INTRODUCTION: JOHN TYNDALL, SCIENTIFIC NATURALISM AND MODES OF COMMUNICATION

Michael S. Reidy

By the autumn of 1872, John Tyndall (182093) was at the height of his influence. He had published two well-received books the previous year: his adventuresome Hours of Exercise in the Alps, an account of his most breathtaking mountaineering exploits, and his more cerebral Fragments of Science, a candid discussion of his views on everything from dust and disease to prayer and miracles. He dedicated the latter volume to his friends in the United States, where he was set to embark for the first time, finally succumbing to repeated invitations from the nations leading intellectuals, including Joseph Henry, Louis Agassiz and Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was an opportune time for him to set sail. He had just returned from another fulfilling climbing season in his beloved Alps, and his rooms at the Royal Institution where he lectured, researched and lived were undergoing renovation. Yet a more controversial reason to flee England simmered in the background, one that would follow him across the Atlantic. That July, three months before he set sail, the London Contemporary Review published an anonymous letter, The Prayer for the Sick: Hints towards a Serious Attempt to Estimate its Value, along with an introductory note by Tyndall. The letter suggested that, if organized correctly, the efficacy of the weekly prayers of all thirty thousand congregations throughout England could be tested experimentally through quantitative methods. Tyndall had purposefully picked a fight what became know as the Prayer-Gauge Debate the contours of which helped shape the age of scientific naturalism.1 Tyndalls aggressive defence of science and fervent attacks on religion brought him into heated conflict with theologians, philosophers and even other prominent physicists, including Lord Kelvin and James Clerk Maxwell. The responses to his call for an experimental verification of prayer were especially hostile. They appeared in all the major reviews and newspapers, from the Contemporary Review and Fortnightly Review to the Spectator and Guardian, written by all classes and conditions of men, from a booksellers clerk to the highest dig1

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nitaries of the English Church and peers of the realm.2 While some critics tossed the experiment off as sarcasm, a sneer or profound irony, others were more personally offended, attacking the suggestion as revolting and monstrous.3 American Methodists, in particular, were outraged; they set up prayer meetings in all the major cities on the East Coast to pray for poor Tyndalls soul. Setting aside the personal attacks and the fate of Tyndall after death, most reviewers focused more rationally on the distinct scientific perspective from which the proposal came. Scientists, they argued, had overstepped their limited domain. As the Rev. Richard Frederick Littledale warned, scientists would do well to admit that some aspects of the world, even the natural world, could not be measured. We cannot quantify prayer, he reminded his readers in a prescient attack on reductionism, any more than we can poetry, art-feeling, or any other lofty and imponderable gift.4 It was on the limited view of the scientist that most critics focused their attacks. They highlighted the tautology at work, where what scientists defined as natural turned out to be nothing more than what they could already explain, leaving the supernatural to stand for everything that remained.5 For Littledale and others, the very act of doing science produced a narrowing influence on the scientists mind, which blinds them altogether to its subordinate position in the domain of knowledge. The debate increasingly rotated around the different domains within the larger hierarchy of understanding. One example Littledale used was particularly jarring. If one were to ask scientists to gauge the usefulness of narcotics, such as beer, tobacco or opium, they would respond in naturalistic terms, pointing to the fact that the very universality of the practice is an adequate proof that it fulfills some useful purpose in animal economy. Argue the same point about the efficacy of prayer, a practice more prolific than the use of narcotics, and those same scientists would scoff at your narrow-mindedness. Tyndall, well known for his love of good beer (and secretly devoted to other, more powerful narcotics), took to the offensive in the Contemporary Review, turning to history for his rebuttal.6 While Galileo and others were once castigated for their views, they were eventually admired for improving rather than impairing our views of the universe and its Author.7 According to Tyndall, the theologians were the ones overstepping their bounds by arguing that prayer had the power to change physical laws. Both sides argued that each others vocation and training necessarily limited their judgments, making them unable to see outside of their own partial perspective. One side touted the limits of science and the loftier knowledge attained through theology; the other boasted the power of science and the restrictive influence of religion. In defending the need for a rational verification of prayer, Tyndall simultaneously poked fun at the religious fervour of the day and tipped his hat to his own growing agnosticism. The ensuing debate, played out in attacks and

Introduction

counter-attacks in the public press, sent shivers through Victorian culture, the sensation of the season, as one critic announced.8 It also set the stage for the even more acrimonious debate that erupted following Tyndalls presidential Belfast Address two years later. There, he was forced to defend the broad views and literary training of his scientific colleagues, linking the expanding reach of scientific naturalism to the very definition of progress. Tyndall argued that from the simple premise of Nature act[ing] through invisible particles,9 advances had been made in every branch of science, first in the physical sciences, then in the biological, and in Tyndalls own day, in the physiological and sociological sciences, particularly through the pioneering work of Herbert Spencer. These advances culminated in the three great foundational laws of science: atomic theory, evolutionary theory and the conservation of energy. Tyndall used this progress narrative to protect an increasingly broad domain of science.
All religious theories, schemes and systems which embrace notions of cosmogony, or which otherwise reach into the domain of science, must, in so far as they do this, submit to the control of science, and relinquish all thought of controlling it.10

These were fighting words, and Tyndall placed himself at the centre of the battle. I regret very much that he [Tyndall] got into the Theological controversy as to prayer, Joseph Henry, the first director of the Smithsonian Institution, confided to Benjamin Silliman, Jr after Tyndalls visit to America, reasoning that the subject of the connection of science and Theology is one which requires to be treated with great delicacy.11 Henry represented a large group of scientists, both in Britain and the United States, who sought to reconcile science and religion. Tyndalls lack of delicacy made such reconciliation frustratingly difficult. According to historian Frank Turner, the controversy surrounding the Belfast Address scandalized Christian clergymen and intellectuals, rivalling the upheaval over Darwins On the Origin of Species.12 In the public press, Tyndall and his friends were satirized as watchdogs for science who required muzzles (see Figure I.1).

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Figure I.1: Spencer caricature, An Appalling Attempt to Muzzle the Watch-Dog of Science, Puck Magazine (14 March 1883). A cartoon about the threats of the Society for the Suppression of Blasphemous Literature to prosecute Tyndall, Spencer and Huxley. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Reading Room, Illus. in AP101.P7 1883 (Case X).

These two episodes the Prayer-Gauge Debate in 1872 and the Belfast Address in 1874 underscore three main points, which correspond to the three main sections of this volume. First, they highlight Tyndalls unflinching defence of a naturalistic world view. His centrality to the larger cultural debates surrounding the role of science in Victorian society led to his participation in shaping what became known in his day as scientific Naturalism. Second, by viewing the physicist Tyndall as a principal figure alongside the biologist Thomas Huxley, the botanist Joseph Hooker, and the sociologist Herbert Spencer the debates convey a more in-depth understanding of scientific naturalism itself, extending its reach across the scientific disciplines. Both debates suggest visions of science still in the process of formation, still in flux, still disputed within the larger hierarchy of knowledge. And third, they demonstrate the different modes of communication public lectures, scientific meetings, personal correspondence, newspaper editorials, pamphlets, even town-hall meetings and church gatherings that sustained science in the period.

Introduction

We have broken the volume into roughly three equal parts, John Tyndall, Scientific Naturalism and Communicating Science. The first section analyses the significant role that Tyndall played within the contested nature of science in the Victorian era. The second section then highlights how our understanding of scientific naturalism has changed, including the shifting relevance and changing make-up of the naturalist movement in general. The third section moves to the different modes used to communicate science in this period, and how that informed debates over sciences larger cultural significance. Within this three-part organization, the essays are held together by common themes that weave in and out of each chapter, including the blurring of distinctions between public and private science, the laboratory and the field, and the popularizer and the practitioner.

John Tyndall
John Tyndall became one of the most influential experimental physicists in the Victorian era. Born in Ireland under relatively poor circumstances, in the early 1840s he worked stints on both the Irish and the English Ordnance Surveys. He was fired for insubordination from the latter when he joined in a protest against the way that the Irish assistants were treated. He then took a job at Queenwood College in the south-east of England teaching for a year, drawing on his surveying skills. With no degree and very little knowledge of German, he abruptly departed in 1848 to attain his PhD at the University of Marburg, where he was influenced by the renowned German chemist Robert Bunsen. His return to England two years later to build a career as a scientist did not go smoothly. He applied for positions all over the world, from Ireland to Toronto, but was denied at every turn. His first break came in February 1853, when he was invited to lecture at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, one of the foremost institutions of science in England. He gave an extraordinary performance. The following year he was elected Professor of Natural Philosophy at the venerable institution, working alongside the legendary Michael Faraday. From humble beginnings in Ireland, Tyndall had risen to hold a premier scientific position in England.13 For the next thirty years, Tyndall undertook sophisticated experimental research in physics in his laboratory at the Royal Institution. He became fascinated with the seemingly analogous processes involved in the cleavage planes of slate and the veined structures of glaciers. From the mid-1850s, he visited the Swiss Alps in the summer to conduct observations on glaciers, spending his winter months performing laboratory experiments on ice in his London laboratory. The results appeared in his highly successful Glaciers of the Alps (1860) and led to a life-long priority dispute with James David Forbes over the mechanisms of glacier motion. By 1859, his work on glaciers had led him to the topic of radiant heat, particularly the manner in which simple gases absorb infrared radiation. He

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extended this study in the early 1860s to an examination of atmospheric gases more generally, including water vapour, carbon dioxide and ozone. The delicate measurements required such fine-tuned precision that Tyndall had to invent his own intricate experimental apparatus. He laboured for months to construct a ratio photospectrometer, the first of its kind, which he used to demonstrate the powerful absorbing power of gases. This painstaking work on radiant heat also suggested his next several research topics, including the role of airborne microbes in causing fermentation and the scattering of light by large particles in the atmosphere. The first led to a new means of sterilization, now known as Tyndallization, and the second, termed the Tyndall effect, demonstrated experimentally why the sky is blue. His peers recognized what he called his Hours of Exercise in the Attic and the Laboratory14 by awarding him the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society in 1869. The government recognized his expertise as well. The number of British vessels wrecked at sea had soared to over 1,200 per year by mid-century, and Tyndall was appointed in 1866 as the scientific advisor to Trinity House, the body in charge of the lighthouses and fog signals that dotted the coasts of Great Britain.15 He thus became an established figure not only within the scientific community, but within influential circles of government as well. Tyndall was respected within science for his experimental research in the physical sciences, but he became known more broadly through his public lectures at the Royal Institution. It was through these lectures that fashionable audiences in London experienced the latest revolutionary discoveries in the burgeoning fields of physics and chemistry. His flamboyant lectures, which mixed practised showmanship with extravagant experiments, presented science as an exhilarating spectacle. His prominent position as an experimentalist and public lecturer often contrasted sharply with his work behind the lecture curtain, outside the venue of the Royal Institution, where he became one of the most outspoken advocates and controversial defenders of science in the nineteenth century. As the Prayer-Gauge Debate suggests, in newspaper editorials and periodical publications, he was often more combative than eloquent.16 The first set of essays in this volume focus specifically on Tyndalls research in the physical sciences and the creation of his public persona, situating both within the intellectual and cultural context of nineteenth-century science. Elizabeth Neswald opens with an analysis of Tyndalls popular expositions of recent advances in thermodynamics, noting the paradoxical nature of his silence concerning the second law. Rather than engaging in the implications of the entropy law, with its heat deaths and possible links with millennial, theistic notions, Tyndall focused his popular work almost exclusively on the first law, the conservation law, which he viewed as far more theologically benign. While Neswald uncovers a previously unknown aspect of Tyndalls popular musings, she also shows how a focus on Tyndall helps us connect him with other philosophical

Introduction

threads and ideological biases of the time. His connection with German physicists, for instance, is a point also found in the essays by Joshua Howe and Michael Taylor. Neswald advances our understanding of Tyndalls public presentations and speculative stances during a period the early 1860s when he was at the height of his alpinism, struggling with glaciers, perfecting his work on radiant heat, and formulating his agnosticism. Joshua Howes chapter dovetails perfectly with Neswalds, as it also deals with Tyndalls work in thermodynamics during this momentous period of his life. Howe exposes the problem of viewing Tyndall as the progenitor of global warming, often celebrated as his most significant accomplishment. Howe situates Tyndalls experimental work on the absorption of atmospheric gases more broadly within the confused and conflicted contemporary debates in the geophysical sciences. In Howes hands, Tyndalls ratio photospectrometer is no longer merely an instrument to measure the absorption of heat in the atmosphere; it becomes a tool to organize Tyndalls overarching research goals, unifying his varied pursuits as he strove to understand the molecular bases of matter and energy. Jeremiah Rankin and Ruth Barton offer a comparison between the popular science writings of Tyndall and those of George Henry Lewes, revealing significant differences in how they claimed scientific authority and self-fashioned their scientific identity. While Tyndall advanced a hierarchical, specialized approach to science, Lewes embraced a more republican and egalitarian view. The comparison highlights the permeability of boundaries between public and private science, the laboratory and the field, and the popularizer and practitioner and draws attention to the variety of skills, motives and personalities associated with the naturalist movement in the mid-Victorian era. It thereby serves as a fitting transition to the next section of essays, which focuses especially on the make-up, definition and influence of scientific naturalism.

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Scientific Naturalism

Frank Turner helped shape our understanding of the Victorian era through his seminal work on scientific naturalism, including his focus on those Victorian intellectuals who critiqued the naturalist programme. He defined the term largely through its central coterie, showing how they used science as a means to fashion a secular world view. As he suggested, the group was made up of scientists who knew and visited one another, enjoyed mutual friends, cited one another in their books and articles, and sparred with mutual enemies.17 Turners work has been so influential that we often forget that scientific naturalism was an actors category that predated the 1850s.18 Most of Turners main actors, however, along with many of those featured in the recent collection on scientific naturalism by Bernard Lightman and Gowan Dawson, were working in the natural historical

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sciences. Because Tyndall was primarily a physicist, interested more in natural philosophy than natural history, a renewed emphasis on Tyndall significantly broadens our view of the naturalist movement, extending its range and influence across the scientific disciplines. A researchers naturalistic stance, it turns out, could influence his approach to the physical and mathematical sciences just as much as it could direct his research in the biological sciences. Scholars, many of whom are well represented in this volume, are beginning to move beyond Turners analysis and reassess their previously held assumptions about who gained authority in the Victorian era and how they attained it.19 While we are relatively well versed concerning scientific naturalism from the perspective of the human and biological sciences, we are far less familiar with the relationship between naturalism and the physical sciences. This second group of essays focuses heavily on the physical sciences, particularly on how scientific naturalism influenced the actual practice of physics. In the process, it highlights some of the less obvious scientific naturalists, providing evidence that the conventional view focusing on Huxley and Darwin is overly myopic and has blinded us to the actual make-up and significance of the naturalist movement.20 They offer new insights into figures such as William Kingdon Clifford, William Huggins and Alfred Newton, as well as a fresh reading of Herbert Spencer, further suggesting that we must expand our understanding of this group, their roots, aims and broader significance. Although Tyndall and his allies were actively forging their own identity, setting up boundaries and defining their disciplines,21 not everyone accepted their definition of science. Tyndalls preferred narrative, where scientific progress overpowered outmoded theological views, made for good headlines, but such a simplistic picture never actually existed. Or, rather, the details of the more complex story are far more insightful. Disagreements continued over what constituted science, and within competing groups different factions surfaced. As the chapters in this volume suggest, the make-up of scientific naturalism was far more variable and its significance far more complex than we previously thought.22 Michael Taylor opens the section with just this theme as his focus. His analysis of the British and German scholarship which influenced Herbert Spencer shows how a rationalist and metaphysical tint came together in Spencers overall philosophy, bringing it in line with Tyndalls own mixture of rationalism and secular spiritualism. Spencer so smart, so troubled, so important, and still so understudied defined scientific naturalism for the broader reading public in Britain. The roots of his naturalism, therefore, which were far from empiricist and materialist and included large doses of Naturphilosophie and evolutionary deism, underscores the popular and fluid definitions of scientific naturalism. Rather than a representative of modernity, Spencer emerges as a transitional figure who owes his goal-directed and inherently moral version of evolution to thinkers from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Introduction

Josipa Petrunics essay introduces us to a protg of Spencers, and one of the Victorian eras most neglected philosophers. She illuminates the role of scientific naturalism in William Kingdon Cliffords unconventional views on mathematics. Clifford died from pulmonary disease at the young age of 33, but his short life burned brightly, offering Victorian society its first evolutionary mathematics. By undermining belief in the traditional God, scientific naturalism seemed to its critics to lead to moral decay. The only reasonable response, Clifford argued, was to find the foundation for morality within scientific naturalism itself, one based on nature rather than God, on observation rather than belief, on science rather than theology. Influenced by a distinctly Spencerian process of evolution, Clifford believed that men of science had a moral duty to question all axiomatic rules. Only then would they be able to discover new concepts and thus advance the human race. A focus on a similarly understudied and often misunderstood character follows in Robert W. Smiths essay on the astronomer William Huggins. Smith places Hugginss research in support of the nebular hypothesis within the larger debates over scientific naturalism, tracing his transition from natural theologian to evolutionary naturalist. Although he demonstrated that nebulae were composed of luminous gas, not stars evidence he used to support the nebular hypothesis he did not accept the radicalism usually associated with that theory. Instead, he applied an idealist conception of unity of plan to the heavens, conceiving of nebulae as founded on unified types created by divine design. In Smiths analysis, Huggins represents those figures in the physical sciences whose naturalistic ideologies fundamentally informed their approach to scientific questions, their interpretation of data and, importantly, their creation of their own scientific identity in the public press. The essay by Jonathan Smith closes the section, continuing similar themes through a detailed study of the Cambridge ornithologist Alfred Newton. Newton is usually viewed as one of the earliest Darwinians, a position he self-fashioned late in his career. Smith argues, however, that although Newton may have been a Darwinian, he certainly was not a scientific naturalist. Newton applied Darwinism to his own work in ornithology, but felt no need to defend the naturalistic stance in public. Smith situates his analysis around Newtons candidacy in 1865 for the new chair of zoology and comparative anatomy at Cambridge, weaving a fascinating narrative about the nature and quality of personal relationships, the creation of support networks, and the behind-the-door negotiations surrounding the filling of scientific positions. As Smiths analysis demonstrates, Newtons life and work challenges the conflict model usually associated with figures like Huxley and Tyndall. The central focus on personal relationships echoes discussions found in earlier chapters and serves as a fitting transition to a discussion of the many different modes of communication used by scientists in the age of scientific naturalism.

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The Age of Scientific Naturalism

Modes of Communication
All the essays in this volume highlight Tyndalls and his contemporaries expansive network of friends and seeming enemies, drawing on their interactions through correspondence, scientific and popular publications and other venues. Scientific practitioners shared their insights in different ways depending on the forum, underscoring the disparate modes in which science was communicated in this period. On the lecture platform or in the pages of the liberal journals, their tone was arrogant, their confidence unbounded, and their metaphysics reductionist, noted Frank Turner. This was their public side. In the privacy of letters and conversation, they were less fulsome, more introspective, and even self-doubting.23 Though such public and private expressions comprises one of the themes which unite all the essays in the volume, we reserved the last section specifically to accentuate how an emphasis on communication adds breadth and depth to our understanding of gentlemanly science, the evolutionary naturalists, private versus public knowledge, the boundary making process, and the culture of debate in the nineteenth century. Janet Browne opens the section by offering a broad and multilayered view of the roles correspondence has played: as surrogates for specimens, as prepublications and, most importantly, as a community-generating engine that consolidated the creation of scientific networks and the formation of shared ideologies. Having spent much of her career working on correspondence networks, Browne emphasizes the manner in which epistolary exchange helped shape the very foundation of modern science, with its emphasis on evaluation, adjudication, authentication, prioritization and distribution of the latest scientific research. Drawing on the recent advances in book history and the history of visual culture, she outlines how a correspondence history could further generate insights into the social structure and development of science. As with other essays in this volume, particularly those by Rankin and Barton and Jonathan Smith, Brownes analysis of correspondence networks blurs the categories of public and private science. While Browne offers a masterful overview of the work that correspondence accomplished in shaping science in the modern period, Melinda Baldwin follows with a focused case study of a specific example: the epistolary exchange between Tyndall and George Gabriel Stokes. Tyndall and Stokes differed radically in upbringing, temperament and religious orientation, yet both also made their careers through scientific communication. Baldwin demonstrates the central role of correspondence in the shaping of the physical sciences in the Victorian era through an analysis of the editorial work and review process involved in the Philosophical Transactions. Stokes, the Victorian version of Henry Oldenburg, was a staunch critic of the materialist vision often attributed to Tyndall,

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Introduction

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yet their polemical ideological orientations and extreme religious differences failed to limit Stokess influence on Tyndall. Thus, through the TyndallStokes correspondence, Baldwin adds to our understanding of Tyndalls relationship to the North British physicists, building on the research of Crosbie Smith and others.24 Similar to the chapters by Michael Taylor, Robert W. Smith and Jonathan Smith, Baldwin questions the notion of an antagonism between science and religion at the time, while offering fresh insight into the role of editors and the mechanism of the peer-review process in the most important and longest lasting scientific journal in the history of Western thought. While Browne focuses on correspondence and Baldwin on publishing, Bernard Lightman closes the volume with his essay on communications within a society. He offers a fresh look at the Metaphysical Society as a place where Victorian intellectuals grappled with the problem of defining science within the larger hierarchy of knowledge. Members of the society, where scientific naturalists made up a vocal minority, viewed the debates as taking place between two different and competing vision of science. Christian intellectuals, that is, were not arguing against science. They simply had their own definition of what it was, the role it should play in society, and the broader ramifications of its findings. Lightman reminds us that there were always different ways to define what science was and who could participate. His concluding chapter returns us to the cultural debate alive at the time, reminding us of the many different and competing notions of authority at play. In essence, Lightmans analysis can serve to represent the main theme of the volume as a whole. By viewing elite figures in a fresh light, our overall understanding of the significance of the scientific naturalists is transformed. The power of science, its limits, and who was allowed to decide such questions, were all still up for grabs.

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Conclusion

John Tyndall died twice. His first death occurred in 1893 on a cold December day in Hasslemere, south of London. The 73-year-old physicist lay awake in his bed as the dim light of dawn filtered into his bedroom. Bottles littered his bedside table sulphate of magnesia for his intestines and chloral hydrate for his insomnia. At 8:30 in the morning, his wife Louisa, twenty-five years his junior, came to his side to comfort him. He requested some magnesia, a mere spoonful, which she poured from one of the bottles and brought carefully to his lips. It tasted curiously sweet, he thought. Louisa panicked. She had accidentally given him chloral, an extremely powerful narcotic, killing one of the greatest scientists of the Victorian era.25 Tyndalls second death was even more bizarre. Louisa, devastated by her tragic error, concocted an unwittingly devious plan to bring her husband back to life. She would take control of all his journals, collect all of his correspondence,

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read all of his unfinished writings, and bring everything together in a monumental Life and Letters. Wracked by guilt, she devoted her life to gathering all of his materials. Two years after Tyndalls death, the Athenaeum reported that Louisa was making good headway with her husbands biography. They acknowledged that she had an enormous correspondence to sift, but were equally hopeful that she had at last reduced it to some sort of order.26 For forty-seven years she toiled. Yet, year after year passed with no Life and Letters. When she died in 1940 at the age of 95, she had published little to resurrect the life and work of her long-dead husband. With Louisas grief and guilt, and with her continuing promise of publication, Tyndall died a second, prolonged death. The current volume is one of several signs of Tyndalls resurrection. For the past eight years, historians of Victorian science have been collaborating to transcribe and publish all of Tyndalls personal correspondence.27 By its very nature, the process of collecting, digitizing, transcribing and editing these letters has created a vibrant community of scholars and a robust corpus of scholarship focused on Tyndall and his influence on nineteenth-century science. Many of these scholars have come together for two conferences specifically organized to share their latest research.28 Drawn from the papers delivered at these conferences, The Age of Scientific Naturalism presents this cutting-edge scholarship on Tyndall and his contemporaries. Frank Turner seemed to suggest that the lessons gleaned from the scientific naturalists were no longer prescient. Their naturalism was too closely related to the science of the time, according to Turner, rendering the movement not only datable but also distinctly dated.29 Thus, the concepts Tyndall and his allies defended became largely outmoded and no longer proved a source of present or enduring wisdom. In some respects, Turner is correct. After all, placing figures within their specific historical contexts is one of the purposes of doing history. Viewing Tyndall as a central Victorian personality sheds light specifically on the age of scientific naturalism, on that unique period in the second half of the nineteenth century, along with all those who lived, worked and communicated within it. It would be unhelpful, therefore, to view Tyndall, Huxley, Hooker and Spencer the quadrumvirate of the Victorian scientific naturalists as somehow the direct predecessor of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, often referred to as the modern four horsemen, an allusion to the impending apocalypse which their blasphemous views would supposedly help usher in. And yet, in other respects, Turner is wrong. The connections between the Victorian era and our own retain their relevance. Dawkins and his contemporaries have been forced to defend their stance (atheistic rather than agnostic) based on the attacks of their critics and the ongoing debates concerning the role of science in modern culture. That is, a culture war is still at play, with prescient

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parallels to the Victorian era. After all, historians reconstruct history both to understand the past and to make sense of the present; we ponder the past so that we can prepare for the future. Tyndall is especially interesting in this regard. The significance of his varied research is gaining traction today primarily because of its increasing relevance. If the planet were not warming, for instance, turning the natural greenhouse effect into global warming, the new climatology centre in Britain, the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, would not bear his name. And perhaps because Tyndall and his contemporaries redefined the boundaries of the debate between science and religion, forcing future commentators into increasingly distinct camps, discussions surrounding evolution are as heated as ever. This is one reason why Tyndalls staunch defence of naturalism still sounds so prescient. Thus, it may be helpful to conclude by returning to the two debates Tyndall so actively encouraged in the early 1870s, but with a modern twist. Take another famous physicist, a bearer of the culture of science in his own day, who also died an untimely death: Richard Feynman. His reductionist musings on atoms almost exactly mimicked Tyndalls discussion in the Belfast Address. One of the most promising hypotheses in all of biology, Feynman reflected,
is that everything the animals do or that living creatures do can be understood in terms of what atoms can do, that is, in terms of physical laws, ultimately, and the perpetual attention to this possibility so far no exception has been demonstrated has again and again made suggestions as to how the mechanisms actually occur.30

Linking the power of science to the progress of knowledge would have made Tyndall and his scientific naturalist colleagues proud. Feynman similarly revitalized the essence of the Prayer-Gauge Debate. It might be true that you can be cured by the miracle of Lourdes, he preached. But if it is true it ought to be investigated We could make the system more powerful by investigating statistically, scientifically judging the evidence objectively, more carefully.31 The idea that science should be used to judge the efficacy of the supernatural echoes Tyndalls own proclamation at Belfast that as regards these questions science claims unrestricted right of search.32 That Feynmans words are not as jarring to our modern ears as Tyndalls were to his audience at Belfast signals the powerful influence Tyndall and his contemporaries have had on our own views. And that the debates are still being fought is further suggestive of the enduring relevance of the age of scientific naturalism.

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