Month: September 2022

ATOMIC COMPOSITIONS. “Chemists of the 1830s and 40s were beginning to untangle the chemical composition of plant and animal products, and assign molecular formulas to what had previously been an undifferentiated sea of carbon and hydrogen.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

VITALISM WOBBLES. “There was an ambitious programme of accounting for organic substances with the same matter and processes used in the inorganic realm. But the death of vitalism was far from complete. The nineteenth century, rather, saw a shift away from a vitalism that identified life with a particular substance, and towards an emphasis on organisation.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

RESIDUES OF VITALISM. “Although references to a particular vital substance disappeared, scientists such as Laurent, Jean-Baptiste Biot (1774-1862), and Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) insisted on the particular nature of living substances. “Activity,” or the ability of substance to alter the mind and body, was at the centre of their work.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

ALCHEMICAL ROOTS. “The ability of plants to act upon the human constitution gave rise to a language of “active principles” which persisted through the centuries, even as its meaning changed. Within the alchemical tradition, the notion that matter itself could have an active component was continuously intertwined with efforts to capture the intoxicating powers of fermented plants.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

BOOZE THE DRIVER. “Wine, after all, was an obvious early example of the ability of natural substances to act on human bodies, and the effort to isolate the particular principle responsible for these effects drove much of the push toward distillation associated with early modern alchemy. Alembics, cucurbits, and stills all sought to separate the more volatile (and intoxicating) elements from the more inert.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

TANGLE OF NATURALISM. “The situation grew more complex in the eighteenth century, as the Newtonian conception of “active principles” threaded the space between alchemical occult qualities and reductionist mechanism.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

THEOLOGICAL VITALISM. “For Isaac Newton, active principles, originating in God, transformed a mechanical universe of mere matter into a dynamic, living one. With gravity as the reigning model, Newton cast these principles not as forms of matter, but as a kind of force or subtle fluid.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn