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lesser extent by the views of their German counterparts who proposed a
Naturphilosophie
affirming a continuity between the spirit of Man and a
spiritual dimension in Nature.
8
Of these Blake was the most condemna-
tory. His 'infernal trinity' comprised Francis Bacon, the exponent of ex-
perimentalism, Newton the arch-mechanist and John Locke, representing
the philosophy of the five senses (Blake 1966, pp. 636, 685). In Blake's
view these three men were dangerous heretics who, blinded by material-
ism, failed to see the complexity of truth. Wordsworth and Keats viewed
the practitioners of a science more in pity than in anger - pity for their
limitations of perception and experience and their rejection of imagina-
tive truth.
The Romantic view has remained particularly influential among prose
writers as well as poets. Thomas Carlyle lamented, “Men are grown me-
chanical in head and in heart as well as in hand” (Carlyle 1915, p. 228),
and Charles Dickens satirized the British Association for the Advance-
ment of Science, which met for the first time in 1831, as “The Mudfog
Association for the Advancement of Everything” (Dickens 1837, pp.
397-413). Its members are depicted as having lost all humanitarian sym-
pathies and values, as socially irresponsible and emotionally and morally
deficient.
Balthazar Claës of Balzac's novel
La Recherche de l'Absolu
(1834) is
far more complex. Although Balzac's major interest is the psychological,
almost clinical, study of a genius and the effect of his obsession on his
family, the underlying moral is the Romantic belief that preoccupation
with science atrophies the normal emotions that sustain personal rela-
tions and social responsibilities. Claës's wife, Josephine, pleads the case
for the emotions when she tells him, “Science has eaten away your heart”
(Balzac, n.d., p. 84), and contrasts her own selfless devotion with his un-
caring obsession with his chemistry. His response, a piece of unwitting
self-condemnation, is to redefine feelings in the current chemical term,
8
Friedrich Schelling proposed that nature was an immense living organism and hence
the goal of science was to discover the
Weltseele
of this organism. On the other hand,
many of the German Romantic poets had received a scientific education. Novalis had
studied mineralogy, physics, chemistry, and mathematics; Schlegel had studied phys-
ics; Goethe had studied botany, as well as being well read in chemistry and optics;
Ritter was a pharmacist, chemist, physicist, and physiologist (Haynes 1994, pp. 76-8).
