Organicism is a notoriously elastic concept. In Romantic Organicism (2003), Charles Armstrong offers a general definition of the term as "a grounding systematics for understanding all holistic structures...a way of thinking meaningfully about wholes" (2). But, as Lisa Ann Robertson shows, beneath that broad umbrella shelters a range of sometimes contradictory ontological commitments and varied aesthetic, ethical, and scientific aims.

In the introduction to the ambitious Embodiment, Aesthetics, and Ethics in Romantic Literature and Science, Robertson attributes some of these contradictions to the differing capacity, or indeed desire, of Romantic thinkers to detach themselves from all facets of Cartesianism. By the late eighteenth century, mind-body dualism was proving an increasingly inadequate ground for new knowledge about embodiment and cognition. Resistance to many aspects of dualism is evident in Romantic organicists' treatments of nature as living rather than mechanical. And yet Cartesian ideas about the special status of the human subject are what separate the British organicist genealogy loosely assembled in this book from contemporaneous (and equally Romantic) organicist traditions. The most influential of the latter, Robertson tells us, originated with the German Naturphilosophen, who sought to preserve the Cartesian subject while rejecting Cartesian dualism.

Embodiment, Aesthetics, and Ethics opens (not unlike Romantic Organicism) by noting the implicit censure of organicist thinking by twentieth-century high theory. The New Criticism's focus on the integrity of self-contained textual wholes (often understood as an outworking of organicism) is the subject of critiques by deconstructionists and New Historicists alike. Robertson argues that the New Critics' version of organicism derived from the German idealist or transcendentalist tradition. This tradition was freighted, Robertson writes, with the belief in art as evidence of "an autonomous self that is free from temporality" (16).

As Robertson proposes to flesh out an account of a different organicism--one with less-studied, non-transcendentalist lineages--we are prompted to wonder how it might align with more recent critical practice. The organicism that Robertson brings to light, one that is more consistently opposed to Cartesianism than the New Criticism was, could be seen as supporting a post-Enlightenment, indeed entirely current, view of the author as embedded with the material, political, and cultural world, rather than as an autonomous liberal subject. In fact, the autonomous liberal subject is one of the targets of Robertson's recurring comparisons between Romantic organicism and contemporary "4e" theories of embodied cognition. "4e," a coinage dating back some two decades, denotes four key attributes of cognition. As Albert Newen, Leon de Bruin and Shaun Gallagher explain in the opening chapter of the Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition, cognition is embodied (shaped by processes in the body that are not just in the brain), embedded (dependent on extrabodily processes in the environment in which the body is situated), extended (supplemented by processes and tools external to the body, like writing), and enacted ("active[ly] engage[d] in and with an agent's environment") (Newen et al. 6). The "uncanny" similarities between these theories and organicism prompt Robertson to think about how contemporary pressures of eco-catastrophe parallel those of late-eighteenth-century industrialization, with both demanding "solutions" that "theorize mind-body-world interdependence" (204, 205).

For all its comparisons to the present, however, Robertson's book is principally committed to its focus on Romantic-era texts. The four substantial body chapters--case studies of David Hartley, Erasmus Darwin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth in their intellectual contexts--could be read individually, or as a story of mutual influence. Robertson avoids any claims about these authors' singularity of vision. Instead, she situates organicism in a milieu of riotous, multiform, transnational intellectual traffic.

I appreciate the carefulness of Robertson's readings all the more because of the (welcome) audacity of her larger thesis in each chapter. David Hartley's theory of embodied cognition, the subject of Chapter 1, has long been understood as mechanistic. Robertson advances a counterclaim. In his discussions of consciousness, Hartley maintained an "ambivalence toward ontology," sidestepping the obligation to declare himself a dualist or a materialist (40). Robertson argues that, focusing instead on the relationality between mind, body, God, and world, Hartley's theory of active cognition belongs to a tradition of British organicism.

Chapter 2 begins by announcing Erasmus Darwin as a proleptic posthumanist. This is perhaps not so surprising. Darwin has seen celebrity in recent years, not only because he straddles the fields of literature and science, but also because he anticipates the questions about distributed agency that have surfaced in New Materialism. It should seem obvious to anyone reading Zoonomia, The Temple of Nature, or The Botanic Garden today that these texts destabilize the human/nature and subject/object binaries. But Robertson's intervention is at its best for me when Darwin gets to stop leaning forward into our age and is instead allowed to converse with his own. Robertson's articulation of Darwin's theory of emotion in terms of eighteenth-century aesthetic philosophy, for instance, is a lively and clever one (89-92).

In Chapter 3, "Phenomenological Organicism: Samuel Taylor Coleridge," we might expect to be returned squarely to canonical literary Romanticism. In fact, however, Robertson draws out Coleridge's complicated dialogue with eighteenth-century British materialists (Hartley, Darwin), dualists (Dugald Stuart, Thomas Reid) and idealists. Robertson stares down the critical orthodoxy which has claimed that Coleridge's attempt at organicism ultimately fails. Such readings, Robertson argues, have almost entirely ignored his interest in the physical. Robertson devotes her chapter largely to Coleridge's posthumously published Theory of Life before ending with "The Eolian Harp." Robertson argues that the poem reinforces Coleridge's theory of embedded cognition as it rehearses contemporary ideas about the mind/matter relationship. Coleridge "represents their potentially problematical implications--passivity, pantheism, and permeable subject-object boundaries" (151). But rather than resolve these problems explicitly, writes Robertson, the poem "enacts his method aesthetically" by drawing Coleridge's readers into a position where they can "better intuit truth by engaging with the phenomenal world" (151). I like the argument that this poem makes meaning by doing rather than saying; it reaffirms that wonderful notebook entry of 1809, "Thought is the past participle of Thing." I would love to see a test of such a reading against some of Coleridge's other fragmentary or seemingly unresolved poetic experiments.

Although the ethical import of British Romantic organicism is one of this book's constant undercurrents, it springs up in earnest in the final, substantial chapter on Wordsworth. Here, Robertson outlines Wordsworth's view that his audience will experience through his poetry the fit of the more-than-human world to the human subject, and that this will regenerate his readers' disposition to connect with other people, "to feel ethically responsible for one another" (161). Wordsworth didn't systematically document his reading, and Robertson has to work uphill to establish the intellectual debts to British materialist philosophy hinted at in his writing. Having done this work, the chapter is able to posit Wordsworth's ethic as a cognitive "feedback loop that involves people and their world," and whereby they may "intellectually understand and emotionally experience themselves as part of a web of relations" (186).

In the short final chapter, "Romantic Organicism in the Twenty-First Century", the Romantics' ethical purpose becomes Robertson's. "Romantic models of embodied organicism are relevant in the twenty-first century," Robertson writes, "because they provide a structuring metaphor that invites us, individually and as a society, to evaluate and change the way we think about and orient ourselves towards our lived world" (203). Robertson notes (uncontroversially) that Cartesian dualism "remains a villain today," feeding "our" (Westerners'?) instrumentalization of nature. The persistent evil of dualism and the many kinds of hierarchy for which it provides a pattern is undeniable, but I'm not convinced that Romanticism offers the best solution here. Erasmus Darwin may have put pressure on the nature/human binary, but he also proposed a major geoengineering project, the towing of Arctic icebergs into warm waters, in The Economy of Vegetation, and he celebrated the British colonization of Aboriginal land in "The Visit of Hope to Sydney Cove": these are not the positions of someone who grasps the full implications of his own posthumanism. It's worth noting here that Romantic organicism shares some of its traits and claims not just with 4e accounts of cognition but with Indigenous philosophies. Reading about how Romantic organicism can undo the worldview that has produced the Capitalocene, I'm reminded of Zoe Todd's take on "the ontological turn": "ontology is just another word for colonialism." What does it mean--on the stolen indigenous lands of North America, or of Australia, where I live--to advocate for British Romantic organicism as the solution to the still-unravelling apocalypse of the Cartesian Enlightenment?

This is a book that rewards both persistence and close attention, but it's not for the faint-hearted. The first sentence drops the reader headlong into an excellently knotty debate about Romantic organicism(s): do not expect a definition for some eleven pages. It's best read, in my view, alongside Denise Gigante's Life: Organic Form and Romanticism (2009), Amanda Jo Goldstein's Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life (2017), or Armstrong's Romantic Organicism. Embodiment, Aesthetics and Ethics in Romantic Literature and Science will be a treat for those interested in the triangulation of literature, science and the long eighteenth century.

Alexis Harley is a senior lecturer at La Trobe University.