Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
looked in literature studies.
42
Indeed, Victor's ambitions at various ages
reflect periods of the history of science of the corresponding centuries, if
one multiplies his age by a hundred. Describing “the birth of that passion
which afterwards ruled my destiny” (p. 25), thirteen-year-old Victor be-
came an ardent enthusiast of the thirteenth- through sixteenth-century al-
chemical writings of “Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracel-
sus, the lords of my imagination” (p. 28). Unlike his intimate's occupa-
tion with the “moral relations of things”, Victor's inclination is towards
the “physical secrets of the world” (p. 24), which suggests the split of
philosophy into moral and natural philosophy. He is fascinated with the
philosophers' stone and, particularly, the elixir of life that “could banish
disease from the human frame and render man invulnerable to any but a
violent death!” (p. 27). After a couple of years of that occupation, Victor
is affected by (late sixteenth-century, early seventeenth-century) skepti-
cism: “It seemed to me as if nothing would or could ever be known” (p.
28). This period is followed by temporary enthusiasm with mathematics
and the mathematical philosophy of nature, which obviously represent
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Cartesianism and Newtonianism.
Interestingly, Shelley emphatically stressed the difference between al-
chemy/chemistry and mathematical physics by describing the latter, in
Victor's retrospective narration, as “the immediate suggestion of the
guardian angel of my life - the last effort made by the spirit of preserva-
tion to avert the storm […] but it was ineffectual” (p. 28). When Victor,
at the age of seventeen, enrolls at the University of Ingoldstadt
43
to study
42
Martin Tropp (1976, pp. 59f.) seems to recognize the parallel, but since for him, as
for many others, the “history of science [goes] from alchemy to technology” (p. 59)
or from Descartes to mechanical engineering (p. 53), he overlooks most of it. This
case suggests the urgent need for greater collaboration between historians of science
and historians of literature.
43
Note that the University of Ingoldstadt had moved to Landshut in 1800. In 1776, the
professor of natural and canon law Adam Weishaupt founded the pseudo-freemason
order of the Illuminati in Ingoldstadt, about which there was the reactionary but dubi-
ous rumor spread all over Europe in the 1790s that the Illuminati would have substan-
tially influenced the French Revolution in 1789. Mary Shelley definitely knew this
rumor, as a friend of her husband, Jefferson Hoog, had already literarily expanded on
the rumor in his
Memoirs of Prince Alexy Haimatoff
(1813). There is little doubt that
she chose Ingoldtstadt for the education of her Frankenstein precisely because of the
alleged Illuminati-Revolution connection, as also Alexandre Dumas père let his
