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.

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    inductive reasoning. 38 It could create an awareness of scientific principles, perhaps even suggest methods, but hardly experiments. Priestley's conception of progress, which his history of science underscored, implied a process of emancipa tion from superstition and Christian orthodoxies. It was a kind of progress which would be: the means under God of extirpating all error and prejudice, and of putting an end to all undue and usurped authority in the business of religion as well as of science. 39 Whatever the breadth of Whewell's churchmanship, he could never have condoned such snide attacks on the Anglican establishment. From his angle, the attain ment of true knowledge through scientific progress highlighted the God-given mind, without which there were, in the last analysis, no epistemological guarantees. 40 This theologically grounded idealism was an aspect of, not a threat to, Whewell's Anglicanism. The inductive method, properly under stood, was part of Anglican culture, not subversive of it. The next comparison involves the quintessential corre lation between Protestant dissent and socially useful forms of applied science. Once again, Priestley and Whewell can be made to appear archetypal, the former a champion of utility, the latter regarding the sciences as a source of polite information and sound reasoning. True to type, Priestley applied himself to the applica tion of science. His solution of 'fixed air' in water he was quick to launch as a preventive remedy for scurvy. 41 Nor did commercial promise elude him. To one correspondent he boasted that I can make better [mineral water] than you import, and what cost you five shillings will not cost me a penny. 42 His most celebrated product, oxygen, was promised as a luxury at an affordable price. 43 And so it was with most of his 'airs'. Each surely had its use? Yesterday, he informed Alessandro Volta, we ate a pigeon which I had kept in nitrous air near six weeks. It was perfectly sweet and good, though the water in which it had stood was very putrid. 44 French balloonists would acknowledge their debt to Priestley 45 who, in conversa tion with fellow members of the Lunar Society, would doubtless have approved a more mundane use for the air-borne vehicle: to carry manure uphill. 46 The suc cessful application of science was, for Priestley, a touchstone of progressive civilisation, part of a Provi dentially ordained process leading to human perfectibility. By contrast, Whewell, in his controversy with Brews ter over the objectives of the British Association, was to emerge as a champion of pure science. The thought of advising government on fisheries perished him, as did Brewster's conception of government finance for sci entific research. 47 It was Brewster's complaint against Whewell's history not only that there was a conspicuous absence of Scotsmen, but also of railways and steam-guns. 48 Even to say that Whewell saw sci ence as part of polite culture is going a bit far. Science was appropriate information for cultured people - which is not the same thing. The sciences, he once wrote, do not constitute the culture [but] they belong to the information of the well-educated man. 49 When he addressed himself to the principles of English uni versity education, he was perfectly explicit on what he understood by utility. The physical sciences were useful, not only as belonging to the information of the educated man, but also as supplying him with exam ples of inductive reasoning. 50 It is not difficult to see why such an apparently restrictive vision, from the very architect of the natural sciences tripos, should be presented as an archetypal image of what Oxbridge science had to offer. One historian has even suggested that it would probably never have crossed Whewell's mind that science might be beneficial to industry. 51 On the assumption that specialised knowledge in a defined area is a prerequisite of scientific advance, there is another sense in which Priestley might be shown to have the forward-looking mentality. To say that he displayed a keener sense of what scientific specialisation required may appear paradoxical in the light of the earlier contrast between Priestley's allow ance for the amateur and Whewell's concern for rigour. Whewell, after all, proposed that the British Association should encourage specialised reports on the progress of individual sciences. 52 And as far as the study of chemistry is concerned Priestley can always be shown to have been less 'professional', less quan titatively rigorous, less systematic than Lavoisier. 53 Nevertheless Priestley's self-effacing remarks about his own inadequacies as a chemist betray an impres sive awareness of a large and specialised branch of knowledge, which, however diffuse, was well enough delineated to create in Priestley himself the feeling that he was but cultivating the margins. 54 It should also be noted that Priestley's histories of science were histories - separate histories - of separate sciences: electricity, optics, the study of airs etc. There is, by contrast, a certain omnivorous quality about Whewell's involvement with the sciences. In a well-known quip it was said that though science was his forte, omniscience was his foible. It was an afflic tion he had suffered from his youth. As a young stu dent, just ensconced in Cambridge, he wrote home to his Lancaster friend, George Morland, alluding to: certain yearnings after the whole circle of the sci ences, certain ecstatic aspirations after universal knowledge, certain indefinite desires to approxi mate to something like omniscience. 55 To be fair, he was having second thoughts: to rest con tent with the amplitude of general views was to be seduced, so he wrote, by the magnificence of exten sive vacuity. Not much good, he predicted, would be likely to come to me if I were to remain in such an all- reading, all-learning mood for ever. 56 The irony is that he was wrong. A prize-winner in poetry, a devotee of the classics, respected natural theologian, critic of utilitarian ethics, champion of mechanics, recipient of a Royal Medal for his researches on the tides, his first professorship was in mineralogy. He was to tread the whole circle of the sciences with almost embarrassing success. Despite his doubts about the British