Buddhist Romanticism

world. Herschel’s reputation—he was one of the early superstars of science
—together with the size of his telescope, gave added authority to his
subsequent discoveries.
In 1789, Herschel published some of his findings in a paper modestly
titled “Catalogue of Second Thousand Nebulae with Remarks on the
Construction of the Heavens.” However, the observations he reported in
the paper, and the conclusions he drew from them, were anything but
modest.
Herschel noted that, with the improved power of his telescope, he had
discovered that many of the “nebulae” in his catalogue were not really
nebulae, but actually separate galaxies, and that our solar system was
located in only one of the many galaxies within his newly-expanded field of
view.
His most important observation, however, was that some galaxies
showed signs of being more evolved than others, a fact that he explained by
detailing how a galaxy might grow, develop, and die in line with the laws
of gravity, an organic process that involved immense spans of time. In other
words, the more evolved galaxies were far older than the less evolved,
which in turn meant that the galaxies were not all created at the same time.
Herschel’s paper accomplished several things at once. It turned
astronomy from a science concerned primarily with navigation to one
focused on issues of cosmology: the origins of the stars and the evolution of
the universe. In terms of the content of the science, it effected a revolution
even more radical than the Copernican. Copernicus had simply moved the
center of the universe from the Earth to the Sun, whereas Herschel argued
that there was no center at all. Moreover—because galaxies were of
different ages even though obeying the same laws of physics—it suggested
that there was no single beginning point in creation or time.
These two propositions were a radical challenge to received religion in
the West. They confirmed the large spans of time needed to explain
geological and biological evolution, and questioned the centrality of human
life in the general scheme of the universe.
Above all—at least in terms of what the Romantics did with this new
discovery—Herschel’s paper reinforced the organic view of the universe.
As one modern writer has observed, the paper turned astronomy into a life
science, concerned with the evolution of stars and galaxies over time. To
emphasize this point, Herschel throughout his paper drew his analogies
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