The Age of Wonder (75 page)

John Stuart Mill would recall in his
Autobiography
how, after his nervous breakdown and therapeutic immersion in the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, it was Herschel’s book that showed him how far he had recovered his intellectual grasp by 1837. ‘Under the impulse given me by the thoughts excited by Dr Whewell, I read again Sir J. Herschel’s
Study of Natural Philosophy,
and I was able to measure the progress my mind had made, by the great help I now found in this work.’
¹⁴

Herschel first looked back at the great triumphs of Romantic science, very properly including work done in France and Germany, and appealed for the public understanding of ‘professional science’ in Britain. It was a profession first proposed by Bacon, based on the fundamental value of free enquiry.
¹⁵
Herschel defined its field as a rapidly expanding arc of scientific disciplines: the classical ones-mathematics, astronomy and optics-now joined by the study of electricity, chemistry, magnetism, geology, botany and gases.
¹⁶
He argued that common to all of them was the three-part ‘inductive’ method. First, the precise gathering of quantitative data by observation and experiment; second, the emergence of a general ‘hypothesis’ from this data; and third, the testing of this hypothesis once more by experiment and observation, to see if it could be disproved.
¹⁷
This inductive discipline was central to all sciences, and led on to the first aim of free scientific enquiry: the investigation of the unknown. ‘The immediate object we propose to ourselves in physical theories is the analysis of phenomena, and the knowledge of the hidden processes of Nature in their production, so far as they can be traced by us.’
¹⁸
Nature was still hidden and mysterious, alive with ‘processes’ and powers, though Herschel was careful to avoid any hint of
Naturphilosophie,
or any speculation about the ‘Power and Intelligence’ that might ultimately maintain it. Nevertheless, nature revealed continuously ‘wonder upon wonder’.
¹⁹

This was greeted as the first attempt since Francis Bacon’s
Novum Organum, or New Instrument
(1620) to write a popular treatise on the inductive philosophy of science. It had an engraving of Bacon (with both microscope and telescope-
micromegas
) on the title page, and began with a Latin epigraph from Cicero:
In primis, hominis est propria VERI inquisitio atque investigatio
’. This was translated for the reader as ‘Above all other things, Man is distinguished by his pursuit and investigation of TRUTH’-an interesting assertion. Of course the whole text was written in English, though Herschel chose the shrewd device of organising it in numbered paragraphs, as well as conventional literary chapters. Indeed it emerged that Herschel, unlike his father, could write fluently, and sometimes with great imaginative force. (One other effect of his Cambridge education was that throughout his life he wrote admirable light verse, and later completed a translation of Virgil’s
Aeneid.
) In one passage he argued the necessity for clarity and precision in the use of scientific terms with almost poetic originality.

For example, the words-square, circle, a hundred etc convey to the mind notions so complete in themselves, and so distinct from everything else, that we are sure when we use them we know the whole of our own meaning. It is widely different with words expressing natural objects and mixed relations.

Take, for instance, IRON. Different persons attach very different ideas to this word. One who has never heard of magnetism has a widely different notion of IRON from one in the contrary predicament. The vulgar, who regard this metal as incombustible, and the chemist, who sees it burn with the utmost fury, and who has other reasons for regarding it as one of the most combustible bodies in nature;-the poet, who uses it as an emblem of rigidity; and the smith and the engineer, in whose hands it is plastic, and moulded like wax into every form;-the jailer, who prizes it as an obstruction, and the electrician who sees in it only a channel of open communication by which-that most impassable of objects-air may be traversed by his imprisoned fluid, have all different, and all imperfect, notions of the same word.

The meaning of such a term is like a rainbow-everybody sees a different one, and all maintain it to be the same.
²⁰

That final embracing reference to ‘everybody’s’ rainbow was a deliberate act of inclusion: Newton’s rainbow, but also Wordsworth’s and Keats’s and Goethe’s are all implied.
^♣

Herschel went on to praise the intellectual and even spiritual value of the true scientific outlook. Everything in nature became interesting and significant, nothing was beneath notice. The most ‘trifling natural objects’, such as a soap bubble, an apple or a pebble, could reveal a scientific law (respectively, the laws of aerostatics, gravitation or geology).

To the natural philosopher there is no natural object unimportant or trifling…A mind that has once imbibed a taste for scientific enquiry has within itself an inexhaustible source of pure and exciting contemplations. One would think that Shakespeare had such a mind in view when he describes a contemplative man finding

Tongues in trees-books in the running brooks
Sermons in stones-and good in everything

Where the uninformed and unenquiring eye perceives neither novelty nor beauty,
he
walks in the midst of wonders.
²¹

It is intriguing that Herschel was quoting from Shakespeare’s
As You Like It
(Act II, scene i), a scene which takes place in the idealised and magical Forest of Arden. Herschel evidently saw the ‘contemplative’ man of science naturally inhabiting such a sylvan world, a place of visions and transformations, where all turns out for the good. So among the triumphs of contemporary science he listed a series of simple discoveries and technological inventions that had hugely improved human safety: among them the lightning conductor, the lighthouse lens, the safety lamp, iodine and chlorine disinfectant (the last three being Davy’s).
²²

Like Davy, Herschel chose chemistry as the exemplary discipline of the Romantic period. Developing from the errors of alchemy and phlogiston theory, chemistry had been ‘placed in the ranks of the exact sciences-a science of number, weight and measure’. It had produced practical applications in every sphere: medicine, agriculture, manufacturing, aerostation and meteorology, for example. But it had also advanced pure science: the doctrines of oxygen, latent heat, atomic weight, polar electricity and the prime elements (of which more than fifty were now known). Moreover, this was the achievement of an international group: Lavoisier, Black, Dalton, Berzelius, Gay-Lussac and Davy.
²³

In ten brilliantly clear and even thrilling pages (paragraphs numbered 368-77), Herschel gave an international history of fifty years’ researches into electricity, from Franklin and Galvani to Davy and Oersted. From early vague ideas of some mysterious natural fluid-a ‘wonderful agent’-seen in lightning strikes, the Aurora Borealis or ‘the crackling sparks which fly from a cat’s back when stroked’, he traced the experimental path which led to increasingly precise and sophisticated concepts of electrical current, conductors, positive and negative poles, batteries, charge and discharge, animal electricity (’an unfortunate epithet’), nervous circuitry, chemical affinity (Davy’s ‘total revolution’) and ‘the wonderful phenomenon of electro-magnetism’, which awaited further exploration.
²⁴

Herschel prophetically implied that electricity and electro-magnetism still hid many secrets, and that their investigation would become the leading science of the new age. This would indeed be Faraday’s coming field of triumph. He summarised (paragraph no. 376) this pursuit in the image of a great and noble sea voyage of exploration. ‘There is something in this which reminds us of the obstinate adherence of Columbus to his notion of the necessary existence of the New World; and the whole history of this beautiful discovery may serve to teach us reliance on those general analogies and parallels between great branches of science by which one strongly reminds us of another, though no direct connection appears.’
²⁵

This notion of a great network or connection of sciences, beginning to form a single philosophy and culture, was crucial to his book. In the same positive vein Herschel argued that science, while often going against common sense or intuition, expanded the human imagination with previously inconceivable ideas of movement or magnitude. The examples he gave were the speed of starlight, the movement of a gnat’s wings, or the vibrations of colour frequency. Finally he promoted the moral value of science. It was a source of clarity and intellectual excitement, and (perhaps more controversially) of philosophical calm in troubled times. In all these ways John Herschel sought to give ‘the man of science’ a new and central place in English society-and not just the Royal Society.

Faraday himself wrote appreciatively to Herschel from the Royal Institution, in one of his breathless, enthusiastic screeds. ‘When your work on the study of Nat. Phil. came out, I read it as all others did with delight. I took it as a school book for philosophers and I feel it has made me a better reasoner and even experimenter and has altogether heightened my character and made me if I may be permitted to say so a better philosopher.’
²⁶

Many others felt the same. For one undergraduate at Cambridge the book was like a summons to arms. ‘Humboldt’s
Personal Narrative
and Herschel’s
On Natural Philosophy
stirred up in me a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science. No one of a dozen other books influenced me nearly so much as these two.’ The undergraduate was twenty-two-year-old Charles Darwin, and his humble contribution was to be
On the Origin of Species
(1859).
²⁷

4

It was now the turn of David Brewster (1781-1868). Educated in Edinburgh, Brewster was a physicist who had contributed widely to scientific journals and encyclopaedias. His field was applied optics, such as lighthouse lenses, and he invented the kaleidoscope; but he was also inventing the new career of science journalism. A Calvinist who had abandoned the Church, he was a natural evangelist for science. He decided that a campaign rather than a book was needed, and now published specific proposals for a new national scientific association in a number of magazines, including the
Quarterly Review.
He wrote urgently to Babbage in February 1830: ‘I wish you could spare ten minutes to my equation…and would it not be useful to organize an Association for the purpose of protecting and promoting the
secular
interests of Science? A few influential noblemen and MP’s would give great help in forwarding such an object.’
²⁸

Such an Association was to meet annually, as Babbage had suggested, on the German model, at different provincial cities-but not London, being the territory of the Royal Society. It was to draw its membership primarily from the universities, the House of Commons and the local ‘Literary and Philosophical’ societies in the great northern cities. There had been fewer than ten of these when Banks had begun at the Royal Society in the 1780s, among the earliest being Manchester, Derby and Newcastle upon Tyne. There were some thirty in existence by the time Davy was elected in 1820, and nearly seventy by the time Charles Darwin came back from the Galapagos islands in 1836. This was the beginning of the historic expansion of Victorian science.
²⁹

There was much campaigning, recruiting and arguing throughout 1830-31. Babbage in London, Brewster in Edinburgh and Whewell in Cambridge led the drive. A typical missive from Whewell read: ‘I can see abundance of good things that such a Society may do: one matter which requires multiplied and extensive fagging is meteorology, which I hope Dalton may do…Sedgwick is still hammering in Wales. Darwin…is just on the point of setting out as a naturalist with Captain Fitzroy who is to complete the survey of the south end of America. I expect he will bring you home the tip of Cape Horn…‘
³⁰

Faraday still remained elusive, and Herschel-mindful of his position as Secretary to the Royal Society-tactfully explained in an immensely long letter that he could only send ‘sincere good wishes for its utility and consequent success’. He did however recognise ‘the want in this country and in the actual state of science, of a great, central and presiding power to give an impulse and direction to enquiry’.
³¹
By autumn 1831 it was still hoped that a few other ‘scientific
lions
may be allowed to perambulate the country’.

Finally, a somewhat depleted first meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science took place at York in October 1831. Undaunted, the members vigorously discussed comets, railways, geological strata, the Aurora Borealis, marsupial mating habits, and subversively drank Joseph Priestley’s health (a reproach to the Royal Society and a greeting to America).
³²
A combative keynote speech about the development of science in Britain was delivered by the first President, William Rowan Hamilton, but this was not felt to have quite the reach or impact of Humboldt in Vienna. There was some lively disagreement (which was to continue for many years) over the correct balance between dinners and lectures, or ‘feasting versus philosophy’. However, in the absence of figures like Faraday and Herschel, the whole thing slipped away almost entirely unreported in the press.