Transcendental anatomy

[1] The term originated from naturalist philosophy in the German provinces, and culminated in Britain especially by scholars Robert Knox and Richard Owen, who drew from Goethe and Lorenz Oken.

[1] From the 1820s to 1859, it persisted as the medical expression of natural philosophy before the Darwinian revolution.

[2] Amongst its various definitions, transcendental anatomy has four main tenets: Johann Wolfgang Goethe was one of many naturalists and anatomists in the nineteenth century who was in search of an Ideal Plan in nature.

[4] In the 1820s, French anatomist Etienne Reynaud Augustin Serres (1786–1868) popularized the term transcendental anatomy to refer to the collective morphology of animal development.

Some advocates regarded transcendental anatomy as the ultimate explanation for biological structures, while others saw it as one of several necessary explanatory devices.