A Vision of Modern Science: John Tyndall and the Role of the Scientist in Victorian Culture

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PALGR AVE STUDIES IN THE H ISTORY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

This series presents original, high-quality, and accessible works at the cutting edge of scholarship within the history of science and technology. Books in the series aim to disseminate new knowledge and new perspectives about the history of science and technology, enhance and extend education, foster public understanding, and enrich cultural life. Collectively, these books will break down conventional lines of demarcation by incorporating historical perspectives into issues of current and ongoing concern, offering international and global perspectives on a variety of issues, and bridging the gap between historians and practicing scientists. In this way they advance scholarly conversation within and across traditional disciplines but also to help define new areas of intellectual endeavor. Published by Palgrave Macmillan: Continental Defense in the Eisenhower Era: Nuclear Antiaircraft Arms and the Cold War By Christopher J. Bright Confronting the Climate: British Airs and the Making of Environmental Medicine By Vladimir Jankovic Globalizing Polar Science: Reconsidering the International Polar and Geophysical Years Edited by Roger D. Launius, James Rodger Fleming, and David H. DeVorkin Eugenics and the Nature-Nurture Debate in the Twentieth Century By Aaron Gillette John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon By John M. Logsdon A Vision of Modern Science: John Tyndall and the Role of the Scientist in Victorian Culture By Ursula DeYoung

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-02

James Rodger Fleming (Colby College) and Roger D. Launius (National Air and Space Museum), Series Editors

10.1057/9780230118058 - A Vision of Modern Science, Ursula DeYoung

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“Professor John Tyndall,” from The Review of Reviews (January 1894). Widener Library, Harvard College Library, P 331.2 (vol. 9, 1894).


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John Tyndall and the Role of the Scientist in Victorian Culture

Ursula DeYoung


A Vision of Modern Science


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A VISION OF MODERN SCIENCE

Copyright © Ursula DeYoung, 2011. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–11053–3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data DeYoung, Ursula. A vision of modern science : John Tyndall and the role of the scientist in Victorian culture / by Ursula DeYoung. p. cm.—(Palgrave studies in the history of science and technology) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–230–11053–3 (alk. paper) 1. Tyndall, John, 1820–1893. 2. Science—Great Britain—History— 19th century. 3. Scientists—Intellectual life—Great Britain—History— 19th century. 4. Tyndall, John, 1820–1893—Inﬂuence. I. Title. Q143.T96D43 2010 509.41909034—dc22

2010035429

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: March 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.


All rights reserved.


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List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

1

Tyndall’s Work as a Scientist: Practice and Reception

19

2

Tyndall’s Philosophy of Science and Nature: The Influences of Carlyle, Emerson, Goethe, and Faraday

59

Tyndall and Theology: The Definition and Boundaries of Science

89

Tyndall as Reformer: The Place of Science in Education

131

Science after Tyndall: The Growth of University Laboratories

171

3 4 5

Conclusion: Scientists in British Culture, 1870–1900

205

Notes

219

Bibliography

251

Index

263


Contents


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Jacket/Cover Art Caricature of John Tyndall, from Vanity Fair (April 6, 1872). P403.1.5*F, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Frontispiece “Professor John Tyndall,” from The Review of Reviews (January 1894). Widener Library, Harvard College Library, P 331.2 (vol. 9, 1894). 1.1 “A Lighthouse—Not Professor Tyndall,” from Moonshine (December 20, 1884). Widener Library, Harvard College Library, P 277.14 (1884). 33 1.2 “Professor Tyndall Lecturing at the Royal Institution,” from The Illustrated London News (May 1870). Widener Library, Harvard College Library, P 229.10F (vol. 66, 1870). 41 5.1 “A Friday Evening Discourse at the Royal Institution; Sir James Dewar on Liquid Hydrogen,” 1904 (oil on canvas) by Henry Jamyn Brooks (1865–1925). The Royal Institution, London, UK; The Bridgeman Art Library, TRI 101904. 192 C.1 “The Scientific Volunteer—‘If ever I have to choose . . . I shall, without hesitation, shoulder my rifle with the Orangeman.’—See Professor Tyndall’s Reply to Sir W. V. Harcourt. ‘Times,’ Feb. 13, 1890.” From Punch (February 22, 1890). Widener Library, Harvard College Library, KSG 660 (vol. 98) 214


Illustrations


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I

would first like to thank Professor Frank A. J. L. James of the Royal Institution in London for allowing me to work in the Institution’s archives, and Mrs. Lenore Symons for her assistance in my research there. I would also like to thank the staff of the Bodleian Library, the Radcliffe Science Library, the History Faculty Library, and the English Faculty Library of Oxford University, as well as the Widener Library, the Lamont Library, and the Houghton Library of Harvard University. I am indebted to many people at Oxford University for their help in researching, writing, and revising this book when it was still a thesis, especially my DPhil supervisor Dr. William Whyte, Professor Pietro Corsi, and Dr. Jane Garnett. I deeply appreciate the guidance of the editors and assistants at Palgrave Macmillan, who helped me transform my thesis into this book, in particular Professor James Fleming, Chris Chappell, and Sarah Whalen. Lastly, of course, I am grateful to my family and friends, always my primary support.


Acknowledgments


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F

or much of the Victorian era the physicist John Tyndall was one of the foremost public figures in Britain. As a popular lecturer on scientific subjects he was considered unmatched, and his published writings sold by the thousands all the way from America to Russia. Yet for the major part of the twentieth century Tyndall’s name lay buried in a few histories of science and the occasional physics textbook. While Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, and Herbert Spencer— each a friend and colleague of Tyndall’s— came to represent Victorian science in its most pugnacious and dramatic period, Tyndall himself remained in obscurity, a man of the second rank known only through association. Now, however, historians are beginning to reassess Tyndall’s influence on Victorian science. William H. Brock, one of the few Tyndall scholars active today, writes in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography that Tyndall “did more than any other Victorian scientist to define physics as a separate scientific discipline.”1 Through his topics of research and his career-long popularization of physics as a specific field of scientific research, Tyndall changed the nature of scientific disciplines. But his work reached beyond the boundaries of the purely scientific realm; as a lecturer and popular science writer he helped to establish the place of science and scientists in British culture. This book aims to demonstrate Tyndall’s enormous impact on the Victorian concept of science and on the public image of the scientist as a figure of authority in British society. Throughout his career Tyndall strove to convince the British public that science should be the primary source of knowledge on issues ranging from education to theology to governmental policy. He fought against centuries of classical tradition to establish science as the foundation of education, and he opposed organized religion in an attempt to free scientists from the restraints of theology. His own character and his complex interpretation of science, shot through with the philosophies of Carlyle, Emerson, and Goethe, became the focus of endless


Introduction


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misunderstandings: he was called an atheist and a materialist, though neither term accurately described his half-agnostic, half-deistic view of Nature; and he was accused of trying to destroy man’s religious feeling, though he held that spirituality was as important as humanity’s scientific instinct. In short Tyndall can be seen as both an exemplar and an agent of the Victorian confusion over science and religion. His public image inevitably distorted and short-changed the complexity of his philosophy, but it was that public image—the image of the scientist as a social authority—that Tyndall fought to promote as the only legitimate purveyor of objective truth. The historian Stefan Collini, in his book Public Moralists (1991), provides a wide-ranging and insightful portrayal of Victorian intellectuals as a group of men united by their educational background and their interest in the social and political issues of Britain, who influenced the culture of their time through published commentary with a strongly moralistic bent. Social clubs, most notably the Athenaeum in London, as well as numerous periodicals ranging from the Edinburgh Review to the Cornhill Magazine, served to provide these men with a framework in which to form a loose intellectual brotherhood that promoted political, philosophical, and literary ideas. While acknowledging the importance of science and scientists, however, Collini does not examine their impact on Victorian culture in depth, nor does he address the campaign by Tyndall, Huxley, and other scientific figures to be accepted as intellectuals and public moralists on the level of John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, and similar figureheads of the nineteenth-century intelligentsia. This campaign for scientists as influential public figures was both passionate and explicit. To give one example, T. H. Huxley wrote to the publisher Macmillan in 1878 with the suggestion of creating a series on “English Men of Science,” similar to John Morley’s “English Men of Letters”: Among the peculiarities of the national character, one of the most singular is a certain pride in the assumed incapacity of the English mind for abstract or speculative inquiries. Nevertheless it may be safely affirmed that no modern nation can show a more remarkable musterroll of great names in philosophy and in physical science; nor point to more important contributions towards the foundations of the scientific conception of Nature than those made by Englishmen. It seems desirable to spread the knowledge of this truth beyond the few students of the history of science, and bring the evidence on which it rests within reach of the general public, by the publication of a series of small but carefully written books, each devoted to some one Englishman or small group of Englishmen by whose means one or more branches of science have been notably advanced, and comprising


A VISION OF MOD ERN SCIENC E


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INTRODUCTION

Huxley’s suggestion demonstrates his desire, shared by Tyndall and others among their scientific colleagues, to establish scientists as equal in cultural importance to literary and philosophical figures; the fact that Macmillan did not take up the idea is indicative of the obstacles that scientists encountered in fighting for social recognition. Several historians have argued for the significance of Tyndall, Huxley, and their circle of fellow scientists, a group often called the “scientific naturalists” because of their rejection of organized religion and belief in the primacy of nature. T. W. Heyck, in contrast with Collini, devotes a large proportion of his book The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England (1982) to the impact of science as a cultural force. Owing to the broad scope of the study, his remarks on scientists tend toward the general, but he emphasizes the desire among many Victorian scientists to make England a “scientific nation” and the efforts led by Huxley, Tyndall, and other scientific reformers to construct a public image of science as a moral and intellectual force.3 Similarly, George Levine wrote, “I would want to emphasise their role as cultural critics, operating feistily and exuberantly in a context where their excesses were almost parodic responses to traditions of faith and authority.”4 Frank M. Turner, who has carried out the most extensive and valuable work in this area, posits in his collection of essays Contesting Cultural Authority (1993) that the intention of the scientific naturalists was to be a cultural force with an influence reaching beyond the purely scientific realm. The question of whether or not Huxley, Tyndall, and their fellow scientific popularizers succeeded in their campaign cannot be easily answered. By the end of his life Tyndall had been passed over and half-forgotten by the next generation of scientists. His research and his methods of lecturing and experimenting had become outdated, and even the Royal Institution, his home and the site of all his scientific work, came to represent an older, less professional era of science, far removed from the well-equipped university laboratories that became the standard in the twentieth century. Tyndall’s vision of the scientist as a familiar and trusted public figure had been in some ways fulfilled, but he had achieved his aims of popularizing the figure of the scientist and establishing science in education at the expense of his own credibility as a scientist and lecturer. After the scientific debates of the 1860s and 1870s, even his contributions as a supporter of science against theology, the area in which he had achieved his


a biography, a statement of the man’s work and its relation to earlier, and its influence on later, scientific thought.2


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greatest victories, received less and less recognition. Eventually, in the mid-twentieth century, Tyndall’s reputation as a scientist and as a scientific popularizer shrank almost to nothing. The fight to establish scientific authority in society had succeeded so well that people forgot it had ever been in doubt. Today the only biography of Tyndall remains that by A. S. Eve and C. H. Creasey, published in 1945 and compiled largely from the materials gathered by Tyndall’s wife.5 As one of the group of scientific naturalists or “young Turks” fighting for the popularization and professionalization of Victorian science, Tyndall has recently received more attention from historians, especially Frank Turner and Bernard Lightman,6 but studies of Tyndall as an individual have lagged behind those focusing on his colleague Huxley and the everpresent Darwin. W. H. Brock, N. D. McMillan, and R. C. Mollan published a valuable collection of essays on Tyndall in 1981,7 and some work has been done on the religious aspects of Tyndall’s vision of science: in 1974 Ruth Barton examined the pantheistic undertones of Tyndall’s famous Belfast Address,8 and Stephen S. Kim has written one of the few full-length works on Tyndall, analyzing his unusual form of agnosticism.9 A few other articles and studies have been published concerning his research and lectures at the Royal Institution,10 but for the most part Tyndall remains a background figure in the world of Victorian science as it is portrayed by today’s historians. This book will attempt to reestablish Tyndall as one of the most influential public figures in Britain in the nineteenth century. Its approach draws on Turner’s paradigm of contested cultural authority but differs first in focusing primarily on Tyndall, heretofore more often examined as one of the group of scientific naturalists, and second in emphasizing the importance of religious and philosophical ideas in Tyndall’s campaign for scientific authority. In his influential essay of 1977 entitled “The Victorian Conflict between Science and Religion: A Professional Dimension,” Turner writes, “The primary motivating force behind this shift in social and intellectual authority, which deeply involved the epistemological controversy, was activity within the scientific community that displayed most of the major features associated with nascent professionalism.”11 Earlier, in his book Between Science and Religion (1974), Turner went further, stating, “The naturalistic publicists sought to expand the influence of scientific ideas for the purpose of secularizing society rather than for the goal of advancing science internally. Secularization was their goal; science, their weapon.”12 Thomas Gieryn reframes this idea, claiming of Tyndall, “His goals are economic. [ . . . ] His tactics are cultural.”13


4


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In these simplistic descriptions of Tyndall’s and the scientific naturalists’ careers, Turner and Gieryn distort both the group’s motivations and their cultural significance. I argue that while a desire to establish a greater professionalism for scientists was certainly one of the motivations for Tyndall, Huxley, and their colleagues in promoting scientific authority, Turner is inaccurate in referring to the “existential, intellectual, and moral bankruptcy of scientific naturalism”14 and in declaring, “If the freethinkers of naturalism triumphed, freedom of thought, liberal pursuit of truth, and unhampered examination of human experience would perish.”15 On the contrary, for the scientific naturalists, their philosophical ideas and belief in science as the best means for understanding the world around them were of equal importance to secularization and professionalization. In other words, Tyndall conceived of science not simply as a tool with which to construct a social and economic platform for scientists like himself but rather as a cause that he genuinely believed worth fighting for in itself. In my interpretation, Turner’s dichotomy could be reversed: Tyndall’s aim was the promotion of science, his weapon was secularization— but that, of course, paints too simple a picture. In fact it is not possible to disentangle Tyndall’s professional desires from his cultural aims and philosophical beliefs; one must view the varying aspects of his life and character as parts of one whole in order to appreciate the complexity and significance of his career as a public figure. I analyze at length, as crucial to understanding Tyndall and his position as an influential public scientist, his religious views and attitude toward spirituality. The “Victorian conflict between science and religion” that has received so much historiographical attention was for Tyndall, as for Huxley, rather a conflict between science and theology. Tyndall viewed religion itself as both inescapable and emotionally necessary for humanity, though his conviction of religion’s importance was often lost on his critics. In thus focusing on Tyndall’s religious beliefs, I am following in the footsteps of Bernard Lightman and Stephen Kim, but whereas Lightman discusses Tyndall in his Origins of Agnosticism as one of several Victorian agnostics and Kim analyzes what he calls Tyndall’s “transcendental materialism” against the background of Victorian religious issues, I attempt to contextualize those beliefs within Tyndall’s career as a public scientist and to assess their importance as a motivation in his fight for scientific cultural influence. In effect I attempt to combine Turner’s perspective with those of Kim and Lightman in analyzing Tyndall, so that neither his religious beliefs nor his cultural aims are shortchanged but are instead seen as interdependent.


INTRODUCTION


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The origin and development of the word “scientist” are in themselves informative of the development of the scientist as a figure. The word was coined in 1834 by William Whewell in a review of Mary Somerville’s On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. His suggestion of the term, though made in a partly humorous vein, was a response to an acutely felt trend of division within the scientific community: But the disintegration goes on, like that of a great empire falling to pieces; physical science itself is endlessly subdivided, and the subdivisions insulated. We adopt the maxim “one science only can one genius fit.” The mathematician turns away from the chemist; the chemist from the naturalist; the mathematician, left to himself, divides himself into a pure mathematician and a mixed mathematician, who soon part company; the chemist is perhaps a chemist of electro-chemistry; if so, he leaves common chemical analysis to others; between the mathematician and the chemist is to be interpolated a “physicien” (we have no English name for him), who studies heat, moisture, and the like. And thus science, even mere physical science, loses all traces of unity. A curious illustration of this result may be observed in the want of any name by which we can designate the students of the knowledge of the material world collectively. We are informed that this difficulty was felt very oppressively by the members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at their meetings at York, Oxford, and Cambridge, in the last three summers. 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 too lofty a term, and was very properly forbidden them by Mr. Coleridge, both in his capacity of philologer and metaphysician; savans was rather assuming, besides being French instead of English; some ingenious gentleman [Whewell himself] proposed that, by analogy with artist, they might form scientist, and added that there could be no scruple in making free with this termination when we have such words as sciolist, economist, and atheist— but this was not generally palatable.16

As Sydney Ross has pointed out in his 1962 article “Scientist: The Story of a Word,” Whewell’s use of the example “atheist” demonstrates the jocularity of the passage, but in 1840, in the preface to his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Whewell again proposed “scientist,” as well as the more specific “physicist” for a student of physics, this time in all seriousness.17 The word for a practitioner of physics


New Terms for New Figures: “Scientist” and “Physicist”


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INTRODUCTION

Again, by this maxim [of not adopting words already in use for other purposes], we are almost debarred from using the term physician for a cultivator of the science of physics, because it already signifies a practiser of physic. We might, perhaps, still use physician as the equivalent of the French physicien [ . . . ]; but probably it would be better to form a new word. Thus we may say, that while the Naturalist employs principally the ideas of resemblance and life, the Physicist proceeds upon the ideas of force, matter, and the properties of matter.18

A few pages later Whewell again brings up the issue, this time addressing the “scientist” question: As we cannot use physician for a cultivator of physics, I have called him a physicist. We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I should incline to call him a scientist. Thus we might say, that as an Artist is a Musician, Painter, or Poet, a Scientist is a Mathematician, Physicist, or Naturalist.19

“Scientist,” according to Whewell, could serve as a useful umbrella term, both indicating and linguistically effecting a unity of the evermultiplying disciplines of science. While more general than “physicist” or “geologist,” however, “scientist” carried a new and different sense of science from that implied in the long-used “natural philosopher,” which connoted someone seeking natural truth on a more lofty plane. Though Whewell used the term “artist” as analogically similar to his suggestion of “scientist,” the implicit differences between “scientist” and “natural philosopher” were arguably more similar to the differences between “artisan” and “artist.” Whereas an artist was someone inspired, a potential genius with a vocation for his art, an artisan was someone skilled in a craft, a professional who had taken up his job as an occupation, as one might choose to be a carpenter or a lawyer. Thus in an 1840 article in Blackwood’s Magazine, the painter David Scott explained:


held a special obstacle due to physics’ close relation to “physic,” the practice of medicine. Whewell wrote:

The distinction betwixt the elements of art and science being kept in view, the strongest point of contrast betwixt Leonardo da Vinci and Coreggio is arrived at. In other respects, they at once stand connected and opposed; but in this they belong to altogether different modes. In the instance of Leonardo, it involves the essential character of his works; in respect to Coreggio, it is merely adventitious to that.


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No one would deny the genius of Leonardo da Vinci, but still in this passage, with the words “seeker” and “assertor,” one sees a difference in creative potential. “Scientist” held the same suggestion of skilled expertise as “artisan,” without the leavening hint of inspired creative ability present in “artist” or, for that matter, in “natural philosopher.” Partly for this reason, and partly from a dislike of linguistic innovation, the term “scientist” did not become popular or commonly used until the twentieth century, and many members of the Victorian scientific community rejected it outright. Throughout his career Michael Faraday preferred to be called an “experimental philosopher,” and he was even less pleased by “physicist” than by “scientist”: “Physicist,” he wrote, “is both to mouth and ears so awkward that I think I shall never be able to use it. The equivalent of three separate sounds of i in one word is too much.”21 William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, agreed, promoting “naturalist” as a substitute and urging his colleagues to “refuse to accept so un-English, unpleasing, and meaningless a variation from old usage as physicist.”22 Similarly, William Grove ridiculed the term, describing “the word physicists, where four sibilant consonants fizz like a squib.”23 As for “scientist,” debate over its legitimacy continued into the 1890s: in 1894 J. T. Carrington, editor of the magazine Science-Gossip, solicited a range of opinions on the word from the nation’s most celebrated scientific figures. The responses, sent in by the Duke of Argyll, John Lubbock, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Lord Rayleigh, among others, show more often than not a personal distaste for the term combined with a resignation to changing times. One exception is Thomas Huxley, to whom resignation was an alien concept. He wrote: “To any one who respects the English language, I think ‘Scientist’ must be about as pleasing a word as ‘Electrocution’. I sincerely trust you will not allow the pages of Science-Gossip to be defiled by it.”24 Thus spoke one of the most forward-looking scientific popularizers of the Victorian era, and yet the figure evoked by the term “scientist,” a professional researcher vastly unlike the figure of the private, gentlemanly amateur evoked by the term “natural philosopher,” was one Huxley strove to establish as the norm for practitioners of science. Tyndall himself was not averse to the new vocabulary, though in the majority of his essays and lectures he uses the less controversial phrase “man of science” rather than “scientist.” The term “physicist”


Leonardo was mentally a seeker after truth— a scientist; Coreggio was an assertor of truth— an artist.20


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INTRODUCTION

I do not know whether scientific men generally have found the warming up of the imagination in the prosecution of their work as beneficial to them as it has been to me. In my case, certainly, writings lying apparently far from science have acted as potent motive powers urging me forward. I would go further and say that the experimental physicist (a word, by the way, which your Father disliked, because of its hissing sound) who has a turn for pure philosophy, will find the latter vastly facilitated by noting the processes of his own mind while engaged upon his work.25

In addition to revealing Tennyson’s own linguistic preferences on the matter, Tyndall in this passage contrasts physics with “pure” philosophy, describing a physicist with a “turn” for philosophy— an apt description of himself— as perhaps something unusual and thus suggesting that a physicist would not necessarily have any interest in philosophy at all. Such a suggestion in itself demonstrates the distance between the terms “physicist”— or, by extension, “scientist”— and “natural philosopher.” The realization of the scientist as a cultural figure was a process as complex and gradual as the acceptance of the word itself. Tyndall and his fellow scientific popularizers fought to establish scientists as authorities in British society, but they were not seeking to place scientists in Parliament. Indeed, they believed that the authority they sought could not be achieved by joining the strands of government and science in such a way: in 1887 Tyndall wrote to his friend Thomas Hirst, “Some discontent has been felt and expressed at Stokes, as President of the Royal Society, becoming a member of the House of Commons. I wish he had let politics alone, for he certainly cannot be the servant of politics and the servant of science at the same time.”26 Nevertheless, the scientific popularizers were anxious for scientists to be seen as legitimate influencers of governmental affairs, arbiters of policy, and consultants on matters ranging from technology to education. They argued that scientists should not be limited by the need to find applications for their discoveries; rather they envisioned researchers pursuing the truth of nature for its own sake, funded by the state and by universities so that they themselves could conduct their research without monetary constraint. That very freedom from the need to support themselves would allow scientists, as Tyndall and his colleagues saw them, to be trustworthy, unbiased authorities for society in all aspects of the natural world. The authority that the popularizers strove to give scientists,


he embraced as evocative of the type of clearly defined science he promoted, in which scientific disciplines were easily recognized and demarcated. In a draft of a letter to Tennyson’s son after the poet’s death in 1892—little more than a year before his own death—Tyndall wrote:


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therefore, was not concrete authority in the form of legal or political power but rather intellectual authority that would enter the cultural system through education, consultation, and an increasingly pervasive conviction that science, rather than any form of theology, should form the underlying structure of accepted truth in human society. Such a task could never be accomplished by one man alone. How then could Tyndall— even working alongside Huxley, W. K. Clifford, and the many other scientific popularizers of the age—hope to establish a unified vision of the figure of the scientist within the complex and changing British society? The answer, of course, is that he could not achieve anything so clear-cut, or so simple. Tyndall’s aims, however, were by no means simple or perfectly defined even to himself. He did not set out with the goal of establishing scientists as the foremost intellectual authorities in British society but rather to clear scientific ground of theological obstacles and to promote the union of imaginative theorizing with rigorous methodology. Yet through his career as a lecturer and essayist, through his battle against the constraints of theology, through his long years of promoting science as a fundamental necessity in education, Tyndall was projecting and lobbying for a particular embodiment of the figure of the scientist. Neither Tyndall nor any of the other Victorian scientific popularizers created the idea of the modern scientist out of thin air. But the scientist as Tyndall and his fellow popularizers perceived the role was something new in British culture, a figure of authority unprecedented in that the legitimacy of that authority was based on reproducible expertise. Their vision of cultural authority resting on standardized investigation into quantifiable data from the natural world was, I argue, a conceptual invention of the Victorian era in which Tyndall played a sizable role. Though the eventual establishment of the scientist was not solely Tyndall’s work, nor was his conception of the figure the only influence on the eventual, instantly recognizable “scientist” of the twentieth century, I will argue that his contribution to the concept of the scientist was both crucial to its development and, because of his conflicted interest in religion and philosophy, representative of deeply significant preoccupations in Victorian thought.



Historiographical Questions: Science in Relation to Culture and Religion There are three major historiographical issues that any historian of nineteenth-century science must come to terms with. First, though the world of science became both professionalized and specialized


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in the nineteenth century— one has only to take a sample of natural philosophers from 1800 (Joseph Priestley, John Dalton, Erasmus Darwin) and self-labeled scientists from 1900 (J. J. Thomson, William Ramsay, Arthur Schuster) to see the truth of that transformation—it is important to realize that one cannot draw a straight line between the two points. Ruth Barton has written a compelling article arguing that for the Victorians themselves, the terms “professional” and “amateur” could not be applied in their modern sense, and that the question of who belonged to the scientific community could not be answered with a uniform standard.27 In 2001 the Journal of the History of Biology published a group of articles also supporting these points, to which Adrian Desmond, Richard Bellon, John C. Waller, and Samuel J. M. M. Alberti contributed. 28 Given the complexity that these scholars have demonstrated in the concept of professionalization, I have found it more useful to focus on Jan Golinski’s concept of the self-fashioning of a social identity for scientists and the prevalence of what he terms “disciplinarity” in nineteenth-century science.29 I shall argue, exhibiting Tyndall as both test-case and instrument of change, that the progression from eighteenth-century gentlemen who dabbled in science to white-coated lab-workers of the twentieth century was neither clear nor straightforward; on the contrary the path of the scientist through the nineteenth century was ambiguous and circuitous, depending in part on the changing nature of science itself and impinging on realms as diverse as literature, politics, education, and religion. This brings us to another significant historiographical issue: I follow the lead of many prominent historians, including Gillian Beer, George Levine, Geoffrey Cantor, Sally Shuttleworth, James Paradis, and Thomas Postlewait, in questioning the alleged barrier between science and the humanities— one might almost say science and the rest of life. While the disciplines within science became more rigid and well-defined over the course of the nineteenth century, and while scientists themselves came to be a more easily recognizable and exclusive group, the definition of science itself and what lay within its realm was a hotly contested issue, and the place of scientists as public figures inspired a great deal of controversy. Tyndall fought throughout his career for a prominent place for scientists within society not only as researchers and educators but as public commentators or, to borrow Collini’s term, public moralists. Tyndall believed that science should form the basis of education and that scientists should be viewed as the most competent judges of everything to do with the natural world—which, in his mind, covered all human life and


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society, even some areas previously thought to be in the theological sphere. Far from shutting themselves off from the world of popular culture, Tyndall and his colleagues fought to expand the scientific sphere into as much of society as possible, often claiming new ground as rightfully belonging to their jurisdiction. The last historiographical issue is the relationship in nineteenthcentury Britain between science and religion. Opinions on this relationship have altered dramatically in the past hundred years. In the early twentieth century a clear-cut battle between Victorian science and religion was a trope in historical studies, one of the most wellknown and well-established facts in Victorian history—in part because the participants themselves had so frequently referred to the debate as a war. Beginning with Charles Coulston Gillispie’s book Genesis and Geology in 1951, however, there has been a reaction to this historiographical view. In the 1970s and 1980s, Frank M. Turner, James R. Moore, Robert M. Young, and Bernard Lightman established a revisionist stance that for the past thirty years has dominated interpretations of Victorian science and religion— a stance arguing that a simplistic scheme of science versus religion ignores the complexities of the issues in question.30 Revisionists have done excellent work in rethinking, for example, the supposed explosion of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, emphasizing the prevalence of various evolutionary theories before that point and the calm with which the Origin was received in most scientific circles: Pietro Corsi, James Moore, Adrian Desmond, and Peter Bowler have all contributed to this field. Historians now insist on the impossibility of separating all of the players in the intellectual arena surrounding the “scientific naturalists” as proponents of either religion on one side or science on the other; Frank Turner in Between Science and Religion (1974) and Robert M. Young in Darwin’s Metaphor (1985) effectively established this area of study, and Bernard Lightman also played a major role, with The Origins of Agnosticism (1987) and a book edited in collaboration with Richard J. Helmstadter, Victorian Faith in Crisis (1990). Since many Victorian men of science were devoutly Christian and almost all of them believed in God or at least the possibility of God; since countless clergymen were amateur scientists, eagerly following news of the latest debates and discoveries in the scientific world; and since many influential figures in the century contributed to both the theological and the scientific discourses, one cannot divvy up the British population into pro-science and pro-religion teams. Even within those debates that undeniably took place— on the geological versus the biblical age of the earth, on the viability of evolution


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and natural selection, on the relationship between the body and the soul— one can never find only two sides to the issue; on the contrary, with most of the subjects in question, there are nearly as many viewpoints as there are commentators. Often one can find theologians taking part in the argument not to uphold a particular theological stance but rather to support one scientific theory over another. The problem, then, becomes how to analyze what was unquestionably a pressing and prevalent issue in Victorian culture, namely the relationship between science and religion, without falling into the trap of simplifying the situation into an inaccurate dichotomy. One solution that Lightman, Turner, and others have found, and which I follow, is to emphasize and explore the recurring intellectual opposition between science and theology. Lightman writes in The Origins of Agnosticism, “Those sections in Huxley’s work which are often quoted to support the thesis that a state of war existed between science and religion in Victorian England are only examples of Huxley’s perception of the antagonism between science and false theology.”31 The same could be said of Tyndall’s work, though in his case, as in Huxley’s, I question the need to include the word “false.” Tyndall objected to theology of any kind that was vaunted as an objective intellectual pursuit, a form of science; religious ideas, he claimed, dealt solely with subjective emotion. Thus, as Turner argues throughout his work, the hostilities between science and theology, in which Tyndall so often took part, were at base epistemological, a conflict over the ownership of intellectual objectivity, the nature of factual evidence, the limits of rationality— even, within the argument itself, the definitions and terminology of the disciplines in question. The undercurrent of this epistemological struggle was the contest for social and cultural leadership— effectively a competition for public acknowledgment that either science or theology held the ultimate access to truth and offered the most legitimate guidance for social, political, and educational policy. With such aims at stake, the conflict was prolonged, intricate, and well-publicized. The concept of “science versus theology,” in their capacities as social and intellectual authorities, would have been recognizable to any reader of nineteenth-century periodicals. Further, while there were complexities within both the content of the debates and the debaters themselves, I argue that these debaters frequently thought of themselves as members of rival groups—though those two groups are not easily defined, nor were they easily defined at the time. My argument is not that progressive Science, as one unified body, fought against conservative Theology, another unified body, but rather that a group


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of men, each of whom consciously donned the mantle of Science— though each might have had a different definition of “Science”— were battling a group of self-labeled theologians, each armed with his own definition of “Theology,” over cultural authority within British society. As an historian examining these issues, one sees that a simplistic interpretation cannot accurately describe the complexity of the debate; yet for a variety of motives, whether convinced of the truth of the divide or merely of its rhetorical power, many Victorians referred to the debate as a war between science and theology. Who Was John Tyndall: A Brief Biography Tyndall was born on August 2, 1820, in County Carlow, Ireland. His father, an impoverished shoemaker and part-time policeman, was a man of great intellectual power and curiosity, who raised his son with an equal emphasis on education and the Protestant faith; though Tyndall eventually disavowed much of this faith, he never lost the anti-Catholic sentiments his father had instilled in him. When he was nineteen years old Tyndall became a surveyor, working in both Ireland and Lancashire. Four years later, having been dismissed for complaining of harsh conditions, he began work as a railway engineer in the north of England, during which time he met his lifelong friend, the mathematician Thomas Archer Hirst, and became acquainted with the writings of Thomas Carlyle, his earliest and most beloved philosophical hero. In 1847 Tyndall took the job of teaching mathematics and surveying at the innovative Queenwood College in Hampshire. After one year of teaching, however, he and his colleague, the chemist Edward Frankland, decided to travel to the University of Marburg in Germany to continue their own education. Tyndall’s natural talent and inclination for scientific research blossomed in Marburg and, after his time there, in Berlin. By the time he returned to England in 1851 for another two years at Queenwood, his determination to establish himself in the scientific world had become unshakable. All the while during his second stint of teaching at Queenwood he was experimenting and publishing papers about his research. He attended meetings of the British Association, and he gained the acquaintance of many famous scientists, including Michael Faraday and Thomas Huxley. In 1852 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and in 1853 he gave his first lecture in London at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, which promptly offered him the position of Professor of Natural Philosophy. Enchanted by the idea of working with his idol Faraday, Tyndall accepted the post,


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thus beginning a career at the Institution that would last thirty-four years. The Royal Institution had been founded in 1799 by Count Rumford for “diffusing the knowledge, and facilitating the general introduction of useful mechanical inventions and improvements; and for teaching, by courses of philosophical lectures and experiments, the application of science to the common purposes of life.”32 In practice, this meant a unique establishment offering employment to a number of scientific men, who could take advantage of the library and basement laboratory for their own research in return for the delivery of series of afternoon lectures on scientific subjects to amateurs and students and— starting from 1826, when Faraday began the tradition—weekly Friday Evening Discourses for the Institution’s paying members. These members, mostly belonging to those of London’s social elite who could afford the annual membership fee of five guineas, ranged in number from seven hundred in 1830 up to over a thousand in the 1880s, and members often brought guests to the Discourses, resulting in a crowded lecture theater.33 Humphry Davy was the Institution’s first superintendent, a charismatic lecturer as well as a brilliant experimentalist largely responsible for the Institution’s initial success as a public scientific forum. Thomas Carlyle quipped that Davy, by popularizing the Institution’s lectures, had made the Institution into “a kind of sublime Mechanics’ Institute for the upper classes.”34 Faraday and Tyndall continued this tradition, attempting to introduce both scientific concepts and scientific method into the upper echelons of society through their lectures. Both garnered tremendous popular acclaim, Faraday delivering a total of 119 Discourses and Tyndall 55.35 George Eliot once remarked that the Discourses were “as fashionable an amusement as the Opera.”36 Thus, under the leadership of Davy, Faraday, and then Tyndall, the Institution served as one of the most renowned and popular scientific venues throughout the nineteenth century, as well as the only establishment in the country devoted solely to scientific research and promulgation.37 Tyndall’s reputation as an enthralling lecturer grew rapidly, and he became known as an articulate communicator of scientific ideas, both in writing and in person. He gained the friendship of a large circle of London scientists, and the city’s high society adopted him as their celebrity of the moment, flocking in unmatched numbers to hear his lectures at the Royal Institution. Ever ready for a fight, on others’ behalf as often as his own, Tyndall entered into various scientific debates, the most notorious of which involved the nature of glacial movement, through which he gained the lasting enmity of


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many northern scientists, including J. D. Forbes and P. G. Tait. In the 1860s and 1870s, Tyndall’s strong objection to the authority of theology became more and more prominent in his published writing. He defended Darwin’s theory of natural selection with as much vehemence as his friends Huxley and Spencer, and together with their other friends in the X Club, a nine-member scientific society that enjoyed considerable notoriety in London in the second half of the century, they supported the establishment of science as a central subject in schools and universities. Having achieved an almost infamous reputation through a long debate over the efficacy of prayer and the possibility of miracles, Tyndall sparked a furor with his presidential address to the British Association in Belfast in 1874, in which he proclaimed that science must be given sole authority over the investigation of the natural world. The controversy that erupted over this speech lasted for many years, in all of which Tyndall continued to promote his vision of science as the best authority on natural phenomena. In 1872–73 he went on a lecture tour of eastern America, during which he was delighted by his audience’s enthusiasm for science in general and for himself in particular. The trip inspired him to continue his popular science writing, most famous of which were his ever-popular Heat as a Mode of Motion (1863) and his Fragments of Science for Unscientific People, which he first published in 1871 and added to in numerous subsequent editions until shortly before his death. The strain of continuous research and lecturing, however, had an increasingly detrimental effect on Tyndall’s health. He had been a victim for years of headaches, dyspepsia, and insomnia, and in the latter portions of his life these ailments often overpowered him, rendering him unable to work for months at a time. Tyndall found solace in his annual trips to the Alps, scene not only of his glacier experiments but also of the continued formulation of his reverential philosophy of the natural world. But still he was lonely. As Gwendy Caroe memorably expressed it in her history of the Royal Institution, “He suffered from overwork, indigestion, doubt and depression. In short he lacked a wife.”38 The acquaintance of Louisa Hamilton, therefore, was a great relief to Tyndall. In 1876, though she was a quarter of a century younger than he was, Louisa married him, and they remained a devoted couple for the next seventeen years. Tyndall’s final decade was overshadowed by his hatred of William Gladstone, whose policy of Home Rule in Ireland infuriated Tyndall to the point of obsession, at times even quenching his interest in scientific developments. After his retirement from the Royal Institution


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in 1887, Tyndall was dismayed at the rapidity with which his successors there and in the larger scientific world forgot his research and publications. By the time of his death in December of 1893 he had become outmoded as a scientific figure; yet in his time Tyndall had gained the respect and friendship of the most illustrious men of his generation, and he had acted for decades as one of the most popular spokesmen of science for the general public. Throughout his life, Tyndall took satisfaction at his rise through the ranks of society on the crest of science. Tyndall’s career was a dramatic journey from obscurity to fame and back again. During the peak of his time as the figurehead of science, he made a lasting impact on British society through his support of scientists as legitimate social commentators— support demonstrated not least by his own well-publicized figure as a popular scientific lecturer and writer. Tyndall was remembered fondly in the 1890s by his few remaining colleagues, most notably Huxley and Spencer, but after his death, despite the devoted efforts of his widow Louisa, who spent the rest of her long life trying to keep the flame of his reputation alive, it was not until the end of the twentieth century that historians began to recognize Tyndall as an important Victorian figure. An Outline of the Chapters to Come This book is composed of five chapters, each focusing on a particular aspect of Tyndall’s life. As the intention of each is to examine one theme or facet of Tyndall’s scientific career, as well as the way in which that theme played a role in the larger historical context, their order should not be viewed as a linear progression. Rather they are arranged with the aim of presenting Tyndall’s philosophy of science and its impact on British society in a clear and coherent fashion. The first chapter outlines Tyndall’s career as a physicist, discussing his research, his lectures, and his published writing, and examining his use of those writings and lectures to support his own definition of science and scientists. The chapter establishes the tension that existed from the beginning between Tyndall’s own research and his efforts at scientific popularization, as well as the frequent controversies that arose concerning his research and the extent to which these colored his public career as a scientist. The second chapter analyzes the way in which Tyndall fashioned his own philosophy of science and nature, which underlay all of his activities as a scientist and served as the prime motivation for his promotion of science as a cultural authority. The chapter focuses especially on


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Tyndall’s relationships with Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Michael Faraday, all of whom Tyndall knew personally and whom he cited as formative influences on his beliefs and attitudes toward science. The third chapter examines Tyndall’s efforts to free science from the constraints of theology by arguing for science as the sole legitimate intellectual authority on the natural world. The chapter discusses the effects of Tyndall’s engagement in theological debates on his public image as a scientist and examines the way in which that image changed over time as the relationship between science and theology developed. The fourth chapter explores Tyndall’s attempts to implement his vision of a scientific society through promoting science in education; it analyzes his view of science as the foundation of human learning and its unique significance in the Victorian age, comparing his beliefs about educational reform with those of his colleagues Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer. The fifth and final chapter discusses the end of Tyndall’s career, examining the ways in which his reputation was affected by the growth of science in universities and the increasing rigidity of scientific professionalism. The chapter investigates the changes in both the sites of scientific research and the nature of scientists themselves through the lens of Tyndall’s two successors at the Royal Institution, Lord Rayleigh and J. J. Thompson. These men, significantly, were both most well-known for their connections with Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory, first headed by James Clerk Maxwell and destined to become by the end of the century the leading site of British scientific research. The conclusion of the book provides a brief overview of the scientist’s place in British culture in the closing years of the Victorian era, assessing the extent to which science had become a dominant social force. It analyzes the reasons for the diminution of Tyndall’s reputation after his death and argues that insofar as he had fought for the establishment of scientists as cultural authorities in Britain, unfettered by the restraints of religious doctrine, Tyndall succeeded in meeting the aims of his career and thus played a pivotal role in the development of Victorian and twentieth-century society.


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Tyndall’s Work as a Scientist Practice and Reception

“T

he meek and retiring manner of Michael Faraday was symbolic of the apologetic attitude which physical science adopted when it was first being popularised. It is now no longer the modest shrinking maiden, its face knows not the blush of shame, its mien is arrogant and aggressive.”1 This statement was published in a New York periodical called The World in 1876, three years after John Tyndall’s lecture tour of the United States, and it is probable that Tyndall, in spite of— or perhaps because of—the popularity of his lectures in America, served as one of the main targets for the statement’s imagery of arrogance and aggression. The comparison demonstrates one way in which the popular image of scientists changed over time. Whereas Faraday was almost defined by his gentle reclusivity, an image that, by virtue of his immense reputation, commentators often extended to science of the early nineteenth century in general, Tyndall was known as an adventurous fighter, a man fighting for the cause of science in society, who was not only willing but eager to take on all the Victorian traditions that stood in the way of making scientific thinking the basis of education and social policy. Yet above all else Tyndall thought of himself not as a reformer but as a man of science— and eventually as a physicist. In effect one can identify three main aims in Tyndall’s career: first, a desire to carry out original and valuable scientific research; second, a desire to convey the discoveries and ideas of science to the general public; third, a desire to establish science as the predominant cultural authority in Britain. This chapter will explore the ties and tensions between these three goals, focusing especially on the difficulties that Tyndall found in treading the line between research and popularization. While the


Chapter 1


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divide between “popular” and “professional” science grew increasingly rigid toward the end of the century, Tyndall encountered criticism and skepticism throughout his career for attempting to excel in both areas. Through his efforts to familiarize the public with scientific concepts and theories, Tyndall helped to establish the scientist as a recognizable public figure, but in doing so he undermined his own scientific credibility. Not only the public but his scientific contemporaries felt that a man so devoted to public life— and so frequently involved in controversy— could not possess as much authority within the purely scientific realm as his more reclusive colleagues. Moreover, in promoting a vision of scientists based in governmentfunded institutions and trained by standard measures, Tyndall was effectively, though not intentionally, arguing for the end of his own more individualistic type of science. Thus Tyndall’s success in promoting science and scientists came at the eventual price of his own reputation as a scientist. This chapter, then, will serve the double purpose of summarizing Tyndall’s career as a public scientist and exploring the ways in which Tyndall created, exploited, and struggled with that career. An Overview: Tyndall, Representative of Science and of His Era In 1887 an article in The Times, written on the occasion of Tyndall’s retirement from the Royal Institution, drew a portrait of Tyndall crusading for the cause of science: Science at his instigation has turned belligerent, and has forced a careless world to take sides. Qualities which make him a rather dangerous ally in other strifes have briskly forwarded the cause he has most really at heart. He has never been able to touch a topic, from the harmony of the spheres to an Alpine ascent, from the efficacy of prayer to the doctrine of germs, without infusing an element of personal antagonism and passion. He has compelled the nation to open dull eyes and ears to look at and listen to the man; and science has snatched the opportunity of revealing itself.2

While critical of Tyndall’s passion in nonscientific arenas, this description indicates the awe that Tyndall evoked in the public through his promotion of science. One must, of course, take the distortion of hindsight into account, but the article speaks of Tyndall’s effect as continuing up to the time of its publication. Science itself, the author suggests, was embodied in Tyndall’s fiery defense of it. An article published in The Saturday Review after Tyndall’s death in 1893 goes




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T Y N D A L L’ S W O R K A S A S C I E N T I S T

Thus in many ways Dr. Tyndall was one of the most characteristic figures of his time, even if he sometimes represented its foible as well as its forte. A man of wide knowledge and wide interest, a hard player as well as hard worker, poles asunder from the popular conception of a savant as a recluse who only leaves his study to take a walk in goloshes on the pavement, he took, at least as long as health was granted, most things “with a frolic welcome,” and those which he could not welcome in a hearty posture of fight.3

Thus, according to this article, the characteristics that defined Tyndall as a scientist—his wide-ranging curiosity, which reached beyond the purely scientific realm; his enthusiasm for bringing science to the people; his indomitable fighting nature—were seen by the end of his life as characteristics of his era as a whole. The statement is evidence of Tyndall’s impact on the public’s view of his time, and it shows also the extent to which both science itself and the fight for scientific authority had become integral to late-Victorian society. Tyndall’s representative nature was not always depicted as laudable; on the contrary, some commentators decried his typicality as indicative of the dangerous depths to which science had lured society. In 1878 Henry Larkin, Thomas Carlyle’s devoted neighbor and amanuensis, published a long, unsigned, scathing pamphlet called Extra Physics and the Mystery of Creation, in which he attacked Tyndall for exactly that which The Saturday Review later praised—his status as a representative figure of his time:4 Professor Tyndall has long been recognised and honoured as one of our Representative Men. To borrow an idiom from his favourite teacher and moralist, he, more than any of his contemporaries, stands for Physical Truth. Other men may be greater in their special departments, but as the High Priest of Physical Truth, interpreting, as with a wave of light, its deepest dynamics, and dispensing with radiant beneficence its subtlest gifts,— as the inspired Seer of Molecular Activities, summoned by an expectant universe to strike, with the tuning-fork of science, the keynote of all practical wisdom, and proclaim with authority the possibilities and limits of the human intellect, he stands alone.5


further on the same lines, describing Tyndall as representative not only of science but of his era as a whole:

Tyndall would have been pleased by the notion of including a physicist in Emerson’s series of Representative Men— especially since it would have meant placing himself in the company of men like Plato


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A man more representative of the leading aims and aspirations of the physical intellect of the nineteenth century, even Emerson could hardly wish for. Such being the case, we need not wonder if every deliberate utterance of his should be joyously welcomed by all hearts beating in physical sympathy with his own, as at once a lesson in science and a revelation in philosophy; or that every new evidence he may vouchsafe to us of the all-sufficiency of physics for human needs and aspirations, should be looked upon as not merely a milestone (which all who can may see through), marking the latest stage of intellectual advancement, but as a spiritual finger-post pointing the golden way to the only corn-fields of the future. Neither need we be altogether astonished if feelings very much the opposite should also have been aroused.7

For the rest of the extensive pamphlet, Larkin attacks Tyndall with surprising ferocity, accusing him of misleading the public and exhibiting the colossal ego of a dictatorial maniac. At one point Larkin quotes Tyndall as saying, “It is perfectly vain to attempt to stop inquiry as to the actual and possible actions of matter and force. Depend upon it, if a chemist, by bringing the proper materials together in a retort or crucible, could make a baby, he would do it.”8 Larkin responds: Doubtless he would, and eat it too, if he could only make it savoury enough. Why not? What are life and death to a physical-force philosopher? Simply the starting and stopping of a bit of mechanism. For him there is nothing “sacred,” unless it be the essential self-sufficiency of physics; and nothing profane, but the needless and unwarrantable “intrusion” upon the same of creative power. What is there he would not do, if he only knew how?9

Lamenting what he sees as immoral materialism—a philosophy that he believes will lead to the end of science’s benefit to society—Larkin also compares Tyndall with science as it once was. He derides Tyndall’s insistence that theology cannot be deemed a science, arguing that a pious reverence for exploring the unknown was what marked his predecessors:


and Goethe.6 But Larkin uses the idea only to turn it upside down: after a few more lines, the sarcasm in his exaggerated compliments, and by extension his dismay at Tyndall’s position as “the High Priest of Physical Truth,” becomes apparent:

How is it, then, that the very men who have, with real heroism of its kind, thus victoriously led the van of persistent inquiry into physical phenomena, should now turn round from north to south, from


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seekers of light to upholders of darkness; and denounce— as a fatuous attempt to know the unknowable and think the unthinkable— all serious inquiry into a class of phenomena, the reality and importance of which they cannot even question? It was not so that their predecessors, the creators of modern science, won their patient victories; and opened out, through impossibilities, darkness, and discouragement, new continents of fruitful intelligence, new possibilities of thought before undreamt of.10

In Larkin’s portrayal, Tyndall is representative of scientists because he exemplifies the negative effect that modern, materialistic scientists have had upon society and upon their own discipline. Science, Larkin argues, once virtuous because connected with religion and morality, has become a dangerous social force, due primarily to Tyndall’s own arrogance and his immoral standpoint on such matters as the soul and humanity’s place in nature. The distortion evident in Larkin’s venomous portrayal of Tyndall demonstrates the extent to which Tyndall’s philosophy, rather than his research—the effect as much as the content of his lectures— influenced his public reputation. Larkin is not concerned with Tyndall’s scientific theories; rather he is outraged by the implications of those theories, which Tyndall so often laid out before the public and which were so often misunderstood as materialism. Because of Tyndall’s objections to theology and his discussions of spirituality, education, and social policy, Larkin wrongfully assumed that Tyndall was a materialist, attempting to use his cultural influence in a way that, in Larkin’s opinion, had nothing to do with legitimate science and everything to do with the dangerous trend of scientists forgetting their proper place. The leap that Tyndall made from being “the latest stage in intellectual advancement” to being “the spiritual finger-post” for the public was enough to make Larkin dub Tyndall an “upholder of darkness.”11 On the whole, however, Tyndall’s critics were matched by the many people who wrote in favor of Tyndall’s lectures. Rather than condemning his philosophical wanderings, they upheld him as an eloquent orator and an unmatched scientific teacher. Most especially for his work at the Royal Institution, though also for his lectures elsewhere, Tyndall was praised for “his simple and beautiful experiments illustrating the subtle laws of matter”12 and for the sparkling energy of his performances; the American writer E. L. Youmans, founder of The Popular Science Monthly, wrote in a letter to his sister describing one of Tyndall’s lectures in 1862, “He was not still a moment, but bending and twisting in all possible shapes as if he had the St. Vitus dance—twisting his legs together, bending down to


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the desk, and working and jerking himself in all possible directions. Everybody was kept awake, entertained, and instructed. It was a work of enthusiasm.”13 No one, by the end of Tyndall’s career, denied the great standing as a lecturer that he had achieved both in the scientific community and in the wider public, in Britain and beyond. Yet in the praise, as in the censure, Tyndall’s research itself often got lost. The public did not seem to be as interested in what he had discovered as in his magnetism as a public performer and in his arguments about the place of science in society. While the attention that he received for his theatricality and equally for his incendiary statements helped him to promote the importance of science as a framework for society, the disjuncture between his research and his public persona indicates the difficulty that Tyndall found in inhabiting conflicting identities. On the one hand there was the tension between his status as a respected researcher and his reputation for voicing controversial views on theology; on the other there was the tension in being simultaneously a scientist and a scientific popularizer. Both of these conflicts served to weaken Tyndall’s authority as a scientist even as they increased his fame. Firm in his commitment to research, to teaching, and to philosophical debate, Tyndall found himself walking an often precarious tightrope, and his success as a public lecturer and popularizer eventually led to a diminution of his reputation within the scientific community as an independent researcher. Tyndall’s Entry into Elite Society: Science as a Calling Card Born into a poor Irish Protestant family with no access to traditional university education, Tyndall was acutely aware of his low social status, and in the early part of his career one of science’s most important roles in his life was that of a calling card into elite society. Science for Tyndall acted as the gateway to financial and social success, his certificate of respectability and intelligence. As his reputation grew as a researcher and lecturer, Tyndall continued his early tactic of using science as a means of establishing a place for himself in society. Science effectively became, to borrow Pierre Bourdieu’s term, Tyndall’s cultural capital, the foundation on which he built his career as a public figure with the right to comment not only on his own area of scientific expertise but on social problems in general.14 Thus science in Tyndall’s eyes took on from the first a social significance beyond its basic nature as an occupational pursuit. Though he promoted science for its own sake and possessed a true passion for scientific research and discovery, the fact had been borne in early upon his mind that science




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could also be used as an influential force in social negotiations; it carried an authority reaching beyond the boundaries of research. The extent of Tyndall’s preoccupation with his lowly background shows clearly in his early journals. When he was teaching at Queenwood College in 1852, after he had gained his PhD in Marburg but before coming to London, he sent a letter to Colonel Edward Sabine, treasurer for the Royal Society, in which he describes his father’s social position. He copied this letter into his journal, and its faint tone of desperation reveals his belief that the confession, though necessary according to his own code of honesty, would harm his future: But my father was a poor man, who made his livelihood by selling leather and shoes— during a portion of his life he was a policeman. In these few words I sum up all his social shortcomings—I have nothing more to say against him, for a man of more inflexible integrity and intrinsic truthfulness of heart I have never met. From his father he inherited a considerable amount of intelligence, and I well remember sitting by his deathbed tracing the veins upon his forehead and listening to his remarks, being deeply impressed by the thought that if his natural ability had had fair play in this world he would have proved a superior man.15

Tyndall’s description shows his resentment of the fact that his father, a man of unusual intelligence, had been cheated by his social status and deprived of a respect and standing that his abilities deserved. Yet Tyndall still states without qualification that his father’s low status was a “social shortcoming,” and that he himself would have to labor at great lengths to become an acceptable member of a higher class. He closes his letter with an almost pathetic plea: If you support me [in becoming a member of the Royal Society] it must be with the fact of what I am clearly placed before you. I have endeavoured, with what success I know not, to render myself fit for the companionship of cultivated men, believing it to be a duty which I owed both to myself and to society.16

Tyndall’s faith in his own intellect vied constantly, in these early days, with a fear that he was handicapped by his origins. A year later, when he had been elected to the Royal Society and landed his job at the Royal Institution, Tyndall recorded his pride in his journal:


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I have exceeded my condition by fair means. I have stood at no man’s door craving admittance, I have been asked in, every external


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advancement having been given not sought— I never sought the Royal Society, still it came, I never sought the Royal Institution but it has come. I never sought the society of the great and eminent, still I have got into such society— and this is the greatest comfort of my position, that I have been led into it by the natural guidance of circumstances, that I have scaled no walls but entered like an honest man into the sheepfold, and it is as an honest man I shall remain, if at all.17

Because Tyndall did not approve of the idea of “scaling the walls” of polite society, it was important to him that his success as a public figure be founded on a legitimate reason, which he could use as a base for a social reputation. His own scientific talent, he asserted, was an innate sign of worth, indicating his equality with the great names of high society. In the time preceding his first lecture at the Royal Institution, before he had been appointed professor, Tyndall wrote in his journal, “If I succeed I shall regard myself simply as the exponent of the supremacy of nature over the power of art.”18 The idea recurred again and again in his promotion of science in education and in society. His own interest in science— like, indeed, everyone’s interest in science—was, according to Tyndall, a natural rather than an artificial sign of personal worth, and as such it was a force that should be recognized by society as both inescapable and legitimately authoritative. For all its naturalness, however, science did not come easily or inevitably to Tyndall as the dominating force of his life. While studying at Marburg he wrote in a letter to Thomas Hirst of his ambivalence in focusing more on science than on his beloved philosophy: In the domain of natural science, which to me has ever been a secondary domain, I was never more at home than at present, but as a compensation my insight on subjects which I deem of still higher importance is comparatively dim. This I know is only temporary, the day I know will come when I shall be able to make use of natural science as the handmaid and expositor of this higher insight; but until that day comes you must bear with my feeble outf low as a writer.19



It is clear from this excerpt that Tyndall had not yet identified himself as, above all else, a scientist. But already one can see his determination to make his increasing knowledge of science useful—to co-opt its influence as a “handmaid and expositor.” From the first, Tyndall viewed science as a means to something else as well as a worthwhile


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Miss Carter asked me once, “And pray Mr Tyndall what is all this study for, what object have you in view?” I was gravelled instantly, I knew I could not satisfy her and that any attempt to do so would have rendered me ridiculous, I therefore contented myself with saying that I had no object or something of that kind, do you want a special answer look round you and see, is there not opportunity enough for a strong man to exert himself: give me strength only and if I don’t find opportunity why then I shake salt on my tail and transmute me into a fossil cocksparrow! My object here then is to gather a little force, well knowing that the world affords opportunity enough for its special applications.20

Tyndall embraced science as the force that would propel him into the society and intellectual circles his ambition prompted him to aim for; his appointment to the professorship at the Royal Institution confirmed his belief in science as a tool for gaining recognition. As time went on Tyndall’s commitment to science for its own sake grew stronger, but it was never an easy passion, and Tyndall struggled throughout his life with the demands that science made on his personal life and on his mental and physical health. He wrote vividly in a letter to Hirst in 1852, while still teaching at Queenwood College: I say to myself sometimes “Is it manly to be the slave of these things? Are you doing your duty in thus invading your health, drying up your heart, sacrificing the impulses of love and friendship and converting your religion into a scientific stalactite?” The question put in these strong terms startles me, and I half resolve to smash my fetters and liberate myself. [ . . . ] I pause an instant and cogitate thus:—My brain is engaged in a battle and shall I give it up because the fight thickens and I am weary? Friendship, love, religion may be invaded by this scientific demon, but the question is, shall I run away from him or beat him down?21

These wrestlings with his “scientific demon” never lessened, in spite of his great success as a lecturer and researcher, and by the end of his life Tyndall’s health had broken down completely because of his overmastering devotion to science. Yet he never “ran away,” and his passion for science grew stronger rather than weaker over the years; from the time of his appointment at the Royal Institution, it became the keynote of his life.


pursuit in itself. One can see this conviction even more explicitly in a later passage of the same letter:


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Science, then, provided Tyndall with social legitimacy, and because of his scientific work, he found himself associating with the most glittering names in London, respected as a man of science and even sought after as a prominent public figure. Justified in his belief in the usefulness of science as “a little force,” which he could apply to other aims, Tyndall began his lifelong attempt to reform society’s attitude to science and its practitioners. Having found to his delight that his position at the Royal Institution minimized the importance of his low social origins, Tyndall strove first to increase his scientific capital and, eventually, to use that capital as a means of exerting his influence in a variety of social spheres. But the most important aim in his early career was to confirm his status as a respected scientific researcher, a man who based his social standing on a sizable body of work recognized within the scientific community. Tyndall’s Capital: Research and Reputation in the Scientific Community Tyndall’s scientific career can be divided into three major categories of research: glaciology, molecular behavior in varying atmospheric conditions, and bacteriology. In each of these categories he conducted extensive research, but he frequently ended by achieving as much notice for the controversies surrounding his discoveries as for the discoveries themselves. Nevertheless his work, encompassing decades of solid study, gave him the reputation of a respected and talented researcher. By the 1860s his name was recognizable to scientists both in Britain and abroad, and having thus gained status within the scientific community, he felt able to venture beyond its bounds into social commentary. Tyndall’s first major research project began when he was still a student in Germany in 1848–51, working in collaboration with two of his most valued mentors, the chemist Robert Bunsen and the physicist Karl-Hermann Knoblauch. Tyndall was investigating diamagnetism by exploring the shifting magnetic fields of various crystals put under pressure, and his researches led him to conclusions different from those of Faraday, who had conducted the first notable experiments on the phenomenon and indeed coined the term “diamagnetism” in 1845.22 Tyndall’s initial lecture at the Royal Institution in 1853 was impressive not only in that he was a young scientist speaking before some of the finest scientific minds in Britain but also because he was presenting a hypothesis contrary to Faraday’s own views. With characteristic good humor, however, Faraday applauded his courage, and




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their partnership began. Once at the Institution Tyndall continued his work on diamagnetism and crystallization. His investigation of the cleavage of slates and crystals fed into his work on the structure and movement of Alpine glaciers, his next sizable research project and one that introduced him to the wonders of the Alps.23 Tyndall’s work on glaciers also sparked the bitterest and most longlasting conflict of his career, through which he gained the opposition of several northern scientists, who grouped themselves together in an informal league of researchers promoting a new physics of energy conservation. Tyndall asserted that ice was not viscous but rather melted and refroze continually, moving in a manner that merely resembled viscosity.24 J. D. Forbes, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, held that ice was, in fact, viscous.25 Forbes was supported by many of the North Briton scientists, including most notably P. G. Tait, one of Forbes’s former students; James Prescott Joule; and the renowned William Thomson. The conflict spiraled into personal antagonism, and when in the early 1860s Tyndall supported Julius Robert Mayer, an obscure German physicist, as a contributor to the study of energy conservation equal in importance to Joule himself, the conflict flared again.26 Tait in particular loathed Tyndall, both because of these scientific conflicts and because Tait disapproved of Tyndall’s views on theology. After participating in numerous battles conducted through periodicals, Nature being the most prominent venue, Tait and his fellow physicist Balfour Stewart published in 1875 a lengthy and popular rebuttal to Tyndall’s views, entitled The Unseen Universe, in which they argued for immortality.27 The year after that, in the latest edition of his Recent Advances in Physical Science, Tait questioned Tyndall’s legitimacy as a researcher: There must always be wide limits of uncertainty (unless we choose to look upon Physics as a necessarily finite Science) concerning the exact boundary between the Attainable and the Unattainable. One herd of ignorant people, with the sole prestige of rapidly increasing numbers, and with the adhesion of a few fanatical deserters from the ranks of Science, refuse to admit that all the phenomena even of ordinary dead matter are strictly and exclusively in the domain of physical science. On the other hand, there is a numerous group, not in the slightest degree entitled to rank as Physicists (though in general they assume the proud title of Philosophers), who assert that not merely Life, but even Volition and Consciousness are merely physical manifestations. These opposite errors, into neither of which it is possible for a genuine scientific man to fall, so long at least as he retains his reason, are easily


29



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seen to be very closely allied. They are both to be attributed to that Credulity which is characteristic alike of Ignorance and of Incapacity. Unfortunately there is no cure; the case is hopeless, for great ignorance almost necessarily presumes incapacity, whether it shows itself in the comparatively harmless folly of the Spiritualist or in the pernicious nonsense of the Materialist.28

Tyndall is the obvious focus of Tait’s attack on the Materialists, in spite of Tyndall’s own objections to Materialism as a philosophy. By identifying such materialistic scientists as essentially mirror-images of the Spiritualists, Tait implies that Tyndall has forfeited his right to be considered a legitimate physicist. Far from expertise, Tait argues, Tyndall and his scientific colleagues have shown only “Ignorance and Incapacity.” In private correspondence Tait was not so formal nor so coy in condemning Tyndall; in a note to Norman Lockyer, the editor of Nature and one of Tait’s supporters, Tait wrote a poem about Spencer’s First Principles (first published in 1862), in which he describes the two sides of the conflict: Your printers have made but one curious blunder Correct it instanter and then for the thunder! We’ll see in a jiffy if this Mr S[pencer] Has the ghost of a claim to be thought a good fencer. To my vision his merits have still seemed to dwindle, Since I found him allied with the great Dr T[yndall] While I have, for my part, grown cockier and cockier, Since I found an ally in yourself, Mr L[ockyer] And am always, in consequence, thoroughly willin’ To perform in the pages of Nature (M[acmillan]).29

With equal vindictiveness, Tyndall wrote to Hirst in 1876 regarding one of Tait’s attacks, “No other man than Tait would think of acting the part of the bluebottle fly, skim over the body of the lecture and alight upon this little sore.”30 The conflict between Tyndall and the northern scientists thus played itself out in a variety of media, from books to periodicals to personal letters, and it remained one of the most notorious scientific battles of the 1860s and 1870s. Yet the conflict also served to establish Tyndall as a formidable voice within the scientific community. Curiously, one of the most prominent names in the controversy, and one that helped to bring the debate into the public as well as the scientific limelight, was not scientific— it belonged to the critic John




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Ruskin. Ruskin took a violent and personal dislike to Tyndall and his stance on glaciers, partly because of his respect for Forbes. Tyndall, feeling that Ruskin had no place in the debate, responded with an equal antipathy. The two men disliked each other for decades, achieving at best an uneasy truce in later years, and their battle gave greater notoriety to the glacier debate and to Tyndall’s position as an up-andcoming researcher who dared to put himself at odds with famous scientists of the day.31 Tyndall’s most substantial and long-lasting research project was the investigation of the transmission and absorption of radiant heat in gases and vapors.32 He also studied the effect of atmospheric molecules on visible light and, when he replaced Faraday as an advisor on the lighthouses of Britain for Trinity House and the Board of Trade in 1866, the transmission of sound through various atmospheric conditions.33 All of these different projects— even those on crystallization and glaciers—were linked through their focus on molecular structure and behavior. Tyndall’s understanding of the molecular nature of gases and vapors allowed him to formulate his theory about the scattering of light of different wavelengths in gases and vapors, which is now known as the Tyndall Effect, and also the theory now known as the Greenhouse Effect.34 Tyndall’s seventeen years as an advisor on lighthouses for the Board of Trade resulted not only in his publications on the nature of sound but also in one of his most well-publicized skirmishes, this time over the question of whether to use oil or gas lamps in lighthouses. Tyndall supported a relatively unknown inventor named John Wigham, whose gas lamp emitted a beam of great power capable of piercing thick fog, but the managers of Trinity House continued in their policy of using oil lamps.35 Tyndall battled with them for years, writing hundreds of letters complaining of their obstinacy and outlining the benefits of Wigham’s method in newspapers and periodicals.36 Trinity House remained unmoved, and in 1883 Tyndall resigned, enraged by his failure. Roy MacLeod, in a detailed article on the debate, argues that Tyndall acted “not so much as the apologist of a particular technique, but rather as the advocate of a policy for fundamental research applied to broader, more far-reaching public needs.”37 Part of the motivation behind Tyndall’s impassioned pleading for more research and the adoption of gas lamps, in other words, was his determination to establish himself as a legitimate advisor to a government Board, a scientific consultant whose advice should be trusted as coming from an indisputable authority. In this attempt, as MacLeod says, Tyndall did not succeed, resembling “the tragic hero rather than the statesman




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of science.”38 Nevertheless, the debate, thanks to Tyndall’s frequent articles on the subject, became familiar to the public and garnered some attention and commentary, most memorably in graphic form in the lighthearted periodical Moonshine, in which Tyndall is depicted as a human lighthouse (figure 1.1).39 In some respects, therefore, Tyndall’s campaign for a change of policy based on research served as one step in his longer battle for scientific authority. In the latter half of his career Tyndall did a great deal of research on fermentation and the germ theory of contagious diseases, a project that contributed more than all of his other investigations to changes in public policy and national health.40 It is significant, however, that the famous surgeon Lord Lister, though he benefited from Tyndall’s researches, wrote to his brother, “It is almost a pity that Tyndall should have meddled with things beyond his beat.”41 The need for specialization, and the condemnation resulting from work in varied fields, was already raising its head. Nevertheless, for the most part Tyndall was commended for his bacteriological work and his efforts to disprove the theory of spontaneous generation. He corresponded extensively on the topic with Louis Pasteur, both men coming to the conclusion that life cannot spring into existence in a vacuum and that many diseases are spread through airborne organic molecules, dangerous especially because of the imperfect preservation of foods.42 The word “tyndallization” refers to a process of intermittent sterilization that Tyndall invented, still in use and distinct from pasteurization. For his contributions to bacteriology, Tyndall was awarded a medical degree from the University of Tübingen in Germany in 1877, something that seems at first unrelated to his PhD in physics; but the heart of Tyndall’s research into bacteria lay, once again, in the nature and transmission of molecules—in this case live molecules—through varying atmospheres. In addition to his MD from the University of Tübingen, Tyndall received honorary degrees for his contributions to the study of physics from Cambridge in 1865, Edinburgh in 1866, Oxford in 1873, and Trinity College, Dublin, in 1886. He was also elected to membership in nearly forty scientific societies in Europe and beyond. He was awarded the Rumford Medal from the Royal Society in 1864 for his work on the transmission and absorption of light and heat in vapors and gases, the findings of which he had not only published in the Philosophical Transactions but also presented to the Society in two Bakerian lectures in 1861 and 1864. These were neither the first nor the last of his Bakerian lectures: In 1855 he delivered his first lecture to the Royal Society about his work on diamagnetism. The




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Figure 1.1 “A Lighthouse—Not Professor Tyndall,” from Moonshine (December 20, 1884). Widener Library, Harvard College Library, P 277.14 (1884).


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It lasted nearly two hours, but even this time was too short to do justice to the subject. I by no means filled the measure of my own ideal, but Lord Wrottesley called the lecture an able one. Lord Ashburton, I am told, expressed himself greatly delighted with it. Grove did not see how the arguments brought forward could be overcome; so that on the whole it cannot be called a failure.43

One can see in this entry the delight of a first success by a journeyman scientist; by the time of his two subsequent Bakerian lectures in the 1860s and his final one in 1881, not long before his retirement from the Royal Institution, Tyndall took the acclaim and prestige in his stride, confident that his contributions to molecular science had earned him the respect of both the British and the continental scientific communities. Tyndall, as Faraday had done before him, often served as a scientific advisor to the government, not only for the Board of Trade on lighthouses but also regarding accidents in coal mines and boiler explosions in steam engines. For some time he sat on the London Board of Gas Referees, and in 1886 he was called in to give advice on improving the acoustics in the House of Commons.44 Throughout his career he was an active member of the Royal Society and contributed regularly to the Philosophical Transactions. He corresponded with dozens of scientists in Britain, Europe, and America. Thus Tyndall’s reputation as a man of science, even stripped of popular notoriety, remained formidable and respected, though often controversial, within the scientific community. While not a luminary on Faraday’s level nor destined for lasting fame as an original discoverer and theorist—he never matched Lyell’s theory of uniformitarianism, Darwin’s theory of natural selection, or J. J. Thomson’s later discovery of the electron—Tyndall contributed solid and carefully tested research to the era’s body of physical, geological, and biological knowledge, and his research into the conduction of heat and light in vapors and gases stands as a pioneer achievement.45


lecture was positively received by the Society, as Tyndall records in his journal:

Tyndall and the X Club: Social Influence from within the Scientific Community Soon after gaining his professorship at the Royal Institution in 1853, Tyndall began to strengthen his social and professional links with


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many prominent scientific figures of the day. His closest friends were Thomas Hirst and Thomas Huxley, but surrounding these three was a small circle of colleagues who, in the 1860s, cemented their friendship and scientific associations in the formation of a private dining club, which they dubbed the X Club. This club met once a month from 1864 to 1892, and— as its name implies—it was exclusive and secretive from the first, with only nine members, all of whom were eminent men of science: Tyndall himself; Huxley and Hirst; the chemist Edward Frankland, Tyndall’s friend from Queenwood; Herbert Spencer; the botanist Joseph Hooker; George Busk, a retired naval surgeon and zoologist; Sir John Lubbock, an ethnologist and entomologist as well as an MP; and William Spottiswoode, a mathematician and physicist. All nine, both individually and as a group, exerted a marked influence on British politics and society due to their public positions, which were in some cases not related to their scientific pursuits, and to their achievements as scientists. The club’s philosophy espoused the cultural leadership of science as opposed to organized religion, and its members advocated the increased cultural dependence on science in all areas from industry to education. They supported the view that science could explain all of the explainable aspects of the universe, thus eliminating the need for theology, and they were proponents of Darwinian theory—Tyndall, Huxley, and Spencer famously so. Though the X Club remained at heart a private dining club for nine gentlemen, its public reputation grew to an immense size, and its influence in scientific and political affairs grew apace. James R. Moore has called the X Club “the most powerful coterie in late-Victorian science,”46 and through that aura of power surrounding both the club and its members, Tyndall gained legitimacy as a respected intellectual acting as a public authority. Roy MacLeod wrote an article in 1970 highlighting the oddities of the X Club’s traditions.47 These foibles show that much of the mystique of the X Club was self-imposed; its members enjoyed the air of unknown power surrounding the club as much as the outsiders who gossiped about it. Herbert Spencer writes in his autobiography that the use of the name “X,” “beyond the advantage that it committed us to nothing, [ . . . ] had the further advantage that it made possible a brief, and, to a stranger, an enigmatical, notice to our meetings.”48 Invitations to their dinners were sent on cards reading only, for example, “X=5” to indicate the day of the month. Spencer gloatingly remarked, “Doubtless many speculations and many absurd conclusions were caused in the minds of servants who took in these post-cards.”49 On the rare occasions when the members’ spouses were invited on outings, the invitations were sent




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to “the X’s and Yv’s.”50 The members were so pleased with their X language that they gave each other X-ian nicknames: the Xcentric Tyndall, the Xalted Huxley, the Xhaustive Spencer.51 When, in the early 1890s, the surviving members considered replacing their deceased comrades, they decided only to elect men whose names contained all the consonants that their own lacked; eventually, however, they concluded that because none of them knew any Slavs, the plan could come to nothing. MacLeod comments, “The more one learns about the X Club, the less apocryphal this explanation seems.”52 It is difficult to keep in mind when reading about the X Club that these were not simply young men delighting in a secret society; and indeed when the club was first formed in 1864, it seems that the members had not planned for it to be more than a way to maintain their ties of friendship and similar interests when their careers became more demanding. Hirst wrote in his diary at the time of the founding, “Besides personal friendship, the bond that united us was devotion to science, pure and free, untrammelled by religious dogmas.”53 While this states a uniformity of opinion among the members, it does not lay out a plan of action for the club as a social or political force. Ruth Barton, however, has argued that the club’s members aimed from the first to become the cultural leaders of their time; she outlines in detail the relationships between the members before the club was officially formed, and she places great stock in Hirst’s comment in his diary, “There is no knowing into what this club, which counts amongst its members some of the best workers of the day, may grow, and therefore I record its foundation.”54 The most significant arenas for the X Club’s influence were the Royal Society, in which they dominated the high offices for the majority of the 1870s and 1880s, and the British Association, as well as several other established scientific societies. Spencer explains the club’s collective power in his Autobiography: It is not surprising that its influence was felt. Among its members were three who became Presidents of the Royal Society, and five who became Presidents of the British Association. Of the others one was for a time President of the College of Surgeons; another President of the Chemical Society; and a third of the Mathematical Society. To enumerate all their titles, and honours, and the offices they filled, would occupy too much space. Of the nine, I was the only one who was fellow of no society, and had presided over nothing.55



Barton emphasizes their efforts to free the Presidency of the Royal Society from the tradition of electing members of the nobility, aiming instead to establish science, represented by the Society, as


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an independent social and political force able to operate without the backing of the aristocracy. In this they seem to have been successful: Hooker wrote to Huxley in 1886, “I found P.R.S. to be a great power with the ministers.”56 There can be no doubt that by the 1870s and 1880s all of the X Club’s members had become influential both in the world of science and, especially through their connections in the Royal Society, in politics. Not only were all but Spencer members— some of them officers— of the Society, they were also prolific writers, contributing hundreds of articles to a variety of scientific journals and supporting each other’s work in the many debates that they entered. Huxley was certainly downplaying the club’s importance when he wrote decades after its foundation: The club has never had any purpose except the purely personal object of bringing together a few friends who did not want to drift apart. It has happened that these cronies had developed into big-wigs of various kinds, and therefore the club has incidentally—I might say accidentally— had a good deal of influence in the scientific world.57

Significantly, it was also Huxley who wrote in 1894: I believe that the “x” had the credit of being a sort of scientific caucus, or ring, with some people. In fact, two distinguished scientific colleagues of mine once carried on a conversation (which I gravely ignored) across me, in the smoking room of the Athenaeum, to this effect: “I say, A, do you know anything about the x Club?” “Oh yes, B, I have heard of it. What do they do?” “Well, they govern scientific affairs; and really, on the whole, they don’t do it badly.”58

Huxley’s sense of humor is evident here, but he is also revealing his satisfaction in the X Club’s secrecy and in its grandiose reputation, its status as the éminence grise behind the rising power of science in Britain. Though he and the other members maintained that the primary purpose of the Club was social, they did not object to the reputation it had gained by the 1880s as a cabal of scientific leaders. The habit of holding the X Club in great esteem, almost awe, became common. Spencer commented, “In course of time the existence of the Club became known in the scientific world, and it was, we heard, spoken of with bated breath—was, I believe, supposed to exercise more power than it did.”59 None of the members, it seems, countered this supposition. John Fiske, an American historian of the time, wrote home to his wife during the period of the X Club’s


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greatest prominence, “I am only two months in London, and am already hand in glove with the best part of the Royal Society. This ‘X Club’ that I dined with last Thursday, is the most powerful and influential scientific coterie in England. [ . . . ] They have dictated the affairs of the British Association for three years past.”60 Apparently none of the club’s members explained to Fiske their true relation to the British Association, perhaps preferring his admiration. Their custom of inviting distinguished guests to their meetings— among them Asa Gray, Hermann von Helmholtz, and Charles Darwin—increased the prestige of the club and can be viewed at least partly as a tactic for advancing the Club’s social status. The X Club was considered to be a group set apart from the rest of society, even from other public figures. Tyndall, Huxley, and the other members were aware that they held enough collective power to affect the status of science in Britain, and they were engaged not only in acting out their roles as eminent scientists but in deliberately shaping what those roles would be; in this way as a group they played a significant part in determining the nature of the late-Victorian scientist, and they also contributed to— and benefited from—the reputation of the scientist as a powerful man able to exert influence in even the highest circles. For Tyndall, the X Club provided not only the emotional support of a group of loyal friends but also the external signature of scientific and social status, necessary if he was to be recognized as a cultural commentator. Tyndall’s Lectures at the Royal Institution: Public Presentation of a Scientist While the X Club signified Tyndall’s arrival into the elite of the scientific community and, to some extent, into the realm of political influence, among the general public Tyndall was best known through his position at the Royal Institution, as a man who brought science to a wider audience and insisted that the populace be not only informed of scientific discoveries but taught the methods and hypotheses behind them. In 1859 Thomas Hirst recorded in his journal a remark that Huxley had made about Tyndall’s contradictory character traits: “From Tyndall’s lectures, one would not expect the man to be so governed by rigorous accuracy of thought as he is. The element of pleasing popularity he introduces would certainly mislead many as to his natural cast of severe thought.”61 That habit of severe thought, which stood him in good stead when conducting experiments in the privacy of his laboratory, disappeared in his dazzling public lectures




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at the Royal Institution. The image of the scientist that he presented to the members of the Institution was not that of a sober recluse but instead that of a vibrant, relevant public authority, well-connected in the upper circles of the social and political elite and able to influence society through his superior knowledge of the natural world. Tyndall’s initial contract with the Royal Institution required that he give at least two Friday Evening Discourses per year and nineteen afternoon lectures in a season. At his request, the latter number was lowered to twelve in 1858 to allow more time for his own research.62 Of the fifty-five Friday Evening Discourses that Tyndall delivered over the course of his career, twelve were on radiant heat; other topics included slates, glacier ice, the color and chemical constitution of bodies, sound and sensitive flames, and the nature of force. One of his most popular Discourses was delivered in 1879 on the electric light, which received such acclaim that he repeated the lecture on the following Monday for a combined audience of 1,762 people, his personal record. Tyndall’s Discourses frequently drew audiences over a thousand strong, numbers matched only by Huxley. His demonstrations included the creation of an artificial sky within the lecture theater, the lighting of a cigar from an invisible infrared beam, and the transmission of musical notes from one room to another via the vibrations of wooden rods.63 He was the first scientific lecturer to hand out notes at the beginning of the lecture to aid his audience, and he would refer to these notes throughout the lecture in his attempt to guide the audience to a thorough understanding of the phenomena in question.64 Tyndall’s afternoon series, which consisted of six, eight, and sometimes twelve lectures in a season, focused in more depth on the experiments he was conducting for his own research. Because these lectures were presented to subscribers who signed up for individual series, Tyndall could freely explore whatever topic he found most interesting and most likely to interest a popular audience. Thus he delivered several afternoon series on radiant heat, light, sound, and electricity. Most of these series were later published as books, which garnered much of Tyndall’s fame abroad. One of his most popular books, The Forms of Water in Clouds and Rivers, Ice and Glaciers— published simultaneously in Britain, France, and Germany in 1872 as the first entry in the International Scientific Series and running to over ten editions by 1900—had its origin in a lecture series that Tyndall gave every year for children at Christmas-time, a tradition begun by Faraday and continued to the present day. Tyndall’s popularity as a public lecturer became a byword in London’s high society. In a lighthearted account of Scientific London,




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published in 1874, the writer Bernard Henry Becker describes the Royal Institution’s lectures (figure 1.2) as “a wonderful combination of science and society, of physics and fashion.”65 Though he pokes mild fun at well-dressed women pretending to like the experiments themselves rather than the glittering social scene, Becker has nothing but praise for Tyndall himself: On another raw afternoon, about three p.m., I betake myself to Albemarle Street, and become the spectator of a widely different scene. The theatre is already full of eager visitors and thirsters after science, when elucidated by those brilliant experiments which excite the admiration and envy of Professor Tyndall’s imitators—I had almost written rivals, forgetting that in this country, and in his own particular line of physical demonstration, Dr. John Tyndall, F.R.S., philosopher and cragsman, has no rival.66

As Becker is describing an afternoon rather than an evening lecture, the topic of Tyndall’s talk would have been purely scientific, the afternoon lectures being reserved for more serious students— though Becker is careful to note the presence of many women, “in all the variety of gorgeous array at present in fashion, for however severe may be the mental attributes of these fair students of physical science, no sternness is ever visible in their outward appearance.”67 His description of Tyndall and his lecture focuses on the success with which Tyndall carries out each experiment: The lecture, interesting in itself, is rendered doubly so by numerous and beautiful experiments, which succeed with infallible certainty. Perhaps the listeners to Professor Tyndall are accustomed to see his experiments “come off” in this way, but the traveller in search of science often sees experiments— chemical, physical, and others—break down with provoking perversity. No approach to anything like failure occurs to-day, and the applause is great on the light-carrying power of water being demonstrated by an experiment of singular beauty.68

Becker’s account of Tyndall and his lectures at the Royal Institution are wholly positive and also wholly performance-oriented. Though he mentions in passing the topic of the lectures, what fascinates him is the dexterity shown in Tyndall’s demonstrations, the beauty of his experiments, and the fluidity of his words, which captivated not only the interest of scientific amateurs but also the butterfly attention of London’s socialites. In closing, Becker writes, “Fashion takes its departure, and, having laid in science enough to last for a week,




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Figure 1.2 “Professor Tyndall Lecturing at the Royal Institution,” from The Illustrated London News (May 1870). Widener Library, Harvard College Library, P 229.10F (vol. 66, 1870).

leaves the professor to enjoy himself in his admirably-appointed laboratory.”69 Dozens of other commentators also gave evidence of Tyndall’s popularity amongst the elite of London. An article in 1893 in The Saturday Review declared that over the course of his career Tyndall and the Royal Institution had become linked together in the public eye: “To many the name and personality of Dr. Tyndall and the Institution in Albemarle Street which he directed so long, and which was so long his home, were almost inextricably blended, and neither seemed to be quite complete without the other.”70 William T. Jeans, in his 1887 Lives of the Electricians, described Tyndall’s celebrity status as a lecturer at the Institution: “It is not an unusual occurrence for the theatre to be full of people nearly an hour before the lecture begins, and whether addressing an audience of young or old people, he rivets attention by his easy, lucid, and fascinating exposition and illustrations of the science of electricity, heat, light, and sound.”71 In Tyndall’s obituary in The Athenaeum in 1893, the author describes Tyndall as




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His lectures were not merely marked by logical reasoning expressed in forcible language, but they were models of method: nothing was left to chance; everything, down to the minutest detail, was prepared with nicety; and the experiments were consequently performed with a precision unequalled by the manipulation of an accomplished conjurer.72

These and other descriptions of Tyndall’s lectures within the Institution, written both during his career and afterward, speak to the near-universal approval of those lectures and also to the great attention paid to Tyndall’s lecturing style rather than to his lectures’ content. In emphasizing the spectacular and theatrical elements of Tyndall’s lectures, commentators like Becker and the author of the Athenaeum obituary were following a well-established tradition of viewing science as a spectacle. Iwan Rhys Morus, in his book Frankenstein’s Children (1998), argues persuasively for the prominence of this brand of scientific culture in London, especially with regard to electricity.73 Visitors to the Adelaide Gallery or the Royal Polytechnic Institution would have encountered the presentation of scientific phenomena as matter for wonderment and admiration, something beautiful and awe-inspiring but often inexplicable. The generation of the effects in question, often from enormous batteries—the bigger the better, in terms of drawing an audience— played a large part in the show. As Morus writes of the perennial favorite, electricity, “Spectacle was an integral feature of its production as well as of its display.”74 The overall emphasis was on the impressive power of both the manmade machines and the natural phenomena they demonstrated. Given the prevalence of the attitude of wonder, it is important to recognize that Tyndall, in contrast, was not offering science solely as spectacle, nor was he fashioning himself as a scientific illusionist or showman. Rather, Tyndall emphasized the explicability of the experiments, providing facts and laws as reasons for the phenomena in question. His aim, in other words, was to inculcate knowledge and understanding rather than simply awe and titillation. That said, Tyndall recognized the importance of performance in scientific lectures, and he believed in approaching natural phenomena with reverence. By giving the reasons behind the displays, he was not repudiating the more theatrical aspects of popular science but rather making it subsidiary to the importance of scientific facts and methods. Undoubtedly familiar with the exhibits of the Adelaide Gallery and


a magician in the lecture theater—his magic relying, significantly, on the pains he took to perfect his demonstrations beforehand:


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the Royal Polytechnic Institution as well as the popularity of electrical displays, Tyndall, in designing flamboyant and surprising experiments to supplement his lectures, used the popular discourse of scientific wonderment to further his own aim of providing scientific knowledge, relying on his reputation as a scientific researcher to add the necessary intellectual weight. The descriptions offered by commentators like Becker, Jeans, and others indicate the extent to which he succeeded in melding dramatic performance with useful instruction. Because Tyndall’s central interest in his lectures within the Royal Institution was the education of his audience in scientific matters and the introduction of science as an accessible method of interpreting nature, he rarely included in these lectures any critique of social policy or theological influence. He himself addressed this point, in reference to evolution, in his essay on “Professor Virchow and Evolution” in 1879: Besides the duties of the chair, which I have been privileged to occupy in London [at the Royal Institution] for more than a quarter of a century, and which never involved a word on my part, pro or con., in reference to the theory of evolution, I have had the honour of addressing audiences in Liverpool, Belfast, and Birmingham; and in these addresses the theory of evolution, and the connected doctrine of spontaneous generation, have been more or less touched upon.75

This statement demonstrates a deliberate effort on Tyndall’s part to separate his lectures at the Institution from his involvement with scientific controversy. The policy arose partly from the rules of the Institution itself, which forbade lecturers to raise controversial issues not directly related to the matter at hand. In 1877 Tyndall wrote a letter to William Spottiswoode discussing a complaint from the Duke of Northumberland about Tyndall’s incendiary statements: The clearly understood law of the Royal Institution is that neither religion nor politics shall be introduced into our lectures. I have been most scrupulous in my conformity to this law. Never in a single instance have I infringed it during the twenty four years of my connexion with the Institution. But while within these walls I am as obedient to the laws of the Institution, as any son of the Church is to the Vatican, outside of them I claim intellectual freedom. Even as an outsider, however, my desire has been to act the part of a conservative rather than that of a Destructive, by gradually preparing the public mind for inevitable changes which without this preparation might take revolutionary forms.76


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Tyndall’s restraint in the theater of the Royal Institution was thus, to a certain extent, simply the result of his obedience to the rules of the


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Institution. But his restraint is also indicative of his ability to tailor his performance to his audience. One can see the results of this decision both in his Friday Evening Discourses and in the purely researchbased focus of his afternoon series of lectures. His published lectures on heat and sound were first delivered as afternoon series, and both of these greatly added to his fame as a researcher and educator. Becker, indeed, writes, “At the present day the Royal Institution maintains its renown—thanks to Professor Tyndall, who, by his work on ‘Heat Considered as a Mode of Motion’, has proved himself no unworthy successor of Davy and Faraday.”77 Tyndall thus confined his lecturing at the Royal Institution to topics closely related to his own research. In accordance with his belief that scientists could offer the most useful education to British society, he provided himself as an example of a scientific teacher and researcher, one unparalleled in reputation and ability. And while he sometimes alluded to more controversial issues within his lectures at the Institution, he never focused on them, instead presenting to his audiences the image of a scientist with no strings attached. The people attending his lectures at the Institution—from young students to women of fashion to aristocrats—were far different from the formidable ranks of scientists who heard his speeches at the meetings of the British Association, though many of these also frequented the Institution. Tyndall, aiming to establish himself as an influential social commentator on the strength of his scientific standing, concentrated on the foundation of that standing—namely the nature and progress of his research—rather than on his part in social controversy, when he faced his popular audiences at the Royal Institution. It is difficult to gauge to what extent Tyndall’s own goals for his lectures at the Institution were achieved. As a supporter of science as an influential force in society, he succeeded brilliantly; as a physicist conveying his scientific research, one might argue that he was overshadowed by his own performative skill. Nevertheless, given that the Institution’s lectures were aimed at an unscientific audience, Tyndall could not have expected a full appreciation of his merits as a researcher; his role as a scientific popularizer took center stage in his design for the lectures, as well as in their ultimate success. He thus used his scientific expertise as a jumping-off point for his larger aim of establishing science and its practitioners as influential public figures. Even if his audiences at the Institution did not remember the details of his experiments, they remembered vividly his air of authority when he discussed the workings of nature and society— and that, ultimately, was Tyndall’s most lasting success.




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The widespread approval of Tyndall’s lectures within the Royal Institution makes the corresponding criticism of Tyndall’s lectures outside the Institution more noticeable—for on the grander scale of the nation and, indeed, the Western world, Tyndall was known not simply for the lucidity of his lectures but for the incendiary implications of their content. In the arena of scientific and social controversy, Tyndall’s talent for public speaking and the communication of complex ideas was usually, if sometimes reluctantly, conceded, but often as a conciliatory preface to a critique or outright attack. As early as 1865, Tyndall wrote in a letter to Huxley, “To think of myself standing in the open market-place of science, and having dirt thrown upon me is almost intolerable; and still I see that almost every man who has raised himself above the general level has had to endure more or less of this.”78 One such mud-slinger was Henry Wace, distinguished clergyman and eventual Dean of Canterbury, who wrote an article in the Quarterly Review in 1878 entitled “Scientific Lectures—their Use and Abuse.”79 Wace was primarily writing in response to an address Tyndall had given in 1877 to the Birmingham and Midland Institute, a center founded in 1854 for the advancement among all classes of science, literature, and art. Tyndall’s address, entitled “Science and Man,” outlined his theories that life and consciousness could be explained— as far as humans would ever be able to explain them— without reference to Christianity. The main purpose of Wace’s article was to launch an attack on what he saw as a blasphemous address; but he first describes Tyndall as follows: Professor Tyndall has justly attained an honourable place among those who combine the two offices just mentioned [lecturer and discoverer]; and though not greatly distinguished for original researches in the fields of Natural Science, he possesses a conspicuous capacity for expounding the results of scientific discoveries to popular audiences. In experiment, in illustration, in lucid exposition, he is among Lecturers of the present day unsurpassed, if not unrivalled; he has thus won, in an unusual degree, the ear of the public. He is not only a welcome Lecturer, alike to adults and to children, at the Royal Institution, but he is sure of a large and attentive audience in any town in the kingdom. There are few men, in fact, who have done more to render scientific truth familiar to the public at large; and the obligations under which he has thus placed his countrymen will always be gratefully acknowledged.80


Tyndall’s Lectures Outside the Royal Institution: A Platform for Controversy


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Having paid this homage to Tyndall’s reputation as a lecturer, Wace proceeds to condemn Tyndall for overstepping his bounds as a scientist, abusing his position as public lecturer, and leading his audience down the road of moral degradation: “[F]or this reason it is the less possible to avoid raising a protest when he misuses his position, and thus sets an example which might become a dangerous and mischievous precedent.”81 Wace’s introductory paragraph indicates the strength of Tyndall’s reputation as a lecturer, both at the Royal Institution and outside it, but it also contains a sting, in that it accuses Tyndall of being “not greatly distinguished for original researches in the fields of Natural Science.” According to Wace, Tyndall’s reputation relied on his capacities as lecturer and teacher, and thus he had no right to put forward hypothetical ideas; on the contrary, he had every obligation to paint science in clear but uncontroversial colors. In Wace’s view, Tyndall was a communicator of scientific ideas rather than a discoverer of them, and the magnitude of his reputation as a communicator made his transgression of that role all the more heinous. His influence was far-reaching enough to affect large audiences and—worse—to inspire imitators among other scientific lecturers. The strength of Wace’s objections indicates, by reverse implication, that Tyndall was achieving success in his effort to become an influential public commentator; but it also demonstrates the deterioration of Tyndall’s reputation as an original researcher.82 Some of Tyndall’s greatest lecturing successes took place not in Britain but in America, when in 1872–73 he traveled along the eastern seaboard to deliver a series of lectures on light in Boston, New Haven, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington. Tyndall’s American audiences welcomed him with almost overwhelming enthusiasm. They were thrilled by his lecturing style and reprinted his lectures in countless newspapers and periodicals. Not surprisingly, some of his notoriety in the theological realm had preceded him, and he wrote to Hirst from Boston, “I am also told that prayer meetings are held with a view to my salvation.”83 But the majority of American responses to his lectures were positive. As usual, Tyndall’s skill as a performer found as much admiration as the content of his lectures; in a letter to Hirst Tyndall reported:



A gentleman came to me last night and said, “I am a teacher of science, and you are entirely altering the character of experimental teaching in these cities.” “How so?” I said. “Why because in our lectures hitherto the experiments have been the principal object of the lecturer’s care,


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and he has neglected the exposition— that is now changing fast.” I am perfectly astonished at the interest the people take in my work and me. The New York Tribune has sown a report of the lectures broadcast over the country. I am told the circulation has been enormous. Taking the circulation of the paper itself into account I am assured that hundreds of thousands of copies have been purchased in the East alone. The West are now beginning to send in their orders; and there is no calculating how many will be thus sent abroad.84

Tyndall was naturally pleased by this effusive delight in his appearances; yet, as was typical of his lecturing style when outside the Royal Institution, he refused to cater to convention, and he openly expressed his critical view of the practical, application-centered trend in American science, which he felt lacked a necessary commitment to pure research. In a letter to Hirst he described one of his lectures in Philadelphia: Last night I spoke to the audience in a manner which I am sure no Englishman had previously employed, and they listened to me without a murmur. I repeated to them de Tocqueville’s account of their poverty as regards genius in the higher sciences: I repeated his explanation of this that had they been alone in the world they would have found that practical science could not long be cultivated with success without abstract science but that they drew their intellectual treasury from England. I took to pieces the claims of their practical men, and opened out to them the region of antecedent discoveries to which the practical men were not contributors, but from which they drew their supplies. In fact I was as plain with them as I could be.85

Supportive though the Americans might be, Tyndall would not compromise his view of science for anybody. As long as he was outside of the Royal Institution, he treated his lectures as an opportunity to argue for a science that favored abstract research over practical applications and thus conferred on its practitioners the authority of unbiased expertise; and he insisted on the superiority of British scientists because, in Tyndall’s view, they were more committed than American scientists to research for its own sake.86 Outside the Royal Institution, then, Tyndall presented a different aspect of his scientific persona to the audiences of his lectures— he showed himself to be a more pugnacious representative of science, who supplemented his physical demonstrations of natural phenomena with rhetorical demonstrations of the scientist’s right to discuss matters beyond pure research. In one sense, Tyndall used his career


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as a microcosm for the type of science he was promoting: within his laboratory, the Royal Institution, he presented himself as wrapped up in his own research, unaffected by external conflicts and devoted to conveying the truth of science to his audiences—who, significantly, provided the funding for that laboratory. Outside the Institution, however, on the edges of the scientific sphere, he presented himself as a scientist prepared to fight for the expansion of science’s cultural boundaries. If truth be told, though Tyndall was campaigning so that researchers could work freely, his fondness for argument led him to enjoy those border-skirmishes as much as he enjoyed his researches at the Royal Institution, and one can see this inclination for controversy creeping into much of his published work. Tyndall’s Published Writing: Reaching the Wider Public As popular— and notorious— as Tyndall became through his lectures at the Royal Institution and beyond, his fame on both the national and international levels owed most to his published writing. Tyndall’s scientific papers, for the most part published initially in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions, were frequently compiled in book form. Thus his published works include Researches on Diamagnetism and Magne-Crystallic Action (1870), Contributions to Molecular Physics in the Domain of Radiant Heat (1872), and Essays on the Floating-Matter of the Air in Relation to Putrefaction and Infection (1881). Of his books, the first one he wrote, The Glaciers of the Alps (1860), achieved the greatest popularity in its own day and continued to be published long after Tyndall’s death, fulfilling his prediction that if he could “connect the glorious objects one encounters on the Alps with their principles,” the work “would have a wide circulation.”87 Despite the book’s success, however, Tyndall found writing it exceedingly difficult; he complained to Hirst, “My book is getting on but it is horrible work and I hate it. I think I shall never undertake to write a book again.”88 In line with this vow, the majority of Tyndall’s later works, for which he gained widespread public attention in Britain and international fame among scientists and laypeople alike, were the ever-expanding collections of his lectures and essays. It is perhaps for this reason that the aspect of those collections most focused on and praised by reviewers was not their scientific content but rather the lucidity and eloquence of their presentation. Tyndall’s collections for the general public include Fragments of Science for Unscientific People, a smorgasbord of essays, lectures, and reviews first compiled and published in 1871, and the smaller treatises




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Heat as a Mode of Motion (1863), Sound (1867), Forms of Water (1872), and Six Lectures on Light (1873), all of which were compilations of lecture series given either at the Royal Institution or, in the case of Six Lectures on Light, during Tyndall’s tour of the United States. These volumes cemented Tyndall’s reputation all the way from America through Europe to Russia and parts of Asia, quickly running to multiple editions and familiarizing his name to many people who would not have had the resources or the social standing—not to mention the convenience of location—to attend his lectures.89 The innovation of these collections lay in their brevity, their rigor, and their readability. Adhering to his self-imposed rule never to simplify science when teaching it to unscientific people, Tyndall instead rendered concepts comprehensible through clear prose and vivid examples. As he explained in one of the lectures from his American tour in 1872–73: Some twelve years ago I published, in England, a little book entitled the “Glaciers of the Alps,” and, a couple of years subsequently, a second book, entitled “Heat as a Mode of Motion.” These volumes were followed by others, written with equal plainness, and with a similar aim, that aim being to develope and deepen sympathy between science and the world outside of science. I agreed with thoughtful men who deemed it good for neither world to be isolated from the other, or unsympathetic towards the other, and, to lessen their isolation, at least in one department of science, I swerved aside from those original researches which had previously been the pursuit and pleasure of my life.90

By the time at which Tyndall delivered this lecture, the great popularity of his books in both America and Europe spoke to his success in the venture. Tyndall of course was not the only scientist to bring his research into the public eye. The mid-nineteenth century saw innumerable scientific articles in popular newspapers and periodicals, many of which were written by prominent scientific figures. Huxley in particular followed the same plan of presenting science in simple but accurate lectures and essays, so as to enable the public to understand without being overwhelmed by the complexity of scientific research. In a letter to Tyndall in 1858, Huxley wrote:


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At the meeting of Reek’s where you were not, there was some talk of working up the public in science through the Saturday Review. [ . . . ] It is suggested that Sylvester, Maskelyne, you, Frankland, myself,


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The plan was one of many to keep the developments of science within the public eye, and the self-awareness, though flippant, with which Huxley refers to the group of scientists as “a corps (d’elite!)” indicates the extent to which their efforts were planned as a strategic campaign for scientific influence in society. Tyndall wrote in his reply to Huxley’s letter, “I think it may become a very important agency and exercise a salutary influence in this quackridden country.” 92 Tyndall’s written work arguably met the best success in this attempt to interest and enlighten the general public. Hermann von Helmholtz himself wrote the Preface to the German edition of Fragments of Science, and he emphasizes the importance of Tyndall’s achievement in view of the rarity of scientific writing intelligible to the general populace: So much the more gratifying is it, I consider, in such a state of things, when, among those who have shown the highest ability for original scientific work, there is found, at times, a man like Tyndall, full of enthusiasm for the problem of making the newly-acquired insights and outlooks of his science available for the wider circle of the people, and, at the same time, endowed with other qualities which are the necessary conditions of success towards this end, eloquence and the gift of lucid exposition.93

Such gifts, Helmholtz writes, are even more valuable considering that Tyndall’s first loyalty— and, in Helmholtz’s opinion, his foremost contribution to science—was his scientific research: “But it would be quite an erroneous conception to think of him merely as the able, popular lecturer; for the greater part of his activity has always been given to scientific investigation, and we owe to him a series of (in part) highly original and remarkable researches and discoveries in physics and physical chemistry.”94 Herbert Spencer, in his article on Tyndall after the latter’s death in 1893, did not feel it necessary to expand on these achievements because they were so well-known through Tyndall’s writing: “I need not dwell on the more conspicuous of Professor Tyndall’s intellectual traits, for these are familiar to multitudes of readers. His copiousness of illustration, his closeness of reasoning, and his lucidity of statement, have been sufficiently emphasised by others.”95 In Tyndall’s obituary in the Athenaeum, the author cites Tyndall’s treatise


Hooker, Ramsay, and Smith, should form a corps (d’elite!) each member of which should pledge himself to supply at least one article in three months. The subject to be at the pleasure of the individual in his own branch of science.91


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on heat as the foremost example of his talent for clarity: “His bestknown book, ‘Heat considered as a Mode of Motion’—in which he presented, thirty years ago, an admirable exposition of the phenomena of heat in accordance with the dynamical theory—may be accepted as typical of his felicity of expression and readiness of illustration.”96 Even from these wholehearted supporters of Tyndall, however, one finds stray phrases and emphases that lead away from the importance of Tyndall’s contributions to science and focus instead on his success as a popularizer. Helmholtz refers to Tyndall’s “(in part) highly original and remarkable researches and discoveries”— a damning parenthetical insertion. Spencer discusses the skill of Tyndall’s presentation of his research, rather than the research itself; the Athenaeum argues that Heat as a Mode of Motion is representative of Tyndall’s work not for the importance of the theories it discusses but rather for its “felicity of expression” and “readiness of illustration.” The increasing frequency of these phrases, emphasizing the readability of Tyndall’s writing rather than its originality and scientific importance, indicates a trend among Tyndall’s colleagues in the later decades of his career to view him as a popular writer rather than a serious contributor to scientific discovery. William T. Jeans, in his 1887 Lives of the Electricians, argues that in the scientific community Tyndall “does not rank as one of those creative minds that mark an epoch in the history of physical philosophy,” 97 but that he brought science to life for the general public: There are men who have made greater and more useful discoveries in science, but few have made more interesting discoveries. There are men whose achievements have been more highly esteemed by the devotees of pure science, but rarely has a scientific man been more popular outside the scientific world. There are men whose culture has been broader and deeper, but who have nevertheless lacked his facility of exposition and gracefulness of diction. The goddess of Science, which ofttimes was presented to the public with the repulsive severity of a skeleton, he has clothed with flesh and blood, making her countenance appear radiant with the glow of poesy, and susceptible even to a touch of human sympathy.98


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While Jeans admires Tyndall’s talent for making science interesting, critics increasingly implied that his popularity necessarily diminished his credibility as a discoverer. A review of Forms of Water, published in Nature in 1873, cites this popularity as the partial basis of its lukewarm judgment: “Dr. Tyndall did not intend, we suppose, that his


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book should be regarded in any other light than as a popular exposition of his subject, and would probably disclaim any place for it as a contribution of new facts and reasonings to our knowledge of glaciers. His narratives of last year’s climbings and observations read very much like those of older ones with which he has already made us familiar.” 99 In spite of the explanation that the author himself provides as to the purpose of the book, namely to be a popular exposition, the negativity of the review indicates a disdain for such publications and suggests, in emphasizing a lack of innovation, Tyndall’s mediocrity as a researcher. Among the most backhandedly undercutting of the reviews of Tyndall’s books in Nature is a three-column review of Heat as a Mode of Motion, written in 1872 by W. F. Barrett, Tyndall’s one-time assistant and eventual professor of physics in Dublin. Barrett takes up all but the last paragraph in discussing not Tyndall but the history of heat-related research. The final paragraph reads as follows: “Briefly speaking, this was the state of our knowledge in this branch of Physics when Dr. Tyndall approached the subject in 1859. After having wrought for twelve years, Professor Tyndall has now gathered into the volume before us the important results his unremitting labour has won. A summary of these results must be left to another article.”100 In spite of the adjective “important,” there is something unavoidably insulting in a review that refuses to discuss the book it claims to be reviewing. Barrett’s tone may well stem from the fact that Tyndall had dismissed Barrett as his assistant six years earlier, after Barrett accused him, without adequate basis, of taking credit for Barrett’s work and ideas— but the end result for a reader unaware of this behind-the-scenes conflict would have been the impression that Tyndall’s book was not worth considering in any depth.101 The review that went furthest in the trend of double-edged compliments concerning Tyndall’s research was written about Tyndall’s 1892 collection New Fragments and published in The Academy, a periodical founded in imitation of French and German intellectual revues: Several years ago an eminent living philosopher happened to speak in conversation of a certain opinion as being held by “our most advanced thinkers,” and on being asked who these might be, promptly answered, “Huxley and Tyndall.” Since that time the two distinguished professors named have been overtaken by a great number of their countrymen, but they still stand in the front rank of thought. It may be said that neither of them has originated a new idea; but what idea at once new and true has been put forward during the third of a century over which their public activity has spread? Their office has been to win




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There can be no doubt that the author of this review believed both Tyndall and Huxley to have performed a valuable service for science— but that service did not involve discovery or even research; rather, according to the reviewer, they acted as supporters, popularizers, and communicators of scientific knowledge that other researchers had acquired. Because Tyndall compiled the treatises on heat, sound, and water from lectures he had originally given at the Royal Institution, their explicit purpose was similar to those original lectures, namely to elucidate scientific theories and discoveries to a nonscientific audience. His Fragments of Science had largely the same aim, though that collection included many of his more notorious lectures delivered outside the Institution. In publishing these works, Tyndall, far from slipping accidentally into the role of science’s supporter, eagerly took up the mantle of scientific popularization. His treatises for the public were meant not to be indicative of his own strengths as a researcher but rather to act as engaging introductions to science’s potential as a tool for understanding the natural world. Their popularity, therefore, in spite of the backlash it inspired regarding his credibility as a researcher, must be viewed as a success for Tyndall in his role as a campaigner for scientific influence in society. Yet even from the perspective of the popularization of scientific ideas, Tyndall’s writings for the public garnered criticism as well as praise, sometimes from within the scientific community. In a review of Tyndall’s Heat as a Mode of Motion in the Edinburgh Review in 1864, the chemist H. E. Roscoe claims that his review will “enable us to judge of the success of [Tyndall’s] attempt ‘to bring the rudiments of a new philosophy within the reach of a person of ordinary intelligence and culture.’ ”103 After an examination of the lectures’ content, Roscoe concludes with a mixture of compliments and censure:


ever wider acceptance for ideas which before them had been held, and held silently, by a few, as well as to protest against the fancied progress which was really the resuscitation of a retrograde philosophy, or the product of short-sighted sentimentalism and blind popular passion.102

Grand as are the truths which this peroration is intended to set forth, we cannot read them without regret that these somewhat inflated expressions should have been put forward as a complete statement of the facts of the case. [ . . . ] On hearing words such as those we have quoted, the half-educated scientific enthusiast would be inclined, and so far as these words go entitled, to believe that this influence of


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the sun’s rays explains all terrestrial actions— all life, all nature; that henceforward a complete knowledge of nature would be gained from this transcendent element; that, as the solar ray “forms the muscle and builds the brain,” the secrets of life are exhausted, and mental as well as physical action is easily referable to a material standard. Yet how far is this from really being the true state of things! and how completely would such a thinker be misled!104

Roscoe explains Tyndall’s misleading of his audience as indicative of the difficulty of teaching science. Men of science, Roscoe implies, betray the duties of the public lecturer when they assume that their theories are a match for man’s ignorance of Nature’s mysteries: One of the difficulties with which popular scientific lecturers have to contend is that of presenting a subject in such a form as to come home to the audience in its true relations not liable to be misunderstood, and of painting one side of the picture forcibly without losing the harmony of the whole. [ . . . ] If [Tyndall] had only hinted at our complete ignorance of the nature of the silent power which bids the oak spring from the acorn, or builds up from the simplest cell the widely differing forms of animal life, he would have done much to present to his hearers’ minds the truer view of Nature’s infinitude and man’s littleness expressed by Newton in his noble words: “To myself I seem to have been as a child playing on the sea-shore, whilst the great ocean of truth lay unexplored before me.”105

Roscoe’s criticism does not take into account Tyndall’s continual insistence on the inability of science to explain fully the workings of nature, and many other reviewers similarly ignored Tyndall’s existential disclaimers in commenting on the apparent egotism of his writing. A later review of Tyndall’s Lectures on Sound, by the Canadian mathematician William Brydone Jack (1817–1886), second president of the University of New Brunswick and founder of Canada’s first astronomical observatory, was published in the Edinburgh Review in 1868. Jack praises Tyndall for the improvement in his writing style since Heat as a Mode of Motion: describing Heat as “brilliant” but over-inflated, Jack goes on to say that Tyndall’s lectures on sound are less indulgently grandiloquent and thus more admirable:



His new book has all the merits of its predecessor, and fewer defects. There is no reason why a scientific lecturer should deny his enthusiasm the ordinary vent of eloquence, but he ought never to forget that the pretensions of science are so lofty that she cannot condescend to


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Like Roscoe, Jack refers to the scientific lecturer as a figure with recognized duties, one of which is be clear and straightforward— a requirement Tyndall easily fulfils—but another of which is not to assume too broad a range for scientific authority. Jack cautions Tyndall about his habit of neglecting this requirement in his scientific lecturing, for Tyndall, in waxing enthusiastic about the power and the glory of scientific discovery, pushes the scientific boundaries to their limit. He might be, Jack claims earlier, a “pioneer as well as an expositor of science,”107 but even pioneers, according to Jack, must play by the rules and confine their discussions to the facts of their scientific research. P. G. Tait, Tyndall’s longtime enemy, summarized the negative interpretation of Tyndall’s popular writings at the end of a vitriolic letter published in Nature in September of 1873. As usual, Tait’s grievance with Tyndall concerned the controversy over Forbes and the theory of glacial movement, but Tait attacks Tyndall with a ferocity that spills into a more general critique of Tyndall’s career: I have all along said, and still say, that I cordially recognize the services of Dr. Tyndall in popularizing certain parts of Science. But his readers must be cautioned against accepting as correct great parts of what he was written. It is granted to very few men to do this useful work without thereby losing their claim to scientific authority. Dr. Tyndall has, in fact, martyred his scientific authority by deservedly winning distinction in the popular field. One learns too late that he cannot “make the best of both worlds.”108

The accuracy of Tait’s remark must be judged in light of his almost hysterical indignation about Tyndall’s position on the issues of glaciers and the conservation of energy, but in spite of his extremism, his description of Tyndall straddling research and popular writing was one that many commentators would have recognized. In 1877, an article in The Saturday Review on the latest meeting of the British Association, commenting on the technicalities of the President’s Address, defended Tyndall and Huxley against a long-standing accusation of being “popularizers”:


attempt to attract attention from idlers. Dr. Tyndall’s “Sound” is seldom disfigured by the hyper-eloquent passages which irritated serious readers in the perusal of its predecessor.106

The gift of interpreting the results of highly special researches for the benefit of those who are not prepared beforehand by special


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knowledge is by no means a common one— in fact, it is itself a speciality which very few have mastered; for which reason people who are anxious to parade themselves as amateurs in science are much in the habit of cheapening it. The notion that Professor Huxley and Professor Tyndall are mere popularizers—because, forsooth, they can expound as well as discover— has almost attained the rank of a vulgar error. Some remarks to that effect were heard at this very meeting in the Guildhall of Plymouth. Those who imagine that such remarks give them a scientific air may be assured that there is no more certain stamp of a narrow and superficial habit of mind.109

This statement, though deploring the trend, indicates that the danger of losing one’s legitimacy in the scientific community by becoming a popularizer of science was already well-established in the 1870s, and by the end of the century the divide had grown yet more pronounced. Tyndall, in attempting to reconcile independent research with scientific popularization, was fighting a losing battle. When claiming that “great parts” of what Tyndall wrote in his popular books were incorrect, Tait was allowing his personal prejudice to lead him into exaggeration. Most members of the scientific community did not focus their criticism on the research-based content of Tyndall’s books so much as on their implications for the position of science in society— on its boundaries, especially those dividing it from theology, and on Tyndall’s position as a scientist and public commentator. The fact that they took up those issues as necessarily foremost in any discussion of his work demonstrates both the power of his reputation as a scientific popularizer and the extent of his influence on social issues ranging beyond scientific research. Tyndall was fulfilling his goal of carving out a position of public authority for himself as a man of science, but over the course of his career this emphasis on public influence detracted from his reputation as a researcher. His effort to promote scientists as legitimate social commentators was, at least in part, achieved through his own notoriety, which injured his reputation as a researcher even as it bolstered his persona as a public figure. Tyndall’s Interlocking Scientific Aims



As can be seen from the recognition he received from his fellow scientists in Britain, Europe, and America, as well as from the awards he received from the Royal Society, Tyndall was deemed by the majority of his scientific contemporaries to be an accomplished researcher independent of his work as a popularizer of science and as a social


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reformer. Yet, as this chapter has discussed, both in the scientific community and in the public eye those two roles took on greater importance than the content of his research in his image as a scientist. The abiding interest of his career, for his admirers as much as for his critics, lay in his public appearances, especially in those times when he went beyond the demonstration of his discoveries into the borderland between science and philosophy, science and theology, even science and spirituality. These frequent episodes in his lectures and in his published writings acted as the spark that lit up Tyndall’s public reputation, giving him both fame and notoriety far greater than he would ever have received had he devoted himself strictly to his research. The fact remains that, as a scientist pure and simple, he never achieved a lasting place in the first rank— arguably, at least in part, because of that same public success. But Tyndall’s aims in his career did not lie only in that first rank of researchers. His desire to explain science to the general public and his correlating desire to promote science as the best cultural framework for society contributed to the eventual undermining of his reputation as a researcher, due to the growing stigma attached to “popular” science as opposed to “professional” scientific research, but Tyndall himself did not see his goals as contradictory or mutually exclusive. On the contrary, for him they acted as the complementary parts of one whole. According to his conception of what a scientist should be, research acted as the necessary foundation of a scientific career, but until it was passed on to society for the increase of knowledge and the advance of technology, it had not fulfilled its purpose. The most wellequipped person to pass on the fruits of research was the person who conducted the research, and thus in Tyndall’s conception the best teacher of science was the researcher himself.110 Believing that the benefits of science were undeniable and that, because of its unparalleled access to objective truth, science was superior in reliability and insight to any other source of intellectual guidance—theology being his most common point of comparison—Tyndall promoted scientists as the logical guides not only in questions of natural phenomena, their speciality, but in all issues that arose out of humanity’s relationship with the natural world: politics, economics, education, social policy. Both the pursuit of truth and the mechanics of society, in Tyndall’s view, fell under the jurisdiction of scientific knowledge, and that meant that scientists were the most appropriate cultural authorities. Thus, in presenting his various personas to the general public and to the scientific community, Tyndall was acting from one mainspring of motivation—his understanding of the relationship between science,




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nature, and humanity. This philosophy, a complex blend of spirituality and rationality, grew out of his readings of Carlyle, Emerson, and German idealist philosophers, as well as his close relationship with Faraday. In order to understand the way in which his philosophy inspired Tyndall’s activities as a scientist, one must grasp his view of humanity’s scientific and religious instincts and the importance he placed on their relationship within society; it is this philosophy that the following chapter will examine.




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Tyndall’s Philosophy of Science and Nature The Influences of Carlyle, Emerson, Goethe, and Faraday

T

he philosophers who inspired Tyndall to pursue a scientific career were also the sources from which Tyndall extracted and shaped his own philosophy of science and his conception of what a scientist should be. In exploiting the philosophical ideas that he discovered as a young man, he changed them to fit with his own developing perspective as a scientific researcher and lecturer, and thus the men who acted as formative influences on his own philosophy also became tools, as it were, in his projection of himself and of his brand of science. In examining those early influences, one is in effect discovering the roots of Tyndall’s vision of the natural world, and in analyzing the ways in which he slanted their philosophies one can discover the nature of his own persona as a public scientist. Who then were the major influences in Tyndall’s early life? As a man striving to become a well-read and urbane figure able to compete with university-trained intellectuals, Tyndall read exhaustively in areas far beyond pure science: literature, poetry, philosophy, economic theory— all these had a place in his early reading, and the names of many individual writers often crop up in his lectures, essays, letters, and journals. Of these, Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Michael Faraday are among the most frequent, and Tyndall himself cited these men as formative in his beliefs and practices. This chapter will first examine Tyndall’s commitment to Carlyle as friend and philosopher, analyzing his science-oriented interpretation of Carlyle’s program for an ideal society. Then it will discuss Tyndall’s


Chapter 2


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devotion to the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson and his closely connected love of mountaineering and the Alps, in which, with the help of the writings and philosophy of Goethe, he found inspiration for the blend of spirituality and practicality that made his interpretation of science unique. Finally the chapter will examine Tyndall’s relationship with Faraday, his colleague at the Royal Institution, in whom he discovered not only immense talent but also a combination of religious devotion and scientific curiosity that he admired deeply, though, in the end, he refused to emulate it. Taken together, the philosophies of these three men, each of whom Tyndall both revered and profoundly differed from, act as the foundation for his vision of science in society. Tyndall’s Vision of Society: Carlyle Joined with Science Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), having grown up in a strongly Presbyterian Scottish household, later became renowned for his lack of conventional faith. He found his first liberation at the University of Edinburgh; afterward he worked as a teacher and then a writer; eventually he returned to London to become one of the most prominent intellectuals of the nineteenth century. Crossing the grain of the prevalent belief in the triumphal progress of the Victorian age, Carlyle argued that society was devolving, having lost the reliable structure of medieval times and replaced it with faith in sham-leaders and sham-religions. Yet Carlyle ended many of his books and essays with a galvanizing call to arms—not a despairing judgment on the state of things but a plea for reform and rebirth. Though one of the most pessimistic Victorian intellectuals in that he refused to admit any achievement in the society of his own time, Carlyle also acted as an energizing and inspiring voice for those who wished to influence the future of society.1 One of the groups most drawn to Carlyle’s contradictory but passionate philosophy were the young scientists who formed the X Club. Frank M. Turner, in his article “Victorian Scientific Naturalism and Thomas Carlyle,” outlines the similarities between Carlyle’s philosophy and the views of the scientific naturalists, tracing the inspirations that the group derived from Carlyle’s writings in their quest to establish scientists as the new intellectual elite.2 Though Turner does not analyze him at length in the article, the club-member most fervently committed not only to Carlyle’s writings but to Carlyle himself was John Tyndall. Thomas Huxley, discussing Carlyle’s works, wrote:



[M]y sense of obligation to their author was then, as it remains, extremely strong. Tyndall’s appreciation of the seer of Chelsea was


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T Y N D A L L’ S P H I L O S O P H Y O F S C I E N C E A N D N AT U R E

From this passage it appears that Tyndall and Huxley, though often spoken of as similar in their devotion to Carlyle,4 thought of Carlyle’s philosophy in different ways—Huxley as an exhilarating source of inspiration, Tyndall as a template for fashioning his own ideas. Tyndall had no qualms about using Carlyle’s philosophy as a source of guidance. He first encountered Carlyle’s work in the 1840s, when he was working on the railways in Lancashire and experiencing firsthand the ruin, rioting, and starvation in Preston. Reading by chance an article by Carlyle in a local newspaper, in which he pleaded for the nation to direct its attention to its stricken countrymen in the north, Tyndall felt an immediate bond with an intellectual who could feel so strongly the sufferings of the people, yet simultaneously rise above democratic restraints. He wrote of his experience of reading Past and Present, “[Carlyle made it] clear to me that without truckling to the ape and tiger of the mob, a man might hold the views of a radical.”5 He at once accepted the full scope of Carlyle’s philosophy, writing to his friend and protégé Thomas Hirst in 1848, “The leading idea of Past and Present I conceive to be the application of the principles handled in Heroes and Hero Worship in politics, it aims rather at elevating the whole system of politics than at obtaining any single measure or series of measures, we have no Morrison’s pill for social maladies.”6 In the early years of Tyndall’s career, the extent of his hero-worship of Carlyle cannot be overstated. When he first saw the great man in London, he wrote in his journal, “I wish they would make him Prime Minister! I would face the devil under the command of such a Chief.”7 Writing to Hirst, he declared, “[F]or my part I owe to him and Emerson more than to any other men living.”8 Four years later he wrote, “Where shall we look for such men as Socrates, Plato, Cato, Plutarch and others of the same stamp at present— one man alone in England I find fit at all to stand beside them and that is our friend Tom Carlyle.”9 Even after Tyndall had himself become a respected public figure, his reverence toward Carlyle remained undiminished. Though some critics took exception to the increasing ferocity and negativity of Carlyle’s philosophy, Tyndall stood fast as an unconditional Carlylean. Carlyle also provided Tyndall with the means of solving a problem that beset him throughout his twenties and thirties— namely his loss


even more enthusiastic; and, in after-years, assumed a character of almost filial devotion. [ . . . ] My friend, I think, was disposed to regard Carlyle as a great teacher; I was rather inclined to take him as a great tonic; as a source of intellectual invigoration and moral stimulus and refreshment, rather than of theoretical and practical guidance.3


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I cannot for one instant imagine that a good and merciful God would ever make our eternal salvation depend on such slender links as a conformity with what some are pleased to call the essentials of religion. I was long fettered by these things, but now thank God they are placed upon the same shelf with the swaddling clothes which bound up my infancy.10

Despite the assurance of this statement, however, the relinquishment of his orthodox beliefs did not come easily to Tyndall, having been brought up under the guidance of his devoutly Protestant and deeply loved father. The continued agony of his dilemma shows through in his letters to Hirst. In one from 1849 he writes: For two years I would have given anything to be a christian, and read books calculated to bring about this consummation. The reading of Dr. Burnet’s account of the death of Rochester the infidel set me on my feet, as a believing christian, for some time. This want within myself was near driving me to join the methodists, expecting that their prayings and groanings and religious excitements would arrest the dry rot of my soul. All this I have gone through, Tom. This has been the forge in which my present creed has been hammered into shape.11

Though Carlyle did not provide Tyndall with an immediate solution to these spiritual difficulties, the nature of his philosophy proved a tremendous solace. Carlyle’s insistence on the unknowable but undeniable presence of a superior Intelligence in nature filled the void in Tyndall’s spiritual life; the idea of “natural supernaturalism,” first expounded in Sartor Resartus in 1833–34 and supported in all Carlyle’s later works, provided Tyndall with an avenue of expressing his reverence toward a higher presence in the universe without having to yield to the social authority of any established church. Carlyle’s natural supernaturalism contained the seed of the spiritual conviction of nature’s mystery that Tyndall later developed in his readings of Emerson and Goethe and in his contemplation of the Alps. As he wrote to Hirst in 1850, “Emerson is a pantheist in the highest sense and so is Carlyle.”12 Once he had attained his job at the Royal Institution in 1853 and established himself in London, Tyndall pursued Carlyle’s friendship


of conventional Christian faith. Tyndall felt unable to believe in the strictures and traditions of established religion, but he continued to believe in God and could not content himself with a rejection of spirituality. In 1847 he wrote:


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with single-minded determination, eventually succeeding in becoming one of the philosopher’s closest associates. He accompanied Carlyle on his momentous trip to Edinburgh in 1866, where Carlyle, as Rector of the University of Edinburgh, delivered his most successful public address, and visited him frequently up to the last weeks of the older man’s decline. In all the years in which he was acquainted with Carlyle, though he deplored the bitterness and pessimism that colored Carlyle’s later works, Tyndall stood by Carlyle’s philosophy; even Carlyle himself must have been satisfied by the strength of Tyndall’s hero-worship. Perhaps the dominant reason behind Tyndall’s devotion to Carlyle was the fact that so much of Carlyle’s writing seemed applicable to Tyndall’s personal situation. Carlyle wrote at length against the trend of reliance upon Mechanism in the modern age. In “Signs of the Times,” an early essay from 1829, Carlyle wrote: For the same habit regulates not our modes of action alone, but our modes of thought and feeling. Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force, of any kind. Not for internal perfection, but for external combinations and arrangements, for institutions, constitutions,—for Mechanism of one sort or another, do they hope and struggle. Their whole efforts, attachments, opinions, turn on mechanism, and are of a mechanical character.13

This accusation against society in general was similar to the accusation of materialism so often pointed at Tyndall by his theological opponents; Tyndall, like the society vilified by Carlyle, stood condemned for removing the individual’s free will from the universe and reducing nature to a clockwork mechanism of soulless matter. Up to the present day, even respected scholars sometimes dub Tyndall a materialist without the necessary qualifications of that term: Iwan Rhys Morus, in When Physics Became King (2005), mentions “the materialist John Tyndall,” and Gillian Beer compounds the mistake in an article from 1993 by calling him both an atheist and a materialist, though she then points out the “transcendental” elements of his philosophy.14 Frank M. Turner himself misleadingly describes Tyndall as “the one Victorian scientist who had no hesitation in referring to himself as a ‘materialist.’ ”15 In another article, however, which specifically discusses Tyndall’s close intellectual bond with Carlyle, Turner explains Tyndall’s reputation as a materialist as part of his distorted public image rather than an accurate labeling of his beliefs.16


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Tyndall found strength in the similarity between Carlyle’s hatred of Mechanism and the accusations of materialism that he himself received, for Carlyle’s counterargument to the trend of Mechanism in his society was precisely the philosophical argument that Tyndall found most conducive to his own view of the world. Carlyle proclaimed at the end of “Signs of the Times,” “Nay, after all, our spiritual maladies are but of Opinion; we are but fettered by chains of our own forging, and which ourselves also can rend asunder. This deep, paralysed subjection to physical objects comes not from Nature, but from our own unwise mode of viewing Nature.”17 This statement correlated with Tyndall’s argument against those who accused him of materialism. From their perspective, because Tyndall denied the rulings of revealed religion, he had subjected himself to the domination of physical objects at the expense of the possibility of a higher presence in the universe; but in fact Tyndall was, like Carlyle, arguing for a new method of “viewing Nature.” Tyndall advocated the pursuit of science as an investigation of the natural world that, even as it revealed new truths about nature to the investigators, simultaneously revealed ever-growing expanses of the mysterious and wondrous within nature, toward which the irrepressible spiritual instinct of humanity could and should direct itself without the hindrance of organized religion. In Past and Present, published in 1843, Carlyle wrote, “The resuscitation of old liturgies fallen dead; much more, the manufacture of new liturgies that will never be alive: how hopeless! Stylitisms, eremite fanaticisms, and fakerisms; spasmodic agonistic posture-makings, and narrow, cramped, morbid, if forever noble wrestlings: all this is not a thing desirable to me.”18 Four pages earlier, he had proclaimed, “I tell thee, through all thy Ledgers, Supply-and-demand Philosophies, and daily most modern melancholy Business and Cant, there does shine the presence of a Primeval Unspeakable; and thou wert wise to recognise, not with lips only, the same!”19 This combination of the need for reverence with a rejection of established beliefs, the simultaneous affirmation of an Intelligence in nature and a refusal to comply with sham-spiritualism and “fakerisms,” supplied Tyndall with the philosophical motivation for his career in scientific research. Carlyle’s exhortation to all mankind to work as a means of finding nobility— “Work is Worship”20 —matched the philosophy behind the untiring but life-draining energy that Tyndall poured into his scientific work. Moreover, Carlyle’s rejection of mechanism equipped Tyndall with the philosophical armaments to fend off the accusations of materialism: as Carlyle wrote in “Signs of the Times,” “If Mechanism, like




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some glass bell, encircles and imprisons us; if the soul looks forth on a fair heavenly country which it cannot reach, and pines, and in its scanty atmosphere is ready to perish,—yet the bell is but of glass; ‘one bold stroke to break the bell in pieces, and thou art delivered!’ ”21 Carlyle provided Tyndall with the means to make “one bold stroke,” and though Tyndall’s efforts were often misunderstood, he considered himself to be blending the truth about matter with the transcendentalism of Carlyle’s philosophy. The mixture—what Stephen S. Kim termed Tyndall’s “transcendental materialism”— can often be seen in Tyndall’s writings. In his 1865 essay “Vitality,” for example, he argues, “Every portion of every animal body may be reduced to purely inorganic matter. A perfect reversal of this process of reduction would carry us from the inorganic to the organic; and such a reversal is at least conceivable.”22 This statement, apparently materialistic when taken out of context, was the sort that caused frequent uproar over Tyndall’s lectures; when “Vitality” was later reprinted, he noted, “All the ‘materialism’ of the ‘Belfast Address’ seems to me to be concentrated in this somewhat ancient fragment.”23 Yet the essay concludes with a Carlylean discussion of nature’s mysteries: “If these statements startle, it is because matter has been defined and maligned by philosophers and theologians, who were equally unaware that it is, at bottom, essentially mystical and transcendental.”24 These metaphysical theories were not the only aspect of Carlyle’s writings that influenced Tyndall in his career as a public scientist. Carlyle advocated the leadership of the people by new heroes along the lines of Oliver Cromwell and Frederick the Great—leaders from history whom Carlyle had pinpointed as possessing the ruthless passion and piercing intelligence needed to rein in and direct the forces of society. Carlyle explored this idea in his book On Heroes, HeroWorship and the Heroic in History (1840), in which he examines the manifestations of both heroism and hero-worship through the ages. Beginning with the Hero as Divinity, he progresses through the Hero as Prophet, Poet, Priest, Man of Letters, and, in the final chapter, King. These heroes, he claimed, were the rightful leaders of society, the true aristocracy to whom everyone else in society should yield, thus creating an ordered social ship to glide smoothly into the future. His selection as the best hope for heroes in Britain’s future were the men he called “the Leaders of Industry.” In Past and Present he wrote, “The Leaders of Industry, if Industry is ever to be led, are virtually the Captains of the World; if there be no nobleness in them, there will never be an Aristocracy more.”25




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Tyndall also believed in the need for an intellectual aristocracy, but to his mind Carlyle had neglected the most worthy group to take on the role. In his “Personal Recollections of Thomas Carlyle,” written in 1890, Tyndall discusses other possible forms of the Hero. He reports that, “fascinated by the grand figure of Michael Angelo, [Carlyle] once announced his intention of writing his life.” Tyndall, in response, comments, “He would have thus added to his picturegallery ‘The Hero as Artist’. Carlyle would have found ‘The Hero as Man of Science’ a more fitting theme.”26 Tyndall explains that Carlyle had “mastered” Newton’s Principia and was at least acquainted with the implications for molecular force inherent within the Newtonian framework. “Without, however, trenching upon these points, which Carlyle saw as in a glass darkly, he would have found in Newton or Boyle an appropriate subject. Had he taken either of them in hand, he would undoubtedly have turned out an impressive figure. Boyle especially would, I imagine, have appealed to his sympathies and love.”27 The scientist-hero was, in Tyndall’s mind, a perfect realization of Carlyle’s vision of new leaders in Victorian society. According to Tyndall’s view, scientists fulfilled all of the requirements that Carlyle laid forth for his ideal heroes.28 In “Signs of the Times,” Carlyle contrasted the present-day trend of Mechanism with the opposite force of Dynamism, by which he meant “the primary, unmodified forces and energies of man, the mysterious springs of Love, and Fear, and Wonder, of Enthusiasm, Poetry, Religion, all which have a truly vital and infinite character.”29 The ideal society, Carlyle argued, would blend the two forces of Mechanism and Dynamism together: “[I]t seems clear enough that only in the right coördination of the two, and the vigorous forwarding of both, does our true line of action lie.”30 This melding, for Tyndall, found its apotheosis in science, or more specifically in his particular brand of wonder-filled, transcendental science; in 1868 he proclaimed to the students of University College, London: But man is not all intellect. [ . . . ] He feels as well as thinks; he is receptive of the sublime and the beautiful as well as of the true. Indeed, I believe that even the intellectual action of a complete man is, consciously or unconsciously, sustained by an under-current of these emotions. It is vain, I think, to attempt to separate the moral and emotional nature from intellectual nature. Let a man but observe himself, and he will, if I mistake not, find that in nine cases out of ten, moral or immoral considerations, as the case may be, are the motive force which pushes his intellect into action. The reading of the works of two men, neither of them imbued with the spirit of modern science, neither of them, indeed,




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friendly to that spirit, has placed me here to-day. Those men are the English Carlyle and the American Emerson. [ . . . ] I never should have gone through Analytical Geometry and the Calculus had it not been for those men. I never should have become a physical investigator, and hence without them I should not have been here to-day. They told me what I ought to do in a way that caused me to do it, and all my consequent intellectual action is to be traced to this purely moral source.31

Tyndall, then, was fully aware of the differences between his own passion for science and the beliefs of Carlyle, as well as Emerson. But in asserting that these philosophers’ writings motivated his scientific endeavors, he argued that “intellectual action” was inevitably dependent on “moral sources.” Science, a solely intellectual activity, must be powered by moral inspiration; the two halves cannot be separated. As Tyndall acknowledged, Carlyle was skeptical of scientists as a potential aristocracy, suspecting them of an inordinate faith in Mechanism— others might have said materialism. As early as 1829 Carlyle wrote, “It is admitted, on all sides, that the Metaphysical and Moral Sciences are falling into decay, while the Physical are engrossing, every day, more respect and attention. [ . . . ] The science of the age, in short, is physical, chemical, physiological; in all shapes mechanical.”32 Later, discussing Locke and his continued popularity, Carlyle writes: His whole doctrine is mechanical, in its aim and origin, in its method and its results. [ . . . ] The grand secrets of Necessity and Freewill, of the Mind’s vital or non-vital dependence on Matter, of our mysterious relations to Time and Space, to God, to the Universe, are not, in the faintest degree, touched on in these inquiries; and seem not have the smallest connexion with them.33

Yet, for Tyndall, these precise matters—free will, the mind’s dependence on matter, our relation to time and space and the universe—were the ultimate questions of science. He did his utmost to convince Carlyle that scientists were capable—indeed more capable than anyone else— of exploring these questions. In 1857 Tyndall wrote to Hirst about an evening he had spent with Carlyle: “He talked a good deal of science with me among other things. I differed from him in his opinion.”34 Never one to allow differences of opinion to pass unremarked, Tyndall did his best to convert Carlyle to the social power of science. Later, in his “Personal Recollections of Thomas Carlyle,” Tyndall wrote:


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As time went on I drew more closely to Carlyle, seeking, among other things, to remove all prejudice by making clear to him the spirit in


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In this way Tyndall tried to convince Carlyle that scientists could be heroes too, according to Carlyle’s own definition, in that they were not interested in outward gains—“worldly profit and applause,” what might be termed mechanistic rewards—but at the same time felt bound by their work to their fellow-man, thus pursuing the benefit of society by forwarding the dynamic pursuit of truth. As Tyndall tried to persuade Carlyle of the virtues of scientists, so he attempted to convince the public that Carlyle had, in fact, been more supportive of science and its practitioners than was immediately apparent from his writings. Rejecting the idea that Carlyle had disliked scientists, Tyndall wrote, “It was the illegitimate science which, in its claims, overstepped its warrant— professing to explain everything, and to sweep the universe clear of mystery—that was really repugnant to Carlyle.”36 Thus the scientists to whom Tyndall objected, “freethinkers who imagine themselves able to sound with their penny twineballs the ocean of immensity,” were also—in Tyndall’s portrayal of Carlyle— condemned by the philosopher: “With such Carlyle had little sympathy.”37 Tyndall believed that, for the true scientist, “the long line of his researches is, in reality, a line of wonders,”38 a view coinciding with Carlyle’s dictum for the proper attitude toward the universe. In his “Personal Recollections” Tyndall expands on this point: The mistake, not unfrequently made, of supposing Carlyle’s mind to be unscientific, may be further glanced at here. [ . . . ] Quite as clearly as the professed physicist he grasped the principle of Continuity, and saw the interdependence of “parts” in the “stupendous Whole.” To him the universe was not a Mechanism, but an Organism— each part of it thrilling and responding sympathetically with all other parts. Igdrasil, “the Tree of Existence,” was his favourite image:—“Considering how human things circulate each inextricably in communication with all, I find no similitude so true as this of a tree. Beautiful; altogether beautiful and great. The ‘Machine of the Universe,’— alas, do but think of that in contrast!” Other penetrative minds have made us familiar with the “Social Organism,” but Carlyle saw early and utilised nobly the beauty and the truth of the metaphor.39


which the highest scientific minds pursued their work. They could not detach themselves from their fellow-man, but history showed that they thought less of worldly profit and applause, and practised more of self-denial than any other class of intellectual workers.35

Thus Tyndall attempted to unite Carlyle’s vision of an interconnected society with the scientific principle of interconnectedness in matter,


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which he and his colleagues promoted as the ultimate vision of the universe. Tyndall worked on both sides—his own philosophy and Carlyle’s—to combine the two, arguing in turns that Carlyle’s views supported his own and that his own supported Carlyle’s. In this way he promoted the philosophy of a man he loved, whose writings he genuinely believed to be insightful, but at the same time furthered his own aim of establishing his science as a lens through which society should view the world, by demonstrating that a famous philosopher supported this claim. At the unveiling of the statue of Thomas Carlyle in London in October of 1882, after the philosopher’s death, Tyndall gave a speech commemorating Carlyle’s life and work, which he concluded by saying, “His doctrine is the doctrine of science, not ‘touched’ but saturated with religious emotion. For the operation of Force— the scientific agent— his deep and yearning soul substituted the operation of the Energy before referred to, which, to avoid periphrasis, we call God.”40 Brushing aside the importance of differing terms, Tyndall argued that Carlyle’s philosophy was identical with that of legitimate science, and thus he promoted the idea that there could be no more suitable group to take on the role of society’s new Carlylean heroes than the scientists themselves. Tyndall in the Alps: The Influence of Emerson and Goethe As strong an influence as Carlyle on Tyndall’s philosophy, from his earliest years as a surveyor and as a student at Marburg, was Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82). At first glance the Bostonian philosopher seems far removed from Carlyle, though the two men grew to be close friends and intellectual colleagues; but Emerson too, having been raised in a religious family— and even becoming a minister himself— eventually lost his faith in Christian orthodoxy and formulated his own, naturalistic philosophy to replace it. A graduate of Harvard College, he first tried his hand at teaching and then turned to writing; while still a young man he was celebrated as a talented orator, praised by Oliver Wendell Holmes, and in time he came to be America’s most famous champion of intellectual freedom. Beginning with the essay Nature, published in 1836, Emerson promoted the philosophy of Transcendentalism, whereby the truth of God can be intuited through a spiritual communion with nature. He often expressed his belief in the pantheistic glory of nature through verse, becoming as well-known for his poetry as for his lecturing.41




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Tyndall’s early letters to Hirst are suffused with Emerson—nearly every page contains some mention of the poet-philosopher, and many letters are devoted entirely to analyses of Emerson’s verses and philosophy. For many years, Tyndall did his best to live according to Emerson’s vision of man and nature. Writing to Hirst in 1848, he proclaimed: In Emerson you behold one of the noblest souls that ever was struck in clay. Every time I rise from his book I find a new vigour in my heart— he teaches one to be so independent that you almost feel disposed to quarrel with himself, just to shew how little you cared about even him. There are many parts of his writings very difficult, especially some portions of the Transcendentalist, and Idealism— The rule he lays down will I believe make all clear— Let us by enacting our best insight, by doing that which we feel to be right, strengthen our powers and purify our vision, and all will be understandable— There is a world of meaning in those two words he uses so emphatically I ought.42

The fulfillment that Emerson found in nature served as an inspiration to Tyndall, and he embraced the Emersonian combination of independence and interconnectedness. In 1850 he wrote to Hirst, “The universe is a body with a life within it, and among it, and through it, permeating its every fibre. Man is one form of that life, vegetables are another— herein consists ‘that occult’ relationship between the former and the latter mentioned by Emerson in one of his essays.”43 All that was missing from Emerson’s philosophy, in Tyndall’s view, was the need for action; in 1849 he wrote to Hirst, “No man knows the value of work as an educator, and as an administrator of happiness better than Emerson; still there is danger in rising from the perusal of his essays that an underestimate of the importance of action has been imbibed.”44 The solution to this potential danger Tyndall found both in Carlyle’s more urgent strictures about the need to reform society and in the philosophy of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), whose infusion of emotion into scientific rationality Tyndall had first encountered in Carlyle’s work and whose poetry and philosophy he read avidly after mastering German.45 Combining the views of these philosophers, his lifelong intellectual heroes, Tyndall built his own philosophy of reverential science. Tyndall first heard Emerson speak in person at Halifax in 1868, and during his trip to America in the early 1870s, Tyndall met the philosopher in Boston, along with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Louis Agassiz—“a perfect galaxy of




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genius.”46 Emerson, in spite of the fact that he “generally felt himself repelled by physicists,”47 was already an admirer of Tyndall, and the two men at once felt a connection.48 Tyndall went on to host Emerson in London multiple times, remaining in contact with the philosopher until his death. As was typical of his instincts as a teacher, Tyndall tried to pass on to wider society the inspiration he found in Emerson and his other favorite thinkers. Describing the formative influences of his student years, he wrote in an 1879 essay, “Emerson kindled me, while Fichte powerfully stirred my moral pulse.”49 In an “Address Delivered at the Birkbeck Institution” in 1884, Tyndall told his audience, “I had been reading Fichte, and Emerson, and Carlyle, and had been infected by the spirit of these great men. Let no one persuade you that they were not great men. The Alpha and Omega of their teaching was loyalty to duty.”50 It is significant that for Tyndall, though he applied the teachings of all these philosophers to his scientific pursuits, their philosophies reached beyond science: he believed and taught that the Emersonian vision of nature and the Carlylean vision of society should provide the warp and weft of life. Though Tyndall became a follower of Emerson and Goethe before he began his forays into the Alps, the grandeur and beauty of the mountains provided him with inspirational confirmation of their nature-based philosophies. Tyndall fell in love with the Alps at first sight, and it was his mountaineering passion as much as his scientific skill that first established him as a celebrity in the eyes of the British public. Soon after gaining his position at the Royal Institution, Tyndall’s interest was sparked in glaciology, and, accompanied by Huxley, he traveled to the Alps in 1856 to conduct his researches on site. From that visit sprang his lifelong love of mountain-climbing, because of which he gained a reputation as a daring athlete equal to his reputation as a devoted scientist. In addition to his own meditations on the mountains, numerous memoirs were published by his friends describing Tyndall’s skill and courage as a climber. Soon after its founding in 1857, Tyndall became a member of the Alpine Club in London, and like many of its other members—Leslie Stephen, John Llewelyn Davies, Matthew Arnold—he connected the physical feats of mountaineering with the uplifting reverence that he felt for the mountains themselves, discovering philosophical meaning in his climbs up the peaks.51 Tyndall’s aptitude for mountaineering, though linked with his scientific endeavors, at times outran them in his public image. In an 1861 review of his book on glaciers in the Edinburgh Review, John




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The scientific results of his visit must be further referred to in these pages; suffice it to say that a slight amount of practice and experience developed in him the qualities of a first-rate mountaineer, and in the eyes of enthusiastic Alpine travellers his achievements with the alpenstock and ice-axe are at least as remarkable as those that have given him his present place in the world of science.52

Sir John Skelton, in an 1895 book of essays, writes of Tyndall, “He was the most conspicuous man of science of his time; but it is as a mountaineer that he will be most widely and affectionately remembered.”53 Two of Tyndall’s closest friends, Herbert Spencer and Thomas Huxley, also foregrounded his love of the mountains in their posthumous descriptions of him. Spencer wrote, “In thus undertaking to fight for those who were unfairly dealt with, he displayed in another direction that very conspicuous trait which, as displayed in his Alpine feats, has made him to many persons chiefly known—I mean courage, passing very often into daring.”54 Huxley praised Tyndall’s boundless energy: “My friend’s exploits as a mountaineer are sufficient evidence of his extraordinary physical vigour.”55 Like Spencer, Huxley admired Tyndall’s “skill and audacity as a climber,”56 and he emphasized Tyndall’s ability to combine his aesthetic appreciation of the mountains with his devotion to scientific research: “The love for Alpine scenery and Alpine climbing, which remained with Tyndall to the last, began, or at any rate became intensified into a passion, with this journey; and, at the same time, he laid the foundations of his well known and highly important work upon glaciers and glacier movement.”57 The physical daring and adventurous scientific curiosity that Tyndall practiced during his mountaineering exploits, however, were often secondary to the spiritual inspiration that he drew from the Alps. With the mountains providing a majestic setting in which to meditate on Emerson’s philosophy, Tyndall forged a religious relationship with nature as important to him as physical exercise or scientific discovery. It was often in the mountains that Tyndall, later in life, battled the difficulties of reconciling spiritual reverence with scientific exactitude and the necessity of freeing science from theology. Surrounded by the beauties of the Alps, he wrote many of his lectures, including the Belfast Address of 1874, and found confirmation that a truly scientific philosophy could include a reverence of nature without the trappings of organized religion.


Ball, Irish glaciologist and politician— and one-time president of the Alpine Club—wrote:


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In an article on his Alpine experiences from 1868, Tyndall explained the allure of the Alps as a combination of emotional and intellectual stimulation: “Herein consisted the fascination of the Alps for me: they appealed at once to thought and feeling, offering their problems to the one and their grandeurs to the other, while conferring upon the body the soundness and purity necessary to the healthful exercise of both.”58 Earlier, in the travel book Mountaineering in 1861, he described this combination as allowing for manifold methods of appreciation: The mutations of the atmosphere, the blue zenith and the glowing horizon; rocks, snow, and ice; the wondrous mountain world into which he looks, and which refuses to be encompassed by a narrow brain:— these are objects at once poetic and scientific, and of such plasticity that every human soul can fashion them according to its own needs.59

Whatever that fashioning might entail, Tyndall’s conviction was that nature in some form is necessary to humanity: “Some philosophers inculcate an independence of external things, and a reliance upon the soul alone. But what would man be without Nature? A mere capacity, if such a thing be conceivable alone; potential, but not dynamic; an agent without an object.”60 Tyndall was enthralled both by the beauty of the mountains and by their gargantuan scale. Committed to the use of imagination and visualization in scientific research, he found the Alps to be ideal manifestations of the extreme age of the earth; they represented aweinspiring development over time, illustrating Emerson’s maxim that Nature “keeps her laws, and seems to transcend them”61: Think of the ages which must have been consumed in the execution of this colossal Alpine structure! The question may, of course, be pushed to further limits: Think of the ages, it may be asked, which the molten earth required for its consolidation! But these vaster epochs lack sublimity through our inability to grasp them. They bewilder us, but they fail to make a solemn impression. The genesis of the mountains comes more within the scope of the intellect, and the majesty of the operation is enhanced by our partial ability to conceive it. In the falling of a rock from a mountain-head, in the shoot of an avalanche, in the plunge of a cataract, we often see a more impressive illustration of the power of gravity than in the motions of the stars. When the intellect has to intervene, and calculation is necessary to the building up of the conception, the expansion of the feelings ceases to be proportional to the magnitude of the phenomena.62


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The description is a typical blend of intellect and emotion: Tyndall’s science, in practice, was not the purely rational observation and quantification of data that he often claimed it to be when defining science as opposed to theology. On the contrary, Tyndall desired and even needed an infusion of emotion into his thought processes in order to appreciate fully the physical phenomena under his investigation. Thus, to grasp the almost unthinkable amount of time in which the Alps arose, he argued that one must rely on “the expansion of the feelings” and force the intellect not to “intervene.” Tyndall often used excerpts from Emerson’s and Goethe’s poetry as epigraphs for his lectures and essays. In Mountaineering in 1861, he opens each chapter with a snippet of poetry; the first chapter begins with some verses from “Monadnoc” by Emerson, whom Tyndall does not cite presumably because he believes the lines to be so wellknown: The mountain cheer, the frosty skies, Breed purer wits, inventive eyes; And then the moral of the place Hints summits of heroic grace. Men in these crags a fastness find To fight corruption of the mind, The insanity of towns to stem, With simpleness for stratagem.63

Emerson’s emphasis on the inherent morality of mountains finds expression again and again in Tyndall’s book, often extending to a declaration of the religious nature of the Alpine scenery. Describing his ascent of the Weisshorn, Tyndall writes, “I opened my note-book to make a few observations, but I soon relinquished the attempt. There was something incongruous, if not profane, in allowing the scientific faculty to interfere when silent worship was the reasonable service.”64 Later, when he wandered on the Matterhorn, he describes the scene’s effect on him once again as spiritual: “The peaks wear a more solemn aspect, the sun shines with a more effectual fire, the blue of heaven is more deep and awful, the air seems instinct with religion, and the hard heart of man is made as tender as a child’s.”65 These moments, so religious and emotional in nature, confirmed Tyndall’s feeling of connection with both Emerson and Goethe, who treated poetry and science as inextricably linked and who believed, as Emerson put it, that “Nature is loved by what is best in us.”66 In a lecture in 1880 at the Royal Institution on Goethe’s Farbenlehre




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The feelings and aims with which Newton and Goethe respectively approached Nature were radically different, but they had an equal warrant in the constitution of man. As regards our tastes and tendencies, our pleasures and pains, physical and mental, our action and passion, our sorrows, sympathies, and joys, we are the heirs of all the ages that preceded us; and of the human nature thus handed down poetry is an element just as much as science. The emotions of man are older than his understanding, and the poet who brightens, purifies, and exalts these emotions may claim a position in the world at least as high and as well assured as that of the man of science.67

Poetry, in Tyndall’s mind, had as much claim on humanity as science, and thus Goethe’s interpretation of light, though incorrect, nevertheless held an aesthetic and emotional value stemming from the strength of Goethe’s poetic vision. Moreover, Tyndall argued, this vision, in addressing the confusion between spirit and matter, could aid the formulation of scientific ideas. In his 1870 address to the Mathematical and Physical Section of the British Association at Liverpool on the “Scientific Use of the Imagination,” Tyndall asked: Supposing that in youth we had been impregnated with the notion of the poet Goethe, instead of the notion of the poet Young, looking at matter, not as brute matter, but as “the living garment of God”; do you not think that under these altered circumstances the law of Relativity might have had an outcome different from its present one? Is it not probable that our repugnance to the idea of primeval union between spirit and matter might be considerably abated? Without this total revolution of the notions now prevalent, the Evolution hypothesis must stand condemned; but in many profoundly thoughtful minds such a revolution has already taken place.68

The poetry and philosophy of Goethe, then, not only complemented science as another method of looking at the natural world but could also actively support science by providing a framework in which to understand new theories about natural phenomena. Inevitably when philosophizing in this vein, Tyndall found himself hesitating over the ability of science to achieve what he promoted as its foremost aim— namely the analysis of the natural world, with or without the help of Goethe and Emerson. His musings inspired by climbing the Matterhorn illustrate this inward conflict; gazing at the mountain’s peaks, he imagines the “nebulous haze” in


(Theory of Color), Tyndall analyzed the difference between Newton’s and Goethe’s philosophies:


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Did that formless fog contain potentially the sadness with which I regarded the Matterhorn? Did the thought which thus runs back through the ages simply return to its primeval home? If so, had we not better recast our definitions of matter and force? for if life and thought be the very flower of both, any definition which omits life and thought must be inadequate, if not untrue. Are questions like these warranted? Are they healthy? Ought they not to be quenched by a life of action? Healthy or unhealthy, can we quench them?69

These uncertainties led him to revisit his ideas on the relationship between science, which he viewed as fundamentally connected with the intellect, and religion, which he relegated to the realm of emotion: When I look at the heavens and the earth, at my own body, at my strength and imbecility of mind, even at these ponderings, and ask myself is there no being or thing in the universe that knows more about these matters than I do; what is my answer? Does antagonism to theology stand with none of us in the place of a religion? Supposing our theologic schemes of creation, condemnation, and redemption to be dissipated; and the warmth of denial, which as a motive force can match the warmth of affirmation, dissipated at the same time; would the undeflected mind return to the meridian of absolute neutrality as regards these ultra-physical questions? Is such a position one of stable equilibrium?70

Such questions, which Tyndall experienced throughout his life during his visits to the Alps, confirmed his belief that spirituality was an inherent part of humanity, that even if one eschewed established religion, one could not escape an instinctive reverence for a higher and inexplicable power in nature. The final conclusion to which Tyndall came regarding physical laws and the mystery of nature was that no human could comprehend the connection between them. Poetry, aesthetics, and philosophical meditations, therefore, served as the only valid medium by which to consider the metaphysical questions that invariably accompanied any scientific investigation of natural phenomena. As he wrote in his essay on “Professor Virchow and Evolution” in 1879:


which the universe, according to some contemporary theories, had originated:

The burthen of my writings in this connection is as much a recognition of the weakness of science as an assertion of its strength. [ . . . ] The


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Tyndall also expressed this sentiment, appropriately enough, in verse, in a poem entitled “A Morning on Alp Lusgen”: Unplanted groves! whose pristine seeds, they say, Were sown amid the flames of nascent stars— How came ye thence and hither? Whence the craft Which shook these gentian atoms into form, And dyed the flower with azure deeper far Than that of heaven itself on days serene? What built these marigolds? What clothed these knolls With fiery whortle leaves? What gave the heath Its purple bloom— the Alpine rose its glow? Shew us the power which fills each tuft of grass With sentient swarms?— the art transcending thought, Which paints against the canvas of the eye These crests sublime and pure, and then transmutes The picture into worship? Science dumb— Oh babbling Gnostic! cease to beat the air. We yearn, and grope, and guess, but cannot know.72

Whatever the literary worth of Tyndall’s poem, the sense of it is clear: science, while it can and must investigate the “how” of nature, can no more answer the correlating “why” than theology can. Francis O’Gorman, in his article on the poem, demonstrates this point even more clearly by revealing that Tyndall, in an earlier draft of the poem, had provided an easy answer to its question—namely “Evolution.”73 The fact that Tyndall then removed this pat response, leaving ignorance as the poem’s central message, shows his eventual conviction that poetry alone has the capacity to address humanity’s desire for meaning—neither science nor theology can provide a certain explanation of the ultimate causes and purposes of Nature. As representations and reflections of the natural world, therefore, Goethe’s and Emerson’s poems held as much value for Tyndall as scientific works such as Newton’s Principia; he simply separated them in his mind as interpretations arising from different aspects of human nature. Tyndall closed his lecture on Goethe’s Farbenlehre with a statement typical of his insistence on the separation of science and religion, intellect and emotion; but, given the preceding praise of Goethe, the declaration takes on a new subtlety, expressing two


phenomena of matter and force come within our intellectual range; but behind, and above, and around us the real mystery of the universe lies unsolved, and, as far as we are concerned, it is incapable of solution.71


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There is no fear that the man of science can ever destroy the glory of the lilies of the field; there is no hope that the poet can ever successfully contend against our right to examine, in accordance with scientific method, the agent to which the lily owes its glory. There is no necessary encroachment of the one field upon the other. Nature embraces them both, and man, when he is complete, will exhibit as large a toleration.74

In the words “fear,” connected with science, and “hope,” connected with poetry, one can see Tyndall’s sympathy for the aesthetic and emotional side of the balance; but his almost militaristic determination to fight for science’s freedom comes to the fore in his declaration of the scientist’s “right to examine, in accordance with scientific method,” all that makes nature what it is. It was clear to Tyndall that poetry did not need his help in its status as an expression of human nature; science, on the other hand, was still a fledgling mode of thought. Tyndall at the Royal Institution: The Influence of Faraday When Tyndall took up his post at the Royal Institution in 1853, Michael Faraday (1791–1867), the superintendent of the Institution and one of the most famous scientists in the world, became not only his valued friend but also his professional mentor. Faraday, like Tyndall, came from a working-class background; the son of a London blacksmith, he managed to get a job in the Royal Institution as a laboratory assistant on the strength of his notes on Humphry Davy’s lectures. From his lowly position as Davy’s assistant and occasional valet, Faraday rose to become the figurehead not only of the Royal Institution but of British science. Throughout his life he was a member of the Sandemanian church, an obscure sect that demanded active participation in the religious community, but Faraday never allowed his religion to conflict with his scientific work. His impact on both science and its popularization was colossal, by virtue of his talent as an experimentalist and his corresponding zeal to communicate the results of his experiments to the general public.75 When Tyndall began to lecture at the Royal Institution he had enormous shoes to fill, and he was well aware of both the challenge and


sides of Tyndall that were equally important to his philosophy of science:


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It was no mean ordeal, therefore, to which Tyndall was subjected when he was asked to give a “Friday evening” in 1852; but he captured his hearers so completely that his appointment to the Fullerian Professoriate of Physics, with the use of a laboratory such as he needed for the original work he loved, soon followed. And for more than thirty years he held his own. From first to last, the announcement of a Friday evening by him meant a crammed theatre.76

This success did not come without considerable worry on Tyndall’s part. Huxley marveled at the stress he felt before each lecture: “I used to suffer rather badly from ‘lecture-fever’ myself; but I never met with anyone to whom an impending discourse was the occasion of so much mental and physical disturbance, as it was to Tyndall.”77 In March 1854, Tyndall wrote in his journal, “Lectured at 3 o’clock. A bad headache. I lectured with the feeling of a man who was deliberately spilling out his life. Got through it well, however, and interested my audience.”78 Later in life, Tyndall learned to alleviate this stress somewhat by having a drink before lecturing—the chemist H. E. Roscoe claimed that he once asked for champagne.79 Clearly, however, in spite of his seemingly effortless success in continuing the popularity of the Royal Institution beyond Faraday’s era, Tyndall expended great thought and energy in his method of doing so. From their first meeting, Tyndall gave to Faraday the same heroworship that he had bestowed on Carlyle and Emerson. In October 1853 he wrote in his journal after a conversation with Faraday, “It is a sweet privilege to have such a man to reverence. So great and yet so childlike. I thank the gods for giving me the capacity to understand such a man.”80 One month later, he wrote, “Surely this man has strength, but it is coupled with a child-like kindness. Let me learn a lesson here. I love strength but let me not forget the possibility of uniting it with softness demonstrated by the character of Faraday.”81 Especially in his younger years, when his interest in philosophy dominated his intellectual life, Tyndall admired Faraday’s gentleness as much as his scientific talent. For Tyndall, Faraday’s character was another example of an ideal way of life. He wrote to Hirst in 1853, “Faraday writes to me with extreme kindness, it is a pleasure to be connected with him. He is a man one can trust. He is not only a man of science but a man of heart, honesty and truth, which between you and me, Tom, are better than all science.”82


the honor of succeeding Faraday as the figurehead of the Institution. Huxley wrote of the transition:


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I think that a great deal of Faraday’s week-day thoughts and persistency might be referred to his Sunday exercises. He drinks from a fount on Sunday which refreshes his soul for the week. I think I will try and do the same according to my own methods; for I believe the same source of power is substantially open to me and Faraday although we approach it by different routes. I think that what in the New Testament is called “faith” merits more attention from me than it has received.83

The statement speaks not only to Tyndall’s profound respect for the power of religious faith but also to his love of Faraday. Bolstered by this early admiration, Tyndall was deeply moved when Faraday later expressed affection and trust in him; he took Faraday’s good feeling as a mark of honor and an indication that he was worthy of his position as a scientist. In 1853 he recorded in his journal a conversation with Faraday that he felt had momentous import: Once he turned his face towards me radiant with kindness and at the same time chastened by something higher. Tyndall, he said. I should like you to love this Institution, to identify yourself with it. In the course of nature I shall soon pass away— and he said something else which seemed to indicate that he wished me to fill his place.84

Tyndall took this remark as the statement of a solemn duty, and he was equally moved when, two months later, Faraday publicly acknowledged their partnership in the lecture theater of the Institution: The theatre was filled. He walked toward the seat that he had reserved for himself and me, but right before the table he stopped, and commenced talking to me about the apparatus. “Have you seen that experiment?” he asked, pointing to a galvanometer. I saw his object instantly. There were 6 or 700 people before us from Dukes downward and there we stood before them all. It was a public recognition, a kind of baptismal act.85


The vast difference in the two men’s attitudes toward Christianity did not ruffle Tyndall in his admiration of Faraday; he attributed Faraday’s serene genius in part to his devout faith and believed that he himself could benefit from a similar habit of reverence:

Tyndall’s use of the word “baptismal” reveals his near-religious respect for Faraday and the importance he placed on Faraday’s support. Such a public demonstration of esteem from Faraday acted for


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Tyndall as a sign that he had truly arrived in the British world of science. Yet, though Tyndall revered Faraday as a scientist and as an exceptionally saintly man, their viewpoints diverged on a broad range of subjects. Part of the challenge for Tyndall in being Faraday’s protégé and, as time went on, his successor as the figurehead of the Royal Institution, was that his own vision of science and scientists in society differed profoundly from Faraday’s. In 1872 Vanity Fair noted the differences not only in the content of their lectures but in their lecturing style: As an experimentalist and also as an expounder, the mantle of Faraday is popularly understood to have fallen on Mr. Tyndall, who succeeded to his place at the Royal Institution. There his lectures make the delight of young and grown-up audiences in a scarcely less degree than those of his famous predecessor, though the riotous spirits and selfconscious arts of the brilliant junior are very different qualities from the modest and absorbed simplicity of Faraday.86

This division in both style and philosophy meant that, while no one doubted Tyndall’s popularity as a lecturer, his success in replacing Faraday as the figurehead of British science was not so universal. A clergyman named James McDougall, in an 1875 paper called “Present-Day Materialism” that he read to the Victoria Institute in London, describes Faraday and Tyndall as offering two irreconcilable scientific philosophies: Given equal knowledge, culture, and ability, the speculation of one scientist may be set against that of another. I will venture to do this. Not long ago Faraday was living, a fellow-labourer with Tyndall, and of at least equal eminence and authority as a scientist. Faraday was not only devoutly religious, but a diligent Christian preacher. Faraday, full of scientific lore, and a daily student of nature, ascribed the “first beginnings” of things to a God: a Being of power, wisdom, skill, foresight, and goodness infinite: a Being equal to the work of the Universe. Tyndall, the Materialist, ascribes the “first beginnings” of things to the things themselves, discerning in the particles of matter “promise and potency” equal to the work of the Universe. The two solutions of the awful mystery are thus before you— they are the speculations of two of the greatest of modern scientific men. Accept that which you prefer. For myself, I do not shrink from saying that I feel compelled, on every rational ground, to choose the solution of the religious experimenter, who places a Being of absolute power and intelligence above and before the raw material of the universe.87


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McDougall thus lays out a choice between the two professors and the two types of science they represented—though, as often happened, he misinterprets Tyndall in labeling him a materialist. Conflating the science with the scientists, McDougall and like-minded critics objected to Tyndall because of his deviation from the godly route of science that Faraday had forged before him, assuming materialism to be the only alternative to Christianity. But Tyndall himself felt no such unbridgeable division from Faraday, in spite of their philosophical disagreements. After Faraday’s death in 1867, Tyndall tried to explain his devotion to his mentor and the extent of Faraday’s genius in two lectures, which he published together in 1868 under the title Faraday as a Discoverer. This book, describing in affectionate detail Faraday’s scientific feats, demonstrates Tyndall’s attitude toward Faraday’s philosophy of science and highlights the contrasts between their visions of what a scientist should be. At the beginning of Faraday as a Discoverer, Tyndall explains that the book is not a traditional biography; rather he describes the life of Faraday through the lens of his scientific discoveries. As a result, there is a great deal of science in the book and many paragraphs that are simply Tyndall’s explanations of scientific phenomena. Yet, in spite of his disclaimer at the opening, Tyndall presents Faraday in a vivid, loving style bordering on the hagiographic. So intent is he on depicting the passion and excitement of Faraday’s discoveries that he often slips into the present tense in his descriptions: “And now theoretical questions rush in upon him. Is this new force a true repulsion, or is it merely a differential attraction?”88 Loving depictions of Faraday’s character crop up again and again in Tyndall’s narrative, each admiring and superlative: “He united vast strength with perfect flexibility”; “Underneath his sweetness and gentleness was the heat of a volcano”; “Pretence of all kinds, whether in life or in philosophy, was hateful to him”; “When he was in good health the question of his age would never occur to you. In the light and laughter of his eyes you never thought of his grey hairs.”89 In his final paragraph, Tyndall dubs Faraday a “Just and faithful knight of God,” emphasizing Faraday’s chivalrous commitment to justice and also his unswerving religious devotion.90 His closing description portrays Faraday as a paragon of goodness: “By some such natural process in the formation of this man, beauty and nobleness coalesced, to the exclusion of everything vulgar and low.” 91 Often Tyndall invokes the image of Faraday as an angelic child, sounding an almost paternal note, as if their roles had been




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reversed: he writes, concerning one of Faraday’s comments about making mistakes, “But is he not all the more admirable, through his ability to tone down and subdue that fire and that excitability, so as to render himself able to write thus as a little child?” Or on the topic of his lectures: “His delight in a soap-bubble was like that of a boy.” Later on, even more explicitly: “[B]ut let us observe the great Man-child when alone.” 92 Tyndall switches to awe when speaking of Faraday’s supernaturalseeming powers. In one of his breathless descriptions of a series of experiments, Tyndall writes that Faraday “plays like a magician with the earth’s magnetism,” and, in spite of Tyndall’s insistence on transparency in scientific method, he displays only admiration when he writes, “Amid much that is entangled and dark we have flashes of wondrous insight and utterances which seem less the product of reasoning than of revelation.” 93 Most vivid is an episode with one of Tyndall’s German colleagues: “[Faraday] is digging the shaft, guided by that instinct towards the mineral lode which was to him a rod of divination. ‘Er reicht die Wahrheit,’ said the lamented Kohlrausch, an eminent German, once in my hearing:— ‘He smells the truth.’ ” 94 Occasionally Tyndall expanded this image of Faraday “smelling the truth” to an explicit description of Faraday as a prophet: Faraday was more than a philosopher; he was a prophet, and often wrought by an inspiration to be understood by sympathy alone. The prophetic element in his character occasionally coloured and even injured the utterance of the man of science; but subtracting that element, though you might have conferred on him intellectual symmetry, you would have destroyed his motive force.95

Here one sees again Tyndall’s insistence on moral “inspiration” motivating intellectual achievement. At the end of the biography, when Tyndall describes Faraday’s gradual decline to death, his profound personal love for the man comes to the fore: The deep radiance, which in his time of strength flashed with such extraordinary power from his countenance, had subsided to a calm and kindly light, by which my latest memory of him is warmed and illuminated. I knelt one day beside him on the carpet and placed my hand upon his knee; he stroked it affectionately, smiled, and murmured, in a low soft voice, the last words that I remember as having been spoken to me by Michael Faraday.96


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In closing, Tyndall proclaims that Faraday’s greatness of character was too magnificent to be held by the boundaries of science: “He did not learn his gentleness in the world, for he withdrew himself from its culture; and still this land of England contained no truer gentleman than he. Not half his greatness was incorporate in his science, for science could not reveal the bravery and delicacy of his heart.” 97 Such an ending confirms what is manifest throughout the book—that Tyndall admired Faraday most for those traits that he himself often lacked: an inclination toward peace, modesty in manner, gentleness of temper, even devout Christian belief. Tyndall respected Faraday for his unshakable faith; indeed he describes that faith as being similar to what Tyndall himself felt about human spirituality: “He believed the human heart to be swayed by a power to which science or logic opened no approach, and right or wrong, this faith, held in perfect tolerance of the faiths of others, strengthened and beautified his life.” 98 Given the obvious sincerity of Tyndall’s admiration for Faraday’s character— especially Faraday’s childlike religious awe, which resembled Tyndall’s reverence for Alpine beauty and the mysteries of nature— as well as his promotion of Faraday’s reputation as a reclusive, saint-like figure, it at first seems paradoxical that Tyndall so ardently presented himself to the world as a pugnacious, fearless fighter for scientific influence on public policy and social issues. How did he reconcile the two images of the scientist, and why did he choose a path so different from Faraday’s? One reason behind his choice is evident in a passage toward the end of Faraday as a Discoverer: Let me say that it was mainly his and other friendships, precious to me beyond all expression, that caused me to value my position here [at the Royal Institution] more highly than any other that could be offered to me in this land. Nor is it for its honour, though surely that is great, but for the strong personal ties that bind me to it, that I now chiefly prize this place. You might not credit me were I to tell you how lightly I value the honour of being Faraday’s successor compared with the honour of having been Faraday’s friend. His friendship was energy and inspiration; his “mantle” is a burden almost too heavy to be borne.99



To Tyndall and doubtless to many of his other scientific colleagues, Faraday had been so stupendous in his role as the near-magic natural philosopher, the mystical High Priest of Nature, that he had, as it were, retired the role. Tyndall rightly recognized that, because of his own quite different personality traits, he could never hope to bear Faraday’s unique “mantle” with the same effect.


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More important, however, was the changing relationship between science and society— a relationship that Tyndall was determined to influence in his promotion of scientists as intellectual authorities. By the time Tyndall joined the Royal Institution in 1853, the London public’s relationship with science had strengthened, due in large part to Faraday’s Friday Evening Discourses. Faraday laid the groundwork for Tyndall’s mode of interacting with the members of society who frequented the Institution: regular public appearances, an insistence on clarity and simplicity, lectures designed for women and children as well as men, all calculated to inspire an interest in and appreciation for science. If Faraday had closed the door on the old-fashioned type of natural philosopher by fulfilling the role to its utmost, he had also opened the door to a close relationship between scientists and the public; he had introduced, both to the scientific community and to the general populace, the concept that science needs a public audience if it is to be fully explored and exploited. Though Faraday believed in the relationship between science and society, however, he relied on society to come to him rather than the other way around. Tyndall, in contrast, took the initiative into his own hands, determined to inculcate science into public life whether society wanted it or not. Both in character and in aim, Tyndall cast a wider net than Faraday had; where Faraday reined himself in for intensive research, Tyndall ventured outside the Royal Institution, throwing himself into social controversy and the limelight of public debate. At bottom, his goal of bringing science to the public held some similarity to Faraday’s, but he expressed this goal more explicitly in his actions and extended it further in his philosophy: he wanted the scientific mode of thought to become the norm not only for scientists but for society in general, and he knew that Faraday’s tradition of public lectures was not enough to establish science as the baseline of social and particularly educational policy. To achieve that goal, he demanded a place for scientists among the leading intellectuals of the day, and in seeking that place and opposing the influence of organized religion he ensured that his public reputation differed dramatically from Faraday’s.



Tyndall’s Own Philosophy of Science By the height of his career in the 1860s and 1870s, Tyndall had developed a complex but consistent philosophy of science that he promoted until his death in 1893. Having studied the works of Carlyle, found spiritual confirmation in the Alps of Emerson’s and Goethe’s poetic


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truth, and experienced firsthand Faraday’s combined commitment to religion and to science, Tyndall fashioned for himself a philosophy of his own, creating the image of a scientific Carlylean hero infused with Emersonian spirituality and the scientific honesty of Faraday. Tyndall integrated the varying philosophies of these men both in his vision of science as the best method of studying the natural world and in his corresponding belief that scientists were the most appropriate intellectual authorities for Victorian society. Tyndall’s philosophy was not always understood in all its nuances, nor did it always find approval or even tolerance. Because of his unorthodox blend of spirituality with hard facts, some critics misconstrued Tyndall’s opposition to theology as a perplexing contradiction of his stated belief in the religious instincts of mankind. Tyndall insisted that there was a close relationship between science and religion, in that both modes of thought played equally important roles in the human mind, yet he was adamant that those roles could and should be separated, that religion, though a potential motivator of intellectual activity, must be seen as purely emotional. Moreover, Tyndall insisted that neither science nor religion ought to claim absolute authority over the meaning of life, and that each instead ought to focus on what it could best explain—religion, the complexities of feeling; science, the phenomena of the natural world and the formulation of physical laws. Stephen S. Kim published a thorough examination of Tyndall’s religio-scientific philosophy in 1996, entitled John Tyndall’s Transcendental Materialism— a challenging title that he defends by examining the influence of transcendental theory and the idea of the unity of nature on Tyndall’s approach to religion and science. Kim makes the important point that Tyndall’s agnosticism was not of the same type as Huxley’s or Spencer’s because of his insistence on the need for reverence and religion in every individual’s life. In fact, one can make the argument, though Kim does not, that Tyndall was not an agnostic but instead a deist, rejecting organized religion rather than God. Regardless of labels, Kim’s book provides a helpful dissection of the strands of philosophy and belief that made up Tyndall’s own creed, and he makes the important point that Tyndall did not initially set out with the intention of shaping a philosophy in order to support science in society; his philosophy, in other words, was formed by personal beliefs rather than the demands of scientific popularization, though the necessity for scientific popularization was inherent in his vision of man’s relationship with nature.100




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As the traditional Christian culture and its major assumptions were seriously challenged by the more secular culture of “New Nature,” Tyndall and his colleagues fought to preserve both science and faith (scientific and religious cultures), which proved to be an impossible task. Consequently, many agnostic intellectuals, including Tyndall, eventually could not escape skepticism and despair.101

The idea that Tyndall battled in his final years with despair does not match the consistency with which Tyndall defended his philosophy in essays and lectures into the last decade of his life. Though in his youth he had struggled with his own Protestant upbringing and his declining faith in Christianity, when he at last arrived at an amalgamation of Carlylean, transcendental, and scientific philosophy, the evidence of his lectures, essays, and correspondence suggests a firm belief in that philosophy. Doubt had been assuaged; in Tyndall’s mind he had successfully reconciled the instinct for reverence and the need for rationality by believing in an unknowable, impersonal God whose purposes and ultimate methods of creating life and the universe would never be discoverable by humanity. Tyndall’s deistic beliefs rejected all possibility of certainty— either scientific or theological— where the mystery surrounding nature was concerned, and this was part of the reason that he so often engaged in debate on what many theologians viewed as their own ground: if no one could ever have an absolute knowledge of God, scientists had as much of a right to speculate on the matter as theologians. Fighting for the freedom of scientific discovery, Tyndall was also battling against the dogmatism of theology, and in promoting the reliability of science on questions of natural phenomena, he also argued the unreliability of theology on questions of religion. Given the complexity of Tyndall’s philosophy, as well as the troubled atmosphere of the Victorian era, when scientific theories were striking blows at some of the most fundamental religious convictions of the general populace, it is not surprising that his brand of science was often unwelcome and misinterpreted. Both the scientific community and the general public frequently failed to grasp the motivations behind Tyndall’s actions and were mystified by the incendiary and metaphysical comments of a man who claimed to be, first and foremost, a scientific researcher. These comments, however, arose from Tyndall’s conviction that science could not take its proper,


Kim’s analysis is insightful, but he ends with an argument that Tyndall’s philosophy resulted in crisis and doubt:


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dominant place in society until it had been freed from the restraints of orthodox theology. Having established a philosophy for himself that compartmentalized religion and science— and eliminated the usefulness of theology as an intellectual pursuit— he devoted his career to promoting that separation, in effect popularizing his own vision of humanity’s relationship with the natural world. The difficulties and successes of that campaign will be the focus of the next chapter.




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Tyndall and Theology The Definition and Boundaries of Science

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hroughout his career Tyndall fought against what he saw as the predominance of blind faith— according to Huxley, “the one unpardonable sin”1—in the British public. Having wrestled himself with the question of religious belief and the nature of God, he was determined to encourage in others a similar questioning of theological doctrine and to promote a reliance on science as the best authority on natural phenomena. His first opportunity to represent the scientific community on this issue came during his opening year at the Royal Institution in 1854, when he and Faraday initiated their lecture series on the scientific method in education.2 From that time forth, Tyndall regularly published essays and delivered speeches on matters connected with faith, the problems of religion, and the benefits of agnostic science over Christianity as an agent of investigation in the natural world. As Tyndall’s essays and addresses grew more antagonistic to established theology and the commonly held religious views of the day, the range of responses to his publications, which began with good-natured opposition, escalated over the course of three decades into angry treatises on Tyndall’s danger to society. One of the most important aspects of the debates over science and theology lay in the vying definitions of “science” within the lectures, articles, and pamphlets published by the debates’ various participants. Though often not explicitly discussed, the nature of science, what it encompassed and what it excluded, served as the crux at which Tyndall and his opponents battled; in that sense, the discourse of the debate and its epistemological convolutions became as important and


Chapter 3


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influential as the issues that were under discussion. The terminology and descriptive language in each pamphlet or lecture became crucial to the overall thrust of each participant’s contribution. Over the decades during which Tyndall took part in the debates, one can discern a variety of definitions of science being used, ranging from the broad idea of science as a form of knowledge, closely related to the French science or the German Wissenschaft, to the narrow definition of science as the collecting and collating of facts concerning the natural world, excluding theory, prediction, or implication. Tyndall himself inhabited the middle ground between these two extremes. He defined science as the observation and measurement of the natural world with a view toward formulating theories of natural law, by which the workings of the universe could be predicted and understood. Implicit in his definition of science was the conviction of the superiority of science thus defined to other forms of knowledge— at least insofar as it could serve as a framework of rational thought. In Tyndall’s view, science provided an objective route to factual truth, which contrasted with his view of theology as fundamentally subjective and falsely presented by many theologians as providing objectivity. Because Tyndall maintained that nature was surrounded by an impenetrable mystery, he protested against theology’s claim to absolute knowledge and, consequently, cultural authority. Tyndall and his colleagues were arguing with their opponents not only over the definition of science and the ownership of factual truth but also over science’s merits as a tool for interpreting and influencing society. Given the variety of possible stances on these issues, the complexity of the debate was immense. The majority of scientists in the debate defined science as excluding theology, but since many scientists were devout Christians, they often felt as much loyalty to theology as to science, and many regarded the two as fundamentally connected. Equally, some theologians argued that theology was a form of science, but other theologians argued for the separation of theology and science and opposed scientific intellectual dominance. There is also the issue of denomination. The term “theologian” is scarcely adequate to distinguish high church from low church, Anglican from Dissenter, even Protestant from Catholic. Tyndall, in fighting the social and cultural restraints of theology, tended not to differentiate between sects, with the notable exception of Roman Catholicism, for which he reserved a special hatred. Having grown up under the tutelage of a passionate Orangeman, he viewed Catholics as the worst of a bad lot: narrowminded, deluded, and outdated.3 This hostility, however, rarely reveals itself in his public speeches and




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essays as distinct from his overarching objections to theology of any kind. Because he was effectively fighting the established church, the most powerful social authority, most of the censure he received came from Anglicans and Scottish Presbyterians, though Unitarians often entered the fray. But, perhaps because Tyndall did not target any specific denomination, instead accusing “theology” and “theologians” in general of wrongfully claiming a knowledge of objective truth and obstructing the path of social progress, his opponents were also content for the most part to fight from the broad platform of “theology” against Tyndall’s “science.” The fact that this reductionist description of the conflict as a clearcut “war” between two sides was common in the discourse of the time becomes apparent when surveying the publications contributing to the debate. One explicit example of this military metaphor is a book published in 1876 by Andrew D. White, the first President of Cornell University, under the name The Warfare of Science. Tyndall provided a preface for the British edition in which he targeted the Roman Catholic Church as aiming to “place the sciences that have given us all our knowledge of this universe at the mercy of their hereditary foe.”4 Both the advocates of “the sciences” and those who supported their “foe,” the church, were aiming to gain influence over the culture within the contested boundaries between science and religion, and both sides used terminology and conceptual definitions as prime weapons in the fight. For several decades after the end of the Victorian era, the idea of a war between science and religion was an accepted trope of nineteenthcentury history. But— as discussed in the introduction—historians such as Frank Turner, Bernard Lightman, and Robert M. Young in the latter half of the twentieth century questioned this contemporary evaluation of the debates, and the Victorian war between science and religion has come to be viewed rather as an intricate web of interconnected, though sometimes conflicting, loyalties and beliefs. My aim in this chapter is not to oppose this viewpoint but rather to use a different perspective, by revisiting the language used by the Victorians themselves and analyzing the debate over science and theology in light of the discourse employed to discuss the issues. I argue that in Tyndall’s case, and in the case of his many allies and opponents, the debate was discussed and envisioned as an antagonism between two sides, but that the prime object of that fight was the form and nature of science rather than the content of any particular discovery or scientific theory. The struggle, in other words, was epistemological in nature, focusing on the overarching relationship between two fields


T Y N D A L L A N D T H E O L O GY


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rather than on the specific content of one or the other. Unlike the earlier skirmishes over the age of the earth or the conflict concerning evolution, in which scientific theories directly opposed theological doctrine, Tyndall’s own research in physics held no immediately obvious contradictions of biblical teaching. Faraday, his friend and mentor, offered an ideal example of a physicist who throughout his career managed to keep his devout religious life separate from his scientific work. Yet Tyndall returned again and again to what he himself described as the contested ground between science and theology. Frank Turner rightly asserts that part of the aim of the scientific naturalists in promoting this conflict was to establish themselves as legitimate professionals, just as Robert M. Young was correct in asserting that there was a great deal of religion in their anticlericalism.5 This chapter, however, argues that by the 1870s the debates had come to focus on the definitions and intellectual boundaries of science, and that this question of definition held as much importance for Tyndall and his colleagues in their campaign for scientific authority as the more practical issues of funding and professionalization. And though Tyndall did not object to religion, he, like Huxley, was rigidly antagonistic to theology. The passions elicited on all sides arose from a conviction that the nature of knowledge itself, the framework on which society was built, had come into question. The origin of truth and the ownership of rationality and method became objects in the struggle, and the ground over which the opponents clashed included the conflicting boundaries of science, theology, philosophy, morality, education, and metaphysics. The militaristic language of the Victorian debates is used in this chapter not with a blind acceptance of the contemporary description of the conflict, but in recognition of the reality of that conflict in the eyes of its participants. For Tyndall, his colleagues, and their opponents, the issues at stake truly merited lifelong battles, and the aim of the chapter in exploring Tyndall’s battle is to examine the epistemological underpinnings of his philosophy, which served as a central focus in the controversy over the legitimacy of scientists rather than theologians as the predominant authorities in nineteenth-century society.



Tyndall’s Conception of the Nature and Boundaries of Science Tyndall defined science to his own satisfaction early in his career and supported that definition throughout his life. Nevertheless, in making


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that definition he acknowledged that he was departing from the idea of science that had predominated before the time of his own career. In his essay “Professor Virchow and Evolution” in 1879, he writes, “That definitions should change as knowledge advances is in accordance both with sound sense and scientific practice.”6 Tyndall considered himself, as an advancer of knowledge, entitled to revise the definition of science and to publicize his definition. Thus, in almost every lecture, essay, and review, he reminded his audience what he meant by the term “science.” At the beginning of the Belfast Address in 1874, he declared: An impulse inherent in primeval man turned his thoughts and questionings betimes towards the sources of natural phenomena. The same impulse, inherited and intensified, is the spur of scientific action today. Determined by it, by a process of abstraction from experience we form physical theories which lie beyond the pale of experience, but which satisfy the desire of the mind to see every natural occurrence resting on a cause.7

Science, according to Tyndall, is the study of the natural world for the purpose of forming theories explaining the causes and functions of natural phenomena. Though relying on the gathering and interpretation of empirical evidence—the “process of abstraction from experience”— scientific research aims for the formulation of laws predicting and explaining phenomena that “lie beyond the pale of experience”: the movement of planets, the formation of the earth, the evolution of species, the inner workings of the body. Throughout his career Tyndall described science in different ways, emphasizing different aspects of the field depending on his varying aims; but his discussions, no matter how wide-ranging, always stood on this same definition. What then was not science, according to Tyndall, and where should the boundary of science be drawn? This was an issue to which Tyndall returned again and again. In 1877, in his address entitled “Science and Man” given to the Birmingham and Midland Institute, Tyndall discussed the problem of consciousness, one of his favorite subjects because it was especially thorny for scientific researchers. His description of the point at which the researcher must trade in science for metaphysics indicates not only the falsity of the accusations against Tyndall for materialism but also the uncertainty that he himself claimed to be present at the margins of science:


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[W]e can present to our minds no picture of the process whereby consciousness emerges, either as a necessary link or as an accidental byproduct of this series of actions. Yet it certainly does emerge—the prick


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of a pin suffices to prove that molecular motion can produce consciousness. The reverse process of the production of motion by consciousness is equally unpresentable to the mind. We are here, in fact, upon the boundary line of the intellect, where the ordinary canons of science fail to extricate us from our difficulties. If we are true to these canons, we must deny to subjective phenomena all influence on physical processes. Observation proves that they interact, but in passing from one to the other, we meet a blank which mechanical deduction is unable to fill. Frankly stated, we have here to deal with facts almost as difficult to seize mentally as the idea of a soul. And if you are content to make your “soul” a poetic rendering of a phenomenon which refuses the yoke of ordinary physical laws, I, for one, would not object to this exercise of ideality.8

Tyndall was not a dogmatist; he was more willing than his opponents acknowledged to grant that mysteries affect our daily lives—indeed he asserted that theologians should also respect these mysteries as unsolvable. Herbert Spencer, in his 1893 essay “The Late Professor Tyndall,” wrote that Tyndall was “much more conscious than physicists usually are, that every physical inquiry, pursued to the end, brings us down to metaphysics, and leaves us face to face with an insoluble problem.”9 Nevertheless, Tyndall was adamant in denying those mysteries the name of science; they lay, as he said, beyond “the boundary line of the intellect,” over which science held a monopoly. As Spencer put it, “[I]n him the consciousness that there here exists a door which, though open, science cannot pass through, if not always present, was ever ready to emerge.”10 There was nothing wrong, in Tyndall’s view, about discussing the human soul, as long as all the participants in the discussion recognized it as a figurative rather than a scientific term: “[M]etaphysics will be welcomed when it abandons its pretensions to scientific discovery and consents to be ranked as a kind of poetry.”11 Thus, though Tyndall did not believe science could explain everything, he did believe that anything beyond science could not be the subject of intellectual investigation. Science owned reason; the rest was poetry. Yet Tyndall’s vision of the scientist, as opposed to science itself, included a respect for the arts equal to the necessary passion for science. A true scientist, he felt, was one who drew strength from both sides of the division, employing in the search for rational truth imagination as well as intellect. In 1888, speaking for science at an annual banquet for the Royal Academy, he discussed the kinship between the artist and the scientist:



Rules and principles are profitable and necessary for the guidance of the growing artist and for the artist full-grown; but rules and principles, I take it, just as little as geology and botany, can create the artist.


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Guidance and rule imply something to be guided and ruled. And that indefinable something which baffles all analysis, and which when wisely guided and ruled emerges in excellence, is individual genius, which, to use familiar language, is “the gift of God.” (Cheers.) In like manner all the precepts of Bacon, linked together and applied in one great integration, would fail to produce a complete man of science. In this respect Art and Science are identical— that to reach their highest outcome and achievement they must pass beyond knowledge and culture, which are understood by all, to inspiration and creative power, which pass the understanding even of him who possesses them in the highest degree. (Cheers.)12

The artist and scientist, then, though divided in their purposes—“the one ever seeking to interpret and express the beauty of the universe, the other ever searching for its truth”13 — are united in Tyndall’s vision by their possession of “inspiration and creative power,” which is necessary to fuel the rationality at the heart of the scientific pursuit of truth. Equally, Tyndall’s view of theologians, though he spoke out so vehemently against their position as social authorities, was far from being wholly negative. In a letter to Huxley in 1869, he wrote: The fact is I enjoy already as much liberty as I care to use, and I do not care a straw how the theologians use theirs. They are powerless and I am free, and that is quite enough. It is curious how one’s feelings vary towards them: Some of them I could hew to pieces before the Lord in Gilgal: but then others are so gentle and noble; and their gentleness and nobleness is so intertwined with their theological wrappings. The problem of the future will be to detach the one from the other without killing the good.14

Tyndall showed great respect throughout his life toward those religious men who he felt demonstrated a genuine nobility of spirit— most notably Michael Faraday. Placing a profound importance on reverence and spirituality in his own philosophy, Tyndall admired those who organized their lives around those feelings. In fact, toward the end of his life, as he wrote in a letter to Hirst, he often felt more drawn to the clergy than to the secular thinkers of the day:


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Besides there is one thing that I feel probably more than either you or Huxley; and that is the goodness, tenderness, even loftiness of heart, that have got mixed up with these beggarly elements of Christian doctrine. I have been many times forced to put before myself the question:— Given the intellectual accuracy of many of our


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This aspect of Tyndall’s philosophy was often lost completely on his detractors, who frequently portrayed him as a purely antagonistic force operating to destroy religion. Tyndall’s battle against theology was in fact based on his objection to clerical authority in society and to theology’s claims to intellectual legitimacy as an objective science, rather than to the religious instincts on which it was based. As for what science should do with its exclusive ownership of the intellect, and how much authority it ought to have in society, Tyndall was equally consistent: in contrast with Huxley, whose eventual wavering on this point can be seen in Evolution and Ethics (1893), Tyndall over the decades became more explicit and unyielding in his statement of the extent to which science should possess cultural authority; in doing so he was articulating views that had been embedded in his speeches and essays from the beginning of his career. In 1868, addressing the Mathematical and Physical Section of the British Association at Norwich on “Scientific Materialism,” he gave essentially a summary of his aims for science in society: Partly through mathematical and partly through experimental research, physical science has, of late years, assumed a momentous position in the world. Both in a material and in an intellectual point of view it has produced, and it is destined to produce, immense changes—vast social ameliorations, and vast alterations in the popular conception of the origin, rule, and governance of natural things. By science, in the physical world, miracles are wrought, while philosophy is forsaking its ancient metaphysical channels, and pursuing others which have been opened, or indicated, by scientific research. This must become more and more the case as philosophical writers become more deeply imbued with the methods of science, better acquainted with the facts which scientific men have established, and with the great theories which they have elaborated.16


Freethinkers, plus the ribaldry to which they give expression in Secular journals [ . . . ] Given, I say, such personages on the one side, and others known to me as believers in the creation of Adam and the resurrection of Christ on the other, I confess that I can take the latter to my heart, while I push the former far away from it.15

The seeds of all Tyndall’s grand schemes for science lie in this paragraph. One finds science changing society for the better, transforming the common view of the natural world, even of the “governance of natural things”; one finds philosophy turning to scientific research


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rather than metaphysics as an avenue of investigation— a statement full of implications against theology that in later speeches Tyndall did not hesitate to make explicit; he speaks of writers becoming imbued with the methods of science and with scientific facts, indicating his intention for science to become, especially through its increasing importance in the educational system, the framework of thought in society. Perhaps most controversially for the time, Tyndall describes miracles in this address as “wrought by science in the physical world,” removing religion from the equation. His mention of miracles at that particular juncture was not incidental. Miracles were the subject of much debate in the 1860s, and Tyndall, as can be seen in his other writings from that period, was not willing to back down from his position on the nature of any religious phenomena—miracles, prayer, special providences— impinging on what he viewed as science’s territory, namely the workings of the natural world. The 1860s: Prayers, Miracles, and the Science of Theology Beginning in the 1850s and continuing into the 1870s, one recurring debate in the public forum of journals and newspapers concerned the physical efficacy of prayer. Participants in the debate contested the extent to which individualized prayers to God could elicit a specific physical effect—the abatement of rain, the lessening of cholera epidemics, the saving of cattle. Perhaps the most publicized incident for which clergymen claimed prayer as the operative solution was the recovery of the Prince of Wales from a dangerous illness in late 1871, after a request had been issued for prayers from all the faithful. Subsequently a national day of thanksgiving was proclaimed, a commemorative plaque was put up in St. Paul’s Cathedral, and, understandably, many members of the medical profession felt they had been inadequately credited for science’s role in saving the Prince. Frank Turner has written an article on this event and the preceding debate, entitled “Rainfall, Plagues, and the Prince of Wales,” in which he traces the ups and downs of the controversy from the 1850s through the early 1870s.17 Turner argues that the issue at stake was not only the efficacy of prayer but also, and more significantly, the underlying question of cultural authority: who should have the right to claim responsibility for rescuing the nation from its minor disasters, the clergy or the scientists? The culmination of this question came in a challenge issued by the London surgeon Sir Henry Thompson, published anonymously in




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the Contemporary Review in 1872. Thompson suggested that, to test the physical efficacy of prayer in a truly scientific way, all members of the Church of England should be instructed to pray for the inmates of a particular hospital for a certain span of years, at the end of which the hospital’s mortality rates could be measured against those of other hospitals who had not received the help of nationwide praying. The proposal, which was never carried out, though it sparked a renewal of controversy, was framed in a letter from Tyndall, who was responsible for its publication, and he prefaced it with a brief endorsement of the plan, approving its aim to “confer quantitative precision on the action of the Supernatural in Nature.”18 Tyndall had been involved in the debate on prayer from the early 1860s, arguing that the proponents of prayer must submit to scientific investigation if they claimed that prayer could affect the natural world. Using similar arguments, he also engaged in a variety of debates touching on the larger issues of faith and the authority of theology on the public mind. His essays include “Science and the ‘Spirits’ ” (1864), a satirical indictment of séances and the charlatans who ran them; “Reflections on Prayer and Natural Law” (1861–5), which, in its final form in Fragments of Science, comprised a collection of smaller articles, most written for a debate taking place in the Pall Mall Gazette about the efficacy of prayer as a response to an outbreak of cholera; “Vitality” (1865), on the relationship between life and matter; and “Miracles and Special Providences” (1867), written for The Fortnightly Review in response to Eight Lectures on Miracles, a book published in 1865 by J. B. Mozley, Oxford’s regius professor of divinity.19 In each of these works, as well as in his 1868 address on “Scientific Materialism” at Norwich, Tyndall’s stance on the position of theology in relation to science is explicitly laid out, and his attitude is unmistakable—in “Reflections on Prayer and Natural Law,” Tyndall wrote, addressing the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette: “Both your correspondents seem to think that scientific discovery may be the result of prayer. If this be believed, I will only say that the bearing of theology towards science at the present day is as unpardonable as it is unaccountable.”20 In “Miracles and Special Providences,” arguing against Mozley’s claim regarding miracles— that they are possible, given that science can tell us nothing about the future, only about the past, an idea effectively negating the viability of scientific laws—Tyndall declares that religion is “an affair of the heart” but that physical occurrences must be judged by “the dry light of the intellect alone.”21 He goes so far as to compare Mozley with Dr. Frankenstein, describing




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Mozley’s creation as “a monster thus evoked that we see stalking abroad, in the degrading spiritualistic phenomena of the present day.”22 Having excoriated Mozley’s use of evidence as an “incongruous mixture of proof and trust” that is “fraught with danger [ . . . ] to the indiscriminate audience which Mr. Mozley addresses,”23 he scornfully tells Mozley, “Let us not play fast and loose with the miraculous,”24 and warns him that science is a “fortress of adamant,” not a “house of clay,” and that it is thus equipped to “bear the buffetings of the theological storms to which it is periodically exposed.”25 Many clergymen as well as scientists entered this fray, and not all of them were in disagreement with Tyndall. Baden Powell was one of the most well-known clerics who denied miracles; in his contribution to Essays and Reviews (1860), “On the Study of the Evidences of Christianity,” he asserted the inviolacy of natural law, arguing that any alleged miracle must be either traceable to physical laws, in which case it is not supernatural, or regarded as a sacred inspiration and thus not susceptible to rational analysis.26 His essay leaves no room for doubt: “In nature and from nature, by science and by reason, we neither have nor can possibly have any evidence of a Deity working miracles;—for that, we must go out of nature and beyond reason.”27 In Powell’s view, an intelligent belief in the Christian God necessitated a belief in a rational universe, governed by a system of universal laws— something that Tyndall also claimed to be fundamental in understanding nature. The clergyman Charles Kingsley, famed for his novels and his love of controversy, argued that the outbreak of cholera in 1854 must be viewed as an hygienic rather than a moral problem, to be dealt with using reform and scientific research—in his view, the tools of God’s goodness—rather than prayer. Discussing the scientific advances made since the last outbreak of cholera, he asked, “What more complete stultification, then, of all which Providence has been teaching us in the last sixteen years, could have been seen devised, than a fresh national fast, to ask Him to do that for us, which He has already taught us to do for ourselves?”28 Similarly Tyndall’s friend Arthur Stanley, Dean of Westminster Abbey, felt deeply uncomfortable about presiding over a day of humiliation in March of 1866, ordered by the Bishop of London in response to an epidemic felling hundreds of the nation’s cattle. Writing to Tyndall, Stanley confided that he considered the day of prayer “a mere paganism” and asked for advice.29 Tyndall replied that he hoped Stanley would “not pray as others will for the staying of this plague, but will ask on the contrary for strength of heart and clearness of mind to meet it manfully and




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fight against it intelligently.”30 Consequently, Stanley’s prayer on the day in question described the cattle plague as “God’s own stimulus to the activity of those scientific researchers by which His supreme will in the works and laws of nature was made known to us”— a message that was anathema to many of his fellow Anglicans.31 Tyndall was delighted by Stanley’s decision and by those likeminded clergymen who promoted scientific discovery and questioned a wholesale belief in miracles and the physical efficacy of prayer. He wrote in Mountaineering in 1861, later reprinting the passage in “Reflections on Prayer and Natural Law”: Such men do service to public character, by encouraging a manly and intelligent conflict with the real causes of disease and scarcity, instead of a delusive reliance on supernatural aid. But they also have a value beyond this local and temporary one. They prepare the public mind for changes, which though inevitable, could hardly, without such preparation, be wrought without violence.32

Knowing how venomous many of his theological opponents could be, and understanding the influence that clergymen wielded over the general populace, Tyndall was grateful to those who could support, if only in part, his promotion of science as the best weapon with which to battle the problems of society. In “Vitality,” broaching the highly sensitive issue of the origin of life, Tyndall put forward the first public defence of his idea that all matter holds the potential for life, making such inflammatory statements as the claim that since organic matter can be reduced to inorganic matter, the reverse must also be possible, and describing life “as a wave which in no two consecutive moments of its existence is composed of the same particles.”33 Not surprisingly, such claims, denying as they did the God-given permanence of human life and the divine origin of life in general, were alarming and offensive to many people, both clerics and laymen. Tyndall hoped by discussing his ideas publicly—which he did throughout his career—to replace fear with understanding. At the end of “Vitality” he pleads for the tolerance of the public: “The sooner the public dread is abolished with reference to such questions the better for the cause of truth.”34 Perhaps because Tyndall’s audience did not fully comprehend what he was arguing, “Vitality,” at the time of its initial appearance, did not provoke the wave of opposition that the same ideas elicited in the 1870s; in fact the essay did not garner nearly as much attention as his 1868 address on “Scientific




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I thought an attempt to give you even a brief and sketchy illustration of the manner in which scientific thinkers regard this problem [the mechanism of living things], would not be uninteresting to you on the present occasion; more especially as it will give me occasion to say a word or two on the tendencies and limits of modern science; to point out the region which men of science claim as their own, and where it is mere waste of time to oppose their advance; and also to define, if possible, the bourne between this and that other region, to which the questionings and yearnings of the scientific intellect are directed in vain.35

Tyndall thus acknowledges explicitly that there is a limit beyond which science, the objective investigation of fact, cannot reach, but critics of the lecture concentrated on Tyndall’s discussion of materialism and on his implication that science could explain life better than theology could. The responses to this address and to Tyndall’s earlier essays on spiritual and faith-related topics tended to focus on Tyndall’s denial of the possible use of the intellect in theological studies—in effect his denial of theology as a science. This was partly because Tyndall was examining issues claimed by theologians as within their purview; he was trying to undermine theology’s credibility on the questions of the efficacy of prayer and miracles by arguing that Christianity, lacking scientific method and the reliability of impartial evidence, could not affect or even understand the workings of the natural world. His critics, rather than denigrating Tyndall on religious grounds with terms like “blasphemer” and “atheist,” as many did in later years, tried instead to regain the credibility he denied them by offering a different definition of science, one that included rather than excluded theological pursuits. A fervent anti-secularist, the Rev. James M’Cann, in an 1866 collection of sermons called The Inter-Relations of Prayer, Providence, and Science, being a Reply to an Article by Professor Tyndall in the Fortnightly Review, declared that religion and the study of the natural world were inextricably joined. “Is the science of our antagonists true or false?” he asks. “If true, our theology must be false, as true science and true theology never oppose each other.”36 The idea of “true” versus “false” science brings to the fore the importance of definition; not surprisingly, in M’Cann’s case “true science” is one that supports the validity of theology as an intellectual pursuit:


Materialism,” in which Tyndall discussed science’s region of influence and its boundaries:

As Christianity and nature are, however, children of the same parent, there is not any reason why the study of the one should prevent belief


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in the other, but every reason why the two should go hand in hand. [ . . . ] The sincere, unprejudiced, unbiased student, the more he studies, will the more deeply feel that without the christian’s faith, the scholar’s learning will prove unable to supply the yearnings and aspirations of his higher nature. He most aids the one who most thoroughly understands and receives the other. That, therefore, which God has joined together let not man put asunder.37

M’Cann uses the term “nature,” rather than “science,” in pairing the idea with Christianity, and by doing so he broadens the field, answering the question he had posed concerning the nature of science with a general rather than a specific definition; he links science with the natural world but avoids the issues of investigation and interpretation, which Tyndall placed as matters of primary importance. He then refers to the “student” and the “scholar,” terms that again broaden the field of science to the pursuit of knowledge, which can include not only “nature” but “Christianity.” Interestingly, the well-known financier and Quaker William Fowler, MP for Cambridge, responded to Tyndall’s critique of Mozley’s work, arguing on similar lines to M’Cann. The fact that two such different men— one now entirely obscure, the other prominent at the time and thereafter—both published contributions to the debate on miracles shows how much public interest the issue received and how broad a spectrum of people considered the question of science and religion. Fowler wrote: Professor Tyndall, for instance, in spite of all his attainments and all his great experience in scientific research, seems to be in this state of mind [of refusal to learn], for he asserts in terms, as I understand him, that magic and miracles are not “matters for ordinary evidence” (p. 659). [ . . . ] There seems here to be an absence of that waiting recipient state of mind which one expects from a distinguished philosopher to whom the world is much indebted. This is not the attitude in which he stands when interrogating nature. He seems to forget that there are moral as well as physical regions in the universe where discoveries have to be made, where man needs to be taught by his great Creator, and where the mode of teaching may be, for aught he knows, quite different from that which is required in other matters.38



Both the “moral” and “physical” regions of the universe, Fowler claims, deserve the investigation of rational examiners, for they are equal in validity, if not identical in procedure. This is a far cry from Tyndall’s dismissal of the moral region as “an affair of the heart.” In one of his footnotes Fowler sarcastically remarks, “It certainly seems


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rather hard that the poor ignorant theologian may not even take a look at nature except through the Professor’s spectacles.”39 Yet, in a way, what he is asking is to do just that: to use the spectacles of “science,” as he defines it—namely the gathering of knowledge, the “making of discoveries”— as a legitimate tool for examining theological questions. The core of the matter is whether or not “scientific” spectacles would function in a spiritual context: Tyndall argued no, Fowler and his fellow critics yes. The idea that theology was one science among many was by no means a new one. John Henry Newman, in an 1852 lecture on “Theology a Branch of Knowledge,” part of his larger series delivered in Dublin on “University Teaching,” argued exactly that: “If God is more than Nature, Theology claims a place among the sciences. [ . . . ] Religious doctrine is knowledge, in as full a sense as Newton’s doctrine is knowledge. University Teaching without Theology is simply unphilosophical. Theology has at least as good a right to claim a place there as Astronomy.”40 For Newman, religious doctrine was indisputable, a set of facts to be interpreted and analyzed in the same way that one would interpret and analyze the natural world. This was fundamentally opposed to Tyndall’s view of theology’s relationship to science, and it was one that many theologians used in refuting Tyndall’s arguments. Joseph Taylor Goodsir, a Scottish Presbyterian minister following the debate, gave a sermon in response to Tyndall’s 1868 address in Norwich, in which he discusses the definition of science as a term applicable to more than one type of knowledge: Here all that lies on the metaphysical and spiritual side of “the bourn” is spoken of as a mystery, which may have power over man, but that merely on a basis of feeling, not of knowledge. Now this we cannot admit. It must be remembered that there is knowledge and knowledge, or rather sciences and sciences. [ . . . ] To refuse the name of science, then, to metaphysical and spiritual knowledge because it does not present a material or physical basis, is still more unreasonable than to refuse the name to logic or arithmetic. More unreasonable, I say, because while the latter need only by admission purely abstract and notional materials to conduct their investigations on, the former assert, on the ground of certain facts and powers admitted to be as real and important as any in the physical world, that they have realities, yea, the very fountain and groundwork of all other, even of physical, realities as their subject-matter.41



The key question in this passage lies not only in the definition of “science” but in the definition of “knowledge.” To know that one feels a


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certain way is, undeniably, a form of knowledge, but is it quantifiable data to which one can apply theories and predictive laws? Tyndall would argue that a knowledge that is not quantifiable, not subject to controlled experimentation, ought not to count as science. Goodsir, broadening “science” and “knowledge” to their most general definitions, argues that physics and metaphysics ought to be thought of as equal branches of one intellectual pursuit. Tyndall, by arguing that any “scientific” support of miracles was a contradiction in terms, in effect denied theology the intellectual legitimacy and objectivity that came with adopting the label of science. His theological opponents asked for the name, or at least the legitimacy, of scientific investigation, in that they were pursuing a form of knowledge. On all sides of the issue, the participants agreed that, rightly or wrongly, theology had possessed this legitimacy of being a pursuit of knowledge— a science in its most general sense of “a branch of learning”—for hundreds of years, but Tyndall refused to rescind his and his colleagues’ new and exclusive claim to the legitimacy of science; the term implied, by Tyndall’s new definition, the highest authority of knowledge of the natural world and thus, by extension, the highest intellectual authority over human society, which was a product of that natural world. Tyndall claimed, as he later put it in 1876, that the theologians were no better than long-term squatters on a piece of land to which they had no title.42 The Early 1870s and the First Publication of Fragments of Science In the first few years of the 1870s, one can see the beginnings of a shift in the nature of the debate between Tyndall and his theological opponents. Whereas before Tyndall had been accused of denying a form of scientific authority to theologians, in the 1870s many theologians began to claim that Tyndall was crossing a boundary into areas that remained under the control of the church; Tyndall, therefore, was accused of overstepping his place and angling for an authority rightly belonging to theology. Tyndall himself continued to make the same arguments he had put forward in the 1860s, though with every new speech and article he became more insistent on the authority of science over all aspects of the natural world. He pushed more and more against the boundaries of science’s sphere, taking with each essay and lecture a bit more ground as science’s own. In 1870 he gave a lecture to the Mathematical and Physical Section of the British Association entitled “The Scientific




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Use of the Imagination,” emphasizing the importance of vision and inspiration in science. Arguably, by asserting that scientists ought to use their imaginations to engage with nature, he was supporting the scientific use of something closer to feeling than to rationality; but he never neglected the importance of using analysis and experimentation to confirm what imagination might suggest as possibility. His critics, in any case, were more worried at his suggestion—first framed in “Vitality”—that life and matter were connected, joined since the earliest stages of evolution (itself an inflammatory subject) and, in figurative terms, “two opposite faces of the self-same mystery.”43 Tyndall asked, attempting to soften the blow of this radical idea, “Is it not probable that our repugnance to the idea of primeval union between spirit and matter might be considerably abated?”44 However, while science might make a supportable claim over the investigation of matter, spirit was the meat and drink of theology; Tyndall’s idea of a link between the two, which could serve as a bridge by which science might come to reign over spirit, caused severe agitation among the theologians—for if spirit was inherent in matter, then it too became part of the “natural world” to which science, in Tyndall’s definition, laid exclusive claim. Tyndall concluded his lecture on “The Scientific Use of the Imagination” by saying that he had led his audience “to the outer rim of speculative science”45; many theologians argued that in this and other lectures, he led them right over the rim onto forbidden ground. In 1872, Tyndall contributed yet another article to the debates on the efficacy of prayer with the essay “On Prayer as a Form of Physical Energy,” in which he reiterated his conviction that prayer had no place in the quantifiably investigable realm: It is under this aspect alone that the scientific student, so far as I represent him, has any wish to meddle with prayer. Forced upon his attention as a form of physical energy, or as the equivalent of such energy, he claims the right of subjecting it to those methods of examination from which all our present knowledge of the physical universe is derived. And if his researches lead him to a conclusion adverse to its claims [ . . . ] he contends only for the displacement of prayer, not for its extinction. He simply says, physical nature is not its legitimate domain.46



Theologians, according to Tyndall, could not accept the proof that scientific analysis offered against the physical efficacy of prayer: “[W]hile science cheerfully submits to this ordeal [of experiment], it seems impossible to devise a mode of verification of their theories


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which does not arouse resentment in theological minds.”47 Thus Tyndall not only argued that theologians and the subjects of theology— prayers, providence, miracles—had no place under the name of science; he also claimed that the theologians themselves, when pressed, objected to the use of the logical reasoning that they professed to include in their definition of theology. Alongside or perhaps in response to these more dramatic claims of what belonged to science and what did not, Tyndall’s opponents began to change their tactics. They focused on Tyndall’s claim that what they considered to be religious matters—the fate of the soul, the potential of life in matter, the nature of free will—were topics to be discussed (and often dismissed) by scientists rather than by theologians. Such a claim, they argued, was little more than an aggressive bid for territory rightfully theirs, and they assumed an indignantly defensive position opposing it. Woven increasingly into the ensuing debates, which grew more and more heated over the 1870s and 1880s, lurked the question of social influence and authority. Tyndall, by claiming such topics as his own, also claimed the attention and interest of society; in his lectures and essays he fought explicitly for the greater reach and influence of science in society at the expense of theology’s authority. The rising objections to Tyndall’s hold on the public were sparked in part by the first appearance in 1871 of Tyndall’s Fragments of Science for Unscientific People, in which the majority of his previous essays, reviews, and lectures were collected and sold to the general public. The gathering of all his controversial statements into one book reinforced the radical nature of his message—namely, trust scientists rather than preachers when it comes to the natural world— and, unfortunately for his opponents, the book became a bestseller, reaching its ninth edition by 1896. In 1872, W. J. Irons, Oxford graduate and prebendary of St. Paul’s, prepared a review of Fragments of Science to be delivered at a meeting of the Victoria Institute. This society, subtitled the Philosophical Society of Great Britain and still in existence today, was founded in 1865 to support the connection between religion and science.48 It deserves a brief examination in itself, first because its mere existence speaks to the range of stances in the science/religion debate, and second because the terms of its foundation offer a revealing mix of scientific and theological language. The “Objects of the Victoria Institute” are described as “of the highest importance both to Religion and Science.”49 The first Object is “To investigate fully and impartially the most important questions of Philosophy and Science, but more especially those which




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bear upon the great truths revealed in Holy Scripture, with the view of reconciling any apparent discrepancies between Christianity and Science.”50 Already science holds “questions” while Holy Scripture holds “truths,” a contrast in definition that would have been viewed with skepticism by Tyndall and his colleagues. The list of Objects goes on to include the aims of translating European scientific works, providing a reading room for members, giving and publishing scientific papers, and instituting public lectures. The most interesting Object in terms of its language, however, is the third: To consider the mutual bearings of the various scientific conclusions arrived at in the several distinct branches into which Science is now divided, in order to get rid of contradictions and conflicting hypotheses, and thus promote the real advancement of true Science; and to examine and discuss all supposed scientific results with reference to final causes, and the more comprehensive and fundamental principles of Philosophy proper, based upon faith in the existence of one Eternal God, who in His wisdom created all things very good.51

The melding in this paragraph of scientific language (“scientific conclusions,” “conflicting hypotheses,” “scientific results”) with the language of religion (“faith in the existence of one Eternal God, who in His wisdom created all things very good”) would have seemed incongruous and unscientific to Tyndall; according to his conception of science, such a mixture would, in effect, be the confusion of two different and irreconcilable components of life, one objective and the other subjective. But to members of the Victoria Institute, this very melding showed their commitment to what they called “true Science,” in which religion and science served as two parts of the same intellectual field.52 Irons, as a published author and Bampton lecturer at Oxford in 1870, was one of the Victoria Institute’s most respected members. He had already delivered reviews there of Darwin’s Origin of Species and Mill’s Essay on Theism. In his review of Fragments of Science he argues that Tyndall, in many of his essays, transgressed onto territory belonging to the theologians, forgetting his place as a scientist because he also forgot that theologians, like scientists, were scholars and intellectuals worthy of respect. Irons advocates a separate but equal policy between theologians and scientists, with the requirement that both be considered as students of science:



The real student of physical science, for instance, is engaged in examining the facts of the outer world, observing their arrangement,


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ascertaining what seem to be general laws, and defining specific tendencies. The student of moral science, on the other hand, whether as philosopher or theologian, has to do with the facts of the inner sphere of human consciousness, the energies and requirements of personality. Collision between those engaged in two such distinct fields must, we should think, be impossible, unless the one or the other were wandering from his proper duty, and mistaking his way.53

Tyndall, Irons argues, neglected this necessary division: Dr. Tyndall practically forgets that our experience brings us in contact with other realities, besides those natural, mechanical, and chemical facts with which his science is concerned; and that he thus unavoidably gives a fictitious prominence to his own specialities, when he would introduce them, surreptitiously, we should think, into the sphere of morals and religion.54

More urgently, Irons condemns Tyndall’s departure from the discussion of facts to the airing of theories—worse, theories on spiritual subjects: “We shall not, if we are allowed to speak for ourselves, consent, for our part, to have it thought that we wish the facts of science to be other than they are; we will only stipulate that in science, as in all things else, the assertions shall keep within the limits of the facts.”55 Later he elaborates: If these ethical sallies were at all necessary to the scientific explorations, we might be more patient of them; but being wholly gratuitous and out of place, suitable only for “young men’s debating and mutual improvement societies,” we firmly protest, as reasoners, against their inappropriateness, self-contradiction, and we must add with all respect, their unworthy tone.56

Significantly, Irons here takes the stance of a “reasoner,” objecting to improper debating techniques; he is still claiming the right to be thought of as a rigorously intellectual scholar, but he objects to Tyndall’s trespassing on what he regards as theological territory. In such a territory, he argues, the theologian’s status as “reasoner” is superior to Tyndall’s:



Now, we are not complaining that men of mechanical or chemical science do not make it their business at the same time to be moral philosophers, and students of the facts of human nature; but we have a right to complain of their meddling with what they will not take the trouble to understand or investigate.57


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As to the subject of this admirable paper; in the first place, I think that we very much over-estimate Professor Tyndall, who has acquired, as it were, a sort of factitious character. I grant that he is a careful experimentalist in the particular subjects in which he has distinguished himself in the world of matter; but in going beyond these, he is altogether a mere trifler, and I think that our lecturer and the public at large, for some reason for which I cannot account, have exalted a man who is a skilful physicist, and a cautious dealer with matter, into a person whose opinions are worthy of consideration upon points which he has not mastered, and in reference to which he is, in reality, no authority whatever.58

In Hill’s complaint we see an objection not only to Tyndall’s “trifling” in matters beyond his expertise but also a keen resentment of the public’s adulation of him as someone worthy of attention. Tyndall had by this time received marked success in his fight for public notice and had gained some influence over society’s ideas; Hill, a self-declared member of the enemy camp, could not keep personal anger at this success out of his commentary. The Rev. C. A. Row, with as much concern but less gall, seconded Hill’s statement: There is no doubt that Professor Tyndall has travelled beyond the limits of his facts as a simple student of physics, and it does often happen that when men have a great reputation for one particular department of knowledge, they fancy that they can maintain the same reputation when they discuss subjects of a totally different character.59

On the whole Row admires Tyndall’s achievements and strength of character, but he too objects to Tyndall’s invasion into what he sees as theological territory. The heart of the debate, as always, lay in the uncertain boundaries and definition of science: what was theology’s relationship to science; which pursuit had a rightful claim to intellectual objectivity; how far could scientists venture in their lectures and essays; and— as importantly—who counted as a scientist? Irons advocated theology as a “moral science,” but he then argued against theorizing in science—which disagrees with one of the most fundamental aspects of Tyndall’s definition of science— and describes Tyndall as stepping


Irons objected to Tyndall’s transgression of legitimate scientific boundaries; in the Institute’s post-presentation discussion regarding his talk, some of Irons’ colleagues went further still. The Rev. J. Hill commented with noticeable bitterness:


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It may be that Professor Tyndall is so fully occupied in his own particular, though somewhat narrow, department of work, that he has no time to give himself thoroughly to philosophy: but if so, he should not capriciously diverge from subjects which he handles with ability to trifle with those for which he shows no aptitude, and in which he refuses to qualify himself.60

With the bitterness that seems to have lurked under the surface throughout this meeting, Irons concludes with one final jab at Tyndall’s popularity: “[I]t is to be feared that there is around Professor Tyndall a mentally juvenile circle of listeners, ready, with abandon, to enjoy that which sparkles, and unwilling to take much pains with the graver subjects on which his hasty light only flashes for a moment.”61 It will come as no surprise that Tyndall declined an invitation to attend Irons’ talk at the Victoria Institute and exhibited nothing but disdain for the society, much to their chagrin. In his introduction of Thompson’s 1872 proposal for measuring the efficacy of prayer Tyndall wrote: “Instead of leaving the subject to the random assertions of half-informed sceptics on the one hand, and hazy lecturers of the Victoria Institute on the other, the writer [Thompson] seeks to confer quantitative precision on the action of the Supernatural on Nature.”62 Needless to say, this attitude bolstered the hostility that the Institute felt toward Tyndall and his conception of science. One can see in the discussion at the Victoria Institute— an example of many similar discussions— a change in the stance of many of Tyndall’s opponents. By shifting their focus from the question of whether or not theology counted as science to the question of how far science’s boundary could extend before it impinged on theology, they were in effect acknowledging a difference between the two disciplines. By implication, Tyndall’s definition of the field in which his opponents granted him “expertise” was accepted, in that they ceased to contest it, debating instead the position of the boundaries of science. The conflict over science’s boundaries, which Tyndall insisted on expanding to include all areas of society save the emotions, and which his opponents tried to restrict to the collection of established facts of


beyond his bounds. Indeed, for Irons and his fellow members of the Victoria Institute, the deciding factor in legitimacy was expertise: Tyndall had declared himself a physicist; he could not then be allowed to venture into the sphere of moralists and ministers. Irons, in his closing remarks, summarizes the point:


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nature, generated more hostility than the previous, more amorphous debate over definitions, though in truth the debate over boundaries was no less complex, and the issue of definition had by no means been solved. However, though the emphasis of the debate toward the latter half of the decade, as one between two separate spheres of life, indicated an implicit acceptance both of Tyndall’s definition of science, which excluded theology, and of his depiction of the debate as a conflict between two distinct sides, these very definitions came eventually to be a stumbling block in Tyndall’s attempts to gain intellectual authority for science over areas that theologians claimed as belonging to religion. Whereas before, in the 1850s and 1860s, Tyndall had been attempting discursively to ward theologians off his scientific property, by the 1870s theologians had begun to accept the delimitations of that property but to insist that Tyndall remain within the boundaries he had defined. In effect, they argued that Tyndall must abide by his own rules, leaving speculations on unquantifiable matters like free will and the soul to those who had made such questions their specialty. One of the most decisive moments for this shift in the nature of the debate came in 1874 in Belfast, when Tyndall delivered the Presidential Address at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. His listeners there constituted the most scientifically talented body of men in the land, and a good many of them supported, or at least did not strenuously object to, his controversial points, many of which addressed questions as much metaphysical as scientific. The speech, however, was published throughout Britain, and as Tyndall’s hold on both public and scientific minds thus strengthened, the resentment and anxiety of his opponents increased. 1874: The Belfast Address The British Association for the Advancement of Science, founded in 1831 and commonly shortened to the BA or BAAS, had been conceived as a method of promoting science throughout Britain. By the 1870s this goal had been reached and surpassed.63 The annual meetings of the British Association, gathering specialists from a vast variety of fields, from biology to sociology, from physics to anthropology, had become one of the most publicized and renowned events of the year. The addresses given at the meeting would be subsequently read not only by other scientists but by countless members of the general




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public, for the event was reported in popular newspapers and periodicals as well as in scholarly journals. In being appointed to the Presidency of the 1874 meeting of the BA, therefore, Tyndall was being offered the most public platform available to a man of science. Two of his previous lectures had been delivered to the Mathematical and Physical Section of the Association—“Scientific Materialism” in 1868 at Norwich and “The Scientific Use of the Imagination” in 1870 at Liverpool. But no lecture given within the meeting carried the same weight as the opening address by the President, which was expected to sum up and effectively represent the progress of science in Britain during the previous year. Tyndall, in keeping with his character, used his appointment to the Presidency as an opportunity to fight for his own view of science rather than to represent others’, and his speech, as a result, ignited immense controversy. “While he spake in Belfast lightning flashes played fitfully among the multitude, soon after the thunder mutterings of discontent were heard, and by the Sunday they swelled into a storm and all the pulpits of the city are said to have fulminated against him.”64 William Binns, in a sermon preached at the Unitarian church at Birkenhead, gave this description of Tyndall at the Belfast meeting soon after the event, in the midst of the furor that Tyndall had caused by his presidential speech on the relationship between science and theology. Tyndall’s friends had predicted from the first that disaster would ensue when Tyndall gave the speech. Huxley wrote to him in the preceding June, “I wonder if that Address is begun, and if you are going to be as wise and prudent as I was at Liverpool. [ . . . ] Let my example be a burning and a shining light to you. I declare I have horrid misgivings of your kicking over the traces.”65 In recalling his own example, Huxley was referring to his stint as President of the BA in 1870, when he used his Presidential Address to discuss the history and viability of the theory of spontaneous generation. Though this was a potentially volatile subject, Huxley examined the question with circumspection, and his conclusion— that spontaneous generation is impossible—would have found favor with Christian as well as agnostic scientists.66 Huxley was followed by William Thomson in 1871, the physiologist William B. Carpenter in 1872, and the chemist Alexander Williamson, standing in for James Prescott Joule, in 1873. All three of these men argued explicitly against materialism; Williamson discussed “how fallacious is that materialistic idea of Physical Science which represents it as leading away from the study of man’s noblest faculties, and from a sympathy with his most elevated aspirations, towards mere inanimate matter.”67




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Both Thomson and Carpenter, moreover, made explicit reference to God— as the “Creator and Ruler” in Thomson’s case, and as the “Great Author of Nature” in Carpenter’s case.68 Interestingly, Carpenter goes on to discuss the relationship of science with theology, arguing perhaps unexpectedly that theology must leave science free to study the workings of nature in its own way, insofar as science studies the workings rather than the causes of natural phenomena: The Science of Modern times, however, has taken a more special direction. Fixing its attention exclusively on the Order of Nature, it has separated itself wholly from Theology, whose function it is to seek after its Cause. In this, Science is fully justified, alike by the entire independence of its objects, and by the historical fact that it has been continually hampered and impeded in its search for the Truth as it is in Nature, by the restraints which Theologians have attempted to impose upon its inquiries.69

Carpenter is in agreement with Tyndall that theology has obstructed the path of science, though his assignment of the “Cause of Nature” to theological study provides more room for theological inquiry into nature than Tyndall would have allowed. From there, however, Carpenter moves to the danger of science exceeding its boundaries: But when Science, passing beyond its own limits, assumes to take the place of Theology, and sets up its own conception of the Order of Nature as a sufficient account of its Cause, it is invading a province of Thought to which it has no claim, and not unreasonably provokes the hostility of those who ought to be its best friends.70

Carpenter, though approaching a potentially controversial subject, ends with a caution against science attempting to “take the place” of theology, and this warning, together with his earlier reference to God, saved him from extensive censure. On the whole, therefore, the tendency of presidential addresses prior to 1874 had been toward moderation, with an emphasis on the limitations of scientific ideas, a rejection of materialism, and in some cases an open avowal of belief in God. Knowing that Tyndall was not one to abide by custom, Huxley advised him not to abandon the tradition of presidential moderation. But—unsurprisingly, considering Tyndall’s character—his note of caution sounded in vain. Incensed by the lack of scientific education in Irish Catholic universities, Tyndall structured his speech




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around the revelation of what he believed to be the true colors of the Catholic and scholastic theological traditions, namely a boundless rancor toward science71; but in the end he expanded his accusation to accuse all theology of constraining scientific discovery. Unable to resist the opportunity of such a public forum, one guaranteed to provide a larger audience than he had had for any of his previous lectures, Tyndall maximized the potentially shocking aspects of his address, emphasizing the unknowability of all spiritual and religious matters but asserting with equal insistence that every aspect of the natural world that was knowable was fair game for investigation by scientists. At the climax of the speech he proclaimed, “The impregnable position of science may be described in a few words. We claim, and we shall wrest from theology, the entire domain of cosmological theory.”72 In his “Apology for the Belfast Address,” later published alongside the Address and in substance not an apology but a spirited confirmation, Tyndall went further: “I thought it not only my right but my duty to state that, as regards the organic world, we must enjoy the freedom which we have already won in regard to the inorganic.”73 These statements made it clear—in case it were not already clear enough—that Tyndall was unequivocally arguing for the authority of science over the entire natural world, including life itself. Not surprisingly, given his radical denial of theological authority over humanity, Tyndall’s speech found an immediate and extensive audience, and it brought not only his arguments but his own figure—the figure of the aggressive and, for some, presumptuous scientist—more prominently than ever into the public eye. Criticism now poured in from a wider variety of sources than before; not only committed theologians but many members of the general public felt they must take a published stand against Tyndall’s subversive speech. The historian Bernard Lightman argues that the speech marked a turning point in the development of Tyndall’s public image in the periodical press, after which he was more often represented in a negative light and the reactions against scientific naturalism became more urgent.74 In 1903 one of George Bernard Shaw’s characters in Man and Superman complains, “It’s a very queer world. It used to be so straightforward and simple; and now nobody seems to think and feel as they ought. Nothing has been right since that speech that Professor Tyndall made at Belfast.”75 Shaw wrote this in mockery of the turmoil caused by Tyndall’s address, but in the 1870s many people genuinely felt that the speech had caused a theological crisis. After Tyndall had delivered and published the Address there was great confusion about what exactly his religious beliefs were and how




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deeply he had committed himself to the philosophy of materialism. It is significant that many readers of the speech were so preoccupied with this question that they did not even reach the larger point of Tyndall’s claims about the rights of science. As discussed in chapter two, Tyndall was not a materialist—he did not believe that nature could be fully explained by the properties of matter— nor is the Belfast Address a materialist manifesto, as so many of its critics claimed. At one point in the Address, Tyndall, placing words in the mouth of Bishop Butler, states, “You cannot satisfy the human understanding in its demand for logical continuity between molecular processes and the phenomena of consciousness. This is a rock on which Materialism must inevitably split whenever it pretends to be a complete philosophy of life.”76 He continues in his own voice, “I hold the Bishop’s reasoning to be unanswerable.”77 Historians have recently begun to pay more attention to this point: in addition to Stephen S. Kim’s analysis of Tyndall’s “transcendental materialism,” Ruth Barton, in an article published in 1987, argues that, far from being a materialist, Tyndall espoused in his Address a form of pantheism.78 These elements of Tyndall’s philosophy, however, were drowned out by his antagonistic claims about the link between mind and matter and the functioning of the natural world independent of any external Creator; for many readers, the unorthodoxy of these claims was the most prominent and outrageous element of the Address. Among the most memorable objections along these lines was a published letter to the Home Secretary in 1874 from one Charles Whitmore Stokes, self-described as “a London merchant” and, in a later pamphlet, “a moderate Liberal.”79 Stokes concludes his letter with a statement of his disapproval: Napoleon the First said of the Tyndalls of his day—“You cannot argue with people who deny the existence of God, the only way is to shoot them.” England assuredly does not require at your hands the exercise of power to so extreme a degree, but I cannot but believe that the circulation of such pernicious trash must sooner or later be suppressed.80

Tyndall, in his Address, did not deny the existence of God, but conservative Christians like Stokes saw in Tyndall nothing but a typical scientist fighting the authority of Christianity—the typicality is indicated by the letter’s reference to “the Tyndalls” of Napoleon’s day— and labeled him a materialistic atheist who ought to be silenced. In spite of Tyndall’s reputation as an outstanding lecturer, even his supporters could not always bring themselves to endorse his Belfast address. William Binns was in fact one of the more moderate critics,




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analyzing the ensuing hubbub as the consequence of Tyndall taking on too much in his address: “Partly he swept away rubbish that men held sacred, and partly he made the blunder of treating as rubbish things that were divine. For me, I trust I shall always be ready to give a reason for the hope there is in me, and I care to curse no man. I can admire while I dissent.”81 Many of Tyndall’s admirers, however, while maintaining their approval of his teaching and writing, could not refrain from condemning the Address. An 1874 article in the Christian periodical Leisure Hour, after praising Tyndall’s research and lecturing skills, concludes: Much as we admire Dr. Tyndall’s ability as a writer, and the fulness of his information on matters of science, we cannot close this paper without taking strong exception to the tendency of his teaching on matters outside his special province of physical science. He commits the evident error of referring the laws of mind to those which regulate matter, as if the latter alone embraced all science.82

Again, one sees in this passage the insistence that “the laws of mind,” which the author separates from Tyndall’s “physical science,” ought to be considered a different but equally valid form of science, and therefore immune from Tyndall’s condemnation. But the article does not focus on this question of definition; rather the main anxiety is Tyndall’s transgression beyond “his special province.” The author objects, as the members of the Victoria Institute had objected in 1872, to Tyndall’s double crime of venturing outside the bounds of his area of expertise and then assuming that his knowledge within those bounds could suffice to explain matters beyond them. The dilemma is one that Stefan Collini has identified as an outgrowth of increasing specialization: as the lines between disciplines solidified, it became more difficult for an expert in a particular field to claim authority as well in the larger role of public moralist.83 This conflict, from within the scientific arena, Tyndall encountered more and more as his career progressed. In an article in the Edinburgh Review, one of the most wellestablished Liberal periodicals, the editor and reviewer Henry Reeve wrote of Tyndall’s Belfast Address:



Professor Tyndall is a man of so much acuteness, and of so much authority in some branches of physical science, that we are unwilling to believe him to have adopted a shallow and irrational creed in matters of far greater moment. But we think that he committed a great error of judgement in making the chair of the President of the British


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Association a pulpit for the promulgation of highly speculative opinions on questions of abstract philosophy and metaphysics. The British Association is a meritorious society, which annually collects and garners in the scientific harvest of the year. Its business is to gauge and record the progress of actual knowledge. But our men of science of the present day are too apt to range beyond the proper field of inductive inquiry.84

Reeve’s article is on the whole one of the more sympathetic and restrained reactions to Tyndall’s Address, but still he cannot condone the “improper” use that Tyndall made of his position as President of the British Association. He later goes on to say that Tyndall “mistook his duty when he plunged, at Belfast, into the atoms of Democritus, the whirlpools of Descartes, or an imaginary conversation between Lucretius and Bishop Butler.”85 According to Reeve, scientists should exert authority only in their specialty—the discovery and analysis of scientific facts. In making this claim, Reeve is implicitly drawing a line between science and theology— and yet he is by no means awarding sole intellectual legitimacy to the side of science. Reeve was not as concerned with the nature of science as with the actions of a scientist, namely Tyndall, who “ranged beyond” the legitimate reach of science. Reeve’s article, therefore, is an example of the shift in the debates to a focus on boundaries— a question on which Reeve takes the most conservative position. Reeve was not alone in objecting to Tyndall’s choice of venue for his speech; many of Tyndall’s detractors argued that the annual meeting of the British Association was not an appropriate setting in which to air one’s theories about the authority of science in society. John MacNaughtan, a clergyman in Belfast, declared as much in a sermon criticizing the speech, which was later published as a pamphlet: Our precious time was occupied with wild theories and wilder speculations, about the formation of the universe, and the origin of species. Advantage was taken of the position of president of a learned body, and of the high platform to which it raised a man untaught in the religion of the Bible, to ventilate his anti-scriptural notions, and throw discredit on the faith of the great mass of his associates: and I could not but feel, that if a Society, formed professedly to cultivate science, was tamely to indorse such sentiments it would ere long be voted to be a nuisance by the Christian world.86



MacNaughtan concentrates on Tyndall himself as an inappropriate commentator on religious subjects. He makes no attempt to promote


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theology as a form of science: on the contrary, at one point in his sermon he explains, “[T]he Bible would have failed in its obvious design if it had aimed at teaching scientific truth.”87 However, though accepting, even insisting on, science’s separate identity from religion, MacNaughtan argues that Tyndall, “untaught in the religion of the Bible,” had no right to comment on anything religious and should not have discussed such topics in an explicitly scientific arena. John Nash Griffin, the incumbent of Trinity Church in Dublin, who had studied mathematics and physics as well as ethics and logic at Trinity College, Dublin, was equally outraged by Tyndall’s use of the Presidential Address, publishing his views in an 1875 pamphlet called Atoms: Such is the folly with which a learned professor has presumed to insult the conscience and the intellect of an Association considered to be the most learned body in Europe. It is much to be regretted that any one should have so abused the high position in which he found himself placed, as in the sacred name of Science to give utterance to his own crude and baseless speculations. The circumstances under which they were spoken give them an importance which they otherwise would not possess, and demand for them a notice which otherwise they do not deserve.88

In effect, Griffin is accusing Tyndall of staging a gigantic publicity stunt in order to gain notoriety for a ridiculous philosophy. What then was the proper role of the President of the British Association, and what areas was his speech expected to cover? According to Reeve in the Edinburgh Review, the purpose of the Association as a whole, and thus of its President as well, was “to gauge and record the progress of actual knowledge.”89 In agreement with this stance, MacNaughtan wrote: I expected in the opening address of one occupying the dignified position of President to the British Association, a statement of what science had achieved during the past twelve months; a notice of the discoveries she had made in some of her varied departments and of their applications to the arts; or an illustration of some of the facts previously ascertained, with their new combinations and uses in the commerce and manufactures of the country.90



There is no room for speculation in MacNaughtan’s description of the presidential role, nor even a possibility of the President commenting on science’s influence in society beyond the application of specific


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[W]e warn those self-styled “apostles of the understanding” not to presume too far, to confine themselves to their legitimate sphere, and not to imagine that the intellect of the nineteenth century is to be frightened by the ghost of an exploded philosophy, or will accept the vain speculations of foolish men as the certain revelations of scientific truth.91

Griffin’s language throughout his lecture is hyperbolic—he ends with the dismissal of Evolution as “a grand impertinence” 92 —but his reference to scientists’ “legitimate sphere” strikes the keynote of the opposition to the Belfast Address. Tyndall, his opponents felt, had finally stepped undeniably into their territory and left legitimate authority behind. He had now extended the boundaries of science so far that asserting theology’s own scientific identity was no longer useful or relevant. The issue was no longer that of one man claiming authority by assigning intellectual objectivity to his field; in the Belfast Address, Tyndall reiterated in unequivocal terms that he was not only claiming cultural authority for science but denying that authority to theologians. In effect, he was pushing science’s boundaries into their territory, and the aggressive wording of the Address left no doubt of his intention to declare war. By questioning, in a public forum not only highly respected but also explicitly scientific, Christianity’s position as the foremost authority in society— and, moreover, asserting that science was fully equipped to answer all answerable questions relating to life, nature, and the universe, without any help from theology—Tyndall had thrown down the ultimate gauntlet to the proponents of theology’s cultural influence. Hostility had been openly declared, and his opponents met his declaration willingly. In MacNaughtan’s words: From these remarks it must appear that Science and Christianity have separate and distinct fields to cultivate, that there is a broad line of separation between them— they are kingdoms with laws peculiar to each, and ought to live in unbroken amity and perpetual friendship. But if war breaks out between them, and Science invades the territory of Christianity, “the weaker must go to the wall.” 93


discoveries in “commerce and manufactures.” Griffin, in somewhat more apocalyptic mode, emphasizes what a President ought not to do:

Though MacNaughtan, in asserting the necessary separation of science and Christianity as two different fields, did not assert Christianity’s


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identity as a science or even as an intellectual discipline, he strongly objected to Tyndall’s violation of the line of separation between them. By this action Tyndall had effectively refocused the argument onto the boundary-line itself, but the definitions and limitations of each form of knowledge had still not been satisfactorily established, and from obscure village pulpits to the most publicized intellectual arenas, the identities of theology and science continued to be contested. Tyndall and James Martineau One of Tyndall’s most formidable opponents was the intellectual James Martineau, a Unitarian minister who was Professor of Philosophy and then President (from 1869) at Manchester College.94 Martineau and Tyndall were already acquainted via the Metaphysical Society, which had been founded in 1869 by James Knowles as a friendly forum for discussing scientific and theological differences—in itself an indicator of how prevalent these issues were in Victorian intellectual society, and also of the complexity of their relationship.95 In the amicable spirit of this club, Tyndall and Martineau showed respect for each other throughout their debate, but their viewpoints were irreconcilable. In 1874 Martineau delivered an address at Manchester New College in London entitled “Religion as Affected by Modern Materialism.” Tyndall, the unwilling figurehead of the materialists in spite of his denial of materialism as a viable philosophy, served as the main topic of Martineau’s speech. Throughout the address, Martineau pleads for understanding between science and theology, while objecting to Tyndall’s relegation of theology to the realm of the subjective: Though, however, no partnership between the physicist and the theologian can be formed on these terms of assigning the intellect to the one and the feelings to the other, may it not be that, in the flurry of exultation and of panic, they misconstrue their real position? and that their relationship, when calmly surveyed, may not be in such a state of tension as each is ready to believe?96

Returning to an argument prominent in Tyndall’s earlier debates with theologians, Martineau demands that theology be allowed its share of rational intellect, though, significantly, he does not assert theology’s right to the term “science” itself:



The only possible basis for a treaty of alliance between the tendencies now in conflict is not in lodging the one in the Reason and the other


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in the Imagination, in order to keep them from quarrelling, but in recognizing a Duality in the functions of Reason itself, according as it deals with phenomena or their ground, with law or with causality, with material consecution or with moral alternatives, with the definite relations of space and time and motion, or with the indefinite intensities of beauty and values of affection which bear us to the infinitely Good.97

In this way Martineau both reasserts theology’s claim to the status of an intellectual pursuit, equal in merit to science, and draws a clear boundary between legitimate science and the purview of theology: “In the investigation of the genetic order of things, Theology is an intruder, and must stand aside. Religion first reaches its true ground, when, leaving the problem of what has happened, it takes its stand on what for ever is.”98 While ceding “the genetic order of things” to science, Martineau’s definition of science as the study of “what has happened,” arguing its limited usefulness as a guide to mankind—who must live in the present and the future—rendered inevitable Tyndall’s disagreement. As a mark of the esteem that each man felt for the other, Martineau’s was one of the few publications that Tyndall honored with an individualized response, first published as the Introduction to Part II of the fifth edition of Fragments of Science in 1876. Respectful as he was, however, Tyndall opened as he meant to go on: Webster defines a squatter as one who settles on new land without a title. This, in regard to Anthropology and Cosmogony, I hold to have been the position of the older theologians; and what their heated successors of to-day denounce as “a raid upon Theology,” is, in my opinion, a perfectly legal and equitable attempt to remove them from ground which they have no right to hold.99

Martineau, Tyndall claims, asserted knowledge where knowledge is impossible: “He professes to know where I only claim to feel.”100 Yet Martineau “frequently uses the word ‘unverified’, as if it were fatal to the position on which its incidence falls”101 and “treats the physicist as a conjurer.”102 Thus Martineau claimed objectivity for himself where he could have none and denied scientists objectivity where they had in fact proved their points. Aside from these logical inconsistencies, Tyndall was most concerned at being labeled a materialist by Martineau, and, worse, having his supposedly materialist ideas misrepresented:



I now come to one of the most serious portions of Mr. Martineau’s pamphlet— serious far less on account of its “personal errors,” than of


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its intrinsic gravity, though its author has thought fit to give it a witty and sarcastic tone. He analyses and criticises “the materialist doctrine, which, in our time, is proclaimed with so much pomp and resisted with so much passion. ‘Matter is all I want,’ says the physicist; ‘give me its atoms alone, and I will explain the universe.’ ” It is thought, even by Mr. Martineau’s intimate friends, that in this pamphlet he is answering me. I must therefore ask the reader to contrast the foregoing travesty with what I really do say regarding atoms.103

Tyndall spends many pages both restating his own theory of atoms, in which he claims that science cannot explain the link between matter and consciousness, and highlighting the errors in Martineau’s pamphlet. Martineau, he argues, leaves his readers “lost in an iridescent cloud of words, after exciting a desire which he is incompetent to appease.”104 In 1876, Martineau replied to Tyndall’s response to his own original lecture, but, just as Tyndall moved not an inch in his rebuttal, so Martineau stood firm, unwilling to accept Tyndall’s denial of the accusation of materialism. Martineau opens by complimenting Tyndall’s rhetoric; his own address, he wrote, “has brought upon me the honour and the danger of a critique by Professor Tyndall, marked by all his literary skill, and rendered persuasive by happy sarcasm and brilliant description.”105 In spite of its brilliance, however, Tyndall’s response made little impact on Martineau—just as, in truth, Martineau’s arguments had made little impact on Tyndall. In closing Martineau restates his aim: “In the discussion which here reaches its close, my object has been simply defensive,—to repel the pretension of speculative materialism to supersede ‘the theological conception’, by tracing that pretension to an imperfect appreciation of the ultimate logic of science.”106 The two men had reached an impasse because, at bottom, the issue in their debate remained one of definition, and neither was willing to acknowledge the other’s formulation of science versus theology. Martineau was too moderate in his philosophy to take personal offence at Tyndall’s growing renown or to be frightened at Tyndall’s rejection of organized religion, and he consequently explored the question on a purely intellectual level, which was no doubt more congenial to Tyndall than the virulent tirades he received from more extreme opponents. But precisely because each man restrained himself to an intellectual examination of the relationship between science and theology, putting aside all social considerations, the argument became irresolvable; Tyndall could not hope to persuade every proponent of theology—let alone a proponent as skilled and eloquent as




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Martineau—that science was rationally superior, nor could Martineau hope to convince Tyndall, leader of the cause of science, to moderate his claim on the intellect. On the personal level between these two men, the debate ended in a stalemate; but in the broader and more complex arena of popular thought, the tide was slowly turning in favor of Tyndall’s view of science— as evinced not only by his increasing popularity but also by the violence of objections to that popularity. After Belfast: The Late 1870s and 1880s In the years after the Belfast Address Tyndall continued to publicize the arguments he had been promoting since the beginning of his career. In his essay on “Professor Virchow and Evolution” in 1879 he wrote: The priests, however, or those among them who were mechanics, and not poets, claimed objective validity for their conceptions, and tried to base upon external evidence that which sprang from the innermost need and nature of man. It is against this objective rendering of the emotions— this thrusting into the region of fact and positive knowledge of conceptions essentially ideal and poetic— that science, consciously or unconsciously, wages war.107

But as Tyndall’s range and influence among the general public increased, the negative responses to his work widened to condemn not only the alleged blasphemy and materialism of his arguments but also his growing popularity in Britain. As much as his controversial statements, his status as a public figure— a recognized scientist-cumcommentator— became a source of grievance to his opponents. Often the opponents in question aired this grievance by accusing Tyndall of using incendiary remarks to stoke the fire of his popularity. Henry Larkin, Carlyle’s neighbor previously discussed in chapter one, wrote in his 1878 pamphlet Extra Physics, and the Mystery of Creation that Tyndall “invariably uses his great popularity, and his high authority as a teacher of science, in discouraging any one from attempting to understand the intrinsic subject of his eloquence.”108 Discussing the extremes of praise and censure that Tyndall elicited as a public figure, Larkin implies that Tyndall’s aim was to gain that reaction and the notoriety that comes with public controversy:



Professor Tyndall evidently plumes himself not a little on the skill with which he can thus, whensoever it so pleases him, wake up, if not


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actually bring down, two such birds with one well-aimed stone; and perhaps derives as much real enjoyment from the wrath and consternation he so skilfully provokes, even as from the grateful applause of his most sympathetic admirers. He delights to pose himself before a popular audience, as the infallible Oracle of all that he knows, and the fearless Extinguisher of all that he cannot comprehend. He stands for Physics: and let all extra-physical phantoms and superstitions take note that, in the fulness of the scientific ages, a prophet has arisen, with unflinching courage to “stand before them face to face,” with a scientific keenness of scent which already sniffs the morning air, and who, by the very act of cock-crow, bids them vanish. Towering in his pride of place on the impregnable dust-heap of his all-sufficient molecules, he loftily declares that, “As far as the eye of science has hitherto ranged through nature, no intrusion of purely creative power into any series of phenomena has ever been observed.”109

Larkin concentrates on the public aspect of Tyndall’s work, insinuating that the publicity itself was all that Tyndall, a conceited attentionseeker, ever desired. Others linked Tyndall’s supposed egomania to the theories he expounded: in 1879, in a pamphlet entitled The Materialistic Views of Professor Tyndall and Miss Harriet Martineau Criticized, the anonymous author accuses Tyndall of insufferable arrogance, due to his dismissal of the human soul: [Man] then comes down to the workshop of matter, simple and sole, and the worship of his own intellect with reference to this vast material laboratory, over which he is as a king; and here he is satisfied to dwell, proud and happy in his littleness; and so convinced is he of the all-important powers of matter, and his own theoretical conceptions thereon, that Tyndall— as representative of the class— disbelieves in the immaterial soul in man, as well as the vegetative or vital principle in plants or animals.110

By 1883, the conviction that Tyndall was denying the human soul— and worse, being listened to as a legitimate authority on the subject— had grown to full strength. A fifty-nine-page poem in couplets on the subject, entitled Professor Tyndall’s Denial of the Soul, and Assumption of Fatalism, by an author dubbing himself “Credo,” warned its readers that Tyndall and science had, in the eyes of the public, become one and the same:



Thus circumstanced, he comes before the world Prepared with pointed weapons, to be hurled


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Against the long accepted dogma known, That every man’s a soul to call his own. And knowing that beyond his audience His words would travel as the words of science, The learned professor, with consummate tact, Explained the magnet’s duplex power to act.111

After paraphrasing some of Tyndall’s more inflammatory ideas, Credo condemns the press for spreading Tyndall’s ideas to the public at large: Or words to like effect were what was said To that great audience, and by thousands read The following day; and thousands thus informed Saw how their citadel of peace was stormed, By this renouncing all that man can deem Spiritual in his nature, the supreme, The nobler part of man.112

The most pernicious aspect of such rapidly spreading publicity, Credo argues, was that so often scientists’ theories, taken as fact by the masses, prove to be erroneous: Too oft such theories the public hold As truths established; for how often told By men of science, and as science held Has been what they, in after years, impelled By greater light to utterly disown; And then before truth absolute was known.113

Yet, as he explains at length, Credo fears that such misplaced faith in Tyndall’s theories might actually take place, that the populace might soon come to believe that there is “No independent God,” “No special providence,” “No soul,” “no force in prayer,” “No will save what necessity creates, / Nor action save what on compulsion waits”:114 Let such a state as this be once proclaimed And held as truth, society is damned. And all our moral safeguards are removed When once this sceptic’s case is held as proved. Once on society those views enlist, And then society cannot exist. Outrun by passions men would, in the name




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Such, according to this fanciful critic, would be the fate of the world if Tyndall received the public’s approval and support. While not all of Tyndall’s opponents painted such an extreme picture of the ruin his ideas would bring to society, even his more reasoned critics feared that Tyndall, having gained influence over society, was abusing his consequent position as a public figure. In 1878 Henry Wace published his lengthy article in the conservative Quarterly Review entitled “Scientific Lectures— their Use and Abuse.” As discussed in chapter one, Wace had no tolerance for the scientific bid for cultural authority, and Tyndall is one of the foremost villains of the article, due to his address in 1877 at the Birmingham and Midland Institute on “Science and Man,” for which the majority of his audience were members of the unscientific public rather than his scientific colleagues. In this address Tyndall expanded on his theories concerning the connection between mind and matter and the problem of free will, closing by saying, “Thus, following the lead of physical science, we are brought without solution of continuity into the presence of problems which, as usually classified, lie entirely outside the domain of physics.”116 In opposition to the implicit claim in this statement that scientists have a right to discuss those problems, Wace argues that scientific lecturers, especially when they are addressing an audience of the general public rather than members of the scientific community, should not broach controversial subjects: It is surely a Lecturer’s duty, under such circumstances, to restrict himself to the elucidation of truths which he knows to be conclusively established, which are within the range of his own scientific knowledge, and in respect to which he may be sure that he cannot well be misleading his hearers. Common modesty and common courtesy should prevent him from intruding into other fields and disparaging the authority of other teachers.117


Of science, put to flight all honest shame. Endowed with ruin, chaos would the place Of order take, and sweep from earth our race.115

Wace is careful to proclaim his allegiance to science as well as to religion: “As we stated at the outset, it is in the interest of the legitimate influence of Science, no less than in that of Religion, that we offer these remonstrances against the example which Professor Tyndall has set.”118 The word “legitimate” is the crux of the statement. Scientists, Wace claims, have legitimate authority over scientific matters only;


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[S]cientific Lecturers who make use of their platforms to disparage religious and moral truths, with which at the same time they display a most imperfect acquaintance, must inevitably damage, with a large portion of the public, the just influence of Science. This may, indeed, be the least of the injuries they inflict. Moral and religious convictions are more sensitive, because more vital elements in our organisation than opinions and beliefs on other subjects, and a man who goes beyond his province, while also transcending the bounds of his knowledge, for the purpose of undermining such convictions, may inflict irreparable injury upon individuals, and, at all events, commits a grave offence against society.119

Wace names Tyndall as the worst of these offenders: “More than once, in recent years, Professor Tyndall had severely tried the patience, not merely of the public, but of a large number of his scientific brethren, by the rashness with which he had intruded his speculations into regions far beyond those which are properly the province of the Professor of Natural Science.”120 Tyndall’s address in Birmingham, which brought his “rashness” to the attention of a large and mostly unscientific audience, confirmed, in Wace’s opinion, his dangerous influence on the British public: “In this reckless materialistic talk Professor Tyndall was not merely undermining dogmas, he was insulting and disparaging some of the most sacred affections which the human heart has ever entertained. We ask again whether any reprobation can be too strong for such wanton and unscrupulous destructiveness.”121 Here, at the height of his rhetorical fervor, Wace insists that Tyndall’s crime in the Belfast Address and in his lecture at Birmingham was not simply an invasion of science onto theological ground but rather— and far worse— an attempt to destroy the spiritual faculties of humanity. Such a rejection of religious feeling never occurs in any of Tyndall’s essays or lectures; on the contrary, Tyndall affirms throughout his publications the inevitable, even laudable, force of man’s spirituality. But dismay over Tyndall’s supposed materialism led Wace to ignore the subtleties of Tyndall’s differentiation between organized religion and humanity’s religious instincts. As often occurred in reactions to Tyndall’s writings and lectures, especially after the Belfast Address, the presumption of a scientist daring to comment on the place of religion in society and its validity as a source of objective knowledge sparked so much outrage that the specifics of Tyndall’s arguments


they lack the expertise and thus the credibility necessary for commentary on matters that Wace views as belonging to religion:


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The Double-Edged Success of Tyndall’s Definition of Science By the 1880s, the publications responding to Tyndall and his work concentrated largely on Tyndall himself, his public figure and his status as a scientist in the public eye. While debate continued over the proper boundaries and the “legitimate sphere” of science, the arguments focused increasingly on the figure of the scientist as a public intellectual: what were appropriate venues in which scientists should lecture; who constituted an appropriate audience for scientists’ lectures; how much influence should scientists be allowed to have over public policy and popular opinion? Implicitly, this move toward the figure of the scientist, away from the nature of science itself, indicated the gradual acceptance of the definition of science and its relationship with theology that Tyndall had promoted from the 1860s onward. Yet by the 1880s Tyndall and his colleagues often found themselves hemmed in by the very strictures on which they themselves had insisted in the 1860s and 1870s. They had told theologians and philosophers to stay out of science’s territory; by the late 1870s and 1880s, theologians and philosophers were telling scientists to stay in that territory. Robert M. Young, in his influential essay of 1969, “Natural Theology, Victorian Periodicals, and the Fragmentation of the Common Context,” quotes Gladstone in conversation with James Anthony Froude and Tyndall in 1881: “Let scientific men stick to their science, and leave philosophy and religion to poets, philosophers, and theologians.”122 The statement was exactly what Tyndall had been arguing for decades, but its import in Gladstone’s voice was one of restriction for the scientists rather than for the poets and philosophers. For the most part, theologians in the 1880s no longer tried to assert theology’s status as a fully fledged science equivalent to the physical sciences, though James Martineau serves as an example of the many thinkers who still insisted on theology’s right to be considered an intellectual pursuit rather than a mere exploration of feelings. The boundaries of science were still contested, but the question, by the 1880s, had become less that of science’s intellectual identity and


were neglected. A scientist had assumed authority, in public, over territory that had previously been theology’s alone; that in itself was as dreadful a calamity to Tyndall’s opponents as the heretical nature of his arguments.


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more that of how far the scientist should be able to exert intellectual authority over society. For there to be a knowledgeable public audience for scientific information, however, there must also be a thorough system of scientific education, something that was by no means in place in Britain during the nineteenth century. The reform of the nation’s educational system occupied a central place in Victorian intellectual debate, and it was in this arena that Tyndall attempted to promote his vision of science’s ideal function in society, unfettered by theological constraints. The following chapter will examine Tyndall’s participation in educational reform and his support of science as the best educational framework for society.




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Tyndall as Reformer The Place of Science in Education

T

he aim of this chapter is to analyze Tyndall’s conception of the role that science and scientists should play in society, once freed from the restraints of theology; it uses as a means for doing so his participation in the debates over scientific education. The promotion of science in education was a cause to which Tyndall devoted a great deal of his time, and it was arguably the arena in which his vision of how science should influence society gained its clearest expression. If Tyndall shaped the definition and boundaries of his idea of science in the context of his fight against the constraints of theology, with the campaign for scientific education he established his vision for what science should do in society and how it should be implemented, as well as how its practitioners should be trained and where their place should be in a society thoroughly inculcated with science. Tyndall’s role in the educational debates formed one of the bases of his reputation as an influential figure. At a Special General Meeting of the Board of the Royal Institution in December 1893, on the occasion of Tyndall’s death, Sir James Crichton-Browne, the respected psychiatrist, said: It is as a popular expounder of science that Tyndall stands pre-eminent. It is as a translator of texts of nature that but for him must long have remained hieroglyphic that he will be best remembered. It is as an evangelist of science, primarily to the intelligent and educated classes, but ultimately to all, that his greatest influence has been exerted. He was one of the Apostles of a new dispensation. His teachings altered the very spirit of the times, and created a tolerance of scientific truth which it had not before enjoyed.1


Chapter 4


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Crichton-Browne’s description, and indeed his entire speech, is exaggerated and overly sentimental, which is not surprising in a eulogy given so soon after Tyndall had died. The image of Tyndall as an evangelist of science to the masses, however, had been widespread and remained popular in descriptions of him after his death. In an 1894 article on Tyndall in Natural Science, a London scientific monthly, the explorer and geologist J. W. Gregory opens by saying: Though Tyndall’s work must be ranked far below that of Darwin, he was far more the representative man of the two, owing to his brilliant versatility, restless energy, his combination of the culture of the literary student with the insight of the scientist and the power of the man of action, his breadth of sympathy and the apostolic zeal with which he fought for a sounder and more scientific system of education.2

Such a statement— similar to several examples discussed in chapter one— suggests that Tyndall is “representative” because of his energy and his persona as “a man of action,” rather than for his achievements in research. But Gregory’s praise of Tyndall’s zeal for a scientific system of education is both sincere and unreserved, and it is clear that he ranks Tyndall as one of the foremost educational reformers of his time. Tyndall was not alone in the campaign for reforming Britain’s educational system; indeed many of his friends and contemporaries overshadowed him in this area. Two of the most important supporters of scientific education, Herbert Spencer and Thomas Huxley, were Tyndall’s intimate friends and exerted an enormous influence on him, both intellectually, in the shaping of his views on scientific education, and socially, in the network he gained from the X Club, of which all three were members. Tyndall, Spencer, and Huxley traded opinions and ideas throughout their adult lives, and the subject on which they worked in closest connection was the campaign for scientific education. Huxley in particular became linked with Tyndall as a fellow promoter of science. As Huxley put it in an article on Tyndall after his death, “The close relations into which we were thrown [ . . . ] had the effect of associating us in the public mind, as if we formed a sort of firm.”3 At times, so close was the connection, they were even confused with each other: in 1876, the year of Tyndall’s marriage, Huxley and his wife traveled to America; upon their arrival, Mrs. Huxley was greeted as a bride—“which was rather hard,” Huxley writes, “upon plain folk, married twenty-one years, and blessed with seven




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children to boot.”4 Huxley also describes a curate who abused “the late Professor Huxley” in a sermon, days after Tyndall’s death.5 In 1887, on the occasion of Tyndall’s retirement, The Times linked both men to the cause of scientific education, declaring, “Dr. Tyndall’s name, in conjunction with that of Mr. Huxley, stands for a symbol of the nationalisation of natural science as an educational instrument.”6 Fifteen years earlier, Vanity Fair had argued that Tyndall and Huxley stood as representatives of their respective scientific fields: Mr. Huxley and Mr. Tyndall are generally classed together in public estimation in virtue of their approximate parity of years and standing in their respective pursuits, as well as their high philosophical and literary ability and stirring ways in our midst. Mr. Tyndall is for Europe and America the representative of English chemistry and physics as is Mr. Huxley of English physiology; and Science is proud of both her sons.7

These examples indicate that both in Britain and across the Atlantic Tyndall’s fame equaled and at times exceeded Huxley’s— and that, in any case, each was constantly connected with the other. Neither man was bothered by this association; on the contrary, they cherished their friendship— one might well call it a partnership— and relied upon each other’s emotional and intellectual support until Tyndall’s death in 1893. Spencer, though never a teacher or lecturer, gained fame for his philosophical writings on the subject of educational reform. His four most influential essays on education were published in 1861 in one volume, entitled Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical.8 The book immediately became popular not only as a rigorous work of philosophy but as an educational guide, and on its merits alone Spencer was celebrated as a valuable contributor to the philosophy of education in spite of his lack of practical teaching experience. Tyndall and Spencer became friends from the time of Tyndall’s first lecture at the Royal Institution in 1853: Spencer recalls their meeting by saying, “I was present at that lecture; and when introduced to him shortly after it, there commenced one of those friendships which enter into the fabric of life and leave their marks.”9 Both Spencer and Tyndall valued each other not only as friends but as intellectual colleagues who supported and challenged each other in all their endeavors. As Spencer wrote, “Though both had pronounced opinions about most things, and though neither had much reticence, the forty years which have elapsed since we first met witnessed no interruption of our cordial relations.”10 Tyndall, as a fellow promoter of scientific education, agreed with much of what Huxley and Spencer advocated in the reform of the


T Y NDA LL AS REFORMER


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educational system, but his outlook on scientific education differed from theirs on several points. The peculiarities of his conception of science as a social agent can be seen in his dual emphases on the instinctive scientific curiosity in human beings and on the uniquely scientific nature of the Victorian age, leading to an unprecedented need for a scientific foundation in education and for expertise in university-trained researchers. Through the campaign to establish science as the framework of education, Tyndall found an avenue by which to promote his idea that, given the nature of the Victorian era, scientists were the ideal candidates for Carlyle’s social heroes, and that the only way to enable them to fulfill that role was to inculcate both scientific knowledge and scientific method, through education, into the marrow of British society. Tyndall as an Educator Tyndall participated in many different areas of scientific education in the course of his career. In addition to his responsibilities at the Royal Institution, he served for nine years, starting in 1859, as the Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal School of Mines in London, where he gave regular courses of evening lectures to audiences of workingclass men, often as frequently as five nights a week to audiences of six hundred men. Nor were his lectures to the working classes limited to the School of Mines: as part of H. E. Roscoe’s Penny Science lecture program in Manchester, Tyndall once lectured to 3,700 working men on crystalline and molecular forces.11 Tyndall also attacked the other end of the educational spectrum, giving a course of science lectures in 1857 at Eton College. In a letter to Hirst, Tyndall wrote, “I have a letter from the Mathematical Master of Eton, asking my opinion as to the introduction of a course of experimental science into the school, which should extend over three or four years. He was introduced to me by Mr Moseley, who regards the movement as possessing a very important bearing upon the question of education in this country.”12 Years later, Tyndall’s wife described the course as providing him with “an entry into one of the strongholds of those old classical traditions that stood with a dead weight of resistance across the pathway he had so near to his heart.”13 Tyndall was also a member of the Board of Governors at Harrow School for twenty-two years, occasionally lecturing to the students and urging the increase of science in the school’s curriculum, and he served multiple times as an Examiner under the Council for Military Education, as well as for the University of London.14 His stint as an




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As I expected, a letter from the War Office at once reached me telling me that I had no right to appear thus without sanction in the public prints. I felt that the War Office was perfectly right from its own point of view. Still as I had besides the War Office the general cause of science in view, I felt that I was not altogether wrong. [ . . . ] If it give them a better notion of science with reference to the practical life of a soldier, my end is gained; if not, it only proves that I have been too early, for a day will yet come, when natural philosophy and chemistry will not, in a soldier’s education, be ranked at half the value of Greek and Latin, and occupy a lower place than English literature.15

Tyndall thus fought for science in every educational arena into which he could find entry. He gave a statement on scientific education to the House of Lords Committee on the Public School Bill in 1865.16 In 1867 he served as a member of the British Association Committee on scientific education, which presented its findings at the 1867 meeting of the Association and instigated the creation of the 1871–75 Devonshire Commission on Scientific Instruction and the Advancement of Science.17 In 1868, he was also called in to be interviewed by the Select Committee on Scientific Instruction.18 Before Tyndall had dreamed of any of these honorable positions, however, he filled a role that gave him the foundation for his views on scientific education, namely his position as a teacher at Queenwood College, the forward-looking school in Hampshire founded in 1839 by the socialist Robert Owen.19 Tyndall used his experiences of teaching math, surveying, and (upon his return from Germany) natural history as the groundwork on which he built his philosophy of education. At one point when he was teaching at Queenwood, the boys were encouraged to pose questions at school meetings which the combined knowledge of both students and teachers would then address. The questions, which could be on any subject whatsoever, nonetheless focused for the most part on the workings of nature: “What is frost?” “What is the cause of hiccup?” “What are those rings which we see round the gas and sun?” “Is it true that men were once monkeys?”20 According to Tyndall, both the questions and—more importantly—the desire to know the answers were instinctive rather than taught and should be nurtured as an inherent property of man: “The sole question then is, whether this desire is to be gratified or


Examiner for the War Office led to one of his many public quarrels, this time over the importance of science in a soldier’s education, which he supported in a letter to The Times in 1856. Soon afterward he wrote to Hirst:


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not. Who created the fact? Who implanted the desire? Certainly not man. Who then will undertake to place himself between the desire and its fulfilment, and proclaim a divorce between them?”21 Nature herself, according to Tyndall, dictates the teaching of science as the foundation of education. Tyndall used these and other examples from his experiences at Queenwood in the most thorough statement of his educational philosophy, “On the Study of Physics,” which he presented in 1854. Tyndall’s lecture was the fifth in a series of seven on the benefits of a scientific education, organized by Faraday, Whewell, and Tyndall in a protest against the fad of table-turning then rampant in London high society.22 Each lecturer in the series discussed one branch of science— chemistry, physiology, linguistics, even economics— as an important aspect of modern education as it ought to be structured. Describing the mental and disciplinary benefits of research into the natural world— not research for any material purpose but rather to learn for learning’s sake about the workings of nature—Tyndall argued that physics, in its broadest sense of studying natural laws, served better than any other subject to train the mind for the business of life. Indeed, the first thing Tyndall discusses is an ambiguity in the title of his lecture: I hold in my hand an uncorrected proof of the syllabus of this course of lectures, and the title of the present lecture is there stated to be “On the Importance of the Study of Physics as a Means of Education.” The corrected proof, however, contains the title:—“On the Importance of the Study of Physics as a Branch of Education.” Small as this editorial alteration may seem, the two words suggest two radically distinct modes of viewing the subject before us.23

The difference between “means” and “branch” lies at the heart of Tyndall’s educational philosophy, but equally important is the fact that “physics” and not simply “science” is the subject in question. Tyndall advocates the inclusion of physics in the nation’s educational curriculum not simply as one subject among many but as the basis of thought in all subjects, the mental foundation on which all other subjects, scientific or otherwise, could be built. Thus, when Tyndall discusses a scientific education, what he means, more often than not, is an education in the basic laws of physics. In 1868, in an “Address to Students” at University College, London, he uses the terms “science” and “physics” as if they were interchangeable:



It is the inner works of the universe which science reverently uncovers; it is the study of these that she recommends as a discipline worthy of


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Though a paragraph break separates these two sentences, Tyndall does not comment on his change of terms, and before the end of the new paragraph he has used not only “physics” but “science” and “physical science” to indicate the same thing. Tyndall, then, had a very specific vision of what the science in a scientific education would entail and why it should be taught; but the particulars of his scheme were often lost in the more general uproar over educational reform. Tyndall’s argument for an education based on scientific method was neither accepted nor even understood by many participants in the long-lasting battle over Victorian education, and in the vast array of contributions to the debates, his stance found numerous opponents. An Overview of the Educational Debates The question of educational reform had already reared its head by the beginning of Victoria’s reign. Pamphlets, essays, lectures, sermons, newspaper articles, full-length books— all these and more were employed to publicize the innumerable different views of educators, philosophers, clergymen, or simply interested bystanders on the subject of how education should be regulated in England and Wales. The debates took several different forms and focused on a variety of issues within the question of national education. There was, for one thing, the question of who ought to do the regulating: for years the Church of England had provided much of the available schooling in the nation, and when, in the middle of the century, the government began to take a serious interest in the matter, producing commission after commission and eventually passing the Education Act of 1870, which established the provision of education for all children between the ages of five and twelve (though that education was not made compulsory until 1876), the Church of England understandably felt that its role ought to be recognized. The question, therefore, was what form the new, standardized education would take. Would it be sacred or secular? Would there be different schools for different religious denominations? How would those schools be treated that had already been established? What would happen regarding the ancient tradition of teaching classics, given the new idea that science ought to


all acceptation. The ultimate problem of physics is to reduce matter by analysis to its lowest condition of divisibility, and force to its simplest manifestations, and then by synthesis to construct from these elements the world as it stands.24


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be included in the curriculum? What would be the place of modern languages and literature? Such questions meant that the debates over educational reform continued unabated through the last decades of the century.25 Elementary education was not the sole or even the main focus of those debates. As important were the secondary schools, the public schools, and the universities.26 In addition to the Commissions on Primary Education, the government also produced Commissions on endowed schools, Scottish schools, middle-class schools, public schools, university education, and the schooling of boys and girls; each of these investigations, as might be predicted, was accompanied by a wave of public controversy. Coming under fire for their antiquated curriculum, their lack of rigor, their neglect of true scholarship and independent research, Oxford and Cambridge—the most influential universities in the nation—became one of the fiercest fighting grounds in the educational debates. The time-honored education that they offered, with its heavy emphasis on Latin and Greek, became a source of intense conflict in itself, influencing as it did not only education on a university level but the curriculum for secondary and primary schools.27 In 1880 Alexander Bain, Professor of Logic at the University of Aberdeen and one of the era’s most respected educationists, declared of the issue—which he described as “the vexed question of the study of the Classics”—“As respects the Higher Education this is the most important of all the questions that can be raised at the present time.”28 The more traditional forms of education did not suffer from any lack of support. In 1860 James Pillans, a Professor at the University of Edinburgh, claimed in a lecture given to the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, in Glasgow: “There is no want either of weighty argument or the authority of great names in support of a proposition, which is as certain as reason and philosophy can make it, that no instrument has hitherto been contrived so well adapted for developing the youthful mind, and training its faculties to their appropriate exercise, as a well-devised course of classical instruction.”29 Gladstone himself stated in the Public Schools Commission of 1864 concerning the sciences, modern languages, modern history, “and the rest”— anything, in short, that was not the classics—“I deny their right to a parallel or equal position; their true position is ancillary, and as ancillary it ought to be limited and restrained without scruple as much as a regard to the paramount matter of education may dictate.”30 Opposition to this stance, however, came from many areas in the spectrum of intellectual opinion. Some advocated an entirely scientific




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education with a near-total abandonment of Latin and Greek; others supported not science but modern literature and languages as the best educational foundation. Many participants in the debate favored a varied education offering a range of subjects, but others rejected that notion as unfeasible and promoted one subject or another as that most suited to occupy education’s center stage.31 Inevitably, the debate took on larger proportions, often becoming a conflict between literature and aesthetic cultivation on the one hand and science and practical knowledge on the other. Nor was the debate confined to England: all over Europe, from Paris to St. Petersburg, intellectuals and the social elite interested themselves in the vying types of education as one of the foremost questions of the age.32 Among these many voices, Tyndall, Spencer, and Huxley took their place with those who fought for science as the best framework of education. Though none of the three wanted to discard languages, literature, and the arts altogether—Huxley, in fact, insisted that a true liberal education would of necessity give the humanities a prominent place— there was no denying that all three men viewed science as the most sensible field in which to carry out an education—because, as they claimed, it was the most valuable method both for disciplining young minds and for providing those minds with useful information. They were not alone in their promotion of science in education: H. E. Armstrong, Lyon Playfair, Edward Frankland, and dozens of others, both external commentators from the intelligentsia and proponents within the educational system itself, advocated— at times implemented—the theory that science should be the foundation for education.33 Of all of the scientific educational reformers, however, Tyndall, Huxley, and Spencer went furthest in constructing a philosophy around the benefits of a scientific education. Why Reform: The Scientific Nature of Man and of the Victorian Age One of Tyndall’s favorite methods for opening lectures, especially those not part of a series, was to give a brief summary of the development of man’s attitude toward nature over time, beginning with cavemen and continuing to the Victorian era. This narrative device— using a simplistic idea of social evolution to describe increasing civilization—was not unusual, but Tyndall used the outline for two particular reasons: the first to establish the instinctively scientific outlook of human beings in their relationship with nature, the second to emphasize the uniquely scientific character of the Victorian age.




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In his “Address to Students” delivered in 1868 at University College, London, Tyndall began, “There is an idea regarding the nature of man which modern philosophy has sought, and is still seeking, to raise into clearness; the idea, namely, of secular growth.”34 Tyndall meant by “secular” not nonreligious but rather pertaining to a long period of time. He remarks later in the Address, “The improvement of man is secular—not the work of an hour or of a day.”35 The idea of “improvement” is crucial to his point; in this and other essays he argues that man’s instinctive curiosity about nature has developed over time into the refined scientific attitude prominent in the Victorian age. His Belfast Address, for which he uses this version of humanity’s history as a framework, begins with a description of the first men: “An impulse inherent in primeval man turned his thoughts and questionings betimes towards the sources of natural phenomena.”36 This impulse, Tyndall argues, was the driving force for the development of all scientific theory, method, and discovery: “The same impulse, inherited and intensified, is the spur of scientific action to-day.”37 But the scientific impulse, in Tyndall’s interpretation, did not always find the ideal outlet by which to express itself in the preceding ages of mankind. In his 1879 essay “Professor Virchow and Evolution,” Tyndall, once again using his primeval-man opening, argues that the earliest manifestation of curiosity about the natural world led to a priesthood of privileged men who could interpret the natural world to their fellow men: The bias towards natural truth must have been strong to have withstood and overcome the opposing forces. Feeling appeared in the world before Knowledge; and thoughts, conceptions, and creeds must have met a deep and general want; otherwise their growth could not have been so luxuriant, nor their abiding power so strong. This general need— this hunger for the ideal and wonderful— led eventually to the differentiation of a caste, whose vocation it was to cultivate the mystery of life and its surroundings, and to give shape, name, and habitation to the emotions which the mystery aroused.38

As emotional interpreters, these early priests met with Tyndall’s approval—“As poets, the priesthood would have been justified”39 — but he goes on to argue that priests and religious leaders “claimed objective validity for their conceptions, and tried to base upon external evidence that which sprang from the innermost need and nature of man.”40 The priests, responding to the instinct in man to investigate the natural world, thus merged an achievable knowledge of




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nature with an unachievable “knowledge” of the ultimate mystery of life; science had become bound up with religion, and it was only in the nineteenth century that it could manage, with Tyndall’s assistance, to free itself. The nineteenth century, then, was the first in which science could have free play, and its development was causing the world to change dramatically: Partly through mathematical and partly through experimental research, physical science has, of late years, assumed a momentous position in the world. Both in a material and in an intellectual point of view it has produced, and it is destined to produce, immense changes—vast social ameliorations, and vast alterations in the popular conception of the origin, rule, and governance of natural things.41

As the world became scientific, the thoughts and investigations of men must turn in the same direction; thus the Victorian age, once started on its scientific course, would inevitably lead to a greater and greater reliance on science, and at last the “popular,” in addition to the intellectual, conception of nature would be primarily scientific. One significant, though unexpected, source of support for Tyndall’s argument came from a group of seventy Irish students and ex-students of the Catholic University in Ireland in 1873, who declared in a Memorial their dissatisfaction with the University’s lack of scientific teaching. Tyndall, with great satisfaction, quotes the Memorial in his “Apology for the Belfast Address”: The distinguishing mark of this age is its ardour for science. The natural sciences have, within the last fifty years, become the chiefest study in the world; they are in our time pursued with an activity unparalleled in the history of mankind. [ . . . ] It is through the physical and natural sciences that the fiercest assaults are now made on our religion. No more deadly weapon is used against our faith than the facts incontestably proved by modern researches in science.42

Science, then, was the Catholic Church’s main enemy, and yet, because of the refusal of the Catholic authorities to provide any scientific instruction, “our generation of Irish Catholics are writhing under the sense of their inferiority in science, and are determined that such inferiority shall not long continue; and so, if scientific training be unattainable at our University, they will seek it at Trinity, or at the Queen’s Colleges, in not one of which is there a Catholic Professor of Science.”43 As if this were not bad enough, the students then produced




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what Tyndall gleefully called the “darkest stroke of all”: “They will, in the solitude of their own homes, unaided by any guiding advice, devour the works of Haeckel, Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, and Lyell.”44 The students’ Memorial, though briefly made public, soon—in Tyndall’s words—“unaccountably vanished from view,”45 the implication being that it was suppressed by the Catholic authorities. Soon afterward, those same authorities founded the more scientific Catholic University at Kensington, under the pretence, according to Tyndall, “of spontaneous inward force, and not of outward pressure, which was rapidly becoming too formidable to be successfully opposed.”46 The Irish students’ complaint against the constraints of a nonscientific education, conducted by one of Tyndall’s oldest enemies, the Catholic Church, served as the main inspiration for the fighting tone of his Belfast Address, though he does not mention the Memorial specifically in the Address itself, reserving his explanation for the later “Apology.” Rather, in the speech, he refers to the general situation of Irish education as one in which science was making gradual but inevitable headway, following an historic tradition of scientific victory over the constraints of the church: I should look upon the mild light of science breaking in upon the minds of the youth of Ireland, and strengthening gradually to the perfect day, as a surer check to any intellectual or spiritual tyranny which now threatens this island, than the laws of princes or the swords of emperors. We fought and won our battle even in the Middle Ages: should we doubt the issue of another conflict with our broken foe?47

Science, according to Tyndall, had already fought its great battle with the church in an earlier age, leaving the Victorian era to be its reign of triumph. In his response to Martineau’s discussion of materialism, he argues even more explicitly about what he views as the Irish Catholic refusal to accept the scientific nature of the present day. In reference to the writers of the Memorial, he declares: For their spiritual guides live so exclusively in the pre-scientific past, that even the really strong intellects among them are reduced to atrophy as regards scientific truth. Eyes they have, and see not; ears they have, and hear not; for both eyes and ears are taken possession of by the sights and sounds of another age. In relation to Science, the Ultramontane brain, through lack of exercise, is virtually the undeveloped brain of the child.48



Without the guidance of a scientific education, then, man’s scientific instinct remains useless and undeveloped. Caught “in the sights


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and sounds of another age” because of their Catholic upbringing, the Irish students and their teachers could not take advantage of the unprecedented scientific opportunities of the nineteenth century. Tyndall, therefore, does not portray the world’s turning to science as a uniform progress concurrent with that of the social evolution he was so fond of using to frame his lectures. Rather he argues that the Victorian age was unique in this cultivation of a scientific outlook because it was the first age in which the scientific instinct had freed itself from its early subordination to a religious framework. In his 1877 lecture “Science and Man” he describes man as an animal “in whom facts excite a kind of hunger to know the sources from which they spring,”49 and he proclaims: Never, I venture to say, in the history of the world has this longing been more liberally responded to, both among men of science and the general public, than during the last thirty or forty years. I say “the general public,” because it is a feature of our time that the man of science no longer limits his labours to the society of his colleagues and his peers, but shares, as far as it is possible to share, with the world at large the fruits of enquiry.50

Here we come to the crux of the matter as far as education is concerned. The Victorian age, because it had witnessed the escape of man’s natural curiosity from the blind alley of theology, was uniquely suited to the spread of scientific knowledge throughout society— a cause at last responding with what Tyndall deemed the correct method and principles to a need that had existed in mankind from its first appearance as a species. In his “Address to Students” at UCL, Tyndall argued that man “comes to us with a bundle of inherited capacities and tendencies, labelled ‘from the indefinite past to the indefinite future’; and he makes the transit from the one to the other through the education of the present time.”51 The present time, therefore, must be the lens through which these instinctive capabilities of man are taught, and it was Tyndall’s view that in the Victorian era both the present time and the instinctive capabilities were scientific— an unprecedented correlation that must be acknowledged and exploited. Two more points are significant in Tyndall’s depiction of the nineteenth century as the first truly scientific age. The first is his argument that, because of the scientific nature of the modern age, it would be crippling for anyone to grow up without an education in scientific principles. As philosophers, researchers, and men of science turned toward the scientific method of interpreting nature, it was their duty




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to instruct the general public in scientific principles because those principles were transforming the nature of society: the railway, the telegraph, electricity, machinery, all the trappings of the industrial age meant that technology and an application of scientific principles appeared at every corner. Such a viewpoint was expressed in the 1873 Memorial from the Irish students, and Tyndall frequently returned to it. In “Science and Man,” Tyndall relates the story of a German peasant seeing a train for the first time: He had never known carriages to be moved except by animal power. Every explanation outside of this conception lay beyond his experience, and could not be invoked. After long reflection therefore, and seeing no possible escape from the conclusion, he exclaimed confidently to his companion, “Es müssen doch Pferde darin sein”—There must be horses inside. Amusing as this locomotive theory may seem, it illustrates a deep-lying truth.52

That truth is, in Tyndall’s words, “Explanation, therefore, is conditioned by knowledge.”53 The peasant is using his instinct for scientific analysis as best he can, but the proper tools are not at hand; he thus cannot reach the truth. Tyndall’s implication is obvious: once knowledge has been gained by scientific researchers, it must be used not only to improve society but to help society understand those improvements. The explanations for phenomena, both natural and man-made, must be modified in light of the new knowledge. The German peasant, here representing the general populace, must not be left in ignorance of the true explanation of the train’s locomotive power; he must be able to understand as well as use the technological advances of his age, or he will not be able to exploit them to their full potential or, indeed, to participate as a fully functioning member of his own society. The second point is Tyndall’s emphasis on man traveling from “the indefinite past” to “the indefinite future”— a reworking of the Victorian trope of the march of civilization. For many Victorians, savagery had yielded to civilization and now bore its ultimate fruit in the accomplishments of the Victorian age. But this was not at all what Tyndall wanted to imply; his emphasis on change continued as far into the future as into the past, and he argued that though humanity had reached an age more scientific than ever before, it was still in its infancy as far as understanding nature was concerned. At the end of “Scientific Materialism” (1868), having established the boundary




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A time may therefore come when this ultra-scientific region, by which we are now enfolded, may offer itself to terrestrial, if not to human, investigation. Two-thirds of the rays emitted by the sun fail to arouse the sense of vision. The rays exist, but the visual organ requisite for their translation into light does not exist. And so from this region of darkness and mystery which surrounds us, rays may now be darting, which require but the development of the proper intellectual organs to translate them into knowledge as far surpassing ours, as ours surpasses that of the wallowing reptiles which once held possession of this planet.54

Humanity therefore must wait for full understanding perhaps millions of years—worse, it might not be humanity at all that finally gains the understanding. Tyndall insisted on applying to mankind the controversial theory of the mutability of species. Not surprisingly, this view, so long-sighted both into the past and into the future, proved disturbing to many Victorians’ selfimportance. The phrase that, unexpectedly for Tyndall, brought some of the most hostile censure was his closing sentence in the Belfast Address, in which he said, “Here, however, I touch a theme [the creative faculties of man] too great for me to handle, but which will assuredly be handled by the loftiest minds, when you and I, like streaks of morning cloud, shall have melted into the infinite azure of the past.”55 This poetic description, for Tyndall simply a rhetorical flourish to end his long oration, elicited disapproval not only because it implicitly denied the immortality of the soul but also, at bottom, because he was so ready to consign all of current humanity to oblivion.56 Having spent nearly the entirety of the Belfast Address in following his favorite schema of caveman to civilization, soothsayer to scientist, he then continued the march inexorably into the unknown future, when the Victorians would be long forgotten. His purpose, however, was not to prick the balloon of Victorian conceit but to provide a context in which to frame his argument that each age must adapt its systems of thought and education to the present conditions. For the Victorian Age, bristling with science and technology and— according to Tyndall’s view of social evolution—inevitably preceding yet more scientific eras, the only rational choice was to adopt a scientific method of education.


between what science can investigate and what it cannot, he qualifies this divide by arguing that science only finds the outer mystery of nature impenetrable for now:


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The Aims and Benefits of a Scientific Education

Two rival methods now solicit attention,— the one organised and equipped, the labour of centuries having been expended in bringing it to its present state of perfection; the other, more or less chaotic, but becoming daily less so, and giving signs of enormous power, both as a source of knowledge and as a means of discipline. These two methods are the classical and the scientific method.57

Given the complexities of the educational debates over the course of the century, this description cannot be seen as an accurate summary of the situation; it was, on the contrary, simply a rhetorically useful binary. However, it is important to understand that Tyndall was not inventing this binary but rather tapping into a common discourse, used by people with a variety of opinions. “Science,” as we have seen, could be defined in any number of ways, and “the classical tradition,” depending on the speaker, could include anything from Latin and Greek to the whole range of the humanities. Henry Sidgwick, a proponent of teaching modern languages and literature, promoted the usefulness of these disciplines in his 1867 essay “The Theory of Classical Education,” in which he contrasted them with the study of science: though he claimed that it was a “most disastrous error” to imagine that there was inevitable antagonism between the two disciplines of science and literature, he argued, “[I]t is so evident that if one or the other must be abandoned, if we must inevitably remain either comparatively ignorant of the external world, or comparatively ignorant of the products of the human mind, all but a few exceptional natures must choose that study which best fits them for communion with their fellow-men”58 —that is, in Sidgwick’s eyes, literature. Tyndall would not have accepted that statement; or perhaps, more accurately, he would have accepted it on the understanding that the discipline most able to “fit students for communion with their fellow-men” was, in fact, science rather than literature. Again and again Tyndall and his colleagues agreed that education ought, as Sidgwick put it, “to impart the highest culture, to lead youths to the most full, vigorous, and harmonious exercise, according to the best ideal attainable, of their active, cognitive, and aesthetic faculties.”59 But they argued that a training in science accomplished these aims more effectively than a training in either classical or modern languages and literature, not only intellectually but morally as well.


In his 1868 “Address to Students” at UCL, Tyndall described the educational debates as a fight between two camps:


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In Spencer’s volume on Education, the first essay, “What Knowledge Is of Most Worth,” contains an outline of the fundamental goals of life, which can be paraphrased as (1) survival, (2) material success, (3) child-rearing, (4) social success, and (5) the arts. Spencer concludes, at the end of a lengthy examination of each activity, that science, taught early and reinforced throughout life, forms the most useful vehicle in which to carry out all five activities. Therefore, he argues, Britain’s education system is exactly the opposite of what it ought to be: “That which our school-courses leave almost entirely out, we thus find to be that which most nearly concerns the business of life.”60 Spencer’s view elicited numerous objections in the years that followed. Edward Thring, Headmaster of the Uppingham School and an influential educational reformer, wrote in 1864, “Whatever a person unskilled in the Classics may know, he is ignorant of the history of man, and unable, in spite of science, in spite of acuteness, in spite of seeming knowledge, fairly to estimate the world as it is, or assign to the discoveries of each generation their proper place in the world’s history.”61 Though he does not throw out science altogether, Thring argues that one cannot become a fully functioning member of society without a foundation in the classics. But his definition of the aim of a classical education, to enable a person “fairly to estimate the world as it is,” bears a strong resemblance to Spencer’s portrayal of science as “that which most nearly concerns the business of life.” Similarly, the aim of education as outlined by Tyndall in his 1868 “Address to Students” could, through its lack of specificity, be reasonably used by both parties: “The object of that education is, or ought to be, to provide wise exercise for [the student’s] capacities, wise direction for his tendencies, and through this exercise and this direction to furnish his mind with such knowledge as may contribute to the usefulness, the beauty, and the nobleness of life.”62 In promoting science as the best means of fulfilling these aims, Tyndall was careful not to discard other disciplines, but his support of science overshadowed his acknowledgment of the worth of the classics: “As long as the ancient languages are the means of access to the ancient mind, they must ever be of priceless value to humanity; but surely these avenues might be kept open without making such sacrifices as that above referred to [a total lack of scientific education], universal.”63 Similarly, in the preface to the sixth edition of Heat as a Mode of Motion in 1880, he wrote:



A distinguished friend of mine may count on an ally in the scientific ranks when he opposes, on behalf of literature, every attempt to render


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science the intellectual all in all. Ours would be a grey world if illuminated solely by the dry light of the understanding. It needs equally the glow and guidance of high feeling and right thinking in other spheres. But this may be conceded while affirming the just and irrefragable claim of science to a more liberal space in public education than that which it is now permitted to occupy.64

As a man renowned among his colleagues for his knowledge of philosophy and poetry as well as science, Tyndall was not someone who believed in the abandonment of the humanities, nor even that science could be fully meaningful without literary knowledge. In his 1868 “Address to Students,” he declares, “Though hardly authorised to express an opinion upon the subject, I nevertheless hold the opinion that the proper study of a language is an intellectual discipline of the highest kind.”65 He goes on to use himself as an example: “If I except discussions on the comparative merits of Popery and Protestantism, English grammar was the most important discipline of my boyhood.”66 However, while there can be no question that Tyndall believed in the necessity of embracing more than just science to achieve a full life, he did not because of that believe in the necessity of the classics in education. At the height of his campaign for scientific education, there were times when Tyndall was not so restrained in his language, nor so understanding of the classics’ claim to prominence. In his preface to the first edition of Heat as a Mode of Motion, in 1863, he concludes with what is essentially a battle cry: As a means of intellectual education [Science’s] claims are still disputed, though, once properly organised, greater and more beneficent revolutions await its employment here, than those which have already marked its applications in the material world. Surely the men whose noble vocation it is to systemize the culture of England, can never allow this giant power to grow up in their midst without endeavouring to turn it to practical account. Science does not need their protection, but it desires their friendship on honourable terms: it wishes to work with them towards the great end of all education,—the bettering of man’s estate. By continuing to decline the offered hand, they invoke a contest which can have but one result. Science must grow. Its developement is as necessary and as irresistible as the motion of the tides, or the flowing of the Gulf Stream. It is a phase of the energy of Nature, and as such is sure, in due time, to compel the recognition, if not to win the alliance, of those who now decry its influence and discourage its advance.67



The classical authors, from Tyndall’s perspective, could not compete in the educational arena with the inexorable flood-tide of science.


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A few days ago, a Master of Arts, who is still a young man, and therefore the recipient of a modern education, stated to me that until he had reached the age of twenty years he had never been taught anything whatever regarding natural phenomena, or natural law. Twelve years of his life previously had been spent exclusively among the ancients. The case, I regret to say, is typical.68

In describing such an incident, Tyndall was lashing out at the foregrounding of the classics in education. He did not respect the mantra of tradition for tradition’s sake, and he argued that the classical authors, while neither irrelevant nor worthless, simply did not provide the education necessary for success in the modern world. Its aims, therefore, were insufficient. The aims of a scientific education, in contrast, specifically addressed the contingencies of a modern world: We have conquered and possessed ourselves of continents of land, concerning which antiquity knew nothing; and if new continents of thought reveal themselves to the exploring human spirit, shall we not possess them also? In these later days, the study of Physics has given us glimpses of the methods of Nature which were quite hidden from the ancients, and we should be false to the trust committed to us, if we were to sacrifice the hopes and inspirations of the Present out of deference to the Past.69

Here we see Tyndall’s insistence on the uniquely scientific nature of the Victorian era and his consequent claim that the educational system must be tailored to suit its needs. To prevent a betrayal of the present age, Tyndall argues, there must be a complete overhaul of educational policy with a new emphasis on scientific knowledge and modes of thought. In accordance with his insistence that in all humans there is an inherent propensity toward scientific thinking, Tyndall argued not only for an increase in the presence of science as a subject of education but also for a consequent reliance on science and its practitioners within society, as the best tool by which to interact with the modern world:


In his 1854 lecture he argued by implication that science must not simply be added to curricula; it must replace the old classical canon as the most important element of education. He describes the ignorance resulting from a purely classical education with explicit condemnation of such a system:

The world was built in order: and to us are trusted the will and power to discern its harmonies, and to make them the lessons of our lives.


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From the cradle to the grave we are surrounded by objects which provoke inquiry. Descending for a moment from this high plea to considerations which lie closer to us as a nation— as a land of gas and furnaces, of steam and electricity: as a land which science, practically applied, has made great in peace and mighty in war:—I ask you whether this “land of old and just renown” has not a right to expect from her institutions a culture more in accordance with present needs than that supplied by declension and conjugation?70

Such a statement in itself is an adequate summation of Tyndall’s educational philosophy, in spite of his careful acknowledgments that the classics also have merit. Tyndall, even more than Huxley, had no patience with the old ways; he rejected the esoteric demands of Latin and Greek in favor of what he saw as the natural and invaluable pursuit of scientific knowledge, for the simple reason that, in his view, each age must have its own instrument of interpretation. Greek and Latin, adequate for earlier periods, were out of place as a primary educational context in the nineteenth century, which must develop its own tools of interacting with and understanding nature. It is worth pointing out that, in promoting a scientific education, Tyndall was breaking away not only from the classical tradition but also from older traditions of scientific learning. His vision of science as an educational system was something more complex, more linked to the structure of society, than the vision of science that many of his predecessors possessed in the first half of the century. Such a contrast was especially prominent in the 1854 lectures series at the Royal Institution: Faraday, who gave the second lecture in the series, presented an impassioned plea for scientific learning couched in terms entirely different from those of Tyndall, Huxley, and Spencer. As we have seen, Tyndall looked up to Faraday and his self-made success with a reverence similar to his reverence for Carlyle, and he by no means rejected Faraday’s vision of a scientific education. Faraday’s passionate insistence on the importance of lifelong self-education formed the substance of his lecture, “Observations on Mental Education.” He argued that scientific thinking was a basis for life, not just for school— an idea similar in some ways to Tyndall’s argument— but he framed his definition of education as a self-propelled journey that each individual must make. Tyndall’s response to this lecture, recorded in his diary, demonstrates his typical attitude to Faraday and his philosophy: “He taught us as one having authority and not as the Scribes. [ . . . ] To me, in a scientific sense, his lecture was like the talking of Christ to the woman of Samaria. He made my own thoughts




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manifest to me with a clearness and precision superior to what I could use myself in declaring them.”71 However, though Tyndall agreed with Faraday’s basic tenet that science leads to truth, the structure he built from that foundation was vastly different from Faraday’s. Tyndall’s goals in advocating the cause of science in education were far removed from Faraday’s in promoting self-education: Faraday aimed at improved habits of education for the individual; Tyndall aimed at an improved educational system for society. Thus, though self-education was important for Tyndall as a means of individual motivation, the teacher of science rather than the student formed the keystone of his theory of education: “Such men, I believe, are to be found in England, and it behoves those who busy themselves with the mechanics of education at the present day, to seek them out.”72 In this sentence, as throughout the lecture, one can see the difference in Tyndall’s use of the term “education” as compared with Faraday’s. Whereas Faraday used “education” to refer to a lifelong process of self-modification on the individual rather than the social level, Tyndall used “education” to mean a specific system in use by society, a system with “mechanics” that could be re-designed, improved, and changed as needed. This difference in their conceptions of education sprang from their differing perceptions of the role of the scientist in society: Faraday thought of the natural philosopher as a man separated from society by his interest in the higher truths; Tyndall, with Spencer, Huxley, and their colleagues, strove to embed the scientist into the threads of the social fabric. Scientific Method as the Foundation of Education The educationist Robert Hebert Quick, in an essay on Spencer as one of the era’s foremost educational reformers, wrote, “The knowledge of poetry, belles-lettres, and the fine arts, which Mr. Spencer hands over to the leisure part of education, is the only knowledge in his programme which I think should most certainly form a prominent part in the curriculum of every school.”73 Edward Thring, in a pamphlet published the same year as Spencer’s treatise, agreed with Spencer that such subjects as music and modern languages should be considered side subjects, but he threw in science itself along with the arts and suggested that only boys too dull to excel in the classics should pursue them, as a means to regain some modicum of self-respect: “In one or other of these, all can find a standing ground, and genial employment, something between school and the playground, which




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prevents the transition being too abrupt, and precludes innumerable evils simply by removing idleness and shame.”74 Quick’s choice of poetry and the fine arts as the “only knowledge” in Spencer’s scientific program that he would promote in a curriculum and Thring’s dismissal of science as a plaything for stupid boys—from a man, moreover, whom many viewed as a radical educational reformer because of his insistence on teaching a wide variety of subjects—highlight by their extreme contrast the importance that Tyndall, Spencer, and Huxley placed on science. Far from being an inferior leisure activity, they argued that, if utilized properly, science could be the framework for every subject—art, math, philosophy, literature—because the mechanics of scientific thinking yielded unparalleled benefits in training the mind. Describing the generic process of scientific analysis, Tyndall compares it to physical exercise: “In thus traversing both ways the line between cause and effect, all our reasoning powers are called into play. The mental effort involved in these processes may be compared to those exercises of the body which invoke the co-operation of every muscle, and thus confer on the whole frame the benefits of healthy action.”75 While most scientists agreed with this view, other participants in the debates sometimes denied science’s usefulness in mental training. George Moberly, the headmaster of Winchester, when questioned about the natural sciences by the Public Schools Commissioners in 1862, said, “I hardly know what their value is. [ . . . ] But as a matter of education and training of the mind, which is our particular duty as instructors, I do not feel the value of them.”76 The problem for Moberly was that he did not believe schoolboys could be taught the methods of science, only the facts, and that these in themselves were useless: “I think the difference is this: a boy who has learned grammar, has learned to talk and to write in all his life; he has possessed himself forever of an instrument of power. A man who has learned the laws of electricity has got the facts of science, and when they are gone, they are gone for good and all.”77 Such a statement opposed a central tenet of Tyndall’s philosophy; for Tyndall, an understanding of physical laws necessarily entailed the training of one’s intellectual powers:



Were they facts only, without logical relationship, science might, as a means of discipline, suffer in comparison with language. But the whole body of phenomena is instinct with law; the facts are hung on principles, and the value of physical science as a means of discipline consists in the motion of the intellect, both inductively and deductively, along the lines of law marked out by phenomena.78


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Tyndall, by the time of that statement, from his 1868 “Address to Students,” had been making the same argument for nearly fifteen years. In his 1854 lecture on physics, he had developed the theme, arguing that the mental exercise required by science served not only to strengthen the mind but also to foster an interest and enjoyment in the use of the intellect that he argued was essential to the fulfillment of humanity’s potential: Thus, then, as a means of intellectual culture, the study of Physics exercises and sharpens observation: it brings the most exhaustive logic into play: it compares, abstracts, and generalizes, and provides a mental scenery appropriate to these processes. [ . . . ] By its appeals to experiment, it continually checks itself, and thus walks on a foundation of facts. Hence the exercise it invokes does not end in a mere game of intellectual gymnastics, such as the ancients delighted in, but tends to the mastery of Nature. This gradual conquest of the external world, and the consciousness of augmented strength which accompanies it, render the study of Physics as delightful as it is important.79

The mastery of Nature, “important” and “delightful” in equal measure, was, according to Tyndall, the highest purpose of man, from both a practical and an idealistic point of view. “There is something ennobling in the triumph of Mind over Matter.”80 Materially it means the progress of civilization through invention—Tyndall gives as examples the steam engine and the telegraph—but, more importantly, it offers a window into the secrets of the universe. The key to success both for individuals and for society as a whole is a combination of these two aims. Thus Tyndall explains that “while the scientific investigator, standing upon the frontiers of human knowledge, and aiming at the conquest of fresh soil from the surrounding region of the unknown, makes the discovery of truth his exclusive object for the time, he cannot but feel the deepest interest in the practical application of the truth discovered.”81 The scientist can in this way improve his society without neglecting the higher aim of his scientific pursuits, which is the discovery of truth for truth’s sake— and the pursuit of this goal provides a foundation of judgment and values in all areas of life.



The Moral and Spiritual Value of Science In pursuing pure over applied research, Tyndall’s hypothetical scientist gains the advantage not only of the usefulness and mental


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Thus the earnest prosecutor of science, who does not work with the idea of producing a sensation in the world, who loves the truth better than the transitory blaze of to-day’s fame, who comes to his tasks with a single eye, finds in that task an indirect means of the highest moral culture. And although the virtue of the act depends upon its privacy, this sacrifice of self, this upright determination to accept the truth, no matter how it may present itself— even at the hands of a scientific foe, if necessary— carries with it its own reward.82

To study science as it ought to be studied, according to Tyndall, was to be a member of at once the most useful and the most virtuous group in society—truly a Carlylean elite. The presence or absence of morality in science was one of the most contested issues in the educational debates; it was, indeed, an issue that inspired conflict in arenas far removed from education, touching as it did on theological concerns. One particularly damning condemnation of the immorality of a scientific education came from Charles Dickens in Hard Times (1854): the character of Mr. Gradgrind, who crushes all ethics and imagination out of his students in his School of Hard Facts, is a vivid and unforgiving satire of the dangers of utilitarian scientific thinking in the classroom. Even those who supported the idea of a scientific education did not always believe that it fostered morality. James Leitch, the Principal of the Church of Scotland Normal School in Glasgow, wrote in an otherwise laudatory essay on Spencer: Lastly, says Spencer, the discipline of science is superior to that of languages, because of the religious culture that it gives, religious in the widest and highest sense. [ . . . ] In this sentiment, Spencer is, I think, fairly in the clouds; for, in my experience, I have not found men of science to be more religious— that is, more honourable, more honest, more truthful, more self-sacrificing— than their neighbours; and I do not see why a man who gloats over the anatomy of a chimpanzee, becomes pale and emaciated over the crucible, or spends anxious hours in calculating the wavelength of light, should necessarily, and more than the student of languages, have his thoughts turned from nature to nature’s God.83


discipline of scientific knowledge but also the inspiration that science provides for man’s moral and spiritual nature:

Implicit in Leitch’s critique is the suggestion that men of science might in fact be less religious than other men, due to the distractions


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of their research and the nature-bound content of their work. Yet, to a certain extent, the religious superiority of science was what Tyndall, Spencer, and Huxley were claiming. They might have shied at saying “nature’s God” rather than, perhaps, nature’s unknowable mystery, but that the study of science yielded a reverential spirituality— one potentially more closely tied with truth than a spirituality gained in any other way—was an idea that the three men firmly supported. Underlining the similarity between his own philosophy and Tyndall’s, Spencer quotes Tyndall in the final section of his essay “What Knowledge Is of Most Worth”: “Believe me, a self-renunciation which has something noble in it, and of which the world never hears, is often enacted in the private experience of the true votary of science.”84 For good measure he then quotes Huxley as well: “True science and true religion are twin-sisters, and the separation of either from the other is sure to prove the death of both.”85 Both Tyndall and Huxley agreed with Spencer when he argued that “not science, but the neglect of science, is irreligious. Devotion to science is a tacit worship— a tacit recognition of worth in the things studied; and by implication in their Cause. It is not a mere lip-homage, but a homage expressed in actions—not a mere professed respect, but a respect proved by the sacrifice of time, thought, and labour.”86 Nor, moreover, was it only scientists who made this claim: Glaswegian minister Alexander Raleigh, when lecturing in 1870 on the Bible as the mainstay of education, claimed— perhaps unexpectedly—“The deep truth is that all secular knowledge is sacred too. To me it is like a religious exercise to hear Professor Huxley lecture.”87 Alexander Bain, the educationist, had no doubts as to the ethical value of science, though he did not take the argument onto the spiritual level, employing instead a more detached tone: Of Science generally we can remark, first, that it is the most perfect embodiment of Truth, and of the ways of getting the Truth. More than anything else does it impress the mind with the nature of Evidence, with the labour and precautions necessary to prove a thing. It is the grand corrective of the laxness of the natural man in receiving unaccredited facts and conclusions.88



Huxley went further than Bain, arguing in 1886 that science, “the poor Cinderella of the schools and universities,” could, if only she were not neglected, act as a corrective not only of man’s weakness but of the confusing teachings of science’s “sinful sisters,” theology and philosophy.89 Twenty years earlier, in his 1866 lecture “On the


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Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge,” he had made the same point: “I say that natural knowledge, seeking to satisfy natural wants, has found the ideas which can alone still spiritual cravings. I say that natural knowledge, in desiring to ascertain the laws of comfort, has been driven to discover those of conduct, and to lay the foundations of a new morality.” 90 Tyndall, describing his own education in Germany, discovered the same path to virtue: But science soon fascinated me on its own account. To carry it duly and honestly out, moral qualities were incessantly invoked. There was no room allowed for insincerity— no room even for carelessness. The edifice of science had been raised by men who had unswervingly followed the truth as it is in nature; and in doing so had often sacrificed interests which are usually potent in this world.91

Tyndall concluded that science, as carried out in the rigorous university at Marburg, yielded a morality as stringent as that of the church: “Among these rationalistic men of Germany I found conscientiousness in work as much insisted on as it could be among theologians.” 92 It was clear to Tyndall that even if a student studied nothing but science, he would still be trained as an ethical and even a spiritual person. Science for the Working Classes Tyndall and Huxley were anxious that the reform in education not be limited to the public schools and universities, which would affect upper- and middle-class boys while neglecting the majority of the population. In their view, science offered an education equally useful to every member of society, and they argued that it was an education everyone deserved to be given, regardless of class. Unsurprisingly, this argument gained them as much fame as the content of their lectures: The Times wrote in 1887, “Dr. Tyndall’s professorship in Albemarlestreet has synchronised, and by no casual coincidence, with the recognition of the claims of the masses to be scientifically instructed.” 93 Later the article praises Tyndall’s insistence on maintaining the rigor of his scientific explanations, no matter what their setting: “Professor Tyndall, like his constant fellow-worker [Huxley], has never for an instant looked upon the masses as entitled only to second-rate knowledge. They have had it of the highest and purest which it was within his means to supply.”94 This determination to present science in its full complexity and significance to all audiences, regardless of class,




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demonstrates Tyndall’s respect both for the intricacies of science itself and for the intelligence and learning capacity of the working classes. In Tyndall’s 1854 lecture on physics, for which the audience would have been primarily drawn from London’s social elite, Tyndall lays out explicitly the universality of science’s usefulness. Scientific education, he claims, is not merely a luxury for the rich, nor, conversely, merely a technical trade for the poor; in Tyndall’s argument, its benefits transcend both viewpoints. Lest there be any confusion, he gives examples from a variety of social strata. At the top of his list are the politicians: Why, for example, should Members of Parliament be ignorant of the subjects concerning which they are called upon to legislate: In this land of practical physics, why should they be unable to form an independent opinion upon a physical question? Why should the member of a parliamentary committee be left at the mercy of interested disputants when a scientific question is discussed, until he deems the nap a blessing which rescues him from the bewilderments of the committeeroom? The education which does not supply the want here referred to, fails in its duty to England.95

Tyndall makes two claims in this passage: first that “practical physics” by 1854 was prevalent in England to such an extent that an ignorance of basic scientific issues would prove a stumbling block to understanding political and economic questions; second that Members of Parliament were, in fact, suffering from that very ignorance—to such a degree that they were sleeping on the job—because the educational system had “failed in its duty to England.” In emphasizing the neglect in government of a field in which all areas of society now had their roots, Tyndall was attacking, albeit mildly, the country’s leaders, some of whose colleagues—the more scientifically minded Members of Parliament—might well have been attending the lecture. His outspokenness reveals not only his habitual disregard for conventional discretion but also the urgency with which he viewed the issue, something that did not diminish in the succeeding years. In his statement to the Committee on the Public School Bill in 1865, Tyndall emphasized the importance of science in the public schools: “It would at all events give our educated classes some knowledge of the system of nature, and enable them to comprehend, if not to direct, the scientific energy which now so powerfully influences the world, and which is destined to influence it more and more.”96 With regard to the working classes, Tyndall in his 1854 lecture first makes the suggestion that science would be a positive moral influence




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“to woo them from the pursuits which now degrade them.” 97 Several of the other lecturers in the series also pointed to the beneficial moral influence of their areas of expertise on the working classes— Charles G. B. Daubeny for chemistry, James Paget for physiology, W. B. Hodgson for economic science.98 Tyndall, however, goes a step further, advocating the scientific education of the working classes for the benefit not only of themselves but of society as a whole: Besides this, our factories and our foundries present an extensive field of observation, and were those who work in them rendered capable, by previous culture, of observing what they see, the results might be incalculable. Who can say what intellectual Samsons are at the present moment toiling with closed eyes in the mills and forges of Manchester and Birmingham? Grant these Samsons sight, and you multiply the chances of discovery, and with them the prospects of national advancement.99

Thus, while Paget advocated a knowledge of physiology as beneficial to the working man’s health, and Daubeny a knowledge of chemistry as beneficial to the farmer’s use of his land,100 Tyndall argued that a scientific education for members of the working class would aid “national advancement” by the creation of scientific discoverers. Such an argument goes well beyond the idea of protecting the working man from himself or of aiding the working man’s own interests: Tyndall is exploiting the idea that anyone with intelligence can improve society as a whole through the means of scientific discovery and invention, and that, moreover, people of intelligence can be found in every class; therefore, every class must receive the same scientific education. With Faraday before them, not to mention Tyndall himself, his audience did not lack examples of working-class men who had risen to scientific prominence through the use of their own intellects; Tyndall, however, was advocating a system that would make this rise possible for anyone capable of scientific thought— and a key point of both Tyndall’s and Spencer’s arguments was that all men and women, by virtue of their nature as humans, fall into this category. In a lecture on “Matter and Force” delivered to working men in Dundee in 1867, Tyndall told them that the working men of London who so often attended his lectures at the Royal School of Mines came out of intellectual curiosity rather than a desire to gain applicable skills:



The knowledge acquired is hardly ever of a nature which admits of being turned into money. It is a pure desire for knowledge, as a thing good in itself, and without regard to its practical application, which


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He compared these working-class audiences with the high-ranking audiences attending his lectures at the Royal Institution, arguing that they were in effect identical: “As regards attention and courtesy to the lecturer, neither of these audiences has anything to learn of the other; neither can claim superiority over the other.”102 High or low, rich or poor, Tyndall’s audiences, according to his own interpretation, flocked to his lectures to quench an innate thirst for scientific education. In 1868, Tyndall was called in to give evidence to the Select Committee on Scientific Instruction, formed to examine the usefulness of scientific instruction in education, as part of the much larger governmental investigation into the nation’s educational system in the 1860s. Many people were summoned to give evidence to the Committee: men and women, researchers and teachers, lecturers and schoolmasters; all were questioned in an attempt to understand the benefits, requirements, and costs of implementing a standard system of scientific education in schools and universities. Tyndall was interviewed in his capacity as a Professor at the School of Mines, and secondarily as a one-time teacher at Queenwood and as an Examiner in Natural Philosophy; the discussion, therefore, centered almost entirely on his experience of working men’s interest in and talent for the study of physics, with some time also given to the boys he encountered at Queenwood and the quality of the examination papers he had marked. Throughout the interview, Tyndall’s answers reflected the philosophy that motivated his lectures for the social elite at the Royal Institution. Humanity, he argued, naturally wants to know about the workings of nature, and in the Victorian Age science was the best interpreter available both for the elite and for the general populace. Neither social group could in Tyndall’s view claim any class-given superiority in their talent for or interest in science. He explained to the Committee:


animates these men. They wish to know more of the wonderful universe around them; their minds desire this knowledge as naturally as their bodies desire food and drink, and to satisfy this intellectual want they come to the School of Mines.101

I have sometimes to lecture before another audience, at the Royal Institution, composed of what you would call a higher stratum of society; but, with regard to gentlemanly demeanour and courteous attention, I cannot conscientiously say that I prefer one of those audiences to the other. I have purposely looked round the filled benches


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in search of a yawn; I never once saw it among these working men. I often receive letters which are perfectly touching, in the name of 20 workmen, or 30 workmen, in such and such a factory, expressing their intense disappointment at not being able to get tickets for the lectures; so that though I do not examine these working men, yet, if there is any trust to be placed in human sympathy, or in one’s observations of the human countenance, we may safely infer that those working men get a great deal of good out of the lectures.103

As described by Tyndall, his working-class audiences were as eager to attend and as receptive to the information he provided as those audiences who clamored for seats in the Royal Institution. Nor was there any disparity in the gain achieved by attending the lectures. “I am persuaded the working men derive great profit from the lectures,”104 he told the Committee. Indeed the working man, because of his frequent interaction with technological developments, might well find the lectures more useful than the wealthy socialites at the Royal Institution: Take, for example, electricity; that at present is a most widely applied power in this country. Take the case of the electric telegraph; you have, in fact, in this land of England, at the present time, a race of engineers calling themselves telegraphic engineers and electricians, whose efficiency depends in a great measure on the knowledge of that branch of physics which we call electricity. The laws of light also have immediate application in the construction of dioptic and catoptic apparatus for our lighthouses; even in the construction and disposition of looking-glasses in our homes. The practical optician, the constructors of our telescopes, microscopes, and photographic apparatus, ought to be intimately acquainted with the laws of light. The engineer also finds frequent occasion to apply the principles of optics; while of late years a branch of the subject, entitled physiological optics, has been greatly developed, an acquaintance with which would be of immense value to the practical oculist, and to the medical profession generally. I need not say a single word about the subject of heat with its applications to the steam engine, and particularly of the modern notions with regard to heat. Of course they have incessant practical application; my course of lectures takes in electricity, magnetism, some lectures on the mechanical properties of air and water, with lectures on acoustics, optics, and heat.105



Tyndall’s lengthy list demonstrates his conviction that a grounding in basic physics could prepare a student—wealthy or working-class— for almost anything that depended on the functioning of natural


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law. The multiplicity of applications to which physics was daily being adapted sprang to his mind at once, and yet he still insisted that a basic course of physics, such as the one he gave to working men, must include the theories of electricity, magnetism, acoustics, optics, heat—it must, in short, remain a course of pure knowledge rather than applied knowledge. This conviction led to a certain tension in Tyndall’s interview with the Committee on Scientific Instruction because, as soon becomes clear from their questions, the Committee had it in mind to convert the School of Mines into an explicitly technical school, where scientific principles would be taught only insofar as they aided the development of technical skills. Thus the following cross-talk developed: “Is there any comprehensive technical school in this country at the present moment?” “I am not acquainted with one.” “Do you consider it desirable that we should have in this country what other countries possess in that respect?” “I think it is highly desirable.” “Would you consider it desirable that Jermyn-street [where the School of Mines was located] should be adopted as the basis or nucleus of such a school?” “That is a question upon which I should like to ponder before giving an answer; I have not thought of the matter.”106 Tyndall was not trying to be difficult, but technical education was not the kind of education that he advocated as the best grounding in scientific knowledge. When asked, “In your lectures, do you point out the application of those subjects to industrial occupations?” he responded, “I cannot say that I do more than glance at the industrial applications of those subjects; but once properly furnished with the principles, the student can at once adjust his previous knowledge when he comes in contact with the industrial applications of the principles.”107 As a necessary and beneficial branch of education, Tyndall supported technical schools wholeheartedly; indeed eventual scientific specialization, both for researchers and technicians, was one of his mantras. But he was equally insistent on the need for a broad introduction to physics. In the initial lectures that he gave to working men at the School of Mines, as indeed in any initial series of lectures in scientific principles, the students must be introduced to the laws, theories, facts, and methods first; the applications of those facts and methods could come second— or, best of all, in the students’ own time, as a natural outgrowth of the possession of scientific knowledge. Eventually, evincing a slight strain of frustration, the Committee asked, “Perhaps you will kindly inform the Committee whether the main scope and purpose of your own lectures is rather to supply an elementary knowledge of science to those who are likely to turn it to




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My object in lecturing and teaching in Jermyn-street is certainly not to give knowledge to be turned to immediate account in business. In the first instance I try to provoke a desire and love for the science that I teach. I endeavour to keep this love and interest awake throughout the course, communicating at the same time as sound and as extensive a knowledge of experimental physics as the time in which I can devote to it (which is limited to 30 or 40 lectures) enables me to do.109

Tyndall’s interest lay in man’s instinctive inclination for scientific knowledge and principles, rather than in its application, though he believed in and supported those applications as a natural outgrowth of scientific knowledge. In Tyndall’s ideal world— and it seems the School of Mines came close to that, in many ways—both students and teachers approached science for the love of it, recognizing its methods as the best way to reach the truth of nature. In light of this somewhat idealistic portrayal of the School of Mines, it is worth looking at Huxley’s interview with the same Committee two months later, if only to grasp the difference between the mentalities of these two men, friends and colleagues though they were. Huxley was also questioned as a lecturer at the School of Mines, but whereas Tyndall had emphasized the eagerness, courtesy, and receptivity of his working-class audiences at the School, arguing that they were exemplars of hundreds more who would benefit from similar institutions, Huxley painted those same audiences as being the few who had successfully escaped “the ignorance and apathy of the manufacturing classes.”110 Plunging at once into the details of why the School of Mines was not as successful as it might have been, Huxley blamed not only the internal system, with its lack of tutorials and hands-on instruction, but also the unwillingness of the working classes to invest in the time needed for a scientific education. Asked by what means he would improve the School, he replied: The principle and chief remedy which I should suggest is one which is not very easy to apply; but it is the real remedy; and that is an increase of intelligence on the part of the manufacturing classes. Let them once know what is the real value of scientific training, and I cannot have a moment’s doubt that they will take it up as eagerly as they will take up any other means of improving their own business, and increasing its results.111


immediate account in business, or to give an impulse to the diffusion of the higher scientific knowledge in England?”108 Here was Tyndall’s opportunity. He replied:


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Tyndall would have agreed with the gist of this statement, but in responding to the Committee he was anxious only to highlight the benefits of the School of Mines as a successful example of his brand of scientific instruction; it did not occur to him to decry its faults. The different ways in which these two men portrayed the same institution indicate the difference in their attitudes toward both reform and science in society. Huxley’s attention to the specific faults of existing systems and the concrete changes needed to remedy them, as well as his often abrasive condemnation of the status quo, led to his being the more effective educational reformer. Tyndall’s portrayal, so much less tied to the mechanics of running a school, so much more philosophical and idealistic in bent, reveals his preoccupation with the underlying principles of scientific education—his conviction of the scientific instinct in man and of the scientific future toward which the Victorian Age was pointing. Science in the Universities Tyndall was consistent throughout his career in his denunciation of British universities—most notably Oxford and Cambridge— in comparison with the research-based universities in Germany. Even as a student in Marburg, he was aware of the contrast and found it surprising. In a letter to Hirst in 1850 on the subject of a privately funded People’s College, he wrote, “It appears that such must be our means of advance in England, as government is too feeble and too cowardly to take the initiative. Our poverty in our educational respect is an object of astonishment among the Germans.”112 In the ensuing decades the British government continued to drag its heels on funding scientific research, and Tyndall maintained the same view of German superiority in scientific education throughout his life.113 Michael Pupin, Professor of Electro-Mechanics at Columbia University— and, as a young man, a Tyndall Fellow at the same university—recalled Tyndall remarking in the 1880s: You will find in the Berlin laboratory the very things which my American and British friends and I should like to see in operation in all college and university laboratories in America and in the British Empire. In this respect the Germans have been leading the world for over forty years, and they have been splendid leaders.114



As far as Tyndall was concerned, Germany offered a real-life, contemporary example of an ideal educational system, and the fact that such


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an example existed made England’s neglect of its own universities even more shameful. How, then, should Britain’s universities be changed so as to bring them closer to Germany’s example? In 1858, Tyndall served as the first witness for a Committee of the University of London, which had been formed, after the University twice received petitions from groups of well-known scientists (including most of the X Club), to assess the “propriety of establishing a Degree or Degrees of Science” within the University.115 Tyndall’s envisioned physics doctorate, as he described it to the Committee, was specialized but required extensive background knowledge: “Let the candidate undergo a thorough examination upon one subject, e.g. Heat; and along with that let a sound general acquaintance with other portions of Physics— Electricity, Magnetism, Optics—be demanded; —but not more than might be derived from a perusal of books.”116 He explained that the requirement of a dissertation based on original research, combined with a viva voce examination, would suffice to impose high standards for the degree. Trouble began when the Committee suggested that the degree should also require some “general knowledge,” so that the candidate would not be an “ignorant man.” Tyndall responded: It is scarcely possible to come to a clear understanding, unless we define the limits as to general knowledge, because your limits and mine might be very different. If you include within the term “general knowledge,” Classical knowledge, and a knowledge of Logic, I say that these ought not to be combined with a scientific examination; I am distinct upon that point; but if you take a portion of Physics, and examine a candidate upon that, I think he ought to be acquainted with Physics generally, but a profound acquaintance with some particular subdivision of Physics ought to be demanded of him. The man who passes the examination I would impose, cannot be an ignorant man.117

There was much discussion on this point of “general knowledge,” but Tyndall persisted in misunderstanding the questions: he repeated that a general knowledge of physics would be desirable in a candidate, but that “to demand of him a profound knowledge of Physics, Biology, Mathematics, and Chemistry, although they may be associated together, would be unreasonable. It is not within the compass of the human intellect to accomplish it all.”118 Classics, for Tyndall, did not enter the question. When the Committee addressed the issue explicitly, he said, “My convictions on the subject are very distinct: I think that it would not be desirable to place Classics as a bar in




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the way of a man possessing scientific knowledge, but that scientific knowledge alone is of itself sufficient to entitle him to a Degree.”119 At one point the Committee explained to Tyndall that the suggested science degrees would not confer the same privileges as the arts degrees already in existence. Tyndall was adamant in his disapproval: “I am not aware of the extent of the power of the University in that respect: but I would neither accept a Degree, nor advise its acceptance, which should carry on it the mark of inferiority to which you refer.”120 Further questioning revealed that Tyndall would also not require a BA of the degree’s recipients: If I look at the state of English science in the present day, if I look at the men who uphold English Science, and bring it to the level of other nations, I find that the weight of Science rests upon the shoulders of men who have never passed those other examinations, and who would not at the present time probably be competent to pass them; and to deprive such men of a Degree of this kind would be in my opinion exceedingly wrong.121

The idea behind Tyndall’s version of the doctorate, therefore, was to fight the injustice that had deprived many of England’s scientists of public and official recognition, while at the same time establishing science as a subject of equal importance to classics and the arts. In pursuit of this aim he was firm to the point of seeming aggressive: “It is a moderate claim for scientific knowledge that it should stand on an equal footing with classical knowledge.”122 Afterward, in a note appended to his evidence, Tyndall explained, In replying to the questions proposed to me, my prevailing desire was to see the onesidedness now existing abolished, and a fair equilibrium established between scientific knowledge and classical knowledge. This might be effected [ . . . ] by granting to Science a recognition equal to that now accorded to Classics, so that students might pursue either the one or the other exclusively, and this is the side to which my evidence leans.123

It is clear from Tyndall’s note that he was aware both of the pugnacity he evinced during his time with the Committee and also that the specialization he advocated was not the only solution to the problem of science in universities: he acknowledges that an emphasis for all students on both classics and science would also yield good results, “provided the time required of the scientific student for the study of an ancient language be not too great.”124 His tactics with the Committee,




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however, were deliberate. In his mind, as so often, he was fighting a battle for science, represented by himself, against what he saw as the unfair monopoly of the classics over the established system of university education. As with their respective contributions to the Parliamentary Committee on Scientific Instruction ten years later, a comparison of Tyndall’s evidence with that of Huxley, who was also called in by the University of London Committee, again highlights a lack of concrete suggestions on Tyndall’s part. Whereas Huxley laid out a clear and detailed plan for introducing science degrees into the current system of the University, Tyndall kept the conversation focused on his larger campaign of supporting scientific education against the dominance of the classics.125 The result is an impressive demonstration of passion and oratory, but it lacks the grounded planning of Huxley’s evidence. D. S. L. Cardwell, discussing Tyndall’s evidence for the Committee, states that “in advocating highly specialised study, Tyndall was very much in the minority.”126 But his statement that Tyndall was advocating a degree in “(say) ‘Heat,’ ”127 rather than in physics, indicates that Cardwell misunderstood—with some reason, given the confusion of the evidence—Tyndall’s plan for scientific education. Like Huxley, Tyndall viewed the universities as ideally the last step in an educational progression that included science from the very beginning. Tyndall’s hypothetical student of heat, therefore, would not be let loose on society knowing about nothing but temperature; he would instead possess a grounding in both science and the arts from primary school and a thorough general knowledge of physics from his years at university, topped by an expertise in heat gained through his doctoral research; his degree in physics would come as the culmination of years of study progressing from the general to the specific, and the existence of specialized experts in the higher echelons of education would in turn ensure a focus on science in the earlier years. At his farewell dinner in New York in 1873, Tyndall laid out in brief the scheme for his educational system, again emphasizing the importance of culminating with pure research at the university level: Making use as far as possible of existing institutions, let chairs be founded, sufficiently, but not luxuriously endowed, which shall have original research for their main object and ambition. With such vital centres among you, all your establishments of education would feel their influence; without such centres, even your primary instruction will never flourish as it ought. I would by no means sever tuition from investigation; but, as in the institution to which I have the honour to belong, the one ought, in the cases now in view, to be made subservient to the other.128




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To keep society as regards science in healthy play, three classes of workers are necessary: Firstly, the investigator of natural truth, whose vocation it is to pursue that truth, and extend the field of discovery for the truth’s own sake, and without reference to practical ends. Secondly, the teacher of natural truth, whose vocation it is to give public diffusion to the knowledge already won by the discoverer. Thirdly, the applier of natural truth, whose vocation it is to make scientific knowledge available for the needs, comforts, and luxuries of civilized life. These three classes ought to co-exist and interact.129

Ideally, moreover, the three classes— or at least the investigator and teacher— should coexist in the same person, for the educator cannot convey the full potential of science as a force for change unless he himself has experienced that force through original research: Indeed, it may be doubted whether the real life of science can be fully felt and communicated by the man who has not himself been taught by direct communion with Nature. We may, it is true, have good and instructive lectures from men of ability, the whole of whose knowledge is second-hand, just as we may have good and instructive sermons from intellectually able and unregenerate men. But for that power of science, which corresponds to what the Puritan fathers would call experimental religion in the heart, you must ascend to the original investigator.130

Tyndall, firm in his belief that both true researchers and true teachers of science must experience the “power of science” through original investigation, thus advocated the promotion of universities as centers for specialized research unfettered by the need to find specific applications for discoveries. Both Tyndall and Huxley argued that in addition to providing an avenue for scientists to receive a standardized certificate of expertise, the establishment of Faculties of Science at universities, by providing centers of scientific investigation, would allow students who had gained the new degrees to pursue a respected and profitable career in science. In one of his lectures on universities, Huxley related the following story: “The other day, an emphatic friend of mine committed himself to the


Tyndall’s emphasis on the “subservience” of tuition to investigation demonstrates his long-held conviction that research should be the primary motivation for scientists. Yet he was equally adamant that research could not be a scientist’s only purpose. In one of his American lectures he explained:


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opinion that, in England, it is better for a man’s worldly prospects to be a drunkard, than to be smitten with the divine dipsomania of the original investigator. I am inclined to think he was not far wrong.”131 According to both Huxley and Tyndall, original investigation in science was the mainspring of all true scientific achievement and would be hampered, if not destroyed altogether, if the investigators were forced to work for money. In his lecture “On the Study of Physics,” Tyndall warned, “The scientific man must approach Nature in his own way; for if you invade his freedom by your so-called practical considerations, it may be at the expense of those qualities on which his success as a discover depends.”132 He argued, therefore, that if scientific discoveries were to be made, it was imperative that scientists be given the freedom and support to pursue whatever line of research they desired. By establishing Faculties of Science at universities, Britain’s educational system would not only make a crucial step toward what Tyndall viewed as the ideal education— one based from the first on science and allowing for a training in science up to and through the university level—it would also produce a legion of men trained thoroughly enough in science to be excellent teachers, so that the scientific vein of education would become self-supporting. Most importantly, it would provide an arena in which Britain’s foremost scientific minds would have the means, time, and backing to pursue their own experiments without being constrained by the need to find practical applications for their discoveries. Thus a reform in the universities would result in improvement on all levels of society, among people of all ages, and, in the realm of science itself, it would raise Britain to the level of Germany’s achievements, allowing her to take her rightful place as a nation renowned for scientific discovery. The Peculiarities of Tyndall’s Philosophy of Scientific Education The establishment of science as the framework for education was deeply important to Tyndall, and in his own time, as we have seen, his contemporaries placed him alongside Huxley and Spencer at the forefront of the campaign for scientific education. Yet, though he addressed the topic of education throughout his career, Tyndall did not produce anything approaching Spencer’s philosophy of education; nor did he equal Huxley in the amount of time and energy devoted to effecting concrete change in educational policy. One reason behind this lesser impact may well have been Tyndall’s greater interest in the overarching philosophical questions of the debates—his tendency to become distracted by an ideal vision and to neglect the details of day-to-day reform. Another




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reason, however, lies in the differences between his vision of scientific education and that of Huxley and Spencer. As is clear from even a cursory examination of their respective works, Tyndall largely agreed with Spencer and Huxley in their views on the benefits of a scientific education. There are, however, two major points on which he differed, and these shaped Tyndall’s view on the role of the scientist in society. The first of these points is Tyndall’s definition of “science” as, in essence, “physics.” On this question one can see the personal bias of each of the three men discussed in this chapter: Spencer, who had no formal training in any scientific field but favored sociology, assigned disciplines to the various branches of education as if he were dealing out a deck of cards—math, chemistry, physics, and engineering for those entering industry; psychology and biology as the best introductions to child-rearing; sociology and political economy in place of traditional history lessons. As a social theorist, he showed his passion most strongly when he argued for the social sciences. Huxley, a doctor by trade and well-versed in the vagaries of medical education, focused on biology, physiology, and anatomy—the sciences of life. Tyndall, a physicist to the core, held out for the laws of the universe. When he spoke of science in education, he implied that the fundamental science is an understanding of the laws determining the natural world—the world of atoms and forces, from electricity to glaciers to stars to life itself. Physics, according to Tyndall’s definition, included humanity: “The territory of physics is wide,” he wrote in 1860. “Let us follow matter to its utmost bounds, let us claim it in all its forms— even in the muscles, blood, and brain of man himself—as ours to experiment with and to speculate upon.”133 This is not to say that Tyndall objected to Huxley’s emphasis on biology or Spencer’s on sociology; he agreed with their positions and argued, as they did, for a general scientific education for everyone in society. But Tyndall’s physics embraced these other scientific disciplines because it took as its focus all physical laws, and that meant the broadest possible domain of authority for scientists trained in Tyndall’s educational system; their area of expertise would cover not only humans and human society but matter in all its forms, the making of the world, and the fuzzy regions between body and mind, laws and miracles. Tyndall’s definition of science, in short, spelled trouble, for it encroached on areas claimed by theologians. Tyndall, as we have seen, was well aware of this encroachment and fought to establish the contested areas as legitimate ground for science, but it meant inevitably that his campaign for educational reform was delayed and entangled by theological concerns. The second significant point about Tyndall’s idea of scientific education arises from his passion for Carlyle. To him the Carlylean vision




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of society guided by an intellectual elite provided the perfect method with which to integrate science into society as the predominant form of knowledge. Scientists, in Tyndall’s ideal world, would be guides for the public, steering modern society between the Scylla and Charybdis of ignorance and superstition. Huxley also deplored the “sin” of blind faith, and Spencer drew vivid pictures of the calamities caused by the public’s ignorance of scientific laws; but Tyndall took the idea one step further, using Carlyle’s imagined social heroes as the template for a truly scientific society in which scientists held the top position of intellectual authority. In order to create these scientific heroes, Tyndall needed a thoroughly scientific system of education, culminating with the existence of advanced scientific degrees from universities. Tyndall closed his 1854 lecture on physics with an exhortation to provide the nation’s students with the means to survive and excel in the world of Victorian Britain. In every moment of life, he argues, the Victorian era calls out for scientific observation and deduction. Thus for all members of society, on a practical as well as an intellectual level, science is the best tool one can have for succeeding in life. With his last words, Tyndall indicates the further role of those men choosing to devote not only their younger years but their entire lives to the pursuit of the investigation of nature: And if the tendency should be to lower the estimate of science, by regarding it exclusively as the instrument of material prosperity, let it be the high mission of our universities to furnish the proper counterpoise by pointing out its nobler uses— lifting the national mind to the contemplation of it as the last development of that “increasing purpose” which runs through the ages and widens the thoughts of men.134

Thus we find the final implication of Tyndall’s vision of a scientific society: the nation should be well-versed in science from top to bottom, and, while the majority focus on the material benefits of science, the learned men should guide society to an appreciation of science’s nobler uses— the expansion of the mind and the exploration of nature’s glories. The universities, in Tyndall’s mind, would in their ideal form act as the hatching ground for scientist-heroes, who would see further into the heart of nature than anyone else— even theologians— and, by virtue of their specialized knowledge, become the new public moralists for society.




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Science after Tyndall The Growth of University Laboratories

I

n 1887 John Tyndall retired from his post as superintendent of the Royal Institution on account of his ill health. Insomnia, headaches, dyspepsia, and general fatigue combined to weaken him beyond the capacity of sustained research. Though he continued to experiment after retiring, his days of significant original research were over, and after six more years of continued decline, Tyndall died on December 4, 1893, from an accidental overdose of chloral administered by his devoted wife Louisa. Realizing that she had mistaken the chloral for magnesia, she said to him, “John, I have given you chloral,” and Tyndall, ever one to look facts in the face, replied, “Yes, my poor darling, you have killed your John.”1 Louisa was devastated by her fatal mistake; she spent the rest of her long life collecting materials for a definitive biography of Tyndall, which she did not live to see published, and battling the increasing obscurity surrounding Tyndall’s name. Even by the time of his retirement, however, Tyndall’s prominence both in the scientific community and in the public eye was waning. A new generation of scientists began to overshadow Tyndall and his colleagues in the 1880s and 1890s. While controversy over the influence of science in culture had by no means diminished toward the end of the century, its focus had shifted; with scientists becoming accepted as influential public figures, the scientific community began to pay more attention to the credentials of men hoping to enter its ranks, which increasingly worked within the standardized and regulated realm of university-based science. This transition into professionalism,


Chapter 5


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however, was not clear-cut; the shift was gradual, varied, and amorphous, and scientists at the turn of the century remained a heterogeneous group, some using traditions dating back to Faraday and the beginning of the century, others looking ahead to innovations in theory as well as practice. Most combined old and new, the transition becoming visible only on a larger time-scale than can be seen in one generation. This chapter explores the nature of this gradual transition by contrasting Tyndall with scientists prominent in the last decades of the century, in particular James Clerk Maxwell, one of the group of “North Briton” scientists who often ranged themselves against Tyndall, and the two men who succeeded Tyndall at the Royal Institution, the third Baron Rayleigh and J. J. Thomson. These three men held in succession the Professorship of Experimental Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University, and the chapter argues that their allegiance to the laboratory, set up largely according to Maxwell’s vision of scientific research, acted as one of the main factors in distinguishing Rayleigh and Thomson from the older generation of scientists to which Tyndall belonged. The chapter examines the founding and development of the Cavendish as well as the scientists who established it as a center of teaching and research, and it discusses the wider changes in the attitude and methods of a science veering increasingly from physical demonstrations to mathematical theories. These changes in scientific language and concepts, coming hand in hand with increasing specialization within scientific fields, in turn led to a shift in the audience for scientific lectures and information. The main audience for in-depth scientific research came to comprise students within the educational system, provided with years of training and exposure to the newer methods and theories. As this form of science became more standardized as a university-based field of study, it also became more inaccessible to the general public, a result that Tyndall had not anticipated in his vision of inculcating science into culture through the means of education. Public lectures such as those delivered at the Royal Institution, and popular books on science such as Tyndall had written with such great success, came to represent a different, simplified version of science, designed to acquaint the general public with vague scientific ideas but unable to convey the complex sophistication of scientific research as it was being carried out in the new university laboratories. Whereas Tyndall had prided himself on explaining the intricacies of science with such clarity that anyone could understand him, his successors increasingly believed that their




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research could not and should not be set before the general populace in all its complexity. Popular science, for them, came to be something that other people— people who were not serious researchers— turned to when they were unable to become professional scientists. This chapter will examine the impact of this growing divergence in science and its audiences on the Royal Institution; it will then analyze Tyndall’s own status in connection with these changing audiences, with the rise of the university laboratories, and with the generation of scientists who replaced him and his contemporaries as the primary faces of science in society. Maxwell and the Nature of Science at the Cavendish: Research and Teaching The Cavendish Laboratory opened in 1874, the completion of a fouryear building project funded by the seventh Duke of Devonshire, at the time Chancellor of the University and head of the Cavendish family. In 1871 James Clerk Maxwell, benefiting from the Chancellor’s funds, became Cambridge’s first Professor of Experimental Physics. Maxwell’s scientific career had differed dramatically from Tyndall’s: born into a devout, landed family in Scotland, he was encouraged in his scientific interests from a young age. He attended first Edinburgh and then Cambridge University, and upon graduating he took up a post as Professor of Natural Philosophy at Aberdeen, later transferring to King’s College, London. After nine years as a professor, he retired into private life and continued his researches at Glenlair, the family estate. His firm allegiance with P. G. Tait, William Thomson, and others who formed the “North Briton” group of scientists, all committed to orthodox Christianity, meant that Maxwell often ranged himself among Tyndall’s enemies.2 With his playful personality, Maxwell did not display a violent dislike of Tyndall; instead he objected to Tyndall’s views through satirical verses or teasing references, as when he wrote to a friend in 1871, “I have been so busy writing a sermon on Colour, and Tyndalising my imagination up to the lecture point, that along with other business I have had no leisure to write to anyone.”3 Though not as virulent in his hostility as Tait, however, Maxwell promoted a science very different from what Tyndall practiced, one grounded in universities, as his own career had been, and fully compatible with Christian belief. It is significant that the man who first put his stamp on the Cavendish— by the twentieth century the most influential scientific center in Britain— came from a group of scientists who stood


SCIENC E A F T ER T Y NDA LL


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against much of what Tyndall believed to be important for the future of science. Cambridge was not the first university to have a laboratory for experimental physics; the well-established laboratories of many German universities acted as primary role models, and even in Britain Oxford, among others, had beaten them to it, completing the Clarendon Laboratory in 1872. Nor was the Cavendish the first British university laboratory to establish the collaborative practice of students assisting their professors in research: for years William Thomson had led intimate classes in physical research in his laboratory at Glasgow, forming the nucleus of a teaching method that other university laboratories later adopted. But the Cavendish Laboratory aimed for a larger and more prominent place in both the scientific community and in the educational system of Britain. Maxwell warned his listeners in his 1871 inaugural lecture that his aim for the Laboratory was grander than Thomson’s or anyone else’s personal laboratory: “We owe it to the munificence of our Chancellor, that, whatever be the character in other respects of the experiments which we hope hereafter to conduct, the material facilities for their full development will be upon a scale which has not hitherto been surpassed.”4 Maxwell seems to have been fully aware of the potential power of Cambridge as an entity in the scientific community. He asks his audience to “consider by what means we, the University of Cambridge, may, as a living body, appropriate and vitalize this new organ, the outward shell of which we expect soon to rise before us.”5 From the first, then, the Laboratory was to be the property not of Maxwell himself or of any individual scientist, but of the University itself—whatever discoveries came out of it would have an institutional label as well as the personal stamp of the discoverers.6 Maxwell also had a clear idea as to what form of experimentation would take place within the Laboratory. In his lecture he contrasts two types of experiments—those of illustration and those of research. “The aim of an experiment of Illustration,” he explained, “is to throw light upon some scientific idea so that the student may be enabled to grasp it.”7 In an experiment of research, on the other hand, “the ultimate object is to measure something which we have already seen— to obtain a numerical estimate of some magnitude. Experiments of this class—those in which measurement of some kind is involved, are the proper work of a Physical Laboratory.”8 Maxwell thus established explicitly that the Cavendish Laboratory would not be following the example either of the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford—the primary role of which for decades was teaching without a research




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component9 — or of the Royal Institution. Tyndall had designed many of his experiments, of necessity, with an eye to making them comprehensible as displays before a public audience; his students were the hundreds who flocked to see his lectures, and the experiments played a crucial part in the success of what was undeniably a theatrical performance. Though he aimed first and foremost for new discoveries, his position as a public lecturer demanded that he also aim for clarity and interest in his experiments. Maxwell had no interest in theatricality, and the students for which the Cavendish was being built differed in both their goals and their educational background from the amateurs of elite society who patronized the Royal Institution. At base, Maxwell’s distinction was one inherent in popular versus professional science; at the Cavendish, science was intellectually exclusive—there would be no outsiders who needed solely illustrative experiments. The scientific goal of the Cavendish, as laid out by Maxwell, was the standardization of measurement and procedure—in effect the standardization of knowledge itself. Indeed Maxwell describes as an eventual function of the Cavendish Laboratory the investigation of method rather than facts: “We might even imagine a course of experimental study the arrangement of which should be founded on a classification of methods, and not on that of the objects of investigation.”10 Such, indeed, he claims to be one of the foremost purposes of the Laboratory as an institutional body: Our principal work, however, in the Laboratory must be to acquaint ourselves with all kinds of scientific methods, to compare them, and to estimate their value. It will, I think, be a result worthy of our University, and more likely to be accomplished here than in any private laboratory, if, by the free and full discussion of the relative value of different scientific procedures, we succeed in forming a school of scientific criticism, and in assisting the development of the doctrine of method.11

Here in a nutshell was Maxwell’s vision for the Cavendish, and though in both procedure and scale it was far removed from Tyndall’s individual experimentation in the Royal Institution, it nonetheless bore a resemblance to the ideal role of universities that Tyndall had envisioned nearly twenty years earlier, in 1854, when he described them as demonstrating science’s “nobler uses” and “lifting the national mind to the contemplation of it as the last development of that ‘increasing purpose’ which runs through the ages and widens the thoughts of men.”12 In the same vein, Maxwell stated in his inaugural lecture: “If society is thus prepared to receive all kinds of scientific doctrines, it




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is our part to provide for the diffusion and cultivation, not only of true scientific principles, but of a spirit of sound criticism, founded on an examination of the evidences on which statements apparently scientific depend.”13 In spite of Maxwell’s optimism, the Cavendish did not succeed without struggling to overcome numerous obstacles—most significantly the weight of classical tradition that had overshadowed the University’s efforts in scientific education for over a hundred years. It had been possible to receive a degree in physics at Cambridge since 1861, but the acceptance of experiment-based science as a subject of equal legitimacy to the classics and pure mathematics came only slowly in the succeeding decades. Maxwell addressed the question of applied science versus pure mathematics in his introductory lecture: But what will be the effect on the University, if men pursuing that course of reading which has produced so many distinguished Wranglers, turn aside to work experiments? Will not their attendance at the Laboratory count not merely as time withdrawn from their more legitimate studies, but as the introduction of a disturbing element, tainting their mathematical conceptions with material imagery, and sapping their faith in the formulae of the textbooks?14

Not surprisingly, Maxwell’s answer to these questions was a resounding no, but he knew that they were being asked, and that it was necessary for someone in his position to defend the worth of practical experimentation. Having given his defense, Maxwell hastened to assure his audience that he did not promote the study of science in isolation: There is a narrow professional spirit which may grow up among men of science, just as it does among men who practise any other special business. But surely a University is the very place where we should be able to overcome this tendency of men to become, as it were, granulated into small worlds, which are all the more worldly for their very smallness. We lose the advantage of having men of varied pursuits collected into one body, if we do not endeavour to imbibe some of the spirit even of those whose special branch of learning is different from our own.15



Whether Maxwell’s idea of an open and rich connection between the arts and sciences in the University was ever realized is debatable; in any case, undergraduates did not begin to take advantage of the opportunities of the Cavendish until two years after Maxwell’s early death in 1879.


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The delay was mostly due to the question of how the natural sciences should be taught: practical exams for the Natural Science Tripos became a requirement only in 1881; before that time the undergraduates, even those committed to a career in science, could not fulfill their envisioned role of students-cum-researchers in the Laboratory without compromising their position as students in the larger university. In December of 1874, the anthropologist G. T. Bettany wrote an article on “Practical Science at Cambridge,” published in Nature. Though enthusiastic about Maxwell, Bettany identifies the obstacle to the Laboratory’s success as that which Maxwell had described three years earlier: The great hindrance to the success of the Cavendish Laboratory at present is the system fostered by the Mathematical Tripos. The men who would most naturally be the practical workers in the laboratory are compelled to refrain from practical work if they would gain the best possible place in the Tripos list. [ . . . ] For a man to do practical work in physics at Cambridge implies considerable exercise of courage and self-sacrifice.16

In 1881, however, the first step in overcoming this hurdle was taken with the establishment of practical exams, and by 1895, according to an advertisement in Nature for the scientific scholarships available at Cambridge, practical science at the university had reached its prime: Thus, though something remains to be done in certain quarters in the direction of placing science on an equal footing with the older subjects as a fit object of college recognition and award, it must be owned that a great advance has been made within the last ten years. The natural science tripos now attracts a larger number of candidates than any other, and this notwithstanding that its standard has steadily been raised.17

In the eventual success of the Laboratory’s undergraduate education system, and in the growing reputation of the Cavendish as a research laboratory, one can see also the increasing acceptance of the brand of science that Maxwell supported— standardized and collaborative research, carried out in university laboratories by men trained in those same laboratories.



Lord Rayleigh: The Scientist Who Succeeded Tyndall The physicist Lord Rayleigh (1842–1919), successor both to Tyndall at the Royal Institution and to Maxwell at the Cavendish Laboratory,


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did not conform to a new or fundamentally modern type of scientist.18 Unlike Tyndall, he was an aristocrat, born John William Strutt, the third Baron Rayleigh, in the topmost rung of the country’s elite, and he followed a traditional path of British education, spending stints at Eton and Harrow (both cut short due to his poor health) and eventually graduating as senior wrangler from Trinity College, Cambridge. Rayleigh thus possessed the educational credentials that were becoming increasingly necessary to successful British scientists and that Tyndall lacked as an impoverished upstart from Ireland. But Rayleigh also followed the older tradition of acting as a wealthy scientific amateur, setting up a laboratory at his country estate, Terling Place in Essex, and for most of his life conducting his experiments in this private abode rather than in a public institution or university.19 Rayleigh, like Maxwell, was devoutly Christian— another point on which he differed from the more radically minded Tyndall. There is a striking contrast between the aggressive, anti-theological thrust of Tyndall’s Belfast Address and the conclusion to Rayleigh’s Presidential Address at the British Association meeting held in Montreal in 1884, ten years later: “Without encroaching upon grounds appertaining to the theologian and the philosopher, the domain of natural science is surely broad enough to satisfy the wildest ambitions of its devotees.”20 Rayleigh, then, had no bone to pick with organized religion, and he was even open to other forms of potentially supernatural phenomena: he spent a great deal of time on psychical research, becoming a founding member of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, though he was never convinced of the reality of spiritualism. When Maxwell died in 1879, the Cavendish Laboratory was still in its infancy, and it was Lord Rayleigh who ensured the continuation of Maxwell’s plans. Rayleigh’s central goal as director of the Cavendish Laboratory was to fulfill Maxwell’s vision of establishing standard units for scientific measurements. Historians Simon Schaffer and Graeme Gooday have argued for the importance of standardization and metrology as tools in both linking research laboratories with the expanding field of technological industry and in establishing the Cavendish as a hub in the growing network of professional scientific research.21 Rayleigh’s choice, therefore, was strategic in making the Cavendish an important center within and beyond the scientific community. But Rayleigh also devoted a great deal of time and energy to the establishment of a thorough system of instruction, thus balancing Maxwell’s focus on original research with an emphasis on the necessary education leading up to assistance in that research. Rayleigh’s son writes in his father’s biography, “Previous to his arrival




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the opportunities of practical instruction for the average undergraduate had not been adequate, and had by no means reached the standard set in Germany by Helmholtz. Lack of system was the deficiency.”22 To address the problem, Rayleigh overhauled the Laboratory’s teaching program: “It was necessary to be much more systematic. Each experiment was set out permanently on a table to itself, and written directions were provided. The classes were at regular hours, and a demonstrator was in attendance, who assigned the experiment, and gave help in any difficulty, finally approving or disapproving the numerical result.”23 From the beginning, accuracy and compliance with standards were among Rayleigh’s foremost demands on beginning students. The same attention to laboratory procedure marked Rayleigh’s own work while at Cambridge. In designing a course of research, Rayleigh wanted to exploit the potential of the Cavendish and simultaneously to establish a standard method of research, one emphasizing collaboration and standardization rather than individual achievement. Arthur Schuster, who worked with both Rayleigh and Thomson at the Cavendish Laboratory before becoming Professor of Mathematics at Owens College and later Dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of Manchester, wrote in his obituary for Rayleigh, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in 1919: Rayleigh gave considerable thought to the organisation of the laboratory as a place of instruction and research, and consulted a few friends who were acquainted with similar laboratories in other Universities. But one idea to which he attached importance and which was entirely his own, was to identify the laboratory with some research planned on an extensive scale so that a common interest might unite a number of men sharing in the work. As a suitable subject he selected the redetermination of the electrical standards, and tried to obtain voluntary workers to take part in it. In this he was not altogether successful, partly because the number of sufficiently advanced students was not great, and perhaps also on account of the natural wish of the beginner to try his hand at a problem in which he could show his individual powers.24



Schuster’s description reveals the difficulties Rayleigh had in establishing as acceptable both the content and the procedure of his research—because the Laboratory was still new, and because its system of graduated status among its students was still being developed, Rayleigh’s vision of collaboration could not instantly be realized; nor, as Maxwell had predicted, did the standardization of electrical


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units fire students’ imaginations. But Rayleigh succeeded eventually both in re-determining the ohm, the ampere, and the volt, and in establishing his method of experiment-based scientific education and team-based research as the standard in university laboratories. R. T. Glazebrook, Rayleigh’s demonstrator and a respected physicist in his own right, wrote in 1910, “But the most marked results of the Rayleigh period at the Cavendish are his own splendid researches.”25 It will be seen from this statement, as well as from the fact of Rayleigh’s subsequent fame, that individual achievement was not hampered by the practice of collaboration in the laboratory, and Glazebrook’s introduction to his description of Rayleigh’s work shows his satisfaction in exact measurement becoming a valid aim of scientific research: “The realisation of the importance of exact measurement as an end to the advancement of knowledge is a marked feature of the progress of physical science in the latter part of the last century.”26 Rayleigh, by the end of his brief term as professor, in 1884, had succeeded in establishing the Cavendish as an internationally recognized arbiter of electrical units— a large step toward confirming the Laboratory’s status as a center for what Maxwell had termed “scientific doctrine”— and had established a place for himself among the great scientists of the age. Three years later, in 1887, Tyndall retired, and Rayleigh became the next Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution. Yet, though the job had been the basis of Tyndall’s career and indeed of his life, for Rayleigh it remained a peripheral responsibility. He found that the Institution’s laboratory facilities, as compared with those of the Cavendish and—more importantly for Rayleigh—with those of his own laboratory at Terling, were outdated and inadequate. Writing to Lord Kelvin in 1888, he exclaimed, “I am now established in the R.I. laboratory. The apparatus has been allowed to fall behind altogether, of which I may give you an idea when I say that there is not an ohm in the place!”27 Not surprisingly, Rayleigh wrote also to Tyndall, the man most familiar with the Institution’s equipment, and Tyndall’s reply is undeniably defensive: You are quite right, but our poverty as to apparatus was self-imposed. We did not buy, but we borrowed, and paid for the loan. This was Faraday’s plan, and mine. It answered. Besides, we were often able to put together, through the exercise of mother-wit, apparatus which, had we resorted to the philosophical instrument-maker, would have cost a ten-fold sum. We never lacked the necessary apparatus; but we declined to heap up dead stock at a time when each year’s advance




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Tyndall seems galled by Rayleigh’s implication of the Institution’s inadequacy, but unfortunately for him, Rayleigh was not interested in the Institution’s struggles for prosperity, nor in the makeshift ingenuity behind its laboratory. For Rayleigh, the appointment to the professorship at the Institution was largely unimportant— an honor, but not a substantive boost either for his career or for his research. He prepared diligently for the lectures that constituted the main responsibility of the post and spoke on subjects similar to those that had formed Tyndall’s cannon—“Sound and Vibration,” “Electricity and Magnetism,” “Light,” “The Mechanical Properties of Bodies”29 — but Rayleigh, unlike Tyndall, had students, both undergraduates and researchers, working by his side at the Cavendish and later at his private laboratory at Terling; for him the audiences at the Institution represented simply the public— some influential, certainly, but the majority in search of spectacle— rather than a group of people wanting and needing scientific instruction. After Tyndall died, Lord Rayleigh spoke on his body of work at a weekly meeting of the Royal Institution. Significantly, what he focuses on is a trait in Tyndall’s attitude toward science that was markedly different from his own approach. “What I could not hope to recall,” he remarks, “was the brilliant and often poetic exposition by which his vivid imagination illumined the dry facts of science.”30 Rayleigh admired this poetic flair, which contributed to “an often magical charm”31 that Tyndall exercised over his associates. But in the end Rayleigh could not give his full approval to such an approach to research. Discussing Tyndall’s treatise on heat, he says, One criticism, however, may be made. Tyndall did not at first describe with sufficient detail the method and the precautions which he used. There was a want of that precise information necessary to allow another to follow in his steps. Perhaps this may have been due to his literary instinct, which made him averse from overloading his pages with technical, experimental details.32


made the apparatus of the preceding year defective. By such methods the Royal Institution was raised from a position of poverty and difficulty now happily unknown.28

There can be no doubt that Tyndall did allow his literary instincts greater play than Rayleigh would have in his scientific writings. But the dearth of “technical, experimental details” in descriptions of his research also arises from a difference in readership: Tyndall wrote for a public he called “unscientific,” aiming to introduce concepts that


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would otherwise be totally unknown to his readers; all his students, in effect, were beginners— and beginners, moreover, unlikely ever to proceed beyond that status. For Rayleigh, who had endeavored to establish a rigorous program of advanced scientific education at the Cavendish, such an approach was inadequate, and his disapproval, though gentle, marks the distance between Tyndall’s world of science and that of his successor. J. J. Thompson: Physics beyond Tyndall J. J. Thomson (1856–1940), who succeeded Lord Rayleigh both as Professor of Experimental Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory in 1884 and as Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution in 1905, marked a further change in the developing figure of the scientist.33 Whereas Rayleigh had frequent interactions with Tyndall and based several experiments on work that Tyndall had carried out, Thomson’s world of physics did not include either Tyndall or his work as relevant factors. After a brief period at Owens College in Manchester, Thomson went at the age of sixteen to Trinity College, Cambridge. He never left the University again. Like Tyndall, he was a scientific researcher linked for his entire career to one laboratory, the reputation of each becoming intertwined with the other, but Thomson’s laboratory bore little resemblance to Tyndall’s. Thomson was elected to the directorship of the Cavendish when he was only twentyeight, and though he went on to gain many other honors, including the Presidency of the Royal Society from 1915 to 1920 and the Mastership of Trinity College in 1918, his name was connected first and foremost with the discoveries made under his guidance in the Cavendish. Like Tyndall, Thomson used his increasing fame to fight for the development and funding of science; but unlike Tyndall, Thomson fought for that development within the bounds of universities and government-funded institutions. He served as a member of the University Grants Committee from 1919 to 1923, and helped to establish the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research in 1919, which promoted science under the auspices of the government. But he did not follow Tyndall’s lead in popularizing science as a field accessible or even of interest to the general public. While he supported scientific education, he envisioned it within the national system of education, under the tutelage of scientists produced by that system. In Thomson’s view, science was something that happened within standardized institutions, operating under the guidance of




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scientists who had acquired their credentials by following the same path of learning about science. When Thomson took over the Cavendish Laboratory in 1884, it took him several years to establish himself as a leader on a par with Rayleigh; eventually, however, he became one of the Laboratory’s most successful directors. Throughout his time there, with the help of Glazebrook and the other demonstrators, Thomson continued to insist on Rayleigh’s collaborative methods of research. Indeed, Isobel Falconer argues that Thomson was so involved with his research that he had little time for undergraduate teaching, on which Rayleigh had spent so much energy.34 This argument most be taken in moderation, since Thomson was a renowned and beloved figure as much among his undergraduate students as among his research students,35 and— as mentioned earlier—he served on several committees formed to examine the state of the national educational system. In 1918, as chairman of the governmental Committee on the Position of Natural Science in the Educational System of Great Britain, he argued for an increase in the number and variety of scholarships and declared in the Committee’s Report that “large expenditure of public money is necessary to equip the universities for their work in pure and applied science,” suggesting that sizable grants be given so that universities could lower their fees.36 The Report also advocated a final year of research for undergraduate science degrees and the limitation of junior demonstrators’ teaching responsibilities to ensure their focus on original research.37 World War I had shown all too clearly the lack of a thorough system of scientific education in Britain— Gordon Roderick and Michael Stephens estimate that in 1910 the number of university students studying science and technology in Britain was 3,000, as opposed to 25,000 in Germany38 —but Thomson continued to support what Maxwell had emphasized at the opening of the Cavendish, the importance of pure research both within the program of undergraduate teaching and as the object of postgraduate studies. Aided by an 1895 statute allowing students with undergraduate degrees from other universities to study as postgraduate researchers at the Cavendish, Thomson was soon directing what Romualdas Sviedrys describes as at the time “the only powerful graduate research centre in Britain.”39 Thomson was thrilled by the advantages he gained through having these research students. He wrote:



[S]ince that time, the Research student has been one of the most characteristic features of the Laboratory, giving to it quite a cosmopolitan tone. [ . . . ] In their discussions they [the Cambridge undergraduates]


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The arrival of these international research students, then, helped to establish Cambridge in the increasingly far-flung network of university scientists, providing it with contacts all over the world—though it must be kept in mind that the Cavendish was still working with only twenty-five research students up to World War I.41 Falconer argues that it was Thomson’s more intuitive and speculative theories that broke the mould of Rayleigh’s staid pattern of experimentation and emphasis on standardization, allowing the Cavendish to become under his and later Ernest Rutherford’s direction the main headquarters of science in Britain.42 By combining Rayleigh’s practice with his own theoretical investigations into electrical discharges through gases, Thomson ushered in the twentieth-century field of atomic research, which dominated the scientific community for decades and was vastly different from the limited, experiment-based researches of Tyndall and his generation—though Thomson’s method of inspired, theory-driven research depended in large part on his scientific use of imagination, the creed that Tyndall had promoted years before. In 1905 Thomson replaced Rayleigh in the Royal Institution’s professorship. Like Rayleigh, Thomson did not use the Institution’s laboratory for his own research, and though he gave some lectures there, the post by this time was effectively honorary. Tyndall had been dead for over ten years, and there seems to have been no personal connection between him and Thomson. In Thomson’s recollections, published in 1936, he never discusses his position at the Royal Institution in detail— suggesting that he spent a minimal amount of time there— and Tyndall himself receives hardly a mention, negative or otherwise, despite the fact that Thomson, born in 1856, would have been a young man beginning his research during the last decade of Tyndall’s career.43 For Thomson, as for Rayleigh, his career and the nature of his scientific research was largely defined by his connection with the Cavendish Laboratory, rather than with the Royal Institution. The Cavendish was, at the time, unusually well-funded for a university laboratory, and for that reason it gained the reputation of being a giant among its peers, the embodiment of university laboratories as they would be in the future when science received its monetary as well as its celebratory dues. Romualdas Sviedrys has argued that it


become familiar with the points of view of many different schools of scientific thought, leading to a better, more intelligent and more sympathetic appreciation of work done in other countries; they gain catholicity of view not merely on scientific but on political and social questions.40


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was the Cavendish’s independent funding, as well as the innovative tendencies of its first directors, that ensured its position as the leading research center of the early twentieth century.44 By 1919, the year of Thomson’s retirement, Sviedrys writes, “the moment had come when practically every physicist of note in Britain was either a Cavendish graduate or had been taught by one.”45 With Rayleigh and then Thomson at its helm, the Cavendish became a symbol for progressive science and the new scientists who embodied it. But both the science itself and the men who practiced it at the Cavendish bore little resemblance to Tyndall and his habits of research and presentation at the Royal Institution. Even from its foundation, the Cavendish was described by Maxwell as the headquarters of new traditions, both scientific and educational. In addition to the inevitable progression in theories and areas of focus, the style of carrying out scientific experiments and of thinking about scientific ideas underwent a gradual transformation at the end of the century. Tyndall had concentrated on physical experiments—most of which could be reproduced as publicly comprehensible displays— and emphasized throughout his career the importance of visualizing the processes being studied. In one of his lectures in America, returning to the subject of his famous lecture in 1870 on “The Scientific Use of the Imagination,” he described the importance of imagery for the natural investigator: In doing this, we shall learn that the life of the experimental philosopher is twofold. He lives, in his vocation, a life of the senses, using his hands, eyes, and ears in his experiments: but such a question as that now before us carries him beyond the margin of the senses. He cannot consider, much less answer, the question, “What is light?” without transporting himself to a world which underlies the sensible one, and out of which spring all optical phenomena. To realise this subsensible world, if I may use the term, the mind must possess a certain pictorial power. It must be able to form definite images of the things which that world contains; and to say that, if such or such a state of things exist in that world, then the phenomena which appear in ours must, of necessity, grow out of this state of things. If the picture be correct, the phenomena are accounted for; a physical theory has been enunciated which unites and explains them all.46



For Tyndall, a theory of physical phenomena that could not be visualized was not a valid theory. But the methods of later generations tended toward almost the opposite principle, relying on symbols to stand in for physical effects and creating theories that often could not


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be demonstrated with physical equipment. While many researchers still valued, as Tyndall had, the visualizing power of imagination, these later physicists frequently delved into regions of physics—both atomic and cosmological—for which models were seen as more hindrance than help, and of necessity the experimental display was replaced by the sheet of equations. As early as 1881, the writer Robert Routledge stated in the introduction to his Popular History of Science, “It may here be proper to observe that as science advances to perfection it is more and more concerned with the processes of mathematical deductions.”47 In spite of Routledge’s supportive declaration, the question of whether or not this mathematical trend meant an advance toward “perfection” was hotly disputed. Not surprisingly, the aging Tyndall could not understand its appeal. He wrote in a letter to Spencer in 1890 on the beauty of the sky: You are too much occupied with the pure intellect to feel to its full extent the lifting of the soul in the presence of natural grandeur. This feeling is my nearest approach to worship, to which it is akin. The horizon all round is belted by a sky lighter than that of the zenith, due of course to the prevalence of floating matter in the lower atmosphere. Some people cherish a fond conceit of throwing simple observations into mathematical forms. Humboldt with a cyanometer, made observations on the intensity of sky blue from the zenith downwards, and found it to be proportioned “to the cosine of the zenith distance.” I should have been content with the observations, minus the formula.48

With a similar feeling but more urgency, Arthur Schuster spoke in 1908 against the danger of superficiality in the new approach. His lectures, delivered at the University of Calcutta, were later collected as The Progress of Physics during 33 Years (1875–1908). At one point Schuster says, “I have during these lectures contrasted on several occasions the former tendency to base our theoretical explanations of natural phenomena on definite models which we can visualise and even construct, with the modern spirit which is satisfied with a mathematical formula, and symbols which frequently have no strictly definable meaning.”49 The danger in this “modern spirit,” according to Schuster, was that it encouraged description without seeking for explanations. Rayleigh and Thomson themselves held similar opinions. Rayleigh, as his son recalls in his biography, disapproved of what he called the “vices of the Cambridge school”:



[These] were, I think, to regard a display of analytical symbols as an object in itself rather than as a tool for the solution of scientific


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Like Tyndall and Maxwell, both Rayleigh and Thomson used visualization as a guide to mathematical processes. According to J. G. Crowther, Rayleigh “made patient and profound efforts to form a physical picture of a phenomenon before he made any calculations. He said that ‘a good instinct and a little mathematics is often better than a lot of calculations.’ ”51 Similarly, Crowther describes Thomson as “not mathematically minded,” using math rather as a tool to explore the implications of experiments and “the physical ideas conceived to explain new experimental data.”52 In the introduction to his Recent Researches in Electricity and Magnetism (1893), Thomson wrote: The physical method has all the advantages of vividness which arise from the use of concrete quantities instead of abstract symbols to represent the state of the electric field; it is more easily wielded, and is thus more suitable for obtaining rapidly the main features of any problem; when, however, the problem has to be worked out in all its details, the analytical method is necessary.53

Under Thomson, therefore, practical experiments were balanced with math; and indeed, the growth of atomic physics made sophisticated mathematics necessary in the majority of research projects. As individual scientists, then, both Rayleigh and Thomson resembled Tyndall more than is readily apparent; all three used the method of visualization in planning and analyzing experiments, and all three supported the idea that less math and more imagination is often the key to successful research. Nevertheless, the research areas of Rayleigh and Thomson— and, to an even greater extent, of their contemporaries who explored quantum physics and relativity— often proved inaccessible to the physical models and experiments that Tyndall favored; the content of the research itself dictated a shift in the methods of conceptualization. The great differences between Tyndall and his successors thus lie not so much in their individual identities as scientists as in the setting of the university laboratory where Rayleigh, Thomson, and their fellow physicists carried out their research; in the emphasis on inter-related teaching and research within a standardized educational framework; and in the increasing necessity of considering


problems. I have heard my father say that in the current slang of mathematical students an absurd distinction was made between “the talk,” which meant a statement of the problem, and the premises on which it was to be discussed, and “the work,” which meant the purely symbolical part of the treatment.50


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mathematics as much as physical models and experimentation a prime method of investigation. These factors in turn led to a growing, though often criticized, tendency of physical research to describe phenomena rather than to offer explanations of their causes, and this attitude, as much as the new methods, stood at odds with the philosophical science that Tyndall had practiced. Though his promotion of science did not demand the connections to larger metaphysical questions that he so often explored—indeed he insisted on science’s need for freedom from all demands as to its aims and applications—the shift in attitude and method meant that Tyndall himself, with his emphasis on the underlying meaning of scientific research, was consigned to an older and out-of-date generation. A Changing Audience: Decline in Research and Attendance at the Royal Institution By the end of the Victorian era, as we have seen, university laboratories were becoming the norm for original research; private laboratories such as those belonging to the Royal Institution no longer occupied the cutting edge of discovery. Students in the universities, therefore, became the primary receivers of new scientific information, rather than audiences at public scientific lectures, who began to receive information that was often second-hand, simplified, and superficial. The fate of the Royal Institution demonstrates this trend: in every year from 1905 to 1917, the number of members in the Institution dropped, and from being unique in Britain for its research-oriented laboratory, the Institution eventually became an impoverished laggard, overtaken by the new and increasingly well-funded laboratories at universities.54 Of course, as with the changing nature of scientists, this transition was neither clear-cut nor immediate. The Institution was not abandoned overnight: having prospered as the most prestigious scientific institution in Britain since the beginning of the century, it retained its status as a headquarters for science well into the twentieth century. Great names such as Pierre Curie and Ernest Rutherford continued to appear as guest lecturers in the schedule for the Friday Evening Discourses, and great discoveries, including Thomson’s identification of the electron, were first publicized—though not often made— within its walls. In spite of its diminution in reputation, moreover, the Royal Institution continued to contribute to the annals of scientific research,




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and Tyndall’s successor as superintendent, the chemist James Dewar, became a respected researcher in his own right, responsible for the first instances of the liquefaction of oxygen and hydrogen. 55 Dewar, like nearly all of his contemporaries in the scientific community, had received the standard university education that Tyndall and Huxley lacked. After attending the University of Edinburgh, where he was Lyon Playfair’s demonstrator in chemistry, he worked as a chemistry lecturer at the Royal Veterinary College and then moved down to Cambridge, having been elected to the Jacksonian Chair of Natural Experimental Philosophy. In 1877 he became Fullerian Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution, and he kept both his Cambridge and Royal Institution positions until his death. It is significant, however, that Dewar did not follow Rayleigh’s example and maintain a connection with Cambridge rather than with the Institution. On the contrary, after replacing Tyndall as the superintendent in 1887, Dewar became the Institution’s new leader, and, in spite of making the majority of its scientific discoveries in that period and giving an enormous number of lectures, he ultimately contributed to its decline through his conservative methods and attitude. In 1896 Dewar became the first director of the Davy-Faraday Laboratory, the Institution’s great untaken chance to regain its reputation as a center of research. That the Institution stood in dire need of a better funded and better equipped research space had been obvious for years. As early as 1873 William Spottiswoode, the Institution’s treasurer, lamented the loss of reputation that the Institution had suffered due to its struggle to keep up with the advances in experimental apparatus: The physical laboratory had remained for nearly seventy years in its original state. At first it was said to be the equal to any laboratory; but then there were hardly any in existence in this country; and during the last few years such splendid edifices have arisen in London, in Oxford, in Cambridge, in Manchester and in Glasgow, and elsewhere, that the laboratory of Davy, of Faraday, and of Tyndall was much inferior to the private laboratories of the professors who carry on their course of instruction in public rooms of still greater size and extent of resource.56



This paragraph preceded an announcement of Tyndall’s renovation of the space, which he modernized as best he could within the Institution’s limited budget. But in spite of these efforts— as Rayleigh found after succeeding Tyndall— Spottiswoode’s description of the Institution trailing behind the university laboratories remained accurate.


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Then, in 1896, thanks to a sizable grant from the German chemist and industrialist Ludwig Mond, the Institution was able to found the Davy-Faraday Research Laboratory in the building next to the Institution itself. The new center was to be equipped with the latest apparatus and maintained so as to provide for the most advanced level of experimentation, with the idea that up-and-coming researchers from outside the Institution would be enticed to apply for its use. Not surprisingly, great hopes rested on its foundation, and yet the very regulations with which it was founded ensured that the Laboratory would not be able to compete with the new university laboratories. Mond stipulated that the Laboratory be reserved entirely for original research, but the researchers who applied to work there were required to fund themselves; they would be provided with nothing beyond the materials of the Laboratory itself. Moreover, they were not allowed to stay for longer than six months, a new application being demanded if they desired to extend their research there. Katherine D. Watson, in an article on the early years of the Laboratory, argues that within the bounds of Mond’s specifications, the Laboratory did in fact provide a useful and productive space for upand-coming scientists, but that these did not come together as a unified research group until after the appointment of William H. Bragg in 1923; one reason, Watson suggests, is the independence of the Laboratory’s managers.57 Dewar himself, uninterested in the potential of being surrounded by other researchers, neglected the Laboratory almost entirely. Nor were the researchers who did conduct experiments there of the top rank, the most promising drawn instead to the greater lures of well-funded university laboratories. Mond’s stipulations, therefore, combined with Dewar’s lack of interest, ensured that for twenty-five years after its founding, the Laboratory produced no celebrated scientific discoveries. In spite of Dewar’s individual accomplishments, the Royal Institution’s reputation for research continued to diminish, overshadowed by the Cavendish and its fellow laboratories at other universities.58 From 1901 to 1903, Nature ran a series entitled “Some Scientific Centres.” The Royal Institution was fifth in the series, the Cavendish Laboratory sixth. Of the Royal Institution, the author writes, “A laboratory in which so many remarkable and important discoveries have been made may certainly be said to have justified the hopes of its founder, and it is surprising that its successes have not won for it a larger measure of public support—that as yet it has had no imitators.”59 Such an assessment, though respectful, indicates that the days when the Institution had been a center of public attention




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The laboratory is of relatively recent foundation in comparison with some of our older scientific centres like the Royal Institution, but yet it may claim to be one of the first of those modern laboratories which have now sprung up in almost all the larger universities where adequate provision is made for the advancement of scientific research as well as the teaching of science.60

The Royal Institution was thus connected with the past, its discoveries a part of history, whereas the Cavendish looked toward the future as “a modern laboratory.” In addition to neglecting the new Davy-Faraday Laboratory, Dewar also unwittingly contributed to the Institution’s decline in other ways. Ever conservative, he insisted that the Institution remain a privately funded body, meaning that he missed out on the increasingly available government funding for scientific research. His obstinacy was so great that he objected to the idea of an international low-temperature laboratory in Holland, in spite of the boost such a center would have given to research in his own field.61 His refusal to take part in the project highlights the isolationism that made the Royal Institution an outsider in the growing international network of science, in which the Cavendish and other university laboratories played so large a role. Frequently receiving censure for this insistence on independence and for his pugnacity in scientific controversy, Dewar also drew the criticism of his colleagues for making money through litigation, most notably from a suit against Alfred Nobel regarding the patent for cordite. As his career went on, he was deemed both lacking in initiative and over-eager for profit, a lethal combination in a scientific community that admired innovative and disinterested research. Moreover, his decision not to retire at sixty in 1902, nor even at seventy in 1912, but to wait instead until 1923, meant, in W. H. Brock’s words, “a serious decline of the Royal Institution,” the leadership of which had passed into almost universally aged hands.62 Dewar’s public lectures at the Institution, while numerous, never gained the enormous popularity of Tyndall’s performances, and his audiences were notably different. Gwendy Caroe provides an interesting analysis of a painting by Henry Brooks in the Royal Institution, portraying Dewar giving a Friday Evening Discourse on “Liquid Hydrogen Calorimetry” in 1904, the year before the Institution’s numbers began to drop (figure 5.1). By identifying depicted members of the audience, Caroe demonstrates a change in the class and


were past. The Cavendish, in contrast, is described in the subsequent article as being among the leaders of the new science:


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Figure 5.1 “A Friday Evening Discourse at the Royal Institution; Sir James Dewar on Liquid Hydrogen,” 1904 (oil on canvas) by Henry Jamyn Brooks (1865–1925). The Royal Institution, London, UK; The Bridgeman Art Library, TRI 101904.

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professions of the Institution’s audience: the men and women shown listening to Dewar, no longer drawn primarily from the aristocracy and those men who might have deemed themselves “gentlemen amateurs” in science, hailed rather from the middle and professional classes. Several eminent men of science are represented—Lord Rayleigh, William Crookes, and Lord Kelvin, among others. Caroe counts twenty-two scientists in all, nine medical men, twelve engineers, fifteen judges and barristers, and assorted industrialists. Not surprisingly, there are no churchmen, and only a small number of peers. Such an audience, in Caroe’s words, represented the “intellectual elite” of London rather than the elite of the nobility and landed gentry; the Royal Institution no longer possessed the glitter of high fashion.63 It is significant that, unlike Tyndall, Huxley, Darwin, and Kelvin in the earlier generation, and also Ramsay, Crookes, and Rayleigh in his own, Dewar received no Vanity Fair caricature, a perennial sign of public interest.64 Moreover, though Dewar continued to draw crowds, his skill as a presenter was no match for the educational clarity of Tyndall’s lectures. As the chemist Henry Armstrong bluntly put it in a memorial Friday Evening Discourse at the Royal Institution in 1924, “Dewar was not a great teacher.”65 This applied to more serious students of science as well as to the public audiences of the Discourses: in a time when the majority of up-and-coming scientists worked in university laboratories, taught undergraduates, and conducted their research on a complex theoretical basis with the help of demonstrators and graduate students, Dewar had no students at all and published no theoretical papers. His research was confined to the discovery of phenomena through experimentation, rather than the development of theories and mathematical models, and this, by the turn of the century, placed him— as well as, by extension, the Royal Institution itself—with the outdated methods of the Victorian age. On one level, Dewar fulfilled a central aim of the Royal Institution, which was to provide scientific lectures to the public. Conveying the discoveries of science to the public had been part of the Institution’s function from its foundation; and yet there was undeniably a loss of prestige in its failure to maintain its leadership in scientific discovery, and the university laboratories were gaining as well in the realm of in-depth scientific teaching. The lecturing system in place within the Royal Institution could not handle so deftly the demonstration of complex mathematical formulas, and its audiences—the bulk of whom tended to be wholly unscientific aside from their membership in the Institution—were ill-equipped to understand the minutiae of the




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These special purposes soon gave way to the effort, as our author expresses it, after striving to be fashionable; and the fashionable element has continued to be the most prominent feature in its subsequent life to the present day. Something is, no doubt, gained by making scientific subjects one of the ordinary topics of conversation in West End salons; the continuation of the History of the Royal Institution, which will have to be written twenty years hence, will show whether this object is compatible with the carrying on of original investigations which will add to the sum of our knowledge of the laws of Nature.66

In 1892, “twenty years hence,” the answer would have been clear: the effort to publicize and popularize scientific discoveries was to a certain extent compatible with original investigations—but those investigations, with few exceptions, were not taking place within the Institution itself, and the audience for those investigations were no longer members of the fashionable public. The Royal Institution, in other words, was becoming a headquarters exclusively for the popularization of science. In the long period of transition at the beginning of the century, the Institution lost its reputation for cutting-edge research among scientists, as well as among the social elite who had once dominated its audience and were used to hearing about new discoveries from the discoverers themselves, but it was not yet able to draw in a new audience who would accept the popular-science lectures that were now being offered. The blame for the Royal Institution’s decline should not be placed solely at Dewar’s door. Though his prickly personality alienated him from his scientific colleagues, and though his lack of initiative for the Davy-Faraday Laboratory aided in the diminution of the Institution’s reputation for original research, the Institution’s steadily shrinking membership at the beginning of the twentieth century demonstrates the effects of the growing number of university laboratories, and— as importantly—the larger changes both in the nature of science and in the public interest in science and its practitioners. Gwendy Caroe provides an insightful summary of this transformation in the public audience for science and scientists, in particular the brand of scientist offered by the Royal Institution:


developing specialized scientific fields. In a review published in Nature in 1872 of Henry Bence-Jones’s history of the Institution, the author writes of the aims laid out in the Institution’s original prospectus:

Davy had been lionized by Society; Faraday could have been so had he wished it; Tyndall dined at aristocratic tables and knew the prominent men of his day. But after the turn of the century it was the literary


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Caroe is careful to acknowledge the continued variety and depth of the lectures offered at the Institution in the Edwardian period, but their high quality was not enough to stem the falling number of members: [I]n spite of this excellent fare offered, people were less interested in lectures than they had been; moreover with new possibilities for grants for research and new laboratories being built, the RI laboratory began to seem rather a one-man-band. One senses that the Institution was settling into a quiet seclusion with a core of nice middle-class members interested in science who came week after week to hear a Discourse, no matter what it was about. They were still there (rather more faded) when the Braggs arrived after the First War.68

Caroe’s regretful judgment, covering both the Royal Institution’s dwindling audience and its failing facilities for research, provides a vivid contrast with the glory and popularity of the Institution in the years when Faraday and Tyndall acted as its figureheads. By the 1900s, then, the Royal Institution no longer headed the race for innovative ideas and discoveries, nor could it be seen as a center for scientific teaching on a par with the university laboratories. Because the standards for scientific qualifications were solidifying into the necessity of acquiring a university degree, Lord Rayleigh and Thomson attracted and trained dozens of science’s future leading minds at Cambridge; and with the help of these assistants, the depth and breadth of both their teaching and their research could not be equaled by any but the laboratory teams at other universities— Oxford, London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and, among the newcomers, Manchester, Liverpool, and Birmingham. The science that they practiced, moreover, was no longer accessible to a public audience unequipped with an in-depth scientific education. The days of Tyndall’s experiments in the basement of the Institution had come to an end, and the Institution’s scientific lectures no longer held the attention of London’s fashionable circles as entertainment on a par with the opera. Though the university-based scientists used the Royal Institution as an occasional means of broadcasting their discoveries, the heart of scientific research was shifting, gradually but inescapably, to the laboratories of Cambridge and other universities, and the Institution’s heyday as a center for popular science had not yet arrived.69


lion who held greater attention in the drawing room (or the returned explorer or artist, but the literary man talked best). The scientist was no longer courted as he had been. As a professional he was too much of a specialist, and becoming very middle-class. Science became unfashionable.67


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Where did all these changes leave Tyndall? Many aspects of the new style of scientific research, with the new generation of scientists, matched the vision he had laid out in so many essays and lectures over the course of his career. These researchers worked in well-funded laboratories devoted to serious experimentation and theorizing, undisturbed by complaints from theologians or by the conflicting desires of conservative classicists. They had successfully carved out their own sphere in the educational ladder, basing their headquarters in exactly the place Tyndall had envisioned— at the top, in the most prestigious universities in the nation. Yet the new generation of scientists, so closely related to his dream of the scientific future, did not include Tyndall himself and had no need either of Tyndall’s presence or, more crushingly, of his life’s work. When he retired from the Royal Institution in 1887, Tyndall was touched by the grand banquet that Norman Lockyer, editor of Nature, hosted in his honor— a dinner that brought together a group of scientific men “such as has seldom or never been brought together on a similar occasion”70 —but he was dismayed and hurt by the speed with which the Institution hustled him out the door. In particular, he felt James Dewar had given him short shrift. A controversy with Dewar over the Christmas lectures to children in 1886–7 had been the immediate instigator of Tyndall’s decision to retire, Tyndall feeling that Dewar was too quick to take over his responsibilities.71 In a letter to Spencer in May of 1887, Tyndall wrote thankfully of Dewar’s help in the previous year, when Tyndall had been ill, but he referred bitterly to the man’s seeming change of heart: Then came in my helpful friend Dewar, who was a most noble prop to me throughout the ordeal. I would give a good deal of the dross which is most highly prized by the world, to have seen him continue so to the end. But it seemed to me that at last he presumed somewhat upon the freedom which my absolute trust in his brotherly affection caused me to allow him, and this to the present hour is a source of sorrow to me.72


Tyndall’s Reputation in the Decades after His Death

Later that year he wrote to Hirst on his wish to continue experimenting: “I had hoped to do such work in a corner of the Royal Institution after I had vacated its chair, but that hope is now gone, and the Royal Institution has become a mere memory to me.”73 Any idea Tyndall might have had of remaining connected with the Institution as a trusted advisor, a continuing presence, was quickly put


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to rest. Though Rayleigh especially was always respectful of Tyndall’s research, one has only to glance at the scientific works of the time, or at the later autobiographies and recollections of the new generation of scientists, to see how little attention is paid to Tyndall’s research, and how rarely his name is mentioned at all. Lord Rayleigh’s son writes revealingly in his biography of his father, “He was, however, always entirely opposed to the belittling of Tyndall’s scientific work which was attempted by some writers of the day.”74 Several articles and obituaries written on Tyndall in the months after his death demonstrate this belittlement, though those written by Tyndall’s personal friends of course valued his work highly. Huxley and Spencer published their intimate reminiscences of Tyndall in The Nineteenth Century and The Fortnightly Review, respectively75; Edward Frankland contributed the obituary notice to the next Proceedings of the Royal Society 76; and Frankland and John Lubbock both spoke at the Special General Meeting held in Tyndall’s honor at the Royal Institution just days after his death, on December 15, 1893.77 This meeting, chaired by Sir James Crichton-Browne, was— as discussed in chapter four— predictably eulogistic in tone. As was consistent with Tyndall’s reputation throughout his career, the speakers emphasized his success in popularizing science as well as in research. Perhaps the oddest compliment was one delivered by Crichton-Browne, who declared that Tyndall “was no idler in the field, and if he sometimes reaped what others had sown, it was his happy faculty to be able to convert the crop at once into wholesome and palatable bread for general consumption.”78 Praise for harvesting other people’s work is hardly an unmixed compliment for an independent researcher, but Crichton-Browne made up for it by his emphasis on Tyndall’s unmatched impact in the support of science in society: “He was one of the Apostles of a new dispensation. His teachings altered the very spirit of the times, and created a tolerance of scientific truth which it had not before enjoyed. He might have been a martyr to science had he been less amply endowed with weapons of defence and attack.”79 In Crichton-Browne’s view, Tyndall was a great man because of his public defense of science, as much as— indeed more than—for his work in the laboratory. Crichton-Browne’s judgment was similar to that expressed by the geologist J. W. Gregory in his article on Tyndall in Natural Science in January 1894. Gregory opens by asserting, “With the death of Professor Tyndall has passed away the second of the men whose names are associated as the three English men of science of the Victorian era,”80 the other two being Kelvin and Darwin. Gregory goes on, however, to


SCIENC E AF T ER T Y NDA LL


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qualify Tyndall’s place in the group: “His claim to be included in this trio does not rest on his being the deepest thinker, the most accurate and ingenious experimentalist, or the most original investigator in the branch of science upon which he was engaged.”81 Rather, according to Gregory, Tyndall’s greatness lay in his being representative of his era, a conceit not uncommon in portrayals of Tyndall during his lifetime (see chapter one). Gregory gives Tyndall’s scientific achievements a prominence in the article equal to his early years, his love of the Alps, his late marriage, and his proclivity for lecturing. But Tyndall would no doubt have been pleased with Gregory’s description of society’s attitude toward science after “the crusade of Professor Tyndall”: “It is now universally recognised that in all matters of natural phenomena and physical energy, Science is the final court of appeal, and that if religion teaches differently so much the worse for religion.”82 As in Crichton-Browne’s eulogy, Gregory, while giving short shrift to Tyndall’s researches, suggests that Tyndall was almost single-handedly responsible for the transformation of popular attitudes toward science. Grant Allen, the well-known popular science writer, expressed the same view in an article for the Review of Reviews: “In John Tyndall the world has lost one of the prime leaders in the great revolution of the nineteenth century”—the revolution consisting, in Allen’s view, of the acceptance of evolutionary theory, for which “Tyndall, who to London was the representative physicist, gave the weight of his name and his personal importance to the side of the evolutionists.”83 Punch lost no time in publishing a sentimental poem in honor of Tyndall’s death, concentrating for the most part on his “bowed but blameless wife,” but exhorting Tyndall to “Rest, Son of Science, certain of your mead! / Of bitter moan for you there is small need.”84 The Illustrated London News devoted more space to Tyndall, including not only an article but an enormous two-page portrait in a special supplement. The article concludes, “It is not so much as an original discoverer as a brilliant expositor that Tyndall ranks among the savants of the Victorian era.”85 It would seem that in the popular estimation, the reputation of Tyndall as the century’s most influential supporter of science was at its height at the time of his death. This exalted view of Tyndall’s significance, however, was not universal. In the same month that both Gregory’s and Allen’s articles appeared, the New Review, a journal established in 1889 and primarily devoted to politics and the arts, published an article on Tyndall that was ultimately dismissive both of his scientific achievements and of his place in history. The author was zoologist P. Chalmers Mitchell, who became secretary of the Zoological Society in 1903 and who routinely added to his income through scientific journalism.86 Mitchell




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Between a great man recognised by his generation, and a man made great by his reputation, there is need of careful discrimination. I fancy that Darwin and Tyndall may serve as contrasting types. Fifteen years ago perhaps Tyndall would have polled more votes in some competition of the evening papers. But the greater our knowledge of science and of the literature of science, the greater must be our estimation of Darwin’s work.87

Tyndall, Mitchell continues, would soon be lost to history, since his scientific work was unoriginal: “Tyndall’s actual scientific work has left little impression upon science. He has founded no school; he has stimulated no large bulk of original research.”88 Such a statement is a severe example of the disregard into which Tyndall’s research had fallen by the 1890s among younger scientists; the force of its condemnation can be seen by a comparison with an article published ten years earlier in the Illustrated Science Monthly (a short-lived journal not to be confused with the influential Popular Science Monthly), which had enthusiastically claimed the opposite: Professor Tyndall is a remarkable instance of the pursuit of knowledge under difficulties, and the power of self-help. His researches on the molecular constitution of matter are permanent contributions to natural philosophy which place him in the first rank of scientific explorers, while his writings also possess the great merit of a transparent and graphic style.89

By the next decade, the idea that Tyndall’s research had lacked originality was taking hold in the British scientific community. Mitchell in his article in the New Review has no time for any of Tyndall’s scientific achievements; rather, like Gregory, Mitchell focuses on Tyndall’s relationship with the public as a supporter of science. In his sketch of Tyndall’s character, Mitchell touches on points that had come by this time to be the signature marks of Tyndall’s personality, and which he gives as reasons for Tyndall’s fame in his own time: “He had the great gift of personal charm”; “he had the wonderful gift of golden speech”; he had an “impatient dogmatism, an irrepressible fixedness of conviction, that excluded from his mind the possibility of his opponents being other than wrong, and consciously and wilfully wrong.”90 All of these factors in his character, claims Mitchell, led to Tyndall’s notoriety, in that they prompted him to do battle against the pervasive Christian tradition: “[I]t is enough to point out that Tyndall


opens his article in the New Review by arguing that Tyndall was sure to be forgotten in the shadow of Darwin’s greatness:


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ran amuck among the prejudices and the convictions of the religious world, and that the wholesale denunciation of him as a type of aggressive science played a large part in the foundation of his fame.”91 Mitchell allows Tyndall credit for the spread of scientific education: “In fact, in Tyndall’s own words, his special office was to ‘deepen sympathy between science and the world outside science’; and this office, in Tyndall’s time, was specially suited to attract attention and to spread fame.” 92 Nothing did more to increase Tyndall’s public prominence than the furor over Darwinism, which soon, however, became an established theory: As the new idea fell into its proper position, and the ruffled thoughts of men became smooth, Tyndall’s notoriety changed to increasing fame, and he got accepted as the courageous and far-seeing exponent of a truth at first unpalatable. Darwin was interested almost entirely in the actual discoveries he made; Huxley battled for them chiefly among scientific people; Spencer among philosophers; Tyndall with the world and especially with the religious world.93

Tyndall thus played an active and important role in the establishment of natural selection as an accepted scientific theory, but Mitchell implies that when the conflict over Darwinism came to an end, so did Tyndall’s usefulness—meaning, effectively, that his own research had possessed no permanent value. Mitchell concludes, after an analysis of Tyndall’s Belfast Address, with the reiteration that, no matter how interesting or influential Tyndall’s views were, his failure to contribute to the world’s sum of hard facts would doom him to a quick death in the public memory: However much the world may grow wiser as it grows older, its increase of wisdom will be chiefly an increase of knowledge. And ultimate questions are so far off that the breath [sic] of knowledge of any age probably subtends an equal angle. The views of Tyndall are interesting chiefly as an index of the change in the attitude of the intellectual world towards science, and he will be remembered as a fighter who made for peace by the very vigour of his onslaughts on encrusted tradition. He did a great work and received a great reward in fame, and his name will be written in water.94



Tyndall’s legacy, then, would be effaced from public memory practically before it had been established there. Surely no scientist, let alone one who in his time was commonly referred to as a figurehead of modern science, could receive a more damning judgment from a member of the next generation.


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One important aspect of Mitchell’s article is his assumption of a clear-cut progression in Victorian science, in which Tyndall played a necessary but ultimately forgettable part: that is, he forged a path for his successors to reach their place in society and in history, without leaving any scientific monuments of his own. After the death of Tyndall’s predecessor, Faraday, commentators drew comparisons between him and figures of the past, linking him with Newton, Galahad, prophets, priests, magicians—in short, placing him at the end of a long and romanticized tradition of wisemen and natural philosophers.95 Tyndall, by contrast, stood in many commentators’ minds at the beginning of modern science, a man who had helped to open the door for Darwin’s theories, who had battled for science’s rightful prominence in society, and who typified the “aggressive Science” of the second half of the nineteenth century— but whose type was soon superseded by the new scientific names of the fin-de-siècle. At the time of Tyndall’s death, scientists’ place in society had been assured, partly through his endeavors; Tyndall’s position in the progress of science was, therefore, defined, labeled, and shelved as that of a transitional fighter. Mitchell’s prediction that Tyndall would be forgotten in the history of science was to a great extent borne out in the decades that followed. In 1900 Henry Smith Williams, an American medical doctor who also wrote popular books on history and science and contributed regularly to Harper’s Magazine, published The Story of NineteenthCentury Science, in which Tyndall receives only three passing mentions, each time as a supporter of a more influential man—Mayer, Darwin, and Pasteur.96 Similarly, Sir John Arthur Thomson, a Scottish naturalist who sold thousands of popular science books, made only two brief references to Tyndall in his Progress of Science in the Century, published in 1906.97 In contrast, A History of Physics (1899, rev. 1929) by the celebrated historian of mathematics Florian Cajori, mentioned Tyndall many times and discussed his work at some length.98 But as the twentieth century progressed, the prominence of his name continued to diminish. A series of lectures delivered by the Scottish-Canadian mathematician Alexander Macfarlane in 1919 on ten British physicists of the nineteenth century did not include Tyndall.99 Two years earlier, in 1917, Arthur Schuster and the Cambridge zoologist Arthur E. Shipley made only brief mention of Tyndall in their history, Britain’s Heritage of Science. Schuster, as he explains in his Biographical Fragments (1932), had read Tyndall when he was a young man eager to pursue science,100 and the short




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He spent a useful life in scientific research, but he will be remembered mainly as an advocate of scientific principles and populariser of science. His books have inspired many young men to the pursuit of science, and the one on “Heat as a Mode of Motion” still deserves to be read as a clear exposition of the fundamental principles of heat.101

Though respectful in tone, the description, by singling out Heat as the one book that “still” deserves to be read, suggests that the majority of Tyndall’s work was by then obsolete. The chemist and educationist Henry Armstrong also described Tyndall admiringly in a Huxley Memorial Lecture in 1933, but, like Schuster, he concentrated on Tyndall’s teaching and performative skills rather than his abilities as a researcher: [A]ttending Tyndall’s marvellously illustrated lectures on Physics, also at Jermyn Street, I was enraptured. His Icelandic strokur, spouting up to the ceiling ever lives in my mind’s eye. Everything in Heat as a Mode of Motion, everything in his Sound, was put before us: we really knew what wave motion was. Tyndall’s science may have been limp at times— he was no mathematician— but as a teacher he was worth all the Professors of the R.C.S. and R.S.M. put together and no other actor on the Royal Institution stage has ever surpassed him as a popular lecturer. The Cabinet Trick, with which he routed Bastien and other believers in spontaneous generation, is now on show in the R.I. Museum and commands attention to-day as a simple monument to his great experimental genius. It made a profound impression the night of the first performance.102

Armstrong’s description of Tyndall’s scientific work as “limp,” and his incorrect assumption that Tyndall was “no mathematician”— though in fact Tyndall’s work as a doctoral student had been primarily mathematical— suggests, as does Schuster’s description, that Tyndall’s legacy survived almost entirely on the basis of his popular writing and lecturing, and usually only in the minds of those who had experienced his influence as young men. Indeed, Armstrong goes on to ask, “Why is it that, while remembering Huxley, the Imperial College has forgotten the great pioneers of practice on their early staff, his companions Frankland, Tyndall, Guthrie?”103 The answer is that, while Huxley had found a place in the history of science through his position as Darwin’s foremost supporter, Tyndall (not to mention Frankland and Guthrie) had slipped through the cracks; Armstrong’s vivid remembrance of him was a rarity. As far as the next generation


description of Tyndall in Britain’s Heritage of Science reflects this early acquaintance:


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of scientists was concerned, Tyndall’s scientific work, eclipsed to the point of irrelevancy even before his death, had all but dropped out of the history of physics, and even his efforts at scientific popularization were remembered only by those who had personally experienced it. One of the few scientists in the early twentieth century who both remembered Tyndall from personal experience and wrote extensively about Tyndall’s career was Sir Oliver Lodge, a renowned physicist instrumental in the development of the radio and the first Principal of the University of Birmingham.104 Unlike the memoirs and biographies of many other noted scientists of his generation, Lodge’s autobiography, Past Years (1931), discusses Tyndall at length, describing him as an early role model: “Professor Tyndall became one of my heroes, and I ever afterwards attended every Friday evening, when he was holding forth at the Royal Institution, that I could prevail on anyone to give me a ticket for. By the time the six lectures were over I was under the absurd illusion that I had fairly mastered the subject of heat.”105 Having read these appreciative comments, it comes as a surprise to turn to Lodge’s entry on Tyndall in the tenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in 1902. In this entry Lodge implies that both Tyndall’s scientific knowledge and his investigative ability were profoundly inadequate. Most of the description comes in negative form: “he had not the genuine mathematical instinct, and never looked at things from the point of view of a mathematician”; “his early magnetic investigations [ . . . ] sadly lack the definiteness which was possible at their date”; “he does not connect polarity with the discontinuity to be expected.”106 Of Tyndall’s mountaineering exploits, Lodge writes: In some respects the Swiss period gives the dominant note of his life, and it represents him fairly both in his strength and weakness: strength in observation and description, and pertinacious— often dangerous— measurements, skill in recording his adventures also, and in collecting information on the subject; weakness in not clearly understanding the true physics of a process even when it had been discovered and laid bare by others.107

Of Tyndall’s writing and lecturing, Lodge makes an almost throwaway comment:



These writings—Fragments of Science, as he calls them, “for unscientific people”— are wholesome and interesting, though naturally they do not add to our knowledge appreciably; nor did the more ambitious Belfast Address (1874), delivered as President of the British Association, make any serious contribution to philosophy, though it stated a form of the materialistic position with his usual trenchant


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Lodge is not being unjust—popular writing cannot necessarily be expected to contribute new ideas to scientific knowledge—but his assumption that essays when aimed at the public must lack originality, as well as the ease with which he dismisses the “supposed” conflict between science and religion that had preoccupied so many great thinkers of Tyndall’s day, indicates his relegation of Tyndall’s career to the irrelevant—almost incomprehensible—past. From the perspective of Lodge and his contemporaries, a scientist simply could not be both a serious researcher and a popular scientific lecturer: the two roles had become incompatible, and thus what had once been Tyndall’s greatest achievement, their combination, was no longer recognized or even understood. Within the scientific community, then, not only Tyndall’s research but his identity as a public scientist became rapidly outdated. The era of the great individualists, with Huxley and Tyndall at their head, came to an end with the establishment of team-based university laboratories. Tyndall, who never once had a student in his career as a researcher, worked alone and lectured alone. His primary aim as a public scientist was to bring science as a fully comprehensible concept into the everyday consciousness of society, and the science he displayed was grounded in experiments, visual demonstrations, explanations of how and why nature works the way it does. Throughout his life he conducted his own research as a free-wheeling scientist and fought for science as he conceived it to be, rather than collaborating with a team of fellow researchers on theoretical problems. The later scientists, working in standardized laboratories with groups of students under the aegis of universities, looked back on him as a quaint and old-fashioned figure, precursor to the modern-day popular scientist, of no use to modern scientific research. Yet the researchers who superseded Tyndall, though vastly unlike the man himself, fulfilled in many ways the vision of future scientists for which Tyndall had fought his lengthy battle over scientific authority in society. Oliver Lodge, J. J. Thomson, and others, accustomed to the respect and attention of the public, could not grasp the importance and the difficulty of Tyndall’s struggle for public recognition as a scientist. But had he, Huxley, and the other popularizers of their generation not pushed their brand of science into the public and educational spheres, the rise of standardized, university-based, government-funded science could never have occurred.


vigour, and made a great stir among those who were then busy with the supposed conflict between science and religion.108


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Scientists in British Culture, 1870–1900

I

n the last thirty years of the Victorian era, the force of science and scientists as cultural icons in British society grew steadily stronger. Science was used to represent change in all its forms from progress to decay, and scientists gained powerful influence over public thought. In his 1871 introductory lecture at Cambridge, James Clerk Maxwell declared: Indeed the cultivation and diffusion of sound dynamical ideas has already effected a great change in the language and thoughts even of those who make no pretension to science, and we are daily receiving fresh proofs that the popularization of scientific doctrines is producing as great an alteration in the mental state of society as the material applications of science are effecting in its outward life.1

Maxwell, though naturally pleased at science’s successes, was also disgusted by the credulity with which the general populace accepted scientific— or pseudo-scientific— ideas: “Such indeed is the respect paid to science, that the most absurd opinions may become current, provided they are expressed in language, the sound of which recalls some well-known scientific phrase.”2 His worry was justified, as the trend of revering science and scientists had by no means reached its height. Beatrice Webb, discussing the 1870s and 1880s in My Apprenticeship (1926), describes the “cult of science” in those decades as “the naive belief of the most original and vigorous minds of the ’seventies and ’eighties that it was by science, and by science alone, that all human misery would be ultimately swept away”:3


Conclusion

This almost fanatical faith was perhaps partly due to hero-worship. For who will deny that men of science were the leading British


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intellectuals of that period; that it was they who stood out as men of genius with international reputations; that it was they who were the self-confident militants of the period; that it was they who were routing the theologians, confounding the mystics, imposing their theories on the philosophers, their inventions on capitalists, and their discoveries on medical men; whilst they were at the same time snubbing the artists, ignoring the poets and even casting doubts on the capacity of politicians?4

Webb’s portrayal demonstrates that scientists by the 1880s had become familiar and influential figures in British society, while at the same time revealing a vastly different conception of the scientist from that of Tyndall, who went to great lengths not to snub artists and ignore poets. Webb’s description shows the multiplicity of images surrounding Victorian scientific men and the ease with which their prominence could take on both positive and negative values, depending on their audiences’ points of view. Many critics argued that a certain arrogance resulted from the prominence that scientists had achieved in common culture, and certainly some descriptions of Victorian scientific progress glowed with self-satisfaction. In 1881, the writer Robert Routledge in his Popular History of Science asserted with obvious pride, “The number of those is increasing who welcome such scientific generalizations as tending to exalt their views of the government of the universe, and, by clearing the ground of thorny questions and disputes concerning lower matters, to leave a wider space for enlarged spiritual views.”5 A page later he writes, “Nothing is more striking than the immediate and general application of scientific discoveries which is continually made to the purposes of everyday life.”6 Some restraint shows in Routledge’s statement, which portrays science as an influential juggernaut but only insofar as “lower matters” are concerned. But by 1887, the writer Grant Allen had dispensed even with that modicum of modesty. Allen published an article in The Fortnightly Review entitled “The Progress of Science from 1836 to 1886,” which is a panegyric to the glories of science: “[W]e, who have beheld it grow rapidly under our own eyes to virile maturity and adult robustness of thew and muscle, we forget how new a power it is in the world, and how feeble and timid was its tender babyhood in the first few decades of the present century.”7 Such is Grant’s complacency that he can look back over the preceding decades as if they were lengthy eras, and the result, in his portrayal, is Nature on a platter: “[M]odern science at the present day offers us the spectacle of a simple, unified, and comprehensible cosmos. [ . . . ] It exhibits to our eyes or to our scientific




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imagination a picture of the universe as a single whole, a picture of its evolution as a continuous process.”8 There is no hesitation here, no room for ambiguity or even complexity. Science, according to Allen, had unraveled Nature’s Gordian knot. The air of authority assumed by (and for) so many scientists in the 1880s implied that, in at least some portions of society, the wish of Francis Galton—Darwin’s cousin and a scientific Renaissance man— to see a “priesthood” of science had more or less come true. Galton had expressed this wish in the conclusion of his 1874 work English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture, a pioneering statistical study in which he attempted to show that scientific ability was innate rather than acquired.9 Galton had no time for clergymen, and many of the remarks in his conclusion meet the criteria of the war of words between science and theology: A great and salutary change has undoubtedly come over the feeling of the nation since the time when the present leading men of science were boys, for education was at that time conducted in the interests of the clergy, and was strongly opposed to science. It crushed the inquiring spirit, the love of observation, the pursuit of inductive studies, the habit of independent thought, and it protected classics and mathematics by giving them the monopoly of all prizes for intellectual work, such as scholarships, fellowships, church livings, canonries, bishoprics, and the rest.10

Galton pulled no punches. Published in the same year in which Tyndall made his notorious Belfast Address, English Men of Science aimed to demonstrate the superiority of the scientifically minded over the rest of humanity, in particular those connected with the church. But Galton did more than rail against the clergy; he predicted a time when scientists would replace them, becoming the new leaders of public thought: As regards the future provision for successful followers of science, it is to be hoped that, in addition to the many new openings in industrial pursuits, the gradual but sure development of sanitary administration and statistical inquiry may in time afford the needed profession. These and adequately paid professorships may, as I sincerely hope they will, even in our days, give rise to the establishment of a sort of scientific priesthood throughout the kingdom, whose high duties would have reference to the health and well-being of the nation in its broadest sense, and whose emoluments and social position would be made commensurate with the importance and variety of their functions.11


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Here is the equivalent of Tyndall’s vision of scientists as cultural leaders, taking over the role of clergymen and becoming public moralists by acquiring the monopoly not only on financial backing and institutional positions but on the duties of looking after “the nation in its broadest sense.” In the opinion of the philosopher William Graham, who published a book called The Creed of Science in 1881, Galton’s dream had become reality within only a few years of its publication.12 In his work Graham attempts to lay out the philosophy of science as contrasted with the philosophy of the Anglican clergymen. He writes in his introduction: In the absence of any single and universally acknowledged authority on all articles of faith and doctrine I have taken the consensus of scientific opinion amongst the few highest authorities on each particular article, and I have treated this as the orthodox teaching of Science— as what would have been the decision had all such authorities met together in Council to fix the faith.13

Graham thus takes to its limit Galton’s idea of treating science as a new religion and scientists as the priests thereof—but his manner of doing so is not one that would have pleased Tyndall, nor indeed any of Tyndall’s associates. In his fight against the monopoly of clergymen over public opinion, Tyndall emphasized the difference between the convictions of science and the convictions of religion. Science, he argued, was not dependent on faith and had no doctrine— on the contrary, it based its theories on observation, deduction, and experiment, processes that could be verified and repeated by whoever wished to test the theories for themselves. Graham’s language and treatment of science as a “faith,” therefore, is probably an attack on the complacency of scientists about their standing in society. He writes later in the introduction, “But when we come to mental, moral, and social questions, neither physicists nor naturalists are any longer authorities, however little some of them seem disposed to concede the point.”14 As far as Graham was concerned, though the scientists—in particular the physical scientists—had many valid points to bring to the debate, they exceeded their boundaries when they sought to become social authorities. Graham was not alone in his opinion that scientists were becoming too big for their breeches, and the closing decades of the nineteenth century saw increasing criticism of science’s “arrogance” and “overbearing” attitude toward alternate social influences. Roy MacLeod in




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an article from 1982 discusses the “creed” of science that developed in these years and the corresponding accusations arguing that science was “bankrupt” and had caused a decline in aesthetic and moral values.15 Ironically, one of the strongest indications of the strength of scientists’ hold on public opinion comes from this backlash. In 1881, a strident defender of science named Frank Fernseed published an article in The Journal of Science entitled “The Future ‘Martyrdom of Science,’ ” in which he warned that the new enemy of science was not theology but “the leaders of ‘advanced thought’, theological,— antitheological rather,— philanthropic, social, and political!”16 Fernseed takes an exaggeratedly antagonistic view of “the moralists, the historians, the orators, and the metaphysicians” who, he claimed, were resisting science’s advances into the social sciences17; but he was not wrong in suggesting that much of the criticism of science in the final decades of the century would extend beyond theological protests and that most of it would focus on science’s “arrogance” in extending its jurisdiction to every sphere of society. One of the most popular arenas for voicing both interest and alarm at science’s influence in society was fiction. In 1886, Robert Louis Stevenson published The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which helped to establish the archetypal figure of the mad scientist torn between morality and the dangerous lure of scientific discovery. Dr. Jekyll is perhaps the most famous of these early fictional scientists, but the frequency with which the character shows up in fiction of this period demonstrates the ease with which authors adapted the traditions of Gothic horror and ethical dilemma to the prevailing preoccupation with science’s immorality. Wilkie Collins, ever fond of mysterious and untrustworthy scientific characters, presented his most explicit condemnation in Heart and Science (1883), in which the two concepts of the title are diametrically opposed. As Collins explains in the preface, one of his purposes in writing the book was to contribute to the fight against vivisection: the villain of the piece, brain-doctor Nathan Benjulia, proclaims at one point, “Knowledge sanctifies cruelty!”18 Thirteen years later, H. G. Wells produced a more grisly protest against vivisection, along with an even more frightening scientist-villain, in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896). Even Sherlock Holmes, the creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who first appeared in A Study in Scarlet in 1887, represented the potential dangers of science as well as its benefits. Though he became a hero to thousands for the strength of his intellect and his devotion to solving crimes, Holmes’s utter coldness and lack of emotion played into the vision of scientists as thinking machines devoid of normal human


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feeling. The fiction of the 1880s and 1890s was littered with similar creations, often portraying scientists struggling in vain against the soul-deadening power of the science they practiced. Commentators outside the fictional sphere also worried that science, when allowed to become a dominant influence in society, would come at the price of morality. In 1877, the Irish poet William Allingham wrote in an article called “Modern Prophets,” published in Fraser’s Magazine, Science has of late been carrying all before it; and I must own that I am not entirely satisfied with the result. Science is carrying too much before it to please me. The victor sweeps away not only hostile rampart and citadel, but the city itself. Those teachers and preachers who have most the ear of the present time, aim at, or at all events tend to, the destruction, not merely of Dogmatism but of Religious Faith.19

Interestingly, the first scientist Allingham refers to as one of the “Modern Prophets” is Tyndall himself, and Allingham presents him as an exception to the rule: One Professor (though he cannot sufficiently ridicule prayer) does not resist the notion, so long as it is not formed into a dogma, of there being possibly a mysterious Something not describable in scientific terms or discoverable by scientific means, something (as the poet said) deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and which occasionally seems to “give tone” to the Professor’s own mental condition. But all this at best is little more than a dream.20

In spite of Tyndall’s “dream”-like saving graces—the “traces of awe and reverence”21 in his lectures and essays—Allingham accuses him and the other scientists who were beginning to dominate society of falling into the same habits for which they themselves condemned the theologians: “The Dogmatism of Science in human affairs is to be as strictly guarded against as the Dogmatism of Theology, and Science has of late unquestionably shown a tendency to overbear and tyrannise in the domain of Human Thought.”22 It is interesting to note that whereas Allingham praised Tyndall’s reverence for “a possible mysterious Something,” that same belief gave rise to ridicule from other writers, most notably W. H. Mallock, author of the satirical roman à clef called The New Republic, also published in 1877. This book of mockery, exploiting the idea of the symposium, gathers together a group of characters for a weekend of discussion in a country house, each guest parodying a




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well-known Victorian figure. Huxley is there, along with W. K. Clifford, Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and others. The character based on Tyndall, Mr. Stockton, is a tiresome windbag who expounds the hazy benefits of religion and poetry and lauds society’s progress with fatuous praise: “Do you mean that society as a rule is not infinitely better informed now than it was thirty years ago? Has it not infinitely fewer prejudices and infinitely more knowledge?”23 In exaggerating Tyndall’s florid style and lambasting his reverence of the unknowable— at one point Mr. Stockton compares religion to cloud-gazing 24 —Mallock derides Tyndall’s philosophy as overblown and self-important. Mr. Storks and Mr. Saunders, the characters representing Huxley and Clifford, are equally unlikable and excessive in their defence of rationalism and objections to traditional religion. Mallock, in attacking the conceit of Tyndall, Huxley, and Clifford, was demonstrating the resentment felt by many critics against what seemed to be overweening pride on the part of scientists, an assumption that they had found truth while others were still groping in the dark. In 1888, eleven years after the publication of Allingham’s article and Mallock’s satire, the writer Frances Power Cobbe, well known for her support of women’s rights and the anti-vivisection campaign, published an essay in The Contemporary Review entitled “The Scientific Spirit of the Age.” Her opening paragraph is an evocative description of the heights that scientists had reached: That the present is pre-eminently the Age of Science is a fact equally recognised by the majority who hail it with triumph and by the minority who regard it with feelings wherein regret and apprehension have their place. [ . . . ] We still in our time have War; but it is no longer the conflict of valiant soldiers, but the game of scientific strategists. We still have Religion; but she no longer claims earth and heaven as her domain, but meekly goes to church by a path over which Science has notified, “On Sufferance Only.” We still have Art; but it is no longer the Art of Fancy, but the Art of the Intellect, wherein the Beautiful is indefinitely postponed to the technically True, as Truth is discerned by men who think qu’il n’y a rien de vrai exepté le laid. All our multiform activities, from agriculture down to dress-making, are in these days nothing if not “scientific,” and to thousands of worthy people it is enough to say that Science teaches this or that, or that the interests of Science require such and such a sacrifice, to cause them to bow their heads, as pious men of old did at the message of a Prophet; “It is SCIENCE! Let it do what seemeth it good.” The claims of the aesthetic faculty, and even of the moral sense, to speak in arrest of


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This description Cobbe uses as the groundwork on which to lay her argument against the prevalence of science in her society. Though she does not deny that science has been of some benefit to the public, it has, she declares, gone too far: “It is the intrusiveness and oppression of the Scientific Spirit in regions where it has no proper work, and (still more often) its predominance in others where its place should be wholly subordinate, against which a protest appears to be needed.”26 Her argument was not a new one—the charge that science was transgressing its proper sphere had been used for decades. But the tone of Cobbe’s protestations is different from earlier protests— she is no longer arguing as the voice of society against an upstart but rather as a member of what she calls “the minority” who object to science’s position as a leading cultural influence. The scientific spirit, Cobbe maintains, is “a spirit to which the terms ‘imperious’ and ‘arrogant’ may not unfitly be applied, and sometimes we may add ‘overbearing’ when a man of science thinks fit to rebuke a theologian for trespassing on his ground after he has been trampling all over the ground of theology.”27 Here Cobbe highlights the transition: in the public eye, theologians are now the trespassers, scientists the overbearing landlords. By the 1890s, then, science in popular thought had come into its own—but the growing difference between popular and professional science becomes immediately obvious in an examination of the authors of such popular texts as those previously mentioned: by the end of the nineteenth century, while supporters and critics operating outside the scientific sphere used science as a sounding board, punching bag, triumphal flag, or cultural litmus paper depending on their ideas and inclinations, the professional scientists for the most part laid aside these societal hypotheses and rarely stepped in to add their opinions to the mix, instead focusing in their commentaries on research and theories within the scientific sphere. Thus the divide between professional and popular science grew larger, and while the influence of scientists as recognized cultural figures grew more prevalent, the communication that Tyndall had envisioned between the laboratory and the general public diminished. Tyndall, perhaps not fully understanding the distinction between the influence of a concept and the influence of individuals, seems toward the end of his life to have overestimated the power of scientists, at least in the realm of politics. On December 27, 1887, he


judgement on matters entirely within their own spheres are ruled out of court.25


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wrote to Huxley about the idea of presenting a scientists’ protest in Parliament against Gladstone’s plan for Irish Home Rule, the bête noire of Tyndall’s old age: “It occurred to me in the Alps this year that a brief expression of opinion on the part of our leading scientific men, would strengthen the hands and increase the courage of the Government.”28 The proposed “expression of opinion” reads in part: “Men of science have for centuries been leaders in the practice and defence of true liberty of thought and speech; but they cannot, without protest, surrender to the modern demagogue, whether English or Irish, the privilege of defining what ‘true liberty’ means.”29 A week later he wrote in a supplementary letter to Huxley, “I hear from various good men and true that they are tired of the professional politician (don’t let Lubbock know this) and wish to hear the free and unbiassed sons of science speaking out.”30 It is significant that several other members of the X Club had helped to formulate the idea. Edward Frankland wrote earlier to Huxley, “At the X it was considered advisable to draw up a kind of scientific declaration in favour of the maintenance of the Union and Tyndall was deputed to draw it, strong but in moderate language, and we all agreed to sign. It was thought that nearly every scientist of note would sign it.”31 In spite of this optimism, however, Huxley replied to Tyndall with a rejection of the idea: scientists, he felt, were not yet such influential commentators that a mere statement of their opinion would sway Parliament on a nonscientific issue. Soon afterward Tyndall wrote to Hirst, “I hoped that the scientific men of Britain might have been able to take some action in support of the Government, but the project, I fear, will come to nothing.”32 In the end, the only result of Tyndall’s continued enthusiasm for his Irish cause was occasional mockery from the press, as in a Punch cartoon from 1890 depicting “The Scientific Volunteer”— an aged and infirm Tyndall staggering to join the Orangemen (figure C.1).33 Tyndall’s proposal— and the X Club’s backing of it— indicates their conviction that scientists had gained a powerful voice in society, and there can be no doubt that on one level this was true. As the popularly acknowledged source of truth, power, and influence, science by the turn of the twentieth century had become a predominant social force, just as Tyndall and Huxley had hoped. Yet, as so often happens, the science they had practiced was not the multifaceted science that emerged in the 1900s, and the scientific researchers they had envisioned as cultural commentators were not the people promulgating the influence of science and its practitioners in British


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Figure C.1 “The Scientific Volunteer—‘If ever I have to choose . . . I shall, without hesitation, shoulder my rifle with the Orangeman.’—See Professor Tyndall’s Reply to Sir W. V. Harcourt. ‘Times,’ Feb. 13, 1890.” From Punch (February 22, 1890). Widener Library, Harvard College Library, KSG 660 (vol. 98).



popular culture at the turn of the century. Tyndall’s own figure, the scientific researcher-cum-popularizer, a man bridging the gap between serious scientific discovery and flamboyant scientific lectures, stood among the last of a dying breed, and the judgment of


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the next generation of scientists demonstrated all too clearly that his time had passed. *

*

So where does that leave Tyndall as a historical figure? In the 1860s and 1870s, Tyndall stood at the helm of physical science. As Grant Allen described: Above all, London, that great heterogeneous London, accepted him frankly as the representative physicist. Of Joule, of Thomson, of Tait, of Clerk Maxwell, of Balfour Stewart, it knew little or nothing personally; even Helmholtz was to it but a great distant name. Tyndall was there, on the spot, audible and visible. He was the Royal Institution. He was also Physics.34

For a few decades then, Tyndall represented physics to society; with Huxley representing biology, the pair arguably formed the public face of science. But Tyndall’s influence, in both the popular and professional arenas of science, began to fade even before his death; after the turn of the twentieth century, only a few people other than those who had personally encountered his writings or lectures remembered him as an influential figure in Victorian science. Why was Tyndall forgotten? There were four major reasons. First, his work as a public lecturer and popularizer of science undermined his credibility as a scientific researcher; the split between popular and professional science, present in some form from the beginning of his career and growing more rigidly defined as university laboratories became more established, meant that anyone who, like Tyndall, shaped his public persona as a scientific instructor for the general populace could not carry the same weight of expertise as those scientists who spent their entire career devoted to research. Though Tyndall taught the basics of scientific methods and ideas to thousands of people via his books and lectures, he had no full-time research students working with him in his basement laboratory, and his individualistic type of research lost its legitimacy in the face of the collaborative, studentaided efforts that became the norm in university laboratories. Second, Tyndall’s scientific work as a researcher was not of the groundbreaking variety that ensured Darwin’s, Joule’s, or Maxwell’s fame. In each major area of his research—glaciology, heat, sound, bacteriology— other researchers produced the theories that were eventually celebrated as turning points in the history of science. Tyndall’s solid work in a range of fields, rather than concentrated and inspired


*


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work in a single field, meant that by the twentieth century, when specialization had become standard for scientific researchers, his career seemed to be one of dilettantism rather than sustained focus. A professional scientist, by the beginning of the twentieth century, was someone who had specialized from the time of his undergraduate years in a particular field of science— physics, biology, chemistry. The crossover between these fields was growing rarer and more difficult year by year, and Tyndall’s leap to, for example, the study of airborne germs, which was logical when physics could be construed as the study of the movements of any molecules, marked him as an amateur once biology had monopolized the study of living matter. The third reason lies in what Stephen S. Kim called Tyndall’s “transcendental materialism”—his unique view of nature as a world of observable, quantifiable laws infused with an inexplicable mystery toward which one could and should feel a religious reverence. Tyndall may have been vilified for supposed materialism in the 1870s, but by the end of the nineteenth century his brand of science was, if anything, too religious for modern scientists, whose determinedly unreligious science often resulted in a tacit agreement within university laboratories not to pursue avenues of scientific philosophy leading to metaphysics. This is not to say that questions concerning the relationship between science and religion disappeared, but they were no longer at center stage, where Tyndall tended to place them. Tyndall’s preoccupation with the metaphysical side of physics formed one of the foremost contradictions of his character, for it belied, at first glance, his insistence that theology give science a free hand in the investigation of the natural world. Tyndall meant by this demand the freedom for science to investigate anything within the natural world— anything potentially governed by observable and quantifiable laws, be it human evolution or the nature of miracles. By the end of his life, however, the boundaries of science, as it was practiced in university laboratories, excluded those speculative regions that for Tyndall held the zest, if not the pith, of scientific inquiry. The fourth reason for Tyndall’s posthumous obscurity is, as P. Chalmers Mitchell suggested in his 1894 article in The New Review, the period-specific nature of his identity as a scientist.35 The issues for which he fought, most importantly the independence of science from theological constraints, became irrelevant to the next generation of scientific researchers, partly because Tyndall, Huxley, and their colleagues were so successful in their fight for scientific independence. Tyndall himself, the experimentalist who made his living through public lectures and popular books on scientific ideas, had no place




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in the scientific community established by the time he died. Since his research was not enough to preserve his name as a discoverer, his career became something of historical rather than scientific interest. Tyndall, in hindsight— as so many of his obituaries prophesied—is significant as a scientific popularizer rather than as a researcher. He is important to the historian more than to the scientist, and thus those scientists and writers narrating the history of scientific discovery in the early decades of the twentieth century found no place for him in their work. It was left to later cultural historians to rediscover his central role in Victorian society. For Tyndall did play a central role. The man who “was Physics” represented science not only to Londoners but to thousands of people— scientists and laymen alike—in Britain, America, and Europe, who heard his lectures and read his books. With Huxley as his most prominent partner in thus shaping the popular image of the scientist, Tyndall familiarized Victorian society with the idea that a scientist was someone who could explain the natural world and, from his vantage-point of knowledge, guide the policies of society. Tyndall’s and Huxley’s participation in the debates on educational reform and Tyndall’s widespread fame as the man who, for good or ill, supported “Science” against “Theology” meant that their names were invariably coupled with social commentary as well as with scientific research. Tyndall was more often recognized for his talents as an expositor and commentator than as a researcher, in spite of the fact that what he exposited was a vision of society wherein the researcher received his due of funding and respect. It is the irony of Tyndall’s career that the very factors which by the end of his life rendered him obsolete— a man whose destiny would be “written in water”36 —were those he had spent so much time and energy in promoting: the rise of university and government-funded laboratories, the specialization of scientific education and research, the increase of students and postgraduate assistants involved in scientific research, the freedom of scientific research from theological constraints, the power of scientists’ influence in society. Tyndall fought for these aims with all the power that celebrity and popularity granted him, exploiting his persona of the pugnacious public scientist, and in the end he was responsible for much of their realization. But the science that came to be recognized as the norm in laboratories throughout the Western world held no place for a scientist like Tyndall; “scientists,” in the opening decades of the twentieth century, were rather men like J. J. Thomson, Ernest Rutherford, Arthur Schuster, and Oliver Lodge, who explored narrow scientific fields


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within the confines of university laboratories, aided by research students and, increasingly, by government grants. The days of the public experimentalist were over; Tyndall lived just long enough to see the beginnings of modern science as he had imagined it and the end of his own identity as a typical scientist.


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Introduction 1. W. H. Brock, “Tyndall, John (1820–1893),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, September 2004; online edn, October 2006), http://ezproxy.ouls.ox.ac. uk:2117/view/article/27948. 2. T. H. Huxley, Letter to Macmillan (November 4, 1878), in Letters to Macmillan, ed. Simon Nowell-Smith (London: Macmillan, 1967), 166–7. 3. T. W. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1982), 87–8 and 101. 4. George Levine, “Scientific Discourse as an Alternative to Faith,” in Victorian Faith in Crisis, ed. Richard J. Helmstadter and Bernard Lightman (London: Macmillan, 1990), 255. 5. A. S. Eve and C. H. Creasey, The Life and Work of John Tyndall (London: Macmillan, 1945). 6. Frank M. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Bernard Lightman, The Origins of Agnosticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). 7. W. H. Brock, N. D. McMillan, and R. C. Mollan, eds., John Tyndall: Essays on a Natural Philosopher (Dublin: Royal Dublin Society, 1981). 8. Ruth Barton, “John Tyndall, Pantheist: A Rereading of the Belfast Address,” Osiris, 2nd series, 3 (1987): 111–34. 9. Stephen S. Kim, John Tyndall’s Transcendental Materialism and the Conflict between Religion and Science in Victorian England (Lewiston, NY: Mellen University Press, 1996). 10. Notable among these are J. D. Burchfield, “John Tyndall at the Royal Institution,” in “The Common Purposes of Life,” ed. Frank A. J. L. James (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 147–68; Jill Howard, “ ‘Physics and Fashion’: John Tyndall and His Audiences in MidVictorian Britain,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 35


Notes


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13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

(2004): 729–58; and N. D. McMillan and J. Meehan, John Tyndall: “X”-emplar of Scientific and Technological Education (Dublin: NCEA, 1980). Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority, 175. Frank M. Turner, Between Science and Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 16. Thomas F. Gieryn, “John Tyndall’s Double Boundary-Work: Science, Religion, and Mechanics in Victorian England,” in Cultural Boundaries of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 43; emphasis in the original. Turner, Between Science and Religion, 36. Ibid., 251. [William Whewell], “Art. III— On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. By Mrs. Somerville,” Quarterly Review 51 (March 1834): 59–60; emphasis in the original. See Sydney Ross, “Scientist: The Story of a Word,” Annals of Science 18 (June 1962): 65–85. William Whewell, Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, vol. 1 (London: J. W. Parker, 1840), lxxi; emphasis in the original. Ibid., cxiii; emphasis in the original. [David Scott], “On Leonardo da Vinci and Coreggio,” Blackwood’s Magazine 48 (August 1840): 273. See John Morrison, “Scott, David (1806–1849),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn), http://ezproxy.ouls. ox.ac.uk:2117/view/article/24866. Quoted in Ross, “Scientist: The Story of a Word,” 72. Quoted in ibid., 73; emphasis in the original. [William Grove], “Physical Science in England,” Blackwood’s Magazine 54 (October 1843): 524; emphasis in the original. Quoted in Ross, “Scientist: The Story of a Word,” 78. Royal Institution Archives, RI MS JT/3/42, MS. Notebooks of John Tyndall, Draft of a letter to Hallam Tennyson, in volume entitled “Literary Reminiscences. Carlyle. Etc.” Royal Institution Archives, RI MS JT/1/HTYP, Typescript Correspondence between Hirst and Tyndall (November 28, 1887). Ruth Barton, “ ‘Men of Science’: Language, Identity and Professionalization in the Mid-Victorian Scientific Community,” History of Science 20 (March 2003): 73–119. The Journal of the History of Biology 34 (Spring 2001): 3–147. See also Ruth Barton, “Scientific Authority and Scientific Controversy in Nature: North Britain against the X Club,” in Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media, ed. Louise Henson et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 223–35. Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 47–78.


11. 12.

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30. See, in particular, Part I of James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies (Cambridge: CUP, 1979), which discusses the historiography of the military metaphor in the science/religion debate. 31. Lightman, The Origins of Agnosticism, 134. 32. Prospectus of the Royal Institution of Great Britain (1800), 3. 33. Sophie Forgan, “ ‘A National Treasure House of a Unique Kind’ (W. L. Bragg): Some Reflections on Two Hundred Years of Institutional History,” in James, “Common Purposes,” 31–2. 34. Quoted in Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 194. 35. Forgan, “ ‘A National Treasure House of a Unique Kind,’ ” 29. 36. Quoted in Frank A. J. L. James, “Running the Royal Institution: Michael Faraday as an Administrator,” in James, “Common Purposes,” 140. 37. Few books have been written about the Royal Institution: in addition to James’s “Common Purposes of Life” the others are Morris Berman, Social Change and Scientific Organization (London: Heinemann Educational, 1978); and Gwendy Caroe, The Royal Institution (London: J. Murray, 1985). 38. Caroe, The Royal Institution, 79.

1

Tyndall’s Work as a Scientist: Practice and Reception

1. Quoted in N. D. McMillan and J. Meehan, John Tyndall: “X”-emplar of Scientific and Technological Education (Dublin: NCEA, 1980), 54–5. 2. The Times (April 8, 1887), 7. 3. “John Tyndall,” The Saturday Review 76 (December 9, 1893): 641. 4. Larkin later identified himself as the author of the pamphlet in his better known, almost worshipful work, Carlyle and the Open Secret of His Life (1886). For more information on Larkin, see Ian Campbell, “Henry Larkin and the Carlyles,” The Huntington Library Quarterly 54 (Spring 1991): 127- 41. 5. Henry Larkin, Extra Physics, and the Mystery of Creation (London, 1878), 13. 6. See R. W. Emerson, Representative Men: Seven Lectures (London: John Chapman, 1850). Tyndall’s interest in Emerson is discussed further in chapter two, in the section entitled “Tyndall in the Alps: The Influence of Emerson and Goethe.” 7. Larkin, Extra Physics, 13–14. 8. Ibid., 15. 9. Ibid., 15–16; emphasis in the original. 10. Ibid., 24. 11. Larkin and his pamphlet are discussed further in chapter three, in the section entitled “After Belfast: The Late 1870s and 1880s.”


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12. William T. Jeans, Lives of the Electricians (London: Whittaker, George Bell, 1887), 87. 13. Quoted in E. A. Youmans, “Tyndall and His American Visit,” The Popular Science Monthly 44 (February 1894), 505. 14. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” trans. Richard Nice, in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. J. Richardson (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 241–58. 15. Royal Institution Archives, RI MS JT/2/13b, Typescript Journals of John Tyndall, vol. II (July 5, 1852). 16. Ibid. 17. RI MS JT/2/13b (June 26, 1853). 18. RI MS JT/2/13b (February 9, 1853). 19. Royal Insitution Archives, RI MS JT/1/HTYP, Typescript Correspondence between Hirst and Tyndall (May 12, 1850). 20. Ibid. 21. RI MS JT/1/HTYP (April 14, 1852). 22. See Tyndall’s later book, Researches on Diamagnetism and MagneCrystallic Action (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1870). 23. For more information, see J. S. Rowlinson, “Tyndall’s Work on Glaciology and Geology,” in John Tyndall: Essays on a Natural Philosopher, ed. W. H. Brock, N. D. McMillan, and R. C. Mollan (Dublin: Royal Dublin Society, 1981), 113–28. 24. See John Tyndall, The Glaciers of the Alps (London: John Murray, 1860), Part II. 25. See, e.g., J. D. Forbes, Reply to Professor Tyndall’s Remarks, in His Work “On the Glaciers of the Alps,” Relating to Rendu’s “Théorie des Glaciers” (Edinburgh: A. and C. Black, 1860). 26. See “On Force” (1862), in Fragments of Science, 8th edn, vol. I (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1899), 380–5. Tyndall discussed Mayer further in Heat as a Mode of Motion (1863) and “The Copley Medalist of 1871” (1871), in Fragments of Science, 8th edn, vol. I, 429–38, as well as in a public and prolonged correspondence with Tait and Thomson. See Chapter 9 in A. S. Eve and C. H. Creasey, The Life and Work of John Tyndall (London: Macmillan, 1945), 94–105. Crosbie Smith, in The Science of Energy (London: The Athlone Press, 1998), devotes a chapter to Tyndall’s conflict with Tait (170–91), though in describing Tyndall’s support of Mayer as a purely tactical move against the North Britain scientific coterie, Smith does not do justice to Tyndall’s sincerity in believing Mayer worthy of credit. 27. B. Stewart and P. G. Tait, The Unseen Universe (London: Macmillan, 1875). This book reached its tenth edition in 1883. 28. P. G. Tait, “Introduction” (1876), in Recent Advances in Physical Science, 3rd edn (London: Macmillan and Co., 1885), 24–5; emphasis in the original.


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29. Quoted in A. J. Meadows, Science and Controversy, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 2008), 37. 30. RI MS JT/1/HTYP (October 16, 1876). 31. See P. Sawyer, “Ruskin and Tyndall: The Poetry of Matter and the Poetry of Spirit,” in Victorian Science and Victorian Values, eds J. Paradis and T. Postlewait (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1985), 217–46. 32. See John Tyndall, Contributions to Molecular Physics in the Domain of Radiant Heat (London, 1872). 33. See John Tyndall, “On Atmosphere in Relation to Fog Signalling,” Contemporary Review 25 (1874): 148- 68, and Sound (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1867). For more information on his researches into heat and sound, see A. J. Meadows, “Tyndall as a Physicist”; Irena M. McCabe, “Tyndall, the Chemical Physicist”; and Philip S. Callahan, “John Tyndall— Contributions to the Development of Infrared and Solid State Communications,” in Essays on a Natural Philosopher, 81–92, 93–102, 129–44. 34. Tyndall’s earliest paper outlining what is now known as the “Greenhouse Effect,” which he began studying in 1859, is his 1861 Bakerian lecture, “On the Absorption and Radiation of Heat by Gases and Vapours, and on the Physical Connexion of Radiation, Absorption and Conduction,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 151 (1861): 1–36. For more on Tyndall’s work on this phenomenon, see James Rodger Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 65–74. 35. See S. E. Fryer, “Wigham, John Richardson (1829–1906),” rev. R. C. Cox, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn), http://ezproxy.ouls.ox.ac. uk:2117/view/article/36889. 36. See John Tyndall, “A Story of Our Lighthouses,” The Nineteenth Century 24 (July 1888): 61-80; “A Story of the Lighthouses,” The Fortnightly Review 50 (December 1888): 805–28; and “A Story of the Lighthouses,” The Fortnightly Review 51 (February 1889): 198–219. 37. Roy MacLeod, “Science and Government in Victorian England: Lighthouse Illumination and the Board of Trade, 1866–1886” (1969), in Public Science and Public Policy in Victorian England (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996), article III, 37. 38. Ibid., 38. 39. “A Lighthouse—Not Professor Tyndall,” Moonshine 10 (December 20, 1884): 297. 40. See John Tyndall, Essays on the Floating-Matter of the Air in Relation to Putrefaction and Infection (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1881).


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41. Quoted in Rickman John Godlee, Lord Lister (London: Macmillan, 1917), 280. 42. For more information, see Con O’Rourke, “Tyndall’s Contributions to Biology and Medicine,” in Essays on a Natural Philosopher, 103–12. 43. Quoted in Eve and Creasey, The Life and Work of John Tyndall, 56. 44. See Parliamentary Papers, 1886, 451, “Report from the Select Committee on House of Commons (arrangements),” 18–24. 45. For a full list of Tyndall’s scientific papers and publications, see Henry Young, A Record of the Scientific Work of John Tyndall (London: Printed for private circulation at the Chiswick Press, 1935). 46. James R. Moore, “Theodicy and Society: The Crisis of the Intelligentsia,” in Victorian Faith in Crisis, ed. Richard J. Helmstadter and Bernard Lightman (London: Macmillan, 1990), 172. 47. Roy M. MacLeod, “The X Club: A Social Network of Science in Late-Victorian England,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 24 (April 1970): 305–22. 48. Herbert Spencer, An Autobiography, vol. ii (London: Williams and Norgate, 1904), 116. 49. Ibid., 116. 50. MacLeod, “The X Club,” 310 and 313. 51. Ibid., 310–11. There were also the Xtravagant Hirst, the Xperienced Hooker, the Xcellent Spottiswoode, the Xquisite Lubbock, the Xemplary Busk, and the Xpert Frankland. 52. Ibid., 314. 53. Quoted in Ruth Barton, “ ‘An Influential Set of Chaps’: The X Club and Royal Society Politics, 1864–85,” The British Journal for the History of Science 23 (March 1990), 57. 54. Ruth Barton, “ ‘Huxley, Lubbock, and Half a Dozen Others’: Professionals and Gentlemen in the Formation of the X Club, 1851– 1864,” Isis 89 (September 1998), 410–44. Hirst is quoted on 411. 55. Spencer, Autobiography, vol. ii, 116–17. 56. Quoted in Barton, “ ‘An Influential Set of Chaps,’ ” 73–4. See also Marie Boas Hall, All Scientists Now (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 112–19. 57. Quoted in Barton, “ ‘Huxley, Lubbock, and Half a Dozen Others,’ ” 413. 58. Quoted in J. Vernon Jensen, “The X Club: Fraternity for Victorian Scientists,” The British Journal for the History of Science 5 (June 1970), 72. 59. Spencer, Autobiography, vol. ii, 116. 60. Quoted in Barton, “ ‘An Influential Set of Chaps,’ ” 58. 61. Quoted in Eve and Creasey, The Life and Work of John Tyndall, 330. 62. Sophie Forgan, “Tyndall at the Royal Institution,” in Essays on a Natural Philosopher, 54.


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63. See Jill Howard, “ ‘Physics and Fashion’: John Tyndall and His Audiences in Mid-Victorian Britain,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 35 (2004): 739; also Charles A. Taylor, “Tyndall as Lecture Demonstrator,” in Essays on a Natural Philosopher, 205–16. 64. D. Thompson, “Contributions to Scientific Education and the Teaching of Science,” in Essays on a Natural Philosopher, 149. 65. Bernard Henry Becker, Scientific London (London, 1874), 44. 66. Ibid., 50. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid., 51. 69. Ibid., 51–2. 70. “John Tyndall,” The Saturday Review 76 (December 9, 1893), 641. 71. Jeans, Lives of the Electricians, 87. 72. “John Tyndall,” The Athenaeum, no. 3450 (9 December 1893), 811. 73. Iwan Rhys Morus, Frankenstein’s Children (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). Morus examined in more detail the significance of visual and tactile displays of electricity, as well as the importance of the popular scientific culture of spectacle in the later nineteenth century, in “The Matter of Victorian Electricity,” a paper given at the seminar for Science and Literature at Oxford University, March 6, 2009. 74. Morus, Frankenstein’s Children, 83. 75. Tyndall, “Professor Virchow and Evolution” (1879), Fragments of Science, 8th edn, vol. II (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1899), 399–400. Rudolf Ludwig Karl Virchow (1821–1902) was a renowned German doctor and pathologist who questioned the theory of evolution. He gave a notorious lecture in Munich in 1877 declaring that, while Darwin was an impressive researcher, his evolutionary theory was dangerous because it might lead to Socialism and should be regarded as a hypothesis rather than a proven doctrine. 76. Royal Institution Archives, RI MS JT/1/TYP/9, Typescript Correspondence of John Tyndall vol. IX (November 11, 1877). 77. Becker, Scientific London, 43. 78. RI MS JT/1/TYP/9 (April 10, 1865). 79. See Stephen Gregory, “Henry Wace (1836–1924),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn), http://ezproxy.ouls.ox.ac.uk:2117/view/article/36669. 80. [Henry Wace], “Scientific Lectures— their Use and Abuse,” The Quarterly Review 145 (1878), 38. 81. Ibid. 82. For more on Wace and his article, see chapter three, the section entitled “After Belfast: The Late 1870s and 1880s.” 83. RI MS JT/1/HTYP ([1872]). 84. RI MS JT/1/HTYP (January 11, 1873).


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85. RI MS JT/1/HTYP (November 23, 1872). The historian Thomas Gieryn uses Tyndall’s distinctions between pure and applied science to emphasize Tyndall’s use of different characteristics of science for different arguments— one set to differentiate science from religion, another to differentiate science from mechanics. See Gieryn, “John Tyndall’s Double Boundary-Work: Science, Religion, and Mechanics in Victorian England,” in Cultural Boundaries of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 37–64. 86. For more on Tyndall’s American tour, see Katherine Russell Sopka, “John Tyndall: International Populariser of Science,” in Essays on a Natural Philosopher, 193–204. 87. RI MS JT/1/HTYP (October 14, 1857). 88. RI MS JT/1/HTYP (21 September 1859). 89. Fragments of Science reached its eighth British edition in 1892; Heat as a Mode of Motion reached its seventh edition in 1887; Sound reached its fifth edition in 1893; The Forms of Water in Clouds and Rivers, Ice and Glaciers reached its tenth edition in 1889; Six Lectures on Light reached its fourth edition by 1885. 90. John Tyndall, Six Lectures on Light, 2nd edn (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1875), 1–2. 91. RI MS JT/1/TYP/9 (April 20, 1858). The scientists referred to are the mathematician James Joseph Sylvester, the mineralogist Nevil Story-Maskelyne, the chemist Edward Frankland, the botanist Joseph Hooker, the chemist William Ramsay, and (in all probability) the mathematician Henry John Stephen Smith. 92. RI MS JT/1/TYP/9 (undated). 93. H. Helmholtz, quoted in “Scientific Worthies, IV.—John Tyndall,” Nature 10 (August 20, 1874), 301. 94. Ibid., 302. 95. Herbert Spencer, “The Late Professor Tyndall,” The Fortnightly Review 61 (February 1894), 33. 96. “John Tyndall,” Athenaeum, no. 3450 (December 9, 1893), 811. 97. Jeans, 2. 98. Ibid., 1–2. 99. “Tyndall’s Forms of Water,” Nature 7 (March 27, 1873), 401. 100. W. F. Barrett, “Tyndall’s Researches on Radiant Heat,” Nature 7 (November 28, 1872), 67. 101. For more on the conflict between Tyndall and Barrett, see the Royal Institution Archives, RI MS JT/2/13c, Typescript Journals of John Tyndall, vol. III (February 17, 1866, and March 10, 1866). 102. “New Fragments. By John Tyndall,” The Academy, 41 (March 26,1892), 293. 103. [H. E. Roscoe], “Thermo-dynamics,” Edinburgh Review 119 (January 1864), 5. 104. Ibid., 25. 105. Ibid., 25–6.


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106. [William Brydone Jack], “Tyndall’s Lectures on Sound,” Edinburgh Review 127 (January 1868), 103. 107. Ibid., 103. 108. P. G. Tait, “Letter to the Editor, on Tyndall and Forbes,” Nature 8 (September 11, 1873), 382. 109. “The British Association,” The Saturday Review 44 (August 18, 1877), 196. 110. This idea is discussed in more detail in chapter four, in the section entitled “Science in the Universities.”

2

Tyndall’s Philosophy of Science and Nature: The Influences of Carlyle, Emerson, Goethe, and Faraday

1. For more on Carlyle, see James Anthony Froude, Thomas Carlyle, 4 vols (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1882–4); Fred Kaplan, Thomas Carlyle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 2. Frank M. Turner, “Victorian Scientific Naturalism and Thomas Carlyle” (1975), in Contesting Cultural Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 131–50. 3. T. H. Huxley, “Professor Tyndall,” The Nineteenth Century 35 (January 1894): 3. 4. See, e.g., James R. Moore, “Theodicy and Society: The Crisis of the Intelligentsia,” in Victorian Faith in Crisis, ed. Richard J. Helmstadter and Bernard Lightman (London: Macmillan, 1990), 168: “Inspired to boldness, however, by the heroic spirit of Carlyle’s ‘natural supernaturalism’, convinced that the universe was on their side, they set out to remake society through plain-speaking and righteous deeds. The careers of T. H. Huxley and John Tyndall were cases in point.” 5. John Tyndall, “Personal Recollections of Thomas Carlyle,” in New Fragments (London: Longmans, Green, 1892), 349. 6. Royal Institution Archives, RI MS JT/1/HTYP, Typescript Correspondence between Hirst and Tyndall (November 23, 1848). 7. Royal Institution Archives, RI MS JT/2/13c, Typescript Journals of John Tyndall, vol. III (May 22, 1855). 8. RI MS JT/1/HTYP (November 23, 1848). 9. RI MS JT/1/HTYP ([May 26, 1852]). 10. Quoted in Bernard Lightman, “Robert Elsmere and the Agnostic Crises of Faith,” in Victorian Faith in Crisis, ed. Richard J. Helmstadter and Bernard Lightman (London: Macmillan, 1990), 296. 11. RI MS JT/1/HTYP (December 2, 1849). 12. RI MS JT/1/HTYP (July 13, 1850). See also “Natural Supernaturalism,” Chapter 8, Book III, in Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987 [1833–34]), 193–202.


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13. Thomas Carlyle, “Signs of the Times” (1829), in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, vol. II (London: Chapman & Hall, 1888), 235–6. 14. Iwan Rhys Morus, When Physics Became King (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 78; Gillian Beer, “Wave Theory and the Rise of Literary Modernism,” in Realism and Representation, ed. George Levine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 207. 15. Turner, “Victorian Scientific Naturalism and Thomas Carlyle,” 135. 16. Frank M. Turner, “John Tyndall and Victorian Scientific Naturalism,” in John Tyndall: Essays on a Natural Philosopher, ed. W. H. Brock, N. D. McMillan, and R. C. Mollan (Dublin: Royal Dublin Society, 1981), 167–80. 17. Carlyle, “Signs of the Times,” 251; emphasis in the original. 18. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (London: Chapman & Hall, 1887 [1843]), 200. 19. Ibid., 197. 20. Ibid., 200. 21. Carlyle, “Signs of the Times,” 251. 22. John Tyndall, “Vitality” (1865), in Fragments of Science, 5th edn (London: Longmans, Green, 1876), 463. 23. Ibid., 465. The “materialism” of the Belfast Address is discussed in chapter three, in the section entitled “1874: The Belfast Address.” 24. Ibid., 464. 25. Carlyle, Past and Present, 232. 26. John Tyndall, “Personal Recollections of Thomas Carlyle” (1850), in New Fragments, 384. 27. Ibid., 385. 28. Frank M. Turner confirms this point in “John Tyndall and Victorian Scientific Naturalism,” 179: “Finally, like Carlyle, Tyndall believed that important work of social reform and improvement must be accomplished by new leaders imbued with a genuine knowledge of the laws of nature and of society. Carlyle’s new elite could be, and by Tyndall was interpreted as, a coterie of scientific experts effectively guiding society toward an improved standard of living through knowledge of the laws of science.” 29. Carlyle, “Signs of the Times,” 240–1; emphasis in the original. 30. Ibid., 244; emphasis in the original. 31. John Tyndall, “An Address to Students” (1868), Fragments of Science (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1871), 101–2. 32. Carlyle, “Signs of the Time,” 237. 33. Ibid., 237. 34. RI MS JT/1/HTYP (March 18, 1857). 35. Tyndall, “Personal Recollections of Thomas Carlyle,” 354–5. 36. Ibid., 388. 37. Ibid., 387. 38. Ibid.


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39. Ibid., 385–6. 40. John Tyndall, “On the Unveiling of the Statue of Thomas Carlyle” (1882), in New Fragments, 396. 41. See Ralph L. Rusk, The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Scribner’s, 1949); Joel Porte, Representative Man (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). 42. RI MS JT/1/HTYP (February 1, 1848); emphasis in the original. 43. RI MS JT/1/HTYP (August 19, 1850). 44. RI MS JT/1/HTYP (December 2, 1849). 45. See John Tyndall, “Goethe’s ‘Farbenlehre,’ ” in New Fragments (London: Longmans, Green, 1892), 47–8. For more on Goethe, see John R. Williams, The Life of Goethe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), especially Chapter 5, “The Scientist,” 258–76. 46. RI MS JT/1/HTYP ([1872]). 47. Rusk, The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 457. 48. Raychel Haugrud, “Tyndall’s Interest in Emerson,” American Literature 41 (1970): 508. 49. John Tyndall, “Professor Virchow and Evolution” (1879), Fragments of Science, 8th edn, vol. II (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1899), 383. Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), a German philosopher and one of the founders of German Idealism, provided another prominent influence on Tyndall’s philosophy. Fichte studied Kant’s work in depth as well as publishing his own theory of the selfsustaining nature of consciousness. 50. John Tyndall, “Address Delivered at the Birkbeck Institution” (1884), New Fragments, 237. 51. See Peter H. Hansen, “Founders of the Alpine Club (act. 1857– 1863),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, October 2008, online edn), http://ezproxy.ouls. ox.ac.uk:2117/view/theme/96327. 52. John Ball, “Forbes and Tyndall on the Alps and their Glaciers,” Edinburgh Review, 113 (January 1861), 225. 53. John Skelton, The Table-Talk of Shirley (London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1895), 100. 54. Herbert Spencer, “The Late Professor Tyndall,” The Fortnightly Review 61 (February 1894), 147–8. 55. Huxley, “Professor Tyndall,” 6. 56. Ibid., 8. 57. Ibid., 9. 58. John Tyndall, “Old Alpine Jottings,” in New Fragments, 430. 59. John Tyndall, Mountaineering in 1861 (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1862), 67. 60. Ibid., 5–6; emphasis in the original. 61. R. W. Emerson, “Nature” (1836), in Emerson’s Essays, ed. Sherman Paul (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1961), 301. 62. Tyndall, “Old Alpine Jottings,” 450–1.


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63. Tyndall, Mountaineering in 1861, 1. This excerpt is a paraphrase rather than a direct quotation, suggesting that Tyndall wrote down the verses from memory. Emerson’s original poem reads as follows: The Indian cheer, the frosty skies, Rear purer wits, inventive eyes,— Eyes that frame cities where none be, And hands that stablish what these see; And by the moral of his place Hint summits of heroic grace; Man in these crags a fastness find To fight pollution of the mind; In the wide thaw and ooze of wrong, Adhere like this foundation strong, The insanity of towns to stem With simpleness for stratagem. See R. W. Emerson, Collected Poems and Translations (New York: Library of America, 1994), 52. 64. Tyndall, Mountaineering in 1861, 58. 65. Ibid., 81. 66. Emerson, “Nature,” 299. 67. John Tyndall, “Goethe’s ‘Farbenlehre,’ ” in New Fragments, 76–7. Goethe’s Farbenlehre was especially meaningful for Tyndall because his copies of the book’s two volumes had been given to him by Carlyle in 1878 as a farewell present before Carlyle died; they were the same volumes that had been given to Carlyle many decades earlier by Goethe himself. 68. John Tyndall, “The Scientific Use of the Imagination” (1870), Fragments of Science (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1871), 160. 69. Tyndall, “Old Alpine Jottings,” 496; emphasis in the original. 70. Ibid., 496. 71. John Tyndall, “Professor Virchow and Evolution,” 393. 72. John Tyndall, “A Morning on Alp Lusgen,” in New Fragments, 498–9. 73. Francis O’Gorman, “John Tyndall as a Poet: Agnosticism and ‘A Morning on Alp Lusgen,’ ” Review of English Studies 48 (1997): 356–7. 74. Tyndall, “Goethe’s ‘Farbenlehre,’ ” 77. 75. For more on Faraday, see Henry Bence Jones, The Life and Letters of Faraday, 2 vols (London, 1870); Geoffrey Cantor, Michael Faraday (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991); Frank A. J. L. James, ed., The Correspondence of Michael Faraday, 4 vols (London: Institution of Electrical Engineers, 1991–). 76. Huxley, “Professor Tyndall,” 5. 77. Ibid., 5.


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78. Royal Institution Archives, RI MS JT/2/13b, Typescript Journals of John Tyndall, vol. II (March 28, 1854). 79. A. J. Meadows, The Victorian Scientist (London: British Library, 2004), 98. 80. RI MS JT/2/13b (October 5, 1853). 81. RI MS JT/2/13b (November 5, 1853). 82. RI MS JT/1/HTYP (June 16, 1853). 83. RI MS JT/2/13b (October 24, 1852). 84. RI MS JT/2/13b (December 29, 1853). 85. RI MS JT/2/13b (February 3, 1854). 86. “Men of the Day.—No. XLIII: Professor John Tyndall, F.R.S.,” Vanity Fair 7 (April 6, 1872), 111. 87. James McDougall, Present-Day Materialism (London, 1875), 13–14. For more on the Victoria Institute, see chapter three, in the section entitled “The Early 1870s and the First Publication of Fragments of Science.” 88. John Tyndall, Faraday as a Discoverer (London, 1868), 93. 89. Ibid., 20, 37, 41, and 167. 90. Ibid., 171. 91. Ibid., 170. 92. Ibid., 38, 111, and 77. 93. Ibid., 29 and 73. 94. Ibid., 45. 95. Ibid., 81. 96. Ibid., 169. 97. Ibid., 170–1. 98. Ibid., 151. 99. Ibid., 168. 100. Stephen S. Kim, John Tyndall’s Transcendental Materialism and the Conflict between Religion and Science in Victorian England (Lewiston, NY: Mellen University Press, 1996), 169. 101. Ibid., 170.

3

Tyndall and Theology: The Definition and Boundaries of Science

1. T. H. Huxley, “On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge” (1866), in Method and Results: Essays (London: Macmillan and Co., 1893), 40. 2. This lecture series is discussed in more detail in chapter four. 3. Given these prejudices, Tyndall would have been horrified by a surprising error in D. S. L. Cardwell’s The Organisation of Science in England, revised edn (London: Heinemann, 1972): “On the need for further comparative studies of religion and science, [the sociologist R. K.] Merton mentions the suggestion that


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4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

Protestantism is generally more favourable towards science than Catholicism. In support of this thesis, Protestant Scotland, with her long line of famous scientists, has been compared with Catholic Ireland, who can claim only one: John Tyndall” (7). John Tyndall, “Preface,” in Andrew D. White, The Warfare of Science (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1876), iv. Frank M. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Robert M. Young, Darwin’s Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). John Tyndall, “Professor Virchow and Evolution” (1879), Fragments of Science, 8th edn, vol. II (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1899), 378. John Tyndall, “The Belfast Address” (1874), Fragments of Science, 5th edn (London: Longmans, Green, 1876), 472. John Tyndall, “Science and Man” (1877), Fragments of Science, 6th edn (London: Longmans, Green, 1879), 358. Herbert Spencer, “The Late Professor Tyndall,” The Fortnightly Review 61 (February 1894): 143. Ibid., 143. Tyndall, “Science and Man,” 359. Quoted in “The Academy Banquet,” The Times (May 7, 1888), 12. Ibid. Royal Institution Archives, RI MS JT/1/TYP/9, Typescript Correspondence of John Tyndall, vol. IX (April 22, 1869). Royal Institution Archives, RI MS JT/1/HTYP, Typescript Correspondence between Hirst and Tyndall (April 15, 1889). John Tyndall, “Scientific Materialism” (1868), Fragments of Science, 5th edn, 411. Frank M. Turner, “Rainfall, Plagues, and the Prince of Wales,” in Contesting Cultural Authority, 151–70. See also Philip Williamson, “State Prayers, Fasts and Thanksgivings: Public Worship in Britain, 1830–1897,” Past and Present, no. 200 (August 2008): 121–74; and Matthew Cragoe, “ ‘The Hand of the Lord is upon the Cattle’: Religious Reactions to the Cattle Plague, 1865–67,” in ed. Martin Hewitt, An Age of Equipoise? (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 190–206. [Henry Thompson], “The ‘Prayer for the Sick’: Hints towards a Serious Attempt to Estimate Its Value,” Contemporary Review 20 (July 1872): 205. For more on the debate between Mozley and Tyndall, see Robert Bruce Mullin, “The Rise of the New Debate over Miracles,” Chapter 2 of Miracles in the Modern Religious Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 31–57. John Tyndall, “Reflections on Prayer and Natural Law” (1861–5), in Fragments of Science, 5th edn, 375. John Tyndall, “Miracles and Special Providences” (1867), in Fragments of Science, 5th edn, 385.


NOTES


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22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

233

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 387. Ibid., 398. Baden Powell, “On the Study of the Evidences of Christianity,” in Essays and Reviews (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1860), 142. For more on Powell, see Pietro Corsi, Science and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Powell, “On the Study of the Evidences of Christianity,” 141–2. Charles Kingsley, “Lord Palmerston and the Presbytery of Edinburgh,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 49 (January 1854), 50. Quoted in Turner, “Rainfall, Plagues, and the Prince of Wales,” 163. Quoted in ibid., 163. Quoted in ibid. Tyndall, “Reflections on Prayer and Natural Law,” 362. John Tyndall, “Vitality” (1865), in Fragments of Science, 5th edn, 463. Though Tyndall believed in the existence of the potential for life in all elements of matter, he did not believe in spontaneous generation and indeed conducted extensive biological experiments disproving the possibility of it. He argued that though science decreed that life must be inherent as a potentiality in all matter, it was thus far powerless to explain the transition between the potentiality and actuality of life— another example of his acceptance of a mystery at the heart of natural phenomena. Ibid., 464. Tyndall, “Scientific Materialism,” 412. James M’Cann, The Inter-Relations of Prayer, Providence, and Science, being a Reply to an Article by Professor Tyndall in the Fortnightly Review (London, 1866), 8. Ibid., 29. William Fowler, Mozley and Tyndall on Miracles (London, 1868), 14–15. Ibid., 29 (footnote). John Henry Newman, “Theology a Branch of Knowledge” (1852), in The Idea of a University (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1927, reissued 1982), 58. Compare Newman’s title with the series of lectures on education that Tyndall took part in, with Faraday and others, in 1854 at the Royal Institution, each lecturer discussing a scientific discipline as “a branch of education” (see chapter four). Joseph Taylor Goodsir, The Divine Rule Proceeds by Law (London, 1868), 28; emphasis in the original. John Tyndall, “Introduction” (1876), Part II, Fragments of Science, 5th edn, 325. John Tyndall, “The Scientific Use of the Imagination” (1870), Fragments of Science, 5th edn, 453.


NOTES


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234

44. Ibid., 454. 45. Ibid., 455. 46. John Tyndall, “On Prayer as a Form of Physical Energy” (1872), Fragments of Science, 5th edn, 468. 47. Ibid., 469. 48. See G. C. Boase, “Irons, William Josiah (1812–1883),” rev. H. C. G. Matthew, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn), http://ezproxy.ouls.ox.ac. uk:2117/view/article/14459. 49. “Objects of the Victoria Institute,” in Rev. W. J. Irons, Professor Tyndall’s “Fragments of Science for Unscientific People,”—In Relation with Theology and Religion (London, 1872), inside front cover. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. For more on the Victoria Institute, see W. H. Brock and R. M. MacLeod, “The Scientists’ Declaration: Reflections on Science and Belief in the Wake of Essays and Reviews, 1864–5,” The British Journal for the History of Science 9 (1976): 57–8. 53. Irons, Professor Tyndall’s “Fragments of Science for Unscientific People,” 2. 54. Ibid., 3. 55. Ibid., 6; emphasis in the original. 56. Ibid., 8. 57. Ibid., 12. 58. J. Hill, in ibid., 16. 59. C. A. Row, in ibid., 18–19. 60. Irons, Professor Tyndall’s “Fragments of Science for Unscientific People,” 26. 61. Ibid.; emphasis in the original. 62. Tyndall, in [Thompson], 205. 63. For more on the founding and early years of the British Association, see Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray, Gentlemen of Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). 64. William Binns, Science, Religion, and the Bible (London, 1874), 2. 65. RI MS JT/1/TYP/9 (June 24, 1874). 66. T. H. Huxley, Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science (London, 1870). 67. Alexander Williamson, Address to the British Association (1873), 14. 68. William Thomson, Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science (London, 1871), 28; William B. Carpenter, Presidential Address to the Brighton Meeting of the British Association (London, 1872), 18. 69. Carpenter, Presidential Address to the Brighton Meeting of the British Association, 19; emphasis in the original. 70. Ibid.; emphasis in the original


NOTES


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235

71. The question of science in the Irish Catholic universities and the connection with Tyndall’s Belfast Address is discussed in more detail in chapter four, in the section entitled “Why Reform: The Scientific Nature of Man and of the Victorian Age.” 72. Tyndall, “The Belfast Address,” 530. 73. John Tyndall, “Apology for the Belfast Address” (1874), Fragments of Science, 5th edn, 545. 74. Bernard Lightman, “Scientists as Materialists in the Periodical Press: Tyndall’s Belfast Address,” in Science Serialized, ed. Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 199–237. 75. G. B. Shaw, Man and Superman (London: Archibald Constable & Co., 1907 [1903]), 164. 76. Tyndall, “The Belfast Address,” 503. This section of the Address is framed as an imaginary discussion between Bishop Butler and Lucretius, but Tyndall is careful to articulate his own views as a balance between the two. For more on Tyndall’s use of Lucretius in the Address, see Frank M. Turner, “Ancient Materialism and Modern Science: Lucretius among the Victorians,” in Contesting Cultural Authority, 262–83. 77. Tyndall, “The Belfast Address,” 504. 78. Ruth Barton, “John Tyndall, Pantheist: A Rereading of the Belfast Address,” Osiris, 2nd series, 3 (1987): 111–34. 79. Charles Whitmore Stokes, The General Election (London, 1879). 80. Charles Whitmore Stokes, Letter to the Rt. Hon. R. A. Cross, MP (1874), 8. 81. Binns, Science, Religion, and the Bible, 2. 82. “Professor Tyndall, LL.D., F.R.S., President of the British Association, 1874,” Leisure Hour 23 (1874), 551. 83. Stefan Collini, Public Moralists (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 203–5. 84. Henry Reeve, “J. S. Mill’s Essays on Theism,” Edinburgh Review 141 (January 1875), 5. 85. Ibid., 6. 86. John MacNaughtan, The Address of Professor Tyndall, at the Opening of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Examined in a Sermon on Christianity and Science (London, 1874), 8–9. 87. Ibid., 16. 88. John Nash Griffin, Atoms (Dublin, 1875), 5. 89. Reeve, “J. S. Mill’s Essays on Theism,” 5. 90. MacNaughtan, The Address of Professor Tyndall, 8. 91. Griffin, Atoms, 6. 92. Ibid., 41. 93. MacNaughtan, The Address of Professor Tyndall, 28. 94. See James Drummond and C. B. Upton, The Life and Letters of James Martineau (London: J. Nisbet and Co., 1902).


NOTES


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236

95. See Alan Willard Brown, The Metaphysical Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947). 96. James Martineau, Religion as Affected by Modern Materialism (London: Williams and Norgate, 1874), 6–7. 97. Ibid., 35. 98. Ibid., 20; emphasis in the original. 99. Tyndall, “Introduction” (1876), Part II, Fragments of Science, 5th edn, 325. 100. Ibid., 336; emphasis in the original. 101. Ibid. 102. Ibid., 345. 103. Ibid., 339. 104. Ibid., 338. 105. James Martineau, Modern Materialism: Its Attitude towards Theology (London: Williams and Norgate, 1876), 5. 106. Ibid., 77. 107. Tyndall, “Professor Virchow and Evolution,” 374. 108. Henry Larkin, Extra Physics, and the Mystery of Creation (London, 1878), 8. 109. Ibid., 15–16. 110. The Materialistic Views of Professor Tyndall and Miss Harriet Martineau Criticized (London, 1879), 27; emphasis in the original. 111. Credo, Professor Tyndall’s Denial of the Soul, and Assumption of Fatalism (London, 1883), 7. 112. Ibid., 11. 113. Ibid., 22. 114. Ibid., 59. 115. Ibid. 116. Tyndall, “Science and Man,” 374. 117. [Henry Wace], “Scientific Lectures— their Use and Abuse,” Quarterly Review 145 (1878): 39. 118. Ibid., 57. 119. Ibid., 38. 120. Ibid. 121. Ibid., 55. 122. Quoted in Young, Darwin’s Metaphor, 160.

4

Tyndall as Reformer : The Place of Science in Education


NOTES

1. “Special General Meeting, 15 December 1893,” Royal Institution Proceedings 14 (February 1894): 163. 2. J. W. Gregory, “Tyndall,” Natural Science 4 (January 1894): 10. See D. F. Branagan, “Gregory, John Walter (1864–1932),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn), http://ezproxy.ouls.ox.ac.uk:2117/view/


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3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

237

article/33555. Gregory’s article is further discussed in chapter five, in the section entitled “Tyndall’s Reputation in the Decades after His Death.” T. H. Huxley, “Professor Tyndall,” The Nineteenth Century 35 (January 1894): 6. Ibid. Ibid., 6n. The Times (April 8, 1887), 7. “Men of the Day.—No. XLIII: Professor John Tyndall, F.R.S.,” Vanity Fair 7 (April 6, 1872), 111. Herbert Spencer, Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (London: Williams and Norgate, 1892 [1861]). Herbert Spencer, “The Late Professor Tyndall,” The Fortnightly Review 61 (Febuary 1894): 33. Ibid. See D. Thompson, “Contributions to Scientific Education and the Teaching of Science,” in Essays on a Natural Philosopher, ed. W. H. Brock, N. D. McMillan, and R. C. Mollan (Dublin: Royal Dublin Society, 1981), 153. Royal Institution Archives, RI MS JT/1/HTYP, Typescript Correspondence between Hirst and Tyndall (November 16, 1856). Quoted in Thompson, “Contributions to Scientific Education and the Teaching of Science,” 152. Christopher Tyerman, in his History of the Harrow School, 1324–1991 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), notes that Tyndall was the only one of the school’s Board in the 1870s interested in examining the curriculum (323). His ideas and lectures played a role in the increasing presence of science in Harrow’s curriculum after its introduction in 1867 (331–3). RI MS JT/1/HTYP (May 4, 1856). See Parliamentary Papers, 1865, 481, “Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords, on the Public School Bill,” 310–11. See “Report of the Scientific Educational Committee,” in Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1867 (London: John Murray, 1867), xxxix–liv. See Parliamentary Papers 1867–8, 432, “Report from the Select Committee on Scientific Instruction,” 118–20. For more on Queenwood, see W. H. Brock, “Queenwood College Revisited,” in Science for All (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996), article XVII, and Chapter 2 of N. D. McMillan and J. Meehan, John Tyndall: “X”-emplar of Scientific and Technological Education (Dublin: NCEA, 1980), 25–36. John Tyndall, “On the Study of Physics” (1854), Fragments of Science, 5th edn (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1876), 286–7. Ibid., 287.


NOTES


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238

22. See Lectures on Education, Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain (London: J. W. Parker & Son, 1855). 23. Tyndall, “On the Study of Physics,” 281. 24. John Tyndall, “An Address to Students” (1868), Fragments of Science, 8th edn, vol. II, (London: Longmans, Green, Inc., 1899), 94. 25. For background, see Mary Sturt, The Education of the People, originally published in 1967 and republished by Routledge in 2007; also Richard Aldrich, School and Society in Victorian Britain (Epping: College of Preceptors, 1995). 26. On secondary education and public schools, see T. W. Bamford, Rise of the Public Schools (London: Nelson, 1967); John Honey, Tom Brown’s Universe (London: Millington, 1977); John Roach, A History of Secondary Education in England, 1800–1870 (London: Longman, 1986) and Secondary Education in England, 1870–1902 (London: Routledge, 1991). 27. Cambridge also had a long tradition of offering degrees in mathematics, but this was seen as radically different from physical and applied science. 28. Alexander Bain, Education as a Science (London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1879), 359. 29. James Pillans, “Hints for Improving the Preliminary Stages of a Classical Education,” in Educational Papers (Edinburgh, 1862), 54. 30. Parliamentary Papers, 1864, 3001, “Report of Her Majesty’s Commissioners Appointed to Enquire into the Revenues and Management of Certain Colleges and Schools, and the Studies Pursued and the Instruction Given Therein,” vol. I, 42–3. 31. For more information on the various debates and their wider implications, see Frank M. Turner, “Moderns and Ancients,” section III in Contesting Cultural Authority (Cambridge: CUP, 1993); Christopher Stray, Classics Transformed (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Lawrence Goldman, “The Social Science Association and Middle-Class Education: Secondary Schooling, Endowments, and Professionalisation in Mid-Victorian Britain,” Chapter 8 in Science, Reform and Politics in Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 236–61. 32. In Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, published in 1877, the characters discuss the merits of a classical versus a scientific education at a dinner party, touching on the benefit of learning general laws, the morality of the classics, and the education of women— see Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1992), 456–60. British writers on the subjects of education and science were well known to the novel’s characters: the protagonist Levin reads both works by Spencer (398–400 and 946) and Tyndall’s Heat as a Mode of Motion (113). 33. See W. H. Brock, “Scientific Education” and “Science for All,” in Science for All, articles X and XIX. See also A. J. Meadows and W.


NOTES


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34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

239

H. Brock, “Topics Fit for Gentlemen: The Problem of Science in the Public School Curriculum,” in ed. Brian Simon and Ian Bradley, The Victorian Public School (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1975), 95–114. Tyndall, “An Address to Students,” 91. Ibid., 97; emphasis in the original. John Tyndall, “The Belfast Address” (1874), Fragments of Science, 5th edn, 472. Ibid. John Tyndall, “Professor Virchow and Evolution” (1879), Fragments of Science, 8th edn, vol. II, 373. Ibid., 374. Ibid. John Tyndall, “Scientific Materialism” (1868), Fragments of Science, 5th edn, 411. Quoted in John Tyndall, “Apology for the Belfast Address” (1875), Fragments of Science, 5th edn, 549–50. Quoted in ibid., 550. Quoted in ibid., 551. Ibid., 549. Ibid., 551. Tyndall, “The Belfast Address,” 530. John Tyndall, “Introduction” (1876), Part II, Fragments of Science, 5th edn, 327. John Tyndall, “Science and Man” (1877), Fragments of Science, 8th, edn, vol. II, 337. Ibid. Tyndall, “An Address to Students,” 92. Tyndall, “Science and Man,” 354. Ibid. Tyndall, “Scientific Materialism,” 422. Tyndall, “The Belfast Address,” 534. See, e.g., J. MacNaughtan, The Address of Professor Tyndall, at the Opening of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Examined in a Sermon on Christianity and Science (London, 1874), 11; John Nash Griffin, Atoms, a Lecture in Reply to Professor Tyndall’s Inaugural Address (Dublin, 1875), 41. James Clerk Maxwell, a devout Christian, mocked this final line in a poetic parody of Tyndall’s Address: Last, praise we the noble body to which, for the time, we belong, Ere yet the swift whirl of the atoms has hurried us, ruthless, along, The British Association— like Leviathan worshipped by Hobbes, The incarnation of wisdom, built up of our witless nobs, Which will carry on endless discussions, when I, and probably you,


NOTES


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240

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

Have melted in infinite azure— in English, till all is blue. See Lewis Campbell and William Garnett, The Life of James Clerk Maxwell (London: Macmillan, 1882), 641. Tyndall, “An Address to Students,” 92. Henry Sidgwick, “The Theory of Classical Education,” in Essays on a Liberal Education, ed. F. W. Farrar (London: Macmillan and Co., 1867), 128. Ibid., 87. Herbert Spencer, “What Knowledge Is of Most Worth,” in Education, 22. Edward Thring, Education and School (Cambridge, 1864), 89. Tyndall, “An Address to Students,” 92. Tyndall, “On the Study of Physics,” 285. John Tyndall, Heat as a Mode of Motion, 6th edn (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1880), ix. Tyndall, “An Address to Students,” 92. Ibid., 92–3. John Tyndall, Heat as a Mode of Motion, 1st edn (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1863), xii. Tyndall, “On the Study of Physics,” 284. Ibid., 285. Ibid., 302. Quoted in A. S. Eve and C. H. Creasey, The Life and Work of John Tyndall (London: Macmillan’s, 1945), 51. Tyndall, “On the Study of Physics,” 302. Robert Hebert Quick, Essays on Educational Reformers (London, 1868), 245. See C. E. Lindgren, “Quick, Robert Hebert (1831– 1891),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn), http://ezproxy.ouls.ox.ac. uk:2117/view/article/22954. Edward Thring, Three Letters and Axioms of Education, 3rd edn (Uppingham, 1861), 13. Tyndall, “On the Study of Physics,” 283. “Report of Her Majesty’s Commissioners Appointed to Enquire into the Revenues and Management of Certain Colleges and Schools,” vol. III, 345. Ibid., 346. Tyndall, “An Address to Students,” 95. Tyndall, “On the Study of Physics,” 293. Ibid., 296. Ibid. Ibid., 291. James Leitch, “Herbert Spencer,” Practical Educationists and Their Systems of Teaching (Glasgow: James Maclehose, 1876), 262–3. Tyndall, “On the Study of Physics,” 291. Quoted in Spencer, “What Knowledge Is of Most Worth,” 45.


57. 58.

NOTES


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241

85. Quoted in Spencer, “What Knowledge Is of Most Worth,” 45. 86. Ibid., 46. 87. Rev. Alexander Raleigh, D. D., Education: The Bill and the Board (London, 1870), 8. See W. B. Lowther, “Raleigh, Alexander (1817–1880),” rev. R. Tudur Jones, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://ezproxy. ouls.ox.ac.uk:2117/view/article/23041. 88. Bain, Education as a Science, 146. 89. T. H. Huxley, “Science and Morals” (1886), in “Evolution and Ethics” and Other Essays (London: Macmillan and Co., 1893), 146. 90. T. H. Huxley, “On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge” (1866), in Method and Results: Essays (London: Macmillan and Co., 1893), 31–2. 91. John Tyndall, “Professor Virchow and Evolution,” 383. 92. Ibid. 93. The Times, April 8, 1887, 7. 94. Ibid. 95. Tyndall, “On the Study of Physics,” 297. 96. “Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords, on the Public School Bill,” 311. 97. Tyndall, “On the Study of Physics,” 297. 98. See Charles Daubeny, “On the Importance of the Study of Chemistry as a Branch of Education for All Classes”; James Paget, “On the Importance of the Study of Physiology as a Branch of Education for All Classes”; and W. B. Hodgson, “On the Importance of the Study of Economic Science as a Branch of Education for All Classes” in Lectures on Education, Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, 117–67, 215–60, 263–316. 99. Tyndall, “On the Study of Physics,” 298; emphasis in the original. 100. Paget, “On the Importance of the Study of Physiology as a Branch of Education for All Classes,” 218–26, 233–9; Daubeny, 145–9. 101. John Tyndall, “Matter and Force” (1867), in Fragments of Science (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1871), 73. 102. Ibid., 74. 103. “Report from the Select Committee on Scientific Instruction,” 120. 104. Ibid. 105. Ibid., 118. 106. Ibid., 119. 107. Ibid., 118. 108. Ibid., 119. 109. Ibid. 110. Ibid., 397. 111. Ibid., 398. One must assume that in this case Huxley means by the word “intelligence” not mental ability but rather information. 112. RI MS JT/1/HTYP (May 12, 1850).


NOTES


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242

113. Roy MacLeod traces the history of government funding for science in the last quarter of the nineteenth century in “The Support of Victorian Science: The Endowment of Research Movement, 1868– 1900,” in Public Science and Public Policy in Victorian England (Ashgate: Variorum, 1996), article IX. 114. Michael Pupin, From Immigrant to Inventor (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1923), 208. 115. Report of the Committee Appointed to Consider the Propriety of Establishing a Degree or Degrees in Science, and the conditions on which such a Degree should be conferred, with the evidence taken before the committee (University of London, 1858). 116. Ibid., 2. 117. Ibid., 8. 118. Ibid. 119. Ibid., 2–3. 120. Ibid., 6. 121. Ibid., 9. 122. Ibid., 6. 123. Ibid., 9. 124. Ibid. 125. See T. H. Huxley’s evidence in ibid., 65–71. 126. D. S. L. Cardwell, The Organisation of Science in England, rev. edn (London: Heinemann, 1972), 93–4. 127. Ibid., 93. 128. John Tyndall, “Appendix,” Six Lectures on Light, 2nd edn (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1875), 244. 129. Tyndall, Six Lectures on Light, 219–20. 130. Ibid., 219. 131. T. H. Huxley, “Universities: Actual and Ideal,” in Science and Education (London: Macmillan and Co., 1893), 223. Huxley’s “emphatic friend” could well have been Tyndall, given his propensity for violent commentary. 132. Tyndall, “On the Study of Physics,” 295. 133. John Tyndall, “Physics and Metaphysics,” The Saturday Review 10 (August 4, 1860): 141. 134. Tyndall, “On the Study of Physics,” 302.

5

Science after Tyndall: The Growth of University Laboratories


NOTES

1. Quoted from the report of Tyndall’s inquest in A. S. Eve and C. H. Creasey, The Life and Work of John Tyndall (London: Macmillan, 1945), 279. 2. For more on Maxwell, see Lewis Campbell and William Garnett, The Life of James Clerk Maxwell (London: Macmillan, 1882); Basil Mahon, The Man Who Changed Everything (Chichester: Wiley, 2003).


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243

3. Quoted in Campbell and Garnett, The Life of James Clerk Maxwell, 379; see also his parody of the Belfast Address, 640–1. 4. James Clerk Maxwell, Introductory Lecture on Experimental Physics (London, 1871), 5. 5. Ibid., 5–6. 6. Dong-Won Kim argues for the importance of this larger institutional setting in the Cavendish’s success in “J. J. Thomson and the Emergence of the Cavendish School, 1885–1900,” British Journal for the History of Science 28 (June 1995): 191–226. 7. Maxwell, Introductory Lecture, 7. 8. Ibid., 8. 9. Robert Clifton, the director of the Clarendon, had fallen back on this method in despair of finding the necessary funding for including original research in his teaching program; see Robert Fox, “Clifton, Robert Bellamy (1836–1921),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn), http://ezproxy.ouls.ox.ac.uk:2117/view/article/51936. However, some laboratory directors deliberately chose not to encourage their undergraduate students in research: William Grylls Adams, at King’s College, London, was successful in his physics teaching program, in spite of the fact that it included no original research. See Robert Fox and Anna Guagnini, Laboratories, Workshops, and Sites (Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley, 1999), 64n. 10. Maxwell, Introductory Lecture, 15–16. 11. Ibid., 16. 12. John Tyndall, “On the Study of Physics” (1854), Fragments of Science, 5th edn (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1876), 302. 13. Maxwell, Introductory Lecture, 6. 14. Ibid., 13. 15. Ibid., 17. 16. G. T. Bettany, “Practical Science at Cambridge,” Nature 11 (December 17, 1874): 133. See also E. A. Davis and I. J. Falconer, J. J. Thomson and the Discovery of the Electron (London: Taylor & Francis, 1997), 20. 17. “Science Scholarships at Cambridge,” Nature 52 (July 18, 1895): 272. 18. See Robert John Strutt, The Life of John William Strutt, Third Baron Rayleigh, O.M., F.R.S. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968 [1924]). 19. Simon Schaffer discusses the links between the new university laboratories and country-house laboratories, focusing in particular on the Cavendish and Terling, in “Physics Laboratories and the Victorian Country House,” in Making Space for Science, ed. Crosbie Smith and Jon Agar (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 149–80. 20. Lord Rayleigh, “Presidential Address” (1884), in Scientific Papers, vol. II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900), 354. 21. Simon Schaffer, “Late Victorian Metrology and Its Instrumentation,” in Invisible Connections, ed. Robert Bud and Susan Cozzens


NOTES


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244

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

(Bellingham, Wash.: International Society for Optical Engineering, 1992), 23–56; Graeme Gooday, “Precision Measurement and the Genesis of Physics Teaching Laboratories in Victorian Britain,” British Journal for the History of Science 23 (March 1990): 23–51. See also Fox and Guagnini, who argue that the “humdrum work on units and standards” was key in gaining acceptance for the Cavendish as a new center of research (63). Strutt, Life of John William Strutt, 105. Ibid. Arthur Schuster, “John William Strutt, Baron Rayleigh, 1842–1919,” in “Obituary Notices of Fellows Deceased,” Proceedings of the Royal Society, series A, 98 (1921), xix–xx. R. T. Glazebrook, “Lord Rayleigh’s Professorship,” in A History of the Cavendish Laboratory, 1871–1910 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1910), 49. Glazebrook went on to become the first director of the National Physical Laboratory in 1900; see Edward C. Pyatt, The National Physical Laboratory (Bristol: A. Hilger, 1983), 20. Glazebrook, “Lord Rayleigh’s Professorship,” 49. Quoted in Strutt, Life of John William Strutt, 231. Quoted in ibid., 232. See ibid., 233–4, for a full list. Lord Rayleigh, “The Scientific Work of Tyndall,” Proceedings of the Royal Institution 14 (March 1895), 224. Ibid., 216. Ibid., 220. See Robert John Strutt, The Life of Sir J. J. Thomson, O.M. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1942); Davis and Falconer, J. J. Thomson and the Discovery of the Electron. Isobel Falconer, “J. J. Thomson and ‘Cavendish Physics,’ ” in The Development of the Laboratory, ed. Frank A. J. L. James (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 113. J. G. Crowther, The Cavendish Laboratory, 1874–1974 (London: Macmillan, 1974), 120. J. J. Thomson et al., Natural Science in Education, being a Report of the Committee on the Position of Natural Science in the Educational System of Great Britain (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1918), 245. Ibid., 244–5. Gordon Roderick and Michael Stephens, “Scientific Studies and Scientific Manpower in the English Civic Universities, 1870–1914,” Science Studies 4 (January 1974): 62. Romualdas Sviedrys, “The Rise of Physics Laboratories in Britain,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 7 (1976): 434. J. J. Thomson, “Survey of the Last Twenty-Five Years,” in A History of the Cavendish Laboratory, 1871–1910, 91.


22. 23. 24.

NOTES


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41. D. S. L. Cardwell, The Organisation of Science in England, revised edn (London: Heinemann, 1972), 215. 42. See Falconer, “J. J. Thomson and ‘Cavendish Physics,’ ” and Davis and Falconer, J. J. Thomson and the Discovery of the Electron, 52–4. 43. J. J. Thomson, Recollections and Reflections (London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd., 1936); the only time that Tyndall’s name appears— without commentary— is in a brief list of scientists who participated in H. E. Roscoe’s penny lecture series in Manchester (24). 44. Romualdas Sviedrys, “The Rise of Physical Science at Victorian Cambridge,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 2 (1970): 127–51. 45. Sviedrys, “The Rise of Physics Laboratories in Britain,” 436. 46. John Tyndall, Six Lectures on Light, 2nd edn (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1875), 43. 47. Robert Routledge, A Popular History of Science (London, 1881), vii. 48. Royal Institution Archives, RI MS JT/1/TYP/3, Typescript Correspondence of John Tyndall, vol. III (October 21, 1890); emphasis in the original. 49. Arthur Schuster, The Progress of Science during the Thirty-Three Years (1875–1908) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), 114. 50. Strutt, Life of John William Strutt, 27. 51. Crowther, The Cavendish Laboratory, 91. 52. Ibid., 108. 53. J. J. Thomson, Recent Researches in Electricity and Magnetism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893), vi. 54. Gwendy Caroe, The Royal Institution (London: J. Murray, 1985), 104 and 93. 55. See W. H. Brock, “Exploring the Hyperarctic: James Dewar at the Royal Institution,” in “The Common Purposes of Life,” ed. Frank A. J. L. James (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 169–90. 56. William Spottiswoode, “On the Old and New Laboratories at the Royal Institution, Part II,” Nature 7 (February 6, 1873): 264. 57. Katherine D. Watson, “ ‘Temporary Hotel Accommodation’? The Early History of the Davy-Faraday Research Laboratory, 1894– 1923,” in James, “Common Purposes,” 191–223. 58. Caroe, The Royal Institution, 93–5. 59. “Some Scientific Centres: V.—The Chemical Laboratory of the Royal Institution,” Nature 66 (September 11, 1902): 462. 60. “Some Scientific Centres: VI.—The Cavendish Laboratory,” Nature 69 (December 10, 1903): 128. 61. Caroe, The Royal Institution, 91. 62. Brock, “Exploring the Hyperarctic,” 188–9. 63. Caroe, The Royal Institution, 98–100.


NOTES


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64. Brock, “Exploring the Hyperarctic,” 174. 65. Henry E. Armstrong, James Dewar, 1842–1923 (London, 1924), 7. 66. “History of the Royal Institution,” Nature 5 (March 21, 1872): 398; emphasis in the original. 67. Caroe, The Royal Institution, 100. 68. Ibid., 100–1. 69. For an analysis of W. H. Bragg’s role in revitalizing an “atrophied” Royal Institution, see Jeff Hughes, “Craftsmanship and Social Service: W. H. Bragg and the Modern Royal Institution,” in James, “Common Purposes,” 224–47. 70. “Notes,” Nature 36 (June 16, 1887): 158; see also pp. 133, 217, and 222. 71. Brock, “Exploring the Hyperarctic,” 179. 72. RI MS JT/1/TYP/3 (May 18, 1887). 73. Royal Institution Archives, RI MS JT/1/HTYP, Typescript Correspondence between Hirst and Tyndall (October 15, 1887). 74. Strutt, Life of John William Strutt, 54. 75. T. H. Huxley, “Professor Tyndall,” The Nineteenth Century 35 (January 1894): 1–11; Herbert Spencer, “The Late Professor Tyndall,” The Fortnightly Review 61 (February 1894): 141–8. 76. [Edward Frankland], “Obituary Notice for John Tyndall,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 55 (January–April 1894), xviii–xxiv. 77. John Lubbock and Edward Frankland, in “Special General Meeting, 15 December 1893,” Royal Institution Proceedings 14 (February 1894): 166–7. 78. James Crichton-Browne, in ibid., 162–3. 79. Ibid., 163. 80. J. W. Gregory, “Tyndall,” Natural Science 4 (January 1894): 10. See also chapter four. 81. Ibid., 10. 82. Ibid., 17. 83. Grant Allen, “Professor Tyndall,” Review of Reviews 9 (January 1894): 21 and 23. For more on Allen and other popularizers of science who were not themselves scientists, see Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 84. Punch 105 (December 16, 1893): 277. 85. “Tyndall,” Illustrated London News 103 (December 9, 1893): 726; emphasis in the original. 86. See J. C. Edwards, “Mitchell, Sir Peter Chalmers (1864–1945),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn), http://ezproxy.ouls.ox.ac.uk:2117/view/ article/35044.


NOTES


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87. P. Chalmers Mitchell, “Professor Tyndall,” The New Review 10 (January 1894): 77. 88. Ibid., 78. 89. “Leaders of Science: John Tyndall,” Illustrated Science Monthly 2 (July 1884): 35. 90. Mitchell, “Professor Tyndall,” 79. 91. Ibid., 79–80. 92. Ibid., 80. 93. Ibid., 81. 94. Ibid., 85. 95. See, e.g., “Faraday,” Quarterly Journal of Science 5 (January 1868): 54; “Michael Faraday,” British Quarterly 47 (April 1868): 471; Henry Bence Jones, Life and Letters of Faraday (London, 1870), vol. ii, 483; “Bence Jones’s Life and Letters of Faraday,” Quarterly Journal of Science 7 (1870): 237; F. R. S., “Michael Faraday,” Good Words (1871), 127. 96. Henry Smith Williams, The Story of Nineteenth-Century Science (London, 1900), 221, 313, 320. 97. John Arthur Thomson, Progress of Science in the Century (Toronto, 1906), 141–2 and 208. 98. Florian Cajori, A History of Physics (New York: Dover, 1962 [1899, 1929]), 181–4. 99. Alexander Macfarlane, Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century (New York: John Wiley, 1919). 100. Arthur Schuster, Biographical Fragments (London: Macmillan, 1932), 50. 101. Arthur Schuster and Arthur E. Shipley, Britain’s Heritage of Science (London: Constable & Co., Ltd., 1917), 213. 102. H. E. Armstrong, “Our Need to Honour Huxley’s Will” (1933), in H. E. Armstrong and the Teaching of Science, 1880–1930, ed. W. H. Brock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 63–4. 103. Ibid., 64. 104. In a paper entitled “John Tyndall: Lecturing, Authority and Correspondence in Victorian Public Science,” given with Jamie Stark on July 24, 2010, at the annual conference of the British Society for the History of Science, Graeme Gooday noted that the physicist Silvanus P. Thompson (1851–1916), similarly to Oliver Lodge, remembered attending Tyndall’s lectures with enthusiasm for Tyndall’s style and verve. 105. Oliver Lodge, Past Years (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1931), 66. 106. Oliver Lodge, “Tyndall, John (1820–1893),” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 10th edn, 33 (Edinburgh, 1902), 518. 107. Ibid., 519. 108. Ibid., 521.


NOTES


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248

NOTES

1. James Clerk Maxwell, Introductory Lecture on Experimental Physics (London, 1871), 6. 2. Ibid., 6. 3. Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1926), 130. 4. Ibid., 130–1. 5. Robert Routledge, A Popular History of Science (London, 1881), 662. 6. Ibid., 663. 7. Grant Allen, “The Progress of Science from 1836 to 1886,” Fortnightly Review 47 (June 1887): 869. 8. Ibid., 883. 9. Tyndall, in spite of his personal friendship with Galton, refused to fill out the questionnaire that Galton had sent to him as one of a carefully selected group of English scientists— perhaps because he was not English. See Victor L. Hilts, A Guide to Francis Galton’s English Men of Science (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1975), 15. 10. Francis Galton, English Men of Science (London: MacMillan, 1874), 259. 11. Ibid., 259–60. 12. See John Rae, “Graham, William (1839–1911),” rev. C. A. Creffield, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn), http://ezproxy.ouls.ox.ac.uk:2117/view/ article/33507. 13. William Graham, The Creed of Science, 2nd edn (London, 1884), xxvii. 14. Ibid., xxviii. 15. Roy M. MacLeod, “The ‘Bankruptcy of Science’ Debate: The Creed of Science and Its Critics, 1885-1900,” in The “Creed of Science” in Victorian England (Aldershot: Variorum, 2000), Article III. 16. Frank Fernseed, “The Future ‘Martyrdom of Science,’ ” Journal of Science 3 (April 1881): 201. 17. Ibid., 204. 18. Wilkie Collins, Heart and Science (London: Broadview Press, 1996 [1883]), 190. 19. Unus de Multis [William Allingham], “Modern Prophets,” Fraser’s Magazine 16 (September 1877): 274. See Robert Welch, “Allingham, William (1824–1889),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn), http://ezproxy. ouls.ox.ac.uk:2117/view/article/405. 20. [Allingham], 276. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 292.


Conclusion: Scientists in British Culture, 1870–1900


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23. W. H. Mallock, The New Republic (London, 1877), 41. 24. Ibid., 60–1. 25. Frances Power Cobbe, The Scientific Spirit of the Age, and Other Pleas and Discussions (London, 1888), 3–4. 26. Ibid., 7. 27. Ibid., 28. 28. Royal Institution Archives, RI MS JT/1/TYP/9, Typescript Correspondence of John Tyndall, vol. IX (December 27, 1887). 29. Ibid. 30. Royal Institution Archives, RI MS JT/1/TYP/9, Typescript Correspondence of John Tyndall, vol. IX (January 4, 1888). 31. Quoted in J. Vernon Jensen, “The X Club: Fraternity for Victorian Scientists,” The British Journal for the History of Science 5 (1970): 71. 32. Royal Institution Archives, RI MS JT/1/HTYP, Typescript Correspondence between Hirst and Tyndall (January 12, 1888). 33. “The Scientific Volunteer,” Punch 98 (February 22, 1890): 85. 34. Grant Allen, “Professor Tyndall,” Review of Reviews 9 (January 1894): 23. 35. P. Chalmers Mitchell, “Professor Tyndall,” The New Review 10 (January 1894): 77–85. 36. Ibid., 85.


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BIBLIOGRAPHY


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Aberdeen, University of, 138, 173 Academy, The, 52 Adams, William Grylls, 243 n.9 Adelaide Gallery, 42 Agassiz, Louis, 70 Albert, Samuel J. M. M., 11 Allen, Grant, 198–9, 206–7, 215 Allingham, William, 210 Alpine Club, 71 Argyll, Duke of, 8 Armstrong, Henry E., 139, 193, 202–3 Arnold, Matthew, 71 Athenaeum, The, 41–2, 50–1 Athenaeum Club, 2, 37 bacteriology, 32, 215 Bain, Alexander, 138, 155 Bakerian lectures, 32, 34 Ball, John, 71–2 Baltimore, Maryland, 46 Barrett, W. F., 52 Barton, Ruth, 11, 36, 115 Becker, Bernard Henry, 39–41, 42, 44 Beer, Gillian, 11, 63 Belfast, 16, 43, 111–12, 117 Bellon, Richard, 11 Bence-Jones, Henry, 194 Bettany, G. T., 177 Binns, William, 112, 115–16 Birkbeck Institution, 71

Birkenhead, 112 Birmingham and Midland Institute, 45, 93, 126–7 Birmingham, University of, 195, 203 Blackwood’s Magazine, 7 Board of Trade, 31 Bourdieu, Pierre, 24 Boston, Massachusetts, 46, 69, 70 Bowler, Peter, 12 Bragg, William H., 190 British Association for the Advancement of Science, 14, 44, 111–13, 116–19, 178, 203, 239–40 n.56 Brock, William H., 1, 191 Brooks, Henry Jamyn, 191–2 Bunsen, Robert, 28 Busk, George, 35 Butler, Bishop Joseph, 115, 117, 235 n.76 Cajori, Florian, 201 Cambridge University, 138, 174, 176, 189, 195, 238 n.27 see also Cavendish Laboratory; Trinity College Cantor, Geoffrey, 11 Cardwell, D. S. L., 166, 231–2 n.3 Caroe, Gwendy, 16, 191, 193, 195 Carrington, J. T., 8


Index


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264

Carlyle, Thomas, 1, 14, 15, 60–9, 169–70, 230 n.67 On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1840), 65 Past and Present (1843), 61, 64, 65 Carpenter, William B., 112–13 Cavendish Laboratory (Cambridge University), 172, 173–80, 182–8, 190–1, 243–4 n.21 Church of England and education, 137 Church of Scotland Normal School (Glasgow), 154 Clarendon Laboratory (Oxford University), 174, 243 n.9 Clifford, Willliam Kingdon, 10, 211 Clifton, Robert, 243 n.9 Cobbe, Frances Power, 211–12 Collini, Stefan, 2, 11, 116 Collins, Wilkie, 209 Columbia University, 163 Committee on the Position of Natural Science in the Educational System of Great Britain, 183 Committee on the Public School Bill (House of Lords), 135, 157 Committee on Scientific Education, Select, 135, 159–63 Contemporary Review, The, 98, 211 Coreggio, 7–8 Cornell University, 91 Cornhill Magazine, The, 2 Corsi, Pietro, 12 Council for Military Education, 134 Crichton-Browne, Sir James, 131–2, 197–8 Crookes, William, 193 Crowther, J. G., 187 Curie, Pierre, 188 Dalton, John, 11

Darwin, Charles, 1, 16, 38, 142, 193, 197, 199–200, 201, 215, 225 n.75 Darwin, Erasmus, 11 Daubeny, Charles G. B., 158 Davies, John Llewelyn, 71 da Vinci, Leonardo, 7–8 Davy-Faraday Laboratory (Royal Institution), 189–91, 194 Davy, Humphry, 15, 44, 78, 194 degrees (academic) in science, 164–6, 238 n.27 Democritus, 117 Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, 182 Descartes, René, 117 Desmond, Adrian, 11, 12 Devonshire Commission on Scientific Instruction, 135 Devonshire, Duke of, 173 Dewar, James, 189–94, 196 diamagnetism, 28–9, 32 Dickens, Charles, 154 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 209 Dundee, 158 Edinburgh Review, The, 2, 52, 54, 71–2, 116–17, 118 Edinburgh, University of, 29, 60, 63, 138, 189, 195 education classical vs. scientific, 146–50, 164–6 debates on, 137–9 scientific, 57, 131–70 electricity, 39, 41, 42, 144, 150, 152, 160–1, 164, 169, 181 Eliot, George, 15 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1, 20–1, 62, 66–7, 69–71, 74, 230 n.63 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 10th edn. (1902), 203 Essays and Reviews (1860), 99 Eton College, 134, 178


INDEX


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Falconer, Isobel, 183, 184 Faraday, Michael, 8, 15, 19, 28, 44, 78–85, 89, 92, 95, 150–1, 158, 172, 180, 195, 201 Fernseed, Frank, 209 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 71, 229 n.49 Fiske, John, 37–8 Forbes, J. D., 16, 29 Fortnightly Review, The, 98, 101, 197, 206 Fowler, William, 102–3 Frankenstein, Dr., 98–9 Frankland, Edward, 14, 35, 49–50, 139, 197, 202, 213 Fraser’s Magazine, 210 Friday Evening Discourses (Royal Institution), 15, 39, 44, 85, 188, 191–3, 195, 203 Froude, James Anthony, 128 Galton, Francis, 207–8 Gieryn, Thomas, 4, 226 n.85 Gillispie, Charles Coulston, 12 glaciology, 15, 28, 29, 31, 55, 71, 215 Gladstone, William, 16, 128, 138 Glasgow, University of, 174, 189, 195 Glazebrook, R. T., 180, 183, 244 n.25 Glenlair (Maxwell family estate), 173 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1, 70, 74–8, 230 n.67 Golinski, Jan, 11 Gooday, Graeme, 178, 247 n.104 Goodsir, Joseph Taylor, 103–4 Graham, William, 208 Gray, Asa, 38 Greenhouse Effect, 31, 223 n.34 Gregory, J. W., 132, 197–8 Griffin, John Nash, 118, 119 Grove, William, 8 Guthrie, Frederick, 202

265

Haeckel, Ernst, 142 Harrow School, 134, 178, 237 n.14 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 38, 50, 179 Helmstadter, Richard J., 12 Heyck, T. W., 3 Hill, J., 109 Hirst, Thomas Archer, 9, 14, 26, 27, 30, 35, 36, 38, 46, 47, 48, 61, 62, 67, 70, 79, 95, 134, 135, 163, 196, 213 Hodgson, W. B., 158 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 69, 70 Holmes, Sherlock, 209–10 Hooker, Joseph Dalton, 35, 37, 49–50 Humboldt, Alexander von, 186 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 1, 2–3, 8, 49–50, 96, 132, 142, 193, 202, 204, 211, 213, 216 and the British Association, 112–13 and Carlyle, 60–1 and commentary on Tyndall, 72, 79, 197 and education, 139, 155, 156, 162–3, 166, 167–8, 169 Evolution and Ethics (1893), 96 as linked with Tyndall, 52–3, 132–3, 215 and theology, 13, 89 and the X Club, 35, 37 Illustrated London News, 41, 198 Illustrated Science Monthly, 199 Irons, W. J., 106–10 Jack, William Brydone, 54–5 Jeans, William T., 41, 51 Joule, James Prescott, 29, 215 Journal of Science, The, 209


INDEX

Kelvin, Lord, see Thomson, William Kim, Stephen S., 5, 65, 86–7, 115, 216


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266 King’s College, London, 173, 243 n.9 Kingsley, Charles, 99 Knoblauch, Karl-Hermann, 28 Knowles, James, 120

Larkin, Henry, 20–3, 123–4, 221 n.4 Leisure Hour, 116 Leitch, James, 154–5 Levine, George, 3, 11 Lightman, Bernard, 5, 12, 13, 91, 114, 246 n.83 Lister, Lord, 32 Liverpool, 43, 75, 112 Liverpool, University of, 195 Lockyer, Norman, 30, 196 Lodge, Sir Oliver, 203–4, 217–18 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 70 Lubbock, John, 8, 35, 197, 213 Lucretius, 117, 235 n.76 Lyell, Charles, 142 Macfarlane, Alexander, 201 MacLeod, Roy, 31, 208–9, 242 n.113 Macmillan (publisher), 2 MacNaughtan, John, 117–20 Mallock, W. H., 210–11 Manchester, 134, 158 Manchester New College, 120 Manchester, University of, 179, 189, 195 Marburg, University of, 14, 26, 69, 156, 163 Martineau, James, 120–3, 128, 142 Materialistic Views of Professor Tyndall and Miss Harriet Martineau Criticized, The (1879), 124 mathematics and science, 185–8, 238 n.27 Maxwell, James Clerk, 172, 173–7, 179–80, 185, 205, 215, 239–40 n.56

Mayer, Julius Robert, 29, 201, 222 n.26 M’Cann, James, 101–2 McDougall, James, 81 Metaphysical Society, 120 Mill, John Stuart, 2 miracles, 97–100 Mitchell, P. Chalmers, 199–201, 216 Moberly, George, 152 Mond, Ludwig, 190 Montreal, 178 Moonshine, 32, 33 Moore, James R., 12, 221 n.30, 227 n.4 Morley, John, 2 Morus, Iwan Rhys, 42, 63, 225 n.73 Mozley, J. B., 98–9 Napoleon the First, 115 National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, 138 National Physical Laboratory, 244 n.25 Natural Science, 132 Nature (periodical), 30, 177, 190–1, 194, 196 New Haven, Connecticut, 46 New Review, 198–9, 216 New York, 19, 46, 47, 166 Newman, John Henry, 103 Newton, Isaac, 54, 66, 75, 77, 201 Nineteenth Century, The, 197 Nobel, Alfred, 191 Northumberland, Duke of, 43 Norwich, 96, 98, 103, 112


INDEX

O’Gorman, Francis, 77 Owen, Robert, 135 Owens College, Manchester, 179, 182 Oxford University, 138, 189, 195 see also Clarendon Laboratory


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Paget, James, 158 Pall Mall Gazette, 98 Paradis, James, 11 Pasteur, Louis, 32, 201 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 46 Philosophical Transactions (Royal Society), 32, 34, 48 “physicist,” word, 6–8 Pillans, James, 138 Playfair, Lyon, 139, 189 Popular Science Monthly, 23, 199 Postlewait, Thomas, 11 Powell, Baden, 99 prayer, efficacy of, 97–100, 105–6 Priestley, Joseph, 11 Prince of Wales, 97 Professor Tyndall’s Denial of the Soul (1883), 124–6 Public Schools Commission (1864), 138, 152 Punch, 198, 213–14 Pupin, Michael, 163 Quarterly Review, The, 45–6, 126–7 Queenwood College, 14, 25, 135–6, 159 Quick, Robert Hebert, 151–2 Raleigh, Alexander, 155 Ramsay, William, 12, 49–50 Rayleigh, Lord, 8, 172, 177–82, 183, 184, 185, 186–7, 193, 195, 197 see also Terling Place, Essex Reeve, Henry, 116–17 Review of Reviews, The, 198 Roderick, Gordon, 183 Roscoe, H. E., 53–4, 79, 134, 245 n.43 Routledge, Robert, 186, 206 Row, C. A., 109 Royal Academy, 94 Royal Institution, 3, 14, 15, 27, 38–44, 78–9, 85, 131,

267

159–60, 173, 175, 180–2, 184–5, 188–95, 196–7, 233 n.40 see also Davy-Faraday Laboratory Royal Polytechnic Institution, 42–3 Royal School of Mines, 134, 158–63 Royal Society, 9, 14, 25–6, 32, 34, 36–7, 38, 48, 179, 182 Rumford Medal, 32 Ruskin, John, 2, 30–1 Rutherford, Ernest, 184, 188, 217–18 Sabine, Colonel Edward, 25 St. Paul’s Cathedral, 97 Saturday Review, The, 20–1, 41, 49–50, 55 Schaffer, Simon, 178, 243, n.19 Schuster, Arthur, 11, 179, 186, 201, 217–18 science in British culture, 205–15 definition of, 89–90, 92–7 and education, 57, 131–70 and the humanities, 11 and philosophy, 8 as physics, 136–7, 169 and politics, 9–10, 157, 212–13 popular vs. professional, 19–20, 24, 53, 55–7, 172–3, 193–5, 213–15 professionalization of, 10–11, 171–2 and religion/theology, 5, 12–14, 89–129 spiritual and moral value of, 153–6 standardization of, 175–7, 178–80, 243–4 n.21 in universities, 163–70 and the Victorian Age, 139–45 and the working classes, 157–63 Science-Gossip, 8 scientific naturalists, 3, 4, 60, 92


INDEX


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268

“scientist,” word, 6–8 scientists and artists, 94–5 as Carlylean heroes, 66–9, 86, 154, 169–70 as lecturers, 45–6, 126–7 as public authorities, 123–8, 205–18 as teachers, 166–8 Scott, David, 7 Shaw, George Bernard, 114 Shipley, Arthur E., 201 Shuttleworth, Sally, 11 Sidgwick, Henry, 146 Skelton, Sir John, 72 Smith, Crosbie, 222 n.26 Smith, Henry John Stephen, 49–50 Society for Psychical Research, 178 Somerville, Mary, 6 Spencer, Herbert, 1, 30, 35–6, 50, 186, 196, 238 n.32 and commentary on Tyndall, 72, 94, 197 and education, 132, 133, 139, 147, 151–2, 154–5, 158, 169 spiritualism, 29–30, 98, 136, 178 Spottiswoode, William, 35, 189 Stanley, Arthur, 99–100 Stephen, Leslie, 71 Stephens, Michael, 183 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 209 Stewart, Balfour, 29 Stokes, Charles Whitmore, 115 Stokes, Sir George Gabriel, 9 Story-Maskelyne, Nevil, 49–50 Strutt, John William, see Rayleigh, Lord Strutt, Robert John, 178–9, 196–7 sound, study of, 31, 215 Sviedrys, Romualdas, 183, 184–5 Sylvester, James Joseph, 49–50 Tait, P. G., 16, 29–30, 55, 56, 173, 222 n.26

Unseen Universe, The (1875), 29, 222 n.27 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 9 Terling Place, Essex (Rayleigh family estate), 178, 181 theology as a science, 101–4 Thompson, Sir Henry, 97–8, 110 Thomson, J. J., 11, 172, 182–4, 187–8, 195, 204, 217–18 Thomson, Sir John Arthur, 201 Thompson, Silvanus P., 247 n.104 Thomson, William, 8, 29, 112–13, 173, 174, 180, 192, 197 Thring, Edward, 147, 151–2 Times, The, 20, 133, 135, 156 Tolstoy, Leo, 238 n.32 Trinity Church (Dublin), 118 Trinity College (Cambridge University), 178, 182 Trinity College, Dublin, 118 Trinity House, 31 Tübingen, University of, 32 Turner, Frank M., 3, 4–5, 12, 60, 63, 91–2, 97, 228 n.28 Tyndall Effect, 31 Tyndall, John and acoustics, 34 “Address to Students” (1868), 136–7, 140, 143, 146–8, 152 and the Alps, 16, 71–7 in America, 16, 19, 46–7, 49, 70–1, 185 “Apology for the Belfast Address” (1874), 116, 141–3 “The Belfast Address” (1874), 16, 72, 93, 111–20, 127, 140, 142, 145, 203, 239–40 n.56 biographical information on, 14–17 and Catholicism, 90–1, 231–2 n.3 see also universities, Irish Catholic and Christian faith, 61–2, 80


INDEX


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and coal mine accidents, 34 and the conflict over glacial movement, 15–16, 29, 31, 55 Contributions to Molecular Physics in the Domain of Radiant Heat (1872), 48 death of, 171 and the definition of science, 90, 92–7 Essays on the Floating-Matter of the Air in Relation to Putrefaction and Infection (1881), 48 and his father, 14, 25, 62 Forms of Water (1872), 39, 51–2, 226 n.89 Fragments of Science (1871), 16, 106–10, 121, 203, 226 n.89 and Francis Galton, 248 n.9 The Glaciers of the Alps (1860), 48, 49 and Gladstone’s policy of Home Rule, 16, 212–14 and James Dewar, 196 and James Martineau, 120–3 and J. J. Thomson, 182, 184, 187–8, 245 n.43 Heat as a Mode of Motion (1863), 16, 51, 53–4, 147–8, 202, 226 n.89, 238 n.32 Lectures on Sound (1867), 54–5, 226 n.89 and lighthouses, 31–3 and the limitations of science, 93–4, 101, 144–5 and materialism, 63–5, 114–15 “A Morning on Alp Lusgen,” 77 Mountaineering in 1861 (1862), 73 “On the Study of Physics” (1854), 136, 149–50, 153, 157–8, 168, 170 and philosophy, 26 posthumous reputation of, 196–204, 215–18

269

“Professor Virchow and Evolution” (1879), 43, 76–7, 93, 123, 140–1 publications of, 48–9 and Lord Rayleigh, 180–2, 187–8 and religion/theology, 5, 13, 72–4, 86–8, 89–129, 216 as representative of science and his era, 20–4 Researches on Diamagnetism and Magne-Crystallic Action (1870), 48 and the Royal Institution, 38–44, 78–9, 189, 195, 196 “Science and Man” (1877), 45, 93–4, 126, 143, 144 and science’s role in society, 96–7, 143–4, 170 and scientific education, 57, 131–70 “Scientific Materialism” (1868), 96, 100–1, 112, 144–5 “Scientific Use of the Imagination, The” (1870), 104–5, 112, 185–6 secondary materials on, 4 Six Lectures on Light, 46, 49, 226 n.89 and social status, 24–6, 28 and theologians, 95–6 and the visualization of scientific concepts, 185–7 “Vitality” (1865), 65, 100, 233 n.33 Tyndall, Louisa, née Hamilton, 4, 16, 17, 171 tyndallization, 32 universities German, 163–4 Irish Catholic, 113–14, 141–3 and science, 163–70, 173–88 University Grants Committee, 182 University of London, 134, 164–6 Uppingham School, 147


INDEX


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270

Vanity Fair, 81, 133, 193 Victoria Institute, 81, 106–10, 116 Virchow, Rudolf Ludwig Karl, 225 n.75 Wace, Henry, 45–6, 126–7 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 8 Waller, John C., 11 War Office, 135 Washington, D.C., 46 Watson, Katherine D., 190 Webb, Beatrice, 205–6 Wells, H. G., 209 Whewell, William, 6–7

White, Andrew D., 91 Wigham, John, 31 Williams, Henry Smith, 201 Williamson, Alexander, 112 Winchester College, 152 World War I, 183, 184 X Club, 16, 34–8, 60, 132, 213, 224 n.51 Youmans, E. L., 23–4 Young, Robert M., 12, 91–2, 128 Zoological Society, 198


INDEX


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A Vision of Modern Science: John Tyndall and the Role of the Scientist in Victorian Culture

A Vision of Modern Science: John Tyndall and the Role of the Scientist in Victorian Culture

Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture

The Art and Science of Victorian History

The role of mathematics in science

The Role of Reason in Science

The role of mathematics in science

Optics: The Science of Vision

Optics: The Science of Vision

Optics the Science of Vision

Making Medicine Scientific: John Burdon Sanderson and the Culture of Victorian Science

Role of Mathematics in Science

John Varley - The Persistence of Vision

The Republican Vision of John Tyler

The Role of the Intellectual in the Modern World

Video Vision: Changing the Culture of Social Science Research

Mindsets: The Role of Culture and Perception in International relations

The Reason of the Gift (Victorian Literature and Culture Series)

Varley, John - Persistence of Vision

Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart

Varley, John - Persistence Of Vision

Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture

John Ruskin and the Victorian Theatre

The Science of Culture: A Study of Man and Civilization

Immunology: The Making of a Modern Science

Computational Modeling of Vision: The Role of Combination

The Story of a Vision

Varley, John - In The Bowl [from Persistence of vision]

The Environmental Vision of Thomas Merton (Culture of the Land)

The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Science

A Vision of Modern Science: John Tyndall and the Role of the Scientist in Victorian Culture