Historians have long seen the search for a viable “science of man [sic]” as a central feature of eighteenth-century intellectual life. David Hume’s (1711–1776) desire to be “the Newton of the moral Sciences” and his insistence in 1740 that “’tis at least worthwhile to try if the Sciences of man will not admit of the same accuracy which several parts of natural philosophy are found susceptible of” have been taken to represent the views of a huge number of intellectuals throughout the century and across all nations of Europe and North America. Moreover, the centrality of the human sciences to the Enlightenment project is acknowledged not only by those sympathetic to the goals of that project and fundamentally optimistic about its liberating consequences but also by those who have found the goals misdirected and the consequences fundamentally destructive.

The issue of how to portray the relationships between such twentieth-century professional disciplines as anthropology, economics, geography, history, linguistics, psychology, or sociology and various eighteenth-century attempts to establish human sciences is both extremely complex and a matter of intense debate. Eighteenth-century authors and readers often thought in terms of categories that differ from those in use today. Thus, for example, the phrases “the natural history of man” and “philosophical history” were frequently used to include many topics now included in anthropology, linguistics, and sociology, along with some that now belong to political science and aesthetics. At the same time, “anthropology” was used in German speaking regions to cover physiology as well as topics from the first three twentieth-century disciplines.

During the eighteenth century the astronomy of the solar system became, in the words of William Whewell, “the queen of the sciences… the only perfect science… in which particulars are completely subjugated to generals, effects to causes.” The striking theoretical advances Whewell refers to were the work of Continental mathematicians, members of scientific academies in Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg, who, through elaborating the algorithms of the Leibnizian differential and integral calculus, elicited the consequences of Newtonian gravitation. Meanwhile, instrument-makers, chiefly British, so refined telescopes and graduated arcs that observational precision kept pace with theoretical prediction. Observatories, the chief of them nationally funded, took pride in contributing not only to the navigational needs of their nations’ navies and merchant marines but also to the supranational goal of a perfected astronomy.

Ancillary to planetary and lunar astronomy was the construction of star catalogs: it was in relation to star positions that the positions of planets and the Moon were determined. The puzzle of apparent systematic motions of the stars was unraveled by James Bradley between 1729 and 1748 – a sine qua non for an astronomy precise to arcseconds. Meanwhile, a few thinkers speculated as to the large-scale structure of the universe. If gravitation were universal, why did not the stars collapse into one another? Was the cosmos a stable structure or in the process of change? Toward the end of the century, dynamical arguments and observational evidence were brought to bear on these questions and led to a new vision of an evolving stellar world.

The engagement of eighteenth-century governments and monarchs in the patronage of science had predominantly utilitarian motives. It was inspired, to very different degrees in different countries, both by a belief in the value of scientific knowledge for manufacturing, agriculture, medical improvement, public works, and warfare and by a perception of science as a form of culture whose promotion would lend luster to any regime seeking to parade its adjustment, however cautious, to the beneficent forces of enlightenment and modernity. Some of these motives had already borne scientific fruit in the seventeenth century, tentatively in England, where Charles II’s patronage of the Royal Society had been no more than nominal, and in a far more concrete fashion in France in the new and existing institutions that were supported under the influence of Louis XIV’s minister Colbert. From its foundation in 1666, the Académie Royale des Sciences was an instrument of the state: its members received material support, in the form of salaries and facilities, and in return the monarchy looked for a source of glory that would outshine the Royal Society in London and for services and expert advice of the kind it requested and received on the water supply to Versailles and on the inventions and machines that were routinely submitted to the Académie for judgment. It was with a similar aspiration to bind the interests of science to those of the state that Colbert commissioned Claude Perrault to design the Observatory of Paris in the late 1660s.

In recent years philosophy of science and the history of philosophy of science have been subjected to a number of critiques by scholars from areas such as sociology of science and history of science. The following is a litany of some of their complaints. Philosophers of science (it is argued) do not deal with the practical engagement with the world that is the central part of scientific activity, and their view of the nature and function of scientific theory is fanciful and biased (“theory” is seen as prior to, and more historically significant than “practice”). Historians of philosophy anachronistically decide what constituted important problems in the past, selecting for study the works of great men whose doctrines they wrench from their historical contexts. They then misinterpret and present the corpus of an individual’s published writings as if it were coherent across various projects and over lengthy periods of time. Philosophers are taken to be in dialog with the timeless problems of their ancestors, and the “progressive, ” pure aspects of scientific work are divorced from other areas of an individual’s intellectual output, such as theology and economics, which are seen as inferior productions. In dealing with the legacy of Newton, “Newtonians” merely develop and never radically challenge powerful suggestions that are inherent within the public texts of the Master, whereas “anti-Newtonians” are lumped together, whatever their doctrines, and whatever the traditions within which they write. As one corollary of Newtonocentrism, historians have tended to argue that all decent examples of exact science in the eighteenth century are the result of successfully grappling with problems laid out or “hinted” at in Newton’s works.

No interested person in the eighteenth century would have accepted the recent insistence by a professor of biology and publicizer of science that art and science are entirely separate and different disciplines. Nobody was astonished in 1760, when the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, founded to promote scientific inventions for the benefit of the national economy, staged the first public art exhibition in Great Britain. In an age when politicians, scientists, and artists met in coffeehouses and clubs and debated subjects ranging from natural history to political scandals, the boundaries between art and science were not clearly marked. In eighteenth-century Europe, botany was not only a cutting-edge science but also the favorite subject matter for the drawings of aristocratic ladies; those who collected and classified shells were also the arbiters of Rococo taste, and the foremost anatomists were employed by art academies to lecture to their students. Each of these areas would be a suitable subject for a chapter dedicated to science and art in the eighteenth century. So, too, might the way that some artists represented the activities of experimental scientists and technologists. Yet it was not such experimental investigators but rather the “natural historians“ – descriptive explorers of the natural world – who were the central figures in the age of the Cult of Nature, and it is their concerns that intersect most clearly with those of artists in the eighteenth century. It is on the changing perceptions of landscape as they developed among artists and natural historians that this chapter will concentrate.

For much of the eighteenth century, the biological world was seen as a very ordered place. Plants and animals yielded to Linnean classification. Physiological functioning was envisioned in mechanistic terms. And the generation of new animals and plants proceeded from preformed germs that had existed since the creation. All this order arose from God, who had created and organized the world for humans to understand and thereby to appreciate His handiwork and lead moral lives. Even the seemingly disordered, such as monsters and wonders of Nature, were generally brought under the paradigm of order.

All this was to be challenged by mid-century. Mechanistic physiology, based on the analogy of living organisms with machines, was to be considerably broadened by the introduction of Newtonian forces into physiology. The clear borders between the animal and plant kingdoms, and even between the plant and mineral worlds, were to be called into question by new experimental evidence. And the comfortable synthesis of mechanism with reproduction from preexisting germs was to encounter serious opposition from new theories of gradual development that raised the specter of materialism.

Some scholars have characterized eighteenth-century life sciences as a move from mechanism to vitalism, from a view that living phenomena could be explained by matter and motion alone to one that argued that living organisms possess some special force or principle that makes them distinct from dead matter. Yet, as Thomas Hankins has pointed out, creating such absolute dichotomies can be misleading because it ignores the “middle ground.”

If there is one characterization of the Enlightenment that appears as a truism, it is the assertion that the Enlightenment adopted, extended, and completed the intellectual and social project usually characterized as the “Scientific Revolution,” a movement forged by Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) and Galilei Galileo (1564–1642), developed by René Descartes (1596–1650) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), and completed by Isaac Newton (1642–1727). In this view, the Enlightenment becomes both the inheritor of this legacy and its most persistent and dogmatic trustee. Because the Enlightenment is often seen as an age in which a “scientific paradigm” is accepted and transformed into “normal science,” the history of Enlightenment science has often been considered “a tiresome trough to be negotiated between the peaks of the seventeenth and those of the nineteenth century; or as a mystery, a twilight zone in which all is on the verge of yielding.” For many recent commentators even the twilight zone has been dispelled, revealing clear and close links between Enlightenment science and the “rational” imperatives of the Scientific Revolution, establishing the Enlightenment as the prototypical era in which scientific and instrumental reason became a defining characteristic of modern culture. These linkages between the Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment science, and a negative evaluation of modernity were first drawn by some intellectuals horrified by the destructiveness of modern civilization at the end of the Second World War. Max Horkheimer, for example, claimed in 1946 that “the collapse of a large part of the intellectual foundation of our civilization is … the result of technical and scientific progress.”

Considered broadly, mathematical activity in the eighteenth century was characterized by a strong emphasis on analysis and mechanics. The great advances occurred in the development of calculus-related parts of mathematics and in the detailed elaboration of the program of inertial mechanics founded during the Scientific Revolution. There were other mathematical developments of note – in the theory of equations, number theory, probability and statistics, and geometry – but none of them reached anything like the depth and scope attained in analysis and mechanics.

The close relationship between mathematics and mechanics had a basis that extended deep into Enlightenment thought. In the Preliminary Discourse to the famous French Encyclopédie, Jean d’ Alembert distinguished between “pure” mathematics (geometry, arithmetic, algebra, calculus) and “mixed” mathematics (mechanics, geometrical astronomy, optics, art of conjecturing). He classified mathematics more generally as a “science of nature” and separated it from logic, a “science of man.” An internalized and critical spirit of inquiry, associated with the invention of new mathematical structures (for example, non-commutative algebra, non-Euclidean geometry, logic, set theory), represents characteristics of modern mathematics that would emerge only in the next century.

Although there were several notable British mathematicians of the period–Abraham De Moivre, James Stirling, Brook Taylor, and Colin Maclaurin among them – the major lines of mathematical production occurred on the Continent, a trend that intensified as the century developed. Leadership was provided by a relatively small number of energetic figures: Jakob, Johann, and Daniel Bernoulli, Jakob Hermann, Leonhard Euler, Alexis Clairaut, Jean d’Alembert, Johann Heinrich Lambert, Joseph Louis Lagrange, Adrien Marie Legendre, and Pierre Simon Laplace.

“The diffusion of a general knowledge and of a taste for science, over all classes of men, in every nation of Europe, or of European origin, seems to be the characteristic feature of the present age.” So wrote James Keir (1735–1820), the pioneer industrial chemist, in the preface to his The First Part of a Dictionary of Chemistry of 1789. There can be no question that the study of the material world – then described as experimental natural philosophy – seriously impinged on the popular consciousness for the first time in the course of the eighteenth century. This was achieved by means of a remarkable social and educational phenomenon: the lecture demonstration.

Science today is understood to be the sphere of activity of the “scientist,” a term that was first coined in the 1830s by William Whewell (1794–1866), author of The History of the Inductive Sciences. The coinage marks a transition between the mainly amateur natural philosopher and the professional scientist. This is not, of course, to say that science was not studied, and used professionally, centuries earlier in Europe. What was missing in the classical Greek approach to the natural world was the use of experiment. Ideas were tested by reason alone, following the authority of Aristotle, which was broadly accepted throughout the Middle Ages. For example, Aristotle denied the possibility of a vacuum because he reasoned that bodies would move with infinite velocity, a theory that could not then be checked by experiment.

David Sabean remarked a few years ago that Anglo-American sociology faced a crisis, as it had based itself fundamentally on the structures of “social class” – a concept that has now given way nearly completely to the concept of “identity.” So many ask now about the historical identity or persona of the scientist but do not seem to want the prosopographer’s answer, for that answer has tended to be given in terms of social class and its related sociological notions, such as the division of labor in the scientific community: a Smithian political economy of knowledge. It is interesting, moreover, that, although a prosopography of the subjects or “heroes” of knowledge may be at once a rather ancient and a very modern pursuit, its true age, from which it traces its provenance, is the eighteenth century. Our prosopography is kith and kin with the liberal, materialistic, and positivistic social and political philosophy of the eighteenth century.

To date there has been little detailed research into the history of institutionalized science teaching in the eighteenth century, apart from work done on the British Isles, France, and the Netherlands. The paucity of data reflects the fact that until recently historians of eighteenth-century natural philosophy have taken little interest in the history of science in the classroom, assuming the subject of small importance. This chapter aims to demonstrate that such a judgment is misguided even if the conclusions of such a study must necessarily be provisional. The history of science teaching in the Age of Reason throws light on the speed and manner with which new theories and discoveries became part of the European cultural inheritance. More important, it also advances our understanding of the way in which distinctive natural sciences came to be defined and stabilized and distinctive national scientific traditions began to emerge at the end of the period.

AROUND 1700

Traditionally, public teaching in the natural sciences was the preserve of the universities, where the resposibility for teaching the gamut of human knowledge was divided among the faculties of arts, theology, law (sometimes divided into separate canon and civil law faculties), and medicine. By 1700, after three centuries of expansion, the number of Europe’s universities had grown from 40 to some 150, and they were to be found in all parts of the continent except Russia. A further fifteen or so universities or university colleges had also been founded in the New World, including three in the then English North American colonies: Harvard, Yale, and the College of William and Mary at Williamsburg.

In August 1783, three eminent men of science made the thirty-mile journey from London to Guildford to watch one of their colleagues, James Price, fulfill the alchemists’ ancient dream of extracting gold from mercury. This distinguished chemist, a wealthy Oxford graduate who had been elected to the Royal Society when only twenty-nine years old, had already publicly demonstrated his alchemical skills and had published a book advertising his successful transmutations. Concerned to preserve the Royal Society’s reputation, its President, Joseph Banks, instructed Price to repeat his experiments before an expert audience. But instead of the process of lucrative creation they had been promised, Banks’s delegates witnessed only one of self-destruction, as Price swallowed a glass of laurel water and died in front of their eyes. Price was pushed into making this ultimate sacrifice in the cause of Enlightenment rationality. Some of his critical peers were preoccupied less with the validity of his claims than with the threat his activities posed to the status of established institutions. One of Banks’s confidants, Charles Blagden, articulated this interest in guarding the proprieties of scientific behavior rather than monitoring its results:

In the history of South Asia, the eighteenth century is unique in the sense that it saw the decline of precolonial systems as well as the inauguration of systematic colonization. This single century encompasses both the precolonial and the colonial phases. Although every historical period is a period of transition, the theme of transition is more applicable to the eighteenth century than to any other period in Indian history. In this century the mighty Mughals broke up, and this collapse has been explained in terms of religious differences, economic crises, and cultural failures. The crucial nature of the last factor has of late been emphasized: “It was this failure that tilted the economic balance in favour of Europe”; it was this failure again that sapped “the capacity to grapple with agrarian crises”; “even military weaknesses flowed from the intellectual stagnation that seem to have gripped the Eastern world.” Is “stagnation” the right description? Was it really an “age of decline”? What was the state of techno-scientific knowledge in this age of political turmoil? It is true that the Eastern knowledge corpus and its implements were no match for what was then happening in the West. But why? Was it because of some “structural fault” in the Indo-Islamic society or some built-in defect in its ideological framework? What was the size and composition of the intelligentsia? What were their economic interests and cultural predilections? Many questions emerge for which only partial explanations can be attempted.

Mention the term “medical science” to someone, and it is likely to evoke an image of white-coated scientists working at a laboratory bench. In the mind of a more historically informed listener, the term might produce a more specific image – of Louis Pasteur gazing at a test tube, of Xavier Bichat bending over one of his corpses in the Hotel-Dieu, or even of William Harvey ligating a vein – but the general meaning would remain largely the same, because for us the association between “medical science” and “experiment” is a powerful one. Yet for all its pervasiveness, this association is misleading when we consider the medical sciences in the eighteenth century. An image far more appropriate than the laboratory would be the simple podium or lectern, for the medical sciences were understood by eighteenth-century physicians primarily as a body of theoretical doctrines that formed one part of the university medical curriculum. The medical sciences, especially the subjects of physiology and pathology, furnished the bridge between medical knowledge proper and the domain of natural philosophy. And natural philosophy attempted in turn to provide a comprehensive theoretical knowledge of the elemental makeup of the world and the motions of matter. Therefore, insofar as physiology and pathology explained the composition and actions of the living body in its healthy and diseased states and rendered those explanations in terms consistent with natural philosophy, they legitimated medicine’s claim to the status of scientific knowledge.

The relations between the images of the man of science and the social and cultural realities of scientific roles are both consequential and contingent. Finding out “who the guys were” (to use Sir Lewis Namier’s phrase) does indeed help to illuminate what kinds of guys they were thought to be, and, for that reason alone, any survey of images is bound to deal – to some extent at least – with what are usually called the realities of social roles. At the same time, it must be noted that such social roles are always very substantially constituted, sustained, and modified by what members of the culture think is, or should be, characteristic of those who occupy the roles, by precisely whom this is thought, and by what is done on the basis of such thoughts. In sociological terms of art, the very notion of a social role implicates a set of norms and typifications – ideals, prescriptions, expectations, and conventions thought properly, or actually, to belong to someone performing an activity of a certain kind. That is to say, images are part of social realities, and the two notions can be distinguished only as a matter of convention.

Such conventional distinctions may be useful in certain circumstances. Social action – historical and contemporary – very often trades in juxtapositions between image and reality. One might hear it said, for example, that modern American lawyers do not really behave like the high-minded professionals portrayed in official propaganda, and statements distinguishing image and reality in this way thus present themselves as real to those who wish to understand contemporary American society.