9 - Science and its popularization

Summary

In 1887, on the occasion of the golden jubilee of Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne, T. H. Huxley declared proudly of the many changes that had occurred during the monarch’s long reign:

This revolution - for it is nothing less - in the political and social aspects of modern civilisation has been preceded, accompanied, and in great measure caused, by a less obvious, but no less marvellous, increase of natural knowledge, and especially of that part of it which is known as Physical Science, in consequence of the application of scientific method to the investigation of the phenomena of the material world.

Huxley was a pioneering biologist, but he was more familiar to the Victorian public as an outspoken proponent of an empirical and naturalistic world-view, gaining notoriety as Charles Darwin’s self-styled 'bulldog' during the evolutionary controversies of the 1860s. In his view, it was the application of various scientific procedures to the practices of industry and transportation that had facilitated the economic dynamism by which nineteenth-century society had been transformed. The 'rapid and vast multiplication of … commodities and conveniences of existence' and removal of the 'natural obstacles, which time and space offer to mutual intercourse' were the direct results of employing scientific methods, which had also entailed a 'strengthening of the forces of the organisation of the commonwealth against those of political or social anarchy'. The very success of the Victorian polity, Huxley proclaimed, could be traced back to the empirical and inductive principles adumbrated in the seventeenth century by Francis Bacon and now brought to fruition two centuries later.