Abstract
This is an extended critical book-report on Sir John Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1831).1 The book is not such a masterpiece as to deserve detailed study, but it contains one important discovery and a few interesting passages which I shall comment on. It expounds a popular philosophy of success which will become amply clear from the present summary of its presentation and ideas and which will be discussed in the concluding section. It expresses the atmosphere of the time in which it was written, as I shall endeavor to illustrate chiefly in my introductory and concluding sections. It influenced the literature considerably, if for no other reason than that the writings of both William Whewell and John Stuart Mill follow in its wake. Its very conception as an updated version of Bacon’s Novum Organum is a forerunner to Whewell’s Novum Organum Renovatum. But I shall not discuss Herschel’s influence on posterity here, since this is a topic for a separate essay.
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Notes
Sir John F. W. Herschel, Preliminary Discourse, etc. (London and Philadelphia, 1831; title page to English edition says 1830, but the page witlt portrait contains correct date). Facsimile by Johnson Reprint Corporation, with a new introduction by M. Partridge (London, 1967). Page numbers refer to the American edition. For the English edition page numbers read thus: 6→9, 12→15, 39→52, 60→79, 61→80, 63→83, 64→84, 73→96, 78→104, 79→105, 85→113, 108→149, 141→188, 143→190, 145→194, 147→196, 149→198, 153→204, 156→208, 162→215, 188→250, 190→253.
Phil. Mag. 55 (1820), 417 ff. Forman, thus, is the discoverer of the chief error of Baconian philosophy, its fear of error. Note also that the reference to Bacon is echoed in Herschel’s often quoted eulogy on Bacon, quoted here at the opening of Section 5.
H. Bence-Jones, The Life and Letters of Faraday, in two volumes, 1 (London, 1870), 303–311, extracts from a lecture ‘On the Forms of Matter’, from which the above is an extraction. The full lecture is extant in the Royal Institution. I hope someone will soon publish Faraday’s early works.
See my ‘Methodological Individualism’, Brit. J. Sociology 11 (1960), and my Towards an Historiography of Science, History and Theory, Beiheft 2 (The Hague, 1963; facsimile reprint, Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1967). See also J. W. N. Watkins, ‘Epistemology and Politics’, Proc. Arist. Soc. (London, 1957).
Phil. Trans. (1820), 45 n.
Encyclopedia Metropolitana (London, 1845), 4, 533. As to Fresnel’s sensitivity, see, for example, his correspondence with Young concerning priority in Peacock’s life of Young.
See my ‘An Unpublished Paper by the Young Faraday,’ Isis 52 (1961); also ‘The Confusion between Physics and Metaphysics in Standard Histories of Science,” in Ithaca, 1962 (Paris, 1964), reprinted in my Science in Flux, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 28, 1975; also Towards an Historiography of Science, op. cit. (note 4), Section 5 and notes; also my Faraday as a Natural Philosopher, Chicago University Press, 1971.
‘Who discovered Boyle’s Law?’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 81 (1977), 189–250; also my unpublished doctoral dissertation, The Function of Interpretations in Physics (University of London, 1956).
See my ‘Unity and Diversity in Science’, in R. S. Cohen and M. Wartofsky, eds., Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 4 (1969); reprinted in my Science in Flux.
See my Towards an Historiography of Science, op. cit. (note 4), Sections 2–5 and my’ sensationalism’, Mind 75 (1966), 1 ff.; reprinted in my Science in Flux.
See Goetlte, Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe, und Gesprache (Zurich, 1949), 9, 653, para. 1222. See also my ‘Unity and Diversity in Science’, op. cit. (note 9), 376 or 457.
This, by the way, was Biot’s attempt to reconcile Newton’s theory with the facts of polarization and double refraction, which, he showed, could be explained by assuming that the spin of the photon (to use the modem idiom) assumes only definite discrete values. But this assumption, now employed in quantum theory, was then rightly rejected as too arbitrary.
See note 8 above.
J. A. R. Newland, The Periodic Law (London, 1884), 23;quoted by E. T. Whittaker, A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity, 2 (New York, 1960), 11.
See my ‘The Kirchhoff-Planck Radiation Law’, Science (April 17, 1967). The part on Balfour Stewart (p. 32) is based on A. Cotton’s excellent but historically inaccurate paper in Astrophys. J. 9 (1899), 237. See my note 20 there. More details are in my Radiation Theory which may one day fInd a publisher despite its unorthodox stance.
See W. W. Bartley, ‘Approaches to Science and Skepticism’, The Philosophical Forum 1 (1969).
See L. Pearce Williams, ‘The Politics of Science in the French Revolution’ in Marshall Clagett, ed., Critical Problems in the History of Science, Proceedings of the Institute for the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin, September 1–11, 1957 (Madison, 1959). Of course, the nineteenth century had more success in popular adult education than its predecessors. Boyle’s Seraphick Love, and Spinoza’s and Locke’s equivalents, were all meant for the intellectual. Isaac Watts’s Logic and Improvement of the Mind were much wider in influence, but nothing like Sam Smile’s Self-Help. Yet the combination of the industrial revolution and the rise of socialism and allied radicalist movements was the crucial factor. Professors’ lectures and the likes were but the trimmings. Doubtless, the rise of the British Association was an expression of the rise of the new class of technologists and experts, but it too was not as important as the movement of literacy classes for workers run by radicalists — as described, e.g., by C. P. Snow in his The Two Cultures and The Scientific Revolution, which the introduction above studies in detail.
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Agassi, J. (1981). Sir John Herschel’s Philosophy of Success. In: Science and Society. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 65. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-6456-6_27
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