The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Theories of vitalism had existed since Aristotle’s time, but the fusion of vitalism with late-eighteenth-century Romanticism produced an ecstatic depiction of Nature suffused with a special “organic” animus that was irreducible to any chemical or physical matter or force. French histologist Marie-François-Xavier Bichat in the 1790s and German physiologist Justus von Liebig in the early 1800s were both influential proponents. In 1795, the movement found its richest poetic voice in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who imagined all of “animated nature” trembling into existence as this vital force flowed through it, just as a breeze might resonate through a harp and produce music that is irreducible to its mere notes. As Coleridge wrote: “And what if all of animated nature / Be but organic Harps diversely framed / That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps / Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze / At once the Soul of each, and God of all.”

It's basically pseudoscience saying that souls exist.