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Victorian men of science struggled to address a central question of nineteenth-century British thought: how do fallible human beings recognize truth? Their solution, embodied within the principles establishing the British Association for the Advancement of Science, focused on a stable set of selfless epistemic virtues—patience, humility, diligence, disinterest, self-control—that provided moral stability amid the relentless advance of new and revised theories of physical reality. But if well-founded ideas flow from virtuous practices, did it not follow that dangerously unsound ideas stem from vice? For this reason, a widely shared commitment to virtuous conduct meant that intellectual disagreements often degenerated into accusations of immoral behavior. This essay explores the complicated role of epistemic virtue in Victorian science by examining three towering products of the University of Cambridge: John Herschel, Adam Sedgwick, and William Whewell.

This chapter traces the triumph of the Kantian perspective. From the time of the Scientific Revolution to the present, vocal representatives are characterized as the Platonic approach or tradition and of the Aristotelian approach or tradition. Before the Origin, there were those like William Whewell and Adam Sedgwick, professor of geology at Cambridge, who simply put down the origins of new species to divine intervention. The fossil record shows that there has been a turnover of forms, and extinction is almost certainly due to natural causes. But when it comes to new forms, God intervenes miraculously. After the Origin, there were those who felt the same way. Louis Agassiz, Swiss-born ichthyologist and professor at Harvard, could never accept evolution, even though his students stepped over the line pretty sharpishly. The preferred option though, for those who were Christians believing in a Creator God, was some form of guided evolution. God puts direction into new variations and hence natural selection has at most a kind of garbage disposal function—it gets rid of the bad forms but does little or nothing to create new, good forms.

This chapter opens part 1 of the book, “Theorizing on the Move,” by examining three major contexts or sources for Darwin’s ambition as a prospective naturalist. First, it describes the existence of a well-known and consequential scientific puzzle to which he would eventually offer a new answer: how were coral reefs formed? This question was of great practical significance to the British Admiralty and individual navigators, and it had important theoretical implications for geologists who were interested in the history of the earth. Second, the chapter explains the purpose of the 1831-1836 Royal Navy voyage of HMS Beagle and of Darwin’s presence aboard, emphasizing the role of Francis Beaufort in directing hydrographic surveyors to study coral reef formation in the South Seas. Third, it describes the range of intellectual and practical experiences Darwin brought to the voyage by examining his training at Edinburgh University and the University of Cambridge. This discussion calls attention to his expertise in the sciences of marine zoology and (terrestrial) geology, his early exposure to the work of Alexander von Humboldt, and the mentorship Darwin received from Robert Grant, John Stevens Henslow, and Adam Sedgwick.

This chapter examines the view that considers nature as a biosphere by focusing on the moose and their wilderness ecosystem at Isle Royale, an island of the Great Lakes, as well as their symbiotic relationship with bacteria. It first describes the moose's rumen as a miniature model of the biosphere before discussing some of the classic scientific arguments about the influence of life on the global environment. In particular, it looks at the views of Adam Sedgwick and Sir Charles Lyell. It then assesses the notion that life is an integral part of very long-term global geologic processes and explains how biological evolution has led to global changes in the environment. It also analyzes three schools of thought about a balance of nature at the global level: that the biosphere is in a steady state; that life acts as Earth's thermostat, requiring and creating constant conditions; and that the biosphere is always changing, and life is changing with it, beyond the ability of life to act as Earth's thermostat. The chapter concludes with some philosophical reflections about nature's hierarchies in space and time.