Kant's organism, and its various romantic variations, soon spread in other countries. In England, Kant's critical tradition thrived through complex networks. After the 1830s Kant's whole philosophy was widely discussed, especially thanks to the authority of William Whewell (1794–1866) and his 1837 History of the Inductive Sciences. For instance, Whewell's defence of Cuvier's functional biology was based on Kant's organicism. Siding against the French naturalist Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Whewell noted that ‘Whether we judge from the arguments, the results, the practices of physiologists, their speculative opinions, or those of the philosophers of a wider field, we are led to the same conviction, that in the organized world we may and must adopt the belief that organization exists for its purpose, and that apprehension of the purpose may guide us in seeing the meaning of organization’. As a famous Cambridge philosopher of science during the first decades of the nineteenth century, Whewell was in a very effective position for influencing new generations of British naturalists, including Owen and Darwin. However, Whewell was not alone. P. Rehbock has showed how Kant's ideas, filtered through Goethe, Schelling and some celebrated Naturphilosophen, were absorbed and transformed by other British philosophers and naturalists. The poet Samuel T. Coleridge (1772–1834), the anatomist Robert Knox (1791–1862) – who deemed Kant, Goethe and Oken individuals belonging to a race superior even to the Anglo-Saxons – the embryologist Martin Barry (1802–55), the physician Joseph H. Green (1791–1863), the physiologist William B. Carpenter (1813–85), the comparative anatomist Richard Owen (1804–92) and the physician John Goodsir (1814–67) all imported and transformed strands of German bio-philosophy in the United Kingdom.