Lateral Excursions

“Romanticism as a cultural force is generally regarded as intensely hostile to science, its ideal of subjectivity eternally opposed to that of scientific objectivity.  But I do not believe this was always the case, or that the terms are so mutually exclusive.  The notion of wonder seems to be something that once united them, and can still do.  In effect there is Romantic science in the same sense that there is Romantic poetry, and often for the same enduring reasons.

The scientific revolution, of the seventeenth century, is familiarly associated with the names of Newton, Hooke, Locke and Descartes, and the almost simultaneous foundations of the Royal Society in London and the Académie des Sciences in Paris.  Its existence has long been accepted, and the biographies of its leading figures are well know.  But this second revolution was something different.  The first person who referred to a ‘second scientific revolution’ was probably the poet Coleridge in his Philosophical Lectures of 1819.  It was inspired primarily by a sudden series of breakthroughs in the fields of astronomy and chemistry.  It was a movement that grew out of eighteenth-century Enlightenment rationalism, but largely transformed it, by bringing a new imaginative intensity and excitement to scientific work.  It was driven by a common ideal of intense, even reckless, personal commitment to discovery.

It was also a movement of transition.  It flourished for a relatively brief time, perhaps two generations, but produced long-lasting consequences – raising hopes and questions – that are still with us today.  Romantic science can be dated roughly, and certainly symbolically, between two celebrated voyages of exploration.  These were Captain James Cook’s first round-the-world expedition aboard the Endeavor, begun in 1768, and Charles Darwin’s voyage to the Galapagos islands aboard the Beagle, begun in 1831.  This is the time I have called the Age of Wonder, and with any luck we have not yet quite outgrown it.

The idea of the exploratory voyage, often lonely and perilous, is in one form or another a central and defining metaphor of Romantic science.”

Holmes, Richard.  ”Prologue.”  The Age of Wonder.