Both science and art, he argues, are linked by a feeling of wonder. In the Age of Wonder, he puts forward a Romantic science, to go alongside literary Romanticism. In others of his books that I have read on this blog, Holmes has dealt with the heroes and heroines of British Romanticism – the likes of Keats, Shelley, and Byron. It is hard for us now to appreciate just how revolutionary Coleridge and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads were when it was first published in 1798. It also, in poetry, in particular, brought attention to the importance of personal, subjective experience in a way that had never really been the case before. Romanticism, against that backdrop, emphasized a rather more complex view of human nature and the world, one full of the interplay between light and dark, reason and unreason, and chaos and order, where nothing was ever quite completed and put away neatly. In literary and philosophical matters, we saw the rise of Romanticism, a counterforce to the stodgy orderliness of the Enlightenment with its emphasis on reason and humanity’s perfectibility. Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder takes us into the period between about 17, a time of rapid change in the sciences – and indeed everywhere else.
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