The original fellow of the Royal Society best known for his concern for the Hermetic tradition is Elias Ashmole, who was associated with the society as early as 1661 and who in 1664 was appointed a member of its committee ‘for collecting all the phenomena of nature hitherto observed, and all experiments made and recorded’, that typically Baconian attempt to clear the decks for ‘scientific’ action. And it was Ashmole's munificence that was instrumental in establishing the first chemical laboratory at any British university, namely that at Oxford set up in the original Ashmolean Building in 1683.

The foundation of the Royal Society marks an important step in the institutionalization of seventeenth-century British natural philosophy. The society's existence and activities provided a focus for the exchange of opinions, while its meetings and publications became forums for scientific debate. Some writers, however, have claimed much more than this for the society and have seen its establishment as marking a real watershed between, on the one hand, intellectually ‘conservative elements’ and, on the other, a set of ‘definite philosophical principles … inspiring … progressive minds’. Others have gone still further and argued not only that the society's activities ‘enormously’ accelerated ‘the development of natural sciences’, but that these activities were the result of the ‘working out of a conscious, deliberately-conceived ideal’. But views which see a single, logically consistent conception of the nature of the scientific enterprise informing the work and outlook of the Royal Society and its members involve a serious oversimplification of the complexity of natural philosophy in the late seventeenth century. Despite some important work published in recent years, we are still far from achieving a satisfactory understanding of the complicated web of traditions, sources, and intellectual systems that provided both an inspirational dynamic for the work of natural philosophers such as those in the Royal Society and patterns of expression through which their preoccupations could be articulated. Thus the many studies which have been devoted to establishing connexions between the scientific movement and patterns of religious or political belief have been flawed from the start by unreal assumptions about the degree of intellectual coherence presented by the natural philosophy of the time. And until we can present a more three-dimensional picture of what the 'scientific movement’ was in fact all about, and until wider agreement has been reached as to satisfactory definitions of various types of socio-theological attitude and behaviour, such studies are no more than attempts to tie together two unknowns by means of a rope of sand.

History is the science which investigates the successive changes that have taken place in the material and intellectual conditions of man; it inquires into the causes of those changes, and the influence which they have exerted in modifying the life and mind of mankind.

In 1877 the first issue of the Revue des questions scientifiques, published by the Scientific Society of Brussels, appeared in France and Belgium. The new journal was greeted with disdain and hostility by Emile Littrè and George Wyrouboff, the disciples of Auguste Comte and editors of La philosophie positive. The Scientific Society of Brussels was a Catholic organization, and the positivists' opinion was that ‘If science is spoken of in this assembly, it is in order to organize a veritable crusade against it’. But the highly prejudiced assessment by Littré and Wyrouboff completely misread the goals of the society. At the time, the Catholic Church was en pleine crise both in France and Belgium. Church attendance had declined dramatically in recent years, as had the number of young people entering religious orders. Many Catholic laymen and church officials were becoming convinced that some rapprochment with the modern world and modern science was essential. It was to this difficult task that the Catholics of the Brussels Scientific Society addressed themselves with determination.

This is a theoretical paper. A little theory goes a long way in history, for me; but it is good to collect as much as is feasible in one paper, so that gaps and inconsistencies can be noticed. I use ‘theory’ in the definite sense of a set of hypothetical statements such that deductions can be made and compared with data, facts, or generalizations obtained in some other way than as derivation from theory. Deductions need not always be rigorous, and there may be two or more ‘solutions’ obtainable, of which the scientist may choose one and discard the rest (for example, he may discard all ‘imaginary’ solutions). I am ignoring the differences between propositions, demonstrations, problems, and the like. Actually there must always be several statements, including rules of procedure, in the set; but often many are assumed and only the new or controversial one is stated as ‘the’ hypothesis of Mr X.

The concepts of action and reaction before Newton have received so little attention from historians that the unwary student might easily get the impression that Newton was the first to concern himself seriously with the problem. In fact, the subject had a long prehistory extending back to Aristotle and it was actively discussed by physicists during the half-century preceding the publication of Principia mathematica in 1687. Although there is no evidence that Newton himself was much influenced by the views of others on the subject, they formed a part of the intellectual background of the Principia which should not be ignored.

Two of the most influential evaluations of Charles Lyell's geological ideas were those of the philosophers of science, John F. W. Herschel and William Whewell. In this paper I shall argue that the great difference between these evaluations—whereas Herschel was fundamentally sympathetic to Lyell's geologizing, Whewell was fundamentally opposed—is a function of the fact that Herschel was an empiricist and Whewell a rationalist. For convenience, I shall structure the discussion around the three key elements in Lyell's approach to geology. First, he was an actualist: he wanted to explain past geological phenomena in terms of causes of the kind that are operating at present. Second, he was a uniformitarian: he wanted to explain only in terms of causes of the degree operating at present; that is, he wanted to avoid ‘catastrophes’. Third, as a geologist he saw the earth as being in a steady-state, in which all periods are essentially similar to one another. Because they will prove important, I draw attention also to two major features of Lyell's programme. First, there is his theory of climate, which suggests, ‘without help from a comet’, that earthly temperature fluctuations are primarily a function of the constantly changing distribution of land and sea. Clearly this theory is actualistic, for it is based on such present phenomena as the Gulf Stream; it is also uniformitarian and supports a steady-state world picture. Second, there is Lyell's denial that the fossil record is progressive, his criticism of Lamarckian evolutionism, ostensibly on the grounds that modern evidence is against it (i.e. it fails actualistically), and his rather veiled claim that the origins of species will nevertheless prove in some way natural, that is, subject to causes falling beneath lawlike regularities in principle discernible by us.

During the decades following the publication of Darwin's Origin of species in 1859, religious belief in England and in particular the Church of England experienced some of the most intense criticism in its history. The early 1860s saw the appearance of Lyell's Evidence of the antiquity of man (1863), Tylor's research on the early history of mankind (1863), Renan's Vie de Jésus (1863), Pius IX's encyclical, Quanta cura, and the accompanying Syllabus errarum, John Henry Newman's Apologia (1864), and Swinburne's notorious Atalanta in Calydon (1865); it was in this period also that Arthur Stanley was appointed Dean of Westminster, and that Bills were introduced in Parliament to amend or repeal the ‘Test Acts’ as they affected universities. They were the years that witnessed Lyell present the case for geology at the British Association at Bath (1864), the first meeting of the X-Club (1864), and the award of the Royal Society's Copley Medal to Charles Darwin. These were the years in which, as Owen Chadwick has put it, ‘the controversy between “science” and “religion” took fire’.

William Thomson's image as a professional mathematical physicist who adheres, particularly in his work in classical thermodynamics, to a strict experimental basis for his science, avoids speculative hypotheses, and becomes renowned for his omission of philosophical declarations has been reinforced in varying degrees by those historians who have attempted, as either admirers or critics of Thomson, to describe and assess his life. J. G. Crowther, for example, sees him as a thinker of great intellectual strength, but deficient in intellectual taste; a scientist aware only of his immediate work and without depth of vision. Not well read in the literature of the subjects of his research, Thomson is seen, moreover, as one whose achievements owe little to the work of others, and whose great personality ‘is an expression in the realm of ideas of the power and blindness of capitalism’, especially through ‘his view of the world in terms of engineering conceptions’. On the other hand, even Sir Joseph Larmor, for whom Thomson was nothing less than a hero, is to be found ascribing to him the epithet of pragmatist.

In offering a contribution to a session concerned with ‘the background to Lyell's work’, I want to begin by launching a caveat against the notion of ‘background’. If, in the case of Lyell, ‘background’ features remained in obscurity then they can be dismissed; if, however, ‘background’ features were important then they become foreground. This point is not merely linguistic pedantry, because if we look at the scientific institutions of London in the period 1820–41, it is too easy to assume, with naïve optimism, that if they existed they must have been functionally effective for scientists. This was not necessarily so. We have to discover, as a matter of contingent reality, the ways in which particular institutions actually affected the careers of individual scientists. In this paper, therefore, I shall offer some general observations on London scientific institutions; and then I shall analyse Lyell's varying allegiances to them in terms of his ambitions concerning the shape and direction of his career.

For many of those who attended the Charles Lyell Centenary Symposium, one of the high points was the reappearance of Lyell himself (ably impersonated by John Thackray) in the lecture theatre of the Royal Institution, where some extracts from his London lectures of 1832–3 gave a vivid demonstration of his persuasive rhetoric. These extracts were also felt to illustrate Lyell's characteristic method of geological interpretation and his deeper concerns with the implications of his science, perhaps more clearly than in other published material from the earlier part of his career. At the request of several members of the symposium, I therefore give here a full version of these passages, without the ‘cuts’ and minor alterations that were necessary for the ‘performing script’. The purpose of this paper is simply to make this source-material more accessible, so that it can be used to enrich our understanding of Lyell's approach to geology at this period. I have recently published an account of the circumstances of Lyell's lectures at King's College London in 1832–3 and those at the Royal Institution in 1833, with a summary of their contents, so I shall present these fuller extracts here with the minimum of editorial notes. The two passages chosen are the longest and most continuous of those which Lyell wrote out in full rather than in note form.

There existed between Charles Lyell and Roderick Impey Murchison, the two most prominent British geologists of the mid-nineteenth century, a rivalry that was personal, professional, and theoretical. This rivalry, which was for the most part friendly, was most keenly felt by Murchison, who was always envious of the popular and professional success of Lyell's theories. Although both were born in Scotland and raised in England, where they lived most of their lives, their early lives were considerably different. Murchison's early career as an army officer and fox hunter contrasts rather strongly with Lyell's academic life at Oxford and as a law student. Each was the eldest child of a well-to-do Scottish family. Although Lyell's family was much the wealthier, Murchison personally always had more money than Lyell since Murchison ultimately inherited the estates of his father, father-in-law, and uncle, while Lyell's inheritance waited until his father's death in 1849, at which time the estate was left in trust for the many Lyell children.

‘Non-Progression’, the interpretation of life-history launched by Lyell in 1830 and defended by him for over twenty years, can be summarized as follows. Palaeontologists, Lyell contended, should assume that at every period of the earth's recoverable past, each class of plants and animals has been represented somewhere on earth. Species have been created solely as responses to perpetually shifting environmental conditions, and not as temporally conditioned stages in the unique unrolling of a grand plan. If certain environments are especially suited to reptiles, then the Creator tailors collections of beautifully adapted terrestrial, aquatic, and even aerial reptiles for them—as He did, for example, for the environments recorded in the British Jurassic; as He did, much more recently, for the Galapagos Islands; and as He will do again, if conditions somewhere on earth ever force mammals into extinction, leaving ecological niches which can more suitably be filled by reptiles. If, for example, changes in the topography and climate of the Sussex Weald eventually lead to the re-establishment of an environment that particularly suits iguanodons, then iguanodons will assuredly appear there again. The essential point about Lyell's interpretation is that time does nothing to determine a particular flora and fauna. When designing a new animal, the Creator, according to Lyell's view, has to take into account only the creature's or plant's destined environment: He has to consult no timetable, or lineage, governing the production of new forms. In notes for a speech given in 1852 Lyell reduced his interpretation to the epitome, ‘Adaptation to geographical circumst5 not progressive develop the real history of past changes’.