Athenaeum | Royal Institution 15th. July | 1863
My dear Sir,
I had the pleasure of receiving two days ago your new & important work.2
Thus far I have had barely time to make myself acquainted with its general character—a character which requires courage as well as ability—on the part of its author.
I trust the time is coming when that word ‘courage’ will not need to be applied to any undertaking which consists in the casual utterance of a man’s conviction; but that each will be permitted, without fear of persecution to speak out the thought that is in him.
It is only the real sceptics as to the power of truth that deprecate this consummation.
May you & such as you continue to make their numbers less.
Believe me dear Sir, | Very sincerely from, | John Tyndall
Library of Congress, John William Draper Family Papers
John William Draper: John William Draper (1811–82), an English philosopher, physician, chemist, historian, and photographer, who, from 1832 made his home in the United States. He made significant improvements in photographic techniques. Draper’s lecture ‘On the Intellectual Development of Europe, considered with reference to the views of Mr. Darwin and others, that the progression of organisms is determined by law’ provided the backdrop to the debate between Thomas Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce at the Oxford meeting of the BAAS in 1860 (ODNB). He went on to write The History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1874), a major contribution to establishing what later became known as the ‘conflict thesis’ regarding the relationship between science and religion. On the ‘conflict thesis’, see B. Lightman (ed), Rethinking History, Science, and Religion: An Exploration of Conflict and the Complexity Principle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019); B. Lightman, ‘The Victorians: Tyndall and Draper’, in J. Hardin, R. L. Numbers, and R. A. Binzley (eds), The Warfare between Science and Religion: The Idea That Wouldn’t Die (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2018), pp. 65–83; and J. C. Ungureanu, Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019).
your new & important work: J. W. Draper, History of the Intellectual Development of Europe (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1863), in which Draper applied the methods of science to writing history.
Please cite as “Tyndall2020,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on