Immanuel Kant presented arguments against hylozoism in the third chapter of his 1786 book Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaften ("First Metaphysical Principles of Natural Science") and also in his 1783 book Kritik der reinen Vernunft ("Critique of Pure Reason"). Yet, in our times, scientific hylozoism – whether modified, or keeping the trend to make all beings conform to some uniform pattern, to which the concept was adhered in modernity by Herbert Spencer, Hermann Lotze, and Ernst Haeckel – was often called upon as a protest against a mechanistic worldview.
