Abstract
That Faraday expounded an empiricist view of science all commentators agree. Yet there are many incompatible strands within empiricism, and this chapter sets out to specify in a much more precise manner Faraday’s rather complex, and apparently inconsistent, views on scientific method, and also to examine why he held those views. Questions about the proper method for pursuing science were very important to him and he felt obliged on numerous occasions to expound his views on this subject so as to defend himself and his scientific work against alternative, but false, conceptions of science. In this chapter we shall be concerned with his methodological pronouncements rather than the actual methods he employed in the laboratory (a topic which will be discussed in chapter 9), although the two were closely related. An appropriate starting point for this discussion is his views about the proper role of the imagination.
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Notes
Faraday to Auguste de la Rive, 2 October 1858: Correspondence, 913–4. Emphases added.
J. Glas, ‘Predestination impugned and defended’, in The works of Mr John Glas (2nd ed., five vols, Perth, 1782), vol.2, pp.395–414, esp. p.398.
D.B. Murray, The social and religious origins of Scottish non-Presbyterian Protestant dissent from 1730–1800 (Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of St Andrews, 1976), pp.112–4.
On the similar use of the plain style by Puritan divines see P. Miller, ‘The plain style’ in S.E. Fish, ed, Seventeenth century prose (Oxford, 1971), pp.147–86.
R. Sandeman, The law of nature defended by Scripture against a learned class of moderns, who think it needful, in order to support the credit of revealed religion against deists, to deny the existence of that law (1760)
R. Sandeman, The law of nature defended by Scripture against a learned class of moderns, who think it needful, in order to support the credit of revealed religion against deists, to deny the existence of that law (1760), in Sandeman, Discourses on passages of Scripture: With essays and letters (Dundee, 1857), pp.273–85. Quotation on pp.278–9.
Faraday to Auguste de la Rive, 16 December 1859: Correspondence, 943–4.
William Barrett used a different but not dissimilar metaphor when he claimed that Faraday considered the Bible as ‘God’s revelation to man of the Divine purpose’, and science as ‘man’s revelation of the Divine handicraft’. William Barrett to J.H. Poynting, 6 March 1911: University of Birmingham, Physics Department.
Faraday to Adolphe Quetelet, 25 February 1850: Correspondence, 579–80, Emphasis added.
T.H. Levere, ‘Faraday, matter, and natural theology — reflections on an unpublished manuscript’, British Journal for the History of Science, 4 (1968), 95–107. Passages quoted on pp.105 and 107. Report of H.M. Commissioners appointed to inquire into the revenues and management of certain colleges and schools and the studies pursued and instruction given therein, in Parliamentary Papers, 1864, vol.4, p.381.
Faraday to Adolph F. Svanberg, 16 August 1850: Correspondence, 588.
A.A. Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, An inquiry concerning virtue (London, 1699); Id., Characteristicks of men, manners, opinions, times (three vols, London, 1711).
Sandeman, op. cit. (n.7); J. Locke, A paraphrase and notes on the epistle of St. Paul to the Romans, in The works of John Locke (12th ed., ten vols, London, 1824), vol.8, pp.373–427.
J. R[orie], Selected exhortations delivered to various Churches of Christ by the late Michael Faraday, Wm. Buchanan, John M. Baxter, and Alex. Moir (Dundee, 1910), pp.15–18.
Faraday’s discussion of prejudice bears a marked resemblance to Francis Bacon’s ‘Idols’, those false images in the mind that vitiate knowledge. Indeed, the three types of prejudice mentioned in the text correspond, respectively, to the ‘Idols of the Tribe’, the ‘Idols of the Market-Place’ and the ‘ldols of the Theatre’. Bacon, The great instauration, in J. Spedding, R.L. Ellis and D.D. Heath, eds, The works of Francis Bacon (fourteen vols, London, 1872–4), vol.4, pp.53–65.
Faraday, ‘Historical sketch of electro-magnetism’, Annals of Philosophy, 2 (1821), 195–200 and 274–90; 3 (1822), 107–21
L.P. Williams, ‘Faraday and Ampere: A critical dialogue’, in D. Gooding and F.A.J.L. James, eds, Faraday rediscovered: Essays on the life and work of Michael Faraday, 1791–1867 (Basingstoke and New York, 1985), pp.83–104, esp. pp.86–90.
Faraday and P. Reiss, ‘On the action of non-conducting bodies in electric induction’, Philosophical Magazine, 11 (1856), 1–17.
Faraday to William Whewell, 19 September 1835: Correspondence, 294–6.
I. Newton, Mathematical principles of natural philosophy (two vols, Berkeley, 1934), vol.1, p. xxvii.
Faraday to Christian E. Neeff, 24 March 1846: Correspondence, 491–2. Emphasis added.
L.P. Williams, Michael Faraday: A biography (London, 1965), pp.73–80
P.M. Heimann, ‘Faraday’s theories of matter and electricity’, British Journal for the History of Science, 5 (1971), 235–57.
J. Agassi, Faraday as a natural philosopher (Chicago, 1971), p.117.
Faraday to Auguste de la Rive, 29 May 1854: Correspondence, 737–8.
Chuang Tzu, Basic writings, trans. Burton Watson (NY and London, 1964), p.45.
Faraday’s contribution to ‘Addresses delivered at the commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Dr Priestley’, Philosophical Magazine, 2 (1833), 390–1. The question of who discovered oxygen is now recognised as a complex problem and the palm cannot simply be presented to Priestley.
Faraday to Julius Plücker, 23 March 1857: Correspondence, 863–4.
Augustus de Morgan to William H. Dixon, 17 March 1857: American Philosophical Society.
‘Commonplace book’, f.87: Institution of Electrical Engineers, Faraday Papers; Jones, 1, 199; S.B. Smith, The great mental calculators. The psychology, methods, and lives of calculating prodigies, past and present (New York, 1983), pp.181–210.
Faraday to John Tyndall, 19 April 1851: Correspondence, 623; Faraday to Peter Riess, 7 April 1855: Ibid., 791–2; J. Tyndall, Faraday as a discoverer (5th ed., London, 1894), pp.63–4.
Quoted in E.C. Patterson, Mary Somerville and the cultivation of science, 1815–1840 (Boston, 1983), p.135.
J. Hutchinson, A treatise of power essential and mechanical, in The philosophical and theological works of the late truly learned John Hutchinson, Esq (twelve vols, London, 1748–9), vol.5, pp.222–3.
Moses’s principia occupies the first two volumes. See also C.B. Wilde, ‘Hutchinsonianism, natural philosophy and religious controversy in eighteenth century Britain’, History of Science, 18 (1980), 1–24;
Id., ‘Matter and spirit as natural symbols in eighteenthcentury British natural philosophy’, British Journal for the History of Science, 15 (1982), 99–131; G.N. Cantor, ‘Light and enlightenment: An exploration of mid-eighteenth-century modes of discourse’, in D.C. Lindberg and G.N. Cantor, The discourse of light from the middle ages to the enlightenment (Los Angeles, 1985), pp.67–106.
Faraday to Tyndall: op. cit. (n.70); W. Barratt, review of J.H. Gladstone’s Michael Faraday, Nature, 6 (1872), 410–3, esp. 412.
Crawford, op. cit. (n.42); Id., ‘Michael Faraday: Ideas about how he thought’, paper delivered to a joint meeting of the British Society for the History of Science and the British Psychological Society, 7 February 1987.
Faraday to Ernst Becker, 25 October 1860: Correspondence, 975–6. Cf. S. Shapin, ‘Pump and circumstance: Robert Boyle’s literary technology’, Social Studies of Science, 14 (1984), 481–520.
J.H. Gladstone, Michael Faraday (2nd ed., London, 1873), pp.138–9; Faraday to Becker: op. cit. (n.89).
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© 1991 Geoffrey N. Cantor
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Cantor, G. (1991). Faraday on Scientific Method. In: Michael Faraday: Sandemanian and Scientist. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13131-0_8
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