Romantic science

Recently I engaged with a friend in a debate about romanticism and science. Of course, we came over Richard Holme's "The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science" (HarperPress 2008). Holmes is a very gifted author as well as biographer and a kind of specialist about romanticism.

In the issue of December 18, 2014 of the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS he published his article "A Quest for the Real Coleridge", from which the following quotation is taken:

So from a narrow initial study of Coleridge and Davy, The Age of Wonder expanded to become the biography of a whole generation, including over sixty writers and scientists, and the very moment when the word and concept of “scientist” itself actually emerged in 1834.
I have now come to feel that the meeting of the two great modes of human discovery—imaginative literature and science—has become one of the most urgent subjects for modern biography to study and understand. I believe this is particularly so in America. You could say that if our world is to be saved, we must understand it both scientifically and imaginatively.
I often think of something Sylvia Plath once said: “If a poem is concentrated, a closed fist, then a novel is relaxed and expansive, an open hand.” This leads me to suppose that a biography is something else again: a handshake. A handshake, across time, but also across cultures, across beliefs, across disciplines, across genders, and across ways of life. It is an act of friendship.
It is a way of keeping the biographer’s notebook open, on both sides of that endless mysterious question: What was this human life really like, and what does it mean to us now? In this sense, biography is not merely a mode of historical inquiry. It is an act of imaginative faith.

Why this quotation? For two reasons:
The essential message that biography is an act of friendship and an act of imaginative faith is worthy to be remembered.
And the conclusion, the knowledge: "You could say that if our world is to be saved, we must understand it both scientifically and imaginatively." should be thoughtfully considered.