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As promised last week, the following is a continuation of my look at Sir Humphry Davy and the science scene of the late eighteenth century, early nineteenth—what we might call the golden age of science.
Humphry Davy studied the various advances in chemistry made by innovators like Alessandro Volta, whose first electric battery led to Antoine Lavoisier’s electrolysis of water into hydrogen and oxygen. The decomposition of water may have been the single greatest advance in natural philosophy since the early Greek philosophers had posited the four basic elements of Earth, Water, Air and Fire. Every science depended on this basic observation, and all scientific thinking, both inductive and deductive, hinged on the question of which of these four elements was most primordial.
Even medical notions of health were based on the idea of maintaining an equilibrium between these elements. Indeed the four humours of Galenic medicine were based on these primal ingredients of the universe: thus medicine worked to establish a balance in the patient among the elements causing dryness (Earth), moisture (Water), cold (Air) and heat (Fire); and the four humours gave rise to admixtures of these qualities: they were black bile (cold and dry), yellow bile (hot and dry), phlegm (cold and wet) and blood (hot and wet). The development of this grand theory went so far as to posit a relationship between a person’s character and his dominant humour. The scientific paradigm accounted reasonably enough for everything medically relevant, including both the mind and the body, and including the soul as well.
The idea of catching a cold is a remnant of that perception that remains with us—perhaps because there is some truth to it. In short, once Lavoisier demonstrated that water was not in fact elemental, but itself composed of more basic elements, a new vision of the cosmos was born, and all the sciences required readjustment.
Speaking of Fire, it is now lost to cultural memory, but Lavoisier was the one to reveal that fire was not an element at all, nor did it depend, as his contemporaries thought, on a “mysterious and volatile substance known as ‘phlogiston’,” but instead was “the rapid combination of carbon with oxygen, a process known as combustion.”1 When it came to Air, it was Lavoisier who determined it was composed of oxygen, nitrogen and several other trace gases. So it was Lavoisier who lifted chemistry entirely out of alchemy, and consequently transformed biology, medicine and physics. In other words he truly brought about a game-changing frameshift. The door he opened on that new horizon almost 250 years ago was the door to the world we live in today.
Lavoisier, by the way, was executed in 1794 at the hands of the French Revolutionary Convention for allegedly embezzling tax funds. I mention this to emphasise that it wasn’t religion that persecuted and murdered this preeminent innovator but a bureaucratic group concerned with the blind, mechanical administration of its regime.
Humphry Davy was one of the early explorer-pioneers of Lavoisier and Volta’s newly discovered world, one who understood the frameshift, recognized the enormity of the undiscovered country that lay beyond the door that these innovators had opened, and it ignited his passion to seek out a method of discovering the chemistry underlying the remaining Hellenic element of Earth.
As literary scholar and historian Richard Holmes puts it in his book The Age of Wonder, “In 1797 Davy quite suddenly became fascinated by chemistry.”2 How marvellous!—the idea that one could suddenly find a passion for a science and then go out and pursue it. He was just seventeen. To the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that door has been locked behind a formidable administrative apparatus, and we ought to be asking how and why.
Michael Faraday (famous for his work on electricity) was another one of these pioneers who decided to quit working as a book seller and to assist instead with Humphry Davy’s researches. Faraday had little formal education, and he too is not as popularly known as he ought to be. How is it that the greatest breakthroughs arise from folks who have not acquired certification, who have not been made to jump through the hoops devised by administrative gate keeping? (To those familiar with my argument about the will to incorporation, I trust the question is rhetorical.)
Holmes tells us that the teen-aged Davy had access to three bountiful private libraries and one subscription library and that he availed himself of them all, reading voraciously. He read poetry, philosophy and science, and kept a journal of his thoughts. “He later observed wryly of this time: ‘The first step towards the attainment of real discovery was the humiliating confession of ignorance.’”3
At the age of sixteen he began a series of essays on religion versus materialism. Keep in mind that in the late eighteenth century, the heroic journey of going one’s own way required the effort of releasing oneself from the dominant paradigm, which was religious. As I have argued elsewhere religion had succumbed to its own kind of materialism, but in Davy’s time, materialism referred to positive science, viewing the material world as the only common reference for humanity.
Keep in mind too that the French Revolution had broken out in 1789 on the heels of the American Revolutionary War which spanned from 1775 to 1783. And in the late 1790s Napoleon was rising to power in France. So England at the time that Davy was growing up was not only a time of Enlightenment flourishing, but also of social upheaval. The authority of the Church was being intellectually stormed, and the royal families (to which religion gave legitimacy) feared for their lives.
Here’s Holmes on Davy’s activity of the period:
In 1796 he wrote an essay ‘On Mathematics,’ and another ‘On Consciousness,’ which gleefully explored the implications of materialism. He described the body as ‘a fine tuned Machine,’ and wrote a syllogistic proof that the ‘soul’ could not exist, since it was said to be eternal and ‘unchangeable,’ while every known part of the human body, including the brain, was temporary and changed perpetually. ‘QED the soul does not exist.’
The experience of ‘paralytic strokes’ (like his father’s), which destroyed ‘perception and Memory’ as well as physical motion, proved that the physical brain was the single centre of ‘all the Mental faculties.’. . .He wrote two supreme declarations of faith on page 61 of his working notebook. The first was: ‘Man is capable of an infinite degree of Happiness.’ The second was: ‘The perfectibility of science is absolutely indefinite.’
That indefiniteness is key. His view of the sheer vastness of scientific exploration is what inspired him, and as Holmes demonstrates through the juxtaposition of these two statements the potential for infinite Happiness is directly tied to the indefinite perfectibility of science.
Meanwhile despite his disagreement with the religious doctrine of the eternal soul, he attended to his psyche with poetry:
He read James Thomson’s great poem The Seasons, and imitated it in his own poem about energy in nature, ‘The Tempest.’ A long poem of self-dedication, ‘The Sons of Genius,’ went through innumerable drafts, that can be dated anywhere between 1795 and 1799, when it was first published.4
Precocious as we say of such activity in youth, indeed Davy was a full fledged Renaissance Man before the age of eighteen. “On the cover of one notebook,” Holmes tells us, “Davy carefully drew in ink an olive wreath encircling the flame of a lamp: the bays of poetry surrounding the light of science.”5
But that doesn’t quite conclude our examination of Sir Humphry Davy. There’s still quite a bit of storytelling ahead where this hero is concerned. More on Davy next week…
Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies(Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine.
Holmes, Richard. The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. London: Harper Press, 2009. p. 245.
Ibid. p. 244.
Ibid. p. 243.
Ibid. p. 243.
Ibid. p. 249. Worth noting too that Davy was a good student, but no prodigy. Achievements in one’s youth were not unusual back in the eighteenth century for persons of means and connections. In fact, it was typical.
It's fascinating too that Davy's belief in happiness and science being capable of infinite expansion had sprung from his insight that so much of scientific discovery proceeds from counter-intuition. Holmes explains how Davy made a similar observation that Goethe did, recognizing how often the "idea inherent in a phenomenon" may be "confused by the fact that it frequently - even normally - contradicts our senses." Common sense is often wrong and appearances can be deceiving: It seems that this counter-intuitive approach to scientific inquiry needs to be rediscovered. Desperately.
I love this framework for exploring the paradigm shift as the Greek elements were decomposed and chemistry supplanted alchemy. Of course, this change in approach to natural philosophy had already been heralded by Boyle's air pump, but I'm inclined to agree that something decisive changed with Lavoisier.