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),[2] working also with Schelling's Naturphilosophie, the work of Goethe regarding morphology, and the first dynamic conception of the physiology of Richard Saumarez.
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).
"[5] 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.
"[7] 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Life is not linear and static, but dynamic process of self-regulation and Emergent evolution that results in increasing complexity and individuation.
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.
The counteraction then of the two assumed forces does not depend on their meeting from opposite directions; the power which acts in them is indestructible; it is therefore inexhaustibly re-ebullient; and as something must be the result of these two forces, both alike infinite, and both alike indestructible; and as rest or neutralization cannot be this result; no other conception is possible, but that the product must be a tertium aliquid, [a third thing] or finite generation.
For Coleridge, there is an innate, primitive or 'primary' imagination that configures invisibly sense-experience into perception, but a rational perception, that is, one raised into consciousness and awareness and then rationally presentable, requires a higher level, what he termed 'secondary imagination', which is able to connect with the thing being experienced, penetrate to its essence in terms of the living dynamics upholding its outer form, and then present the phenomena as and within its natural law, and further, using reason, develop the various principles of its operation.
"[16] For Coleridge the power of life lies in every seed as a potential to be unfolded as a result of interaction with the environment (heat, light, air, moisture, etc.