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

Criticism, Summer, 1998 by Mark Kipperman

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For Coleridge, science's goal is to arrive at universal law, and it must remain independent of social enthusiasms: in a late work, The Theory of Life, he looks back on the 1790s as a time when the new materialism became an "almost epidemic enthusiasm which, scarcely less than its political revolutions, characterise the spirit of the age." This enthusiasm produced bad science, in fact, by kindling expectations too much bound up with political hopes, a "higher excitement which an unsettled and revolutionary state is sure to inspire. He who supposes that science possesses an immunity from such influences knows little of human nature."(7)

But in 1802, Coleridge had listened with some enthusiasm of his own to Humphry Davy's Inaugural Lecture at the Royal Institution in London, where he promised not an empty utopianism based on a priori reasoning but the steady progress of empirical knowledge toward real and impending social transformation: "We do not look to distant ages, or amuse ourselves with brilliant, though delusive dreams, concerning the infinite improveability of man, the annihilation of labour, disease, and even death. But we reason by analogy from simple facts. We consider only a state of human progression arising out of its present condition. We look for a time that we may reasonably expect, for a bright day of which we already behold the dawn."(8) Coleridge's early excitement over Davy grew within the radical Bristol circle of Dr. Thomas Beddoes, who introduced them in 1799. Four years earlier it was Beddoes who introduced Coleridge to the works of Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley, and most likely to the Germans--Kant, Steffans, and the physiologist Blumenbach.(9) The radical Unitarian gentlemen of Bristol were much taken with the young Pantisocrat, and with money and access supported the researches of both Coleridge and Davy (they were both published by the Bristol republican Joseph Cottle, who in 1800 published the second edition of Lyrical Ballads from proofs corrected by Davy). Theirs was a tradition of progressive materialism, and their hope was that the ideology of a static, ordered cosmic and social hierarchy was being replaced by a vision of nature where human knowledge could uncover laws of change that could be mastered to produce broader material happiness and social equality. "[Alchemical] views of things have passed away, and a new science has gradually arisen," said Davy in his 1802 lecture.

The composition of the atmosphere, and the properties of gases,

have been ascertained; the phenomena of electricity have

been developed, the lightnings have been taken from the

clouds.... The guardians of civilization and refinement, the

most powerful and respected part of society, are daily growing

more attentive to the realities of life ... in considering and

hoping that the human species is capable of becoming more

enlightened and more happy, we can only expect that the different

parts of the great whole of society should be intimately

united together by means of knowledge and the useful arts.