Robert Hunt (1807–1887) was a polymath of the Victorian era. A philosopher of science, he was also a pioneer in photography, a geologist, and a statistician. He bridged the gap between the Romantic era of nature mysticism and the systematic science of the late nineteenth century.
Hunt was a devotee of the Romantic poets, particularly Wordsworth and Coleridge. In The Poetry of Science (1848), his most famous work, Hunt proposed that scientific discovery did not destroy the mystical character of nature but enhanced it. He put forward a case for the aesthetic and spiritual beauty of physical laws. The forces of nature, light, heat, electricity, were manifestations of a divine underlying power. The book was immensely popular and influenced many, including a young Richard Jefferies, the novelist and nature writer noted for his depictions of English rural life. It served as a vehicle for the general public to understand complex physical phenomena through a literary lens. Hunt was one of the earliest practitioners and theorists of photography. He established the science behind photography and invented energiatype as a photographic process in 1844. His Researches on Light (1844) was the first comprehensive scientific examination of the chemical changes produced by solar rays, probing how light physically alters matter.
Thus, Hunt occupied a unique position in both the scientific and “mystical” worlds.
The Spirit of Nature (1849), is a philosophical “scientific romance” in novel form exploring the limits of knowledge. He edited the 1854 edition of Isaac Disraeli’s Curiosities of Literature and wrote extensively on English folklore, notably The Popular Romances of the West of England (1865), a foundational collection of Cornish folklore and myths
But he eventually moved away from the more “magical” interpretations of science as the Victorian era progressed and focused on the hard data of the mining industry, taking a more pragmatic role than his Poet of Science stance. Indeed, he became Keeper of Mining Records in 1845, where he was responsible for the first systematic collection of data regarding British mineral resources, vital for the management of Industrial Revolution. Robert Hunt represents that moment in the nineteenth century where a single person could be a government statistician by day and a philosopher of “universal forces” by night.
There is no record of John Henry Newman’s referring directly to Hunt in his published theological or philosophical works, but the two intellectuals can be placed together because they represent two different yet parallel responses to the rise of materialism in the Victorian age. Their paths crossed conceptually in their observing the material effects of scientific method upon ordinary human experience. Hunt was a prominent member of the Royal Society during the years Newman was at Oxford in the 1830s. During the Oxford Movement many of Newman’s contemporaries were interested in Natural Philosophy, the precursor to modern science, as a way to understand the divine order.
In The Poetry of Science, science does not “unweave the rainbow” but reveals a deeper, divine beauty. The physical laws of light and electricity are essentially “poetic” forces of a Creator. Newman, particularly in his essay Poetry, with Reference to Aristotle’s Poetics (1829), holds that the “poetic mind” is essential for the assent of religious faith. Poetry is the antagonist to science, not because the two modes of inquiry and expression are contradictory, but because science categorises and systematises, and is therefore unequipped to approach theology, while poetry seeks to apprehend and assist the relationship between what cannot be measured and the individual path to faith and the appreciation of divine truth. Newman was wary of any scientific approach to religion that tried to prove God through mechanical data or strict logic. Hunt, while a romantic, became essentially a data-driven statistician. Newman thought that the evidences of science such as those Hunt collected were secondary to what he described in An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870) as the “Illative Sense”, the personal interior grasp of ultimate reality and divine truth.
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