The Great Chain of Being after Forty Years: An Appraisal

Lovejoy A. O. , The great chain of being (New York, 1960 (first pub. 1936)), 21–22; for a perceptive survey of relevant historiographic issues and literature, see Mandelbaum Maurice , “The history of ideas, intellectual history, and the history of philosophy”, History and theory, Beiheft v (1965).

See, for instance, the essays in two recent collections: Mathias Peter (ed.), Science and society, 1600–1900 (Cambridge, 1972); Teich Mikuláš Young Robert (eds), Changing perspectives in the history of science (London, 1973).

Hahn Roger , The anatomy of a scientific institution: The Paris Academy of Sciences, 1666–1803 (Berkeley, California, 1971); Singer Charles , A short history of scientific ideas to 1900 (London, 1959).

Lovejoy , op. cit. (ref. 1), chs ix–xi, esp. 244, 293–4, and 317–26. Cf. Collingwood R. G. , The idea of nature (Oxford, 1965 (first pub. 1945)), 121–32.

Lovejoy , op. cit. (ref. 1), 24 and 326.

Ibid., 18.

On plenitude and cosmology, cf. Koyré Alexandre , From the closed world to the infinite universe (Baltimore, 1957); its relation to questions of biological extinction is passingly considered in Allen Don Cameron , The legend of Noah (Urbana, Illinois, 1963 (first published 1949)); Rudwick M. J. S. , The meaning of fossils (London, 1972), 64–65, 86, and chapter iii, contains a more specific discussion.

Aristotle , Historia animalium , trans. Thompson D'Arcy (Oxford, 1910), viii, 1, 588b. The passage is quoted in an alternative translation in Lovejoy, op. cit. (ref. 1), 58.

The phrase is from Edward Young's Night thoughts. Numerous eighteenth century poets (Young, Pope, Akenside, Haller, Blackmore) rendered poetic expositions of the chain of being.

Smellie William , Philosophy of natural history (2 vols, Edinburgh, 1790–99), i, 521.

The phrase is from Locke's Essay concerning human understanding , quoted by Lovejoy, op. cit. (ref. 1), 184.

A recent study of optimism is Charles Vereker, Eighteenth century optimism (Liverpool, 1967).

Lovejoy , op. cit. (ref. 1), 332.

It is one of the strengths of Michel Foucault's “historical archaeology” that it underscores these connexions. Foucault's major works have now been translated into English. Particularly relevant is his Madness and civilization, trans. Howard Richard (London, 1965).

Smellie, for instance (op. cit. (ref. 10), 521–2), justified the Hindu caste system with the observation that “nature herself has formed the human species into casts [sic] or ranks”.

Bowler Peter J. , “Evolutionism in the Enlightenment”, History of science, xii (1974), 159–83; Glass Bentley (eds), Forerunners of Darwin (Baltimore, 1959).

The best general survey of the subject remains Greene John C. , The death of Adam (Ames, Iowa, 1959). An outstanding study of eighteenth century French biology is Roger Jacques , Les sciences de la vie (2nd ed., Paris, 1971). Bowler (op. cit. (ref. 16)) surveys the present state of scholarship in the area.

Bury J. B. , The idea of progress (London, 1932) is the classic history of the idea. There are some useful comments on the idea in Gay Peter , The Enlightenment: An interpretation (2 vols, New York, 1966–69), esp. ii, ch. vii.

Some of Smellie's activities are considered by Shapin Steven , “Property, patronage, and the politics of science: The founding of the Royal Society of Edinburgh”, British journal of the history of science, vii (1974), 1–41. Still useful is Kerr Robert , Memoirs of the life, writings, and correspondence of William Smellie (2 vols, Edinburgh, 1811).

For Enlightenment Scotland, cf. Phillipson N. T. Mitchison Rosalind (eds), Scotland in the Age of Improvement (Edinburgh, 1970); Ross Ian Simpson , Lord Kames and the Scotland of his day (Oxford, 1972); and the papers by Morrell J. B. Shapin Steven Christie John R. R. in History of science, xii (1974), 81–141. The standard work on the Lunar Society is Schofield R. E. , The Lunar Society of Birmingham (Oxford, 1963).

For France, there is Duchet Michèle , Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des lumières (Paris, 1971); and for the earlier period, Hodgen Margaret , Early anthropology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Philadelphia, 1964), contains some useful material. However, as Weber Gay , “Science and society in nineteenth century anthropology”, History of science, xii (1974), 260–83, has pointed out, historians of anthropology too often neglect the natural historical origins of the discipline.

Goldsmith On , cf. Lynskey Winifred , “Goldsmith and the chain of being”, Journal of the history of ideas, vi (1945), 367–74, and Pitman J. H. , Goldsmith's animated nature (New Haven, 1924). Friedman Arthur (ed.), Collected works of Oliver Goldsmith (5 vols, Oxford, 1966) contains valuable notes on essays such as his “Comparative view of races and nations”, iii, 66–86.

Bryson Gladys , Man and society: The Scottish inquiry of the eighteenth century (Princeton, N.J., 1945) is useful but outdated. To the studies already cited (refs 19–20) should be added Lehmann William C. , Henry Home, Lord Kames, and the Scottish Enlightenment (The Hague, 1971); idem, John Millar of Glasgow (Cambridge, 1960); Scott Harold W. (ed.), John Walker's “Lectures on geology” (Chicago, 1966); Shapin Steven , “The Royal Society of Edinburgh: A study of the social context of Hanoverian science” (University of Pennsylvania Ph.D. thesis, 1971); Porter R. S. “The making of the science of geology in Britain, 1660–1815” (University of Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 1974), chs vi–viii. Figures of the Scottish Enlightenment loom large in Slotkin J. S. , Readings in early anthropology (London, 1965), chs iv–vii.

Below, Section V, for a brief consideration of these questions.

Fruman Norman , Coleridge, the damaged archangel (London, 1971).

Coleridge claimed, for instance, to have discovered that the ‘higher’ plants (eg, the dicotyledons) resemble the ‘lower’ animals less than do the ‘lower’ plants. Such a characterization was incompatible with a single continuous chain. Rather, plants and animals were seen to diverge from a common point (usually zoophytes). Lamarck, for instance, believed that plants and animals were divergent. Fruman, op. cit. (ref. 25), 129–34, has discussed Coleridge's remarks on the subject.

Lovejoy A. O. , “Coleridge and Kant's two worlds”, in Essays in the history of ideas (New York, 1960).

Shaffer E. S. , “Coleridge and natural philosophy: A review of recent literary and historical research”, History of science, xii (1974), 284–98, contains stimulating suggestions for constructing a fuller account of Coleridge's place in the history of science, and for the relationships between British natural philosophy and German Naturphilosophie.

Hartley On , cf. Warren Howard C. , A history of the association psychology (London, 1921); Oldfield C.R. Oldfield K. , “Hartley's ‘Observations on man’”, Annals of science, vii (1951), 371–81. A full-length study of Hartley's theories and the uses to which they were put by men like Priestley, Erasmus Darwin, and William Godwin would be illuminating.

Garfinkle Norton , “Science and religion in England, 1790–1800”, Journal of the history of ideas, xvi (1955), 376–88; on Britain and the French Revolution more generally, cf. Brown Philip Anthony , The French Revolution in English history (London, 1918); O'Gorman F. , The Whig party and the French Revolution (London, 1967). Gavin de Beer's thesis that The sciences were never at war (London, 1960) cannot be maintained except at a superficial level.

Useful general studies include Roland Stromberg, Religious liberalism in eighteenth century England (Oxford, 1954); Manuel Frank , The eighteenth century confronts the gods (Cambridge, Mass., 1959). The volumes of The Anti-Jacobin review (1798–1821) would repay systematic examination in this context.

Semmel Bernard , The Methodist revolution (London, 1974).

Halévy's 1906 paper has recently been translated by Bernard Semmel as The birth of Methodism (Chicago and London, 1971).

Thompson E. P. , The making of the English working class (Harmondsworth, 1968), is a work of outstanding importance for understanding England in the half-century before the First Reform Bill.

Semmel , op. cit. (ref. 32), 18–19.

See, for instance, his “Remarks on the Count de Buffon's ‘Natural history’” [1782] in Works (3rd ed., 14 vols, London, 1831), xiii, 410–16.

Furneaux Robin , William Wilberforce (London, 1974); Brown Ford K. , Fathers of the Victorians (Cambridge, 1961).

Brown , op. cit. (ref. 37), 6, pointed out that the Brontes, H. T. Buckle, Mark Pattison, Benjamin Jowett, Elizabeth Barrett, George Eliot, Kingsley, De Quincey, Ruskin, Macaulay, Peel, Gladstone, Manning and Newman all had evangelical backgrounds; none of them stayed an evangelical.

Ibid., 329–40.

There is a large literature on the slave trade and slavery debates in England. A recent summary of them may be found in Hurwitz Edith F. , Politics and the public conscience (London, 1973). More generally, Davis David Brion , The problem of slavery in western culture (Harmondsworth, 1970), is a brilliant study of the problem through the eighteenth century.

Lawrence William , Lectures on physiology, zoology, and the natural history of man (London, 1819), 96 ff. On Lawrence, cf. below.

Cf. Semmel , op. cit. (ref. 32), 153: “In 1813, a good part of England seemed obsessed by a frenzy for foreign missions”. Cf. De Jong J. A. , As the waters cover the sea: Millennial expectations in the rise of Anglo-American missions 1640–1810 (Amsterdam, 1970).

I have dealt at greater length with this and other issues raised in this article in my Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, “Time's noblest offering: The problem of man in the British natural historical sciences 1800–1863”.

Baker William , “William Wilberforce on the idea of Negro inferiority”, Journal of the history of ideas, xxxi (1970), 433–40, notes how important theological considerations were in Wilberforce's own beliefs about the meaning of racial equality.

I have dealt with these attacks in my thesis, op. cit. (ref. 43). For Sumner's social thought, cf. Soloway R. A. , Prelates and people: Ecclesiastical social thought in England 1783–1852 (London, 1969), esp. chs iii and iv.

Prichard J. C. , Researches into the physical history of man, ed. Stocking George W. Jr (London and Chicago, 1973). John Crump is at work on a full-length study of Prichard based on both printed and manuscript sources.

Ibid. , xliv. For Prichard's evangelicalism, cf. xlvii ff.

Temkin Owsei , “Basic science, medicine, and the romantic era”, Bulletin of the history of medicine, xxxvii (1963), 97–129; Goodfield-Toulmin June , “Some aspects of English physiology 1807–1840”, Journal of the history of biology, ii (1969), 283–320; Wells Kentwood , “Sir William Lawrence (1783–1867); a study of pre-Darwinian ideas on heredity and variation”, Journal of the history of biology, iv (1971), 319–61; and my thesis, op. cit. (ref. 43), ch. iii.

Thompson, op. cit. (ref. 34), provides a graphic account of political repression during these years. For a later decade, Hollis Patricia , The pauper press (Oxford, 1970) is a brilliant account of the underground, working-class press of the 1830s. An older study which is still valuable is Wickwar W. H. , The struggle for the freedom of the press, 1819–1832 (London, 1928).

Halévy Elie , The growth of philosophical radicalism, trans. Morris M. (London, 1952), remains the standard work on the utilitarians.

Jordan Winthrop D. , White over black: American attitudes towards the Negro 1550–1812 (Baltimore, Maryland, 1969), ch. xiii. More generally, cf. Pagliaro Harold E. (ed.), Racism in the eighteenth century (Studies in eighteenth century culture, vol. iii, Cleveland, 1973).

E.g., Sheehan Bernard W. , Seeds of extinction: Jeffersonian philanthropy and the American Indian (Chapel Hill, 1973); Binder Frederick M. , The color problem in early national America as viewed by John Adams, Jefferson, and Jackson (The Hague, 1968); Gossett Thomas F. , Race: The history of an idea in America (Dallas, 1963).

Jordan , op. cit. (ref. 51), 510.

Rothman David , The discovery of the asylum; social order and disorder in the new Republic (Boston, 1971).

Ibid., chs x and xi. For other American institutions, cf. Grob Gerald N. , Mental institutions in America: Social policy to 1875 (New York, 1973); and Lewis W. David , From Newgate to Dannemora: The rise of the penitentiary in New York, 1796–1848 (Ithaca, New York, 1965).

Macalpine Ida Hunter Richard , George III and the mad-business (London, 1969); these same two authors have also edited an outstanding volume of readings from British psychiatric literature, Three hundred years of psychiatry, 1535–1860 (London, 1963).

I have examined medical attitudes towards psychiatric therapy in “Rationales for therapy in British psychiatry, 1780–1835”, Medical history, xviii (1974), 317–34.

Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine have written an introduction to a reprint of Samuel Tuke, Description of the Retreat (London, 1964 (first pub. 1813)); cf. also, Tuke Daniel H. , Chapters in the history of the insane in the British Isles (London, 1882). On the Quakers, cf. Raistrick Arthur , Quakers in science and industry (Newton Abbot, 1968 (first pub. 1950)); and the perceptive book by Isichei Elizabeth , Victorian Quakers (Oxford, 1970), especially ch. i, for their evangelical connexions.

Jones Kathleen , History of the mental health services (London, 1972).

Parry-Jones William Ll. , The trade in lunacy, a study of private madhouses in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (London, 1972).

Checkland G.S. Checkland E. O. A. (eds), The poor law report of 1834 (Harmondsworth, 1974). Cf. also, Marshall Dorothy , The English poor in the eighteenth century (London, 1965); Marshall J. D. , The old poor law 1795–1834 (London, 1968); and Owen David , English philanthropy 1660–1960 (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1965).

Poynter J. R. , Society and pauperism: English ideas on poor relief, 1795–1834 (London, 1969).

Young Robert , “Malthus and the evolutionists: The common context of biological and social theory”, Past & present, xliii (1969), 109–45; and his “The historiographic and ideological contexts of the nineteenth century debate on man's place in nature”, in Teich Young (eds), op. cit. (ref. 2).

Vorzimmer Peter , “Darwin, Malthus and the theory of natural selection”, Journal of the history of ideas, xxx (1969), 527–42; and Herbert Sandra , “Darwin, Malthus and selection”, Journal of the history of biology, iv (1971), 209–17.

In addition to the works cited in refs 61 and 62, cf. Smith Kenneth , The Malthusian controversy (London, 1951); and Boner Harold , Hungry generations: The nineteenth century case against Malthusianism (New York, 1955).

Bonar James , Malthus and his work (London, 1924), is dated.

Malthus T. R. , An essay on the principle of population [1798], ed. Flew Anthony (Harmondsworth, 1970), 72.

Jarrold Thomas , Dissertations on man, philosophical, physiological, and political (London, 1806); and Anthropologia: Or dissertations on the form and colour of man (Stockport, 1808).

On this subject, cf. Newsome David , Two classes of men, Platonism and English romantic thought (London, 1974), esp. ch. ii, “The vision of the child”; and Ogilvie R. M. , Latin and Greek, a history of the influence of the classics on English life from 1600 to 1918 (London, 1964), esp. ch. iii. Also useful on children is Pinchbeck Ivy Hewitt Margaret , Children in English society (2 vols, London, 1969–73), though the subject is too large for the length of the volumes.

Lovejoy , op. cit. (ref. 1), 143.

Burrow J. W. , Evolution and society, a study in Victorian social theory (Cambridge, 1966), esp. ch. ii.

See, for instance, two recent works by Marshall Peter James , Problems of empire, Britain and India, 1757–1813 (London, 1968), and The British discovery of Hinduism in the eighteenth century (Cambridge, 1970).

For an overview of the subject, see Semmel Bernard , The rise of free trade imperialism: Classical political economy, the empire of free trade, and imperialism 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 1970).

Curtin Philip , The image of Africa: British ideas and action, 1780–1850 (London, 1965).

Smith Bernard , European vision and the South Pacific 1768–1850 (Oxford, 1960).

Daudin Henri , De Linné à Jussieu (Paris, 1926); and Cuvier et Lamarck (2 vols, Paris, 1926).

Much of this literature is discussed briefly in the article by Bowler, op. cit. (ref. 16), to which may be added François Jacob, The logic of living systems, trans. Spillmann B. E. (London, 1974), chs i and ii.

Quoted by Foucault Michel , The order of things (published in French as Les mots et les choses; London, 1970), 232. Chs v and vii contain an interesting discussion of the differences between eighteenth century natural history and nineteenth century biology.

Schiller Joseph , “L'échelle des êtres et la série chez Lamarck”, in Grassé P.-P. (eds), Colloque international “Lamarck” (Paris, 1971), 99; and Schiller J. , “Queries, answers, and unsolved problems in eighteenth century biology”, History of science, xii (1974), 184–99.

Coleman William , Georges Cuvier, zoologist (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), ch. iv.

Hodge M. J. S. , “Species in Lamarck”, in Colloque international “Lamarck” (ref. 79).

Rudwick , op. cit. (ref. 7), ch. iii, contains an excellent discussion of these issues.

Pickstone J. V. , “The origins of general physiology in France with special emphasis on the work of R. J. H. Dutrochet” (University of London Ph.D. thesis, 1973), esp. ch. iii, contains much relevant material; and Joseph Schiller's forthcoming Classification and physiology should elucidate the subject.

Linnaeus's anthropology is conveniently summarized by Bendyshe Thomas , “The anthropology of Linnaeus”, Memoirs read before the Anthropological Society of London, i (1863–4), 421–58. Cf. also, Larson James L. , Reason and experience, the representation of natural order in the work of Carl von Linnté (Berkeley, California, 1971); and Wikman K. R. V. , Lachesis and Nemesis, four chapters on the human condition in the writings of C. Linnaeus (Stockholm, 1970).

For a convenient edition of much of Blumenbach's work, see Bendyshe Thomas (trans.), The anthropological treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (London, 1865); cf. also, Mühlmann Wilhelm E. , Geschichte der Anthropologie (2nd ed., Frankfurt-am-Main, 1968), and Baron Stricker B. , “Die Anschauungen Johann F. Blumenbachs über die Geschichtlichkeit der Natur”, Sudhoffs Archiv, xlvii (1963), 19–26.

Two volumes in that debate include [ Whewell William ], Of the plurality of worlds (3rd ed., London, 1854); and Powell Baden , Essays on the spirit of the inductive philosophy, the unity of worlds, and the philosophy of creation (London, 1855), essay ii.

Mandelbaum Maurice , History, man, and reason, a study in nineteenth century thought (Baltimore and London, 1971), 83–84.

Sedgwick Adam , A discourse on the studies in the University of Cambridge (5th ed., Cambridge, 1850), ccvi ff.; Wilson Leonard G. (ed.), Sir Charles Lyell's scientific journals on the species question (New Haven and London, 1970), 254–5.