The wonders of science in a Romantic age.

BY ROGER KIMBALL

'Romantic science"? Is that not a confusion, almost an oxymoron? Most of us, if we think of "Romanticism" and "science" at the same moment, imagine opposing impulses or remote realms of thought. We may remember Wordsworth's warning, from "The Tables Turned" (1798), that "our meddling intellect / Misshapes the beauteous forms of things: -- / We murder to dissect."

But in "The Age of Wonder," Richard Holmes aims to debunk the popular image ("myth" is his word) that the Romantic era was inherently "anti-scientific." Indeed, he argues, it was an era in which science was remarkably transformed by the spirit of the age.

Mr. Holmes is certainly the man to undertake this intellectual salvage operation. His two-volume biography of Coleridge (1989, 1998) made that opium-besotted sage seem almost lucid, while his biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1974) managed to bring that narcissist to life without discounting the human wreckage he deposited around him throughout his short life.

The Age of Wonder" attempts something even more ambitious. Mr. Holmes endeavors to dramatize how the "Romantic Generation" -- bracketed by Capt. James Cook's first voyage around the world in 1768 and Darwin's embarkation for the Galapagos Islands in 1831 -- achieved what amounted to a "second scientific revolution" (Coleridge's term), forever altering the course of scientific investigation.

Romanticism for Mr. Holmes is not just about lyric poetry, swooning love of nature, or emotional excess. Romanticism is also inextricably bound up with man's passionate questing after truth. The Romantics saw science as an intellectual and moral adventure -- the thirsting for knowledge at any cost. Not for nothing was the demonic figure of Faust a Romantic archetype: Romantic science was risky business, the laboratory a moral theater, not a warren of cubicles. The solitary genius, not the patient collaborator, typified the period's image of what a scientist might be. Similarly, Romantic science put a premium on epiphany -- what Mr. Holmes calls the "Eureka moment."

Mr. Holmes perhaps overstates the discontinuity between "Romantic science" and what came before and after, but he is right to stress the novel tone that insinuated itself into the project of science at the end of the 18th century. And he is right to seize the expeditions of discovery as chronological markers. It was a moment in which bold explorations -- cosmological as well as geographical -- changed our understanding of the world.