The Contemporary Political and Social Situation

Abstract

This short digression will try to make up for our insufficient knowledge of details from Gauss’s childhood and youth by providing some general comments about the social and historical situation of the time. Gauss grew up in Brunswick, a city located in the (Protestant) north of Germany. Though religion was still an important facet of everyday life, his parents do not seem to have been very religious and were certainly free of the evangelical (pietistic) tendencies which were then widespread among families of a similar background.¹ The sudden interest, during the 1840s, in experiments like seances and table-turning may have reminded Gauss of the religious folklore of his youth. His comments were predictably and decidedly negative when he was consulted by W. Gerling, a former student who was professor of physics at the University of Marburg. Gauss completely rejected mystical experiences of this (or any) kind and made it very clear to Gerling that there was no scientific basis.²