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on science popularization. From about 1860 he developed his views on
the social role of science and the relationship between science and relig-
ion that sharply deviated from those of Mulder. His marriage to Petro-
nella Adriana Pierson in 1858 not only brought him into contact with cir-
cles associated with the orthodox Protestant movement 'Reveil', but also
with the movement of emerging Modernist theology, led by his brother-
in-law Allard Pierson and the then famous Dutch author Conrad Busken
Huet. Without ever subscribing to the Modernist direction, Gunning
showed himself to be in the remainder of his life a fierce proponent of a
strict dualism between religion and science, which was professed by both
Modernists and orthodox (!). This dualism radically broke with more
than a century of physico-theology, Enlightenment didactics, and the dif-
fusion of 'useful knowledge'. For Gunning the Bible, and the figure of
Christ in particular, was the foundation of religion, while science had to
be practiced experimentally and objectively, unrelated to any philosophi-
cal-moral or religious ideology. As a child of the professionalizing sci-
ence of his time he demanded full freedom for scientific research “for its
own sake”, regardless of whatever social usefulness (Gunning 1865;
Gunning 1882; De Vrijer 1946, pp. 38-42, 47-61, 222-3, 251-60). From
this perspective, in 1882 Gunning looked back on the work of his teacher
and criticized his views with singular sharpness. Mulder, Gunning ar-
gued, did not know the “autonomy of science in the modern sense”; he
valued “science only […] to the extent it could elevate humanity morally
[and] not for its own sake”. Such “fatal” views had troublesome conse-
quences for both science and ethics. “To attribute a morally edifying
character to science, by asking it to be subservient to objectives that as
such - no matter how lofty and honorable - are foreign to it, is to make it
unfree.” Which knowledge will become useful could not be determined
in advance, according to Gunning, notwithstanding Mulder's self-reliant
view on this issue (Gunning 1882, pp. 155-7, 171-2, 185-7). While
Mulder saw himself as a transitional figure, in between the traditional
scholar and the 'man of useful knowledge', he failed to recognize that, as
he grew older, the 'train of chemistry', influenced by Liebig and his fol-
lowers, had already moved on to the next station: the 'man of useful
knowledge' was replaced by the professional chemist who transferred his
knowledge to the next generation of professional chemists rather than to
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