320 Thurs
the term “working hypothesis” became common fare. And the pantheon
of great scientists also began to change. In his Principles of Science, Stanley
Jevons championed the ascendancy of a hypothesis- friendly Newton over
Bacon, whose method he dismissed as a “kind of scientifi c bookkeeping.”
A more active view of methodology often resulted in a division of labor
between the observer, “who contents himself with merely ascertaining
facts,” and the thinker, “who gives shape to science.” This distinction was
often projected onto history, though such depictions distorted the true
methodological beliefs of an earlier generation. In 1890, Joseph LeConte,
a well- known geologist and science popularizer, claimed that natural his-
tory before Darwin gathered a “dead mass of facts” without inquiry into
their meaning. Evolution, for LeConte, led to a more advanced and syn-
thetic method.^47 The cost of such rhetoric, however, was a potential return
to more permeable boundaries. Karl Pearson, one of the most notable
advocates of such a view, wrote in 1892 that “all great scientists have, in a
certain sense, been great artists; the man with no great imagination may
collect facts, but he cannot make great discoveries.”^48
Its strong links with very narrow and confi ning depictions perhaps
made scientifi c method less fl exible and multivalent than it might have
been, and thus limited its spread as a prominent keyword. The term was
only beginning to become a popular slogan during the late 1800s. As a
fraction of magazine articles catalogued by the American Periodicals Series
Online that were about science generally, those that used the phrase “sci-
entifi c method” grew from 1.5 percent to 2.5 percent during the 1860s. By
the 1870s, that number had increased to 6.5 percent. These were notice-
able but not massive shifts in public rhetoric. The contemporary nature of
scientifi c knowledge itself also hampered too ready an appeal to scientifi c
method. Instead, most authors of popular literature offered ideas—such as
evolution or the conservation of energy or new devices such as the electric
light or the telegraph—as the primary products of nineteenth- century sci-
ence. Development by evolution, for instance, provided a grand metaphor
that people could and did use to describe progressive change, whether dis-
cussing the history of human society or tracing the path of the soul during
life and after death. In doing so, they could make an area of thought scientifi c
in a much more obvious way without any overt appeal to methodology.THE GREATEST GIFT OF SCIENCE
By the twentieth century, the relative value of methodology in making ar-
eas scientifi c increased. During the early 1900s, much of the latest science