LAURA J. SNYDER. Reforming Philosophy: A Victorian Debate on Science and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2006. Pp. x, 386. $45.00

Abstract

The Mill-Whewell debate will mean little to nonspecialists in the history of the philosophy of science; even Victorianists might not be able to summon up more than a dim impression of a tart exchange between a utilitarian Radical and an intuitionist Tory. Laura J. Snyder's impressive achievement is not only to register a significant improvement in our understanding of the technicalities of this debate over the proper method of scientific reasoning, but also to bring the debate alive in a way that illumines the whole terrain of mid-Victorian intellectual life. Snyder's principal aim is to show that John Stuart Mill and William Whewell were never as far apart as their (mostly, Mill's) shadow-boxing implied. Whewell's Toryism was of the reformist—perhaps Peelite—variety. Son of a master carpenter and Lancaster grammar school boy, he became a pillar of the natural and moral philosophy establishments and (in 1841) Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, but he was always a measured believer in the possibility of mental and moral improvement for all. Far from being a doctrinaire intuitionist, he sought a “middle way” between the epistemologies of John Locke and Immanuel Kant. He believed both in empiricism and in pure reason, as evident in his nuanced idea of “discoverers' induction.” Unlike Kant, Whewell believed that the “Fundamental Ideas” through which knowledge is made possible are “independent of the processes of the mind,” “justified by their origin in the mind of a divine creator” (pp. 44–55)—the red rag to the utilitarian bull—but that our appreciation of these Fundamental Ideas requires a progressive development largely built up from experience, until “the experiential truth has been ‘idealized’ into a necessary truth” (p. 89). For Whewell the “love of knowledge” was a pious trait, as well as a universal potential, to be developed by study both of the Fundamental Ideas and the more speculative “progressive sciences.” By the same token, his belief in moral necessity—the immanence of Moral Rules—also entailed a belief in the need for the progressive development of the moral sense, “a culture of the human mind,” for the full appreciation of those rules; morality, in Whewell's understanding, was therefore not a fixed code laid down by the status quo but rather “a living and growing body of truth” (pp. 261–262).