OLD AND NEW KNOWLEDGE

In bringing a translation of a German work on university education before the British public in 1843, Francis Newman captured one of the profound tensions of the period. He warned that if ‘the new sciences’ and all subjects relevant to the physical welfare of society were driven out from the old universities, there would be ‘two national minds generated under two hostile systems’. In this contest all intellectual causes would lose and rude ‘industrialism’ would triumph. Instead, he advised, the ideal should be a curriculum in which the ‘moral and material sciences, the modern and the ancient knowledge’ grew together, balancing each other (F. Newman 1843, 1, xxxiii-xxxiv).

Whewell favoured this notion of balance in his contributions to educational debate from 1837 to 1850, but he did so in a way that left limited space for the new sciences. In the Principles of English university education he announced that ‘we cannot find in any of the more modern physical sciences, any thing that can fitly be substituted’ for the study of geometry and the classics – the traditional course of study at Cambridge. One reason for this was that the definite mental discipline provided by geometry could not be replaced by ‘sciences which exhibit a mass of observed facts, and consequently doubtful speculations’ (Whewell 1838a, 41). He then mentioned geology.