The Orphic Voice, page 19
He was called to a living relationship with myth by his vision of Correspondences. This was his first vision, taking precedence over all the later visions and more truly theological than any of them. He fails in his calling on two counts: he mishears the language and misconstrues his function as interpreter. The work, as Emerson puts it, “was narrowed and defeated by the exclusively theologic direction which his inquiries took.” That is carefully and well said. What happens to Swedenborg is not that he misdirects himself into theology, but that he misunderstands the nature of the Word, in the full Christian sense, and hence of the language he is to work with. So he fuses the language of nature and the language of the Bible in a rigid and congealed hypostasis, and then mistakes the role of interpreter, opting not for hieroglyphic but for cipher. The correspondence, that manifold meaning Emerson was talking about, petrifies immediately into a lifeless one-to-one code, as Emerson sees,23 and Swedenborg becomes the only man who can read it, The Interpreter. His letter to the Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, written in 1770 long after he had turned away from the directly Orphic vision, and usually published as an appendix to his treatise On the White Horse Mentioned in the Apocalypse, 1758, is an example of this. In it he suggests that the Academy might aid and support him in a study of Egyptian hieroglyphics, which, he claims, signify the correspondences between natural and spiritual things. In the White Horse he had opined:
That the Science of correspondences and representations was pre-eminently THE SCIENCE among the ancients.
Especially among the people of the east.
And was cultivated in Egypt more than in other countries.
Also among the Gentiles, as in Greece, and in other places.
But that at this day the science of correspondences and representations is lost, especially in Europe.
That, nevertheless, this science is more excellent than all other sciences, inasmuch as without it the Word cannot be understood.
In the letter he adds a few details, and then proposes himself as interpreter of the hieroglyphics.24 “They deserve that someone among you should look into them,” he says; “I am ready, if so desired, to develop and publish the hieroglyphics, a task which can be accomplished by no-one else.” The emphasis is his own, and is melancholy.
Swedenborg is an extraordinary case, perhaps unique, of a mind with the Orphic vision but with the power of poetry denied it. Emerson saw it: “It is remarkable that this man, who, by his perception of symbols, saw the poetic construction of things, and of the primary relation of mind to matter, remained entirely devoid of the whole apparatus of poetic expression, which that perception creates. He knew the grammar and rudiments of the Mother-Tongue —how could he not read off one strain into music? . . . The entire want of poetry in so transcendent a mind betokens the disease.” And so, Emerson concludes, we still lack “this design of exhibiting such correspondences which, if adequately executed, would be the poem of the world, in which all history and science would play an essential part . . . The dictionary of symbols is yet to be written. But the interpreter, whom mankind must still expect, will find no predecessor who has approached so near to the true problem.” Let that be Swedenborg’s epitaph.
3
not as the inventory but as the programme of nature
“THE STUDY of natural history, simple, beautiful, and instructive, consists in the collection, arrangement, and exhibition of the various productions of the earth.” That is Linnaeus in his introduction to the Systema Naturae.
In the eyes of contemporaries and of posterity, Linnaeus is the taxonomer par excellence. He is not the first in the European field, for apart from classical and medieval attempts the first great taxonomer is the Englishman John Ray (1627–1705). But Linnaeus took the work further than any other, devoting his whole life to inventing and recasting systems of tabulation for the orders of living creatures. His activity culminated in the Systema Naturae and the later botanical works and neither familiarity nor inattention should blind us to the due grandiloquence of that title. An English title page of a translation of it, published in 1800, will show the scope: “A General System of Nature, through the three Grand Kingdoms of Animals, Vegetables and Minerals: systematically divided into their several Classes, Orders, Genera, Species, and Varieties, with their Habitations, Manners, Economy, Structure and Peculiarities. In 5 Volumes.” D’Arcy Thompson sees the whole work of classification as a response to the master’s command: “This secular labour,” he says in Growth and Form, “is pursued in direct obedience to the precept of the Systema Naturae— ‘ut sic in summa confusione rerum apparenti, summus conspiciatur Naturae ordo.”’25 But another mind sees it reciprocally, not just as the mind ordering nature but nature bending the mind itself to her purposes: “Nature hastens to render account of herself to the mind. Classification begins . . . But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law, which is also a law of the human mind?” That is Emerson in “Man Thinking” in the first series of Essays. In “Nature” he goes farther:
For the problems to be solved are precisely those which physiologist and naturalist omit to state. It is not so pertinent to man to know all the individuals of the animal kingdom as it is to know whence and whereto is this tyrannizing unity in his constitution, which evermore separates and classifies things, endeavouring to reduce the most diverse to one form . . . I cannot greatly honour minuteness in details, so long as there is no hint to explain the relation between things and thoughts; no ray upon the metaphysics of conchology, of botany, of the arts, to show the relation of the forms of flowers, shells, animals, architecture, to the mind, and build science upon ideas.
Are we, with these voices, what they speak of and whom they speak of, in science or in poetry? In cataloguing, which Bacon as well as Emerson deplores, or in something else?
It is only to be expected that in our present climate of opinion, with centuries of the split Baconian system behind us, the main emphasis should fall upon Linnaeus as cataloguer, either with approval as a systematic logician or with disapproval as a mere codifier.26 Taxonomy, too, may be seen as a working logic, and attempts have been made to connect it with symbolic logic. There are difficulties, however, in fitting Linnaeus into such a view. Was logic the principle on which Linnaeus operated, or something more akin to intuition? Was he a scientist or an artist, or a queer mixture of both? His biographers insist on his pronounced artistic side.27 Taxonomy itself, wherever it is pursued by a mind above that of a filing-clerk, raises the same questions. It has been said to be based on intuition, with the logic developing later out of this; and scientists such as Agnes Arber and Michael Polanyi insist upon the kinship of taxonomy and morphology to aesthetic and artistic pursuits. Linnaeus and his essential characteristic are a taxonomer’s problem; how is he, or his activity, to be classified? Since this becomes a question of method, a methodological voice shall speak to the point:
Un jour viendra, que je crois avoir entrevu dans le cours de mes observations, un jour où la science sera constituée, où les grandes familles d’esprits et leurs principales divisions seront déterminées et connues . . . Pour l’homme, sans doute, on ne pourra jamais faire exactement comme pour les animaux où pour les plantes; l’homme moral est plus complexe; il a ce qu’on nomme liberté et qui, dans tous les cas, suppose une grande mobilité de combinaisons possibles. Quoi qu’il en soit, on arrivera avec le temps, j’imagine, à constituer plus largement la science du moraliste; elle en est aujourd’hui au point où la botanique en était avant Jussieu, et l’anatomie comparée avant Cuvier, à l’état, pour ainsi dire, anecdotique . . . Je suppose donc quelqu’un . . . de propre à être un bon naturaliste dans ce champ si vaste des esprits.
This is Sainte-Beuve, in the long two-part essay on Chateaubriand, Vol. 3 of the Nouveaux Lundis, 1870, in which he examines his own method, literary criticism. The terms he uses seem so significant that one wonders whether this man may not turn out to be one of the central figures of literary development in the last 150 years, and his method an instrument with immense possibilities as yet scarcely even recognized. Jussieu and Cuvier belong, of course, in the great line of systematic biologists to which we shall come in a moment. Here they attest Sainte-Beuve’s awareness of what he was after—a new flexible taxonomy of minds. He goes on to set up some of the categories needing investigation: heredity, family relationships, the group, the environment; in other words, a genetic and ecological approach. Elsewhere he talks of “la critique physiologique,” while his method of investigating the individual in a dynamic context of time suggests a morphology of organism and behavior.
We have always been led to suppose that Sainte-Beuve’s method was historical-biographical and petered out in manuals of literary anecdote. It seems we were wrong. What this suggests is that literary criticism is capable of being an instrument akin to the best scientific methodologies, engaged on a common task, a wide natural history. Sainte-Beuve himself says this: “Être en histoire littéraire et en critique un disciple de Bacon, me paraît le besoin du temps et une excellente condition première pour juger et goûter ensuite avec plus de sûreté.” This reinterpretation of biology as a fit instrument by which to explore the natural history of the world of ideas and words is peculiarly French, and is often consciously derived from Bacon himself. Lamarck has it in 1809;28 the Philosophie zoologique has friendly references to Bacon, and incidentally to poetry. De Maistre has it, by inversion, in his great attack on Bacon of 1836. Renan has it in L’Avenir de la science; so in his own way does Comte; both of them mention Bacon. The latest to affirm it is Teilhard de Chardin. This is the interpretation fully understood, not mere cataloguing but the patient observation and collecting held together and caught up and transformed by activity of the mind, in the making of dynamic systems, the making of myth. This is postlogic, and upon it the life of taxonomy depends. So what we have is a provisional classification for Linnaeus, a postlogician (which, it must always be remembered, is not antilogician). Only one person can confirm or deny this—Linnaeus himself; and Linnaeus appeals to Orpheus.
It is peculiarly delightful that, with Linnaeus, Orpheus turns up in a catalogue. In the Deliciae Naturae,29 Linnaeus runs through a list of “the artful and the curious.” It begins reasonably soberly with hippopotamuses and peacocks and crocodiles; at least in this part of the list, if one were to indict anyone for lack of sobriety, it would have to be the Creator and not Linnaeus. But then the list seems to get out of hand, and we come to Dragons, and Pegasuses (in the plural, as if there might be herds of them), and eventually to Orpheus and his heavenly singing. The zoological and the mythological run straight into one another.
To the Sprats of this world, the semi-Baconians, this must be either scandal or playfulness which is irrelevant to serious science. Orpheus has no business alongside ordines naturales. Playful this catalogue certainly is, and charmingly so; but that does not mean it is irrelevant. It is an Orphic microcosm of taxonomy, a catalogue of living things into which Orpheus and myth have been admitted by the greatest taxonomer of them all.
Our minds, grown stiff in an ill tradition, are unaccustomed to science keeping mythological company. But nearer to Linnaeus’ own time no such nice feelings prevailed. An Orphic mind like Erasmus Darwin’s recognizes, even if only half-consciously, Linnaeus’ affinity to myth, and apostrophizes it thus in Canto 1 of The Loves of the Plants:
BOTANIC MUSE! who in this latter age
Led by your airy hand the Swedish sage,
Bade his keen eye your secret haunts explore
On dewy dell, high wood, and winding shore;
Say on each leaf how tiny Graces dwell;
How laugh the Pleasures in a blossom’s bell;
How insect loves arise on cobweb wings,
Aim their light shafts, and point their little stings.
Even the poet and scientist who are not specifically Orphic may do the same thing. We find in France two such collaborating, in Jacques Delille’s Les Trois Règnes de la nature, which was published in 1808, with notes by Cuvier, whose Le Règne Animal distribué d’apres son organisation appears in 1817. Cuvier’s systematics depend on comparative anatomy. For the first time inner structure and morphology were used as the directing principle of a taxonomic system. It is as if we come eventually to that “latent configuration” which was to be part of Bacon’s study of forms. This is the man to whom, we remember, Sainte-Beuve appeals.30
In Delille’s volume Cuvier discusses his method. He sees it as logic, as is to be expected; but then he calls it an art, and suggests a scope for it far wider than any set of zoological pigeon holes—a method of ordering not facts but ideas:
Cette habitude que l’on prend nécessairement en étudiant l’histoire naturelle, de classer dans son esprit un très-grand nombre d’idées, est l’un des avantages de cette science dont on a le moins parle, et qui deviendra peut-être le principal, lorsqu’elle aura été généralement introduite dans l’éducation commune; on s’exerce par là dans cette partie de la logique qui se nomme la méthode . . . Or cet art de la méthode, une fois qu’on le possède bien, s’applique avec un avantage infini aux études les plus étranges a l’histoire naturelle.
In his notes to Canto 6 of Delille’s long scientific poem, Cuvier discusses method in relation to Linnaeus and Buffon:
Le premier, effrayé du chaos où l’incurie de ses prédécesseurs avait laissé l’histoire de la nature, sut, par des méthodes simples et par des définitions courtes et claires, mettre de l’ordre dans cet immense labyrinthe, et rendre facile la connaissance des êtres particuliers; le second, rebuté de la sécheresse d’écrivains, qui pour la plupart s’étaient contentés d’être exacts, sut nous intéresser a des êtres particuliers, par les prestiges de son langage harmonieux et poétique.
To find a professional scientist of the highest order complaining of writers overvaluing exactitude is as encouraging as it is rare. It is the poet in this team, however, even a poet as thin as Delille, who puts things a little more clearly. For him, too, Linnaeus is the orderer, and rightly so:
Et Linné sur la terre, et Newton dans les cieux,
D’une pareille audace étonnerent les dieux.
This is in Canto 6, but a little earlier in that same Canto, where the poet is dealing at greater length with Linnaeus, he gives him a full mythological setting:
Linné surtout, Linne dévoila ces mystères,
Leurs haines, leurs amours, leurs divers caractères,
Leurs tubes infinis, leurs ressorts délicats.
Flore même en naissant le reçcut dans ses bras.
This could be mere classical reference and ornament. Delille goes on at once, however:
Flore sourit d’espoir a sa première aurore;
Non point cette éternelle et ridicule Flore
Qui pour les vieux amours compose les bouquets,
Mais celle qui du monde enseigne les secrets.
Myth is at the heart of the living world, explaining or unwinding its mysteries; and here Linnaeus also belongs. Even a minor poet has glimpses of this; and it is good for us to glimpse also that we need not be so scornful of didactic poetry as an inferior deviation from the true stock. Didactic poetry might even teach us something, if only that poetry has many other functions than simply to win the approval of critics. It has its own taxonomic functions, and it may be the poets who can tell us most about the nature of taxonomy.
4
The constructive intellect produces thoughts, sentences, poems, plans, designs, systems. It is the generation of the mind, the marriage of thought with nature
THERE have been frequent meetings between the traditions of morphology and taxonomy on the one hand, and poetry and word studies on the other. Erasmus Darwin and Goethe are not the only examples of their kind. Taxonomers spill over into something closely akin to poetry, as John Ray does in The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation, published in 1691 when Ray was a member of the Royal Society, and containing that wonderful phrase “plastick Nature.” Poets move into taxonomy, as did the poet Gray; his studies not only in the classics, in music, the plastic arts, and history, but also in many branches of natural history earned for him the reputation of being “perhaps the most learned man in Europe.” One of Gray’s visitors says, “He had Linnaeus’s Works, interleaved, always before him, when I have accidentally called upon him,”31 while another, the Swiss de Bonstetten, adds a delightful comment on his host: “After breakfast appear Shakespeare and old Lineus [sic] struggling together as two ghosts would do for a damned soul. Sometimes the one gets the better, sometimes the other.”32 And small genealogies spring up, based on nonscientific preoccupations among the professional scientists. H. K. Airy Shaw, discussing the post-Darwinian development of botanic taxonomy, mentions one such, a groping toward a “dynamic” taxonomy which he traces back to Michel Adanson (1727–1806), through Hans Hallier, whose scientific work appears from about 1890 to 1920, to Hayata, a contemporary Japanese botanist. Of these men he says: “Adanson’s . . . interest in reformed spelling and in languages in general constitutes a remarkable parallel with Hallier’s absorption in comparative philology.” Hallier, we are told, also wrote “whimsical little botanical poems,” while Hayata had a profound admiration for Goethe and, the author says, produced his dynamic system largely under the influence of the Metamorphose der Pflanzen.33 We shall meet Adanson again, as one of Linnaeus’ critics; but he comes in here also as the founder of another small line of descent, those scientists who have written about plants as if they were sentient beings. A. J. Wilmott says, “Adanson . . . considered plants from all angles, even to a paragraph on their souls!”34 The exclamation mark indicates at least the conventional sense of shock; but Adanson is not the only one to take this line. Erasmus Darwin in a delightful passage in Zoonomia (1794) says, “This leads us to a curious enquiry, whether vegetables have ideas of external things.” He then discusses for a page or two the capacity of vegetables for ideas and sentiments, including love, and ends, “I think we may truly conclude, that they are furnished with a common sensorium belonging to each bud, and that they must occasionally repeat those perceptions either in their dreams or waking hours, and consequently possess ideas of so many of the properties of the external world, and of their own existence.” The classic case of this is Fechner’s Nanna, oder Über das Seelenleben der Pflanzen, of 1848. I am not assessing these ideas as working methods, good or bad; what I want to do is to draw attention to the nature of the method these scientists are using. It is evidence, and it points to the likelihood of our conjecture that morphology and taxonomy are post-logical and consequently nearly related to poetry, which in its turn is morphological and taxonomic in character. The groping toward a dynamic systematics which accompanies an interest in poetry and words, the anthropomorphic botanical thinking (which is an experiment in mythological methods, as Fechner certainly knew)35 are part of postlogic.
