Probing the Origins of British Romantic Science

Richard Holmes produces in this engaging book a vivid description of the Wild West nature of scientific knowledge at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, a period usefully described by Holmes as a time of " romantic science. " While romanticism is familiar to students of literature and art history, it is less well established as a helpful way of periodizing the history of science. Holmes demonstrates the virtue of the label, and he usefully argues for a history of science that views scientists as creative thinkers immersed in a cultural and historical context. As romanticism produced a type of counter-Enlightenment way of thinking—steeped in emotion, intuition, feeling, sympathy , affinity—a new type of scientific imagination was liberated and given form. Holmes's book provides a lively account of the ways these new habits of mind and the gentlemanly spirit of science, especially in its nonprofessional guise, produced a social and cultural space that was remarkably innovative , productive, and creative. " Romantic science, " once stripped of aspects of its instrumentality, could aspire to something more profound. Would Thomas Kuhn call this a period of " revolutionary science? " Maybe. But what I think is more interesting is the way that Holmes subtly argues that romanticism provided a type of mental template, almost a form of what Ludwik Fleck called a " thought style, " that proved to be remarkably creative and egalitarian, elastic and utilitarian. The book is organized around a series of central figures whose intellectual accomplishments and joie de vivre are palpable. The text opens with Holmes's account of Joseph Banks—later the president of the Royal Society—and his biological and anthropological studies of Tahiti while in the company of Captain James Cook during Cook's expedition of 1768–1771. This moment of cross-cultural exchange between the British explorers and the residents of Otaheite is rendered delightful in Holmes's account, and the darker hints that Holmes provides—a gesture toward the sad story of European imperialism and the reduction of non-Europeans 340