The lines of influence between the poetry and the new science of the eighteenth century have been often studied, usually with the aim of showing how the observations, language, or methods of science are incorporated into poems. My interest here, though, in reading James Thomson's Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton, is not so much in what science does to poetry as in what poetry does to science, since Thomson takes the elegy for Newton as an occasion to define the scientific imagination poetically, and, through the definition of science, to define implicitly the potentials of the poetic imagination. This approach to Thomson's poem allows us to see certain features of Thomson's poetic practice, and it allows us to see the poem as one vehicle for an eighteenth-century mythology of science, a mythology of science which reflects less the empirical methods of science itself than an imagery of light derived from the neoplatonic and Christian traditions of wisdom as "the everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the power of God" (Wisdom of Solomon, 7:26). This paper will investigate three patterns in the Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton which shape this mythology of science. The first of these patterns is the poem's organization as an elegy; the second is a contrast between the scientific and poetic imaginations; and the third is a fabric of allusion by which Thomson identifies Newton with traditional personifications of wisdom.

Thomson's elegy for Newton was published in May, 1727, two months after Newton's death while Thomson, too, was publishing the first versions of The Seasons. The poem celebrates Newton's discoveries in optics and in celestial mechanics, discoveries which represent a new understanding of the nature of creation. The poem, then, is a sustained panegyric which draws from the conventional physico-theology of Thomson's day: it celebrates the wisdom of God revealed in the creation, and its tone approximates a hymn on divine order.

Although there are no textual divisions apart from verse paragraphs, the poem divides into three parts: the first places Newton's discoveries into the context of the darkness and confusion which have impeded man's understanding, comparing Newton's vision with the general condition of man "Clouded in Dust"; the final part discusses the implications of his discoveries and their potential impact on other men. These two parts of the poem are comprised of corresponding verse paragraphs on the futility of temporal achievements and on Britain's progress, on time's effect on man as seen in the tides and on Newton's explanation of the tides, on Newton's astronomy and on the power of the Creator as revealed in the order of the heavens. The middle section of the poem is a long description of the rainbow, the thematic center of the poem, which I will discuss in detail later.

Within this framework, Thomson draws on the conventional imagery of an elegy, and on conventional images of praise for Newton. Like other elegies, the poem contrasts the world of ordinary men and the world made possible by the subject of the poem; the subject himself is a redeemer, bringing men from one world to the other, or at least to a glimpse of the other, in memory, as in life, the subject radiates wisdom down to men from heaven. Closer to his own subject, Thomson draws on an established set of images in praise of Newton. Newton's accomplishments had been represented as light illuminating or piercing through a darkness which obscured nature, showing a new beauty and showing divine order in the world. This set of images is summed up most tersely in Pope's couplet epitaph for Newton—"Nature, and Nature's Laws lay hid in Night. / God said, Let Newton be! and All was Light"—but the same metaphor had been used in Roger Cotes's Preface to the 1726 edition of the Principia, in Edmund Halley's "Ode: To the Illustrious Man Isaac Newton," and in John Norris's earlier praise of the new science. And Thomson chose as his epigraph for Newton a passage from Lucretius originally dedicated to Epicurus: "At all this a kind of godlike delight mixed with shuddering awe comes over me to think that nature by thy power is laid thus visibly open, is thus unveiled on every side."

Thomson, writing the most beautifully articulated celebration of Newton, gave new life to this reservoir of conventional materials. He begins the poem with a question posed as a challenge to the Muses:

Shall the great Soul of NEWTON quit this Earth,
To mingle with his Stars; and every Muse,
Astonish'd into Silence, shun the Weight
Of Honours due to his illustrious Name?

This opening question may be hard to understand. Although Thomson's was the first published elegy, it was clear when Halley wrote in 1686 that Newton was "to the Muses dear." But the subject is a challenge, one which raises a corollary question: what can the Muses say in the face of the Creation revealed to man? This is one of several challenges—including one which Thomson addresses to himself again near the middle of the poem, "in Fancy's lighter Thought, / How shall the Muse then grasp the mighty Theme" (135-36)—and it introduces a double theme in the poem, one a praise of Newton and the other a questioning of the poet's imagination.

The opening lines also introduce a central symbol in Newton's "illustriousness," in the seraphs as "Sons of Light," in the light of the stars. Newton, whose name was intimately associated with his Opticks, is also associated in Thomson's poem with a complex image of light which joins under a common rubric all aspects of the universe—common physical light, the light of the stars, Newton's illustriousness among men, the light of intellect, the light of faith, divine light. This imagery has two immediate implications for Thomson's poem. The first is that all the universe is suffused with light so that light of any one type suggests and "illuminates" light of any other type. The second implication is in Thomson's concentration on Newton's sight, on his "All intellectual Eye" (39), his "measuring Eye" (95), his "well-purg'd penetrative Eye" (73). Through Thomson's characteristic emphasis on verbs and participles this seeing is intensely active, stretching toward and snatching in the stars (61), pursuing comets or beams of light (76, 95), so Newton's science is imaged as movement: "while on this dim Spot, where Mortals toil / Clouded in Dust" (13-14), "he took his ardent Flight / Thro' the blue Infinite" (57-58). The extended analogy of light is not fixed in a hierarchy where the light of intellect, for instance, is greater than that of sensation. It is more like Plotinus' fountain of light, where different levels of creation flow from the divine source and simultaneously flow back into it. Like the neoplatonic universe, that depicted by Thomson (seen by Newton) is one where the laws of the universe are simultaneously immanent in the creation and transcendentally outside of it. Thomson thus establishes a poetic metaphysics where both scientific and poetic intuitions move between the concrete and the abstract, between manifestations and laws, although the contrast between science and poetry also resides in this metaphysics of light.

The imagery of light takes its fullest form in the description of the rainbow, which is the middle segment of the poem, and which brings together the scientific and poetic perceptions of light. This passage moves through the different colors of the spectrum; and it moves through time. The colors of the rainbow take on associations of the changing seasons. The passage moves from Newton's youthful discoveries to his death. It begins with metaphoric sunrise—

The Schools astonish'd stood;…
…At once their pleasing Visions fled,
With the gay Shadows of the Morning mix'd,
When NEWTON rose, our philosophic Sun!
(85-90)

and it ends with the poet, after Newton's death, looking at the colors in the sunset which had been explained by Newton's laws: "flaming RED," "tawny ORANGE," "delicious YELLOW," "all-refreshing GREEN," "the pure BLUE, that swells autumnal Skies,"

The description of the rainbow juxtaposes the scientist's vision of the universe, at the beginning of the passage, with the poet's vision, at the end. The juxtaposition of scientist and poet thus forms a transition from the first part of the elegy, where Newton breaks through the obscurity which had hidden nature, to the second part of the elegy, where Thomson reflects on the value of Newton's discoveries for other men. It also reveals the second organizing pattern in the poem: the contrast between scientific and poetic imaginations.

The first part of the rainbow passage is Thomson's rendering of the scientific method. From physical experiments charming in themselves the scientist educes, collects, and measures the innate properties of things. Thus Newton "Untwisted all the shining robe of Day" (98) and "To the charm'd Eye educ'd the gorgeous Train / Of PARENT-COLOURS" (101-02). This is the procedure Newton describes in his own letter to the Royal Society outlining his projected Opticks. When testing the refraction of a prism he found "it was at first a pleasing divertisement to view the vivid and intense colors produced thereby," but "I then proceeded to examine more critically" the rays of light. In the Principia Newton explained that such a critical examination should follow definite laws. As the first two of four rules for scientific procedure he held that "we are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearance" since "Nature is pleased with simplicity," and then that we should "to the same natural effects…as far as possible assign the same causes" so that the pull of gravity or the reflection of light on earth and on the planets would be attributed to the same causes. These rules are rendered by Thomson in Newton's ability to see "Motion's simple Laws" determining the course of the cosmos. Newton saw "every STAR"

the living Centre each
Of an harmonious System: all combin'd,
And rul'd unerring by that single Power,
Which draws the Stone projected to the Ground.
(64-67)

This set of images creates a particular relationship between the scientist and the poet. Newton's intelligence pursues and penetrates into "Even LIGHT ITSELF" to see the unifying laws, in optics and in physics, which lie behind the manifold appearance of things:

Nor could the darting beam, of Speed immense,
Escape his swift Pursuit, and measuring Eye.
Even LIGHT ITSELF, which every thing displays,
Shone undiscover'd, till his brighter Mind
Untwisted all the shining Robe of Day.
(94-98)

Thomson's image of Newton's method carries with it a kind of appropriation. The stars are "his Stars"; "The Heavens are his own"; "Nature herself / Stood all subdu'd by him, and open laid / Her every latent Glory to his View" (36-38). The idea behind such imagery is simple: by knowing the laws which govern the universe, Newton has dominion over it; while God ordained the laws, Newton has intellectually re-created them. The poet's vision, on the other hand, is not intensive in this way but extensive, seeing the various acts of creation just as it sees the various colors refracted out of white light. The laws of nature known to Newton in their "first great Simplicity" (84) are to the poet an "Infinite Source / Of Beauty" (116-17), of "Effects so various, beautiful, and great" (71), following Addison's conditions for esthetic pleasure. This is the view from Greenwich hill at sunset. Thomson sees the "setting Sun," "shifting Clouds," and the "lovely Heights" whose colors derive from Newton's laws.

The scientist and poet have complementary intuitions of the world. The scientist pushes toward a transcendental unity; the poet catches the profusion of manifest things. According to a comparison Thomson makes at the conclusion of Summer, in The Seasons, nature is

To reason's and to fancy's eye displayed—
The first up-tracing, from the dreary void,
The chain of causes and effects to Him,
The world-producing Essence, who alone
Possesses being, while the last receives
The whole magnificence of heaven and earth,
And every beauty, delicate or bold,
Obvious or more remote, with livelier sense,
Diffusive painted on the rapid mind.
(Summer, 1744-52)

Furthermore, the materials of science, beginning with minute particulars and leading to the most comprehensive abstractions, mark the boundaries of poetic language. To clarify this point, though, I must step momentarily outside of the poem dedicated to Newton to consider The Seasons.

In Spring, too, Thomson implicitly contrasts the scientific and poetic intuitions of the world through the image of the rainbow. The profusion of spring flowers and the rainbow have the same form. The rainbow is a "various twine of light" which "Shoots up immense; and every hue unfolds" ("Spring," 211, 205); the flowers are "a twining mass of tubes" which "the vernal sun awakes" and through which "lively fermentation mounting spreads / All this innumerous-coloured scene of things" (Spring, 566, 567, 570-71). But where Newton could "unfold / The various twine of light," "who [can] pierce / With vision pure into these secret stores / Of health and life and joy?" ("Spring," 234-36). If the rainbow is a test of the scientist, "this innumerous-coloured scene of things" is a test of the poet since it escapes categorization and eludes completely the resources of language: "Ah, what shall language do? ah, where find words / Tinged with so many colours" (Spring, 475-76). Here are "Infinite numbers, delicacies, smells, / With hues on hues expression cannot paint" (Spring, 553-54).

The sheer amplitude of the world's effects, then is one limit of poetic language. But this is compensated for because the poet participates in phenomena both physically and by an act of imagination that replicates their profusion. Thomson catches "the landscape, gliding swift / Athwart imagination's vivid eye," "Ten thousand wandering images of things" (Spring, 458-59, 463). When he walks through the fields with his Amanda the abstract phrasing of "the living herbs, profusely wild" blossoms into a forty-line catalogue of flowers filling "the finished garden" (Spring, 222, 516). The whole landscape is cast through the eye of the poet and through his struggling imagination: "Snatched through the verdant maze, the hurried eye / Distracted wanders" (518-19).

The universal, unifying order is the second limit of poetic language. In Summer Thomson explains this boundary, speaking first of the sun and then of God:

This limitation is also compensated for, by the poet's art of metaphor and allusion. In Spring, the rainfall which stimulates the growth of flowers becomes a figure of the Deluge, since it reminds Thomson of the golden age of cooperative love which preceded the Flood and the age of rapine which has followed it; in Summer, Thomson draws on the well-established metaphor of the sun as a sensory image of God, so that echoes of theological speculations lie behind the poetry. And, returning to the elegy for Newton, this power of metaphor brings the methods of science into our moral experience by calling out secondary meanings, the echoes of fallen man, in such phrases as "this dim Spot, where Mortals toil / Clouded in Dust."

In addition to the symmetrical outline, and in addition to the central contrast between scientific and poetic intuitions, Thomson's poem is organized according to a fabric of allusion, the third pattern unifying the poem and developing Thomson's mythology of science. It works in various ways: a pattern of allusions links the first and third parts of the poem; it places Newton in a unique position in the world as a new Adam; and it brings to bear on Newton's life a rich set of associations accumulated around the imagery of light.

The difference between the first and third parts of the poem lies in a realigning of man's relationship to nature, through the agency of Newton's science. In the fifth paragraph, for example, the "wandering" moon and rising and falling tides are images of time passing—a time which is purposeless and resistless, being either destructive "heaving on the broken Rocks," or idle, leaving "A yellow Waste of idle Sands behind" (53, 56). In the corresponding paragraph in the final part of the poem, the "TIDE OF TIME" is not purposeless but flows "To vast Eternity's unbounded Sea" (125-26): the waters of time move toward eternity; they are lighted though their origin is in darkness; they are channeled and marked with beacons for historians trying to make the course of human events intelligible.

Newton's realignment of man's relationship to the cosmos means, in effect, a re-creation of the world. The laws of creation existed before Newton discerned them, but his vision qualitatively changed man's conception of them from chaos to cosmos. Newton has intellectually re-created these laws, and in this re-creation stands as a type of Adam: in his account of Newton's science, Thomson emphasizes Newton's discoveries regarding light, astronomy, and the tides—the first elements of creation in Genesis; and Newton penetrates into the intrinsic nature of these things with an Adam-like intuition:

The echoes of fallen man in the first lines of this paragraph are deafening ("erring Man," "oft disgrac'd," "The Pride of Schools"), but Newton stands in the midst of confusion and ignorance as a type of Adam who "saw at last the SYSTEM dawn, / And shine, of all his Race, on him alone":

Newton's double role in Thomson's poem, as a kind of co-creator and as a figure of Adam, links Newton (within Thomson's mythology of science) to traditional images of wisdom, and it links him to the most important set of metaphors in the poem, those entailed in the imagery of light. The elegy for Newton comes near the end of a long tradition of imagery combining light, intuitive knowledge, and immediate vision. At the center of this constellation of images is the figure of wisdom, personified as a demiurge, a co-creator with God, giving order to the universe. This personification derives from the demi-urge of Plato's Timaeus, from the Hebraic Wisdom books of the Apocrypha, and from the neoplatonic strain in Christianity: "Wisdom reacheth from one end to another mightily: and sweetly doth she order all things" (Wisdom of Solomon, 8:1). Because Wisdom is the co-creator, a figure of beneficent order, and God's "only begotten" in the Hebraic tradition, the Christian tradition considered Christ to be the incarnation of Wisdom as divine grace working in the world, although their formal derivation differs. Neoplatonic Christianity distinguished sapientia increata, God's own wisdom, equal and co-eternal with him, from sapientia creata, which resulted from God's contemplation of himself. Both differ radically from any form of human knowledge or reason, but sapientia creata is a spiritual and moral ability to conceive of and apprehend all being which may be given to man by grace—although preternatural Adam was supposed to have intrinsically possessed this kind of immediate understanding. It is this Wisdom which had been personified in the Apocrypha.

Wisdom is imaged as perpetual light. Augustine in the Confessions works out the image this way: "It means created wisdom, that intellectual nature which is light because it contemplates the Light…. But there is as great a difference between the Wisdom, which creates and the wisdom which is created as between the Light which enlightens and light which receives its brilliance by reflection…. "The Wisdom of Solomon uses the same image: "For she is the brightness of the everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the power of God, and the image of his goodness" (7:26). The Wisdom of Solomon also elaborates:

7:17. For [God] hath given me certain knowledge of the things that are, namely to know how the world was made, and the operation of elements: 18. The beginning, ending and midst of the times: the alterations of the turning of the sun, and the change of seasons: 19. The circuits of years, and the positions of stars…. 21. And all such things as are either secret or manifest, them I know. 22. For wisdom, which is the worker of all things, taught me: for in her is an understanding spirit… 23. Kind to man, stedfast, sure, free from care, having all power, overseeing all things, and going through all understanding, pure, and most subtil, spirits.

This tradition of a personified Wisdom, or Sophia, or Sapientia, persisted well into the seventeenth century in England. Its imagery lies behind Milton's "Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heav'n first-born" (Paradise Lost, III, 1), and it is represented clearly in the writings of the Cambridge Platonists. John Smith, for example, speaks of "Reason in man being Lumen de Lumine, a Light flowing from the Fountain and Father of Lights," and speaks of Solomon as "one of her Eldest Sons of Wisdom, alwaies standing up and calling her blessed: his Heart was both enlarged and fill'd with the pure influence of her beams, and therefore was perpetually adoring that Sun which gave him light." For the Platonists, wisdom is an intuition which pierces to the truth of things; it is light contemplating the Light. The wisdom of God manifested in the works of the creation is one favorite theme of eighteenth-century theodicies (the phrase itself forms the title for John Ray's book on nature—1691), and the personification of wisdom is preserved in Richard Blackmore's Creation (1715) and in his poem "A Hymn to the Light of the World" (1703):

This is the imagery that Thomson draws on when, in the poem for Newton, he writes:

O unprofuse Magnificence divine! Ï
O Wisdom truly perfect! thus to call
From a few Causes such a Scheme of Things,
Effects so various, beautiful, and great,
An Universe compleat! And Ï belov'd
Of Heaven! whose well-purg'd penetrative Eye,
The mystic Veil transpiercing, inly scan'd
The rising, moving, wide-establish'd Frame.
(68-75)

And it is an imagery that Thomson recalls again in Summer, where he speaks of Newton as "pure intelligence, whom God / To mortals lent to trace his boundless works / From laws sublimely simple" (Summer, 1560-62).

The constellation of imagery remains in several forms for Thomson to use in the elegy for Newton: it persists in the conventions of the elegy and in the conventions of praise from which Thomson draws his portrait of Newton, and it persists in a rich tradition of imagery in poetry and philosophy linking light with intuition. This established imagery applies with unique appropriateness to Newton, and Thomson takes advantage of this fact in order to shape our understanding of a new phenomenon—the phenomenon of the scientific consciousness—by bringing Newton's life into the sphere of associations accumulated around the figure of wisdom: Thomson uses the older mythology of wisdom to give shape to the newer mythology of science. Newton's studies in celestial physics and in the properties of light (and still more the moral qualities attributed to wisdom) draw together Thomson's poem and the Biblical personification: Newton is an image of wisdom, a wisdom which is preternatural, creative, and an agent of God in the world.

Seeing Newton according to the image of wisdom clarifies the moral shift between the first and last parts of Thomson's poem, and clarifies both the personal and public benefits Thomson attributes to Newton.

Newton, in life, enjoyed a serenity and spiritual well-being which resulted from seeing the divine perfection behind the harmony of physical laws, and in these moral qualities he acted as a prism refracting wisdom into varied virtues which other men can see. Thus Thomson urges John Conduitt (the husband of Newton's niece) to write Newton's biography while his heart "glows with all the recollected Sage" (161). Even after death Newton enjoys "grateful Adoration, for that Light / So plenteous ray'd into thy Mind below, / From LIGHT HIMSELF" (196-98). This moral refraction is a central image in Thomson's elegies, as in his poem "On the Death of Mr. William Aikman, the Painter":

Viewed round and round, as lucid diamonds throw
Still as you turn them a revolving glow,
So did his mind reflect with secret ray
In various virtues heaven's internal day.
(9-12)

The relationship here is precisely that between the scientist and the poet: the one seeing the unified light, the other seeing the refracted beauties.

The radiance of Newton's life also helps explain the public benefits which Thomson attributes to Newton, and these benefits lead back to the theme of time. The fourth paragraph of "Newton" compares his accomplishments to the ephemeral "Triumphs of old GREECE and ROME" (31), and the final paragraph picks up the comparison: "Ye mouldering Stones … what Grandeur can ye boast / While NEWTON lifts his Column to the Skies, / Beyond the Waste of Time" (174, 179-81). Thomson asks Newton from his celestial position to "Exalt the Spirit of a downward World" (200) and be Britain's presiding genius

While in Expectance of the second Life,
When Time shall be no more, thy sacred Dust
Sleeps with her Kings, and dignifies the Scene.
(207-09)

Newton's vision, like the vision granted by wisdom, transcends mutability: it channels time; it is a timeless monument. But this work of wisdom struggles against the ruin of time. According to the Wisdom of Solomon, wisdom "is more beautiful than the sun, and above all the order of the stars: being compared with the light, she is found before it. For after this cometh night: but vice shall not prevail against wisdom" (7:29-30). For Augustine the relationship is more ambiguous: wisdom is outside of time, "Yet mutability is inherent in it, and it would grow dark and cold unless, by clinging to [God] with all the strength of its love, it drew warmth and light from [Him] like a moon that never wanes." This way in which wisdom is immortal only in its dependence on the Light applies to Thomson's image of Newton. Thomson's final vision is apocalyptic: the second kingdom is without time; Newton, as a figure of wisdom, is both inside and outside of time. But his vision is not immutable; it is not the light which enlightens but the light which "receives its brilliance by reflection." Even if man is made a little lower than the angels, as the eighth Psalm has it, so that he may contemplate the work of God's hands, he remains man; Newton, like the author of the Wisdom of Solomon, is "a mortal man, like to all, and the offspring of him that was made of earth" (7:1). Only if Newton remains immortal in the memory of men so that men may see the beauty of his laws, as the poet does on Greenwich hill, only if men come out of their chaos into an ordered existence such as that Newton had seen in the whole cosmos, will night not follow the day of Newton's life.

Two conclusions may be drawn from this reading of Thomson's Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton. First, the poem for Newton illustrates poetic patterns which reoccur in Thomson's other poems. Within the last fifteen years, critics have shown us much about ways in which Thomson's poems convey a system of moral tensions through the details of description. Thomson's poetic structures are based both on processes (the processes of nature and of consciousness), and on contrasts (such as those between expansion and contraction or between ascent and descent). Thomson in The Seasons, for example, teaches his readers to see not states but processes of nature which range in scale from the great changes in the seasons to the minute, invisible movements by which plants grow or frost seals over a river. Accompanying the processes of nature are the movements of consciousness by which human beings, through reason and through imagination, integrate their awareness of nature and rise from sensation to intellection to spiritual apprehension. We can see these processes of meditation to be represented, for example, in Thomson's praise of Philosophy in Summer (lines 1709-1805) or in his praise of Lyttleton in Spring (lines 895-933).

Not the least of the movements of consciousness is the movement of the poet's own imagination, as his imaginative eye moves through the scene presented to it. So, one structuring principle in Thomson's poetry is that of interlocking chains of association, chains which take the form of a meditative cycle, moving from observations of nature, to moral reflections, to psalm-like passages of praise. But in addition to following these processes of association, Thomson's poetry is also structured according to systematic contrasts which are based on a poetic architecture—an architecture of placement and of allusion. Ralph Cohen, for one, has seen Thomson to be working out the ambiguities of human nature in natural descriptions because these descriptions are organized according to contrasting forces and because they recall older traditions of moral imagery. Cohen has seen Thomson's poetry as typically Augustan in "sharing with the major poetry of the period an awareness of the valued past, the corruption of this past in the present, the limited nature of human life, and the faith that a better life exists beyond 'this dark State.'" Such a pattern of contrasts defines the structure of the elegy for Newton. In fact, the architectural structure of Thomson's poetry may be easier to see in a short poem such as Newton (which is slightly over 200 lines long) than in the more intricate fabric of The Seasons. The poem establishes a symmetrical contrast between the state of man's understanding before Newton's vision and the state of our understanding following that vision; Thomson places himself at a dividing point in man's moral history, at a dividing point between one vision of the world and another (although he reminds us that this new vision is still bound to time and change); and he gives moral weight to Newton's new science by associating it with older traditions of wisdom.

The second conclusion to be drawn from this reading of Thomson's elegy for Newton is that Thomson uses the poem to give shape to a mythology of science, a mythology which is not Thomson's alone, but one which is shared by most other commentators on the new science. This mythology is based in part on a psychology of science rising in meditative steps from phenomena to God. More importantly, it is based on an older and more established idea of man's wisdom. Thomson uses the imagery of this tradition—he uses the metaphoric resources of poetry—to shape our perception of the new science, so that while the actual discoveries of science may elude poetry, poetry in another way comprehends science by giving it an imaginative form.

Thomson's mythology of science also reveals what was certainly for him a clearly held idea of the poetic imagination. Science and poetry are opposites, the one revealing the unity of natural laws, and the other tracing a spectrum of sensation. But in another respect they are more nearly parallel than contrasting, since the scientists's response to the world is analogous to the poet's esthetic response. Although published in 1748, twenty years after Thomson's poem, Colin Maclaurin's Account of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophical Discoveries exemplifies an attitude toward science prevalent since the beginning of the century. Science is valued not only for its knowledge but also for the psychological responses it inspires. Along with other reactions, "the unexhausted beauty and variety of things makes natural philosophy ever agreeable, new and surprizing," and the scientist "while he contemplates and admires so excellent a system, cannot but be himself excited and animated to correspond with the general harmony of nature." Furthermore, extending knowledge beyond sensation is explained by Maclaurin specifically as an act of "a well regulated imagination." Similarly, the poet's response to the world is analogous to the scientist's. As we see in Thomson's own poems, poetry, like science, joins sensation to intellection, and moves from sensory things to the sublime adoration of Thomson's psalm-like passages. "The atmosphere of these lines," Patricia Meyer Spacks has said of one such passage from The Seasons, "is far from the rationalism of a Newtonian thinker, despite the fact that their theme is the universal order which Newton had so distinctly revealed." The atmosphere is different from Newtonian rationalism, but not far from it: the atmosphere of Thomson's poetry is the other side of Newtonian rationalism. What such passages show us is that the Newtonian universe helps Thomson to define his poetry, and that the metaphors of poetry help to define science, because both are a part of one imaginative enterprise.