In their animosity towards an uncritical and ontology-based mechanism, both the new discipline of biology, which was becoming established around 1800, and Schelling‹s idealistic natural philosophy strove for a description and explanation of the phenomena of life which were pertinent to life. Against this backdrop, the work of the naturalist Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer is placed in the context of contemporary philosophical and naturalist discussions of the time in the first part of this study before the significance of Kielmeyer‹s phenomenology of the organic for the systematic development of Schelling‹s system of natural philosophy is shown in the second part.