Coleridge's theory of life is an attempt by Samuel Taylor Coleridge to understand not just inert or still nature, but also vital nature. He examines this topic most comprehensibly in his work Hints towards the Formation of a more Comprehensive Theory of Life (1818). The work is key to understand the relationship between Romantic literature and science.
Works of romanticists in the realm of art and Romantic medicine were a response to the general failure of the application of the 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 the physiology of Richard Saumarez.
Context 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 the 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 the 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 Aristotelian philosophy termed natura naturata.
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."
Coleridge's was the dominant mind on many issues involving the philosophy and science in his time, as John Stuart Mill acknowledged, along with others since who have studied the history of Romanticism.
The name of Coleridge is one of the few English names of our time which are likely to be oftener pronounced, and to become symbolical of more important things, in proportion as the inward workings of the age manifest themselves more and more in outward facts.
The need for a new paradigm
For Coleridge, as for many of his romantic contemporaries, the idea that matter itself can beget life only dealt with the various changes in the arrangement of particles and did not explain life itself as a principle or power that lay behind the material manifestations, natura naturans or "the productive power suspended and, as it were, quenched in the product" Until this was addressed, according to Coleridge, "we have not yet attained to a science of nature."
This productive power is above sense experience, but not above nature herself, that is, supersensible, but not supernatural, and, thus, not 'occult' as was the case with vitalism. Vitalism failed to distinguish between spirit and nature, and then within nature, between the visible appearances and the invisible, yet very real and not simply hypothesized notion, essence or motivating principle (natura naturans). Even Newton spoke of things invisible in themselves (though not in their manifestations), such as force, though Comte, the thorough materialist, complained of the use of such terms as the 'force of gravity' as being relics of animism.
The matter was not a 'datum' or thing in and of itself, but rather a product or effect, and for Coleridge, looking at life in its broadest sense, it was the product of a polarity of forces and energies, but derived from a unity which is itself a power, not an abstract or nominal concept, that is Life, and this polar nature of forces within the power of Life is the very law or 'Idea' (in the Platonic sense) of Creation.
Life as polarity/function/motion
For Coleridge, the essence of the universe is motion, and motion is driven by a dynamic polarity of forces that is both inherent in the world as potential and acting inherently in all manifestations. This polarity is the very dynamic that acts throughout all of nature, including into the more particular form of 'life biological', as well as of mind and consciousness.
The tendency having been ascertained, what is its most general law? I answer—polarity, or the essential dualism of Nature, arising out of its productive unity, and still tending to reaffirm it, either as equilibrium, indifference, or identity.
And this polarity is dynamic, that is real, though not visible, and not simply logical or abstract. Thus, the polarity results in manifestations that are real, as the opposite powers are not contradictory, but counteracting and inter-penetrating.
...first, that two forces should be conceived which counteract each other by their essential nature; not only not in consequence of the accidental direction of each, but as prior to all direction, nay, as the primary forces from which the conditions of all possible directions are derivative and deducible: secondly, that these forces should be assumed to be both alike infinite, both alike indestructible... this one power with its two inherent indestructible yet counteracting forces, and the results or generations to which their inter-penetration gives existence, in the living principle and the process of our own self-consciousness.
Thus, then, Life itself is not a thing—a self-subsistent hypostasis—but an act and process.
And in that sense Coleridge re-phrases the question "What is Life?" to "What is not Life that really is?"
This dynamic polar essence of nature in all its functions and manifestations is a universal law in the order of the law of gravity and other physical laws of inert nature. And, critically, this dynamic polarity of constituent powers of life at all levels is not outside or above nature, but is within nature (Natura naturans), not as a part of the visible product, but as the ulterior natural functions that produce such products or things.
a Power, acting in and by its Product or Representative to a predetermined purpose is a Function…
The first product of its energy is the thing itself… Still, however, its productive energy is not exhausted in this product, but overflows, or is effluent, as the specific forces, properties, faculties, of the product. It reappears, in short, as the function of the body.
It is these functions that provided the bridge being sought by Romantic science and medicine, in particular by Andreas Röschlaub and the Brunonian system of medicine, between the inertial science of inert nature (physics) and the vital science of vital nature (physiology) and its therapeutic application or physic (the domain of the physician).
Romanticism and vitalism
Coleridge was influenced by German philosophy, in particular Kant, Fichte and Schelling (Naturphilosophie), as well as the physiology of Blumenbach and the dynamic excitation theory of life of the Brunonian system. He sought a path that was neither the mystical tendency of the earlier vitalists nor the materialistic reductionist approach to natural science, but a dynamic one.
What Coleridge was after was definitely not animism or naive vitalism based on vital substance, or mechanical philosophy based on material substance. He was trying to find a general law...that explicates its self-regulating internal power.
Coleridge's challenge was to describe something that was dynamic neither in mystical terms nor materialistic ones, but via analogy, drawing from the examples of inertial science. As one writer explains, he uses the examples of electricity, magnetism and gravity not because they are like life, but because they offer a way of understanding powers, forces and energies, which lie at the heart of life. And using these analogies, Coleridge seeks to demonstrate that life is not a material force, but a product of relations amongst forces. Life is not linear and static, but dynamic process of self-regulation and Emergent evolution that results in increasing complexity and individuation. This spiral, upward movement (cf. Goethe's ideas) creates a force for organization that unifies, and is most intense and powerful in that which is most complex and most individual - the self-regulating, enlightened, developed individual mind. But at the same time, this process of life increases interdependence (like the law of comparative advantage in economics) and associational powers of the mind. Thus, he is not talking about an isolated, individual subjective mind, but about the evolution of a higher level of consciousness and thought at the core of the process of life.
Life and liberty
And the direction of this motion is towards increasing individuation, that is the creation of specific, individual units of things. At the same time, given the dynamic polarity of the world, there must always be an equal and opposite tendency, in this case, that of connection. So, a given of our experience is that man is both an individual, tending in each life and in history generally to greater and greater individualization, and a social creature seeking interaction and connection. It is the dynamic interplay between the individuation and connecting forces that leads to higher and higher individuation.