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C hristopher S mart's Systema Naturae : Anti‐Newtonianism and the Categorical Impulse in J ubilate A gno
Author(s) -
POWELL ROSALIND
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
journal for eighteenth‐century studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.129
H-Index - 11
eISSN - 1754-0208
pISSN - 1754-0194
DOI - 10.1111/1754-0208.12092
Subject(s) - impulse (physics) , poetry , categorical variable , intertextuality , literature , art , classics , sociology , theology , history , philosophy , computer science , physics , machine learning , quantum mechanics
This article explores C hristopher S mart's poetic emphasis on reading the world correctly in the face of contemporary religious and empirical anxieties about the incapacity of human ideas to frame the natural world and the inadequacy of language to describe, name and categorise it. Tracing a development from religious restraint to a new kind of botany, the article concentrates on four themes: the inability to express the divine and the risk of vanity in science in the poet's early work, S mart's rejection of scientific language, and his categorical impulse in J ubilate A gno , which orders his natural subjects into a new physico‐theology.