ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how and why large portions of the educated public—and many working scientists—came to think otherwise, systematically opposing imagination to science. It argues that the critical period was the mid-nineteenth century, when new ideals and practices of scientific objectivity transformed the persona of the scientist and the sources of scientific authority. The chapter focuses on the apparent paradox, also first framed in the early decades of the nineteenth century, that the more scientists insisted upon the obduracy and intransigence of facts, the more they feared the power of their own imaginations to subvert those facts. Only in the early nineteenth century was fear of the imagination in science compounded with loathing. The wild imagination and individualism held to be the birthright of true artists frightened even romantic scientists. Wild, ineffable imagination became the driving force of creativity in art—and the bogey of objectivity in science.
