2 Introduction
the bold claim that the history of science is “the only history which can
illustrate the progress of mankind.”^2
In keeping with this vision, histories of science from the fi rst half of
the twentieth century traced humankind’s gradual intellectual and mate-
rial progress from modest beginnings in Egypt and Mesopotamia to the
present. The key periods of history, according to this account, were the
golden age of Greek science and the scientifi c revolution of the seven-
teenth century. It was taken for granted in these large- scale narratives
that throughout history, “science,” in spite of its changing context, was
more or less the same kind of thing, namely, a quintessentially rational
and systematic approach to the natural world. Given this conception of
the nature of science, the purpose of setting out its history, as Sarton suc-
cinctly expressed it, “was to illustrate impartially the working of reason
against unreason.”^3 Science, in every age, was accordingly distinguished
from myth, popular prejudice, superstition, religion, and magic. Today,
these classical narratives of the history of science still hold considerable
appeal for practicing scientists and continue to provide the basic plot lines
for popular histories of science.
Over the past thirty years, however, historians of science have become
increasingly dissatisfi ed with this story. Some have gone so far as to sug-
gest that “science,” as we now understand it, is a relatively recent phe-
nomenon—specifi cally, a product of the nineteenth century. Certainly
there is merit in the suggestion that in previous periods of history what
we would presently regard as science was distributed across a number of
distinct but related activities, such as “natural philosophy” and “natural
history.” These expressions, it might be argued, were not simply differ-
ent labels for what later became known as science. In fact, as the use
of these two particular terms—natural philosophy and natural history—
might suggest, they retained important links with philosophy and history
(broadly construed), and they included moral and religious elements that
are now almost completely absent from science.
It is now often claimed that one tangible indication of the belated
birth of modern science was the appearance of a new vocabulary. As one
historian put it, “Our present use of the word ‘science’ was fi rst coined in
the nineteenth century and, strictly speaking, there was no such thing as
‘science’ in our sense in the early modern period.”^4 This claim draws sup-
port from the Oxford English Dictionary, according to which the dominant
sense of the term in modern use—branches of study that relate to the
phenomena of the material universe and their laws, and which exclude
reference to the theological and metaphysical—dates from April 1867. It is
also signifi cant that the now- familiar term “scientist” was used for the fi rst