The Age Of Wonder: How the romantic generation discovered the beauty and terror of science
HarperCollins, $59.99 hb, 553 pp
The great ocean of truth
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Richard Holmes’s aim in this remarkable book is to set aside the notion that ‘Romanticism as a cultural force is generally regarded as intensely hostile to science, its ideal of subjectivity eternally opposed to that of scientific objectivity’, replacing it with the notion of wonder, uniting once mutually exclusive terms, so that ‘there is Romantic science in the same sense that there is Romantic poetry, and often for the same enduring reasons’. |
What Coleridge, in 1819, called the ‘second scientific revolution’ grew out of the Enlightenment rationalism of the eighteenth century, inspired by discoveries in astronomy and chemistry but subsequently transforming it by ‘bringing a new imaginative intensity and excitement to scientific work … driven by a common ideal of personal commitment to discovery’. The emergence of the notion of passionately disinterested science, independent of political ideology or religious doctrine, and of the linking of scientific genius to poetic inspiration is seen by Holmes as challenging fundamentally the terms of the first scientific revolution led by Newton, Locke and Descartes, as well as the long-established authority of London’s Royal Society and Paris’s Académie des Sciences.
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