Edmund Duncan Montgomery, a Scottish-American philosopher, anticipated in his "philosophy of vital organization" ideas of emergent evolution, the energetic nature of matter, and the pragmatic functioning of knowledge. Born in Edinburgh, he studied medicine in Germany in the 1850s, did research on cell pathology in London in the 1860s, and emigrated to America in 1870 with his sculptor wife, Elisabet Ney.

After a short-lived communitarian experiment at Thomasville, Georgia, the Montgomerys settled on Liendo Plantation, near Hempstead, Texas. There Montgomery wrote most of his philosophical articles and, in his later years, took an active role in community affairs. As chairman of the Waller County Democratic Party in the 1896 Bryan-McKinley campaign, he argued the dependence of political liberty upon economic reforms.

By 1867 Montgomery saw life as a power of certain compounds to reintegrate their chemical unity after damage, a power evolved by the inherent...