The Philosophical Breakfast Club

by Laura J. Snyder

  In the early 1830s, architectural historians were focused on the transition from the Romanesque style to the Gothic style. Most scholars tended to define the Gothic—such as that exemplified by the magnificent cathedral at Chartres, France, dedicated in 1260, with its soaring steeples, pointed archways, and stained-glass windows—by the presence of a single characteristic, the pointed arch. Any building with pointed archways could be classified as “Gothic” on this detail alone, whereas a building with the rounded arch typical of the earlier Romanesque style was not Gothic. But, just as he and Jones had done in economics, Whewell rejected the notion that a “science of architecture” could start with definitions, as Ricardo and his followers had claimed for their field. Rather, he insisted, observations of numerous Gothic buildings were necessary in order to determine the defining element of the Gothic. Whewell himself would describe his personal observations of over eighty Gothic churches in his book.

  Examination of these churches led Whewell to the belief that the development of Gothic architecture was due to the introduction of an idea: the idea of verticality, the concept of reaching upward toward the heavens. The rise of the Gothic style, Whewell concluded, had occurred by the substitution of the idea of verticality for the Romanesque idea of horizontality. The new style, then, was brought about not by the introduction of one feature such as the pointed arch, but rather by the introduction of the new idea. Indeed, the new idea led to the new feature: the desire for more vertical lines led to the use of the pointed arch, because in order to have greater height with thinner walls and more light, it was necessary to provide greater stabilization for the increased thrusts of the vaults over the interior. This was partially provided by pointed arches. This follows from a principle of mechanics: the shape of the pointed arch more closely approximates that of a reversed catenary curve, which is the ideal line of pressure, where the weight of material in an arch is uniformly distributed.

  But the sought-after verticality and lightness required more than just the pointed arch; masons were also forced to rethink the heavy barrels over the gallery or high aisle that had previously been used to carry the thrusts to the external walling. These blocked the light from outside and increased the aspect of heaviness to the structure. Eventually, architects realized that flying or arch buttresses—projections from the wall—could be used to stabilize the vault thrusts imposed by greater height. Thus the flying buttress was equally as important as the pointed arch to the development of the Gothic style.

  Far from being a barbaric form of architecture, as many had argued, and as the original use of the term “Gothic” was meant to signify, the Gothic style is beautiful when found in its purest form. Whewell explained that what makes a building or architectural style “beautiful” is that it contains a principle or idea that gives unity and harmony to the whole. The Gothic style, “in adopting forms and laws which are the reverse of the ancient ones … introduced new principles as fixed and true, and as full of unity and harmony, as those of the previous system.”19 Buildings are “barbarous” or “degenerate” when they mix styles, when there is no overriding principle of unity.

  His work in architecture suggested to Whewell that concepts could be unifying principles, means of bringing together and making lawful a group of otherwise disparate facts. Just as the concept of verticality could unify diverse parts of a Gothic structure, so too the concept of an ellipse could unify and make lawful the observed points of the orbit of Mars. The scientist, then, was like an architect, building lovely, unified structures called theories, using the bricks that nature provided, and the blueprints provided by the mind.

  HERSCHEL WAS pleased and excited when Whewell finally published his work on scientific method. He took time out of his beloved photography experiments, and his important and time-consuming work reducing the Cape observations, to write a joint review of Whewell’s History and Philosophy. The article was so lengthy that the publisher of the Quarterly Review, John Gibson Lockhart, had to remind Herschel to consider the poor reader!20

  In the review, Herschel praised his friend’s work. But he made it clear that he disagreed with Whewell’s major point, his introduction of the conceptual element into knowledge—to Herschel it seemed too mystical, too “German” (an ironic charge for the son of a German émigré). Although Whewell, along with his friends Hare and Thirlwall, had been reading German works in philosophy and history for years, in general British intellectuals were extremely disdainful of the German thinkers of recent history, such as Immanuel Kant.

  Kant had begun his career as a natural philosopher (his dissertation in 1755 was on the nebular hypothesis, in which he argued that gaseous clouds slowly rotate, gradually collapse, and finally flatten due to gravity, eventually forming new stars and planets). Like Bacon before him, and Whewell later, Kant wanted to find a middle way between empiricism and rationalism. In the end, however, Kant came to believe that we cannot have knowledge of the physical world per se, but only knowledge of our experience of the world, and that the physical world itself is a “dim and unknown region” to us. The human mind could never, according to Kant, break through the veil of our ideas to understand physical reality. This view of knowledge was perpetuated by later German philosophers such as Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, who collectively became known as “idealists” because of their emphasis on ideas rather than on empirical facts.

  Herschel argued with Whewell that his view of scientific method would lead to the same consequences as Kant’s view: that we were fundamentally incapable of having knowledge of the physical world that exists outside our minds. But Whewell countered that this was not his conclusion at all. Rather, Whewell believed that the concepts in our minds could help us to have knowledge of the world outside our minds, because both our mental concepts and the physical world were created by God.

  Whewell’s philosophy of science was rooted in his natural theology. God created us, including the concepts in our minds, and God created the world, which worked according to laws that could be understood by the use of those concepts. God purposely made our concepts match the world because God wanted humans to be able to understand the world and its laws. As he had argued with Hugh James Rose years before, Whewell believed that the study of the natural world is not only consistent with belief in God—such study is actually required in order to fulfill God’s plan that we come to understand his physical creation. But God intended that hard work would be necessary to gain this understanding. According to Whewell, God created us with only the “germs” of our ideas; we still have to “clarify” and develop those ideas in order for them to be useful in science; over time our concepts evolve, and science progresses. As concepts become clearer and more explicit, they can be used to colligate the facts and form correct theories. This is why the history of science is the history of increasingly accurate knowledge of the world.

  Jones agreed with Herschel that Whewell was too influenced by the German philosophers. After reading Whewell’s Philosophy and Herschel’s review, Jones moaned to Herschel that “you are the only old friend who has stuck fast by the true faith.”21 He hoped Herschel’s review would make Whewell “hesitate in a path which is sure … to lead to skepticism as to all things exterior to us and all their relations.”22 Both Jones and Herschel felt that Whewell’s view was a departure from the empiricism of Bacon.

  At this very time Jones was giving support to Herschel in another way as well—he and his wife, Charley, were hosting Herschel’s young son Willy, then eight years old, who was sickly, as it was thought he would benefit from the better air near Haileybury. Jones reported to Herschel that Willy was doing better under the doctor’s regimen, which included “half a glass of port-wine in water, and … new-milk instead of tea” and “only” six hours of studying each day. The childless Jones and his wife were happy to oblige: “He gives us no trouble and is really a very entertaining little guest!” Years later, Willy would return to Haileybury to study for a position with the East India Company.23

/>   After several attempts to convince each other of their respective positions, Whewell and Herschel decided to agree to disagree over the precise way to understand Bacon’s “marriage” of the rational and empirical faculties. “We are like two staunch politicians, Tory and Radical,” Herschel told Whewell, “who agree in love of country and whom a thousand delightful associations keeps from tearing each other’s eyes out.”24 To show that there were no hard feelings, in the same letter, Herschel asked Whewell to be the godfather to the newest Herschel, their daughter Amelia.25 Whewell accepted with pride and pleasure.

  IN MARCH of 1841, Whewell attended a large soirée given by Lord Northampton, who had succeeded the Duke of Sussex as president of the Royal Society. At the party Northampton spoke to Whewell about his friend John Marshall, the Leeds flax manufacturer who had been the founding president of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society from 1818 to 1826, and had been active in the British Association since its earliest days (he attended the York meeting in 1831, and was on the committees of the Statistical Section in both 1834 and 1835).26 Whewell knew Marshall as well, not only from the meetings of the Statistical Section but also more intimately. He had met the Marshalls through his friendship with William Wordsworth and Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy. Whewell had been introduced to the poet years before, during one of Wordsworth’s visits to Trinity College, where his brother Christopher was Master, and Whewell became a frequent guest at the Wordsworths’ Lake District home. (Whewell would later dedicate his textbook on moral philosophy to the poet, whom he grew to love.)27 Dorothy Wordsworth had been at school with Jane Pollard, John Marshall’s wife.28 After the Newcastle meeting of the British Association in 1838, Whewell, along with Northampton, Murchison, and Herschel, had been invited to stay at Hallsteads, Marshall’s summer home hidden amid the trees of a promontory jutting out from the west bank of Ullswater in the Lake District, near Wordsworth’s house.29 Although the founders of the British Association had bemoaned the influence of the aristocracy in the Royal Society, it was a tradition since the founding of the new organization that aristocratic house parties were held before and after the meetings, giving the members of the gentry a chance to fraternize with the men of science.

  John Marshall had become extraordinarily rich as one of the premier flax manufacturers in the north. Whewell knew the industry well, having grown up surrounded by flaxmen in Lancaster. The two men were very much alike. Like Whewell, John Marshall played to win, and could be cutting to his competitors. But, also like Whewell, when surrounded by friends and family Marshall was “so gentle, so mild, and with so much genuine feeling, simplicity and good sense,” as Dorothy Wordsworth put it.30 Each man felt that he had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps; each had risen high based on his own talents and enterprise, from modest circumstances. Marshall, too, had suffered the sting of members of the aristocracy considering him to be parvenu, and only grudgingly willing to give him their respect. He had made his fortune by taking advantage of the newest flax-spinning machinery right at the start, and by shrewdly stockpiling supplies of flax when prices were low and selling them when the demand and prices were high.31 He was able to buy himself the appurtenances of respectability: two grand houses, a role in local politics as a liberal reformer (even a seat in Parliament as the member for a rotten borough), and charity work.32

  At the Royal Society soirée in March 1841, Northampton may have made a suggestion to Whewell that was to change the direction of his life: Why not consider marrying Cordelia, one of John Marshall’s daughters? It was rumored that each of the daughters had a marriage portion of £50,000.33 Although Whewell had met Cordelia over two years earlier, the idea had not apparently occurred to him then; or perhaps the idea had not been compelling to Cordelia’s father. Marshall liked Whewell, and he could understand and admire his scientific expertise and brilliance. When he was forty, John Marshall had turned over the day-to-day operations of the mill to his sons, and devoted himself to politics, economics, and science. He had already been performing experiments to determine, for example, the most efficient way of bleaching yarn. These experiments led to an intensive study of chemistry; he also attended lectures (keeping copious notes) on optics, electricity, and astronomy; and he did some amateur geologizing in the hills around his Lake District home.34 But Whewell was not, at first, seen as an appropriate suitor for one of Marshall’s daughters.

  But now things were different. Whewell held a prestigious professorship at Cambridge; he had published works that were well regarded by savants and the literate public; his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences had made him the scientific “man of the hour,” as much as Herschel. He had been chosen as the next president of the British Association, and there was talk of his succeeding Christopher Wordsworth as Master of Trinity. Whewell was now considered a good prospect—John Marshall even thought of him in the same light as his most recent son-in-law, Whewell’s friend Thomas Spring Rice, now Lord Monteagle, who had been chancellor of the exchequer in Lord Melbourne’s second ministry until 1839, and who had recently married Cordelia’s older sister Mary Anne. (The Spring Rices and Marshalls were much intermarried. Two of Spring Rice’s daughters had married sons of John Marshall, and then he, after becoming a widower, chose one of Marshall’s daughters as his second wife.) Cordelia, at thirty-eight, was by now considered a spinster, unlikely to make a better match.

  Once the idea was put to him, Whewell was swept up into the romance of the moment, rushing to Hallsteads to pay court to Cordelia, telling Herschel that the place was now “the happiest in the world” for him.35 Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s younger half-cousin, then eighteen years old and a student at Trinity, was with a reading party in nearby Keswick that summer, and was often invited into the Marshalls’ drawing room. He later rather unkindly recalled of Whewell’s courtship that “his behavior reminded me of a turkey-cock similarly engaged. I fancied that I could almost hear the rustling of his stiffened feathers, and did overhear the sonorous lines of Milton rolled out to the lady a propos of I know not what, ‘cycle and epicycle, orb and orb,’ with hollow o’s and prolonged trills on the r’s.”36

  Thomas and Jane Carlyle, merciless critics of all around them, were friends of Cordelia’s, but had little good to say of her. Thomas called her “a prim, affectionate, but rather puling, weak and sentimental elderly young lady.”37 He also described her as “the sick one.”38 Jane considered her as “another of the inarticulate people of the world—never able to give themselves fair play.”39 William Wordsworth, on the other hand, felt quite protective of her, and admired her as well, particularly for her strong moral qualities. One of the sonnets published in his Poems Composed or Suggested During a Tour in the Summer of 1833 is dedicated “To Cordelia M—, Hallsteads, Ullswater,” and in this poem Wordsworth suggests that below seemingly plain and insignificant surfaces something deep and true can lurk:

  Not in the mines beyond the western main,

  You say, Cordelia, was the metal sought,

  Which a fine skill, of Indian growth, has wrought,

  Into this flexible yet faithful Chain;

  Nor is it silver of romantic Spain

  But from our loved Helvellyn’s depths was brought,

  Our own domestic mountain. Thing and thought

  Mix strangely; trifles light, and partly vain,

  Can prop, as you have learnt, our nobler being:

  Yes Lady, while about your neck is wound

  (Your casual glance oft meeting) this bright cord,

  What witchery, for pure gifts of inward seeing,

  Lurks in it, Memory’s Helper, Fancy’s Lord,

  For precious tremblings in your bosom found!

  As one literary scholar has put it, this Petrarchan sonnet is Wordsworth at his most “erotic.”40 He clearly found Cordelia more interesting than did the Carlyles.

  Whewell had read this poem, and saw Cordelia Marshall as having qualities he realized were important for him in a wife. As he explained to Hare, in a l
etter describing his wife-to-be, “She is what … the poet describes her to be, and will, I am persuaded, fulfill his predictions.” Whewell further confided, “I trust you will think that though Cordelia is not perhaps the wife you would have expected me to chuse, I have chosen well, she is gentle and good and affectionate.” He admitted to Hare that “a struggle of feelings of which you may form some surmise, and of which even to you I cannot say a syllable more, made it difficult for me to make my selection with the singleness of heart that I could have wished.” One problem, Whewell acknowledged, was that she was not his intellectual equal—she was “not likely to talk well about Coleridge’s Confusions of an Enquiring Spirit”—and thus would not be the same type of wife as Mary Manning could have been. (As if in comparison, Whewell mentioned having seen “MaMan” in London recently.)41 After Hare met Whewell’s new bride, the groom conceded to his friend, “How rightly you judge … when you deem Cordelia such a wife as my moral being required. I may venture to say that was one main consideration in my choice.”42

  Whewell had realized that he needed a wife with a calm, sweet nature to counteract his own natural gruffness. Someone equally strong and contentious—someone like Mary Manning—would likely bring out his worst side. It was not only his physique that was referred to in the story told by Leslie Stephen of the prizefighter who said to Whewell, “What a man was lost when they made you a parson!” (Stephen did, though, admit that Whewell “concealed a warm heart and genuine magnanimity under rather rough and overbearing manners.”)43 Tennyson called Whewell, who had been his tutor, “the lion-like man,” referring to his fierce nature.44 His other students referred to him as “thunderous Whewell”: a stickler for college rules, who chastised the students for walking across the lawns of the college or for dawdling when crossing the bridges over the River Cam, telling them that “a bridge is a place of transit and not of lounge.”45