Vitalism in America: Elihu Palmer’s Radical Religion in the Early Republic

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.