Abstract

Romantic sensibility and political necessity led Humphry Davy, Britain's most prominent scientist in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, to pantheism: nature worship, involving for him a fervent belief in the immortality of the soul. Rapt with a vision of sublimity, from mountain tops or balloons, men of science in succeeding generations also found in pantheism a reason for their vocation and a way of making sense of their world. It should be seen as an alternative both to active participation in church life (like Faraday's) and to a gritty agnosticism (like Huxley's), indicating again how subtle and complex relationships were between science and religion in the nineteenth century.

Keywords

Thomas Henry Huxley, James Glaisher, Michael Faraday, Romanticism, Humphry Davy, pantheism, Britain, John Tyndall, Victorians, agnostic, Nature, Alfred Tennyson, science, Victor Frankenstein, sublime, mountains, worship

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