A reader may ask how science can disappear. With all our modern contrivances and information, how – short of an environment-wrenching catastrophe – could science come to an end? Yet the circumstance has occurred before, when past civilizations like Rome and China expressed little interest in seeking explanations for natural phenomena. They delighted in mechanical contrivances; they celebrated canonical wisdom; they published enduring works of art and literature. But they were not driven to push back the frontiers of knowledge, to use a metaphor associated with European expansion.
The present book has emerged as an enquiry into science as a social activity. It relates directly to the prospect of science in our time. We do not proceed by appealing to the heavy theoretical machinery and the long-distance sentences that are now fashionable in our discipline. We fly no philosophical, political, or methodological colours. We celebrate the observation attributed to writer Marcel Proust, that methodology, when visible in writing, is like a price tag worn on a suit of clothes. We are mindful of poet John Keats’s sentence about rejecting poetry that has a design on us.
As we enter a new millennium, the words of Francis Bacon possess a freshness and special pertinence. To invoke his phrase ‘servants of nature’ is to offer relief from those who would exaggerate or minimise the interpretation of science broadly conceived. This phrase balances the self-satisfaction, if not the hubris, of some scientists with Bacon’s recognition that nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. Bacon knew that evidence from the natural world comes in many forms; evidence, in some manner going beyond prejudice, can produce general judgments and, on occasion, laws.
Our method will be apparent from the Table of Contents. We identify and elaborate a number of themes that we believe are central to exploring the role of science in society. The themes fall under three headings: institutions, enterprises, and sensibilities. We trace the themes through the recent and more distant past, through Western and non-Western cultures. Our work is grounded in the belief that history may help us see clearly today. We draw inspiration from the great works of French scholarship that celebrate history as a craft based upon a manipulation of concrete particulars, a tradition inaugurated by Marc Bloch and perfected by Theodore Zeldin.
This book is in fact a child of French North America. Conceived in French Canada, where we taught at Université de Montréal and Concordia University, it finally emerged in French Acadiana, where we work at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. While writing it we ran up many debts. We wish to thank our students and colleagues, who heard us elaborate these ideas. We owe special thanks to Eliane Kinsley and Marc Speyer-Ofenberg, and we are grateful to Roy Porter, Crosby Smith, and Bill Swainson for critical comments. Anyone who has lived through a marital collaboration knows what is involved, but children are the most perceptive observers of it. We dedicate this book to our three spirits.
Lafayette, Louisiana
May Day 1996
Introduction: Science and Its Past
Our thirteen-year-old daughter is studying the history of the United States of America. She is memorizing lists of warriors and battles, statesmen and treaties. She sees pictures of people in powdered wigs and frock coats, on horseback and in carriages. Ordinary people wearing rags and buckskin also appear in her books and films. She learns about hopes and fears in times past. Previously, she learned about history from a German perspective. (She can recite the fiercest North Sea storms of the past fifty years.) Our older son learned history first from the point of view of French-Canadian nationalists and then in a traditional English-Canadian vein, before he, too, had to acquaint himself with American facts and foibles. We hope that our children will achieve the level of cultural literacy now being established by prominent intellectuals. If, decades from now, they do not quite recall why George Washington crossed the Delaware or why Chappaquiddick stands for more than an island off the coast of Massachusetts, they will nevertheless retain the notion that what is told about the past is a function of language and politics.1
Whatever gaps there may be in our children’s schooling, in some sense they will have been educated. Schooling substitutes for travel, for direct experience of distinct cultures. Yet today the distinctness is disappearing. Electronic media and air travel have brought people nearly everywhere in the world into contact with clinically tested drugs, prewashed blue jeans, and the internal-combustion engine. The signs of this convergence have provoked commentary for much of the twentieth century. However the great mixing up is understood, it certainly qualifies as one of the key phenomena of our time.
How did it happen? How did we arrive in our present circumstances? These are the questions posed by historians. They offer many kinds of answer. It has to do with the price of corn over the past 150 years, an economic historian might say. More important are the precedents of Common Law, a legal historian might counter. It is the art of war, thunders a military historian. Everything is family demographics, a social historian counters. Each of these explanations is a splendid room in the mansion of our collective past. But they do not seem to help us understand the form of the objects we use on a daily basis. Does any one of them on its own explain what we see as we go out to purchase the ingredients for dinner or as we watch the evening news on television?
Regardless of the special values that we hold – the religious creed, political persuasion, aesthetic preference, and moral sensibility that together define our character and give meaning to existence – what we experience every day derives from our grasp of the natural and physical world. The following pages investigate how this perception has related to the world of human activity over time. Philosophers and social commentators have argued about how knowledge relates to social dynamics – the regimes of family structure, governmental taxation, religious celebration, and professional obligation that loom large in cultures and civilizations. Perceptions do vary with time and circumstance, but they are not necessarily grounded in incommensurable systems of belief. Microelectronics and molecular biology, for example, which allow all people to share in computer games and biochemical therapy, seem to follow one set of principles everywhere, even though the context of their use varies considerably. The present book explores how knowledge of nature has found a place in society in times past. Sometimes it has transcended language and place. Sometimes it has been anchored firmly in a particular culture.
Our understanding of past knowledge has its own past. Early writings in history of science legitimized a temporal institution, intellectual tendency, or moral lesson. In 1667 Thomas Sprat (1635–1713) promoted the aims of experimental science in his history of the Royal Society of London, the most prestigious association of men of science in the seventeenth century. Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) defended Benjamin Franklin’s (1706–1790) notions of electricity against traditional European views in a history of science first published in 1767. And a portion of Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel’s (1770–1831) lectures on the history of philosophy, appearing in the 1820s and 1830s, served to instruct readers in his opinions about natural philosophers like Francis Bacon (1561–1626), whom Hegel surprisingly admired. Use of the word history was then as much a synonym for narrative and inventory as a by-word for polemic.2
With the nineteenth century, histories of science reverted to the distant and remote past. The impetus came from the crystallization of the historical profession and its installation in European universities. Proponents of the discipline of history required a method to distinguish themselves from the naive, descriptive narrators of previous generations. The discipline came to centre around the treatment of manuscript documents, which had found their way in large numbers to central repositories like the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and the Library of the British Museum in London. The task of the historian became one of