Thomas Collyns Simon

Thomas Collyns or Collins Simon, eldest son of the Cork merchant Peter Simon, is known to many NIFHS members: tutor of William Agnew of Kilwaughter (1824-91), husband of William’s sister Maria, and father of Countess Balzani (Maria Augusta Simon, 1847-1895). But his peculiar writings on science, metaphysics and religion deserve a note. He is buried at Oxford in St Sepulchre’s.

See www.stsepulchres.org.uk/burials/simon_thomas.html for some family details, a list of publications, and this Oxford memorial. He matriculated there in 1829, followed in 1834 by younger brother William Frederick, who died in a lunatic asylum and whose daughter Margaret married into the Winckworth Scott family notable in Anglo-India, soccer, cricket, and golf putter design. In the 1940s her grandson Ray won a DFC with bar in dogfights and bomber escort, and divorced the same lady twice for misconduct with the same gentleman.

Optics and astronomy

An online copy of this 1879 book is here dedicated by the Countess (“with the kind regards & high esteem of the Author’s daughter M A Balzani”, at Rome on 25 February 1891).

Most scientists, and almost all good ones, make and correct serious errors from time to time. Some suppress the evidence or hope nobody notices; some grab publicity by announcing how stupid they were; Collyns Simon made simple and fatal errors, then kept banging on.

“Inverse squares” means here that, for a point source radiating uniformly in all directions, the light irradiance (colloquially called “intensity”) varies as the reciprocal of the square of R, or "1/(R-squared)"; real sources such as candles and stars are not points, but the law will hold once the range R is much greater than any dimension of the source.

Collyns Simon said that zero variation with range, implying equal solar illumination strength for all planets (“Neptune’s Light as Great as Ours”), is demonstrable and indeed obvious. He repeatedly tried to have his optical “truths” accepted in public. For example, Scientific Certainties of Planetary Life (1855, a swift counter to William Whewell’s On the Plurality of Worlds) combines the inverse square fiasco with comments on other planets and their “Moral Agents”. He never quantifies “Light” with what we call scientific units (such as Watts per square metre), and uses no equations or diagrams; this words-only approach was then common; but the fact that he is erring, or at the very least preparing to err, is clear from:

“Let us for an instance suppose the space between the planets and the sun to be a perfect vacuum. In that case the solar rays undergo no diminution in their passage from the sun to Neptune. They present themselves outside Neptune’s atmosphere in as much force as outside that of Mercury. The only diminution that they undergo before they reach the solid surfaces of the respective planets, in the case that we are supposing, is that which is effected by each planet’s own atmosphere.” (pp. 203-204)

His 1879 preface railed against professors of physics, or rather the system that chains them with “not the least time free from teaching, – not even what would suffice to investigate the truth of what they teach”. He alleged mercenary motives. Cash incentives (his 50 guineas offered for “disproof of the scientific facts”) seem irregular in discussions of science and metaphysics between gentlemen, but are not unknown today. The professors fobbed him off, or did not reply, or made unhelpful remarks about the conservation of energy.

M J Crowe’s The Extraterrestrial Life Debate 1750-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 1986) is justifiably harsh: “a very odd conception of science…strikingly demonstrates its author’s aberrant views”. Collyns Simon is not wholly to blame. The available physics models and observations were not our “modern” ones, arguments by analogy were accepted faute de mieux, other writers were making serious errors, and scientists tended to stick with what they knew, or were told, or thought they knew. Still, his is a bad and persistent case. His accounts of optics and optical propagation are so odd – from most modern points of view – that it is hard to know where to start. There are multiple nomenclatures – discussions of propagation need care, and “brightness”, “radiance” and so on can be ambiguous – but that is not the only problem.

“I am pointing out that an Optical theory, asserted by all, – the theory of the Inverse Squares, is utterly and manifestly false; and, in order to make this clear, I seek to explain that Light from its nature does not and cannot deviate from the straight line as that theory supposes that it can, a natural fact this also as stoutly denied or neglected by all, as the interference of waves can well be said to have been.”

“Interference of waves” is a nod to the important but once-heretical views of Thomas Young. Many pages follow in what seems, to us, a mad senseless argument about areas, windows, cones, candles, paint thicknesses and so on, the whole vitiated by refusal or inability to define and quantify optical language such as “degree of Light” and distinguish between intensive and extensive properties.

There seem to be three main issues:

- Optical absorption: a beam or ray of light of initial irradiance I (in units of e.g. Watts per square metre), when propagating a distance z through an absorbing medium, is attenuated in the sense that I is multiplied by some factor f(z) between 0 and 1, that is, reduced by some amount I(1-f(z)); Collyns Simon in 1855 explains this, but sometimes says that I(1-f(z)) is proportional to z-squared, and often implies that the light is entirely extinguished (f strictly zero) for some finite z. In 1879 he correctly states (but rejects) the accepted theory of “Geometrical Progression”, namely f(z) = exp(-μz) (where μ is the attenuation coefficient); to him it is obvious lunacy that the “degree of Light”, however small, can be nonzero after an indefinitely lengthy attenuating medium.

- Inverse square behaviour of light from a point source: the light, spreading uniformly in three dimensions in vacuum, will show an irradiance proportional to 1/(R-squared), where R is the range and the light is spread uniformly across a “sphere” of area 4π times R-squared; but Collyns Simon does not grasp this (page 232); he may not have thought in terms of “irradiance”, solid angles, and energy conservation. Instead his unquantified arguments are based on innumerable “rays” or “threads” of Light which exist between source and object with undiminished strength.

- The interstellar ether: Collyns Simon supposes this to be responsible for the optical absorption above; he says its (unknown, but very small) density or equivalently its attenuating power obeys an inverse square law as the range from the sun increases, because the ether is concentrated near the sun by gravity (page 216); this ether is hardly relevant to the main misunderstandings, but adds to the confusion.

But probably his line of argument would be more familiar and attractive to someone raised two hundred or two thousand years earlier: no equations for waves / fields / diffraction, no conservation laws or quantitative vocabulary for energy / power / intensity, but reasoning from geometric “principles” about points, rays, spokes and cones. Perhaps his heart is in the right place; poor fact-checking and professional cliques are always with us; but (on this topic) his views are crank.

The Leader’s reviewer called Scientific Certainties a readable essay “in spite of dogmatism”. “Very superior to Sir David Brewster’s Treatise, in point of style and reasoning powers” said the Guardian. The Morning Post (8 February 1855) offered more compliments after borrowing its final paragraph:

That polished cadence shows Collyns Simon as a Victorian who knew classical (ciceroning) rhetoric and its perorations – such as Darwin’s “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers…”, also in the 1850s. But the rhetoric is little use when the arguments by analogy are unquantifiable, at best plausible, sometimes risible, and when the physics of nebulae and stellar evolution are not understood.

Immaterialism, George Berkeley, and elephants

During the 19^th century squabble about essences and perceptions, Collyns Simon clearly saw, and insisted in public, that Berkeley had a point. Many people thought immaterialism was all nonsense; Boswell said that Dr Johnson kicked a stone to “refute” it; Collyns Simon, to his credit, was not intimidated.

He issued an annotated edition of Berkeley’s Principles of Human Knowledge in 1878, did much to spread understanding (or at least awareness) of Continental philosophers, and keeps a place in the footnotes if not the main line of modern commentary.

In On the nature and elements of the external world: or Universal immaterialism fully explained (1847), when discussing inventions deprecated by himself and Berkeley – metaphysical, hypothetical “objects...entirely beyond our knowledge” – he introduces a celebrated beast:

"Upon the same principle, said Berkeley, there may be an invisible elephant in the room with me, or a solar system in a nutshell. I admit that such things, not being physically impossible, may be true, although I do not perceive them.”

His 1878 commentary expands this:

The context is an enquiry about evidence, belief and existence...Might there be an elephant despite the failure of our best efforts to detect it? Can such an elephant be ruled out? In today's metaphor an “elephant in the room” is real and obvious although we may not want to see it or admit it.

The journeys of St Peter

In contrast again, Collyns Simon wrote a 300-page tome debunking the claims that St Peter left the Holy Land and established himself in Rome. It is readable though not laugh-a-minute. The temporal and spiritual authorities of the Church of Rome were thought to depend on St Peter’s move or moves. If he never left the Holy Land, then at least some Papal claims were undermined. The question is still not dead and still receives polemics.

We often blink at how some Victorians worked seriously across (nowadays) separate fields. But those above – “speculative philosophy” and the plurality of worlds, Berkeleyism and the German idealism of Hegel and others, and evidence-based Biblical study (with the worrying liberties taken by German modernists) – were all the rage. In summary, Collyns Simon was more than the Agnews’ hired tutor. Later he did useful service by reviving interest in Berkeley’s arguments and defending them against attacks and ridicule. He wrote much about Hegel and other philosophers, Biblical studies, and astronomical theory. Unluckily he made a fool of himself by repeatedly misunderstanding what we clever folk consider simple "inverse square" laws of physics and optics. He could write well, but he needed sub-editing. Through Larne, London, Somerset, Germany, Italy, Rugby and Oxford, he contributed his mix of deep learning and rubbish: an untenured amateur, classically educated and multilingual, with a poor grasp of how various physical models, mathematics and experiments can supplement speculation and analogy.

References and further reading

Honorary degree of LL. D. - These Senate minutes, reproduced with permission from the University of Edinburgh, list a distinguished XI (College/Senatus Minutes, shelfmark EUA IN1/GOV/SEN/MIN/1):

Belfast-born Sir William Thomson (later 1^st Baron Kelvin) leads Matthew Arnold, Wheatstone of the “Wheatstone bridge”, Swan of the “Swan band”, Gordon (later Lord-Advocate and Baron) – and Alexander Bain (the logician and psychologist and founder of Mind, not the Caithness-born inventor; both were known to Thomson). Collyns Simon, not of 1^st XI level in the long term, and holding views on optics not shared by these 1869 colleagues, nonetheless grasped his chance. The University Library finds no acceptance speeches or nomination papers, but I suppose his LL. D. was awarded mainly for the expositions of e.g. Berkeley and Hegel, and tireless philosophical networking, not for astronomy or Church history.

The University’s List of Graduates 1859-88 shows Sir Roderick Murchison as a 12^th man in 1869, while Henry Acland and Sir Colin Blackburn (listed in the Morning Post of 21 April 1869) were deferred till 1870. All agree on 1869 for Collyns Simon.

Much correspondence from these 19^th century professors and philosophers survives. There was formal public argument, as when Matthew Boulton or Bolton (another solar scientist and multitalented challenge to biographical research) published a long Letter to T. Collyns Simon, Esq. (1862) criticising the views of Sir William Hamilton and Henry Mansel (LL. D. 1860) on the Infinite and Absolute, and disparaging Collyns Simon’s exposition of those views. St John’s College in Cambridge has John Couch Adams (still famous for his part in the discovery of Neptune in the 1840s) privately pestered in 1880 about the Solar Illumination book. The papers of Professor Campbell Fraser, in the National Library of Scotland, include many more Collyns Simon letters, with others from Arnold, Bain and Playfair. Campbell Fraser was Hamilton’s Edinburgh successor in Chairs of Logic (1846), and of Logic and Metaphysics (1856). The Preface to his 1901 enlarged edition of Berkeley’s Collected Works says:

“Among others who have delivered appreciative criticisms of Berkeley within the last thirty years are J. S. Mill, Mansel, Huxley, T. H. Green, Maguire, Collyns Simon, the Right Hon. A. J. Balfour, Mr. Leslie Stephen, Dr. Hutchison Stirling, Professor T. K. Abbott, Professor Van der Wyck, M. Penjon, Ueberweg, Frederichs, Ulrici, Janitsch, Eugen Meyer, Spicker, Loewy, Professor Höffding of Copenhagen, Dr. Lorenz, Noah Porter, and Krauth, besides essays in the chief British, Continental, and American reviews”.

C S Peirce’s American essay is at https://peirce.sitehost.iu.edu/writings/v2/w2/w2_48/v2_48.htm.

Mainly because of the prolific Berkeley industry, Collyns Simon’s name still appears in Irish and international literary contexts.

The (invisible) elephant in the room – John Roberts of Berkeley Studies stresses that Berkeley has already concluded against any such “transmundane” object or beast: Berkeley’s phrase “But though it were possible…” (Principles of Human Knowledge, I.18) should be seen more as a counterfactual (“Even if we were to suppose it was possible…”), used solely for the purpose of argument. Laurence Shafe comments on Simon’s “invisible elephant” in Darwin and Beauty: 1859-1882 (Ph.D. thesis, University of Bristol, 2012). Roberts stresses that no such phrase is in Berkeley’s works. Perhaps Collyns Simon, paraphrasing or interpreting, originated it; do readers know an earlier instance?

S A Hill – Hill’s links with Rudyard Kipling overshadow his science and his introduction of the elephant unit of wind force (see North Irish Roots, vol. 30, no. 1, 2019, and this website). Collyns Simon’s brief Kilwaughter drama – tutoring the eccentric William Agnew, then quasi-eloping with the young sister – may similarly have left his work underappreciated. Possibly Hill (London student, meteorologist, solar scientist and photographer) and Collyns Simon knew each other through solar radiation; just possibly they met. Hill’s parents lived at Ballyboley about five miles from Kilwaughter; on his last home visit he attended a Larne bazaar on 29 August 1889, then sailed for India where he died in 1890.

Hill's "actinometric" work, including papers on solar heating and atmospheric absorption, was recognised by colleagues such as Tyndall, and relates very closely to the "Geometrical Progression" denied by Collyns Simon. Light is partly "extinguished" during propagation through a medium such as our atmosphere; energy is lost, or rather redistributed, through scattering and absorption and re-radiation; and the investigations by Hill and others of these processes are important in the early understanding of what we now call global warming and climate change. Although our accounts of the spectrum of solar light and the wavelength dependence of the above processes are more detailed, and founded on electromagnetic and quantum theories unfamiliar to Hill, he was already clear about some consequences of pollution:

These results [Langley's bolometer measurements, at Allegheny Observatory, for different wavelengths] are so extremely discordant, some of them differing by fully 200 per cent., that one or other of three conclusions is forced upon us by them: either the solar radiation varies enormously from time to time both in quantity and in quality, or the bolometer is altogether untrustworthy, or the atmosphere of Pittsburgh and Allegheny is quite unsuited to such work. The first conclusion is incredible, and the second at least doubtful, but to anyone who has ever been in Pittsburgh, the smokiest town in the world of its size, there can be no doubt about the third.

A few minutes' talk with Hill might or might not have helped Collyns Simon with Geometric Progression, the sometimes very sharp wavelength dependence of the f(z) mentioned above, and the overall conservation of energy for light crossing the spherical surface defined by any radius from a point source. Hill had nitpicked over Langley's methods ("A Criticism of Certain Points") but, in turn, would have conceded that the new instruments revealed unsuspected and interesting features in the "extreme ultra-red" - meaning in those days about λ = 3 microns, but soon to be pushed to 10 microns and beyond.

I thank Norah Crammond, John Roberts, the Friends of St Sepulchre, those who replied on the Rootschat online forum, and the libraries of St John’s College, Cambridge (Adam Crothers), Edinburgh University (Stephen Willis), and the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh (Aaron Fleming). The NIFHS research centre in Newtownabbey is not yet (December 2021) reopened, but I or they will be pleased to hear more information about the people mentioned here: via the Larne branch (Larne@nifhs.org), which is the one nearest Kilwaughter, or via malvernlidar@gmail.com.