The Philosophical Breakfast Club (45 page)

Whewell cast the entire history of science as the history of progressive development, leading men and women ever closer to the truth—a view not surprising in an age of such optimism, when Britain was expanding its international empire and its scientists were expanding the empire of knowledge. Whewell described every scientific discipline as having a dramatic form, with major discoveries marking “epochs” in the field, preceded by “preludes” and followed by “sequels.” (In the
Preliminary Discourse
, Herschel had used the term “epoch” to describe important stages in the history of science; it was a term already in use in astronomy and geology.)
¹³
Whewell dedicated the work to Herschel, dating the dedication from Jones’s house on Hyde Park Street, to show how important the two had been in the project, which, Whewell told Herschel, had been “growing closer to my heart, ever since our undergraduate days.”
¹⁴
Babbage did not make it to the dedication page, having already distanced himself from the shared project of the Philosophical Breakfast Club.

Whewell found that the history of science testified to the value of Bacon’s inductive method. Like Bacon, Whewell believed that gaining scientific knowledge required a method that struck a middle course between two kinds of approaches to knowledge: the purely empirical, focused only on the information received from the senses, and the purely rational, focusing on the ideas or concepts found in the mind. Whewell wished to develop a scientific method appropriate for the scientific bee,
as Bacon had put it, not for the ant or the spider, and he used his study of the history of science to cultivate such a view.

In his
Philosophy
, Whewell accordingly described all knowledge of the world as requiring both an empirical dimension, something that comes from the world itself, and a rational element, something derived from our minds. The elements that come to us from outside are the perceptions or sensations that give us information about the world. The elements that come from inside are the ideas and concepts of the mind. Whewell explained that the idea of space is what enables us to understand objects as existing in a particular place, with a particular shape and size. Each idea gives rise to more-specific concepts, such as, for the idea of space, the concepts of “triangle” and “straight line,” or, for the idea of cause, the concept of “force” (which is one type of cause).

In order to have knowledge of the physical world, we use our ideas and concepts as the “thread” on which we string the facts about the world, the “pearls.” We do this by a process Whewell called “colligation”—bringing together a number of distinct facts by the use of a concept or idea. It is the concept or idea that provides a way to organize that “blooming buzzing confusion” of facts, as the philosopher William James would put it half a century later.

Whewell revealed that the astronomer Johannes Kepler had used this kind of reasoning when he discovered the law that planetary orbits are elliptical, rather than circular as had been thought for thousands of years before. His expertise in mathematics, especially geometry, ensured that Kepler had in his mind very clear concepts of the geometrical shapes, including the ellipse (a type of oval figure). He used this concept to colligate the observed places of the planet Mars, showing that this concept accounted for the observations more accurately than did the concept of a circle. The orbit is extremely close to circular; Kepler’s achievement was not a trivial matter of plotting the observed points of Mars’s orbit on a piece of graph paper, connecting the dots, and seeing that the proper curve was an ellipse. Rather, it required insight based on great mathematical skill to see that the orbit described an ellipse. Kepler next inferred that if Mars’s orbit was elliptical, then—since it had always been assumed that the orbits of all the planets would describe the same curve—all the planetary orbits were elliptical. He thus invented his first law of planetary motion, which states that the orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the sun at one focus (one end of the ellipse).

One important innovation in Whewell’s view of scientific discovery was his recognition that in many cases finding the correct concept to use in colligating the facts is the most difficult and most crucial part of discovering a new theory. Kepler’s mentor and employer, the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, had made the extraordinarily precise and accurate observations of Mars later used by Kepler. Yet even Brahe did not colligate these data using the concept of an ellipse—he continued to “see” the orbit as circular. The revolutionary aspect of Kepler’s discovery was not making the observations of the planet’s positions—though these were a necessary precondition for the discovery—but putting these together using the new concept of an ellipse.

This insight led Whewell to the claim that, as he put it, “no discovery is the work of accident.” The mind of the scientist must be “prepared,” with clear concepts that are the correct ones to use to colligate the facts, in order to make new discoveries. Although Lord Byron, in his poem “Don Juan,” publicized the apocryphal story of Newton discovering the law of universal gravitation because an apple fell before his eyes (“And this is the sole mortal who could grapple / Since Adam, with a fall, or with an apple”), Whewell pointed out that many thousands of people had seen apples fall prior to Newton, and yet it required the genius of Newton to see that the planets were moved in their orbits by the same force that caused an apple to fall perpendicular to the ground. Newton’s mind, like Kepler’s, was “well prepared” for his discovery. Whewell’s view of scientific method thus differs radically from that famously proposed in the twentieth century by Karl Popper, who argued that discovering scientific theories is not a rational matter, but is more often than not purely accidental. According to Whewell, even though the moment of discovery might seem to the scientist himself or herself to be a “eureka” moment coming out of the blue, in fact it is an insight for which the scientist’s mind was prepared by his or her prior study of nature and its laws.

The inspiration for Whewell’s belief in the crucial role of clearly formulated concepts in scientific knowledge originated from an unlikely source: Whewell’s study of architecture. He had been interested in architecture for years. When Whewell helped found the Cambridge Philosophical Society in 1819, the first paper he delivered to the group was on architecture. In 1823 he had toured Normandy with his pupil Kenelm Digby, who would later become an important writer on ecclesiastical architecture. At the end of the decade Whewell studied Gothic architecture
in the Rhine region of Germany, publishing a work on this topic in 1830. In the summer of 1832 he toured Picardy and Normandy with Thomas Rickman, then the most eminent architectural historian in England. Whewell, at that time professor of mineralogy at Cambridge, was at work on the second edition of his
Architectural Notes on German Churches
. The two men had quite an adventure on that trip. As Whewell recalled:

“A serjeant-major [
sic
] of the national guard of Norrey considered our attention to his church to be alarming, and declared us his prisoners; and as the mayor of that place was from home, having gone to market to sell his corn, we were … marched under a guard of three sabers and two fowling-pieces to the next village, Bretteville, where the mayor was reasonable enough to decide that antiquaries were not dangerous people, and dismissed us.”
¹⁵

Rickman and Whewell sought to create a “science of architecture”—to make architectural studies more precise, avoiding haphazard speculation and focusing on careful description before theorizing about the causes of the rise of new architectural styles. Whewell explicitly compared architecture to the classifying sciences, such as botany, rather than the other arts such as painting.
¹⁶
The student of architecture should construct “taxonomies” of the different parts of buildings, just as a botanist would describe a plant by detailing its kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species.
¹⁷
In later years Whewell would have a friendly argument with the art critic John Ruskin, who wanted the study of architecture to be less scientific and more romantic, full of poetical language and feeling.
¹⁸

In the early 1830s, architectural historians were focused on the transition from the Romanesque style to the Gothic style. Most scholars tended to define the Gothic—such as that exemplified by the magnificent cathedral at Chartres, France, dedicated in 1260, with its soaring steeples, pointed archways, and stained-glass windows—by the presence of a single characteristic, the pointed arch. Any building with pointed archways could be classified as “Gothic” on this detail alone, whereas a building with the rounded arch typical of the earlier Romanesque style was not Gothic. But, just as he and Jones had done in economics, Whewell rejected the notion that a “science of architecture” could start with definitions, as Ricardo and his followers had claimed for their field. Rather, he insisted, observations of numerous Gothic buildings were necessary in order to determine the defining element of the Gothic. Whewell himself
would describe his personal observations of over eighty Gothic churches in his book.

Examination of these churches led Whewell to the belief that the development of Gothic architecture was due to the introduction of an idea: the idea of verticality, the concept of reaching upward toward the heavens. The rise of the Gothic style, Whewell concluded, had occurred by the substitution of the idea of verticality for the Romanesque idea of horizontality. The new style, then, was brought about not by the introduction of one feature such as the pointed arch, but rather by the introduction of the new idea. Indeed, the new idea led to the new feature: the desire for more vertical lines led to the use of the pointed arch, because in order to have greater height with thinner walls and more light, it was necessary to provide greater stabilization for the increased thrusts of the vaults over the interior. This was partially provided by pointed arches. This follows from a principle of mechanics: the shape of the pointed arch more closely approximates that of a reversed catenary curve, which is the ideal line of pressure, where the weight of material in an arch is uniformly distributed.

But the sought-after verticality and lightness required more than just the pointed arch; masons were also forced to rethink the heavy barrels over the gallery or high aisle that had previously been used to carry the thrusts to the external walling. These blocked the light from outside and increased the aspect of heaviness to the structure. Eventually, architects realized that flying or arch buttresses—projections from the wall—could be used to stabilize the vault thrusts imposed by greater height. Thus the flying buttress was equally as important as the pointed arch to the development of the Gothic style.

Far from being a barbaric form of architecture, as many had argued, and as the original use of the term “Gothic” was meant to signify, the Gothic style is beautiful when found in its purest form. Whewell explained that what makes a building or architectural style “beautiful” is that it contains a principle or idea that gives unity and harmony to the whole. The Gothic style, “in adopting forms and laws which are the reverse of the ancient ones … introduced new principles as fixed and true, and as full of unity and harmony, as those of the previous system.”
¹⁹
Buildings are “barbarous” or “degenerate” when they mix styles, when there is no overriding principle of unity.

His work in architecture suggested to Whewell that concepts could be unifying principles, means of bringing together and making lawful a group of otherwise disparate facts. Just as the concept of verticality could unify diverse parts of a Gothic structure, so too the concept of an ellipse could unify and make lawful the observed points of the orbit of Mars. The scientist, then, was like an architect, building lovely, unified structures called theories, using the bricks that nature provided, and the blueprints provided by the mind.

H
ERSCHEL WAS
pleased and excited when Whewell finally published his work on scientific method. He took time out of his beloved photography experiments, and his important and time-consuming work reducing the Cape observations, to write a joint review of Whewell’s
History
and
Philosophy
. The article was so lengthy that the publisher of the
Quarterly Review
, John Gibson Lockhart, had to remind Herschel to consider the poor reader!
²⁰

In the review, Herschel praised his friend’s work. But he made it clear that he disagreed with Whewell’s major point, his introduction of the conceptual element into knowledge—to Herschel it seemed too mystical, too “German” (an ironic charge for the son of a German émigré). Although Whewell, along with his friends Hare and Thirlwall, had been reading German works in philosophy and history for years, in general British intellectuals were extremely disdainful of the German thinkers of recent history, such as Immanuel Kant.

Kant had begun his career as a natural philosopher (his dissertation in 1755 was on the nebular hypothesis, in which he argued that gaseous clouds slowly rotate, gradually collapse, and finally flatten due to gravity, eventually forming new stars and planets). Like Bacon before him, and Whewell later, Kant wanted to find a middle way between empiricism and rationalism. In the end, however, Kant came to believe that we cannot have knowledge of the physical world per se, but only knowledge of our experience of the world, and that the physical world itself is a “dim and unknown region” to us. The human mind could never, according to Kant, break through the veil of our ideas to understand physical reality. This view of knowledge was perpetuated by later German philosophers such as Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, who collectively became known as “idealists” because of their emphasis on ideas rather than on empirical facts.

Herschel argued with Whewell that his view of scientific method would lead to the same consequences as Kant’s view: that we were fundamentally incapable of having knowledge of the physical world that exists outside our minds. But Whewell countered that this was not his conclusion at all. Rather, Whewell believed that the concepts in our minds could help us to have knowledge of the world outside our minds, because both our mental concepts and the physical world were created by God.