These were Captain Cook's first round the world expedition aboard the Endeavour, begun in 1768 and Charles Darwin's voyage to the Galapagos islands aboard the Beagle begun in 1831. Romantic Science can be dated roughly, and certainly symbolically, between two celebrated voyages of exploration. It flourished for a relative brief time, perhaps two generations, but produced long-lasting consequences - raising hopes and questions - that are still with us today. It was driven by a common ideal of intense, even reckless, personal commitment to discovery. It was a movement that grew out of 18th century Enlightenment rationalism, but largely transformed it, by bringing a new imaginative intensity and excitement to scientific work. It was inspired primarily by a sudden series of breakthroughs in the fields of astronomy and chemistry. The first person who referred to a "second scientific revolution" was probably the poet Coleridge in his Philosophical Lectures of 1819. It existence has long been accepted, and the biographies of its leading figures are well known.īut this second revolution was something different. The first scientific revolution of the 17th 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 Academie des Sciences in Paris. In effect there is Romantic science in the same sense there is Romantic poetry, and often for the same enduring reasons. The notion of wonder seems to be something that once united them, and can still do so.
But I do not believe this was always the case, or that the terms are so mutually exclusive. Romanticism as a cultural force is generally regarded as intensely hostile to science, its ideal of subjectivity eternally opposed to that of scientific objectivity. The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Wonder of Science
0 kommentar(er)
