Skepticism and Surmise in Humphry Davy

Abstract

Humphry Davy (1778-1829) became the best-known natural philosopher in Regency England in part by applying voltaic electricity to isolate new substances--including the new metals he named sodium and potasium. The experiments impressed other philosophers because they supported his suspicion that electric affinity might be the force binding elements together in compounds. They also made good story: the new metals were produced as flammable liquids, globules of which, in Davy's words, sometimes violently exploded and separated into smaller globules, which flew with great velocity through the air in state of vivid combustion, producing beautiful effect of continued jets of fire. (1) As this quotation conveys, Davy was also writer. Chemical hypotheses mingle with political philosophy and lyric poetry in his notebooks. Though Scott and Coleridge praised them, academic critics paid little attention to Davy's poems until the 1960s; recently scholars have begun to suspect that they reward study both in themselves and for the new light they cast on his friends Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth. (2) In this article I take up little-noticed aspect of Davy's poetry: its fascination with fragmentary, mediated, and fleeting perception. Davy's speakers adopt version of the posture that Geoffrey Hartrnan, writing about Wordsworth, described as of surmise: brought to meditative pause by glimpse of subjectivity's limits, they proceed interrogatively, entertaining possibilities without giving them full visionary endorsement. The history of surmise in Davy's writing illuminates broad connections between poetry and natural philosophy in British Romanticism. The stance of surmise is one of the things Romantic poetry does best; surmise gives rhetorical form to the questioning temper of the period--which fuses, as Susan Wolfson remarked, an admission of uncertainty with a longing for presence and intelligibility. (3) But Davy's use of surmise was closely bound up with his writings on scientific method, which stressed the limited scope of human knowledge. The contradiction here between skepticism and speculation was in practice constitutive tension; as in many Romantic poems--This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, for instance--an initial confinement to sense experience compresses and intensifies imaginative aspiration. Not all natural philosophers were, like Davy, poets; however, many others applied skeptical methodology that foreshadowed the questioning temper of Romantic poetry. Poetic surmise and scientific skepticism, moreover, responded in parallel ways to the climate of political reaction at the end of the 1790s. Thus surmise became central to British Romantic lyric for many of the same reasons that gave ignorance its peculiar prestige in science. If Romantic surmise were only wonder and uncertainty, it would be easy to show that it was important to eighteenth-century science. Natural philosophers enjoyed quoting Isaac Newton's summary of his career: To myself I seem to have been only like boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. (4) They used the quotation to demonstrate that human greatness reveals itself in an ever-growing consciousness of the unknown. And they gave that consciousness rhetorical form by imitating the long list of wildly speculative queries in Newton's Opticks. (For instance: Are not gross bodies and light convertible into one another ...? (1931: p. 374). The connection between Romantic surmise and Newton's child on the seashore is easy to make because it is diffuse. As Geoffrey Hartman points out, surmise already provided Ovid and Milton with way to transform uncertainty into an expansive and fluidifying gesture. Romantic surmise is distinguished from earlier examples by its close connection to self-consciousness: the Romantic speaker is not merely curious, but halted and balked by veil or vacancy that throws the mind back on its own resources: lengthened pause / Of silence, for instance, in the Boy of Winander episode of The Prelude. …