Kant’s Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy

INTRODUCTION

1. Schiller’s description of the ideal society, for example, was of a political organization “which is formed by itself and for itself . . . insofar as the parts have been severally attuned to the idea of the whole,” a state where “every individual enjoyed an independent existence, but could, when need arose, grow into the whole organism,” On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Reginald Snell (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004), 33, 40. Herder was equally indebted to organic models: “Thus, as natural history can only observe a plant completely if it knows how it goes from seed, bud, bloom to decay, so would Greek history be for us such a plant.” “General Reflections on the History of Greece,” in Herder, On World History: An Anthology, ed. Hans Alder, trans. Ernest Menze (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), 288. Schlegel was also indebted to such models when arguing, for example, that “just as the organic seed [Keim]—thanks to the constant development [Evolution] of the formative drive [Bildungstrieb]—completes its cycle, grows vigorously, blossoms copiously, matures quickly, and wilts suddenly: so it is with every type of poetry, every age, every school of poetry.” On the Study of Greek Poetry, trans. Stuart Barnett (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), 65. And finally, in a vein similar to Schiller’s, there is of course Kant’s own remark on the body politic as analogous to the natural purposiveness of the organism. For in what seems to have been an allusion to the American Revolution, Kant wrote that “in speaking of the complete transformation of a large people into a state, which took place recently, the word organization was frequently and very aptly applied to the establishment of legal authorities, etc., and even to the entire body politic. For each member in such a whole should indeed be not merely a means but also a purpose; and while each member contributes to making the whole possible, the idea of that whole should in turn determine the member’s position and function.” Critique of Judgment, 5:375. All citations from Kant will henceforth be to Kants gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1902–), except references to the Critique of Pure Reason, which will follow standard citation practice in referring to the A edition of 1781 and the B edition of 1787 when providing academy-edition page numbers.

2. Thomas Ramsay in praise of the naturalist Thomas Pennant, “To the Lovers of Natural History,” Scots Magazine 34 (1774): 174.

3. The terms “preexistence” and “preformation” are frequently used interchangeably by commentators to capture the difference between a description of embryological formation where the problem of form is “solved” and a description, as in the case of epigenesis, where it is not. Jacques Roger, and Peter Bowler after him, have argued for the need to clearly distinguish between these terms. “Preexistence,” as Roger sees it, should strictly refer to those theories proposing that all individual embryos were made by God at the moment of creation, so that all embryos thereby “preexist” their moment of specific temporal development. Malebranche, the earliest proponent of this view, argued that all future generations of the human race existed as fully formed miniscule beings whose embryological development was nothing more—so far as form was concerned—than their enlargement. Because Malebranche believed that future generations were contained in the sexual reservoirs of current ones, his position is referred to as embôitement, the “Russian doll” theory, “encasement theory,” and even “individual preformation.” Initially, these miniscule “homunculi” were thought to be contained in the female, a position called “ovism”; once Leeuwenhoek discovered what he called “spermatic animalcules” under the microscope in 1674, the testes were thought instead to be the storage site, a determination that was referred to as “spermism.” As positions like Malebranche’s began to suffer under the pressure of discoveries such as Trembley’s polyp, preexistence theories were adjusted until they became by the mid-eighteenth century, with Bonnet, arguments for the preexistence of only preformed germs for the species lines. “Preformation,” according to Roger’s distinction, should be reserved for a position like Buffon’s. In this case, the parts of the embryo are formed by the parents (who contain molds for the parts, and whose molds were originally made for the species by God), with embryological development thus akin to the assembly of preformed parts. This account was disdained by preexistence theorists as affording too much power to nature, for even granting nature the capacity for the assembly of premade parts—Buffon thought this capacity was due to a “penetrating force”—was suspicious. Buffon insisted that generation was a mechanical process and has been since identified as a “mechanical epigenesist.” The position that would be cautiously endorsed by Kant, proposed the nonmechanical (i.e., organic) epigenesis of individuals according to an internalized plan for their species as a whole, a plan that was therefore only “generic” for the species line. On the argument for severing preexistence and preformation, see Jacques Roger, The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century French Thought, trans. Robert Ellrich (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 259–260; and Peter J. Bowler, “Preexistence and Preformation in the Seventeenth Century: A Brief Analysis,” Journal of the History of Biology 4 (1971): 221–244. Against this distinction, see J. S. Wilkie, “Preformation and Epigenesis: A New Historical Treatment,” History of Science 6 (1967): 138–150.

4. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. A. L. Peck (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 733b23–735a29. Anthony Preus explicitly identifies Aristotle’s account with epigenesis when discussing these passages. Science and Philosophy in Aristotle’s Biological Works (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1975), 66–69, 285n6.

5. William Harvey, Disputations Touching the Generation of Animals (1651), trans. Gweneth Witteridge (Oxford: Blackwell Scientific, 1981). For Aristotle’s influence on Harvey see James Lennox, “The Comparative Study of Animal Development: William Harvey’s Aristotelianism,” in The Problem of Animal Generation in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Justin E. H. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 21–46.

6. Caspar Friedrich Wolff, Theoria generationis (1759) and Theorie von der Generation in zwo Abhandlungen erklärt und beweisen (1764), facsimile reprints (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1966). See Wolff (1759), §§ 43–53, §168, §242 and (1764), 160. The most thorough discussion of Wolff remains Shirley Roe’s Matter, Life, and Generation: Eighteenth-Century Embryology and the Haller-Wolff Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Karen Detlefsen challenges some of Roe’s conclusions in “Explanation and Demonstration in the Haller-Wolff Debate,” in Smith, Problem of Animal Generation in Early Modern Philosophy, 235–261.

7. Albrecht von Haller, “Reflections on the Theory of Generation of Mr. Buffon,” in From Natural History to the History of Nature: Readings from Buffon and His Critics, ed. and trans. Phillip Sloan and John Lyon (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 322.

8. Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755), 1:215–368.

9. The Only Possible Basis for a Demonstration of the Existence of God (1763), 2:63–164.

10. As Kant put the point three years later, “I am convinced that Stahl, who is disposed to explain animal processes in organic terms, was frequently closer to the truth than Hoffman or Boerhaave, to name but a few. These latter, ignoring immaterial forces, adhere to mechanical causes.” Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics (1766), 2:331. The spirit of Kant’s compromise between preformed species lines and organically generated individuals can easily be compared to Ernst Mayr’s own summary of the way genes work. As Mayr described it in 1997, “The genotype is the preformed element. But by directing the epigenetic development of the seemingly formless mass of the egg, it also played the role of the vis essentialis of epigenesis. . . . [The concept of a genetic program] was thus, in a way, a synthesis of epigenesis and preformation. The process of development, the unfolding phenotype, is epigenetic. However, development is also preformationist because the zygote contains an inherited genetic program that largely determines the phenotype.” This Is Biology: The Science of the Living World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 157–158. Mayr’s formulation is nicely critiqued by Jason Robert, but this is a critique that Kant’s sense of the metaphysical epigenesis of reason ultimately avoids given its affinity with Robert’s understanding of epigenesis as entailing emergent properties. See Robert, Embryology, Epigenesis, and Evolution: Taking Development Seriously (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 38–41.

11. Critique of Judgment (1790), 5:165–486.

12. Kant is explicit regarding the spontaneous generation or “self-birth” (Selbstgebärung) of reason (A765/B793; cf. 18:273–275), but Harvey’s model must be inferred when considering the relationship between the various faculties and apperception or reason as their undifferentiated ground (e.g., A119, B150–154).

13. Darwin famously described his response to reading the economist Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) when developing the theory of natural selection with the comment, “Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work.” The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–1882, with Original Omissions Restored, ed. Nora Barlow (London: Collins, 1958), 120. For Kant’s use of epigenesis in this specific sense, see also 17:554, 18:8, 18:12, 18:273–275, B167. Compared to many of the issues under discussion in Kant scholarship, there has not been a great deal of work on Kant’s appeal to epigenesis in connection with his account of reason; indeed the number of commentators can be counted on two hands. The best short essays remain Günter Zöller’s “Kant on the Generation of Metaphysical Knowledge,” in Kant: Analysen-Probleme-Kritik, ed. H. Oberer and G. Seel (Wurzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 1988): 71–90; and Claude Piché’s “The Precritical Use of the Metaphor of Epigenesis,” in New Essays on the Precritical Kant, ed. Tom Rockmore (New York: Humanity Books, 2001), 182–200. Similarly significant for their attention to the distinctive philosophical requirements of the transcendental account are Hans Ingensiep’s “Die biologischen Analogien und die enkenntnistheoretischen Alternativen in Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft B §27,” Kant-Studien 85, no. 4 (1994): 381–393; and Brandon W. Shaw’s “Function and Epigenesis in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason” (master’s thesis, University of Georgia, 2003). The most thorough discussion is provided by Thomas Haffner in “Die Epigenesisanalogie in Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft” (Ph.D. diss., Universität des Saarlandes, 1997). An older essay concentrating mainly on an explanation of the biological vocabulary used by Kant in the B deduction is provided by J. Wubnig, “The Epigenesis of Pure Reason: A Note on the Critique of Pure Reason, B, sec. 27, 165–168,” Kant-Studien 60, no. 2 (1969): 147–152. A. C. Genova discusses the epigenesis of reason in the B deduction but primarily through the lens of Kant’s later remarks regarding the epigenesis of organisms in the Critique of Judgment. See “Kant’s Epigenesis of Pure Reason,” Kant-Studien 65, no. 3 (1974): 259–273. The assumption that Kant’s attitude toward epigenesis in biological organisms is the key to interpreting his account of the epigenesis of reason, is made by the majority of commentators, including Phillip Sloan’s influential essay, “Preforming the Categories: Eighteenth-Century Generation Theory and the Biological Roots of Kant’s A Priori,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 40 (2002): 229–253; and John Zammito’s several discussions indebted to Sloan’s interpretation on this point, including most notably “‘This Inscrutable Principle of an Original Organization’: Epigenesis and ‘Looseness of Fit’ in Kant’s Philosophy of Science,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 34 (2003): 73–109. Ingensiep’s response to the Sloan-Zammito interpretation is worth noting: “Organism, Epigenesis, and Life in Kant’s Thinking,” Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology 11 (2006): esp. 70–73. Marcel Quarfood reaches different conclusions than Sloan and Zammito regarding Kant’s supposed attitude toward preformation, but he follows the approach starting with Kant’s biological discussions when considering the epigenesis of reason. See his Transcendental Idealism and the Organism: Essays on Kant (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 2004). This is also the case in Helmut Müller-Sievers’s discussion of Kant in Self-Generation: Biology, Philosophy, and Literature around 1800 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); and in François Duchesneau’s “Épigenèse de la Raison pure et analogies biologiques,” in Kant Actuel: Homage à Pierre Laberge, ed. F. Duchesneau, G. Lafrance, and C. Piché (Montreal: Bellarmine, 2000): 233–256.

The difficulty with interpretations of the epigenesis of reason that begin with, or are at least oriented by, Kant’s comments on biological generation is twofold. First, inadequate attention is typically given to the difference in status between transcendental and natural considerations, and thus to the specter of subreption regarding the latter. Second, the epistemic context of Kant’s metaphysical appeal to the epigenesis of reason is frequently overlooked; that is, Kant’s attempt to ground necessity in the face of Hume’s challenge, on the one hand, and to locate the origin of knowledge in neither Locke’s empiricism nor the innatism of Leibniz and Crusius, on the other. Ultimately Kant was a metaphysician with respect to reason, and because of this he was able to think about reason as something self-born even though he would have vigorously rejected the suggestion that he was thereby naturalizing reason in a vein similar (as he would have seen it) to the theory proposed by J. N. Tetens.

14. 17:736; cf. 28:231, 235, and 277, though this use is distinct from Kant’s later identification of the transcendental imagination as a more fundamental ground of connection (23:18–20).

15. Kant later describes with approval Blumenbach’s notion of a “formative impulse” (Bildungstrieb) so far as it refers to the capacity matter has for organization in the case of an organism (5:424). The formative impulse thus mirrors, as Kant interpreted it, the predisposition or aptitude of the mind for form.

16. In Bonnet’s words, “I understand in general by the word germ every preordination, every preformation of parts capable by itself of determining the existence of a plant or of an animal.” The Contemplation of Nature (1764), quoted by Bentley Glass in “Heredity and Variation in the Eighteenth Century Concept of the Species,” in Forerunners of Darwin, 1745–1859, ed. Bentley Glass, Owsei Temkin, and William L. Strauss (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1968), 167. Elizabeth Gasking offers a careful overview of Bonnet’s views in Investigations into Generation, 1651–1828 (London: Hutchinson, 1967), 117–129. For a recent reappraisal of Leibniz’s influence on Bonnet’s mature views, see François Duchesneau, “Charles Bonnet’s Neo-Leibnizian Theory of Organic Bodies,” in Smith, Problem of Animal Generation in Early Modern Philosophy, 285–314. While Bonnet was rightly famous for this “solution” to the problem of animal regeneration for preexistence theories, in his first essay on race Kant was more directly engaged with the work of Maupertuis and Buffon, each of whom also appealed to germs and dispositions in their discussion of the issues.

17. This term is used in current accounts of embryological development so far as the “epigenetic” response to environmental conditions understands actual ontogenesis as something that cannot be reduced to the simple unfolding of a genetic program. Emergent properties in this instance are “inexplicable from lower (or higher) hierarchical levels; for instance, cells’ collective behavior during morphogenesis cannot be explained (or predicted) by examining the behavior of individual cells prior to cell division, differentiation, or (in animals) condensation—let alone by examining DNA sequences. This is because the formation of cell condensations is contingent not on genetic directives but rather on the spatiotemporal state of the organism and its component parts at multiple levels” (Robert, Embryology, Epigenesis, and Evolution, 97). A broad and relatively nontechnical recent assessment of emergent properties at work in cellular functioning is offered by Steve Talbott, “Getting Over the Code Delusion,” New Atlantis 28 (2010): 3–27. Emergent properties in these discussions should not be confused with descriptions, for example, of appeals to “emergent vital forces” in late eighteenth-century German biology. In that context vital forces were understood to emerge from chemical-physical forces acting on inorganic matter, and the question of a subsequently directed formation at the hands of these vital forces was either left open—as in the case of Caspar Wolff’s vis essentialis—or included, as in Blumenbach’s notion of the Bildungstrieb. A careful reconstruction of Wolff’s position on this point is in François Duchesneau, “‘Essential Force’ and ‘Formative Force’: Models for Epigenesis in the Eighteenth Century,” in Self-Organization and Emergence in Life Sciences, ed. B. Feltz, M. Crommelinck, and P. Goujon (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 171–186, esp. 173–175. Timothy Lenoir nicely describes Blumenbach’s position, according to which “the Bildungstrieb was not a blind mechanical force of expansion which produced structure by being opposed in some way; it was not a chemical force of ‘fermentation,’ nor was it a soul superimposed on matter. Rather the Bildungstrieb was conceived as a teleological agent which had its antecedents ultimately in the inorganic realm but which was an emergent vital force.” “Kant, Blumenbach, and Vital Materialism in German Biology,” Isis 71 (1980): 83.

18. Leibniz describes this kind of special affinity in the New Essays on Human Understanding (1705), ed. and trans. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 80. Hume, on Kant’s reading, “confounds a principle of affinity, which has its seat in the understanding and affirms necessary connection, with a rule of association, which exists only in the imitative faculty of imagination, and which can exhibit only contingent, not objective, connections” (A766/B794, cf. 4:259). See Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740), ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. ed., ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 504n71.

19. The “system of evolution” refers in this case to preexistence theory, specifically the encasement or “embôitement” model of generation. For more discussion of this see n. 3.

20. An archaeology of nature attempting to link species, while not inconsistent as a judgment of reason, has no empirical evidence and therefore amounts to what Kant describes as a “daring adventure of reason” (5:419n1). Judgment regarding the unity of humanity as a result of their monogenesis has at least the evidence of interfertility in its support.

21. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Fortunate Encounter” (1794), in Scientific Studies, trans. and ed. Douglas Miller, vol. 12 of Goethe’s Collected Works (New York: Suhrkamp, 1983), 21. Cf. “What I had undertaken to do was nothing less than to present to the physical eye, step by step, a detailed, graphic, orderly version of what I had previously presented to the inner eye conceptually and in words alone, and to demonstrate to the exterior senses that the seed of this concept might easily and happily develop into a botanical tree of knowledge whose branches might shade the entire world.” “Later Studies and Collections” (1817), in Goethe’s Botanical Writings, trans. and ed. Bertha Mueller (Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow, 1952), 97. Robert J. Richards highlights the shift from a heuristic to a constitutive use of Kant’s approach to nature in “Kant and Blumenbach on the Bildungstrieb: A Historical Misunderstanding,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Science 31 (2000): 11–32. See also Richards’s The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), chap. 5., 216–237.

22. “This resemblance is often expressed by the term ‘unity of type’: or by saying that the several parts and organs in the different species of the class are homologous. The whole subject is included under the general name of Morphology. This is the most interesting department of natural history, and may be said to be its very soul.” Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859) (London: Penguin Books, 1968), 415.

CHAPTER ONE

23. See, for example, “De Anima,” 415b, 9–30, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). For some discussion of the role played by metaphysics for Aristotle’s theory of sexual reproduction, see J. M. Cooper, “Metaphysics in Aristotle’s Embryology,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 214 (1988): 14–41; A. Code, “Soul as Efficient Cause in Aristotle’s Embryology,” Philosophical Topics 15 (1986): 51–60; and D. Henry, “Understanding Aristotle’s Reproductive Hylomorphism,” Apeiron: A Journal of Ancient Philosophy and Science 39 (2006): 269–300. While the situation is more complicated when explaining the spontaneous generation of lower animals, the metaphysical models are still presupposed, and in fact synonymy is preserved. A helpful discussion of this is in D. Henry, “Themistius and Spontaneous Generation in Aristotle’s Metaphysics,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 24 (2003): 183–208.

24. In a typical formulation Jean Calvin declares that “concerning inanimate objects, we ought to hold that, although each one has by nature been endowed with its own property, yet it does not exercise its own power except insofar as it is directed by God’s ever-present hand. These are, thus, nothing but instruments to which God continually imparts as much effectiveness as he wills, and according to his own purpose bends and turns them to either one action or another.” Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. J. McNeil, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), bk. 1, chap. 16, sect. 2. A well-researched discussion of the impact of Reformation theology on seventeenth-century mechanical philosophy is Gary B. Deason’s “Reformation Theology and the Mechanistic Conception of Nature,” in God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science, ed. David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986): 167–191. A clear account of Boyle’s work to make sense of matter in motion within the constraints set by reformers is in Peter Anstey’s The Philosophy of Robert Boyle (New York: Routledge, 2000), esp. 164ff.

25. The classic example of this is Borelli’s De motu animalium (1680–1681), but Descartes’s Treatise on Man serves just as well. A survey of contributors to the rise in mechanist anatomy is in R. S. Westfall’s “Biology and the Mechanical Philosophy,” in The Construction of Modern Science: Mechanisms and Mechanics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977): 82–104.

26. This formative work on the part of the soul is distinct from the role played by matter with respect to individuation. On the difference see G. E. R. Lloyd, “Aristotle’s Principle of Individuation,” Mind 79 (1970): 510–529.

27. “Parts of Animals,” 643b27f., in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Barnes. See also G. E. R. Lloyd’s “The Development of Aristotle’s Theory of the Classification of Animals,” Phronesis 6 (1961): 59–81. Aristotle’s caution was overlooked in the face of the overwhelming practical needs facing taxonomists in the sixteenth century. The most important figure in this history was Andreas Cesalpino. Cesalpino was determined to develop botany as a proper science, but to do so he had to retrieve it from the province of medical gardeners and their chaotic classification schemes within the many materia medica being produced at the time. In contrast to these sorts of practical aims regarding the development of medicinal recipes, Cesalpino’s interests were primarily theoretical, and he saw the development of a universal classification system to be the necessary basis for any true botanical science. Taking his lead from Aristotle, Cesalpino argued that reproduction was the essential function of a plant and that a natural system of division could therefore be established according to the parts of fructification as the most essential features of a plant. As he put it, “From the means of producing fruits many genera of plants can be distinguished. Indeed, in no other structures has nature formed such a multiplicity and distinction of organs as are seen in the fruits. . . . Therefore we shall try to investigate the genera of plants by means of the unique fructifying characters which have been provided us by the Grace of God, both in the trees and shrubs, and in other plants.” De plantis libri XVI (Florence, 1583), bk. I, 28. Phillip R. Sloan emphasizes Cesalpino’s incorporation of Aristotle in “John Locke, John Ray, and the Problem of the Natural System,” Journal of the History of Biology 5 (1972): 1–53, esp. 9–13. For further discussion of Cesalpino see Julius von Sachs’s discussion in his History of Botany (1530–1860), trans. Henry Garnsey (Oxford: Clarendon, 1906), 37–66; and A. G. Morton’s History of Botanical Science: An Account of the Development of Botany from Ancient Times to the Present Day (London: Academic, 1981), 128–148.

28. “The Origin of Forms and Qualities According to the Corpuscular Philosophy,” in Selected Philosophical Papers of Robert Boyle, ed. M. A. Stewart (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), 49ff. For a lengthier discussion see Boyle’s 1675 essay, “Of the Imperfection of the Chemists’ Doctrine of Qualities,” ibid., 120–137.

29. On this point Boyle’s target was the Aristotelians’ reliance on a substantial form to provide unity to matter and, in particular, Daniel Sennert’s hybrid of corpuscular-Aristotelianism. See William Newman, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Boyle’s language of matter’s convention is meant, therefore, to replace the metaphysical concepts of both substance and form, arguing, moreover, that discussions of generation, corruption, and alteration can be adequately redescribed in terms of matter’s convention, dissolution, and transposition resulting from local motion. See Boyle’s “The Origin of Forms and Qualities According to the Corpuscular Philosophy,” in Selected Philosophical Papers,, 44. The convention or “stamp” of corpuscles can thus explain the relatively stable properties demonstrated by metals, for example, without compromising the basic ontology regarding matter’s essential plasticity: “For such a convention of accidents is sufficient to perform the offices that are necessarily required in what men call a form since it makes the body such as it is, making it appertain to this or that determinate species of bodies, and discriminating it from all other species of bodies whatsoever.” Ibid., 40. On this see also Dennis Des Chene, “From Natural Philosophy to Natural Science,” in The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Donald Rutherford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006): 67–94, 79.

30. Thus despite the fact that Boyle was the first person to develop chemical identification tests, for example, the ontological theory guiding Boyle’s investigations meant that he was unable to discern their true significance for the development of a system of classification. See Richard S. Westfall’s discussion in Construction of Modern Science, 79: “Again [Boyle’s] mechanical philosophy appears to have operated to thwart the most promising aspect of his chemistry.” It should be noted that recent work on Boyle’s chemistry has suggested, against a long-standing tradition in line with Westfall’s reading, that interpretation of Boyle’s corpuscular ontology cannot simply understand it according to its mechanical principles but should in fact include the integration of semina rerum—particles endowed with different degrees of formative force and therefore not substantially identical—into corpuscular philosophy by the mid-1750s. See especially Antonio Clericuzio’s discussion of Boyle in his Elements, Principles, and Corpuscles: A Study of Atomism and Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000). A reconsideration of “inert matter” can also be found in Simon Schaffer, “Godly Men and the Mechanical Philosophers: Souls and Spirits in Restoration Natural Philosophy,” Science in Context 1 (1987): 55–85; and John Henry, “Occult Qualities and the Experimental Philosophy: Active Principles in Pre-Newtonian Matter Theory,” History of Science 24 (1986): 335–381.

31. “The Origin of Forms and Qualities According to the Corpuscular Philosophy,” in Selected Philosophical Papers, 70.

32. “Considerations and Experiments, Touching the Origin of Qualities and Forms. The Historical Part,” in The Works of Robert Boyle, ed. Michael Hunter and Edward B. Davis, 14 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999), 5:383–384.

33. Boyle’s recourse to a physical yet “plastick” principle when explaining generation demonstrates the genuine difficulties faced by midcentury theorists in accounting for biological processes. As Peter Anstey describes Boyle’s position, “Study of Boyle’s theory of seminal principles reveals a Boyle who is in tension, not a Boyle who abandons the corpuscular hypothesis when intruding on the biological domain and not a Boyle who is unaware of the need to reach beyond the sparse ontology of mechanical affections of matter. Boyle was unable to resolve this dilemma in his natural philosophy and as interpreters we should not do it for him.” “Boyle on Seminal Principles,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 33 (2002): 628.

34. “Considerations and Experiments,” 384. Boyle’s description of formative power in terms of a motion for fitting together particles is perhaps not so far from Descartes’s discussion of bodily processes in his Treatise on Man; generation, for Descartes, is due to motion yielded by the heat of fermentation (like “yeast”), and this fermented mixing of the seminal fluids from the two sexes moves the individual particles into the form required to become parts of the body. Description of the Human Body, AT 253. Further discussion is in Vincent Aucante, “Descartes’s Experimental Method and the Generation of Animals,” in The Problem of Animal Generation in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Justin H. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006): 65–79. The critical role played by motion and heat for Descartes and Boyle reveals the seventeenth century’s pervasive indebtedness to Aristotelian models. See the helpful discussion of Aristotle’s theories and influence in Remke Kruk, “A Frothy Bubble: Spontaneous Generation in the Medieval Islamic Tradition,” Journal of Semitic Studies 35 (1990): 265–282, esp. n. 1.

35. See J. W. Gough, “John Locke’s Herbarium,” Bodleian Library Record 7 (1962–1967): 42–46; Peter Anstey and Stephen Harris, “Locke and Botany,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Science 37 (2006): 151–171; G. G. Meynell, “A Database for John Locke’s Medical Notebooks,” Medical History 42 (1997): 473–486; J. R. Milton, “Locke, Medicine, and the Mechanical Philosophy,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 9 (2001): 221–243; and Guy Meynell, “Locke as a Pupil of Peter Stahl,” Locke Studies 1 (2001): 221–227.

36. Locke’s “Morbus” entry is reproduced in Jonathan Walmsley’s “Morbus—Locke’s Early Essay on Disease,” Early Science and Medicine 5 (2000): 391–393; all citations are from p. 392, English modernized. Walmsley argues for the influence had by Van Helmont’s philosophy on Locke’s position here in contradistinction to Boyle’s. See also J. R. Milton’s discussion of Locke and Van Helmont in this context, “Locke, Medicine, and the Mechanical Philosophy,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 9 (2001): 221–243. Walmsley’s view is contested by Peter Anstey and subsequently rebutted by Walmsley. See Peter Anstey’s “Robert Boyle and Locke’s ‘Morbus’ Entry: A Reply to J. C. Walmsley,” Early Science and Medicine 7 (2002): 358–377 and Jonathan Walmsley’s “Morbus, Locke and Boyle: A Response to Peter Anstey,” Early Science and Medicine 7 (2002): 378–397.

37. Locke makes use of neither “metamorphosis” nor “epigenesis” to describe the chicken’s embryonic change from liquid to hard parts. Although Locke had carefully worked through Harvey’s De generatione, taking care to note both Harvey’s distinction between “Metamorphosis” and “Epigenesis” and his discussion of the efficient cause of generation (see Locke’s medical school notebook entries from 1659–1660, Bodleian Library MS Locke fol. 14, p. 1; fol. 20, pp. 1–2, 4–5), it is not clear that Locke has this model in mind or even, pace Walmsley, is instead contrasting the Helmontian conception of a guiding “archeus” to Boyle’s conception of motion guiding fitted particles of matter into the chick. J. R. Milton takes “Morbus” to represent an early eclecticism on Locke’s part. See “Locke, Medicine, and the Mechanical Philosophy,” 239.

38. In Milton, “Morbus—Locke’s Early Essay on Disease,” 392, English modernized.

39. Thomas Sydenham, preface to Observationes Medicae, trans. in G. G. Meynell, “Locke and the Preface to Sydenham’s Observationes Medicae,” Medical History 50 (2006): 106.

40. In “The Origin of Forms and Qualities According to the Corpuscular Philosophy” Boyle also appeals to mistletoe, in this case as an example against the supposed existence of a vegetative soul guiding the plant. Selected Philosophical Papers, 66.

41. Authorship of Sydenham’s preface has been attributed to Sydenham, to Locke, and to both together. See Guy Meynell’s “Locke and the Preface to Sydenham’s Observationes Medicae,” Medical History (2006): 93–110; and Milton, “Locke, Medicine, and the Mechanical Philosophy,” esp. 229n42.

42. One complaint in the preface already speaks to the problem of classification so far as the materia medica—compendiums of medicinal recipes—are said to lack utility because of the inconsistent theories of symptoms and disease guiding their organization. See Meynell, “Locke and the Preface to Sydenham’s Observationes Medicae,” 103.

43. Locke to Dr. Thomas Molyneux, January 20, 1692, in Dr. Thomas Sydenham (1624–1689) by Kenneth Dewhurst (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 179–180.

44. Elements of Natural Philosophy, in The Works of John Locke, 12th ed., (London: C. and J. Rivington, 1824), 3:319.

45. A large piece of Locke’s second reply to Stillingfleet takes up the latter’s use of Leeuwenhoek’s discovery when discussing resurrection. Locke argues that while seeds are responsible for both the production of individuals and the continuation of species, there can be no sense to the suggestion that the preformed individual in embryo is materially identical to the adult. “Locke’s Reply to the Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to his Second Letter,” in Works of John Locke, 4:319). Locke’s response flows directly from his discussion of identity added to the second edition of the Essay: it is the “organization of life in several successively fleeting particles of matter united to it” that makes for continued identity; to suppose that it were matter alone would make it hard “to make an embryo, one of years, mad, and sober, the same man”. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Niddich (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 2.27.3, 2.27.6. Although it has been conventional in Locke studies to cite the Essay’s book, chapter, and section divisions as, for example, E II. xxvi. 2, I will be following more recent trends in simply using Arabic numerals separated by periods to indicate the divisions.

46. Bodleian Library MS Locke fol. 2, 357–358.

47. J. W. Gough details the contents of Locke’s Herbarium in “John Locke’s Herbarium,” 42–46. For an extensive discussion of the circumstances surrounding Locke’s collection practices and his creation of the Herbarium, see Anstey and Harris, “Locke and Botany.”

48. For example, “I think, there is scarce any one will allow this upright figure, so well known, to be the essential difference of the Species Man; and yet how far Men determine of the sorts of Animals, rather by their Shape, than Descent, is very visible; since it has been more than once debated, whether several human Foetus should be preserved, or received to Baptism, or no, only because of the difference of their outward Configuration, from the ordinary Make of Children, without knowing whether they were not as capable of Reason, as Infants cast in another Mould” (3.6.26).

49. See Locke’s entry on “Species” from 1677: “in vegetables we find that several sorts come from the seeds of one and the same individual as much different species as those that are allowed to be so by philosophers.” Locke’s journal entry from November 19, 1677, in An Early Draft of Locke’s Essay, Together with Excerpts from His Journals, ed. by R. I. Aaron and J. Gibb (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), 99.

50. It must be said that Locke followed this description of the life of plants with an account favorably comparing the workings of animal parts to the functioning of a clock. One can only speculate as to the grounds for his greater openness to living aspects of botanical processes, but his own experience with these had at least prepared him to be ready for surprises when it came to vegetable life.

51. While imperceptible corpuscles are assumed to bear a causal relationship to the observed properties of any given thing, there is no sense in which these can be known, for not only are they insensible but our constitution prevents us from experiencing unsorted aggregates. We appreciate roses, for example, for their fragrance and color and handle them gingerly both for fear of thorns and in deference to the delicacy of their petals; the experience of a rose, however, is in no way akin to that of a body conceived as a collection of corpuscles because the latter describes an experience one could never actually have. Locke does not seem to have perceived any tension between his appeal to an unknowable real essence and his account of the cognitive means by which experience was in fact constructed. But the relationship between these two views explains, I think, the appearance of apparent contradictions between claims, for example, that nature has a real constitution, and that the very notion of an internal constitution is incoherent insofar as it requires criteria for determining it.

52. Despite his talk of abstraction and archetypes, Locke was not an idealist, and his materialist commitments were typically on view in such discussions. That aside, this kind of tension between one’s experience of real individuals and the simultaneous acknowledgment of the artificial nature of species categories, continues to plague discussions in natural history to this day.

53. Locke to William Molyneux, January 20, 1693, in The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E. S. De Beer (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979) 4:626.

54. Cf. “Whereby it is plain, that Men follow not exactly the Patterns set them by Nature, when they make their general Ideas of substances; since there is no Body [such as referred to by “Metal”] to be found, which has barely Malleableness and Fusibility in it, without other qualities as inseparable as those. But Men, in making their general Ideas, seeking more the convenience of Language and quick dispatch, by short and comprehensive signs, than the true and precise Nature of Things, as they exist, have, in the framing their abstract Ideas, chiefly pursued that end, which was, to be furnished with store of general, and variously comprehensive Names (3.6.31). Locke’s nominalism is at its most pronounced with respect to non-living substances so far as these seem to succumb to the demands of corpuscular ontology. See especially Locke’s journal entry on “Species,” September 19, 1676, in An Early Draft of Locke’s Essay, 83.

55. Lisa Downing makes the point as well, arguing, for example, that an “unsorted particular” could not count as a real essence for Locke, “since no distinction between essential and accidental properties is possible without reference to a kind.” “Locke’s Ontology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding ed. Lex Newman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Anstey and Harris, by contrast, take Locke’s active involvement in botanical matters to raise important questions against the presumption that Locke was a species nominalist: “Locke’s botanical activities link him closely with essentialist classificatory projects, whilst his interpreters, using the Essay as their entry point into Locke’s views on species, seem uniformly to have taken him to be, if not a species nominalist, then at least highly skeptical of the essentialist program in biological classification in general.” “Locke and Botany,” 167. While they take the extended discussions of species in book 3 of the Essay to represent rather a “moderate conventionalism” (168), for the reasons argued above I agree with the stronger reading of Locke’s nominalism, and I take it to be motivated in part as a result of precisely those empirical investigations Anstey and Harris see in their favor.

56. Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed. R. H. Quick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902), §192, 168. Reading this passage, G. A. J. Rogers concludes that “Locke’s ontology, then, allowed room for spirits, and therefore appears to allow for the possibility of the spirits of the natural magicians,” and he suggests, therefore, that “Locke’s rejection of the possibility of knowledge of the essences of substances—material or spiritual—did not commit him either to the rejection of an ontology which could include active spirits, or, on the other side, to one that excluded the possible truth of Epicurean Atomism.” Locke’s Enlightenment: Aspects of the Origin, Nature and Impact of his Philosophy (Hildesheim: G. Olms Verlag, 1998), 185–186.

57. A very clear account of Leeuwenhoek’s discovery and subsequent difficulties in explaining the precise manner by which the spermatic “animalcules” became active only at the age of sexual maturity and the subsequent physical process by which they accrued matter is detailed in Edward G. Ruestow, “Images and Ideas: Leeuwenhoek’s Perception of the Spermatozoa,” Journal of the History of Biology 16 (1983): 185–224.

58. While Leibniz’s system would eventually furnish some theoretical foundations for discoveries made by the microscopists, as Shirley Roe rightly observes, “The fact that [Swammerdam] and Malpighi’s observations were immediately taken up by those making preformationist claims indicates that the concept of preexistence was not one that grew out of observational evidence alone. It is clear, as several scholars have pointed out, that preformation through preexistence was a theory that responded more to philosophical than to observational needs.” In Shirley Roe, Matter, Life, and Generation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 7. Roe offers a brief overview of developments in generation theory from Harvey’s epigenetic account to the various camps—ovism, animalculism, and Perrault’s germ theory—within preexistence theory, 1–20. Far more detailed discussions can be found in the opening chapters of Elizabeth Gasking’s Investigations into Generation, 1651–1828 (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1967), and in Jacques Roger’s The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century French Thought, translated by Robert Ellrich (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), especially 205–369.

59. As Leibniz puts it in the Principles of Nature and Grace based on Reason (1714), “Each monad, together with a particular body, makes up a living substance. Thus, there is not only life everywhere, joined to limbs or organs, but there are also infinite degrees of life in the monads, some dominating more or less over others.” In Philosophical Essays, ed. and trans. R. Ariew and D. Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 208. The best treatment of Leibniz in this context is Justin E. H. Smith’s Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

60. Ibid., 222.

61. A New System of the Nature and Communication of Substances, and of the Union of the Soul and Body (1695), in Philosophical Essays, 139. “Only metaphysical points or points of substance (constituted by forms or souls) are exact and real,” Leibniz continued, “and without them there would be nothing real, since without true unities there would be no multitude” or individuation at all. Ibid., 142. See also Discourse on Metaphysics (1686), ibid., 44.

62. Leibniz went so far in his support for the microscopists as to include a call for their support in his essay on justice. See his Reflections on the Common Concept of Justice (1702), in Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. and trans. L. Loemker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 2:532.

63. Leibniz to Arnauld, October 9, 1687, ibid., 1:532.

64. Leibniz to Louis Bourguet, August 5, 1715, ibid., 2:1079.

65. Leibniz to Arnauld, October 9, 1687, ibid., 1:531. In 1687 part of Leibniz’s concern, as the letter continues, is whether the individual monads make up the “organic machine.” Smith carefully distinguishes the strands of Leibniz’s approach to living beings in terms of their physical, organic, and metaphysical aspects in Divine Machines, 97–123.

66. In the New System Leibniz summarizes his argument for this. See Philosophical Essays, 140–141.

67. Leibniz considered the organized soul-body complex of an animal to operate teleologically at the metaphysical level and mechanically at the physical level (though this did not mean that he took derivative mechanical forces to be less purposive). His descriptions of the organic machine thus often presented a blend of mechanical, natural, and metaphysical elements, as in the following response to Locke’s description of the understanding as akin to an empty closet: “To increase the resemblance we should have to postulate that there is a screen in this dark room to receive the species [sense ideas], and that it is not uniform but is diversified by folds representing items of innate knowledge; and, what is more, that this screen or membrane, being under tension, has a kind of elasticity or active force, and indeed that it acts (or reacts) in ways which are adapted both to past folds and to new ones coming from impressions of the species. This action would consist in certain vibrations or oscillations, like those we see when a cord under tension is plucked and gives off something of a musical sound.” New Essays on Human Understanding,, 144.

68. F. J. Cole details Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of the parthenogenesis of aphids in “Microscopic Science in Holland in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the Quekett Microscopical Club 4 (1938): 59–77.

69. New Essays on Human Understanding, 140–141. See also Principles of Nature and Grace, in Philosophical Essays, 209.

70. Leibniz to Louis Bourguet, March 22, 1714, in Die Philosophischen Schriften von Leibniz, ed. C. I. Gerhardt, 7 vols. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1875–1890), 3:565 as translated by Lloyd Strickland and available through the online resource www.Leibniz-translations.com. On Leibniz’s support for ovism see Reflections on the Doctrine of a Single Universal Spirit (1702), and for animalculism see Principles of Nature and Grace (1715), both in Philosophical Papers and Letters, 2:905 and 1037, respectively. Committed to the animalculist position, Leeuwenhoek effectively campaigned for it, writing to Leibniz periodically with new findings. See Ruestow’s discussion of these letters from 1715–1716 in “Images and Ideas,” esp. 198.

71. The requirement for divine preformation cannot be forgotten amid discussion of Leibniz’s dynamic conception of an endless transformation of forms (just as his arguments against metempsychosis cannot), since it is on the basis of such claims that Leibniz consistently rejected vitalism, Van Helmont’s “archeus,” and epigenesis. See especially his “Considerations on Vital Principles and Plastic Natures, by the Author of the System of Pre-Established Harmony” (1705), in Philosophical Papers and Letters, 2:953. For some discussion of Leibniz’s earliest thoughts on preformation, see Richard Arthur, “Animal Generation and Substance in Sennert and Leibniz” in The Problem of Animal Generation in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Justin Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 147–174; and Smith, Divine Machines, 165–196.

72. “Letter to Hansch on Platonic Philosophy,” July 25, 1707, in Philosophical Papers and Letters, 2:963. The original here is “Sunt tamen in nobis semina eorum, quae discimus, ideae nempe, & quae inde nascuntur aeternae veritas.” Initially included in Epistola Godefridi Guilielmi Leibnitii ad Michaelem Gottlieb Hanschium, ed. Georg Veesenmeyer (Leipzig: Gleditsch, 1716), this is more easily found in the 1768 edition of Leibniz’s works Gothofredi Guillelmi Leibnitii, Opera Omnia, ed. Louis Dutens, vol. 2 (Geneva: Fratre de Tournes, 1768), 223; Loemker has broken one Latin sentence into two in his edition.

73. New Essays on Human Understanding, 80. Elsewhere Leibniz will distinguish a “virgin” idea from one that has mingled with others and thereupon generated impossible or superfluous notions. See ibid., 264.

74. For references to Leeuwenhoek’s letters surrounding his discovery of parthenogenesis see Ruestow, “Images and Ideas,” 219–220nn166–168; for the precise manner in which Leeuwenhoek attempted to use this as a model for the spermatic animalcules, see F. J. Cole, “Microscopic Science in Holland,” 64. Charles Bonnet is typically credited with this discovery, for while Leeuwenhoek did in fact first observe that the young were present as miniature adults within the parent—a discovery taken to confirm preexistence theory in the 1670s—it was Bonnet, following Réaumur’s efforts, who starting in 1740 successfully raised ten generations of aphids without a single male present—that is, parthenogenetically. This led Bonnet to the ovist view of preexistence theory, a position he would modify in favor of his germ theory by 1764.

75. New Essays on Human Understanding, 80.

76. Letter to Hansch on Platonic Philosophy, July 25, 1707, in Philosophical Papers and Letters, 2:964; on Leibniz’s support for Plato’s doctrine of recollection see also Discourse on Metaphysics, ibid., 1:493. On the relationship between Plato and Leibniz in terms of the ideas and necessary truths, see especially Paul Schrecker, “Leibniz and the Timaeus,” Review of Metaphysics 4 (1951): 495–505. Leibniz’s appreciation for Plato is declared on numerous occasions, indeed the opening passages of his preface to the New Essays identifies Aristotle and Locke for holding a position in stark contrast to Plato and Leibniz’s shared approach to the mind and its ideas.

77. Thomas Hankins includes an engraving of ’sGravesande’s apparatus built to test Leibniz’s theory of active force; ’sGravesande’s experiments were performed in 1721. See Hankins, Science and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 31–33.

78. Leibniz argued that force understood as a mere measurement of motion failed to account for the active force or “vis viva” describing the accumulated and transferable energy of moving bodies; indeed it was transferability without loss that was necessary for the proper understanding of the conservation of force as a whole. See especially A Brief Demonstration of a Notable Error of Descartes and Others Concerning a Natural Law (1686) and Specimen Dynamicum (1695), both in Philosophical Papers and Letters, 1:455–463 and 2:711–738, respectively. Two helpful discussions of Leibniz’s position here are Daniel Garber’s “Leibniz: Physics and Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 270–352; and Donald Rutherford, Leibniz and the Rational Order of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 237–264.

79. See his “Against Barbaric Physics: Toward a Philosophy of What there actually Is and Against the Revival of the Qualities of the Scholastics and Chimerical Intelligences,” in Philosophical Essays, 312–320, and the fifth reply to Clarke, numbers 113–116, in Philosophical Papers and Letters, 2: 1165–1166.

CHAPTER TWO

80. Significant excerpts of Haller’s account of forces are collected by Shirley Roe in The Natural Philosophy of Albrecht von Haller (New York: Arno, 1981). Roe reconstructs Haller’s position on the forces at work in “animal mechanics” in Matter, Life, and Generation: Eighteenth-Century Embryology and the Haller-Wolff Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 96–102.

81. Louis Bourguet, Lettres philosophiques sur la formation des sels et des crystaux et sur la génération et le méchanisme organique des plantes et des animaux (Amsterdam: F. L’Honoré, 1729), esp. 56–168; for “organic mechanics” see p. 64. Medieval philosophers described the work that Aristotle had attributed to the “nutritive soul” as a process of absorption, which they termed “intussusception.” This term was later taken up by René Réaumur in 1709 to describe the processes of shell formation in “De la formation et de l’acroissement des coquilles des animaux tant terrestes qu’aquatiques, soit de mer soit de rivière,” Mémoires de la Académie Royale des Sciences, 1709: 364–400, esp. 366, 370. Bourguet took the term from Réaumur but insisted on the interiority of intussusception (71) in contrast to the kind of external, mechanical accretion occurring in crystals or shell formation. Buffon used the term “intussusception” in line with Bourguet’s account of an internal absorption or assimilation (e.g., History of Animals, chap. 3, “Of Nutrition and Growth”), as did Kant when arguing that systems may “grow from within (per intussusceptionem), but not by external addition (per appositionem)” (A833/B861). The appearance of “intussusception” after Kant shows its meaning to have changed again, in this case via Schelling, who used it in his philosophy of nature to identify the universal tendency of attraction in nature. See First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature (1799), trans. K. Peterson (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004), 7. A brief review of Bourguet’s position is in J. Roger, The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century French Thought, trans. Robert Ellrich (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 300–303. For a fuller treatment see François Duchesneau, “Louis Bourguet et le modèle des corps organiques,” in Antonio Vallisneri: Lédizione del testo scientifico d’età moderna, ed. M. T. Monti (Florence: Leo Olschki, 2003), 3–31. Thomas Hankins describes Buffon’s “popularization” of Bourguet’s main tenets in Science and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 128–129.

82. Stephen Hales, Vegetable Staticks (London: Scientific Book Guild, 1961). A comprehensive discussion of Hales is in D. G. C. Allan and R. E. Schofield, Stephen Hales, Scientist and Philanthropist (London: Scolar, 1980). Henry Guerlac has two excellent essays on Hales in his Essays and Papers in the History of Modern Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), chaps. 12 and 17. Much of this material is reproduced in Guerlac’s entry “Hales, Stephen,” in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. C. Gillispie (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970–1980): 35–48.

83. Hales, Vegetable Staticks, 192.

84. Ibid., 185–186. Hales thought that temperature provided the mechanical means for respiration: “But as plants have not a dilating and contracting Thorax, their inspirations and expirations will not be so frequent as those of Animals, but depend wholly on the alternative changes from hot to cold, for inspiration, and vice versa for expiration.” Ibid., 186.

85. A helpful description of Hales’s discussion of this is given by Julius von Sachs in his History of Botany, 476–482. Von Sachs takes a dim view of the manner in which Hales’s contributions to the investigation of air were ultimately understood. In his view Hales’s “successors did not comprehend the fundamental importance of these considerations, and made no use of the pregnant idea, that a much larger part of the substance of plants comes from the air and not from the water or the soil. . . . [T]hey quoted and repeated Hales’s experiments and observations again and again, but forgot that which in his mind bound all the separate facts together” (481). Hales’s experiments were critical in providing the background for Lavoisier’s establishment of the oxygen theory of combustion; this connection is established by Guerlac in Lavoisier—The Crucial Year: The Background and Origin of His First Experiments on Combustion in 1772 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1961).

86. Stephen Hales, Vegetable Staticks, 179–180. Boyle had published the results of his experiments with a vacuum pump in 1660, experiments demonstrating the necessity of “elastic” or “good” air for sustaining both a flame and animal life. Since then it had become common to consider air as containing life-sustaining properties, but Hales was original in suggesting it might have a role in generation.

87. Ibid., 203. Hales had earlier suggested the importance of light: “May not light also, by freely entering the expanded surfaces of leaves and flowers, contribute much to the ennobling the principles of vegetables? for Sir Isaac Newton puts it as a very possible query, ‘Are not gross bodies and light convertible into one another? . . . The change of bodies into light, and of light into bodies, is very conformable to the course of nature, which seems delighted with transmutations. Opt. qu. 30.’” Ibid., 186–187.

88. Ibid., 202.

89. Patrick Blair, Botanick Essays in Two Parts (London: W. and J. Innys, 1720).

90. Patrick Blair, “Observations Upon the Generation of Plants, in a Letter to Hans Sloan,” Philosophical Transactions 31 (1720–1721): 216–221. Leeuwenhoek’s was no small presence in the Royal Society, and to get a sense of this, one need only count the number of letters he wrote regarding his discoveries that were published in the Philosophical Transactions over the years: starting with 1693, 3 letters; 1698, 1; 1700, 5; 1702, 1; 1704, 8; 1706, 5; 1708, 10; 1710, 4; 1712, 1; 1720, 4; 1722, 5. Blair’s 1720 piece devoted numerous pages to refuting Leeuwenhoek’s position and took up many of the cases Leeuwenhoek himself had described in his published letters. See Botanick Essays in Two Parts, 309ff.

91. Blair, “Observations Upon the Generation of Plants,” 218. Blair went to great lengths when making this point in 1720: “The features, the gestures, the humours, the tracts of face, the temper, the stature, the voice, the external shape and figure of the body; the inward passions of the mind, the distempers, and frequently the virtuous and vicious inclinations, are as much imparted to us by our mothers as by our fathers; and this is obvious to us every day, in those they call mongrel animals.” Botanick Essays in Two Parts, 309–310.

92. Camerarius’s letter was addressed to Michael Valentin under the title Academiae Caesareo Leopold. N.C. Hecotorus II. Rudolphi Jacobi Camerarii, Professoris Tubingensis, ad Thessalum, D. Mich. Bernardum Valentini Professorum Giessensem excellentissimum, de sexu plantarum epistola (Tubingae: Typis Viduae Rommeii, 1694). Excerpts from the letter were published by Valentin in 1696, and the letter was then published unabridged in 1700 and 1701. (This is the same Camerarius mentioned by Leibniz in his letter to Bourguet in 1714; see n. 70.) Today Camerarius’s letter is easily found in translation under the title Ueber das Geschlecht der Pflanzen (De sexu plantarium epistola), trans. and ed. M. Möbius (Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1899). The translator’s introduction provides bibliographical information for all editions subsequent to the first appearance of the letter in 1694.

93. Camerarius’s impact is traced by A. G. Morton in History of Botanical Science, 214–220, 239–245. Morton takes the shared notion of sexuality in plants and animals to mark the beginning of a rapprochement between botany and zoology towards something that will become biology (238).

94. Buffon translated the second edition of the Vegetable Staticks (1727, 1731) in 1735, and his French translation was later translated into German under the direction of Christian Wolff in 1748; Wolff’s preface, which preceded Buffon’s in the German edition, will be discussed later in connection to Kant. In the years following, there would be translations available in Dutch (1750) and Italian (1765). Regarding the widespread availability of Hales, Allan notes, “The editors of the 1809 Philosophical Transactions, Abridged observed that an abstract of Desagulier’s review of the Vegetable Staticks was unnecessary, ‘the work itself being in the library of every person who possesses the least taste for physiological inquiries.’” See Allan and Schofield, Stephen Hales, 128.

95. Buffon’s changes to Hales’s text are discussed by Allan in ibid., 130–131. The best general resource for Buffon remains Jacques Roger’s Buffon: A Life in Natural History, trans. Sarah Bonnefoi (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).

96. Georges Buffon, “Préface du traducteur,” in La Statique des végétaux, et l’analyse de l’air, by Stephen Hales (Paris: J. Vincent, 1735), 3. A complete English translation of Buffon’s preface with editorial notes is available in Phillip Sloan and John Lyon, From Natural History to the History of Nature: Readings from Buffon and His Critics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 35–40.

97. Georges Buffon, preface to La methode des fluxions, et des suites infinies, by Isaac Newton (Paris: Debure l’aîné, 1740), esp. xv–xxv. Buffon’s opening discussion concerns his decision in dating Newton’s piece to sometime between 1664 and 1671, followed by remarks on the special problem of infinity in mathematics. Buffon’s case for Newton as the true author of the calculus details numerous letter exchanges and other pieces of evidence in Newton’s favor.

98. Georges Buffon, “Initial Discourse” (1749), in Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1749–1767), vol. 1. (Buffon’s enormously popular work eventually totaled thirty-six quarto volumes with supplements, 1749–1788; by the end of the eighteenth century it had been translated into German, English, Spanish, Italian, and Dutch.) Although the Natural History was fairly quickly translated into well-known English editions—William Smellie’s in Edinburgh and J. S. Barr’s in London—the “Initial Discourse” was not included in any of the many English editions it went through. There is a complete English translation of the “Initial Discourse” with editorial notes in Sloan and Lyon, From Natural History to the History of Nature, 89–128, and separately as “The ‘Initial Discourse’ to Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle: The First Complete English Translation,” by John Lyon, in Journal of the History of Biology 9 (1976): 133–181.

99. Georges Buffon, “Initial Discourse,” in Sloan and Lyon, From Natural History to the History of Nature, 125.

100. Ibid., 121–122.

101. Ibid., 123. It is tempting to read Hume’s influence here even with the significant difference that for Hume such probability could only yield “belief.” According to Roger, at least, Buffon was not yet aware of Hume’s work in either the Treatise (1739–1740) or the Enquiry (1748). See Roger’s Buffon, 90.

102. Buffon took “the most beautiful and felicitous” use of the true method to be Newton’s theory of gravity: “We must admit that if Newton had only given us the physical conformations of his system without having supported them by precise mathematical evaluations they would not have had nearly the same force.” “Initial Discourse,” in Sloan and Lyon, From Natural History to the History of Nature, 125.

103. As Buffon expressed it, “The penetrating forces by which these immense bodies are animated, by which they act reciprocally upon each other at a distance, animate at the same time every particle of matter; and this mutual propensity of all parts toward each other, is the first bond of beings, the principle of consistency and permanency in nature, and the support of harmony in the universe.” “Second View of Nature” (1765), in Natural History, General and Particular, trans. William Smellie (Edinburgh: W. Creech, 1780), 7:93.

104. Georges Buffon, “The Ox” (1753), in ibid., 3:423–424.

105. Bourguet had insisted that something like an internal mold (Moule) determined the organization of the organic material when forming the organism and that this kind of mold was unique to organic mechanism. Whereas a crystal simply repeated the same mold or shape over and over again, the organism needed a different means for accounting for the innumerable different parts of its organization. This is not to say that the organism was reducible to its organization for Bourguet; as a Leibnizian, Bourguet took the entire process to be a case of mechanical accommodation to an underlying dominant monad. See Bourguet, Lettres philosophiques, 146, 165.

106. Georges Buffon, “Of Nutrition and Growth,” chap. 3 of History of Animals, (1749), in Buffon’s Natural History, trans. J. S. Barr (London: H. D. Symonds, 1797), 2:302.

107. Thomas S. Hall traces the eighteenth-century use of such “inexplicable explicative devices,” focusing, for example, on Haller’s appeal to “irritability” as an explanation for muscle contraction. See “Biological Analogs of Newtonian Paradigms,” Philosophy of Science 35 (1968): 6–27. For specific discussion of Buffon’s application of Newton’s method, see Gasking, Investigations into Generation, 92–94.

108. Buffon, “Of Nutrition and Growth,” 303. Buffon repeatedly defended the use of analogies in line with Newton’s own practice of reasoning. For example, “In my theory of expansion and reproduction, I first admit the mechanical principles, then the penetrating force of gravity, which we are obliged to accept, and, from analogy and experience, I have concluded the existence of other penetrating forces peculiar to organized bodies.” “Of Nutrition and Growth” (1749), chap. 3 of History of Animals, in Natural History, General and Particular, trans. Smellie, 2:48.

109. Georges Buffon, “A Comparison Between Animals, Vegetables, and Other Productions of Nature,” chap. 1 of History of Animals, in Buffon’s Natural History, trans. Barr, 2:272.

110. Georges Buffon, “Of Reproduction in General,” ibid., 2:279.

111. This caused some to associate Buffon’s theory with the “homoeomeries” (“things with like parts”) attributed to Anaxagoras. Focusing on Buffon’s attention to crystal formation, Haller, for example, aligned Buffon’s account with Anaxagoras: “The Homeomeria of Anaxagoras evidently govern this portion of nature, wherein one sees particles form into a whole with constancy and regularity, without the least suspicion of a semen or seed being involved.” “Reflections on the Theory of Generation of Mr. Buffon,” trans. Phillip R. Sloan, in From Natural History to the History of Nature, 315. Roger similarly identifies Buffon’s organic molecules and the homoeomeries of Anaxagoras in Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century French Thought, 667n92. It seems likely, however, that it is rather Bourguet who is once more serving as an influence for Buffon’s account. See Bourguet, Lettres philosophiques, 56–57. Anaxagoras in fact conceived of seeds (“homoeomeries” was the term used to describe Anaxagoras’s seeds by Aristotle, among others) as necessarily containing both the substance from which they came and a “portion” of their opposites, a necessity if change was to be explained (e.g., food transformed into hair and flesh). See the selections and commentary in “Anaxagoras of Clazomenae,” in The Presocratic Philosophers, 2nd ed., trans. and ed. G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 368–371, 374–378. It was this inclusion of opposites that presumably led to Goethe’s interest in Anaxagoras’s account. See “On the Spiral Tendency in Plants,” in Goethe’s Botanical Writings, trans. Bertha Mueller (Woodbridge, CT: Oxbow, 1952), 131.

112. The lack of entelechy here would be one of the main avenues for Haller’s critique of Buffon, one launched first in an anonymous French review and then added as a preface to the German translation of Buffon’s Natural History volumes overseen by Abraham Kästner (1750–1774). Rehearsing Buffon’s discussion of the internal mold and the penetrating force, Haller complained that these could not provide a reasonable source of organization given the complexity of the body. “In brief,” Haller concluded, “what is the cause which arranges the human body in such a way that an eye is never attached to the knee, an ear is never connected to the hand, a toe never wanders to the neck, or a finger is never placed on the extremity of the foot, as happens in the crystallization of salts, where one finds at all times some of the spires sometimes similar and sometimes different, often without form, and in reverse order?” “Reflections on the Theory of Generation,” 320.

113. The fact that hydra—a name chosen by Linnaeus for the Medusa-like properties of the polyp—both reproduced and regenerated by budding had been first described (with little notice taken) by Leeuwenhoek in a 1702 letter to the Royal Society. See “Part of a Letter from Mr. Antony van Leeuwenhoek, F. R. S. Concerning Green Weeds Growing in Water, and Some Animalcula Found about Them,” Philosophical Transactions 23 (1702–1703): 1304–1311. Once published, Trembley’s own investigations, by contrast, had an enormous and immediate impact on the intellectual life of the eighteenth century. See Mémoires pour servir a l’histoire d’un genre de polypes d’eau douce (Paris, 1744).

114. Unlike Buffon, preexistence theorists took the entire individual to be formed in either the male or female parent and thus suffered to explain the appearance of inheritance from both sides. See the introduction to the present volume, n. 3, on the difference between preexistence and preformation, distinctions frequently conflated within the secondary literature. The fact that Buffon’s organic molecules were themselves preformed or premolded in the parents might have contributed to Barr’s decision to usually translate “développer” as “unfold”—a verb choice typically used alongside “evolution” and “development” when referring to the expansion of a microscopic yet fully formed preexistent individual.

115. Haller, “Reflections on the Theory of Generation,” 322.

116. Although they disagreed on key points regarding generation—Maupertuis claimed never to have understood Buffon’s notion of internal molds—the influence was mutual during these years. This is made especially clear in John Turbeville Needham’s descriptions of his work with Buffon, “A Summary of some late Observations upon the Generation, Composition, and Decomposition of Animal and Vegetable Substances,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 45 (1748): 615–666, esp. §18, p. 633: “He [Buffon] had long been disatisfy’d with the Opinion of pre-existent Germs in Nature; and he and Mr. Maupertuis, President of the Academy of Sciences at Berlin, had often discours’d together upon the Subject. We have several Hints of this Dissatisfaction, in a little Book, published by Mr. Maupertuis himself upon this Question at Paris, before my Arrival there; in short, it was by general Reflections, and some other consequent Thoughts, that Mr. de Buffon was conducted to frame his System of organical Parts.” Thus Buffon, for example, praised the arguments against preexistence theories laid out in Maupertuis’s Venus Physique, declaring that “this author is the first who has returned into the road of truth, from which we were farther strayed than ever, since the supposition of the egg system, and the discovery of spermatic animals.” “Experiments on the Method of Generation,” chap. 6 of History of Animals (1749) in Buffon’s Natural History, trans. Barr, 3:76. Once the Natural History was published, Buffon was cited by Maupertuis in support of his argument for some fluidity between the animal and vegetable classes. See Maupertuis’s Essai sur la formation des corps organisés, in Oeuvres (Paris, 1756), vol. 2, §47, p. 152, where he refers to Buffon’s vol. 2, chap. 8, p. 303, and chap. 9, p. 322 (corresponding to Barr’s translation, Buffon’s Natural History, 3:206–207 and 223–224, respectively). Note, however, Buffon’s explicit rejection of appeals to such fluidity on the basis of the Tree of Diana, in “Initial Discourse,” in Sloan and Lyon, From Natural History to the History of Nature, 101.

117. Mary Terrall describes the difficult social and political environment within which Maupertuis worked in The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), esp. chaps. 9 and 10. A comprehensive listing of Maupertuis’s unusually complicated publication history—a history comprising multiple editions under different titles, often published anonymously or even pseudonymously—is in Giorgio Tonelli’s introduction to Oeuvres, by P. L. Moreau de Maupertuis (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1974), 1:xi–lxxxiii. For our purposes it is enough to trace the trajectory of Maupertuis’s publications regarding generation theory. These started in 1744 with three successive pamphlet editions of an anonymously written discussion of biological generation, a discussion occasioned by the sensation created in Parisian salon culture by an albino boy (born to African slaves living in colonial South America) who had been paraded around Paris by the aristocracy as a curiosity that year. See “Dissertation physique à l’occasion du nègre blanc” (Leiden, 1744). The following year this piece was reissued (and slightly changed) as “Concerning the Origin of Animals” and printed together with a separate essay on “Varieties in the Species of Man” under the title Venus Physique; this too was published anonymously, with neither publisher nor location identified, only the date, 1745. In 1751, Maupertuis returned to the issue, this time publishing his essay in Latin as a (fake) thesis from Erlangen written by a student identified only as Dr. Baumann; the original is no longer extant, but at the time, it was published (in Berlin, not Erlangen) as Dissertatio inauguralis metaphysica de universali naturae systemate (Berlin, 1751). An edition of Maupertuis’s collected works that appeared in 1752 included the Venus Physique, thus revealing Maupertuis’s authorship. See Oeuvres (Dresden: C. Walther, 1752). In 1754, Maupertuis anonymously reissued the Baumann thesis from 1751, now under the title Essai sur la formation des corps organisés (Berlin, 1754). The Essai was reissued two years later under the title Systêm de la nature for the next edition of Maupertuis’s collected works, revealing thereby Maupertuis’s authorship of the Essai (and the Baumann thesis). See Oeuvres, 4 vols. (Lyon, 1756). Finally, in 1761, an anonymous translator working out of Potsdam issued a German translation of the Baumann thesis as Versuch von der Bildung der Körper, aus den Lateinischen des Herrn von Maupertuis übersetzt von einem Freunde der Naturlehre (Leipzig, 1761); it was this edition that Kant owned.

118. Pierre Maupertuis, The Earthly Venus, trans. S. Boas (New York: Johnson Reprint, 1966), 56. Like Buffon, Maupertuis agreed that female particles must contribute to the formation of an embryo, and the Venus Physique attacked preexistence doctrines for their inability to account for obvious cases of “blended” offspring. In his later discussions Maupertuis included extensive documentation of the Ruhe family in Berlin, since the many cases of polydactylism in the family were shown to be heritable on both maternal and paternal lines, evidence Maupertuis took to be fatal for both spermist and ovist versions of the preexistence theory of generation. See Essai sur la formation des corps organizes, 159–161. New data regarding the Ruhe family was included only in the 1754 Essai sur la formation des corps organisés Berlin edition, as evidenced by its absence from the German translation of the Baumann thesis. On the Ruhe family see, for comparison, Maupertuis, Versuch von der Bildung der Körper, §37, p. 31. Section numbers in the 1761 German translation correspond to the 1754 Berlin edition until §38, after which sections are added in the remainder of the French edition with the result that German §39 = French §40, German §53 = French §55, German §62 = French §65.

119. Réaumur’s fame as a naturalist was due to the publication of his multivolume work on insects, L’histoire des insectes (Paris, 1734), at which time he separately published a treatise on incubation. The quote is from his discussion of philosophical accounts of generation that closed the treatise on incubation, “Quatriéme mémoire: Esquisse des amusemens philosophiques que les oiseaux d’une basse-cour ont à offrir,” in Art de faire éclorre et d’élever en toute saison des oiseaux domestiques de toutes especes (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1749), 2:329–330. Abraham Trembley prepared an English translation of this work: The Art of Hatching and Bringing Up Domestic Fowls by Means of Artificial Heat (London, 1750), 461–462.

120. Réaumur, “Quatriéme mémoire,” 330; Réaumur, The Art of Hatching, 462.

121. In the preface to the German edition of the Baumann thesis, for example, the translator declared the two positions to be identical—“Die hauptsache scheint mir der Monadologie des Herrn v. Leibnitz einerley zu seyn”—even as Maupertuis was praised for his added doctrines. Maupertuis, Versuch von der Bildung der Körper, paragraph 5 (preface unpaginated). Interest in Leibniz’s monads was widespread as a result of 1747’s prize question “for or against the doctrine of monads,” a contest overseen by Maupertuis himself as president of the Berlin Academy of Sciences. As Euler, the academy’s leading mathematician, described it, “There was a time when the dispute about monads was so lively and general that one spoke of them heatedly in all social circles, even in the corps de garde. There was almost not a single lady at court who had not declared herself for or against monads.” Quoted in Terrall, Man Who Flattened the Earth, 258.

122. Maupertuis, Versuch von der Bildung der Körper, §§3, 4, p. 15. Later Maupertuis appears to be responding directly to Réaumur, explicitly listing the impossibility of understanding the eye or the ear to be the result of such forces. Ibid., §14, p. 21.

123. Ibid., §33, pp. 30–31.

124. For discussion of Leibniz and Maupertuis, see Terrall, Man Who Flattened the Earth, 328–334. I agree with Terrall’s assessment regarding the actual nature of Maupertuis’s understanding of the particles’ organic forces as a conception that does not, in the end, rely on the kind of metaphysics associated with Leibniz’s panorganicism. As Terrall puts it, “When mechanical properties proved insufficient to the explanatory task at hand, Maupertuis simply attached various appropriate active properties directly to matter, for a different kind of active matter” (333; see also her comments at n. 77). It is perhaps not technically correct, therefore, to identify Maupertuis’s position with hylozoism, for despite the divinely (and hierarchically) granted intelligence ascribed to the particles, their “life” is in the end only an activity that has been somehow “attached” to matter. By contrast, John Zammito takes Maupertuis’s commitment to hylozoism to be both real and the basis of Kant’s later rejection of Maupertuis’s views on generation. “Kant’s Early Views on Epigenesis: The Role of Maupertuis,” in The Problem of Animal Generation in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Justin E. H. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 317–354.

125. G.-L. Buffon, “Of the Expansion, Growth, and Delivery of the Foetus,” chap. 11 of History of Animals, in Natural History, Genetic and Particular, trans. Smellie, 2:308.

126. Ibid., 305.

127. Ibid., 309. While Leibniz’s explicit discussion of “analysis situs” is readily available today (e.g., Philosophical Papers and Letters, 1:390; see also 1:382), it is hard to say whether anyone actually read it in the eighteenth century. Louis Dutens’s well-regarded edition of Leibniz’s complete works appeared only in 1768 and included neither Leibniz’s essay nor his letter to Huygens from the same period, a letter that also made mention of a new geometry of situation (Leibniz to Huygens, September 8, 1679, in Philosophical Papers and Letters, 1:381–390). Vincenzo De Risi traces the impact of Leibniz’s rumored geometry in Geometry and Monadology: Leibniz’s Analysis Situs and Philosophy of Space (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2007). According to De Risi, “It was thanks to Wolff that the entire scientific world first learned about analysis situs and attached it to Leibniz’s fame,” for in volume 1 of Wolff’s Elementa matheseos universae (Halle: 1713–1715), Wolff had described Leibniz’s “new analysis of situation, constructed upon a peculiar kind of calculus (which he calls calculus of situation), completely different from the calculus of magnitudes.” See De Risi, Geometry and Monadology, 94–95; see also n. 104.

128. A brief, clear discussion of “the general logic of embryo geography,” including topographical mapping techniques using applied geometry, is in Sean B. Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 89–98.

129. Buffon, “Second View of Nature,” 7:97.

130. Ibid., 7:101.

131. The best discussion of Buffon’s relationship to Linnaeus is Phillip R. Sloan’s “The Buffon-Linnaeus Controversy,” Isis 67 (1976): 356–375.

132. Buffon, “Initial Discourse,” in Sloan and Lyon, From Natural History to the History of Nature, 104.

133. Ibid., 105. Between the inability to determine criteria capable of determining essential divisions between species (since this required agreement regarding their “essence”) and the empirical experience of the fluidity of forms (an experience frequently undermining belief in fixed essences at all), deep tensions within taxonomy had arisen by midcentury between arbitrarily determined criteria like reproductive organs and conflicting experience with respect to claims regarding biological affinity. The “artificial” system of Linnaeus self-consciously took this all for granted, but even though Linnaeus grasped both the logical problem and the practical tensions within taxonomical science, the difficulties were in fact exacerbated by his defaulting, as a matter of practical necessity, to the idea of species fixity. As a result, as Sachs puts it, species fixity “became with his [Linnaeus’s] successors an article of faith, a dogma, which no botanist could even doubt without losing his scientific reputation; and thus during more than a hundred years the belief that every organic form owes its existence to a separate act of creation and is therefore absolutely distinct from all other forms, subsisted side by side with the fact of experience, that there is an intimate tie of relationship between these forms which can only be imperfectly indicated by definite marks. Every systematist knew that this relationship was something more than mere resemblance perceivable by the senses, while thinking men saw the contradiction between the assumption of an absolute difference of origin in species (for that is what is meant by their constancy) and the fact of their affinity.” Sachs, History of Botany, 10. Morton details Linnaeus’s awareness of this problem, describing its resolution as the precondition for a shift toward the concept of organic evolution. See History of Botanical Science, 262–276, esp. 270.

134. Buffon, “Initial Discourse,” in Sloan and Lyon, From Natural History to the History of Nature, 102. Cf. “Nature has neither classes nor species; it contains only individuals. These species and classes are nothing but ideas which we have ourselves formed and established.” Buffon, “Of Infancy,” chap. 2 of History of Man, in Buffon’s Natural History, trans. Barr, 3:326.

135. Buffon, “Initial Discourse,” in Sloan and Lyon, From Natural History to the History of Nature, 111.

136. Buffon, “Second View of Nature,” 96. Following Buffon’s distinction between an eternal and a temporal view of a species depends as much on context as anything else. On Buffon’s failure to make the difference explicit, see the helpful discussion in Roger’s Buffon, 325–329.

137. Buffon, “Of the Degeneration of Animals” (1766), in Natural History, General and Particular, trans. Smellie, 7:395.

138. Ibid., 398, 400.

139. Ibid., 416, cf. 420, 422.

140. Ibid., 422.

141. Ibid., 415.

142. Ibid., 437.

CHAPTER THREE

143. See Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 179.

144. Johann Herder, Herders Sämmtliche Werke, ed. B. Suphan (Berlin: Weidmann, 1893), 18:325.

145. Kuehn, Kant, 179.

146. Discours sur la différente figure des astres avec une exposition des systems de MM. Descartes et Newton (Paris, 1732; 2nd ed., 1742). Kant cited a passage from this text (1:232) that he had found in a review in Nova Acta Eruditorum of the 1744 edition (Ouvrages Divers, 1 vol. (Amsterdam, 1744)) of Maupertuis’s works. See Nova Acta Eruditorum, 1745, 221–229. For the original passage see Maupertuis, Oeuvres (Lyon: Bruyset, 1756), 1:88. Kant might already have been familiar with the first version of this essay, since it was included in the first publication (1746) of the Berlin Academy of Sciences under Maupertuis’s direction; the annual volume was a central source of income for the Berlin academy and was therefore distributed widely to booksellers and libraries. See Maupertuis, Essay on Cosmology, in Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences et Belles-Lettres (Berlin, 1746), 267–294.

147. See The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God (2:113–116) and Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics (2:327–333).

148. A lengthy discussion of Kant’s early views on forces is in Martin Schönfeld’s The Philosophy of the Young Kant: The Precritical Project (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Manfred Kuehn looks at Kant’s 1747 essay in connection with Kant’s teacher Martin Knutzen in “Kant’s Teachers in the Exact Sciences,” in Kant and the Sciences, ed. Eric Watkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 11–30.

149. The so-called Spin-Cycle essay’s complete title runs, “Investigation of the question whether the earth in its axial rotation, whereby it causes the change of day and night, has experienced any change since the earliest times of its origin, and how one could answer this question, announced for the current year’s prize, by the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin” (1:183–192).

150. See Mary Terrall’s detailed account of Maupertuis’s difficulties in Berlin in Man Who Flattened the Earth, 231–269. A list of the academy’s prize essay questions—and the winners—during Maupertuis’s tenure as president, alongside a thorough history of the academy itself, is in Adolf Hartnack’s Geschichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 4 vols. in 3 (Berlin: Reichsdruckerei, 1900); prize essays listed in vol. 1, 409ff.

151. “Les loix du mouvement du repos, deduites d’un principe métaphysique, par M. de Maupertuis, (1746), in Histoire de L’Académie Royale des Sciences et des Belles-Lettres (Berlin: chez Ambroise Hande, 1748), 267–294.

152. See “Accord de différentes loix de la nature qui avoient jusque’ice paru incompatibles,” in Mémoires de l’Académie Royal des Sciences (Paris, 1744), 417–426.

153. “Les Loix du Mouvement du repos,” 290.

154. Only the first two sections of the older pieces would be republished as the Essay on Cosmology. A complete history of this is in Giorgio Tonelli’s introduction to Maupertuis’s Oeuvres (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1974), 1:lix and following.

155. Maupertuis, “Les loix du mouvement et du repos deduites des attributs de la supreme intelligence,” Essay de Cosmology, in Oeuvres (Dresden: George Conrad Walther, 1752), 22–23.

156. Maupertuis’s general strategy regarding proofs for the existence of God would be repeated again by Kant in the Only Possible Argument (1763).

157. Kant refers to Maupertuis repeatedly in the precritical years, most often invoking Maupertuis’s work on celestial mechanics. See Universal Natural History, 1:232, 236, 254, 255; Only Possible Argument, 2:98, 115, 141; Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, 2:330; Of the Different Races of Human Beings, 2:431; Lectures on Logic, 16:103, 281 (marginalia); Nachlass, 18:230, 18:578; and Reflexionen zur Medizin, 15:955.

158. Oeuvres (1752), 23.

159. Statick der Gewächse oder angestelte Versuche mit dem Saft in Pflanzen und ihren Wachstum (Halle: Rengerischen Buchhandlung, 1748). The translation of Hales (from Buffon’s French edition) was done under Christian Wolff’s supervision. Wolff had himself published on vegetable anatomy in Allerhand nützliche Versuche (Halle, 1721) and on plants in general in his Vernünftige Gedanken von der Wirkungen der Natur (Magdeburg, 1723). Some discussion of Wolff’s botanical writings can be found in Julius von Sachs’s History of Botany, 472–476.

160. Kant, like the majority of Hales’s readers, valued Vegetable Staticks for the many experiments described by Hales, experiments whose results lent themselves to ready application. Kant appealed to Hales in The Question Whether the Earth Is Aging, Considered from the Point of View of Physics, 1:208; Universal Natural History, 1:326; Succinct Exposition of Some Meditations on Fire, 1:381, 382; New Elucidation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Knowledge, 1:408; History and Natural Description of the Most Curious Occurrences Associated with the [Lisbon] Earthquake, 1:457; and Opus Postumum, 21:238n. There are also numerous indirect references to Hales’s work: to list only a few, 2:107, 21:454, 21:263, 21:499. It is a measure of Hales’s significance that Kant held onto his translation of Hales despite the fact that he is known to have sold books during these years to help make ends meet. It was not until 1766 that Kant’s fortunes changed for the better. Taking on the job of sublibrarian at the Schlossbibliothek—the palace library doubled as the university’s—meant Kant had the means to move into rooms above Kantor’s bookshop. Kantor allowed his tenants to read the books and many periodicals coming through the shop, a fact of its own significance when considering Kant’s intellectual development, and a point to be underscored when considering the relatively few books Kant’s personal library contained. For something of Kant’s circumstances during this period, see Kuehn, Kant, 159–160. Kant’s library has been cataloged by Arthur Warda in Immanuel Kants Bücher (Berlin: M. Breslauer, 1922).

161. Buffon’s preface to Statick der Gewächse, 8 (unpaginated in text).

162. Wolff’s preface to Statick der Gewächse, 1 (unpaginated in text).

163. Ibid., 4.

164. Ibid., 6.

165. Kant referred to Buffon repeatedly during his career, most often concerning questions related to natural history. He cited Buffon on cosmology, earthquakes, and geology (1:227, 238, 345, 421, 438, 444, 451); on generation, female attraction, and the geometry of “analysis situs” (2:4, 8, 115, 142, 237, 377, cf. 2:38, 429); on volcanoes on the moon and the genealogy of dogs (8:74, 75, 168); on physical geography (9:213, 303); on the formation of mountains (14:547, 589, 607); on anthropology (15:389); regarding the Conflict of the Faculties (15:389); and in the Nachlass (17:96).

166. Haller’s prefaces are available in English translation. See “Reflections on the Theory of Generation of Mr. Buffon,” trans. Phillip R. Sloan, in From Natural History to the History of Nature,, 320.

167. Kant explained that he was first inspired to give such a course after reading a 1751 review of William Wright of Derham’s cosmological treatises in the Hamburgischen freien Urtheile (1:231).

168. In his opening discourse Buffon appraised the cosmological theories of Newton, Burnett, Woodward, Whiston, and Leibniz’s Protagaea.

169. Natural History, General and Particular, trans. Smellie, 1:64. See also the editorial comments regarding Kant’s passage, 1:549ff.

170. As a lecturer without an official position at the university, Kant needed to advertise his upcoming courses, advertisements that included short essays: West Winds (1757), New Theory of Motion and Rest (1758), Reflections on Optimism (1759), M. Immanuel Kant’s Announcement of the Programme of his Lectures for the Winter Semester 1765–66 (1765), and On the Different Races of Mankind (1775).

171. Kant’s longtime interest in cosmology would find its place, albeit negatively, in the first Critique’s discussion of the antinomies. For more discussion of Kant’s early cosmological theories, see Schönfeld’s Philosophy of the Young Kant; Alison Laywine, Kant’s Early Metaphysics and the Origins of Critical Philosophy, North American Kant Society Studies in Philosophy, vol. 3 (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1993); and Michael Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 1–52.

172. Versuch von der Bildung der Körper, aus dem Lateinischen, des Herrn von Maupertuis übersetzt von einem Freunde der Naturlehre (Leipzig, 1761). This was a translation of Maupertuis’s pseudonymously published Latin “dissertation” from 1751, the so-called Baumann thesis. In 1754 Maupertuis published the thesis in French under the title Essai sur la formation des corps organisés, and the essay was retitled for the publication of Maupertuis’s collected works in 1756 as the Système de la nature with some additions to the text. The German translation was directly taken from the first Latin thesis—of which, according to the German translator, only ten copies were printed—and thus did not include the empirical studies of sexdigitalism, for example, added by Maupertuis for the French editions. Further information regarding the publication history of these pieces can be found in nn. 117 and 118.

173. A thorough account of the Haller-Wolff debates is in Shirley Roe’s Matter, Life, and Generation, including a publication history of Wolff’s works and their subsequent reviews by Haller.

174. Although Kant’s 1755 Universal Natural History had been reviewed, few copies made it into the hands of potential readers because the press was impounded—and Kant’s books with it—for bankruptcy just after the copies had been printed. A subsequent fire resolved the publisher’s financial difficulties, but it also burnt most of the copies of Kant’s book. For more of this history see Kuehn’s Kant, 104–105.

175. English translations from Kant’s precritical period—when they are available—are either taken whole from or are based on the translations by David Walford in Immanuel Kant: Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) or Lewis White Beck in Kant’s Latin Writings: Translations, Commentaries, and Notes (New York: P. Lang, 1992).

176. The encasement, or “embôitement,” theory was first proposed by Malebranche, and both he and Leibniz after him used the verb “développer” to describe the change from microscopic to normally sized individuals (for Leibniz, développer was in contrast to the “envelopper” of the monads at death). When Buffon described this kind of “augmentation” of individuals according to the encasement theory, he used “développer,” but—and this decision would create a challenge for his interpreters—he also reappropriated the verb as more properly understood to describe his own position regarding the generation and growth of individuals, processes that, according to Buffon, resulted from the joint efforts of the organic molecules and the molded parts collected from both the mother and father. Kästner’s translation of Buffon—the only German translation until 1775—regularly chose “auswickeln” (literally “to unwrap or unwind,” used in the vernacular with respect to unwrapping a swaddled child but usually translated in English as “to unfold”) over “entwickeln” (“develop” in English) when translating “développer.” In the early English editions of Buffon, développer received divergent translations; the Smellie translations, for example, used “expansion” for “développer,” a choice emphasizing augmentation, whereas the Barr translations relied on “unfold,” a choice that, given its history, linked Buffon to preexistence theory for anyone unaware of his reappropriation of the word for his own ends. Thus although Buffon was explicitly critical of encasement theories in either their ovist or animalculist versions, distinctions between Buffon and preexistence theories were easily obscured from the start because of the language in play. On this point compare, for example, Buffon’s opening passages in the History of Animals, chap. 3, “Of Nutrition and Growth,” between editions. See Buffon, Histoire naturelle (1749), 2:41, and Kästner’s translation (1750), vol. 1, part 2, p. 27; Smellie’s translation (Natural History, General and Particular, 1785), 2:39; and Barr’s translation (Buffon’s Natural History, 1791), 2:298. Today, English-language historians of science refer to “embôitement” or encasement theory as a theory of “individual preformation,” “evolution,” “development,” and “unfolding,” often obscuring, thereby, the particular histories associated with each of these terms.

177. In these passages David Walford has translated Fortpflanzung (“reproduction” in English) as “propagation.” Within the context of Walford’s translation as a whole, I think that this choice might be misleading at points, although propagation is good for capturing the nonsexual nature of reproduction according to encasement theory. Kästner used “Vermehrung” as a translation of Buffon’s description of the “augmentation” of an embryo in preexistence theories. The taking in of nutrition, for example, yields “eine Vermehrung” and “diese Vermehrung der Größe nennet man das Auswickeln, weil man sie dadurch zu erklaren hat, daß man sagte, das Tier sey in kleinen gebildet, wie es seiner völligen Größ nach beschaffen ist, und daher, liese sich leicht begreiffen, wie sich seine Theile auswickelten, indem nach und nach eine dazu kommende Materie alle in gehörigen Ebenmaaße vergrößerte,” in Allgemeine Historie der Natur: Nach ihren besonderen Theilen abgehandelt, trans. A. G. Kästner, vol. 1, part 2 (Hamburg: G. C. Grund and A. H. Holle, 1750), 27.

178. A helpful discussion of Kant’s attempt to synthesize preexistence theory and epigenesis in this section is in Mark Fisher, “Kant’s Explanatory Natural History: Generation and Classification of Organisms in Kant’s Natural Philosophy,” in Understanding Purpose: Kant and the Philosophy of Biology, ed. Philippe Huneman, North American Kant Society Studies in Philosophy, vol. 8 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2007), 101–121.

179. Paul Menzer takes Kant—wrongly, in my view—to have Caspar Wolff’s position rather than Hales’s in mind in this passage. See Menzer, Kants Lehre von der Entwicklung in Natur und Geschichte (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1911), 104. That said, in Herder’s notes from Kant’s lectures on metaphysics during the same period as the 1763 piece it is clear that, without naming them, Kant could have understood that the specific difficulty facing Haller and Wolff was the lack of any decisive evidence in favor of one position versus the other. As Herder recorded him, “Die Physikalischen beobachtungen zeigen, daß der Körper zuerst gebildet wurde, andere daß sie bei der Schöpfung gebildet sei” (29:889). In his notes Herder went on to report that the main conceptual difficulty facing the life sciences was twofold, at least so far as Kant understood their attempt to discern the processes of generation, namely, the conception of freedom on the one hand and its generation in the world (die Zeugung seines gleichen im Raum) on the other.

180. In Kant’s words, “Große kunst und eine zufällige Vereinbarung durch freie Wahl gewissen Absichten gemäß ist daselbst augenscheinlich und wird zugleich der Grund eines besondern Naturgesetzes, welches zur künstlichen Naturordnung gehört. Der Bau der Plflanzen und Thiere zeigt eine solche Anstalt, wozu die allgemeine und nothwendige Naturegesetze unzulänglich sind” (2:114).

181. Compare Wolff’s opening reverie regarding a metaphysical knot (ein unauflöslicher Knoten) so tangled that one might be tempted “to simply cut or hack through it”: “oder, wenn wir ihn aufzuwickeln nicht vermögend sind, ihn gleich zerschneiden, oder gar zerhauen wollen.” Like Kant, Wolff’s knot referred to the difficulty in connecting the supersensible and material realms. By 1766, however, Kant was prepared to dismiss the supposed entanglement as a case of the mind’s “surreptitious” application of sensible concepts to intelligible objects (2:321n; cf. 10:72). See Wolff’s preface to the translation of Stephen Hales’s Vegetable Staticks, Statick der Gewächse, 2 (unpaginated in text).

182. Kant taught “anthropology” as an independent course starting in 1772 and continued to teach it every year until his retirement in 1796. A careful reconstruction of Kant’s developing interests in anthropology during these years is in John Zammito’s Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

183. Buffon’s “Variétés dans l’espèce humaine” was over 150 pages long. Although it was included at the very end of the third volume of the Histoire Naturelle in 1749, Kästner translated only the first two volumes for the 1750 German edition; the contents of volume 3—including Buffon’s “Verschiedene Gattungen in dem menschen Geschlechte”—appeared in German in 1752.

184. While Leibniz’s explicit discussion of analysis situs is readily available today (e.g., Loemker’s translation of Leibniz’s Philosophical Papers and Letters, 1:390; see also 1:382), it is hard to say whether anyone actually read it in the eighteenth century. Louis Dutens’s well-regarded edition of Leibniz’s complete works appeared only in 1768 and included neither Leibniz’s essay nor his letter to Huygens from the same period, a letter that also made mention of a new geometry of situation (Leibniz to Huygens, September 8, 1679, in Philosophical Papers and Letters, 1:381–390). Vincenzo De Risi traces the impact of Leibniz’s rumored geometry in Geometry and Monadology. According to De Risi, “It was thanks to Wolff that the entire scientific world first learned about analysis situs and attached it to Leibniz’s fame,” for in volume 1 of Wolff’s Elementa matheseos universae (Halle, 1713–1715), Wolff had described Leibniz’s “new analysis of situation, constructed upon a peculiar kind of calculus (which he calls calculus of situation), completely different from the calculus of magnitudes.” Geometry and Monadology, 94–95; see also 105n104.

185. “Of the Expansion, Growth, and Delivery of the Foetus,” chap. 11 of History of Animals, in Buffon’s Natural History, trans. Barr, 3:263. Setting up his own discussion of “incongruent counterparts,” Kant distinguished himself from Buffon in terms of the latter’s identification of one dividing line: “I shall call a body which is exactly equal and similar to another, but which cannot be enclosed in the same limits as that other, its incongruent counterpart. Now, in order to demonstrate the possibility of such a thing, let a body be taken consisting, not of two halves which are symmetrically arranged relatively to a single intersecting plane, but rather, say, a human hand. From all the points on its surface let perpendicular lines be extended to a plane surface set up opposite to it.” (2:382).

186. Jill Vance Buroker describes Kant’s later discussions of incongruent counterparts in light of his subsequent account of the transcendental ideality of space in Space and Incongruence: The Origin of Kant’s Idealism (Dordrect: D. Reidel, 1980). Her discussion of Kant’s 1768 essay (pp. 50–68) concentrates—as does much of her book—on a comparison between Leibniz’s and Kant’s views. The majority of commentators, taking their cue from Kant’s comments on Leibniz’s analysis situs and the reference to “German philosophers,” have taken the essay to be primarily in dialogue with the Leibnizian theory of space. I take some historiographical revision to be in order for such interpretations, not least because of the unlikelihood that Kant would have had any direct knowledge of Leibniz’s geometry of situation. Vincenzo De Risi’s brief remark regarding Buffon and Kant is a welcome exception. See Geometry and Monadology, 291.

CHAPTER FOUR

187. “Subreptio,” or “Erschleichung” in German, was initially used in a juridical context, referring to the practice of concealing important facts in order to gain an advantage. Christian Wolff adapted the term to indicate when mere inferences were represented as actually grounded in sensation. Kant changed the meaning of “surreptitious concepts”—or “subreptive axioms,” as he referred to them in the Inaugural Dissertation (1770)—once more, this time to indicate the illicit application of sensible concepts to metaphysical objects. The meaning of subreption had to be changed by Kant again as the contours of transcendental idealism fell into place, given that it crucially relied on a connection between sensible intuition and intellectual concepts. By 1781 “transcendental subreption” was therefore reformulated as a problem referring to the application of intellectual concepts to objects of what would have to be an intellectual intuition, a problem defining the challenges faced in the Critique of Pure Reason’s transcendental dialectic (e.g., A389, A509/B537, A583/B611, A619/B647, A643/B671, but note the older cast of subreption in terms of the barrier between sense and intellect at A294/B350). Intellectual concepts in the Critique would be limited to an “empirical employment,” with the “transcendental employment” of these concepts yielding only “a logic of illusion” (A131/B170). For an extensive consideration of the role played by subreption in eighteenth-century philosophy as a whole, and in Kant in particular, see Hanno Birken-Bertsch’s Subreption und Dialektik bei Kant: Der Begriff des Fehlers der Erschleichung in der Philosophie des 18. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 2006). Michelle Grier traces Kant’s account of subreption from the precritical period to his discussions in the transcendental dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason in Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

188. Kant’s newfound conviction is even more pronounced in his response to Moses Mendelssohn’s comments on Dreams of a Spirit-Seer: “The upshot of all this is that one is led to ask whether it is intrinsically possible to determine these powers of spiritual substances by means of a priori rational judgments. This investigation resolves itself into another, namely, whether one can by means of rational inferences discover a primitive power, that is, the primary, fundamental relationship of cause to effect. And since I am certain that this is impossible, it follows that, if these powers are not given in experience, they can only be invented” (10:72).

189. As Kuehn describes it, “In 1766, when Green was on business in England, Scheffner wrote to Herder: ‘The Magister [Kant] is now constantly in England, because Rousseau and Hume are there, of whom his friend Mr. Green sometimes writes to him.’” Kant, 155. See also Kuehn’s note regarding the lack of any such letters from Green in Kant’s correspondence (463n38).

190. Locke described this piece in a letter to Molyneux as a chapter meant to be added to the fourth edition of the Essay. Locke died before it was complete, but it was published posthumously under the title Of the Conduct of the Human Understanding (W. Bowyer, 1706). Kypke translated this together with a second posthumous piece from the same collection, Locke’s “A Discourse of Miracles”: Johann Lockens Anleitung des menschlichen Verstandes zur Erkenntnis der Wahrheit (Königsberg: J. H. Hartung, 1755). Alois Winter suggests that Kypke’s translation might have been undertaken at Kant’s urging. “Selbst Denken-Antinomien-Schranken Zum Einfluß des späten Locke auf die Philosophie Kants,” Aufklärung, 1 (1986): 27–66. For more on Kypke’s relationship to Kant, see Kuehn, Kant, 110–111.

191. In 1741 G. H. Thiele published a revised version of the first Latin translation from 1701 as Johannis Lockii Armigeri Libri IV de Intellectu Humano (Leipzig: Theophilum Georgi, 1741). Although a German translation of Locke’s Essay was available in 1757, Kant typically paraphrased Locke in Latin when referring to him in his notes, so it is likely that he was using Thiele’s translation. Further discussion of this is in Winter, “Selbst Denken-Antinomien-Schranken,” 27–28; and Reinhard Brandt, “Materialien zur Entstehung der Kritik der reinen Vernunft (John Locke und Johann Schultz),” in Beiträge zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781–1981, ed. I. Heidemann and Wolfgang Ritzel (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1981), 37–68.

192. During this time period Herder, for example, reported Kant’s references to Locke—references displaying an especially careful reading of Locke’s account of space and personal identity—during Kant’s lectures on metaphysics from 1762 to 1764 (28:39, 43). Kant’s notes from 1764–1766 also considered Locke’s distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments (17:278). Thirty years later Locke remained a presence in Kant’s courses; as Kant characterized him in one late lecture, “Leibniz and Locke are to be reckoned among the greatest and most meritorious reformers of philosophy in our times. The latter sought to analyse the human understanding and to show which powers of the soul and which of its operations belonged to this or that cognition” (9:32). Altogether, Kant would directly refer to Locke over forty times in his writings.

193. Although Leibniz’s New Essays were reviewed by Eberhard in the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek in 1766 (III, St. II, 44ff.), the book, at least according to Giorgio Tonelli, seems not to have had an immediate scholarly impact. See Tonelli, “Leibniz on Innate Ideas and the Early Reactions to the Publication of the Nouveaux essais (1765),” Journal of the History of Philosophy 12 (1974): 437–454. John Zammito, by contrast, identifies the New Essays as the clear source of Kant’s “great light,” in Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology, 270. With respect to determining Kant’s access to Leibniz in general, greater significance, in my view, must be placed on Louis Dutens’s 1768 publication of Leibniz’s complete works. The Dutens edition included, for example, Leibniz’s letter to Hansch, a letter in which Leibniz directly linked himself to Plato’s doctrines on the origin of ideas (in Philosophical Papers and Letters, 2:962–967). The Dutens edition received a laudatory review in the widely read Nova Acta Eruditorum, a review that included lengthy descriptions of the contents of each volume (October 1768, 433–449). The following year, a long review of the second edition of J. J. Brucker’s Historia critica philosophiae (Leipzig, 1742–1744, 1767) appeared in the Nova Acta Eruditorum, with the reviewer noting the significant amount of time Brucker had devoted to Leibniz and referring readers to the new Dutens edition (April 1769, 156–173). Of Brucker’s interpretation Tonelli writes, “The great historian of philosophy, J. J. Brucker (of Thomasium extraction), was able to notice what other people had overlooked, and what they would continue to overlook for a long time thereafter. He quoted extensively from Leibniz’s Epistola ad Hanschium [the letter to Hansch], reproducing the crucial passage on innateness. Moreover, referring to the Causa Dei, he shows that he is aware of the core of the problem. His carefulness in doing this was probably accompanied by a certain relish in the implicit revelation of the divergency between Leibniz and Wolff.” “Leibniz on Innate Ideas,” 446. Note that Tonelli gives incorrect information regarding the location of Brucker’s account: Leibniz’s letter to Hansch is discussed by Brucker in vol. 4, p. 375. While it is uncertain whether Kant read the review of Brucker, he was certainly familiar with Brucker’s discussions of Plato (and thus presumably of Leibniz, given that Brucker followed Leibniz in identifying their positions), for Kant made direct reference to Brucker when considering the connection between Plato’s notion of the archetypes and the role assigned by Kant to the “Ideas” of reason in the Critique of Pure Reason (A316/B372). Brucker first rehearses Plato’s position in his sections devoted to Greek philosophy 1:627–727; the pagination is the same in both the 1742 and 1767 editions.

194. Leibniz, preface to New Essays on Human Understanding, 47–48.

195. “Non tanquem conceptus connati, sed e legibus menti insitis (attendendo ad eius actions occasione experientiae) abstracti, adeoque acquisiti” (2:395).

196. I treat Kant’s theory of intuition more fully in “Intuition and Nature in Kant and Goethe,” European Journal of Philosophy 19, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 431–453.

197. Note that “cause” is now listed as an intellectual concept, whereas it was earlier listed as one of the primary cases of a sensible concept’s surreptitious application to intelligible objects. This switch must be attributed to Hume, and Kant’s new—if not yet fully worked out—interest in “protecting” the concept from the problem of induction. On Hume’s influence with respect to this, see especially Lewis White Beck, Essays on Kant and Hume (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978).

198. J. de Castillon’s 1770 essay was awarded the prize: “Descartes et Locke conciliés,” in Nouveaux Memoires de l’Académie Royale des Sciences et Belles-Lettres (Berlin: Voss, 1772), 277–282. The academy had already published a similarly themed essay by N. Beguelin, “Conciliation des idées de Newton et de Leibnitz sur l’espace et le vuide [sic]” (1769), in Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences et des Belles-Lettres de Berlin (Berlin: Haude et Spenner, 1771), and Castillon opened his piece with reference to Beguelin’s work.

199. “Letter to Hansch on Platonic Philosophy,” July 25, 1707, in Philosophical Papers and Letters, 2:963.

200. Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, 80.

201. Kant’s subsequent identification of these laws with the concepts themselves would not entail a reinterpretation of the concepts as innate; on the contrary, the laws themselves would be ultimately understood by Kant to be part of the “epigenesis of reason” itself (B167). I will discuss the stages of Kant’s development of this position first in terms of the need to establish reason’s unity apart from any specific laws for connecting representations (chapter 5) and second in terms of Kant’s portrait of reason in the Critique of Pure Reason (chapter 7).

202. A reprint of Baumgarten’s text is included in the academy volume devoted to the notes Kant made in his own copy of the text. See 17:5–226. All of Kant’s notes made within Baumgarten’s text are identified in terms of their location and arranged according to their supposed chronology, such that, for example, Kant’s various remarks on §§770–775, “Origo Animae Huminae,” can be traced throughout Kant’s career. Since Kant taught this text every year, determining the chronological sequence of any notes made for a given section is necessarily imprecise in that it can rely only upon placement, ink color, and so on. The academy edition’s two volumes devoted to Kant’s notes on metaphysics (vols. 17 and 18)—including numerous pieces written on so-called loose sheets—follow Erich Adickes’s dating system, a system explained by Adickes at the start of the volumes devoted to Kant’s notes, marginalia, and assorted Nachlaß (14:lx–lxi). Adickes’s system is almost always followed by the Cambridge edition of Kant’s notes, though the editors often suggest longer possible time frames for a given text. Translations are here taken from the Cambridge edition wherever possible. See Immanuel Kant: Notes and Fragments, trans. Paul Guyer, Curtis Bowman, and Fred Rauscher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

203. Kant’s elaboration of the epigenesist alternative can be compared to the relatively brief remarks—at least so far as Herder recorded them—when discussing this section of Metaphysica in 1762–1763. See 28:889.

204. Discussing the same passage in Baumgarten thirty-three years later, for example, Kant continued to use the term “epigenesis” in contrast to the preexistence theory of origin, but in place of his concern with the physical process of blending—in fact, in place of any consideration of biological generation at all—Kant focused on the Aristotelian-derived account of “concreationism” in Baumgarten’s text, rejecting this option on principle, given the soul’s nature as simple substance. In language deliberately borrowed from chemical analyses, Kant here characterized the soul as either an “educt”—a thing that preexisted its new form—or as a “product,” something newly produced via epigenesis. The latter theory was completely impossible, according to Kant, because a noncomposite substance like the soul could not be expected to transfer a part of itself to its offspring (28:684—these comments are taken from student lecture notes, “Metaphysics Dohna,” from Kant’s metaphysics course in 1792–1793). Kant made additional notes for this passage, rejecting the soul’s epigenesis because of its immateriality (18:190) and its immortality (17:672, 18:429). Kant also considered the epigenesis of the soul separately in terms of a potential transfer of good or bad character (23:106–107).

205. Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–1882, with Original Omissions Restored, ed. N. Barlow (London: Collins, 1958), 120.

206. For more on Lambert’s influence on Kant, see Lewis White Beck, “Lambert and Hume in Kant’s Development,” in Essays on Kant and Hume (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 108ff.; and Alison Laywine, “Kant in Reply to Lambert on the Ancestry of Metaphysical Concepts,” Kantian Review 5 (2001): 1–48.

207. Lambert took the word Schein from the study of optics, and, impressed by the methods used by astronomers, he called his phenomenology a “transcendent optics” to maintain its sense as a study of appearance in all of its modes, namely, as both illusion, or bloßes Schein, and as real appearance or that which is indexed to the real. See J. H. Lambert, Neues Organon (1764), in Gesammelte Philosophische Schriften (Hildesheim: Olms, 1965), IV, §4. For a short discussion of this see Lewis White Beck, Early German Philosophy: Kant and His Predecessors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 407–411.

208. The first two cases would be reworked for Kant’s discussion of the paralogisms and the antinomies, respectively, in the Critique of Pure Reason.

209. There is one other instance in the Dissertation that similarly falls afoul of Kant’s own restriction regarding any contact between intellect and sense. It occurs in Kant’s discussion of “number” as an intellectual concept requiring sensible intuition for its “actualization”: “Pure mathematics considers space in geometry, time in pure mechanics. To these there is added a certain concept which, though itself indeed intellectual, yet demands for its actualization in the concrete the auxiliary notions of time and space (in the successive addition and simultaneous juxtaposition of a plurality), namely, the concept of number, treated of by arithmetic” (2:397). In the Critique of Pure Reason, number will no longer be treated as an intellectual concept, but its connection to space and time will be essentially similar so far as it functions in the “Axioms of Intuition” as a means for “actualizing” or connecting the intellectual categories of “Quantity” to sensible intuition (A160/B199–A167/B207).

210. Herz had published his response to Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation, sending a copy to Kant in 1771; it was in reply to this that Kant ostensibly wrote to Herz in February of 1772. See Marcus Herz, Betrachtungen aus der spekulativen Weltweisheit (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1990). For more on Herz’s Betrachtung see Eric Watkins, “The ‘Critical Turn’: Kant and Herz from 1770–1772,” Proceedings of the Ninth International Kant Congress 2 (2001): 69–77.

211. Kant had already outlined the problem for himself in similar terms: “How does it come about that to that which is but a product of our self-isolated mind there correspond objects and that these objects are subject to those laws which we prescribe to them?” (17:564 and again at 17:615).

212. There are interpretive disputes regarding Kant’s letter to Herz, in this instance, regarding the nature of the “objects” themselves: are the intellectual concepts meant to connect to intellectual objects or to sensible objects of experience? I take Kant to be referring only to sensible objects here, a position I discuss more fully in “The Key to all Metaphysics: Kant’s Letter to Herz, 1772,” Kantian Review 12, no. 2 (2007): 109–127.

213. Erich Adickes connects Kant’s discussion here to a similar rehearsal of the various parties. In a note Adickes takes to have been written at the same time as Kant’s letter to Herz—same script, similar shade of ink (Kant mixed his own ink, so different shades mark different batches and therefore different time periods)—Kant runs through the cast again, considering Crusius’s “Methodus cognitionis praestabilitae” and the contrasting resources for ideas, “per epigenesin vel per praeformationem” (17:554). Here Kant pulled together the separate vocabularies of origin and connection, and he would later return to it again (a different ink color) to add yet a third layer of description in terms of dogmatic versus skeptical approaches to metaphysics. As a sign of Kant’s own progress, we can read his final entry regarding this: “Alle haben die Metaphysik dogmatisch, nicht critisch tractirt” (17:554).

CHAPTER FIVE

214. Kant’s presentation of the deduction would be subsequently criticized for its “obscurity,” a charge to which Kant responded by repeating the distinction between the respective tasks of the objective and subjective portions of the discussion, insisting that the latter portion, while important for explaining how the intellectual concepts inform experience, was less necessary than the objective proof that they in fact did so. Kant called the achievement of a subjective deduction “meritorious,” therefore, but inessential in comparison to the importance of the objective portion of the deduction (4:474). Kant later complained that even this attempt at a clarification of his goals regarding the deduction had been misunderstood, emphasizing once more the greater need to demonstrate the objective validity of concepts derived from a nonempirical origin (8:184). Such protestations aside, Kant in fact secured the rightful application of the concepts to experience—a rightfulness whose demonstration was required in order to show their “objective validity”—by way of an account of the pure understanding as the actual site of the categories’ nonempirical origin and thus indeed on the subjective portion of the deduction. I return to this point in chapter 7.

215. In the following years Kant would repeatedly promise Herz that the “critique of metaphysics” would soon be forthcoming, complaining variously of “one major object that, like a dam, blocks” him (10:199) or of a “stone” blocking his path (10:124) when explaining its delay. The most comprehensive account of Kant’s work to develop the objective and subjective strands of the argument is given by Wolfgang Carl in “Kant’s First Drafts of the Deduction of the Categories,” in Kant’s Transcendental Deductions: The Three Critiques and the Opus Postumum, ed. Eckart Förster (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 3–20, and in his monograph Der schweigende Kant: Die Entwürfe zu einer Deduktion der Kategorien vor 1781 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1989).

216. As Kant explains it at one point, “Since space and time are only conditions of appearance, there must be a principium of the unity of pure reason through which cognition is determined without regard to experience” (17:704). This is clearly broader than Kant’s previous announcement regarding his “possession of a principle that will completely solve what has hitherto been a riddle and that will bring the misleading qualities of the self-alienating understanding under certain and easily applied rules” (10:144).

217. See also, “There must be two sorts of principles of unity a priori. Unity of the intellection of appearances a priori, insofar as we are determined through them, and unity of the spontaneity of the understanding, insofar as the appearances are determined through it. . . . Unity of reason. Unity of the self-determination of reason with regard to the manifold of the unity of rules or principles. Not of the exposition, i.e., of the analytic unity of appearances, but of the determination (comprehension), i.e., of the synthetic, through which the manifold as given in general (not merely to the senses) necessarily has unity” (17:707–708). In these notes Kant is inconsistent in identifying distinctive tasks for the understanding when compared to reason, but he does already think that the principles of the former’s unity depend on reason (17:709).

218. Kant had previously published course announcements on four separate occasions (1757, 1758, 1759–1760, 1765–1766), and the 1775 announcement, “Of the Different Races of Human Beings to Announce the Lectures on Physical Geography of Immanuel Kant, Professor Ordinarius of Logic and Metaphysics,” would be his last. The Berlin Academy edition of Kant’s course announcement offers an amalgamation of two editions. The opening and closing paragraphs directly concern details of the course and are from 1775; the body of Kant’s piece, however, comes from the 1777 edition. Kant had prepared the separate, expanded version of the essay for inclusion in J. J. Engel’s Der Philosoph für die Welt (Leipzig, 1777), part 2, pp. 125–164. Although Kant was invited by the publisher and book merchant Johann Brietkopf to prepare a separate treatment on the subject of race for inclusion in an anthology, Kant declined in 1778, explaining that his “views would have to be expanded and the play of races among animals and plant species considered explicitly, which would require too much attention from me and necessitate new and extensive reading rather outside my field, since natural history is not my specialty but only a hobby and my principle aim with respect to it is to use it to extend and correct our knowledge of mankind” (10:230). Of course, Kant lectured on the “physical geography” aspect of his “hobby” some forty-eight times between 1756 and 1796, behind only logic and metaphysics in number of times taught. This demonstrated not only Kant’s long-standing interest in natural history but the manner in which he considered his speculative contributions to the field to be scientifically significant and not, therefore, the mere musings of an enthusiastic hobbyist. John Zammito describes the extent to which Kant would work to establish and defend his anthropological views against Herder’s position during the 1760s and 1770s in Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology. Klaus P. Fischer describes the Lockean basis of the position held by the philanthropinists in “John Locke in the German Enlightenment,” Journal of the History of Ideas 36, no. 3 (1975): 438.

219. Buffon, “The Natural History of Man,” sect. 9, “Of the Varieties of the Human Species,” (1749), in Natural History, General and Particular, 3rd ed., trans. W. Smellie, (London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1791), 3:57. Although Buffon published the first three volumes of his natural history together in 1749, Kästner translated and published only the first two volumes in German in 1750; volume 3 appeared in 1752. It should be noted that Buffon moved easily between “variety” (variété) and “race” (race) when discussing the matter. Since the thirteenth century, “de bonne race” had been used in France when referring to the aristocracy, with a subsequent broadening of its usage in the sixteenth century in terms of a struggle between “la noblesse d’épée” and “la noblesse de robe.” By the end of the seventeenth century, race was defined by the dictionary of the French Academy in a manner that made it interchangeable with the human race: “la race mortuelle, pour dire, le genre humain.” François Bernier was thus unusual for the time, given his use of race as a means for discriminating between peoples he had encountered on his voyages. See “Nouvelle division de la terre, par les différentes espèces ou races d’hommes qui l’habitent,” Journal des sçavans (1684): 133–140 reprinted 1685, pp. 148–155. Antje Sommer and Werner Conze’s entry on “Rasse” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexicon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984), 137–141, traces some of this history. A helpful discussion of Buffon on race is in Phillip R. Sloan, “The Idea of Racial Degeneracy in Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 3 (1973): 293–321.

220. Maupertuis, The Earthly Venus (1745), 76. Compare Kant’s comment from a late lecture on physical geography on the general difficulties facing breeders regarding color: “Moors can give birth to white children, just as happens time to time when a white raven, crow, or blackbird is born” (9:314).

221. Ibid., 71.

222. Ibid., 78.

223. Ibid., 80.

224. See “The Natural History of Man,” 3:132, 165, 173.

225. Like Maupertuis, Buffon took white to be the original color, although in Buffon’s case this was on grounds tied to geographical considerations; as he summarized it, “White, then, appears to be the primitive colour of Nature, which may be varied by climate, by food, and by manners, to yellow, brown, and black, and which, in certain circumstances, returns, but so greatly altered, that it has no resemblance to the original whiteness, because it has been adulterated by the causes which have already been assigned.” Ibid., 3:181. It must be kept in mind that degeneration was by no means akin to speciation in either its transformist versions espoused by Lamark or the transmutationist position held by Charles Darwin. Thus Buffon took it to be at least theoretically possible for any variety to resume its original form once it had returned to its point of geographical origin, though he thought that it would take numerous generations for the molds to be reaffected and that it would be nearly impossible to determine with certainty the specific geographical site upon which any given species had arisen.

226. Buffon, “On Degeneration” (1766), in Natural History, General and Particular, 3rd ed., trans. Smellie, 7:396. Kästner’s translation of this entry, “Von der Abartung der Thiere,” appeared in 1772.

227. Ibid., 392.

228. Ibid., 393.

229. Ibid., 394.

230. “This is very practical,” Kant noted, “for in the first case [Animalculism] a man has to look closely at the character of the wife and her race [Race], in the second [Ovism] he does not, rather the wife has to look at the race [Race] of her husband. According to epigenesis one must look to both: 1) as a result of the alternative, 2) as a result of the blending [Mischung]. With preexistence you do not have to” (17:416; see also the continued attitude toward preexistence theory in Kant’s later discussion of Mary’s immaculate conception, 6:80n). Kästner’s translation of Buffon’s “race” was “Rasse,” which is not to suggest that Kant was reading Buffon in French, only to note the difference. Kant used “Race” over “Rasse” in both of his essays, “Von den verschiedenen Racen der Menschen” (1775), and “Bestimmung des Begriffs einer Menschenrace” (1785).

231. In his lectures on metaphysics during this period Kant would therefore insist that questions regarding animal souls amounted more to reports on our “ignorance” than the revelation of “secrets known only to philosophers” and that the real “discovery here which has cost much trouble and which only a few know [is] . . . to cognize the limits of reason and of philosophy and to comprehend how far reason can go here” (28:274). All that could be said about animal souls, according to Kant, was that something like a principle of activity must be logically presumed to exist in animals, since matter considered on its own is inert (28:275).

232. Kant’s claim regarding the status of his own anthropological work, namely, that it is to be understood only as putting forward ideas for a speculative consideration of natural history, has been largely challenged by scholars investigating the history of the idea of race. See most recently, for example, Raphaël Lagier’s Les races humaines selon Kant (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004). Given the number of racist remarks made throughout Kant’s work in this area, it has been tempting, moreover, to see Kant’s discussion of race as doing something more than providing a heuristic tool, to see it rather as a scientific scaffolding upon which Kant could justify his racist attitudes. For something of this interpretation see Mark Larrimore, “Sublime Waste: Kant on the Destiny of the Races,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 29 (1999): 99–125. All citations from Kant’s 1775 essay will be taken from “Of the Different Races of Human Beings,” in The Works of Immanuel Kant: Anthropology, History, and Education, trans. H. Wilson and G. Zöller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 84–97.

233. Peter McLaughlin discusses Kant’s vocabulary at work in the proposed taxonomy in “Kant on Heredity and Adaptation,” in Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500–1870, ed. S. Müller-Wille and H-J. Rheinberger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 277–291. Further discussion of Kant’s work to provide a scientific definition of race is in Robert Bernasconi, “Who Invented the Concept of Race? Kant’s Role in the Enlightenment Construction of Race,” in Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 11–36. For discussion of Kant’s treatment of race in connection with his views on organisms, see Susan Meld Shell, The Embodiment of Reason: Kant on Spirit, Generation, and Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). For an account of Kant’s anthropological works in connection with his critical system, see Lagier, Les races humaines selon Kant.

234. Kant explained the unique permanence of color against subsequent climatic variation by way of the functioning of the germs themselves for this specific trait: “Only the phyletic formation can degenerate into a race; however, once a race has taken root and has suffocated [erstickt] the other germs, it resists all transformation just because the character of the race has then become prevailing in the generative power” (2:442). Why racial difference alone remained invariant, for Kant, emerged only implicitly in his later discussions of the moral teleology at work in providential history—essays from the mid-1780s that were drawn in part from Kant’s end discussions in his anthropology lectures. There had already been intimations of the requirement for antagonism between people in the 1770s, as Kant dismissed Maupertuis’s eugenics program for a “noble sort,” for example, with the claim that such a plan, while “feasible,” was “well prevented by a wiser Nature because the great incentives which set into play the sleeping powers of humanity and compel it to develop all its talents and to come nearer to the perfection of their destiny, lie in the intermingling of the evil with the good” (2:431).

235. Paul Menzer, by contrast, argues that the conceptual strategy behind Kant’s appeal to germs and dispositions in the anthropological writings parallels the strategy at work in Kant’s early cosmological treatise (1755) regarding the formation of planets. See Kants Lehre von der Entwicklung in Natur und Geschichte, 106.

236. Kästner translated Buffon’s “développer” with the same word, “Auswickelung,” that was used in accounts of the unfolding of preformed embryos by preexistence theorists. Kant follows this terminology in 1763, equally rejecting the account of a “supernatural Auswickelung” proposed by preexistence theorists and the “natural Auswickelung” or development of the embryo out of parts that had been previously molded—parts that were “preformed” in this specific sense only—according to Buffon. (See my remarks in n. 176 for further comments regarding Buffon’s reappropriation of développer for his own purposes and the difficulties this would pose for his translators.)

237. See also Herder’s notes regarding this from Kant’s lectures on metaphysics during the same period, 28:891–892.

238. Attention to Kant’s language throughout the essay on race reveals Maupertuis, and particularly Buffon, to have been Kant’s central interlocutors on race at this juncture. Their specific accounts of generation seem, moreover, to have been Kant’s primary models when considering the role of germs and dispositions in his own theory. Thus while it can be supposed that Kant was aware of Bonnet’s account of preexistent germs as the most nuanced defense of preexistence theory, there are only a very few direct references to Bonnet made by Kant: once in 1768 in reference to Bonnet’s thought experiment (originally Condillac’s) regarding the senses—the so-called bonnetische Statue—and three times in the 1780s while criticizing Bonnet’s notion of the “great chain of being” (2:381, B696, 8:180n.). The key words to trace here in Kant’s usage are the nouns and derivatives of auswickeln (to unwrap, usually translated as “unfold” in English), and entwickeln (to develop). On the whole, Buffon’s German translators used auswickeln for développer during Buffon’s discussions of generation, whereas Bonnet’s translators tended to use entwickeln for développer, particularly in his Palingénésie (1770; vol. 1 trans. 1770, vol. 2 trans. 1772). While there is still some mixing of the terms in the German translation of Bonnet’s Contemplation de la nature (1764–1766; trans. 1766)—such that there is reference, for example, to the “universal laws of unfolding [Auswickelung]” by which “a new head develops [entwickelt]” on a hydra—in Bonnet’s book on palingenesis there are almost no occurrences of the terms Auswickelung (0) or auswickeln (4), compared to Entwickelung (21) or entwickelt (25). (By comparison, in Betrachtung der Natur: Auswickelung occurs 9 times, auswickeln 4, Entwickelung 15, and entwickelt 19, but note that auswickeln is also used as a translation of Evolution, not only développer, in this text.) For references to Bonnet see Betrachtung über die Natur (Leipzig: J. F. Junius, 1766); and Philosophische Palingenesie, trans. J. C. Lavatar, 2 vols. (Zurich: Orell, Gessner, Fuesili, 1770). These differences suggest that Kant’s own pattern of word choice reveals, to some extent, his linguistic influences. Up until 1777 Kant used Auswickelung some 14 times, compared to 11 uses Entwickelung. After 1777 Kant used Auswickelung 9 times, but Entwickelung would appear some 112 times. What can perhaps be seen here is that the change in Kant’s usage from auswickeln to entwickeln after 1777 demonstrates that he was reading Buffon, not Bonnet, when appealing to germs and dispositions in his discussion of race in 1775. After 1777, after, that is, Kant had carefully read through volume 2 of Tetens’s Versuche, where there were literally hundreds of pages devoted to a discussion of generation in terms of the three positions Tetens sought to combine—Buffon’s “concreationist” account, Caspar Wolff’s theory of epigenesis, and Bonnet’s system of the Entwickelung of preexistent germs—Kant would switch almost exclusively to the use of Entwickelung. Tetens’s own position argued for an “Evolution through Epigenesis.” See J. N. Tetens, Philosophische Versuche über die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwickelung (Leipzig: Weidmanns Erben und Reich, 1777), 2:508–513. Amid all this data, however, there are two points that should not be forgotten: first, that Buffon explicitly rejected preexistence theories despite his use of développer and, second, that although Bonnet rejected the notion of preformed, miniature individuals, he was indeed an advocate of preexistent structures contained in the germs of an animal, structures whose enlargement he took to be captured by his notion of développer. Beyond the context of Buffon and Bonnet in German translation, by the mid-1780s Entwickelung would come to convey an unspecified sense of activity in development, whereas Evolution would become linguistically established as the preexistence alternative.

239. Kant used the language of germs and dispositions throughout his writings, particularly in the moral works. Indeed, taken altogether, according to Kant there was a germ for metaphysics, for reason, for evil, for cultivation, and for enlightenment. And while Kant tended to distinguish Naturanlagen from moralische Anlagen (with the latter frequently blurring the lines between itself and Gessinung), undenominated Anlagen appeared as frequently throughout Kant’s works as did germs.

240. In later lectures Kant would weaken the claim that all individuals were themselves perfectible given the universal perfectibility of the species. In the lectures from 1775–1776, for example, the “savage Indian or Greenlander” was said to have “the same germs as a civilized human being, only they are not yet developed” (25:651). But by 1781–1782 Kant suggested that in cases where no advancement had occurred in a people over time, “one must assume that there is a certain natural disposition [Naturanlage] within them that cannot be overcome.” Immanuel Kants Menschenkunde: Oder Philosophische Anthropologie nach handschriftlichen Vorlesungen, ed. F. C. Starke (Leipzig, 1831), 352. And by 1790–1791, Kant was ready to say that although the point of the species’ natural dispositions was to lead it to the formation of a civil society (and ultimately, thereby, a moral kingdom of ends), neither the Negro nor the American Indian would ever be capable of creating (stiften) such a society themselves. See Kants Anweisung zur Menschen- und Welterkenntnis, ed. F. C. Starke (Leipzig, 1831), 119, 121. This shift in Kant’s thinking paralleled the increasing emphasis in his lectures on the role of a “moral disposition”—in this case, purported laziness, weakness of character, etc.—as an occasioning cause alongside climate and nutrition in the formation of races and varieties. Pauline Kleingeld traces a change in Kant’s views after 1792 regarding the hierarchy of the races with respect to their moral characterizations, arguing that Kant was forced to weaken this aspect of his theory—while still maintaining the viability of race as a physiological concept—once he took up the question of cosmopolitan right. See “Kant’s Second Thoughts on Race,” Philosophical Quarterly 57 (2007): 573–592. Drawing primarily on Kant’s lectures on physical geography, Robert Bernasconi revisits Kleingeld’s claim in order to describe, by contrast, the extent to which Kant’s earlier attitudes remained fundamentally intact during the physical geography lectures Kant delivered during the 1790s. See Bernasconi, “Kant’s Third Thoughts on Race,” in Reading Kant’s Geography, ed. Stuart Elden and Eduardo Mendietta (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011), 291–318. For Kant’s public criticisms of colonialism and, in particular, the treatment of the Sugar Islands’ slave population and the moral duty to educate the children of slaves, see his published remarks from the 1790s, namely, Perpetual Peace (8:359) and the much later Metaphysics of Morals (6:266, 283, 314, 331).

241. Kant used Basedow’s Methodenbuch as a textbook when lecturing on pedagogy during the winter semester of 1776–1777. A good sense of Kant’s commitment to the school during this period emerges from his letter exchanges regarding it. See esp. 10:191–195.

242. Kant’s encomium was even more pronounced at the end of that semester’s anthropology lectures: “The present Basedowian institutes are the first that have come about according to the perfect plan of education. This is the greatest phenomenon which has appeared in this century for the improvement of the perfection of humanity, through it all schools in the world will receive another form, and the human race will thereby be freed from the constraints of the prevailing schools” (25:722–723). The next time Kant would be willing to express such optimism regarding humanity’s progress would be with respect to the feelings of sympathy generated by the French Revolution, feelings he took to be signs of a deep moral disposition (moralische Anlage) in the human race (7:85).

243. This claim guides every one of the nine propositions outlined by Kant in his 1784 essay “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim.” See esp. 8:18–23, 25, 30.

244. Kant would make a similar argument regarding this kind of susceptibility when discussing moral feeling in the Metaphysics of Morals. In this discussion Kant described a “vital moral force” capable of exciting moral feeling as a nonpathological response to the mind’s representation of the moral law. In his words, “No human being is entirely without moral feeling, for were he entirely lacking in receptivity to it he would be morally dead; and if (to speak in medical terms) the moral vital force could no longer excite this feeling, then humanity would dissolve (by chemical laws, as it were) into mere animality and be mixed irretrievably with the mass of other natural beings” (6:400). This susceptibility or “receptivity” was original to us, and its function was to orient the mind toward the moral law without thereby compromising its freedom. The ability to be quickened by the moral force in this manner was thus indeed innate, according to Kant, but not in the sense of its having been implanted. Moral feeling was in this sense simply “inscrutable,” and rather than speculate further regarding its origins, our responsibility lay instead toward its “cultivation” (cultiviren) (6:400; cf. 8:344).

245. On a Discovery Whereby Any New Critique of Pure Reason Is to Be Made Superfluous by an Older One (1790), trans. Henry Allison, in Theoretical Philosophy after 1781 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Kant would undertake a similar approach when trying to negotiate the question of determining the innate character of goodness and evil in mankind (e.g., evil is innate only insofar as freedom as its a priori ground is innate) (6:32, 35).

246. J. A. Eberhard was the Leibnizian philosopher responsible for one of the more scathing attacks Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason would receive. A thorough history of this accompanies Henry Allison’s translation of Eberhard’s piece. See H. Allison, The Kant-Eberhard Controversy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 1–104.

247. Leibniz, New Essays on the Human Understanding, 80.

248. I therefore disagree with Phillip Sloan’s widely cited account of Kant’s position on this point during both this period and in the first Critique. While Sloan is right to identify the continuity between Kant’s vocabulary of germs and dispositions when discussing intellectual concepts in the 1770s and 1781 (e.g., A66/B91) the continuity stands with regard to their epigenesis, not their preformation in the Leibnizian sense of ideas implanted in the mind. See Sloan, “Preforming the Categories: Eighteenth-Century Generation Theory and the Biological Roots of Kant’s A Priori,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 40 (2002): 229–253. Claude Piché, by contrast, interprets Kant in a manner close to my own on this point, though I depart from him regarding the shift he sees in Kant toward the epigenesis of experience during the 1780s. See “The Precritical Use of the Metaphor of Epigenesis,” in New Essays on the Precritical Kant, ed. Tom Rockmore (New York: Humanity Books, 2001), 182–200.

CHAPTER SIX

249. The clearest version of this argument—including within it a short rehearsal of Tetens’s theory of cognition—is provided by Herman de Vleeschauwer in his influential account of Kant’s development, La déduction transcendentale dans l’oeuvre de Kant (Paris: É. Champion, 1934), 1:299–315. A shorter summary of de Vleeschauwer’s argument in English is in The Development of Kantian Thought: The History of a Doctrine, trans. A. R. C. Duncan (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1962), 82–88. More recent appraisals of the differences between Tetens’s and Kant’s ultimate theories of representation can be found in separate discussions by Beck, Carl, and Kitcher. Beck, Early German Philosophy, 412–424; Carl, Der schweigende Kant, 119–126; and Patricia Kitcher, Kant’s Thinker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 31–39. The best discussion of Tetens’s own theory of cognition, of its connection to Kant, and of the assessment made by both Kant’s contemporaries and his successors regarding Tetens’s influence on the Critique is in Wilhelm Uebele’s Johann Nicolaus Tetens nach seiner Gesamtentwicklung betrachtet, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des Verhältnisses zu Kant (Berlin: Reuther and Reichard, 1911), esp. chap. 3, 69–156. A brief selection of passages from the first volume of Tetens’s Philosophische Versuche über die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwickelung is available in English translation from Eric Watkins in his Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: Background Source Materials (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 353–391.

250. This aspect of Lambert’s thought is also described by Beck in Early German Philosophy, 402–412.

251. J. N. Tetens, Einleitung zur Berechnung der Leibrenten und Anwartschaften, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Weidmanns Erben und Reich, 1785–1786).

252. Kant would complain about Tetens’s lack of attention to the first Critique on three separate occasions, describing Tetens as one of “the only men through whose cooperation this subject could have been brought to a successful conclusion before too long, even though centuries before this one have not seen it done. But these men are leery of cultivating a wasteland that, with all the care that has been lavished on it, has always remained unrewarding. Meanwhile people’s efforts continue in a constant circle, returning always to the point where they started; but it is possible that materials that now lie in the dust may yet be worked up into a splendid construction” (10:341). Kant also mentions Tetens in this vein at 10:346. Given these remarks, one might wonder at the lack of published attention on Kant’s part to Tetens’s Versuche—at least prior to Kant’s being attacked for his “psychologism”—here Uebele’s claim regarding Kant’s subsumption of Tetens under Locke as the universal representative of empiricist approaches seems right. See Uebele, Johann Nicolaus Tetens nach seiner Gesamtentwicklung betrachtet, 188.

253. See J. N. Tetens, Über die allgemeine spekulativische Philosophie (Bützow: Berger und Boednerschen Buchhandlung, 1775). Uebele describes the specific nature of the Dissertation’s influence on the 1775 piece—an influence operating primarily through Kant’s theory of spatial intuition. Ibid., 103ff.

254. Although Tetens intimates his ultimate position in the preface to volume 1 of the Philosophische Versuche, the specific account of the manner in which he sees an analogous balance between form and force to be operating in the generation of the body, the brain, and the soul, is first introduced in the second volume, 2:508–513.

255. Ibid., 1:vii–ix, xiv. It is worth remembering here that psychology first emerged in the eighteenth century as a method meant to correct the excesses of speculative metaphysics. This background makes sense of Bonnet’s insistence, for example, that he not be compared to Leibniz, since he took his psychological investigations into cognition to have nothing to do with those of the older metaphysician. Thus in the preface to the second German edition of Bonnet’s Palingenesie the physiognomist Johann Caspar Lavater ruefully included long excerpts from Bonnet’s letter to Lavater admonishing him for having included misleading remarks concerning Leibniz and Bonnet in his German translation of the first edition. See Charles Bonnet, Philosophische Palingenesie oder Gedanken über den vergangenen und künftigen Zustanden lebender Wesen, 2nd. ed., trans. J. C. Lavater (Zurich: Orell, Gessner, Fuesili, 1770), 1:xi, xiii. Tetens was similarly concerned to position his work in 1777 as distinct not only from traditional metaphysics but also from “the analytic or anthropological method” being used by the “new psychology.” See Tetens, Philosophische Versuche, 1:iv–v. Martin Kusch provides a thorough history of the rise of attacks on psychologism in the wake of Kant and Hegel in nineteenth-century Germany in Psychologism: A Case Study in the Sociology of Philosophical Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1995). A recent anthology devoted to this history is also helpful, especially the introductory essay: Dale Jacquette, ed., Philosophy, Psychology, and Psychologism: Critical and Historical Readings on the Psychological Turn in Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2003).

256. Tetens, Philosophische Versuche, 1:v.

257. Ibid., xi.

258. Hamann to Herder, May 17, 1779, cited by Arnulf Zweig in Correspondence, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 168n1.

259. A. G. Baumgarten, Metaphysica, 3rd ed. (Halle: C. H. Hemmerde, 1757). A reprint of Baumgarten’s text is included in the academy volume devoted to the notes Kant made in his own copy of the text. See 17:5–226. Thomas Sturm discusses Baumgarten’s account of empirical psychology in relation to Kant in “Kant on Empirical Psychology,” in Kant and the Sciences, ed. Eric Watkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 163–184.

260. Rudolf Makkreel considers the impact of Kant’s views on empirical psychology on the Critique of Judgment in “Kant on the Scientific Status of Psychology, Anthropology, and History,” in Kant and the Sciences, ed. Eric Watkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 185–201.

261. This kind of distinction lay behind Kant’s later taxonomy regarding the metaphysics of morals as well, insofar as moral empiricism was similarly determined to be a species of “practical anthropology” for its consideration of the will only so far as it could be sensuously affected (4:388), and it grounded Kant’s insistence that “we should not dream for a moment of trying to derive the reality of the basic moral principle from the special characteristics of human nature” (4:425).

262. I follow Wolfgang Carl in dating the “Metaphysics L1” lectures to the winter semesters between 1777 and 1778 and between 1779 and 1780. See Der schweigende Kant, 117–118. The editors of the Cambridge edition of Kant’s lectures provide the history of attempts to determine the precise dating of these lectures in Lectures on Metaphysics, trans. and ed. Karl Ameriks and Steve Naragon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), xxxi–xxxiii.

263. In Kant’s anthropology notes from this period he also identifies the genius as having a faculty of “Urbildung,” which Rudolf Makkreel describes as the capacity to form archetypes: “Das Urbildende Talent ist genie, das Nachbildende nicht” (15:232). Makkreel discusses Kant’s early account of image formation and the imagination in connection to his later discussions in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Judgment in Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermeneutical Import of the “Critique of Judgment” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

264. This use of the imagination in the formation of “determinate” judgments is connected to logical subordination in a manner that is distinct from the imagination’s role in “reflective” judgments, where aesthetic coordination (versus logical subordination) marks the formative process. This difference is already anticipated at 15:131 and in Kant’s notes in his copy of Meier’s logic at 16:119. Kant used Georg Friedrich Meier’s logic textbook, Excerpts from the Doctrine of Reason, for his logic courses. See Meier’s Vernuftlehere (Halle: J. J. Gebauer, 1752) and Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre (Halle: J. J. Gebauer, 1760). It is worth recalling Beck’s comment on Meier, since, according to Beck, Meier went beyond Baumgarten “in recognizing the role of imagination in all intellectual activity, even in the formation and application of concepts in the process of knowing.” Early German Philosophy, 286.

265. See Tetens, Philosophische Versuche, 1:104–127, 159–161. Thus, for example, Tetens takes a thorough “deduction” of the various aspects of the formative power as an investigation starting from experience (though he ultimately judges this to lie outside the particular purview of his first investigation): “Eine ausführliche physische Untersuchungen der bildenden Kraft der Seele, in der jede Regel, jedes Gesetz ihrer Wirksamkeit so vollkommen mit Beobachtungen belegt würde, als eine überweisende Deduktion aus Erfahrungen es erfordert, würde über die Gränzen hinausgehen, die ich mir in dem gegenwärtigen Versuch gesetzet habe” (119).

266. Although Kant would go on to describe the foundational role played by the transcendental synthesis of the imagination for any empirical synthesis according to the laws of association (e.g., A106–109) in the 1781 edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, he would remove all references to empirical synthesis from his account in the second (1787) edition, since by then he had decided that discussion of the “reproductive” imagination belonged in fact to empirical psychology as opposed to transcendental philosophy (B152).

267. The constraint applied to vocabulary regarding the soul is everywhere the same when referring to transcendental apperception also as “the bare I think” (e.g., A117, B132).

268. Dieter Henrich argues similarly in “Kant’s Notion of a Deduction and the Methodological Background of the first Critique” in Kant’s Transcendental Deductions, ed. Eckart Förster (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989): “The unity of apperception is the origin of the system of the categories and the point of departure for the deduction of the legitimacy of their usage” (45). “In its fundamental structure,” as Henrich rightly puts it, “the transcendental deduction is patterned on a deduction that aims to justify an acquired right by appealing to particular features of the origin of the categories and their usage” (39). I believe that Henrich is wrong, however, in suggesting that Kant’s method of proof in the deduction is not ostensive (41). While I agree with Henrich’s reading of the implicit nature of reflection and its connection to the indirect sense of apperception as a bare “I think,” Kant explicitly identifies the transcendental deduction as a (nonsyllogistic) ostensive proof. The ostensive nature of Kant’s proof in fact supports Henrich’s (and my own) reading of the deduction, since it “combines with the conviction of its truth insight into the sources of its truth,” or as Kant also puts it, ostensive proofs proceed by “reviewing the whole series of grounds that can lead us to the truth of a proposition by means of its complete possibility” (A789/B817, A791/B819). Note Henrich’s comment regarding his widely cited earlier treatment of the transcendental deduction: “When I wrote the paper, I had no idea what a deduction consists in and took for granted that it was exhaustively defined as a chain of syllogisms. But it isn’t, and after finding out that this is so, I must relativise what I said in that paper. The deduction of the second edition is indeed a proof within two steps; but Kant’s main reason for separating the two steps is their distinctive contribution to an understanding of the origins of knowledge” (252). Henrich’s first essay remains highly influential. See “The Proof-Structure of Kant’s Transcendental Deductions,” Review of Metaphysics 22 (1969): 640–659.

CHAPTER SEVEN

269. This comment was made by Johann Schultz, court chaplain and longtime supporter of Kant’s work. Schultz’s remarks were embedded in his anonymous review of a book on logic by Johann Ulrich. The specific charge of obscurity became well known in part because it was one of the very few criticisms of the Critique of Pure Reason to which Kant directly responded. Kant replied to Schultz’s review in a lengthy footnoted remark in the preface to the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (4:474–476), promising to make up for the difficulties in his exposition “at the earliest opportunity.” Kant was given that opportunity less than a year later, as he began revisions for the second edition of the Critique in the summer of 1786. As for Kant’s own views regarding the deduction’s relative opacity, it is noteworthy that he took that task to be relatively straightforward in comparison to the far more challenging attempt at a similar deduction in the moral sphere (e.g., 5:46). Schultz’s review is reprinted in Brigitte Sassen’s collection of translations as “Institutiones Logicae et Metaphysica by Jo. Aug. Hen. Ulrich,” in Kant’s Early Critics: The Empiricist Critique of the Theoretical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 210–214.

270. In what seems to have been an outline written for this discussion in 1780, Kant had drawn up a preliminary list of the various paths that had been so far taken by reason in its metaphysical investigations. As he saw it, there had been four altogether: “The empirical path and universality through induction. The fanatical path of intuition through the understanding. That of predetermination through innate concepts,” and finally, “the qualitas occulta of the healthy understanding [common sense] which gives no account” (18:272). With reason’s history thus laid out, Kant stopped to criticize the empiricists in particular for having followed a route that had done away with necessity in both mathematics and experience. “Thus Locke,” Kant concluded, “who earned almost too much honor after Leibniz had already refuted him, falls by the wayside. There thus remain epigenesis, mystical intuition, and involution. Finally there is also the qualitas occulta of common reason” (18:272–273). From here Kant went on to create a second list of positions that had advanced logical systems of cognition. These systems could be either empirical or transcendental, “the former Aristotle and Locke,” Kant wrote, “the latter either the system of epigenesis or that of involution, acquired or inborn” (18:275). It was clear where Kant placed himself on these lists, for as the first Critique would go on to show, only the critical path had discovered a system where transcendental logic emerged epigenetically from out of reason itself.

271. In the first Critique Kant characterized the difference between the two sections as lying between a focus on the “materials” versus the “plan” for a building, defining the “Doctrine of Method” as the section concerned with the “formal conditions of a complete system of pure reason” (A708/B736). He would repeat this distinction in the Metaphysics of Morals, explaining there that insofar as method concerns the “form of the science,” it stands with respect to the “Doctrine of Elements” as the “ground plan of the whole” (6:413).

272. See n. 81 for a fuller explanation of growth by “intussusception.”

273. Kant made the same point in the Metaphysics of Morals: “Since, considered objectively, there can be only one human reason, there cannot be many philosophies; in other words, there can be only one true system of philosophy from principles, in however many different and even conflicting ways one has philosophized about one and the same proposition”; only by paying attention to that fact, according to Kant, would it be possible to demonstrate the “unity of the true principle which unifies the whole of philosophy into one system” (6:207). In Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone Kant described the historical self-development of religion in a manner that was also indebted to his description of reason. For example, “we must have a principle of unity if we are to count as modifications of one and the same church the succession of different forms of faith which replace one another . . . for this purpose, therefore, we can deal only with the history of the church which from the beginning bore with it the germ and the principles of the objective unity of the true and universal religious faith to which it is gradually being brought nearer” (6:125). This point would be mirrored in the social and political sphere once Kant took up the history of civil constitutions in his essay Perpetual Peace, a history whose epochal determinations were unified throughout, as Kant saw it, by the unfolding of reason’s concept of right (8:350)—a point that Kant repeated in terms of the “evolution of a constitution” in both the Conflict of the Faculties (7:87, see also 7:91) and the Metaphysics of Morals (6:340). In his Philosophy of Art Schelling would mirror Kant’s account of philosophy’s organic development across history: “There is only one philosophy and one science of philosophy. What one calls different philosophical sciences are mere presentations of the one, undivided whole of philosophy under different ideal determinations. . . . The relationship between the individual parts in the closed and organic whole of philosophy resembles that between the various figures in a perfectly constructed poetic work, where every figure, by being a part of the whole, as a perfect reflex of that whole is actually absolute and independent in its own turn.” The Philosophy of Art, trans. D. Stott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 281–282.

274. This was not quite yet Herder’s definition of Bildung as “rising up to humanity through culture,” but Kant’s notion of reason’s perfectibility—under the influence of Rousseau as much as anyone else—was foundational for views in line with Herder’s own. Discussions of Bildung as both cultural advancement and the progressive development of the species were increasingly prominent in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Thus whereas J. G. Walch’s important Philosophisches Lexikon from the 1730s made no mention at all of Bildung, by the time W. T. Krug put together the next big philosophical dictionary at the beginning of the nineteenth century there was a lengthy entry. In Krug’s entry Bildung referred to the cultivation of “head, heart, and taste” corresponding respectively to intellectual culture, morality, and aesthetics. (Although Krug had referred to the critical philosophy in many of his entries, he did not make the obvious connection to Kant’s three Critiques regarding this three-pronged cultivation of humanity.) Krug listed a Bildungstrieb—without naming Blumenbach—as the correlative branch of Bildung with respect to natural formation and development. See W. T. Krug, “Bildung,” in Allgemeines Handwörterbuch der philosophischen Wissenschaften nebst ihrer Literatur and Geschichte, 2nd ed., (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1832), 1:358–360. Insofar as the concept of Bildung was taken to be operating at the levels of both the culture and nature, Denise Gigante sees it as the bridge between aesthetics and science, as in fact the theoretical basis of Romantic science itself. See Life: Organic Form and Romanticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 46. For Herder’s definition see Gadamer’s discussion, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall (New York: Continuum International, 2004), 10. Günter Zöller discusses the impact Rousseau’s notion of perfectibility would have on Kant in “Between Rousseau and Freud: Kant on Cultural Uneasiness,” in New Studies on Kant, ed. Pablo Muchnik (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2013).

275. This sense of metaphysics’ self-development as something that has been, as Kant put it here, “wisely organized for great ends,” leads Claude Piché to argue that reason is subject here to the same teleological work of “providence” that one finds described in Kant’s early history essays with respect to humanity. Piché thus concludes that “if such a parallel is legitimate, this means that critical philosophy relies on ultimate metaphysical premises that are not in themselves subjected to philosophical investigation, simply because they sustain Kant’s critical project from the beginning.” “The Precritical Use of the Metaphor of Epigenesis,”, 195. Piché’s conclusion might very well be correct in general regarding Kant’s reliance on metaphysical premises, but it should at least be seen that because the history of reason is in fact conceived by Kant as something that has developed out of reason itself, his appeals to “providence” in the history essays might as well be appeals to the work of reason. This conclusion is fully in keeping with Kant’s own language insofar as one must then simply recognize that reason is everywhere oriented only by goals that it has set for itself; Kant is explicit on this point with respect to practical reason’s appeal to divine providence in his essay Perpetual Peace, 8:362.

276. E.g., A309/B366, A328/B383, A336/B393, A339/B397, A778/B806.

277. As Kant put it in the Critique of Judgment, “Even in one and the same tree we may regard each branch or leaf as merely set into or grafted onto it, and hence as an independent tree that only attaches itself to another one and nourishes itself parasitically” (5:371–372). The clear successor to Kant in this appeal was Goethe. Demonstrating the manner in which “the whole was reflected in each of the parts” was key to all scientific investigations, according to Goethe, but plants were especially good examples of this, since “in organic formations, several identical forms can and must develop, in, with, beside, and after one another. They indicate multiplicity in unity. Every leaf, every bud, is entitled to become a tree. . . . We cannot repeat often enough that each organization unites various active parts.” See “Later Studies and Collections,” in Goethe’s Botanical Writings, trans. Bertha Mueller (Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow, 1989), 100; and “Nacharbeiten und Sammlungen,” in Goethes Schriften zur Morphologie, ed. Dorothea Kuhn (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker, 1988), 464. Since Goethe agreed with Schlegel in believing that science must become art, he would make the point in both poetry—“Asleep within the seed the power lies / Foreshadowed pattern, folded in the shell / Root, leaf, and germ, pale and half-formed”—and in prose: “Leaf and eye [root point] are inseparable: every leaf has an eye behind it, every eye has leaves which overlap like scales, and each of these leaves (the first as well as those that follow) gives us a picture of the whole plant. As a result we must think of any point on the plant as an eye with the potential to produce a root.” Goethe’s poem “The Metamorphosis of Plants,” trans. Heinz Norden, in The Metamorphosis of Plants, introduction and photography by Gordon L. Miller, trans. Douglas Miller (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 1; the prose passage is from “Leaf and Root,” in Goethe: Scientific Studies, trans. Douglas Miller (New York: Suhrkamp, 1983), 99; “Blatt und Wurzel,” in Goethes Schriften zur Morphologie, 660.

278. Extended reflections on the “needs” of reason appear in Kant’s 1786 piece meant to respond to Jacobi in light of the developing pantheism controversy. See “What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking,” in Religion and Rational Theology, trans. Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 7–18; 8:133–146. But it must be said that discussion of needs, in this sense, is present everywhere once one turns to the practical writings, particularly in the Critique of Practical Reason, with respect to both the moral law and reason’s postulates in connections with it (e.g., 5:114, 5:125).

279. It was with this in mind that Kant criticized Hume’s “geographical” approach to reason, an approach demanding a linear path when mapping its extent (A760/B788; cf. 8:135). “Our reason,” as Kant put his response to Hume on this point, “is not like a plane indefinitely extended, the limits of which we know in a general way only; but must rather be compared to a sphere, the radius of which can be determined from the curvature of the arc of its surface . . . outside this sphere (the field of experience) there is nothing that can be an object for reason” (A762/B790). It bears noting, nonetheless, that Kant would go on to differentiate between the speculative attempts of theoretical reason and the subjective need, on the part of practical reason, to assert the objective reality of the intelligible objects it had postulated—a difference Kant describes as the “enigma of the critical philosophy” (5:5). Kant was clear, moreover, on the primacy of practical reason’s goals in comparison to those of speculative reason, a hierarchy whose arrangement was necessary in order to avoid a conflict of reason within itself (5:121).

280. Kant’s phrasing here is unusual, and the grammar in the original is ambiguous with respect to the “Selbstgebärung” of reason; that is, it is unclear whether this is simply an appositional clause meant to reaffirm the generation of concepts from out of reason or if Kant is indicating that reason is itself self-born (given Kant’s other remarks regarding the “self-development of reason” or the “epigenesis of reason,” I take the latter to be the case). Kant’s English-language translators have struggled with the word Selbstgebärung, appealing in all cases to vocabulary taken from the life sciences. Kemp Smith uses, for example, “spontaneous generation,” and Guyer-Wood chooses “parthenogenesis”; both of these translations take the clause regarding the “Selbstgebärung” of reason to be appositive. This is the only place Kant uses the term Selbstgebärung, but although it was not a word used by him in place of epigenesis elsewhere, from all of his other comments regarding epigenesis it seems clear that the “epigenesis of reason” (B167) is understood by him to mean that reason is indeed self-born. The only regular use of words similar to Selbstgebärung in the German of Kant’s time appear in reference to Hesiod’s account of Gaia (Earth), who gave birth to her first children—sky, hills, and sea—without a father (die ihre Kinder ohne einen Vater aus sich selbst gebären kann). Gaia’s ability to produce children “without sweet union of love” is almost always described as a case of “parthenogenesis” in English-language discussions of Hesiod on this point.

281. For Hume’s use of “natural affinity,” see A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740), ed. Selby-Bigge, rev. ed. ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978): “When the mind is determined to join certain objects, but undetermined in its choice of the particular objects, it naturally turns its eye to such as are related together. They are already united in the mind: they present themselves at the same time to the conception; and instead of requiring any new reason for their conjunction, it would require a very powerful reason to overlook their natural affinity” (504n71, italics added). Of course, Kant did not want the “special affinity” proposed by Leibniz either, that is, the connection between mind and idea guaranteed by the fact that each stemmed from an identically divine origin: “What makes the exercise of the faculty easy and natural so far as these truths are concerned is a special affinity which the human mind has with them; and that is what makes us call them innate (italics added). So it is not a bare faculty, consisting in a mere possibility of understanding those truths: it is rather a disposition, an aptitude, a preformation, which determines our soul and brings it about that they are derivable from it.” Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, 80. Henry Allison takes up the issue of affinity with a different agenda in “Transcendental Affinity—Kant’s Answer to Hume,” in Kant’s Theory of Knowledge, ed. Lewis White Beck (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1974), 119–127.

282. Kant would subsequently point to reason as the birthplace of the moral law as well. Thus in the Groundwork, for example, Kant would explain that “it is here that she has to show her purity as the authoress of her own laws—not as the mouthpiece of laws whispered to her by some implanted sense,” and also not as having received them from experience, which “would foist into the place of morality some misbegotten mongrel patched up from the limbs of a varied ancestry and looking like anything you please, only not like virtue” (4:425–426). Morality would instead have to be born from out of pure reason itself, for only that kind of pedigree could ensure its sovereignty over the will on the basis of birthright alone. This account of reason’s role in giving birth to individual morality ran parallel to its work to achieve the moral advancement of the species as a whole. Perfect moral advancement would culminate in the creation of a “kingdom of ends,” according to Kant, and bring with it the completion of the history of reason. This was an idea of moral perfection born out of reason itself, an idea that lay invisibly within humanity as something whose conception was “self-developing” (sich entwickelnden) and whose existence needed to be understood as a “self-fertilizing germ” (besamenden Keim) of goodness in the species as a whole (6:122). It was just this aspect of Kant’s philosophy that would earn harsh criticisms from Hegel, however, since he took Kant’s notion of pure reason to be impotent, something capable of supplying only an empty notion of unity, that is, one that had never been lifted out of intellect by the intellectual intuition of itself. On the basis of such sterility, as Hegel saw it, Kant could never explain how practical reason “is nonetheless supposed to become constitutive again, to give birth out of itself and give itself content.” Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977), 80.

283. Whether Kant appreciated the radicality of his argument, a strategy that began with the epigenesis of concepts but gradually became so encompassing that even morality grew out of an epigenetic reason, is not clear. It has, however, caused some of Kant’s interpreters to draw back in the face of this portrait of Kant. As Hans Ingensiep put it, for example, if Kant were to have taken the epigenesis of the categories seriously, then “so müßte er im letzten doch wieder ins übersinnliche Substrat der Natur verweisen. . . . Die Kategorien gehören zur intelligiblen Welt; sie wären mit Hypothesen zu einem phänomenalen epigenestischen Ursprung nicht faßbar.” “Die biologischen Analogien und die erkenntnistheoretischen Alternativen,” 393. Ingensiep is mistaken, however, in thinking that this suggests a consequence that would be out of line with Kant’s approach to reason. That is, within Kant’s system, reason does effectively function as a “supersensible substrate” so far as it understands its relationship to the realms of both nature and freedom. Kant was consistent, moreover, in rejecting positive discussions of epigenesis as a biological phenomenon in nature, even as he repeatedly appealed to this as the model for understanding the metaphysical generation of reason and the categories alike. In light of this it cannot be right to suggest, as a number of Kant’s interpreters have done, that Kant restricted his understanding of epigenesis to the epigenesis of experience. This conclusion is reached by mapping Kant’s later hypothesis regarding a “generic preformation” of the species lines (5:423) onto the production of experience, such that the categories perform their role on the generically preformed side of the equation, while their construction of experience results in the active generation of something new. For this line of interpretation see Haffner, “Die Epigenesisanalogie in Kants Kritik” (1997); Ingensiep, “Die biologischen Analogien und die erkenntnistheoretischen Alternativen” (1994); Ingensiep, “Organism, Epigenesis, and Life” (2006); Piché, “The Precritical Use of the Metaphor of Epigenesis” (2001); and Shaw, “Function and Epigenesis in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.”(2003). The analogy between generic preformation and the construction of experience might hold in a limited sense (assuming the caveat that the categories, while lawlike, are not preformed). But this is not what Kant meant by the “epigenesis of reason,” since the very basis of Kant’s long-standing attraction to epigenesis was its ability to position the mind’s independence from both sense and God as suppliers of mental form. Kant was a metaphysician, not a naturalist, with respect to reason, and because of this he was attracted to a metaphysical conception of reason as something self-born, even as he remained suspicious of the models of emergent vital forces that were being proposed in the life sciences of his day.

284. Kant was clear regarding their identity: “practical reason has the same cognitive faculty for its foundation as the speculative, so far as they are both pure reason” (5:90; cf. 6:382). But he was also delighted by the manner in which their investigation had proceeded in identical ways. As he summarized his findings in the analytic of practical reason, “Here I wish to call attention, if I may, to one thing, namely, that every step which one takes with pure reason, even in the practical field where one does not take subtle speculation into account, so neatly and naturally dovetails with all parts of the Critique of Pure (theoretical) Reason that it is as if each step had been carefully thought out merely to establish this connection” (5:106). It was precisely because of this that Kant felt confident in pursuing the strategy he had followed in the first Critique with respect to identifying the table of judgments as the genealogical basis of both the categories and the ideas of reason; in this case, with respect to the genetic grounds upon which he could identify causality and freedom (5:55–57, 5:65–67, 5:68–70).

285. Timothy Lenoir appeals to a similar distinction when distinguishing between a mechanical series of causes and effects as a “linear series” and the teleological approach to causality as a “reflexive series” according to which the end of the series is simultaneously the cause of it. Lenoir discusses this in terms of what he takes to be the “teleomechanism” of Kant’s approach to organic life in the Critique of Judgment (e.g., 5:373). See Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth-Century German Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 25.

286. Günter Zöller regards the tracks between Kant’s critical doctrines and his anthropological works to be necessarily parallel rather than entwined, and as describing therefore only a “mutually supplementary relation” between the critical theory of reason and the natural history of reason. “Kant’s Political Anthropology,” Kant Jahrbuch 3 (2011): 131–161. Paul Menzer argues similarly regarding the need to keep Kant’s projects distinct in Kants Lehre von der Entwicklung in Natur und Geschichte (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1911), 404–445. Since I take it that Kant’s use of organic models has a deep methodological impact on the critical system—the “epigenesis of reason” does not only have a metaphorical value for Kant, in other words—I am willing to reach the stronger conclusion regarding the necessary intertwining of Kant’s critical and anthropological concerns regarding reason’s historical development.

287. This distinction between claims made about reason in contrast to those concerning nature does more than simply demonstrate Kant’s lifelong attention to the specter of subreption; it locates him among the vanguard of those concerned with the establishment of scientific practices regarding “boundary maintenance.” In the mid-1770s Lavoisier ended the phlogiston debate in large part because his oxygen theory offered a new vocabulary, a new method, and above all, a severely circumscribed set of questions that the chemical scientist could ask. The model would be adopted by geology in the coming decades, and indeed all of the sciences established in the nineteenth century would eventually follow suit, with the key to their successful establishment in each case being determined by such boundary maintenance. Questions regarding (or coming out of) metaphysical speculation, religious presuppositions, or biblical interpretation—in short, questions relying on claims that were untestable and therefore unknowable—would simply lie outside of the boundaries of a given science. This is perhaps why one might say that Kant’s German idealist successors were mistaken to have ignored Kant’s boundaries when establishing their own systems, even if they got Kant right in taking his organic conception of reason as their starting point.

288. Kant’s conclusions regarding the relationship between these modes of judgment developed directly out of his discussions of physicotheology and moral teleology in the first Critique, even if these were to be freshly distinguished in order demonstrate that only moral teleology was capable of yielding conviction in its proofs (5:462, 5:478).

289. Although much has been made of Kant’s endorsement of Blumenbach and of questions regarding Blumenbach’s influence on Kant in his discussion of epigenesis, one should not forget that, whatever influence might be claimed, Blumenbach in fact transgressed a clear boundary set by Kant between thinking about nature as purposive and claiming that nature was in fact purposive. Robert J. Richards emphasizes this difference between Kant and Blumenbach in “Kant and Blumenbach on the Bildungstrieb: A Historical Misunderstanding,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biology and Biomedical Science 31 (2000): 11–32. See also Richards’s The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), chap. 5., pp. 216–237. As Timothy Lenoir describes Blumenbach’s position, “The Bildungstrieb was not a blind mechanical force of expansion which produced structure by being opposed in some way; it was not a chemical force of ‘fermentation,’ nor was it a soul superimposed on matter. Rather the Bildungstrieb was conceived as a teleological agent which had its antecedents ultimately in the inorganic realm but which was an emergent vital force.” “Kant, Blumenbach, and Vital Materialism,” 83. It was precisely this interpenetration of form and force—something Kant explicitly liked about Blumenbach’s theory—that caused Caspar Wolff, the first author to describe vegetative growth and reproduction as a form of epigenesis, to complain about Blumenbach’s position. For Wolff, force simply could not by definition also be responsible for form. See Wolff, “Von der eigenthümlichen und wesentlichen Kraft der vegetabilischen sowohl als auch der animalischen Substanz,” in Zwo Abhandlungen über die Nutritionskraft welche von der Kayserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaft in St. Petersburg den Preis getheilt haben. St. Petersburg: Kayserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1789.

290. Kant’s caution regarding the progress of the life sciences has continued relevance today. After nearly a century dominated by the genes-as-destiny model, the resistance of the organism to this kind of determination has formed the core of a recent reorganization in genetic investigations, a reframing made necessary by the discovery of the central role played by emergent, environmentally fluid switches for gene expression. The new science surrounding this discovery is called “epigenetics.”

EPILOGUE

291. Kant had played with this sort of image as early as 1772, imagining as well a difference in the inhabitants disposed to living in one or the other of the various “regions” of reason. As Kant pictured this geography in 1772, however, it was dogmatic metaphysics that formed an island of cognition, and bridges between this island and the mainland of experience were still thought to be possible: “In metaphysics, like an unknown land of which we intend to take possession, we have first assiduously investigated its situation and access to it. (It lies in the (region) hemisphere of pure reason;) we have even drawn the outline of where this island of cognition is connected by bridges to the land of experience, and where it is separated by a deep sea; we have even drawn its outline and are as it were acquainted with its geography (ichnography), be we do not know what might be found in this land, which is maintained as uninhabitable by some people and to be their real domicile by others. We will take the general history of this land of reason into account in accordance with this general geography” (17:559).

292. Goethe, “Judgment through Intuitive Perception” (1817), in Scientific Studies, trans. Douglas Miller (New York: Suhrkamp, 1988), 12:32. I discuss Kant in relationship to Goethe on this point more fully in “Intuition and Nature in Kant and Goethe.”

293. As Darwin put it, “This resemblance is often expressed by the term ‘unity of type’: or by saying that the several parts and organs in the different species of the class are homologous. The whole subject is included under the general name of Morphology. This is the most interesting department of natural history, and may be said to be its very soul.” The Origin of Species, 415.