Today, Romantic poets set the stage for Victorian
science. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
Here's an odd letter by the
poet Coleridge. He's 29 and writing to his friend
Tom Poole. " ... deep Thinking," he says,
is attainable only by a man of deep Feeling
...
all Truth is a Species of Revelation.
He goes on to say he's been studying
Newton. It's hard going, but he's "delighted with the
beauty and neatness of [Newton's] experiments." He
also likes Newton's "immediate deductions." Then he
gets to the point. Newton's overall vision, he says,
is "so superficial." In Newton's system, the mind "is
always passive -- a lazy onlooker on an external
world."
The year was 1801. For over a century, Newton had
set the Rationalist agenda. It was clear enough to
Coleridge that Newton was shaping the objective
scientific method we use today. Scientists and
science-based engineers have struggled ever since
to view an external world with objective
detachment.
Coleridge wanted none of that. He went on to say
that the human mind is the creative wellspring. We
misuse the mind when we make it into a passive
observer of an external world
The earliest Romantic poet, William Blake, had
already said the same thing. "I will not reason and
compare," he vowed. "My business is to create." The
same year Coleridge wrote his letter, Blake wrote
this:
The Atoms of Democritus
And Newton's Particles of light
Are sands upon the Red sea shore.
When those 19th-century thinkers
attacked Rationalism, their impact on the world of
making and doing was profound. Science went into
retreat while a technology like none ever known rose
up in England. Machines, of course, are the first
fruit of the human mind. Before a machine can be
built in the world, it must be built in the mind. It
is a synthetic reality. Technology acts out the
Romantic vision.
So English engineers flung their railroads, iron
bridges, and steam factories across the land, and
Wordsworth wrote,
Huge and mighty forms that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly through the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.
Formal Newtonian science came back in
the late 19th century. But it came back as a powerful
set of man-made models of the external world. We've
never seen scientific success to match that of the
late 1800s. Victorian science was based on Newtonian
rigor, all right. But the Romantic thinkers had given
it a new dimension. Victorian science went so far
because it gazed on the world within -- before it
gazed on the world around us.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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