rowanpacker

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Since the study of science (or natural philosophy) was decoupled from the study of theology, it has grown increasingly distant too from the arts, and from artistic ways of thinking. The cold rationality of science and its desire for cohesion and simplicity, causality and objectivity put it ever at odds with those more subjective aspects of life. Never was this conflict felt so strongly as during the late 18th and early 19th century by the Romantics; and of the Romantics, by none so strongly as William Blake. Of Blake's many monotypes, perhaps the one most blatantly critical of the sciences is his Newton.

The publication, in 1687, of Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, or Principia, was the culminating act of the scientific revolution of the previous two centuries, and many consider it the seminal work in the intellectual history of modern scientific thought. It described nature, for the first time, through a series of simple mathematical axioms linked, to the joy of the rationalist, irreconcilably by logic. And to the joy also of the empiricist, Newton’s laws of mechanics agreed almost universally with observations of the heavenly bodies. At the heart of the work was a dogmatic realism: the notion of an objective (and mathematical) reality, entirely independent of perception, a notion which would remain essentially untouched until the early 20th century. The goal of natural philosophy in the ensuing era of Enlightenment, led by the example set in Principia, became to uncover this mathematical reality, to describe the mathematical laws which underpin all natural processes. It is important here to stress the use of the word ‘uncover’. It was, and still is though to a lesser extent, the prevailing belief that natural philosophy was discovering something innately true about the universe, not that it was imposing mathematical structure on a Nature which was governed by some other unknown system of laws.

William Blake (1757-1827) belonged to the movement of Romantic poets and visual artists. He had, even by Romantic standards, a strenuous relationship with the Enlightenment philosophy which marked the second of the two major intellectual schools of his time. He was critical of religion in the same way Enlightenment thinkers were, although here again he took things a bit further than his fellows, inventing his own cosmology of satirical religious figures, telling their stories in volumes of biblical parody. In almost every other respect though, his opinions differed from those of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment ideals of objectivity, rationality and empiricism were in harsh conflict with the more emotional and intuitive beliefs of romanticism. The Cartesian division of the soul and the external world (res cogitans, res extensa) compounded in Newton’s Principia cut harshly into the film of passion and reverence through which the Romantics viewed the world. The apparently objective nature of reality, and the reduction of the conscious experience to purely physical processes was at clear odds with Romantic ideals of beauty as more than form. Newton, then, was to Blake’s mind an icon of Enlightenment thinking, a vital figure in its intellectual history. His simple mechanical laws were the crowning achievement of a movement which attempted to simplify the human experience to little more than mathematical formalism. There was no beauty to be found in the symmetries and resonances that characterised the external universe, nor in the pursuit of such things.

Blake’s Newton is depicted as a classical nude, contorted in the style of Michelangelo and bearing no similarity to the real man. He would appear then to be a divine figure, one of the characters in Blake’s personal religion. Where in the latter Blake aims to satirise the close-mindedness of religion, here he takes aim at the close-mindedness of science. A scroll, or perhaps a roll of fabric, appears to hang down from his head. This is objective reality unfurling at his feet beneath his critical gaze, upon which he makes clear geometric marks with a compass. That the fabric of reality extends from his head might represent the chain of scientific logic which ascribes objectivity not only to the external world, but to the conscious experience. Conversely, it could mean to imply, cynically, that no such division between the soul and reality as that of Descartes’ can be made. Absorbed in his science, Newton is oblivious to the animal and plant life that clings to the rock behind him; life which seems caught in an invisible current by which the scroll itself is unaffected. This is the subjective reality of Blake and the Romantics. The sparse, hostile appearance of this life is perhaps a call to find beauty through a reverence of nature for natures sake, abandoning the notion of beauty as an affair of form. More likely, it is meant to represent the disappearance of the natural world as a result of the industrialisation which marked the late 18th and early 19th centuries through which Blake lived. A disappearance which is going entirely unnoticed by Newton.

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Rejected as a bit of a nutter in his lifetime, I like to think that Blake would find some solace in seeing how far departed physics is these days from the laws of Newton. In light of quantum theory, it is no longer possible to make any clear distinction between objective reality and our own perception, the very words we use to describe either have lost their meaning in modern science. It certainly can’t be said that the results of physical processes are all independent of observation. The neat, external mathematical reality revered by enlightenment thinkers would also appear, increasingly, to be false. The uncertainty inherent in quantum mechanics suggests an unavoidable incoherence in the structure of the universe, and it is clear that even our most successful physical models are approximations of something bigger. It would appear there is something strange going on in nature which our current mathematics is unable to grasp. Unfortunately, any comfort he took from this would of course be outweighed by his horror at how far the natural world he held so dear has been degraded, he was definitely right about that as well in hindsight.

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If one had to choose a single painting which best represents the effect the sciences had on the popular psyche in the latter half of the 19th century, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to pick William Dyce’s Pegwell Bay, Kent – a Recollection of October 5th 1858. The painting depicts a family exploring the rock pools left by the receding tide, a backdrop of chalk cliffs beneath a vast sky, tinted slightly by the ochres of a setting sun. This otherwise ordinary scene gains a much greater significance when considered in the context of the scientific advancements of the time. Less than a year earlier Charles Darwin had published his foundational work On the Origin of Species, while at the same time geologists such as Charles Lyell were putting forward groundbreaking theories on geological formation. At the heart of both of these emerging fields was the suggestion that the Earth was almost incomprehensibly old. How must it have felt to be a human, previously stood amongst the shallow ripples of ordinary life, to be cast adrift on the vast tides of geological time? How could one hope to reconcile the implications of evolution with their religious beliefs? And what of the promises of eternity on which they had staked their life? An eternity which had at once adopted an earthly element. With this in mind it is hard not to imagine one sees fossils emerging from the carefully rendered strata of those white chalk cliffs, artifacts of a lost time, or to perceive a loss in the receding waves. The loss of what it is hard to say. An innocence perhaps. A comforting simplicity of thought. A lie. But such is the nature of change that even an exciting unknown is often rejected in preference for a familiar ignorance.

A minor feature in the painting is the father figure who stands with his back to his family, looking up to the sky. A faint white streak is Donati’s comet, which was visible in the southern sky at the date of the painting. Here is a reminder not only of the vast aeons of time, but of the perhaps yet more incomprehensible scale of our universe, which by the mid 19th century was beginning to be better understood. The viewers eye is ultimately drawn to this lone figure, who stands conscious for the first time of his position in the present moment as a mere flicker in the flame of antiquity, gazing up (down) into the unfathomable depths of the cosmos. Stood looking out over the waves, an educated member of Victorian society, one can imagine there runs through his mind the words of Lord Tennyson, writing almost a decade earlier:

If e'er when faith had fallen asleep, I hear a voice 'believe no more' And heard an ever-breaking shore That tumbled in the Godless deep, (In Memoriam A.H.H., 1850)

Whether this figure was ever able, as Tennyson was, to reconcile his faith with the new science of his age we cannot be sure. What is certain is that Dyce’s painting is a masterpiece of social commentary, finely perceptive to the hairline fractures which were beginning to form in the foundations of genteel society, a quiet yet disquieting image of a new and inevitable moment of being.