ANIMAL SPIRITS

How ideas about the blending of spirit and materiality have influenced American thought and life.

In his latest book, history professor Lears explores the American evolution of so-called animistic thinking, “a loosely defined outlook acknowledging the centrality of spontaneous energy in human experience,” or a somewhat more formalized “metaphysical worldview…known as vitalism.” The author first covers some key British expressions of vitalism in such figures as John Donne, Daniel Defoe, and Laurence Sterne, who “epitomized the lingering and lurching of the patriarchal ethos in a world where male authority was becoming detached from its traditional sources in dogmatic religion and landed wealth.” Then he moves on to a series of American exemplars, including both the well known (Timothy Dwight, Walt Whitman, Theodore Roosevelt) and the more obscure (Andrew Jackson Davis, Helen Wilmans). As Lears memorably demonstrates, the belief in the significance of pulsing flows of energy that move through minds and objects has played a profound, if not often well-acknowledged, role in American philosophy and lived experience. The author makes a convincing claim that vitalism remains relevant not just in popular, but also scientific discourse and has in fact “begun to acquire new legitimacy in our own time as scientists have rediscovered the uses of animist-derived ideas in physics, botany, geology, and epigenetics.” Such recuperations will continue to be crucial, the author argues, in responding to the contemporary threat of ecological collapse. A notable strength of the book is the richness of the author’s commentary on the context in which vitalist ideas emerged; he offers a strikingly detailed view of the lineage of specific articulations of a faith in “animal spirits.” The only lacuna is a thorough accounting of how Indigenous worldviews have impacted Anglo-American thinking over several centuries; a little more close attention to those worldviews, which have undergone their own substantial transformations, would have been useful.

A well-informed, engrossing consideration of the significance of vitalist ideas.