Cooleridge Describes Davy's Work as Methodical

This refusal to allow anything to chance, ‘accident’ or good fortune was exactly the same as Herschel’s insistence that chance played no part in his discovery of Uranus. Coleridge had taken this up as one of the key philosophical problems associated with science, in an essay provokingly entitled ‘Does Fortune Favour Fools?’, which he republished in The Friend in 1818. Here he described Davy, perhaps mischievously, as ‘the illustrious Father and Founder of Philosophic Alchemy’. But he praised his great discoveries without reservation, and denied that his scientific research could ever have depended on ‘accident’ or ‘luck’. Yet this left him in a philosophical quandary: did that imply that ‘genius’ and ‘inspiration’ had no place in Davy’s science?

The essay was originally written in 1809, in response to Davy’s work with the voltaic battery. Coleridge argued that Davy’s discoveries always depended on ‘preconcerted mediation … evolved out of his own intellect’, never on external accident. Davy’s scientific method was always conscious, skilful and deliberate, the fruit of deep knowledge and experience. But the essay raised other issues about scientific research. Coleridge’s way of describing the experimental process betrayed a certain uneasiness. Chemical experiments — using fire or electricity — contained a kind of violence. Davy’s aim was ‘to bind down material Nature under the Inquisition of Reason, and force from her, as by torture, unequivocal answers to prepared and preconceived questions’. Coleridge also wondered if scientific laws could ever truly ‘bind down’ all the phenomena of nature. Newtonian laws could define the phases of the moon, for instance, but could they ever define the movements and appearance of clouds?. ‘The number and variety of their effects baffle our powers of calculation: and that the sky is clear or obscured at any particular time, we speak of, in common language, as a matter of accident’.

His discoveries were not the result of accidents or luck.

See Also: Coleridge, The Friend (1809 edition), no. 19, 1809; in The Friend, vol 2, edited by Barbara E. Rooke, Routledge, 1969, pp251-2