Among the comments on the 150th anniversary of James Clerk Maxwell's groundbreaking paper On Physical Lines of Force (Nature 471, 289–291; 2011), nothing was said about what drove the thinking of this great physicist.

Personal perspectives can provide insight into the dynamics of scientists' behaviour. As the Victorian age matured, science leaders became increasingly materialistic. At a meeting of the British Association in 1874, president John Tyndall took the opportunity to advance his world view of materialism. Maxwell was in the audience and crafted a poem to express his disquiet, the first verse of which runs:

In the very beginnings of science, the parsons, who managed things then, Being handy with hammer and chisel, made gods in the likeness of men; Till Commerce arose, and at length some men of exceptional power Supplanted both demons and gods by the atoms, which last to this hour. Yet they did not abolish the gods, but they sent them well out of the way, With the rarest of nectar to drink, and blue fields of nothing to sway. From nothing comes nothing, they told us, nought happens by chance, but by fate; There is nothing but atoms and void, all else is mere whims out of date!

Such thorny issues may well have influenced Maxwell's perspective on science.