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Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas
  
  
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7. However, the cosmogony of Eureka was late and
isolated—intellectually Poe was an offspring of the
eighteenth century—at a time (1848) when the trium-
phant world view was not only Heraclitean but ro-
mantic, in the strict sense of the word, rather than
baroque. The Great Vortex, without being abandoned
(pure astronomers are still inclined to accept it, at least
in the form of a complete rotation of our whole galaxy)
enjoys less favor than the flight to infinity. The circle,
and even the ellipse, yielded to the straight line or
to curves (parabola, hyperbola) which are fascinating
because they are open-ended. Scientific excuses were
offered by Herschel and then by Laplace (Exposition
du système du monde,
1796). “Several observations,”


520

Laplace says, “are represented well enough by suppos-
ing the solar system being carried towards the constel-
lation of Hercules.” It was only a mere hypothesis but
the romantic imagination took hold of it. And for the
intellectual delight of completely embracing the whole
cosmos, the romantic substituted the joy of feeling
himself projected outward, beyond all anticipation, the
joy of resigning and losing one's self, relishing the
mysterious and a certain intellectual vertigo with the
savor of the “maybe.” Carried away towards what?
Towards regions of light, dense with stars, or towards
some frightful collision? The romantic mind succumbed
to the pathos of the “Voyage Out With No Return.”
This propensity for the “voyage out,” associated with
the desire for freedom, had created the prestige of
comets. (We refer to the comet of the astronomical
era, when the comet was recognized as a heavenly
body and not as a supernatural apparition.) The comets'
vast orbits, their unpredicted appearance, and the
belief, due to Descartes, that they can escape from
their own vortex and pass from one system to another—
all that had made comets the model vagabonds; but
now the whole solar system was in flight. Works, solidly
documented for their time in astronomical matters,
yielded to this intoxication and maintained it. For
example, Alexander von Humboldt's Kosmos (1845)
offered the reader an impressive speeded-up film of
a universe in flight: “Countless stars are carried away,
like whirlwinds of dust, in opposite directions.” Jean
Reynaud's Earth and Sky (Terre et ciel, 1854) also
insisted on the exalted idea that navigation by the stars
never followed the same route twice.

However, among the romantics (with a few excep-
tions like Byron and Leopardi) optimism carried the
day; fear itself can be, after all, no more than a
pleasurable intoxication. Faith in a Supreme Being was
not given up. Only the “harmony of the world” was
not divorced from time; it was in the process of be-
coming. Minds, preoccupied with socialism, like the
Saint-Simonian socialism of J. Reynaud, or with an
esoteric idea, like that of Flammarion (to name only
truly informed astronomical writers), conceived the
universe as “a great fraternal society” (Reynaud) or
as a place reserved for souls allowed to rise from one
world to a higher world in an indefinite progress.

Quite different was the reaction to the universe in
flight by the pessimistic type of minds that formed the
majority of sky-watchers at the end of the nineteenth
century. What occurred now was a very intense nega-
tion of the “harmony of the world.” The source of this
current was not astronomical; the slow and steady
progress of science did not justify it, but on the con-
trary, it offered grounds for creating enthusiasm. The
discovery of Neptune in 1877, the study of Mars'
“canals” revived speculation on the plurality of in-
habited worlds, and the flood of Martian fiction began
to mount.

The influence of Schopenhauer and Hindu philoso-
phy, accompanying perhaps an era of social stagnation
and boredom, and perhaps also, the mysterious play
of the psychological pendulum, imposed on cosmolo-
gists and poets the vision of an empty, dark, and icy
space in which the imaginary voyage can only be a
nauseating dizzy fall into the infinite. The hospitable
space of Newton gave way to an uninhabitable space.
And in this sea of Darkness all that the earthly ship
could expect thereafter without a pilot was shipwreck.