Why French philosophy wasn't as anti-German as British philosophy

After World War I, British philosophy, and not French philosophy, followed a trend of diminished engagement with its German counterpart. What accounts for this difference between the British and French philosophers?

First, note that by the early years of the 20^th Century, France had already experienced extreme antipathy towards the Kaiserreich in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War. Following that war, academic philosophers in France arrived at a framework that warranted continued engagement with some German philosophy.

In developing a clearer sense of the relations between French and German philosophy in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, I have found very helpful Martha Hanna's book, The Mobilization of Intellect (Harvard University Press, 1996). According to Hanna, French intellectuals developed a 'two-Germanies' hypothesis after the Franco-Prussian War. They distinguished between the good, high-culture Germany (which ended roughly with Kant) and the bad, militaristic Germany (which began with Hegel).^{(Hanna, Mobilization of the Intellect, p. 9)} In the 1870s, French scholars began to devote more time to studying Kant. In fact, French neo-Kantianism began to grow shortly after France's loss to Prussia and reached its height in the 1890s.^{(Hanna, Mobilization of the Intellect, p. 35)}

In France, neo-Kantianism was one strand in French philosophy's turn from scientism.^(Ibid.) Another strand, which came to prominence in French right-wing, Roman Catholic circles during the early years of the 20^th Century, was stridently anti-German and regarded German scholars as uncreative technicians who were embroiled in scientism. Hanna describes the activities of this French, conservative school of thought during the War, including the work of Jacques Maritain and Victor Giraud.^{(Hanna, Mobilization of the Intellect, pp. 184-9)} In an essay that Giraud published in 1917, he characterizes 'scientisme' as 'that gross doctrine held by half-scientists or half-philosophers which has come to us from Germany and which consists in making positive science the only type of knowledge and the only rule of action.' ^{(Giraud, 'French Civilisation', in The French Miracle and French Civilisation: Two Essays, trans. H. P. Thieme and W. A. McLaughlin [Ann Arbor, MI: The Ann Arbor Press, 1917], p. 71; first published in French in 1917)}

So, in French academic circles during the early years of the 20^th Century, any general bias against German philosophy was associated with a conservative, religious orientation, one which had already been disavowed by many secular philosophers. In contrast to the French right, these secular French philosophers (esp. the neo-Kantians) had endorsed a two-Germanies model in the decades before WWI, and this model encouraged the continuing engagement with some German philosophers, especially those who worked in a Kantian vein and who repudiated what the French called 'scientisme'. This might help to explain why Husserl, for instance, enjoyed a favorable reception in post-War Paris. (Husserl lectured in Paris on Feb. 23 and 25, 1929. His lectures in London in 1922 were not so well received.)

British Germanophiles could only dream of inhabiting such a congenial environment. Some of them (e.g., John Muirhead) propounded their own 'two-Germanies' doctrine during the War and its immediate aftermath. Their approach placed Hegel on the safe, good-German side of the boundary and may have been undermined by the fact that its French counterpart had positioned Hegel as a villain.^{(Hanna, Mobilization of the Intellect, p. 9, p. 23)}

Such differences might explain why, as Stuart Wallace says, the post-War years saw 'nothing in Britain to compare with Julien Benda's scathing postwar critique, La Trahison des Clercs (1927)'. ^{(Wallace, War and the Image of Germany: British Academics, 1914-1918 [Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988], p. v)} The target of Benda's critique was the anti-German propaganda that French professors had produced during the War. Wallace adds that while similar reckonings with 'the national chauvinism of professors' appeared in Germany (Hans Wehburg's Wider den Anruf der 93! [1920]) and in the USA (H. L. Mencken's articles), no British authors produced a similar repudiation of their own nation's professorial propaganda.

Three mistakes in a recent book on Einstein and Bergson

I've seen few philosophical works on the books-of-the-year lists. One of the few is The Physicist and the Philosopher by Jimena Canales. The focus of the book is a dispute between Einstein and Bergson about the nature of time.

I've just bought the book and haven't had time, yet, to read it. However, after skimming some pages I've found three mistakes.

First, on p. 183, Canales says that 'Einstein admired Eddington for refusing to fight during World War I and liked Bertrand Russell, who had been imprisoned for refusing to join the army, for similar reasons'. In fact, Russell was fined in 1916 for writing an anti-war pamphlet, and was imprisoned for six months at the end of the war because he had written that American troops in the UK might be used for breaking strikes.

Secondly, on p. 204, Canales writes that Jacques Maritain 'helped craft' the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. However, the Charter was written after public consultations in 1980 and came into effect in 1982. Maritain died in 1973. I can find no evidence that Maritain contributed to Canada's earlier Bill of Rights (1960).

Thirdly, on p. 205, Canales reports that 'Maritain is known for having coined the word "scientism".' In fact, he isn't known for having coined the word, since it was being used before he used it (in 1910).

Update (Dec. 16): A colleague has informed me that Canales' book is longer than it needs to be (i.e., could do with a good edit) but is worth a read.

Corporate social-scientism in Whyte's 'Organization Man'

Seventeenth in a series of seventeen posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, & 16)

In the previous post in this series, I distinguished between, on the one hand, the social-scientism of the early positivists and, on the other hand, the X-club's scientism, which was championed by T. H. Huxley, among others. I hummed and hawed about the latter variety's label (e.g., reductive-scientism, eliminative-scientism). I should simply have called it physical-scientism. For adherents of physical-scientism, the physical sciences, armed as they were with the new evolutionary theory, were poised to solve all the erstwhile mysteries about human beings, thereby putting the humanistic and social sciences out of business.

I've said that critics of social-scientism trace its lineage to 19th-Century France, particularly to the work of Comte and Saint-Simon. Hayek and others trace it back to the founding of the École Polytechnique.

French social-scientism was largely a left-wing creature. The French association of social-scientism with the political left probably inspired the American cold-war use of 'scientism' as a term of abuse in political debate. On that note, it's interesting that one of the more famous deployments of 'scientism' in 1950s America saw the word applied not to big government but, rather, to big, private corporations. I have in mind William Hollingsworth ('Holly') Whyte's use of the term in The Organization Man (1956), the third chapter of which is called 'Scientism'.

[Here's Whyte interviewed on PBS. I think Whyte would have liked The Wire.]

Citing Hayek and Voegelin, Whyte introduces 'scientism' as follows:

The first denominator is scientism. This is the practical part of the Social Ethic, for it is the promise that with the same techniques that have worked in the physical sciences we can eventually create an exact science of man. (Whyte, The Organization Man [University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002/1956], p. 23)

That's a nice, in-a-nutshell statement of social-scientism.  Like Hayek and van Duzer, Whyte traces the ideology back to France:

With the founding of the École Polytechnique in Paris at the end of the eighteenth century scientism was given another forward push; Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte energized a formidable school with the promise of positivism (Ibid., p. 25). 

To display the extent to which private corporations have taken up social-scientism, Whyte quotes from advertising, personnel, and public-relations journals. He quotes an editorial in Public Relations Journal, according to which, 'The challenge of social engineering in our time is like the challenge of technical engineering fifty years ago' ^{(Ibid., p. 26)}. Whyte embraces the phrase, 'social engineering' ^{(Ibid., p. 27)}, a locution with which I, myself, was more familiar as an epithet for the batch of concerns that he addresses. Perhaps 'social engineering' has displaced 'scientism' as the preferred term of abuse for social-scientism.

I believe that social-scientism in its corporate incarnation is the brand of scientism on which Sebastian Benthall and Adam Elkus focus in their interesting posts on scientism. Benthall links this kind of scientism to recent enthusiasm about 'big data'. Elkus characterizes scientism as,

a generalized philosophy that argued modern life was too complex, bewildering, and dangerous for the common man to navigate without the aid of enlightened elites, who would use supposedly scientific methods to direct society through managerial control of social life and the flow of information. Hence, Scientism is really about the idea that a small group of people might be uniquely endowed to engineer the fates of others due to superior knowledge and rationality.

Positivists vs. Darwin's bull-dog (social-scientism vs. reductionist-scientism, Part II)

Sixteenth in a series of seventeen posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, & 17)

In my last post on scientism, I claimed to have excavated distinct uses in that word's history (and in the history of the French scientisme). I labeled the older use social-scientism. This use was directed primarily at Saint-Simon, Comte, and their followers. These philosophers and scientists were not in thrall to reductionism; they did not, for example, prophesy the reduction of other sciences to physics. Nor did they envisage the elimination of special sciences (such as sociology). In fact, Comtean positivists embraced a levels picture, on which the special sciences (such as biology and sociology), while dependent upon lower, more general empirical sciences (such as physics and chemistry), were nonetheless capable of explaining phenomena that could not be accounted for in the terms of the more basic sciences. In short, the special sciences were taken to do distinctive explanatory work that could not, even in principle, be accomplished without them. Still, critics used the word 'scientism' to ridicule the Comteans' vision of sociology as an empirical science that held the key to understanding all human activities in terms of observed uniformities of conduct, a science that could be used to revamp society.

I called the second use of 'scientism' reductionist-scientism. I should, perhaps, have called it eliminative-scientism, for its critics were horrified by the prospect of a physical science, such as biology, putting both the old, humanistic disciplines and the newer, social sciences out of work by giving an exhaustive explanation of these disciplines' putative subject matter. The critics feared that biology would eliminate the social sciences and the humanistic disciplines by answering all the sensible how- and why-questions that could be posed about human beings. For its critics, the impetus behind this type of scientism was Darwinian theory, and its champions were members of the X-Club.

In an old periodical, I found a fierce exchange between a Comtean positivist and the most famous member of the X-Club -- well, fierce by Victorian standards. The positivist was Frederic Harrison, and the X-Clubber was 'Darwin's bulldog', T. H. Huxley.

"TH Huxley" by Carlo Pellegrini - Vanity Fair, 28 January 1871. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

What follows are selections from Harrison's contribution, in which Harrison defends a levels view of the sciences. He wants to police the boundaries between the sciences, ensuring that evolutionary theory does not gobble up the explananda of other scientific fields of inquiry. Harrison writes:

I am quite aware that Prof. Huxley has elsewhere formulated his belief that biology is the science which 'includes man and all his ways and works.' If history, law, politics, morals, and political economy, are merely branches of biology, we shall want new dictionaries indeed. (A Modern Symposium II: the Soul and Future Life, first published in The Nineteenth Century [September, 1877]: 175)

More generally, Harrison ridicules Huxley for 'fancying that one science can do the work of another' (Ibid. 178). Harrison acknowledges that everything in the proprietary domain of the human sciences depends on the phenomena that are described in the more basic physical sciences. Still, he takes Huxley to task for

that hallucination of his about questions of science all becoming questions of molecular physics. The molecular facts are valuable enough; but we are getting molecular-mad, if we forget that molecular facts have only a special part in physiology, and hardly any part at all in sociology, history, morals, and politics; though I quite agree that there is no single fact in social, moral, or mental philosophy, that has not its correspondence in some molecular fact, if we only could know it. (Ibid., 178-9)

Harrison is vague about the nature of the dependence relation in question -- he doesn't say 'emergence' or 'supervenience' -- but he stresses that it does not supply an explanation of the dependent items. Again, in his words:

We both agree that every mental and moral fact is in functional relation with some molecular fact. ... But, then, says Prof. Huxley, if I can trace the molecular facts which are the antecedents of the mental and moral facts, I have explained these mental and moral facts. That I deny; just as much as I should deny that a chemical analysis of the body could ever lead to an explanation of the physical organism. Then, says the professor, when I have traced out the molecular facts, I have built up a physical theory of moral phenomena. ... [T]here is no such thing, or no rational thing, that can be called a physical theory of moral phenomena, any more than there is a moral theory of physical phenomena." (Ibid., 172-3, emphases in original)

"Frederic Harrison" by Carlo Pellegrini - Vanity Fair,23January1886. Licensed as Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Harrison's emphasis is squarely on the relations between sciences (their taxonomies and laws) rather than on the entities or facts that fall within the purview of any given science. He says:

We do not diminish the supreme place of the spiritual facts in life and in philosophy by admitting these spiritual facts to have a relation with molecular and organic facts in the human organism -- provided that we never forget how small and dependent is the part which the study of the molecular and organic phenomena must play in moral and social science. (Ibid., 158, italics added)

In view of these quotations, it's safe to say that Harrison would side with the critics who accused Huxley of eliminative-scientism. Nevertheless, many of those critics would charge Harrison with social-scientism, for he remained committed to the program of naturalistic social sciences that broadly follow the empirical methods of the physical sciences and that will, eventually, describe laws of human functioning that afford as complete an understanding of us as can be had. The methods in question needn't invoke empathy, or Verstehen. As Harrison remarked in another context, 'We take man as he is and history as we find it, and we seek to interpret the whole on one uniform scientific method' ('The Creeds - Old and New', The Nineteenth Century, No. XLIV, [October, 1880]: 526-49, at 544).

Social-scientism vs. reductionist-scientism (Part I)

Fifteenth in a series of sixteen posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 & 16)

I've distinguished two strands in the use of 'scientism'. On the one hand, there's what I've called 'the mid-20th-Century' use (post 9), or the 'cold-war use' (post 11), which channels apprehensions about left-wing political agendas, especially Marxism. In post 11, I conjectured that this deployment of the term echoes some of the concerns behind the earliest uses of the French 'scientisme'. In both cases, 'scientism(e)' gave voice to dark forebodings about radical, 'socialist' agendas whose aim was to jettison much of tradition in a drastic redesign of society. Such radical programs were linked to science by their putative roots in the new social sciences.

Let's coin the label social-scientism for the kind of scientism that was being attacked in these uses. Who was supposed to be guilty of social-scientism? While cold-war fulminations targeted Marxism, the earlier French uses of 'scientisme' were more often motivated by opposition to the visions of Saint-Simon and Comte (and their followers). My understanding of the earlier French concerns is suggested by Richard G. Olson's work. In his Science and Scientism in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Olson writes: 

The Saint-Simonians unquestionably understood themselves as scientists, developing a science that comprehended the events of the social as well as of the natural world. Moreover, nearly thirty years before Friedrich Engels appropriated the term 'scientific socialism' for the doctrines that he and Karl Marx had developed, Karl Grün (1817-87) had applied the term to Saint-Simonianism (Olson, Science and Scientism in Nineteenth-Century Europe, [Urbana, IL: the University of Illinois Press, 2008], p. 59).

In both the cold-war and earlier French castigations, social-scientism was reviled for its supposed reduction of persons to mere cogs in a machine, social bits and pieces susceptible of the same sort of understanding to be had in the physical sciences. To be sure, proponents of social-scientism might abjure attempts to reduce special sciences to physics, denying that the subject matter of the social sciences (or of any science other than physics) could be reduced to that of any more basic science. Nonetheless, they (e.g., Comtean positivists) held that the same sort of method that had met with such stellar success in the physical sciences now promised an understanding of humanity (if only it were applied to that subject matter). The kind of intellectual operation at work in this method involved the subsumption of the subject matter under universal laws of nature, themselves to be discovered by empirical study.

Note that those who were charged with social-scientism need not be taken by their critics to have embraced reductionist materialism or, indeed, any metaphysics at all. Instead, they were seen as using their science to plot other people's lives, designing a new social order in which people were treated as pawns to be manipulated rather than as free agents to be let alone. (Such worries about social-scientism are echoed by libertarian animadversions about social engineering.)

Note, also, that since social-scientism was associated with socialism, its critics tended to be conservative traditionalists. However, many who have warned of the dangers of scientism have been further to the left on the political spectrum.

This observation brings us to the second strand in the uses of 'scientism'. The main theme in this second strand is a concern about reductionist programs in which a physical science (such as biology) threatens to gobble up the subject matter of the old humanistic disciplines or of the newer social sciences. Let's call scientism of this second variety reductionist-scientism. This is the kind of scientism that members of the X-Club were thought to embrace. Critiques of reductionist-scientism were more likely to include the accusation that its adherents were committed to a materialistic metaphysics. Clearly, concerns about this brand of scientism were fueled by the advent of evolutionary theory. The concerns were exacerbated by the subsequent rise of social Darwinism. Opponents of reductionist-scientism included not only traditionalists but many left-wing authors as well.

The current use of the term 'scientism' incorporates elements from both social-scientism and reductionist-scientism, although the influence of the latter variety has been more pronounced in the past few decades.

'Scientism' 14 - 1891-1968

Fourteenth in a series of sixteen posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15 & 16)

In 1891, the New York positivist T. B. Wakeman chose, as W. M. Brown would later do, to embrace 'scientism' (the doctrine and the label). Wakeman wrote:

We find the religious history of our race to consist, therefore, of a gradual evolution of its leading peoples from a broad base of general animism and fetichism [sic], thence to astrology, thence to polytheism, thence to monotheism, and thence to scientism expressed chiefly to us in the pantheism of Goethe, the positivism of Comte, the synthetism of Spencer, the cosmism of Fiske, and finally by the monism of Haeckel. He proposed this word monism as expressive of the world-unifying law of science, as the summary of all that was true and good in the other philosophic names proposed by the philosophers just named, while it excluded what he regards as the crude and vulgar notions of materialism, spiritualism, and dualism. (Thaddeus B. Wakeman, 'Ernst Haeckel', in Evolution in Science, Philosophy, and Art: Popular Lectures and Discussions before the Brooklyn Ethical Association [NY: D. Appleton & Company, 1891], p. 41; italics in the original)

Uses from the 1930s are interesting, since they precede the papers by Hayek that popularized 'scientism'. In his 1935 doctoral dissertation, Contribution of the Ideologues to French Revolutionary Thought, Charles van Duzer had this to say:

Two major currents ran through French thought during the latter half of the eighteenth century. On the one hand was Rousseauistic sentimentalism which tended toward the close of the century to pass into a religious mysticism as exemplified in the writings of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Saint-Martin; on the other, the Voltairian philosophy of common sense and scientism which informed the rational and utilitarian tendencies of Encyclopedic thought. (van Duzer, Contribution of the Ideologues to French Revolutionary Thought in The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science Series 53, No. 4 [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1935], p .5 of the number [p. 419 of the volume])

Next, there are two uses from the late 1940s. First, we have Max Horkheimer's use in 1947: 'Like any existing creed, science can be used to serve the most diabolical social forces, and scientism is no less narrow-minded than militant religion'  (Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, 1947).

In the same year, we find Werner Jaeger using the term as follows: 'The unilateral emphasis on the physical side of pre-Socratic philosophy in their works is a product of 19th-century scientism and its horror of everything metaphysical' (Jaeger, The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers (Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 195, n. 25).

In a letter to William L. Kinter (dated July 30, 1954), C. S. Lewis wrote that That Hideous Strength 'is about a triple conflict: Grace against Nature and Nature against Anti-Nature (modern industrialism, scientism, & totalitarian politics)' (C. S. Lewis: Collected Letters, v. III: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950-1963, ed. Walter Hooper [New York: HarperCollins, 2006], pp. 497-98).

By the 60s, uses of 'scientism' had become common , but it's interesting to see how Leszek Kolakowski used the word (in 1968):

...scientism, that is, the doctrine according to which any question that cannot be settled by the methods of the natural and deductive sciences is an improper question' [p. 160]. ... It [logical empiricism] professes scientism, that is, it asserts the essential unity of the scientific method, accounting for differences between the sciences on this score -- especially between the social and the physical sciences -- by the immaturity of the former [pp. 177-8] (Kolakowski, The Alienation of Reason, [1968]).

Some philosophy links (February)

Chad Hansen's new MOOC 'Humanity and Nature in Chinese Thought'.

'Stanford scholar explores Arabic obsession with language....Key also found that the early scholars benefited from a holistic perspective. The ancients lacked the modern methodological divide between arts and sciences, and so were able to see language as a cognitive function shared between poetry and logic.'

In Our Time - Melvyn Bragg talks with Simon Blackburn, Jennifer Hornsby, and Crispin Wright about truth. and with Simon Glendinning, Joanna Hodge, and Stephen Mulhall about phenomenology.

Julie Allard on 'Ronald Dworkin: Law as Novel Writing'.

A collection of new papers on Jaegwon Kim will be available this month from Cambridge University Press.

Harald Sack on Pierre Gassendi.

Gary Saul Morson: 'On Toulmin, Tolstoy, & the Dawkinsization of the humanities'.

Steven Shapin: 'The new scientism, for all its claims that there is a way science can make you good, shares one crucial sensibility with its opponents: having secularized nature, and sharing in the vocational circumstances of late modern science, the proponents of the new scientism can make no plausible claims to moral superiority, nor even moral specialness.'

Richard Zach on 'Carnap on "Syntax" vs. "Semantics"'.

Elucidations podcasts: from October,  Episode 64: James Conant and Jay Elliott discuss the analytic tradition; and from December, Episode 66: Haim Gaifman discusses mathematical reasoning.

Krista Tippett interviews Paul Elie, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Robin Lovin discuss Reinhold Niebuhr's legacy. Audio recordings of some of Niebuhr's sermons and lectures.

At Philosophy Bites, Christine Korsgaard on the status of animals.

'Ethics and Aesthetics are One: The Earnestness of High Modernism in Wittgenstein and Musil' by Genese Grill.

At Philosophers Zone, Joe Gelonesi talks to David Papineau about consciousness and the brain.

Nicholas Maxwell on 'what philosophy ought to do'.

Colin Strang's obituary.

Winthrop Pickard Bell: 'Husserl asked his Canadian student to write his dissertation on Royce, and when completed he praised it. ... [Bell] received his degree in 1922. Bell was the first teacher of phenomenology at Harvard from 1922-1927; his students included Dorion Cairns and Charles Hartshorne.' More about Bell:

During the fall of 1921 [Bell] returned to academia and taught philosophy at the University of Toronto and within the same time frame made an application to have his doctorate from Göttingen University re-instated. The formal doctorate was finally issued to Dr. Bell in May of 1922. His tenure in Toronto was to be short-lived and he resigned after the spring semester. In the fall of 1922 he took up teaching in the philosophy department at Harvard University.

Rebecca Suter reviews Matthew Strecher's The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami:  'According to Strecher, the metaphysical realm in Murakami’s work is the place where individual subjects are able to connect to their “inner narrative,” get in touch with their innermost feelings and (re)construct a worldview that is closer to their true self than the false myths or “collective narratives” produced by society.'

Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, a student of Kant's -- well, he attended some of Kant's lectures -- wrote some early science fiction tales. Michael Hauskeller has a blog post on Hoffmann's tale 'Sandman'. Another blog post about 'Sandman'. In his chapter of Wiley's Companion to Science Fiction, 'The Origins of Science Fiction', George Slusser devotes a section to Hoffmann's 'Sandman'.

'Scientism' 13 - Charlton on the difference between positivism & scientism

Thirteenth in a series of sixteen posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15 & 16).

The relation between the phrases 'positivism' and 'scientism' is ambiguous. Some use 'scientism' as a synonym for 'positivism' (see Leszek Kolakowski's uses in The Alienation of Reason [1968]; e.g., p. 160 and pp. 177-8). Others take positivism to be a proper subset of scientism (my preferred use). Still others take the two groups to be disjoint.

An example of this latter use can be found in D. G. Charlton's admirable book Positivist Thought in France during the Second Empire, 1852-1870. (Oxford University Press, 1959) Charlton reserves 'positivism' for the view of those positivists who remained true to the anti-metaphysical tenets of that philosophy and who did not pretend to draw ethical results from science (or from reason). 'Scientism' then refers (for Charlton) to distortions of positivism that erect ethical or metaphysical doctrines (e.g., materialism) on a putatively scientific basis (Charlton 1959, p. 2; cf. p. 224). Charlton's use of 'scientism' is clarified by this line about Claude Bernard: 'He rejects the claim of scientism that science alone can offer a new ethic of life and reorder civilization'. (Charlton 1959, p. 81)

Chapters 3-7 of Charlton's book distinguish between, on the one hand, those authors who stayed true to positivist epistemology by remaining agnostic about metaphysics and ethics (and much else) and, on the other hand, those who betrayed positivism by laying claim to knowledge beyond what was verifiable, thereby lapsing into scientism. By Charlton's lights, only Bernard and Émile Littré were true positivists while Comte, himself, Ernest Renan, and Hippolyte Taine had unwittingly forsaken positivism for scientism. Here's an interesting remark that Charlton makes about Taine:

He illustrates with especial clarity one of the most significant distortions of positivism in the mid-nineteenth century, a distortion arising from the intermingling of German idealism and Anglo-French positivism. The addition of Hegel and positivism produces scientism: this is the equation demonstrated in the philosophies of Taine and Renan alike. (Charlton, Positivist Thought in France during the Second Empire [Oxford University Press, 1959], p. 154)

I quote this intriguing passage but, won't delve into it here.

Charlton's use of 'scientism' connects with what I said in the final paragraph of post 11. Indeed, much of Charlton's book is devoted to 'catching out' supposed positivists in moments of betrayal.

In short, for Charlton, since science is silent on metaphysics, ethics, etc., positivism urges silence on such matters.* 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent' (though I don't mean to say Wittgenstein was a positivist). For Charlton, scientism won't shut up about the 'whereof'.

*The nature of this urging is unclear. It's normative, so, by positivist standards, it isn't based on scientific method, which itself consists of normative claims....Though perhaps at that point they rely only on hypothetical imperatives.

'Scientism' 12 - James, Dewey & Mueller

Twelfth in a series of fourteen posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, & 14).

William James used 'scientism' in a few letters. The first such letter was addressed to his father's friend James John Garth Wilkinson (a Swedenborgian). James wrote to Wilkinson about the latter's book Greater Origins and Issues of Life and Death. In the letter (dated March 8, 1886), James wrote of his desire

...to protest against the sottish sect of "scientists" so far as it is a sect - which of course it is on an enormous scale.... Science carries its own remedy in its method and will slough off each successive crust of scientism that tries to harden over it, before it has had time to set. (James, letter to James John Garth Wilkinson [March 8, 1886], The Correspondence of William James, v. 6: 1885-1889, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley; [Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2004], p. 125)

'Scientism' appears in two letters that James penned in later years, one of which was sent to James Mark Baldwin (in Jan., 1889) (Ibid., p. 477) about Baldwin's critique of James' 'Will to Believe'.

As was noted in an earlier post, James used the even more ungainly word 'scientificism' in his published work. Why didn't he use 'scientism' instead? Perhaps he thought it had associations with more conservative religious authors; or, perhaps, in an effort to play up the supposed folly of scientism, he opted for a more ridiculous, comical phrase.

I said in my 6th post of this series that John Dewey was taken for a paragon of scientism by some of his contemporaries. Further evidence of that tendency may be found in a review from 1949 by Roy Wood Sellars. In the course of discussing some lectures by R. B. Perry, Sellars said:

This is James' meliorism with fideism. God is the mightiest champion of the good. Not so much of this remains in Dewey, with his increased scientism and humanism. (Sellars, 'The Cook Lectures: "Characteristically American": A review of a distinguished philosopher's five discussions of fundamental aspects of American life, as recently presented to University audiencess', The Quarterly Review of the Michigan Alumnus [1949]: at 190)

Finally, in 1936, Gustav Emil Mueller (a Swiss-American philosopher) published Philosophy of Our Uncertainties, which included a chapter called 'The Four Fallacies of Scientism'. Mueller there said:

We now proceed to examine the mongrel scientism. Its position may be stated as follows: The universe is an object of scientific knowledge; what remains of philosophy will be a series of problems capable of investigation by the observational methods of the true sciences. This maxim raises a legitimate issue against 'popular' pretensions to solve 'the riddle of the universe' in competition with scientific endeavors, and by wholesale and 'intuitive' methods of their own. We now turn to the criticism of the fallacies implied in it, if it is meant as a metaphysical position and not merely as a regulative, pragmatic maxim. (Mueller, Philosophy of Our Uncertainties [Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1936], p. 70)

January philosophy links

Eric Banks interviewed about his new book The Realistic Empiricism of Mach, James, and Russell: Neutral Monism Reconceived. Banks wrote an earlier book called Ernst Mach's World Elements.

Thomas Dixon on the history of the term 'altruism' (in a series called 'Philosophical Keywords'). In giving the rationale for this new blog project, Dixon mentions 'Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s view, expressed in the latter’s Aids to Reflection (1825), that there were cases when "more knowledge of more value may be conveyed by the history of a word than by the history of a campaign".’

Seyla Benhabib on the Charlie Hebdo massacres.

At Siris, 'the Key to Mill's Utilitarianism'.

David Auerbach's 4th post on Simmel's Philosophy of Money.

Duncan Richter has a couple of new drafts (developed from blog posts) on Winch, Wittgenstein, and religious experience.

Isabelle Kalinowski on 'Max Weber and Capitalism's Strange Reality'.

'Cassirer on Enlightenment in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Part 2)'.

More about Putin's philosopher, Ivan Ilyin.

Eric Voegelin at 114.

Musical interlude:


'The story of historian Natalie Zemon Davis, as she tells it, is largely one about the benefits that have accrued to an outsider'.

Elucidations podcast of Sally Sedgwick on Hegel and Kant.

Rebuilding a positivist church in Brazil:

The positivist ritual consists of classical music, readings from Comte’s works, debate and invocations to the Supreme Being. It was conducted weekly until one night in 2009 when the roof, its wooden beams weakened by Brazil’s notorious tropical termites, suddenly caved in.

In E. T. A. Hoffmann's 'Master Flea', Peregrinus (aka Mr. Peregrine Tyss) uses 'a microscope that allows him to observe people’s thoughts from the motion of their physical brain and nerves', thereby anticipating Herbert Feigl's autocerebroscope (elaborated upon by Paul E. Meehl). Hoffmann's 'Automata' (pdf) made io9's short list for the Victorian Hugos (1886, the year of its English translation).  Here's Hoffmann's 'Sandman'. At Gutenberg.

'Take me then as a sort of reflective and experienced carp; but do not estimate the justice of my ideas by my facial expression.' In 'Shadows of the Coming Race' (1879) by George Eliot, we're outwitted and displaced by self-reproducing, mechanical zombies. Eliot's reflections were prompted by T. H. Huxley's 'On the Hypothesis that Animals Are Automata'.

Here's a neat old book, Contemporary Thought in France, in which Félix de Dantec (one of the early users of 'scientisme') is said to have adopted Huxley's epiphenomenalism. The book was written by Isaac Benrubi and translated from the German by Ernest B. Dicker in 1926 (the year of its initial publication).

Parts 1 and 2 of 'C. S. Lewis and the Inklings' on CBC Radio.

Harald Sack on 'Alfred Tarski and the Undefinability of Truth'.

Logicians in fiction:

Laura Mae Isaacman interviews Yannick Grannec about Grannec's The Goddess of Small Victories, 'a fictional story that re-imagines the life of mathematician Kurt Gödel and his wife Adele'.

Re. Richard Montague: Sacha Arnold on echoes of Montague in Samuel Delany's pornutopic Mad Man and in Aifric Campbell's Semantics of Murder.

Bertrand Russell was a basis for Scogan, an unflattering character in Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow. Russell was also a model for Sir Joshua Malleson in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love, for Thornton Tyrell in Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, and for Mr. Apollinax in a poem by T. S. Eliot. Bruce Duffy's The World as I Found It is about Russell, Wittgenstein, and G. E. Moore.

'Scientism' 11 - 'Scientism' in analytic philosophy

Eleventh in a series of fourteen posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, & 14).

The word 'scientism' has been in use among analytic philosophers at least since John Passmore used it twice in 1948 (in 'Philosophy and Scientific Method' and 'Logical Positivism III'). About ten years later, W. H. Dray accused Carl Hempel of scientism on p. 4 of his Laws and Explanation in History (1957).

More recently, we find the word appearing in the works of philosophers who were influenced by Wittgenstein. Recall that in post 10 of this series, I quoted a Jesuit philosopher, John Wellmuth, who saw in scientism an enemy of metaphysics. By contrast, Wittgensteinian critiques of scientism are more likely to see scientism, itself, as symptomatic of a residual attachment to metaphysics. For example, here's Warren Goldfarb in 1989:

It does make him [Wittgenstein] antiscientistic, against the smug and unexamined assurance that what wants explanation is obvious, and that scientific tools are immediately applicable. For Wittgenstein, scientism is just as misguidedly metaphysical as traditional, more transparently a prioristic, approaches. An immediate inclination to look to science for answers can in fact be an expression of a philosophical picture. Goldfarb, 'Wittgenstein, Mind, and Scientism', Journal of Philosophy 86 (1989)

Beyond the sphere of Wittgenstein interpretation, one finds several first-rate analytic philosophers with Wittgensteinian affinities disapproving of scientism. For instance, Michael Dummett, in the course of reviewing Noam Chomsky's Rules and Representations, observes that Chomsky's attitude 'contrasts not only with the widespread irrationalism of our day but with the equally repellent scientism usually opposed to it' (London Review of Books, 1981). In The Nature and Future of Philosophy (2010), Dummett says that scientism involves regarding the 'natural sciences as the only true channel of knowledge' (p. 35). That's from a chapter called 'Psychology and Scientism'.

Here's John McDowell in 1978:

But the notion of the world, or how things are, which is appropriate in this context is a metaphysical notion, not a scientific one: world views richer than that of science are not scientific, but not on that account unscientific (a term of opprobrium for answers other than those of science to science's questions). To query their status as world views on the ground of their not being scientific is to be motivated not by science but by scientism. (McDowell, 'Are Moral Imperative Hypothetical Imperatives?' Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 52 [1978]: at 19)

In his View From Nowhere (1986), Thomas Nagel says:

Philosophy is also infected by a broader tendency of contemporary intellectual life; scientism. Scientism is actually a special form of idealism, for it puts one type of human understanding in charge of the universe and what can be said about it. At its most myopic it assumes that everything there is must be understandable by the employment of scientific theories like those we have developed to date—physics and evolutionary biology are the current paradigm—as if the present age were not just one in the series. (Nagel, View from Nowhere [1986], p. 9)

Here's Hilary Putnam in his 1990 Gifford Lectures, which were published as Renewing Philosophy (1993):

Analytic philosophy has become increasingly dominated by the idea that science, and only science, describes the world as it is in itself, independent of perspective. To be sure, there are within analytic philosophy important figures who combat this scientism. Nevertheless, the idea that science leaves no room for an independent philosophical enterprise has reached the point at which leading practitioners sometimes suggest that all that is left for philosophy is to try to anticipate what the presumed scientific solutions to all metaphysical problems will eventually look like. (Putnam, Renewing Philosophy [1993], p. x)

In the Annual Lecture of the Royal Institute of Philosophy (Feb., 2000), which was published under the title 'Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline' (2000), Bernard Williams says, 'Scientism is, rather, a misunderstanding of the relations between philosophy and the natural sciences which tends to assimilate philosophy to the aims, or at least the manners, of the sciences.' In the Abstract for this paper, Williams wrote, 'Scientism stems from the false assumption that a representation of the world minimally based on local perspectives is what best serves self-understanding'.

In a metaphysics textbook, E. J. Lowe defined scientism as 'the doctrine that such legitimate metaphysical questions as there are belong to the province of the empirical sciences' (The Possibility of Metaphysics: Substance, Identity, and Time, p. 5).

These philosophers take scientism to include a metaphysical project in which metaphysical questions will be answered by the modern, natural sciences. The metaphysical impulse thus survives in scientism at least insofar as the old metaphysical questions are still treated as well-formed foci for inquiry. Critics of scientism then divide into, on the one hand, those philosophers (e.g., Wellmuth and Lowe) who accept the metaphysical questions as legitimate but seek the answers outside the natural sciences and, on the other hand, those (e.g., Wittgensteinians) who reject the metaphysical questions themselves as involving conceptual confusions.

The analytic philosophers' use of 'scientism' seems more in accord with the 1870s use than the cold-war use. As noted, the cold-war use implied nefarious social and political agendas, such as Soviet communism. I conjecture that this use was more influenced by the French 'scientisme', which appeared often in critiques of positivism. French positivism incorporated a radical program for reforming society on purely scientific grounds. Its French critics meant to neutralize this agenda in their critiques of scientism. So, it's plausible that the cold-war use of 'scientism', with its dark foreboding about radical ideologies, developed partly from these French debates. By contrast, the 1870s use of 'scientism' indicated (explicitly) few, if any, fears about radical social upheaval. Instead, the focus of that use was squarely on the notion that old metaphysical methods were being displaced by the modern natural sciences, a shift that was thought to lead to some sort of materialism.

In post 9 of this series, I expressed surprise at the discovery that in the anglo-sphere, the 1870s accusations of 'scientism' were directed chiefly at members of the X Club and not so much at positivists. After all, consistent positivists should presumably take towards metaphysics the same approach as Wittgensteinians by exposing the illegitimacy of metaphysical questions and then ceasing to  engage in metaphysics. Weren't there any inconsistent positivists around at the time, positivists who could be 'caught out' in surreptitious metaphysical flights? Perhaps 19th-Century, anglo-critics of scientism didn't think so, taking the positivists to have succeeded in eschewing metaphysics; or perhaps these critics saw no point in accusing positivists of inconsistently harboring metaphysical commitments, preferring, instead, to direct their fire at the more influential X-Clubbers, some of whom clearly did tout metaphysical doctrines (materialism) that were allegedly based on the natural sciences. If so, then these 19th-Century critics seem to have been making an argument very similar to those advanced by Wellmuth and Lowe, the point of which was not to catch out positivists but was, instead, to take on the metaphysical scientists, the scientists who drew metaphysical results from natural-scientific evidence.

Update (Jan. 25): Here's another example of 'scientism' being used by an analytic philosopher. In a 1994 paper, Mark Johnston wrote:

Just as there is a certain kind of materialism which lives off the Cartesian legacy by taking over the Cartesian idea of the body as dumb matter, there is a certain kind of scientism which lives off the legacy of medieval theology by taking over the idea of the world's having a structure privileged independently of our cognitive activity, a structure which any able cognizer should want to know. (Johnston, 'Objectivity Refigured:Pragmatism Without Verificationism' in Reality, Representation, and Projection [Oxford University Press, 1994], p. 86)

'Scientism' 10 - Wellmuth and Owen

Tenth in a series of fourteen posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, & 14).

I've found two definitions of 'scientism' by clerics in the mid-20th Century.

In my previous post on this topic, I said that some of the early, 19th-Century adopters of the term linked it to a hubristic view of modern science as holding the promise of a complete knowledge of reality.

Here's a passage that makes this hubristic sense explicit. It's from D. R. G. Owen's 1952 book, Scientism, Man, and Religion:

We may call it scientism or scientolatry. This peculiarly modern form of idolatry refuses to recognize the limitations of science and claims that its working principles can be used as universal principles, in terms of which the whole of reality can be explained and controlled. ... Scientolatry, therefore, claims that it can solve all problems 'scientifically.' (Owen, Scientism,Man, and Religion [Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1952], pp. 20-21)

Owen was an Anglican clergyman and Provost of Trinity College in the University of Toronto. He has here built a straw-man. Who ever claimed for science a capacity to give us the ability to 'control' everything?

Here's a better definition, which avoids imputing dreams of sweeping, comprehensive knowledge (let alone power) to those who stand for scientism. It was presented by John Wellmuth (S.J.) in his 1944 Aquinas Lecture at Marquette University:

The word 'scientism', as used in this lecture, is to be understood as meaning the belief that science, in the modern sense of that term, and the scientific method as described by modern scientists, afford the only reliable natural means of acquiring such knowledge as may be available about whatever is real. (Wellmuth, S. J., The Nature and Origins of Scientism [Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1944], p. 5)

This is not the hubristic version of scientism, for supporters of scientism are being taken to be confident about science only as the royal road to 'such knowledge as may be available' and not to an exhaustive knowledge of all reality.

The appearance in Wellmuth's definition of 'natural' is intriguing. Wouldn't the definition be better without it? Perhaps Wellmuth wanted a conception of scientism that could be applied to those religious people who allowed for divine revelation but who relied solely upon modern scientific methods for all other knowledge. If so, Wellmuth's conception of scientism positions it as a foe not so much of religion but, rather, of metaphysics.

Added (Jan. 16): I should add that my speculation re. Wellmuth's intended target was partly suggested by the focus of his Aquinas Lecture. He concentrates on medieval philosophers, esp. late medieval ones (inc. Scotus) and argues that the trend towards scientism was already under way before Descartes. It was initiated by medieval, Christian thinkers who accepted divine revelation but curtailed the prospects for metaphysical knowledge.

'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.'