The Virtues of Wondering and of Skilled Biography

The Age of Wonder

How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

By Richard Holmes, Harper Press

Reviewed: 20 September 2008

Richard Holmes he turns a brass spyglass on a range of those ``natural philosophers'' who, through extraordinary effort and courage, established foundations for modern science. A number of these key British figures were discovering ``the beauty and terror of science'' during the so-called Romantic period, roughly between Captain Cook's first voyage to the Pacific and the emergence, around 1840, of the first generation of researchers to call themselves ``scientists''. 

His characters were pioneers, moving their intellectual world from belief-based examination of a universe that was assumed to be a fixed creation, towards broad recognition that the scientific method of rigorous observation, hypothesis and testing provided the only reliable basis for continual expansion of knowledge.  The ``wonder'' they shared was the intellectual excitement of a generation which realised that the process of discovery has no natural limit, so long as humans continue to speculate, to observe, and to test.

Sir Joseph Banks looms over much of this book, from his early role as a self-funded naturalist with Captain Cook's Pacific voyage (1768-9), through 40 years as president of the Royal Society, the principal sponsor of British science and exploration. Banks's journals detail how his anthropological research in Tahiti included spending most of his nights ashore observing, and practising, the Tahitian customs of sexual freedom. His intimate relations went far beyond sheer personal indulgence and deeply challenged his cultural assumptions. 

Years later, after he had founded the British Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, Sir Joseph shows up as a reliable supplier of good-quality Indian hemp to the poet (and natural philosopher) William Taylor Coleridge.

Coleridge would also write ecstatically of the psychedelic effects of inhaling laughing gas (nitrous oxide) as the guest of Sir Humphrey Davy, who succeeded Banks at the Royal Society. Davy became part of the circle including Shelley, Coleridge and Wordsworth whose Romantic quest was for new ways of thinking, seeing and feeling. 

The decades toward 1840 trace a transition from the gentlemanly practice of natural philosophy for its own sake, towards recognition of the new profession of ``scientist'' as a person applying scientific method to a practical economic or social purpose. The term ``scientist'' was in fact coined by the poet Coleridge (as was the term ``psychosomatic'').

The Age of Wonder makes a highly readable, informative and stimulating narrative of individuals making history, and made by their time a time with many parallels to our own.

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Richard Thwaites is a Canberra reviewer who is still wondering.