Romantic science

Romantic science describes a way of studying nature in which the observer is not imagined to stand outside the world being observed. Feeling, sensory attention, and imagination are not defects to be eliminated but human capacities through which nature’s patterns may become intelligible. In the book, this approach links Alexander von Humboldt’s natural philosophy with Paul Stamets’s work on fungi, and offers a counterpoint to scientific practices that can make living systems appear like collections of separate objects.

A participatory way of knowing

Humboldt provides the clearest model. He held that nature’s order and beauty could be understood through human subjectivity, including the imagination. This did not mean that nature was merely invented by the observer: the human mind was itself part of nature, and so could participate in comprehending the system to which it belonged. Humboldt rejected the ideal of a perfectly objective observer looking at nature from a position outside it, expressing the alternative in the statement, “I myself am identical with nature.”

That model makes knowledge relational. Nature is not simply a scene set before a detached scientist; it is a system in which the knower is already implicated. Imagination can help disclose patterns that narrow observation might miss, while observation remains essential to testing what imagination proposes. Romantic science therefore does not amount to abandoning evidence. It asks what forms of attention are needed to perceive connections among organisms and environments, and what might be lost when science treats its subject as wholly external.

Paul Stamets as a modern naturalist

The book arrives at this idea through the contrast between Stamets’s expansive talk and the material record of his work. A tour of Fungi Perfecti, the company he founded after college, passes through long white metal buildings set in evergreen forest, with wood chips, discarded fungi, and growing media outside. Inside are grow rooms for medicinal and edible species, and research spaces with clean rooms and laminar flow chambers where fungi are reproduced from tissue culture and experiments are conducted. His patents hang framed on the office walls.

Those concrete details correct the impression that Stamets is only a speculative talker. He is also a researcher and entrepreneur whose work uses fungi in medicine, environmental restoration, agriculture, forestry, and national defense. The book describes him as an amateur in the affirmative sense: self-taught, without formal credentials, and willing to cross disciplinary boundaries. He is also an inventor and naturalist, with new species and patents to his credit. The comparison with Humboldt is not a claim that their achievements are equal; it identifies a shared orientation toward nature and a willingness to use imagination to notice systems that conventional categories may obscure.

For Stamets, metaphors such as the “earth’s Internet,” the “neurological network of nature,” and the “forest’s immune system” give language to relationships beneath the visible surface. Their Romantic sound does not by itself establish their scientific validity. Their importance in the account is that they prompt attention to networks and reciprocal effects rather than to organisms conceived in isolation. The book places Stamets among naturalists who try to see from the perspectives of plants, animals, microbes, and fungi, combining imaginative perspective-taking with observation.

Living systems against objectification

The historical contrast is not between science and feeling, but between different habits of scientific attention. The Romantic naturalists discussed in the book—including Humboldt, Goethe, Joseph Banks, Erasmus Darwin, and Henry David Thoreau—encountered nature as a densely connected world of subjects acting upon one another. Humboldt’s formulation that everything involves interaction and reciprocity captures this emphasis. Their approach is associated with coevolution: organisms are not merely adjacent objects, but participants in ongoing relations.

As professional science became more specialized, it increasingly moved indoors and used instruments to observe processes at scales invisible to the unaided eye. Those changes extended scientific knowledge, but they also subtly changed the object of study, encouraging nature to be regarded more as an object. Romantic science preserves the practical value of specialized observation while asking what its objectifying habits may leave out, materially as well as spiritually. Its alternative is not a return to ignorance, but an effort to retain the sense of a living whole while investigating its parts.

A small example gives the argument its ecological force. Stamets proposed that honeybees visit woodpiles to medicate themselves by nibbling on saprophytic mycelium that produces an antimicrobial compound useful to the hive. The observation reframes the woodpile: it is not simply debris, nor is the fungus merely an isolated organism. The account presents a possible exchange in which the hive benefits from the fungus, while leaving open what the fungus receives in return. The unanswered question matters because it directs attention toward reciprocal relations that may not yet be understood.

Psychedelic research and the conditions of knowledge

The book’s discussion of psychedelics extends the problem of observation into experimental psychology. Psychedelic experience is highly shaped by expectation: people told to anticipate spirituality, temporary madness, the collective unconscious, or birth trauma may experience the session in terms of those suggestions. Researchers therefore confront a difficulty that is epistemic as well as practical: the experience under study can be influenced by the descriptions, assumptions, and procedures through which it is approached.

This complicates the aspiration to isolate a drug’s effect through controlled experiments. Researchers must contend with powerful expectancy effects, the difficulty of blinding participants and clinicians, and the influence of the therapeutic environment. The book notes that psychedelic therapy could appear closer to shamanism or faith healing than to conventional medicine, while researchers’ enthusiasm could both contribute to reported results and intensify skepticism among colleagues who had not used psychedelics. These tensions make it difficult to fit the experience into existing scientific and psychiatric structures without either dismissing it or overstating what it establishes.

The Saskatchewan LSD studies show how experimental conditions can alter the result. Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer learned from volunteers that the environment and the presence of an engaged, empathetic therapist could shape the session; they came to suspect that some psychotic reactions might be associated with the metaphorical white room and white-coated clinician. In the early 1960s, the Addiction Research Foundation in Toronto attempted to reproduce the Saskatchewan results under stricter controls. Volunteers received LSD in neutral rooms, were not engaged by clinicians except for questionnaires, and were restrained or blindfolded, sometimes both. The results did not match the earlier trials, and some participants had terrifying experiences.

The disagreement that followed cannot be resolved by treating one side as simply mistaken. Critics could point out that the treatment performed less well under rigorous controls; supporters could argue that the controls removed the supportive conditions essential to its success. Both conclusions were consistent with the trials as conducted. In this account, Romantic science helps name the deeper problem: the observer and the conditions of observation are not always separable from the phenomenon being studied. Recognizing that entanglement does not make findings meaningless; it makes careful attention to context part of the scientific task.