Walter B. Cannon, L. J. Henderson, and the organic analogy.

Abstract

Y THE 1920S ECHOES of great Victorian controversy over scientific naturalism had long since died away in United States, fundamentalism and Scopes trial notwithstanding. For most educated Americans-as for their European counterparts-the debate itself had been secularized: then, as today, naturalism stood for the doctrine that there can be a natural scientific study of society rather than for opposition to supernaturalism in scientific explanation. At stake was more how this study might best proceed than legitimacy of naturalism itself, and although controversy still raged over such key tactical issues as biological argumentation in human sciences, debate about naturalism as an explanatory strategy had mostly shifted from general intellectual circles to specialized realm of academic departments of philosophy.2 The question of scientific naturalism is very much alive for historians of twentieth-century science, however pervasive may have been acceptance of naturalistic modes of explanation in American culture by years between wars.