James Hutton e o sublime geológico: a Teoria da Terra entre o Iluminismo e o Romantismo

Abstract

The works of the Scottish geologist, naturalist and physicist James Hutton (1726-1797), in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment, were greatly influenced by the ideas of intellectuals such as Isaac Newton and David Hume, representing a synthesis and a transposition of the moving force of Enlightenment to the newborn Earth sciences. His view of the terrible magnitude of natural forces and the immense amounts of geological time as compared to the briefness of human life reflects the Kantian concepts of Dynamic and Mathematic Sublime, respectively. From the development of geology as a science which opened the human eye to natural history, it is possible to draw a parallel between the theories of James Hutton and the views about Nature of the romantic poets of the XIX century, mainly Coleridge and Wordsworth. In this way, geology is born as a Science exactly at the crossroads between two of the main intel-lectual and cultural movements of Western civilization, Enlightenment and Romanticism.