Probably you're sick of these quotations from my reading, but I think this book is interesting. Anyway, I've already had one of those days--beginning with staying up past midnight as I drove 80 miles back and forth to school to pick up boys coming home from a soccer game in Bar Harbor, a trip accompanied, first, by the Red Sox losing the final game of the season in spectacular yet predictable fashion and, second, by endless and tedious presidential-debate detritus; followed by "Didn't I tell you to put that iPad away and go straight to bed?"; followed by tossing and turning all night; followed by a non-ringing alarm clock that my husband mistakenly un-set after I'd set it; followed by rushing around without enough coffee; followed by driving 80 miles back and forth to school because the kid had, in response to the non-ringing alarm clock, missed the bus. In other words, unless you want to listen to me sulk, you'd better just settle for a history lesson.

from The Birth of the Modern: World Society, 1918-1930 by Paul Johnson

The intuitive physics of Kant and Coleridge foreshadowed electromagnetic theory, but they did not explain the nature of matter, on which the forces played. Kant, indeed, by positing immaterialism, actually pointed in the wrong direction. Coleridge at least was moving in the right one, taking Davy with him. He rejected the prevailing notion of an imponderable fluid, often called phlogistron: It was a "vulgar idea like that of the peasant, everything done by a spring; so everything must be done by a fluid." A more likely explanation, in Coleridge's view, was that "all power & vital attributes" depended on "modes of arrangement." [Pioneer scientist Humphry] Davy, thus prompted, put it in more "scientific" terms: "forms of natural bodies may depend upon different arrangements of the same particles of matter." This foreshadowing of atomic theory is a striking demonstration of the importance of imagination in forming scientific hypothesis: Coleridge and Shelley could see possibilities in nature with the intuition of poets and so open the eyes of the experimental scientists. The early 19th century was a great age of science precisely because it was also a great age of poetry.