Generations of Reason: A Family's Search for Meaning in Post-Newtonian England

GENERATIONS OF REASON: A Family's Search for Meaning in Post-Newtonian England by Joan L. Richards. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021. 456 pages, with 21 b/w illustrations, 1,218 endnotes, and a 35-page index. Hardcover; $45.00. ISBN: 9780300255492. *The title gives no clue who this book is about. Nor does the publisher's description on its website, the abbreviated blurb inside the book jacket, the four endorsements posted on the jacket's back ("beautifully written," "epic masterpiece," "magnificent study," "compelling and wide-ranging"), or even the chapter titles. The reader first learns whom the book is about and how it came into focus in the author's Acknowledgments. In studying the divergent interests of Augustus De Morgan and his wife, Sophia, the importance of De Morgan's father-in-law William Frend's thinking became apparent. This is turn led Richards to delve into the lives and beliefs of two ancestors from the previous generation, Francis Blackburne and Theophilus Lindsey, who felt compelled by their commitment to "reasoned conclusions about matters of faith" (p. x) to move away from orthodox Anglicanism and establish the first Unitarian church in England. Thus the book eventually evolved into chronicling the lives of three generations over a century and a half during (roughly) the Enlightenment era. *A central motif running through the experiences, beliefs, and work of these families was their steadfast commitment to a form of enlightened rationality that provided coherence and foundational meaning for their lives. Reason informed their ecclesiastical commit-ment to Unitarianism, their views of science and mathematics, and their public activity favoring social and educational reforms. But also, paradoxically, their search for reason led to the beliefs and practices (of some family members) that today would be considered pseu-do-scientific--mesmerism, phrenology, and spiritism, among others. *As Richards notes in the book's opening sentence, for her, Generations of Reason is "the culmination of a life devoted to understanding the place of mathematics in modern European cultural and intellectual history." The mathematics and logic of early- to mid-nineteenth-century Britain has been an ongoing research interest for Richards during her forty-year tenure as a historian of mathematics at Brown Universi-ty. It is this that largely drew me to the book and which I will focus on here: it climaxes in a substantive treatment of the progressive mathematics of De Morgan, whose work contributed to transforming British algebra and logic. This is in stark contrast with the radical ideas of Frend, who refused to admit negative numbers into mathematics. *A central figure behind the developments under investigation is John Locke, whose Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) and The Reasonableness of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures (1695) exercised a tremendous influence over and challenge for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British thinkers. Locke's ideas defined and emphasized rationality in relation to knowledge generally and to scientific and religious knowledge in particular, providing dissenters with a rationale for combatting traditional theology and conformist science and philosophy. For Locke, however, a literal reading of scripture was still authoritative for religious beliefs. This was true for Frend and De Morgan also, even though they held tolerant attitudes toward a wide latitude of thinkers. *Locke's view of Reason also affected period reflections on mathematics. Like others in the early modern and Enlightenment eras, Locke had held up mathematics as a model of absolutely certain knowledge because of the clarity of its ideas and the supposed self-evidence of its axiomatic truths. Of course, this characterization applied more to Euclidean geometry than to the burgeoning domains of analytic mathematics, such as calculus, which, as Berkeley charged, still lacked a sound theoretical basis. As for logic, Locke had an acute antipathy toward traditional argument forms and proposed that one should reason with ideas rather than words, assessing their agreement or disagreement in less convoluted ways than in a syllogism. In expressing such relations with language, though, one should use meaningful and unambiguous terms. This was somewhat problematic in algebra and calculus, where symbolic expressions were manipulated to produce useful and important results, even when their meaning was less than clear. *Around the turn of the nineteenth century, Frend campaigned to bring algebra in line with Lockean reasoning: algebra was conceptualized at that time as universal arithmetic, containing such laws as the transposition rule if a + b = c then a = c - b. Thus, no expression should be employed if its meaning was unintelligible. In the above equations, one must assume the condition b < c to rule out negative values, since numbers, which represent quantities of discrete things, cannot be less than 0. Excising negative quantities from mathematics was extreme but necessary in order to adhere to a literalistic view of rationality. *British mathematicians largely resisted following Frend down this path of purity, though they were unsure how to rationally justify their use of negative and imaginary quantities without going outside mathematics and appealing to things like debts. Robert Woodhouse, in an 1803 work, was one of the first Cambridge mathemati-cians to propose a more formalistic algebraic approach in calculus. This agenda was furthered a decade later by members of Cambridge's Analytical Society, one of whom was George Peacock. His and others' attempts to convert Cambridge analysis from Newtonian to Leibnizian calculus were waged through translating a French textbook and making notational changes in Cambridge's mathematical examinations. *In 1830 Peacock's Treatise on Algebra introduced a more formalistic approach in algebra. Richards argues, drawing upon some fairly recent research, that Peacock's position was grounded in a progressivist view of history: arithmetic developed naturally out of fluency with counting, and algebra out of familiarity with arithmetic. Arithmetic suggests equivalent forms (equations, or symbolic assertions like the above rule) that can also be accepted as equiva-lent/valid in algebra without being constrained by restrictions appropriate to arithmetic. Such transitions, he thought, constitute genuine historical progress. Algebra thus splits into two parts for Peacock, arithmetical algebra and symbolical algebra, the latter based upon his principle of the permanence of equivalent forms, as found in his 1830 A Treatise on Algebra. *Peacock's approach to algebra set the stage for later British mathematicians such as De Morgan (Peacock's student), Boole, and others. Initially inclined to follow his future father-in-law's restrictive approach in algebra, De Morgan was soon won over to Peacock's point of view, even going beyond it in his own work. In a series of articles around 1840, De Morgan identified the basic rules governing ordinary calculations, but he also began entertaining the notion of a symbolical algebra less tightly tied to arithmetical algebra. By more completely separating the interpretation of algebra's operations and symbols from its axioms, symbolical algebra gained further independence from arithmetic. This gave algebra more flexibility, making room for subsequent developments such as the quaternion algebra of William Rowan Hamilton (1843) and Boole's algebra of logic (1847). *After exploring the foundations of algebra, De Morgan turned his attention to analyzing forms of reasoning, a topic made popular by the resurgence of syllogistic logic instigated at Oxford around 1825 by Richard Whately. Traditional Aristotelian logic parsed valid arguments into syllogisms containing categorical statements such as every X is Y. De Morgan treated such sentences exten-sionally, using parentheses to indicate total or partial inclusion between classes X and Y. Thus, every X is Y was symbolized by X)Y since the parenthesis opens toward X; to be more precise, one should indicate whether X and Y are coextensive or X is only a part of Y. By thus quantifying the predicate, as it was called, De Morgan allowed for these two possibilities to be symbolized respectively by X)(Y and X))Y, in compact symbolic form as ')(' and '))'. Combining the two premises of a syllogistic argument using this notation, one could then apply an erasure rule to draw its conclusion. De Morgan enthusiastically elaborated his symbolic logic by adopting an abstract version of algebra that paved the way for operating with formal symbols in logic. De Morgan's symbolism is not as inaccessible as Frege's later two-dimensional concept-writing (though the full version of De Morgan's notation is more complex than indicated here), but it is still rather forbid-ding and failed to find adherents. *In addition to expanding Aristotelian forms by quantifying the predicate, yielding eight basic categorical forms instead of the standard four, by 1860 De Morgan was generalizing the copula "is" in such sentences to other relations, such as "is a brother of" or "is greater than." He began to systematically investigate the formal properties of such relations and the ways in which relations might be compounded. Though intended as a way to generalize categorical statements and expand syllogistic logic, his treatment of relations was later recognized as an important contribution that could be incorporated into predicate logic. Richards's treatment gives the reader a fair sense of what De Morgan's logic was like, and while a detailed comparison is not developed, the reader can begin to see how De Morgan's system compares to Aristotelian logic, Boole's algebra of logic, and contemporary mathematical logic. *However, as indicated at the outset, exploring De Morgan's algebraic and logical work is only a subplot of Richards's story. Her book is principally a brief for how Reason grounded the work and lives of several significant thinkers in an extended family over three generations. As she ties various threads together, the reader occasionally senses that the presentation may be too tidy, drawing parallels between vastly different developments to make them seem of a piece, all motivated by the same driving force of Reason. Nevertheless, Richards's account forces the reader to continually keep the bigger picture in mind and to connect various facets of the actors' lives and work to their deeper commitment to Reason. Her book thus offers a commendable case study for how technical trends in mathematics might be tied to broader cultural and philosophical concerns. *Reviewed by Calvin Jongsma, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, Dordt University, Sioux Center, IA 51250.