Whewell, William (1794–1866)

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WHEWELL, WILLIAM
(1794–1866)

William Whewell, the British philosopher and historian of science, was born in Lancaster. He spent the greater part of his life at Trinity College, Cambridge, as an undergraduate, fellow, and tutor, and finally as master of Trinity from 1841 until his death. He twice served as vice chancellor of Cambridge University, and he also taught mineralogy and later (1838–1855) moral philosophy.

Whewell's output was exceptional both in its abundance and in its diversity. Save for a dozen papers on the tides (1833–1850), however, his scientific works were devoted not so much to research as to teaching (Mechanical Euclid, Cambridge, U.K., 1837) or popularization and to apologetics (Astronomy and General Physics, London, 1833; Plurality of Worlds, London, 1853). In addition to his scientific writings he published a number of works in moral philosophy (Elements of Morality, Including Polity, 2 vols., London, 1845; Lectures on Systematic Morality, London, 1846; Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy in England, London, 1852) and pedagogy (Principles of English University Education, London, 1837; Of a Liberal Education, London, 1845). He also produced editions, with prefaces, notes, and in some instances translations, of works by Isaac Newton, Joseph Butler, Hugo Grotius, Plato, and others, as well as sermons, poetry, and occasional or polemical essays.

However, his principal work—in length, scope, and the central position it occupies in his thought—is constituted by the History of the Inductive Sciences, from the Earliest to the Present Time (3 vols., London, 1837) and the Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded upon Their History (London, 1840). The former, one of the first general histories of natural science, is erudite yet perfectly readable. The latter, revised and enlarged for its third edition, was published in three parts under separate titles: History of Scientific Ideas (2 vols., London, 1858); Novum Organon Renovatum (London, 1858); and On the Philosophy of Discovery (London, 1860).

According to Whewell, the theory of induction, which had been examined to the point of exhaustion after Francis Bacon formulated it as a program for future science, should be taken up again in view of the fact that the sciences called inductive have been actually established. Notwithstanding the opinions of the "writers of authority" invoked by J. S. Mill, the word induction can now validly signify only one thing: the method of construction employed in those sciences that all modern thinkers agree to call inductive. And the only means of becoming acquainted with this method is to see it at work in history. (This is the source of the close connection between the two works, the History and the Philosophy, which matured simultaneously over a period of many years.)

Induction and History

The study of history reveals an inductive process that does not resemble the generalizing argument of the logicians. In the first place, the induction practiced by the scientist is not reasoning that is valid vi formae (by virtue of its form). It is quite another way of arriving at truth: a venturesome course taken by the mind, which, as if deciphering a cryptogram, tests or tries out various hypotheses in turn, until by a "happy guess" it hits upon the relevant idea. The question therefore is not under what conditions this procedure is logically correct—it never is—but simply whether its result is sound. Care and rigor assert themselves in the experimental control of the inductive proposition, and not in its elaboration, which allows great freedom to the imagination. It is fruitless to try to set up an "inductive logic" that is symmetrical with deductive logic and that formulates canons analogous to those of the syllogism.

In the second place, scientific induction consists not in generalizing the observed facts but in colligating them, in binding them together by the intelligible unity of a new conception. Finding this conception requires the initiative of genius. Generalization comes afterward; the decisive discovery is the forging of the idea. Once this idea has taught us how to read experience, it becomes incorporated into experience; and it seems to us that we see it there. Thus, the contribution of the mind to knowledge is ignored: this is the source of the empiricist error. One forgets that the facts have little by little been given form by ideas and that the facts of today (such as the fact that the earth revolves) are the hypotheses of yesterday; our facts are realized theories.

Induction and Ideas

Whewell's epistemological analyses have a general philosophical import; indeed, they furnish an indispensable basis for the theory of knowledge. Whewell was one of the first to whom the thought occurred that such a theory could rely validly only on the history of the sciences, examining how this exemplary form of knowledge had developed. Such an examination seemed to him to justify what one might call an inductive rationalism. All knowledge requires an ideal element just as much as an empirical one. By reason of this "fundamental antithesis" Whewell's philosophy at one and the same time is, in contrast with that of the apriorists, a philosophy of induction, and in contrast with that of the empiricists, a philosophy of the idea. Even the experimental sciences rest on certain axioms whose character as necessary truths—acknowledged to the point that one cannot distinctly conceive their negation—can be explained only by the presence in our mind of certain "fundamental ideas." Number, space, time, cause, medium, polarity, affinity, symmetry, resemblance, final cause—new ideas are added to those that precede as one descends the ladder of the sciences. It was this notion that largely inspired Antoine Cournot.

But such a rationalism, stamped with the influence of Immanuel Kant, is by no means bound up with a deductive idealism. The fundamental ideas are illuminated for us only progressively, in the course of our effort to interpret experience. They become elements of the structure of reason; and the principles that they govern pass little by little, as they are better understood, from the status of happy guesses to that of necessary truths that education then makes permanent in the public mind. Through this bold conception of how self-evidence develops, the theory of fundamental ideas is joined with the theory of induction, the idea as category with the idea as hypothesis. Here there would have been a prefiguring of modern theories of the self-construction of the reason had not theological preoccupations led Whewell to locate these "fundamental ideas," from all eternity, in the divine understanding. As a result the apparent invention of these ideas by man is ultimately reduced to a simple discovery.

Although Whewell's authority was recognized, his philosophy was received only with reservation. His theory of fundamental ideas ran counter to the empiricist tradition, and freethinkers regarded the theological setting of the theory as an anachronism. The logicians, for their part, complained that Whewell's theory of induction had altered the sense of the word by wrongly assimilating inductive method to the method of hypothesis and that it had neglected the question of proof. In all these respects Mill was his typical opponent. It is worth remarking, however, that neither he nor the other critics attacked Whewell's most daring and most novel notions, the interesting nature of which seems to have escaped them: the incorporation of ideas into the facts and the development of self-evidence.

Bibliography

In addition to Whewell's works cited in the text, see I. Todhunter, William Whewell, an Account of His Writings with Selections from His Literary and Scientific Correspondence, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1876), and Mrs. Stair Douglas, The Life and Selections from the Correspondence of William Whewell (London, 1879).

For further information on Whewell's philosophy, see M. R. Stoll, Whewell's Philosophy of Induction (Lancaster, 1929); Robert Blanché, Le rationalisme de Whewell (Paris: Alcan, 1935); C. J. Ducasse, "Whewell's Philosophy of Scientific Discovery," in Philosophical Review 60 (1951): 56–69 and 213–234; and Silvestro Marcucci, L'"idealismo" scientifico di William Whewell (Pisa: Istituto di Filosofia, 1963).

Robert Blanché (1967)

Translated by Albert E. Blumberg

Encyclopedia of Philosophy