The Orphic Voice, page 21
One might almost say that he has a mystique of naming. “To give true and proper names to plants belongs to the genuine systematic botanists, and to them only,” he says in the Philosophia Botanica, “for such only are able to distinguish the genera, and to know the names which were formerly in use.” Later in the same work he says, “If botanists had once arrived so far, that they could determine every species by an essential name, they could proceed no farther towards perfection in the art.”43 What did Linnaeus see in the name that was so essential? He tells us in the introduction to the Systema Naturae:
Man, the last and best of created works, formed after the image of his Maker, endowed with a portion of intellectual divinity, the governor and subjugator of all other beings, is, by his wisdom alone, able to form just conclusions from such things as present themselves to his senses, which can only consist of bodies merely natural. Hence the first step of wisdom is to know these bodies; and to be able, by those marks imprinted on them by nature, to distinguish them from each other, and to affix to every object its proper name.
These are the elements of all science; this is the great alphabet: for if the name be lost, the knowledge of the object is lost also; and without these, the student will seek in vain for the means to investigate the hidden treasures of nature.
METHOD, the soul of Science, indicates that every natural body may, by inspection, be known by its own peculiar name, and this name points out whatever the industry of man has been able to discover concerning it: so that amidst the greatest apparent confusion, the greatest order is visible.
This is a noble statement, and an echo of earlier ones. For Linnaeus “the great alphabet” is classification, whose proper use will lead to the interpretation of nature itself. What is to be found out and interpreted he tells us in the Philosophia Botanica: “Besides all the above-mentioned systems . . . which may . . . be called artificial, there is a natural method, or nature’s system, which we ought diligently to endeavour to find out . . . And that this system of nature is no chimaera . . . will appear . . . from hence, that all plants, of what order soever, show an affinity to others to which they are nearly allied.” This natural system was the hidden model for all systematics invented by man, and it had not yet been found.
Linnaeus, looking for the “natural system,” was trying to improve upon Ray,44 and Linnaeus’ successors in their turn try to improve his method. If taxonomy were logic and scientists worked on principles of analytic exactitude alone, we might expect post-Linnaean scientists to try to perfect the system in that direction, urging Linnaeus, as it were, toward greater precision, into language-as-science or pseudo-mathematics. In fact the contrary happens. Scientists complain from the beginning that Linnaeus is too mathematical and rigid. They push him not into logic but into postlogic.
Buffon as early as 1745 says in a letter to Jalabert: “On pèche en physique en attribuant à la nature trop d’uniformité; c’est aussi par là que pèchent toutes les méthodes de botanique; et celle de Linnaeus me satisfait moins encore que toutes les autres.” This by way of general introduction; now come three proposals for improving the system. The first is Adanson with his Familles des plantes in 1763, calling Linnaeus a “name-changer” and contemplating a new and more dynamic form of classification for plants. Then in 1789 comes Jussieu’s Genera Plantarum. His descendant Adrien de Jussieu describes the methods of both as follows:
Adanson . . . found out that in order to group the genera into families, attention ought to be paid to the whole of their characteristics and not to a single one . . . Each point of their organisation, considered separately, would give us a separate system, which would present all of them in a certain order. If, in all these partial systems thus obtained, the two same genera happen to be constantly brought into juxtaposition, it is evident that they resemble one another in all the points of their organisation, that they form part of the same natural group . . . [Jussieu adopted] the employment of a principle which had escaped the notice of Adanson: that of the subordination of the characteristics, which in Jussieu’s system are, according to his own expression, weighed and not counted. They are considered as having unequal values: so that a characteristic of the first order is equivalent to several of the second, and so on.45
In Adanson there is a move away from analysis to a more synthetic approach, in Jussieu a move toward a more qualitative or evaluative method; and in both we begin to see what scientists may mean when they speak of a “dynamic” classification. The dynamics are in the mind inventing or using the system, acknowledged and accepted as part of the system’s workings. Plants do not move themselves around in alternative arrangements; the mind does it for them. So a system of this kind is a myth in our original terms, a working interpretation of world plus mind, an inclusive and not an exclusive mythology. The third would-be reformer is Erasmus Darwin. Much as he admires Linnaeus, he also makes a suggestion that will move Linnaeus away from mathematics toward perception or bodily thinking, which is also a part of postlogic. In the Phytologia, 1800, he says,
Often as I have admired the classification of vegetables by the great Linneus deduced from their sexual organs of reproduction, some of the classes have appeared to me to be more excellent than others, as they seemed to approach nearer to natural ones. On further attention to this subject, I perceived that those classes which were deduced from the proportions or situations of the stamina . . . were more natural classes than those, which were distinguished simply by the number of them.46
The Frenchmen appeal to abstract thought, the Englishman to the senses, as if to illustrate their respective traditional approaches to natural history; but each is postlogical in his own way, and they complement one another.
It is another Englishman, Darwin’s grandson, who will next attempt a Linnaean reform, in the Origin of Species. He has his own interpreter who appointed himself to the “humbler, though perhaps as useful, office of an interpreter between the ‘Origin of Species’ and the public”:47 Thomas Henry Huxley. The encounter between Charles Darwin and Huxley is one of the most interesting in the whole Baconian tradition. I use the word “encounter” advisedly. Huxley is generally thought of as battling with all comers on behalf of Darwin and the theory of natural selection, and this is part of the story but not the whole. His work suggests that he has another battle on his hands, a more secret one with Darwin and with himself. For Huxley resembles Bacon with his vision and his inconsistencies. Darwin is half a Bacon, that half which was hypnotized by facts and mechanisms (and for which in an 1887 essay Huxley takes Bacon to task).48
To Darwin his own position was clear: he was to take Bacon’s dictum, that the seeker must go to the facts for everything, as comprehensive, final, and the one path of scientific rectitude. Huxley reports him as saying that on reading his grandfather’s Zoonomia he was much disappointed, the proportion of speculation to facts being so large.49 Even Huxley has difficulty with the factuality of the Origin of Species, calling it “a sort of intellectual pemmican—a mass of facts crushed and pounded into shape, rather than held together by the ordinary medium of an obvious logical bond.” He adds a little later, “Due attention will, without doubt, discover this bond, but it is often hard to find.”50 But it may be a postlogical bond which Huxley is really missing. The determination to reduce everything to facts can be seen perhaps most clearly in The Descent of Man. Thus, for instance, chapter 3: “My object in this chapter is to show that there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.” (Wallace51 strongly objected to this, as contrary to the available evidence.) Determination to reduce everything to material fact can be a powerful working prejudice. It nearly succeeds in turning The Descent of Man from a scientific inquiry into special pleading. Upon this Huxley’s interpretation had to work.
Huxley’s cast of mind is much less simple. He says of himself: “my great desire was to be a mechanical engineer . . . and though the Institute of Mechanical Engineers would certainly not own me, I am not sure that I have not all along been a sort of mechanical engineer in partibus infidelium . . . notwithstanding that natural science has been my proper business, I am afraid there is very little of the genuine naturalist in me . . . what I cared for was the architectural and engineering part of the business.” That might be Bacon himself—the appeal to the mechanical arts; yet this is the same Huxley who could say in 1856, “Nature is not a mechanism, she is a poem,”52 and so exhibit Bacon’s own dilemma, the split between engines and postlogic which Shakespeare set out to bridge by poetry in King Lear.
Huxley has glimpses of postlogic, and they unsettle him. He will search the Origin of Species for logic, yet applaud Kepler as “the wildest of guessers.”53 When he comes to interpret Darwin, Huxley tries to redraw his picture on more flexible, imaginative, and, in the long run, explicitly Baconian lines. He does what Bacon did: affirms two contraries simultaneously. From this springs his curiously ambivalent attitude toward Darwin and his book, so different from uncomplicated agreement and disagreement such as Wallace’s. Darwin was for him “the incorporated ideal of a man of science,” but Huxley’s interpretation is always toward something more like postlogic —“It was this rarest and greatest of endowments [honesty] which kept his vivid imagination and great speculative powers within due bounds,”54 he says of Darwin. And when he comes to official encomium, in his memorandum on the proposed Darwin Memorial, 1885, the words in which he describes Darwin’s work are Bacon’s own. He calls Darwin “one of those rare ministers and interpreters of Nature,” while the Origin of Species is described as the source of “a great renewal, a true ‘instauratio magna’ of the zoological and botanical sciences.”55
The identification, for Huxley, is completed. But calling Darwin a Bacon does not make him one, and it is not from the postlogical Baconian standpoint that Darwin deals with Linnean taxonomy, but from his own. In the chapter on classification in the Origin he says this:
From the most remote period in the history of the world organic beings have been found to resemble each other in descending degrees, so that they can be classed in groups under groups. This classification is not arbitrary like the grouping of the stars in constellations . . . Naturalists, as we have seen, try to arrange the species, genera and families in each class, on what is called the Natural System. But what is meant by this system? . . . Expressions such as that famous one by Linnaeus, which we often meet with in a more or less concealed form, namely, that the characters do not make the genus, but that the genus gives the characters, seem to imply that some deeper bond is included in our classifications than mere resemblance. I believe that this is the case, and that community of descent—the one known cause of close similarity in organic beings—is the bond which, though observed [sic; obscured?] by various degrees of modification, is partially revealed to us by our classification . . . All the foregoing rules and aids and difficulties may be explained, if I do not greatly deceive myself, on the view that the Natural System is founded on descent with modification . . . all true classification being genealogical; that community of descent is the hidden bond which naturalists have been unconsciously seeking, and not some unknown plan of creation, or the enunciation of general principles, and the mere putting together and separating objects more or less alike.
Darwin is claiming that he has found once for all the natural system which Linnaeus set up as a goal before the eyes of taxonomers. There is no more unknown plan to be read. The dynamics will no longer be those of mind and natural objects but simply those of actual time or history as incorporated in the biological specimens themselves, which can then be reduced to full logical order, with no further need for imaginative speculation. True to his long endeavor, Huxley tries to interpret this very statement of Darwin’s more flexibly: “No doubt Mr. Darwin believes that these resemblances and differences upon which our natural systems or classifications are based, are resemblances and differences which have been produced genetically, but we can discover no reason for supposing that he denies the existence of natural classifications of other kinds.”56 But that passage from the Origin belies him. Darwin presents his system as the consummation of the Linnaean taxonomy, its un-postlogical logical conclusion. The partial Baconian view was reasserted with all the weight of a great name behind it, and the consequences, for the good estate of science and poetry in their mutual relationship, have been melancholy and prolonged.
We shall assume that this was not in fact the end of the matter. What we have to do now is to retrieve the line of postlogical taxonomy where we can find it still unbroken in Erasmus Darwin and Goethe.
6
Nature has dearly at heart the formation of the speculative man, or scholar . . . He is no permissive or accidental appearance, but an organic agent, one of the estates of the realm, provided and prepared, from of old and from everlasting, in the knitting and contexture of things
IT WAS IN 1775 that Goethe accepted the young prince’s invitation to go to Weimar, and went on a visit which was to last for the rest of his life. Already a poet and writer of repute, he moves now into the intensive microcosm of culture, government, and intellectual activity which that little duchy could offer him. He himself dates the beginnings of his scientific interests from this point,57 ascribing them to the practical knowledge he needed, in forestry or mining for instance, in order to fulfill the official duties which he increasingly assumed until his death almost sixty years later. In 1786 he makes his Italian Journey, that strange secret flight to the Rome he had so ardently desired to see, followed by two years spent in Italy where he broods on ancient art and natural science and his own vocation and sets it out in the Italienische Reise and, salted with classical reference and sensual passion, in the beautiful Römische Elegien. After his return to Weimar the Metamorphose der Pflanzen appears in 1790, and thereafter till his death in 1832 the steady stream of literary and scientific works continues, along with autobiography, letters, journals, notes, and conversation of which records were kept.
Erasmus Darwin’s life is packed into a shorter span. By 1775 he was already a successful doctor in the Midlands, apparently as speculative and experimental in his practice as he was in his thinking.58 Here too was a small provincial world that was not without claims to literary and scientific culture, and Dr. Darwin seems to have taken full advantage of local society, consorting with literary figures such as Anna Seward, the Swan of Lichfield, avoiding Dr. Johnson at all costs as a juggernaut of a conversational rival, and belonging to that remarkable society the “Lunatics,” which included four Fellows of the Royal Society—Erasmus Darwin, James Watt, Samuel Galton, and Joseph Priestley, besides Edgeworth and Thomas Day, the author of Sandford and Merton.59 The Doctor’s written works fall in the last twelve years of his life: The Botanic Garden, 1791; his first scientific work, Zoonomia, or, The Laws of Organic Life, 1794; his second, Phytologia, or, The Philosophy of Agriculture and Gardening with the Theory of Draining Morasses and an Improved Construction of the Drill Plough, 1800; and the second, posthumous, poem, The Temple of Nature, 1803.
Darwin’s fellow countrymen have agreed to dismiss him, unread, as a figure of fun. In science it is not until the 1870’s that he is given recognition, and then by a German, Ernst Krause, who compares Darwin with Goethe,60 gives the former his due in the development of evolutionary thought, and maintains that he was bound to be misunderstood by his contemporaries because he was a hundred years ahead of them. This recognition of Darwin is taken further by Samuel Butler in Evolution Old and New, which appeared in 1882, and by Shaw in the preface to Back to Methuselah. In literary criticism, Erasmus Darwin has had no recognition at all. This is partly the result of what Coleridge said about him: a man who was generally if comprehensibly unjust to Darwin and whose critical reputation now stands so high that it may tacitly prevent a true assessment of Darwin’s contribution to our tradition.61
With Goethe something else happens. I can speak only for Anglo-Saxon minds, but here he is generally little known and little liked. At best he will be accorded an aloof recognition as one of the great but not as a patron and friend; at worst he will meet with an odd puritanical rejection, of the man and his work both, on the grounds of his arrogance and unapproachability. If he was right when he said to Eckermann, May 12, 1825, that always and everywhere one learns only from those one loves, we have put ourselves in a position where we can learn nothing from him at all. Only the Orphic minds turn to him, as did Novalis, Carlyle, Emerson, and, eventually, Rilke after a long reluctant capitulation. In the history of scientific thought, Goethe’s position has been the subject of prolonged controversy which is still going on.62 I shall not enter into this; but it is noticeable that among contemporary scientists only those with a postlogical turn of mind, such as Agnes Arber, Michael Polanyi and Lance Whyte, have a real understanding for what Goethe may have been trying to do.
The clearest Orphic commentator on Goethe is Emerson. When he writes about Goethe in Representative Men, he casts him for a particular part: “I find a provision in the constitution of the world,” Emerson says, “for the writer or secretary who is to report the doings of the miraculous spirit of life that everywhere throbs and works.” To the noble metaphor of nature as a language is added a hint that the interpreter of that language belongs to a kind of celestial Civil Service, the “secretary” and the “report” bending themselves that way, a fitting way of thinking about Goethe and his allegorical life. Then Emerson goes on:
Nature will be reported. All things are engaged in writing their history . . . The air is full of sounds; the sky, of tokens; the ground is all memoranda and signatures; and every object covered over with hints, which speak to the intelligent . . . Nature conspires. Whatever can be thought can be spoken, and still rises for utterance, though to rude and stammering organs. If they cannot compass it, it waits and works, until, at last, it moulds them to its perfect will, and is articulated.
