ANNALS OF SCIENCE, 47 (1990), 291-300 Essay Review Teleology with Regrets T. Lenom, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth-Century German Biology. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989. xii +314 pp. $1495 (paper). Reviewed by K. L. Caneva, Department of History, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, N.C. 27412, U.S.A. The present edition of Timothy Lenoir's Strategy of Life is a minimally corrected reprinting of the work first published by Reidel in 1982. Although one might have hoped for a more substantially revised edition, its appearance in paperback will make this important and difficult work more accessible to the average scholar and hence easier to evaluate. At its first appearance the work was greeted with a chorus of laudatory reviews such as every author dreams of." In my opinion, however, it does not sustain its thesis, This thesis is the existence of ‘a very coherent body of theory based ona teleological approach’ (p. 2), of a unified ‘research program’ or ‘research tradition’ (p. 12) among a well-connected group of German life scientists from roughly the 1780s to the 1850s, one which traced its origins to Kant'’s analysis of the status of teleological explanations in biology and their compatibility with an otherwise mechanical understanding of the phenomena of nature. Kant’s position implied that mechanical explanations should be pushed as far as possible, with the understanding that ‘at the highest levels, in the explanation of the source of organization itself, the principles of mechanism are not applicable’ (p. 155). As William Bechtel (among others) has pointed out, Lenoir’s intention was to identify a tradition in nineteenth-century German biology different from both a vitalistic Naturphilosophie and a reductionist materialism.? That tradition—dubbed ‘teleomechanism'—defended one or another form of non-vitalistic teleology. Lenoir analyzes that ‘teleomechanist program’ into three phases: ‘vital materialism’, ‘developmental morphology’, and “functional morphology’. It is not always easy, however, to determine who Lenoir assigns to his various categories, or why, and the reader is left to do a lot of inferring. The vital materialists seem to include J. F. Blumenbach, J. C. Reil, C. F. Kielmeyer, G. R. Treviranus, F. Hildebrandt, E. H. Weber, and (on page 3)J. F. Meckel; one passage places A. v. Humboldt and J. Miiller in their ranks as well (p. 168). The developmental morphologists include F. Tiedemann, K. E. v. Baer (perhaps the ‘central figure’ of the study; see p. x), H. Rathke, J. Miiller, * See especially (in roughly descending order of praise) F. B. Churchill in 4S Review, 1, No. 3 (Fall, 1983), 29-30; F. Gregory, Trail blazing, Isis, 75 (1984), 555-8; T. H. Levere in American Scientist, 71 (1983), 551-2, G. Uschmann in Annals of Science, 41 (1984), 306-7; D. Knight in British Journal for the History of Science, 17 (1984), 318-9; A Desmond in Medical History, 29 (1985), 219; and S. A. Roe in Journal of the History of Biology, 17 (1984), 148-150. 2 W. Bechtel, ‘Teleomechanism and the Strategy of Life’, Nature and System, 5 (1983), 181-7 (p. 181). 1 found this review a helpful analysis of the book. (0003-3790/90 $300 © 1990 Taylor & Francis Ltd292 Essay Review I. Déllinger, K. F. Burdach, R. Wagner, and (on page 56) J. F. Meckel. The functional morphologists are H. Lotze, J. v. Liebig, T. Schwann, C. Bergmann, R. Leuckart, and (probably) T. L. W. Bischoff and R. Virchow. Nor is it easy to glean from the book clear and consistently applied descriptions of its central categories. Although Lenoir makes a show of allying himself with Lakatos’ conception of scientific research programmes possessing a ‘hardcore’ of fundamental assumptions and a set of heuristic guidelines, he never clearly spells out precisely what he understands that hardcore to be, and in fact the ‘tradition’ he describes does not appear to have been guided by a dedicated and self-conscious attachment by its representatives to anything other than one or another different conception of the teleology of organic systems. Tracing the programme’s alleged hardcore to Kant'’s Critique of Judgement, Lenoir writes that Kant ‘introduced a notion which was to become a central feature of all later teleo-mechanist approaches, namely, the morphotype’ (p. 13). In fact he seldom uses the term in the body of the book, and it seems little applicable to many of his alleged teleomechanists, the functional morphologists in particular.’ The Preface states that one of the book’s aims is ‘to show that in the early nineteenth century the central issue was not vitalism as such, but rather the more interesting problem of causality in biology’ (p. ix). That indeed was an important issue, but the body of the book says virtually nothing explicit about it. The book interprets teleology variously as entailing the ultimate irreducibility of biological phenomena to physics and chemistry, the priority of the whole overits parts, the notion that life presupposes organization, and the apparent goal-directed nature of organic processes—but these are neither equivalent nor interchangeable conceptions. In the event, the operative meaning of the term seems to be primarily the idea that (as. quoted above), the source of organization is not explicable on mechanical grounds. That much is indeed true for his group of teleomechanists, and to that extent he does have a ‘programme’ of sorts. According to Lenoir, both vital materialism and functional morphology ‘reject the vitalistic notion of purposive activity and attempt to explain such apparent activity in terms of natural physical causation’ (p. 10). This is odd, given that Kant's conception of teleology was intimately tied to a notion of purposefulness, as was Blumenbach’s Bildungstrieb and von Bacr’s entire conception of organic processes; nor is it easy to see how ‘natural physical causation’ at all captures either Blumenbach’s or von Baer’s understanding of developmental processes. The forces they invoked were not, as claimed, ‘based on the organization of chemical- physical forces’ (p. 12). The programmatically conjoined concept of mechanism is even less well defined, and at times it appears that attention to material process—or perhaps, more precisely, the explanation of organic phenomena in terms of physical and chemical forces—is enough to identify the researcher as a mechanist. Itis possible Lenoir means to contrast. mechanism with vitalism, which he characterizes as assuming ‘the existence of an agent. which actively selects and arranges matter in the organism’ (p. 9). Ifthisis the case, then the coherence of the teleomechanist programme is in trouble, since Lenoir himself recognizes that many of his teleomechanists broke with the severe Kantian notion of teleology as a merely regulative concept of the understanding, and instead conjured up a variety of vital forces more or less actively constitutive of the individual organism: 1 note in passing that the book is not well served by its four-page index.Essay Review 293 .. by attributing a physical existence to the principle of biological organization rather than declaring as inexplicable the source of the order found in biological mechanisms, the vital materialists [and developmental morphologists] had in fact prepared the ground for DuBois-Reymond’s [reductionist and anti-vitalist] attack. (pp. 216-217) What does this recognition do to the purported contrast between ‘the unscientific vitalism of the Naturphilosophen which treated organization as the result of the immanent material presence of mind in nature’, and teleomechanism ‘which treats the Lebenskraft as an irreducible, but nonetheless emergent property of the systematic integration of the animal machine’ (p. 215; the book does not consistently italicize German words)? Since the vital forces of Blumenbach, von Baer, and Miller create the organism's systematic organization, it requires some qualification to describe them as ‘emergent’: their manifestation depends on the degree of organization attained, To be sure, these vital forces are not aspects of ‘mind’, but to make that the deciding distinction is to establish a false dichotomy within a continuum of positions with respect to the nature of vital force. On the other hand, Lenoir’s definition of the teleomechanist programme is so loose that it is hard to say whether such a constitutive conception of vital force properly belongs under it or not. Bechtel concurred with Lenoir's position that the hypostatization of the vital force as a creative entity was not incompatible with the teleomechanist research programme because it did not undermine scientists’ ability ‘to make fundamental empirical contributions to the understanding of organization’.* The latter claim is certainly true, but [ have trouble when the hardcore of an alleged research programme excludes one of the most characteristic and important beliefs of some of the programmes’s major representatives. I found Lenoir’s conceptualization more confusing than useful to my understanding of the science under study. According to Lenoir, the vital materialism of Blumenbach and Reil interpreted the vital force ‘as an emergent property dependent upon the specific order and arrangement of the components’ of the organ (p. 9); for the vital materialists in general, ‘life presupposes organization’ (p. 62). Reil fits this schema reasonably well, but Blumenbach was quite explicit that his Bildungstrieb gave form to ‘previously formless matter’; it was the antecedent cause of organization, and not any kind of property ‘emergent’ from that organization.’ Lenoir repeatedly insists that for representatives of all versions of teleomechanism, ‘organization is the primary starting point for biological research, for which no mechanical explanation can be advanced’ (p. 154; ‘comma supplied). This is essentially true for most of his functional morphologists (such as Lotze, Schwann, and Bergmann), but its application to the likes of Blumenbach, von Baer, and Miilleris tricky due to Lenoir’s ambiguity as to whether itis only the limit of scientific research which is defined by the organism’s material organization (as in the last quote), or whether organic activity itself presupposes a degree of material organization (as asserted above for the vital materialists). Von Baer insisted repeatedly that, in organic development, ‘it is] not the matter as it is momentarily arranged, but * Bechtel (footnote 2), 183. °4.F. Blumenbach, De nisu ormativo et generationis negotio nuperae observationes(Gottingae, 1787), pp. viii and’ x; “Uber den Bildungstreb (Nisus formativus) und seinen EinfluB auf die Generation und Reproduction’. Goutingisches Magasin der Wissenschaften und Litteratur, 1 (1780), 247-66 (pp. 249-50)294 Essay Review the essence (the idea according to the modern school) of the generating animal form which controls the development of the embryo’.° The developmental process is marked by the appearance of heterogeneity out of homogeneity.” Von Baer did not liken the vital force to Newtonian gravitation, as Lenoir claims without citing any evidence that was Blumenbach’s analogy—nor did he treat it as ‘arising directly out of the arrangement of matter in the organic context’ (p. 125). When Lenoir correctly recognizes at one point that, for von Baer, ‘the essence of the animal, what it will ultimately become, determines the sequence of events in its developmental history’ (p. 85), then that rather contradicts his usual teleomechanist claim: One of the long-standing assumptions of the tradition we have been discussing, dating to the work of Kant and Blumenbach in the 1790s, was that while the germ was considered a homogeneous mass of material, it was nonetheless regarded as organized, containing its full developmental potential in the order and arrangement of its constituent elements. (p. 223) Although Lenoir does not tell us so, von Baer explicitly and repeatedly advanced his embryological work as subversive of the materialism frequently associated with science because that work demonstrated the subservience of matter to a purposeful idea. Although von Baer was certainly a fervent teleologist, I see no useful sense in which he can be called a mechanist Nor does the term well fit Miller, who accepted Kant’s notion of the purposefulness of organic beings and the priority of the whole over its’ parts while rejecting Reil’s programmatic attempt to explain vital phenomena in terms of the particular combination of the organism's material elements, of its particular form and composition (Form und Mischung).° Echoing von Baer, he argued that the insufficiency of material form to determine the course of organic development is shown by the similarity in the initial embryonic form of widely divergent species, and added that the insufficiency of composition is shown by the material identify of an organism immediately before and after death. According to Lenoir, Miller's approach clearly incorporated both teleological and mechanical modes of explanation: It was mechanical in that the specific functioning of the organ was to be explained not as the result of a vital force but in terms of the forces of physics and organic chemistry; it was teleological in the sense that... the same sorts of physico- chemical causation that account for the functioning of the organ are not capable of explaining the source of its organization. (p. 159; emphasis supplied) This claim— central to the book's thesis—is correct as farasiit goes. The problem is that it leaves out much that was central to Miller’s approach. For one, the book capture the extent to which Miller distinguished between what might be true of nature and what could be established by natural science: the former is decidedly less ‘mechanical’ than the latter. ©K_E. v. Baer, Uber Entwickelungsgeschichte der Thiere, 2 paris (Kiniasberg, 1828-37), pt. 1 (1828), . 148; see also 147 and 263-4 "ibid, 153, "Ibid, 148 and (from essays writen in 1833/34, 1860, and 1876) Reden gehalten in wissenschaflchen Versammlungen und Kleinere Aufsatzevermischten Inhalt, 3 vols (St Petersburg, 1864-73), 71-2, 280,282: 215,217, 466-7. think Lenoir tris to make too much of von Baer’ us of the term Gestaltungskraft (of which ine cites only one instance) and his use of the concept of central forees "J. MOLLER, Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen, 2 vols in parts. (Coblenz, 1833-40), 1 pt 1 (1833), 18 and 26.Essay Review 295 More importantly, Lenoir’s account misses Miller's effective distinction between an ‘organizing’ (organisirende) and an ‘organic (organische) force: the former was responsible for embryological development, the latter for the organism's ongoing functioning." The ‘organizing force’ was not explicable in physicochemical ter although Miller was mostly studiously non-committal about its precise nature, idealist leanings were close to the surface and he occasionally referred to such a force as an ‘idea’."! What one observes going on here is the progressive separation of ‘physiology’ in our sense of the term from a more broadly conceived enterprise which had traditionally included problems of generation. Lenoir is not unaware of this distinction (see pages 232-233, and C. Ludwig's criticism of Leuckart on pages 217-218), but his analysis does not reflect the extent to which it contributed to such a fundamental transformation of the life sciences as to render problematic the identification of anything approaching a unified teleomechanical research programme. According to Lenoir, Miiller’s vital force, ‘like the force of gravitation, does not exist independently of the material constituents’ (p. 154). I am not aware that Miller ever invoked an analogy with gravitation, nor does Lenoir cite any evidence to the contrary. On the other hand, Miller did discuss at great length similarities and differences between the vital force, the soul (Seele or geistiye Krafte), and the imponderables heat, light, and electricity, whereby he concluded that they all could be understood existing in a ‘latent’ state in ponderable matter, only becoming manifest under appropriate circumstances,'? Here, as in a number of important places, Lenoir's selective attention to the issues characteristic of teleomechanism has led him to ignore much of the real context of his protagonists’ work. Put another way, an historically grounded understanding of (for example) Miiller’s conception of the vital force would do better to see how he used it than to identify it as an exemplar of a certain kind. From Lenoir’s account one would not guess that Miiller pondered deeply on the ontological status of the above-named entities In some ways the most successful part of the book is its analysis of functional morphology, 'a program which acknowledged the need for a teleolgical framework, but a framework completely divested of developmental [or vital] forces’ (p. 15). Lotze, Schwann, Bergmann, Leuckart, and Virchow did (more or less) combine teleology with mechanism by taking as the starting point of scientific investigation organisms so contrived that the explanation of their organic functions did not require going beyond the normal forces of physies and chemistry; how that organization originally came into being was a question which lay outside science. With these men a teleomechanist programme would seem to have come into its own. Lenoir’s discussion of the less-well- known figures Bergmann and Leuckart is especially good, though even there the relationship of their work to (for example) von Baer's might be better understood in terms of the particular problems they dealt with rather than in terms of their supposed allegiance to a common teleomechanist research programme. Lenoir correctly notes that Schwann denied there were any special vital forces resulting from the arrangement of material in organisms; however, he somewhat misleads the unwary reader by having Schwann accept the teleology of the teleomechanist programme (pp. 126-127). That is, although Schwann’s explanation of organisms’ purposiveness is ultimately in accord bid, 1, pt. 1, 18, 22, 24:1, pt. 3 (1840), 509 (among many examples). “Ibid, pt. 3, 505, 510, STL Ibid. 1, pt 1, 27, 535m, pt 3, $09, $13.296 Essay Review with Lenoir’s functional morphology, one would like to see that conclusion reconciled with the fact that Schwann was an outspoken critic of what he termed the teleologische Ansicht.!> The word meant different things to different people. Where Schwann ‘opposed the teleogische to the physikalische Ansicht, Lenoir has him opposing ‘vitalism’ to ‘physical reductionism’ (p. 126), thus terminologically facilitating Schwann’s assimilation to the teleomechanist programme. ‘The least successful representative of functional morphology is Liebig, whom Lenoir linked on several counts with Berzelius. There is evidence (which Lenoir does not cite directly) that at times *Liebig wanted to avoid the possibility that catalysts and enzymes might work somehow inexplicably through the exercise of the “catalytic force” which Berzelius had introduced in 1836 (p. 162). But Liebig’s views were seldom simple, and he elsewhere embraced the catalytic force, in part just because its apparent inexhaustibility helped legitimate his conception of a work-performing vital force by showing the latter's close analogy with bona fide chemical forces.'* Lenoir has the following to say with respect to Berzelius, Liebig, and the vital force: A principal advance in establishing the meaning and limits of the notion of Lebenskraft was made by Berzelius and Liebig. Their work reinstated the importance of conceiving Lebenskrafi as the expression of a complex interrelation ‘of material parts incapable of further analysis but inseparable from the order and arrangement of matter. Lehenskraft was to be understood as the expression of this state of affairs rather than its sustaining cause, and the object of physiology was understood to consist in the investigation of the lawlike effects of this state of organization. (p. 160) Although Berzelius early in his career had in fact given qualified acceptance to a vital foree, by 1839 he had come to the position assigned him by Lenoir (who did not, however, substantiate his claim with appropriate evidence).'* The real problem is with Liebig, who here again defended such an inconsistent range of views as to make exceedingly problematic any categorical statement. According to Lenoir, ‘Liebig was an outspoken proponent of the Lebenskraft in physiology, but he was very careful not to attribute to it either a special constitutive, active, or directive role’ (p. 162). However, the passage which Lenoir quotes immediately thereafter—the oft-cited first paragraph from the Animal Chemistry—quite clearly contradicts such a claim. His parallel claim, ‘that Liebig contributed significantly to the reformulation of vital materialism by showing that the Lebenskraft could be divested of ts privileged status as cause of order and arrangement and simply be reinterpreted as the combined effect of appropriately arranged physical and chemical forces’ (p. 196), I find unsupported by the evidence presented (pp. 160-6) and at odds with Liebig’s own pronouncements.'® Lenoir has seriously distorted Liebig’s work by identifying his as an opponent of an active and ©. Schwann, Mikroskopische Untersuchungen iiber die Uebereinstimmung in der Struktur und dem Wacksthum der Thiere und Pflanzen (Berlin, 1839), 20-6, "44, Liebig, Chemische Brite. 1, Allgemeine Zeitung, Beilage, no. 259 (16 September, 1841), 2069-70 (p. 2070}; Die organische Chemie in threr Anwendung auf Physiologie und Pathologie (Braunschweig, 1842), 212-3. This particular ‘Chemical Letter’ was not included in the well-known Chemische Briefe; the second ‘ork cited here is commonly known as Licbig's Animal Chemistry. "55.5. Berzclius, A View ofthe Progress and Present State of Animal Chemistry(London, 1813), 4-6;"Ueber ige Fragen des Tages in der organischen Chemie’, Annalen der Physik wnd Chemie, 47 (1839), 289-322 (op. 290-1), ° Liebig, Die organische Chemie (footnote 14), 225-6.Essay Review 297 directive vital force, while in fact he was one of its strongest German advocates during the 1840s.” I would not diminish the difficulty in making coherent sense of Liebig’s confusing and contradictory pronouncements, but Lenoir has not even begun the job. Ina section headed ‘Life without Purposive Organization; Helmholtz’s Path to the Erhaltung der Kraft’, Lenoir interprets Helmholtz’s formulation of the conservation of energy in terms of his response to telemechanism, in particular his rejection of all forms of vitalistic explanation in physiology’ and of ‘any use of teleological reasoning as an explanatory strategy’ (p. 197). In the Introduciton, Lenoir had announced that one of his study's main conclusions was that, ‘contrary to the claims of Helmholtz and DuBois-Reymond, the principle of the conservation of energy did not, and indeed could not, deliver a fatal blow to teleological thinking in biology’ (pp. 15~16; cf. 233). The enterprise fails, however, in the first instance because Helmholtz’ critical attention was not directed primarily towards a teleological vital force—nor does Lenoir provide any evidence to the contrary. In addition, Lenoir misses some of the aspects of Liebig’s and Lotze’s work which more plausibly gave Helmholtz something to react against. He quotes from the opening paragraph of Helmholtz’s 1845 paper on material exchange and muscular action: One of the most important questions of physiology, one immediately concerning the nature of the Lebenskraft, is whether the life of organic bodies is the effect of a special self-generating, purposive force or whether itis the result of forces active in inorganic nature which are specially modified through the manner of their interactions. (p. 200)'* For Lenoir the key aspect of the vital force is its ‘purposive’ character, but for Helmholtz the more crucial issue was whether or not it was ‘self-generating’. Lenoit’s neglect of this important point perhaps explains why he simplified his translation of the original’s ‘sich stets aus sich selbst erzeugende’ by omitting the ‘continuously out of itself” part.!® Lenoir's failure to see Helmholtz in the proper context stems in part, I suspect, from his failure to appreciate the extent to which Liebig wasa fervent (if sometime!) advocate of a work-performing vital force whose energy did not derive from concomitant processes of material exchange. There was a challenge for the future formulator of the principle of conservation of energy. Similarly, if Helmholtz read Lotze, then we might "See, for example, Liebig, Die organische Chemie in ihrer Anwendung auf Agricultur und Physiologie (Braunschweig, 1840), 36, 39, 320-5, 344-5; Die organische Chemie footnote 14), 1,8, 203-4; Chemische Briefe (Heidelberg, 1844), 24-5; Fin Vortrag Liebigs aber anorganische Natur und organisches Leben’, Allgemeine Zeitung, no. 24-25 (24-25 January, 1856), 369-70, 385-6 (p. 370). '* H. Heimboltz, “Ueber den Stoflverbrauch bei der Muskelaktion’, Archie fir Anatomie, Physiologie und wissenschafiliche Medicin, 1845, 72-83 (p. 72}, Lenoir misstates the title of the journal "© Contrary to the appearance of Lenoit’s quotation, in the original this passage is not by itself'a complete sentence, but a clause which introduces a longer sentence; accordingly, the first “is’ should be in square brackets and the passage should end with an ellipsis. I was not encouraged to find several cases of ‘misquotation among the relatively few passages I looked up in the original. Where he has von Baer saying “An orginal emergence of organisms without descent must have taken place'(p. 263), the German reads “Eine ‘urspriingliche Entstehung von Organismen ohne Abstammung von Formen derselben Art muB bestanden haben’ (Reden [footnote 8], u, 418); and the word he translates as “suecess' in the next sentence— Erfolg should rather be ‘result’298 Essay Review be warranted in suspecting he might have taken exception to Lotze's idiosyncratic notion that the vital force was a ‘variable force’ (variable Kraft).?° But these were not issues that had anything to do with Lenoit’s teleomechanist programme in general or with the purposefulness of the vital force in particular. Other problems beset Lenoir’s analysis of Helmholtz’s work. I think he quite overstates the ‘nearly unique’ way in which Helmholtz’s experiments involved coversions between a number of different forces (p. 211), and, whatever their inspiration, he misses the actual irrelevance of the results of Helmholtz’s experiments in muscle physiology for the conservation of energy. Perhaps Lenoir is concerned to argue that the ‘very construction’ of the galvanometer Helmholtz, used in his muscle experiments ‘embodies the conservation of energy in such an obvious way that it can scarcely have escaped Helmholtz’s notice’ (p. 207), and that ‘the physiology of muscle ion laid before Helmholtz all the elements of the conservation of energy’ (p. 211) because he appears to believe that that paper preceded Helmholtz’s Uber die Erhaltung der Kraft, whereas in fact it followed it (see p. 202, where the correct date should be November 12). In claiming that ‘Helmholtz’s statement of energy conservation... rested upon an extremely idiosyncratic assumption’—to wit, ‘that the only forces in nature are constant, central, action-at-a-distance forces’ (p. 231)—he seems curiously to have forgotten the special status Kant accorded such forces. Nor was Kant alone. And his claim that ‘developmental morphologists, von Baer in particular, had universally [!] treated the vital force as a central foree’ (p. 231) is vastly overstated in its desire to assimilate Helmholtz to a teleomechanist context, In the same context Lenoir gratuitously assigns to Miller and von Baer the notion that ‘through the proper arrangement of physical forces an “emergent force” might be generated as a sort of epiphenomenon of the original set of forces’ (p. 231). Not only has he previously demonstrated nothing of the kind, but the claim is seriously in error. Miiller, for one, insisted on the distinctness of the vital force from the (in some regards analogous) physical and chemical forces of nature, and it was anything but an ‘epiphenomenon’ of life: it both formed and preserved the organism.?! To be sure, there is at least one statement in the section on Helmholtz I can wholeheartedly subscribe to: ‘It is a tired cliché that we must view any debate in its historical context by taking into account the constellation of factors forming its total problem domain as well as the historical actors involved’ (p. 232). Several other of the book’s general claims do not withstand critical scrutiny, In challenging others’ belief that ‘persons who defended teleological thinking in the life sciences were fundamentally motivated by religious concerns’ (pp. ix-x), Lenoir asserts that ‘the German tradition I will examine here never made use of the design argument or the notion of a purposeful divine architect’ (p. 4), What motivated Miiller, von Baer, et al.‘to adopt and tenaciously defend teleological thinking in the life sciences was.....a concern for good science’ (p. x). Although he is correct in identifying teleology a la William Paley and Samuel Wilberforce as characteristically British, his desire to decouple German teleological thinking from religion and attach it to ‘good science’ 2H. Lotze, Allgemeine Pathologie und Therapie als mechanische Naturwissenschafien (Leipzig, 1842), 60-2; “Leben. Lebenskraft’, in R. Wagner, Handbuch der Physiologie mit Riicksicht auf physiologische Pathologie, 4 vols in 5 (Braunschweig, 1842-53), 1 (1842-[43)), ix-Ivii (pp. xxxvii-ix). Love's article appeared in 1843. On Liebig see the passages cited in footnote 17, especially p. 39 of the first-named: ‘Die Lebenskraft ist die in einem jeden einzelnen Organe innewohnende Fahigkeit, sich selbst in jedem Zeitmomente new wieder zu erzewen...” (emphasis supplied). Compare Liebig’s’ words with those of Helmholtz cited above, *' Miller (footnote 9), 4, pt. 1, 27,Essay Review 299 {g0es too far. I cannot easily assess the scientists’ motives, but I can recognize the ways in which Blumenbach, Tiedemann, Lotze, Schwann, and—if I may include him here, too—Berzelius all explicitly explained the obvious purposefulness of the natural world in terms of its creation by a rational creator.?? Blumenbach saw evidence of the providential intention of the omnipotent Creator and Author of Nature in the ways in which nature thwarts the production of hybrids.’* Tiedemann said we need to recognize a rational and purposeful first cause of the harmoniously ordered world we perceive, a cause we represent to ourselves as the Absolute, as the World Soul, as God.** In defending his mechanistic view of life from the religious objection that it took away the dignity and sanctity of life, Lotze countered with the argument ‘that this mechanism has not come into existence through its own virtue, but that the wisdom of God created it’2* Schwann sought the explanation for the purposefulness of both organic and inorganic nature ‘in the creation of matter with its blind forces by a rational being’ For Berzelius, too, appreciation of the obviously designed purposefulness of organic nature should convince us that it is the creation of a ‘lofty understanding’.*” Although Liebig generally kept theological issues out of his science, after the mid- 1840s, when he began to be sensitive to the antircligious implications of the materialistic reductionism coming to dominate much of the general scientific world- view, he spoke openly of our knowledge through science of the goodness and wisdom of the Creator, of the Almighty.2* Even Miiller and von Baer, though not conventionally Christian in their religious orientation, gave space in their scientific works to the discussion of deeply important spiritualist and antimaterialist concerns.” In 1860 von Baer went as far as to state that one must regard vital processes as ‘thoughts of the creation, imagined to have come down to earth from above’.*° Lenoir sees his study of the Kantian teleomechanist tradition as an answer to those who wrongly believe that early nineteenth-century German biology was dominated by Schelling’s Naturphilosophie (pp. 5-6). Unfortunately, he overstates what is otherwise an important point and tries too hard to expunge good teleomechanist science of any Romantic taint. The book’s thesis requires that teleomechanists be kept free of major inspiration from Naturphilosphie in order to be able to retain the overworked image of Naturphilosophie as an intrinsically purely speculative enterprise and to reinforce the argument that teleomechanism’s brand of teleology —unlike other ‘vitalist’ positions — encouraged empirical research (p. 69, including note 38). But even on his own evidence the lines cannot be drawn that sharply. Tiedemann was spellbound by Schelling, though later ‘disenchanted’ (p. 55). Meckel’s concepts (c.g. of polar opposites, analogies, 22'The exclusion of others from this short list does not mean they might not also belong. 1 am not personally familiar with the writings of all the figures Lenoir discusses, and could not practicably research them all in writing this review. Biumenbact, Uber den Bildungstrieb und das Zeupungsgescafie (Gittings formativo (footnote 5) x, XxX, XXXi- 2+, Tiedemann, Physiologie des Menschen, 2 vols (Darmstadt, 1830-36), 1 (1830), 80-1, (The ‘second” volume was volume i) 2 Lotz, ‘Leben. Lebenskralt’ (footnote 20), xlv; ef. also xxvii, axxix, and his Allgemeine Pathologie (footnote 20), 57-60. wann (footnote 13), 222. » Berzelius, Lehrbuck der Chemie, translated by F. Wahler, 4 vols. in 8 parts (Dresden, 1825-31), pt. (1827, 136-7. 28 Licbig, Chemische Briefe footnote 17), 26-7. 2 Miller (footnotes 9 and 10), 1, pt. 3, 510-3; on von Baer, see footnote 8. 2”Von Baer, Reden (footnote 8), 1, 275 (far Gedanken der Schipfung, auf die Erde herab gedacht 1, 1781), 62; De nisu300 Essay Review and symmetries) look suspicioulsy naturphilosophisch (pp. 59-60), Lenoit’s dismissal of such evidence is unconvincing: It is true that this concern for symmetry was one of the principal characteristics ‘of the writings of the Naturphilosophen evident in the work of Schelling, Oken, and Carus; but in the case of both Kielmeyer and Meckel, who were outspoken and vigorous critics of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, the source of this concern is to be sought in the internal workings of their vital materialism. (pp. 59-60) Déllinger and Burdach were incontrovertibly much influenced by Naturphilosophie (pp. 68, 72, 76). Von Baer spoke highly of Oken, and his work teems with motifs redolent of Naturphilosophie. Lenoir’s developmental morphologists were all influenced in varying degrees by that powerful philosophical movement. Should it be surprising that Germans then interested in developmental processes were so influenced? Lenoir writes too much as an advocate for a cause, and his story is unbalanced. That advocacy is not, I think, unconnected with a dangerous tendency in Lenoir’s historiographical approach: he seems to loose sight of the fact that his categories are his categories, and not in any explicit sense also those of the scientists he studied.* The tendentious language of scientists ‘committed to this research tradition’ (p. 3), of ‘enthusiastic converts to the teleomechanist program’ (p. 55), and the like, all contribute to the false impression that there was some commonly perceived unified teleomechanist ‘research program’ with a universally subscribed-to ‘hardcore’. Such a perspective has also encouraged the author to underplay the importance of various research topics and problems which scientists addressed on the basis of methods, assumptions, and interests drawn from a wide range of sources. The dangers of Lenoir's ‘identificationist” approach—my nonce word—are quite clear in his serious misinterpretation of Helmholtz. Again, more attention to problems and less to a putative programme or tradition would have made immediately prominent the important differences between developmental and more narrowly physiological problems. Lenoir has forgotten the purely regulative character of his categories, and tends to treat them without compelling historical warrant as constitutive of the historical reality of his protagonists Having subjected The Strategy of Life to several close readings, and having struggled to come to terms with its complex and often confusingly presented thesis, I am still not confident that I have done the book full justice. 1 am quite sure that the book contains many serious mistakes in historical analysis; and I am reasonably sure that a sufficiently recast account would be able to salvage something for the importance ofa Kantian programme something like the one he has attempted to describe. But I do not find it enlightening to embrace (for example) Blumenbach, Reil, von Bacr, Licbig, and Schwann within a common teleomechanist ‘program’, And I have great trouble getting past all the errors, misrepresentations, inconsistencies, unsupported claims, and plain unclear writing in order to appreciate what of value survives (in perhaps reformulated terms)—for the book does contain much that is true and valuable. Unfortunately, only readers who possess rather intimate familiarity with a broad range ‘of material will be in a position to identify the true and the valuable. Others, especially, will need to use this work with caution. Ido not think any book should expect as much sifting by its readers as this one demands. ** A similar criticism was made in F. L, Holmes, “Vitalism Reexamined’, Science, 221 (1983), 146-7 (. 147).