Vitalism in America

Elihu Palmer's Radical Religion in the Early Republic

Bibliographic Data

ID3454740
AuthorsKirsten Fischer (0009-0006-6169-9152, corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume73
Issue3
Pages501
Publication date2016-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe William and Mary Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0043-5597 • E-ISSN: 1933-7698
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.5309/willmaryquar.73.3.0501
OpenAlexW2498766991
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited24

For more than a decade, the New York–based freethinker Elihu Palmer (1764–1806) lectured and wrote on “vitalism,” the idea that a divine life force inheres in the tiny particles of matter that comprise everything in the universe. The idea was transformative, Palmer believed. When people recognize that all creatures are made of the same eternal and divinely propelled particles, they will radically change their behavior toward all living things. Palmer was a minister by training who never left the United States. Where did he learn about a vital power infusing all matter? Three men inspired him: Dr. Isaac Ledyard of Long Island, who first introduced Palmer to a vitalist cosmology; John “Walking” Stewart, an eccentric Englishman who persuaded Palmer that atoms register and remember pain; and comte de Volney, a French philosophe attached to the idea of a life force in matter. Fully persuaded, Palmer made it his life’s work to undermine all “religious superstition” and spread the good news of vital matter in eternal motion. He believed vitalism would naturally evoke a “universal benevolence” that would in turn end all oppression, making vitalism, in his view, the most radically egalitarian philosophy in the early Republic

Aesthetics · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Power (physics · Vitalism · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Philosophy · Religion, Ecology, and Ethics · Religious studies · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices

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