Studies in History

www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsa

Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 38 (2007) 584–592

and Philosophyof Science

‘Lord only of the ruffians and fiends’? William Whewelland the plurality of worlds debate

Laura J. Snyder

Department of Philosophy, St. John’s University, New York, USA

Abstract

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the opinion of science, as well as of philosophy and even religion, was, at least in Britain,firmly in the camp of the plurality of worlds, the view that intelligent life exists on other celestial bodies. William Whewell, considered anexpert on science, philosophy and religion (among other areas), would have been expected to support this position. Yet he surprisedeveryone in 1853 by publishing a work arguing strongly against the plurality view. This was even stranger given that he had endorsedpluralism twenty years earlier in his contribution to the Bridgewater Treatises. In this paper I show that the shift in Whewell’s view wasmotivated by three factors: the influence of Richard Owen’s theory of archetypes on Whewell’s view of the argument from design, andWhewell’s perception of the need to strengthen such arguments in light of evolutionary accounts of human origins; important develop-ments in his view of philosophy and his role as a scientific expert; and new findings in astronomy. An examination of the development ofWhewell’s position provides a lens through which we can view the interplay of theology, philosophy and science in the plurality of worldsdebate.� 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: William Whewell; Plurality of worlds; Natural theology; Analogies; Archetypes; Conjectures; Evolution

When citing this paper, please use the full journal title Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

1. Introduction

Upon learning that his friend William Whewell thoughtit unlikely that there was intelligent life on other worlds,the astronomer John Herschel wrote to him:

So this then is the best of all possible worlds—the ne plus

ultra between which and the seventh heaven there is

nothing intermediate. Oh dear! Oh dear! ’Tis a sad cut-

ting down. Lord only of the Ruffians and Fiends . . . I

can’t give in my adhesion to the doctrine that between

0039-3681/$ - see front matter � 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.shpsa.2007.06.006

E-mail address: snyderl@stjohns.edu1 Herschel to Whewell, 30 November 1853, Cambridge, Trinity College, Ad2 See Crowe (1999), p. 299, Heffernan (1978), p. 82, Todhunter (1876), Vol.

this and the angelic there are not some dozen or twogrades of intellectual and moral creatures.1

We may presume that Herschel’s tongue was firmly incheek, but his dismay was real. Like most other scientists,philosophers and religious individuals in Britain in thenineteenth century, Herschel endorsed the view that theuniverse contained numerous other worlds populated byintelligent inhabitants.2 Indeed, his own work on the dou-ble stars had contributed evidence, according to many, forthis ‘plurality of worlds’ position. Yet in his letter to

d.Ms.a.207, f. 90.1, p. 185.

L.J. Snyder / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 38 (2007) 584–592 585

Whewell, Herschel did not highlight astronomical evidencein favor of plurality. Rather, he raised—even if ironically—theological and moral concerns about the opposing view.

Soon after receiving the letter from Herschel, Whewellexpressed his view publicly (though anonymously) in hisOf the plurality of worlds, a book that went on to arousegreat controversy. Those, unlike Herschel, who had notreceived prior notice of Whewell’s position on the issue,would have been surprised, for twenty years earlier Whe-well had endorsed the plurality of worlds in his contribu-tion to the Bridgewater Treatises (works commissionedfor the purpose of showing how various scientific disci-plines could contribute to Natural Theology). In this paperI will discuss the development of Whewell’s thought on thisissue from the 1830s to the 1850s, showing that his shiftingopinion had mostly to do with three factors: the influenceof Richard Owen’s theory of archetypes on Whewell’s viewof the argument from design, and Whewell’s perception ofa need to strengthen such arguments in light of evolution-ary accounts of human origins, important developments inhis philosophical outlook, and new findings in astronomy.An examination of the progression of Whewell’s thinkingprovides a lens through which we can view the interplayof theology, philosophy, and science in the plurality ofworlds debate.

2. From many worlds to one

Whewell’s Bridgewater Treatise, Astronomy and general

physics, considered with reference to natural theology (1833),was one of the first to appear, and was one of the most suc-cessful, in the series. In a chapter entitled ‘On the vastnessof the universe’, Whewell raised the topic of the plurality ofworlds. Of the other planets in our system, Whewellclaimed,

No one can resist the temptation to conjecture, thatthese globes, some of them much larger than our own,are not dead and barren;—that they are, like ours, occu-pied with organization, life, intelligence. To conjecture isall that we can do, yet even by the perception of such apossibility, our view of the kingdom of nature isenlarged and elevated.3

Indeed, the multitude of stars in the sky almost inevitablyleads us to the further assumption that these stars are likeour sun, and may have planets revolving around themwhich could be the seats of intelligent life. Even the nebu-lae, those ‘extended masses of dilute light’, are thought bysome to be condensing into planetary systems. After a con-

3 Whewell (1833), p. 206.4 Ibid., p. 212.5 Ibid., p. 215.6 See Brooke (1977), Crowe (1999), and Heffernan (1978).7 This phrase is taken from the will of the Earl of Bridgewater, who left the8 See Crowe (1999), p. 282.

sideration of the vast quantity of life that may possiblyexist in the whole of creation, Whewell concluded that the

ever-expanding view which is brought before us, of thescale and mechanism, the riches and magnificence, thepopulation and activity of the universe;—may reason-ably serve, not to disturb, but to enlarge and elevateour conceptions of the Maker and Master of all.4

Whewell argued in the following chapter that, if the plural-ity of worlds position were true, there would be no diffi-culty accounting for man’s special place in the creationor his special relationship with God; he thus claimed thatthe plurality position did not contradict revealed religion.Whewell relied upon an argument made by Thomas Chal-mers in his Astronomical discourses of 1817. Chalmers hadargued that the microscope had led to the discovery of mil-lions of creatures not previously known, which had beenunder the care of God without our knowledge, and whichdid nothing to diminish our privileged relationship withGod. Similarly, the possible discovery of further creatureson other worlds, also under God’s care, should not causeus to worry. Like Chalmers, Whewell argued that the pres-ence of numbers of creatures in the universe far larger thanwe can conceive would not entail that God does not havethe power to place man under His special care. We cannotpresume to limit his power by assuming otherwise.5

It is important to note that Whewell’s brief discussion ofplurality is laced with the term ‘conjecture’. All we canmake are conjectures, Whewell believed, about the possibil-ity of intelligent life on other worlds; we cannot say thatthere probably is such life, nor even that we have groundsfor believing in the possibility of this hypothesis. Thus inhis Bridgewater Treatise Whewell was by no means verystrongly supporting the plurality position, as some com-mentators have suggested.6 Nevertheless, in the contextof his book on natural theology, he was perfectly willingto use this popular position in favor of his own argumentfrom design. Even the mere conjecture of vast numbersof intelligent beings in the universe enhanced the view ofthe ‘Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as manifestedin the Creation’.7

Whewell was publicly silent on the plurality questionuntil 1853, when he published, anonymously, his Of theplurality of worlds. His anonymity did not last long; evenreviewers in the popular press surmised his identity.8 In thiswork, Whewell forcefully argued against the probable exis-tence of intelligent life on other worlds. (Whewell assertedthat there were no philosophical or theological difficultiesin conceiving other parts of the universe to be populatedby animal life, though he showed later in the book that

money for these treatises.

586 L.J. Snyder / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 38 (2007) 584–592

scientific considerations weighed against this possibility.)9

He utilized several different trains of argument against aplurality of worlds. In the first four chapters, Whewellargued—contrary to what he had claimed in the Bridgewa-ter Treatise—that the tenets of revealed religion seem togive reasons against this position. He admitted, however,that if scientific arguments were in favor of the pluralityof worlds, then the ostensible inconsistency with revealedreligion would need to be reconsidered (throughout hiscareer, Whewell had maintained that there could be nocontradiction between scientific and theological truth,and that apparent conflicts were often caused by a misun-derstanding of theology).10 But the evidence from sciencewas, he claimed, against plurality. The greater part of hisbook—chapters five through ten—consists in argumentsintended to show that both geology and astronomy giveno reason to hold the plurality position, and many reasonsto reject it. In chapters eleven and twelve, Whewell demon-strated that natural theology (contrary to what he hadargued in the Bridewater Treatise) did not imply the plural-ity of worlds. In the final chapter Whewell contemplatedthe future of our existence on earth.

3. Unity of plan and the design argument

A number of commentators have speculated on the rea-son for the shift in Whewell’s view between 1833 and 1853.As I have shown, Whewell’s support for the plurality posi-tion was not nearly as strong in 1833 as commentators havesuggested; he may well have believed that there could beintelligent life on other worlds, and he was willing to usethis possibility as additional ammunition for his designargument, but there is no evidence either in his publishedworks or in his notebooks and voluminous correspondencethat Whewell had thought deeply about this topic or wasstrongly wed to this view in the 1830s. On the other hand,he was certainly strongly opposed to it by 1853. What pre-cipitated this shift?

The debate over the plurality of worlds was cast into awhole new light for Whewell after the anonymous publica-tion of Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the natural history of

creation in 1844. In his book, Chambers had suggested thatthe plurality position supported the view of the transmuta-tion of species. ‘We have to suppose’, Chambers claimed,

that every one of these numberless globes is either a the-atre of organic being, or in the way of becoming so . . . Isit conceivable, as a fitting mode of exercise for a creativeintelligence, that it should be constantly moving fromone sphere to another . . . ? Yet such is the notion that

9 Whewell (2001 [1853]), pp. 35–36.10 See Whewell (1840), Vol. 1, p. 148, and Snyder (2006), pp. 197–198.11 Chambers (1844), p. 161; cited in Brooke (1977), p. 266.12 In William Whewell to J. D. Forbes, 19 February 1854, in Todhunter (18713 As Michael Ruse has noted, it is somewhat ironic that, in the twentieth cent

of intelligent life on other worlds (since, according to them, there is only a lowRuse (2001), pp. 25–28.

we must form, if we adhere to the doctrine of specialexercise.11

If other parts of the universe were populated by intelligentlife, it seemed unreasonable to believe, Chambers argued,that this life had been individually created by God in eachlocation at different moments. Rather, it was more likelythat evolutionary processes were at work throughout theuniverse. Since the plurality position was the view heldby most of his readers, it was a shrewd rhetorical movefor Chambers to link the plurality of worlds with the vastlymore unpopular notion of the transmutation of species.

Against the advice of his friends, who feared that astrong response by Whewell would only add to the publicnotice of the Vestiges, Whewell confronted Chambers’sevolutionary view by publishing a collection of selectionsfrom his earlier works, entitled Indications of the Creator,

extracts bearing upon theology, from the history and the phi-

losophy of the inductive sciences (1845). These selectionswere chosen to show the evidences of design in the world.Notably, however, unlike in the Bridgewater Treatise,Whewell did not adduce the possibility of intelligent lifeon other worlds as evidence for God’s power and goodness.Thus it is clear that, by this time, Whewell had begun torethink the plurality issue. When he eventually wrote Of

the plurality of worlds, Whewell explicitly considered it anattack on the view expressed by the author of the Vestiges.In a letter to his friend, the physicist J. D. Forbes, Whewellnoted that his Plurality ‘might have some value as a strong

case exactly opposed to his’.12 In the Bridgewater Treatise,Whewell had implied that the argument from design seemsto lead to the plurality position, because otherwise itappears that God has been wasteful in creating so manyempty potential seats of intelligent life. Now, however, inlight of Chambers’s association of the pluralist and trans-mutationist views, Whewell felt the need to reject thisimplication, and indeed to reject categorically the pluralistposition.13 Whewell argued instead that the argument fromdesign is not violated by the anti-pluralist position. Happilyfor him, around the time that Whewell was working on hisresponse to Chambers, his close friend Richard Owen wasdeveloping a theory which provided Whewell with a way tounderstand the intelligent design of the universe that didnot imply the plurality of worlds.

Owen first published his theory in 1846 in his work onthe Anatomy of fishes and developed it further in On the

archetype and homologies of the vertebrate skeleton (1848)and On the nature of limbs (1849). Owen argued that indi-vidual vertebrate animals, for example, could be seen asmodified instantiations of patterns or archetype forms that

6), Vol. 2, p. 400.ury, it has been professional evolutionists who tend to doubt the possibilityprobability of an evolutionary process leading to intelligent creatures). See

L.J. Snyder / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 38 (2007) 584–592 587

existed in the Divine Mind. This ‘unity of plan’ viewallowed Owen to explain homologies, that is, similar struc-tures that have quite different purposes, such as the wing ofa bird and the forelimb of a quadruped. On Owen’s view,the similarity of these structures that are used in such dif-ferent ways is a consequence of their being variations onthe vertebrate archetype. Similarly, structures withoutapparent purpose, such as male nipples, do not contradictthe claim that all of creation was designed; rather, they arethe result of the application of general archetypes.14 Whe-well was able to use Owen’s archetype theory to counter theview that the anti-plurality position contradicted design inthe following way. The existence of a vast, mostly unpop-ulated universe was not a sign of waste, and hence didnot controvert the design of the universe by a beneficentand powerful God. Rather, Whewell argued, uninhabitedcelestial bodies were products of an overall pattern usedby God in designing the universe. Just as the presence ofseemingly useless male nipples is no evidence against God’sintelligent design, so too the existence of unpopulated plan-ets is no evidence against it. The planets and stars are‘brought into being by vast and general laws’, laws whichare particularly aimed at creating earth as a seat of life,but which also result in the lifeless stars and planets. AsWhewell rather picturesquely put it, ‘the planets and thestars are the lumps which have flown from the potter’swheel of the Great Worker’.15

Whewell was aware that some would claim that thisimage of the universe was one of great waste: a vast spacefilled with empty rocks, devoid of intelligent life in all butone lonely spot. Whewell responded to this concern intwo ways. First, he noted that the universe is filled with‘rudiments’ that never develop, with seeds and germs andembryos that never fulfill their purposes. Given this, it isnot at all inconsistent to imagine that, out of all the heav-enly bodies that we know to exist, only one should havebeen ‘fertile’.16 Further, Whewell argued that the existenceof intelligent life on only one planet is not a ‘waste’,because man is a creation worthy of the whole universe.Not man as he is, but man as he may be—with all of hismoral and intellectual abilities unfolded into actuality.‘The elevation of millions of intellectual, moral, religious,spiritual creatures, to a destiny so prepared, consummated,and developed, is no unworthy occupation of all the capac-ities of space, time, and matter’.17 Man’s nature as a pro-gressive being, endowed with the ‘germs’ for his own self-development, is thus crucial to Whewell’s argument. Whe-well elaborated on this point in his final chapter, which

14 For more on Owen, see Rupke (1994).15 Whewell (2001 [1853]), p. 243.16 Ibid., p. 223.17 Ibid., pp. 246–247.18 Reported by Stephen (1890), p. 1370.19 For more on Whewell’s epistemology, see Snyder (2006), especially Chapte20 For a fuller discussion see Snyder (1994).21 These chapters are reprinted in Whewell (2001 [1853]), pp. 247–347.22 See Whewell (1860), Chs. 30 and 31.

contained his speculations on the future history of manon earth. His argument for the special nature of man,and his worth as the sole end of creation—especially whenman has fully unfolded his intellectual and moral capabil-ities—invited the famous sneer that, in his book, Whewellhad tried to prove that ‘through all infinity, there was noth-ing as great as the Master of Trinity’.18

4. The development of Whewell’s philosophy

Another reason for Whewell’s shift on the plurality issuehas to do with two central developments in his philosophybetween 1833 and 1853. As we have seen, by 1853 Whewellhad come to believe that man’s nature as an intellectualand moral being was inherently progressive. Regardingman’s intellectual faculties, Whewell’s mature epistemologywas founded upon the insight that in order to have knowl-edge we must attend not only to facts of perception, butalso to certain ‘Fundamental Ideas’ in our minds. Theseideas must be clarified and ‘unfolded’ before we can gainany knowledge at all.19 Our apprehension of both empiricaland a priori truths thus requires a certain development inour intellectual faculties. Whewell had not yet workedout this position when he composed the Bridgewater Trea-tise in 1833, though it is clearly indicated in his Philosophy

of the inductive sciences, published seven years later.20 Bythe time he wrote the Plurality of worlds, Whewell wasarguing that our intellectual development consists in ourapproximating closer and closer to the Ideas that exist inthe Divine Mind. Our Creator has given us the ‘germs’ ofthe Divine Ideas, and over time we must attempt to‘unfold’ these germs in order to have knowledge of God’screation (and, to some degree, knowledge of God himself).This view received its most complete exposition in fivechapters originally written for the Plurality, which Whewelldeleted at the very last moment before publication.21 Whe-well took this step on the advice of his friend Sir JamesStephen, who had been Regius professor of history atCambridge since 1849. (Stephen was concerned that thesechapters were too ‘metaphysical’ for the general reader.)Whewell fully incorporated this view into his generalepistemology in the last volume of the final edition of thePhilosophy of the inductive sciences, published in 1860.22

From the mid-30s through the 40s, when he became Pro-fessor of Moral Philosophy (and then Master of Trinity),Whewell focused some of his attention on moral philoso-phy and educational policy. He developed a view of ourmoral nature similar to that of our intellectual faculty,

r 2.

588 L.J. Snyder / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 38 (2007) 584–592

holding that there is a progressive development of certainmoral ideas such as justice, benevolence, and so on. Ashumans we all have the germs of these ideas within us,and so we are each capable of this development, but moralachievement, like intellectual attainment, requires a partic-ular kind of historical process, one in which the moral ideasare carefully unfolded and clarified. During these two dec-ades, Whewell published several works arguing that theproper kind of education was required in order for thisunfolding of man’s moral and intellectual faculties to takeplace.23

Whewell’s focus, in the 30s and 40s, on the progressivenature of man’s intellectual and moral faculties, helpsexplain his growing concern with revealed religion in theearly 50s, when he began working on the Plurality of

worlds. Both the special nature of man, and man’s privi-leged relationship to God, were indicated for Whewell byman’s progressive nature. Only man is a developmentalbeing; animals do not progress intellectually or morally.Since man is special in this way, it is highly unlikely thatother beings like men exist elsewhere in the universe. AsWhewell explained,

animal life implies no progress in the species. Such asthey are in one century, they are in another . . . But arace which makes a progress in the development of itsfaculties, cannot thus, or at least cannot thus with thesame ease, be conceived as existing through all time,and under all circumstances . . .24

Humans are distinctive in their developmental nature;hence the fact that humans exist on earth is no reason tobelieve similar life forms exist elsewhere.

Not only does our progressive nature show us to have aspecial place in God’s creation, but it also signifies that wehave a privileged relationship to God. By clarifying andexplicating our Fundamental Ideas, these ideas can cometo approximate more closely to the Divine Ideas in themind of God. In this way our intellectual nature comesto resemble, though in a faint way, the Divine Mind. Whe-well argued as well that our existence as moral beings, whoare capable of progress in our moral faculties, leads us tobelieve that God is our ‘Moral Governor’, in the sense ofproviding moral guidance to us. There is no reason to sug-gest that God plays a similar role to other creatures. Whe-well explained that

God is seen to be the Moral Governor of man, by evi-dence which is derived from the character of man; andwhich we could not attempt to apply to any other crea-ture than man, without making our words altogetherunmeaning . . . Except we can point our something more

23 For example, see Whewell (1837, 1845).24 Whewell (2001 [1853]), p. 36.25 Ibid., p. 41.26 Ibid., pp. 44–45.27 For more on the connection between Whewell and Bacon, see Snyder (19928 See Herschel (1841).

solid than this [i.e., the evidence that we have], to reasonfrom, on such subjects, there is no use in our attemptingto reason at all. Our doctrines must [then] be mereresults of invention and imagination.25

Moreover, the incarnation and redemption—the mostprovidential of God’s actions—seem inconsistent with apluralist outlook. Whewell explained that

the earth . . . cannot, in the eyes of any one who acceptsthis Christian faith, be regarded as being on a level withany other domiciles. It is the Stage of the great Drama ofGod’s Mercy and Man’s Salvation. . . This being thecharacter which has thus been conferred upon it, howcan we assent to the assertions of Astronomers, whenthey tell us that it is only one among millions of similarhabitations?26

Chalmers had attempted to deal with this difficulty byarguing that intelligent inhabitants of other worlds werenot in need of salvation. Other religious proponents of plu-rality had claimed that God may have sent Christ to differ-ent worlds as well. Whewell had not fully addressed theseclaims in the Bridgewater Treatise, a book concerned withnatural theology rather than revealed religion; he now dis-missed them as ‘conjectures and imaginations’.

The second aspect of Whewell’s philosophy relevant tothe movement towards an anti-pluralist viewpoint is thecoalescence of his scientific methodology in the mid-1830sto the 1840s, and the consolidation of his role as a scientificexpert. From his early days at university, Whewell wasenthralled by the idea of ‘renovating’ the inductive method-ology of Francis Bacon.27 The methodology he eventuallydeveloped was one which took into account both theempirical, perception-based part of knowledge and the apriori, idea-based part, thus emulating Bacon’s call forthe epistemologist to take a ‘middle path’ between the roleof the ant, which merely collects empirical facts, and thespider, which merely spins thoughts out of his own ratio-nality. In a famous Aphorism from the Novum organum,Bacon claimed that the scientist should be instead likethe bee, which gathers pollen and then creates somethingnew, the honey, from both what was external (facts) andhis inner nature (ideas). Unlike many other readers ofBacon in the nineteenth century, Whewell focused on thisdual aspect of his epistemology, this via media betweenempiricism and idealism. Whewell was criticized for this;even Herschel chastised him for imparting an idealist com-ponent to British philosophy of science.28 According toWhewell, it was necessary to use an inductive discoveryprocess—one that involved the ideas of the mind as well

9, 2006 esp. pp. 67–82).

L.J. Snyder / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 38 (2007) 584–592 589

as the perceptions of the external world—in order to arriveat scientific theories.

In the Plurality, it is impossible to overlook the vastnumber of disparaging comments regarding the ‘conjec-tures’, the ‘arbitrary hypotheses’ and ‘imaginative inven-tions’, involved in the plurality position. His argument inthe important middle chapters, on geology and astronomy,was clearly designed to counter the view of scientific rea-soning as involving this kind of guesswork. He noted theimportance of distinguishing between ‘astronomical dis-coveries’ and ‘cosmological conjectures’, and he pointedout the distinction between ‘real and imaginary discov-ery’.29 The arguments of the plurality proponents are char-acterized as being based on ‘wild imagination’, built fromassumptions which are merely ‘bold guesses’.30 The plural-ity position is a ‘rash and unphilosophical’ doctrine.31 Hewas particularly incensed with those who claim that theuniversal laws of matter do not hold on distant worlds,without any evidence for this assumption. ‘For if we beginto imagine new and unknown laws of nature for thoseabodes’, Whewell cautioned, ‘what is there to limit ordetermine our assumptions in any degree? What extrava-gant mixtures of the attributes and properties of mindand matter may we not then accept as probable truths?’32

Whewell was quite concerned to point out that correct sci-entific reasoning does not proceed in such ways, and indeedprecludes these kinds of imaginative conjectures.

Although he was certainly not Whewell’s main target,Herschel may well have been on Whewell’s mind when hewrote these methodological passages. Whewell had criti-cized Herschel years before for seeming to endorse amethod involving ‘gratuitous theorizing’, or ‘bold leaps’to hypotheses, rather than careful, step by step inductivereasoning.33 Whewell was perhaps also thinking of theScottish physicist David Brewster, who had disparagedWhewell years before for not recognizing that scientific dis-coveries are the result of ‘pure accident’.34 Both Herscheland Brewster endorsed methodologies that seemed to Whe-well to involve conjectures and guesswork. Perhaps notcoincidentally, Herschel and Brewster each also supportedthe plurality of worlds. Although Herschel made his dis-agreement with Whewell on the plurality question knownprivately, in the letter cited earlier, Brewster’s responsewas quite public. He wrote a scathing review of Whewell’sPlurality of worlds; so scathing, in fact, that even Whewell(who was certainly used to being reviewed in a negativelight) wondered in a letter to Roderick Murchison, ‘why

29 Whewell (2001 [1853]), pp. 101, 122.30 Ibid., pp. 139 and 165–167.31 Ibid., p. 261.32 Ibid., pp. 228–229.33 See Whewell (1831), p. 399.34 Brewster (1837), p. 121.35 Whewell to Murchison, 30 May 1854, Cambridge, Trinity College, O.15.436 For more on the debate between Whewell and Brewster on this issue, see37 Brewster (1870 [1854]), p. 73; cited in Crowe (1999), p. 303.38 Whewell (2001 [1853]), p. 182.

is he so savage?’35 This review was followed by a book—equally savage in its personal attacks against Whewell—arguing for the plurality position, entitled, More worlds

than one: The creed of the philosopher and the hope of the

Christian.36 In this work, Brewster made a number ofextreme and unsupportable claims, including that Jupiteris inhabited by beings with ‘a type of reason of which theintellect of Newton is the lowest degree’.37 In contrast tothese types of wild suppositions, Whewell had argued ina much more careful manner. In considering Jupiter, forexample, Whewell drew heavily upon Herschel’s discussionin his Treatise on astronomy. According to Whewell, theobservational evidence pointed to Jupiter being composedmainly of water and water vapor. Moreover, given theknown density of the planet, gravity on its surface wouldbe 2.5 times that on earth; therefore it is not likely thatany inhabitants could have a skeletal system. Thus, Whe-well argued, if there were any life on Jupiter it must consistin ‘cartilaginous and glutinous masses; peopling the waterswith minute forms’.38 To assume without any evidence thatsuch life did exist, and that it had intelligence surpassingour own, was merely a matter of conjecture, the very kindthat Whewell wanted to expunge from science. The contro-versy between Whewell and Brewster became known to thegeneral reading public, though not necessarily for theirmethodological dispute. Two years after Brewster’s bookwas published, the controversy features in Trollope’s Bar-

chester Towers. Just before a moonlit stroll, Charlotte, awoman who is described as ‘knowing a little about every-thing’ (a charge often leveled at Whewell himself), asksthe young widow Eleanor, ‘Are you a Whewellite or aBrewsterite?’ Eleanor admits that ‘I have not read any ofthe books, but I feel sure that there is one man in the moonat least, if not more’. Charlotte’s brother Bertie chimes in,‘you don’t believe in the pulpy gelatinous matter?’ After abrief consideration of the topic, the three go off on theirwalk.

Interestingly, in the Bridgewater Treatise, Whewell hadadmitted that the doctrine of plurality was a mere ‘conjec-ture’, but did not reject it out of hand, and was willing touse it as evidence for his design argument. By 1853, how-ever, Whewell’s position was quite different. As one ofthe recognized authorities on science in the country, Whe-well felt the need to characterize publicly the correct formof scientific reasoning, and to put thinking about extrater-restrial life back on a scientific track. Thus, while Herscheland Brewster could endorse the claim (at least as a scientific

7, f. 311; cited in Crowe (1999), p. 300.Brooke (1977) and Crowe (1999), Chapter 7.

590 L.J. Snyder / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 38 (2007) 584–592

hypothesis awaiting confirmation) that there were ‘Jupiteri-ans and Saturnians’, Whewell rejected the postulation ofmere ‘imaginations’, until there were inductive groundsfor inferring them. Indeed, one of the reasons for writinghis book was to show that this was the proper attitude totake towards the issue.

5. Evidence from geology and astronomy

As part of his campaign against ‘conjectures’ in the Plu-

rality of worlds, Whewell particularly focused on the so-called ‘scientific analogies’ being used to argue for the plu-rality position. As he explained,

the analogies in favor of ‘other worlds’ are (to say theleast) greatly exaggerated. And by taking account ofwhat astronomy really teaches us, and what we alsolearn from other such sciences, I shall attempt to reducesuch ‘analogies’ to their true value.39

The most common argument in favor of plurality appealedto analogy: since our planet is but one of many similarcelestial bodies, and ours has intelligent life, surely someof the others must have it as well. Somewhat surprisingly,Whewell’s first line of attack against this analogy is viaan examination of geology, not astronomy. Whewell re-viewed the claims of geology regarding the age of the earthand the extinction of species. Geological science has shown,Whewell noted, that the earth has probably existed for mil-lions of millions of years.40 Whewell adduced the evidenceof the different strata which make up mountain ranges, not-ing that each layer must have required a long period oftime for its formation.41 He gave many details of the recentdiscoveries of Roderick Murchison, Whewell’s friendAdam Sedgwick, and others, illustrating the different stratafound in various parts of Britain.42 These investigations ofstrata, and of the fossils contained within them, show thatthe earth has passed through successive stages of organiclife. ‘The tribes of animals which are found petrified inour rocks’, Whewell explained,

are almost all different, so far as our best natural histo-rians can determine, from those which now live in ourexisting seas . . . The creatures which we find thus imbed-ded in our mountains, are not only dead as individuals,but extinct as species.43

39 Ibid., p. 49.40 See ibid., pp. 68–76.41 Ibid., pp. 58–59.42 Ibid., pp. 61–62.43 Ibid., p. 59.44 See Todhunter (1876), Vol. 2, p. 111.45 Whewell (1833), pp. 73–74.46 Whewell (2001 [1853]), p. 77.47 Ibid., pp. 91 ff.48 Ibid., p. 81.49 Ibid., p. 105.50 Ibid., p. 107.

Indeed, there are different strata, the Pliocene, Miocene,and Eocene—terms Whewell himself had invented in183144—which contain fossils of decreasing numbers ofspecies still living, showing that the existing forms of or-ganic life have supplanted a different population previouslyexisting on the earth, by a very gradual process.45

Whewell next noted that

the best geologists and natural historians have not beenable to devise any hypothesis to account for the succes-sive introduction of these new species into the earth’spopulation; except the exercise of a series of acts ofcreation.46

He flatly denied the ‘speculation’, which he claimed to be‘destitute of proof’, of the transmutation of one species intoanother. This is especially important in considering theappearance of man on earth, which was a fairly recentoccurrence, according to the fossil evidence.47 Againappealing to his earlier claim of the special, progressivenature of man, Whewell drew an absolute distinction be-tween man and beast. This distinction is based not onlyon the developmental aspect of man—unlike animals,man has the ‘capacity of progress’, both in his intellectualand moral faculties48—but also on the fact of man’s ratio-nality. Animals have only instinct, while man has reason.

Whewell used this geological discussion to argue againstthe plurality analogy in the following way. Whewellpointed out that there is certainly an ‘analogy’ betweenthe past and the present state of earth—much more so thanthe analogy between earth and Jupiter, or earth and anyunseen, postulated planet orbiting around a distant star.Nevertheless, there were no intelligent beings in the pasthistory of earth. In the same way that one period of timewhich resembles another in physical circumstances doesnot necessarily resemble it in the character of its popula-tion, one world which resembles ours in physical circum-stances (even if any did) would not necessarily resemble itin the character of its population.49 Indeed, this geologicalconsideration leads to an analogy with a quite differentconclusion:

the analogy of nature . . . appears to be, that thereshould be inferior, as well as superior, provinces in theuniverse; and that the inferior may occupy an immenselylarger portion of time that the superior; why not then ofspace?50

L.J. Snyder / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 38 (2007) 584–592 591

Just as ‘the earth, as the habitation of man, is . . . a speck atthe end of an infinity of time’, so too may it be a ‘a speck inthe midst of an infinity of space’.51

Whewell then turned to a consideration of astronomicalevidence, showing that it also tended to support the anti-pluralist position. Here too, Whewell focused on the anal-ogy used by pluralist proponents in favor of their position.Whewell argued that astronomical research had shown thatthe earth was not analogous to the nebulae, the fixed stars,and the other planets orbiting our sun. To take one exam-ple, in his chapter on the nebulae, Whewell discussed recentdiscoveries by Lord Rosse and John Herschel particularlyrelevant to the plurality question. In the 1840s, Rossehad been able, with the use of a large telescope, to resolvesome nebulous matter into stars. This caused many astron-omers to claim that all nebulous matter could be soresolved, if telescopes with high enough optical strengthwere available. Many people believed that this implied thatthere were millions and millions more stars, each of whichcould potentially be orbited by a planetary system. How-ever, as Whewell noted, Herschel’s observations of theMagellanic Clouds had shown that some nebulous matterwhich cannot be resolved was equally distant to us as somenebulous matter that could be resolved; this led Whewell tobelieve that not all nebulous matter was composed ofstars.52 Moreover, even if all nebulous matter could oneday be resolvable into ‘shining dots’, this would not entailthat these dots were stars similar to our sun. To claim thatthese ‘dots’ were analogous to our sun required a ‘very

bold’ assumption.53 After a detailed discussion of otherrecent investigations, including Rosse’s discovery of ‘spiralnebulae’, Whewell concludes that

we appear to have good reason to believe that nebulaeare vast masses of incoherent or gaseous matter, ofimmense tenuity, diffused in forms more or less irregu-lar, but all of them destitute of any regular system ofsolid moving bodies.54

(Whewell’s theory of the nebulae gained support in the1860s, when Huggins used the spectroscope to show thatmany nebulae, such as Orion, could not be resolved intostars, and that in fact they were giant gas clouds.)55 Hencethe nebulae are quite unlike our solar system, and the anal-ogy of the pluralists fails for these bodies.

Given these the many pages of the Plurality devoted todiscoveries in geology and astronomy, we might well won-der to what extent new findings in these sciences influencedWhewell’s move towards an anti-pluralist position. In the

51 Ibid., pp. 99–100.52 Ibid., pp. 118–120.53 Ibid., p. 121.54 Ibid., p. 138.55 Crowe (1999), p. 286.56 Whewell (1832), pp. 104, 106.57 Ibid., p. 108.58 See ibid., pp. 119, 125.

case of geology, much of the evidence adduced by Whewellin discussing the immense age of the earth, the long dura-tion before man appeared, and the successive appearanceof other species, many now extinct, was already knownto Whewell at the time he wrote the Bridgewater Treatise.In fact, most of the discoveries described by Whewell in hisgeological chapters had already been discussed by him inhis reviews of the first two volumes of Lyell’s Principles

of geology; these reviews appeared in 1831 and 1832, beforethe publication of the Bridgewater Treatise. For example,in his 1832 review, Whewell referred to the important dis-covery that ‘the organic species which the earth contains,offer a series of genera and species, so far fixed and con-stant, that they enable us to distinguish and identify thesuccessive beds’ or strata; moreover, Whewell noted thatthese strata represent different periods of time, and ‘eachof many periods appears to have had its own Flora andFauna’.56 He remarked that the earth has existed for atleast millions of years,57 and he accepted the extinctionof species.58 So there were no major additions to the geo-logical evidence that could be cited as a reason for thechange in Whewell’s view.

On the other hand, in the case of astronomy there wassome new evidence relevant to the plurality issue. The dis-coveries of both Herschel, regarding the Magellanic Cloud,and Rosse, regarding spiral nebulae, had been made afterthe publication of the Bridgewater Treatise. Thus it is pos-sible that new findings in astronomy may have influencedWhewell’s change of opinion to some degree. (Indeed,Whewell’s perception of the importance of Lord Rosse’sdiscovery of the spiral nebulae is indicated by the fact thathe placed drawings of them on the frontispiece of the Plu-

rality.) While working on successive editions of his History

of inductive sciences, Whewell ensured that his knowledgeof various sciences was very up-to-date, and his closefriendship with Herschel caused Whewell to follow Her-schel’s discoveries closely. Even before turning his atten-tion to the plurality issue, Whewell would have beenaware of these discoveries.

Yet, again, besides in the chapter on the nebulae, muchof the astronomical evidence discussed in the work hadbeen known for quite some time, even prior to the writingof the Bridgewater Treatise; thus it seems unlikely that thenew findings in astronomy were the major motivation forWhewell’s move to the anti-plurality position. Neverthe-less, the fact that both geology and astronomy gave no evi-dence in favor of the plurality of worlds, and some evidenceagainst it, was certainly significant for Whewell. As we saw

592 L.J. Snyder / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 38 (2007) 584–592

earlier, Whewell held throughout his career that therecould be no real contradiction between science and reli-gion, and that apparent conflicts were often caused by mis-interpretations of religious doctrines. Had it been the casethat scientific evidence pointed towards plurality, Whewellwould likely have considered whether his belief thatrevealed religion was opposed to this position was correct.But science, in his view, argued against the plurality ofworlds.

6. Conclusion

We have seen that, for Whewell, philosophical, religious,and scientific issues were intertwined in his thinking aboutextraterrestrial life. Because the scientific evidence couldnot absolutely decide the issue (though it seemed to argueagainst it), Whewell saw that one inevitably brought philo-sophical and religious ideas to bear. His Plurality was per-haps unique in his time for its clearheaded recognition ofthis inevitability, and his attempt to examine separatelythe different strands of argumentation.

Interestingly, there was also a socio-political element tothis issue for Whewell. He hints at this towards the end ofthe Plurality. In a discussion of the possible future state ofman on earth, Whewell noted that

If we were to conceive a Universal and Perpetual Peaceto be established among the nations of the earth . . . andif we were to suppose, further, that those nations shouldemploy all their powers and means in fully unfolding theintellectual and moral capacities of their members, byearly education, constant teaching, and ready help inall ways; we might then, perhaps, look forward to a stateof the earth in which it should be inhabited, not indeedby a being exalted above Man, but by Man exaltedabove himself as he now is.59

Whewell here suggested that his concern about the plural-ity debate was, in part, one that many people have raised inmore recent years: by concentrating on seeking the condi-tions of life in the heavens, we may ignore the conditionsfor a good life here on earth. Even without the existenceof intelligent beings on other worlds, Whewell stressed,we could bring about a condition in which God was notthe ‘Lord only of the Ruffians and Fiends’.

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