SOURCE: “Industrialisation, Poetry, and Aesthetics,” in Under the Banner of Science: Erasmus Darwin and His Age, Manchester University Press, 1987, pp. 31-58.

[In the following essay, McNeil contends that as Darwin celebrated the industrial and scientific advances of the late eighteenth century, he also expressed in his poetry an overall sense of optimism regarding the power and possibilities of all of humanity.]

In both the pregnancy of the mythical image and the clarity of the scientific formula, the everlastingness of the factual is confirmed and mere existence pure and simple expressed as the meaning which it forbids.

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno.¹

Watching the dawn of industrialisation in Britain Erasmus Darwin sang of a new humanity which could recreate both itself and its world; he expressed the specific experience of the industrial bourgeoisie as a universal expansion of human powers. The last chapter [in Under the Banner of Science] examined Darwin's poetry as a moment in the cultural and economic changes of the Industrial Revolution. This chapter explores how he transformed the growing potency of Midlands men of industry and science, into a generalised cultural optimism.

THE IMAGINATION IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN

In the Preface to The Temple of Nature, Darwin stated his aim as ‘to amuse by bringing distinctly to the imagination the beautiful and sublime images of the operations of Nature’. He addressed his poem to his readers' imagination, the faculty which intrigued investigators of human nature at this time. He labelled his task as the production of ‘the beautiful and sublime images of the operations of Nature’, invoking the visual emphasis that predominated in his poetic work.

Ernest L. Tuveson has described the centrality of the conception of imagination in eighteenth-century British thought.² He traced the development of an interpretation of the relationship between God and humanity in which nature became the mediator, and imagination became the faculty which facilitates salvation. The contributions of Hobbes, Locke, Addison, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson to this tradition are highlighted in his account, and Shaftesbury is considered the principal formulator of this view. Even from the perspective of a less explicitly religious framework, the imagination tended to be regarded by most eighteenth-century philosophers as a bridging mechanism—a mediator between human sensory faculties and intellectual and higher faculties. Alexander Gerard was one of the many exponents of this view: ‘Those internal senses from which taste is formed, are commonly referred to the imagination, which is considered as holding a middle rank between the bodily senses, and the rational and moral faculties.’³ Mark Akenside took a similar stand in The Pleasures of Imagination: ‘There are certain powers in human nature which seem to hold a middle place between the organs of bodily sense and the faculties of moral perception: They have been call'd by a very general name, the powers of imagination.’⁴

By addressing his poetry to the imagination, Darwin also seemed to recognise the mediating potential of this faculty. His Advertisement in The Botanic Garden endorsed this role for the imagination:

The general design of the following sheets is to inlist Imagination under the banner of Science; and to lead her votaries from the looser analogies, which dress out the imagery of poetry, to the stricter ones which form the ratiocination of philosophy. While their particular design is to induce the ingenious to cultivate the knowledge of Botany, by introducing them to the vestibule of that delightful science, and recommending to their attention the immortal works of the celebrated Swedish Naturalist, Linneus.

The familiar eighteenth-century instrumentalist view of the imagination is secularised here. The imagination is invoked as the vehicle which can mediate between sensual poetic images and ‘the ratiocination of philosophy’. In this schema, science replaces God as the telos of human progress. The phrase ‘immortal works’ plays on the eighteenth-century religious tradition described by Tuveson, while locating its dynamics in an entirely human setting.

THE VISUAL

Darwin's poetry appealed not just to a mediating imagination, but also to a visually-orientated imagination. In the Proem of The Loves of the Plants, he beckoned his readers: ‘Lo, here a camera obscura is presented to thy view, in which are lights and shades dancing on a whited canvas, and magnified into apparent life!’ He then explained that he had tried to restore plants to their original animality in his poem with portraits, ‘which thou may'st contemplate as diverse little pictures suspended over the chimney of a Lady's dressing-room’, and the poem presented a series of portraits of plants. The Preface to The Temple of Nature indicated a similar intention to bring before the imagination ‘images of the operations of nature’. After his invitation to ‘walk and view the wonders of my inchanted garden’, Darwin led his readers through his poetic garden of protraits of various plants in The Loves of the Plants. Similarly, in The Temple of Nature he provided his readers with a panorama of nature. Nature, as a visible goddess, appears in the successive settings of the production of life, the reproduction of life, the progress of the mind and the moral sphere. Darwin characterised his poetry as ‘pure description’ (The Loves of the Plants, p. 61).

Darwin's poetic practice was reinforced by his theory. In the first Interlude of The Loves of the Plants he argued that poetry should use few words denoting abstract ideas: ‘And as our ideas derived from visible objects are more distinct than those derived from the objects of our other senses, the words expressive of these ideas belonging to vision make up the principal part of poetic language. That is, the Poet writes principally to the eye, the Prose-writer uses more abstracted terms.’ He contended that personification and allegory were eminently suitable poetic devices because of their ability to appeal to the visual sense. In the second Interlude of this poem he extended his analysis of poetic devices, explaining that the simile ‘should have so much sublimity, beauty, or novelty, as to interest the reader; and should be expressed in picturesque language, so as to bring the scenery before the eye’. In the third Interlude he expounded on the similarities between the sister arts of painting and poetry. The poet should provide pictures of the operations of both nature and human nature. The artist and poet should both busy themselves ‘making sentiments and passions visible … this is done in both arts by describing or pourtraying [sic] the effects or changes, which those sentiments or passions produce upon the body’.

This concern with the visual dominated not only Darwin's poetic theory, but also his epistemology. He defined ideas in The Temple of Nature as the product of the interaction between the visual and tactile senses, as the ‘successive trains of the motions, or changes of figure, of the extremities of the nerves of one or more of our senses’ (Canto III, fn. 398). He gave ideas a physiological definition as provoking a visible change in body figure:

As the pure language of Sight commands
The clear ideas furnish'd by the hands;

(Canto III, lines 163-4)

Hence his entire epistemology was founded on a visual framework.

Darwin's interest in vision was rooted in his own physiological studies.⁵ He devoted a large section of Zoonomia (III, Sect. III) to a detailed explanation of vision, and he considered various problems of visual distortion and illusion. His son, Dr Robert W. Darwin, had investigated the degree of pleasure and pain experienced by the eye when exposed to various stimuli and the son's treatise on this topic was included in Zoonomia (II, Sect. XL). Erasmus Darwin pursued this investigation with speculations about the possibility of ‘luminous music’ drawing on Newton's ideas on the spectrum of colours (The Loves of the Plants, Interlude III).

THE VISUAL SENSE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The background to this emphasis on the visual sense is important. Newton's Opticks (1704) had launched the exploration of vision, light and colour which came to preoccupy many eighteenth-century minds.⁶ Darwin participated in the scientific investigation of vision by natural philosophers which began with the Opticks and Berkeley's An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709).⁷ This scientific response to the Opticks was accompanied by a poetic response to which Darwin also contributed and which Marjorie Nicolson has explored in Newton Demands the Muse.⁸

The visual sense was also central to eighteenth-century speculations about ideas and knowledge. This development stemmed from Locke's visually-oriented epistemology. He described the process whereby the mind acquired simple ideas:

Whatsoever is so constituted in Nature, as to be able, by affecting our Senses, to cause any Perception in the Mind, doth thereby produce in the Understanding a simple Idea; which whatever be the external cause of it, when it comes to be taken notice of, by our discerning Faculty, it is by the Mind looked on and considered there, to be a real positive Idea in the Understanding.⁹

Locke's use of a verb of vision to describe the operation of the mind was in line with his general interpretation of the mind as a ‘mental eye’. Joseph Addison used Locke's notion of visual ideas to posit a visually-stimulated imagination. In his influential essays in The Spectator in 1712. Addison established the basis for the subsequent exploration of this faculty with his claim that all the pleasures of the imagination ‘arise originally from sight’.¹⁰

The poetry of Enlightenment Britain reflected the Lockean and Addisonian emphasis on the visual sense. Darwin joined Thomson, Collins, Gray, Smart and Cowper in this tradition. James Thomson, the most renowned nature poet of eighteenth-century Britain specialised, like Darwin, in the production of panormas of the operations of nature. Thomson's most famous work, The Seasons (1726-30) can be ‘taken from the beginning to be a triumph of vision in the literal sense’.¹¹

The push towards visually-orientated poetry came from several directions. Painting exerted considerable influence on English poetry during this period.¹² On a more theoretical level, this trend was reinforced by specific aesthetic concepts, particularly the vogue for the ‘picturesque’ (referring to the capacity to ‘please from some quality, capable of being illustrated in painting’).¹³ Finally, the concern for gardening was indicative of the attention given to visual experience during the century. Fashions in gardening, in turn, often influenced the nature poetry of the era.¹⁴ Darwin had his own botanic garden in Lichfield which provided part of the inspiration for his poetic Botanic Garden. For him and many of the nature poets of his century, the poet's verbal tour of nature offered visual sensations comparable to those experienced in a stroll through an English garden.

The legacy of Locke and Addison combined two strains: the identification of the visual sense with the faculty of reason (with knowledge and ‘clear ideas’) and the association of that sense with the faculty of imagination. Samuel Johnson captured these two kinds of definitions of vision in his dictionary of 1755.¹⁵

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF DARWIN'S STRESS ON THE VISUAL SENSE

Darwin was very much influenced by the developments outlined above. He drew on the dual affinities of the visual sense with reason and with imagination. His confidence that he could ‘inlist the Imagination under the banner of Science’ through his highly visual poetry was based on his recognition of the visual orientation of eighteenth-century natural philosophy. Furthermore, Darwin's strategy was instrumentalist, not only in relation to the faculty of the imagination, but also in relation to the visual sense itself. He used this sense to reorientate his readership towards the goals of his peers in the industrial Midlands, in particular towards the pursuit of science. The aims of eighteenth-century men of science and industry of understanding the natural world, and of employing that knowledge within industry, were transcribed into a poetic project by Darwin.

This project was undermined by the emergence of critiques of Enlightenment presumptions. There was a growing awareness of the limitations of the faculty of reason.¹⁶ The desire to maximise pleasure and minimise pain was considered to be the determinant of all human action, according to Francis Hutcheson and his followers. Pleasure and pain thereby guided individuals, making it possible for them to function despite the limitations of human reason. In addition, M.H. Abrams has shown that the century witnessed progressive moves towards the conception of a truly creative imagination.¹⁷

The increasing sense of the expansive powers of the imagination demanded a recognition of that faculty's involvement with all senses or even its potential to carry human beings beyond the limitations of their senses. Thus, the exclusive reliance on appeals to the visual sense came to be regarded as a weakness rather than a strength in poetry. Edmund Burke claimed as early as 1757 that: ‘Indeed, so little does poetry depend for its effect on the power of raising sensible images, that I am convinced it would lose a very considerable part of its energy if this were the necessary result of all description’.¹⁸ Later in the century, Archibald Alison compared the powers of the poet and of the painter from a similar vantage point: ‘The Painter addresses himself to the Eye. The Poet speaks to the Imagination. The Painter can represent no other qualities of Nature, but those which we discern by means of the sense of sight. The Poet can blend with those, all the qualities which we perceive by means of our other senses.’¹⁹ Both Burke and Alison were moving away from Addison's conception of the imagination as an exclusively visually-orientated faculty.

With this broadening of the dimensions of the imagination, many of Darwin's critics found his preoccupation with visual images most dissatisfactory. The Edinburgh Review deplored this aspect of his work, stating, ‘it is surely a very unjust limitation of the natural range of poetry, to consider it as solely or ultimately employed in the production of such [picturesque] effects’.²⁰ Working within the Addisonian interpretation of the imagination, Darwin had restricted the appeal of his poetry to the visual sense.

The natural philosophy of Darwin's century also came under attack for its preoccupation with visual images. The first lines of Coleridge's critique of David Hartley make this clear:

Of Hartley's hypothetical vibrations in his hypothetical oscillating ether of the nerves, which is the first and most obvious distinction between his system and that of Aristotle, I shall say little. This, with all other similar attempts to render that an object of the sight which has no relation to sight, has been already sufficiently exposed.²¹

Burke and Alison had challenged the association of the imagination and poetry with the visual sense. Coleridge aimed his assault from the other direction, criticising natural philosophy which was supported by a Lockean epistemology that regarded the mind as an ‘internal eye’.

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE VISUAL SENSE

The full implications of the Lockean-Addisonian tradition for eighteenth-century science and imagination were explored by William Blake. He regarded Newton as the dominant figure of the century, recognising the particular potency of ‘the picture-language quality of Newton's system’.²² For him, it was precisely its visual orientation which made Newton's cosmology equally appealing to the faculties of reason and imagination. Newton's system played on the duality of the visual, its inroads to reason and imagination, and the distinctive poetic and scientific responses to Newton's Opticks seemed to verify this dual capacity.

Blake's explorations of the visual stood in direct opposition to Darwin's poetic project. This opposition is clarified in Donald Ault's account of Blake's work:

Because Newton's system, and Descartes' before him, submerged such powerful metaphors [of vision] under a logically consistent structure of reality, it is no accident that Blake, looking at them as a ‘visionary’, could appreciate the threat these powerful images posed to the human imagination. It was incumbent on him, then, to appropriate many details from these systems and transform these supposedly ‘visualizable’ concepts into images in his poetry to operate symbolically, drawing their critical aspect from their oblique reference to scientific doctrines and their positive aspects from their independent operation in the poetry as metaphors.²³

Blake was determined to rescue the imagination which he felt had been threatened by Newtonianism. He stood steadfast against an instrumentalist view (such as Darwin's) of that faculty. To this end, he inverted the tradition of the visual orientation which dominated Darwin's poetry. Thus, while Darwin used the visual sense as a vehicle for scientific knowledge, Blake gave the visual image an independent status. He set about his task of liberating the imagination from the fetters of Newtonianism by rescuing the metaphor of vision from its mediating role within eighteenth-century poetry and natural philosophy. Blake imbibed the century's emphasis on vision, criticised it (as it appeared in the Newtonian cosmology) and transformed it in his own use of ‘perspective’ and optical analogies:

The nature of infinity is this: That every thing has its
Own Vortex, and when once a traveller thro' Eternity
Has pass'd that Vortex, he percieves [sic] it roll backward behind
His path, into a globe itself unfolding like a sun;
Or like a moon, or like a universe of starry majesty,
While he keeps onwards in his wondrous journey on the earth,
Or like a human form, a friend (with) whom he lived
                    benevolent.(24)

The intimacy between the intellectual forces of the Enlightenment and the social dynamics of industrialisation are manifest in the tensions between Blake's and Darwin's poetry. While they took opposing stands on such issues as the role of imagination and of reason, they both recognised that the natural philosophy of the eighteenth century went hand-in-hand with a complementary set of social and literary conventions and values. For both, industrialisation marked the culmination of the development of these forces.

Their disagreement was based on a difference in both social and literary perspective. Darwin was riding high on the triumphs of the industrial bourgeoisie. Buoyed by their success, he offered the century's most confident poetic testimony to their values: science as the avowed goal of poetry, exclusive reliance on the visual sense, and an instrumentalist use of the imagination. For Blake, the impoverishment of the lower orders and the impoverishment of the imagination were part of the same process. In identifying with this segment of society, he saw the need to wage battle on their behalf against the entire heritage of the Enlightenment. Blake represented the ominous nature of the contemporary faith in reason through his mythical figure, ‘Urizen’. ‘Urizen’ was portrayed as a tyrant who threatened to dominate and destroy the universe. Hence, Blake's struggle against ‘Urizen’ represented his concern that Darwin's goal of enlisting ‘the Imagination under the banner of Science’ would not be realised.

DARWIN AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NATURE POETRY

Erasmus Darwin's poetry stands out from earlier nature poetry in its description of the struggle for existence. He did, however, have one predecessor in this area; in 1796, Richard Payne Knight published a poetic sketch of the struggle for existence within the animal kingdom:

Progressive numbers without end increase,
While nature gives them safety, food, and ease:
Whence, through the whole the balance to sustain,
And in proportion'd bounds each race restrain,
Each stands opposed to some destructive power,
By nature form'd to slaughter and devour;
And still, as each in greater numbers breeds,
More foes it finds, and more devourers feeds.(25)

Darwin extended the view of this struggle to include humanity:

So human progenies, if unrestrain'd;
By climate friended, and by food sustain'd,
O'er seas and soils, prolific hordes! would spread
Erelong, and deluge their terraqueous bed;
But war and pestilence, disease, and death
Sweep the superfluous myriads from the earth.

(The Temple of Nature, Canto IV, lines 369-74)

For both Darwin and Knight, the interaction between human beings and their natural environment was described in terms of the biological struggle for survival. Darwin incorporated ‘war’, ‘pestilence’ and ‘disease’ into this framework as the most prominent natural forces operating within the human environment.²⁶ Since he did not discriminate between social and natural forces, ‘war’, ‘pestilence’ and ‘disease’ were all portrayed as natural, and yet personified, which conveyed the impression that nature was purposeful. In addition, the pathetic fallacy was used in order to suggest that the sort of relationship that exists between the individual and the climate is equivalent to one of friendship.²⁷ The total effect of the passage is a blurring of the boundaries between the human and the natural.

DARWIN, MALTHUS, BLAKE AND THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

Darwin's poetry on this theme of the struggle for existence echoed the ideas popularised by T.R. Malthus in An Essay on the Principle of Population. In that essay, Malthus argued that: ‘A man … if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society do not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is. At nature's mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him.’²⁸ Just as some environmental poets of late-eighteenth-century Britain envisaged social and moral characteristics as natural, Malthus regarded the political and economic forces operating in industrialising Britain as natural. Unemployment and starvation were the equivalents, in Malthus's vision, to ‘war’, ‘pestilence’ and ‘disease’ in Darwin's poetic descriptions. They were regarded as sets of natural forces.

Malthus played on the merger of social, moral, and natural categories. He begins in the passage above with a description of a social situation—that of a man unable to get subsistence from his parents and unable to find work. He then interjects a moral evaluation of that social situation: this man has no right to food, or to a place in his society. Finally, Malthus reinforces this moral evaluation by presenting it as nature's judgement on this individual's condition. The personification of ‘nature’ in the last sentence is the final ingredient in the subtle play on these categories. This personification parallels Darwin's similar use of this device together with the pathetic fallacy.

Malthus and Darwin thus naturalised the poverty and suffering in Britain during their era.²⁹ Neither of them set this as their goal. Malthus's Essay was a protest against the concept of human perfectibility which had been advocated by Marquis de Condorcet and William Godwin.³⁰ Darwin, on the other hand, was preoccupied with the benefits of industrialisation. His commitment to it as a progressive force and his identification with those who were benefiting in its wake were unquestioned. Thus, like Malthus, he could only presume that the destructive forces which he saw operating about him originated in nature, rather than in his industrialising society.

William Blake, their contemporary, was not of the same opinion. He satirised Malthusian attitudes:

Compell the poor to live upon a Crust of bread, by soft mild arts.
Smile when they frown, frown when they smile; & when a man looks pale
With labour & abstinence, say he looks healthy & happy;
And when his children sicken, let them die; there are enough
Born, even too many, & our Earth will be overrun
Without these arts.(31)

Blake's use of the imperatives, ‘compell’, ‘smile’, ‘let die’ and his recurrent references to ‘arts’ convey his belief that the social problems observed by Malthus were matters for which individuals must take responsibility. The so-called natural forces of unemployment and hunger (discussed in Malthus's Essay) and disease (described in the quotation from The Temple of Nature, p. 37 above) are portrayed vividly and personally.

Blake, like Darwin and Malthus, also played on the merger of moral, social, and natural categories. Rather than projecting the social problems of industrialising Britain on to nature, as Darwin and Malthus had, Blake telescoped them on to the individual conscience. For him, there were no abstract natural forces controlling society, there were only concrete, tragic social problems created by individual callousness and irresponsibility.

PERSONIFICATION AND THE PATHETIC FALLACY

The most frequently used devices in the British poetry of this period were personificaiton and the pathetic fallacy. Josephine Miles and Earl Wasserman have studied the use of the pathetic fallacy and personification respectively.³² Both studies give well-documented accounts of the various functions of the two devices and of the context which made them particularly suitable techniques. However, neither Miles nor Wasserman discussed in any detail the implications of the widespread use of these devices during the eighteenth century for the human relationship to the natural world.

Erasmus Darwin's friend and fellow-member of the Lunar Society, Joseph Priestley, described some of these implications in his account of the suitability of the device of personification:

As the sentiments and actions of our fellow-creatures are more interesting to us than anything belonging to inanimate nature, or the actions of brute animals, a much greater variety of sensations and ideas must have been excited by them, and consequently adhere to them by the principles of association. Hence it is of prodigious advantage, in treating of inanimate things, or merely of brute animals, to introduce frequent allusions to human actions and sentiments, where any resemblance will make it natural. This converts everything we treat of into thinking and acting beings. We see life, sense, and intelligence everywhere.³³ [his emphasis]

Priestley's is a telling description of the appeal of the poetic devices of personification and pathetic fallacy in his era. The desire to convert ‘everything we treat of into thinking and acting beings’ assumes the legitimacy of such a transformation. Moreover, this desire is distinguished from primitive anthropomorphism by the fact that it involved a conscious attempt to read human characteristics into nature.

Given their situation at the leading edge of industrialisation, both Darwin and Priestley found the human dominion over nature unproblematic. Their literary strategies complemented their ambitions for science and industry. Thus, Priestley had no reservations about the projection of human features on to nature through the use of the pathetic fallacy and personification. Likewise, Darwin depended on these devices and described a natural world which assumed human traits in all his poetic works. He used both personification and the pathetic fallacy frequently:

New woods aspiring clothe their hills with green,
Smooth slope the lawns, the grey rock peeps between;
Relenting Nature gives her hand to Taste,
And Health and Beauty crown the laughing waste.

(The Economy of Vegetation, Canto III, lines 197-200)

Nature, in all its manifestations behaved very humanly in Darwin's poetry, and was also portrayed as a goddess in both of his poetic works, for example:

—Till o'er the wreck, emerging from the storm,
Immortal nature lifts her changeful form,
Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame,
And soars and shines, another and the same.

(The Economy of Vegetation, Canto IV, lines 389-92)

Despite the fact that many contemporary literary critics were sceptical about the use of machinery in poetry, he seemed convinced that it was appropriate to use it in his panoramas of nature and human nature. The attribution of divine characteristics further aggrandised nature and humanity.

Darwin's use of the pathetic fallacy, personification and machinery can be seen as the continuation of the general tendency to coalesce humanity, nature and God in the poetry of his era. However, his use of an industrial metaphor to describe the operations of nature was a unique contribution to this trend:

In earth, sea, air, around, below, above,
Life's subtle woof in Nature's loom is wove,
Points glued to points in living line extends,
Touch'd by some goad approach the binding end.

(The Temple of Nature, Canto I, lines 251-4)

He explicitly described nature as a machine and life as the product of an industrial process.³⁴

The use of this industrial metaphor reveals the vantage point of Darwin's poetic studies of nature. Enlightenment natural philosophy and industrial processes were brought together through the metaphor of the machine, the loom. Priestley had observed that, in looking at nature, it was appropriate that human beings should project their characteristics on to nature. For Darwin, ‘life, sense, and intelligence’ were quintessentially embodied in the industrial machine. This identification related directly to his affiliation with the industrialists of the Midlands, and to his allegiance to mechanical innovators such as Arkwright, Watt and Boulton. His image of nature and his peculiar expression of the coalescing of divine and natural powers in industrialisation were directly influenced by his social setting.

The social roots of this vision become more obvious when Darwin's use of the metaphor of weaving is contrasted with that of William Blake. Writing a few years later, Blake drew on similar associations in constructing his metaphor: the mechanistic natural philosophy spearheaded by Locke and Newton, and mechanised industrial processes. Like Darwin, Blake depicted the meshing of industrial production and natural philosophy:

I turn my eyes to the Schools & Universities of Europe
And there behold the Loom of Locke, whose Woof rages dire,
Washed by the Water-wheels of Newton: black the cloth
In heavy wreathes folds over every Nation: cruel Works
Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
Moving by compulsion each other, not as those in Eden, which,
Wheel within Wheel, in freedom revolve in harmony & peace.(35)

Darwin, on the one hand, excited by the God-like powers involved in industrial production, used the loom as an analogue for the divine role within nature. His perspective was that of the inventors of, and controllers of, the machinery of production. Blake's perspective, on the other hand, was that of labourers within ‘cruel Works’. From this vantage point, appalled by what he saw as destructive consequences, he used the same metaphor to condemn the philosophy which fostered industrialisation and, concomitantly, what he regarded as social tyranny.

THE ORGANIC ANALOGY

The most obvious interface of the natural and the human emerged during the eighteenth century in the use of the organic analogy. Edward Young was the innovator of this practice in his treatise on genius and originality.³⁶ There were two versions of the organic analogy as it was invoked to describe the operations of the mind in eighteenth-century Britain.

The first of these was the frequently used notion of the mind as a garden or as soil, productive of knowledge through a process equivalent to plant growth. Thomas Gray employed it in ‘The Alliance of Education and Government. A Fragment’ (1748-9):

So fond Instruction on the growing powers
Of nature idly lavishes her stores,
In equal Justice with unclouded face
Smile not indulgent on the rising race,
And scatter with a free though frugal hand
Light golden showers of plenty o'er the land.(37)

Likewise, the analogy can be found in Thomas Gisborne's Walks in the Forest (1796):

Think on your change! Fast as the expanding mind
Receives the lesson, truth's instructive lore
Infuse. Leave not the vacant soil a prey
To weeds quick-sprouting; plant with earliest care
The seeds ye most desire should fill the heart.(38)

The painter and theorist of aesthetics, Joshua Reynolds, also thought of the operations of the mind as a vegetative process: ‘The mind is but a barren soil; it is a soil soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilised and enriched with foreign matter.’³⁹ The implication of this use of the analogy was that the products of the human mind were like other products of living organisms.

The second use of the organic analogy was based on a grander vision of the expansiveness or limitlessness of the human mind, drawing a comparison between it and God's creation, nature. Whereas in the first use the distinction between humanity and nature was broken down, in the second use, the human, the natural and the divine were seen to fuse in the mind. Edward Young opened the way to this second sense in writing of the mind: ‘Its bounds are as unknown, as those of the creation.’⁴⁰ This remark was the cornerstone of the concept of creative genius, based on the vision of the limitlessness of divine creation. Coleridge referred to the conclusion implicit in this use of the analogy in his Biographia Literaria: ‘For aught I know, the thinking spirit within me may be substantially one with the principle of life and of vital operation. For aught I know, it may be employed as a secondary agent in the marvellous organization and organic movement of my body.’⁴¹ As he observed, by the end of the eighteenth century the link between mental and vital operations was firmly forged.

In Erasmus Darwin's writings the organic analogy's implication of a continuity between vital and mental processes was transcribed on to the notion of biological development. Darwin employed the analogy in the metaphor of the ‘tree of knowledge’ (The Temple of Nature, Canto IV, line 284). In the same poem, he called upon the Goddess of Nature to describe the progress of the mind:

Immortal Guide! [Goddess of Nature] O, now with accents kind
Give to my ear the progress of the Mind.
How loves, and tastes, and sympathies commence
From evanescent notices of sense?
How from the yielding touch and rolling eyes
The piles immense of human science rise?—

(The Temple of Nature, Canto III, lines 41-6)

The organic roots of ideas and the mind were traced, from their most primitive form in the nervous responses of the simplest organisms. Darwin showed that, through the inheritance of acquired characteristics, the interaction between organisms and their environment led to the progress of organic forms and as the ultimate goal of this development, to the production of ideas.

This attempt to explain ‘the progress of the mind’ and the origins of human science was ambitious. Underlying it was the expansive sense of human power implied in the second use of the organic analogy mentioned above: human creativity as the mirror of divine creativity expressed in nature. However, Darwin wished to subject this poetic sense to the discipline of scientific explanation, using Locke's sensationalist epistemology and David Hartley's purpose of discovering and establishing ‘the general Laws of Action’ affecting human behaviour.⁴² These various threads were located on a progressive grid by Darwin, from the ‘evanescent notices of sense’ to ‘the piles immense of human science’. Once again, his poetic project was rooted in, and shaped by, his sense of the achievement of the men who contributed to ‘the piles immense of human science’.

DARWIN'S POETIC FORMULA

Writing at the end of the eighteenth century, Erasmus Darwin was an early investigator of the relationships between myth and technology and myth and science. These relationships still spark much reflection as Alex Comfort demonstrated when he observed:

The roots of technology are in imagination, in the conceivable, in myth, quite as much as in practical outcomes. Even when we are being highly practical and shut the doors, the myth gets in the windows. Our great grandfathers built locomotives to pull trains, and came up with minor deities possessing personality and sexuality. The astronaut, top man in technology, is carrying out literally the feat of an Eskimo wizard, and going to the Moon on a ladder of arrows.⁴³

Roland Barthes was similarly fascinated by the interactions among science, technology and myth in Western culture:

Einstein's brain is a mythical object: paradoxically, the greatest intelligence of all provides an image of the most up-to-date machine, the man who is too powerful is removed from psychology and introduced into the world of robots.⁴⁴

Like Comfort and Barthes, Darwin in his day explored the constant interplay between myth and reality that human creativity mediates. His poetry involved three major quests: first, an enquiry into the anthropological roots of many Western myths; secondly, a review of some of the highlights of the history of science and technology, and thirdly, futuristic speculations about the technology of succeeding generations. In pursuing the three themes of the heritage of literary myths, contemporary science and technology, and futuristic technological dreams, Darwin was a predecessor of twentieth-century analysts of science's cultural role.

MYTHOLOGY

Mythology was the primary vehicle of Darwin's poetry. In The Botanic Garden Darwin depicted nature with the potency and visual immediacy of hieroglyphic figures. He explained in the Apology to this work that the Egyptians had frequently expressed their discoveries in philosophy and chemistry in hieroglyphics and that, after the discovery of writing, these figures were transformed by the poets of the period into the deities of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome. He set out to paint the accomplishments of contemporary science in a similar manner, implying that the figures of his portraits (contemporary scientists, industrialists and inventors) should enjoy the status of deities. Again, in the first page of the preface to The Temple of Nature, Darwin observed: ‘The Deities of Egypt, and afterwards of Greece and Rome, were derived from men famous in those early times, as in the ages of hunting, pasturage, and agriculture.’ This preface reinforced Darwin's self-image as a painter of the gods of contemporary society.

Darwin took his inspiration for The Temple of Nature from the Eleusinian mysteries:

In the Eleusinian mysteries the philosophy of the works of Nature, with the origin and progress of society, are believed to have been taught by the allegoric scenery explained by the Hierophant to the initiated, which gave rise to the machinery of the following piece.

(Preface to The Temple of Nature, 2nd page)

He suggested that Virgil had used these mysteries in the sixth book of The Aeneid in his description of Elysian fields. Comparing his own effort in The Temple of Nature with Virgil's project, he concluded: ‘Might not such a dignified pantomime be contrived, even in this age, as might strike the spectators with awe, and at the same time explain many philosophical truths by adapted imagery, and thus both amuse and instruct’ (Canto I, fn. 137). Thus, Darwin's poetic works, were directly inspired by the hieroglyphic tradition.

Not only did Darwin's concern with mythology shape his poetry, but it also dictated much of its content. The Economy of Vegetation contained exposés of the mythological significance of Juno and Jupiter, a lengthy description of the Portland Vase as the hieroglyphic representation of human development, an analysis of Adonis as the symbol of the transmigration of matter, together with a section on the derivation of the symbol of the horn of plenty. In The Loves of the Plants Darwin examined the fable of Archane and the roots of the Promethean myth. Besides the Eleusinian mysteries, The Temple of Nature included an attempt to distinguish between the myths of Dione and Adonis, an analysis of the story from Ovid of the production of animals from the mud of the Nile, and an exploration of the biblical account of the Creation of Eve from the rib of Adam (with a Fuseli illustration entitled ‘The Creation of Eve’).

Darwin's interest in mythology was accompanied by an interest in symbol, particularly language as symbol. He referred to the ‘language of painting’ and pondered the derivation of symbols of that language (including the luminous circle used to identify saints) (The Economy of Vegetation, Canto I, fn. 358). Colours and sounds, the latter being ‘the symbol of the sense’ (The Loves of the Plants, pp. 178-9), were regarded by him as symbolic languages built up by associations. His curiosity about symbols led to the discussion of the butterfly as the ancient emblem of the soul after death in The Temple of Nature (Canto II, fn. 223).

STUDIES OF DARWIN'S USE OF MYTH

There have been two studies of Darwin's use of myth, one by Irwin Primer and a second by Robert N. Ross.⁴⁵ Primer restricts his analysis to The Temple of Nature. He notes the juxtaposition of the interest in mythology and in contemporary science in Darwin's poetry, concluding that the poetry reveals ‘the man of science striving to reconcile and harmonize into a whole the knowledge of both the humanistic and the scientific cultures at a time when these disciplines were moving steadily away from one another’.⁴⁶ However, Primer fails to explain adequately the reasons for Darwin's combination of mythology and science in poetic form. Futhermore, he takes no account of the third element in Darwin's poetry, his futuristic visions about technological triumphs.

Ross's consideration of the appeal of mythology and the use of a mythological framework by Darwin is valuable. He explains the attraction of myth, metaphor and allegory for Darwin: ‘Ideas are treated hieroglyphically because any symbolic language is perforce arbitrary and half knowledge and hieroglyphic metaphor and allegory most closely; approximate real patterns of thought by preserving, instead of ignoring, the mysterious abyss between perceptions and knowledge’.⁴⁷ Ross locates one of the central tensions inherent in Darwin's poetry when he claims that ‘Darwin's poetic problem was, in fact, how to move from the distinctness of phenomena in the eye to the indistinctness of phenomena within the mind’.⁴⁸ However, the article does not analyse any of Darwin's specific discussions of myths or symbols. It is not clear how Darwin's investigation of specific myths and symbols fit into Ross's general interpretation of the function of mythology as the vehicle for his poetry. Ross does not consider Darwin's manner of presentation of scientific ideas and inventions, and offers no assessment of his speculations about future technology. In short, there are several aspects of Darwin's treatment of mythology that are neglected.

DARWIN'S USE OF MYTHS

Turning from Darwin's use of mythology to his specific treatment of individual myths, his consistent search for the anthropological roots of these myths is striking. He seemed eager to reinterpret and revitalise them, and occasionally this led him to interpretations of myths which were rather unusual for his time. His account of the Promethean myth as an allegory of the dangers of drinking spirituous liquors, is one such example (The Loves of the Plants, Canto III, fn. 371). His interpretations often involved aspects of contemporary science and technology. Thus, for example, he explained the story from Ovid of the production of animals from mud as a primitive description of spontaneous generation (a doctrine to which he was committed). Similarly, he regarded Arkwright as the modern embodiment of the fable of Archane the spinner (The Loves of the Plants, Canto II, fn. 67).

Darwin also used myths and symbols to confirm the merger of humanity and nature. As previously noted, his use of the symbol of ‘the tree of knowledge’ suggested that knowledge was a natural product. This merger was reflected also in Darwin's poetic discussion of the mythological Psyche and Cupid which accompanied his description of love as experienced in the natural world by lions, tigers and other animals (The Temple of Nature, Canto II, lines 357-70). The human mind and emotions emerge from this description as the embodiment of all natural processes (in this case, in the experience of love).

There were, thus, unifying factors in Darwin's various interpretations of diverse myths which relate directly to his general view of humanity, nature and science. These were all part of his intention to show the anthropological roots of these myths—to reclaim them in a secularised view of history.

MYTHOLOGY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Darwin's use of mythology had its roots in Neo-Classicism and in the beginnings of the Romantic Movement in the second half of the eighteenth century in Britain. Winckelmann published his Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks in 1765, which became the bible of the classical revival.⁴⁹ This renaissance brought with it insatiable curiosity for classical art and its figures, the gods and goddesses of mythology. For at least one member of the Lunar Society, this revival had immediate commercial implications. Josiah Wedgwood produced copies of some of the artefacts recovered in the excavations popularised by the Neo-Classical Movement. Darwin provided a lengthy analysis of the hieroglyphic representations on the most famous vase which Wedgwood copied, the Portland Vase.⁵⁰

The moves towards a romantic rebellion from classicism also engendered an interest in mythology. Edmund Burke's investigation of ‘the sublime’ and Horace Walpole's Gothic tales were among the most popular manifestations of a new cultural concern for the emotional, the exotic, the supernatural. The contemporary enthusiasm for the poems of the legendary Gaelic poet Ossian (subsequently revealed to be fabrications), and the interest in Celtic and Nordic cultures, were other signs of this new direction. This romantic tendency supported an interest in mythology as part of the cult of the unknown and supernatural.

The specific indications of the revival of interest in mythology appeared around the middle of the eighteenth century in Britain. William Warburton's Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated on the Principles of a Religious Deist, a central text in this regard, appeared first in 1741 with a number of subsequent eighteenth-century editions; Ross has shown in some detail that Darwin's interest in hieroglyphics and hieroglyphical poetry was inspired by this book.⁵¹ Another product of the interest in myth during this period in Britain was Thomas Blackwell's Letters Concerning Mythology (1748). This book contains a correspondence about the value and relevance of mythology in contemporary society. For both Blackwell and Darwin mythology was one means of challenging ‘the unnatural Separation of Learning from Life, [which] has done infinite harm to both’.⁵² The coming together of myth and science was seen by Blackwell as both possible and desirable:

They [poets] have long, it is true, monopolized the Muses, as if they favoured none of the Sons of Science but themselves; and along with that Encroachment they have appropriated their Method of instructing by Fable and Allegory: But anciently it was not so: the inspiring Muse confined not her Influence: the Poet was not her sole Favorite: no, nor even so much as when he was a real Philosopher. fable was the first Garb in which Wisdom appeared; and was so far from being peculiar to the Sing-song Tribe, that the Fathers of Science both Civil and Sacred adopted it as the best of Means both to teach and persuade.⁵³

Darwin's bringing together of mythology and science was clearly in line with Blackwell's expectations.

Darwin's image of himself as the guardian and transmitter of mythology in his contemporary society was aligned to the image of the poet which permeates the writings of William Collins (1721-1759) and Thomas Gray (1716-1771). Both were interested in Celtic poetry and mythology, Gray being particularly concerned with Nordic traditions.⁵⁴ In his ‘Ode Occasioned by the Death of Mr Thomson’ (1748-9), Collins portrayed Thomson as the idealised ancient Druid:

‘O! vales and wild woods’, shall he say,
‘In yonder grave your Druid lies!’(55)

Similarly, Gray, in ‘The Bard. A Pindaric Ode’ (1755-7), conjured up the vision of the poet as a Celtic hero:

On a rock, whose haughty brow
Frowns o'er old Conway's foaming flood,
Robed in the sable garb of woe,
With haggard eyes the poet stood.(56)

These portraits of poets as Celtic warriors conveyed the opinion that the poet was the guardian of precious cultural traditions. The metaphors of Collins and Gray revolved around the fact that they regarded the ancient warriors' physical struggles to defend their culture and society as primitive symbols of the efforts of contemporary poets to protect their cultural heritage. This was an image of the poet which shaped Darwin's own explorations of mythology; however, his ambition was to relate his mythological heritage to the science and technology of his own era.

Mythology provided the medium for Darwin's poetic project of bringing his contemporaries to a knowledge of nature. His pursuit of the anthropological roots of mythology revealed a conviction that the discovery of such roots would permit access to the life-centre of contemporary civilisation, and that there was a vital and clear link between his contemporary culture, in particular its science and technology, and its mythological heritage. Darwin found inspiration in the general cultural revival of interest in mythology, in the specific texts of this movement (including those of Warburton, Bryant and Blackwell) and the image of the poet's task dominant in the poetry of William Collins and Thomas Gray. His distinctive contribution was his attempt to relate science and technology to mythology.

SCIENCE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH POETRY

Some of the ways in which Darwin invoked contemporary science and technology in his explorations of mythology have been noted. This interest was a very consistent theme in his writing. Fire, steel tools, gunpowder, steam engines, techniques of copper mining, coining apparatus, the electrometer, lightning rods, steel and pottery production, canal building, balloon flights, spinning machinery and automatons are but some of the technological topics which can be found in Darwin's poetry. Moreover, he praised the scientific and technological accomplishments of Wedgwood, Boulton, Watt, Newcomen, Franklin, Arkwright, Priestley and Savery. His poetry was part of a poetic debate about science and technology which spanned the eighteenth century.

Some participants in this debate did not share Darwin's enthusiasm for contemporary science and technology. A less favourable interpretation of developments in this area was taken earlier in the century by Henry Brooke (1703?-1783) and Alexander Pope (1688-1744). Brooke wrote in his ‘Universal Beauty’ (1735):

For deep, indeed, the eternal founder lies,
And high above his work the maker flies;
Yet infinite that work, beyond our soar;
Beyond what Clarkes can prove, or Newtons can explore!(57)

The same sort of scepticism about science prevaded Pope's Essay on Man (1733-4). Pope suggested that there were definite limits to what science could teach humanity about nature:

Superior beings, when of late they saw
A mortal Man unfold all Nature's law,
Admired such wisdom in an earthly shape,
And shew'd a Newton as would show an Ape.(58)

While recognising Newton's achievement, he felt strongly that this accomplishment was only remarkable within the boundaries of the human perspective on nature. For both Brooke and Pope, the limitations of the human mind were concretely manifested in science.

However, as Marjorie Nicolson has pointed out, eighteenth-century science (particularly Newtonianism) did receive a good deal of positive poetic attention.⁵⁹ James Thomson offered one of the many poetic effusions over the accomplishments of science:

Here, awful Newton, the dissolving clouds
Form, fronting on the sun, the showery prism;
And to the sage-instructed eye unfold
The various twine of light, by thee disclosed
From the white mingling maze.(60)

The chief distinction between the more negative approach to science (in the work of Brooke and Pope) and the poetic enthusiasm for science expressed by Thomson, Mark Akenside and others, resulted from two different estimations of the significance of the human perception of nature. For Brooke and Pope, science was limited precisely because it was the tool of a finite creature, the human being. It was employed to explore the infinite magnitude of God's creation, nature. For Akenside and Thomson, however, only the human comprehension of nature mattered. For them, the accomplishments of Newton and other scientists should be celebrated as extensions of the human perspective on nature. Accordingly, Akenside contended that Newton's description of the rainbow actually intensified the human experience of this part of nature.⁶¹ Thomson's eulogy of Newton is noteworthy in this regard:

When Newton rose, our philosophic sun!(62)

Thomson considered Newton's role in natural philosophy as equivalent to that of the sun in vision. This metaphor reinforced the intrinsic and exclusive importance of human awareness of nature by creating the impression that human knowledge was a sort of universe of its own with Newton at the centre.

A third poetic approach to science in the eighteenth century brought together the scepticism of the first wave and the sense of the primacy of the human mind that characterised the second variety. D.J. Greene has sketched the dynamics of this third poetic school as manifested in the attacks on Newtonianism by Christopher Smart (1722-1771) and William Blake.⁶³ The necessary primacy of the human mind in any science was one of the central tenets of both Smart and Blake. This commitment is obvious in Blake's ‘Vision of the Last Judgement’:

The Last Judgement is an Overwhelming of Bad Art & Science. Mental Things are alone Real; what is call'd Corporeal, Nobody Knows of its Dwelling Place: it is in Fallacy, & its Existence an Imposture. Where is the Existence Out of Mind or Thought?⁶⁴

Greene has shown that for both Smart and Blake the divorce of the mind from the physical world implicit in the Newtonian and Lockean dualistic (yet materialistic) cosmology was unacceptable. Greene considers that these poets explored the central problem of Newtonianism, identified by Berkeley, of the metaphysical pretension, which evaded the crucial issue of how to move from individual sensations to objective statements regarding an external nature. The poetic effusions over Newtonianism (especially in the works of Thomson and Akenside) shared the presumption that there were no problems in this area.

The poetic accounts of science and technology took a fourth direction in the final decade of the eighteenth century. The optimism of Richard Payne Knight and Erasmus Darwin regarding contemporary science and technology created an affinity between their work and that of Akenside and Thomson. Nevertheless, Knight and Darwin were sensitive to many of the issues raised by Smart and Blake. In The Progress of Civil Society (1796), Knight set the tone of his poem with his initial query about the key epistemological issue of the era:

Whether primordial motion sprang to life
From the wild war of elemental strife;
In central chains, the mass inert confined
And sublimated matter into mind?—
Or, whether one great all-pervading soul
Moves in each part, and animates the whole;
Unnumber'd worlds to one great centre draws;
And governs all by pre-established laws?—(65)

Knight concluded that such questions were unanswerable and that his poem should deal with the accessible:

Let us less visionary themes pursue,
And try to show what mortal eyes may view.(66)

Thus, this poem became a graphic display of the progress of human inventions:

Still one invention to another leads,
And art to art, in order slow, succeeds,(67)

and:

Thus more effective implements were found
To raise the building, and to till the ground;
Labour by art was methodized and fed;
And man's dominion over nature spread.(68)

He implied that there was an organic relationship between men and their inventions in one section of the poem:

Each bright invention rear'd its infant head;
Science and art their various powers combined,
To polish, charm, and elevate mankind.(69)

The image of nature as the child of God is invoked, conveying both the organic and the divine facets of human creativity in invention. Knight's treatment of human progress as reflected in technology was close to Darwin's.

Nevertheless, there are crucial differences between the two poets. Darwin, unlike Knight, did not shy away from the epistemological problems which they both recognised as fundamental. For Darwin, the only method whereby human claims to knowledge of nature and natural laws could be validated involved a monistic account of a common origin for nature and mind. The Creator had ‘stamped a certain similitude on the features of nature’, Darwin claimed in the Preface to Zoonomia, ‘that demonstrates to us, that the whole is one family of one parent. On this similitude is founded all rational analogy.’ He pinned his hopes on the possibility that a science of life would overcome the epistemological problems regarded by Smart and Blake as the fundamental shortcoming of Newtonian natural philosophy. His expectations for the unifying effect of a science of life were set out in the first lines of The Temple of Nature:

By firm immutable immortal laws
Impress'd on Nature by the great first cause.
Say, Muse! how rose from elemental strife
Organic forms, and kindled into life;
How Love and Sympathy with potent charm
Warm the cold heart, the lifted hand disarm;
Allure with pleasures, and alarm with pains,
And bind Society in golden chains.

As suggested above, Darwin sought to provide a framework which would incorporate all social, intellectual and moral developments into the operations of nature. ‘The laws of motion therefore are the laws of nature’, Darwin observed in the first page of Zoonomia, before outlining those laws as they related to the human body and mind. The Temple of Nature sketched the progressive operations of these laws of motion from the first appearance of primitive life to the most sophisticated technological and moral achievements of Darwin's society.

Darwin's project was unique. For him, the verification of the organic unity of mind and nature through a science of life offered the only possible solution to the epistemological dilemmas plaguing eighteenth-century natural philosophy and poetry. The reaction to Darwin's solution was typified by the Edinburgh Review's charge that one of his most serious errors in The Temple of Nature ‘arises from constantly blending and confounding together the two distinct sciences of matter and mind’.⁷⁰ The Newtonian version of Descartes's duality was too firmly entrenched to be shaken by Darwin's gropings towards a science of life.

The foregoing discussions show how distinctive was Darwin's poetic handling of scientific and technological themes. His juxtaposition of descriptions of inventions with poetic portraits of the vegetable world in The Loves of the Plants was not anomalous or bizarre. This striking move paralleled the life and experience of plants with human life, experiences and perpetuation through technology. For Darwin, the loves of plants and the achievements of eighteenth-century science and technology were two equally important aspects of the operations of nature.

FUTURE TECHNOLOGY

Darwin was not merely interested in the past and present, he was also excitedly peering into the future in both his major poetic works. He speculated about flying chariots, speeding cars (powered by steam), methods of controlling and altering climates, and submarines. These speculations can be divided into two categories. First, some of Darwin's suggestions were based on possible extensions of industrial processes already in use in Britain. He commented on how the industrial production of gunpowder might be used to power machinery, and he wondered if Edgworth's automaton could be used as a hygrometer.⁷¹ His second type of suggestion regarding future technology was based on possible extensions or imitations of various natural processes. He proposed, for example, a submarine which would use mechanisms similar to those found on fish fins, to help propel the vessel. Similarly, he speculated that an alternative source of sugar might be found in fossil or animal materials since sugar production was one of the functions of animal life.⁷² This storming of imaginative barriers in expectations about future technology involved both industrial and natural processes; his faith was that both were fundamentally the same.

DARWIN'S JUXTAPOSITION OF MYTH, CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGICAL DREAMS

Darwin has been described as ‘the first English poet to interpret modern science’.⁷³ His poetry uniquely incorporated an exploration of myth, a review of the accomplishments of science, and reveries about technological progress. It represented an early and important perception of the relationship between myth and technology.

The implications of this perception can be gauged by relating it to Ernest Tuveson's opinion that, in eighteenth-century Britain, imagination came to be regarded as the ‘means of grace’, in a cosmology in which that faculty mediated between humanity and nature.⁷⁴ This framework was secularised during the century as attention became focused more exclusively on nature itself, rather than on nature only as a means to God.

Darwin transformed this world-view even further. For him, the link between past myth, present science and technology, and future technology was the human imagination. He led his readers on a three-dimensional exploration of the possibilities of human imagination. In the terms of Tuveson's model, imagination was still the ‘means of grace’ for Darwin. However, it was brought into the service of science, and salvation was redefined in Darwin's cosmology as technological progress. Hence, the entire fabric of eighteenth-century Natural Theology was secularised. Furthermore, through this use of imagination, humanity acquired knowledge, not only of a divinely constructed external nature, but also of its own nature and power. This transformation of Natural Theology was the culmination of the merger of humanity, nature and God described above.

William Blake also inverted the Natural Theology tradition. He did so by critical juxtaposition in religious dramas of mythical characters and the concepts of modern science. While Darwin wished to invoke the imagination on behalf of science, Blake wanted to rescue it from both natural philosophy and Natural Theology. As Donald Ault puts it: ‘For Blake, the redemption of the individual is possible …, only if nature parodies the Imagination’.⁷⁵ The imagination, not science, took primacy for Blake. While he set out with the same goal as Darwin (the increase of human power), he did so by turning the human vision inwards on the powers of the imagination rather than outwards on its powers within nature:

I rest not from my great task!
To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes
Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought, into Eternity
Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination.(76)

The distinction between these two transformations stemmed from two different attitudes towards technology. Darwin regarded science and technology as expressions of human creativity and power. Indeed, they were the root of the power of the new industrialists and scientists in the Midlands. The achievements of science and the triumphs of technology (like the myths of previous civilisations) were the symbols of power. For Blake, eighteenth-century natural philosophy and the beginnings of industrialisation threatened the human imagination. In fact, in his perspective, they did threaten both the lives and the life styles of the industrial workforce. The tangible signs of industry, the ‘Satanic Mills’, were not symbols of power, but harbingers of destruction for Blake. Blake and Darwin were standing opposite each other at the poles of the different class experiences which constituted the Industrial Revolution in Britain.

With his secular cosmology and strong sense of human potency, Darwin in his poetry and aesthetics celebrated a new industrial humanity. He suggested that, by using science, humanity could reclaim its past, control its present and improve its future. This vision was exhilarating. Nevertheless, the potentialities of industrial and scientific change could be assessed from a very different vantage point. Darwin's writings inspired a decidedly more negative exploration of these potentialities which appeared in 1818. The humanly-created new ‘Adam’ (the monster) of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was both the symbol and negative image of Darwin's vision.⁷⁷ This ‘Adam’ was the ultimate product of the powers unleashed in the new era, representing the human power even to create new life; but he also represented the destructive capacities of the new age, a possibility which Darwin did not countenance. The specific experience of the industrialists and scientists of the Midlands was transcribed within Darwin's poetry into a generalised cultural optimism and secularisation. The leading spokesman for Natural Theology, William Paley, recognised that it could only be rescued if God could be shown to be a more impressive producer than the new industrialists. Hence, from Paley to the Bridgewater Treatises, Natural Theology studied the results of divine production.⁷⁸

Despite its generalised cultural expression, Darwin's experience of and reaction to industrialisation were far from universal. Blake's presentation of science as a threat to the imagination was the cultural alternative to Darwin's view. He, in contrast to Darwin, spoke for those for whom industrialisation meant less, not greater, power.

Notes

1. M. Horkheimer and T. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, J. Cumming (trans.), New York, 1972, p. 27.

2. E. L. Tuveson, The Imagination as a Means of Grace: Locke and the Aesthetics of Romanticism, Berkeley, 1960.

3. A. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 3rd edn, Edinburgh, 1780, p. 143.

4. M. Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination, A Poem. In Three Books, London, 1744, p. 5.

5. For an interesting discussion of the background in eighteenth-century physiology to Darwin's work, see R. Smith, ‘The background of physiological psychology in natural philosophy’, History of Science, XI, 1973, pp. 75-123.

6. I. Newton, Opticks, or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light, first published 1704, 4th edn, London, 1730.

7. G. Berkeley, An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, Dublin, 1709.

8. M. H. Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse: Newton's Opticks and Eighteenth Century Poets, Princeton, 1946.

9. J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in Four Books, 5th edn, London, 1706, p. 73.

10. J. Addison, ‘On the Pleasures of the Imagination’, in The Spectator with a Biographical and Critical Preface and Explanatory Notes, III, London, 1854, p. 269.

11. P. M. Spacks, The Poetry of Vision: Five Eighteenth-Century Poets, Cambridge, Mass., 1967, p. 46.

12. See J. H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray, Chicago, 1958.

13. W. Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape, London, 1792, p. 3. See also W. J. Hipple, The Beautiful, the Sublime and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory, Carbondale, Illinois, 1957.

14. See R. Paulson, ‘The pictorial circuit and related structures in eighteenth-century England’, in P. Hughes and D. Williams (eds.), The Varied Pattern: Studies in the Eighteenth Century, Toronto, 1971, pp. 165-87.

15. S. Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols, London, 1755. …

16. See W. P. Jones, ‘The ideas of the limitations of science prior to Blake’, Studies in English Literature, I, 1961, pp. 97-114; H. Petit, ‘The limits of reason as a literary theme in the English Enlightenment’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, XXVI, 1963, pp. 1307-19.

17. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, London, 1974.

18. E. Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, Montrose, 1803, p. 195.

19. A. Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, London, 1790, p. 91.

20. Edinburgh Review or Critical Journal, II, July 1803, p. 502.

21. S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketch of My Literary Life and Opinions, London, 1817, I, p. 107.

22. D. Ault, Visionary Physics: Blake's Response to Newton, London, 1974, p. 50.

23. Ault, Visionary Physics, p. 50.

24. W. Blake, ‘Milton’, written and etched 1804-8, in G. Keynes (ed.), William Blake: Complete Writings with Variant Readings, London, 1972, p. 497, lines 21-7.

25. R. Knight, The Progress of Civil Society: A Didactic Poem in Six Books, London, 1796, p. 27, lines 5-12.

26. In an earlier letter Darwin claimed that he hated war. He was particularly opposed to the prospect of war with France. Nevertheless, war is given a function in his vision of the development of the natural world. It might be that Darwin came to this functional view later in his life or that he was quite simply inconsistent in these matters. What is perhaps more significant is that others could find justification for wars in Darwin's naturalistic explanation. See letters to Charles F. Greville, 12 December, 1778; William Hayley, 21 January, 1795; nos. 78j, 95a in King-Hele (ed.), Letters, pp. 94-5, 274-5.

27. The pathetic fallacy is the ‘attribution of human feeling to the natural world’. See J. Miles, Pathetic Fallacy in the Nineteenth Century: A Study of Changing Relations Between Object and Emotion, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1942. See also pp. 41-3 below.

28. T. R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population; or, A View of its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness; with an Inquiry into our Prospects Respecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the Evils which it Occasions, London, 1803, p. 531.

29. Mary Douglas argues: ‘Telling each other that … it is against nature … [is] the means by which we adapt our society to its environment, and it to ourselves’, ‘Environments at risk’, Times Literary Supplement, no. 3583, 30 October, 1970, p. 1275. See also: M. Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, London, 1970; M. Douglas (ed.), Rules and Meanings: The Anthropology of Everyday Knowledge, Harmondsworth, 1973; R. Williams, ‘Ideas of nature’, in his Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays, London, 1980, pp. 67-85.

30. See A. Flew, Introduction in T. R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population and A Summary View of the Principle of Population, Harmondsworth, 1970, pp. 7-56; R. M. Young, ‘Malthus and the evolutionists: the common context of biological and social theory’, Past and Present, XLIII, 1969, pp. 109-45.

31. W. Blake, ‘Vala or The Four Zoas’, written and revised 1795-1804, in Keynes (ed.), William Blake, p. 323, lines 17-22.

32. See Miles, Pathetic Fallacy; E. R. Wasserman, ‘The inherent values of eighteenth-century personification’, Publications of the Modern Languages Association, LXV, 1950, pp. 435-63.

33. J. Priestley, A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism, London, 1777, p. 247.

34. Regarding the use of machine imagery to depict society in the period 1730-80, see J. Barrell, English Literature in History 1730-80: An Equal, Wide Survey, London, 1983.

35. W. Blake, ‘Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion’, written and etched 1804-20, in Keynes (ed.), William Blake, p. 636, lines 14-20.

36. E. Young, Conjectures on Original Composition, 2nd edn, London, 1759.

37. R. Lonsdale (ed.), The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, London, 1969, p. 93, lines 13-18.

38. T. Gisborne, Walks in a Forest, 2nd edn, London, 1796, p. 10.

39. J. Reynolds, A Discourse, Delivered to the Students of the Royal Academy, on the Distribution of the Prizes Dec. the 10th, 1774, London, 1775, p. 211.

40. Young, Conjectures, p. 49.

41. Coleridge, Biographia, II, pp. 155-6.

42. E. Darwin, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations, London, 1749, I, p. 6.

43. A. Comfort, review of The Body Electric: Patterns of Western Industrial Culture, by Jonathan Benthall, Guardian, 11 March, 1976.

44. R. Barthes, Mythologies, A. Lavers (trans.), St. Albans, 1973, p. 68.

45. See I. Primer, ‘Erasmus Darwin's Temple of Nature: progress, evolution, and the Eleusinian Mysteries’, Journal of the History of Ideas, XXV, 1964, pp. 58-76; R. N. Ross, ‘“To charm thy curious eye”: Erasmus Darwin's poetry at the vestibule of knowledge’, Journal of the History of Ideas, XXXII, 1971, pp. 379-94.

46. Primer, ‘Temple of Nature’, p. 76.

47. Ross, ‘To charm thy curious eye’, p. 382.

48. Ross, ‘To charm thy curious eye’, p. 384. For background on the Eleusinian Mysteries, see G. E. Mylonas, Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries, London, 1961.

49. J. J. Winckelmann, Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, trans. from the German by H. Fuseli, London, 1765.

50. See E. Darwin, The Economy of Vegetation, Additional Note XXII. …

51. Ross, ‘To charm thy curious eye’. For Darwin's reference to Warburton, see The Temple of Nature, Canto I, fn. 137.

52. T. Blackwell, Letters Concerning Mythology, London, 1748, p. vii.

53. Blackwell, Letters, p. 283. For a discussion of the relationship between myth and science during the Enlightenment, see D. Stempel, ‘Angels of reason: science and myth in the Enlightenment’, Journal of the History of Ideas, XXXVI, 1975, pp. 63-78. See The Temple of Nature, Canto I, fn. 137 for Darwin's reference to another eighteenth-century authority on mythology, Jacob Bryant (1715-1804). Bryant stated his purpose as being ‘not to lay science in ruins; but instead of desolating to build up, and to rectify what time has impaired: to divest mythology of every foreign and unmeaning ornament; and to display the truth in its native simplicity’, in his book, A New System, or an Analysis of Ancient Mythology, I, London, 1774, p. xiii.

54. See W. Collins, ‘An Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland, Considered as a Subject of Poetry’, 1749-50, in Lonsdale (ed.), Poems of Gray, Collins, Goldsmith, pp. 492-519; T. Gray: ‘The Descent of Odin. An Ode’, 1761; ‘The Triumphs of Owen’, 1761, in Lonsdale (ed.), Poems of Gray, Collins, Goldsmith, pp. 220-28, 228-33.

55. Lonsdale (ed.), Poems of Gray, Collins, Goldsmith, p. 491, lines 43-4.

56. Lonsdale (ed.), Poems of Gray, Collins, Goldsmith, p. 185, lines 15-18.

57. In H. Brooke, A Collection of the Pieces, London, 1778, I, p. 42, lines 319-22.

58. A. Pope, An Essay on Man, London, 1753, p. 34, lines 31-4.

59. See Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse.

60. J. Thomson, ‘To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton’, in L. Robertson (ed.), The Complete Poetical Works of James Thomson, London, 1908, p. 11, lines 208-12.

61. M. Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination, Bk II, lines 100-120, pp. 51-2.

62. J. Thomson, ‘Ode to Sir Isaac Newton’, in Robertson (ed.), Works of Thomson, p. 439, line 90.

63. D. J. Greene, ‘Smart, Berkeley, the scientists and the poets: a note on eighteenth-century anti-Newtonianism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, XIV, 1953, pp. 327-52.

64. W. Blake, ‘[A Vision of the Last Judgement]’ From the Note-Book for the year 1810, in Keynes (ed.), William Blake, p. 617. The title was given by subsequent editors, not by Blake.

65. Knight, Progress of Civil Society, p. 3, lines 1-8.

66. Knight, Progress of Civil Society, p. 3, lines 15-16.

67. Knight, Progress of Civil Society, p. 50, lines 37-8.

68. Knight, Progress of Civil Society, p. 51, lines 47-50.

69. Knight, Progress of Civil Society, p. 82, lines 188-90.

70. Edinburgh Review or Critical Journal, II, July 1803, p. 499.

71. See Darwin: The Economy of Vegetation, Canto I, fn. 242; The Loves of the Plants, Canto III, fn. 131.

72. See Darwin: The Temple of Nature, Canto II, fn. 373; Canto IV, fn. 66.

73. J. V. Logan, The Poetry and Aesthetics of Erasmus Darwin, Princeton, 1936, p. 147.

74. See Tuveson, The Imagination.

75. Ault, Visionary Physics, p. 30.

76. W. Blake, ‘Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion’, written 1804-20, in Keynes (ed.), William Blake, p. 623, lines 17-20.

77. M. Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, London, 1818. See also: B. R. Pollin, ‘Philosophical and literary sources of Frankenstein’, Comparative Literature, XVII, 1965, pp. 97-108; C. Small, Ariel Like a Harpy: Shelley, Mary and Frankenstein, London, 1972; R. Florescu, with contributions by A. Barbour and M. Cazacu, In Search of Frankenstein, London, 1977.

78. See W. Paley, Natural Theology or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature, London, 1802. The eight ‘Bridgewater Treatises on the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God as Manifested in Creation’ were commissioned by the Earl of Bridgewater and appeared between 1833 and 1836. Written by well-known British figures of the period, the books went through several editions and covered a wide range of scientific topics which were carefully constructed as complementary to theology. For a description of Natural Theology and the Bridgewater Treatises in relationship to the concerns of Erasmus Darwin and his grandson Charles see H. E. Gruber, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity, 2nd edn, London, 1981, p. 57. On the relationship between Natural Theology and science in the early nineteenth century in Britain and the Bridgewater Treatises see also C. C. Gillispie, Genesis and Geology, Cambridge, Mass., 1950, pp. 209-16.