History of the Intellectual Development of Europe (Classic Reprint)
(British Association for the Advancement of Science, held ...)
British Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Oxford in 1860,1 read an abstract of the physiological argument contained in this work respecting the mental progress of Europe, reserving the historical evidence for subsequent publication. This volume contains that evidence. It is intended as the completion of my work on Human Physiology, in which man was treated of as an individual. In this he is considered in his social relation. But the reader will also find, I think, that it is a history of the progress of ideas and opinions from a point of view heretofore almost entirely neglected. There are two methods of dealing with philosophical questions the literary and the scientific. Many things which in a purely literary treatment of the subject remain in the background, spontaneously assume a more striking position when their scientific relations are considered. It is the latter method that I have used. Social advancement is as completely under the control of natural law as is bodily growth. The life of an individual is a miniature of the life of a nation. These propositions it is the special object of this book to demonstrate. No one, I believe, has hitherto undertaken the labor of arranging the evidence offered by the intellectual history of Europe in accordance with physiological principles, so as to illustrate the orderly progress of civilization, or collected the facts furnished by other branches of science with a view of enabling us to recognize clearly the conditions under which that progress takes place. This philosophical deficiency I have endeavored in the following pages to supply. Seen thus through the medium of physiology, history presents a new aspect to us. We gain a more just and thorough appreciation of the thoughts and motives of men in successive ages of the world. In the Preface to the second edition of my Physiology, published i
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)
History Of The Conflict Between Religion And Science
(The scientist John William Draper and the writer Andrew D...)
The scientist John William Draper and the writer Andrew Dickson White were the most influential exponents of the Conflict Thesis between religion and science. In the early 1870s, Draper was invited to write a History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874), a book replying to contemporary issues in Roman Catholicism, such as the doctrine of papal infallibility, and mostly criticising what he claimed to be anti-intellectualism in the Catholic tradition, yet assessing that Islam and Protestantism had little conflict with science.
John William Draper was an English-American scientist, philosopher, physician, chemist, historian and photographer.
Background
Draper was born on May 5, 1811, in St. Helens, England, to John Christopher Draper, a Wesleyan clergyman and Sarah (Ripley) Draper. He also had three sisters, Dorothy Catherine (August 6, 1807 - December 10, 1901), Elizabeth Johnson, and Sarah Ripley. On June 23, he was baptized by the Wesleyan minister Jabez Bunting. His father often needed to move the family due to serving various congregations throughout England.
Education
In 1822 Draper entered to the Woodhouse Grove School. In 1829 he commenced his premedical studies at University College, London. There Draper studied chemistry under Edward Turner, an admirer of Berzelius and the author of one of the earliest English textbooks in organic chemistry. Turner interested Draper in the chemical effects of light and thereby gave his career a decisive turn. At a time when Parliament had not yet broken the monopoly of Oxford and Cambridge for granting degrees, Draper had to be content with a “certificate of honors” in chemistry. After studying at the University of London, he settled in the United States in 1832 and received a medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania in 1836. His thesis, “Glandular Action, ” reflected the interest of his teacher J. K. Mitchell in the researches of Dutrochet on osmosis. His other principal instructor was Robert Hare.
Career
After graduation from the University of Pennsylvania, Draper returned to Virginia and was engaged as chemist and mineralogist to the newly formed Mineralogical Society of Virginia, which had been inspired by the writings of the celebrated pioneer of scientific agriculture in America, the Virginian Edmund Ruffin. A projected school of mineralogy never materialized, but many of the projectors were trustees of Hampden-Sidney College, where Draper served as professor of chemistry and natural philosophy from 1836 to 1839. From 1839 Draper was a professor of chemistry in the College of New York University.
Draper first achieved wide celebrity for his pioneering work in photography. As early as 1837, while still in Virginia, he had followed the example of Wedgwood and Davy in making temporary copies of objects by the action of light on sensitized surfaces. When the details of Daguerre’s process for fixing camera images were published in various New York newspapers on 20 September 1839, Draper was ready for the greatest remaining challenge, to take a photographic portrait. A New York mechanic, Alexander S. Wolcott, apparently won the race by 7 October. But if Draper knew of this, he persisted in his own experiments and succeeded in taking a portrait not later than December 1839.
His communication to the Philosophical Magazine, dated 31 March 1840, was the first report received in Europe of any photographer’s success in portraiture. The superb likeness of his sister Dorothy Catharine, taken not later than July 1840, with an exposure of sixty-five seconds, seems to be the oldest surviving photographic portrait. In the busy winter of 1839–1840, Draper also took the first photograph of the moon and launched, in a very modest way, the age of astronomical photography. He obtained “distinct” representations of the dark spots or lunar maria. He first announced his success to the New York Lyceum of Natural History on 23 March 1840.
With a grating ruled for him by the mechanics of the United States Mint, Joseph Saxton, Draper took, in 1844, what seems to have been the first photograph of the diffraction spectrum. Apparently, he was also the first to take with any precision a photograph of the infrared region, and the first to describe three great Fraunhofer lines there. Draper also proved (1847) that all solid substances become incandescent at the same temperature, and that thereafter with rising temperature they emit rays of decreasing wavelength. He demonstrated a fundamental proposition of astrophysics, later elaborated by Gustav Kirchhoff, that incandescent solids produce a continuous spectrum; and showed that the maxima of luminosity and of heat in the spectrum coincide. In 1850 he enlisted his aid in photographing slides through a microscope to illustrate a projected textbook, Human Physiology (1856).
His principal historical teaching, embodied in the Oxford address and in his Intellectual Development of Europe (1863), was an unstable compound of Comtian Positivism (progression of mankind away from theology toward science) and cyclical theories of history (societies as biological organisms experiencing birth, maturity, and death). His most popular book, widely read in many translations, was a History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874), a vigorous polemic against the persecution of scientists by religionists.
In addition to the above-mentioned activities, Draper was a founding proprietor of the tenuously connected New York University School of Medicine (1841), of which he served as president from 1850. Under his inspiration, the university proper granted the degree of doctor of philosophy five times between 1867 and 1872, to students who had a bachelor’s degree in arts or science or a medical degree and had then completed two further years of study in chemistry. This appears to be one of the two earliest attempts in the United States to establish the Ph. D. as a graduate degree. The enterprise petered out with Draper’s own advancing years. His other principal institutional exertions were as the first president of the American Union Academy of Literature, Science, and Art, founded in 1869 as a riposte to the creation of the National Academy of Sciences in 1863. Draper had unaccountably been omitted from the original incorporators of the latter, and the omission was not repaired until 1877. He was, however, elected the first president of the American Chemical Society in 1876.
On September 13, 1831, John William Draper married Antonia Coetana de Paiva Pereira Gardner (c. 1814-1870), the daughter of Daniel Gardner, a court physician to John VI of Portugal and Charlotte of Spain. Antonia was born in Brazil after the royal family fled Portugal with Napoleon's invasion. There is dispute as to the identity of Antonia's mother. Around 1830, Antonia was sent with her brother Daniel to live with their aunt in London.