion and Scientific Faith (London, 1946), 146-53, p. 153. Cf. Needham and Raven's contributions to John Lewis, Karl Polanyi and Donald K. Kitchin (eds.), Christianity and the Social Revolution (London, 1935). For a critical appreciation of Needham on "science and religion," see Joel Kovel, "The Embracing Vision of Joseph Needham," Science as Culture, No. 5 (1989), 50-70.
4For "cosmical weather," see Chauncey Wright, "A Physical Theory of the Universe," North American Review, 99 (1864), 1-11, in Edward H. Madden (ed.), The Philosophical Writings of Chauncey Wright: Representative Selections (New York, 1958), 106-17, pp. 115-16; and idem, Chauncey Wright and the Foundations of Pragmatism (Seattle, 1963), 87-89.
5Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (London, 1958); idem, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (London, 1988); Simon Schaffer, "The History and Geography of the Intellectual World: Whewell's Politics of Language," in Menachem Fisch and Simon Schaffer (eds.), William Whewell: A Composite Portrait (Oxford, 1991), 201-31; Martin J. S. Rudwick, "Transposed Concepts from the Human Sciences in The Early Work of Charles Lyell," in L. J. Jordanova and Roy S. Porter (eds), Images of the Earth: Essays in the History of the Environmental Sciences (Chalfont St. Giles, 1979), 67-83; Gillian Beer, Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London, 1983), chaps. 1-4; idem, " 'The Face of Nature': Anthropomorphic Elements in the Language of The Origin of Species," in Ludmilla Jordanova (ed.), Languages of Nature: Critical Essays on Science and Literature (London, 1986), 207-43; Robert M. Young, Darwin's Metaphor: Nature's Place in Victorian Culture (Cambridge, 1985); Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780-1860 (Princeton, 1967); John Burrow, "The Uses of Philology in Victorian England," in Robert Robson (ed.), Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain: Essays in Honor of George Kitson Clark (London, 1967), 180-204; Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791-1819 (Oxford, 1984).
6James Moore, "Deconstructing Darwinism: The Politics of Evolution in the 1860s," Journal of the History of Biology, 24 (1991), 353-408; idem, "Socializing Darwinism: Historiography and the Fortunes of a Phrase," in Les Levidow (ed.), Science as Politics (London, 1986), 38-80.
7T. H. Huxley to A. Dohrn, 30 April 1870, in Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley (2 vols, London, 1900), I, 332-3, p. 333.
8Charles Grandison Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835), in William G. McLoughlin (ed.), The American Evangelicals, 1800-1900: An Anthology (New York, 1968), 87-100, p. 90. See J. G. Donat, "British Medicine and the Ulster Revival of 1859" (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1986).
9See Marion Glastonbury, Holding the Pens, in idem and Sarah Elbert, Inspiration and Drudgery: Notes on Literature and Domestic Labour in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1978), 27-48.
10James A. Secord, The Discovery of a Vocation: Darwin's Early Geology" The British Journal for the History of Science, 24 (1991), 133-57; Daniel Duman, "The Creation and Diffusion of a Professional Ideology in Nineteenth Century England," Sociological Review, n.s., 27 (1979), 113-38.
11Frank Miller Turner, Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism In Late Victorian England (New Haven, 1974); James Moore, "Evangelicals and Evolution: Henry Drummond, Herbert Spencer, and the Naturalization of the Spiritual World," Scottish Journal of Theology, 38 (1985), 383-417.
12For a slight, suggestive study, see P. O. G. White, "Three Victorians and the New Reformation," Theology, 69 (1966), 352-8.
13T. Huxley to F. D. Dyster, 10 October 1854, in L. Huxley, Life and Letters (ref. 7), i, 113; "Sunday Lecture Society Proceedings from 1869 to 1889," British Library, Department of Printed Books, 4355.d.f.17; C. J. Ellicott, "Explanatory Paper," in [William Thomson], Lord Archbishop of York, et al,.; Modern Scepticism: A Course of Lectures Delivered at the Request of the Christian Evidence Society (London, 1871), 505-27.
14Logie Barrow, Independent Spirits: Spiritualism and English Plebeians, 1850-1900 (London, 1986); Jane Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914 (Cambridge, 1985); Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (Philadelphia, 1990).
15Alison Winter, "Ethereal Epidemic: Mesmerism and the Introduction of Inhalation Anaesthesia to Early Victorian London," Social History of Medicine, 4 (1991), 1-27; idem, <|>'The Island of Mesmeria': The Politics of Mesmerism in Early Victorian Britain (Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge University, 1992).
16Douglas Lloyd Wertheimer, The Victoria Institute, 1865-1919: A Study in Collective Biography Meant as an Introduction to the Conflict of Science and Religion after Darwin (unpublished typescript, 1971).
17John Wordsworth, The One True Religion (1881), in James Moore (ed.), Religion in Victorian Britain, III: Sources (Manchester, 1988), 327-32, p. 332; Evelleen Richards, "A Question of Property Rights: Richard Owen's Evolutionism Reassessed," The British Journal for the History of Science, 20 (1987), 129-71.
18William J. Irons, On the Whole Doctrine of Final Causes: A Dissertation in Three Parts, with an Introductory Chapter on the Character of Modern Deism (London, 1836), 119, 122, 183; Paul Barrett et al (eds), Charles Darwin's Notebooks, 1836-1844: Geology, Transmutation of Species, Metaphysical Enquiries (Cambridge, 1987), 347 (D 49), 634 (Abstract 54v); Natural Theology: Comprising "Nature and Grace" by Professor Dr. Emil Brunner and the Reply "No!" by Dr Karl Barth, trans. by Peter Fraenkel (London, 1946), 65 ff.
19[John Henry Newman] Catholicus, The Tamworth Reading Room: Letters on an Address Delivered by Sir Robert Peel, Bart. M. P., on the Establishment of a Reading Room at Tamworth (London, 1841), 20, 35, 37, 39, 40. See Ian Ker, John Henry Newman: A Biography (Oxford, 1988), 206-12.
20Newman, Tamworth Reading Room (ref. 19), 38.
21See Richard Kennington, "Descartes and Mastery of Nature, in Stuart F. Spicker (ed.), Organism, Medicine, and Metaphysics: Essays in Honor of Hans Jonas on His 75th Birthday, May 10, 1978 (Dordrecht, 1978), 201-33, pp. 221-2, and my discussion in "Theodicy and Society: The Crisis of the Intelligentsia," in Richard J. Helmstadter and Bernard Lightman (eds.), Victorian Faith in Crisis: Essays on Continuity and Change in Nineteenth-century Religious Belief (London, 1990), 153-86.
22See Jerome R. Ravetz, "The Scale and Complexity of the Problem," in Roger L. Shinn (ed.), Faith and Science in an Unjust World: Report of the World Council of Churches' Conference on Faith, Science and the Future I: Plenary Presentations (Philadelphia, 1980), 89-96, p. 89.