Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century/Lecture 6
WILLIAM WHEWELL[1]
(1794-1866)
William Whewell was born at Lancaster, England, on May 24, 1794. His father was a master carpenter and had several children. William was educated first at the grammar school of his native town, and was afterwards sent to that at Heversham in order to qualify for an Exhibition to Trinity College, Cambridge. The winning of this exhibition of 50 was his first scholastic success. At these schools great attention was paid to classical studies, including versification in both Latin and Greek, and he also received a good start in mathematics. He entered Trinity College in October, 1812. The Analytical Society was then in existence and he became one of the group which met on Sunday mornings to breakfast and to discourse on philosophical subjects. One of the principal honors which he gained in his undergraduate career was the Chancellor's medal for the best poem on Boadicea, in the course of which he celebrates the praises of beauty:
Hold the round earth in viewless magic bands;
From burning climes where riper graces flame
To shores where cliffs of ice resound thy name,
From savage times ere social life began
To fairer days of polished, softened man;
To thee, from age to age, from pole to pole,
All pay the unclaimed homage of the soul.
Whewell did not concentrate his attention exclusively on the subjects of the final examination, but he came out second wrangler. The next year (1817) he won a fellowship, took private pupils, and began to read extensively with a view of following in the footsteps of Francis Bacon. He was soon appointed one of the mathematical tutors of his college. His connection with the Analytical Society suggested his first work An Elementary Treatise on Mechanics, in which the continental notations for the calculus is used. It was a great advance on any existing text-book on the subject used at Cambridge; subsequently it passed through several editions and became much altered. In 1820 Whewell was one of the moderators at the tripos examinations, and, following the example of Peacock the year before, he made use of the d notation. He was not an ardent reformer like Peacock; he appeared to have waited until the success of the movement was apparent. Although his first book was on Mechanics, his main design, even then, was a work on the inductive philosophy in which he should take full advantage of what had been accomplished in the physical sciences since the time of Bacon. For this reason we find him at an early age studying Locke's Essay on Human Understanding and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
In those days a fellowship expired at the end of seven years unless the holder took holy orders. Whewell took orders in 1826; in the same year he and Airy, the Lucasian professor of mathematics, made observations in a mine in Cornwall to determine the mean density of the earth. Bacon, more than two centuries earlier, had suggested swinging a pendulum in a deep mine for this purpose. Airy and Whewell attempted to determine the time of oscillation of a pendulum at the bottom of the mine—about 1200 feet deep—and to compare it with that of another pendulum on the surface. An accident to the pendulum vitiated the first series of observations. Two years later they made a second series, which was also unsuccessful on account of an accident in the mine. Nearly thirty years later Airy, however, made successful observations at another mine from which he deduced 6.565 as the mean density of the earth as compared with water. At the time when Whewell took orders the professorship of mineralogy at Cambridge fell vacant; it appears to have been occupied as asinecure. Whewell saw in it a position where he might have opportunity to study one of the sciences comprehended in his scheme of inductive philosophy. He held the appointment for several years, delivered lectures, founded a museum and wrote an essay on mineralogical classification. In 1830 he published a book on the architecture of Gothic churches, in which he gave a theory explaining how the Gothic style had been derived from Grecian and Roman architecture.
It suited the philosophic plans of the professor of mineralogy to study the new and allied science of geology. In 1830 the first volume of Lyell's Principles of Geology appeared in which was adopted and extended the doctrine of uniformity first published by Hutton. Whewell believed in the older doctrine of successive catastrophes; in a review of the book he said:
"Hutton, for the purpose of getting his continents above water, or of manufacturing a chain of Alps and Andes, did not disdain to call in something more than the common volcanic eruptions which he read of in newspapers from time to time. He was content to have a period of paroxysmal action, an epoch of gradual distraction and violence, to usher in one of restoration and life. Mr Lyell throws away all such crutches; he walks alone in the path of his speculations; he requires no paroxysms, no extraordinary periods; he is content to take burning mountains as he finds them; and with the assistance of the stock of volcanoes and earthquakes now on hand, he undertakes to transform the earth from any one of its geological conditions to any others. He requires time, no doubt; he must not be hurried in his proceedings. But if we will allow him a free stage in the wide circuit of eternity, he will then ask no other favor."
Whewell here seems to adopt that view of geological time which has since been advocated by Kelvin. This same year there appeared Herschel's work Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy. Herschel's object was to extend and correct the inductive philosophy of Bacon in the light of later achievements. Whewell was, from his own plans deeply interested in this work and he wrote a review in which he remarked that Herschel had said nothing of Bacon's condemnation of the method of anticipation of nature, as opposed to what he considers as the true method of interpretation of nature. As a matter of fact Herschel was too wise to follow Bacon in his condemnation of anticipation; he knew that the guidance of theory was needed for the interpretation of facts.
Whewell was one of the eight persons selected to write the Bridgewater Treatises. His subject was "Astronomy and General Physics considered with reference to Natural Theology," and he received £1000 as well as the profits of the volume. His treatise is divided into three parts: (1) Terrestrial adaptations, (2) Cosmical, arrangements, (3) Religious views. In the first part he aims at demonstrating how the laws and facts of nature work in harmony to secure the well being of man, animals, and plants; and the inference is drawn that such arrangement testifies to the existence of an intelligent and beneficent Creator. In the second part he shows how all the universe is subject to a law of continual decay. The third part has two remarkable chapters on inductive and on deductive habits, the former, he held, had a stronger tendency to religion. This volume was the most popular of the eight Bridgewater Treatises, and it went through seven editions.
Soon after the British Association was founded in 1831 Whewell became one of the most active members; to him is due the important suggestion of the preparation, by committees or specially appointed individuals, of reports upon subjects of scientific importance and their publication in full in the Proceedings. In 1833 he was one of the secretaries of the meeting of the Association held at Cambridge and it fell to him to deliver an address similar to the presidential addresses of later years. By this time Whewell had acquired the reputation through his philosophical researches of being the best authority in Great Britain on scientific language. Faraday in his electrolytic researches had encountered a number of new ideas and for these he wished to have suitable names. Whewell suggested anode, cathode, anion, cation, ion, words which, with their derivatives, are now familiar not only to the electrician, but to people of general culture. Other electrical terms suggested by Whewell to Faraday were paramagnetic and diamagnetic. To Lyell, the geologist, he suggested eocene, miocene, pliocene.
In 1833 Whewell published in the Transactions of the Royal Society the first of a series of memoirs on the tides. In its preface he says: "No one appears to have attempted to trace the nature of the connection among the tides for the different parts of the world. We are, perhaps, not even yet able to answer decisively the inquiry which Bacon suggested to the philosophers of his time, whether the high water extends across the Atlantic so as to affect contemporaneously the shores of America and Africa, or whether it is high on one side of the ocean when it is low on the other, at any rate such observations have not yet been extended and generalized." To this subject Whewell applied his method of the colligation of facts, more commonly called the reduction of observations. His main object was to reduce the enormous series of observations concerning the tides which had accumulated, and in this work he had the aid of skilled computors paid by the Admiralty or by the British Association. He began by constructing a map of cotidal lines for the whole globe, that is, lines drawn on the surface of the ocean and passing through all the points where it is high water at the same time. The succeeding memoirs were devoted to the discussion of observations at London, Liverpool, Plymouth, and other ports. There were fourteen of these memoirs and Airy thus estimates their value: "Viewing the two independent methods introduced by Mr. Whewell, of reducing the tabular numbers to law by a process of numerical calculation, and of exhibiting the law to the eye without any mathematical operation by the use of curves, we must characterize them as the best specimens of reduction that we have ever seen." Whewell did not grapple with the theory of the tides, that he left—to use his own words— "to bolder and stronger mathematicians." Neglect of the rôle played by theory, especially mathematical theory, in the discovery of truth, is the weak point in Whewell's philosophy. The reduction of observations to empirical laws is only one step in the process and not the most important.
In 1835 Whewell published a pamphlet on mathematics in liberal education—one of the fruits of his philosophical studies. In it he maintains that mathematics is superior to formal logic as an educational discipline, and he discusses faults in teaching by which its benefits are diminished. In reply to the pamphlet an article appeared in the Edinburgh Review, written by Sir William Hamilton, professor of logic and mathematics at Edinburgh, which became notorious as a wild and indiscriminate attack on mathematical work by a person only slightly acquainted with it. In the succeeding number Whewell asks for the titles of some treatises on practical logic and philosophy which the reviewer would recommend for their educational efficiency as rivals to the well-known mathematical treatises. In this tilt between the expounder of the renovated Baconian logic and an official representative of the old scholastic logic, the modern champion came off victorious.
In 1837 Whewell finished the first part of his History of the Inductive Sciences. In this book he notes the epochs when the great steps were made in the principal sciences, the preludes and the sequels of these epochs, and the way in which each step was essential to the next. He attempts to show that in all great inductive steps the type of the process has been the same. The prominent facts of each science are well selected and the whole is written with a vigor of language and a facility of illustration rare in the treatment of scientific subjects. This book was, however, introductory to his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences which appeared three years later; its preparation had indeed gone along with that of the History. In this work Whewell explained the process of induction, the elements of which it consists, what conditions it requires, and what facilities it calls into play. He maintains that, in order to arrive at knowledge or science, we must have besides impressions of sense, certain mental bonds of connection, ideal relations, or ideas. Thus space is the ideal relation on which the science of geometry depends; time, cause, likeness, substance, life, are ideal relations on which other sciences depend. Whewell's philosophy was, in fact, a blending of Kant and Bacon. Bacon recommended that a great collection of facts should be made regarding every branch of human knowledge, and conceived that, when this had been done by common observers, philosophers might extract scientific truth from these facts by the application of a right method. As an example of such an investigation Bacon collected facts bearing on the nature of heat and he arrived at the conclusion "That heat is an expansive, restrained motion, modified in certain ways, and exerted in the smaller particles of the body." This true conclusion was designated by Bacon as a "first vintage," in other words as a guess, but it was regarded by Whewell as an unfortunate conclusion, and he asks "Where is the motion in a red-hot iron?" Whewell made a great advance on the method of Bacon by claiming that ideas are as indispensable as the facts themselves, and that facts are collected in vain except they be duly unfolded by ideas; his defect was that he stopped short at ideas, instead of proceeding to theories and equations.
In 1841 he was president of the British Association for the meeting at Plymouth. His address was characteristic; he compared the Association to Solomon's House, imagined by Bacon in The New Atlantis, the principal difference being that the Association depended upon voluntary support, whereas the philosophers of Solomon's House were to be paid by the state. This House had caves and wells, chambers and towers, baths and gardens, parks and pools, dispensatories and furnaces, and other provisions for experiment and observation. "There were also many classes of persons to conduct the business of the college: merchants of light, mystery men, depredators, pioneers or miners, dowry men or benefactors, inoculators, and finally interpreters of nature who elevate the truths of experiment into general laws which are the highest form of human knowledge." The imaginary teacher who thus described Solomon's House to a traveler also said: "The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes and secret motions of things." But Whewell said: "Knowledge is to be dealt with as the power of interpreting nature and using her forces, not as a power of exciting the feelings of mankind and providing remedies for social evils."
In the interval between the publication of the History and the Philosophy Whewell took a step which may appear erratic, but which in reality was a step toward the accomplishment of his great plan. He accepted the Chair of Moral Philosophy. In a letter he explained that this was done so that he might ultimately extend his inductive principles to some of the metaphysical sciences. He proposed to resign his position as a mathematical tutor and to take a college living in the country. In 1841 he was 47 years old and engaged to be married. But finally, instead of retiring to the country, he bought a house in Cambridge. Shortly after he was married, and within a week he was appointed Master of his college—the foremost scientific college in England. He never occupied the house which he had bought; henceforth his home was Trinity College.
While Master of Trinity he published anonymously the book Plurality of Worlds, to which I referred in the lecture on H. J. S. Smith.[2] Fontenall and Chalmers had maintained the affirmative—that there is a plurality of worlds. Whewell maintained the negative and his book went rapidly through five editions. Brewster in More Worlds than One then took the affirmative side, this title being said to give "the Creed of the Philosopher and the Hope of the Christian." In more recent times Proctor wrote Other Worlds than Ours setting forth the results of scientific researches. Only a few months ago Whewell's old position was maintained in the Fortnightly Review by Mr. Wallace, but in a matter of astronomical reasoning Proctor is a much safer guide than Wallace. Whewell was Master of Trinity College for 25 years; much of his time was taken up by the duties of administration, especially on account of the reform of the college which the Government carried out. His writing during this period was mainly on moral science, but he also brought out the second and third editions of his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. One of his acts was to present a statue of Bacon to Trinity College.
Whewell was noted for his power as a University preacher. He was a man of splendid physical development. A Cambridge legend tells of a prize-fighter who had exclaimed "What a man was lost when they made you a parson!" No doubt his friends imagined him hale and hearty at a very advanced age; but it was not to be. He was fond of horseback exercise and it was this recreation which cut short his career. His horse bolted and threw him, and the injuries were such that he died in a few days. His death occurred on March 6, 1866, in the 72d year of his age. He was twice married, but, having no children, bequeathed the most of his fortune to Trinity College.
He was very fond of argument and in early life, at least, somewhat rough in manner. De Morgan wrote: "The Master of Trinity was conspicuous as a rough customer, an intellectual bully, an overbearing disputant. The character was as well established as that of Sam Johnson, but there was a marked difference. It was said of Johnson that if his pistol missed fire he would knock you down with the butt end of it; but Whewell, in like case, always acknowledged the miss, and loaded again or not as the case might be. . . . I knew him from the time when he was my teacher at Cambridge, more than forty years ago. As a teacher he was anything but dictatorial, and he was perfectly accessible to the proposal of objections. He came into contact with me in his slashing way twice in our joint lives, and on both occasions he acknowledged himself overcome by that change of manner and apologetic mode of continuance which I had seen him employ toward others under like conditions." The great variety of his studies struck some of his contemporaries as peculiar; for instance Sydney Smith said at a breakfast party with reference to Whewell: "That man's forte is science and foible omniscience." There was, however, as we have seen, a method in his madness. In his day he was a Grand Master; in more recent times some have asked what contributions did he make to science. His enduring monument is the Renovation of the Baconian philosophy.
Whewell, like Bacon, set forth a series of aphorisms giving the essentials of his philosophy. I will quote four of these: "I. Man is the interpreter of nature, Science the right interpretation. . . . VIII. The Sensations are the objective, the Ideas are the subjective part of every act of perception or knowledge. XI. Observed facts are connected so as to produce new truths by superinducing upon them an Idea; and such truths are obtained by Induction. XII. Truths once obtained by legitimate Induction are Facts; these facts may be again connected so as to produce higher truths; and thus we advance to successive Generalizations." On the title page of his later books you may find a picture of a hand transmitting a torch to another hand, with a motto of four Greek words underneath. The words are from Plato, who in allusion to an Athenian ceremony says: "Holding torches they will pass them on one to another." Whewell adopted the picture for his coat of arms with the motto lampada tradam.