---
title: "Romanticism in science"
chunk: 3/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism_in_science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:40:27.840006+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

==== Organic chemistry ====
The development of organic chemistry in the 19th century necessitated the acceptance by chemists of ideas deriving from Naturphilosophie, modifying the Enlightenment concepts of organic composition put forward by Lavoisier. Of central importance was the work on the constitution and synthesis of organic substances by contemporary chemists.

== Popular image of science ==
Science was a subject of great interest to important romantic writers and artists. The English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example, was a passionate student of chemistry as well as optics, medicine, and the now-discredited field of animal magnetism. William Wordsworth was one of several writers whose poetry about the natural world is associated with the rise of ecology, even though ecology would not be formalized as a discipline until the second half of the nineteenth century.
Another British Romantic writer interested in science was Mary Shelley.  Her famous book Frankenstein also conveyed important aspects of Romanticism in science as she included elements of anti-reductionism and manipulation of nature, both key themes that concerned Romantics, as well as the scientific fields of chemistry, anatomy, and natural philosophy.  She stressed the role and responsibility of society regarding science, and through the moral of her story supported the Romantic stance that science could easily go wrong unless man took more care to appreciate nature rather than control it.
John Keats' portrayal of "cold philosophy" in the poem "Lamia" influenced Edgar Allan Poe's 1829 sonnet "To Science" and Richard Dawkins' 1998 book, Unweaving the Rainbow.
German Romantic writers and philosophers were similarly interested in contemporary science. Johann von Goethe, who published his own treatise on optics called Theory of Colors, was an important poet and novelist. His novel Elective Affinities repeatedly uses to concepts from chemistry to explore romantic attraction and passion. Like other German Romantic writers, Goethe was very interested in theories about the nature, origin, and essence of life. The poet and novelist Novalis referenced in his writing several ideas he learned in his studies electricity, medicine, chemistry, physics, mathematics, mineralogy and natural philosophy.
French, British, German, and American artists likewise referenced contemporary sciences in their works. Caspar David Friedrich, a German Romantic landscape painter, referenced the ideas of the geologist and mineralogist Abraham Gottlob Werner in several paintings. Friedrich's paintings also engaged with the geological concept of deep time. French Romantic artist Anne-Louis Girodet and his Anglo-American contemporary Benjamin West both represented eclectic experiments in major paintings.

== Decline of Romanticism ==
The rise of Auguste Comte's positivism in 1840 contributed to the decline of the Romantic approach to science.

== See also ==
Coleridge's theory of life
History of science
Romantic epistemology
Romantic linguistics
Romantic medicine
Romantic psychology
Vitalism

== Notes ==

== References ==
Alexander, Amir R (2006). "Tragic Mathematics: Romantic Narratives and the Refounding of Mathematics in the Early Nineteenth Century". Isis. 97 (4): 714–726. doi:10.1086/509952. PMID 17367007. S2CID 38520228.
Bossi, M., and Poggi, S., ed. Romanticism in Science: Science in Europe, 1790–1840. Kluwer: Boston, 1994.
Cunningham, A., and Jardine, N., ed. Romanticism and the Sciences. (1990). excerpt and text search
Fulford, Tim, Debbie Lee, and Peter J. Kitson, eds. Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge (2007) excerpt and text search
Holmes, Richard.  The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science (2009)  ISBN 978-1-4000-3187-0, focus on William Herschel the astronomer and Humphry Davy the chemist
Holland, Jocelyn. German Romanticism and Science: The Procreative Poetics of Goethe, Novalis, and Ritter (2009) excerpt and text search
McLane, Maureen N. Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species (2006) excerpt and text search
Murray, Christopher, ed. Encyclopedia of the romantic era, 1760–1850 (2 vol 2004); 850 articles by experts; 1600pp
O'Rourke, Stephanie. Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism. Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Richardson, Alan. British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (2005) excerpt and text search
Snelders, H. A. M. (1970). "Romanticism and Naturphilosophie and the Inorganic Natural Sciences, 1797–1840: An Introductory Survey". Studies in Romanticism. 9 (3): 193–215. doi:10.2307/25599763. JSTOR 25599763.