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Through the Middle Ages, the specific characteristics of nature were ignored. Instead, nature was viewed as operating according to larger, divine truths. Lion cubs, for example, were viewed as born dead and coming alive on the third day in order to symbolize the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And into the 1300s, philosophically-minded mystics were trying to grasp the whole. But there were people defying these traditions. Influenced by nominalism, or by science, a few people were investigating specific aspects of nature.
Religion had provided meaning for that what otherwise would appear as no more than chaos. The rise of science was providing an understanding that was intruding into explanations of things. People were learning from scientists about the causes of disease, and a few were eager to improve public health. In the 1840s in Britain, sewage was still being collected in buckets, and the basements of many tenement houses were knee-deep in excrement. In rural areas people were piling sewage into heaps, and, being accustomed to dung, when they moved to the more crowded city they tolerated the excrement there. And the cities were not collecting garbage, despite the belief that people contacted diseases by breathing in bad odors.
Jeremy Bentham (who died in 1832) had believed in public programs and science, and a man who had been one of Bentham's assistants, Edwin Chadwick, advocated government action in behalf of public health. In 1842 he published a report that connected disease with an unsanitary environment. Britain's middleclass was opposed to any such public program, but this was overcome and the Public Health Act of 1848 was passed, which included the establishment of a board of health. And following Chadwick's lead, public health measures spread to the United States, France and Germany.
Microorganisms had been discovered in the 1670s by a Dutchman using a microscope, and now, almost 200 years later, it was learned that cholera was produced by the kind of microorganism called bacteria, which attached to people's intestines and produced a toxin. Cholera was killing thousands every year in Britain. The Thames River, which flowed through London, supplied people with drinking water and was also glutted with untreated sewage. By the 1850s, it was realized that cholera in London was being spread by the people of London drinking the contaminated water of the Thames.
Knowledge of bacteria spreading disease inspired greater cleanliness. Hospital floors had been covered with sawdust to soak up blood and other matter. Doctors had not been washing their hands and had been passing disease from patient to patient. Twenty-five to thirty percent of British women giving birth had been dying.
In 1848 in Britain, for every 1,000 persons 13 died from a disease carried by micro-organisms. Typhus, a disease spread by lice bites, was killing many as were measles, smallpox and respiratory tuberculosis. People were not living long enough for a higher percentage of deaths from the diseases common to older age, such as cancer and heart degeneration.
It was discovered that the human body was always at war with invasions from outside the body and that the body developed immunities. Virtually all city dwellers in Europe were exposed to tuberculosis, but only a small percentage died from the disease. Vaccines were invented to strengthen immunity. Vaccination was applied to combat smallpox. It was smallpox that concerned the inventor of vaccination, Edward Jenner (1749-1823). By 1835 in Britain, vaccination was mandatory for all. And vaccination became mandatory for all Germans during a small pox epidemic in 1874. But vaccination was resisted by some Protestants and by the Catholic Church. In countries predominately Catholic, death rates remained higher than in Britain. In the 1700s, smallpox had been as widespread as cancer would be in the late 1900s, when smallpox would be all but defeated.
Another advance in medicine, and dentistry, was the use of narcotics to reduce pain. In 1846 was the first amputation of a limb - a leg - with the patient under anesthesia.
In Britain early in the 1800s the study of geology contributed to a revolution in how people viewed the world. The Geological Society of London was created in 1807, its founders expressing their desire to avoid preconceived notions and to collect facts for discussion. Geologists had been describing their findings in a way compatible with Biblical scripture. They had been explaining the formation of mountains and other distributions of earth according to the catastrophic theory of geological change - change as the result of sudden upheavals, including a flood thought to have covered the entire globe - a view compatible with the prevailing belief that the earth was about 6,000 years old.
In the early 1830s a British geologist, Charles Lyell, tried to make sense of what he was seeing in geological formations. He proposed that volcanic activity, earthquakes and erosion had slowly been remodeling the earth's surface, and for this he supplied empirical evidence. His Elements of Geology, published in 1838, became a standard work in stratigraphical and palaeontological geology. Lyell and his successors found no evidence of a flood that had been world wide and Lyell's theory of change required an earth much older than 6,000 years. It took 6,000 years for just one inch of limestone to build.
Lyell's views on geology reached a 21-year-old collecting beetles in the Americas - Charles Darwin. Darwin was thinking about species changing with their environment. He was trying to make sense of mockingbirds on one island in the Galapagos differing from the mockingbirds on another island and his awareness that South America had only one specie of mockingbird. He thought maybe the different species of mockingbird had a common ancestor and that maybe species evolved (transmuted). In 1838, Darwin devised his theory of natural selection: that across a broad span of time a member of a specie might reproduce a creature with a new trait that survives and reproduces, creating a new species. This was heresy among those who believed all species were basically the same as when God made them.
Rudimentary theories of evolution had been around a long time, and as recent as that of the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamark (1744-1829). Darwin worked on it quietly. Then in 1858 the biologist Alfred Russel Wallace sent him an essay describing a similar theory, so Darwin had a book published, in 1859, entitled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. In the book, Darwin made one long argument, with empirical support, that changes in creatures was more than one creature changing and another creature changing, that it was a group phenomenon, the creation of a new group of creatures.
Darwin and his contemporaries did not know of genetic mutations. Like other theories drawn empirically his theory was imperfect. It was rudimentary approximation, but Darwin gained supporters. And Darwin and his supporters were criticized by people who believed in God‘s perfect plan. A public debate arose, including the well-known exchange in 1860 between an Anglican bishop, Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley, a student of natural history. It was Huxley who began using the term agnostic, meaning not having knowledge in spiritual matters – some of Darwin’s critics believing Huxley's self-characterization appropriate.
Moving further from science as method into the realm of philosophy, atheists picked up the theory of evolution as an argument against the long-standing theory among the religious that creation was the work of intelligent design. Atheists rejected the old notion of the physical world as the work of godly magic. rather than clone-like uniformity they saw something like a random lack of uniformity. Atheists found in the theory of evolution a view of humanity existing only because circumstances allowed it, rather than those circumstances having been created so that humanity could exist. And atheists preferred to think of bodily functions and desires that humans had in common with other creatures as not just an accident of nature, godly whim or a punishment as described in the ancient fable of Adam and Eve, but as a development that made life possible.
For some people of faith it was easier to imagine the creation of species as sudden and miraculous rather than to imagine development across millions of years. Those among them who believed in the scientific method complained that the theory of evolution was faulty because it had gaps, and they filled those gaps with their certainties about the miraculous. But some persons of faith accepted Darwin’s theory, opting for a view of godly intension behind all of the variation and change that atheists viewed as a happenstance.
Earlier in the century, a Frenchman, Auguste Comte (1798-1857) advocated a philosophy that tied together everything that was knowable through the senses - the error of leaving out God that would be described by Pius IX. Comte believed that history had passed through stages of religiosity and was coming into what he called the positivist stage, an age of science.
Compte lumped together history and politics, biology and anything else that could be studied empirically into what he called sociology. His sociology consisted of observation and it consisted of experimentation such as altering a segment of society to study its effects. Also it consisted of comparative research, such as animal societies compared to human society and comparing different human societies around the globe. By using sociology, he believed, a new and stable society could be created on scientific principles.
The sociologists who followed Compte were less optimistic about their discipline producing the perfect society. Among them was a British philosopher, Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), an avowed "agnostic."who was influenced by Compte and had been an evolutionist before Darwin's publication of Origins of the Species, but without an effective theory of natural selection. Spencer wrote of organisms developing from simple to more complex forms and spoke of this as progress. Spencer, not Darwin, coined the phrase "survival of the fittest," and Darwin, in later editions of his Origins of the Species employed Spencer's phrase.
Spencer believed that human behavior was primarily organized toward self-preservation. He assumed that societies had formed by individuals coming together for mutual self-defense and that they remained tied together by a natural sympathy and concern for each other. Humans, he believed, had an innate sense of morality and had developed a compassion for their fellow humans that extended beyond the family unit. Spencer believed that men were political creatures, that no man was an island. Like Aristotle, he believed that societies functioned best when they allowed a degree of liberty to individuals. The only liberty that should be restricted, he held, was that which was necessary to preserve liberty in general.
Spencer's belief in the fittest fit well with the free-wheeling capitalism of his day. He is said to have delayed factory inspections and various labor laws. The state, he believed, should not be involved in education, religion, the economy or in providing any kind of welfare. He believed in cold science and heaped scorn upon the study of the liberal arts.
Recommended Books
Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin
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Copyright © 2003-2005 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.
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