19世紀のman of scienceにおける努力、徳、および天才について。
The virtues of men of science could assume heroic proportions in biographical writing. Tyndall’s life of Michael Faraday extolled the sacrifices made for truth, the purity of purpose, and the special powers of mind required for scientific discovery (Tyndall 1868). Such portraits drew on a romantic tradition of genius, an intellectual force that was innate like nobility, but that often resided in those of humble birth. Its characteristics—intuition, mental suppleness, refined discrimination—marked out a few individuals as destined to be leaders of men and spirits of the age (Schaffer 1990). In the nineteenth century, genius was usually coupled with the virtues of industriousness and hard work, becoming an endowment of the self-made man who had to labor and struggle for truth. Such qualities were drawn from more general models of middle-class manhood in a society still partly governed by inherited titles and noble birth. Even Darwin, a gentleman of leisure, continually characterized his scientific activity as hard work, tallying up days, months and years on which he spent writing each of his books (De Beer 1959). Francis Galton’s 1874 survey, English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture, compiled over a hundred comparable accounts: men who walked 50 miles a day without fatigue in search of specimens, men who worked habitually until two or three in the morning. Using autobiographical testimony, he documented their leading characteristics as perseverance, steadiness, determination, and “the secretion of nervous force”: “many have laboured as earnest amateurs in extra professional hours long into the night … they have climbed the long and steep ascent from the lower to the upper ranks of life” (Galton 1874, 75). Possessing a rare combination of virtues in the highest degree, men of science were thus like an intellectual peerage or a new priesthood. [White, Paul. “The Man of Science.” p. 156 In A Companion to the History of Science, 153–63. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118620762.ch11]
