ROMANCING NEWTON

At the age of sixteen, Charles Brockden Brown was an ardent antidisciplinarian, at the last moment for it until our own era. “Knowledge must not be departmentalized,” he told his Belles Lettres Club, which met occasionally in Franklin's home in Franklin's Philadelphia, and which was dedicated to considering “science and art within the same circle.”! The question is how long Brown's intellectual ecumenism lasted. Starting in 1794 (some seven years after the Belles Lettres pronouncement), Brown gradually made the acquaintance in New York of several prominent scientists and fellow travelers – Elihu Hubbard Smith, Samuel Miller, Edward Miller, Samuel Latham Mitchill – from whom he seems to have learned that the romances he was writing were antiscientific. Of course, when Brown arrived in New York in 1798 with the intention of settling there, he had already started Wieland, which still exhibits Brown's confidence in his compatibility with science: He defends the verisimilitude of Wieland's insanity by an “appeal to Physicians and to men conversant with the latent springs and occasional perversions of the human mind.” This makes colleagues of Benjamin Rush and Erasmus Darwin. But how long after Wieland and after the decision to live in New York was Brown confident that he and scientists were performing analogous investigations in the same spirit?

The problem with trying to pinpoint Brown's intellectual orientation at any phase of his novelistic career is that it had no phases.