Ideas about nature first started to change in the late 1700s and more clearly in the 1800s.  Europeans began to admire (from a distance) the wilderness in North America and a few Americans who lived in cities picked up this idea (actually settlers on the frontier still saw wilderness simply as something to be conquered). 

Both the Enlightenment and the people who reacted against it (Romantics) developed more positive views of wilderness.  The idea that wilderness was good was spreading, but it took several different forms.

The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement in the 18th century.  The scientific revolution got people excited that we can understand the world through science.  This led to an emphasis on finding better ways of doing things, instead of tradition.  This was very influential on the American revolution and the constitution.
New ways of seeing nature resulted from the enlightenment, in three rather contradictory ways.

• the enlightenment led some intellectuals to Deism: an approach to religion that focuses on God as the creator of the world, rather than emphasizing God intervening in our daily lives (and if you focus on God as creator then the creation becomes an important way of knowing God).  God is a perfect watchmaker who made the creation work so well that God doesn't need to interfere.
  
• the development of science led to the idea of natural theology, a different approach that lead to the idea that studying nature was a way to get closer to God, popular even among some evangelicals
  
• The Romantic movement in Europe was a reaction against the idea that science can explain everything, that everything is rational.  It led to an enthusiasm for whatever was wild and mysterious.  God is in the mysterious and can't be understood so is a very personal experience.
  

Where did this new idea--Natural Theology--come from?


Romanticism: A literary and artistic movement that encouraged an interest in the strange, remote, solitary, and mysterious, instead of wanting to make the world as well-ordered as possible.  

• Romantics didn't want to understand everything rationally, they were interested in what couldn't be understood
  
• Romantics weren't sure that civilization had indeed made us happier, but instead admired primitive people
• they were more interested in feelings and imagination and less interested in rationality
• they saw feelings as wild and identified rationality with civilization
• they were interested in those things that cannot be understood rationally

Romanticism was a fad--not many people believed it fully

but Romantics popularized several ideas that were more widely influential

• they had a new idea of how nature is beautiful
  
• Sublime: natural beauty that was not neat and well-ordered like a garden but complex, uncontrollable and impressive, leading to feelings of awe.
• beauty that changes the viewer, that brings the viewer in touch with God or some greater truth
• experiencing nature creates awe for God's creation and becomes a form of worship
  
• An emphasis on the individual character of different nations (romantic nationalism)
  

Europeans admired American scenery before Americans did.  Romantics gave everybody new words to use to describe their experience of nature.

Copying European ideas, a few Americans began to write of wilderness as beautiful.   This was new--it seems obvious to us but people really hadn't written about it that way before.

Art promoted this way of seeing nature: