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CHAPTER IX Science, Theology, and Common Sense Science, we like to think, is the highest product of man's reasoning powers-embodying the culmination of several thousand years' progress toward the ultimate in rationality and logic. As noted in the Introduction to this study, this strong presentist conviction presents a special danger to one who would characterize a period in the history of scientific thought. Put very bluntly, the historian is automatically tempted to employ a line of analysis that borders on moral judgment: one group of thinkers was "right," the rest "wrong"; one group followed the trail of scientific progress, as defined by our day; the rest were diversionary or even obscurantist. Commonly, such an analysis tends to develop as a dialectic between the "right" and the "wrong," with an accompanying tendency to oversimplify the amount of consensus on either "side," as well as the conflict between "sides." The general result, then, is a more or less false reading of the past. To yield to this presentist temptation in trying to understand scientific thought in the early nineteenth century would be to do that period a special injustice. Broad areas of agreement and dispute indeed existed within the American scientific community, but it is not easily discemable that one segment was progressive and one was not. Mter this has been said, however, the historian writing from a twentieth-century advantage, if he is duly cautious, may define a certain developmental movement in American scientific thought during the thirty years from 1815 to 1845. Although hitherto no attempt has been made to display this movement to its best advantage , it can be traced through the preceding chapters. To view it as 192 SCIENCE, THEOLOGY, AND COMMON SENSE a comprehensive interpretation of the period would do violence to the historical record, but the development is worth outlining in some detail if only to highlight the ambiguities to be accommodated by any study of thinkers in a transitional intellectual era-and with not a single profound philosopher among them. Mter the close of the War of 1812, it seemed to Americans that no more obstacles stood in the way of the rapid progress of scientific thought, with all the material and spiritual advantages it would supposedly bring with it. The real political independence achieved by the war was accompanied by a uesire to extend that independence to economics, to literature, and to science. American scholars intensified their natural-history exploration in order to keep pace with the westward movement, developed a deep and abiding interest in research in the physical sciences, and began providing both an institutional basis for the pursuit of science and a domestic media for the dissemination of ideas and findings. Advance was so rapid that an almost childlike faith in science became the rule among educated Americans. The assumption underlying scientific work was that pure Baconianism-collection, deSCription, and classification-if pursued long enough and consistently enough, would inevitably lead not only to a rich and mature understanding of nature, but also to great material happiness. And it was naturally assumed that such understanding and happiness would also promote a lofty morality and an unshakeable devotion to the Creator of all things. Benjamin Silliman's deSignation of his period as the "intellectual age of the world" is symptomatic of this first stage. First becoming evident about 1820, however, a reaction to this gross optimism occurred. It was caused in part by the speculative excesses symbolized by "French materialism" and in part by a disillusionment with the failure of the Baconian method to lead automatically into the higher classifications that were its aim. The method had produced more unassimilated data than scientists could manage, and developments in the sciences had produced research interests to which the method seemed inapplicable. This explanatory bankruptcy of the Baconian philosophy was probably the most important factor in bringing about the second stage, which, as an unusually perceptive observer of the time noted, had two different manifestations.1 On the one hand, scholars offered wild and conflicting hypotheses SCIENCE, THEOLOGY, AND COMMON SENSE 193 in an abortive effort to account for the otherwise overwhelming data. This first manifestation was exemplified by John Esten Cooke's therapeutic system based on a single-entity theory of disease, by Lardner Vanuxem's two classes of matter out of which he thought a world could be deduced, by frantic and ill-founded efforts to achieve a "natural system" of classification, and by Robert Hare's decision that "matter...

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