Coherence and Vicissitude

When considering the problem of stability in natural bodies, the natural philosopher Robert Boyle invites his reader to imagine a swarm of bees. From a distance, the swarm ‘seems to be one entire masse or body’. On closer inspection, however, the viewer will notice that the bees have their own ‘distinct and peculiar motions’:

when one of the more innermost Bees removes, as she lets go her hold from those that she rested on before, and goes away from those that rested on her, so she meets with others on which she may set her feet, and comes under others that in like manner set their feet on her, and so by this vicissitude of mutual support their coherence and their removes are made compatible.¹

Boyle’s declared purpose here is to exemplify the ‘coherency of the heap’: in the undulating rhythms of the bees’ independent motions, the swarm – with all its connotations of chaos and confusion – is reconfigured as a model of dynamic coherence. Indeed, as Wolfram Schmidgen contends, in this buzzing, natural scheme we see ‘the elevation of a cooperative order that achieves a degree of stability by trusting … the constantly shifting “vicissitudes of mutual supports”’.²

In Exquisite Mixture, Wolfram Schmidgen instates Robert Boyle’s influential work on natural forms and mixture at the heart of an argument that embraces – in its wide scope – the social, the scientific, and the political. Schmidgen’s central contention is an ostensibly simple one: namely, that the idea of mixture acquired a new significance, and indeed a new creative potency, in the intellectual debates of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As becomes increasingly clear in reading Schmidgen’s book, however, there is nothing conceptually simple or singular about mixture during this era: indeed, unlike the restrictive Aristotelian model of mixture, whose end result is the undifferentiated oneness of perfect assimilation, early modern mixture is characterised not by a consistent and sterile homogeneity, but in terms of a sociable and generative heterogeneity, through which – as Schmidgen writes – ‘constant change’ makes ‘identity and sameness … possible’ (p. 136). The scientific, religious, and political discourses through which mixture finds itself reframed and refracted are closely involved with one another, jostling with and borrowing from one another, like Boyle’s bees, for argumentative support. Nonetheless, Schmidgen guides the reader through the period’s mixed dances of influence and impurity, asking how mixture gained its ‘function as a maker of forms, an agent of improvement, a guarantor of liberty and unity’ (p. 19) with an ease and consummate precision that almost belie (and for this the reader can only be grateful) the dense vagaries of his subject.

Until the beginning of the seventeenth century Aristotle had something of a stranglehold on the concept of mixture. His theory of generation, as expressed in De Generatione et Corruptione, situated mixture as markedly distinct from generation. Aristotle denounced the atomist notion propounded by Leucippus and Democritus – namely that generation is caused by a process of mixing – as false, contending that, whereas generation involves the transformation of the thing entirely (a transformation predicated on the contrariety of an agent and a patient and occurring when the patient turns into the agent), mixture is only the blending together of substances. The resulting substance is ‘uniform throughout’, so that ‘any part of what is blended should be the same as the whole’.³ It is not generated, however, because it still contains in latent form, and is always reducible to, its ingredients as they existed before being mixed together. The product of mixture, then, is an in-between thing: it hovers – Aristotle suggests – in a state of being and not being. Consequently, the mixed body is an illegitimate and sterile body, incapable of generation or corruption and excluded from the noble striving for perfection.

As Schmidgen tells, however, by the second decade of the century the Aristotelian distinction between mixture and generation was beginning to slip. Schmidgen tells how the Calvinist Godfrey Goodman, in his...