Natural philosophy in *Frankenstein* is the broad, boundary-free pursuit of understanding nature that preceded what we now call science. When Victor Frankenstein describes himself as a “natural philosopher,” he means something wider than a chemist or biologist. He means someone who investigates the fundamental forces of life, death, and matter with few rules about what methods or questions are acceptable. Mary Shelley set her novel at the exact historical moment when this sprawling tradition was fragmenting into the specialized scientific disciplines we recognize today, and that tension drives the entire story.
Natural Philosophy vs. Modern Science
In the late 1700s and early 1800s, the word “scientist” didn’t yet exist. People who studied the natural world were natural philosophers, and their domain included everything from chemistry and physics to anatomy and even what we’d now consider occult speculation. There were no rigid boundaries between disciplines. A natural philosopher might study optics one year and the origin of life the next, drawing freely on ancient texts, hands-on experimentation, and philosophical reasoning all at once.
This began to change during the 19th century in what historians call the “great transition.” General scientific academies branched into ones dedicated to specific sciences. Broad journals gave way to discipline-specific publications. Textbooks on natural philosophy were replaced by volumes focused on experimental physics, chemistry, or particular branches of each. The shift moved knowledge from a relatively unrestricted, unbounded system of communication toward something more specialized and controlled. *Frankenstein*, published in 1818, sits right at the hinge of that transformation, and Victor’s education dramatizes the conflict between the old way and the new.
Victor’s Early Education in Alchemy
As a teenager, Victor stumbles upon the works of three figures who represent the most ambitious extremes of natural philosophy: Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Albertus Magnus. All three were real historical figures known for their interest in artificial creation. Albertus Magnus was said to have built a functioning housekeeper out of brass. Agrippa spent years attempting to breed life from decaying matter. Paracelsus wrote what amounted to a recipe for creating a human being through alchemy, describing how human material sealed in glass and buried in horse manure for forty days could, if properly nourished, grow into a small but fully formed child called a homunculus.
Victor devours these texts and becomes consumed by two goals that defined the alchemical tradition: finding the philosopher’s stone (which could transmute base metals into gold) and discovering the elixir of life. He quickly loses interest in wealth. What captivates him is immortality. As he puts it, “what glory would attend the discovery, if I could banish disease from the human frame, and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!” This is natural philosophy at its most grandiose: not content to describe how nature works, but determined to conquer its deepest limitations.
The Clash at Ingolstadt
When Victor arrives at the University of Ingolstadt, he encounters two professors who represent opposing attitudes toward this older tradition. Professor Krempe dismisses the alchemists outright, mocking Victor for wasting his time on outdated nonsense. Professor Waldman takes a more nuanced position. In his lectures, Waldman acknowledges that the ancient natural philosophers promised results that were unrealistic and unachievable, but he also credits them with laying groundwork that modern chemistry has built upon. He attempts to redirect Victor’s ambitions into something more disciplined and rational.
Waldman’s lectures echo the real-world influence of Humphry Davy, a prominent British chemist whose book *Elements of Chemical Philosophy* Mary Shelley recorded reading in her diary while writing the novel. Davy described chemistry’s goals as discovering the causes of chemical reactions and applying that knowledge to benefit people. His vision was methodical and practical, a far cry from the alchemists’ pursuit of immortality. Waldman offers Victor this same pivot: keep your passion, but channel it through modern methods. Victor, fatefully, takes the methods but keeps the alchemical ambition.
The Real Science Behind the Monster
Shelley grounded Victor’s creation of the Creature in scientific ideas that were genuinely electrifying the public imagination. The most important was galvanism. In the 1780s and 1790s, Luigi Galvani, a professor of anatomy in Bologna, demonstrated that electrical stimulation could make the muscles of dead frogs contract. He showed that stimulating a frog’s sciatic nerve with an electric shock triggered the attached leg muscle to move, and he argued this happened because organisms possess an intrinsic “animal electricity” they use to send messages through the body. He even designed experiments without metal conductors: connecting a nerve’s cut surface directly to muscle tissue produced contractions, suggesting the electricity came from the tissue itself.
Galvani’s nephew Giovanni Aldini took these ideas to their most dramatic public demonstration. In 1803, at the Royal College of Surgeons in London, Aldini applied electrical arcs to the corpse of George Forster, a man executed for murder. The results were startling. Forster’s jaw quivered, his left eye opened, his face convulsed, and one hand clenched. When conductors were applied to his ear and other parts of his body, the muscular contractions “almost gave an appearance of reanimation.” The experiments continued for more than seven hours after the execution. Aldini denied any intention of actually bringing the dead back to life, but everyone in the room would have considered it a triumph if he had.
Another influence Shelley cited directly was Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s grandfather. In the foreword to the 1831 edition of *Frankenstein*, she mentioned Darwin’s work on microscopic creatures that appeared to spontaneously revive after desiccation. These tiny animals, which Darwin called “vorticella” and Shelley referred to as “vermicelli,” seemed to blur the line between living and nonliving matter. If dried-out organisms could spring back to life, perhaps the boundary between life and death was not as firm as it seemed.
Why Natural Philosophy Matters to the Story
The novel’s horror depends on natural philosophy’s lack of boundaries. A modern chemist or biologist works within a defined discipline, with peer review, ethical oversight, and narrow specialization. Victor operates in the older mode, where a single mind can range across anatomy, chemistry, and electrical theory and then apply all of it to a project no committee has approved. His education fuses the alchemists’ impossible ambitions with modern chemistry’s real tools, and Shelley presents that combination as uniquely dangerous.
The 1818 and 1831 editions frame this danger somewhat differently. In the original 1818 text, Victor’s central error is creating life and then abandoning the Creature, refusing to take responsibility for what he has made. In the revised 1831 edition, Shelley shifts the emphasis so that the act of creation itself is the sin. Victor’s crime becomes daring to “play God.” His exposure to science also changes: in the 1818 version, his father introduces him to scientific ideas, while in the 1831 edition, a stranger explains how lightning destroyed a tree near their home, sparking Victor’s curiosity through a dramatic natural event rather than parental guidance. These revisions deepen the sense that natural philosophy’s boundless ambition, not just Victor’s personal failings, is the source of catastrophe.
Shelley subtitled her novel “The Modern Prometheus” for exactly this reason. Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity, crossing a boundary that was never meant to be crossed. Victor, armed with the sweeping reach of natural philosophy and the practical power of modern chemistry, does the same. The novel asks what happens when someone inherits the old tradition’s willingness to ask any question but gains the new tradition’s ability to actually get answers.