Abstract

Modern coherent disciplines like physics or linguistics were born in the earlier 19th century, as was the idea of science as systematic, ever-ongoing research.The fundamental background for what happened was the manpower needs of states, both in administration and in production. That called for modernization of the higher educational system, and led to the creation of technical high-schools and the transformation of universities, in which henceforth teaching as well as learning were to be based on research. The former type was exemplified by the French École Polytechnique (founded 1794), the latter by the Prussian university reform (1809), but both were emulated elsewhere. These institutions, apart from research, produced “the modern engineer”, the high-level practitioner trained in the scientific knowledge of his own days.In the sciences the outcome was a strong expansion – first of knowledge, next also of the number of sub-disciplines, kept together however by the ideal of unified science (together with a historicist approach the main legacy of Romanticism in the sciences) but also by necessity if scientific knowledge should be applicable. Both contributing to the formation of sub-disciplines and a counter-acting force was a new, more democratic institution: the scientific congress.Most impressive was the explosion of knowledge in the natural sciences (to which we may count mathematics since the later 17th century). This, coupled to undreamed technological advances (steam power in general use, new chemical technologies, electric power, etc.) made the second half of the century see itself as an age of science (and, with pride, of imperialism).Ideologically, the most important breakthrough was probably Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of “natural selection” (certainly often misunderstood then as now). For human practical life, new mechanical and chemical technologies were much more important; so was also the germ theory for medicine (in itself, and in its assistance to social medicine).The latter, more than Darwinism (which came relatively late and remained disputed), inspired one strand in the human and social sciences to be come equally objective (in the language of the time, just as ambiguous, “positive”). They were also the inspiration for the phenomenon of “popular” (as opposed to popularized) science: movements representing “our own science”, just as good as that of the scholarly mandarins, such as phrenology, Mesmerism – and even social Darwinism and eugenics.A first text group represents the development of evolutionary thought in biology and geology, from Lamarck and Cuvier to Lyell and Darwin, and also includes Claude Bernard’s non-evolutionary but vitalist thought. A second group illustrates historicist thinking in human and social sciences (Ranke on historiography, Marx on class formation as a social process, Taine’s environmentalist history of literature, Saussure on sound shift laws, Engels on cultural anthropology).Excerpts from Clausewitz’s On War illustrates how military thought was shaped as social engineering.Mathematical and exact sciences are represented by text excerpts from Niels Henrik Abel (the new request for mathematical rigour), Mary Somerville (on the unity of the physical sciences), William Thomson and Peter Guthrie (on the understanding of experiments), and finally John Dalton’s atomic theory. It is closed by Tyndall’s Belfast address, which integrates Darwinism and physical science in a general view of the world.Last comes Jevons’s early formulation of marginalist economic theory – no stringent analysis but certainly efficient as an ideology.