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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    Academy he would have encountered the association between science and natural theology but the utility of applied science would have been a less prominent motif. If Priestly's induction into practical chemistry was via the lectures and demonstrations of Matthew Turner, who lectured at Warrington between 1763 and 1765, there is a certain irony. 94 Turner made connec tions between chemistry and commerce, but he appears to have been notable as an atheist. 95 As for other origins of Priestley's interest in utilitarian sci ence, there is a case for saying that it was through salt that he came to Bacon. Whilst at Nantwich he appears to have taken an interest in the local manufacture of Cheshire salt and, according to one biographer, proba bly came across William Brownrigg's The art of making common salt (1748) - a book with a Baconian preface, extolling a knowledge of the mechanic arts for the relief of man's estate. 96 One point is abundantly clear. It would be difficult to see in ascetic Calvinism the spur to Priestley's science when he had already been dis mantling the doctrinal edifice of Calvanism brick by brick. 97 The general difficulty is perhaps best sym bolised by a remark made, later in life, when he was addressing Edmund Burke. Priestley's social millen nium was going to be brought about by the influence of the commercial spirit aided by Christianity and true philsophy 98 - not, it should be noted, by Christianity and true philosophy aided by the commercial spirit. The difficulty in establishing correspondence rules for linking correlates within the type does not disqualify the attempt to trace the connections which Priestley made to confer consistency on his metaphysics. The considerations above are not intended as a critique of the style of analysis offered by John McEvoy, whose reconstruction of Priestley's philosophical writings shows how, in matters of ontology and epistemology, it would be extremely difficult to disentangle the religi ous from other threads of argument. McEvoy has, in any case, renounced the claim that the problems, con cepts and techniques that concerned Priestley as natural philosopher were derived from his metaphysics. 99 The difficulty nevertheless remains. In extending Merton's conception of motivation to embrace Priestley's scientific activity the problem of proof is writ large. There is the further and predictable problem: to what extent can one allow divergence from the type before conceding that it has failed in a particular case? The assimilation of Priestley and Whewell to their respec tive types was accomplished with relative ease. But it has to be confessed that it was altogether too slick. In the first place there were marked similarities between them which a preoccupation with the types would probably obscure. There is first the question of whether their ideas on the application of science were so very different. In Thackray's account of Mancunian science, Priestley is taken as the symbol of a particular attitude towards experimental philosophy and prog ressive culture. Nevertheless, the science of the Liter ary and Philosophical Society is still presented with the accent on cultural expression rather than on utility in a narrow technological sense. Thackray accordingly complains that the interaction between science and technology within the Society's walls has assumed for historian commentators a degree and kind of impor tance it never possessed for contemporaries whether manufacturers or men of science. 100 In the case of Priestley himself there is surely irony in that his very own application of science (his carbonated water) was based on virtually no science - as he freely and some what embarrassingly confessed - whilst as a preven tive remedy for scurvy it was an abject failure. 101 The episode serves as a reminder that what Priestley's con temporary Thomas Barnes called the happy art of connecting together liberal science and commercial industry has been one of the great elusives, so diverse in its manifestations that it can scarcely be codified into a type. And what of Whewell? Was the archetypal Oxbridge philosopher so blind to the practical application of theoretical science? Almost certainly not. It was just that Cambridge was not the place for the dissemina tion of such information. His point was that practical knowledge, such as civil engineering, arts and trades, must be learned, as in fact they are learned, among professional men and practical applications. 102 For Whewell, knowledge of the practical application of sci ence was on a par with, not inferior to, a knowledge of the higher physical sciences: if they are wished for as information, they stand on the same ground as the higher physical sciences. 103 Nor should it be forgotten that Whewell's campaigning to relate professorial lec tures more closely to undergraduate examinations helped to pave the way for Robert Willis to lecture on Mechanics and Mechanism and their application to manufacturing processes, the steam engine etc. 104 It was, moreover, one of the hallmarks of Whewell's instruction in mechanics that the principles were to be mastered by reference to down-to-earth applica tions. 105 He was neither blind nor averse to the practical application of science. It was simply that such know ledge could not constitute a liberal education. And if he underplayed the association between pure and applied science, he may well have had diplomatic reasons for so doing. As Eric Ashby pointed out, the too ready association of science with utility created an obstacle for those, like Whewell, who sought to bring science into the curriculum: One unhappy consequence of [a] narrowly pragma tic attitude to science was that scientific education tended to be regarded as more suitable for artisans and the lower middle classes than for the governing classes. 106 To have dwelled on pragmatism rather than edifica tion would have been to lose the case. We should not have an image of Whewell as a boffin unconcerned with the measurement of the real world. He was not above devising a piece of apparatus even if it was only a self-registering anemometer. 107 Still threshing away at the tides in April 1838, he expected to show how each year's observations may... add something to the accuracy of the existing tide tables of the place where they are made. 108 That being so, it appeared to him that government did, after all, have a responsibility in the matter. It was the business of all civilized.