William Whewell 1794 – 1866

William Whewell was an English polymath, scientist, and philosopher and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge for more than two decades. He coined the modern English term scientist, along with much of the working vocabulary of Victorian science. His History of the Inductive Sciences and Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences offered the fullest treatment of scientific method and the development of natural knowledge produced in his century, articulating the doctrine of consilience of inductions. He carried on a long and friendly debate with John Stuart Mill on the foundations of science.

William Whewell was born in 1794 at Lancaster, the son of a master carpenter. A clerical scholarship took him to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was elected to a fellowship in 1817 and remained for the rest of his life. He was Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy from 1838, and Master of Trinity from 1841 to his death.

His major works span natural science, philosophy of science, and ethics. The History of the Inductive Sciences (1837) and the Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840), with their classifying of past scientific knowledge and their systematic theory of induction, were succeeded by the Novum Organon Renovatum, the Plurality of Worlds (1853), and Of the Plurality of Worlds: An Essay. His Elements of Morality, Including Polity (1845) and Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy were standard Cambridge textbooks. He coined the words 'scientist', 'physicist', 'anode', 'cathode', and many other scientific terms at the request of Faraday.

Whewell argued, against Mill's narrowly empiricist induction, that scientific discovery proceeds by the creative imposition of a 'colligating' idea on facts, and that successful colligation provides genuine, if fallible, knowledge. He defended the unity of the sciences in a Christian framework that did not quite weather the Darwinian decade. He died at Cambridge in March 1866 after a fall from a horse.