Coleridge on dreaming: romanticism, dreams, and the medical imagination

deconstruction demonstrate his fundamental law or affect Maxwell's account of electromagnetic induction? These are small potatoes, however, when you consider that "electrical experiments could mold politics as much as politics did electricity." Do not think that the meaning of this equality is that neither affected the other. No sirree. "Replacing the Newtonian philosophy with the electrical theory of the universe meant replacing the whole social, political, and religious order that underpinned earlynineteenth-century life." A final grotesque. "By the 1830s the dominant ethos had shifted away from Enlightenment ideals [progress via association and co-operation]. Scientific discovery and progress were now held to emerge from the workings of isolated genius rather than from dubious cabals such as the Lunar Society with which Priestley had been associated." Let us leave aside whether the Royal Society, the Academie des sciences in Paris, the universities of Europe; and the republic of letters in the later eighteenth century were or are aptly characterized as dubious cabals. Was England in the 1830s distinguished for practising the cult of the isolated scientific genius? No. Then and there the greatest of all clubs for scientific men, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, was founded and waxed exceedingly. This peculiar clubbiness was so conspicuous that Dickens made it a subject of satire. Morus' extravagances deserve a place in the Proceedings of the Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything and the Transactions of the Pickwick Club, as an addendum to its president's theory of tittlebats.