The Art of Science: Nineteenth-Century Theory and the Logic of Practice

Abstract

This chapter examines how nineteenth-century philosophers from William Paley and Charles Darwin to John S. Mill and William Whewell described and debated the relations between art and science as well as practice and theory. Offering close readings of Paley’s Natural Theology and of various passages from Charles Darwin’s work on breeding and gardening, the chapter distinguishes between two conceptions of art in the sense of skilful practice: art as guided by knowledge and different from nature on the one hand and art as productive of knowledge as well as continuous with an evolving nature on the other. As the chapter argues, these two notions of art played a key role in a controversy between John S. Mill and William Whewell that was carried out, between 1840 and 1872, through successive editions of their published works. Engaging closely with the style and spirit in which this debate was conducted, the chapter shows that Mill and Whewell argued from radically different conceptions of what ‘science’ means. As a result, they disagreed, for instance, about the very question of what constitutes a logical form of argument or proof.