Stephen Case’s Creatures of Reason: John Herschel and the Invention of Science explores the personal and intellectual contexts in which Herschel (1792–1871) produced his 1831 Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, recognized at the time of its publication and since as a defining moment in the development of modern science. While Case briefly summarizes Herschel’s important later work in helping shape a number of scientific disciplines, from botany to astronomy to optics, he argues convincingly that these later efforts can be fully appreciated only if we understand how they were built upon the foundation of his Discourse. The Discourse itself, Case claims, was a model of consilient thinking that brought together the broad and often apparently unconnected interests of Herschel’s adolescence and early adulthood. While Herschel’s eclectic intellectual interests consistently rested on a commitment to rigorous analysis, Case also shows that they were shaped by many of the cultural influences of the period, including the growth of new modes of publication aimed at the middle classes, broader access to the universities, and the professionalization of mathematics and the sciences.

Herschel’s early childhood was shaped by the innovations in sidereal astronomy of his father, William Herschel (1738–1822), and his aunt, Caroline Herschel (1750–1848). However, John initially eschewed astronomy and instead entered Cambridge in 1809 to study mathematics, winning the Smith Prize and graduating as Senior Wrangler in 1813. He was determined to replace the English universities’ increasingly outdated reliance upon geometry, which represented the world of mathematics as wholly measurable, with the analytic and algebraic approaches developed in French works like Pierre-Simon Laplace’s Celestial Mechanics (1799–1825). Herschel and his close friend Charles Babbage formed the Cambridge Analytical Society to debate the merits of the French system but made little direct headway in their evangelizing for analysis. Herschel’s first major article explored the superior utility of algebraic operations rather than geometric representations in mathematics and physics. Subsequent pieces on astronomy, light, and sound appeared in Richard Griffin’s Encyclopedia Metropolitania, a London-based example of the relatively new genre of the popular encyclopedia. A detailed piece on light and color appeared, more traditionally, in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1823.

Herschel left Cambridge briefly, returning in 1816 to study optics. By this time, William Herschel was in failing health (he died in 1822), and John took over his father’s reflecting telescopes. At the same time, he worked with Babbage and George Peacock to translate and significantly expand Sylvester LaCroix’s 1797 treatise on calculus, envisioning the application of analysis to the thousands of astronomical calculations accrued over centuries. A trip to Paris in 1819 solidified his intentions to apply analytical mathematics to the physics of optics and polarization, and he helped co-found the Astronomical Society of London upon his return to England. By the 1820s, he had completed his somewhat roundabout return to astronomy.

The two decades before 1831, Case argues, were fundamental to the mature Herschel’s approach to natural philosophy. Herschel was a polymath, and his interdisciplinary interests and love of travel encouraged the development of an inclusive theoretical approach to the understanding of the natural world. His social standing was important: his intellect opened many doors, but his class status, as the son of an immigrant inventor, inspired a reformist zeal based upon his own frustrations with hierarchy and tradition. Always ambivalent about the power of institutions like the Royal Society, he was determined to frame science as a set of actions that could be mastered through the virtue of self-discipline, privileging inclusive access to knowledge over the exclusivity of influence. Raised in a home that was conformist but not pious, his marriage to Margaret Brodie Stewart deepened his interest in questions of theology and faith, ultimately clarifying the moral framework in which he would root his Preliminary Discourse.

Case demonstrates how these influences ultimately shaped both the scope and the content of the Preliminary Discourse, representing the historical moment where modern science emerged from traditional natural philosophy. Herschel argued that this new approach to understanding the world, famously labelled as “science” by his colleague William Whewell, “is the knowledge of many, orderly and methodically digested and arranged, so as to become attainable by one” (213). The unchanging laws of nature could be understood by applying mathematical analysis to the physical world, using logic and classification to reason beyond observable phenomena and experience into new theoretical frameworks. Case argues that the Preliminary Discourse was ultimately a moral text, where Herschel sketched out a view of virtue based upon reason, humility, and hope for the possibilities inherent in the universe rather than upon traditional theologies or hierarchies.

Case argues that the fundamental paradigm shift embedded in the Discourse was immeasurably important to all scientific disciplines and that its somewhat traditional moral framework muted the sharp break with the past. But Case also shows that the scientific world inspired by the Discourse was one where Herschel himself often felt profoundly uncomfortable, as professionalizing disciplines no longer held space for polymaths like himself and where new knowledge was no longer easily framed within a familiar Anglican theology. “Though Herschel’s work inspired the first generation of scientists, he remained the last of a generation of natural philosophers” (229), Case argues.

Case leaves it to others to pick up the last half of Herschel’s rich and productive life, pointing briefly to his many accomplishments and accolades and his importance to the scientific and learned societies of the Victorians. There is a danger of both over- and under-inclusiveness in this approach; for example, Herschel’s first failed attempt at a marriage engagement is explored in more detail than the episode merits, while his later work as a popular lecturer in the sciences, embodying his commitment to the virtues of knowledge and reason, remains unexamined. Overall, however, Case’s approach to “the invention of science” is accessible, entertaining, and persuasive.