ABSTRACT
There is a small group of distinguished people who have declined an official nomination to the Presidency of the Royal Society. Arthur James Balfour had been elected in 1888 not as a man of science but as someone prominent in public life with scientific interests; and historians of the science of the nineteenth century have studied the process of professionalization extensively, coming to believe that they were charting the end of the reign of the amateur. During Balfour's childhood, Henry Mansel had in 1858 published his Bampton Lectures on The Limits of Religious Thought in which he brought scepticism to bear upon natural theology, in what he intended to be support of genuine religion. In 1878 Balfour published his first book, A Defence of Philosophic Doubt, it was to been Philosophic Scepticism, and the book was apparently advertised under that title; but because "scepticism" had come at that date to be applied almost exclusively to religion.
