Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Old and New Organicisms
- 2 Romantic Biology: Establishing Connections in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
- 3 The British Version: J. S. Haldane, D'Arcy Thompson and the Organism as a Whole
- 4 The New Generation: A Failed Organismal Revolution
- 5 The American Version: Chicago and Beyond
- 6 Romantic Biology from California's Shores: W. E. Ritter, C. M. Child and the Scripps Marine Association
- Conclusion: Whatever Happened to Organismal Biologies?
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
3 - The British Version: J. S. Haldane, D'Arcy Thompson and the Organism as a Whole
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Old and New Organicisms
- 2 Romantic Biology: Establishing Connections in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
- 3 The British Version: J. S. Haldane, D'Arcy Thompson and the Organism as a Whole
- 4 The New Generation: A Failed Organismal Revolution
- 5 The American Version: Chicago and Beyond
- 6 Romantic Biology from California's Shores: W. E. Ritter, C. M. Child and the Scripps Marine Association
- Conclusion: Whatever Happened to Organismal Biologies?
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
In the previous chapter we saw some of the possible routes through which the organicist tradition travelled. I sketched, in a very general and synthetic way, the network that from Kant onwards guaranteed the diffusion and extension of a specific research programme that – notwithstanding its idiosyncrasies and contradictions – directed the aims and methods of many naturalists active in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this chapter, we will see more in detail the way this tradition (which I have dubbed Romantic biology) was translated, transformed and re-proposed by two important scientists mainly active during the first half of the twentieth century: J. S. Haldane and D'Arcy Thompson. As I mentioned earlier, when Haldane delivered his paper at the History of Science Congress in 1931, he was recognized as one of the leading physiologists in England. Born in Edinburgh in 1860, Haldane studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and, like many biologists of his generation, spent part of his training in Germany, particularly in Jena, where he attended the lectures of J. W. Dobereiner, J. Loder, E. Haeckel and the famous botanist E. Strasburger. Throughout his life, Haldane was a staunch supporter of German biology and philosophy. He loved and praised Goethe's philosophy and science, and acquired a deep knowledge of Kant's critical philosophy and Hegel's idealism through the acquaintance of the British idealists. In his first publication, an article written together with his brother Robert, Kant's bio-philosophy was explicitly discussed. One of the venerable conclusions of this early work is striking and demonstrates the overwhelming pervasiveness of Kantian philosophy and its wide diffusion:
For Kant then, the relation of reciprocity, as the most concrete of the categories, is the highest relation of reality … The fact is that every part of the organism must be conceived as actually or potentially acting on and being acted on by the other parts of the environment, so as to form with them a self-conserving system. There is nothing short of this implied in saying that the parts of the organism can adapt themselves to one another and to the surroundings.
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- Information
- Romantic Biology, 1890–1945 , pp. 53 - 82Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014