The Philosophical Breakfast Club

by Laura J. Snyder

  The problem for Malthus and his followers was that things had changed since he first started thinking about the population problem. He had correctly diagnosed in his own day what economists now call the “Malthusian Trap”—that as population rose, personal income levels decreased. This was true in England, but only until about 1800. When Malthus wrote his Essay on Population in 1798, real wages had been stagnant or declining for generations. Farm workers in Malthus’s own parish had seen their wages drop significantly.115 But after 1800 the facts told a different story. By the time they wrote their works on economics in the late 1820s and early 1830s, Babbage, Jones, and Whewell had divined correctly that personal income was increasing even as the population grew. As Babbage had predicted, the rise of manufacturing jobs meant that greater numbers of people had steady, year-round income. While now we think of factories in those days as dark, dank, dangerous places, the fact is that many people were better off working in them than engaging in back-breaking farm labor for part of the year, and hovering near starvation the rest of the time. With greater personal income came more discretionary spending—few people at the lower levels of the economic scale saved money in those days—leading to a greater need for other workers to make and sell consumer goods. Britain became, even more than before, a “nation of shopkeepers,” as Smith had described it, as well as a nation of shoppers. It was no longer the case that an increase in population meant more people living in poverty.116 Using an inductive method, Jones was able to show that the evidence disconfirmed Malthus’s and Ricardo’s gloomy predictions for the future.

  A YEAR AFTER his book appeared, Jones dejectedly told Whewell that he thought it had been a failure. Whewell disagreed a bit impatiently, guessing that it had probably sold more copies than the first editions of Smith’s and Malthus’s books. In any case, he remonstrated with Jones, “The discovery and promulgation of truth” is “a sufficient employment and reward in itself. I do not know what is the good of knowing and admiring people like Herschel, if we cannot learn this from them.”117

  Jones’s book did have an impact on economics, though it did not, as Poulett Scrope had optimistically predicted in his review of it, deal the “finishing stroke to the miserable theory of … Ricardo.”118 John Stuart Mill—the youthful distributor of pamphlets describing birth-control methods, now a leading economist—revised his position on several fronts after reading it. Once a diehard Ricardian, who thought economic science could only proceed deductively, Mill began to see that some empirical data were necessary in order to draw economic conclusions. He jettisoned Ricardo’s universalist notion of rent, adopting Jones’s division of rent into different categories (though, as Whewell complained to Jones, Mill did not give proper credit for this schema to its author).119 Mill soon also began to incorporate issues of social policy into his economic theory, arguing famously that wealth was not the most important goal of a nation: more vital was the growth of leisure time, so that even the members of the lower classes could have occasion to read poetry, study history, and learn moral philosophy.120 Marx, too, later praised Jones for his historical approach. Unfortunately for the history of the twentieth century, Marx did not adopt Jones’s view that there was a common interest of all classes of society; rather, more in line with Ricardo’s theories, Marx developed his theory of class warfare. Jones’s book was an influence on the English and German “historical schools” of economics in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

  Ultimately, however, history was on the side of Ricardo: the economics of today, with its employment of the abstract “economic man,” and its use of mathematical deductive reasoning, much more closely resembles Ricardo’s political economy than Jones’s. Yet there has been a recent pendulum swing back toward the view of Jones and his friends. The Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen has argued that economics is “impoverished” by its enforced separation from ethics; he would like to see a return to the notion of economics as a moral science, one that takes into account not only how to make a nation wealthy, but how to create a just and happy society.121 And a number of economists—including another Nobel winner, Vernon Smith—are beginning to favor a more fact-based, empirical approach, bringing in insights from behavioral psychology and sociology to help make more-accurate predictions about people’s economic actions.

  But whatever happens to the science of economics in the future, the writings of the Philosophical Breakfast Club on political economy were successful in a more immediate way. By linking their project of transforming science to political economy, a topic being talked about and worried over by nearly everyone at the time, Babbage, Jones, Herschel, and Whewell gained a broad audience for their inductive, Baconian view of scientific method—an audience that included the next generation of men of science.

  6

  THE GREAT BATTLE

  EVER SINCE GEORGIANA DIED, BABBAGE’S FRIENDS COULD NOT help noticing how cranky he was becoming. Formerly known as a cheerful family man, who had delighted his children by stringing wires between the drawing room and his workshop to send messages back and forth in little wheeled carriages, and who had created toys for them out of the leftover pieces of his engine, now Babbage was always, it seemed, irascible and on the verge of anger.1 Never one to accept criticism easily, it was becoming more and more difficult to speak to him without his taking offense.

  Everything was personal, for Babbage, and he seemed always to be keeping score, especially now. Unlike Whewell, who was said to harbor no resentment toward anyone—when a dispute ended, it was over, and he had no bad words for anyone behind his back—and unlike Herschel and Jones, who suffered slights inwardly and became depressed, Babbage never let go of his anger, and never stopped expressing it by lashing out at those around him.2 Until the very end of his life Babbage recalled—and complained in print about—one episode in the 1820s when he had been promised, and then passed over for, the junior secretary position at the Royal Society of London.3

  At first his friends excused him, knowing how horribly he had suffered in that annus horribilis of 1827. They knew, too, the corrosiveness of Babbage’s ongoing struggles to build his Difference Engine. It was impossible for him not to feel resentment over the situation. Instead of being knighted, and heaped with praise, Babbage was forced to act like the tradesman with his cap in hand, going around to the servants’ entrance to beg for his money. Babbage’s bitterness distressed Herschel, who asked him, “Now are not you ashamed of yourself to keep up your old growl on the score of having expended time and money in accomplishing a great and worthy object which will hand you down with well Earned fame to Posterity—Who the deuce ever did anything worth naming without a sacrifice of some kind or other?”4

  As soon as he had returned from Europe in 1828, Babbage applied to the Duke of Wellington, at that time the prime minister, for more money to build his engine. The duke asked the Royal Society for an assessment of the present state and future usefulness of the machine. Once again, Herschel was on the committee to evaluate his friend’s creation—this time Whewell joined him, along with eleven others. Again the report was enthusiastic, enough so that an additional £1,500 was given to Babbage. But he had already spent much more than £3,000, the total amount granted by the government since 1823. Herschel and Babbage’s brother-in-law, the member of Parliament Woolrych Whitmore, requested a meeting with the prime minister to ask for more money. The duke visited Babbage, inspected the demonstration model of the machine, and liked what he saw. He authorized another grant of £3,000.

  His friends thought Babbage would be happy. Instead, Babbage refused to take the money until the prime minister agreed that all future charges of his machinist, Clement, would be paid directly by the government; as it was, Babbage had to lay out the funds and then beg the government for reimbursement. While the duke was not willing to agree to such an open-ended arrangement, he did authorize another £3,000, making a grand total of £9,000 of government money to Babbage thus far. Although it is extremely difficul
t to calculate precise current values from monetary amounts this far back, on one method of approximation, £9,000 in 1830 equals more than £817,000 (about $1.3 million) today!5

  Part of Babbage’s distress arose from the fact that his relationship with Clement was beginning to break down. Since Babbage was not paying as quickly as Clement desired, the machinist went on strike, saying he would not work on the engine until Babbage remitted all the money he was owed.6 There was also some confusion about who owned the special tools that had been developed by both of them for building the machine, the plans, and the machine itself. Both sides agreed to arbitration by two outside engineers, Brian Donkin and George Rennie, and matters were settled, at least for now: Babbage paid Clement’s bills, Clement owned the tools, Babbage the machine and the plans. In the meantime, though, work on the engine had ceased for over a year. The whole process had begun to seem to Babbage like “a never ending plague.”7 He plowed his frustration into an attack on the bastion of the scientific establishment in England, the Royal Society—an attack that sparked what the logician and mathematician Augustus De Morgan would later refer to as the “Great Battle of the scientific world.”8 Although originating in Babbage’s personal pique, this battle would ultimately change the face of science forever.

  DURING HIS TRIPS to Paris, Babbage compared what he saw as the sorry state of science in England with that of the French capital. Happily, thanks to his Analytical Society, England was finally starting to catch up to France in mathematics. But in chemistry, England still lagged behind the nation of Lavoisier and his followers; Georges Cuvier’s compatriots had a head start in the sciences he invented, comparative anatomy and paleontology; the Comte de Buffon had set the bar high for all those who would follow him in natural history; and men such as Fresnel, Arago, and Biot were leading the way in physics and astronomy.

  The reason that England lagged behind was easy to pinpoint, Babbage believed. In England, men of science labored under conditions not conducive to carrying out research. There were few career opportunities for natural philosophers, and so most had to engage in their research as a hobby, or while laboring under the undue burden of having to lecture at one of the universities—this would not have inflicted much damage on Babbage, since he never lectured while holding the Lucasian professorship—and the professorships rarely paid enough in any case to support a man with a family. Men of science received no high government positions, at least not since Newton had been made Master of the Royal Mint, and no honors such as knighthoods. (As if to prove Babbage wrong, Herschel would be knighted in 1831 for his service to science.) The best and brightest were lured to more-lucrative positions outside the scientific world, in law, politics, medicine, or industry.

  In France, on the contrary, Babbage believed, savants were given respect, and showered with titles and money. As a book Babbage would have been likely to read before his first visit to Paris put it: “The title of savant is not more brilliant than formerly, but it is more imposing: it leads to consequence, to superior employment, and, above all, to riches.”9

  Although Babbage may have had too rosy a view of things in France, his critique was accurate on some levels. France was acknowledged to be the center of intellectual activity during the period known today as the Enlightenment, roughly between the 1690s and the 1790s. And French men of science did have more support than did their counterparts in Britain. In France there were greater opportunities for paid scientific positions, in the army, at the universities, at the Paris Observatory, and in the Bureau des Longitudes. Professors at the university were paid not only for teaching but for research; so they had much more time for their scientific work than did the overworked professors at Cambridge and Oxford, many of whom had to tutor students in order to augment their small salaries (again, Babbage was something of an exception here). Moreover, the most brilliant savants were rewarded with government positions and honors—Laplace and Berthollet had been made senators by Napoleon, and Cuvier would soon be elevated to the noble rank of Peer.

  Science in France was given an edge by its major scientific society. The Académie des Sciences had been founded in 1666, six years after the birth of the Royal Society of London. But the Académie (folded into the new National Institute of Sciences and Arts after the French Revolution, and then reconstituted as the Royal Academy of Sciences in 1816) was a leading force in science in a way that the Royal Society of London had ceased being years before. Babbage compiled the differences between these two societies in a book, Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, which he hoped would lead to some greatly needed reforms.

  In France, as Babbage recorded bitterly in his book, being admitted to the Royal Academy of Sciences was an honor reserved for those savants active in scientific research. By the 1820s, membership in the Royal Academy was determined in part by publications in scientific journals detailing original research.10 On the other hand, membership in the Royal Society of London was much less exclusive, requiring only a nomination signed by three current fellows, so long as no one vetoed the candidate. With his habitual attention to numbers, Babbage calculated that in France only one person out of 427,000 was a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences, while in England one out of 32,000 was a member of the Royal Society.11 (Actually, Babbage was being overly optimistic. In 1821 the total population of England was 11,492,000, which means that 1 out of 16,100 was a fellow of the Royal Society!)12 By Babbage’s count, only 72 out of 714 fellows of the Royal Society—just over 10 percent—had even published two or more papers in the Society’s Transactions.13 As Babbage pointed out, as early as 1674 members of the Council of the Royal Society had tried, unsuccessfully, to come up with a plan to allow for the “ejection of useless Fellows.”14 If the requirements for being a fellow of the Royal Society were more stringent, Babbage thought, science as a profession would be more esteemed in England, as it was in France. All fellows should be required to be fully engaged in some original scientific research.

  Members of France’s Royal Academy of Sciences were not only accorded respect and status in society; they were granted pensions, or salaries, so that they could dispense with other work if they wished to do so. They were awarded cash prizes for outstanding researches, and subsidies for the cost of conducting experiments. The Royal Society, Babbage argued, should reform itself to resemble more closely the Royal Academy.

  Babbage was not content to fulminate against the Royal Society in general; he leveled personal attacks on leaders of the Royal Society for their misconduct. The officers of the Royal Society, Babbage fumed, were guilty of forging the minutes of official business meetings, rigging awards, even misappropriating funds. Babbage named names, very much against the social standards of the day: Davies Gilbert, the current president; the late Sir Joseph Banks, a previous president; Edward Sabine, who had received the prestigious Copley medal of the Royal Society for his experiments on pendulums; Sir Everard Home, who had earned large sums of money for engravings used to illustrate papers in the Transactions (and who was found, a few years later, to have plagiarized most of his scientific writings from the notes of his brother-in-law, the surgeon and anatomist John Hunter).15

  After reading the manuscript, a shocked Herschel told him that “if I were near you and could do it without hurting you and thought you would not return it with interest I would give you a good slap in the face.” His advice to Babbage was curt; he should “by all means burn” the manuscript. But Babbage was undeterred. He told Herschel that “I hope to teach even chartered and ancient bodies a lesson that may in future prevent them from studiously neglecting and then insulting any individual amongst them.… I will make them writhe if they do not reform. In short my volume will be a receipt in full for the amount of injuries I have received.”16 Herschel held his breath and awaited the storm that was sure to come.

  WHEN THE Decline of Science appeared, the scientific community was stunned. Babbage seemed surprised that the men he had attacked were upset with him; he could not understand wh
y Captain Sabine, whom he had accused of corruptly accepting £1,000 as an award for experiments with a pendulum that were known to be inaccurate, “cut” him (ignored him) at a dinner party; a friend had to explain to Babbage that “Mrs. Sabine … kept her bed a month … on reading [your] animadversions!”17 It was darkly hinted in an anonymous letter in the Times that Babbage could be expelled from the Royal Society for publicly defaming it; but Davies Gilbert refused to take that step, saying it would be better to just ignore him.18 But it became uncomfortable, to say the least, for Babbage to attend the meetings, and so he stopped going; it would be decades before he returned.19

  The Royal Society had never before been so violently attacked in print. A spate of other critical works soon followed. David Brewster, the Scottish physicist, praised Babbage’s book and lambasted the state of science in England in an effusive article in the Quarterly Review.20 Other books soon joined in on the offensive, including one evocatively entitled Science Without a Head; or the Royal Society Dissected.

  But criticism of Babbage’s book was also forthcoming. Gerrit Moll, an astronomer and physicist from the Netherlands, who had once gone on a tour of a coal mine with Babbage, published a pamphlet “On the Alleged Decline of Science in England, by a Foreigner.”21 Moll pointed out that the situation was not as hopeful in other countries as Babbage had depicted. There were few “professional savants”; most men of science were either independently wealthy or had paid positions as professors or in other professions, such as mining—they were not supported by their scientific work. The exceptions to this were the members of the Royal Academy of Sciences in France, who did receive a small pension from the state.22 As Moll noted, however, that pension came with a price: strong government control over the savants and their researches. “The regulation of the French Institute would appear … revolting and injurious to the feelings of an Englishman,” Moll pointed out astutely. The savants supported by the Royal Academy were required to live in Paris; to attend biweekly meetings; and even to sit in carefully marked-out places, with the most senior members given the best seats. The highly centralized system of science in France meant that the Royal Academy—and its particular interests and preferred theories—held a kind of monopoly on the type of research that was done.23 Such a system would never work in England, where men guarded their freedoms jealously—so much so that in 1811 the British politician John William Ward could write that “they have an admirable Police at Paris, but they pay for it dear enough. I had rather half-a-dozen people’s throats be cut in Radcliffe Highway every three or four years, then be subject to domiciliary visits, spies, and all the rest.”24