Worship of Nature is Worship of Light

Davy’s two main essays were far the most ambitious contribution to the anthology, and announced his intellectual arrival in Bristol. He set out to champion chemistry, and speculate about its future, on the grandest metaphysical scale. In a Penzance notebook he had exclaimed: ‘What we mean by Nature is a series of visible images: but these are constituted by light. Hence the worshipper of Nature is a worshipper of light.’38 In his Essay 1, ‘On Heat, Light and the Combinations of Light’, he developed this into an entire cosmological vision, in which the whole universe was powered by starlight as well as Newtonian gravity, and would eventually be understood as a single unified idea. ‘We may consider the sun and the fixed stars (the suns of other worlds) as immense reservoirs of light, destined by the great Organizer to diffuse over the Universe organization and animation. And thus will the law of Gravitation, as well as the Chemical laws, be considered as one great end — PERCEPTION. Reasoning thus it will not appear improbable that one law alone may govern and act upon matter, — an Energy of Mutation impressed by the will of the Deity — a law which may be called the law of Animation.’

He added confidently that ‘the further we investigate the phenomenon of Nature, the more we discover simplicity and unity of design’

...and other simple laws of nature.