The Philosophical Breakfast Club

O
N
J
UNE
24, 1833,
THE
B
RITISH
A
SSOCIATION FOR THE
A
DVANCEMENT
of Science convened its third meeting. Eight hundred fifty-two paid-up members of the fledgling society had traveled to Cambridge from throughout England, from Scotland and Ireland, and even from the Continent and America, to attend. At the first General Meeting the members—and many of their wives and daughters—crowded into the grand and imposing Senate House of the university. The atmosphere was charged with barely suppressed excitement and anticipation as the audience watched one of the speakers take his place on the stage before them. It was William Whewell—a tall, robust man in his late thirties, renowned for the brawn of his muscles and the brilliance of his mind. At Cambridge he was a star: outspoken fellow of Trinity College, recently resigned as Professor of Mineralogy, the author of a number of physics textbooks and a new, provocative work on the relation between science and religion. In less than a decade he would surprise no one by being appointed Master of Trinity, the most powerful position at the university; some would say the most powerful position in the entire academic world. Whewell was one of the guiding lights in the formation of the British Association, and he was the proud host of the Cambridge meeting.
²

Whewell spoke in a strong, self-assured voice, redolent with the peculiar vowels of his native Lancashire accent. He praised the assembled group. He discussed the current state of the sciences, singling out astronomy as the “Queen of the Sciences.” He remarked on the nature of science, noting the importance of both “facts and theory” in its formation: both the skills of the keen observer and those of the rational reasoner were combined in the successful practitioner of science. He spoke of a former member of Trinity College, Francis Bacon, the seventeenth-century scientific reformer, connecting the goals of the British Association with those of his illustrious predecessor. It was a masterful performance, just as the organizers had expected in inviting Whewell to open the meeting. After respectful applause—not only for Whewell, but for their own good sense and good taste in coming together as they had—the audience grew silent.
³

As the applause died down, one man rose imperiously. It was, the other members realized with some surprise, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the celebrated Romantic poet. Decades earlier, Coleridge had written a tract on scientific method. Although for the last thirty years he had rarely left his home in Highgate, near Hampstead, he had felt obliged to make the long journey back to his alma mater for the British Association meeting. It would be the last of such trips; he died within the year. His intervention in the meeting would have far-reaching consequences for those who practice science, even to the present day.

These practitioners were, at the time, known as “men of science” (they were rarely women in those days), “savants” (using the French word for a man of great learning), or—beckoning back to the close-knit relation between science and philosophy that had existed since ancient times—“natural philosophers.” Coleridge remarked acidly that the members of the association should no longer refer to themselves as natural philosophers. Men digging in fossil pits, or performing experiments with electrical apparatus, hardly fit the definition; they were not, as he might have said, “armchair philosophers” pondering the mysteries of the universe, but practical men, with dirty hands at that. Indeed, Coleridge persisted, as a “
real
metaphysician,” he forbade them the use of this honorific.

The hall erupted in a tumultuous din, as the assembled group took offense at Coleridge’s sharp insult. Then Whewell rose once again, and quieted the crowd. He courteously agreed with the “distinguished gentleman” that a satisfactory term with which to describe the members of the
association was wanting. If “philosophers” is taken to be “too wide and lofty a term,” then, Whewell suggested, “by analogy with
artist
, we may form
scientist
.”
⁴

That the coining of this term occurred when, where, and by whom it did was no accident; rather, it was the culmination of twenty years of work by four remarkable men, Whewell and three of his friends. It was also, in some ways, merely the beginning of their labors, for the term, thus launched, was not to be widely used for decades more.
⁵

T
HE FOUR HAD
met at Cambridge, at the very site of this creation of the “scientist.” Two decades earlier, as students, Whewell and his friends Charles Babbage, John Herschel, and Richard Jones had come together to discuss the themes that Whewell touched upon in his 1833 address. The importance of Francis Bacon, the need to carry out the reforms he had foreseen two centuries before, the role for both observation and reasoning in science: all of this had been the fodder for “Philosophical Breakfasts” fondly recalled by the four in later years.

At these Sunday morning meetings, the four students had cast their young, critical eyes over science as it was currently practiced, and found it wanting. They saw an area of inquiry perceived as the private pursuit of wealthy men, unsupported and unheralded by the public. No one was paid to conduct scientific research; the universities barely supported the experiments of their chemistry professors; students could not even receive degrees in the natural sciences at Cambridge and Oxford; no honors, no peerages or monetary rewards, were offered for scientific innovation. Within science itself, its practitioners rarely met, and never debated publicly about their work; even at the Royal Society of London, that bastion of natural philosophy since the time of Isaac Newton, scientific papers were read, but never discussed or opposed. Indeed, its members were often not even men of science, but antiquarians, literary figures, or noblemen who wished to associate with the philosophers.

Moreover, there was no agreed-upon “scientific method,” no one process of discovering theories that was sanctioned above any other. Worse, there was a disquieting trend toward a kind of scientific reasoning the four men thought was not only sterile, leading to no new knowledge, but outright dangerous in its consequences. And while science had long been employed in the service of the state, of kings and governments, it was not
generally accepted that science should be used to improve the lives of common men and women. It was to these friends as if the old medieval system of alchemy, with its secret methods and its mysteries, its discoveries hidden by codes and ciphers, its riches reserved for its practitioners, still held knowledge of the physical world in its grip. It was no surprise, they felt, that science was stagnating.

The four men devoted their lives to transforming science. And to an amazing extent, they succeeded. After their labors, science—and scientists—began to look much as they do today.

A
T THE START
of the 1800s, the man of science was likely to be a country parson collecting beetles in his spare hours, or a wealthy gentleman performing experiments in his own privately funded laboratory, or a factotum of a wealthy patron; by the end of the century he was a “scientist”—a member of a professional class of (still mostly) men pursuing a common activity within a certain institutional framework: professional associations open only to practicing members; research grants; university and laboratory training for younger practitioners. When Coleridge, the most famous poet of the day, wrote his tract on scientific method in 1817 it was not considered an oddity; by 1833, the time of the third meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, it was already remarkable, and in the years that followed it was almost inconceivable. A wall was slowly being constructed between art and science, a wall that still stands today.

When the Philosophical Breakfast Club first began to meet, men of science and the public hardly ever explicitly argued about what kind of scientific method should be used; by the end of it, this topic was often discussed—and hotly debated. Men of science were forced to reflect on their method, not just proceed haphazardly. Before, Francis Bacon’s method of “induction” was sometimes referred to, but rarely understood; afterwards, a sophisticated form of Bacon’s inductive method had been developed and popularized, one that continues to guide the work of scientists today. And while earlier research was most likely done for the sake of personal glory, or for that of king and empire, or for the furthering of “pure knowledge,” by the end of the nineteenth century the scientist was seen as responsible in some way to the public. More than ever before, it was assumed that the methods of natural science could be—and
should be—used to understand and solve the problems facing society. This ideal—though it has had a checkered history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—remains at the heart of much modern scientific work, and is part of the public’s conception of science, even if scientists themselves do not always view it as their driving force.