Science and Technology

The extracts in this section fit into three groups. The first consists of passages by William Paley, Humphrey Davy and G. H. Lewes, and deals with general issues of scientific method and value. The second concentrates on the physical and life sciences, with passages by Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley and William James. The last consists of Ada Lovelace, Charles Dickens and Charles Babbage and focuses on applied science and the impacts of technology, dealing especially with transport, communication and industrial manufacture. However, numerous themes run across all of them and offer a glimpse of the main preoccupations of Victorian scientists, and the writers who responded to their work. Of those dealing with general scientific issues, for example, Davy debates the relationship between pure and applied science, and Lewes discusses the ethics of vivisection, then as now a particular talking point in the debate about scientific processes. These issues, dealing with the general purposes of science and matters of social benefit, have a direct bearing on the responses to scientific and technological development to be found in the next part.