The Book, the Laboratory, and the Mind: Wordsworth’s Inward Calculus

Abstract

This essay explores how Wordsworth’s poetics works as a project of inward calculus. Traditionally seen as in opposition to science, Wordsworth’s poetics reveals its relationship with mathematics when considered in the context of his Newtonianism and his effort to transform the anatomical mode of observation derived from medical science into a gaze that functions as a driving force that inwardly re-counts material quantities. For Wordsworth, the mind serves as this calculating instrument—a new experimental laboratory in which the natural world becomes moral, and his calculus makes a contrast with Jeremy Bentham’s felicific calculus. Wordsworth’s “science of feelings” (the mind) represents what follows the evolution of science from natural philosophy (the book) to natural history (the laboratory). That is, this transition from the laboratory to the mind corresponds to what is known as the shift from mechanism to sensibility, or vitalism, in the history of science.