Abstract
Humphry Davy was the friend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the preeminent chemical discoverer and lecturer of his day. Chemical and natural philosophers of the nineteenth century were willy-nilly the heirs of the Romantic movement as well as the Enlightenment represented by Antoine Lavoisier; and in Britain (as in the German lands) this meant thinking dynamically, conceiving forces rather than matter to be fundamental. Those who aspired like Davy to combine poetry and dynamical natural philosophy would move beyond Understanding to Reason, achieving true wisdom and becoming sages.
Oh, most magnificent and noble nature!
Have I not worshipped the with such a love
As never mortal man before displayed?
Adored thee in thy majesty of visible creation,
And searched into thy hidden and mysterious ways
As Poet, as Philosopher, as Sage? (John Davy, Fragmentary Remains, Literary and Scientific, of Sir Humphry Davy (London: Churchill, 1858), 14.)
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Notes
- 1.
Harold Hartley, Humphry Davy (London: Nelson, 1966).
- 2.
Russell Re Manning, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology, (Oxford: University Press, 2013); my ‘Chemical Sciences and Natural Theology’, from which parts of this essay are expanded, is at 434–48.
- 3.
Humphry Davy, Consolations in Travel, or the Last Days of a Philosopher (London: Murray, 1830), 245.
- 4.
See Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 1(1773); and William Enfield, A Pronouncing Dictionary (London: Crosby, 1815), s.v.‘creative’.
- 5.
Humphry Davy, Collected Works, ed. John Davy (London: Smith Elder, 1839–1840), vol. 7, 41.
- 6.
William Paley, Natural Theology,[1802], ed. Matthew D. Eddy and David Knight (Oxford: University Press, 2006).
- 7.
Kathleen Coburn, ed., Inquiring Spirit: a new Presentation of Coleridge from his Published and Unpublished Prose Writings (London: Routledge, 1951), 120, 381.
- 8.
Thomas Gisborne, The Testimony of Natural Theology to Christianity, (London: Cadell & Davies, 1818).
- 9.
Humphry Davy, Consolations in Travel, 254-5. On Consolations see James Secord, Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age (Oxford, University Press, 2014).
- 10.
Humphry Davy, Consolations in Travel, 20.
- 11.
Coburn, ed., Inquiring Spirit, 340.
- 12.
David Knight, Voyaging in Strange Seas: the Great Scientific Revolution, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).
- 13.
Joseph Priestley, The History and Present State of Electricity, 3rd ed. (London: Bathurst & Lowndes, 1775), vol. 1, xv.
- 14.
Humphry Davy, Consolations in Travel, 219.
- 15.
William Lawrence, Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man (London: Benbow, 1822); Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
- 16.
William Babington, Alexander Marcet and William Allen, A Syllabus of a Course of Chemical Lectures read at Guy’s Hospital (London: Phillips, 1816).
- 17.
Joseph Cottle, Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey (London: Houlston and Stoneman, 1847), 269.
- 18.
Michael Hunter, Boyle: Between God and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
- 19.
Humphry Davy, Salmonia, 3rd ed. (London: Murray, 1832), 173-4.
- 20.
Samuel Parkes, The Chemical Catechism: with Notes, Illustrations, and Experiments, 4th ed. (London: Lackington Allen, 1810), ix; subsequent quotations are from 510, 463, 169, 407, 22.
- 21.
Thomas Kuhn, “The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research,” in Alistair Crombie ed., Scientific Change (London: Heinemann, 1963), 347−69.
- 22.
James F. W. Johnston, The Chemistry of Common Life (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1855), vol. 2, 448.
- 23.
Jon R. Topham, “Beyond the Common Context: the Production and Reading of the Bridgewater Treatises,” Isis 89 (1998), 233−62.
- 24.
Thomas Thomson, An Attempt to Establish the First Principles of Chemistry by Experiment (London: Baldwin, Craddock & Joy, 1825).
- 25.
William H. Brock, The Fontana History of Chemistry (London: Fontana, 1992), 160-2; Brock, From Protyle to Proton: William Prout and the Nature of Matter (Bristol: Adam Hilger, 1985).
- 26.
William Prout, Chemistry, Meteorology, and the Function of Digestion considered with reference to Natural Theology, 2nd ed. (London: Pickering, 1834), 7.
- 27.
Ibid., xiii; for chemistry’s basis in experience, 19.
- 28.
George Fownes, Chemistry, as Exemplifying the Wisdom and Beneficence of God (London: Churchill, 1844).
- 29.
Ibid., 184.
- 30.
George Wilson, Religio Chemici: Essays, ed. J. Wilson (London: Macmillan. 1862), 114, 121, 164.
- 31.
J. B. Cooke, Religion and Chemistry, or Proofs of God’s Plan in the Atmosphere and its Elements (New York: Scribner’s, 1864).
- 32.
Wilson, Religio Chemici, 26, 31, 43, 50.
- 33.
Samuel T. Coleridge, The Friend, [1818], ed. Barbara E. Rooke (London: Routledge, 1969), vol. 1, 471.
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Knight, D. (2017). Poetry, Chemistry, and Wisdom. In: Buchwald, J., Stewart, L. (eds) The Romance of Science: Essays in Honour of Trevor H. Levere. Archimedes, vol 52. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58436-2_5
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