Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
the parameters of measurement and for the validity of non-rational forms
of knowing: imagination, intuition, dreams, the emotions, and the sub-
conscious. The villains of Romanticism were neo-alchemists, reducing
the world to symbols and isolating themselves from the healing power of
Nature, which might have restored them to sanity and wholeness. These
images have been powerfully presented in fiction, vindicating the Mod-
ernist premise that twentieth-century society had no humanity touch or
emotional well-being.
This vilification of science began prior to the Romantics, with the
eighteenth-century English satirists who presented the virtuosi
6
of their
day as divorced from reality, unable to relate to human concerns, and so
obsessed with their narrow focus of interest that they fell into grave er-
rors of fact as well as moral disrepute. Thomas Shadwell's popular play
The Virtuoso
(1676) and its many imitators, notably Samuel Butler's
The
Elephant in the Moon
(1676), Jonathan Swift's
Gulliver's Travels
(1726), especially Book III ridiculing the astronomers of Laputa and the
Projectors of Balnibarbi, and Alexander Pope's
Essay on Man
(1733) all
satirized the arrogance of contemporary natural philosophers.
7
These criticisms were amplified in the wholesale rejection of science
by the English Romantic poets, Blake, Wordsworth, and Keats, and to a
6
The term 'virtuoso' was used for wealthy patrons of natural philosophy who enthusi-
astically undertook miscellaneous projects, without rigor or training. Indiscriminate
hoarders and collectors of anything and everything, the virtuosi amassed private mu-
seums or 'cabinets' (Haynes 1994, pp. 35-49).
7
Butler's poem satirized almost the whole membership of the Royal Society of his
day, including Hooke, Boyle, and Leeuwenhoek (Haynes 1994, pp. 43f.). It was
widely (and wrongly) assumed that through his 'Virtuoso', Sir Nicholas Gimcrack,
Shadwell was lampooning the Royal Society since many of the experiments de-
scribed were only slightly altered from those reported in contemporary
Transactions
of the Royal Society
(Haynes 1994, pp. 45f.). Swift's term 'Projectors' had particular
significance since 'real life' Projectors were speculators whose extravagant projects
threatened innocent investors with financial ruin. The most notorious of such finan-
cial speculations was the 'South Sea Bubble'. The Flying Island of Laputa carries
references to Newton's calculations and to William Gilbert's experiments in magnet-
ism. Through his Laputans and Projectors Swift parodied John Locke's theory of
knowledge and specific experiments of the Royal Society (Haynes 1994, pp. 68-72).
Pope, although he produced the most famous epigraph on Newton - “Nature and Na-
ture's laws lay hid in night; God said, 'Let Newton be!' and all was light.”- was nev-
ertheless critical of the arrogance of natural philosophers who confused mere obser-
vation of phenomena with understanding (Haynes 1994, pp. 67f.).
