“Writing in Letters of Blood”: Manners in Scientific Dispute in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the German Lands

Abstract

'The essence of the spirit, the British morphologist Thomas Huxley claimed in 1880, criticism. He continued: tells us that to whatever doctrine claiming our assent we should reply: take it if you can compel it. The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.2 The image Huxley evokes here is a familiar one. It is the image of a science driven by the clash of ideas - a science getting ever closer to uncovering the truth by exploring conflicting arguments to the fullest.The importance of (intellectual) conflict for the process, stressed by Huxley, has often been endorsed by philosophers of science, particularly since the Second World War. Intellectual confrontations have been central in philosophies of science ranging from Karl Popper's Conjectures and refutations to Marcelo Dascal's inquiries into the role of controversy for the shaping of knowledge.3 At the same time, it is clear that the idea of an inherent conflict in science has not always and universally been acknowledged. Historically, discussion, and controversy have received negative as well as positive associations among scientists, and the way in which men of science have actually dealt with disagreements has been regulated by historically and geographically contingent values.The rise of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) in the 1970s and 1980s has sharpened our eye for the question of how the social embedment of science has epistemological consequences, or, to paraphrase David Bloor, how ideas of knowledge interact with social images. The focus of SSK has triggered a strong historical interest in controversies, and, at least for some time, also in the cultural rules that have moderated these.4 Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer have famously addressed the latter question in Leviathan and the air-pump. There, they have shown that, in the 1660s, Robert Boyle developed a set of rules - or in their words: in dispute - that regulated how natural philosophers should deal with disagreement. Although several of Boyle's rules of conduct would reappear in one form or the other in the following centuries, Shapin and Schaffer make clear that they also bore the mark of the time and place in which they were developed. Boyle, so they indicate, tried to create a calm public space that would earn the experimental philosophers credit in a society torn apart by the violence of the Civil War.5 Since the publication of Leviathan and the air-pump, the changing cultures of of other seventeenth-century contexts have received detailed scholarly attention. This research has, amongst others, focused on the courtly etiquette that moderated discussion in the Italian states, and the courtesy rules that shaped the correspondence of French mathematicians.6 Overall, these studies have emphasized the importance of virtue (whether of gentlemen or courtiers) in discussions on natural philosophy.7In this article I will shift attention to the nineteenth century - a period described by the contemporary mathematician Charles Babbage as the age of discussion.8 The rise of new disciplines, the advent of science as a career, the development of a secular culture, and the infusion of liberal values in science are only a few of the characteristics which are generally cited to discern the social context of nineteenthcentury science from that of the scientific revolution.9 It might be fair to say with John Pickstone that Science in the nineteenth-century sense was a game with rules that were radically different from natural philosophy in the previous centuries.10 In this article it will be explored how this shift in rules left its traces in the etiquette of disagreement.The topic of nineteenth-century manners in has not been without its historians. …