The New Culture of Science in Germany

Liebig, Wöhler, and Bunsen, and behind them the guiding spirit of Berzelius, constituted the chief representatives of the founding generation of post-Napoleonic German academic chemistry, a field that grew explosively and attained world preeminence by the second half of the century. Among them, they created during the Vormärz new models of chemical research, as well as pedagogical reforms that were much emulated in the second half of the century, not only in Germany but elsewhere as well. But these models were not created in a vacuum. Some context and biographical detail has already been established here. Several questions now need to be addressed. What specific predecessor institutions and patterns did our founders have in mind in pursuing their innovations? What clienteles were they attempting to serve, in what fashion and for what purposes? And what wider cultural and psychological models were influential for them during this period?

With regard to the first of these questions, it should be clear by now that our founders were not the first to develop laboratory-based instruction in German universities.^[52] Breslau established a chemical institute in 1811, which was led after 1815 by N. W. Fischer. It seems that Döbereiner had a practicum at Jena after 1810; enrollment figures are not known, but twenty are reported in 1828. Even earlier, a practicum had been established at Göttingen by J. F. Gmelin, which was continued by his successor Stromeyer. Stromeyer is a particularly interesting figure since it appears that his practicum was the first to be advertised in a university course list. His subject was inorganic quantitative analysis, and his clientele mostly medical students; among his students were Wöhler's teacher Leopold Gmelin, as well as Mitscherlich and Bunsen.^[53] A few other examples of early chemical practica exist. All of these were, however, small affairs, rarely sanctioned or supported by university authorities and usually available only on the basis of personal patronage of the laboratory's director. Apparatus and chemical stocks were as a rule the personal property of the director. The principal institutionalized purposes of academic laboratories dur-

ing this period were for the personal research of the professor and for the preparation of lecture demonstrations.

Early nineteenth-century academic laboratories in other countries followed the same pattern. The situation in France has been examined for the cases of Gay-Lussac and Dumas. There the situation was slowest to change among the principal European countries because of the degree of centralization of academic culture in Paris and a certain insularity that took hold.^[54] Insularity was even more evident in Britain early in the century, though British academic institutions were gradually transformed by the influence of Liebig and other German chemists after about 1840.^[55]

The University of Berlin exemplifies the difficulties that German academic chemists experienced in mounting successful experimental institutes. One recent study of the ideological battles over institution building in the early Vormärz depicts the situation in Prussia as characterized by a conflict between disciples of Schelling and Kant.^[56] Humboldt, the architect of the university in 1809-1810, was inclined toward speculative idealist philosophy and the intellectual intuition of Schelling; as Liebig so luridly portrayed a generation later, Naturphilosophie had not yet spent its popular force. But already in 1810, Humboldt was succeeded by Friedrich Schuckmann, and after 1817, the ministry of culture was directed for more than two decades by Altenstein.

Schuckmann and Altenstein were much more favorably influenced by the empirical attitude of Kant and the latter's emphasis on sense intuition. Many of the German experimental scientists of the nineteenth century were enrolled under a Kantian banner. Kantian physical scientists hired early for Berlin include Klaproth, E. G. Fischer, Christian Weiss, and Paul Erman, and H. F. Link arrived in 1815. Altenstein sought to acquire the sober experimentalist Berzelius as the successor to Klaproth; when that failed, he hired Link's student Mitscherlich and the brothers Rose. In the following few years, he brought in J. C. Poggendorff, Heinrich Dove, and Gustav Magnus. The same pattern transpired at other universities: C. G. Bischof at Bonn, N. W. Fischer at Breslau, L. W. Gilbert at Halle, and Kastner at Halle, Bonn, and Erlangen were all self-professed Kantians or clearly influenced by his ideas. German physicists during this period and later were even more oriented toward Kant.^[57]

Despite the experimentalist stamp of nearly all of Altenstein's acquisitions, however, laboratory instruction was virtually unavailable to Berlin students. Mitscherlich had a laboratory not at the university but at the Prussian Academy of Sciences, where he was a member. Following the example of Stromeyer, Heinrich Rose began a practicum in his first semester of teaching in the fall of 1822. This was at first in Mit-

scherlich's lab, then in his own residence, for the university refused to pay expenses or provide a space. Magnus was also forced to set up a "university" lab in his lodgings, but fortunately, he came from a wealthy family and could afford to provide proper equipment and supplies. None of these men had more than a small handful of students at any one time, even as late as the 1840s and 1850s. Mitscherlich, Magnus, and Rose all complained to the university administration without effect about the lack of support. However, as late as 1841 all three men also asserted a preference for the use of academic laboratories only for personal research, a few advanced students, and lecture demonstrations—not for general education. The first large-scale university-supported laboratory institute at Berlin came only upon A. W. Hofmann's arrival in 1865.^[58]

Representatives of other sciences were also having trouble in initiating and maintaining healthy laboratory-based practica in German academia. In physics, for instance, Wilhelm Weber introduced practical exercises in his lab at Göttingen as early as winter semester 1833/34, and Franz Neumann established his mathematical—physical seminar at Königsberg the following year. In addition, Magnus is often cited as having established an early physics practicum at Berlin in 1843. However, these cannot be compared to the Liebig-Wöhler style of chemical laboratories. Lacking the argument of importance for technology, medicine, and pharmacy and lacking the student clienteles that chemistry could lay claim to, these physics practica remained small and undernourished. Participants were mostly prospective Gymnasium teachers of mathematics and physics, a clientele whose numbers were very limited due to the relatively small amount of science taught in the German Gymnasien of the Vormärz.^[59] The field of physiology has also been examined for signs of early laboratory-based education. Johannes Müller at Berlin and Jan Purkyne at Breslau in the 1830s, and Jakob Henle at Heidelberg in the 1840s are candidates for early innovators in this respect.^[60] It is curious that these developments happened simultaneously with those in the field of chemistry.

The crucial change in both chemistry and physiology was from the older private-research cum student patronage-research cum lecture-demonstration model of academic labs, which extends well back into the eighteenth century, into the modern mass-education cure mass-research model. What made all the difference was student demand, with the symptom of the crucial change being the induction of large numbers of students into the practica. Once the numbers became available, entrepreneurial professors could then extort conditions from their administrations for support of their institutes and make use of the students in implementing their research programs. From here on, the

intense competitiveness of German academia could provide the engine of change throughout the rest of the century.

Partial answers to the question of where the clientele for chemistry was located are beginning to appear. A revealing study of 105 European universities and technical schools (65 of them from German-speaking countries) has established the overall shifts that took place in chemical professorships during the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries.^[61] University chemistry posts before about 1790 were almost entirely confined to medical faculties. Significant growth in the number of academic chemists had occurred during the eighteenth century, at first ensconced in positions that embraced several fields and were filled by physicians, but culminating in the second half of the century in a trend toward dedicated chemistry professorships in the medical schools. Between 1790 and 1845, the total number of university chemistry posts remained approximately constant (at around sixty in these 105 universities), but a trend began toward moving these professorships from the medical to the philosophical faculties. By 1845 the majority of academic chemists were teaching the subject as an independent science, not as a purely ancillary medical art.

The circumstance that two of our founders, Berzelius and Wöhler, were educated as physicians and taught in medical school faculties is emblematic of the medical orientation of academic chemistry. Döbereiner (at Jena), Klaproth (at Berlin), Kastner (at Erlangen), and Zimmermann and Liebig (at Giessen) were early examples of chemists in German philosophical faculties; Bunsen was moved from the Marburg medical to the philosophical faculty upon his promotion to Ordinarius in 1841. This was the position to which Kolbe succeeded. The image of chemistry as a practical and empirical art rather than a true science such as physics provided the resistance against movement into the philosophical faculty. This resistance was gradually overcome as evidence of the maturation of chemical science percolated into the consciousness of university administrators, faculty colleagues, and students. Clearly, though, even at mid-century and even in modernist chemistry curricula in philosophical faculties, a substantial student contingent group came from medicine.

Pharmacy, however, was a rival to medicine as a source of chemistry students, and it formed the locus of the critical transition period during the early nineteenth century.^[62] Since the late eighteenth century, pharmacists in Germany had been trying to raise professional standards, above all by transforming pharmaceutical training from craft apprenticeship to academic education. Because prospective pharmacists were largely excluded from the universities by the fact that few attended Gymnasium and hence did not possess the necessary Abitur

certificate, there arose several chemical boarding schools that emphasized laboratory practica. These were led by such chemists as J. C. Wiegleb, S. F. Hermbstaedt, J. F. A. Göttling, C. T. Göbel, and especially J. B. Trommsdorff. Many of these proprietors were well-known university professors. The best of these schools offered well-rounded scientific instruction and attracted clientele that included budding chemical technologists and civil servants as well as pharmacists.

But an alternative route around the difficulty was simultaneously being created. The philosophical faculties in German universities accepted students without the Abitur since these faculties had traditionally served as preparatory education for the "professional" faculties. This was true even after their status was raised and their propaedeutic function dropped in the wake of the neohumanist reforms. As chemistry moved increasingly into the philosophical faculties, a new and fruitful source of student clientele became available in the form of pharmacy students without Abiturs. As German academic chemists discovered this rich vein, the Trommsdorff-style schools lost business and were forced to close. An obvious conflict existed at the neohumanist universities between what looked like narrow and practical professional training in the new institutes and the widely accepted Romantic convictions regarding the pure and elevated character of university education, but the chasm could be bridged by appropriate argumentation.

There is evidence that at least some chemists deliberately pursued this strategy.^[63] Liebig founded his laboratory school self-consciously on Trommsdorff's model, but aggressively defended his pedagogy with Humboldtian neohumanist rhetoric. Although for many years most of his (and Wöhler's) students were in pharmacy or medicine, the purpose of his all-day practica, he argued, was not to show students how to boil soap or to compound drugs but rather to educate the mind and teach the student how to think. Chemistry was a true science, independent of other sciences but complementary to them—including such humanist sciences as philology and history. At least in his rhetoric (which as we will see is an important qualification), Liebig was contemptuous of the eighteenth-century emphasis on utility and application. The way to learn any discipline, he argued, was to concentrate first on the study of pure knowledge and theory, but always in conjunction with laboratory manipulations. Indeed, applications would emerge fastest and first under the hands of those who could think clearly and could logically develop their pure understanding, leaving those who learned their craft merely by rote far behind.

It may seem that Liebig was trying to have it both ways—appealing to pure theory and neohumanist Bildung while at the same time

pushing intense laboratory practice for large numbers of students as well as the ultimate utilitarian value of his pedagogical philosophy. This ambivalence can be understood by looking at some more distant models that may have helped guide the predilections and psychology of Liebig and our other founders. The first point to be noted is that these men were autodidacts to a striking degree. A rather sharp generational change occurred in Germany that resulted especially from the French wars, and it would not be surprising to see new and foreign elements of thought in the first Vormärz generation, nor would perfect self-consistency be expected.

Indeed, one factor that has been too little emphasized is the curious prevalence of French and specifically French Enlightenment ideas in this group of German "Romantic" scientists: namely, an ardent empiricist commitment coupled with a marked orientation toward practical or technological utility. These ideas flourished even in the face of the strong currents of nativist Francophobia, neohumanism, and speculative and idealist philosophies prevalent in Germany at this time. Berzelius was educated in the 1780s and 1790s under the spell of French Enlightenment ideas suffusing Gustavian-age Sweden. He maintained a lifelong commitment to physiological chemistry and to practical and empirical medicine due to his convictions of utility, he taught his entire career at a professional medical school rather than a university, and he tenaciously fought the neohumanists, Naturphilosophen, and other idealist philosophers of the Schelling-Hegel school.^[64]

The situation was similar with Liebig and Wöhler, and not just because of Berzelius' influence. Both were raised in technically oriented families, and as students, neither man found in Germany the experimentalist style of science he was seeking: Wöhler traveled to Sweden, and Liebig to Paris, where each discovered a new world of precision and empiricism. As we have seen, Liebig's proximate goal was to become a professor neither in the older nor in the modern (neohumanist) mold, but rather to found a professional laboratory school for pharmaceutical chemists. After a decade and a half of what felt to him like mucking around in theoretical organic chemical matters, in 1840 Liebig threw it all aside and for the rest of his life devoted himself to practical and technological applications in agriculture, physiology, and medicine. To the end of his life, what especially troubled him about the modern "structural" chemistry was its distance from practical (physiological) application.^[65]

Wöhler's first position was at the Berlin Trade School, his second at the Kassel Technische Hochschule. Only at the age of thirty-six did he go to a university, and even then it was to Göttingen, which was the most prominent representative of the Aufklärung in Germany, little

touched by idealist or romantic modes of thought. He maintained his personal and institutional ties to medicine and pharmacy all his life.

Bunsen's early environment was also Göttingen, and as a professor's son, he must have gotten a strong dose of the university's rationalist flavor. His teacher Stromeyer was educated partly at the École Polytechnique under Vauquelin. Similarly, Bunsen's Wanderjahr was spent largely in Paris; it also included a stay with Liebig and Wöhler. The strongest influence on his scientific development, however, may well have been Berzelius, even if indirectly. After serving as Privatdozent at Göttingen, he went, as Wöhler had, to the Kassel Technische Hochschule; only in 1839 did he become professor at Marburg. He had the most pronounced technological orientation of any of our founders. In 1841 he invented a battery that proved revolutionary both for practical applications and for pure science, and in 1855 he developed his eponymous laboratory gas burner. The major advance in eudiometry connected with his name also had great practical significance.

We have summarized the origins of systematic chemical laboratory-based instruction at the German universities at the hands of Liebig in particular, but also Wöhler and Bunsen slightly later. It was Liebig's model to which most people looked and many emulated, especially after 1850. To be sure, Coleman has suggested that the physiologist Purkyne was a principal innovator in Germany, and he has argued for the relevance of the empiricist Enlightenment pedagogue Pestalozzi, which would suggest parallel development in physiology from similar factors. And yet, Coleman himself noted that one essential element is absent from Purkyne's early activities, and that is the number and type of students in the laboratory. It seems that except for Stromeyer's relatively uninfluential and smaller-scale efforts, Liebig really was the first to offer systematic lab instruction to large numbers of students, many of whom were of only average abilities or were studying ancillary disciplines.^[66] The model also carried over into physics, but as we have seen, those developments came significantly later.

It is Coleman who has most clearly indicated, if not investigated in detail, what he calls "a veritable culture of science" in early nineteenth-century Germany—an outgrowth of Enlightenment ideas that was in some essential respects at odds with the dominant romantic culture.^[67] If neohumanism represented a break with the past in Germany, this scientific culture represents a more cosmopolitan element of continuity, an influence that looks toward rather than away from France. For Ernst Bischoff, a professor of medicine at Bonn and a representative of the older patterns, Liebig and his style of research and mass teaching of students in the laboratory represented a modern

academic cancer, which he (correctly) saw as "an imported French evil."^[68]

The pedagogical orientation does have a definite French feel to it. We have stressed the predominance of professional and trade schools rather than universities in the backgrounds of our founding generation. Many of these institutions were patterned directly or indirectly on French models, especially the École Polytechnique (where Liebig himself studied), although eighteenth-century German predecessor institutions existed as well.^[69] By contrast, the universities and their administrators, under the thrall of anti-utilitarian neohumanism, tended to view laboratories as connected with the materialistic world of commerce and technology, alien to their sacred refuge of Wissenschaft. This seems to have worked especially effectively at Berlin, the fount of neohumanist reform, to delay the introduction of routine laboratory instruction. Gradually this negative perception faded, and after 1848 it was replaced by positive promotion of laboratory sciences in the universities of most of the German states. This new movement was based partly on the conviction in the state ministries that experimental science could provide a means for promoting industrialization, economic modernization, and social stability.^[70]

Overall, the commonalities in the interests and careers of our founders explored in the past few pages provide exemplification and further support for Coleman's point and for the claims made by other recent scholars regarding a certain disjunction between neohumanism and the development of science at the German universities. Yet it would be foolish to deny that these men were also an intimate part of their culture and shared many nativist, romantic, and neohumanist values. One area in which this can be seen is the sometimes diffuse tradition of nineteenth-century Kantianism, to which I have already referred.

Elsewhere I have argued for a distinct, though perhaps indirect, influence of Kantian philosophy on Berzelius.^[71] I know of no evidence of the direct influence of Kant on Bunsen. However, Debus, noting inter alia Bunsen's orientation toward empiricism and precision, speculated that although Bunsen may never have studied Kant's works, he always acted and thought in a Kantian spirit.^[72] There are some suggestive connections between Kant and Liebig, who was, after all, a student of the Kantian Kastner. I have noted his passionate experimentation even as a boy. In his autobiography, he argued that this activity produced in him a characteristic that is found particularly in successful chemists: the ability to "think in phenomena." This talent, he said, can only be developed by constant exercise of the senses, and it increased in him to the point of becoming a photographic visual memory of compounds

and reactions.^[73] Debus remarked that this "concrete" manner of thinking as described by Liebig and exemplified by Bunsen is sharply opposed to a more abstract mathematical style and precisely illustrates Kantian sense intuition.^[74]

That Liebig thought this talent was vital to his great success is indicated by the fact that he spent the first several pages of his autobiography describing it. Those scientists that lack such an ability, he thought, do not reach or maintain their potential. Soon before Berzelius' death, he expressed to Wöhler the opinion that as great as Berzelius was, he was too wedded to mere data, that he never mastered the vital art of "creation through thoughts,"^[75] which is another way of saying the same thing. But Liebig was underestimating Berzelius. In a letter to Wöhler, Berzelius explained that he could "sense" incorrect theories even without being able to propose a better alternative, the same way a musician can sense delicate differences of intonations.^[76]

Wöhler stated something similar, in his characteristic self-deprecating way:

My imagination is fairly active, but I am somewhat slow in my thinking. No one is less oriented to be a critic than I. The organ for philosophical thought is entirely missing in me, as you know so well, just as that for mathematics. Only for observation do I imagine that I have a passable facility in my brain, which may be connected with a sort of instinct to be able to predict empirical relationships.^[77]

Such a predilection for the anschaulich and the intuitive found in Liebig, Bunsen, Berzelius, and Wöhler is strongly reminiscent of Kantian sense intuition. This tendency is also (at least rhetorically) discernible in Kolbe, who constantly stressed his mission to teach students to "think like a chemist," by which he meant in concrete phenomenal terms and not abstractly. Kenneth Caneva has explored the differences between what he calls "concretizing" and "abstracting" scientific styles among physicists, the former characteristic especially of early nineteenth-century Kantians and the latter prevalent among mid- and late-century mathematical physicists.^[78]

To put the matter perhaps a bit too bluntly, Liebig's balancing act between neohumanist Bildung and utilitarian laboratory practice can be understood as a combination of German idealist and French empiricist philosophies. The new German culture of science that took root in the Vormärz had imported French roots, but also a strong nativist element as well. In the process of assimilating these ideas to their own agendas, Liebig and others had created a novel pedagogy with a great future.