Romanticism in science
[3]: xii Romanticism advanced a number of themes: it promoted anti-reductionism (that the whole is more valuable than the parts alone) and epistemological optimism (man was connected to nature), and encouraged creativity, experience, and genius.
[3]: xii [2]: 22 Both sought to increase individual and cultural self-understanding by recognizing the limits in human knowledge through the study of nature and the intellectual capacities of man.
"[2]: 4 The philosophy of nature was devoted to the observation of facts and careful experimentation, which was much more of a "hands-off" approach to understanding science than the Enlightenment view, as it was considered too controlling.
[3]: xii Natural science, according to the Romantics, involved rejecting mechanical metaphors in favor of organic ones; in other words, they chose to view the world as composed of living beings with sentiments, rather than objects that merely function.
Sir Humphry Davy, a prominent Romantic thinker, said that understanding nature required "an attitude of admiration, love and worship, ... a personal response.
[3]: xiv [2]: 2 When categorizing the many disciplines of science that developed during this period, Romantics believed that explanations of various phenomena should be based upon vera causa, which meant that already known causes would produce similar effects elsewhere.
Various disciplines on the study of nature that were cultivated by Romanticism included: Schelling's Naturphilosophie; cosmology and cosmogony; developmental history of the earth and its creatures; the new science of biology; investigations of mental states, conscious and unconscious, normal and abnormal; experimental disciplines to uncover the hidden forces of nature – electricity, magnetism, galvanism and other life-forces; physiognomy, phrenology, meteorology, mineralogy, "philosophical" anatomy, among others.
[3]: 31 The "new science of biology" was first termed biologie by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in 1801, and was "an independent scientific discipline born at the end of a long process of erosion of 'mechanical philosophy,' consisting in a spreading awareness that the phenomena of living nature cannot be understood in the light of the laws of physics but require an ad hoc explanation.
Nichols (2005) examines the connections between science and poetry in the English-speaking world during the 18th and 19th centuries, focusing on the works of American natural historian William Bartram and British naturalist Charles Darwin.
[5] Alexander (2006) argues that the nature of mathematics changed in the 19th century from an intuitive, hierarchical, and narrative practice used to solve real-world problems to a theoretical one in which logic, rigor, and internal consistency rather than application were important.
As the discipline changed, so did the nature of the men involved, and the image of the tragic Romantic genius often found in art, literature, and music may also be applied to such mathematicians as Évariste Galois (1811–1832), Niels Henrik Abel (1802–1829), and János Bolyai (1802–1860).
Strongly influenced by Kant's critique of corpuscular theory and by his friendship and collaboration with Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776–1809), Ørsted subscribed to a Romantic natural philosophy that rejected the idea of the universal extension of mechanical principles understandable through mathematics.
[2]: 20 John Keats' portrayal of "cold philosophy" in the poem "Lamia"[2]: 3 influenced Edgar Allan Poe's 1829 sonnet "To Science" and Richard Dawkins' 1998 book, Unweaving the Rainbow.
