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. 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 break-throughs in the fields of astronomy and chemistry. 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 Acadèmie 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. This is my account of the second scientific revolution, which swept through Britain at the end of the 18th century, and produced a new vision which has rightly been called Romantic science. The Age of Wonder is a relay-race of scientific stories, and they link together to explore a larger historical narrative.
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