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European Romantic Review,

Vol. 18, No. 2, April 2007, pp. 265–272

ISSN 1050–9585 (print)/ISSN 1740–4657 (online) © 2007 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/10509580701298040

ZeitgeistDenise GiganteTaylor and Francis LtdGERR_A_229708.sgm10.1080/10509580701298040European Romantic Review1050-9585 (print)/1740-4657 (online)Original Article2007Taylor & Francis182000000April 2007Dr DeniseGigantedgigante@stanford.edu

The Romantic concern with élan vital—vital power, vis essentialis, or Lebenskraft —has

been traditionally dismissed by historians of science as obscurantist mystification. So too,

the idea of aesthetic vitality, associated by Kant and Coleridge with organic form on the

natural philosophical model, has been challenged by recent decades of literary scholarship

informed by historicism and cultural materialism. Both versions of formative power, natu-

ral and aesthetic (the Bildungstrieb of Blumenbach and the Bildung motivating Goethe’s

novels and British Romantic poetry alike), have been subsumed into an outmoded concept

of Zeitgeist and its old-fashioned critical methodology, the history of ideas. This paper will

suggest some ways in which the concept of vital power, at the heart of what was called

“living form” in the period from 1760 through 1830, can help us to think through the inter-

disciplinary approach to organicism that was, nevertheless, characteristic of Romanticism.

A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth … (Shelley 515)

Shelley’s claim in A Defence of Poetry that a “poem is the very image of life expressed in

its eternal truth” (515) might not make much sense to us today; its vague diction may

even prove something of an embarrassment to literary scholars seeking professional

respect in a very real institutional conflict of the faculties. But it comes into more

immediate focus, and its stakes of more obvious relevance, when we recall the ways in

which the concept of life, its meanings and material expressions, were being contested

across a range of developing disciplines around the turn of the nineteenth century. The

cell theory that transformed biological investigation in the 1830s marked an epistemic

break with Romantic investigations into the phenomena of life. When Karl Ernst Von

Baer (1792–1876) announced his discovery in 1828 of the mammalian egg, he paved

the way for the identification of the cell itself as the starting point of life. Early cell theo-

rists had thought that cells spontaneously emerge from unformed liquid, but from the

mid-nineteenth century cells were known to be produced through cellular division,

Denise Gigante is Associate Professor of English at Stanford University. Correspondence to: Denise Gigante,

Department of English, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-2087, USA; email: dgigante@stanford.edu

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starting with the original embryonic germ cell, or fertilized egg. “Every animal that

originates from the copulation of a male and female develops from an egg,” Von Baer

announced, “and none from the pure ‘formative’ liquid.”1 Unlike the concept of the

egg associated with animal reproduction since Harvey’s work of the mid-seventeenth

century, the cell that Von Baer observed through the microscope was a distinct material

particle.2 Cellular biology reduced living form from an internal flow of power to a

structural assemblage. Yet it is important to keep in mind that writers in the period

from 1760 to 1830, a time roughly coterminous with the literary period designation of

Romanticism, worked to ascribe meaning to the purposive agency of the organism as a

whole.

Traditionally, organic life had been thought of as larger systems composed of fibers

and atoms, but these basic units were considered mere subdivisions of organic matter,

not independent units of life. Around 1800, the French physician Xavier Bichat

suggested a different layer of organization, somewhere between the atom, fiber, organ,

and organism, which he called tissue. But this cross-section of interwoven systems

(nervous, muscular, vascular, osseous) was also conceived as a subdivision of a larger

whole, the organism, animated by vital powers. Not until Theodor Schwann’s articula-

tion of cell theory in 1838 would the study of life shrink down from the totality of living

form to the self-enclosed cell. In his Microscopical Researches, Schwann explicitly

likened the cell to a person: “Each cell is, within certain limits, an Individual, an inde-

pendent Whole” (2). He thus defined a whole that was suddenly explicable in terms of

biochemistry and cellular metabolism. Once the basic unit of life was redefined as the

cell, the organism lost its status as the fundamental quantity of being and metaphysical

concerns parted ways, for the time being, with experimental life science. And when

heredity was discovered at the heart of the cell (which it was by the 1870s) the wide-

ranging study of life, which had preoccupied many different strands of culture in the

Romantic era, moved into increasingly specialized, less public spaces. What was lost,

above all, once the cell replaced the organism as the primary object of life science, was

the prevailing concern, across many schools of thought, with the idea of a unifying

principle. Associated with the classical definition of beauty, this idea had made its way

into the science of living form, bringing various discourses to bear on the generation of

life.

The turn in scientific investigation from living form to cellular biology signaled a

corresponding turn away from the natural philosophical concern with life as vaguely

equivalent to self––or an organic whole requiring a unifying principle. Once living

form no longer implicated beauty as its philosophical correlative, the study of nature

splintered into the specialized fields of biology, themselves constructed like cellular

units of a former epistemic whole. Reduced from a complex system of powers to a

structural assemblage, organic form lost touch with the broader philosophical context

of ontology with its motivating concerns of subjective freedom and individual agency.

When cell theory dismantled Romantic-era vitalism, in other words, it dismissed the

types of questions that vitalism had generated––and that had generated Romanticism

as a wide-sweeping inquiry into the phenomena of life. For as long as the external form

of the creature—rather than the discrete cellular membrane––formed a bounding line

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European Romantic Review 267

between self and objective world, physiology was inseparable from natural philosophy

and the aesthetics of organic form.

The purpose of this essay is to suggest that the era of Romantic vitalism (roughly

from 1760 through 1830) provides the context for making sense of the life contained in

the poetry of this time, both at the level of content and form. For poets like Christopher

Smart, William Blake, Percy Shelley, and John Keats, “the burden of the mystery” was

real.3 The continuity of living form had not yet been replaced with empirical cellular

particulars, and the mystery of life itself did not reduce easily to specific scientific ques-

tions. Cell theory demystified nature because living forms, no longer perplexingly

purposive, were, in Schwann’s words, “remarkable for the simplicity of their internal

structure” (1). Doing away with the so-called mystery of life, as well as the necessity for

a transcendental consciousness or soul, naturalists could rest content with the idea that

“nature’s extraordinary diversity in figure” is produced solely by different arrange-

ments of simple structures, which are “throughout essentially the same, namely, cells”.

The immense variety of living forms populating the world could all boil down to a

single structural unit, and biologists could study organic functions in a range of heter-

ogeneous matter without worrying about how these all added up to a synthetic ideal of

“unity in multëity”, to borrow Coleridge’s phrase for what was at once both beauty and

life (510).

When the natural philosophical approach to a single, impenetrable object––call it

the Zeitgeist of living form––gave way to a properly “scientific” heuristic attitude

toward nature, disease needed no longer be feared as a dark phantom, or specter of evil

attacking the healthy organism, any more than health could be understood in vitalist

terms as a Naturheilkraft, or healing power. Schwann’s successor, Rudolph Virchow

(1821–1902), saw fit to banish all such animating principles from the day-to-day prac-

tice of medicine: “We don’t need something like an innate force, or soul, or vital power

or spirit” since “each simple part, out of which [the organism] is put together—the

cells—can individually be looked at as a person who is self-standing and self-consistent,

whose power comes from their own structure, their physique” (24, 19).4 With life

defined as aggregation, the Romantic concept of vital power came to look about as

believable as a goblin: “If one looks rationally at this purposive working, the tendencies

ascribed to this force,” Virchow wrote, “then another goblin flies out and the

Naturheilkraft turns into a ghost” (18). Thus vanished the spirit of vital power that had

been the animating force of living form. The threat, or sublime possibility (depending

on perspective), of an intangible vital power with its own agency and formative

purpose dissolved into a multiplicity of metabolic functions, and naturalists branched

off on their own to study organic morphology without having to become embroiled in

the metaphysics of selfhood.

The story of this loss, as we might provocatively call it, is familiar to historians of

science, but its implications for literary history have yet to be considered, and I hope

in this paper to initiate some steps in that direction. The concept of Zeitgeist, so

congenial to Romantic writers such as Shelley at the end of A Defence of Poetry or

Hazlitt in The Spirit of the Age, implies transcendental unity. But have not scholars

cleared up the mist of Zeitgeist haunting literary periodicity, along with its natural

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philosophical twin, the benighted concept of vital power? Literary critics along with

their sibling rivals in history have, for all intents and purposes, opened the metaphori-

cal window and let the superstitious concept of Zeitgeist, founded on the concept of

vital or formative power, fly out from the legitimate academic space of the university.

As the critical focus of literary studies has shifted from phenomenology to cultural

history, literary production has come to be seen less as a mysterious current of

thought than as a sociological field, driven by market forces, economic factors, and

other historical determinants. The critique of ideology has also helped to reconfigure

literary history as a heterogeneous collection of cultural products that have, falling

within certain dates of production, been catalogued for institutional purposes within

period-designations (e.g., Enlightenment, Romantic, Victorian). Concepts such as

imagination and genius, like the philosophical notion of subjective freedom, have

been more or less tabooed.

But in chasing the literary Zeitgeist from our midst, we also have lost touch with the

centrality of form to our discipline—and with what Thomas Pfau calls, in an outstand-

ing paper for the fourteenth annual NASSR conference, “the Theory of Romanticism.”

All texts are formal products of some sort, including the paratexts we now take into

account through the enrichments of book history, but whereas an author like Mary

Shelley will remain undiminished or even elevated past her former status as a minor

female writer when formal questions fall by the wayside, sprawling poems, along with

disjointed novels and messy, miscellaneous texts of all sorts that challenge formal

containment and resist educational commodification tend to suffer. Works like

Smart’s Jubilate Agno, Blake’s Jerusalem, and Shelley’s Witch of Atlas, for instance, are

uncomfortable to confront and easy to look away from. Despite their status across the

board as artistic productions of poets at the height of their powers, they have yet to be

made sense of as wholes and have all but slipped from the current academic scene.5

What I wish to demonstrate in a longer, full-length study of this material is a pragmatic

methodology for reading and making sense of the “life” contained in the poetry of the

time, not only at the level of content but of form.6

This necessarily raises the question of how science and literature––the Bildungstrieb

and the Bildungsroman––are to be reconciled methodologically. In a recent essay, the

historian Peter Hans Reill has proposed that by redefining living form as “a constituent

assembly of forces,” scientists at the end of the eighteenth century made the principle

of relation––rapport or Verwandschaft––the key to investigating nature. “Analogical

reasoning became the functional replacement for mathematical analysis,” he argues:

“With it one could discover similar properties or tendencies between dissimilar things

that approximated natural laws without dissolving the particular in the general… .

Comparison’s major task was to see similarities and differences and mediate among

them, finding analogies that were not immediately apparent” (“Between Mechanism

and Romantic Naturphilosophie” 158–159).7 This seems to me both an accurate and a

useful way of thinking through the relationship between science and literature in the

years when the debate over vital power was at its height. Particularly if one intends

more than an influence study, direct links and exact correspondences, so crucial to the

writing of history, become less important than the technique of analogy itself.

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European Romantic Review 269

Romantic scientists and imaginative writers alike employed this technique to imagine

and represent natural as well as artistic products as living forms. Juxtaposing artistic

expressions of living form with biological ideas in cultural circulation at the time might

provide a way to test the literary-critical value of the analogy.

For just as poets made use of metaphorical language (itself a complex version of

analogy), physiologists in the late eighteenth century began to find that analogical

thinking could define their methodological difference from the physical sciences. The

life sciences had been built on the principle of analogy with physical science, such that

vital powers were likened to gravitation and theories of “animal magnetism” and

organic “affinity” on the rise. For contemporary scientists, philosophers, and poets (or

polymaths like Coleridge and Goethe who qualified as all three), the analogy stood as a

viable heuristic approach to the phenomena of life. As Goethe’s cabinets and libraries

enshrined in Weimar attest, a sense of beauty defined scientifically as life––and life

defined aesthetically as beauty––characterized the cross-disciplinary response to the

question of life.8 Goethe himself viewed his heterogeneous endeavors, ranging from

poetry to optics to the morphology of plants, as analogous ventures into that undiscov-

ered terrain, the truth about living form. In Britain, Coleridge cautioned about the

limitations of chemistry to explain life, but he also remarked that we must “guard

against the opposite error of rejecting its aid altogether as analogy, because we have

repelled its ambitious claims to an identity with the vital powers” (500). In relation to

the problem of life specifically, the analogy worked in tandem with speculative ventures

such as the Lebenskraft (vital power), Bildungstrieb (formative drive), and other unify-

ing principles.

The historian Robert J. Richards, who has recently published The Romantic

Conception of Life, highlights the difference between the analogy and the homology in

writing the history of science. The homology, he explains, used in anatomical compar-

ative analysis and later evolutionary biology, refers to structures that have a common

origin and exhibit the same structure and function, though they may appear different:

for instance, a human arm and a bird’s wing. The analogy, by contrast, refers to struc-

tures with different origins that nevertheless exhibit similar structure and function. A

more widespread definition distinguishes the homology from the analogy as exact

structural correspondence from a case in which parts seem similar but are actually

structurally or functionally diverse. The scientific imperative descended from Charles

Darwin not to confuse that which seems similar (the analogy) with that which is struc-

turally the same (the homology) might well be taken as a model for history, with its

twin disciplinary aims of local certitude and general truth. In order to avoid the Zeit-

geist of an outmoded history of ideas, Richards explains, the historian “must be care-

ful not to mistake analogies for homologies, not to assume that because one set of

ideas is similar to another it must have descended from that other” (Meaning of

Evolution 2). But in the case of literary history, this disciplinary imperative might be

effectively reversed: do not mistake homologies for analogies; do not seek to present

as fact what rightly viewed is “only” metaphor. For while homology can guarantee

certitude about the nature of the relation between disparate facts, the homology itself

becomes just one more fact.9 The analogy, by contrast, can prove a heuristic

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technique of great value when it comes to disciplinary objects that are themselves not

facts but sites of hidden truth––or hypostases of difference, as Coleridge considers

living form in his Theory of Life.10

There are, of course, other ways to find patterns in literary and cultural history than

those we inherit from Romanticism. Franco Moretti has recently advocated a “quanti-

tative approach to literature,” which involves charting, graphing, and breaking down

data about literary production into more arbitrary, mathematical categories, such as

the decade. On the one hand, his approach takes the disciplinary trend toward the

appropriation of external methodologies (from sociology, economics, history, and so

forth) to its logical extreme. If literary critics want to be taken seriously by a society and

university system increasingly aware of its own corporate status, one that quantifies

value economically within a larger system of commodity production, then they may as

well embrace quantitative methodology and quiet their public-sphere critics. Yet it also

recognizes the need to account for the “internal shape” of literary history, over and

above its content (90). The recognition is one that has long been familiar to scientists:

instruments and experiments can only provide information to questions previously

posed, or respond to others that may arise in the research process. Ultimately, there is

no escaping the imaginative leap from facts to form, from disparate empirical data to

representation, interpretation, theory. I would submit that the broader disciplinary

object of living form, which is ideologically charged as Friedrich Schiller has shown,

and cuts across genres as well as disciplines, may provide a way to restore inner form to

a pivotal moment of literary history that lacks (unless it encroaches on others) its own

century and institutional status.11 This would allow us to approach European Roman-

ticism as a shared intellectual project, founded on the philosophically complex prob-

lem of living form.

Notes

[1] Qtd. in Maienschein 32.

[2] What Harvey had meant by an egg, which he also referred to as a “primordium,” was rela-

tively unclear. The embryonic mass or ovum he observed in female deer was not the same

thing as the cellular body observed by Von Baer. “An egg is a conception exposed beyond the

body of the parent, whence the embryo is produced;” wrote Harvey, “a conception is an egg

remaining within the body of the parent until the foetus has acquired the requisite perfection;

in everything else they agree; they are both alike primordially vegetables, potentially they are

animals” (462–463). Cf. Gasking 28.

[3] Wordsworth’s phrase from l. 38 of “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.”

[4] Virchow’s terms are einheitlichen Kraft for force, Lebenskraft for vital power, and Spiritus for

spirit.

[5] The Witch of Atlas, less obvious at first glance than the others, is still a good case in point.

Written at the height of Shelley’s poetic powers, between Prometheus Unbound and A

Defence of Poetry, it is usually dismissed by his critics. Most major studies of Shelley’s work

(with the exception of Harold Bloom, who puts it at the center of Shelley’s Mythmaking)

include no mention of the poem, nor is it included in most anthologies of Romantic poetry,

including Norton, Longman, and the editions by David Perkins or Anne K. Mellor and

Richard Matlak. Even Sharon Ruston’s excellent study, Shelley and Vitality, makes no

mention of the poem.

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[6] I refer to my book-length manuscript entitled, What is Life? Living Form, Vital Power, Roman-

tic Monstrosity.

[7] Early hints of this argument are apparent in Reill’s “Bildung, Urtyp and Polarity.” As the

German physiologist Johachim Dietrich Brandis wrote in 1795, “there are analogies, which

make the idea [Lebenskraft] possible” (11; my translation).

[8] In his 1809 novel Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften), Goethe’s heroine Charlotte

observes, “These figures of speech are pretty and amusing, and who does not like to play with

analogies?” (55). Her comment reveals the degree to which chemical and other scientific anal-

ogies had become a parlor game by the nineteenth century.

[9] I am grateful to Jeff Dolven of Princeton University for a conversation that led to this realiza-

tion.

[10] Christian Wolff, whose philosophical system dominated the university system of the German

speaking lands in the eighteenth century, made space in his universal scientific method for

natural philosophers, who must pursue what he called ars inveniendi. Unlike “common

knowledge,” whose facts were available to be logically arranged, “hidden knowledge” was the

object of ars inveniendi, to be approached through other methods than logic (74). Wolff’s

sense of hidden knowledge, in this sense, resembles what Buffon called “probable knowledge”

in the first discourse of his monumental Histoire Naturelle (1749) .

[11] See particularly the fourth letter of Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.

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