The Way the World Ends: The Scientism of Catastrophic Imagery in the English Eighteenth Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Today's environmentally self-conscious age is, of course, not the first to be much concerned with devastating natural catastrophes, with the ways in which our physical world can get changed decisively for the worse and even brought to an end. When people today find themselves looking back on past environmental disasters and anticipating even greater (and perhaps ultimate) ones in the future, they are following a long-established tradition, religious and scientific. But the specific context for such fears and speculations has varied a good deal from one age to another. This article's main historical emphasis will be on the English Restoration and eighteenth century — roughly speaking, on the Newton-and-after era — and its main intellectual focus will be on areas where works of natural philosophy or natural history with some scientific pretensions (primarily for what we now call physics, geology, chemistry, and physiology) merge with other kinds of writing. These other kinds include Christian biblical commentary, popular science and religion, and that hard-to-define field which we still like to call literature. I shall quote from a good many poems. Indeed, I think of this article as much less concerned with the history of science or the history of religion than with the wide-ranging use for various purposes of some fascinating and insistent images of potentially world-ending catastrophe. In my discussion the concept of 'world' will, however, following the loose and shifty practice of the period itself, be used very casually, moving between universe, galaxy, earth, life, and humankind indiscriminately and without warning. I shall also discuss two positive (creative rather than destructive) topics with naturalistic aspects and scientific relations — topics that Christians liked to involve in such a catastrophe: the physical formation of an earthly millennium and (before the last judgment) the resurrection of the body. As a very limited topic, which can anticipate, but not too elaborately, some of my later concerns, in particular the role of atomic physics, the latter will provide a convenient introductory section.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".