Students of the knowledge of the material world
SCIENTIST, n. My current novel draft is set in the 1820s and there is a character with an interest in observing the world and performing experiments in order to make discoveries, and I’ve been stuck on how he might refer to himself. I was using “natural philosopher,” which is absolutely what such a person might have used in the 17th or the 18th centuries, but I began to doubt my word choice. At some point in the 19th century, people stop calling themselves “natural philosophers” and talking about “natural philosophy” and start talking about “science(s)” and calling themselves “scientists.” But when?
The Attributes of the Sciences, Jean Chardin, 1731, at the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris, image sourced from Wikipedia
This question required opening more tabs and poking through more dictionaries than I expected, and a normal issue of Word Suitcase is a three-dictionary affair. But “science” is a gigantic topic even now, when we mainly use the word to refer to physics, chemistry, biology, etc. For most of its existence, the word “science” meant “knowledge.” So to get into when people start calling themselves scientists, I had to figure out when our contemporary, narrower definition of science arose.
Noah Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language first defines science as knowledge, and definition two says
In philosophy, a collection of the general principles or leading truths relating to any subject. Pure science, as the mathematics, is built on self-evident truths; but the term science is also applied to other subjects founded on generally acknowledged truths, as metaphysics ; or on experiment and observation, as chimistry and natural philosophy ; or even to an assemblage of the general principles of an art, as the science of agriculture; the science of navigation.
So if you can say “the science of natural philosophy,” you’re clearly not using “science” to mean “natural philosophy,” because that makes no sense. Still, we can see the connection to math and chemistry in this entry, and how that connection might give rise to our current usage of science.
Webster’s specificity about “pure science” intrigued me, and I also found that term when I looked up science in Le Littré, a French dictionary published in the 1870s. The first ten definitions offered are all related to the more general sense of knowledge. The eleventh and last definition finally mentions some things we think of as science, like physics and chemistry, and specifies that these are sometimes called “pure science” or “abstract science.” The Littré cites the work of French philosopher of science/sociologist Auguste Comte, who wrote some texts called Course of Positive Philosophy in the 1830s, as the origin of these terms. According to Comte, there are six pure/abstract sciences: math, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and sociology.
(An aside: what little I know of Auguste Comte, I know because Gustave Flaubert hated him. I hadn’t really thought about the fact that he was one of the founders of sociology; all I know is that Comte came up with a kind of positivism, and Flaubert insulted it in his novels. This is the perspective you get on the history of science when you study literature. Years ago, in a literature class with my beloved, we read Voltaire’s Candide and had to answer the question “Who was Leibniz?” on a quiz. The literary answer is that Leibniz was the natural philosopher who proposed that ours is “the best of all possible worlds,” the notion that Voltaire ruthlessly mocks in Candide. My beloved, a scientist, wrote on his quiz: “Leibniz invented calculus, but we don’t care about that in here.”)
So some time around the 1830s, people start talking about the “sciences” as we know them. They don’t necessarily stop talking about natural philosophy. The terms co-exist for a while. And how would a person who studies these things describe themself? Most likely in specific terms, as e.g. a chemist or a biologist, but what I want is a more general word. The OED indicates that for a while in the 18th and 19th centuries, English had the word “sciencist,” and the less popular but much funnier “scientman,” “sciencer,” and “scientician,” and also “man of science.” People really did not want to say “scientist”:
The word [scientist] was a somewhat controversial coinage (compare quot. 1834 at sense 1) and was consciously avoided by many in Britain (apparently less so in North America) until at least the late 19th cent. This was to a certain extent connected with resistance to the narrowing of the word science to denote chiefly the natural sciences, although the word scientist was criticized and avoided by many who did accept equivalent use of science , including leading figures in the natural sciences in 19th-cent. Britain (some of whom preferred etymologically unrelated terms, such as natural philosopher n.).
The eventual selection of scientist rather than sciencist as the usual term may have been motivated partly by considerations of euphony; compare (from a discussion also hostile to the use of scientist):
1874 Galaxy Jan. 93/1 If we would, we could say sciencist; and let any who will say it, and hiss himself properly in the saying of it.
Let him hiss himself properly in the saying of it! I love it. “Sciencist” is a pretty sibilant word. And here is the 1834 quotation mentioned above, written by William Whewell in the Quarterly Review:
1834 W. Whewell in Q. Rev. 51 59 Science..loses all traces of unity. A curious illustration of this result may be observed in the want of any name by which we can designate the students of the knowledge of the material world collectively. We are informed that this difficulty was felt very oppressively by the members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at their meetings..in the last three summers... Philosophers was felt to be too wide and too lofty a term,..; savans was rather assuming,..; some ingenious gentleman proposed that, by analogy with artist, they might form scientist, and added that there could be no scruple in making free with this termination when we have such words as sciolist, economist, and atheist—but this was not generally palatable.
Despite not being generally palatable, “scientist” eventually won. Does any of this answer my original question about how my character should refer to himself? Sort of. It’s too early for him to call himself a scientist, but natural philosopher is probably fine—unless we go with William Whewell saying that philosopher is “too wide and too lofty of a term.” Though now that I know about “scientman,” I’m tempted.
Some discussion of rape in romance novels below this.
I only read one small-r romance novel in the past couple of weeks, but it was a doozy. Laura Kinsale’s Shadowheart (m/f, both cis and het, historical) is set primarily in Monteverde, a fictional principality of northern Italy in the 1380s, a place riven by intrigue and murder among its three aristocratic families. The heroine, Elena, is its long-lost principessa, spirited out of danger at the age of six and hidden in England. Sheltered from the world but highly educated, she remembers almost nothing of Monteverde. The hero, Allegretto, is the bastard son and sole living member of one of the families that tried so desperately, through subterfuge and violence, to take control of Monteverde. Trained by his cruel father to be a spy and assassin, he has been exiled and excommunicated and now lives on a small island in the Mediterranean and sustains himself as a pirate, but he dreams of retaking Monteverde. When Elena is sent out of England to marry the heir of the third rival family, Franco Pietro di Navona, Allegretto captures her.
It’s a Laura Kinsale novel, so that’s only the beginning. There are several hundred more pages of twists and turns, naturally including a journey through the countryside where our protagonists can only rely on each other (yes), and along the way, a conveniently abandoned castle where they can spend a few days getting to know each other (yes). Every single description of a setting in this novel made me die of envy. To select one at random, is this not exactly what it feels like to walk into an old church (even one that doesn’t have your awful father’s corpse in the crypt)?
It was unnerving to enter a hallowed place against his ban. It was the church where his father lay sealed in the crypt below, no easy memory. In the dimness the windows glowed with brilliant color against lacy black outlines. The huge space echoed with whispers that were not quite voices, sounds that carried and reverberated endlessly through the long double row of pillars that marched down the nave.
My God, Laura Kinsale, leave some for the rest of us.
Kinsale’s prose kept me reading this book even after a scene that would have made me quit any other romance: Allegretto rapes Elena. (In case you are wondering, this book was first published in 2004. Not that there is any publication year that would make this scene more palatable.) It’s not that I think rape should be categorically excluded from fiction, but I don’t find it romantic. It makes it hard for me to believe that these two characters can ever be happily in love. I kept reading after the rape scene in a detached sort of way, wondering if Kinsale could convince me of the happy ending. Intellectually, I understand why she put it there. Allegretto and Elena begin the book profoundly at odds, with all the power in his hands—his greater age, experience, knowledge, wealth, and skill at violence—and over the course of the book, he gradually, willingly submits to her, both in and out of the bedroom. For them to travel the greatest emotional distance, the beginning and the end of the arc should feel as opposite as possible, hence the rape.
Except I think the book could work without it.
Allegretto’s heartlessness is demonstrated in many other ways. (An interesting question, here, is why the other ways he’s reprehensible bother me so much less. For example, his absurd body count. Or that he holds his enemy’s child hostage and brutally trains that child to be an assassin. I think it’s because that doesn’t feel real, or common, in the way that rape does. It’s also not so directly mixed up with Allegretto and Elena’s sexual and romantic connection—though Elena does make him stop training child-assassins and ends up as a kind of adoptive parental figure for the child in question.) His power over Elena is also made very clear. Prior to the rape, Allegretto makes it appear as though he and Elena have had sex by staging a scene where she wakes up in his bed after he drugged her, and some supporting characters walk in and see blood on the sheets. Yikes, I thought while reading that, but at least it’s a trick and he didn’t actually rape her, not knowing that mere pages later, he would.
I already thought he was a bad person in need of redemption and forgiveness before he could become worthy of her love. I didn’t need him to be worse. One could make an argument that because Allegretto and Elena’s eventual happy relationship is one with elements of sadism and masochism, the rape scene acts as a foil for the consensual BDSM scenes, but I’m basically past the point of any argument here: I just didn’t like it and I wish it wasn’t there. (Sorry, this was a lot of words to get to that point.)
There are so many other good parts I haven’t even touched on, but this just took up too much of my attention. Shadowheart could have been a five-star read for me, something to swoon over, and I do understand why other people might love it, but I simply couldn’t get past this. I still think Kinsale is an incredible writer. At least I’ll always have Flowers from the Storm.
Better luck next time @ myself, I guess. I will be back in your inboxes in a couple of weeks!
