'Scientism' 9 - X Club (1870s)

Ninth in a series of fourteen posts  (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, & 14).

In my previous post on this topic, I said that 'scientism' was used several times during the 1870s in response to the works of T. H. Huxley and John Tyndall. These two scientists belonged to the the X Club, which (according to Ruth Barton) aimed to weaken the Church of England's influence over scientific institutions.

The use of 'scientism' increased after 1874, the year of Tyndall's Belfast Address. 1874 was also the year in which Huxley published 'On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata', which he apparently presented at the same Belfast meeting at which Tyndall spoke (although this source says that Huxley gave the talk in 1870 and only published it in 1874). Tyndall's address and Huxley's 'Hypothesis' each provoked widespread controversy and debate in British and American journals and surely must have played an important role in the spread of the cry 'Scientism!'

I said (in post # 8 of this series) that the label 'scientism' was at first applied not to positivists but, instead, to the supposed materialists in the X Club. In spite of their shared enthusiasm for the sciences, the positivists and X-Clubbers were not on friendly terms with each other. Huxley had called Comte's positivism 'Catholicism minus Christianity'; he classed positivism among the 'sickening humbugs'; and Huxley had a vigorous debate with the positivist Frederic Harrison, whose criticisms of materialism included some thinly veiled ad hominems directed at Huxley. (Another X-Club member, Herbert Spencer, produced his own critique of Comte.)

I would have expected the positivists to be the first to be charged with scientism. As we have seen, 'scientism' sometimes carries the connotation that one adheres to a new, secular worldview, a comprehensive framework of belief that is meant to replace religion and that purports to be built upon science; and it was Comte, after all, who called for an actual 'religion of humanity'. Moreover, the English positivists actually did build a secular church (or two).

But in the 1870s, it was members of the X Club (and some of its invited speakers, such as W. K. Clifford) who were said to be guilty of scientism. The term seems to have been meant to impute, first, an epistemology. In the rhetorical excesses of its critics, adherents of scientism were sometimes represented as believing that the methods of science would give us exhaustive knowledge of reality. However, no one in the X Club can reasonably be interpreted as having championed such a hubristic epistemology. At most, Huxley and the others adopted the more modest view that insofar as something can be known (more accurately, known about) at all, it can be known only via the methods of science.

As I noted in post # 8, the metaphysics that scientism allegedly implied drew much of the fire from critics in the early and mid-1870s, and this metaphysics was materialism. According to the critics, scientism's proponents took reality to be nothing beyond the world revealed by science, and every part of that world was (supposedly) either physical or entirely dependent on physical things. (The latter disjunct accommodates Huxley's psychological model in which mental events aren't physical but are mere by-products, epiphenomena, of a material system.) The critics thus portrayed scientism as being wedded to a materialistic metaphysics in which everything is material or dependent on material things. More plausibly, though, the X-Clubbers and their allies made only the more modest claim that everything encompassed by our knowledge (thus far) is material or is dependent upon material things.

(In fact, Huxley's views on materialism and metaphysics were much more complicated than his critics implied [as Sherri Lyons has argued]. Tyndall was impressed by the explanatory gap between consciousness and physical states (à la du Bois-Reymond; more here) and may have been an idealist; he was influenced by Kant, Fichte, F. Schlegel, Carlyle, and Emerson [as Ruth Barton and others have stressed]. And Spencer, also aware of the explanatory gap, opted for the 'Unknown Reality' of neutral monism [see the final paragraph of his 'First Principles'].)

So, in the late Nineteenth Century, 'scientism' was used by defenders of Christianity as a label for an epistemological and metaphysical outlook that affords no support for traditional theistic belief. Most of those who were charged with scientism belonged to the X Club, which had challenged the institutional power of the Church of England. The phrase 'scientism' was used to mark these individuals as materialists.

Here's a rough stab at a definition of 'scientism' (as used by its 1870s critics): Scientism is the doctrine that all beliefs about the nature of reality should be warranted by the methods of the natural sciences; the result of this epistemic policy is materialism.

The X-Clubbers would perhaps balk at the suggestion that they had advanced any such prescription for forming beliefs about the nature of reality (the really real, the basic furniture of the universe, etc.). That's metaphysics, after all, which they eschew in favour of agnosticism. They stick to the observable phenomena. Of course, this response would not placate their critics, who would take Huxley and the others still to be committed to the doctrine that any beliefs we may form about the world -- whether about its ultimate nature or about the terrain through which we navigate in our daily lives (or about the mechanisms that explain the phenomena in that terrain) -- should be justified by the methods of the natural sciences, a policy which yields a materialistic picture of the known world and agnosticism about whether there's anything more. The critics would also argue that this scientistic doctrine cannot itself be supported by means of natural-scientific method.

These early uses of 'scientism' don't share the political connotations that attended the term's mid-20th-Century uses. Indeed, the X-Clubbers generally opposed socialism. Perhaps the 20th-Century association of scientism with socialist views was a product of French influence, but that's sheer speculation on my part.

'Scientism' 8 - Early uses (1870s)

Eighth in a series of fourteen posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, & 14).

The English word 'scientism' came to be used in its modern sense in the 1870s. In these early uses, those who are said to be guilty of scientism are not positivists. Instead, the guilty parties are the supposed materialists, T. H. Huxley and John Tyndall. Huxley and Tyndall were not, strictly speaking, materialists. Still, they did take the position that states of matter determine mental states and that the latter appear to be entirely dependent upon the former (so that there can be no independent mental substance). This stance sufficed at that time to secure the designation 'materialist'. Of course, Huxley and Tyndall were closely associated with Darwin's evolutionary theory, a theory which was taken by Huxley and Tyndall to imply a wholly physical origin of animal minds.

Some quick observations about these early uses:

• While the English word 'scientism' may yet have a French origin, its 1870s uses give no indication of a French source. 
• 'Scientism' was at first used primarily to signify a metaphysical doctrine (materialism); its epistemological dimension, the connotations that would implicate the positivists (and which are implied in the passage from Canon Barry [below]), came to the fore later in the 1870s. (The epistemological sense of 'scientism' is prominent in Dawson's 1877 attack on W. K. Clifford.)
• The following passages appeared in semi-popular magazines. Huxley and Tyndall, in addition to being scientists, were populizers of science. 'Scientism', then, was first used in pop-science contexts.
• In 1870, Huxley published Lay Sermons: Addresses and Reviews. I wonder if that title suggested to critics the idea that Huxley championed an alternative religion, which they then called scientism. The positioning of scientism as a religion is evident in the following quotations of Frothingham ('credo of a new religion') and Hecker ('votaries'). [Added, Jan. 10, 2015: Interestingly, in January of 1870, R. H. Hutton published a piece in the Spectator called 'Pope Huxley'.]

In 1871, D. R. Goodwin (a professor in Philadelphia's Episcopal Theological Seminary) published an article called 'Huxley's Writings' in The American Presbyterian Review. On its last page, we find this passage:

If, in the face of the increasingly triumphant exultations of modern scientism, in the face of its sneering sarcasms and insolent taunts, strangely mingled with insinuating appeals to a friendly and charitable judgment, any of the friends of Christian philosophy, morality and religion, are dismayed and despondent, let them be reassured by the patent fact, that with all its boasted progress towards the annihilation of the Christian Faith, modern speculation has not yet got one step beyond the positions of Benedict Spinoza and David Hume. (Goodwin, 'Huxley's Writings' American Presbyterian Review New Series, v. 3 [1871]: 302-333, at 333)

Here, 'scientism' needn't be given its more recent interpretation. Indeed, Goodwin might have taken the term's meaning, strictly speaking, to be no different from that of 'science'. Still, he at least associates the word with its more recent anti-religious implications.

'Scientism' next appears up in an 1872 book review in the Methodist Quarterly Review (Fourth Series, v. 24 [1872]: 339-342). The review is of Martyn Paine's Physiology of the Soul and Instinct, as distinguished from Materialism. The anonymous reviewer remarks that 'with modern scientism the problem is how to account for the system of things without a God' (p. 340). Here, the author seems to take atheism (or at least agnosticism) to be part of the meaning of 'scientism'.

In 1876, Frederick Frothingham used 'scientism' in his contribution to a Unitarian magazine. He asks,

Is it not so plain as to be well-nigh self-evident that the true Radicalism can have no sympathy with that spirit which, however it may claim the name of Radicalism, is not radical, and though boasting of scientism is not scientific,—which identifies itself with, and declares as scientific truths, what are yet, and perhaps for ages, if not always, must remain surmises, and proclaims these as the credo of a new religion?' (Frothingham, 'Our Work in the Light of Some Present Demands' The Unitarian Review and Religious Magazine 6 [1876]: 117-133, at 128) 

Also in 1876, Father Isaac Thomas Hecker uses 'scientism' three times in his review of St. George Jackson Mivart's book Lessons from Nature as manifested in Mind & Matter. The word appears twice on the first page and once on the final page of the review.

On the first page, Hecker writes, 'Yet it is sadly true that the votaries of scientism are on the increase, and that Huxley, Spencer, Darwin, and Tyndall usurp ... a place lately held by Mill, Renan, Strauss, and Hegel' (Hecker, 'Mivart's "Lessons from Nature"' The Catholic World, 24 [1876]: 1-13, at 1). Hecker then dismisses the view that matter harbors the 'promise and potency of every form and quality of life'. (The quoted phrase [unattributed by Hecker] is from John Tyndall's 'Apology for the Belfast Address', Tyndall's defense of a very influential talk given in 1874 [which was ridiculed by James Clerk Maxwell in some poems].) Hecker then says, 'It is evident that scientism is more rigorously skeptical than rationalism or the materialism of the eighteenth century -- in a word, that it is supremely nihilistic' (Ibid.).

Finally, in 1877 Canon Barry rejects the 'scientism' of T. H. Huxley. Barry uses the term on p. 114 of A modern symposium. Subjects: The soul and future life, by Frederic Harrison [and others] and, The influence upon morality of a decline in religious belief, by Sir James Fitzjames Stephen [and others]. Interestingly, Barry applies the label not to the Comtean positivist Frederic Harrison but, instead, to the supposed materialist Huxley:

Mr. Harrison's earnest and eloquent plea against the materialism which virtually, if not theoretically, makes all that we call spirit a mere function of material organization ..., and against the exclusive 'scientism' which, because it cannot find certain entities along its line of investigation, asserts loudly that they are either non-existent or 'unknowable,' is strong, and (pace Prof. Huxley) needful. (Barrry, A Modern Symposium [1877], p. 114)

Incidentally, the first use that I've found of 'scientism' in a literary context is in George Bernard Shaw's marathon 1921 play (90 000 words long), Back to Methuselha, which includes this line: 'On the contrary, the iconography and hagiology of Scientism are as copious as they are mostly squalid.'

'Scientism' 7 - Dawson on Clifford (1870s)

Seventh in a series of fourteen posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, & 14).

I've found an 1877 piece called 'Scientism' in a Canadian magazine. Here's a passage from the opening paragraph of 'Scientism' by S. E. Dawson (1877):

Although the word we have placed at the head of this paper [scientism] is not to be found in that repertory of neologisms, Webster's Dictionary, it is one nevertheless much needed concisely to denote a phase of thought which has seized upon the current literature of the day and is imposing its one-sided truths upon the world as a complete system of philosophy. Precisely as the sacerdotalist would compel all belief and duty to bow before his supernatural authority, so the professor would narrow the whole field of truth by ignoring or repudiating every belief and duty which is not commensurate with his methods. Naturally, there is bitter war between these two classes of thinkers, and the scientist, having found a suitable pulpit in the Fortnightly Review, deals out his monthly modicum of denunciation and sneers at the religious faith of others with the arrogance of a mediaeval prelate; and, in truth, considering how short a time it is since the scientists have got control of the leading channels of thought, it is amazing how quickly they have attained to the fullest measure of dogmatism ever reached by their antagonists during the many centuries of their domination. Apt scholars, as many of them are, in dogmatism, they have imitated also the unnecessary offensiveness of by-gone ages, and whether it be Mr. Morley, spelling God with a little 'g,' or Professor Clifford, imputing 'immorality' to everybody not belonging to his school, one can hardly take up a number of the Fortnightly without being struck with some instance of this literary brutality, showing how little the apostle, even of the new evangel of 'sweetness and light,' has been able to charm the native fierceness of the scientific Philistine. When the 'Great Being' — the 'Goddess Humanity' of Comte, or 'Man' of Professor Clifford — (all with capital letters) is duly installed, and society is reorganised on the most advanced principles of Sociology, we fear that the 'hierarchy of science' will be found as intolerant of heresy as their sacerdotal prototypes. (Dawson, Belford's Monthly Magazine 3 [1877]: 903-920, at 903)

W. K. Clifford is the main focus of Dawson's ire. A few pages on, Dawson has this to say against Clifford's epistemology:

It is, however, assumed too readily that, in scientific matters, we believe only upon demonstration, whereas in fact men receive the chief part of their knowledge upon authority alone. There are very few who have gone over the proofs of the heliocentric theory in astronomy, and the reasoning upon which it is based is beyond the powers of many, but yet it is believed contrary to the evidence of our senses, solely upon the authority of a few. Not one thousandth part of our daily working beliefs are actually verified. We are always ready to give faith to the chemist, biologist or geologist, working out results in their special spheres. Professor Clifford himself is incessantly using such phrases as 'Huxley has shown,' 'Tyndall has said,' 'Darwin has taught,' 'Haeckel has demonstrated.' He is willing enough to accept authority and to lend faith to those distinguished specialists, not only in their demonstrations, but in their metaphysical theories upon these demonstrations. (Ibid., at 906)