Page 13 - spring21

Metternich emphasises reason; he was basically a child of the Enlightenment,
although his experiences of the French Revolution made him politically conservative.
He believed that by defending the legitimacy of traditional rulers, he was defending
the rational, natural order of things. But Mazzini’s emphasis is on emotion; as a
nationalist, he derived his idea of legitimacy from the inner life of the individual. This
made him a revolutionary: he wanted to overthrow the existing European order to
bring it line with people’s inner nationalist feelings and aspirations. This made
Metternich and Mazzini bitter political enemies.

Charles Babbage (1791-1871) and Ada Lovelace (1815-1852)
Charles Babbage is hailed as the inventor of the first computer. Ada Lovelace, nee
Byron, his friend and collaborator, is celebrated as a history’s first computer
programmer. Yet at first sight, they seem, like Metternich and Mazzini, to come from
opposite sides of the Enlightenment/Romanticism divide. Babbage was one of the
most celebrated men of science and mathematics of his time; Lovelace was the

daughter of Lord Byron, the archetypal “Romantic hero” (“Byronic” being virtually its
synonym). Clearly this is going to be a story with some surprising twists.

Bridge to the unknown
Further, Charles and Ada’s project, the attempt to create a fully-fledged Victorian
computer operated by cog-wheels, seems almost beyond belief. It was firmly
grounded in the realm of Enlightenment reason in its purest, most logical form:
mathematics. Yet the nature of their enterprise, as Babbage put it, “throwing a

bridge from the known to the unknown world”, required not so much hypothesis-
testing by methodical experimentation, more great leaps of faith, insight, imagination
and daring. Clearly reason and emotion are not the simple binary opposites they
appear.

Charles and Ada pursued their uncharted vision with all the obsessiveness and

creativity of true Romantics. Each made imaginative leaps into the unknown.
Babbage saw how the punched cards used to operate Jacquard’s looms could weave
algorithms as well as tapestries, by transferring energy to rotating rods rather than
individual warp threads, and how the tooth of a rotating cog could represent a
number. Ava’s imaginative genius was to grasp, better than Charles, the
programmable potential of his Analytical Engine (had he ever fully built it). Their
story illustrates how daring and creativity are required as much in scientific progress
just as much as Romantic works of art, and how blurred is the boundary between the
supposedly cold reason of the Enlightenment and the emotion and imagination of

Romanticism. Artists and scientists are maybe not so different.