Quotation and the Rhetoric of Experiment

Tate, Gregory

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-31441-5_3

Gregory Tate⁵

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine ((PLSM))

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Abstract

This chapter considers how science writers and lecturers deployed poetic quotations to support and supplement their appeals to the intellectual authority of experiment. According to them, poetry and scientific experiment were similarly characterised by a negotiation between the passive observation and the active interrogation of nature’s material things. The chapter posits that these writers used the eloquence and respectability of poetry to defend the legitimacy of an experimental method that depended both on material evidence and on the mind’s inductive (and arguably speculative) elaboration of theoretical models of nature. The chapter examines the role of poetic quotation in the scientific naturalism of John Tyndall, in the natural theological arguments of Margaret Bryan and Robert Hunt, and in the metascientific writings of John Herschel and William Whewell.

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Notes

1.
John Tyndall, Address Delivered Before the British Association Assembled at Belfast (London: Longmans, Green, 1874), 64–65, quoting William Wordsworth, “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” ll. 89–103.
2.
Bernard Lightman, “Scientists as Materialists in the Periodical Press: Tyndall’s Belfast Address,” in Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, ed. Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 200.
3.
Ruth Barton, “John Tyndall, Pantheist: A Rereading of the Belfast Address,” Osiris 3 (1987): 113 and 116.
4.
Tyndall, Address, 55.
5.
Tyndall, “Inaugural Address of Professor John Tyndall,” Nature 10 (1874): 319.
6.
Tyndall, Address Delivered Before the British Association Assembled at Belfast, “seventh thousand” (London: Longmans, Green, 1874), xiv.
7.
Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983), 3rd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 142.
8.
Richard C. Sha, “John Keats and Some Versions of Materiality,” Romanticism 20 (2014): 238.
9.
Peter Dear, “Romanticism and Victorian Scientific Naturalism,” European Romantic Review 26 (2015): 338.
10.
Benjamin Morgan, The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 17–18.
11.
For considerations of the use of poetic quotation in writings about specific disciplines, see Adelene Buckland, Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 95–130; Ralph O’Connor, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 117–61; and Gillian Daw, “‘Dark with Excessive Light’: Milton’s Paradise Lost and the Nineteenth-Century Astronomical Imagination,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 37 (2015): 107–26.
12.
Beer, “Parable, Professionalization, and Literary Allusion in Victorian Scientific Writing,” in Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 215.
13.
Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 2.
14.
Kate Rumbold, Shakespeare and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Cultures of Quotation from Samuel Richardson to Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
15.
Dahlia Porter, Science, Form, and the Problem of Induction in British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 51–61.
16.
Casie LeGette, “Cutting Lyric Down to Size: Victorian Anthologies and the Excerpt as Poem,” Genre 50 (2017): 401.
17.
Gregory Machacek, “Allusion,” PMLA 122 (2007): 533–34.
18.
Ibid., 526–27.
19.
For a survey of the wide range of scientific, philosophical, and religious views which these lines were used to promote in the nineteenth century, see Robert M. Ryan, Charles Darwin and the Church of Wordsworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 94–99.
20.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, ed. John Beer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 404, quoting Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” ll. 96–103 (omitting l. 101).
21.
Ewan Jones, Coleridge and the Philosophy of Poetic Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 6.
22.
Coleridge, Aids, 394.
23.
Coleridge, “Treatise on Method,” in Shorter Works and Fragments, ed. H. J. Jackson and J. R. Jackson, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 1:677.
24.
Ibid., 1:640–41.
25.
Ibid., 1:680–81.
26.
Jon Klancher, Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences: Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 169.
27.
Coleridge, The Friend (1818), ed. Barbara E. Rooke, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 1:498.
28.
Ibid., 1:489.
29.
Michael Raiger, “Coleridge’s Theory of Symbol and the Distinction between Reason and Understanding: A Genealogical Recovery of the Baconian Method of Science,” History of European Ideas 36 (2010): 315.
30.
Coleridge, Friend, 1:509–10, quoting Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” ll. 77–84 and 132–70 (ll. 144–45).
31.
James Vigus, Platonic Coleridge (London: Legenda, 2009), 6.
32.
Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 2:126.
33.
Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, in Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 741.
34.
Coleridge, Biographia, 2:16–17.
35.
Ibid., 2:17, quoting John Davies, Nosce Teipsum, ll. 537–48.
36.
Davies , Nosce Teipsum, ll. 547–48, in The Poems of Sir John Davies, ed. Robert Krueger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).
37.
Seamus Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 132. Raimonda Modiano similarly argues that Coleridge’s understanding of the relation between the mind and nature involves both “a predominantly speculative interest in nature’s dynamic constitution” and “a direct engagement with external objects.” Modiano, Coleridge and the Concept of Nature (London: Macmillan, 1985), 5.
38.
Tyndall, “Scope and Limit of Scientific Materialism,” in Fragments of Science for Unscientific People (London: Longmans, Green, 1871), 111.
39.
Edward Young, Night Thoughts, ed. Stephen Cornford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 9:1470–71.
40.
Tyndall, “Matter and Force,” in Fragments, 85–86.
41.
Tyndall, Essays on the Use and Limit of the Imagination in Science (London: Longmans, Green, 1870), 48.
42.
Tyndall, “‘Materialism’ and its Opponents,” Fortnightly Review 18 (1875): 599.
43.
Ibid., 592, quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Sphinx,” ll. 29–32.
44.
Times, 3 October 1870, quoting Milton, A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus), ll. 476–79, in Tyndall, Essays, 12.
45.
Milton, Comus, ll. 475 and 473, in Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd edn. (Harlow: Longman, 1997).
46.
Gowan Dawson, Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 20.
47.
Robert Buchanan, “Lucretius and Modern Materialism,” New Quarterly Magazine 6 (1876): 16.
48.
Ibid., 23.
49.
Margaret Bryan, Lectures on Natural Philosophy (London: George Kearsley, 1806), 218 and 173.
50.
Ibid., 21.
51.
Ibid., 272, quoting James Thomson, “Spring,” ll. 899–902.
52.
Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 61.
53.
Bryan, Lectures, 2.
54.
Ibid., n.p.
55.
O’Connor, Earth, 23.
56.
Bryan, Lectures, 55, quoting Milton, Paradise Lost, 7:263–67.
57.
Kristine Larsen, “Margaret Bryan and Jane Marcet: Making Space for ‘Space’ in British Women’s Science Writing,” in Gender and Space in British Literature, 1660–1820, ed. Karen Gevirtz and Mona Narain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 76.
58.
Lucy Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 223.
59.
Bryan, Lectures, 102.
60.
Adeline Johns-Putra, “‘Blending Science with Literature’: The Royal Institution, Eleanor Anne Porden and The Veils,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 33 (2011): 47.
61.
Bryan, Lectures, 143.
62.
Ibid., 146.
63.
Robert Hunt, The Poetry of Science (London: Reeve, Benham, and Reeve, 1848), v-vi.
64.
Ibid., 134–35, quoting William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1:2:421.
65.
Melanie Keene, “An Active Nature: Robert Hunt and the Genres of Science Writing,” in Uncommon Contexts: Encounters Between Science and Literature, 1800–1914, ed. Hazel Hutchison, Ben Marsden, and Ralph O’Connor (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013), 41.
66.
Hunt, Poetry, 24–25.
67.
Ibid., 25.
68.
Devin Griffiths, The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature between the Darwins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 201.
69.
John Phillips Potter, “The Diffusion of Knowledge amongst the People,” Monthly Repository n.s. 8 (1834): 281.
70.
Ibid., 277, quoting Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2:1:16–17.
71.
John Herschel, A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, 1st edn. (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1830), 14–15, quoting Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2:1:16–17.
72.
James Brooke-Smith, “‘A Great Empire Falling to Pieces’: Coleridge, Herschel, and Whewell on the Poetics of Unitary Knowledge,” Configurations 20 (2012): 311.
73.
Herschel, A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, “new edition” (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1851), 15.
74.
Herschel, Preliminary Discourse, 1st edn., 72–73.
75.
Ibid., 37–38.
76.
Ibid., 39.
77.
Ibid., 182.
78.
Ibid., 185–86, quoting Alexander Pope, “Windsor-Forest,” l. 154.
79.
Tyndall deploys Pope’s words more provocatively in his Belfast address, quoting his poem “The Universal Prayer” in the course of his argument that the “doctrine” of the conservation of energy, rather than God, “binds nature fast in fate.” Tyndall, Address, 45, quoting Pope, “The Universal Prayer,” l. 11.
80.
Herschel, Preliminary Discourse, 1st edn., 144 and 358, quoting Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” l. 189.
81.
Richard Yeo, Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge, and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 70.
82.
William Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 2 vols. (London: John W. Parker, 1840), 2:197.
83.
Ibid., 1:25–26, quoting Wordsworth, ‘Tintern Abbey,’ ll. 106–8.
84.
Ibid., 1:31.
85.
John Davy, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Humphry Davy, in The Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy, ed. John Davy, 9 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, 1839–40), 1:444.
86.
Whewell, Philosophy, 2:205.
87.
Ibid., 2:199.
88.
Ibid., 2:202.
89.
See, for example, Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences, 3 vols. (London: John W. Parker, 1837), 1:389–90, quoting Milton, Paradise Lost, 8:128–30 and 163–66.
90.
Ibid., 3:2, quoting Wordsworth, The Excursion, 4:953–64.
91.
Ibid., 1:10.
92.
See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), 4th edn. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
93.
Brooke-Smith, “Great Empire,” 302.

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Gregory Tate

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Tate, G. (2020). Quotation and the Rhetoric of Experiment. In: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31441-5_3

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