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The Rise of Modern Science and the Genesis of Romanticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Hans Eichner
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Abstract

The replacement of the mechanical philosophy by an organic view of the cosmos is one of the most significant features of Romanticism. My article explains why the Romantics felt compelled to attack the mechanical philosophy and confirms Peckham's findings that the new organicism accounts for a large part of Romantic theory. This theory led to substantial progress in our understanding of the humanities. The Romantic world view is, however, no less flawed than the view it temporarily superseded: it is incompatible with the foundations of modern science.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 97 , Issue 1 , January 1982 , pp. 8 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1982

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References

Note 1 Wellek, in Comparative Literature, 1 (1949), 1–23, 147–72; rpt. in Wellek, Concepts of Criticism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 128–98.

Note 2 Peckham, “Toward a Theory of Romanticism,” PMLA, 66 (1951), 5–23. The present paper is largely an elaboration of Peckham's theory. In fact, if Peckham had written at greater length in 1951, and if he had not subsequently changed his mind, this paper would probably be unnecessary.

Note 3 References to Lovejoy's book are to the third edition (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1966); references to Foucault's are to the English translation, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage-Random, 1973).

Note 4 In Lovejoy, this omission is justified, since it follows directly from his concern with the history of a single idea, that is, the great chain of being. Foucault devotes a whole chapter to biology but takes no account of those fields in which modern science achieved its decisive breakthrough. “The interest shown by the Classical age in science,” he maintains, “the publicity accorded to its controversies, its extremely exoteric character, its opening up to the uninitiated, Fontenelle's popularization of astronomy, Voltaire reading Newton, all this is doubtless nothing more than a sociological phenomenon. It did not provoke the slightest alteration in the history of thought, or modify the development of knowledge one jot” (p. 89).

Note 5 For my assessment of Galileo, see, for example, Charles C. Gillispie, The Edge of Objectivity: An Essay in the History of Scientific Ideas (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1960), p. 8: “[Galileo,] whose claim is higher than any other's to the honor of having founded modern science….” The recent controversies about his precise achievement do not, as far as I can see, seriously affect this judgment; in fact, now that Stillman Drake has produced documentary evidence that Galileo really did perform the experiments he claims to have performed (Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978]), Galileo's traditional status as “the greatest of the founders of modern science” (Bertrand Russell) seems more secure than ever.

Note 6 Paul-Henri d'Holbach, The System of Nature, trans. H. D. Robinson (1868; photomechanical rpt. New York: Franklin, 1970), pp. 18–19. In the rest of this paper, so as not to obscure the main issues, I ignore the residual vitalism evident in many seventeenth-and eighteenth-century mainstream scientists.

Note 7 Grew, The Anatomy of Plants (London, 1682), p. 80; quoted from A. R. Hall, The Scientific Revolution, 1500–1800 (London: Longmans, Green, 1954), p. 289.

Note 8 An interesting case in point is J. S. Haldane, who owes his fame less to the substantial contributions he made to science than to his popular lectures against materialism, which he attempted to refute by arguing that mechanistic or physicochemical hypotheses could not account for such phenomena as reproduction, self-healing, and the adjustment of living organisms to their environments. These arguments seemed plausible in the 1920s because modern genetics was still in its infancy, cybernetics had not yet developed such concepts as negative feedback, and computer technology was not even dreamed of. (For a collection of the lectures, see J. S. Haldane, Materialism [London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1932].)

Note 9 Needless to say, this statement implies no disrespect. The skill and ingenuity that go into, for example, the synthesis of a complicated organic molecule are equal to those displayed in any other field.

Note 10 Boyle, “The Excellence and Grounds of the Mechanical Philosophy,” in Boyle, Philosophical Works (London, 1725), i, 187; quoted from Hall, p. 212.

Note 11 Leibniz, Monadology; quoted from Colin Brown, Philosophy and the Christian Faith (London: Inter-Varsity Press, 1969), p. 57.

Note 12 Thus Joseph Clarke, writing in 1734, held it certain “that God cannot hereafter create any new Species of Beings; because, whatever it is good for him to create in time, it was equally good from all Eternity” (Lovejoy, p. 242). Similarly, the existing beings can move neither up nor down in the great chain of being, since any such change would push another being from its proper place and leave a gap. The argument ultimately derives from Plato. Evidence for its ubiquity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is scattered throughout Lovejoy's monograph, but see esp. pp. 242–44.

William King, in his influential treatise De Origine Mali (1702), argues that the evil in the world is “not only consistent with infinite wisdom, goodness and power, but necessarily resulting from them” (Lovejoy, p. 213). Eighteenth-century optimism thus consisted, as Lovejoy (pp. 208–26) has shown, primarily in recognizing that the world is as it must be. Most seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rationalists were, however, inconsistent enough to combine their dour metaphysical deductions with much more cheerful religious and commonsense beliefs. Leibniz, for example, asserts both that the universe is unchanging and that monads can progressively develop to higher states of consciousness, though only the first of these assertions is compatible with his metaphysics. Perhaps Leibniz, like Descartes, simply wanted to avoid martyrdom and thus made conscious concessions to orthodox beliefs in his published writings; but it is just as likely that he occasionally made unconscious concessions to commonsense convictions and established habits of mind. Rare, indeed, are the thinkers for whom a metaphysical deduction is as real as the bacon and eggs they have for breakfast.

Note 13 “Where now, as our wise men say, only a soulless ball of fire revolves, then [in antiquity] Helios drove his golden chariot in quiet majesty. These heights oreads crowded, with every tree a dryad died, and the rivers' silver foam sprang from the urns of lovely naiads…. Unaware of the joys it gives, never delighted by its own perfection, never conscious of the arm that guides it, never enriched by my gratitude, insensitive even to its maker's honor, nature, bereft of its gods, [now] slavishly serves the law of gravity like a lifeless pendulum clock. Nature digs its own grave today to be reborn tomorrow, and on a weightless distaff the moons eternally spin up and down of their own accord. Useless to a world that has outgrown its leading-strings and now hovers aloft unaided, the gods, rendered idle, have returned to the world of poetry.” Friedrich Schiller, “Die Götter Griechenlands” (version of March 1788), Sämmtliche Werke, Horen ed. (Munich: Georg Müller Verlag, [1910]), v, 3–10. (All translations from German and French are my own, except where otherwise noted.) There is, of course, a vast difference between Newton's beliefs and the implications of “Newtonian science” as interpreted by Continental thinkers sixty or seventy years after Newton's death.

Note 14 See H. Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1965), p. 62.

Note 15 Descartes, Principia Philosophiae (1644); quoted from Descartes, A Discourse on Method, trans. John Veitch (London: Dutton, n.d.), pp. 166, 179, 180.

Note 16 For this paragraph and the next, compare Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1946), pp. 583–84. Russell's and my remarks concerning the identification of the constants in the collision of elastic bodies oversimplify what was actually quite a slow process of clarification, but a detailed account of the vis viva controversy would be irrelevant both to Russell's argument and to mine.

Note 17 Christian Wolff, who decisively influenced German eighteenth-century thought, accepted Descartes's conviction of the mechanical determination of bodily movements in its entirety, stating “that all bodily movements would be the same as they are now even if there were no soul, since the soul does not contribute to them by its power; we would, however, not be conscious of what happens in our bodies.” Aware of the problem he had thus created for himself, he sacrificed logical consistency to the requirements of his ethics, decked out his Cartesian assumptions with bits and pieces of Leibniz' monadology, and blithely declared that the mechanistic determination of the body “does not restrict the freedom of the soul.” See Hans M. Wolff, Die Weltanschauung der deutschen Aufklärung, 2nd ed. (Bern: Francke, 1963), p. 108.

Note 18 Julien La Mettrie, L'Homme machine, ed. and introd. Aram Vartanian (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1960), pp. 154, 186; see also Introd., p. 20.

Note 19 The great exception is Spinoza, who denied both free will and a personal god, but the problem of evil drove even this fearless and honest thinker to what seems to me a purely verbal solution. It is difficult to see, for example, that the genocide practiced by the Nazis is not really evil sub specie aeternitatis but only an appearance of evil due to our limited understanding.

Note 20 For an account of the objections of Kant's contemporaries, see Nicolai Hartmann, Die Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus, 3rd ed. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974), Ch. i (esp. pp. 15–26); for a succinct modern restatement of these objections, see Russell, pp. 734—35, 741–44.

Note 21 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Gesamtausgabe der Baye-rischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1961- ), Pt. I, Vol. iv, p. 206. For his comment to F. Schlegel, see Briefe von und an Fried-rich und Dorothea Schlegel, ed. Josef Korner (Berlin: Kindle, 1926), p. 9.

Note 22 “[Fichte] nur [Kritiker], (noch) nicht Hist-[orischer] [Systematiker],” Kritische Friedrich-Schegel-Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler with the assistance of Jean-Jacques Anstett and Hans Eichner (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1958- ), xviii, 33, No. 148. For the date of this entry see Ernst Behler's commentary in xix, 386, No. 126. Henceforth volume and page numbers cited for F. Schlegel in the text and notes refer to this edi-tion.

Note 23 Novalis, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Carl Seelig (Zurich: Buhl, 1945–46), iv, 213, No. 2642.

Note 24 F. W. J. Schelling, Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen; quoted from Armand Nivelle, Frühromantische Dichtungstheohe (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1970), p. 35. Schegel, xviii, 421, No. 1222.

Note 23 “Wo ist eine Sonne, wo ist ein Atom, die nicht Teil wäre, der [sic] nicht gehörte zu diesem Organischen All, lebend in keiner Zeit, jede Zeit fassend in sichl—Wo bleibt denn der Unterschied zwischen den Teilen des Tieres, der Pflanze, dem Metall und dem Steine?—Sind nicht sämtlich Teile des großen All-Tiers, der Natur?” ‘Where is a sun, where is an atom that is not part of, that does not belong to this organic universe, living in no time, encompassing all time in itself?—Where, then, remains the difference between the parts of the animal, the plant, the metal, and the stone?—Are they not all parts of the great universal animal, Nature?‘ (Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Beweis, daß ein bestdndiger Galvanismus den Lebensprozeß in dem Thierreich begleite [Weimar, 1798], p. 171.) The passage is quoted from the excellent monograph by W. D. Wetzels, J. W. Ritter: Physik im Wirkungsfeld der Romantik (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1973), p. 23.

Note 26 By calling motion “dynamic,” Schlegel means the exact opposite of what modern science teaches under the heading of “dynamics,” that is, that the motion originates with the moving object itself.

Note 27 See, e.g., Friedrich Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1936), and Ernst Cassirer, Die Philosophie der Aufklärung (Tübingen: Mohr, 1932).

Note 28 There is, of course, no confusion in this respect with Fichte. In his system, every person who is capable of intellectual intuition understands that the ego is free and active; the unconscious productive imagination creates the nonego. The importance the early Romantics attached to intellectual intuition and the imagination is undoubtedly connected with the key roles these qualities play in the Wissenschaftslehre. But Fichte himself was a rationalist, and Romantic irrationalism, in spite of its dependence on Fichte's concepts, resulted from organicism. Nicolai Hartmann shows the connection for F. Schlegel (pp. 172–73); for Schelling, see Georg Lukács, Die Zerstörung der Vernunft (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1973), i, 114–38.

Note 29 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Vber die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (Stuttgart: Reclams Universal-Bibliothek, 1969) 86. Jean Paul, Vorschule der Asthetik, in Sdmtliche Werke, Historisch-kritische Ausgabe der PreuBischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Weimar: Böhlau, 1927–64), Pt. i, Vol. xi, p. 37. Schlegel, xii, 421; xviii, 329, No. 57; see also ii, 257, No. 8. Wordsworth, The Prelude xiv.190–91. Berlin, Pref., in H. G. Schenk, The Mind of the European Romantics: An Essay in Cultural History (London: Constable, 1966). Keats, Letters, ed. M. B. Forman, 3rd ed. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1947), p. 67.

Note 30 Of course, beauty and the imagination manifest themselves equally in the other arts, and the Romantic contribution to art and art history, music and musicology cannot be overlooked. If I limit myself to poetry, I do so partly for reasons of space. But since Romanticism arose largely in response to philosophical problems, its earliest practitioners (with the notable exception of Wackenroder) were inevitably preoccupied with verbal art. That the man now widely regarded as the most seminal mind of European Romanticism, Friedrich Schlegel, was primarily a literary critic and theorist hardly seems coincidental. The German Romantics, we must also remember, used the word “poetry” (Poesie) in at least two different senses, that of belles lettres (Schlegel's “Poesie der Worte,” ii, 285) and that of the creative human spirit that manifests itself in all the arts. Occasionally, the Romantics identified “poetry,” in this second sense, with Fichte's unconscious productive imagination; hence Schlegel's reference to the “bewußtlose Poesie” ‘unconscious poetry’ that pervades all nature (ii, 285) and his notorious identification of the “poetic ideal” with God (Literary Notebooks, ed. Hans Eichner [London: Athlone, 1957], p. 87, No. 735; this edition is hereafter cited as LN).

Note 31 René P. Le Bossu, Traité du poéme épique (Paris: Michel le Petit, 1675), p. 1.

Note 32 Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique (Paris: Gamier, 1935), ii, 161. Winckelmann's statement, “Es gibt nur Ein Schones, wie es nur Ein Gutes gibt,” is quoted from Carl Justi, Winckelmann und seine Zeitgenossen, 3rd ed. (Leipzig, 1932), iii, 203, and Fichte's, “So wie es nur Eine Vernunft giebt, giebt es auch nur Eine wahre Poesie,” is from a letter to F. Schlegel (16 Aug. 1800, Briefe von und an F. und D. Schlegel, p. 31). While the neat parallelism of these three assertions does, I believe, illustrate a common attitude toward humanity and the world—an attitude that is the direct opposite of Romantic individualism—they are of course logically independent of one another, and Voltaire's conviction that there is only one morality did not prevent his being a relativist in aesthetics.

Note 33 Winckelmann comes remarkably close to drawing this absurd conclusion: in discussing an antique statue of Niobe and her daughters, he claims that the faces of the girls resemble one another because they all approximate the one and only ideal of beauty (Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, ed. Wilhelm Senff [Weimar: Bohlau, 1964], pp. 192–93). Goethe was so greatly taken with the single ideal of beauty in his classicistic period that he was pleased when readers could not distinguish between his and Schiller's anonymous publications in Die Horen. That his and Schiller's works had begun to resemble each other seemed evidence to him that they were both on the (one and only) right road. (See Goethe's letter to Schiller, 26 Dec. 1795, Goethe-Schiller Briefwechsel [Frankfurt: Fisher, 1961], p. 91.)

Note 34 Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, L'Art poétique, quoted from Sir William Soame's translation in The Art of Poetry: The Poetical Treatises of Horace, Vida and Boileau, ed. Albert S. Cook (Boston: G. E. Stechert, 1892), pp. 160, 161, 167.

Note 35 The closely related view, however, that poetry can have an important function only in relatively primitive societies and must decline in more advanced civilizations was quite widespread. Its most famous proponents were Vico, Herder, and, in the nineteenth century, Hegel. Thomas Love Peacock's version of it provoked Shelley's Defence of Poetry.

Note 30 This deficiency in pre-Romantic critical literature explains why I concentrate to such an extent on early German Romanticism. Most of the characteristic ideas and preoccupations of European Romanticism can be traced back for decades, if not for centuries. Thus the view that the divine and the infinite can only be expressed symbolically already appears in Origenes and Clement of Alexandria, and it was never entirely lost sight of (at least not among theologians); Goethe and his friends made the earliest lucid and comprehensive statements of the symbolic nature of art, formulating them as part of a classicistic aesthetics. The Romantic concern with irrational sources of knowledge revived Plato's doctrine of enthusiasm, to which at least lip service had been paid for more than two thousand years and which was defended at length and in full seriousness, long before the Romantics, by Shaftesbury. Young pleaded brilliantly for “originality,” and Herder's historicism was as sweeping, in some of its conclusions, as Schlegel's. The overriding lesson to be learned from studying pre-Romanticism is that none of the ideas that characterize Romanticism succeeded on its own in seriously challenging the main thrust of European thought. They did so only when they came together under the leading concept of organicism and thus coalesced into a coherent whole. This happened in Germany, and hence any account of the genesis (as distinct from the poetic achievement) of European Romanticism must focus on that country.

Note 37 In this document, the argument that leads up to the apotheosis of poetry is derived from the position among the faculties of the mind that Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft assigns to judgment, but this link with Kant was soon dissolved. The supremacy of the imagination, and hence that of poetry, was assumed to follow directly from the organicist assumption and spread rapidly even among poets whose knowledge of German philosophy was slight. For a discussion of the authorship of the “Systemprogramm,” see Otto Pöggeler, “Hegel, der Verfasser des altesten Systemprogramms des deutschen Idealismus,” Hegel-Tage Urhino 1965 (Hegel-Studien, Supp. 4 [Bonn: H. Bouvier, 1969]), pp. 17–32, and Pöggeler, “Hölderlin, Hegel und das älteste Systemprogramm,” Hegel-Tage Villigst 1969 (Hegel-Studien, Supp. 9 [Bonn: H. Bouvier, 1973]), pp. 211–59; for a critical edition of this document, see pp. 263–65.

Note 38 Novalis, Schriften, ed. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel (Darmstadt: Kohlhammer, 1965) ii, 591, No. 280; Wordsworth, Preface, Lyrical Ballads, 2nd ed.; Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. H. B. Forman (London: Reeves and Turner, 1880), vii, 136.

Note 39 In fact, somebody else did. The law was formulated in 1662 by Richard Townley, on the basis of Boyle's measurements, but it apparently did not become widely known, so that Edme Mariotte had to discover it all over again in 1679.

Note 40 Tieck, Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, ed. Alfred Anger (Stuttgart: Reclams Universal-Bibliothek, 1966), p. 342.

Note 41 Friedrich Schlegels Briefe an seinen Bruder August Wilhelm, ed. O. Walzel (Berlin: Speyer and Peters, 1890), p. 70.

Note 42 See, e.g., Goethe's attack on Manier in “Einfache Nachahmung der Natur, Manier, Stil” (1789), in Werke, Weimarer Ausgabe, Pt. I, Vol. XLVII, pp. 77–83.

Note 43 “When we make an experiment,” Werner Heisenberg states, “we have to assume a causal chain of events that leads from the atomic event through the apparatus finally to the eye of the observer; if this causal chain was not assumed, nothing could be known about the atomic event” (Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 2nd ed. [London: Allen and Unwin, 1963], p. 82). Karl R. Popper, who would prefer not to assume the principle of causality, which he regards as metaphysical and therefore undesirable, substitutes for it a “methodological rule” that “corresponds so closely to the ‘principle of causality’ that the latter might be regarded as its metaphysical version. It is the simple rule that we are not to abandon the search for universal laws and for a coherent theoretical system, nor ever give up our attempts to explain causally any kind of event we can describe” (Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, rev. ed. [London: Hutchinson, 1972], p. 61). The difference between Popper's view of causality and that prevailing in classical (Newtonian) physics is of great interest, but it has no bearing on the arguments of the present paper.

Note 44 Heisenberg, p. 162. I am of course deliberately quoting the discoverer of the uncertainty principle rather than any of the dozens of historians of science I might have quoted instead. Quantum physics has not done away with causation. While the uncertainty principle states that there is a limit to the accuracy with which the velocity and the position of a particle can be measured simultaneously, so that the future of an individual particle cannot be predicted, quantum mechanics can make statistical predictions; and it thus assumes causation (though, in the parlance of quantum theorists, only the “weaker type” of causation, where the concept of probability may be used to define the state of the system). Where causation is not assumed, no predictions can be made, and there is no science.

Note 45 “Der Unterzeichnete erbietet sich zu einem fortgesetzten mündlichen Vortrage der Wissenschaftslehre, d.h. der vollständigen Lösung des Rätsels der Welt und des Bewußtseins mit mathematischer Evidenz” (Berliner Zeitung, 1804; quoted from Bernhard Casper, “Der historische Besen …,” in Romantik in Deutschland: Ein Interdisziplinäres Symposium, ed. Richard Brinckmann [Stuttgart: Metzler, 1978], p. 493).

Note 46 See, e.g., “Einleitung zu dem Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie,” Schellings sämmtliche Werke (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856–61; hereafter cited as Werke), Pt. I, III, 275–77, and “Einige allgemeine Betrachtungen,” Werke, Pt. I, Iv, 527–33. See also the excellent summary in Robert C. Stauffer, “Speculation and Experiment in the Background of Oersted's Discovery of Electromagnetism,” Isis, 48 (1957), 33–70.

Note 47 See, e.g., “System des transzendentalen Idealismus,” Werke, Pt. i, iii, 475–77.

Note 48 See Hegel, Dissertatio Philosophica de Orbitis Planetarum (1801; rpt. in G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, ed. Verein von Freunden des Verewigten [Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1832–44], xvi, 1–29); Schelling, “Fernere Darstellungen aus dem System der Philosophie,” Werke, Pt. i, iv, 432, and Schelling's 1803 addition (Zusatz) to the introduction to his “Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur,” Werke, Pt. I, II, 70.

Note 49 See Stillman Drake, “Ptolemy, Galileo and Scientific Method,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 9 (1978), 99–115. Kepler still held that the hypothesis had to be validated not only by prediction or retrodiction but by its being, in one way or another, metaphysically significant. Thus he asssociated the center of planetary motions with God the Father, the encircling spheres with the Son, and the relations between them with the Holy Ghost. Galileo—and most scientists after him—dropped the requirement for an explanation of this kind, and the Romantics revived it. For Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, there were no contingent facts in science, and the Romantics quite generally looked for a “human” or cosmological significance in whatever facts they had to deal with. For them, just as for Plato and Aristotle, a scientific “explanation” was the identification of a purpose or a final cause that revealed a divine intelligence at work. Both Novalis and Schlegel kept notebooks on “Physik und Moral,” and although these notebooks are lost, we can gain an impression of what they might have contained from other notes that have been preserved. Thus Schlegel suggested that the inner planets must be “more religious,” the outer planets “very romantic,” and the comets “probably completely irreligious, merely poetic and philosophic” (xviii, 154, Nos. 372 and 375), and Novalis wrote to Schlegel in July 1798: “In meiner Philosophie des täglichen Lebens bin ich auf die Idee einer moralischen … Astronomie gekommen und habe die interessante Entdeckung der Religion des sichtbaren Weltalls gemacht…. Was denkst Du, ob das nicht der rechte Weg ist, die Physik im all-gemeinsten Sinn, schlechterdings Symbolisch zu be-handeln? Auf diesem Wege denke ich tiefer als je, einzudringen und aller Campanen und Oefen entubrigt zu seyn” ‘In my philosophy of everyday life I had the idea of a moral … astronomy and made the interesting discovery of the religion of the visible universe…. Don't you think this might be the right way of treating physics, in the widest sense of this word, absolutely symbolically! In this way I hope to penetrate more deeply than ever and be rid of all retorts and furnaces’ (Schriften, iv, 255).

Note 50 These two statements are quoted by Popper, p. 40. The first is from F. Waisman, in Erkenntnis, 1 (1930), 229; and the second is from M. Schlick, in Naturwis-senschaften, 19 (1931), 150.

Note 31 Although Popper seems to me more important than Toulmin, Kuhn, and Feyerabend, his profound belief in the rationality of science makes it unnecessary to discuss him in the present connection.

Note 32 See Frederick Suppe's account of Toulmin's early views in Suppe, ed., The Structure of Scientific Theories, 2nd ed. (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1977), pp. 127–35. My debt to this excellent book is greater than my few references to it suggest.

Note 33 Paul Feyerabend, “Against Method : Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge,” Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 4 (1960), 17–130; quoted from the paperback rpt. (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1975), pp. 47, 52.

Note 34 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 146.

Note 33 His final answer to the question, What gives scientific ideas merit, and how do they score over their rivals? is that they must be “(in Copernicus' words) ‘consistent with the numerical records’ ” and “acceptable—for the time being, at any rate—as ‘absolute’ and ‘pleasing to the mind.‘ ” (Stephen E. Toulmin, Foresight and Understanding: An Enquiry into the Aims of Science [New York: Harper, 1963], pp. Ill, 115.) Toulmin's more recent writings are beyond the scope of this paper.

Note 56 See, e.g., Suppe, pp. 135–51, 643–49; D. Shapere, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” Philosophical Revue, 73 (1964), 383–94; Larry Laudan, Progress and Its Problems: Toward a Theory of Scientific Growth (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1977), pp. 73–76.

Note 57 See, e.g., Die Begriindung der Elektrochemie und Entdeckung der ultravioletten Strahlungen von Johann Wilhelm Ritter: Eine Auswahl aus den Schriften des romantischen Physikers, ed. A. Hermann (Frankfurt/ Main: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1968; Ostwalds Klassiker der exakten Naturwissenschaften, NS, No. 2), and H. Schipperges' postscript to the photomechanical rpt. of Ritter's Fragmente aus dem Nachlap eines jungen Physikers (Heidelberg: L. Schneider, 1969).

Note 58 See R. C. Stauffer, “Speculation and Experiment in the Background of Oersted's Discovery of Electro-magnetism,” Isis, 48 (1957), 33–50.

Note 59 Trevor Levere comes to this conclusion in “Coleridge, Chemistry, and the Philosophy of Nature,” Studies in Romanticism, 16 (1977), 349–79.

Note 60 The twentieth-century philosophers who do concern themselves with this problem have approached it in a way entirely different from that of either the Cartesians or the idealists—by conceptual analysis. See, e.g., Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1949). I doubt, however, that the problem can be “explained away” in this manner.

Note 61 See Heinrich Henel, “Erlebnisdichtung und Sym-bolismus,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fur Literatur-wissenschaft und Geistesgesschichte, 32 (1958), 71–98, where a similar conclusion is reached by a different road.