Baden Powell, MA FRS FRGS (22 August 1796 – 11 June 1860) was an English mathematician and Church of England priest. He held the Savilian Chair of Geometry at the University of Oxford from 1827 to 1860. Powell was a prominent liberal theologian who put forward advanced ideas about evolution.

Origins

Baden Powell II was born at Stamford Hill, Hackney in London. His father, Baden Powell I (1767–1841), of Langton and Speldhurst in Kent, was a wine merchant, The mother of Baden Powell II was Hester Powell (1776–1848), his father's paternal first cousin,

The Powell family can be traced back to the early 16th century, where they were yeomen farmers at Mildenhall in Suffolk. In 1740 a branch of the family bought the Whitefriars Glass works.

The name Baden originated in Susanna Baden (1663–1737), the maternal grandmother of David Powell (1725–1810) of Homerton, Middlesex,

Education

Powell was admitted as an undergraduate at Oriel College, Oxford in 1814, and graduated with a first-class honours degree in mathematics in 1817.

Powell's first marriage on 21 July 1821 to Eliza Rivaz (died 13 March 1836) was childless.

His second marriage on 27 September 1837 to Charlotte Pope (died 14 October 1844) produced one son and three daughters:

  • Charlotte Elizabeth Powell, (14 September 1838–20 October 1917)
  • Baden Henry Baden-Powell, FRSE (23 August 1841–2 January 1901)
  • Louisa Ann Powell, (18 March 1843–1 August 1896)
  • Laetitia Mary Powell, (4 June 1844–2 September 1865)

Survivors of Baden Powell's third family: Back row, standing (left to right): Major B. F. S. Baden-Powell; Miss Agnes D. S. Baden-Powell; Mr. Frank Baden-Powell; Colonel R. S. S. Baden-Powell. Front row, seated: Sir George Baden-Powell; Mrs. Henrietta Grace Baden-Powell with one of Powell's grandchildren; and Mr. Warington Baden-Powell|thumb

His third marriage on 10 March 1846 (at St Luke's Church, Chelsea) to Henrietta Grace Smyth (3 September 1824–13 October 1914), a daughter of Admiral Smyth, produced seven sons and three daughters:

  • Henry Warington Baden-Powell, (3 February 1847–24 April 1921), a naval officer, a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a King's Counsel (K.C.)
  • Sir George Smyth Baden-Powell, (24 December 1847–20 November 1898), a politician and Conservative MP (1885–1898)
  • Augustus Smyth Powell (1849–1863)
  • Francis (Frank) Smyth Baden-Powell (29 July 1850– 25 December 1933), an artist who exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts
  • Henrietta Smyth Powell (28 October 1851–9 March 1854)
  • John Penrose Smyth Powell (21 December 1852–14 December 1855)
  • Jessie Smyth Powell (25 November 1855–24 July 1856)
  • Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell, (22 February 1857–8 January 1941), an army officer, writer and a founder of the World Scouting Movement and (with his sister Agnes) founder of the Girl Guides.
  • Agnes Smyth Baden-Powell, (16 December 1858–2 June 1945), founder of the Girl Guides.
  • Baden Fletcher Smyth Baden-Powell, (22 May 1860–3 October 1937), an army officer, aviator and president of the Royal Aeronautical Society

Shortly after Powell's death in 1860, his wife renamed the remaining children of his third marriage 'Baden-Powell'; the name was eventually legally changed by royal licence on 30 April 1902. Baden Henry Powell is often also referred to as Baden Henry Baden-Powell, and was using this name by the 1891 census.

Evolution

Powell was an outspoken advocate of the constant uniformity of the laws of the material world. His views were liberal, and he was sympathetic to evolutionary theory long before Charles Darwin had revealed his ideas. He argued that science should not be placed next to scripture or the two approaches would conflict, and in his own version of Francis Bacon's dictum, contended that the book of God's works was separate from the book of God's word, claiming that moral and physical phenomena were completely independent.

His faith in the uniformity of nature (except man's mind) was set out in a theological argument; if God is a lawgiver, then a "miracle" would break the lawful edicts that had been issued at Creation. Therefore, a belief in miracles would be entirely atheistic. Powell's most significant works defended, in succession, the uniformitarian geology set out by Charles Lyell and the evolutionary ideas in Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation published anonymously by Robert Chambers which applied uniform laws to the history of life in contrast to more respectable ideas such as catastrophism involving a series of divine creations.

The boldness of Powell and other theologians in dealing with science led Joseph Dalton Hooker to comment in a letter to Asa Gray dated 29 March 1857: "These parsons are so in the habit of dealing with the abstractions of doctrines as if there was no difficulty about them whatever, so confident, from the practice of having the talk all to themselves for an hour at least every week with no one to gainsay a syllable they utter, be it ever so loose or bad, that they gallop over the course when their field is Botany or Geology as if we were in the pews and they in the pulpit. Witness the self-confident style of Whewell and Baden Powell, Sedgwick and Buckland." William Whewell, Adam Sedgwick and William Buckland opposed evolutionary ideas.

When the idea of natural selection was mooted by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in their 1858 papers to the Linnaean Society, both Powell and his brother-in-law William Henry Flower thought that natural selection made creation rational.

Essays and Reviews

He was one of seven liberal theologians who produced a manifesto titled Essays and Reviews around February 1860, which amongst other things joined in the debate over On the Origin of Species. These Anglicans included Oxford professors, country clergymen, the headmaster of Rugby school and a layman. Their declaration that miracles were irrational stirred up unprecedented anger, drawing much of the fire away from Charles Darwin. Essays sold 22,000 copies in two years, more than the Origin sold in twenty years, and sparked five years of increasingly polarised debate with books and pamphlets furiously contesting the issues.

He would have been on the platform at the British Association for the Advancement of Science 1860 Oxford evolution debate that was a highlight of the reaction to Darwin's theory. Huxley's antagonist Wilberforce was also the foremost critic of Essays and Reviews. Powell died of a heart attack a fortnight before the meeting.

Notable students

Lewis Carroll attended the lectures on pure geometry by Baden Powell.

Collections

In 1970, 170 volumes from Powell's library were presented to the Bodleian Libraries by his grandson, D. F. W. Baden Powell.

Notes

References

Further reading

  • Corsi, Pietro (1988). Science and Religion: Baden Powell and the Anglican Debate, 1800-1860, Cambridge University Press , 346 pages
  • Collection of obituary notices