Writing in 1882, the economist Stanley Jevons had complained that in spite of the steady appearance of articles in learned periodicals on the subject of infant death rates in large towns in Britain, he feared that infant mortality in general remained ‘far too wide and vague an idea to rivet the attention of the public.’ If there was justice in this observation in the 1880s, the situation changed rapidly over the next ten years, and between 1900 and World War I it is reasonable to assert that prevailing rates of infant mortality in England became denned by contemporaries as one of the major social problems of the time.

It is not difficult to understand why this came to be so. Infant mortality had remained high throughout the nineteenth century (averaging about 149 deaths per 1000 live births); but this rate had attracted little attention while general death rates also remained high. However, between the 1860s and 1900 the general death rate (or deaths per 1000 in the total population) had fallen by about 15 per cent. Further, as the Registrar General emphasized in 1907, while the death rate for children aged from one to five years had fallen by 33 per cent over the preceding forty years, that for infants under one year had remained as high for the decade of the 1890s as it had been for the 1860s. Meanwhile, of course, the birth rate had entered upon a period of steady decline; from 35.5 per thousand in 1871–75 to 29.3 per thousand in 1896–1900. In other words, by 1900 fewer babies were being born, a high proportion of whom continued to perish in the first twelve months of life.

The appeal to science as the embodiment of certainty, the insistence that his particular specialism conforms to a model derived from the ‘hardest’ physical science, is a familiar, even a commonplace, phenomenon among nineteenth- and twentieth-century social scientists. The new specialism of the psychology of individual differences, emerging from the turn of the century, was no exception to this, nor was its principal field of application, education. The proponents of mental measurement, or psychometrics, as some of them chose to call it, offered it to teachers and educational administrators as the new technology which would at last enable the theory and practice of education to attain scientific status. This essay

The statistics for improvements in women's health since the 1840s are impressive. Between 1840–9 and 1960–5 the death-rate of women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four in England and Wales fell continuously from 10.6 to 1.8 per thousand. The ratio of male to female mortality in England and Wales (adjusted for age differences) was simultaneously rising – from 1.096 in 1841– 5 to 1.276 in 1931–5. Maternal deaths per thousand live births in the United Kingdom fell from 4.71 in 1900–2 to 0.17 in 1972–4. These trends continue: for example, perinatal mortality per thousand births in Great Britain fell from 37.7 in 1949 to 34.6 in 1959, to 23.6 in 1969, to 19.5 in 1975. Female deaths due to pregnancy, childbirth or abortion fell strikingly between 1968 and 1975. There are no comparable statistics for levels of morbidity, whose relationship to levels of mortality is complex; but the improvement in mortality rates is impressive enough in itself, and the continuous fall in the age of menarche – by three to four months per decade during the last century – reflects an improved nutrition which can hardly have left morbidity levels unaffected.

Many factors apart from improved nutrition have combined to produce this improvement: improved standards of public health, a reduced birth-rate which has the advantage of concentrating births at physiologically the most suitable time, and the dramatic decline in puerperal sepsis. The period has also seen major improvements in the diagnosis of pregnancy, in the understanding of

I am most grateful to Mrs Jenifer Hart, of St Anne's College, Oxford, for commenting on an earlier draft of this essay; I alone am to blame for any mistakes which remain.

The years around 1900 witnessed a bitter controversy within British biology. It involved on the one hand the biometricians, or biometric school, led by the statistician and philosopher Karl Pearson (1857–936) and the zoologist W. F. R. Weldon (1860–1906), and on the other, the early Mendelian geneticists led by William Bateson (1861–1926). The controversy was marked by the shattering of personal friendships, by heated public debate, by suggestions of fraud and by long-lasting divisions within the British scientific community. Historians of biology have rightly identified the episode as an important one in the development of modern genetics and evolutionary theory, and accordingly it has been the object of considerable scholarly attention, particularly in the last decade.

My aim here is neither to produce another account of the events of the controversy nor to discuss its long-term significance. Rather it is to ask a somewhat different question from those that have hitherto been raised in the bulk of the literature on the controversy. I shall inquire as to the extent to which the controversy can be seen as sustained by social factors. I shall examine both the role of factors arising from the ‘internal’ social structure of science and the way in which the controversy was connected to society at large by the ‘sociobiological’ uses of the theories of genetics and evolution. First, however, it is necessary to discuss the most obvious issue on which the two sides differed: their approaches to the study of heredity.

GREEN PEAS, YELLOW PEAS AND GREENISHYELLOW PEAS

Modern biology and medicine are inescapably involved with questions of policy and politics. The essays comprising the present volume explore major dimensions of this interrelationship. The authors demonstrate convincingly that cross-currents between the arenas of biological and social thought have persisted into the present century, notwithstanding the apparent greater isolation, sophistication and objectivity of the modern experimental sciences. The current sociobiology debate is merely the most recent manifestation of this interaction. It is by no means lost on participants in the many-sided controversy surrounding sociobiology, that generic sources for their respective views may be located at various points within the modern scientific movement, Darwinian evolutionary theory being outstandingly important. When, in an isolated and intentionally inscrutable remark in the Origin of Species (1859), Darwin conceded that “light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history” he was inaugurating a new phase in the continuing debate concerning the relationship between the biological and social sciences. The novelty of evolutionary language failed to obscure the deeper historical roots of ideas concerning the relevance of evolution to social thought. Indeed the programme for deducing political principles from the experimental sciences is virtually concomitant with the scientific movement.

Problems of population have provided an important occasion for the transference of ideas between the scientific and political areas. The whole rise into industrialization of Western Europe has been accompanied by theorizing concerning the relationship, between wealth and population. The sciences provided a stimulus for data gathering in the fields of economics and population and they evolved tools for mathematical analysis of these data. Natural philosophers contributed freely to economic and population theory; their speculation and analysis periodically questioned the ability of western

In the aftermath of a scientific controversy which has bordered at times on the outrageous, it is appropriate that historians should turn their attention to ‘The Roots of Sociobiology’. Of course, this is no easy task. For one thing, it is too early to be sure of the precise nature of the subject with which we are dealing. The biologist Richard Dawkins highlighted this problem recently, when he asked almost despairingly: ‘What on earth is sociobiology?’ According to the philosopher David Hull, this question cannot be answered in terms of a set of simple defining characteristics, or even by exclusive reference to the substantive content of the subject. Sociobiology, Hull argues, has no ‘essence’; in the last analysis it is what its practitioners make it. This approach introduces another element of uncertainty, since at the present time it is far from clear exactly who are the sociobiologists. When Edward Wilson published his massive volume Sociobiology. The New Synthesis in 1975, some biologists were surprised that so much fuss should be made over a subject which they had been teaching in undergraduate courses for several years, and others wondered whether they were not witnessing a ‘political game’ involving the naming and renaming of fields. Finally, the problems facing the historian are compounded by the fact that the sociobiology debate is highly polarized, and the literature abounds with tendentious and superficial historical judgements. At close range it is often difficult either to ignore these judgements altogether, or to bring them into the sharp focus which is necessary for the purpose of critical assessment.

Several years ago, confronted by problems in the history of chemistry, I sought an interview with Kathleen Coburn, to ask for help in unraveling Humphry Davy's possible indebtedness to Coleridge. Miss Coburn's response was to introduce me to Coleridge's remaining unpublished notebooks, some of them replete with chemical and other scientific entries. She cheerfully invited me to make sense of them. The notes proved, for the most part, individually incomprehensible, forming part of an intellectual enterprise that was then unfamiliar to me. This book has grown from my attempts to overcome that unfamiliarity; and so I take pleasure in reminding Kathleen Coburn that she provided my incentive.

Miss Coburn and Merton Christensen, coeditors of the forthcoming volumes of The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, have been generous with criticism, encouragement, information, transcripts, and time. Miss Coburn has also been of great assistance in persuading me of the value of a blue pencil in revising drafts of my manuscript.

Several editors of individual works in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (general editor Kathleen Coburn) have been equally generous. Heather Jackson told me of several manuscripts of which I was ignorant; she allowed me to read drafts of her edition of the Essay on Scrofula and the Theory of Life for the Shorter Works and Fragments; and she read and criticized a complete draft of this book.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in the organic unity of his thought, worked constantly toward a system reducing “all knowledges into harmony.” Thomas McFarland has observed that “the urge to system is a reflection, in the special realm of philosophy, of a universal concern, the need to harmonize, to tie things together – what we may call the need for reticulation.” This need impelled Coleridge to attempt to reconcile conflicting systems of thought, and to make room for all facts of experience.

He was determined to construct a scheme that was truly comprehensive, encompassing the reality and dignity of external nature, the moral sense and freedom of will of mankind, and God, in whom man had his being. Faith in this scheme was not irrational, but rather subsisted “in the synthesis of the reason and the individual will.” Trinitarian Christianity came to provide a unifying logic for this scheme, and that logic in turn supported Christianity, in a mutual interdependence: “True philosophy rather leads to Christianity, than contained anything preclusive of it.” Coleridge asserted, indeed, “that it was one of the great purposes of Christianity … to rouse and emancipate the soul from … debasing slavery to the outward senses, to awaken the mind to the true criteria of reality, namely, permanence, power, will manifested in act, and truth operating as life.”

Coleridge held fast to the reality of man's moral being and to that of external nature.

Beddoes and Darwin, Werner and Hutton

Coleridge, in the year before his death, had come to see geological debates as of the most fundamental importance. “Since the controversy between the Realists and Nominalists of the 13th, and 14th Centuries, there has been … no more important Question – than that … of the German & thence the French Hypothesis of a progressive Zoogony, (and of course, a Geogony, with its successive Epochs & their Catastrophes; and of its English opponents, Lyell … &c.” He had not always been so impressed with the importance of geology, which he first encountered in the persons and writings of Darwin and Beddoes. Coleridge, disputing with Darwin in Derby in 1796, learned that he had adopted James Hutton's theory. Not long previously, Coleridge had read Darwin's Botanic Garden, which evinced a partly Wernerian stance toward the theory of the earth. His encounter with Darwin came shortly after his first meeting with Beddoes, who was in the habit of addressing combative geological letters to his friend and fellow physician Darwin. Beddoes had studied at Edinburgh in the 1780s, when Hutton's theory was becoming known there. Beddoes's publications and lecture notes following his removal to Oxford show him as indebted to both Werner and Hutton. His lectures were essentially Wernerian, his papers Huttonian. Coleridge had certainly encountered the debate between the two schools of geology by 1796.

The construction of matter

Length, breadth, and depth are the three dimensions of matter corresponding to the linear axis of magnetism, the superficial charge given to bodies by static electricity, and the inner chemical effects of a galvanic cell. They can be seen as the keys to the creation of three-dimensional matter and of the cosmos, whereas the activity of the powers of attraction and repulsion, symbolized in the magnet and corresponding to the power of length, represents the first stage of that construction. Because the creation of matter and of the cosmos was initiated and effected by an act of divine will, matter could provide an image of that act of will, reminding one of the spiritual origin of nature. Thus Coleridge once described matter as “the phantom of the Absolute Will.” To him, matter was at once a reality and an abstraction, to be distinguished from body: “When we think Body in the abstract, we call the result Matter: when we imagine Matter in the concrete, we call it Body.” His concept was here analogous to Aristotle's, wherein matter and form underlay the actuality of bodies. But for Coleridge, unlike Aristotle, matter could exist independently of body – for example, in the phenomenon of light, which he regarded as material although not corporeal.

Matter, then, was generated by an interaction of polar powers, existed in virtue of those powers, and was essentially active.

A world of little things

Coleridge's objections to mechanism were all interdependent, but the imputation of atheism came to be the fundamental objection, just as theological preoccupations filled his later notebooks. At every state, he sought to keep his interpretation of nature, his philosophy, and his theology in step with one another. The tripartite organization of his first educational schemes was maintained over the years. “True Philosophy,” he wrote in 1817, “… takes it's root in Science in order to blossom into Religion.” Science in itself was morally neutral, but it provided materials for the construction of philosophy, which in turn supported and was transcended by theology. Atheism, in contrast, meant for Coleridge the end of reason and purpose in nature, the end of any possibility of rational knowledge or purposeful action. In an early note, Coleridge proposed to introduce into a poem “a dissection of Atheism – particularly the Godwinian System of Pride Proud of what? An outcast of blind Nature ruled by a fatal Necessity.” He believed that blind Nature and fatal Necessity followed inevitably from atheism and materialism, and he indentified two kinds of materialists and atheists. The first kind assumed that everything was material, that the atoms of matter were endowed with the passive attributes of figure and movability, and that thought and sensation arose from the accidental organization of atoms. The second kind added the active properties of self-movement and life to atoms and derived thought not from the mere arrangement of atoms, but from the aggregation of the properties essential to atoms.

Coleridge and the doctors

Coleridge's cosmos was a living one, informed by the power of life, and reaching its climax in man at the summit of the terrestrial creation. Coleridge's concern with the ascent of life complemented his probing into his own human nature and his fascination with the relations between mind and body. These interests drew him to medical works, and accidents of personality and health brought him into extended intercourse with medical men. Many of the sixty or more physicians and surgeons among his acquaintance were interested in powers, in the theory of life, in zoomagnetism, and in psychosomatic diseases.

Coleridge's brother Luke (1765–90) had been a surgeon in the London Hospital. Coleridge recalled his desire to emulate his brother: “Every Saturday I could make or obtain leave, to the London Hospital trudged I. O bliss, if I was permitted to hold the plasters or to attend the dressings, I became wild to be apprenticed to a surgeon. English, Latin, yea Greek books on medicine I read incessantly. Blanchard's Latin Medical Dictionary I nearly had by heart.” When in 1797 he stated the preparation needed for writing an epic poem, he included the acquisition of a thorough knowledge of anatomy and medicine.

His studies in Germany in 1799 took him to Blumenbach's lectures on physiology, anatomy, and natural history. When he returned to Bristol, it was to find Beddoes and Davy busy with pneumatic medicine, and with access to the patients in the Bristol Infirmary.

Unity in multeity: the need for a method

In 1803, Coleridge jotted down a note for a “Poem on Spirit – or on Spinoza – I would make a pilgrimage to the Deserts of Arabia to find the man who could make understand how the one can be many! Eternal universal mystery! It seems as if it were impossible; yet it is – & it is every where!” Multeity was everywhere. The empiricist tradition in science emphasized it – indeed, for Coleridge, presented nature as made up exclusively of a world of little things. This was intellectually and emotionally unsatisfying. “I can contemplate nothing but parts, & parts are all little –! – My mind feels as if it ached to behold & know something great – something one & indivisible – and it is only in the faith of this that rocks or waterfalls, mountains or caverns give me the sense of sublimity or majesty! – But in this faith all things counterfeit infinity!”

The observer, faced by the vast richness of the world of the manifold, sought and needed to appreciate its minute beauties while grasping its unity. At one level, this synthetic function was carried out by the understanding, which brought together a multitude of impressions into a unity by identifying something common to them all. But this was limited by the extent of the observer's experience. The understanding was not enough, and a different approach was needed.

Hartley and Priestley

Politics and religion provided Coleridge's introduction to science. In December 1795 he had published a sonnet to Joseph Priestley, whose sympathy for the French Revolution had wrought the mob to drive him out of Birmingham. Priestley was a Socinian, and thus congenial to Coleridge, then a Unitarian and a Democrat. And Priestley had recently crossed the Atlantic in search of freedom from persecution. In his Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, he had stated his creed as a natural philosopher: