No German writer is more representative of the Romantic polymath in the Age of Goethe than Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert. Yet Schubert was neither an original thinker nor a truly creative author. Rather, he belonged to a curiously Romantic breed of medical scientist who sought in nature a unifying moral principle underlying the development of all life forms. As a gifted lecturer and popularizer who explored the interfaces between philosophy, religion, and the biological sciences, he represented a bridge between Johann Gottfried Herder's humanistic-Spinozan pantheism and the new idealist organicism of Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling's Naturphilosophie (philosophy of nature). Briefly a member of the same Dresden circle of Romantic practitioners as the famed dramatist Heinrich von Kleist, Schubert is credited with Kleist's interest in somnambulist and hypnotic trances, split consciousness, clairvoyant spells of fainting, and amnesiac ecstasy or rage. A prolific writer, Schubert had a knack for anticipating breaking...