BOOKS.
WRITINGS AND LEITERS OF DR. WHEWELL.. WE should have supposed that such a work as the one before us would have been a labour of love to a Fellow or an ex-Fellow of Dr. Whewell's own college. We are rather surprised that Trinity men have allowed so honourable a task to have fallen into the hands of a Johnian. Of course, the name of Mr. Todhunter is a guarantee that it has been well done. Cambridge probably • William Whewell, D.D., Master of Trinity College, Cambridge: an Account of his Writings, with Selections from his Literary and Scientific Correspondence. By J. Tod- bunter, MA., F.B.S. 2 Tole. London ; Macmillan and Co. does not number among her Bons a man who could have done it better. in all respects Mr. Todhunter is well fitted to give the world an account of Dr. Whewell's literary and scientific career. He was not, indeed, so he tells us, personally intimate with him, but he has had abundant means of knowing almost everything about him worth the knowing. Although he is chiefly fatuous as a mathematician, and is, perhaps, usually regarded as a specialist, he is known to many as a man of very wide and varied attain- ments. He is, in fact, quite the man to understand and ap- preciate Dr. Whewell's prodigious intellectual activity. There are few subjects, it may be safely said, on which he cannot make an acute remark. He has, too, great patience and industry. It seems that the work he undertook was of a formidable nature, and two distinguished members of Trinity College declined it. However, as might have been ex- pected, be received from various quarters a good deal of judi- cious assistance, which indeed appears to have been sorely needed. He had to work at an immense mass of material, and to reduce chaos into order. Dr. Whewell, it seems, did not put into prac- tice Bacon's remark that truth emerges more easily from error than from confusion, though he much admired it. He used to pin together leaves of manuscripts relating to the same subject, and the result was that the leaves were torn and mangled, and many of them escaped. So Mr. Todhunter found himself con- fronted by a promiscuous heap of papers. All things considered, he has arranged his materials clearly and intelligibly. We have a complete analysis of Dr. Whewell's different writings, and a copious selection from his letters. We get a good insight into the workings of a singularly fresh and vigorous intellect. Several objections may be made to the form of the work, and possibly it can be spoken of as readable only in regard to a somewhat limited circle. Mr. Todhunter himself feels this. He admits that the exclusion of all that belongs to Dr. Whewell's personal and domestic life must impair the interest of his volumes for the general reader. A "Life," it seems, will soon be published. We have no doubt that this will be a very interesting, almost a popu- lar work. Meantime, many of us will thank Mr. Todhunter for giving us a clear idea of the writings, literary and scientific, of one of the most remarkable men of this century.
Dr. Whewell was a very exceptional head of a college. One always used to associate the notion of quiet, dignified repose with that exalted position. Dr. Whewell indeed had dignity, but quiet and repose were the last things of which he thought. His name and his person were alike familiar to every Cambridge under- graduate. As a rule, we believe, the head of a college was hardly known by sight or name to the undergraduate world. There was a tremendous energy, physical energy as well as well as intellec- tual, which made Dr. Whewell for many years one of the most conspicuous figures in the University. Cambridge men were in- tensely proud of him, and at the same time feared him. He was credited with a superhuman power of snubbing people. He had the reputation of being a most stern upholder of college discipline. He would show little mercy to a stupid, " fast " man who had been guilty of some vulgar, meaningless breach of order and good manners. We have heard a story that, seeing a man walking on the roof by way of a foolish freak, he dragged the unhappy creature through a sky-light. He was well known to be devoted, heart and soul, to the best interests of the noble college over which he presided from 1841 to his death in 1866. This insured him respect. Every one, too, knew, at least by hearsay, the wide range and variety of his attainments. A story was current that some adventurous person, after much anxious thought and consultation, once put him to the test. Having crammed up an article on Chinese music out of some encyclopmdia, he contrived to broach the subject in conversation to Dr. Whewell. His amazement and confusion may be imagined when, after awhile, the doctor observed, " Ah, I see you have been reading my article ; but I have quite changed my opinions since I wrote it, many years ago." The story, whether true or not, exactly illustrates what was commonly thought about him. Some London wit who met him at one of Rogers' breakfasts said that science was his forte and omniscience his foible.' It would seem that early in life he was fully conscious of his besetting temptation. In a letter written in 1815, he says, "Some people bid us beware of the Demon of universal knowledge, and I suppose some people are wise." But his intellect was so rest- less that he could not restrain it. He was all aglow with scientific enthusiasm, and though on certain subjects he might have been at a disadvantage compared with a specialist, still he could never have been fairly described as superficial. Mr. Todhunter evidently would resent the application to him of such an epithet. He says, indeed, in his preface, that the examination of Dr. Whewell's ex-
tensive correspondence cannot fail to raise the opinion formed of him by the study of his published works, however high that opinion may be.
One of Dr. Whewell's best known works, that indeed on which perhaps his fame mainly rests, isthe History of the Inductive Sciences, from the earliest to the present time. It was published in 1837, and was dedicated to his friend SirJ. Herschel, then busy with astro- nomical investigations at the Cape of Good Hope. Thesubject was one of which Dr. Whewell had made himself thoroughly master. Sir David Brewster reviewed it rather unfavourably in the Edinburgh Review. He was apparently dissatisfied with the treatment which his own special subject of optics had received, and also with the author's inadequate appreciation of the scientific labours of his countrymen. Mr. Todhunter, who of all men is a competent judge on such a matter, speaks highly of the general accuracy of this great and extensive work. It ham, no doubt, its weak points ; among them, something like a superstitious reverence for the inductive method, which is frequently contrasted with deduction, to the disparagement of the latter. We are familiar with the phrase, "the soundest principles of the inductive philosophy," which has become a cant expression in the mouths of persons who flatter themselves that they are representing the last results of modern enlightenment. As Mr. Todhunter observes, the triumphs of astronomy, one of Dr. Whewell's special subjects, are essentially triumphs of the deductive method ; and Newton and Laplace, as to this, were far removed from Baconian influence. In his Philo- sophy of the Inductive Sciences, published in 1840, Dr. Whewell showed that he was by no means wanting in capacity to grapple with the metaphysical side of the subject. The work naturally provoked much criticism. Mr. Mill differed from him altogether on necessary truths, and on inconceivableness as a test of impossi- bility. Dr. Whewell maintained that the truths of geometry were perceived by intuition, not derived, as Mr. Mill and Sir J. Herschel contended, from experience. It appears that in this controversy, Mr. Herbert Spencer, though differing from both sides, rather inclined to Dr. Whewell's view. So, too, does Mr. Todhunter. He says that he must "emphatically disclaim any trace in his memory of obtaining certainty by trial and ex- perinnnt as to the axiom that two straight lines cannot enclose a space." It was said in some review that the work in question "bore the same relation to a true philosophy of induction as Wombwell's menagerie did to a natural-history museum." Dr. Whewell, perhaps, did not handle the difficult subject of induc- tion quite clearly and satisfactorily, but it is hardly too much to say that he has contributed something considerable towards its solution.
His essay on the plurality of worlds, which appeared anony- mously in 1853, is, perhaps, one of the cleverest and most popu- lar of his works. The subject, indeed, with which it deals is as purely speculative as it is possible to conceive, but it naturally has great fascinations for the human mind. It touches indirectly on theology, and this aspect of it had been dealt with by Chalmers in his astronomical discourses, in which it was eloquently argued that the Christian revelation was perfectly reconcilable with a belief in the existence of innumerable inhabited worlds. Dr. Whewell maintained that the usually accepted hypothesis was altogether improbable. The book was much read and discussed. Dr. Whewell's old foe, Sir David Brewster, made a fierce on- slaught on it in the North British Review, and subsequently ex- panded his article into a book, entitled, More Worlds than One ; the Creed of the Philosopher and the Hope of the Christian. There was more rhetoric than argument in it. So passionate an enthu- siast was the author for a plurality of worlds, that he pro- nounced confidently on the existence of inhabitants in the Sun, and he thought that they might well find enjoyable occupation in astronomical observation, for which they would have opportunities when those occasional disruptions occur in the bright atmosphere of the sun which produce to our eyes the spots on his surface. Without going the length of Sir David Brewster, who forgoes the advantage of the only data we have for reasoning on such a subject, when he contends for the habit- ability of furnaces like the Sun by any beings organised like those we know, we may yet say that Dr. Whewell's book was ingenious, but on the whole, that it failed to convince. It may not depart from "the spirit of the inductive method," as some reviewer said of it, without apparently very clearly knowing his own meaning, but still there would seem to be almost insuperable difficulties in believing that our world is a solitary exception in the universe.
On the value of classics and mathematics as infinitely the best instruments of a good education Dr. Whewell held a very
decided opinion. The two, he thought, ought to be combine& The demands he made on a student were very severe. His mathematical course included Newton's Principia and the Micanique Celeste of Laplace,—in fact, what are generally spoken of as the higher mathematics. As to classics, the student must be familiar with all the best classical writers. These he thought were vastly superior to modern authors Altogether, Du. Whewell was quite in sympathy with the general method of study pursued at his university. This, among other reasons, made him look suspiciously on schemes of reform. In 1855 he published a pamphlet attacking the proposals started in this" direction. Some will say that he was blindly attached to the old system, in the midst of which he had grown up. There were- certainly evils in it,—those, for instance, connected with the to and tenure of fellowships, which seem never to have struck him. As to these, the progress of opinion has decided against him. But it would be a mistake to say that he had nothing in him of the reforming spirit. It was known to all re- sident members of the university that by his example and influence he did much to raise its character and to enlarge its range of studies. In some respects, Dr. Whewell, great man as he was, had a certain narrowness of mind. He did not see much to admire in Coleridge, and says that his metaphysics are often superficial, and his humour heavy and uncouth. The fact is that the two men- stood in strong intellectual contrast. Dr. Whewell, we suspect, seldom thought very highly of a man who had next to no acquaintance with physical science. T/ordsworth's Excursion seems to have, thoroughly bored him. He complains of its "childishness, of its enthusiastic and, at the same time, quite false philosophy." It will be remembered that Mr. Mill delighted in Wordsworth's poetry. It should be added that Dr. Whewell was a compara- tively young man when he pronounced the above criticism Nor- did he care much, it appears, for Sir Walter Scott; at any rate, he found little interest in the Fortunes of Nigel and in Peverilof the- Peak. Lamb's Essays, which most people can enjoy, he describes as ingenious indeed, but as conceited and strained. Wilhelnr Meister be speaks of as a collection of speculative generalities, put in the mouths of all the characters without exception. And though he admits Macaulay's cleverness and wonderful power of illustration, he was not much impressed by the profundity of his thoughts, which, he says, are little beyond common-place and vulgar opinions. Similar criticism has often been passed on- Macaulay. Still we think it is certain that there were some really great authors whom, from some defect of sympathy, Dr. Whewell could not adequately appreciate.
As a preacher, he was often vigorous and eloquent. His style was apt to be now and then rather cumbrous and involved, but it is for the most part clear and powerful. Mr. Todhunter gives us several specimens of his sermons. One is directed against the famous Bampton Lectures of Dean Mansel, which occasioned a controversy, in which Mr. Maurice took a conspicuous part. The Dean argued that a true knowledge of God is impossible for man. Dr. Whewell, like Mr. Maurice, protested that this doctrine was. as false in philosophy as it is subversive of revealed theology. The following passage, with which we take leave of these two interesting volumes, shows that Dr. Whewell had something of the fire of eloquence, as well as an acute and highly trained intellect :—" If,' he says, "we cannot know anything about God, revelation is in vain. We cannot have anything revealed to us, if we have no power of seeing what is revealed. It is of no use to take away the veil, when we are blind. If, in consequence of our defect of sight, we cannot see God at all by the sun of nature, we cannot see Him by the lightning of Sinai, nor by the fire of Mount Carmel, nor by the star in the East, nor by the rising sun of the Resurrection. If we cannot know God, to what purpose is it that- the Scriptures, Old and New, constantly exhort us to know Him, and represent to us the knowledge of Him as the great purpose of man's life, and the sole ground of his eternal hopes ?"
Previous page
