 Through the lens of modern science, nature was regarded as an inanimate, mechanistic domain of dead and meaningless matter that is composed of separate atoms and thoroughly determined by efficient causality. Modern science “dissected [nature] atomistically like a dead corpse” (Eichendorff, EW 5: 423). The romantics regarded this approach to nature as reductive as much as they regarded it as “dissecting”: it reduces nature to mere matter, devoid of the features that the romantics took to be essential to it, like holistic unity, self-organization and life. The growing sense of man’s alienation from his natural surrounding was seen as a product of this reduction of nature: human beings seemed alienated from nature exactly because the rational, soulful and sense-making character that is usually associated with them is opposed to a mechanistic and deterministic domain.