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Michael Faraday: Sandemanian and Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ Geoffrey Cantor, Macmillan,
pp 359, £40

Michael Faraday would find a place in anyone’s pantheon of distinguished
scientists. Not only did his deep physical intuition lead him to the great
experimental discoveries of electromagnetic induction and the laws of electrochemistry,
but his ideas about lines of force provided the basis for one of the most
important conceptual innovations in 19th-century physics: the notion of
interaction through the extended medium of a field.

The story of Faraday’s life is a romantic tale, where merit was both
recognised and rewarded. The apprentice bookbinder who learnt science by
the perusal of the works he was binding, became assistant to Sir Humphrey
Davy and eventually the latter’s successor as director of the Royal Institution.

Faraday’s talent was equally for exposition as for discovery. His Friday
evening discourses at the institution drew fashionable crowds. One lady
described his performance as ‘mind addressing mind’. His ingenious and almost
invariably successful use of demonstrations, and his accessibility to young
people, established traditions at the Royal Institution that continue to
this day.

In some ways Faraday was at odds with the science of his time. He viewed
mechanics unfavourably and he had idiosyncratic ideas about inherent powers
in matter and about the ‘conservation of force’. This was doubtless in part
caused by his inability to cope with the mathematical elaboration of Newtonian
physics.

Faraday’s lack of formal education contrasted with the grounding in
the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos that characterised many of his scientific
contemporaries. Augustus de Morgan, the mathematician, said patronisingly
that Faraday was ‘more ignorant of mathematics than any one would imagine’.
The full flowering of electromagnetic field theory would require the mathematical
skill and insight of James Clerk Maxwell.

Geoffrey Cantor suggests that Faraday’s distaste for mechanics may also
partly stem from his metropolitan life and lack of the kind of acquaintance
with industry that shaped someone like James Joule. Cantor also proposes
that Faraday’s notion of inherent powers originated in his theological views.
One of the fascinating things about him, widely known but seldom discussed,
is his lifelong membership of a small nonconformist sect, the Sandemanians.

This tiny movement originated in one of the fissiparous dissensions
of 18th-century Scottish religion. In Faraday’s time, the sect numbered
only about 600, of whom about 100 belonged to the London congregation. The
Sandemanians demanded uniform standards of belief and conduct. They enforced
harmony in their meetings by excluding those who were not in full agreement.
This happened to Faraday in 1844, but he was restored to the fellowship
within a few weeks.

The sect sought to follow the teaching of the Bible, interpreted with
a simple literalism and used as the sole guide. For example, they did not
hold funerals because there is no Biblical instruction to do so. Their manner
was sober and they eschewed any revivalist enthusiasm.

Almost all the great figures of British physical science in the 19th
century, such as Clerk Maxwell, Kelvin and Stokes, were men of deep religious
conviction. They seemed untroubled by the evolutionary storms that raged
around them. However, they belonged in the main to broad religious traditions,
such as Presbyterianism and Anglicanism. Faraday is fascinating because
of his membership of so narrow a denomination. Cantor seeks to explore this
phenomenon. The task is not easy because there is a paucity of relevant
material.

Faraday seldom discussed religion with his scientific correspondents
or made overt references to it in his public discourses. He has often been
spoken of as someone who preserved a separation between his public life
as a scientist and his private life as a Sandemanian believer. One of his
celebrated observations was that ‘there is no philosophy in my religion’.
The tradition of discursive system-building, so congenial in the senior
common room, was foreign to his style.

The picture of a compartmentalised life appears, to some extent, to
be borne out by this book. Cantor does his best to find connections, but
the argument seems rather thin. References to God as the law giver, or to
science as the reading of the book of nature, are really just using the
commonplaces of a religious attitude to creation, and certainly do not betray
any peculiarly Sandemanian slant.

I did not find Cantor’s treatment to be very discriminating in its account
of religious attitudes. He also has a tendency to overplay the hand. I am
not convinced that when Faraday used the word ‘confuse’, the Tower of Babel
was in his mind.

More persuasive is the judgement that ‘both science and Sandemanianism
were strikingly similar responses to his environment, since they both offered
ways of ordering his experience and rendering the world safe’. I wish that
Cantor had been able to shed more light on the mysterious breakdown and
headaches that afflicted Faraday in the 1840s.

Faraday was a man of modesty and integrity, a scientist of great distinction
and a religious believer of deep conviction and surprising simple-mindedness.
He remains something of an enigma. As an essentially private person he would
probably have been content to be so.

John Polkinghorne is President of Queens’ College, Cambridge.