I have found no words to more accurately represent the modern person’s approach to discovering himself or herself within a cosmos– how he works, where his impulses come from, how are they controlled and what changes she could make in her own life, how she can cultivate more of what she values– like those penned by the American poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892). This poem was included in an anthology I covered in a History of the Scientific Revolution college course, and after I read it I knew that my studies had brought me to breach a field of history unlike any other, almost primeval in nature relative to the rest.
WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
As It is Found 