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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." == Background == 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). This reduction of the question of life to matter, and the corollary, that the method of the inertial sciences was the way to understand the very phenomenon of life, that is, its very nature and essence as a power (''natura naturans''), not as manifestations through sense-perceptible appearances (''natura naturata''), also reduced the individual to a material-mechanical 'thing' and seemed to render human freedom an untenable concept. It was this that Romanticism challenged, seeking instead to find an approach to the essence of nature as being also vital not simply inert, through a systematic method involving not just physics, but physiology (living functions). For Coleridge, quantitative analysis was anti-realist and needed to be grounded in qualitative analysis ('-ologies') (as was the case with Goethe's approach). At the same time, the Romantics had to deal with the idealistic view that life was a 'somewhat' outside of things, such that the things themselves lost any real existence, a stream coming through Hume and Kant, and also infusing the German natural philosophical stream, German idealism, and in particular ''naturphilosophie'', eventuating scientifically in the doctrine of 'vitalism'. For the Romantics, life is independent of and antecedent to nature, but also infused and suspended in nature, not apart from it, As David Bohm expresses it in more modern terms "In nature nothing remains constant…everything comes from other things and gives rise to other things. This principle is…at the foundation of the possibility of our understanding nature in a rational way." And as Coleridge explained, 'this antecedent unity, or cause and principle of each union, it has since the time of Bacon and Kepler been customary to call a law." And as law, "we derive from it a progressive insight into the necessity and generation of the phenomena of which it is the law." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Romanticism and the theory of life」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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