The Ecology of Romantic BiologyRobert J. Richards. The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe. (Science and Its Conceptual Foundations.) xix+587 pp., frontis., illus., bibl., index. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. $35 (cloth)

In its exhaustive survey of essential primary sources, its sympathetic yet incisive analysis, and its masterful interweaving of the lives and ideas of his dozen protagonists, the bulk of Robert Richards’s Romantic Conception of Life constitutes the best synthetic account I have ever read of the scientific—especially biological—aspects of German Romantic philosophy. The author has explored all imaginable sources and mined them for every relevant nugget of information. Focusing roughly on the period 1770–1830, Richards has charted the philosophical and scientific ideas of German Romantic thinkers “as their ideas emerged from the intellectual legacy to which they were heir, from their immediate scientific experiences, and especially from their more intimate personal relationships” (p. xviii). The amount of biographical detail may tax the patience of the reader who wants to know what the significance is of this or that fact, but the picture that results is all the richer for having been so fleshed out, and it well illustrates Richards’s point that an adequate understanding of German Romantic philosophy cannot be divorced from the interconnected lives of the people who created it. “Out of these intellectual and personal interactions came a mode of thought that emphasized creative becoming, development, and self-realization” (p. 200). Richards is especially good, for example, in showing the connections between Goethe’s art and science in the context of his lived life, in particular his aesthetic response to both women in the flesh and the female as an abstraction. Nor did he thereby ignore the importance of Goethe’s response to both Kant’s and Schelling’s philosophical enterprises. Indeed, the book invites reflection on what it means to understand a philosophical system like Schelling’s, which evolved from work to work without ever achieving canonical form, which employed concepts and modes of thought largely alien to most of us, and which