---
title: "Romanticism in science"
chunk: 1/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism_in_science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:12:37.034889+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

19th-century science was greatly influenced by Romanticism (or the Age of Reflection, c. 1800–1840), an intellectual movement that originated in Western Europe as a counter-movement to the late-18th-century Enlightenment.  Romanticism incorporated many fields of study, including politics, the arts, and the humanities.

In contrast to the Enlightenment's mechanistic natural philosophy, European scientists of the Romantic period held that observing nature implied understanding the self and that knowledge of nature "should not be obtained by force".  They felt that the Enlightenment had encouraged the abuse of the sciences, and they sought to advance a new way to increase scientific knowledge, one that they felt would be more beneficial not only to mankind but to nature as well.
Romanticism advanced a number of themes: it promoted anti-reductionism (that the whole is more valuable than the parts alone) and epistemological optimism (man was connected to nature), and encouraged creativity, experience, and genius. It also emphasized the scientist's role in scientific discovery, holding that acquiring knowledge of nature meant understanding man as well; therefore, these scientists placed a high importance on respect for nature.
Romanticism declined beginning around 1840 as a new movement, positivism, took hold of intellectuals, and lasted until about 1880.  As with the intellectuals who earlier had become disenchanted with the Enlightenment and had sought a new approach to science, people now lost interest in Romanticism and sought to study science using a stricter process.

== Romantic science vs. Enlightenment science ==
As the Enlightenment had a firm hold in France during the last decades of the 18th century, the Romantic view on science was a movement that flourished in Great Britain and especially Germany in the first half of the 19th century.  Both sought to increase individual and cultural self-understanding by recognizing the limits in human knowledge through the study of nature and the intellectual capacities of man.  The Romantic movement, however, resulted as an increasing dislike by many intellectuals for the tenets promoted by the Enlightenment; it was felt by some that Enlightened thinkers' emphasis on rational thought through deductive reasoning and the mathematization of natural philosophy had created an approach to science that was too cold and that attempted to control nature, rather than to peacefully co-exist with nature.
According to the philosophes of the Enlightenment, the path to complete knowledge required dissection of information on any given subject and a division of knowledge into subcategories of subcategories, known as reductionism.  This was considered necessary in order to build upon the knowledge of the ancients, such as Ptolemy, and Renaissance thinkers, such as Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo. It was widely believed that man's sheer intellectual power alone was sufficient to understanding every aspect of nature. Examples of prominent Enlightenment scholars include Sir Isaac Newton (physics and mathematics), Gottfried Leibniz (philosophy and mathematics), and Carl Linnaeus (botanist and physician).

== Principles of Romanticism ==

Romanticism had four basic principles: "the original unity of man and nature in a Golden Age; the subsequent separation of man from nature and the fragmentation of human faculties; the interpretability of the history of the universe in human, spiritual terms; and the possibility of salvation through the contemplation of nature."
The above-mentioned Golden Age is a reference from Greek mythology and legend to the Ages of Man. Romantic thinkers sought to reunite man with nature and therefore his natural state.
To Romantics, "science must not bring about any split between nature and man." Romantics believed in the intrinsic ability of mankind to understand nature and its phenomena, much like the Enlightened philosophes, but they preferred not to dissect information as some insatiable thirst for knowledge and did not advocate what they viewed as the manipulation of nature.  They saw the Enlightenment as the "cold-hearted attempt to extort knowledge from nature" that placed man above nature rather than as a harmonious part of it; conversely, they wanted to "improvise on nature as a great instrument."  The philosophy of nature was devoted to the observation of facts and careful experimentation, which was much more of a "hands-off" approach to understanding science than the Enlightenment view, as it was considered too controlling.
Natural science, according to the Romantics, involved rejecting mechanical metaphors in favor of organic ones; in other words, they chose to view the world as composed of living beings with sentiments, rather than objects that merely function. Sir Humphry Davy, a prominent Romantic thinker, said that understanding nature required "an attitude of admiration, love and worship, ... a personal response." He believed that knowledge was only attainable by those who truly appreciated and respected nature.  Self-understanding was an important aspect of Romanticism.  It had less to do with proving that man was capable of understanding nature (through his budding intellect) and therefore controlling it, and more to do with the emotional appeal of connecting himself with nature and understanding it through a harmonious co-existence.

== Important works in Romantic science ==
When categorizing the many disciplines of science that developed during this period, Romantics believed that explanations of various phenomena should be based upon vera causa, which meant that already known causes would produce similar effects elsewhere. It was also in this way that Romanticism was very anti-reductionist: they did not believe that inorganic sciences were at the top of the hierarchy but at the bottom, with life sciences next and psychology placed even higher. This hierarchy reflected Romantic ideals of science because the whole organism takes more precedence over inorganic matter, and the intricacies of the human mind take even more precedence since the human intellect was sacred and necessary to understanding nature around it and reuniting with it.
Various disciplines on the study of nature that were cultivated by Romanticism included: Naturphilosophie; cosmology and cosmogony; developmental history of the Earth and its creatures; the new science of biology; investigations of mental states, conscious and unconscious, normal and abnormal; experimental disciplines to uncover the hidden forces of nature – electricity, magnetism, galvanism and other life-forces; physiognomy, phrenology, meteorology, mineralogy, "philosophical" anatomy, among others.