1. Rossi quotes a letter written to Benjamin Austin in 1860 regarding an invitation to lecture:

I shall be very happy to read to your association three lectures on the evenings named, but the question is about their character. They will not be scientific in the common, nor, perhaps, in any sense…. [T]hey will be transcendental, that is, to the mass of hearers, probably moonshine. Do you think that this will do? Or does your audience prefer lamplight, or total darkness these nights? I dare say, however, that they would interest those who are most interested in what is called nature. (Thoreau 1958, p. 584) [BACK]

2. Positivism's influence affected all intellectual domains. It called for renewed vigor in scientific objectivism, and it was also manifest in application to human sciences and moral philosophy, where explanations of social behavior were sought in biology. As Leszek Kolakowski observed, “positivism … renounces the transcendental meaning of truth and reduces logical features to biological behavior. The rejection of the possibility of synthetic judgments a priori—the fundamental act constituting positivism as a doctrine—can be identified with the reduction of all knowledge to biological responses” (1968, p. 214). [BACK]

3. Diana Postlethwaite (1984) and Peter Dale (1989) have cogently argued that positivism was the dominant nineteenth-century successor to the Romantics' efforts at totalization, that vast cultural project which sought a unifying basis for nature and society. Dale writes that, militantly realistic,

the ground of its realism lay not in the historical structures of society so much as in the evolving structures of the natural world, to which it tended to reduce the historical.

4. The battle was to be fought on philosophical—specifically, epistemological—grounds. The reductionists proceeded to reduce life to a problem of defining attractive and repulsive forces (very much in keeping with the Romantic preoccupation with polarities) in order to link the physical sciences to the biological, which indeed were connected “not empirically, not because the physical foundations of physiology had been experimentally determined, but a priori, independent of any scientific investigation at all[!]” (Galaty 1974). [BACK]

5. Romantic holism, as a philosophical construct, grew out of seventeenth-century debate over the metaphysical structure of nature. Indeed, Spinozan pantheism was the direct antecedent of the Romantic notion of nature's unity (McFarland 1969), and Thoreau was, of course, a disciple of that orientation. Spinoza, in response to the dualistic construction of mind and body proposed by Descartes, endeavored to unify the schism by transcending the alternative primacy of either mind or body with a new concept, “substance”: absolute, infinite, and unknowable. The finite expression of substance was the “mode,” known only by our cognizing abilities as “thought” and “extension.” Thus, body and mind are the only conceivable manifestations of substance as mediated through modes, and although each appears distinct, both, according to Spinoza, are in fact derivative of primal substance and thus complementary aspects of one and the same reality. The key issue was the unity of nature that undergirded all the variegated manifestations. This is an important example of an abiding theme in Western civilization, namely, “the need to reconcile, to bring to line, to unify within a single, allembracing, coherent, and logical system of thought those divergent— and diverse—elements that threaten to disrupt an orderly world” (Smocovitis 1996, p. 4, citing Berlin 1977 and 1992). In this sense, as discussed in chapter 6, Thoreau regarded himself as pursuing a heroic endeavor. But this definition is incomplete, for Romanticism also embraced disruption, fragmentation, irony, and chaos. It required its own sustaining structure, one constructed from the rejection of any universals. For further discussion, see the Introduction. [BACK]

6. Notwithstanding the deficiencies of such a position, it is fascinating to note the fecundity of Goethe's musings, which were later developed in twentieth-century phenomenological philosophy. This general orientation is again regarded as an important direction to explore in terms of the experiential quality of science. See Kohàk 1978. [BACK]

7. Thomas Nagel (1986) argues that “absolute objectivity”—or allembracing knowledge—is deeply paradoxical because such knowledge cannot adopt some particular view, that is, be inclusive of reality as we know it (the subjective), and is thus always partial and incomplete. Ideally the subjective and the objective sides of objectivity should be joined, but because of the limits imposed on absolute

8. See n. 1 to Acknowledgments. [BACK]

9. Interestingly, Goethe did not defend Romantic subjectivity to preserve a particular humane orientation to counter a scientific worldview (he predated the positivists and perhaps felt less defensive than Thoreau); rather he sought a fine balance between interpretative free play with observations and a mode of doing science which would allow the full play of human imagination in order to stimulate discovery. Goethe thus personifies the deep conflict in Romantic science—the search for some objectified nature filtered through the sanctity of human interpretation—a tension that was to plague his cohort until their eclipse by the positivists, who sought to minimize, if not eliminate, the human element in the gathering of facts. [BACK]

10. See n. 7 above. [BACK]

11. I hasten to add that Thoreau was hardly an antiscientist and clearly understood the power of the scientific method and the importance of science for his own worldview and poetic appreciation. For instance, in discussing the important role of identifying and naming a natural object, he wrote:

I have known a particular rush … for at least twenty years, but have been prevented from describing some [of] its peculiarities, because I did not know its name…. With the knowledge of the name comes a distincter recognition and knowledge of the thing. That shore is now more describable, and poetic even. My knowledge was cramped and confined before, and grew rusty because not used,—for it could not be used. My knowledge now becomes communicable and grows by communication. I can now learn what others know about the same thing. (August 29, 1858, Journal, [1906] 1962, 11: 137) [BACK]

12. At the other end of the philosophical spectrum from Whewell, John Stuart Mill advocated both a pragmatic (or utilitarian) understanding and a rigorously inductive explanation of scientific research and theory formation (A System of Logic [1843]). He maintained that all reasoning, even apparently deductive reasoning, is ultimately inductive. Methodologically opposed to Whewell's reliance on the verification of hypotheses as evidence of truth, Mill insisted that since various hypotheses could explain a group of facts, inductive proof required the affirmation of one hypothesis at the expense of the others. The crucial difference between Mill and Whewell perhaps may be reduced to the role of hypotheses in their respective philosophies. Whewell, in reading the history of science, saw that history as an illustration of the Hypothetical Method, where the truth of a hypothesis is attested from its ability to explain observed phenomena (socalled Inference to the Best Explanation). Mill argued for the undeterminedness of theory, where a body of data might be equally explained by more than one hypothesis. [BACK]

13. In the letter declining membership (December 19, 1853), Thoreau included answers to a questionnaire:

Occupation (Professional or otherwise). Literary and Scientific, combined with Landsurveying…. Branches of science in which especial interest is felt The manners and

14. This perspective on “the disenchantment of the world” has found adherents in our own century, the most eloquent perhaps being Max Weber ([1922] 1946). While acknowledging that successful science depends on a singleminded devotion to its own methods and its own conclusions, Weber believed that to be a specialist is not simply to be a calculator or tool in the scientific process but a vital, creative agent. To situate science in terms of its humane function rather than its epistemological standing or its technological application, Weber referred to the “inward calling for science”; that is, he addressed the possible meaning of the enterprise for its practitioners. He suggested that the defined scope of scientific disciplines provides an opportunity for specialization, and that the fragmentation of domains of knowledge in modern society entails the conclusion that genuine achievement is possible for the individual only within a narrow and confined domain of expertise. However, Weber rejected the notion that science “has become a problem in calculation.” He was unwilling to accept that only a “factory” method of cold calculation and methodical computation can yield scientific results, and he strongly maintained the necessity of intuition and inspiration—of “ideas”—in science (as in art). And so he joined the Romantic tradition of finding human value in scientific practice. [BACK]

15. Kuhn looked at the history of science and saw that the narratives bequeathed him in the 1950s were hardly rational or cumulative in the normal sense. As a novice physicist, he understood that scientific development hardly ever depended on knowing the history of what had preceded the particular narrow question at hand, and thus that the practicing scientist had little, if any, historical consciousness. As Kuhn wrote in Structure, “More historical detail, whether of science's present or of its past, or more responsibility to the historical details that are presented, could only give artificial status to human idiosyncrasy, error, and confusion. Why dignify what science's best and most persistent efforts have made it possible to discard? The depreciation of historical fact is deeply, and probably functionally, ingrained in the ideology of the scientific profession, the same profession that places the highest of all values upon factual details of other sorts” (1970, p. 138). This was an important insight that brought at least two ideas in train. The first was the fundamental question of how and why science proceeds without this selfconscious awareness of its own method. The second—and this was the one Kuhn himself, and later the entire discipline of history of science, pursued—was to what extent science might be characterized by some historical self-reflexiveness. In a sense, the first set of questions would in effect be answered as a shadow response to the second set. If science, to proceed, does not rely on understanding its own origins and tracing its historical evolution, then to what extent does it adhere to such rational categories of development? The answer offered by Kuhn—and later aggressively

16. These attacks, begun in the 1960s and 1970s, on the normative standing of science generated heated rebuttals (Holton 1993; Gross, Levitt, and Lewis 1996), and the socalled Science Wars of the 1990s pitted conservative defenders of science against those whom they regarded as attacking a bastion of Western civilization. The fundamental issue in the Science Wars is the degree to which scientific findings—from theory to elemental fact—are “constructed.” The issue goes back, at least in its modern formulation, to Kant, who, in proposing that we know the world only insofar as our mental faculties allow, offered a philosophical constructivist theory of cognition: our manner of perceiving the world and acting in it depend on the particular character (i.e., biology) of our minds,and that world exists for us (i.e., can be known) as defined by those faculties of knowing. (Metaphysical realism was thus challenged, if not replaced, by the noumena/phenomena distinction.) We might concur that the degree of epistemological agreement between individual knowers must be very high (because of adaptive evolution, the commonality of language, and the overwhelming evidence of practice); yet because of the “other minds” problem and the uncertainty of noumena, doors to skepticism and relativism have been opened. Science has, of course, always made a privileged claim on objectivity, but if one extrapolates the Kantian position from individual perceptions to instruments, on the one hand, and social factors (including language, cultural values, political organization, etc.) on the other hand, then “constructivism” in science becomes a problem of degree. In short, the argument hinges on the degree to which science's privileged epistemological position protects its cognitive content from contamination by confounding elements not factored into the calculus of ideal objective knowing.

The constructivist quandary entered science studies through each of its three branches—history, philosophy, and sociology of science. When a logical structure for scientific discovery and verification seemed elusive at best (philosophy), and the history of science seemed similarly marked by nonprogressive, nonrational models of growth, students of science paid closer attention to the social variables that might account for scientific practice. While a comprehensive description was hardly forthcoming, one major result of these studies was that science exhibited a construction of its knowledge in a fashion analogous to other forms of knowledge formation. While there indeed was a privileged epistemological standing in the natural sciences, this was different in degree, not kind. Simply put, science is, in a trivial sense, “social,” i.e., it is a human activity, which draws upon all those elements of our culture that support its enterprise. This is hardly contentious in itself, but the argument commences as to the degree of construction which would be allowed for scientific practice and discourse, and from there, the degree of relativism allowed for science's content. [BACK]

17. See n. 16 above. [BACK]

18. My own views and papers supporting what I would call a pragmatic realist's position may be found in the anthology Science and the Quest for Reality

19. When discussing science and aesthetics, it is difficult to draw the line between psychology and philosophy. Geometric form and other visual metaphors generally fulfill criteria of form that we “perceive” as beautiful, but whether the appreciation of a phenomenon or form as beautiful is learned (i.e., culturally derived) or in fact fulfills some resonant cognitive function remains a vexing question (Rentschler et al. 1988). The literature concerned only with defining the beautiful in science is vast; see Tauber 1996b for a partial listing. [BACK]

20. Indeed, a useful way of illustrating the elusive synthesis of scientific experience may be seen in the way the aesthetic has often served to span, in scientists' own accounts, the deep metaphysical schism (Tauber 1996b). For instance, when the physicist Paul Dirac said, “it is more important that a theory be beautiful than that it be true” (quoted by Charles Hartshorne [1982] as heard in a lecture), he did not proclaim qualitative equivalence, as did John Keats (“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”), but offered the sense of the beautiful as paramount. Dirac clearly emphasized a mathematical aesthetic method at the expense of inductive empiricism: “A theory of mathematical beauty is more likely to be correct than an ugly one that fits some experimental data,” and “there are occasions when mathematical beauty should take priority over agreement with experiment” (Kragh 1990, p. 284, quoting Dirac). Or again, “It is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment” (Dirac 1963). This socalled Dirac-Weyl doctrine in fact can be traced in modern physics to Hermann Minkowski, but perhaps of greater influence on Dirac was Einstein, who was guided by principles of simplicity and exhibited legendary confidence in his equations of gravitation theory. Dirac and many other physicists of his time regarded Einstein's gravitation theory as created virtually without empirical reasoning, although Einstein himself was more circumspect in his trust in aesthetic parameters (Kragh 1990, pp. 286–87; see also McAllister 1990).

Dirac's pronouncement falls prey to the disjunction of the rational scientific from the emotive beautiful. In the very separation of beauty from truth we perhaps might be satisfied with Keats's assignment of equality, or at least complementarity, inasmuch as “truth” fulfills certain necessary criteria and “beauty” others. Dirac distinguishes them as different and hierarchical. In a most profound sense, by separating truth and beauty, we again admit a potentially debilitating dichotomy. Dirac's proclamation jolts as it challenges the usual perception of scientific inquiry, and yet it is neither a novel assessment nor a radical position. The entire issue of the subjectivity and changing standards of aesthetic criteria is beyond our concern, but there has been much discussion of this issue. (See Renscher 1990 and Tauber 1996b for introductions.) [BACK]

21. See Henri Atlan's discussion of this issue (1993, p. 193), where he draws upon Gaston Bachelard's original insights concerning the psychological motivations of scientists (Bachelard [1934] 1984). See also the discussions of Holton (1994) and Torrance (1994) for other perspectives on the quest for universal, transcendent truths from religious and scientific orientations. [BACK]