¹ Brooke, J. H., ‘Natural theology and the plurality of worlds: observations on theBrewster-Whewell debate’, Annals of science, 1977, 34, 221–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

² Chalmers, Thomas, The adaptation of external nature to the moral and intellectual constitution of man, London, 1834, pp. 25–7Google Scholar; The works of Thomas Chalmers, 25 vols., Glasgow, 1836–1842, i, 222–3Google Scholar. Subsequent references will be to Chalmers' Works. Robison, John, according to his biographer in the Dictionary of national biography, 22 vols., Oxford, 1917, xvii, 57–8Google Scholar, was ‘one of those who led the way in turning the blind veneration of [Francis] Bacon into a rational worship’. The author was in fact quoting from Hallam, Henry, Introduction to the literature of Europe, 4 vols., London, 1837–1839, iii, 227Google Scholar Robison was certainly a great admirer of Bacon and, like Bacon, he mapped out a grand classification of the sciences, of human knowledge, in the manner he believed accorded more closely with our experience. For a contextual discussion of Robison's conception of natural philosophy, see my paper, ‘“Mechanical philosophy” and the emergence of physics in Britain: 1800–1850’, Annals of science, 1976, 33, 3–29 (7–11).Google Scholar

³ Hanna, William, Memoirs of the life and writings of Thomas Chalmers, 4 vols., Edinburgh, 1849–1852, i, 43–4Google Scholar. According to Hanna, Chalmers attended St Andrews University in the 1790s, and entered the University of Edinburgh at the turn of the century. In 1805 he was unsuccessful against John Leslie as a candidate for the Edinburgh chair of mathematics, left vacant by John Playfair's move to natural philosophy as Robison's successor. Chalmers subsequently became minister of a country parish until he was called to Glasgow in 1814. It was at Glasgow that he made his reputation as a powerful and eloquent preacher in the Evangelical tradition, and as the author of the Astronomical discourses which went through nine editions in one year. In 1823 Chalmers returned to the academic fold as professor of moral philosophy at St Andrews. Four years later he was offered the moral philosophy chair at the new London University, but he became professor of divinity at Edinburgh instead, a chair which he held until the 1843 Disruption. It was during the 1830s, in fact, that most of his writings on natural theology, including the first Bridgewater treatise, were published, and it is these works which are of most interest for our period. See also Rice, D. F., ‘Natural theology and the Scottish philosophy in the thought of Thomas Chalmers’, Scottish journal of theology, 1971, 24, 23–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Rice discusses Chalmers' debt to the Scottish Common Sense philosophers of the late eighteenth century—Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, and James Beattie, for example.

⁴ [Robison, John], ‘Physics’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 3rd edn., Edinburgh, 1797–1801, xvi, 637–59Google Scholar; [Robison, John], ‘Philosophy’Google Scholar, ibid., xiv, 573–600, especially pp. 581–600.

⁵ See Paley, William, ‘Natural theology; or, evidences of the existence and attributes of the Deity, collected from the appearances of nature’ [1802], The works of William Paley, DD, 5 vols., London, 1823, ivGoogle Scholar. For a clear delineation of the role of natural theology and theologies of nature, see Brooke, J. H., ‘Natural theology in Britain from Boyle to Paley’, in New interactions between theology and natural science, Milton Keynes, 1974, pp. 8–9.Google Scholar

⁶ Chalmers, , Works, i, 222–3Google Scholar. For the corresponding discussion by Robison, , see op. cit. (4), xiv, 582.Google Scholar

⁷ Chalmers, , Works, i, 222–5Google Scholar; Robison, , op. cit. (4), xvi, 647Google Scholar. See also Smith, , op. cit. (2), 7–8.Google Scholar

⁸ Chalmers, , Works, i, 225.Google Scholar

⁹ Chalmers, T., ‘On the defects and uses of natural theology’, Works, ii, 358–420, especially p. 361Google Scholar. Compare Cairns, David, ‘Thomas Chalmers's Astronomical discourses: a study in natural theology’, Scottish journal of theology, 1956, p, 410–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁰ Ibid., pp. 364–8.

¹¹ Ibid., pp. 371–2.

¹² Ibid., pp. 389–90.

¹³ On the theological tradition of voluntarism, see Oakley, Francis, ‘Christian theology and Newtonian science’, Church history, 1961, 30, 433–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar or an account of its nature and origins, and McGuire, J. E., ‘Boyle's conception of nature’, Journal of the history of ideas, 1972, 33, 523–42CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed for its employment in seventeenth-century natural philosophy.

¹⁴ Chalmers, , Works, iv, 387–8.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Chalmers, T., ‘On the consistency between the efficacy of prayer and the uniformity of nature’, Works, vii, 234–62, especially pp. 234–6.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Ibid., p. 241. Chalmers turned to those classic scriptural texts in Job and Psalms to give support to his exposition of the ‘subserviency of the visible instruments to the invisible but real agency of Him who wields them at His pleasure’. For example, rather than use the Authorized version of the verse from Job, Chapter XXVI, verse 14, ‘Lo, these are parts of his ways; but how little a portion is heard of him?’ Chalmers translated the verse himself as ‘These are the parts, or the lower endings of his ways’. Similarly, verse 4 from Psalm CIV which runs in the Authorized version as ‘Who maketh his angels spirits, his ministers a flaming fire’, Chalmers translated as ‘Who maketh the winds his messengers, and the flaming fire his servant’ which corresponds very closely to the New English Bible version ‘Who maketh the winds thy messengers, and the flames of fire thy servants’. Chalmers, then, believed that his theology of nature corresponded to, and indeed derived from, scripture. While God has the absolute power to abrogate the laws of nature, He will more often respond to the prayers of man by working through his various agents such as the powers of nature, which appear to be subject to the uniformity of nature at the visible level. Ultimately, however, they were wholly dependent on divine will. In other words, behind the constancy of visible nature lies the unseen and presiding agency of a God of absolute power.

¹⁷ Chalmers, , Works, i, 167–8.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Chalmers, T., ‘On the non-eternity of the present order of things’, Works, i, 161–87Google Scholar. See also Millhauser, Milton, ‘The scriptural geologists. An episode in the history of opinion’, Osiris, 1954, 11, 65–86, especially pp. 66–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Millhauser discusses Chalmers' view that there may have been an interval between the primal creation and the six days' work as set out in Genesis. Such an interpretation would allow for both a long geological time-scale and creative interposition, and would relate intimately to his natural history–natural philosophy distinction with its demarcation of arrangement and order from creation ex nihilo and laws of events. See also Cannon, Walter, ‘The problem of miracles in the 1830s’, Victorian studies, 1960, 4, 5–32, especially pp. 15–17.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Chalmers, T., ‘The transitory nature of visible things’, Works, vii, 263–79.Google Scholar

²⁰ Ibid., pp. 266–7.

²¹ Whewell, W., Astronomy and general physics considered with reference to natural theology (London, 1833), pp 193–207Google Scholar. For an analysis of Whewell's views on this aspect, see my ‘Natural philosophy and thermodynamics: Thomson, William and “the dynamical theory of heat”’, The British journal for the history of science, 1976, 9, 293–319, especially pp. 303–4.Google Scholar

²² Chalmers, , Works, i, 193nGoogle Scholar; Hanna, , op. cit. (3), iii, 381.Google Scholar

²³ Chalmers, , Works, ii, 389–90Google Scholar. See also Young, R. M., ‘Malthus and the evolutionists: the common context of biological and social theory’, Past and present, 1969, 41, 119–25Google Scholar for a discussion of Chalmers' views on social issues, including his adoption of Malthusian doctrines.

²⁴ Chalmers, T., ‘On the new heavens and the new earth’, Works, vii, 280–99.Google Scholar

²⁵ Thomson, W., ‘Presidential address to the British Association, Edinburgh, 1871’, Popular lectures and addresses, 3 vols., London, 1889–1894, ii, 203–5.Google Scholar

²⁶ See Smith, , op. cit. (21), pp. 309–15Google Scholar. William Thomson's father, James Thomson, was acquainted with Thomas Chalmers personally; see Hanna, , op. cit. (3), iii, 169–79Google Scholar. However, I would not wish to claim that there is substantive evidence of a direct Chalmers-Thomson influence. Rather, both were responding to common intellectual traditions of Christian theology on the one hand, and of Scottish natural philosophy on the other. James Clerk Maxwell, for his part, did respond directly to Chalmers. See Maxwell, , ‘Molecules’ [1873], in The scientific papers of James Clerk Maxwell, ed. by Niven, W. D., 2 vols, in one, New York, 1965Google Scholar (reprint of 1890 edn.), ii, 376–7 and Heimann, P. M., ‘Molecular forces, statistical representation and Maxwell's demon’, Studies in history and philosophy of science, 1970, 1, 189–211CrossRefGoogle Scholar (203, 210). For Maxwell, molecules were an example of a collocation or distribution of matter, and he explicitly linked the use of the word ‘collocation’ to Chalmers. Each molecule of hydrogen, for example, contained exactly the same amount of matter, that is, a definite arrangement of matter, which ‘we have no difficulty in imagining to have been arranged otherwise’. In addition, however, molecules were the foundation stones of the universe and as such remained unbroken and unworn. Their arrangement, as well as their matter or substance, was immutable: ‘They continue this day as they were created—perfect in number and measure and weight, and from the ineffaceable characters impressed on them we may learn that those aspirations after accuracy in measurement, truth in statement, and justice in action, which we reckon among our noblest attributes as men, are ours because they are essential constituents of the image of Him who in the beginning created, not only the heaven and the earth, but the materials of which heaven and earth consist.’ This passage contains much more than a superficial reading might suggest. While it does indicate a role for a natural theology—learning something of the divine nature from the character of molecules—the crucial argument can only be fully understood in the context of what has been discussed above with respect to Chalmers. There is first of all the important distinction between creation ex nihilo and arrangement. The former was not an object of science for Maxwell: ‘science is incompetent to reason upon the creation of matter itself out of nothing’. The laws of conservation of matter and of energy, were thus basic assumptions—perhaps even necessary truths—for natural science and they made science possible. The latter kind of creation was that of form, arrangement, and distribution, and it was molecules which God had chosen as the particular arrangement of matter for the building blocks, the materials, of the universe. Not all arrangements, of course, were immutable, as Maxwell pointed out. The forms and dimensions of the planetary orbits and the size of the earth—‘from the standard of what is called the metrical system has been derived’—also depend, not on any law of nature, as he stressed, but upon a particular collocation of matter. Such magnitudes, however, were far inferior in scientific importance ‘to that most fundamental of all standards which forms the base of the molecular system’ namely, molecules. By contrast with molecules, ‘natural causes … are at work, which tend to modify, if they do not at length destroy, all the arrangements and dimensions of the earth and the whole solar system’. Nature, therefore, was mutable and transitory: old systems or arrangements of nature may be dissolved and new ones evolved out of the ruins even though not only the total matter and energy remained constant, but the molecules themselves continued unchanged. Maxwell's theology of nature was thus an interpretation very similar to that of Chalmers and the Scottish context with which I have been concerned.

²⁷ Ibid., pp. 314–5.

²⁸ Paley, , op. cit. (5), iv, 377–8.Google Scholar

On theology and the physical sciences in the second half of the nineteenth century see the interesting discussion by Heimann, P. M., ‘The unseen universe: physics and the philosophy of nature in Victorian Britain’, The British journal for the history of science, 1972, 6, 73–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The work under analysis was [Stewart, Balfour and Tait, P. G.], The unseen universe, London, 1875Google Scholar. Because Stewart and Tait's theological framework was a curious modification of a voluntarist one, and because their scientific views were inherited in large measure from those of Thomson and his associates, The unseen universe cannot be regarded as an isolated work, unconnected with the developments in thought during the later part of the period 1800–1875. To begin with, the authors' assumptions were voluntaristic, with a characteristic emphasis on divine will, omnipotence, and governance: ‘[God the Father] appears to be regarded as the Being or Essence in virtue of whom the Universe exists. Thus in reciting the Apostles’ Creed the Christian disciple says: “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth”; and the laws of the Universe are regarded by Christian theologians as being expressions of the will acting in conformity with the character of this Being. Thus Nature … is the course in which the Author and Governor of all things proceeds in his works'; ibid., pp. 28–9. However, Stewart and Tait attempted to go beyond the notions of a Supreme Governor acting through laws of nature. By making the ‘Principle of Continuity’ fundamental to their view, they endeavoured to abolish all absolute discontinuities, such as beginnings and endings, which had been essential to previous voluntaristic views of nature. They sought in particular to forge a firm link between the visible world and the invisible realm by supposing that the energy of visible matter had originally derived from, and would eventually return to, the energy of invisible ether; ibid., pp. 157–9. The energy of the ‘Great Whole’ was infinite in space and time and was indestructible, but the energy of the visible universe was constantly being dissipated according to the second law of thermodynamics. For Stewart and Tait, therefore, as for Chalmers and Thomson, the visible universe was transitory and perishable. Stewart and Tait, indeed, quoted the very verses of scripture which we have already seen in the previous thinkers: Psalm CII on the waxing old of the heavens and the earth, second Corinthians on the temporal nature of that which is seen and on the eternal nature of that which is unseen, and second Peter on the end of the universe and the vision of a new heaven and earth; ibid., pp. 26–7. For The unseen universe, ‘the visible universe must, certainly in transformable energy, and probably in matter, come to an end. We cannot escape this conclusion’ (p. 64).

The critical point of divergence from previous views was suggested by the full title The unseen universe: or, physical speculations on a future state. The important separation between God and nature in the theological views which we have examined was effectively a bolished by Stewart and Tait's ‘Principle of continuity’. They seemed to be claiming that we could have a knowledge of the workings of the invisible realm, which included God, from the laws of the visible universe. The so-called ‘Great whole’ for example, was as subject to the law of conservation of energy as was the visible realm (p. 164): such a fundamental law could not therefore be abrogated by divine will, otherwise continuity would be violated. Thus, while the inlention of continuity was to allow for immortalily, the effect of such a principle was to blur the God-Nature distinction and to lessen the emphasis on divine omnipotence. Probably for this reason, among others, neither William Thomson nor Maxwell liked the work. See Thompson, S. P., The life of William Thomson, Baron Kelvin of Largs, 2 vols., London, 1910, i, 480Google Scholar, and Maxwell, , op. cit. (26), pp. 756–63.Google Scholar