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.