Reason and Experience: The Representation of Natural Order in the Work of Carl von Linné (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 265 Reason and Experience: The Representation o~ Natural Order in the Work o/ Carl yon Linn~. By James L. Larson. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Pp. viii+171. $7.50) Professor Larson's careful study marks a genuine beginning in the English-language analysis of Linnaeus by intellectual historians, removing Linnean studies from the almost exclusive province of historically oriented botanists and zoologists, whose work has typically suffered from an exclusive concern with scientific detail and the defects of positivist historiography. By contrast, Dr. Larson has combined genuine philosophical insight with a familiarity with important scientific detail, and the result is a work which can be read with profit by intellectual historians, historians of science and scientists with historical interests. In his exposition, Professor Larson initially delimits the philosophical assumptions historically underlying the concepts of the "natural system" in biology, and those of the classificational systems which presume to represent or express this natural order, treating these ideas as found in the writings of the Renaissance herbalists, their influential theoretical elaboration by Andreas Cesalpino in his De Plantis of 1583, and their subsequent development in the writings of the main seventeenth-century taxonomists--Robert Morison, John Ray and Joseph Pitton de Tournefort. In his discussion of these key points, Professor Larson has provided the most satisfactory analysis this author has encountered of the origin of these concepts in the Aristotelian philosophy, and their express elaboration on this philosophical base by Cesalpino. Subsequent chapters, two of which are revisions of earlier periodical articles, provide a clear exposition of Linn6's endorsement of these traditional assumptions, and of the increasing refinement they undergo in his actual botanical practice. Linnaeus' often misinterpreted distinction between the "natural" and "artificial" systems is accurately discussed, and the details of his struggles in his later works to find the key to the natural system are given in depth. Discussions of the modifications gradually forced upon Linn6's theoretical views concerning the fixity of species, and an exposition of his nomenclatural reforms close the work. Professor Larson provides ample documentation for his case, drawing not only upon the primary Latin sources, but also on the large body of Scandinavian-language studies on Linnaeus. Discussions of scientific details are helpfully illustrated with plates from LinnCs own works. The deficiencies of Dr. Larson's work, in my view, lie in its sole concentration on a descriptive analysis of LinnCs thought and practice, and the elucidation of the basic intellectual sources of his taxonomic thought. While this is, to be sure, an important consideration, one is left without any real answer, other than one in terms of an exposition of the clarity and logical rigor given to taxonomic thought by Linnaeus, as to why he should be viewed as anything more than a minor historical anachronism of eighteenth-century science, a philosophically naive and rather pedestrian scientific thinker. Yet in the face of the brute historical fact than Linnean science was an immense historical success, influencing in various ways figures as diverse as Rousseau , Kant, Goethe and Darwin, such a conclusion will not do. Professor Larson's failure to articulate Linnaeus' philosophic thought in any real way with broader aspects of the intellectual history of the eighteenth century leaves us, however, without a satisfactory explanation of his significance. It is not quite correct, as Dr. Larson seems to imply, to see a simple continuity of an internal tradition of Aristotelian taxonomic philosophy running in an unbroken line from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, as if there was never at any point 266 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY some recognition among taxonomic biologists of the basic incompatibility of the Aristotelian metaphysics and the epistemological Realism underlying their endeavor, and the overt anti-Aristotelianism of the new science and philosophy of the seventeenth century. Fundamental questions over these points had been raised, and internal conflicts among taxonomic biologists had arisen among Linnaeus' most important predecessors, John Ray and Joseph Tournefort, precisely over the validity of assumptions concerning the existence of a knowable natural order, the distinction between essential and accidental characters, and the philosophical possibility of man ever constructing a classification which could claim to represent anything more than human utility...