What Coleridge, in 1819, called the ‘second scientific revolution’ grew out of the Enlightenment rationalism of the eighteenth century, inspired by discoveries in astronomy and chemistry but subsequently transforming it by ‘bringing a new imaginative intensity and excitement to scientific work … driven by a common ideal of personal commitment to discovery’. The emergence of the notion of passionately disinterested science, independent of political ideology or religious doctrine, and of the linking of scientific genius to poetic inspiration is seen by Holmes as challenging fundamentally the terms of the first scientific revolution led by Newton, Locke and Descartes, as well as the long-established authority of London’s Royal Society and Paris’s Académie des Sciences.