Baden Powell (mathematician)
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| Baden Powell | |
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| Born | August 22, 1796 |
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| Died | June 11, 1860 (aged 63) Kensington, London, England |
Rev. Baden Powell, MA, FRS, FRGS (22 August 1796–11 June 1860 Kensington, London, England [1]) was an English mathematician and Church of England priest. He was also prominent as a liberal theologian who put forward advanced ideas about evolution. He held the Savilian Chair of Geometry at the University of Oxford from 1827 to 1860. After his death his family changed their surname to Baden-Powell in his memory.
His son, Sir George Baden-Powell was a politician, and served in the Colonial Service. Another son, Robert Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell, was the founder of the world scouting movement. A third son, Major Baden Baden-Powell was an aviation pioneer and travelled the world extensively. His daughter Agnes Baden-Powell was, with her brother Robert, the founder of the Girl Guide movement.
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[edit] Family
Professor Baden Powell's first marriage on 21 July 1821 to Eliza Rivaz (died 13 March 1836) was childless.
His second marriage on 27 September 1837 to Charlotte Pope (died 14 October 1844) produced one son and three daughters
- Charlotte Elizabeth Powell (14 September 1838–20 October 1917)
- Baden Henry Powell (23 August 1841–2 January 1901)
- Louisa Ann Powell (18 March 1843–1 August 1896)
- Laetitia Mary Powell (4 June 1844–2 September 1865)
His third marriage on 10 March 1846 (at St Luke's Church, Chelsea) with Henrietta Grace Smyth (3 September 1824–13 October 1914), produced seven sons and three daughters, three of whom died in infancy:
- Henry Warington Smyth Powell (later Baden-Powell), KC (3 February 1847–24 April 1921)
- (Sir) George Smyth Powell (later Baden-Powell), KCMG, MP (24 December 1847–20 November 1898)
- Augustus Smyth Powell (1849–1863),
- Francis Smyth Powell (later Baden-Powell) (29 July 1850–1931)
- Henrietta Smyth Powell (28 October 1851–9 March 1854),
- John Penrose Smyth Powell (21 December 1852–14 December 1855),
- Jessie Smyth Powell (25 November 1855–24 July 1856),
- Robert Stephenson Smyth Powell (later Baden-Powell), 1st Baron Baden-Powell (22 February 1857–8 January 1941)
- Agnes Smyth Powell (later Baden-Powell), (16 December 1858–2 June 1945)
- (Major) Baden Fletcher Smyth Powell (later Baden-Powell), FS, FRAS, FRMetS (22 May 1860–3 October 1937)
Shortly after the professor's death, the remaining children of his third marriage became 'Baden-Powell'.
[edit] Evolution
Powell was an outspoken advocate of the constant uniformity of the laws of the material world. His views were liberal, and he was sympathetic to evolutionary theory long before Charles Darwin had revealed his ideas. He argued that science should not be placed next to scripture or the two approaches would conflict, and in his own version of Francis Bacon's dictum, contended that the book of God's works was separate from the book of God's word, claiming that moral and physical phenomena were completely independent.[2]
His faith in the uniformity of nature (except man's mind) was set out in a theological argument; if God is a lawgiver, then a "miracle" would break the lawful edicts that had been issued at Creation. Therefore, a belief in miracles would be entirely atheistic.[3] Powell's most significant works defended, in succession, the uniformitarian geology set out by Charles Lyell and the evolutionary ideas in Vestiges of Creation published anonymously by Robert Chambers which applied uniform laws to the history of life in contrast to more respectable ideas such as catastrophism involving a series of divine creations.[2] "He insisted that no tortured interpretation of Genesis would ever suffice; we had to let go of the Days of Creation and base Christianity on the moral laws of the New Testament." [4]
Similarly, when the idea of natural selection was mooted by Darwin and Wallace in their 1868 papers to the Linnaean Society, both Powell and his young friend William Henry Flower thought that natural selection made creation rational.[5]
The 'Philosophy of Creation' has been treated in a masterly manner by the Rev. Baden Powell, in his 'Essays on the Unity of Worlds,' 1855. Nothing can be more striking than the manner in which he shows that the introduction of new species is "a regular, not a casual phenomenon," or, as Sir John Herschel expresses it, "a natural in contra-distinction to a miraculous process." [6]
This led Joseph Dalton Hooker to comment "These parsons are so in the habit of dealing with the abstraction of doctrines as if there was no difficulty about them whatever... that they gallop over the [science] course... as if we were in the pews and they in the pulpit. Witness the self confident style of...Baden Powell".[7]
[edit] Essays and Reviews
He was one of seven liberal theologians who produced a manifesto titled Essays and Reviews around February 1860, which amongst other things joined in the debate over On the Origin of Species. These Anglicans included Oxford professors, country clergymen, the headmaster of Rugby school and a layman. Their declaration that miracles were irrational stirred up unprecedented anger, drawing much of the fire away from Charles Darwin. Essays sold 22,000 copies in two years, more than the Origin sold in twenty years, and sparked five years of increasingly polarised debate with books and pamphlets furiously contesting the issues.[8]
Referring to "Mr Darwin's masterly volume" and restating his argument that belief in miracles is atheistic, Baden Powell wrote that the book "must soon bring about an entire revolution in opinion in favour of the grand principle of the self-evolving powers of nature.":
Just a similar scepticism has been evinced by nearly all the first physiologists of the day, who have joined in rejecting the development theories of Lamarck and the Vestiges; and while they have strenuously maintained successive creations, have denied strenuously maintained successive creations, have denied and denounced the alleged production of organic life by Messrs. Crosse and Weekes, and stoutly maintained the impossibility of spontaneious generation, on the alleged ground of contradiction to experience. Yet it is now acknowledged under the high sanction of the name of Owen (British Association Address 1858), that 'creation' is only another name for our ignorance of the mode of production; and it has been the unanswered and unanswerable argument of another reasoner that new species must have originated either out of their inorganic elements, or out of previously organized forms; either development or spontaneous generation must be true: while a work has now appeared by a naturalist of the most acknowledged authority, Mr. Darwin's masterly volume on The Origin of Species by the law of 'natural selection' – which now substantiates on undeniable grounds the very principle so long denounced by the first naturalist – the origination of new species by natural causes: a work which must soon bring about an entire revolution of opinion in favour of the grand principle of the self-evolving powers of nature.[9]
He would have been on the platform at the legendary BA 1860 Oxford evolution debate that was a highlight of the reaction to Darwin's theory. That would indeed have been interesting, for Huxley's antagonist Wilberforce was also the foremost critic of Essays and Reviews. Sadly, Powell died of a heart attack a fortnight before the meeting.[10]
[edit] Notes and references
- ^ GRO Register of Deaths: JUN 1860 1a 38 KENSINGTON - Baden Powell, age unknown
- ^ a b Robert M. Young (1985). The impact of Darwin on conventional thought. Darwin's Metaphor: Nature's Place in Victorian Culture. Retrieved on 2007-08-29.
- ^ Desmond & Moore 1991, p. 500
- ^ Desmond, Adrian 1982. Archetypes and ancestors. Muller, London. p45
- ^ Desmond, Adrian 1982. Archetypes and ancestors. Muller, London. p51 et seq 'The Christian commitment'.
- ^ Darwin 1861, p. xviii.
- ^ Desmond & Moore 1991, p. 412
- ^ Desmond & Moore 1991, p. 500
- ^ The 1860 publication: "Essays and Reviews" by (Church of England theologians) Temple, Williams, Powell, Wilson, Goodwin, Pattison and Jowett. Retrieved on 2007-08-29.
- ^ Desmond & Moore 1991, p. 500
- Darwin, Charles (1861), On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (3rd ed.), London: John Murray
- Desmond, Adrian & Moore, James (1991), Darwin, London: Michael Joseph, Penguin Group, ISBN 0-7181-3430-3
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