Abstract
In 1980, a group of historians of science published a book evaluating the history of eighteenth-century science.2 The authors lamented the fact that despite the virtual revolution taking place in the history of science, its impact upon the history of 18th century science had been negligible. They ascribed this result to two factors. The first was the problematic nature of the 18th century. “Historians of science hasve tended to regard it as a tiresome trough to be negotiated between the peaks of the seventeenth and those of the nineteenth century; or as a mystery, a twilight zone in which all is on the verge of yielding.”3 The second retarding factor was the persistent tendency of historians of science to write “tunnel histories” of specific disciplines, a practice that privileged internalist accounts, assumed a model based upon continuous development and by implication postulated the existence of a scientific discipline even before it was defined as such.4
The last section of this essay and portions of the second section were published in an article entitled “Science and the Construction of the Cultural Sciences in Late Enlightenment Germany: The Case of Wilhelm von Humboldt,” History and Theory 33 (October 1994)
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Notes
G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter eds. The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Science (Cambridge, 1980).
Ibid., 2.
This observation is based upon Keith Baker’s article “Enlightenment and the Institution of Society: Notes for a Conceptual History,” in W. F. B. Melching and W. R. E. Velema, eds., Main Trends in Cultural History (Amsterdam and Atlanta, 1993).
See J.G. Pocock’s critique of this method with respect to political science in his essay, “Languages and their Implications: The Transformation of the Study of Political Thought,” in Politics, Language and Time (New York, 1973), pp. 3–42.
For an example see Michael Gottlob, Geschichtsschreibung zwischen Aufklärung und Historismus: Johannes von Müller und Friedrich Christoph Schlosser (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1989).
For an excellent interpretation of La Mettrie see A. Vartanian, La Mettrie’s L’Homme Machine: A Study in the Origins of an Idea (Princeton, 1960).
Charles Louis Dumas defined vitalism in his important work, Principes de Physiologie, ou introduction à la expérimental, philosophique et médicale de l’homme vivant. “Aus dem Missbrauch physischer Grundsätze entstand die alte und zahlreiche Secte der Materialisten. Der Missbrauch der Metaphysik erzeugte die eben so alte Secte der Spiritualisten. Zwischen beyde tritt noch eine dritte Classe von Physiologen ein, welche alle Lebenserescheinungen weder bloss von der Materie, noch bloss von der Seele, sondern von einem zwischen beyden mitten innen liegenden Vermögen ableiten, welches sich von der einen, wie von der andern durch besondere Eigenthümlichkeiten unterscheidet und alle Lebensthätigkeiten regiert, leitet und ordnet, ohne durch die physischen Einwirkungen des materiellen Körpers bestimmt, noch durch die geistigen Thätigkeiten oder die intellectuellen Kräfte des denkenden Grundvermögens beseelt und aufgeklärt zu werden. Aus diesen drey Secten sind alle übrigen physiologischen Secten hervorgegangen. Aus der ersten die der Mechaniker und Chemiker, aus der zweyten die der Animisten und Stahlianer; aus der dritten die der Vitalisten.” I have used the German translation, Anfangsgründe der Physiologie oder Einleitung in eine auf Erfahrung gegründete, philosophische und medicinische Kenntniss des lebenden Menschen. 2 vols., trans. L. A. Kraus and C. J. Pickhard (Göttingen, 1807), vol. I, p. 97.
Buffon, De le manière d’étudier & de traiter l’Histoire Naturelle (Paris, 1986: fac. reprint), p. 35.
Ibid., 66. Adam Ferguson, Principles of Moral and Political Science, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1972), vol. I, p. 79.
Richard S. Westfall, The Construction of Modern Science: Mechanisms and Mechanics (Cambridge, 1977), p. 33.
The term synergy was originally coined by Stahl and taken up by the French physiologist Paul-Joseph Barthez, Nouveaux éléments de la science de l’homme 2 vols. (Montpellier, 1778), vol. I, p. 146.
Elements of Physiology, trans. Charles Caldwell (Philadelphia, 1795) vol. I, p. 33.
Ibid., p. 22.
Ibid., pp. 65–66, fn.
Ibid., p. 203.
Blumenbach described the Bildungstrieb as an “occult quality.” Blumenbach, Ueber den Bildungstrieb, 2 ed. (Göttingen, 1791), pp. 33–34.
Blumenbach, Elements of Physiology, vol. I, p. 177. A similar assumption that inner powers could never be seen, but approximated by looking at outward phenomena was given by Carl von Dalberg in his Grundsätze der Aesthetik deren Anwendung und künftige Entwicklung (Erfurt, 1791).
Buffon, Historie der Natur, vol. I, pp. 29–30. In the French original the Statement reads as follows: “l’on peut dire que l’amour de l’étude de la Nature suppose dans l’esprit deux qualités qui paroissent opposées, les grandes vues d’un génie ardent qui embrasse tout d’un coup d’oeil, & les petites attentions d’un instinct laborieux qui ne s’attache qu’à un seul point.” G.L. Leclerc de Buffon, De la Manière d’étudier & de traiter l’Histoire Naturelle.Reprint of original edition (Paris, 1986), p. 6.
Ibid.
Kant defines the schemata as that which “underlies our pure sensible concepts.” Though making sensible understanding possible, its operations remained a mystery. “This schematism of the understanding, in its application to appearances and their mere form, is an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover, and to have open to our gaze.” And, as so many writers of the time, Kant joined this topos of hidden activities to the concept of semiotics by designating the schemata as a monogram of something else. “This much we can assert: the image is a product of the empirical faculty of reproductive imagination; the schema of sensible concepts…is a product and at the same time a monogram, of pure a priori imagination, through which, and in accordance with which, images themselves first become possible. These images can be connected with the concept only by the schema which they signify. In themselves they are never completely congruent with the concept.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York, 1965), pp. B 180–181 /A 141.
Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Boston, 1984), pp. 14–16.
August Ludwig Schlözer, Vorstellung seiner Universal Historie (Göttingen, 1772), 2 vols., vol. I, pp. 15–19. The generalizing vision to which Schlözer refers is an anlogy to Buffon’s coup d’oeil. See footnote 22.
Peter Camper, Ueber den natürlichen Unterschied des Gesichtszüge in Menschen verschiedener Gegenden und verschiedenen Alters; über das schöne antiker Bildsäulen und Geschnittener Steine’, nebst Darstellung einer neuen Art, allerlei Menschenköpfe mit Sicherheit zu zeichen, trans. Samuel T, Sömmerring (Berlin, 1792).
Samuel Thomas Sömmerring, Über die körperliche Verschiedenheit des Mohren vom Europäer (Mainz, 1784)
Samuel Thomas Sömmerring, Über die körperliche Verschiedenheit des Negers vom Europäer (Mainz, 1785). See the excellent dissertation on Camper: Miriam Claude Meijer, The Anthropology of Petrus Camper (1772–1789) (Los Angeles, 1991).
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, “On the Varities of Mankind,” in The Anthropological Treatises: with Memoirs of Him by Marx and Flourins, trans. & ed. Thomas Bendyshe (London, 1865). Handbuch der vergleichende Anatomie (Göttingen, 1805).
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, “Über Physiognomik: Wider die Physiognomen. Zu Beförderung der Menschenliebe und Menschenkenntnis,” in Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Schriften und Briefe, ed. Wolfgang Promies (Munich: Hanser, 1972) vol. Ill, pp. 256–295.
Elements of Physiology, trans. Charles Caldwell (Philadelphia, 1795) vol. I, pp. 65–66, fn.
Humboldt made this clear to F.A. Wolf in 1804. “Im Grunde ist alles was ich treibe, auch der Pindar, Sprachstudium. Ich glaube die Kunst entdeckt zu haben, die Sprache als ein Vehikel zu brauchen, um das Höchste und Tiefste, und die Mannigfaltigkeit der ganzen Welt zu durchfahren, und ich vertiefe mich immer und mehr in dieser Ansicht.”
quoted by Volker Heeschen, Die Sprachphilosophie Wilhelm von Humboldts, diss., Bremen, 1972, p. 16. Heeschen also emphasizes the heuristic nature of Humboldt’s language studies. They are the vehicles for his “historical, anthropological, and ethnographic researches,” p. 17.
Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Limits of State Action, ed. J.W. Burrow (Cambridge, 1969), p. 16.
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Reill, P.H. (1998). The Construction of the Social Sciences in Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century Germany. In: Heilbron, J., Magnusson, L., Wittrock, B. (eds) The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation of Modernity. Sociology of the Sciences, vol 20. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5528-1_4
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