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Recently a reader responded with dismay to a New Yorker article by historian Daniel J. Kevles about the charge of scientific fraud brought by Margot O'Toole against Thereza Imanishi-Kari. What distressed this reader was not so much the issue of fraud itself as Kevles's argument that the exercise of judgment and imagination in science was essential and should not be conflated with fraud :
... I am troubled by Kevles's acceptance of a need for scientists to be imaginative in analyzing research results. What might the public's realization that this practice exists do to its confidence in the hard sciences ? Will we next be expected to believe that accountants require imagination in their work?1
Such expressions of uneasiness about the role of the imagination in science are not new. When the physicist John Tyndall delivered a "Discourse on the Scientific Use of the Imagination" to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1870, he too drew shocked reactions from the press. The London Times was severe :
The glory of a Natural Philosopher appears to depend less on the power of his imagination to explore minute recesses or immeasurable space than on the skill and patience with which, by observation and experiment, he assures us of the certainty of these invisible operations.... [Tyndall] confesses that Mr. Darwin "has drawn heavily upon time and adventurously upon matter." We ask ourselves whether we are listening to one experimental philosopher describing the achievement of another experimental philosopher. We had been under the impression that Natural Philosophers drew no bills.2
The echo of fiscal analogies reverberates over the space of more than a century : scientists should be as methodical (and as plodding) as accountants ("Natural Philosophers draw no bills"). To permit the imagination to infiltrate science is to tamper with the books, to betray a public trust.
My aim here is not to show that first-rate science requires imagination ; others have already pleaded this point with vigor and eloquence.3 Rather, I would like to explore how and why large portions of the educated public - and many working scientists - came to think otherwise, systematically opposing imagination to science. I shall argue that the critical period was the mid-nineteenth century, when new ideals and...