![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/gosse.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Glimpses of the Wonderful by Anne Thwaite, reviewed for New Scientist, 2 November 2002<\/a><\/p>\n WHY do we study the natural world? Today, we might answer: to uncover life\u2019s underlying principles. In the mid-19th century, those underlying principles were thought to be already established: life was a Creation of God\u2019s.<\/p>\n Ann Thwaite, a literary biographer best known for her lives of Edmund Gosse and A. A. Milne, forays into the history of science with this life of Edmund Gosse\u2019s father, the naturalist Philip Henry Gosse.<\/p>\n Thwaite shows that Gosse\u2019s believed that \u201cthe gratification of scientific curiosity is worse than useless if we ignore God\u201d. After all, what is science for, if not veneration? What Gosse never could do was abandon his belief in the revealed Word and take up the un-anthropomorphic \u201csearch for underlying principles\u201d which would become the defining feature of modern science.<\/p>\n A self-styled Puritan who famously called Christmas pudding \u201cthe devil\u2019s sweetmeat\u201d, Gosse was also the finest naturalist of his age. He enjoyed a lifelong, friendly correspondence with Charles Darwin, and popularised the science of his day with rigour and intelligence. For most of us, though, Gosse is best known through his son\u2019s memoir Father and Son \u2013 a poignant account of Edmund\u2019s father\u2019s \u201cstrange severities and eccentric prohibitions\u201d, to which Thwaite provides a robust response.<\/p>\n Dogmatic belief shields us from the inevitability of death. Gosse, born into a millennial age, believed that Christ would return before he died. He spent the last hours of his life in a state of heart-rending and terrible dejection. Who can say they do not share Gosse\u2019s terrible fear of death? His unenviable distinction was to hold fast to conventional comforts in a revolutionary age.<\/p>\n Thwaite weaves together Gosse\u2019s professional studies and personal convictions, not into some dead synthesis, but into a story of a man caught in the toils of the scientific establishment as it re-geared itself for the modern age. Omphalos, Gosse\u2019s great \u2013 and greatly lampooned \u2013 attempt to marry creationist dogma with the evolutionary record, is the work by which he is best known. It is a measure of Thwaite\u2019s intellectual grasp that we understand how well considered that book really is, and at the same time how unworthy of him. Better that we remember Gosse as a friend remembered him: a figure to embody all the contradictions of his day, \u201cplunging into a pool in full sacerdotal black, after a sea anemone\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Glimpses of the Wonderful by Anne Thwaite, reviewed for New Scientist, 2 November 2002 WHY do we study the natural world? Today, we might answer: to uncover life\u2019s underlying principles. In the mid-19th century, those underlying principles were thought to … Continue reading