Chapter 20 Chapter 18 Relying on Revolution or Evolution?

The 19th century—the era in science that stretched from Dalton's atomic theory to Planck's quantum theory, and included Darwin's evolution—was filled with revolutionary ideas and revolutionary political and social movements.Among the roster of radical theories and ideologies are the social and political thought of Marx and Engels, Darwin's theory of evolution, Comte's positivist philosophy and Freud's psychoanalysis.Since the French Revolution proclaimed its birth, this century has experienced the revolutions of 1820-1824, 1830, 1848 and 1871, and the rise of national revolutionary movements throughout Europe and the world. The year 1848 was particularly unusual.Ended with the aborted Russian Revolution in 1905, the 19th century was undoubtedly an "era of revolutions" (Hobsbawm, 1962).However, the 19th century was also a time of evolution.Darwin's theory of evolution, the major new scientific concept of the century, not only changed the course of biology and prevailing ideas of how science progressed, but also influenced everything from sociology, political science, and anthropology to literary criticism. Theories in some fields.Yet, somewhat paradoxically, the idea of ​​evolution, which was dominant at the time, arose against the backdrop of one of the greatest revolutions in the history of science.

From the beginning of that century on, people seem to have generally understood the word "revolution" in the sense of the French Revolution - the establishment of a new order, the creation of a new institution, the development of a new set of ideas.For nearly all thinkers and doers, the word "revolution" has completely lost the resiliency it once had.Some cognate connotations such as cycle or rise and fall.However, around the middle of the 19th century, a new misinterpretation of this concept appeared: "permanent revolution".This statement was put forward by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels when discussing the question of what position and attitude the "proletarian" organizations should maintain under a "petty bourgeois" democracy ( Marx and Engels, 1962, 1:106-117).The answer of Marx and Engels was: "Their battle cry should be: permanent revolution" ("Selected Works of Marx and Engels", Vol. 1, People's Publishing House, p. 392).But even earlier than that, in October 1848, P. -J．Proudhon (1923, 3:17) once publicly declared: "Whoever wants to talk about revolution must talk about progress."From this, he goes on, it follows that "revolutions are nnpermanence (permanently) carried on, and, strictly speaking, only identical revolutions are uninterrupted among different revolutions".The significance of the concept of permanent revolution later gradually exceeded the scope of purely ideological importance: in Russia after Lenin's death, it became a major point of ideological disagreement between Trotsky and Stalin and their respective followers (See Teich, 1973, 84-92, 97-105).The permanent revolution is undoubtedly the 18th century conception of revolution as a single event or a series of related events capable of overthrowing an existing political, social or economic system and establishing a new political, social or economic system fundamental transformation.

Those who wrote in the nineteenth century on the subject of revolution in science did not explicitly use Marx's phrases "sustained revolution" or "permanent revolution" and it was not science in Proudhon, This image of a long revolution arose in the minds of Marx and Engels.In the nineteenth century, though, many scientists and scientific analysts began to conceive of science as a continuous or never-ending quest.This aspect of scientific inquiry has been expressed by a mathematical metaphor: truth exists on an asymptote, which means that science does not have any simple finite end, truth is a very distant goal, and we can get closer and closer This goal, but never fully achieves it.

So, as the nineteenth century progressed, it was acknowledged that there had been revolutions in science and that science had been driven by revolutions (perhaps an uninterrupted series of revolutions), but it was also gradually recognized that Such revolutions may be long-term—rather than the shorter duration of a political revolution lasting a few years.Moreover, it was at this time that the concept of a scientific revolution emerged: a sequence of events spread over perhaps a century or more, from Copernicus to Newton; in the process of spreading, modern science emerged.This concept appears clearly in the writings of Auguste Comte (cf. Gluck, 1977, 33).But, like much of Comte's thought, we can find the germs of this concept in the writings of Saint-Simon.Houd served as secretary to Saint-Simon, see Chapter 22 below. ) At the same time, we also see that in the first decades of the nineteenth century there was widespread awareness of a long-term industrial revolution.In the twentieth century, the view of science as a continuous process, or as a long-term, even lasting revolution, emerged in Herbert Butterfield's widely read collection of lectures (949) and Lu In Peter Hall's The Scientific Revolution 1500-188 (1954).

Not all nineteenth-century thinkers of scientific progress accepted the idea that revolutions were in any case desirable or inevitable.During the last quarter of that century, it came to be expected that revolutions in science were avoidable and, in some thought groups, it was believed that revolutions in science would not happen at all.Leading scientists like Mach, Boltzmann, Newcomb, and Einstein believed that major breakthroughs were part of an evolutionary process rather than a revolutionary one.Simon Newcomb's presentation on "The Evolution of the Scientific Investigator" at the Congress of Arts and Sciences held during the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.This evolution, he insisted, was a "worthy subject" (1905, 137): "From this point of view, it is evident that the main motive force behind the movement of man to raise man to the mastery he now occupies is the researcher of science...  As the first impetus that brought together the representatives of this researcher today, let the evolution of the scientific researcher be our worthy subject today. Because we want to understand an organism by studying its various stages of generation and development evolution, so we must see how the work of the scientific researcher is related to the futile efforts of his predecessors".Newcomb sees revolutions as the culmination of long evolutionary developments; they may not be obvious, and may not be revealed until deeper study.

The change in perception from revolution to evolution towards the end of the nineteenth century was in part a reaction of thinkers to political and social developments, as they felt more and more the negative aspects of political revolutions.Whatever one may think of the goals and ideals of the French Revolution, there is one inescapable fact: the republic bowed to a leader and, ultimately, an emperor.The old nobles were retained, and Napoleon added some new nobles. This is a mockery and play on the so-called "equality", and it may take a long, long time for people to forget the rampant atrocities of the era of terror.It must be remembered that revolutions in nineteenth-century Europe were accompanied by violence: in the Revolution of 1848, people fought on barricades and barricades, while restoring the extremes of the French Revolution.

In 183o, the historian B. G．Niebuhr wrote in his Preface to Volume 2 of "History of Rome" (Niebuhr, 1828-1832, Vol. 2, p. 2; cf. Schieder, 1950, 237): "If God does not intervene", then The world would collapse again, as "what happened in Roman society in the middle of the third century: the extinction of happiness, liberty, education and science".Forty years later, in November 1871, Jacob Burckhardt gave a series of lectures on the era of the French Revolution.He began by saying: "What can be said about this process is that what is happening in the era we live in today is actually an epoch of revolutions, and perhaps we are closer to the beginning of this era, or we are in it the first two phases of the 1815-1848 seemingly peaceful thirty years, which turned out to be but an interlude in the great drama of that great drama. But this seems to be becoming A movement in stark contrast to all those events that have ever taken place" (Burkhardt 1942, 200).

In light of these similar comments about the destructiveness of revolution, we are seeing the concept of revolution - which had been a dominant concept during the first three quarters of the twentieth century - It should come as no surprise that time in the past has given way, to some extent, to the concept of evolution.In science we may be able to find a justification for this change from revolution to evolution in the theory of geological change.This example is particularly noteworthy because it vividly illustrates the impact and role of revolutionary changing ideas and experiences in the political sphere on the actual development of scientific thought (rather than on ideas about scientific progress or the history of science) .This change can be seen by comparing the three uses of the term "revolution" by geologists in the eighteenth century, early nineteenth century, and late nineteenth century.

In the eighteenth century, examination of the history of the earth generally followed Buffon's view of revolutions that changed the nature of the earth and changed its structure and surface.Consistent with the Enlightenment tradition, such revolutions are generally regarded as particularly important intermittent stages in an orderly process of development, rather than cataclysms characterized by violence.At the beginning of the 19th century, due to the influence of the French Revolution, the image of the revolution changed.Cuvier therefore used the term in a completely different sense than when his predecessors used it.Cuvier was fully aware of the influence and role of the French Revolution, especially its impact on science, and in 1827 wrote an insightful book that delved into the subject.So it is not surprising to find (following Martin Ludwijk's suggestion 1972, 109) that Cuvier transformed Buffon's conception of revolution on Earth, giving it a post-1789 meaning.Such revolutions are no longer a mere continuation of a series of crustal alterations, the last of which was (in Buffon's view) caused by man.Now, they have become violent, sudden events, accompanied by the destruction of life itself.In this respect Cuvier's revolution includes not only changes in geology, but also the extinction of ancient species of fauna and flora which we know to have existed in past epochs from the study of the ancient fossil record. of.

By the end of the nineteenth century there was a general aversion and distaste for "revolution," and it was expected that geologists would no longer need to use the word revolution when describing the history of the earth.The aim is to use the geological analogies and analogies of Darwin's interpretation of "the evolution of species" - which has replaced Cuvier's cataclysmic or revolutionary succession in explaining the succession of plants and animals found in ancient fossils —replacing the old ideas about such revolutions.William Maurice Davis articulated this point in his address to the St. Louis Arts and Sciences Convention in 1904. W． M．Davis used the concepts of evolution and revolution to evaluate the progress and development of Earth science during the 19th century.Of course, he was fully aware of "the revolution in which the teleological philosophy of the first half of the nineteenth century was replaced by the evolutionary philosophy of the second half of the nineteenth century" (1906, 494).He asserted that "this revolution has brought about a profound change in the way we think about the Earth and its inhabitants".He insisted that geologists should use the term evolution in a "wider sense" than Darwin's natural selection.His insight has even more significance under the current conditions.In his discussion of geological change, he asserts, "We are very happy to replace the violent revolutions of our predecessors by the calm process that evolution has shown" (p. 496).

It may seem rather strange that, when violent revolutionary activity collided with action against it, an essentially conservative man like Charles Darwin and the astronomer and philosopher Sir Herschel could have So radical that they considered "revolution" a laudable achievement.Both Darwin and Herschel described Charles Ryle's influence on geology as a revolution, and Darwin further correctly predicted that a "major revolution" would take place in the biological sciences when his own ideas became generally accepted. ".This notion of "revolutionizing" a science was actually quite common in the nineteenth century, although by the end of that century there had been movements away from the concept. In 1845, a lecture on microscopy and histology exclaimed the scale and scope of the discovery of electric currents "revolutionizing the whole of chemistry and a considerable part of physics" (Bennett 1845, 520).In the year Darwin published his first paper on evolution (1858), the president of the London Linus Society predicted that the time was ripe for a revolution in biology.In a discussion of germ theory in 1888 (Conn 1888, 5), it was explained that the theory was ridiculed when the physicians of that era were students: "So they would still reject a The theory that so revolutionized the concept of disease".In a biography of Laplace (Arago 1855, 462; 1859 edition, p. 309), François Arago considers the achievements of Kepler and Newton to be "remarkable in astronomy." amazing revolution".In an article in the magazine Harris Crescent, an American journalist (Riding, 1878) said that Lister's "sterilized method of treating wounds almost revolutionized surgery". The tension between the two views of whether science develops through slow accumulation or a more radical revolutionary view is vividly described in the work of Justus von Liebig.Liebig was one of the most eminent scientists of the mid-19th century.In an 1866 paper entitled "The Development of Scientific Thought," Liebig made a rather novel claim: that science has progressed steadily through the centuries due to the incremental contributions of a large number of researchers "(See Liebig, 1874). An illustration of this is that the establishment of current ideas about the properties of gases in the atmosphere is the result of the efforts of hundreds of thousands of people over thousands of years. This may be a reflection of the "cumulative view" on the development of science ", or one of the earliest formal descriptions of the "view of growth." Of course, as Liebig recognized in another paper, the contributions of great scientists are extremely important to the progress of science.To show the precise nature of such contributions, he uses the analogy of a circular motion.This motion, he says, is a cycle of varying radii.He says (ibid., 273) that "progress or development is a circular motion in which the radius becomes longer and, if our intellectual horizons are wider, any new fruitful thought must to be supplemented by existing thought".He explains the process this way: "Take away from the most influential achievements of great men the ideas they got from other people, and there is always something left that the others don't have—often just a fraction of a new idea." Partly, however, it is precisely because of this that a man is a great man." This particular view of science rejects the notion of development by revolution.However, Liebig wrote in an "Autobiographical Outline" (1891, 36; 1891a, 277), "Through the school of Berzelius, H. A great revolution has begun." In the much-reprinted and influential History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century (first published in 1903), the historian J. T．Merz himself was among those students of the nineteenth century who refused to see the period primarily in terms of revolutions.Merz rejects "the thought of the nineteenth century as fundamentally revolutionary thought" because "the work of destruction, in its earlier and more intense phase, belongs to the above-mentioned epoch," to a "rightly called The Period of a Revolutionary Century" (1896, 1:77-78).In the following pages, Mo Huo explores the destructive characteristics of the "revolutionary spirit".Therefore, he said, "the work of destruction is indeed still going on; in the midst of this work of construction or reconstruction, we still have to witness the work of the revolutionary spirit".As an illustration of "these destructive influences" he points to "new ideas arising and forming in Kant's philosophy and in the school of idealism which degenerated in its further development into a superficial materialism and a hopeless skepticism" ". Merz was so caught up in the same sense of revolution and destruction that he even professed his intention to "see thought as a constructive rather than a destructive force."So, although he admits that "no age has been so rich in competing and widely contested theories, so cleansed of old ideas, and so destructive of principles that have been steadfast through ages," as ours (p. 80), he Still emphasizing ("focusing my attention and my narrative on") "the remarkable and constructive ideas that have sprung up in this century" (p. 81): "Thoughts so constructive are those that conserve energy and the idea of ​​consumption; the doctrine of average, statistics, and probability; the ideas of evolution in Darwin's and Spencer's science and philosophy of science and philosophy; the doctrine of individualism and individuality, and Lotze's unique view of the "world of values." So, silently It is by no means strange that Z's development of the subject employs the concept of revolution in science (or in philosophy) only rarely, even as a metaphor.We can thus assign special importance to his use of the adjective "revolutionary" when speaking of Maxwell's electromagnetic theory.Curiously, when Merz refers to Maxwell in his account, he forgets that he originally equated revolution with destruction, and seems to use the word "revolutionary" in the more common sense of his day to Indicates a radical innovation with special effects. Merz vividly describes a phenomenon I have already mentioned: much of what historians and scientists say about revolutions in science expresses what may not represent a seriously and fully developed and consistently taken philosophical position the opinion of.so.Although Merz equated revolution with destruction in volume 1 of his History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century; And adopted the concept of revolution more generally.Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism was not the only example in which Merz linked science to revolution.According to Merz, apart from "the insights put forward by Darwin", no other thought in science has had such a powerful effect and influence on "thoughts in general" as the "thought of energy".Thereafter, Merz (1903, 2:136-137) stated that "a new vocabulary must be created", textbooks "must be rewritten", "established theories must be amended and reformulated in more correct terms", "must To tackle in newly invented ways problems that have been dormant for ages".These results, he says, of "seeing nature as a playground for energy transformation" should be seen as "a revolution in the field of scientific thought."But the word and the concept "revolution" are evidently absent from his subsequent descriptions of these developments. Although Leon Ellira and others believed that science was a perpetual or never-ending quest (whether revolutionary or evolutionary), by the end of the 19th century there was a growing intellectual movement that considered science to be finite, And in some areas it's almost done.This view seems to be shared by the vast majority of physicists, although it has also been expressed by chemists and astronomers (see Bardas, 1972).The idea of ​​this meaning of the consummation of science was put forward by Maxwell in his inaugural address (1890, 2:244) as the first Cavendish Professor at Cambridge University, that "after a few years, it is left to the scientist Our only job will be to advance these measures [of large physical constants] to another decimal place".Maxwell himself had been playing with this idea, probably just resisting it, but L.Badattu (1972) pointed out that this view may be more common than is usually assumed, especially among natural scientists in English-speaking countries. An oft-cited example of this "next decimal place" set is AA.Michelson, known for determining the speed of light and for participating in the Michelson-Morley experiment.In the 1898-1899 Anniversary of the University of Chicago, he published a summary of a lecture he gave on the selflessness of the Ryerson Physics Laboratory at the University of Chicago, in part saying this (quoted in Bardas, 1972, 52 ): "Although we can never venture to say with certainty that the future of physics will be devoid of even more amazing and extraordinary figures than those of the past, most of the main fundamental principles seem to be firmly established...  A famous physicist said that the future truth of physics is to be found in the sixth decimal place".Michelson's colleague R. A．According to Millikan (1950, 23-24), the famous physicist was Lord Kelvin.Millikan said that Michelson could later "remorse himself deeply for that statement"; but Michelson repeated the statement on more than one occasion. In 1903, he said in his book "Light Waves and Their Applications": In 1897, a book by Charles Emerson Currie, The Theory of Electricity and Magnetism, was published in London.I don't know who Currie was (his name doesn't appear in the Dictionary of National Biography or the Biographical Dictionary of Scientists, nor in the Who's Who in the World of Science).However, his book is published by MacMillan, and the author is obviously quite famous, so he has the honor of having Ludwig Boltzmann as a preface.The opening sentence goes like this: "All disciplines of theoretical physics, except electricity and magnetism, in the present state of science, can be regarded as finished, that is to say, year after year, in the Among them only certain insignificant changes have taken place".Two physicists who went on to become quite famous for their inventive research work—Planck and Millikan—both expressed pessimism about the future of physics. In 1875, Planck had the dilemma of choosing a career for himself among the disciplines of classical philology, music, and physics.He ignored Philip J. G．Von Joly's persuasion, physics was chosen.Professor Jolly once told him that nothing new had been discovered in that discipline (Meissner 1951, 75).Millikan (195O, 269-270) says that at Columbia University in 1894, when the new "living" field of social science was opening up, his fellow graduate students "continued to laugh at him for insisting on a discipline like physics." A finished and dead discipline". The whole history of nineteenth-century ideas about revolutions in science could easily be written in one book.The ideas of three famous French thinkers—Saint-Simon, Comte, and Cournau—and the influence of Marx and Engels, we shall explore in a later chapter.But we will first turn to the most important scientific revolution of the nineteenth century, Darwin's.Ironically, Darwin's revolution popularized the concept of evolution, a concept that ultimately contributed to undermining some scientists' conviction that a scientific revolution existed.