Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
research in terms of its social outcomes.
31
Should the positivist program
gain public support and patronage, he could well imagine theoretical and
empirical research programs falling subject to the whims of a new oligar-
chy of sociologists and historians. There were already signs that these ama-
teur overlords were beginning to mobilize. Richard Congreve, destined
to become one of positivism's high priests, had resigned his tutorship at
Oxford's Wadham College in 1854 so that he could prepare for these holy
orders by studying medicine. Twelve years later he founded the London
Positivist Society, and in 1870, a Positivist school.
32
It is impossible to gauge how seriously Huxley may have taken the pros-
pects of the positivist movement itself, but it was certainly clear to him that
its ascendancy threatened the autonomy of the scientific enterprise. This
is a concern reflected in his treatments of other competing enterprises
of inquiry as well. Although he was happy to give a dedication speech in
1880 in support of a new technical college being opened in Birmingham
by the industrialist Josiah Mason, he also used this occasion to reiterate the
primacy of “pure” over applied science—lest the new industrialist powerbro-
kers should become errant scientific policymakers.
What people call applied science is nothing but the application of pure
science to particular classes of problems. It consists of deductions from
those general principles, established by reasoning and observation, which
constitute pure science. No one can safely make these deductions until he
has a firm grasp of the principles; and he can obtain that grasp only by
personal experience of the operations of observation and of reasoning on
which they are founded.
33
This characterization of technical application's dependency upon “pure”
science is a bit overdrawn. Technological advances, in fact, typically had
not followed from basic research, as Robert Gilpin has pointed out. They
had emerged in parallel with theoretical science, and had only begun to
become dependent upon it in the nineteenth century with the rise of the
German system of scientific research and education.
34
Huxley undoubtedly
knew this as well, but such “boundary-work,” as Thomas Gieryn has called
the social construction of such distinctions as this, could also secure the
position of basic research atop an epistemic hierarchy.
35
All threats to the autonomy of the natural sciences had to be kept in
check. From 1864 until 1892, much of this was managed from the inside
through an informal interest group whose members called themselves the
“X-Club.” Along with Huxley, the other eight members, all prominent
