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Romanticism during the Age of Reflection ( 1800–40) was an intellectual movement that originated in Western Europe as a counter-movement to the late-18th-century Enlightenment. Romanticism incorporated many fields of study in the arts and humanities, but it also greatly influenced 19th-century science.〔Cunningham, A., and Jardine, N., ed. ''Romanticism and the Sciences'', p. xxi.〕 In contrast to Enlightenment mechanistic natural philosophy, European scientists of the Romantic period held that observing nature implied understanding the self, and that knowledge of nature "should not be obtained by force." They felt that the Enlightenment had encouraged the abuse of the sciences, and they sought to advance a new way to increase scientific knowledge, one that they felt would be more beneficial not only to mankind but to nature as well.〔Bossi, M., and Poggi, S., ed. ''Romanticism in Science: Science in Europe, 1790–1840,'' p. xii.〕 Romanticism advanced a number of themes: it promoted anti-reductionism (the whole was more valuable than the parts alone) and epistemological optimism (man was connected to nature), and encouraged creativity, experience, and genius.〔Molvig, Ole, ''History of the Modern Sciences in Society'' lecture course, Sept. 26.〕 It also emphasized the scientist's role in scientific discovery, holding that acquiring knowledge of nature meant understanding man as well; therefore, these scientists placed a high importance on respect for nature.〔Bossi, M., and Poggi, S., ed. ''Romanticism in Science: Science in Europe, 1790–1840,'' p.xiv.〕 Romanticism declined beginning around 1840 as a new movement, positivism, took hold of intellectuals and lasted until about 1880. As with the intellectuals who earlier had become disenchanted with the Enlightenment and had sought a new approach to science, people now lost interest in Romanticism and sought to study science using a stricter process. ==Romantic Science vs. Enlightenment Science== As the Enlightenment had a firm hold in France during the last decades of the 18th century, so the Romantic view on science was a movement that flourished in Great Britain and especially Germany in the first half of the 19th century.〔Bossi, M., and Poggi, S., ed. ''Romanticism in Science: Science in Europe, 1790–1840,'' p.xii; Cunningham, A., and Jardine, N., ed. ''Romanticism and the Sciences,'' p.22.〕 Both sought to increase individual and cultural self-understanding by recognizing the limits in human knowledge through the study of nature and the intellectual capacities of man. The Romantic movement, however, resulted as an increasing dislike by many intellectuals for the tenets promoted by the Enlightenment; it was felt by some that Enlightened thinkers' emphasis on rational thought through deductive reasoning and the mathematization of natural philosophy had created an approach to science that was too cold and that attempted to control nature, rather than to peacefully co-exist with nature.〔Cunningham, A., and Jardine, N., ed. ''Romanticism and the Sciences,'' pp.3–4.〕 According to the ''philosophes'' of the Enlightenment, the path to complete knowledge required a dissection of information on any given subject and a division of knowledge into subcategories of subcategories, known as reductionism. This was considered necessary in order to build upon the knowledge of the ancients, such as Ptolemy, and Renaissance thinkers, such as Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo. It was widely believed that man's sheer intellectual power alone was sufficient to understanding every aspect of nature. Examples of prominent Enlightenment scholars include: Sir Isaac Newton (physics and mathematics), Gottfried Leibniz (philosophy and mathematics), and Carolus Linnaeus (botanist and physician). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Romanticism in science」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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