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Richard Sullivan (1752-1806) British Politician and Naturalist

     Although naturalist was one of Sir Richard Joseph Sullivan’s many occupations, and although he wrote numerous long and detailed descriptions concerning his observations and theories of geology and natural phenomena, he has not been heralded as a giant in the scientific community. Sullivan’s traditional claims to fame is, in fact, his tenure as the Member of Parliament representing New Romney (1790-96) and, subsequent baronetcy of the United Kingdom (1804).

     Yet, despite not being widely received as a scientist, Sullivan’s writings on nature and science illuminate the manner in which the intellectual community of the Romantic era often chose apocalyptic language when describing the natural world. For example, in A View of Nature, in Letters to a Traveller Among the Alps with Reflections on Atheistical Philosophy, Now Exemplified in France (1794), a narrative of his treks through France, Germany, and Italy during the first years of the French Revolution, Sullivan portrays nature and the earth as actors in a Huttonian cycle of generation, decay, death, and regeneration. The essential movement of the cycle, the movement from life to death to new life, parallels the essential movement of an apocalypse, the death of the present followed by the birth of a new future.

     A View of Nature is even more remarkable for the discussion of apocalypse because Sullivan asks his audience to consider his work through an explicitly religious perspective. Prefacing his work, he writes that he intends "to expose the fallacy of the atheistical philosophy, and to shew how little support its advocates could derive, either from physics, where well understood, or from metaphysics, when cleared to extravagancy" (I. 3). In other words, he intends to combat recent trends towards Natural Philosophy and atheism--exemplified by Thomas Paine, for example-- and to return the practice of observing nature according to a firm religious perspective.

     This religious perspective appears in several passages of A View of Nature in which Sullivan describes the earth as apocalyptic terrain. Sullivan envisions an earth on which natural disasters are a part of the natural order than clears the way for new life. In Volume II he says that
These [natural] disasters, so indelible in their marks, are the result of pre-established laws of nature, and shew how irrevocably it is fixed, that some parts shall be deranged for the prosperity of the whole. It is this, that comets have presented themselves to surprized sights of philosophers; that their eccentric course has been dreaded as eventually tending to trouble the tranquility of our solar system; that terrors have been excited by them, even in the breasts of the enlightened; and that naturalists have fancied, all the destructive revolutions of the earth have had their origin in their energy and influence. But, the Great Ruler of the universe has so ordained it, that sometimes the seasons shall be displaced, sometimes the elements shall be in discord, the sea shall pass its limits, the solid earth shall shake, mountains, shall run and embrace each other, contagion shall destroy man and beast, and sterility shall desolate countries. But, these afflicting disorders are effects of causes purely natural, acting conformably to fixed laws, and determined by the established nature of things. (180)
     Sullivan later elaborates that
Creation, and destruction, thus regularly succeed to one another. Nothing is at a stand. All is in motion, and every revolution serves but to some wise purpose. Thus, while some regions are undermining, others are forming; while this mountain crumbles, its resemblance consolidates in the ocean; while flints, jaspers, petro-silex, felt spar, granites, lavas, and ferruginous stones, from long exposure to the air, fall into a state of decomposition, similar bodies and crystalllizations assume their distinct shapes, and wait to be called into being. Thus succession is most admirable. Every particle of matter this comes into action. But the times required for such regeneration is infinitely, perhaps, too unbounded for the circumscribed imagination and faculties of man. (185-6)
     According to Sullivan, the earth is a realm beyond the limited ken of the human mind. Humanity must have faith in the knowledge that the destructions that seem to devastate all possibilities for human life are actually a clearing of the way for new life.

Works Cited

Sideny Lee and Lesley Stephen, eds. Dictionary of National Biography. Dictionary of National Biography.

Sullivan, Richard Joseph. A View of Nature, in Letters to a Traveller Among the Alps with Reflections on Atheistical Philosophy, Now Exemplified in France. London: T. Becket, 1794.