Abstract
Vitalism, the theory that life is generated and sustained through some form of non-mechanical force or power specific to and located in living bodies, is usually associated with Romantic theories of nature. It is often connected with particular perceptions of nature: as possessing independent powers of animation and self-direction, vital energies of self-generation and the ability to take actions — whether an unconscious muscular response in an animal, or the unfurling of leaves towards the sun in a plant — which will best promote an organism’s well-being. Coleridge’s speculation in The Eolian Harp that ‘all of animated nature’ might ‘tremble into thought’, with its attribution of even further powers to nature — an embryonic consciousness — can be read as one iconic moment of such Romantic vitalism, and, indeed, Coleridge himself quotes these very lines in a letter to John Thelwall, author of a controversial essay on ‘animal vitality’, which reviews various contemporary theories of life and vitality. As with too many critics and historians since, Coleridge was ready to dismiss the era immediately prior to his own as an age of mechanism, but speculation about the possible, if as yet unknown powers possessed by organic matter, in fact recurred throughout the eighteenth century, and directly informed the very debates which Coleridge enthusiastically surveys.1 Stimulated by the inability of the mechanical natural philosophy of the late seventeenth century to explain the actions and functioning of living bodies, and prompted too by Newton’s speculations in the ‘General Scholium’ to his Principia and in the Queries which were appended to his Opticks, physiologists, philosophers and experimenters grappled throughout the eighteenth century to offer alternative accounts of living nature.
And now we might add something concerning a certain most subtle Spirit which pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies Newton, General Scholium, Principia (2nd edition), 1713
And what if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversly fram’d, That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of all?
Coleridge, The Eolian Harp, 1796
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Notes
Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), vol. 1, pp. 294–5. For Coleridge and Thelwall, see Ian Wylie, Young Coleridge and the Philosophers of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 123–6, and Trevor H. Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science (Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 208. Coleridge refers to the ‘mechanical solutions’ of the eighteenth century in a discussion of the physiologist John Hunter, in his Theory of Life. See The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 11, Shorter Works and Fragments, ed. H. J. Jackson and J. R. de J. Jackson (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 486.
The phrase ‘language of nature’ is used by Peter Hanns Reill in his Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); see also Ludmilla Jordanova, ed., Languages of Nature: Critical Essays on Science and Literature (London: Free Association, 1986). The term ‘science’, which did not gain its current meaning until the nineteenth century, is used anachronistically throughout this book to refer to the wide and various range of natural philosophical and experimental researches and activities which we now understand as scientific in the modern sense.
Alexander Pope, ‘An Essay on Man’, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (1963, repr. London: Routledge, 1989), III, 13–26 (p. 526).
For Pope’s strategic contradiction, see David Fairer, ‘Introduction’, in Pope: New Contexts, ed. D. Fairer (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), p. 6. For a full account of the interpretative difficulties surrounding the Essay on Man, as well as a reading of the text as deliberately resisting ‘polite’ communication, see Stephen Copley and David Fairer, ‘An Essay on Man and the Polite Reader’, in Pope: New Contexts, ed. Fairer, pp. 205–24; and for Coleridge’s failure to appreciate such textual subtleties, see John Whale, ‘Romantic Attacks: Pope and the Spirit of Language’, in Pope: New Contexts, ed. Fairer, pp. 153–68 (p. 160).
For these and other examples, see the OED. For The Ladies Dispensatory, see Vivien Jones, ed., Women in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 83.
On Newtonian and post-Newtonian matter theory, see P. M. Heimann, ‘“Nature is a Perpetual Worker”: Newton’s Aether and Eighteenth-Century Natural Philosophy’, Ambix, 20 (1973), 1–25; Heimann, ‘Voluntarism and Immanence: Conceptions of Nature in Eighteenth-Century Thought’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 39 (1978), 271–83; Heimann and J. E. McGuire, ‘Newtonian Forces and Lockean Powers: Concepts of Matter in Eighteenth-Century Thought’, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 3 (1971), 233–306; and Alan Gabbey, ‘Newton, Active Powers, and the Mechanical Philosophy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Newton, ed. I. Bernard Cohen and George E. Smith (Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 329–57. For Newton’s impact on physiology, see Anita Guerrini, ‘James Keill, George Cheyne, and Newtonian Physiology, 1690–1740’, Journal of the History of Biology, 18 (1985), 247–66, and Shirley Roe, ‘The Life Sciences’, in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 4, Eighteenth-Century Science, ed. Roy Porter (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 397–416.
See John P. Wright, The Sceptical Realism of David Hume (Manchester University Press, 1983), p. 162.
On post-Lockean debates, see John Yolton, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).
See Sergio Moravia, ‘From “Homme Machine” to “Homme Sensible”: Changing Eighteenth-Century Models of Man’s Image’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 39 (1978), 45–60; François Duchesneau, ‘Vitalism in Late Eighteenth-Century Physiology: The Cases of Barthez, Blumenbach and John Hunter’, in William Hunter and the Eighteenth-Century Medical World, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge University Press, 1985) and Elizabeth L. Haigh, ‘Vitalism, the Soul, and Sensibility: The Physiology of Theophile Bordeu’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 31 (1976), 30–41. For vitalism in the European Enlightenment more generally, see Reill, Vitalizing Nature.
For the history of the Edinburgh Medical School, see J. B. Morrell, ‘The University of Edinburgh in the Late Eighteenth Century’, Isis, 62 (1971), 158–71; John R. R. Christie, ‘The Origins and Development of the Scottish Scientific Community, 1680–1760’, History of Science, 12 (1974), 122–41; Christopher Lawrence, ‘The Nervous System and Society in the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientific Culture, ed. Barry Barnes and Steven Shapin (London: Sage, 1979), pp. 19–40; and A. L. Donovan, Philosophical Chemistry in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Doctrines and Discoveries of William Cullen and Joseph Black (Edinburgh University Press, 1975), ch. 3.
Innumerable physicians in this period had links to Edinburgh. These include Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Beddoes and John Brown, whose ‘Brunonian’ medicine, based on the theory of bodily excitability, was widely adopted in Germany and used as a basis for Romantic medicine. See Christopher Lawrence, ‘The Power and the Glory: Humphry Davy and Romanticism’, in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 213–27 (p. 215). William Hunter, brother of the eminent physiologist John Hunter, and a leading anatomist and physician in his own right, was also an early pupil and lifelong correspondent of Cullen.
Sharon Ruston, Shelley and Vitality (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005); Nicholas Roe, The Politics of Nature: William Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). For Romanticism and vitalism, see also Denise Gigante, Life: Organic Form and Romanticism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder (London: Harper, 2008), and Clayton Koelb, The Revivifying Word: Literature, Philosophy, and the Theory of Life in Europe’s Romantic Age (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008).
Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge University Press, 2001). On Romantic science, see, inter alia: Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine, eds, Romanticism and the Sciences (Cambridge University Press, 1990); Hermione de Almeida, Romantic Medicine and John Keats (Oxford University Press, 1991); Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine and Reform in Radical London (Chicago University Press, 1989); Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature; Nicholas Roe, ed., Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life (Oxford University Press, 2001); and Wylie, Young Coleridge.
Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, no. 168 (26 October 1751), 377–9 (p. 378). On animation in eighteenth-century poetry and criticism, see my ‘The Science and Poetry of Animation: Personification, Analogy, and Erasmus Darwin’s Loves of the Plants’, Romanticism, 10:2 (2004), 191–208 (pp. 195–6).
Ruston, Shelley and Vitality, p. 23. Haller introduced the terms ‘sensibility’ and ‘irritability’ to mid-eighteenth-century anatomy: see Andrew Cunningham, ‘The Pen and the Sword: Recovering the Disciplinary Identity of Physiology and Anatomy before 1800. II: Old Anatomy — the Sword’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 34 (2003), 51–76 (p. 66). Central to the debate between Whytt and Haller was the former’s contention that the irritability of living tissue derived from a living principle within it. Haller preferred to explain muscular action by what Shirley Roe has described as ‘animal mechanics’. Roe, ‘Life Sciences’, p. 403.
Roy Porter and George Rousseau, ‘Introduction: Toward a Natural History of Mind and Body’, in The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought, ed. G. S. Rousseau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 31. Peter de Bolla similarly sees this period as one ‘of an emerging new understanding of the construction of the subject’ in his ‘Introduction’ to The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 1. Dror Wahrmann’s The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) is the most recent examination of the eighteenth-century ‘self’; see also Michael McKeon, ‘Biography, Fiction, and the Emergence of “Identity” in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in Writing Lives: Biography and Texuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modern England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 339–55; Felicity Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); and Patricia M. Spacks, Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976).
Dennis Todd, Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England (University of Chicago Press, 1995).
On the Essay as ‘natural history’, see James G. Buickerood, ‘The Natural History of the Understanding: Locke and the Rise of Facultative Logic in the Eighteenth Century’, History and Philosophy of Logic, 6 (1985), 157–90. On Locke’s discussion of personal identity, see Christopher Fox, Locke and the Scriblerians: Identity and Consciousness in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 341.
Joseph Butler, ‘Of Personal Identity’, in The Works of Joseph Butler, ed. W. E. Gladstone, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896), vol. 1, p. 392. Quoted in Fox, Locke and the Scriblerians, p. 10.
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 66.
Isaac Newton, Mathematical Principles, trans. Andrew Motte, rev. Florian Cajori (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1934), p. 547.
Isaac Newton, Opticks, or A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colours of Light (London, 1730, repr. London: Bell and Sons, 1931), p. 401.
My argument here and in the next paragraph runs parallel with that in my ‘Feigning Fictions: Imagination, Hypothesis, and Philosophical Writing in the Scottish Enlightenment’, Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation, 44:2 (2007), 149–71. On vitalism as a response to Hume’s sceptical attack on the methods of natural philosophy, see Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment.
Robert Whytt, ‘Essay on the Vital and Other Involuntary Motions of Animals’, in The Works of Robert Whytt (Edinburgh, 1768), p. v.
William Cullen, A Letter to Lord Cathcart, President of the Board of Police in Scotland, Concerning the Recovery of Persons Drowned and Seemingly Dead (Edinburgh, 1776), pp. 25–6. For interest in resuscitation and reanimation across Europe in the late eighteenth century, see Reill, Vitalizing Nature, pp. 171–82, and Sean M. Quinlan, ‘Apparent Death in Eighteenth-Century France and England’, French History, 9 (1995), 27–47.
The Spectator, 9 August 1714, no. 578, in The Spectator, ed. Gregory Smith, 4 vols (London: Dent, 1963), vol. 4, pp. 315–19.
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© 2012 Catherine Packham
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Packham, C. (2012). Introduction. In: Eighteenth-Century Vitalism. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230368392_1
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