Science, medicine and dissent : Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) ; papers celebrating the 250th anniversary of the birth of Joseph Priestley together with a catalogue of an exhibition held at the Royal Society and the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine / edited by R.G.W. Anderson and Christopher Lawrence.

Date:
1986
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Science, medicine and dissent : Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) ; papers celebrating the 250th anniversary of the birth of Joseph Priestley together with a catalogue of an exhibition held at the Royal Society and the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine / edited by R.G.W. Anderson and Christopher Lawrence. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    25/124 (page 11)
    Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) and William Whewell (1794-1866): Apologists and Historians of Science. A Tale of Two Stereotypes. JOHN HEDLEY BROOKE With reference to the celebrated thesis of R.K. Merton, the question is still asked whether we know any more today about the rela tions between Puritanism and science than in 1938 when Merton first published. A possible answer, to judge from a recent analysis by Gary Abraham, is that we know less. For the diverse parties among the his torians have all failed to appreciate [Merton' s] central line of argument and most historians seem never to have understood Merton's original intentions. 1 My object in this paper is not to discuss Merton's thesis per se, but to expose a few problems that seem to arise in applying and testing the stereotypes that have been derived from it. This may be to flog an old war-horse, but hardly a dead one if there is truth in Abraham's judgement. Two of the most common stereotypes would certainly be deducible from the thesis which Merton re-affirmed in 1970: the autonomous case for pure science evolved out of the derivative case for applied science. 2 That derivative case, according to the original thesis, had been legitimised by a set of religious values associated with ascetic Protestantism. Merton made it perfectly clear that Puritan values were not necessary for science, but he emphasised a correlation that has been erected into a type: The Puritan complex of a scarcely disguised utilitarianism; of intramundane interests; methodi cal, unremitting action; thoroughgoing empiricism; of the right and even the duty of libre examen-, of anti- traditionalism - all this was congenial to the same values in science. 3 Leaving aside, for the moment, the multiple layers of ambiguity associated with the words 'Puritan' and 'utilitarianism', the reference to anti-traditionalism in Merton's formulation shows how the type can be hypostatized; that is by contrast with a second type which embraces the values of traditionalism. The resulting dichotomy was probably at its sharpest in Christopher Hill's Intellectual origins of the English Revolution: One the one hand, Puritanism, the new science, optimistic belief in progress, and Parliamen- tarianism; on the other, neo-popery, traditional medieval theology, sceptical pessimism and royalism. 4 The type erected on that other hand has commonly been reinforced by references to Oxbridge, its neglect of science when it had little and its neglect of useful sci ence when it eventually had some. Thus Merton him self drew an unflattering comparison between the English universities and dissenting academies as far as the encouragement of science was concerned. 5 In rather more depth Donald Cardwell emphasised the role of dissenting clergy, and dissenters generally, in promoting popular scientific education - the contrast with aristocratic and Anglican values being epitomised by the courage of one Anglican gentleman who lec tured the mechanics on the folly of their institutes. 6 The contrast between an Oxbridge and a dissenting ethos, in its relevance to science, goes back, of course, a long way before Merton. One recalls that much quoted passage in Halevy: It is in Non-conformist England, the England excluded from the national universities, in indust rial England with its new centres of population and civilisation, that we must seek the institutions which gave birth to the utilitarian and scientific cul ture of the new era. 7 Despite the refinement and revision of intervening years, the types continue to be applied, and in refresh ing new ways. Two recent examples occur in the con tributions of Derek Orange 8 and Michael Neve 9 to a comparative study of Metropolis and province. Orange has investigated William Turner's commitment to the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society, arguing that the springs of his intellectual mission are to be found in the values of Rational Dissent. Accordingly, the visible symbol of the marriage between liberal politics, liberal religion and useful knowledge was Turner's chapel in Hanover Square. 10 Turner himself had argued for the absolute dependence of...