The uses of analogy: James Clerk Maxwell's ‘On Faraday's lines of force’ and early Victorian analogical argument

Abstract

AbstractEarly Victorian analogical arguments were used to order the natural and the social world by maintaining a coherent collective experience across cultural oppositions such as the ideal and material, the sacred and profane, theory and fact. Maxwell's use of analogical argument in ‘On Faraday's lines of force’ was a contribution to that broad nineteenth-century discussion which overlapped theology and natural philosophy. I argue here that Maxwell understood his theoretical work as both a technical and a socially meaningful practice and that embedding his use of analogy in the social and intellectual context of Victorian Britain provides a means of telling a sociocultural history of Maxwell's development of a new cognitive tool: a way of thinking on paper analogous to thinking with objects in the laboratory.And analogy can do no more, immediately or directly, than shew such and such things to be true or credible considered only as matters of fact.Bishop Butler, 17361