THE ANXIETIES OF ALIENATION

Twice-Told Tales has very few men of science – Aylmer, Rappaccini, and the virtuosi of “The Hall of Fantasy” populate Mosses From an Old Manse – but it does have Doctor Cacaphodel of “The Great Carbuncle.” Is Cacaphodel a scientist? This is the sort of question that turns up frequently in Hawthorne criticism: Is Aylmer himself a scientist? Rappaccini himself? We will not get very far in appraising Hawthorne's relation to science if we shirk the issue. But in this case, there is a very good reason for shirking it. It was in 1840 that Whewell decided that the men of inductive science needed a collective name, and made up the epithet “scientist” for them. Twice-Told Tales was published in 1837, before there was any such thing.

This is more than an accident of nomenclature, though Whewell proposed the term “scientist” nonchalantly: “We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I should incline to call him a Scientist. Thus we might say, that as an Artist is a Musician, Painter, or Poet, a Scientist is a Mathematician, Physicist, or Naturalist.” That is all Whewell urged on behalf of the coinage, but in fact, the scientist's right to the appellation had been only recently earned by a momentous historical development that Whewell's book exists to theorize. There were scientists (not just, say, chemists and astronomers) not because the discipline was becoming less specialized, but because there had emerged a “science” whose success in discovering definite truths could be analyzed across a considerable spectrum of specializations.