1 Soul as mind, soul as organism: two naturalization strategies in the Enlightenment Charles T. Wolfe (Toulouse) Abstract I present two cases of Enlightenment ‘naturalization of the soul’. First, a psychological naturalization, where the soul as locus of mental functions is reconfigured in increasingly ‘naturalistic’ terms (mechanistic, Newtonian, associationist, materialist…) (Vidal 2011, Wolfe 2016). In a 1761 letter to Charles Bonnet, Hieronymus Gaub makes an intriguing remark: criticizing materialist accounts of mind-body relations such as La Mettrie’s, Gaub suggests that a thorough study of the “mechanics of the soul” is needed, and Bonnet should write it. The mechanics of the soul, even though it is presented as non-materialist, sounds like a ‘naturalization of the soul’ (although not of the metaphysical sort discussed in Martin and Barresi 2000). Indeed, in his psychological writings, Bonnet declares that by ‘soul’ he just means ‘mind’. A second, more biological naturalization takes the soul as a ‘principle of organic unity’ and gradually reconfigures it as ‘organism’. Here, Stahlian animism is appropriated and transformed by Montpellier vitalists (Bordeu, Ménuret), who strip ‘soul’ of its metaphysical commitments (Wolfe-Terada 2008, Wolfe 2019) and conflate ‘soul functions’ with vital functions and organismic unity (Wilson 1997). An unresolved question for both the ‘psychological’ and the ‘biological’ naturalizations is the extent to which they flow into ‘positive science’. 1. Introduction Animism, if understood as the doctrine according to which nature is ensouled, with particular medico-philosophical variants claiming that the soul is life, or at least the locus of mental and bodily activity (King 1964, Azouvi 1982), seems to be a perfect case of what some would call a ‘losing view’ in the Scientific Revolution. 1 After all, wasn’t the core gesture of the 1 I borrow the phrase from the title of the 13 th Bucharest-Princeton Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy (Bran, Romania, July 2013), which I had the pleasure of participating in: ‘Losers of the Scientific Revolution’.