This chapter recovers the shifting ways in which landscape occupied the political and aesthetic imaginations of the group of radical liberals with whom Vaughan Williams spent his formative years. This generation of liberals was concerned with bringing the life of the mind directly to bear on the world at hand. It was a worldview that included particular assumptions about the processes of history, the future, and the role of the exceptional individual in the work of social reform, and which was made tangible through an affective relationship with landscape. Walking, cycling, and mountaineering became forms of spiritual exercise within a landscape that was ‘storied’ by family and national histories, and which exhibited the same processes of incremental change that were characteristic of certain liberal approaches to political, legal, and aesthetic reform. The chapter compares Vaughan Williams’s outlook with that of his close friend G. M. Trevelyan in particular, tracing the ways in which both men struggled to adapt their liberal values after the First World War. For Trevelyan, Vaughan Williams, and their liberal intellectual peers, a circumscribed vision of the landscape became emblematic of that feature of English political and legal history that tended towards incremental change, as well as the liberal sense of ‘continuity within change’ that arose as an expression of the importance of personal freedom and of national self-determination.

While trudging through the landscape of his rambles, Coleridge filled his notebooks with reference to and drawings of geometric figures. The question arises: Given his fascination with the uncultivated, irregular wild hills and rivers of his rambles, why would he utilize the fixed, abstracted geometric idiom removed from time? This chapter addresses this seeming contradiction by suggesting that his attraction to the geometric figure in his landscape descriptions is neither perplexing nor inconsistent but rather an expression of his immersion in an environment that nurtured a geometric frame of mind and believed in a mathematical ordering of the entire universe. Beginning with his mathematical training both at Christ’s Hospital School and at the University of Cambridge, Coleridge inherited a cultural conviction that one should take Euclid seriously. Furthermore, this training sharpened his powers of attention, abstraction, and an a priori intuition. Ultimately, his attachment to a geometric perspective did not distract him from his attraction to the sensuous movements, sounds, and colors of his natural surroundings. He intertwined them both and in so doing tempered his contemporaries’ way of thinking that separated the two modes of perception.

This chapter introduces Newton’s intellectual biography before the publication of the Principia, and provides a new account of his methods as a natural philosopher. From the 1660s onwards, Newton – in line with his mentor Isaac Barrow and with other mixed mathematicians discussed in I.1 – sought a phenomenological science of properties, actively disdaining conjecture concerning the underlying causes of phenomena. The famous ‘De gravitatione’ manuscript is shown to stem from hydrostatical lectures delivered in 1671; contrary to most of the literature, it contains no elaborate metaphysics of divine omnipresence. Newton’s interest in revealed theology developed when he had to perform disputations in 1677; he did not become an antitrinitarian until the late-1680s, and there is no evidence that his theological views influenced the Principia. For all its mathematical sophistication, that work was very much the product of a methodology not much different from that which mixed mathematicians had been advocating for the previous century. In particular, Newton’s ideas at this time bear a strong conceptual resemblance to those developed by other English mixed mathematicians, such as John Wallis. The very first ‘Newtonians’ recognised the anti-metaphysical thrust of his ideas.