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

Criticism, Summer, 1998 by Mark Kipperman

(19;21-22)

What excited young Coleridge (and probably Shelley) about Davy's chemistry was its applicability to social institutions not merely as an analogy but as proof of unifying immanent lawfulness that could guide moral and even political understanding. In this hope, so congruent with Godwin's rationalist view of social causality, Coleridge and Shelley were, in their early years, united. We might recall that the notes to Queen Mab attempt to navigate a difficult terrain (and rhetorically it is less navigation than full-throttle ride) between universal natural lawfulness and an almost Leibnizian immanent idealism: "Every grain / is sentient both in unity and in part, / And the minutest atom comprehends / A world of loves and hatreds" (4.143-46).(10) Yet while the verse may proclaim that "Throughout this varied and eternal world / Soul is the only element" (4.141-42), the notes contextualize this soul within a universe of material causes, but causes so infinitely diffused as really to constitute a physical field: "He who asserts the doctrine of Necessity means that, contemplating the events which compose the moral and material universe, he beholds only an immense and uninterrupted chain of causes and effects, no one of which could occupy any other place than it does occupy, or act in any other place than it does act."(11) Shelley's "Soul," his notes clarify, is not a freely acting will but rather a decidedly non-human "power" ("not an organic being"). On this question of immanent powers Coleridge could never agree, and this was one reason for his increasing divergence from Godwin, and his rejection of the belief that empirical knowledge could disclose the true (transcendent and ideal) lawfulness of the cosmos.

It remains true that, despite their different metaphysics, both Coleridge and Shelley interpreted universal "forces" as continuous in some way with the human, as "universal" across the Organic, inorganic, and the ideal. This would not seem to us consistent with modern scientific practice or theory. Even so, the remark of Hans Eichner that "Romanticism is, perhaps predominantly, a desperate rearguard action against the spirit and the implications of modern science" is only partly true. Eichner indicts Coleridge and other enthusiasts of idealist Naturphilosophie for their passion for such contemporary findings as animal magnetism or Mesmerism, appropriating this discourse "with almost indecent haste, in the conviction that these phenomena demonstrated the superiority of their own speculative organicism over Newtonian physics."(12) But as historian of science Trevor Levere concludes, scientists like Priestley, Darwin, Oersted, and even Davy kept themselves informed of and to a degree accepted the notion of a dynamic, unifying principle explored by both the new chemistry and German speculations, so that "scientists did not fit into a clear dichotomy of respectable scientists on one hand and Romantic ones on the other."(13) Walter Wetzels reminds us that "Romantic natural science has a strong empirical basis, and most of its speculative ventures are extrapolations from experimental data.... The movement was not anti-science; it eagerly embraced the new discoveries in the fields of electricity and chemistry."(14) And in his broad evaluation of the effects of Schelling's Naturphilosophie on scientific method, Barry Gower distinguishes between empirically based theories and the a priori metaphysical assumptions that ground them, which he sees as "methodological, as regulative, as heuristic. They are justified in terms of the understanding they provide, and of the coherence of the theories they make possible." Though the theories they suggest may be wrong, the assumptions are not themselves the theories. In Schelling's case, "it is clear that although speculative physics was designed to provide a context for experimental scientific enquiries it was never intended, by Schelling at least, to provide a substitute for those enquiries."(15)