1 See D.S.L. Cardwell’s Technology, Science and History (1972) for an admirable overview of the topic (esp. ch.5, “The High Tide of Progress” which discusses the relationship between technology and pure science). In art, such pictures as Turner’s Fighting Téméraire (1838) and Rain, Steam and Speed (1840) dramatically mark the start of what was to prove an uneasy transition from Romanticism to Modernism. Turner was strongly influenced by Faraday’s experiments with light.

2 Bain’s manuscript catalogue of the Aberdeen Mechanics’ Institute library is still extant; Ruskin’s “Letters to the working-men of Britain” in Fors Clavigera has already been noted (above, ch.v,); Tyndall’s popular lectures at the Royal Institution had immense influence (above, ch.v); and Clerk Maxwell made a similar contribution during his time at University College London. The seminal writings of Samuel Smiles in promoting “mutual improvement” cannot be ignored and Smiles’ introduction to his most memorable work, Self-Help, includes a vivid picture of the early days of the movement (see Smiles, 1866, pp.viiff). The wide impact of Huxley’s popular lectures is well known; Sidgwick, amongst much other work, pioneered higher education for women (cf. Brown ,1973, p.127).

3 The corresponding Scottish legislation followed in 1872.

4 Smith’s unease was shared by Thomas Huxley, who was scathing over the annual succession of apologetic lectures under the Bampton and Hulsean bequests and who remarked, in 1890, that “the Bampton lecturer of 1859 had to grapple only with the infant Hercules of historical criticism; and he is now a full grown athlete, bearing on his shoulders the spoils of all the lions that have stood in his path” (“The lights of the Church and the lights of Science”; in Bibby, 1967, p.117).

5 L&E, p.109; cf. above, ch.iv.

6 Thus McCosh (1875) writes: “There are susceptible youths who catch the spirit of the times, as lake waters take the hue of the sky above, or as worms take the dye of the herbage they feed upon” (p.182), while John Oswald Dykes (1873) more obliquely warns his London audience: “So strong, and even excessive, is this prejudice of the moment, that I may fairly assume, when I address an audience of cautious and conscientious young men, that you are aware of it and on your guard against it” (p.4).

7 In an appendix appraising Darwin’s recently published Descent of Man (1871), McCosh writes (1875, p.351): “I have allowed Mr Darwin to draw the picture. I confess I shrink from it. I am inclined to argue that the very circumstance that man has a consciousness of a something within, which separates him from the brutes, that he claims to have a higher origin, is a consideration of some value in determining the question. Man’s very feeling is a presumption in favour of his having a noble lineage”.

8 Ib., p.84: “He [God] has scattered beauty all around us, in earth and sky, in plant and animal, in man and woman; but it is not necessary for our happiness and comfort that he should impart to every object qualities which are fitted to raise excited aesthetic feeling. For . . . it is not reckoned the highest taste to have every part of a scene characterized by sublimity or beauty”.

9 Ib., p.90. The acceptance of an “indeterminate” evolutionary period represents a major concession to science. Even Tait’s colleague, Sir William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), had been reluctant to extend the age of the planet much beyond twenty thousand years.

10 Ib., p.91

11 Ib., p.107. Cf. p.129: “And being under obligation does seem to imply that we are under obligation to a Power, or rather a Being who will call us to account. This seems to point to God as the Moral Governor, and at last to be the Judge of the Universe”.

12 Ib., pp. 98f.: “They have a body of adherents eager to propagate their system, and ever ready to make an assault on all who would inculcate a philosophy of a higher and more spiritual character. . . . They derive men from the brutes, and make him merely an upper brute”.

13 Interestingly, McCosh (p.141) blames the concept of agnosticism, usually assigned to Huxley (who certainly gave the term currency), on Herbert Spencer’s adoption of the “rash” attribution to St Paul, by the Scottish philosopher, Sir William Hamilton, of the idea of an unknowable God.

14 Ib., p.100. It was McCosh’s hope that the Anglo-Saxon world would be saved from such corrupting influences by “the glorious outburst of patriotism which the present [Franco-Prussian] war has called forth, and which has been fond of recognising a providence”.

15 Ib., p.101: “We are on the eve of a conflict with a physico-philosophy, which would account for all mental action and ideas by molecular motion, or some form of material agency”.

16 Ib., p.102. For McCosh the awareness of a moral sense was sufficient proof of this.

17 Ib., p.107. McCosh is here struggling to rebut the growing physiological evidence (adduced for example by Bain, Henry Maudesley and Faraday, as well as by their German counterparts) for the pre-eminence of the central nervous system in directing both thought and action.

18 Ib., pp.127f.

19 Cf. p.148: “It is clear that God has attributes like ours; for, by the powers with which he has endowed us, we can produce effects like those we see produced by him in nature”.

20 Ib., p.139: “Persons low in the scale of intelligence make him a mere Fetich; . . . and the academic moralist, declining to recognize the existence of sin in our world, paints him as a being of pure benevolence; while the conscious-stricken array him in colours of blood”.

21 Ib., p. 95. To do justice to McCosh, one must offset his more chauvinistic effusions by noting his concern (pp.66ff.) lest the more “degraded” races are exterminated in the Darwinian struggle for existence before they can be redeemed: “I for one would not like to see all the varieties of mankind disappear, and the whole reduced to one race, though that should be the Anglo-Saxon, any more than I would like to see all the trees of the forest reduced to one species, though that should be the oak”.

22 Ib., p.158. Cf. (p.159): “Coleridge has played out his tune, sweet and irregular as the harp of Aeolus; and all men perceive that he never had any thing to meet the deeper wants of humanity, except what he drew from Zion”.

23 Ib., p.165.

24 Ib., pp. 208f.

25 Ib., p.219.

26 Ib.

27 L&E, pp.353f. See above, ch.viii, n.62. Slade’s prosecution was instigated by the eminent biologist, E. Ray Lankaster, in concert with Dr Charles Donkin.

28 Cf. Gauld (1968) pp.13f.: “The rapidity with which Spiritualism spread across the United States in the eighteen-fifties is quite remarkable. . . Whatever the explanation . . . Spiritualism spread, if not like wildfire, at any rate fast enough to alarm the orthodox and move them to vigorous denunciations”.

29 John Tyndall was among the first of many to expose their fraudulent nature.

30 In addition to those individuals discussed here in detail, other notable adherents from the scientific world included Sir William Crookes, Sir J. Oliver Lodge, William James and Prof. J.J. Thomson.

31 Gauld (1968) p.140, who quotes Gladstone as affirming that psychical research was “the most important work which is being done in the world”.

32 Henry Sidgwick (1830-1900) was educated at Rugby and Trinity College, Cambridge, and married Eleanor, sister of A.J. Balfour. His life-long concern was to establish “direct proof of continued individual existence” (DNB) but his persistence was unrewarded by any conclusive findings.

33 Frederic W.H. Myers (1843-1901) was one of Sidgwick’s pupils at Trinity, thereafter becoming an intimate friend. A man of intense, almost morbid, sensibility, Myers typifies the late Victorian who rejected Christian orthodoxy while continuing to search for a religious faith which guaranteed immortality. Like Matthew Arnold, Myers became a school inspector, after resigning his fellowship at Cambridge on conscientious grounds.

34 The investigations of the Sidgwick group (and indeed of the SPR generally) comprehended the “scientific study” of thought-reading, hypnosis, clairvoyance, extra-sensory perception, apparitions and all physical phenomena not obviously explicable by reference to known natural laws. Curiously enough, miraculous healings appear not to have been a matter of especial interest. The 1887 EB9 article on Spiritualism (vol. xxii, pp.404-407) is by Mrs Henry Sidgwick and should be compared with the distinctly sceptical references to spiritualism contained in the 1875 article “Apparitions” by Andrew Lang (EB9 vol. ii, pp.202-208).

35 Cf. Gauld (1968) p.44: “Religion and religious observances were made the central point not just of lessons but of life. A child might come to believe that, should he die, his parents’ most loved and trusted friend, the Lord Jesus, would personally conduct him to a place of everlasting bliss; and might wonder, as Freddy Myers did, why Heaven was not visible when the clouds rolled back. The emotional security in which such an upbringing, if not too harsh, could enfold a child is nowadays, and to an adult, almost unimaginable. Loss of faith entailed not just a poignant realisation that all one’s hopes and all one’s memories must some day lapse into the shadows; it cut one instantly adrift from a loving and sheltering world in which one’s place and obligations admitted of no doubt, and one’s path ahead, however arduous, was clear”.

36 Quoted in Turner (1974) p.55.

37 See above, ch.viii.

38 L&E, p.350 (“On Prophecy”).

39 Cf. Boring (1950) pp.39f.

40 FortRev, vol.xvi, 1874, pp.555-580. Huxley had, however, been working towards this view for many years.

41 Ib., p.561.

42 Ib., p.563.

43 Ib., p.575.

44 Ib., p.576.

45 Ib. Huxley adds, as an aside: “And there are so very few interesting questions which one is, at present, allowed to think out scientifically – to go as far as reason leads, and stop where evidence comes to an end – without speedily being deafened by the tattoo of the ‘drum ecclesiastic’ ”.

46 Ib., p.577. Huxley goes on to note that, if his views cause consternation, it should be remembered that all predestinarians (Augustine, Calvin, Jonathan Edwards and Hartley included) have, by implication, adhered to the view of man as a conscious automaton.

47 Carswell (1927) p.116 suggests that both Sidgwick and Leslie Stephen supported Smith’s admission to Cambridge.

48 The “Turkish Conference” ran from December, 1876, to January, 1877, and was an international attempt, convened by Britain, to resolve the bitter dispute between Russia and Turkey over control of the Balkans. It preceded the Congress of Berlin in 1878.

49 L&E, pp.353f.

50 Ib.

51 Appointed Director of Kew Observatory in 1859, Balfour Stewart (1828-1887) subsequently became Professor of Physics at Owens College, Manchester, from 1870 and was President of the Society for Psychical Research (following Sidgwick) from 1885 to 1887. Balfour Stewart’s interest in spiritualism was much more intense than that of his conservatively orthodox colleague, Tait (cf. Knott, 1911, pp.35ff.; also B&C, p.163).

52 First published in 1875, The Unseen Universe rapidly went through seventeen editions.

53 B&C, pp.162f. Smith’s biographers over-simplify what was an exceedingly complex spectrum of attitudes, both theological and scientific.

54 Tait and Stewart (1875) p.vii. The book is prefaced felicitously by the lines from II Cor. 4:18: “. . . we look not to the things that are seen but to the things which are unseen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal”.

55 At page 10, for example, the authors write: “Indeed a learned Hebraist has assured us that the Hebrew word for the abstract notion ‘life’, whenever it refers to a rational being, is a pluralis tantum, ‘Hayim’, while the word for the abstract notion ‘death’ is a singular, ‘maveth’, thus establishing by the very character of the language the existence among the people of the belief in more than one condition of life”. Again, at p.95, Tait makes unacknowledged use of Smith and Lindsay’s 1871 B.A. paper on Democritus and Lucretius to explain Greek conceptions of the atom.

56 Presumably these sections were contributed by Balfour Stewart: Swedenborg is commended for his honesty and genius but the account of his extra-terrestrial visits to meet the denizens of the then known planets (including the moon) is reluctantly dismissed as a fabrication of his imagination. The manifestations of contemporary spiritualism are similarly rejected, although commended for “enlarging” our awareness of an unseen world.

57 D715.

58 This inducement was offered by Tait in a later letter (B&C, p.166): “We have a glorious, hot-new preface, with a perfect halo of gold and spangles in which to put you”.

59 There are, as one would expect, disparaging allusions to Tyndall and Clausius.

60 Tait and Balfour (1875) p.104. Tait’s own experiments with smoke-rings (imperfect and relatively unstable vortices) constituted the best available experimental model of atoms as vortex-rings. Maxwell had worked industriously, but relatively ineffectually, at constructing mechanical models of molecular movement through the hypothesised ether. The almost complete absence, in the pages of The Unseen Universe, of any reference to Maxwell’s researches suggests reservations about the book on his part, similar to those which Smith seems to have held. For a discussion of the many different models proposed, and the way in which they mirrored each scientist’s particular sphere of expertise, see Hunt (1991) pp.73ff.

61 Ib., p.156. Charles Babbage (1791-1871), inventor of the mechanical “Difference Engine” for the purpose of facilitating large and intricate calculations, is today regarded rightly as the founding-father of information technology. The Unseen Universe contains several references to his extraordinarily farseeing ideas, amongst which was the conception of the Deity as celestial programmer. A friend of J.S. Mill and Clerk Maxwell, Babbage’s influence (as well as Herschel’s) on the latter is evident in Maxwell’s description of atoms (EB9, vol.i, 1875, s.v. “Atom”) as “manufactured articles”.

62 Ib., p.170. Tait’s need to envisage the universe in terms of his favourite experimental demonstration (smoke-rings) is psychologically illuminating. The source idea of permeation from one universe to another probably came, however, from Maxwell’s description of the permeability of electricity through induction: cf. Maxwell (1954) pp.54f.

63 Tait’s argument peters out somewhat disappointingly at this point. His thinking about the inter-penetrability of contiguous universes is strongly influenced here by Darwinism (“the theory of Development” as Tait calls it, using Spencer’s term) and Darwin’s conclusion that the “species barrier” does not operate if a sufficiently close relationship exists in terms of functional characteristics (ib., p.136).

64 Ib., pp.188-192. Tait’s case for the credibility of miracles ignores many crucial issues.

65 Ib., pp.210f.

66 Ib., p.211: “The truth is, that science and religion neither are nor can be two fields of knowledge with no possible communication between them. Such an hypothesis is simply absurd”.

67 A noted mathematician, William Kingdon Clifford (1845-1878) was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, thereafter gaining a fellowship. A pioneer of the study of non-Euclidean geometry in England, Clifford was one of the few Victorian academics openly prepared to avow his atheistic principles; he was widely admired nevertheless for his high ethical standards as well as for his lively temperament and brilliant intellect. Like WRS and Clerk Maxwell, he died at a tragically young age, several years before Smith found his way to Cambridge.

68 FortRev, vol.xvi (1875) p.776. An edited version, omitting many of Clifford’s sharpest barbs, is to be found in the posthumously published Lectures and Essays (vol.i) edited by Leslie Stephen and Frederick Pollock (1879). The review wounded Tait, as he indicates in his letter (D715) written to Smith the same week: “You have, of course, seen Clifford’s painful essay in the Fortnightly. ‘Il a jeté son bonnet pardessus les moulins’ as the French say of a neophyte in the demi-monde. But a little while ago a most advanced ritualist, who put the sign of the cross on every page of his answers in the Senate-House, he [Clifford] is now, discontinuously, an absolute pagan. Next year he will be an evangelical perhaps”.

69 Ib., pp.776f.

70 Ib., p.778 (Clifford’s emphasis). Man is so constituted, Clifford asserts in very Huxleyan terms, that his natural instincts are for self-preservation and the fear of death is no more than the negative aspect of this.

71 Ib., p.779 (Clifford’s emphasis). Tennyson expressed such sentiments more memorably in his poem Tiresias (written in 1833 but not published until 1885).

72 Cf. ib., p.780: “[God’s] curse was no mere symbol of displeasure, but a fixed resolve to keep his victims alive for ever, writhing in horrible tortures, in a place which his divine forethought had prepared beforehand. . . To the dead, then, if this be the future life, there is left only the choice between shame and suffering. How well and nobly soever a man shall have worked for his fellows, he must end by being either the eternal sycophant of a celestial despot, or the eternal victim of a celestial executioner”.

73 Ib., p.781. Clifford is said to have written this essay at one ten-hour stretch, and its frenetic style betrays its speed of composition.

74 Ib.

75 Ib., p.787.

76 See above, ch.viii.

77 FortRev, vol.xvi (1875) p.788.

78 II Cor. 3:18: “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is Spirit” (RSV). The whole of Tait and Stewart’s book might justifiably be construed as an attempt to interpret Pauline eschatology in terms of late Victorian physics.

79 Ib.

80 Ib., pp.788f. Cf. Tait and Balfour (1875) pp.113ff. Clifford’s superior familiarity with the most modern cosmological hypotheses is an obvious attempt to “crush” his opponents, who (it has to be conceded) have ventured well out of their depth in their aim of demonstrating (p.116) “that the properties of the ether are of a much higher order in the arcana of matter than those of tangible matter”. Here again, Tait and Stewart carefully evade the problem of distinguishing what is spirit and what is matter.

81 Ib., pp.789f.

82 The notion of atoms as “manufactured articles” came originally from Sir John Herschel, as Maxwell acknowledges in his EB9 article “Atom” (vol.iii, 1875, p.49).

83 Ib., p.791.

84 Ib., p.791. “Sixty-three” refers to the number of known elements at the time.

85 Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley first carried out what is now known as the Michelson-Morley experiment in the United States in 1881, confirming their results in 1887. Their findings have been many times repeated. Cf. Hunt (1991) pp. 191-193.

86 The notion of an all-pervasive lumeniferous ether did not disappear immediately; indeed the term “ether” remained in popular usage until the mid-twentieth century: see Cantor and Hodge (1981) esp. p.53, who indicate that “not a few [modern] physicists have urged the necessity of some form of ether theory”. The set of essays edited by Cantor and Hodge provides a very comprehensive historical and critical overview of the subject.

87 Cf. Maxwell (1954) vol.i, pp.62; 70. Maxwell’s mathematical theorems held, he said, irrespective of the nature of the intervening medium.

88 The prime figures were Heaviside in Britain and Hertz in Germany, but Oliver Lodge also played a crucial role.

89 B&C, pp,163. They give an excellently succinct account of the book’s aims (ib., pp.163f.): “The authors started on the one hand from the received postulates of religious teaching, and, on the other, from the current hypotheses of contemporary science, and sought to show that these, so far from being irreconcilable, really pointed to the same conclusions – the existence of a transcendental universe, and the immortality of the soul”.

90 cf. G.N. Cantor, in Cantor and Hodge (1981) p.151: “The late Victorian resurgence of interest [in the ether] is perhaps best explained by the ‘crisis of faith’ that affected many scientists, who then frequently attempted to reconcile science and religion through the somewhat simplistic strategies offered by spiritualism”.

91 Ib., p.164.

92 John Rogerson (1995) provides a convincing account of the powerful influence on Smith of Richard Rothe’s Zur Dogmatik, which enabled him “to affirm without reservation that the Bible was the record of a supernatural revelation and that it was the highest task of theology to investigate that revelation with a believing attitude and to present it to the world” (p.92). While that influence is undeniable, it is perhaps fairer to speak of Smith discovering, in Rothe’s work, views which harmonised with and supported the conclusions of his own thinking.