Page 58 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

nature 1359
n a ture 1359

One result of the Scientific Revolution was that female Being, outlines the belief that the deity appointed each
nature was transformed “from an active teacher and par- species a fixed place in an eternal chain of being from the
ent...[to] a mindless, submissive body.” That body was lowliest maggot through humans to God. The task of
submissive first to God and then through God to natural history was to fit new discoveries into the appro-
humankind (Merchant 1980, 190). priate link in the chain. The environmental historian
Natural historians, strongly influenced by the explana- Donald Worster, in his Nature’s Economy, traces the his-
tory power of mathematics and physics, continued to tory of nature as both a sacred and an economic system
search for stable order in the rapidly increasing numbers from the Greek word for “house” (oikos) through its
of animals and plants that resulted from the voyages of amplification to refer to household management, the
discovery from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. political “oeconomy” of human societies, and nature’s
The Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778) economy. Thus, Linnaeus, in his essay, “The Oeconomy
created the first universally accepted system for organiz- of Nature” (1749), describes nature as the “earth house-
ing the members of living nature in an arrangement that hold” in which God is the “Supreme Economist” who
apparently revealed God’s design. Continuing a Greek rationally ordered the cosmos and “the housekeeper who
tradition, however, Linnaeus viewed change in nature as kept it functioning productively” (Worster 1985, 37).
fundamentally cyclical, always returning to the same By the beginning of the nineteenth century two scien-
starting point. tists—the English geologist Charles Lyell (1797–1875)
Mechanical philosophy located nature in mathemati- and the German geographer Alexander Von Humboldt
cally based laws that play out in the physical world, in (1769–1859)—began a discovery process that swept
which the Earth can be understood through “a series of away the singular chain and the stable taxonomy (scien-
deductions from abstract premises” with little considera- tific classification) and led to questions about the role of
tion for final causes and less interest in the abundance of a designing deity. In their footsteps walked the English
life (Glacken 1967, 406). Although Linnaeus partici- naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882), who discovered
pated in the urge to render a nature ordered by abstract a basic key to understanding the history of nature. Ben-
laws, he also inspired the rise of natural history by giv- efiting from Lyell’s understanding of the age of the Earth’s
ing naturalists tools to organize their botanical discov- crust and its history of sometimes-violent change and
eries. The obsession with documenting and organizing from Humboldt’s discoveries of geographical diversity
the abundance of life derives as well from a group of and mutual dependency in plant groupings, Darwin
writers, many of them influenced by Linnaeus, who sailed to the New World, arriving in 1835 at the Gala-
returned to classical ideas of organic nature, argued for pagos Islands, an isolated archipelago off the coast of
final causes and design in nature, and sought them in Ecuador in South America. The creatures that he saw
observations of the sensory world.The Englishman John there were very like and yet very different from South
Ray (1627–1705), the leading natural theologian, in his American species. His observations led him to develop
The Wisdom of God in the Works of Creation (1691) the theory that isolation, chance migration, and fit with a
emphasized the interrelatedness of animals, plants, and specific environment lead to the evolution of new species.
habitats as evidence of a wise creator. Naturalists who The English economist Thomas Malthus’s (1766–
came later continued to investigate the intricacies of 1834) An Essay on the Principle of Population gave Dar-
relationships in nature even as they moved away from win the mechanism for evolution: the elimination of the
the argument from design. weak and the survival of the fit. Darwin called this mech-
One of the most persistent characteristics of nature anism “natural selection.” When he published On the Ori-
throughout the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries was the gin of Species in 1859, the objectified view of material
law of subordination. Lovejoy, in his The Great Chain of life of the mechanical philosophers, as well as the eternally