ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the developing situation of differentiation and competition between 'scientists' and poets in the Romantic period in the light of a specific debate which was to dominate both science and literature in the mid-century. Although Erasmus Darwin's direct manner of teaching science through verse did not continue in the nineteenth century there is ample evidence of a more complex symbiosis between scientific and imaginative thinking which developed during the half-century after his death. Degeneration was even more marked among the domestic animals reduced to slavery. The existence of pain and suffering was perceived as one of the greatest challenges to Natural Theology but also as an opportunity for its greatest triumph. Within Natural Theology, the existence of war could be explained as a divine necessity, but other natural features of the universe, such as earthquakes and painful disease, were embarrassing to the natural theologians.
