It has been a while, and I don't know if many here will remember me. I have been off busy with my own scholarship, which, if people recall, is in the field of 18th century literature and religion, with an emphasis on the Romantics.

I felt like I would clear up a few things that Holmes gets very bad. Well, right off the bat, a discussion of Romantics and science has been a theme in criticism for a very long time. Scholars like Pamela Edwards makes Richard Holmes seem like an amateur on the subject. But I wont bother delving into such broad stuff but get down to the point: science always was an important part of Romanticism, but not in the way Holmes suggests.

Coleridge, a follower of Joseph Priestley, can be seen to start this affinity with science. Romanticism, like the new science, sought to overcome the rigid cyclical structures of Enlightenment thought that culminated in Newton's Principia. Although those like Christopher Smart attacked Newton's views on science since the 1750s, the Romantics saw it as their imperative to remove the rigid structures and return a "human" element into science. No longer were there set, fixated patterns that seemed to be correct. Instead, observations would be based on what we can know and feel.

To be a scientist, like a poet or a philosopher, one must serve mankind. In order to serve mankind, the individual must know mankind, must know nature, and must understand reality in a very Baconian manner. A theory is worthless unless it can be shown to work and then be shown to improve humanity. Of course, those like William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, Charles Lamb, and Percy Bysshe Shelley were more concerned about man becoming in tune with nature than actual science. However, they all sought a natural harmony between the two.

Now, reading Holmes makes one believe that he didn't understand what the apocalypse represented. He throws out ideas about the end of the world and the rest. However, none of the Romantics believed that a mere ending of humanity was apocalyptic. Instead, apocalypse was a developmental aspect of humanity. Blake, on one extreme, believed that the apocalypse was completely internal and man must go through a personal development for salvation. On the other, Wordsworth flipped the apocalypse to represent man's connecting with nature and an external understanding of reality. Someone like Keats or Coleridge displaced the apocalypse further to an external evolution within society, with Keats emphasizing cultural and artistic changes while Coleridge emphasized political. Each of these individuals were influenced by the massive changes that came with the French Revolution and the new hope that society, and the individual, would be able to break the previous cycles and attain some sort of truth.

But where does this end of the world nonsense come from? Well, Byron wrote "Darkness", a poem that described the end. Is that apocalyptic? No, not in any sense of the word he would have known. Instead, it describes how essential the sun is to society in a physical and symbolic sense, and shows how human virtue is connected to nature. There is also Mary Shelley's The Last Man, which describes an end of humanity via a mysterious plague. Is that apocalyptic? Not in any sense she would know. Instead, it represents the destruction of an ideal held by the Romantics, and it shows that Mary herself was probably not representation of Romantic theory in any kind of way.

Of course, Holmes focuses on Frankstein. Does he not know what the story is about? The frame of the narrative describes a man leaving his family behind in pursuit of glory that would come from a scientific achievement. Obviously, this parallels with Frankenstein's ignoring of nature and social order in seeking out a way to achieve greatness. Even when he creates the famous monster, he is unwilling to nuture it and care for it as a father should. He shrugs off all social responsibility and is destroyed because of it. The moral is that science is worthless if mankind does not put the human first.

The Romantics didn't believe that science would destroy the world, or that the world was going to end. Instead, they believed that science, along with right government, true philosophy, and the promotion of these through art was the best way to help mankind. They believed that spreading their message would bring about a revolution that would herald in a golden age. True science, as in anything that can be claimed as truth, was essential, as mankind must understand reality as she truly is in order to become what we are truly ment to be.