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

THE EDGE OF OBJECTIVITY

AN ESSAY IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENTIFIC IDEAS

BY CHARLES COULSTON GILLISPIE

With a new introduction by Theodore 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

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To the Undergraduates of Humanities 304 Who in 1956, 1957, and 1958 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 dedicated—in particular appreciation of the engaging complements of curiosity and skepticism which stimulated even while restraining the author’s more immoderate enthusiasms.

Princeton, June 1959

CONTENTS

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 second generation of readers. Naturally, I am delighted that the book and its author are alive, and apparently well, and I shall do my best to look at it objectively.¹

The story begins with Galileo and the law of falling 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 solved, 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 named include two voyagers, for a place in such a history should certainly be made for the expansion 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 discovery then initiated a process of geographical and political dynamism that eventually acquired the vis viva to carry spacecraft to the moon. What relates the early voyages and their sequels to the history of science is that they were bearers of the civilization which through science came to dominate the world, at least till yesterday, for good and for ill. Further, what differentiates them from the random travels of antiquity, and of other civilizations, which produced only adventure, legend, or commerce, is that they were always involved with, though not perhaps motivated by, the problem of how the world is made—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 bold at the beginning of the bibliographical essay to express a hope that it might help to encourage the development of a professional approach to the history of science. It has since become apparent that my book was an early instance of such a movement already under way, for clearly the growth in range and sophistication of scholarship has proved much greater and more rapid than anyone then engaged in the subject could have foreseen. Even more clearly, its development has gone far beyond anything that could be attributed to the influence of any particular item in the literature, including this one.

Something 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 scholars to devote themselves wholly to the history of science as a specialty in itself, one comparable to art history, for example, or (as I suggested at the time) to philosophy of science. An important literature already existed, of course, going back to 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 of lectures that The Edge of Objectivity 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 opportunities 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 Koyré 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 Being (1936), but somehow Koyré 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, Koyré’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 1960. 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 second 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 longer than 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 articles devoted to the appropriate figures in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography (1970–1980), which were based 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 1980s, by the annual Critical Bibliography issue of the journal Isis. Let me here simply indicate the main sectors 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 Clagett 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 concerned 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

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 during the revival of a fascination with the occult and with alternative ways of seeing nature in the countercultural movements 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 restored 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 himself has not escaped exploration of the alchemical writings and utterances recorded in his manuscripts, nor the attentions of psychobiography.¹⁷ The signal matter, however, is Richard S. Westfall’s superb biography, comprehensive both scientifically and personally, Never at Rest.¹⁸ Newton’s unpublished correspondence and mathematical papers are now available in two complementary and splendid editions.¹⁹ In addition, I. 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 collaboration with Alexandre Koyré.²⁰ Finally, Alan Shapiro has published the Optical Lectures 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 radicals in the 1970s to see science not as a liberation from ignorance and superstition, but 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 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 sociological foundation, but 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 Isis, the monographic journal Osiris.²⁵ The background in practical chemistry, and particularly in pharmaceutical operations, was the subject of important earlier 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 Académie 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 reflected the state of scholarship at the time it was written. In the intervening three decades, interest has continued to bear on evolutionary questions, both Lamarckian and Darwinian.²⁹ Ernst Mayr’s, The Growth of Biological Thought is a 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, Ampère, Faraday, Maxwell, and Kelvin have appeared.³³ A new edition of Maurice Daumas’s Arago 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. Brush gives a history of the kinetic theory of gases.³⁵ Peter Galison, in his book How Experiments End, brings 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-by-step 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 long 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 large share of attention has shifted from the internal history of science in its ideas and concepts to the external history of science in its own institutions 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 concerns, or between internal and external factors, and not by investing the body of scientific knowledge 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 took on the importance for each other that they have held in rapidly increasing measure ever since.⁴¹

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. 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 subtler 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 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 Navajos 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 inverse-square law of gravity if Newton had fulfilled predictions 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 contributions to modern science. No other evidence is needed beyond the well-known experience 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, but they do have to converge on something. Moreover, although the introduction of a piece of science will bear the mark of its creator—Lavoisier’s clarity of mind, Maxwell’s playful imagination, Galileo’s haughty sense of drama—the personal element that went into the original formulation 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, but it is a human, not a scientific, interest. The discovery 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. Together 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 impersonal 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, but made about the world and not about themselves.

There are other ways to find out about ourselves.

Princeton, New Jersey

March 1990

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’oggetività (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1981).

² Études galiléennes (Paris, 1939). Humanities Press has published a translation, Galileo Studies (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1978). There is a discussion of Koyré’s career and influence in my article on him, Dictionary of Scientific Biography 7 (1973): 482–490.

³ Science in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

⁴ Lynn T. White, Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963).

⁵ Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science (Oxford: Clarendon 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, Theories of Light from Descartes to Newton (London: Oldbourne, 1967).

⁷ The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959); Edward Grant, Much Ado About Nothing: Theories of Space and Vacuum from the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

⁸ The Mechanization of the World Picture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961).

⁹ 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, 1601-1665 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973).

¹² Shaffer and Shapin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); 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, 1965–86).

¹⁴ 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 Instauration (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 Pagel, William Harvey’s Biological Ideas (Basel: Karger, 1967).

¹⁶ Robert G. Frank, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists: Scientific Ideas and Social Interactions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).

¹⁷ Betty J. T. Dobbs, Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Frank Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1968).

¹⁸ 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).

²⁰ 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. 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

²² Thomas L. Hankins has published a full-scale treatment, Science and the Enlightenment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

²³ Paul Forman, Weimar Culture, Causality, and Quantum Theory, 1918–1927, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 3 (1971): 1-115.

²⁴ I have discussed these matters in two essays, Remarks on Social Selection as a Factor in the Progressivism of Science, American Scientist 56 (1968): 439–450, and The Liberating Influence 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).

²⁶ Henry Guerlac, Lavoisier, the Crucial Year (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1961), and Essays and Papers in the History of Modern 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, fascicule 4 (1784–86), ed. Michelle Goupil (Éditions Belin, 1986).

²⁸ D.S.L. Cardwell, ed., John Dalton and the Progress of Science (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968); Robert E. Schofield, ed., A Scientific Autobiography of Joseph Priestley (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1963); Trevor H. Levere, Affinity and Matter: Elements of Chemical Philosophy, 1800–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon 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: Lamarck and Evolutionary Biology (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1977); Goulven Laurent, Paléontologie et Évolution en France, 1800–1860 (Paris: Comité 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).

³⁰ Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press, 1982.

³¹ Martin J. S. Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985); James A. Secord, Controversy in Victorian Geology: The Cambrian-Silurian Dispute (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics 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 expérimental 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 Translation of Il Mondo di Carta (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1980). Bellone’s essay on the role of time in the laws of physics is equally provocative: I Nomi del Tempo (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1989).

³³ C. Stewart Gillmor, Coulomb (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971); André Chappert, Étienne Louis Malus (Paris: Vrin, 1977); Christine Blondel, Ampère et la Création de l’électrodynamique (Paris: Comité 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 the Electro-Magnetic 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).

³⁴ Paris: Éditions Belin, 1987; edited by Emmanuel Grison, with a preface by Jean Dhombres and a postface by myself.

³⁵ Jed Z. Buchwald, The Rise of the Wave 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: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

³⁷ Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

³⁸ Subtle Is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, vol. 1, The Early Years, 1879–1902 (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).

⁴⁰ Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.

⁴¹ Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.

A passage from the Inaugural Lecture given by James Clerk Maxwell as Professor of Experimental Physics in the University of Cambridge, in October 1871, by way of

FOREWORD

"WE ARE NOT HERE TO DEFEND LITERARY AND HISTORICAL STUDIES. 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 whose names are found in the history of science are not mere hypothetical constituents of a crowd, to be reasoned upon only in masses. We recognize them 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 enumeration of successful investigations. It has to tell of unsuccessful enquiries, and to explain why some of the ablest men have failed to find the key of knowledge, and how the reputation of others has only given a firmer footing to the errors into which they fell.

The history of the development, whether normal or abnormal, of ideas is of all subjects that in which we, as thinking men, take the deepest interest. But when the action of the mind passes out of the intellectual stage, in which truth and error are the alternatives, into the more violently emotional states of anger and passion, malice and envy, fury and madness; the student of science, though he is obliged to recognise the powerful influence which these wild forces have exercised on mankind, is perhaps in some 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. We cannot enter into full sympathy with these lower phases of our nature without losing some of that antipathy to them which is our surest safeguard against a reversion to a meaner type, and we gladly return to the company of those illustrious men who by aspiring to noble ends, whether intellectual or practical, have risen above the region of storms into a clearer atmosphere, where there is no misrepresentation of opinion, nor ambiguity of expression, but where one mind comes into closest contact with another at the point where both approach nearest to the truth."

Introduction to the New Paperback Edition

HISTORIANS are better than their theories, Charles Gillispie would often say, instancing, perhaps, Elie Halévy’s thesis that Methodism had immunized England against revolutionary Jacobinism. Gillispie so admired this French historian of the English people that, acting on a suggestion of his graduate advisor, he published an essay on Halévy in 1950, one year in advance of his first book, Genesis and Geology. The ultimate triumph of historical method, he wrote, is to find a meaning which gives significance and unity to one’s work and which can be modified out of the work itself. Whether an interpretative hypothesis is ‘true’ or not is less important than whether it is honestly come by and fruitful. The author of The Edge of Objectivity never put scare quotes around scientific truth. History was for him more forgiving and more personal. He had majored in chemistry during the Depression, he said, as a matter of duty, for the sake of a career. History was my joy, however. While insisting on thorough research and close attention to sources, he recognized in history a need for interpretation and emphasis that science seemed to disallow. As a writer, Charles Gillispie never hid behind his subject matter.¹

He and Thomas Kuhn were colleagues at Princeton from about 1963 to 1979. He recalled later that they saw eye to eye on all the academic as well as human and practical matters associated with managing a teaching program. There was just one matter on which they disagreed, he said, of little consequence for their personal or collegial relations. It concerned merely the fundamental nature of science.² That disagreement is most palpable in the books they wrote just before Kuhn joined him in the new Princeton program in History and Philosophy of Science. Gillispie framed his Edge of Objectivity as a positivist narrative of the ascent of the sciences in sequence to objectivity: first, mechanics or physics, then chemistry, then biology. That book impressed general readers, as well as scholars and scientists from a range of disciplines, and served students and their teachers as a (dauntingly) high-level introduction to the history of scientific ideas. Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), one of the most influential academic books of the twentieth century, made a conscious break with positivism. He said that scientists accept paradigms almost as dogma, 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, sometimes exaggerated his intellectual differences with Kuhn. They had begun discussing intellectual possibilities for history of science as a field of knowledge in 1946, when they were Harvard graduate students. Both favored a naturalistic account of science growing outward from insecure roots rather than being drawn to a telos of irresistible truth. Both found essential inspiration in the writings of the philosophical historian Alexandre Koyré, whose deep engagement with classic scientific texts also inspired many of their colleagues. In the 1970s, such work began to be criticized as internalist, which was not quite accurate, since Koyré and his admirers emphasized intellectual themes that linked natural science to wide philosophical traditions, notably Platonism. By 1980, both Gillispie and Kuhn worried that the new generation of scholars was not engaging seriously with the content of the science. They shared, finally, a degree of idealism, insisting on the need of science to achieve conceptual coherence before empirical results could have much definite meaning. The Edge of Objectivity stresses this point from the very first page, where Galileo is quoted giving a correct formula for falling bodies on the basis of incorrect premises that even contradict his law. When, finally, Galileo understood how to grasp motion with mathematics, it was a true mutation of ideas.³

In later work, Gillispie emphasized the interactions of science with the state and its technologies. Inspired by his participation as preceptor in a lecture course by his senior colleague R. R. Palmer, he launched a research project on science and the French Revolution, which by 1960 was well underway. The scope and density of archival research for that project, culminating in two large volumes on Science and Polity in France, remain unmatched in the history of science.⁴ By then he regarded his focus on ideas as much too narrow, and he says so in the new introduction, written in 1990. He wrote the original text of The Edge of Objectivity from printed materials, growing out of an undergraduate course that he first taught in 1956. His topics were already familiar ones, even if real historical scholarship was lacking for many of them. While a few reviewers delighted, as academic reviewers often do, in pointing out little lapses, a fair-minded scholar will be impressed, even now, by his knowledge of the sources for three centuries of science. His prose, which is nothing if not brilliant, does not merely render the science comprehensible, but evokes the activities, ambitions, and achievements of these scientific men (there are no women) in arresting images.

The book is organized by the forward leaps of the objectivizing edge, from Galileo’s mechanics to Newton’s physics, then the chemistry of Priestley, Lavoisier, and Dalton and the biology of Darwin and Mendel. Gillispie finishes with a survey of developments in nineteenth-century physics that set the stage for yet another leap into mathematical abstraction, Einstein’s relativity. As an interpretive hypothesis, the relentless advance of objectivity provides a plot line, rudimentary but comprehensive, connecting developments from diverse fields of science. Was that all he asked of it? Clearly not. Since science is about things rather than values, he proposed, the history of science may extend the definiteness of its subject even to slippery and elusive concepts such as romanticism. He exposed Locke’s psychology as resting on a basic fallacy, the aspiration to analyze objectively what is only experienced subjectively, and boldly condemned the whole project of social science as vitiated by the characteristic determination of its practitioners to do good. He even offered retrospective counsel to biologists, who, with the benefit of proper history, might have heeded the lesson of Dalton’s atomic chemistry and seized on Mendel’s genetic atomism at the first opportunity.⁵

His insistence on the absolute neutrality of objective science might in other hands lead to a narrative without character. However, Gillispie’s enchantment with the backgrounds, ambitions, and personalities of his protagonists shines through everywhere. The cruel edge of objectivity, in real life, wears many masks and is shaped by differences in the manners and methods of the scientists. He credits the first big step in the advance of objectivity, the mathematization of motion, partly to Kepler, whom Arthur Koestler (in The Sleepwalkers) had depicted as a mystic hero. Gillispie identified the spirit of true science with Galileo’s Latin genius, the clear light of Italian classicism, which Koestler demonized. Koestler, to Gillispie, was a literary figure who (therefore) utterly misunderstood science, yet Kepler’s Germanic mysticism, which Koestler admired, is depicted most engagingly in The Edge of Objectivity as well. Gillispie’s most memorable pas de deux of scientific advance juxtaposes the cool, closed Lavoisier—competent, organized, and precise, but too inflexible to adjust to surprises—with the modest, confiding, spontaneous Priestley. Together they created a new chemistry of gases and brought this science to the point of quantification, enshrined in Lavoisier’s textbook. Back in the north of England, John Dalton with his atoms achieved the denouement, objective chemistry.

Stories like these do more than spice up a narrative; they represent science as multifarious and perhaps even as dependent on human heterogeneity, within reason. Gillispie put particular emphasis on national differences, and seems sometimes to essentialize them. 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 fruits, as they must. Much of this is difficult to square with the image of science as strict, unyielding, and irretrievably amoral. Just what, if not some form of moral commitment, would European science in the hands of the Chinese or Egyptians be missing? He does not say. But he does identify the danger with a specific technological device: the bomb.

From the standpoint of the third-millennium science, which, so far, has been obsessed with genetics and genomics, it is not so obvious that a book like The Edge of Objectivity should start and end with physics. In the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at the height of the Cold War, state-sponsored military applications loomed much larger than biomedical ones. The security of the free world seemed to depend on science, yet science must be free rather than a slave to military ambitions. While schoolchildren now received lessons in scientific method, Gillispie was too clear-headed to suppose that such teaching could give access to the serious work of science. Historical study appeared more promising for this purpose. It would not make citizens into scientists, but it would give them an appreciation of the sources and of the complex thought processes of science. Only the ignorant could suppose that science reduces to commonsense knowledge and empirical study. That, he argues, was Bacon’s idea, and it was vulgar.

The opinions of historians still differ on Bacon’s importance for science. It brings us, however, to what is truly original, even brilliant, in this book. In parallel with this history of the advance of mathematical reason, Gillispie offers here a history of antiscience. He condemned it unequivocally, but he also was entranced, and the reader will find here a fresh and original history of resistance to science, a warfare not between science and theology, but of neutral objectivity against moralized nature. The fluctuating tensions between science and Christianity he regarded as superficial and transitory, for the rock of religion does not depend on nature. It was, instead, atheists who could not tolerate the meaningless chance which operates under the name of natural selection.⁶ Objective science, he declares, reduces becoming to being. It chooses atomism over a swirling continuum and does not recoil from the reality of chance. Neither does it protest the alienation of the scientist from nature. Romantic science rejected physics, positioning biology as fundamental and building this biology from a necessitarian organicism. This is the ever-changing nature described by Heraclitus, whose flows are immanent, spontaneous, and elude explanation. Gillispie calls attention to its sexualized language, such as the erotic tension and release in Goethe’s description of plants.

He took up the topic of anti-science initially in relation to France in the era of its Revolution. In 1956 and 1959, he published strikingly new interpretations of Lamarck, and then of the articles on chemistry in Diderot’s Encyclopédie. He set up Diderot’s dislike of mathematics as a model for the hostility toward the Paris Academy of Sciences that broke out as the Old Regime crumbled. In the paper on Lamarck he showed that the inheritance of acquired characters had only a superficial role in Lamarckian evolution, which really came down to chemistry and to spontaneous processes of organic development. The Edge of Objectivity deals especially harshly with Goethe’s scientific pretentions, and later explains some prominent German evolutionists of the late nineteenth century as romantic opponents of objectivity, and in no way Darwinians. He identified Stoic pneuma, with its focus on activity rather than stable, atomic matter, as prototype of these romantic doctrines.⁷

Even as he condemned their evocation of a living, inchoate, sexualized nature, his dazzling prose brought them to life. These passages, like the chapter on Marat and Mesmer in Science and Polity, are irresistible. Whether or not we choose to follow him in dismissing Diderot, Lamarck, and Goethe as anti-scientific, he succeeded in demonstrating their radical dissent from the scientific traditions recognized by a present-minded history. Yet their science was more than unadorned ideology. It had its own empirical basis, as he shows, and often was congruent with craft knowledge.⁸ He also challenged elite appropriations of scientific doctrine. While he insisted on the centrality of science to Western civilization, he speaks here of high-minded ambitions to unify the two cultures as fatuous. Objective science, in his book, stands utterly apart from human values and feelings. In a memorable digression, he quotes an argument from a book on conservatism that ‘diffusion of power is the characteristic of organic life’ and a safeguard against ‘efficient despotism.’ He must have been holding a copy from the Princeton Library, for he next remarks that this passage had been appreciatively underlined by a succession of student readers, fortunate young men of the American elite…. [I]t is almost alarming to think for a moment of the vast structures of reasoning about the state and society which depend upon substituting the metaphor of organism for atomism and mechanism. We see, then, what deep interests and deep feelings, from romantic conservatism to socialism, have been bound up with the metaphor of organism. He called it a false crutch for politics, and the wrong view for science.⁹

The Edge of Objectivity provides a passionate defense of cool, abstract, objective science, detached from human meanings. Yet the plot line depends on such meanings. We cannot forget the author’s own ultimate choice. Sometime in 1941, after a stint of graduate work in chemical engineering at MIT, he decided it would be better to do what was pleasing, and enrolled at Harvard as a graduate student in history. That much he put down in writing. There is a more novelistic version which he communicated now and again to audiences of historians:¹⁰ Standing on a bridge over the Charles River, tortured by doubts, the hero at last flings his slide rule (for this is not Werther) into the watery deep, sealing a decision for history that four years of obligatory military service would not overturn. While he did not at all forsake the austere objectivity of science, he converted it willy-nilly into an interpretive hypothesis of history.

Theodore M. Porter

¹ Charles Coulston Gillispie, The Work of Elie Halévy: A Critical Appreciation, Journal of Modern History, 20 (1950), 232-249, p. 244; Gillispie, Apologia pro Vita Sua, Isis, 90 (1999), Supplement, S84-S94, p. S84. See also Gillispie, A Professional Life in the History of Science, in Gillispie, Essays and Reviews in History and History of Science (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2004), ix-xix. For a full bibliography, see Jed Z. Buchwald, ed., A Master of Scientific History (New York: Springer, 2012), 3–13.

² Gillispie, Apologia, p. S90.

³ Gillispie, Thomas S. Kuhn: The Nature of Science, Science (14 Dec. 1962), reprinted in Gillispie, Essays and Reviews, 341-349.

⁴ Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Science and Polity in France: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

⁵ Gillispie, Edge, pp. 164, 154, 335. He reaffirmed its basic thesis in 2004 in l’Envoi, Essays and Reviews, 405–411, pp. 409–411.

⁶ Gillispie, Edge, p. 351.

⁷ On the stoics, see his review of Schmuel Sambursky, A Physicist Looks at Greek Science (1956) in American Scientist (1958), reprinted in Gillispie, Essays and Reviews, 316–331. See also reprints there of his papers on Lamarck and on the chemistry in the Encyclopédie, pp. 47–62 and 107–142

⁸ See especially Science and Polity in France (The End of the Old Regime), 290–330.

⁹ Gillispie, Edge, pp. 200–201; R. J. White, The Conservative Tradition (London: N. Kaye, 1950), pp. 8–9. Thanks to Emily Kern for examining the Firestone Library copy of this book, whose underlining differs from what Gillispie describes. However, the book is marked as copy 2, and there is now no copy 1.

¹⁰ Gillispie, Apologia, p. S84. He told this story in his 1999 distinguished lecture in Pittsburgh to the History of Science Society.

THE EDGE OF OBJECTIVITY

CHAPTER I

FULL CIRCLE

IN THE YEAR 1604, Galileo Galilei formulated a law of falling bodies in a letter to his friend, Paolo Sarpi. I have arrived at a proposition, he wrote, which is most natural and evident, and assuming it, I can demonstrate the rest; namely, that spaces traversed in natural motion are in the squared proportion of the times, and consequently the spaces traversed in equal times are as the odd numbers beginning with unity. And the principle is this, that the naturally moving body increases its velocity in the proportion that it is distant from the origin of motion. This is a curious statement. For the first part is right, but one cannot explain how Galileo knew it, since it does not in fact follow from the principle, which is wrong. Under uniform acceleration, velocity varies directly as time, not distance, and any schoolboy learns the correct law by rote as either or both of two equations,

s = ½ gt² and s = ½ vt.

Even when he finally did get it right, Galileo could not so express it. Algebra had yet to be adapted to description of continuously developing quantities. He disposed only of the resources of ordinary language and of the geometry of Euclid and Archimedes. In 1632, after years of reflection and not a little frustration, he explained the law in Dialogue on the Two Chief Systems of the World, the great Copernican argument over which the Roman Catholic Church humiliated him; and there he repeated, that the distances passed by the body departing from its rest are to each other in double proportion of the times in which those distances are measured.

To that, Sagredo, the receptive interlocutor, now responds, This is truly admirable; and do you say there is a mathematical demonstration for it? And Galileo gratifies the request he has invited by expressing the relation between velocity, distance, and time as a triangle. Falling from rest at A, the body picks up speed through infinite degrees of velocity. The time of fall is laid off on the vertical AC. E Perpendiculars (DH, EI, etc.) represent the velocity after time AD, DE, etc., and the whole triangle is "the