The Orphic Voice, page 18
These Orphic Urworte represent first of all an oracular voice out of a dim past, reminding us, as Darwin’s Orpheus did, of the Orpheus of cult and classical literature. But they do more than this, for they do indeed belong with the Urpflanze and the Urtier, by their subject matter as well as by their name. Goethe, realizing as all of us have done since, that these are very dark sayings, wrote a series of notes on the poems in 1820. He tells us there that these five stanzas were published in the second volume of his Morphologie. This gives them part of their setting, and of their significance, on which Goethe himself insists.6 This Orphic pronouncement has to do with the great forces which mold and control human forms as well as those in nature. Orpheus in Goethe is a dark poetic oracle upon the meeting-point of living things and language in the processes of time and change.
2
The slightest adumbration of a dynamical morphology
OUR LINE of descent stems from Bacon and Shakespeare; but of the two, it is the Baconian line which is easiest to follow. The Shakespearean one seems to go underground after Milton, not to reappear until that wonderful burst of Orphic recognition and celebration of Shakespeare at the end of the eighteenth century and through the nineteenth, in Germany and England for the most part, though it moves into France later with Hugo and Renan. Erasmus Darwin is involved in this slightly, Goethe profoundly, though it is Coleridge who sorts out most clearly the respective claims of Bacon and Shakespeare upon Orphic minds.7
Great visions such as Bacon’s perpetuate themselves according to their own powers but also according to the powers of those who receive and transmit them. Greatness can transmit its own integrity, though always with modification, because this is no mechanical process. But any vision has, besides its greatness, peculiar failings, and Bacon’s has these in full measure. The result upon lesser minds may be that they receive only a part, take it to be the whole, and distort the whole activity of the vision thereby. Orphic minds are a danger in this way to non-Orphic ones.
Sprat is a classic example of what happens. Demythologizer of science as he thought he was, he was busy removing the so-called “facts” further and further from the operation upon them of the constructive mind, from myth in its true sense, working with figures and language. If Bacon half-heartedly began the divorce proceedings between science and poetry, his disciples carried them on with gusto.
Where Sprat provides evidence on what was happening to lesser scientists in these circumstances, Cowley provides it for the poets, at the same time as Sprat, on almost identical grounds and in close collaboration with him. He contributed an Ode, in guarded praise of Bacon and in celebration of what was already then coming to be thought of as scientific method, to Sprat’s history of the Royal Society, and he was himself one of the original members of that Society. It is a pity that it has since given up the habit of admitting poets to its numbers,8 but perhaps the poets are partly themselves to blame for this. Cowley, writing in 1661, four years before Sprat, puts forward A Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy. In this he proposes a “Colledge” for those chosen for this work. He recalls Bacon’s New Atlantis, but regards this as altogether too visionary: “We do not design this after the Model of Salomon’s House in my Lord Bacon (which is a Project for experiments that can never be experimented).” But when he comes to consider what his own foundation is to study, the program is this: “briefly, all things contained in the Catalogue of Natural Histories annexed to My Lord Bacon’s Organon.” He too succumbs to this fascination, though as befits a poet he has glimmerings of something else: “and because the truth is we want good Poets (I mean we have but few) who have properly treated of solid and learned, that is, Natural Matters, (the most part indulging to the weakness of the world, and feeding it either with the follies of Love, or with the Fables of gods and Heroes) we conceive that one Book ought to be compiled of all the scattered little parcels among the ancient Poets that might serve for the advancement of Natural Science.” Cowley is not going to let poetry and science be completely separated; but it is instructive that all he can propose to hold them together is another compilation or collection or catalogue, not a living union of the two in a discipline of thought, which is what is needed. Hooke in his turn caught the vision, but again only partially.
There are degrees of authority and confidence in Orphic voices. The least, those who get into this line by accident or almost by misadventure, can only reflect the dualism, the broken vision which unfortunately they approve of and foster. Greater ones struggle to reassert a unity but fall short for various reasons. The greatest Orphic voices of all stand, as their minor fellows do, against their period’s wrong-headedness and disharmony; but it must not be thought that they are themselves split, as the first group is, or that they struggle to heal the divergencies in the thought of their age. They know of no such split, and they are right, for it is a chimera, a nonbeing. They do not argue against dualism, they utter and exemplify unity. Only the lesser figures are attainted; the greater ones go their own way, living by the life of their own Orphic tradition, unaffected by the sicknesses of philosophy and scientific methodology. They have their own tradition, and the rest is irrelevance. It is by this kind of simplicity that they minister to our distractions. Their method is not dialectic but poetry.
There arise now three great scattered Orphic figures, which carry us on to the Orpheus of Darwin and Goethe. These are Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), and Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778).
The first of our three is Vico. I wish it were possible to take this man’s greatness for granted, needing here only corroboration and gratitude, but this is not possible at all. He is scarcely known. A true prophet, as Orphic voices must be, he lies ahead of us still; by his own contemporaries he could not be heard at all. He has his own Orphic genealogy, though he has a habit of bursting upon us utterly unexpectedly, as he burst upon Michelet.9 He draws his descent direct from Orpheus, who is mentioned several times in his works as the founder of what Vico calls “poetic theology”; and after Orpheus, from Bacon. Vico came upon him in 1707 and found in him “incomparable wisdom.”10 Vico is the truest and greatest Orphic progeny Bacon and the Baconian vision of postlogic have yet had, answering fittingly his master’s Novum Organum with the Scienza nuova, the new made new again a hundred years afterward. From these two a direct line runs to Coleridge. In 1825 Coleridge was lent a set of Vico’s works, and he writes of them as follows: “I am more and more delighted with G. B. Vico, and if I had (which thank God’s good grace I have not) the least drop of Author’s blood in my veins, I should twenty times successively in the perusal of the first volume (I have not yet begun the second) have exclaimed: ‘Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixere.”’ Coleridge, we are told, planned a translation of the Novum Organum to be illustrated with Vichian parallels.11 Other lines of descent from Vico run to Germany, through Hamann to Herder and thence to Schelling and Goethe, who during his Italian Journey was lent Vico’s works while he was staying at Naples and writes a paragraph on them in his journal, calling them sibylline premonitions of something good and true that was still to come. Another runs to France, through Michelet and then Renan’s L’Avenir de la science. Vico enters Das Kapital in an interesting footnote, in the company of Charles Darwin. And in modern scholarship we can count Croce, Collingwood, and Cassirer among Vico’s devotees.12 All in all, it is little enough.
What Vico meant to write was an account of the development of social man, a synthesis of all other sciences. This is what he says about it, in the French of Michelet’s edition (Vol. 2, Bk. v):
A travers la diversite des formes exterieures, nous saisirons l’identité de substance de cette histoire. Ainsi ne pouvons-nous refuser a cet ouvrage le titre orgueilleux peut-être de Science nouvelle. Il y a droit par son sujet: la nature commune des nations; sujet vraiment universel, dont l’idée embrasse toute science digne de ce nom.
This has the same sweep of undertaking as Bacon’s pronouncements had. Elsewhere Vico says he means the Scienza to be “une histoire des idées humaines”; he ties these absolutely to language, admitting that in the first version of the Scienza (there are several versions) “he erred . . . because he treated the origins of ideas apart from the origins of languages, whereas they were by nature united.” Back to language, then, he goes, to assert that poetry comes up out of nature and is the first natural speech; nature is seen as language and myth, “la nature passionnée, cette image prodigieuse”; while from what he calls poetic knowledge or wisdom come theology, logic, jurisprudence, economics, politics, in fact all the structures of human society and scholarship. He is the first to give myth its full status as a subject of historical study (Cassirer traces out the results this had upon much later scholars such as Schelling and Strauss).13 Vico has been called the founder of the philosophy of history, of the modern philosophy of language, of the philosophy of mythology.
This sounds very academic, put in those conventional terms. But on our own terms, here is a new specimen of our Orphic species who suddenly appears out of nowhere, like an idea itself, or as Collingwood says,14 like Vico’s idea about how ideas appear. Orphic scholar or scientist (the fact that the Scienza nuova has been called a great poem15 will not contradict but confirm that title) of unmatched originality and fertility, his importance for us here is threefold. First, in a period when Bacon’s “natural history” was in danger of attenuation into mere cataloguing, here is a historian who sees history as part of nature and never loses sight of the method, which for him resides in the very nature of speech itself. The Scienza nuova works upon what Novalis would call an organology of language and thinking. Second, he confirms the nature of the full Baconian postlogic, in its poetry, its closeness to language, its mythological method, its powers of synthesis, the inclusive nature of its thinking— “celui qui médite cette science s’en crée à lui-même le sujet. Quelle histoire plus certaine que celle où la même personne est à la fois l’acteur et l’historien?”— and the recognition of myth as a means of research— “ces germes féconds nous ont laissé voir dans l’imperfection de sa forme primitive la Science de réflexion, la science de recherches . . . On peut dire en effet que dans les fables, l’instinct de l’humanité avait marqué d’avance les principes de la science moderne.”16 Third, he sends our minds forward into the future, by the strange history of his own thought, by what he says, and by what has been said about him. Croce says of him, for instance, that his whole thought was “dynamic and evolutionary,” Adams that he designed “the beginning of a morphology of human culture.”17
Our next Orphic voice is Swedenborg. This may seem surprising. Is he not a religious visionary, and what would he have to do with the Orphic inquiry? He did not, however, begin his career of visionary till he was over fifty. In 1745, he says, heaven was opened to him. Up till then he had been an active scholar and scientist, and here his Orphic credentials occur. During his early pursuit of literature and science over a very wide field he published in 1715 Camena Borea: cum Heroum et Heroidum Factis Ludens: sive Fabellae Ovidianis Similes, of which the twelfth deals with “Orpheus redivivus et relapsus in Tartara.” In addition we have Orphic commentary on this figure: Emerson, with Coleridge to second him.
Swedenborg appears first before us as simply a brilliant young Swede with a passion for study, pursuing science and letters. After the publication of Camena Borea his literary interests wane, and we find him in the following year undertaking the editorship of periodic collections of essays devoted to scientific subjects and discoveries. They bear the not uninteresting title of Daedalus Hyperboreus. Then come years of scientific and technological activity, and a rise to eminence in these fields. In 1734 he publishes his Principia Rerum Naturalium, written mainly from the point of view of physics. He knew and combated Bacon in this work, which is dull, the only interesting thing in it from our point of view being that the author more than once quotes the Metamorphoses in serious illustration of scientific discussion, as if Ovid had not been left entirely behind. In 1740–41 he publishes the Oeconomia Regni Animalis, a work on human physiology and man as a rational animal. The range of his scientific interests is considerable and he seems to have been in certain respects in advance of his times. What matters to us, however, is something which appears already in this last work, and which will carry through into his later life. This is his doctrine of correspondences.
He puts it as follows in the Oeconomia: “In our Doctrine of Representations and Correspondences we shall treat of these Symbolical and Typical Representations, and of the astonishing things which occur, I will not say in the living Body only, but throughout Nature, and which correspond so entirely to Supreme and Spiritual things, that one would swear, that the Physical World was purely Symbolical of the Spiritual World.” This passage is not altogether clear; it could suggest merely Platonic Ideas, or allegory, with neither of which, nor with “symbolism” as such, is postlogic concerned. But it could suggest something else, however vaguely: a relationship between created things and mental forms, a correspondence between natural orders and systems of the mind. Upon this depends a living science of classification and taxonomy. Swedenborg gives us a hint about the nature of this science. By it he becomes a precursor of Linnaeus’ efforts, and confirms his Orphic status and that seemingly accidental Orphic and Ovidian beginning which he had. And by it he exercises his later influence: on Coleridge, who calls him a philosophic genius, anticipating much of what is most valuable in the work of Schelling and otherers;18 and on Emerson, who returns to him again and again with a kind of admiring exasperation, in the two series of Essays, and at greater length in the judicious study of Swedenborg in Representative Men, 1850.
Emerson’s interest in Swedenborg is itself taxonomic in character. He sees in this vision of correspondences the distinguishing mark which admits Swedenborg to the company of the poets. The poet “stands one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing and metamorphosis; perceives that thought is multiform; that within the form of every creature is a force impelling it to ascend into a higher form; and following with his eyes the life, uses the forms which express that life, and so his speech flows with the flowing of nature.” A moment later Emerson adds, “This is true science,” and applies it boldly to astronomy, chemistry, and biology.19 He puts it more compactly elsewhere, “The whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.” This is in the chapter on language in the long essay on “Nature” in the first series, where language and nature together form the “grand cipher, the standing problem which has exercised the wonder and study of every fine genius since the world began; from the era of the Egyptians and the Brahmins, to that of Pythagoras, of Plato, of Leibniz, of Swedenborg.” In another essay Emerson places Swedenborg squarely at the point of interpretation: “Swedenborg of all men in the recent ages, stands eminently for the translator of nature into thought. I do not know the man in history to whom things stood so uniformly for words. Before him the metamorphosis continually plays.”20 (The metamorphosis here is the interchange of nature and thought through the medium of language; what we are calling myth.)
Already we have one of Emerson’s attempts to give his specimen, once identified, a due genealogy. He tries this over and over again, and the connections he suggests are most helpful. One of them goes back to Orpheus himself. “But the highest minds of the world have never ceased to explore the double meaning, or, shall I say, the quadruple, or the centuple, or much more manifold meaning, of every sensuous fact: Orpheus, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Plato, Plutarch, Dante, Swedenborg.” Here is another: “Pythagoras, Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, Cardan, Kepler, Swedenborg, Schelling, Oken.” Here is a third: “A colossal soul, he lies vast abroad on his times, uncomprehended by them, and requires a long focal distance to be seen; suggests as Aristotle, Bacon, Selden, Humboldt, that a certain vastness of the human soul in nature is possible.”21 The Baconian connection is re-emphasized in the Representative Men essay, whence that last quotation comes. Emerson refers to the passage from Swedenborg’s Oeconomia which we quoted earlier, and says, “The fact, thus explicitly stated, is implied in all poetry, in allegory, in fable, in the use of emblems, and in the structure of language . . . Lord Bacon had found that truth and nature differed only as seal and print . . . The poets, in as far as they are poets, use it . . . Swedenborg first put the fact into a detached and scientific statement . . . It required an insight that could rank things in order and series.” Not content with Bacon, he gives us in this essay Shakespeare as well, “I have sometimes thought that he would render the greatest service to modern criticism, who shall draw the line of relation that subsists between Shakespeare and Swedenborg”; and a little later he makes a connection between Swedenborg and Linnaeus.
Emerson calls Swedenborg a man with the insight that could rank things in order and series, i.e. a taxonomer. Emerson sees that task, the translation of nature into thought, as a language job, to be effected by the poet. Here he indicts Swedenborg for failure, in a remarkable sentence: “Strange, scholastic, didactic, passionless, bloodless man, who denotes classes of souls as a botanist . . . the warm, many-weathered, passionate-peopled world is to him a grammar of hieroglyphs.” What Swedenborg turns into, for this refers to his theological works, is, instead of a living taxonomer, a botanist in the driest sense, a dusty grammarian. Neither botanical classification nor grammar are dull in themselves, but the life in each depends on myth and poetry. Without this, they fossilize rapidly. It is as a true taxonomer (which is to say, a scientist and poet) that Swedenborg fails. It is not that he is wholly astray but that he is so nearly right, “wrong but in consequence of being in the right, but imperfectly,” as Coleridge said of him.22
