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When Todd Weir asked me to contribute to the symposium for which this chapter was prepared, I was intrigued, because the term "monism" has not featured very often in the work I have done on British science and its implications in the early twentieth century. I checked the index of my book Reconciling Science and Religion to bolster my impression that the term was not widely used, and was reassured when I found just four entries. Of course that does not mean that the ideas associated with the term were absent from British debates, only that the term "monism" itself does not seen to have caught on among British scientists. When one begins to dig a little more deeply, one does find British and American philosophers and scientists who endorsed monism, and who indeed regarded monism as a key feature of the emerging scientific attitude to the world. In this chapter I hope to show that a study of those scientists who may be associated with the philosophy (if not the term) may throw light on the complex history of how monism has been used and perceived both in Britain and elsewhere. Here, as in America and on the Continent, monism was developed in several different forms, and indeed there was some debate over what the philosophy actually implied for certain issues of concern to scientists and for their moral and ideological implications.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137011749_8

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