HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS

2018, VOL. 44, NO. 5, 528–542

https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2018.1466186

Literature in the German science of the soul: Johann Gottlob

Krüger’s Dreams
Michael J. Olson
Department of Philosophy, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The early history of anthropology in eighteenth-century Germany wove Johann Gottlob Krüger;
together contributions from medicine, metaphysics, and a host of other anthropology; literature;
disciplines in an attempt to develop a holistic ‘science of man.’ This dreams; philosophy;
physiology
paper examines a literary text written by prominent figure in that
movement, Johann Gottlob Krü ger’s Dreams (Träume) (1754). The
collection of parables staged as dreams in this book presents specifically
literary cases against the sufficiency of either philosophy or physiology
for the study of human life as a whole. Through close readings of a
number of these dreams and related texts, this paper shows how
Krüger’s Dreams advocates an approach to anthropology that recognizes
the importance of literature for an interdisciplinary study of human life.
More than simply recognising literary writing as another means of
studying human life, the vision of a new anthropology implied in this
book draws on literary devices to counter the overconfidence and
partisanship of existing philosophical and medical theories of human
nature.

The eighteenth century saw philosophical and theological studies of human life come under heavy
criticism from an array of physicians whose medical experience urged a more empirical study of
human life. At the extreme, these philosophical physicians – médicins-philosophes in France, ver-
nünftige Ärzte in Germany – sought to displace philosophical analysis entirely.1 In this vein, Julien
Offray La Mettrie (1709–1751) argued:
Man is a machine constructed in such a way that it is impossible first of all to have a clear idea of it and con-
sequently to define it. That is why all philosophers’ a priori research, in which they tried, as it were, to use the
wings of the mind, has failed. Hence it is only a posteriori, or by trying as it were to disentangle the soul from the
body’s organs, that we can […] reach the greatest possible probability on the subject.

Therefore let us take up the staff of experience and ignore the history of all the futile opinions of philosophers.2

Others, however, argued that neither philosophy nor physiology was capable of a comprehensive
understanding of human life and that it was necessary to develop a new discipline better suited to
the task. This was the case for Ernst Platner (1744–1818), whose Anthropology for Physicians and
Philosophers (1772) played a definitive role in the new field. Platner writes, ‘The human being is
neither body nor soul alone; it is the harmony of both, and the physician may, I think, as little

CONTACT Michael J. Olson mjamesolson@gmail.com Department of Philosophy, Macquarie University, NSW 2109,
Australia
1
On the parallel developments of the rational physician in France and Germany, see John H. Zammito, ‘Médicin-philosoph: Persona
for Radical Enlightenment’, Intellectual History Review 18, no. 3 (2008): 427.
2
Julien Offray La Mettrie, ‘Man Machine’ [1748], in Man Machine and Other Writings, trans. and ed. Ann Thomson (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1996), 5.
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS 529

constrain herself to the former as the moralist may to the latter.’3 The dual nature of the human being
gives rise, on Platner’s view, to three distinct human sciences:
One can, first, study the parts and behaviors of the machine on its own, without looking at the constraints the
soul places on these movements or which the soul in its turn receives from it. This is anatomy or physiology.
Second, one can investigate in the same way the powers and properties of the soul, without ever considering the
effects of the body or the changes that occur in the machine. That would be psychology, or what is the same,
logic, aesthetics, and a large part of moral philosophy. […] Finally, one can consider body and soul in their
reciprocal relations and constraints. That is what I call anthropology.4

Platner’s anthropology was well received by physicians and philosophers alike and has subsequently
determined the parameters for studies of the history of the discipline.5
The view that early German anthropology was a synthesis of philosophical and medical reflec-
tions on humanity in the service of an integrated account of the reciprocal influence of the body
and the soul has been complicated, however, by a growing appreciation of the breadth of the dis-
ciplinary concerns that fed into early eighteenth-century German writings on the topic. In
addition to the more familiar influences of metaphysics and medicine in the field, recent analyses
have cast light upon the resources and concerns brought to bear on the new, more holistic study
of humanity from the fields of natural history,6 politics,7 theology,8 and aesthetics.9 This paper
will consider the role of literature in the development of anthropology in Germany.
In contrast with the clear opposition between metaphysics and physiology in the writings of La
Mettrie and Platner, putting one’s finger on what makes a piece of writing literary is a vexing
problem. Prominent efforts to define literature under the capacious title of Poesie in the period
remained less than definitive. Zedler’s Universal-Lexicon (1731–1754), for example, explains
that Poesie is:
a manner of speaking well that […] clothes our highest ideas in all manner of clever and pleasing notions,
images, and representations with the help of inspiration [Ingenii] […]. The essence of true poetry is the
means of writing pleasingly and skilfully such that poems have at least the appearance of verisimilitude and
the main ideas are appropriately represented.10

3
Ernst Platner, Anthropologie für Ärzte und Weltweise, vol. 1 (Leipzig: 1772), iv. Here and below all translations are my own unless
otherwise indicated.
4
Platner, Anthropologie, xv–xvii.
5
Contemporary reviews of Platner’s Anthropology were published by J.G.H. Feder, ‘Ernst Platner, Anthropologie für Ärzte und Weltwei-
sen’, Göttingische Anzeigen (4 June, 1772): 571–4; Christian Garve, ‘Dr. Ernst Platners, der Arzneykunst Professors in Leipzig, Anthro-
pologie für Ärzte und Weltweisen. Erster Theil. Leipzig in der Dyckische Buchhandlung 292. Octavseiten’, Neue Bibliothek der
schönen Wissenschaften 14, no. 2 (1773): 214–47; and Markus Herz, ‘D. Ernst Platner, der Arzneykunst Professors in Leipzig, Anthro-
pologie für Ärzte und Weltweisen. Erster Theil. Leipzig, in der Dyckische Buchhandlung, 1772. 8. 292. Seiten’, Allgemeine deutsche
Bibliothek (1773): 25–51. Platner’s lasting influence on the historiography stems in no small measure from Kant’s repeated identi-
fication of Platner’s physiological anthropology as representative of approaches to the study of human life whose drawbacks his
own pragmatic anthropology aims to sidestep. Kant distinguishes his own anthropology from physiological approaches, which ‘are
in great error when they believe they can infer with certainty from the brain to the soul’ (Kants Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königlich-
Preussische, later Deutsche, Akademie der Wissenschaften [Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 1902–], [hereafter AA] 25: 9–10) already in his
1772–1773 anthropology lectures. He makes a similar point in the 1775–1776 lectures (AA 25: 472). Different criticisms of physio-
logical anthropology are found in the Menschenkunde notes of the early 1780s (AA 25: 856) and the Mrongovius notes of the mid-
1780s (AA 25: 1211). The published form of the Anthropology makes this point at AA 17: 119.
6
See, for example, Wolf Lepenies, ‘Naturgeschichte und Anthropologie im 18. Jahrhundert’, Historisches Zeitschrift 231, no. 1 (1980):
21–41; and Jennifer Mensch, ‘Caught between Character and Race: “Temperament” in Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology’, Austra-
lian Feminist Law Journal 43, no. 1 (2017).
7
Christian Wolff’s dismissal from Halle in 1723 illustrates the political stakes of debates about the metaphysics of the relation
between body and soul and their implications for the nature of free will and personal responsibility. See Jonathan I. Israel, Radical
Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 544–52.
8
See Udo Sträter, ed., Alter Adam und Neue Kreatur: Pietismus und Anthropologie (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2009).
9
See Ernst Stöckmann, ‘Von der sinnlichen Erkenntnis zur Psychologie der Emotionen. Anthropologische und ästhetische Pro-
gression der Aisthesis in der vorkantischen Ästhetiktheorie’, in Physis und Norm: Neue Perspektiven der Anthropologie im 18. Jahr-
hundert, ed. Manfred Beetz, Jörn Garber, and Heinz Thoma (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007), 69–106.
10
Johann Heinrich Zedler, Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon aller Wissenschafften und Künste, 64 vols. (Halle and Leipzig: 1731–
1754), vol. 28, 502.
530 M. J. OLSON

This definition, the entry goes on to remark, ‘extends the realm of poetry more broadly than is ordi-
narily believed, in light of which comedies, satires, novels, oratory, allegories, and similar things are
the fruits of the poetic arts [Dichtkunst].’11 If Zedler’s definition cautions against attempts to limit the
domain of literary writing, there are other prominent sources from the period that nonetheless aim
to distinguish literary interventions from the analytical methods of philosophical argumentation.
Ephraim Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn pressed just this point in their submission for the 1753
Berlin Academy of Sciences prize, Pope: A Metaphysician!.12 They distinguish literature (Poesie)
from philosophy through the former’s embrace of synonymy, euphony, and rhetorical figures in gen-
eral, on the one hand, and through its rejection of the rigid philosophical method of beginning with
definitions, on the other hand. Notwithstanding this characterization, Élisabeth Décultot observes,
‘what constitutes the core of Lessing’s concept of poetry remains open, as indeed does the question
of which texts, genres, and forms of discourse can positively be subsumed under this category.’13 One
must, then, be cautious not to overstate the distance between literary and scholarly writing. Bearing
this caution in mind, we might still ask how literature contributed to the early history of
anthropology.
Indeed, many scholars have noted the influence of literature on the formation of the new ‘science
of man’ in the eighteenth century. Wolfram Mauser, for example, argues, ‘one of the distinguishing
characteristics of the early Enlightenment is the unusual proximity of poetry, natural history, and
medicine. What bound them together,’ he claims, ‘was the anthropological perspective.’14 In his
definitive study of the early history of anthropology in Germany, John Zammito similarly argues,
‘the interpenetration of insights from literature and medicine, from medicine and philosophy,
from travel and history – this distinctly metaphorical transfer not just of data but of “ways of know-
ing” – is the distinctive feature of the emergent “science of man.”’15 Zammito highlights two primary
literary contributions in this vein: travel literature and psychological novels. Travel literature pro-
vided valuable information about cultural and physical variation around the world.16 Alexander
Pope’s Essay on Man (1733–1734), Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759), and Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) exemplify the way literature contributed to eight-
eenth-century anthropological investigations of psychology and morals. A driving force behind
the literary contributions to anthropology in this period, according to Zammito, was the rise of Popu-
larphilosophie in Göttingen, particularly following Johann Georg Heinrich Feder’s arrival at the uni-
versity there in 1768.17 This school was marked by an ‘insistence on the importance of the
humanistic disciplines for the pursuit of philosophy, not only in terms of the tone of its presentation,
but in terms of the educative and humanizing burden of its content.’18 The rise of the new science of
anthropology was marked, among other things, by an elevation of literary writing alongside medical
and physiological texts as integral resources for the analysis of the ‘the whole man’ as well as for the
popular dissemination of the fruits of that analysis.

11
Ibid.
12
Ephraim Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn, Pope: ein Metaphysiker! (Danzig: 1755).
13
Élisabeth Décultot, ‘Criticism as Poetry? Lessing’s Laocoon and the Limits of Critique’, trans. Steven Tester, Rethinking Lessing’s
Laocoon: Antiquity, Enlightenment, and the ‘Limits’ of Painting, ed. Avi Lifschitz and Michael Squire (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2017), 246.
14
Wolfram Mauser, ‘Johann Gottlob Krüger. Der Weltweise als Arzt—zur Anthropologie der Frühaufklärung in Deutschland’, in ‘Ver-
nünfige Ärzte:’ Hallesche Psychomediziner und die Anfänge der Anthropologie in der deutschsprachigen Frühaufklärung, ed. Carsten
Zelle (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2001), 58.
15
John H. Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 222. For a study of
developments in anthropology in Kant’s wake, see Chad Wellmon, Becoming Human: Romantic Anthropology and the Embodiment
of Freedom (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 2010).
16
See Michael Harbsmeier, ‘Towards a Prehistory of Ethnography: Early Modern German Travel Writing as Traditions of Knowledge’,
in Fieldwork and Footnotes: Studies in the History of European Anthropology, ed. Han F. Vermeulen and Arturo Alvarez Roldán
(London: Routledge, 1995), 19–38.
17
For a sketch of Popularphilosopie, see Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 165–9.
18
Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology, 247.
 HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS 531

Though many have noted the novel proximity of literary and scholarly texts in the anthropology of
this period, there are fewer analyses of the detailed means by which specific works of literature intervened
in the debates animating the emerging field of anthropology.19 The present essay accordingly seeks to
expand our understanding of just how specifically literary ‘ways of knowing’ contributed to the multi-
disciplinary study of human life in this period. To this end, we will focus on a single author in order
to specify how he brought literary tools to bear on the efforts of the vernünftige Ärzte. That author, a
noted Professor of ‘Arztneygelahrheit und Weltweisheit,’ is Johann Gottlob Krüger (1715–1759).
Krüger was a seminal figure in the German tradition of philosophical physicians that emerged
from Halle in the middle of the eighteenth century. He earned degrees in philosophy and medicine
in Halle before entering professional academic life in the medical faculty there in 1743 and eventually
moving to the philosophy faculty at Helmstedt in 1751. His medical and scientific reputation – built
on works like the three-volume physiology textbook, The Doctrine of Nature (1740), and the
Thoughts on Coffee, Tea, Tobacco, and Snuff (1743), which was published simultaneously in German
and French – earned him membership in the Prussian Academy (from 1744) and the Leopoldina
(from 1745). Later, his articulation of a style of empirical psychology distinct from the Wolffian
model in the Essay on Experimental Psychology (1756) placed him at the heart of debates about
the borders between natural science and metaphysics.
Our attention here does not primarily concern Krüger’s scientific and philosophical writings, but
a literary work published in 1754, the Dreams (Träume). This book saw four editions (1754, 1758,
1765, 1785), the last one edited and introduced by Johann August Eberhard. This ranks it among
Krüger’s most popular works: his Doctrine of Nature went through five editions (1740, 1744,
1750, 1663, 1771), for example, and his more practical Principles of Dietetics, just two (1751,
1763). The Dreams contains between 139 and 167 (the number varied by edition) short parables
styled as dreams addressing a dizzying array of controversial topics, ranging from religious tolera-
tion, the comparative savagery of east Indian cannibalism and European religious wars, and the var-
ieties of natural philosophy likely to be accepted by inhabitants of various celestial bodies.
Krüger’s writings are particularly valuable for those interested in charting the interaction of medical,
philosophical, and literary elements of early Enlightenment anthropology for the simple reason that Krü-
ger himself published medical, philosophical, and literary works. Krüger’s reflections on human life illus-
trate how physiology, medicine, philosophy, and literature came together in a fashion that reflects the
indistinct boundaries between these ways of thinking about the human being. Carsten Zelle has analysed
elegantly how Krüger’s writing ‘puts literature into immediate relation with science.’20 What Zelle has
not analysed and what is of particular interest here is how the relations between the philosophical, lit-
erary, and scientific elements of Krüger’s thought are themselves important themes of his literary inter-
ventions. Krüger uses literary devices, as we will see, to highlight the dynamics of reciprocal constraint
and support among medicine, philosophy, and literature in a way that grants literature second-order
function within his synthetic, multidisciplinary studies of human life.21
Our pursuit of this idea falls into four parts. First, we will see how Krüger mounts a literary case
for the claim that metaphysical speculation is insufficient to the task of grasping the nature of the
connection of the mind and the soul. Then we will consider a related literary presentation of the
inability of physiology to capture the essence of the soul. Third, we will consider an instance in
which Krüger uses literature to make a positive contribution to efforts to understand the principles
of the relation of body and soul. Finally, we will turn to Krüger’s argument for the inability of litera-
ture alone to grasp the core of the human condition. This analysis will finally bring into view how

19
For a broad overview of the interaction of anthropology and literature, see Alexander Kosenina, Literarische Anthropologie: Die
Neuentdeckung des Menschen, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2016).
20
Carsten Zelle, ‘Träume eines “vernünftigen Arztes:” Zum literarisches Werk des Naturlehrers Johann Gottlob Krüger’, in Heilkunst
und schöne Künste. Wechselwirkungen von Medizin, Literatur und bildender Kunst im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Anett Lütteken, Heidi
Eisenhut, and Carsten Zelle (Göttingen: Wallstein 2011), 107.
21
Zelle sees this second order function of literature in Johann August Eberhard’s preface to the fourth edition of the Dreams, which
Zelle says ‘achieves the status of meta-metapoetics’ (ibid., 106), but not in Krüger’s writings themselves.
532 M. J. OLSON

Krüger, one of the seminal figures of Enlightenment anthropology, advocated and practised
a robustly interdisciplinary study of the humanity that wove together the contributions of
medicine, philosophy, and literature in a way that refused to subordinate its literary elements to
the others.

1. A literary case for the insufficiency of metaphysics

Zammito suggests that Popularphilosophie’s interest in harnessing the ‘educative and humanizing’
potential of literary writing played an important role in determining the early contours of German
anthropology.22 The valuable accessibility of Krüger’s literary writing was acknowledged in its own
time and granted Krüger a prominent role in early anthropology.23 It would be inaccurate, however,
to reduce the Dreams to a literary popularization of exiting ideas. The shape of the book’s contri-
bution is best brought to light by considering a series of individual dreams recounted in the Dreams
and situating them in relation to the aspects of mid-century anthropology to which they respond.
The first instances of Krüger’s literary engagement with the study of humanity adopt a satirical
strategy by reproducing existing philosophical theories in a way that highlights their implicit absurd-
ities. We encounter this strategy in dream 65, which drops the reader into the deep end of metaphys-
ical theories of how the soul relates to its body. In the dream, a series of artisans presents machines
designed to replicate a human being. Each his own Vaucanson, the four artisans have built machines
out of pulleys, cords, springs, and all manner of mechanical support. One machine, which looked
very much like a person, had a dog inside it and was arranged so that the dog could control the move-
ments of the machine and make it do whatever the dog liked. The second machine also had a dog in
it, but this dog could not control the machine. Instead, the artisan who made the machine paid care-
ful attention how the dog acted while inside the machine and based on these observations moved the
machine like a marionette so that the actions of the machine paralleled the dog’s intentions and
desires. A third machine had a drive spring within it so that it could move under its own power.
It also had a dog in it who appeared to control the machine’s movements, though its creator
explained to the assembled audience that the machine would move exactly as it did regardless of
whether in fact it had a dog in it. The final machine was also driven by its internal springs alone.
The machine itself was said to be capable of thinking and so needed no dog to move it. The machine’s
spring, the artisan explained, was irritated by the tension it felt and did everything in its power to
relieve that tension.
The four machines present caricatures of four conceptions of the nature of the interaction and
connection of the body and the soul prominent in early modern philosophy. The first artisan is a
Cartesian, and so he creates a machine that illustrates the dualism favoured by Descartes and his
descendants.24 The second machine offers an occasionalist model. The third artisan’s insistence
that his machine merely appears to be directed by its canine pilot when the machine is in fact driven
by its own internal mechanisms represents a species of pre-established harmony. And finally, the
fourth machine, which by virtue of an indigenous capacity for thought requires no dog-soul, stands
in for materialist positions that reduce cognition and volition to a complex of purely material
processes.

22
That literary writing was influential in political as well as scientific conceptions of humanity is clear from Lynn Hunt’s analysis of
the formative role of literature in emerging conceptions of human rights in the eighteenth century. See Lynn Hunt, Inventing
Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007).
23
Zelle refers to a report on Krüger’s inaugural lecture in Helmstedt published in the Göttingische Zeitung von gelehrten Sachen in
April, 1752. See Carsten Zelle, ‘Commercium mentis et corporis. La contribution de Johann Gottlob Krüger à l’anthropologie littér-
aire autor de 1750’, trans. Gilles Darras, Revue germanique international 10 (2009), 26.
24
Zelle finds this machine to represent a Stahlian animism more specifically. If the machine could only move under the direction of
its dog-pilot, I would agree. Krüger does not specify the details on this score, so I take the machine to represent a more general
dualist position. For a masterful analysis of the satirical upshot of representing the soul with a dog, see Zelle, ‘Träume eines “ver-
nünftigen Arztes”’, 97–9.
 HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS 533

Which system, then, does Krüger’s dream endorse? Despite advocating for physical influx as an
explanation of the interaction of body and soul in other texts,25 in the Dreams – in this dream and
others – Krüger adopts a more circumspect posture. More than that, he casts doubt upon the possi-
bility of resolving the question at all. At the close of the dream, a wise old man who inspected the
wondrous menagerie is asked to determine which of these machines best captures the nature of
the human beings after whom they were modelled. The old man responds in verse:
Ihr irret allesamt, nur irret anderst.
Ins innere der Natur dringt kein erschaffener Geist,
Zu glücklich, wem sie noch die äussere Schaale weißt.26
[You all err, but in different ways.
No created spirit can penetrate the core of nature.
Lucky are those whom nature still shows its outer shell.]

The poetic conclusion of this dream is, it turns out, a hybrid quotation of two poems written by
another German natural philosopher with a penchant for literary reflection on the principles under-
pinning his work, namely, Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777).
The first line of the old man’s poetic judgment comes from Haller’s 1729 poem ‘Thoughts on
Reason, Superstition, and Atheism,’ which he wrote while on a botanical trip in the Swiss Alps.27
As a whole, the poem connects, as the title suggests, the misuse of human reason with the twin social
problems of superstition and atheism. When people fail successfully to use reason, Haller claims, we
are susceptible to superstition. When, on the contrary, we turn to reason in order to avoid falling
prey to superstition, we run the risk of sliding into agnosticism and atheism by overestimating
the powers of finite rationality. These twin threats confound humanity:
Unseliges Geschlecht, das nichts aus Ursach thut!
Dein Wissen ist Betrug, und Tand dein höchstes Gut.
Du fehlst, so bald du glaubst, und fäll’st, so bald du wanderst;
Wir irren allesamt, nur jeder irret anderst.28
[Unfortunate race that cannot do anything right!
Your knowledge is deception, and trinkets are your highest good.
You fall short as soon as you believe, and you stumble as soon as you wander.
We all err, but everyone errs differently.]

The last line, which Krüger’s old man appropriates in his judgment, makes clear that Haller is not
describing a problem that others – atheists and the superstitious, say – succumb to but that his
superior wisdom allows him to escape. ‘We all err,’ he says. In Krüger’s dream, however, this changes.
Rather than implicating himself in a congenital problem of human life in general, the old man in the
dream passes judgment on the assembled inventors: ‘You all err,’ he says. The hubris one at first
detects in this variation on Haller is dispelled by the old man’s explanation of the common feature
of the inventors’ errors, namely, their attempt to understand something that surpasses human
comprehension.
The second and third lines of Kruger’s poetic conclusion are drawn from a different poem from
the same volume. Haller’s 1730 poem ‘Falsity of Human Virtues’ reflects on the interplay between
human weakness and virtue, ultimately concluding that ‘shortcomings become beautiful and virtue
radiates from weakness.’29 The relevant section for our purposes again discusses humanity’s

25
See, for example, Krüger, Versuch einer Experimental-Seelenlehre, 2nd ed. (Halle and Helmstädt: Hemmerde, 1756), 324: ‘Nerven
und Muskeln sind also das Band, welches die Seele mit dem Leib verknüpfet.’
26
Krüger, Träume, 243.
27
Albrecht Haller, ‘Gedanken über Vernunft, Aberglauben, und Unglauben’, in Versuch Schweizerischer Gedichte, 3rd ed. (Danzig:
1743), 36–50.
28
Ibid., 47.
29
Albrecht Haller, ‘Falschheit menschlicher Tugenden’, in Versuch Schweizerischer Gedichte, 54.
Haller’s prominence as both a physiologist and a poet meant that Krüger was not the only later author to appeal to these to
lines in order to illustrate a point of his own. So, for example, Goethe responds to Haller’s scepticism about our ability to under-
stand nature as it truly is in a late poem, ‘Allerdings: Dem Physiker,’ of 1820. See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘Allerdings: Dem
534 M. J. OLSON

epistemic limitations. The poem celebrates the successes of the natural sciences in explaining the
movement of celestial bodies, the composition of light, and the regularity of the tides. The philoso-
pher has in this respect, Haller writes, ‘filled the world with clarity.’30 Emboldened by these successes,
however, the philosopher turns his attention to other, more difficult questions: how can we dis-
tinguish dreaming from waking? how can we explain gravity or magnets? what is the nature of bodies
and of space? When faced with these puzzles, Haller recommends epistemic humility. He writes:
Doch suche nur im Ritz von künstlichen Figuren
Beym Licht der Ziffer-Kunst der Wahrheit dunkle Spuren;
Ins innre der Natur dringt kein erschafner Geist,
Zu glücklich, wenn sie noch die äußre Schaale weis’t;
Du hast nach reifer Müh, und nach durchwachten Jahren,
Erst selbst, wie viel uns fehlt, wie nichts man weiß, erfahren.31
[Sure, search only in the crannies of artificial figures
By a cryptographic light for the truth of obscure traces.
To the inner core of nature no created mind can penetrate,
Lucky are those whom nature still shows its outer shell.
After long labor and sleepless years, you have,
experienced firsthand how much we lack, how little we know.]

Newton, whose name Haller repeatedly invokes in the poems of this period, offers a useful illus-
tration here.32 Newtonian mechanics’ accurate description of the effects of gravity – nature’s
äußre Schaale – is an astounding accomplishment, one might say, particularly given that any expla-
nation of gravity itself – the innre der Natur – is foreclosed to our limited minds.
The inner core of nature at issue in Krüger’s dream is not the nature of gravity, but the relation
between body and soul. The old man’s judgment that all four inventors have gotten it wrong is not
based on their failure to adopt the correct metaphysical explanation of the relation. The problem is
rather that they attempted to model something that surpasses human understanding. If a holistic
understanding of humanity requires an analysis of the structures and dynamics of both mental
and bodily existence, as well as an investigation of the reciprocal determinations of these dimensions
of our lives, we cannot rely on philosophy to discover the metaphysical basis of this reciprocity. The
deep nature of the connection between body and the soul remains beyond the reach of philosophical
analysis.
Krüger’s scepticism about the sufficiency of philosophical resources for resolving the mind–body
problem is not unique or particularly novel. After all, John Locke, another philosopher with medical
training, came to a similarly sceptical conclusion about the powers of human reason to determine the
nature of the soul and its relation to the body.33 Metaphorical presentations of philosophical theories
of mind–body interaction are not particularly novel either.34 What is more interesting, however, is
Krüger’s literary presentation of his agnostic conclusion. Rather than mounting a philosophical
argument about the sources and limits of human knowledge to establish that metaphysical solutions
to the mind–body problem lie on the far side of those limits, Krüger quotes a poem to the same effect.
That he quotes Haller’s poem to make the point rather than writing one of his own suggests that

Physiker’, in Goethes Werke, 133 vols. (Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1887–1919), vol. 3, 105. Around the same time, Hegel too takes up
these lines from ‘Falsity of Human Virtues’ as a negative example. See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Encyclopädie der philoso-
phischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse, 3rd ed. (Heidelberg: 1830), §140.
30
Haller, ‘Falschheit’, 64.
31
Ibid.
32
On Haller’s esteem for Newton and it’s expression in the philosophical poems of the late 1720s, see Howard Mumford Jones,
‘Albrecht von Haller and English Philosophy’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 40, no. 1 (1925): 103–27.
33
On Locke’s agnosticism, see Jonathan Bennett, ‘Locke’s Philosophy of Mind’, in The Cambridge Companion to Locke, ed. Vere Chap-
pell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 100–4.
34
Leibniz and Bayle’s debate over the merits of pre-established harmony, for example, illustrate the doctrine in part through the
image of a ship that pilots itself. See G.W. Leibniz, ‘Response aux reflexions contenue dans las seconde Edition du Dictionaire
Critique de M. Bayle, article Rorarius, sur le systeme de l’harmonie preétablie’, in Die philosophishen Schriften von Georg Wilhelm
Leibniz, ed. C.I. Gerhardt, 7 vols. (Berlin: 1875–1890), vol. 4, 554–71.
 HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS 535

poetry offers a tradition with an authority of its own. That Krüger combines lines from two of Hal-
ler’s poems indicates that the intellectual value of poetry’s contribution lies in a range of work rather
than in an exceptional piece of unexpectedly philosophical poetry. The authority of the poem’s con-
clusions stems instead from their roots in the tradition of German poetry. In short, in this dream
Krüger offers a characteristically literary case for the inability of metaphysics to determine the
deep core of the relation between human mental and physical life.35

2. A literary case for the insufficiency of physiology

Criticisms of the pretensions of metaphysics to grasp the root of human nature are commonplace in
the mid-eighteenth century, both within Germany and beyond. The tradition of vernünftige Ärzte to
which Krüger’s Essay on Experimental Psychology was an early tributary was built in large measure
on a desire for a more holistic conception of human life than was possible in the confines of meta-
physical debates about how the body and soul were related. One of the most prominent features of
that tradition was to turn to medical and physiological studies of psychosomatic dynamics to shed
light where metaphysics fell into obscurity. La Mettrie, the most strident advocate of this strategy,
thus argues:
You can see that, in order to explain the union of the soul with the body, there is no need to torture one’s mind
as much as those great geniuses Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, Malebranche, Leibniz and Stahl did, and that it is
enough to keep going in a straight line and not look behind or to the side when the truth is in front of one.36

That straight line led by La Mettrie the physician directly to the body. Krüger, by contrast, was not so
sanguine about the ability of medicine and physiology to provide the answers philosophy could not.
Krüger was a strong advocate for the value of the empirical study of the mind. He agreed with La
Mettrie that the philosophical study of the soul could be greatly improved with the help of medi-
cine.37 He also recognized that experimental approaches to the study of the soul faced obstacles.
In the Introduction to the Essay on Experimental Psychology, he ventriloquizes a horrified critic of
any experimentation on the soul:
You want to open rational men’s heads in order to discover the seat of their rationality; you want to cut up their
brains in order to experience where their memory has its seat; […] you want to rip the heart out of the body, to
stick it with needles, and to ask if it feels anything; you want to cut off his head in order to know if the severed
head still feels anything and how long the soul remains in it.38

This is of course not the kind of experiment Krüger has in mind. Rather than subjecting human
subjects to the ‘extraordinary alterations of the body’ necessary to observe the ‘extraordinary and
unusual state of the soul’ that would be particularly informative to the experimental natural philo-
sopher, Krüger draws on the existing wealth of historical medical reports about patients that had
already suffered an array of such alterations.39
Despite his commitment to the fruitful collaboration of philosophical and medical studies
of human life, Krüger did not expect this kind of experimental study to clarify the metaphysics of
35
Wolfram Mauser explores how other dreams contest related aspects of broadly rationalist metaphysics in ‘Johann Gottlob Krügers
“Träume:” Zu einer wenig beachteten literarishen Gattung des 18. Jahrhunderts’, in Germanistik aus interkultureller Perspektive, ed.
Adrien Fink and Gertrud Gréciano (Strasbourg: Université des Sciences Humaines de Strasbourg, 1988), 55–6.
36
Julien Offray de La Mettrie, ‘Treatise on the Soul’ [1750], in Man Machine and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Ann Thomson, 64.
37
Krüger, Experimental-Seelenlehre, 20: ‘so gewiß ich auch versichert bin, daß dadurch [that is, through medical experiments], wenn
sie mit gehöriger Klugheit angestellt würden, der Seelenlehre durch die Arzneygelahrheit ein grosser Vortheil zuwachsen würde.’
For how an analysis of the importance of the imagination and dreaming in Krüger’s campaign in favour of empirical (rather than
metaphysical) studies of the relation between the body and the soul, see Claire Gantet, Der Traum in der Frühen Neuzeit: Ansätze
zu einer kulturellen Wissenscheftsgeschichte (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2010), 413–28.
38
Krüger, Experimental-Seelenlehre, 18–19.
39
Ibid., 20. Zelle argues that Krüger’s passive relation to extant medical reports means his experimental psychology is really more
observational than experimental. See Zelle, ‘Experiment, Experience and Observation in Eighteenth-Century Anthropology and
Psychology – The Examples of Krüger’s Experimentalseelenlehre and Moritz’ Erfahrungsseelenkunde’, Orbis Litterarum 56, no. 2
(2001): 101.
536 M. J. OLSON

the soul and its relation to the body. In the penultimate chapter of the Essay, he concludes that
empirical observation supports a physical influx view. He hardly saw this as an advance, however.
At the end of the day, his analysis underwrites the conclusion that ‘the soul is affected if the body
is altered because the soul is always altered when the body is altered. Certainly an important discov-
ery!’40 The modest returns of empirical studies of the soul thus recommend alternative strategies.
Schmidt-Hanissa explains one way that literature is deputized in this situation:
Thought experiments came on the scene because of the impossibility of gaining knowledge of the soul and its con-
nection to the body with the help of empirical or experimental methods. […] They [literary thought experiments]
break with existing conventions of thought and present their object in new, unexpected, and clever ways.41

We saw above how Krüger used a literary thought experiment to criticize metaphysical studies of the
soul and its relation to the body. Now we will see how he uses this technique to follow up on the
humility of the poetic conclusion to dream 65 with a more direct challenge to the ability of medicine
and physiology to grasp the nature of the soul. Though these fields offer unmatched insight into the
workings of the body, to take that success to indicate the likelihood of finding similar insights into
the question of the relation to the body to the soul is, Krüger argues in another dream, misguided.
That is precisely the point Haller’s poetry makes in the dream we have just considered.
In dream 63, Krüger finds himself standing before a transparent ox. The skin and all the organs of
the ox are entirely transparent such that he can see the tangle of fibres that comprise the ox’s nervous
system. As well as seeing the blood and fluids of the ox’s organs circulate throughout the animal’s
body, Krüger can see very quick bursts of light running through its nerves. This light is concentrated
in its brain, but travels throughout its body. What he sees is an anatomist’s ideal: the opacity and
obscurity of the structures and operations of the inner recesses of the ox are replaced by transparency
and illumination. That is not, however, how the dreaming Krüger thinks about what he sees. He con-
cludes instead that what he’s looking at is the ox’s soul. As soon as he realizes this, a butcher appears.
The ox is then stunned, slaughtered, and butchered. During this process, the light that had previously
pinged through the ox’s nerves fades and eventually dies out entirely. At the beginning of the dream,
Krüger is surprised to report that he was able to perceive the ox’s soul so distinctly in the animal’s
nervous system. By the end of the dream, he has reconciled himself to the materialist conclusion that
the dynamic to and fro of the nervous system is sufficient to account for the ox’s soul.
In the closing lines of the dream, Krüger cleverly forecloses any attempt to draw an analogous
conclusion about human souls. He writes, ‘Never has anyone made such an ox-ish representation
[ochsenmäßige Vorstellung] of the soul of an ox, and I admit that one could not dream of a more
wondrous one.’42 This conclusion should be read dialectically. In the first instance, the physiological
understanding of the ox’s soul presented in this dream is an ochsenmäßige Vorstellung, which has a
positive connotation: it is a representation entirely appropriate to the object it represents. In this
sense, Krüger’s wondrous representation of the ox’s soul is ochsenmäßig, ‘according to the standards
of the ox.’ This positive connotation is undercut, however, by a sense of the severe restrictions of the
neurophysiological model of the ox’s soul proffered in the dream. If we, in a second moment, take
Krüger’s success at capturing the nature the ox’s soul in the activity of its nervous system to support
an extension of this model to the human case, we will have gone too far. Though the most fantastic
physiological understanding of the soul may succeed in capturing the bovine soul, it cannot capture
the nature of the human soul. In this sense, a physiological approach to the soul is ochsenmäßig in the
sense of being ochsig, ‘like and ox’ or ‘oafish.’ Even the most detailed physiological understanding the
soul is a bit inept, too coarse.43 But just as an entirely materialist understanding of the human soul

40
Krüger, Experimental-Seelenlehre, 330.
41
Schmidt-Hannisa, ‘Krügers geträumte Anthropologie’, 169.
42
Krüger, Träume, 240.
43
I depart here from Zelle’s interpretation of this dream. See Carsten Zelle, ‘Modellbildende Metaphorik im Leib-Seele-Diskurs der
“vernünftigen Ärzte”’, in Tropen und Metaphern im Diskurs der Geisteswissenschaften des 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Elena Agazzi (Ham-
burg: Felix Meiner, 2011), 209–23.
 HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS 537

would be oafish, so too is the materialist conception of the ox’s soul. The initially positive connota-
tions of the ochsenmäßig physiological representation of the ox’s soul turns into its opposite: a
clumsy grasping at what eludes our comprehension. Given that the first dream we looked at already
criticized the materialist position, it is not surprising to find Krüger’s scepticism cleverly reiterated
here. Physiology, even when it is most successful, in other words, comes up short.

3. A positive literary contribution

Though satire and irony are among the characteristic strengths of the genre of dream writing, it
would be a mistake to think that the Dreams is an entirely negative, critical text. Krüger does in
fact include dreams that present positive cases of their own. One such dream makes the case for a
synthesis of the two dominant schools of physiology and so suggests literature’s ability to contribute
positively where natural philosophy has been hampered by internecine conflict.
Krüger’s seventy-second dream portrays the attempts of 3 sons to make good on their father’s dying
wish. The father, a medical doctor, instructs his sons to forsake his career and to use their inheritance
to become millers, since, the father explains, ‘I have noticed throughout my life that this is a very profitable
profession.’44
The oldest son – a spiritual disciple of Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738)45 – worked hard to build a
mechanically perfect mill: he read mathematical books, consulted engineers, and constructed a pre-
cise machine. When the mill did not work, he figured the problem was mechanical. ‘Since the mill is
a machine,’ he said, ‘the problem must necessarily lie in its structure.’46 He did not notice that the
stream over which he built his mill was too shallow to drive the mechanism. After replacing many
parts and fine tuning his mill, one day he put a nail in the wall of the mill so that he could hang up his
coat. On that same day, the mill started to work. ‘Who would have thought that the mill didn’t want
to go because I forgot to pound a nail in the wall,’ the oldest son exclaimed.47
The second son quite enjoyed his brother’s mistake. It was not the nail, of course, that made the
mill run, but the melting snow coming down from the mountains and increasing the flow of the
stream. The second son was, Krüger informs us, a follower of the animist Georg Stahl (1659–
1734). On his view, the structure of the mill alone is insufficient – it is the water that is the ‘soul
of the mill.’48 The second son was so focused on maximizing the flow of water through the mill
44
Krüger, Träume, 267–8.
45
In a public lecture delivered at the University of Leiden in September 1703 that marked his accession to a chair in the Faculty of
Medicine, the ‘Oration on the Usefulness of the Mechanical Method in Medicine’, Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738) explained:
Its usefulness [i.e. the usefulness of mechanics] is therefore recognized by all civil and military arts. It is celebrated as
being indispensable for all other disciplines, no only by the experts, but also by the ignorant who try to acquire
some vain fame by praising what they do not understand. Only in the field of medicine is it despised, generally con-
sidered to be useless, and so neglected. Now I consider this opinion to be far from the truth and calamitous for medical
science that I wish to discuss this subject, rather than any other, in this hour. (Herman Boerhaave, ‘Oration on the Useful-
ness of the Mechanical Method in Science’, in Boerhaave’s Orations, trans. E. Kegel-Brinkgreve and A.M. Luyendijk-Elshout
[Leiden: Brill/Leiden University Press, 1983], 95)
The conclusion of Boerhaave’s considerations of the subject is that ‘we must acknowledge the pre-eminence of mechanics with
regard to the investigation, or even the governing of the human body’ (97).
46
Krüger, Träume, 268.
47
Ibid., 269.
48
Ibid., Stahl’s animism maintained that the body required a non-mechanical, living organizing principle to maintain and direct its
otherwise mechanically interrelated parts. A popular compendium of Stahl’s views on the soul explains:
If we represent the human body without attending to its living soul it is clear that the matter of which it is composed, the
source of its essential properties, very quickly begins to decay and its parts begin to separate. This decay and dissolution,
which belongs to the essential nature of matter of the human body, must accordingly be resisted by something in a living
body. The body must be held together by something whose origin, in its essential properties, is directly opposed to matter,
whose origin cannot itself lie in matter. The human body is thus necessarily the effect of something other than itself if it is
to continue to exist. (Wendelin Ruf, Georg Ernst Stahls Theorie der Heilkunde [Halle: J.J. Gebauer, 1802], 31–2; emphasis added)
For a general introduction to Stahl and animist physiology, see Lester A. King, ‘Stahl and Hoffmann: A Study in Eighteenth Century
Animism’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 19, no. 2 (1964), 118–30.
538 M. J. OLSON

that he did not notice that his water wheel was damaged. With a steady flow of water through the
mill, he was very puzzled about why it was not working. During the night, the oldest son, who had
noticed his brother’s broken water wheel, fixed it. When he returned in the morning to explain to his
brother why the mill was now working, the Stahlian son refused to accept the mechanical expla-
nation. The mill did not start to work because of the mechanical repair, he responded, but because
of the heavy rain last night, which finally made the stream sufficiently strong to drive the mill. This
disagreement, as one would expect, tore the family apart.
The third son, whose mill worked quite well, eventually grew weary of his brothers’ feud and
called them together. The youngest brother said:
you are both right in a certain way and wrong in another. One of you cares only about the water wheel and not at
all about the water; the other lets the mill fall into disrepair and only concerns himself about where he can get more
water. You belong together. A mill is a machine, and no machine performs its task when it lacks an orderly struc-
ture. Such an orderly structure doesn’t have the least effect, however, if there is no power to set it in motion.49

In order successfully to run a mill, he continued, one must attend to the mechanical structure of the
mill as well as the flow of water that powers it. The root of the problem, the youngest brother con-
cludes is that the elder brothers are too educated. He explains,
You both studied – you mechanistic medicine, he said to the older brother, and, you, Stahlian medicine, he said
to the second brother. I haven’t studied at all, which means that I follow common sense rather than great men,
and my mill runs like a well-oiled machine.50

Although this dream, like all the others, is narrated by Krüger, himself a doctor, the structure of the
parable aligns the reader with the ‘healthy understanding’ of the youngest brother against the theor-
etically committed, older physicians. By allying the narrator, author, and reader to the youngest
brother, this fable associates its literary form with effective common sense. Where educated physicians
are caught up in the narcissism of small differences, the healthy rationality of literary distance points
the way toward a more effective synthesis. Here it is the accessibility of literature, the fact that it can act
as a popularizing medium that does not demand specialized training of its readers that secures its rela-
tive advantage over the more scholarly (and sectarian) approach of the physicians. Insofar as literature
strives to address a popular audience, it avoids the specialized training that gives rise to sectarian dis-
pute and the narcissism of small differences. In the case of Krüger’s reflections on the debates between
disciplines of the descendants of Boerhaave and Stahl, the pragmatism of the youngest brother is linked
to literary common sense, which finds strengths in both mechanical and vitalist conceptions of life
while refusing the academic drive for principles and the purity of rigorous conceptual systematization.
This pragmatic remove from the heated debates of narrow academic specialities underpins literature’s
ability positively to intervene in entrenched academic debates.

4. The literary case for the insufficiency of literature

From the dreams considered to this point, one might reasonably conclude that the epistemic mod-
esty Krüger recommends to the natural philosopher and the literary means by which he makes that
recommendation indicate that he is looking to supplant a narrowly physiological anthropology with
a more humane, literary vision of the study of human life driven by common sense rather than tech-
nical expertise. His literary writing does, as we have seen, criticize both metaphysical and physiologi-
cal approaches to understanding the relation of the body and the soul. It would be wrong, however,
to conclude that Krüger sought to elevate literature at the expense of philosophy. He argues instead
for a more nuanced position, namely, that philosophy and literature both have a partial and com-
promised claim on truth, and so we should recognize them as complementary rather than competing
approaches to any holistic study of human life.
49
Krüger, Träume, 270–1.
50
Ibid., 271.
 HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS 539

Krüger compares literature to philosophy in the Dreams in a number of passages that explicitly
question the veracity of the dreams reported in the book. So, for example, he writes, ‘Truth and
dream are so closely related to each other that nothing is easier than to mix the two up.’51 And else-
where, ‘these dreams, like the dreams of all people, are a mixture of truth and error.’52 In one of the
most developed of these reflections – dream 57 – Krüger reports awaking in a library that contains
every book that ever has or will be written. The divine librarians have combed through all the
volumes in their collection and crossed out every line of every book that is not true. When Krüger
asks what they’ve done with his Dreams, a librarian explains that every line in it has been crossed out
and suggests that Lies would have been a better title than Dreams.53 Finally, in the concluding section
of the book, the ‘Evaluation of the Dreams,’ Krüger implores his reader to ‘look at these dreams as
nothing other than nonsense [Thorheiten],’ so much so that he advises the reader ‘cross out every-
thing from the first page through the 650th and then to replace everything with its opposite.’54 It
seems, then, that Krüger does not take his literary writings to provide a clear improvement on his
or others’ philosophical and medical writings.
But these dismissals of the epistemic value of dreams and literature are more complicated than
they first appear. Even while downplaying the claims laid out in these dreams, Krüger also more sub-
tly asserts the value of their contributions. If dreams are a mixture of truth and error, as he claims in
the preface, and if Krüger’s oneiric nonsense can only be corrected by striking everything through
and replacing it with its opposite, then the result of this correction – the opposite of nonsense:
sound scholarly conclusions, one expects – is also a tangle of truth and error. The imaginative rep-
resentation of the world, whether in literal or literary dreams, cannot finally be separated in this
respect from the sober clarity of learned dissertations. The admixture of truth and falsity found in
scholarly and literary writing alike prevents us from cleanly separating literature from natural phil-
osophy on the basis of epistemic criteria alone. Both forms of writing can offer insight as well as they
can obscure, which means the scholar need not feel restricted to the domain of the disputation, dis-
sertation, and treatise. The poem and the dream also have their place. Since he argues that philos-
ophy and literature each distorts or obscures as much as it reveals, it has should come as no surprise
that Krüger – like the youngest brother in dream 72 – regularly combines these 2 approaches in order
to maximize his chances of hitting on the truth.
The Dreams itself is a good example of how Krüger bled the literary and the philosophical
together. We have already seen how the Dreams offers some specifically literary criticisms and con-
tributions to questions about human life. If we consider the book as many of its readers would have,
however, beginning with the preface to its first three editions, the specifically literary nature of the
text is considerably downplayed. The continuity between the literary and the scientific in Krüger’s
writing is signalled in the preface in two ways. First, the preface opens with a physiological discussion
of sleep, which presents dreaming as an intermediate state between waking and pure sleep. That the

51
Ibid., 136.
52
Ibid., unpaginated (=[c4v]).
53
Ibid., 227. This echoes a passage from the preface to his textbook of natural philosophy. After noting the fashion for writing books
of natural philosophy, Krüger hedges, ‘Wenn man aber Bücher, die bloß aus leeren Wörtern und süssen Träumen bestehen, das
Recht absprechen wolte, betrachtungen der Natur zu heissen: so besorge ich, daß nicht gar zu viele übrig bleiben möchten’
(Johann Gottlob Krüger, Naturlehre, 3 vols. [Halle: Hemmerde, 1740–1750], vol. 1, unpaginated [={d2r–d2v}]).
54
Krüger, Träume, unpaginated (=[Tt3v]). In order to make restitution to the reader for publishing a book of nonsense, Krüger
explains that he has appended a translation of part of Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde represen-
tées par des figures dessinées de la main de Bernard Picard [sic]: avec une explication historique, & quelques dissertations curieuses, 7
vols. (Amsterdam: J.F. Bernard, 1723–1737). Krüger translates the ‘Dissertation sur le Culte religieux’, Ceremonies 1 (1723): iii–
xxxviii. This too was a bit of nonsense, since the book had already been printed in German translation by the time Krüger’s
Dreams was published in 1754. The first German edition was Heilige Ceremonien, Gottes- und Goetzen-Dienste aller Völcker der
Welt: oder eigentliche Vorstellung und summarischer Begriff der vornehmsten Gottes-dienstlichen Pflichten.Nach des berühmten
Picarts Erfindung in Kupfer gestochen, trans. David Herrliberger, 3 vols. (Zurich: David Herrliberger, 1738–1751). For an explanation
of the significance of Picart’s Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses in the intellectual context of mid-century German religious and
anthropological debates, see Carsten Zelle, ‘Johann Gottlob Krügers enthnologische Träume’, in Der ganze Mensch—die ganze
Menschheit: Völkerkundige Anthropologie, Literatur und Ästhetik um 1800, ed. Stafan Hermes and Sebastian Kauffman (Berlin:
Walter De Gruyter, 2014), 42–9.
540 M. J. OLSON

Dreams is prefaced by a brief on the nature of dreams immediately places this literary text squarely in
relation to Krüger’s earlier scholarly writings. Second the short discussion of the mechanics of
dreams in the preface weaves together scientific remarks on the activity of the nervous fluid in
dreaming and sleeping, more philosophical discussion of the role of vivid sensation and memory
in supplying dream content, and quotations from three poems.55 Two of those poems – Haller’s
‘Thoughts on Reason, Superstition and Atheism’ and ‘Falsity of Human Virtues’ – appear also in
dream 65, as we saw above. The poetic citations are smoothly integrated into Krüger’s remarks
on the nature and causes of dreams rather than being used merely as epigraphs or adjuncts to the
text, which indicates how thoroughgoing Krüger understood the relation of scholarly and literary
writing to be. Indeed, after glossing the effects of illness and cultural differences on dream content,
he concludes the preface by underlining the connection between the imaginative expression of
dreams and the scholar’s meditative reflection. ‘What is meditation,’ Krüger asks, ‘other than a wak-
ing, rational dream?’56 Since the dreams presented in the Dreams stand in more broadly for the crea-
tive work of the imagination (and so, by extension, for literature), the parallel between waking
dreams and meditation here implies a similar parallel between meditation and literature.57 The
theoretical contributions contained in the dreams considered above bear the fruits of this parallel.
The close relationship between philosophical and scientific reflection on the one hand and literary
creativity on the other is not a feature unique to Krüger’s literary writing. Though Krüger nearly
always writes in an animated and pleasing style, some of his texts – the three-volume physiology text-
book comes to mind – are clearly more scholarly that literary. Even in his scholarly texts, however,
literature has a strong presence. Wolfram Mauser points out, for example, ‘that in the Doctrine of
Nature Krüger rarely referred to Haller’s medical writings while he consistently returned to the lat-
ter’s poems.’58 In a book that owes much to Haller’s scientific writings, the preponderance of direct
references to the celebrated anatomist are quotations of his poetry rather than citations of his medi-
cal writings. This is consistent, Mauser argues, with the ‘unrestricted recognition’ in Krüger’s day of
‘the authority and competence of the poet in questions regarding humanity and its place in nature.’59
The authority Krüger grants poetry is perhaps most strikingly illustrated in his 1746 mathematical
text, Thoughts on Algebra (1746). The 45-page table of all the prime numbers between 0 and 101,000
appended to the book indicates that Krüger’s cast of mind in this book is not particularly literary.
Nonetheless, before getting to the symbols and equations, he starts with some poetry. He opens
the main body of the text with an epigraph drawn from Haller’s 1733 ode, ‘To Herr Doctor Geßner:’
O Meßkunst, Zaum der Phantasie,
Wer dir nur folget, irret nie.
Wer ohne dich will gehn, der gleitet.60
[O geometry, bridle of fantasy,
Whoever follows you, never errs.
Whoever wants to go without you, slips.]

In the first chapter itself, Krüger presents what he calls a ‘eulogy’ to algebra, which conveys his reflec-
tions on the virtues of mathematicians and mathematics.61 The clarity, novelty, and solidity of math-
ematical results compares particularly favourably, Krüger explains, with philosophical arguments
and proofs. Three times in the 10 pages devoted to this topic, he quotes poems to motivate or

55
Krüger quotes five lines from Albrecht Haller’s ‘Gedanken über Vernunft, Aberglauben und Unglauben’ at Träume [a4v]; he para-
phrases a single line from Haller’s ‘Falsity of Human Virtues’ at Träume [a5v]; and he quotes four lines of Friedrich Hagedorn’s ‘An
den Verlornen Schlaf’ at Träume [a2v]). Hagedorn’s poem is found in Friedrich Hagedorn, Oden und Lieder in fünf Büchern (Ham-
burg: 1747), 77–8.
56
Krüger, Träume unpaginated (=[c3r]).
57
On the close connection between dreams and literature, particularly poetry, see Mauser, ‘Johann Gottlob Krügers “Träume”, 51–4.
58
Mauser, ‘Der Weltweise als Arzt’, 60.
59
Ibid.
60
Johann Gottlob Krüger, Gedancken von der Algebra, nebst den Primzahlen von 1 bis 1000000 (Halle: 1746), 3. The epigraph comes
from Albrecht Haller, ‘An Herrn D. Geßner’, in Versuch Schweizerischer Gedichte, 87.
61
Krüger, Algebra, 3.
 HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS 541

illustrate his point.62 Where other scholars might point toward specific figures in the mathematical
pantheon to illustrate these virtues, the poet’s celebration of mathematics was for Krüger evidence
enough. The authority of poetry helps, on this view, to buttress the authority of mathematics.
We see another instance of Krüger appealing to poetry to shore up the credentials of other dis-
ciplinary approaches in the introduction to the Essay on Experimental Psychology. That book bears
some comparison to Christian Wolff’s (1679–1754) introspective empirical psychology.63 The most
important difference between the empirical psychology pursued by Wolff and Krüger’s later project
is that for the former empirical psychology was a propaedeutic discipline designed to establish the
core characteristics of the soul, which were later given firm metaphysical grounding in the higher
field of rational psychology.64 For Krüger, however, empirical psychology stood on its own as a
study of the human soul. Despite his preference for empirical over metaphysical investigations of
human life, Krüger had deep academic roots in Halle and he maintained a respectful attitude toward
Wolff. Thus, in the Essay on Experimental Psychology, Krüger makes it plain to his reader that he will
‘search in vain in this book for mathematical proofs of the essence of the soul, of its immortality, its
condition after death, etc.,’ while at the same time cautioning him that neither will he ‘encounter in
this book the attitude that defaces metaphysical texts as the shame of humanity.’65 As an illustration
of his appreciation of the contributions of school metaphysics, Krüger quotes two stanzas of an ode
to Christian Wolff written to commemorate the latter’s visit to the court of the King of Sweden in
1740.66 As he did in the earlier Thoughts on Algebra, Krüger here too uses poetry to establish the
value of the contributions of another discipline. Even if the Essay on Experimental Psychology is
not itself a work of special metaphysics, it employs poetry to set its sights on the possibility of a
complementary rather than competitive relationship between metaphysical and experimental or
observational studies of human mental life. More generally, Krüger’s writings – the Dreams in par-
ticular, but a number of other texts as well – consistently weave literature into the already interdis-
ciplinary disciplinary fabric of German studies of the principles and varieties of human life.

5. Conclusion
Johann Gottlob Krüger provides a fruitful case study for expanding our appreciation of the interdis-
ciplinary nature of early German anthropology. That the history of that discipline found its origins in
a project aiming to synthesize philosophical – which is to say metaphysical and moral – reflections
on the human soul, on the one hand, with medical and physiological studies of the body, on the
other, is familiar to readers of Platner’s formative textbook. One aspect of the multidisciplinary,
synthetic character of anthropology in this period – and more generally of Enlightenment efforts
to produce a holistic conception of human nature – that that La Mettrie and Platner’s studies
obscures is the role played by literary texts in establishing the internal dynamics of the new field
of enquiry.
62
He quotes (changing two words) Haller’s ‘Falsity of Human Virtues’ at Algebra, 5 (cf. Haller, Experimantal-Seelenlehre, 63); he con-
tinues to quote that same section of ‘Falsity of Human Virtues’ on the next page (6). He finally quotes a poem comparing math-
ematicians with spiders at Algebra, 10. To this point, I have been unable to identify the source of these last lines.
63
See Christian Wolff, Psychologia empirica (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1732).
64
See Christian Wolff, Psychologia rationalis (Frankfurt, 1734).
65
Krüger, Experimental-Seelenlehre, unpaginated (=[2v],[5r]).
66
Ibid., unpaginated (=[5r–5v]). The full poem is printed in Johann Christoph Gottsched, Historisches Lobschrift des weiland hoch-
und wehlgebohrnen Herrn Christians des H.R.R. Freiherrn von Wolff (Halle: 1755), Appendix T, 74–8. Krüger quotes the following
lines, which bear on the controversy surrounding Wolff’s expulsion from Halle for his supposed Spinozism and eventual return to
Halle following the accession of Frederick the Great:
O großer Wolff! du kannst alleinHiervon der beste Zeuge seyn.Wenn hat die Wahrheit mehr gelitten,Aus seit der Zeit der
UnverstandIn deinen Schriften Lehren fand,Die wider Policey und GOtt und Bibel stritten.Du pfropfst noch die Philoso-
phie,Sie kriegt durch dich kaum Safft und Augen,So geben sich schon Spinnen MühAus diesen Blumen Gifft zu saugen.-
Die Einfalt durch den Neid entstammtErgreift zuerst das Richteramt,Und rufft die Heucheley zum Zeugen,Die nimmt
durch ihren frommen ScheinDen sonst so klugen Fürsten ein,Und heißet auf sein WortDie Wahrheit gehn und schweigen.
542 M. J. OLSON

Krüger was undoubtedly part of the larger trend in early anthropology that brought literature into
close proximity with medicine and natural history, which Zammito and Mauser have charted.
Within this movement, though, the specific literary ‘way of knowing,’ Krüger develops merits special
attention. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and other texts offered resources for investigating those aspects
of human life unavailable to scientific investigation. Others – for example, Pope and Voltaire’s treat-
ments of Leibnizian optimism in the Essay on Man and Candide – used the accessibility of literature
to disseminate philosophical ideas about human life to popular audiences. Later in the century, still
others identified a unique aesthetic unity in poetry and argued for its privileged capacity to reflect the
unity unpinning the accumulating wealth of physiological, psychological, philosophical, and natural
historical studies of human life.67 Krüger’s literary contributions to anthropology are not exhausted
by any of these models.
We have seen how Krüger’s writings liberally weave poetry, literary allegory, and the playful pres-
entation of academic positions and debates into his wide-ranging studies of human life and his more
traditional textbooks. In some sense, literature suffuses his work in a way that undoes any effort
finally to separate the literary from the philosophical and scientific dimensions of his research.
That feature of Krüger’s contributions reflects both the capacious character of literature as Poesie
in the period and recent studies of the literary dimensions of early anthropology. In this respect,
our study of Krüger’s Dreams reinforces what we already know about the history of the field.
We have discussed two features of Krüger’s use of literature, however, that merit special attention
within this broader intellectual landscape. First, the pleasing style and suggestive allegories Krüger
employs in the Dreams is not only a matter of a superficial literary presentation designed to make
abstract ideas accessible to a wider audience. As our interpretation of the miller-physiologists in Sec-
tion 3 suggests, Krüger aligned the literary style of the Dreams with a common sense deflation of
academic physiological debates. When seen in this way, dream 72 employs literary style to intervene
in an ongoing debate rather than just communicating the stakes of the debate to a popular audience,
which shows that Krüger’s use of literature is more than rhetorical or stylistic. Second, as we saw in
Section 4, literature also figures prominently in Krüger’s reflections on the relations between the
fields that fed into the highly interdisciplinary new anthropology. Right across his writings, but
especially in the Dreams, we find Krüger injecting literature as one more approach to the study of
human life that demands to be incorporated into a holistic study of human life while also positioning
literature as a valuable means of regulating and integrating the contributions of the disciplines and
approaches involved. Here, too, Krüger’s incorporation of literature into his study of human life has
material as well as formal or stylistic effects. On the one hand, this strategy produces a vision of
anthropology that pays little mind to the differences between literary, philosophical, and scientific
modes of analysis, preferring instead to draw resources from wherever they can be found. On the
other hand, however, Krüger repeatedly employs clear literary tools as important correctives against
the partisanship and over-confidence of academic philosophy and science. In this respect, literature
maintains a semblance of autonomy from other approaches, even as it is everywhere found in Krü-
ger’s writings working in concert with them. Krüger’s Dreams offers a fascinating example of how
complex and productive literary ways of knowing were incorporated into early German
anthropology.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

See, for example, Friedrich Hölderlin, ‘Anmerkungen zur Antigonä’, in Die Trauerspiele des Sophokles, trans. F. Hölderlin (Frankfurt
67

a.M., 1804).