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Notes
1. On the intimacy of natural philosophy and poetry, see Lawrence, “The Power and the Glory,” 589–595; Levere, “Coleridge and the Sciences,” 295–306; King-Hele, “Romantic Followers,” Ch. 11. Robert J. Richards has mapped the union of poetry, philosophy and natural science in the German Romantic movement in The Romantic Conception of Life. Denise Gigante, in Life: Organic Form and Romanticism, and Alan Richardson, in British Romanticism and the Science of Mind, have done the same for the English Romantics.
2. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 24–25, 28.
3. Goethe, “The Influence of Modern Philosophy,” 29.
4. Goethe, “History of the Printed Brochure” (1817), 171–172.
5. I use the term “classical mechanism” to refer to a specific form of mechanist science and philosophy established and espoused from the latter seventeenth century by Cartesians and others such as Robert Boyle, who insisted upon a strict separation of matter and force, and upon the fundamental inactivity of matter itself. Others who described themselves as “mechanists” – such as G.W. Leibniz and his followers and fellow-travelers – meant something very different by it. This is why I find it important to distinguish “classical” mechanism from mechanism in general, which included a variety of views.
6. On the role of mechanist science in the culture of Romanticism, and specifically on the falsity of the opposition between mechanism and Romanticism, see Tresch, The Romantic Machine, especially Ch. 1. Tresch argues that the idea of an opposition between mechanism and Romanticism was a conceit of the early twentieth century.
7. Timothy Lenoir has influentially characterized Kant's complicated stance with regard to the science of living beings as “teleomechanism.” See Lenoir, Strategy of Life, Ch. 1. Robert Richards has more recently disagreed with Lenoir's account, arguing that Kant excluded biology from the realm of science. See Richards, Romantic Conception of Life, 229–237. Here I am reading Kant's Critique of Judgment against the background of the animal-machine tradition with its escalating contradiction between understandings of living forms as intrinsically purposeful and a mechanist model of science that precluded such ascriptions of purposefulness to natural phenomena. In this context it seems to me that Kant's account of the study of life is unclassifiable either as science or non-science, teleological, mechanist, or both at once. Rather, it addresses the contradiction itself and seeks to encompass all of the conflicting positions.
8. Because of the central role of gravitational force in the Newtonian system, some commentators from the seventeenth century onward have seen Newton's physics as intrinsically active in contrast with Cartesian cosmology. For a recent representation of this view of Newtonianism, see Dear, Intelligibility of Nature, Ch. 1, §4. As Dear points out, Newton did invoke “active principles” in his last major work, the Opticks. See Newton, Opticks, 398.
9. Kant, Gedanken; Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, 394–395 fn..
10. See, e.g., Scruton, Kant, 97.
11. To any philosophers, especially Kantians, who might be reading this: I read as a historian, not as a philosopher. My main purpose is not to demonstrate Kant's influence on the Romantic Movement, or on nineteenth-century life sciences, nor is it to arrive at a rigorous Kantian program by interpreting his writings so as to eliminate any apparent tensions or contradictions. I am not interested in trying to free Kant's ideas from the messiness of historical context. Rather I aim to situate his thinking, including its tensions and contradictions, in time and place, to see what it signifies regarding the intellectual world in which he was working, and the one we have inherited.
The Critique of Judgment has been the subject of a great deal of philosophical analysis and debate, but rather less historical consideration (important exceptions are the works of Timothy Lenoir and Robert Richards mentioned in note 7, above). I have studied the philosophical literature in this area and it has informed my own reading, but in a trans-disciplinary and therefore indirect way. Philosophers read very differently from historians. Philosophers' primary purpose in reading Kant, or any philosopher, is to define a philosophical approach of their own in keeping with his principles. They therefore seek ways to “rescue” and “defend” key aspects of what he wrote, to resolve tensions and ambiguities, to solve apparent contradictions, to arrive at something they feel able to endorse. As a historian, in contrast, I am reading for the whole of what Kant wrote in a given text, including – indeed, especially – the tensions and ambiguities, because these reflect the preoccupations of the world in which he was working.
For recent philosophical discussions of Kant's understanding of the role of teleology and mechanism in the sciences of life, see the works listed below. These offer ways to resolve the central tension of the Critique of Judgment: the conflict between the requirement of contemporary mechanist science that scientific explanations attribute no intrinsic purposefulness to natural phenomena, and the apparent purposefulness of living forms. For my (historian's) purposes, these philosophical readings of Kant serve to confirm the presence and importance of this central tension, since what I am interested in is the tension itself, and in the fault line it represents in contemporary science, not in finding a philosophical resolution to it. See Steigerwald, Kantian Teleology and the Biological Sciences; Breitenbach, “Teleology in Biology,” 31–56; Ginsborg, “Kant's Biological Teleology and its Philosophical Significance”; Ginsborg, “Kant on Aesthetic and Biological Purposiveness,” 329–360; Ginsborg, “Lawfulness Without a Law,” 37–81; Ginsborg,“Kant on Understanding Organisms as Natural Purposes,” 231–258; Ginsborg,“Oughts Without Intentions”; Guyer, “Organisms and the Unity of Science,” 259–281; and McLaughlin, Kant's Critique of Teleology.
12. Kant, Critique of Judgment, §s 62–68, quoted passages in §64, Academy Edition [hereafter AE] 371 and §65, AE 374–375.
13. Kant, Critique of Judgment, §65, AE 374; §73, AE 395.
14. Kant, Critique of Judgment, §66, AE 376.
15. Kant, Critique of Judgment, §85, AE 436–441. On Kant's rejection of the argument from design, see also Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund, especially Fünfte – Siebente Beträchtungen; and §68, AE 381, where he argues that the argument from design is a vicious circle.
16. Kant, Universal Natural History, 115 [first published in German as Allgemeine Naturgeschichte, 146: “Es wird in der That alsdenn keine Natur mehr seyn; es wird nur ein Gott in der Maschine die Veränderungen der Welt hervor bringen.”] See also Kant, Critique of Judgment, §78, AE 411–412.
17. Kant, Critique of Judgment, §§66, 72, 78, 81, quoted passage from §81, AE 421.
18. Kant, Critique of Judgment, §§62, 65, 67, 71, 73, quoted passages from §62, AE 364 and §65, AE 375.
19. Kant, Critique of Judgment, §65, AE 375.
20. Kant, Critique of Judgment, §§70–71, AE 387–389.
21. Kant, Critique of Judgment, §68, AE 382.
22. Kant, Critique of Judgment, §63, AE 369.
23. Kant, Critique of Judgment, §80, AE 418–420.
24. Kant, Universal Natural History, 94 [“aus den mechanischen Gesetzen der zur Bildung strebenden Materie,” Allgemeine Naturgeschichte, 110].
25. See Maienschein, “Epigenesis and Preformationism.”
26. Blumenbach, Über den Bildungstrieb; Kant, Critique of Judgment, §81, AE 424; Kant – Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, 5 August 1790, in Guyer and Wood, Correspondence, 354.
27. Genetishe Behandlung: Goethe, “Vorarbeiten zu einer Physiologie der Pflanzen,” 303–304. Published in partial English translation as “Excerpt from Studies for a Physiology of Plants,” 73–75.
28. Goethe, The Metamorphosis of Plants, ¶113.
29. Goethe, “A Commentary on the Aphoristic Essay ‘Nature,’” 6.
30. Blumenbach, An Essay on Generation, 61. For an analysis of the nature and status of Blumenbach's nisus in relation to contemporary notions of vital forces, see Larson, “Vital Forces,” 235–249.
31. Lamarck, Hydrogéologie, 8, 188. For “biologie,” see also Lamarck, Histoire naturelle, 49–50; Lamarck, Recherches sur l'organisation, vi, 186, 202; Lamarck, Philosophie zoologique, xviii; and Lamarck,“Biologie, ou considérations sur la nature,” a manuscript plan for a never-written book. Lamarck was not the only person to coin the term: several authors arrived at it independently around the same time. See Corsi, “Biologie,” 37–64.
32. Lamarck, Philosophie zoologique, Vol. 2: 95, 127; Lamarck, Histoire naturelle, 50, 134; Lamarck, Hydrogéologie, 188. On Lamarck's “ceaseless tendency” of living beings to compose and complexify themselves, a “continually active cause,” see also Philosophie zoologique, Vol. 1: 132; Vol. 2: 69, 100, 101, 104. For “monade,” see Vol. 1: 285; Vol. 2: 67, 212. “Animated point” is in Discours d'ouverture prononcé, 16. On Lamarck's relations to Leibniz and the possibly Leibnizian origins of his term “monade,” see Canguilhem, “Note sur les rapports,” 188 (for Maupertuis's role in transmitting the Leibnizian monad into theories of life); Smith, “Leibniz's Hylomorphic Monad,” 24; and Burkhardt, The Spirit of System, 233, n. 36.
33. Lamarck, Philosophie zoologique, Vol. 2: 310–311.
34. For analyses of Cuvier's denigration of Lamarck, see Gould, “Foreword”; and Rudwick, Georges Cuvier, 83.
35. Cuvier, “Eloge de M. de Lamarck,” i–xxxi, on p. xx.
36. Cuvier, Le Règne animal, Vol. 1: 7.
37. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, 257.
38. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 264.
39. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 273.
40. See Micheli, The Early Reception, Ch. 3: “Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Kant”; and Edwards, The Statesman's Science, 144.
41. Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences and Correspondence.
42. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, 393–397, 399, 401.
43. Ibid., 389–392.
44. See Seymour, Mary Shelley, 58.
45. Shelley, Introduction to Frankenstein, Third Edition, 170, 171.
46. Richardson, British Romanticism, 17.
47. Cabanis, Rapports, Vol. 1: 128.
48. Ibid., 118.
49. Ibid., 243.
50. Darwin, The Temple of Nature, 62–64. The talking head is reported in Additional Note XV on page 98.
51. Shelley, “Introduction to Frankenstein,” 171; Darwin, Temple of Nature, note 12.
52. Davy, “The Sons of Genius,” 1:26 (ln. 97).
53. Davy, “Discourse Introductory,” 2: 311–326, at ¶3.
54. Darwin, Zoonomia, §2, part 2, ¶1–2. See also Darwin, Botanic Garden, Part I, Canto I, ln. 363 ff; Temple of Nature, Additional Notes, 12–13, 74–89; Abernethy, Introductory Lectures, 5: no. 130; Humboldt, Expériences sur le galvanisme.
55. Galvani, Commentary.
56. Darwin, Temple of Nature, Canto III, lns. 111–112.
57. Hogg, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1:56.
58. Shelley, Introduction to Frankenstein, 171–172.
59. Aldini, An Account.
60. “Horrible Phenomena! – Galvanism,” in The Times, 11 February 1819, 3; see also The Examiner, 15 February 1819, 103; and Keddie, Anecdotes Literary and Scientific, 3–4.
61. Ure, “An Account of Some Experiments,” 290; see also Golinksi, “The Literature of the New Sciences”; and Sleigh, “Life, Death and Galvanism,” 219–248.
62. Shelley, Introduction to Frankenstein, 172.
63. Saumarez, A New System of Physiology, Vol. 2: 8. For Coleridge's admiration of this work, see Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Ch. 9 and fn. 31.
64. Davy, “Discourse.”
65. Lawrence, Lectures, 57.
66. Bichat, Recherches, 2.
67. Darwin, The Botanic Garden, Part I, Canto I, ln. 368.
68. Lamarck, “Biologie,” 10–11.
69. Lamarck, Mémoires de physique, 248–249; see also Recherches, ¶817, 289.
70. Lamarck, Recherches, ¶818, 289–290.
71. Saint-Hilaire, Philosophie anatomique, Vol. 1: 208–209.
72. Darwin, Temple of Nature, Canto II, lns. 41–42.
73. Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy, 59, 109.
74. Darwin, Temple of Nature, Canto IV, lns. 379–80.
75. Coleridge, “On the Passions,” 2: 1442.
76. [Anima Mundi] Abernethy, Introductory Lectures, 51.
77. The principal primary texts for the emergence of energy conservation include Mayer, “Bemerkungen,” an early formulation of the law of energy conservation with a physiological foundation; Helmholtz, Über die Erhaltung der Kraft; and Reymond, Über die Lebenskraft, 1:1–26. For a primary account of the development of the principle of energy conservation, see Mach, History and Root of the Principles of the Conservation of Energy. Important secondary treatments include Kuhn, “Energy Conservation,” 321–356; Cardwell, From Watt to Clausius; and Smith, Science of Energy. On Helmholtz, see also Bevilacqua, “Helmholtz's Ueber die Erhaltung.”
78. Johannes Müller first presented his doctrine of specific nerve energies in Zur vergleichenden Physiologie. For an overview of the emergence of ideas about energy in physiology, see Rothschuh, History of Physiology, Ch. 6. For an analysis of the instrumental connections between Helmholtz's work in physics and in physiology, see Brain and Wise, “Muscles and Engines.”
79. Müller, Elements of Physiology, 27, 31–35, 712, 714, 719.
80. Cabanis, Rapports, Vol. 2: 423–24.
81. Müller, Elements of Physiology, 285.
82. Helmholtz, “On the Conservation of Force,” 124.
83. Helmholtz, “On the Interaction of the Natural Forces,” 37, 38.
84. Coleridge, “The Eolian Harp,” ln. 27.
85. Darwin, Temple of Nature, Canto II, lns. 19–22.
86. Rabinbach, The Human Motor, 92. Rabinbach uses the phrase “transcendental materialism” specifically in connection with the theory of energy conservation, which made energy the common basis of all things, and the corresponding social and technological concepts of work, labor power and industry.
87. Herder, Outlines, 113.
88. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, 393.
89. Wordsworth, “Lines Composed,” lns. 101, 102, Complete Poetical Works.
90. Herder, Outlines, 99.
91. Darwin, Zoonomia, 2: no. 129, 44.
92. Wordsworth, “The Recluse,” ln. 793, Complete Poetical Works.
93. Coleridge, “The Eolian Harp,” lns. 44–47.