ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in this book. The book begins with Charles Wolfe's deflation of the notion of "mechanistic materialism" by confuting its bald projection onto the eighteenth-century materialists by Friedrich Engels in 1888. The crucial category to discern in the eighteenth century is vital materialism, the idea of emergent order as an inherent potentiality in nature itself. Mid-eighteenth-century French materialism was "a conception of matter as endowed with vital, self-organizing properties, a vital, non-mechanistic materialism". Comparative anatomy and physiology aimed "to integrate the 'life of the soul' with medicine and thereby modify metaphysics". The German absolute idealists took up the metaphysical vision of natura naturans from Spinoza and construed a narrative of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself. Among the many outraged protests such a speculative vision no doubt incites would be the charge of "anthropocentric triumphalism".
