A note on Alice and Paul

Sun 21 Nov 2010 09:20 AM

Jender points to "The Royal Society's lost women scientists", an interesting article in today's Guardian by historian Richard Holmes. He mentions, among other people, "Alice Bodington, the fearless Darwinian author of Studies in Evolution."

My curiosity piqued, I searched the web to see if Bodington's Studies was available on-line. The first page of links was mostly to Holmes' article and mirrors of it. A bit further on, there was a mention of Bodington in Philosophy as a science: a synopsis of writings of Dr. Paul Carus. Carus is an american philosopher whose fame is preserved mostly because the Carus Lectures are named for him. The volume that includes abstracts of his entire corpus is available via Google Books; the essay that addresses Bodington is summarized thusly:

In answer to Mrs. Alice Bodington, an agnostic. The nature of our religious ideal is as much predetermined as man's reason...

I'll explicitly mention the irony of dressing down Mrs. Bodington for violating man's reason; I'm heavy handed like that.

To be fair, a different search term eventually turned up excerpts from Bodington's Studies.