Research Category

Visions of Science: Humphry Davy

My Christmas gift this year was James A. Secord’s recent Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age (2014). After reading Secord’s magisterial Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (2000) earlier in the year, I have looked forward to […]

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The Bodleian Library: A Protestant Arsenal against Catholicism

The other day I began reading the introduction to Anthony Grafton’s Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (2009). This work is a collection of essays, originally published between 1983 and 2008, on the nature of scholarship. Grafton covers a wide-ranging set of topics, from The Republic of Letters to Google’s […]

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Signs of the Times

Thomas Carlyle’s (1795-1881) review essay, “Signs of the Times,” first appeared in the Edinburgh Review in 1829. Rather than reviewing the books listed—namely, William Alexander MacKinnon’s On the Rise, Progress, and Present State of Public Opinion (1829), Edward Iriving’s The Last Days: A Discourse on the Evil Character of These Our Times (1829), and the […]

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Contesting Mosaic Geology

In the April, 1824 issue of the British Critic—a popular quarterly journal, founded in 1793 by conservative and High Churchmen, and supported by the Anglican orthodox group known as “Hackney Phalanx”—there is an anonymous and blistering review of Granville Penn’s A Comparative Estimate of the Mineral and Mosaical Geologies (1822) and A Supplement to the […]

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Philosophical Myths of the Fall

I came across a fascinating book today. I originally found it in a footnote in Peter Harrison’s The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (2007). The book in question is Stephen Mulhall’s Philosophical Myths of the Fall  (2005). He begins with a long quote from Genesis 3, the story of mankind’s willful rebellion […]

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The New Theodicy of the Scientific Naturalists

I have come across several references to Frank Turner’s “The Secularization of the Social Vision of British Natural Theology” recently, so I decided to read it myself. The essay is part of the collection of essays under the heading “Shifting Boundaries” in his Contesting Cultural Authority (1993). In this essay Turner traces the “demise” of […]

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Progress as a Secularized Eschatology

Nineteenth-century Victorian scientific naturalists had a particular conception of scientific and social progress. In his “The Progress of Science 1837-1887” (1887), Thomas Henry Huxley argued that a “revolution” had taken place, both politically and socially, in the modern world. In brief, scientific progress came with the adoption of a naturalistic approach to studying nature. Any […]

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Phrenology, the Origins of Scientific Naturalism, and Herbert Spencer’s “Religion of the Heart”

Over the weekend I came across several interconnecting books and themes. The first was John van Wyhe’s excellent Phrenology and the Origins of Victorian Scientific Naturalism (2004), which traces the origins of scientific naturalism back to British phrenology. In this book Wyhe takes the “social interests” approach, resting on the “common-sense assumption,” he writes in […]

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Scientific Epistemology as Moral Narrative

The latest hierology is hitting the big screen in November, director James Marsh’s The Theory of Everything.  Based on the trailer, the film sets out to tell the “love story” between world-renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking and his (first) wife, Jane Wilde. Nevermind that Wilde and Hawking divorced in 1995, after years of what she has […]

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The Principle of Uniformity and its Theological Foundations

According to John Herschel, Charles Lyell, and William Whewell, the concept of “uniformity” of nature is the defining feature of science. Nature’s “inflexible order,” its “uniform sequences  and laws,” led many nineteenth-century scientists to reject miracles and divine intervention. According to Lyell, By degrees, many of the enigmas of the moral and physical world are […]

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