Nineteenth-Century Popularizations of Thermodynamics and The Rhetoric of Social Prophecy

Nineteenth-Century Popularizations of Thermodynamics and the Rhetoric of Social
Prophecy
Author(s): Greg Myers
Source: Victorian Studies, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 35-66
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3827565
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Greg Myers
NINETEENTH-CENTURY
POPULARIZATIONS OF
THERMODYNAMICS AND THE
RHETORIC OF SOCIAL PROPHECY
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THERMODYNAMICS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY,
introducing the concepts of energy and entropy, was part of a re

tion in nineteenth-century physics contemporary with the revolu
brought about in biology by the concept of evolution by natural
tion.' Like Darwinism, thermodynamics has been intertwined
social thought, influenced by it and influencing it since the ear
formulations. In the words of the twentieth-century writer Osw
Spengler, "What the myth of Gotterdammerung signified of old
the myth of entropy signifies today - the world's end as completi
an inwardly necessary evolution."2 The implication of this myth i
history is shaped by the laws of physics rather than by the strugg
people.
Historians of science have shown the importance of social and
theological assumptions and metaphors in the thinking of Herman von
Helmholtz, William Thomson, James Clerk Maxwell, and others.3
Literary critics and historians have shown how such social prophets as
J. Theodore Merz, A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century, 4 vols. (Edinburgh:
William Blackwood, 1896-1914), II, 136.
2 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1957), I, 423.
3 See Thomas Kuhn, "Energy Conservation as an Example of Simultaneous Discovery," in Marshall
Clagett, ed., Critical Problems in the History of Science (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1959), pp. 321-356; Yehuda Elkana, The Discovery of the Conservation of Energy (London: Hut-
chinson Educational, 1974); D. S. L. Cardwell, From Watt to Clausius (Ithaca: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1974); Susan Cannon, Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period (New York:
Science History Publications, 1978); Stephen G. Brush, The Kind of Motion We Call Heat: A
History of the Kinetic Theory of Gasses in the Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam: North Holland,
1976).
AUTUMN 1985
36 Greg Myers
Henry Adams and Gustav LeBon use thermodynamics as a vision of

universal history, a scientific explanation for what they see as the grow-
ing disorder of society.4 With these recent studies of the conceptual
links between thermodynamics and social prophecy as a backgound, I
will show how the language of social and moral criticism came to
permeate the rhetoric of the nineteenth-century British popularizers of
physics, and how the language of physics came to be used for social and
moral criticism. I will trace some commonplaces, rhetorical topics ap-
plicable to a variety of fields and arguments, as they are introduced in
popular texts by physicists, intertwined with social commonplaces in
the works of later popularizers, and finally used by non-physicists to
give social views apparently scientific authority.
I am using the term "social prophet" to describe writers like
Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and Henry Adams, who criticize the
society of their time in terms of a vision of universal history. Like the
Old Testament prophets, they take on a special role as representatives
of, mediators for, and critics of their nation and their historical mo-
ment. Like the Old Testament prophets, they claim to read "the Signs
of the Times." But in the nineteenth century they had to compete for
authority as readers of those signs with scientists, first geologists, then
biologists and physicists, who claimed a professional monopoly on the
interpretation of nature. Social prophets were able to borrow the
language and authority of physicists because physicists had already
borrowed the language and authority of social prophets. Just as the
ideas of Thomas Malthus influenced Charles Darwin and then
reentered the social arena, with a new scientific authority, as soci
Darwinism, the ideas of various social thinkers, including Condorc
Adam Smith, Carlyle, and Henry Thomas Buckle, influenced t
physicists and reentered the social arena with the authority of phys
law. Henry Adams is perhaps the best-known example of the proces
popularization I am describing.5
4 Stephen G. Brush, "Thermodynamics and History: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth
tury," The Graduate Journal, 7(1967), 481-543, now expanded into a book, The Temperatur
History: Phases of Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Burt Frank
1978); Erwin Hiebert, "The Uses and Abuses of Thermodynamics in Religion," Daedalus
(1966), 1046-80; Jerome Buckley, The Triumph of Time (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harva
University Press, 1966); William Jordy, Henry Adams: Scientific Historian (New Haven: Y
University Press, 1952).
5 Henry Adams, A Letter to American Teachers of History, in Brooks Adams, ed., The Degrad
of Democratic Dogma (New York: Macmillan, 1919), p. 140. William Jordy and others h
discussed Adams's confused understanding of these concepts and their application to history
note 4.
VICTORIAN STUDIES
THERMODYNAMICS AND SOCIAL PROPHECY 37
Adams could use the phrases and names of the physicist

confidence because the conservation and dissipation of energy
already established, in some circles, as familiar concepts with
social applications. A topic used in this way can be called, in rh
terms, a commonplace, "a general argument, observation, or d
tion a speaker could memorize for use on any number of possi
sions."6 When Darwin refers to "that old canon in natural his
'natura non facit saltum,' "7 he is not applying a law nor even
plicit methodological principle, but is drawing on a genera
argument he can assume his readers know. When he refers to
and almost universal belief, founded, I think, on a considerab
of evidence, that slight changes in the conditions of life are benefi
all living things," he does not introduce evidence but refers to
monplace that a change will do you good (Darwin, p. 281). His
have studied exhaustively how such accepted ideas shape the s
thought of the physicists I will discuss; what interests me is th
such commonplaces in the popularization of their thought. I wi
show how commonplaces are useful rhetorically both becau
they may have a great deal of evidence to support them in spec
texts, they need not be supported, and because while they may
quite definite meaning in one discourse, they transfer easily
discourses. Such commonplaces are essential to the popularizat
science; just as nineteenth-century lecturers used familiar ho
objects in demonstrating phenomena, they used familiar langu
images in explaining concepts. Eventually, the names of the s
themselves became commonplaces: Maxwell has been identifie
"Maxwell's Demon," Darwin with "survival of the fittest," Albe
stein with "relativity," Werner Heisenberg with "the uncertain
ciple." I will try to show the steps in the process by which th
monplaces associated with conservation and dissipation, i
thermodynamic senses, become available for popular and very
social use. The process begins, I argue, with the reliance of nin
century physicists on traditional commonplaces that also hav
implications. Later popularizers emphasize this intertwining of
6 Richard Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (Berkeley: University of California

p. 110.
7 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, ed. J. W. Burrow (1859; rpt. ed., Harm
Penguin, 1982), pp. 223, 233. The phrase can be translated "Nature does not make le
Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Ca
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982), finds this commonplace in Leibn
Linnaeus (p. 259), and Lamarck (p. 480). Mayr quotes Huxley's doubts about this "ap
which turns up so often in his pages" (p. 544).
AUTUMN 1985
38 Greg Myers
cal language with social. Finally we see the physical principles

used explicitly to support ideology.
The historian Charles Coulston Gillispie points out that, though

energy and entropy were strikingly new concepts, the commonplaces of
thermodynamics have a long history. Energy and entropy are, he says,
"highly sophisticated and abstract representations of certain elemen-
tary experiences of the world, certain serious intuitions; Energy, of the
intuition that there is an activity, a'force,' in things beyond matter in
motion, that something real makes nature go . . ; Entropy, on the
other hand, of the complementary experience of water seeking its own
level . . . of a world getting old and running down."8 Whatever the
conceptual origins of the principle of the conservation of energy, the
popular sense of it as a self-evident law applicable to all fields owes
something to these older ideas of circulation. In The Advancement of
Learning (1605), Francis Bacon discusses conservation as one of several
concepts that link a number of apparently unrelated fields. "Is not the
observation, omnia mutantur, nil interit, a contemplation in philoso-
phy thus, that the quantum of energy is eternal? is natural theology
thus, that it requireth the same omnipotency to make somewhat
nothing, which at the first made nothing somewhat? according to the
scripture Didici quod omnia opera, quae fecit Deus, perseverent in
perpetuum; non possumus eis quicquam addere nec auferre."9 This
general language does not make Bacon the discoverer of conservation
of energy, as some of the more eager anglophiles in nineteenth-century
priority debates claimed. But passages like this influenced the public's
interpretation of the new concept, making it seem both familiar and
broadly applicable.
The power and persistence of these commonplaces in the nine-
teenth century is suggested by the work of John Frederick William
Herschel (1792-1871). Though he wrote A Preliminary Discourse on
the Study of Natural Philosophy in 1831, before the major statements
of thermodynamics, he uses a number of commonplaces we will find in
B Charles Coulston Gillispie, The Edge of Objectivity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960),
p. 400. This chapter, "Early Energetics," may be the best short introduction to the early history of
thermodynamics for readers interested in literature.
9 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning and The New Atlantis, ed., Arthur Johnston (Lon-
don: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 84-85. These phrases can be translated "everything
changes, nothing perishes" and "I have learned that all works, that God has made, last forever; it
is not possible either to add to them or to subtract from them."
VICTORIAN STUDIES
later texts: the parallel of social statistics and physical statistics

continuity of physical laws, the manufactured quality of atoms
correlation and circulation of natural powers. And he, like Bacon
phasizes the applicability of these analogies to various fields. Fo
stance, he.comments on the "well-known sentence" Darwin would
later use, Natura non agit per saltum: "The pursuit of this law into
cases where its application is not at first sight obvious, has proved a fer-
tile source of discovery, and led us to the knowledge of an analogy and
intimate connection of phenomena between which at first we should
never have expected to find any."10 Herschel believed that such
analogies would carry over from the physical world into the social,
finally bringing politics and economics into the realm of science.
Thus the nineteenth-century scientists who read Bacon and
Herschel as methodological guides found in them sources both of com-
monplaces and of encouragement for their broadest analogical use.
And in thermodynamics they found new concepts to put to this use,
concepts that were highly general in application and strikingly con-
crete in illustration. The first law of thermodynamics, as we know it,
was formulated only in the 1840s, when scientists began to see energy
as an elementary entity in nature, as distinct from force, which is an at-
tribute of matter in motion (Elkana, p. 9). The law was suggested in a
number of forms by researchers interested in physiology, steam
engines, and universal laws of conservation (Kuhn, p. 324). Popular
discussions often take the steam engine as an example of the conversion
of heat energy to mechanical energy; thus the commonplaces of energy
intersect with the commonplaces of mechanism (such as Carlyle's
universe as steam engine in Sartor Resartus). When Adams refers to this
first law he suggests that society was, but is no longer, seen as a closed
system in which "social energy" circulates without being created or
destroyed (Adams, Letter, p. 146).
The second law did not replace the first, as Adams suggests it
did; in fact, it preceded the first historically, having its first statement
in Sadi Carnot's Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824). Ac-
cording to the second law, even though the energy in a closed system
remains the same, the system becomes less and less able to do work as it
becomes more and more disorganized. One way to think of entropy is
as a measure of this disorganization. So in an ideal steam engine, work
can be done because the system is initially organized into hotter and
colder areas, the boiler and condenser. When the boiler and condenser
10 John F. W. Herschel, A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (London:
Longman's, 1831), p. 188.
AUTUMN 1985
40 Greg Myers
become the same temperature, no work can be done. The heat energy
is still there, the average temperature remains the same, but the
organization of the system has been lost, and the system cannot be
restored to its original hot and cold state without the addition of work
from outside the system. The concept of entropy, then, relates to the
ancient commonplaces of decline, irreversibility, and disorder. A social
prophet who uses the word entropy is saying that society, or the
universe, or the economy, is a closed system that is running down like
the hypothetical steam engine." Another image for entropy used by
Adams and other fin-de-siecle writers is that of the slowly dying sun.
Algernon Charles Swinburne ends "The Garden of Proserpine" with a
vision of a world sunk into maximum entropy:
Then star nor sun shall waken,
Nor any change of light;
Nor sound of waters shaken,
Nor any sound or sight;
Nor wintry leaves nor vernal,
Nor days nor things diurnal;
Only the sleep eternal
In an eternal night. 2
The images are at least as old as the Bible, but their effect is different
when they are given scientific authority by a writer like Adams, or by
the physicists whom he followed.
While the concepts of energy and entropy were being adapted to
a wider audience, the discipline of physics was itself changing, in ways
that made it less accessible but gave it greater authority. Physics has
never been a subject for amateurs as geology once was. In the period I
am describing, it became a profession, with the establishment of
laboratories, professorships, and new universities, and increased fund-
ing for non-academic institutions that employed physicists.'3 These
changes required physics to present itself to an uncomprehending
public as a discipline worth teaching and funding (Herschel, p. 213).
The worth of physics was not immediately obvious; it had not entered
into natural theological treatises as much as geology, had not proved its
practical value as had chemistry, and had not developed a long tradi-
tion in the university as had mathematics. "Physics" in its present
meaning was a new word; as late as 1871 Thomson called his textbook
on the subject a Treatise on Natural Philosophy, retaining the term
"See the chapter, "The Running-Down of the Universe" in Arthur S. Eddington, The Nature of the
Physical World (New York: Macmillan, 1930).
12 Algernon Charles Swinburne, "The Garden of Proserpine," The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Circle,
ed. Cecil Lang (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 362-363.
13 See Cannon, Science in Culture, for a more complex view of professionalization.
VICTORIAN STUDIES
used by Isaac Newton. When John Tyndall, Michael Fa

cessor as Professor of Natural History at the Royal Institu
asked for examination questions in science in the schools, h
friend (1855), "The natural sciences are in a sad state in En
ple appear to have no clear idea of what the region of phys
mix it up with chemistry, and in the present instance every
mixed up with them . . . The absurdity makes a man a
Before he could take the Chair of Natural Philosophy at th
of Glasgow, Thomson was warned by his father, who h
chair before him, that "the situation is half mathematica
popular," and that the younger Thomson was thought by h
to be "too deep for our students."'5 Maxwell, the first Cave
fessor of Experimental Physics at Cambridge, set up a lab
1871 only with special intervention of the Chancellor, an i
interested in promoting scientific research, and had to lob
vant questions on the mathematics tripos.'6 Balfour Stewar
ticularly difficult early career, working his way up from
position at the Kew Observatory.
The need to appeal for popular support for the discip
account for some of the physicists' emphasis on the mora
relevance of physics and for their use of concepts familiar
fields to explain new concepts. All these scientists wer
popularizers in their different ways: Tyndall gave demon
tures to large crowds at the Royal Institution; Thomso
became famous for his work on the transatlantic cable, le
variety of fields; Maxwell wrote excellent articles for the
Britannica; and Stewart wrote one of the most popular te
thermodynamics. In each case they were also arguing for
philosophical or social position, as well as for their discipl
for the materialism of the Belfast Address, Thomson for a
Darwinism, Maxwell for a moral and spiritual alternative
materialism, and Stewart for immortality of the soul. Wh
ferences in the causes to which they apply physics, they ag
ing to make it applicable. In doing so, they helped to mak
tific language of conservation and decline available to oth
14 Arthur S. Eve and C. H. Creasey, The Life and Work of John Tyndall (Lon
1945), p. 61.
15 S. P. Thompson, The Life of William Thomson, Baron Kelvin of Largs, 2 vols. (London: Mac-
millan, 1910), I, 163.
16 See Romualdas Sviedrys, "The Rise of Physical Science at Victorian Cambridge," Historical
Studies in the Physical Sciences, 2 (1970), 128-142.
AUTUMN 1985
42 Greg Myers
The principle of the conservation of energy was associated in the

popular mind with the name of John Tyndall (1820-93), whose Heat as
a Mode of Motion (1855), based on a series of lectures at the Royal In-
stitution, presented the principles of the new physics with striking ex-
periments and imaginative language.17 Tyndall did important work on
radiant heat, but he did not use his very popular works to promote his
own discoveries: it was scientific education he saw himself as pro-
moting. His experience as an examiner, he says in one of his prefaces,
had led him to deplore the want of scientific knowledge "and the utter
absence of sympathy with scientific studies, which mark the greater
bulk of our otherwise cultivated English public."'8 His aim, he says,
was "to combine soundness of matter with a style which should arouse
interest and sympathy in persons uncultured in science" (Tyndall,
Heat, p. viii). Tyndall gains this interest by spectacular demonstrations
of phenomena (described with illustrations of the apparatus in the
text). He also places the new theories in the context of Victorian
literary culture. For instance, he finds conservation anticipated by
Carlyle in Sartor Resartus: "That little fire which grows star-like across
the dark-growing moor . . . is it a detached separated speck, cut off
from the whole universe; or is it indissolubly joined to the whole? Thou
fool, that smithy fired was kindled primarily of the sun." And Tyndall
comments, "Such passages - and they abound in his writ-
ings - might justify us in giving Carlyle the credit of poetically, but
accurately, foreshadowing the doctrine of The Conservation of
Energy."'9 Tyndall does not just use Carlyle for ornament; as Frank
Turner shows, Carlyle was an inspiration to Tyndall and many of his
scientific contemporaries.20 We see in Tyndall Carlyle's ideas of the
power of facts, the fundamental mysteriousness of nature, and the her-
oism of the philosopher. Tyndall says in an introduction: "I have there-
fore tried to show the tendency displayed throughout history, by the
most profound investigators, to pass from the world of senses to a world
where vision becomes spiritual, where principles are elaborated, and
from which the explorer emerges with conceptions and conclusions, to
17 For Tyndall's influence, see Brush, The Kind of Motion, p. 199, and Merz, History, II, 148 and 57:
"The book was to the popular mind a revelation." For recent essays on Tyndall, see W. H. Brock,
N. D. McMillan, and R. C. Mollan, John Tyndall, Essays on a Natural Philosopher (Dublin: Royal
Dublin Society, 1981), especially the essays by A. J. Meadows, pp. 81-92, Frank M. Turner, pp.
169-180, and Tess Cosslett, pp. 181-192.
18 John Tyndall, Heat as a Mode of Motion, 3d ed. (London: Longman's, 1863), p. vii.
9 John Tyndall, "Personal Recollections of Thomas Carlyle," New Fragments (New York: D. Apple-
ton and Co., 1896), p. 386. Tyndall regularizes Carlyle's capitalization and spelling.
20 See Frank Turner, "Victorian Scientific Naturalism and Thomas Carlyle," Victorian Studies, 18
(1975), 326-343.
VICTORIAN STUDIES
be approved or rejected as they coincide, or refuse to coincide

sensible things."21 Although Tyndall's language here is Carlyl
aim is not; as his later agnostic manifesto, the "Belfast Address
shows, he would make science the measure of all things.
When Tyndall sums up the correlation and conservation
ergy in his last lecture, he quotes a long passage from The Outline
tronomy (1833) by John Herschel. The passage begins, "The su
are the ultimate source of almost every motion which takes plac
surface of the earth" (Tyndall, Heat, p. 526). Water flows, plan
animals run, men eat and use water power and animals; th
kingdoms of mineral, vegetable, animal, and human are se
hierarchy with the sun at the top, the levels linked by the cons
change of energy. Tyndall comments, "This fine passage require
breath of recent investigation to convert it into an exposition of th
of the conservation of energy" (Tyndall, Heat, p. 527). Tyndall'
ing is that of an agnostic; the physicist, rather than the creator, b
life into this world. But the radical new concepts of conser
transformed energy are assimilated into a philosophy dating f
clesiastes: "The thing that hath been, is that which shall be; a
which is done is that which shall be done; and there is nothing
der the sun" (1:9). All change merely reinforces the sense of a perm
hierarchy. In Tyndall's words, "Waves may change to ripples, ri
waves, - magnitude may be substituted for number, and num
magnitude, - asteroids may aggregate to suns, suns may inves
energy in florae and faunae, and florae and faunae may melt
- the flux of power is eternally the same" (Tyndall, Heat, p. 5
John Ruskin, surprisingly, responds to Tyndall's evocati
biblical rhythms and hierarchies, and his echo of Ruskin's own
Carlyle, with considerable sarcasm.22 In The Eagle's Nest (1
points to the passage as a commonplace, not a discovery: "All t
ceedingly true; and it is new in one respect, namely, in the asc
ment that the quantity of solar force necessary to produc
power is measurable, and, in its sum, unalterable. For the res
perfectly well known in Homer's time, as now, that animals co
move till they were warm."23 Later, in The Storm Cloud of th
21 Heat as a Mode of Motion, 6th ed., 1880, p. viii.
22 For a study of John Ruskin's conflicts with Tyndall, see Paul L. Sawyer, "Ruskin and Ty
Poetry of Matter and the Poetry of Spirit," in James Paradis and Thomas Postlewait
torian Science and Victorian Values: Literary Perspectives (New York: New York Ac
Sciences, 1981).
23 John Ruskin, The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, The Works of John Ruskin
Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1903-12), XXII, 19
AUTUMN 1985
44 Greg Myers
teenth Century (1884), his reference to the same passage is more bitter:
"The lilies of the fields are the sun's workmanship, in the same sense
that the lilies of the hothouse are the stove's workmanship, - and in
perfectly logical parallel, you, who are listening to me, because you
have been warmed and fed through the winter, are the workmanship
of your own coal scuttle" (Works, XXXIII, 61). Ruskin sees that Tyn-
dall is using the language of Carlyle and Homer for a materialist argu-
ment. Adams, on the other hand, sees Tyndall as shoring up traditional
ideas. This "famous outburst of eloquence" is the last gasp of "the
scientific dogma which asserted resolutely, without qualification, the
fact that nothing in nature was lost" (Adams, Letter, p. 143). And we
will see Huxley apply the ideas of circulation of energy in this passage
directly to economic questions.
II
As Adams suggests, Tyndall's message is comforting compared

to that of William Thomson. Adams quotes Thomson, later Lord
Kelvin (1824-1907), as his authority for the second law of ther-
modynamics. He traces to Thomson's 1852 essay "On a Universal
Tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy" his ideas
of decline and irreversibility.24 After quoting the essay, Adams com-
ments, "This young man of twenty-eight thus tossed the universe into
the ash-heap" (Adams, Letter, p. 142). But Thomson had no such
radical purpose. He saw his function, as Professor of Natural Philoso-
phy at Glasgow, proponent of Newton and successor of his own father,
as that of finding "overpoweringly strong proofs of intelligent and
benevolent design." If Tyndall saw Carlyle as his model, Thomson saw
William Paley's Natural Theology, "that excellent old book," as his.
Crosbie Smith and David Wilson have shown in Thomson's education
and notebooks the influence of natural theology on his scientific think-
ing.25 For Thomson, the appearance of life on a cooling earth, between
its molten origins and icy end, could not be the result of chance. In
24 William Thomson, Mathematical and Physical Papers, 6 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1882), I, 511-514. Stephen G. Brush, "Irreversibility and Indeterminism: Fourier to
Heisenberg," Journal of the History of Ideas, 37 (1976), 603-630, has shown other possible sources
for the concept of irreversibility, including Fourier, who provided the basis for much of Thomson's
work. But popular writers in England and Germany generally refer only to Thomson.
25 David B. Wilson, "Kelvin's Scientific Realism: The Theological Context," Philosophical Journal,
11 (1974), 41-60; and Crosbie Smith, "Natural Philosophy and Thermodynamics: William Thom-
son and 'The Dynamical Theory of Heat,' " British Journal for the History of Science, 9 (1976),
293-319.
VICTORIAN STUDIES
later papers, he would use his formula for the dissipation of the
a solid body to give an age of the earth young enough to confl
Darwin's estimates. So he was presenting both a general ar
from design and a specific argument against natural selection
Though Thomson published his paper in the Transactions
Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Philosophical Magazine, tw
nals with generally quite technical articles, his non-technical la
suggests he wanted to reach the widest possible audience. Ada
others usually quote the conclusion: "Within a finite period of
past, the earth must have been, and within a finite period of
come the earth must again be, unfit for the habitation of ma
present constituted, unless operations have been or are perfor
which are impossible under the laws to which the known oper
going on in the physical world are subject."26 The rest of the
paper leads carefully to this prediction of "heat death." As He
von Helmholtz says, "We must admire the sagacity of Thomso
in the letters of a long-known little mathematical formula, wh
speaks of the heat, volume, and pressure of bodies, was able to
consequences which threatened the universe, though certainly
infinite period of time, with eternal death."27 The lea
mathematics to prophetic oracle is the source of the pow
Thomson's essay.
Thomson's essay begins mildly enough, as a note on his e
account of Carnot's theory: "The object of the present commun
is to call attention to the remarkable consequences which follow
Carnot's theory" (Thomson, p. 511). He then raises the questio
transformations that do not meet the conditions of Carnot's
thermodynamic engine": "As it is most certain that Creative
alone can either call into existence or annihilate mechanical en
the 'waste' referred to cannot be annihilation, but must be some
transformation of energy." The capitalization of Creative Power sug-
gests a theological assumption that energy is created by God, then
dissipated by nature and particularly by humans. Crosbie Smith's
study of Thomson's notebooks shows he was thinking of the Bible here;
Thomson notes in reference to this passage, "The earth shall wax old,
&c." (Smith, p. 59). The full text of Isaiah 51:6, to which Thomson is
referring, helps us see the theological framework: "Lift up your eyes to
26 William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, Mathematical and Physical Papers, 6 vols. (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1882), I, 514.
27 Hermann von Helmholtz, Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects (New York: D. Appleton and
Co., 1885), pp. 172-173, and Buckley, pp. 66-68.
AUTUMN 1985
46 Greg Myers
the heavens, and look at the earth beneath; for the heavens shall vanish
away like smoke, and the earth shall wax old like a garment, and they
that dwell therein shall die in like manner; but my salvation shall be
forever, and my righteousness shall not be abolished." Here the con-
trast between eternity and temporality is explicit; the earth shall pass
away in entropy, dissipation, and sin, but righteousness, salvation, and
energy shall not be abolished. Thomson recalls the Old Testament vi-
sion of decline in order to preserve a conservative, natural theological
sense of the power of the Creator over nature.
The power of Thomson's vision of irreversible decline, as com-
pared to the Old Testament vision on which he draws, or the classical
sense of the mutable earth and immutable heavens, derives from his
apparently scientific approach. To inquire into the transformation of
energy, Thomson divides stores of mechanical energy into two classes,
statical and dynamical (or what he would later name potential and
kinetic). Then he lays down his propositions: that a system undergoing
reversible processes requires heat from outside to be restored to its
primitive condition, and that a system undergoing irreversible pro-
cesses such as friction, conduction, or absorption cannot be restored to
its primitive condition. But he does not yet generalize these proposi-
tions to the entire material world. First he shows mathematically that
the full heat of friction can never be recovered for work. Then he shows
mathematically the quantity of work that could be done in equalizing
the temperature of all parts of a solid, by even the most efficient
method, ending with a formula for the final uniform temperature of
the system. The conclusions I have quoted seem to follow from the
propositions at the beginning of the article. The mathematics is not
really necessary to support them, but it gives them a sense of exactness.
Prophets through the ages have predicted the end of the earth; Thom-
son gives a formula for its final temperature. The cautious tone of his
assertions adds to his authority. A restoration is "probably never ef-
fected by means of organized matter." An operation preserving the
earth as a home for humanity is impossible "under the laws to which
the known operations going on at present in the material world are
subject" (Thomson, I, 514). Here he echoes Charles Lyell's unifor-
mitarianism, even as he strikes at its foundations.
To some of Thomson's contemporary readers, his mathematical
precision and his insistence on irreversibility were more disturbing
than the grimness of his prediction. Ruskin, reading Thomson's
description of universal dissipation secondhand, in Balfour Stewart's
textbook, responded bitterly in The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth
VICTORIAN STUDIES
Century (1884): "Do you wish me to congratulate you on thi

cheerful result of telescopic and microscopic observation,
close my lecture?" (Ruskin, p. 76). Ruskin's own obser
decline, in which, "month by month the darkness gains upo
looks remarkably similar to Thomson's (Ruskin, p. 78). But
the darkness is a cloud between man and the light, not the
end of the light itself; even in his bleakest visions, Ruskin h
admittedly unlikely chance that the world will be redeem
moral order. He prefers to see physical laws as illustrating,
mining, human conduct. Later Adams would borrow
apocalyptic tone without the theological confidence. A
would transform Thomson's division of "creative power" a
into a division of productive capital and all-consuming lab
As Thomson is identified in the popular mind with d
irreversibility, and Tyndall with progress, so Maxwell is ide
ideas of chance, uncertainty, and disorder.28 In a sec
"Limitation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics" at th
Theory of Heat, Maxwell speaks of a "being whose facu
sharpened that he can follow every molecule in its course, s
whose attributes are essentially finite as our own, would b
what is at present impossible to us."29 This Demon (as Tho
named this hypothetical being) would be able to separate t
hotter molecules from a container that was cooler on the a
therefore, without expending energy, transfer heat from
warmer body.30 The apparent purpose of this section of Ma
book is to remind the reader that the second law is a statistical inter-
pretation of nature, a generalization for a large number of molecules
the individual behavior of which remains uncertain. But in Adams's
reading, the emphasis is on the possibility of life or thought, at some
level, escaping the general law. The "limitation" is both a limitation of
scientists' materialism and a suggestion of what might lie beyond that
28 Theodore M. Porter, "A Statistical Survey of Gasses: Maxwell's Social Physics," Historical Studies
of the Physical Sciences, 12 (1981), and others have traced the influence of nineteenth-century
statistics on Maxwell; Porter argues that Maxwell introduced ideas of uncertainty into a method
associated in the social sciences with certainty. Merz also shows the effect of Buckle's interpretation
of history in terms of statistics (History, II, 592), and Ludwig Boltzmann acknowledges Buckle's
influence ("The Second Law of Thermodynamics," (1886) in Brian McGuiness, ed., Theoretical
and Philosophical Problems: Selected Writings [Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1974], p. 20).
29 James Clerk Maxwell, Theory of Heat (London, 1870; 7th ed., New York: D. Appleton and Co.,
1883), p. 332.
30 See Martin J. Klein, "Maxwell, His Demon, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics," American
Scientist, 58 (1970), 84-97; and Edward E. Daub, "Maxwell's Demon," Studies in the History and
Philosophy of Science, 1 (1970), pp. 213-227.
AUTUMN 1985
48 Greg Myers
materialism. In this case statistical uncertainty does not undermine

natural law; it leaves a loophole for will.
We can see how Maxwell's use of statistics functions rhetorically
in one of his lectures for popular audiences, "Molecules" (1873),
delivered before the British Association at Bradford and later published
in Nature. Maxwell begins, like Tyndall, with a plea for the cultural
importance of scientific research. He continues, like Tyndall, with
some illustrative experiments to give visual support for the scientific
theories he describes. But then, unlike Tyndall, he stresses the limits on
our knowledge by comparing physical statistics to social science
statistics; neither can tell us anything about the history of an individual
particle or person.
Maxwell's lecture, Theodore M. Porter tells us, is one of many
discussions in the 1870s that were "free will disputations masked as
discussions of atomism" (Porter, p. 111). Maxwell begins, not with
observations, but with Democritus and Anaxagoras. The question is
old, he tells us, but the research is new. His introduction, we see, is in-
tended to place the work he is doing in the new lab at Cambridge in a
traditional cultural context. Writing at the height of the popularity of
Idylls of the King, he compares the work of physicists to the search for
the Grail:
But though many a speculator, as he has seen the vision recede before him into the inmost
sanctuary of the inconceivably little, has had to confess that the quest was not for him, and
though philosophers in every age have been exhorting each other to direct their minds to
some more useful and attainable aim, each generation, from the earliest dawn of science
to the present time, has contributed a due proportion of its ablest intellects to the quest of
the ultimate atom.31
Unlike these earlier searchers, he has some "definite information" to of-

fer. To present it, he uses a demonstration (the diffusion of ammonia
through the lecture hall), a "mental representation" (molecules as a
swarm of bees, some marked), and the "analogy" of a messenger with a
letter moving through a dense crowd. The demonstration makes the ex-
periment public, and the analogies invest the microscopic level with
social organization and meaning. He refers to his quest analogy, show-
ing the effect of this study on the mind of the researcher. He quotes
Tennyson on Lucretius's clashing atoms, showing the difficulty
materialistic theories have in accounting for the apparent free will of
those particles. Scientists deal with these particles, he says, using
methods from Section F, the division of the British Association devoted
to the social sciences. But while the statisticians concentrate on a small
31 W. D. Niven, ed., The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1890; rpt. ed., New York: Dover, 1965), II, 364.
VICTORIAN STUDIES
sample to generalize about a large number, he is obser

number and attempting to theorize about individuals. M
this statistical method only because he cannot, on th
molecules, apply the historical method, in which the resear
the course of individuals. Thus he has established two levels of
knowledge, and has shown that in physics the more certain of the
kinds is inaccessible to us.
But he does not leave us at the point of uncertainty. "When we

pass from the contemplation of our experiments to that of the
molecules themselves, we leave the world of chance and change, and
enter a region where everything is certain and immutable" (Maxwell,
"Molecules," p. 374). Here Maxwell quotes Herschel's Preliminary
Discourse which holds that an atom has "the essential character of a
manufactured article and a subordinate agent." Their manufactured
appearance is an argument for creation, their unchanging nature an
argument against evolution, and their arrangement an argument for
design. So the lesson is, in Maxwell's words, that
They continue this day as they were created - perfect in number and measure and
weight, and from the ineffaceable characters impressed on them we may learn that those
aspirations after accuracy in measurement, truth in statement, and justice in action,
which we reckon among our noblest attributes as men, are ours because they are the essen-
tial constituents of the image of Him who in the beginning created, not only the heaven
and the earth, but the materials of which heaven and earth consist.
(Maxwell, "Molecules," p. 377).
According to Adams and some of the other social prophets, Maxwell
finds uncertainty and leaves room for irrationalism. But in this lecture,
it is only statistical mechanics that is uncertain, only disbelief that is
irrational. We see the argument from design extended to the atomic
level. As Thomson makes a place for decline in the theological order,
Maxwell makes a place for uncertainty.32 Like Thomson, Maxwell is
creating a basic permanence in contrast to a world in which we see
only change.
In the popular works I have quoted, Tyndall, Thomson, and
Maxwell are all trying to explain scientific concepts by using com-
monplaces. In doing so, they adapt new scientific ideas to more
familiar concepts, including social constructs. In the next stage of
popularization, Balfour Stewart (1828-1887), a less eminent physicist
than Thomson or Maxwell but a more popular writer, makes the con-
nection between science and society explicit. His popular writings may
have had more influence on the public perception of thermodynamics
32 One should compare Maxwell's confident vision with Boltzmann's popular lecture, "The Second
Law of Thermodynamics," in McGuinness, Theoretical Physics and Philosophical Problems, to see
how the same scientific concept could be presented as the basis for skepticism.
AUTUMN 1985
50 Greg Myers
than those of the scientists whose work defined the field. Maxwell says
of Stewart's speculative book The Unseen Universe: "There must be
many who would never have heard of Carnot's reversible engine if they
had not been led through its cycle of operations while endeavoring to
explore The Unseen Universe. No book containing so much thoroughly
scientific matter would have passed through seven editions in so short a
time without the allurement of some more human interest."33 In the
first of Stewart's articles that I will discuss, the "thoroughly scientific
matter" seems to dominate; in the second, the "more human interest"
becomes apparent. These articles will help us follow the rhetoric of
Stewart's thermodynamics textbook, The Conservation of Energy, his
speculations in The Unseen Universe, and his reflections on his own
rhetoric in its sequel, Paradoxical Philosophy.
Stewart, educated at Edinburgh, was like Tyndall, who re-
ceived his degree from Marburg, in being something of an outsider in a
discipline dominated by those who had studied mathematics at Cam-
bridge. After rising to a position as director of the Kew Observatory, he
finally was appointed to a new chair of physics at Owens College,
Manchester, where his laboratory trained a number of important
physicists.34 His work on radiant heat won him the Rumford Medal in
1868. Two articles he wrote in that year with J. Norman Lockyer (the
first editor of Nature) show that he was already framing his spec-
troscopic findings in theological terms. Stewart and Lockyer make two
related arguments in "The Sun as a Type of the Material
Universe" - that their research should be funded, and that it can pro-
vide arguments against materialism and against social disorder. The
key to these arguments is their description of the universe as a delicate-
ly balanced organism that can be directed by life without making life
subject to its physical laws.
Stewart and Lockyer begin their first article with Galileo's first
observation of sunspots, and end it with the Kew Observatory's latest
observation of sunspots, portraying themselves, by implication, as
scientific rebels against a naive ideology. But Galileo was persecuted,
while they are given funding from the Royal Society. They
acknowledge these grants prominently, as researchers do when they
publish funded work today, promoting the funding agency as they pro-
mote themselves. The first article contains mostly detailed observations
and comparison of rival theories. Only at the end do we see that all this
33 James Clerk Maxwell, "Paradoxical Philosophy," in Scientific Papers, II, 451.
34 Robert Kargon, Science in Victorian Manchester (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1976), pp. 214-224.
VICTORIAN STUDIES
is leading to a spiritual argument. As Galileo's observations quest

the view of the heavens as perfect and unchanging, the Kew obs
tions question the view of the heavens as inanimate and mechan
There seems to be a great molecular delicacy of construction in the sun, and probab
to an inferior extent, in the various planets ... The result of all this will be that a d
bance from without is very easily communicated to our luminary, and that when it
place it communicates a thrill to the very extremities of the system. In a future arti
principle of delicacy of construction will be dwelt upon at greater length, more esp
in reference to the Place of Life in a Universe of Energy.35
The future article uses this "delicacy of construction" to show h

"disturbance from without," from a spiritual world beyond the e
can guide the material.
They begin the second article, on "The Place of Life," by po
ing out the usefulness of analogies: "There is often a striking like
between principles which nevertheless belong to very different d
ments of knowledge."36 This sounds like Herschel's suggestion t
analogies be used to relate apparently unrelated fields, but it is
like Bacon's suggestion that analogies be used to discover general
relating all the sciences; it is less a methodological principl
conducting research than a rhetorical principle for explainin
results. The whole article consists of these analogies, building on
foundation of fact from the previous article, and especially on th
age of a delicately balanced sun:
We shall venture to begin this article by instituting an analogy between the social a
physical world, in the hope that those more familiar with the former than with th
may be led to clearly perceive what is meant by the word ENERGY in a strictly p
sense. Energy in the social world is well understood. When a man pursues his cou
daunted by opposition, he is said to be a very energetic man. By his energy, we mea
power which he possesses of overcoming obstacles; and the amount of his en
measured by the amount of obstacles which he can overcome, by the amount of
which he can do. Such a man may in truth be regarded as a social cannonball. By me
the energy of his character he will scatter the ranks of his opponents and demolish
ramparts. Nevertheless, such a man will sometimes be defeated by an opponent w
not possess a tithe of his personal energy. Now, why is this? The reason is that, alt
his opponent may be deficient in personal energy, yet he may possess more
equivalent in the high position which he occupies, and it is simply this positi
enables him to combat successfully with a man of much greater personal energ
himself.
(Stewart and Lockyer, "The Place of Life," p. 319).
Stewart says he uses this analogy only to explain the physical, be

"Energy in the social world is well understood." But the analogy
in reverse as well, as a justification of those in power, who must
35 Balfour Stewart and J. Norman Lockyer, "The Sun as a Type of the Material Universe
millan's, 20 (August 1868), 257.
36 Balfour Stewart and J. Norman Lockyer, "The Place of Life in a Universe of E
Macmillan's, 20 (September 1868), 319.
AUTUMN 1985
52 Greg Myers
have superior energy or be the heirs of others who had superior energy.
Perhaps this vision of the social world as populated by cannonballs and
opponents owes something to Stewart's own struggle for a position. But
he presents this vision as entirely natural: "In [the physical world] as in
the social world, it is difficult to ascend. The force of gravity may be
compared to that force which keeps a man down in the world."
Stewart and Lockyer apply the same sort of analogy to explain Thom-
son's "dissipation of energy": "As in the social world a man may
degrade his energy, so in the physical world energy may be degraded;
in both worlds, when degradation is once accomplished, a complete
recovery would appear to be impossible, unless energy of a superior
form be communicated from without" (Stewart and Lockyer, "The
Place of Life," p. 322). Adams too exploits the moral connotations of
the word dissipation, but he is saying society follows the laws of
physics, while the physicists here are saying that physics can be
understood in terms of morals. The physicists' comparison supports
ideology more effectively than a comparison of social forces to
physical, because for them the class barriers are just facts, "well
understood." By making the comparison in this direction, from social
to physical, Stewart and Lockyer keep their authority as physical scien-
tists intact: "It is desireable to state clearly, and once for all, that our
standpoint in what follows is that of students of physical science"
(Stewart and Lockyer, "The Place of Life," p. 323).
The connection of these analogies with the analogy of the sun to
an organism in the previous article becomes clear only when they come
to the question of life. "This freedom which is given to animated beings
is nevertheless held quite in conformity with, and in subjection to, the
laws of energy already mentioned, but it requires as a condition of its
existence great delicacy of organization" (Stewart and Lockyer, "The
Place of Life," p. 324). They compare life to a loaded gun, in which
"by the expenditure of a very small amount of energy on the trigger a
stupendous mechanical result may be achieved, which may be greatly
varied."37 They then trace social change, and in particular industrial
development, to a similar kind of delicate organization responsive to
the smallest impulse:
In the mysterious brain chamber of the solitary student we conceive some obscure
transmutation of energy. Light is, however, thrown upon one of the laws of nature; the
transcendent power of steam as a motive agent has, let us imagine, been grasped by the
human mind. Presently the scene widens, and as we proceed, a solitary engine is seen to be
37 Erwin T. Hiebert traces the arguments about this theory of will as a trigger through later Catholic
theologian-scientists in "The Uses and Abuses of Thermodynamics in Religion," pp. 1046-80.
VICTORIAN STUDIES
performing, and in a laborious way converting heat into work; we proceed fu

further until the prospect expands into a scene of glorious triumph, and the im
streamlet of thought that rose so obscurely has swelled into a mighty river, on
the projects of humanity are embarked.38
Their own area of thermodynamics, then, is proof of a princip

guiding humankind. Just as British geologists of the nineteenth ce
pointed to the providential provision of coal for their island,
engineers and physicists took the invention of the steam engine as
of the intertwining of science and the British national genius.
The earlier article shows that not only life, but the phy
universe as a whole, is subject to this kind of control. Stew
Lockyer conclude "that something of this kind might be expect
suppose that a Supreme Intelligence, without interfering with
dinary laws of matter, pervades the universe, exercising a dir
energy capable of comparison with that which is exercised by
being" (Stewart and Lockyer, "The Place of Life," p. 327). B
they may have felt that they were losing the scientific tone of th
for they conclude, "Whether such a mode of action is a fact
decided by other considerations." In these articles we see the
of all of Stewart's popular works: a lively exposition o
modynamics, an explicit argument leading to a Creator and th
mortality of the soul, and an implicit argument from social "fa
are so familiar and unquestionable they can introduce more d
physical theories.
Stewart begins his very popular textbook, The Conserva
Energy (1873), with a comparison, like Maxwell's the same
social science statistics and statistical mechanics.39 He establish
on the atomic level, "Existence is, in truth, one continued figh
great battle is always and everywhere raging, although the f
which it is fought is often completely shrouded from our view
art, Conservation, p. 3). Stewart is no Darwinian, but the meta
"the warfare of clashing atoms" captures the sense of social c
many had after the Second Reform Bill. He continues the met
his definitions. To define potential energy of position, for ins
says, "We may assume that two men of equal activity and stre
fighting together, each having his pile of stones with which to
38 Stewart and Lockyer, "The Place of Life," p. 327. Compare this passage to Adams's c
his History of the United States, with its river of democracy flowing from trickles in the
ocean.
39 Balfour Stewart, The Conservation of Energy: An Elementary Treatise

(London: Henry S. King, 1873).
AUTUMN 1985
54 Greg Myers
his adversary. One man, however, has secured for himself and his pile
an elevated position on the top of a house, while his enemy has to re-
main content with a position at the bottom" (Stewart, p. 24). The ex-
tended metaphor, like those in the article, is bizarre because it is un-
necessary; it clarifies nothing, and the concept of raising a weight
against gravity is no more complex or abstract than the military con-
cept of the advantage of higher ground.
When Stewart compares energy of position to energy of motion,
he uses the social metaphor of the earlier article, now in explicitly
capitalistic terms:
The former may be compared to money in the bank, or capital, and the latter to money
which we are in the act of spending ... If we pursue the analogy a step further, we can
see the great capitalist, or the man who has acquired a lofty position, is respected because
he has the disposal of a great quantity of energy; and that whether he be a nobleman, or a
sovereign, or a general in command, he is powerful only from having something else
which allows his to make use of the services of others. When the man of wealth pays the
labouring man to work for him, he is converting so much of his energy of position into ac-
tual energy, just as a miller lets out a portion of a head of water in order to do some work
by its means.
(Stewart, Conservation, p. 27).
The ostensible purpose of this passage is to provide a striking,

memorable analogy for potential energy. But it serves more to explain
capitalism. The analogy of the miller and the waterwheel was used by
earlier writers to show that work, in thermodynamic terms, can only
be done if there is a difference between levels; Stewart suggests that
this is also true of work in economic terms.
Stewart extends these analogies between energy and money into
a political economy of the cosmos. Thus, "The sun .. . is in the posi-
tion of a man whose expenditure exceeds his income. He is living upon
his capital, and is destined to share the fate of all who act in a similar
manner" (Stewart, Conservation, p. 152). Here we have the improb-
able meeting of William Thomson and Mr. Micawber. For Stewart,
"The world of mechanism is not a manufactory, in which energy is
created, but rather a mart, into which we may bring energy of one
kind and change or barter it for an equivalent of another kind, that
suits us better - but if we come with nothing in our hand, with noth-
ing we shall most assuredly return" (Stewart, Conservation, p. 341).
We have seen Thomson trace conservation to the Old Testament, and
Tyndall trace it to Carlyle and Herschel. Edinburgh-educated Stewart
finds his model in Adam Smith.40
40 Kurt Heinzelman points out that the intertwining influences may be even more complex than this,
since nineteenth-century political economists as early as Mill traced their models to physics. See
The Economics of the Imagination (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980).
VICTORIAN STUDIES
At the end of The Conservation of Energy, Stewart warn

complacency: "We have been content very much to remain sp
of the process, apparently forgetful that we are at all concerne
issue. But the conflict is not one which admits of onlookers -
universal conflict in which we must all take our share" (Stew
154). Those who had not read Stewart's earlier articles, with the
of theological issues, may have wondered what exactly they we
posed to do about the continuing dissipation of the energy of t
system. In Stewart's most popular book, The Unseen Universe
written with Peter Guthrie Tait, another famous physicist an
book writer, and originally published anonymously, we learn
are supposed to follow out these universal physical laws to a b
the immortality of the soul.41 As Maxwell notes, Stewart's an
theological interests attracted a larger audience than either of
had for his scientific textbooks: the book went through fourte
tions in thirteen years.42 Where Stewart's figures in the earlie
and the textbook are still presented as illustrations, in The
Universe Stewart and Tait seem unable to distinguish between
of physics, the laws of capitalism, and the dictates of faith.
Stewart's and Tait's metaphysical argument is, essentially
energy represents the transcendent reality promised in C
theology. The conservation and dissipation of energy are para
for they lead to an end to the universe inconsistent with what
and Tait call "The Principle of Continuity." Thus, as was sugg
the earlier articles on the sun, the "unseen universe" of energy
tervene to counteract dissipation. They make their argument in
as well as scientific terms, quoting Tennyson's speculations on
tionary destruction from In Memoriam, and responding with
ander Pope's "Whatever is, is right" (Stewart and Tait, The
Universe, p. 158). In their conclusion they quote Tennyson
"What hope of answer or redress?/ Behind the veil, behind t
(Stewart and Tait, The Unseen Universe, p. 155). For them th
the material world, and behind it we find angels in the form of
41 [Balfour Stewart and Peter Guthrie Tait], The Unseen Universe; or, Physical Specu
Future State (1875; 5th ed., London: Macmillan, 1885). For a detailed account of the b
intellectual background by an authority on nineteenth-century physics, see P. M. Hei
Unseen Universe: Physics and the Philosophy of Nature in Victorian Britain," British Jo
the History of Science, 6 (1972), 73-79. For a contemporary review, see W. K. Cliffor
seen Universe," Lectures and Essays, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1879), I, 250. Brian
"Physics and Psychics: Science, Symbolic Action, and Social Control in Late Victorian
in Barry Barnes and Steven Shapin, eds., Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scienti
(Beverly Hills: Sage, 1979), 167-186, treats the speculations on psychic phenomena b
Tait, and other physicists in a political context.
42 Dictionary of National Biography.
AUTUMN 1985
56 Greg Myers
Tennyson, Tess Cosslett says, "naturalises the concept of

immortality."43 By quoting him, Stewart and Tait reassure their
readers that they are continuing the same project.
Stewart and Tait base their argument on two principles, Conti-
nuity and Conservation, both of which they define with metaphors in-
volving gold or money. The Principle of Continuity holds, essentially,
that patterns revealed over time must be trusted to continue. Again, we
can trace this principle to Herschel, who calls it "that general law
which seems to pervade all nature"(p. 188). But Herschel's example of
continuity is the beating of goldleaf until light passes through it, mak-
ing a continuity between the opaque and the transparent; his concern
is with the range and nature of variation. As P. M. Heimann points
out, Stewart and Tait "employed this principle in a confusing way, not
only to affirm the constancy of natural laws, but also to assert continu-
ity of action within the natural order" (Heimann, p. 77). This confu-
sion is what enables them to introduce social actions as natural laws.
For one example they suggest that if "the sun, the moon, and the stars
were to move about in strange and fantastic orbits, during one day,
after which they returned to their previous courses . . . science would
come to an end." Their other example is supposed to parallel this case:
"Suppose for instance that the gold of the world were to disappear for
six hours and then to return to it again, - should we not have all the
social relations of men as well as their conceptions of matter thrown into
irretrievable confusion?" (Stewart and Tait, The Unseen Universe, p.
88). For Stewart and Tait, the Principle of Continuity means that the
circulation of the planets and the circulation of money have the same
grounds of self-evident permanence.
The Principle of Conservation, Stewart's and Tait's generaliza-
tion of the first law of thermodynamics, has similar social implications:
"This is the conservation referred to. It is as if a man always when he
received a sum of money fell to the same amount in debt - the state of
affairs, as shown by his books, would of course not be altered" (Stewart
and Tait, The Unseen Universe, p. 106). While explaining physics with
an example from economics, this parallel carries assumptions about ex-
change, value, and permanence from one field to the other. It implies
that an individual involved in economic exchange is a closed system;
that is the only kind of system to which conservation applies. It implies
that value, like energy, cannot be produced or destroyed, but only ex-
changed. And it implies that income and expenses are only transient
43 Tess Cosslett, The "Scientific Movement" and Victorian Literature, (Brighton: Harvester, 1982),
p. 66.
VICTORIAN STUDIES
forms, like heat or motion or chemical potential, while ca

state of affairs as shown by [the] books," is, like energy, a
conserved quantity. The economic system applies to the ph
tion only if one views the exchanges in physics as a capital
In the textbook, dissipation was explained in moral ter
the analogy is political: "In other words, the tendency of
wards equalization; heat is par excellence the communist o
verse, and it will no doubt ultimately bring the present s
end" (Stewart and Tait, The Unseen Universe, p. 126). The
to a communist, four years after the fall of the Paris Comm
have carried a specific meaning for Stewart's and Tait's re
social order and the cosmic, the end of the universe and the
talism, are conflated. It is not far from this conflation to that
Adams, telling a friend that A Letter to American Teacher
"is intended as a historical study of the scientific ground o
Collectivism, Humanitarianism, and Democracy and all the
Unlike Adams, who extends these analogies to all
knowledge, Stewart and Tait focus on the rhetoric of their
ment. Paradoxical Philosophy (1879), a sequel to The Unsee
seems at first to add nothing to its predecessor. In it the
Law of Continuity (p. 64), the commentary on Paley (p. 70
plication to theological purposes of "the modern theory of
tion of energy" (p. 73), Thomson's vortex atoms and theori
and Maxwell's manufactured molecules (p. 96).45 The few a
they add- on the difference between men and animal
stance - seem like the side issues debated in the prefaces t
editions of the earlier book. What is new is the form in which
ment is presented. Paradoxical Philosophy is a fictional co
in their preface the authors refer to a tradition that inclu
Love Peacock, Arthur Helps, William Hurrell Mallock, C
North, John Bunyan, and Plato. They present the book as
of the jubilee meeting of the Paradoxical Society, a group t
various types representing the audience for The Unseen U
Liberal Member of Parliament (representing politics), a Sc
older philosophy), a parson (Broad Church Anglicanism
physics professor named Herman Stoffkraft46 (materialis
44 Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., The Letters of Henry Adams, 2 vols. (Boston
flin, 1930-38), II, 541.
45 [Balfour Stewart and Peter Guthrie Tait], Paradoxical Philosophy (London: Ma
46 See Huxley's references to a book in which "Kraft und Stoff are paraded as the
of existence" ("Science and Morals" [1886] in Evolution and Ethics [London: Mac
AUTUMN 1985
58 Greg Myers
and presiding over it all, a genial and fairminded host, his son, a Cam-
bridge student who keeps the participants to the rules of debate, and
the host's daughter, who settles all the issues in the end. The plot con-
cerns the conversion of the eminent but naive professor to the theology
of his hosts and the social life of an English country-house weekend. It
turns out that everyone but the hapless professor has read The Unseen
Universe and can quote from it, to the professor's dismay. Routed by
their replies to his mildly materialistic arguments, he is ready for the
young hostess's presentation of "the moral and social point of view"
(Stewart and Tait, Paradoxical Philosophy, p. 121). But instead of
marrying Miss Fairbanks and completing his development, Dr. Stoff-
kraft goes to Scotland and is led beyond common sense to spiritualism
and, worse, to mathematics, achieving academic and civil eminence
for such papers as "The Physical Determination of Beknottedness."47
"Here is a man," the politician says, "who until lately was engaged in
the most engrossing and important pursuits, and he is now driven by
ghostly influence to leave them for subjects not only wholly pedantic
but singularly barren of useful results" (Stewart and Tait, Paradoxical
Philosophy, p. 230).
While Paradoxical Philosophy does not popularize further scien-
tific ideas, it presents an ideal of how science is to be popularized. The
Paradoxical Society recalls the local philosophical societies of the early
part of the nineteenth century; that this is its jubilee meeting em-
phasizes that it is something of a pleasant anachronism. The son sees
that its debates are governed by the rules of Cambridge debating
societies, and he compares them explicitly to the other contests he
coaches, cricket matches. The setting, a country house dating from the
Norman conquest, allows the participants to comment on the land-
scape and history of England, much as Henry Adams does at Wenlock
Abbey in The Education of Henry Adams. And Dr. Stoffkraft's pro-
gress demonstrates the supposedly irresistable logic of Stewart's and
Tait's argument, as his decline demonstrates the unfortunate tenden-
cies of modern science to unChristian spiritualism on the one hand and
to airy, purely technical abstraction on the other.48 The remedy for
47 An anonymous referee points out that Tait did important topological work on the theory of knots;
see the Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York: Scribners, 1976).
48 The sharp criticism of German mathematics at the end of Paradoxical Philosophy may have been
preparation for Tait's articles ten years later attacking Ludwig Boltzmann. See the chapter
"Herschel's Lion," in Enrico Bellone, A World on Paper: Studies on the Second Scientific Revolu-
tion (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1980), pp. 29-83. Stoffkraft's ignorance of English
physics recalls Tait's sarcastic remarks in his fierce controversy with Tyndall over Robert Mayer's
role in the discovery of the conservation of energy; see the preface to Tait's Sketch of Ther-
modynamics, 2d ed., (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1877), pp. i-xviii, and also Cardwell, pp.
285ff., Merz, II, 97, and Eve, pp. 94-105.
VICTORIAN STUDIES
these tendencies is apparently English common sense, fair pla

healthiness (at one point the conversation turns from metaph
the virtues of "Muscular Christianity").
Stewart's article ten years earlier had made an organism o
universe; here he brings the argument about the universe bac
organism. Every point of the debates over physics has a m
social significance, and all important points are accessible
elements of educated society. Just as good physics provided, b
plication, a guide to a good society, a good society produces go
and useful) physics. It is no wonder that Maxwell, reviewing th
in Nature, had difficulty in determining whether it was a sci
work. He points out that there are many quite recent scientific
it, but he finally concludes that "personality," the self that Stew
Tait want to show as eternal, lies beyond the bounds of scient
vestigation (Maxwell, "Paradoxical Philosophy," II, 451). For St
and Tait "personality" is at the center of physics and motivate
portant research.
The generation of writers who read Tyndall, Thomson, Ma
and Stewart found social and physical ideas thoroughly intert
Conservation, in Stewart's presentation of the ideas of Tyndall
son, and Maxwell, implies a world of exchange without produ
Dissipation suggests a universe of two levels, one producing an
other inevitably wasting. Molecules assure us the basic order o
universe is that of perfect and uniform "manufactured articles.
ently, the order of nature supports the hierarchy of capitalist s
These commonplaces of thermodynamics were useful in
fields besides social prophecy. In particular, Brush and Buckle
show that the new physics was intertwined with aesthetics in
the early critical works on the Decadent Movement. But the rh
thermodynamics carries a different sort of authority in a
criticism than it does in social criticism; the artists and writers
use these metaphors as metaphors rather than as laws. Those
the commonplaces in aesthetic terms do not need them to stru
emerging discipline, do not try to give their criticism the auth
the physical sciences, and do not even recognize such an au
they are likely to invert the commonplaces science gives them
out the relation of these commonplaces to non-scientific sourc
The intertwining of scientific and social terms is potent
more dangerous. Two works from the 1890s show how the
monplaces were used in social terms by two non-physicists: T
Henry Huxley and H. G. Wells. Huxley's "Capital - The Mo
AUTUMN 1985
60 Greg Myers
Labour," like the other essays in his last book, Evolution and Ethics,
applies scientific concepts to broad social and philosophical questions.
The subtitle, "An Economic Problem Discussed from a Physiological
Point of View," suggests that its scientific basis will be biological, but
the commonplaces on which Huxley draws are those we have traced in
the writing of physicists: Tyndall's conservation, Thomson's dissipa-
tion, Stewart's loaded gun and equation of capital with energy.
"Capital - The Mother-of Labour," was one of several attacks
by Huxley on Henry George's remarkably popular book Progress and
Poverty. The title, which was suggested to Huxley by the editor of
Nineteenth Century as "more attractive" than "Capital and Labour" to
the working men who were supposed to read it, suggests his
argument.49 He draws a three-part analogy between the child, created
and nursed by the mother, the farmer, nourished by green plants, and
the laborer fed by the wages of the capitalist.50 Since in each case there
is a store of "vital capital" before work begins, Huxley sees as nonsen-
sical Henry George's arguments that value arises from labor and that
wages are paid from the produce of labor. Presented thus baldly, Hux-
ley's analogies seem tenuous, to say the least. But in the essay the argu-
ment is supported by scientific commonplaces and by the sort of
rhetoric we see in Stewart's writing. The metaphors Huxley uses gain
their power from the specificity characteristic of good scientific
popularization.
Like Stewart, Huxley seems to be intent on explaining scientific
concepts in more familiar social terms. So he opens with a statement
followed by a specific scientific detail: "The first act of a new-born
child is to draw a deep breath. In fact, it will never draw a deeper, in-
asmuch as the passages and chambers of the lungs, once distended with
air, do not empty themselves again."51 This bit of information - that
the lungs are never completely empty - plays no part in Huxley's
analogy, but starts his essay on an informative, rather than persuasive,
note. Later he introduces other bits of information on the manufacture
of gunpowder, the metabolism of fungi, the nutritional possibilities of
cypresses and mosses, the cultivation of diatoms; all these details sug-
49 Leonard Huxley, The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, 3 vols. (London: Macmillan,
1908), III, 138.
50 James Paradis, T. H. Huxley: Man's Place in Nature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978),
pp. 181-182, places this essay in the context of Huxley's later work, and provides a helpful critique
of Huxley's political essays. But I think he is too kind to Huxley in asserting that Huxley separates
vital capital from financial capital. The commonplaces link the two kinds of capital even if the
argument separates them, so that the effect is to give financial capital a justification in nature.
51 Thomas Henry Huxley, Evolution and Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1894), p. 147.
VICTORIAN STUDIES
gest his analogies carry the weight of scientific observation. W

begins his argument with the model of men on islands (a comm
of economists basing value on exchange), he uses the names
islands in the Canaries, apparently just to reinforce his content
"We have been dealing . .. with suppositions and materials whi
furnished by everyday experience, not with mere a priori assum
(Huxley, p. 161).
The center of Huxley's argument is the analogy that sees
human child as a machine for production. The first drawing of
is compared to the movement of a bellows; the child's muscles a
of motors" created by the mother and controlled by the child
p. 148). Here he uses Stewart's metaphor of the loaded gu
metaphor that allows for the use of energy under control of t
"The powder in a loaded gun is such another stock of substance
of yielding energy in consequence of a change of state
mechanism of the lock. ... If that change is brought about, the
of the powder passes suddenly into actual energy, and does the
propelling the bullet" (Huxley, p. 148). And the child's "work-
like the gunpowder, must be manufactured. Here the econom
minology of work merges with the physical terminology: "Thi
stuff is part of a stock or capital of that commodity stored up
child's organism before birth, at the expense of the mother" (H
149). And, as the child grows, "Milk ... is a stock of materials
essentially consists of savings from the foodstuffs supplied to the
. . . by borrowing directly from the vital capital of the mother
directly from the store in the natural bodies accessible to her
make good the loss of its own" (Huxley, p. 151). Finally the in
analogy is completed in a reference to "the enlargement
'buildings and machinery' which is expressed by the child's gr
The child, then, is an entirely "unproductive" laborer. The ph
model here, unlikely as it seems for an agnostic, is Thomson's h
of the Creative Power and the wasteful creation. If one takes th
as a model physical system, one sees only dissipation of the e
given to it, from outside, before and after birth.
In the second stage of his argument, Huxley applies this
to all production. He considers first the case of savages living o
and seeds and then the case of a purely pastoral life: "The sav
the child, borrows the capital he needs and . .. does nothing t
repayment" (Huxley, p. 152). He asks who, in these cases, t
ducer" is, and answers with a passage. reminiscent of Tyndall
all life to plants, and concluding that "The energy by which th
AUTUMN 1985
62 Greg Myers
does its work is supplied by the sun - the primordial capitalist so far
as we are concerned." Thus Tyndall's (and Herschel's) broad view of
circulation, which served to locate the source of life within the
material world, is used here in specific economic terms to locate the
source of value outside the world of labor: "I hope to have left no doubt
in the reader's mind that, in regard to production, the importance of
human labor may be so small as to be almost a vanishing quantity"
(Huxley, p. 158).
Huxley turns rather late in the essay to the object of his attack,
Henry George's book. Now George can be attacked for being, not
simply wrong, but unscientific. The attack is not trivial, for Huxley
chooses to focus, not on George's more utopian flights, but on the basic
principles he shares with Karl Marx.52 Huxley ends the essay by asser-
ting that George's theory, unlike his own strictly empirical inquiry, is
built on a priori grounds (Huxley, p. 187). Stewart merely suggested
the parallels between physics and an economics of wasted and conserv-
ed capital; Huxley uses the parallel explicitly to defend capitalism
against George's challenge.
But the same commonplaces can support views quite different
from those of Stewart or Huxley. At the end of The Time Machine
(1895), H. G. Wells gives a vision of the heat death of the earth that
might be taken from Thomson or from the French scientists quoted by
Adams: "The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in
freshening gusts from the east, and the showering white flakes in the
air increased in number. From the edge of the sea came a ripple and a
whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the earth was silent."53 But Wells
does not simply repeat the commonplaces of the physicists in social
terms. The story moves by the narrator's questioning and repeated re-
jection of his premature generalizations and analogies. When he first
sees the Eloi he is a typical fin-de-siecle social prophet: "It seemed to
me that I had happened upon humanity upon the wane. The ruddy
sunset set me thinking of the sunset of mankind" (Wells, p. 37). Later,
when he sees the Morlocks, he frames a theory of class conflict: "It
seemed clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present
merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and
Labourer, was the key to the whole position" (Wells, p. 60). But this is
clear "as daylight"; it too is a view from the world of the Eloi. These
shifts show how the narrator's theories are shaped by his position as an
52 See Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes, 3 vols. (New York: Vintage, 1977-82), I, chaps. 1.2,
24.
53 H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895; rpt. ed., New York: Bantam, 1968), p. 105.
VICTORIAN STUDIES
observer; his applications of science have no superior objectivi

narrative frame emphasizes the conflict between the time tra
scientific persona and his visionary tale: "The story was so fan
and incredible, the telling so credible and sober" (Wells, p. 111
uses the analogies and images of the physicists, but he also dra
the problem Maxwell saw in Paradoxical Philosophy: claims for
jective prophetic vision lead us back to the subjective view and i
of the writer.
Huxley uses the commonplaces of thermodynamics to den

opposition of capital and labor; Wells's narrator sees in the
monplaces the key to understanding class conflicts. The commo
of thermodynamics could be, and continue to be, useful to th
prophets of both the left and the right, just as Darwin was useful
was praised by both Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx. Faced wi
contradictions in the application of these commonplaces in fiel
than physics, we might be tempted to try to find what thermodyn
really meant to nineteenth-century physicists, before it was mi
non-professionals. But we have seen that we cannot trace thes
monplaces back to their roots in physics, for the physicists the
draw on earlier commonplaces from Herschel, or Bacon, or Lu
or the Bible: Tyndall's circulating sunlight, Thomson's Creativ
ruling over a dissipating earth, Maxwell's perfect manuf
molecules. And we have seen that when Stewart intertwines th
monplaces of physics and the commonplaces of capitalist econo
apparently intends to explain physics and to argue for the imm
of the soul, not to justify capitalism, which in his eyes hardl
justification. So when social prophets use physics to justify cap
as Huxley does, they find that both the specific commonplaces
general analogy of physics to economics are already well deve
Instead of an origin, we find a constant movement of
monplaces between discourses, and at each stage of this move
claim for authority. We are familiar with the claims of vario
theorists to the authority of science; Henry Adams and T. H.
for instance, use the commonplaces of physics to support their
an absolute historical perspective apart from their moment a
But the physicists are making a claim as well; their use of fami
monplaces supports their claim to be extending and maintainin
tional knowledge. Indirectly, they encourage public support f
rapid growth, during their lifetimes, of their profession and its in
tions. Popularizers like Stewart make a somewhat different c
AUTUMN 1985
64 Greg Myers
authority as interpreters of the scientists to the public. They assure us

that they can explain all new concepts, of whatever origin, in terms of
familiar examples and concepts of order from the world of everyday
social life. Every new idea must fit in. Thus any popularization takes
on an ideological function, however disinterested the scientist behind it
may seem, however careful the popularizer may be in avoiding explicit
politics.
Popularized applications of the ideas of the conservation and
dissipation of energy have continued in both social theory and
literature in the twentieth century. The rhetoric of decline in social
theory is most often associated with Spengler, who adopts the mathe-
matical diction as well as the commonplaces of the physicists: "From
our standpoint of to-day, the gently sloping route of decline is clearly
visible . . . and now the question is what form will the down-curve
assume?" (Spengler, p. 424). Ironically, he takes science itself as an ex-
ample of this scientifically described decline: "In physics as in
chemistry, in biology as in mathematics, the great masters are dead,
and we are now experiencing the decrescendo of brilliant gleaners who
arrange, collect and finish off like the Alexandrian scholars of the
Roman age ... Dynamics, which began to bud about 1600, is today in
the grip of decay" (Spengler, p. 425).
But it is not only such avowedly prophetic figures as Spengler
who use this language; such academic economists as Nicholas
Georgescu-Roegen still base their systems quite closely on ther-
modynamics. Georgescu-Roegen argues (as I do) that the influence
flows from economics to physics as well: "Thermodynamics is at bot-
tom a physics of economic value."54 He, like Huxley, takes limited
natural resources as the source of value, and claims this assumption
undermines both capitalist and socialist economics. Jeremy Rifkin has
popularized Georgescu-Roegen's work in his recent best seller Entropy:
A New World View, in which he claims that thermodynamic laws can
give detailed prescriptions not only for economics, but for policies to
shape education, transportation, agriculture, scientific institutions,
and even Christianity: "Adherents of the Eastern religions - and
especially the Buddhists - have long understood the value of minimiz-
ing energy flow-through."55 Rifkin begins, like so many social proph-
ets, by appealing to the popular sense that "Every day we awake to a
54 Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Energy and Economic Myths (Oxford: Pergamon, 1976), p. 8. For a
detailed exposition, see his The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1971).
55 Jeremy Rifkin, Entropy: A New World View (New York: Viking, 1980).
VICTORIAN STUDIES
world that appears more confused and disordered than the on

the night before. Nothing seems to work anymore" (Rifkin, p
absolute authority of thermodynamics enters this disordered w
a religious revelation: "The Entropy Law has a special power.
utterly overwhelming that, once fully internalized, it transforms
one it comes in contact with; it is this almost mystical attrac
makes the Entropy Law so frightening to take hold of " (Rifk
Rifkin's recommendations are sensible and ordinary enough -
we should conserve fossil fuels - but his rhetoric recalls the
ical flights of Stewart and Tait.
Twentieth-century science fiction writers are gener
literal and more playful than the social theorists in their use of t
monplaces of thermodynamics. Some use the new scientific p
to open multiple points of view on their narratives, as Wells
instance, the dystopian novel We (1925), by the Soviet author
Zamyatin (who was trained as an engineer and did historical
thermodynamics) reverses Adams's association of entropy
leveling brought on by socialism, linking it instead to the t
practice of scientific management. In Zamyatin's totalitarian
individuals are arranged like the molecules in a crystal, in a
glass-walled cells, and flow, frictionless, in perfectly ordere
Though the novel has been read as an attack on the new Sov
the narrator tell us that the hero of this oppressively planne
is Frederick Taylor, the American efficiency expert.56 In a st
say, "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matter
Zamyatin explains his association of entropy with ideology:
of revolution is red, fiery, deadly; but this death means the
new life, a new star. And the law of entropy is cold, ice blue
icy interplanetary infinities. The flame turns from red to a
warm pink, no longer deadly, but comfortable. The sun a
planet, convenient for highways, stores, beds, prostitutes, pri
is the law. And if the planet is to be kindled into youth again, it
set on fire, it must be thrown off the smooth highway of evolut
is the law.57
More recently, Thomas Pynchon has developed Adams's parallel
between entropy in physical systems and disorder in society and in the
mind. But Pynchon, unlike Adams and like Wells and Zamyatin, is
56 Stephen Brush also links Taylor to thermodynamics. See The Temperature of History, p. 129.
Zamyatin may have been influenced by Lenin's admiration of Taylor.
57 Mirra Ginsburg, ed., and trans., A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 108.
AUTUMN 1985
66 Greg Myers
interested in the spurious authority of scientific language and the per-

spective of the individual scientist, rather than in universal and absolute
laws. In The Crying of Lot 49, John Nefastis, the bizarre inventor of a
machine using Maxwell's Demon to produce motion, tries to explain it to
the baffled Oedipa Maas: "Entropy is a figure of speech, then, . . . a
metaphor . .. The Demon makes the metaphor not only verbally grace-
ful, but objectively true."58 The nineteenth-century popularizers of
science saw the verbal grace of this figure as a way of forging a link be-
tween social theory and natural science; the danger comes when we, like
the mad John Nefastis, try to see this figure as objectively true.59
University of Lancaster
58 Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966; rpt. ed., London: Pan, 1979), p. 73.
59 I would like to thank Peter Antelyes, Charles Bazerman, Harry Cleaver, Tess Cosslett, John Far-
rell, Richard Friesner, Kurt Heinzelman, Susan Jarratt, Florence Leibowitz, Carol Mackay, Dan
Moshenberg, Robert Palter, Ramon Saldivar, and Mark Schenker for their help with varous stages
of this article. The reviewers of an earlier draft for Victorian Studies suggested important correc-
tions and references.
VICTORIAN STUDIES

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Nineteenth-Century Popularizations of Thermodynamics and the Rhetoric of Social

THERMODYNAMICS AND THE

RHETORIC OF SOCIAL PROPHECY

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THERMODYNAMICS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY,

introducing the concepts of energy and entropy, was part of a re

Henry Adams and Gustav LeBon use thermodynamics as a vision of

Adams could use the phrases and names of the physicist

6 Richard Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (Berkeley: University of California

cal language with social. Finally we see the physical principles

The historian Charles Coulston Gillispie points out that, though

later texts: the parallel of social statistics and physical statistics

used by Isaac Newton. When John Tyndall, Michael Fa

The principle of the conservation of energy was associated in the

be approved or rejected as they coincide, or refuse to coincide

21 Heat as a Mode of Motion, 6th ed., 1880, p. viii.

As Adams suggests, Tyndall's message is comforting compared

Century (1884): "Do you wish me to congratulate you on thi

materialism. In this case statistical uncertainty does not undermine

Unlike these earlier searchers, he has some "definite information" to of-

sample to generalize about a large number, he is obser

But he does not leave us at the point of uncertainty. "When we

is leading to a spiritual argument. As Galileo's observations quest

The future article uses this "delicacy of construction" to show h

Stewart says he uses this analogy only to explain the physical, be

performing, and in a laborious way converting heat into work; we proceed fu

Their own area of thermodynamics, then, is proof of a princip

39 Balfour Stewart, The Conservation of Energy: An Elementary Treatise

The ostensible purpose of this passage is to provide a striking,

At the end of The Conservation of Energy, Stewart warn

42 Dictionary of National Biography.

Tennyson, Tess Cosslett says, "naturalises the concept of

forms, like heat or motion or chemical potential, while ca

these tendencies is apparently English common sense, fair pla

gest his analogies carry the weight of scientific observation. W

observer; his applications of science have no superior objectivi

Huxley uses the commonplaces of thermodynamics to den

authority as interpreters of the scientists to the public. They assure us

world that appears more confused and disordered than the on

interested in the spurious authority of scientific language and the per-

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