The Fate of William Whewell's Four Palætiological Domains: A Comparative Study

In 1847, the British polymath William Whewell pointed out that the sciences for which he, in 1837, had coined the term "palætiological" have much in common and that they may reflect light upon each other by being treated together. This recommendation is here put into practice in a specific way, to wit, not by comparing the palaetiological sciences that Whewell distinguished himself but by comparing the general historical development of the scientific study of the four broad palætiological domains that he enumerated in 1847: the solar system, the Earth, its vegetable and animal creation, and man.

For wide and various as their subjects are, it will be found that [the palætiological sciences] have all certain principles, maxims, and rules of procedure in common; and thus may reflect light upon each other by being treated together.

William Whewell (1847, 1, p. 640)

1. Introduction

In its modern meaning, the term "science" refers to a both diachronically and synchronically multifaceted and heterogeneous subculture. Even the long quest for a delineation of a method that all the sciences supposedly have in common has proven to be futile.¹ Likewise, Thomas Kuhn's historical development model of sciences, including the structure that supposedly is shared by all scientific revolutions, has not withstood critical examination (e.g., Reingold 1980). Michel Foucault's (1970) somewhat similar development pattern has not convinced historians either, even though it was restricted to only a few sciences.² However, that does not mean that sciences have nothing at all in common nor that there are no groups of sciences which have some significant features in common.

One example of the latter kind of sciences are the so-called palætiological sciences: the sciences in which, as William Whewell (1837, 3, p. 481) put it, "the object is, to ascend from the present state of things to a more ancient condition, from which the present is derived by intelligible causes."³ In a table in The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1847, 2, p. 117), he defined the fundamental idea by which these sciences are inspired as "historical causation" and distinguished them from other categories of sciences such as the pure mathematical sciences, the pure motional sciences and the mechanical sciences, which each were inspired by their own fundamental idea or conception. His two exemplary palætiological sciences were geology and comparative philology, but he realized that some other sciences also had palætiological divisions, such as astronomy and the science that he, in 1840, began to call "biology." He also distinguished three components in palætiological sciences: a descriptive component, an aetiological component (i.e., the discovery of causes and their limits) and a final theoretical component or "theory of facts" which resulted from "the application of causes well understood to facts well ascertained" (Whewell 1847, 1, p. 664). They were not (to be) practiced in a chronological fashion but each component depended to some extent on advances in the preceding component.

In the said table, he enumerated four palætiological sciences: geology, distribution of plants and animals, glossology (history of languages) and ethnography. Strangely enough, biology was not categorized as a palætiological science. It appeared in the separate category of "organical sciences" and was based on the fundamental idea of organization. This nicely illustrates what will be reiterated below: a synthetic life science was initially not founded upon the idea of historical or evolutionary causation. Put differently: it was, in contrast with the specific study of the post-Deluge distribution of plants and animals, initially not conceived as a palætiological science.

More important for the present paper are the four broad palætiological domains that he distinguished: the solar system—the then known universe as a whole was still deemed to be a steady-state system—, the Earth, its vegetable and animal creation, and man (Whewell 1847, 1, p. 654).⁴ Whewell's work on the (philosophy of) palætiological sciences has received some attention from philosophers and historians of science.⁵ However, the historical development of the scientific study of these...