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HISTORY OF SCIENCE

Henning Schmidgen

The history of science comes from the Middle Kingdom. That is, it stems from the interstices, the spaces between science and literature, science and philosophy, and science and science. At the same time, it studies interstices: the changing interfaces and relays that connect experimental set-ups, laboratory desks as well as published texts, but that also divide those from one another. In other words, historians of science investigate the development of heterogeneous couplings that exist or are created between instruments and organisms, numbers and curves, images and concepts, in order to construct new knowledge and deconstruct the old – and vice versa. Interstices in this sense can always be found where the production of scientific knowledge is tied to specific material cultures: to the laboratory, the observatory, the museum, or the archive. However, they also exist in discursive formations and metaphorical tropes that facilitate but sometimes also complicate exchanges between one scientific discipline and another, between science and the broader public, as well as between contemporary science and its past. The history of science, then, works on, at, and with these interstices. It is a discipline from the Middle Kingdom, an interdiscipline, and arguably the interdiscipline par excellence.

The interstice as leitmotiv for this historiography is not radically new. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the “in-between” separating and binding You and I, perception and movement, cause and effect, has been a focus of theoretical attention, in authors as diverse as Martin Buber, Eugène Dupréel, Erwin Straus, and Hannah Arendt (see Theunissen 2004). “Life lurks in the interstices of each living cell, and in the interstices of the brain,” notes Alfred North Whitehead (1960: 161) in Process and Reality, while Maurice Merleau-Ponty observes in his phenomenology of speech that “the sense appears only at the intersection of and as it were in the interval between words” (Merleau-Ponty 2007: 243–44).

In similar ways, traditional science studies, historical as well as sociological, have used the concept of the interstice and/or the interval, even if they did not apply the exact term. The most famous example of this is the idea that, under the conditions of a scientific crisis, “Gestalt switches,” akin to radical shifts in the interpretation of an ambiguous visual perception, lead from one paradigm of scientific practice to another (Hanson 1958; Kuhn 1962). But the same holds true for the notion that epistemological “ruptures” (coupures) separate sensorial knowledge from scientific knowledge, as well as today’s science from its non-scientific past (Bachelard 1940). In both cases, in Thomas Kuhn just as in Gaston Bachelard, gaps and pauses appear as essential elements marking the collective process of acquiring scientific knowledge.

Recent studies in the history of science have rephrased this leitmotiv in forceful ways. Focusing on single laboratories and experiments, historians of science have filled the empty time between the paradigms and epistemes. They have replaced the relatively closed world of Gestalt-switches and epistemological ruptures with an open universe of micro-fissures residing in the space between diverse laboratories and their local milieus, between experimental things and experimental texts, between measuring instruments and model organisms, even between single scientific statements and images. One of the results of this remarkable change has been that historians no longer characterize the progressions of science as revolutions, but as gradual displacements that occur within circumscribed constellations of scientific practice, leading from states of productive precariousness to states of reproductive stability, and vice versa (see, e.g., Pickering 1995; Rabinow 1996; Rheinberger 1997; Stengers 2000).

At the same time, the image of science that has emerged from this shift emphasizes materiality and chance as key elements of scientific practice. It thereby contradicts the classical view of science as based on strictly organized and clearly programmed practices. Instead, recent studies in the history of science highlight the fundamental role of encounters, appropriations, and deviations as epistemologically relevant events. But where does this new image of science stem from? What are the encounters and events that have produced these novel approaches to writing the history of science? There is no comprehensive history of science history that would provide an answer to this question. Given the proliferation of methods and topics in recent times, it has even become difficult to survey the entire field (however, see Kragh 1994; Golinski 1998; Daston 2001; Kelley 2002; Biagioli 2009). All one can say is that, besides traditional philosophical and structural accounts, there are now social and cultural histories of science, and that besides general or encyclopedic investigations, there is a rapidly increasing number of micro-histories and case studies, i.e. historical accounts of science focusing on specific discourses and disciplines, individuals and instruments, images and inscriptions.

In this proliferating situation, a short sequence of exemplary observations concerning the genesis and structure of history-of-science discourses should help us glimpse some of the reasons why the contemporary state of this kind of inquiry is characterized by productive diversity and even disunity, and why this heterogeneity is the perhaps paradoxical but certainly stimulating basis for its constantly changing identity. Eventually, I suggest, it is science itself that is speaking to us here.

Post-positivism in the historical study of science

At first sight, the new history of science seems to have emerged from recent developments at the intersections between history, philosophy, and sociology of science. As Peter Galison has put it, these developments amount to a turn away from orientations that are usually identified as “positivism” and “anti-positivism” (Galison 1997: 781–844), as exemplified respectively by Rudolf Carnap’s Aufbau der logischen Welt (1928) and Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). It is true that Carnap and Kuhn disagreed in fundamental respects: the first conceived of science as a project based on observations and protocols that lead to general theories, the latter saw it as an activity firmly grounded in conceptual schemes and theories that result in facts which, in turn, correspond to the adapted schemes and theories used to comprehend them. Still, both started from the assumption that science is a unified and, in this sense, also universal endeavor. Whether it be the grand story of single observations resulting in theories or, instead, a macro-history of paradigms that successively break down, only to yield new ones, Carnap as well as Kuhn were convinced that the existence and development of science can be depicted by master narratives, or grands récits.

The “post-positivism” of recent history and sociology of science has proposed an image of science that is considerably less abstract (Zammito 2004). Here, scientific activities no longer resemble a painting by Mondrian where orderly ways lead from observation to theory and vice versa. Instead they come close to an assemblage, say a box by Joseph Cornell, where multifarious, network-like connections between diverse objects exist: both artificial and natural, found and made, flat and deep. In other words, historians of science no longer deal with the sensorial and concrete on the one side and the cognitive and abstract on the other. What they mainly investigate are the spaces “in between,” i.e., transitional zones populated with numerous actors: scientists and technicians, instruments and organisms, but also and above all, inscription devices of all kinds. As a consequence, laboratory notes, databases, photographs, movies, simulations, and other media technologies have become crucial objects and means for historical research concerning the sciences (see Lenoir 1998; Berthelot 2003; Holmes, Renn, and Rheinberger 2003; Dotzler and Schmidgen 2008).

Towards a genealogy of “history and science”

However, the new look of science history also pays tribute to long-lasting trends in modern science itself. As is well known, the emergence and development of discourses about the history of science is not at all limited to the twentieth century. As Wolf Lepenies (1976) has pointed out, historical discourses on the sciences are profoundly tied to the temporalization processes that have characterized modern science since at least 1800. According to Lepenies, these processes can be detected on the level of scientific objects, the form of scientific theories, and the organizational structure of science. In fact, since the late eighteenth century, scientists have been increasingly interested in time measurements, case histories, and traditions of all kinds – from printed texts to social rules and geological strata. The developing interest in time as an object of scientific study went hand in hand with the emergence of theories of science that emphasized active experience and inductive reasoning over contemplation and ideas. This development was paralleled by the founding of a growing number of scientific institutions that functioned according to principles of divided labor. With the rise of new institutions, the time of scientific operation became detached from the careers and life-spans of individual scholars. Furthermore, as Lepenies has argued, from the late eighteenth century onward, physics, chemistry, and the emerging life sciences met the growing “empirical imperative” (Empirisierungszwang) by making new kinds of observations and experiments, but also by developing discursive and non-discursive historical practices, e.g., by collecting data and things, by ranging innovative facts into an order of scientific advancement, and by situating individuals vis-à-vis increasingly established research practices and projects.

Some authors claim that the beginnings of the history of science can be traced back to antiquity, in particular to Aristotelian philosopher Eudemus of Rhodes (Zhmud’ 2006). However, peripatetic histories of mathematics and astronomy failed to establish themselves as a successful genre of philosophical and scientific writing, and only a restricted number of fragments from the original texts have survived. In the late Renaissance, scientists such as Johannes Kepler may have been inspired by these ancient models. However, Kepler and others used historical arguments and narrations mainly to justify the study of topics that were otherwise considered to be useless and undignified. More generally, historical representations of sciences such as mathematics and astronomy served as a means to reflect upon such disciplines and science in general, to articulate their content and to organize their teaching in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Grafton 1997; Goulding 2006). Only in the late seventeenth century did depictors of science draw things together in ways that started to resonate with our contemporary understanding of history-of-science discourses. In the Éloges that literary writer Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle presented to the Academy of Science in Paris, starting in the 1690s, he insisted for the first time that the contradictory connections between science, life, and time were a crucial topic for the history of science. In 1731, Fontenelle published a two-volume collection of his Éloges, including a sketch of the history of the Parisian Academy of Science. According to Georges Canguilhem (1968), these volumes significantly prefigured the history of science in today’s sense. On the one hand, Fontenelle complained about the huge number of repeated and varied experiments that can hardly have been accounted for. On the other hand, his eulogies focused on the relation between knowledge and life. In other words, the discourse of science history here manifested itself under the specifically modern sign of individuality, finitude, and the lack of time. It is remarkable that this did not result in a discourse that spoke against the ideal of leading a scientific life. To the contrary, Fontenelle connected his historical accounts to the “popularization” of science. While historicizing science he also wrote literary works on scientific problems, e.g., Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686).

Progressions and projections

Between 1750 and 1840, numerous studies were published that presented the historical development of the sciences (mostly mathematics and astronomy, but also physics, alchemy, chemistry, and medicine) as continuously gaining better approximations to truth. This approximation was often seen as valuable in itself. At the same time, Enlightenment philosophers attributed positive ethical and political value to scientific achievements (Laudan 1993). Working along these lines were authors such as Jean-Baptiste de La Chapelle in his Traité des sections coniques, et autres courbes anciennes of 1750, or Alexandre Savérien in his Histoire des progrès de l’esprit humain dans les sciences exactes et dans les arts qui en dépendent of 1766. From today’s standpoint, much of these progressive histories appear to be epistemologically rather shallow. By and large they were based on the assumption that scientific knowledge resulted from a growing number of observations of nature, observations that were implicitly passive. This epistemological stance was shaken, however, in the wake of the “revolution” in philosophy usually associated with Immanuel Kant.

In 1837, William Whewell, in his extensive History of the Inductive Sciences from the Earliest to the Present Times, underscored again the empirical nature of science. Simultaneously, however, Whewell emphasized the active role of the human mind: the mind applied its theories to nature and, if necessary, subjected nature to thought. A similar view characterizes Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s contributions to the theory of color published in 1810. Against the background of his own experiments concerning color production and perception, Goethe insisted on a specific, anti-Newtonian “view” or “visual perception [Anschauung] of Nature.” Less well known is the fact that, in this context, he also developed an elaborate discourse on the history of science centered on the “brave individual” and took into account the individual’s conflicted position between experimentation and tradition: “The conflict of the individual with immediate experience and mediated tradition is the proper history of science” (Goethe 1991: 611). Goethe further developed this notion of conflict in another contribution to his theory of colors in which he described trials, or experiments, as “mediators between object and subject.” The relation between literature and (the history of) science that had been emphasized in Fontenelle was re-accentuated here in instructive and important ways.

The list as a historical account

In the 1830s and 1840s, philosopher, mathematician, and science popularizer Auguste Comte produced comprehensive progressive histories of science and advocated a largely empiricist epistemology in his “Positivism” (Braunstein 2009). At about the same time, the perspectives embodied in discourses of science history underwent significant changes in other areas, in particular insofar as a growing number of laboratory scientists began to act as historians (Engelhardt 1979). One of the results was that, in the course of the nineteenth century, science history itself was subjected to the empirical imperative that regulated science in general. Laboratory historians emphasized the collection and processing of raw data and presented these in forms as practicable and instructive as possible. The work of the German physicist Johann Christian Poggendorff is a case in point.

From 1824 to 1876, Poggendorff was editor of one of the most important science journals of the nineteenth century, the Annalen der Physik und Chemie.In 1853, he published a remarkable book on Life Lines in the History of the Exact Sciences, in which he attempted to apply new techniques of “graphic representation” to the history of science. Inspired by Joseph Priestley’s “charts of biography,” he represented geographical and biographical data from the history of science in curves and diagrams. Poggendorff complemented these visual elements with tables in which he listed scientific “discoveries” in alphabetical order. A decade later he started to publish his Biographisch-literarisches Handwörterbuch zur Geschichte der exacten Wissenschaften (1863). Besides short biographies of mathematicians, astronomers, physicists, chemists, geologists, etc., this handbook contained extensive bibliographical information concerning individual scientific authors for the period until 1858.

After Poggendorff’s death in 1877, the Handwörterbuch was continued by other authors, and was eventually adopted, as a permanent project, by the Saxon Academy of Science. A long-term effort of data collection, it resembles the Catalogue of Scientific Papers compiled by the Royal Society of London in nineteen volumes between 1867 and 1925. Similar bibliographical and biographical reference works are the backbone for much of the encyclopedic histories of science written in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Prominent models for such reference works range from Ludwig Darmstaedter’s chronological list of the “path breaking actions and fundamental events” in the history of science over the past 4,000 years (1904) to the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, edited by Charles Gillispie between 1970 and 1980, and today’s online databases on Galileo, Newton, Darwin, etc. Given the ongoing importance of such reference works and resources, one might argue that chronological and alphabetical lists are one of the crucial genres of science-history writing.

Polemical use of the history of science

As scientists started systematically to collect raw data from and for the history of science, they also began to use historical discourses for specific purposes. In particular, they historicized science to meet the challenge of the growing competition among researchers and to promote increasingly nationalized cultures of science. The consequence was that, in addition to the role of “popularization,” the history of science started to function as a medium for carrying out conflicts and debates. In other words, science history became polemic. As prototypical in this regard, one could choose the work of nineteenth-century German electrophysiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond (perhaps not by coincidence a friend of Poggendorff’s). His pioneering contributions to the history of the life sciences have been critically discussed by historians such as Canguilhem (1955), Jardine (1997), and Rheinberger (2010).

Despite the fact that du Bois-Reymond sometimes used the classical form of the eulogy, or Gedächtnisrede, his main genre was the extensive historical presentation and discussion of previous research directly within his own scientific publications – today an almost forgotten model. His main motivation for including historical sections in his scientific writings, in particular the Untersuchungen zur thierischen Elektricität (1848–84), was to decide the issue of temporal priority and thus gain appropriate recognition, estimation, and reward among the scientific community. As early as 1845, du Bois-Reymond argued against what he considered to be an “excess” of scientific journal publications. In a letter to Alexander von Humboldt, he explained that he “despises of these kinds of premature publications,” which “are so common in our days that the journals are flooded with single facts and observations without common connection that come along with hasty claims of authorship” (du Bois-Reymond 1997: 77). As for himself, du Bois-Reymond claimed not to publish the findings of his experimental work until he would be capable “of producing a substantial whole” that would leave “a mark” and help advance his discipline –“because of the number of new facts that would be accumulated there, because of the internal relation that would connect them with one another, and because of the conclusion that could be derived from their hanging together” (77).

What du Bois-Reymond alluded to was the ongoing work at his later famous Untersuchungen in electrophysiology. At the same time, he referred to a larger problem that he was also confronted with as a founding member of the German Society for Physics. In the eyes of du Bois-Reymond, it was not the “vanity of the authors” or their “desire for fame” that were the principal reasons for a lack of appropriate references to his work, and hence a lack of recognition of authorship and priority. The main problem was the separation of scientific practice from its history, in particular the “tendency of some physicists to completely neglect the study of writings that preceded their own investigations and never to mention the names of those from whom they have received the fundamental ideas for their work” (du Bois-Reymond 1997: 77). Given this state of things, one of the explicit goals of the German Society of Physics was to act against the “lack of a literary history in physics,” mostly by publishing a yearbook on the advances in physics (Karsten 1847: viii). In a sense, history here took on an explicit role in contributing to the progression of science (Maienschein, Laubichler and Loettgers 2008). And this role tends to be overshadowed when the sciences develop in increasingly dynamic ways and the history of science starts looking at itself as a largely autonomous discipline of the humanities.

History as interpretation and diagnostics

With the advent of Darwinism, discourses about the history of science underwent another remarkable shift. In the 1870s and 1880s they found a new basis and resource in science itself. In other words, historians of science did not any longer just refer to an object, i.e., “science,” but also began to use science, and in particular the life sciences, as a reference frame for discussing what science and history were all about. In this sense, Alphonse de Candolle, in his Histoire des sciences et des savants depuis deux siècles (1873), invoked the model of botany. Shortly later, Francis Galton referred to contemporary research on heredity in his English Men of Science (1874). In the following years, authors such as Ernst Mach, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Georg Simmel, who placed more emphasis on scientific processes, referred to and relied on evolutionary theory in their historical and philosophical writings (Richards 1989).

While this relating of science to science may be considered as circular, it has proven extremely productive. It is precisely this circle that enabled the history of science to become an activity of interpretation and diagnosis that, in its approaches and perspectives, could profoundly engage with the sciences it investigated. The recurring starting point for this self-referential project was the language of science, in particular of scientific concepts. Already for Nietzsche and Simmel, language constituted the indivisible medium of scientific knowledge, the inter-stice that connected science and non-science, while at the same time separating them from one another. Almost all of the big figures in twentieth-century history of science subscribed to this view – from Gaston Bachelard and Alexandre Koyré to Michel Foucault and Hans Blumenberg. Although there are significant differences in their broader concerns, these authors held true to language as the decisive level of historical analysis, despite the increasingly important status assumed by the mathematization and visualization of scientific knowledge.

Against the background of evolutionary theory, however, “language” did not remain a purely linguistic category. In his studies of biological concepts, Canguilhem, for example, did not just focus on the meaning and use of single entries from the historical vocabulary of science. Often referring to Darwin and Nietzsche, he emphasized the theoretical and practical orientations, the vital postures and gestures, the attitudes and allures that were connected to concepts such as “reflex” or “Umwelt.” Canguilhem even went so far as to deduce such concepts from the forms that individuated life produces out of itself or brings about, with the help of human beings, in technology and the arts. Moving away from concepts, history thus started to concentrate on images and the machine – topics that, in recent science history, have gained great significance. In fact, historians of science who are focusing on “forms of knowledge” in this sense are able to demonstrate that these forms are deeply entrenched in life as such. At the same time, they can show that in the ongoing conflict between human beings and their surroundings, these preconceptual forms of knowing often enter into unexpected relations of correspondence, for example, when the “reflex” is compared to an explosion of canon powder or the “cell” to a honeycomb.

Such analogies are not purely formal. From the perspective of evolutionary theory, they can be viewed as referring back to the process of assimilation that is a basic feature of life in all its individuated forms. In other words, the initial forms of concepts are related to the general biological problem of the inside and the outside, of expulsion and assimilation ( Johns Schloegel and Schmidgen 2002). Consequently, the sense or meaning of a scientific concept never explains itself horizontally, simply with respect to other words and texts. Only by having recourse to the vertical forces that, historically or currently, “take possession of a thing,” e.g., health, heredity, or thinking, can the sense of a concept be grasped and investigated (see Latour 1988: 153). Interpretation, then, turns into a special kind of diagnostics, a search for signs of “taking possession of something.” Conversely, the same approach opens the possibility of connecting literature and science (and the history thereof) in novel ways. A passage from the physics of Pierre Gassendi can now become translated by a poem by La Fontaine, a philosophical attitude towards the machine can be explained by a quote from a novel by Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, and a problem of epistemology becomes illustrated by a sentence from Paul Valéry (see, e.g., Canguilhem 1955).

Discipline or interdiscipline?

In parallel and contrast to these critical developments in the interstices between history and science, the late nineteenth and twentieth century saw increasing attempts to establish the history of science as an autonomous humanities discipline within the existing academic landscape, similar to the history of art and/ or religion (Corsi 1983). In 1892, the first chair devoted to the history of science was created at the Collège de France in Paris. In 1901, the German physician Karl Sudhoff created the first national society for the history of science and medicine, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Medizin und der Naturwissenschaften.In 1912, the Belgian mathematician and chemist George Sarton founded the journal Isis: Revue consacrée à l’historie de la science, the first issue of which appeared in 1913, mostly containing publications in French, Italian, and German. In 1924, together with Lawrence Joseph Henderson, Sarton founded the History of Science Society in Boston. The first international congress for the history of science took place in Paris in 1929, under the presidency of the Italian mathematician and historian of mathematics Gino Loria. In the following years and decades an uncounted number of national and international meetings of general and discipline-specific societies for the history of science took place (Sarton 1952: 48).

There is no doubt that these institutions and events served an important social role. They fostered the exchanges among their members and contributed to the professional identity of historians of science. However, whether or not the pursuit of disciplinary autonomy was and is a productive strategy with respect to the topics, problems, and methods of the history of science remains doubtful. In his programmatic article concerning “An Institute for the History of Science and Civilization” (1917), Sarton argued that the history of science could only be done in creative and convincing ways if it was constantly inspired by a close coordination of three points of view: the points of view of the historian, the philosopher, and the scientist. This interdisciplinary perspective tends to be lost when the history of science defines itself as a discipline exclusively expressing the point of view of the historian (Daston 2009).

In the recent history of science, the translation of Gestalt-switches and epistemological ruptures into a multiplicity of gaps and interfaces in scientific practice has been a more successful strategy, resulting in numerous innovative studies of the structure and evolution of laboratory instruments, images, and inscriptions. But acknowledging this success does not always go hand in hand with seeing what that change has neglected. When explaining the discontinuities in the process of science, Kuhn as well as Bachelard referred the history of science back to science. Kuhn used experimental investigations concerning ambiguous perceptions of visual patterns (e.g., the duck-rabbit diagram) as a “model” for the explanation of paradigm shifts in the history of scientific knowledge (Kuhn 1962). Similarly, Bachelard referred to the laboratory technology of stroboscopy to bolster his argument that even the process of sensory knowledge “is clearly marked by novelties, surprises, ruptures” and “by blanks cut into pieces” (Bachelard 1950: 29). That is, Bachelard extended an analogy from psychological experience into the realm of history, which is itself slowed down and externalized, as it were, by the discontinuous development of scientific knowledge. Similar operations of relating science to science itself (e.g., the history of physics to Gestalt psychology, or the history of biology to cybernetics) seem desirable and even necessary if the production of new knowledge is to remain a crucial topic for historical science studies. From where, if not from science, can we derive categories that will allow us to grasp the new as the new?

In his study on bacteriology in the nineteenth century, Bruno Latour has argued that the conceptual framework of history and the social sciences (e.g., notions such as “society,”“modernization,” or “interest”) is, by and large, inappropriate for tackling this task (Latour 1988: 9). As Latour explains, this framework was developed at about the same time as bacteriology. As a result, it biases our perspective on the object under investigation. Latour’s answer to this problem consisted in choosing a quasi-literary approach. He adopted Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace as a narrative framework for posing general questions concerning the agency of scientific practice. Although this strategy proved to be successful in his study of Pasteur, Latour’s proclaimed “agnosticism” with respect to science seems contradictory. In a culture saturated with science, it is highly questionable whether historical studies of science can situate themselves “outside” of science, in a purified realm of the non-scientific. The real challenge for historical accounts of scientific practice seems to be to engage with contemporary science and its fundamental concepts – if necessary by a detour through philosophies that have met scientific knowledge with exemplary openness. It is precisely this detour that has proven highly productive for recent studies in the history of science. With Derrida’s Grammatology, historians of science such as Hans-Jörg Rheinberger have rephrased issues of communication and tradition in terms of cybernetics and bioinformatics. Deleuze, with his references to Charles M. Child, Albert Dalcq and other embryologists, has inspired Stengers, Pickering, and other science historians and drawn general attention to developmental biology as an important resource for reconceiving historical processes.

Conclusion

The history of science comes from the interstices, from the changing spaces between science and literature, science and philosophy, and science and science. At the same time, historians of science study interstices. Instead of focusing on the knowing subject and their capacities, on the one side, and the knowable objects, on the other, they investigate the technological and cultural conditions under which and within which the processes of acquiring scientific knowledge go on. In other words, the history of science is not primarily interested in the question “how knowing subjects might attain an undisguised view of their objects.” Instead it investigates “what conditions had to be created for objects to be made into objects of empirical knowledge under variable conditions” (Rheinberger 2010: 3). In short, the history of science is the investigation of means and methods of the production of knowledge.

Situated between history, philosophy, and science, it finds itself in a rather unique position. As interdiscipline par excellence, it can act as a driving force for innovation in the humanities. At the same time, it may contribute to what Stengers, following Whitehead, has called a “culture of interstices” (Stengers 2002: 367) – a culture that refrains from exacerbating impatience with scientific institutions and social organisms and instead decelerates and percolates, in other words, historicizes.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Ed Jurkowitz, Jeffrey Schwegman, and Bruce Clarke for their suggestions and corrections. Unless otherwise stated, all translations from French and German are my own.

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