History of Science Analysis Paper

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History of Science Analysis Paper

Europe’s Age of Enlightenment was a time of new scientific theories, discoveries, and technologies that powerfully affected, even shaped, society. As technological advances became widespread after the Industrial Revolution, this interactive relationship between science and society accelerated. Reflecting on the social and scientific changes they were witnessing, Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) and Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) sought to grasp the nature and consequences of a central interest of the Enlightenment, Progress.

In his 1857 work, Progress: Its Law And Course, Spencer sought to understand Progress by cleaving it from its accomplishments and laying bare its essentials. Central to this task was dispassion as Spencer set aside consideration of the moral and ethical consequences of Progress and sought only to observe and describe its nature and effect. Such observation, he declared, showed that the nature of biological Progress had been revealed. To him biological progress was indisputably an evolution from homogeneity to heterogeneity. This “law of organic progress” he took to be the “law of all progress”.

Applying this notion to social phenomena, Spencer maintains that human history is just such a progression, an evolution from homogeneous social structures to heterogeneous ones. Accordingly, Spencer maintains that government, commerce, language, literature, arts, religion, and even the various scientific disciplines over time inevitably have grown more intricate and specialized. Writing about the distinct social classes and their structure, Spencer notes that after the Industrial Revolution, because people started to have much more specific jobs , commu...

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...Bartlett, John, comp. Familiar Quotations, 10th ed, rev and enl. By Nathan Haskell Dole.

Boston: Little, Brown, 1919; Bartleby.com, 2000 (for birth and death years)

Bowler, Peter J., and Iwan Rhys Morus. Making Modern Science: a historical survey. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005. Print.

Carlyle, Thomas. “From Signs of the Times: “The Mechanical Age”” Modern History Sourcebook. 1998. Web. 29 Sept 2010.

Spencerr, Herbert. “Progress: Its Law and Cause.” Modern History Soucebook. 1997. Web. 28 Sept 2010.

Weinstein, David, "Herbert Spencer", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), . (for birth and death years)

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