West Coast History of Science Society Meeting

University of California, San Francisco

April 11th - April 14th, 2002
[Program]

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Much ado About Nothing: Ether Anxiety and language in Late Victorian Britain

Kevin Lambert
UCLA
 

In the second half of the nineteenth century, anxiety over Darwin's theory of natural selection created heated discussion among British intellectuals about God's design in nature.  This anxiety charged the concept of the ether -- an all-pervading medium that had come to offer physics the possibility of a "theory of everything" -- with a theological significance.  At the same time, the new science of language, philology, became an important place in which arguments about man's place in nature could be made.  My paper looks at how the work of philologist and mythographer Max Müller and physicist George Fitzgerald were both concerned with making language the mark of the divine in humanity.  A direct connection is made through christian writer Emma Marie Caillard,  who uses both Müller and Fitzgerald in her arguments for a christian interpretation of Darwins theory of evolution.  But Müller and Fitzgerald also parallel each other philosphical, both arriving at an idealist positivism very close to sensationalist epistemology espoused by Ernst Mach in the same period.  Through these connections the paper raises some interesting questions about the relationship between philology and mathematics.   For Example:  were James Clerk Maxwell and George Boole aware of and interested in the work of philogists such as Max Müller?  What is the relation of mathematics to language in the nineteenth century?