Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction
- Part I Science and Society
- Part II Disciplines
- Part III Special Themes
- Part IV Non-Western Traditions
- Part V Ramifications and Impacts
- 32 Science and Religion
- 33 Science, Culture, and the Imagination: Enlightenment Configurations
- 34 Science, Philosophy, and the Mind
- 35 Global Pillage: Science, Commerce, and Empire
- 36 Technological and Industrial Change: A Comparative Essay
- Index
- References
33 - Science, Culture, and the Imagination: Enlightenment Configurations
from Part V - Ramifications and Impacts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
Edited by
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction
- Part I Science and Society
- Part II Disciplines
- Part III Special Themes
- Part IV Non-Western Traditions
- Part V Ramifications and Impacts
- 32 Science and Religion
- 33 Science, Culture, and the Imagination: Enlightenment Configurations
- 34 Science, Philosophy, and the Mind
- 35 Global Pillage: Science, Commerce, and Empire
- 36 Technological and Industrial Change: A Comparative Essay
- Index
- References
Summary
The Arts and Sciences brighten’d Europe’s face, Learning did no more noble blood debase, T’was honour’s genuine stamp, and dignify’d the race.
(John Mawer, The progress of language, an essay …, London, 1726)Hence the fine arts become like the mechanical; genius is fettered by precedents; and the waving line of fancy exchanged for a perpetual round of repetitions.
(William Rutherford, A View of Antient History; including the progress of literature and fine arts, London, 1788–91)A CENTURY OF CHANGE
Alexander Pope (1688–1744), reputedly the greatest English poet of his age and a man whose satiric lash spared no target and whose panegyric pen captured entire lives in a single couplet, exalted Isaac Newton this way in the widely read Epitaph Intended for Sir Isaac Newton In Westminster Abbey:
Nature, and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night.
God said, Let Newton be! and All was Light.
These lines were widely quoted, paraphrased, and translated into every European language within a few years of Newton’s death in 1727. Leibniz, Voltaire, and most of the philosophes knew them by memory, as did the French and the Italians. Goethe, that unparalleled Enlightenment man (enlightened in almost all the senses in which this label was used in the eighteenth century), imagined himself in Newton’s place, and Byron composed variations on the Pope couplet for poetic sport. One could fairly predict that the Newton whom Pope epitomized as a mortal man, his couplet art transformed into an immortal – a veritable god. The analogy was this: God–Newton, Newton–light.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of Science , pp. 762 - 799Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
References
, Visionary Physics: Blake’s Response to Newton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975)Google Scholar
, Essays on the Nature and Immutability of Truth in Opposition to Sophistry and Scepticism (Dublin, 1762).Google Scholar
(ed.), Writing the Museum: Diderot’s Bodies in the Salons (Lexington, KY: French Forum Pubs., 1984).Google Scholar
, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).Google Scholar
(ed.), Energy and Entropy: Science and Culture in Victorian Britain (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
, Enlightenment and Romanticism in Eighteenth-Century Prussia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974)Google Scholar
in The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).Google Scholar
and (eds.), Nature Transfigured: Science and Literature, 1700–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
, “self-within,” The Stranger Within (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979).Google Scholar
, Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996)Google Scholar
, “The Rise of Modern Science and the Genesis of Romanticism,” PMLA, 97 (1982).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Jules Verne Rediscovered: Didacticism and the Scientific Novel (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988).Google Scholar
, In Search of Frankenstein: Exploring the Myths Behind Mary Shelley’s Monster (London: Robson, 1996).Google Scholar
, A compendious system of antomy In six parts. Part I. Osteology. II. Of the muscles, etc. III. Of the abdomen. Part IV. Of the thorax. V of the brain and nerves. IV of the senses (London, 1790).Google Scholar
, The Edge of Objectivity: An Essay in the History of Scientific Ideas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960).Google Scholar
, “The Analogistic Tradition from Anaximander to Bonnet,” On togeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977)Google Scholar
, “Towards a Profile of the Word Conscious in Eighteenth-Century Literature,” in (ed.), Literature and Psychology in the Eighteenth Century (New York: AMS, 1987).Google Scholar
, “La femme au foyer, vue par Clara Reeve,” Bulletin de la societé d’Études Anglo Americaines de XVIIe et XVIIIe Siécles, 20 (1985).Google Scholar
, Lexicon Technicum: An universal English dictionary of arts and sciences, 2 vols. (London, 1736), entry on “science.”Google Scholar
, The Autobiography and Memoirs of Benjamin Robert Haydon (London: Humphrey Milford, 1927).Google Scholar
, From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).Google Scholar
, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Study of Early Modern Physics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).Google Scholar
, Literal Imagination: Blake’s Vision of Words (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).Google Scholar
, “The Image of the Scientist in Science Fiction,” American Journal of Sociology, 63 (1958)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, Vol. 1, 1500–1800 (London: Harper Collins, 1995).Google Scholar
, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans in Early Modern Europe (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981)Google Scholar
(ed.), The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992).Google Scholar
, “‘The Mark of Truth’: Looking and Learning in Some Anatomical Illustrations from the Renaissance and Eighteenth Century,” in and (eds.), Medicine and the Five Senses (Cambridge University Press, 1993).Google Scholar
, “Glory or Gravity: Hutchinson vs Newton,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 22 (1961)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “The Old and the New Schoolmaster 1821,” in (ed.), Lamb as Critic (London: Routledge, 1980).Google Scholar
and , The Renaissance Man in the Eighteenth Century (Los Angeles: Papers of the Williams Andrew Clark Memorial Library, 1978)Google Scholar
, The Ordering of the Arts in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970).Google Scholar
, Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660–1740 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994)Google Scholar
, Murdering to Dissect: Grave-Robbing, Frankenstein, and the Anatomy Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995)Google Scholar
, Beyond Anthropology: Society and the Other (New York:Columbia University Press, 1989)Google Scholar
, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987)Google Scholar
, “The Origins of Interdisciplinary Studies,” Eighteenth Century Studies, 28 (1994).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “A Criticism of Their Own: Romantic Women Literary Critics,” in (ed.), Questioning Romanticism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)Google Scholar
, Pepys’ Diary and the New Science (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1965).Google Scholar
, In and Out of Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth-Century England,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 2 (1991).Google ScholarPubMed
, “Organicism and the Birth of Energy,” in (ed.), Approaches to Organic Form: Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science (Boston: Reidel, 1987)Google Scholar
, The Cyclopaedia; or, Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature, 45 vols. (1819–20)Google Scholar
, The Progress of Romance, through times, countries, and manners; with remarks on the good and bad effects of it, on them respectively; in the course of evening conversations (Colchester, 1785)Google Scholar
, “Discourses of the Nerve,” in (ed.), Literature and Science as Modes of Expression (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989).Google Scholar
, “Cultural History in a New Key: Towards a Semiotics of the Nerve,” in and (eds.), Cultural History (London: Macmillan, 1991).Google Scholar
, “Mandeville and Europe: Medicine and Philosophy,” in Mandeville Studies (London: Oxford University Press, 1975).Google Scholar
, “‘To Thee, whose Temple is all Space’: Varieties of Space in The Dunciad,” Modern Language Studies, 9 (1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, , and (eds.), The Relations of Literature and Science: An Annotated Bibliography of Scholarship, 1880–1980 (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1987).Google Scholar
, Nature’s Body: Sexual Politics and the Making of Modern Science (London: Pandora, 1994)Google Scholar
, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977)Google Scholar
, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760 to 1860 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996)Google Scholar
, The Discovery of the Mind: The Origins of European Thought (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953)Google Scholar
, Encylopaedia Britannica, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1771)
, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990)Google Scholar
in Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).Google Scholar
, Reflexivity in Tristram Shandy: An Essay in Phenomenological Criticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977).Google Scholar
, The Behmenists and the Philadelphians: A Contribution to the Study of English Mysticism in the 17th and 18th Centuries (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1948).Google Scholar
, Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America (London: Secker and Warburg, 1988).Google Scholar
, Walking, Literature, and English Culture: The Origins and Uses of Peripatetic in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), chap. 1 for the eighteenth century.Google Scholar
- 2
- Cited by