Keats was your quintessential Romantic poet with his simpering stanzas and constant baaing and mooing on the pastures of English literature. What marked Keats was the anti-intellectualism that plagued his writing. Rational thought and scientific explanations were both anathema to him. In “Lamia” he writes:
On another level, Keats decries the whole approach of science and philosophy as dastardly pursuits—their only aim being to dash the magic and wonder of the human imagination against the cold rocks of facts.
What makes the world charming, according to Keats, is the magical, the supernatural, the spectral, the spiritual, and—the infantile. Rational thought, he believes, robs us of these mysteries and is capable of clipping an angel’s wings, emptying a gnome-filled mine, and unweaving a rainbow.
In “Lamia,” a young lad named Lycius falls head over heels in love with a seductive woman, Lamia. This woman is, in fact, a serpent and dreads the company of Lycius’s tutor, the philosopher Apollonius, for fear that he might expose her. The poem ends with Apollonius arriving uninvited at the couple’s wedding and denouncing Lamia as the monstrous creature that she is. Lamia disappears, and Lycius is left to mourn the loss of his beloved.
Keats’s sympathies lie with the deceptive Lamia, and he abhors the philosopher for destroying Lycius’s love—even though it was a sham and based on an illusion.
The poem espouses Keats’s cockamamie views against scientific and logical thinking. Why is it that Keats and his ilk have such distrust in reason? Does the rainbow actually lose its ability to inspire wonder and awe once it has been explained away?
Quite the contrary: gazing up at the night sky might inspire wonder and awe in both a poet and a scientist. But while the poet’s wonder is limited to the superficial beauty of what to him is a collection of twinkling pricks of light, the scientist’s wonder is far more profound. His wonder is infinitely advanced by his knowledge that those twinkling pricks of light are actually photons, massless packets of energy, that travel for millions, perhaps billions, of years across countless parsecs to reach the earth. He knows that when they finally reach earth they collide with molecules in the earth’s atmosphere and finally hit the retina of our eye. Here, the signal is converted to electrical impulses that make their way through the optical nerve to the appropriate centre in the occipital lobe of our brain that makes sense of those quantum particles and tells us that what we are seeing is actually a prick of light.
While the poet’s heart leaps at how pretty twinkling stars appear, the scientist’s sense of wonder is multiplied a hundredfold by his realisation that those pricks of light are actually gigantic balls of hydrogen and helium producing enormous amounts of energy through nuclear fusion for millions and billions of years.
While the poet gazes at twinkling stars in the night sky and sighs, wondering how much it looks like diamonds on black velvet, the scientist knows that there are some collapsed stars that are actually colossal, trillion-carat diamonds—made up as they are of complex-structured carbon (which is precisely what a diamond is).
When the poet gazes at the twinkling star, he doesn’t really wonder; he simply enjoys the moment. The scientist, on the other hand, would look at a star and wonder how far it was; whether it was part of a binary system; whether it had planets; how many planets were inhabitable; was there intelligent life; have they tried communicating with us; was someone on that planet gazing back at us across the vast vistas of time and space, and a myriad such questions.
All this knowledge and wonder is foreclosed to Keats whose narrow-mindedness precludes him from appreciating the true nature of the world. Keats would have been content to gaze at the rainbow and sentimentalise. Newton’s explanation of the rainbow made way for the wave theory of light, which gave us the quantum theory of matter, which in turn gave us electronic gadgets, advanced telescopes, and quantum computers. All that Keats gave us was a sigh and the knowledge that his heart leapt every time he saw a rainbow in the sky.
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, was Keats’s cuckoo comrade-in-arms and vying for the same cap and bells. In his “Satyre against Reason and Mankind” he says:
Reason, an ignis fatuus of the mind,
Which, leaving light of nature, sense, behind,
Pathless and dangerous wand’ring ways it takes
Through error’s fenny bogs and thorny brakes;
Whilst the misguided follower climbs with pain
Mountains of whimseys, heaped in his own brain;
Stumbling from thought to thought, falls headlong down
Into doubt’s boundless sea where, like to drown,
Books bear him up awhile, and make him try
To swim with bladders of philosophy.
The good Earl sees reason as an erroneous mental representation—a dangerous illusion that misleads, misguides, and misdirects people. Anyone senseless enough to follow the dictates of reason will soon stumble and fall headfirst into a sea of doubt, where he will be condemned to drown.
All this tripe against the faculty of reason is lamentable. The actual fact is that it is our ability to reason, ask questions, raise doubts, clear uncertainties, and find answers that has taken us taken us from being a loose band of fearful hunter-gatherers on the plains of the African Savannah to being intrepid astronauts exploring the dark side of the moon and the infinity of the universe.
Lack of reasoning, on the other hand, has given us mountains of superstition, rivers of fear, stacks of ignorance, and bloated mortuaries of obsolete deities.
To feel cheated or outraged when an explanation is given, as Keats and the Earl do, requires a fairly feeble and primitive mind—a mind stuck in gear—a mind that refuses to advance. The sort of mind that relishes stories of flying unicorns, magical fairies, grumpy goblins, and spooky ghosts. The sort of mind, in fact, which, if we all possessed, would leave our species floundering against the rocks of Bronze Age folly, instead of sailing into the space age as we have.
There is something pitiable about a mind that constantly craves ignorance and strives to remain in deliberate perplexity. It must be admitted that what defines and separates our species from others is our ability to look at the world around us in wonder. It is this sense of wonder that drives us to seek answers and to find explanations. The power of thunder and lightning to inspire awe in us does not diminish because we have explained how they are caused. It would be contemptible, not to say humiliating, to worship such elements of nature.
We know that rain is no more caused by a rain god than sunshine by a sun god. Our species has lost little by learning that the sun is not a deity but a giant ball of helium and hydrogen powered by nuclear fusion reactions at its core. Does this knowledge make the sun any less useful? Does this knowledge make the sun any less potent in its effect on our planet?
Scientific knowledge has moved us from the timid species we were to the intrepid explorers we are. Where once we were cowering in caves at the slightest hint of lightning and convulsing with horror at the faintest shadow of an eclipse, today we send satellites into space and use X-rays to scan the stars.
Where once we thought the moon was a calabash in the sky or worshipped it as a goddess, today we send probes that land on it. Where once we could barely communicate with someone from the next village over the hill, today we send radio waves into the farthest reaches of our galaxy in possible communication with extra-terrestrial intelligence.
There is something infinitely noble in pursuing knowledge—in fulfilling our potential as a species. Our giant brain, with its powerful neocortex and countless trillions of dendritic connections, isn’t meant to sit in feeble stagnation and gibber in fear and wonder. We are meant to go beyond wonder and seek explanations and find causes. It is curiosity that is the hallmark of our species. And curiosity begets discoveries that demand explanations.
Francis Bacon was of the opinion that knowledge is power. The kind of knowledge he undoubtedly had in mind was of a scientific nature. It is the scientific method that has allowed us to gaze at the farthest ends of the universe and peer into the quantum world of subatomic particles. It is the scientific method that has unlocked the secrets of our genetic code hidden in our DNA. This is only the latest feat in a long list of outstanding scientific feats. Medical science has a terrific track record in reducing human suffering and prolonging human life.
During the four and half billion years of the earth’s existence, our planet has been smashed by gigantic asteroids, devastated by explosive volcanoes, wracked by earthquakes, and pummelled by tidal waves. Our precarious existence on this planet could easily be snuffed out by a single meteor. Life—all life—could be annihilated. The only hope we have of protecting ourselves from our dispassionate cosmos and the ravages of nature is through innovation and development of scientific technology.
Twenty-first century Western Europe is the most advanced and prosperous group of countries in the history of mankind. The kind of security, life-expectancy, health care, pension, and unemployment benefits its citizens enjoy has never been seen before in any part of the world ever before. It is no coincidence that these countries were also the first to embrace a scientific outlook of the world. These countries are where they are because they placed innovation over superstition, rational thought over dogmatic faith, logic over blind belief.
Rather than reprehensibly cowering under the blanket of fear and ignorance, these countries chose to stride boldly into the light of knowledge—uncovering the secrets of reality and demystifying the vagaries of everyday existence.
The universe has existed for at least fifteen billion years. That is an unimaginably long time. Such a span of time is, in every sense, truly incomprehensible to our minds that can only really appreciate time scales of up to hundreds or thousands of years. After all these billions of years of inanimate matter and insensate energy, life began to flourish on one quotidian planet in the backyard of a run-of-the-mill universe until humans finally arrived on the cosmic scene. At long last, and perhaps for the first time, the stuff of the universe had finally reached the point where it could contemplate itself and its origins. For, like it or not, we are made of mere molecules—the same molecules found in stars, planets, interstellar clouds, and cosmic dust.
As a collection of mere molecules destined to enjoy a few years of sentience and self-awareness, it would seem most logical and necessary to contemplate our origins and seek to understand the world around us. What could be more exuberating than unlocking the mysteries of the universe—the same universe from which we come and of which we are a part.
The universe is a wonderful place—wonderful, not only because it has allowed for us to exist in it, but because it is a place of order. The universe has many secrets, but it is predictable. It is precisely these features of order and predictability that make it so compelling for us to analyse and understand.
The problem with Keats’s vision of the world is that he would rather it were chaotic and unpredictable—a world in which anything could happen. He seeks his astonishment in the oddity and inexplicability of the universe. But this just doesn’t fit with what we know. The universe isn’t capricious or whimsical in its functioning. It is orderly, structured, and obeys its own set of rules. It is the search for these rules that drives science and scientists.
Understanding these rules is the key to everything. It can help abolish disease and malnutrition, it can alleviate poverty and suffering, and it can eradicate illiteracy and ignorance. It is a rational and scientific approach to medicine and education that can lift our species from its wretched, petty, xenophobic, and parochial nature and raise it to such dizzying heights of tolerance, justice, and kindness as we have never seen before. The true reformers of our age are not politicians or priests. It is scientists who have given us a new and better world. Things aren’t perfect—not by any means—but this is only the beginning.
The scientist and the mystic both share a wonder of the universe. The difference arises when the mystic is content to bask in his ignorance and conjure up all sorts of fantastic stories while the scientist feels compelled to yank away the veil of mystery and find the truth behind it.
