Science and the Public 361own vision of the professional scientist. Just as Whewell was prepared to
allow women into the world of science, Proctor welcomed female con-
tributors to Knowledge. Whereas Huxley ranked women’s intelligence with
that of the “lower” races, Proctor rejected the notion that women were
intellectually inferior to men.^70 He poured scorn upon evolutionists who
argued that women needed to wear corsets because nature had not yet
fi tted them for the upright position.^71 As for the attempts of scientifi c
naturalists to draw on scientifi c arguments to demonstrate the natural
limits to social reform, one of Proctor’s strictest rules was the exclusion of
politics from the columns of Knowledge.^72
But Proctor’s affi nity with the gentlemen of science is perhaps most
apparent in his conception of the cultural and religious meaning of sci-
ence. To Proctor, science promoted a belief in universal law and the grad-
ual extinction of superstition and fanaticism.^73 This is what Proctor liked
about Darwin’s theory of evolution. No scientist since Newton had done
as much, in Proctor’s opinion, “to extend men’s recognition of the wide-
ness of the domain of law,” and of “the infi nitely perfect nature of the
laws of the universe.” Whereas Newton had demonstrated the lawfulness
in space, Darwin had showed that law operated throughout time. Hux-
ley and Proctor could agree that evolutionary theory was important for
the way it expanded the reign of natural law. But to Proctor, a devoutly
religious soul with an eye for the divine order at the heart of the natu-
ral world, the expansion of the laws of nature also enlarged the domain
of religion rather than secularizing science. Religion had been “rendered
infi nitely grander—infi nitely more impressive by our new knowledge”
and “infi nitely more reasonable.”^74 Proctor was able to incorporate evolu-
tionary theory into his argument for extraterrestrial life, and then place
both into the framework of a theology of nature. In his Other Worlds Than
Ours (1870), his fi rst bestseller, Proctor extracted lessons from the sun, the
planets, the stars, and other heavenly bodies, which pointed to the divine
order in nature.^75 A study of the evolutionary process on Earth revealed
that nature, according to Proctor, “has a singular power of adapting living
creatures to the circumstances which surround them.”^76 Darwin’s insight
held for planets throughout the cosmos, not just Earth. It was a universe
teeming with life. Whatever the physical conditions to be found on any
particular planet, there were beings that could adapt to the environment.
For Proctor, pluralism and natural theology went hand in hand. Since God
had created nature to fulfi ll a certain purpose, and since nature’s “great
end” was “to afford scope and room for new forms of life, or to supply the
wants of those which already exist,” the greatest proof of God’s existence
lay in the discernment of the existence of alien life.^77 Needless to say,