ABSTRACT
The practical effects of all sorts of previous discoveries would seem to be the subject of eighteenth-century science. Jonathan Swift’s contemporaries were less complex; they viewed science more straightforwardly than he had in A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels. Two predominant attitudes seem to have been emerging as the century wore on. First, the widespread belief in the positive aspects of science — the notion that it was good, something to stay; second, an increasingly milder strain of criticism when it failed to live up to its glorious promise and magisterial reputation. A pattern was developing in which London provided the theory of science while the provinces supplied the application. Medicine was the other ‘science’ at that time that rivalled mathematics in its forward strides. The pre-eighteenth-century lineage of psychology is thus clear: anatomy and physiology are its parents and neurology, or ‘nerve science’, its tutor.
