vernadsky as historian
The history of natural science, and of science in general as the history of the human scientific mind, was the second great scientific interest of Vernadsky. The work done by him in the field of natural sciences seems to be sufficient for several scholars. But he also was one of the twentieth century’s most outstanding historians of science. Working at his specific problems of crystallography, mineralogy, and geology, he constantly went beyond the limits of the studied area to the vast spaces of the greater history of knowledge, and not accidentally but quite consciously:
More and more am I carried away by the idea of devoting myself seriously to the history of science. But it is hardly possible: I feel a lack of education and an insufficient power of mind for such a task. Such work will take up many years, as I shall have to prepare for it for a long time. (From a letter to his wife N. V. Vernadskaya, 1893).
But this was not mere intention. In 1902–1903 he delivered lectures on the history of natural science at Moscow University which later were published as a separate book based on the archive records. Here he reveals himself not only as a professional investigator of the history of specific areas of the natural sciences, but also as an outstanding theoretician in a field of historic knowledge that was still nascent.
The very first pages of Essays on Geochemistry show Vernadsky as an historian. His works in general are noted for the scrupulous search for and descriptions of the historic predecessors of his own or other ideas, which, unfortunately, is not characteristic of most scientists of the present-day generation (though it is always characteristic of real scientists).
I shall give one of his notes to Essays on Geochemistry as an example of his attention to the history of scientific thought and to particular scientists. This note is devoted to a Croatian scientist of the eighteenth century, R. J. Boscovich:
R. Boscovich – Jesuit and citizen of the Dubrovnik Republic. Not an Italian, as it is sometimes stated, and against which he had always protested…. He became a French citizen in 1773, and passed several years (1773–1782) in Paris as an academician and Director of “Ortique de la Marine.” Being a Jesuit, he had numerous friends and influential enemies (including d’Alembert). It is interesting to note the sharply opposite estimations of his scientific importance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For us he is one of the greatest scientists; but in 1841 an outstanding astronomer, F. Arago, considered him “a person to whom Lagrange and d’Alembert related with great contempt” and “a mediocre foreigner” (F. Arago, Oeuvres completes, ii, p. 139–140, 1854). The interest in Boscovich has begun to increase since the middle of the nineteenth century in connection with the rise of the new physics; but it had never flagged in the previous century either.
This small note reveals Vernadsky’s typical approach to historic material, the scrupulous manner of looking into the personality of a scientist, the conditions of his work and his scientific and social surroundings. Of course it was promoted by the fact that he read in fifteen modern languages – all the Slavonic, Roman and German languages. No doubt he knew the classical ones, too.
thinker
Vernadsky was well-read in the issues of philosophy. He studied and knew not only the philosophical systems of the West, but also those of ancient India and China. He did not think it possible for himself to prefer any philosophical system he knew, and thus he remained a skeptic. He contended that the foremost task of a scientist, studying reality, is accomplished not by philosophy but by empirical science, by the specific facts it uncovers, and by empirical generalizations based on these facts.
Vernadsky, Moscow 1940
He considered the notion of an “empirical generalization” to belong to the highest category of scientific cognition, unlike scientific hypotheses and theories, which always turn out to be temporary. As a specific example of an empirical generalization of everlasting significance, he gave the Periodic Law of Chemical Elements discovered by Mendeleyev. To this we can now add his own empirical generalizations, such as the ideas of “living matter” and “scientific thought,” which need no proof. His teachings on the biosphere and the noösphere may probably also may be counted as such.
Vernadsky wrote a lot about the significance of science as a whole; scientific hypotheses and theories on the one hand, and of empirical generalizations on the other hand. He noted the lack of philosophical understanding concerning the issue of the place of empirical generalizations in contemporary cognition theory, and was the first to put forward this problem, which has not attracted the attention of philosophers up till now.
The volume of Vernadsky’s manuscripts on philosophical issues is large enough, but these papers were never published during the author’s life. He did not intend them for publication, since, it seems to me, he perfectly understood their discrepancy with the officially cultivated dialectic materialism, which had acquired the status of State Philosophy.
Vernadsky had always stressed the distinct difference between the cognitive potential of philosophy and that of the empirical sciences. But even in the very first manifestations of the ancient philosophical mind, he saw the dawn of scientific knowledge. He wrote in one of his letters of 1902:
I look at the meaning of philosophy in the development of knowledge in quite a different way than most naturalists, and attach to it great fruitful significance. I think these are aspects of one and the same process, aspects that are absolutely indispensable and inseparable. They can be separated only in our minds. If one of them decays, the other will stop growing too.”
And here are words from his 1902 lecture, “On a Scientific Worldview”:
Never in history have we observed science without philosophy, and studying the history of scientific thought, we see that throughout all the time of its existence, philosophical concepts and philosophical ideas have permeated science as an indispensable element.
This is an example of his own philosophical reflections from his student’s diary of 1885:
What is time and space? These are problems that throughout the ages have interested the human mind in the form of its most brilliant representatives…. No doubt, time and space do not exist in nature separately; they are inseparable. We know not a single phenomenon that covers no time and no space. Only for logical convenience do we imagine time and space separately, only because our mind is used to doing so while solving problems.
In reality we see time and space separately only in our imagination. To what do these inseparable parts belong? They belong to the only thing existing, to matter, which we divide into two basic coordinates: time and space.
These words were written more than a quarter of a century before Professor Minkovsky, at the Mathematical Congress in Cologne in 1908, overwhelmed listeners by his new ideas about the single, indivisible concept of space-time, about time as the fourth dimension of space. Such was the force of Vernadsky’s anticipating thought in a field that was not even