There are many levels at which science and religion can he seen to interact. Yet commentators have usually discussed this interaction in terms of key concepts that bridge scientific theories and theological propositions. For example, Francis Oakley and others have demonstrated the role of voluntaristic theology in early modern science.1 Although this bridging strategy deserves a central place within the science-religion domain, it should not exclude other approaches. One of the aims of this chapter is to move the focus away from the history of ideas and instead engage the life and experience of the individual, since it is through our life experiences that we directly engage both science and religion. If the self is accepted as a site worthy of study, then biography offers an appropriate genre for understanding the construction of science-religion relationships.

In writing biography the historian or biographer seeks to identify the various strands that mould the biographical subject. Religious background and sensibilities are often accorded prominence; indeed, contributors to the New Dictionary of National Biography are instructed to include information on their subjects' affiliation and degree of religious adherence. For a scientist a further important constituent will be the choice of career and research topic, together with the pressures generated in pursuing a life in science. Biography has also to engage the social and political currents that toss the individual. Both unities and disjunctions are often revealed as we witness the unfolding of an individual's life. Thus through biography we might come to appreciate the existential tensions encountered by scientists as they struggle to cope with the demands made both by science and by religion. Equally, both the theory and practice of science may express a person's celebration of God through the appreciation of lawlikeness and harmony perceived in the universe.

Despite the widespread popularity of biographies among the book buying public, some academics remain rather reticent towards them, Until recently many historians of science eschewed scientific biography, perhaps considering it a genre more suited to retired scientists than to sophisticated scholars. For example, Alexandre Koyré, whose idealist and anti-Marxist views profoundly influenced the post-war generation of British and American historians, wrote extensively on Newton and Galileo but never attempted a biography of either. His most celebrated article, which is entitled ‘The significance of the Newtonian synthesis’, contained the absolute minimum of biographical detail about Newton. Instead, Koyré argued incisively that Newton's significance lay in his mathematisation of the cosmos and he particularly directed attention to Newton's innovative ways of conceptualising space, time and causality.2 In Koyré's hands ‘Newton’ was not a person, in the conventional sense, but a peg from which to hang a clutch of scientific theories and metaphysical notions. Although Koyré's idealist approach was later challenged by a new generation of sociologically-informed historians they also downplayed biography but for a very different reason. They conceived individual lives subsumed within and explained by broader social and institutional forces. Despite being concerned with social background, these social historians of science tended to portray Newton or Darwin as cyphers representing certain social interests. More recent fashions, such as deconstruction and the analysis of ‘laboratory life’, have likewise decentred scientific biography.

However, over the last decade or two there has been a greater willingness to accept biography as an exacting genre that raises a host of demanding historiographical problems. Several academic meetings have recently been held on the subject and the first volume of collected essays devoted specifically to analysing scientific biography was published in 1996.3 There are also some excellent exemplars in print, such as Richard Westfall's portrait of ‘restless’ Newton, Janet Browne's insightful treatment of Darwin's personality, the more heady politicised account of Darwin by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, and the portrayal of Lord Kelvin as the son of industrial Glasgow, by Crosbie Smith and Norton Wise.4 All these biographies are weighty tomes. Indeed, to portray adequately a rich and varied life spanning three score years and ten seems now to require several hundred, if not a thousand, pages. While the thickly-textured approach to biography possesses many advantages, this is not the place to explore the lives of individual scientists in so much depth and detail. Instead the brief biographies offered in this chapter are more akin to pencil sketches than to full-length portraits in oil.

Turning from science to religion we likewise find no shortage of biographies. Indeed, despite the problems of recovery, the lives of Jesus and Mohammed are often accepted as exemplary by the Christian and the Muslim respectively. The lives, thoughts and deeds of religious men and women—from Martin Luther to Martin Luther King, and from Saint Thérèsa to Mother Teresa—have been recounted on numerous occasions.5 While there is no one message to be read from the many volumes of religious biography, the biographical subject's religious experiences and moral attributes are frequently emphasised. Thus to quote James McClendon, biography has a major role to play in Christian theology since the recounting of ‘singular or striking lives… may serve to disclose and perhaps to correct or enlarge the community's moral vision’. McClendon also argues that biography is a proper vehicle to teach Christian ethics by example and thereby transform theology. ‘Biography at its best’, he claims, ‘will be theology.’6 If McClendon's use of biography sails rather too close to hagiography for comfort, many critical, scholarly biographies are to be found in religion as well as in science. It is also interesting to note that the philosopher Richard Rorty has advocated the study of biographies since they ‘take us out of our old selves by the power of strangeness, to aid us in becoming new beings’. Although Rorty adopts a secular position, he, like McClendon, emphasises that reading biographical narratives can be a major source for personal renewal.7

In this chapter we shall illustrate the uses of biography by briefly sketching four Victorian lives: those of an Anglican, a dissent Catholic and an agnostic. Each came from a different religious tradition; each had different educational experiences; each practised a different science and each conceived the science-religion nexus differently. Yet despite these contrasts their life-lines were not so isolated or distinct. They shared the environment of early Victorian Britain and their lives were buffeted by many of the same social, political, religious and scientific forces. Like other contemporary thinkers all four took firm stands on the pressing question of the interrelation between science and religion.8 In this chapter we shall return to Charles Darwin's Origin of Species since its publication in 1859 provides a common locus for these biographical sketches. How our four subjects responded to this widely-discussed book can be understood in terms of their individual biographies.

One final point must be made before we meet these Victorians. Biographers and their publishers sometimes claim that they are offering the ‘definitive biography’ of some well-known character usually a literary lion or a film star. Such a claim implies that the purchaser will be buying the master-narrative that follows the writer or film star from the cradle to the grave (and perhaps beyond). Yet, as with other historical genres, there is no single biographical story but rather a welter of contending narratives. To cite the example of Newton, biographers have offered us Newton the hero of science, Newton the alchemist, Newton the autocrat who orchestrated the Royal Society, Newton the closet theologian who believed that he possessed a special and close personal relationship with God, and, of course, Newton the neurotic.9 Many words may have been written on Newton, but never the last word.

John Tyndall (1820–1893), Agnostic

From a biographical stand-point Tyndall's Protestant Irish background is all-important. His father was an Orangeman and throughout his life John Tyndall consistently supported the Unionist cause. As to religious commitment he was less constant. Although he later related that as a child he was ‘well versed in Scripture; for I loved the Bible, and was prompted by that love to commit large portions of it to memory’,10 he soon found that he could use this sharp mind to score points against Catholicism, which he viewed as the bastion of reaction and oppression. Thus in letters written to his father in 1841 he claimed that he was engaged in refuting the arguments for transubstantiation with the aid of a modicum of logic.11 There are also indications that from early in his career he adopted an anti-supernaturalist position and insisted that humankind should stand on its own without expecting assistance from any divine agency. Having undermined Catholicism to his satisfaction, he then deployed the same critical apparatus to question his own religious tradition and in particular the doctrine of resurrection. As he later recalled, one major doctrinal difficulty was that he could not imagine how the particles composing one human both could be reassembled after having been dispersed at death, subsequently forming many different mixtures or compounds. Thus a particular atom that once formed a person's hand might combine with other atoms to form a flower, and later an insect or a worm. A most extraordinary concourse would be required at the Resurrection to reunite that atom perfectly with its neighbours so as to recompose the original hand. For the young Tyndall such a miracle seemed too far-fetched to be credible.12

His early social experience is also highly relevant. As a young man working with the Ordnance Survey in Preston he was deeply shocked to witness the massacre of a number of impoverished workers by soldiers during a bread riot.13 Shortly thereafter he was sacked from the Survey for complaining about the conditions to which he and other employees were subjected. Fired by ‘a burning zeal against injustice and oppression’, he often aligned himself with the spirit, although not always with the policies, of the radicals.14 Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present was a significant and early influence on Tyndall who particularly sympathised with Carlyle's insistence on the dignity of man and the paramount need to pursue truth. In his later writings he frequently cited Fichte, Goethe, Emerson and particularly Carlyle, with whom he shared a close friendship.15 Carlyle's recognition of the nobility of the human spirit appealed to him greatly: ‘I could see that his contention at bottom always was that the human soul has claims and yearnings that physical science cannot satisfy.’ According to Carlyle, man possesses, the ability to transcend thins mundane life and to participate in the ‘ethical and ideal side of human nature’, which is the source of our strength and moral identity.16 In accepting the ethical and transcendental side of human nature, Tyndall's soul was filled with the ideals of Romanticism, not Christianity.

Coming from a poor family Tyndall entered science by a circuitous route. At the end of the great railway boom he failed to obtain a satisfactory post as a surveyor but was hired in 1847 as a teacher at Queenwood College, which Robert Owen had earlier founded as a Socialist institution. A year later he proceeded to the University of Marburg where he sat at the feet of the eminent chemist Robert Wilhelm von Bunsen and several other leading scientists. By dint of hard work he completed his PhD in two years—rather than the normal three. Tyndall then returned to Queenwood in 1851 desperately seeking a scientific post while trying to make contacts in the scientific community and writing research papers. His break occurred in February 1853 when he delivered a lecture at the Royal Institution which was very well received and brought him to Michael Faraday's attention. Later that year he was hired as its Professor of Natural Philosophy. Although his low salary forced him to accept a great deal of outside work, including the editorship of the Philosophical Magazine, he now possessed a key post in Metropolitan science. He was a paradigm example of the Victorian self-made man.

While working in Marburg Tyndall studied the behaviour of crystals in a magnetic field and related their behaviour to modifications in the crystal's molecular arrangement. His subsequent work on heat and light was likewise directed to elucidating molecular structures. Tyndall increasingly found himself ‘compelled to regard not only crystals, but organic structures, the body of man inclusive, as cases of molecular architecture, infinitely more complex… than those of inorganic nature, but reducible, in the long run, to the same mechanical laws’.17 This was the basis of the materialistic creed that Tyndall espoused so vehemently in his 1874 Presidential Address before the British Association in Belfast.18 For him the cutting edge of science lay in its ability to account for phenomena in terms of material particles and the laws governing their behaviour.

This public and widely-reported Address raised a storm and he was accused of preaching the atheistical doctrine of materialism. Yet such criticism failed to recognise that Tyndall's materialism was restricted to answering questions about the material universe. While the human body is material, Tyndall viewed the soul as decidedly non-materialistic and not reducible to matter. If we concentrate on the issue of materialism we are liable to overlook other religious issues raised by Tyndall's Address. The local context is particularly important since in returning to the country of his birth Tyndall took the opportunity to attack the Catholic authorities' attempts to control their flock by denying them an education in science. His anti-Catholic guns blazing, Tyndall recounted an appeal made the previous year by seventy students and ex-students of the Catholic University of Ireland who complained that the University failed to teach modern developments in the sciences, including the works of Lyell, Darwin and Huxley. Tyndall saw this as a typical example of censorship by the Catholic Church.19

Frequently engaged in skirmishes, Tyndall became a skilled and effective controversialist. On several occasions he crossed swords with that celebrated Glaswegian, William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin. In the midst of one controversy Peter Guthrie Tait, the professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh, wrote to Thomson: ‘I think we ought to crush Tyndall at once… Such a nuisance must be abated, even at the risk of becoming [a] Commissioner of Sewers.’20 This antipathy was exacerbated by their religious differences, especially Tyndall's dismissal of the design argument which both Thomson and Tait considered so important to science. Indeed, when invited to edit William Prout's Bridgewater Treatise he refused, claiming that ‘if no better Deity than this can be purchased for the eight thousand pounds of the Earl of Bridgewater, it is a dear bargain’.21 Yet, despite Tyndall's willingness to publicly challenge organised religion and Christian—especially Catholic—cant and dogma, he counted a number of churchmen among his friends, such as Dean Arthur Stanley, David Brewster, Louis Rendu and Françoise Moigno, the last two being French Catholics. In reviewing J. B. Mozley's 1865 Bampton Lectures on miracles he claimed that ‘It is my privilege to enjoy the friendship of a select number of religious men, with whom I converse frankly upon theological subjects.’22 With characteristic generosity, humour and honesty he subsequently related an unexpected encounter with Canon Henry Liddon, of St. Paul's, who, he claimed, must previously have

pictured me… as a creature with hoofs and horns. But we parted very cordially.… There is something wonderfully kind and sympathetic in the Canon's eye. The world will be better when such men rely upon their natural impulses instead of tacking on to them the tag, rag and bobtail of an impossible religion.23

The main reason why he considered Christianity ‘impossible’ was that it posited an interventionist supernatural being. Instead Tyndall insisted that humankind must be self-sufficient and not look for support from some hypothetical divine hand.

The Yale historian Frank Turner has labelled Tyndall one of the leading Victorian ‘naturalists’—naturalism, in this instance, being contrasted with supernaturalism.24 Another revealing insight into his religious sensibilities can be gained from an early letter to his friend Thomas Archer Hirst in which he reported an encounter with two ‘Methodist fanatics’ who were distributing pamphlets in the street. Although he denied any intellectual sympathy with their religious cause, he admitted deep admiration for ‘the working of that spirit which keeps the world out of mud’.25 Here we see an instance of the power of the human spirit that Tyndall the Romantic found so essential and so congenial. Tyndall's biographers rightly insist that he was not an atheist and instead suggest that he should be labelled an agnostic since he rejected the claims of both scientists and theologians who allowed science to be debased by ungrounded speculations. Yet he also readily admitted that our scientific knowledge is limited and he accepted that an incomprehensible power suffuses all of nature, ourselves included.26 This deeply-held Romantic perception of nature distances Tyndall from Huxley and other more trenchant agnostics who took every opportunity to attack both the institutional and anti-materialistic aspects of religion.

Since most of his research was in physics Tyndall was not directly concerned with the implications of Darwin's theory of evolution for biology. Nevertheless, in a number of his essays and public lectures he championed evolution as a great stride in the search for truth and as a prime example of the freedom of thought. Here was an account of species, humankind included, that required no supernatural cause but was naturalistic through and through. Here also was a fine example of a truly scientific theory firmly underpinned by evidence and analogy. While Tyndall cautioned against claiming too much for the theory, he was bitterly opposed to those theologians who dismissed its powerful insights either from prejudice or from inadequate knowledge of the subject. Darwin's theory was, he claimed, concerned solely with the laws governing the organisation of mailer, particularly the ‘germs’ that give rise to diverse organic forms. The theory had to be assessed critically by rational scientific criteria, against which it would either prove successful or be shown inadequate. He could see no relevant theological objections and argued that evolutionary biologists ‘have as little fellowship with the atheist who says there is no God, as with the theist who professes to know the mind of God’.27

Moreover, as a fellow practitioner, Tyndall respected Darwin for his hard work and intellectual honesty. According to him Darwin ‘shirks no difficulty’ bill ‘moves over the subject with the passionless strength of a glacier’, usually overcoming the objections of his opponents.28 As one of the pioneers of glaciology Tyndall knew just how slowly and unrelentingly glaciers travelled!

St George Jackson Mivart (1827–1900), Catholic

Despite his hostility to Catholicism, Tyndall was certainly correct in pointing out how few Catholics adorned the ranks of British science. Among contemporary Catholic scientists none was better known than St George Jackson Mivart, the Professor of Comparative Anatomy at St Mary's Hospital Medical School in London. Another ardent polemicist, Mivart wrote extensively on the relationship between evolutionary theory and Catholicism but adopted positions and conclusions starkly opposed to Tyndall's.

According to his biographer, Mivart's father, who owned Mivart's Hotel (now Claridges), was a cosmopolitan man with a zest for learning. A Fellow of the Zoological Society, he presented his young son with a copy of Buffon's Histoire Naturelle and also encouraged his boyhood enthusiasm for collecting monkeys and reptiles.29 If his father fostered his scientific leanings, his mother's evangelical commitments nurtured his youthful religious sensibilities. Although brought up in the Anglican communion, in his mid-teens he met a number of Tractarians and was carried on their wave of fervour. However, the aesthetics of architecture seems to have played a major role in driving him towards Catholicism. In particular, young Mivart was inspired by Augustus Pugin's vision of Gothic architecture in the service of Catholicism. Thus his biographer claims, ‘it was the externals of the Church—its rituals, its language and its architecture—which chiefly concerned’ Mivart, while his son stressed that his ‘keen sense of the beauty of Gothic architecture brought him quickly to realize the sublimer beauty of Catholic ritual’.30 After reading Puffin he toured several neo-Gothic Catholic churches, ending at St Chad's, Birmingham, where he received his first communion at the tender age of sixteen and a half. Now unable to proceed with his earlier Intention of entering Oxford he joined several other recent converts at Oscott College, Birmingham, under Nicholas Wiseman's presidency.

Although Mivart later trained as a lawyer, science became his vocation, his two mentors being Richard Owen and Thomas Henry Huxley, who offered exciting but sharply contrasting ways of under standing living organisms. From Owen he learnt his zoology and particularly the skill of identifying structural homologies between the bones of different species. Mivart subsequently pursued this programme in his own research on the comparative anatomy of primates and, like Owen, envisaged archetypal structures reflected in different species. This early passion for architecture and his highly-developed aesthetic sensibility may help explain why he emphasised teleological and architectonic principles in his anatomical researches. The ‘architecture of the universe’ became his subject of study and he readily perceived God as its architect.31 The importance to Mivart of aesthetic judgements in both science and religion is a further illustration of the theme explored in the preceding chapter.

Through Huxley Mivart was drawn into the Darwinian circle and shared in the excitement generated by Darwin's innovative theory. The evidence concerning his attitude to Darwinism in the early 1860s is somewhat contradictory. Although he declared in 1897 that he had initially withheld his vote either for or against the theory of natural selection—‘I was neither its opponent nor convinced it was untenable’—in an earlier article he maintained that he rapidly became ‘a hearty and thoroughgoing disciple of Mr Darwin, and I accepted from him the view that Natural Selection was “the origin of species”’.32 However strong his initial attraction to orthodox Darwinism, he later became its most persistent and able critic. So abrasive were his criticisms that Darwin devoted a new chapter principally to them when the sixth edition was published in 1872.

Why did Mivart change his mind and become Darwin's bitter opponent? In part the answer lies in broader changes within both science and the Catholic Church. Mivart's initial interest in Darwin's theory occurred at a time when many Catholics in Britain were optimistic and looked forward to the Church providing positive encouragement for science. This optimism was, however, short lived In 1863 Pius IX promulgated the Munich Brief that required science to be subservient to theology. Moreover, a conservative backlash within Catholicism resulted in increasing emphasis on scholasticism and on papal infallibility and authority. Mivart, who repeatedly sided with Newman and other liberals, found himself in an increasingly isolated position within the Church and also under mounting pressure to oppose Darwinism. Confronted with these divergent demands Mivart sought a new synthesis between science and religion that would honour both. Yet, he could only achieve this synthesis by rejecting not only the reactionaries within the Catholic Church but also the faction around Huxley who were bent on making anti-religions capital out of the theory of evolution.

A scientifically-literate Catholic priest named William Roberts, who was also on close terms with Huxley, appears to have played a crucial role in Mivart's biography. In 1868 Roberts seems to have persuaded him that evolution is incapable of accounting for the origin of the human mind. Moreover, over the next two or three years Mivart became increasingly concerned that Darwin's theory implied that man and the apes were descended from a common ancestor. Although he had mentioned his disaffection to Huxley two years earlier, Mivart's public declaration of his withdrawal from Darwinian orthodoxy came in 1871 with a hard-hitting review of Darwin's Descent of Man, in the Quarterly Review, and his book On the Genesis of Species.

In the former he argued that although there are a number of apparent continuities between brutes and men, man alone possesses self-consciousness and reasoned thought. In particular he pointed to the moral sense and the use of language as setting man apart from other animals.33 The crux of his argument was that if man were different in type from other species—as Mivart believed he had demonstrated in his anatomical researches—then natural selection was inadequate in explaining the evolution of our minds. He nevertheless acknowledged that evolution could account for our physical form. However, this review also makes manifest his concern that scientists do not overstep their authority. The first half of the article is devoted to showing that Darwin was not infallible—indeed, according to Mivart, he was often inconsistent and even downright wrong. Moreover, he accused Darwin of having largely abandoned the theory of natural selection; instead the mechanism of sexual selection was attributed a far more central role in Darwin's Descent of Man (1871). Mivart was also deeply troubled by the way Darwinism had become the new orthodoxy. Indeed, he complained that ‘starting at first with an avowed hypothesis, [Darwin then] constantly asserts it as an undoubted fact, and claims for it, somewhat in the spirit of a theologian, that it should be received as an article of faith’.34 Science was in danger of becoming a new religion.

On the Genesis of Species, which was based on articles published in a Catholic periodical, enabled Mivart to mount a frontal assault on the mechanism of natural selection, while maintaining that species had undergone change. For example, he raised a forceful objection based on the observation that distinct species sometimes manifest very similar organic structures. Claiming that these species were of independent origin, Mivart argued that their convergence could not be explained solely by the mechanism of natural selection. Moreover, he conceived that natural selection is incompatible with saltationism,35 which he claimed was strongly supported by diverse evidence. Although he was committed to evolutionary change, he argued that natural selection was insufficient to account for the evolution of species and that there must be other forces at work. While acknowledging that external factors were relevant, he believed that ‘an internal power is a great, perhaps the main, determining agent’ for directing changes in organisms and producing convergence to common structures.36

The second aim of his book was to demonstrate that organic change, by whatever mechanism, was perfectly compatible with Catholicism and posed no threat to religion. Thus the widely-perceived conflict between Darwinism and religion ‘has arisen through a misunderstanding’.37 Properly understood, the creation of new species through intermediate law-like causes (as postulated in the theory of evolution) was perfectly compatible with God being the creator of those causes. Hence evolution was ‘Divine action by and through natural laws’.38 While Mivart resented the criticism of evolutionary theory by scientifically illiterate men claiming to speak for theology, he particularly cautioned his readers that Darwin had gained ‘a chorus of more or less completely acquiescing disciples’ who were totally uncritical of the theory.39 Mivart's book was greatly appreciated by his mentor Cardinal Newman who expressed satisfaction in finding that a Catholic had written ‘the first real exposition of the logical insufficiency of Mr Darwin's theory’. Catholics, added Newman, ‘may be better reasoners than [are the] philosophers’.40

The ferocity of Mivart's attack in the Quarterly Review stung Darwin, who took his criticisms personally. Writing to Hooker he claimed that Mivart ‘shows the greatest scorn and animosity towards me.… He makes me the most arrogant, odious beast that ever lived. I cannot understand him; I suppose that accursed religious bigotry is at the root of it.’41 In response to these attacks on Darwin and his henchmen Mivart was marginalised, isolated and bitterly attacked, especially by Huxley who likewise attributed Mivart's opposition to Darwinism to his Catholicism, which Huxley despised. According to another member of their circle, Huxley intended ‘to “pin out” Mr. Mivart, for his insolent attack on Mr. Darwin’.42 Forced to defend himself in print Mivart overreacted, striking out wildly at the immorality he perceived implicit in Huxley's scientistic philosophy:

the principles he advocates cannot but tend, by a fatal necessity… to produce results socially, politically, and morally, which he [Huxley] would be the first to deplore. They tend in the intellectual order to the degradation of the mind, by the essential identification of thought with sensation, and in the political order to the evolution of horrors worse than those of the Parisian Commune. I refrain from characterising their tendency in the moral order.43

Moderation was never Mivart's forte. Soon Huxley formally terminated their friendship.

For Mivart, Catholicism did not specify a unitary, infallible truth; even the judgements of the Pope and bishops were open to question. Since Scripture had to be mediated by fallible men there was always room for genuine, informed disagreement. Moreover, he believed that truth is not static but is continuously emerging as part of the natural evolutionary process. What most distressed him was the possibility that reactionary forces within the Church would prevent it from achieving its historical destiny. In particular, he feared a repeat of the Galileo affair if the Church prohibited the theory of evolution:

In this important matter [the Galileo affair] it was the man of science that was right and ecclesiastical authority that was wrong. The latter sought to impose, and more or less succeeded in imposing, an erroneous belief as to God's word, from which erroneous belief science has delivered us.44

The Galileo affair had not only resulted in the suppression of scientific truth but it had also greatly damaged his Church. To prevent a similar imbroglio over the theory of evolution, he cautioned ignorant clerics not to pronounce on Darwin's theory. Instead, the Church would be strengthened by encouraging those Catholics, like himself, who possessed a God-given vocation for science.

As an outspoken liberal, Mivart was attacked with increasing frequency in the Catholic press. Paradoxically the issue that triggered his excommunication had little direct connection with science but instead turned on a theological doctrine with implications for the Church's authority. In 1892 he launched an outright attack on the doctrine of eternal damnation which he found distasteful because it smacked of pagan barbarism and because it did not cohere with his progressivist view of Catholicism. Moreover, he complained that incarceration in hell seemed doctrinally flawed since it offered the soul no means of redemption.45 That he published his views in a non-Catholic periodical doubtless fanned the flames of controversy. Mivart soon found many powerful members of the Catholic hierarchy arraigned against him. Hell was unmoved and the Church proved immoveable; instead his articles on the subject were placed on the Index of prohibited books in 1893. A further blow came in the same year with the encyclical Providentissimus Deus, which was intended to foster study of the Bible but which also favoured a literalist interpretation of Scripture while discouraging scientific biblical criticism, which Mivart had publicly championed.

During the late 1890s he found himself in an increasingly isolated and desperate situation as his rift with Rome increased. Further estrangement resulted from the French Church's questionable involvement in the Dreyfus case and the Pope's failure to intervene. Mivart viewed this as evidence that the Vatican was morally bankrupt and complacent.46 Also, in reviews published in January 1900 he was sharply critical of a Church which, in his opinion, had taken refuge behind a facade of biblical literalism and had become unresponsive to the challenges of the modern world.47 Having experienced several years of torment by leading clerics Mivart was excommunicated in 1900. He fell considerable relief in parting from the Church which he believed had so signally failed to grasp its evolutionary destiny. However, his relief was short-lived, since a few weeks later he died from a heart attack and was buried in unconsecrated ground.

What conclusions can be drawn from Mivart's biography? Perhaps too many and too many inconsistent ones. Had we asked Huxley or Tyndall they would have identified Catholicism as the problem and unquestioningly attributed Mivart's desertion from the Darwinian camp to his (untenable) religious beliefs. By contrast, many Catholics championed Mivart when he attacked Darwin's theory but abandoned him when he became a thorn in the Church's flesh.48 That he survived so long without censure is testimony to the patronage of Newman and even of Pope Leo XIII.

But we reach a different conclusion if we read events from his standpoint. Indeed, the biographical perspective is particularly instructive precisely because it shows how an individual can be riven by conflicting loyalties. At one level the conflict was internal: Mivart was torn between his allegiances to both science and religion. However, we must also recognise that far from subscribing to the conflict thesis he firmly believed that science and religion must be in harmony. He therefore devoted much of his own writings to criticising both anti-scientific Catholics and those scientists who freely deployed science for anti-religious purposes. In his opinion both sets of opponents were blinkered dogmatists who set their pet views about both religion and science beyond rational criticism. Likewise both misused their authority. As he wrote in one of his later essays, the proper attitude of scientists ‘is emphatically a questioning attitude, while for consistent Theists doubt has a distinctly religious character’.49 From this standpoint the discord lay not with Mivart but with the gatekeepers of both science and religion who frustrated his personal quest. They excommunicated him twice—first from the Huxleyite chapter of the scientific church and later from the Catholic Church. In his dealing with both communities Mivart found himself at odds with powerful Mafiosi. It must also be remembered that changing external circumstances are highly relevant since not only did Catholicism become distinctly more reactionary and conservative during the closing decades of the nineteenth century, but the scientific community was becoming increasingly professional and authoritarian, but also less tolerant of dissent.

William Benjamin Carpenter (1813–1885), Dissenter

Our third biographical subject is William Benjamin Carpenter whose scientific research was centred on physiology, but also covered oceanic studies, zoology and psychology. Despite some worthy contributions to research, he was generally considered a competent compiler of other people's ideas rather than a creative, original thinker. Partly for financial reasons and also as an adjunct to his various teaching posts he published a number of textbooks, including several works on physiology and a frequently-reprinted book on the microscope.50 Although Carpenter's work will probably be little-known to a present-day audience, he was a respected Victorian who became Registrar at London University and a Vice-President of the Royal Society.

Carpenter was the fourth child of the Revd Dr Lant Carpenter, a leading figure in the Unitarian movement who wrote copiously on religious, moral and educational issues. The elder Carpenter was also one of the founders of the Bristol Philosophical and Literary Institution and included many scientists of note among his personal friends. The Carpenter home has been described as earnest but ‘not oppressive, only healthful and bracing, and abundant room was given for the free play of every activity’.51 However, James Martineau, who became one of Lant Carpenter's pupils, later claimed that he had ‘never seen in any human being the idea of duty, the feeling of right, held in such visible reverence.… Of the discipline enjoined upon his house—its early rising, its neatness, its courtesy, its golden estimate of moments—he himself [Lant Carpenter] was the model.’52 As a child William was imbued with the values of virtue, duty and public service. On the surface he was a solid Victorian, who strove to accomplish all the goals he set himself or which were set by others. A workaholic by temperament, he seems to have filled almost every waking moment, occasionally finding relief in music or a vacation. Continually aware of the difficulty of living up to the highest standards preached by his father, he expressed the fervent wish ‘that in my moral character I had more of his spirit’.53 Even his achievements in science were not sufficient and on one occasion he confided to his mother that those committed Christians—like his father and younger brothers—who devote their lives to saving sinners do ‘a far higher work’ than the scientific textbook writer or the research scientist.54 A supreme example of his faithfulness to duty was his insistence on delivering a scheduled lecture to students at University College London less than an hour after receiving news of his mother's death.55 The great personal demands he made on himself also took their toll and sometimes resulted in frustration. Writing to his sister Mary in 1850 he complained that his work was frequently interrupted: ‘I try to exercise Christian charity towards the many people who bother me; but it is really very difficult to do so when one feels driven to desperation by the want of power to fulfil one's engagements, to say nothing of having one's trains of thought interrupted.’56

The great engine directing his life was his search for truth. As R. K. Webb has stressed, early Unitarians were imbued with a strong sense of intellectual independence; so that, having carefully weighed the evidence, each was expected to make an informed decision on any issue in science, religion, society or politics.57 This emphasis on the judicious use of reason coloured the Unitarian response to science. Moreover, the Church's history included Joseph Priestley and many other scientists of note who avidly championed science in the name of truth. As Carpenter insisted, ‘In the pursuit of truth’, we should ‘faithfully, strictly, and perversely… fix our attention on the goal, not allowing ourselves to be distracted by the temptations of self-interest’ or timidity.58 His commitment to science was based on his belief that it provided one sure road to truth, the other being religion. ‘I have the greatest confidence in the ultimate prevalence of truth’, he told one of his brothers.59 This optimistic creed suffused not only his science but also his socio-religious outlook, and, like Joseph Priestley, he confidently predicted that science would lead to an increasingly bright future and the perfectibility of humankind.

Much of Carpenter's science was inspired by his belief that the physical world constitutes an harmonious unity. Thus in his earliest researches he sought to unify the animal and vegetable domains by exploring their structural and functional analogies. Again, in his paper ‘On the mutual relations of the vital and physical forces’ (1850) he developed William Grove's view that mechanical motion, beat, light, electricity, and so forth are mutually related forms of force, by claiming that these physical forces are interrelated to vital forces, such as the force produced in the nerves. This search for unity led, almost naturally, to a reassessment of God's role. Thus he speculated whether ‘all the physical forces of the universe… [are] the direct manifestation of the Mental force of the Deity’. Moreover, in a passage reminiscent of Newton's speculations about the universe being the sensorium of God. Carpenter conjectured whether ‘the phenomena of the material universe [may be] considered as the immediate expression of the Divine will’.60

Although he was prone to these pantheistic speculations about the role of force, Carpenter insisted that the laws of nature were manifested as observable uniformities in phenomena. By identifying the laws of nature he sought to demonstrate that ‘Science and Religion are manifestly in harmony’. Thus in a series of eighteen articles published in 1845 in a leading dissenting newspaper, the Inquirer, he engaged the science-religion issue under the explicit title ‘On the harmony of science and religion’. Here he argued that through the discovery of laws we become convinced that the world is constructed according to the divine plan implemented at the Creation:

[A] true appreciation of the Laws of Nature leads us to put aside the idea of continual interference on the part of the Deity, [and] it is equally opposed to the idea that the Laws can operate without His continual sustaining action; and they can only regarded as simple forms of expressing the modes and conditions, in which the Deity appears to operate in the material and moral world. [Indeed,] every step which we gain in our [scientific] generalizations, is really a step in our ascent towards Him.61

Lawlikeness was not only to be found in astronomy and the physical sciences but also in the biological sciences and in psychology. All branches of science were therefore founded on laws that proclaim God's omnipotence and omniscience. Contrary to the reactions of many of his religious contemporaries, Carpenter asserted that even the nebular hypothesis was the ‘greatest contribution that Science has made to Religion’. He even endorsed much of the scientific argument of the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), insisting that, if properly considered, the author's argument would lead to a theistic conclusion.62

Carpenter's essays in the Inquirer provoked one critic to complain that he seemed prepared to throw out Revelation when it conflicted with our admittedly limited knowledge of the natural world: ‘His philosophy may be compared to a flowery, but fruitless, creeper, twining round a hollow trunk, whose mouldering structure it endeavours to conceal, and whose well-known character it attempts to disguise.’63 This critic correctly identified Carpenter's tendency to emphasise reason over faith, science over Revelation; for although he often asserted the complete coherence between science and Revelation he avoided any close, analytical engagement with the Bible. For Carpenter, science was the dominant mode and he even envisaged a time when ‘the fundamental truths of religion will rest on the generalizations of science’.64 As the historian of the Metaphysical Society has commented, Carpenter attempted ‘to make religion scientific and science religious’.65 If he successfully maintained an insistent providentialism in respect to the latter, his notion of religion became all too circumscribed under the sway of science. In adopting this position Carpenter was reflecting a significant change evident among contemporary British Unitarians, spearheaded by his lifelong friend James Martineau. Unlike earlier generations that had constructed their religion with close attention to the Bible, Martineau relegated Biblical authority and instead emphasised the dominant role of reason and conscience in shaping the human spirit.66 Likewise, Carpenter's writings on science and religion extolled reason and feeling at the expense of Revelation.

Carpenter expressed the heartfelt hope that he might ‘be of some use as a mediator in the conflict which has now distinctly begun between science and religion’.67 Yet compared with Mivart's tortuous path, Carpenter trod an intellectually undemanding road and displayed little awareness of the deeper and more challenging problems facing contemporary science and religion, and their interrelationship.

The foregoing discussion should prepare us for his response to evolution. He reviewed the Origin of Species favourably and Darwin was gratified that a physiologist of Carpenter's standing had supported him. However, Darwin confided to Charles Lyell that although Carpenter's review was ‘very good and well balanced’, it was ‘not brilliant’.68 Indeed, with characteristic caution Carpenter did not go quite far enough on the question whether vertebrates were descended from one ancestor.

Although Carpenter's reviews were principally concerned with the scientific aspects of Darwin's work, he briefly engaged religious issues in a manner that would both have pleased Darwin but also did not go as far as Darwin might have hoped. Possibly reflecting his earlier brushes with the critics of science, Carpenter felt the need to defend evolution against unnamed theological opponents. He presumed that these critics would claim that the theory of natural selection removed God's action from the physical world. Such an objection he considered ‘simply absurd’ since the truth of Darwin's theory was a scientific and not a theological issue. Moreover, as he pointed out, botanists had long been concerned with tracing slow changes in plant species without raising a theological storm.

Although Carpenter initially appeared to distance Darwin's work from theology, he also conceived an underlying harmony. Denying that God's interaction with the physical world had ended at the Creation, he portrayed nature as in a continual state of progressive development under God's creative power. However, the question remained whether God had to intervene, periodically, to eliminate some species and replace them by new ones, or whether the new species had developed through the modification of the old. The question was easily settled since special creation was unacceptable to Carpenter, who considered that it required God to act in a mysterious and incoherent manner. By contrast, Darwin's theory appealed to him precisely because it employed natural selection which operated according to natural law. He asserted that since evolutionary theory connoted ‘order, continuity, and progress’ it was commensurable with the acceptable notion that God ‘knows no variableness, neither shadow of turning’. Since Carpenter had long accepted the world as ordered and progressive and God as a rational agent, he took Darwin's theory in his stride and did not consider it a threat to religion. Indeed, he could not envisage how theology could offer any challenge to science. Instead he labelled those theologians who rejected the theory as obscurantists, and argued that in time they would come to accept it just as their predecessors had eventually accepted the Copernican theory. Darwin's theory was clearly on the side of progress and provided it encapsulated physical law—which it did—Carpenter could accept it as yet another example of God's lawlike governance of the physical world.69

Adam Sedgwick (1795–1873), Anglican

Unlike the other three scientists discussed in this chapter. Adam Sedgwick was not only a product of Cambridge University but spent most of his adult life in Cambridge. Entering Trinity College in 1804 at the relatively advanced age of 19, he rose through a College Fellowship to become the Woodwardian Professor of Geology in 1819 and Vice-Master of Trinity in 1845. Although a leading and respected member of that isolated Anglican community Sedgwick was no grey, conformist clergyman and academic but displayed some of the proud independence of his Yorkshire background. Like his father, the vicar of Dent, he was strongly opposed to the slave trade; he supported Catholic emancipation, the abolition of religious tests and championed many other aspects of university reform. Although a leading don, he remained ambivalent towards the University and often felt constrained by its reactionary ethos. It may be no coincidence that when in Cambridge his health usually deteriorated, whereas his vigour returned on geological fieldtrips, particularly when pursued in the neighbourhood of Dent.

But there is another strong sense in which he was deeply marked by his rural, Yorkshire roots. Late in life he recounted his childhood, emphasising the assiduity, stability and moral rectitude of the Dentdale population. This ideal community was financially sustained by smallholdings, sheep farming, textile manufacture and mining. However, the world he had known as a child had largely disappeared by the mid-nineteenth century owing principally to the forces of mechanisation which rendered traditional industries uneconomic. Poverty became widespread, the indigenous population fell sharply and lawlessness increased. The economic and moral decline of Dentdale affected Sedgwick profoundly.

Sedgwick possessed great personal charm and evoked deep feelings of love and admiration from his many friends. He could certainly bear grudges (for example, against his ex–co-worker Roderick Murchison who, he believed, had gratuitously undermined some of his innovations in geology), but most of his letters overflow with warmth, humour and sympathy. He could readily share his friends' joys and sorrows; his letters comforting the bereaved are especially poignant. Although he never married—much to his regret—he pursued long-term correspondence with several younger women, such as his nieces, towards whom he adopted the role of an avuncular confidant. The vein of humanity found in his letters was an expression of his practical Christianity. As a lecturer he inspired great affection, evidenced by the following comment by one of his auditors at an anniversary meeting of the Geological Society: ‘Sedgwick made the great speech of the evening. By turns he made us cry and roar with laughter, as he willed. His pathos and wit are equally admirable.’70 But Sedgwick's eloquence was not reserved for High Table at Trinity or the Geological Society of London. He was President of the Kendal Natural History and Scientific Society (Kendal being some 15 miles from his family home at Dent); he lectured to an audience of 1200 at the Leeds Mechanics' Institute and, most famously, in 1838 he delivered an impromptu address on the geology and economy of coal ‘on the sea-beach at Tynemouth to some 3000 or 4000 colliers and rabble (mixed with a sprinkling of their employers), which has produced a sensation such as is not likely to die away for years’.71

When he accepted the Woodwardian Chair in 1819 he knew little about geology. Soon, however, he undertook expeditions to Matlock, the West of England including Cornwall, the Yorkshire coast, the Isle of Wight, Hampshire, Oxfordshire and the Lake District. He was quickly recognised as a leading geologist, and played a central role in the ‘golden age’ of British geology, spanning the 1820s to 1850s, when the basic fieldwork and theories were pursued in a spirit of novelty and excitement.72

If geology was his passion, his theological concerns appear more sporadic. Indeed, according to his biographers, as a young man ‘he had no very decided inclination’ to enter the Church.73 Only in 1817, when he was in danger of dismissal from his Fellowship if he did not take orders, did he secure his position at Cambridge by seeking ordination. A further seventeen years passed before he was appointed by Henry Brougham to a prebendary stall at Norwich Cathedral which, worth £600 per annum, provided reasonable financial security. However, this position required him to spend two months each year in Norwich. With typical dedication he was the model of a hard-working cleric dedicated to the spiritual and pastoral care of his flock. He was foremost a practical Christian involved in the daily duties of a hard-pressed cleric but relatively unconcerned with controversial issues in theology. When offered the deanery of Peterborough in 1853 he declined, preferring his regular duties at Norwich to advancement. By that time in his life his earlier career ambitions had long been satisfied.

Despite his evangelical leanings Sedgwick emphasised toleration. Thus shortly after taking up his post at Norwich he sought ‘to bring together more heretics and schismatics within my house’ than had ever entered since the Cathedral had been built—Independents, High Churchmen and Quakers attended.74 Likewise, there was a degree of self-reference when he described Charles Simeon as ‘a devout and faithful man, who stuck to his principles… and ended by gaining the love and good-will of all men about him’. What he appreciated most about Simeon was the steadfastness of his faith and his emphasis on Christianity as a biblically-inspired way of life.75 Although brotherly love came before all other commandments, Sedgwick's toleration was severely strained by many High Churchmen and he particularly deplored Newman and the Tractarians who had split the Church of England on issues of doctrine. ‘I pity their delusion, I despise their sophistry, and I hate their dishonesty’, he wrote. Their defection to Rome had, he believed, been delayed far too long and had damaged his beloved Anglican Church.76

Sedgwick was committed to liberal causes and was widely recognised as one of the most solid Whigs in Cambridge. In matters of religion he is more difficult to characterise, but on many issues he was most closely akin to the moderate evangelicals. For example, at a time of rapid social change and dislocation Sedgwick viewed Christian morality as a stabilising force and as proof against the depravity to which he believed humankind was so easily prey. As Boyd Hilton has emphasised, during the first half of the nineteenth century Anglican evangelicals reacted strongly against the utilitarianism of the age, which they rejected as conducive to atheism. In place of the utilitarian theory of mind they constructed a providentialist moral economy commensurate with their Christian beliefs.77

Like many of his Cambridge contemporaries, Sedgwick stands firmly in this tradition; for example, in his 1833 Discourse on the Studies of the University, he attacked William Paley for denying the moral sense and for championing a utilitarian theory of ethics.78 While utilitarianism was a common enemy recognised by all evangelicals, Sedgwick deployed his heaviest artillery against those who sought to undermine Christianity by mobilising materialistic interpretations in science. Thus in his review of Chambers's Vestiges in the Edinburgh Review and in an overly-long preface to the fifth edition of his Discourse (1850) he sought to repudiate the increasing number of scientific writers who, he claimed, sought to propagate materialism, atheism and pantheism in their various forms.79 Yet his intention was not only to refute such works but to provide an alternative and (in his opinion) correct value-system, particularly in the realm of education.

Sedgwick's need to live within the framework of Christian morality is best captured by the following declaration contained in one of his letters: ‘I wish to live and die with the hopes of a Christian. If these hopes were away, what would the remnant of my life be good for? A stammering remnant of a babbler's dream.’80 As Senior Proctor, Sedgwick was directly responsible for enforcing moral standards among Cambridge students who were easy prey to drink and prostitutes. On appointment to the post in 1827 he pictured himself ‘strutting about and looking dignified, with a cap, gown, cassock, and huge pair of bands; the terror of all academic evil-doers—in short a finished moral scavenger’.81 He appears to have carried out his duties with great efficiency and commitment. Moral education was also the central theme of his Discourse in which he argued that a university education had to be grounded firmly on Christian ethical principles. Again, he conceived his geological lectures at Cambridge as possessing ‘the power of producing a good moral influence by raising my voice against a kind of dreamy pantheistical philosophy which tries to lift up its head among academical men’.82 This quotation is of particular interest since it makes clear the moral role he attributed to geology.

As he emphasised in his Discourse, the study of science should not be an end in itself but must serve moral purposes. Not only do scientific studies lead to intellectual improvement but they also help to inculcate self-control and function as an antidote to arrogance and pride. Those trained in science should manifest the qualities of ‘simplicity of character, humility, and love of truth’. But the main moral significance of science lay in natural theology. Science was not an end in itself—a ‘cold and uninviting’ subject—or merely a means for material progress. Rather, its main purpose was to enrich us, both emotionally and intellectually. The study of Newtonian science, for example, ‘teaches us to see the finger of God in all things animate and inanimate, and gives us an exalted conception of his attributes’. He therefore urged his auditors to use their scientific studies

to believe yourselves in the perpetual presence of God—to adore him in the glories of his creation—to see his power and wisdom in the harmony of the world—his goodness and his providence in the wonderful structure of living beings.…83

What is so striking about this passage is Sedgwick's appeal ad hominem through the use of the reflexive verb. He portrayed science as continually enhancing one's appreciation of God's relation to His creation, ourselves included.

Reflecting on the relationship between science and revelation, Sedgwick envisaged that ‘these two kinds of truth, embodied in physical history and revealed religion, so fat from bring conflicting, were entirely in unison and harmony, if we investigate the one, and read the other, in a right spirit’.84 Thus he conceived that both science and Revelation were in agreement in confirming the earth's finite age and man's recent habitation on the earth. Moreover, his early geological papers display an enthusiasm for Werner's neptunist theory with its emphasis on the role of water in precipitating the various strata of rocks, that were identified by their mineral content,85 and in 1825 he argued that ‘a great diluvian catastrophe [had occurred] during a comparatively recent period in the natural history of the earth’. Although he insisted that this was a legitimate Inference from scientific observations and not an illegitimate attempt to frame a priori a Mosaic geology, he was clearly delighted that science and revealed religion concurred in this conclusion.86

However in his 1830 Presidential Address to the Geological Society he argued strenuously against those geologists who strove to reconcile science with a literal interpretation of Mosaic history. Not only was this an inappropriate way to pursue an inductive science but any mistake in the scientific argument might lead readers to doubt the truth of Scripture. Moreover, he stressed that geology was a new science in which excessive theorising was premature. Instead, the subject needed to be constructed on a firm basis of observed facts from which laws could be inductively inferred.87 In line with this empiricist approach much of Sedgwick's geological writings stressed natural (rather than revealed) theology and the moral value of the inductive sciences. In the following year he recanted his diluvialist leanings before the Geological Society, expressing caution about specifying any tight connections between geological theory and the biblical narrative.88

While adamantly opposed to scriptural geology, Sedgwick's responses to both Vestiges and Darwin's Origin of Species should be interpreted as part of his ceaseless moral crusade against those who used science for atheistical purposes. Like many scientists of the period. Sedgwick had no shortage of scientific objections to Vestiges but it is clear that the underlying thrust of his argument was the author's immorality and the book's unacceptable implications for moral philosophy. As he wrote to Charles Lyell, ‘what shall we say of [the author's] morality and his conscience, when he tells us he has “destroyed all distinction between [the] moral and [the] physical”…? If the book be true, the labours of sober induction are in vain; religion is a lie;… morality is moonshine;… and man and woman are only better beasts!’89 Some fifteen years later he read Darwin's book through the same moralistic lens, yet he considered the Origin even more dangerous because it was far better argued and contained fewer errors than the Vestiges.

It is clear that the moral implications of materialism lay at the heart of Sedgwick's objection to evolution. While he chastised Darwin for ‘utterly repudiat[ing] final causes’, it was not only the absence of teleological arguments that distressed him. Worse still, evolutionary theory ‘indicates a demoralized understanding on the part of its advocates’ who portray the human condition devoid of all morality and decency. The word ‘demoralized’ implies the denial of moral evidence and the rejection of our higher faculties, especially our conscience and religious feelings. Darwin had thereby stripped humankind of its moral faculties and degraded its members to the level of beasts. This deeply offended Sedgwick's sensibilities and threatened his world-view in which he conceived humankind as part of the providential scheme. As he wrote to Darwin immediately after reading the Origin, there ‘is a moral or metaphysical part of nature, as well as a physical’. Moreover, Darwin had impugned the proper practice of science, which should lead the scientist and the scientific reader to a richer appreciation of God's providence.90 However, just as the Dentdale of his childhood had been largely swept away by industrialisation, so Darwin threatened to reduce Sedgwick's Weltanschauung to ‘A stammering remnant of a babbler's dream.’

Concluding Comments

Not surprisingly, the attitudes of our four biographical subjects were deeply affected by their backgrounds and subsequent experiences. Thus Tyndall's Protestant, Irish upbringing coloured his attitude not only to Catholicism but ultimately to all religious systems. Carpenter grew up at the centre of the Unitarian community and throughout his life espoused the values so deeply inculcated by his father. Likewise, Sedgwick's childhood in rural, idyllic Dentdale influenced his responses both to Cambridge University and to industrialisation Despite Mivart's trajectory being the least easy to chart, his cosmopolitan London background is highly relevant to his biography.

Although all four were marked by their social, political and religious backgrounds, one of the main uses of biography is to challenge stereotypes and to show that the experience of the individual is often far more complex and interesting than the stereotype will allow. Thus Tyndall was not the atheistic materialist portrayed by his opponents but was imbued with Carlyle's Romanticism. This provided him with strong religious (although not specifically Christian) sensibilities and emphasised the creative power of the human spirit. Likewise, although Mivart was influenced by the Tractarian movement and converted to Catholicism, he was not a submissive representative of Rome but fought for the liberal, progressive brand of English Catholicism advocated by his mentor Cardinal Newman. Even Sedgwick, who usually projected a calm and confident exterior, was deeply affected by contemporary events and in a letter admitted that ‘To my friends I shew my best face; but by myself I am often oppressed with miserable spirits, and with the consciousness of doing so little of what I ought to do.’91

On the crucial issue of Darwin's theory of evolution there was also much diversity. While Tyndall and Carpenter accepted evolution without reserve, Sedgwick bitterly attacked the theory for challenging the doctrine of providential design and for threatening Christian morality. From a biographical stand-point the responses of these three authors could have been predicted from their reactions to such earlier theories as Laplace's nebular hypothesis, Lamarck's transformationism and Chambers' Vestiges. Yet biographical analysis is also useful for illuminating cases which do not display such outward constancy. Here the example of Mivart is particularly informative since he initially welcomed Darwin's theory; later, however, he increasingly opposed the theory of natural selection whilst continuing to proclaim a broad-based evolutionist philosophy.

The most important general issue raised by the preceding biographical sketches is that they challenge a form of analysis frequently encountered in discussions of science and religion. In the opening chapters we characterised ‘the essentialist position’ which attributes fixed defining qualities to both science and religion. Essentialists then proceed to postulate a unique relationship between them. However, it should be clear that this approach is thoroughly a-historical and flies in the face of the diversity displayed though the study of history.

Essentialism likewise underpins many of the attempts to construct taxonomies that characterise the various ways science and religion have been interrelated. For example, a recent and sophisticated taxonomy appears in Ian Barbour's sociologically-informed Religion in an Age of Science where four ‘stances’ are postulated. ‘Conflict’ claims that there is a necessary opposition, such as between a naturalist and a supernaturalist account of the origin of humankind. Secondly, ‘independence’ consigns science and religion to different, non-interacting domains. ‘Dialogue’ postulates that science and religion share certain similarities—such as both are tentative or use metaphorical language—so that there can be negotiation. Finally, there are various forms of ‘integration’ where there is an interfusion between the scientific and religious beliefs; for example, the argument from design mixes these two ingredients.92 While Barbour does not appear to be committed to essentialism, his taxonomy may encourage this position and each of his four options can be, and has been, read as connoting the essence of the science-religion relationship.

From the historian's point of view, we find Barbour's taxonomy problematic if each of his four stances is taken as an exclusive alternative, each mapping on to an essentialist definition of both science and religion. Instead we wish to emphasise the role of human agency working in history and in society. Biography is particularly useful in sustaining this approach, since in the preceding case-studies we see that individuals were not restricted to any single essentialist position. Instead, in each case the scientist made use of more than one of Barbour's stances. This is not to imply inconsistency, but rather to emphasise the complex and diverse ways in which the science-religion interrelation can be manipulated.

The example of Mivart is especially instructive since he employed all four of Barbour's stances. He perceived ‘conflict’ between the Darwinians' overstated commitment to natural selection and his understanding of the human condition in which mental and moral attributes were important but could not be explained by natural selection. Likewise he used an ‘independence’ strategy when arguing that the Galileo affair should teach us that science is for scientists and theology for theologians. Each had its own proper domain. Yet he also conceived a form of dialogue when arguing that both science and religion are rational activities; he insisted that neither scientists nor theologians should forsake their critical faculties. Finally, much of his own research was empowered by specific integrationist strategies. Thus he perceived the world framed by the divine architect and he directed his research to elucidating archetypes. His integrationist programme greatly inflamed Huxley and other proponents of scientific naturalism.

In studying Mivart's biography it should be clear how an individual can—and often does—make use of a variety of different arguments. Yet this very diversity and complexity casts doubt on the usefulness of trying to capture the contingent and changing relations between science and religion along any single essentialist axis. Indeed, in opposition to the essentialist programme we would argue that the individual must be treated as an active agent who deploys different strategies creatively. In the case of Mivart, who was desperately trying to maintain his participation in both science and Catholicism in the face of determined opposition from both communities, much resourcefulness was required. He cannot be understood as exemplifying any single essentialist position but as actively constructing his understanding of the mutual bearings of science and religion at a specific time and place.

Biography is important precisely because it focuses on such specificity. Both religion and science are thereby particularised in terms of how they were experienced by the biographical subject. As the historian Thomas Söderqvist has written, biography ‘is primarily a genre through which we try to bring to life again the unique individual’.93