Victorian poetry and sciencecrawls under the table, relying exclusively on his senses in his positivist
quest to find a material basis for Spiritualist phenomena.
Poetry furnishes an interesting alternative to Spiritualism in Alfred
Tennyson's In Memoriam (1850), a long series of elegiac lyrics in which the
poet communes with his dead friend Arthur Henry Hallam. Tennyson
developed a close friendship with Hallam at the University of Cambridge,
where they were both elected to the "Apostles," an elite undergraduate
society whose twelve members debated pressing intellectual matters of the
day. It is to these more abstract issues that Tennyson returns in In
Memoriam, which he began after Hallam's early death in 1833 and
continued writing at intervals until the year before the poem went on sale.
The "Prologue," which dates from 1849, brings the principle of religious
faith into relief against the poem's implicit acceptance of the current
scientistic criterion for knowledge: "We have but faith: we cannot know; /
For knowledge is of things we see" (AT 21-22). These lines mark a rupture
with natural theology, the influential doctrine that allied empiricism with
Christianity by claiming that the existence and nature of God could be
inferred from natural phenomena. Tennyson knew of this system of thought
from at least two documents: first, William Paley's frequently reprinted
Natural Theology; or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the
Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature (1802); and second, the
Bridgewater Treatises (1833-37), a series originating with a bequest left by
the eighth Earl of Bridgewater to which such prominent natural philoso-
phers as William Whewell, Tennyson's lecturer at Cambridge, contributed
"On the Power, Wisdom, and Good of God as Manifested in the Creation." 4
On several occasions in the poem, Tennyson states that natural theology
cannot serve as the basis for his belief in God: "I found Him not in world or
sun, / Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye" (CXXIV, 5-6).
Throughout the Victorian era, Tennyson was widely regarded as the
principal heir of Romanticism. He was also, according to his friend the
Darwinian naturalist T.H. Huxley, "the first poet since Lucretius who has
understood the drift of science." 5 For Tennyson and his peers, the most
momentous secular application of empirical science prior to Darwin was
Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830-33), a book that Tennyson -
according to his son - was "deeply immersed in" during 1837. 6 Lyell
developed James Hutton's theory of uniformitarianism, which claims that
what are seemingly the most stable group of natural phenomena, those of
the earth beneath our feet, have changed gradually but momentously over
history through the actions of such currently observable terrestrial forces as
volcanic activity, strata-building, and wind and water erosion. Uniformitar-
ianism demonstrates that the earth is very much older than the biblical
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