John Hedley Brooke

Natural theology and the plurality of worlds: Observations on the Brewster-Whewell debate

Summary The object of this study is to analyse certain aspects of the debate between David Brewster and William Whewell concerning the probability of extra-terrestrial life, in order to illustrate the nature, constitution and condition of natural theology in the decades immediately preceding the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwins Origin of species. The argument is directed against a stylised picture of natural theology which has been drawn from a backward projection of the Darwinian antithesis between natural selection and certain forms of the design argument. Contrary to the popular image of natural theology as an essentially static, autonomous and monolithic set of presuppositions about the existence of design in nature, the paper underlines the existence of a fundamental divergence of strategies within natural theology, a divergence that, in the case of Brewster and Whewell, can be correlated with the religious cultures to which they most closely belonged. The fact that, in the plurality of worlds...

Richard Owen, William Whewell, and the Vestiges

In The life of Richard Owen by his grandson there is an inference to the effect that Owen had objected to his name being used to authorize various statements that Whewell was drafting in opposition to the Vestiges . The inference is drawn from letters that Whewell wrote to Owen on 13 and 15 February 1845. Corroboration of this would corne from a letter of Owen to Whewell, dated 14 February 1845, if extant. Among the Whewell papers at Trinity College, Cambridge, there are several letters from Owen to Whewell, none of which bears that date. There is one, however, dated 14 February 1844 which, on doser inspection, turns out to be the missing link in their correspondance. The evidence for the misdating is not merely that the letter falls naturally into a later sequence. The conclusion is inescapable because Owen refers to an ‘opinion which I have always entertained, and still do strongly, on the subject of a refutation of “Vestiges”’. Since the first edition of Chamberss book did not appear until October 1844, the letter must belong to the following year. My object in this paper is to examine the implications of this letter for a reconstruction of Owens attitude to that book which Adam Sedgwick could so detest for, among many things, its ‘gross (and I dare to say, filthy) views of physiology’.

Reviews : Michael Segre, In the Wake of Galileo, New Brunswick, Rutgers Univer sity Press, ISBN 0-8135-1700-1, 1991; xix + 192 pp.; US

conventional assessment according to which English humanism was an imported item, entirely dependent on Continental and especially Italian models. This may seem true, argues Starkey, if one considers only the activity of professional scholars. But this would be missing the point, in his view, since the Renaissance intellectual, in England, tends to be a gentleman amateur ’who wrote in English, though he was inspired by Latin’ (153). To be sure, concedes Starkey, there were no Continentalclass scholars in England. Even those among Erasmus’s English friends who enjoyed a Continental reputation failed to publish. Erasmus ’exhausted even his fecund ingenuity in making excuses for their failure to publish.... The truth seems to be that they wrote nothing because they had nothing to say’ (154). The best of the essays in this collection serve to underline the diversity of Renaissance culture. The reader comes away from this symposium with the clear impression that the Renaissance, manifested diversely in different social settings, was, nevertheless, an international movement irresistible in its appeal.

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De quelle maniere les savants anglais ont accueilli, assimile, transforme les theories francaises au plan de la theologie naturelle. William Buckland et Georges Cuvier| Charles Lyell et Lamarck| William Whewell et Laplace| Richard Owen et Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire