Abstract
A study of nineteenth-century secularism would be grossly incomplete and nearly incomprehensible if it failed to address scientific knowledge production in the period. However, as Charles Taylor has suggested in A Secular Age, ‘secularization’, to the extent that it can be thought to have happened, cannot be understood as an inevitable effect of the ‘rise of science’, urbanization, bureaucratic rationalization, and so forth — that is, as a result of the processes of modernity itself.1 Nor, with Owen Chadwick, can we regard the secular as a by-product of materialist science in particular.2 For Taylor, the standard secularization thesis, among its many flaws, amounts to an instance of the hysteron proteron fallacy — a confusion of subject and predicate, of cause and effect — or of affirming the consequent: modern science (or urbanization, rationality, or what have you) is secular; thus, with the advent of modern science comes secularization. But this construction begs the question: how did science become secular before secularization, as such?
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Notes
C. Taylor (2007) A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press).
O. Chadwick (1975) The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 161–90.
See for example D. Nash (2004) ‘Reconnecting Religion with Social and Cultural History: Secularization’s Failure as a Master Narrative’, Cultural and Social History 1, 302–25.
In particular, P. L. Berger, once an important secularization theorist, reversed his long-standing position on secularization in (1999) The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center), esp. at pp. 1–18.
L. Schwartz (2013) Infidel Feminism: Secularism, Religion and Women’s Emancipation, England 1830–1914 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press), p. 19.
F. M. Turner (2010) ‘The Late Victorian Conflict of Science and Religion as an Event in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual and Cultural History’, in T. Dixon, G. Cantor, and S. Pumfrey (eds) Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 88.
T. Dixon (2010) similarly argues against the reification of the categories of ‘science’ and ‘religion’. See T. Dixon (2010) ‘Introduction’, in Science and Religion, pp. 4–5.
C. Lyell (1990) Principles of Geology, Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation, M. J. S. Rudwick (ed.) 3 vols (1830–1833), facsimile of the first edition, (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press), Vol. 1, p. 4. As I refer to two different editions of Lyell’s Principles, I will include the year of publication to differentiate them.
C. Lyell (1997) Principles of Geology (abridged), J. A. Secord (ed.) (London: Penguin Books), p. 9; C. Lyell (1990) Principles of Geology, Vol. 1, pp. 23–24.
A. Johns (1998) The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 35.
S. J. Gould (1987) Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), passim. Lyell’s version of the history of geology had been adopted by historians from the nineteenth century on, including W. Whewell (1836–7), A. Ramsay (1848), Sir A. Geikie (1897), T. G. Bonney (1895), Sir E. B. Bailey (1962), C. C. Gillespie (1951), T. Kuhn (1962), and L. G. Wilson (1972). See R. Porter (1976) ‘Charles Lyell and the Principles of the History of Geology’, British Journal for the History of Science 9.2, 91–103; part 2, 91, 100, notes 2–6; and M. T. Greene (1982) Geology in the Nineteenth Century: Changing Views of a Changing World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).
See R. Porter (1976) ‘Charles Lyell and the Principles of the History of Geology’, British Journal for the History of Science 9.2, part 2, 91. Porter calls Lyell’s history ‘catastrophist’ (p. 98). See also W. F. Cannon (later known as S. F. Cannon) (1976) ‘Charles Lyell, Radical Actualism, and Theory’, British Journal for the History of Science 9.2, 104–20, at 108. Cannon reiterates her earlier claim that Lyell’s history is ‘erroneous propaganda’ and ‘historical romance’. The July 1976 issue of British Journal for the History of Science (9.32, part 2) was the Lyell Centenary Issue, a record of the conference in honor of the centenary of Lyell’s death, held at Imperial College, King’s College, the Geological Society, and the Royal Institution, London, 1–5 September 1975.
The biography is L. G. Wilson (1972) Charles Lyell: The Years to 1841: The Revolution in Geology (New Haven: Yale University Press). See esp. pp. 278–93 (for Vol. 1) and 328–39 (for Vol. 2). The scholarly introductions to the Principles are by M. J. S. Rudwick (1990) in Principles of Geology, pp. vii-lviii; and J. A. Secord (1997) Principles of Geology, pp. ix–xliii.
S. Sheets-Pyenson, qtd. in W. H. Brock and A. J. Meadows (1984) The Lamp of Learning: Taylor & Francis and the Development of Science Publishing (London, Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis), pp. xi–xii.
A. Rauch (2001) Useful Knowledge: The Victorians, Morality and the March of the Intellect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), passim.
J. Klancher (2013) Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences: Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press), pp. 127–28.
[H. Brougham] (1825) ‘New University in London’, The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal 42, 346–67, esp. at 354–55; [H. Brougham] (1825–26) ‘The London University’, The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal 43, 315–41.
While historians of science have generally seen the nineteenth-century development of science as a second scientific revolution, the first occurring in the seventeenth century, later commentators have suggested that it was in fact the first scientific revolution. See A. Cunningham and N. Jardine (eds) (1990) ‘Introduction: The age of reflexion’, in Romanticism and the Sciences (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press), pp. 1–9; and D. Knight (1992) Humphry Davy: Science & Power (Oxford, UK; Cambridge, USA: Blackwell), p. xii.
William Whewell later made the same connection; see W. Whewell (1833) Astronomy and General Physics Considered with Reference to Natural Theology, Third Bridgewater Treatise (London: W. Pickering). Whewell connected commerce and colonialism to the growth of knowledge. The stimulus to trade and colonialism was the variety of vegetables and animals that God had placed in the various regions of the earth. In fact, God had placed them as such in order to encourage such trade and colonialism: ‘The intercourse of nations in the way of discovery, colonization, commerce; the study of the natural history, manners, institutions of foreign countries; lead to most numerous and important results. Without dwelling upon this subject, it will probably be allowed that such intercourse has a great influence upon the comforts, the prosperity, the arts, the literature, the power, of the nations which thus communicate. Now the variety of the productions of different lands supplies both the stimulus to this intercourse, and the instruments by which it produces its effects. The desire to possess the objects or the knowledge which foreign countries alone can supply, urges the trader, the traveler, the discoverer to compass land and sea; and the advantages of civilization consists almost entirely in the cultivation, the use, the improvement of that which has been received from other countries’. (See pp. 62–63).
C. Lyell, ‘Scientific Institutions’, 179. In dwelling on the importance of the provinces and colonies, Lyell advocated a system that mirrored what became the gentleman’s imperial relationship with his sources — a relationship marked by the appropriation of often working-class, provincial and colonial knowledge, by metropolitan elite science. For an analysis of such relationships between gentleman naturalists and their mostly artisan and rural correspondents, see A. Secord (1994) ‘Corresponding Interests: Artisans and Gentlemen in Nineteenth-Century Natural History’, British Journal for the History of Science 27, 383–408.
In a recent essay, B. V. Lightman concludes that the relationship between the scientific naturalists and religionists was more complicated than F. M. Turner suggested in his groundbreaking monograph, Contesting Cultural Authority (1993). Lightman suggests that neither the theists nor the scientific naturalists viewed the struggle in terms of ‘science versus religion’. Rather, the theists fought on the grounds of science itself, unwilling to yield scientific authority to the scientific naturalists. For their part, the scientific naturalists argued only against theology’s truth claims, not against religion’s role in the private realm of feeling. See B. V. Lightman (2014) ‘Science at the Metaphysical Society: Defining Knowledge in the 1870s’, in B. V. Lightman and M. S. Reidy (eds) The Age of Scientific Naturalism: Tyndall and His Contemporaries (London; Brookfield, Vermont: Pickering & Chatto), pp. 187–206.
C. Lyell to G. Mantell (22 June 1826) [Mrs.] K. M. Lyell (ed.) (1881) Life Letters and Journals of Charles Lyell (Farnborough, Hants: Gregg), Vol. 1, pp. 164–65.
The Murray publishing firm was famous in the nineteenth century and has attracted the attention of scholars ever since. By the 1820s, John Murray II was the doyen of English publishers. The firm boasted a list of authors that included Jane Austen, John Wilson Croker, Leigh Hunt, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walter Scott, Madame de Stael, Thomas Moore, Sir John Franklin, Washington Irving, and Thomas Robert Malthus, among others. Murray’s reputation amongst authors was formidable. His courage in literary speculation earned the name given him by Lord Byron of ‘the Anak [king] of stationers’. His acknowledged authority in the industry prompted Lyell to refer to him as ‘absolute John’. For a history and correspondence of the Murray publishing house, see S. Smiles (1891) A Publisher and His Friends: Memoir and Correspondence of the Late John Murray, with an Account of the Origin and Progress of the House, 1768–1843, 2 vols (London: J. Murray).
C. Knight (1854) The Old Printer and the Modern Press (London: J. Murray), p. 243.
S. Smiles, A Publisher and His Friends, Vol. 1, pp. 295–96.
J. A. Secord (2000) Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 48–49.
S. Bennett (1976) ‘John Murray’s Family Library and the Cheapening of Books in Early Nineteenth Century Britain’, Studies in Bibliography 29, 140–67, esp. at 141; J. A. Secord, Victorian Sensation, p. 50.
M. J. S. Rudwick (1990) ‘Introduction’, Principles of Geology, pp. xi–xii; J. A. Secord (1997) ‘Introduction’, Principles of Geology, p. xiv. However, As M. J. S. Rudwick (1985) points out, especially as they were reprinted by the weekly Athenaeum and the commercial Philosophical Magazine, and in foreign journals, the Proceedings were more likely than the Transactions to be read by a wider audience. See M. J. S. Rudwick (1985) The Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge Among Gentlemanly Specialists (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 26.
C. Lyell to his father (10 April 1827), in [Mrs.] K. M. Lyell, Life, Letters and Journals of Charles Lyell, Vol. I, pp. 169–71, at 170; Mrs. Marcet (1809) Conversations on Chemistry, in Which the Elements of that Science Are Familiarly Explained, and Illustrated by Experiments and Plates: To Which Are Added, Some Late Discoveries on the Subject of the Fixed Alkalies (New Haven, CT: From Sidney’s Press, for Increase Cooke & Co.).
[G. Penn] (1828) Conversations on Geology: Comprising a Familiar Explanation of the Huttonian and Wernian Systems: The Mosaic Geology (London: Printed for S. Maunder).
J. F. W. Herschel (1830) A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. vi; M. Ruse (1976) ‘Charles Lyell and the Philosophers of Science’, British Journal for the History of Science 9, 121.
H. Davy, Sir, and J. Davy (1830) Consolations in Travel, or, the Last Days of a Philosopher (London: J. Murray).
T. Hope (1831) Essay on the Origin and Prospects of Man (London: Murray).
M. Bartholomew (1973) ‘Lyell and Evolution: An Account of Lyell’s Response to the Prospect of an Evolutionary Ancestry for Man’, British Journal for the History of Science 6, 261–303; M. Bartholomew (1976) ‘The Non-Progression of Non-Progression: Two Responses to Lyell’s Doctrine’, British Journal for the History of Science 9, 166–74; P. Corsi (1978) ‘The Importance of French Transmutationist Ideas for the Second Volume of Lyell’s Principles of Geology’, British Journal for the History of Science 11, 221–44.
A. Desmond (1989) The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
C. Lyell (1990) Principles, Vol. 1, Chapters 7 and 8;and Chapter 9, pp. 104–66.
H. Davy, Consolations in Travel, p. 148, emphasis mine. Attributing fossils to a ‘plastic force’ thought to create them from stones was ridiculed by C. Lyell (1990) Principles of Geology, Vol. 1, p. 23. The ‘theory’ that God created and buried such fossils to foil geological speculators had been proposed by some theologians.
L. G. Wilson, Charles Lyell, pp. 284–93; C. Lyell (1990) Principles, Vol. 1, pp. 104–43.
C. Lyell (1990) Principles of Geology, Vol. 1, p. 145, emphasis mine. The opening sentence of Lyell’s quotation is actually from page 147 of Consolations, a passage from later in the published text than all other parts. The clause beginning with ‘in those strata’ is from page 143. The clause ‘and whoever dwells upon this subject’, is from page 145, and actually begins a new sentence there. ‘In the oldest secondary strata’ is found on page 147, and ends with ‘the existence of man’, where Lyell begins his quotation: ‘You must allow that it is impossible to defend the proposition …’. As I have suggested, Lyell misquoted, or else he was looking at manuscript or a publisher’s proof. The following discussion argues that Lyell misquoted Davy for argumentative effect.
C. Lyell (1990) Principles of Geology, Vol. 1, p. 144. Lyell interchanged the term ‘progressive development’ with ‘successive development’ throughout chapter nine, although the terms surely suggest distinct meanings. ‘Progressive development’ might imply transmutation while ‘successive development’ could be limited to suggest serial, special creations.
F. M. Turner (1993) Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press); B. V. Lightman and M. S. Reidy, (eds) The Age of Scientific Naturalism: Tyndall and His Contemporaries.
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Rectenwald, M. (2016). Principles of Geology: A Secular Fissure in Scientific Knowledge. In: Nineteenth-Century British Secularism. Histories of the Sacred and the Secular, 1700–2000. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463890_3
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