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Coleridge's theory of life


Romanticism grew largely out of an attempt to understand not just inert nature, but also vital nature. Romantic works in the realm of art and Romantic medicine were a response to the general failure of the application of method of inertial science to reveal the foundational laws and operant principles of vital nature. German romantic science and medicine sought to understand the nature of the life principle identified by John Hunter as distinct from matter itself via Johan Friedrich Blumenbach's Bildungstrieb and Romantic medicine's Lebenskraft, as well as Röschlaub's development of the Brunonian system of medicine system of John Brown, in his excitation theory of life (German:Erregbarkeit theorie), working also with Schelling's Naturphilosophie, the work of Goethe regarding morphology, and the first dynamic conception of physiology of Richard Saumarez. But it is in Samuel Taylor Coleridge that we find the question of life and vital nature most intensely and comprehensively examined, particularly in his Hints towards the Formation of a more Comprehensive Theory of Life (1818), providing the foundation for Romantic philosophy, science and medicine. As one source states, this work is "a key document understanding...the complex relation between Romantic literature and science."

The Enlightenment had developed a philosophy and science supported by formidable twin pillars: the first the Cartesian split of mind and matter, the second Newtonian physics, with its conquest of inert nature, both of which focused the mind's gaze on things or objects. For Cartesian philosophy, life existed on the side of matter, not mind; and for the physical sciences, the method that had been so productive for revealing the secrets of inert nature, should be equally productive in examining vital nature. The initial attempt to seek the cause and principle of life in matter was challenged by John Hunter, who held that the principle of life was not to be found nor confined within matter, but existed independently of matter itself, and informed or animated it, that is, he implied, it was the unifying or antecedent cause of the things or what Aristotelean philosophy termed natura naturata (the outer appearances of nature).


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