The Peculiar Illumination of the Polymathic Mind: Mary Somerville, William Whewell, and the Disciplinary Formation of the Sciences

Abstract: Mary Somerville (1780-1872) and William Whewell (1794-1866) both contributed to the disciplinary formation of the sciences in Great Britain in the nineteenth century: she as a synthesizer who connected the various branches of knowledge in the emerging physical sciences, and he as the first person who used the history of all branches of science to define what distinguished scientific knowledge from other kinds. Both published bodies of scholarly work whose volume and breadth astounded their contemporaries and seem almost unimaginable today. Neither is included in standard histories of science because neither made the kind of original discovery around which those histories are organized. They become much easier to comprehend in the context of polymathy, which recognizes discerning and illuminating coherence in large bodies of knowledge as an exceptional but essential creative act. Their writings reveal the adeptness of the polymathic mind in framing large bodies of knowledge through two rhetorical moves: (1) association, which connects the subject with commonly held assumptions and values and draws on aesthetic traditions that have emotional resonance; and (2) orientation, which provides organizing ideas and conceptual frameworks that establish the coherence of the subject matter and guide the reader through the text. The distinctively anti-disciplinary approach of Somerville and the fluid nature of the disciplinary categories Whewell used to organize his history suggest that the world of knowledge, including science, has never been divided into the territorial disciplinary structures that dominate higher education. Like polymaths collectively, Somerville and Whewell are apparent anomalies whose very existence challenges our notions about the role and value of specialization.