Indirect Supremacy

Abstract

If we take a bird’s eye view of the course of natural history over the arc of time that extends from about the middle of the seventeenth century to the middle of the eighteenth century, we note that Aristotle’s fixist, essentialist and teleological framework substantially holds its ground. Although its paternity is gradually disowned and in a certain sense disguised; and although significant innovations are introduced into this field of enquiry, both quantitatively and qualitatively especially in the sphere of systematics; and, finally, although repeated attempts are made to import Cartesian notions into the field, the framework holds fast. Despite Aristotle’s being cited less and less, from the point of view of the three fundamental principles, at this time natural history can still legitimately be interpreted as a form of ‘Christianized Aristotelianism’:

For my part, I would argue that the systematic natural history of Tournefort, Ray, Linnaeus, and others was in many respects simply a Christianized Aristotelianism, although much narrower in scope than Aristotle’s biology. True, Ray’s world was created, Aristotle’s eternal, but in either case the species were fixed and given. Aristotle postulated final causes in nature to explain the adaptations of plants and animals, Ray a transcendent Creator; in either case nature did nothing in vain. Aristotle distinguished between essential and accidental characters in defining kinds of animals; Ray employed the same distinctions in arriving at species and constructing his systems of classification, adding, however, the novel idea that the members of each species were related by common descent.¹