Let me provide an explanation for. To start with blush, Miller appears to be grist for Turner’s mill. Indisputably he does now not resemble the ones figures Turner conjures as foils: the unscientific romantic, totally immersed in his fast revel in, and the fresh creationist, blithely detached to medical consensus. However there’s a drawback. Miller’s geology, whilst decent for its time, is significantly old-fashioned. It isn’t that it comprises no truths, however judged by means of twenty-first century requirements, those are mingled with all method of half-truths and outright fictions. The query is whether or not this undermines Miller’s aesthetic revel in, or to make use of Turner’s language, prevents him from reaching the similar stage of aesthetic engagement as a twenty-first century geologist. Ancient cognitivism suggests an affirmative solution. False ideals undermine aesthetic engagement, so Miller must be incapable of attaining the similar stage of engagement as his trendy opposite numbers (all else being equivalent). However this conclusion sits uncomfortably with the ancient report. Previous geologists don’t appear to have been systematically impaired of their aesthetic engagement with nature. On the contrary, geologists like Miller had been marvels of aesthetic sensibility whose exploits have scarcely been matched within the contemporary historical past of science.
Ancient cognitivism, then, faces a ancient problem. In line with cognitivism, the capability for cultured engagement ought to extend as medical wisdom will increase—a minimum of more or less, and assuming other folks have now not modified of their innate skill to reach aesthetic engagement, or of their willingness to hunt out aesthetic studies. However this doesn’t appear to be the case. So ancient cognitivism is suspect.
A 2d instance will sharpen the critique. In 1858, the longer term director of the Geological Survey of Nice Britain, Archibald Geikie (1835–1924), revealed a e book referred to as The Tale of a Boulder. It was once meant as an advent to geology for a lay target audience, and centered at the rationalization of an “erratic block”: principally, a hunk of rock discovered someplace it isn’t intended to be. Geikie starts with a brilliant panorama description that unearths him to be, in historian David Oldroyd’s phrases, a “romantic aesthete”:
3 miles to the south-west of Edinburgh… there’s a ravine, overshadowed by means of a thick expansion of beech and elm, and traversed underneath by means of a circulation, which… winds throughout the wealthy champaign nation of Mid-Lothan. It’s, in any respect seasons of the yr, one of the vital picturesque nooks within the nation. I’ve noticed it within the intensity of iciness—the leafless bough doddered and dripping, the rocks dank and naked save the place half-hidden by means of rotting herbage… The remaining time I visited was once within the center of June. The beech timber had been in complete leaf… ; festoons of ivy, with right here and there a thread of honeysuckle interwoven, hung gracefully from the cliffs overhead… (Geikie 1858, 1–2)
Geikie continues on this vein for a number of pages till we meet the eponymous boulder, which in the beginning seems to be only a rock within the woodland. “It had an irregularly rectangular shape, about two or 3 ft lengthy, and half of as prime. Ferns and herbage had been grouped about it, the wood-sorrel clustered up its aspects, and little patches of moss and lichen nestled in its crevices” (Geikie 1858, 4). Thus far, that is usual boulder stuff. And but, Geikie claims, “there was once one thing about it that… riveted my consideration.” “The extra I seemed the extra did I see that me; and when, after slightly labour, some parts of its higher floor had been indifferent, my interest was once abundantly gratified.”
However what can also be “outstanding in the sort of gray stone, hidden in a wooden[?]” The query takes Geikie 250 pages to respond to. Now not the least unexpected factor we be told alongside the way in which is that the stone was once as soon as embedded in an iceberg right through a time when all the house was once lined by means of a shallow sea. This accounts for its dissimilarity from the encircling rock; the stone was once carried to its resting position from afar, “[like] a sculpted obelisk transported from the plains of Assyria to the streets of London” (Geikie 1858, 258). Geikie proceeds to consider “a large arctic sea, studded with icebergs that come drifting from the north. Right here and there a naked barren islet rises above the waste of waters, and the packed ice-floes regularly strand alongside its shores, whilst at different portions nice towering bergs… stay emerging and falling with the heavings of the surge” (259). The imagery is arresting: icebergs above Edinburgh! And but it’s improper. The speculation was once discredited across the time Geikie’s e book gave the impression, changed with a principle of huge overland ice sheets that continues to be widely credible to nowadays. Geikie quickly authorized this (see Geikie 1863, 74), and we will consider him returning to the similar ravine years later and having a reasonably other aesthetic revel in.