The Subject of Science

The debate between Mill and Whewell is not so much a scientific controversy as a controversy about the very idea of science and its operative supplement, namely art. It is about how science is to be defined in relation to the art of making, extending and applying it. On Whewell's account, to repeat, ‘science’ refers to a theoretical sphere that ought to be kept neatly apart from all modes of experience-based reasoning and embodied thought. For Mill, by contrast, the practical domain of life, along with the moral and political issues inherent in it, must be acknowledged as continuous with scientific ideas. While this may appear like a mere quarrel over the meaning of words, it draws attention to an unsettled relationship between people's theoretical knowledge about the world and their practical experience of being engaged with it.

This interplay between being and knowing, as I shall argue in this chapter, between sensual involvement and intellectual detachment and, for that matter, between ontology and epistemology, was of central concern to many Victorians and has remained relevant ever since. It is best explored by way of another influential definition of ‘science’ that was originally proposed by John Herschel in 1830. ‘Science,’ Herschel writes in his Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural History, ‘is the knowledge of many, orderly and methodically digested and arranged, so as to become attainable by one.’ On this conception, science represents a general mode of knowledge that is abstracted from individual circumstances, interests and points of view. Science, thus defined, is what has been purified of the multiple ways in which it may be perceived so as to be contained in an ideal, often mathematical form ‘attainable by one’. As Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston have argued, this notion of ‘science’ as justified general knowledge, which conforms with Whewell’s, is both premised on and productive of an ethos of disengagement and self-restraint that, towards the end of the nineteenth century, came to define what is now usually conceived of as a professional culture of scientific pursuit.