The Philosophical Breakfast Club (37 page)

However, in his reviews of both volumes of Lyell’s
Principles of Geology
, published in 1831 and 1832, Whewell had claimed that God sometimes performs miracles outside of—and contrary to—natural law. Lyell had argued that the fossil record showed not only evidence of now-extinct animals, but also the “succession of different races of animals,” suggesting that not only did species become extinct, but also that new species arose to take their place. Whewell agreed that the evidence seemed to confirm this. But, he cautioned, Lyell must show how one world of animal forms was exchanged for another,
how
the earth went from being populated by plesiosaurs and pterodactyls to paleotherians and mastodons. To Whewell, the inescapable conclusion was that God intervened miraculously, creating new species after the old became extinct. We see in this fossil record, Whewell argued, “a distinct manifestation of creative power, transcending the operation of known laws of nature.”
⁵⁰

In his three-volume work
History of the Inductive Sciences
, published only a few weeks before Babbage’s
Ninth Bridgewater Treatise
—so that it is possible Babbage had not yet seen the book when he finalized his manuscript—Whewell made this point even more explicitly. “We must,” Whewell insisted, “believe in many successive acts of creation, and extinction of species, out of the common course of nature; acts which, therefore, we may properly call miraculous.”
⁵¹
That is, new species were most likely created by specific interventions of God himself, not through any purely natural process. Appealing to miracles in explaining the origin of new species was not denial of scientific method, Whewell insisted, because the appearance of new species was in the realm of religion rather than science. In trying to explain such origins, geology “says nothing, but she points upwards [i.e., to God].”
⁵²

Here Whewell was clearly in the majority among scientists at the time, who were reluctant to give up their belief that species were individually created by God, even as the evidence of new species found in the fossil record mounted. Whewell felt that his view was scientifically supportable as well; he knew that Newton, the greatest of all the natural philosophers, had also argued that God must constantly intervene in the natural world. Newton had even argued this point against Leibniz, who believed that God had made a perfect world that required no further intervention. (Voltaire’s Pangloss, who believes that this is the “best of all possible worlds,” was created to poke fun at Leibniz and his rosy view of things.) On the contrary, Newton argued in his
Opticks
, God’s intervention is
necessary in order to keep the planetary orbits moving in their paths; without God’s continual action, he believed, the orbits would become more and more irregular over time. In a letter to Caroline of Ansbach (the wife of the future King George II of England), Leibniz had mocked this view, noting that Newton believed “God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time, otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion.”
⁵³

In his
Ninth Bridgewater Treatise
, Babbage agreed with Leibniz (another inventor of a calculator!) that God does not need to work in such an unlawful and messy way. To attribute this kind of constant meddling in His Creation to God was, as Leibniz had noted, “by implication denying to Him the possession of that foresight which is the highest attribute of omnipotence.”
⁵⁴
God is not a tinkerer, but a divine planner. Babbage disagreed with Hume’s characterization of miracles as events outside natural law; for Babbage, miracles were events
inside
natural law, because God has created the law with the supposed miracle built in. Babbage’s main example in the book of this kind of preordained miracle was his Difference Engine with the feedback mechanism, just as he had been demonstrating at his soirées in order to show that God was, in Babbage’s conception, a divine programmer, who set up the laws of the universe such that unexpected, seemingly “miraculous,” events were part of the initial program. (Babbage did not, however, use the term “program” or “programmer” in this book; these terms had not yet been created, because there was as yet nothing concrete to which they could refer.)

Provocatively, Babbage made it clear in his book, as he had at his parties, that the origin of new species was one of these so-called miraculous events that could be explained as the result of God’s divine program.
⁵⁵
Just as the laws of the caterpillar give way to the laws of the butterfly, and that of the tadpole to that of the frog, so, too, the laws governing a land covered with vegetation could be replaced by laws governing the appearance of animal forms, some of which die out and are replaced by newly arising forms. “To have foreseen all these changes, and to have provided, by one comprehensive law, for all that should ever occur … manifests a degree of power and of knowledge of a far higher order” than would be required by a being who continuously tinkered with His creation, Babbage insisted.
⁵⁶

Babbage enlisted Herschel’s aid in arguing against Whewell. Lyell had shown Babbage a letter from Herschel on this topic, as well as Lyell’s
reply, and Babbage reprinted portions of these letters as an appendix to his
Ninth Bridgewater Treatise
.
⁵⁷
In his letter to Lyell, Herschel had referred to “that mystery of mysteries, the replacement of extinct species by others.” In his view, we are led by analogy with how God’s laws work in the natural world to suppose that God acts through “intermediate” or physical causes, and thus that “the origination of fresh species … would be found to be a natural in contradistinction to a miraculous process.”
⁵⁸
In this letter, Herschel made it clear that he believed it possible that the appearance of a new species could be a matter of natural law, not a special case of divine intervention.

The crux of the disagreement between Babbage, Herschel, and Whewell over the creation of new species rests on this point. Babbage and Herschel believed that new species could arise through a lawful, natural process, just as they conceived the planets moving in their orbits due to a law set by God at the start of His Creation—the law of universal gravitation. Whewell, on the other hand, was much more skeptical, and thought it likely that God had to intervene each time a new species arose, in an act of “special creation” outside natural law—similar to the view of modern proponents of intelligent design. At the same time, however, Whewell did not absolutely shut the door on the possibility that new species
might
have arisen through natural law, without God’s intervention; indeed, after reading the
History of the Inductive Sciences
, Lyell optimistically reported to Herschel that Whewell “appears to me to go nearly as far as to contemplate the possibility at least of the introduction of fresh species being governed by general laws.”
⁵⁹
(Jones, the fourth member of the Philosophical Breakfast Club, seems not to have expressed any view on this topic in writing.) The four friends had disagreed with each other over other issues, such as public financing for science and the importance of reforming the Royal Society and creating the British Association, but this was the first serious fissure in the group, both philosophically and personally.

After reading Babbage’s
Ninth Bridgewater Treatise
, Whewell wrote to Babbage, with his characteristic dry wit, “I have been unable to get rid of the persuasion that displeasure at a sentence or two in my Bridgewater Treatise, had a considerable influence upon you, both as to the design and the execution of your book.” Nevertheless, in this response to Babbage, which he printed up and distributed widely, Whewell praised him for being a “fellow volunteer” in the task of showing how science and
religion were not in conflict.
⁶⁰
Trying to find common ground with his old friend, Whewell suggested that Babbage’s world might be a computing machine, but at least it was one created by God. Herschel was pleased, he admitted to Jones, that Whewell’s response to Babbage was such a “triumph of self-respect and forbearance.” Knowing of Whewell’s propensity to react strongly to slights against him, from his boyhood fights against fellow students at the Lancaster grammar school to his argument with the university dons over the Union Society, Herschel admitted that it was not what he would have expected from Whewell, whose “temper will never be good!”
⁶¹

Although Whewell pretended that he and Babbage were not so far apart in their views, he was in fact deeply hurt by Babbage’s public and vitriolic attack. Jones recoiled from Babbage’s nastiness, and retaliated by telling Darwin that “the great calculators, from the confined nature of their [mental] associations … are people of very limited intellects!”
⁶²
Herschel, too, was “grieved,” he told Jones, at Babbage’s “spiteful allusions to Whewell.”
⁶³
Whewell was shocked to find himself accused of believing that science and religion were in conflict, the very opposite of the point he was trying to get across in his Bridgewater Treatise. He was upset as well by Babbage’s defection from the main goal of the Philosophical Breakfast Club: to promote Baconian induction in science—instead, Babbage was privileging deductive reasoning. But Whewell was hurt the most by Babbage’s personal slurs against him. In an appendix to his book, Babbage mentioned the importance of studying the tides, noting that the subject was “at present in great mathematical difficulties and possessing … the highest practical importance.” He made no mention of Whewell’s important work on the tides, including his worldwide study, instead presenting an opposing tidal theory.
⁶⁴
And in the preface to the book, Babbage spitefully remarked that
his
“Bridgewater Treatise,” unlike Whewell’s, was not written for pecuniary gain. That cutting comment—by a man who had inherited £100,000, and who had received another £17,000 from the government (in part with Whewell’s help)—was not only unfair but painful.

From now on their letters to each other would be infrequent, and short. Although Whewell invited Babbage to come to Cambridge during one of Jones’s visits in the 1840s, their friendship would never recover. Over the years Babbage would continue to make a true reconciliation impossible. In a book published in 1852, Babbage cruelly referred to the
“mistake” made by some wealthy people “who, finding in the son of their village blacksmith … some great aptitude for figures, immediately conclude that if properly trained and then sent to college, he will turn out a great mathematician.” That result was hardly ever achieved, Babbage noted snidely. The lad would probably become nothing more than a fairly “respectable member of society,” with no more than a “decent knowledge of science.”
⁶⁵
In his autobiographical
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher
, published in 1864, Babbage did not mention Whewell’s name once.

B
ABBAGE’S WORK
with the “feedback mechanism” he devised to perform his parlor trick, showing how God could have preset “miracles” into his laws, soon led him to the greatest of his inventions, the Analytical Engine, the world’s first truly programmable computer. In a sense, then, this brilliant device was born of Babbage’s anger at Whewell, since the demonstration with the portion of the Difference Engine was devised to counter Whewell’s view of miracles as interventions of God outside natural law. But it also arose out of another personal catastrophe for Babbage.

The problem, once again, was his machinist, Clement. Babbage had built a workshop for Clement on land abutting his Dorset Street property. Babbage wanted Clement to move his family to a residence over the workshop, so that he and Babbage could consult with each other more easily. But Clement balked at this plan. Thanks to the experience and reputation Clement had earned by his work on the Difference Engine, he had built up a thriving business, and he was loath to give that up to work full time on Babbage’s project. He demanded £350 to move his tools, £130 for new furniture, and £660 per year for the expenses of keeping up his separate workshop for his other jobs. Babbage, in disgust, forwarded this demand to the Treasury, which, not surprisingly, found it to be “unreasonable and inadmissible.”
⁶⁶
Clement refused to accept anything less, and at any rate Babbage declined to make a counteroffer. Early in 1833, Clement drew up a bill for the work done between July 1 and December 31, 1832. Babbage refused payment until an agreement was reached about Clement’s move. Clement threatened to stop work and lay off his workers. It was a stalemate.

Finally Clement fired the men, and work on the Difference Engine ceased, never to resume. By the time the accounts were all settled, the government had spent a total of £17,478 14s 10d—nearly £1.6 million
(about $2.5 million) in today’s currency—for a machine that would never be completed.
⁶⁷
That amount was more than double the cost of an Admiralty warship; HMS
Beagle
, originally launched as a ten-gun brig sloop of the Royal Navy, cost £7,803 in 1820.
⁶⁸

Ironically, just as work was ceasing on the Difference Engine, its merits were being touted by Dionysius Lardner in a series of public lectures, including at the 1834 British Association meeting in Edinburgh where, Whewell complained to Airy, “We allowed Dionysius to tyrannize a whole evening concerning Babbage’s machine, which was universally declared to be a very heavy infliction.”
⁶⁹
Around this time Lardner also published a long and laudatory article on the Difference Engine in the
Edinburgh Review
. Here Lardner championed the potential usefulness of the Difference Engine, noting that when constructed it would “produce important effects not only on the progress of science, but on that of civilization.”
⁷⁰
He put into perspective the amount of money spent thus far on the machine, drawing a compelling analogy with the steam engine, which, he pointed out, required over twenty years of James Watt’s life and £50,000 to come to perfection (though Lardner did remark pointedly that Watt and Bolton had invested the money themselves, and received no government grant).
⁷¹
Lardner wrote much of this article at Babbage’s house, poring over Babbage’s vast collection of volumes of logarithmic tables—from which he gleaned the frightening fact that in a random sample of forty tables, there were 3,700 acknowledged “errata”—as well as the plans and drawings of the machine. Babbage may even have helped write the descriptive parts of the engine’s functions. But he could not have been happy with the harsh closing paragraph of the article, in which Lardner criticized the inventor for having withdrawn from the process of completing the engine. “Does not Mr. Babbage perceive the inference which the world will draw from this course of conduct?” Lardner asked. “Does he not see that they will impute to it a distrust of his own power, or even to a consciousness of his own inability to complete what he has begun?” Lardner hoped to inspire Babbage to hunker down and finish the project. But that is not what happened.