2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

which the fortunes of an empire depended appeared quite commonly in
European literature of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, the
apparent invention of just such an instrument in 1608 would have filled a
preexistent and familiar cultural fantasy.
Joan␣ L. Richards Brown University
Sophia and Augustus De Morgan’s Faiths of Mind
HSS Abstracts
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In 1863, the London house of Longman, Green, Longman, published From
Matter to Spirit by “CD” with a Preface by “AB,” with the mathematical
symbolism in ironic contrast with the spiritualist convictions in the book.
Behind the AB stood Augustus De Morgan, the distinguished professor of
mathematics at University College, London; behind the CD stood his wife,
the socially active mother of their seven children. Augustus’s “Preface” served
as a defense of the intellectual legitimacy of his wife’s report on a decade of
investigation into the mid-Victorian world of channeling mediums, turning
tables, and writing spirits. Augustus was unequivocal in his conviction about
the events and experiments Sophia reported in her book: “I am perfectly
convinced that I have both seen and heard in a manner which should make
unbelief impossible, things called spiritual . . .” (v) Even as Augustus defended
the legitimacy of his wife’s experiences, however, he distanced himself from
them, saying he would not “stand committed either for or against the
conclusions of the book.” (v) Augustus’s ambivalent support for Sophia’s work
can be seen as an attempt to defend his reputation as a cool-headed scholar
even as he used that reputation to protect his wife’s investigations. But it was
more than that. Sophia’s book contained an interpretation of those incidents
built on a view of language and truth diametrically opposed to the logical one
he had been developing and defending for years. Augustus did not address his
and Sophia’s differences directly in his preface, but at its end he did recognize
them with the comment: “Between us we have, in a certain way, cleared the
dish; like that celebrated couple of whom one could eat no fat and the other no
lean.” (xlv) From Matter to Spirit appeared at the very beginning, if not before,
the period in which Victorians and their historians have located the Victorian
crisis of faith. What is more, neither Augustus nor Sophia would have claimed
allegiance to the kind of religious faith that would support crises among their
more orthodox compatriots. Nevertheless, the tension between the ways that
they assigned meaning to words and events mirrors that which many of their
somewhat younger compatriots faced within themselves. The Victorian crisis
of faith is often interpreted as the product of an epistemological crisis. In this
paper I want to use From Matter to Spirit to reconsider that crisis from the
perspective of meaning as opposed to epistemology, to consider what supported
Sophia’s and Augustus’s complementary worlds, and to explore what made
their coexistence so difficult in the next generation.
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