Coleridge, Shelley, Davy, and science's millennium - Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Humphry Davy

Criticism, Summer, 1998 by Mark Kipperman

"True knowledge leads to love." --Percy Shelley

One is struck, whenever one rereads the notes to Shelley's Queen Mab, by the sheer brazenness of their confidence, of their palpable expectation of a new world just here, a world conjured up ideally by new knowledge in physics, astronomy, economics, as well as philosophy, ethics, theology. It is hard not to think of Coleridge's excitement, in his own youth, at the world-remaking newness of the chemistry of Davy and Priestley, the botany of Darwin. Indeed, the model for Queen Mab's visionary science as well as for Coleridge's millennial optimism in his 1794 Religious Musings was Erasmus Darwin's enormously popular poem, The Botanic Garden, whose scientific footnotes ran to 100,000 words. Chemist Humphry Davy fancied himself a poet; Coleridge called him "the Man who born first a poet first converted Poetry into Science."(1) Of course, this was an era when, in 1802, the twenty-seven-year-old Schelling could lecture his university students that, "at the present time, everything in science and art seems to be tending toward unity, when matters that long seemed remote from each other are now recognized to be quite close, and a new more universal vision, encompassing almost all disciplines, is taking shape. An epoch such as our own is surely bound to give birth to a new world.(2) It was in January that same year that Coleridge sat listening to Humphry Davy's chemistry lectures and, amid his copious notes on "oxygenated muriatic gas," wrote "If all aristocrats here, how easily Davy might poison them all."(3)

Yet even as Coleridge wrote this, he was becoming far more politically conservative; ultimately, for Coleridge, the expansion of knowledge is an attenuation of the human and a rarefaction towards the absolute. Chemistry, he wrote Davy, "united the opposite advantages of immaterializing mind without destroying the definiteness of Ideas --nay even while it gave clearness to them."(4) In his early days Coleridge, like Shelley, could call himself "a compleat Necessitarian" and saw in the materialism of Godwin, Hartley, and Priestley a unifying revolution of dawning moral progress in which matter and mind rose transcendently in a mutually evolving political scientific, and religious order. "Millennium," he wrote in his notebook in 1796, "an History of, as brought about by progression in natural philosophy."(5) Thus Religious Musings can speak of "the one omnipresent Mind / Omnific" (11. 105-6) while foreseeing the millennium's arrival in the heroic struggles of "Science" (225) and the discoveries of the materialist Hartley, "he first who marked the ideal tribes / Up the fine fibres through the sentient brain" (369-70). But Coleridge came to see scientific knowledge, in the fashion of Naturphilosophie, as knowledge that implied the reconciliation of material polarities in the ideal absolute--though as a Kantian he saw that absolute as ultimately transcendent and obscure. It is well known that Coleridge rejected his early Hartleyan materialism; less well understood are the ways in which his rejection of Godwinism in 1801-4 led him to be increasingly suspicious of the French materialist tradition that identified science with social progress, even as he was drawn to the new German view of science as a system of universal idealism. At the same time, for all his rejection of Godwinian materialism, Shelley never abandoned the hope that an expansion of physical knowledge--combined with a refinement of moral sensibility--was a precondition of progressive civilization.

The example of Shelley suggests that Coleridge's turn from science as a millennial force was not only a necessary product of his Kantian conversion in 1801-4. I would like to explore the complex reasons (historical and philosophical) for the radical divergence between Coleridge and Shelley--who began with such parallel hopes--on the social utility of scientific knowledge. In Coleridge's case, certainly, his suspicions were tied to his sense that authority could not derive from a knowledge of space and time, those human, transcendental categories. Shelley's is a world of ideal, but essentially immanent, forces evolving with an inner necessity, an organic purposiveness Coleridge associated with pantheism. Moreover, Shelley's social hopes were linked to such immanent forces, since these unfold in a real time and within a human history that progressively comprehends and harnesses them. If space and time were merely human for Coleridge, they were ineluctably human for Shelley; and the authority of our knowledge is the revelation that the universe will appear as civilized to us as we (within the given forms) make ourselves to be. But do these differences in metaphysical perspective fully account for their divergence?

There has been a general assumption among literary critics that a turn to idealism marks a rejection of science, or scientific method, or even empirical knowledge as such.(6) It remains puzzling, however, that a Shelley might retain his enthusiasm for science, even while, in the Defence of Poetry, clearly subordinating it to the guidance of imagination and moral leadership. Though Shelley is no materialist or empiricist, it is clear from Act 4 of Prometheus Unbound that Shelley's millennial vision does include an expansion of the powers of natural science. Of course, part of the solution to such puzzles is that the Two Cultures were not so clearly distinct in the early nineteenth century, though in Coleridge and Shelley we do begin to see marks of tension. The "sciences," however, did not at this time denote exactly our modern disciplines, and the "arts" had not yet quite attained their dubious Wildean distinction of uselessness: history and theology, as systematic studies, were "sciences," and engineering might be categorized as a "useful art."