Triumphalist histories of science are nothing new but were, in fact, a staple of the 19th century. This article considers one of the more famous works in the genre and argues that it was motivated by doubt more than by faith

Finkelstein, Gabriel

English

PhilPapers

Emil du Bois-Reymond was a 19th century physiologistbest remembered for his mechanistic view of life and forhis essays on science and culture. He was born into theBildungsbürgertum, that elite and somewhat anxious socialclass central to discussions of modern German society. Hisparents were about as well established as was possible forBürger in Biedermeier Berlin. His father (Figure 1), a poorSwiss Huguenot, had worked his way through the ranks ofthe foreign office until he became court counsellor for theaffairs of Neuchâtel, a position that he held until his earlyretirement in 1848, when revolution gained the cantonindependence from the Prussian crown. His mother hadan even better pedigree from one of the oldest and mostprominent of Berlin’s Huguenot families: her great-great-grandfather had been the city’s first established silk dyer1,her grandfather was director of Berlin’s Academy of FineArts and the city’s most famous engraver2, and her fatherwas pastor of the French church, librarian to the King anddirector of the state artists’ guild.With such breeding, Emil du Bois-Reymond receivedan outstanding education, accompanying his father toSwitzerland on official tours of inspection, learning to drawfrom his aunt3, polishing his French style at home andmixing with the wide circle of his family’s friends and re-lations (Figures 2,3). To complete his studies, he attendedthe Französische Gymnasium and the University of Berlin,two of Germany’s best schools, where he learned a broadrange of academic subjects before switching to the facultyof medicine in his sixth semester. In 1841, his advisor askedhim to look into Carlo Matteucci’s treatise on animal elec-tricity. This he did – in fact, du Bois-Reymond spent therest of his scientific life looking into the topic. The first twovolumes of his Investigations in Animal Electricity appearedin 1848 and 1849, and ran to over 1400 pages; in 1884, hepublished a third volume to this truncated masterpiece4.This research established electrophysiology as a scientificdiscipline. It also made du Bois-Reymond’s career, earn-ing him a seat in the Prussian Academy of Sciences, aprofessorship in physiology at the University of Berlin,oversight of the Berlin Physiological Society andDirectorship of Berlin’s first Institute of Physiology.The ‘frog doctor’Du Bois-Reymond’s scientific achievements can bedivided between theory, experiment and technique. Withregard to the first category, he expounded one of theprincipal statements of biological reductionism. Du Bois-Reymond conceived of living things as subject to the lawsof chemistry and physics, a view expressed most clearlyin the introduction to his 1848 treatise on animal electricity.At the time, revolution was sweeping through Berlin, and0160-9327/00/$ – see front matter © 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S0160-9327(00)01309-0 Endeavour Vol. 24(3) 2000 129The ascent of man? Emil du Bois-Reymond’sreflections on scientific progressGabriel FinkelsteinTriumphalist histories of science are nothing new but were, in fact, a staple of the 19th century. This articleconsiders one of the more famous works in the genre and argues that it was motivated by doubt morethan by faith.Gabriel FinkelsteinTeaches History of Science and European History at the Universityof Colorado at Denver. He is currently completing a biographyof the physiologist and essayist Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896) and is planning a book on German scientific exploration.His research concerns the role of science in 19th-century Germansociety. gfinkels @ carbon.cudenver.edu Figure 1 Emil du Bois-Reymond’s father Felix.du Bois-Reymond was inspired to draft a kind ofscientific manifesto that excoriated the Church, RomanticNaturphilosophen and any other superstitious believers inthe concept of ‘life force’. For his part, he claimed to havelaid to rest the issue of vitalism when he ‘succeeded inrestoring to life, in full reality, the hundred-year-olddream of the physicist and physiologist: the identity of thenervous principle with electricity’5.This he accomplished by means of a remarkable seriesof laboratory investigations. Using a galvanometer, an in-strument that could measure faint amounts of electricity,du Bois-Reymond detected a flow of charge through allmuscular and nervous tissue. He deemed his finding the‘resting current’6. Far more significant, du Bois-Reymonddiscovered that, when he stimulated muscles and nerves,the resting current diminished and even reversed. This‘negative variation’, as he termed it, equates to what wenow call the action current – a plain sign of the electricalnature of the nerve signal (Figures 4,5).Du Bois-Reymond’s breakthroughs rested on a foun-dation of ingenious and painstaking method. Other sci-entists had used galvanometers to investigate animalelectricity but none could rival his patience and skill. Tofind the negative variation in the nerve, for example, duBois-Reymond spent months designing and constructingthe most sensitive galvanometer in existence, one whosecoils he wound, by hand, with a mile of wire. He also in-vented a number of other instruments (dial compensators,sled inductors and non-polarizable electrodes), some ofwhich remained standard laboratory apparatus well intothe 20th century. Indeed, it might be said that everysubsequent refinement in electrophysiological equip-ment, from the vacuum tube amplifier through the micro-electrode to the patch clamp, can be read as a footnote todu Bois-Reymond’s original technique7.Survival of the fittestWhen he was around 40, du Bois-Reymond saw his scien-tific development stagnate. He had just become professorand the burdens of lectures, examinations and committeesweighed on him. In his frustration, he began to write and,somewhat to his surprise, he found an interested public.Du Bois-Reymond’s addresses were remarkable for theirrange and style. His favoured genre was biography, or per-haps one should say autobiography, because he portrayedall his subjects (Voltaire, Diderot, La Mettrie, Maupertuis,Chamisso, Erman, Müller, Helmholtz and even Goetheand Frederick the Great) in his own image. His historiesshared the same bias. Whether he treated animal electricity,experimental physiology, European education or Westerncivilization, he always left his readers with the impressionthat the highest stage of development had been achievedin Prussian universities. This tendency to conflate self andother makes his writings hard to judge. They alternatebetween scholarship and art, and, at an even deeper levelof ambiguity, between sensitivity and solipsism.Characteristic in this regard was his essay ‘Science andCultural History’, a speech that he delivered on 24 March1877 at the Society for Scholarly Lectures in Cologne8.The date and location are significant: this was the height ofthe Kulturkampf and du Bois-Reymond intended to takethe battle straight to the enemy. From our perspective, thereis something faintly absurd in the thought of a 59-year-old Prussian professor going to Cologne to argue for theimportance of science in civilization. We see a man speak-ing before an audience and, just outside, perhaps visible130 Endeavour Vol. 24(3) 2000Figure 3 Emil du Bois-Reymond, age 18, drawn by his auntLouise.Figure 2 Emil du Bois-Reymond’s family at home. Clockwise from bottom: hisolder sister Félicie, his aunt Louise, Emil himself, his father, his mother and hisyounger brother Paul. The landscape behind Emil looks like Neuchâtel, where the family stayed between 1830 and 1831. The painting is a composite of portrait and memory: Paul was born after the du Bois-Reymonds returned from Switzerland.through the window, we see an enormous Gothic cathedral,only recently completed after centuries of work, the symbolof Christian German unity become symbol of CatholicReaction. On the one hand, the authority of education,reason and science; on the other, that of tradition, faithand the Church.The first part of his speech did nothing to dispel thissimple division of value. Du Bois-Reymond recounted theages of man and, with them, his slow ascent out of barbarityand ignorance. The Stone Age, or ‘childhood of the race’,possessed no science at all, apart from the flint weaponsthat accompany every find of prehistoric artefacts. The‘Anthropomorphic Age’, as he called the next stage ofhistory, showed little progress. Simple inference enabledman to personify nature, offering a source of religion, if notits absolute cause. The ‘somewhat shallow rationalism’ ofBuckle’s and Lecky’s determinist histories, which alignedmyth with environment, were to be avoided lest we foolourselves into thinking that we could derive monotheismfrom the harsh and unvaried aspect of the Semitic desert.Du Bois-Reymond next criticized Greece and Rome. Inno way did Classical science equal its achievements in thefields of art, literature, history, jurisprudence, rhetoric,metaphysics, war and administration. The ancients werecertainly good engineers, but so were the Egyptians,Assyrians, Indians and Incas. The Chinese possessed bettertextiles and ceramics, and they also developed the compass,gunpowder and printing. Even the Aztecs kept a zoo. Therelative values of art and science in the Classical worldwere manifest in its money: splendid portraits decoratingcoins the minters did not know how to make round.The ancient world fell because it lacked vision. DuBois-Reymond meant this literally: had Roman craftsmenstudied nature with the attention that they devoted to scul-pture, they might have developed the technology to staveoff the barbarians. Like many contemporaries, du Bois-Reymond ascribed Prussia’s recent victories to superiorweapons, communications and railways, advantages, he ar-gued, ultimately based on science. ‘It was the Universityof Berlin that triumphed at Sadowa’, a French historianobserved9. If true for Paris, why not also for Rome?The Middle Ages confounded him. Du Bois-Reymond’ssynopsis of the period rehearsed a litany of intellectualevils: obsession with sin, stultifying ignorance, popularsuperstition and pointless scholasticism, all of whichwarned of the consequences of ignoring the naturalworld. One benefit nevertheless did accrue fromChristianity: the idea of absolute truth encouragedrational inquiry.Du Bois-Reymond’s survey of cultural evolutionculminated in what he called the ‘Technical–InductiveAge’, a true break with the past. Perhaps the mostsignificant of the changes brought by science is ourconception of history. As the one human endeavour thatcan be said to progress, ‘science is the absolute organ ofculture, and the history of science the essential history ofhumanity’10. No other sphere of civilization can make thisclaim – not art, not politics, and certainly not morality.For what else has history taught us? Isn’t the traditionaldiscipline simply a pathetic chronicle, one which:tells us of nothing other than the rise and fall of kings andempires, of treaties and inheritance claims, of wars and con-quests, of battles and sieges, of rebellions and party strug-gles, of wasted cities and pogroms, of murders and execu-tions, of palace plots and priestly intrigues; which shows usnothing in the war of all against all except a dismal muddleof ambition, avarice, and sensuality, of violence, betrayal,and revenge, of delusion, superstition, and hypocrisy?11I submit that du Bois-Reymond’s celebration of scienceexpressed an essential pessimism.Endeavour Vol. 24(3) 2000 131Figure 4 Du Bois-Reymond’s laboratory apparatus for observing the negativevariation. Top: metal electrodes for stimulating the nerve. Bottom: arrangement fordetecting the negative variation in the muscular current. The frog thigh muscle restsacross two thick paper conducting pads bent over the edges of the saline derivingvessels. (The rest of the circuit extending to the galvanometer is not shown.) Metalelectrodes, held in place by an adjustable stand, stimulate the nerve. The twistedwires trail off to some source of electricity, most probably a magneto-electrometer.Figure 5 An early daguerreotype of Emil du Bois-Reymond demonstrating the existence of the ‘voluntary tetanic current’, or nervous signal, by tensing his right arm. His fingers dangle in saline deriving vessels. Wire leads run to the galvanometer on the table to his right. The galvanometer needle, which is suspended from the thread in the glass bell, swings at the moment of musculareffort. Du Bois-Reymond is unclothed to prevent static interference. Whistling in the dark?There are three reasons for the bleakness of his outlook.The first is personal and therefore of greatest interest tothose historians who side with Carlyle and Froude, seeinghistory as the story of individual lives. I mentioned earlierthat du Bois-Reymond’s career in science had stalled.Perhaps I should add that his role in the Kulturkampf hadmade him an object of hate, that his wife’s inheritancewas evaporating in bad investments and that he wassimply quick to mistrust, or at least had been since the ageof ten, when his younger brother died and his parentsnever let him forget it.The second reason is social and most convincing to thosewho want to anchor history to the structures of status andpower. Du Bois-Reymond’s class always claimed to speakin the interests of the entire nation and, for three or fourdecades in the middle of the 19th century, that claim hadseemed plausible. By the 1870s, however, things hadchanged irrevocably. Improvements in literacy, transpor-tation and wages had removed politics from the control ofelites. Liberal ascendancy came to its end and, with it, theconfidence that its values would prevail. ‘Is continual pro-gress manifest in the forces governing bourgeois his-tory’12? Du Bois-Reymond’s history of culture, like thoseof Hippolyte Taine or Henry Adams, resembled a funeraloration.The last reason is intellectual. Du Bois-Reymond wasone of the first converts to Darwin in Germany13. Darwinheld that man descended from apes. If man acted like ananimal, it was because he was an animal. Du Bois-Reymondprofessed his faith in science because it was his only faithleft to profess.Notes and references1 Etienne Henry2 Daniel Chodowiecki3 Susette Henry4 du Bois-Reymond, E. (1848–1884) Untersuchungen überthierische Elektricität (2 Vols), Reimer5 du Bois-Reymond, E. (1848–1884) Untersuchungen überthierische Elektricität (Vol. 1), p. xv, Reimer6 One of du Bois-Reymond’s own students, LudimarHermann, later showed this to be an erroneous artefact ofinjury sustained by the animal preparation7 Frank, R.G., Jr (1994) Instruments, nerve action, and theall-or-nothing principle. Osiris (2nd Ser.) 9, 208–235;Neher, E. and Sakmann, B. (1992) The patch clamptechnique. Sci. Am. 266, 44–518 du Bois-Reymond, E. (1912) Kulturgeschichte undNaturwissenschaft. In Reden (2nd edn) (Vol. 1) (du Bois-Reymond, E.), pp. 567–629, Veit9 Emile Boutmy (1835–1906), friend of Hippolyte Taine,quoted in Smith, R. (1997) The Norton History of theHuman Sciences, p. 750, Norton. Compare this withPasteur, L. (1871) Quelques réflexions sur la science enFrance. In Oeuvres de Pasteur, réunies par Pasteur Vallery-Radot (Vol. 7), pp. 199–221, Masson10 du Bois-Reymond, E. (1912) Reden (2nd edn) (Vol. 1), p. 596, Veit11 du Bois-Reymond, E. (1912) Reden (2nd edn) (Vol. 1), pp. 593–594, Veit12 du Bois-Reymond, E. (1912) Reden (2nd edn) (Vol. 1), p. 594, Veit13 du Bois-Reymond, E. (1912) Darwin und Kopernicus. InReden (2nd edn) (Vol. 2), pp. 243–248, Veit132 Endeavour Vol. 24(3) 2000

The Ascent of Man? Emil du Bois-Reymond's Reflections on Scientific Progress

https://philpapers.org/archive/FINTAO-8.pdf

The Ascent of Man? Emil du Bois-Reymond's Reflections on Scientific Progress

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

PhilPapers