Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

11. From Hierarchy to History

CHAPTER XI From Hierarchy to History "What are we to think of the hundreds of earnest, patient, intelligent men . . . whose misfortune it was to devote their whole lives to false hypotheses?"-HARDIN CRAIG. WHEREVER IN THE CHAIN OF BEING the savage was allotted a place-below or in company with European man-there in theory he was ordained to stay. The medieval mind made no provision for the mutability of animal species, or, among human beings for the transmutation of cultures from incivility to civility. Nor did most minds in the Renaissance. Basically Christian, they adhered to a serial cosmos in which the Good Bookkeeper, God, kept each category in a position eternally fixed, its classificatory bounds firmly established, its value unvarying. One of the major characteristics of the hierarchical view of things, and to many its most reassuring, was this stability. It settled without doubt or debate not only the relation of nature to man but of both to the realm of heaven. For many scholars, it also provided occupation in the task of determining the proper places of the members of the enchainment . The doctrine and imagery of this immutability was seldom challenged even by those most skilled in metaphysical subtlety. Nature, here and now, or the Creation, exhibited itself in a 433 434 Early Anthropology in the 16th and 17th Centuries continuous and unbroken series of members, ranks, or degrees, some still undiscovered perhaps, but each the realization of a changeless archetype existing from the beginning in the mind of deity. Consequently, the chain was not envisaged as a succession in time. Metaphysically and theologically, all members existed simultaneously. In essence the hierarchy was a juxtaposition of the philosophically higher and lower which, if occasion demanded, could be set down on a piece of paper as a simple inventory or list of created things. To its admirers, this orderly, constant, and immobile disposition of the multiplicity of things in space was one of its chief assets; and to the practical men, later collectors particularly, it put an end to argument by permitting the tidy and uncapricious insertion of each specimen in its proper pigeon-hole, each item in its proper rank. Like book titles catalogued by alphabet, each form had a fixed and foreseeable position. It could be readily located when wanted. Although in an ideal or Aristotelian sense each form might be thought of as striving to perfect itself, the process of perfection , if indeed it involved motion or change in any mundane sense, took place solely within the conceptual boundaries of each category of the scale, not from category to category. No allowance was made for novelty. There was no thought that any form, be it mineral, vegetable, animal, or human, would strive to assume characteristics other than its own. There was no expectation that any member of the spatial enchainment would be tempted to violate the precincts of any other member next succeeding. As late as the eighteenth and even the nineteenth century, this doctrine was held no less faithfully among biologists than among theologians or philosophers. Linnaeus, a Christian taxonomist, who included the ranks or degrees of mankind in his floral and animal hierarchy, accepted the separate and fixed creation of species. And for nearly a century after his death, or well into the Victorian period, the same From Hierarchy to History 435 doctrine was cherished by the vast majority of scientists. The publicity visited upon the few, such as Darwin, who proposed that the enchainment was a record of changes, testifies to the generality of its acceptance. Given the toughness of this ancient envisagement of an immutable and serialized world, the modem revolution in Western thought was not its abandonment. Indeed, the hierarchical order per se remains for most minds today a truism. The intellectual unsettlement took the form of a conversion of the purely architectonic, static, and spatial order of categories into a temporal one. The concept of a timeless inventory of Creation was transformed into one that was viewable as historical, developmental, evolutionary, or progressive -one in which transition from form to form, or from culture to culture, far from being contrary to reason and theoretically disallowed, was accepted as the way things worked. But how did this drastic modification in a venerable and devoutly respected world view come about? How, logically and historically speaking, was this non-historical, constant, changeless but serial world of beings transmuted into...