Mary Shelley seems to understand with acuity a phenomenon that could only have just
come into general awareness in her time. We now recognize that a paradigm shift had
occured in the previous generation, one forcing the "life sciences" into a disciplinary
partnership with the physical sciences. From that point forward all notions of distinct
animistic or quasi-magical differences separating them disappear. Furthermore, under
this conceptual format nineteenth-century scientific inquiry increasingly reduces
the processes of life themselves to merely chemical reactions.