John Ruskin, cultural authority, and the scientific imagination

The Victorian period was marked by a long struggle for political and cultural authority in which scientists challenged other authorities by virtue of the claim that scientific methodology offered a more direct---or even unique---access to knowledge because it avoided the distortion of language. The debate between T. H. Huxley and Matthew Arnold has been seen as representative of this general struggle for authority and an antecedent to modern science wars. However, a more emblematic predecessor of the Huxley/Arnold debate and its modern counterpart can be found in John Ruskin's critique of Darwinism.;Ruskin's critique has often been dismissed as critics have attributed it to arrogance, Evangelical angst, an antiscientific tendency, or incipient struggles with mental illness. It has particularly been criticized because of its playfulness. A more careful examination of Ruskin's position on Darwinism illuminates Ruskin's methodology, his general cultural project, and the dynamics of Victorian struggles for authority. Although Ruskin was grounded strongly in the sciences, he opposed the scientific project that derived authority from the claim that science operated on observation undistorted by imagination, interpretation, and language. Ruskin recognized the metaphorical basis of scientific methodology and disrupted scientific authority by illuminating its linguistic basis, which had been elided by scientists like Huxley and Charles Darwin. This rhetorical elision enabled scientists, particularly eugenists, to imagine themselves as hierarchically above and separate from everything else. Because competing cultural authorities operated within language, the argument that scientific methodology avoided linguistic distortion effectively removed science from scrutiny by other cultural authorities and from constraint.;Through his critique, and particularly through his linguistic play, Ruskin illuminated this rhetorical elision and attempted to undermine it and redirect human agency. The general struggle for cultural authority continued not only in the Huxley/Arnold debate, but also in the work of late Victorians. Eugenist Karl Pearson admitted the linguistic foundation of science and the constructed nature of scientific models, but tried to reestablish the authority of science on a statistical method. Late Victorian novelists also explored the struggle for cultural authority. In particular The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells, functions as a critique of scientific authority.