Wordsworthian Science in the 1870s

Abstract

In the first half of the nineteenth century, theology in Britain usually meant natural theology, the investigation of what the physical might reveal about its Creator. That the had a Creator then seemed undeniable; all respectable British scientists at the time were theists, for whom religion remained the primary stimulus for scientific investigation and provided the intellectual context in which the discoveries of science were understood and evaluated. Most of them had had little difficulty reinterpreting or ignoring the Biblical creation account when discoveries in geology and paleontology made a literal reading of Genesis untenable. The old concept of an initial creation by divine fiat of everything that now exists had given way easily enough to an understanding of creation as a gradual process in which the cosmos evolved slowly according to a plan preconceived by the Creator. By 1850, the concept that creation operated by intelligible, predictable of was generally acknowledged. The only question concerned how these laws were implemented. Were they executed once for all at the beginning of time and set to continue operating mechanically and inevitably, or were they a continuing manifestation of divine power that exerts itself at every moment in all the processes of nature? Repelled by what they considered a deistic conception of an absentee divinity whose relationship with life on earth was completed at the beginning of time, a number of scientists affirmed their belief in a providential Deity who remained immanent and active in his creation--a position that their critics condemned as pantheistic. This pantheistic conception of nature is what I am calling Wordsworthian science. For a time, mostly in the 1870s, a conception of nature resembling Wordsworth's and specifically credited to him became a respected scientific theory, one that enabled its adherents to reconcile belief in God with new developments in physics, chemistry, and biology. Wordsworth was highly esteemed as a natural philosopher in the later nineteenth century. In a culture that produced few prominent theologians, he emerged as one of the most influential religious thinkers of the century. In 1898, nearly fifty years after Wordsworth's death, the Reverend Richard Acland Armstrong, a prominent Unitarian preacher and writer, told his Liverpool congregation: Wordsworth's] greatest utterances are so great that in their kind they are absolutely unrivaled in the world's literature; they are wholly unique; they are prophecies in a new Scripture; they are a new evangel for mankind; they are the Bible of a new and larger faith ...; they constitute, perhaps, the mightiest single intellectual influence of the nineteenth century; the only possible rival being that illuminating and penetrating conception associated with the splendid name of Darwin (26). Note the comparison with Darwin as an intellectual influence possibly as great as that of Wordsworth. It was not uncommon at the time to find these two names linked in discussion. They had come to represent two important complexes of ideas about the natural world. To those who could not accept Darwin's vision of nature, Wordsworth stood as the alternative or the antidote (that word was used), an authority whose life-long experience of nature, whose credentials as a naturalist, were as imposing as Darwin's. Wordsworth was brought into the argument not only as aesthetically sensitive, but as scientifically respectable. Science had apparently verified Wordsworth's intuitions about the divine presence in Nature. The Reverend Armstrong was identifying the poet with recent tendencies in science when he said of Wordsworth. He tolerates no longer the idea of God as a Creator outside Nature, but sees the Divine Energy and love in every throbbing fibre of the universe (42). Respectable theorists of the time understood as hard science what sounds like nature mysticism. …