Reforming Philosophy: A Victorian Debate on Science and Society (review)

In roughly the first half of Victoria's reign, there was an ongoing debate between those who would preserve things more or less as they had been and those who sought radical change. At the forefront of this debate were William Whewell, representing the former group, and John Stuart Mill, representing the latter. Whewell hated Mill's ethics and also the associationism that he believed supported it, and Mill despised Whewell's appeal to intuition, rather than argument, to support his ethics. History has proven Mill to be the winner of this debate: he still defines the issues for us, or at least, he poses the questions we still ask. Whewell has not survived. We still read Mill's Utilitarianism (1861) and On Liberty (1859), but Whewell's Elements of Morality (1845) goes unread, or unread by all except those who want to see what Mill was writing about when he wrote his review of the lectures. Mill may have won out, but Laura Snyder argues that Whewell deserves better.

In Reforming Philosophy: A Victorian Debate on Science and Society, Snyder presents the debates in detail and situates them within their cultural context. As part of this latter project, she begins the book with biographical treatments of Mill and Whewell. Mill's life is better known, if only because of his Autobiography (1873). There is nothing like that for Whewell—Isaac Todhunter did a "life and letters" in 1876, but it is hard going, and Whewell himself left no autobiographical record. Thus Snyder rightly devotes more space to Whewell's life: she describes his working-class origins, his rise into the English squirarchy as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and his political and scientific work. Snyder shows that both Mill and Whewell saw the reform of philosophy as an educational project; yet while Mill aimed to better educate the nation, Whewell focused on students—albeit students expected to go out and manage the nation.

Snyder contends that Whelwell is better than usually thought and Mill not so good, but I am not quite convinced. Mill proposed wholesale reform of Oxford and Cambridge, following a line of argument going back to Adam Smith's chapter on the topic in The Wealth of Nations (1776) and William Hamilton's essay in the Edinburgh Review (1831) (neither of which, strangely, appear in the bibliography). The idea was that the dons were in effect paid in advance, and that those paid in advance could not be relied upon to be as good in their efforts as those who received compensation after performance. Mill also proposed that instructors should undertake research, as in Scotland or Germany, which would help improve their teaching. Mill saw Whewell as the champion of unreformed universities. Snyder, however, argues that Whewell was also in favour of reform. Whewell was indeed in favour of admitting dissenters; yet he would accept them only so long as they conformed (contrary to their consciences) to the rule of compulsory chapel. He argued against requiring dons to undertake research, a requirement that Smith, Hamilton, and Mill defended. It is true that Whewell argued for innovations in the teaching of mathematics and physics at Cambridge. He believed, however, that these innovations should consist of learning self-evident and unquestioned first principles in math and science, which would help to train the students to accept moral principles as also self-evident and to submit unquestioningly to given principles of political order. This is precisely the opposite of the questioning, critical frame of mind characteristic of Mill's education. In other words, Mill's and Whewell's aims for education reform were farther apart than this book allows. This is true too in political economy.

The book is often too generous to Whewell. For example, in his well-known essay "On the Nature of Truth" (1835), Whewell defends the claim that basic truths in mechanics are self-evident. Or rather, he asserts...