American Science in the Age of Jackson

By George H. Daniels

Shows how American scientists emerged from a disorganized group of amateurs into a professional body sharing a common orientation and common goals
 
In this first effort to define an American scientific community, originally published in 1968, George Daniels has chosen for special study the 56 scientists most published in the 16 scientific journals identified as “national” during the period 1815 to 1845. In this reprint edition, with a new preface and introduction, Daniels shows how American scientists emerged from a disorganized group of amateurs into a professional body sharing a common orientation and common goals.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Mar 16, 2010
• ISBN: 9780817384487

Book preview

American Science in the Age of Jackson

History of American Science and Technology Series

General Editor: LESTER D. STEPHENS

American Science in the Age of Jackson

GEORGE H. DANIELS

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 1968

The University of Alabama Press

New Preface copyright © 1994

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Grateful acknowledgment is made to

Columbia University Press

for permission to offset the text from the original 1968 edition.

The paper on which this book is printed meets the

minimum requirements of American National Standard

for Information Science-Permanence of Paper

for Printed Library Materials,

ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Daniels, George H.

American science in the age of Jackson / George H. Daniels.

p.    cm. — (History of American science and technology series)

Originally published: New York: Columbia University Press, 1968.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8173-0740-0

1. Science—United States—History—19th century. 2. United States—Intellectual life—1865–1918. I. Tide. II. Series.

Q127.U6D3        1994

509.73'09'034—dc20

94-31186

ISBN 978-0-8173-0740-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8173-8448-7 (electronic)

To

George H. Daniels, Sr.

and Katherine Robison Daniels

Contents

Preface to the 1994 Edition

Preface

Introduction

1. The Pursuit of Science in America, 1815–1845

2. The Scientific Profession

3. The Reign of Bacon in America

4. The Philosophy in Action

5. A Deluge of Facts

6. The Limits of Baconianism: History and the Imponderables

7. Finalism, Positivism, and Scientific Explanation

8. The Inductive Process and the Doctrine of Analogy

9. Science, Theology, and Common Sense

Appendix I. Biographical and Bibliographical Sketches of Fifty-five Leading American Scientists of the Period 1815 to 1845

Appendix II. American Scientific Journals, 1771–1849

Notes

Index

Preface to the 1994 Edition

In 1962, when I began the research that was later published as American Science in the Age of Jackson, American science was either a spurious field, as many people held, or one badly in need of definition, as it appeared to a growing number of young scholars. A handful of books and articles dealing with specifically American subjects had appeared; many were very well done, and a few of them are now regarded as classics. But exactly what the subject matter of a field of study to be termed American science was to be was still unclear. The best-known works up to that time had been biographical studies of those few individuals who had established a connection with the European scientific community and had achieved some recognition from it—one thinks of Franklin, Gray, and Agassiz, each of whom had been the subject of an excellent study.¹ Of a similar nature was Brooke Hindle’s The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, which focused on an extraordinary generation of American colonials who were recognized primarily by their connection to the world scientific community.² But an American science dealing with those individuals who had received some degree of recognition by the world scientific community would soon have its subject matter exhausted. The basic proposition of those arguing against an American science was, after all, correct—Americans had contributed only minimally to the developing body of world science before the twentieth century. Most early American scientists who had any claim to membership in the world scientific community had been the subject of at least one biography, although no others measured up to the standards set by I. Bernard Cohen, Edward Lurie, and A. Hunter Dupree. Works outside this explicit framework were extremely rare. Dupree’s Science in the Federal Government—clearly the best of these—had pursued one strand of the science/society relationship within a purely national framework, and William Stanton’s The Leopard’s Spots dealt with the relationship between national culture and scientific attitudes with regard to the issue of race. Dirk J. Struik’s Yankee Science in the Making, although badly flawed by the author’s crude Marxism, was nevertheless suggestive of what was possible.³

Although there had been occasional calls from general American historians for the study of science as a part of the general culture, it was not until 1964 that A. Hunter Dupree flatly made the point that the place of science in America was not dependent upon its relationship to world science, but like religion and art, it should be studied simply because it was a part of American civilization. Moreover, Dupree argued, it was not necessary that the historian have any deep understanding of the sciences, for it was not the things of science that was his subject matter, but the people who were doing the science. As he put it, The scientists study the things; the historians study the scientists. Writing in the same vein a few years later, Edward Lurie argued that if one viewed science broadly, as a part of the social and intellectual context of an era, it would provide a key to understanding that is more sophisticated and broadly based than reliance on the history of religion, politics, or ‘society’ as loosely conceived by an earlier generation.⁴

This is a brief sketch of the context in which American Science in the Age of Jackson was written. Conceived as spadework for the kind of broad understanding that many of us hoped the study of American science would contribute, it had two entirely distinct aims. First, by a process explained in the Introduction to the original publication, the period 1815 to 1845 was selected, and a group of fifty-five leading contributors to the sixteen most important scientific journals was identified. My argument that these men could reasonably be considered representatives of the American scientific community has not been challenged, and quite similar arguments have, in fact, been used by others since.⁵ Then, using biographical data about these individuals and an analysis of their writings, I offered a sketch of the scientific community. The men composing it (there were no women) tended to be well educated, primarily employed as scientists, and, in their research interests, highly specialized, with about half doing their work in the physical sciences and half in natural history. An analysis of their work revealed very little evidence of the practical considerations that had been said to drive science in America; on the contrary, most of the men seemed to be primarily oriented toward making contributions to the developing body of world science. These conclusions about the scientific community, at odds with the common understanding of science in America during that period, were discussed in my 1963 University of Iowa dissertation, titled The Baconian Philosophy in America, and in a paper at the History of Science Society meeting that year. Since that time they seem to have fared rather well. The statistically based studies referenced above reached essentially similar conclusions, and I know of none since that called them into question.⁶ Steven G. Brush, in a 1979 article, found even more evidence of theoretical interests among American astronomers of that period than I did,⁷ and James R. Fleming, in a recent book, argues from the strongly theoretical orientation of American meteorologists that the dominance of fact gathering had been exaggerated.⁸ The burden of Sally G. Kohlstadt’s study of the early years of the American Association for the Advancement of Science was the increasing domination of that organization by a professional outlook during the 1850s.⁹ Joel J. Orosz had argued that the 1840s was an age of professionalism during which earlier educational goals of the museum movement were subordinated to the demands of scholarly researchers.¹⁰ Charlotte M. Porter’s book on natural history gives a clear picture of the strains within the American scientific community as it moved toward professionalization. Although her sympathies remain with the old-fashioned field naturalists, she clearly shows that they were being supplanted by closet professionals by the 1840s.¹¹ That American naturalists of the decades before Darwin were contributing to a major theoretical reformulation is a point emphasized by Neal C. Gillespie in his 1984 study.¹²

In general, the argument that the Age of Jackson was an important transitional period for the American scientific community seems to have found general acceptance in the recent literature. John C. Greene, for example, in his splendid study of the period from the end of the revolution to 1820, has provided an underpinning for many of the conclusions of this study. For one thing, his efforts should have laid to rest forever the notion that there was not much interest in science in America. From very early times the interest extended far beyond natural history subjects into such fields as chemistry, astronomy, and natural philosophy, and the primary motivation he could identify was intellectual curiosity, although he also credits national pride and a desire to promote the economic development of their country.¹³ A great deal of ink has been wasted by historians who assumed that the motivations for engaging in scientific work must be either purely scientific or purely social/economic. One of the contributions of Greene’s work is to demonstrate that a variety of motivations can work together to produce a result. But even though Greene finds a great deal of activity, it is clear that his period ended before the older tradition of science as avocational had been replaced, and at a time when only the barest beginnings had been made in institution development. At the end of his period, there was still no real sense in which there was a national scientific community. Instead, there was a continuation of the development of a group of communities, each including an urban center and its hinterland—Philadelphia, Boston, New Haven, New York, Charleston, and New Orleans; then Lexington and Cincinnati were added as the nation moved westward. Communication among members of these communities grew, and there was even some overlap in membership, symbolized perhaps by the participation of Thomas Jefferson in all of them. They remained, however, essentially separate entities. The occasional efforts to organize nationally, as Greene notes, never got off the ground.

Had Greene’s interest gone in such directions, he could have pointed out that the organization in terms of local communities was exactly what should be expected at that point in national development. As the latest studies on the development of the American economy by Diane Lindstrom and others have revealed, a national economy developed slowly by expanding outward from a variety of discrete and more or less self-sufficient centers, each containing an urban concentration and its hinterland.¹⁴ One does not have to be an economic determinist to realize that intellectual communities would be subjected to the same kinds of constraints as economic communities and that the same forces fostering the wider exchange of goods would do the same for the exchange of ideas. The active forces in bringing the centers together and thereby creating a real national scientific community will surely be found to be the same that were indispensable in creating the national economy in the same period—transport, communications, and the increasing tendency to look toward the national government.

Greene’s portrayal of the scientific community at the end of the Jeffersonian era as essentially a disorganized group of amateurs (albeit some were quite talented) without common goal or direction and lacking in any kind of national organization or other supra-local institutional base is exactly the condition specified as the beginning point in 1815 of American Science in the Age of Jackson, which argued that the next generation was a transitional one which had developed into a professional body by mid century. Although I explicitly recognized the social forces that were active in creating that national community (e.g., p. 8), I was not able to deal with them any more than others had been. At the present time, that is still our greatest need. Even Robert Bruce, in his Pulitzer Prize–winning The Launching of Modern American Science: 1846–1876, does not deal adequately with the mechanism of change, although he does a better job than most in relating American science to what was going on in American life generally during that period. His book should convince most readers that it was the phenomenal economic growth, which came in part from the exploitation of the land and in part from technology, that accounted for many of the developments in American science and for most of those characteristics that distinguish it from the science of other nations.¹⁵ He shows, for example, that natural history was a primary preoccupation of American scientists because the abundance of opportunities drew them to it, and the commitment to economic development made government favor it (p. 243). He also shows how such scientist-politicians as Alexander Dallas Bache, Joseph Henry, Matthew F. Maury, and Spencer F. Baird were able to use some of the federal power for their own purposes by attaching their work to economic developmental activities.¹⁶ In the end, however, Bruce draws back from a thoroughgoing social analysis, arguing that it was the growing scope and complexity of science by the 1840s that made national organization imperative (p. 251), and it was the work of individuals that brought it about. The emphasis on individuals probably accounted for his assignment of less importance than one would have expected to the Civil War and Reconstruction. Against some of his own evidence, he seemed inclined to assign more importance to an informal group of individuals in bringing about the sweeping changes in organization, in government-science relations, and in professionalization than to the special conditions established by those shattering events (e.g., p. 218, p. 244).

However one may be inclined to argue about some of his specific conclusions, Bruce’s work can be said to have firmly established the point that scientific activity could best be studied in national communities, with little or no attention to the relationship to a world scientific community and only minor attention to the content of the sciences—just as Dupree had argued some years before.

The second point made in American Science in the Age of Jackson, and the one addressed by the bulk of the book, has not fared quite so well as the first. From contemporaries to mid-twentieth-century historians of science, everyone who has approached the issue has agreed that American scientists prior to the twentieth century were relatively lacking in achievement. Yet it seemed to me that there was something inherently unsound about the assumption that it could all be explained as a result of the lack of adequately developed institutions and a scarcity of trained manpower. Institutional weakness could certainly account for a relative lack of achievement, but to the careful observer, the lack appeared to be more than relative. There was also the puzzling fact that when Americans engaged in theoretical debate, they almost invariably chose the wrong side of the issue. The obvious gap between potentiality and achievement, along with the problems with theory, so I thought, could be traced to the prevalence of an excessively naive philosophy of science that was based, rather loosely, on the teachings of Francis Bacon. This philosophy was what Americans called Baconianism and for them, this was the scientific method (p. 33).

As filtered through the Scottish philosophers Reid and Stewart, Baconianism held out the promise that the meticulous description of nature was not only the key to the understanding of the world but also to its Creator. In the general understanding, the Baconian method meant that one must be careful to avoid all hypotheses or idle speculation, that one must strive to base reasoning on the careful and unprejudiced observation of as many facts as possible, to arrange and classify them as judiciously as possible, and to let the laws flow naturally from this process. Secure in their belief that to doubt the accuracy of the senses was to deny the veracity of God (pp. 66–67), American Baconians spent entirely too much time in the collection of undigested facts, and when they did venture into the more abstract areas of science, their scientific method had not equipped them to handle those areas and their efforts were generally unfortunate (p. 86). John Burnham, in 1971, agreeing that the positivist approach to nature did not appear to lead scientists to interpretation, synthesis, or speculation, pointed out that even at the end of the nineteenth century, Americans tended to excel in experiment rather than theory. It was not, Burnham concluded, simply a matter of money, but of inclination.¹⁷

The fact of Baconianism has been generally accepted from the time of publication of the book down to the present. In 1970, it was the basis of Henry D. Shapiro and Zane L. Miller’s interpretation of Daniel Drake.¹⁸ More recently, Chandos Michael Brown presented Benjamin Silliman as (among other things) an example of the prevailing Baconianism that widely influenced the practice of natural history during the period, and cited American Science in the Age of Jackson as the authority on Baconianism.¹⁹

One religious historian extended the range of the concept by showing in much greater detail than I had done how the Baconian philosophy was pervasive in the thought of a wide range of intellectual middlemen—clergymen, pamphleteers, writers in the quarterly reviews on a variety of subjects, and professional orators.²⁰ Still later, a writer in the Law Library Journal showed that the approach was also common in the law.²¹

Although there has been no real debate about the reality of Baconianism as the dominant philosophy of science in America, many scholars have not been willing to credit adherence to it as an explanation for American lack of achievement. Despite some early evidence of interest in the explanatory possibilities of Baconianism, as by Burnham, Shapiro and Miller, and some others, the tendency in recent years has been to discount the intellectual factors in favor of the strictly social-institutional. Thomas Bender, for example, chided Shapiro and Miller for focusing on Daniel Drake’s Whiggery and his Baconian philosophy of science rather than on the context of his scientific activities. Appropriate questions, so Bender argued in his 1976 essay, would have included: What scientific institutions were developed? In what kinds of communities? Why? What kinds of scientific work were undertaken? What kinds of ideas were communicated? Who participated? For what reasons?²²

In the same year that Bender wrote, Cohen moved beyond his earlier dismissal of the field of American science to argue that the failure of American science in the nineteenth century was related to the general situation of intellectuals, particularly college professors. The establishment of a scientific tradition requires more than the production of able individual scientists. It needs a group of devotees working in association, being able to recruit others to their cause, and attracting financial support. As Cohen saw it, the failure of American science appeared to have little or nothing to do with philosophies of science; it was due simply to a kind of institutional weakness that made Americans come late in achieving the conditions under which a true scientific tradition could be established at all.²³

With only a few exceptions, the work on early nineteenth-century American science since the publication of American Science in the Age of Jackson has been directed toward filling in the story of the development of institutions and the material conditions that made it possible for Americans to achieve so much in recent times. I have no quarrel with such a research program; indeed, I always viewed my book as an initial effort to describe the early beginnings of a scientific community, and I deliberately began with a discussion of the institutional base. But despite the social content—even the explicit use of sociological concepts—there is no question that the work was primarily an intellectual history and that it was grounded in my belief in the importance of the philosophy of science. Today, my emphasis would probably be different, for like many others I have come to be skeptical of the power of intellect and suspicious of claims for the efficacy of philosophy. But I think that after the development of scientific institutions has been traced in meticulous detail and the importance of the material background has been established beyond doubt, it will still be necessary to refer to widely held presuppositions about nature and the task of the student of nature in order to understand the exact place that science held in men’s minds and how it related to other important elements of the culture, especially religion, literature, and the law. And I harbor the suspicion that after all this institutional work has been completed, scholars will study the record and ask, as I did, why American achievements did not even measure up to such potentiality as its trained manpower and the institutional supports it did possess would have led one to expect (p. 33). If so, they may have to consider in earnest the relationship between the material conditions that make possible the pursuit of science and the assumptions that lead toward certain results rather than others. I have agreed to the re-publication of American Science in the Age of Jackson, even though I would now quarrel with some of its conclusions and emphases, in the hope that it may contribute in some small way to such a consideration.

Notes

1. I. Bernard Cohen, Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments. . . (Cambridge, Mass., 1941); A. Hunter Dupree, Asa Gray (Cambridge, Mass., 1959); Edward Lurie, Louis Agassiz, A Life in Science (Chicago, 1960).

2. Brooke Hindle, The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735–1789 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1956).

3. A. Hunter Dupree, Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities to 1940 (Cambridge, Mass., 1957); William Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes Toward Race in America, 1815–1859 (Chicago, 1960); Dirk J. Struik, Yankee Science in the Making (Boston, 1948).

4. Dupree’s paper was read at the 1964 meeting of the American Historical Association and published under the title The History of American Science—A Field Finds Itself, American Historical Review 71 (April 1966), 863–874; the quotation is from p. 869. For Lurie, see The History of Science in America: Developments and New Directions, in Nineteenth Century American Science: A Reappraisal, edited by George H. Daniels (Evanston, Ill., 1972), p. 9

5. See, for example, Donald deB. Beaver, The American Scientific Community, 1800–1860: A Statistical-Historical Study, Ph.D. Diss., Yale University, 1966; Clarke A. Elliott, The American Scientist in Antebellum Society: A Quantitative View, Social Studies of Science 15 (1975), 93–108; Robert V. Bruce, A Statistical Profile of American Scientists, 1846–1876, in Nineteenth Century American Science: A Reappraisal, edited by George H. Daniels (Evanston, Ill., 1972).

6. Thomas Bender did criticize me for considering the scientists in my study as professionals because they were employed as college teachers, suggesting that he forgets that the college was not a university or even the germ from which the university later grew. As much as I admire Professor Bender’s work, and actually agree with most of his comments in that article, I do not think that this particular criticism is to the point: employment in a scientific capacity was cited as only one of the defining characteristics of a professional. See his Science and the Culture of American Communities: The Nineteenth Century, History of Education Quarterly 16 (1976), p. 66.

7. Stephen G. Brush, The Rise of Astronomy in America, American Studies 20 (1979), p. 43.

8. James R. Fleming, Meteorology in America, 1800–1870 (Baltimore, 1990).

9. Sally G. Kohlstedt, The Formation of the American Scientific Community: The American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1848–1860 (Urbana, 1972).

10. Joel J. Orosz, Curators and Culture: The Museum Movement in America, 1740-1870 (Tuscaloosa, 1990).

11. Charlotte M. Porter, The Eagle’s Nest: Natural History and American Ideas, 1812–1842 (Tuscaloosa, 1986).

12. Neal C. Gillespie, Preparing for Darwin: Conchology and Natural Theology in Anglo-American Natural History, in Studies in History of Biology, edited by William Coleman and Camille Limoges (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), Vol. 7.

13. John C. Greene, American Science in the Age of Jefferson (Ames, Iowa, 1984), p. 129.

14. Diane Lindstrom, Economic Development in the Philadelphia Region, 1810–1850 (New York, 1978) and The Industrialization of the Northeast, 1810–1860, in Working Papers from the Regional Economic Research Center, edited by Glenn Porter and William H. Mulligan, Jr. (Greenville, Del., 1979), Vol. 2.

15. Robert V. Bruce, The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846–1876 (New York, 1987), p. 5.

16. While Bruce makes effective use of such material, he was by no means the first to discover this connection. See, for example, Dupree, Science in the Federal Government, which is still the best work to deal extensively with such topics.

17. John C. Burnham, Science in America: Historical Selections (New York, 1971), p. 73.

18. Henry D. Shapiro and Zane L. Miller, Physician to the West: Selected Writings of Daniel Drake on Science & Society (Lexington, Ky., 1970), xvii.

19. Chandos Michael Brown, Benjamin Silliman: A Life in the Young Republic (Princeton, 1989), p. 128.

20. Theodore Dwight Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science: The Baconian Ideal and Antebellum American Religious Thought (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1977). Bozeman, for a reason that I still have not been entirely able to fathom, felt called upon to criticize me for not giving enough credit to the Scottish philosophy. I was perplexed, for I had emphasized that Bacon’s ideas had been filtered through the writings of Reid, Stewart, and their popularizers, and my chief exhibit for this point, as I discovered when his book was published, had been the same as his—Samuel Tyler, a Baltimore lawyer, follower of Reid and Stewart and prolific writer in the reviews. For an early exchange between us, see Correspondence, in Isis 63, no. 218 (1972). See also Herbert Hovenkamp, Science and Religion in America, 1800–1860 (Philadelphia, 1978).

21. The author cited Daniels and Bozeman as authorities for the statement that The Baconian method was the dominant approach to science in the Anglo-American world at this time. William P. LaPiana, Dusty Books and Living History: Why all those Old State Reports Really Matter, Law Library Journal 81 (1987), p. 34.

22. Thomas Bender, Science and the Culture of American Communities: The Nineteenth Century, History of Education Quarterly 16 (1976), p. 65.

23. I. Bernard Cohen, Science and the Growth of the American Republic, Review of Politics 38 (1976), p. 384.

Preface

This book is intended as a study of key issues in the intellectual history of the American scientific community during the first half of the nineteenth century. It has nothing to do with Andrew Jackson and only indirectly does it have to do with Jacksonian Democracy. Age of Jackson refers only to the fact that the kind of thinking about science described herein reached a height in the 1830s and early 1840s—the period usually given that title. While I hope that the work can be used by others—or perhaps even by me at a later time—as a beginning point for a study of the broad social relationships of science during that period, and also for an exploration of the substantive developments in science, I have limited myself largely to a description and analysis of what the scientists (and friends of science) were thinking about science. This I regard as necessary groundwork for further studies.

Naturally I have become indebted to a great many people in the course of writing this book. At the University of Iowa, where the manuscript was written as a dissertation, Stow Persons worked very hard to keep my historical sense intact, and Gustav Bergmann was always ready to point out my philosophical errors and suggest fruitful lines for speculation. John Greene of the University of Kansas read an earlier version of the manuscript and offered valuable suggestions, many of which I have incorporated in the present version. By footnotes in the text I have made partial acknowledgment of my indebtedness to him. Robert R. Dykstra of the University of Nebraska gave generously of his editorial and stylistic skill. Bernard Gronert and Frederick Nicklaus at Columbia University Press have been helpful far beyond reasonable expectation. It is a great deal more than a literary convention when I point out that none of these gentlemen can be blamed for my errors, for I have obstinately disregarded their advice on a number of points.

Chapter III is a revised form of an article which previously appeared in the Huntington Library Quarterly, and a portion of Chapter VII was published in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine. I am grateful to the editors for permission to use this material.

A Woodrow Wilson dissertation fellowship made it possible for me to do the research for the dissertation, and a faculty research grant from Northwestern University was an indispensable aid to me in putting the book in its present form.

GEORGE H. DANIELS

July 1967

Introduction

There are two fundamentally different ways of approaching the history of science—or, for that matter, the history of any subject whatever. One can either assume that the phenomenon he is studying is a part of a continuing development, or he can assume that it is part of a spatially and temporally bound cultural situation. Few would deny that every human activity has both these aspects at the same time; the only questions usually at issue have to do with significance and possibility. Questions frequently raised are: Which aspect of the subject is the most significant? Is it possible to study the past outside of a developmental framework? An eminent American physicist, crowning a lifetime of speculation about his own science by pronouncing upon a broader subject, answered the first of these questions in favor of development and the second in the negative. According to P. W. Bridgman:

it seems that much of history is not written with an adequate appreciation that the past has meaning only in terms of the present. The impartial recovery of the past, uncontaminated by the influence of the present, is held up as a professional ideal, and a criterion of technical competence is the degree to which this ideal is reached. The ideal is, I believe, impossible of attainment, and cannot even be formulated without involvement with meaningless verbalisms.¹

One cannot, Bridgman thought, even begin to sever his connections with the present in order to understand the past on its own terms. Many historians, and in particular, historians of science, have at least implicitly agreed with him on this point.

At first glance one can see good reasons for historians of science to choose the developmental approach, either on grounds of possibility or of significance. It is difficult to overlook the huge body of knowledge existing at the present time, and it is equally difficult to escape passing judgment on the past in terms of that knowledge. Science is surely the most progressive subject known—by its very nature it involves a continual building upon the knowledge of the past—and its spectacular achievements in the twentieth century could hardly be denied by either its friends or its enemies. It was only natural, therefore, when historians became interested in science, that they should emphasize this aspect of it. Consequently, we find that, with a few exceptions, histories of science are written within a tightly patterned developmental framework, and all that does not fit that framework is rejected as being of no consequence, or at the very least, of no interest.² The historian, having a knowledge of the present state of the sciences, wishes to explain how they came to that elevated state, and to celebrate the achievements of those men of genius responsible for the successive links in the chain leading ever upward to the present. M. Pattison Muir, in the introduction to his History of Chemical Theories and Laws, summed up the viewpoint of this type of historian when he said, The book is not an attempt to move through the past without knowing whereto the course of the science is tending. This approach, he noted, made his work rather a consideration of the growth of the science from an outside position than an attempt to live through each period along with those who made the advances in that period.³

Although most historians of science are still framing their work according to the concept of progressive development, an increasing number have come to realize that this is a terribly limited view of their subject. It has been argued that a too exclusive concern with scientific progress tends to obscure the fact that the introduction of a new scientific theory is a profoundly revolutionary act—an act which subverts the entire structure of pre-existing science and is therefore undertaken only in desperation, after all other efforts have failed.⁴

This argument, which I accept as being an essentially sound outline of the way scientific change occurs, suggests some profound consequences for the general historian of ideas. For such a historian, whose interest is in the relations between ideas in different disciplines at a given time, a recital of the successive links in the chain of progress is not only useless but positively misleading. This is so because those men who belong in the chain have earned their place there precisely because they were not representative of their own generation. They were, for one reason or another, able to transcend the limitations of the scientific community to which they belonged, and to see the world in an essentially new way or they would not have been able to create the innovation for which they are remembered. The study of genius is always fascinating, but such studies reveal only indirectly anything about the normal scientific community of a period.⁵

However useful for some purposes it may be to consider the history of science from the viewpoint of the present, for the purposes of the historian of ideas it is the normal science of a generation that is its most relevant aspect. Considered in this manner, with no reference to the chain of progress, science can best be defined as a body of knowledge and opinions about nature, existing at a particular time and place. It is the currently accepted way of framing questions about nature, and the prescribed way of looking for the answers. It even dictates the type of questions that will be asked in the first place, and it determines at what point the scientist will be satisfied with the answers. It is, in short, both a methodology and a general frame of reference, and as such it varies from time to time and from place to place. In this respect, the concept of a national science makes perfectly good sense, for the normal science of a generation—like its art, music, or religion—is a part of the larger cultural context within which it appears. It influences, and is influenced by, that context.⁶

The present study is an attempt to accomplish exactly what Bridgman declared to be impossible; to recapture a small part of the past as uncontaminated as possible by present judgments as to importance. It is an effort to understand the thought about science of a generation of normal scientists—including practitioners, theorists, and interested commentators. The