contempt for the uses of modern natural philosophy
Mary Shelley seems to understand with acuity a phenomenon that could only
have just come into general awareness in her time. We now recognize that a
paradigm shift had occured in the previous generation, one forcing the
"life sciences" into a disciplinary partnership with the physical
sciences. From that point forward all notions of distinct animistic or
quasi-magical differences separating them disappear. Furthermore, under
this conceptual format nineteenth-century scientific inquiry increasingly
reduces the processes of life themselves to merely chemical reactions.
