The Edge of Objectivity: An Essay in the History of Scientific Ideas 9781400883585

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
PREFACE
FOREWORD
INTRO DUCTION TO THE NEW PAPERBACK EDITION
I. FULL CIRCLE
II. ART, LIFE, AND EXPERIMENT
III. THE NEW PHILOSOPHY
IV. NEWTON WITH HIS PRISM AND SILENT FACE
V. SCIENCE AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT
VI. THE RATIONALIZATION OF MATTER
VII. THE HISTORY OF NATURE
VIII. BIOLOGY COMES OF AGE
IX. EARL Y ENERGETICS
X. FIELD PHYSICS
XI. EPILOGUE
BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY
INDEX

Citation preview

THE EDGE OF OBJECTIVITY AN ESSA Y IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENTIFIC IDEAS BY CHARLES COULSTON GILLISPIE With a new introduction by T heodo re M. Porter

* PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1960 by Princeton University Press Copyright © renewed by Princeton University Press, 1988 Preface copyright © 1990 by Princeton University Press Introduction to the New Paperback Edition copyright © 2016 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire, OX20 1TR All Rights Reserved Tenth paperback printing and first printing with the new preface, 1990 First printing of the new paperback edition, with a new introduction, 2016 L.C. Card 60-5748 Cloth ISBN: 978-0-691-07952-3 New Paperback ISBN: 978-0-691-17252-1 Printed in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper ∞ 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

To the Undergraduates of Humanities 304 Who in rg56, I957 1 and rg58 responded with charm and forbearance to the presentation of this history by the spoken word, and who by discussion brought about its evolution to the present form, This reduction of our dialogue to a book is dedicatedin particular appreciation of the engaging complements of curiosity and skepticism which stimulaled even while restraining the authors more immoderate enthusiasms. Princeton, ]une r959

liii

CONTENTS

Il il

PREFACE FOREWORD I NT RO D UC TIO N T O T H E NEW PAPE RB AC K E DI T IO N

I. FULL CIRCLE

II. ART, LIFE, AND EXPERIMENT III. THE NEW PHILOSOPHY

IX

XXV XXVII

3 54 83

IV. NEWTON WITH HIS PRISM AND ~LENTFACE

117

V. SCIENCE AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT

151

VI. THE RATIONALIZATION OF MATTER

202

VII. THE HISTORY OF NATURE VIII . BIOLOGY COMES OF AGE IX . EARL Y ENERGETICS

x.

FIELD PHYSICS

XI. EPILOGUE

26o

3°3 352 406 493

BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSA Y

521

INDEX

545

Preface THE PUBLISHER thinks that The Edge of Objectivity needs a new suit of clothes on its thirtieth birthday, and has asked for a preface to say how the work looks to me now that it has to face up to a seeond generation of readers. Naturally, I am delighted that the book and its author are alive, and apparently weil, and I shall do my best to look at it objectively. 1 The story begins with Galileo and the la w of fallin g bodies. If I were rewriting it now, the opening scenes would still lie in Italy, but farther back, with the enterprises of a Brunelleschi, a Leonardo da Vinci, a Michelangelo, a Vasco da Gama, a Christopher Columbus. Theirs were doings animated by the same instinct that later formed a Galileo, namely, that knowledge finds its purpose in action and action its reason in knowledge, that if a problem can be solved, it should be solv~d, that if something can be done, it should be done. It has come to be my opinion that those behavior patterns, rather than the philosophical influence of Platonic idealism (which should not be eliminated from consideration, however, but only from preeminence) were what made the culture of the Renaissance in Italy the matrix wherein ancient and scholastic learning and technique were converted into modern science and engineering. The persons just narned include two voyagers, for a place in such a history should certainly be made for the expansion 1 I am grateful to my colleagues and friends, Gerald L. Geison and Michael S. Mahoney, for their criticism and suggestions on reading a draft of this preface, which developed from an essay contributed to the Italian translation, Il criterio dell'oggetivitii (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1981).

-[x]-

of the arena of science beyond the spherical triangle bounded in the fifteenth century by the Adriatic, the Portuguese coastline, and the Irish Sea. Clearly, the voyages of discavery then initiated a process of geographical and political dynarnisrn that eventually acquired the vis viva to carry spacecraft to the rnoon. What relates the early voyages and their sequels to the history of science is that they were hearers of the civilization which through science carne to dorninate the world, at least till yesterday, for good and for iii. Further, what differentiates thern from the randorn travels of antiquity, and of other civilizations, which produced only adventure, legend, or cornrnerce, is that they were always invalved with, though not perhaps rnotivated by, the problem of how the world is rnade-in a word (again), with knowledge. It would not be practical for me to write that book now, however, and this one will have to stand on its own feet, within its boundaries of intellectual history. When it was published, in 1960, I made hold at the beginning of the bibliographical essay to express a hope that it rnight help to encourage the developrnent of a professional approach to the history of science. I t has since becorne apparent that my book was an early instance of such a rnovernent already under way, for clearly the growth in range and sophistication of scholarship has proved rnuch greater and rnore rapid than anyone then engaged in the subject could have foreseen. Even rnore clearly, its developrnent has gone far beyond anything that could be attributed to the influence of any particular item in the literature, including this one. Sornething may be said about the juncture, however. Those of us who were then writing on the subject at the outset of our own careers made up the first generation of schalars to devote thernselves wholly to the history of science as a speciaity in itself, one cornparable to art history, for exarnple, or (as I suggested at the time) to philosophy of science. An irnportant literature already existed, of course, going back to

-[ xi ]the eighteenth and even to the seventeenth centuries. In large part, its content was philosophical, and its character programmatic, not to say prescriptive. Examples are the writings of Auguste Comte, Pierre Duhem, and Ernst Mach. Contributions of another sort derived from avocations of scientists themselves-Delambre on the history of astronomy, Chasles on the history of geometry, Sachs on the history of botany. There was also a strong philological element, particularly when the question concerned antiquity. Even George Sarton's work consists mainly of a summons to the subject and the provision of bibliographical tools. All those approaches have their distinctive merits, of course, and their limitations. Only in the time when this book was being written had scholars begun to incorporate the subject into the discipline of professional historiography, and only in the 1950s were formal courses of instruction beginning to be offered in colleges and universities. Students at the undergraduate level came in large part from the sciences and from engineering. It was from such a course oflectures that The Edge ofObjectivity derived. At the same time, or soon after, advanced students in certain graduate programs began to receive training for the doctorate with a view to becoming historians of science on purpose, instead of by personal or professional accidents of the sort that had led their teachers at an early stage of careers already under way to the apportunities that the subject affords. The bibliographical essay also tells how, when those fortunate accidents occurred in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the work of Alexandre Koyre on Galileo offered us a model of what exciting interest the critical history of scientific ideas might hold. 2 I should equally have mentioned Arthur O. Lovejoy for the elegance and charm of The Great Chain of Be2 Etudes galiteennes (Paris, 1939). Humanities Press has published a translation, Galileo Studies (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1978). There is a discussion

-[ xii ]-

ing (1936), hut somehow Koyre imparted a greater impetus to our thinking. So stimulating was his example, and so austere his taste, that one can only regard the influence as fortunate, although there have been critics who thought his mode of treatment over-intellectualized. Perhaps one might apply Comte's law of the three stages of development in science to its historiography: theological in infancy, metaphysical in youth, positive in maturity. If so, Koyre's appeal and its reflection in my book might be assigned to a moment of late youth, in the life of its author and of the discipline. When the notion of reissuing this work arose, the publisher also asked, very reasonably, whether the bibliographical essay might be revised and brought up to date. Embarrassments of two sorts prevent my acceding fully to that request. The first is relatively trivial, and is that the bibliography was never intended to be exhaustive, even of the resources available to scholars in l 960. It pretends to be no more than a critical account of writings that I had found most suggestive in composing the book. That modest purpose would be lost to view in a revision. The seeond difficulty is insurmountable. Such has been the activity of scholarship in the intervening three decades that a review of the literature relevant to the topics discussed would be unmanageable in scale. A bibliographical essay adequate to the work on the career of Newton, for example, would be several times longerthan the chapter treating his life and physics in the pages that follow. Readers wishing to pursue this, or any other topic I discuss, may consult the artides devoted to the appropriate figures in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography (l 970-1 980), which were bas ed on, and often constituted, the latest scholarship at the time of publication. Each provides a full bibliography. The DSB may be supplemented, particularly for the l 980s, by the annual Critical Bibliography issue of the journal /sis. Let me here of Koyre's career and influence in my artide on him, Dictionary of Scientific Biography 7 (1973): 482-490.

-[ xiii ]simply indicate the main seetars in which scholarship has been fruitful in the last thirty years and winnow out certain strategic items from the harvest. A word should first be said about the Middle Ages, even though the period does not fall within the present purview, for the reason that scholarship has tended to smooth the transition between medieval and early modern science. David C. Lindberg has edited a collaborative overview. 3 The inventiveness of European technology is now traced back beyond the Renaissance to innovations of builders and craftsmen in the high Middle Ages. 4 The writings of A. C. Crombie argue that the origin of inductive reasoning and experimental method are to be found in the work of Robert Grosseteste and successors through the fourteenth century. 5 . The study of optics is seen to be continuous from al-Kindi to Kepler. 6 Medieval statics and kinematics have assumed increasing importance both for the conceptualization and mathematicization of phenomena of force and motion. Marshall Ciagett gives a comprehensive history, with extensive selection from the texts in translation, while Edward Grant provides an account of theories of space and the void. 7 Anyone cancerned with these subjects from antiquity through the seventeenth century should have recourse to E. J. Dijksterhuis, for whose book the only right word is magisterial. 8 3 1

Science in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). Lynn T. White, Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford: Ciaren-

don Press, 1963). 5 Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science (Oxford: Ciarendon Press, 1963). 6 David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); see also A. I. Sabra, Theor-ies of Light from Deseartes to Newton (London: Oldbourne, 1967). 7 The Science ofi\IJ.echanics in the i\IJ.iddle Ages (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959); Edward Grant, Muck Ado About Nothing: Theories of Space and Vacuum from the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution (New York: Cambridge U ni versity Press, 1981). 8 The iv[echanization of the World Picture (Oxford: Ciarendon Press, 1961).

- [ XlV ] -

As for the period of the Scientific Revolution, our understanding of Galileo has improved through studies that tend to emphasize the experimental aspects of his work. 9 What may have been the real, and secret, reason for his condemnation by the Church is the central problem of a fascinating study by Pietro Redondi vividly recreating the milieu, scientific, political, and ecclesiastical, wherein Galileo reasoned, quarreled, and wrote. 10 On the mathematical side of the Scientific Revolution, Noel Swerdlow and Otto Neugebauer have collaborated on a treatise explicating Copernican astronomy, while Michael S. Mahoney has explored the significance of Fermat' s career for the background of modern analysis.11 The actual practice of experimental philosophy and its relation to Hobbesian philosophy form the subject of Simon Shaffer and Steven Shapin. Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Erudition and its conceptual transformation is the theme of Peter R. Dear's study of Mersenne. 12 Important for this period, and not only for British science, is the publication of the correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, Secretary of the Royal Society . 13 A topic that receives virtually no attention in my book, the alleged significance for science of magic and hermeticism, has attracted extensive and also intense interest, particularly dur9 Ludovico Geymonat, Galileo Galilei (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965); and, especially, the edition of the complete text of the Discourses on Two New Sciences, Discorsi e dimonstrazioni matematiche, intorno a due nuove scienze ... , ed. Adriano Carugo and Ludovico Geymonat (Turin, 1958). 10 Galileo: Heretic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). 11 Mathematical Astronomy in Copernicus's De Revolutionibus (New York: Springer Verlag, 1984); The Mathematical Career of Pierre de Fermat, 16011665 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, l 973). 12 Shaffer and Shapin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, l 985); Dear, Mersenne and the Learning of the Schools (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). 13 A. R. and M. B. Hall, eds., Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, 13 vols. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, l 965-86).

-(XV)-

ing the revival of a fascination with the occult and with alternative ways of seeing nature in the countercultural rnavements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. That, to be fair, was not the only reason for the trend. The theme of winning power over nature occupies authors of books as various as Paolo Rossi's admirable study of the origins of Francis Bacon's philosophy, Keith Thomas's book on the decline of magic in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, Frances Yates's pioneering research on hermeticism, most notably in a work on Giordano Bruno, and Charles Webster's account of the common understanding of science in England during the period of the Puritan Revolution. 14 Medical elements are emphasized in scholarship devoted to alchemy and to the Paracelsists, whereas Harvey has been rescued, so to say, from Descartes, who made him a mechanistic physiologist, and restared to Aristotle. 15 Harvey's followers in Oxford form the subject of a book that peoples a research tradition with real investigators, rather than simply invoking the importance of the role they play in the making of science. 16 Newton himselfhas not escaped exploration of the alchemical writings and utterances recorded in his manuscripts, nor the attentions of psychobiography. 17 The signal matter, how11 Paolo Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968); Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribners, 1971); Charles Webster, The Great lnstauration (London: Duckworth, 1975); Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), and The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 1972). 15 Allen G. Debus, The English Paracelsists (London: Oldbourne, 1965); The Chemical Philosophy, 2 vols. (New York: Science Press, 1977); Science, Medicine and Society in the Renaissance: Essays to Honor Walter Pagel, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1972); Walter Page!, William Harvey's Biological ldeas (Basel: Karger, 1967). 16 Robert G. Frank, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists: Scientific Ideas and Sociallnteractions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). 17 Betty J. T. Dobbs, Foundations of Newton's Alchemy (Cambridge: Cam-

-[ xvi ]ever, is Richard S. Westfall's superb biography, comprehensive both scientifically and personall y, N ever at Rest. 18 Newton's unpublished correspondence and mathematical papers are now available in two complementary and splendid editions.19 In addition, l. Bernard Cohen has written a history of the production of the Principia and edited a variorum edition that is surely definitive, a project that he bagan in coliaboration with Alexandre Koyre. 2° Finally, Alan Shapiro has published the Optical Leetures of 1670-1672 in the first volume of a projected edition of Newton's writings on optics. 21 It is fair to say that critics have consistently found the most suggestive chapter of my book to be the fifth, dealing with Science and the Enlightenment. 22 The theme of tension between a rationalist and a romantic mode of reaction to the role of science in culture was in some sense recapitulated, and its psychological reality thus confirmed, by the tendency among cultural radieals in the 1970s to see science not as a liberation from ignorance and superstition, hut as a force set against humanity, a disease of western civilization. It was curious that, although Marxism has always represented itself as the extension of science to the recognition of laws of historical development in society, the New Left then commingled a bridge University Press, 1975); Frank Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1968). 1s New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980. 19 H. W. Turnbull, J. F. Scott, and A. R. Hall, eds., The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, 7 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959-77); D. T. Whiteside, ed., The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton, 8 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967-80). 2o Introduction to Newton's Principia; and Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, The Third Edition (1726) with Variant Readings (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1971; 2 vols., 1972). 21 The Optical Papers of Isaac Newton, vol. l (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 22 Thomas L. Hankins has published a full-seale treatment, Science and the Enligklenment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

-[ xvii ]political with cultural hostility to exact science (although not, of course, to natural history, ecology, or organismic biology). In these respects, its position was identical with that of the Far Right in Weimar Germany. 23 This instance of an emotional touching of the extremes compounds the paradox just mentioned, for in practice the resentment turned on the political role of science. The Marxist, and indeed the liberal, sense that science pertains historically to progressivism, while telling against conservatism and tradition, is widely shared. The notion does have a sociologica! foundation, hut there is no basis for it either in political implications of the laws of nature, for they have none, or in the political actions of the professional community of science. 24 Whatever the private opinions of scientists, their civic role has normally been to provide the governing authorities with powers, while drawing authority and resources from the state for science. The relation of scientists to the state in modern times has been one of partnership rather than partisanship, whether for or against programs of particular political parties. In my view, this consideration is further evidence that science is intrinsically relevant to means and indifferent to the choice of ends. To return now to my book, its next topic, the chemical revolution, has been reexamined in an issue of the recently revived companion to !sis, the monographic journal Osiris. 25 The background in practical chemistry, and particularly in pharmaceutical operations, was the subject of im portant ear23 Paul Forman, "Weimar Culture, Causality, and Quantum Theory, 19181927," Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 3 (1971): 1-115. 2 " I have discussed these matters in two essays, "Remarks on Social Selection as a Facto r in the Progressivism of Science," American Scientist 56 ( 1968): 439-450, and "The Liberating Inftuence of Science in History," in Aspects of American Liberty, Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, no. 118 (Philadelphia, 1977). 25 "The Chemical Revolution: Essays in Reinterpretation," ed. Arthur Donovan, Osiris 4 (1988).

-[ xviii ]lier work by Henry Guerlac and others, while Frederic L. Holmes has published an account of the research on respiration that occupied Lavoisier in his last years. 26 The Academie des Sciences in Paris has resumed publication of the long-interrupted correspondence of Lavoisier. 27 Worthy studies of Joseph Priestley and John Dalton have also appeared, and the theory of elective affinities has begun to be appreciated for its place in the developing comprehension of chemical bonding, as has the crystallographic model of the molecule. 28 As for nineteenth-century biology, it is a limitation that the conception of this book made no place for subjects other than those relating to evolutionary theory. In part, at least, that choice reftected the state of scholarship at the time it was written. In the intervening three decades, interest has continued to hear on evolutionary questions, both Lamarekian and Darwinian.29 Ernst Mayr's, The Growth of Biological Thought is a 26 Henry Guerlac, Lavoisier, the Crucial Year (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1961), and Essays and Papers in the History of Modem Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); F. L. Holmes, Lavoisier and the Chemistry of Life (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985 ). 27 Oeuvres de Lavoisier, Correspondance, fascicu1e 4 ( 1784-86), ed. Michelle Goupil (Editions Belin, 1986). 2s D.S.L. Cardwell, ed., John Dalton and the Progress of Science (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968); Robert E. Schofield, ed., A Scientific Autobiography ofJoseph Priestley (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1963); Trevor H. Levere, Affinity and Matter: Elements of Chemical Philosophy, 1800-1865 (Oxford: Ciarendon Press, 1971); Seymour H. Mauskopf, "Crystals and Compounds," Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 66, part 3 (Philadelphia, 1976). 29 Richard W. Burckhardt, Jr., The Spirit of System: Lamarek and Evolutionary Biology (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1977); Goulven Laurent, Paleontologie et Evolution en France, 1800-1860 (Paris: Comite des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, 1987), with a preface by myself; Michael Ghiselin, The Triumph of the Darwinian Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); David Kohn, ed., The Darwinian Heritage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).

- [ XIX ) -

masterful treatment by a leader in modern evolutionary biology.30 Illuminating in a different way are certain studies that are not so much about the formation of theory as about the manner in which science was actually made, with respect particularly to the resolution of controversy in British geology and in German biology, to relations between physiology and medicine, and to the background of genetics and molecular biology. 31 The opening paragraphs of the chapter on nineteenth-century physics deplore the paucity of the secondary literature. That situation has been much repaired, particularly in the last ten years. Enrico Bellone, A World on Paper, deals philosophically and quizzically with the central issues of physics in the framework of a Second Scientific Revolution. 32 Studies of Coulomb, Malus, Ampere, Faraday, Maxwell, and Kelvin have appeared. 33 A new edition of Maurice Daumas's Arago

° Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press,

1982. Martin J. S. Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985); James A. Secord, Controversy in Victorian Geology: The Gambrian-Silurian Dispute (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Meckanies in Nineteenth-Century German Biology (Dordrecht and Boston: Reidel, 1982); John E. Lesch, Science and Medicine in France: The Emergence of Experimental Physiology, 1790-1855 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1984); Mirko D. Grmek, Raisonnement experimental et recherches toxicologigues chez Claude Bernard (Geneva: Droz, 1973); Frederic L. Holmes, Claude Bernard and Animal Chemistry (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1974); Gerald L. Geison, Michael Foster and the Cambridge School of Physiology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); Robert C. Olby, The Path to the Double Helix (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1974). 32 Translatian of 1l M ondo di Carta (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1980). Bellone's essay on the role of time in the laws of physics is equally provocative: l Nomidel Tempo (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1989). 33 C. Stewart Gillmor, Coulomb (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971); Andre Chappert, Etienne Louis Malus (Paris: Vrin, 1977); Christine Blonde!, Ampere et la Creation de l'electrodynamique (Paris: Comite des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, 1982); L. Pearce Williams, Michael Faraday (New York: Basic Books, 1965); John Hendry,james Clerk Maxwell and the Theory of 3

31

-[XX ) -

has been issued. 34 Jed Buchwald treats the development of the wave theory of light in the early part of the century and electromagnetic theory at the end of it, while Stephen G. Brus h gives a history of the kinetic theory of gases. 35 Peter Galison, in his book How Experiments End, b rings the current preoccupation with the fine-grained activities of producing science to the historiography of physics. 36 Thomas S. Kuhn's, Black Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity is a step-bystep analysis of how Max Planck arrived at the theory from which quantum mechanics took its departure. 37 Finally, Abraham Pais has contributed a physicist's biography of Einstein, the publication of whose papers is at very Iong last under way. 38 That an excellent history of the science in America should treat rather the profession than the content of physics may be taken as an instance of a change in emphasis that has affected our entire discipline. 39 A !arge share of attention has shifted from the interna! history of science in its ideas and concepts to the externa! history of science in its own instituthe E leetro-M agnetic Field (Bristol and Boston: A. Hilger, 1986); Crosbie Smith and M. Norton Wise, Energy and Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 3 '1 Paris: Editions Belin, 1987; edited by Emmanuel Grison, with a preface by Jean Dhombres and a postface by myself.

'"J ed Z. Buchwald, The Rise of the W ave Theory of Light, and From Maxwell to Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989 and 1986, respectively), the latter being very technical in the treatment; Stephen G. Brush, The Kind of Motion We Call Heat (Amsterdam and New York: North-Holland, 1986). 36 Chicago: U n iversity of Chicago Press, 1987. 37 Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. SR Subtie Is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, vol. l, The Early Years, !879-1902 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), and vol. 2, The Swiss Years: Writings, 1900-1909 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 39 Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists (New York: Knopf, 1978).

-[ xxi ]tions and its relation to society. Preoccupation with institutions was thought antiquarian and outmoded at the time my book was written. It has become respectable, and even central, largely through the influence of Thomas S. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which turns on the question of how the practice of science affects its content. 40 Beyond that, or rather around it, the social history of science gathered strength from the heightening of social consciousness throughout the historical profession since the late 1960s, while its political history appeals to a related awareness of the importance that science has come to hold as a force in the world, both in the domestic affairs of nations and in international relations. In my view, instances of this tendency that amount to a kind of sociopolitical reductionism may go too far. It would be absurd to deny that science is no longer a purely intellectual pursuit (that it ever was is a myth), or to shut one's eyes to the enormous influence it exerts in education, the economy, politics, diplomacy, and warfare. But it appears to me that its role is to be studied in the intersections between technical and civic cancerns, or between interna! and externa! factors, and not by investing the body of scientific knowled ge with the attributes of politics or the structure of society at large. That science partakes of those attributes in its organization is an incidental rather than an intrinsic aspect of its nature. Such, at any rate, is the approach of a book of my own, Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime, which treats a context wherein science and the national state tookon the importance for each other that they haveheldin rapidly increasing measure ever sinceY In closing, perhaps I ought to say a word about the theme of the present book. It incurred some criticism at the time of publication for the lack of a clear definition of objectivity. 4

° Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

·Il

1962. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.

-[ xxii ]Since then it has met with some disfavor on the (not altogether consistent) grounds that, whatever objectivity means, no such attitude is attainable in this world of culturally conditioned existence and conflicting ideologies. As to the former charge, I have to admit that there is some justice to it, and would plead only that it is characteristic of works of history that, unlike works of philosophy, they may be more convincing in recreating parts or aspects of their subjects than they are in point of the theory or argument that animated their author at the time of writing. If I were writing this book again, even as a purely intellectual history, I would not insist so patently on objectivity as the common feature of scientific theories. I would be more inclined to use terms such as externalization of nature to describe the central cultural tendency of science, and alienation to evoke its consequence in sensibility. But though I hope I might write a subder book, I do not believe it would be a different one thematically. It still seems to me that science has exacted a price, and the price is that anthropomorphic considerations of goal, purpose, suitability, and wish be eliminated from its formulations and statements. I still think that the intellectual history of science finds its sequence or direction in successive stages of that sometimes painful process. For my taste, moreover, the price is worth paying. On the one hand, I also remain persuaded that science has been a potent, if not omnipotent, weapon in the battle against ignorance, superstition, dogma, and material deprivation. However two-edged the sword has felt since the discovery of nuclear fission, and however leaden a life preserver amid the rising tide of industrial pollution, respect for the human mind still requires us to believe that, though knowledge is dangerous, ignorance is more so, and that abating the ills accompanying science requires better-directed science rather than a retreat or a regression. For, on the other hand, I remain unpersuaded by the sort of statement I have heard from the lips of a noted anthropologist, to the effect that it

-[ xxiii ]makes as much sense to say, "Magic works," as it does to say, "Science works." The statement is one that might be subscribed to in a current school of interpretation-social constructionist as it is usually called-on the grounds that it is not by the nature of the world itself that we are given any reason for preferring one representation of its processes or structure over another, the Newtonian over the Aristotelian, the Darwinian over the creationist, the quantum-mechanical over the classical or relativistic, the germ theory of disease over the humoraL Like Taoism or Stoicism, or the beliefs about natural phenomena harbored by the N a vajos or an African tribe in another century, these constructions are taken to be merely epiphenomena of a particular culture serving the purposes, economic or political, of some dominant group in certain circumstances, and it is by their sociocultural works that they are to be known and judged. I would cite two sorts of evidence, not discussed explicitly in my book, to support the contrary proposition that science, though undoubtedly produced by individual persons and groups of persons in a social environment, has the capacity to transcend personality and circumstance in its effect within the historical process. The first has to do with the relation of science to the persons who create it, where there is a contrast to be made with the mode of creation of art and literature. It is obvious that Hamlet, the Gioconde, and the Mass in B-Minor would not exist if Shakespeare, Leonardo, and Bach had never lived. It is different with science, even the greatest science. The planets would still move subject to the inversesquare law of gravity if Newton had fulfilled predietians at his premature birth and died in infancy. Although no one else would then have written the Principia, it could be argued convincingly that others would then or soon have written down in one way or another everything in it that really mattered to classical physics. Much the same is surely true of nearly all the great contribudons to modern science. No other evidence is needed beyond the well-known experience

- ( XXIV ] -

of virtually simultaneous discovery of almost all the important laws and of a host of minor phenomena and effects. It is all very well to say that convergent social forces are the explanation of simultaneous discovery, hut they do have to converge on something. Moreover, although the introduction of a piece of science will hear the mark of its creator-Lavoisier's darity of mind, Maxwell' s playful imagination, Galileo's haughty sense of drama-the personal element that went into the original formulatian makes no difference to the practice of workaday science once it has left the hand of its creator, which is immediately. The personalities of science are full of interest, hut it is a human, not a scientific, interest. The discavery itself must be verifiable and workable by any qualified person, if it is to be science at all. So it is with the cultural context of discovery. I also remain persuaded that from the fifteenth or sixteenth century until very recently, science was a creation of European civilization, and of it alone among all the others that have seen the world. Tagether with the technology that attends it, science is, moreover, the one· aspect of western civilization that the others have wanted to adopt. They have never wanted our political or social systems, our religions or philosophies, our arts or letters. Beginning with the Japanese, they have wanted science, and they can acquire it and operate it as well as we do in order to liberate themselves from constraints of many sorts, including us. Thus, though created out of personality and in culture, science is not then bound by personality or culture. It is im personal and universal. I can think of nothing else of which that may be said. Perhaps it is a reflection that justifies describing science as objective, a body of knowledge made by persons, hut made about the world and not about themselves. There are other ways to find out about ourselves. Princeton, New Jersey March 1990

A passage from the Inaugural Leeture given by James Clerk Maxwell as Professor of Experimental Physics in the University of Cambridge, in October r87r, by way of

F01?g WO 'l\!} ''WE ARE NOT HERE TO DEFEND LITERARY AND HISTORICAL

We admit that the proper study of mankind is man. But is the student of science to be withdrawn from the study of man, or cut off from every noble feeling, so long as he lives in intellectual fellowship with men who have devoted their lives to the discovery of truth, and the results of whose enquiries have impressed themselves on the ordinary speech and way of thinking of men who never heard their names? Or is the student of history and of man to omit from his consideration the history of the origin and diffusion of those ideas which have produced so great a difference between one age of the world and another'! It is true that the history of science is very different from the science of history. We are not studying or attempting to study the working of those blind forces which, we are told, are operating on crowds of obscure people, shaking principalities and powers, and compelling reasonable men to bring events to pass in an order laid down by philosophers. The men whosenames are found in the history of science are not mere hypothetical constituents of a crowd, to be reasoned upon on ly in masses. W e recognize t hem as men like ourselves, and their actions and thoughts, being more free from the influence of passion, and recorded more accurately than those of other men, are all the better materials for the study of the calmer parts of human nature. But the history of science is not restricted to the enumerSTUDIES.

-[ xxvi ]-

ation of successful investigations. It has to tell of unsuccessful enquiries1 and to explain why same of the ablest men have failed to find the key of knowledgel and how the reputation of others has only given a firmer faoting to the errors inta which they fell. The history of the development 1 whether normal or abnormal 1 of ideas is of all subjects that in which we 1 as thinking men 1 lake the deepest interest. But when the action of the mind passes out of the intellectual stage} in which truth and error are the alternatives} inta the more violently emotional states of anger and passion 1 malice and envy} fury and madness; the student of science1 though he is obliged to recognise the powerful influence which these wild forces have exercised on mankind1 is perhaps in same measure disqualified from pursuing the study of this part of human nature. But then how few of us are capable of deriving profit from such studies. W e cannot en ter inta full sympathy with these lower phases of our nature without losing same of that antipathy to t hem w h ich is ou r surest safeguard against a reversion to a meaner type 1 and we gladly return to the company of those illustrious men who by aspiring to noble ends1 whether intellectual or practical} have risen above the region of storms inta a clearer atmosphere1 where there is no misrepresentation of opinion} nor ambiguity of expression 1 but where one mind comes inta clasest contact with another at the point where bath approach nearest to the truth.JJ

Introduction to the New Paperback Edition HISTORIANS are better than their theories, Charles Gillispie would often say, instancing, perhaps, Elie Hale;y's thesis drat Methoclism had inmmnized England against revolutionary Jacobirllsrrl. Gillispie so adrnired this French historian of the English people that, acting on a suggestion of his gradnate advisor, he published an essay on I-IalCvy in 1950, one year in advance of his first book, Genesis and Geology. Tl1e "ult:itnate tritnnph of historicalrnethod," he wrote, is ''to find a rueaning vvhich gives significance m1d unily to one-'s work m1d which can be rnodified out of the work it,elf. Whether an interpretative hypothesis is 'tiue' or not is less irnportm1t than whether it is honestly corne by and fmirl\rl." 'l1re author of T/te Edge of ObjectitJity never put scare quotes arotmd scientific trnth. History was for him more forgi;ing and more personal. H e had majored in chemistry during the Depression) he said, as a matter of ~'duty," for the sake of a career. '"History was n1y joy, however." \\bile insisting on thorough research and dose attention to sotrrces) he recognized in history a need for interpretation and emphasis that science seemed to clisallow. As a writer, Charles Gillispie never hid behind his subject matter. 1 He and Thomas Ktdm were colleagues at Princeton from about 1963 lo 1979. He recalled later drat d1ey saw eye lo eye on all the academic as well as "lmnmn" and '"practical'-' mat1 Charles Coulston Cillispie, "The \Vork of Elie Halevy: A Critical Appreciation," Jounwl of Modern History, 20 (1950), 232-249, p. 244; Gillispie, "Apologia pro "\'ita Sua," !sis., 90 (1999), Supplement, SS.4.S94, p. 584. See also Gillispie, "A Professional Lik in tl1e History of Science," in Gillispie, Es..sa:ys and Rroiews in History and HL~f(fi'Y o{ Science (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2004), ix-xix. For a full bibliography, see Jed Z. Buchwald, ed., A Master of Scientilu History (N e w York: Springt:r, 2012), 3-13.

-l xxviii ]ters associated wid1 n1a.naging a teaching program. There was just one matter on which they disagreed, he said, of litde consequence for d1eir personal or collegial relations. It cancerned merely '"the fimdamental nattrre of science. "2 That disagrcement is most palpable in the books d1eywmte just before Kulm joined him in the new Princeton program in History and Philosophy of Science. Gillispie framed his Edge of Objectivity as a positivist narrative of d1e ascent of d1e sciences in sequence to objectivity: first, rnechcullcs or physics, d1en chenllstry, then biology·. That book llnpressed general readers, as well as schalars and scientists frorn a range of disciplines, cmd served students and their teachers as a (dauntingly) high-leve! introduction to the history of scientific ideas. Kuhn's Stru.cture ofSdentijic Reuolutions (1962), one of d1e most influential academic books of the twentieth cennny, n1ade a conscious break with positivisn1. H e said that scientists accept "paradigTI1S" ahnost as dogtna, and that the evidence can never be sufficient to require a transition to a new one. Kuhn never wrapped up an episode by declaring, as Gillispie does, that Diderot's or Goethe' s position was wrong for science. But then he did not emphasize such characters at all. Gillispie, who enjoyed such provocations, son1etimes exaggerated his intdlectual differences with Kulm. 'l11ey had begm1 disenssing intellectual possibilities for history of science as a field of knowledg-e in 1946, when they were Harvatd graduate students. I~oth favored a natt.rralistic account of science growing outvvard frorn insecure roots rather than being dra~n to a telos of inesislible truth. I~oth found essential inspiration in the vvrilings of the philosophical historian A.lexandre KoyTC, whose deep engagernent with dassic scientific texts als o inspired rnany of their colleagues. In the l970s. such vvork began to be criticized as ~'internalist," which was not quite accurate) since KoyTe and his athniters emphasized intellectual themes that 2

Gillispie, "Apologia,'' p. 590.

-[ :xcxix ]linked natural science to wide philosophical traditions, notably Platonism. By 1980, both Gillispie and Kulm worried that the new generation of schalars was not engaging seriously with the content of the science. They shared, fmally, a degree of idealism) insisting on the need of science to achieve conceptual coherence before empirical results could have much definite meaning. TheEdge of Objectit•ity s tresses tlris point from the very first page, where Galileo is quoted gi;ing a correct forrnula for fhlling bodies on the basis of incorrect preullses that even contradiet his law. \'v'hen, finally, Galileo understood howtograsp 1notion vvith Inadleinatics, it was a t:Iue "rrmtation of ideas. "3

In later work, Gillispie etnphasized the intera.ctions of science with the state and its technologies. Inspired by Iris participarian as preceptor in a leeture course by his senior colleague R. R. Palmer, he larmched a research project on science and the French Revolution, wirich by 1960 was weil undetway. The scope and density of archival research for that project, cultninaring in two large vohnnes on Science and Polity in France, remain unmatched in the history of science. 4 Bythen he regarded his focus on ideas as tnuch too narrow, and he says so in the new intwduction, written in 1990. He wrote the original text of The Edg~ of Objectivity from printed materials, growing out of an undergraduate comse that he lirs t taught in 1956. His topics were already farniliar ones, even if real historical scholarship was lacking f(>r rmmy of them. vVhile a few reviewers delighted, as acadernic reviewers often do, in poinling out little lapses, a fair-rninded scholar vvill be irnpressed, even now, by his knowledge of the sources for three centmi.es of science. I-lis prose, ,,i:Uch is nothing if not brilliant, does not rrH:~rely render the science corr1prehensible, hut evokes the activilies, arnbitions, and 3 Gillispie, "Thomas S. Kuhn: The Nature of Science," Science (l-1 Dec. 1962), rqninted in G-illispie, Essays and Reriews, 341-349. 4 Science and Fotity in France at the End o{ the Old Regime (Princeton: Princeton UnNersity Press, 1980)_: Sciena and Polity in_Pmnce: The Rcoolutionary and Napokonic Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 200-1).

-{ x:xcx lachievernents of these scientific rnen (there are no women) in arresting images. The book is organized by dre fmward leaps of ilie objectivizing edge, from Galileo's mechanics to Newton' s physics, ilien ilie chemistiy of Priesdey, Lavoisier, and Dalton and dre biology of Darwin and Mendel. Gillispie finishes wid1 a survey of developrnents in nineteend1-century physics d1at set d1e stage for yet anod1er leap into mathernatical abstraction, Einstein's relativity. As an interpretive hypothesis, dre relendess advance of objectivity provides a plot Iine, mdimentary bu t comprehensive, connecting developrnents frmn diverse fields of science. Was that all he asked of it? Clearly not Since science is about drings radler iliarr values, he proposed, the history of science may extend ilie defmiteness of its subject even to slippery and elusive concepts such as romanticisrn. He exposed Locke's psychology as resting on a basic fallacy, ilie aspiration to analyze objectively what is only experienced subjectively, and boldly condemned ilie whole pmject of social science as vitiated by dre characteristic detennination of its practitioners to do good. He even otiered retrospective cmmsel to biologists, who, with d1e benefit of proper history, nright have heeded dre lesson of Dalton's atmnic chernisu·y and seized on Mendel' s genetic atomism at the first oppmtunity. 5 J-lis insistence on the absolute neutralily of objective science tnight in other hands lead to a muralive \'\i.thout chm·acter. I1ovvever, Gillispie's enchantinent vvith the backgn)lmds, arnbitions. and personalilies of his protagonists shines through eveq·where. Tl1e ''cruel edge of objectivily," in real lifi::, wears rnany rnasks and is shaped by differences in the tnarmers m1d methods of ilie scientists. He credits the lirs t big step in ilie advance of objectivily, the tnathernatization of tnotion, partly to Kepler, whom Arthur Koestler (in The Sleejlwalkm) had depicted as a mystic hero. Gillis pi e identified the spirit of true science 5

Gillispie, Edge, pp. 164, 154, 335. He reaflinned .its basic thesis in 2004 in Es5ay5 and Rt:r)itws, 405-411, p p. 409-411.

"fF~n:voi,"

-[ :xcxxi ]with Galileo's "Latin genius," the "dear light of Ilalian classi-

cism," which Koestler demonized. Koesder, to Gillispie, was a literary figur e who (d1erefore) utter! y misrmderstood science, yet Kepler's Germallic mysticism, which Koesder adrnired, is depicted most engagingly in TheEdge of Objecti·,•ity as weiL Gillispie's most 1nemorable pas de deux of scientific advance juxtaposes the cool, closed Lavoisier-cmnpetent, organized, and precise, but too inflexible to adjust to surprises-wid1 the modest, confiding, spontaneous Priestley. T'ogether d1ey created a new chenllstry of gases and brought dus science to the point of quantification, enshrined in Lavoisier's textbook. Back in d1e north of England, Jolm Dalton with his atoms achieved the denouement, objective d1enllstry. Stories like these do more tl1an spice up a narrative; they represent science as multifarious and perhaps even as dependent on human heterogeneity, widlin reas on. Gillispie put particular emphasis on national diiferences, and seems sometitnes to essentialize then1. He also insisted on science as distinctively European. In one notorious passage, he expresses anxiety about the consequences when nations outside '' our'' culture acquire its technological frnits, as they must Much of dUs is difficult to square with the image of science as su·ict, unyielding, and irreLrievably mnoral Just what. if notsorne fonn of tnora1 cotntnittnent, would ''European" science in the hands of the Chinese or Eg)l)Lians be tnissing:,) H e does not say. Buthe does identify the dang