ABSTRACT
Insofar as it reflected on intellectual life from 45 years prior to its publication, its appearance seemed to underscore the accuracy of its forecasts. The future of science in the 1840s was the present of science in the 1890s. The mere ‘collector’ or the ‘amateur’ might be useful to science, but insofar as they pursue their science for their own satisfaction or pleasure, so they fall short of what science should be, victims of their own curiosity. The materialist aspect more acutely focuses the status of scientific knowledge production on the figure of the scientist and on scientific equipment: the means of neutrality, as it were. The scientific rationale, across many different specialisms, did not overly focus on the outmoded cosmology of prevailing Judeo-Christianity and its understanding of ‘man’s place in nature’, but rather emphasised an overwhelming feeling of the possibility of scientific revelation.
