The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century French Thought (review)

Specialists have exploited Roger’s Sciences de la Vie (Paris, 1963) for years, but only in ways that serve their limited interests. Historians of science have mined the treatment of the sciences of generation, and literary historians have appropriated the explication of classic French texts; both groups have ignored the broad cognitive landscape that Roger laid out. As for the larger scholarly public, Roger’s quiet, meticulous work has dropped out of sight. His choice of animal generation as a peg on which to hang his inquiry has limited the book’s appeal. Generation was a major branch of natural philosophy throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—a cluster of loosely related sciences, each dealing with an intricate set of facts the combinations and implications of which were examined at length. The texts are not only obscure, but tedious. Roger explored this entire field, the highways and the byways; some of his necessarily technical analyses have stopped all but the most zealous readers in their tracks. It is probably safe to say that the overall merits of Roger’s complex achievement remain to be discovered.

At the time Roger began work, histories of generation, like the sciences themselves, employed a strategy of divide and conquer. The field was crowded with studies of ovism, spermism, regeneration, teratology, and so on, but historians had only a vague sense of the extent of the field, relations among individual problems, or their proper contexts. Roger set out to map this territory in its entirety.

Broad historical considerations played a big part in this daunting project. The locus for the study of generation had evolved from the corporate structures of Renaissance medicine through the Academy of Sciences to the collection of agents associated with the Encyclopédie. Throughout this development, students of generation were involved in the quarrels of philosophers and theologians about the central question of life. Gradually, as new instruments and techniques came into use, and as naturalists and physiologists hit upon appropriate aims and methods, the life sciences freed themselves from the tyranny of alien speculation, and began to set the pace of inquiry. The process mirrored the tendency toward secularization in the culture at large.

To join this process to his scientific texts, Roger adapted the concept of mentality, which he defined as an aggregate of mental attitudes grouping practitioners of a period, a nation, or a discipline. “We are dealing with mind sets that have become automatic . . . practices and ‘spontaneous’ reactions, impermeable to criticism because they no longer belong to the domain of functioning reason” (xxv). In Roger’s hands, mentality is a flexible tool, equally apt at characterizing an intellectual milieu, a problematic, or an epoch. Above all, Roger’s conception of mentality deals with a problem that confounds the better known concepts of paradigm and episteme, the transitions between marked discontinuities in fields of historical inquiry. Roger follows the turbulent development of the generational sciences throughout a period of two centuries without once appealing to nonexistent revolutions or statutes of discontinuity.

Ellrich’s translation is fresh and accurate, confronts older technical terms bravely, and captures Roger’s clarity and wit. Readers should be cautioned that the editor has omitted the chapter on Denis Diderot, claiming, incorrectly, “that its absence does not detract from the integrity of the work” (ix). In spite of the mutilation, The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century French Thought will be of abiding interests to students of early-modern history, the life sciences, and researchers grappling with large-scale historical discontinuities of all sorts.